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7*ŕ Mortal Coil
Friedeburg could only stand wide-eyed and meaningless.
'Please - will you go upstairs?'
The police-official marshalled Friedburg in front of himself. The youth slowly mounted the stairs, feeling as if transfixed through the base of the spine, as if he would lose the use of his legs. The official followed close on his heels.
They reached the bedroom. The policeman unlocked the door. The housekeeper followed with a lamp. Then the official examination began.
'A young lady slept here last night?'
'Yes.'
'Name, please?'
'Marta Hohenest.'
'H-o-h-e-n-e-s-t,' spelled the official.'- And address?'
Friedeburg continued to answer. This was the end of him. The quick of him was pierced and killed. The living dead answered the living dead in obscene antiphony. Question and answer continued, the note-book worked as die hand of the old dead wrote in it the replies of the young who was dead.
The room was unchanged from the night before. There was her heap of clothing, the lustrous, pure-red dress lying soft where she had carelessly dropped it. Even, on Hie edge of the chair-back, her crimson silk garters hung looped.
But do not look, do not see. It is the business of the dead to bury their dead. Let the young dead bury their own dead, as the old dead have buried theirs. How can the dead remember, they being dead? Only the Uving can remember, and are at peace with their living who have passed away.
England, My England
He was working on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in die dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving die grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked again, straining his keen blue eyes, that had a touch of the Viking in diem, through the shadowy pine trees as through a doorway, at the green-grassed garden-path rising from the shadow of alders by the log bridge up 10 the sunlit flowers. Tall white and purple columbines, and the butt-end of the old Hampshire cottage that crouched near the earth amid flowers, blossoming in the bit of shaggy wildness round about.
There was a sound of children's voices calling and talking: high, childish, girlish voices, slightly didactic and tinged with domineering: 'If you don't come quick, nurse, 1 shall run out there to where there are snakes.' And nobody had the sang-froid to reply: 'Run then, Ktde fool.' It was always, 'No, darling. Very well, darling. In a moment, darling. Darling, you must be patient.'
His heart was hard with disillusion: a continual gnawing and resistance. But he worked on. What was there to do but submit!
The sunlight blazed down upon the earth, there was a vividness of flamy vegetation, of fierce seclusion amid the savage peace of the commons. Strange how the savage England lingers in patches: as here, amid these shaggy gorse commons, and marshy, snake-infested places near the foot of the south downs. The spirit of place lingering on primeval, as when the Saxons came, so long ago.
Ah, how he had loved it! The green garden path, the tufts of flowers, purple and white columbines, and great oriental red poppies with their black chaps and mulleins tall and yellow: this Samy garden which had been a garden for a thousand years, scooped out in the little hollow among the snake-infested commons. He had made it flame with flowers, in a sun cup under its hedges and trees. So old, so old a place! And yet he had re-created it.
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The timbered cottage with its sloping, doak-like roof was old and forgotten. It belonged to the old England of hamlets and yeomen. Lost all alone on the edge of the common, at the end of a wide, grassy, briar-entangled lane shaded with oak, it had never known the world of to-day. Not rill Egbert came with his bride. And he had come to nil it with Sowers.
The house was ancient and very uncomfortable. But he did not want to alter it. Ah, marvellous to sit there in the wide, black, time-old chimney, at night when the wind roared overhead, and the wood which he had chopped himself sputtered on the hearth! Himself on one side the angle, and Winifred on the other.
Ah, how he had wanted her: Winifred! She was young and beautiful and strong with life, like a flame in sunshine. She moved with a slow grace of energy like a blossoming, red-flowered bush in morion. She, too, seemed to come out of the old England, ruddy, strong, with a certain crude, passionate quiescence and a hawthorn robustness.. And he, he was tall and slim and agile, like an English archer with his long supple legs and fine movements. Her hair was nut-brown and all in energie curls and tendrils. Her eyes were nut-brown, too, like a robin's for brightness. And he was white-skinned with fine, silky hair that had darkened from fair, and a slightly arched nose of an old country family. They were a beautiful couple.
The house was Winifred's. Her father was a man of energy, too. He had come from the north poor. Now he was moderately rich. He had bought this fair stretch of inexpensive land, down in Hampshire. Not far from the tiny church of the almost extinct hamlet stood his own house, a commodious old farm-house standing back from the road across a bare grassed yard. On one side of this quadrangle was the long, long barn or shed which he had made into a cottage for his youngest daughter PrisciUa. One saw lmte blue-and-white check curtains at the long windows, and inside, overhead, the grand old timbers of the high-pitched shed. This was Prissy's house. Fifty yards away was die pretty little new cottage which he had built for his daughter Magdalen, with the vegetable garden stretching away to the oak copse. And men away beyond the lawns and rose-trees of the house-garden went the track across a shaggy, wild grass space, towards the ridge of tall blade pines that grew on a dyke-bank, through the pines and above the sloping little bog, under the wide, desobte oak trees, all there was Winifred's cottage crouching unexpectedly in front, so much alone, and so primitive.
It was Winifred's own house, and the gardens and the bit of common
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and the boggy slope were hers: her tiny domain. She had married just at the time when her father had bought die estate, about ten years before the war, so she had been able to come to Egbert with this for a marriage portion. And who was more delighted, he or she, it would be hard to say. She was only twenty at the time, and he was only twenty-one. He had about a hundred and fifty pounds > year of his own - and nothing else but his very considerable personal attractions. He had no profession: he earned nothing. But he talked of literature and music, he had a passion for old folk-music, collecting folk-songs and folk-dances, studying the Morris-dance and the old customs. Of course in time he would make money in these ways.
Meanwhile youth and health and passion and promise. Winifred's father was always generous: but still, he was > man from the north with a hard head and a hard skin too, having received a good many knocks. At home he kept the hard head out of sight, and played at poetry and romance with his literary wife and his sturdy, passionate girls. He was a man of courage, not given to complaining, bearing his burdens by himself. No, he did not let the world intrude far into his home. He had a delicate, sensitive wife whose poetry won some fáme in the narrow world of letters. He himself, with his tough old barbarian fighting spirit, had an almost child-like delight in verse, in sweet poetry, and in die delightful game ofa cultured home. His blood was strong even to coarseness. But that only made the home more vigorous, more robust and Christmassy. There was always a touch ofOiristmas about him, now he was well off. If there was poetry after dinner, there were also chocolates, and nuts, and good little out-of-the-way things to be munching.
Well then, into this family came Egbert. He was made of quite a different paste. The girls and the father were strong-limbed, thick-blooded people, true English, as holly-trees and hawthorn are English. Their culture was grafted on to them, as one might perhaps graft a common pink rose on to a thorn-stem. It flowered oddly enough, but it did not alter their blood.
And Egben was a born rose. The age-long breeding had left him with a delightful spontaneous passion. He was not clever, nor even 'literary'. No, but the intonation of his voice, and the movement of his supple, handsome body, and the fine texture of his flesh and his hair, the slight arch of his nose, the quickness of his blue eyes would easily take the place of poetry. Winifred loved him, loved him, mis southerner, as a higher being. A higher being, mind you. Not a deeper. And as for him, he loved her in passion with every fibre of him. She was the very warm stuff of life to him.
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Wonderful then, those days at Crockham Cottage, the first days, all alone save for the woman who came to work in the mornings. Marvellous days, when she had all his tall, supple, fine-fleshed youth to herself, for herself, and he had her like a ruddy fire into which he could cast himself for rejuvenation. Ah, that it might never end, this passion, this marriage! The flame of their two bodies burnt again into that old cottage, that was haunted already by so much by-gone, physical desire. You could not be in the dark room for an hour without the influences coming over you. The hot blood-desire of by-gone yeomen, there in this old den where they had lusted and bred for so many generations. The silent house, dark, with thick, timbered walls and the big black chimney-place, and the sense of secrecy. Dark, with low, little windows, sunk into the earth. Dark, like a lair where strong beasts had lurked and mated, lonely at night and lonely by day, left to themselves and their own intensity for so many generations. It seemed to cast a spell on the two young people. They became different. There was a curious secret glow about them, a certain slumbering flame hard to understand, that enveloped them both. They too felt that they did not belong to the London world any more. Crockham had changed their blood: the sense of the snakes that lived and slept even in their own garden, in the sun, so that he, going forward with the spade, would see a curious coiled brownish pile on the black soil, which suddenly would start up, hiss, and dazzle rapidly away, hissing. One day Winifred heard the strangest scream from the flower-bed under the low window of the living room: ah, the strangest scream, like the very soul of the dark past crying aloud. She ran out, and saw a long brown snake on the flower-bed, and in its flat mouth the one hind leg of a frog was striving to escape, and screaming its strange, tiny, bellowing scream. She looked at the snake, and from its sullen flat head it looked at her, obstinately. She gave a cry, and it released the frog and slid angrily away.
That was Crockham. The spear of modern invention had not passed through it, and it lay there secret, primitive, savage as when the Saxons first came. And Egbert and she were caught there, caught out of the world.
He was not idle, nor was she. There were plenty of things to be done, die house to be put into final repair after the workmen had gone, cushions and curtains to sew, the paths to make, the water to fetch and attend to, and then the slope of the deep-soiled, neglected garden to level, to terrace with little terraces and paths, and to fill with flowers. He worked away, in his shirt-sleeves, worked all day
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intermittently doing this thing and the other. And she, quiet and rich in herself, seeing him stooping and labouring away by himself, would come to help him, to be near him. He of course was an amateur - a born amateur. He worked so hard, and did so little, and nothing he ever did would hold together for long. If he terraced the garden, he held up the earth with a couple of long narrow planks that soon began to bend with the pressure from behind, and would not need many years to rot through and break and let the soil slither all down again in a heap towards the stream-bed. But there you are. He had not been brought up to come to grips with anything, and he thought it would do. Nay, he did not think there was anything else except little temporary contrivances possible, he who had such a passion for his old enduring cottage, and for the old enduring things of the by-gone England. Curious that the sense of permanency in the past had such a hold over him, whilst in the present he was all amateurish and sketchy.
Winifred could not criticise him. Town-bred, everything seemed to her splendid, and the very digging and shovelling itself seemed romantic. But neither Egbert nor she yet realised the difference between work and romance.
Godfrey Marshall, her father, was at first perfectly pleased with the menage down at Crockham Cottage. He thought Egbert was wonderful, the many things he had accomplished, and he was gratified by the glow of physical passion between the two young people. To the man who in London still worked hard to keep steady his modest fortune, the thought of this young couple digging away and loving one another down at Crockham Cottage, buried deep among the commons and marshes, near the pale-showing bulk of the downs, was like a chapter of living romance. And they drew the sustenance for their fire of passion from him, from the old man. It was he who fed their flame. He triumphed secretly in the thought. And it was to her father that Winifred still turned, as the one source of all surety and life and support. She loved Egbert with passion. But behind her was the power of her father. It was the power of her father she referred to, whenever she needed to refer. It never occurred to her to refer to Egbert, if she were in difficulty or doubt. No, in all the serious matters she depended on her father.
For Egbert had no intention of coming to grips with life. He had no ambition whatsoever. He came from a decent family, from a pleasant country home, from delightful surroundings. He should, of course, have had a profession. He should have studied law or entered business in some way. But no - that fatal three pounds a week would
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keep him from starving as long as he lived, and he did not want to give himself into bondage. It was not that he was idle. He was always doing something, in his amateurish way. But he had no desire to give himself to the world, and still less had he any desire to fight his way in the world. No, no, the world wasn't worth it. He wanted to ignore it, to go his own way apart, like a casual pilgrim down the forsaken side-tracks. He loved his wife, his cottage and garden. He would make his Kfe there, as a son of epicurean hermit. He loved the past, the old music and dances and customs of old England. He would try and live in the spirit of these, not in the spirit of the world of business.
But often Winifred's father called her to London: for he loved to have his children round him. So Egbert and she must have a tiny flat in town, and the young couple must transfer themselves from time to time from the country to the city. In town Egbert had plenty of friends, of the same ineffectual sort as himself, tampering with the arts, literature, painting, sculpture, music. He was not bored.
Three pounds a week, however, would not pay for all this. Winifred's father paid. He liked paying. He made her only a very small allowance, but he often gave her ten pounds—or gave Egbert ten pounds. So they both looked on the old man as the mainstay. Egbert didn't mind being patronised and paid for. Only when he felt the family was a little Iw condescending, on account of money, he began to get huffy.
Then of course little children came: a lovely little Monde daughter with ahead of thisde-down. Everybody adored the child. It was the first exquisite blonde thing that had come into the family, a little mite with the white, slim, beautiful limbs of its father, and as it grew up the dancing, dainty movement of a wild little daisy-spirit. No wonder the Marshalls all loved the child: they called her Joyce. They themselves had their own grace, but it was slow, rather heavy. They had everyone of them strong, heavy limbs and darkish skins, and they were short in stature. And now they had for one of their own this light litde cowslip child. She was like a little poem in herself.
But nevertheless, she brought a new difficulty. Winifred must have a nurse for her. Yes, yes, there must be a nurse. It was the family decree. Who was to pay for the nurse? The grandfather - seeing the father himself earned no money. Yes, the grandfather would pay, as he had paid all the lying-in expenses. There came a slight sense of money-strain. Egbert was living on his father-in-law.
After the child was born, it was never quite the same between him
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and Winifred. The difference was at first hardly perceptible. But it was there. In the first place Winifred had a new centre of interest. She was not going to adore her child. But she had what the modem mother so often has in the place of spontaneous love: a profound sense of duty towards her child. Winifred appreciated her darling little girl, and felt a deep sense of duty towards her. Strange, that this sense of duty should go deeper than the love for her husband. But so it was. And so it often is. The responsibility of motherhood was the prime responsibility in Winifred's heart: the responsibility of wifehood came a long way second.
Her child seemed to link her up again in a circuit with her own family. Her father and mother, herself, and her child, that was the human trinity for her. Her husband -? Yes, she loved him still. But that was like play. She had an almost barbaric sense of duty and of family. Till she married, her first human duty had been towards her rather: he was the pillar, the source of life, the everlasting support. Now another link was added to the chain of duty: her father, herself, and her child.
Egbert was out of it. Without anything happening, he was gradually, unconsciously excluded from the circle. His wife still loved him, physically. But, but - he was almost the unnecessary party in the affair. He could not complain of Winifred. She still did her duty towards him. She still had a physical passion for him, that physical passion on which he had put all his life and soul. But -but-
It was for a long while an ever-recurring bul. And then, after the second child, another blonde, winsome touching little thing, not so proud and flame-like as Joyce - after Annabel came, then Egbert began truly to realise how it was. His wife still loved him. But - and now the but had grown enormous - her physical love for him was of secondary importance to her. It became ever less important. After all, she had had it, this physical passion, for two years now. It was not this rhat one lived from. No, no - something sterner, realer.
She began to resent her own passion for Egbert - just a little she began to despise it. For after all there he was, he was charming, he was lovable, he was terribly desirable. But - but - oh, the awful looming cloud of that bull - he did not stand firm in the landscape of her life like a tower of strength, like a great pillar of significance. No, he was like a cat one has about the house, which will one day disappear and leave no trace. He was like a flower in the garden, trembling in the wind of life, and then gone, leaving nothing to show.
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As an adjunct, as an accessory, he was perfect. Many a woman would have adored to have him about her all her life, the most beautiful and desirable of all her possessions. But Winifred belonged to another school.
Tbc years went by, and instead of coming more to grips with life, he relaxed more. He was of a subtle, sensitive, passionate nature. But he simply would not give himself to what Winifred called life. Work. No, he would not go into the world and work for money. No, he just would not. If Winifred liked to live beyond their small income - well, it was her look-out.
And Winifred did not really want him to go out into the world to work for money. Money became, alas, a word like a firebrand between diem, setting them both aflame with anger. But that is because we must talk in symbols. Winifred did not really care about money. She did not care whether he earned or did not earn anything. Only she knew she was dependent on her father for three-fourths of the money spent for herself and her children, that she let that be the cams betli,' the drawn weapon between herself and Egbert.
What did she want - what did she want' Her mother once said to her, with that characteristic touch of irony: 'Well, dear, if it is your fate to consider the lilies, that toil not, neither do they spin,1 that is one destiny among many others, and perhaps not so unpleasant as most. Why do you take it amiss, my child?'
The mother was subtler than her children, they very rarely knew how to answer her. So Winifred was only more confused. It was not a question of lilies. At least, if it were a question of lilies, then her children were the little blossoms. They at least grew. Doesn't Jesus say: 'Consider the lilies how they grů».' Good then, she had her growing babies. But as for that other tall, handsome flower of a father of theirs, he was full grown already, so she did not want to spend her life considering him in the flower of his days.
No, it was not that he didn't earn money. It was not that he was idle. He was not idle. He was always doing something, always working away, down at Crockham, doing little jobs. But, oh dear, the little jobs - the garden paths - the gorgeous flowers - the chairs to mend, old chairs to mend!
It was that he stood for nothing. If he had done something unsuccessfully, and lost what money they had! If he had but striven with something. Nay, even if he had been wicked, a waster, she would have been more free. She would have had something to resist, at least. A waster stands for something, really. He says: 'No, I will not aid and
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abet society in this business of increase and hanging together, I will unset the apple-cart as much as I can, in my small way.' Or dse he says: 'No, I will not bother about others. If I have lusts, they are my own, and I prefer them to other people's virtues.' So, a waster, a scamp, takes a sort of stand. He exposes himself to opposition and final casttgation: at any rate in story-books.
But Egbert! What are you to do with a man like Egbert? He had no vices. He was really kind, nay generous. And he was not weak. If he had been weak Winifred could have been kind to him. But he did not even give her that consolation. He was not weak, and he did not want her consolation or her kindness. No, thank you. He was of a fine passionate temper, and of a rarer steel dun she. He knew it, and she knew it. Hence she was only the more baffled and maddened, poor thing. He, the higher, the finer, in his way the stronger, played with his garden, and his old folk-songs and Morris-dances, just played, and let her support the pillars of the future on her own heart.
And he began to get bitter, and a wicked look began to come on his face. He did not give in to her, not he. There were seven devils inside his long, slim, white body. He was healthy, full of restrained life. Yes, even he himself had to lock up his own vivid life inside himself, now she would not take it from htm. Or rather, now that she only took it occasionally. For she had to yield at times. She loved him so, she desired him so, he was so exquisite to her, the fine creature that he was, finer than herself. Yes, with a groan she had to give in to her own unquenched passion for him. And he came to her then - ah, terrible, ah, wonderful, sometimes she wondered how either of them could live after the terror of the passion that swept between them. It was to her as if pure lightning, flash after flash, went through every fibre of her, till extinction came.
But it is the fate of human beings to live on. And it is the fate of clouds that seem nothing but bits of vapour slowly to pile up, 10 pile up and fill the heavens and blacken the sun entirely.
So it was. The love came back, the lightning of passion flashed tremendously between them. And there was blue sky and gorgeousness for a little while. And then, as inevitably, as inevitably, slowly the clouds began to edge up again above the horizon, slowly, slowly to lurk about the heavens, throwing an occasional cold and hateful shadow: slowly, slowly to congregate, to fill the empyrean space.
And as the years passed, the lightning cleared the sky more and more rarely, less and less the blue showed. Gradually the grey lid sank down upon them, as if it would be permanent.
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Why didn't Egbert do something, then? Why didn't he come to grips with life? Why wasn't he like Winifred's father, a pillar of society, even if a slender, exquisite column? Why didn't he go into harness of some sort? Why didn't he take some direction?
Well, you can bring an ass to the water, but you cannot make him drink. The world was the water and Egbert was the ass. And he wasn't having any. He couldn't: he just couldn't Since necessity did not force him to work for his bread and butter, he would not work for work's sake. You can't make the columbine flowers nod in January, nor make the cuckoo sing in England at Christmas. Why? It isn't his season. He doesn't want to. Nay, he can'I want to.
And there it was with Egbert He couldn't link up with die world's work, because the basic desire was absent from him. Nay, at tbc bottom of him he had an even stronger desire: to bold aloof. To hold aloof. To do nobody any damage. But to hold aloof. It was not his season.
Perhaps he should not have married and had children. But you can't snip the waters flowing.
Which held true for Winifred, too. She was not made to endure aloof. Her family tree was a robust vegetation that had to be stirring and believing. In one direction or another her life had to go. In her own home she had known nothing of dus diffidence which she found in Egbert, and which she could not understand, and which threw her into such dismay. What was she to do, what was she to do, in face of this terrible diffidence?
It was all so different in her own home. Her father may have had his own misgivings, but he kept them to himself. Perhaps he had no very profound belief in this world of ours, this society which we have elaborated with so much effort, only to find ourselves elaborated to death at last But Godfrey Marshall was of tough, rough fibre, not without a vein of healthy cunning through it all. It was for him a question of winning through, and leaving die rest to heaven. Without having many illusions to grace him, he still did believe in heaven. In a dark and unquestioning way, he had a sort of faith: an acrid faith like the sap of some not-to-be-exteraunatcd tree. Just a blind acrid faith as sap is blind and acrid, and yet pushes on in growth and in faith. Perhaps be was unscrupulous, but only as a striving tree is unscrupulous, pushing its single way in a jungle of others.
In the end, it is only this robust, sap-like faith which keeps man going. He may live on for many generations inside the shelter of the social establishment which he has erected for himself, as pear-trees and currant bushes would go on bearing fruit for many seasons, inside
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a walled garden, even if the race of man were suddenly exterminated. But bit by bit the wall-fruit-trees would gradually pull down the very walk that sustained them. Bit by bit every estabbshment collapses, unless it is renewed or restored by living hands, all the while.
Egbert could not bring himself to any more of dus restoring or renewing business. He was not aware of the face but awareness doesn't help much, anyhow. He just couldn't He had the stoic and epicurean quality of his old, fine breeding. His fáther-in-law, however, though he was not one bít more of a fool then Egbert, realised that since we are here we may as well live. And so he applied himself to his own tiny section of die social work, ami to doing die best for his family, and to leaving the rest to the ultimate will of heaven. A certain robustness of Wood made him able to go on. But sometimes'even from him spurted a sudden gall of bitterness against the world and its makeup. And yet - he had Us own will-to-succeed, and this carried him through. He refused to ask himself what the success would amount to. It amounted to the estate down in Hampshire, and his children lacking for nothing, and himself of some importance in the work): and kastal-Bastal Bastal*
Nevertheless do not let us imagine that he was a common pusher. He was not He knew as well as Egbert what disillusion meant Perhaps in lus soul he had the same estimation of success. But he had a certain acrid courage, and a certain will-to-power. In his own small circle he would emanate power, the single power of Us own blind self. Wim all Us snottmg of Us children, he was srJD the father of the old English type. He was too wise to make laws and to domineer in the abstract But he had kept, and all honour to Urn, a certain primitive dominion over the souk of Us children, the old, almost magic prestige of paternity. There it was, still burning in htm, die oM smoky torch of paternal godhead.
And in the sacred glare of dus torch Us children had been brought up. He had given the girls every liberty, at last. But he had never realty let them go beyond his power. And they, venturing out ňu» the hard wUte light of our fatherless world, teamed to see with the eyes of the world. They learned to criticise their father, even, from some effulgence of worldly white light, to see Um ss inferior. But this was all very well in the head. The moment they forgot their tricks of criticism, the old red glow of his authority came over them again. He was not to be quenched.
Let the psycho-analyst talk about father complex. It is just a word invented. Here was a maň who had kept ahve the old red name of
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fatherhood, fatherhood that had even the right to sacrifice the child to God, like Isaac. Fatherhood that had life-and-death authority over the children: a great natural power. And till his children could be brought under some other great authority as girls; or could arrive at manhood and become themselves centres of the same power, continuing the same male mystery as men; until such time, willy-nilly, Godfrey Marshall would keep his children.
It had seemed as if he might lose Winifred. Winifred had adored her husband, and looked up to him as to something wonderful. Perhaps she had expected in him another great authority, a male authority greater, finer than her father's. For having once known the glow of male power, she would not easily turn to the cold white light of feminine independence. She would hunger, hunger all her life for the warmth and shelter of true male strength.
And hunger she might, for Egbert's power lay in the abnegation of power. He was himself the living negative of power. Even of responsibility. For the negation of power at hst means the negation of responsibility. As far as these things went, he would confine himself to himself. He would try to confine his own influence even to himself. He would try, as far as possible, to abstain from influencing his children by assuming any responsibility for them. 'A little child snail lead them - * His child should lead, then. He would try not to make h go in any direction whatever. He would abstain from influencing it. Liberty! -
Poor Winifred was like a fish out of water in this liberty, gasping for the denser element which should contain her. Till her child came. And then she knew that she must be responsible for it, that she must have authority over it.
But here Egbert silendy and negatively stepped in. Silently, negatively, but fatally he neutralised her authority over her children.
There was a third little girl born. And after this Winifred wanted no more children. Her soul was turning to salt.*
So she had charge of the children, they were her responsibility. The money for them had come from her father. She would do her very best for them, and have command over their life and death. But no! Egbert would not take the responsibility. He would not even provide die money. But he would not let her have her way. Her dark, silent, passionate authority he would not allow. It was a battle between them, the battle between liberty and the old blood-power. And of course he won. The link girls loved him and adored him.'Daddy! Daddy!'They could do as they liked with htm. Their mother would have ruled them.
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She would have ruled them passionately, with indulgence, with the old dark magic of parental authority, something looming and unquestioned and, after all, divine: if we believe in divine authority. The Marshalls did, being Catholic.
And Egbert, he turned her old dark, Catholic blood-authority into a sort of tyranny. He would not leave her her children. He stole them from her, and yet without assuming responsibility for them. He stole them from her, in emotion and spirit, and left her only to command their behaviour. A thankless lot for a mother. And her children adored him, adored him, little knowing the empty bitterness they were preparing for themselves when they grew up to have husbands: hus-                  I;
bands such as Egbert, adorable and null.
Joyce, the eldest, was still his favourite. She was now a quicksilver little thing of six years old. Barbara, the youngest, was a toddler of two years. They spent most of their time down at Crockham, because he wanted to be there. And even Winifred loved the place really. But now, in her frustrated and blinded state, it was full of menace for her children. The adders, the poison-berries, the brook, the marsh, the water that might not be pure - one thing and another. Front mother and nurse it was a guerilla gunfire of commands, and blithe, quick-                     in,
silver disobedience from the three blonde, never-still little girls. Behind                    J;
the girls was the father, against mother and nurse. And so it was.                         :i{'
'If you don't come quick, nurse, I shall run out there to where                   |||
there are snakes.'                                                                                         ij
'Joyce, you must be patient. I'm just changing Annabel.'
There you are. There it was: always the same. Working away on the common across the brook he heard it. And he worked on, hist die same.
Suddenly he heard a shriek, and he flung the spade from him and started for the bridge, looking up like a startled deer. Ah, there was                    ,,
Winifred -Joyce had hurt herself. He went on up the garden.
'What is it?'
The child was still screaming - now it was - 'Daddy! Daddy! Oh-oh. Daddy!'And the mother was saying:                                                  1 j
'Don't be frightened, darling. Let mother look.'
But the child only cried:
'Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!'
She was terrified by the sight of the blood running from her own knee. Winifred crouched down, with her child of six in her lap, to examine the knee. Egbert bent over also.
'Don't make such a noise, Joyce,' he said irritably. 'How did she do it?'
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244
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'She fell on that sickle thing which you left lying about after cutting the grass,' said Winifred, looking into his face with bitter accusation as he bent near.
He had taken his handkerchief and tied it round the knee. Then he lifted the stül sobbing child in his arms, and carried her into the house and upstairs to her bed. In his arms she became quiet. But his heart was burning with pain and with guilt. He had left the sickle there lying on the edge of the grass, and so his first-born child whom he loved so dearly had come to hurt. But then it was an accident - it was an accident. Why should he fed guilty? It would probably be nothing, better in two or three days. Why take it to heart, why worry? He put it aside.
The child lay on the bed in her little summer frock, her face very white now after the shock. Nurse had come carrying the youngest child: and little Annabel stood holding her skin. Winifred, terribly serious and wooden-seeming, was bending over the knee, from which she had taken his blood-soaked handkerchief. Egbert bent forward, too, keeping more sangfroid in his face than in his heart. Winifred went all of a lump of seriousness, so he had to keep some reserve. The child moaned and whimpered.
The knee was still bleeding profusely - it was a deep cut right in the joint.
'You'd better go for the doctor, Egbert,' said Winifred bitterly.
'Oh, no! Oh, no!' cried Joyce in a panic.
'Joyce, my darling, don't cry!' said Winifred, suddenly catching the little girl to her breast in a strange tragic anguish, the Mater Dolorala.* Even the child was frightened into silence. Egbert looked at the tragic figure of his wife with the child at her breast, and turned away. Only Annabel started suddenly to cry: 'Joycey, Joycey, don't have your leg bleeding!'
Egbert rode four miles to the village for the doctor. He could not help feeling that Winifred was laying it on rather. Surely the knee itself wasn't hurt! Surely not. It was only a surface cut.
The doctor was out. Egbert left the message and came cycling swiftly home, his heart pinched with anxiety. He dropped sweating off his bicycle and went into the house, looking rather small, like a man who is at fault. Winifred was upstairs sitting by Joyce, who was looking pale and important in bed, and was eating some tapioca pudding. The pale, small, scared face of his child went to Egbert's bean.
'Doctor Wing was out. Hell be here about half-past two,' said Egbert.
'I don't want him to come,' whimpered Joyce.
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'Joyce, dear, you must be patient and quiet,' said Winifred. 'He won't hurt you. But he will tell us what to do to nuke your knee better quickly. That is why he must come.'
Winifred always explained carefully to her little girls: and it always took the words off their lips for the moment.
'Does it bleed yet?' said Egbert.
Winifred moved the bedclothes carefully aside.
'I think not,' she said.
Egbert stooped also to look.
'No, it doesn't,' he said. Then he stood up with a relieved look on his face. He turned to the child.
'Eat your pudding, Joyce,* he said. 'It won't be anything. You've only got to keep still for a few days.'
'You haven't had your dinner, have you, Daddy?'
'Not yet.'
'Nurse will give it to you,' said Winifred.
'You'll be all right, Joyce,' he said, smiling to the child and pushing the blonde hair aside off her brow. She smiled back winsomely into his face.
He went downstairs and ate his meal alone. Nurse served him. She liked waiting on him. All women liked him and liked to do things for him.
The doctor came - a fat country practitioner, pleasant and kind.
'What, little girl, been tumbling down, have you? There's a thing to be doing, for a smart little lady like you! What! And cutting your knee! Tut-tut-tutt That 9am't clever of you, now was it? Never mind, never mind, soon be better. Let us look at it. Won't hun you. Not the least in life. Bring a bowl with a little warm water, nurse. Soon have it all right again, soon have it all right.'
Joyce smiled at him with a pale smile of faint superiority. This was not die way in which she was used to being talked to.
He bent down, carefully looking at the little, thin, wounded knee of the child, Egbert bent over him.
'Oh, dear, oh, dear! Quite a deep little cut. Nasty link cut. Nasty little cut. But, never mind. Never mind, litdc lady. We'll scon have it better. Soon have it better, little lady. What's your name?'
'My name is Joyce,' said the child distinctly.
'Oh, really!' he replied. *Oh, really! Well, that's a fine name too, in my opinion. Joyce, ch? - And how old might Miss Joyce be? Can she tell me that?'
'I'm six,' said the child, slightly amused and very condescending.
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'Six! There now. Add up and count as far as six, can you? Well, that's a clever little girl, a clever little girl. And if she has to drink a spoonful of medicine, she won't make a murmur, I'll be bound. Not like some little girls. What? Eh?'
'I take it if mother wishes me to,' said Joyce.
'Ah, there now! That's the style! That's what I like to hear from a little lady in bed because she's cut her knee. That's the style -'
The comfortable and prolix doctor dressed and bandaged the knee and recommended bed and a light diet for the little lady. He thought a week or a fortnight would put it right. No bones or ligatures damaged - fortunately. Only a flesh cut. He would come again in a day or two.
So Joyce was reassured and stayed in bed and had all her toys up. Her father often played with her. The doctor came the third day. He was fairly pleased with the knee. It was healing. It was healing - yes -yes. Let the child continue in bed. He came again after a day or two. Winifred was a trifle uneasy. The wound seemed to be healing on the top, but it hurt the child too much. It didn't look quite right. She said so to Egbert.
'Egbert, I'm sure Joyce's knee isn't healing properly.'
'I think it is,' he said. 'I think it's all right.'
'I'd rather Doctor Wing came again -1 don't feel satisfied.'
'Aren't you trying to imagine it worse than it really is?'
'You would say so, of course. But I shall write a post-card to Doctor Wing now.'
The doctor came next day. He examined the knee. Yes, there was inflammation. Yes, there might be a little septic poisoning - there might. There might. Was the child feverish?
So a fortnight passed by, and the child was feverish, and the knee was more inflamed and grew worse and was painful, painful. She cried in the night, and her mother had to sit up with her. Egbert still insisted it was nothing, really - it would pass. But in his heart he was anxious.
Winifred wrote again to her father. On Saturday the elderly man appeared. And no sooner did Winifred see the thick, rather short figure in its grey suit than a great yearning came over her.
'Father, I'm not satisfied with Joyce. I'm not satisfied with Doctor Wing.'
'Well, Winnie, dear, if you're not satisfied we must have further advice, that is all.'
The sturdy, powerful, elderly man went upstairs, his voice sounding
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rather grating through the house, as if it cut upon the tense atmosphere.
'How are you, Joyce, darling?' he said to the child. 'Does your knee hurt you? Does it hurt you, dear?'
'It does sometimes.' The child was shy of him, cold towards him.
'Well, dear, I'm sorry for that. I hope you try to bear it, and not trouble mother too much.'
There was no answer. He looked at the knee. It was red and stiff.
'Of course,' he said, 'I think we must have another doctor's opinion. And if we're going to have it, we had better have it at once. Egbert, do you think you might cycle in to Bingham for Doctor Wayne? I found him very satisfactory for Winnie's mother.'
'I can go if you think it necessary,' said Egbert.
'Certainly I think it necessary. Even if there is nothing, we can have peace of mind. Certainly I think it necessary. I should like Doctor Wayne to come this evening if possible.'
So Egbert set off on his bicycle through the wind, like a boy sent on an errand, leaving his father-in-law a pillar of assurance, with Winifred.
Doctor Wayne came, and looked grave. Yes, the knee was certainly taking the wrong way. The child might be lame for life.
Up went the fire of fear and anger in every heart. Doctor Wayne came again the next day for a proper examination. And, yes, the knee had really taken bad ways. It should be X-rayed. It was very important.
Godfrey Marshall walked up and down the lane with the doctor, beside the standing motor-car: up and down, up and down in one of those consultations of which he had had so many in his life.
As a result he came indoors to Winifred.
'Well, Winnie, dear, the best thing to do is to take Joyce up to London, to a nursing home where she can have proper treatment. Of course this knee has been allowed to go wrong. And apparently there is a risk that the child may even lose her leg. What do you think, dear? You agree to our taking her up to town and putting her under the best care?'
'Oh, father, you know I would do anything on earth for her.'
'I know you would, Winnie darling- The pity is that there has been this unfortunate delay already. I can't think what Doctor Wing was doing. Apparently the child is in danger of losing her leg. Well then, if you will have everything ready, we will take her up to town tomorrow. I will order the large car from Denley's to be here at ten.
*48
England, My England
Egbert, will you take a telegram at once to Doctor Jackson? 11 is a small nursing home for children and for surgical cases, not far from Baker Street I'm sure Joyce will be all right there.'
'Oh, father, can't I nurse her myself!'
'Well, darling, if she is to have proper treatment, she had best be in a home. The X-ray treatment, and the electric treatment, and whatever is necessary.'
'It will cost a great deal -* said Winifred.
'We can't think or cost, if the child's leg is in danger - or even her life. No use speaking of cost,' said the elder man impatJendy.
And so it was. Poor Joyce, stretched out on a bed in the big closed motor-car - the mother sitting by her head, the grandfather in his short grey beard and a bowler hat, sitting by her feet, thick, and implacable in his responsibility, - they rolled slowly away from Crockham, and from Egbert who stood there bareheaded and a little ignominious, left behind. He was to shut up the house and bring the rest of the family back to town, by train, the next day.
Followed a dark and bitter time. The poor child. The poor, poor child, how she suffered, an agony and a long crucifixion in that nursing home. It was a bitter six weeks which changed the soul of Winifred for ever. As she sat by the bed of her poor, tortured little child, tortured with the agony of the knee, and the still worse agony of these diabolic, but perhaps necessary modern treatments, she felt her heart killed and going cold in her breast Her tittle Joyce, her frail, brave, wonderful, little Joyce, frail and small and pale as a white flower! Ah, how had she, Winifred, dared to be so wicked, so wicked, so careless, so sensual.
'Let my heart die! Let my woman's heart of flesh die! Saviour, let my heart die. And save my child. Let my heart die from the world and from the flesh. Oh, destroy my heart that is so wayward. Let my heart of pride die. Let my heart die.'
So she prayed beside the bed of her child. And like the Mother with the seven swords in her breast,7 slowly her heart of pride and passion died in her breast, bleeding away. Slowly it died, bleeding away, and she turned to the Church for comfort, to Jesus, to the Mother of God, but most of all, to that great and enduring institution, the Roman Catholic Church. She withdrew into the shadow of the Church. She was a mother with three chÜdrerk But in her soul she died, her heart of pride and passion and desire Wed to death, her soul belonged to her church, her body belonged to her duty as a mother.
Her duty as a wife did not enter. As a wife she had no sense of duty:
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only a certain bitterness towards the man with whom she had known such sensuality and distraction. She was purely the Mater Dolorata. To the man she was dosed as a tomb.
Egbert came to see bis child. But Winifred seemed to be always seated there, like the tomb of his manhood and his fatherhood. Poor Winifred: she was still young, still strong and ruddy and beautiful like a ruddy hard flower of the held. Strange - her ruddy, healthy face, so sombre, and her strong, heavy, full-blooded body, so still. She, a nun! Never. And yet the gates of her heart and soul had shut tn his face with a slow, resonant dang, shutting him out for ever. There was no need for her to go into a convent. Her will had done it.
And between this young mother and this young father lay the child, tike a bit of pale silk floss on the pillow, and a little white pain-quenched face. He could not bear it. He just could not bear it He turned aside. There was nothing to do but to turn aside. He turned aside, and went hither and thither, desultory. He was still attractive and desirable. But there wss a tittle frown between his brow as if he had been cleft there with a hatchet: deft right in, for ever, and that was the stigma.
The child's leg was saved: but the knee was locked stiff. The fear now was lest the lower leg should wither, or cease to grow. There must be long-continued massage and treatment, daily treatment, even when the duld left the nursing home. And the whole of the expense was borne by the grandfather.
Egbert now had no real home. Winifred with the children and nurse was tied to the little flat in London. He could not live there: he could not contain himself. The cottage was shut-up - or lent m friends. He went down sometimes to work in his garden and keep the place in order. Then with the empty house around him at night, an the empty rooms, he fdt his heart go wicked. The sense of frustration and futility, tike some slow, torpid snake, slowly bit right through his heart Futility, futility, futility; the horrible marsh-poison went through his veins and lolled him.
As he worked in the garden in the silence of day he would listen for a sound. No sound. No sound of Winifred from the dark inside of the cottage: no sound of children's voices from the air, from the common, from the near distance. No sound, nothing but the old dark marsh-venomous atmosphere of the place. So he worked spasmodically through the day, and at night made a fire and cooked some food stone.
He was alone. He himself cleaned the cottage and made his bed. But his mending he did not do. His shirts were slit on the shoulders,
250                            England, My England
when he had been working, and the white flesh showed through. He would fed the air and toe spots of rain on his exposed flesh. And he would look again across the common, where the dark, tufted gotse was dying to seed, and the bits of cat-heather were coming pink in tufts, like a sprinkling of sacrificial blood.
His heart went back to the savage old spirit of the place: die desire for old gods, old, lost passions, the passion of the cold-blooded, darting snakes that hissed and shot away from him, the mystery of Wood-sacrifices, all the lost, intense sensations of the primeval people of the place, whose passions seethed in the air stul, from those long days before the Romans came. The seethe of a lost, dark passion in the air. The presence of unseen snakes.
A queer, baffled, half-wicked look came on his face. He could not stay long at the cottage. Suddenly he must swing on to his bicycle and go - anywhere. Anywhere, away from this place. He would stay a few days with his mother in die old home. His mother adored him and grieved as a mother would. But the little, baffled, half-wicked smile curled on his bee, and he swung away from his modter's solicitude as from everything else.
Always moving on - from place to place, friend to friend: and always swinging away from sympathy. As soon as sympathy, like a soft hand, was readied out to touch him, away he swerved, instinctively, as a harmless snake swerves and swerves and swerves away from an outstretched hand. Away he must go. And periodically he went back to Winifred.
He was terrible to her now, like a temptation. She had devoted herself to her children and her church. Joyce was once more on her feet; but, alasf lame, with iron supports to her leg, and a little crutch. It was strange how she had grown into a long, pallid, wild little thing. Strange that the pain had not made her soft and docile, but had brought out a wild, almost msnad temper in die child. She was seven, and long and white and (hin, but by no means subdued. Her blonde hair was darkening. She stul had long sufferings to bee, and, in her own childish consciousness, the stigma of her lameness to bear.
And she bore it. An almost maenad courage seemed to possess her, as if she were a long, thin, young weapon of life. She acknowledged all her mother's care. She would stand by her mother for ever. But some of her father's fine-tempered desperation flashed in her.
When Egbert saw his little girl limping horribly - not only limping but lurching horribly in crippled, childish way, his heart again hardened with chagrin, like steel that is temp« -sd again. There was a tacit
England. My England
IS i
understanding between him and his little girl: not what we would call love, but a weapon-like kinship. There was a tiny touch of irony in his manner towards her, contrasting sharply with Winifred's heavy, unleavened solicitude and care. The child flickered back to him with an answering little smile of irony and recklessness: an odd flippancy which made Winifred only the more sombre and earnest.
The Marshalls took endless thought and trouble for die child, searching out every means to save her limb and her active freedom. They spared no effort and no money, they spared no strength of will. With aU their slow, heavy power of will they willed that Joyce should save her liberty of movement, should win back her wild, free grace. Even if it took a long time to recover, it should be recovered.
So the situation stood. And Joyce submitted, week after week, month after month, to die tyranny and pain of the treatment. She acknowledged the honourable effort on her behalf. But her flamy reckless spirit was her father's. It was he who had all the glamour for her. He and she were like members of some forbidden secret society who know one another but may not recognize one another. Knowledge they had in common, the same secret of life, the father and the child. But the child stayed in the camp of her mother, honourably, and the father wandered outside like Ishmacl,* only coming sometimes to sit in me home for an hour or two, an evening or two beside the camp fire, like Ishmad, in a curious silence and tension, with the mocking answer of the desert speaking out of his silence, and annulling the whole convention of the domestic home.
His presence was almost an anguish to Winifred. She prayed against it That little deft between his brow, that flickering, wicked, link smile that seemed to haunt Ins face, and above all, the triumphant londiness, the Ishmacl quality. And then the ercctness of his supple body, like a symbol. The very way he stood, so quiet, so insidious, like an erect, supple symbol of life, the living body, confronting her downcast soul, was torture to her. He was like a supple living idol moving before her eyes, and she fdt if she watched him she was damned.
And he came and made himself at home in her little home. When he was there, moving in his own quiet way, she fdt as if the whole great law of sacrifice, by which she had elected to live, were annulled. He annulled by his very presence the laws of her Ute. And what did he substitute? Ah, against that question she hardened herself in recoil.
It was awful to her to have to have him about - moving about in his shirt-sleeves, speaking in his tenor, throaty voice to the children.
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Annabel simply adored him, and he teased die little girl. The baby, Barbara, was not sure of him. She had been born a stranger to him. But even the nurse, when she saw his white shoulder of flesh through the slits of his torn shirt, thought it a shame.
Winifred felt it was only another weapon of his against her.
'You have other shirts - why do you wear that old one that is all torn, Egbert?* she said.
'I may as well wear it out,' he said subtly.
He knew she would not offer to mend it for him. She could not. And no, she would not. Had she not her own gods to honour? And could she betray them, submitting to his Baal and Ashtaroth?' And it was terrible to ber, his unsheathed presence, that scented to annul her and her faith, like>another revelation. Like a gleaming idol evoked against her, a vivid life-idol that might triumph.
He came and he went - and she persisted. And then the great war broke out He was a man who could not go to the dogs. He could not dissipate himself. He was pure-bred in bis Engltshness, and even when he would have liked to be vicious, he could not.
So when the war broke out his whole instinct was against it: against war. He had not the faintest desire to overcome any foreigners or to help in their death. He had no conception of Imperial England, and Rule Britannia was hut a joke to him. He was a pure-blooded Englishman, perfect in his race, and when he was truly himself he could no more have been aggressive on the score of his Englishncss than a rose can be aggressive on the score of its rosiness.
No, he had no desire m defy Germany and to «alt England. The distinction between German and English was not for him the distinction between good and bad. It was the distinction between blue water-flowers and red or white bush-blossoms: just difference. The difference between the wild boar and the wild bear. And a man was good or bad according to his nature, not according to his nationality.
Egbert was well-bred, and this was part of his natural understanding. It was merely unnatural to him to hate a nation en bloc. Certain individuals he disliked, and others he liked, and the mass he knew nothing about. Certain deeds he disliked, certain deeds seemed natural to him, and about most deeds he had no particular feeling.
He had, however, the one deepest pure-bred instinct. He recoiled inevitably from having bis feelings dictated to him by the mass feeling. His feelings were his own, his understanding was his own, and he would never go back on cither, willingly. Shall a man become inferior to his own true knowledge and self, just because the mob expects it of him?
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What Egbert felt subdy and without question, his father-in-law felt also in a rough, more combative way. Different as the two men were, they were two real Englishmen, and their instincts were almost the same.
And Godfrey Marshall had the world to reckon with. There was German military aggression, and the English non-military idea of liberty and the 'conquests of peace* - meaning industrialism. Even if the choice between militarism and industrialism were a choice of evils, the elderly man asserted his choice of the latter, perforce. He whose soul was quick with the instinct of power.
Egbert just refused to reckon with the world. He just refused to decide between German militarism and British industrialism. He chose neither. As for atrocities, be despised the people who committed them, as inferior criminal types. There was nothing national about crime.
And yet, war! War! Just war! Not right or wrong, but just war itself. Should he join? Should he give himself over to war? The question was in his mind for some weeks. Not because he thought England was right and Germany wrong. Probably Germany was wrong, but he refused to make a choke. Not because he felt inspired. No. But just-war.
The deterrent was, the giving himself over into the power of other men, and into the power of the mob-spirit of a democratic army. Should he give himself over? Should be make over his own life and body to the control of something which be knew was inferior, in spirit, to his own self? Should he commit himself into the power of an inferior control? Should he? Should he betray himself?
He was going to put himself into the power of his inferiors, and he knew it. He was going to subjugate himself. He was going to be ordered about by petty canaille1* of non-commissioned officers - and even commissioned officers. He who was born and bred free. Should he do it?
He went to his wife, to speak to her.
'Shall I join up, Winifred?'
She was silent Her instinct also was dead against it. And yet a certain profound resentment made her answer:
'You have three children dependent on you. I don't know whether you have thought ofthat.'
It was still only the third month of the war, and the old pre-war ideas were still alive.
*Of course. But it won't make much difference to them. I shall be earning a shilling a day, at least.'
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England, My England
'You'd better speak to father, I think,' she replied heavily.
Egbert went to his father-in-law. The elderly man's heart was full of resentment.
'I should say,' he said rather sourly, 'it is the best thing you could do.'
Egbert went and joined up immediately, as a private soldier. He was drafted into the light artillery.
Winifred now had a new duty towards him: the duty of a wife towards a husband who is himself performing his duty towards the world. She loved him still. She would always love him; as far as earthly love went. But it was duty she now lived by. When he came back to her in khaki, a soldier, she submitted to him as a wile. It was her duty. But to his passion she could never again fully submit. Something prevented her, for ever: even her own deepest choice.
He went back again to camp. It did not suit him to be a modern soldier. In the thick, gritty, hideous khaki his subtle physique was extinguished as if he had been killed. In the ugly intimacy of the camp his thoroughbred sensibilities were just degraded. But he had chosen, so he accepted. An ugly little look came on to his face, of a man who has accepted his own degradation.
In the early spring Winifred went down to Crockham to be there when primroses were out, and the tassels hanging on the hazel-bushes. She felt something like a reconciliation towards Egbert, now he was a prisoner in camp most of his days. Joyce was wild with delight at seeing the garden and the common again, after the eight or nine months of London and misery. She was still lame. She still had the irons up her leg. But she lurched about with a wild, crippled agility.
Egbert came for a week-end, in his gritty, duck, sandpaper khaki and puttees and the hideous cap. Nay, he looked terrible. And on his face a slighdy impure look, a little sore on his lip, as if he had eaten too much or drunk too much or let his blood become a little unclean. He was almost uglily healthy, with the camp life. It did not suit htm.
Winifred waited for him in a little passion of duty and sacrifice, willing to serve the soldier, if not die man. It only made him feel a little more ugly inside. The week-end was torment to him: the memory of the camp, the knowledge of the life he led there; even the sight of his own legs in that abhorrent khaki. He fcJt as if the hideous cloth went into his Mood and made it gritty and dirty. Then Winifred so ready to serve the soldier, when she repudiated the man. And the children running around playing and calling in the rather mincing
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*55
fashion of children who have nurses and governesses and literature in the family. And Joyce so lame! It had all become unreal to him, after the camp. It only set his soul on edge. He left at dawn on the Monday morning, glad to get back to the realness and vulgarity of the camp.
Winifred would never meet him again at die cottage - only in London, where the world was with them. But sometimes be came alone to Crockham, perhaps when friends were staying there. And then he would work awhile in his garden. This summer still it would flame with Hue anchusas and big red poppies, the mulleins would sway their soft, downy erections m the air: he loved mulleins: and the honeysuckle would stream out scent like memory, when die owl was whooing. Then he sat by the fire with the friends and with Winifred's sisters, and they sang the folk-songs. He put on thin civilian clothes and his charm and his beauty and the supple dominancy of his body glowed out again. But Winifred was not there.
At the end of the summer he went to Flanders, into action. He seemed already to have gone out of life, beyond the pale of life. He hardly remembered his life any more, being like a man who is going to take a jump from a height, and is only looking to where he must land.
He was twice slighdy wounded, in two months. But not enough to put him off duty for more than a day or two. They were retiring again, holding the enemy back. He was in die rear - three machine-guns. The country was all pleasant, war had not yet trampled it. Only the air seemed shattered, and the land awaiting death. It was a small, unimportant action in which he was engaged.
The guns were stationed on a little bushy hillock just outside a village. But occasionally, it was difficult to say from which direction came the sharp crackle of rifle-fire, and beyond, the far-off thud of cannon. The afternoon was wintry and cold.
A lieutenant stood on a little iron platform at the top of the ladders, taking the sights and giving die aim, calling in a high, tense, mechanical voke. Out of the sky came die sharp cry of die directions, then the warning numbers, then 'Fire!' The shot went, the piston of the gun sprang back, there was a sharp explosion, and a very faint film of smoke in the air. Then the other two guns fired, and there was a lull. The officer was uncertain of the enemy's position. The duck dump of horse-chestnut trees bdow was without change. Only in the fár dištance the sound of heavy firing continued, so fár off as to give a sense of peace.
256                           England, My England
The gorse bushes on either band were dark, but a few sparks of flowers showed yellow. He noticed them almost unconsciously as he waited, in the hill. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and the air came chill on his arms. Again his shirt was slit on the shoulders, and die flesh showed through. He was dirty and unkempt. But his face was quiet. So many things go out of consciousness before we come to the end of consciousness.
Before him, below, was the highroad, running between high banks of grass and gorse. He saw the whitish, muddy tracks and deep scores in the road, where the part of die regiment had retired. Now all was still. Sounds that came, came from the outside. The place where he stood was still silent, chill, serene: the white church among the trees beyond seemed like a thought only.
He moved into a lightning-like mechanical response at the sharp cry from the officer overhead. Mechanism, the pure mechanical action of obedience at the guns. Pure mechanical action at the guns. It left die soul unburdened, brooding m dark nakedness. In the end, the soul is alone, brooding on die lace of the uncreated flux, as a bird on a dark sea.
Nothing could be seen but the road, and a crucifix knocked slanting and the dark, autumnal fields and woods. There appeared three horsemen on a little eminence, very small, on the crest of a ploughed field. They were our own men. Of the enemy, nothing.
The lull continued. Then suddenly came sharp orders, and a new direction of tbc guns, and an intense, exciting activity. Yet at the centre the soul remained dark and aloof, alone.
But even so, it was the soul that heard the new sound: the new, deep 'pappľ of a gun that seemed to touch right upon die soul. He kept up the rapid activity at the machine-gun, sweating. But in his soul was the echo of the new, deep sound, deeper than life.
And in confirmation came the awful faint whistling of a shell, advancing almost suddenly into a piercing, tearing shriek that would Kar through the membrane of lúč. He heard it in his ears, but he heard it also in his soul, in tension. There was relief when the thing had swung by and struck, away beyond. He heard the hoarseness of its explosion, and the voice of the soldier calling to the horses. But he did not turn round to look. He only noticed a twig of holly with red berries fall like a gift on to the road below.
Not this time, not this time. Whither thou goest I will go.1' Did he say it to the shell, or to whom? Whither thou goest I will go. Then, the faint whistling of another shell dawned, and his blond became small
England, My England                           257
and still to receive it. It drew nearer, like some horrible blast of wind; his blood lost consciousness. But in the second of suspension he saw the heavy shell swoop to earth, into the rocky bushes on the right, and earth and stones poured up into the sky. It was as if he heard no sound. The earth and stones and fragments of bush fell to earth again, and there was the same unchanging peace. The Germans had got the aim.
Would they move now? Would they retire? Yes. The officer was giving the last lightning-rapid orders to fire before withdrawing. A shell passed unnoticed in the rapidity of action. And then, into the silence, into the suspense where the soul brooded, finally crashed a noise and a darkness and a moment's flaming agony and horror. Ah, he had seen the dark bird flying towards him, flying home this tune. In one instant life and eternity went up in a conflagration of agony, then there was a weight of darkness.
When faintly something began to snuggle in the darkness, a consciousness of himself, he was aware of a great load and a clanging sound. To have known the moment of death! And to be forced, before dying, to review it. So, fate, even m death.
There was a resounding of pain. It seemed to sound from the outside of his consciousness: like a loud bell clanging very near. Yet he knew it was himself. He must associate himself with it. After a lapse and a new effort, he identified a pain in his head, a large pain that clanged and resounded. So far he could identify himself with himself. Then there was a lapse.
After a time he seemed to wake up again, and waking, to know that he was at the front, and mat he was killed. He did not open his eyes. Light was not yet his. The clanging pain in his head rang out die rest of his consciousness. So he lapsed away from consciousness, in unutterable sick abandon of life.
Bit by bit, like a doom, came the necessity to know. He was hit in the head. It was only a vague surmise at first. But in the swinging of the pendulum of pain, swinging ever nearer and nearer, to touch him into an agony of consciousness and a consciousness of agony, gradually the knowledge emerged - he must be hit m the head - hit on the left brow; if so, there would be blood - was there blood? -could he feel blood in his left eye? Then the clanging seemed to burst the membrane of his brain, like death-madness.
Was there Mood on his face? Was hot blood flowing? Or was it dry Mood congealing down his cheek? It took him hours even to ask the question: time being no more than an agony in darkness, without measurement.
*S8
England, My England
A long tíme after he had opened his eyes he realised he was seeing something - something, something, but the effort to recall what was too great. No, no; no recall!
Were they the stars in the dark sky? Was it possible it was stars in the dark sky? Stars? The world? Ah, no, he could not know it! Stars and the world were gone for him, he closed his eyes. No stars, no sky, no world. No. No! The thick darkness of blood alone. It should be one great lapse into the duck darkness of blood in agony.
Death, oh, death! The world all Wood, and the blood all writhing with death. The soul like the tiniest little light out on a dark sea, the sea of blood. And the light guttering, beating, pulsing in a windless stonn, wishing it could go out, yet unable.
There had been life. There had been Winifred and his children. But the frail death-agony effort to catch at straws of memory, straws of life from the past, brought on too great a nausea. No, no! No Winifred, no children. No world, no people. Better the agony of dissohirion ahead than the nausea of the effort backwards. Better the terrible work should go forward, the dissolving into the black sea of death, in the extremity of dissolution, than that there should be any reaching back towards life. To forget! To forget! Utterly, utterly to forget, in the great forgetting of death. To break the core and the unit of Ufe, and to lapse out on the great darkness. Only that. To break the due, and mingle and commingle with the one darkness, without afterwards or forwards. Let the black sea of death itself solve the problem of futurity. Let the will of man break and give up.
What was that? A light! A terrible light! Was it figures? Was it legs of a horse colossal - colossal above hňn: huge, huge?
The Germans heard a slight noise, and started. Then, in the glare of a light-bomb, by the side of the heap of earth thrown up by the shell, they saw the dead face.
The Horse Dealer's Daughter
'Well, Mabel, and what are you going to do with yourself?' asked Joe, with foolish flippancy. He felt quite safe himself. Without listening for an answer, he turned aside, worked a grain of tobacco to the tip of his tongue, and spat it out. He did not care about anything, since he felt safe himself.
The three brothers and the sister sat round the desolate breakfast table, attempting some sort of desultory consultation. The morning's post had given the final tap to the family fortunes, and all was over. The dreary dining-room itself, with its heavy mahogany furniture, looked as if it were waiting to be done away with.
But the consultation amounted to nothing. There was a strange air of incffcctuality about the three men, as they sprawled at tabic, smoking and reflecting vaguely on their own condition. The girl was alone, a rather short, sullen-looking young woman of twenty-seven. She did not share the same life as her brothers. She would have been good-looking, save for the impassive fixity of her face, 'bull-dog', as her brothers called it.
There was a confused tramping of horses' feet outside. The three men all sprawled round in their chairs to watch. Beyond the dark holly-bushes that separated the strip of lawn from the highroad, they could sec a cavalcade of shire horses swinging out of their own yard, being taken for exercise. This was the last time. These were the last horses that would go through their hands. The young men watched with critical, callous look. They were all frightened at the collapse of their lives, and the sense of disaster in which they were involved left them no inner freedom.
Yet they were three fine, well-set fellows enough. Joe, the eldest, was a man of thirty-three, broad and handsome in a hot, flushed way. His face was red, he twisted his Mack moustache over a thick linger, his eyes were shallow and restless. He had a sensual way of uncovering his teeth when he laughed, and his bearing was stupid. Now he watched the horses with a gUzed look of helplessness in his eyes, a certain stupor of downfall.
The great draught-horses swung past. They were tied head to tail, four of them, and they heaved along to where a lane branched off
a88                                Samson and Delilah
She started, and seemed to shudder. But his hand insinuated itself between her breasts, as she continued to gaze in the fire.
'And don't you think I've come back here a-begging,' he said. 'I've more than one thousand pounds to my name, I have. And a bit of a fight for a how-de-do pleases me, that it do. But that doesn't mean as you're going to deny as you're my Missis...'
Tickets, Please
There is in the Midlands a single4ine tramway system which boldly leaves the county town1 and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dak, through the long ugly villages of workmen's houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy cold little market-places, tOting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where me collieries are, dien up again, past a mile rural church, under die ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last Ktrie ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wad, gloomy country beyond. There the green and creamy coloured tram-car seems to pause and purr with curious satisfaction. But in a few minutes - the clock on the turret of the Cooperative Wholesale Society's Shops gives the time- away it starts once more on the adventure. Again mere are die reckless swoops downhill, bouncing the loops: again die cmuy wait in the hill-top market-place: again the breathless slithering round the precipitous drop under the church: again the patient halts at the loops, waiting for die outcoming car so on and on, for two long hours, till at last die dry looms beyond the fát gas-works, the narrow factories draw near, we arc in die sordid streets of the great town, once more we adle to a standstill at our terminus, abashed by the great crimson and cream-coloured chy cars, but still perky, jaunty, somewhat dare-devil, green as a jaunty sprig of parsley out of a black colliery garden.
To ride on diese cars is always an adventure. Since we arc in wartime, the drivers are men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks. So they have the spirit of the devil in them. The ride becomes a steeplechase. Hurray! we have leapt in a dear jump over the canal bridges - now for die four-lane corner. With a shriek and a trail of sparks we are dear again. To be sure, a tram often leaps the rails - but what matter! It sits in a ditch till other trams come to haul it out. It is quite common for a car, packed with one solid mass of living people, to come to a dead halt in the midst of unbroken blackness, the heart of nowhere on a dark night, and for the driver and die girl conductor to call, 'All get off- car's on fire!' Instead, however, of rushing out in a panic, the passengers stolidly reply: 'Get on - get on! We're not
290                                Tickeis, Please
coming out. We're stopping where we are. Push on, George.' So til) flames actually appear.
The reason for this reluctance to dismount is that the nights are howlingly cold, Mack, and windswept, and a car is a haven of refuge. From village to village the miners travel, for a change of cinema, of girl, of pub. The trams are desperately packed. Who is going to risk himself in the black gulf outside, to wait perhaps an hour for another tram, then to see the forlorn notice 'Depot Only', because there is something wrong! Or to greet a unit of three bright cars all so tight with people that they sail past with a howl of derision. Trams that pass in the night.
This, the most dangerous tram-service in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with pride, is entirely conducted by girls, and driven by rash young men, a little crippled, or by delicate young men, who creep forward in terror. The girls are fearless young hussies. In their ugly Muc uniform, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid* of an old noncommissioned officer. With a tram packed with howling colliers, roaring|: hymns downstairs and a son of antiphony of obscenities upstairs, the lasses are perfectly at their ease. They pounce on the youths who try to evade their ticket-machine. They push orTthe men at the end of their distance. They are not going to be done in the eye - not they. They fear nobody - and everybody fears them.
'Hello, Annie!'
'Hello, Ted!'
'Oh, mind my corn, Miss Stone. It's my belief you've got a heart of stone, for you've trod on it again.'
'You should keep it in your pocket,' replies Miss Stone, and she goes sturdily upstairs in her high boots.
'Tickets, please.'
She is peremptory, suspicious, and ready to hit first. She can hold her own against ten thousand. The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae.1
Therefore, there is a certain wild romance aboard these cars - and in the sturdy bosom of Annie herself. The rime for soft romance is in the morning, between ten o'clock and one, when things are rather slack: that is, except market-day and Saturday. Thus Annie has time to look about her. Then she often hops off her car and into a shop where she has spied something, while the driver chats in the main road. There is very good feeling between the girls and the drivers. Arc they not companions in peril, shipmates aboard this careering
Ticken, Please                                aoi
vessel of a tram-car, for ever rocking on the waves of a stormy land.
Then, also, during the easy hours, the inspectors arc most in evidence. For some reason, everybody employed in this tram-service is young: there are no grey heads. It would not do. Therefore the inspectors are of the right age, and one, the chief, is also good-looking. See him stand on a wet, gloomy morning, in his long oil-skin, his peaked cap well down over his eyes, waiting to board a car. His face is ruddy, his small brown moustache is weathered, he has a faint impudent smile. Fairly tall and agile, even in his waterproof, he springs aboard a car and greets Annie.
'Hello, Annie! Keeping the wet out?'
'Trying to.'
There are only two people in the car. Inspecting is soon over. Then for a long and impudent chat on the foot-board, a good, easy, twelve-mile chat.
The inspector's name is John Thomas Raynor - always called John Thomas, except sometimes, in malice, Coddy.* His face sets in fury when he is addressed, from a distance, with this abbreviation. There is considerable scandal about John Thomas in half a dozen villages. He flirts with the girl conductors in the morning, and walks out with them in the dark night, when they leave their tram-car at the depot. Of course, the girls quit the service frequently. Then he flirts and walks out with the newcomer: always providing she is sufneiendy attractive, and that she will consent to walk. It is remarkable, however, that most of the girls are quite comely, they arc all young, and this                     !,.<
roving life aboard the car gives them a sailor's dash and recklessness.                    !
What matter how they behave when the ship is in port. Tomorrow they will be aboard again.                                                                              ;I
Annie, however, was something of a Tartar,9 and her sharp tongue                   j
had kept John Thomas at arm's length for many months. Perhaps,                    \
therefore, she liked him all the more: for he always came up smiling, with impudence. She watched him vanquish one girl, then another. She could tell by die movement of his mouth and eyes, when he flirted                     '
with her in the morning, that he had been walking out with this lass,                   1
or the other, the night before. A fine cock-of-thc-walk he was. She                  !|
could sum him up pretty well.                                                                       \
In this subtle antagonism they knew each other like old friends, they were as shrewd with one another almost as man and wife. But Annie had always kept him sufficiently at arm's length. Besides, she had a boy of her own.
The Statutes fair,* however, came in November, at Bcstwood. It
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happened that Annie had the Monday night off. It was a drizzling ugly night, yet she. dressed herself up and went to the fair ground. She was alone, but she expected soon to find a pal of some sort.
The roundabouts were veering round and grinding out their music, the side shows were making as much commotion as possible. In the cocoanut shies there were no cocoanuts, but artificial war-time substitutes, which the lads declared were fastened into the irons. There was a sad decline in brilliance and luxury. None the less, the ground was muddy as ever, there was the same crush, the press of faces lighted up by the flares and the electric lights, the same smell of naphtha and a few fried potatoes, and of electricity.
Who should be the first to greet Miss Annie on the show-ground but John Thomas. He had a Mack overcoat buttoned up (o his chin, and a tweed cap pulled down over his brows, his face between was ruddy and smiling and handy as ever. She knew so well the way his mouth moved.
She was very glad to have a 'boy'. To be at the Statutes without a fellow was no fun. Instantly, like the gallant he was, he took her on the Dragons, grim-toothed, round-about switchbacks. It was not nearly so exciting asa tram-car actually. But, then, to be seated in a shaking, green dragon, uplifted above the sea of bubble faces, careering in a rickety fashion in the lower heavens, whilst John Thomas leaned over her, his cigarette in his mouth, was after all the right style. She was a plump, quick, alive little creature. So she was quite excited and happy.
John Thomas made her stay on for the next round. And therefore she could hardly for shame repulse him when he put his arm round her and drew her a little nearer to him, in a very warm and cuddly manner. Besides, he was fairly discreet, he kept his movement as hidden as possible. She looked down, and saw that his red, clean hand was out of sight of the crowd. And they knew each other so well. So they warmed up to the fair.
After the dragons they went on the horses. John Thomas paid each rime, so she could but be complaisant. He, of course, sat astride on the outer horse - named 'Black Bess' - and she sat sideways, towards him, on the inner horse - named 'Wildfire'. But of course John Thomas was not going to sit discreetly on 'Black Bess', holding the brass bar. Round they spun and heaved, in the light. And round he swung on his wooden steed, flinging one leg across her mount, and perilously tipping up and down, across the space, half lying back, laughing at her. He was perfectly happy; she was afraid her hat was on one side, but she was excited.
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He threw quoits on a table, and won for her two large, pale-blue hat-pins. And then, hearing the noise of the cinemas, announcing another performance, they climbed the boards and went in.
Of course, during these performances pitch darkness falls from time to time, when the machine goes wrong. Then there is a wild whooping, and a loud smacking of simulated kisses. In these moments John Thomas drew Annie towards him. After all, he had a wonderfully warm, cosy way of holding a girl with his arm, he seemed to make such a nice fit. And, after all, it was pleasant to be so held: so very comforting and cosy and nice. He leaned over her and she felt his breath on her hair; she knew he wanted to kiss her on the tips. And, after all, he was so warm and she fitted in to him so softly. After all, she wanted him to touch her lips.
But the light sprang up; she also started electrically, and put her hat straight He left his arm lying nonchalantly behind her. Well, it was run, it was exciting to be at the Statutes with John Thomas.
When the cinema was over they went for a walk across the dark, damp fields. He had all the arts of love-making. He was especially good at holding a girl, when he sat with her on a sole in the Mack, drizzling darkness. He seemed to be holding her in space, against his own warmth and gratification. And his kisses were soft and slow and searching.
So Annie walked out with John Thomas, though she kept her own boy dangling in the distance. Some of the tram-girls chose to be huffy. But there, you must take things as you find them, in dus life.
There was no mistake about it, Annie liked John Thomas a good deal. She fdt so rich and warm in herself whenever he was near. And John Thomas really liked Annie, more than usual. The soft, melting way in which she could flow into a fellow, as if she melted into his very bones, was something rare and good. He fully appreciated this.
But with a developing acquaintance there began a developing intimacy. Annie wanted to consider him a person, a man; she wanted to take an intelligent interest in him, and to have an intelligent response. She did not want a mere nocturnal presence, which was what he was so far. And she prided herself that he could not leave her.
Here she made a mistake. John Thomas intended to remain a nocturnal presence; he had no idea of becoming an all-round individual to her. When she started to take an intelligent interest in him and his life and his character, he sheered off. He hated intelligent interest. And he knew that the only way to stop it was to avoid it. The possessive female was aroused in Annie. So he left her.
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It is no use saying she was not surprised. She was at first startled, thrown out of her count. For she had been so very sure of holding him. For a while she was staggered, and everything became uncertain to her. Then she wept with fury, indignation, desolation, and misery. Then she had a spasm of despair. And then, when he came, still impudently, on to her car, still familiar, but letting her see by the movement of his head that he had gone away to somebody else for the time being, and was enjoying pastures new, dien she determined to have her own back.
She had a very shrewd idea what girls John Thomas had taken out. She went to Nora Purdy. Nora was a nil, rather pale, but wcD-built girl, with beautiful yellow hair. She was rather secretive.
'Hey!' said Annie, accosting her; then softly, 'Who's John Thomas on with now?'
'I don't know,' said Nora.
'Why tha does,' said Annie, ironically lapsing into dialect. 'Tha knows as well as I do.'
'Well, I do then,' said Nora. 'It isn't me, so don't bother.'
'It's Gssy Meakin, isn't it?'
it is, for all I know.'
'Hasn't he got a face on him!' said Annie. 'I don't half like his cheek. I could knock him off the foot-board when he comes round at me.'
'He'll get dropped-on one of these days,' said Nora.
'Ay, he will, when somebody makes up their mind to drop it on him. I should like to see him taken down a peg or two, shouldn't you?'
Í shouldn't mind,' said Nora.
'You've got quite as much cause to as I have,' said Annie. 'But we'll drop on him one of these days, my girl. What? Don't you want to?'
i don't mind,' said Nora.
But as a matter of fact, Nora was much more vindictive than Annie.
One by one Annie went the round of the old flames. It so happened that Cissy Meakin left the tramway service in quite a short time. Her mother made her leave. Then John Thomas was on the out-vive.7 He cast his eyes over his old flock. And hb eyes lighted on Annie. He thought she would be safe now. Besides, he liked her.;■■■■
She arranged to walk home with him on Sunday night It so happened that her car would be in the depot at half-past nine: the last car would come in at 10. ■ 5. So John Thomas was to wait for her there.
At the depot the girls had a little waiting-room of their own. It
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295
was quite rough, but cosy, with a fire and an oven and a mirror, and table and wooden chairs. The half dozen girls who knew John Thomas only too well had arranged to take service this Sunday afternoon. So, as the cars began to come in, early, the girls dropped into the waiting-room. And instead of hurrying off home, they sat around the fire and had a cup of tea. Outside was the darkness and lawlessness of war-time.
John Thomas came on the car after Annie, at about a quarter to ten. He poked his head easily into the girls' waiting-room. 'Prayer-meeting?' he asked. 'Ay,' said Laura Sharp, indies only.'
'That's me!' said John Thomas. It was one of his favourite eicla-mations. 'Shut the door, boy,' said Muriel Baggaley. 'On which side of me?* said John Thomas. 'Which tha likes,' said Polly Birkin.
He had come in and dosed the door behind him. The girls moved in their circle, to make a place for him near the fire. He took off his great-coat and pushed back his hat. 'Who handles the teapot?' he said. Nora Purdy silently poured him out a cup of tea-'Want a bit o' my bread and dríppin'?' said Muriel Baggaley to him.
'Ay, give us a bit.'
And he began to eat his piece of bread. 'There's no place like home, girls,' he said. They all looked at him as he uttered this piece of impudence. He seemed to be sunning himself in the presence of so many damsels.
'Especially if you're not afraid to go home in the dark,' said Laura Sharp.
'Me! By myself I am.'
They sat till they heard the last tram come in. In a few minutes Emma Houselay entered. 'Come on, my old duck!' cried Polly Birkin. 'It is perishing,' said Emma, holding her fingers to the fire. 'But - I'm afraid to, go home in, the dark,' sang Laura Sharp, the tune having got into her mind.
'Who're you going with to-night, John Thomas?' asked Muriel Baggaley, coolly.
To-night?' said John Thomas. *Oh, I'm going home by myself to-night - ail on my lonely-O.'
2o6                                Tkkels, Plttut
"That's meť said Nora Purdy, using his own ejaculation.
The girls laughed shrilly.
'Me as well, Nora,' said John Thomas.
'Don't know what you mean,' said Laura.
'Yes, ľm toddling,' said he, rising and reaching for his overcoat.
'Nay,' said Polly. 'We're all here waiting for you.'
'We've got to be up in good tune in the morning,' he said, in the benevolent official manner.
They all laughed.
'Nay,' said Muriel. 'Don't leave us all lonely, John Thomas. Take one!'
'Ill take the lot, if you like,' be responded gallandy.
That you won't, either,' said Muriel. 'Two's company, seven's too much of a good thing.'
"Nay - take one,' said Laura. 'Pair and square, all above board, and say which.'
'Ay,' cried Annie, speaking for the first time. 'Pick, John Thomas; let's hear thee.*
'Nay,' he said. 'I'm going home quiet to-night. Feeling good, for once.'
'Whereabouts?' said Annie. Take a good 'unt then. But tha's got to take one of us!'
'Nay, how can I take one,' he said, laughing uneasily. 'I don't want to make enemies.'
'You'd only make owe,' said Annie.
The chosen one,' added Laura.
"On, my! Who said girls!' exclaimed John Thomas, again turning, as if to escape. 'Well - good-flight'
'Nay, you've got to make your pick,' said Muriel. Turn your face to die wad, and say which one touches you. Go on - we shall only just touch your back - one of us. Go on - turn your face to the wall, and don't look, and say which one touches you.'
He was uneasy, mistrusting them. Yet be had not the courage to break away. They pushed him to a wall and stood him there with his face to it Behind his back rhey all grimaced, tittering. He looked so comical. He looked around uneasily.
'Go on!'he cried.
'You're looking - you're looking!* they shouted.
He turned his head away. And suddenly, with a movement like a swift cat, Annie went forward and fetched him a box on the side of the head that sent his cap flying and himself staggering. He started round.
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But at Annie's signal they all flew at him, slapping him, pinching him, pulling his hair, though more in tun than in spite or anger. He, however, saw red. His blue eyes flamed with strange fear as well as fury, and he butted through the girls to the door. It was locked. He wrenched at it. Roused, alert, the girls stood round and looked at him. He faced them, at bay. At that moment they were rather horrifying to him, as they stood in their short uniforms. He was disdncdy afraid.
'Come on, John Thomas! Come on! Choose!' said Annie.
*What are you after? Open the door,' he said.
'We shan't - not till you've chosen!' said Muriel.
'Chosen what'' he said.
'Chosen the one you're going to marry,' she replied.
He hesitated a moment
'Open the blasted door,' he said, 'and get back to your senses.' He spoke with official authority.
'You've got to choose!' cried the girls.
'Come on!' cried Annie, looking him in the eye. 'Come on! Come on!'
He went forward, rather vaguely. She had taken oft* her belt, and swinging it, she fetched him a sharp blow over the head with the buckle end. He sprang and seized her. But immediately the other girls rushed upon him, pulling and tearing and beating ram. Their Mood was now thoroughly up. He was their sport now. They were going to have their own back, out of him. Strange, wild creatures, they hung on him and rushed at him to bear him down. His tunic was torn right up the back, Nora had hold at the back of his collar, and was actually strangling him. Luckily the button burst. He struggled in a wild frenzy of fijry and terror, almost mad terror. His tunk was simply torn off his back, bis shirt-sleeves were torn away, his arms were naked. The girls rushed at him, clenched their hands on him and pulled at him: or they rushed at him and pushed him, butted him with all their might or they struck him wild blows. He ducked and cringed and struck sideways. They became more intense.
At last he was down. They rushed on him, kneeling on him. He had neither breath nor strength to move. His face was bleeding with a long scratch, his brow was bruised.
Annie knelt on him, the other girls knelt and hung on to him. Their laces were flushed, their hair wild, their eyes glittering strangely. He lay at last quite still, with face averted, as an animal lies when it is defeated and at the mercy of the captor. Sometimes his eye glanced
208
Tickets, Please
back at the wild faces of the girls. His breast rose heavily, his wrists were torn.
'Now, then, my fellow!' gasped Annie at length. 'Now then -now -'
At the sound of her terrifying, cold triumph, he suddenly started to struggle as an animal might, but the girls threw themselves upon him with unnatural strength and power, forcing him down.
'Yes - now, then!' gasped Annie at length.
And there was a dead silence, in which the thud of heart-beating was to be heard. It was a suspense of pure silence in every soul.
'Now you know where you are,' said Annie.
The sight of his white, bare arm maddened the girls. He lay in a kind of trance of fear and antagonism. They felt themselves filled with supernatural strength.
Suddenly Polly started to laugh - to giggle -wildly - helplessly -and Emma and Muriel joined in. But Annie and Nora and Laura remained the same, tense, watchful, with gleaming eyes. He winced away from these eyes.
'Yes,' said Annie, in a curious low tone, secret and deadly. 'Yes! You've got it now! You know what you've done, don't you? You know what you've done.'
He made no sound nor sign, but lay with bright, averted eyes, and averted, bleeding face.
'You ought to be killed, that's what you ought,' said Annie, tensely. 'You ought to be killed.' And there was a terrifying lust in her voice.
Polly was ceasing to laugh, and giving long-drawn Oh-h-hs and sighs as she came to herself.
'He's got to choose,' she said vaguely.
'Ch, yes, he has,' said Laura, with vindictive decision.
'Do you hear - do you hear?' said Annie. And with a sharp movement, that made him wince, she turned his face to her.
'Do you hear?' she repeated, shaking him.
But he was quite dumb. She fetched him a sharp slap on the face. He started, and his eyes widened. Then his face darkened with defiance, after all.
'Do you hear?' she repeated.
He only looked at her with hostile eyes.
'Speak!' she said, putting her face devilishly near his.
'What?' he said, almost overcome.
'You've got to chooseV she cried, as if it were some terrible menace, and as if it hurt her that she could not exact more.

Tickets, Please                                    2go
'What?' he said, in fear.
'Choose your girl, Coddy. You've got to choose her now. And you'll get your neck broken if you play any more of your tricks, my boy. You're settled now.'
There was a pause. Again he averted his face. He was cunning in his overthrow. He did not give in to them really - no, not if they tore him to bits.
'All right, then,' he said, 'I choose Annie.' His voice was strange and full of malice. Annie let go of him as if he had been a hot coal. 'He's chosen Annie!' said the girls in chorus. 'Me!' cried Annie. She was still kneeling, but away from him. He was still lying prostrate, with averted face. The girls grouped uneasily around. 'Me!' repeated Annie, with a terrible bitter accent. Then she got up, drawing away from him with strange disgust and bitterness.
'I wouldn't touch him,' she said.
But her face quivered with a kind of agony, she seemed as if she would fall. The other girls turned aside. He remained lying on the floor, with his torn clothes and bleeding, averted face. f                         'Oh, if he's chosen -' said Polly.
f                         'I don't want him - he can choose again,' said A>inie, with the
j 1                    same rather bitter hopelessness.
I                         'Get up,' said Polly, lifting his shoulder. 'Get up.'
f                         He rose slowly, a strange, ragged, dazed creature. The girls eyed
I                     him from a distance, curiously, furtively, dangerously.
1 i                       'Who wants him?' cried Laura, roughly.
%                         'Nobody,' they answered, with contempt. Yet each one of them
t                     waited for him to look at her, hoped he would look at her. All except
I                        Annie, and something was broken in her.
II                          He, however, kept his face closed and averted from them all. There 11                    was a silence of the end. He picked up the torn pieces of his tunic, f I                    without knowing what to do with them. The girls stood about uneasily, j                     flushed, panting, tidying their hair and their dress unconsciously, and í                     watching him. He looked at none of them. He espied his cap in a '•                     corner, and went and picked it up. He put it on his head, and one
of the girls burst into a shrill, hysteric laugh at the sight he presented. -. I                    He, however, took no heed, but went straight to where his overcoat
* j                    hung on a peg. The girls moved away from contact with him as if
he had been an electric wire. He put on his coat and buttoned it down.
Then he rolled his tunic-rags into a bundle, and stood before the
locked door, dumbly.
"* ri^"'^p^WBr"swr-;'"' -3
3°o
Tkkels, Pltúse
'Open the door, somebody,' said Laura.
'Annie's got the key,' said one.
Annie silently offered the key to the girls. Nora unlocked the door.
'Tit for tat, old man,* she said. 'Show yourself a man, and don't bear a grudge.'
But without a word or sign he had opened the door and gone, his face closed, his head dropped.
That'll learn him,' said Laura.
*Coddyľ said Nora.
'Shut up, for God's sake!* cried Annie fiercely, as if in torture.
'Well, I'm about ready to go, Polly. Look sharp!* said Muriel.
The girls were all anxious m be off. They were tidying themselves hurriedly, with mute, srupified faces.
The Blind Man
Isabel Pervin was listening for two sounds- for the sound of wheels on the drive outside and for the noise of her husband's footsteps in die hall. Her dearest and oldest friend, a man who seemed almost indispensable to her living, would drive up in the rainy dusk of the closing November day. The trap had gone to fetch him from the station. And her husband, who had been blinded in Flanders, and who had a disfiguring mark on his brow, would be coming in from the out-houses.
He had been home for a year now. He was totally blind. Yet they had been very happy. The Grange was Maurice's own place. The back was a farmstead, and the Wernhams, who occupied the rear premises, acted as farmers. Isabel lived with her husband in the handsome rooms in front. She and he had been abnost entirety alone together since he was wounded. They talked and sang and read together in a wonderful and unspeakable intimacy. Then she reviewed books for a Scottish newspaper, carrying on her old interest, and he occupied himself a good deal with the farm. Sightless, he could still discuss everything with Wcmham, and he could also do a good deal of work about the place - menial work, it is true, but it gave him satisfaction. He milked the cows, carried in the pails, turned the separator, attended to the pigs and horses. Life was still very full and strangely serene -for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness. With his wife he had a whole world, rich and real and invisible.
They were newly and remotely happy. He did not even regret the loss of his sight in these times of dark, palpable joy. A certain exultancc swelled his soul.
But as time wore on, sometimes the rich glamour would leave them. Sometimes, after months of this intensity, a sense of burden overcame Isabel, a weariness, a terrible amm, in that silent house approached between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she would go mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had devastating fits of depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole being. It was worse than depression - a Mack misery, when his own life was a torture to him, and when his presence was unbearable to his wife. The dread
390                               The Border Line
magnesium ribbon, away on the plain. Across was the Russian Chapel; below, on the left, the town, and the Lichtenthal.' * No more gamblers, no more cosmopolitan play. Evening and the dark round hills going lonely, snow on the Merkur hill.
Mercury! Hermes!'' The messenger! Even as she thought it, standing there on the wall, Alan came along and stood beside her, and she felt at ease. The two men down below were looking up at her. They watched in silence, not knowing the way up. They were in the cold shadow of the hall below. A little, lingering sun, reddish, caught her where she was, above.
Again, for the last time, she looked over the land: the sun sinking below the Rhine, the hills of Germany this side, and the frozen stillness of the winter afternoon. 'Yes, let us go,' she heard the elder man's voice. 'We are hardly men or women any more. We are more like the men and women who have drunk in this hall, living after our day.'
'Only we eat and smile still, and the men want the women still.'
'No! No! A man forgets his trouser-lining when he sees the ghost and the woman together.'
The two tramps turned and departed, heavy-shod, up the hill.
Katherine felt Alan's touch on her arm, and she climbed down from the old, broken castle. He led her through the woods, past the red rocks. The sun had sunk, the trees were blue. He lingered again under a great pine-tree, in the shadow. And again, as he pressed her fast, and pressed his cold face against her, it was as if the wood of the tree itself were growing round her, the hard, live wood compressing and almost devouring her, the sharp needles brushing her lace, the limbs of the living tree enveloping her, crushing her in the last, final ecstasy of submission, squeezing from her the last drop of her passion, like the cold, white berries of the mistletoe on the Tree of Life.
The Woman Who Rode Away
She had thought that this marriage, of all marriages, would be an adventure. Not that the man himself was exactly magical to her. A little, wiry, twisted fellow, twenty years older than herself, with brown eyes and greying hair, who had come to America a scrap of a wastrel, from Holland, years ago, as a tiny boy, and from the gold-mines of the west had been kicked south into Mexico, and now was more or less rich, owning silver-mines in the wilds of the Sierra Mad re: it was obvious that the adventure lay in his circumstances, rather than his person. But he was still a little dynamo of energy, in spite of accidents survived, and what he had accomplished he had accomplished alone. One of those human oddments there is no accounting for.
When she actually saw what he had accomplished, her heart quailed. Great green-covered, unbroken mountain-hills, and in the midst of the lifeless isolation, the sharp pinkish mounds of the dried mud from the silver-works. Under the nakedness of the works, the walled-in, one-storey adobe house, with its garden inside, and its deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides. And when you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio, you saw the huge pink cone of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery of the extracting plant against heaven above. No more.
To be sure, the great wooden doors were often open. And then she could stand outside, in the vast open world. And see great, void, tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into nowhere. They were green in autumn time. For the rest, pinkish, stark dry, and abstract.
And in his battered Ford car her husband would rake her into the dead, thrice-dead little Spanish town forgotten among the mountains. The great, sundried dead church, the dead portales, the hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she saw a dead dog lying between the meat stalls and the vegetable array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it away. Deadncss within deadness.
Everybody feebly talking silver, and showing bits of ore. But silver
392                       The Woman Who Rode Away
was at a standstill. The great war came and went. Silver was a dead market. Her husband's mines were closed down. But she and he lived on in the adobe house under the works, among the flowers that were never very flowery to her.
She had two children, a boy and a girl. And her eldest, the boy, was nearly ten years old before she aroused from her stupor of subjected amazement. She was now thirty-three, a large, blue-eyed, dazed woman, beginning to grow stout. Her little, wiry, tough, twisted, brown-eyed husband was fifty-three, a man as tough as wire, tenacious as wire, still full of energy, but dimmed by the lapse of silver from the market, and by some curious inaccessibility on his wife's part
He was a man of principles, and a good husband. In a way, he doted on her. He never quite got over his dazzled admiration of her. But essentially, he was still a bachelor. He had been thrown out on the world, a little bachelor, at the age often. When he married he was over forty, and had enough money to marry on. But his capital was all a bachelor's. He was boss of his own works, and marriage was the last and most intimate bit of his own works.
He admired his wife to extinction, he admired her body, all her points. And she was to him always the rather dazzling CaUiornian girl from Berkeley, whom he had first known. Like any sheik, he kept her guarded among those mountains of Chihuahua. He was jealous of her as he was of lůs sflver-mine: and mat is saying a lot
At thirty-three she really was still the girl from Berkeley, in all but physique. Her conscious development had stopped mysteriously with her marriage, completely arrested. Her husband had never become real to her, neither mentally nor physically. In spite of his late sort of passion for her, he never meant anything to her, physically. Only morally he swayed her, downed her, kept her in an invincible slavery.
So the years went by, in the adobe house strung round the sunny patio, wirb the silver-works overhead. Her husband was never still. When the silver went dead, he ran a ranch lower down, some twenty roues away, and raised pure-bred hogs, splendid creatures. At the same time, he hated pigs. He was a squeamish waif of an idealist, and really hated the physical side of life. He loved work, work, work, and making dungs. His marriage, his children, were something he was nuking, part of his business, but with a sentimental income this time.
Gradually her nerves began to go wrong: she must get out. She must get out. So he took her to El Paso for three months. And at least it was the United States.
The Woman Who Rode Away                      393
But he kept his spell over her. The three months ended: back she was, just the same, in her adobe house among those eternal green or pinky-brown hills, void as only the undiscovered is void. She taught her children, she supervised the Mexican boys who were her servants. And sometimes her husband brought visitors, Spaniards or Mexicans or occasionally white men.
He really loved to have white men staying on the place. Yet he had not a moment's peace when they were there. It was as if his wife were some peculiar secret vein of ore in his mines, which no one must be aware of except himself. And she was fascinated by the young gentlemen, mining engineers, who were his guests at times. He, too, was fascinated by a real gentleman. But he was an old-timer miner with a wife, and if a gentleman looked at his wife, he felt as if his mine were being looted, the secrets of it pryed out.
It was one of these young gentlemen who put the idea into her mind. They were all standing outside the great wooden doors of the patio, looking at the outer world. The eternal, motionless hills were all green, it was September, after the rains. There was no sign of anything, save the deserted mine, the deserted works, and a bunch of half-deserted miner's dwellings.
Í wonder,' said the young man, 'what there is behind those great blank hills.'
'More hills,' said Lederman. 'If you go that way, Sonora and the coast. This way is the desert - you came from there - And the other way, hills and mountains.'
'Yes, but what lives in the hills and mountains? Surely there is something wonderful? It looks so like nowhere on earth: like being on the moon.'
There's plenty of game, if you want to shoot. And Indians, if you call them wonderful.'
'Wild ones?'
'Wild enough.'
'But friendly?'
'It depends. Some of them are quite wild, and they don't let anybody near. They kill a missionary at sight And where a missionary can't get, nobody can.'
'But what docs the government say?'
"They're so far from everywhere, the government leaves 'em alone. And they're wily; if they think there'll be trouble, they send a delegation to Chihuahua and make a formal submission. The government is glad to leave it at that.'
394                          The Woman Who Rode Away
'And do they live quite wild, with their own savage customs and religion?'
'Oh, yes. They use nothing but bows and arrows. I've seen them in town, in the Plaza, with runny sort of hats with flowers round them, and a bow in one hand, quite naked except for a sort of shirt, even in cold weather - striding round with their savage's bare legs.'
'But don't you suppose it's wonderful, up there in their secret villages?'
'No. What would there be wonderful about it? Savages are savages, and all savages behave more or less alike: rather low-down and dirty, unsanitary, with a few cunning tricks, and struggling to get enough to eat'
'But surely they have old, old religions and mysteries - it must be wonderful, surely <t must.'
'I don't know about mysteries - howling and heathen practices, more or less indecent. No, I sec nothing wonderful in that kind of stuff. And I wonder that you should, when you have lived in London or Paris or New York -'
'Ah, everybody livesin London or Paris or New York' - said the young man, as if this were an argument.
And his peculiar vague enthusiasm for unknown Indians found a full echo in the woman's heart. She was overcome by a foolish romanticism more unreal than a girl's. She felt it was her destiny to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians of the mountains.
She kept her secret. The young man was departing, her husband was going with him down to Torreon, on business: - would be away for some days. But before the departure, she made her husband talk about the Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the Navajo, who were still wandering free; and the Yaquis of Sonora: and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua'State.
There was supposed to be one tribe, the Chilchuis, living in a high valley to the south, who were the sacred tribe of all the Indians. The descendants of Montezuma and of the old Aztec or Totonac kings' still lived among them, and the old priests still kept up the ancient religion, and offered human sacrifices - so it was said. Some scientists had been to die Chilchui country, and had come back gaunt and exhausted with hunger and bitter privation, bringing various curious, barbaric objects of worship, but having seen nothing extraordinary in the hungry, stark village of savages.
Though I^derman talked in this off-hand way, it was obvious he
The Většit Who Rodt Away                         395
felt some of the vulgar excitement at the idea of ancient and mysterious savages.
'How far away arc uSey?' she asked.
*Oh - three days on horseback - past Cuchitee and a little lake there is up there.'
Her husband and the young man departed. The woman made her crazy plans. Of late, to break the monotony of her life, she had harassed her husband into letting her go riding with him, occasionally, on horseback. She was never allowed to go out alone. Tbc country truly was not safe, lawless and crude.
But she had her own horse, and she dreamed of being free as she had been as a girl, among the hills of California.
Her daughter, nine years old, was now in a tiny convent in the little half-deserted Spanish mining-town five miles sway.
'Manuel,* said the woman to her house-servant, 'I'm going to ride to the convent to see Margarita, and take her a few dungs. Perhaps I shall stay the night in the convent You look after Freddy and see everything is all 'right tül I come back."
'Shall I ride with you on the master's horse, or «hall Juan?' asked the servant
'Neither of you. IshaDgo alone.'
The young man looked her in the eyes, in protest. Absolutely impossible that the woman should ride alone!
'I shall go ahme,' repeated the large, placid-seeming, fair-complexioned woman, with peculiar overbearing emphasis. And the man ttkndy, unhappily yielded.
*Why are you going ahme, mother?' asked her son, ss she made up parcels of food.
'Am I never u be let alone? Not one moment of my life?' she cried, with sudden explosiou of energy. And the child, Kke the servant, shrank into silence.
She set offwithouta qualm, riding astride on her strong roan horse, and wearing a riding suit of coarse linen, a riding skirt over her Hnen breeches, a scarlet neck-tie over her white blouse, and a black felt hat on her head. She had food in her saddle-bags, an army canteen with water, and a large, native blanket tied on behind the saddle. Peering into the distance, she set off from her home. Manuel and the little boy stood in the gateway m watch her go. She did not even turn to wave diem farewell.
But when she had ridden about a mile, she left (he wild road and took a small trail m the right, (hat led into another valley,
3o6                       The Woman Who Rode Away
over steep places and past great trees, and through another deserted mining-settlement. It was September, the water was running freely in the little stream that had fed the now-abandoned mine. She got down to drink, and let the horse drink too.
She saw natives coming through the trees, away up the slope. They had seen her, and were watching her closely. She watched in turn. The three people, two women and a youth, were making a wide detour, so as not to come too close to her. She did not care. Mounting, she trotted ahead up the silent valley, beyond the silver-works, beyond any trace of mining. There was still a rough trail, that led over rocks and loose stones, into the valley beyond. This trail she had already ridden, with her husband. Beyond that she knew she must go south.
Curiously she was not afraid, although it was a frightening country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain-slopes, the occasional distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great carrion birds occasionally hovering, like great flies, in the distance, over some carrion or some ranch house or some group of huts.
As she climbed, the trees shrank and the trail ran through a thorny scrub, that was trailed over with blue convolvulus and an occasional pink creeper. Then these flowers lapsed. She was nearing the pine-trees.
She was over the crest, and before her another silent, void, green-dad valley. It was past midday. Her horse turned to a little runlet of water, so she got down to eat her midday meal. She sat in silence looking at the motionless unliving valley, and at the sharp-peaked hills, rising higher to rock and pine-trees, southwards. She rested two hours in the heat of the day, while the horse cropped around her.
Curious that she was neither afraid nor lonely. Indeed, the loneliness was like a drink of cold water to one who is very thirsty. And a strange elation sustained her from within.
She travelled on, and camped at night in a valley beside a stream, deep among the bushes. She had seen cattle and had crossed several trails. There must be a ranch not far off. She heard the strange wailing shriek of a mountain-lion, and the answer of dogs. But she sat by her small camp fire in a secret hollow place and was not really afraid. She was buoyed up always by the curious, bubbling elation within her.
It was very cold before dawn. She lay wrapped in her blanket looking at the stars, listening to her horse shivering, and feeling like a woman who has died and passed beyond. She was not sure
The Woman Who Rode Away                       397
mat she bad not heard, during the night, a great crash at the centre of herself, which was the crash of her own death. Or else it was a crash at the centre of the earth, and meant something big and mysterious.
With the first peep of light she got up, numb with cold, and made a fire. She ate hastily, gave her horse some pieces of oil-seed cake, and set off again. She avoided any meeting - and since she met nobody, it was evident that she in turn was avoided. She came at last in sight of the village of Cuchhee, with its black houses with their reddish roofs, a sombre, dreary little cluster below another silent, long-abandoned mine. And beyond, a long, great mountain-side, rising up green and light to the darker, shaggier green of pine trees. And beyond the pine trees stretches of naked rock against the sky, rode slashed already and brindled with white stripes of snow. High up, the new snow had already begun to fall.
And now, as she neared, more or less, her destination, she began to go vague and disheartened. She had passed the link lake among yellowing aspen trees whose white trunks were round and suave like the white round arms of some woman. What a lovely place! In California she would have raved about it. But here she looked and saw that it was lovely, but she didn't care. She was weary and spent with her two nights in the open, and afraid of the coming night. She didn't know where she was going, or what she was going for. Her horse plodded dejectedly on, towards that immense and forbidding mountain-slope, following a stony little trail. And if she had had any will of her own left, she would have turned back, to the village, to be protected and sent home to her husband.
But she had no will of her own. Her horse splashed through a brook, and turned up a valley, under immense yellowing cotton-wood trees. She must have been near nine thousand feet above sea-level, and her head was light with the altitude and with weariness. Beyond the cotton-wood trees she could see, on each side, the steep sides of mountain-slopes hemming her in, sharp-plumaged with overlapping aspen, and, higher up, with sprouting, pointed spruce and pine tree. Her horse went on automatically. In this tight valley, on this slight trail, there was nowhere to go but ahead, climbing.
Suddenly her horse jumped, and three men in dark blankets were on the trail before her.
'Adios!' came the greeting, in the full, restrained Indian voice.
'Adiosľ she replied, in her assured, American woman's voice.
'Where are you going?' came the quiet question, in Spanish.
398
The Woman Who Rode Away
The men in the dark sarapes had come closer, and were looking up at her.
'On ahead,' she replied coolly, in her hard, Saxon Spanish.
These were just natives to her: dark-faced, strongly-built men in dark sarapes and straw hats. They would have been the same as the men who worked for her husband, except, strangely, for the long black hair that fell over their shoulders. She noted this long black hair with a certain distaste. These must be the wild Indians she had come to see.
'Where do you come from?' the same man asked. It was always the one man who spoke. He was young, with quick, large, bright black eyes that glanced sideways at her. He had a soft black moustache on his dark face, and a sparse tuft of beard, loose hairs on his chin. His long black hair, full of life, hung unrestrained on his shoulders. Dark as he was, he did not look as if he had washed lately.
His two companions were the same, but older men, powerful and silent. One had a thin black line of moustache, but was beardless. The other had the smooth cheeks and the sparse dark hairs marking the lines of his chin with the beard characteristic of the Indians.
'I come from far away,' she replied, with half-jocular evasion.
This was received in silence.
'But where do you live?' asked the young man, with that same quiet insistence.
'In the north,' she replied airily.
Again there was a moment's silence. The young man conversed quietly, in Indian, with his two companions.
'Where do you want to go, up this way?' he asked suddenly, with challenge and authority, pointing briefly up the trail.
'To the Chilchui Indians,' answered the woman laconically.
The young man looked at her. His eyes were quick and black, and inhuman. He saw, in the full evening light, the faint sub-smile of assurance on her rather large, calm, fresh-complexioncd face; the weary, bluish lines under her large blue eyes; and in her eyes, as she looked down at him, a half-childish, half-arrogant confidence in her own female power. But in her eyes also, a curious look of trance.
'listed es Seňora? You are a lady?' the Indian asked her.
'Yes, I am a lady,' she replied complacently.
'With a family?'
'With a husband and two children, boy and girl,' she said.
The Indian turned to his companions and translated, in the low.
The Woman Who Rode Away
399 gurgling speech, like hidden water running. They were evidently at loss.                                                                                         "    *
'Where is your husband?' asked the young man.
'Who knows?' she replied airily. 'He has gone away on business for a week.'
The black eyes watched her shrewdly. She, for all her weariness smiled faintly in the pride of her own adventure and die assurance of her own womanhood, and the spell of the madness that was on he
'And what doyou want to do?' the Indian asked her.
'I want to visit the Chilchui Indians - to see their houses and t know their gods,' she replied.                                                          °
The young man turned and translated quickly, and there was silence almost of consternation. The grave elder men were flancine her sideways, with strange looks, from under their decorated hats And they said something to the young man, in deep chest voices.
The latter still hesitated. Then he turned to the woman.
'Good!' he said. 'Let us go. But we cannot arrive until to-morrow We shall have to make a camp to-night.'
'Good!' she said. 'I can make a camp.'
Without more ado, they set off at a good speed up the stony trail The young Indian ran alongside her horse's head, the other two ra behind. One of them had taken a thick stick, and occasionally he struck her horse a resounding blow on the haunch, to urm him forward. This made the horse jump, and threw her back in the saddle, which, tired as she was, made her angry.                                        ^
'Don't do that!' she cried, looking round angrily at the fellow She met his black, large, bright eyes, and for die first time her spirit rcallv quailed. The man's eyes were not human to her, and they did not see her as a beautiful white woman. He looked at her with a Mack bright inhuman look, and saw no woman in her at all. As if she were some strange, unaccountable thing, incomprehensible t0 him u™ inimical. She sat in her saddle in wonder, feeling once more as if she had died. And again he struck her horse, and jerked her badly in the saddle.
AH the passionate anger of the spoilt white woman rose in her She pulled her horse to a standstill, and turned with blazing eyes to the man at her bridle.
'Tell that fellow not to touch my horse again,' she cried.
She met the eyes of the young man, and in their bright black inscrutability she saw a fine spark, as in a snake's eye, of derision He spoke to his companion in the rear, in the low tones Of the Indian The
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man with the stick listened without looking. Then, giving a strange low cry to the horse, he struck it again on the rear, so that it leaped forward spasmodically up the stony trail, scattering the stones, pitching the weary woman in her seat.
The anger flew like a madness into her eyes, she went white at the gills. Fiercely she reined in her horse. But before she could turn, the young Indian had caught the reins under the horse's throat, jerked them forward, and was trotting ahead rapidly, leading the horse.
The woman was powerless. And along with her supreme anger there came a slight thrill of exultation. She knew she was dead.
The sun was setting, a great yellow light flooded the last of the aspens, dared on the trunks of the pine-trees, the pine-needles bristled and stood out with dark lustre, the rocks glowed with unearthly glamour. And through this effulgence the Indian at her horse's head trotted unweariedly on, his dark blanket swinging, his bare legs glowing with a strange transfigured ruddiness in the powerful light, and his straw hat with its half-absurd decorations of flowers and feathers shining showily above his river of long black hair. At times he would utter a low call to the horse, and then the other Indian, behind, would fetch the beast a whack with the stick.
The wonder-light faded off the mountains, the world began to grow dark, a cold air breathed down. In the sky, half a moon was struggling against the glow in the west. Huge shadows came down from steep rocky slopes. Water was rushing. The woman was conscious only of her fatigue, her unspeakable fatigue, and the cold wind from the heights. She was not aware how moonlight replaced daylight. It happened while she travelled unconscious with weariness.
For some hours they travelled by moonlight. Then suddenly they came to a standstill. The men conversed in low tones for a moment.
'We camp here,' said the young man.
She waited for him to help her down. He merely Jtood holding the horse's bridle. She almost fell from the saddle, so fatigued.
They had chosen a place at the foot of rocks that still gave off a little warmth of the sun. One man cut pine-boughs, another erected little screens of pine-boughs against the rock for shelter, and put boughs of balsam pine for beds. The third made a small fire, to heat tortillas. They worked in silence.
The woman drank water. She did not want to eat - only to lie down.
'Where do I sleep?' she asked.
The young man pointed to one of the shelters. She crept in and lay inert. She did not care what happened to her, she was so weary.
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and so beyond everything. Through the twigs of spruce she could see the three men squatting round the fire on their hams, chewing the tortillas they picked from the ashes with their dark fingers, and drinking water from a gourd. They talked in low, muttering tones, with long intervals of silence. Her saddle and saddle-bags by not far from the fire, unopened, untouched. The men were not interested in her nor her belongings. There they squatted with their hats on their heads, eating, eating mechanically, hite animals, the dark sarape with its fringe faffing to the ground before and behind, the powerful dark legs naked and squatting like an animal's, showing the dirty white shirt and the sort of loin-cloth which was the only other garment, underneath. And they showed no more sign of interest in her than if she had been a piece of venison they were bringing home from the hunt, and had hung inside a shelter.
After a while they carefully extinguished die fire, and went inside their own shelter. Watching through the screen of boughs, she had a moment's thrill of (ear and anxiety, seeing the dark forms cross and pass silently in the moonlight. Would they attack her now?
But no! They were as if oblivious of her. Her horse was hobbled; she could hear it hopping wearily. All was silent, mountain-silent, cold, deathly. She slept and woke and slept in a semi-conscious numbness of cold and fatigue. A long, long night, icy and eternal, and she aware that she had died.
u
Vet when there was a stirring, and a clink of flint and steel, and the form of a man crouching like a dog over a bone, at a red splutter of lire, and she knew it was morning coming, it seemed to her the night had passed too soon.
When the fire was going, she came out of her shelter with one real desire left: for coffee. The men were warming more tortillas.
'Can we make coffee?' she asked.
The young man looked at her, and she imagined the same faint spark of derision in his eyes. He shook his head.
'We don't take it,' he said. There is no time.'
And the elder men, squatting on their haunches, looked up at her in the terrible paling dawn, and there was not even derision in their eyes. Only that intense, yet remote, inhuman glitter which was terrible to her. They were inaccessible. They could not see her as a woman at all. As if she mere not a woman. As if, perhaps, her
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whiteness took »way all her womanhood, and left her as some giant, female white ant. That was all they could see in her.
Before the sun was up, she was in the saddle again, and they were climbing steeply, in the icy air. The sun came, and soon she was very hot, exposed to the glare in the bare places. It seemed to her they were climbing to the roóf of the world. Beyond against heaven were slashes of snow.
During the course of the morning, they came to a place where the horse could not go farther. They rested for a time with a great slant of living rock in front of them, like the glossy breast of some earth-beast Across this rock, along a wavering crack, they had to go. It seemed to her that for hours she went in torment, on her hands and knees, from crack to crevice, along the slanting bee of this pure rock-mountain. An Indian in front and an Indian behind walked slowly erect, shod with sandals of braided leather. But she in her riding-boots dared not stand erect.
Yet what she wondered, all the time, was why she persisted in clinging and crawling along these mile-long sheets of rock. Why she did not hud hersdf down, and have done! The world was below her.
When they emerged at last on a stony slope, she looked back, and saw the third Indian coming carrying her saddle and saddle-bags on his back, the whole hung from a band across his forehead. And he had his hat in his hand, as he stepped slowly, with the slow, soft, heavy tread of the Indian, unwavering in die chinks of rock, as if along a scratch in the mountain's iron shield.
The stony slope led downwards. The Indians seemed to grow excited. One ran ahead at a slow trot, disappearing round the curve of stones. And the track curved round and down, till at last in the full Maze of the mid-morning sun, they could see a valley below them, between walls of rock, as in a great wide chasm let in the mountains. A green valley, with a river, and trees, and clusters of low flat sparkling houses. It was all tiny and perfect, three thousand feet below. Even the flat bridge over the stream, and the square with the houses around it, the bigger buildings piled up at opposite ends of the square, the tall cotton-wood trees, the pastures and stretches of yellow-sere maize, the patches of brown sheep or goats in the distance, on the slopes, the railed enclosures by the stream-side. There it was, all small and perfect, looking magical, as any place will look magical, seen from the mountains above. The unusual thing was that the low houses glittered white, whitewashed, looking like crystals of salt, or silver. This frightened her.
They began the long, winding descent at the head of the barranca,*
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following the stream that rushed and fell. At first it was all rocks: then the pine-trees began, and soon, the silver-limbed aspens. The flowers of autumn, big pink daisy-like flowers, and white ones, and many yellow flowers, were in profusion. But she had to sit down and rest, she was so weary. And she saw the bright flowers shadowüy, as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead must sec them.
At length came grass and pasture-slopes between mingled aspen and pine-trees. A shepherd, naked in the sun save for his hat and his cotton loin-cloth, was driving his brown sheep away. In a grove of trees they sat and waited, she and the young Indian. The one with the saddle had also gone forward.
They heard a sound of someone coming. It was three men, in fine sarapes of red and orange and yellow and black, and with brilliant feather head-dresses. The oldest had his grey hair braided with fur, and his red and orange-yellow sarape was covered with curious black markings, like a leopard-skin. The other two were not grey-haired, but they were elders too. Their blankets were in stripes, and their headdresses not so elaborate.
The young Indian addressed the elders in a few quiet words. They listened without answering or looking at him or at the woman, keeping their faces averted and their eyes turned to the ground, only listening. And at length they turned and looked at the woman.
The old chief, or medicine-man, whatever he was, had a deeply wrinkled and lined face of dark bronze, with a few sparse grey hairs round the mouth. Two long braids of grey hair, braided with fur and coloured feathers, hung on his shoulders. And yet, it was only his eyes that mattered. They were black and of extraordinary piercing strength, without a qualm of misgiving in their demonish, dauntless power. He looked into the eyes of the white woman with a long, piercing look, seeking she knew not what. She summoned all her strength to meet his eyes and keep up her guard. But it was no good. He was not looking at her as one human being looks at another. He never even perceived her resistance or her challenge, but looked past them both, into she knew not what.
She could see it was hopeless to expect any human communication with this old being.
He turned and said a few words to the young Indian.
'He asks what do you seek here?' said the young man in Spanish.
'I? Nothing! I only came to sec what it was like.'
This was again translated, and the old man turned his eyes on her once more. Then he spoke again, in his low muttering tone, to die young Indian.
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'He says, why does she leave her house with the white men? Does she want to bring the white man's God to the Chüchui?'
'No,' she replied, foolhardy. '1 came away from the white man's God myself. I came to look for the God of Childiui.'
Profound silence followed, when this was translated. Then the old man spoke again, in a small voice almost of weariness.
'Does the white woman seek die gods of the Chüchui because she is weary of her own God?' came the question.
'Yes, sJie does. She is tired of the white man's God,' she replied, thinking that was what they wanted her to say. She would like to serve the gods of die Chikhui.
She was aware of an extraordinary thrill of triumph and exultance passing through the Indians, in the tense silence that followed when this was translated. Then they all looked at her with piercing Mack eyes, in which a steely covetous intent glittered incomprehensible. She was the more puzzled, as there was nothing sensual or sexual in the look. It had a terrible glittering purity that was beyond her. She was afraid, she would have been paralysed with fear, had not something died within her, leaving her with a cold, watchful wonder only.
The elders talked a little while, then the two went away, leaving her with the young man and the oldest chief. The old man now looked at her with a certain solicitude.
'He says arc you tired?' asked the young man.
'Very tired,' she said.
The men will bring you a carriage,' said the young Indian.
The carriage, when it came, proved to be a litter consisting of a sort of hammock of dark woollen frieze, slung on to a pole which was borne on the shoulders of two long-haired Indians. The woollen hammock was spread on the ground, she sat down on it, and the two men raised the pole to their shoulders. Swinging rather as if she were in a sack, she was carried out of the grove of trees, following the old chief, whose leopard-spotted blanket moved curiously in the sunlight.
They had emerged in the valley-head. Just in front were the maize fields, with ripe ears of maize. The corn was not very tall, in this high altitude. The well-worn path went between it, and all she could see was the erect form of the old chief, in the flame and black sarape, stepping soft and heavy and swift, his head forward, looking to neither to right nor left. Her bearers followed, stepping rhythmically, the long blue-black hair glistening like a river down the naked shoulders of the man in front.
They passed the maize, and came to a big wall or earthwork
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made of earth and adobe bricks. The wooden doors were open. Passing on, they were in a network of small gardens, full of flowers and herbs and fruit trees, each garden watered by a tiny ditch of running water. Among each cluster of trees and flowers was a small, glittering white house, windowless, and with closed door. The place was a network of little paths, small streams, and little bridges among square, flowering gardens.
Following the broadest path - a soft narrow track between leaves and grass, a path worn smooth by centuries of human feet, no hoof of horse nor any wheel to disfigure it - they came to the h'tde river of swift bright water, and crossed on a log bridge. Everything was silent - there was no human being anywhere. The road went on under magnificent cotton-wood trees. It emerged suddenly outside the central plaza or square of the village.
This was a long oblong of low white houses with flat roofs, and two bigger buildings, having as it were little square huts piled on top of bigger long huts, stood at cither end of the oblong, facing each other rather askew. Every little house was a dazzling white, save for the great round beam-ends which projected under the flat eaves, and for the flat roofs. Round each of the bigger buildings, on the outside of the square, was a stockyard fence, inside which was garden with trees and flowers, and various smalt houses.
Not a soul was in sight. They passed silently between the houses into the central square. This was quite bare and arid, the earth trodden smooth by endless generations of passing feet, passing across from door to door. All the doors of the windowless houses gave on to this blank square, but all the doors were closed. The firewood lay near the threshold, a day oven was still smoking, but there was no sign of moving life.
The old man walked straight across the square to the big house at the end, where the two upper storeys, as in a house of toy bricks, stood each one smaller than the lower one. A stone staircase, outside, led up to the roof of the first storey.
At the foot of this staircase the litter-bearers stood still, and lowered the woman to the ground.
'You will come up,' said the young Indian who spoke Spanish.
She mounted the stone stairs to the earthen roof of the first house, which formed a platform round the wall of the second storey. She followed around this platform to the back of the big house. There they descended again, into the garden at the rear.
So far they had seen no one. But now two men appeared, bare-
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headed, with long braided hair, and wearing a sort of white shin gathered into a loin-cloth. These went along with the three newcomers, across the garden where red flowers and yellow flowers were blooming, to a long, low white house. There they entered without knocking.
It was dark inside. There was a low murmur of men's voices. Several men were present, their white shirts showing in the gloom, their dark faces invisible. They were sitting on a great log of smooth old wood, that lay along the far wall. And save for this log, the room seemed empty. But no, in the dark at one end was a couch, a sort of bed, and someone lying there, covered with furs.
The old Indian in the spotted sarape, who had accompanied the woman, now took offhishatand his blanket and his sandals. Laying them aside, he approached the couch, and spoke in a low voice. For some moments there was no answer. Then an old man with the snow-white hah-hanging round his darkly-visible face, roused himself like a vision, and leaned on one elbow, looking vaguely at the company, in tense silence.
The grey-haired Indian spoke again, and then die young Indian, taking the woman's hand, led her forward: In her linen riding habit, and black boots and hat, and her pathetic bit of a red tie, she stood there beside the fur-covered bed of the old, old man, who sat reared up, leaning on one elbow, remote as a ghost, his white hair streaming in disorder, his face almost black, yet with a far-off intenmess, not of this world, leaning forward to look at her.
His face was so old, it was like dark glass, and the few curling hairs that sprang white from his lips and chin were quite incredible. The long white locks fell unbraided and disorderly on cither side of the glassy dark face. And under a faint powder of white eyebrows, the black eyes of the old chief looked at her as if from the far, far dead, seeing something that was never to be seen.
At last he spoke a few deep, hollow words, as if to the dark air.
'He says, do you bring your heart to the god of the Chilchui?' translated the young Indian.
'Tell him yes,' she said, automatically.
There was a pause. The old Indian spoke again, as if to the air. One < >f the men present went out. There was a silence as if of eternity, in i he dim room that was lighted only through the open door.
The woman looked round. Four old men with grey hair sat on the log by the wall facing the door. Two other men, powerful and impassive, stood near the door. They all had long hair, and wore white shirts gathered into a loin-cloth. Their powerful legs were naked and dark. There was a silence like eternity.
The Woman Who Rode Away                       ^
At length the man returned, with white and dark clothing on his arm. The young Indian took them, and holding them in front of the woman, said:
'You must take off your clothes, and put these on.'
'If all you men will go out,' she said.
'No one will hurt you,' he said quiedy.
'Not while you men arc here,' she said.
He looked at the two men by the door. They came qukkly forward and suddenly gripped her arms as she stood, without hurting her, but with great power. Then two of the old men came, and with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her. In a few moments she stood there white and uncovered. The old man on the bed spoke, and they turned her round for him to sec. He spoke again, and the young Indian deftly took the pins and comb from her fair hair, so that it fell over her shoulders in a bunchy tangle.
Then the old man spoke again. The Indian led her to the bedside. The white-haired, glassy-dark old man moistened his finger-dps at his mouth, and most delicately touched her on the breasts and on the body, then on the back. And she winced strangely each time, as the fingertips drew along her skin, as if Death itself were touching her.
And she wondered, almost sadly, why she did not feel shamed tn her nakedness. She only fdt sad and lost Because nobody fdt ashamed. The dder men were all dark and tense with some other deep, gloomy incomprehensible emotion, which suspended all her agitation, while the young Indian had a strange look of ecstasy on his face. And she, she was only utterly strange and beyond herself, as ifher body were not her own.
They gave her the new clothing: a long white cotton shift, that came to her knees: then a tunic of duck blue woollen stuff, embroidered with scarlet and green flowers. It was fastened over one shoulder only, and belted with a braid sash of scarlet and black wool.
When she was thus dressed, they took her away, barefoot, to a litoe house in the stockaded garden. The young Indian told her she might have what she wanted. She asked for water to wash hersdf. He brought it in a jar, together with a long wooden bowl. Then he fastened the gate-door of her house, and left her a prisoner. She could see through the bars of the gate-door of her house, the red flowers of the garden, and a hummingbird. Then from thereof of the big house she heard the long, heavy sound of a drum, unearthly to her in its summons, and an uplifted voice calling from die house-top in a strange language,
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The Woman Who Rode Away
with a far-away emotionless intonation, delivering some speech or message. And she listened as if from the dead.
But she was very tired. She lay down on a couch of skins, pulling over her the blanket of dark wool, and she slept, giving up everything.
When she woke it was late afternoon, and die young Indian was entering with a basket-tray containing food, tortillas and com-mush with bits of meat, probably mutton, and a drink made of honey, and some fresh plums. He brought her also a long garland of red and yellow flowers with knots of blue buds at the end. He sprinkled the garland with water from a jar, then offered it to her, with a smile. He seemed very gentle and thoughtful, and on his face and in his dark eyes was a curious look of triumph and ecstasy, that frightened her a little. The glitter had gone from the black eyes, with their curving dark lashes, and he would look at her with this strange soft glow of ecstasy that was not quite human, and terribly impersonal, and which made her uneasy.
'Is there anything you want9' he said, in his low, slow, melodious voice, that always seemed withheld, as if he were speaking aside to somebody else, or as if he did not want to let the sound come out to her.
'Am I going to be kept a prisoner here?' she asked.
'No, you can walk in the garden to-morrow,' he said softly. Always this curious solidtudc.
'Do you like that drink?' he said, offering her a little earthenware cup. 'It is very refreshing.'
She sipped the liquor curiously. It was made with herbs and sweetened with honey, and had a strange, lingering flavour. The young man watched her with gratification.
'It has a peculiar taste,' she said.
'It is very refreshing,' he replied, his black eyes resting on her always with that look of gratified ecstasy. Then he went away. And presently she began to be sick, and to vomit violently, as if she had no control over herself.
Afterwards she felt a great soothing languor steal over her, her limbs felt strong and loose and full of languor, and she lay on her couch listening to the sounds of the village, watching the yellowing sky, smelling the scent of burning cedar-wood, or pine-wood. So distinctly she heard the yapping of tiny dogs, the shuffle of far-off feet, the murmur of voices, so keenly she detected the smell of smoke, and flowers, and evening falling, so vividly she saw the one bright star infinitely remote, stirring above the sunset, that she felt as if all her senses were diffused on the air, that she could distinguish the sound of evening flowers unfolding, and the actual crystal sound of the heavens, as the vast belts
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of the world-atmosphere slid past one another, and as if the moisture ascending and the moisture descending in the air resounded like some harp in the cosmos.
She was a prisoner in her house and in the-stockaded garden, but she scarcely minded. And it was days before she realised that she never saw another woman. Only the men, the elderly men of the big house, that she imagined must be some sort of temple, and the men priests of some sort. For they always had the same colours, red, orange, yellow, and black, and the same grave, abstracted demeanour.
Sometimes an old man would come and sit in her room with her, in absolute silence. None spoke any language but Indian, save the one younger man. The older men would smile at her, and sit with her for an hour at a time, sometimes smiling at her when she spoke in Spanish, but never answering save with this slow, benevolent-seeming smile. And they gave off a feeling of almost fatherly solicitude. Yet their dark eyes, brooding over her, had something away in their depths that was awesomely ferocious and rdendess. They would cover it with a smile, at once, if they felt her looking. But she had seen it.
Always they treated her with this curious impersonal solicitude, this utterly impersonal gentleness, as an old man treats a child. But underneath it she felt there was something else, something terrible. When her old visitor had gone away, in his silent, insidious, fatherly fashion, a shock of fear would come over her; though of what she knew not.
The young Indian would sit and talk with her freely, as if with great candour. But with him, too, she felt that everything real was unsaid. Perhaps it was unspeakable. His big dark eyes would rest on her almost cherishingly, touched with ecstasy, and his beautiful, slow, languorous voice would trail out its simple, ungrammatkal Spanish. He told her he was the grandson of the old, old man, son of the man in the spotted sarape: and they were caciques, kings from the old, old days, before even the Spaniards came. But he himself had been in Mexico Gry, and also in the United States. He had worked as a labourer, building the roads in Los Angeles. He had travelled as far as Chicago.
'Don't you speak English, then?' she asked.
His eyes rested on her with a curious look of duplicity and conflict, and he mutely shook his head.
'What did you do with your long hair, when you were in the United States?* she asked. 'Did you cut it off?'
Again, with the look of torment in his eyes, he shook his head.
'No,' he said, in a low, subdued voice, i wore a hat, and a handkerchief tied round my head.'
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And he relapsed into silence, as if of tormented memories.
'Are you the only man of your people who has been to the United States?' she asked him.
'Yes. I am the only one who has been away from here for a long time. The others come back soon, in one week. They don't stay away. The old men don't let them.'
'And why did you go?'
'The old men want me to go - because 1 shall be the Cacique -'
He talked always with the same naivete, an almost childish candour. But she felt that this was perhaps just the effect of his Spanish. Or perhaps speech altogether was unreal to him. Anyhow, she felt that all the real things were kept back.
He came and sat with her a good deal - sometimes more than she wished-as if he wanted to be near her. She asked him if he was married. He said he was - with two children.
'I should like to see your children,' she said.
But he answered only with that smile, a sweet, almost ecstatic smile, above which the dark eyes hardly changed from their enigmatic abstraction.
It was curious, he would sit with her by the hour, without ever making her self-conscious, or sex-conscious. He seemed to have no sex, as he sat there so still and gentle and apparently submissive, with his head bent a little forward, and the river of glistening black hair streaming maidenly over his shoulders.
Yet when she looked again, she saw his shoulders broad and powerful, his eyebrows black and level, the short, curved, obstinate black lashes over his lowered eyes, the small, fur-like line of moustache above his blackish, heavy lips, and the strong chin, and she knew that in* some other mysterious way he was darkly and powerfully male. And he, feeling her watching him, would glance up at her swiftly with a dark, lurking look in his eyes, which immediately he veiled with that half-sad smile.
The days and the weeks went by, in a vague kind of contentment. She was uneasy sometimes, feeling she had lost the power over herself. She was not in her own power, she was under the spell of some other control. And at times she had moments of terror and horror. But then these Indians would come and sit with her, casting their insidious spell over her by their very silent presence, their silent, sexless, power-nil physical presence. As they sat they seemed to take her will away, leaving her wilMcss and victim to her own indifference. And the young man would bring her sweetened drink, often the same emetic drink, but sometimes other kinds. And after drinking, the languor filled her
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heavy limbs, her senses seemed to float in the air, listening, hearing. They had brought her a little female dog, which she called Flora. And once, in the trance of her senses, she felt she heard the little dog conceive, in her tiny womb, and begin to be complex, with young. And another day she could hear the vast sound of the earth going round, like some immense arrow-string booming.
But as the days grew shorter and colder, when she was cold, she would get a sudden revival of her wilt, and a desire to go out, to go away. And she insisted to the young man, she wanted to go out.
So one day, they let her climb to the topmost roof of the big house where she was, and look down the square. It was the day of the big dance, but not everybody was dancing. Women with babies in their arms stood in their doorways, watching. Opposite, at the other end of the square, there was a throng before the other big house, and a small, brilliant group on the terrace-roof of the first storey, in front of wide open doors of the upper storey. Through these wide open doors she could see lire glinting in darkness and priests in headdresses of black and yellow and scarlet feathers, wearing robe-like blankets of black and red and yellow, with long green fringes, were moving about. A big drum was beating slowly and regularly, in the dense, Indian silence. The crowd below waited -
Then a drum started on a high beat, and there came the deep, powerful burst of men singing a heavy, savage music, like a wind roaring in some timeless forest, many mature men singing in one breath, like the wind; and long lines of dancers walked out from under the big house. Men with naked, golden-bronze bodies and streaming black hair, tufts of red and yellow feathers on their arms, and kilts of white frieze with a bar of heavy red and black and green embroidery round their waists, bending slightly forward and stamping the earth in their absorbed, monotonous stamp of the dance, a fox-fur, hung by the nose from their belt behind, swaying with the sumptuous swaying of a beautiful fox-fur, the tip of the tail writhing above the dancer's heels. And after each man, a woman with a strange elaborate headdress of feathers and seashclls, and wearing a short black tunic, moving erect, holding up tufts of feathers in each hand, swaying her wrists rhythmically and subtly beating the earth with her bare feet.
So, the long line of the dance unfurling from the big house opposite. And from the big house beneath her, strange scent of incense, strange tense silence, then the answering burst of inhuman male singing, and the long line of the dance unfurling.
It went on all day, the insistence of the drum, the cavernous.
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The Woman Who Rode Away
roaring, storm-like sound of male singing, the incessant swinging of the fox-skins behind the powerful, gold-bronze, stamping legs of the men, the autumn sun from a perfect blue heaven pouring on the rivers of black hair, men's and women's, the valley all still, the walls of rock beyond, the awful huge bulking of the mountain against the pure sky, its snow seething with sheer whiteness.
For hours and hours she watched, spell-bound, and as if drugged. And in all the terrible persistence of the drumming and the primeval, rushing deep singing, and the endless stamping of the dance of fox-tailed men, the tread of heavy, bird-erect women in their black tunics, she seemed at last to feel her own death; her own obliteration. As if she were to be obliterated from the field of life again. In the strange towering symbols on the heads of the changeless, absorbed women she seemed to read once more the Mene Mene TekeS Upkarňn.* Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of woman. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the great stream of impersonal sex and impersonal passion. Strangely, as if clairvoyant, she saw the immense sacrifice prepared. And she went back to her tittle house in a trance of agony.
After this, there was always a certain agony when she heard the drums at evening, and the strange uplifted savage sound of men singing round the drum, like wild creatures howling to the invisible gods of the moon and the vanished sun. Something of the chuckling, sobbing cry of the coyote, something of the exultant bark of the fox, the far-off wild melancholy exultance of the howling wolf, the torment of the puma's scream, and the insistence of the ancient fierce human male, with his lapses of tenderness and his abiding ferocity.
Sometimes she would climb the high roof after nightfall, and listen to the dim cluster of young men round the drum on the bridge just beyond the square, singing by the hour. Sometimes there would be a fire, and in the fire-glow, men in their white shim or naked save for a loin-cloth, would be dancing and stamping like spectres, hour after hour in the dark cold air, within the fire-glow, forever dancing and stamping like turkeys, or dropping squatting by the fire to rest, throwing their blankets round them.
'Why do you all have the same colours?' she asked the young Indian. 'Why do you all have red and yellow and black, over your white shirts? And the women have bbek tunics?'
The Woman Who Rode Away                      4>3
He looked into her eyes, curiously, and the faint, evasive smile came on to his face. Behind the smile lay a soft, strange malignancy.
'Because our men are the fire and the daytime, and our women are the spaces between the stars at night,' he said.
'Aren't the women even sure?' she said.
'No. We say they are the spaces between the stars, that keep the stars apart.'
He looked at her oddly, and again the touch of derision came into his eyes.
'White people,' he said, 'they know nothing. They are like children always with toys. We know the sun, and we know the moon. And we say, when a white woman sacrifice herself to our gods, then our gods will begin to make the world again, and the white man's gods will fan to pieces.*
'How sacrifice herself?' she asked quickly.
And he, as quickly covered, covered himself with a subtle smile.
'She sacrifice her own gods and come to our gods, I mean that,' he said, soothingly.
But she was not reassured. An icy pang of fear and certainty was at her heart.
'The sun he is alive at one end of the sky,' he continued, 'and the moon lives at the other end. And the man all the time have to keep the sun happy in his side of the sky, and the woman have to keep the moon quiet at her side of the sky. All the time she have to work at this. And the sun can't ever go into the house of the moon, and the moon can't ever go into the house of the sun, in the sky. So the woman, she asks the moon to come into her cave, inside her. And the man, he draws the sun down till he has the power of the sun. All the time he do this. Then when the man gets a woman, the sun goes into the cave of the moon, and that is how everything in the world starts.'
She listened, watching him closely, as one enemy watches another who is speaking with double meaning.
'Then,' she said, 'why aren't you Indians masters of the white men?'
'Because,' he said, 'the Indian got weak, and lost his power with the sun, so the white men stole the sun. But they can't keep him -they don't know how. They got him, but they don't know what to do with him, like a boy who catch a big grizzly bear, and can't kill him, and can't run away from him. The grizzly bear eats the boy that catch him, when he want to run away from him. White men don't know what they are doing with the sun, and white women don't know what they do with the moon. The moon she got
4U                       The Woman Who Rode Away
angry with white women, like a püma when someone kills her little ones. The moon, she bites white women - here inside,' and he pressed his side. 'The moon, she is angry in a white woman's cave. The Indian can see it - And soon,' he added, 'the Indian women get the moon back and keep her quiet in their house. And the Indian men get the sun, and the power over all the world. White men don't know what the sun is. They never know.'
He subsided into a curious exultant silence.
'But,' she faltered, 'why do you hate us so? Why do you hate me?'
He looked up suddenly with a light on his face, and a startling flame of a smile.
'No, we don't hate,' he said softly, looking with a curious glitter into her face.
'You do,' she said, forlorn and hopeless.
And after a moment's silence, he rose and went away.
in
Winter had now come, in the high valley, with snow that melted in the day's sun, and nights that were bitter cold. She lived on, in a kind of daze, feeling her power ebbing more and more away from her, as if her will were leaving her. She felt always in die same relaxed, confused, victimised state, unless the sweetened herb drink would numb her mind altogether, and release her senses into a sort of heightened, mystic acuteness and a feeling as if she were diffusing out deliriously into the harmony of things. This at length became the only state of consciousness she really recognised: this exquisite sense of bleeding out into the higher beauty and harmony of things. Then she could actually hear the great stars in heaven, which she saw through her door, speaking from their motion and brightness, saying things perfectly to the cosmos, as they trod in perfect ripples, like bells on the floor of heaven, passing one another and grouping in the timeless dance, with the spaces of dark between. And she could hear the snow on a cold, cloudy day twittering and faintly whistling in the sky, like birds that flock and fly away in autumn, suddenly calling farewell to the invisible moon, and slipping out of the plains of the air, releasing peaceful warmth. She herself would call to the arrested snow to fall from the upper air. She would call to the unseen moon to cease to be angry, to make peace again with the unseen sun like a woman who ceases to be angry in her house. And she would smell the sweetness of the moon relaxing to the sun in the wintry heaven, when the snow fell in a
The Woman Who Rode Away                      4I$
faint, cold-perfumed relaxation, as the peace of the sun mingled again in a sort of unison with the peace of the moon.
She was aware too of the sort of shadow that was on the Indians of the valley, a deep, stoical disconsolation, almost religious in jB depth.
'We have lost our power over the sun, and we are trying to get him back. But he is wild with us, and shy like a horse that has got away. We have to go through a lot.' So the young Indian said to her looking inte her eyes with a strained meaning. And she, as if bel witched, replied:
'I hope you will get him back.'
The smile of triumph flew over his face.
'Do you hope it?' hie said.
'I do,' she answered fatally.
'Then all right,' he said. 'We shall get him.*
And he went away in exultance.
She felt she was drifting on some consummation, which she had no will to avoid, yet which seemed heavy and finally terrible to her.
It must have been almost December, for the days were short, when she was taken again" before the aged man, and stripped of her clothing, and touched with the old finger-tips.
The aged cacique looked her in the eyes, with his eyes of londy, far-off, black intentness, and murmured something to her.
'He wants you to make the sign of peace,' the young man translated, showing her the gesture. 'Peace and farewell to him.'
She was fascinated by the black, glass-like, intent eyes of the old cacique, that watched her without blinking, like s basilisk's, overpowering her. In their depths also she saw a certain fatherly compassion, and pleading. She put her hand before her face, in the required manner, making the sign of peace and farewell. He made the sign of peace back again to her, then sank among his furs. She thought he was going to die, and that he knew it.
There followed a day of ceremonial, when she was brought out before all the people, in a blue blanket with white fringe, and holding blue feathers in her hands. Before an altar of one house, she vts perfumed with incense and sprinkled with ash. Before the altar of the opposite house she was fumigated again with incense by the gorgeous, terrifying priests in yellow and scarlet and black, their faces painted with scarlet paint. And then they threw water on her. Meanwhile she was faintly aware of the fire on the altar, the heavy, heavy sound of a drum, the heavy sound of men beginning powerfully, deeply, savagely
4i6                       The Woman Who Rode Away
to sing, the swaying of die crowd of faces in die plaza below, and the formation for a sacred dance.
But at this tunc her commonplace consciousness was numb, she was aware of her immediate surroundings as shadows, almost immaterial. With refined and heightened senses she could hear the sound of the earth winging on its journey, like a shot arrow, the ripple-rustling of the air, and the boom of the great arrow-string. And it seemed to her there were two great influences in the upper air, one golden towards the sun, and one invisible silver; the first travelling like rain ascending to the gold presence sunwards, the second like rain silvcrily descending the ladders of space towards the hovering, lurking clouds over the snowy mountain-top. Then between them, another presence, waiting to shake himself free of moisture, of heavy white snow that had mysteriously collected about him. And in summer, like a scorched eagle, he would wait to shake himself dear of the weight of heavy sunbeams. And he was coloured like fire. And he was always shaking himself clear, of snow or of heavy heat, like an eagle rustling.
Then there was a still stranger presence, standing watching from the blue distance, always watching. Sometimes running in upon the wind, or shimmering in the heat-waves. The Hue wind itself, rushing as it were out of the holes in the earth into the sky, rushing out of the sky down upon the earth. The blue wind, the go-between, the invisible ghost that belonged to two worlds, that played upon the ascending and the descending chords of the rains.
More and more her ordinary personal consciousness had left her, she had gone into that other state of passional cosmic consciousness, like one who is drugged. The Indians, with their heavily religious natures, had made her succumb to their vision.
Only one personal question she asked die young Indian:
'Why am I the only one that wears blue?*
'It is the colour of the wind. It is die colour of what goes away and is never coming back, but which is always here, waiting like death among us. It is the colour of the dead. And it is the colour that stands away off, looking at us from the distance, that cannot come near to us. When we go near, it goes farther. It can't be near. We are all brown and ydlow and black hair, and white teeth and red blood. We arc the ones that are here. You with blue eyes, you arc the messengers from the far-away, you cannot stay, and now it is tíme for you to go back.'
'Where to?'she asked.
'To the way-off things like the sun and the blue mother of rain, and tell them that we are the people on the world again, and we can bring
The Woman Who Rode Away                       4,7
the sun to the moon again, like a red horse to a blue mare; we are the people. The white women have driven back die moon in the sky won't let her come to the sun. So the sun is angry. And the Indian must give the moon to the sun.'
'How?'she said.
'The white woman got to die and go like a wind to the sun, tell him the Indians will open the gate to him. And the Indian women will open the gate to the moon. The white women don't let the moon come down out of the blue coral. The moon used to come down among the Indian women, like a white goat among the flowers. And the sun want to come down to die Indian men, like an eagle to the pine-trees. The sun, he is shut out behind the white man, and die moon she is shut out behind the white woman, and they can't get away. They arc angry, everything in the world gets angrier. The Indian says, he will give die white woman to die sun, so the sun will leap over the white man and come to the Indian again. And the moon w3l be surprised she will see the gate open, and she not know which way to go. But the Indian woman will call to the moon, Come! Come! Come buck into my grasslands. The wicked white woman ean't harm you any more. Then the sun will look over the heads of the white men, and see the moon in the pastures of our women, with the Red Men standing around like pine trees. Then he will leap over the heads of the white men, and come running past to the Indians through the spruce trees- And we, who are red and black and yellow, we who stay, we shall have the sun on our right hand and the moon on our left. So we can bring the rain down out of the blue meadows, and up out of the black; and we can call the wind that tells die corn to grow, when we ask him, and we shall make the clouds to break, and the sheep to have twin lambs. And we shall be full of power, like a spring day. But the white people will be a hard winter, without snow -'
'But,' said the white woman, 'I don't shut out the moon - how can I?'
'Yes,' he said, 'you shut die gate, and then laugh, think you have it all your own way.'
She could never quite understand the way he looked at her. He was always so curiously gentle, and his smile was so soft. Yet there was such glitter in his eyes, and an unrelenting sort of hate came out of his words, a strange, profound, impersonal hate. Personally he liked her, she was sure. He was gentle with her, attracted by her in some strange, soft, passionless way. But impersonally he hated her with a mystic hatred. He would smile at her, winningly. Yet if, the
4i8
The Woman Who Rode Away
next moment, she glanced round at him unawares, she would catch that gleam of pure after-hate in his eyes.
'Have I got to die and be given to the sun?' she asked.
'Sometime,' he said, laughing evasively. 'Sometime we all die.'
They were gentle with her, and very considerate with her. Strange men, the old priests and the young cacique alike, they watched over her and cared for her like women. In their soft, insidious understanding, there was something womanly. Yet their eyes, with that strange glitter, and their dark, shut mouths that would open to the broad jaw, the small, strong, white teeth, had something very primitively male and cruel.
One wintry day, when snow was falling, they took her to a great dark chamber in the big house. The lire was burning in a corner on a high raised dais under a sort of hood or canopy of adobe-work. She saw in the fire-glow, the glowing bodies of the almost naked priests, and strange symbols on the roof and walls of the chamber. There was no door or window in the chamber, they had descended by a ladder from the roof. And the fire of pinewood danced continually, showing walls painted with strange devices, which she could not understand, and a ceiling of poles making a curious pattern of black and red and yellow, and alcoves or niches in which were curious objects she could not discern.
The older priests were going through some ceremony near the fire, tn silence, intense Indian silence. She was seated on a low projection of the wall, opposite the fire, two men seated beside her. Presendy they gave her a drink from a cup, which she took gladly,, because of the semi-trance it would induce.
In the darkness and in the silence she was accurately aware of everything that happened to her: how they took off her clothes, and, standing her before a great, weird device on the wall, coloured blue and white and black, washed her all over with water and die amole* infusion; washed even her hair, softly, carefully, and dried it on white cloths, till it was soft and glistening. Then they laid her on a couch under another great indecipherable image of red and black and yellow, and now rubbed all her body with sweet-scented oil, and massaged all her limbs, and her back, and her sides, with a long, strange, hypnotic massage. Their dark hands were incredibly powerful, yet soft with a watery softness She could not understand. And the dark faces, leaning near her white body, she saw were darkened with red pigment, with lines of yellow round the cheeks. And the dark eyes glittered absorbed, as the hands worked upon the soft white body of the woman.
The Woman Who Růde Away                      419
They were so impersonal, absorbed in something that was beyond her. They never saw her as a personal woman: she could tell that. She was some mystic object to them, some vehicle of passions too remote fór her to grasp. Herself in a state of trance, she watched their faces bending over her, dark, strangely glistening with the transparent red paint, and lined with bars of yellow. And in this weird, luminous-dark mask of living face, the eyes were fixed with an unchanging steadfast gleam, and the purplish-pigmented lips were closed in a full, sinister, sad grimncss. The immense fundamental sadness, the grim-ness of ultimate decision, die fixity of revenge, and the nascent exult-ance of those that are going to triumph - these things she could read in their faces, as she by and was rubbed into a misty glow, by their uncanny dark hands. Her limbs, her flesh, her very bones at last seemed to be diffusing into a roseate sort ofmist, in which her consciousness hovered like some sun-gleam in a flushed cloud.
She knew die gleam would fade, the cloud would go grey. But at present she did not believe it She knew she was a victim; that all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimising her. But she did not mind. She wanted it.
Later, they put a short blue tunic on her and took her to the upper terrace, and presented her to the people. She saw the plaza below her full of dark faces and of glittering eyes. There was no pity: only the curious hard exultance. The people gave a subdued cry when they saw her, and she shuddered. But she hardly cared.
Next day was the last. She slept in a chamber of the big house. At dawn they put on her a big blue blanket with a fringe, and led her out into the plaza, among the throng of silent, dark-blanketed people. There was pure white snow on the ground, and the dark people in their dark-brown blankets looked like inhabitants of another world.
A large drum was slowly pounding, and an old priest was declaring from a housetop. But it was not till noon that a litter came forth, and the people gave that low, animal cry which was so moving. In the sack-tike litter sat the old, old cacique, his white hair braided with black braid and large turquoise stones. His face was like a piece of obsidian. He lifted his hand in token, and the litter stopped in front of her. Fixing her with his old eyes, he spoke to her for a few moments, in his hollow voice. No one translated.
Another litter came, and she was placed in it. Pour priests moved ahead, in their scarlet and yellow and black, with plumed head-dresses. Then came die litter of the old cacique. Then the light drums began.
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and two groups of singers burst simultaneously into song, male and wild. And the golden-red, almost naked men, adorned with ceremonial feathers and kilts, the rivers of black hair down their backs, formed into two files and began to tread the dance. So they threaded out of the snowy plaza, in two long, sumptuous lines of dark red-gold and black and fur, swaying with a faint tinkle of bits of shell and flint, winding over the snow between the two bee-clusters of men who sang around the drum.
Slowly they moved out, and her liner, with its attendance of feathered, lurid, dancing priests, moved after. Everybody danced the tread of the dance-step, even, subdy, the liner-bearers. And out of the plaza they went, past smoking ovens, on the trail to the great cotton-wood trees, that stood like grey-silver lace against the blue sky, bare and exquisite above the snow. The river, diminished, rushed among fangs of ice. The chequer-squares of gardens within fences were all snowy, and the white houses now looked yellowish.
The whole valley glittered intolerably with pure snow, away to the walls of die standing rock. And across the flat cradle of snow-bed wound the long thread of the dance, shaking slowly and sumptuously in its orange and black motion. The high drums thudded quickly, and on the crystalline frozen air the swell and roar of the chant of savages was like an obsession.
She sat looking out of her liner with big, transfixed blue eyes, under which were the wan markings of her drugged weariness. She knew she was going to die, among the glisten of this snow, at the hands of this savage, sumptuous people. And as she stared at the blaze of blue sky above the slashed and ponderous mountain, she thought: i am dead already. What difference does it make, the transition from the dead 1 am to the dead I shall be, very soon!' Yet her soul sickened and fell wan.
The strange procession trailed on, in perpetual dance, slowly across the plain of snow, and then entered the slopes between the pine-trees. She saw the copper-dark men dancing the dance-tread, onwards, between the copper-pale tree trunks. And at last she, too, in her swaying liner, entered the pine-trees.
They were travelling on and on, upwards, across the snow under the trees, past the superb shafts of pale, flaked copper, the rustic and shake and tread of the threading dance, penetrating into the forest, into the mountain. They were following a sircam-bed: but the stream was dry, like summer, dried up by the frozenncss of the head-waters. There were dark, red-bronze willow bushes with wattles like wild hair.
The Woman Who Rode Away                         ^a,
and pallid aspen trees looking like cold flesh against the snow. Then jutting dark rocks.
At last she could tell that the dancers were moving forward no more. Nearer and nearer she came upon the drums, as to a lair of mysterious animals. Then through the bushes she emerged into a strange amphitheatre. Pacing was a great wall of hollow rock, down the front of which hung a great, dripping, fang-like spoke of ice. The ice came pouring over the rock from the precipice above, and then stood arrested, dripping out of high heaven, almost down to the hollow stones where the stream-pool should be below. But the pool was dry.
On either side the dry pool, the lines of dancers had formed, and the dance was continuing without intermission, against a background of bushes.
But what she felt was that fanged inverted pinnacle of ice, hanging from the lip of the dark precipice above. And behind the great rope of ice, she saw the leopard-like figures of priests climbing the hollow cliff face, to the cave that, like a dark socket, bored a cavity, an orifice, half way up the crag.
Before she could realise, her litter-bearers were staggering in the footholds, climbing the rock. She, too, was behind the ice. There it hung, like a curtain that is not spread, but hangs like a great fang. And near above her was the orifice of the cave sinking dark into the rock. She watched it as she swayed upwards.
On the platform of the cave stood the priests, waiting in all their gorgeousness of feathers and fringed robes, watching her ascent. Two of them stooped to help her liner-bearer. And at length she was on the platform of the cave, far in behind the shaft of ice, above the hollow amphitheatre among the bushes below, where men were dancing, and the whole populace of the village was clustered in silence.
The sun was sloping down the afternoon sky, on the left. She knew that this was the shortest day of the year, and the last day of her life. They stood her facing the iridescent column of ice, which fell down marvellously arrested, away in front of her.
Some signal was given, and the dance below stopped. There was now absolute silence. She was given a little to drink, then two priests took off her mantle and her tunic, and in her strange pallor she stood there, between the lurid robes of the priests, beyond the pillar of ice, beyond and above the dark-faced people. The throng below gave the low, wild cry. Then the priests turned her round, so she stood with her back to the open world, her long blond hair to the people below. And they cried again.
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The Woman Who Rodt Away
She was facing the cave, inwards. A fire was burning and flickering in the depths. Pour priests had taken off their robes, and were almost as naked as she was. They were powerful men in the prime of life, and they kept their dark, painted faces lowered.
From the fire came the old, old priest, with an incense-pan. He was naked and in a state of barbaric ecstasy. He fumigated his victim, reciting at the same time in a hollow voice. Behind him came another robeless priest, with two flint knives.
When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and tegs. Behind stood the aged man, like a skeleton covered with dark glass, holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife.
She felt little sensation, though she knew all that was happening. Turning to the sky, she looked at the yellow sun. It was sinking. The shaft of ice was like a shadow between her and it. And she realised that the yellow rays were fitting half the cave, though they had not reached the altar where the fire was, at the far end of the funnel-shaped cavity.
Yes, the rays were creeping round slowly. As they grew ruddier, they penetrated farther. When the red sun was about to sink, he would shine full through the shaft of ice deep into the hollow of the cave, to the innermost.
She understood now that this was what the men were waiting for. Even those that held her down were bent and twisted round, their black eyes watching the sun with a glittering eagerness, and awe, and craving. The black eyes of the aged cacique were fixed like black mirrors on the sun, as if sightless, yet containing some terrible answer to the reddening winter planet. And all the eyes of the priests were fixed and glittering on die sinking orb, tn the reddening, icy silence of the winter afternoon.
They were anxious, terribly anxious, and fierce. Their ferocity wanted something, and they were waiting the moment And their ferocity was ready to leap out into a mystic exultance, of triumph. But still they were anxious.
Only the eyes of that oldest man were not anxious. Black, and fixed, and as if sightless, they watched the sun, seeing beyond the sun. And in their black, empty concentration there was power, power intensely abstract and remote, but deep, deep to the heart of the earth, and the heart of the sun. In absolute morjonlessness he watched tilt the red sun should send his ray through the column of ice. Then the
The Woman Who Rodt Away
W
old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice *„A
achieve the power.                                                                          a
The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race