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man

who had come to that unbuilt house had been driven by his, and

for some time he wandered about his rooms as that other shape had

gone through the streets, seeking peace and finding none. At

last he found himself in his bedroom, looking out of the window,

as the dead man had stood there looking over the ruins of

history, from the place of his skull. Wentworth stood there now

for some seconds, exercising a no more conscious but a still more

deliberate choice. He also yielded—to the chaos within rather

than the chaos without. The dead man had had reason to suppose

that to throw himself down would mean freedom from tyranny, but

Wentworth was not so much of a fool as to think that to thrust

himself into the way of possible discovery would mean any such

freedom. A remnant of intelligence cried to him that this was

the road of mania, and self-indulgence leading to mania.

Self-preservation itself urged him to remain; lucidity urged him,

if not love. He stood and looked and listened, as the dead man

had looked and listened. He heard faint hurrying footsteps

somewhere on the Hill; the moon was covered by a cloud. The

shadow provoked him; in it they might be, now, passing the end of

his road. He must act before it was too late. He would not go

to spy; he would go for a walk. He went out of the room, down

the soft swift stairs of his mind, into the streets of his mind,

to find the phantoms of his mind. He desired hell.

 

He strode out on his evening walk. He walked down the length of

his road; if that led towards the station it could not be helped,

nor if at a point it joined the road which Adela would take from

the station. He was a man, and he had a right to his walk. He

was not a child, neither the child that had lost its toy and

cried for it, nor the child that had lost its toy and would not

let itself care, nor the child that had lost its toy and tried to

recover it by pretending it never did care. It may be a movement

towards becoming like little children to admit that we are

generally nothing else. But he was; he was a man, he was going

for his walk.

 

At the junction of roads, as at a junction of his mind, he

stopped and waited-to enjoy the night air. His enjoyment

strained intently and viciously to hear the sounds of the night,

or such as were not of too remote and piercing a quality to reach

him. The wind among the hills was fresh. He heard at a distance

a train come in, and the whistle of its departure. One or two

travellers went by; one, a woman, hurrying, said something to him

as she passed—good night or good morning; it sounded, in his

strained joy, like both. He became aware that he was visible in

the moon; he moved back into shadow. If he saw them coming he

could walk away or walk on without seeming to be in ambush. He

was not in ambush; he was out for a walk.

 

An hour and more went by. He walked back, and returned. His

physical nature, which sometimes by its mere exhaustion postpones

our more complete damnation, did not save him. He was not

overtired by his vigil, nor in that extreme weariness was the

vision of a hopeless honour renewed. He paced and repaced,

cannibal of his heart. Midnight passed; the great tower clock

struck one. He heard the last train come in. A little up the

road, concealed in the shadow, he waited. He heard the light

patter of quick feet; he saw, again, a woman go hurrying by. He

thought for a moment she was Adela, and then knew she was not.

Other feet came, slower and double. The moon was bright; he

stood at the edge of his own skull’s platform; desire to hate and

desire not to hate struggled in him. In the moonlight, visible,

audible, arm in arm, talking and laughing, they came. He saw

them pass; his eyes grew blind. Presently he turned and went

home. That night when at last he slept he dreamed, more clearly

than ever before, of his steady descent of the moon-bright rope.

Chapter Four

VISION OF DEATH

 

Pauline’s parents had both died a few years before; she had been

put in Battle Hill to live with her grandmother for two reasons.

The first was that she had no money. The second was that her

uncle refused “to leave his mother to strangers”. Since

Pauline’s mother had never liked her husband’s parents, the girl

had practically never seen the old lady. But the blood

relationship, in her uncle’s mind connoted intimacy, and he found

an occupation for an orphan and a companion for a widow at one

stroke of mercy. Pauline was furious at the decisive kindness

which regulated her life, but she had not, at the time when it

interfered, found a job, and she had been so involved with the

getting to Battle Hill that she discovered herself left there, at

last, with her grandmother, a nurse, and a maid. Even so, it was

the latent fear in her life that paralysed initiative; she could

respond but she could not act. Since they had been on the Hill

and the visitations had grown more frequent, she felt that deep

paralysis increasing, and she kept her hold on social things

almost desperately tight. Her alternative was to stop in

altogether, to bury herself in the house, and even so to endure,

day by day, the fear that her twin might resolve out of the air

somewhere in the hall or the corridor outside her own room. She

hated to go out, but she hated still more to stop in, and her

intelligence told her that the alternative might save her nothing

in the end. Rigid and high-headed she fled, with a subdued fury

of pace, from house to gathering, and back from gathering to house,

and waited for her grandmother to die.

 

Her grandmother, ignoring the possible needs of the young, went

on living, keeping her room in the morning, coming down to lunch,

and after a light early dinner retiring again to her room. She

made no great demands on her granddaughter, towards whom indeed

she showed a delicate social courtesy; and Pauline in turn,

though in a harsher manner, maintained towards her a steady

deference and patience. The girl was in fact so patient with the

old lady that she had not yet noticed that she was never given an

opportunity to be patient. She endured her own nature and

supposed it to be the burden of another’s.

 

On an afternoon in early June they were both in the garden at the

back of the house; the walls that shut it in made it a part of

the girl’s security. Pauline was learning her part, turning the

typescript on her knees, and shaping the words with silent lips.

The trouble about some of them was that they were so simple as to

be almost bathos. Her fibres told her that they were not bathos

until she tried to say them, and then, it was no good denying,

they sounded flat. She put the stress here and there; she tried

slowness and speed. She invoked her conscious love to vocalize

her natural passion, and the lines made the effort ridiculous.

She grew hot as she heard herself say them, even though she did

not say them aloud. Her unheard melody was less sweet than her

memory of Stanhope’s heard, but she did not then think of him

reading, only of the lines he had read. They were simple with

him; with her they were pretentious and therefore defiled.

She looked up at Mrs. Anstruther, who was sitting with her eyes

closed, and her hands in her lap. Small, thin, wrinkled, she was

almost an ideal phenomenon of old age Some caller, a day or two

before, had murmured to Pauline on leaving: “She’s very fragile,

isn’t she?” Pauline, gazing, thought that fragile was precisely

not the word. Quiet, gentle, but hardly passive and certainly

not fragile. Even now, on that still afternoon, the shut eyes

left the face with a sense of preoccupation—translucent rock.

She was absent, not with the senility of a spirit wandering in

feeble memories, but with the attention of a worker engrossed.

Perhaps Stanhope looked so when he wrote verse. Pauline felt

that she had never seen her grandmother before and did not quite

know what to make of her now. A light sound came from the garden

beyond. Mrs. Anstruther opened her eyes and met Pauline’s. She

smiled. “My dear,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you

something for the last day or two.” Pauline thought it might be

the hot afternoon that gave the voice that effect of distance; it

was clear, but small and from afar. The words, the tone, were

affectionate with an impersonal love. Pauline thought: “She

might be talking to Phoebe”—Phoebe being the maid—and at the

same time realized that Mrs. Anstruther did so talk to Phoebe,

and to everyone. Her good will diffused itself in all

directions. Her granddaughter lay in its way, with all things

besides, and it mingled with the warm sun in a general

benediction.

 

Pauline said: “Yes, grandmother?”

 

“If by any chance I should die during the next few weeks,” Mrs.

Anstruther said, “you won’t let it interfere with your taking

part in the play, will you? It would be so unnecessary.”

 

Pauline began to speak, and hesitated. She had been on the

point of beginning formally: “O, but”, when she felt, under the

lucid gaze, compelled to intelligence. She said slowly:

“Well, I suppose I should have….”

 

“Quite unnecessary,” Mrs. Anstruther went on, “and obviously

inconvenient, especially if it were in the last few days. Or the

last. I hoped you wouldn’t think of it, but it was better to

make sure.”

 

“It’ll look very odd,” said Pauline, and found herself smiling

back. “And what will the rest of them think?”

 

“One of them will be disappointed, the rest will be shocked but

relieved,” Mrs. Anstruther murmured. “You’ve no proper

understudy?”

 

“None of us have,” Pauline said. “One of the others in the

Chorus would have to take my part… if I were ill, I mean.”

 

“Do any of them speak verse better than you?” Mrs. Anstruther

asked, with a mild truthfulness of inquiry.

 

Pauline considered the Chorus. “No,” she said at last,

sincerely. “I don’t think… I’m sure they don’t. Nor

Adela,” she added with a slight animosity against the princess.

Her grandmother accepted the judgment. “Then it would be better

for you to be there,” she said. “So you’ll promise me? It will

very nearly be a relief.”

 

“I’ll promise certainly,” Pauline said. “But you don’t feel

worse, do you, my dear? I thought you’d been stronger lately—since

the summer came in.”

 

“‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,’” Mrs. Anstruther

quoted. “And a quieter starting-place than our ancestor.”

 

“Our ancestor?” Pauline said, surprised. “O, but I remember. He

was martyred wasn’t he?”

 

Mrs. Anstruther quoted again: “‘Then the said Struther being

come to the stake, cried out very loudly: To him that hath shall

be given, and one of the friars that went with him struck at him

and said: Naughty heretic, and what of him that hath not? and he

shouted with a great laughter, pointing at the friar, and calling

out: He shall lose all that he hath, and again the Lord hath sent

away the rich with empty bellies. Then they stripped him, and

when

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