This Is the End by Stella Benson (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

Haven't you heard their high voices that were tuned to cut through the voice of the sea? Haven't you found their very wide, long-toed footprints in the sand? Have you walked blind through this world?"

"No," said Jay, "I remember. The women decorate their hair with seaweed, pink and green. I have watched them catch fish with their hands. I have watched them put their babies to play in the pools among the rocks...."

"On the cliffs," said the fellow-ghost, "men clad in armour share the camps of the Englishmen who fought at Cressy, and at Waterloo, and at the Marne. On these seas the most ancient pirates sing and laugh in chorus with Nelson's drowned sailors, and with men from the North Sea, men whose mothers still cry in the night for them. Did you think there was any seniority in Eternity?"

"But I don't understand," said Jay. "Time seems to leave itself behind so quickly...."

"There is nothing to understand," said the old woman. "There is no explanation. Time does not move. Men move." The noise of the rain seemed to wash out everything but remembrance, and there was no feeling in Jay but a terrible longing to have her Secret Friend with her again, and that long secret childhood of theirs, and to wipe out half her days and all her knowledge, and to hear once more those songs upon the sands of the cove, and to feel the tingling ground of the sunny hills.

"My Friend has never forsaken me before," she said.

She felt a hand press her hand, and she met the eyes of little Mrs. Love.

"Yo're a mousey sort of kid," said Mrs. Love, "sittin' there as if you was in church. Shall we go 'ome? The rine's gettin' worse an' worse, an' it's no good wytin'. I'll see you 'ome."

When Jay, very wet and dazed, reached Eighteen Mabel Place, she found a card pushed under the door. The name on it was Mr. Herbert Russell's, and there was a suggestion in a beautiful little handwriting on the back of it that she should ring him up next morning and tell him when to come and see her, as he had a message from her brother.

"This is the sort of thing that couldn't possibly happen in real life," said Jay. "I must be drunk after all. On no doorstep except Heaven's could one find a message so romantic."

She was instinctively disobedient to Older and Wiser people. She never entertained the idea of telephoning. She could imagine Mr. Russell answering the telephone in a prosaic voice like a double bass. She wrote the following letter:

DEAR SIR--Don't you remember, I was to meet you anyway on the steps of St. Paul's at ten o'clock next Sunday? I will wait till then for the message.--Yours faithfully,

JANE ELIZABETH MARTIN, 'Bus-conductor.

"That letter ought to put two and two together for him," she thought, "if he hasn't done it already. It's a complicated little sum, and the result is--what?"

She felt hot and feverish when she wrote the letter. And directly she had posted it she regretted having done so.

"I forget what I wrote," she said. "It is dangerous to post letters to Older and Wiser Men when drunk."

All that night she lay awake and mourned the desertion of her Secret Friend.

You promised War and Thunder and Romance. You promised true, but we were very blind, And very young, and in our ignorance We never called to mind That truth is seldom kind.

You promised love, immortal as a star. You promised true, yet how the truth can lie! For now we grope for hands where no hands are, And, deathless, still we cry, Nor hope for a reply.

You promised harvest and a perfect yield. You promised true, for on the harvest morn, Behold a reaper strode across the field, And man of woman born Was gathered in as corn.

You promised honour and ordeal by flame. You promised true. In joy we trembled lest We should be found unworthy when it came; But--oh--we never guessed The fury of the test.

You promised friends and songs and festivals. You promised true. Our friends, who still are young, Assemble for their feasting in those halls Where speaks no human tongue. And thus our songs are sung.

I have very rarely found Sunday in London a successful day. I hate idleness without peace, and festivity without beauty, and noise without music. I hate to see London people in unnatural clothes. I hate to see a city holding its breath.

Jay waited ten minutes on the steps of St. Paul's for Mr. Russell. This was not because he was late, but because she was early; and this again was not because she was indecently eager, but because she had hit on an unexpectedly non-stop 'bus. She felt a fool for ten minutes. And when you have waited ten minutes on those enormous steps under the eye of the pigeons, you will know why she felt a fool.

Mr. Russell arrived in Christina the motor car, and simultaneously a shower fell. From the first moment Jay felt unsuccess in the air of that much-anticipated day. She was introduced to Christina, and said, "But we can't take that thing into the Cathedral."

"We don't want to," said Mr. Russell, although, as he was a born driver, the challenge made him instinctively measure with his eye the depth of the steps, and the width of the doorway, from Christina's point of view. "We don't want to pray. We want to talk."

Anonyma would have been astonished to hear him say this.

"As a matter of fact," said Jay, "I brought Chloris for the same reason."

Chloris was eating the bread which a kind but short-sighted old lady believed herself to be giving to the pigeons.

Mr. Russell had hardly been able to imagine his 'bus-conductor in any dress but that of her calling. Now that he saw her in unambitious London-coloured things, he was glad to notice that her clothes were not Sunday clothes, but the sort that you forget about directly you look away from them.

This was the sort of day that breaks up delusions, and as Christina the motor car started away, Jay discovered that her hat was not adequately attached to her head. There are few discoveries more depressing than this at the beginning of a day of movement.

The bells of St. Paul's began to sing. Little fairy bells dodged behind and about the great notes. But Christina soon swept the sound into the forgotten air behind her.

"I've got a lot to talk to you about," said Mr. Russell as he headed Christina Hackney-way. He was conscious that he was taking his miracle curiously for granted. I don't think he really believed in it yet. For Mr. Russell all truth was haunted by the ghost of a clanking lie. He discerned deceit on the part of Providence where no deceit was. "I'll give you your brother's message first, because it interests me personally least. He is gone. There was a sudden move across the Channel last week, and he went--I suppose--ten days ago now. The message he hadn't time to give you was an appeal to give up 'bus-conducting. He had an absurd idea that you walked out with men-conductors in Victoria Park."

"Not at all absurd," said Jay. "Not half so absurd as the idea of driving out with a casual fare. I know some delightful conductors and drivers; we joke together when the traffic sticks. There is one perfect darling called Edward; his only fault is that he drives a mere Steamer. But we always bow, and once when a horse fell down and we got hung up for twenty minutes in the Strand, he sang me a little song about a star."

Mr. Russell listened to all this very attentively, and then continued: "Your brother wants you to go back to your Family. His last words to me about it were that if you could manage to be ladylike for three years or the duration of War, at the end of that time he and you would go and live by your two selves in New Zealand, and if you liked you need wear no skirts at all there, but riding breeches all the time."

"Ladylike!" snorted Jay. "What's the use of ladyliquity even for five minutes? So Kew sent you as an antidote? I suppose he didn't know you were one of my fares?"

"A fare," said Mr. Russell sententiously, "may, I suppose, be a wonderful revelation, because you only see your fare's eyes for a second, and the things you may see have no limit, and you never know the silly little truth about him. Yet even so, there is more than a ticket and a look between you and me, and you know it."

"Possibly there is a Secret World between you and me," said Jay. "But that's a pretty big thing to divide us."

"Supposing it doesn't divide us?" said Mr. Russell, looking fiercely at the road in front of him. "Supposing it showed me how much I love you?"

"How disappointing!" said Jay in the worst of possible taste. (She was like that to-day.) "You're ceasing to be an Older and Wiser, and trying to become an ordinary Nearah and Dearah."

("Oh, curse," she thought in brackets. "I shall kick myself to-night.")

"That's a horrid thing to say," said Mr. Russell. "But still I do love you."

"It sounds very Victorian and nice," said Jay, wondering if he could still see her through her veil of bad temper. "But, you know, in spite of Secret Worlds, and secret souls, and centuries of secret knowledge, we still have to keep up this 1916 farce, and leave something of ourselves in sensible London. How do I know you're not married?"

Mr. Russell thought for a very long time indeed, and then said, "I am."

Jay was not very well brought up. She did not stop the car and step out with dignity into respectable Hackney. She was just silent for a long time.

"As you were," she said to herself, when she found herself able to think again. "This is a bad day, but it will be over in something less than a hundred years."

"You drive well," she said presently, looking with relief from Mr. Russell's face to his hands. Christina the motor car and two 'buses were just then indulging in a figure like the opening steps of the Grand Chain. "You drive as though driving were poetry and every mile a verse."

"After all," she told herself, "the man loves me, and I must at least take an intelligent interest in him."

"Are you a poet?" she added.

Nobody had ever asked Mr. Russell this question before, and not knowing the answer to it, he did not answer.

"I have never written a line of poetry," said Jay. "Or rather, I have several times written a line, but never another line to fit it. Yet because I have a Friend,--I know in what curious and extended order the verses come, and how the tunes come first, and the various voices next, and the words last, and how a good rhyme warms you like a fire, and how the tunes fall away when the thing is finished, and how ready-made it all is really, and yet how tired you feel...."

To Mr. Russell it all seemed true, and part of the miracle. He had nothing to add, and therefore added nothing.

"Obviously you are a poet," said Jay.