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Highway to Valour

The names of Newfoundland settlements are like trivial labels on primal places. A strip of coast can be glacier-scraped and be called Heart’s Desire. Inland country may look scattered and peeled and be Paradise on the map. Vinland suggests a profusion of grapes ripening for wine, when there will be nothing richer on the ground than blueberries. In the jungle of saga and fact plaited to make a history, it can only be concluded that the salty men misnaming this new found land had an illusive sense of sanctuary after long insecurity in cockleshell boats.

Mageila Michelet was born in Feather-the-Nest.

Feather-the-Nest was pinched between rock and sea. Behind it precipitous land sloped and frowned, seeming to wish the houses a tumble downhill. More hostile, the sea spat at them and sometimes dared cross the road to lick at their doors. Mageila thought the sea had a murderous mind, and at the earliest age she pondered on what it might do “with one great stroke of its left fore-paw.” Other times she saw it lifted like a scythe, ready to reap the land. Life seemed a continuation of putting out, of balancing in a threatened boat and seeing caverned cliffs with no more refuge than a bird-ledge for a gull. The blind murdering forces of nature gave her a feeling of doom, making her marvel that men bothered to fashion weapons to speed their deaths, when the sea hated them, the land fought them, trees fell on them, lightning struck them, and hard work killed them before their time. At first such thoughts were feelings, becoming definite in her mind when one of the liveyers killed his wife and children. Even before the police had taken him away, Mr. Tilley muttered to the neighbours that he didn’t know why he did it. He just picked up the axe and killed them! To Mageila there was a terrible simplicity in the explanation repeated again and again on wondering lips. It made her turn her eyes seaward and murmur to herself, “the sea can rise up and strike Feather-the-Nest!” When she said it starkly, in her own mind, she felt lonely as polar-land, and was impelled to lay her hand on her heart to feel its warmth. There was a war between people and place, with the strength of both contending forever. On dark days she would walk round, laying her hands on animal bodies to sense the life force under fur and hide. When she touched human flesh she must be conscious of pain. Was she not “the little doctor” in Feather-the-Nest?

Mageila’s true thoughts rarely escaped their prison. In time she knew her mother was too busy and important to comprehend the presumption of natural forces overwhelming her righteous life. Her father was too elusive in his everyday life, too lightly loyal to the fetters he had forged himself, to say whether he felt oppressed by the unconsoling land and sea. It was certain Mrs. Michelet only understood the Tilley murder. Following the far-away trial in the papers she explained to her daughters that Mr. Tilley was convicted of murder after the doctors had certified him to be suffering from depressive mania. Mageila waited for another sister to ask about depressive mania, and at once Mrs. Michelet explained it was a fault rather than a disease: the self-indulgence of people who wasted valuable time looking at the lot they would not improve. If Mr. Tilley had listened to her he would not have been depressed! If Mrs. Tilley had listened to her and washed her house and her face, she would not have been murdered!

Mageila repressed an urge to ask what the children should have done to be saved, but she refrained from giving cues for the answers she knew by heart. In this case her mother would talk at great length about the sins of the parents being visited . . . not forgetting to draw a contrast between Michelet blessings and Tilley misfortunes. Mageila had little wish for outward contention, but she knew no pronouncements were valuable to her unless she felt them herself. Her mother said dancing was a sin, approving the minister’s sermon about it even when he shook his fists and said he would rather see his children’s legs cut off than see them dance. That same Sunday evening, in church, Mrs. Michelet played a hymn like a gospel-jig; and the minister read a dancing psalm, bidding the floods clap their hands and the hills be joyful. Mageila disliked them both for their pretences. Dancing was part of children’s feet; a cross-word puzzle said it was the oldest art. The sea danced; birds danced; adult opinion was ridiculous. The bears should have eaten the old man instead of the children. Even while living a silent tractable life she asked herself with gathering wonder what there was in age to make it a source of wisdom. Why should a child accept evasions? When she asked her mother what womb was, she was told it was a word in the Bible. The big red dictionary said it was a place where the young were nourished and kept before birth.

In countless ways Mageila trusted her own approach to knowledge, and the integrity of print. But when she pondered on the Tilley pronouncement she decided her mother might be right. As a family the Tilleys had been inclined to sit in dirty doors, like limp rag dolls with clouded eyes. Looking from the frowning hills to the hungry sea, Mageila glimpsed a mood that might be unbearable to people like the Tilleys. They saw the sky falling down from above, felt the damp creeping up from below, heard the whispers from the sharp-pointed trees on the hills, and shrank from the rage of the foaming sea. Once she thought she had only to go to the top of the hills to see the world, but after her first ardent climb she had discovered other hills rolling endlessly away. That might have made a dark trap for Mr. Tilley’s mind. But why had he not demanded her hands like the others? Was depressive mania a pain? Would that round feeling in her hands have kept him from murdering his wife and children?

Mageila was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, with healing in her hands and infinite silence on her lips. Because she did not nurse well at birth the midwife said she was tongue-tied. Mrs. Michelet took no notice. A talkative woman herself, she was not anxious to cut the bridle of anyone’s tongue—especially the tongue of a daughter who threatened her power. Mageila was better silent, and her mother had no time or inclination to estimate anything but outer action. Therefore she was not disconcerted by a daughter as secret as the sky, or worried by the profound silence that made others rush into speech and flinch from the sound of their witless words. But the liveyers did not crave Mageila’s speech as much as her touch. Silence made her God-given faculty as deep and dark as the returning earth. Because she was the seventh daughter, healing was expected from her; it was demanded by right of nature on a coast where qualified doctors were scarce. There had never been a time when Mageila had not charmed away toothache or placed her hands on ugly warts. Never in her life had she seen a smile of incredulity that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter could not cure. They knew she could; she knew she could; so there was unity between suffering and relief. Practical realist as her mother was, she would not deny the people her daughter’s hands. Her own early days had been lived close to the earth and she knew its herbs and medicines were only something else when they arrived in chemists’ shops. But she could disapprove of Mageila for refusing to admit that the labourer was worthy of his hire. As a small child, when some grateful sufferer offered a coin she refused it with profound dignity. When her mother admonished her, she answered in a voice seeming to come from the unknown power rather than the body of the child, “No one could take money for this!” The poorer people nodded profoundly. They understood and they liked to get something for nothing.

Mageila often pondered on the way she felt when she charmed away pain. Inwardly she explained it to herself. The sun was round; the moon was round; the earth was round; the sky was round above her head; her hand felt round over the pain and her flesh felt part of the flesh she touched. She had a sense of the unbroken circle, of lines that must not be jagged and sharp in spite of the daggerlike rocks rising from the sea. For that reason it was natural for her to ask whether Mr. Tilley’s depressive mania was pain or something unnatural from the world. Already two of her sisters had complained of the sombre life; and when their parents permitted them an education in St. John’s they had gone farther, by sailing away to the United States to become trained nurses. Two other sisters had died in infancy, leaving no mournful ripple on their mother’s mind. When Mageila was very young, asking how she could be the seventh daughter when there were only five, her mother explained that two had gone to glory. But her French father said, with a tiny smile, “Elles sont au ciel, ma chérie.” And when Mageila asked how she would see them her father said in the same way, “On ne revient pas du ciel; c’est nous qui irons vers elles.”

“Sera-ce bientôt?” demanded Mageila acceptingly.

“Ce sera quand Dieu voudra.”

Mageila learned early that there was a great difference between her father’s and her mother’s God, but her mother had more knowledge of how He felt about things. Having played the Doxology so often and with such authority, she had a praise-God voice for her daughters. When they complained about the stunt of life in Feather-the-Nest, she said: though Newfoundland might have a long winter and no spring, it had no plagues of locusts and people did not have to empty their shoes before putting them on; though Newfoundland might have more rock than earth, it had no earthquakes; though the sea could rise and cross the street, they had no tidal waves. And when she pronounced, the sheer omnipotence of her opinion should have settled matters. Only Mageila felt uneasy when she heard, becoming swamped with the dark loneliness of land intolerant of people on its crust.

When it came, on the day, it was over and done in an hour, while those who were left writhed under an empty-faced moon as cold and white as infinity. Then Mageila became the lonely gull with flesh as cold as winter-feathers. The wings of life, spreading to carry her with grave ecstasy, became weighted; and as long as she lived she would go on remembering that the bird must fall, the beast must be felled, warm blood must chill, and living people who seemed greatest could be least because of the earth that shook them and the sea that drank them in.

Then she met a dark sleek man, and she knew at once how he made her feel. “He took me to a banqueting-house and his banner over me was love.”

Mageila’s mother, Sheila Mageila Michelet, born Dilke, was a seventh daughter who had been born and raised in a larger and richer settlement than Feather-the-Nest. A descendant of men who were masters at twenty, who owned fleets of vessels, who went to Labrador in summer and to the ice-fields in winter, and of men farther back who sailed out of Devon to find bold new lands, she was as proud of her ancestry as the daughter of a lord of any manor; and her substitution for the Squire’s pew was the organ stool of the Methodist Church, where she pedalled with her feet and struck with her hands—bringing forth a loud noise unto the Lord. The organ was on a dais, permitting every humble person to see the elevation of the first lady of Feather-the-Nest; and everyone looked towards her, waiting for the upbeat and the sound of her strong soprano encouraging them towards praise.

Sheila Mageila was accustomed to being the big frog in the little pool. She said her people were the descendants of the fishermen of 1501, who arrived in Newfoundland after John Cabot and his son Sebastian had pointed the way. She said she was the direct descendant of the beautiful Irish Princess, Sheila Mageila, who had been abducted by pirates and brought to Newfoundland for strong male reasons. No one contradicted her, because there had been a beautiful princess—making a glamorous mystery for the annalists of folklore and fact. To a section of Newfoundland the name of Sheila Mageila retained the lustre of Deirdre in the Ulster cycle of Ireland. Mrs. Michelet did not probe too deeply into the mystery of the first Sheila Mageila. The fact that the name had been passed down in her family furnished sufficient evidence that the Princess established a background. It was indisputable that the Dilke family was salty and old, claiming the most ancient dead in Newfoundland. Too detailed investigation into the past was left to people with more time on their hands. As the seventh daughter of a man who had been a master at twenty with thirty older men under him, she lived in the active present. The descendants of the Princess did not sit with folded hands or stop to consider the lilies. When they were young the men sailed the seven seas, and when they were older they became principal merchants with store-houses, vessels, and wharf-premises of their own. With such ancestry, power was intensified in Sheila Mageila Michelet and advantages hers by right of the Princess. Had she not been to the City to school? Had she not travelled to Boston and Providence? Had she not travelled again to Niagara Falls? In her own environment she was aristocracy, and when she went to the humbler settlement of Feather-the-Nest she was the peak.

When Pierre Michelet, of the French islands off the south coast of Newfoundland, anchored at her father’s wharf, and appeared later at her father’s house, he capitulated at once to her snug superior charms. In her turn she approved, with suitable reticence, of his black hair, grey eyes, and minted profile under skin as clear as golden-oak. Pierre’s French realism made him aware of the dot the seventh daughter could concede with herself, and though he was Catholic and she was the bones and blood of Methodism they did not contend. She accomplished the unusual through her own exalted infallibility. Not once did she entertain the thought that a man could ask a woman for her children. Not once did she think Pierre would wish to be married in any church but her own. The first thing her childish eyes had noticed were the two Wesleys, Charles and John, in bas-relief on her father’s wall. She had been unable to live unworthily because of the underlip of one of the Wesleys, Charles or John, and she considered its protrusion the very thrust of Methodism.

When Pierre began his courtship in front of the two Wesleys he handed the thin edge of the wedge to Sheila Mageila; and later, when they set themselves up where she would be the first lady and he principal merchant, she chose a place where there was no other source of inspiration than the Wesleys. The bas-relief went to Feather-the-Nest and was placed opposite the marriage-bed. Pierre had merely to look up to see the two marble profiles looking austerely ahead, but he had a flexible mind and they had the minted look of many saints. Twice a year when he went to town to buy his supplies, and to his own French island, he crept into his own church; and if a Jesuit or two warned him he was sleeping with the Devil, Sheila Mageila could always convince him of an impeccable return to her bosom. There was no infallibility she could not intensify under the Wesleyan banner. If Pierre knew it was well to increase and multiply he knew he must swell the Methodist numbers.

But they lived without contention. Generously Sheila Mageila gave her dot into his hands, but also she gave as her cloak an exhortation on the parable of the talents. Pierre would have her trust as long as he took her talents and traded, making many other talents. Pierre traded zealously, and for his energy, thrift, and capacity as a provider he was permitted to talk to his little girls in French; but he had to address his wife in English. It was impossible for her to speak a language she could not use with authority. But she never ceased loving him, glimpsing the something she could not possess, manage, or ever know. He was the incalculable, the light unweighted touch, and his habit of disposing of serious issues with an insouciant shrug kept her in thrall and often a “oui, oui; là, là!” defeated her. The best she could do was to make it known she understood everything, and to mitigate his influence over their daughters. But there were times when she found it difficult to counterblast his difference from herself, even though she took full charge of religious instruction and the whole of Sunday. On that day there was no French, and not a secular note could intrude.

In spite of that Pierre took charge of his daughters’ Mondays, and Sheila Mageila would frown when she heard the little girls singing:

There was nothing to grasp in “Frère Jacques.” It was sound, bidding Brother James get up early. It should have been full of wholesome fun; but it sounded frivolous and full of flotsam-nonsense, and whenever the little girls sang for Pierre they laughed—even Mageila, who seldom laughed and then did in a sweet grave way. It was Pierre who would not let her join in the romp that went with “Sur le Pont d’Avignon.” He said it was too gay for her, but he would sing it himself with the gaiety he could always liberate at the end of an arduous day; and in his most abandoned moods he would sing “Les belles dames font comme ça” and the little girls would curtsey, and again when he sang “Les braves soldats font comme ça” they would salute, and then organ-grind, until Sheila Mageila was sure the Wesley underlip was farther out.

The general romp over, Pierre would reach for his seventh daughter and bid her sing “Au Clair de la Lune” and for a fugitive minute Sheila Mageila would glimpse the incommensurable thing in the daughter as in the father. Even to a practical mother she was arresting when she stood utterly still, singing gravely to Pierre’s attentive face. When she came to

Pierre would become emotionally French and wink a tear from his eye. Then he would touch her black hair tentatively, like a man who would not intrude, and act like a father who did not have the right to bestow the easy smacking kisses he gave his other daughters. His wife would hear him say, for no reason at all, “pauvre Mignonne”—as if there was anything to pity in being the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, descendant of a princess—and he approached the ridiculous when he asked foolish questions like “vous êtes seule tout le jour?”—being satisfied by response from Mageila’s grey eyes—and once when she replied, in her unchildish voice, “Tu ne me laisseras pas seule, Papa?” Mrs. Michelet dismissed them both to tangible things.

Mrs. Michelet liked things she could see with her eyes and feel with her hands: material to cut out with bold scissors, thread to crochet, wool to knit, sugar and butter to cream, and eggs to whip into food. When she remembered that man did not live by bread alone, there were the Wesleys to sponsor her life. That it should be active was all she asked, and she mentioned Christian works as some people mention beauty. Her week was crammed from Monday morning to Saturday night and her Sunday was a Praise-God-Barebones day of spiritual bustle, with a possible waste of time when she had to sit in the corner of the pew and listen to the minister’s sermons. For her outlet of energy there was the church organ, strong breathing from the diaphragm to help her voice above all others, morning and evening service, the young women’s Bible class and second-meeting. Life did not torment her. She could see all around it. Having little imagination, she had great physical courage. A snarling dog with bared teeth was not allowed to get the better of her. She would mount a flight of steps and give the dog a flick on his nose for nonsense. She could quell the roistering of rum-running tongues, and once when a bold spirit stepped up to her defiantly, her crisp remark, “my man, you’re drunk; run home and ask someone to put you to bed,” wilted his courage. She had the faculty of reducing male dignity to the status of the little boy with a ring round his neck. Only Pierre could reduce her, and because of him she stayed within the tolerable bounds of briskness and bossiness. Had she been asked to take over some difficult ship of state she would not have considered the task beyond her powers. She did not nag; she was never angry; she was charitable, even though she gave from the length of her tongue and her purse at the same time; she was merely one of the women who knew better than anyone else. In her own home her voice went on all day, and on Sundays it held dominion over Feather-the-Nest.

Pierre, Mageila, and her sisters found the day of rest more exhausting than a week-day. There was a longer grace at breakfast, a psalm and family prayer before morning service—which they attended as a rearguard for Mrs. Michelet, who walked briskly ahead to arrange her books of praise. Then Sunday-school in the afternoon, and home to make the daughters learn improving verse. Mageila learned easily, while disliking the things she had to learn. If it had been something from the Old Testament with sonorous words she could turn over on the silent voice of her mind, she would have enjoyed memorizing; but when she ventured to ask for such things, her mother said they were not girlish and directed her to something about “the heap of good in living.” Mageila’s sisters merely dawdled with the book in their hands, and their mother had to sigh and admit that time could fly before all improvement was accomplished. Then Mageila would have to recite her bit about the heap of good in living, while pining for the rapture of words suggested by eagles’ wings and the heavens as a curtain. It was the same when Mrs. Michelet prepared her for school concerts. When Mageila wanted to sing a French folk-song her mother insisted on Moody and Sankey. Once when she was required to sing “I should like to die, said Willy” Mageila felt ashamed of herself, and equally ashamed when she had to sing “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.” She disliked asking Jesus to make her a sunbeam, but it was useless to protest. Mother knew best. The one thing Sheila Mageila could not do was to detain Pierre for second-meeting. She could command her daughters, but Pierre, with a liberated step, went home to do what he liked and to listen to the Catholic hour.

Her mother awed Mageila, making her ponder on the substance of an inner self so sure of an outer. She suffered when her mother sang a few bars by herself before the congregation took up the tune, even when she knew sympathy was unnecessary. With the timidity of people who spoke little in everyday life, the inhabitants of Feather-the-Nest had to have their music dragged from them. Mrs. Michelet did the dragging, and once it was released she would not let them linger on the slurred wailing notes so beloved by people living beside the brimming sea. But at second-meeting they were allowed to sing as they pleased because their leader came off her dais, encouraging sustained praise as if she loved the long sound of her own voice. Then the hymns were all of the sea. “Jesus, Saviour, pilot me.” “Throw out the life-line.” “Let your lower lights be burning,” or “Eternal Father.”

Although Mrs. Michelet kept her daughters for second-meeting she would not permit them to testify. Mageila would have endured martyrdom before she would testify, knowing she would never feel the entry of that special kind of spirit needed to jump up and say how she found the Lord. She would never be able to clap her hands and shout “Hallelujah!” Neither did her mother ever testify. Never having lost the Lord, she could not tell how she found Him. The one companionable thing she could do was to lead the saved sinners in prayer; then she asked a blessing on many things, naming them one by one. Sometimes Mageila’s sisters stirred and whispered that their mother prayed for everything but the hens.

The ritual of second-meeting was always the same. Lesser worshippers filed out on the protests of a voluntary from Mrs. Michelet. Then she would leave her dais and settle in the first pew of a tiny transept as the minister left his pulpit and stood level with his people, asking Sister Michelet to raise a tune. When the testimonies began, Mageila’s sisters would lower their heads and stuff their handkerchiefs into their mouths for fear of explosive laughter. Mageila could not laugh. Under lowered lights the shadows seemed to grow deep and dark, blue and bleak as the shadows on granite rock and winter snow. There was a gathering atmosphere mounting and expanding as if human expression was fusing with the sounds of the outside world. The faint rocking to and fro resembled the ebb and flow of the tide, a hymn of washing, wailed to be as clean as the water-turned stones on the beach. There was a sense of blood, like the slain lamb’s; and once when the wind was blowing and the sea lamenting, the atmospheres became so fused that a woman cried out loud with many tongues. The odd gibberish made Mageila’s sisters red in the face with suppressed laughter; but Mageila stared, wondering what the queer voice represented.

There was one testimony always tranquil and darkly deep. Old Mrs. Slater was a widow with a bent back, sunless flesh, and gnarled wind-bitten hands. She lived alone far up on the hill, and her isolation was that of a bird knowing nothing but solitude and height. Attracted by such self-containment, Mageila had ventured into Mrs. Slater’s sloping garden and stooped to weed beside her without saying a word. At once a look from her seemed like a hymn to earth, making her feel contented and easy in her downward bend. She returned and helped Mrs. Slater draw water and chop splits. Once when she asked briefly, “are you lonely here?” Mrs. Slater answered profoundly, “I’m not alone, my maid.” Then Mageila knew a spirit could be close-companioned although its body stooped humbly for its maintenance. When Mrs. Slater straightened as far as her hump would permit, taller people dwindled beside a dignity as mysterious as the sky. Mageila revered her, watching her come and go like a woman mingling and yet far away. She always stayed to second-meeting, sitting quietly inside a body humped with the volume of work. Very often she testified and when she did Mageila identified the poetry of the Old Testament. From the core of a black cape Mrs. Slater spoke of life as a hand-breadth and of people as sojourners on an earth more enduring than themselves. But she fused the elements with people, mixing the salt of the sea with the salt of blood, and human dust with the dust of the earth.

Other testimonies were not so profound. There was Sister Clark, tall and thin with caverned eyes, blackened teeth, and a sense of bad breath in her whispers. She spoke softly, sadly, in such perpetual shame that no one ever heard the whole of her testimony. When her voice fainted away Uncle Mosey Rowden voiced a loud “Hallelujah,” beginning his own testimony in a vibrant tone strongly suggestive of reproach for a fainting spirit. Uncle Mosey Rowden would not testify on his feet. His procedure was elaborate. Extracting a red handkerchief from his pocket, he would flap it like a flag, spread it on the tiny floor of the pew, kneel, and disappear. But his voice compensated for his lack of visibility, soaring through a story of how he raised his Ebenezer when sailing out of China fifty years ago come Michaelmas. Quite frankly Mageila thought he enjoyed himself a great deal and stopped reluctantly to let Pea-Pea-Peter have his say. Pea-Pea-Peter was a poor pil-garlic of a man who had to sit in the last shadowed pew of the church because he had to go out very often. His testimony was thin—a complaint of how he had found the Lord too late, after he had “rotted his innards with rum.” During his testimony Mrs. Michelet kept a quelling eye on her daughters, daring them to show a smile. Neither did she relax when Sister Waddleton rose majestically to her feet.

She was impressive, suggestive of murky opulence, ostrich-feathers, and five-gore skirts; and she was a twice-saved sinner: once in South America, where the boulevards of Brazil had not kept her steadfast; then in Feather-the-Nest, where the rocks brought her back to the Lord and the seas cleansed her thoughts of Rio. Her voice was unctuous, soft, and her accent grand when she spoke intimately of “Gawd” and the “awcid test.” With an ear for gossip Mageila’s sisters whispered that their mother was supposed to call on Mrs. Waddleton every Saturday for the purpose of recensoring her testimony. Mageila did not quite understand. The South American travels were questionable, making her mother tight-lipped when she mentioned them; but there were whispers of girls, with Sister Waddleton offering sweetmeats. She knew her father had forbidden them to speak to her unless it was necessary for civility’s sake. Mageila had no wish to speak to Sister Waddleton. When she testified she did it in an oily way, and inside gloves her hands looked like flesh straining to burst through skin. She made Mageila feel tainted when she fixed her eyes on the Michelet girls as if she liked them more than the others. Her mother stared back; but try as she would to collect Sister Waddleton’s eyes, Mageila felt she and her sisters got all the attention. She came to the slow conclusion that Mrs. Slater had found God and the others had not.

The Michelet house was square and uncomplicated, with stairs in the centre, four rooms on each flat, and two pointed bits on the roof to diminish its squareness. Pierre had suggested building a French-provincial house, but Sheila Mageila said it meant wasting money on roof. Newfoundlanders built boxlike houses without architecture, and what was good enough for her ancestors was good enough for her; but she graciously permitted the pointed bits on the roof and a small verandah with two flights of steps. Almost at once Pierre called the house Feather-Cake, because it was square and white, with blobs, like one of his wife’s first white-of-egg cakes. Dubiously she permitted the name, though she would have preferred “The Anchorage” or “The Sheltering Rock”; but when Pierre gaily derided solid names she capitulated without knowing why. Neither could she ever quite understand why Pierre laughed so often at living in Feather-Cake in Feather-the-Nest. Mageila could have explained at once. It was as foolish and frivolous as the grave dark rocks enduring the decoration of small first snow. As the years advanced and more room was needed, Feather-Cake had linneys and out-houses attached to its rear. Theirs was the gentility of an underprivileged world living mostly in its kitchen. They kept a man for their cow and hens and their sloping gardens, and a maid for the rough work of the house; and Pierre employed a man and a girl to work in his shop. The Michelets ate in a solidly red dining-room at a table spread with white linen damask, and with a red plush table-cloth when the meals were over. They were always warm and well fed; the daughters away were permitted a small allowance while in training, and the ones at home a little pocket-money and something new to wear every spring and autumn.

On a small steamer and on various schooners, the daughters often accompanied Pierre to his French islands; but Mrs. Michelet never left Feather-the-Nest—not even to visit the capital town, where Pierre went twice a year. She was resigned and slightly martyred when coaxed to take a trip. She demanded at once: how could the place get on without her? Who would run the house? Who would play the church organ? Who would visit the sick? Who would entertain the W.M.S.? Who would lead second-meeting in prayer? Mentally they all answered her at once. The daughters could housekeep very well. Mageila could play the organ with less sound but more expression than their mother. Mageila was more useful to the sick than her mother. Sister Waddleton was aching to entertain the W.M.S., and Uncle Mosey Rowden to raise another Ebenezer. But every spring and summer when Pierre would entreat, “Mama, why will you not come for a little trip?” the same excuses were listed. Then his grey eyes would widen and he would smile at his daughters as if their faces were mirrors reflecting his thoughts. Though he was too loyal to wink, they were sure he did it behind his eyes. It was impossible not to know that their mother gave the wrong excuses because she did not care for the truth. If she went to the capital town she would feel inferior, of no account whatever. Cars and trams would rush past her, she would have to look both sides of the road for fear of being run down, the shops would not know her, and important women would step from cars and sweep by as if the first lady of Feather-the-Nest did not exist. She would be a deposed queen, so she clung to the kingdom that she knew.

Not once did her daughters suggest that such reasons kept her home. They were tolerant because their father’s comprehension stood between them and their mother’s heavy hand. They were happy enough in their narrow world, and it was only Mageila who wondered what their lives might have been without their father. Would they not have been a living sacrifice to the Wesleys, Charles and John? But when Mageila was seventeen she dimly discerned that her mother cared for her father as a woman could care for a man, and love broadened her narrow nature. With a strange feeling of pity she thought her mother made eyes at her father long after an affectionate moment was over and he had gone far away.

On the afternoon of the day prior to the thing, familiar pictures made powerful contours on Mageila’s memory. As with the sharpened clarity of minds before death or disaster, she experienced intensity, boldness of perception, and an encompassing eye for the hard-etched beauty of her world. November, the most reluctant month towards splendour, conceded an arresting day, though its sun flamed and died early in the afternoon.

She closed a door on her sisters in bed with the fever of light influenza. Although she could not absorb their unrest she had diminished it. After washing their faces and brushing their hair she bequeathed stillness, which let her carry away a picture of closed eyes as contented as death.

The upper landing was warmed by a funnel running like an elongated sausage from a stove in the lower hall. Attracted by a red glow, she entered her mother’s room and found it icy without the funnel—suggesting the fact that the sun had as cold a core as the moon awaiting a darker sky. Her parents were neat, maintaining straight lines, square corners, and toilet articles arranged in parallel slants. Through the yellow blinds the sun glared as if it would consume by light alone. The white bed-spread looked threatened, and the Wesleys in fiery danger. Scanning the familiar bas-relief, she felt gravely amused at their red hair, tinted cheeks, and strongly painted lips. Externally they were fired with life, but she knew the sun would set and return them to white austerity. It was the illusion sun gave to implacable things, but it was not difficult to remember that silver sea leadened, evergreen blackened, and the whole of their world crept back to the bone. Under fierce light the Wesleys went on as coolly as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Her eyes dismissed them, travelling outward to the bay, and at once she was conscious of intensification, stillness, and the unusual splendour of a November sky. She felt awe mixed with dread and her body went weightless, because she knew the world was holding its breath for strong deep reasons of its own. She marvelled at the impudence of houses, daring to perch beside rock so darkly deep in the earth. She knew they were conscious of their frailty and their crouch behind the one writhing road. She felt the loneliness of the world entering her thought; heard silence, sure that inner cries were mounting higher and higher, threatening to grow wild and strange, and she could not tell why, when it seemed so very still. She felt the shadow of darkness creeping from the rocks when the delicacy of new snow lay on them like a mockery of lace. She looked towards a beaky headland, seeing sharpness whitened and rounded like a many-breasted gull. The immobility of the day settled in her, bidding her stand still as the rocks and await the thing beyond perception. She felt cold creeping up from below, and for the first time she thought of death in relation to herself.

It was a journey for her as well as for others, a fall into a deep well, circles of blackness widening away from some fatal core in herself. Death was part of her, and she felt she had to accept it as the earth accepted seed and the sea swallowed what it drank. But it was new and strange and she was too small for the immensity of feeling in the air. Her body protested, giving a mighty shiver, and, glad of involuntary motion, she placed her hand over her heart, thanking it for its beat and the warmth of her rounded breast. Her chilled thought rushed towards soft-furred kittens, young active dogs, and slow-moving cattle warming stables with animal heat. But her hands continued cold, making her feel miserable as a land-bird too long over the sea. Dread in herself was outgrowing capacity when the decisive opening of a door returned her to the earth-bound day.

“Mageila! Mageila!” The voice was loud, like a spray of common-sense over the unknown. Unconsciously she relaxed, moving towards the upper landing; but she moistened her lips before commanding her ordinary voice.

“Yes, Mama. What is it?”

“What is it? Really, Mageila—” A sound of exasperation came strongly upstairs. “What a time-waster you are! You know you promised to go to Bertie Butler for his toothache. His mother said he was crying all night, and I said you’d walk over to the point.”

“I’m going, Mama.”

“Well, hurry up then. I don’t know where I’d be if I let the grass grow under my feet.”

Mageila turned into her own icy bedroom, neater even than the one she had left. Placing a beret over her black hair, she felt grateful for vibrant direction. Surely nothing could be impending if cooking, cleaning, cutting, and sewing made familiarity in an ordinary day?

Descending to greater warmth, she lingered for a moment by the hot stove until the running contact of scissors against wood impelled her towards her mother. Inside the dining-room there was nothing to fear from outside. It was warm, and stuffily red with wall-paper, carpet, fire, and clean with the energy of a woman looking well to the ways of her household. The plush cloth had been laid aside, and the table was covered with a length of flannelette under a paper pattern. Mrs. Michelet was making her winter night-dresses: three new ones every autumn so that her stock would never run low. With her knowledge of two influences from different parents, Mageila recognized the French taste in the material. Her father did all the buying, and the flannelette was gay, with sprigs of pink flowers on a pale-blue background. From her robust grasp of the scissors Mageila knew her mother enjoyed her work. The Wesley underlip did not intrude into the fashioning of square necks and kimono sleeves finished around with a fancy stitch. Once again the red iciness of upstairs invaded her flesh. “She’ll never wear them,” she told herself. Then she felt apart, fanciful and foolish in sight of the reassurance of her mother’s red cheeks and mouth, barely greying hair, and strong supple body. But it was the scissors that fascinated Mageila. The firelight flashed in their steel, guided by a hand that would cut out a world for itself. “She knows it all,” Mageila told herself, “but she doesn’t know this.” Then she saw her mother unpin the paper pattern and hold the cut length against her body.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she asked complacently, extending a leg the better to see the flannelette.

“Very pretty,” said Mageila, wondering if unplaced pity was in her voice.

Her mother looked up, but not to criticize her tone. “You should be gone. It’ll be dark soon.”

“Yes, it will be dark,” agreed Mageila.

Impervious to nuances, Mrs. Michelet threw another length of flannelette over the table. Then, at the sound of an opening door, she asked alertly, “Who’s that?”

“Papa,” said Mageila instinctively, turning to the door and wondering why a wife could not identify a husband’s sounds.

“Your father! At this hour of the afternoon?” said Mrs. Michelet dubiously. “He was spending the afternoon in the stock-room—”

“And he stopped to have a cup of tea with Mama,” said the gay voice of a Frenchman speaking a second language.

“Pierre!”

With smiling insouciance Pierre came into the room, compact and square inside baggy grey trousers and a pull-over sweater with rolled-up sleeves. Like Mageila he wore a black beret on his head, under which his face looked golden and his eyes like the soul of changing water.

“Yes, Mama, it is Pierre,” he said with a laugh, revealing teeth as white as a peeled stick. “I was taking stock. Yes, when suddenly I thought why must I take stock? I felt I would like to come in and drink a cup of tea; so I did. We do not stop enough, Mama. I felt I wanted to stop, so I stopped.”

“But the steamer will be in the day after tomorrow, and you’ve got to have your Christmas list. If you waste your time, Pierre—”

“Pierre!” he mocked gaily. “Mageila, ma chérie, she still says Pierre, like pear after bare.”

“Nonsense!” protested Sheila Mageila bridling. “I do nothing of the sort.”

“You do,” insisted Pierre with unoffending conviction. Approaching his wife, he put his arm round her shoulders and pointed to the flannelette. “See, Mageila! Pretty, is it not? In winter I buy her flower-sprigs and in summer I buy her angel-skin.” Pierre laughed as if he delighted in his purchases. “But Mama has a pretty neck.”

“Go on with you,” said Sheila Mageila, with the air of a woman pushing virtuously away from pleasure.

At that moment Mageila felt older than her mother. She saw her as a woman who had married young, who had borne her children early, who was earth-bound to her household and now stood beside her husband in vital maturity. She was pleased he had returned to her for tea, but it was not in her nature to accept the fact gracefully. Her “go on with you” was the very peak of approval.

“Yes,” teased Pierre, “Mama has a pretty neck.”

“Stop your nonsense,” commanded Sheila Mageila, but she added with great complacency, “all the Dilke girls have good complexions.”

“You see, Mageila,” smiled Pierre, “she accepts her pretty skin as if it was hers by right. She does not say, ‘Thank the good God. There but by His goodness I might go with boils and blackheads.’ ”

“The very idea!” protested Sheila Mageila. “I never had a blackhead in my life, and only one boil after—”

“Yes, yes, only one boil,” smiled Pierre, releasing her shoulders. With his back to his wife he stood staring at his daughter, who knew without a word that he was making a wide internal gesture over unpassable common-sense.

“Mageila,” commanded her mother, “tell Annie to hurry the kettle and bring tea and some thin bread and butter. Your father likes the fresh butter. And tell her to skim off a drop of cream and to use the pink cups.”

Mageila turned, but with her hand on the door-knob she did not hear all the directions. She felt strangely hesitant, fearful of leaving protection, and lingered until she felt firelight scorching the backs of her legs.

“Go on, slow-coach,” she was urged.

“No hurry, Mignonne,” said her father, benignly mitigating command. “Now that I am here I can wait.”

“There is a difference between Mama and Papa,” thought Mageila slowly. “Mama gives orders and Papa makes kind requests.” Turning to acclaim him, she saw him seated in an arm-chair with a dark leather back that blended into his beret and left his golden face in strong relief. With the luxuriousness of a man unused to relaxation he closed his eyes, displaying curled lashes that looked strong and black. Mageila realized how few times she had seen her father with his eyes closed. An active man who could be quiet and restful, he did not slump or nap except in bed. Now the smooth curve of his lids made his face empty and submissive to rest.

“Papa!” she said, from an urge she could not comprehend.

“Mignonne?” he answered, sitting forward with quick resilience.

Mageila put a tentative hand over her heart, smiling at herself. “Nothing, thank you, Papa.”

“No, don’t go,” he said, leaning farther forward. “Stay with us. There will be tea for three, and we’ll send a tray upstairs and make a party. And we’ll make a toast for the little hospital-caps far away. We will be together. Stay, Mageila! Où vas-tu? Je veux—”

“Speak English,” commanded Sheila Mageila, with equal authority for them both. “And be off with you, Mageila. We don’t want tea and supper together. Pierre! Pierre! What’s the matter? Oh—” Sheila Mageila gave a relieved laugh. “Just a goose walking over your grave? I thought you were having a fit.”

“I was cold,” he explained, staring up ingenuously—like a man surprised at himself.

Suspending her scissors, Sheila Mageila examined him closely. “You may be getting flu—you should have stayed out of the girls’ bedroom. Mageila,” she commanded, “get the thermometer.”

“No,” denied Mageila gravely, but she walked to her father’s chair and laid the back of her hand against his cheek. “He has no fever, Mama.”

“He doesn’t look sick, but you never know,” said Sheila Mageila, as if her husband could not speak for himself. “I’d better put his feet in mustard-water and rub his chest.”

“Yes, Mama,” grinned Pierre, “rub my chest and tie a stocking round my throat. I’m sick in bed. Je suis sur le bord de la tombe.”

“No, no, Papa,” implored Mageila.

“What did he say?” demanded her mother, with an unconscious betrayal of ignorance.

“Nothing of any account,” reassured Pierre, rising and putting his arm round Mageila’s shoulders.

As he guided her to the door she was conscious of the delicacy of touch, of warmth like a comfortable circle. She told herself, with sudden certainty, that is how a man should touch a woman. But she was sure that when her father’s arm lay round her mother’s shoulders it fell with heavy masculine pressure.

“But where are you going, Mignonne?”

“I’m going, Papa—”

“She’s going to Bertie Butler for his toothache,” explained her mother, as if she could not endure the slowness of Mageila’s voice. “I met Mrs. Butler this morning and she said Bertie was crying all night. I said she’d be right over, but at the rate she’s going she’ll get there by tomorrow morning. And the child has been in pain two days.”

“Well,” shrugged Pierre, like a soothing philosopher, “if the toothache has lasted that long a minute more will not matter. But Mama wants her tea, and when Mama wants she wants fast.”

“I hate dawdling,” agreed Sheila Mageila virtuously.

“But it is nice to dawdle sometimes,” Pierre told her serenely. Turning Mageila around, he placed gentle hands on her shoulders. “We have not dawdled much in Feather-the-Nest. I have worked hard over beef, pork, flour, fish—everybody’s fish—and hogsheads of salt, but that was my rough work. You are my bit of fine work.”

“The very idea!” protested Sheila Mageila. “She’s like the Dilkes.”

“She is not,” denied Pierre in his unoffensive way. “She has a face no one can get behind unless she likes. She looks at you, and you hope your face is clean and you feel sorry if you did not shave a second ago. She can cure because she is sheer, like grey chiffon.”

“She’s just a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,” said Sheila Mageila diminishingly.

“And,” continued Pierre unheeding, “her Papa loves her face. He saw it once or twice when he sailed to Marseilles. She is a girl in a picture-gallery.”

“And you, Papa,” said Mageila with rare spontaneity, “are a man from a golden sovereign.”

“Sovereign indeed!” scoffed Sheila Mageila, pouncing on the tangible. “A lot you know about gold! When I was a girl at Christmas, Grandpapa always gave us each a sovereign.”

“Mama pines for the good old days,” smiled Pierre. “For me I do not know. We did not know yesterday how we would feel today. We do not know how we will feel tomorrow. We may not be here at all. There is no forever except the forever of—”

“Mageila, tell Annie to use the milk in the pink jug.”

“ ’Bye, Papa,” said Mageila, leaving a delicate kiss on his hard golden cheek. “I know your forever.” Then she turned away, feeling sustained, able to go out of doors without fear.

“And tell Annie—”

“To bring the tea,” laughed her father. “I give her the idea and she will not wait. I say I like the ripple of muscles under the skin of a little cat, and she says she will find the one she crocheted when she was a girl. Mama, we will . . .”

Retreating to the kitchen, Mageila heard her father’s voice fainting away.

Between sea and settlement she walked slowly, feeling the soundlessness of snow underfoot. “First snow is delicate,” she thought, “soft as a chick, white as a duck on a pond, different altogether from the dense piling up of drifts.”

There were so few people around that she walked alone, coldly bathed in the dwindling glare of the western sky. Marvelling again at the stillness, she savoured the relaxation of a Newfoundlander perpetually tightened from the torment of wind. Now she felt herself walking softly like an Indian, moccasin-clad, easy in body, unblown and unpuckered. Occasionally she paused, knowing she was seeing stark beauty bathed in red. A streak of sunset on snow made her think of blood on white fleece. Her narrow world had brought her close to the slaying-knife, the axe, and the barbed hook striking at the fruit of the sea. Blood, blood, she thought unhappily, visualizing the beauty of the slain lamb and the proud strut of the rooster laid low on the block; but she bade herself look at them, firmly knowing such things must be. Something whispered to turn round and see her father’s store-houses high up on the hill, only a hundred yards or so below Mrs. Slater’s highest house. Poor Mrs. Slater, she thought, with a deep gush of pity for the old woman who was her self-chosen friend. Then she wondered how she dared pity anyone so profoundly self-contained as Mrs. Slater. But the well-being of her youth sighed for the hump on a back, the drag of feet, and the stiffness of hands. Would her father give Mrs. Slater a box of groceries for Christmas?

Christmas, she questioned with ice-cold wonder. Now the dying red and dulling white suggested a bright season pushed out of place by the thing beyond perception. Even while she told herself time did not stand still, she felt Christmas would not come. She searched the sky, wide-eyed with wonder. “Is it that I expect my own death?” she ventured to ask; but the thought chilled her, as the drop of the sun was chilling the world. She crept to the edge of the road and stood in the shadow of a dark point of land. From the horizon inward the sea held a sullen glaze, breaking in froth at the shore-line. She visualized it in other gigantic moods. It was a monster, a sword, a knife, a big blurred being with slobbering lips. It was too big for people, she knew, letting it grow considerably darker before she threw off her chilly trance. With a shiver she straightened and began to climb a rocky path to a house some distance above sea-level.

She saw square outlines, pointed logs stacked up for winter, and a kitchen door wide open in welcome, and she knew she had taken a long time to come a little distance. Lamplight made a yellow square on the first delicate snow. She wished for decision to advance and get on with what she had to do, but she felt useless as driftwood turned about on the sea. She had an instinct to retreat and let Bertie Butler cry himself to sleep. His toothache seemed a mere nothing in face of things at large in the air. Once more she implored the sky with words softly articulate on her lips, “God, what do I know? How can I cure pain when I am full of it myself?”

But though the sky held nothing but the growth of the moon, she remembered it would be round above a round world; and she seemed to hear old Mrs. Slater saying, “God is in Heaven and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.” Question and entreaty eased out of her, leaving her able to advance. If the world fell around her ears she could do nothing but her job. She even invited the thought of death, daring to think it would be deep and rich as the sea and earth that enclosed it. “It will be round,” she thought. “Only dying will be pointed and sharp: the wrench of the tree when it leaves its root, the snap of the flower from the plant.” With no more hesitation she advanced, letting louder feet announce her presence. Almost at once she was welcomed by a thin-faced woman with a sunken mouth, spare shoulders, and a body stout below the waist. The very sight of her made Mageila feel how ordinariness could lessen big incomprehensible moods.

“Mrs. Butler, I’m so sorry—”

“Oh, Miss Mageila, dear, ’tis of no consequence. Bertie has been at it that long now.”

Smiling widely, Mrs. Butler revealed false teeth like curves of pearl buttons.

“Come in now, Miss, and take a chair.”

Mageila knew prosperity was relative. Her family would be considered poverty-stricken according to some standards of living, but to this they represented wealth. The kitchen was scrubbed and warm with the perilous comfort of a hand-to-mouth existence. There was a wood-stove, a pile of kindling, a box of twigs, a table covered with white oil-cloth, wooden chairs, three-cornered shelves cluttered with household utensils, and a wide settle on which lay a bundled-up baby pawing the air with fat curled hands. On a chair beside it sat Bertie Butler, a six-year-old boy with eyes made small from weeping. From the circle of a black stocking tied round his head, his face peered out peaked and shadowed with childish grief.

“Poor Bertie,” said Mageila, advancing to the settle and sitting down at the baby’s bundled feet.

With her head on one side Mrs. Butler stood by, smiling with warm-hearted motherhood but with nothing to say in front of a force beyond herself. As if ready to proffer return thanks, her eyes wandered from the kettle to a brown tea-pot on the three-cornered shelf.

Mageila slipped off her gloves, loosened her coat, and sat still—letting the little boy get used to her before she spoke a word. When silence was comfortably warm she smiled at the baby, patting it with a long hand.

“It’s a happy baby, Bertie. What’s its name?”

“Valda,” he whispered at once.

“Valda?” said Mageila, making the name sound deeper and richer.

Leaning towards the boy, she untied the black stocking while she talked to him with infinite comfort. “I don’t think we need the stocking, Bertie. You’re warm and cosy by the stove. Is the pain there?” she asked, touching the child’s tear-stained cheek.

A small soiled hand indicated another spot. “There,” he quavered.

“There,” said Mageila, going round the pain with quiet circular motions. “Bertie, you’re tired and sleepy. Look at me before you go to sleep.”

From under swollen lids Bertie looked up, letting his eyes trance as if they were too weary for further motion.

Mageila held them, lost for a long moment to everything but the child. “Bertie,” she said, with the natural command she had always known, “you haven’t got the toothache any more. It’s quite gone, and you’re going to sleep. Remember, you’re going to sleep.”

“Y-yes,” quavered the child.

As if the cure was accomplished Mrs. Butler leaned over the stove, peering inside the kettle. “You’ll have a cup of tea, Miss, for your trouble.”

But for a minute Mageila had no thought for the mother. She sat stroking the child’s cheek until he nodded on the edge of exhaustion. “You can close your eyes, Bertie,” she said.

The swollen lids drooped, willing and anxious to fall, and the body wilted against the back of the chair. Like comfortable response at the right moment, Mageila stood up and helped him to his feet.

“Lie here, Bertie, at the baby’s feet. There’s room on this big sofa. Now if we had something to cover you . . .”

Bertie lay in a tired crook, relaxed like a child darkly comfortable at the bottom of a pit.

“Here, Miss,” said the mother, taking a winter coat from a hook on the wall; but out of respect she refrained from covering her own child. When Bertie was tucked up, she stood looking down with a smile round her sunken mouth.

“The like of that now, and he hasn’t had a wink these two nights.”

“He’ll sleep now,” said Mageila, sitting down quietly in Bertie’s stiff chair.

“Yes, Miss, that he will, and God bless you for what you’ve got. ’Tis hard to see them suffer,” said Mrs. Butler, walking cheerfully towards her tea-pot. She knew her son had been charmed into a painless sleep. Mageila knew it too. Service like this was part of her, like her own arms and legs. It was born in her; had grown with her when she had not known about it and elders had called her from play, unmindful of the grime on her childish hands.

“You’ll take a cup of tea for your trouble, Miss.”

“Thank you,” she agreed, knowing she must stay when her instinct was to go.

Now that her task was accomplished she was invaded again. Her possession had barely departed long enough to let her cure Bertie Butler. As the thing came back she knew she could not expel it. She was reminded of those who had been possessed of devils, and what was incomprehensible before was credible now. If the invasion spread beyond her she would begin to run, and perhaps rush to the edge of the cliff and leap over. By the strongest effort of will she sat leashed. To go without breaking bread would be a wound to Mrs. Butler’s pride, but as the kitchen door darkened she started like a creature prepared for the worst. It was only Mr. Butler, a short square man in blue overalls and a cap behind a coxcomb of curls. His smile was a bit of warmth in a bleak face and encompassed his domain.

“Miss Mageila,” he said, touching the brim of his cap.

“Mr. Butler,” she murmured courteously.

“How is the toothache?” he asked, stepping inside the kitchen.

“Look of ’un, sleepin’ sound! Ain’t it wunnerful now?” said Mrs. Butler, falling into excited dialect at the sight of her own man. “Come in, Jabe, and see ’un. He’s lovely now.”

Mr. Butler entered the kitchen, bringing in a breath of cold air blended with sea, earth, stable, and hay. With the unity of simplicity he stood beside his wife and looked down at his son. Then the baby opened its mouth in a big square, emitting a wail.

“Well,” said Mr. Butler, as if the impossible had happened, “ ’tain’t like Valda now to cry at the sight of her fadder.”

But the baby wailed on, making her mother touch her breast as if she possessed its peace. Uncertainly she placed the tea-pot on the table, but her husband directed her otherwise.

“Make the tea, woman. It’s the storm in the air that ails her. ’Tis wunnerful strange for the time of year. Wunnerful uneasy like.”

“I’ll hold the baby,” said Mageila with dry lips, stooping to conceal uneasiness in herself.

Thankfully she lifted the fat bundle, glad of warmth and something to mind but herself. Gratified at the promotion of her child, Mrs. Butler warmed her tea-pot from the kettle as Mageila bent her head and inhaled warm earthy flesh. Mrs. Butler was swishing water round the sides of the tea-pot when her head jerked like a spring.

“What’s that?” she asked, wild-eyed. “Jabe!” she screamed, and the wide fling of her arms sent an arc of boiling water in the air.

“Watch out, woman,” he ordered, grabbing her arm; but Mrs. Butler’s screams went pointing into the air. “It’s thunder! Hold your tongue,” yelled her husband.

“Thunder,” sobbed Mrs. Butler. “Thunder is over not unner!”

“It has come,” thought Mageila. Without warning, with nothing before but her own difference, she felt the house tremble, saw the china rain off the three-cornered shelves, watched a sugar-bowl empty itself on the floor, and knew beyond doubt that the rocks trembled and called out in a long rumbling voice. Without being told she knew what it was.

“It’s an earthquake,” she said, clutching the crying child.

But Mr. Butler was a seaman and he would not believe. “That don’t happen here. ’Tis from the sea,” he yelled. “Hold on to the child.”

“Yes,” she said, making herself hold without desperation.

Now that the thing was here, her possession retreated—leaving her with a sense of responsibility towards something smaller than herself. She made a soothing sound, bracing herself against the wall. But there was no support from shivering wood; so she stood forward with feet apart, while deeply inside she experienced the trapped agony of humanity in the face of natural forces. If she seized the baby and ran, where could she go over rocking earth? Then she remembered hearing that earthquakes were supposed to be worse inside houses, so she measured the length to the door. But another rain of crockery hit Mrs. Butler, collapsing her with arms outspread like a wall-crucifixion. Then, as if the wall stung her, she scuttled away into the middle of the floor.

“Jabe,” she screeched, “the walls are fair liftin’!”

“Hold your tongue,” commanded her husband, jerking her to her feet. “That’s no way to take on. Let the boy sleep.”

Beyond personal concern, Mr. Butler raised his head as he heard the plaintive distress of animals enclosed in a stable. At once he made a step to the door, but his wife burdened his arm with human claims.

“No, don’t go now,” she implored with shrill supplication.

“Shushhh,” crooned Mageila, as much to the mother as to the child.

Then the rocking and the rumbling ceased as abruptly as it had begun, bringing such relief to Mrs. Butler that she collapsed on a chair and extended her arms across the table in limp reaction. Momentarily dazed, Mr. Butler stood inert as Mageila sat down with a small thud. The baby stopped crying and there was a fathom-deep fall into silence as they fearfully savoured survival, with strained ears waiting for more. When suspension went on, they dared open their mouths and speak.

“Mr. Butler, take the baby,” said Mageila, standing up. “I must go at once. My father—”

“No, no, don’t leave me, Miss; don’t leave me,” moaned Mrs. Butler, beginning to sob from some hard core; and when the sound reached her lips they jibbered, loosening her teeth.

Unheeding, refusing the baby, Mr. Butler took a step to the door. “T’beasts,” he muttered implacably.

Mrs. Butler moved her head on the table as if she would wound herself. “Don’t go, don’t go; somebody stay with me,” she sobbed.

Still holding the baby, Mageila saw the wrecked kitchen with its broken china, spilled sugar, and pools of water on the floor. “I must go,” she said, with the will to service sternly leashed for her own.

Mr. Butler took another step forward, reducing his wife to harder sobs. The baby whimpered unhappily, but its mother would not heed. Seeing the rising hysteria, Mageila knew she would be detained if she did not do something at once. Without pity she gave the baby a hard nip, making it roar louder than its mother.

“Mrs. Butler,” she said sternly, “take your baby. It needs you.”

Instinct stronger than hysteria made the woman sit up and extend a limp arm, which kept growing more and more vital until clutching increased the baby’s cries.

“Shushhh,” she jibbered, rocking the baby, herself, and her own misery. Outer sight returned and she moaned for lesser things. “M’ china, m’ cups and saucers. M’ lovely teaset. Oh . . .”

But as her child cried louder she pulled up her sweater with automatic maternity, and when contact was established both slumped and went silent, as if they had found a measure of healing.

Seeing the baby drawing from a source needing replenishment in itself, Mageila spoke as quickly as her slow speech would permit.

“I’ll look across. If it’s all right I’ll sweep the kitchen and make the tea.”

“There, Mother,” said Mr. Butler. “Now just bide a while until she comes.”

With Mr. Butler, Mageila went outside to look down at Feather-the-Nest. Overhead the moon made a pale disc in a sky like frozen smoke. Its light revealed the world in solid outlines, suggesting that the earthquake had been nothing but a dream of human instability. Only the sea spoke of disquiet, rolling turbulently as if it had sucked the earthquake.

“Quare,” said Mr. Butler grimly. “Mighty fast it’s come up.”

Peering anxiously, Mageila stepped to the edge of shelving rock—unmindful of the sea aspiring to the height of the house. The settlement stood intact and the moon made the houses look like cardboard boxes built by children in a desolate place. Feather-Cake predominated, as if a larger child had built with a fanciful hand. As every window gleamed with light, she knew they reported excitement.

“Nothin’ wrong but the way they take on,” said Mr. Butler.

Then Mageila knew her ears were receiving the shrill echoes of many human voices talking of new experiences. They would all shout together and there would be no terror like unto every special terror. Even her sisters would be like that, she thought, shivering in their beds with the clothes drawn up under their chins. But not her mother. She had enough courage and authority to rebuke the very earth for its foolishness. At once she would order her daughters to be quiet and sit up and have a nice cup of tea and feel better. In her effort to do something practical she would sweep the maid aside and boil the kettle herself. Her father would leave her in charge, go out, and look for his youngest daughter. As if she could see him walking towards her, Mageila was conscious of his surge of anxiety.

“I’m all right, Papa,” she said, deeply articulate.

Over her shoulder she saw Mr. Butler on his way to the stable and one moment more she appraised the sea, hearing it sighing and singing in a different way. “Is this all?” she asked herself slowly. “Was the earthquake all that I felt?” At once she was filled with an urgency to run down the rocky path and desert Mrs. Butler. But it was not in her to act like that, so she turned resolutely to render the assistance that would free her. Inside the kitchen she found nothing had stirred but the rise and fall of breath; so she worked with the sound of the sea in her ears, gathering up china, replacing objects on shelves, mopping up water, and straightening the listed kettle.

“You shouldn’t do that, Miss,” muttered Mrs. Butler, looking uneasily at the open door. “The sea is wunnerful loud.”

“Yes,” said Mageila, “the wind must be coming up.”

“No, ’tis not wind,” said the woman. “M’ ears know the sound of that.”

“Just sit still,” said Mageila soothingly, “and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“Kind you are, Miss,” muttered the woman, sitting on the edge of her chair like leashed maternity; but her lips and her eyes would not still for her child. “Think of that now,” she mused uneasily. “An earthquake; that’s what it was.”

Mageila saw that she was reliving it, assembling it, and that when she could recapture it she would present it for shrill conversation. As if working to be gone before that time, she coaxed the fire with boughs and kindling; and when the kettle boiled again she made a pot of tea.

But Mrs. Butler had lost interest in replenishment. “ ’Tain’t over,” she said, lifting a taut strained face.

“There,” said Mageila, firmly reaching for her coat and scarf. “Drink your tea.”

“What is it? What is it?” moaned Mrs. Butler, and Mageila was reminded of second-meeting: rocking, rocking and singing of being washed in the blood, while the sea went on outside straining to reach the church.

“Just the sea, just the sea,” she said, but she turned her back so that Mrs. Butler would not notice her dread.

She knew it was the sea and something else. Now nothing could hold her. All the Butlers could die at her feet and she would still walk away to her own. If there was more, she must be with them when it came.

But Bertie Butler sat up like a small resurrection, with anxious deathlike eyes.

“Miss, what’s that?” he asked fearfully.

Unconsciously delaying herself, Mageila put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Just the sea, Bertie.”

“ ’Tis loud, Miss,” said the boy, imploring explanation with his eyes.

“But we don’t know all of the sea, Bertie,” she explained. “We never come to the end of the sea.”

There was a wild roar and a pound as waves broke on the shelving rock.

“But it knows the end of us,” muttered Mrs. Butler with a hint of panic.

“I’m going,” said Mageila without looking back. “Bertie, stay with your mother like a good boy.”

“Yes, Miss,” said Bertie, dumbly obedient.

It was on and over so quickly that she could never recapture the split second of infinite living. As she ran with down-bent head to challenge obstruction she collided with Mr. Butler, charging with a loud “Lord Jesus!” on his lips.

“Inside,” he roared, as if his frail dwelling could protect them.

Dumb from collision, she swerved but stood cloven to the rocks by what she saw. There was nothing in front of her but a wall of advancing water, and the awful clarity of her mind photographed the infinite grandeur of peril. The sea was upright, glossily taut and curved at the top like a reaping-hook. It was coming to take her, and she could not move; but even as she waited for the strike, she saw the wave break at her feet and spit in her face. Then it churned and boiled and receded, meeting another wave and propelling it back on the shore.

“Inside,” roared Mr. Butler, and she landed on the kitchen floor from the urgency of Mr. Butler’s hip.

Then the sea struck as noisily as a cannon, lifting the house with savage buoyancy and sweeping it inland until it toppled on higher rock. There was a sense of sucking round the house, of water sweeping in, of sea-strength being mustered for a higher lift on its bosom. When it swept the house outward, they were in a boat that was not a boat and on a bottom that let in much water. Its icy feel round her body made Mageila leap with a wild sense of self-preservation. With the same mental clarity she saw Mrs. Butler’s open mouth, witless eyes, bare breasts, and arms relinquishing her child. On its way to the floor Mageila snatched the baby, then held it high on her chest. She saw Mr. Butler seize Bertie with one hand and give a dislocating jerk to his wife’s arm with the other.

“We’ll ground agin, Miss. I’ve got the two of them. Can you leap for it?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling a rain of objects falling round her head and hearing hot wood-ashes sizzling in the water.

They were surging inland on the wild rush of the waves. They grounded and the floor felt ripped by rock. Mageila saw Mr. Butler leap, dragging a grotesque woman and a limp obedient boy. But he went, seeming to fall into a foaming cauldron.

“Now, Miss,” he called in a loud encouraging voice.

“I’m coming.”

Self-preservation took her beyond herself, making the baby a featherweight in her arms. She felt the step underfoot, the cold air on her face; she saw the seethe of water, but she knew there was land. She went out high and wide and strong as an eagle. She felt the wild soar of herself and the strange primal exaltation of danger. She felt winged and beaked to help herself in the air. She remembered a dream of flying when she did not fall. But she did, terribly, shatteringly, crashing on rock, tearing her flesh, lacerating her knees as she made a last spurt to climb as high as she could. Then a spur of rock winded her and she lay gasping with breath that had to run out. She slumped face forward; but cold snow cleared her mind, permitting the effort of pushing the baby aside so that she would not lie on it. Then as if it was too defenceless she covered it with an arm, while all around her sea-sounds mingled with shrill human cries.

However, she was indifferent to every pain but her own. The sea was a dagger in her chest, assaulting her breath and leaving her icily cold. The chill in herself was unbearable, beyond the iciness of any polar winter. It was running up her legs, entering her body, and when it reached her chest she must die. Her heart was a bird fluttering in darkness, and she fell fathoms deep into unconsciousness she could not fight.

Men who lived in the few scattered houses uphill came down to the piles of square stones where the other houses had been. One of them had descended to the point of land and clambered across to rescue Mrs. Butler, Bertie, and the baby, leaving Mageila like a creature deep down in prostration. Without amazement and as yet incapable of realizing his devastation Mr. Butler turned his back on his house and his stable, grateful that they had receded beyond the sounds of imprisoned beasts. Enduringly he wiped his face with the back of his hand, ready to leave the shrillness of loss to his woman. Then he gripped Mageila’s shoulders, turning her face up to the moon.

“Not dead, m’ girl,” he muttered, “though there’s them that are and them that are on their way.”

There was a sound of rubber boots on hard ground, the plop of a cork, the pungent smell of rum, and the rescuer was back proffering a black bottle.

“Have a pull yerself, b’y,” he said, with the sympathy of a man whose house survived.

Wordlessly Mr. Butler took the bottle, turning its neck down his throat, and the smacking of his lips was his only acknowledgement of gratitude. “Needed that,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and the neck of the bottle with his whole hand. “Don’t see this often. How come?”

There was a hard grunting laugh. “Mind I got it from Pea-Pea after he found the Lard.”

“He’s found Him for sure now,” said Mr. Butler starkly, but with rescuing energy he lowered the bottle towards Mageila’s lips.

The other man stayed his hand. “Easy now, b’y; don’t slop it,” he ordered, pointing with his thumb. “There’s many down there’ll be glad of a swig.”

Fleetingly Mr. Butler examined the sea; but he turned back, unready to encompass its implication. “Poor maid! What’ll become of y’ now?” he muttered. Momentarily arrested, he stared hard at Mageila’s face and saw her lashes freezing on her cheeks and her unbound hair pointing like snakes on the ground. In rough pity for her blood-stained face he wet his hand with his mouth, wiping her forehead with a wide gesture. “Cut a bit,” he said, peering with concerned eyes. “Got a bit of chewin’ tobaccy?”

“Nary a chaw,” said the other man, making a squatting shadow on the ground.

Mr. Butler grunted, wiping again with his hand. “Now, m’ girl,” he said, carefully easing a trickle of rum between her lips. Then he sat back on his heels, waiting for results; and when none came he put his finger in the bottle and kept wetting her lips. “Wunnerful brave maid,” he declaimed, eloquent from his own drink. “Never opened her trap like m’ own woman. Jest picked up the kid and hopped like a twillick. Never saw such a le’p! And there’s not a scratch on the child. She’s here, too, ’cos of Bertie’s tooth. He’s been takin’ on these two nights.”

“Good thing that he did,” muttered the other man, with no eyes to spare for Mageila. His head sunk low in his shoulders, he stared sideways with repulsed eyes that could not leave the cause of their repulsion. “She’s wakin’ to no good,” he said slowly. “It didn’t profit her father nothin’ that he had more than we—”

“Shut yer trap,” said Mr. Butler sharply. “She’s comin’ to.”

Mageila was coughing in response to raw spirits seeping down her throat. Unconsciously she bent double, returning to life with a hard physical rack; and the anguish of her body made the men shrink back, leaving an unimpeded view that would spare them explanations. When she could breathe more comfortably she relaxed, with closed eyes, until her body complained to her benumbed mind that she was icily wet and full of pain. Unremembering, in a shoreless world she opened her eyes and made a vague gesture across her brow that smeared her face with blood. Repulsed, she tried to clean her hand on her clothes; but her eyes saw nothing except moon-struck sky. Painfully she drew herself up from the waist, struggling to free her matted hair; she did not know that Mr. Butler gave it a yank, leaving a black lock on the ground. It was all part of the unidentified struggle, and when she was up the lag continued between sight and its meaning.

There was nothing absolutely familiar, no object in its right place. She frowned expansively, aiding a flow of blood towards her eyes; but she wiped it away, spinning in a world beyond the body’s pain. Where was she? Why was the water-front so empty? Why were there so many squares of stones where the houses had been? Why were the boats bobbing so far out on the harbour? Why had that stack of hay escaped from its loft? Why were chairs and tables floating on the water? Why was the moon like a lamp revealing every detail? Why were the houses going to sea like crazy ships? For a split second the cause teetered on the edge of her mind; but it receded, returning her to wild unreality. She clasped her hands, beseeching the sea for enlightenment; but its long swells of agony entered herself, until some dim associations suggested the dreadful day of judgement with the world drowning in another deluge. That was strange, she thought, when everyone expected fire. But the sea said it was a deluge, announcing it in a loud voice of many waters and mighty thunderings.

Almost convinced of the cause of disarray, she searched the sky for verification. Soon there would be a white horse appearing with its vesture dipped in blood; and after it would come the armies of the Lord clothed in fine linen, fighting through the fowls that fly. Inconsequentially she remembered her mother raising a gospel-hymn, and without volition her mind began to sing “Bring them in, bring them in, bring them in from the fields of sin.” She frowned, knowing she had always disliked that hymn. Now she was sure it was too trivial for the dreadful day of judgement. But where were the people? Had the reapers gone out to gather them in? Over her head the sky went on undisturbed by white horses, and she thought it looked unready to follow the wild suggestion of the sea. Her eyes returned to the incredible earth as a flash of comprehension came and went like lightning. Then she thought she would go mad with not knowing, her immensity of loneliness, and her creeping sense of doom. She was cold again beyond the coldness of all winter and an icy shiver tore through her, clattering the teeth in her head.

In response to audible pain Mr. Butler echoed with a hard spontaneous sob. Inaction and forced looking had revealed the disaster in relation to himself, his family, and his bleak future. He saw the toil of his hands reduced to nothing, and despair grew larger than endurance.

Wonderingly Mageila called out, “is anybody here?” Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and, turning saw a face as full of pain as her own body. “No, no,” she said in quick refusal. “I can’t help you today. I’m not the little doctor any more. Pain is in me.”

“Yes, m’ girl,” he agreed, with tears on his face like water on rock. “We don’t ask y’ nothin’ today. Rest awhile and I’ll take y’ up the hill.”

“Up?” she questioned vaguely. Mageila stared, reading on his face the story of a breadwinner sitting on a shore like a peeled stick. She leaped as if electrocuted with memory. “The earthquake, the tidal wave, the baby— But my father, my mother—” She came strongly to her feet, transfigured by the pull of family concern. “I must go,” she said, taking a step towards the rocky path; but Mr. Butler made her waver and halt, with the pitying realism of words.

“Better look hard, Miss,” he said slowly. “There’s no comfort to tend y’ for what’s come t’ pass. We’re all in the same boat, but I—”

He stopped as she wheeled unsteadily on her feet, shading her eyes to see Feather-Cake as prominent amongst its neighbours on sea as it had been on land.

“Boaths,” she beseeched in a thick tongue-tied voice. “Boaths! Come down to the boaths.”

Crouching at her feet, Mr. Butler saw her staggering with arms outstretched like a bird ravished of flight.

“No boats, Miss,” he said, without moving. “If there were boats wouldn’t the men that are left be in them? And yer face is cut, and yer legs.”

“No boats?” she questioned the other man, refusing to accept impossible fact; but he stared, bemused, like a spectator uninvolved in personal horror.

“There must be boats,” she told the empty shore.

“No boats,” said Mr. Butler with inexorable truth. “The wires will be down. Nothin’ to do but help a bit, and wait until someone walks over the heads—”

“They’ll be the same as we,” said the other man with stark return.

“Do you mean to say,” whispered Mageila, “that people are inside those houses? Didn’t they jump like we did? They must be somewhere.”

“They were on sea-level. Can’t y’ hear,” said Mr. Butler, cocking his own ears for terrible truth.

Mageila listened with eyes, mouth, and ears wide open to realization, knowing at last that above the sea came sounds of shrill desperation—with every shriek suggesting beating hands, bulging eyes, and hope running round demented.

“We must swim,” she said, like a person drowning on dry land.

Mr. Butler leaned forward on one knee. “Look ’ut,” he said, indicating the pitiless sea. “Who’d live a minute in that? No, m’ girl, we’ll climb the hill and get warm.”

Mageila comprehended only the refusal of help.

Reason found no place in a body projecting itself towards its kindred flesh. Opening her mouth, she lifted her chest for a mighty breath and her lurching was over. Power had come to the faint when the spirit went outside its own flesh. She turned, spurning inactivity, and went down the rocky path with life-saving leaps. She dropped to sea-level, speeding over a road that had become part of the beach, past foundations of stone wrenched out of line; seeing and hearing panic-stricken people running with less purpose than herself. But she moved like a stranger on her own shore. In the aftermath of danger every stunned sufferer wallowed in personal misery and every able-bodied survivor searched for his own, while those high up on the hill had climbed higher to look down on those who sat on their roofs.

Mageila knew there was no fear of a flood. The sea had stood up, striking once and receding in satisfaction with the water-front. Soon it would lie down and relax from struggle, like a face after death. She thought of her mother telling her not to trample the mounds in the graveyards. As she remembered the keels of ships cutting across the floating dead a sob tore her throat, spurting her onward so that such a thing would not happen to her own. Charles and John Wesley seemed to run with her, as if they must rescue the bas-relief on her mother’s wall. The air vibrated with their encouragement and she imagined her mother playing an organ blare and singing a bar alone before the congregation settled into a rolling sing-song. Hymns that were all of the sea speeded her over beach-rocks with the zeal of a coast-guard entrusted with a life-line. Another sob tore from her throat as the invisible melodies in her head swelled to “Lower Lights.” In the rooms of the houses outward bound, the lower lights were all submerged and beams came across the sea from the upper windows.

Now a hollow in the road made the sea look like an unsteady hill blotting out her view of the middle harbour, intensifying fear that the houses would go beyond her help. A glance inland revealed silent figures shading their eyes for strained looking; so she cut uphill, clambering strongly over rock and wood. Once she identified a miserable child and a dead pink pig not far away from a woman rocking back and forth as if the sea had touched her, condemning her to perpetual motion. Then she saw a group of sheep with spindle-legs extended in the air. “Sheep cannot turn over,” said her mind to her hands. If she did not do something they would die in a little while. But she continued on her way with the pitiless indifference of an oarsman rowing away from a wreck. The will to find her family sent her hurtling to the foundations of Feather-Cake, where she collapsed with the limpness of a spilling sack—feeling herself bursting from a thudding heart.

“Papa?” she gasped with the remnants of breath, as remembrance suggested he must have stopped drinking tea to return to his stock-room.

It was possible all had jumped from the houses to shelter up there. Hope gave her strength to climb; but she went in a crawl, pulling herself up with hands instinctively falling on rocks firmly embedded in the earth.

“Papa?” she called, muting her voice to its special tone for her father. “Papa?” she whispered, with her head within the darkness of a door.

Blackness fell on her eyes, trying to enter her mind as she smelt the thick silence of flour; and she knew it was the first sense of dryness she had encountered. Gathering weakness urged her to lie down, and for a second she welcomed a fall into substance that was silky and stifling but soft, white, and clean.

“Papa!” she cried with a will, to prevent her body’s collapse. “Papa, are you there? Where are the others?”

The futility of her voice speaking to emptiness collapsed her on the door-step with her head drooping to her knees. But there was no rest when hard sea-sounds demanded she should look up and out. Then she knew that sight had the power to kill, but not until anguish had become so sharp that it felt like death that could not die. Now the houses looked flat, white, and far off, like cardboard stuck up with a light behind. Her eyes became nailed, feeling they must crucify on Feather-Cake with its points leaning for a last look at the land. Frantically she knew her mother stood in a window like a stony figure weighted on either side by her sisters, but in spite of her dreadful maternity she bent towards the sea.

“Papa,” she beseeched, “what will I do? Where are you?”

There was a sound of feet disturbing a stone, and she dragged her eyes from her engulfing home to see two men standing like creatures in a trance. Their inactivity made her feel murderous with strength that brought her between them, like an apparition with icicle hair.

“Come,” she urged, grasping their arms and taking a forward stride until backward weight made her taut and tilted as a figurehead. “Come,” she said, hanging on; but superior strength pulled her round to let a goggle-eyed man peer into her face.

“The little doctor!” he ejaculated. “Then you isn’t out there?” he asked foolishly. “Your father! I seen ’un.”

“Then he lives?” she croaked eagerly.

“The houses are sinkin’; they’re sinkin’!” screamed someone else, but Mageila had turned her back on the sea.

“My father lives! Where is he?” she said, shaking a hard male arm.

“Naw—”

“Where is he?” she questioned urgently, and when they were slow to reply she turned haunted eyes to the sea. “I’ll find him,” she said, stumbling downhill; but arms swooped after her, detaining her with remorseless decision.

“You stay here now,” said a voice as grim as the arms, but she fought like a creature possessed with a tiger.

“Let me go; let me go,” she croaked with deep-toned hate. “Let me go, you cowards!”

A voice bawled words that exhausted her fight. “I’ll tell you what I know, Miss. I seen ’un.”

“I seen your father too, Miss.”

Now both men could release her and see her as still as an upright figure of death.

“You mean . . .” she said slowly.

Unhappy clodhoppering feet shuffled uneasily on the ground.

“He could’ve saved hisself, Miss,” said a slow reluctant voice, but farther up the hill another man took up the story.

“A few of us were on the brow, Miss, when we saw the bore rise up.”

“And how it riz! B’y, how it riz!” said another voice in shrill excitement. “I seen the boats lift up, the fish-flakes go, and two cows—”

“Shut up,” said the lucid voice, accompanying the command with a kick across the ground. “We didn’t feel the quake, Miss, like them inside, but we knew it was on when the trees shook like a shivery-Hapse! We saw your father go to the store-room twice; but he must’ve seen the bore coming, for the last I saw of him was leapin’ against his back door.”

“He went out,” said a dreary voice, as if it must end intolerable detail. “Out like m’ own!”

“Out!” said Mageila, suffocating on a word.

“He could’ve saved hisself,” repeated the first slow voice. “He could’ve stopped where he was.”

Mageila felt herself dropping coldly dead, but her voice lived on to say, “he gave his life, gave it because he had to—to—”

Weakness buckled her knees, doubling her up on the ground; but she managed to sit with legs outstretched towards the sea. Then she knew if she would hasten her death she need only keep looking, and hear from behind the hard helpless grief of relatives watching loved ones tortured in front of their eyes. She became like the woman sitting on the beach, rocking to and fro; like a coxswain bemused on dry land. Anguished motion moved her hands up and down, her legs causing her to remember what she represented. The little doctor came to life, whole as a separate entity, eager to lay on her hands.

“God, God,” she entreated deeply, “let me cure pain now, if ever I cured it before. Their flesh is my flesh. Let their pain come into me so that my hands can touch it and I can mix myself with their death.”

In sight of the drowning houses no one noticed her special agony. There was no inequality in death and the peaks of Feather-Cake were humbled by the sea. She was left alone in her own world, rocking, moaning; feeling the sea rising round her feet, lapping up her body, slobbering in her mouth, snatching her breath, and stopping up her ears. She struggled in engulfing darkness, fighting water as it went over her head; but though death-struggles shattered her, the little doctor went on rubbing, up and down, round and round, with a timeless harmony that would not break. The ends of her fingers felt like fluid running across the sea to make contact; and because she made a bridge her father came near, as if he was too newly dead for the sea to hold him beyond her deepest need.

“Papa,” she crooned, “ma chandelle est morte! Papa, Mama wants only you. Go to her. She was looking out the window trying to find you. Ouvre-moi ta porte! Papa, please, please, pour l’amour de Dieu!”

Long shuddering breath made her teeth clatter and her lungs strain as if she had the rales. She felt herself in death-throes, knowing the others were passing through her and drowning on their way. She was suffocating; but her hands went on, and only when they fainted from her legs did the little doctor whisper that her people were dead. Submissively she dropped to the ground, feeling her legs narrowing to the cold length of a girl’s coffin. She thought she heard Mrs. Slater’s voice, as unaffected in disaster as in a summer calm. She felt it like the remoteness and nearness of God, as a lightning flash suggested that Heaven might be a sublime even place where the mind lived on incapable of sharpness. Mrs. Slater’s voice came lower, detaining her from a cold descent.

“Rise up, my maid! Rise up! The Lord has spared you for his working. Think of them like they were, like they are now, and not as you saw them go. Peace has come to them.”

“Let me alone,” she muttered. “Death is so near.”

But hands disturbed her body. Stockings were stripped from her, to be replaced by fisherman’s socks; and her feet were not allowed to fall until they were weighted by clumsy rubbers. Then she had a sense of volume coming between herself and the sea.

“Rise up, my maid! The going was hard, but their peace is here.”

Stirring grief was the only active thing in Mageila’s body. “My people, my people,” she moaned in anguish. “My mother looking for Papa. Don’t touch me.”

“Rise up, my maid.”

“No,” she refused, cowering away—too wounded for anything but darkness. “Let me alone.”

“No, my maid. Help me now! Rise up and come up the hill. My house is full, but others need tending.”

Mrs. Slater’s voice was as clear as the moon riding high in the sky, and as impossibly exalted. Mageila shrank farther down, but though she made no physical effort her mind lighted like storm streaked with lightning. Death could be simpler than life! Collapse offered an easier way than the intolerable return to an orphaned state. Who would cable her sisters, she pondered vaguely. Somebody else must bother: her aunts, her uncles, her grandfather. She could do no more, she thought, cowering darkly in her halfway house of death.

“No, my maid, you can’t give way. If it was your time you would have been with them. Rise up!”

At the bottom of a hill she was invited to life on an unattainable peak. Mrs. Slater must let her alone, and live on in her highest house. She had not lost her people. How could she, asked her dark mind illuminated with Mrs. Slater’s agonies. She was a widow with a widow’s mite, her husband having gone down in a vessel. She was a mother with sons starkly dead on the ice-fields. She was a woman with a hump on her back from stooping for her own maintenance. Recognizing incredible valour, Mageila could not move a finger to live.

“Rise up, my maid. ‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee.’ ”

Her body rippled with anguish, while the quality of direction told her she must rise or sink in shame to her grave. In the first endeavour she felt the lift of a finger a terrible exhaustion, but she strove with a will swerving away from the cold comfortable way. Something said not to clutch Mrs. Slater, but to take infinite time and wait until strength could be mustered for a rally.

“Let me help myself,” she muttered, and she felt Mrs. Slater kneel back with a suggestion of the folding of hands.

“Yes, my maid, help yourself, but underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Mageila sobbed with a warm uprising chin, but the distance from the ground to her feet felt like infinite upright miles. Once when she felt she must fall back, Mrs. Slater’s voice got between her and the ground.

“ ‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee: and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee.’ ”

Now Mageila felt tortured and she sobbed with anguish that had the feeling of life itself.

Mrs. Slater did not touch her but kept going on with her rolling words. “ ‘When thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned.’ ”

Mageila’s head was a convulsion, but the words helped her up.

“ ‘Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable.’ ”

“No, I can’t bear it!”

But she was up, with Mrs. Slater beside her offering her short humped body for support. Though Mageila accepted contact, the feeling of the hump under her arm would not let her lean. By a vast effort she let herself be turned uphill over stone and hard ground with many shadows from the pointed spruce and fir, and when she stumbled, blinded from tears, Mrs. Slater brought out words from her Old Testament knowledge.

“ ‘Bring forth the blind that have eyes’—just a few steps more, my maid—‘and the deaf that have ears.’ ”

But Mageila was not deaf, hearing all round her the pitiful grief of others. As she struggled she knew the tidal wave had stripped her of things that would not grow on her again. The very nature of living was different from anything she had been taught. “You have to die to know; you have to die to know; you have to die to know,” droned her mind with dreary repetition. “He who counted the hairs of your head, He who watched the sparrows fall—” “No, no,” she moaned, “He was not like that. He was nature—something withdrawn like the moon, something gigantic like the sea, something a million second-meetings could not solace when the sea fell on the land.”

The stunned core of her being felt that the battle between sea and land was over. After the unequal fight the victor had retreated with a clean lick. There was no need of a cemetery, with no one to bury. “As yet,” thought her shuddering soul, knowing the sea would spit some of its victims back. Bitterly she wept for the rage of waters and the hard stripping of land. Hardly she lamented her loved ones, restless in large sea-graves. Would they be cast up for burial? The thought of their sprawling limbs and streaming hair made her crave their enclosing in the cosier earth. But where was her father? Not anywhere near the others. On the rocks? Near the shore? Somewhere strongly dead, with his beret floating away from his hair. Every raw thought transformed her sense of life into a barbed agony from which she must escape. She felt nailed to endurance when she would have ripped herself away and scattered the remnants of courage Mrs. Slater bade her assemble. But she was obedient, doing as directed, accepting strange dry clothes, offering her head and legs for bathing, and refusing to lie down because the effort of rising had been too great for repetition.

So she sat withdrawn, like a wooden image with an uneven base. Inner sight was so agonizing that she wished it to be black and blind, but she knew pictures were in her forever. No solidity would comfort her feet or extract earth-tremors from her legs. No warmth would banish the ice from her flesh. No motion would balance the distortion of her fall, and wherever she went she would remember herself at sea on a sinking floor. Shuddering from the depths of her being, she saw her weighted future. Why did people make wars when nature warred strongest of all? The upright sea had invaded her, singing its cruel songs.

Reflecting her thought, a woman moaned from the floor. “Drones—I hear drones! I can’t bear it! Ohh-hhh . . .”

It was a time when grief went unsolaced. Vaguely Mageila knew the kettle held drones associated with the presence of death. Remembering another superstition, she gave a hard shudder. “Place a lighted candle in a loaf of bread: set it afloat and the loaf will slow over the bodies of the drowned.” Was there any bread? Were there any boats to bring in the drowned when the loaves had slowed?

Someone was speaking of food.

People must die full of water—like Hamlet’s father, who died full of bread—but the living must eat. The prospect choked her with the sense of wrong-way crumbs. Mrs. Slater could bear it, Mageila knew when she heard her directing a man to the store-house for tea and flour and whatever he could find.

“Yes, ’um,” said an alert voice, and a lack-lustre man who had been slumped on the settle stirred with sudden life.

Salvage! Salvage from wrecks! It was in their blood and they would go and come, spurred by a sense of snatching. It was her father’s store-house they would salvage, but what did that matter now? The living must live; and to fortify her sense of moving in life she bent painfully, putting some kindling in the stove.

“Thank you, my maid,” said Mrs. Slater, as if she missed no spark of life. “Soon we’ll hearten all hands with a drop of strong tea.”

“I could do with a live-drop,” muttered a voice from an outer room. “ ’Tis a tragical day! A tragical day!”

“Now, my little man!” Mageila heard Mrs. Slater round and about a child. “I know it’s Jacob Barnes. Let me clean out this cut. ’Twill sting, my lad, but it’s a bit of a pain to bear on a night like this. Where were you when—”

“At Cow’s Gut, mum,” whimpered the boy. “I went out; but m’ fadder threw me his coat and dragged me in, and when I look for ’un he was gone. I run up the head—”

“Yes, we’ll pray God he’s safe. Soon we’ll know. The school-teacher is making the rounds of the higher houses, trying to bring the families together. Be easy, my little man.”

The impossible advice made Jacob stop crying; but Mageila huddled inside her clothes, trying to get near some vital warmth. Then she straightened, taut and shell-like, shading her face with her hair for fear the voice she heard should attempt to violate her misery. Sister Waddleton was filling the kitchen with a sense of body opulence that swamped Mageila with repulsion she could not comprehend.

“Sistah Slatah! Gaud’s ways are inscrutable. This afternoon I apprehended. When I would have stayed by the fire I was bidden visit the widow and the fatherless. Aund, my deah Sistah, short of breath as I am, I climbed the hill, wawlking in to Two-Pond-Barren to see that lonely—”

“Mrs. Hodder! Is she well?” asked Mrs. Slater with suggestive brevity, but Mrs. Waddleton flowed on.

“Well enough, but frightened beyond Christian courage.”

“Many have the spirit but not the flesh,” said Mrs. Slater equably. “Now, my little man.”

“Yes, yes, not the flesh! I’m glad the Lord willed that I should be steadfast. When the quake came,” continued Mrs. Waddleton majestically in her second-meeting voice, “I realized, compared to my experience in South America, that it was a mere meah, but I remembered deah Papa relating to us little ones how in the yeah before the American Civil Wah there had been a tidal wave taking a large toll of life. I stayed with Mrs. Hodder, and although I returned to find my little home—”

“Shut yer trap,” muttered the voice that had bemoaned the tragical day. “ ’Tis easy for the likes of you, insured like y’re for an Act of God.”

Unperturbed, Mrs. Waddleton displayed Christian forbearance. “We auh not ourselves on a day like this, Sistah! What cawn I do in the vineyard?”

A surge of repulsion swept Mageila nearer life, humanizing her anguish. Why was her family taken and this woman left? Who could find her endearing with her eyes like evil black holes? Who could bear her voice like thick white grease. Why had the sea not singled her out, if only to wipe her clean? Why had she survived to jangle every stretched nerve? Only Mrs. Slater seemed as tolerant as God towards her preservation.

“Wash out these cuts, Mrs. Waddleton, for fear of the earth; and if tea comes, make it hot and strong for all. I’m going down the hill again. There’s but a few cups—”

“Share and share alike,” muttered a voice from the floor.

“Yes, yes,” agreed Mrs. Waddleton with sipping breath, “tea will be naice. When I studied first aid in the last wah, I was taught that strong tea was as restoring as intoxicants.”

“Can’t y’ hold yer tongue?” implored the voice from the hall.

“The basin,” said Mrs. Slater with deep-toned suggestion.

Then she was gone, Mageila knew from the increased restlessness of the kitchen and the outer expressions of suffering. There was a sound of heavy kneeling, the spacious splashing of water, as Mrs. Waddleton ministered with a flow of Christian inspiration she would not restrain.

“Yes, yes, here we auh, my deah people, on this unhappy day. ‘Out of the depths do I cry.’ . . . Roll down your stocking a little further. Many are called! Yes, yes, but by the grace of Gaud we might all have gone out on the sea. Mawster the tempest is raging! A twist with a bit of this pillow-slip. Well, well, that deah woman has tore up a pillow-slip with a crochet-edge. Just a moment and I’ll save the lace.”

Mageila tightened until her ears sang, drowning Mrs. Waddleton’s voice. By shrinking against the wall where the light of the lamp did not penetrate, she withdrew to double darkness until oddly familiar words jolted her consciousness.

“And for those who live in idleness, neither lending their hand to the plough nor—”

Horror-stricken, Mageila knew Mrs. Waddleton was leading with her mother’s second-meeting prayer. Word for word, sentence by sentence, it rolled out, not as a design for disaster but as a general exhortation for the blessing of the Christian world. It was deliberate—a loud testimony, telling all who could hear that the first lady of Feather-the-Nest had passed and her successor had come to stay. It was intolerable, a turning of the knife in the wound, and she could not listen without a screaming protest. Desperately she stood, feeling the stiffness of her legs, and grimly she knew as she hobbled that others identified themselves with her repulsion. Once she received a wink from a tear-swollen eye, and she knew it was a crude way of telling her not to mind what she heard. But she had to escape or burst with terrible emotion. As she tried to pass and not see swollen fingers against a compressed bust, a scud of glittering black eyes identified her as she went. For a moment Mrs. Waddleton wavered, as if she would become secular and suave; then, returning to God, she prayed louder and more devoutly.

Reaching the small back door, Mageila felt icy grief more tolerable than warmth polluted by Mrs. Waddleton. Then she slumped, with protest running out of her. Why writhe for the lesser thing, she wondered drearily. How could that woman affect her mother, who had waited so firmly for death? The memory of her courage was more spacious than her legacy of second-meeting prayers. She slacked against the frame of the door, pressing her forehead against wood—unable to distinguish between spiritual and physical pain.

“Papa, Mama,” she whispered desolately, “where can I go? What will I do? You’re dead such a little while that you can’t be so far away.”

Through the cold open door came the sound of a distant voice singing, with its shrill soul on its lips:

Empty-handed was right! Thrusting her face into the air, she tried to freeze her hot tears; and when they lessened she saw Mrs. Slater approaching, carrying a young sheep grotesquely big in contrast to the foolish frailty of its legs. Nothing could sustain her any more. Even Mrs. Slater’s goodness seemed a wild distortion. Why save a sheep that must be slain tomorrow, today? She slid down the frame of the door, spilling herself over the door-step; abandoning herself to hot grief and outer cold; hearing Mrs. Slater crunch heavily past, lay the beast in an out-house, and return; seeing her consider the blocking of her door.

“The beast had a broken leg,” she explained quietly. “Don’t foul your face with weeping, my maid.”

Mageila sobbed in anguished protest. “Why did you bother about it? Tomorrow someone will kill it. Everything is killed—men, women, animals—”

Sobbing breath stifled her own words, and silence reigned above her until Mrs. Slater spoke in a sorrowing voice.

“It looks like that, my maid; but we didn’t fashion the world, hard as it seems. Times come when God seems far away. I’d take your trouble if I could, because I’m at the other end of sorrow. Useless to tell you now that morning will come again.”

“No, just leave me alone,” she implored.

“No, my maid, I can’t do that,” Mrs. Slater told her. “Grief chills the body. Just let me tend you and put you in bed. I’ll find a hot-bottle and bring you a cup of tea.”

The unselfish detachment of the voice made Mageila clutch the frame of the door and pull herself up. “No,” she said from under her hair, “you can’t do all that for me. You must be tired yourself. You’re—”

“Old?” said Mrs. Slater mildly. “Yes, my maid, I’m at the end of a life. But I’m not tired. Strength often comes when life goes, and why should I save myself? But you’re at the beginning. So come inside by the stove—”

“I—I can’t,” she muttered.

Mrs. Slater, listening, heard from within the sustained flow of Mrs. Waddleton’s praying, as if she was the one attendant at a revival-meeting. Without comment Mrs. Slater turned round the corner of her house.

“There’s another door,” she said. As if sure of being followed, she walked like slow volume.

And Mageila crept after her, crowding into the lee of her hump, not wishing to burden a power beyond the level of her own broken body.

Death after a body-depleting illness is different from the memory of death in health, with faculties wild and alert. Intolerably Mageila saw her mother and sisters waiting for the sea to enter before they could die. She felt mangled, until shock released her to a numbed state where she did as directed and nothing more. Time became so infinite that she wondered if the tidal wave had struck it beyond its capacity to crawl away; but with the exhaustion of other mourners and the diminution of sea-sounds, sharpness settled like the falling waters. She was sure they had coffined her over cold conscious length, though outer warmth touched her from the vinegar-bottles Mrs. Slater had filled with hot water. She felt ashamed that age should wait on youth, but she was helpless—knowing darkness was what she wanted, and the isolation she had in a cell-like room so close to the rising land that it felt like a hole in the hill.

The rooms were divided by walls that lent privacy from sight but not from sound. Mageila could announce herself by a breath, while the destitute reached her with every sound. People talked in a dazed way, unable to comprehend their experiences; and those who could trudged round, seeking stories of similar destitution. She heard Mrs. Waddleton depart with the intention of seeking another vineyard, after Uncle Mosey Rowden had been reported leading prayer in another kitchen. Mageila’s mouth went wry, but in that hour she knew even hate could grow limp. Pea-Pea Peter had been picked off like a scab from the land. Thinking of Pea-Pea, she was glad her people had gone clean and wholesome from temperate living. She felt a twisted pity for Pea-Pea but not for his state, and for the first time she pondered over some of her mother in herself. Neither could tolerate a rolling downhill because of self-indulgence, and she dimly discerned some hardness compelling her to love above her. Pity was contemptuous love, without the spine of respect. She wondered what had happened to Sister Clark. Had her bad breath been quickly snatched by the sea? Undeniably her father was her greatest loss, making her crave him as the person holding consolation. “Courage!” she thought, worshipping it in her parents, praying that it had taken root in her sisters, seeing it as a quality challenging herself. Steadied with sad wonderment, she encompassed her heritage, recalling salty ancestors giving much of their dust to the sea. But she felt it like grit between her teeth. How could she be brave when her props were removed, her home, her few treasured possessions, and everything that made a life? She was the absolute refugee with nothing but what she stood up in. Where were her clothes, she wondered, with a sudden urge to retain what was left.

Dragging herself up, she saw them dried at the foot of her bed. “Help me,” she implored her company of ghosts, making hard effort that left her sitting on the edge of the bed. Then she knew it was late in another afternoon. Time, seeming so infinite, had accomplished things of which she knew little. Listening intently, she heard some news. The bottom of the sea had risen up, and ships could not come close to the shore. Some houses had been swept inland and cast up; others had been washed out with all hands. There were injuries needing medical attention. There was a shortage of food, but Mrs. Slater said women had flour and were baking bread. Someone mentioned the little doctor and there was a slight surge until Mrs. Slater bade them remember another’s loss. When she heard her name Mageila tightened, thinking they might forget her if she huddled away. The little doctor was helpless, craving the laying of hands on herself; but, seeing a basin of water filmed with ice, she was able to wash round her bandage and smooth her hair after sitting down for many rests. Cold water braced her resolution and when she dressed she felt humanized, though her body was unfamiliar, her legs were stiff, and her feet were hard-pressed in shoes baked from drying. Effort accomplished, she slumped—too miserably inadequate to do more. Cold surrounded her like a fog, making her seek the bottles and hug them against her chest until someone approaching from outside halted at the back door to bring news.

A ship was due tomorrow morning! “Yes,” she thought, “Papa is going . . .” Is? Was? The two brief words encompassed all her state. Not only a refugee, but an orphan too stunned to think of ways and means. And decisions for herself would be harder because her mother had commanded her outer life. She heard more. Wireless messages had gone all over the island from the next settlement. The earthquake was general, but the tidal wave a special calamity for fifty miles of coast. Rescue ships were on the way with food and medical supplies, and the latter information made Mrs. Slater speak encouragingly to people within.

“Did you hear? That’ll hearten you all. Only a few more hours before the ships come in.”

Listening to mutters she could not assimilate, Mageila was shocked to hear her name.

“And you wired Mageila Michelet’s people?”

“I did,” said a competent voice, muting to a note she could hear very well. “I sent a message to Captain Dilke. If he’s home and he starts right away, he can catch one of the boats. ’Tis but a day’s sailing from Ship-Haven.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Slater in a heartfelt voice. “Her grandfather will come. What did you tell him?”

“I said the tidal wave had taken all but herself. She was the only survivor.”

The only survivor! Reality struck, suggesting motion—out of doors, over the hills, anywhere beyond memory or sound. She flung the bottles on the bed and fell hard against the frail door, fumbling ineptly with the knob, shaking and rattling as if dreadfully imprisoned.

“Let me out! Let me out!” she croaked to an invisible enemy, and when finally the door was open she encountered Mrs. Slater on the tiny landing.

Immediately her frenzy dwindled in sight of a face looking dark, rough-hewn, like exhaustion cut out of mottled rock. The eyes were almost lost in shadowed folds, and the head with its wings of grey hair seemed unseparated from its shoulders.

“Mrs. Slater,” she ejaculated, beyond herself, “have you been to bed?”

“No, my maid. I had a nap in a chair,” she said, serenely ignoring the recent frenzy. “I’m glad you’re up. Some are just lying with their faces to the wall. I came to tell you—”

“Yes, I heard,” she said slowly, “Grandpa will come. I haven’t seen him since Grandma died. Aunt Molly keeps house for him. He’ll be strange.”

“He’s your kinsman, and it’s not likely he’ll stand aloof,” Mrs. Slater rolled out in her Old Testament way. “He’ll take charge of everything. You’ll be glad to go.”

“Go?” she said thickly, staring with stony eyes tranced from thought beyond human expression.

They would expect her to set out; to feel a ship rising and falling, knowing it was sailing over a sea fuller now with the floating dead. Bodies would be swollen with water, buoyant enough to float by as she passed. She might see her sisters’ night-dresses like white balloons, and their faces strange in their restless hair. She might catch a glimpse of her mother’s dress or her father’s familiar sweater. She might see his golden face all . . .

“No,” she protested, cowering against the wall with an arm up to ward off blows, “I can’t sail!”

Mrs. Slater answered like the core of stark comprehension. “Yes, you can, my maid. You’ve got to go to sea to get anywhere in this country.”

She knew she would be let off from nothing. The old woman was worse than a bully cracking a whip; and though Mageila dropped her arm, settling against the wall where she could look down, she felt dwarfed to the stature of a child near the floor, looking up, pleading to be let off from a horror through the power of some adult. She had a wish to clutch Mrs. Slater’s skirt, press her face against her knees, and implore protection from further anguish. But even as she restrained her wildest instincts, she knew she could never fling herself hysterically on Mrs. Slater. To clutch her would be like intruding on God.

“Where can you go, my maid, out of sight of the sea? When people came to this country they did not come for the land. The sea gives and the sea takes away, and for the fat years it demands its lean years. The sea made your people prosperous. It’s the nature of things that your sorrow should come from it. And your father was a well-off man because he bought fish and sold it to the foreign markets. All your comforts came from the sea. It would be going against nature to fear it now.”

“Yes,” she muttered, knowing there was no argument against stark truth.

But she who had ridden on the sea, in schooners, sailing-vessels, steamers, dories, trap-skiffs, and motor-boats; she who had felt exhilarated with pitch and toss, tilting her face to wind that could blow out her eyes—she who was all of sea-descent was a craven coward, nauseated in her vital organs, unable to do anything but grovel away from her heritage. Feeling all that, she glimpsed human burdens that must be endured beyond outer expression.

“I suppose I’ll have to go,” she muttered, standing away from the wall.

At once Mrs. Slater put her wrinkled hand on a banister, starting a heavy descent; and Mageila crept after her, remembering that people used to touch a hump in superstition. But Mrs. Slater was not deformed. Her hump had come from hard work, making her too squat to shelter tall thin youth. Knowing she would have to be seen by others, Mageila turned up her coat collar in an endeavour to shrink from eyes waking to curiosity.

With each heavy step Mrs. Slater talked without turning her head. “If I were you, my maid, I’d step out and look at the sea. The longer you put it off the harder ’twill be. Then you must have a bite to eat. ’Tis but a few fragments, a bit of bread and some salt meat. I’ll make a drop of black tea.”

“I’ll make it myself.” Mageila muttered in a goaded voice.

It was but a few steps from the kitchen to the cold bleak hill. The day was grey, sunless, dreary with true November, and drab with yesterday’s snow. First she looked inland, seeing in the distance the little cemetery sloping downhill. Did they lie with a list because they had to face the sea? It was so incredibly desolate. The spruce trees were pointed and black, the rocks grim, and the near and far hills like comfortless land. At that moment her frozen body seemed more suffering than her mind, and when she turned stoically to the sea she knew the body’s chill could annihilate the heat of its anguish. Nausea hit her as if the rolling waves compelled sea-sickness, and she scarcely breathed for fear of retching. The water-front was utterly razed, looking as if it held nothing but rock left over from some savage life. She saw it dully, enduringly, told to look; so she looked like a martyr, hearing the sea roar and the wind lament, thinking of the awful sounds imprisoned in herself. She would have stayed indefinitely, like something stuck up, if Mrs. Slater had not called her in.

“Come and eat, my maid. The kettle is on the boil.”

She turned and her only emotion was a rising hate. Mrs. Slater was not like God. She was like the devil, goading her to conduct revolting her soul. If she could find a dark corner where she could throw herself down she would never come into the light again. But she had to sit and eat salt meat when her stomach felt like expelling itself. And if she refused, the sight of the old woman made her feel shame that was sharper than sorrow.

The regular steamer came in, followed by others anchoring outside. Boats were expeditiously laden, lowered, and rowed strongly to shore. The remains of Feather-the-Nest passed into government hands. An upper house was converted into a crude hospital and the destitute left Mrs. Slater. Mageila stayed, satisfied with the care of her injuries. Because of her natural faculty she had no instinct to seek the antiseptics and sterile bandages of doctors and nurses.

Where the wharf had been, Mrs. Slater stood, with arms folded under a black cape, watching an old man make a crashing descent to the beach and stand appraising the water-front. It spoke to him mutely of calamity, and he responded by applying a handkerchief to his nose and eyes. Then he questioned a group of men, who indicated Mrs. Slater with a backward stab of their thumbs.

Coming from a family who did not expect to resign until the nineties, Captain Dilke considered himself in his late prime at eighty-two. Hearts like reliable pumps, lungs full of fresh air, plain food, and brains unmuddled by alcohol had founded a family of great longevity. When they had to lie down or sit for hours in a chair they wanted to die. The Dilkes favoured fresh clear skins, blue eyes, and Spanish-black hair. Captain Dilke’s hair was strong and grey, and his eyebrows oncoming like small stiff waves. From always being on his way he walked with his head preceding his body, but his faded blue eyes were vigilant above a big carved nose and a long upper lip over strong yellow teeth. The quality of his apparel was good, his coat longer than the mode, his lapels short, his hat pinched—that of a man who was satisfied with the pattern he had chosen fifty years ago.

Mrs. Slater waited, unstirring, until Captain Dilke presented himself, raising his soft hat by its pinched crown.

“Ma’am, they pointed you out as the benefactor of my granddaughter.”

Mrs. Slater advanced a slow arm and the two wrung mutually compassionate hands.

“ ’Tis a sad day for you,” the old woman rolled out. “I came down the hill to tell you about the maid before I take you towards her. In that way she will be spared a story. She asks that you would do the first telling to her sisters.”

“Yes, indeed, ma’am. I expected to cable them, but I wanted to see the extent—”

“Yes, there’s enough to see,” said Mrs. Slater heavily. “The maid will write after a time, but it’s hard for the young—”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Captain Dilke, wiping his eyes, “at our age we see death more naturally.”

“We do,” agreed the old woman profoundly. “But you’ll want to hear about your own daughter, and your mourning will be heartened by her courage. I saw her standing like a rock, with her daughters hanging round her neck.”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you. My girls are strong. ’Twas a harsh passing, but it’s what I’d take myself. Death, with no moping beforehand.”

“Yes,” murmured Mrs. Slater, “as my own have gone, in their boots.”

There was a hard sympathetic silence as Mrs. Slater waited for Captain Dilke to look where Feather-Cake had stood; and when he regarded the twisted foundations his faded eyes filled, like those of a man who could sorrow naturally.

“It must have struck hard,” he muttered. “I see some of Pierre’s sheds are still standing. A good business man, Pierre! He was doing well.”

“A fine man, Captain Dilke, with joy in his heart, and well liked round the whole of the shore.”

“I’ll have a look round later on, when I’ve fixed up the girl. There’s some stock—someone must take charge.”

“Yes, but some stock was taken to feed—”

“Of course, ma’am, of course. Necessity knows no law. In danger a man lives by his instincts. Now, ma’am, I’m ready. Where do we find my granddaughter?”

“Up the hill by this path. Often I’ve thought it long, but there’s many would have been glad of its length.”

They began to trudge, heads forward, shoulders down, but without the short breath of age. Products of the same strong world, speaking the same language Mrs. Slater could speak and be comprehended.

Alone, Mageila heard feet letting the ground have the full measure of the body’s weight. She saw the door open and her grandfather step aside to let Mrs. Slater precede him. Then, as he paused on the threshold to focus his far-sighted eyes, she rose to meet him, recognizing him as unchanged since her childhood. He had seemed very old then. If anything, he seemed younger now.

“My poor girl,” he said pitifully.

Mageila saw his face working. He was mourning a daughter! He was her kinsman and he was suffering too. She stepped forward, resting her head against his shoulder, accepting support that was of her own flesh. She knew he was restraining his own strong emotion when he spoke.

“My girl! You were a seventh too. I’ll take care of you. Your room is ready in your grandfather’s house.”

“Grandpa,” she sobbed, “she was so brave. She just stood at the window—”

“Yes, my girl, they’re like that, my daughters! I can see her when she was a little maid, reciting ‘We Are Seven.’ ”

Mageila sobbed out loud, knowing her grandfather was remembering her mother as a little girl. Quietly Mrs. Slater stood by, with her arms folded under her cape.

Captain Dilke met her eyes. “With your permission, ma’am, I’ll take my granddaughter on board right away. No need to torment her eyes any more. Now, Mageila, we won’t linger. Say good-bye to your benefactor.”

“She’s been so good, Grandpa.”

“She’ll hear from us, my girl. We won’t try to say anything now.”

“Go with your grandfather, my maid, where you can lie down in comfort.”

Mageila stood back, buttoning her coat, turning its collar high round her ears.

“Anything to carry, Mageila?”

“No, Grandpa,” she said, with a breaking face.

As if angry with his tactlessness, Captain Dilke took a step to the small window and stared out with a grim expression. Mageila stepped in front of Mrs. Slater and held out a hand, which was taken in profound compassion.

“I can only s-say th-thank you—”

“Don’t try to say anything, my maid. Next to the richness of loved ones on earth is the richness of loved ones in Heaven. I find it hard to separate the two worlds, but you’re young for that. In time it will become softer.”

“Yes, thank you,” she whispered.

“The Lord bless you; the Lord keep you—”

Mageila could not bear it. She put her face in her hands, sobbing with an agony that must detain her further. When the benediction was echoing round her, there was silence disturbed only by her broken-hearted tears. Captain Dilke could not bear it either. He wiped his nose and his eyes, diving in another pocket to produce a silver flask.

“Now, my girl,” he said in a voice to be obeyed. “I’m not one to offer a maid strong drink, but it’s no time to eat a lettuce-leaf. You look scrammed with the cold, and this will hearten you. What do you say, ma’am?”

“Whatever will help,” said Mrs. Slater, serenely unbiased over other people’s sources of strength. Moving heavily to her dresser, she offered a tumbler. “A drop of water? Hot or cold?”

“Hot,” said Captain Dilke, tipping up the kettle himself. Then he tasted the pungent drink, and because it was too hot he added more brandy to cool it. “Won’t hurt you this time, my girl. It’s hard for you to leave with the raw feel of yourself. Now drink it down, and we’ll get on our way.”

Mageila drank, coughed, as her grandfather wrung Mrs. Slater warmly by the hand. “I’ll write to you, ma’am.”

“Yes, let me hear of the maid. God bless you both!” she answered, moving to see them off at the door.

Blindly Mageila followed her grandfather, hearing the trudge of his feet, conscious of his descending back. She did not look anywhere, but she sensed the silence of spectators awed by great calamities. Once she heard a voice saying softly, “good-bye, Mageila; good-bye, little doctor,” but she could make only a tiny gesture of acknowledgement. She knew when she passed the foundations of Feather-Cake, but she did not look until she felt stones crashing underfoot. Then she knew she was on the beach, where she glimpsed the boat and the waiting oarsmen. Accepting a hand, she stepped on the gunnel and went automatically astern; she heard the little run her grandfather gave as he shoved off with the other men, heard him settle and peer naturally over the side as he spoke his thoughts in a saddened voice.

“ ’Twill be a long time before the fish come back to these waters.”

“That it will, sir. The bottom is riz right up.”

It was not the ordeal she had anticipated. On her cold grieved stomach the brandy whirled, making her unable to separate the roundabout in her head from the up and down of the sea. Neither could she bear the light in her swollen eyes; so she kept them sealed, knowing they rowed in shadow of the dark point of land. How were the Butlers, she wondered vaguely, remembering she had not inquired for their welfare. Sorrow is personal, she thought; but she had to dismiss the Butlers, feeling increased sickness in herself, sitting taut in fear of retching, hardly able to mount the ladder when the boat swept along the dark sides of the steamer. Again she heard the awed silence of spectators, broken only by the unchanged tones of her grandfather; but he hurried her beyond curiosity, helping her over a step to a stuffy lounge, down a companion-way and an alley-way, until they came to the door he wanted.

“Yes, number sixteen. A single cabin all to yourself. A bit of influence, my girl, with the purser, but I thought you’d like to be to yourself.”

“Yes,” she said gratefully; but she stood inside the cabin in the exact middle of the floor, looking through the port-hole to the treacherous sea. Dulled to its effect, she turned heavily and saw her grandfather snatching at small curtains to find a bell. “There it is, Grandpa,” she said, with the woman’s automatic response to a man’s ineptitude.

Captain Dilke kept his finger on the bell, and when a plump white-capped stewardess entered he looked greatly relieved.

“Ah, Mrs. Powell, I’m glad to see you. Now, here’s the girl. Take care of her. You found her a night-gown and a bed-warmer?”

“Yes, sir, there’s a hot-bottle in the bed, and an extra blanket.”

The voice was plump, comfortable, the very core of motherliness. It did something to Mageila, and when she heard her grandfather go out, the stewardess rattle the hook and turn round, she collapsed on her shoulder like a girl without bones.

“I think I’m drunk,” she said desperately.

Unperturbed, Mrs. Powell gave her a pat, placed her on the lounge-seat, and stooped to pull off her shoes.

“Leave it all to me, dear,” she said, beginning a speedy undressing.

“I feel sick,” choked Mageila, holding on to her stomach.

“Would you like the tin can, dear?”

“No,” she moaned, “let me lie down.”

“Yes, indeed! No wonder you’re sick, dear. ’Twould break the heart in your body to see the sights round this shore. Such a dreadful experience for a young thing like you. All your loved ones . . . Yes, have a good cry. I don’t believe in holding back the tears. Your grandfather told me about you, and I promised I’d give you special attention.”

The invitation to relax and not stiffen a spine changed into jelly made her weep effortlessly, weakly uncontrolled. She knew she was drunk, and she sobbed for her hard thoughts of Pea-Pea. She had condemned a drunkard and now she was drunk herself. She remembered her father taking the care of their childish colds from her mother, and sending them to bed with hot milk and brandy. Useless for Mama to tell Papa wine was a mocker! Temperate, strong, and wholesome, Papa believed in little celebrations. There was the green pot-bellied bottle. . . .

“Have a hot menthe, Mama? Just the right thing for a cold winter night.”

“No, Pierre, you know very well I dislike anything that makes me feel I don’t own my body.”

“Oh, là, là! Mama does not own her body after a little hot menthe. A hot toddy, Mama?”

“No, Pierre, you know I hate it all. What people see in it I can’t imagine. It never did anyone any good. ‘Be not among winebibbers.’ ”

“But, Mama, it is nice to winebib sometimes—not on Monday or Tuesday or, of course, on Sunday, but on Saturday afternoons when Mageila and I listen to the opera broadcasts. Just a few sips to wash away the flour-barrels, and then Mageila and I are in front of the golden curtain.”

“Mageila should be darning her stockings on Saturday, and let me catch you giving the child any sips . . .”

“There, my dear, I’ve got hold of you. Now . . . I’ll have the upper berth strapped up. ’Twill give you more air.”

Mageila fell; but the mattress received her, though her pillow whirled away. Clutching it like disappearing comfort, she went down, down, vaguely conscious of other voices, just knowing someone held her wrist and touched the bandage round her head.

“I’d like to have a look at that cut.”

“I think she wants sleep, Doctor.”

“Yes, raise her up and I’ll pop this in her mouth.”

Mageila swallowed something and washed it down, then fell back on the fringe of unconsciousness.

“Keep her asleep, Mrs. Powell. We won’t sail for some time. I’ll leave another capsule. The old man said to say he’d gone ashore. Bad luck when insurance becomes null and void through Acts of God.”

Mageila threw out her hand, clutching at something new. Null and void! Null and void! . . .

“Mama, I am better off to you dead than alive. I took your ten talents and they have multiplied.”

“Stop your nonsense, Pierre! Don’t you dare leave me alone. I won’t have it. Drink a nice cup of tea!”

“But, Mama, you will be a prosperous widow.”

“Hold your tongue, Pierre!” . . .

Null and void! Her sisters were nurses. They could earn forty dollars a week. She was uneducated, incapable of earning her living. She was a pauper. Paupers were buried by the people, in a plain box covered with dark drab cloth. Null and void. . . .

She relaxed, uncaring, reaching a state where nothing mattered.

One of the larger outports,^[1] Ship-Haven looked as if the sea had bitten the land with a horse-shoe mouth. Scattered widely, the settlement seemed lifted to stare at the sea. At the harbour-entrance stood a rocky island so naked that winter could strip it of nothing at all.

On the wharf in front of sheds and piled-up timber, people awaited the incoming steamer. Though it was always an event, the crowd was larger that day because of an arrival affecting the Dilkes. Some could claim legitimate business, but the majority had collected to see the landing of the granddaughter. Conversation was all of the earthquake and the tidal wave, both seeming as incredible as the things occurring in China or Turkey. Though always a threat, Newfoundland sea was expected to stay within bounds; to strike at ships, leave widows and orphans, and make the Marine Disaster Fund a prominent charity. To intrude on granite land as enduring as the first Rock of Ages seemed a queer foreign trick. Voices were low but excited as eyes discreetly appraised the three Dilke daughters standing aloof with two Dilke husbands, James John Bartlett, magistrate, and the Reverend Leander White, minister of the First Methodist Church. Voices queried the absence of Doctor Harold Martin, husband of Ella, until everyone remembered that his appearance always coincided with the last minute before the baby.

With pale flesh looking whiter against black the Dilke women isolated themselves, while their men shifted uneasily and murmured of work they had left undone. Clannish over all family matters, and as yet unable to identify the ship’s passengers, the sisters consulted in generalities about the bereavement. It was dreadful! Such an utter tragedy, but they must make the best of it and continue their ordinary lives. They would not go anywhere for six months; but, of course, they would go on with their church-work, and as soon as possible persuade Mageila to take a Sunday-school class. So difficult to get anyone to teach in the Sunday-school! Poor Leander was nearly out of his mind, what with all the young people away and others so selfish. Besides, it would take her mind off herself! Was Beatie’s hat too smart for mourning and for a minister’s wife? Yes, Ella knew her coat was not a good black. It was greener in the light than she had expected, but what could you do when you had to shop locally? As soon as Mageila was settled she’d get Harold to drive her to town for a day’s shopping. Of course, Harold might not be able to get away—there were the Christmas confinements. Had they each written to Frances, Marion, and Gertrude after the night-letters? Of course, Papa would expect to pay for the night-letters. Having to send three to such distant places as Calgary, Vancouver, and Winnipeg! And not being able to use up the fifty words through lack of news! . . .

No, none of them had written! Well, no time lost! As soon as Mageila arrived they would all write, and tell the sad details. Awkward not knowing what to do about wreaths! How shocked the girls would be! There was that nice young man in the bank! How old was Mageila? Going on for eighteen. All the Dilkes married early! They must have the young man in. Look how well the girls had done for themselves by marrying bank-boys. All managers now in big Canadian cities. What was the young man’s name? Had a very Nova Scotian accent! What did that matter? It was not what a man said! It was what he provided. Pierre had been doing so well, though how he could when he seemed so flighty. . . . How awful for insurance to be null and void through an Act of God. James said you could insure for anything at Lloyd’s. How careless of Pierre not to insure at Lloyd’s! That’s what comes of being French and a Roman Catholic! Of course, they were not insured at Lloyd’s themselves! How on earth could a tidal wave get at Ship-Haven, stuck up as it was? Didn’t they have enough wind to blow their heads off, but compared to Feather-the-Nest it was a metropolis! Between themselves, if Sheila had listened to them and moved . . . Oh, poor Sheila! Remember “We Are Seven”! She was the first in the churchyard laid! Was she in the churchyard laid?

In the bleak November morning three pairs of Dilke blue eyes questioned one another in unrealized horror. Eyes filling in unison, three handkerchiefs were extracted from bags; but then Molly Bartlett lifted a hard chin, disdaining external weakness. How awkward it was coming out in the morning! You could never depend on a maid getting a meal on the table. She had chosen a boiled fowl for Mageila, with white sauce. Easier to digest they say, though for her part she could digest nails. She wished the ship would hurry so that she could get back to the fowl. All very well for you, Molly! Who would answer Harold’s bell? All very well for you, Ella! Who would answer Leander’s door? Look at that woman standing over there in that good coat, and only yesterday she had come begging to Leander. Absolutely scandalous! Poor Mageila! She’d find it dull with none of the young people at home.

“We mightn’t have any children,” moaned Ella Martin, softly dabbing her eyes; and they all lamented their losses, enduring the burden of many Newfoundland parents.

While the elders stayed in the places made by their forefathers, modernity attracted the young, calling them to bigger schools, larger careers, and eventual settling in other places.

“Hubert will be back for good, next summer,” said Beatie with maternal complacency. “As the only boy who would go into the business, Papa will probably leave—”

“He’ll do nothing of the sort,” contradicted two at once. “Papa will remember his daughters first. Poor Sheila—”

There was united sorrowing, bridged again by Molly Bartlett.

“Sheila’s children are almost strangers to us,” she mused. “Spoiled, I thought, when she spent that summer with us. For a sensible girl she let Pierre have a lot of his own way. And now they’re both gone. I simply can’t take it in.” Trying to encompass incredible reality, Molly frowned at Beatie’s hat. Without distinction but designed for longer upswept hair, it sat oddly on Beatie’s pinched flat shingle. “That hat is wrong,” she pronounced. “It’s not proper mourning and it’s intended for a much younger woman.”

Beatie bridled. “I can’t help it now. I’ll have to wear it. I’m not made of money,” she said pointedly, referring to greater wealth.

“It’s very nice,” said Ella, the most peace-loving sister.

United, the sisters contended as well—dividing and coming together several times a day. Hearing a voice more soothing than her own, Molly Bartlett raked Ella with varnished blue eyes.

“Where’s Harold?” she demanded. “If he couldn’t come why didn’t he say so? I do hate depending on other people. We could have brought the Buick, couldn’t we, James?”

James John Bartlett, magistrate, started abruptly. “Yes, dear, of course. What did you say?” he asked, returning from intense preoccupation with men’s affairs.

Accustomed to directing a local court and being directed by his wife, his manner veered between authority and ingratiation. In dark clothes, a bowler hat topping a long thin figure with an unexpectedly stout stomach, he took a step towards his wife; but she dismissed him with cold eyes.

“The Buick has no heater,” said Beatie, avenging her hat. “Harold’s Nash is much warmer, air-conditioned—better for Mageila.”

“Harold will be here,” said Ella hastily. “He has less time than other men.”

The Reverend Leander White, a tall gangling man with the rutted face of a Lincoln, opened his mouth protestingly, but forbearance stayed his tongue. It was not the moment to remind his sister-in-law of the infinite calls on a man in the Master’s service.

“He will be here,” he said, as if speaking of a more sacred arrival.

Reassurance did not comfort Molly Bartlett. A woman who liked routine and organization, she became critical when jolted from normality. Staring at Leander’s face, more rutted through forbearance, she frowned, bending to whisper to Ella out of earshot of Beatie.

“Leander always looks dirty in the morning. Beatie should—”

“Yes! Shushhh,” hissed Ella. “She says it’s strength, but I think even Abraham Lincoln could have done with a closer shave. Look, there’s Hal now,” she said on a louder note. Impulsively she raised a welcoming hand, snatched by Molly.

“Control yourself, Ella. What will people say? You know everyone is watching us. Sheila not dead four days!”

Disconcerted, Ella Martin huddled inside her mourning. “Harold is here,” she murmured decorously.

All eyes, ready to be diverted, looked up the wharf to see Harold Martin leave his car and approach with the leisure of a man who has learned to move without overconsumption of energy. As he approached he greeted people naturally, arriving as the ship turned broadside to ease into the wharf.

“You’re late,” accused Molly sharply.

A square compact man with twinkling brown eyes and dark hair, Harold Martin grinned at his sister-in-law. “I’m not,” he drawled. “And if you had your way we’d be coolin’ our heels before breakfast. There’s the captain! Where’s—”

“Yes, where?” they all asked, turning in a bunch to examine the ship’s rail.

“There’s Papa,” said Ella, refraining from any welcoming gestures. Then, as she stared, her eyes filled with spontaneous tears. “Oh, look,” she mourned. “The poor child! She’s like a ghost. Harold—”

“She looks droppin’,” he drawled, narrowing professional eyes.

The Dilkes and their husbands pressed towards the edge of the wharf and the crowd followed, leaving a suitable distance between mourners and spectators. In sight of tragedy they could see but not comprehend, the women went mute, uncomfortable in well-being, conscious of the heartiness of their anticipation. Unspoken thought said at once there would be no taking of a Sunday-school class, no interests in a bank-boy, no zest for a boiled fowl. They heard the silence of other passengers, falling back for the devastated girl in dejected-looking clothes. They saw their father, surrounding himself with officials, and a seaman ready to take away the gate to the gangway and permit them the first landing. They saw him offering his shoulder and Mageila drooping as if her bones were folding up. Other eyes, pitiful but greedy for sensation, stared also, and for some minutes Mageila commanded a wide stage.

For the first time the sisters really met their sorrow. Unimaginative, living energetically in the exterior world, narrow with their own importance, they needed tragic evidence to call up genuine tears. Unlike the men of their ancestry, they had not learned humility from the undiscriminating seas. Like Sheila Mageila, they were big frogs in little pools—despising everything beyond their range, criticizing what they did not understand. Inactivity was a sin. Books were for people who had nothing to do or for those who would not find things to do. Their interests were fervent, virtuous, and womanly. They hooked balls of twine and cotton as if the world could be redeemed through mats and doilies. They knitted as if the naked knocked at their doors. They beat up eggs with the speed of a fireman trained to appear with life-saving food. They were house-proud, dusting over and under everything—and behind their pictures once a month. They superintended the preparation of meals, taking the lids off the saucepans, understanding all the gradations between a simmer and a long rolling boil. A new crochet pattern was of more consequence than the latest news from the European dictators.

They thought Hitler a very bad man who might have been saved through church-work. Doing dreadful things beyond Christian belief, he was as remote as the missionaries they supported in China. When their husbands and their father gathered together to discuss politics, the state of Europe, the omen of the future, the doubtful state of Newfoundland, and the surety of war before 1940, they eyed one another with the nervousness of mothers with sons. But with the aptitude of domestic ostriches they buried their heads in household sand. There could not be another war! If men had more to occupy their time, they would not sit imagining horrors. A woman’s work was never done! If the original Sheila Mageila had experienced incommensurable yearnings in her Irish soul, they had been well diluted in her female descendants. Romantically they demanded little, accepting the fact that a wife’s most frequent position was her stoop to pick up after her husband. They favoured men who were solid citizens, church-stewards, committee-heads—men who were comely to sit beside in motorcars that would transport them to the capital city of St. John’s, where they could show the snobbish town-folk that old outport families were better than themselves.

The eldest daughter, Molly Bartlett, was the most rigid, and she spoke collectively for her sisters. We Dilkes don’t have head-aches! We Dilkes don’t take laxatives! We Dilkes marry young! We Dilkes don’t take chloroform for our children! Always well, she would not permit Ella to speak of her major operation—considering it an outrage on Dilke female organs. She thought Sheila Mageila foolishly infatuated with Pierre, seeming to illustrate the impossible fact of falling in love after marriage. Now in sight of their daughter she felt a slight shaking of values. Already she had met large lamenting eyes, seeming too heavy-laden for Dilke consolation.

As Mageila wavered down the gangway with her hand on her grandfather’s shoulder, the women’s minds vaguely glimpsed calamity striking deeply within.

“Papa,” they murmured mutely, while their husbands mumbled indefinite male greetings, shifted their feet, and cleared their throats.

“Well, girls! How is everything?” Captain Dilke asked with supreme naturalness. “Now, Mageila, my girl . . .”

Subdued to unusual gentleness, the sisters whispered sorrowfully, “Mageila, my dear! We’re broken-hearted too. Mageila, your room is ready. There’s a nice bright fire! Your dear mother!”

Courteously the girl accepted their kisses and the men’s gentle hand-clasps, turning to each with incredible slowness, staring long and strangely with dry eyes strained to examine new situations. When the greetings were over she stood facing the way they left her, and her unconscious effect was so great that the husbands, anticipating collapse, made a triangle of shoulders. The women halted tentatively. With no respect for their husbands’ decisions, they were accustomed to listen when their father spoke.

“Harold! Ella! I see your car! Take Mageila along. We’ll walk.”

“Yes, Papa,” agreed Ella, glad to be the chosen one. “Hal, the car is rather far—”

“Not so far. I can walk,” said Mageila in her throaty voice.

They all started, knowing she spoke for the first time. Neither her grandfather nor the doctor forbade the walk. Representing white bereavement, battered youth, her eyes lived on, like light under ice, and she bore herself with the dignity of effort forbidding overt attention.

“She’s too weak,” protested Ella, moist-eyed.

“She wouldn’t be carried ashore. Do as she says! And, Ella, don’t jade her with questions.”

“Papa, as if I would!” she expostulated; but, subduing personal feelings, she turned to Mageila. “Come, dear. Harold and I will take you away from these staring people. You look very white.”

Mageila went unseeingly, like a girl walking alone. As Captain Dilke directed a boy to transport his luggage, the two other men became galvanized with energy.

“We’ll go to work,” they both said together, and stalked off.

Thus dismissed in mid-morning, Molly and Beatie exchanged the doubtful glances of adults dubious over the dignities of youth.

“I must say she’s very self-possessed. Not a tear! I believe we feel it more than she does. More grown up than I expected.”

“Talks like a foreigner,” said Molly doubtfully.

“Sheila always said she was tongue-tied. She should have had—”

“Nonsense,” snapped Molly at once. “None of the Dilkes were ever tongue-tied. Papa,” she went on, including her father in general dubiety, “why on earth did we have to walk?”

“And why not?” said the old man, moving up the wharf as a daughter fell in on either side. “Lately come to you to need an engine under you. You walked plenty when you were girls. If you got a ride in a square-bodied wagon—”

“Papa!” protested Beatie. “At such a time! Tell us about—”

“That’s why we walked,” the old man told them. “I can’t have the girl jaded with questions. She’s been through enough to kill an ox.”

Captain Dilke looked back at the entrance to the harbour like a man ready to return wholesomely to his responsibilities.

“Is the Sheila Mageila in from North Sydney?”

“Yes, Papa! She’s unloading her coal.”

“And the Phoebe Jane?”

The sisters exchanged patient glances. Before telling them a thing, their father had to hear the news from his shops, his wharf, his schooners, and his cargoes.

Ella Martin sat on the extreme edge of the back seat of her husband’s car, with her eyes rivetted on an ashen profile.

When she had expended herself to reach the car, Mageila settled as still as ice.

Accustomed to women who talked incessantly when driving, looking behind and before and on either side, Harold Martin gave her frequent sidelong glances. Inwardly he thought she looked on the brink of pernicious anemia, and because he was a doctor he thought of restoration in medical terms. Rest, the right food, and possibly liver injections for that bloodless pallor.

“How do you feel, Mageila?” he asked slowly, too inured to human ills to be made self-conscious by a stricken girl. “You must go to bed and let me go over you.”

“Yes, let Harold go over you,” corroborated her aunt, offering her husband whole-heartedly.

Mageila was staring directly ahead, dully aware of familiar landmarks remembered from childhood. Soon there would be a place revealing the rocky island with its lonely lighthouse. There were the shops on one side, seeming to be built against the sky, with the hungry sea below waiting to receive them if the wind chose to blow them down. There was the rising land full of larger houses than Feather-the-Nest, three church spires, three schools—Roman Catholic, Church of England, Methodist—all in one tiny place. Denominationalism is the curse of the country! Denominationalism is the curse of . . . Inwardly she shook herself, forbidding the parrot repetition of a phrase. Her mind was becoming like that. If it stuck on something it could not get away without effort. But they all said denominationalism was the curse . . . “Who cared?” she asked, struggling against witlessness. Neither her father nor her mother was Catholic or Methodist now. The first snow had gone. Everything had a stripped skeleton look. Sad! Sad and dying. . . .

“How do you feel, Mageila?”

When they had driven far enough along the arm, there would be the biggest building of all: red brick with shops underneath, a house above, a wharf behind with stacked-up timber and barrels of flour—flour, she remembered, flour that would receive her in thick white rest.

“How do you feel?” asked the doctor more demandingly.

“What?” she muttered vaguely.

“Tell Harold how you feel, dear,” said her aunt with a kind medical manner. “Have you got any special pain? Does your head hurt? Have you got a cough?”

Mageila breathed under her stricken chest. How separate one pain from another, or talk about them to foolish people? Would she ever be let alone?

“How did you get that bruise on your—”

“Never mind that,” drawled the doctor, but while silencing his wife he demanded response for himself. “Do you feel weak, Mageila? Gone?” he suggested with some comprehension.

Mageila mustered her strength for reply, startling her relatives by the depth of a voice from a shallow chest. “I feel turned to water” was all she could think of to say, and to herself it explained everything.

“Turned to water?” repeated her aunt, staring at the back of her husband’s neck as if it held significant eyes.

More silently the doctor considered it, in the terms of pernicious anemia or of shock doing strange things to human blood, but his wife spoke her thoughts out loud. When the Dilkes had something to say they spoke it without mental reservations.

“The wave, dear, I suppose,” she explained. “I’ve been in hospital and I know. I lost a lot of blood, but it wasn’t a case of the red corpuscles eating up the white.”

Mageila swallowed, writhing for the first time in outer protest.

“Here we are,” said the doctor, braking more than his car.

Now Mageila saw nothing but a broad door leading to the house by many stairs. How could she climb, she wondered, when her head felt as if her blood was too weak to reach her brain. If only she could sit on, and give way to the clawing thing in herself. But her aunt was out on the uneven side-walk. She had a face like her mother’s, even though its skin was bleaker and she had not been cherished by a man like her father. But the doctor was nice! The doctor was nice! The doctor was nice! . . .

“Now,” he said in his encouraging drawl.

“Get out, Mageila, and as soon as we get in we’ll have a nice cup of tea.”

Coming to this woman was no great change; but her mother was under the water, floating round, up and down, rising with the tide. . . . “Ahhhhh,” she moaned, with such expiring energy that two people snatched her forward fall.

“Easy,” commanded the doctor. “Ell, open the door and we’ll soon—”

“Yes, we’ll soon be there and Harold will make it all right,” said Ella Martin with bright fatuity.

Mageila was up at last, in a long hall between two rows of rooms. Everything glittered with a high polish. Pools of light, finding homes in glass, yellowed the golden-oak frames round many sea-faring pictures. Glimpse of rooms through half-open doors emphasized the air of order and cleanliness in her grandfather’s house. But the end of the hall was savage with another world. Under a window, with light giving it full value, stood a heavy marble-topped table bearing the mounted heads of two stags with tall interlocked antlers.

“Your room is the last one down. On the back, where you can get a nice view of the sea,” said Ella Martin with tactless kindness.

“The stags!” muttered Mageila, dragging on a supporting arm. “I don’t remember—”

Suddenly nervous, Ella Martin looked down the hall with the surprise of a woman who had looked often without comprehension. “Oh, the stags! Papa only got them recently. One of his men found them like that in Labrador, and Papa had them mounted. Come, dear.”

But Mageila shook her off, standing like a spent sensitive horse refusing to pass a disturbing object. “How did they get that way?” she said, glaring like an accuser.

“Come, dear,” said her aunt, plucking her sleeve.

“How did they get that way?” Mageila demanded of the man.

Harold Martin rumpled his dark hair. “That way?” he drawled. “What way?”

“That way!” accused Mageila, demonstrating terribly with her eyes as the other two stared with sharpened sight.

The table was agonized with a stayed picture of unacquiescent death. All the cruelty of nature and the savage battles of the forests were arrested under their eyes. The stags’ necks were arched in strain, flung back as if they had struggled endlessly to settle into an easy position denied them by their contending antlers. They seemed to pant through open mouths and to stare with a torment no glass eyes could eliminate, and the taller head looked as if it had struggled longer to live. On their polished stand they represented slow savage death, without any settling into final peace.

“H-how . . .” she stuttered.

Startled beyond considering the effect of his words, Harold Martin explained slowly. “They’re often found like that. They fight and their antlers get mixed, and when they try to get apart they can’t. The more they try the more tangled they get, until they tire out. Then—”

“Then?” she demanded implacably.

Harold Martin, uneasy at last, rumpled his hair again, entreating his wife with his eyes.

“We’ll look at the stags another time,” she suggested brightly.

“Then?” demanded Mageila as if her aunt was not there.

“Well, then—they fall to the ground, until they get strength to rise and struggle again; and when they can’t get apart they lie and starve to death.”

“Oh,” she said, expelling a hard sigh.

“Nature is cruel, dear,” explained her aunt, making an apologetic discovery. “Now we won’t think of it any more.”

“No, we won’t think of it any more,” agreed Mageila like a dying parrot.

The knife in her heart was turning round with mortal intent. Like a river seeking a new course her cold blood receded from her head, making her flatten her hands against the wall and claw for support. Then she slid effortlessly to the floor, disintegrating like a broken thing in too many pieces to mend.

In a second Ella Martin was kneeling down in wailing dismay. “Well, well! This is dreadful! Harold—”

But her husband was standing in momentary bewilderment, like a man who had never heard of restoratives. “My God,” he drawled, giving intense value to the Creator’s name. “Think of comin’ through a tidal wave and faintin’ over stags. What did you tell her that for, Ell? You frightened her about the corpuscles.”

“I?” gasped his wife in mounting indignation. “It’s a pity you didn’t give her a few more details. Why didn’t you describe the death-rattle, and the rales you were talking about yesterday? Do something, and don’t stand there like a great gawk!”

The stags had finished her. She lay in a bed with a high wooden back, as if her forefathers had preferred to sleep sitting up. The room was heavy with walnut furniture, warm from fire in an old-fashioned grate, and strongly lighted by windows commanding a view of the rocky island with its desolate lighthouse. When she opened her eyes she could watch the sea striking against bare rock, drawing back, and striking again as if it would never tire of trying to subdue a difficult adversary. The cruelty of nature was in her like a bodily affliction, and the tidal wave was aggravated by the memory of the interlocked stags. They were not on the marble-topped table. They were in the centre of her eyes, with necks, mouths, and eyes making spheres of agony linked with the cruel fate of her own people.

The world was too strong for her; the inanimate had become the animate, making her see that the universe lived like a monster. Wind was its breath, the sea its blood and passion, and the sky its high indifferent mind. In her new frailty she could not live when the monster kept knocking her down. Again she returned to the feeling of being coldly composed, and consciously coffined over narrow length. Her thoughts were too strong for whispers, so her words dropped back as stone-dead sound. She felt her grandfather eyeing her sorrowfully and she would have liked to respond to his challenge. He was like Mrs. Slater, compelling hard things he would sponsor, like God, lest she dash her foot against a stone. She knew she was giving trouble. Her aunt Ella looked after her as if she knew how. She heard her Uncle Harold ordering red meat, spinach, liver extract, before he stabbed her with a needle. She knew her Aunt Molly seized on the preparing of food as a charge.

But she spoke to no one, making her Aunt Beatie declare that if anyone could rouse her Leander could. That flicked her, almost to mustering strength for protest. She was tired to death of the Wesleys, knowing they had drowned in the tidal wave. The bas-relief had gone down: Charles and John were dead. But Leander came and she heard the scrape of his chair and smelt church: red plush, varnish, warmth after cold because the fire had not been lighted for long. The Wesleys had bleak flesh, unlike the flesh of her own father. They could not speak with his joyous voice, neither could they stand with suspended hands and listen to a high bird-call. The Wesleys could not dance, because they had stiffened their knees against altars; so what remained of time she would like to free of the Wesleys. But her Uncle Leander talked softly and incessantly, and when she took no notice he knelt to pray and they all crept close to her bed.

Her frailty suggested gentleness, the presentation of a tender Saviour, making the room mild with green pastures, still waters, the rescued lamb. In the midst of the muted prayer tempered for her state, she opened eyes glaring with last defiance.

“Get up! Get out!” she said chokingly. “Meek and mild! Still waters! You’re crazy. Get out!”

She laughed horribly, with sound submerged in her throat; and they knelt on, stupefied with shock. All but her grandfather, who had remained standing by the window. Then, taking charge, he dismissed them all, shutting the door on their backs, returning to sit on the bed and encircle her shaking shoulders.

“My girl,” he said compassionately, “Leander meant well. You looked bad, so he prayed that way. He didn’t see what you left, or know what you went through. Many good people only see with their eyes. I’m a seaman, and I know what you feel. You think it’s been too rough for Leander’s God.”

“Yes,” she said, clutching at comprehension. “Grandpa, Papa knew about the sea. He used to read to me about a lighthouse. La phare! How the sea tried to get at it. ‘La mer est un tyran.’ The tidal wave got past trying, like the stags’ necks—their antlers—”

“Yes, what’s that?” asked Captain Dilke, startled beyond comprehension. But he was old, experienced, natural as the earth. He took her sorrow and aired it, talking naturally about her people, asking nothing but the things Mrs. Slater had asked. “We can’t ease it, my girl. Nothing but time can do that. Just let us work a bit on your body. You need some food in you. There now; cry it out. The sea is not right when it’s too quiet.”

“It was that way before—”

“Yes, my girl, unnatural. You feel the thing rising up. A storm, a hurricane, and the glass begins to fall. I’ve had hard times myself, seen them go overboard or sewed up in a sail. And your Grandma, a life’s companion—I suppose you’d feel better if you could think of them tucked up in a bed. Death like that can be harder to watch than a good clean slap from the sea. It’s the outside of their going that looks so bad. No one can soften death, Mageila. You can only step up to it in courage. Your mother and father did that. I’m proud of my own girl, and that good woman told me she had her arms round your sisters.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “and Papa went after them. He gave—”

“Yes, my girl, he gave his life. I remember a fellow in the war who lost his legs, and when someone like Leander sympathized with him he said he didn’t lose his legs—he gave them.”

“Yes, Grandpa,” she whispered on a softer note. “I’m sorry I was rude about the prayer.”

“They’ll understand. I’ll see that they do. Will you be a good maid and eat something? A bit of gruel?”

“Yes,” she said obediently, feeling in herself the ability to struggle when the right crutch was under her arm.

The tidal wave seemed to have diluted Mageila’s blood. The feeling of the incipient death in a faint became part of many days.

Outside her room opinion differed. Molly Bartlett said the faints were imagination. If she would stir herself and get out of doors more, she would feel better. Beatie was grim, wishing she had the time for a few faints; but when a church called a minister to its service it expected the minister’s wife to go with it, without faints. As the wife of a doctor, and the victim of the one Dilke pelvic operation, Ella told them they were most uncomprehending. Harold Martin laughed amiably at his sisters-in-law, telling them to their faces they were so strong they’d need shooting. He would not hear of Mageila’s getting out of bed, and he told his wife to look after her and spare her jaw from her aunts. Usually tolerant to strenuous opinion, Captain Dilke told his daughters to hold their tongues and look after their niece or he’d send to town and get a pair of nurses for night and day. The daughters were impressed, whispering to one another that Papa was “tissing.” Papa was very indulgent to Mageila! Imagine Sheila having such a delicate daughter! That must be Pierre. Of course a child had two parents, but so far it had never come out in the Dilkes. It was like having fits in the family. Would they get a nice clean clothes-pin to put between Mageila’s teeth? That’s what they always did to the girl who had her fits in church. Imagine having two extra women in the house, sitting around all day in white caps and expecting the maid to put every shovelful of coal on the fire! Really, Papa was most inconsiderate. Ella would come across the street three times a day, as she knew about pans and how to make a bed with the person in it.

Inside Mageila’s room everyone was immediately kind and full of service. Against Molly’s best pillow-cases she inspired the most robust chivalry. Molly was pleased with the way she lay without creasing the linen. Having embroidered many best pillow-slips against the illness that never arrived, she took a great pride in the bed. Every time Ella and Beatie came into the room they fingered the linen, admiring its quality and the pattern of the embroidery. Her share of service for Mageila went into the preparing of trays and the dusting—twice a day, because a fire in a bedroom made such dirt.

The husbands were gentle. James Bartlett was dreamy and absent-minded in his own world, having learned that his many responsibilities as magistrate were secondary to those of a housekeeping Dilke. He crept round the house dropping things as he went, too absent-minded to pick them up. But when his wife stooped after him he knew it, from the voice reminding him from the vicinity of the floor. The Reverend Leander was forbearing, friendly, and secular after the first failure of Christian effort.

For many weeks the oft-repeated remark in the family was “Mageila has fainted again!” The doctor treated her for a low blood-count, evident from bloodless hands and feet and the unsupplied brain causing weakness and nausea preceding the collapses. It was her grandfather who began to notice they did not occur from exertions but from hearing of violent things happening to the natural body. Denied conversation about her operation, Ella Martin recounted it to her patient while washing her face. In great detail she spoke of female suffering, taking Mageila through enemas, needles, anaesthetics, being strung up, surgical cutting, sutures through three skins; and when she was giving full value to subsequent tubes, she looked under her wash-rag to see a face whitening to complete unconsciousness.

Mageila was reading a letter from her eldest sister. “You must come to us as soon as you can. We advise you to go back to school and pass the examinations for the hospital requirements. Thank God we can look after ourselves, though we certainly will miss the allowance from dear Papa and the feeling that he was there at our backs. No one could have been a sweeter father. We suppose there’s no insurance now, or any estate, if everything was washed away? But if there’s nothing from Papa, Grandpa will finance you. He hasn’t forgotten a birthday or Christmas since we left home. Remember the little book with all our names in it? Talk it over with him and see what he says. Bee says with your gift of being the little doctor you won’t settle easily into this world, but I think you will. You must get over that idea of thinking nature will do it all. It goes a long way, and because we came from where we did we know more about that than the American nurses. But, Magee, we lived in a neck of the woods compared to the advantages here. Make up your mind and prepare yourself. Having plenty to do takes your mind off yourself. A hospital is a world by itself, and a wonderful world when you get used to it. After a while everything becomes part of the day’s work and you don’t mind what you have to do. I have a patient now with the most terrible wound in his side. Six ribs are gone, and the dressings are the worst I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something. When the wound is open you can look through to the beating heart. . . .”

Mageila dropped the letter, whirling away into blackest unconsciousness.

To distract her and keep her thoughts outward, her grandfather threw a coil of wire under her bed and placed a radio within reach of her hand. She responded by twiddling weakly with the dials and lying back confused with voices as various as the tower of Babel. But she fainted after listening about the persecutions of some European minorities. And one morning when an American commentator announced with sensational urgency, “three times the executioner’s axe glittered in the German sun,” she fell into prolonged unconsciousness. Later in the afternoon her grandfather came upstairs from his premises and cleared the room of women.

“Mageila!”

“Yes, Grandpa?”

“Look at me.”

Mageila looked, remembering her own demand that people should meet her eyes before she laid her hands on a pain. Now she met the dwindling blue of her grandfather’s eyes, feeling an entrance into a stronger world. After staring for a hard moment he went to the window, giving a yank to Molly’s meticulous curtains.

“You’ve got to get up, Mageila. You’re turning away from your trouble and trying to escape. I don’t believe a word Harold says about corpuscles. You don’t faint from exertion. Get up and try your feet. If you drop in your tracks we’ll pick you up, until you try again. It may sound hard, but you’ve got to help yourself. What do you think? You’re an intelligent girl.”

“Yes,” she said, wide-eyed. “Yes, Grandpa, I don’t faint because I’m tired. It’s blood! The stags—”

“Well, my girl, I’m not going to take the stags away. It’s no good moping against things that won’t change, and I’m not one to fill you up with a bellyful of trash. You can’t get away from storms, but they’re only the other face of calms.” He gave the curtains another yank. “Look out, and you’ll want to go out again. It’s a hard world in these parts; but your people belonged to it, living the life that was given them, dying the death that came their way. You’ve got to see all round and accept the whole horizon. Now, my girl,” he said, dropping the curtains and leaving them as a wild legacy for Molly, “I’ve got to go to St. John’s about your father’s affairs. I put them in a lawyer’s hands, but they can’t go any further without me. There’s a couple of savings accounts in the banks—but I won’t know for some time if there’s a bit for you and your sisters. I couldn’t go before because you were poorly, but will you be a good maid and try—”

“Yes,” she said soberly. “I didn’t know. Uncle Harold said—”

“I’ll tell him you’ve changed your doctor,” said the old man grimly. Satisfied with his work and the sight of his granddaughter sitting up with the bed-clothes under her chin, he went to the door but turned with a conspiring wink. “As soon as the schooners are tied up for the winter, I’m off. But none of the girls were ever satisfied to see me come home with a lock of m’ hair. What’ll I bring you?”

Mageila stared, realizing strongly and humanely that she was a girl in a borrowed night-dress. “I—I can’t go out,” she whispered. “I—I—”

Her grandfather gave a humorous grunt. “I didn’t mean you to go for a ten-mile walk, my girl. I meant you to make an effort. You can sit around until I come back. Read a bit, and listen to the radio. There’s lots to learn from that thing. It’s as good as a map. What did you amuse yourself with? Will I buy you a bit of wool or some hooking-thread?”

Mageila made a face of young distaste. “Grandpa,” she said firmly, “I can knit, but I don’t want to and I don’t want to hook.”

“Don’t blame you,” said her grandfather, chuckling. “Since Molly came to keep house, m’ daily bread has been tangled up in lace. Your Grandma didn’t think I was disgraced if I didn’t eat over doilies. What would you like?”

Mageila spoke slowly, subduing any emotion. “Grandpa, if it’s not too expensive, Papa was going to give me a ukulele for Christmas—”

“Write it down, my girl,” said her grandfather. “No good to keep money these days. It might be here today and gone tomorrow.”

“Grandpa,” she whispered with grave spontaneity, “you know I’m very grateful.”

“Grateful?” scoffed her grandfather. “You don’t need to be that. A man expects to look after his own.”

Mageila felt warmer, better able to face the strong slap of the winter. Her grandfather left and she lay back, feeling herself the inhabitant of a saner world. From below and above she could hear the sounds of the house, shops, and wharf-premises, never wasting a minute of time. She knew the Sheila Mageila was unloading coal from her last trip to Canada, and soon she would be berthed in mid-stream with the Phoebe Jane and ice would enclose their sides. For the first time since the calamity she had a sense of body-comfort. Fire looked comfortable, making dancing gleams in the walnut furniture. She would try and get up in a very few minutes. Then she saw the wild disarray of the curtains. Her Aunt Molly would come in and see them before anything else. Her eyes would harden, her chin would go up, and her voice would go on. Haven’t I enough to do in this house? Does anyone ever— Quickly, without a thought of herself, Mageila stepped out of bed and padded to the window to straighten the curtains. Her eyes flinched from the sea; but she looked out, encompassing the world stripped to the bone for a winter sleep. Sombrely she turned away, crossing the room, going out to look at the stags. There was no one in the hall, nothing around but a comfortable house resting and waiting to receive its occupants when they chose to seek its shelter.

The stags’ necks inclined towards each other under the savage arch of entangled antlers. She held herself from leaning against the wall as she viewed them, achingly, pityingly, with a wish to touch and transmit human kinship. The barbed edge of her seeing was over, and the knife in her heart did not turn. There was just a large round pain from the fusing of personal sorrow with the sorrows of the savage world. In gentleness and pity she touched the strained necks, staring into glass eyes set in sockets of death.

“Poor things, poor things!” she whispered. “Don’t mind! Don’t mind! Humans go like you did, just as hard, just as wild!”

She could go back with eyes swimming in tears, falling down her cheeks—tears that came without noise, saturating her flesh, seeping through to cry in her heart long after her eyes were dry.

As the father of daughters Captain Dilke knew something of the props of restoration. Having given seven dots, he was not dismayed at providing a wardrobe for a naked granddaughter. Like all male shoppers he was extravagant, and Mageila became better dressed than if his daughters had bought. In his own words, he selected a smart young woman and told her to keep trying on until he saw something he liked for a thin maid with black hair. He picked first and asked the price after; and with the benevolence of a man who would do all a human could towards rehabilitation, he spent generously. Mageila learned what it was to weep from the sheer wonder of possession, and to feel the droop of her physical body springing up like a stalk in fresh water. Her similarity to a refugee in a spattered dress and baked shoes disappeared as drabness slid off like a dusty cloak. It was as if the trappings of her girlhood had been stripped away and she was reborn in premature womanhood. Beyond other effects fresh clothes made her feel like an individual. She had been a girl comfortably but modestly dressed, the youngest of seven, often put off with a reach-me-down. When Captain Dilke returned from town, she had shoes no other feet had trodden the wrong way, dresses unhaunted by other flesh, and hats empty of another’s thoughts.

All the Dilkes loved clothes and the daughters gathered to see what Papa had bought for Mageila. In a night-dress and a gown, but taut and upright in a chair, she stared with eyes growing wide with human acquisitiveness. Like a beaming producer absorbed in effects, Captain Dilke displayed a pretty wardrobe for a young girl, openly snubbing his daughters’ disapproval when they saw he had selected various shades of grey. To the lifting of Molly’s chin and Beatie’s query as to what they would say, he told them if they didn’t like it they could lump it! He wasn’t going to have a young girl trigged out like a hearse. When their father “tissed,” as they called it, they gave way, allowing themselves to be swamped in femininity. Molly forbore to dust or tidy up, Ella fingered garments wondering if they were too young for her figure, while Beatie perched a hat on her pinched shingle wondering what the congregation would say if she wore it to church. Clothes seemed to soften them, and Molly led the feminine squeals of delight.

When the room was strewn and Mageila had her ukulele Captain Dilke went out and came back, putting a big box across Mageila’s knees. That, he said, was the real present from her grandfather; the other things she had to have. Mageila, bemused, untied string, inhaling the excitement of a new box, fresh tissue-paper, and some unbelievable opulence. When she saw what she had, her hands tingled, and the aunts all squealed together. Mageila had a fur coat of grey squirrel, with a graceful collar, a loose body, square sleeves—the coat of a young girl’s dreams. It was too much for her. Weakness would not permit any strong emotion. She took one step, letting her aunts examine the gift as she wept on her grandfather’s shoulder. Usually distrustful of outward emotion, the aunts were indulgent. Their attitude was that it was nice of Mageila to be so grateful! So many young people took everything for granted! Even some of their own thought parents were made of money! It was very generous of Papa, more than he could afford they were sure; but under the circumstances—a girl did not often lose everyone in one hour!

Aunt Molly wound up by declaring that now Mageila could go to church. The women agreed at once. In a small world where most of the social life centred round the church, no place of display was better than the middle aisle of the biggest church.

There was no more church after her first attendance. Brave in her squirrel coat, she appeared in a more opulent building than the one she had attended in Feather-the-Nest. With an impressive rostrum ahead, the choir above, and seats curving towards the Reverend Leander, she became stricken with imprisonment suggesting suffocation and the need of a desperate escape. Aggravating the disturbance in herself, the scene was a design for acutest memory—reminding her of her agonized run across the beach when an invisible organ had blared with hymns that were all of the sea. Literally the church dwindled, and she could see her mother pedalling on her last Sunday on earth and her father, with the golden tan of his skin, sitting beside herself and her sisters. She was possessed, companioned by ghosts that would not become distant with death, terrified at being taken in full anguish in front of a whole congregation. Digging her nails into her palms, she sat still as a stone about to be erupted by a stirring volcano. Why had they put her inside? She would have to scramble over three pairs of legs; and when her grandfather sat he extended his legs, wrapping his old Prince Albert around him like a man padlocking his pew. He seemed to go into a vast content, lending the Reverend Leander his presence while rejecting him with his mind.

Mageila clung to control, wondering why they could not see her coming collapse and let her go; but they rose to sing, and Aunt Molly praised God in a piercing soprano, and her Uncle James liberated a musical tenor that could be drowned but not snubbed. Her grandfather stood, letting the book drip from his hands as if he was thinking of the schooners berthed for the winter or selling hogsheads of salt or tons of coal. By swallowing repeatedly over her suffocation Mageila thought she might last; but when she sat her hands began to swell, and she looked down expecting to see footballs in her lap. But they continued to look white, and dead as a fish belly up in the water. Through the singing of her ears she began to entreat God not to let her faint, until the prayer became formless repetition pierced by a sermon from Ephesians, about redemption through blood and the word blood—became a thousand missiles hitting her until she was exhausted and bruised. Redemption through blood—the blood of the lamb, their blood poured out as dust, the spirit and water and blood. . . . There was so much other blood that her own raced from her head to join another source. Without hesitation she stood, scrambling over legs, taking no notice of astonished whispers, seeing nothing, wavering down the aisle like a girl with a Daddy-long-legs gait until she opened swinging-doors with a flat face-forward bang.

The whole of the service was upset. The three aunts rose from different parts of the church, filing out in full Dilke panoply. Captain Dilke stood up, putting on his overcoat, adjusting his scarf, rattling his stick, taking plenty of time, unmindful of the strained pause in the Reverend Leander’s discourse.

Terrible as such behaviour was, there was no doubt Mageila made conversation for every feminine ear in Ship-Haven. It was the tenth faint, and they didn’t know how many weak turns! She had managed to reach the vestibule, but she had a terrible bruise on her forehead. It was a blessing she hadn’t fractured her skull! Harold said the shock had come while she was still growing; adolescence, anemia—well, you know how it is with young girls! Leander had lost his thread! His best discourse too, pointing out the difference in the German redemption through blood! Now Papa said she was not to be forced into anything, so they let her alone and she didn’t mind a bit. She played the piano, really very well, but all the Dilkes were musical! Then she lay on the bed for hours listening to the radio (of course after taking off the top-spread). She seemed to know about operas and she could understand the French news. When she wasn’t doing that she had her nose in a book. Good thing she liked to read, though what she could see in so much sitting down! A young thing like that! Papa had lots of books: George Eliot and Huxley and Darwin! All the Dilkes had read The Mill on the Floss, and they knew Mageila would appreciate it as everyone in it was drowned! Papa was very easy with Mageila, but grandparents were indulgent to grandchildren.

At Mageila’s age Molly had been keeping company with James, and was not allowed to sit with anything in her hand but a needle. As soon as Mageila was stronger they were going to entertain the young man from the bank. Perhaps he didn’t play Rook, but he would play it with them—Papa had the largest account! Papa said Rook was cheating the devil in the dark, and if he played he liked the spotted cards; but Mama had never let them play anything but Rook, and out of respect to Mama they continued to play Methodist-Bridge. Really there was no difference in anything but the cards; and though they wouldn’t dream of playing for stakes, sometimes a little prize—and maybe ten cents a corner after Leander preached about tainted money. He said to bring the tainted money, and the cause would cleanse it. They enjoyed a game, though Molly always gave herself away by squealing when she got the bird.

If she had grown squeamish about life, Mageila did her best to fight crouching repulsion.

She read anything between covers, often seeing print in a daze. Lack of retention bothered her, and terror rose when she realized she had read the whole of Romola without comprehending a word. Her Aunt Ella consoled her, talking mysteriously of cause and effect, critical ages, while refraining from mentioning the balder facts of physical ills. Her Uncle Harold gave her iron-tonics and she took them faithfully, because she disliked the feel of her frosted members. Sometimes over her grandfather’s books her brain would clear and she would ponder over Florence Nightingale, Chinese Gordon, The Brontës, Darwin, Huxley, Cardinal Newman. Then her brain would swim and they would become names surrounded by words. During one period of retention she found herself reading Renan’s Vie de Jésus, realizing she held what the French called a “succès de scandale.” Because of the overemphasis of church in her life, she gripped something that took Jesus away from the Wesleys. Though she read beyond her she recognized the reverent presentation of a very human Jesus; and when she came to the crucifixion she was so moved she wept bitterly, seeing Him as taken in death as the stags and as unconsoled as her own people. The aunts saw the signs of tears, and their attitude was that she should be getting over it by now. Unexpressed disapproval reached her, imparting loneliness like the lighthouse on the naked island.

How explain she was weeping for Jesus? How make them understand the book made her ponder on the miracles and spend hours watching the sea? Did He walk on the water? Did He make the tempest obey His will? Could He have calmed the tidal wave? If storm was the other half of calm He would be in both, and He would not go against Himself. Rolling from one wild mood to another, the sea promised to obey nothing but itself. Always it resented the land, washing over her grandfather’s wharf, tormenting the winter-berth of the schooners, struggling against ice until it was free again. There were times when she felt she must demand her father’s return if she would live on. To feel the comfort of his arms, just once, would have helped; but she asked nothing of that nature from the living, knowing it was beyond the range of her aunts and uncles. They could not glimpse his ideas of affection or the close-companioning of his tenderness. Silence was the weapon she used when she was wounded by her aunts’ insensitive handling of her sorrow. Without her grandfather she would not have struggled, but his inspiring hardness braced her like a challenge.

The young man from the bank spent an evening, but it was not a success. He was pleasant, uncomplicated, embarrassed at finding himself in the presence of tragedy, shaking hands with Mageila and telling her he was sorry for her trouble. Then he clung to the aunts, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of grey eyes making him conscious of the second shave he might have had. They played Rook and Mageila did not know there was anything special in getting the bird, so Aunt Molly snatched it playfully away for herself. But when the aunts stirred to fuss over the supper-table, the tray, the coffee, the Indian-tree cups, the six kinds of cake, and the four kinds of sandwiches, Mageila and the young man had a few moments side by side on a sofa. He examined her, attracted and repelled by an enigma. She did not look tearful or red-eyed in any way; but she was a girl behind a veil, with eyes, mouth, and nostrils seeming less pinched than her body. It seemed incredible that she did not make an effort for the most eligible man in Ship-Haven—an importation too, who had lived in Nova Scotia and Ontario.

When she displayed no interest he made an effort himself, referring to her tragedy in a flat monotonous voice. “It’s ah-ful what happened to you. I lost my own mother, and it was ah-ful when she died; but you— And barely escaping yourself! Gee, that’s ah-ful! I don’t know how—”

When he came to the end of sympathy and awfulness Mageila said, “Thank you! You are kind,” in a grave courteous voice; and there was silence, during which her composure was easier than his.

When he had left, Aunt Molly was critical—upbraiding Mageila for her silence. She had been as stiff as a poker. The young man had not mentioned coming again. No wonder, when she was such a stick. She was nearly eighteen and she had never had a beau. She would never get a man that way! A girl had to be bright and amusing. Mageila refrained from asking why, when the young man did not amuse her. Neither did she say she would be irked if she had to live within sound of his voice. If she ever loved a man he must be gentle, with a rich voice—a man who could laugh, who was not embarrassed when he was sorry for troubles; a man who moved easily in life and who had arms like the core of comfort. As she thought in such terms, her face broke up. There were no such men in the world. They had gone away with her father.

In a country where spring is always held back and a crocus is venturesome in May, winter seemed to have a monopoly of that year. It snarled away with many a backward spit. Salty as her grandfather was, he “tissed” for the first time over weather—wondering if he was getting old. Then Mageila realized her youth. She felt spring, belated though it was. She exulted in a crocus, coming through snow clinging to the earth like dirty adhesive to flesh. She thought she was restored when she could respond to the stirring earth, and her ears heard the bleat of lambs and the cow-bells of beasts turned out from their stables. The day came when she knew the tree was tired of being naked in May; and she could walk lingeringly, savouring the gentleness of sea and sky. Her heart ceased its uneven jump to be ardent with the pulse of the world. She became gravely excited, feeling resurrection in herself. She went out, and she returned home knowing she did not feel like dropping down in a chair.

The sequel of her first comfort was unfortunate when her Aunt Molly served a large bullock’s heart for dinner. Her father had never eaten insides, so her mother had never served them. The great heart aroused the crouching repulsion in Mageila’s body. She saw her grandfather approach it—basted, steamed, and finally roasted—with a knife. She felt her hands on warm animal hides, she saw rich blood poured out, and she was taken with a nausea that knocked away every new-found prop. Without fuss or a word of explanation she slid under the table in the first faint for some time.

Still holding the carving knife, Captain Dilke made a sound of sympathetic exasperation. “Who could get better in this climate? The girl wants a change. I’ll take her to Labrador with me.”

By this time Aunt Molly had learned about restoratives, and she applied herself to faints with the same efficiency she gave to any weak spring in the house. Holding ammonia to Mageila’s nose, she told her husband to sit down and go on with his dinner; then she began to argue briskly with her father.

“I never heard of such a thing, Papa. Labrador! It’s much too cold for her.”

“Cold? Stuff and nonsense,” contradicted her father. “There’s days you can go out in your figger.”^[2]

“It’s a matter of taste,” said Molly coldly. “Hasn’t Mageila had enough rocks? Much better take her to St. John’s and buy her a few summer dresses.”

“What good would that do, traipsing round a town? We go back there anyway, after two weeks at sea. The maid will have a bit of town as well.”

“If she lives to enjoy it. And who’s going to bring her out of faints in Labrador? I’m certainly not going. Much better get her a trip on a cargo-boat to Jamaica.”

“Or Brazil?” suggested Uncle James quietly.

But Captain Dilke swept them both aside. “She’ll live longer shivering in Labrador than sweating in Jamaica. She’ll meet all kinds of people and stop at fifty-nine ports. If that’s not enough change—”

“You mean fifty-nine rocks,” said Molly acidly. “It may be your idea of Paradise, Papa, but it’s not mine. Give me the city, or a trip to Montreal or Boston, with shops. But Labrador, with ice-bergs and flies together!”

“She’ll decide for herself,” said Captain Dilke firmly. “None of you would ever come with me, so if a granddaughter will—”

From the floor Mageila swam back to hearing; but she could not speak for a while, knowing even her eyelids felt weak. Labrador? She would like to go. How tell her Aunt Molly she had never felt permanent in Ship-Haven? How tell her she was always taut in her presence? Summoning her strength, she spoke with compelling decision.

“Grandpa, I’d like to go.”

“There!” said Captain Dilke, with his carving knife lifted like a baton. “She has more guts than the lot of you. Grand country! She’ll soon pick up. She’s scrammed from the long winter.”

“So you’re going to give her more of it,” said Molly, having the last word.

As Trevor Morgan was sailing along the Newfoundland coast on the northern steamer Assou, the wind snatched a slim folder from his hand. Leaning on the rail, he watched it become a paper-bird with print on its swelling chest. A ghost of a shrug accepted it as an untamed thing in an untamed land, but he regretted losing the names of the fifty-nine ports he expected to visit. Partial memory made him anticipate Dead Island, Snug Harbour, Comfort Bight, and Eskimo settlements he could not pronounce. At thirty-three he was experiencing the boy’s anticipation of husky-dogs, kayaks, and wilder sea and coast than he had ever known. Inner excitement showed on his face, making him remove his hat and let the wind blow through his sleek black hair. Already hardened from Newfoundland weather, his golden skin had little to fear from the harsh burn of sun, sea, and wind. He knew he was taking a far-away trip that few of his world would know. For Snug Harbour, Punch Bowl, they would substitute Nice, Monaco, and be sure they were travelling far. From their world his friends would mourn for poor Morgan in that God-forsaken country; and when they heard that St. John’s was in the same latitude as Paris they would not believe, because they had been conditioned to think of Newfoundland as an impossible country vaguely near the Pole.

The glare on rock and water, and a dwindling blue-white growler, made him dive in a tweed pocket for tinted glasses. Behind them his sensitive eyes could relax and observe without strain. He knew he was overtired. His work was hard, various, much less circumscribed than it had been in England, and subject to perpetual criticism from the rugged Newfoundlander, frequently uncomplimentary to the civil-servant and ceremonial-official. The Newfoundlander had a habit of speaking his mind, unimpressed by an officer. A backwash of strain puckered Trevor’s brow, hollowing his temples, until he smiled at the sea acclaiming a vital attraction. The Newfoundland problem could go during his holiday. He might have gone home? Certainly not, he thought quickly. Though his eyes might suffer from glare, he would not choose mild English haze. After a year of lonely walks round St. John’s he was smitten with sea and sky, searching wind, and gulls sculptured against rock. He had responded to hard simplicity, often standing on hill-tops to watch wings against the sky and sails against the sea. The land God piled up with his surplus of rock! Now he was sailing to the land that God gave Cain! Both places suggesting the bleakness of God and the rocky work of his hands.

As his outer eyes studied a march of hills humped like rock-monsters, his inner eyes contrasted the west of England—where they had grown used to a world of orchards, golden wheat, and cottages comfortable on hill-sides. He visualized green grass, a wealth of blossom, and subsequent pictures of sturdier fruit. Then he passed to London, knowing that there nature was never lost. A man could emerge and rediscover the crocus and masses of tempered growth. Very strongly he recalled pink-flowering almond in gardens round Harrow, and for a moment he was swept with nostalgia for England. There was austerity in exchanging beauty for primal grandeur. There was no doubt about it, the Englishman had grass in his soul and the Newfoundlander had rock. More soberly he looked out, remembering the Newfoundland coast as the grave-yard of the Atlantic. The sea foamed round jagged rock, leaped ambitiously at headlands, and surged towards ports perched on pointed country. None of the dwellings were at ease like comfortable English cottages. Instead they rose tall and tightened, conscious of natural peril.

Monica? How would she see it? Was his instinct to spy out the land alone a definite escape? Did Englishwomen transplant well? Did they not complain of everything different from England? Would Monica seize on the small crudities of the country and raise her delicate eyebrows as if he was as responsible for Newfoundland as John Cabot and his son Sebastian? Sighing and shrugging in quick succession, he knew Monica could not be dismissed. Had she not deplored his appointment, approving only when she knew his salary would be bigger out of England? Had she not insisted there could be nothing to spend money on in Newfoundland and it could be a period of economy towards another appointment, anywhere—not in America. And if she came rutted with insularity she would have a thin time. The Newfoundlanders were strong, individualistic, quick to resent patronage and equally quick to open their doors in hospitality; but there was no aggravation like the hide-bound distinctions of England.

After a few hours at sea he felt retained between two worlds when he wished to expand in the big cold freedom of salty air. Then he noticed they were sailing between a long arm and an island rising like white nakedness from the sea, and as he stared, fascinated, he was amused at a voice farther along the rail. “I declare that rock is the most naked thing I’ve ever seen. My grandmother would feel prudish about it.” All around there was a surge of passengers to the rail, and voices speaking English with many accents.

“Ship-Haven, so the book says!”

“Imagine! A lighthouse on that rock. Think of being the lighthouse keeper’s daughters.”

“Here two hours. Sail at six.”

“Look at that ice-berg! In July! Is it salt?”

“No, ice-bergs are portions of glacier-ice. In the spring they break off and—”

Trevor marvelled, listening to an American woman giving a neat knowledgeable lecture on ice-bergs. They always seemed to know everything and to be ready to tell it to anyone. Monica would be quite satisfied the ice would be salt if the sea was salt. That would be English common-sense.

Feeling his shoulder jostled, he saw a weather-beaten Newfoundlander appearing beside him.

“Ship-Haven,” he said, indicating the shore with a jerk of his head.

“Is it?” said Trevor agreeably. “I seem to remember driving round here by car. Looks different from the sea.”

Always ready to respond to civility, the Newfoundlander settled against the rail.

“Yes, sir, Ship-Haven!” he said, as if it was the work of his own hands. “Know it well! Run by the Dilkes! Old man now! Been there a long spell.”

Trevor refrained from asking how long that was. It might mean a month or a hundred years, like the few gunshots up the road often directing him many miles. He relaxed, seeing sun on blue water, feeling the slowing of the ship’s engines and the diminution of wind, and he longed to walk over the two land-arms yearning towards the sea.

“Time to take a walk?” he asked casually.

“Sure, b’y,” answered the Newfoundlander with Irish indifference to schedules. “And if you’re a bit late, they’ll wait for you. What’s a bit of time anyway, and by the sound of your voice you must be one of them English fellahs runnin’ us now.”

Trevor’s smile was a reflection of the grin he felt in himself. “As a matter of fact, I’m a lesser bit of the system.”

“And a mighty poor system it is,” said the Newfoundlander with immediate candour. “You fellahs don’t know a fish-tail from a turnip. Agriculture, me eye! This country must live or die by its fishery. Yes, sir,” he said, thumping the rail of the deck. “Richer than the mines of Peru! That’s what they said about the cod-fishery and they took damn good care they lined their own pockets with it. If you gave us a million a minute now, it wouldn’t make up for what you did to us in—”

“You’re like the Irish: you’ve got long memories,” Trevor reminded him amiably.

“And what’s wrong with the Irish?” demanded the Newfoundlander defensively. “M’ own people came out of Cork. Yes, sir,” he went on, as if opportunity was too good to lose, “you fellahs will be the ruination of us. Efficient civil service, me eye! What we want is somebody who understands the fishery! Ruined, that’s what we are; and soon the grass—”

“And there’s not much grass, is there?” said Trevor, quite unperturbed. A year in the country had given him time to develop a pachyderm hide towards criticism of English government in Newfoundland, and equal time to acquaint himself with much enlightening history.

“That’s what I said,” insisted the Newfoundlander. “Fish, not grass! That’s what we want. Yes, sir, if the country had had a chance, and if—”

“I know, my good fellow,” said Trevor soothingly, “it’s only a hundred years since you were allowed to build permanent dwellings of your own, and the Fishing-Admirals out of England were swashbucklers and tyrants. They burnt the land, and the houses of the colonists who tried to settle in the country. The English merchants were like many modern men. They wanted to keep trade in their own hands. It’s not a very new story and none of us have altered very much.”

Foiled in his attempt to air his country’s grievances, the Newfoundlander slumped against the rail—saddening over the inhumanity of man to man. “Shockin’, ain’t it?” he mourned.

“Have a cigarette?” asked Trevor, diving for a package. “We’re all in the same boat. The world is just a little madder than usual. I feel lucky if I have another year. Johnny, get your gun—and all that.”

“That’s right,” mourned the Newfoundlander further. “I was in the last war m’self. Had m’ members frost-bit in Gallipoli.”

“Hard luck! Cigarette?”

“Don’t mind if I do now,” said the Newfoundlander.

And they both settled on the rail, wrangling amiably over Britain’s injustices to her Oldest Colony and the threat of another World War.

Tired from his walk round Ship-Haven, Trevor Morgan seated himself in the corner of the dining-saloon—where he could relax against wine-coloured plush and study the backs of some diners and the faces and shoulders of others. To the offer of a place at the captain’s table, by virtue of his government position, his English prestige, etc., he had murmured his wish to be alone—he was tired; he would like to prop up a book and read; if he sat with others he would have to talk. Would the steward . . . The steward had obliged by placing him in the remotest corner, where he could ease into shadow and observe. It was a mistake, he felt now, with eyes strained from his walk round the glaring land-arms of Ship-Haven. His head ached, making him desire distraction from the vital assortment of people heading north for stronger reasons than a mere salty change. Challenged by energy, he speculated on the various reasons compelling people towards this special trip. Having lived in Newfoundland, he knew some of the Labrador reasons well.

There were liveyers returning to holdings, merchants of town and outport going towards summer fish-premises, American college-students volunteering for summer work at the Grenfell Missions, scientists, explorers, flying-men—all taut and ardent for active adventure. There was an Eskimo woman in American clothes, with rhinestone pins in her hair, sitting amongst children obviously products of an Anglo-Saxon union. Intrigued, he searched for a possible man; but the Eskimo sat unescorted, and empty of all expression. As he stared and appraised, his ears picked up fragments of conversation relating the rigours of the coasts, the drama of the Missions, the fidelity and treachery of the husky-dog, the variety of sea-birds; and from a near-by table of strong-looking women he heard bits about handicrafts and a nurse telling of her mistake in throwing hard-biscuit to the leader of a dog-team, causing the other huskies to devour him in front of her eyes. Strong conversation, he thought, but invigorating; it made him regret more and more the lost opportunity of sitting at the captain’s central table, where conversation might have swirled round him.

It was supper, not dinner, he noted, seeing bread and rolls, marches of pickle-bottles, and stewards offering cold meats or fish and potatoes fried golden brown. Appreciating the even tone of the squares of fish, he realized hunger in spite of his head-ache. He gave his steward an order and waited a trifle desolately, hearing in himself the only silence on the ship. Was it, he asked himself, sitting forward with quickened interest. At the captain’s table, he knew, his place had been taken by a doctor on his way to the St. Anthony hospital for summer research. But who was the new girl sitting next him—opposite the salty old man whose head wagged volubly towards the captain and the doctor, both listening with fascinated attention? Was their conversation an agony to the frozen girl? Was she related to the salty old man? The country was full of his type—vigorous old individualists, descendants of hardy pioneers—but he could not classify the girl at all. She was so arresting and different that he thought every diner should suspend eating for looking; and he almost resented inattention, not realizing his eyes were experiencing the miracle of attraction. He forgot everything else and stared frankly, seeing the girl through two pairs of shoulders.

She sat in such upright tension that the wine-red of the lounge made a striking background for her head. The collar of a squirrel coat she had not slipped off lent her modernity, emphasizing the delicate greys in herself. Then he decided her effects were not delicate or gradual. They were sudden, impressionistic, the chalk-white of her pallor being too unshadowed against hair like brush-work on either side of her head. Her mouth was too quickly full and darkly red, and her nose, tilted by the tension of her neck, made her wide nostrils look like black holes. How had her mouth lived on so darkly red in an unwarmed face? With a wry feeling for simplicity he wondered why a man should anticipate an unpainted mouth on any woman? Even the Oriental passivity of the Eskimo’s face was modernized by lip-stick, suggesting all the female vanities in Labrador. Behind protective glasses he continued to be intrigued by the girl and her elusive challenge.

He would throw a striped scarf around her shoulders, braid her hair with coloured stones, and she would be the brunette sister of La Belle Simonetta. She would not, he contradicted himself at once: Cosima’s maid was too vital for this girl, resembling winter. If she stared at him he was sure she would look through him, and continue dreaming behind the wide trance of her eyes. He imagined it would be difficult to discountenance her, because she sat surrounded by clatter like a sleep-walker waiting to dine. But sleep-walkers waked terribly to shock. Was she doing that under his eyes? Inwardly he shook himself, wondering if his imagination was overstimulated by surroundings. He remembered his receptivity to the poetry and drama of Old World cities. Was he remembering that death always seemed close in this country, where the wind searched every cranny and the sea sucked the land? Was he imagining added tension in the tilted head and wider protest in the nostrils? Was she staring through the port-hole with eyes like wells of martyrdom? Did the pin-points of light in them represent fixed fanatical effort? Was she ill, condemned by a mortal complaint? Was he fantastical when he saw her persecuted, Messianic with something she had to keep aloft? He was reminded of old mosques and synagogues. Perhaps she was an exile, expelled from Europe on new explosive hates. No, he contradicted himself again. She was not Jewish, he was sure, even though he speculated on the possibilities of foreign blood. What was she? What race? What had bruised the youth in her face, making it hard to estimate her age? Was she virgin, he demanded, finding her mystery a challenge to investigation. Was his imagination making a fool of him?

Almost with physical effort he made his eyes search for his table-steward. Was it that one approaching with a bleak wind-bitten face held high above fried fish and potatoes? He would eat. The girl’s attraction was probably no more than a wrapping round no mystery at all. Illusion, he thought, ideality, the pursuit with no arrival. Why had he imagined he could ever love Monica intensely? Why were all his subsequent adventures no more than discreet easings of flesh? Where was his fish? Seeing the bleak-looking steward laying his plates in front of other people, he lit a cigarette and, resting his elbow, purposely looked at other girls—observing them in utter contrast to the girl he could still see from the corner of his eye. Could she be real and look like wax-work? Reluctantly abandoning discipline, his eyes returned fully to the source of their interest.

Was it credible she still sat like a strained young sphinx turning the riddle of her face to the north? Then he saw the captain lean forward and address her with directness startling in reaction. She turned like a girl shot to attention; her hand went to her throat, losing its long lines in squirrel fur; her face became whiter; her fingers emerged from fur to work against her neck; her nostrils, mouth, and eyes widened. She turned and half rose, as if she would depart with a speed she seemed incapable of making. Then her eyes were dragged back to the old man across the table; and such was the conflict in her face that Trevor leaned forward, lost to manners, trying to estimate what quality the man had to detain her and make her look like a panic-stricken actress gulping air before she could say her lines. Now the captain, the doctor, and the old man sat like men alert for a crisis, but the girl kept her eyes fixed on the old man until she relaxed. Then Trevor saw her head at an angle permitting a view of a knot at the nape of her neck, and while he was appreciating uncut hair he saw her lips moving with the grave courtesy of youth talking to age. Surprised at feeling relief that impendence had not happened, he examined other diners—wondering if there had been a moment when all had paused in anxiety over the girl’s distress. But everyone seemed to be concentrating on something else and it looked as if he alone had contributed all his attention. Deprecating his romanticism, he looked back to see her bending over food; and again he wondered if it was his imagination that made him suspect she ate painfully, bolting over a dry throat.

Probably the things he saw were the projections of his own mind, he told himself. He would eat and recall the realism of a strong outer world. Making a deliberate business of his meal, he lingered until people began to leave on loud robust notes. Then the girl rose and his eyes followed her, liking everything about her—her sleek hair, her tilted face, her sleep-walking eyes, and the way she walked—though he thought her feet were too slow for her wish to be gone. A glance back at the head of the table told him three other men watched her exit, and when she was out of sight their heads converged as if they spoke of nothing else. Again he wished himself at the captain’s table to hear what detained the men until the saloon was empty and the stewards were clearing away. Then Trevor saw them rise and he studied the old man, noting his bushy eyebrows and his strong nose preceding him like a decisive prow. Being a large man, the captain brought up the rear; for he needed the full width of the table to permit the passage of his bulk. He was so round that he seemed to represent flesh reluctantly restrained in a brass-buttoned jacket. His neck flowed over his collar; his face was massive below the cheek-bones and suddenly narrow above the eyes.

“An odd type,” reflected Trevor, suspecting a strain of Eskimo blood—when the captain caught his eyes and made a waddling detour across the dining-saloon.

“How do you do?” said Trevor, standing up.

“Mr. Morgan, and how is it with you on my ship? Anything I can do?” The captain’s smile was a humorous streak from ear to ear. “The steamship company told me to keep my eye on you. If there’s anything—”

“Well,” grinned Trevor, “you might teach me to pronounce some Eskimo names.”

“Macovik, Ailik, Turnavick, are the Eskimo places we stop at. The name of this ship is Assou, Beothuck for sea-gull.”

“And I didn’t know that. Sit down, Captain, won’t you? A drink? A cigarette?”

“Never drink on the sea, sir. But I’ll have a cigarette.”

The captain sat readily, as if willing to rest his weight. Putting his peaked cap crown-up on the table, he patted his rotundity with hands proportionately large.

“Putting on weight, I think, Mr. Morgan,” he said, creasing his face with another humorous line.

“Well, sir,” condoled his passenger, “the sea, I suppose, and not much exercise—”

“And three square meals a day and live-drops in between.”

“Live-drops?” questioned Trevor with humorous interest.

“Yes, sir, live-drops, mug-ups! A cup of tea any time of the day.”

With sea-faring geniality the captain talked, giving information about arrivals and sailings, the last places where there would be wharves and lighthouses; and when the moment presented itself Trevor proffered a casual question.

“I suppose you take on new passengers everywhere. I noticed an interesting old man at Ship-Haven—”

“Captain Dilke,” volunteered the captain immediately. “One of our grand old men! Yes, sir, Newfoundland has some grand old men as well as England. He knows the coast better than I do myself, and he can smell the rocks not on the chart. Comes with me every year and I keep a place for him at my table. First time I’ve ever known him to bring a petticoat, though he’s got seven daughters.”

“She looks young to be his daughter,” said Trevor, abandoning all finesse in the face of the captain’s readiness to talk.

“Granddaughter, sir, granddaughter! Miss Mageila Michelet—French father, from St. Pierre, who married one of Captain Dilke’s daughters. Terrible thing, terrible, terrible!” said the captain with rolling regret.

“Terrible?” questioned Trevor, wondering how far his imagination would be justified.

The captain inhaled smoke from a cigarette, which looked ridiculous against his large, face. “Yes, sir, terrible indeed! That girl was one of the worst sufferers from last year’s tidal wave. Was washed to sea in a house that was washed back again. Barely escaped by the drowning-straw. Saved a baby too. Then she had to sit on the beach and watch her home sink—with her mother and her sisters at the window, and her father—”

“Good God! I remember reading—”

“Yes, sir, that’s the girl that was left. Terrible trial,” said the captain with a seaman’s moderation of disaster. “Got a bit knocked about too, so her grandfather said. Inclined to be sickly.”

“Sickly!” ejaculated Trevor, appalled and amused at the insufficiency of words. “To have to sit— Why, it’s unthinkable!”

“Unthinkable or not, that’s what she did. But ’twas hard for her to come to sea. At supper her grandpa thought she was going to faint, but after a spell she ate her food. Lovely-looking girl if you like them skinny. Her part of the country got the full brunt of the tidal wave. Her grandfather sailed in one of the rescue ships, and he said he never saw the like in his whole experience.”

“I thought she had a tragic face,” mused Trevor out loud, and the captain became momentarily grim.

“Well, Mr. Morgan, those that have been ship-wrecked don’t exactly split their sides for the rest of their lives.”

“Been ship-wrecked yourself?” he inquired of the captain’s large good-humoured face.

“Not yet, not yet,” said the captain, getting heavily to his feet as if the event might be imminent. “But I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up dead in oilskins,” he grinned. “Come on up to my little bridge-deck, Mr. Morgan. I can’t be offering it to the whole passenger-list, or I wouldn’t be able to run my ship. All those fly-by-night Americans would be up there with their gramophones, swingin’ it and saying ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah’ to the northern lights. Not that I mind a bit of dancing, Mr. Morgan. Used to swing the Missus at the Wesleyan Soiree, but I was light on my feet then. Come along up whenever you feel like it. There’s a nice bit of deck and many’s the famous person that’s trod it. I’ll introduce you to Captain Dilke. I always give the run of it to him, though he’s not the man to be found sticking to one spot. Now he said he’d be glad of it as his granddaughter is not a great hand at gallivantin’ with people her own age.”

“Thank you, sir,” answered Trevor with deep cordiality. “I’ll be glad to.”

Alone in the lee of a chart-room obscuring a man at the wheel, Mageila leaned on the rail of the bridge-deck and saw the western sky, like fire, belching purple smoke. The coast-line was distant and dark, and ghostly white where the sea boiled at the foot of the land. But it was more splendid than savage, and she saw the evening with a diminution of the tripping terror she had experienced in the dining-saloon.

Control was steadying her, making her marvel that tempests could be leashed under outer calm. Embarking on the Assou was an escape from the increased nagging of her Aunt Molly and, always comfortable with her grandfather, she felt better at once, able to breathe without criticism. She could leave her aunt without regret, and forget disapproval she had heard every day. Why did she waste so much time reading? Why on earth did she want to continue music at her age? What good could come to a girl who wasted whole Saturday afternoons listening to opera broadcasts? She was eighteen now and a woman, and all of the Dilkes were engaged at eighteen. The young man at the bank had come back, though why he had when she was such a stick . . . Perhaps if she played her cards well she might become a bank-manager’s wife, like her three aunts in Canada. He had given her five boxes of chocolates and sent to town for flowers—what more she could want than that!—and she hadn’t even embroidered a guest-towel for a hope-chest. What sort of a wife would she make without a stock of pillow-slips and bed-spreads? A girl always provided the linen, and none of the Dilkes had ever put a man to the expense of buying what a woman could make.

Always Mageila heard her aunt in silence and when she did not answer she was accused of stubbornness. How explain the memory of a household stripped to its bare foundations? How explain her feeling of impermanence and the futility of piling up possessions? How put into words her lost feeling for life? How tell uncomprehending strength that her flesh felt small and cold, like the first snow on dark deep rocks? How tell anyone she heard drones in kettles and dolorous notes in the sea?

With Ship-Haven receding she had been able to bear the reminders in the rise and fall of the sea; but in the dining-saloon she had become panic-stricken with a sense of suffocation so acute that she wanted to clutch her throat and run up on deck, where she would not choke so hardly to death. And she had sat on, reliving the scene at the Butlers’, feeling herself sucked back into the green gulch of the sea. With the feeling of imminent annihilation she knew she was turning purple, and when her grandfather spoke of her she could hardly bear the unchanged note of his voice as he told the captain and the doctor that she had not been very well; but his naturalness recalled her, enabling her to win a victory over collapse. The doctor had been interested, diverting her with conversation, inviting her to talk about Newfoundland, helping her with gentle encouragement, and when she had eaten he had spoken out of earshot of the others.

“Miss Mageila, every human being fights on a battle-field. The greatest victories are the ones we hear nothing about. You’ve done well on yours.”

Unable to say anything, she had gone away feeling sustained—knowing when older people were like that they acted like a spur and not a deterrent to effort. So different from her Aunt Molly, who could make her feel miserably inadequate in a life bounded by domesticity. Every moment of her life with her father had made her feel round and gracious. Every moment with her aunt made her feel pointed and sharp. Looking quietly at the sea, she ached in the centre of her heart for lost things; and the emotion returned such a living picture of her father that she felt he must be living strongly in some world where the light could play on his smiling teeth and where gaiety could make his eyes dance like lively water. With the feeling of not knowing what was the dream and what the reality she was startled by a modulated voice in the vicinity of her shoulder.

“Miss Michelet, my name is Morgan. The captain introduced me to your grandfather. He said I could find you and talk to you if you would let me— I say! I am sorry. Have I startled you very much?”

Mageila had turned with the shock of a person whose nerves are unreliable. Her white face flooded with pink until the colour receded, leaving her paler than before. Her eyes and nostrils widened as she stood face to face with a man so like a younger edition of her father that she stared, bemused between two worlds, feeling the same lag between sight and reality that had invaded her on the night of the tidal wave. Her startled mind went so far as to entertain the return of her father, not French but English—the product of another world that might be the result of the changing sea. Then she knew she was ridiculous. This man was young, slender, well dressed—a man with white teeth in a tanned face and a thin sensitive profile with a fine bony brow, hollow at the temples and making a little shelf over eyes that were brown and soft with immediate concern. His manner was easy and his voice one that could insinuate its way past any reticence.

“I—I—” she said uncertainly.

“I have startled you,” he said, with such regret that she struggled towards shattered self-possession.

“No, no,” she assured him slowly, “not at all. It’s only that I was far away, and you were like someone I knew. It made me think—”

“I know about you, Miss Michelet,” he said, with such compassionate directness that she felt stripped of every disguise. “I’ve heard of your ordeal. It gave me courage to speak to you. People who have been through things pretend less than others. There is little help for sorrow, but there is kinship. I was ten years old when I saw my mother open a wire that said my father had been killed in action. Then she died, four months later, having a baby—my youngest sister. I was packed off to preparatory school.” He gave a mute shrug of tweed-clad shoulders. “Everyone was kind, in a detached way; but I used to long for the dark, when I didn’t have to pretend to take it on the chin. My mother was an affectionate woman, the sort who put her arms round her children. Life is difficult without warm-hearted parenthood.”

“You know!” she decided, in wide-eyed wonder.

“Yes, I know.”

Then he stopped personalities, looking round in a way that shared her vigil. His eyes narrowed to face the dwindling sunset, and she noticed he was holding dark glasses by the ear-piece and his brow was slightly puckered. But he was easy, comfortable to be with—like the return of an essence she knew very well.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“No,” she said, moving in mute cordiality so that he could stand beside her; and his tweed-clad shoulder made her fur feel like cat’s whiskers, recording the most delicate touch.

For a while he made no comment, relaxing in silence without any strain. Then a slight smile widened his sensitive mouth.

“I’m looking forward to the northern lights,” he said, looking up at the sky. “I’ve seen them greenish-yellow in St. John’s, but never coloured like they say they can be. Have you seen them like that?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up also, “but not as often as you’d think. Once or twice like a rainbow dress, floating round and round as if someone danced inside.”

“They call them ‘The Dancers,’ don’t they?”

“Yes, I believe so. Grandpa says the Eskimos think they’re long lights to guide the dead across the dark valley.”

“It’s a thought,” he said gravely.

“But nothing can help,” she said with such throaty conviction that he turned, speaking directly to her eyes.

“Yes, it can—the thought of something bigger than yourself. Your grandfather told me something of your tragedy. He said your father went after his house and his family. He thought of that beyond himself. He said your mother had her arms around her daughters and that she looked for your—”

“Yes,” said Mageila intensely, “she did that. But what did my sisters think of? They were young, inexperienced, frightened, and they had been ill. Mama couldn’t hold them all the way; I feel they suffered terribly. They went through me—”

“You must tell me,” he said with gentle invitation; but for a long time Mageila leaned on the rail looking out, remembering in a new comforting way, and for a while they talked of many other things.

They were under a full northern twilight with the sea like a moving mystery when Mageila spoke in answer to his persuasion.

“Grandpa says a captain sees the glass going down, and knows what to expect. In myself I felt the glass going down. I did not want to go out; I wanted to stay home and be close—”

“To whom?” he asked as she hesitated.

“Papa. Now I know he was my life. Mama,” she explained, as with newly discovered truth, “did not really love us. We were only faces to wash and stockings to darn. But I know she loved Papa.”

“Some women are like that. Some love the man, some the children, and some do not love at all.”

“Then what do they live on?” she demanded, and again her fur recorded his delicate shrug.

“The things that move them in sundry English places.”

“What do you mean?” she asked intensely.

“Nothing at present. Let’s talk of you. You loved your father. There’s a great difference in the way people affect us.”

“Yes, a great difference. Some touch sorrow gently; others knock it down.”

“Quite,” he agreed.

There was a long silence and Mageila rested her face on her hand, leaning comfortably on the rail as if she had told everything and been understood. He saw that she was slow with words, needing stimulation to call her out; but when he gave it, she continued without consciousness or reluctance.

“I’m the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and I’m supposed to cure pain.”

“What? They did not mention that. Tell me again,” he said, without the incredulity that would have silenced her.

“Yes,” she said. “I cure pain; that is, I used to cure pain. I can, I did, because I never remember doing anything else and I suppose children get used to trusting the thing they know. They expected me to have the power and it never failed, but—”

“What?” he urged as she showed signs of prolonging a silence.

“The power is gone.”

“No, of course it’s not,” he denied, touched by the regret in her voice and the mute way she looked into her hands. “Those things do not die.”

“I’m afraid they do. Perhaps because pain came into myself.”

“It will come back. Was it on the day that—”

“Yes—the last time I touched a pain,” she told him.

In stark sentences she made a short story of the disaster, dwelling on nothing but the action; and by eliminating the emotion she made it shudder between them. Listening, he thought he had never heard such a simplification of tragedy given in a voice like a submerged bell; and for a moment he wondered how incredible the story would sound in his own world, when here it was verified at once.

He was so moved that he did not attempt condolence, merely managing to say, “it seems too much for one human to bear.”

“I felt that, but when they had gone through me I was not allowed to die. There was a woman like a chapter in Isaiah—”

“Wings as eagles,” he suggested—returned to his school-chapel, where he had thrilled over things a boy would not dare mention except to a girl.

“Yes,” she agreed, with an expansive sigh. “But she was like the places you can’t reach. I hated her sometimes.”

“Mmmm,” he pondered, “I think I know the type—a bit primal and grand, and about as comfortable as a rock.”

“She was like a rock,” Mageila agreed, “and she looked like one, dark with iron-stains; but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for rocks. I know now it was wonderful to feel the house grounding after the sea.”

“Your country is in you, Mageila,” he said, using her name so unconsciously that both let it pass. “Tell me of your life before that day. What you did—”

“What I did?” she asked herself more than him, and he imagined she would not reply. Then she told him. “Mama gave us the Wesleys. Papa gave us French and folk-songs instead of hymns.”

“Exercise, games?” he asked, with English interest in activity.

“Not much. Walking always uphill, and down when we turned back to the sea. Sliding and skating in winter, boating in summer, and swimming.”

“Not bad,” he approved. “And what now?”

“I don’t know,” she said in such a lost voice that he regretted the question, more so when he saw her face like a pale blur on a tenser neck.

“Having come so far, you won’t worry now,” he said soothingly; and she neither agreed nor denied but merely settled into a silence introducing the night with all its elemental sounds, broken at last by Captain Dilke’s dark advance from the vicinity of the chart-house.

“Ah, there you are, my girl. I see you came top-side, young fellow.”

“Yes, sir, I introduced myself.”

“Well, my girl, don’t you think it’s time to be turning in? I was having a yarn in the smoke-room when I remembered.”

“Yes, Grandpa. I’ll go right away.”

“Nice night, sir,” said Trevor Morgan, turning his back on the rail and peering down at the old man’s bent head and shoulders.

Captain Dilke looked at the sky with a flash of keen blue eyes. “Choppy tomorrow,” he pronounced, “but bright and clear. I hope you’re a good sailor, Mageila. We don’t run to sea-sick stomachs in our family, but the girl has not been well.”

“I feel well, Grandpa,” she interrupted gravely. “Are you going to turn in too?”

“No, my girl, not yet. The older I grow the less sleep I need, but it’s different with a young thing like you. Be off with you.”

“Good-night, Mr. Morgan,” she said, turning gravely to her new friend.

“I’ll take you down,” he said at once.

She touched her grandfather’s shoulder, saying good-night, and she went, feeling precious again, guided by a black-haired man whose hand was under her elbow—easing her way down steep stairs and across a deck where they caught glimpses of faces, forms, lighted cigarette-ends, dark distant land, and the sleek scud of the sea. They felt the abrupt change from cold air to the laden stuffiness of the lounge and saw the American college-students grouped round the piano singing popular songs; but they passed like aliens to noise, going down the companion-way and along an alley-way until they turned into a narrow passage.

“Here I am,” she said. “I have a small cabin to myself.”

“So have I,” he told her. “It spoils a trip to be cooped up with the wrong person.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t like it. Grandpa is kind. He knows I like to be alone.”

“He seems well known on the ship.”

Mageila smiled. “It’s his fifty-third trip to Labrador,” she said, turning to say good-night; but he took the hook off the door, holding it open for her to enter. “Good-night,” she said in grateful dismissal.

“Good-night,” he replied, holding out his hand; and hers relaxed, experiencing its first true warmth since the tidal wave. Close to her face, he wondered why he had thought it unwarmed—when it was tilted below him like white marble over light, and her mouth was like a long red ripple. “It’s only good-night,” he said, retaining her hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning. We have six days to find out everything about each other.”

The number of days impelled slow question. “I have thirteen or fourteen. Are you going to stay in Labrador?”

He smiled, indulgently tolerant. “No, of course not. But after the last port for this ship I’m going to take a schooner. I thought I’d see as much of the north as possible. You and your grandfather are making the round-trip?”

“Grandpa gets off at Spotted Islands,” she began, hesitating uncertainly in view of the humour in his eyes. “What did I say?” she asked steadily.

“Say! Another Newfoundland name! You people with your Misery Points and Heart’s Desires. It was the place I was laughing at,” he reassured her, and more than ever he saw everything about her was slow. Her smile travelled before it arrived, and her laugh was a reluctant bubble rising from the depths of her throat.

“And your grandfather goes to Spotted Islands?” he asked absent-mindedly.

“Yes, he has a schooner there—the Sheila Mageila—and he’s meeting her for inspection.”

“The Sheila Mageila! What a lovely name! After you?”

“No, the Irish Princess.”

“The Irish Princess?” he demanded, letting nothing pass. “Who’s she?”

Mageila smiled in the same slow way. “Maybe a legend! So much of our history is word of mouth passed down from one generation to another; but there was a princess abducted by pirates, and the name has come down in our family.”

Trevor Morgan looked amazed and amused, bending over the hand he still retained. “Mageila take a bow! A descendant of Irish kings! A subject salutes you.”

Doubtful of delicate mockery, she withdrew her hand in cool dignity. “The English would call them disreputable,” she told him.

“Now, now,” he murmured plaintively, “don’t you begin! I’m so often abused for Britain’s crimes.”

“They were very bad in Newfoundland,” she said, gravely severe.

“I know, my dear,” he said, with a spontaneous endearment that brought a pale flush into her face. “We’re a nation of hypocrites. When I read your history I confess I was one British blush. But here we are now, making amends.”

“Are you?” she questioned with native doubt. “I’ve listened a lot to Grandpa and my uncles. They say the Englishman governs like the cock who thinks the sun rises to hear him crow.”

“Mageila! Et tu, Brute!” he grinned. “I thought you were a pure working with a mind above governments.”

“Was I rude?” she said, gravely disarmed by his humour.

“You couldn’t be, with your beautiful voice,” he assured her. “Where is that about the sun and the cock?”

“The Mill on the Floss,” she smiled. “It stuck in my mind.”

He laughed, with a display of white teeth in a tanned face very disturbing to Mageila’s memories. “Victorian!” he accused her with rising humour.

“What’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “Are they queer books? They belonged to Grandpa.”

“Not queer at all. Tell me more,” he said, with no inclination to go after saying good-night. “Do you read a lot?”

Mageila stepped inside the cabin, keeping the door open with her shoulder. “I read all winter, days at a time—anything to keep my thoughts outward. I read a lot I didn’t understand at all. There was Renan’s Vie de Jésus, Darwin, the Brontës, Huxley—and I tried to read him because he was the seventh child of a seventh child.” She trailed off, gravely retiring from the mixed expressions on his face. “Good-night,” she said, with an unassailable dignity that brought his head and shoulders inside her door.

“I’m not laughing at your books; I’m marvelling. I knew you’d be different from anyone else. I have to confess I was drawn to your face.”

She was too young to know what to say; but she could hear unself-consciously, having been too elementally shattered to understand artifice. Her silence was a struggle between submerged girlhood and incipient womanhood, and his fugitive resemblance to her father made her eyes glaze and look deeply beyond him.

“Don’t do that,” he suggested gently. “Come back.”

“Yes,” she said, with a flash of external sight; but she retreated, letting him hold the door with his shoulder. “It’s late. You’ve been very kind. I would like to say thank you.”

Her natural grace and sincerity shattered his lighter disguise, returning him to a more tempered note. “No, don’t thank me; I would like to thank you. You’ve been a revelation.” Turning from the lighted interior, he looked through a port-hole permitting a dark glimpse of the sea. “I’ve never said this out loud, but I’ve felt it often. Since I came to this country I’ve got the feeling of living close to my bones.”

“Newfoundland speaks of death,” she said, with such throaty conviction that he was pierced by unyouthful knowledge.

“You’re too young for that,” he said, repudiating hard realism.

“I have the sense of death,” she said, so remotely that she held the suggestion of a medium answering questions.

“Will it make a difference, from now on?” he asked compassionately.

Mageila breathed hard with the difficulty of voicing intimate thought. “I feel stranger than I did, as if nothing is—fixed, I think. Life feels frail, little-lasting, like the leaves that the wind blows off the trees.”

“But the roots are fixed,” he said—so comfortingly that she took a step forward, staring hopefully into his face.

“Yes, they are, I suppose, no matter how the leaves are shaken.” And then, spontaneously for her, she told him of the mute death-picture in the interlocked stags. “I can see them now,” she whispered. “Their twisted necks and their eye-sockets.”

“You’ve been very wounded,” he said, gesturing with compassionate hands that would venture in sympathy; but Mageila shrank away, proud as a twice-born Brahmin.

“Don’t pity me, please. Grandpa taught me not to be soft. I tell you about it, but there’s really nothing to say.”

“No,” he said, grimly accepting the human cost of doing nothing. “The disaster is in you, Mageila. The wave really washed over you.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “I feel it’s the only death.” Then she was startled by his short laugh.

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s only that you can’t see any farther at present. There’s wholesale destruction travelling along. The colossal foolishness of the last war was not enough. Munich was a mere breather. I’m past the boy’s age that can accept it as an adventure. I have to think of it mentally, see the awfulness—”

“No, it mustn’t be,” she protested, stepping towards him.

But, like her, he retreated, raising his eyebrows in quizzical irony. “You see, I can’t help you; and when it comes, you won’t be able to help me.”

She clasped her hands, giving them a tormented wash. “That is not true. You helped me. I felt warm, natural—I will remember. You said it yourself: in bad moments there must be something—a faith, the rocks, the roots under the trees.”

“I did,” he agreed, stepping nearer again. “But it’s surprising how easy it is to say brave things to the other fellow. I’ve hurt you,” he asked, in a different voice, “added more to your bewilderment?”

“No,” she denied.

“I’m afraid I have,” he said, taking her hand—which she let him retain. “But didn’t you feel the implications of Munich?” Over his shoulder he looked again through the dark port-hole towards the lonely sea. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “that in isolated places reality doesn’t penetrate, or should I say unreality?”

Mageila stood lost between the two, finally struggling slowly through words. “Where I lived first, it was a bit of land between the sea and hills. Though we heard everything over the radio, it seemed as if it would never find us. The guns were in the wind and the sea. That kind of war was for another world; and though Papa was from St. Pierre and men from there are Frenchmen, and not French-Canadians—”

“Yes,” he said as she paused, seeing him like a girl visualizing war for the first time—something that might be fought by one man. “But Newfoundlanders are great sailors. They have brilliant records, volunteering at once for the navy,” he told her.

“Yes,” she mused. “They leave a little vessel for a big one, but if they don’t come back it’s just more sorrow from the sea.”

His dark face softened in a way that eased her intensity. “Let’s hope war will always be something on the radio. We’ll meet tomorrow and read the story of the rocks and wish all the dictators in Labrador, where man finds enough natural obstacles to fight. It won’t be like that,” he said, contradicting himself at once, “but we’ll pretend. Good-night, Mageila, and sleep well, if only to tell me tomorrow morning I haven’t upset you.”

“You haven’t. Good-night, Mr. Morgan.”

He turned back with a protesting face. “Please don’t be girlish in this natural world. Call me Trevor. At once, please,” he said, with smiling command.

“Good-night, Trevor,” she said, with a sweet grave naturalness that made him smile approvingly and retreat with a silent acknowledgement of his hand.

She shut herself inside her cabin, putting her hands over her face to hide from the glare of white light. In her ears she heard her new blood and felt a delicate spur goading her flesh. She could feel the sea making a recession of her sorrow, washing away the terrible past and the cheerless future. Its notes were not dolorous any more, nor loud with a tragic theme.

She had to do something active about her new comfort; so she undressed slowly, washing her body, scrubbing her teeth, drinking cold water, and responding to the freshness inside and out. The memory of the evening invaded her delicately, renewing all her wonder. She felt a surge of vitality that could have taken her out for a long strong walk; but she lay down, putting out the light, feeling the rise and fall of the ship with its many sounds settling down for the night. She wanted to stay awake and think, and try to sort out what he had said and what she had answered; but it was confusion, holding excitement, peace, and relaxation for her tense mind and body. She could go to sleep for the first time since the tidal wave, and put some other thing in front of it.

As Captain Dilke had predicted, the morning was bright and clear and the sea spirited with high white-horses. The choppiness tormenting the Assou had forced the shutting of her port-holes, leaving stuffiness to replace the invigorating northern air.

There were so many smells, thought Trevor Morgan as he turned towards the wall to avoid the light probing his face like a glittering eye. Behind his brow he felt a throbbing spot, and he knew he had a head-ache that would be intensified when he stood up. Odd to feel a head-ache in the soles of his feet, he reflected, with the wry expression of a man uncertain of well-being. At that moment he felt he could smell the whole of Newfoundland, making him ready to admit that the North Atlantic might well be a fish-pond. Although the smells made a concentrate in the middle of his cabin, he felt he could separate sea, salt, tar, bilge, oilskins, rubber boots, jostled by the nearer smells of engines, cargo, and cook-house. From the alley-way came sounds indicating haste to emerge on deck. Feet trod briskly, and voices were as bright and clear as outer air. Americans predominated, returning him to the memory of a different throaty voice.

Would that pale girl with the Spanish-black hair and the slow transfiguring smile be up and about on a choppy morning? Possibly, he admitted, remembering the toughness of the Newfoundlander and the way the most delicately nurtured could travel over rock and ice, while strangers wobbled like sinners walking in slippery places. She would probably be at the rail, watching the sea as if there had been no dark uneasy interlude. What was there about her? Were the things she said really profound or was it the effect of a voice? And what eyes! Like clear hypnotized water! By this world’s judgments she should be crude from narrow living and uneasy with self-consciousness. She was neither, having some deep still essence which attracted him strongly. What had she been like before her devastation? Was the calamity something compelling premature development? What would she be like beside Monica, who judged girls in terms of schools, English props, and expensive parades in Paris? He must be careful not to show too much interest, he told himself, thinking that in spite of composure the girl emanated emotional starvation and deep spiritual craving. She was spinning between the living and the dead, mourning some companionship that might occasion an outpouring over imagined substitution for loss. But who could stem a spontaneity of attraction? Who wanted to when the body was living its ardent years and the future seemed uncertain? Who had said love was a matter of latitude? It might be, he reflected. Easy to extend arms in warm southern places, easy to kiss with casual intensity, easy to forget.

But what of the land that God gave Cain? A sense of his surroundings suggested deprivation by staying in bed; but to wake with a sense of the morning meant a body to match the mood, and he had to admit he felt below par. Then he recalled Mageila’s grandfather, and he could picture him rising vigorously as if head-aches were maladies for younger generations. Protesting his self-indulgence, Trevor braced himself for a quick spring to the lounge-seat—where he knelt and unscrewed the port-hole. Air stimulated him, but his eyes contracted from glare as he felt himself dashed with icy spray he did not heed until a wave tried to fill his pyjama sleeve.

“Damn,” he muttered, closing the port-hole and deciding that stewards could be right in imposing undesirable stuffiness.

Mopping himself, he reached for slippers and gown and rang for the bath-steward.

The steward, a melancholy-looking man, clearly indicated that a good passenger used the basin without bothering about the bath. Yes, he could provide a bath; but there was a string of other people waiting. Besides, he was only half a bath-room steward; the other half of him had to wait in the dining-saloon, and people were already at breakfast. The bath-room wasn’t much of a place anyway, and no place for a man with a head-ache. Yes, he could have a cold bath if that was what he wanted; and as it was cold, he’d move him a bit up the line.

The steward was right. The bath-room was not much of a place, being dark, hot, and steamy with sticky water incapable of lathering; but after pouring a jug of fresh water over him Trevor felt better, though he knew he was going to feel his head-ache every time he put a foot on the ground.

Emerging upon the crowded lower deck, Trevor walked behind a line of backs, and noticed that the Assou was heading for a port. In the clear distance a church spire dominated a settlement crouching behind hundreds of pancake rocks. After the similarity of sharply sculptured coast the round low rocks seemed part of a different world. Wishing he knew more geology, he put his hand on a brass rail to ascend to the bridge-deck; but under the open sky he felt afflicted with the dazzle on scrubbed deck-boards, making him crave a spot where he could sit in the shade.

The Assou steamed towards the land, giving evidence of power in the foaming sea-street she left behind. The sun made a shadeless world, casting an ecstasy of light into anything that could be coloured blue or green. It was so buoyant and brilliant that Trevor disliked retiring to dimness; but after painful flinching he capitulated to glasses, and saw the bulk of the man at the wheel grow darker and the sea and sky become blackly blue. A few privileged people leaned on the rail with forward-gazing eyes and with the instinct of being unobtrusive he walked to the chart-house entrance, where he saw a desk-table at right angles to upholstered seats facing each other as in a railway compartment. Emptiness lured him in where he could sit and look from soothing shade. He had been there some time when he saw Mageila arrive and stand unconscious of observation. Now that he knew her it seemed unfair to stare when she might be off guard, but after long looking he decided there was little to read of the inner girl from her outward appearance that morning. She stood comfortably erect in black shoes, displaying the fact that her heels were neat and the seams of her stockings exact lines up her slender legs. Her coat was unbuttoned, making spilling lines with the collar down, and her hair above lay like black wings against the neat body of her head. She stood quietly with hands folded on the rail, and because the outer world was brilliant she merely looked ahead. But he knew he needed only speak to startle her as he had on the previous evening. Her name hovered near outward expression, but disinclination for conversation and his head-ache made him prolong his isolation. The doctor had told him to rest his eyes by looking into space, adding inconsequentially that thirty feet was as good as infinity. Mageila must be about thirty feet away.

Nearer the shore the hundreds of rocks revealed the miracle of navigation it would take to ease the Assou into port. Momentarily distracted from thirty-foot vision, Trevor was surprised to hear a contralto voice humming with grave content. Arrested, he returned to the study of Mageila—seeing the clear width of one grey eye, a generous nostril, and half a rippling mouth. Her neck was a long line tilting her head towards the sun and, listening, he heard her singing “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” and the French was so perfect that he experienced surprise immediately ridiculed. Her French should be good when her father came from St. Pierre.

“Mageila,” he called, spontaneously speaking her name.

She started, looking behind, investigating the possibilities of a voice belonging to an impervious back at the other side of the deck.

“Mageila,” he called on a louder note, and she looked everywhere before she found him.

“You?” she said, walking towards him to shade the door with the grateful greyness of her coat.

Automatically he stood up. “Good-morning,” he said quietly.

“Good-morning,” she said with deeper quietude.

For some time they appraised each other; and he saw her young, illumined as if the morning lent sheen to her eyes and skin and the sky a blue tinge for her hair. When the light verified the natural red of her mouth, he wondered how her blood reddened it when the rest of her face was so pale. She saw him shadowed, with a high brow seeming finer and whiter than the lower part of his face; and when he removed his glasses, she noticed his brown eyes shrinking under the dark shelf of his brows.

“Are you ill? Perhaps a little sea-sick?” she suggested with delicate tentativeness.

“No, not at all,” he said with formal denial. “A bit below par—the glare, I think. My eyes have been bothering me. I’ve been sticking too close to indoor work. It’s nothing at all—a mere head-ache.”

“Head-ache?” she repeated slowly. “You have a head-ache?”

“Well, yes, but not too bad,” he said, with a man’s wish to ignore a fuss; but Mageila’s reaction was so sure, spontaneous, and simple that he was swept along before he could remind himself he was an ordinary young Englishman abroad on Colonial Service.

“Trevor!”

“Yes,” he said, arrested by the slow authoritative sound of his name—like a voice taking it between firm lips.

“Trevor, look at me!”

He did, staring into eyes with spots of piercing light.

“Sit down,” she commanded; and he did, with the small surprised thud of a man obeying without conscious co-operation.

“Trevor, you haven’t got a head-ache any more. I’m taking it away.”

As if her eyes were diving, she stooped and laid her palms on his temples with the fearlessness that could come only from a transmutation of sensuous touch.

“Close your eyes now,” she told him as her palms moved with the faintest suggestion of circular motion, going subtly round and round until he was taken with formlessness and an instinct to slump as if his nerves were tight strings loosening round the parcel of his head.

He let himself go towards the flesh-pillows under her thumbs—knowing that her touch was without sensuality, that her hands embraced his head with intimate detachment. Then the analytical quality receded. He became insensible, without knowledge of time or surroundings, until she returned him to earth with her voice.

“Trevor, don’t go to sleep. Your head-ache is gone.”

She took a backward step and he opened his eyes, blinking like a person returning from the unknown.

“Mageila!” he ejaculated, swamped with strange wonder. “What have you done to me? Good God, it’s not possible—”

“You haven’t got a head-ache,” she told him with grave exultation; and he saw her glad, transfigured with something he had not remembered.

“No,” he agreed with gathering incredulity. “You are—are you—you said you were the—”

“The little doctor,” she said with new introduction.

A moment of mental churlishness made him clutch the common day and try to recapture his head-ache. It simply must be there. He always had it twenty-four hours and he had planned to have it that long. No seventh daughter of a seventh daughter could do anything about it. But his sense of well-being told him she could and, looking at Mageila reborn to a natural faculty, he told himself there were more things in Heaven and earth . . . He stood up, searching eyes that were seeing him humanely but not individually.

“Thank you,” he said with extreme gentleness. “I feel very well.”

“I’m the little doctor again,” she said as if she had not heard.

“Yes, it seems you are. But why could I give you back the power?” he inquired curiously.

“I don’t know. I felt right again, as if I stopped protesting the loss of everything. I never talk about it. Please let it alone. Come out on deck. You don’t need to sit here any more. It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

But he wished to detain the source of his healing, treasure it, and set it aside for himself; however, he reminded himself of the fallacy of possession. Who could possess a mystery? She had come through calamity preserving the clear thing in herself, and he had nothing to do with its resurrection. Had he? Dare he think it had flared from some warm human affinity? And what if it had? He liked her so much. Liking? Loving? The greater power in liking was weighting the scales when he saw her step from the chart-house. Having sought solitude, she now wished to rub shoulders with the ship’s company.

“Come down to the lower deck. I want to see people. Will you come?”

“Yes,” he agreed, knowing she would go without him.

She turned her head over her shoulder to see if he followed, and he thought her face utterly beautiful with its new vitality. Then he was seeing her head dipping towards the lower deck and he knew she walked confidently, winding through a crowd towards her grandfather; and without any reason but the pursuit of the unattainable he followed, becoming the indrawn person, hearing over and over again through the hubbub one throaty sentence. “Trevor, you haven’t got a head-ache any more.” Yet she looked as if she was not remembering. Her sleep-walking look was gone and she was regarding the world as if she was one with its pulse. There was nothing for him to do but remind himself that he was one of many she must have touched. She talked to her grandfather, asking about the place they approached, how long they would be there, and what was the place after this.

When the Assou was berthed to unload supplies for a typical Newfoundland settlement, passengers swarmed down the gangway eager for a longer walk than the deck of a ship could provide.

Captain Dilke stayed with his cronies, willing to exercise on the wharf. When Trevor suggested that Mageila should walk along the one winding road, Captain Dilke agreed, but told them to return immediately they heard the ship’s whistle. They went, past freight-sheds; turning at right angles and walking behind the young Americans, who made a gay chattering group. The men wore grey flannel and tweeds and the girls competent sports clothes with bright three-cornered scarves round their heads, reminding Trevor of pictures from the National Geographic Magazine. After the cold sea the land was hot, making Mageila shed her coat; and he took it from her, seeing her more slender in a grey knitted dress. With no loose ends of hair for the wind to worry, she could walk neatly bare-headed; but, giving her sidelong scrutiny, he saw she was unconscious of the effect she made.

“The Americans are going to St. Anthony to work,” she told him, indicating the group ahead.

“So I hear. Extremely nice boys and girls. I’ve talked to a few of them.”

“They look very nice,” she approved. “They have to be nice to come so far, and they have to be well off to do it. They pay their own expenses, and I was making it up in my head. It must cost them five hundred dollars to do it.”

“A hundred pounds,” he said, thinking in terms of English expense; but Mageila continued to express her own thoughts.

“They’re Americans and the doctor next me at table is an American. It’s a long way to come—”

“The spirit of adventure, a trip off the beaten track,” he suggested.

“Perhaps. More Americans come than English.”

He laughed. “You sound accusing. Americans are globe-trotters. The average English person feels far-flung if he goes to the Channel Islands.”

She laughed and he found himself waiting for her submerged gaiety.

“I have four dead sisters,” she said, startling him with another trend.

“Yes?” he ventured encouragingly.

“I have two left, living in New York. They are nurses and they write every mail persuading me to join them.”

“Mmm,” he murmured, thinking that yesterday she had been empty of purpose. “What do you feel about it? Are there difficulties?”

“Not over money,” she explained. “Grandpa likes his grandchildren to work. He’s helped a lot of them with education. He will finance me if there’s nothing from Papa. He was insured, but the tidal wave was an Act of God.”

“That was unfortunate,” he commiserated. “Money is always a help, but your grandfather looks prosperous. He’s really a remarkable old man. I was watching him last night and I thought he was the perfect mixer. He’s the same to everyone, neither condescending nor deferring. It’s a gift.”

Mageila eyed him with grave approval. “Grandpa is like that. He thinks nothing of asking four or five mixed-up people for a meal. He was always used to a big table and he gets lonely with two or three. Aunt Molly, who keeps house for him, gets very cross. Her mouth gets tighter and tighter, but Grandpa would invite the King of England to eat salt fish with him and expect him to like it. When Aunt Molly invites people she wants to be prepared, with different china, different silver, and everything very polished.”

He smiled. “I expect men are irritating to women like that.”

Mageila became gravely defensive. “I feel like Grandpa about it. He doesn’t believe in the fatted-calf welcome.”

He smiled again. “There’s something to be said for both Martha and Mary.”

They advanced in easy silence, hearing their feet on the uneven road, seeing the blue water on their right and the clean square houses facing many different ways on the sloping land. It was a settlement about the size of Feather-the-Nest, but the hills did not frown in a sinister way; neither did the sea crave the land. Mageila could walk confidently in space and brilliant sunshine.

“What do you feel about joining your sisters?” he asked with persuasive interest. “Tell me; I like to hear. Wouldn’t that natural faculty of yours—”

“That’s what I wonder,” she said with acclaim for his comprehension. “Could I give two aspirin when— Wouldn’t the doctors get mad with me?”

“I expect so,” he laughed. “But if you cured one of their head-aches they’d feel as I do.”

“Would they?” she asked without personal curiosity. “I don’t feel useful with aspirin.”

“Then you’d be unpopular in a hospital.” He was silent, staring thoughtfully ahead before continuing in a dissatisfied voice. “It’s not my affair, Mageila, but I can’t see you as a conventional nurse. Hospitals are so full of abnormalities. That natural faculty might be better used. If you must use it, wait until this war comes along and then volunteer as a V.A.D. It would be more impromptu, more in your line.”

“It would not,” she said with sure interruption. “Shooting people and trying to mend them is most unnatural for a natural faculty. I’d rather do what the Americans are doing; only I’d stay all winter.”

“What?” he said, appalled. “Labrador in winter? It’s impossible!”

“St. Anthony is in Newfoundland,” she corrected.

“The very north, sub-Arctic anyway,” he told her, unconsciously protesting to a point of vehemence. “It’s unthinkable. You’d be cut off from the world. Nothing but snow and ice, and dog-team the only means of transportation. Think of those great frozen bays. It’s too rough, too elemental. Even summer in Newfoundland is never quite warm. I notice people always say, ‘lovely day, but the wind is cold.’ People are tightened up, but in Labrador— Good God!”

As he stopped, leaving protest to expressive shoulders, she stared in contemplative wonder, letting him walk in a silence he broke himself.

“It’s your life of course, but it seems an incredible choice. You look so clear. When you tilt your head I imagine you’re seeing things the rest of us—”

“I’m strong,” she interrupted slowly. “That is, I used to be.”

“But the eternal winter,” he muttered with dissatisfaction.

“I’d mind that less than you. It’s the country I know, and I understand the people. I sense them because I’ve touched them.”

“It would be hospital work,” he said argumentatively.

She nodded in grave agreement. “Yes, there are hospitals and medicine; but there is faith like the people had at home. Grandpa has told me about the Missions, how the people bring the sick in open boats. I know that sort of life. I know how to answer its pain.”

Trevor looked out to sea, where the hundreds of rocks spread like a boulder-beach. “Look, Mageila, today it’s beautiful because of the sun. Picture it in winter, all long shadows.”

She answered steadily. “I don’t need to remind myself of something I know very well. I remember when green is black, blue is grey, and snow gets terribly dirty. Trevor . . .”

“Yes?” he said, thinking his name had never sounded so attractive.

“You said you felt it yourself, what it was like to live close to bones.”

“Yes,” he agreed; but he felt cold, thinking it was one consciousness for a man and another for a beautiful unusual girl. “Yes,” he muttered again, “but there’s the whole world. You’re bilingual, and there would be many opportunities. There’s France, and England—”

“You’re certain they’re going to war.”

“Then there would be so much to do—”

“No.” She looked down the rough road with a return of her sleep-walking expression. “There is different work in Labrador. This winter I used to listen to French broadcasts from the Pasteur Institute. They often repeated what Louis Pasteur said, ‘on the one side blood and death, on the other peace, work, and salvation.’ I wrote it down because it represented so much.”

“Mageila,” he said compassionately, protesting unyouthful conversation; but when she did not answer he gave a short laugh. “This will be our quarrelling point.”

“No,” she denied. “I do not feel quarrelsome.”

“Neither do I in that way,” he reassured her gently. “I meant our different outlooks. I’m a product of a world that seems built from the top down. You’re from a world built from the bottom up. In England upbringing is traditional—public schools . . . But, as Kipling says, we live in a way that loses ten thousand pounds’ worth of education to one ten-rupee bullet.”

“You sound like I felt about the tidal wave. Sharp, pointed, like the tops of the spruce trees in yourself.”

“Definitely! Didn’t we arrive at this place last evening.”

“Place?”

“In conflict I mean. Oh, I say!” he said in a very different voice. “Look, the Americans are going into a shop. Mageila, let’s investigate.”

Instinctively he took her hand and ran her up a grassy bank, where they turned their backs on a white picket-fence to read the list of products painted on the shop-windows. “What will you have?” He grinned, contracting his eyes to see. “Pork, beef, apples, oranges, fresh eggs, new turnips, ice-cream—”

“Ice-cream? It would be nice,” she said in a different voice herself.

Mageila accompanied him gravely across the street. It was a shop like her father’s in a brighter flatter place, but she gave no sign of intensified memory. There was the suggestion of a bell as he opened the door, but the Americans drowned it with gay chatter as they drank, ate ice-cream, and stuffed their pockets with chocolate bars. Without haste Trevor eased towards the counter, drawing Mageila after him.

“Ice-cream?” he inquired, raising dark quizzical brows. “Something fizzy from a bottle? A barrel of pork? Anything you say, Mageila.”

There was general laughter, and a lowering of voices from his suggestion of gay modulation.

“Ice-cream, thank you,” said Mageila, commanding a moment’s complete silence which reported to Trevor that her story had gone the rounds of the ship.

But they were well-bred young people, and when two girls at Mageila’s elbow included her in their conversation he heard her responding with the composed friendliness of a person whose main concerns were too remote to be upset by products from a wider wealthier world. Neither was she any different when two young men joined in with the naturalness of Americans breaking more social ice in one minute than Englishmen break in a year. Then the noise flared up again, and the group mixed and surged in the small open place of a shop stocked with all the necessities of life.

When the Assou commanded them in a piercing whistle they all tried to get through the door together, hurrying as if the ship might depart without them. But the Assou had whistled well before sailing; so Mageila and Trevor returned and sat idly on barrels, hearing winches and ropes and smelling freight that was being lowered on the wharf. The sun was warm, inducing indolence occasionally stimulated by a cold breath from the sea.

“This is a fish-barrel,” said Trevor after a sustained silence. “I feel the smell will stay with me long after we’re absent one from the other.”

Mageila sniffed with wider nostrils. “Herring,” she said laconically.

Trevor sat on, hunching contented shoulders. “What’s yours?”

“My what?”

“Barrel?”

“Flour,” she said sombrely.

The quality of her voice made him aware of an averted face. “Mageila—”

“Yes,” she said, without turning.

“Look at me.”

She did, and he saw nothing but a strained empty expression. “I’m beginning to know that look,” he said gently. “Was it a disturbing question?”

“Flour was part of it,” she said.

“Tell me,” he said. “You’re not very communicative unless I dig deep.”

She smiled and told him about the thick white smell of flour, and when she had finished he saw her lose the tightened look in her neck and face.

“It does you good to talk, Mageila. You’ve been bottled up far too long. You didn’t mind telling me that.”

“No,” she admitted, “but it’s not easy to talk.”

“No,” he said, “but you were friendly with the Americans. They land tomorrow and two of them are having a beano tonight. You’re coming. It’s somebody’s birthday and they brought champagne.”

“I don’t drink.”

“No, of course not; you’re too young. But I do; that is, like an officer and a gentleman,” he added, with a flash of white teeth. “You’re not a young fanatic, are you?”

“No . . . I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Drinking can be as destroying as the tidal wave and much dirtier.”

“What do you mean?” he asked tentatively, refraining from intruding on possibly delicate ground; but Mageila smiled comprehendingly.

“No, no one was a drunkard,” she assured him. “Though Mama was severe about it, Papa liked little celebrations; but—”

Then in her clear stark way she told him about Pea-Pea Peter; and though one side of him wanted to laugh, the theme was too near her tragedy for him to indulge himself and he sobered when she wound up slowly, “he was swept out like a bit of driftwood, so they said. I used to hate looking at him, and the way he smelt; but when Grandpa came he made me drink something, and it made me terribly sorry for myself. I cried and cried and the stewardess had to undress me, and when I lay down my pillow ran away. It was terrible, and I kept apologizing to Pea-Pea and I heard Papa and Mama—” She bit her lip, stopping abruptly.

“Poor Mageila,” he whispered. “You’ve certainly taken it. There are times when one drink is a knock-out, but fanatics never do any good. Almost anything can be destructive in excess.” He gave the ghost of a shrug. “Who knows what’s what? Some psychologists, or cynics—whatever you like—say war is merely intensified politics, more democratic than the thousands of underprivileged deaths from bad distribution. The shells do not pick and choose. Everything is cock-eyed. The best we can do is to seek an even keel. We’re part of a tottering system, being swept along until we drop out.”

Mageila listened intently, but when he stopped she spoke strongly. “Yes, the wave taught me that; but I’d rather go feeling wholesome than rotten like Pea-Pea, who brought it on himself.”

He nodded his head, smiling with soft brown eyes. “Like Wolsey to Cromwell, ‘Then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell, thou fall’st a blessed martyr.’ ”

“One of the plays I read that was just print. I must read it again. I like to read Shakespeare and the Book of Isaiah.”

“Do you indeed? You’ve got a nice aristocratic mind. There’s the whistle. What a loud noise!” he said, putting his hands up to his ears. “Don’t hurry, Mageila. Whistles are peremptory things.”

St. Anthony, the Grenfell settlement, represented the end of the journey for the Americans, the industrial workers, the doctors and nurses. Half the passengers were ready to land when the Assou steamed into a nearly landlocked harbour sheltering a sprawling settlement with mission-buildings looking like modernity in an elemental setting. The round-trippers and the people travelling farther north lingered at the rail, watching landing operations before going ashore.

“This is the last wharf,” said Captain Dilke.

“A lot of sick people,” murmured Trevor. “I had no idea— Where do they all come from? It looks like a pilgrimage to a shrine.”

“Huh!” said Captain Dilke with an approving grunt. “It could be that. This place is like a bit of God on a rock.”

“Looks like it indeed,” Trevor agreed, giving a comprehensive survey to schooners, trap-boats, and their own ship—all seeming to swell the number of sick for the hospital.

He was arrested by the drama of journeys to attain medical aid. There were stretcher-cases, patients supported and bandaged, and patients creeping along the wharf by themselves, and all had such bleak wind-bitten flesh that the mark of illness was intensified.

“Does you good to see how other people live,” he muttered.

“Hard coast,” said Captain Dilke grimly. “A lot of ‘sufferment,’ as one of my skippers used to say.”

But Trevor was watching Mageila looking down at a stretcher-case as if her natural faculty would like to meet the primitive evidence of pain. Her eyes were wide, hypnotic, and he could hear her voice in the centre of his head, “you haven’t got a pain any more. Remember you haven’t got a pain any more.”

Black magic? White magic? The healing of a pure working? More things in Heaven and earth . . . Would she have been burnt as a witch in another age? Why was the popular idea of witches so haglike and unlovely? The true witch was beautiful, with grey eyes like rock-water in black grass.

There were so many pictures they saw together, and they shared incidents that were stark and strong. Two hours out from St. Anthony they walked aft on the lower deck, pausing idly beside a long box against the after-hatchway. Lazy from the long rays of the sun, Trevor sat down.

“Nice convenient box! Sit down, Mageila.” When she did not comply he looked up. “Sit down,” he said invitingly. “I don’t like your wide-open eyes way up there.”

She smiled but remained standing, and he thought her eyes, nostrils, and mouth were widening together.

“I feel that box,” she told him. “I can’t sit on it.”

“And why not?” he demanded. “We sat on a herring-barrel. Are you going luxury-liner on me? I admit it’s an ordinary box, rough enough to cause splinters; but—”

“It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“Well, it’s here today. Sit down,” he said, extending a hand as a passing steward gave a raucous guffaw.

“Hi, Mister! You’re sittin’ on a stiff. We’re taking him home in salt.”

Appalled, Trevor leaped like a scalded cat; but, meeting Mageila’s startled eyes, he shrugged and relaxed. “You knew, because you’re more sensitive. I hope the poor fellow will forgive me for sitting on him.”

Mageila looked astern at the churning path the Assou made in the sea. “The keels of ships go over their faces,” she said quietly.

“Quite right,” he said, losing his horror. “It’s the way we’re conditioned. Convention has made us artificial about death. But we’ll go forward just the same.”

They moved, joining a group seated round a sturdy-looking nurse who had done two years medical work on the coast. People were drawing her out with questions, making her talk; and she did, starkly, speaking of operations performed by the light of one kerosene lamp, of life-and-death rides with patients behind a dog-team, of frozen bays and untimely blizzards, of babies delivered on dirty newspapers. When an American woman shrilled, in fascinated horror, “but infection!” the nurse smiled all over a hard brown face.

“That happens more in big cities and hospitals. You couldn’t work here if nature didn’t work with you. It does all the time. I could tell you cases that would have died—”

“Do,” said more than one voice; and the nurse talked on, making Trevor stop listening to watch Mageila absorbing the conversation as if she were blotting-paper.

When there was a lull and the listeners were marvelling together he touched her arm, drawing her aside to the ship’s rail. “Mageila, come back.”

She dropped her hands on the rail and spoke in a slow bemused voice. “You see! She said nature works here. I would be all right. If I wanted to be a nurse I could be part of natural healing.”

“Yes,” he agreed, but he had the feeling of seeing longer shadows on a darker bay.

They knew they were truly north when they heard the husky-dogs echoing the ship’s whistle. There was something in the long weird plaints that called up the image of black cold, rock, and the terrible width of frozen water. Hearing the huskies, Trevor felt the impossibility of sensitive life marooned in such a place. Neither could he be reassured when he was reminded that they were merely steaming through a bit of the northern route between America and Europe. It was summer, he knew from the fleets of schooners and trap-boats fishing in Labrador water; but blue as the water was he felt lurking frost, and in the white clouds he sensed snow heavily lifted for the earliest fall. The north became personally significant and there were times when he became Mageila’s silent escort, merely observing as the ship’s whistle announced her arrival. With the last of the wharves the Assou would be barely anchored when she would be surrounded by hungry-looking boats waiting for supplies. Sometimes the passengers only hung over the rail, watching freight dealt with in open water. Other times they would go ashore with the mail-boat, land, and stand on rocks holding a few hovels before they returned to the ship. That, Trevor told himself, meant visiting places like Comfort Bight and Snug Harbour. Comfort and snugness stayed in the names, and once the huskies’ echo of the ship’s whistle got violently on his nerves.

“Good God,” he protested, “can’t they bark like decent dogs?”

“They can’t bark,” she said serenely. “They’ve kept the sound of the wolf.”

“You’re such a comfort, darling,” he murmured ironically, changing his voice when he saw a sensitive flush stain her face. “Doesn’t the sound of the wolf upset you? Would you like it for your song without words?”

Mageila turned, and he saw her face become smooth—bland with sweetness that could be empty if he chose to read it that way.

“There is other music, the B.B.C. Didn’t you hear—”

“I did,” he said, baffled. “I thought they sounded—”

“Polite?” she asked smoothly.

“Mageila, I suspect you of becoming feminine and of—”

“Of what?”

“Making fun of my accent?”

“No,” she said sweetly. “English voices do not speak of the wolf.”

When the morning came, ushering in the ice-bergs, they went in thrall to white glittering silence. The Assou made a dark moving spot, and so quiet was its course that it looked like a hearse winding between mighty tomb-stones. A muted voice murmured to the upper air, “they look like memorials for men like Columbus, Cabot, Cartier . . .” It was a true simile, impelling the thought of explorers coldly at rest. But, like most of the people, refraining from the inadequacy of speech, Mageila and Trevor stood side by side on the upper deck. Beauty was intense, fierce, with a colour announcing that ice was never white. The mighty bergs rose high, with steep aquamarine sides running with rainbow water from the heat of the sun. Someone began to count them out loud, until at one hundred and forty-nine an irate voice said, “be quiet!”

Though he approved silence, the time came when Trevor made a spontaneous remark himself. “Good God! Mirage! How incredibly beautiful!”

But Captain Dilke came and stood beside him, peering ahead with faded blue eyes. “The horizon is doubled. It often happens at this time of year.”

“They’re upside down in the sky,” breathed Mageila.

It was true. The ice-bergs were inverted in the blue sky above the horizon, making a picture like an ecstatic day in an ice-age. Many people refused to go below for lunch; but when Captain Dilke left a phenomenon he had seen many times and Mageila hesitated, Trevor bade a passing steward bring sandwiches and they ate with their eyes on everything else.

That evening the northern lights came out, changing the sky into an animated palette. People used to temperate skies became fearful, talking uneasily of omens, lunar disturbances, earth-results; but the Newfoundlanders laughed, knowing the drama of their skies did not bid them make their souls. It was almost too much living for a day, and though Mageila wanted to be alone to recapture it she would not leave the upper deck until her grandfather sent her to bed. Bemused in a canvas chair, Trevor rose to follow her down; but when he stood by her cabin-door he turned, content to go in silence.

“Good-night,” she said, in such a full voice that he returned.

“If there’s never another day—” he began slowly.

“No one would forget this,” she agreed.

“Right,” he said. “Today I believe I experienced ecstasy that had nothing to do with any I knew before, but I doubt if I would have felt it if you hadn’t been there. I was a fool to try and put it into words. As it is, I feel it was beyond me—too much grandeur.”

Mageila turned her head in some human unrest. “Yes, it seems to have—”

“Have what?”

“I don’t know. The colour—”

“Colour is good for you. You think too darkly.”

Mageila tilted her head in young exaltation. “Then when I do I shall remember this. I may need it if disaster comes again.”

“It won’t,” he said. “You’ve had enough. The balance of things will see that you’re happy.”

“Will it? What will make me happy?”

He questioned with his shoulders as well as his voice. “Who knows? You’re planning to become a Labrador exile. It’s not very promising.”

“Then I’ll remember today. It will be enough.”

Without reason he reacted irritably before he smiled tolerantly, tenderly, knowing she was unawakened to the agonies of a strictly personal heart. It was in him to return her to her sorrowful sleep-walking state rather than disturb her with the hail and farewell of emotion. Let her live on in her cold open country, with her nun’s eyes fixed on another world; but as his mind pursued detachment he felt the surge of a physical mood. Sensuous appreciation quickened, making him aware of her long white throat, the black and white of her colouring centred with a full red mouth; and spontaneously he challenged her, letting his eyes travel down the long immaturity of her body framed in the squirrel coat. He was conscious of emotional aggression, feeling if she was awake she must shrink and wrap her coat round her with the scrambling hands of prudery. Instead she stood with steady eyes probing his face.

“Good-night,” he said sharply, for fear of introducing change in her face.

His abrupt difference jolted Mageila, bringing her hand up under her chin. “What . . .” she questioned uncertainly. Then she straightened, said a quiet good-night, and started to close the door.

Instinctively his outstretched hand prevented it. “What what?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she said, in such proud dismissal that he could not go without restoring himself in her eyes.

“I was being stupid,” he said normally. “I wouldn’t consciously hurt you for worlds. It merely came over me how exalted and young it was of you to imagine that memory is ever enough. Human beings have only so much capacity for northern lights. They come to earth and crave human things, the comfort of arms—”

“I’ve wanted that ever since my father died,” she said, with such stark truth that he gestured despairingly.

“I don’t know you, Mageila. You seem so other-worldly and then you speak with such human sincerity—don’t wake up to knowing what it is to sweep together and apart. To feel close—”

“I felt close to my father.”

He laughed shortly. “The psychologists have plenty to say about that. Probably I harp on war because my own father was killed in action, but affection between a man and a woman—”

“My mother loved my father. I know I’m ignorant, but I imagine it might be the affection that makes you feel cherished—”

He considered her more sensitively. “The loss of affection hurt you most?”

Very steadily Mageila met the increasing intensity of his eyes. “Yes, it did. I know since Papa died that people need affection to live at all.”

“They say love lives after death,” he suggested with some irony.

“It does,” said Mageila with conviction, “but it’s lonely. It has tears. It can’t put its arms around you, or smile, and make you laugh.”

“No, it can’t, I know that very well. When the thing goes we get love-starved, and it makes us say and do a lot of things we don’t mean. So when love comes you’ll feel cherished, will you?” he asked curiously, and he put one foot over her step as if an advance would compel an answer.

Mageila stood where she was, showing no disposition to retreat.

“Tell me?” he persuaded.

“How do I know? I can only say what I think would happen.”

“What?”

She smiled, mitigating the seriousness of the moment. “I’d be like the wise virgins, I think.”

“And that in twentieth-century language?”

“If you don’t understand—”

“Perhaps I do, but I wasn’t brought up on the Bible. Put it in your own words. You speak a foreign language sometimes. I haven’t met any girls like you. Are you too shy?”

“No,” she said slowly, letting her voice pick its way through words. “I think the love would be the trimmed lamp. It would make me ready.”

“Ideality,” he whispered with gentle tolerance, seeing her young and old in turns and not knowing which way to weight the scales.

“I expect so,” she agreed as his voice picked its way through words.

“But you’ve been in a forcing-house. It’s something, after all, to have your tears behind you.”

“Yes,” she said soberly. “I don’t think I could cry so hard again.”

“Hush,” he protested. “It’s challenging the gods.”

Mageila looked up as if the gods might be addressed from below. “No. If things happen again, I’ll try and not cry. I don’t think broken-hearted people are any good. They lose something.”

“Yes,” he said tersely. “Even a horse must race with heart.”

Something about her tilted face and far-away eyes made him take her hand in warm protective clasp. “When you go away like that I have the strongest desire to drag you back. Good-night, Northern Sphinx! Some day there’ll be one made of ice, left to stare out over the sea; and it will be made in your image. Bless you, my dear, and sleep well.”

He was gone and Mageila shut her door, standing still—becoming suddenly indrawn, unable to remember the external world because of the new importance of inner living.

The day after the ice, fog fell like grey milk—so close to the Assou that it was impossible to glimpse the immediate sea. Thinking of the uncharted rocks and the ice-bergs was not comforting, but like the nurse who depended on nature the seaman had the natural sense. The Assou eased ahead like a ghost with a wary nose. Once she stopped dead, staying becalmed for a long time; and when the fog lifted for short looking, anxious, fearless, or merely interested eyes saw a hungry-looking ice-berg peaked with frozen threat. To watch the captain ease his ship away was an experience to remember.

The fogs came and went like restless ghosts, but when they truly settled they merged into one grey presence.

In rain-coats, with misted hair and beaded eye-lashes, Trevor and Mageila stood on a deck they could not see, isolated in fog. Occasionally a rift would occur in front of them, revealing a green sea-street. It was during one of those intervals that they glimpsed a boat whose pathos gripped them in mutual depression. Before they saw, they heard sounds like the muffled phut-phut of an engine. Then the fog slid away like a pall from the living and the dead. In an open boat two figures sat aft, drooping towards a body shrouded in a hospital blanket. Wetness dejected everything: the mourners, their garments; a flag like a half-mast coloured string; and the red material, over the figure athwart the seats, outlining a profile of wasted death. Then parted fog reunited and the sight of the boat went, like the fugitive clarity of a dream.

“Did you see it?” asked Trevor, blinking doubtful eyes.

“I saw,” Mageila assured him. “A face with a thin dead nose.”

They strained their eyes into fog; but there was nothing but the muffled knell the boat left behind, carrying in its sound the very sight of the sorrowful craft. Trevor felt wrung and, peering sideways, he saw two tears, so big and clear that he had the momentary illusion of Mageila’s eyes falling out to mourn on her cheeks. When the tears were not wiped they travelled, falling so slowly and enduringly that he reached for her chilled bare hand.

“Skeletons?” he commiserated gently.

“They just sat,” she mourned, “too miserable to cry.”

He nodded, maintaining a sympathetic silence he broke himself. “Yesterday I saw the nun in you,” he mused irrelevantly.

“Nun?” she questioned wonderingly. “No, I will never be a nun.”

He smiled, seeing her become more enclosed in a vaporous world. “I meant your capacity to work for other people, to heal, maybe up here—”

“But not for a nun’s reason.” Then she questioned him with her misted eyes. “Do I know a nun’s reason?”

He examined her face in a way that dried her tears. “I’m not sure that I know it myself. I believe they have a vocation, so they leave the world; others, I’m told, are disappointed in love.”

Mageila withdrew her eyes to the indistinct sea. “I will not be a nun,” she said noncommittally.

“But there are veils on you now,” he informed her, “although they don’t cover your hair. The wet has made it very curly round your face. You remind me of the soft greys of Russian novels, and you have some of their melancholy. But you’re quite beautiful,” he decided in contemplative detachment.

“Am I?” she asked in such wide-eyed interest that he burst out laughing.

“Didn’t you know?”

But she merely stared like a girl in quest of truth. Then she shook her head, answering strangely. “Nothing is quite clear, is it? The tops of things don’t tell much. I would like to find truth.”

He sobered. “You won’t, my dear; but it’s not the fault of truth. It’s because we cling to self-delusion.”

“I know a woman who knows truth,” she said, thinking of Mrs. Slater.

“Then,” he shrugged, “she must possess higher knowledge.”

“She does,” said Mageila, “whatever that is.”

It was a malodorous whaling-station that revealed how far Mageila had progressed since leaving Ship-Haven. The Assou seemed apologetic, creeping past craggy rocks with an air of flinching from the next ports, and before anchoring in a polluted bay everyone knew there were foul things ahead. The sea began to look corrupt and the same emanation crept from the shore, making faces assume the broadened nostrils of noses afflicted with smell. As the Assou slipped into oily waters faint repulsion became obvious repugnance; and when she anchored, fascinated eyes saw the cause in a whale-factory with a platform and flensing-board seeming carpeted with ooze and a float to which was moored eight inflated dead whales. But the thing afflicting the eyes was a mass of bleeding flesh on the platform in front of the factory.

For the passengers it was a question of suffering distantly or attempting to mitigate repulsion with a large interest.

With a whitening face Mageila stood regarding the red mass, but there was so much distaste that no one had sympathies to spare. Even Trevor abandoned every concern but smell, and if Mageila had been capable of analysis she would have recognized the light ironical mood that often took him when he talked with his tongue in his cheek.

“Quite the largest smell,” he told Mageila and a group of passengers huddled on the rail, “quite the most villainous thing I’ve ever encountered!”

“I’ll say,” groaned a muffled female voice from behind a handkerchief.

Then Trevor became plaintive, staring ahead with wry lips exposing his front teeth. “What shall I do, Mageila mia? My Columbus side would explore this witches’ cauldron, but—”

“I’ve eaten whale-steak,” said a dubious voice.

“Well,” said Trevor judiciously, “now you can weigh the pros and cons of experience. Definitely I’d say there were no pros, but there might be one for looking. It seems wrong to ignore so much whale. I may never have another opportunity. They don’t swim in the streams of England.”

“But that red thing,” protested the stifled woman.

“Definitely bloodsome,” agreed Trevor nonchalantly.

“That,” said an emphatic male, “is just a single head. Yes, sir,” he expounded, as if he had created the size, “that’s a real good head! Many barrels of oil will come out of that. The heads of whales—”

“If that’s a head, what must the body be?” drawled Trevor, smiling directly at the whales. There was always a well-informed person ready to lecture on natural resources.

“Yes, sirree, you can smell a whale-factory miles away,” continued the knowledgeable man. “The smell is something by itself. It’s bad enough when it’s fresh, but when it’s dead—”

“I’ll believe you. No need to insist,” murmured Trevor. “But that noise? Is there one or am I smelling the whale with my ears?”

Everyone listened as across the harbour came the echoes of hard, regular, mechanical sounds. The well-informed man knew about them at once.

“That’s the retort from the rendering-room. After the whale is cut up, it’s hoisted—”

“Indeed! Do they render them? Oh, here we are,” announced Trevor, leaning over the rail to watch the mail-boat lowered and the accommodation-ladder go down the ship’s side. “To be or not to be. That is the question. Is it nobler to suffer the sniffs and horrors of outrageous smell or brave the mail-boat in a sea of blubber?”

“May Hamlet forgive you,” said an American, responding brightly to his nonsense. “I’m wondering if I can bear it myself, but I know if I get back to New York without seeing those whales I’ll regret the lost opportunity. They say it only knocks once.”

“Wouldn’t once be enough of this?” complained Trevor.

“Well, yes,” laughed the American. “It certainly is high, but I’m for the shore.”

“People have been decorated for less,” Trevor told Mageila, as he watched the passengers surge to the top of the ladder, the women holding their handkerchiefs in front of their noses and clutching their skirts as if already treading the ooze of the platform. He stood watching their full descent before he noticed that Mageila still waited, drooping against the rail. “Coming?” he teased her gently. “This is new for you. Even your highly seasoned country doesn’t run to this-size smell.”

When nothing in her responded to his nonsense his voice reported a concern that made her avert her face.

“Anything wrong? My dear child,” he said with sweet reason, “there’s no need to make a martyr of yourself. Your ear is quite white. I’m not making you go to the whale, but unlike the mountain it comes to us. It’s one of the times when there’s perfect equality between the sexes. Nothing the male can do will sweeten the lot of the female, so—”

“It’s not the smell,” said Mageila in a strangled voice.

“Not the smell!” he expostulated. “What else? I say, are you—”

“No,” she said desperately, “it’s just— We must hurry if—”

“Yes, by Jove, they’re shoving off. Hi!” he called, leaning over the rail and waving to a good-natured oarsman who picked up a boat-hook to return alongside.

Automatically Trevor put his hand under Mageila’s elbow; but she lurched past him, going so precipitously that he pelted after her.

“Careful,” he warned urgently, looking at the yawning space of sea between the small platform and the mail-boat; but Mageila collapsed into a stern seat and he followed, helping to lower the gunnel dangerously near the water.

Imaginations became putrid and visualized an enforced swim in such a sea, causing people to sit as if deep breathing would imperil immunity.

“Gobbets,” said Trevor, watching bits of blubber and offal rising on the oily waves.

His eyes were bright, ironical with brown twinkles as he sensed the atmosphere of people restraining repulsion until it became partially ousted by interest. It might be once in a lifetime that they would see a raft mooring eight dead whales awaiting a run up the flensing-board. When Trevor asked why dead whales could float so buoyantly, the well-informed man said they were inflated with air until the cutters were ready to feed the factory with another whale. Carefully every passenger peered at the floating monsters until the difficulties of landing swamped other considerations. It meant waiting for the boat to sweep alongside and quickly mounting rungs of an incredibly slimy ladder. As every hold defied a grip, Trevor was not too preoccupied to notice how much better Mageila managed it than he did himself. She stepped automatically as if the high sweep of an open boat beside greasy foot-holds made a normal landing, and when she was on the offensively soft platform she walked when the other women minced.

It was an experience endured rather than relished. Ears were deafened by the reverberations of a retort; feet feared every step; clothes were held from contact; noses were utterly violated. And when the visitors left the rank outside air for the rendering-room, many beat an immediate retreat. Mageila and Trevor did not venture, remaining outside; and because they stood under the hoisting-machine which fed the retorts, they endured a worse experience than did those inside the factory.

“We’re lucky or unlucky,” murmured Trevor, regarding a monstrous body. “Here’s a whole new whale just arrived from the float—all puffed up, so they say. What’s that fellow doing with that murderous-looking knife?”

“That, sir, is the cutter.”

“Cutter? Good God! Stand back, Mageila.”

Sheer spontaneous horror made him pull and then draw Mageila within the circle of his arm, pressing her head with a hand denying her sight.

“Don’t look; I forbid it,” he said so strongly that she obeyed, becoming unconscious of everything but consideration and a return to encirclement; and as she relaxed, his arms tightened and his fingers flattened over her eyelids.

But no one noticed mere gestures of male protection. There was a high glittering flash of a knife, a deep disappearance into the huge body of the whale, a hideous rise of blood and water as a long sigh deflated a swollen belly—forcing through the gash offensively large entrails filthy with decomposition. There was a sound of gagging, and a woman walked to the edge of the platform calling to a man in a trap-boat.

“I’d like to hire a boat if the mail-boat is not ready. There are some experiences I can live without.”

“Let me,” said Trevor, advancing gingerly with Mageila still blinded and encircled.

When he released her she stood face forward, barely stirring to drop into the boat. With other escaping passengers she found herself seated beside him, and under cover of his rain-coat he clasped her hand as if needing contact himself.

“Utterly repulsive,” he decided for her and himself. “I wish you hadn’t come.”

“Repulsive,” moaned the woman who had retreated first. “I had perfume on my handkerchief, and I’m going back to the ship to throw the whole bottle away. There’s not a gardenia left in a bottleful! If I ever used it again, I’d smell and see—” Stopping, she met Trevor’s dark sardonic eyes. “Do I look green?” she asked doubtfully.

“If you did I’d excuse you,” he said soothingly. “I’m none too well myself, but I’m not prepared to add another gobbet to this ocean.”

They all laughed and Mageila sat with a bent head listening to his mitigating nonsense, feeling her hand warmly held when he appeared to be humorous and detached. But every eye was fixed on the Assou, and when the accommodation-ladder was reached the passengers pelted up with an air of attaining sanctuary. Murmuring a soft heartfelt “thank you,” Mageila fled.

When Trevor reached the deck after the delay of paying for the boat he came face to face with Captain Dilke, staring after her disappearing back.

“She walks all right,” the old man muttered as Trevor stamped his feet, brushing himself off like a man returning from a dirty walk. “I suppose she’s all right?” questioned Captain Dilke, as if Trevor should know.

“Well, sir,” he answered grimly, “I have a feeling Jonah’s return was not as savoury as it might be. By choice I wouldn’t welcome him home. You didn’t go ashore?”

“No,” said Captain Dilke, staring at the door through which Mageila had disappeared. “I’ve seen that factory often. I was in the engine-room when we anchored, and I came up to tell the girl to stay on board.”

“She went, I’m sorry to say.”

Captain Dilke lifted his face with its look of vital serenity, but now Trevor thought it pleased and amused beyond cause.

“And she got on all right.”

“Got on? Well, none of us liked it much, I can assure you. We were just in the nick of time to see a grand disembowelling, and I’d say the whale had been dead a long time. It’s not an experience to dwell on.”

But Captain Dilke was chuckling in a way that made Trevor follow him to the rail and wonder why he smiled so approvingly at the mass of disgusting flesh.

“Did she look at that?”

“I’m afraid she had to see a certain amount of it.”

“And she came back on her feet?”

“Yes,” said Trevor, mystified at the way the old man laughed out loud with his mouth and nose wide open to the malodorous air. “What did you expect to happen, sir?”

“Hasn’t she mentioned her weakness?” said the old man with childlike surprise.

“No,” confessed Trevor, feeling defrauded. “Has she been ill?”

“Nigh unto death,” said the old man. “My daughter Molly said it would be the death of her up here. She wanted me to send her on a southern cruise to have a nice sweaty summer, but I believe in bracing. Well, well!”

“What was the matter with her, sir?” asked Trevor with immediate persuasion.

“She hasn’t told you? And I thought all women liked to talk of their aches and pains. Another daughter of mine, Mr. Morgan, had an operation we know by heart—all the catgut that sewed her up and the sailor’s knots that tied her. I admire the girl for holding her tongue.”

“I admire her very much, sir,” said Trevor, wondering when he would get the new knowledge he craved.

“Yes,” said the old man, chuckling to himself, “there she was all winter fainting around; and when I told her she had to fight and help herself, she’d try and pick herself up like a boxer who knows he can’t lie still until he’s right out. Well, well—”

“Yes; but what, sir—” implored Trevor.

But he had to wait until Captain Dilke finished chuckling before he heard the whole of Mageila’s story. As he listened he remembered a white ear and an averted face, and the silent way she had relaxed against him. But he could recall no fainting slump. She had been taut and then suddenly small inside her bones, letting his hand remember her head and the wide smoothness of her closed lids. It was not a topic for her grandfather or an explanation of restoration. Or was it? He stood on, soberly responding as Captain Dilke wandered into other topics; and when more people joined them he went below, to change his shoes and wash away the smell of whale before he rejoined Mageila to speak to her from a fuller heart.

About to vacate his cabin, he paused in deep thought—standing in sight of the oily sea. Where was he going, he pondered. Then he threw himself down on the lounge and picked up a book, beginning to read with feverish concentration. He had not read a word since coming on board and he could no longer blame his eyes. Like Mageila with her winter reading, he saw nothing but print. His mind went on independently reporting the deceptive isolation of a ship, the chunk of living it represented, lifted away from other time. It was too prone to intensify the minute, the hour, the present day. Would it not be wiser if he gave up his monopoly? Was it fair to Mageila to accompany her every appearance? He would be general for the rest of the time, he told himself with stern common-sense. He would talk to everyone, stay with the crowd, be impersonal, and remember that all journeys end in the resumption of the common day. Why the devil couldn’t he concentrate on his book? Aldous Huxley! All right before; but now all the women seemed privileged bitches and the men intellectual rotters, creatures of distortion, in the memory of a face intruding between him and the book. No girl should be allowed to have eyes like hers! It should be against the law. Suddenly deciding he had not met any people like those Huxley wrote about, he longed to return on deck and renew himself with Mageila. Monica? Huxley might write about her and deride her with his bitter pen for her preoccupation with gentry, orders, and decorations.

“Damn,” he said out loud, scowling at a white wall.

He settled again and, picking up a magazine, held it with firm fingers. The relations between Poland and the Danzig Free State were deteriorating, making it more evident that Hitler must have Danzig back within the Reich. Even that seemed unreal in the world he inhabited. What would he read to distract him? Reaching for a small anthology, he opened it at random.

He flung the book down, dissatisfied with everything in print.

He got up and began to walk the small cabin space, but immediately frustration ran into his feet. He felt confined, shut up, unable to be simple and walk out into the open. He would go below and see the engines, hobnob with the crew, and avoid the upper deck. Common-sense was the thing and a reminder of ordinary working worlds. He found his dark glasses and put them on, instinctively reinforcing a retreat to a place where no one could penetrate his disguise.

Places visited on vacation can be considered as mere changes of scene, a means for the recharging of tired minds and bodies. But places become deeply significant when they represent people. If unconscious effects are the greatest triumphs, Mageila reflected herself to Trevor through a whole landscape. When he retreated, raising a barrier between himself and the living girl, he saw her everywhere and heard her voice like an undertone of the sea. She became the experience, the place, making him conscious of life and love, of time that was brief—and ominously brief for men of his generation. His introspective mood intensified, reminding him that he had never been able to see himself old. After his father’s death he remembered examining his hands, unable to picture them stiff and dry like the hands of old men not at war. He had a vital memory of his father in a British-warm over a body hard with buttons and a Sam Browne belt. He saw war as something clutching for women and full of fearfulness for children. Now sharpened sensitivity imagined the sky like a grey pall, and the caves in the cliffs like empty eyes in a granite skull. The sense of natural risk and death in the air challenged him to consider man in relation to an armament-age. In his present surroundings he resented being the tool of a system, of a civilization that could cancel millions of his kind when he felt he would like to be spacious and follow a natural trend.

Then he argued with himself. He was feeling the effects of far-away places where elemental sounds were unsubdued by the rattle of the machine. Here people were tightened to receive a spit from the sea and the hard lash of the wind. He told himself he was merely taking a journey that would recede like other journeys, when he returned to St. John’s and eventually to England; but significance seeped into him, seeking a permanent place. Self-imposed isolation made him feel cold and then warm with a surge of desire to return to Mageila, put his arms around her, stir her flesh, protect her, deepen her already deep voice, and kiss her generous mouth.

But a man did not do that with someone he liked very well, though he was capable of embracing where he did not like at all. He walked delicately beside girls like Mageila, and the realization assured him his higher instincts would prevail. Better stay apart, just the same. A man was as safe as a church with distance between himself and a person compelling his instant attention. He felt the man in him would always be challenged by her frequent somnambulisms and the way her eyes awaited the mystery of sea and sky to be made known. Then when she talked, with words creeping over the pondering mind, he felt soothed by the tone of her voice and stimulated by her thoughts. And when he was beside her he relaxed, as if she was the essence of old and new friendship. Impossible to question the why of such things. They were! How long since he had known her? Four days and a bit. What did that matter? There was timelessness on a ship, a phase of living deceptively full of infinity, making one feel at the end of a journey that much land-history might have been made.

After long contemplation Trevor concluded there were dreary loyalties a man imposed on himself: responsibilities he assumed through personal choice that could be compensated only by casual adventure, meaning as little as a dish without salt and pepper but a dish nevertheless. Easy to forget if you don’t touch? Mageila had touched him marvellously, miraculously, though as impersonally as the Queen of Heaven. But there had been no detachment when he had enclosed her on the reeking platform of the whaling-station. She had escaped blindly against him, accepting the comfort of his body. To be blind for a while? Was that what he wanted, he demanded of himself, feeling restless, irritable, wanting to strike out because he felt unsure and insecure in a magnificently brooding world.

In the man’s way towards the woman he spent an evening alone, explaining change merely to himself. Then he passed a morning alone after smiling at Mageila across the dining-saloon, telling himself he was the same—friendly, interested, appreciative. She must find him so, because she gave no other sign. Her smile started and travelled, arrived and left, leaving him baffled over non-revelation. Was it possible she was indifferent? Then he blamed her when his breakfast became savourless through the thought. A girl had no right to an inscrutable face. Much more honest to show states of mind in expression. She was subfeminine? Yes, of course, that was it. She did not try to attract a man. She had no coquetry. She did not mind a long silence. Quite subfeminine indeed. Women rushed into words, displayed hurt feelings, spoke their minds, put a man on the spot and told him exactly where he was. It was dishonest to have no attitude, to sit with uncalculated effects, to stand under skies intensifying intangible qualities, to look as simple and complex as the earth, to provoke thoughts of an exciting novice teetering between the world and the cloister.

In the final disturbance he sought the Englishman’s remedy. Exercise was the thing.

After staring glassily at rain he became alert, seeing it lessen and show signs of clearing, and when the ship anchored in one of its comfortless places he avoided the accommodation-ladder. Instead he stepped briskly astern and found a member of the crew jigging cod for the Assou’s table, with another standing by to split and clean. Interested and diverted, he watched and then asked for a line. With the civility of the Newfoundlander the seaman stopped jigging to show him how to hold the line between the fingers, how to jig and haul in. It was not difficult; and after the excitement of the first catch he found cod could be hooked in the side, the belly, the eye—anywhere but the place good fish should be hooked—and when the line was hauled in they flopped, gasping and dying. So much drab death repulsed him, making him see it as a symbol of his surroundings. Acceptance? Inertia? It was the quality he had seen in the patients waiting to enter the mission-hospitals. It was in the risked lives whether the sea was open or shut.

It was in Mageila. She had no right to be so brooding, so uncomplaining over devastation. She should protest, cry woman’s tears, and make some sucker of a man pay for her losses. He was turning on her mentally when he remembered to ask himself how much he protested systems, traditions, and backgrounds. Everything was out of focus, cock-eyed, he thought, frowning at gaping cod-fish mouths.

He was still standing when he became conscious of the blood-spattered deck, the slimy feel of his hands, and the fact that he was overlooked. Glancing up towards the after-deck, he saw Captain Dilke and Mageila—the former laughing out loud, as if the sight of an English official jigging cod-fish held plenty of humour.

“Bloody decks, Mr. Morgan?” inquired Captain Dilke.

Trevor had the grace to smile back, knowing the old man was giving him the sealer’s toast; but in answering he was acutely conscious of Mageila’s cool clear eyes.

“Disgusting untemperamental fish, sir.”

“Well, it’s not a salmon. Just a natural resource.”

“But it has no kick,” complained Trevor. “It lets itself be hooked anywhere. You don’t have to play it. You haul in and it dies almost at once.”

“Would you rather it took a long time?”

Startled, he shifted his eyes—feeling as if a voice had spoken from behind a cloud. It sounded so remote and yet near, from a core he recognized at once. Unmindful of how long he took to answer, he looked into eyes surrounded by lashes made fresh by the rain. Then he knew from impalpable reading that she spoke across the barrier he had raised himself, though she gave no special sign of new distance. Neither was her voice particularly accusing; but her fresh skin and water-clear eyes made him conscious of his soiled hands, and because he felt inferior he attempted to explain.

“I was thinking in terms of sport.”

Captain Dilke answered first. “You’re jigging, Mr. Trevor, to feed people. But anyone in Newfoundland can take you to ponds for trout or to pools for salmon. I’d—”

“We won’t interrupt, Grandpa. Mr. Morgan is catching our supper.”

The old man waved and turned, letting Mageila take his arm.

Trevor saw her head with its polished hair-dressing, making the line of her skull so sweeping and simple that he would have said it was stylized on anyone else. She had put him in the wrong, causing a strong surge of resentment that made him fling himself towards his cabin to get clean.

It was a day like biting into rind instead of fruit. He spent the afternoon on the lower deck, sitting on a pewlike seat talking to a retired English scientist who was fulfilling a boyhood’s dream of visiting Labrador. He should have found Dr. Britten soothing, but he felt irritated by peace and poise. With a pink fresh face, hair, eyebrows, and small pointed beard looking white and fresh, Dr. Britten sat in dark clothes resting thick-soled shoes on the deck while waiting to go ashore to indulge his hobby of botanizing in Labrador. Mildly he talked of tundra, flora, moss, and the different places of the earth; and, listening, Trevor found him rational, tolerant, agnostic, content with scientific findings, and ready to leave the incommensurable to metaphysical minds. He was as serene as Captain Dilke, the difference being that one was nurtured on a liberal education and the other on strong natural forces. Perhaps they were the same things, Trevor thought with a flash of unity. But harmony was evasive that day. He listened, talking enough to stimulate conversation, and watched the sea and land, thinking no country had ever owned so many islands. It looked as if a bold sculptor had chiselled a coast, leaving rock-rags at its edge. Impossible to feel smooth in such a land, he decided irritably.

With one of its quick changes the sun came out, and to his surprise Trevor began to hear the sustained buzz of mosquitoes and to feel deer-flies making a continued contact with his face. It began to be extremely uncomfortable, but Dr. Britten sat on as if a course of hatha-yoga had elevated him beyond physical rebellions.

A change in the coast-line was like a metamorphosis. The Assou steamed into a magnificent bay surrounded by high thickly wooded hills. Trevor had thought there were no trees. Now he saw them in abundance. He thought there were no flowers. Dr. Britten told him differently, and when they anchored he showed a boy’s eagerness to botanize in spite of land looking as if it was covered with thick black-dotted veiling.

“The flies,” protested Trevor, slapping tormented flesh. “Not what I expected up here.”

“The surprise of the north,” explained the doctor equably, taking no notice of the fact that his white beard was blackened by burrowing mosquitoes.

Trevor’s instinct was to stay on board; but when the doctor rose he followed him to the mail-boat, seeing no sign of Mageila or Captain Dilke, and very soon he envied them their partial immunity from the torment representing his last expectation. Then he remembered hearing of explorers going mad in the fleeting northern summer, and immediately he was sure it could happen. On land, progress seemed literally impeded and the light-looking huskies ringing the shore were blackened with masses of flies. Mosquitoes flew into the mouth, the nostrils, the ears—pouncing on every bit of exposed flesh; penetrating socks; crawling inside collars, up sleeves, like a persecution. Spluttering and slapping, the majority of the passengers rushed into a Hudson’s Bay store with sight-seeing zeal immediately cancelled; and for a second Trevor opened his squeezed eyelids, hoping his companion would do the same thing.

But although small rivulets of blood crimsoned Dr. Britten’s neck he continued undaunted, climbing precipitous land; and Trevor followed, cursing the acceptance he had deplored in Mageila. Either Dr. Britten was immune to bites or else he was above discomfort. He examined everything, visiting a grave-yard, a tiny church, a memorial, before he began to peer on the ground with his nose down like a retriever following a scent. As pleased as a child, he picked bake-apples; and when he mildly requested assistance Trevor complied, refusing to protest a torment an old man bore better than himself. He felt stung, blinded, and bleeding all over, with one wish—to swim back to the Assou if necessary like a dog trying to rid himself of fleas. Only when Dr. Britten had collected all there was did he notice the whirling black air.

“A lot of flies,” he murmured mildly. “Most unusual!”

“Yes,” agreed Trevor with grim firmness. “And the mail-boat is ready by now.”

“We can hire a dory,” murmured the doctor, looking intently at a patch of coarse grass.

“The ship sails the moment the boat returns,” said Trevor with scant regard for truth, and, turning, he saw the mail-boat as a Mohammedan sees Mecca.

It was worse than the escape from the whale. People looked hunted and, as they shoved off, the sleeping huskies opened segments of yellow eyes, peering hungrily after them. Dr. Britten was the only person not slapping and spluttering. He sat erect, holding his specimens and studying the huskies with scientific interest.

“They say they don’t feed them in the summer. Captain Dilke warned me to keep my feet. They’re tempted with anything on the ground. Apparently they haven’t lost the instinct of attacking in a pack.”

“Ate an Eskimo baby last year,” said an oarsman laconically.

“Well,” said a woman, breast-beating like a sinner in anguished repentance. “Why they didn’t eat us alive I don’t know. I admire their restraint, with all those flies on them. Captain Dilke seems to know everything up here. Too experienced to risk this horror. I never saw anything like the way he steps over those huskies. The captain of the ship says not to be afraid but to kick them aside if they get in the way, but I must say I don’t appreciate kicking aside half-bundles of wolf. I know dogs can smell fear and I smelt enough to be mauled to death. That tidal wave girl is as good as her grandfather. She strolls through the dogs as if they were kittens. I suppose after floods you don’t bother about a percentage of wolf. She makes me think she could be thrown to the lions and not get eaten. There’s a Christian-martyr look about her, at-the-mercy-of-Tiberius sort of thing.”

Still breast-beating, the woman chattered on and Trevor felt diverted by a new thought of Mageila; but when he reached the deck in bleeding and swollen discomfort and saw her with Captain Dilke, her fresh unspotted face made him feel angry. Neither did Captain Dilke’s voice sweeten his mood.

“This is the worst place for flies in the world. No sense at all to go ashore without ointment. Bad time, Mr. Morgan?” he asked, with a mild chuckle.

The passengers were speeding below to their cabins in search of alleviation. On his own way Trevor turned to answer, but Captain Dilke was looking at Dr. Britten’s specimens. Face to face with Mageila, he became conscious of his bites, his dishevelment, and his frantic desire to scratch. Like cool unhelpful balm her eyes understood his state.

“If you ask the steward for some ammonia,” she suggested, “it will take away the sting.”

For unaccountable reasons he wanted to blast her from cool composure, and without thought he rushed into words. “It’s much worse than a head-ache. Couldn’t you touch the bites—make the rounds of the ship—”

He stopped, aghast at himself, and for a second he thought her arm was coming up as if to ward off a blow. Literally she dwindled before him, with flesh flattening on her cheek-bones. Then she recovered, answering with deadly deep composure.

“I am sorry; you must excuse me. I have no power over sting.”

Was it a two-edged remark? If so, he deserved it. He was a lout, an ill-bred clown before a girl with no pretensions to worldly polish, with no armour but instinctive good manners.

“Mageila,” he said with urgent repentance, but it was useless.

The two old men were at her elbow, hobnobbing over flora. So he went, disliking the whole breed of men; and for another reason than Abou Ben Adhem’s his name led all the rest.

In his cabin he rang with an irritated finger and stood in the middle of the floor until a steward appeared, increasing his irritation by a pitying grin.

“Bit up, sir,” he said as if stating a fact.

Fuming inwardly, Trevor controlled himself. “I’m afraid I am. I wonder if you have any— What do you use? Iodine?” he asked, rigidly repudiating Mageila’s suggestion.

The steward considered his passenger’s dabbing at spots of blood, and the sight made him shake a doleful head for the things a man brings on himself. “Shockin’; you should have known better,” he commiserated. “ ’Twas a great mistake to go ashore as you was, sir. You should have smeared yourself proper with fly-dope. Paper is good, sir.”

“Paper?” muttered Trevor irritably.

“Yes, sir, paper. You put it inside your socks, round your legs and arms, everywhere—the flies is that fierce in these parts.”

“I’ll believe you,” said Trevor, beginning to strip.

With friendly uncouthness the steward slouched against the door, volunteering information about flies. “Some gets bit so bad they get p’isoned. Some don’t get bit at all. You’d think, sir, their flesh was a bit high. I had a woman last year—took on something awful, and at last she wound herself up in toilet-paper like one of them corpses they fancy-up, and then she complained the flies bit through the j’ins.”

Trevor found it impossible not to grin. “I’m afraid it’s a bit late for that, but if you have any iodine—”

“No good, sir,” said the steward like a wiseacre. “A drop of raw vinegar, or household ammonia, the stronger the better to draw out the sting. I hope, sir, you don’t fester easy.”

“I hope not indeed,” he murmured. “Perhaps a cold bath?”

The steward gestured with a belittling arm. “Naw! If you wash them you rub them, and the more you rub them the more they smert.”

“Smert?”

“Yes, sir, smert; there’s more smert than pain.”

“Oh, yes, of course; I seem to be smarting a good deal. You were saying—”

“Ammonia for the smert, sir.”

“Then, my good fellow, cut along and get it,” he said with unoffending dismissal.

The steward made a leisurely departure, permitting Trevor to strip and allow himself a bleeding scratch before the steward returned and insisted on applying enough ammonia to change him into a pillar of fire. When finally he got rid of ministrations and had changed his clothes, he felt more like a human being who could deplore his conduct. Though he was not at all vain, his mirror made him feel he would like his face as it had been in the past instead of looking convalescent after scratched measles. To settle any situation, and to appear before someone with grace, a man would like the face he knew, and for a moment he understood the armour-plating of women after beauty-parlours.

He arrived very late for supper and the dining-saloon was empty when he left, to emerge in such soothing fresh air that he deplored his temperamental day and was eager to be sincere and ordinary—ready to step up to Mageila and try to explain himself back into grace. When he sought her, making a leisurely survey of the ship, halting for conversation with fellow-sufferers still inclined to splutter and slap, he turned into the smoking-room, where he found Captain Dilke in a group round a table. Trevor dropped into a chair and lighted a cigarette, listening, joining in now and then, waiting until the right moment came to inquire for Mageila. In a swivel-chair Captain Dilke turned, isolating himself from the group.

“She’s turned in with a book. I thought she looked peaked. She said she was feeling all right, but I packed her off and told her not to get up to see me off.”

“Off, sir? Oh, yes, I remember.”

“I get off the next port after daylight sailing. I’m meeting the skipper of the Sheila Mageila.”

“What a lovely name it is!” said Trevor involuntarily.

“A name in our family for a long time. The Irish Princess may or may not be a legend—there was nothing written, just word of mouth like a good deal of our history. My own girl was Sheila Mageila, this child’s mother, taken eight months ago in the tidal wave.”

Trevor sobered, seeing the old man’s eyes become dim with memory. Conscious of a disaster designed for one girl, for the first time he realized other victims.

“Your daughter, sir?” he said sympathetically.

Captain Dilke heaved an old man’s sigh. “Yes, my seventh. Women, young fellow, are busy creatures, always chasing a man with a duster or barking his heels with a carpet-sweeper; but when they behave like my girl, a man wonders if they’re not bigger creatures than himself. When I think of her washed to sea in her comfortable home, standing with her arms round her daughters, waiting to die—”

“Ghastly things happen in the world, sir,” Trevor said with trenchant sympathy.

But he marvelled at the way the old man let tears fill his eyes, as if it was natural to mourn. He thought how self-conscious he would be if he filled up in front of people. Not Captain Dilke. When his tears passed, he extracted a large handkerchief, blew his nose, and wiped his eyes.

“Thank God, my girls are strong women; but Mageila is not a Dilke. She’s a more delicate creature; her French blood, I suppose, or—” Captain Dilke smiled, holding his handkerchief in front of his mouth like a boy emerging from sorrow. “Perhaps there’s something in being born the seventh of a seventh. She has power, they say, though the poor maid was so poorly this winter she needed the laying of hands on herself. Her mother had a practical mind, but she never denied the girl’s quality; and the young thing would never take a coin for it, even when she was too small to know the difference—”

“What?” said Trevor with intense interest.

“No, Mr. Morgan, when she could hardly know what she was doing someone gave her a shilling and she pushed it back, and her mother said she spoke like somebody else and said no one could take money for that.”

Trevor held his breath for a second and then answered from his heart. “I think she’s a pure working.”

The old man stared with sharpened vision. “Mmmm! I don’t know that you’re not right. She seems—”

“Clairvoyant,” suggested Trevor gently.

“Good,” said Captain Dilke, using his own words. “Good without the nonsense that often goes with it. Dr. Britten and that doctor who got off at St. Anthony, both with good hard heads, said she had the eyes of a hypnotist. They explained it was the power of concentrating a force—”

“Perhaps,” said Trevor, denying scientific explanation of Mageila.

Captain Dilke mused for a minute before continuing contentedly. “She’s all right now, on her mettle. I can leave her until the boat picks me up on her return journey. The captain is going to keep an eye on her, and old Dr. Britten too. She knows a bit about wild-flowers, used to send me little bits of paper painted all over with them.”

Trevor felt a pang that he who had spent so much time with Mageila had not been asked to keep an eye on her. Captain Dilke was either too old to notice personal emotion or too wise to do anything but establish mature protection for Mageila.

“It will do her good to feel her own feet,” mused Captain Dilke, “and when the captain is busy old Dr. Britten will be there.”

Trevor repressed a smile, knowing old Dr. Britten must be a good ten years the younger of the two; but he warmed to Captain Dilke, knowing he was with a man who had lived every minute of his life, who could report on more than a half a century of his country’s history.

Trevor reached a point where he realized the only way to live was to live with truth. But he found it was one thing to clear a self-made barrier and another to meet one raised by some one else.

Captain Dilke was gone. As if Dr. Britten was the substitution, Mageila stayed by him. When the dining-saloon was cleared after breakfast, and the tables covered with red cloth, Trevor discovered them seated at a table with the specimens, pencil and paper and a box of water-paints, belonging to Dr. Britten. Mageila was sketching a spiky-looking plant which the doctor held under the light from the port-hole. Casually Trevor walked in, standing behind Mageila’s chair, seeing her white-parting and the simple knot at the nape of her neck. Dr. Britten murmured a cordial greeting; but from his vantage point he saw Mageila’s fingers tighten on her pencil, and when he continued to stand, challenging his presence to make no difference to her work, she looked up with inscrutable eyes.

“Please do not watch me. I can’t draw very well.”

“You’re doing marvellously,” reassured Dr. Britten. “Good bold lines! A lovely bit of bottlebrush, isn’t it, Mr. Morgan?”

Dr. Britten spoke of bottlebrush as a jeweller might speak of gems. Privately Trevor had a poor opinion of it, but in view of Mageila’s intent eyes he murmured a word of approval.

“Sorry to disturb your work. I’ve been looking for you since yesterday afternoon.”

“Yes, I’m here,” she said gently.

“When you’re ready for a walk— Perhaps you’ll come ashore at the next stop?”

Mageila continued to look with eyes a little too sweet and clear. “But the flies? How are your bites?”

Reminded of his spots, he passed his hand over his bumpy forehead. “As the steward says, they smert a great deal. He hopes I don’t fester easy, because lots of people get p’isoned at this time of year.” The Newfoundland vernacular brought a fleeting smile to Mageila’s lips, encouraging him in his lighter vein. “They didn’t like Dr. Britten much. Perhaps if I’d been more interested in the bottlebrush—”

Dr. Britten laughed. “Well, a hobby is very distracting and I’ve had little time for mine. I always wanted to botanize seriously. Miss Mageila is coming ashore with me next port. She’s very kindly making a few sketches for me from the living plant. Much more interesting! It’s an experience finding flowers up here. I know the commoner Newfoundland flowers from the Illustrated British Flora and the Flora of the United States and Canada. Some of them are here in Labrador. Most interesting! I’ve managed to get bits of dwarf catchfly and Arctic buttercup, which is the three-petalled crowfoot, Ranunculus hyperboreus, and—”

Trevor stopped listening, suspecting the old man of testing his interest in botany. Knowing little but English garden flowers and fruit blossoms, unable to enthuse over bottlebrush, he felt like an intruder. Reluctantly he faded away, seeing Mageila absorbing a scientific lecture as if it was the only thing she wanted to hear. Her smile and nod as he went would have done credit to true experience. Pure instinct had called up woman’s defences, though they were not as feminine as the ones he knew, making him see her range as big, dramatic, and emotional, but as unsentimental, as her rock-bound world.

After midday dinner he saw the botanists emerge preparatory to going ashore, and he blinked—hardly believing his eyes. Mageila was belted in a rain-coat with upturned collar framing a face as dark as an Indian’s. With no regard for effect she had made her face, neck, hands, and wrists dark with oil, and by the look of her woollen stockings her legs as well. If she was a girl left in mid-air after close-companioning, she gave the impression of a grey-eyed Indian whose other-worldly look suggested the kingdom of Ponemah.

Trevor grew fearful. One more day and he would transship. Was it possible they would part like this? He would capture her in the late afternoon. But when she returned she descended to remove her oil and change her clothes, and when next he found her she sat surrounded by children. After standing deliberately in front of her with a turned back he heard her halt, falter, and continue telling a story of Matwock of the ice-bergs. How like her to tell a story of a polar-bear to northern children! She was good with children, he thought, more talkative and expansive than she was with adults, and her voice seemed to trance them into wide-eyed attention; but when they heard the end of Matwock they clattered away, and he was amused to see that one was a half-breed of the Eskimo woman he had studied his first day on board. Mageila’s slower rise to follow the children gave him his moment.

“Mageila,” he said, turning his back fully on the sea. “You’re avoiding me.”

With a narrow deck between them they stared at each other and he thought she looked cold, faintly blue round her eyes. Her skin was young and she could stand it, but he felt a momentary hate for a country’s bleakness that could enter and dwell in feminine flesh. When she stood, enduring his gaze, he ventured a step towards her.

“We must talk. I have something to tell you. You can’t be unforgiving—say something; you don’t have to count ten before you speak to me.”

Mageila raised her chest and he saw the characteristic widening of her eyes, mouth, and nostrils. Then he heard breath being expelled like a mute expression of strain.

“If I counted a thousand I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Before he could stop her she was gone, turning inside without a backward look and leaving a memory of a gallant back that made him restless with desire to regain her confidence and speak more directly than ever before.

In the evening the captain appeared to keep his eye on her, and with his ship at anchor he relaxed, sitting beside Mageila, with his arms around his stomach as if cradling it in his lap. His creasing smile was in evidence as he demanded a sing-song, and immediately the American who had likened Mageila to a Christian martyr stepped to a small upright piano.

“I suppose, Captain,” she said, with amused co-operation, “you want songs about silver threads and perfect days?”

The captain’s fat laugh was an agreement and the American played competently, leading a sing-song with more sound than quality. Sitting in a corner of the lounge-seat, Trevor took her back through the years, seeing her as a young precocious American with an early platform manner, but he had to admit she had a large repertoire of old-time songs that gradually drew most of the passengers in from the decks. When the captain became local, demanding old-time songs of Newfoundland, she shrugged and stood up.

“Sorry, Captain, I’ll have to resign.”

Releasing one hand from the support of his stomach, the captain jogged Mageila to the piano whether she could play or not. As she could, she stood up and went with a slight flinching from the limelight; but, watching her intently, Trevor knew her sight of him gave her a suddenly straighter back.

“What?” she said to the wall.

“ ‘We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders,’ ” said the captain, beginning to sing before a note was struck.

Mageila played and the captain led the singing, with even more noise than quality, the Newfoundlanders joining in; and when they ran out of verses, like a master on his own ship the captain commanded Mageila to sing more. Very gravely, in a deep-toned contralto adapted to the vernacular of her country, she added a solo verse:

Trevor had not thought it was in her; but she did it perfectly, singing with a slow lilt, half-grave, half-gay, as if she knew every nuance of her country. And she brought down the house—causing the Newfoundlanders to surge round her, leaving the strangers as musical outsiders. She went on playing folk-songs until there was a lull, when the captain commanded supper to the lounge. In that hungry air food superseded music; and when the moment came Mageila left, before the first round of ham sandwiches and before Trevor could thread his way over other people’s legs.

He went quietly, going to stand in front of the bulletin-board in the companion-way but seeing nothing until he glanced at his watch. Ten-fifteen! A good respectable hour with a northern twilight prolonging day. He descended, treading the alley-way, feeling he was marching while knowing he was strolling for the benefit of casual eyes. In the passage beside Mageila’s door it was dark, full of long swishing sounds that told him she was brushing her hair. He tapped softly, hearing human silence broken by ship’s sounds and the wash of the sea. He knocked again, sure of the widening of her features reporting nervous excitement. There was no answer and his eyes began to grow accustomed to darkness, making him linger as if he was communicating through a closed door. As he was tapping for the third time, she opened so suddenly that he blinked from a glare of white light.

“You?” she said, standing in tableau with her hair-brush in her hand.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “You knew it the first time I knocked.”

Then he felt like a boy forgetting his piece, seeing her hair like blacksnakes swinging on the shoulders of a plain velvet gown. He had never before seen her in any colour but grey; and this rich wine shade made her a warmer girl, different from any other he had known. A great change was apparent at once, making him speak with excited candour.

“Mageila, I’ve never seen hair down like that. It makes me think the Victorians really got a kick out of repenting in hair.”

Laughing at his own thought, he changed the whole tone of intended approach. If Mageila had been prepared, it was for anything but gay admiration. Her hands touched her hair tentatively before she answered his theme.

“All girls have short hair. I’m old-fashioned. I may cut it when I go to town.”

“No,” he protested, stepping inside the cabin. “Please don’t! If I had the right I’d forbid it. It’s so distinctive, so glossy and black.”

Mageila eyed him, contemplating the unexpected. “I’m glad you like it,” she said, trailing off into a silence in which she stood very still.

“I want to talk to you,” he said quietly. “It’s only tennish. Would your grandfather mind?”

“No,” she said slowly, “Grandpa wouldn’t.”

Like a girl prepared to meet him simply she put the door on the hook in shipboard convention, moving serenely as if she knew she was quite adequately clothed in a dressing-gown. He stood watching the long hair on her back swinging and dividing at her waist like pointed black tongues. Then she faced him with grave directness.

“Yes?”

Without preamble he spoke with quiet sincerity. “I know you’ve been avoiding me. I want to explain on two counts. Yesterday for speaking as I did, for sounding flippant about something I respect very much. When I remember your hands—well, all I can say is I could have bitten out my tongue. Even the fairest feelings run amok sometimes. You were very hurt, I think?”

Her face lost some of its cold composure. “Yes, I was,” she confessed. “For a moment it was like seeing the tidal wave, something destructive.”

“I know it,” he said with deep contrition. “Will you forgive me? It was nothing but temper from those incredible flies.” He waited, letting silence do the rest of his pleading, enduring her eyes investigating his sincerity.

At last she sighed as if soothing hands had relaxed her. “Yes, it is all right now,” she said, with a pause between each word.

“Thank you. I think it’s this way, Mageila: when you like a person a great deal the mood swings the other way, and you want to hurt—God knows why. But we all have some sadism in us—we’re human beings, not Gods.”

Mageila stared with assenting eyes. “Yes,” she pronounced slowly. “As Grandpa says, everything has another face. Storm, calm. Good, evil.”

“Love, hate,” he said at once. She made no direct answer and he thought her skin became suddenly translucent with a blood response. “Sit down,” he said, removing a suit-case from the lounge-seat.

They sat on its edge, too intense to relax against the padded back.

“The other thing,” he said slowly. “The reason why I was there and not there. Did you mind?”

Mageila raised her head in a way that brought her hair higher on her shoulders. With divided attention he desired it wild and wind-blown, streaming back from a face that would look like a white mask in a black whirl. When she did not answer, he thought she was making a search for truth.

“You minded. Tell me?”

“I minded,” she finally admitted. “If you’d explained—”

“Men do that,” he shrugged. “We’re selfish beasts and think of our own point of view. I felt myself getting too fond of you, of letting you be the whole trip. There was no special reason to tell you until now. Mageila, I’m married.”

As she had yesterday she dwindled, growing smaller in front of his eyes while seeming to sit bolt upright. Then she breathed hard, giving a deep, short laugh. “There is no reason why you should not be. Only I never thought of it that way.”

“Eight years.”

Now she was incredulous. “Eight years, Trevor? It’s not possible. Sometimes you seem like a boy.”

“An experienced boy, I’m afraid,” he said grimly. “I’m married and whether I wanted it or not my wife would rather go to Siberia than come to Newfoundland. At least Siberia is on the right side of the water.”

“Your wife?” was all she said, making the word like a symbol of a state.

“Not like that,” he objected. “I’m married, but never for a second have I felt married.”

“Tell me,” she said, folding her hands in her lap.

He shrugged with brief irony. “It’s not a question of being misunderstood. More a question of two people marrying, hardly knowing each other at all. After my parents’ deaths I was a lone wolf, seeing my brothers and sisters when we stayed round with relatives or somewhere by arrangement. For that reason other people’s home-life looked attractive. After my mother’s death I had one secret obsession to replace her affection, and when I was missing her most I was making up my mind to marry early. Believe it or not, all the bold independence of men is nonsense; they say a lot of brave things, but it’s lip-service to maleness—more often than not they have women in their hearts because they know there’s no happiness without them.” He shrugged more ironically, in a way that made Mageila’s womanhood emerge on her face.

“Please go on,” she said deeply.

“I imagined women were like my mother. She had been brought up on rather liberal lines, coming of educated people who were creative, encouraged to look at things as they were and not as people would like them to be. Well, after a lot of unsatisfactory holidays arranged by an executor of my father’s estate, I went to stay with a chap in a lovely home in the west of England, with gardens and all the things England can have. It was so ordered, and the people seemed so agreeable. There was a girl, the chap’s sister, and we seemed to get on very well; but, looking back, I see it was in a mobile way, playing tennis and a few holes of golf, dancing informally in the evenings and going for tea and tennis or for dinner to another house a few miles away. We were hardly ever alone to talk and I built a mystery around her, thinking—well, the long and short of it was that we kept up a correspondence, and at twenty-four we drifted into marriage without any high moments, and almost at once I knew it was going to be a flop. She was conventional, with cotton-wool over a mind full of preconceived ideas. She liked everything traditionally English, houses generations old, men who trimmed themselves for promotion and who licked the boots of their betters. She’s a snob, and she thinks I’m informal and much too fond of hobnobbing with people who will get me nowhere. From the beginning I could not love her intensely, and in spite of her smooth country home she’s as frigid as if she never heard of the natural earth. How can I make you see her? . . . She’s good-looking enough, but this describes her perfectly—if I told her about you, the only thing that would interest her would be the Irish Princess.”

“I see,” said Mageila slowly. “What Papa called ‘de haut en bas.’ ”

“Exactly. Her idea of fun is a white tie in some terribly swank place.”

Mageila shook her head. “I know nothing of that kind of life.”

“No,” he said gently. “They can be charming, but they are the beads and junk-jewellery of living. Up here life is different, elemental. You feel conscious of life and death—whether the fisherman will be able to catch his fish and wrest his few potatoes from the earth.”

“It’s like that for a lot of people in Newfoundland.”

“I know, but it makes interesting people. In many ways you remind me of the elements: rock, sea, fire—”

“And more wind than wisdom, Grandpa says of people,” she finished, with a slow smile that softened everything and swung them completely together again.

Impulsively he held out his hand, and she gave hers into his eager clasp.

“Friends, and full forgiveness?” he asked softly.

“Yes, and thank you for telling me about yourself.” She paused and then added slowly, “I wish you were happier.”

“I’m not exactly unhappy; I want something I haven’t got.” Holding her hand, he laid it across his palm and studied the long fingers with their pale unpolished nails. “Your hands show what you’ve been through,” he said absent-mindedly. “They’re frailer than your face. Once, Mageila, we had a terrific dust-up and I suggested a divorce. She was so horrified she tried to be more . . . well—”

“Divorce?” she said, so strangely that he glanced up quickly.

“Yes, divorce—quite ordinary.”

“Is it?”

Her voice made so much of it that he frowned. “Don’t you know any divorced people?”

Mageila pondered, replying so slowly that he had to believe her ridiculous answer. “There was the divorce of Henry and Catherine, before the Reformation—”

“What? My dear child! Good heavens, I forgot; of course there’s no divorce in Newfoundland. I remember thinking how odd that was.”

“Marriage is for life here,” she said acceptingly, smiling in such a remembering way that he pulled at her hand.

“What does that look mean?”

“I was remembering that once Mama mentioned divorce as if it was a terrible thing. Mama always knew about right and wrong.”

“Did she?” he commented dryly.

“But not Papa,” she said, shaking her head. “He never laid down the law about anything; and when Mama tried to make him say something serious about divorce he would not do anything but laugh and laugh, and then he said, ‘Mama, it is well there is no divorce in Newfoundland. After the long winter was over, and the first spring day came so late, every man would want another wife and every wife another husband.’ Mama was cross, wanting Papa to say he would not want anyone but her.”

He laughed and squeezed her hand. “You make me see them very well. Mageila—”

“Yes?”

“I’m so happy to have you back.”

“I’m glad too.”

“Then”—he stood up, drawing her to her feet—“tomorrow is another day. I’d like to touch your hair, but I have no right. I would not want to make you unhappy by causing you to care too much for a married man.” Her eyes, with their infinitely clear expression, made him pause, and in kinship with her state of mind he absorbed her answer.

“Trevor, I have no sense of the future. Some girls say when I am married, when I have a baby— Perhaps at the time when I might have thought like that the tidal wave came. Now there seems just today.”

“Yes,” he said with grim agreement. “We’re somewhat alike in that. A quarter century of insecurity has done it to men like me, and a natural disaster has done it to you. Perhaps it’s one of the things that drew us close to each other. You do feel close to me, don’t you?” he asked, in spite of his higher resolutions.

“Yes,” she said with large simplicity.

“I’m glad.” His hands gestured towards her, but they did not fall. “Good-night,” he said, backing away. But when Mageila followed, offering her hands, he held them against his face. “Bless you,” he whispered. “You’re natural and sweet. Bless you a thousand times, and yet once is enough for the way I feel.”

Mageila’s gesture was that of a girl who had known the naturalness of touching a well-loved man. She pressed his shoulder with a long hand and skimmed her cheek against his. “Dieu te bénisse,” she said gravely.

And he went, with eyes that spoke for him.

They had a day of young active happiness when the human element was stronger and sweeter than the material world. Trevor wondered why backgrounds had depressed him when now they became stimulating with grave beautiful effects. Wind blew with high benevolence, the sky held a deeper blue, and light-spots danced in the sullen sea. Even the cold rays of the sun shed a warmer glow, he told himself, not knowing whether he thought about weather from other men’s feelings or from his own. The sun could not last a whole day, but there are fogs and fogs—cold fogs with an edge, and perfect fogs filling the space between Heaven and earth with the mystery of a veil. He was buoyant, conscious of outspread wings—white gulls and white sails catching the wind. From earliest morning, when they saw the distant blue of mountains and green valleys rich with spruce and fir, the rocks seemed decently covered things. Full gaiety emerged, with Mageila showing a capacity for laughter bubbling up from some deep source. When he left his solitary table to take Captain Dilke’s place at breakfast they were earlier than anyone else, as if there was mutuality of desire to compensate for lonely lost time.

At the end of a journey there was a whole day before the ship turned, homeward-bound, and it became something beautiful and various and long-drawn out. They were in sight of the oldest Mission, the Unitas Fratrum—the Unity of the Brethren—conceived in Bohemia, with long strong roots deepening from men like John Huss. They learned the history of the Moravian Church in Labrador, of the Brethren settling far away to divert the Eskimo from his plundering ways. From the deck of the ship they first saw the short squat men with their broad Mongolian faces seeming like a design for lustreless passivity. They saw them stand like stout human pillars until they swarmed towards the Assou in dories and kayaks.

Before they went ashore Trevor and Mageila made themselves dark and dirty with oil, and they saw each other like greasy Indians walking easily through the torment of flies. They strolled through the huddled dogs, and when some of the passengers talked nervously of sticks Mageila bent down and patted their heads. They saw Americans busy taking photographs and Dr. Britten, still impervious to discomfort, continuing his research. As if the Eskimo was his subject he stood with a camera up to his eyes trying to photograph a jabbering old crone who waved, covered her face, and then plucked her clothes—making signs towards her small hovel with a mass of huskies asleep on the door-step. Baffled, Dr. Britten lowered his camera and stared wistfully at more successful photographers.

“Try another squaw,” whispered Trevor blandly; he was comfortable and protected under his thick coating of oil, though the flies were still inclined to fill his mouth if he made too long a speech.

“I like that one,” objected Dr. Britten. “She’s so toothless and weather-beaten. I want to get every wrinkle, but she’s evidently disinclined—”

“She’s not,” said Mageila. “She wants to be photographed, but she wants you to wait until she changes her dicky^[3]—probably for the one she wears to church.”

Trevor and the old man stared at Mageila, smiling at the jabbering Eskimo crone.

“Mageila—”

“My dear child, do you speak their language?”

“No, but can’t you understand her actions?”

Mageila took a step forward, nodded her head, pointed at the doctor; and they heard an excited spate of native tongue as the old woman scuttled into her hovel, reappearing in a short time smiling in toothless content.

“Looks exactly the same to me,” whispered Trevor.

“Oh, no,” said Mageila. “It’s much fresher and it has more embroidery, and better fur round the hood.”

“You win,” he said, smiling into grey eyes in a strangely dark face.

Then they swarmed into the mission-buildings and were arrested by another world—one of square porcelain stoves, shining board-floors, a simple church with white sand on the floor and hymn-books printed in the Eskimo tongue. As Trevor was to wait in the mission-house for his schooner the Moravian woman singled him out for special attention, inviting him to see her garden, and more than ever they believed in the flies when they followed their hostess, who was clothed in a long skirt over skin boots reaching the knees and wore a common straw hat from which flowed a waist-length veil of thick black crepe. It was like following a dolorous gardener to a clearing in spruce trees where she hung lovingly over one primrose speaking of it reverently through thick black crepe. Remembering England in spring, Trevor thought it was the saddest bloom he had ever seen; and he had to leave Mageila to respond, hearing her talk like a girl who understood the achievement of one primrose in Labrador.

When the woman turned and suggested that Trevor begin his stay in the mission-house then and there, he answered courteously, “thank you very much, but I’m remaining on the ship until she sails.”

The curve of their moods descended as the horizon darkened and fog fell, shutting out the stark shore. They stood isolated in the dimmest corner of the upper deck, feeling the coldness of the sea with its never-melting remnants of ice-bergs. She was turning south and he was heading farther north and silence was in them with all their impressions confused, needing time and the recession of nearness before they could emerge and sort strong memories. At present they could only breathe what remained of sea, ice, wind, northern lights, ship, and each other. Because he was more of the world he endeavoured to speak in words.

“I wonder where we’ll be in a year’s time. You still in Ship-Haven—”

“No.”

“No?” he questioned in surprise. “Have you made up your mind about the nursing? Have you plans? You must tell me if you leave—no, you must not. We can’t write—what’s the use?—we must call it a day.” His voice was darker than the voice that greeted her at breakfast.

“Trevor,” she said, talking to the sea.

“Yes, I’m here—though there is fog between us.”

“Out of all the things I read this winter I remember—”

“About the cock—”

“No, don’t talk like that. I know now that when you want to pretend you become—”

“Flippant? You’re right, my dear. It’s good protection. What else did you remember?”

“This is what I remember, that the meeting-place of friends is in the heart. It comforted me about Papa.”

“But it’s incomplete,” he said, with the man’s awakened wish to touch and retain.

Mageila sighed and he pressed closer to her shoulder, encircling her with his arm, smelling fresh soap from her vigorous scrubbing of her face. Silence settled and they stood like two statues with the fog blurring their outlines. Again he lamented the fugitive quality of a moment and the uncertainty of the future.

“It’s such a cancelled age,” he said, rubbing his face against her fur-clad shoulder. “Personal living seems impossible. There’s nothing but things in the air—disaster, war upsets—”

“I know,” she said, rather desperately. “But if we can only be steady ourselves . . .” She dropped her own head on her clasped hands. “I feel—”

“What?” he whispered.

“I believe if my own heart was full of comfort I could let them cut off my head.”

His arm tightened round her. “Something sustains martyrs, darling. You’ve got a bit of it in you. Newfoundland is a martyred country. Is it too much to ask if you feel some comfort now?”

“I do,” she said, and he had an odd sense of hearing a true response to a marriage-service.

“Then I’m going,” he whispered. “I have a boat alongside. Don’t come down; don’t look after me. Stay where I found you the first time, and keep looking out to sea. Think of it as the cruel and beautiful thing in your life. I won’t have a thought that won’t bless you. If I never see you again— That’s ridiculous; I feel I shall see you again—though where, God alone knows. I’d like to kiss you good-bye— I don’t live with my wife now. There’s nothing more dreary than physical love without heart.”

“I’d like to kiss you too.”

The accord of their motion brought them into each other’s arms without knowing who moved first. He held her, seeing her eyes like translucent fog before the lids veiled them. He pressed her dark head, and when her knot of hair fitted into his palm he tilted her face . . . arriving gradually at her lips; recognizing womanhood, softness, generosity, and nascent emotion coming full-flowered to life.

In St. John’s the sea ended where the railway began.

On a narrow-gauge railroad a long smoky train fussed preparatory to departure. There were steam-sighs, the clang of a bell, a belch of black smoke, and a sense of a whistle about to exhale.

“All aboard! All aboard!”

Mageila put her arm round her grandfather’s neck, kissing him on both cheeks.

“Good-bye, dear Grandpa, good-bye. Thank you for letting me stay.”

The train jolted its couplings, threatening departure, as Captain Dilke stepped on the platform of the last car.

“Mind now, my girl, if you don’t make a go of it, and you want to come home, wire, telephone—I’m only a step away. I’ve arranged a certain amount—no need to worry when you can pay your way. You’re paid up at the hotel until tomorrow night. Be sure and decide about boarding-houses first thing in the morning and send your address. If you want any advice go to—”

“Yes, thank you, Grandpa; you’ve told me. I’m to go to your bank-manager. Good-bye.”

“And be sure and eat properly. Don’t go filling yourself up with belly-wash. If you get sick—”

“I’ll go into hospital. But I won’t get sick. Don’t worry. Give them my love and explain why I’m staying.”

Mageila walked along the platform as her grandfather receded, becoming a small forward-bending figure, waving a white handkerchief, until the train’s gathering speed rushed him along a river, over a trestle, and into a fresh sweet valley. The train stayed in her ear, playing a tune with many notes but all uniting in a round-and-round theme propelling itself ahead. Turning, she saw people beginning to rush away and she followed—going slowly until she emerged on a noisy street to await a tram. Standing easily in her shoes, she had a sense of rising exhilaration. She was alone. No one knew her. If she was thrown a glance, it was from idle curiosity and nothing more. There would be no nudges and whispers and veiled glances of wonder and pity. She felt stronger in privacy, able to look the world in the face. Morning was no longer an unrested time. Neither did she have to lie in bed gathering strength of will to arise. Spaciously alive after a nightmare nonexistence, she could concentrate and refrain from long reclining on new mental pillows. Now she was prepared to take the effects of the past into the confusion of town living. Knowing that everything had an opposite face, that Trevor had illustrated it further in the pleasure and pain of loving, she had become a miser about life, for fear it might be swamped by another wave. Travelling, she thought, with the Arab’s feeling of the world being a bridge to pass over without building a house. She had a house, but it was not made with hands; and because she had experienced the imminent frost of death she responded warmly to life.

Outwardly her grey days were over too. She wore a white dress with a red belt, and a hat fit for town. Escape was assured from her Aunt Molly and she could forget that the Wesleys had lent much ennui to her childhood. If she attended church it would be from choice instead of compulsion. A new independence would permit her to prepare herself for self-support, if life conceded a future. In her leisure she could walk in sight of the sea, and when she was lonely she could turn into small parks and watch the masses of children. If chilled moments returned the pictures of death, she could satisfy her need for life by laying her hands on the many stray cats and dogs in the city. There were other simple pleasures, she thought, as she boarded a tram. Paying for herself, standing in front of new doors, getting in and out of lifts, visiting a public library, going to a cinema, and becoming submerged in a crowd.

As the tram clattered along a water-front with red brick shops obscuring a view of the harbour, air from open windows ballooned her skirt. Tucking it under her knees, she sat staring in grave excitement. Everything was different because she was doing it alone. Even the advertisements were symbols of more complex living. “Warning: Cover Up That Cough!” All the Dilkes had sound lungs, she reflected, enjoying her Aunt Molly in memory. “No-rubbing, Liquid Wax Gives Floors a Brilliant Lasting Polish.” All the Dilkes believed in elbow-grease and the rubbing way towards polish. “Difficult Days Made Comfortable.” She felt startled, studying a cardboard girl with a very wry face. Her Aunt Molly would be scandalized. Such talk! The Dilke daughters did not recognize their bodies. Mageila’s thoughts came close to a smile. Town people might be scandalized at the way her Aunt Molly spoke openly of paying extra for virgin eggs to put in her cakes. “Don’t Let Time Darken Your Hair. Her hair was getting darker; its dull dingy look made her look seven years older. Men are attentive now!” For a second the hard truth of her living made her scorn such allurements. Then she challenged herself with a shrug that was a legacy from Trevor’s shoulders. She had brushed her own hair because he liked it glossy and black. If a girl met a man who liked more blondeness might she not bleach? Girls were like that, she supposed.

Short retrospect brought Trevor sweeping back. He was modulated, serious, light, bitter, sweet, man of the world she knew little about, man of the natural world she knew much about. Moreover, he had some quality that burned out her shyness. Wherever she went she took him with her, marvelling at her new feeling of identification, knowing that his small shrug touched her shoulders and that there were fugitive moments when he felt a part of herself. She supposed she should weigh the rights and wrongs of loving a married man, but the way she felt seemed to have little relation to social laws. It was enough that he had restored her sense of life.

After running the length of the water-front the tram curved shortly, beginning to climb. She knew the town was high, with four hill-drops to the sea, and she enjoyed height, revelling in the thought that Trevor also liked to climb and look down on white sails. Hitler lived on a hill-top, she thought with a shock, but it was clearly evident he did not notice white sails. Spilled blood, she thought, momentarily cooled with the memory of her faints. Surely no dictator could make masses of boys mix their blood with the earth and the salt of the sea. Now that she was in the capital town of a Dominion, she was closer to the incredible man-made world. Would she read the papers every day or escape into chosen books? She would read the papers, she decided at once, bound up as they were with Trevor.

Returning from contemplation, Mageila saw her hotel and descended on an irregular square overlooking an almost landlocked harbour, an enclosed grassy spot bright with flowers, and numberless flat-houses facing in any and every direction. In spacious content she stared round, pausing on the wide pavement to enjoy the ever-present wind, the sense of the sea, and the slanting rays of the setting sun.

“Paper?” urged a ragged boy at her elbow.

“Yes, thank you,” she agreed, in a voice that made the ragged boy slow down.

It was supper-time, but alone she would not consider eating in the hotel dining-room. Too much and too expensive, she decided, knowing eating was less important when the man had gone away. Strolling into the hotel-restaurant, she dutifully remembered her grandfather by ordering a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk, adding a chocolate ice-cream for independence.

High up in her small impersonal room, she savoured quietude surrounded by distant noise: the rush of water, the clang of a lift, street-rattle, and the shrillness of unidentified voices. Placing her things on the bed, she threw the window wide-open and leaned out the better to encompass roofs, tree-tops, church spires, and a harbour full of ships. Her eyes fastened on the sea, recognizing sealing-steamers pushed aside to await another season, schooners crowding busy wharves, gloomy coal-ships and sleek-looking liners linked mysteriously with a bigger world. At the harbour-entrance rose a lighthouse like a lonely monument reflecting the glare of the western sky. “La phare!” she murmured, remembering “la mer est un tyran.” For a second she imagined the sea exploding with mines and torpedoes and she recoiled, wondering if she was becoming invaded again. Was there something impending? She dropped her brow on her hand, going from full light to darkness, recapturing a cold memory of the afternoon in her mother’s room. But she did not become breathless or terribly apprehensive. She relaxed, dropping her hands palm-up on the window-sill and staring into them, feeling that if she did not clutch she might be able to retain. Whatever slid out, there was the way she felt and the trimmed lamp in the centre of her heart. “La phare,” she thought, looking at the harbour-entrance. The lighthouse was the trimmed lamp for the sea. She was too small and unimportant to do anything but live as closely to the body of life as a drop of water in the turbulent sea. That evening it was as peaceful as a nurse cradling tired ships. She thought of Trevor, homeward-bound by now, coming to this town where some day she might meet him anywhere.

Mageila abandoned outer view and sat down, thinking of the change she had brought about. With only her grandfather to persuade it had been easy. Unlike her Aunt Molly, he had no omnipotent feelings that age meant wisdom for youth. When she talked he listened; and when he realized her ambition he had concurred, investigating the possibility of summer-schools and boarding-houses. Then he had taken her to the lawyer who was settling her father’s affairs; and though the lawyer could not say . . . possibly there would, possibly there wouldn’t . . . he would keep her informed . . . in the meantime there was a small sum she could draw upon, remembering she was only entitled to a third . . . but in view of the fact— Concluding that lawyers came hardly to plain information, Mageila gave him glassy attention—fastening on the fact that there was a little independence. Then her grandfather had taken her to an impressive bank full of caged young men, and she thought how her Aunt Molly would delight in inviting them in for Rook. Several of them greeted her grandfather respectfully, but he waved them aside and trudged into the manager’s office; here he was received with cordiality, and Mageila sat upright on a straight-backed chair while the men talked business. She left feeling that the manager was extending benevolent paternity along with the honouring of her cheques, but when she remarked on his kindness her grandfather gave an amused chuckle.

“Kind? Very kind indeed, but he’s not as kind as that to men on the dole. Your father had a nest-egg in that bank. There will be a bit for you and your sisters when the legal tomfoolery is over. You’ll soon learn the long way round towards money. You wouldn’t be your father’s daughter if you didn’t. There was no nonsense about him. He knew the world.”

“But he always laughed at it, Grandpa.”

“He laughed the right side of his mouth,” granted her grandfather approvingly.

So the scene was set for her own decisions about classes and boarding-houses. She could begin this evening, she thought, looking at full daylight outside. Would she, she asked herself, reaching for the evening paper. Because it was the first paper she had bought for herself it was significant, something she must be thrifty about and read every word of. A lot of opening advertisements! “Wanted to Buy.” . . . “Wanted to Lease.” . . . “Chimney-sweeping.” . . . “Is Your Range Dirty?” . . . “Dress-making Done at Reasonable Prices.” . . . “Radios Reduced.” . . . “For Less than Two Cents a Day You Can Protect Yourself against Sneak-thieves.” . . . “Ease That Raspy Throat.” . . . “Wanted a Girl Who Can Do Plain Cooking.” . . . “Wanted a Girl Where Another Is Kept.” . . . “Required Female Teachers.”

Wanted a Girl Who Speaks French and English to Act as Nurse-governess for Six-year-old Child. Mageila made the paper crackle with suddenly tense hands. “Necessary qualifications are patience, good temper, good manners, responsibility, common-sense without common-placeness. Good salary for suitable person. Apply Mrs. David Kirke, 12 Humphrey-Gilbert Road, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. References required.”

Though by nature deliberate in motion Mageila rose impulsively, urged towards something designed for herself. She had always been half-hearted about her sisters’ plans for herself, waiting for an intangible lead to reveal another way. It was here.

Impelled by instinct, Mageila picked up her hat—realizing the time was providential for the prospect. Then she halted in deep thought, dangling her hat by its band. The care of a child seemed a fulfilment—something that would augment her healing and let her learn, and teach what she learned in a simpler form. She could identify herself with the careless years, and because hers were newly lost she could recapture and preserve them for a child. But what of her qualifications? Soberly she reflected, picking up the paper to read the advertisement again. Compared with others it was long, individualistic, suggesting carelessness of cost and imperiousness of demand. Was Mrs. David Kirke asking something for her child she could not give herself? Dropping the paper, Mageila stepped in front of a mirror and questioned herself. Was she patient? Yes, she decided at once. Was she good-tempered? That took longer to answer, for she recalled how often she had been irked by her Aunt Molly and how she had flared at her Uncle Leander. But, like a judge for herself, she argued that she had felt very weak and shocked out of self-control. Also her aunt irritated her grandfather, and he was a sweet-tempered man. Manners? Trevor had approved them, and he was a man of the world; so he ought to know. Responsibility had grown on her; she felt she could do with less. Common-sense without common-placeness? That was the strangest demand of a wholly strange advertisement, she thought, and she fell into sudden reverie, unaware of the reflected room as memory replaced it with another scene. . . .

Her father, gay, golden-faced, returning to drink a cup of afternoon tea, smiling with gleams of firelight in his white teeth. Her father speaking with an undercurrent of laughter. “I say to Mama that I like the muscles under the skin of a little cat and she says she will find the one she hooked when she was a girl.” That represented her mother’s common-placeness. Nothing could make her see the something else that could not be captured in crochet-work. . . .

References required first. Returning from thought, Mageila saw the proud lift of her own chin. Her grandfather’s name was reference enough for anyone.

She was drawn by the advertisement, deeply conscious that there were instincts which could not be ignored. She would groom herself carefully, descend, and inquire the direction of Humphrey-Gilbert Road, and when she came to number twelve she could walk straight up to the door.

In the centre of a road in sight of the sea but flowing towards high wooded country Mageila stood before a wide-open gate staring at a Georgian-Colonial house of white painted clapboard with a shingle roof. The house looked opulent, she thought, studying two pillars supporting a pediment above a well-dusted fanlight. Paint was fresh, windows shone, and ground was large for the centre of a town. From the gates tire marks swept towards and around the house, and there seemed to be garden front and back. Sensitive second observation said all was not equal at number twelve. Although the gate was open, there was a solid fence as if occupants did not wish to be intruded upon. From her position she examined the house in profile until her eyes turned to the garden, where she noticed discrepancies of prosperity. Grass was trimmed, but flower-growth was coarse with many perennials spilling unchecked. Those that had bloomed showed skeleton pods, and others were blowsy with life. Poppies had crooked stalks as if they could not bear to stand erect with their flaunting bloom, and delphiniums were so scraggy that they seemed to hold nothing but height. “It will be dreary when the sun sets,” she thought, looking back at the spick-and-span house. Then she saw a spot of sad decay in the shape of a dog humped on the door-step.

Very slowly she approached, walking stealthily, compelled to a tentative advance by repulsion and attraction. Her feet stirred sufficient gravel to attract any vigilant dog, but she was at the door before it raised its head. Then it rose in old feebleness, revealing itself as a weary setter with matted hair, grey nose, and sad eyes milky with incipient cataract. It must have been a good dog once, she decided, imagining it in its prime responding to the tang of September and the feeling of partridge in the air. Very gently she laid her two hands on its ears, tilting its head until the milky eyes met her own in a way that reported the dog was not blind. Like all setters it was responsive, wagging feebly, sighing, and sidling close with all its shaggy smells. But she was not repulsed, although she would have liked its eyes to be cleaner at the corners.

“I’ll wipe them for you,” she whispered, forgetting her mission to pluck two big leaves from a maple-tree.

Very carefully she wiped the dog’s eyes and it stood patiently, as if liking the cool fresh contact. There was no cure for its complaint, she thought, knowing it suffered from age. Dropping the leaves, she stood with a hand on the dog’s head while, unconscious of time, she kept reflecting on her restored body and the fleet way she could run if she chose. Invaded with the intangible, she entertained retreat; but contact with the dog detained her until she felt she was being observed. There was a sense of tiptoeing at an upper window, whispers, the darting of a child and a sudden snatching away. Had she imagined those things, she wondered, and had she rung the bell? Conscious of another long lag between sight and reality, she watched the door until she saw it move.

Mageila had not rung the bell, although she faced a stout maid staring in appraisement approaching insolence. But there was kindliness and interest in the eyes smiling between lids hairy with short lashes, and when the maid spoke her voice was a brogue full of vocal curtseying.

“Brin,” she said, addressing the dog, “let the young lady in.”

“I’ve come—” began Mageila.

“Yes, come in, Miss. You’re a treat to take to my mistress. Haven’t I been telling her only the angels could answer that ad? Not that I expect them to speak the French language in Heaven, Miss, but the trash out of Heaven that’s come—” The maid gestured with a free hand, ending in a push against coarse black hair. “Girls are flighty, Miss; but the mistress says it’s the times, not knowing what will come next. Shockin’ prospects with the Poles, and not so long back ’twas the Sudeten fellows—people I never heard of before, me having been raised to think the Irish made all the trouble. Think of more war, Miss! We should never have given them that Ruhr.”

“Will you kindly—”

“Yes, of course, Miss. What name please?” Mageila gave her name, and the maid appeared to approve by opening the door wider and flowing on in her soft obsequious voice. “Don’t mind her, Miss, if she’s sarcastic. She’s got enough to torment her. The Lord pity our weaknesses.”

Mageila’s smile travelled across her mouth as a sweetly arid voice called from inside.

“Moira, I’ll do the talking. Leave something for me to say.”

Listening, Mageila heard a thin sweet echo of tolerance and irritation.

“Yes, mum, I’m coming,” soothed the maid, as if talking to a child.

“After a few opening remarks, I suppose. Must you be my chairman?”

“No, indeed, mum,” said the maid, turning.

Mageila followed, conscious of strange effects. She glimpsed two steps leading down to a panelled dining-room, a white staircase with dark treads and banister, before she turned into a long formal room with a colour-scheme of beige and mulberry.

“Miss Michelet,” announced the maid. “She calls herself Mageila, and by the look of her she comes from fine people. I’m an outport girl myself and I know the best people don’t live in the town.”

“Moira,” interrupted her mistress smoothly, “finish putting Patricia to bed, and say I’ll be up later.”

“Yes, mum,” agreed the maid; but she detained herself as long as possible, dipping lightly to the floor to pick up a thread and touching objects as she went—making Mageila wonder if her hands ever fell to her sides.

“Moira runs me,” said Mrs. Kirke tolerantly, and Mageila looked at a woman seated in a high-backed colonial chair watching her maid go with tolerant humour. Then she looked up and her expression changed. “Asseyez-vous, Mademoiselle. Vous devez parler français puisque vous êtes venue en réponse à mon annonce?”

“Oui, Madame, je parle français. Mon père a été élevé à Saint Pierre, quoiqu’il ait demeuré plus tard à Terre-Neuve. Lorsque nous étions seule nous parlions toujours français.”

“Vos parents où sont-ils maintenant?”

“Ils sonts morts, Madame.”

“C’est pour cela que vous voulez travailler?”

“Non, Madame. J’allais étudier pour une carrière. Il n’y a qu’une demi-heure que j’ai aperçu votre annonce. J’avais l’idée que cela me redonnerait ma jeunesse que de m’occuper d’un enfant. Je pourrais peut-être revivre ainsi l’époque où je me sentais protégée par la tendresse familiale. Et puis la joie étant si incertaine ici-bas, je prendrais plaisir à assurer le bonheur d’un enfant.”

“Mmmm,” said Mrs. Kirke expressively.

The conversation had been rapid, and though Mageila could not be rushed into speech she felt she had answered at random. Still standing, she endured the interest of narrow concentrated eyes.

“Sit down,” she was ordered smoothly, “and we’ll see why a young girl feels like that. Moira Brophy might be wrong. She said I would be suited if the angels applied.”

Mageila sat, giving as much scrutiny as she endured, gradually identifying elegance and young middle-age with greying brown hair swept back from a dark delicate face.

Mrs. Kirke was forty-three, with the girlish lines of the modern woman and skin that had been preserved. Her brow was low above eyes that would be large if opened wide, and though her skin was smooth and unwrinkled it bore the subtle marks of age in the shadows finding homes in the planes and hollows of her face. Her mouth was full, reddened so perfectly that it resembled the artificiality of a carved colourful figure. But, in contrast to the swell of flesh in the lips, the chin was thin and imperious; the back and shoulders were flat; the fingers of two restless hands were waisted and waspish, with pointed nails.

Woman and girl appraised each other, but when Mrs. Kirke spoke she swerved lightly from continuity.

“I saw you wipe Brin’s eyes. Dear Brin, he was such an aristocrat once. Odd how you can be hard-boiled about people and sorrow over animals. I should have him put to sleep, but I can’t deny my husband his one link with affection. Dogs are uncritical.”

“Yes,” agreed Mageila briefly.

Mrs. Kirke reached for a cigarette, picked up a lighter, and made a flame by the motion of a decisive thumb.

A trimmed lamp, thought Mageila vaguely as she watched the light go out and Mrs. Kirke inhale like an experienced smoker. Accustomed to silence, she stayed in it easily—waiting for a lead, unable to comment on such a remark from a wife.

Mrs. Kirke’s eyes narrowed further and she gave a ghost of a laugh. “I doubt if I could bear your great eyes around me—somebody must have told you about them by now—and your generous mouth. Are you in love, child?”

The question was so casually conversational that Mageila almost answered with simple truth. Then she stiffened in protesting dignity. “Is it necessary—”

“Certainly not,” interrupted swifter tones. “Perhaps I was testing you. Perhaps wishing to save your wide-eyed look. Don’t ever fall in love. It’s sweet and deluding, nature’s way of throwing unsuitable people together merely for the sake of the race. What does she care about personal happiness? Love and marriage don’t go together. God pity our weaknesses, as Moira Brophy would say.” Mrs. Kirke spoke as if she came bitterly to pity.

Mageila stiffened again, speaking staunchly from her own faith. “I believe in love.”

Mrs. Kirke tilted her chin, laughing in light amusement. “Do you? Perhaps you wear a charm around your neck? Don’t mind, my child,” she commanded with careless grace. “I suspect myself of envy when I see something fresh and undaunted. There’s so much cruelty in the air, and rumours of wars. I can only think of the last and relate a new one to my sons. I have two boys, eighteen and nineteen, at present in Canada, where they had to spend their holidays because their own home—I know if war comes I’ll get a high-spirited cable from them to say they’ve volunteered, and anyone who’s been reading realistically knows it’s going to be an uneven struggle. England is asleep! As Priestley says, she’s become a nation of inheritors. But the Solomon Slows are going to have a terrible awakening, and while they’re feeling profoundly shattered the beautiful boys will go out and die because the deluded old men had no foresight. How pleasant war would be if the right people could be shot! I took my sons away from English schools because I saw they were being educated in unreality; and though their accents are not so good now, they are less inclined to believe in privilege. I’ve tried to teach them the privilege of energy, but I have to keep them out of their own home to do it. I’ve been hoping to get someone for Patricia so that I could go to Canada to see them. Moira Brophy can manage my responsibilities.” Mrs. Kirke tapped with restless fingers. “What a system! One that can bring these things to pass has to fall. I’d like to live long enough to see the new shape of the world, but before it comes we’ll be ruined and certainly broken-hearted.”

Mageila felt as if someone was pelting her with small icy snow-balls—and when they hit they were hard and hot—but in her new broadening she followed very well. Vividly she thought of every man in relation to some woman, and it left her with an instinct to go out and find Trevor and hide him away; but she sat on, swallowing hard and feeling herself reclaimed by her enemy. Threat, insecurity, a rising and falling floor under her that made her lower her hand and feel the seat of her chair in case she stumbled, slipping and sliding in water.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Kirke crisply. “You look odd.”

“Nothing,” murmured Mageila. “Sometimes I— It’s nothing.”

“Nonsense! Of course it’s something. Your eyes look wild. You’re healthy, aren’t you?” she asked doubtfully.

“Yes,” said Mageila quite loudly. “It’s not that; it’s what you said about war. I think I’m—”

“What?” asked Mrs. Kirke, examining Mageila with intense interest. “Can’t you tell me?”

Mageila looked at the delicately haggard face and knew she could. “Yes,” she admitted with grave candour, “I can because you don’t look happy yourself. I can’t see life and death apart.”

“Can’t you?” asked Mrs. Kirke without amazement. “It’s a death-conscious age. Tell me about yourself; that is, the general outlines, and why you came to the unyouthful state of mind you indicated when you came in. First, who are you?”

Mageila mentioned her grandfather, gratified that Mrs. Kirke knew of his name.

“The oldest stock in the country,” she said pleasantly. “But what of yourself?”

Mageila clasped her hands over her bag and in a few sweeping sentences told everything about herself but Trevor, and when she looked at Mrs. Kirke with external sight she saw her grinding out her cigarette with the air of a woman whose actions are mechanical. There was a long palpitating silence, broken by a light compassionate voice.

“You must be a very gallant girl. I admire courage very much.” Gesturing with a slender pointed hand, she smiled warmly, humanely. “I salute you, Mageila, and I’m happy you came to me.”

Light sincerity and easy grace brought two big tears into Mageila’s eyes; but she tilted her head, doing nothing about them until her wide eyes took them back. Left to recover from spontaneous emotion, she realized Mrs. Kirke was unembarrassed—waiting like a woman aware of every nuance of sorrow.

“Honourable tears,” she said comfortingly. “I envy you. There are greater calamities death does not ease. It’s not a solution.” Mageila thought she would hear more; but Mrs. Kirke sat up, becoming direct and decisive. “I’ll have you for Patricia if you’ll come. I’ll pay you forty dollars a month because there will be times when you’ll be solely responsible. Days will come when I won’t see you at all. Is the salary satisfactory?”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, with the air of not knowing whether it was much or little and not minding either way.

Mrs. Kirke smiled. “I’m not a fussy mother, but I insist that the child gets the truth when she asks for it. Teach her to wait on herself, to cross the street looking both ways before she goes, to expect no privilege she doesn’t earn, and make her co-operate in a way that will not set up antagonism. Is it too complicated?”

“No,” said Mageila slowly. “You want her to feel gracious and not sharp inside.”

“Yes, I do,” agreed Mrs. Kirke. “That’s very adroit of you. I must confess the child is terribly spoilt. I’ve been unable to give her time, and the maids I’ve had found it easier to wait on her. She’s high-spirited, but I feel if well directed she’ll soon fall in line. If we mutually agree, when you can come?”

“Tomorrow,” said Mageila calmly, knowing that whatever had repelled her in the atmosphere it was not Mrs. Kirke.

She might be ironical, making Mageila wonder whether she was the object of appreciation or of amusement, but she was generous and comprehending. And because of Trevor she could understand her. Both lived in a world that was different from hers. They were cosmopolitan, tormented by civilization, and they turned to her as if she was one with their essence. She was not, she knew. She had few contradictions. However much she was confused by her externals she felt simple as life in Feather-the-Nest and only as mysterious as the death that went with it, and if she worked for Mrs. Kirke she would endure what there was to endure, enjoy what there was to enjoy, think her own thoughts, and consider it a sin not to earn her money. That was simple, but Mrs. Kirke was looking at her as if she could not believe in simplicity.

“I can’t credit you,” she said, laughing. “What made you come?”

“What I said.”

“What were you going to do?”

Mageila told her, and Mrs. Kirke raised surprised brows.

“It was a quick change. Are you always like that?”

“No,” said Mageila, “but the advertisement fitted in. I felt it.”

Mrs. Kirke played a staccato scale with her pointed hand before she rose decisively, revealing a straight figure with the wasted elegance of worried flesh. “Please come upstairs with me.”

Mageila rose, meeting slitted brown eyes on a level with her own. Then as she turned towards the door Mrs. Kirke tossed a casual question over her shoulder.

“Are you easily shocked—inclined to be girlish when you meet realities?”

At the door Mrs. Kirke barred the way, challenging confirmation. Brought up on her toes, Mageila took a memory tour of raw things in Feather-the-Nest: the clouded eyes of the Tilleys before they were murdered, a pig on its way to be stuck, boats full of blood and offal, Mrs. Waddleton’s cockroach eyes, Pea-Pea Peter’s smell, primitive water-closets, and the sea’s making mossy the things it took from the land.

“No, I’m not girlish,” she decided out loud.

There was a short laugh from Mrs. Kirke, and a shrug of thin shoulders. “You couldn’t be, I suppose, after a tidal wave.”

“Not only that,” said Mageila slowly. “Where I lived first, we lived close—”

“To what?” pressed Mrs. Kirke.

Mageila picked her way over words. “I think I meant close to the sea, and the men and boats—I don’t know,” she decided vaguely. “You only feel those things.”

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Kirke. “Only overeducated people try to express it, and the major poets who know how. You’re an odd girl,” she said, with more appreciation than criticism.

“Am I too odd?” demanded Mageila.

“Too oddly perfect,” murmured Mrs. Kirke. “A girlish girl would be a calamity. Come upstairs.”

Mrs. Kirke mounted the colonial staircase and Mageila followed tentatively, reminded of her creep after Mrs. Slater, finding a quality of similarity between a straight back and a hump; but she had little time for speculation. Mrs. Kirke trod swiftly, with nothing but the sound of flared skirts to suggest she moved at all. Soon they were moving along a carpeted hall into a sitting-room less elegant but more comfortable than the room downstairs and walking to a window, red with western sun, Mrs. Kirke pulled aside a curtain. “Look!” she commanded. “That is my husband.”

Mageila approached and looked down, thinking at first she saw a scarecrow loosely dressed to frighten the birds. But there was no strawberry patch, she thought, and when she was convinced she was seeing something human she recoiled sensitively, unwilling to observe what seemed to belong to a grave.

“Won’t he see us?” she faltered.

Mrs. Kirke jerked the curtain farther aside. “My dear child,” she said, with a curling lip, “forget your manners. Have a good look. I’d be glad if he was conscious of us; but he lives in a world of his own, dead to everything human and ordinary.”

Mageila leaned forward again, reminded of being sent out by Mrs. Slater to stare painfully at the sea. This looking was as difficult, though without the personal anguish. It was like staring into a dark cave with a flaming core, she thought as she saw a back garden with shadows lengthening from a big dark fence. But the flaming red of the sunset illumined a chair holding what she thought was a scarecrow man. The old decayed dog had left the front door-step to sprawl at his feet, and both looked still as death in fiery light. Like the nothing vital inside a scarecrow’s clothes, the man’s body sagged with a sharp look of wooden knees and of elbows that must make pointed holes in the arms of the chair. She thought of Trevor living spiritually close to his skeleton because of Newfoundland’s gauntness, when in reality this man lived repulsively close to his. His face was like the front of a skull covered with yellow oil-silk, so transparent that a shadow rested beside every outlined tooth. His dead fair hair looked wet and unwholesome, and even from a distance she saw that the sleek reminder of oil-silk was suggested because his skin was sweaty from more than the sun.

“He’s very thin,” she said tonelessly.

“Emaciated! It takes the appetite away,” said Mrs. Kirke, dropping the curtain; and Mageila turned her back on the window, watching Mrs. Kirke pick up a framed picture. “This is how he was in 1916,” she explained.

Taking it, Mageila stared at a young officer in a tunic with a Sam Browne belt over his shoulder. Under a peaked cap worn at a jaunty angle a young face gazed out from wide eyes over a straight nose and curved sensitive lips topped by a minute moustache. The face was so attractive that she suffered from the effort of relating it to the scarecrow man in the garden.

“He did not fail there,” said Mrs. Kirke, like a woman dragging herself to justice. “He won the M.C. If you look you will see a ribbon.”

The voice, paying difficult tribute, made Mageila wish she could remain in silence and not try to stumble through inadequate words.

“It seems a waste,” she said simply and regretfully.

“Yes, I suppose he was one of the weak ones who could not adapt himself after. You see, Mageila— May I call you that?”

“Yes, please, Mrs. Kirke.”

“You cannot bring up young sensitive boys to be gentle-hearted through one phase of living and murderers through another. Poor David,” murmured Mrs. Kirke. “He was a war-drunkard—unable to stop in peace. That was a problem, but not subhuman like this. Seven years ago he went away by himself, because the doctors said a complete break from me was best. He took a cure, and came back so full of well-being that I thought a miracle had happened. We were almost happy again, and my sons could come home for their holidays. That was when I began to have Patricia. When I was in hospital with her, feeling quite contented, I had been reading a novel about drugs, with a lot about pin-point eyes. My husband was leaning over my bed, and in a flash I knew he had exchanged one vice for another. He had provided himself with a large quantity of drugs and, as you know, or probably don’t know, addicts conceal them beyond discovery and, when they want them they— Well, never mind the details,” repudiated Mrs. Kirke. “That’s my problem. It was too late when I discovered it. He surrendered unconditionally, and I was only glad that Patricia had been conceived before it gained much ground. They say the children of drug-fiends are apt—” Again Mrs. Kirke stopped herself. “There’s no divorce in this country,” she said conversationally. “I must see him out for better or worse.”

The light unemotional voice pierced Mageila’s heart with sharp comprehension. When she had to express the body of pain herself she did it in the same toneless way, to keep herself from collapse. Her lot was easy, she thought, compared with this woman’s living death.

“Well?” questioned Mrs. Kirke quietly.

Mageila struggled to speak and then made a brief gesture with her long hand. “Mrs. Kirke, I salute you.”

The woman’s head stiffened in a way that made her neck a support of thin cords. Her eyes opened to wide brown beauty misting spontaneously before she laughed shortly at herself. “My dear child, thank you. Imagine weeping at my age! I don’t deserve any praise; I’m so often a hell-cat, worrying about my sons. But with Moira Brophy it’s impossible to be wholly tragic. She’s the most unmoral person living, and as sweet as natural sap. She believes in helping people downhill when they’ve turned irrevocably that way, and she simplifies life enormously. When the cat has kittens she picks them up and flushes them down the water-closet.”

“What?” said Mageila, startled. Then she thought with hard realism. “It isn’t any worse than drowning them in clean water. They’re dead faster her way; only—”

“Quite!” said Mrs. Kirke, with a curling lip. “We’re so squeamish we prolong our agonies.” Strolling to the mantelpiece, she found a cigarette and fit it with the same sharp motion of a pointed thumb as she had used on a lighter. “It’s a fool of a world,” she said between half-open lips.

Mageila stared, seeing acid courage. “Mrs. Kirke . . .” she ventured slowly.

“Well?” she was asked ironically.

“Where I came from,” pondered Mageila, staunch to her upbringing, “men had to work or starve. It takes money to buy drink and drugs.”

Unoffended, Mrs. Kirke laughed with light grimness. “Yes, of course. Money can be a boomerang. Both our parents are well off and we had too much. You’re quite right. There should be a system to abolish privilege in case it enervates a generation. I’ve tried to teach my sons to be something themselves. Sometime, in the dim future, we may have a world fit for children, but in the meantime the other world will have a magnificent field-day comforting broken hearts.”

The pleasantly bitter voice made Mageila remember the Wesleys going to glory in the tidal wave. Then she saw Mrs. Slater and heard her profound Old Testament voice. “I think happiness can be a real thing inside people on this earth,” she said slowly. “If war comes and we lose what we love—”

Mrs. Kirke raised interrogative eyebrows as Mageila paused. “We? Then you are in love?”

To her consternation Mageila felt a rare blush burning her face, and she stood uncertainly until Mrs. Kirke touched her wrist.

“Forgive me. I was intruding. It is your own life if you are.”

The light and shade of the woman was beyond Mageila’s experience. Truth was a simple solution. “It is true,” she said in a deep voice. “I am in love. I was miserable when I met him, and the way I felt about him made me feel well. Love helps.”

Without defiance she met slitted eyes changing from irony to tolerance. “I know; love is like that. Restoring to all women. Only fools would deny it.”

“And he’s married,” said Mageila in full candour.

“Then,” said Mrs. Kirke with swift recklessness, “enjoy every minute of him if you can, because if he’s young he’ll be taken away.”

There was a speculative silence as both regarded each other in sudden intimacy.

Then Mrs. Kirke shook a doubtful head. “No, I’m wrong. Don’t follow advice, ever, about anything so instinctive as love. Do what you feel is right yourself, but I assure you if there’s anyone you want to talk to I’m willing to hear. I respect love, even though it makes fools of us all. Somebody said—I don’t know who—‘Utopia is a land at which humanity is always landing.’ We all think we might arrive. Don’t lose touch with the ideal.”

“Thank you,” said Mageila, dreaming and lost.

“Now come upstairs to my brat,” said Mrs. Kirke, returning her to the present. “I like you very much.”

“I like you too,” said Mageila wonderingly. “You’re like—”

“Him,” said Mrs. Kirke, wrinkling her nose like a much younger person. “I hope he’s much nicer for your sake. I’m saturated with disillusion.”

They mounted other stairs to an attic under a pointed roof; its angular walls were warmed with sun from gable windows that the tops of trees could not shade. Mageila caught a glimpse of a mountain-ash with pancake clusters of greenish berries flushing towards scarlet. In her mind’s eye she could look ahead and see them left high and ripe on a naked tree, so that the birds would not starve in winter. Even as she saw height she saw the depth of the dark garden, where Mr. Kirke seemed to twitch and stir, and begin to scratch his hands as the shadows crept closer.

“The child lives up here,” explained Mrs. Kirke over her shoulder. “She even eats here. There’s a lift from the kitchen—I’ve made it as convenient as possible.”

From an open door came Moira Brophy’s curtseying voice, carrying in its sound the suggestion of frequent dipping to the floor to pick up after the child.

“Now you needn’t be putting out of place what I’ve put in place. Your Mama wants you to be neat, and to tidy after your own self.”

“I want to ride my tricycle, Moira. I’m not going to bed. Pick up if you want to.”

“And who was your servant last year?” lilted Moira, answering her own question in further suggestions of zealous service.

“Come in,” said Mrs. Kirke, entering a cream-coloured room animated with a mural of elfin figures dancing in such stayed motion that they seemed to have contributed their activity to the child, who was whirling round like a baby-dervish. “Patricia,” said Mrs. Kirke with an attempt at authority, “I’ve—”

“Look, Mummy. I’m Jumping Joan,” said the child, stopping her whirling to leap into the air.

“Yes, darling,” agreed her mother pleasantly, “but don’t you think it would be nice to be something more restful?”

“No,” said Patricia with utmost finality, picking up a fabric doll and spinning it round by its flabby arm.

Moira attempted to take it from her, and there was a high-spirited tussle with signs of rising temper.

“Gimme! It’s mine, Moira. Gimme!”

“All right, all right,” conceded the maid, shaking her head in agreeable reproof. “You’re as wild as a goat, to be sure.”

“And Daddy is as drunk as David’s sow,” chanted Patricia, trancing her mother and the maid in shock that Mageila would not overlook.

Moira recovered first and spoke with facile unction. “And where did you hear your poor father spoken of like that, when he’s as sick as can be, poor gintleman? Now you hop into bed and speak to this lovely young lady. If you’re good she might tell you a story about the little Lord Jesus.”

“Want to hear about Jumping Joan,” said the child, eluding a reaching hand and darting towards the gable window.

“Patricia!”

“Hush,” said Mageila, “let us be quiet.”

She had noticed that the child defied without meeting anyone’s eyes, seeming firmly entrenched in her own world, holding herself with difficulty to activity because she was being forced to repose. Mageila admired the child’s fresh skin, her tender neck, and the back of her head, as she stood momentarily absorbed at the window as if they were not there. Though she had never been free and wild like this child, she remembered the revolt at being snatched from play in full golden daylight.

There had been long summer evenings with her sisters on the beach, when work was over for her father and he would arrive scrunching stones with his big feet. There would be the boats, slippery with panting fish, and an occasional lobster that seemed to resemble an animal instead of a fish. The sun would be a fire-ball burning the sea, and they would run in glare, follow the waves out over wet stones, retreat when they turned and chased their feet. They would laugh and leap from rock to rock, get splashed and not feel the splashing. Then their mother would call from their door, and they would have to go to bed behind sun-bathed blinds. It would be wash yourself, brush your hair, fold up the towel, hang up your dresses, say your prayers, clean your teeth, go to the bath-room, what do you mean by getting wet, haven’t I enough to do. . . . Then when they loitered adult hands would hasten them, pull off their clothes to the sudden full nakedness of a rabbit stripped of its skin, and bring down the hair-brush on their scalps with an energy that struck them down.

She felt the child’s revolt, thinking there was something coarse about all domination. Was any child ever allowed to flower without impatient forcing? This Patricia was happy at the window, admiring a sunset world, and Mageila hated to lay hands on her or urge her with her voice. Her sun might go down so fast through disturbances as calamitous as the tidal wave of Feather-the-Nest. Silence was so complete that the child felt estranged, and when it continued she turned and stood poised in question.

Mrs. Kirke’s full lips relaxed towards speech but closed again as Mageila advanced on her own initiative, easing into Patricia’s life.

“Patricia, look at me.”

Big brown eyes with lively light-spots fixed themselves on Mageila’s face.

“Patricia, I’m Mageila,” she said, kneeling down to be on a level with the child. “I’ve come to play with you; to tell you stories, and what little French girls call their toys. I’ll call the world by other names, and we’ll do so much that you’ll get sleepy and go to bed to get up soon again.”

The child stared, saying nothing, becoming as excessively still as she had been active.

“Patricia, will you call me Mageila?”

The child lifted her head with a listening look.

“Do you hear?” asked Mageila, tilting her own head.

“You’ve got a funny voice,” announced Patricia.

Mageila’s slow smile travelled across her mouth. “Nice funny or nasty funny? If it’s nasty, I’ll go and not say any more.”

“No,” said the child quickly, prodding Mageila’s shoulder with one hard little finger. “Nice, nice, but funny.”

“Then will we play tomorrow? We could walk—”

“I ride in cars,” said the child. Then she added, with an eager grin, “but I like to ride in the street-car. If we had five cents—”

“We will ride in the street-car,” said Mageila, “but sometimes it is nice to walk by the sea.”

“Could we take a boat and row in the little path the sun puts on the sea?”

Mageila breathed deeply, remembering how in the past, as at present, she was always drawn to the self-same path. “It would be far,” she regretted. “I’ve wanted to do that, but there will always be things we can’t do.”

“Why?” complained Patricia, undoubtful of her own powers.

Mageila shook her head. “I don’t know myself. Perhaps it’s like jumping. You try hard and only jump so far.”

“I’m going to jump so high I’ll touch the sky,” boasted Patricia.

“You won’t,” said Mageila, with composed truth that carried conviction. “But there are other things we could really do.”

That seemed to appeal to Patricia and she looked inquiringly into her mother’s face. “Mummy, could we?”

Mrs. Kirke spoke with supreme detachment. “It would depend on how nice it was for her here. If you asked her—”

“To spend the day,” exulted Patricia. “I often spend the day places when Daddy—”

“Is sick, poor gintleman!” gushed Moira suggestively.

“And,” grinned Patricia with a child’s provocation, “when Moira takes the dye.”

Mageila did not look up, leaving answers to others; but all she heard was a benevolent “tchick” of Moira’s tongue as Patricia continued, with a child’s feeling of how far she could go.

“Moira dyes. When little grey hairs stick out she has the afternoon off to take the dye.”

“Patricia!” reproved her mother.

“Don’t mind her, mum,” said Moira serenely. “I don’t. Those that dye should dye in the open.”

An upward glance told Mageila the maid was pushing up a fringe as if she liked its stiff black texture, while Mrs. Kirke watched the gesture with affectionate humour.

“Moira’s grey hair is the only thing she doesn’t accept as the will of God,” she told Mageila softly.

Moira stepped lightly to the door, filling it like a figure of amiable candour. “I don’t mind telling the young lady myself, mum. When m’ fellah left me to go to war, Miss, he said, ‘good-bye, Moira; give me a lock of your hair.’ So I gave him a grand black lock that he put in his prayer-book; and I told him to button it up in his breast-pocket, thinking no bullet could get by. But there’s other parts of a man to hit, Miss; so he was killed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mageila gravely, answering the extremely contented brogue. “And because your hair was black then—”

“Yis,” hissed Moira happily, “that’s the right understanding. I’m not taking chances on him not knowing me when I walk into Heaven. He left me black, and black I stay.” With sweet guile she looked down on the child. “If the young lady can put up with you, Patricia, you can ask her what she likes to eat for her breakfast.”

“Yes,” murmured Mrs. Kirke.

“She’ll stay; she’ll stay!” said Patricia. “Will you stay?”

“I will stay if we tidy up the toys together. Then—”

“You’ll tell me a story,” suggested Patricia, rounding out her own programme.

Mageila stood up, looking at Mrs. Kirke for direction.

“If you would be so kind,” the mother said.

“Then, first,” said Mageila to the child, “we’ll—”

“I’ll go, mum,” said Moira from the door. “It wasn’t for nothing I found a four-leaf clover this morning.”

Mrs. Kirke nodded, feeling a sense of relaxation round her usually tight temples. She felt recharged, able to cope with her problems again. More wide opened eyes appreciated benevolent servile hands habitually raised preparatory to picking up as she went. She regretted her irritations at Moira’s maddening acceptances of drugging, drunkenness, peace, war, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, as the will of God. She knew Moira was the corner-stone of what comfort she had. She was that rare thing, a human being who could accept things as they were, and serve evil as well as good, because in some mysterious way both were part of the will of God. Her philosophy was simple. When the drunkard was determined to drink, give him all he wanted and more. When the drug-fiend gave himself up body and soul to his needle, let him prick himself with it as often as he liked. God would take care of their foolishness.

And now this girl, mused Mrs. Kirke. With the scepticism that was part of her nature she tried to analyze Mageila and determine how much of her was true, how much skin-deep; but in doing so she remained still, for fear of disturbing the new co-operation of her child. “Il n’y a qu’une demi-heure que j’ai aperçu votre annonce. J’avais l’idée que cela me redonnerait ma jeunesse de m’occuper d’un enfant.” That was obviously sincere. She had applied herself, and won the child with unusual concentration. “Je pourrais peut-être revivre ainsi l’époque . . .” Mrs. Kirke understood that feeling. If Mageila craved a return to childhood from the shadow of premature womanhood, she could lean from middle-age towards tender youth. The girl’s eyes made her feel achingly conscious of long-lost freshness, causing her to flinch from memories of dreary compromises with living. This girl suggested no compromise: chin up, take it, and let us look—

At what, thought Mrs. Kirke cynically. Some seamen had a special look, and some mountaineers. In houses, amongst ordinary people, they retained a disconcerting emanation of width, of heads striving for a bump against sky. Interesting but uncomfortable. Perhaps this girl had sex-appeal, the gift of flesh, a trick of wide-open eyes? No, she decided, dropping the trivial thought. There was something inner saturating the outer. Good clean Newfoundland stock crossed with French blood? Not enough. An elemental? A compound of air, rock, salt, sea? She had confessed to human love. Mrs. Kirke’s eyes narrowed. What sort of man? Decidedly not every man’s meat, she thought, seeing Mageila seated on her child’s narrow bed telling a story with her deep dragging voice. How a man would enjoy that full mouth! But men did not like profundity in women. They liked their Greta Garbos in picture-houses and their Mona Lisas in galleries. Was she a virgin? Certainly, thought Mrs. Kirke, shocked at the difficulty of remembering the state. That’s what irregular living did. There was a price to pay for everything.

This girl had love in her face, but sex with its thick blind cloy had not touched her. Sex? Love? Two such different things. Mrs. Kirke felt maternal, wishing to give Mageila one but not the other. Sex was such a trap, and she had come to a place in mental thought when she was sure love could not flower in marriage. Perhaps she had gone sour because of a squalid union without economic support, comradeship, or marital fulfilment. Impotence followed drinking and drugging. Good thing, she reflected dryly. But the girl suggested exaltation over fresh things. “Et puis la joie étant si incertaine ici-bas . . .” Damn the girl, exploded Mrs. Kirke with internal protest. She did not wish to be reminded of that. Neither did she wish any exalted reminders of Heaven. A measure of uncomplicated living would be enough these troubled days.

What was the girl telling the child? An animal story of the north, about teams of dogs, polar-bears, caribous, and wolves mixed up with Indian children—bequeathing Patricia the new sport of whip-cracking and shouts of “Hiya, hiya!” Patricia was promptly capitulating to a new type of story in her life. With a distasteful face Mrs. Kirke looked at the elfin mural round the room. What on earth had made her decorate like that? Should she replace it with nature-studies and savage animals? But, she reflected dryly, wolves were not the most comforting thought for a child to take to bed, and yet this strange girl was making a wolf a wild elemental hero.

“I must get that book for Patricia,” she decided out loud, to be immediately snubbed by her child.

“Shushhhh, Mummy. What did you say his name was, Mageila?”

“Wayeesis,” said Mageila, “the white wolf, the strong one! If your mother will buy you the book, I will read—”

“I would rather hear,” said Patricia graciously.

The girl was like an Indian, decided Mrs. Kirke, and that was why she could make Patricia turn so comfortably to wolves. This ridiculous mural! Fairies! Such utter nonsense! To keep a child in touch with reality these days there should be murals with bombs, planes, tanks, smoke, fire, and screeching sudden death. Sharp portentous pain made Mrs. Kirke clench her hands and dig her nails into her palms, causing a wish to crash Patricia’s story and do something where she would not have to wait and brood on nightmare threat to her absent sons. If there was war could she persuade them that they would be more useful after they had taken their degrees? No, she could not, she decided. How quickly David had volunteered in 1914! How young she had been! How divinely unknowing! War had meant little more than the possession of a glamorous escort in a miraculously tailored uniform, with a creaking polished belt and brass buttons that hurt when she was ecstatically embraced. “God, God,” she ejaculated inwardly, standing tensely still like a vessel of constraint. But the story was over and Patricia had become a tucked-up child willing to let her mother precede Mageila downstairs, where she paused in the hall to discuss routine and details before the two strolled out and stood between the pilasters supporting the pediment.

Looking at the girl in sharper light, Mrs. Kirke saw her big clear eyes go at once to a line of dark hills peaked by a solid stone tower outlined against the darkening sky. Not an ardent Newfoundlander herself, she felt irritated. The abundance of rocks made her think of her stripped heart, the pointed trees reminded her of her nerves, and the wind made her feel continually bleak. Much easier to be miserable in a good climate, she decided. She would like to live in a country where she would never see another rock. “Grass is the forgiveness of nature,” she quoted vaguely to herself. Who had said that and wasn’t there more, she questioned inwardly—something about fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, and growing green again through the forgiveness of grass. Such terrible healing made her voice vicious with protest.

“Why do you look like that after all you’ve been through? It’s ridiculous!”

Mageila’s eyes returned from the hills to search Mrs. Kirke’s tormented face. “Are you angry?” she asked mildly.

“No, not at all,” said Mrs. Kirke, laughing at herself. “My temper seems to be uneven. But I really would like to know what brought that expression to your face. You don’t mind my being personal? When people meet and get on very well, there’s only one way—”

“Yes,” agreed Mageila. But she smiled a little. “I don’t know what expression was on my face. But now life seems—exciting, I think, since I realize I may lose it. I notice things more: the woods when they look young, the moon in the day, and—well, just the look of the world.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Kirke, restrained from snubbing. “The world looks ridiculous to me. Hills stuck up, a great deal of untidy water, odd animals on all fours, ordinary humans on two legs and subhuman ones goose-stepping like terrible dolls—giving me the fantastic feeling that I’m not seeing anything real at all.”

“I know that feeling,” said Mageila slowly. “I’ve had it a lot. Like walking in a daytime dream. Strangeness gets under everything and—”

“What?”

Mageila fumbled with the effort to say what she felt. “And perhaps the feeling that because death is so deep there might be wonderful strangeness under it.”

“And that is exciting?” asked Mrs. Kirke dryly; but she took the girl’s arm, beginning to walk with her towards the gate. “I hope you’ll be able to bear my temper. Remember if I snap it will not be because of you.”

“I’ll remember. You have a lot to bear.”

That there was a lot became immediately evident. Very slowly around the house came Mr. Kirke, advancing like a skeleton man who would have clattered if he had not been dressed and if yellow skin had not encased his bones. In spite of herself Mageila was shocked. Unconsciously fastening on the simile of the scarecrow, she had not expected him to walk. Because he was as he was, he should have remained fixed in some fear-making spot. At his heels padded old Brin, creeping like a dog in pain from four fallen arches, and as the couple neared both emanated decayed smells. The man’s eyeballs looked the only thing about him that had not dwindled and, staring from bony sockets, they made the one round line in his body.

Mageila swallowed, knowing she and Mrs. Kirke could not pass without an encounter; but the latter took hold of the problem like a person doing a difficult thing promptly and politely.

“David!” she said clearly, and the man’s eyes looked in her direction but did not see.

“Yes, did you speak, my dear?” he answered in a voice that was thin from a long return to earth.

This time Mageila was shocked by the refinement and education of the voice.

“David, this is Miss Michelet. She’s going to be with us to look after Patricia.”

“How do you do,” he said, vaguely courteous, raising a thin arm to a hat that was not on his head.

“How do you do,” responded Mageila, speaking softly, anxious to be gone.

But at that moment the glaze passed from Mr. Kirke’s eyes and he saw her. The change in his face magnetized her feet to the ground, and for a moment she could not have advanced unless she had been dragged. Unconscious of what she was doing, she remained fixed by Mr. Kirke—who was hating her with every line of his body.

“Who is that girl?” he asked murderously. “What do you mean by bringing in a stranger? Get her out of here. Get her out, I say.”

His body twitched as if animated by thin wires, and the baring of his deathlike teeth caused a perceptible trembling in Mageila’s limbs. Without her volition she stood revolted, with her instinct to heal taking a great swerve of retreat. But she faced him, enduring incomprehensible hate.

“Get out, you—”

“David!” said his wife, like the cut of a whip. “We are going.” And without another word she took Mageila’s arm and swept her strongly down the gravel path to the gate. “Don’t take any notice,” she whispered hurriedly. “I’m very sorry. He takes aversions. It’s one of the moods when he realizes his condition. He was upset by your clean eyes. You mustn’t mind—”

“Yes, but—if he hates me like that, can I—”

“Certainly. We’ll just be careful to keep out of his way. Good-bye, until tomorrow, and please accept my apologies.”

Mageila turned, to see Mrs. Kirke’s face drawn with many emotions. “Do not mind,” she said gently. “That sort of thing will not hurt me.” She searched her mind for something alleviating to say about Mr. Kirke and, finding nothing, she mentioned Brin. “The old dog likes him,” she said.

Mrs. Kirke’s painted mouth went down at the corners. “That is dog,” she said acridly. “Moira and I feed him. David would not remember he needs food. He doesn’t eat himself—the drug takes the appetite away. That’s why he’s so thin.”

There was so much proud suffering in the voice that Mageila felt sympathy would be intrusion, but she pressed Mrs. Kirke’s thin arm. “If you will let me I will work in the background. I was brought up to help in a house. I can make beds, wash and iron, cook a little, sew—”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Kirke, with a relaxing smile. “I have a cook who comes in by day, and who never comes upstairs. But Moira does everything. I’m glad you’re not particular about what you do. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Mageila, glad to be gone.

Outside the fence, where Mrs. Kirke could not see her, she leaned against the boards to recover from the insecurity of her legs. Her nerves were not as strong as she had hoped.

She must write to her grandfather, but before she could shut herself up in inner stuffiness she had to walk. Instinctively her eyes turned to the dark hills and the stone tower she had seen from Mrs. Kirke’s steps. If she walked with long steps she could reach there and back before full night came. Having climbed to the tower before, she knew there was a road. Immediately she walked towards the sea, reaching its edge at the place where a fishermen’s village huddled at the foot of the hills like a symbol of gaunt outport Newfoundland in its capital town. She walked past the village, climbing high, perseveringly, until the town was well below and she stood by the grey stone tower overlooking the inner and outer sea. There was space above, below, and all round. There was pink and grey twilight, and a bit of grass to minimize the harshness of rock. There was a valley like something rich at her feet. There were a few parked cars with a sense of hush around their bulk, and long sensitive looking told her their occupants had driven high to put their arms around each other and not to look at the sea. They seemed unmindful of observation; but in consideration she walked to the edge of the cliff and sat down on an old cannon, unconscious of its symbolism.

She had climbed to sort everything out, and suddenly she was invaded by thoughts of Trevor. The quickening of her perception, the new intensity of her living, made her feel the inner life of the cars. She shut her eyes and let Trevor advance, and she knew that when he spoke she would no longer hear the far and near water, the wind, or the restlessness of many ships. There would be a crackling of northern lights and she would be back on the Assou. Her blood tingled delicately and for a long, long time she sat on alone, living vicariously from the shut sweet silence of the parked cars. When finally she looked up, it was darker and the hills were humped like various monsters. They made her remember Mrs. Kirke—hills stuck up, and a lot of untidy water around.

She could not think like that. Mrs. Kirke was twisted because of her husband, and she could sympathize with her but not with her point of view. Then with a little shock she felt she understood the maid. There was something elemental about Moira. She was a force, an instinct, someone unshrinking, as strong in her own way as Mrs. Slater. Trying to comprehend, Mageila fumbled to the conclusion that Moira did not know the difference between right and wrong. But that seemed foolish in the remembrance of her sweet Irish voice and her sustaining service. Moira was important, she thought vaguely; and then she shivered, knowing the wind had made her cold. The world looked mysterious, beautiful, but terrible; and the sweet emanation from the parked cars seemed a mere breath, like lilac or syringa, in a harsh garden.

She must go, she knew. What did she mean by being out alone at night, upon a hill, without her coat and in a strange place? No good would come to her—the crisp reminder of her Aunt Molly made her rise and tiptoe past the parked cars. But as she went she got a sense of Trevor again. He must walk here, she thought. “Some day we’ll meet on this hill.”

The Kirke house represented the extremes of light and shade. In the child’s world there was health demanding that waking time should be animated. In the man’s there was decay demanding the assuagement of anodynes. Through the two Mrs. Kirke’s radio-world shrilled loudly of Nazi aggression.

Mageila fitted into the house like a hand in a glove. From the first moment she became responsible for Patricia, releasing Mrs. Kirke and Moira to less wholesome service. Beyond the first interview there were no directions and, without experience or book knowledge of child psychology, she felt her way, stimulating interest in French by naming Patricia’s best-loved objects first, hearing the child mouth new words like vocal toys and display an interest in prayers when she could address God as “Notre père qui est aux cieux.” Mageila’s control was intuitive: not to enforce tyrannies she had disliked herself, not to drag or speak with domination. And intuition worked very well. At once she found that Patricia disdained dolls and would never be interested in cold china faces. Without hesitation all the dolls were laid in cots, where they slept like sweet vacuity. Warmer life compensated.

An aloof unsexed cat was patronizing their quarters several times a day, and a thin mother cat with an apricot-coloured kitten as svelte and round as a rose with many thorns. At the venturesome age, the kitten was insinuating—springing after heels or circling ebulliently after its own tail. When Patricia tried to make the perfect circle, joining the kitten’s head to its tail, she was rewarded with ungrateful scratches. Mageila applied no antiseptic, and she tried in vain to find an answer to the question why the kitten went on chasing a tail it could not catch. Finally, as much to herself as to the child, she answered, “it is like that. It cannot catch its tail any more than you can jump as high as the sky.” And when Patricia asked why, Mageila said no one knew—it was one of God’s secrets. The child was never contemptuous, appreciating an adult who did not know everything. For dolls Mageila substituted interest in animals, in the care of old Brin, in the changing ships in the harbour, in how many different kinds of birds they could see in a day. When she had time she sought books in the public library, reading them in order to have new stories to tell Patricia.

She doubted her choice when Mrs. Kirke, examining them, laughed in a sharp uncutting way, like the run of a dagger in a sheath.

“Are they wrong?” demanded Mageila, wishing to appraise the laughter.

“Not at all. I was amused at the source. My sister would be horrified. My friends would not dream of letting library books into their homes. They don’t believe in high thinking unless they break the cellophane first. My sister is an impeccable matron in the exact centre of her wedding-ring, and her attitude to me is: if I had done this or that, if I had put my foot down from the first— Bah,” repudiated Mrs. Kirke with detached venom, “women talking of experiences they haven’t had are like children talking of what they will do when they grow up. Adult education is what we all need.”

“Yes,” said Mageila with slow confidence. “My mother was uncomprehending. Papa was sweet always; but when Mama went on about what everyone should do, Papa’s eyes would open wide and, though he would not do such a thing, I often felt he was winking inside.”

Mrs. Kirke laughed dryly. “People do a lot of that. As for the books, get her what you like. She won’t get germs from them any more than the diphtheria my sister predicts from the cats. Germs nearly always attack people protected from reality.”

Mageila pondered, looking from the gable window upon leaves always crumpled with wind. Did they look more expensive to the rich? Did the sea discriminate between rich and poor? In the small stunted world of Feather-the-Nest the Michelets had been the first family. In Ship-Haven the Dilkes were the same, but they all worked energetically from morning till night. She had not assimilated social differences, being accustomed to sitting in kitchens and drinking cups of tea with women who scrubbed their own floors, visiting houses full of sad damp smells, and learning to identify a slaughtered-bed-bug smell when she was taken to hovels. She knew poverty could be verminous, but she could not believe in germs on books.

“They will not hurt Patricia,” she declared.

“No,” agreed Mrs. Kirke. “My friends are absurd. Like most Newfoundlanders, their forebears came from England with all their possessions tied up in a red pocket handkerchief; but now their descendants have a tremendous sense of property. My sister is very helpful in establishing a privileged class. The new-world ideal of an aristocracy of talent and virtue is quite distasteful to her, as it is, indeed, to America too. All the people I’ve visited there have houses like Versailles, with Pompadour beds; but they mostly sleep on the porch in iron cots. And I hope,” said Mrs. Kirke, lightly candid, from the door, “that your Englishman is not the sort who does England harm.”

“No,” said Mageila, accepting the naturalness of speaking for Trevor. “He laughs at things like that. I think it’s because, as he said, his wife would die if she had to eat macaroni and cheese for supper, in Newfoundland, at six-thirty.”

Mrs. Kirke burst out laughing. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s him,” said Mageila quite gaily.

“Him!” mocked Mrs. Kirke lightly. Over her shoulder her thin face became softer. “I hope he won’t make you unhappy, Mageila. Has he spoken of divorcing his wife?”

“No,” said Mageila, dumbfounded.

“Why not?” demanded Mrs. Kirke forthrightly. “Wouldn’t you like to marry him?”

“Yes,” admitted Mageila starkly.

“Then that’s very satisfactory.” Mrs. Kirke paused for a moment, staring at her pointed nails. “Do you think he loves you?”

“It felt like it,” said Mageila gravely.

“A woman always knows when a man loves her,” agreed Mrs. Kirke. “Then do something about it. Haven’t you thought of the wife?”

“No, I just thought of the way it was and how I remembered—”

“That’s very young,” said Mrs. Kirke, slightly irritated. “You must take hold of the problem, lay the cards on the table. There is divorce in England. Never mind,” she said in a softer voice, “but you can’t only remember a man. Wives have a habit of being important. You’ll probably find she’s full of English prejudices about us.”

“Yes,” said Mageila, like a revelation, “that’s what he meant when he talked about things that move her in sundry English places. I thought she must be a lot of trouble to herself.”

Mrs. Kirke shrugged. “Have you read any Dickens?” she asked irrelevantly.

“Yes,” said Mageila, surprised.

“Somebody said—I never remember who—the greatest of his glories was that he could not describe a gentleman. What’s the man’s name?”

“You mean—”

“Yes, of course, I mean—”

“Trevor Morgan.”

“What! One of the young deputies in the government. I know him myself.”

“You do!” said Mageila, sitting down suddenly and making Mrs. Kirke laugh.

“Did you think no other women knew him in Newfoundland?”

“Perhaps I did,” confessed Mageila.

“Well, indeed! Everybody knows everyone in St. John’s—at least, my sister would add, who’s anyone and, of course, the anyone English, and your Trevor is included because he’s got the right voice. England is convenient. You don’t need a social register—just the book that reports their salaries in case they’re marriageable. We all went to English schools.” Mrs. Kirke paused on her way out, smiling to herself before she rushed on in acrid humour. “Many of us know England is a fen of stagnant waters, but we want to be born in the fen.” From the door her face looked suddenly young and attractive. “When you find him bring him in. I’ll allow nursery-company.”

She left and Mageila, though in a mood to sit and dream, rallied, going to the bath-room to teach Patricia that the bath was designed for washing and not for boisterous swimming.

Mageila warmed to Mrs. Kirke. Complex as she seemed to be, full of disquiet and light hail-stone conversation, she had a gracious simplicity when she arrived in the attic. She encouraged actively strewn living-rooms; she could perch on the piano-stool and play with tense fingers; she gave them valuable art-books and did not expect them to endure without finger-prints; she could dabble with water-paints and splash so widely that Mageila felt she was getting rid of submerged colour. Then she could laugh and leave, challenging Mageila and the child to paint themselves. She was quite indifferent if the anxious mother cat coaxed her kitten on the beds, and merely shrugged if something valuable was broken. She was solicitous for old Brin when he insisted on spending himself in climbing the stairs, and often she would aid him with the gentlest of waspish-looking hands and give him over to Mageila halfway up. With less solicitude Patricia would embrace his shaggy neck, unmindful of disreputable smells; but with Mageila’s advent he attained a respectable old age.

She brushed his coat, gave him water, washed his eyes, and helped him out when he whimpered in fear of misbehaviour. Sometimes she lifted him, realizing his old body was as bony as his master’s. It was as if Brin sought them in order to recharge himself with their youth. He came often, standing and waiting like the remnants of perfect breeding, trying to accompany them on their walks but advancing so painfully that Mageila felt held between two worlds: the forward ardour of the child and the backward drag of the dog. Firmness was necessary in making Brin’s milky eyes meet her own before she said, “Brin, go home.” Then he would go, obediently, sadly, in a hurt drooping way, as if disliking his dismissal to a master so far removed from life. He would look over his shoulder for signs of relenting and often Mageila had to tilt her head towards the sky, making her eyes take back the tears for other sorrows she remembered through the sad look of the dog.

In the attic there was a day-nursery under a roof slanting over a cottage-piano, a radio, a gramophone, and many other things for wet-day entertainment. They ate in a small room where they could pull a rope and receive three meals a day. They went out, with Moira Brophy preceding them to see that the child should be spared startling sights. They walked, shopped, played in a park, and on some days a car would appear driven by a uniformed chauffeur and they would be dismissed for a day by an idler sea. They would picnic, dig sand, bathe, and sometimes, with Patricia in sight, Mageila would sit on a stone-beach and be chilled by memories. Then the Assou seemed to steam by like a wonderful phantom-ship and her blood would warm again. She would throw stones in the water until motion held rhythm—the curve of her arm, the grasp of the stone, the poise, reporting a tangible hold on things. Then there would be the throw and the plop in the water, speaking so strongly of disappearance that she was forced to follow the dull weighted drowning of stones. She came to the place where she forgave the sea, knowing that it was not its own master, that it was pushed around by the wind, that it often moaned in a goaded way as if longing for soundless peace.

Once when Mrs. Kirke accompanied them, driving the car herself, Mageila’s deep feeling for surroundings took an inward dive. Looking old and young in turn, becoming adaptable and unadaptable, the older woman lay comfortably and uncomfortably on stones, lightly taunting a land of pointed trees that she said made perpetual Christmas. She complained because Mageila sat like a worshipping idol. She berated the wind, the hard stones, the cold cluck of hens, the top-heaviness of sheep, the uncouthness of cows; she asked Patricia to suggest a more aesthetic place for udders, and when the child obligingly suggested the middle Mrs. Kirke wanted no udder at all. She dismissed cows, declaring they were insensate and bumpy with bones. Mageila said nothing, remembering tragic cows in a way that made Mrs. Kirke pounce and demand why she was being contradicted. It was often like that. When she left unhappiness and discontent to silence, Mrs. Kirke insisted on knowing what she meant. Mageila, undisturbed, sat embracing her knees, finding no fault in the present day.

“I did not answer,” she declared.

Lying full length on the beach, Mrs. Kirke picked up stone after stone but discarded them as if quite unsuitable. “You looked,” she accused.

“You said I was like an idol. Idols do not look.”

“I was a cat, and you’re a mule,” said Mrs. Kirke pleasantly. “It’s your eyes reflecting judgements. Patty, lovely, the stones are smaller down there. Dig Mummy a bucketful of stones.”

In a sun-suit, with a pail and spade, Patricia showed a desire to remain with the conversation, while her mother indicated a desire to speak without thought of her daughter. Recognizing her cue for diversion, Mageila wondered if she was nurse-governess or companion and audience to Mrs. Kirke. Both positions held equal but widely different interests.

“Patricia,” she said in the way that never failed to challenge co-operation, “if you will find five white stones all alike—or nearly all alike, because stones are never the same shape—I’ll teach you to play jack-stones.”

“Yes, jack-stones,” agreed Mrs. Kirke with a dry chuckle that threatened to detain Patricia. “It’s a lovely game I was not allowed to play. My mother said it would give me knuckles, so that’s what I got through frustration. Think how lucky you are, Patricia. My childhood was a complete deprivation—no jack-stones, no stiffy-staffy, no dog-taking-a-bone for fear of my ear-drums—but I yearned hardest for jack-stones. It seemed so many sided; you lay your eggs and do your bulls—”

“How do I do my bulls?” asked Patricia with intense interest, searching wide inland country as if horned animals must lend a clue.

In the way of the mother Mrs. Kirke made conversational mischief and left the rest to Mageila, who explained, “that is advanced; it’s like learning to read before you speak. But if you want to sit down all day—”

“No!” shrilled Patricia in horror.

“Then find the white stones, and when we go home we’ll learn about Mary at the cottage-door—”

“Eating cherries off the floor! There’s something about the minor poets,” murmured Mrs. Kirke.

“Mummy talks queer,” said Patricia tolerantly.

But when Mageila had satisfied her that the quest for white stones held glamour she went out of earshot, with her nose down towards the small-stoned curve of the beach.

“I make it harder,” said Mrs. Kirke penitently. “I’m not fit for motherhood when I have so little left over. Relationships are tyranny at their best. Somebody in the group makes a bed and the others lie on it too.”

“Yes,” agreed Mageila, feeling that Mrs. Kirke always talked like a river urged to deeper sea.

“Tell me about cows,” Mrs. Kirke murmured persuasively.

Mageila smiled, responding to brittle sensitivity. “I thought of the cows shut up in a stable on the night of the tidal wave, and the sound they made—”

“Stop,” insisted Mrs. Kirke, drawing up her knees in pain. “I’m a fool and I hate witless opinion. I remember reading about a cow, in the last war, sweating and crying real tears in a bombardment. Odd how little one’s imagination can encompass total war—then someone mentions the kind of day it was, a kitten playing in a trench, a cow, and it seems so real. Oh—” Mrs. Kirke turned her face in on her arm, continuing in muted torment, “I thought it would be a relief to come with you; but now I feel I should be in town hearing more horror, and realizing death round the corner for the beautiful boys who will be sacrificed by the pitiless old men.”

“The Nazis are young,” Mageila reminded her.

“Yes, the little monsters,” shuddered Mrs. Kirke. “Creatures conceived in sadistic minds and not in women’s bodies. They seem like the results of a union between money and machinery. How uncomfortable they must be to mothers! How ghastly as lovers! Imagine them goose-stepping through romance, with hands as tender as tanks and kisses like a rain of shrapnel. Our sins are many, but we can still speak out loud. Imagine not being able to express your loathing of Nazi necks because your own might end on the block. Imagine having to pretend to like anything about them. Death seems a beautiful preference.” Mrs. Kirke sat up, with eyes contracting from the dazzling sea. “Will my sons have to die to let me speak my mind?” Having no answer in her, Mageila waited—and heard a voice grow soft with beauty. “How fair it is—how blue and beautiful! If only we could feel like it.” Mageila maintained further silence, refraining from reminding Mrs. Kirke she had recently traduced her surroundings. “Don’t you think it must be terrible to fight on a beautiful day? It could not be such a heart-break in winter, but when the sun puts light into everything— Wouldn’t you think they’d want to say, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’?”

“Yes,” said Mageila, feeling the same as when she looked at old Brin.

“And yet,” mused Mrs. Kirke, “now that things have got so far, competitive strength is the only thing to cope with the Nazis.”

Mageila looked at the sea, remindful of terrible power. “Strength does not matter much when the thing is on,” she muttered. “All drown together.”

“You uncomfortable girl,” complained Mrs. Kirke; but she reached over, touching Mageila’s knee. “You’re not at all. You’re infinite comfort. I did not imagine there were girls like you in the world.”

“Thank you,” said Mageila in her most tongue-tied voice.

Her life had not prepared her for graceful compliments, and they came as agreeable surprises. When her father had praised her physical appearance, her mother had felt it necessary to belittle it. It had been the same when Trevor lapsed into long-looking, and once on that last magical day he had made a gesture as if impelled to touch her before people. And he had whispered that he would be dead before he was tired of watching her face. Such things made her feel infinitely stronger in life.

“This mad world!” muttered Mrs. Kirke, relaxing again on the beach. “I wish I could go to sleep. I had none last night.”

“I know,” said Mageila slowly. “I heard.”

“You shouldn’t. You must go to sleep.”

“I wanted to help.”

“You can’t do that,” said Mrs. Kirke firmly. “What goes on is not fit for a girl in charge of a child.”

“It would not hurt me if I could help. I would not mind.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Kirke gratefully. Then she became restless, disturbing the stones at her feet. “He’s always worse at night—the twitching and the colic—and sometimes he cries because he’s beyond help, and the flesh is so thin— The restlessness is terrible, and the dose he needs has become poisonous. Then he forgets and puts his cigarettes any place, and though we give him a soup-plate for the ashes he burns everything.”

Now the stones rattled with disquiet as Mrs. Kirke’s head burrowed in her arm and her voice rising, struck hardly at Mageila’s sensitivity. “He’s such a wound to my eyes, such a torment to my spirit. To have to see, to have to hear—feeling the decay in yourself. I feel tainted—I can’t bear to look at strong light. I feel—”

An arched protesting body made the round stones sound full of sharp edges. The beach became jagged as if the sea had not smoothed them at all. Mageila felt attacked, seeing the spruce trees like green spear-heads against blue space and the coast bristling with granite knives. It was impossible to suggest distraction; so she said nothing, remembering her misery at the way her Aunt Molly had urged her towards strong sensible things when she felt incapable of lifting a finger. She looked sombrely at the sea, knowing there was no full compensation for what it had done to her. No matter how much her heart was filled, there would always be a cold door open only to the sea. She felt it opening then; but she sat like a wax image, clutching her chilling hands.

When silence shouted louder than words, Mrs. Kirke looked up with quick comprehension. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I reminded you. One is always so selfish. No trouble but one’s own.”

“I’m all right,” said Mageila through stiff lips, but Mrs. Kirke gave her skirt a protesting tug.

“Of course you’re not. I burden you. Burden me. Say it out loud. It’s much better.”

Mageila felt that the thought of another had drawn Mrs. Kirke out of herself, so to keep her that way she tried to put the indescribable into words. “It was what you said about decay going into yourself. When you live close to the sea, things get washed up different from the way they fell in. I’ve had such thoughts of them— Grandpa never told me, and I did not ask; but I’m sure a lot of them were washed up.”

Mrs. Kirke sat up, all wiry spine. “It would not be any worse than the earth.”

“I know, and I’m not afraid of the earth. I used to help a woman dig a garden.”

Mrs. Kirke looked interested. “Put your foot at the end of a fork, and dig in manure? Not the kind that comes in boxes.”

“No,” denied Mageila strongly. “This woman says you give back to the earth what comes from it.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Kirke with a rising mood. “I approve of dung-farmers. Thank God reality is never refined. Think of the manure nourishing the rose. And, as Havelock Ellis says, somebody kneels at your feet and kisses your hand—and he’s not put off by what the hand has to do. There’s nothing very grand about anything—nothing really ideal for more than a minute.”

“Perhaps it should be that way,” said Mageila slowly. “Perhaps we’re intended to be warm with the sun, cold with the snow, and—”

“And tightened up with the wind,” said Mrs. Kirke viciously. “But today is nice.”

“Then,” said Mageila softly, “forget your husband and talk about your sons.”

“Shall I tell you they both went to Canadian schools and belonged to a cadet-corps associated with the air force?” asked Mrs. Kirke tartly.

“No, tell me what they’re like with you. Are they tall? Are they thin?”

“You’re talking as if I was Patricia,” mocked Mrs. Kirke, “but I’ll fall because I want to. Do you really want to hear or are you being polite?”

“I want to hear. I like their photographs. Talk about them, and kick away the rest as Patricia kicks away a ball.”

“Is that how it’s done?” asked Mrs. Kirke curiously.

“I don’t know,” said Mageila slowly. “I only know there are times when the mind clasps one thing.”

“Some people’s minds,” said Mrs. Kirke. “Most women’s minds are a muddle. You can be neck-high in tragedy and somebody says the refrigerator has gone off, mum, I left on the electric-iron, the dish came apart in me hand, sure the cat ate that bit of left-over chicken.”

Mageila laughed at the light derisive production of Moira Brophy and a voice changing to appreciation in the next breath.

“Dear Moira Brophy, she’s a tower of strength! Nothing upsets her, but sometimes I think she’s bad for my husband. When he’s very violent, he can’t bear the sight of me because I’m linked with his failure. Then Moira takes charge and I suspect her of helping him with his doses. She’s the sort who would not dream of measuring, and if it would help him she would give him a nice drop, mum, rather than bother about grains. She’ll probably end by being a compassionate murderer, though—” Mrs. Kirke troubled the stones again, sighing unhappily.

“Write a letter to your sons.”

“I haven’t any paper and I’m too tired.”

“Then think of them doing something, perhaps having a swim,” suggested Mageila patiently. “All seas join together and that means they are part of our sea. They must be doing something like that.”

“Probably!” Mrs. Kirke sighed maternally. “How I wish they were little boys again, with filthy pockets and earth in their hair!”

“Yes,” said Mageila dreamily, “I always thought boys smelt as if they’d been digging worms or bailing out a boat—a little bit of bilge about them.”

“Quite! Mine dearly loved the ships. I could never keep them off the wharves, and they liked to go to the dry-dock to see the bottom of a ship. And they always wanted to know about brigantines and barquentines. I’m afraid I let them down over mizzens; but they were never contemptuous, the poor sweets. They would go fishing to catch a pink trout for my breakfast, and they often brought it home in their pockets; and they went frogging with rusty tin cans and made the frogs hop like tiddlywinks. If I could only think of them with nothing more destructive in their hands than a fishing-rod—”

Mageila listened to a voice shaded with joy and fear, and when it grew dreamy she sat infinitely quiet, making a sign to Patricia not to approach, and the child increased her own interest in white stones by tiptoeing round to find them.

Mrs. Kirke’s voice trailed off and her eyes closed as she sighed in a sagging way, pressing the stones to rest. When sleep came to her, Mageila knew it by the faintest click of rings falling on stones. Glancing sideways in a slow unstabbing way, she saw an emptying face with a mouth pushed forward as if unfinished with love. From the feeling of her own dedicated lips Mageila thought of the millions of kisses men would carry to war. If they went to the bone they must sweeten the earth should the men become dust. Remembering something special about bones, she thought of Trevor’s kinship with herself and his odd sensitivity towards Newfoundland. She saw him vividly. He was smiling, leaning on the rail of the Assou, and it was one of the times when his eyes could bear all the light. He said he understood for the first time a Gothic tale about a man who felt he could really love a girl could he have her in her beautiful bones. And when he said it he made her feel delicately conscious of her flesh.

Patricia called impatiently and Mageila rose with one gesture, knowing the more naturally she walked the less she would wake. Used to a beach, she could tread without crashing the stones; and soon she had the child out of earshot of her mother, walking with her over curves and dips like a cobbled sea. Remembering her own childhood beside sea and stone, she knew past states could never be recaptured. Trevor was beside her, speaking of more complex living. She remembered a coast like bare bones, changing suddenly as if trees and grass thickened to give it flesh.

In the public library Mageila saw a title, It Walks by Night. Immediately she applied the words to the Kirke house. High up in the attic she was isolated beside the child to interpret as she liked. Disturbance did not keep her awake unless she willed it that way. When she concentrated on sleep she could switch her mind on one image, command cosiness and content, and drop into darkness. But many nights she identified herself inactively with the torment below. She thought decay always made a faint blue breath in the house. In spite of good furniture, clean fabrics, and fresh paint, at night the breath was intensified. Neither open windows nor disinfectant could annihilate the breath of diseased kidneys, unsound bones, stale smoke, or old Brin’s unwholesome age. Because it was in her to identify human states with their surroundings, she felt walls could not settle, floors could not rest, and light flashed colour awake. Everything in the world needed spells of darkness, and the Kirke house was never soothed.

Nobody explained what went on, but there were ordinary human voices overlaid with one running high and thin with torment or dragging along dropping to death. There would be slumps and spurts of energy crashing through more than one room. There would be indications that Mr. Kirke was critically ill, and doctors came and went. There would be the smell of scorching and of a burnt hole extending itself, and a sense of Moira’s going round and round with her hands up and her nose down. And always her voice would seem to be curtseying to the floor, as if she was delighted to be a servant at any hour of the night. Sometimes when Mr. Kirke’s voice became high and energetic there would be the sound of the front door opening, of a starting car, and then Mageila might learn in the morning that Mrs. Kirke had driven her husband fastly and furiously, at his demand, until she was forced to return from exhaustion. Then Moira would receive them, disposing of them according to their needs. The maid, who slept in a room between her master and mistress, was like a policeman, continually separating disorder from order.

And sometimes Mageila and the child would wake to a house like a sun-lit vault, get ready, and go out past uneasy doors. They knew that Moira would poke out a rough black head and give them directions and that old Brin would unclose milky eyes, make an attempt to follow, and flop down again, sighing in a way that said he had lost much sleep. Mageila marvelled at the way Brin clung to decayed heels. It was as if the dog remembered his master’s heyday—his shooting days when both, behaving in the clear autumn way, had ranged vigorously over ground rich with berries and scarlet leaves. Gentle and devoted to the women, polite as an old human being, Brin was truly faithful to his master.

Mageila was supposed to have regular time for herself, but the house was so tormented that she often stayed to release Mrs. Kirke and Moira from the responsibility of keeping the child’s quarters inviolate. She insisted on rigid escort for Patricia because she had learned there were startling things the child might have seen. When she came and went by herself they treated her as an equal who could bear what they did, and often as she walked on the landing her eyes glazed in an effort to destroy their own sight. Antisocial as he was, Mr. Kirke lived with no connection between privacy and his body. It was enough for Mageila to see his yellow skull on the pillow; but once when he glimpsed her some strange effect from her passing made him fling the clothes from his terrible body, shocking her until her knees threatened collapse. She remembered letters from her sisters saying that a nurse could get used to anything and that the worst horrors became part of work. One of them had made a comment that a nurse came to a point in her training when she could get hard and common, but the right sort never did. After experiencing some of the things a nurse might have to see, Mageila warmed to her sisters and wrote with a more sympathetic pen.

In her spare time she seemed to write a lot of letters, enjoying them as a new experience in her life. Letters from her aunts urged her to make contacts with people they knew in town. After reproaching her for not knowing her own mind from one minute to another, her Aunt Molly gave her good advice: young girls could not be too careful. Her Aunt Beatie wrote not to quench the spirit, to go and find it in the United Church, and to introduce herself to the minister by naming her Uncle Leander. They had met in Conference—the minister might invite her to the parsonage if she made herself agreeable and took a Sunday-school class. Her grandfather wrote, saying he was happy about her if she was happy about herself. He liked young people around him, so he supposed she did too. If Mrs. Kirke was taking a long drive any day he would be glad to receive her in Ship-Haven; but, her Aunt Molly being as she was, she had better send a message first, because Molly did not know how to be a hostess without the best china or the head off a bigger hen. He knew all about the Kirkes. They had too much money and too much time on their hands. They had been good sports, but he felt like the man who said sport was for people who had nothing to do and less to think about. Was she eating three square meals a day and not filling up her stomach with belly-wash? The uncles did not write at all.

Feeling the pleasure in receiving and writing letters, she thought how easy it would be to write to Trevor every day. She could say what she thought, felt, and did, and not have to consider various prejudices. How tell her Aunt Molly she did know her own mind, and her Aunt Beatie that she had no wish to quench the spirit—that it was near in many forms and memories, that she had only to look at the sea to think of Mrs. Slater serene beside waves and billows—but that she was tired of red plush and the once-a-week smell of the United Church. How explain to an ardent Methodist that she had found a Gothic cathedral, open all day, where she could sit and see stone so soaring and smooth that it looked like a row of natural arches worn by a soothing sea? Only her grandfather would understand if she wrote and asked: did he mind, but some belly-wash was very pleasant.

During some evenings of prolonged daylight, when Patricia was in bed, Mageila sat looking over the child’s clothes, dividing her attention between work and the world from the height of the gable window. There would be a water-sound in the trees, and clatter from the street that made her look out over the high board-fence to where cars flashed by in colourful streaks. But she thought the people who trudged home from open country looked poor; and the boys and girls walking towards it seemed unromantic, though their yearning shoulders made her sympathize with ardour under dejected clothes. It was the homing children who caused her oft-repeated gesture of tilting her head for her eyes to take back their tears. Big children escorted little children; short legs could not keep up with long legs, and the toddlers, crying with the weight of a day, scuffed or spurted as the bigger ones jerked, resenting the load on themselves. The hot-looking clasped hands and the strain of extended arms brought moments when she implored God to be more than He was.

Nearer view showed the Kirke relatives, on both sides, arriving to condole or condemn. They did not seem to need prayers. Visits were opulent, accompanied by agreeable sounds of tires crunching the gravel and halting with good mechanical manners. Prosperous men opened doors for women whose heads were curled and whose feet winced from the ground in high-heeled pain. The slender look of shoes under heavy bodies always made Mageila extend her toes fanwise, exulting in unsqueezed comfort. The women went indoors at once, as if they would not risk their modish hair in the ever-present wind. Comfortably cropped, with nothing to blow around but ears, the men forgathered in the sprawling front garden, where unstaked fox-gloves looked as tall as themselves. It was easy to hear what they said. Opinion was definite, without the modulation of the English voice Mageila had learned to love through Trevor. The male relatives talked robustly, deploring the state of Newfoundland, the decline of her natural resources, and the narrow vision of English government at home and abroad. They regretted the fair weather, declaring it good for the crops but damn bad for the fish. Then they would predict blue ruin near and far, in the excessively cheerful voices of men whose minds visualized ruin for others than themselves. Observing from the attic window, Mageila thought the men were the town editions of what her people represented in the outports. The difference was, she decided slowly, that harder living had kept her people from the forward bulges of prosperity. In contrast to the men the women were compressed by good corseting, and weight took a backward curve.

In both clans Mr. and Mrs. Kirke were the only wasted members, and Mageila gathered it was one of the reasons why Mrs. Kirke’s sister, Pauline, disapproved of her strongly. Mrs. Langley was a Colonial who wished to be English, a woman who was resentful that incessant good living would not keep her slim, a wife and mother who desired every preferment for her own family. Having escorted Patricia to all their homes, Mageila could identify every one. She knew the men to be genial, and the women grand with the effort of being something they were not. Mrs. Langley was the grandest of all. At a children’s party she had been obviously concerned about whether Mageila should sit with the mothers or be sent to the kitchen with the maids; and when Mageila suggested she would go for a walk and call for Patricia later, Mrs. Langley was both relieved and annoyed.

Wider and more various contacts told Mageila there were people to whom she had nothing to say. If she had dwelt on it, her instinctive dislike of Mrs. Langley would have been aggravated by the open way she criticized Mrs. Kirke. She complained that her sister occupied one of the few Newfoundland houses with true architecture, but as she never entertained it should be sold to one of the relatives who did. Whenever she arrived Mageila could look down at a matron with a girlish hair-dressing and pastel shades over a body better fitted for navy blue. When she left she knew Mrs. Kirke would be like a woman in a hair-shirt, reporting with the rough edge of her tongue that Pauline had taken to pastel shades only since the royal visit, that she would never be satisfied until she had a fanlight over her door, etc., etc. But it was Mrs. Langley who reported to Mrs. Kirke that young Trevor Morgan had sat next to her at a dinner, and he seemed to have become an ardent Newfoundlander all at once. Mageila was told, and though the information was exciting it was only a corroboration of the feelings she had of his nearness.

If Mrs. Kirke’s sister upset her, Mrs. Kirke senior plagued her son. Worldly, hale, in her late seventies, she would arrive with an air of intense martyrdom, rake the sprawling garden with disapproval, sweep through the pilasters, and ask for her son in a voice balancing between duty and distaste. Sick, secretive, antisocial, Mr. Kirke would be invaded with resultant misery all round. Then the old woman would depart, tragically, haughtily, leaving Moira to cope with effects. Mageila would hear her sweet lilting voice running on, “now be a good gintleman and quiet yourself.” If Mrs. Kirke’s people were near, there would be a cleavage between the families. Mrs. Kirke’s would demand that the invalid be shipped away to a home in Canada or the United States; Mr. Kirke’s called the idea an outrage; and when contention ran high Moira would go towards them pushing up her fringe, agreeing with everything everyone said, whispering in soft sibilance that many a man had two childhoods—the most temperate came to the weakest end, and but for the grace of God they might be in the same sad state.

Moira could soothe them all, let the men tease her about taking the dye, while she shepherded them in and out, bringing whiskey or tea and making them feel there was no tragedy anywhere except in themselves. Under her protection the self-destroying invalid was humanized, and one by one the men would steal upstairs, or out to the dark garden, to see him and make him feel, in the way of men, that his vice was not as bad as the women made out.

On the night of August 24 he was forgotten for world news. The family bunched in front of the radio, and up two flights of stairs Mageila heard the men’s voices stupefied with astonishment over the Russo-German Pact of nonaggression; they spoke as if the worst had arrived when Communist shook hands with Nazi. Disturbance was communicated to Mr. Kirke, and reminders of a war where he had started his vices. Later the house seethed with disturbance. Mrs. Kirke lost all restraint in dealing with her husband, and from what Mageila heard it had shocking results. There were high-pitched voices, with Mr. Kirke’s rising to a scream—the sound of Moira’s drowned between them—followed by one sobbing collapse, a wild opening and shutting of a door, telephoning, other arrivals and departures, and the beginning of jagged peace.

Shutting Patricia’s door, Mageila sat up in readiness for the tragedy she felt must come; but, true to her orders, she refrained from intrusion until she was called. It was four o’clock when Moira appeared on the upper landing. Seeming part of her chair, Mageila stared—marvelling that a face could be so completely unchanged after all that.

“What was it? Is it over?” she ventured to ask.

Moira stood, pushing up her stiff black hair, speaking as if her subject was the core of common-place conversation. “ ’Twas them Russians that upset her, and the men’s talk about war. She controls herself well when he’s bad, because the doctor says she must do the controlling or put him away; and there’s nothing but the lunatic-asylum, and that’s no place for the poor man. He raised his hands to her and she took on; but I told her, Miss, he didn’t know what he was doing, and not to mind a few bruises. And she said it was the bruise to her spirit; but I told her again, Miss, that they don’t show on the outside, and I’d ring up the beauty-parlour in the morning and she’d feel better after a good greasing. She said I was an insensitive fool, and she shut the door in my face; but I listened outside, and I heard her breaking her heart. She needs sleep and she won’t take anything on account—”

“No,” agreed Mageila, sitting forward in her chair.

“There’s times everything has its uses,” said Moira with sweet reason. “So I called to her and said I’d heat her a drop of milk and rum. Rum is muddling, Miss, and many a time I’ve seen it drown the mischief in a man.”

“No,” said Mageila distastefully, thinking of Pea-Pea Peter’s smell, “don’t give her anything to drink.”

“You haven’t undressed, Miss,” said Moira, noticing it for the first time.

“No, is he—”

“Oh, yes, Miss, he’s quiet now—though God knows if he’ll wake, because they say he’s taking poisonous doses. But before he went off I gave him a good glass of whiskey. If you’d go down and rub her head a bit—”

“Yes,” said Mageila, too numb with sitting to have thought of it herself.

She rose, feeling stiff; but she crept into the bath-room and wakened herself with cold water. Suddenly she felt whole, able to descend and venture past a closed door.

With a concentrated heart and a will to help, Mageila entered a room full of grey dawn and of mahogany shining with higher lights. She dared advance, seeing Mrs. Kirke at the window with her brow pressed against the pane as if it was the one cool spot in fever.

Mrs. Kirke turned, standing stock-still like a thin dreary woman making a stone statue of herself, and Mageila crept forward with a wish to ease that drained immobility.

“Gracious!” said Mrs. Kirke, easing it sharply herself. “I thought you were one of the cats. Your eyes— How odd—” There was a hint of hysteria and a rigor shaking exhausted flesh.

“You must lie down and go to sleep.”

“Sleep!” Mrs. Kirke used the word as if it was a precious possession someone had stolen away. “If I could, if I could!” she moaned, accepting Mageila’s appearance as if it was beyond question.

“You can,” said Mageila peacefully. “You can. Look at me, Mrs. Kirke. I know you can go to sleep. Lie down.”

Mrs. Kirke stared with fixed red-rimmed eyes. “Yes, perhaps I will,” she said, vaguely capitulating and throwing herself in a thin prone line on the bed. But the upper part of her body shook with taut laughter for no reason at all. “Imagine! I thought you were the cat.”

Mageila’s voice was as portentous as the drones in kettles. “You’re going to sleep . . . you’re going to sleep . . . everyone is asleep now.”

She knelt by the bed, burying her fingers in dry brown hair—using them in a circular motion as she thought of herself and Mrs. Kirke like round stones falling into the sea and making so many widening circles that they covered all the waters of the globe.

“Sleep,” she muttered, dropping her brow against the edge of the narrow unmarried-looking bed.

Like independent entities her hands went on until they slept from self-hypnotism. She did not know when Mrs. Kirke slept because she herself slept, crumpled against the bed, and when she woke her hands were still making a contact with brittle hair. Cautiously she looked round until she saw a clock reporting seven-thirty. She reached the door on her hands and knees, gaining the landing like a departing cat. Then she stood upright, with her nostrils disliking the faint blue tinge so often in the house. All the doors were sealed and Mr. Kirke’s gave her the feeling of a tomb, making her sure that when she passed his key-hole she would get a breath of decay. She risked it when she saw old Brin sleeping there on a mat, for she found it impossible not to touch him with solicitous hands. Then she regretted her inconsiderate waking. Showing the whites of his eyes, Brin sighed and stretched stiffly—making a feeble effort to respond to human affection.

“Shushh, go to sleep, Brin,” she said, laying her hands across his milky eyes; and the old dog sagged, glad to be let off from waking.

Brin was upsetting, pointing one way; but that morning she felt death would be his friend. At the upper window she stood looking down at the mountain-ash, surprised that the berries were getting red. Then she heard a sound in Patricia’s room and, entering, she saw the child sitting up, with brown eyes full of the morning.

At three o’clock that afternoon Mageila went out alone, gratefully dismissed by Mrs. Kirke for the rest of the day. The feeling of no responsibility was a soothing joy, leaving her with a slow-motion sense and a vision that could fall and stay where it willed. Her eyes did not have to stab or be everywhere for Patricia. Her ears were not crowded with Mr. and Mrs. Kirke, and her nose was empty of the faint foulness of a seemingly fresh house. She was an entity, no longer in diffusion. Externally her arms and legs felt free and long, and her hands flexible and smooth. With the sudden relaxation she wondered if her mouth was becoming a little loose. It was her way to move slowly in joy. What would she do? As various prospects trailed suggestively through her mind, she knew she would do none of them. Natural instinct made her turn to where the stone tower stood solidly against vague opalescence. It was a Mecca, the tip of a hill which, once attained, would reveal sea-space she could not live without.

Slowly she left Humphrey-Gilbert Road, entering a small green park where afternoon shadows were short on the grass. There were children in shabby prams and on the ground, slack old men on benches, and loutish young men sprawled on the grass as if oppressed with unemployment. “They will have work if there’s war,” she thought, with slight break of calm; but desirously she dismissed disturbing thoughts for the outer sight of yellow flowers, high-blown dahlias, gladioli, and a bed of phlox as round as a crimson pond. She reached the edge of the town and began to climb one of the harbour-hills, turning continually to look at the shipping—intensified by a British cruiser slanting aft against another hill. Imagination, clouded with the times, changed it suddenly into a monster belching smoke and death. Further disturbing thought made her continue with eyes front, for fear she might be punished by too much turning.

When her climb was over and she had attained the vision, she stood with the wind blowing round her; but she did not clutch her hat or bend double. Her hair was long—all the same length—and her hat was snug. Neither was the wind inquisitive, full of cold fingers plucking warmth from the flesh. She stood happily, far-gazing, realizing there were deep impersonal joys no calamity could take away. When she stirred she walked sideways, unmindful of direction but sure of grass by the easy tread of her feet.

Not since the last day on the Assou had she experienced such a sense of quiet rapture, even to the point of imagining herself in her squirrel coat with its shoulder fur recording delicate contact with another. It was exhilarating to feel so companioned on what seemed merely a taller deck above more gleaming sea. Then her feet came to the end of grass and from too exalted gazing she stumbled on stones, doubling up, as a body came between herself and the sky, with arms diving strongly under her own. She gasped, struggling like a person between a vague sweet dream and a rugged reality. Neither was full awakening accomplished when she glimpsed a pair of dark glasses at the end of a sun-burnt hand.

“Mageila,” challenged a well-remembered voice in its deepest tones.

It was too much for a girl convinced that joy lay behind her. She slithered against tweed until arms and a pair of lips challenged her body to remember its blood and bones.

“T-Trevor,” she stammered in her most tongue-tied voice, as quicker words stampeded her ears.

“I knew I’d find you,” he said, an inch away from her lips. “My waste-paper basket is full of unfinished letters. I started one to your grandfather, but it seemed useless. Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything until I hear from England.” . . . His voice trailed away, but Mageila had heard nothing but the sound of a voice. “Mageila,” he whispered; and, conscious of a tremor in his limbs, she stood more firmly on her own feet.

With a deep-toned imperviousness to onlookers they were swept together, standing silently embraced with joined lips resting, until two pairs of eyes denied the dazzling day. The dark tower hid them, and they took it for granted that the men inside were occupied with their affairs—direction-finding, signalling, scanning the sea for ships that must split the horizon. Through a prolonged embrace Mageila found it impossible to think, and when she did she said the first thing that came into her head.

“Trevor, don’t you work? What are you doing up here in the day?”

His unrestrained laughter made a ho-ho roll down the hills. “Work? Of course I work, with overtime thrown in. It’s a half-day. Darling,” he said with intense irrelevance, “I’m so happy to find you. I was sure I’d remembered your face, but I know now my mind held a ghost. Kiss me again before those fellows in the tower turn their telescopes on us, and they bring us so near I’d feel conscious— I’ve missed you so terribly. Imagine thinking I could live without you! I’ve got something to tell you, but first tell me all about yourself. What you’re doing here. Why you’re in white when I think of you in grey.”

“Grandpa,” she said in a deep voice. “When we landed in town he made me buy white, with a red belt to liven me up.”

“Like the red roofs in a picture,” he said, vaguely attentive to her words. “You must have a lot to tell me.” He held her back, staring at her with warm brown eyes. “You look—”

“What?” she asked gravely.

“More grown up, more poised, and very well indeed.”

“I am well.”

“You must tell me everything.”

In greater sanity Mageila stood back, surveying the wide spaces that might hold secret eyes. “It will take a long time and I have a slow voice. Mama always finished my sentences for me.”

He smiled. “I’m prepared to wait. Let’s find a flat rock and sit down.”

“There’s a cannon over there I sit on.”

“How unlike you to sit on a cannon,” he said, beginning to walk towards it, holding her hand.

“It fought the French,” she said regretfully.

“Did it? We’re very matey now. I try not to think of war and I’ve stopped listening to the wireless. My chief encourages me. He says if it comes it will be a comfortable sit-down war, stagnation behind concrete, with the bully beef on ice. New style, I suppose.” Talking in his happiest vein, he drew her down on the recumbent cannon—from where they could see the town, the harbour, and the British cruiser. “Three cheers for the Navy,” he said, waving his hand to the sleek grey ship. “I know some fellows in that ward-room. The first evening after Labrador there was a dance on board, and the quarter-deck looked like anything but war. The passage-ways were made of bunting, with ladies here and gentlemen there.”

Mageila felt a stab of pain that might settle into an enduring ache. Now that he was near he would be doing interesting things that would leave her out. She remembered women like Mrs. Langley who snubbed working-girls; but he gave her little time for reflection, coming back to her with brown eyes devouring her face. His shoulders were hunched and he looked dark, sleek, and well, making her experience the woman’s wish that he might be unfit for war.

“Begin,” he commanded. “From the place where I left you in the fog before I went on to Nain. Why I did I don’t know. It was more rock, more Mission, more Eskimos, and more fly-blackened dogs. But we had an amazing skipper. His navigation was something to write home about. He never looked at a sextant. He searched for a ‘foxy rock’ and turned north.”

“That’s Newfoundland.”

“Now.”

Mageila sat with her hands palm-up in her lap, and by question and contact he stimulated her fluency. When she got to Mrs. Kirke he said at once, “yes, I know her. A tormented-looking woman with a smile to balance her tongue.” When she hesitated over Mr. Kirke he said for her, “don’t be loyal, darling; I’ve seen him. They say he drugs. They’re a big family with too much money and very little discipline.”

When she got to old Brin he took her hand and held it, and he smiled over Patricia’s interest in French prayers.

“Nice child?” he asked, with amused brown eyes.

“Yes,” she said definitely. “There’s lots to do, but I enjoy it.”

There was a meditative silence as he digested her present life. “How did you feel about me?” he asked slowly.

“In a dream, I think,” she confessed. “I seemed to stay in one place. Then I thought being with a child would make me feel young.”

“I know, darling; you needn’t explain. And somehow you look both younger and older.” After another meditative silence he questioned her with concern. “Is it hard, difficult, with that man around?”

Mageila hesitated again, unwilling to tell Mrs. Kirke’s worst secrets even to Trevor. “I’m upstairs. I only hear,” was all that she said.

He looked at her with intense comprehension. “You could say a lot more, I think.”

Mageila answered, slowly irrelevant. “She has a terrible life, but there’s no divorce in this country.”

His brown eyes probed her with a different interest. “That’s an advance for you. Your attitude about divorce worried me considerably.”

“I hadn’t thought. You have to see to understand. Now I know no one can make a sacrament by calling it one.”

“That’s satisfactory,” he said ambiguously.

There was a long silence, dreamy on her part and deeply reflective on his, before he began to speak with a portent that made her stare at him with hypnotized eyes.

“This is my story. After you went I had time to think. The sea had a lop and the land looked hungrier than ever. But it looked so abiding that I felt influenced by your Biblical similes. I remembered that man’s life was as grass. I asked myself what I valued, and if I was going to be the traditional official with no initiative. Civil-service training inclines a man to think time does not matter. When we were anchored at Nain I wrote to my wife. It was quite direct and uncomplicated, and I asked her to give me a divorce. I can’t think of a reason on earth why she would refuse. Now I’m waiting to hear and—”

Mageila was staring like a person asked to examine something her eyes could not credit.

“Then,” he said softly and directly, “I was going to find you, and ask you to wait and marry me when the decree was made absolute.”

Surprised with the incredible, Mageila could not answer. Neither could she go on looking at his face and think coherently. Almost with physical force she dragged her eyes away, dropping her head in her hands and withdrawing to darkness. He was offering her a future when she could not credit a future, and though his nearness brought intense warmth it felt no nearer than the warmth of the sun. Hard surroundings and sorrow had slowed her, making it difficult to grasp fugitive things. Uncertainly she raised her head, and at once her eyes saw the sleek lines of the cruiser slanting harmoniously aft.

“Look,” she said at once. “That ship! You came back and went there to dance. I know nothing of that kind of life. I would not fit.”

“Mageila!” His voice was stern, with a touch of irritation. “I can’t bear you to be humble. It jars on me. I’ve had a large dose of overcivilized women. I forbid you to belittle yourself.”

“I don’t belong,” she decided with some stubbornness.

“Look at me.” She did, dissipating all his arguments, making him gesture despairingly. “Don’t say you feel you don’t belong,” he muttered.

She shook her head as a sweet grave smile warmed her mouth. “I could not feel that about you. But a life—”

“Then,” he said quickly and gladly, “that’s enough. You would feel at home in England because I would be there. At home in France because you’re half-French.”

“The sea—” she muttered.

“My dear, all the sea in the world is not round Newfoundland.”

“I know, but what I had went back to Newfoundland sea.”

He leaned forward, putting persuasive arms around her. “Mageila, you would not be morbid?” Then he smiled with rueful lips and eyes. “I think I was overconfident. I thought when I found you you’d say at once in that rich voice of yours, ‘yes, thank you, Trevor, I will. I was sure you loved me.’ ”

“I do,” she said, so deeply that his arms made a circle round her.

“Then why—”

“I don’t know. I would have to get used to it. You helped so much, but since it happened I’ve felt so stripped—”

One hand pressed her head into his shoulder. “I hate to hear you talk like that. Think of the way I love you.” Resentfully his dark eyes encompassed the great area of land, sea, and sky. “Mageila, let’s walk down the cliffs to the sea. This place is not very private.”

“Yes,” she agreed eagerly.

“How much time have you got off from your place?” he asked, with a smile she did not see.

“Until eleven.”

“Darling, will she let me call on the help?”

Mageila gave a little laugh. “Yes, I think she’d like it.”

“Then when we get back we’ll walk right in and ask her to befriend us. I know her. But first we’ll have dinner, very properly, where your grandfather would approve. It seems planned that I meet you in high places.”

Mageila drew back to look in his face. “You’re making all the plans. You’re so quick. I’m slow.”

“I know. Beautifully slow. Don’t you like them?”

“Yes.” She sat silently considering his face, and he grew distracted staring into her own.

“You have divine and divining eyes, Mageila.”

“Trevor, I can’t feel myself married to you; but I know I would like it.”

“Thank you, darling. I know that feeling; I had it after my father was killed. I couldn’t imagine myself as an old man. It’s the times. In spite of myself I feel the future is in the distance, but we do know we’re together again.”

“Yes.” She looked round—at the town, the harbour, and then out to sea—before her eyes returned to his face, and as she considered him he spoke with soft threat.

“If you insist on sitting on a cannon I’ll have to keep my arms round you, and lots of people come here from town.”

Mageila stood up, looking down the terribly steep cliff. Then she stepped towards it and began to descend.

“I know,” he said plaintively, “you’ll go down like a mountain-goat and I’ll do the slipping and sliding.”

“I’ll help you,” she said with grave sweetness.

“Is a man a mouse?” he asked, crashing after her. “Take me to a place where we’re the only two people in the world.”

“Down to the sea,” she said with infinite content.

Going confidently to Mrs. Kirke, Trevor talked while Mageila sat bemused as a Galatea between flesh and marble. An unusual pink flush in her white cheeks detained Trevor’s eyes, and forthrightly Mrs. Kirke told her she had been reborn since the morning. Mageila smiled, hardly hearing, feeling like the centre of widening circles. Sipping whiskey, Trevor and Mrs. Kirke set her apart as if their circle would not widen to include her there. Trevor was at the age when he could be charming to youth and maturity. Ease of manner, a grace of mind and speech, deep eyes, and a white smile in a dark face assured Mrs. Kirke of his capacity for friendship as well as love. From poisoned emotions she emerged wholesomely to acclaim something clear and yet obstructed. Immediately she was sympathetic, evincing protective womanhood in the way she sponsored Mageila. She told Trevor he had a government position; he could not anticipate his wife’s decision; he must be discreet. She warned him people were censorious, her own family were gossips, and her sister, Pauline, would exult in them as a choice bit of news. Then, mitigating the advice of restraint, she invited him to come and see Mageila when she was in and to take her car when they went out.

Under her persuasion, and inside a beautiful room, Mageila and Trevor felt they might achieve the comfort of houses instead of wind-blown decks and recumbent cannons. Visualizing a home of their own, they looked at each other as if they could no longer imagine a world not made for themselves. Intercepting the look, Mrs. Kirke was swamped by a resurgence of poison. Her eyes narrowed and her fingers curved like talons over radio-buttons. Trevor frowned, looking shattered; but Mageila rose like a girl moving in slow sweet time, saying good-night to Mrs. Kirke, giving Trevor her hand as if his deeper being was so much hers that she could leave him untormented in another world. Momentarily the two older persons came under her spell, and their poise was less than her own. She was beautifully and mysteriously whole, emanating a luminous containment that left Trevor staring at the door as if he would project himself outside.

Releasing pent torment, Mrs. Kirke claimed him sharply while she presented the state of things as they were with remorseless reality. Then she laughed, proceeding to present Mageila sweetly, connecting her with the life in the house, making neither little nor much of its unhappy atmosphere. Giving her intense awareness, Trevor returned the comprehension extended to himself; and when he stood up to thank her and go, he ended with quiet candour.

“I can see why Mageila stayed. There’s a similarity between you.”

Mrs. Kirke laughed, with her eyes slits of derision. “My dear man, don’t be fantastic. We’re not in the least alike.”

“You are,” he said, gently insistent. “You both like the truth as you see it, and you both face up to it.”

Mrs. Kirke relaxed her eyes to wide brown beauty. “I feel you’ve paid me a high compliment. So may I say something I would not say before her?”

“Yes,” he agreed at once.

Momentarily tentative, she examined her hands before venturing into speech; but when she did, it was without hesitancy.

“This is what I want to say. I’m an experienced woman and you’re not an inexperienced man. You can’t anticipate your wife’s decision. Mageila must be protected. She’s not the type to change or console herself with second-best, third-best, or make dreary compromises as I’ve done. And you?”

“Frequently,” he admitted tersely. “But it’s absurd to regret the medium of good lessons. I know what I don’t want.”

“Then you must know how hard it is to put to sleep what has been awakened.”

“Mageila’s heart is awakened,” he said slowly.

Mrs. Kirke clasped her hands in unconscious feminine appeal. “But as yet her sex is only partial. Until you know—it would be wrong— Forgive me,” she murmured, as he made a quick untranslatable gesture.

Trevor laughed shortly, meeting her eyes foursquare. “There’s nothing to forgive. Mageila makes me believe in morality. Love is not merely of bodies. I don’t lust after her. I want to marry her.”

Mrs. Kirke looked quite grateful. “I felt it was like that. Odd how disillusioned one can get through abnormality. She’s so young and—”

“I know that,” he said trenchantly. “And I’d spend myself protecting her; but unfortunately our outer lives are not our own, and sometimes I think she can muster strength I haven’t got.”

“I think she can,” agreed Mrs. Kirke, leaving him to long consideration before she said with detached irrelevance, “how lucky you are to live in a country with divorce!”

From under dark brows Trevor considered her with some compassion. “Yes, it seems incredible about this country.” Then he himself paused before returning some of her own candour. “Hasn’t it been a long time? Isn’t your husband very ill?”

“He is,” said Mrs. Kirke, “and I want him to die.”

Her face challenged him to be shocked, but his shoulders recorded their habitual shrug. “Why pretend? It’s refreshing to acknowledge the truth. I know you have two boys.” Her recoil made him halt, and continue in graver concern. “I realize your worries about them. Every woman must feel the same. We seem to be in an appalling mess, and I’m afraid it’s an important turn in history and many will have to make sacrifices for a new order. There will be martyrs in every country.”

“You?” whispered Mrs. Kirke with maternity in her voice.

“I more than think so.”

“Mageila will not be touched by war except through you,” she told him sensitively. “I think she’s an older soul than the girls who will switch from dancing and jazz to bandage-rolling and first-aid courses.”

Trevor frowned, looking round at the curtained windows as if he must probe what lay beyond them. “It’s a pretty fair world if we were only allowed to inhabit it,” he muttered.

“ ‘And only man is vile,’ ” quoted Mrs. Kirke bitterly. Then the sight of his face made her speak soothingly, with a woman’s quick change for a man’s dark dread. “You must hope for the best. Come and see her as often as you like. Patricia will love you. She’s become quite amenable without losing any of her spirit, and it’s because Mageila keeps her interested. Perhaps you’ll have luck. Your wife will give you a divorce, there will be no war, and common-sense will prevail.”

He smiled grimly. “Whose common-sense? If I was as optimistic as that, what would you do?”

“Bite your head off,” she confessed agreeably. “Well—the house is yours.”

Trevor seized her hand, holding it in warm appreciation. “If I could tell you how generous you are—”

“Do!” Mrs. Kirke laughed through soft full lips. “It’s quite charming to be appreciated. I loathe feeling like a hag.”

“You’re a very good-looking woman,” he said with deep sincerity. “And I hope you have more happiness with your sons.”

Mrs. Kirk winced. “I won’t, I’m afraid; but I’d like to join them before the deluge.”

“You will,” he said in a way that made Mrs. Kirke smile as if she must believe him.

And he left, having made a friend for himself and a stronger ally for Mageila.

If Mageila was saturated with the Biblical text, Mrs. Kirke inclined to the lay proverb. She said spitting against the wind meant spitting in her own face. Finding it impossible to be the ultimate vassal to ruin, an exchange was effected between herself and Moira. Mistress became maid, and maid attendant and provider for Mr. Kirke. The providing seemed odd to Mageila, like the grapes of gall and the poison of dragons; but Mrs. Kirke rang down the curtain on the travesty of meals in the dining-room with Moira present to take her plate, to fill her husband’s glass and empty his ash-tray. In the new arrangement Mrs. Kirke ate upstairs, and if Mr. Kirke ate at all only Moira knew. Those who saw her mysterious exits and entrances must conclude that he subsisted on drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Over a period of years there had been a diminution in his drinking. Now it flared out again; but, whatever the means, Moira achieved an amazing quiet in the house—though one glimpse of Mr. Kirke’s bed made Mageila wonder how, when wrinkled sheets spoke of nightmarish slumber.

Within the intensified rhythm of her own flesh she had jangled moments when she wondered if there was a low fall, too low for regeneration. Not to see the earth, not to smell its blossom, not to strengthen on a sunny day, seemed an incredible deprivation Mr. Kirke had made for himself. She had a sense of walking through cool brilliance from sun with more silver than gold. The rising tide of war and the hate in men were so fierce that love seemed distilled in the natural world. The blue of the sky was lightly veiled, the water was dappled with sheen, and the wind held a bit of every season’s breath. She heard an echo of Mrs. Slater’s profound voice—“He is the rock. His work is perfect”—and in elusive glimpses she imagined a love that could exist without returns; it made her wish that if Trevor must go he would go now, when the God of perfection was in her.

Time stood still, and even Trevor said they were not escaping but resting in life as it could be. They went out in Mrs. Kirke’s car and parked by the green-grey sea, and then again in the shadow of dark pointed trees mounting towards a lighter sky. They were quiet, holding hands, leaning with skimming flesh until love became more personal when they lost the outside world, closing their eyes, trying to comprehend human love through the urgency of lips.

Nothing would induce Mageila to accept too much privilege. Though it was generously offered she was so adamant in refusal that Mrs. Kirke called her a faithful mule, ringing up Trevor herself to come to nursery-tea. Even then, when Patricia was in bed, Mageila sewed and mended because it was part of her job, but the very peace and ordinariness of it affected Trevor like deep change. He relaxed in the only big chair amongst miniature furniture designed for a child, seeing dark distance through the gable window and the near sight of Mageila’s black head against a light wall. He was drawing its smooth distinction with an invisible pencil when the apricot-coloured kitten jumped on his knee. Soon its anxious mother, having tried to recall it, settled down, assured against hostility, and peace was so much part of the upper flat that old Brin began to whimper as if he was left out. There was a sound of scratching and scuffling followed by a sad plaint of animal frustration. Trevor returned the kitten to the floor and got to Brin first, helping him up, watching him settle stiffly and give grateful doglike glances from his milky eyes before his sighing nose relaxed on his paws.

Trevor watched Brin pitifully, while Mageila looked at Trevor—seeing him thin and sinewy inside a grey town-suit intensifying the darkness of his skin and hair. Something about his long hand extended towards Brin made her rise and put her arms around him and say she loved him. Moved by her spontaneity, he held her—asking why she loved him more at that moment. Her answer was vague, slowly irrelevant, saying she had meant to ask him before: did he go in for fashionable English sports depending on cruelty to animals? When he had assured her he did not, he recalled the day he had caught cod; and they talked of the past as if fearing the future. Then Brin woke up, trying to rise in his stiff way; and, with his arms still round Mageila, Trevor spoke gently, reproaching the old dog for caprice.

Mageila knew differently. From the lower landing rose stronger smells of smoke and spirits, and the sound of heavy shuffling as if the soul of a thin man weighted his feet. For a moment she hid her eyes on Trevor’s shoulder, trying to shut out the inner sight of Mr. Kirke; but she found it impossible not to remember a mouth like a caverned snarl. She dropped to the floor, wishing to detain Brin from such a master; but the old dog shivered, straining forward with milky eyes turned apologetically in her direction. Mageila let him go, helping him in his stiffness, lifting him when he slid on the stairs. The sight of Brin being carried like a baby affected Trevor oddly; and when Mageila returned to the upper landing he held her close, and they stood together, whispering, for fear of something they did not know.

“It’s wrong to detain that dog on earth, darling.”

“I know, but he’s such a gentleman. She won’t destroy his affection.”

“Does it mean anything to him?”

“No,” she said with sad honesty, “but it does to Brin.” His hand cupped the knot of her black hair, pressing her face against his in a way that diminished her mourning. “This is a sad house and it could have been beautiful. She’s nice, Patricia is lovely, and the sons look clean and fresh. Something is going to happen. I feel it. I ache for poor Brin.”

“ ‘And the worst friend and enemy is but death,’ ” he quoted soothingly.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Last night I dreamt of Brin. I was calling him and he would not come, and I thought, ‘how strange of him when he’s always so polite!’ Then I noticed he was running like a young dog and his hair looked brown and silky. I felt he might die today. If they could only die together!”

“She’d be glad to be let off, darling.”

“She would,” said Mageila deeply. “She would go to Canada then.”

“What would you do?” he asked with immediate anxiety. “The divorce will take a long time—I’ll have to go to England. Anything might happen, any day.” Above her head his dark eyes probed the unknown future. “If I could only hear! If I had an inkling! We don’t know anything,” he said restively.

“We know one thing,” she reminded him.

“We do,” he agreed in a relaxed voice. “We know that we love each other, and it sweetens the thought of the worst possible days.”

“I’m glad,” she whispered, “because it makes me feel very strong.”

Doing house-work distracted Mrs. Kirke, though she frequently became entangled in the cords of electric appliances. She said dusting was an art—a penetration of the roses, pineapples, and prince’s-feathers of wood. She dusted zealously, always listening to the news; but when Germany invaded Poland, Warsaw was bombed, and Britain and France sent an ultimatum to Germany, she acted as if she had never thought war was inevitable. She sat, with a duster in her hand, staring at the big grey bag of a vacuum-sweeper as if it was an object of fascinating repulsion. Mageila removed the duster and the sweeper, using both on the dining-room and drawing-room, going down on her knees to dust the staircase with its dark treads and white uprights, because Patricia had been dismissed to one of the many relatives by wish of the mother to detain Mageila for herself. Openly and desperately Mrs. Kirke said she would have got dead-drunk if her husband had not been at saturation point upstairs. But she chain-smoked, going back and forth from the house to the garden and hating both with equal strength. She snapped at Moira Brophy as if she was responsible for her husband’s condition, she accused Mageila of looking as calm as a cow, and when she had succeeded in upsetting everything she told Mageila to get ready for a walk. As Mrs. Kirke always drove, nothing would have signified greater unrest; but Mageila got ready, following every caprice, standing by but saying nothing, unable to realize war when the world looked so fair and her face retained a delicate sense of Trevor’s kisses.

A good walker, Mageila was rushed off her feet. Mrs. Kirke charged down the high hills of the tall town and gaining the water-front, where traffic seemed as accelerated as herself. Wheels and legs went faster, as if from an extra compulsion. The quality was in everyone hurrying on the sidewalks, and those restrained inside shops peered out with palpable longing to join the restless throng. Callous to danger, people crossed the roads with an unseeing air—as if they would fall in witless death. Mrs. Kirke was the worst offender, see-sawing from one side of the street to the other, finding it cold where the tall brick-shops hid the sun and warm where the sun made a glare. Then shadows won, and she walked the whole length of the water-front until they reached a place where music blared through a loud-speaker like a design for acutest memory. Some broadcaster seemed determined to intensify the moment by a presentation of other war-time music.

Walking in thin proud tension, Mrs. Kirke recaptured the past. She was a young tender girl watching boys marching with a beautiful rhythm of khaki-clad legs. She remembered her own feet responding to gay martial music; she heard herself singing, felt herself dancing and standing still in sudden sweet trances to be embraced by a young man creaking with a smart leather belt. She ached for the noncomprehension of her ardent youth and the terrible disillusion of subsequent years. In the beginning war had seemed like a design for better-looking men, a provider of escorts for callow girls. Now melody was like a corkscrew crucifying her ears. No woman should have to be blasted as a wife and mother. She came to the end of a block, catching a glimpse of the harbour-hills hiding the vaster sea. Urgently, violently, she tried to project her mind to Canada. What were her sons doing? Were they lifting their young heads, sniffing the smell of battle, consulting with each other as to what service they would join? Were they concocting a cable between them saying Canada would declare war when England did; they would not go to university; they would join the air force; they would be pilots, navigators, rear-gunners—anything that brought them into the highest exaltation of danger? She would send another cable forbidding them to do such a thing. What was the good of that? Children belonged to life, to their time, and not for a second to parent’s apron-strings. She would not risk losing them by anxious possession. Much better to break what heart she had left.

Mrs. Kirke breathed hard, compelled to walk in a more goaded way; but Mageila accompanied her shoulder to shoulder, with her features widening in sensitivity to pent misery. Giving her a sidelong glance, Mrs. Kirke saw the expression of concern on a face seemingly modelled in translucent marble. To her Mageila and her sons were the symbol of another generation walking blindly towards suffering. Like the travail of the second baby, the second death, the second disillusion, older people knew what they faced. Even Mageila’s natural shattering now seemed compensated by glamour. Though her wings had been clipped, her soaring qualities diminished, the look on her face said she could rise and fly, fugitively at least, by the miraculous power of love. The way everything could die, including love, made an ear-to-ear line of Mrs. Kirke’s throat. What difference, she asked herself, weeping bitterly in the inner core of her being. It would be total war and many would never reach the age of disillusion. Girls and boys would spread their wings once, and drop to the earth in death. Intensified maternity made her wish to rescue youth from such dire calamity. Without needing to be told she knew she was having a day’s hysteria; that she was strung, overstrained from the miserable years. Soon she would brace herself and settle back into the muted ruts of endurance. But not today. She had to walk off the devils of protest possessing her body.

Past war-music changed to a light inconsequential melody.

It was so gay, so witless, that Mrs. Kirke felt afflicted, standing suddenly still on the curb, tranced and trapped in a wide-open space.

“Let’s get out of here,” she muttered.

“Yes, let us go,” said Mageila in a way that soothed some of the hard effects of street-rattle.

“Come on then,” said Mrs. Kirke, standing stock-still.

“We’ll climb to the tower and look at the sea.”

“Damn you and your sea,” exploded Mrs. Kirke for no reason at all; but Mageila took no notice, guiding her across the street to the bottom of hills that threatened to wear down any mobile agony.

They would climb to the tower from the lowest level, even though it was a walk for strength rather than emotional energy. They started upward in mutual silence, but though Mageila’s sprang from consideration Mrs. Kirke’s was maintained from waning strength. They were in sight of the tower when a white line appeared round her red mouth, but Mageila made no comment, evinced no concern, until Mrs. Kirke began to stumble over loose stones as if she could no longer pick her way.

“Come and sit down,” said Mageila firmly.

Fresh and untired herself, she guided Mrs. Kirke forward; and as they came in sight of the cannon they saw Trevor standing and frowning in the direction of England. Mageila felt a hard personal pang, afraid of his tense looking but glad when he turned without the knowledge of her voice.

“I telephoned,” he muttered, accepting their presence as they accepted his.

Then he took in the situation at a glance, whipping tension from his voice, sending Mageila one deep look before abandoning her to give his attention to Mrs. Kirke. He made her sit down; he told her it was natural to go to pieces at first—he knew how she felt about her sons. Could he send a cable for her? When tears flooded Mrs. Kirke’s eyes and she made her face ugly with repression Trevor sat beside her, taking her hand, telling her to be sensible and cry out loud. There was plenty to cry about. Mageila would stay with her. He would go into the tower and get a glass of water, telephone for a taxi to take them back to town. They would go to his quarters and have a drink. They would stay for dinner. Mageila would telephone Moira. Patricia would stay where she was for the night, with other children, where nothing could startle her youth. They would all have a good wallow and then they would pull themselves together and face what had to be faced. Like a woman too spent to think for herself, Mrs. Kirke did what she was told. She let her tears relax and run down her face. She drank water and stopped crying, powdering her nose before she permitted herself to be placed in the car arriving perilously near the edge of the cliffs.

After the hard climb it was exquisite relief to descend easily, to reach a house where disharmony did not leap from the front door-step. When they stopped before a tall wooden hotel and followed Trevor to a sitting-room full of the square corners and the bleakness of bachelor-living, Mrs. Kirke dropped on a lounge and accepted every effect. Trevor went to a cabinet, beginning to prepare drinks, while Mageila walked to the window, interested and excited at being where Trevor lived but diverted at first by his view.

“You can see the harbour, and right out to sea,” she informed them with such ingenuous pleasure that Mrs. Kirke returned grimly to humour.

“That girl should have been born on a raft.”

They all laughed in a relieving way. Mrs. Kirke took a drink, draining it as if in need. Trevor sipped and sat down by Mageila, and they all stretched their legs in a long tired way. There was little conversation, no sounds but the unidentified ones from without and within the hotel. Mrs. Kirke showed an inclination to nod. Trevor stared at the carpet as if he was memorizing the pattern; but in spite of his preoccupation he reached for Mageila’s hand, making her remember personal living through the warm feeling of his flesh. Would his wife write now? Would she feel a divorce was unimportant when the world was going to war? Had she written already, expressing a peace-time point of view? Was she anywhere in this room with her husband?

Mageila’s eyes travelled slowly round the room, but she saw nothing except the impersonal suggestion of a man who had come to a new country with little more than himself.

On the third, England declared war on Germany. On the twelfth, Canada did too. And very soon Mrs. Kirke received a cable from her sons saying both were joining the air force. Her reaction was inconsistent. Instead of talking as if she had a goad on her mind she sat silently, with slack hands and veiled eyes, withdrawn to some world of her own.

Mageila substituted the dream for the reality, and in doing so she could not comprehend the world’s afflictions. After the first day Trevor followed her trend. Officials advised him not to rush into action, and the feeling crept round that men were being accepted for various services rather obligingly than otherwise.

Mrs. Kirke had no dream, nothing but terrible reality, and to intensify her worry her husband became seriously and noisily ill. Isolated with the child, Mageila only half knew what went on; but occasionally she learned grim details from Moira, always in transit from the sick-room to the bath-room with mysteriously draped vessels, sheets, draw-sheets, rubber sheets, and squares of flannelette. Inside herself Mageila shuddered. Service would be simple if given in compassion for natural declines of the flesh. It would be a degradation if the heart was in protest against the ailments of self-destruction. There were occasions when Mr. Kirke cried out, when nurses came and left almost at once after his voice could be heard in immediate dismissal. To Mageila he seemed to have two distinct voices: the attenuated tones of education and restraint, and the rasping dominations of drink and drugs. There were glimpses of smart-looking nurses, acidly described by Mrs. Kirke as products of youth, starch, and technique. After each professional exit she would sit at the telephone trying to locate a plain woman with common-sense and less technique, but Mr. Kirke’s idea was to fire everyone but Moira. The plain women went too, speeded by Moira’s soothing courtesy. It was not their fault. They were fine women. It was a treat to see anyone so ironed out, but the master was a bit difficult and he could not get used to waking up and seeing big white women by his bed. In his state he thought they were angels, and angels were not what he expected to see. She would look after him herself. She always wore black alpaca, and he was used to her white apron.

Heroically Moira shouldered day and night duty for her master, relieved by Mrs. Kirke when he slept. Otherwise she had the same effect on him as the nurses. She was fired the minute he saw her. More than ever Mageila thought the house walked by night. She was awake continually, but it was only after Patricia sat up with round frightened brown eyes that her mother decided to send her to relatives by night and to a kindergarten by day. To Mageila’s mild statement that she would go, Mrs. Kirke stormed out loud. Hadn’t she enough to bear? What was the use of trying to give sanity to a child in a mad-house? Must she lose the only comfort she had? Was she too mulish to help in other ways? In sight of true torment Mageila acquiesced at once, taking over the house-work, calling for Patricia to take her to kindergarten and fetching her again at noon. With parting between them the child met her ardently, showing immediate interest in a new world and eagerness to know more French to show off to the other children.

Mageila did not hurry Patricia towards or away from school. It was a magical time, a sweet lull before a storm. Tall yellow flowers lived dangerously on, and bright nasturtiums blew low on the ground. Colour was in exaltation, crystallizing in the dog-berries that made a rich droop overhead. The children on the streets were so busy, so important in tunics and blazers, that she longed to be a child going to school after prolonged leisure. She knew so little. She could do with more education. Then she would see Trevor and she would not be a child any more. But youth was in her heart and she could companion the children with a silver-sweet sense of September. Even old Brin stirred sensitively, showing a disposition to stay out of doors and sleep in a pile of new-fallen leaves. Sometimes he raised his head, sniffing as if he was scenting a bird. Then he would creep to the gate and walk into the wind, looking back for the master that must be there to shoot over him in long-lost energy. Once Mageila found him standing on a sparrow, and the sight of his tottering legs made sadness descend on her heart. She remembered her dream when Brin would not come when she called, and she wished he could go to a perfect world where he could stand on a bird without a gun.

Then there was a frost. Flowers became blackened and the gardens like cold clots. Everything seemed more acute because it was bleak. Mrs. Kirke was like a sand-paper woman in a sand-paper world and even Moira looked tired, suggesting to the others that the props of the house would founder if her endurance failed.

The night came in late September when everyone felt she must sleep or crack. Mrs. Kirke, Moira, and Mageila realized that one person could exhaust several others. In her forthright way Mrs. Kirke declared she could not agonize over anything or anyone any more. Snapping off the radio, she said she craved sleep more than her husband had ever craved drink or drugs. When Mageila stared from wide luminous eyes Mrs. Kirke waved repudiating hands, insisting that no hypnosis, no deep breathing, no massage, could help her when her head felt fashioned of creaking wood. In sight of face-shadows like dark stains, Mageila had nothing to say when Mrs. Kirke swallowed two yellow capsules from a round red box and fell into bed without washing her face. Mumbled instructions said to lock up, put Brin out, and go to bed.

Looking exhausted too, Moira had her own approach towards sleep. For the first time Mageila saw her hands, down by her sides, trying to conceal whiskey, a glass syringe, and two round tins of cigarettes. When Moira was inside the sick-room Mageila thought liberal doses must have come from the bottle and the needle. There was no disturbance beyond the attenuated voice, the creak of a bed, the splash of liquid, the slopping of a mouth, the scratch of a match; no intensification of a state beyond slightly stronger smells and Moira’s last remark as she emerged on the landing, “good-night, sir; you’re sure to sleep now, and mind you drop your ashes into the plate.”

With the door closed Moira pushed up her black fringe, adding casually to Mageila, “I’ve put a meat-platter beside him. That ought to hold his ashes. A soup-plate don’t do him any more.”

Mageila nodded in vague agreement—recording the sense of a man lying on his back, with thin lips struggling to retain a cigarette. Shivering over such sources of rest, she thought control and resolution were at low ebb that evening; but she faced Moira strongly, offering to lock up. With an air of washing her hands of everything Moira accepted at once, shutting her own door with strong finality. Like the gentleman he was, Brin had moved painfully away during the entrances and exits into his master’s room; but with Moira’s departure he returned to his mat, settling with a long sigh.

Mageila felt deserted in her own fatigue. Because Patricia had a cold she had not been out that day. She felt drab with house-work, taut from Mrs. Kirke’s nerves, repulsed with Mr. Kirke’s sounds and smells, badgered with radio, and utterly unrested from twenty-four hours without Trevor. So busy with the end of the month, he had not even telephoned that day. Ordinarily it would not have mattered, but the brief time past seemed like the drag of a year. It was between seasons, reminding her of the icy periods in her own home before the hall stove was in. She ought not to mind cold, she told herself disapprovingly; but there was a coldness beyond the flesh, something blackening the spirit with intangible frost. Then she roused herself when Brin began to whine and struggle towards the stairs, slipping in a way that challenged her strength.

“Wait, Brin,” she called comfortingly.

It was more awkward than heavy to carry Brin. His legs stuck up, his spine was like a knife, and his bones gave no heat. Gave no heat? Her Bible-training stirred, presenting old King David, stricken in years, with no heat in his body though they covered him with clothes. Abishag, the virgin, had lain on his bosom to keep him warm. It was all right she supposed, thinking of love seeking no identity. Then she frowned from the feeling of sad old bones in her arms. It seemed more natural for David to accept his age without the warmth of Abishag. She could not have liked cheating nature.

Mageila placed Brin on his legs before she opened the door and let both of them out on the gravel path. It was not late. Tires swished on the roads and lights shone everywhere, seeming to twinkle as if shaken by the wind. The air was cold and damp, doleful with the incipient burden of a long northern winter. The garden in front looked like a blurred jungle spilled to the ground. Then a stirring of gravel told her Brin was back from the deeper shadows, shivering against her legs; and though she could have lingered to identify the stone tower and the line of the hills against the lighter sky, consideration made her go inside and lock up, front and back, before she returned to find the dog with his front paws on the bottom step as if he would not struggle by himself any more.

“That’s right, Brin,” she said soothingly.

She mounted and laid him outside his master’s door, wondering what quality there was in his milky eyes that made her so sure of his gratitude. Dogs did not drink or drug; the worst they did was to snarl a little when their bones were full of pain.

Brin made a few circles round his mat as if treading long grass before lying down. It seemed a sad waste of energy, she thought as he flopped at last—releasing her to the upper flat, where every step gave her a sense of isolation and a deeper feeling of self. The jagged living of the house became no more than part of her job, and finally when routine was over she was free to dwell on the sources of her own joy and fortitude. In bed she lay on her back, breathing deeply to let her body warm the cold sheets before she made a full retreat into her heart. She relaxed, tired but no longer drab, feeling her mind fusing with the sounds of the wind and the sapless rattle of the leaves. Her senses told her colour was resting, soothed by infinite black. She thought of Trevor with his brown face, browner now against a white pillow—or maybe he was walking home, a little bent from the wind on the high-blown roads. Wherever he was he was with her, glowing like a luminary on the darkness of her heart. She grew limp, with a long luxury of arms and legs and of a brain refusing dreams as she eased into the blank representing the most soothing state of sleep.

Black rest was over. She stirred dreamfully, with sounds from the outer world impinging on her ear. The leaves rushed like frigid water filmed on the surface with ice. There was dark autumn night disturbed by the whimper of an animal miserable from some unknown cause. Suggestion returned her to Labrador, where Trevor was angry because the dogs would not bark. Then she felt physical discomfort from stinging eyes, and a tickling throat that recalled the feeling of the fiery trickle from Mr. Butler’s rum bottle. She would not wake, she decided, turning her face into the pillow for fear she would open her eyes on the sight of many waters. But her position stopped her breath with a reality that jolted her up with panic, making it impossible to distinguish a true physical state from the insecurities experienced since the tidal wave. She was clutching her throat, feeling she had more than two bulging eyes and two straining nostrils, when common-sense made a cold return.

Sounds, smells, suffocations, explained themselves. Brin was whining, the house was on fire, and she had smoke in her throat—major disturbances which made her leap and remember a dearly loved voice associated with earliest childhood. “Do not walk round in your bare feet, Mignonne. Always take time to put on your dressing-gown, even if the house is on fire.” She emerged on the landing, projecting her mind to the others before her body could arrive. As she threw up the hall window she paused, remembering that wind could encourage a fire. But there was no sign of flame, nothing but a sense of smouldering and light acrid smoke. She would leave the window open, she decided, beginning to run down the attic stairs. Halfway she stopped abruptly, with feet taken in paralysis and eyes trancing at the sight of Moira, grotesque in a barrel-shaped night-dress, bending away from Mr. Kirke’s door. At her feet Brin coughed and whined, trying to push past her stout legs; and suddenly Moira gave way, letting the old dog into the smoky room, shutting the door on the tip of his tail.

“Brin!” screeched Mageila, liberating herself by her own noise.

But Moira barred her reach to the door-handle and suddenly she was wrestling, fighting with all her strength against hard relentless hands. Everything must repeat itself, she thought wildly, remembering the man she had wrestled with on the night of the tidal wave.

“Let me go,” she croaked, but though she fought hard she merely felt the skin of her wrists taking a painful turn.

“And that I won’t. You’d choke to death in there.”

It was incredible that Moira’s voice could sound sane and sweet before it turned into a hacking cough.

“Brin,” choked Mageila in agony, knowing she was useless against strength beyond her own. Growing momentarily slack, she sobbed through smoke and tears. “How could you do that to Brin?”

There was a long silence, as if both would choke before further action. Then Moira spoke softly, in a voice holding none of the hostility of her hands. “And what is it but the will of God for them both?”

Not so accepting, Mageila gathered strength to hurl herself against Moira. “It’s not the will of God!” she shouted. “Brin was not there. You let him in.”

“Hush now,” hissed Moira soothingly, using force to remove Mageila from the door as a wave might remove a chip.

Beyond the event it was startling to contact Moira’s body, to meet strength scarcely imagined. It was the awareness of another sense, a different knowledge from touch. Mageila swayed back, anticipating a new face to match a new body; but above the voluminous night-dress she studied pale skin and hairy lashes round kindly familiar eyes. Were they familiar, she asked herself, realizing she had never looked into Moira’s eyes before; and the deep dive she was taking now was as full of surprises as the drop of a diver to the bottom of the sea. Like sea-water, opaque over its own secrets, Moira’s eyes cleared for a moment, revealing frightening depths.

“Brin,” whispered Mageila, drooping desolately. “He must be dead by now.”

“Yis, he must be dead,” hissed Moira as Mrs. Kirke’s door opened and she emerged beside them in a bias-cut night-dress that made her look sleek and long.

“What’s this? What’s all the noise?” she questioned, like a person too recently torn from sleep to understand externals.

Her momentary vagueness gave Moira a chance to release Mageila—leaving her bent double from smoke and emotion, with lolling hair like a fall of black tongues.

Mrs. Kirke blinked, staring as if the girl was incognizable in such disarray. Then she passed a hand across her face, trying to drag the blur of smoke away from her eyes. “I can’t see,” she faltered, with a hand descending to a complaining throat.

Moira stepped forward, speaking as if she was reporting nothing at all. “There must be a bit of a fire in the master’s room, mum. And what could have happened at all, at all, when I left everything all set? Maybe he was smoking.”

“Smoke!” declared Mrs. Kirke, seizing on a new fact. “Yes, of course, the house is full of smoke. We must do something. It’s fire,” she said, as if they could not know. “Get out of my way, Moira.”

“Yes, indeed, mum,” agreed Moira, standing firmly in front of her. “We must do something, but we must have sense. There, mum, you’ll cough to death if you don’t stand by the window.”

“It will kill him,” muttered Mrs. Kirke in a hacking voice.

“And what would it be but the death of a baby in his state?” asked Moira soothingly. “Thank God the child is away.”

“Yes, thank God,” murmured Mrs. Kirke automatically.

“Brin,” muttered Mageila from the vicinity of the floor.

“And if you want to help, Miss,” said Moira amiably, “make haste and telephone the fire-department. You needn’t trouble to look for a number. Just call Fire Alarm, and they’ll connect you right off.”

With a gait like her run from Mr. Butler’s, Mageila went wavering downstairs. Her spirit seethed; her heart sorrowed; her mind protested; her throat hacked with a ceaseless cough, making her wonder if there was much difference between the suffocations of water and smoke.

“And,” called Moira to her back, “you might ring Mrs. Langley and tell her to come too, and—”

“Yes,” muttered Mageila in a goaded voice.

“Then I’ll be putting on m’ clothes, mum. There’ll be enough to do when they come streamin’ in.”

Breathing the cold air from an open window, Mrs. Kirke crowded into a corner of the hall—thinking her finer sensibilities were still under the influence of the drug she had taken. A dull detachment made her unable to realize the full implications of a fire in her husband’s room. Quite unemotionally she speculated on its cause. Had his cigarette dropped on the sheet, the carpet, the table, instead of the plate? Surely a meat-platter was large enough for a prodigious pile of ashes? Had he become restless and cold, struggling up to put a match to his fire? Would he remember the chimney was closed and smoke would pour back in his room? Was that a major piece of carelessness on their part, she asked herself, remembering a fire lighted in a grate when the chimney had been blocked with snow. In a few minutes they had been staggering round fumbling for doors and windows. And if that could happen to people in their health, what would happen to her husband? What did it matter, anyway, in a life at the bottom of the hill?

For a moment a new future came tripping along towards her. She would be free to become part of a larger calamity, to join her sons before they were cut off in their youth. Then her dulled mind winced from substance and shadow. Fires were noisy, she thought, hearing gigantic machinery panting at her own gate; it made her crowd against the wall because of the feeling of having to rush out of the way when she heard a fire. She pictured the bulk of red brassy equipment, full of black-coated men with helmets on their heads and hatchets and hoses in their hands. Odd to have fire in her own house.

But it was not her own house any more. Men surged up the gravel path, up the stairs, and quite coldly she regretted the effect of their thick boots on the floors. One, two, three, four, five, six—all the men were exactly alike she was sure, and all were rushing around like the wind. Should she step forward and greet them, usher them into her husband’s room? Were firemen accustomed to a host, a hostess? Absurd, she told herself, seeing them taking possession; crashing round with hatchets, hoses, and extinguishers in their hands. And there was no need to show them the right door when they stood before it in a black huddle adjusting masks before they disappeared, shutting the door behind them. How brave, she thought, giving detached admiration to firemen. Then she saw Mageila appearing from the well of the stairs, with black hair swinging round a white ghostly face. Her head was tilted, her eyes were wide-open, and she looked like a sleep-walker condemned to some cold quest.

“Mageila,” she called wakefully.

The girl stood poised on the top step as if she might fall forward or back, and the way she stared convinced Mrs. Kirke the grey of her eyes had paled to the look of clear rock-crystal.

“Brin,” said Mageila like a last word.

“Brin!” ejaculated Mrs. Kirke. “What do you mean ‘Brin’? He always sleeps outside. Where is he?”

Mageila said nothing, shifting her eyes to the door.

Mrs. Kirke put her hands to her face, covering her eyes, feeling the stream of life thawing and rushing through her in its full spate of anguish. Without a word she stumbled into her room, banging her door as Moira emerged fully dressed and with her black fringe newly combed.

“Poor gintleman! It’s the will of God if he’s at rest at last,” she gushed softly.

Mageila stood stone-still, impervious to words, waiting to claim Brin, pick him up, and lay his bones under the sagging weight of autumn earth.

The firemen had gone, leaving echoes of shattering noise. Mr. Kirke’s door was shut on a new smell of damp charred wood. The house was filling with shocked relatives, greeted by Moira as if it was high-noon and the occasion as ordinary as breath. Mrs. Langley whispered, hissingly, at great length, announcing to everyone that she would take charge. Discreet mortuary-men lumbered over the floors—consulting uneasily before passing into Moira’s room, where the firemen had laid her master. Then the maid emerged, venturing naturally through Mrs. Kirke’s closed door to report they would take her husband away and then bring him back. What would she like him to wear: a blue serge suit, a black morning-coat, or a nice brown habit?

Mrs. Kirke’s thin hand gestured nervously, irritably, dismissing Moira to dispose of her master in death as she had in life.

In her sweet servant voice Moira said, “yis, mum,” giving a bare glance to Mageila, who was kneeling on the floor with her tears making bright spots on Brin’s brown fur.

As the maid had secreted her master so Mageila had secreted Brin, withdrawing at once to lay him at Mrs. Kirke’s feet before her relatives claimed her. For the moment Mageila had no thought for an event that might affect her own future, no imagination to spare for anything but Brin. He must have died at once, she thought. He was so old, so feeble, with so little breath. There was no sign of a struggle, no lolling tongue or bulging eyes—nothing but a limp relaxation of his old bones and a final expelling of breath. He would not sigh any more, or make the supreme effort of wagging his tail when humans disturbed his rest. He was pressing against the carpet as if he was glad to be laid. But he did not look rested enough, she thought. His eyes were open, milky and glazed, without life, making her mourn his sidelong affectionate glances. Who could say animals did not have a touch of mind, a vestige of soul, when you could miss the look in their eyes? She had never closed eyes before, but now she tried to lower Brin’s lids. They would not stay shut, she found; and for a moment it bothered her, until she told herself she loved him whether his eyes were open or shut. He might be a skinful of bones; but he was Brin, who liked to sleep with his nose near his tail. She was beginning to tuck him up into a cosy circle when Mrs. Kirke dropped to her knees.

“Don’t,” she implored, rocking Brin’s head in her arms. “He was such a gentleman, and he never pushed forward like other dogs. Look,” she said, loosening her hold. “He didn’t choke. His face is quite peaceful. He was merely tired and old. If that was the worst—” She bit her lip, smoothing out her distorted face before she laid Brin’s head against her knees. “Dear Brin, there never was a better dog,” she murmured in a relaxed voice. “But I’m very glad he’s dead.”

Sitting back on her heels, Mageila could not speak; she was seeing softness given to a dog that might have gone to a man. “Let me have him,” she said gently. “I’ll take care of him. I’ll bury him myself.”

Mrs. Kirke rose, gazing down on the top of a black head. “No, don’t bury him yourself,” she said softly. “Call Trevor. He was compassionate with Brin. If he comes you won’t feel so unhappy. It’s the sharing of sorrow that counts.”

“Yes, thank you,” whispered Mageila, beginning again to make Brin a circle before his body got stiff.

Above her head Mrs. Kirke gazed round unhappily until her eyes fell on the half-open bed, making her snatch and extract a large white sheet. “Here,” she said, dropping it beside Mageila. “Wrap him up in this. Then carry him down to the kitchen. It will be dawn—”

“At six o’clock.”

“I’d expect you to know that,” said Mrs. Kirke quietly. “I’ll go now and let them speak to me. Then I’m going up to Patricia’s room. I must think and send a message to my sons.”

Mrs. Kirke belted a gown round her thin body, stepping to the mirror to draw a comb through her hair. Then she powdered her face and wiped the powder from her brows and lashes with the air of a woman adjusting a mask.

“I’ll take them in the drawing-room,” she said, with a wry face. “Then they won’t notice your going with Brin. They’d say he was only a dog.”

“He’s Brin,” murmured Mageila.

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Kirke, going out with her head in the air.

On the floor Mageila spread out the sheet, recognizing its quality and the K embroidered for Kirke. Immediately she saw Mrs. Waddleton saving a bit of crochet for herself on the night of the tidal wave. Mageila patted Brin’s body, feeling the terrible boniness of his ribs.

“I won’t save the embroidery, Brin,” she whispered. “She wants to wrap you up in the best she has. They were apart and they should have been together, but you didn’t see any of their differences. If a good dog could stick to him, perhaps he had something she couldn’t find. I’ll pray for him and for you too, dear Brin.”

Feeling herself utterly alone, she continued whispering to Brin while she wrapped him up roundly, found a needle and cotton to fasten the sheet, sewed gently for fear she might touch his bones. When he was a tidy white bundle she felt it slightly warm and she dropped her face against it.

“I won’t put you in the earth until you’re cold, Brin. What warmth you had was for life.”

Sitting on her heels, she waited—hearing and smelling the house. Then she noticed Mrs. Kirke’s telephone and she crept towards it, knowing Trevor had one by his bed. Carefully she lifted the receiver, huskily whispering his number, and when she got him she heard him sleepy, anxious, and startled. Then in a few seconds he was alert, muted, and almost on his way. Gratefully she thanked God he could accept her brevity and know her words were scant because she was threatened with tears. When he told her he would be at the back door in less than fifteen minutes, she felt a great surge of appreciation for gentleness and comprehension. Then, quietly as a thief, she picked up her bundle and, going out, began to descend, feeling light as air because Brin had no breath and she was holding her own.

Thankfully she knew she had passed like a ghost and could breathe, alone, in the rear of the house and lay Brin on a black and white diamond-patterned floor. The kitchen glared with harsh light on porcelain, nickel, and enamel, seeming a cold empty place in spite of the fullness it represented. Town-kitchens merely expressed the flesh-pots, she thought; but the kitchens of Feather-the-Nest had been the centres of life, where food, work, people, and warmth had all been fused together. She heard a clock tick and the sapless rattle of leaves from outside, and she knew if she pulled up the blind she would see the beginning of day. When she heard Trevor’s step on the gravel path she went to admit him, seeing him muted, less vital, because of time and circumstances. Though his face was paler than usual, his eyes were warm and his arms made an immediate circle for her body. He looked at the bundle on the floor, and the expression on his face made her conscious of the heaviness of her lids and a new drowning of her eyes. He pressed her against him, while his hand kept her tears from running down.

“I’ll bury him, my dear,” was all that he said. “The earth is soft in the back garden. Tell me where to find a spade.”

“I’ll come with you,” she said urgently.

His hand went down her long black hair. “You’re not dressed,” he reminded her gently.

Mageila leaned back, revealing black lashes like springboards for tears. “I’ll get a coat—Moira’s coat, and her gaiters. She keeps them down here. She was always running out for his whiskey. I’ll feel much colder inside.”

“Do you want it that way?” he asked gravely.

“Yes, I want to be where you are.”

Over old Brin he held her; and for a moment they stood withdrawn, mutually flinching from the task of stirring the cold autumn earth.

It was impossible to say Mr. Kirke died unhonoured and unsung. His funeral was opulent—of impressive length, with many cars behind a hearse and casket smothered with flowers and with an extra hearse without a casket to hold the overflow of wreaths. The papers gave him long notices, mentioning the relatives one by one. There was a church-service, with an abundance of clergy going the extra mile to commit him to the earth. Beginning to pick up bits of fern and moss, Moira said God would do the rest. Still away with a relative, Patricia pursued the happy day unaware of an orphaned state.

Mageila companioned Mrs. Kirke. At first she slept like an old-elastic woman with little contraction left. Then she rose for the rest of the time her husband lay in a closed casket in the formal drawing-room. Mageila was like a medium between the front door and the attic—where Mrs. Kirke isolated herself, selecting silence and the service of semistrange hands rather than the ones belonging to her own family. Minute after minute there were notes and cards, varied with cables, which Mrs. Kirke read with slitted brown eyes before filing them on an old-fashioned hat-pin as if she enjoyed the stabbing. Mageila went around naturally, descending to make pots of tea, co-operating when Mrs. Kirke listened and then spoke like a jet of irritation.

“Go down and ask Pauline if she has to whisper and creep. Tell her to stop or I’ll go mad.”

Mageila descended, contemplating the suppression of such procedure before she decided it exceeded her privileges. As an employee, she had no wish to propitiate Mrs. Kirke’s sister. Finding her in the upstairs sitting-room, Mageila changed the order to a request—hearing dead silence from other women; seeing Mrs. Langley’s eyes trance and pop, and her girlish curls transfix on her neck. Then she was answered with hissing tolerance magnanimously extended to a girl who could transmit such a request at such a time.

“It’s quite all right. Tell her I quite understand. Tell her not to worry, not to bother about a thing. I’m doing everything.”

Mageila remounted the stairs, thinking Mrs. Langley’s whispers were wide with external adequacy. She was doing everything? Who could live the emotion for you? If there was anything truly objectionable in life, Mageila decided it was women like Mrs. Langley. They stared without seeing. They spoke as experts. They did not wash dishes, and other women were hired to sew their fine seams. And they had so much leisure that they liked running a funeral. They were even enjoying the war because it gave them something to do. And that worldly old mother of Mr. Kirke’s? What was admirable about her? They said she was in bed, prostrate. Over what? She thought of Mrs. Slater working single-handed to maintain her profound old breath, and reading her Bible at night by the aid of one kerosene lamp. And Mrs. Langley was waiting to snub the nurse-governess until after the funeral was over. But when the time came for it to leave the house she was too busy peering through the curtains to resent anything.

At a gable window upstairs Mrs. Kirke stood woodenly, with Mageila unobtrusively near. The earth looked numb, the sky grey, and the sea purple with cold. The berries of the mountain-ash were beginning to look like crimson beads held high in the air. “They will feed the birds until after Christmas,” thought Mageila, visualizing the snow that would enclose them; through it the birds would peck until skeleton stalks remained.

Her mind deserted Mr. Kirke, taking his last ride. She saw her mother looking at a mountain-ash and planning to put the berries into her crab-apple jelly. She saw her father shaking his head and speaking in the humorously admonitory voice he so often used to her mother. “No, Mama, no! You must not boil the berries belonging to the birds.” And her mother had made plain crab-apple jelly because her father had spoken. How her mother must have loved her father to mind what a mere man said! Love was strong. It had made steel of her mother’s iron, giving her a spine that could bend towards her husband as she bore the drag of her daughters. Along the path of love Mageila’s glazed eyes returned to the funeral as lamentation stirred in her for death without warm-hearted anguish.

This cold-hearted funeral seemed bitter, making her recall the iciness of the tidal wave scalded with many tears. She could hear a stray voice shrilling in high soprano anguish, “Must I go and empty-handed,” and she swerved from the new life returned through Trevor’s love. She was falling into cold black nothingness as a voice got between herself and the ground. “When thou passest through the waters I shall be with thee.” . . . “Since thou wast precious in my sight thou hast been honourable.” . . . There was nothing precious here. This woman was watching her husband’s going as if she would torment the earth that fell on him. Better, much better, for her to be prostrate and called to rise again. Tears seemed a necessity for Mr. Kirke, a warm salt-wash that would cleanse him and open his wife’s clenched hands. Knowing her going would not be noticed, Mageila retreated to the landing and descended to the now empty sitting-room at the rear of the house; and when she returned, her presence was acknowledged by a bitter expulsion of words.

“Flowers, masses of flowers! Everyone who found him a nuisance in life remembered him in death. And what a death! If there had been something to meet I would have met it, some will power to restore I would have tried to restore it; but he had no wish to resist. Wife and children meant nothing to him. He had to drink, and then he had to drug as if he was dulling something in him.” Mrs. Kirke stifled bitterness, letting extenuation soften her voice. “But he had a terrible upbringing—all worldliness and window-dressing, and nothing but traditional lies for a child. Then school and the war and a starting downhill. After that there was no road back—I should never have let Moira hide him away so much or been such a coward about his smells, and the way he had to scratch his hands. When I remember his handsome young body—”

“Look!”

Holding the picture of the young Mr. Kirke before his wife’s repulsed eyes, Mageila heard an expiring gasp and saw a head draw back as if a tongue would point from a round red mouth; but none of the physical suggestions came to pass. The appearance of the picture was too sudden, too reminding of lost beauty. Mrs. Kirke collapsed in a chair, beginning to cry as if tears were too remote to come immediately forward; but when they did they came plentifully, painfully, leaving red-rimmed eyes and a nose that had to be blown to breathe. As she waited, Mageila had a feeling that the house was relaxing too. Taint eased from the windows and nothing of staleness remained but a smell of charred wood behind one locked door. Patricia would come home and walk where she pleased; and at night the house would rest when they did, and colour would be general blackness. When Mrs. Kirke spoke Mageila noticed at once that her voice was soft, like the echo of vanishing music.

“It was sensitive of you to do that, but then you are sensitive. I was not like you when I was a girl. I was spoiled, indulged, and uncomprehending, and at first I had everything on a silver plate. There’s a place in youth where you know the world is yours, when you’re sure your feelings will never change, when first marriage is as fresh and new as the wedding-presents. How many brides expect the silver to get tarnished?” Mrs. Kirke shivered convulsively. “I wouldn’t be young again for anything in the world—but I was happy with him once. We were in England at school and we used to meet during the holidays. We had money to spend and we thought we were tremendous swells. I was there when he was on leave; I remember all the music—” Mrs. Kirke dabbed her eyes and blew her nose with more energy. “He tortured me, but I expect he tortured himself. The great beauty of death is that you can remember the best part of life.”

“Yes,” whispered Mageila like an amen.

Then she advanced to the window, leaving silence to its first real rest. Down, far down, she saw horse-chestnut leaves lying on the ground like cloven green hands. Autumn was in the air and frost over land returning to bone. In the harbour lay grey sand-bagged ships, suggesting unnatural threat from the sea; making her shiver, conscious of sombre moods in nature creeping into mind.

“I’m cold; it feels wintry,” said Mrs. Kirke with subconscious sympathy.

“It’s sorrow,” said Mageila starkly.

“No, it’s me,” decided Mrs. Kirke firmly. “I’m finished with personal living. I’m not a woman any more, but I am a mother.” In the aftermath of emotion she fell into firm reflection. “I must settle everything at once, and I’ll have to face family opposition. They’ll expect me to stay in and see streams of people, but I won’t,” determined Mrs. Kirke, with eyes denying the door as if callers besieged it outside. “I’ll wear black but not weeds, and my ordinary stockings because my legs are on their way. I shall be quite ruthless. I won’t answer any of those letters. That’s all right, isn’t it, under the circumstances? I do loathe hypocrisy. You don’t approve?” she challenged Mageila. “I know when you look particularly wide-eyed you don’t approve in the least.”

In her heart Mageila detested ruthless conduct. Nothing gentle was ever accomplished when eyes stabbed, hands snatched, and feet rode rough-shod towards goals.

When Mrs. Kirke stared, demanding an answer, Mageila spoke slowly. “If you keep Patricia away I’ll answer your letters. I won’t be any good, but I can say thank you.”

Mrs. Kirke rose, touching Mageila’s wrist. “Thank you. I’ll accept. Perhaps it’s best to conform where I can.” She shrugged grimly, wrinkling her red nose. “It will make it easier and placate my husband’s people. I hate wangling; but I’ll have to wangle, because I intend to go to Canada at once and I must see that I get the same allowance they gave my husband. Write the letters; say what you like. And thank you for everything, especially what you did for Brin.” About to step into the landing, she spoke without turning round. “Moira says you tried to get into the room.”

Mageila stood still, regarding an unrevealing back. “Yes, I did,” she finally admitted.

“She said the smoke would have choked you as it choked Brin.”

“It might.”

“Brin usually sleeps on the mat?”

Mageila said nothing, accepting the question as a statement.

Mrs. Kirke took a forward step. “I always said Moira could help the moving finger.”

“She says it’s the will of God.”

“She flushes the kittens down the closet,” said Mrs. Kirke.

“What will you do about Moira?” asked Mageila tentatively.

Mrs. Kirke swung round in surprise. “Do? Give her a holiday and take her away with me, or send for her after. She brought up the children. She’s part of us.” Contemplating a new future, Mrs. Kirke looked at Mageila with regretful eyes. “Everything is changed now. The present arrangement must be terminated. I can’t tell you what you’ve been, but I’ll have to give you notice.”

“Yes,” said Mageila without surprise.

“What will you do?” asked Mrs. Kirke gently.

“Wait,” answered Mageila.

Mrs. Kirke shook her head. “You can’t drift. You must hear soon, but there’ll be a long gap—”

“I know.”

“Trevor will volunteer, anyway. He doesn’t believe in a sit-down war.”

“Yes . . . no,” said Mageila vaguely.

There was a quiet silence as both tried to probe widely different futures. Then Mrs. Kirke spoke quickly and persuasively from her new decision. “Write to your grandfather. Come to Canada with me. You could take courses until—”

“Thank you, I must wait,” murmured Mageila. “I feel nothing certain as yet.”

Mrs. Kirke moved with liberated feet. “And I feel very certain. Don’t give me another thought today. Ring up Trevor and tell him to come this evening. He may be sensitive about telephoning right after the funeral. I’ll cope with the family, and begin on Pauline by telling her she can buy this house.” Mrs. Kirke smiled in a way that would horrify convention. “She’ll go Colonial and give up her girlish curls. Well—” She left, with decision in every step and a suggestion that she would like to begin packing her trunks at once.

Mageila stood on as if she did not know whether it was yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

During the local tragedy the war receded. Neither the destruction of Warsaw and its capitulation nor what Moira called the “goings on of Russia” could submerge the near event. With their one casualty laid, they could not comprehend the deaths of distant thousands.

The radio rested. Mrs. Kirke came to a point where she knew the war was in Canada with her sons. Their cables and letters were the only ones Mageila did not have to answer. With her, omen came and went—stirring when she looked at the sea, waning when Trevor came and enclosed her in the circle of his arms. He made the war a truce; but he was restless, like a man unready to catch a waiting train. Neither of his problems were in sight of solution. Officials seemingly in the know continued to advise him not to rush into service. It would be a slow war, a stalemate in the Maginot Line; and yet, with the one important letter delayed, his relatives reported the men volunteering in various services, everyone doing A.R.P. work, and his sisters enrolling in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Indecision brought restlessness appeased only when he escaped with Mageila to another world.

Mrs. Kirke decided that Moira needed a longer holiday than an afternoon devoted to taking the dye; so the maid went, walking through the gates with her hands up in their habitual way—as if she would tidy up on the street. No words from Moira explained her part in the tragedy. Neither did Mrs. Kirke make any further reference to it, but Mageila never forgot her feeling of deeper seeing from her glimpse into Moira’s eyes. She felt sure of Moira now. She was as warm and cold as life itself, and as unsentimental as the sea. She would continue unaffected, working with willing hands, as if it was a natural sequel to shutting the door on old Brin and waiting for the firemen to bring out the remains.

With Moira on holiday there was plenty to do. Patricia still stayed away and Mageila did house-work and wrote letters, going patiently through the sheaf impaled on the hat-pin, varying her simple words according to those received, deciding that some knew about loss and others did not. A few sent verses and they got the shortest replies. Mageila felt very strongly that Mr. Kirke’s death had not been poetical.

Immediately after the funeral Mrs. Kirke became a different woman, cutting through sentimentality and family attitudes like an emergency-official destroying red-tape. Her uneven temper settled and she got her own way by talking smoothly, fluently, as if suggested obstructions were the height of impassioned unreason. Mageila thought she began to look very attractive when she went out on business in a smart black coat and jubilant hat, with a plump silver fox lolling round her shoulders. Her directive energy was a revelation to Mageila, who could hear her on the telephone arranging for things to be done in a day. Ignoring the “only an animal attitude,” she called a stone-cutter and ordered a slab of granite to be laid over Brin so that no one would disturb his earth. In the way of stone-cutters they expected to deliver the order in a few months, but Mageila smiled to hear Mrs. Kirke getting her stone immediately. No, she did not want an angel, a lamb, an urn, or anything with a fanciful top. She wanted rough granite laid flat on the ground today, and if they could not let her have it she would find someone who could. Rather breathless men arrived with cement and granite; and when Patricia came home it made a table for her play, while her mother packed, Mageila wrote, the autumn gales intensified, and the sea became a long running roll.

Mageila was asked to do another hard thing. A woman who would not dispose of her animals indifferently, Mrs. Kirke chose death for them rather than unsympathetic homes. The two old cats were attached to the location and Mrs. Langley would not hear of taking them over with the house. When Mrs. Kirke suggested it, a voice could be heard traducing all cats. Mrs. Kirke’s full mouth became tight and, sweeping to a telephone, she commanded the services of a veterinarian. But, apologizing for cowardice, she went out with Patricia, leaving Mageila to attend to the cats.

Utterly muted, oppressed with sadness and loneliness, Mageila felt partings were perilously close to her heart. The kitten gave the lie to the perpetuity of joy in the way it played unmindful of death. Protest made Mageila’s eyes and throat spheres of agonized repression; but she beat down emotion, keeping her eyes so tautly open that no tears could seep through. She found the veterinarian humane, with sensitive hands for animals and an attitude that took it for granted she would help him with his work. He asked for towels; and though Mageila helped him roll the cats, she would not pour chloroform where their noses pointed under the wrappings. When the kitten accepted its incipient death as a game, digging its claws into the towel, she had to go to the window and fight hard, for fear this lesser sorrow would release the flood-gates of big sorrows past and new ones creeping along. She felt spent with subduing an instinct to howl like a Labrador dog retaining natural laments; but she stood bleakly, staring at the dreary earth, refusing to look until the veterinarian pronounced that the cats were dead. Then he went, leaving her alone with three white bundles; and she sat on a hard kitchen chair, refusing to lay them in the earth until their bodies were stiff and cold.

Useless to say animals were all alike, dogs were dogs and cats were cats. Brin had been an individual. The old unsexed cat had been as antisocial as Mr. Kirke, but the mother cat had loved her kitten like a harassed human parent. She unwrapped two bundles and tucked the kitten and the cat cosily together. Then she went out of doors and dug two holes near old Brin; and when the earth was smooth again she felt old, with a tired body and a throat that ached with ear-to-ear pain. She was very quiet when Mrs. Kirke returned and with penitent comprehension discussed everything but the cats.

When Patricia’s bed-time came Mrs. Kirke took charge herself, letting Mageila sit on in the attic as if she was reclaiming the sombreness of a darkening sea and sky. When Trevor was at her shoulder, she had nothing for him but a forward slump of her head against his body. His touch was tender and sustaining, but his voice was quiet and cold.

“It seems you’re to be let off nothing. She told me what you had to do. The way people can shift their responsibilities—”

“No,” protested Mageila at once, “she knew I could do it. She’s always considerate.”

“Is she?” he asked grimly. “You’re very white.”

“It was hard,” she admitted. “They were warm and soft and then cold.”

“Of course it was hard. Why didn’t you say right out you wouldn’t do it?”

“I never thought of it,” muttered Mageila.

His hand gave her a slight tender shake. “You Newfoundlanders! So full of acceptance!”

“She’s a Newfoundlander,” protested Mageila.

“I don’t mean the people in the town,” he denied. “They never represent a country. The people brought up as you were, in isolated places, are all terribly accepting. It’s wrong. Never mind, my dear; I wasn’t being critical. I was annoyed that you were upset.”

“It was the kitten,” said Mageila desolately. “The old cats took it easily. It seemed like Patricia and me. When you’re grown you’ve got to take it, but when you’re young—”

“As you should be,” he said grimly, “if things had been different. A great many people are agonizing over youth these days.” Mageila looked up and his fingers went softly over her lids. “Your eyes are like big tears. They should be wet,” he said, looking at his dry finger. “No, I haven’t heard, my dear. There’s a direct boat arriving in a day or two. Odd why she takes so long to decide. I’ve been tempted to cable, but she’d feel coerced. We must get on with it,” he said, frowning above his deep-set eyes; but Mageila’s lids fell heavily, returning her to darkness, making her wonder why she felt lonely when he was so near. “No, we won’t feel down,” he said sensitively to her mood. “God knows where we’ll be soon.”

“Then you think—” she muttered starkly.

“I don’t think,” he denied quickly. “Let’s go out. She said to take her car.”

“I said she was kind.”

“But not about her cats and dogs. Let’s go, my dear. I’ve got a feeling of the twilight of the gods. There’s a moon. It made me remember the old witch who might pitch the moon down.”

“No!” protested Mageila, wrapping an arm round his body. “No! But I feel differently tonight,” she decided slowly, as if she must come face to face with her shadowed heart.

“Don’t,” he commanded. “Get a coat and come out.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

They went, descending two flights of stairs, stepping past a room full of voices, closing the front door slowly, before gathering speed to shut themselves inside Mrs. Kirke’s car. Silently they drove through part of the lighted town and Mageila saw his destination was the dark tower, which at night gave the impression of being a chimney on the top of a gigantic building. Small wooden houses seemed to perch on slopes like the sides of a house; but when they drove higher all signs of habitation ceased, and they emerged on an incline both moon-lit and dark. At one spot like an illuminated hole Trevor spoke to both sides of the road, keeping his eyes hardly in front.

“There’s a no-bottom pond over there. Sit closer, Mageila.”

She answered him ambiguously. “There’s always a no-bottom pond in Newfoundland.”

“And a Heart’s Delight and a Misery Point,” he added. “How grim it looks! If it wasn’t for the moon it would be frightening.”

“I’ve been reading. They used to hang people here.”

He laughed shortly. “High up where everyone could see them, I suppose.”

Mageila pressed against his shoulder. “There’s so much cruelty,” she lamented.

“I know, darling. One imagines everybody must hate it, and yet I’m beginning to think it’s giving a great many people what they want. Don’t think. Let’s be selfish and hear nothing but ourselves.”

Mageila made silent agreement as they drove into solid blackness ending in space high up above water moon-struck into calm. She breathed hard and he laughed, pulling at the hand-brake.

“I know, darling, your eyes, nose, and mouth are getting wider and wider. Marvellous, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, with long-drawn-out wonder. “It’s so different through glass, without the wind and the smell of the sea.”

“Yes, but we’ll keep it that way for a change. We’ll be like the Lady of Shalott with the shadows of the world. Let’s get in the back away from the wheel.” He was over at once, drawing Mageila after him to a corner commanding a view of the sea.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t look out when we’re in,” she said vaguely. “The windows might crack.”

He laughed, pressing her closer to his side. “But I’m inside, and who cares then? How do you know about Camelots when you’re only a Colonial?” he teased gently.

She laughed from a gathering state of content. “I was always reciting. Mama had charge of the concerts. It was terrible, and I was sure there was never anyone on the programme but one Miss Michelet after another. I used to be so ashamed seeing the family going up on the platform; and the minister of the church was always the chairman, and when he got to me he would say, ‘Little Miss Michelet,’ and once he told everyone I was winsome. I disliked being winsome very much. If it hadn’t been for Papa I would have walked off the platform.”

Trevor’s laugh made a happy echo round the car. “It sounds like the village concerts they have in England; and winsome is quite the wrong word for you, my dear. What else did you recite? Tell me,” he said, relaxing very comfortably.

“Everything very long, because I had a good memory. I had a slow voice; but there wasn’t much to do in Feather-the-Nest, so the people were patient.”

“But what long pieces did you say? I once learned ‘Horatius at the Bridge.’ I felt very sorry for the poor fellow. Nowadays a good bomb would do what took so long with saw and lever. Sorry,” he said quickly. “That’s forbidden. What did you recite?”

“Oh, pieces about Minnehaha and the long and cruel winter, and for temperance concerts pieces about the sparkling cold water.”

Trevor forgot everything for sheer joy in the sound of her deep dry voice. “What else? If you don’t tell me, I’ll make you recite them all.”

Mageila laughed and half sighed over her childish memories. “Mama was always like a school-teacher. We were learning all the time. There was one about a train, a red flag, a drunkard, and a little girl who put the red flag against his bottle of rum, and he never took another drop. I thought, when I went to Mrs. Kirke’s, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Patricia put a red flag near her father’s drugs; but I’m afraid those things don’t affect real drunkards.”

“They do not,” he agreed, and quite irreverently his laugh echoed round the car again. “I imagine you were a very talented child, with your French and your English and your Newfoundland folk-songs. I can see you singing on the Assou.”

“The captain made me. I didn’t want to.”

“Yes, you did,” he contradicted. “You were keeping your chin up because I was watching you. Darling, you went to the piano like a virgin martyr.”

“I was miserable,” she confessed, hiding her face in a way that made him turn it towards the moon-light.

“Your face fascinates me,” he whispered, with a complete change of tone. “Didn’t I tell you death would find me long before I tire of watching you?”

“Books say beautiful things.”

For a fleeting second he looked out at the lighted sky. “Juliet wanted to cut Romeo out in little stars.”

“Stars? No,” said Mageila, in wide-eyed consideration. “If I had to cut you out, I’d cut you out in white-wings—to carry me when I was tired.”

“How I love you!” he said, rushing her against him; but his voice held a quality that made Mageila touch his face with her hand.

“Let it make you happy,” she entreated.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes, very happy. It feels as if this time is so lasting that the rest will not hurt.”

“We’ll need that,” he said darkly. “It’s not a time to live inside glass.”

“We can until eleven.”

“Then—”

He lifted her higher in his arms, suggesting the silence of lips; and they settled, becoming part of the large quiet along with the inner disturbance of blood. Human wonder held them, demanding the darkness of closed eyes and the exciting comfort of flesh. The grandeur of the outer world went on with its moon, its sea, its rock, and its sky; and without their knowledge two ships sailed into the harbour, and one was not a sleek liner any more. It was grey, sombre, and sand-bagged; but the other was unaltered, because its course was through perilous seas outside the zones of war.

Mrs. Kirke was still getting notes and letters. Sometimes she read them; other times she passed them gracelessly to Mageila to stick on the hat-pin. It seemed impossible to achieve the end of a task when the letters increased. Sorting the morning mail, Mageila found two for herself. With a teetering feeling of leaving the best, or the worst, to the last she read the one from Ship-Haven first. Her grandfather would be in town tomorrow. He had some buying to do. Would Mrs. Kirke be gone? Could she join him at his hotel? They must discuss what she would do. He was getting uneasy about her. Would she think of joining her sisters? It was getting harder to enter the United States now; money between countries was complicated. They must talk about it.

In herself Mageila felt no response to questions or suggestions. Not yet, not yet; she must wait. Very slowly she turned the other letter round in her hands, staring at it, pondering over its contents, so anxious to know them that she forgot her privilege of reading. This was the answer, she knew. This was different from all other contacts, all other communications. It was! It wasn’t! He always telephoned. Surely he would not, he could not, write a good-bye. The up and down of her mind, the beat of her heart, made her face hot and her hands cold and inept on the letter.

“My darling—”

Her skin contracted delicately, as if joy had crawled over it. She was tempted to dream and not read any more. But lesser or greater words would determine her future.

“I’ve heard at last. I would come to you, but I’d rather we met by the tower. The hill always reminds me of the deck of a larger ship. We met that way. It’s a half-day and I’m starting off early. Could you be at the tower round four? I’ll wait until five, and then call if you haven’t come. It’s a brute of a day, but that makes the hill all ours—at least for another afternoon. Ever yours, Trevor.”

Mageila dwindled, feeling the warm days going out and the chill ones coming in while her mind said she had known all the time; but she had ventured to hope because desire was strong. With a wish to hide away she crept into the drawing-room and stood in the midst of rosewood furniture, feeling she must be in the Butlers’ kitchen balancing on a heaving floor. She crossed her arms on her chest, surprised that the Butler baby was not there. But she would be all right if she steadied herself and straddled while the earth rocked and waves threatened to go over her head. She was sure she was alone with oncoming desolation when she heard Mrs. Kirke approaching, not as a beaten woman flinching from light but as a competent woman infinitely liberated. As always in shock, Mageila became slow from the lag between sight and reality.

“What is it?” questioned Mrs. Kirke, encompassing Mageila with a vigilant eye. “Sit down. You’re as white as a sheet.”

Mageila sat, with the note dripping from her fingers.

“May I?” said Mrs. Kirke, reaching decisively.

A small nod gave permission; but when Mrs. Kirke had read, Mageila reclaimed the note and crumpled it under her hand.

Mrs. Kirke stood, marvelling at the change in the physical girl. It appeared as if strength and resolution had been artificial, something fed on sustained emotion, and health and beauty fugitive as fire fed with chaff. The girl’s face looked smudged, and her wide nostrils like black holes. For a moment Mrs. Kirke thought of a doctor, until she remembered how the shocked heart can affect the body. She spoke sanely, challenging a response to optimism.

“There’s nothing in the note to say she has refused. Wait until he explains.”

“I don’t need to. I feel it.”

Mrs. Kirke was too wise to argue against that, but she strove to nurture the girl towards life. Mageila looked drowned, she thought oddly, with her sleek black hair giving the illusion of wetness. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder, pressing it, goading it with thin sharp strength.

“It’s not like you to collapse. She may have refused, but she doesn’t control everything. Anything can happen these days. Come to Canada with me; work and wait—”

“He’ll go to war now,” said Mageila, as if she had not heard.

“He was going, anyway,” said Mrs. Kirke.

Mageila spoke as if she was realizing it for the first time. “It will spoil everything, thinking of him that way—going against nature.”

“Don’t be fanatical,” ordered Mrs. Kirke. “It doesn’t matter in the least what we think ourselves. Goodness knows I’ve railed to you enough against war; but it’s on, so we must be humble. Women who expected lives of their own will be like sleep-walkers in men’s shadows. We can’t do anything about it but mean something to the men who will die thinking of us. The women’s portion is more bitter than ever: the older ones will go through it twice, the younger ones will lose their first loves, and beautiful girls will be forced to be spinsters and the mothers with young children will be demented with air raids. But what can we do about it? We can only love the men and live the different future now; that’s got to be.”

Mageila stared. “You’re different.”

“Yes, my dear, I’m different. A woman will submerge herself for her children, when she won’t for her husband. You look better. Get up.”

Mageila rose, standing tall and straight. Another woman had told her to get up, a woman very different from Mrs. Slater.

“Thank you,” she said soberly. “I’ll remember. It was only at first—”

Unsentimental by nature, Mrs. Kirke’s eyes filled with tears. “Poor Mageila; poor child—”

“No, no,” said Mageila, shrinking away. “Don’t pity me. It’s destroying.”

“I won’t,” said Mrs. Kirke. “I was pitying all women, myself as well. I don’t fear for you, my dear girl. You’ll be more than adequate. He’s a nice man, Mageila—beyond the boy’s age, too thoughtful not to suffer a great deal. Men like him will be like plants kicked from the ground.”

“Yes,” said Mageila, turning hunted eyes towards the door as if she must go to him now.

“Go out for a walk if you like. I can spare you.”

Mageila rallied, recovering acceptance. “No, thank you; I’ll go on with the letters until the time. Work is a help.”

Mrs. Kirke glanced through the window at the grim day. “Couldn’t you have him here?” she said, recoiling. “Why meet him in such an uncomfortable place? Be cosy—”

“Neither of us will be cosy for a long time,” said Mageila sombrely.

“But the wind and the cold—”

Mageila stared through the window. “There’s no wind,” she said aloofly. “The hills are near. We’ll have rain. We met in the cold and the fog. We like it.”

Mrs. Kirke gave a small natural laugh, returning them to a lower plane. “I never know when the hills are near or far. I feel like flotsam when you talk like that.”

“You’re not,” said Mageila. “You’re just right. Thank you very much.”

Stark appreciation brought a faint flush into Mrs. Kirke’s face. “Remember,” she said warmly, “I’ll be glad to sponsor you if you can arrange it with your grandfather. It would be wrong to have a happy ending now. The times are out of joint. But,” said Mrs. Kirke softly, “send him away with love.”

“I don’t need to be told that,” said Mageila gravely.

Mageila went, walking like a ghost of happiness. Outside, the air was full of edges like a day torn out of time. There was no wind and she knew why. Fog would be filling the wide sea-spaces, trailing wraithlike at the feet of the land. In the upper air, frost lay like a clot expanding to make a winter. As soon as she was outside she was glad of her fur coat, though the choice had suggested some pampering in October. Desolately she told herself it was becoming, making a frame for her white face and black hair. Then she decided it was a poor-looking girl a squirrel coat would not improve. The return to grey had been instinctive, having its roots in her sombre mood, her muted heart, and the dreary look of the world. This time she walked to the tower without backward glances, ascending steadily until she reached the top of the hill and saw what she expected: all-enveloping fog, growing thin by the near water—out of which loomed a sailing-vessel with sails looking solid and brown.

After a brief survey she concentrated on her other quest, thinking for a moment that Trevor had not arrived. Then she saw him with his shoulders pressed hardly against the tower-wall, and as the distance lessened between them she noticed a bleakness seeping through the summer-brown of his skin. When he saw her his eyes covered her approach, drawing her on by their dark intensity. His subdued body and lack of greeting made her recall Mrs. Kirke’s selfless advice. With delicate confidence she went straight to his side, slipping her arm through his, finding it possible to simplify the whole situation.

“You need not say anything. I know it can’t be. I felt it when I got your note.”

A long expelled breath made his shoulder sag towards her. “I thought you would,” he muttered.

There was silence, broken by the muted wash of the near sea and the ghostly approach of the brown-sailed vessel. Accepting deprivation at once, Mageila had no questions for the reasons and attitudes concerning it; and when she did not ask, he volunteered bitter information at once.

“She wrote a long letter. She was deeply shocked, deeply grieved, that she had to get my letter when they were all so stricken, etc., etc. She could not understand how I could suggest such a thing, at such a time, when people should lay aside all personal selfishness. It was a time for—” He shrugged briefly. “There were a lot of times in the letter. The crux of the situation was that she had consulted her vicar, and he told her to make it a matter of prayer—marriage was a sacrament; it was better to improve a union than to dissolve it. She was ready to improve, and she hoped I would not be upset at her refusing the divorce; but in time I would realize she had done the best thing. I should never have left England—”

“Didn’t she r-refuse—” faltered Mageila.

“She did, definitely! Didn’t I tell you she’d prefer Siberia to Newfoundland? At least that was on the right side of the water. She knew I would be returning to volunteer for some service, that I would never wait until my class was called up; and when I got back she would let the dead past bury its dead, and we would begin again for England’s sake. God—”

Mageila made a deep sound, protesting one thing in his bitterness, and sensitively he reassured her at once. “It’s unfortunate for her that she’s ready to improve when I’m not. England or no England, I won’t go back to her. I wouldn’t go back—” He stopped, stifling his own overemphasis. “It’s a question of nonability,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing quite so dead as dead attraction. My wife is a conventional woman full of small-scale generosity, but when she wants to be a hypocrite she’s full of large-scale sentimentality. There’s no doubt about it, she’ll be good to England. She’ll do war-work and behave very well, but she’s one of those who wants nothing changed.”

“Did she mention me?” asked Mageila in a deep dead voice coming from the turned-up collar of her coat.

“She did.”

“Tell me.”

Without vocal reply he turned, taking her by the shoulders and forgetting much of his theme in the deep run he took into her eyes. The extra dimension she represented in his living softened his bitter lips before he kissed her.

“You’re like you were the first day I saw you—black, white, and grey, and the look that saw past me. But you don’t live like a sleep-walker any more; at least I haven’t noticed it lately.” He shook his head, speaking with a sorrowful regret. “You’re very white and I can’t bear you to look whiter through me.”

Mageila turned her face away from his eyes. “I’m well,” she said to his cold brown ear. “I expect people look better when they’re happy. You looked better when you were. Now you’re like you were the day I cured your head-ache.”

“I’ll always remember the first touch of your hands,” he whispered, “even though they were impersonal. Mageila, I can tell you what Monica said. It can’t affect you in the least. She said when I got back to England I would realize the impossibility of getting involved with a Colonial.” Holding her back to see the effect of his words, he saw her slow smile travelling across her mouth.

“Perhaps she feels she is superior. Perhaps I thought we were a little superior in Feather-the-Nest. Then I saw the tidal wave treat everyone alike. Perhaps your Monica needs a disaster.”

“So do a lot of people in England. Our best hope is she’ll be real again when she gets her teeth into it.” He freed a hand and touched her face with fingers that might belong to sensitive blindness. “I’d like to memorize your face with my hands, every eye-lash.”

She sighed, drooping on his shoulder, finding it impossible not to express intangible regret.

“This can’t be the all,” he said soothingly. “Perhaps I could prevail on her when I get to England. If she knew I was sailing—”

“Did you say sailing?” she asked tensely.

He nodded, releasing her but taking her hand to draw her on. “Come and sit on the cannon,” he urged, and soon they were side by side—looking down on the shrouded harbour, where hulls, masts, and funnels loomed out like phantom shipping. His eyes narrowed and strained, trying to pierce the fog concealing the wharves. “We can’t see, but over there is the English boat. She sails tomorrow, but I don’t know the time. We’re not allowed to know. I’ve made all arrangements, fixed everything—I’m taking that boat.”

Mageila received the information without stirring, sitting like a wooden girl placed bolt upright; but though he recognized shock and tension he made no attempt to ease something that had to be met. He watched her eyes, and when he noticed they would not blink he tried to restore her by natural comment.

“We have to join a convoy. We’ll take some time to get over—much longer than usual. The convoy sails at the speed of the slowest ship.” Still she said nothing and he bent forward and then back, finding something in her withdrawal forbidding physical persuasion. “Odd how things fall into line,” he went on with desperate ordinariness. “Once the decision was made, everything went smoothly. I had a feeling I wanted to see the old Assou, and this morning there she was in the harbour. It was good of her to come in before I left.”

“You saw the Assou?” she asked, with a long pause between each word.

He stared with sharpened vision, trying to compel her unblinking eyes. “Yes, darling. I saw the Assou,” he said, refusing any portent in the statement. “I was glad to see her. It was what I would have wished. It made me recapture those big days—”

His eyes pleaded for her concurrence; but she neither answered nor acted as if she had heard, and he was sure if he tried to take a deep run into her eyes he would meet glaze he could not pass. In spite of himself his hands reached out in a physical way that could be more compelling than his voice; but he remembered Mrs. Kirke’s warning about a girl’s flesh, and the way would be bitter enough. In the sight of her trance he grew apprehensive, uneasy over the way she was living alone. Again he spoke gently, reasonably, keeping the situation within the bounds of naturalness.

“The Assou must be up the harbour where the fog is thickest.”

“And Grandpa comes to town tomorrow,” she said, addressing the place where the ship must be. From utter stillness she started to rise, like a sleep-walker not knowing what she left.

Halfway he caught her hand, and it wrestled strongly in his. “Where are you going, Mageila?”

“To Labrador,” she muttered, as if she was on her way.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said sternly, and his greater strength returned her to himself. “Darling, wake up. You know you can’t go to Labrador in winter. That’s a trip for the summer,” he explained, as if the subject was new and strange.

“I can. I will,” she affirmed with deep stubbornness. “I was waiting for a lead. It came. Grandpa will be here. He knows everyone on the coast. The ship always takes a week to load her supplies. There’s sure to be a vacancy for some service in the winter. Mrs. Kirke will be gone. You will be gone. It all fits.”

“I don’t think it does,” he said, subduing emphasis; but she started to rise again, and after a moment’s restraining he let her go and she found herself on her feet looking down to sea. She had taken one step when his deadly quiet voice hit her like cold stones. “And if you must go, are you going like that?”

Mageila turned, seeing a dark face with lips curling away from white teeth. Immediately her mislaid womanhood rushed back to her body. She knelt on the cannon embracing his head, speaking thick smooth words to his bitterness.

“No, no, forgive me. I couldn’t go like that, but even if I did I would take you with me. It was the shock. I think I’m slow when I’m shocked. Things seemed to be fitting in place like a pattern. I saw the tidal wave, Mrs. Kirke, Moira, Brin, and the cats, you going to war, and I got the feeling of trusting the death in the tidal wave. Everything else was against nature. Forgive me, Trevor.”

Relaxation and much forgiveness lay in his yielding body but not in his voice. “You’ll be always influenced by that. Why wouldn’t you be? The elements are in you, and you’re not afraid of them any more. Primitive people were, and they made blood-sacrifices to them. Now we make blood-sacrifices, to what?”

“I don’t know,” she said desolately, but she struggled to modify the bitter unhappiness of his voice. “Trevor, wherever you go, near or far, it will make no difference. You may be married to Monica, but I feel you are married to me. If I could I would keep you safe, make you happy, love you. I would be like God and keep you from dashing your foot against a stone.”

He stirred restlessly, sorrowfully, against her shoulder. “Don’t, Mageila; you seem too much to leave,” he entreated; and for a while he accepted the circle of her arms, letting her be the sanctuary, before he lifted his head and drew her down beside him. “Darling, I’d like to have truth between us. I know you take in your stride what confounds timid townpeople; but it hurts me to think of you in Labrador, closed in behind those great bays—with all that wind, and northern lights like a judgement-day. I’d find it intolerable to think of you there.”

About to repress her feelings, Mageila answered his wish for truth. “It will be intolerable for me to think of you at war.”

His despairing shoulders lifted, and stayed up, before coming down with mute resignation. “The war seems safer,” he muttered.

“I’m going,” she said with soft but deep decision. His tone made her tilt her face to the sky until fears of tears caused her to drop her head in her hands and speak to the stony ground. “You must try and understand, Trevor. We can’t interfere with each other that way. What you grow up with must be important. When I look back my life seems full of sea and church. I got tired of church, but it makes you remember the Bible. When I was very young I thought it had been written about Newfoundland. There was so much about waves and billows, and people doing business in great waters.” She laughed, deeply and shortly, at her own foolishness. “The old woman I told you about—she used to work all day; but in the evening she read her Bible until she went to bed, and she always read out loud. I remember walking up the hill and listening at her door. I can always see the lamp-chimney and the light on the cover of her Bible. Sometimes I went in; sometimes I didn’t. Once when I did I asked her if the chapter she was reading had been written about Feather-the-Nest. She smiled and told me the Jews were land-people and feared the sea; but they had to do business in great waters, so they came to write of the emotion of the sea in people. Mrs. Slater said there should be no terror for that sort of thing. Many people who drowned went to death simply because they loved the sea.” She stopped, turning her head unhappily. “Trevor, I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

Her distress and faltering voice made him forget himself and let tenderness live in his face and voice. “I think you do, my dear. You’re trying to tell me you can only work in that sort of danger because there you feel at home.” He paused, looking reflectively at the sea. “I missed the Bible-training—they say that’s a great lack in the modern world. Mageila, I was trying to persuade you I was surprised about Labrador; but it’s what I expected. I feared it, so I hoped you wouldn’t say it.”

It was his turn to drop his face in his hands and speak a theme to the ground that brought her upright to stare at the back of his head.

“Today, at lunch, I was feeling pretty grim, thinking what a fool I’d been to marry so young. Then I found myself next to a tableful of young giggling girls, finished with school perhaps since the summer-term. They were all about your age and one was giving the lunch because it was her birthday, and she gushed so extravagantly about the presents they had given her; and when they talked together it was about the party last night, the one they were going to that evening, what this and that boy had said—and the hostess confessed the boy she liked best had asked her what flowers she wanted and she told him black orchids, at a hundred dollars each. Then she giggled and they all giggled.” His short laugh was as hard as the ground he stared at. “It was all so divinely witless and yet beautiful—I wouldn’t change a thing about you, Mageila, but I ached to give you youth and irresponsibility through me.” He sat up, meeting her wide wondering eyes.

“I was never like that, Trevor. Nobody was like that where I came from. Even if nothing had happened I would have begun to earn my own living or—”

“What?” he asked, taking her hands.

“Married, I suppose,” she said sombrely.

He dropped her hands quickly. “I shouldn’t keep you from that when it comes along.”

Mageila thrust her hands back into his. “I don’t change, Trevor. If I could tell you—”

“What?” he said gloomily.

“I cannot say what I feel,” she said, in sudden thick frustration.

He looked into eyes compelling a rise from dark moodiness. “I know, my dear. You’re trying to tell me we can live a whole future in a brief time. You’ve done that to me, Mageila—made me conscious of the mystery here and beyond. I feel I can fight for good things: love and joy, peace and—”

“I’ll work for them,” she said softly.

His face became distorted with reality. “In such lonely places?”

Mageila laid her face against his and they sat embraced, with the fog misting their hair.

“Will I be alone, Trevor? I can think of a feeling that will turn winter into summer.”

“You’re quite right. I won’t let you be alone,” he said in a firm vibrant voice.

“Then—” said Mageila softly.

“Then,” he decided, “you’ll return with me now. We’ll have dinner, and sit, and make an evening a lifetime. After—”

“What is there to say? But Dieu te bénisse.”

The sweet depth of her voice made him clutch her with earth-bound hands. “This is not all,” he protested. “We can’t say good-bye and leave it alone. There must be more.”

Above his bent dark head Mageila looked down at the harbour, veiled with fog hiding their two ships. She turned towards the cold sea that was her heritage. She tilted her face to the sky, imploring it to draw up her tears.

“Yes, there will be more,” she said when she could. “The same sea, with other people travelling over it; and all of them will want something permanent and none of them will find it. But the ones—”

“What?” he muttered.

Each word dropped from her lips like smooth round stones. “The ones who love will know they can walk through the waters and not feel drowned.”

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of Highway to Valour by Margaret Duley]