Jacob's Room

VIRGINIA WOOLF

CHAPTER ONE

"So of course, " wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeperin the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave. "

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolvedthe full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowlyfilled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and shehad the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bendinglike a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awfulthings. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular;the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread. 

"... Nothing for it but to leave, " she read. 

"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldestson, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she feltchilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't wantto play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late. 

"Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run andfind him. Tell him to come at once. " "... But mercifully, " she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand theperambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow.... "

Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: CaptainBarfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahliasin her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in hereyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is afortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking upstones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poorcreatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years. 

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted. 

"Scarborough, " Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a boldline beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But astamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; thenfumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panamahat suspended his paint-brush. 

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Herewas that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He struckthe canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It wastoo pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gullsuspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was toopale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite withhis landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and muchgratified if his landladies liked his pictures--which they often did. 

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted. 

Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervouslyat the dark little coils on his palette. 

"I saw your brother--I saw your brother, " he said, nodding his head, asArcher lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the oldgentleman in spectacles. 

"Over there--by the rock, " Steele muttered, with his brush between histeeth, squeezing out raw sienna, and keeping his eyes fixed on BettyFlanders's back. 

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" shouted Archer, lagging on after a second. 

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure fromall passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breakingagainst rocks--so it sounded. 

Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black--it was justTHAT note which brought the rest together. "Ah, one may learn to paintat fifty! There's Titian... " and so, having found the right tint, up helooked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay. 

Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sandoff, and picked up her black parasol. 

The rock was one of those tremendously solid brown, or rather black, rocks which emerge from the sand like something primitive. Rough withcrinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, asmall boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel ratherheroic, before he gets to the top. 

But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandybottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels. A fishdarts across. The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and outpushes an opal-shelled crab--

"Oh, a huge crab, " Jacob murmured--and begins his journey on weakly legson the sandy bottom. Now! Jacob plunged his hand. The crab was cool andvery light. But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when hesaw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, anenormous man and woman. 

An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretchedmotionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefullyskirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots. 

The large red faces lying on the bandanna handkerchiefs stared up atJacob. Jacob stared down at them. Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly atfirst, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and hehad to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him andfloated out and settled again a little farther on. A large black womanwas sitting on the sand. He ran towards her. 

"Nanny! Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of eachgasping breath. 

The waves came round her. She was a rock. She was covered with theseaweed which pops when it is pressed. He was lost. 

There he stood. His face composed itself. He was about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a wholeskull--perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until heheld the skull in his arms. 

"There he is!" cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and coveringthe whole space of the beach in a few seconds. "What has he got hold of?Put it down, Jacob! Drop it this moment! Something horrid, I know. Whydidn't you stay with us? Naughty little boy! Now put it down. Now comealong both of you, " and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand andfumbling for Jacob's arm with the other. But he ducked down and pickedup the sheep's jaw, which was loose. 

Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer's hand, andtelling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnowhad lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all thetime in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort. 

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep's skullwithout its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a moreunpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. Thesea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a littledust--No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders. It's a greatexperiment coming so far with young children. There's no man to helpwith the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinatealready. 

"Throw it away, dear, do, " she said, as they got into the road; butJacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out herbonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh. The wind wasrising. The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of waves before a storm. The fishing-boats wereleaning to the water's brim. A pale yellow light shot across the purplesea; and shut. The lighthouse was lit. "Come along, " said BettyFlanders. The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the greatblackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried to strip asthey passed. 

"Don't lag, boys. You've got nothing to change into, " said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earthdisplayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses ingardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against thisblazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, whichstirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer's hand. On she plodded up the hill. 

"What did I ask you to remember?" she said. 

"I don't know, " said Archer. 

"Well, I don't know either, " said Betty, humorously and simply, and whoshall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishingdaring, humour, and sentimentality--who shall deny that in theserespects every woman is nicer than any man?

Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with. 

She had her hand upon the garden gate. 

"The meat!" she exclaimed, striking the latch down. 

She had forgotten the meat. 

There was Rebecca at the window. 

The bareness of Mrs. Pearce's front room was fully displayed at teno'clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of thetable. The harsh light fell on the garden; cut straight across the lawn;lit up a child's bucket and a purple aster and reached the hedge. Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table. There were her large reels ofwhite cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown woolwound round an old postcard. There were the bulrushes and the Strandmagazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys' boots. A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blewstraight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as theypassed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea. 

Archer could not sleep. 

Mrs. Flanders stooped over him. "Think of the fairies, " said BettyFlanders. "Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on theirnests. Now shut your eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in herbeak. Now turn and shut your eyes, " she murmured, "and shut your eyes. "

The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cisternoverflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipesand streaming down the windows. 

"What's all that water rushing in?" murmured Archer. 

"It's only the bath water running away, " said Mrs. Flanders. 

Something snapped out of doors. 

"I say, won't that steamer sink?" said Archer, opening his eyes. 

"Of course it won't, " said Mrs. Flanders. "The Captain's in bed longago. Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under theflowers. "

"I thought he'd never get off--such a hurricane, " she whispered toRebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door. The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burntquietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge. 

"Did he take his bottle well?" Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebeccanodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flandersbent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning. Thewindow shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it. 

The two women murmured over the spirit-lamp, plotting the eternalconspiracy of hush and clean bottles while the wind raged and gave asudden wrench at the cheap fastenings. 

Both looked round at the cot. Their lips were pursed. Mrs. Flanderscrossed over to the cot. 

"Asleep?" whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot. 

Mrs. Flanders nodded. 

"Good-night, Rebecca, " Mrs. Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called herma'm, though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy ofhush and clean bottles. 

Mrs. Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room. There wereher spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark. She had not drawn the curtains either. 

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child'sgreen bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster whichtrembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of itsown back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lightsseemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights inbedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced overthe Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. 

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguishedthe lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch wasrained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would havebeen fastened down by the rain. Lying on one's back one would have seennothing but muddle and confusion--clouds turning and turning, andsomething yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness. 

The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets andlay under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer layspread out, with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed; andwhen the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened hiseyes. The wind actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers, andlet in a little light, so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawerswas visible, running straight up, until a white shape bulged out; and asilver streak showed in the looking-glass. 

In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundlyunconscious. The sheep's jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at hisfeet. He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail. 

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the windfell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to theearth. The child's bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weaklylegs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and tryingagain and again. 

CHAPTER TWO

"MRS. FLANDERS"--"Poor Betty Flanders"--"Dear Betty"--"She's veryattractive still"--"Odd she don't marry again!" "There's Captain Barfootto be sure--calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and neverbrings his wife. "

"But that's Ellen Barfoot's fault, " the ladies of Scarborough said. "Shedon't put herself out for no one. "

"A man likes to have a son--that we know. "

"Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear withfor years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to youin bed. "

(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid. )

Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been saidand would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was half-way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the death ofSeabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the outskirts ofScarborough; her brother, poor Morty's, downfall and possible demise--for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes, she looked along theroad for Captain Barfoot--yes, there he was, punctual as ever; theattentions of the Captain--all ripened Betty Flanders, enlarged herfigure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded her eyes for no reasonthat any one could see perhaps three times a day. 

True, there's no harm in crying for one's husband, and the tombstone, though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer's days when thewidow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hatswere raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands' arms. Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in threeshells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood beenglass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a youngman whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused tochange his boots. 

"Merchant of this city, " the tombstone said; though why Betty Flandershad chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had onlysat behind an office window for three months, and before that had brokenhorses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild--well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys. 

Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if itweren't the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soongoes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, hehad merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand whitestones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crossesof green tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped inApril, with a scent like that of an invalid's bedroom, over thechurchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirthitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for service orfuneral, that was Seabrook's voice--the voice of the dead. 

The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, sothat now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her whenshe went to feed the fowls. 

"Wouldn't you like my knife, mother?" said Archer. 

Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son's voice mixed life anddeath inextricably, exhilaratingly. 

"What a big knife for a small boy!" she said. She took it to please him. Then the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer toshut the door into the kitchen garden, Mrs. Flanders set her meal down, clucked for the hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen fromover the way by Mrs. Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, heldit for a moment suspended while she observed to Mrs. Page next door thatMrs. Flanders was in the orchard with the chickens. 

Mrs. Page, Mrs. Cranch, and Mrs. Garfit could see Mrs. Flanders in theorchard because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and DodsHill dominated the village. No words can exaggerate the importance ofDods Hill. It was the earth; the world against the sky; the horizon ofhow many glances can best be computed by those who have lived all theirlives in the same village, only leaving it once to fight in the Crimea, like old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe. The progress of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laidagainst it to be judged. 

"Now she's going up the hill with little John, " said Mrs. Cranch to Mrs. Garfit, shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors. Openingthe orchard gate, Mrs. Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holdingJohn by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; butthey were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting outwhat ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view--moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one endto the other laid out flat like a puzzle. Mrs. Flanders, who was growingstout, sat down in the fortress and looked about her. 

The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her;its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up fromthe sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over;she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; andthe criss-cross of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamondflash of little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like theseescaped her, she might have let her fancy play upon the gold tint of thesea at sunset, and thought how it lapped in coins of gold upon theshingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black arm of thepier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist-wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of tarwhich stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriagesthrough crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid outthe flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt inthe sun. Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purplebonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs. Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. CaptainGeorge Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangularhoarding said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; and each line endedwith three differently coloured notes of exclamation. 

So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallowblinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, thetables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behindsix or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fishfor hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an emptyGladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium;but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilledexpression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queuethat one could be admitted to the pier. Once through the turnstiles, every one walked for a yard or two very briskly; some flagged at thisstall; others at that. 

But it was the band that drew them all to it finally; even the fishermenon the lower pier taking up their pitch within its range. 

The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board. It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jewslodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse-dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the sameblurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks attheir feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably, swaying round the iron pillars of the pier. 

But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought theyoung man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady'sskirt; the grey one will do--above the pink silk stockings. It changes;drapes her ankles--the nineties; then it amplifies--the seventies; nowit's burnished red and stretched above a crinoline--the sixties; a tinyblack foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sittingthere? Yes--she's still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged withroses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There's no pierbeneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, butthere's no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea isin the seventeenth century! Let's to the museum. Cannon-balls; arrow-heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. JasparFloyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Romancamp on Dods Hill--see the little ticket with the faded writing on it. 

And now, what's the next thing to see in Scarborough?

 Mrs. Flanders sat on the raised circle of the Roman camp, patchingJacob's breeches; only looking up as she sucked the end of her cotton, or when some insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone. 

John kept trotting up and slapping down in her lap grass or dead leaveswhich he called "tea, " and she arranged them methodically but absent-mindedly, laying the flowery heads of the grasses together, thinking howArcher had been awake again last night; the church clock was ten orthirteen minutes fast; she wished she could buy Garfit's acre. 

 "That's an orchid leaf, Johnny. Look at the little brown spots. Come, my dear. We must go home. Ar-cher! Ja-cob!"

"Ar-cher! Ja-cob!" Johnny piped after her, pivoting round on his heel, and strewing the grass and leaves in his hands as if he were sowingseed. Archer and Jacob jumped up from behind the mound where they hadbeen crouching with the intention of springing upon their motherunexpectedly, and they all began to walk slowly home. 

"Who is that?" said Mrs. Flanders, shading her eyes. 

"That old man in the road?" said Archer, looking below. 

"He's not an old man, " said Mrs. Flanders. "He's--no, he's not--Ithought it was the Captain, but it's Mr. Floyd. Come along, boys. "

"Oh, bother Mr. Floyd!" said Jacob, switching off a thistle's head, forhe knew already that Mr. Floyd was going to teach them Latin, as indeedhe did for three years in his spare time, out of kindness, for there wasno other gentleman in the neighbourhood whom Mrs. Flanders could haveasked to do such a thing, and the elder boys were getting beyond her, and must be got ready for school, and it was more than most clergymenwould have done, coming round after tea, or having them in his own room--as he could fit it in--for the parish was a very large one, and Mr. Floyd, like his father before him, visited cottages miles away on themoors, and, like old Mr. Floyd, was a great scholar, which made it sounlikely--she had never dreamt of such a thing. Ought she to haveguessed? But let alone being a scholar he was eight years younger thanshe was. She knew his mother--old Mrs. Floyd. She had tea there. And itwas that very evening when she came back from having tea with old Mrs. Floyd that she found the note in the hall and took it into the kitchenwith her when she went to give Rebecca the fish, thinking it must besomething about the boys. 

"Mr. Floyd brought it himself, did he?--I think the cheese must be inthe parcel in the hall--oh, in the hall--" for she was reading. No, itwas not about the boys. 

"Yes, enough for fish-cakes to-morrow certainly--Perhaps CaptainBarfoot--" she had come to the word "love. " She went into the garden andread, leaning against the walnut tree to steady herself. Up and downwent her breast. Seabrook came so vividly before her. She shook her headand was looking through her tears at the little shifting leaves againstthe yellow sky when three geese, half-running, half-flying, scuttledacross the lawn with Johnny behind them, brandishing a stick. 

Mrs. Flanders flushed with anger. 

"How many times have I told you?" she cried, and seized him and snatchedhis stick away from him. 

"But they'd escaped!" he cried, struggling to get free. 

"You're a very naughty boy. If I've told you once, I've told you athousand times. I won't have you chasing the geese!" she said, andcrumpling Mr. Floyd's letter in her hand, she held Johnny fast andherded the geese back into the orchard. 

"How could I think of marriage!" she said to herself bitterly, as shefastened the gate with a piece of wire. She had always disliked red hairin men, she thought, thinking of Mr. Floyd's appearance, that night whenthe boys had gone to bed. And pushing her work-box away, she drew theblotting-paper towards her, and read Mr. Floyd's letter again, and herbreast went up and down when she came to the word "love, " but not sofast this time, for she saw Johnny chasing the geese, and knew that itwas impossible for her to marry any one--let alone Mr. Floyd, who was somuch younger than she was, but what a nice man--and such a scholar too. 

"Dear Mr. Floyd, " she wrote. --"Did I forget about the cheese?" shewondered, laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheesewas in the hall. "I am much surprised... " she wrote. 

But the letter which Mr. Floyd found on the table when he got up earlynext morning did not begin "I am much surprised, " and it was such amotherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it formany years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; longafter he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield, which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to saygood-bye, he told them to choose whatever they liked in his study toremember him by. Archer chose a paper-knife, because he did not like tochoose anything too good; Jacob chose the works of Byron in one volume;John, who was still too young to make a proper choice, chose Mr. Floyd'skitten, which his brothers thought an absurd choice, but Mr. Floydupheld him when he said: "It has fur like you. " Then Mr. Floyd spokeabout the King's Navy (to which Archer was going); and about Rugby (towhich Jacob was going); and next day he received a silver salver andwent--first to Sheffield, where he met Miss Wimbush, who was on a visitto her uncle, then to Hackney--then to Maresfield House, of which hebecame the principal, and finally, becoming editor of a well-knownseries of Ecclesiastical Biographies, he retired to Hampstead with hiswife and daughter, and is often to be seen feeding the ducks on Leg ofMutton Pond. As for Mrs. Flanders's letter--when he looked for it theother day he could not find it, and did not like to ask his wife whethershe had put it away. Meeting Jacob in Piccadilly lately, he recognizedhim after three seconds. But Jacob had grown such a fine young man thatMr. Floyd did not like to stop him in the street. 

"Dear me, " said Mrs. Flanders, when she read in the Scarborough andHarrogate Courier that the Rev. Andrew Floyd, etc. , etc. , had been madePrincipal of Maresfield House, "that must be our Mr. Floyd. "

A slight gloom fell upon the table. Jacob was helping himself to jam;the postman was talking to Rebecca in the kitchen; there was a beehumming at the yellow flower which nodded at the open window. They wereall alive, that is to say, while poor Mr. Floyd was becoming Principalof Maresfield House. 

Mrs. Flanders got up and went over to the fender and stroked Topaz onthe neck behind the ears. 

"Poor Topaz, " she said (for Mr. Floyd's kitten was now a very old cat, alittle mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to bekilled). 

"Poor old Topaz, " said Mrs. Flanders, as he stretched himself out in thesun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how shedid not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen. 

Jacob drew rather a dirty pocket-handkerchief across his face. He wentupstairs to his room. 

The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles). Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies weredead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellowswhich came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on tothe moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter ina broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp. From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eatingroast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the paleclouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from home. 

Rebecca had caught the death's-head moth in the kitchen. 

A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes. 

Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed. Tawny ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon them. 

The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly markedwith kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescentupon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it. Therehad been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the wood. And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late. Theonly one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said. 

Morris called it "an extremely local insect found in damp or marshyplaces. " But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a veryfine pen, made a correction in the margin. 

The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern, stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the deadbeech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the redunderwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The redunderwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was aftertwelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room, playing patience, sitting up. 

"How you frightened me!" she had cried. She thought something dreadfulhad happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early. 

There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hotroom, blinking at the light. 

No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing. 

The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob'swindow, and it creaked--creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creakedagain. 

Now it was clouding over. 

Back came the sun, dazzlingly. 

It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet verygently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon thebutterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over themoor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillariesflaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying onthe turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and thepeacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away fromhome, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas. He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oaktree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer toher garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, shetold him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see twobadgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting, she said. 

"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob, " said his mother, popping herhead in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye. " It wasthe last day of the Easter holidays. 

Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day. He dressed himself very neatly inblue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted twofingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out fromthe house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon. 

At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot. 

"Move me, " she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanadefor fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens. " Atthe first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay thechair there in the bright strip. 

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot--James Coppard's daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joinsBroad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time ofQueen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipalwatering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds ofsolicitors' consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited theAquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the sharkquite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed themsuperciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots, orthe brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals. ForEllen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a prisoner--civilization's prisoner--all the bars of her cage falling across theesplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, theswimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow. 

An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her, smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions--who people were--who nowkept Mr. Jones's shop--then about the season--and had Mrs. Dickenstried, whatever it might be--the words issuing from her lips like crumbsof dry biscuit. 

She closed her eyes. Mr. Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man hadnot altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you, you noticed how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of theother; how there was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers;how he leant forward unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himselfsuddenly out of the shafts drawing no cart. But as Mr. Dickens sucked inthe smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man wereperceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now onhis way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his master. For at home inthe little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary in the window, and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs. Dickens huddled up withthe rheumatics--at home where he was made little of, the thought ofbeing in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to thinkthat while he chatted with Mrs. Barfoot on the front, he helped theCaptain on his way to Mrs. Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs. Barfoot, a woman. 

Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs. Rogers. Turning again, he saw that Mrs. Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair, and Mrs. Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silverwatch and told her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great dealmore about the time and everything than she did. But Mrs. Barfoot knewthat Captain Barfoot was on his way to Mrs. Flanders. 

Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeingDods Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffusedwith dust colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spiteof his lameness there was something military in his approach. Mrs. Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and herNewfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side. 

"Oh, Captain Barfoot!" Mrs. Jarvis exclaimed. 

"Good-day, Mrs. Jarvis, " said the Captain. 

They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs. Flanders's gateCaptain Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing verycourteously:

"Good-day to you, Mrs. Jarvis. "

And Mrs. Jarvis walked on alone. 

She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawnlate at night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: "Lookat the moon, look at the moon, Herbert!"

And Herbert looked at the moon. 

Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as acertain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a moredistant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little bookhidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and lookedabout her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty-five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is, and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she sometimesthreatened. 

Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman's wife runs whenshe walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant'sfeather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose herfaith upon the moors--to confound her God with the universal that is--but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never readher poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the moonbehind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high aboveScarborough... Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep, moving astep or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set their bellstinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheekkissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other andpass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distantconcussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when thehorizon swims blue, green, emotional--then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving a sigh, thinks to herself, "If only some one could give me... If I could givesome one.... " But she does not know what she wants to give, nor whocould give it her. 

"Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain, " saidRebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Restinghis elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking hislame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrulebeside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him. Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they"nice" thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper;tenacious, faithful. Women would have felt, "Here is law. Here is order. Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night, " and, handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions ofshipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling fromtheir cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket, matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. "Yet I havea soul, " Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blewhis nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, "and it's the man'sstupidity that's the cause of this, and the storm's my storm as well ashis"... So Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in tosee them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almostsilent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing ofthe kind. 

"Oh, Captain, " said Mrs. Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, "Ihad to run after Barker's man... I hope Rebecca... I hope Jacob... "

She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she putdown the hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said itwas hot, flung the window further open, straightened a cover, picked upa book, as if she were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and agreat many years younger than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she didnot look more than thirty-five. He was well over fifty. 

She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head fromside to side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering, completely at his ease--after twenty years. 

"Well, " he said at length, "I've heard from Mr. Polegate. "

He had heard from Mr. Polegate that he could advise nothing better thanto send a boy to one of the universities. 

"Mr. Floyd was at Cambridge... No, at Oxford... Well, at one or theother, " said Mrs. Flanders. 

She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green ofthe garden were reflected in her eyes. 

"Archer is doing very well, " she said. "I have a very nice report fromCaptain Maxwell. "

"I will leave you the letter to show Jacob, " said the Captain, puttingit clumsily back in its envelope. 

"Jacob is after his butterflies as usual, " said Mrs. Flanders irritably, but was surprised by a sudden afterthought, "Cricket begins this week, of course. "

"Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation, " said Captain Barfoot. 

"Then you will stand for the Council?" Mrs. Flanders exclaimed, lookingthe Captain full in the face. 

"Well, about that, " Captain Barfoot began, settling himself ratherdeeper in his chair. 

Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906. 

CHAPTER THREE

"This is not a smoking-carriage, " Mrs. Norman protested, nervously butvery feebly, as the door swung open and a powerfully built young manjumped in. He seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before itreached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railwaycarriage, with a young man. 

She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that thescent-bottle and a novel from Mudie's were both handy (the young man wasstanding up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack). Shewould throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tugthe communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, andhad a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous. She read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over theedge to decide the question of safety by the infallible test ofappearance.... She would like to offer him her paper. But do young menread the Morning Post? She looked to see what he was reading--the DailyTelegraph. 

Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached hisface. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down, since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent, unconscious--as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked out of thewindow, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he didn'tnotice her. Grave, unconscious... Now he looked up, past her... Heseemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an elderly lady... Then hefixed his eyes--which were blue--on the landscape. He had not realizedher presence, she thought. Yet it was none of HER fault that this wasnot a smoking-carriage--if that was what he meant. 

Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting oppositea strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they seeall sorts of things--they see themselves.... Mrs. Norman now read threepages of one of Mr. Norris's novels. Should she say to the young man(and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): "If you want tosmoke, don't mind me"? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to herpresence... She did not wish to interrupt. 

But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably hewas in some way or other--to her at least--nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best onecan with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. Itis no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactlywhat is said, nor yet entirely what is done--for instance, when thetrain drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and putthe lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: "Letme" very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it. 

"Who... " said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowdon the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish hersentence. As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and roundtables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in hermind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirlsin the water and disappears for ever. 

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if youare of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, showerdown from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge--anyhow above theroof of King's College Chapel--there is a difference. Out at sea a greatcity will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to supposethe sky, washed into the crevices of King's College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn notonly into the night, but into the day?

Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, asthough nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces, what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great bootsmarch under the gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thickwax candles stand upright; young men rise in white gowns; while thesubservient eagle bears up for inspection the great white book. 

An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purpleand yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks uponstone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neithersnow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stainedglass. As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burnssteady even in the wildest night--burns steady and gravely illumines thetree-trunks--so inside the Chapel all was orderly. Gravely sounded thevoices; wisely the organ replied, as if buttressing human faith with theassent of the elements. The white-robed figures crossed from side toside; now mounted steps, now descended, all very orderly. 

... If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forestcreeps up to it--a curious assembly, since though they scramble andswing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have nopurpose--something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watchingthem, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if foradmittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any andshouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what's that? A terrifyingvolley of pistol-shots rings out--cracks sharply; ripples spread--silence laps smooth over sound. A tree--a tree has fallen, a sort ofdeath in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees soundsmelancholy. 

But this service in King's College Chapel--why allow women to take partin it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarilyvacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), ifthe mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards uponcupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs. Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense ofindividuals--some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansiesand forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows nodisrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes theblood run cold with horror (should you be one of a congregation--alone, shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely. So do these women--though separately devout, distinguished, and vouchedfor by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands. Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they're as ugly assin. 

Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant's eye;looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked. 

"Waverley, " the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr. Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names areuseful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they satwaiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there wastalk of names upon gates. 

"How tiresome, " Mrs. Plumer interrupted impulsively. "Does anybody knowMr. Flanders?"

Mr. Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said, awkwardly, something about being sure--looking at Mr. Plumer andhitching the right leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up andstood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like astraightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible thanthe scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden beingafflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to crossthe sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every oneat the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffledgrey, and the sparrows--there were two sparrows. 

"I think, " said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite, while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, andhe, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touchedthe bell. 

There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life, save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved themutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday afterSunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members ofParliament, business men--if no don ever gave a luncheon party--

"Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?" heasked the young man next him, to break a silence which had alreadylasted five minutes and a half. 

"I don't know, sir, " said the young man, blushing very vividly. 

At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time. 

Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a secondhelping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat hismeat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once ortwice to measure his speed--only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this, Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind--and thetart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid togive Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton. Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon. 

It was none of her fault--since how could she control her fatherbegetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and oncebegotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and anant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top ofthe ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all therungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumerbecame Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer couldonly be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at theground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of theladder. 

"I was down at the races yesterday, " she said, "with my two littlegirls. "

It was none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, inwhite frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda hadinherited her father's cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and theTrade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books wereon his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-pennyweeklies written by pale men in muddy boots--the weekly creak andscreech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry--melancholy papers. 

"I don't feel that I know the truth about anything till I've read themboth!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with herbare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. 

"Oh God, oh God, oh God!" exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduatesleft the house. "Oh, my God!"

"Bloody beastly!" he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle--anything to restore his sense of freedom. 

"Bloody beastly, " he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort atthe world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing--therewas no doubt about that--but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in--Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after, scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they never readHomer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined againstthe feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devilshad rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him. Those wretched little girls--

The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog. Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which theelderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like bricksuburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellowflame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by thecomposure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was ayoung man of substance. 

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come asa shock about the age of twenty--the world of the elderly--thrown up insuch black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors andByron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teethin it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth sointolerably disagreeable--"I am what I am, and intend to be it, " forwhich there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one forhimself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells andShaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every timehe lunches out on Sunday--at dinner parties and tea parties--there willbe this same shock--horror--discomfort--then pleasure, for he draws intohim at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, suchreassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft inthe blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springyair of May, the elastic air with its particles--chestnut bloom, pollen, whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees, gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not atflood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops whitedrops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, asif lavishly caressing them. 

Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that theirtopmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay inthe water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the realleaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind--instantly an edge ofsky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherriesthrough the green wedge of leaves, their stalks twinkling as theywriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would go downred into the green. The meadow was on a level with Jacob's eyes as helay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thingreen water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, butstood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs ofchildren deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, heheard; then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch, munch, as they tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him twowhite butterflies circled higher and higher round the elm tree. 

"Jacob's off, " thought Durrant looking up from his novel. He keptreading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodicalmanner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bagand ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing thebackwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were nowmoored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of airbetween two trees, round which curled a thread of blue--Lady Miller'spicnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without gettingup, shoved their boat closer to the bank. 

"Oh-h-h-h, " groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, andthe white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long andwavering up the bank. 

"Oh-h-h-h!" He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped inhis face. 

"They're friends of my mother's, " said Durrant. "So old Bow took no endof trouble about the boat. "

And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St. Ives Bay, all round thecoast. A larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June, properly fitted out, Durrant said... 

"There's the cash difficulty, " said Jacob. 

"My people'll see to that, " said Durrant (the son of a banker, deceased). 

"I intend to preserve my economic independence, " said Jacob stiffly. (Hewas getting excited. )

"My mother said something about going to Harrogate, " he said with alittle annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters. 

"Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?" asked TimmyDurrant. 

Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant's room the nightbefore. 

"I expect he's feeding the sharks, if the truth were known, " said Jacob. "I say, Durrant, there's none left!" he exclaimed, crumpling the bagwhich had held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He saw LadyMiller's picnic party on the island as he threw the bag into the river. 

A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes. 

"Shall we move on... This beastly crowd... " he said. 

So up they went, past the island. 

The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night thechestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley inthe meadows. 

The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards, from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob's rooms, however, were in Neville's Court; at the top; so that reaching his doorone went in a little out of breath; but he wasn't there. Dining in Hall, presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville's Court long beforemidnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and thefountains. A curious effect the gate has, like lace upon pale green. Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum of talk, too, from thediners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening and shutting with asoft thud. Some are late. 

Jacob's room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellowflags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cardsfrom societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, andinitials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a redmargin--an essay, no doubt--"Does History consist of the Biographies ofGreat Men?" There were books enough; very few French books; but then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takeshim, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, forexample; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greekdictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages;all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boatsburnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua--all very English. The works of JaneAusten, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else's standard. Carlylewas a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of theRenaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usualtext-books. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling thecurtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chaircreaks, though no one sits there. 

Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seattalking to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the oldman, with his hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched, unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Thenanother, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky;another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights werelit in the dark windows. 

If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms;Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poorold Huxtable can't walk straight;--Sopwith, too, has praised the sky anynight these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories. It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning, since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti's on thewall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl orrusty pipes), how priestly they look! How like a suburb where you go tosee a view and eat a special cake! "We are the sole purveyors of thiscake. " Back you go to London; for the treat is over. 

Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his changeof dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose hispaper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh ofhis face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip awhole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and oldHuxtable's head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous withideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain. Yet sometimes therehe'll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a manholding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges, or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talkof money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallestsilver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with allher lies. Strange paralysis and constriction--marvellous illumination. Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or inthe quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stonehe lay triumphant. 

Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fire-place, cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later therewould be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when theycame; Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking--as ifeverything could be talked--the soul itself slipped through the lips inthin silver disks which dissolve in young men's minds like silver, likemoonlight. Oh, far away they'd remember it, and deep in dulness gazeback on it, and come to refresh themselves again. 

"Well, I never. That's old Chucky. My dear boy, how's the world treatingyou?" And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial, Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using theother everything, everything, "all I could never be"--yes, though nextday, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed tohim childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summingthings up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save everypenny to send his son there. 

Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech--thingsyoung men blurted out--plaiting them round his own smooth garland, making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns, manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything, until perhaps he'd grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silverdisks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple, and the old stamp look too pure, and the impress always the same--aGreek boy's head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining thepriest, would, involuntarily, despise. 

Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy littleman, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgiland Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only--sometimes itwill come over one--what if the poet strode in? "THIS my image?" hemight ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all, Virgil's representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as forarms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with aFrench novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to behome again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug littlemirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of thedons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon hislips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goessauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiouslyenough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as shereaches Clare Bridge: "But if I met him, what should I wear?"--and then, taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy playupon other details of men's meeting with women which have never got intoprint. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as thoseof Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the textfor ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taughtand the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over, no longer the representative of Virgil. No, the builder, assessor, surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors. Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can--the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian andArabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known andthings that are about to be known. So that if at night, far out at seaover the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a cityilluminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hallof Trinity where they're still dining, or washing up plates, that wouldbe the light burning there--the light of Cambridge. 

"Let's go round to Simeon's room, " said Jacob, and they rolled up themap, having got the whole thing settled. 

All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on thecobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The youngmen were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing. What was it that could DROP like that? And leaning down over a foamingwindow-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they wentand down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, thehive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming, suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz. 

The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young menstill went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now andthen there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life afterdinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their booksas the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense ofconcentration in the air. Behind the grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs, perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, andwriting while their heads went round in a circle as the pen moved--simple young men, these, who would--but there is no need to think ofthem grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr. Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl:"Jo--seph! Jo--seph!" and then he ran as hard as ever he could acrossthe court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immensepile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this wasa diversion. There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs, holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something thatwould see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midlandtowns, clergymen's sons. Others read Keats. And those long histories inmany volumes--surely some one was now beginning at the beginning inorder to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must. That was part ofthe concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring night--dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books, actualchapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared; orRichard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink spillsfrom an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and contentedno more, but almost fierce. Why? Only perhaps that Keats died young--onewants to write poetry too and to love--oh, the brutes! It's damnablydifficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on the next staircase, inthe large room, there are two, three, five young men all convinced ofthis--of brutality, that is, and the clear division between right andwrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the window beingopen, one could see how they sat--legs issuing here, one there crumpledin a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could not see him, somebody stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who sat astride achair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing. The answer camefrom the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air, then replaced. Jacob wheeled round. He had something to say to THAT, though the sturdyred-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging his head slowlyfrom side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he dug the pointof it again and again into a knot in the table, as if affirming that thevoice from the fender spoke the truth--which Jacob could not deny. Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he might findsomething to say to it--indeed his lips opened--only then there brokeout a roar of laughter. 

The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely havereached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along theopposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures ofarms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room. Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort?What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?

A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except theenclosing buildings--chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brickand building for a May night, perhaps. And then before one's eyes wouldcome the bare hills of Turkey--sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers, and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in thestream to beat linen on the stones. The stream made loops of water roundtheir ankles. But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlingsand blanketings of the Cambridge night. The stroke of the clock even wasmuffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as ifgenerations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through theirranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing, for the use of the living. 

Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to thewindow and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. Hestood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softlyround him. Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied;indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of oldbuildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; andfriends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, itseemed, he yawned and stretched himself. 

Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument ornot, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared withthe dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men risingfrom chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, onedriving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in theyfell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone withMasham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon. The others had all gone. 

"... Julian the Apostate.... " Which of them said that and the otherwords murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, likea veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flappingthrough Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. "Julian theApostate"--and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow thesails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hotIndian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again. 

So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she nowdrowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against apillar. 

"Somehow it seems to matter. "

The low voice was Simeon's. 

The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe onthe mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said "hum, "or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was theintimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mindindelibly. 

"Well, you seem to have studied the subject, " said Jacob, rising andstanding over Simeon's chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little. He appeared extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim andspill down the sides if Simeon spoke. 

Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy--the room wasfull of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speechit rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, andcoating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of alight, of Cambridge burning, it's not languages only. It's Julian theApostate. 

But Jacob moved. He murmured good-night. He went out into the court. Hebuttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, andbeing the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, hisfootsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, backfrom the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps, as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: "The young man--the young man--the young man-back to his rooms. "

CHAPTER FOUR

What's the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of thoselittle thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck togetherwith sea-water? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently beenpraised, even quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since theystarted had Jacob managed to read one through. Yet what an opportunity!

For the Scilly Isles had been sighted by Timmy Durrant lying likemountain-tops almost a-wash in precisely the right place. Hiscalculations had worked perfectly, and really the sight of him sittingthere, with his hand on the tiller, rosy gilled, with a sprout of beard, looking sternly at the stars, then at a compass, spelling out quitecorrectly his page of the eternal lesson-book, would have moved a woman. Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The sight of Timmy Durrant was nosight for him, nothing to set against the sky and worship; far from it. They had quarrelled. Why the right way to open a tin of beef, withShakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should haveturned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell. Tinned beef is coldeating, though; and salt water spoils biscuits; and the waves tumble andlollop much the same hour after hour--tumble and lollop all across thehorizon. Now a spray of seaweed floats past-now a log of wood. Shipshave been wrecked here. One or two go past, keeping their own side ofthe road. Timmy knew where they were bound, what their cargoes were, and, by looking through his glass, could tell the name of the line, andeven guess what dividends it paid its shareholders. Yet that was noreason for Jacob to turn sulky. 

The Scilly Isles had the look of mountain-tops almost a-wash.... Unfortunately, Jacob broke the pin of the Primus stove. 

The Scilly Isles might well be obliterated by a roller sweeping straightacross. 

But one must give young men the credit of admitting that, thoughbreakfast eaten under these circumstances is grim, it is sincere enough. No need to make conversation. They got out their pipes. 

Timmy wrote up some scientific observations; and--what was the questionthat broke the silence--the exact time or the day of the month? anyhow, it was spoken without the least awkwardness; in the most matter-of-factway in the world; and then Jacob began to unbutton his clothes and satnaked, save for his shirt, intending, apparently, to bathe. 

The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, andgreen flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished; butwhen Jacob had got his shirt over his head the whole floor of the waveswas blue and white, rippling and crisp, though now and again a broadpurple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there floated an entire emeraldtinged with yellow. He plunged. He gulped in water, spat it out, struckwith his right arm, struck with his left, was towed by a rope, gasped, splashed, and was hauled on board. 

The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back ashe sat naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isleswhich--confound it! the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard. There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pagesruffling innumerably; and then he went under. 

Strangely enough, you could smell violets, or if violets were impossiblein July, they must grow something very pungent on the mainland then. Themainland, not so very far off--you could see clefts in the cliffs, whitecottages, smoke going up--wore an extraordinary look of calm, of sunnypeace, as if wisdom and piety had descended upon the dwellers there. Nowa cry sounded, as of a man calling pilchards in a main street. It worean extraordinary look of piety and peace, as if old men smoked by thedoor, and girls stood, hands on hips, at the well, and horses stood; asif the end of the world had come, and cabbage fields and stone walls, and coast-guard stations, and, above all, the white sand bays with thewaves breaking unseen by any one, rose to heaven in a kind of ecstasy. 

But imperceptibly the cottage smoke droops, has the look of a mourningemblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave. The gulls, making theirbroad flight and then riding at peace, seem to mark the grave. 

No doubt if this were Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of aclassical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standingon them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad. Yes, thechimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with the wavesbreaking unseen by any one make one remember the overpowering sorrow. And what can this sorrow be?

It is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs ourpane of glass. To escape is vain. 

But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob's gloom as he satnaked, in the sun, looking at the Land's End, it is impossible to say;for he never spoke a word. Timmy sometimes wondered (only for a second)whether his people bothered him.... No matter. There are things thatcan't be said. Let's shake it off. Let's dry ourselves, and take up thefirst thing that comes handy.... Timmy Durrant's notebook of scientificobservations. 

"Now... " said Jacob. 

It is a tremendous argument. 

Some people can follow every step of the way, and even take a littleone, six inches long, by themselves at the end; others remain observantof the external signs. 

The eyes fix themselves upon the poker; the right hand takes the pokerand lifts it; turns it slowly round, and then, very accurately, replacesit. The left hand, which lies on the knee, plays some stately butintermittent piece of march music. A deep breath is taken; but allowedto evaporate unused. The cat marches across the hearth-rug. No oneobserves her. 

"That's about as near as I can get to it, " Durrant wound up. 

The next minute is quiet as the grave. 

"It follows... " said Jacob. 

Only half a sentence followed; but these half-sentences are like flagsset on tops of buildings to the observer of external sights down below. What was the coast of Cornwall, with its violet scents, and mourningemblems, and tranquil piety, but a screen happening to hang straightbehind as his mind marched up?

"It follows... " said Jacob. 

"Yes, " said Timmy, after reflection. "That is so. "

Now Jacob began plunging about, half to stretch himself, half in a kindof jollity, no doubt, for the strangest sound issued from his lips as hefurled the sail, rubbed the plates--gruff, tuneless--a sort of pasan, for having grasped the argument, for being master of the situation, sunburnt, unshaven, capable into the bargain of sailing round the worldin a ten-ton yacht, which, very likely, he would do one of these daysinstead of settling down in a lawyer's office, and wearing spats. 

"Our friend Masham, " said Timmy Durrant, "would rather not be seen inour company as we are now. " His buttons had come off. 

"D'you know Masham's aunt?" said Jacob. 

"Never knew he had one, " said Timmy. 

"Masham has millions of aunts, " said Jacob. 

"Masham is mentioned in Domesday Book, " said Timmy. 

"So are his aunts, " said Jacob. 

"His sister, " said Timmy, "is a very pretty girl. "

"That's what'll happen to you, Timmy, " said Jacob. 

"It'll happen to you first, " said Timmy. 

"But this woman I was telling you about--Masham's aunt--"

"Oh, do get on, " said Timmy, for Jacob was laughing so much that hecould not speak. 

"Masham's aunt... "

Timmy laughed so much that he could not speak. 

"Masham's aunt... "

"What is there about Masham that makes one laugh?" said Timmy. 

"Hang it all--a man who swallows his tie-pin, " said Jacob. 

"Lord Chancellor before he's fifty, " said Timmy. 

"He's a gentleman, " said Jacob. 

"The Duke of Wellington was a gentleman, " said Timmy. 

"Keats wasn't. "

"Lord Salisbury was. "

"And what about God?" said Jacob. 

The Scilly Isles now appeared as if directly pointed at by a goldenfinger issuing from a cloud; and everybody knows how portentous thatsight is, and how these broad rays, whether they light upon the ScillyIsles or upon the tombs of crusaders in cathedrals, always shake thevery foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God. 

 "Abide with me: Fast falls the eventide; The shadows deepen; Lord, with me abide, "

sang Timmy Durrant. 

"At my place we used to have a hymn which began

 Great God, what do I see and hear?"

said Jacob. 

Gulls rode gently swaying in little companies of two or three quite nearthe boat; the cormorant, as if following his long strained neck ineternal pursuit, skimmed an inch above the water to the next rock; andthe drone of the tide in the caves came across the water, low, monotonous, like the voice of some one talking to himself. 

 "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee, "

sang Jacob. 

Like the blunt tooth of some monster, a rock broke the surface; brown;overflown with perpetual waterfalls. 

 "Rock of Ages, "

Jacob sang, lying on his back, looking up into the sky at midday, fromwhich every shred of cloud had been withdrawn, so that it was likesomething permanently displayed with the cover off. 

By six o'clock a breeze blew in off an icefield; and by seven the waterwas more purple than blue; and by half-past seven there was a patch ofrough gold-beater's skin round the Scilly Isles, and Durrant's face, ashe sat steering, was of the colour of a red lacquer box polished forgenerations. By nine all the fire and confusion had gone out of the sky, leaving wedges of apple-green and plates of pale yellow; and by ten thelanterns on the boat were making twisted colours upon the waves, elongated or squat, as the waves stretched or humped themselves. Thebeam from the lighthouse strode rapidly across the water. Infinitemillions of miles away powdered stars twinkled; but the waves slappedthe boat, and crashed, with regular and appalling solemnity, against therocks. 

Although it would be possible to knock at the cottage door and ask for aglass of milk, it is only thirst that would compel the intrusion. Yetperhaps Mrs. Pascoe would welcome it. The summer's day may be wearingheavy. Washing in her little scullery, she may hear the cheap clock onthe mantelpiece tick, tick, tick ... Tick, tick, tick. She is alone inthe house. Her husband is out helping Farmer Hosken; her daughtermarried and gone to America. Her elder son is married too, but she doesnot agree with his wife. The Wesleyan minister came along and took theyounger boy. She is alone in the house. A steamer, probably bound forCardiff, now crosses the horizon, while near at hand one bell of afoxglove swings to and fro with a bumble-bee for clapper. These whiteCornish cottages are built on the edge of the cliff; the garden growsgorse more readily than cabbages; and for hedge, some primeval man haspiled granite boulders. In one of these, to hold, an historianconjectures, the victim's blood, a basin has been hollowed, but in ourtime it serves more tamely to seat those tourists who wish for anuninterrupted view of the Gurnard's Head. Not that any one objects to ablue print dress and a white apron in a cottage garden. 

"Look--she has to draw her water from a well in the garden. "

"Very lonely it must be in winter, with the wind sweeping over thosehills, and the waves dashing on the rocks. "

Even on a summer's day you hear them murmuring. 

Having drawn her water, Mrs. Pascoe went in. The tourists regretted thatthey had brought no glasses, so that they might have read the name ofthe tramp steamer. Indeed, it was such a fine day that there was nosaying what a pair of field-glasses might not have fetched into view. Two fishing luggers, presumably from St. Ives Bay, were now sailing inan opposite direction from the steamer, and the floor of the sea becamealternately clear and opaque. As for the bee, having sucked its fill ofhoney, it visited the teasle and thence made a straight line to Mrs. Pascoe's patch, once more directing the tourists' gaze to the oldwoman's print dress and white apron, for she had come to the door of thecottage and was standing there. 

There she stood, shading her eyes and looking out to sea. 

For the millionth time, perhaps, she looked at the sea. A peacockbutterfly now spread himself upon the teasle, fresh and newly emerged, as the blue and chocolate down on his wings testified. Mrs. Pascoe wentindoors, fetched a cream pan, came out, and stood scouring it. Her facewas assuredly not soft, sensual, or lecherous, but hard, wise, wholesomerather, signifying in a room full of sophisticated people the flesh andblood of life. She would tell a lie, though, as soon as the truth. Behind her on the wall hung a large dried skate. Shut up in the parlourshe prized mats, china mugs, and photographs, though the mouldy littleroom was saved from the salt breeze only by the depth of a brick, andbetween lace curtains you saw the gannet drop like a stone, and onstormy days the gulls came shuddering through the air, and the steamers'lights were now high, now deep. Melancholy were the sounds on a winter'snight. 

The picture papers were delivered punctually on Sunday, and she poredlong over Lady Cynthia's wedding at the Abbey. She, too, would haveliked to ride in a carriage with springs. The soft, swift syllables ofeducated speech often shamed her few rude ones. And then all night tohear the grinding of the Atlantic upon the rocks instead of hansom cabsand footmen whistling for motor cars. ... So she may have dreamed, scouring her cream pan. But the talkative, nimble-witted people havetaken themselves to towns. Like a miser, she has hoarded her feelingswithin her own breast. Not a penny piece has she changed all theseyears, and, watching her enviously, it seems as if all within must bepure gold. 

The wise old woman, having fixed her eyes upon the sea, once morewithdrew. The tourists decided that it was time to move on to theGurnard's Head. 

Three seconds later Mrs. Durrant rapped upon the door. 

"Mrs. Pascoe?" she said. 

Rather haughtily, she watched the tourists cross the field path. Shecame of a Highland race, famous for its chieftains. 

Mrs. Pascoe appeared. 

"I envy you that bush, Mrs. Pascoe, " said Mrs. Durrant, pointing theparasol with which she had rapped on the door at the fine clump of St. John's wort that grew beside it. Mrs. Pascoe looked at the bushdeprecatingly. 

"I expect my son in a day or two, " said Mrs. Durrant. "Sailing fromFalmouth with a friend in a little boat. ... Any news of Lizzie yet, Mrs. Pascoe?"

Her long-tailed ponies stood twitching their ears on the road twentyyards away. The boy, Curnow, flicked flies off them occasionally. He sawhis mistress go into the cottage; come out again; and pass, talkingenergetically to judge by the movements of her hands, round thevegetable plot in front of the cottage. Mrs. Pascoe was his aunt. Bothwomen surveyed a bush. Mrs. Durrant stooped and picked a sprig from it. Next she pointed (her movements were peremptory; she held herself veryupright) at the potatoes. They had the blight. All potatoes that yearhad the blight. Mrs. Durrant showed Mrs. Pascoe how bad the blight wason her potatoes. Mrs. Durrant talked energetically; Mrs. Pascoe listenedsubmissively. The boy Curnow knew that Mrs. Durrant was saying that itis perfectly simple; you mix the powder in a gallon of water; "I havedone it with my own hands in my own garden, " Mrs. Durrant was saying. 

"You won't have a potato left--you won't have a potato left, " Mrs. Durrant was saying in her emphatic voice as they reached the gate. Theboy Curnow became as immobile as stone. 

Mrs. Durrant took the reins in her hands and settled herself on thedriver's seat. 

"Take care of that leg, or I shall send the doctor to you, " she calledback over her shoulder; touched the ponies; and the carriage startedforward. The boy Curnow had only just time to swing himself up by thetoe of his boot. The boy Curnow, sitting in the middle of the back seat, looked at his aunt. 

Mrs. Pascoe stood at the gate looking after them; stood at the gate tillthe trap was round the corner; stood at the gate, looking now to theright, now to the left; then went back to her cottage. 

Soon the ponies attacked the swelling moor road with striving forelegs. Mrs. Durrant let the reins fall slackly, and leant backwards. Hervivacity had left her. Her hawk nose was thin as a bleached bone throughwhich you almost see the light. Her hands, lying on the reins in herlap, were firm even in repose. The upper lip was cut so short that itraised itself almost in a sneer from the front teeth. Her mind skimmedleagues where Mrs. Pascoe's mind adhered to its solitary patch. Her mindskimmed leagues as the ponies climbed the hill road. Forwards andbackwards she cast her mind, as if the roofless cottages, mounds ofslag, and cottage gardens overgrown with foxglove and bramble cast shadeupon her mind. Arrived at the summit, she stopped the carriage. The palehills were round her, each scattered with ancient stones; beneath wasthe sea, variable as a southern sea; she herself sat there looking fromhill to sea, upright, aquiline, equally poised between gloom andlaughter. Suddenly she flicked the ponies so that the boy Curnow had toswing himself up by the toe of his boot. 

The rooks settled; the rooks rose. The trees which they touched socapriciously seemed insufficient to lodge their numbers. The tree-topssang with the breeze in them; the branches creaked audibly and droppednow and then, though the season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up wentthe rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as thesager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spentenough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft;the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampasgrass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of themeadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth wasspinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were washed into the twilight, but the tobacco plant and the passionflower, over which the great moth spun, were white as china. The rookscreaked their wings together on the tree-tops, and were settling downfor sleep when, far off, a familiar sound shook and trembled--increased--fairly dinned in their ears--scared sleepy wings into the air again--the dinner bell at the house. 

After six days of salt wind, rain, and sun, Jacob Flanders had put on adinner jacket. The discreet black object had made its appearance now andthen in the boat among tins, pickles, preserved meats, and as the voyagewent on had become more and more irrelevant, hardly to be believed in. And now, the world being stable, lit by candle-light, the dinner jacketalone preserved him. He could not be sufficiently thankful. Even so hisneck, wrists, and face were exposed without cover, and his whole person, whether exposed or not, tingled and glowed so as to make even blackcloth an imperfect screen. He drew back the great red hand that lay onthe table-cloth. Surreptitiously it closed upon slim glasses and curvedsilver forks. The bones of the cutlets were decorated with pink frills-and yesterday he had gnawn ham from the bone! Opposite him were hazy, semi-transparent shapes of yellow and blue. Behind them, again, was thegrey-green garden, and among the pear-shaped leaves of the escalloniafishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drewpast the women's backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastilyin the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayedunbroken. Like oars rowing now this side, now that, were the sentencesthat came now here, now there, from either side of the table. 

"Oh, Clara, Clara!" exclaimed Mrs. Durrant, and Timothy Durrant adding, "Clara, Clara, " Jacob named the shape in yellow gauze Timothy's sister, Clara. The girl sat smiling and flushed. With her brother's dark eyes, she was vaguer and softer than he was. When the laugh died down shesaid: "But, mother, it was true. He said so, didn't he? Miss Eliotagreed with us. ... "

But Miss Eliot, tall, grey-headed, was making room beside her for theold man who had come in from the terrace. The dinner would never end, Jacob thought, and he did not wish it to end, though the ship had sailedfrom one corner of the window-frame to the other, and a light marked theend of the pier. He saw Mrs. Durrant gaze at the light. She turned tohim. 

"Did you take command, or Timothy?" she said. "Forgive me if I call youJacob. I've heard so much of you. " Then her eyes went back to the sea. Her eyes glazed as she looked at the view. 

"A little village once, " she said, "and now grown. ... " She rose, takingher napkin with her, and stood by the window. 

"Did you quarrel with Timothy?" Clara asked shyly. "I should have. "

Mrs. Durrant came back from the window. 

"It gets later and later, " she said, sitting upright, and looking downthe table. "You ought to be ashamed--all of you. Mr. Clutterbuck, youought to be ashamed. " She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck wasdeaf. 

"We ARE ashamed, " said a girl. But the old man with the beard went oneating plum tart. Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, asif indulging him. 

"We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant, " said a young man with thick spectaclesand a fiery moustache. "I say the conditions were fulfilled. She owes mea sovereign. "

"Not BEFORE the fish--with it, Mrs. Durrant, " said Charlotte Wilding. 

"That was the bet; with the fish, " said Clara seriously. "Begonias, mother. To eat them with his fish. "

"Oh dear, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"Charlotte won't pay you, " said Timothy. 

"How dare you ... " said Charlotte. 

"That privilege will be mine, " said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing asilver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to thetable. Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holdingherself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauzefollowed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosywoman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess. All passed out at the open door. 

"When you are as old as I am, Charlotte, " said Mrs. Durrant, drawing thegirl's arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace. 

"Why are you so sad?" Charlotte asked impulsively. 

"Do I seem to you sad? I hope not, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"Well, just now. You're NOT old. "

"Old enough to be Timothy's mother. " They stopped. 

Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck's telescope at the edgeof the terrace. The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting the names of the constellations: "Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia. ... "

"Andromeda, " murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly. 

Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrumentpointed at the skies. 

"There are MILLIONS of stars, " said Charlotte with conviction. MissEliot turned away from the telescope. The young men laughed suddenly inthe dining-room. 

"Let ME look, " said Charlotte eagerly. 

"The stars bore me, " said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace withJulia Eliot. "I read a book once about the stars. ... What are theysaying?" She stopped in front of the dining-room window. "Timothy, " shenoted. 

"The silent young man, " said Miss Eliot. 

"Yes, Jacob Flanders, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"Oh, mother! I didn't recognize you!" exclaimed Clara Durrant, comingfrom the opposite direction with Elsbeth. "How delicious, " she breathed, crushing a verbena leaf. 

Mrs. Durrant turned and walked away by herself. 

"Clara!" she called. Clara went to her. 

"How unlike they are!" said Miss Eliot. 

Mr. Wortley passed them, smoking a cigar. 

"Every day I live I find myself agreeing ... " he said as he passed them. 

"It's so interesting to guess ... " murmured Julia Eliot. 

"When first we came out we could see the flowers in that bed, " saidElsbeth. 

"We see very little now, " said Miss Eliot. 

"She must have been so beautiful, and everybody loved her, of course, "said Charlotte. "I suppose Mr. Wortley ... " she paused. 

"Edward's death was a tragedy, " said Miss Eliot decidedly. 

Here Mr. Erskine joined them. 

"There's no such thing as silence, " he said positively. "I can heartwenty different sounds on a night like this without counting yourvoices. "

"Make a bet of it?" said Charlotte. 

"Done, " said Mr. Erskine. "One, the sea; two, the wind; three, a dog;four ... "

The others passed on. 

"Poor Timothy, " said Elsbeth. 

"A very fine night, " shouted Miss Eliot into Mr. Clutterbuck's ear. 

"Like to look at the stars?" said the old man, turning the telescopetowards Elsbeth. 

"Doesn't it make you melancholy--looking at the stars?" shouted MissEliot. 

"Dear me no, dear me no, " Mr. Clutterbuck chuckled when he understoodher. "Why should it make me melancholy? Not for a moment--dear me no. "

"Thank you, Timothy, but I'm coming in, " said Miss Eliot. "Elsbeth, here's a shawl. "

"I'm coming in, " Elsbeth murmured with her eye to the telescope. "Cassiopeia, " she murmured. "Where are you all?" she asked, taking hereye away from the telescope. "How dark it is!"

Mrs. Durrant sat in the drawing-room by a lamp winding a ball of wool. Mr. Clutterbuck read the Times. In the distance stood a second lamp, andround it sat the young ladies, flashing scissors over silver-spangledstuff for private theatricals. Mr. Wortley read a book. 

"Yes; he is perfectly right, " said Mrs. Durrant, drawing herself up andceasing to wind her wool. And while Mr. Clutterbuck read the rest ofLord Lansdowne's speech she sat upright, without touching her ball. 

"Ah, Mr. Flanders, " she said, speaking proudly, as if to Lord Lansdownehimself. Then she sighed and began to wind her wool again. 

"Sit THERE, " she said. 

Jacob came out from the dark place by the window where he had hovered. The light poured over him, illuminating every cranny of his skin; butnot a muscle of his face moved as he sat looking out into the garden. 

"I want to hear about your voyage, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"Yes, " he said. 

"Twenty years ago we did the same thing. "

"Yes, " he said. She looked at him sharply. 

"He is extraordinarily awkward, " she thought, noticing how he fingeredhis socks. "Yet so distinguished-looking. "

"In those days ... " she resumed, and told him how they had sailed ... "my husband, who knew a good deal about sailing, for he kept a yachtbefore we married" ... And then how rashly they had defied thefishermen, "almost paid for it with our lives, but so proud ofourselves!" She flung the hand out that held the ball of wool. 

"Shall I hold your wool?" Jacob asked stiffly. 

"You do that for your mother, " said Mrs. Durrant, looking at him againkeenly, as she transferred the skein. "Yes, it goes much better. "

He smiled; but said nothing. 

Elsbeth Siddons hovered behind them with something silver on her arm. 

"We want, " she said. ... "I've come ... " she paused. 

"Poor Jacob, " said Mrs. Durrant, quietly, as if she had known him allhis life. "They're going to make you act in their play. "

"How I love you!" said Elsbeth, kneeling beside Mrs. Durrant's chair. 

"Give me the wool, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"He's come--he's come!" cried Charlotte Wilding. "I've won my bet!"

"There's another bunch higher up, " murmured Clara Durrant, mountinganother step of the ladder. Jacob held the ladder as she stretched outto reach the grapes high up on the vine. 

"There!" she said, cutting through the stalk. She looked semi-transparent, pale, wonderfully beautiful up there among the vine leavesand the yellow and purple bunches, the lights swimming over her incoloured islands. Geraniums and begonias stood in pots along planks;tomatoes climbed the walls. 

"The leaves really want thinning, " she considered, and one green one, spread like the palm of a hand, circled down past Jacob's head. 

"I have more than I can eat already, " he said, looking up. 

"It does seem absurd ... " Clara began, "going back to London. ... "

"Ridiculous, " said Jacob, firmly. 

"Then ... " said Clara, "you must come next year, properly, " she said, snipping another vine leaf, rather at random. 

"If ... If ... "

A child ran past the greenhouse shouting. Clara slowly descended theladder with her basket of grapes. 

"One bunch of white, and two of purple, " she said, and she placed twogreat leaves over them where they lay curled warm in the basket. 

"I have enjoyed myself, " said Jacob, looking down the greenhouse. 

"Yes, it's been delightful, " she said vaguely. 

"Oh, Miss Durrant, " he said, taking the basket of grapes; but she walkedpast him towards the door of the greenhouse. 

"You're too good--too good, " she thought, thinking of Jacob, thinkingthat he must not say that he loved her. No, no, no. 

The children were whirling past the door, throwing things high into theair. 

"Little demons!" she cried. "What have they got?" she asked Jacob. 

"Onions, I think, " said Jacob. He looked at them without moving. 

"Next August, remember, Jacob, " said Mrs. Durrant, shaking hands withhim on the terrace where the fuchsia hung, like a scarlet ear-ring, behind her head. Mr. Wortley came out of the window in yellow slippers, trailing the Times and holding out his hand very cordially. 

"Good-bye, " said Jacob. "Good-bye, " he repeated. "Good-bye, " he saidonce more. Charlotte Wilding flung up her bedroom window and cried out:"Good-bye, Mr. Jacob!"

"Mr. Flanders!" cried Mr. Clutterbuck, trying to extricate himself fromhis beehive chair. "Jacob Flanders!"

"Too late, Joseph, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"Not to sit for me, " said Miss Eliot, planting her tripod upon the lawn. 

CHAPTER FIVE

"I rather think, " said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth, "it's inVirgil, " and pushing back his chair, he went to the window. 

The rashest drivers in the world are, certainly, the drivers of post-office vans. Swinging down Lamb's Conduit Street, the scarlet vanrounded the corner by the pillar box in such a way as to graze the kerband make the little girl who was standing on tiptoe to post a letterlook up, half frightened, half curious. She paused with her hand in themouth of the box; then dropped her letter and ran away. It is seldomonly that we see a child on tiptoe with pity--more often a dimdiscomfort, a grain of sand in the shoe which it's scarcely worth whileto remove--that's our feeling, and so--Jacob turned to the bookcase. 

Long ago great people lived here, and coming back from Court pastmidnight stood, huddling their satin skirts, under the carved door-postswhile the footman roused himself from his mattress on the floor, hurriedly fastened the lower buttons of his waistcoat, and let them in. The bitter eighteenth-century rain rushed down the kennel. SouthamptonRow, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you willalways find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. "Showingoff the tweed, sir; what the gentry wants is something singular to catchthe eye, sir--and clean in their habits, sir!" So they display theirtortoises. 

At Mudie's corner in Oxford Street all the red and blue beads had runtogether on the string. The motor omnibuses were locked. Mr. Spaldinggoing to the city looked at Mr. Charles Budgeon bound for Shepherd'sBush. The proximity of the omnibuses gave the outside passengers anopportunity to stare into each other's faces. Yet few took advantage ofit. Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in himlike the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends couldonly read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and thepassengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all--save "a manwith a red moustache, " "a young man in grey smoking a pipe. " The Octobersunlight rested upon all these men and women sitting immobile; andlittle Johnnie Sturgeon took the chance to swing down the staircase, carrying his large mysterious parcel, and so dodging a zigzag coursebetween the wheels he reached the pavement, started to whistle a tuneand was soon out of sight--for ever. The omnibuses jerked on, and everysingle person felt relief at being a little nearer to his journey's end, though some cajoled themselves past the immediate engagement by promiseof indulgence beyond--steak and kidney pudding, drink or a game ofdominoes in the smoky corner of a city restaurant. Oh yes, human life isvery tolerable on the top of an omnibus in Holborn, when the policemanholds up his arm and the sun beats on your back, and if there is such athing as a shell secreted by man to fit man himself here we find it, onthe banks of the Thames, where the great streets join and St. Paul'sCathedral, like the volute on the top of the snail shell, finishes itoff. Jacob, getting off his omnibus, loitered up the steps, consultedhis watch, and finally made up his mind to go in. ... Does it need aneffort? Yes. These changes of mood wear us out. 

Dim it is, haunted by ghosts of white marble, to whom the organ for everchaunts. If a boot creaks, it's awful; then the order; the discipline. The verger with his rod has life ironed out beneath him. Sweet and holyare the angelic choristers. And for ever round the marble shoulders, inand out of the folded fingers, go the thin high sounds of voice andorgan. For ever requiem--repose. Tired with scrubbing the steps of thePrudential Society's office, which she did year in year out, Mrs. Lidgett took her seat beneath the great Duke's tomb, folded her hands, and half closed her eyes. A magnificent place for an old woman to restin, by the very side of the great Duke's bones, whose victories meannothing to her, whose name she knows not, though she never fails togreet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like onher own tomb, for the leathern curtain of the heart has flapped wide, and out steal on tiptoe thoughts of rest, sweet melodies. ... OldSpicer, jute merchant, thought nothing of the kind though. Strangelyenough he'd never been in St. Paul's these fifty years, though hisoffice windows looked on the churchyard. "So that's all? Well, a gloomyold place. ... Where's Nelson's tomb? No time now--come again--a coin toleave in the box. ... Rain or fine is it? Well, if it would only make upits mind!" Idly the children stray in--the verger dissuades them--andanother and another ... Man, woman, man, woman, boy ... Casting theireyes up, pursing their lips, the same shadow brushing the same faces;the leathern curtain of the heart flaps wide. 

Nothing could appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul's than thateach person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; anincome; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's ByzantineEmpire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different;for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirtyprecisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of allthese multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets belong tothem; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; thestretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung highabove the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly menat a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement asif the street were their parlour, and here, against the wall, a womanstares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you tobuy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed;a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue orwhite is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel filings and horse dungshredded to dust. 

There, under the green shade, with his head bent over white paper, Mr. Sibley transferred figures to folios, and upon each desk you observe, like provender, a bunch of papers, the day's nutriment, slowly consumedby the industrious pen. Innumerable overcoats of the quality prescribedhung empty all day in the corridors, but as the clock struck six eachwas exactly filled, and the little figures, split apart into trousers ormoulded into a single thickness, jerked rapidly with angular forwardmotion along the pavement; then dropped into darkness. Beneath thepavement, sunk in the earth, hollow drains lined with yellow light forever conveyed them this way and that, and large letters upon enamelplates represented in the underworld the parks, squares, and circuses ofthe upper. "Marble Arch--Shepherd's Bush"--to the majority the Arch andthe Bush are eternally white letters upon a blue ground. Only at onepoint--it may be Acton, Holloway, Kensal Rise, Caledonian Road--does thename mean shops where you buy things, and houses, in one of which, downto the right, where the pollard trees grow out of the paving stones, there is a square curtained window, and a bedroom. 

Long past sunset an old blind woman sat on a camp-stool with her back tothe stone wall of the Union of London and Smith's Bank, clasping a brownmongrel tight in her arms and singing out loud, not for coppers, no, from the depths of her gay wild heart--her sinful, tanned heart--for thechild who fetches her is the fruit of sin, and should have been in bed, curtained, asleep, instead of hearing in the lamplight her mother's wildsong, where she sits against the Bank, singing not for coppers, with herdog against her breast. 

Home they went. The grey church spires received them; the hoary city, old, sinful, and majestic. One behind another, round or pointed, piercing the sky or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granitecliffs, spires and offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank;eternally the pilgrims trudge; barges rest in mid stream heavy laden; assome believe, the city loves her prostitutes. 

But few, it seems, are admitted to that degree. Of all the carriagesthat leave the arch of the Opera House, not one turns eastward, and whenthe little thief is caught in the empty market-place no one in black-and-white or rose-coloured evening dress blocks the way by pausing witha hand upon the carriage door to help or condemn--though Lady Charles, to do her justice, sighs sadly as she ascends her staircase, takes downThomas a Kempis, and does not sleep till her mind has lost itselftunnelling into the complexity of things. "Why? Why? Why?" she sighs. Onthe whole it's best to walk back from the Opera House. Fatigue is thesafest sleeping draught. 

The autumn season was in full swing. Tristan was twitching his rug upunder his armpits twice a week; Isolde waved her scarf in miraculoussympathy with the conductor's baton. In all parts of the house were tobe found pink faces and glittering breasts. When a Royal hand attachedto an invisible body slipped out and withdrew the red and white bouquetreposing on the scarlet ledge, the Queen of England seemed a name worthdying for. Beauty, in its hothouse variety (which is none of the worst), flowered in box after box; and though nothing was said of profoundimportance, and though it is generally agreed that wit desertedbeautiful lips about the time that Walpole died--at any rate whenVictoria in her nightgown descended to meet her ministers, the lips(through an opera glass) remained red, adorable. Bald distinguished menwith gold-headed canes strolled down the crimson avenues between thestalls, and only broke from intercourse with the boxes when the lightswent down, and the conductor, first bowing to the Queen, next to thebald-headed men, swept round on his feet and raised his wand. 

Then two thousand hearts in the semi-darkness remembered, anticipated, travelled dark labyrinths; and Clara Durrant said farewell to JacobFlanders, and tasted the sweetness of death in effigy; and Mrs. Durrant, sitting behind her in the dark of the box, sighed her sharp sigh; andMr. Wortley, shifting his position behind the Italian Ambassador's wife, thought that Brangaena was a trifle hoarse; and suspended in the gallerymany feet above their heads, Edward Whittaker surreptitiously held atorch to his miniature score; and ... And ... 

In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent usfrom being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them havearranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is noneed to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains--one has tochoose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England or only for amoment--I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the PrimeMinister's gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of hallsand gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after alltheir secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's ownheadpiece, how strange to assume for a moment some one's--any one's--tobe a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaenasings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherdpipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no--we must choose. Never wasthere a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, morecertain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittakerin his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor. 

A young man with a Wellington nose, who had occupied a seven-and-sixpenny seat, made his way down the stone stairs when the opera ended, as if he were still set a little apart from his fellows by the influenceof the music. 

At midnight Jacob Flanders heard a rap on his door. 

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. "You're the very man I want!" and without moreado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; onlythey come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius. 

"Yes; that should make him sit up, " said Bonamy, as Jacob stoppedreading. Jacob was excited. It was the first time he had read his essayaloud. 

"Damned swine!" he said, rather too extravagantly; but the praise hadgone to his head. Professor Bulteel, of Leeds, had issued an edition ofWycherley without stating that he had left out, disembowelled, orindicated only by asterisks, several indecent words and some indecentphrases. An outrage, Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; tokenof a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespearewere cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with theprofessional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed toscorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men wereperfectly right--extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back theycame from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century--when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept hismother's letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with theCornish postmark. The lid shut upon the truth. 

This black wooden box, upon which his name was still legible in whitepaint, stood between the long windows of the sitting-room. The streetran beneath. No doubt the bedroom was behind. The furniture--threewicker chairs and a gate-legged table--came from Cambridge. These houses(Mrs. Garfit's daughter, Mrs. Whitehorn, was the landlady of this one)were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilings high; over the doorway a rose, or a ram's skull, is carvedin the wood. The eighteenth century has its distinction. Even thepanels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have their distinction. ... 

"Distinction"--Mrs. Durrant said that Jacob Flanders was "distinguished-looking. " "Extremely awkward, " she said, "but so distinguished-looking. "Seeing him for the first time that no doubt is the word for him. Lyingback in his chair, taking his pipe from his lips, and saying to Bonamy:"About this opera now" (for they had done with indecency). "This fellowWagner" ... Distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though, from looking at him, one would have found it difficult to say which seatin the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle. A writer?He lacked self-consciousness. A painter? There was something in theshape of his hands (he was descended on his mother's side from a familyof the greatest antiquity and deepest obscurity) which indicated taste. Then his mouth--but surely, of all futile occupations this ofcataloguing features is the worst. One word is sufficient. But if onecannot find it?

"I like Jacob Flanders, " wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. "He is sounworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes tohim, though he's frightening because ... " But Mr. Letts allows littlespace in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach uponWednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! "No, no, no, " she sighed, standing at the greenhouse door, "don't break--don't spoil"--what?Something infinitely wonderful. 

But then, this is only a young woman's language, one, too, who loves, orrefrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for everprecisely as it was that July morning. And moments don't. Now, forinstance, Jacob was telling a story about some walking tour he'd taken, and the inn was called "The Foaming Pot, " which, considering thelandlady's name ... They shouted with laughter. The joke was indecent. 

Then Julia Eliot said "the silent young man, " and as she dined withPrime Ministers, no doubt she meant: "If he is going to get on in theworld, he will have to find his tongue. "

Timothy Durrant never made any comment at all. 

The housemaid found herself very liberally rewarded. 

Mr. Sopwith's opinion was as sentimental as Clara's, though far moreskilfully expressed. 

Betty Flanders was romantic about Archer and tender about John; she wasunreasonably irritated by Jacob's clumsiness in the house. 

Captain Barfoot liked him best of the boys; but as for saying why ... 

It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that aprofound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creaturesis utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we arecold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In anycase life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is thatwe embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, beingshadows. And why, if this--and much more than this is true, why are weyet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young manin the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the mostsolid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we knownothing about him. 

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love. 

("I'm twenty-two. It's nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughlypleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of foolsabout. One must apply oneself to something or other--God knows what. Everything is really very jolly--except getting up in the morning andwearing a tail coat. ")

"I say, Bonamy, what about Beethoven?"

("Bonamy is an amazing fellow. He knows practically everything--not moreabout English literature than I do--but then he's read all thoseFrenchmen. ")

"I rather suspect you're talking rot, Bonamy. In spite of what you say, poor old Tennyson. ... "

("The truth is one ought to have been taught French. Now, I suppose, oldBarfoot is talking to my mother. That's an odd affair to be sure. But Ican't see Bonamy down there. Damn London!") for the market carts werelumbering down the street. 

"What about a walk on Saturday?"

("What's happening on Saturday?")

Then, taking out his pocket-book, he assured himself that the night ofthe Durrants' party came next week. 

But though all this may very well be true--so Jacob thought and spoke--so he crossed his legs--filled his pipe--sipped his whisky, and oncelooked at his pocket-book, rumpling his hair as he did so, there remainsover something which can never be conveyed to a second person save byJacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy--the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Thenconsider the effect of sex--how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here's a valley, there's a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all's as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the wrongaccent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowingJacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all--forthough, certainly, he sat talking to Bonamy, half of what he said wastoo dull to repeat; much unintelligible (about unknown people andParliament); what remains is mostly a matter of guess work. Yet over himwe hang vibrating. 

"Yes, " said Captain Barfoot, knocking out his pipe on Betty Flanders'shob, and buttoning his coat. "It doubles the work, but I don't mindthat. "

He was now town councillor. They looked at the night, which was the sameas the London night, only a good deal more transparent. Church bellsdown in the town were striking eleven o'clock. The wind was off the sea. And all the bedroom windows were dark--the Pages were asleep; theGarfits were asleep; the Cranches were asleep--whereas in London at thishour they were burning Guy Fawkes on Parliament Hill. 

CHAPTER SIX

The flames had fairly caught. 

"There's St. Paul's!" some one cried. 

As the wood caught the city of London was lit up for a second; on othersides of the fire there were trees. Of the faces which came out freshand vivid as though painted in yellow and red, the most prominent was agirl's face. By a trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. Theoval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum forbackground. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at theflames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic inher thus staring--her age between twenty and twenty-five. 

A hand descending from the chequered darkness thrust on her head theconical white hat of a pierrot. Shaking her head, she still stared. Awhiskered face appeared above her. They dropped two legs of a table uponthe fire and a scattering of twigs and leaves. All this blazed up andshowed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycockhats on; all intent; showed too St. Paul's floating on the uneven whitemist, and two or three narrow, paper-white, extinguisher-shaped spires. 

The flames were struggling through the wood and roaring up when, goodness knows where from, pails flung water in beautiful hollow shapes, as of polished tortoiseshell; flung again and again; until the hiss waslike a swarm of bees; and all the faces went out. 

"Oh Jacob, " said the girl, as they pounded up the hill in the dark, "I'mso frightfully unhappy!"

Shouts of laughter came from the others--high, low; some before, othersafter. 

The hotel dining-room was brightly lit. A stag's head in plaster was atone end of the table; at the other some Roman bust blackened andreddened to represent Guy Fawkes, whose night it was. The diners werelinked together by lengths of paper roses, so that when it came tosinging "Auld Lang Syne" with their hands crossed a pink and yellow linerose and fell the entire length of the table. There was an enormoustapping of green wine-glasses. A young man stood up, and Florinda, taking one of the purplish globes that lay on the table, flung itstraight at his head. It crushed to powder. 

"I'm so frightfully unhappy!" she said, turning to Jacob, who sat besideher. 

The table ran, as if on invisible legs, to the side of the room, and abarrel organ decorated with a red cloth and two pots of paper flowersreeled out waltz music. 

Jacob could not dance. He stood against the wall smoking a pipe. 

"We think, " said two of the dancers, breaking off from the rest, andbowing profoundly before him, "that you are the most beautiful man wehave ever seen. "

So they wreathed his head with paper flowers. Then somebody brought outa white and gilt chair and made him sit on it. As they passed, peoplehung glass grapes on his shoulders, until he looked like the figure-headof a wrecked ship. Then Florinda got upon his knee and hid her face inhis waistcoat. With one hand he held her; with the other, his pipe. 

"Now let us talk, " said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill betweenfour and five o'clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-armwith Timmy Durrant, "about something sensible. "

The Greeks--yes, that was what they talked about--how when all's saidand done, when one's rinsed one's mouth with every literature in theworld, including Chinese and Russian (but these Slavs aren't civilized), it's the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus--JacobSophocles. It is true that no Greek could have understood or professorrefrained from pointing out--Never mind; what is Greek for if not to beshouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn? Moreover, Durrant never listenedto Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful, triumphant; itseemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known everysin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers readyfor picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. Andsurveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shadesof London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece. 

"Probably, " said Jacob, "we are the only people in the world who knowwhat the Greeks meant. "

They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and littlelamps burnt along the counter. 

Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him abouthis boy at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised theDuke of Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking aboutthe Greeks. 

A strange thing--when you come to think of it--this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden, especially on leaving crowded rooms, or after a surfeitof print, or when the moon floats among the waves of the hills, or inhollow, sallow, fruitless London days, like a specific; a clean blade;always a miracle. Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to stumblethrough a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing. However, as hetramped into London it seemed to him that they were making theflagstones ring on the road to the Acropolis, and that if Socrates sawthem coming he would bestir himself and say "my fine fellows, " for thewhole sentiment of Athens was entirely after his heart; free, venturesome, high-spirited. ... She had called him Jacob without askinghis leave. She had sat upon his knee. Thus did all good women in thedays of the Greeks. 

At this moment there shook out into the air a wavering, quavering, doleful lamentation which seemed to lack strength to unfold itself, andyet flagged on; at the sound of which doors in back streets burstsullenly open; workmen stumped forth. 

Florinda was sick. 

Mrs. Durrant, sleepless as usual, scored a mark by the side of certainlines in the Inferno. 

Clara slept buried in her pillows; on her dressing-table dishevelledroses and a pair of long white gloves. 

Still wearing the conical white hat of a pierrot, Florinda was sick. 

The bedroom seemed fit for these catastrophes--cheap, mustard-coloured, half attic, half studio, curiously ornamented with silver paper stars, Welshwomen's hats, and rosaries pendent from the gas brackets. As forFlorinda's story, her name had been bestowed upon her by a painter whohad wished it to signify that the flower of her maidenhood was stillunplucked. Be that as it may, she was without a surname, and for parentshad only the photograph of a tombstone beneath which, she said, herfather lay buried. Sometimes she would dwell upon the size of it, andrumour had it that Florinda's father had died from the growth of hisbones which nothing could stop; just as her mother enjoyed theconfidence of a Royal master, and now and again Florinda herself was aPrincess, but chiefly when drunk. Thus deserted, pretty into thebargain, with tragic eyes and the lips of a child, she talked more aboutvirginity than women mostly do; and had lost it only the night before, or cherished it beyond the heart in her breast, according to the man shetalked to. But did she always talk to men? No, she had her confidante:Mother Stuart. Stuart, as the lady would point out, is the name of aRoyal house; but what that signified, and what her business way, no oneknew; only that Mrs. Stuart got postal orders every Monday morning, kepta parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read thefuture in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was behind thechastity of Florinda. 

Now Florinda wept, and spent the day wandering the streets; stood atChelsea watching the river swim past; trailed along the shoppingstreets; opened her bag and powdered her cheeks in omnibuses; read loveletters, propping them against the milk pot in the A. B. C. Shop; detectedglass in the sugar bowl; accused the waitress of wishing to poison her;declared that young men stared at her; and found herself towards eveningslowly sauntering down Jacob's street, when it struck her that she likedthat man Jacob better than dirty Jews, and sitting at his table (he wascopying his essay upon the Ethics of Indecency), drew off her gloves andtold him how Mother Stuart had banged her on the head with the tea-cosy. 

Jacob took her word for it that she was chaste. She prattled, sitting bythe fireside, of famous painters. The tomb of her father was mentioned. Wild and frail and beautiful she looked, and thus the women of theGreeks were, Jacob thought; and this was life; and himself a man andFlorinda chaste. 

She left with one of Shelley's poems beneath her arm. Mrs. Stuart, shesaid, often talked of him. 

Marvellous are the innocent. To believe that the girl herself transcendsall lies (for Jacob was not such a fool as to believe implicitly), towonder enviously at the unanchored life--his own seeming petted and evencloistered in comparison--to have at hand as sovereign specifics for alldisorders of the soul Adonais and the plays of Shakespeare; to figureout a comradeship all spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equalon both, for women, thought Jacob, are just the same as men--innocencesuch as this is marvellous enough, and perhaps not so foolish after all. 

For when Florinda got home that night she first washed her head; thenate chocolate creams; then opened Shelley. True, she was horribly bored. What on earth was it ABOUT? She had to wager with herself that she wouldturn the page before she ate another. In fact she slept. But then herday had been a long one, Mother Stuart had thrown the tea-cosy;--thereare formidable sights in the streets, and though Florinda was ignorantas an owl, and would never learn to read even her love letterscorrectly, still she had her feelings, liked some men better thanothers, and was entirely at the beck and call of life. Whether or notshe was a virgin seems a matter of no importance whatever. Unless, indeed, it is the only thing of any importance at all. 

Jacob was restless when she left him. 

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. Latehome-comers could see shadows against the blinds even in the mostrespectable suburbs. Not a square in snow or fog lacked its amorouscouple. All plays turned on the same subject. Bullets went through headsin hotel bedrooms almost nightly on that account. When the body escapedmutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. Little elsewas talked of in theatres and popular novels. Yet we say it is a matterof no importance at all. 

What with Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley--choosewhom you like--the fact is concealed and the evenings for most of uspass reputably, or with only the sort of tremor that a snake makessliding through the grass. But then concealment by itself distracts themind from the print and the sound. If Florinda had had a mind, she mighthave read with clearer eyes than we can. She and her sort have solvedthe question by turning it to a trifle of washing the hands nightlybefore going to bed, the only difficulty being whether you prefer yourwater hot or cold, which being settled, the mind can go about itsbusiness unassailed. 

But it did occur to Jacob, half-way through dinner, to wonder whethershe had a mind. 

They sat at a little table in the restaurant. 

Florinda leant the points of her elbows on the table and held her chinin the cup of her hands. Her cloak had slipped behind her. Gold andwhite with bright beads on her she emerged, her face flowering from herbody, innocent, scarcely tinted, the eyes gazing frankly about her, orslowly settling on Jacob and resting there. She talked:

"You know that big black box the Australian left in my room ever so longago? ... I do think furs make a woman look old. ... That's Bechsteincome in now. ... I was wondering what you looked like when you were alittle boy, Jacob. " She nibbled her roll and looked at him. 

"Jacob. You're like one of those statues. ... I think there are lovelythings in the British Museum, don't you? Lots of lovely things ... " shespoke dreamily. The room was filling; the heat increasing. Talk in arestaurant is dazed sleep-walkers' talk, so many things to look at--somuch noise--other people talking. Can one overhear? Oh, but they mustn'toverhear US. 

"That's like Ellen Nagle--that girl ... " and so on. 

"I'm awfully happy since I've known you, Jacob. You're such a GOOD man. "

The room got fuller and fuller; talk louder; knives more clattering. 

"Well, you see what makes her say things like that is ... "

She stopped. So did every one. 

"To-morrow ... Sunday ... A beastly ... You tell me ... Go then!" Crash!And out she swept. 

It was at the table next them that the voice spun higher and higher. Suddenly the woman dashed the plates to the floor. The man was leftthere. Everybody stared. Then--"Well, poor chap, we mustn't sit staring. What a go! Did you hear what she said? By God, he looks a fool! Didn'tcome up to the scratch, I suppose. All the mustard on the tablecloth. The waiters laughing. "

Jacob observed Florinda. In her face there seemed to him somethinghorribly brainless--as she sat staring. 

Out she swept, the black woman with the dancing feather in her hat. 

Yet she had to go somewhere. The night is not a tumultuous black oceanin which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wetNovember night. The lamps of Soho made large greasy spots of light uponthe pavement. The by-streets were dark enough to shelter man or womanleaning against the doorways. One detached herself as Jacob and Florindaapproached. 

"She's dropped her glove, " said Florinda. 

Jacob, pressing forward, gave it her. 

Effusively she thanked him; retraced her steps; dropped her glove again. But why? For whom? Meanwhile, where had the other woman got to? And theman?

The street lamps do not carry far enough to tell us. The voices, angry, lustful, despairing, passionate, were scarcely more than the voices ofcaged beasts at night. Only they are not caged, nor beasts. Stop a man;ask him the way; he'll tell it you; but one's afraid to ask him the way. What does one fear?--the human eye. At once the pavement narrows, thechasm deepens. There! They've melted into it--both man and woman. Further on, blatantly advertising its meritorious solidity, a boarding-house exhibits behind uncurtained windows its testimony to the soundnessof London. There they sit, plainly illuminated, dressed like ladies andgentlemen, in bamboo chairs. The widows of business men provelaboriously that they are related to judges. The wives of coal merchantsinstantly retort that their fathers kept coachmen. A servant bringscoffee, and the crochet basket has to be moved. And so on again into thedark, passing a girl here for sale, or there an old woman with onlymatches to offer, passing the crowd from the Tube station, the womenwith veiled hair, passing at length no one but shut doors, carved door-posts, and a solitary policeman, Jacob, with Florinda on his arm, reached his room and, lighting the lamp, said nothing at all. 

"I don't like you when you look like that, " said Florinda. 

The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain. Beauty goeshand in hand with stupidity. There she sat staring at the fire as shehad stared at the broken mustard-pot. In spite of defending indecency, Jacob doubted whether he liked it in the raw. He had a violent reversiontowards male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics;and was ready to turn with wrath upon whoever it was who had fashionedlife thus. 

Then Florinda laid her hand upon his knee. 

After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It'snot catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it'sthe way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. 

Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached. 

But when she looked at him, dumbly, half-guessing, half-understanding, apologizing perhaps, anyhow saying as he had said, "It's none of myfault, " straight and beautiful in body, her face like a shell within itscap, then he knew that cloisters and classics are no use whatever. Theproblem is insoluble. 

CHAPTER SEVEN

About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put onthe market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As itwas the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the newdiscovery was found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes thelittle coloured flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Theirfortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a greatdiscovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes. Thepaper flowers did no less. 

It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature. Roses, lilies, carnations in particular, looked over the rims of vasesand surveyed the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificialrelations. Mr. Stuart Ormond made this very observation; and charming itwas thought; and Kitty Craster married him on the strength of it sixmonths later. But real flowers can never be dispensed with. If theycould, human life would be a different affair altogether. For flowersfade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow and jadednext morning--not fit to be seen. On the whole, though the price issinful, carnations pay best;--it's a question, however, whether it'swise to have them wired. Some shops advise it. Certainly it's the onlyway to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinnerparties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute. Old Mrs. Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf--just one--dropped into the bowl. She said it kept the water pure for days and days. But there is somereason to think that old Mrs. Temple was mistaken. 

The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a moreserious problem than the flowers. More horses' legs have been worn out, more coachmen's lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon timevainly lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and payfor it into the bargain. The little demons are the source of as manyreprieves, calamities, and anxieties as the battle itself. SometimesMrs. Bonham has just gone out; at others she is at home. But, even ifthe cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there are unrulypowers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, anduprooting the stability of the afternoon--dressmakers, that is to say, and confectioners' shops. Six yards of silk will cover one body; but ifyou have to devise six hundred shapes for it, and twice as manycolours?--in the middle of which there is the urgent question of thepudding with tufts of green cream and battlements of almond paste. Ithas not arrived. 

The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky. But regularly theydipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or thepurlieus of Clerkenwell. No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata. In order to buy one pair ofelastic stockings for Mrs. Page, widow, aged sixty-three, in receipt offive shillings out-door relief, and help from her only son employed inMessrs. Mackie's dye-works, suffering in winter with his chest, lettersmust be written, columns filled up in the same round, simple hand thatwrote in Mr. Letts's diary how the weather was fine, the childrendemons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly. Clara Durrant procured thestockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim infinger-bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled attheir brief lives. 

Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme. Edwin Mallett, forexample, wrote his verses ending:

 And read their doom in Chloe's eyes, which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at thesecond, saying that it was just like him to call her Chloe when her namewas Clara. Ridiculous young man! But when, between ten and eleven on arainy morning, Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out ofthe room and hid herself in her bedroom, and Timothy below could not geton with his work all that morning on account of her sobs. 

"Which is the result of enjoying yourself, " said Mrs. Durrant severely, surveying the dance programme all scored with the same initials, orrather they were different ones this time--R. B. Instead of E. M. ; RichardBonamy it was now, the young man with the Wellington nose. 

"But I could never marry a man with a nose like that, " said Clara. 

"Nonsense, " said Mrs. Durrant. 

"But I am too severe, " she thought to herself. For Clara, losing allvivacity, tore up her dance programme and threw it in the fender. 

Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paperflowers to swim in bowls. 

"Please, " said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almostopposite the door, "don't introduce me. I like to look on. The amusingthing, " she went on, addressing Mr. Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was accommodated with a chair, "the amusing thing about a party is towatch the people--coming and going, coming and going. "

"Last time we met, " said Mr. Salvin, "was at the Farquhars. Poor lady!She has much to put up with. "

"Doesn't she look charming?" exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrantpassed them. 

"And which of them ... ?" asked Mr. Salvin, dropping his voice andspeaking in quizzical tones. 

"There are so many ... " Miss Eliot replied. Three young men stood at thedoorway looking about for their hostess. 

"You don't remember Elizabeth as I do, " said Mr. Salvin, "dancingHighland reels at Banchorie. Clara lacks her mother's spirit. Clara is alittle pale. "

"What different people one sees here!" said Miss Eliot. 

"Happily we are not governed by the evening papers, " said Mr. Salvin. 

"I never read them, " said Miss Eliot. "I know nothing about politics, "she added. 

"The piano is in tune, " said Clara, passing them, "but we may have toask some one to move it for us. "

"Are they going to dance?" asked Mr. Salvin. 

"Nobody shall disturb you, " said Mrs. Durrant peremptorily as shepassed. 

"Julia Eliot. It IS Julia Eliot!" said old Lady Hibbert, holding outboth her hands. "And Mr. Salvin. What is going to happen to us, Mr. Salvin? With all my experience of English politics--My dear, I wasthinking of your father last night--one of my oldest friends, Mr. Salvin. Never tell me that girls often are incapable of love! I had allShakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, Mr. Salvin!"

"You don't say so, " said Mr. Salvin. 

"But I do, " said Lady Hibbert. 

"Oh, Mr. Salvin, I'm so sorry. ... "

"I will remove myself if you'll kindly lend me a hand, " said Mr. Salvin. 

"You shall sit by my mother, " said Clara. "Everybody seems to come inhere. ... Mr. Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards. "

"Are you going away for Christmas?" said Mr. Calthorp. 

"If my brother gets his leave, " said Miss Edwards. 

"What regiment is he in?" said Mr. Calthorp. 

"The Twentieth Hussars, " said Miss Edwards. 

"Perhaps he knows my brother?" said Mr. Calthorp. 

"I am afraid I did not catch your name, " said Miss Edwards. 

"Calthorp, " said Mr. Calthorp. 

"But what proof was there that the marriage service was actuallyperformed?" said Mr. Crosby. 

"There is no reason to doubt that Charles James Fox ... " Mr. Burleybegan; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well;had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter. 

"Going about as girls do nowadays--" said Mrs. Forster. 

Mr. Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw movedtowards her, threw out his hands, and exclaimed: "Well!"

"Nothing!" she replied. "Nothing at all--though I left them alone theentire afternoon on purpose. "

"Dear me, dear me, " said Mr. Bowley. "I will ask Jimmy to breakfast. "

"But who could resist her?" cried Rose Shaw. "Dearest Clara--I know wemustn't try to stop you... "

"You and Mr. Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know, " said Clara. 

"Life is wicked--life is detestable!" cried Rose Shaw. 

"There's not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?" saidTimothy Durrant to Jacob. 

"Women like it. "

"Like what?" said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them. 

"Where have you come from?" said Timothy. "Dining somewhere, I suppose. "

"I don't see why not, " said Charlotte. 

"People must go downstairs, " said Clara, passing. "Take Charlotte, Timothy. How d'you do, Mr. Flanders. "

"How d'you do, Mr. Flanders, " said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand. "What's been happening to you?"

 "Who is Silvia? what is she? That all our swains commend her?"

sang Elsbeth Siddons. 

Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty. 

"Ah, " sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, half-way through. 

 "Then to Silvia let us sing, That Silvia is excelling; She excels each mortal thing Upon the dull earth dwelling. To her let us garlands bring, "

sang Elsbeth Siddons. 

"Ah!" Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacobclapped his bare ones; and then she moved forward and directed people tocome in from the doorway. 

"You are living in London?" asked Miss Julia Eliot. 

"Yes, " said Jacob. 

"In rooms?"

'Yes. "

"There is Mr. Clutterbuck. You always see Mr. Clutterbuck here. He isnot very happy at home, I am afraid. They say that Mrs. Clutterbuck ... "she dropped her voice. "That's why he stays with the Durrants. Were youthere when they acted Mr. Wortley's play? Oh, no, of course not--at thelast moment, did you hear--you had to go to join your mother, Iremember, at Harrogate--At the last moment, as I was saying, just aseverything was ready, the clothes finished and everything--Now Elsbethis going to sing again. Clara is playing her accompaniment or turningover for Mr. Carter, I think. No, Mr. Carter is playing by himself--Thisis BACH, " she whispered, as Mr. Carter played the first bars. 

"Are you fond of music?" said Mr. Durrant. 

"Yes. I like hearing it, " said Jacob. "I know nothing about it. "

"Very few people do that, " said Mrs. Durrant. "I daresay you were nevertaught. Why is that, Sir Jasper?--Sir Jasper Bigham--Mr. Flanders. Whyis nobody taught anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?" She leftthem standing against the wall. 

Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacobshifted perhaps five inches to the left, and then as many to the right. Then Jacob grunted, and suddenly crossed the room. 

"Will you come and have something to eat?" he said to Clara Durrant. 

"Yes, an ice. Quickly. Now, " she said. 

Downstairs they went. 

But half-way down they met Mr. And Mrs. Gresham, Herbert Turner, SylviaRashleigh, and a friend, whom they had dared to bring, from America, "knowing that Mrs. Durrant--wishing to show Mr. Pilcher. --Mr. Pilcherfrom New York--This is Miss Durrant. "

"Whom I have heard so much of, " said Mr. Pilcher, bowing low. 

So Clara left him. 

CHAPTER EIGHT

About half-past nine Jacob left the house, his door slamming, otherdoors slamming, buying his paper, mounting his omnibus, or, weatherpermitting, walking his road as other people do. Head bent down, a desk, a telephone, books bound in green leather, electric light.... "Freshcoals, sir?" ... "Your tea, sir. "... Talk about football, the Hotspurs, the Harlequins; six-thirty Star brought in by the office boy; the rooksof Gray's Inn passing overhead; branches in the fog thin and brittle;and through the roar of traffic now and again a voice shouting:"Verdict--verdict--winner--winner, " while letters accumulate in abasket, Jacob signs them, and each evening finds him, as he takes hiscoat down, with some muscle of the brain new stretched. 

Then, sometimes a game of chess; or pictures in Bond Street, or a longway home to take the air with Bonamy on his arm, meditatively marching, head thrown back, the world a spectacle, the early moon above thesteeples coming in for praise, the sea-gulls flying high, Nelson on hiscolumn surveying the horizon, and the world our ship. 

Meanwhile, poor Betty Flanders's letter, having caught the second post, lay on the hall table--poor Betty Flanders writing her son's name, JacobAlan Flanders, Esq. , as mothers do, and the ink pale, profuse, suggesting how mothers down at Scarborough scribble over the fire withtheir feet on the fender, when tea's cleared away, and can never, neversay, whatever it may be--probably this--Don't go with bad women, do be agood boy; wear your thick shirts; and come back, come back, come back tome. 

But she said nothing of the kind. "Do you remember old Miss Wargrave, who used to be so kind when you had the whooping-cough?" she wrote;"she's dead at last, poor thing. They would like it if you wrote. Ellencame over and we spent a nice day shopping. Old Mouse gets very stiff, and we have to walk him up the smallest hill. Rebecca, at last, after Idon't know how long, went into Mr. Adamson's. Three teeth, he says, mustcome out. Such mild weather for the time of year, the little budsactually on the pear trees. And Mrs. Jarvis tells me--"Mrs. Flandersliked Mrs. Jarvis, always said of her that she was too good for such aquiet place, and, though she never listened to her discontent and toldher at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off herspectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots keeps themfrom the frost, and Parrot's great white sale is Tuesday next, "doremember, "--Mrs. Flanders knew precisely how Mrs. Jarvis felt; and howinteresting her letters were, about Mrs. Jarvis, could one read themyear in, year out--the unpublished works of women, written by thefireside in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting-paper'sworn to holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot. Himshe called "the Captain, " spoke of frankly, yet never without reserve. The Captain was enquiring for her about Garfit's acre; advised chickens;could promise profit; or had the sciatica; or Mrs. Barfoot had beenindoors for weeks; or the Captain says things look bad, politics thatis, for as Jacob knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the eveningwaned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs. Flanders would fall musingabout Morty, her brother, lost all these years--had the natives got him, was his ship sunk--would the Admiralty tell her?--the Captain knockinghis pipe out, as Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick upMrs. Flanders's wool which had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of thechicken farm came back and back, the women, even at fifty, impulsive atheart, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns, Cochin Chinas, Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her outline; but powerful as hewas; fresh and vigorous, running about the house, scolding Rebecca. 

The letter lay upon the hall table; Florinda coming in that night tookit up with her, put it on the table as she kissed Jacob, and Jacobseeing the hand, left it there under the lamp, between the biscuit-tinand the tobacco-box. They shut the bedroom door behind them. 

The sitting-room neither knew nor cared. The door was shut; and tosuppose that wood, when it creaks, transmits anything save that rats arebusy and wood dry is childish. These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt. But if the pale blueenvelope lying by the biscuit-box had the feelings of a mother, theheart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door wasthe obscene thing, the alarming presence, and terror would come over heras at death, or the birth of a child. Better, perhaps, burst in and faceit than sit in the antechamber listening to the little creak, the suddenstir, for her heart was swollen, and pain threaded it. My son, my son--such would be her cry, uttered to hide her vision of him stretched withFlorinda, inexcusable, irrational, in a woman with three children livingat Scarborough. And the fault lay with Florinda. Indeed, when the dooropened and the couple came out, Mrs. Flanders would have flounced uponher--only it was Jacob who came first, in his dressing-gown, amiable, authoritative, beautifully healthy, like a baby after an airing, with aneye clear as running water. Florinda followed, lazily stretching;yawning a little; arranging her hair at the looking-glass--while Jacobread his mother's letter. 

Let us consider letters--how they come at breakfast, and at night, withtheir yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by thepostmark--for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realizehow soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of themind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wishannihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, thereare letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal;making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alonethe voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the lettercomes always the miracle seems repeated--speech attempted. Venerable areletters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. 

Life would split asunder without them. "Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in thecapital is gay; the Russian dancers.... " These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet ... When we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope tomeet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spendour days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us--drinking tea?dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. Andeverywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices thattry to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. "Try to penetrate, " for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express thehope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, becertain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, whichfall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; andthe telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if boundtogether by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps--whoknows?--we might talk by the way. 

Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. Forcenturies the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for thecommunications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, haveturned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushingaside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are writtenwhen the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselvesto the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched andturned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seekhang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath theleaf. 

Mrs. Flanders wrote letters; Mrs. Jarvis wrote them; Mrs. Durrant too;Mother Stuart actually scented her pages, thereby adding a flavour whichthe English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day longletters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. ClaraDurrant's letters were those of a child. Florinda--the impedimentbetween Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy abutterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote shedeclared her belief in God. Then there were crosses--tear stains; andthe hand itself rambling and redeemed only by the fact--which always didredeem Florinda--by the fact that she cared. Yes, whether it was forchocolate creams, hot baths, the shape of her face in the looking-glass, Florinda could no more pretend a feeling than swallow whisky. Incontinent was her rejection. Great men are truthful, and these littleprostitutes, staring in the fire, taking out a powder-puff, decoratinglips at an inch of looking-glass, have (so Jacob thought) an inviolablefidelity. 

Then he saw her turning up Greek Street upon another man's arm. 

The light from the arc lamp drenched him from head to toe. He stood fora minute motionless beneath it. Shadows chequered the street. Otherfigures, single and together, poured out, wavered across, andobliterated Florinda and the man. 

The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern onhis trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands;and face. 

It was as if a stone were ground to dust; as if white sparks flew from alivid whetstone, which was his spine; as if the switchback railway, having swooped to the depths, fell, fell, fell. This was in his face. 

Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted tenyears' seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; thisis swallowed up by a desire to help--overwhelming sense, reason, and thetime of night; anger would follow close on that--with Florinda, withdestiny; and then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. "Surelythere's enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our caresin gold!" Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak and lookover your shoulder towards Shaftesbury Avenue, destiny is chipping adent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to hisrooms, no--that we won't do. 

Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in andshut the door, though it was only striking ten on one of the cityclocks. No one can go to bed at ten. Nobody was thinking of going tobed. It was January and dismal, but Mrs. Wagg stood on her doorstep, asif expecting something to happen. A barrel-organ played like an obscenenightingale beneath wet leaves. Children ran across the road. Here andthere one could see brown panelling inside the hall door.... The marchthat the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Nowdistracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvisinga few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detachedgaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poorshout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)--yet allthe while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room. 

"Life is wicked--life is detestable, " cried Rose Shaw. 

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must havebeen apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left anyadequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but ourpassions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn thiscorner?

"Holborn straight ahead of you" says the policeman. Ah, but where areyou going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with hisstory, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen's Square, and there he shows you a collection ofbirds' eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales's secretary, and this(skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter's day to theEssex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the shipsails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise;and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, anoutcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infectedwith yellow fever as likely as not, and--fill in the sketch as you like. As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in thecontinuity of our ways. Yet we keep straight on. 

Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs. Durrant's evening party a few nights back, said that life was wickedbecause a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memoryserves) Helen Aitken. 

Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariablyseparated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. Hebowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They satin the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. Bowley hadrooms in the Albany. Rose was re-born every evening precisely as theclock struck eight. All four were civilization's triumphs, and if youpersist that a command of the English language is part of ourinheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Malebeauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a senseof fear. Often have I seen them--Helen and Jimmy--and likened them toships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have youever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance? As shepassed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks. Bowley saw whatwas up-asked Jimmy to breakfast. Helen must have confided in Rose. Formy own part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs withoutwords. And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals. Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said. 

The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burningbayonets. The yellow canopy sinks and swells over the great four-poster. Passengers in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenthcentury looked through leafless branches and saw it flaring beneaththem. The light burns behind yellow blinds and pink blinds, and abovefanlights, and down in basement windows. The street market in Soho isfierce with light. Raw meat, china mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms akimbo, theystand on the pavement bawling--Messrs. Kettle and Wilkinson; their wivessit in the shop, furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyescontemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The little man fingering the meatmust have squatted before the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, andheard and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself evenvolubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers the meat silently, hisface sad as a poet's, and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babieswith purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners; girls look across theroad--rude illustrations, pictures in a book whose pages we turn overand over as if we should at last find what we look for. Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picturefeverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What dowe seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages--oh, here is Jacob's room. 

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish sheet was spread flatbefore him. He propped his face in his hand, so that the skin of hischeek was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he looked, set, anddefiant. (What people go through in half an hour! But nothing could savehim. These events are features of our landscape. A foreigner coming toLondon could scarcely miss seeing St. Paul's. ) He judged life. Thesepinkish and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine pressednightly over the brain and heart of the world. They take the impressionof the whole. Jacob cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football, bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England simultaneously. Howmiserable it is that the Globe newspaper offers nothing better to JacobFlanders! When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully, to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient words. 

The Prime Minister's speech was reported in something over five columns. Feeling in his pocket, Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed. Jacob took the paperover to the fire. The Prime Minister proposed a measure for giving HomeRule to Ireland. Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was certainly thinkingabout Home Rule in Ireland--a very difficult matter. A very cold night. 

The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at three o'clock in theafternoon over the fields and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stoodout upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black, and now and then ablack shiver crossed the snow as the wind drove flurries of frozenparticles before it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping--sweeping. 

The stream crept along by the road unseen by any one. Sticks and leavescaught in the frozen grass. The sky was sullen grey and the trees ofblack iron. Uncompromising was the severity of the country. At fouro'clock the snow was again falling. The day had gone out. 

A window tinged yellow about two feet across alone combated the whitefields and the black trees .... At six o'clock a man's figure carrying alantern crossed the field .... A raft of twig stayed upon a stone, suddenly detached itself, and floated towards the culvert .... A load ofsnow slipped and fell from a fir branch .... Later there was a mournfulcry .... A motor car came along the road shoving the dark before it .... The dark shut down behind it.... 

Spaces of complete immobility separated each of these movements. Theland seemed to lie dead .... Then the old shepherd returned stifflyacross the field. Stiffly and painfully the frozen earth was troddenunder and gave beneath pressure like a treadmill. The worn voices ofclocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long. 

Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretchedhimself. He went to bed. 

CHAPTER NINE

The Countess of Rocksbier sat at the head of the table alone with Jacob. Fed upon champagne and spices for at least two centuries (four, if youcount the female line), the Countess Lucy looked well fed. Adiscriminating nose she had for scents, prolonged, as if in quest ofthem; her underlip protruded a narrow red shelf; her eyes were small, with sandy tufts for eyebrows, and her jowl was heavy. Behind her (thewindow looked on Grosvenor Square) stood Moll Pratt on the pavement, offering violets for sale; and Mrs. Hilda Thomas, lifting her skirts, preparing to cross the road. One was from Walworth; the other fromPutney. Both wore black stockings, but Mrs. Thomas was coiled in furs. The comparison was much in Lady Rocksbier's favour. Moll had morehumour, but was violent; stupid too. Hilda Thomas was mealy-mouthed, allher silver frames aslant; egg-cups in the drawing-room; and the windowsshrouded. Lady Rocksbier, whatever the deficiencies of her profile, hadbeen a great rider to hounds. She used her knife with authority, toreher chicken bones, asking Jacob's pardon, with her own hands. 

"Who is that driving by?" she asked Boxall, the butler. 

"Lady Firtlemere's carriage, my lady, " which reminded her to send a cardto ask after his lordship's health. A rude old lady, Jacob thought. Thewine was excellent. She called herself "an old woman"--"so kind to lunchwith an old woman"--which flattered him. She talked of JosephChamberlain, whom she had known. She said that Jacob must come and meet--one of our celebrities. And the Lady Alice came in with three dogs on aleash, and Jackie, who ran to kiss his grandmother, while Boxall broughtin a telegram, and Jacob was given a good cigar. 

A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itselftogether, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the furtherside. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body raninto the horse's body and it was your own forelegs grown with his thatsprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies amass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyesaccurately judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammerstrokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping:"Ah! ho! Hah!" the steam going up from the horses as they jostletogether at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in theapron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from thecabbages to stare too. 

So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost thehunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck. 

He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping, saying, "After you, " clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles ofturkeys, using free speech until Mrs. Horsefield and her friend MissDudding appeared at the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hairlooping down. Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window with his whip. Amotor car throbbed in the courtyard. Gentlemen, feeling for matches, moved out, and Jacob went into the bar with Brandy Jones to smoke withthe rustics. There was old Jevons with one eye gone, and his clothes thecolour of mud, his bag over his back, and his brains laid feet down inearth among the violet roots and the nettle roots; Mary Sanders with herbox of wood; and Tom sent for beer, the half-witted son of the sexton--all this within thirty miles of London. 

Mrs. Papworth, of Endell Street, Covent Garden, did for Mr. Bonamy inNew Square, Lincoln's Inn, and as she washed up the dinner things in thescullery she heard the young gentlemen talking in the room next door. Mr. Sanders was there again; Flanders she meant; and where aninquisitive old woman gets a name wrong, what chance is there that shewill faithfully report an argument? As she held the plates under waterand then dealt them on the pile beneath the hissing gas, she listened:heard Sanders speaking in a loud rather overbearing tone of voice:"good, " he said, and "absolute" and "justice" and "punishment, " and "thewill of the majority. " Then her gentleman piped up; she backed him forargument against Sanders. Yet Sanders was a fine young fellow (here allthe scraps went swirling round the sink, scoured after by her purple, almost nailless hands). "Women"--she thought, and wondered what Sandersand her gentleman did in THAT line, one eyelid sinking perceptibly asshe mused, for she was the mother of nine--three still-born and one deafand dumb from birth. Putting the plates in the rack she heard once moreSanders at it again ("He don't give Bonamy a chance, " she thought). "Objective something, " said Bonamy; and "common ground" and somethingelse--all very long words, she noted. "Book learning does it, " shethought to herself, and, as she thrust her arms into her jacket, heardsomething--might be the little table by the fire--fall; and then stamp, stamp, stamp--as if they were having at each other--round the room, making the plates dance. 

"To-morrow's breakfast, sir, " she said, opening the door; and there wereSanders and Bonamy like two bulls of Bashan driving each other up anddown, making such a racket, and all them chairs in the way. They nevernoticed her. She felt motherly towards them. "Your breakfast, sir, " shesaid, as they came near. And Bonamy, all his hair touzled and his tieflying, broke off, and pushed Sanders into the arm-chair, and said Mr. Sanders had smashed the coffee-pot and he was teaching Mr. Sanders--

Sure enough, the coffee-pot lay broken on the hearthrug. 

"Any day this week except Thursday, " wrote Miss Perry, and this was notthe first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry's weeks blankwith the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her oldfriend's son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long whiteribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted byfive female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals, Mudie's library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was alreadythat Jacob had not called. 

"Your mother, " she said, "is one of my oldest friends. "

Miss Rosseter, who was sitting by the fire, holding the Spectatorbetween her cheek and the blaze, refused to have a fire screen, butfinally accepted one. The weather was then discussed, for in deferenceto Parkes, who was opening little tables, graver matters were postponed. Miss Rosseter drew Jacob's attention to the beauty of the cabinet. 

"So wonderfully clever in picking things up, " she said. Miss Perry hadfound it in Yorkshire. The North of England was discussed. When Jacobspoke they both listened. Miss Perry was bethinking her of somethingsuitable and manly to say when the door opened and Mr. Benson wasannounced. Now there were four people sitting in that room. Miss Perryaged 66; Miss Rosseter 42; Mr. Benson 38; and Jacob 25. 

"My old friend looks as well as ever, " said Mr. Benson, tapping the barsof the parrot's cage; Miss Rosseter simultaneously praised the tea;Jacob handed the wrong plates; and Miss Perry signified her desire toapproach more closely. "Your brothers, " she began vaguely. 

"Archer and John, " Jacob supplied her. Then to her pleasure sherecovered Rebecca's name; and how one day "when you were all littleboys, playing in the drawing-room--"

"But Miss Perry has the kettle-holder, " said Miss Rosseter, and indeedMiss Perry was clasping it to her breast. (Had she, then, loved Jacob'sfather?)

"So clever"--"not so good as usual"--"I thought it most unfair, " saidMr. Benson and Miss Rosseter, discussing the Saturday Westminster. Didthey not compete regularly for prizes? Had not Mr. Benson three timeswon a guinea, and Miss Rosseter once ten and sixpence? Of course EverardBenson had a weak heart, but still, to win prizes, remember parrots, toady Miss Perry, despise Miss Rosseter, give tea-parties in his rooms(which were in the style of Whistler, with pretty books on tables), allthis, so Jacob felt without knowing him, made him a contemptible ass. Asfor Miss Rosseter, she had nursed cancer, and now painted water-colours. 

"Running away so soon?" said Miss Perry vaguely. "At home everyafternoon, if you've nothing better to do--except Thursdays. "

"I've never known you desert your old ladies once, " Miss Rosseter wassaying, and Mr. Benson was stooping over the parrot's cage, and MissPerry was moving towards the bell.... 

The fire burnt clear between two pillars of greenish marble, and on themantelpiece there was a green clock guarded by Britannia leaning on herspear. As for pictures--a maiden in a large hat offered roses over thegarden gate to a gentleman in eighteenth-century costume. A mastiff layextended against a battered door. The lower panes of the windows were ofground glass, and the curtains, accurately looped, were of plush andgreen too. 

Laurette and Jacob sat with their toes in the fender side by side, intwo large chairs covered in green plush. Laurette's skirts were short, her legs long, thin, and transparently covered. Her fingers stroked herankles. 

"It's not exactly that I don't understand them, " she was sayingthoughtfully. "I must go and try again. "

"What time will you be there?" said Jacob. 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

"To-morrow?"

No, not to-morrow. 

"This weather makes me long for the country, " she said, looking over hershoulder at the back view of tall houses through the window. 

"I wish you'd been with me on Saturday, " said Jacob. 

"I used to ride, " she said. She got up gracefully, calmly. Jacob got up. She smiled at him. As she shut the door he put so many shillings on themantelpiece. 

Altogether a most reasonable conversation; a most respectable room; anintelligent girl. Only Madame herself seeing Jacob out had about herthat leer, that lewdness, that quake of the surface (visible in the eyeschiefly), which threatens to spill the whole bag of ordure, withdifficulty held together, over the pavement. In short, something waswrong. 

Not so very long ago the workmen had gilt the final "y" in LordMacaulay's name, and the names stretched in unbroken file round the domeof the British Museum. At a considerable depth beneath, many hundreds ofthe living sat at the spokes of a cart-wheel copying from printed booksinto manuscript books; now and then rising to consult the catalogue;regaining their places stealthily, while from time to time a silent manreplenished their compartments. 

There was a little catastrophe. Miss Marchmont's pile overbalanced andfell into Jacob's compartment. Such things happened to Miss Marchmont. What was she seeking through millions of pages, in her old plush dress, and her wig of claret-coloured hair, with her gems and her chilblains?Sometimes one thing, sometimes another, to confirm her philosophy thatcolour is sound--or, perhaps, it has something to do with music. Shecould never quite say, though it was not for lack of trying. And shecould not ask you back to her room, for it was "not very clean, I'mafraid, " so she must catch you in the passage, or take a chair in HydePark to explain her philosophy. The rhythm of the soul depends on it--("how rude the little boys are!" she would say), and Mr. Asquith's Irishpolicy, and Shakespeare comes in, "and Queen Alexandra most graciouslyonce acknowledged a copy of my pamphlet, " she would say, waving thelittle boys magnificently away. But she needs funds to publish her book, for "publishers are capitalists--publishers are cowards. " And so, digging her elbow into her pile of books it fell over. 

Jacob remained quite unmoved. 

But Fraser, the atheist, on the other side, detesting plush, more thanonce accosted with leaflets, shifted irritably. He abhorred vagueness--the Christian religion, for example, and old Dean Parker'spronouncements. Dean Parker wrote books and Fraser utterly destroyedthem by force of logic and left his children unbaptized--his wife did itsecretly in the washing basin--but Fraser ignored her, and went onsupporting blasphemers, distributing leaflets, getting up his facts inthe British Museum, always in the same check suit and fiery tie, butpale, spotted, irritable. Indeed, what a work--to destroy religion!

Jacob transcribed a whole passage from Marlowe. 

Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by thefinal letters in Lord Macaulay's name. And she read them all round thedome--the names of great men which remind us--"Oh damn, " said JuliaHedge, "why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?"

Unfortunate Julia! wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoelaces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her giganticlabours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperatedsensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every considerationthe male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man forexample. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she muststudy statistics. There are more women than men. Yes; but if you letwomen work as men work, they'll die off much quicker. They'll becomeextinct. That was her argument. Death and gall and bitter dust were onher pen-tip; and as the afternoon wore on, red had worked into hercheek-bones and a light was in her eyes. 

But what brought Jacob Flanders to read Marlowe in the British Museum?Youth, youth--something savage--something pedantic. For example, thereis Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame ofMarlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palterwith the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. And toset that on foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to yourfriends. For which purpose one most collate editions in the BritishMuseum. One must do the thing oneself. Useless to trust to theVictorians, who disembowel, or to the living, who are mere publicists. The flesh and blood of the future depends entirely upon six young men. And as Jacob was one of them, no doubt he looked a little regal andpompous as he turned his page, and Julia Hedge disliked him naturallyenough. 

But then a pudding-faced man pushed a note towards Jacob, and Jacob, leaning back in his chair, began an uneasy murmured conversation, andthey went off together (Julia Hedge watched them), and laughed aloud(she thought) directly they were in the hall. 

Nobody laughed in the reading-room. There were shirtings, murmurings, apologetic sneezes, and sudden unashamed devastating coughs. The lessonhour was almost over. Ushers were collecting exercises. Lazy childrenwanted to stretch. Good ones scribbled assiduously--ah, another day overand so little done! And now and then was to be heard from the wholecollection of human beings a heavy sigh, after which the humiliating oldman would cough shamelessly, and Miss Marchmont hinnied like a horse. 

Jacob came back only in time to return his books. 

The books were now replaced. A few letters of the alphabet weresprinkled round the dome. Closely stood together in a ring round thedome were Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Shakespeare; the literatureof Rome, Greece, China, India, Persia. One leaf of poetry was pressedflat against another leaf, one burnished letter laid smooth againstanother in a density of meaning, a conglomeration of loveliness. 

"One does want one's tea, " said Miss Marchmont, reclaiming her shabbyumbrella. 

Miss Marchmont wanted her tea, but could never resist a last look at theElgin Marbles. She looked at them sideways, waving her hand andmuttering a word or two of salutation which made Jacob and the other manturn round. She smiled at them amiably. It all came into her philosophy--that colour is sound, or perhaps it has something to do with music. Andhaving done her service, she hobbled off to tea. It was closing time. The public collected in the hall to receive their umbrellas. 

For the most part the students wait their turn very patiently. To standand wait while some one examines white discs is soothing. The umbrellawill certainly be found. But the fact leads you on all day throughMacaulay, Hobbes, Gibbon; through octavos, quartos, folios; sinks deeperand deeper through ivory pages and morocco bindings into this density ofthought, this conglomeration of knowledge. 

Jacob's walking-stick was like all the others; they had muddled thepigeon-holes perhaps. 

There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato isthere cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. Thisgreat mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it. Nevertheless (as they take so long finding one's walking-stick) onecan't help thinking how one might come with a notebook, sit at a desk, and read it all through. A learned man is the most venerable of all--aman like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, theysay, and could have kept his end up with Bentley. And then there isscience, pictures, architecture, --an enormous mind. 

They pushed the walking-stick across the counter. Jacob stood beneaththe porch of the British Museum. It was raining. Great Russell Streetwas glazed and shining--here yellow, here, outside the chemist's, redand pale blue. People scuttled quickly close to the wall; carriagesrattled rather helter-skelter down the streets. Well, but a little rainhurts nobody. Jacob walked off much as if he had been in the country;and late that night there he was sitting at his table with his pipe andhis book. 

The rain poured down. The British Museum stood in one solid immensemound, very pale, very sleek in the rain, not a quarter of a mile fromhim. The vast mind was sheeted with stone; and each compartment in thedepths of it was safe and dry. The night-watchmen, flashing theirlanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on thetwenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going toviolate these treasures--poor, highly respectable men, with wives andfamilies at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protectPlato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate. 

Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over thevisions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato's brain andShakespeare's; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls andlittle jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and thatincessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for itslong sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toesscrupulously to the East. Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; inspite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles; in spite of the womanin the mews behind Great Ormond Street who has come home drunk and criesall night long, "Let me in! Let me in!"

In the street below Jacob's room voices were raised. 

But he read on. For after all Plato continues imperturbably. And Hamletutters his soliloquy. And there the Elgin Marbles lie, all night long, old Jones's lantern sometimes recalling Ulysses, or a horse's head; orsometimes a flash of gold, or a mummy's sunk yellow cheek. Plato andShakespeare continue; and Jacob, who was reading the Phaedrus, heardpeople vociferating round the lamp-post, and the woman battering at thedoor and crying, "Let me in!" as if a coal had dropped from the fire, ora fly, falling from the ceiling, had lain on its back, too weak to turnover. 

The Phaedrus is very difficult. And so, when at length one readsstraight ahead, falling into step, marching on, becoming (so it seems)momentarily part of this rolling, imperturbable energy, which has drivendarkness before it since Plato walked the Acropolis, it is impossible tosee to the fire. 

The dialogue draws to its close. Plato's argument is done. Plato'sargument is stowed away in Jacob's mind, and for five minutes Jacob'smind continues alone, onwards, into the darkness. Then, getting up, heparted the curtains, and saw, with astonishing clearness, how theSpringetts opposite had gone to bed; how it rained; how the Jews and theforeign woman, at the end of the street, stood by the pillar-box, arguing. 

Every time the door opened and fresh people came in, those already inthe room shifted slightly; those who were standing looked over theirshoulders; those who were sitting stopped in the middle of sentences. What with the light, the wine, the strumming of a guitar, somethingexciting happened each time the door opened. Who was coming in?

"That's Gibson. "

"The painter?"

"But go on with what you were saying. "

They were saying something that was far, far too intimate to be saidoutright. But the noise of the voices served like a clapper in littleMrs. Withers's mind, scaring into the air blocks of small birds, andthen they'd settle, and then she'd feel afraid, put one hand to herhair, bind both round her knees, and look up at Oliver Skeltonnervously, and say:

"Promise, PROMISE, you'll tell no one. " ... So considerate he was, sotender. It was her husband's character that she discussed. He was cold, she said. 

Down upon them came the splendid Magdalen, brown, warm, voluminous, scarcely brushing the grass with her sandalled feet. Her hair flew; pinsseemed scarcely to attach the flying silks. An actress of course, a lineof light perpetually beneath her. It was only "My dear" that she said, but her voice went jodelling between Alpine passes. And down she tumbledon the floor, and sang, since there was nothing to be said, round ah'sand oh's. Mangin, the poet, coming up to her, stood looking down at her, drawing at his pipe. The dancing began. 

Grey-haired Mrs. Keymer asked Dick Graves to tell her who Mangin was, and said that she had seen too much of this sort of thing in Paris(Magdalen had got upon his knees; now his pipe was in her mouth) to beshocked. "Who is that?" she said, staying her glasses when they came toJacob, for indeed he looked quiet, not indifferent, but like some one ona beach, watching. 

"Oh, my dear, let me lean on you, " gasped Helen Askew, hopping on onefoot, for the silver cord round her ankle had worked loose. Mrs. Keymerturned and looked at the picture on the wall. 

"Look at Jacob, " said Helen (they were binding his eyes for some game). 

And Dick Graves, being a little drunk, very faithful, and very simple-minded, told her that he thought Jacob the greatest man he had everknown. And down they sat cross-legged upon cushions and talked aboutJacob, and Helen's voice trembled, for they both seemed heroes to her, and the friendship between them so much more beautiful than women'sfriendships. Anthony Pollett now asked her to dance, and as she dancedshe looked at them, over her shoulder, standing at the table, drinkingtogether. 

The magnificent world--the live, sane, vigorous world .... These wordsrefer to the stretch of wood pavement between Hammersmith and Holborn inJanuary between two and three in the morning. That was the groundbeneath Jacob's feet. It was healthy and magnificent because one room, above a mews, somewhere near the river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people. And then to stride over the pavement (therewas scarcely a cab or policeman in sight) is of itself exhilarating. Thelong loop of Piccadilly, diamond-stitched, shows to best advantage whenit is empty. A young man has nothing to fear. On the contrary, though hemay not have said anything brilliant, he feels pretty confident he canhold his own. He was pleased to have met Mangin; he admired the youngwoman on the floor; he liked them all; he liked that sort of thing. Inshort, all the drums and trumpets were sounding. The street scavengerswere the only people about at the moment. It is scarcely necessary tosay how well-disposed Jacob felt towards them; how it pleased him to lethimself in with his latch-key at his own door; how he seemed to bringback with him into the empty room ten or eleven people whom he had notknown when he set out; how he looked about for something to read, andfound it, and never read it, and fell asleep. 

Indeed, drums and trumpets is no phrase. Indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sitting-room and the sitting-room with fifty people in itare liable at any moment to blow music into the air. Women perhaps aremore excitable than men. It is seldom that any one says anything aboutit, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stopto Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is thedrums and trumpets. Only, should you turn aside into one of those littlebays on Waterloo Bridge to think the matter over, it will probably seemto you all a muddle--all a mystery. 

They cross the Bridge incessantly. Sometimes in the midst of carts andomnibuses a lorry will appear with great forest trees chained to it. Then, perhaps, a mason's van with newly lettered tombstones recordinghow some one loved some one who is buried at Putney. Then the motor carin front jerks forward, and the tombstones pass too quick for you toread more. All the time the stream of people never ceases passing fromthe Surrey side to the Strand; from the Strand to the Surrey side. Itseems as if the poor had gone raiding the town, and now trapesed back totheir own quarters, like beetles scurrying to their holes, for that oldwoman fairly hobbles towards Waterloo, grasping a shiny bag, as if shehad been out into the light and now made off with some scraped chickenbones to her hovel underground. On the other hand, though the wind isrough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand inhand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They arehatless. They triumph. 

The wind has blown up the waves. The river races beneath us, and the menstanding on the barges have to lean all their weight on the tiller. Ablack tarpaulin is tied down over a swelling load of gold. Avalanches ofcoal glitter blackly. As usual, painters are slung on planks across thegreat riverside hotels, and the hotel windows have already points oflight in them. On the other side the city is white as if with age; St. Paul's swells white above the fretted, pointed, or oblong buildingsbeside it. The cross alone shines rosy-gilt. But what century have wereached? Has this procession from the Surrey side to the Strand gone onfor ever? That old man has been crossing the Bridge these six hundredyears, with the rabble of little boys at his heels, for he is drunk, orblind with misery, and tied round with old clouts of clothing such aspilgrims might have worn. He shuffles on. No one stands still. It seemsas if we marched to the sound of music; perhaps the wind and the river;perhaps these same drums and trumpets--the ecstasy and hubbub of thesoul. Why, even the unhappy laugh, and the policeman, far from judgingthe drunk man, surveys him humorously, and the little boys scamper backagain, and the clerk from Somerset House has nothing but tolerance forhim, and the man who is reading half a page of Lothair at the bookstallmuses charitably, with his eyes off the print, and the girl hesitates atthe crossing and turns on him the bright yet vague glance of the young. 

Bright yet vague. She is perhaps twenty-two. She is shabby. She crossesthe road and looks at the daffodils and the red tulips in the florist'swindow. She hesitates, and makes off in the direction of Temple Bar. Shewalks fast, and yet anything distracts her. Now she seems to see, andnow to notice nothing. 

CHAPTER TEN

Through the disused graveyard in the parish of St. Pancras, Fanny Elmerstrayed between the white tombs which lean against the wall, crossingthe grass to read a name, hurrying on when the grave-keeper approached, hurrying into the street, pausing now by a window with blue china, nowquickly making up for lost time, abruptly entering a baker's shop, buying rolls, adding cakes, going on again so that any one wishing tofollow must fairly trot. She was not drably shabby, though. She woresilk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, only the red feather in herhat drooped, and the clasp of her bag was weak, for out fell a copy ofMadame Tussaud's programme as she walked. She had the ankles of a stag. Her face was hidden. Of course, in this dusk, rapid movements, quickglances, and soaring hopes come naturally enough. She passed rightbeneath Jacob's window. 

The house was flat, dark, and silent. Jacob was at home engaged upon achess problem, the board being on a stool between his knees. One handwas fingering the hair at the back of his head. He slowly brought itforward and raised the white queen from her square; then put her downagain on the same spot. He filled his pipe; ruminated; moved two pawns;advanced the white knight; then ruminated with one finger upon thebishop. Now Fanny Elmer passed beneath the window. 

She was on her way to sit to Nick Bramham the painter. 

She sat in a flowered Spanish shawl, holding in her hand a yellow novel. 

"A little lower, a little looser, so--better, that's right, " Bramhammumbled, who was drawing her, and smoking at the same time, and wasnaturally speechless. His head might have been the work of a sculptor, who had squared the forehead, stretched the mouth, and left marks of histhumbs and streaks from his fingers in the clay. But the eyes had neverbeen shut. They were rather prominent, and rather bloodshot, as if fromstaring and staring, and when he spoke they looked for a seconddisturbed, but went on staring. An unshaded electric light hung aboveher head. 

As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, neverconstant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it. Now sheis dull and thick as bacon; now transparent as a hanging glass. Thefixed faces are the dull ones. Here comes Lady Venice displayed like amonument for admiration, but carved in alabaster, to be set on themantelpiece and never dusted. A dapper brunette complete from head tofoot serves only as an illustration to lie upon the drawing-room table. The women in the streets have the faces of playing cards; the outlinesaccurately filled in with pink or yellow, and the line drawn tightlyround them. Then, at a top-floor window, leaning out, looking down, yousee beauty itself; or in the corner of an omnibus; or squatted in aditch--beauty glowing, suddenly expressive, withdrawn the moment after. No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper. Nothingis to be won from the shops, and Heaven knows it would be better to sitat home than haunt the plate-glass windows in the hope of lifting theshining green, the glowing ruby, out of them alive. Sea glass in asaucer loses its lustre no sooner than silks do. Thus if you talk of abeautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a seconduses the eyes, lips, or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glowthrough. 

She was not beautiful, as she sat stiffly; her underlip too prominent;her nose too large; her eyes too near together. She was a thin girl, with brilliant cheeks and dark hair, sulky just now, or stiff withsitting. When Bramham snapped his stick of charcoal she started. Bramhamwas out of temper. He squatted before the gas fire warming his hands. Meanwhile she looked at his drawing. He grunted. Fanny threw on adressing-gown and boiled a kettle. 

"By God, it's bad, " said Bramham. 

Fanny dropped on to the floor, clasped her hands round her knees, andlooked at him, her beautiful eyes--yes, beauty, flying through the room, shone there for a second. Fanny's eyes seemed to question, tocommiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. But she exaggerated. Bramham noticed nothing. And when the kettle boiled, up she scrambled, more like a colt or a puppy than a loving woman. 

Now Jacob walked over to the window and stood with his hands in hispockets. Mr. Springett opposite came out, looked at his shop window, andwent in again. The children drifted past, eyeing the pink sticks ofsweetstuff. Pickford's van swung down the street. A small boy twirledfrom a rope. Jacob turned away. Two minutes later he opened the frontdoor, and walked off in the direction of Holborn. 

Fanny Elmer took down her cloak from the hook. Nick Bramham unpinned hisdrawing and rolled it under his arm. They turned out the lights and setoff down the street, holding on their way through all the people, motorcars, omnibuses, carts, until they reached Leicester Square, fiveminutes before Jacob reached it, for his way was slightly longer, and hehad been stopped by a block in Holborn waiting to see the King drive by, so that Nick and Fanny were already leaning over the barrier in thepromenade at the Empire when Jacob pushed through the swing doors andtook his place beside them. 

"Hullo, never noticed you, " said Nick, five minutes later. 

"Bloody rot, " said Jacob. 

"Miss Elmer, " said Nick. 

Jacob took his pipe out of his mouth very awkwardly. 

Very awkward he was. And when they sat upon a plush sofa and let thesmoke go up between them and the stage, and heard far off the high-pitched voices and the jolly orchestra breaking in opportunely he wasstill awkward, only Fanny thought: "What a beautiful voice!" She thoughthow little he said yet how firm it was. She thought how young men aredignified and aloof, and how unconscious they are, and how quietly onemight sit beside Jacob and look at him. And how childlike he would be, come in tired of an evening, she thought, and how majestic; a littleoverbearing perhaps; "But I wouldn't give way, " she thought. He got upand leant over the barrier. The smoke hung about him. 

And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, howeverlustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, orstride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly theylook into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among ushalf contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to beplayed on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speakbeautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubbleof small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as ifthey knew how long to stay and when to go--oh, but Mr. Flanders was onlygone to get a programme. 

"The dancers come right at the end, " he said, coming back to them. 

And isn't it pleasant, Fanny went on thinking, how young men bring outlots of silver coins from their trouser pockets, and look at them, instead of having just so many in a purse?

Then there she was herself, whirling across the stage in white flounces, and the music was the dance and fling of her own soul, and the wholemachinery, rock and gear of the world was spun smoothly into those swifteddies and falls, she felt, as she stood rigid leaning over the barriertwo feet from Jacob Flanders. 

Her screwed-up black glove dropped to the floor. When Jacob gave it her, she started angrily. For never was there a more irrational passion. AndJacob was afraid of her for a moment--so violent, so dangerous is itwhen young women stand rigid; grasp the barrier; fall in love. 

It was the middle of February. The roofs of Hampstead Garden Suburb layin a tremulous haze. It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain. 

The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. The tears well and fall as the dog barks inthe hollow, the children skim after hoops, the country darkens andbrightens. Beyond a veil it seems. Ah, but draw the veil thicker lest Ifaint with sweetness, Fanny Elmer sighed, as she sat on a bench inJudges Walk looking at Hampstead Garden Suburb. But the dog went onbarking. The motor cars hooted on the road. She heard a far-away rushand humming. Agitation was at her heart. Up she got and walked. Thegrass was freshly green; the sun hot. All round the pond children werestooping to launch little boats; or were drawn back screaming by theirnurses. 

At mid-day young women walk out into the air. All the men are busy inthe town. They stand by the edge of the blue pond. The fresh windscatters the children's voices all about. My children, thought FannyElmer. The women stand round the pond, beating off great prancing shaggydogs. Gently the baby is rocked in the perambulator. The eyes of all thenurses, mothers, and wandering women are a little glazed, absorbed. Theygently nod instead of answering when the little boys tug at theirskirts, begging them to move on. 

And Fanny moved, hearing some cry--a workman's whistle perhaps--high inmid-air. Now, among the trees, it was the thrush trilling out into thewarm air a flutter of jubilation, but fear seemed to spur him, Fannythought; as if he too were anxious with such joy at his heart--as if hewere watched as he sang, and pressed by tumult to sing. There! Restless, he flew to the next tree. She heard his song more faintly. Beyond it wasthe humming of the wheels and the wind rushing. 

She spent tenpence on lunch. 

"Dear, miss, she's left her umbrella, " grumbled the mottled woman in theglass box near the door at the Express Dairy Company's shop. 

"Perhaps I'll catch her, " answered Milly Edwards, the waitress with thepale plaits of hair; and she dashed through the door. 

"No good, " she said, coming back a moment later with Fanny's cheapumbrella. She put her hand to her plaits. 

"Oh, that door!" grumbled the cashier. 

Her hands were cased in black mittens, and the finger-tips that drew inthe paper slips were swollen as sausages. 

"Pie and greens for one. Large coffee and crumpets. Eggs on toast. Twofruit cakes. "

Thus the sharp voices of the waitresses snapped. The lunchers heardtheir orders repeated with approval; saw the next table served withanticipation. Their own eggs on toast were at last delivered. Their eyesstrayed no more. 

Damp cubes of pastry fell into mouths opened like triangular bags. 

Nelly Jenkinson, the typist, crumbled her cake indifferently enough. Every time the door opened she looked up. What did she expect to see?

The coal merchant read the Telegraph without stopping, missed thesaucer, and, feeling abstractedly, put the cup down on the table-cloth. 

"Did you ever hear the like of that for impertinence?" Mrs. Parsonswound up, brushing the crumbs from her furs. 

"Hot milk and scone for one. Pot of tea. Roll and butter, " cried thewaitresses. 

The door opened and shut. 

Such is the life of the elderly. 

It is curious, lying in a boat, to watch the waves. Here are threecoming regularly one after another, all much of a size. Then, hurryingafter them comes a fourth, very large and menacing; it lifts the boat;on it goes; somehow merges without accomplishing anything; flattensitself out with the rest. 

What can be more violent than the fling of boughs in a gale, the treeyielding itself all up the trunk, to the very tip of the branch, streaming and shuddering the way the wind blows, yet never flying indishevelment away? The corn squirms and abases itself as if preparing totug itself free from the roots, and yet is tied down. 

Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling runthrough the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyesdesiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if theexaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The starswould shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops--assometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of thiscradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never anymaking believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is muchlike another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin. 

"People are so nice, once you know them. "

"I couldn't think ill of her. One must remember--" But Nick perhaps, orFanny Elmer, believing implicitly in the truth of the moment, fling off, sting the cheek, are gone like sharp hail. 

"Oh, " said Fanny, bursting into the studio three-quarters of an hourlate because she had been hanging about the neighbourhood of theFoundling Hospital merely for the chance of seeing Jacob walk down thestreet, take out his latch-key, and open the door, "I'm afraid I'mlate"; upon which Nick said nothing and Fanny grew defiant. 

"I'll never come again!" she cried at length. 

"Don't, then, " Nick replied, and off she ran without so much as good-night. 

How exquisite it was--that dress in Evelina's shop off ShaftesburyAvenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fannythe one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in thatvery street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silkand gauze; or, festooned with ribbons in Swan and Edgars, rapidly addedup pence and farthings on the back of the bill and twisted the yard andthree-quarters in tissue paper and asked "Your pleasure?" of the nextcomer. 

In Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue the parts of a woman were shownseparate. In the left hand was her skirt. Twining round a pole in themiddle was a feather boa. Ranged like the heads of malefactors on TempleBar were hats--emerald and white, lightly wreathed or drooping beneathdeep-dyed feathers. And on the carpet were her feet--pointed gold, orpatent leather slashed with scarlet. 

Feasted upon by the eyes of women, the clothes by four o'clock wereflyblown like sugar cakes in a baker's window. Fanny eyed them too. Butcoming along Gerrard Street was a tall man in a shabby coat. A shadowfell across Evelina's window--Jacob's shadow, though it was not Jacob. And Fanny turned and walked along Gerrard Street and wished that she hadread books. Nick never read books, never talked of Ireland, or the Houseof Lords; and as for his finger-nails! She would learn Latin and readVirgil. She had been a great reader. She had read Scott; she had readDumas. At the Slade no one read. But no one knew Fanny at the Slade, orguessed how empty it seemed to her; the passion for ear-rings, fordances, for Tonks and Steer--when it was only the French who couldpaint, Jacob said. For the moderns were futile; painting the leastrespectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe andShakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?

"Fielding, " said Fanny, when the man in Charing Cross Road asked herwhat book she wanted. 

She bought Tom Jones. 

At ten o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a schoolteacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones--that mystic book. For this dullstuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross theirlegs read Tom Jones--a mystic book; for there is something, Fannythought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked--much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, thinking of thecorridors at the Slade and the fancy-dress dance next week. She hadnothing to wear. 

They are real, thought Fanny Elmer, setting her feet on the mantelpiece. Some people are. Nick perhaps, only he was so stupid. And women never--except Miss Sargent, but she went off at lunch-time and gave herselfairs. There they sat quietly of a night reading, she thought. Not goingto music-halls; not looking in at shop windows; not wearing each other'sclothes, like Robertson who had worn her shawl, and she had worn hiswaistcoat, which Jacob could only do very awkwardly; for he liked TomJones. 

There it lay on her lap, in double columns, price three and sixpence;the mystic book in which Henry Fielding ever so many years ago rebukedFanny Elmer for feasting on scarlet, in perfect prose, Jacob said. Forhe never read modern novels. He liked Tom Jones. 

"I do like Tom Jones, " said Fanny, at five-thirty that same day early inApril when Jacob took out his pipe in the arm-chair opposite. 

Alas, women lie! But not Clara Durrant. A flawless mind; a candidnature; a virgin chained to a rock (somewhere off Lowndes Square)eternally pouring out tea for old men in white waistcoats, blue-eyed, looking you straight in the face, playing Bach. Of all women, Jacobhonoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, withdowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson saidto the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferableoutrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature--or words tothat effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fannylaid down Tom Jones. 

She stitched or knitted. 

"What's that?" asked Jacob. 

"For the dance at the Slade. "

And she fetched her head-dress; her trousers; her shoes with redtassels. What should she wear?

"I shall be in Paris, " said Jacob. 

And what is the point of fancy-dress dances? thought Fanny. You meet thesame people; you wear the same clothes; Mangin gets drunk; Florinda sitson his knee. She flirts outrageously--with Nick Bramham just now. 

"In Paris?" said Fanny. 

"On my way to Greece, " he replied. 

For, he said, there is nothing so detestable as London in May. 

He would forget her. 

A sparrow flew past the window trailing a straw--a straw from a stackstood by a barn in a farmyard. The old brown spaniel snuffs at the basefor a rat. Already the upper branches of the elm trees are blotted withnests. The chestnuts have flirted their fans. And the butterflies areflaunting across the rides in the Forest. Perhaps the Purple Emperor isfeasting, as Morris says, upon a mass of putrid carrion at the base ofan oak tree. 

Fanny thought it all came from Tom Jones. He could go alone with a bookin his pocket and watch the badgers. He would take a train at eight-thirty and walk all night. He saw fire-flies, and brought back glow-worms in pill-boxes. He would hunt with the New Forest Staghounds. Itall came from Tom Jones; and he would go to Greece with a book in hispocket and forget her. 

She fetched her hand-glass. There was her face. And suppose one wreathedJacob in a turban? There was his face. She lit the lamp. But as thedaylight came through the window only half was lit up by the lamp. Andthough he looked terrible and magnificent and would chuck the Forest, hesaid, and come to the Slade, and be a Turkish knight or a Roman emperor(and he let her blacken his lips and clenched his teeth and scowled inthe glass), still--there lay Tom Jones. 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Archer, " said Mrs. Flanders with that tenderness which mothers so oftendisplay towards their eldest sons, "will be at Gibraltar to-morrow. "

The post for which she was waiting (strolling up Dods Hill while therandom church bells swung a hymn tune about her head, the clock strikingfour straight through the circling notes; the glass purpling under astorm-cloud; and the two dozen houses of the village cowering, infinitely humble, in company under a leaf of shadow), the post, withall its variety of messages, envelopes addressed in bold hands, inslanting hands, stamped now with English stamps, again with Colonialstamps, or sometimes hastily dabbed with a yellow bar, the post wasabout to scatter a myriad messages over the world. Whether we gain ornot by this habit of profuse communication it is not for us to say. Butthat letter-writing is practised mendaciously nowadays, particularly byyoung men travelling in foreign parts, seems likely enough. 

For example, take this scene. 

Here was Jacob Flanders gone abroad and staying to break his journey inParis. (Old Miss Birkbeck, his mother's cousin, had died last June andleft him a hundred pounds. )

"You needn't repeat the whole damned thing over again, Cruttendon, " saidMallinson, the little bald painter who was sitting at a marble table, splashed with coffee and ringed with wine, talking very fast, andundoubtedly more than a little drunk. 

"Well, Flanders, finished writing to your lady?" said Cruttendon, asJacob came and took his seat beside them, holding in his hand anenvelope addressed to Mrs. Flanders, near Scarborough, England. 

"Do you uphold Velasquez?" said Cruttendon. 

"By God, he does, " said Mallinson. 

"He always gets like this, " said Cruttendon irritably. 

Jacob looked at Mallinson with excessive composure. 

"I'll tell you the three greatest things that were ever written in thewhole of literature, " Cruttendon burst out. "'Hang there like fruit mysoul. '" he began. ... 

"Don't listen to a man who don't like Velasquez, " said Mallinson. 

"Adolphe, don't give Mr. Mallinson any more wine, " said Cruttendon. 

"Fair play, fair play, " said Jacob judicially. "Let a man get drunk ifhe likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. 'Hang there like fruit my soul, '" he began quoting, in a musicalrhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. "The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon!" he exclaimed as the wine washed over the rim. 

"'Hang there like fruit my soul, '" Cruttendon and Jacob both began againat the same moment, and both burst out laughing. 

"Curse these flies, " said Mallinson, flicking at his bald head. "What dothey take me for?"

"Something sweet-smelling, " said Cruttendon. 

"Shut up, Cruttendon, " said Jacob. "The fellow has no manners, " heexplained to Mallinson very politely. "Wants to cut people off theirdrink. Look here. I want grilled bone. What's the French for grilledbone? Grilled bone, Adolphe. Now you juggins, don't you understand?"

"And I'll tell you, Flanders, the second most beautiful thing in thewhole of literature, " said Cruttendon, bringing his feet down on to thefloor, and leaning right across the table, so that his face almosttouched Jacob's face. 

"'Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, '" Mallinson interrupted, strumming his fingers on the table. "The most ex-qui-sitely beautifulthing in the whole of literature. ... Cruttendon is a very good fellow, "he remarked confidentially. "But he's a bit of a fool. " And he jerkedhis head forward. 

Well, not a word of this was ever told to Mrs. Flanders; nor whathappened when they paid the bill and left the restaurant, and walkedalong the Boulevard Raspaille. 

Then here is another scrap of conversation; the time about eleven in themorning; the scene a studio; and the day Sunday. 

"I tell you, Flanders, " said Cruttendon, "I'd as soon have one ofMallinson's little pictures as a Chardin. And when I say that ... " hesqueezed the tail of an emaciated tube ... "Chardin was a great swell.... He sells 'em to pay his dinner now. But wait till the dealers gethold of him. A great swell--oh, a very great swell. "

"It's an awfully pleasant life, " said Jacob, "messing away up here. Still, it's a stupid art, Cruttendon. " He wandered off across the room. "There's this man, Pierre Louys now. " He took up a book. 

"Now my good sir, are you going to settle down?" said Cruttendon. 

"That's a solid piece of work, " said Jacob, standing a canvas on achair. 

"Oh, that I did ages ago, " said Cruttendon, looking over his shoulder. 

"You're a pretty competent painter in my opinion, " said Jacob after atime. 

"Now if you'd like to see what I'm after at the present moment, " saidCruttendon, putting a canvas before Jacob. "There. That's it. That'smore like it. That's ... " he squirmed his thumb in a circle round a lampglobe painted white. 

"A pretty solid piece of work, " said Jacob, straddling his legs in frontof it. "But what I wish you'd explain ... "

Miss Jinny Carslake, pale, freckled, morbid, came into the room. 

"Oh Jinny, here's a friend. Flanders. An Englishman. Wealthy. Highlyconnected. Go on, Flanders. ... "

Jacob said nothing. 

"It's THAT--that's not right, " said Jinny Carslake. 

"No, " said Cruttendon decidedly. "Can't be done. "

He took the canvas off the chair and stood it on the floor with its backto them. 

"Sit down, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Carslake comes from your part ofthe world, Flanders. From Devonshire. Oh, I thought you said Devonshire. Very well. She's a daughter of the church too. The black sheep of thefamily. Her mother writes her such letters. I say--have you one aboutyou? It's generally Sundays they come. Sort of church-bell effect, youknow. "

"Have you met all the painter men?" said Jinny. "Was Mallinson drunk? Ifyou go to his studio he'll give you one of his pictures. I say, Teddy... "

"Half a jiff, " said Cruttendon. "What's the season of the year?" Helooked out of the window. 

"We take a day off on Sundays, Flanders. "

"Will he ... " said Jinny, looking at Jacob. "You ... "

"Yes, he'll come with us, " said Cruttendon. 

And then, here is Versailles. Jinny stood on the stone rim and leantover the pond, clasped by Cruttendon's arms or she would have fallen in. "There! There!" she cried. "Right up to the top!" Some sluggish, sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip hercrumbs. "You look, " she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling whitewater, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spreaditself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All thewater was puckered with drops. A blue air-ball gently bumped thesurface. How all the nurses and children and old men and young crowdedto the edge, leant over and waved their sticks! The little girl ranstretching her arms towards her air-ball, but it sank beneath thefountain. 

Edward Cruttendon, Jinny Carslake, and Jacob Flanders walked in a rowalong the yellow gravel path; got on to the grass; so passed under thetrees; and came out at the summer-house where Marie Antoinette used todrink chocolate. In went Edward and Jinny, but Jacob waited outside, sitting on the handle of his walking-stick. Out they came again. 

"Well?" said Cruttendon, smiling at Jacob. 

Jinny waited; Edward waited; and both looked at Jacob. 

"Well?" said Jacob, smiling and pressing both hands on his stick. 

"Come along, " he decided; and started off. The others followed him, smiling. 

And then they went to the little cafe in the by-street where people sitdrinking coffee, watching the soldiers, meditatively knocking ashes intotrays. 

"But he's quite different, " said Jinny, folding her hands over the topof her glass. "I don't suppose you know what Ted means when he says athing like that, " she said, looking at Jacob. "But I do. Sometimes Icould kill myself. Sometimes he lies in bed all day long--just liesthere. ... I don't want you right on the table"; she waved her hands. Swollen iridescent pigeons were waddling round their feet. 

"Look at that woman's hat, " said Cruttendon. "How do they come to thinkof it? ... No, Flanders, I don't think I could live like you. When onewalks down that street opposite the British Museum--what's it called?--that's what I mean. It's all like that. Those fat women--and the manstanding in the middle of the road as if he were going to have a fit... "

"Everybody feeds them, " said Jinny, waving the pigeons away. "They'restupid old things. "

"Well, I don't know, " said Jacob, smoking his cigarette. "There's St. Paul's. "

"I mean going to an office, " said Cruttendon. 

"Hang it all, " Jacob expostulated. 

"But you don't count, " said Jinny, looking at Cruttendon. "You're mad. Imean, you just think of painting. "

"Yes, I know. I can't help it. I say, will King George give way aboutthe peers?"

"He'll jolly well have to, " said Jacob. 

"There!" said Jinny. "He really knows. "

"You see, I would if I could, " said Cruttendon, "but I simply can't. "

"I THINK I could, " said Jinny. "Only, it's all the people one dislikeswho do it. At home, I mean. They talk of nothing else. Even people likemy mother. "

"Now if I came and lived here---" said Jacob. "What's my share, Cruttendon? Oh, very well. Have it your own way. Those silly birds, directly one wants them--they've flown away. "

And finally under the arc lamps in the Gare des Invalides, with one ofthose queer movements which are so slight yet so definite, which maywound or pass unnoticed but generally inflict a good deal of discomfort, Jinny and Cruttendon drew together; Jacob stood apart. They had toseparate. Something must be said. Nothing was said. A man wheeled atrolley past Jacob's legs so near that he almost grazed them. When Jacobrecovered his balance the other two were turning away, though Jinnylooked over her shoulder, and Cruttendon, waving his hand, disappearedlike the very great genius that he was. 

No--Mrs. Flanders was told none of this, though Jacob felt, it is safeto say, that nothing in the world was of greater importance; and as forCruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most remarkable people he hadever met--being of course unable to foresee how it fell out in thecourse of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had thereforeto live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom bythis time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with anovelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, insolitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the Americanpainter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her inpensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinarypebbles picked off the road. But if you look at them steadily, she says, multiplicity becomes unity, which is somehow the secret of life, thoughit does not prevent her from following the macaroni as it goes round thetable, and sometimes, on spring nights, she makes the strangestconfidences to shy young Englishmen. 

Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he couldmake no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as forwriting it down---

"Jacob's letters are so like him, " said Mrs. Jarvis, folding the sheet. 

"Indeed he seems to be having ... " said Mrs. Flanders, and paused, forshe was cutting out a dress and had to straighten the pattern, "... Avery gay time. "

Mrs. Jarvis thought of Paris. At her back the window was open, for itwas a mild night; a calm night; when the moon seemed muffled and theapple trees stood perfectly still. 

"I never pity the dead, " said Mrs. Jarvis, shifting the cushion at herback, and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did nothear, for her scissors made so much noise on the table. 

"They are at rest, " said Mrs. Jarvis. "And we spend our days doingfoolish unnecessary things without knowing why. "

Mrs. Jarvis was not liked in the village. 

"You never walk at this time of night?" she asked Mrs. Flanders. 

"It is certainly wonderfully mild, " said Mrs. Flanders. 

Yet it was years since she had opened the orchard gate and gone out onDods Hill after dinner. 

"It is perfectly dry, " said Mrs. Jarvis, as they shut the orchard doorand stepped on to the turf. 

"I shan't go far, " said Betty Flanders. "Yes, Jacob will leave Paris onWednesday. "

"Jacob was always my friend of the three, " said Mrs. Jarvis. 

"Now, my dear, I am going no further, " said Mrs. Flanders. They hadclimbed the dark hill and reached the Roman camp. 

The rampart rose at their feet--the smooth circle surrounding the campor the grave. How many needles Betty Flanders had lost there; and hergarnet brooch. 

"It is much clearer than this sometimes, " said Mrs. Jarvis, standingupon the ridge. There were no clouds, and yet there was a haze over thesea, and over the moors. The lights of Scarborough flashed, as if awoman wearing a diamond necklace turned her head this way and that. 

"How quiet it is!" said Mrs. Jarvis. 

Mrs. Flanders rubbed the turf with her toe, thinking of her garnetbrooch. 

Mrs. Jarvis found it difficult to think of herself to-night. It was socalm. There was no wind; nothing racing, flying, escaping. Black shadowsstood still over the silver moors. The furze bushes stood perfectlystill. Neither did Mrs. Jarvis think of God. There was a church behindthem, of course. The church clock struck ten. Did the strokes reach thefurze bush, or did the thorn tree hear them?

Mrs. Flanders was stooping down to pick up a pebble. Sometimes people dofind things, Mrs. Jarvis thought, and yet in this hazy moonlight it wasimpossible to see anything, except bones, and little pieces of chalk. 

"Jacob bought it with his own money, and then I brought Mr. Parker up tosee the view, and it must have dropped--" Mrs. Flanders murmured. 

Did the bones stir, or the rusty swords? Was Mrs. Flanders's twopenny-halfpenny brooch for ever part of the rich accumulation? and if all theghosts flocked thick and rubbed shoulders with Mrs. Flanders in thecircle, would she not have seemed perfectly in her place, a live Englishmatron, growing stout?

The clock struck the quarter. 

The frail waves of sound broke among the stiff gorse and the hawthorntwigs as the church clock divided time into quarters. 

Motionless and broad-backed the moors received the statement "It isfifteen minutes past the hour, " but made no answer, unless a bramblestirred. 

Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, "I am Bertha Ruck, " "I am Tom Gage. " And they saywhich day of the year they died, and the New Testament says somethingfor them, very proud, very emphatic, or consoling. 

The moors accept all that too. 

The moonlight falls like a pale page upon the church wall, and illuminesthe kneeling family in the niche, and the tablet set up in 1780 to theSquire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God--so themeasured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could imposeitself upon time and the open air. 

Now a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes. 

Often, even at night, the church seems full of people. The pews are wornand greasy, and the cassocks in place, and the hymn-books on the ledges. It is a ship with all its crew aboard. The timbers strain to hold thedead and the living, the ploughmen, the carpenters, the fox-huntinggentlemen and the farmers smelling of mud and brandy. Their tongues jointogether in syllabling the sharp-cut words, which for ever slice asundertime and the broad-backed moors. Plaint and belief and elegy, despairand triumph, but for the most part good sense and jolly indifference, gotrampling out of the windows any time these five hundred years. 

Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, "How quiet itis!" Quiet at midday, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet inthe afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor isperfectly quiet. 

A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. Aleaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposesin the camp in the hazy moonlight. 

"... And, " said Mrs. Flanders, straightening her back, "I never caredfor Mr. Parker. "

"Neither did I, " said Mrs. Jarvis. They began to walk home. 

But their voices floated for a little above the camp. The moonlightdestroyed nothing. The moor accepted everything. Tom Gage cries aloud solong as his tombstone endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty Flanders's darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch. Andsometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to hoard theselittle treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight when no one speaks orgallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish tovex the moor with questions--what? and why?

The church clock, however, strikes twelve. 

CHAPTER TWELVE

The water fell off a ledge like lead--like a chain with thick whitelinks. The train ran out into a steep green meadow, and Jacob sawstriped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy. 

A motor car full of Italian officers ran along the flat road and kept upwith the train, raising dust behind it. There were trees laced togetherwith vines--as Virgil said. Here was a station; and a tremendous leave-taking going on, with women in high yellow boots and odd pale boys inringed socks. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. Itwas the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then atMilan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figuresover the roofs. 

These Italian carriages get damnably hot with the afternoon sun on them, and the chances are that before the engine has pulled to the top of thegorge the clanking chain will have broken. Up, up, up, it goes, like atrain on a scenic railway. Every peak is covered with sharp trees, andamazing white villages are crowded on ledges. There is always a whitetower on the very summit, flat red-frilled roofs, and a sheer dropbeneath. It is not a country in which one walks after tea. For one thingthere is no grass. A whole hillside will be ruled with olive trees. Already in April the earth is clotted into dry dust between them. Andthere are neither stiles nor footpaths, nor lanes chequered with theshadows of leaves nor eighteenth-century inns with bow-windows, whereone eats ham and eggs. Oh no, Italy is all fierceness, bareness, exposure, and black priests shuffling along the roads. It is strange, too, how you never get away from villas. 

Still, to be travelling on one's own with a hundred pounds to spend is afine affair. And if his money gave out, as it probably would, he wouldgo on foot. He could live on bread and wine--the wine in straw bottles--for after doing Greece he was going to knock off Rome. The Romancivilization was a very inferior affair, no doubt. But Bonamy talked alot of rot, all the same. "You ought to have been in Athens, " he wouldsay to Bonamy when he got back. "Standing on the Parthenon, " he wouldsay, or "The ruins of the Coliseum suggest some fairly sublimereflections, " which he would write out at length in letters. It mightturn to an essay upon civilization. A comparison between the ancientsand moderns, with some pretty sharp hits at Mr. Asquith--something inthe style of Gibbon. 

A stout gentleman laboriously hauled himself in, dusty, baggy, slungwith gold chains, and Jacob, regretting that he did not come of theLatin race, looked out of the window. 

It is a strange reflection that by travelling two days and nights youare in the heart of Italy. Accidental villas among olive trees appear;and men-servants watering the cactuses. Black victorias drive in betweenpompous pillars with plaster shields stuck to them. It is at oncemomentary and astonishingly intimate--to be displayed before the eyes ofa foreigner. And there is a lonely hill-top where no one ever comes, andyet it is seen by me who was lately driving down Piccadilly on anomnibus. And what I should like would be to get out among the fields, sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth--Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes. 

Jacob heard them crying strange names at railway stations through thenight. The train stopped and he heard frogs croaking close by, and hewrinkled back the blind cautiously and saw a vast strange marsh allwhite in the moonlight. The carriage was thick with cigar smoke, whichfloated round the globe with the green shade on it. The Italiangentleman lay snoring with his boots off and his waistcoat unbuttoned.... And all this business of going to Greece seemed to Jacob anintolerable weariness--sitting in hotels by oneself and looking atmonuments--he'd have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant.... "O--h, " Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front ofhim and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him toget something--the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and going off to have a wash. 

So Jacob sat up, and saw a lean Italian sportsman with a gun walkingdown the road in the early morning light, and the whole idea of theParthenon came upon him in a clap. 

"By Jove!" he thought, "we must be nearly there!" and he stuck his headout of the window and got the air full in his face. 

 It is highly exasperating that twenty-five people of your acquaintanceshould be able to say straight off something very much to the pointabout being in Greece, while for yourself there is a stopper upon allemotions whatsoever. For after washing at the hotel at Patras, Jacob hadfollowed the tram lines a mile or so out; and followed them a mile or soback; he had met several droves of turkeys; several strings of donkeys;had got lost in back streets; had read advertisements of corsets and ofMaggi's consomme; children had trodden on his toes; the place smelt ofbad cheese; and he was glad to find himself suddenly come out oppositehis hotel. There was an old copy of the Daily Mail lying among coffee-cups; which he read. But what could he do after dinner?

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are withoutour astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, havinggiven up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much moreprobably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluousimagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an unclewho was last heard of--poor man--in Rangoon. He will never come back anymore. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at thatfor a head (they say)--nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows--everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs andarms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development--the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greekscould paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon;then Euripides. One day--that was an occasion, by God--what people havesaid appears to have sense in it; "the Greek spirit"; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that anyGreek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have beenbrought up in an illusion. 

Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mailcrumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom. 

"But it's the way we're brought up, " he went on. 

And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be doneabout it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man aboutto be executed. Clara Durrant had left him at a party to talk to anAmerican called Pilchard. And he had come all the way to Greece and lefther. They wore evening-dresses, and talked nonsense--what damnednonsense--and he put out his hand for the Globe Trotter, aninternational magazine which is supplied free of charge to theproprietors of hotels. 

In spite of its ramshackle condition modern Greece is highly advanced inthe electric tramway system, so that while Jacob sat in the hotelsitting-room the trams clanked, chimed, rang, rang, rang imperiously toget the donkeys out of the way, and one old woman who refused to budge, beneath the windows. The whole of civilization was being condemned. 

The waiter was quite indifferent to that too. Aristotle, a dirty man, carnivorously interested in the body of the only guest now occupying theonly arm-chair, came into the room ostentatiously, put something down, put something straight, and saw that Jacob was still there. 

"I shall want to be called early to-morrow, " said Jacob, over hisshoulder. "I am going to Olympia. "

This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is amodern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for thematter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. Hewould go into Parliament and make fine speeches--but what use are finespeeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in ourveins--of happiness and unhappiness. That respectability and eveningparties where one has to dress, and wretched slums at the back of Gray'sInn--something solid, immovable, and grotesque--is at the back of it, Jacob thought probable. But then there was the British Empire which wasbeginning to puzzle him; nor was he altogether in favour of giving HomeRule to Ireland. What did the Daily Mail say about that?

For he had grown to be a man, and was about to be immersed in things--asindeed the chambermaid, emptying his basin upstairs, fingering keys, studs, pencils, and bottles of tabloids strewn on the dressing-table, was aware. 

That he had grown to be a man was a fact that Florinda knew, as she kneweverything, by instinct. 

And Betty Flanders even now suspected it, as she read his letter, postedat Milan, "Telling me, " she complained to Mrs. Jarvis, "really nothingthat I want to know"; but she brooded over it. 

Fanny Elmer felt it to desperation. For he would take his stick and hishat and would walk to the window, and look perfectly absent-minded andvery stern too, she thought. 

"I am going, " he would say, "to cadge a meal of Bonamy. "

"Anyhow, I can drown myself in the Thames, " Fanny cried, as she hurriedpast the Foundling Hospital. 

"But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted, " Jacob said to himself, lookingabout for something else to read. And he sighed again, being indeed soprofoundly gloomy that gloom must have been lodged in him to cloud himat any moment, which was odd in a man who enjoyed things so, was notmuch given to analysis, but was horribly romantic, of course, Bonamythought, in his rooms in Lincoln's Inn. 

"He will fall in love, " thought Bonamy. "Some Greek woman with astraight nose. "

It was to Bonamy that Jacob wrote from Patras--to Bonamy who couldn'tlove a woman and never read a foolish book. 

There are very few good books after all, for we can't count profusehistories, travels in mule carts to discover the sources of the Nile, orthe volubility of fiction. 

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I likesentences that don't budge though armies cross them. I like words to behard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of thosewhose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw upthe window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear ashout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature. That was not Bonamy's way at all. That his taste in literature affectedhis friendships, and made him silent, secretive, fastidious, and onlyquite at his ease with one or two young men of his own way of thinking, was the charge against him. 

But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking--farfrom it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the tableand falling into thought about Jacob's character, not for the firsttime. 

The trouble was this romantic vein in him. "But mixed with the stupiditywhich leads him into these absurd predicaments, " thought Bonamy, "thereis something--something"--he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than ofany one in the world. 

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets. Therehe saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people ofthe lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling intogroups and gesticulating with their hands. Their lack of concern for himwas not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction--itwas not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are. 

Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men weresitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remainedgloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to bealone; out of England; on one's own; cut off from the whole thing. Thereare very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them bluesea in triangular spaces. A little like the Cornish coast. Well now, togo walking by oneself all day--to get on to that track and follow it upbetween the bushes--or are they small trees?--to the top of thatmountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity--

"Yes, " said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, "let's look at the map. "Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. Togallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earthspin; to have--positively--a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang--there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us prettyoften. 

The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window atOlympia. 

"I am full of love for every one, " thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, "--for the poor most of all--for the peasants coming back in the eveningwith their burdens. And everything is soft and vague and very sad. It issad, it is sad. But everything has meaning, " thought Sandra WentworthWilliams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted. "One must love everything. "

She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling--stories byTchekov--as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel atOlympia. How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty. The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls. The inevitablecompromise. She seemed to have grasped something. She would write itdown. And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leanther chin in her hands and thought of the peasants, of suffering, of herown beauty, of the inevitable compromise, and of how she would write itdown. Nor did Evan Williams say anything brutal, banal, or foolish whenhe shut his book and put it away to make room for the plates of soupwhich were now being placed before them. Only his drooping bloodhoundeyes and his heavy sallow cheeks expressed his melancholy tolerance, hisconviction that though forced to live with circumspection anddeliberation he could never possibly achieve any of those objects which, as he knew, are the only ones worth pursuing. His consideration wasflawless; his silence unbroken. 

"Everything seems to mean so much, " said Sandra. But with the sound ofher own voice the spell was broken. She forgot the peasants. Only thereremained with her a sense of her own beauty, and in front, luckily, there was a looking-glass. 

"I am very beautiful, " she thought. 

She shifted her hat slightly. Her husband saw her looking in the glass;and agreed that beauty is important; it is an inheritance; one cannotignore it. But it is a barrier; it is in fact rather a bore. So he drankhis soup; and kept his eyes fixed upon the window. 

"Quails, " said Mrs. Wentworth Williams languidly. "And then goat, Isuppose; and then... "

"Caramel custard presumably, " said her husband in the same cadence, withhis toothpick out already. 

She laid her spoon upon her plate, and her soup was taken away halffinished. Never did she do anything without dignity; for hers was theEnglish type which is so Greek, save that villagers have touched theirhats to it, the vicarage reveres it; and upper-gardeners and under-gardeners respectfully straighten their backs as she comes down thebroad terrace on Sunday morning, dallying at the stone urns with thePrime Minister to pick a rose--which, perhaps, she was trying to forget, as her eye wandered round the dining-room of the inn at Olympia, seekingthe window where her book lay, where a few minutes ago she haddiscovered something--something very profound it had been, about loveand sadness and the peasants. 

But it was Evan who sighed; not in despair nor indeed in rebellion. But, being the most ambitious of men and temperamentally the most sluggish, he had accomplished nothing; had the political history of England at hisfinger-ends, and living much in company with Chatham, Pitt, Burke, andCharles James Fox could not help contrasting himself and his age withthem and theirs. "Yet there never was a time when great men are moreneeded, " he was in the habit of saying to himself, with a sigh. Here hewas picking his teeth in an inn at Olympia. He had done. But Sandra'seyes wandered. 

"Those pink melons are sure to be dangerous, " he said gloomily. And ashe spoke the door opened and in came a young man in a grey check suit. 

"Beautiful but dangerous, " said Sandra, immediately talking to herhusband in the presence of a third person. ("Ah, an English boy ontour, " she thought to herself. )

And Evan knew all that too. 

Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her. Very pleasant, he thought, tohave affairs. But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was fivefeet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his ownpersonality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, hesighed), it was useless. He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob andasked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether hehad come straight out from England. 

"How very English!" Sandra laughed when the waiter told them nextmorning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain. "I am sure he asked you for a bath?" at which the waiter shook his head, and said that he would ask the manager. 

"You do not understand, " laughed Sandra. "Never mind. "

 Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyedhimself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole ofhis life. 

But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like tosee the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on theterrace smoking--and how could he refuse that man's cigar?) whether he'dseen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whetherhe read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had tosacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?

"And now, " wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, "I shall have to readher cursed book"--her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him. 

Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities. 

There is something absolute in us which despises qualification. It isthis which is teased and twisted in society. People come together in aroom. "So delighted, " says somebody, "to meet you, " and that is a lie. And then: "I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, Ithink, as one gets older. " For women are always, always, always talkingabout what one feels, and if they say "as one gets older, " they mean youto reply with something quite off the point. 

Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble forthe theatre. It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday. The wildred cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling fromclump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes. Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored withan august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe. 

Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made himuneasy--when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margatefisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral. You couldn't make himunderstand a thing when he was in a mood like that. One had better leavehim alone. He was dull. He was apt to be grumpy. 

He was up very early, looking at the statues with his Baedeker. 

Sandra Wentworth Williams, ranging the world before breakfast in questof adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright--Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on alevel with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was allin his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out ofthe Museum and left her. 

Still, a lady of fashion travels with more than one dress, and if whitesuits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, ablack hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she wasarranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked. With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemedto watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemedto notice how the hill changed from blue to black, seemed todiscriminate between truth and falsehood, Jacob thought, and crossed hislegs suddenly, observing the extreme shabbiness of his trousers. 

"But he is very distinguished looking, " Sandra decided. 

And Evan Williams, lying back in his chair with the paper on his knees, envied them. The best thing he could do would be to publish, withMacmillans, his monograph upon the foreign policy of Chatham. Butconfound this tumid, queasy feeling--this restlessness, swelling, andheat--it was jealousy! jealousy! jealousy! which he had sworn never tofeel again. 

"Come with us to Corinth, Flanders, " he said with more than his usualenergy, stopping by Jacob's chair. He was relieved by Jacob's reply, orrather by the solid, direct, if shy manner in which he said that hewould like very much to come with them to Corinth. 

"Here is a fellow, " thought Evan Williams, "who might do very well inpolitics. "

"I intend to come to Greece every year so long as I live, " Jacob wroteto Bonamy. "It is the only chance I can see of protecting oneself fromcivilization. "

"Goodness knows what he means by that, " Bonamy sighed. For as he neversaid a clumsy thing himself, these dark sayings of Jacob's made him feelapprehensive, yet somehow impressed, his own turn being all for thedefinite, the concrete, and the rational. 

Nothing could be much simpler than what Sandra said as she descended theAcro-Corinth, keeping to the little path, while Jacob strode overrougher ground by her side. She had been left motherless at the age offour; and the Park was vast. 

"One never seemed able to get out of it, " she laughed. Of course therewas the library, and dear Mr. Jones, and notions about things. "I usedto stray into the kitchen and sit upon the butler's knees, " she laughed, sadly though. 

Jacob thought that if he had been there he would have saved her; for shehad been exposed to great dangers, he felt, and, he thought to himself, "People wouldn't understand a woman talking as she talks. "

She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts. 

"Women like Fanny Elmer don't, " he thought. "What's-her-name Carslakedidn't; yet they pretend... "

Mrs. Williams said things straight out. He was surprised by his ownknowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than onethought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had knownhimself before. 

Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and downhill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishinglyclean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparklingdeep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which arescattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees andsometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between theknuckles and the little hairs stood upright. Sandra rode opposite, dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air. 

"Heartless!" thought Evan (which was untrue). 

"Brainless!" he suspected (and that was not true either). "Still... !" Heenvied her. 

When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found. Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance. Poor old Bonamy!No; there was something queer about it. He could not write to Bonamy. 

"I shall go to Athens all the same, " he resolved, looking very set, withthis hook dragging in his side. 

The Williamses had already been to Athens. 

Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddestcombination, the most incongruous assortment. Now it is suburban; nowimmortal. Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays. Nowthe stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above theknee. No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazingafternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of theroyal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along thepitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed inbowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royalwheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raisesitself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellowcolumns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it. 

The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of theday firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the shipsin the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (thewaistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockingswhich they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to thechildren, and troop off down the hill back to their houses. 

There they are again, the pillars, the pediment, the Temple of Victoryand the Erechtheum, set on a tawny rock cleft with shadows, directly youunlatch your shutters in the morning and, leaning out, hear the clatter, the clamour, the whip cracking in the street below. There they are. 

The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, ofthe emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewheredissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quiteindependently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficientlyhumane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud--memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions--the Parthenon is separatefrom all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, forcenturies, you begin to connect the blaze (at midday the glare isdazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps itis beauty alone that is immortal. 

Added to this, compared with the blistered stucco, the new love songsrasped out to the strum of guitar and gramophone, and the mobile yetinsignificant faces of the street, the Parthenon is really astonishingin its silent composure; which is so vigorous that, far from beingdecayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast theentire world. 

"And the Greeks, like sensible men, never bothered to finish the backsof their statues, " said Jacob, shading his eyes and observing that theside of the figure which is turned away from view is left in the rough. 

He noted the slight irregularity in the line of the steps which "theartistic sense of the Greeks preferred to mathematical accuracy, " heread in his guide-book. 

He stood on the exact spot where the great statue of Athena used tostand, and identified the more famous landmarks of the scene beneath. 

In short he was accurate and diligent; but profoundly morose. Moreoverhe was pestered by guides. This was on Monday. 

But on Wednesday he wrote a telegram to Bonamy, telling him to come atonce. And then he crumpled it in his hand and threw it in the gutter. 

"For one thing he wouldn't come, " he thought. "And then I daresay thissort of thing wears off. " "This sort of thing" being that uneasy, painful feeling, something like selfishness--one wishes almost that thething would stop--it is getting more and more beyond what is possible--"If it goes on much longer I shan't be able to cope with it--but if someone else were seeing it at the same time--Bonamy is stuffed in his roomin Lincoln's Inn--oh, I say, damn it all, I say, "--the sight ofHymettus, Pentelicus, Lycabettus on one side, and the sea on the other, as one stands in the Parthenon at sunset, the sky pink feathered, theplain all colours, the marble tawny in one's eyes, is thus oppressive. Luckily Jacob had little sense of personal association; he seldomthought of Plato or Socrates in the flesh; on the other hand his feelingfor architecture was very strong; he preferred statues to pictures; andhe was beginning to think a great deal about the problems ofcivilization, which were solved, of course, so very remarkably by theancient Greeks, though their solution is no help to us. Then the hookgave a great tug in his side as he lay in bed on Wednesday night; and heturned over with a desperate sort of tumble, remembering SandraWentworth Williams with whom he was in love. 

Next day he climbed Pentelicus. 

The day after he went up to the Acropolis. The hour was early; the placealmost deserted; and possibly there was thunder in the air. But the sunstruck full upon the Acropolis. 

Jacob's intention was to sit down and read, and, finding a drum ofmarble conveniently placed, from which Marathon could be seen, and yetit was in the shade, while the Erechtheum blazed white in front of him, there he sat. And after reading a page he put his thumb in his book. Whynot rule countries in the way they should be ruled? And he read again. 

No doubt his position there overlooking Marathon somehow raised hisspirits. Or it may have been that a slow capacious brain has thesemoments of flowering. Or he had, insensibly, while he was abroad, gotinto the way of thinking about politics. 

And then looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations weregiven an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the Parthenon in ruins;yet there he was. 

(Ladies with green and white umbrellas passed through the courtyard--French ladies on their way to join their husbands in Constantinople. )

Jacob read on again. And laying the book on the ground he began, as ifinspired by what he had read, to write a note upon the importance ofhistory--upon democracy--one of those scribbles upon which the work of alifetime may be based; or again, it falls out of a book twenty yearslater, and one can't remember a word of it. It is a little painful. Ithad better be burnt. 

Jacob wrote; began to draw a straight nose; when all the French ladiesopening and shutting their umbrellas just beneath him exclaimed, lookingat the sky, that one did not know what to expect--rain or fine weather?

Jacob got up and strolled across to the Erechtheum. There are stillseveral women standing there holding the roof on their heads. Jacobstraightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the bodyfirst. These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with herkodak pointed at his head. Of course she jumped down, in spite of herage, her figure, and her tight boots--having, now that her daughter wasmarried, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob hadseen her. 

"Damn these women--damn these women!" he thought. And he went to fetchhis book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon. 

"How they spoil things, " he murmured, leaning against one of thepillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side. (As forthe weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was undercloud. )

"It is those damned women, " said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have beenshould never be. 

(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young menin the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon becomefathers of families and directors of banks. )

Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiouslyround him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked ratherfurtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on herhead. She reminded him of Sandra Wentworth Williams. He looked at her, then looked away. He looked at her, then looked away. He wasextraordinarily moved, and with the battered Greek nose in his head, with Sandra in his head, with all sorts of things in his head, off hestarted to walk right up to the top of Mount Hymettus, alone, in theheat. 

That very afternoon Bonamy went expressly to talk about Jacob to teawith Clara Durrant in the square behind Sloane Street where, on hotspring days, there are striped blinds over the front windows, singlehorses pawing the macadam outside the doors, and elderly gentlemen inyellow waistcoats ringing bells and stepping in very politely when themaid demurely replies that Mrs. Durrant is at home. 

Bonamy sat with Clara in the sunny front room with the barrel organpiping sweetly outside; the water-cart going slowly along spraying thepavement; the carriages jingling, and all the silver and chintz, brownand blue rugs and vases filled with green boughs, striped with tremblingyellow bars. 

The insipidity of what was said needs no illustration--Bonamy kept ongently returning quiet answers and accumulating amazement at anexistence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe (Mrs. Durrant meanwhile enunciating strident politics with Sir Somebody in theback room) until the virginity of Clara's soul appeared to him candid;the depths unknown; and he would have brought out Jacob's name had henot begun to feel positively certain that Clara loved him--and could donothing whatever. 

"Nothing whatever!" he exclaimed, as the door shut, and, for a man ofhis temperament, got a very queer feeling, as he walked through thepark, of carriages irresistibly driven; of flower beds uncompromisinglygeometrical; of force rushing round geometrical patterns in the mostsenseless way in the world. "Was Clara, " he thought, pausing to watchthe boys bathing in the Serpentine, "the silent woman?--would Jacobmarry her?"

But in Athens in the sunshine, in Athens, where it is almost impossibleto get afternoon tea, and elderly gentlemen who talk politics talk themall the other way round, in Athens sat Sandra Wentworth Williams, veiled, in white, her legs stretched in front of her, one elbow on thearm of the bamboo chair, blue clouds wavering and drifting from hercigarette. 

The orange trees which flourish in the Square of the Constitution, theband, the dragging of feet, the sky, the houses, lemon and rosecoloured--all this became so significant to Mrs. Wentworth Williamsafter her second cup of coffee that she began dramatizing the story ofthe noble and impulsive Englishwoman who had offered a seat in hercarriage to the old American lady at Mycenae (Mrs. Duggan)--notaltogether a false story, though it said nothing of Evan, standing firston one foot, then on the other, waiting for the women to stopchattering. 

"I am putting the life of Father Damien into verse, " Mrs. Duggan hadsaid, for she had lost everything--everything in the world, husband andchild and everything, but faith remained. 

Sandra, floating from the particular to the universal, lay back in atrance. 

The flight of time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternaldrudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief ballsof yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisseson lips that are to die; the world turning, turning in mazes of heat andsound--though to be sure there is the quiet evening with its lovelypallor, "For I am sensitive to every side of it, " Sandra thought, "andMrs. Duggan will write to me for ever, and I shall answer her letters. "Now the royal band marching by with the national flag stirred widerrings of emotion, and life became something that the courageous mountand ride out to sea on--the hair blown back (so she envisaged it, andthe breeze stirred slightly among the orange trees) and she herself wasemerging from silver spray--when she saw Jacob. He was standing in theSquare with a book under his arm looking vacantly about him. That he washeavily built and might become stout in time was a fact. 

But she suspected him of being a mere bumpkin. 

"There is that young man, " she said, peevishly, throwing away hercigarette, "that Mr. Flanders. "

"Where?" said Evan. "I don't see him. "

"Oh, walking away--behind the trees now. No, you can't see him. But weare sure to run into him, " which, of course, they did. 

But how far was he a mere bumpkin? How far was Jacob Flanders at the ageof twenty-six a stupid fellow? It is no use trying to sum people up. Onemust follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what isdone. Some, it is true, take ineffaceable impressions of character atonce. Others dally, loiter, and get blown this way and that. Kind oldladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A catwill always go to a good man, they say; but then, Mrs. Whitehorn, Jacob's landlady, loathed cats. 

There is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering ismuch overdone nowadays. After all, what does it matter--that Fanny Elmerwas all sentiment and sensation, and Mrs. Durrant hard as iron? thatClara, owing (so the character-mongers said) largely to her mother'sinfluence, never yet had the chance to do anything off her own bat, andonly to very observant eyes displayed deeps of feeling which werepositively alarming; and would certainly throw herself away upon someone unworthy of her one of these days unless, so the character-mongerssaid, she had a spark of her mother's spirit in her--was somehow heroic. But what a term to apply to Clara Durrant! Simple to a degree, othersthought her. And that is the very reason, so they said, why she attractsDick Bonamy--the young man with the Wellington nose. Now HE'S a darkhorse if you like. And there these gossips would suddenly pause. Obviously they meant to hint at his peculiar disposition--long rumouredamong them. 

"But sometimes it is precisely a woman like Clara that men of thattemperament need... " Miss Julia Eliot would hint. 

"Well, " Mr. Bowley would reply, "it may be so. "

For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff out theirvictims' characters till they are swollen and tender as the livers ofgeese exposed to a hot fire, they never come to a decision. 

"That young man, Jacob Flanders, " they would say, "so distinguishedlooking--and yet so awkward. " Then they would apply themselves to Jacoband vacillate eternally between the two extremes. He rode to hounds--after a fashion, for he hadn't a penny. 

"Did you ever hear who his father was?" asked Julia Eliot. 

"His mother, they say, is somehow connected with the Rocksbiers, "replied Mr. Bowley. 

"He doesn't overwork himself anyhow. "

"His friends are very fond of him. "

"Dick Bonamy, you mean?"

"No, I didn't mean that. It's evidently the other way with Jacob. He isprecisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for therest of his life. "

"Oh, Mr. Bowley, " said Mrs. Durrant, sweeping down upon them in herimperious manner, "you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece. "And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely and fetched strawberries. 

So we are driven back to see what the other side means--the men in clubsand Cabinets--when they say that character-drawing is a frivolousfireside art, a matter of pins and needles, exquisite outlines enclosingvacancy, flourishes, and mere scrawls. 

The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their stationsaccurately apart. At a given signal all the guns are trained on a targetwhich (the master gunner counts the seconds, watch in hand--at the sixthhe looks up) flames into splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen youngmen in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths ofthe sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery ofmachinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tinsoldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, throughfield glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate upand down like fragments of broken match-stick. 

These actions, together with the incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancellories, and houses of business, are the strokeswhich oar the world forward, they say. And they are dealt by men assmoothly sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. Butyou will observe that far from being padded to rotundity his face isstiff from force of will, and lean from the efforts of keeping it so. When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows straight fromshoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinctions. The buses punctually stop. 

It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. Theysay that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling throughtheir nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what welive by--this unseizable force. 

"Where are the men?" said old General Gibbons, looking round thedrawing-room, full as usual on Sunday afternoons of well-dressed people. "Where are the guns?"

Mrs. Durrant looked too. 

Clara, thinking that her mother wanted her, came in; then went outagain. 

They were talking about Germany at the Durrants, and Jacob (driven bythis unseizable force) walked rapidly down Hermes Street and ranstraight into the Williamses. 

"Oh!" cried Sandra, with a cordiality which she suddenly felt. And Evanadded, "What luck!"

The dinner which they gave him in the hotel which looks on to the Squareof the Constitution was excellent. Plated baskets contained fresh rolls. There was real butter. And the meat scarcely needed the disguise ofinnumerable little red and green vegetables glazed in sauce. 

It was strange, though. There were the little tables set out atintervals on the scarlet floor with the Greek King's monogram wrought inyellow. Sandra dined in her hat, veiled as usual. Evan looked this wayand that over his shoulder; imperturbable yet supple; and sometimessighed. It was strange. For they were English people come together inAthens on a May evening. Jacob, helping himself to this and that, answered intelligently, yet with a ring in his voice. 

The Williamses were going to Constantinople early next morning, theysaid. 

"Before you are up, " said Sandra. 

They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan orderedsomething--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind ofsolicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible. To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there atime when the country had more need of men. He sighed. 

"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra. 

"Yes, " said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evanspoke to the head waiter about calling them early. 

"It is astonishing, " said Jacob, in a gruff voice. 

Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded alittle too. 

"At half-past six then, " said Evan, coming towards them, looking as ifhe faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with theirbacks to the window. 

Sandra smiled at him. 

And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, inbroken half-sentences:

"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are youtoo tired?"

At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him, at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not thatshe would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, foranything he could do, cease its tortures. 

They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to theSquare of the Constitution. 

"Evan is happier alone, " said Sandra. "We have been separated from thenewspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what theywant.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... Whatimpression ... I think that you are changed. "

"You want to go to the Acropolis, " said Jacob. "Up here then. "

"One will remember it all one's life, " said Sandra. 

"Yes, " said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time. "

"This is more wonderful, " said Sandra, waving her hand. 

Jacob looked vaguely. 

"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time, " he said. "Youcouldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"

"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"

"There were some awful women this morning, " said Jacob. 

"Awful women?" Sandra echoed. 

"Frenchwomen. "

"But something very wonderful has happened, " said Sandra. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her. 

"Yes, " he said. 

"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You willfall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so mucholder. "

She was brushed off the pavement by parading men. 

"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked. 

"Let us go on, " she insisted. 

For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or wasit some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizonshe discerned it and could not rest. 

"You'd never get English people to sit out like this, " he said. 

"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or comewith us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly. 

"But then... "

Sandra sighed. 

"You must go to Delphi, of course, " she said. "But, " she asked herself, "what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I havemissed.... "

"You will get there about six in the evening, " she said. "You will seethe eagles. "

Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street cornerand yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet therewas something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extremedisillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it neednot come to him--this disillusionment from women in middle life. 

"The hotel is awful, " she said. "The last visitors had left their basinsfull of dirty water. There is always that, " she laughed. 

"The people one meets ARE beastly, " Jacob said. 

His excitement was clear enough. 

"Write and tell me about it, " she said. "And tell me what you feel andwhat you think. Tell me everything. "

The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound. 

"I should like to, awfully, " he said. 

"When we get back to London, we shall meet... "

"Yes. "

"I suppose they leave the gates open?" he asked. 

"We could climb them!" she answered wildly. 

Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the cloudspassed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;the trailing veils stayed and accumulated. 

It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where thestreets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electriclight. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the wavesbeing invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a fewlights. 

"I'd love to bring my brother, if I may, " Jacob murmured. 

"And then when your mother comes to London--, " said Sandra. 

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud musthave touched the waves and spattered them--the dolphins circling deeperand deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Seaof Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy. 

In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours thesand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then itpelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standingstiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle. 

Sandra's veils were swirled about her. 

"I will give you my copy, " said Jacob. "Here. Will you keep it?"

(The book was the poems of Donne. )

Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns--Paris--Constantinople--London--were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might bedistinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps insome southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The Englishsky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passedinto it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blewin at Betty Flanders's bedroom window, and the widow lady, raisingherself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but wouldfain ward off a little longer--oh, a little longer!--the oppression ofeternity. 

But to return to Jacob and Sandra. 

They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? Thecolumns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh onthem year after year; and of that what remains?

As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or thatwhen Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keepfor ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople. 

Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne's poemsupon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in theEnglish country house where Sally Duggan's Life of Father Damien inverse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve littlevolumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books andher eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into thearm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, forsometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swingacross the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. Shehad had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing tickedand Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, "What for?What for?"

"What for? What for?" Sandra would say, putting the book back, andstrolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwardswould be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roastmutton, by Sandra's sudden solicitude: "Are you happy, Miss Edwards?"--athing Cissy Edwards hadn't thought of for years. 

"What for? What for?" Jacob never asked himself any such questions, tojudge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by thedepth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young--a man. And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. Atforty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the thingshe liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might placebeside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare. 

But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of moodwhich forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any singleperson, or inspection of features. All faces--Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English--would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length thecolumns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids andSt. Peter's arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul's looms up. 

The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with theirinterpretation of the day's meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissentersof different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers, resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact--how thereis a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thinvoice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, thatcollects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawnsigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath--you can hear it from an openwindow even in the heart of London. 

But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing withhands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus inskeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped inflesh. 

"The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning, " says Mrs. Grandage, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian catstretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft roundpaws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a babyis deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while TomGrandage reads the golfing article in the "Times, " sips his coffee, wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatestauthority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. Theskeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the windrolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and BedfordSquare it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season), plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preservingthe room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said onthe staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of thealarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigsstir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runsrapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous withbreathing; elastic with filaments. 

Only here--in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square--eachinsect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of theforest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honeyis treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is theindescribable agitation of life. 

But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out intotulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills thegauze of the air and the grasses and pools. 

The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head ofgolden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey andstrawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburbantrains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces ofall the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints thelustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew. 

Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; uponall the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; whichhas dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stoodglass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such anarmoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbsengaged in the conduct of daily life is better than the old pageant ofarmies drawn out in battle array upon the plain. 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"The Height of the season, " said Bonamy. 

The sun had already blistered the paint on the backs of the green chairsin Hyde Park; peeled the bark off the plane trees; and turned the earthto powder and to smooth yellow pebbles. Hyde Park was circled, incessantly, by turning wheels. 

"The height of the season, " said Bonamy sarcastically. 

He was sarcastic because of Clara Durrant; because Jacob had come backfrom Greece very brown and lean, with his pockets full of Greek notes, which he pulled out when the chair man came for pence; because Jacob wassilent. 

"He has not said a word to show that he is glad to see me, " thoughtBonamy bitterly. 

The motor cars passed incessantly over the bridge of the Serpentine; theupper classes walked upright, or bent themselves gracefully over thepalings; the lower classes lay with their knees cocked up, flat on theirbacks; the sheep grazed on pointed wooden legs; small children ran downthe sloping grass, stretched their arms, and fell. 

"Very urbane, " Jacob brought out. 

"Urbane" on the lips of Jacob had mysteriously all the shapeliness of acharacter which Bonamy thought daily more sublime, devastating, terrificthan ever, though he was still, and perhaps would be for ever, barbaric, obscure. 

What superlatives! What adjectives! How acquit Bonamy of sentimentalityof the grossest sort; of being tossed like a cork on the waves; ofhaving no steady insight into character; of being unsupported by reason, and of drawing no comfort whatever from the works of the classics?

"The height of civilization, " said Jacob. 

He was fond of using Latin words. 

Magnanimity, virtue--such words when Jacob used them in talk with Bonamymeant that he took control of the situation; that Bonamy would playround him like an affectionate spaniel; and that (as likely as not) theywould end by rolling on the floor. 

"And Greece?" said Bonamy. "The Parthenon and all that?"

"There's none of this European mysticism, " said Jacob. 

"It's the atmosphere. I suppose, " said Bonamy. "And you went toConstantinople?"

"Yes, " said Jacob. 

Bonamy paused, moved a pebble; then darted in with the rapidity andcertainty of a lizard's tongue. 

"You are in love!" he exclaimed. 

Jacob blushed. 

The sharpest of knives never cut so deep. 

As for responding, or taking the least account of it, Jacob staredstraight ahead of him, fixed, monolithic--oh, very beautiful!--like aBritish Admiral, exclaimed Bonamy in a rage, rising from his seat andwalking off; waiting for some sound; none came; too proud to look back;walking quicker and quicker until he found himself gazing into motorcars and cursing women. Where was the pretty woman's face? Clara's--Fanny's--Florinda's? Who was the pretty little creature?

Not Clara Durrant. 

 The Aberdeen terrier must be exercised, and as Mr. Bowley was goingthat very moment--would like nothing better than a walk--they wenttogether, Clara and kind little Bowley--Bowley who had rooms in theAlbany, Bowley who wrote letters to the "Times" in a jocular vein aboutforeign hotels and the Aurora Borealis--Bowley who liked young peopleand walked down Piccadilly with his right arm resting on the boss of hisback. 

"Little demon!" cried Clara, and attached Troy to his chain. 

Bowley anticipated--hoped for--a confidence. Devoted to her mother, Clara sometimes felt her a little, well, her mother was so sure ofherself that she could not understand other people being--being--"asludicrous as I am, " Clara jerked out (the dog tugging her forwards). AndBowley thought she looked like a huntress and turned over in his mindwhich it should be--some pale virgin with a slip of the moon in herhair, which was a flight for Bowley. 

The colour was in her cheeks. To have spoken outright about her mother--still, it was only to Mr. Bowley, who loved her, as everybody must; butto speak was unnatural to her, yet it was awful to feel, as she had doneall day, that she MUST tell some one. 

"Wait till we cross the road, " she said to the dog, bending down. 

Happily she had recovered by that time. 

"She thinks so much about England, " she said. "She is so anxious---"

Bowley was defrauded as usual. Clara never confided in any one. 

"Why don't the young people settle it, eh?" he wanted to ask. "What'sall this about England?"--a question poor Clara could not have answered, since, as Mrs. Durrant discussed with Sir Edgar the policy of Sir EdwardGrey, Clara only wondered why the cabinet looked dusty, and Jacob hadnever come. Oh, here was Mrs. Cowley Johnson... 

And Clara would hand the pretty china teacups, and smile at thecompliment--that no one in London made tea so well as she did. 

"We get it at Brocklebank's, " she said, "in Cursitor Street. "

Ought she not to be grateful? Ought she not to be happy?

Especially since her mother looked so well and enjoyed so much talkingto Sir Edgar about Morocco, Venezuela, or some such place. 

"Jacob! Jacob!" thought Clara; and kind Mr. Bowley, who was ever so goodwith old ladies, looked; stopped; wondered whether Elizabeth wasn't tooharsh with her daughter; wondered about Bonamy, Jacob--which youngfellow was it?--and jumped up directly Clara said she must exerciseTroy. 

They had reached the site of the old Exhibition. They looked at thetulips. Stiff and curled, the little rods of waxy smoothness rose fromthe earth, nourished yet contained, suffused with scarlet and coralpink. Each had its shadow; each grew trimly in the diamond-shaped wedgeas the gardener had planned it. 

"Barnes never gets them to grow like that, " Clara mused; she sighed. 

"You are neglecting your friends, " said Bowley, as some one, going theother way, lifted his hat. She started; acknowledged Mr. Lionel Parry'sbow; wasted on him what had sprung for Jacob. 

("Jacob! Jacob!" she thought. )

"But you'll get run over if I let you go, " she said to the dog. 

"England seems all right, " said Mr. Bowley. 

The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full ofparasols and waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly, lightly observant. 

"'This statue was erected by the women of England... '" Clara read outwith a foolish little laugh. "Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!" Gallop--gallop--gallop--a horse galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; thepebbles spurted. 

"Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!" she cried, white, trembling, grippinghis arm, utterly unconscious, the tears coming. 

"Tut-tut!" said Mr. Bowley in his dressing-room an hour later. "Tut-tut!"--a comment that was profound enough, though inarticulatelyexpressed, since his valet was handing his shirt studs. 

Julia Eliot, too, had seen the horse run away, and had risen from herseat to watch the end of the incident, which, since she came of asporting family, seemed to her slightly ridiculous. Sure enough thelittle man came pounding behind with his breeches dusty; lookedthoroughly annoyed; and was being helped to mount by a policeman whenJulia Eliot, with a sardonic smile, turned towards the Marble Arch onher errand of mercy. It was only to visit a sick old lady who had knownher mother and perhaps the Duke of Wellington; for Julia shared the loveof her sex for the distressed; liked to visit death-beds; threw slippersat weddings; received confidences by the dozen; knew more pedigrees thana scholar knows dates, and was one of the kindliest, most generous, least continent of women. 

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had therapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, whenthe trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult ofthe present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, andthere rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showedthrough skirts and waistcoasts, and she saw people passing tragically todestruction. Yet, Heaven knows, Julia was no fool. A sharper woman at abargain did not exist. She was always punctual. The watch on her wristgave her twelve minutes and a half in which to reach Bruton Street. LadyCongreve expected her at five. 

The gilt clock at Verrey's was striking five. 

Florinda looked at it with a dull expression, like an animal. She lookedat the clock; looked at the door; looked at the long glass opposite;disposed her cloak; drew closer to the table, for she was pregnant--nodoubt about it, Mother Stuart said, recommending remedies, consultingfriends; sunk, caught by the heel, as she tripped so lightly over thesurface. 

Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and shesucked, through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, nowsoothed by the sweet taste. When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, evento the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them. Nickhitched his clothes together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair;sat down, to an ordeal, nervously. She looked at him; and set offlaughing; laughed--laughed--laughed. The young Swiss waiter, standingwith crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too. 

The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waitermust see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted his glass. 

"He's like Jacob, " said Florinda, looking at the newcomer. 

"The way he stares. " She stopped laughing. 

 Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust inHyde Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been theParthenon, or again a mathematical diagram. And why was the pebble soemphatically ground in at the corner? It was not to count his notes thathe took out a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandrahad written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before herand in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some momentin the dark on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed)mattered for ever. 

"He is, " she mused, "like that man in Moliere. "

She meant Alceste. She meant that he was severe. She meant that shecould deceive him. 

"Or could I not?" she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in thebookcase. "Jacob, " she went on, going to the window and looking over thespotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed underbeech trees, "Jacob would be shocked. "

The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing. Shekissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his. 

"HE'S a small boy, " she said, thinking of Jacob. 

And yet--Alceste?

 "What a nuisance you are!" Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one legand then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chairticket. 

"I expect the sheep have eaten it, " he said. "Why do you keep sheep?"

"Sorry to disturb you, sir, " said the ticket-collector, his hand deep inthe enormous pouch of pence. 

"Well, I hope they pay you for it, " said Jacob. "There you are. No. Youcan stick to it. Go and get drunk. "

He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, withconsiderable contempt for his species. 

Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublimemanner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs. Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten bythe schoolmaster. 

Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the batteredUlysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob's presence, enough to last her half a day. But this was wearing thin. And she wrotenow--poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face inadvertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody. But at breakfast (she shared roomswith a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and theprongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised thesevisions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she lacedher stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, forshe had loved too; and been a fool. 

"One's godmothers ought to have told one, " said Fanny, looking in at thewindow of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand--told one that it is nouse making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said itnow, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. 

"This is life. This is life, " said Fanny. 

"A very hard face, " thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of theglass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to beserved. "Girls look old so soon nowadays. "

The equator swam behind tears. 

"Piccadilly?" Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed tothe top. After all, he would, he must, come back to her. 

But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; ofjurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park. 

The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were cloggedomnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passingdown Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from betweenthe paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to theirfaith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look intothe sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind thegold letters of their creed. 

The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot. But the procession passed; the banners glittered--far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun toa smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street;and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues downWhitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, andthe large white clock of Westminster. 

Five strokes Big Ben intoned; Nelson received the salute. The wires ofthe Admiralty shivered with some far-away communication. A voice keptremarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag;entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted;said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador atConstantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall(Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorablegravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated, inscribed with the utterances of Kaisers, the statistics of ricefields, the growling of hundreds of work-people, plotting sedition in backstreets, or gathering in the Calcutta bazaars, or mustering their forcesin the uplands of Albania, where the hills are sand-coloured, and boneslie unburied. 

The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of typewritten sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase. 

His head--bald, red-veined, hollow-looking--represented all the heads inthe building. His head, with the amiable pale eyes, carried the burdenof knowledge across the street; laid it before his colleagues, who cameequally burdened; and then the sixteen gentlemen, lifting their pens orturning perhaps rather wearily in their chairs, decreed that the courseof history should shape itself this way or that way, being manfullydetermined, as their faces showed, to impose some coherency upon Rajahsand Kaisers and the muttering in bazaars, the secret gatherings, plainlyvisible in Whitehall, of kilted peasants in Albanian uplands; to controlthe course of events. 

Pitt and Chatham, Burke and Gladstone looked from side to side withfixed marble eyes and an air of immortal quiescence which perhaps theliving may have envied, the air being full of whistling and concussions, as the procession with its banners passed down Whitehall. Moreover, somewere troubled with dyspepsia; one had at that very moment cracked theglass of his spectacles; another spoke in Glasgow to-morrow; altogetherthey looked too red, fat, pale or lean, to be dealing, as the marbleheads had dealt, with the course of history. 

Timmy Durrant in his little room in the Admiralty, going to consult aBlue book, stopped for a moment by the window and observed the placardtied round the lamp-post. 

Miss Thomas, one of the typists, said to her friend that if the Cabinetwas going to sit much longer she should miss her boy outside the Gaiety. 

Timmy Durrant, returning with his Blue book under his arm, noticed alittle knot of people at the street corner; conglomerated as though oneof them knew something; and the others, pressing round him, looked up, looked down, looked along the street. What was it that he knew?

Timothy, placing the Blue book before him, studied a paper sent round bythe Treasury for information. Mr. Crawley, his fellow-clerk, impaled aletter on a skewer. 

Jacob rose from his chair in Hyde Park, tore his ticket to pieces, andwalked away. 

"Such a sunset, " wrote Mrs. Flanders in her letter to Archer atSingapore. "One couldn't make up one's mind to come indoors, " she wrote. "It seemed wicked to waste even a moment. "

The long windows of Kensington Palace flushed fiery rose as Jacob walkedaway; a flock of wild duck flew over the Serpentine; and the trees werestood against the sky, blackly, magnificently. 

"Jacob, " wrote Mrs. Flanders, with the red light on her page, "is hardat work after his delightful journey... "

"The Kaiser, " the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, "received me inaudience. "

"Now I know that face--" said the Reverend Andrew Floyd, coming out ofCarter's shop in Piccadilly, "but who the dickens--?" and he watchedJacob, turned round to look at him, but could not be sure--

"Oh, Jacob Flanders!" he remembered in a flash. 

But he was so tall; so unconscious; such a fine young fellow. 

"I gave him Byron's works, " Andrew Floyd mused, and started forward, asJacob crossed the road; but hesitated, and let the moment pass, and lostthe opportunity. 

Another procession, without banners, was blocking Long Acre. Carriages, with dowagers in amethyst and gentlemen spotted with carnations, intercepted cabs and motor-cars turned in the opposite direction, inwhich jaded men in white waistcoats lolled, on their way home toshrubberies and billiard-rooms in Putney and Wimbledon. 

Two barrel-organs played by the kerb, and horses coming out ofAldridge's with white labels on their buttocks straddled across the roadand were smartly jerked back. 

Mrs. Durrant, sitting with Mr. Wortley in a motor-car, was impatientlest they should miss the overture. 

But Mr. Wortley, always urbane, always in time for the overture, buttoned his gloves, and admired Miss Clara. 

"A shame to spend such a night in the theatre!" said Mrs. Durrant, seeing all the windows of the coachmakers in Long Acre ablaze. 

"Think of your moors!" said Mr. Wortley to Clara. 

"Ah! but Clara likes this better, " Mrs. Durrant laughed. 

"I don't know--really, " said Clara, looking at the blazing windows. Shestarted. 

She saw Jacob. 

"Who?" asked Mrs. Durrant sharply, leaning forward. 

But she saw no one. 

Under the arch of the Opera House large faces and lean ones, thepowdered and the hairy, all alike were red in the sunset; and, quickenedby the great hanging lamps with their repressed primrose lights, by thetramp, and the scarlet, and the pompous ceremony, some ladies looked fora moment into steaming bedrooms near by, where women with loose hairleaned out of windows, where girls--where children--(the long mirrorsheld the ladies suspended) but one must follow; one must not block theway. 

Clara's moors were fine enough. The Phoenicians slept under their piledgrey rocks; the chimneys of the old mines pointed starkly; early mothsblurred the heather-bells; cartwheels could be heard grinding on theroad far beneath; and the suck and sighing of the waves sounded gently, persistently, for ever. 

Shading her eyes with her hand Mrs. Pascoe stood in her cabbage-gardenlooking out to sea. Two steamers and a sailing-ship crossed each other;passed each other; and in the bay the gulls kept alighting on a log, rising high, returning again to the log, while some rode in upon thewaves and stood on the rim of the water until the moon blanched all towhiteness. 

Mrs. Pascoe had gone indoors long ago. 

But the red light was on the columns of the Parthenon, and the Greekwomen who were knitting their stockings and sometimes crying to a childto come and have the insects picked from its head were as jolly as sand-martins in the heat, quarrelling, scolding, suckling their babies, untilthe ships in the Piraeus fired their guns. 

The sound spread itself flat, and then went tunnelling its way withfitful explosions among the channels of the islands. 

Darkness drops like a knife over Greece. 

 "The guns?" said Betty Flanders, half asleep, getting out of bed andgoing to the window, which was decorated with a fringe of dark leaves. 

"Not at this distance, " she thought. "It is the sea. "

Again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women werebeating great carpets. There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sonsfighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? Was that someone moving downstairs? Rebecca with the toothache? No. The nocturnalwomen were beating great carpets. Her hens shifted slightly on theirperches. 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"He left everything just as it was, " Bonamy marvelled. "Nothingarranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did heexpect? Did he think he would come back?" he mused, standing in themiddle of Jacob's room. 

The eighteenth century has its distinction. These houses were built, say, a hundred and fifty years ago. The rooms are shapely, the ceilingshigh; over the doorways a rose or a ram's skull is carved in the wood. Even the panels, painted in raspberry-coloured paint, have theirdistinction. 

Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting-crop. 

"That seems to be paid, " he said. 

There were Sandra's letters. 

Mrs. Durrant was taking a party to Greenwich. 

Lady Rocksbier hoped for the pleasure.... 

Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; theflowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there. 

Bonamy crossed to the window. Pickford's van swung down the street. Theomnibuses were locked together at Mudie's corner. Engines throbbed, andcarters, jamming the brakes down, pulled their horses sharp up. A harshand unhappy voice cried something unintelligible. And then suddenly allthe leaves seemed to raise themselves. 

"Jacob! Jacob!" cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sankdown again. 

"Such confusion everywhere!" exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open thebedroom door. 

Bonamy turned away from the window. 

"What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?"

She held out a pair of Jacob's old shoes.