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A young man who had arrived uninvited from France lay under the green slate roof of the verandah perfecting the idea he had suggested to his hosts, that, if he had not come, they would have sent for him. He had not had to walk the ten miles from Starn to their remote house above the sea. A cart had given him a lift along the lanes. He still smelt of dust and crushed nettles. And already the brother and sister and the sister’s husband were reinstating him—their minds making delicate interior adjustments to excuse their weakness—into his position as a cherished family curse. Scylla, his hostess, did it best. “He is our ring of Polycrates,” she had cried out suddenly in the hour of spiritual angularity just after he had appeared. “We are infinitely well-off here.” “Polycrates exactly,” said Felix, her brother. “It didn’t end there.” Still, after that, the situation had run more easily; for with a certain kind of english person a classical allusion has the weight and function of a text. Instantly their minds had gone out to sea: Samos; the Thalassocrats; and their eyes had sought it from where they stood, beside a very old stone house, built under a green down, set with its lawn deep in the base of a triangular wood, stream-bisected, which ran down to a blunt nose of cliff and a ledge of rock to the sea. Terrible cliffs, airy, bird-trodden, flanked their quiet land-cup and its easy promontory of worn gold stone. The turf hills backed it, a chess-board of fields filled it. Round one side curved a village of extraordinary beauty. On the other, two miles off, sprang their wood. Centuries ago, their house had been built there—in the most ancient part of the wood within sound of the sea.

There was no road between the village and their wood, only three paths. The easy ribbon along the little cliff, the field-path half way up to the hills, and the third—the first ever made by man—the green road along the down top. Past five kings’ barrows on your right, and on your left seventeen geographical cows. On that road a light car could bump itself quietly along the top of the world and down a flint slope to the gate outside the wood and the dark path to the house.

The land’s way is important in this story, because its people will be continually running to and fro by hill or shore or field—from the house in the wood to another house, a little above the village across the cup. A house not like their house, the wood’s jewel, but a more familiar elegance, built in the eighteenth not the sixteenth century, out of the same grey stone. A house that was now shut-up and blind; its jade shutters bolted, its roses run to suckers, its fountains dry. It had belonged to their cousin, Felicity Taverner, who was dead. Her death was still a kind of death to the three of them, to whose family the two houses in the hollow land belonged—to Felix Taverner and to Scylla, his sister; whose husband, Picus Tracy, came from a variation of the same stock and the same country a hundred bee-miles inland. It was now spring, but the thought of their cousin’s death in the past winter remained like a small tide mounting and retreating, reversing the usual formula for death. They wore no mourning for her, but there was a stain under Scylla’s eyes as though a dead violet had brushed them, and her light hair flung back from her white forehead sometimes hung raggedly, as though combed by fingers trying to tear thoughts out of the brain. She loved her cousin; did not know if it had been suicide which had left her, bloody and dusty, beside the road, under a rock where the Lower Corniche rises above Villefranche.

After the first shock, she had not been sorry to see Boris—the uninvited, cast-off-at-intervals, sprung-of-a-murdered-Russian-and-a-Upas-tree discovery of Felix.

Whom they had fed and loved, and by whom they had been selected to bear all things and endure all things. His reasonable behaviour would last a week at most, and then the lurid extravaganza would begin again. But any distraction would be a diversion, for the men were taking their loss in two varieties of silence; her husband reduced to nothing but inconsequent monosyllables or ways to match; her brother pretending that it did not matter, either the event or the reasons for it. Boris’s sensibility and curiosity would help them. There was always an oblique help in Boris, as incalculable but as certain as the monstrosities of behaviour by which his friends paid for his love.

She went into the house to see to his comfort and propitiate their old nurse, and found her already propitiated, her darning egg stretched over one of his socks. And Boris was there before her, perched on a corner of the kitchen table, waving a spoon and praising the existence and the nature of her jam.

Before dinner the spring night turned suddenly cold, but before they had time to realise it, Boris had a great fire alight. Green sparks leapt from a drift-log out of a fire-wall of pale gold. Nanna had alchemised food into a dinner. Boris added a russian dish. Picus had risen, his thin skull cobwebbed, up the cellar stair, with good wine that only God could have preserved there till then. After dinner, with his familiarity which did not offend, Boris took the tallest wax candles and filled every wall sconce and rubbed silver candlestick. So they sat before the fire, in light all down the long room. The shutters were bolted across the french windows. From nowhere could the night come in.

An hour before dinner Scylla had walked in with Boris down the wood-path, towards the sea. There under the high tree-talk he had said: “You have had a trouble here. I saw it in the french papers.” She had repeated that her cousin was dead. “You never met, did you?” Then: “Let us try and talk about it after dinner. We have been too silent about it. After dinner, listen to us. Make us speak.”

After dinner they were silent, but aware of something like a thread of renewed well-being stirring in their veins, and pleasure because of the lights. When Felix asked: “What are we to do?” Scylla answered: “Tell Boris.” And since she told stories well, it was left to her to tell him.

She began slowly, knowing that they had none of them yet arranged such facts as they knew into a version of the truth. She smiled: Boris as a truth-elicitor, a mould into which a series of events, full of omissions and each distinct and white-hot with their charge of emotion, could be poured. Presently the mould would be broken and leave them with a death in its proportions. Felicity’s torn and strewn members collected; laid out; laid in state. For them to assuage themselves with offerings. This done, let the earth take her; do what it liked with her; make her serviceable for its coarse business under the soil. (But she’d been cremated.) Scylla laughed. Anyhow, she must have her requiem: give occasion for a good story, and so to her survivors some peace, since ballads were no longer within man’s capacity. In their house-saga, her story well-told would keep her memory brighter than earth’s freshest grass. The first recital should have her for rhapsodist. Felix later should write it, the family’s professional chronicler. She began:

“You must know, Boris, that Felicity was my first cousin, and so kin to Picus. Tracys have married Taverners before. (Remember also that I shall have to try round and say a great many things that are not true until I start a truth.) So, I’ll call her a fool. A fool because life had given her everything, yet when you’d admitted her every beauty, grace and gift, you knew that something had been left out, like some secretion we haven’t yet isolated or named, and whose lack made each of her qualities ineffective—” She hesitated.

“This dish without the salt,” said Boris.

“I could have said that before if I’d meant it”—rather tartly—“you’ve got to endure it while I get this story straight. If I’d said ‘without salt,’ you’d have taken her for a lovely fool. She was not. She was adorable. If a crystal became a white narcissus, you’d have something like her. She walked, laughed, prayed to Mozart. She was disinterested and without pretension. Yet she knew when she had been, even when she would be, abused. Accepted it—just as in the Middle Ages she would have worn a hair shirt under a white shift and a dress stiff with gold. Her choice of objects—of possessions—was perfect, and her virtue—for she was most men’s friend and very few’s lover—had the same passion and detachment. If she was poor, and she generally was, she could make and mend and cook potatoes, with or without butter; but once out in the world it seemed as though great houses had been built to display her.”

“But,” cried Boris, “you are describing not a fool but a saint.”

“She was a fool,” said Felix slowly, “or how would this have happened to her?”

“But I hear it as a story of someone the Gods loved and took young.”

Then he saw Scylla’s face and the nails drawing blood from the palms of her hands. He saw Picus, her husband, look at her, the ray that passed between them. And that, though Scylla did not look at him, her fingers relaxed.

“I’ll withdraw ‘fool.’ Only with her wit she must have known that persons of her quality have the whole brutishness of our society against them. They can only save themselves by planting their feet hard into some patch of earth. Clean earth, and suppose it’s muddy, it grips better. But Felicity seemed always to be perched up an almond tree or a pear, shaking down petals for blessings on the unjust and the just. If you protested, she said that Nature did that. ‘Like the sweet apple.’ Oh, she was always off, robbing some heavenly orchard and sharing the spoil. Only it seemed that a warning went with her, like a cream-dipped-in-coal thunder-cloud, that fat menace that sits along the horizon and means that the weather will break.”

Scylla paused, knowing that the men were on the look-out for the bias proper to a female cat. Must allow for it and ignore it in her search for the story’s truth; endure it until its finding justified her.

—“One of the greatest poems says at the end:

Boris, even I know how curiously and actually that is true. Enough—if our age would allow it—to justify talk of miracles. Only it seemed as though—as though—Felicity of all people—in the end had been left out. Almost everyone we know is worth less than she was; you, mon ami, and I; and outside our range, the rough stuff of the earth and its scoundrels even. And I’ve seen heaven’s ambulance rush after them. While she seemed left alone to do first-aid on herself. Who never thought of herself. I watched it for years: called it a mystery.”

“You are speaking about a woman who was a miracle herself,” said Boris.

“I think I am. But that raises questions. Don’t you see, I tried to get out of it by calling her a fool, who had all heaven’s weapons and wouldn’t or couldn’t use them. Don’t you see, we shall go mad if we can’t account for the awful luck which left her dead at thirty-three with all our loves at her service?”

“But she is back in Paradise now,” said Boris.

Felix said: “Your virtue-level, Scylla, is about what the world will stand. If it’s properly bullied. And that’s only because of the patch of mud you talk about, and carry round with you; stick your feet in when you’re up against it; sacrifice a pair of socks. Like a praying carpet. Now cut out the mystery and tell Boris what happened.”

Boris nodded. She began again:

“Family-life. What can’t you say about family-life? To-day it’s considered no more than the forcing-bed for the Oedipus complex. While our national variety either works exceedingly well, or it is the most brutal thing alive. An English family gets born, and if they don’t happen to like each other, the young are handed over, without benefit of counsel, to a judge, jury, prison, executioner of its parents and itself, disguised under a sentimental conception of family love. Oh, it makes us hardy; drives us out to Ispahan or to suicide; on to the streets or to the Mountains of the Moon. . . .

“Well, Felicity’s mother is our aunt, a Taverner only by marriage. She was her only daughter and her mother didn’t happen to like her. Old Aunt Julia is a notable dowager and an infernal bully. I’ve been watching her lately. Once her activities had to be diluted with a strong dose of sentiment; lately she’s reversed gears, become as acid a cynic as she was once a sentimentalist. In both cases, alternate statements of the original bitch. You’d think that she’d have bullied Felicity until she’d married her off. Not a bit. Somehow Felicity managed to elude her, and when, very rarely, elusion failed, you saw for an instant another Felicity, which was like. . . . Think if the crescent moon showed you its teeth.

“Anyone but a limpet or a practising criminal would have quarrelled with Aunt Julia, but that situation was hopeless. Aunt Julia had borne this creature: couldn’t break her: couldn’t (suppose she had tried) teach her sense; wouldn’t conciliate, but could wound and torture and bleed her to death. Chiefly about nothing. Or about her friends. Yet her mother to-day has her house full of people we should not tolerate and Felicity omit to notice.

“Think then of a mother a bully, with several sons whose docility and whose sex got them off comparatively scot-free. A woman in love with power, who got it in so strong a dose that in justice to her I believe she would have feared it if she had understood. Only she became persuaded that it was her duty to punish Felicity. And Felicity, who could do all things for some people, had no ‘hands’ with the Great Crested Dowager of our family. Anymore than Aunt Julia wanted a Lesser Spotted Debutante under her wing. Felicity who had ‘hands’ with elderly scientists and young men it was worth misunderstanding to help; and with tapettes and concierges and lost princesses, could find no formula for her mother. When Aunt Julia was young, things ought to have happened to her, and they didn’t. Married to my uncle, who loved a female skeleton in a barrow more than any properly covered bones in bed, she had no young practice in love. Can anything make up for that? Then to have Felicity for daughter, growing up in one of our intervals of freedom—”

“Besides,” said Felix, “she was distinctly chaste.”

“That’s what I mean. To have your own daughter turn up her nose at what you hadn’t dared do; or refused to please God. When Felicity started an affair, it was somehow outside the rules, regular or irregular.”

“You can imagine how much her mother stood for it,” said Felix.

“And I’ve seen her,” said his sister, “with the same look that Saint Catherine of Siena had in ecstasy.”

“By Sodoma,” said Felix, “exactly.”

Boris spoke: “Is it that you mean to say that your aunt murdered her?”

“If you like. Infanticide à la mode.”

“We’ve not got to that yet, if she did,” said Felix’s sister. Boris went on:

“Your priest who I love so. I asked him when he was teaching me English to let me hear some of your eloquence, your rhetoric. At first he did not seem to understand. Then he read to me out of Shakespeare and out of Byron. Then some of your prayers. They delighted me. One of them said you were ‘to set your affections on things above, not on things of earth,’ and told me particularly to do that because there was no danger that I should do it too much. I thought that adorable. Afterwards he said that to a very few people it might become a sin, because we know something of how to live on earth but not at all how to live in heaven. Was not that your cousin’s . . . ?”

“Miscalculation,” said Scylla suddenly. “No. And if I called her a fool, it was because she so often shamed me. And if it’s true that heaven didn’t rush up with the help it gives any malignant child, then she had comfort too rare for us to notice. Or else it wanted her back. . . .”

“If it did,” said Felix, “the last thing she wanted was a return to our father’s house. With all her star-and-petal talk, she put early death into the same category as wrinkles.”

Said Boris: “What was she afraid of?”

There was silence, acute with attention and appreciation of Boris. Then Picus expressed himself, in words for once.

“Now you’ve asked, it was like this. She was afraid of going without things any more. Not the heavenly treasures, but things like cut glass and jade and the first flowers and fruits. And of how the way having no money hands you over to vile people, virtuosos in the art of being vile. There was a man once who sowed dragons’ teeth. I don’t know what Felicity sowed, but there came up vile bodies with a beard and a bill and a voice you go on hearing in your sleep.”

Boris shivered. Picus added casually: “That took murder off her mother’s hands. Her idea was that her daughter had done wrong not to live on the stuff that isn’t butter and had gone to hell besides.” His wife looked at him with troubled and adoring love.

“We’re on the track now,” she said. “A mob is ordering itself into a ballet.” She leaned staring over the fire; sat back, her fingers raking her hair.

“After Picus’s lead, the story is clearer. And intolerable.”

Felix acknowledged again Picus’s intelligence, a man who usually never opened his mouth except for an irrelevance or for some finally condensed statement. Was his sister right, and Picus sometimes inspired? To the world he assumed their marriage to be one of convenience and divorce imminent. In reality he feared that he might at any moment become an uncle. Would hate to watch Scylla’s figure spoilt. A glance reassured him. Hill-walking had built her up like a light tree; while all winter long Picus’s arms seemed to have moulded her as much as the summer’s long wave-tumbling and the caresses of the sea. He saw her eyes burn with the intelligence Picus had quickened and the wordless quiet play between lover and lover. Suppose then, he thought, that it was true that they loved each other, assume the improbable, original unoriginality; one had to admit that their variety gave an illusion of strangeness and beauty, as though it had never happened before. Suppose then that true love was like art, and no more original, and each time as unique.

Picus and Scylla were of the generation before the war; Felix of the half generation after it. And at the bottom of that dry gulf between half a generation there are corpses, who did not notice the gulf was there. He saw Boris too, approving of them. Felix thought of his relations with Boris and their uneasiness. All should have gone well with them, but after the start, it was as if they were both playing at a game of which neither knew the rules, or if there were rules. Not only because Boris was a pest, and one that fell chiefly on the just, the unjust recognising it at sight; but because Boris seemed also to have the key to some private disreputable paradise where Felix could not go in.

Meanwhile, at Picus’s word, Scylla was about to reduce a hideous chaos to a tragic cosmos. Their blood-link made him aware that her imagination was tuning-in. She sat back from the fire, grave, attentive, about to give them their cousin’s Lycidas.

He heard the drums and flutes of that opening: of that poem about a drowned curate and shepherds more respectable than Theocritus and english rivers in mourning, by which Milton arrived at the same universe as the Fifth Symphony or the Ninth.

“This is her story: I mean one version of it,” she said. “You must know, Boris, how poor Felicity was. We are poor, but we make something and we shall inherit; and not one of the three of us will go off on an orgy without knowing that it will not quite ruin us. Also we can make and mend; and Nanna, who had meant to spend a tranquil old age with Felicity, chose to stay and care for never less than three of us. So, not an eggshell is wasted, and I haven’t to think about it. What I mean is that we have just enough: Felicity just not enough. Which makes you reckless.” Boris nodded.

“We had this house left to us and Felicity the one across the valley. It was let from time to time to people we did not like. So you did not see it when you were here before. It is rather too perfect: a museum-piece. Complete early Eighteenth Century Bijou Residence, once the Property of a Young Lady, Killed by a Broken Heart. Yes: that will do for the present. The salon has an alabaster chimney piece, italian, with little amoretti ‘in terms of learned and exquisite fantasy.’ Honey-pale and gay like the house.

“D’you understand, Boris? A house can be gay and tragic. This one can catch the sea-roar and turn it into peals of laughter. No, I know nothing about the history of her house. A cadet of ours built it, to park a widowed mother there or an aunt. Only somehow it is over-charged with sensibility: has the vapours and pouts at you.”

“It’s the house Haunters and Haunted happened in,” said Felix.

“(Our best ghost-story, Boris. No. I can’t stop and tell it. No. Yours are always about vampires, a pleasing thought but limited. We don’t have them here.) I must finish Felicity’s house, it’s important.

“It needed to be kept-up and it asked to be lived-up to. You see it is an objet d’art. Round quicksilver mirrors set in ebony on the panels of an octagonal room. Some painted with birds, or with diminishing glasses in their glass. Curtains and coverings of old toile de Jouy, and some royal brocades. Cupboards with glass doors sunk in the walls. And a small shallow stair that mounts as delicately as an empire train. So take back Haunters and Haunted, Felix. That house was square and grim.

“Like so many things in her life, her exquisite house wasn’t much good to her. Goodness only knows what snob-ghost lived in it, but it snubbed her. On summer evenings she would run here across the fields.”

“So she did,” said Felix uneasily, whose love was not yet of the painstaking kind and who shirked the irrevocable.

“Leaving family affection out, it was to get her feet attached again to earth—to the mud-patch. She said once that all the hoops and crinolines worn in that house made her feel she must go up like a balloon. This house anchored her. It does not stir to find you, but it never turns any, or hardly any, creature away.”

Here Picus muttered something about “nor live nor dead, nor fox nor rabbit” which essentially unfriendly combination he did not explain.

“And it was like Felicity that she would not let her house down. Perfect it was and had a right to be. But it’s a poule de luxe: eats money and paints its face.”

“Who lives in it now?”

“She died intestate and with no children. It goes back to her brother, Adrian. (I suppose you know when she did die—last winter, four months ago.) There never was a divorce.” Two voices intoned the following tune: “that ghastly man she married—”

Boris noted the caste-feeling assert itself.

“He was a Russian, Nicholas Kralin, son of a political exile, long before your Revolution. For believing in Tolstoy, or something. No, not your sort. A proletarian-idealist. A very thorough one he must have been to have had that wolf for son. Tolstoy found the way to heaven blocked by the books he would not go on writing. So he was left to drive men to God over the rough. With every morning a footman for remembrancer: ‘Monsieur le comte, votre charrue est à la porte.’ ”

Boris nodded, agreeably serious for once.

“It is right,” he said, “to be a great noble or a great artist or a great saint. But they cost each what they cost. And this disciple. Had he jewish blood?”

“Not officially. But his son is not arriviste, but by reaction, a wolf. A wolf that tried to turn house-dog, and became neither dog nor wolf.”

Picus asked: “Does a man become a castrato for his voice’s sake and then never sing again? Or feed the flies on the arsenic he bought for his wife’s tea?”

His voice died away, and then continued clearly: “—And this not out of idiocy or fear, or by mistake, or for any reason. Except for no reason at all. For the what’s-its-name—virtuosity of Unreason. Which is a God. Nick Kralin’s answer is that there’s no answer. If you asked him the meaning of meaning, he’d answer ‘no meaning at all.’ ”

Felix broke in: “Yes, and with a pretty copy of nice english diffidence. And in some ghastly way make you feel he was in the know: that if your poor intellect was worth it, he’d just make it clear to you the jolly little secret he and Meaning have between them, that there is no meaning to anything at all.”

“Was he very gifted at metaphysics?” asked Boris, anxiously.

“Mercifully not,” said Scylla, “a top-heavy mushroom on a rickety stalk. Both full of maggots. Superficial, scientific pornographist. All for style, nothing for content. The usual camp. What more could he be if meaning’s meaning’s meaningless? I’m sorry for him now, who’s become a eunuch of the kingdom of nothing’s sake. Yet, when he was young, he had an air, a quality, which made people ask if he had genius. Also, he was very beautiful. He had the pleasantest speaking-voice.”

“Where does one arrange him in the world?”

“In Snob-cultivated Society. Assembles with impeccable perverse taste a number of objets d’art. Has been psycho-analysed out of any pleasure in anything. Or so he thinks. Felicity fell in love with him when he was young: married him: helped him. (He acquired his money later.) Ran away from him. Believed that she had discovered some frightful secret. Called it the Grey Thing, but it was what Felix meant about meaning. And Unreason which Picus said is a God. That man is sure that he has the inside dope on the ultimate senselessness of everything. And is content.”

She paused: the story paused. Then Felix said: “You were so busy, Scylla, high-hatting him, that you were never all round the man.”

“I know,” she said, “I may have been frightened, too. Go on with him yourself.”

“Well,” said Felix, “the ‘grey thing’ was Felicity having the vapours. It’s a real horror. Kralin’s no ordinary pessimist. None of that russian gloom so conspicuously absent in Boris. Our Boris’s reaction to the unpropitious is to run amok.”

Explanations, admissions, excuses followed.

Felix went on: “She used to run over here to find us, at any hour, if anything grey happened to the weather. She was afraid of the sea-mist. Panic-fear. Or of one of those cold summer days after rain when the hay lies down in swathes struck a sort of silver-slug colour. And I remember one iron frost when the sky came down on our heads, and sent her out bare-headed. I’d even had a feeling she was coming, and had gone out to the edge of the wood and noticed when I saw her, running like a lapwing over the open grass, that there was grey under her eyes and no red on her cheeks. And when old Marshallsea came here one night and told us about the drowned ghost that comes up from the cove clung on to by something—‘ ’twas a grey corpse with a grey, greasy trail of weed come up out of a grey tide,’ I thought she’d faint.”

“I’ve watched the cove for it for years,” said Scylla. “There’s nothing there.”

“I never said there was. But there’s a something, a quality you can call grey about Nick Kralin, a grey that repeats itself. So grey frightened her.” Picus spoke: “You can get a first in Greats or fly round inside the crater of Vesuvius, but what you depend on for your private life is your degree in witch-doctoring. How much you can smell-out the propitious from the unpropitious.”

Boris, who had been following attentively, seemed to agree.

“Suppose what you call ‘the grey thing’ is the same power that made our Revolution distinct from other revolutions. For it is.” They nodded.

—“It was your priest again who suggested that to me. And not because the Bolsheviki were against the Church. The French were that, but they invented the Marseillaise, and for one who did not believe, there were a hundred who thought ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Equality’ were three new names of God. Suppose then that your cousin believed at first that she was embracing a beautiful young lover who had genius, and found that she was being embraced by a comprimé of—” There was sweat on the high, round forehead.

“Of the demon who gave your sword of justice to the Tcheka to handle,” said Scylla. “Will that do?”

“Or,” said Felix, “as though you had gone to sleep on your marriage-bed to wake up with an octopus in a tank.”

“Fool that I’ve been,” said Scylla. “Felix, I hand over our house-saga to you.”

“No,” said Felix, kindly: “only Felicity was rather my affair. She really was what people call humble; had an inferiority complex about us because there was nothing particular she could do. I used to point out that to love and be lovely was a whole-time job.”

Blind with her own humiliation, Scylla covered her eyes. Then turned to Boris.

“I know it was an obscene evasion when I called her a fool.”

“A woman would,” said he kindly.

“In my heart I felt myself inferior before her. That made me impatient.”

“Wonders of the complex,” said Felix, “and this isn’t the time for them. Here’s her photograph, Boris. What d’you make of it?”

Then it occurred to all three that Boris might easily have met her in Paris. He looked at it quickly:

“She is what I said at the beginning—a woman who came out of Paradise; and if she left it, it was to look for people who could not find their way in. She was on earth ‘pour faire aimé l’amour.’ The world did not want to and it killed her. But what happened to her just before? And when Picus spoke about money?”—

There was silence again, while Scylla prepared the next sequence, and the room had its turn. Instead of four voices, the fire spoke, the voice of flames disintegrating salted wood into the quiet fall of light ash. The crack of old panels responding to heat, and behind them the ground-scratch of mice. A door in the kitchen quarters opened and shut. Nanna’s feet and the maid’s mounted the stair. The heavy shutters bolted-out the interminable conversations of the trees. Behind these incidental breaks, the pulse of the long room in the delicate candle-light beat in time with the house and the wood. In time with its own time, a pace inaudible, yet sensible to each. Felix had said that a sonata could be written on the room’s tempo, whose finale should be a demonstration of relativity.

Then the long room took advantage of their silence, and its shadowless walls seemed to move each in its own direction to some uncharted place. Happy lovers, asleep together, sometimes imagine their bed sails out, indifferent to walls, and visits those countries which lie east of the sun, west of the moon. In this second silence the walls left them behind, preoccupied with Felicity’s passion and death; aware only that something was happening to the place where they sat, to describe which the comparisons of poets have been used to obscure reality. So that a literal description passes, even among poets, for metaphor, as when Wordsworth said: “as if to make the strong wind visible”; “as if” discounting what he had to say, who had seen the wind, and not dared say so.

So the four observed the four walls set at right angles, on the march, and not interfering with one other. A perception not easy to discuss for lack of terms. It had happened before, and after history had been ransacked for analogies, Felix had supplied them with Alice running with the Red Queen on the squares: Picus with a story of John Buchan’s about a man who died of finding out what space is really like, and in it quotes a dream of trains passing without collision on crossed rails.

Felix ended the silence: “Ready to go on, Scylla? The walls’ parade is getting on my nerves.” They were ready for her voice with its human stresses, pauses and climaxes, for research into a story in known terms.

She began again:

“The meaning of money is that it determines the route, not the goal, of things. You can get on with it or without it, but you will get on differently. And so are modified yourself. The other Taverner boys were pushed into professions, out into the world. They are younger than Felicity, and they have nothing to do with this story.

“There was her younger brother, Adrian, and he has, I think.”

“I’ve met him,” said Boris.

“Everyone has. And you know in any country the position of the favourite son. Mrs. Taverner held the pursestrings, but she gave a lot to him. Well, about six months before she died, Felicity thought that he’d realised something about her. At least he came to see her, after she had been struggling to live on nothing for a long time, and said that she was his darling and that he would put her affairs right.”

“Wrote it as well, I think,” said Felix.

“At any rate there was a promise that there should be an end of pinching and uncertainty and window-shopping and waking up and dawn-staring because there was a man coming about a bill. Felicity was not a bad manager, an exquisite one and quite careful; only she was not born an economist. It was proper for her to have room to flower in. While her candour and timidity both loathed debts; felt them a dishonour. She had none of the technique some people learn of how to live on what they owe, in which you, Boris, are a talented amateur. I said amateur.

“But Felicity was helpless. While her mother always implied and often said that since cheap shoes were all she could afford, they were what she ought to wear. And that she neither could do or would. Aunt Julia will wear any kind of shoe with a Lanvin dress.

“It did not seem just to Felicity. While it hurt her that a mother could be like that. To this part of the story there is an under-song you have heard before: ‘Felicity had not “hands” with her mother.’ Aunt Julia thought that she ought to make it up with Nick Kralin: or marry again: or get some work. Felicity shuddered at Kralin: didn’t want to marry again: didn’t know any ‘work.’ Could not convey to her mother any notion of what she was.

“Her occupation was to be lovely and exquisite and kind. And to adorn that bitch of a house. To learn things and never to show them off. It was her business to understand things and to love. (What better business is there?) But what ice could that cut with old Mrs. Taverner? ‘Who could object to Jane, her understanding excellent, her manners captivating, her mind improved?’ While her mother saw her a scandalous piece, whose generosities reproached her meanness, whose failures justified her common sense. For it is now time to say that she gave a victorian dowager something to put up with; she did not gild the pill or sweeten it, or, if you like, justify herself by any conspicuous success. Mind you, she would have had success, ordinary social success, if they had helped her; would have made a present of it to her mother, since it was her nature to give people what they asked. Only it mattered nothing to Aunt Julia that everybody loved her, and everything that they exploited her; and that her poverty kept her out of the houses she could have visited. Even made her run away from such people who could have protected her and adored.

“Instead she hid. Ran away, if you like. Here, out on wild nights with the shepherds at lambing time. Or in Paris, Boris, comforting people like you.

“Also she was piteously shy; her first reaction that insane sense of her unworthiness; and an adorable, poetic and often quite cynical admiration for persons as they were, or according to their kind.

“Her Paris-place—she even gave them up just before she died—was like a dutch interior. There she would sit and read and embroider; and hungry boys would come, hopeless, and she would feed them, and climb some tree in Paradise and shake down a petal-storm over them. Some of the petals stuck: some shook them off as they got outside: some kept a few in their cigarette cases and showed them with a leer. But not many. I know even french dowagers would send their sons to her, knowing they would come to no harm, pick up some fine English, and even sometimes come away with a momentary enthusiasm for virtue.

“Those mothers shrugged their shoulders, of course. I heard one sum it up: the pity and the inexplicable madness of it that such a woman should be alone: heard wish her a convenable husband and then a salon worthy of her.

“That impressed me. It was so exactly what Felicity ought to have had.”

Felix spoke: “That is what she had come to see; it was that that she wanted: that she needed. She told me.”

“Do you get it clear, Boris, these preliminaries?”

“Perfectly.”

Scylla continued:

“Can you bear it if I go on? It is you who will make us remember everything. Remember that I have to be counsel for both sides. If I had to show you that Adrian and Aunt Julia were the cause of Felicity’s death, I have to show you that I think neither knew what they were doing: and that her mother may even have thought that she was doing the right thing. Aunt Julia is the type that has always to believe that she is doing the right thing.

“Above all, you are not to go away and tell the world that her mother and her brother murdered Felicity—if it should be true that she was driven to throw herself before that car on the Lower Corniche. Still less that they hired a chauffeur-assassin. It was that, ignorantly, they had weakened her hold on life. Aldous Huxley writes of the enormous biologic pressure under which man lives in order to go on living. We are not lobsters to throw out a new claw. And I do not know if the destruction of the will is really possible. There was very little wrong with her health. She had got very thin and she slept badly, but it was bills that woke her. Mrs. Taverner paid some of them, but her alternative was to have bills or ask Mrs. Taverner to pay them. I don’t know which I would choose for a death-sentence on sleep. One has known my aunt to do generous things; but never a generous thing generously. So Felicity lay hid in Paris where she had once played with Alastair. I’m afraid to think of her there, crouched like a hare in its forme, dead-still, only her eyes glancing with fear. ‘Feet of a faun’ and gone to no greenwood.

“There must have been fierce economics: her maid sent away: no flowers, or fresh gloves, or new books. And her place took a faded air, smelt of Paris dust, whose scent is unique, almost a perfume, sweet, and most demoralising. While her hands must have coarsened, though they had learned how a floor is waxed, or kitchen tiles washed red, or a bath white. This went on happening after Adrian’s visit and his promise to her, and she was waiting for it to come true.

“Why didn’t we help? God forgive us. Picus and I were getting married and away in Greece on mule-back. Quarantined too on Scyros by a plague scare. We didn’t know that the year before she hadn’t even found a tenant for here. Felix was turning an equivocal penny leading an american party on a search for culture, of various sorts, in North Africa. Culture for cash and surprises thrown in. An un-rest cure. We had never heard from her after she had so adorned our wedding that Picus almost changed wives.

“Felix saw her once, I think.”

“Yes, I did—” the young man cried out—“I could not tell you, but I’ll tell you now what I saw—”

Remorse to-day is a rare emotion. They evaded it, Scylla, Boris, Picus.

—“It was on my way south, to pick up those art-lechers. I stepped off in Paris and went to see her. Found her door unlatched and walked in. Found her in the far room, with the shutters closed, in the half dark. I remember her dress was white on a black divan, and she’d a candle beside her, because, I suppose, the electric light was cut off.

“She lay on her back, and her arms were restless. I thought she was asleep. Sat down to wait. She’d neither been asleep, nor heard me. Sat up suddenly, and you’re right, Scylla, about her eyes. They were red too, round and bright. She didn’t see me: drew up her knees; staring, staring. Stared round and saw me and smiled.

“I said: ‘Been asleep?’ ‘No,’ she said, like a truthful kid. She’d frightened me, and I suppose I shouted at her to tell me what had happened. She shivered, and if you’ll believe it, she stammered that she mustn’t be shouted at any more to-day.”

“Son amant l’avait trompé sans doute,” said Boris, nervous, it seemed, at Felix’s emotion.

The walls were in their place again: the shining room charged-up with pain.

“She told me she had been lying still, waiting until the day should be over, when her brother had walked in. Hadn’t expected him, or known that he was in Paris. Had charged in on her, and it was like a storm, she said. Sounded more like slops from a top window. ‘He told me,’ she said, ‘when I threw him a cushion, not to waste civility on him: not to think that he didn’t know that all I wanted was money from him. That money was all I was out for from him and from mother, money to spend on my fancy-men.

“ ‘After that he said what hurt even more: that there was no such thing as disinterested action or sentiment: the only decent thing was to admit it; and that all I did was to add hypocrisy to the most sordid, shameless, above all profitless desire for cash. But I needn’t think I’d deceived him or my angel-mother. They knew me through and through.

“ ‘Then, he asked, where had my idealism got me? What had it brought me? How much longer would I have the face to pretend that clean hands and a pure heart were worth it? Besides, I’d lost them. They’re a fancy for the rich.’ Then she put out her hands. ‘If you believe in what were called the Signatures, Felix, it made me afraid when my brother said that. I’d been sewing a great deal, and my needle had pitted the skin of my forefinger into shreds and my hands weren’t very clean. I couldn’t answer him. I can’t tell you the violence of him: how he paced about. Flung himself up and down again: let out his voice. I knew how quiet and detached I ought to have been. Only, by a cowardice I shall pay for, I felt shouted-down. It hurt my body, the pure sound of him as much as the sense. I couldn’t breathe right. I loved him so. And because I’ve been for a long time strained and tired, I could not forget how easily he could have taken all that out of my life. Let alone what he had promised me.

“ ‘And in some awful, false way he made me ashamed. Like that poem “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.” ’—This was what she told me about Adrian and his promises.

“I suppose I deserve never to forget how she said it.

“What did I do? Oh, I took her out and she danced so lightly and laughed so sweetly, that she made it quite convenient for me to forget. I paid a few bills, and swore I’d see Adrian and put the fear of God if I couldn’t the love of man into him when I got back. And when I got back, she was dead.”

Felix was not crying. It was Boris who wept. There was something that checked Scylla’s apology for causing him pain.

A wretched silence followed, brimming the room, making the warm comfort comfortless. Dostoievsky’s dreadful insistence on the reality of the comfortless seemed to have come in with them to rest. To be truth.

Scylla began again: “I’m glad that you’re here, Boris, to be told this. I’ve somehow got from you a double image of her. One like a cameo, cut delicately, and then another, a terrible duplicate, over life-size, Io, Hathor or some such divine simplification—out of the Book of the Dead. Do you see what I mean?” Felix did.

“Io and Hathor were both cows,” said Picus. “Who wore the moon. And one came to Prometheus.”

“That was part of the worst of it,” said Felix: “Felicity never found a Prometheus.”

“I’m not so sure. There was Alastair.”

“His number was Philoctetes.”

Boris, who owed his Philoctetes to Gide, considered it an inappropriate moment for a display of classical erudition. His small, emerald torch-point flashed again about the piled, distorted shadows his friends evoked.

“Can you make a summary of this now, or is there more to tell?”

“There must be a great deal more, Boris, that happened. That is what we have to find out. All we have done is to try to begin to understand her. To tell each of us what we know, until we may—and then, I am not very sanguine—find out the truth.”

To a silent Boris, whose eyes could not keep still, Scylla said again:

“We know now that she was a woman made for a particular kind of love, a love that the world at present has particularly no use for. Recognises no God with her for priestess.

“It was as good as any art to her. ‘In whom alone love lives again’ and all that. And all we’ve said is the sugar of her story, not the honey. She was beginning to see what she had to do. I suppose it was Alastair who made her see. She’d seen the world going to its present senseless devil, anaemic with stupidity and spite, and she had meant to do something about it. Until, and I mean it, she was killed. She’d become more dangerous than she knew.

“As you can be made sick with bad painting, so was she by bad loving. If Boris thinks that a woman like that must play Chopin and have a foot like a tea-leaf or look like a boy in the wrong pants, he can think something else. She wasn’t sentimental, she was passionate. She had also what made her ‘genial,’ she gave to each relation its appropriate love. If beds were trumps, she was in one like a pearl in a shell. Or, and when she was at her rarest, she could turn all passionate feeling from its concentration on the person into the discovery of its relations with ideas and actions, unsuspected until her imagination linked them, set them to music.”

“She called that her suicide-cure,” said Felix.

“And I’ve heard her say,” said Picus, “and this is my way of saying it; that there are people who read-up the Poor Law and people who read Pindar: people, usually the same people, who never go to bed and people who never get up; people who have contraceptive delirium and people who spawn like fish. Any fool could do either, but that life began when you could do both. What she never found out was that immediately you understand that, you become over life-size. Which is what the world cannot forgive, and only finally adores.”

“Is that size then not strength?” said Boris.

“Her humility destroyed her,” said Scylla. “She did not know her own power—her own discovery.”

“Is there anything more to tell?” said Boris. “Did not one of you see her again after Felix left her on his way south?” Their silence answered him.

“Let us think about it a little more, Boris. There are three people to bear witness against her: her mother, Adrian and Nick Kralin. They must know some things that we don’t know. Aunt Julia’s anger had been maturing since her birth. The duration of Adrian’s I do not know at all. For once he loved her. While Aunt Julia’s conscience was the old-fashioned kind; to hate her daughter she must be justified; to be justified, she must create a legend about her. The world passionately resents freedom in others—freedom of genius or beauty or madness or crime—it’s all one to our teeming sphere. Still, she could not have been happy about her child’s state, and here the legend came in. For her, Felicity’s life was wholly composed of the excesses she would have liked to have enjoyed, who had sacrificed her jus saturnalia to God. That since then God has changed his mind for every boy and girl, did not excuse Felicity. So the legend had it that Felicity in Paris reeled nightly from Montmartre to Montparnasse, and in the taxi home was at least kissed. And it was to most peoples’ interest to keep the legend green; women who were jealous of her; men who had not found her light. Kralin, too, had his revenge to consider: Adrian as well could not have been proud of himself.”

Felix broke in:—

—“D’you know, I believe the legend became a mania in that house. Before I saw her in Paris for the last time, I went down to see Aunt Julia. Found her with Kralin, both as thick as thieves. Then Adrian came in, a bit flushed and restless. Had some story about his sister, when she must have been trying to make him understand that she was hard put to it for food, that she’d been seen down at Biarritz with some chic notorieties who happen to detest Adrian.

“Now that sort of accusation is the hardest thing on earth to disprove. I knew that Felicity had met those people, but that she’d no more been to Biarritz with them than she’d been to the moon. I said so. Saw that they were furious, both ways: that she had been to Biarritz, and equally that she had not been to Biarritz, and when I told them she’d never left Paris and that she needed help. For I’d seen her there casually already, before the time I’ve told you. Only I had not believed that Adrian would promise everything and do nothing.

“Then they cross-questioned me, until even my male mind noticed they were ravening after garbage. So I tied them down, or tried to, to the fact that she hardly knew the people, and hadn’t been to Biarritz for years. Faked a guarantee that I hadn’t got. Their defence was pretty poor. Only Kralin was dangerous. About the scruples of an emotional alligator. It was odd. As though everything was all of a tremble in that serene room along the terrace at Pharrs. I was shaking and you’d excuse the teaspoons, but not the chairs and the cabinets and the pictures on the walls.

“Then I saw Kralin’s cleverness. A true story might have been easier for me to handle. Also that they could turn on me, and say I was in love with her.

“They did. Well you know the fool that makes you feel. Till then I hadn’t noticed it—not the way they would think of it. I was going to stop, when—well, I thought of Felicity, and that, if she was right, I must not mind making a fool of myself for love’s sake. So I told Kralin I wished we’d been of an age, and I’d have given her a better show than he had. Played the snob-stuff too.”

Felix’s popularity, a fluctuating quality, ran up to a degree unparalleled.

—“All of a sudden, I went dog-tired. More than tired, and had a ghastly feeling—the ghastliest of all—that it was just no good. The Devil had got his trap set first. You know those future hunches.”

The silence that followed was an empty one of fatigue.

“To end it,” said Scylla, “after Felix saw her for the last time, we came back but not by way of Paris. Raced back here, to finish our honeymoon in our own place. She was in our minds, as if she had come, running up-channel to meet us, and along the top of the downs. When we went to the Dancing Rocks, she landed there, and the sea kindly reproduced Boticelli’s wave-curl edge. She walked up the wood with us and quickened it: she stayed with us. She was how I have tried to describe her to you, everywhere, so that the hills were her body laid-down, and ‘Felicity’ was said, over and over again, in each bud and leaf. She made it as though she were a third with us. Think of a shape of bright darkness, blowing out flowers.”

“I’m glad,” said Picus, “that you liked your honeymoon. I did too.” Then it ran through the silence between them that he and Scylla were accompanied still.

“That is no part of the story,” said Scylla. “I said it partly for our excuse. Boris knows how in ancient tragedy a brother ‘off’ may be hacking his sister in pieces to a chorus about birds.”

No one knew better than she that moral justifications were as wasted on Boris as on the weather. They had been enjoying themselves, and that, for him, was enough.

“We came back to our senses and to London soon after Christmas. Felicity, though she’d given up the flat, was still in Paris, hiding, waiting, holding on. Still believing in her mother and in Adrian’s promise. Until she must have gone south suddenly—and died there. And other things that we do not know must have happened by then. And we must learn them.

“God knows why she didn’t write,” Felix said. “All I know about that is from a man who saw her, but who didn’t see much. And what he saw suggests that something abominable may have happened to her. Something that may again have got round, twisted, to her people: usual talk about a disgraceful love-affair.—Believe it or not, but I mean it when I say that I thought she’d have written if she’d wanted me.”

Felix’s cry of pain brought his sister to him as a bird might drive its way home through a storm.

“This is where I’d have you all admit her imperfection. It was solely that her pride had got out of hand. She knew that she had us. More than one of the gods have scolded her that she, our lover, wouldn’t use Felix’s love.”

Then Boris spoke:

“It is possible that this time she had done something that she would not want you, of all people, to know. Suppose,” he went on, a tiny smile tight on his lips, “that this time it was true. Neither a ‘potin’ nor a distortion nor an invention.”

Scylla found herself roused from an agonised meditation to give Boris more than her reason’s attention: to listen to him with the backs of her ears. Felix said soberly:

“I think you’ll understand, but I don’t think it would have mattered with me. Not if it had been shady, disgraceful even, foul.”

“He’s right, Boris,” said Scylla, “and we seem back again at the pride that took the wrong turning.”

Boris did not answer. All that she could have explained was that she was aware of the backs of her ears; or the bones of her skull, in the state called intuitive, her mind working too fast for its process to be followed. A state allied to fear: to excitement: even to awe. And there went with it a re-relating of the time-sense, as of speed eaten by speed. She had kept note of such times in the past; made a scrupulous examination of them. So far it seemed that if given sufficient rein and a certain form of detachment and control, those moments led to results not otherwise obtainable, a short-cut to reason’s slow re-construction of events. Nor did they seem liable, as with reasoning, to become invalid at the entrance of a new fact.

Meanwhile the backs of her ears told her that Boris knew, or guessed something, something at once foolish and intolerable. And that their enquiry and the working of their grief’s slow passion had touched the nerves of slav cruelty in him.

Was he going to tell them? No. Not yet.

He had been in Paris part of that time. There were friends, gossips, various threads and all untrustworthy between Felicity and him. Were the others thinking the same thing? (They were.) She tried a direct attack.

“Boris, you were about Paris. Did you hear a rumour of any sort? You did not know her, but are you sure that you heard nothing? (Never mind our feelings . . . )”

It seemed as though Boris did not dare to hesitate.

“I do not like to say, because the memory, if it is a memory, is so indistinct. Only it may have been that I heard a story of an Englishwoman, who might be your cousin, in alliance with a man of great promise and charm. Of a sudden, brutal break. That he left her for no reason that was known.”

To Scylla his story was an admission. A grim thought occurred to them all, that Boris might have separated their cousin from her lover. For devilry or innocently or for fun? That was why he had let them talk. He had been curious: thought himself secure. Their ignorance had been too much for his vanity. Conviction seized on them. Yet by trusting such guess-work, they might do him great wrong. None of them wished, they even feared, to do him wrong. Yet each was prepared to chance it.

Accuse him? The brother and sister were on fire when Picus said:

“Enough of it for to-night. Let’s go to bed,” the rare note in his easy voice that made them obey him.

All night the earth and the heavens followed their usual arrangements. Stars passed: an immense tide went out. The Dancing Rocks lay naked, a single gull hung over them. A silent sea raced back with the sun, its wave turn-over small, delicate and comfortless. The most glorious of all stars hung above the sun’s threshold and went out. An hour later the sun governed the earth again, mist-chasing, flower-opening, bird-rousing, ghost-driving, spirit-shepherding back out of the various gates of sleep.

Nanna first opened to him the dining-room’s terrace doors. The pain of the room had cried out to her as she came in; also its shameful look as of a stage-set in disuse. She counted candle-ends and fretted at the waste, but her real preoccupation was with fear for her children. She had come down first into a dark room, stale with dead smoke and cold ashes and wax shrouds. Out of these some grief seemed to have made itself a body, and some evil doing, which would declare itself and Miss Felicity’s death not over yet. For the Bible told her that “there is nothing hid that shall not be made known,” and her good sense that the world was not made to spare Miss Scylla or Mr. Felix. Any more than she trusted Mr. Boris, not from the day two years back when she’d seen him land, come up there at their feet out of the sea. Love them he might, but his loving wasn’t their loving. You might as well expect a cat to care for you the same as men care, or your horse or your dog. And suppose they knew that, did they know that there was danger when a man of his sort loves? He couldn’t help it, she knew. But it made her think of Miss Felicity and Mr. Kralin. Foreigners both, she understood, from the same part. And it didn’t matter that one was from the great gentry and the other from goodness knew where. While Mr. Boris was pretty, Mr. Boris was witty as they used to sing . . . she knew how he’d get round her in her kitchen . . . give him what he wanted to please her children and because of his family out there being murdered. Yes, and for his pretty ways too.

Lend him out of her savings though. Not she. Any more than she’d tell Miss Scylla he’d asked her.

So the old nurse ran on, while under her eye the maid drove out the night. But even when the rugs, after a tea-leaf massage and a sun-bath on the dew-heavy grass, were replaced, when pillars of new wax stood in the sconces and a pyramid of dry sticks had been built in the grate, she felt none of the housewife’s satisfaction. Though the wood’s scent and voice were now everywhere, something had come in during the night which could not be driven out; that Mr. Boris had brought with him across the sea. A bitter thing for them to know. Truth was well enough, but Miss Felicity was dead; and suppose Miss Scylla was with child and didn’t know it. Shaking a duster, she found herself taking a few steps down the grass path to the gate of the wood. Was it the truth coming to take revenge for Miss Felicity? It seemed to her that it would need a lot of it to do it, and that she didn’t see how. Meanwhile, that there was no comfort about the house, nor was likely to be until Mr. Boris had done his worst.

They’ll have to get over it, my lambs. Let’s hope whatever’s coming is worth it to them.

So they awoke to a morning whose pleasant prospect ran counter to the abominations of man. With shameful ingratitude they came down to spring’s best effort, birds triumphant and new birds; that year’s hatching out of coloured eggs, cup-held, plume-warmed, sung-to, worm-fed; and now out, a feather in spring’s cap, wing-trying, learning to sing.

For once in their lives they had no use for it, nor at breakfast for the sea’s small fish-harvest, and Boris’s offering, a rare tea, was drunk ungratefully. Certainly they had smoked too much: from their symptoms they might have drunk too much; conscious and ashamed of discontent at the matchless weather saluting them. There it was for their pleasure and adoration, and where was Felicity?

And each carried their grief in a separate picture, a tiny image of what might have happened to Felicity. Felix as though he heard a light engine-sound which meant that a car had bumped its way across the turf. He ran out and saw that it was Felicity, in the jade and silver coupé she had wanted so childishly and so much. She had come back to them and it was all over. Adrian had kept his promise. And she had brought no more pain with her. The car meant that it was gone for ever. Scylla saw her in winter, in a room where she was going to give a party, in a dress the colour of the lights through a rose. An admirable femme de chambre was arranging winter’s rarest things to eat, with strawberries Felix had taught his cousin how to build in pyramids, backed against splendid wines. Rings of jade and crystal slid up and down her arms. The woman was looking at her mistress with pride. And so as to be there early and speak with her alone, a young man, superb, adorable, had just passed the concierge’s loge.

While Picus, without the least sensuality, saw her before her mirror, just out of her bath. In a room which was to serve beauty and nothing else. There in a shift, sea-green, incorruptible, she was making herself lovely for love. It was all rather like the best american advertisements and they knew it; irritated as though they had given her a cheap funeral. Until Scylla told herself that they were past that cant of the intellect which denies the loveliness of pleasant things.

The silence of their pain returned to them. Felix went out with his sister across the lawn into the wood. His arm round her shoulder, he muttered to her at last:

“Can’t someone be born—someone has got to be born—who will make ‘On Heaven’ true? A God that’s no blind man. A God that’s our father? ‘Because she was very tall and quaint. And gold like a quattrocento saint.’ There was a car in that. It must be true. And the place they found where they could love each other. Wherever your fancy is . . .”

Then out loud, petulant and fierce, “Are Adrian and Aunt Julia to have the last word?”

*  *  *  *  *

Against his doctor’s orders (he was his own doctor), Boris was undergoing a katharisis. It had happened to him before in England, with the Taverners, that he had not been quite able to follow his instincts and extract profit out of bad to worse. He slipped off down the wood to bathe, stripped on the Dancing Rocks, crossed the reef, white as a birch-tree walking, the smallest wind moving in his black curled hair. While he genuinely admired the view and his own addition to it, he tried not to listen to a small gong in his head, dinning insistently that curiosity killed the cat and that for once he wasn’t sorry if it did; glad and ashamed and indignant that his emotions were about to betray him. And what was it that had betrayed him before, made him cross the sea to visit the Taverners with a present of china tea, when he had lately helped kill their cousin? There was virtue still in Boris. He was not old enough to have become quite bad. At that moment, the eastern-slav tincture in his blood dyed all the rest. He was there, in their house, in their hearts: eating their salt after helping to destroy one of them. At very least, it was bad magic. He winced as though the stones’ worn gold burned his feet. Every superstition in him dictated a penance. “You made them talk. You must speak now.” What a position for a man, as he considered himself, of breeding.

He turned back again to the cliff’s root, as though he did not dare enter that pure sea. He dressed and scrambled up its crumbling path. He wanted to hide, and where in that open country? He feared the wood.

He was in the state in which he usually got into serious mischief, when Scylla met him, kicking his heels on a stone stile; and he was not sorry when she swept him off with her on a round of village errands and a long walk to a distant inn for lunch. They tramped in the growing heat, side by side, silent.

Boris felt the sweat start out between his shoulderblades, as lightly and wearily, shoulder to shoulder, they mounted a precipice of flint-sewn chalk just above the village. There he nearly made his confession: checked himself. Scylla was looking up towards some building, hardly aware of him. Looking at Felicity’s house. He thought of the rehearsal with her once they had passed it, prelude to a full confession, after dinner, before them all. Only it was just not quite the right moment for him to make the adjustments necessary to suit this scheme to his vanity, his actor’s sense that repetitions are stale; his vision of Scylla’s smile when he repeated to her husband and her brother a story that she had already heard. He could hear her voice: “Boris, comme c’est déjà bien travaillé.” That would not do. He knew too well what their sense of plain-dealing would expect. He began to resent as never before what these people had done for him. Was he not being forced to behave as they would wish him to be? And how many men, from rarities like Boris to the workman who cuts his wife’s, his children’s and then his own throat, do it with the cry: “Why couldn’t they leave me in peace to be what I am?” Scylla moved fast beside him, innocently staring. The road to the down top rose straight up into the sky. Right before them was the church, enclosed in immense trees; beside it the vicarage: on the other side, in a line with them, Felicity’s house.

“There she lived,” said Scylla, coldly. “And she is not buried there. Bead wreaths on a box in a marble chest of drawers in the south.”

Boris licked his lips with pleasure at the house. Built of grey stone, on the façade there were wreaths of stone fruit, and above the door twin fish, the Taverner arms between them on a raised panel of stone. Then he saw what he took to be a green marble rope enclosing the whole device.

“Look again,” said Scylla. Then he saw that it was a snake with its tail in its mouth. A curious addition to the lovely sobriety of wreaths and fruit. Odder than fish for mantling.

“No,” she said, “we don’t know who put a snake for frame round our arms. Or why there should be fish. Heraldic fancy roams usually in the direction of sea-weed. There’s an intention in it that no one knows. One of the question marks about this house. Like the pavement in the hall, black marble and white, diamond-squared, round a centre mosaic. First a wreath of green marble; then, what would you expect? Cupid and Psyche? Cupid or Psyche? A head of Moses? Marcus Aurelius? Alpha and Omega? A local view? Not a bit of it. A set of stars. But no known constellation or patch of the sky. If you know your heavens, there is something almost improper about it. As though there the choice lay between formal star-dots or the Zodiac.”

She went on, speaking to herself:

“About 1700 our family took a turn; before Nature happened, Rousseau, Swedenborg, Blake. Before Voltaire. I can’t describe what happened, but Felix is wrenched by it.”

She called herself back. She had brought Boris with her to confront him with Felicity’s house. A house that they suspected. She cursed their family indolence, content to accept its intuitive speciality, without scrutiny or analysis, once it seemed justified. Suppose Felicity had died to make them look into it, until knowledge made them acquainted with their gift? For if they did, she more than half suspected that an account of their perception might be the means to an incalculable enlargement of human power.

On no account must she say a word to Boris about it. Extension of that kind of capacity would make Boris dangerous—more dangerous than he was.

At the gate, it was piteous to see the rank lawn, and the Cupid, from whose hands a water-plume should have mounted to play with the wind, bound in the sucker of a fierce rambler, the teeth and claws of a rose. A fresh one was fastening on the slight flanks. She told Boris the name of an old flower run to seed in the border. He took no notice of her. There was something of the wolf about his attention.

“There is someone in the house,” he said.

The door opened and a young woman came out. The kind least tolerated of all strangers in that land. Out-of-town by rapid transit from its slums; young, heavy-haunched and over breasted, wearing a terrible parody of country clothes. Her mouth expressed discontent, her brown onyx eyes stared about with mistrust. Bored to extinction she seemed, to exasperation; one hand on her hip, rocking on ill-balanced heels. The kind that only a tincture of fear keeps from tantrums which are like running amok. From behind the house a girl of the same sort joined her, dragging her feet along the path. In the lane, Scylla and Boris observed them, standing beneath a tree.

The pair of them kicked their heels, their arms linked. Come to a village, God at the moment seemed to know why, grave and still under the spring-chorus, dimly aware of Nature’s enormous, satiric eye on them. Had the order rested with Scylla, she would have had them driven into the bull-field and left. With the high peremptory voice that Boris secretly feared, she was about to speak to them, when the door of the house opened, and there came out Felicity’s husband, Nick Kralin.

He had brought his harem down: that was evident. She told Boris. Nick Kralin, who knew her only too well by sight, saw also that he was no more than an exhibit. (“Adrian must have let it to him.”) The widower passed between the two women and came through the gate. No hand-shaking. Boris was observant. These people’s people had peddled fairings at the back-door of his château. You could not tell it in the man; he had quite a distinguished air. He might have been an exquisite lad. No, he would not insult him to please Scylla. He could hardly afford to. The family went sometimes too far. In private, an indication of the difference between their ranks would be sufficient. He heard her say to him:

“Are you introducing Felicity’s remplaçantes?”

Kralin looked as embarrassed as any decent man.

“Hardly yet, Scylla. We motored over. I have taken the house, and wanted to see if it was in order. Didn’t like to bother you.”

“We should have been glad.”

“That would be perfect then, if you would. I only remembered that grilling field-walk. And the bull.”

“Wouldn’t it be as well if Nanna saw to it?”

“Of course it would. I didn’t know you were here yet. We’re leaving. I had hoped to be back the day after to-morrow, for good. Alone probably.”

He strode back into the house. A man’s walk. The women nudged him as he passed. Scylla sat down on a stone by the wall, beating the dust with her stick. Through the half-closed door came sounds of girlish curiosity and squeals and Kralin’s low voice turned brusque. He came back almost at once, and gave Scylla a bunch of bright steel keys on a ring.

“They’re in duplicate. I’ve kept mine if you don’t mind.” A slip. Why should she?

“Why should I? But I think that Nanna has a third set that Felicity gave her. Anyhow she’ll have the place in perfect order.”

“I know she will. Thank Nanna. I’ll thank her myself when I get back.”

That was well done. Without insistence he would still have them consider him part of their family. Only, was it just perceptible that he was uneasy that Nanna should have another bunch of keys? As Boris took the heavy ring from Scylla, he said:

“They are, I think, the surest. The locksmith came over and refitted.”

Her assent was earnest and polite.

“If you are going into Starn, can I drive you there? I’ve my car here. I could take you in now and come back for the others.”

“We are only going half way, to Stone End, but it would spare you a climb, Boris.” Then she introduced them. The ex-husband of Felicity Taverner shot Boris a look; the smile of introduction showed for a second superb teeth. Quickly calculating possibilities, Boris slipped into the car. Kralin shot them up-hill and down into the further valley by a road of dreadful curves, like a demon charged with a convoy he hopes can be damned. The wind parted Scylla’s hair into pale ribbons. Boris saw her eyes and her skin, flint and chalk pale. Kralin set them down beside a grass-patch in the centre of a village, beside a stone where one would have expected a cross. For some minutes the thunder and shriek of his car-sound marked his return up the long hill which now lay between them and the sea.

They felt cut-off in the valley, pickled in spring smells, undiluted by salt from off the sea. Over a beer outside the inn Scylla questioned herself. Nothing but the inability to kill them without killing himself had induced Nick Kralin to land them there. A point she had realised from the start and he had realised on the first angle of the hill. So they were there, intact at the village of Stone End, rather than in hell. Which he had considered to be their joint address. Or only hers? Or Boris’s? Kralin was often in Paris. Had he met him before? What did Kralin know?

He had not been pleased to know that Nanna had a third set of keys. It was necessary to consider this separately. It might be that he was looking for something in the house. Something then that he had not found, otherwise he could conceal it or destroy it. Or was it simple dislike of contact with them? During that crazy shoot up-hill and down, had he shown something of the quality his wife had called the “grey thing”? Or had it been plain human rage? What reason had he to feel that against her cousin, there on her lawful occasion, and scrupulously polite? Nothing in reason, unless he believed her to be condoning some atrocity that Boris had done to his wife. Which was unlikely. (But was she?) She looked again at Boris. Suppose it had been Boris he had wanted to kill. But whatever Boris had done, and whatever version of the truth he was arranging to tell them, Kralin was more responsible than he for Felicity’s death. An infinite degree more responsible, an irrevocable, unforgivable responsibility. A volition measured against a caprice. It would be that. And, whatever he had done, they would all of them forgive Boris quicker than Nick Kralin. For reasons that would bear a fair amount of scrutiny. For Boris would be sorry once he had understood; not for long, but passionately. While there was an equal certainty about Kralin, he might even suffer for what he had done; but never would he be sorry. It was there began that “grey thing” which had made his wife afraid. Made a bad wife of her too, and excused her, even to her own gentle conscience. Of course, the “grey thing,” whatever it was, was more than the inability to say “sorry” and to mean it. She paused again. What more was implied? What goes on in the secret places of a heart incapable even de s’incliner devant Dieu? It would mean a man persuaded that there is no such thing as good. Oh, God! How far would the death of one young woman bring them? Five people at least glancing over “the most fearful depths of the spirit.” Nor likely to be let off at that. Boris’s part seemed suddenly become unimportant, a thing to be got out of the way.

She drew deeply at the scent-charged air, whose taste was like an opiate.

“Boris, what did you do to Felicity, in Paris, during those last months?”

Boris had had time to make up his mind, suggest himself into belief in his rearrangements. He turned to her—his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult of access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later. He began:

“By the end of last night I was already uneasy. It was that I felt more than sorrow for your sorrow. In bed I could not sleep, and when I slept, there were dreams—”

Scylla had a recollection of untroubled snores.

“It came back to me at dawn, with the birds. But more when I went down to the rocks where the sea dances, as you say, a ballet with each tide. That is so. I remembered all that had happened there. How we played long ago in Paris, and how not you but your lovely cousin got the apple. I did not agree.” Under his lashes he took a look at her and went on quickly:

“It is a good thing that we are alone together, Scylla, now. I had just remembered it all, seen it all, and had to run up off those rocks like a man under a curse. You know me. I am the kind of man who when the intolerable happens has so great a wish to run away—to lie.”

She heard herself saying coarsely:

“Cut the cackle, Boris. What did you do in Paris that helped kill Felicity off? And don’t stop to register feelings. Have mercy on us. We know you are less to blame than Kralin.” Boris thought her indelicate. Only since it was essential to humour her, he salted the dish with a pinch more truth.

“It was like this. I have a very old friend, an Englishman for whom I have had an affection for years. While always we have been separated: I am so poor, and they will only let Red Russians into England. Always we wrote: always it was intended that in the Midi we should share a little house.

“At last he came to Paris, and I had to look for him. At last I met him by hazard, and I saw that his ideas were changed. He was charming and sad, and I could see troubled. Then I heard that he was with a beautiful lady. That she was your cousin, at that time, I did not know. I suffered too. I did not see them together. I was alone. Then one night I met him, walking on the quays. There I asked him if he meant to marry and ranger himself. Suddenly he told me that he did not know what he wanted to do. Your cousin—the lady—was too good for him, and there would have to be a divorce. Then I understood that he must not get drunk again if he was to marry her; not never get drunk, but drunk as I used to get.”

“You mean that you went off together and did.”

“I told him,” said Boris gravely, “that she was right, and how the sobriety I had learned from you had saved more than my life—” Her sigh might have conveyed a sudden regret.

—“There was also something else that he said. I do not know it all, but one part of it was that he might lose some money that was to come to him from an old lady, who did not wish him to marry anyone. So he did not know what he wanted to do. It was an exquisite night, and the river like an enchanted serpent from the Mille et une Nuits. I was with my friend again. He is a man of genius, and such charms that he has always had everything given to him. That means that he thinks that the world is his only; and that if you do good, you do it as a woman puts colour on her face to increase her beauty. What we call honour means no more to him than that.”

“Name, please, of this beauty. Gigolo, I take it, by profession.”

“No, I tell you that he has genius. And he is a gentleman. Already he had made fausse route as I had.”

“What’s his name? D’you suppose it will take us long to find out?”

“T’chiquo. You will surely have heard that name for him.” She had not, and it is a poor position not to know the petit nom you are supposed to know. And it was good fun to watch how Boris made the tiny advantage serviceable.

“Ma chère amie, now begins what I am not able to forgive myself. Of course, since you do not know him, you will think worse of me, but at least you know what I am like. There was a little ‘dancing’ on that quay. They were kind to us. I do not pretend that we did not get drunk. Only I was astonished that it took so little to make T’chiquo drunk . . . not drunk only, but altogether drunk . . . wrongly drunk.” Engagingly. “Now I used to get drunk. He had not been like that before, and I was troubled. For he might have been mad . . . and became helpless, and in such a way that he became a bore. You will say that this does not matter. Only it explains—”

“What?”

“What I have to tell you. For a long time I listened to him; then I understood.” (At that moment, faith justified itself.) “You will know what I am trying to say: how T’chiquo told me what he would not have told if he had not been drunk. How because of me his will had become in two: how all the time I was at least as dear to him as Felicity, and because of her there could not be that house in the Midi. She would not have it, because she said that I would make him drunk again. I, who have not drunk as I used to since I promised you—” He could not judge how he was affecting her. A bad sign.

“Scylla, you must not be unjust to me. Scylla! I tell you that I tried to send him back to her. And he would not leave me. He said he was not good enough for her, and I believed that. I found that he would be afraid to go back to her at that hour, drunk. Nor could I take him to her, did I then know where she lived? And can you not see that I thought she must be stupid.”

“So you took him back to his hotel?”

“Into a taxi. It went off, and we did not know where to tell it to stop. Rain came on. We were in the country. It was very dark. The man was cruel. He wanted his money all the way back into Paris. We hid behind a tree.

—“It was one of the long straight roads with a canal beside it. When T’chiquo got out and we woke up, we had to walk along it in our ‘smokings’ in the rain.” (No, he did not see that a ten days’ interval, during which Felicity had had no word of her lover, could so long after be established.)

—“It was when we got back to Paris that the old lady arrived, and from her I understood that your cousin would neither marry him, nor tell him to go away. I swear to you that in those days he had no one he could be sure of but me. And is it not you who have taught me to stand by my friends?”

“So?”

“The old lady—I admit that by old ladies I am sure always of being loved—sent us down together to the country. There he wrote music. I have the score. To play it to you was a great reason that I came. He was to write and ask Felicity to join us. I do not know if he did. She did not come. What could I do?”

Silence. He had finished. Not so badly. Except a timetable evasion, not an event that had not actually occurred. No sign from Scylla. It exasperated him, these peoples’ minds slow-working and slow response. For good or bad, who wants to wait?

But wait as long as she liked, where would she find—not contradiction, mercifully it did not need that—but his tale’s amplification? A part of Boris’s nature which he valued and despised could now equip him with a sense of injured innocence. A touch of caution, of finesse, warned him not to show it. With a little helpless laugh, he hid his face in his arms.

For once, Scylla made no attempt to believe him, was content to wait until whatever Errinys who was on his track should arrive and take the situation in hand. From indolence, from charity, it was easier for her to assume all men innocent, and the greatest rarity in Nature a lie. This time, without judgment, without shock or even the least pain, she admired his story and dismissed it. Dismissed too much. Said nothing. Boris understood.

At that moment they heard a shriek repeated, far-off and high-up and knew that Nick Kralin’s car was threading the hill road on its second race back. And though there were now two of his fancy-women in it, he hardly seemed to drive less furiously. The inn lay a little off the high-road. Neither of them were too nice to cross and observe him from behind a hedge-rose screen. Not known for an insane driver, he showed the village no mercy. The women were packed behind him, and when the dust settled, they saw that an orange cat had been sacrificed, the white dust drinking up its blood freely.

They returned slowly, not by the road, but by diagonal field-paths that mounted the downs, to the base of the green hill earth-works above their house. When the path gave out, they attacked the hill-flank direct, glad of a lynchett to stick their toes in. By midsummer it would have been as easy to walk up glass. Before they reached the top and the sight of the sea, the wood and their house, she said:

“Don’t you know us well enough to tell us the truth, without arranging it to excuse you?”

Time, place and sentence uniting one perfect want of tact. Even so, if Boris had not blistered his heel and wanted his tea, his growing unhappiness might have prostrated him. Instead irritation of body cancelled discomfort of soul. If that was all she thought of his beautiful story. . . .

A watcher from the village below would have seen two forms the distance had reduced to the size of tea-leaves, moving perpendicularly up the bare green. Had his curiosity held out, he would then have seen them stop, and the two leaves unite, but in an agitated manner, not as though joined by an embrace. A moment later, he would have seen one tea-leaf, still stationary, but waving itself about. Then suppose he had believed them to be tea-leaves, he might have said that tea-leaf A had swallowed tea-leaf B. This conclusion might have led him away from tea-leaves to the remoter speculations of human thought. The truth being that leaf B was now invisible because Boris had knocked Scylla down.

Women of her sort are not used to being hit by men. It makes them angry and not in the least afraid. She shammed dead an instant, from surprise, and then because the sky she watched under her lids seemed a most delicate and restful blue. Meanwhile, tea-leaf A would still have been seen, stationary but unquiet. The watcher might have suspected this to be a digestive process instead of an offer, shouted back, to walk away at once until it reached Starn, and never see leaf B or leaves C, D and X again. An offer it began to fulfil. For raising her arms to pillow her head, “you had better go now,” Scylla had said.

The watcher from Stone End might have lost interest in leaf A returning alone, unless he had remained to see his theory contradicted by the sight of leaf B, perpendicular and on its way again alone. To collect further data, he would have had to wait for leaf A’s return to the village.

This, except for the error about tea-leaves, was what Nick Kralin saw from his seat at the porch of the inn, where he had returned, having put his lady friends into the train at Starn.

He too had changed his plans. Once more he was a lusty bachelor. He had taken his dead wife’s house on a short lease, and had brought down a selection of her possible successors. The house had instantly shown them out; instantly made two fine wenches loathsome to him. Once rid of them, he had to return to it alone. He had met Scylla and knew that the house across the fields was full of Felicity’s kin, and that she had seen the women he had brought. He had seen the young man she had with her, and that he came of the race who carried dislike of his to its logical conclusion. He detested Scylla and everyone over at that house. What had he heard about their pet, Boris Polteratsky? He would tell them what he had heard about him; might see them turn him out.

No doubt which keys they would use, now, that to right himself over the women, he had put the house into their hands to clean. Not that it mattered. He had had time to put away something which they would look for and must not find. On his way back from Starn, at Stone End, without petrol and without garage, his engine had given out, left him neither on nor off the spot. Though the inn was kind, he was in no easy temper as he watched the tea-leaves, which had looked to him like tea-leaves on the hill.

Nor had he identified them with Scylla or with Boris, until nearly half an hour later he identified leaf A crossing a near field, on the easiest step that ever the spring-grass sprang up behind uncrushed. Already he had tried to sneer at feet so small they should have made the height unstable. It would not suit his plans for Boris to tell them that he had come back. If he saw Boris alone, he might want to hurt him. That would not do either.

He took himself off. The shed where his car had been dragged would hide him also. A small dirty window let him look out onto the village’s curious green. Certain houses bordered by a white track round a patch of grass whose outline defied geometry. In whose centre, and not exactly there, there was nothing but a stone. And the grass about it and the track round the grass were a four-sided figure of peculiar shape; and the stone which, as Felix said, looked as if it had stopped there on its way to Stonehenge, by virtue of some strangeness of form, stayed in the mind as a thing out of its class. “On no account touch this stone: yours sincerely J. Patten.” Kralin remembered that story and Felicity reading it aloud: his disgust, impatience: the others’ pleasure and Felix’s staring eyes. The sticky cobwebs about the window stuck to his fingers. For an instant the Jew-about-town admitted that country life allowed for the invention of such fancies.

Boris had not yet appeared out of the lane, sunk between the curled hedges, that rose into the green at the furthest point from its stone. Waiting for him, Kralin had time to observe the houses man had built round a shape which seemed as if it had been dictated by a stone.

The place was not a period-gem like the Taverner’s village over the hill. There Felicity’s house was called the New House, and on the cliffs stood a Martello tower, built to discourage Napoleon, called Taverner’s Folly; and there was a nasty story about that. In comparison, Stone End was a patchwork. It might be as old in parts but without unity; nor was it the english labourer who mattered there, nor the speed of the plough nor the silver fruit of the sea; not the country house nor the kingdom of the birds; not lobsters or fleeces or bees, or what goes on in the woods. Only a large, naked, pale-grey stone. There was the inn beside him, dun plaster laid over some dateless rock. With its porch and garden, it stood out, while the other houses seemed to have shrunk back. At the far end, at right angles to it, the ground descended suddenly into the valley, and a long, white rose-hung farm had chosen to follow the earth downhill. Suppose it more than one room thick, the further side must be reached by steps; while its thatch hung down and savage plants shut the small window-eyes beneath it. “An eyebrow of flowers”—Felicity’s words he had done his best to sneer out of her.

At right angles to the farm and by the lane where he must watch for Boris, stood a narrow house made in the one century in which England had forgotten how to build. A flat roof with a parapet, a flagstaff and no flag. Blank, black windows and a basement with railings and up to the door five neat steps. A fanciless fancy. Outside the railings a laburnum hung out its branches loaded with gold rain.

Set there in protest or in alliance with the stone?

Next it a façade, between towers, a grey-stone-shell whose pierced windows let through the day from a row on the further side, and a distortion of trees and light. An ancient house, almost a ruin, shut-up. Quite in the Taverner’s style. He saw above the door a splendid, glossy hand of ivy covering the shield of an extinct family. Another Felicity-flight. Why in hell had he taken her house, in her land? Here he had learned how to dislike her: how to hurt her: watched her try to get him to cancel her hurt. Calculated the time needed for her to despair. The way she had run off, first with, then later without a row with him, reminded him of animals supposed to know a cure for snake-bite. Results inconclusive in her case. Sometimes she would come back muddy, torn and red with tears. Sometimes just quite well. Occasionally—it was that he had feared and hated in her—transparent, glorified, a dew on her no cloud had condensed. What business had a woman’s body, blood-driven engine for secretion and excretion, to play such tricks? Dead, she was at her tricks again, making him dance to her tune. Eyelash of flowers and a shoot of ivy closing the eyes of old fame. There were images in his mind—learned out of the cursed mythology they had sucked in with their milk, and he could never get right. Was this their secret—how to make love and put it to sleep and where to find its eyes?

He twitched with impatience. Ivy in growth is ivy, and lobster lobster, and man man. Lobster turns into man and man into lobster. Nothing could be more mysterious. As though God had said, “Be Yourself” to the whole creation: who had obeyed him. Had man? Kralin did not know and would not have cared, did not the question sometimes nag at him. Was he himself? He did not know, or if he had a self to know. In that ignorance and his assured indifference lay his satisfaction, his strength and a fear. If man’s test is the attainment of biologic security, he would pass. Very comfortably established. Besides—it was when his meditation reached this that there came a look into his face no man so far has been able to name; while, whatever his shapely hands were doing, a finger lay against his increasing nose, and through the snigger which replaced his rare frank laugh, you caught a word of his secret. The reason for his reason. Which reason was—and at such moments he had the power to convince—that there was no reason; no meaning to meaning: that not only is man incapable of conceiving truth, but the truth is that there is no truth for him to conceive.

Men like that can have great fun with young women in love.

At that moment tea-leaf A appeared. Not like a tea-leaf, of such distinct identity as to suggest to Kralin that here was an almost unique work of Nature and it was laughing at him. Under the laburnum tree Boris looked up, took hold of a branch and shook down a gold storm over himself. Twitched his shoulders and crossed delicately in the full sunlight towards the inn. Kralin’s eyes, two almonds of grey jelly, watched him through the dim glass.

Real bouleversement had driven Boris back to Stone End in the direction of Starn. Starn he did not intend to reach. He had no money. Suppose he wired from there and Scylla had a black eye, they might send it. Enough to get back to Paris third class. Then his own particular “Jésus la Caille” might grow impatient at his perfectly genuine stock-in-trade as White Russian in distress. While if his plan came off and he managed somehow to remain in England, his little voyou was to have followed him as valet. While, as it turned out, on the second day he had knocked his hostess down, and was suspected of having played even more part than he had in her cousin’s equivocal death. How should he have known that he would come upon them in mourning? That they would ask him questions and scrutinise his answers? That he would lose his temper and be told to go? Impenitent, the spring-walk had run the irritation out of him. Play in the valley with some setter puppies in a cottage garden had set him perfectly free, and as he ran up the hill to the village, he had commended himself to his god. Invited that god to put the affair right, and see to his quick return to the Taverners.

To give the god time to start, he sat down at ease outside the inn. Kralin saw that he had been maladroit. For unless he waited till nightfall in the shed or Boris drank himself blind, he could not avoid meeting him. At dusk he had been promised a mechanic when the men returned from the fields. The woman at the inn had found Boris a deck chair, three cushions, lemons, a syphon and gin. Was he to walk out of the shed in full view of him and then six miles to Starn? Abandon his car? Kralin watched him sink, further and further into his ease, into sleep. Detested him for a son of the morning. Where was he going? A question that was being asked on the other side of the hill.

“Yes,” said Scylla, “but I saw it coming and I fell soft. My head sang, so I lay low and looked at the sky: into the blueness of blue. Let him agitate himself. Told him to go back to Paris. . . . Yes, he may have got as far as Starn.”

“Or,” said Felix, “as Stone End. And suppose Kralin is still about?” A moment of happy contemplation followed. Two men who would be equally too much for each other. Nor did it occur to any of them that Boris need not come back, who was their offering to luck, to fate—which would probably not be accepted—their indulgence of their humour and of their love of daring, who was once also a god.

She listened: Picus was leading the birds’ dusk chorus from the wood. As he crossed to the house, Felix answered, fitting words to his tune:

Her husband came in and stood over her like a tall bird. She ran two fingers up under the sleeve of his coat, over cool skin, over fine bones which did not match his powerful hands.

“We’re waiting again—is it for Boris? Or for Kralin?”

He did not answer.

“There is no waiting for Boris,” said Felix. “He’s there. Suppose they’ve met, suppose there’s been a row. Boris wouldn’t come between Kralin and what he means to do.”

“What is that?”

“What we’re afraid of.”

Nanna came in to light up. They did not know if their fear was for the coming event or for their ignorance of it.

*  *  *  *  *

By the time the evening arrived, softly and in full splendour at Stone End, Boris’s god had given him no reason to transfer his faith. After the necessary rest, before he had time to get drunk, during a cat-nap, Kralin had found the shed finally intolerable; and as Boris’s eyes had opened, had turned the corner of the hedgerow towards Starn. It was ten minutes later that the woman at the inn told him that the gentleman who had married Miss Felicity Taverner, who had died, had been there; and though he had been seeing after his motor car in the shed, she would not like to say where he had gone now. Boris giggled and explained that it was probably to the devil, with a picture of the sort of devil. His odd, good English worked a marvel of conviction. Nick Kralin, striding resentfully into Starn, might have turned back had he known in what fire his goose was being roasted alive. Yet suppose he had, suppose for a moment that he had found at Stone End not Boris but a miracle of grace. Suppose he had been told the story of his wife, not Boris’s version but the true story, the whole story, if Boris had known it to tell. Told him with humility, with candour; suppose on the road two holes in the dust, and sharp flints marking where the boyard had knelt to the Jew. Boris might have profited by such a reversal of emotion, the situation nothing. For Kralin governed his soul by refusing to admit even immediate truth under any passionate form, to whom the soul’s nakedness was no more than one of a series of masks. So Boris wasted no virtue on confessions. It ran more quickly in him unspent. His idea at the moment was that, if he owed reparation to the dead, what better could he do than prepare a nemesis for Nick Kralin? He went out and found his car, and quickly and deftly put it out of local or immediate repair. Through the open door of the shed there was no one for his witness but the stone. Then back over the hill to the house and the wood and the sea. To the people who, after all, he loved best. He told himself that he would alter the proportions of his conduct, be serviceable to them, tell them the truth. It was best so. Entendu. He had even paid with his last shilling for what he had drunk.

Which way home? He had had enough of the long field diagonal. By the road he might meet Kralin or might not get a lift. No. The man had seen him asleep and must have run back to Starn. Why? It was more than obvious—the man had a worse conscience than anyone else.

On the road, however, his god gave out. There was no lift. In the south of England there are few severer hills, and not even a cart overtook him. While, near the top, hungry, at nightfall, he tried an amateur’s short-cut. It was not a success. Crossing the stone walls, the thorned lashes that bind them cut off shreds of cloth and skin. Loose stones fell out and hit the delicate bones of his legs. On the down-crest he could not strike the green road. He had struggled up an earth-wall to the down top, at dusk, into sea and wind cries that were almost inaudible, and like the coming of another power which was to take over the world. He began to whistle piteously, and saw the sky suddenly pricked, one after the other, with cold stars. Prelude to more punishment? He lay down upon the coarse grey grasses and gave it up. He counted the stars. One had a cruel shape and there was too much night. He was a black slip patched with white under the stars, who would soon vanish.

He lay there and wept, quiet tears; until Felix stumbled over him, swore at him, embraced him; shouted to Picus that he had found him. Picus bent down over him and grinned. So they brought him home, and nothing more was said that night.

Next morning Felix and Scylla went over to Felicity’s house. The night before they had decided among themselves that Kralin’s permission to Nanna to put it in order was a free gift, that it would give them time and opportunity to go over the place for themselves. Once there they could do the only thing that had occurred to them, look for their cousin’s papers, for diaries, letters which might tell them more about her death. The more they thought of it, the more the idea pleased them. It was, at least, something to do. It seemed certain also that they would find them there. They remembered that she had given up her Paris flat, sent home all its smaller contents before she had gone south to die.

They said nothing to Boris about it. They would deal with him later, after dinner; who had perhaps no more than one clear day before Kralin came back.

So the morning found Felix and Scylla alone, in a room with eight sides to it, Felicity’s bedroom, the most exquisite cell in that house. Cell of a queen bee, forme where a hare had lain trembling, its octagon panelled in white wood, each wall set with a round quicksilver glass to diminish and repeat. A glass chandelier hung from the ceiling; from the wall sconce above the divan where she had slept hung a cluster of glass grapes. The fire screen was a sheet of framed glass. On a round table lacquered sea-blue was a glass fish. The whole room was in terms of glass, transparency or reflection. The carpet they moved on noiselessly was sea-cool like the table, and the curtains and the cover of the low bed. There, as they knew now, love had lain waiting, lain bleeding. Her pretty things still lay about; she might appear at any instant, by any of the eight panel slips. In one of the windows an old flawed pane distorted the country outside. Through it she might swim in, from the fair land where wolves had hunted her.

“It makes me think,” said Scylla, “of a fairy-story I’ve forgotten, except that there was a glass room in it where a blue bird-prince lay wounded and was found by a princess. Was there ever a prince here? Did one ever sleep on the bed? Not Kralin. I think I remember it was to his room that she went.”

Felix found himself composing “Those Blue Bird Blues,” until he opened a window and at once let in plain bird-song and the noise of carpet-beating. Nanna was hard at it, getting ready her nursling’s house—for Kralin. They had had a day to find out her secrets, if she had left them there; discover her papers, select from them, destroy them. To loose the memory of her and to preserve it, but to keep rather than to destroy.

They began with her bureau, of ivory and black wood. Open, it showed the pillar drawers of its recess, whose sides were lined with mirror very dirty and old.

“Someone has been at it before us,” said Felix, and pointed to scratches round the outer lock as though made by a wire.

It was then that they began to enjoy themselves; at that point their cousin’s death became a detective story of high merit and entirely their own. There in a ghost’s last hiding-place, on the supposition that it would please the ghost.

“Take every paper you can find,” said Scylla; “relock, and we’ll read them over at the house.” Felix nodded; preparing for himself a piece of wire in case of necessity also.

If he had not presumed so many secret drawers, they would have been a shorter time about it. As he tapped, she ran through the books on the shelf by the divan. Ovid on the transformations of heroes and heroines; Ronsard and Phantasies. The Moon Endureth and the Testament of Creseyde; Les Enfants Terribles. These for livres de chevet. She held each out and shook them; bumped them together and no secret slip fell out, and only one bill. “For riveting one cut glass jug: 10/6.” Unreceipted. Then Felix found out that one glass wall of the cabinet’s interior was made to slip aside, and behind it there was a door to which there was no key. With his wire he went to ground with it until it seemed that most of a large young man was disappearing into the cabinet’s recess. Scylla found the key in the stan-dish, fastened to seven blue slips off a jay’s wing, tied in a fan. It was empty. So was every other drawer—of letters; but neither of them would admit discouragement.

“Put everything we’ve found on the table,” said her brother, “and see what they tell us.” So Scylla arranged them: the jay-feather posy, a handful of red rose leaves, paper dry; a ring of grey jade, two anonymous keys, a bundle of orange sticks, a rouge pot, a box of nibs, four french stamps, a bar of green sealing-wax, a bar of black; one drawing pin; a sock of the gayest pattern and the softest wool trodden into huge holes. Three curtain rings, an amber cigarette-holder, once a thin gold trumpet, now in half, with a tooth-bitten hole at its mouth. Half a french card-pack, a domino, a cribbage-peg, a spellican, a draught piece, two chess men and a halfpenny to play shove ha’penny. A pin, a safety-pin, a needle, a darning-needle. A ball, a reel, a card, a skein of wool, of silk, of cotton. A coat button, a trouser button, a shirt button, a boot button; made of bone, of brass, of shell, of wood. Pinned together in a colour-sequence, a green rag of cloth, of linen, of velvet, of muslin, of canvas, of lawn. Inside the blue-bound blotter there was a sheaf of clipped papers. Hope for a moment. Then, a recipe for iced oranges, for corn-beef hash, for rouge; for and against constipation, weight, sleep; a french ordonnance for what sickness they could not determine. “Death probably,” said Felix, and laughed unhappily. Nine gilt and five china beads, two jet beads, eleven silver beads, seven marble beads, fourteen ivory beads, eighty-seven glass beads, seventeen carnelian beads, thirty-one coral beads, two beads of wood. A box of tonquin beans of repellant similarity and dissimilarity.

“I shall go mad,” said Felix. Scylla poured the crystal beads into the pocket of her coat.

“These may as well go back with us,” she said.

*  *  *  *  *

Over the hill also nothing that had been expected happened. While the brother and sister were drawing blank at the house, Picus had gone over prepared to meet Kralin and to cope with him; and there found that he had no more than some mislaid washing to deal with and a discontented Boris. From the woman at the inn they heard of the abandoned car and the retreat on Starn, that the car had been dragged away by a lorry and nothing more seen of the gentleman who had been Miss Felicity’s husband. After an hour or so of silent male idling, the butcher carried them back, with the washing and such news as there was, over the hill.

Nor until late that night did they ask Boris for his story, the true truth of what he had done, of what he knew. Enough that even he had learned that lies were not the only specific, that truth has, not only its virtues but its utilities; that by supplying it, he would bless, not only them but himself. While Boris also was curious, wanted to know more, if only that his share would be forgotten in the enormities disclosed—preferably of Nick Kralin.

He knew that they had not found what they wanted in Felicity’s house, a house now aired and opened, polished and put away for others’ use. They sat together, as before, in their own house, in the long dining-room, after dinner again and lit by candles and wood. They were waiting for Boris to begin, who began by bolting an interesting hare. He asked them what they would say if he told them that Kralin was a Red agent. There was a chorus of reluctant denial. His father had been a Christian kind of anarchist; he had been naturalised; his son did not know one kind of politics from another. Then Scylla stopped:

“Boris does not mean that,” she said.

Boris saw that he must make an effort, drag a difficult meaning out of his instincts, his blind flair for the curious number of beans which in this case made five. Knowledge in one “Born to see strange sights, Things invisible.” They spoke in English for the old nurse to hear.

“You do not think much of my morality, yet you do not doubt of my affection for you. And it is that which has protected our relations with each other.” Unqualified assent to this.—“Nor does it annoy you that part of my tenderness is based on what I call old-fashioned in your quality. It was some time before I learned that it was not a thing demodée—it was the great thing you taught me—that what you follow is not old or new, of the last century or the next, that it is a virtue not affected by fashion.—I am still often angry when you make me appear without it. But at least I salute it in you—”

His grin saved them from embarrassment. While experience assured them that they would not be troubled long with Boris’s pieties.

—“So you will not be angry when I compare even the worst things I have done with greater wickedness; with people we know even—”

Comparisons were being made hastily; a series recalled of Boris’s appalling acts. Which were forgiven him. Why? Because of some power of love that he had? Partly. They gave it up. Anyhow, he had been forced into an admission of virtue.

“Carry on,” they said. He went on:

“There is a kind of ambiance around us here—or wherever you are—that I cannot explain. As if we were all inside a magic ring. You do not ask me to change myself, yet, it seems that I am changed—”

They agreed. Besides “ambience” had it. Race apart, class apart, tastes apart, he was their own kind. Yet Boris was a bad man.

He sat back, the russian boy, and for the first time they saw an air of power about him.

“Think of the world, my friends, that is, outside our world. For, living here, nature repeats to you what you are yourselves. There are worlds enough, but one that is outside you, outside this place, killed your cousin, Felicity. A world that is like Nick Kralin.”

“We know that, but not what it is. Go on.”

“No, you do not know what it is—or the nature, the taste of it. What your cousin learned when she spoke of the ‘grey thing.’ ”

“We know enough to recognise it when we meet it. And keep clear. It is not like anything in her mother or in Adrian.”

“ ‘Le Kralinism,’ I have called it. Like pockets of poisoned air, it is everywhere now. And the time has come when you have not been able to ignore it—” Scylla said slowly:

“When you called Kralin a Red agent, I take it you did not mean propaganda.”

“I mean propaganda of what he is. Of ‘le Kralinism.’ ”

(How did Boris live when he was away from them? Slept all day and ran about Paris all night. And ran into—?)

“Now I will tell you what really happened in Paris. I went out many nights—apart from the escapade of which I told you—with them both. There I saw what they did not see—people hating that they should love.”

“People generally do,” said Scylla.

“Yes, but it was more than that. I do not know how to explain. It is active. People practising how to kill what they do not like. Their ill-will works. And among certain people I know of in Paris, they know how to make it work. This they do for fun, or under some compulsion; or an order. How can I convince you? It was as if it had been decided on that she was to be crucified.

—“You will want to ask questions, and I should have to tell you stories all night to answer them. Different stories, like beads strung on one thread. But they did it. She is dead—not the only one who is dead. And he I told you of has found a café in Toulon where there is a drink that kills. He sits and stares at the stale water of the harbour. Sometimes when he is drunk he sees her, coming lightly across where the sun pours on the white stones. Then he plays a grand drunk game that he is sober.—It is not a new story. Old as can be. Only now no one seems to see any reason why it should not happen like that. There is no effective protest. Not from her friends. Not from her brother. A little from me, perhaps, and my conduct left to be desired. And if there are people to protest against it, they have only old reasons in a dull way. Or, if they feel passionately, they have not skill or wit to put power into their passion. Or else they are so alone and unhelped that they die of pure pain. It was not that Felicity killed herself. To me she had been killed already. (You say that she was driving the car alone. If it had not been like that the chauffeur might have been made to do it. That is not impossible.) Only your cousin was composed of imagination as well as love. She had seen ‘le Kralinism’ naked. Had she not had it to sleep with, a young wife?

—“Why do you all pretend that you are not crying? Be angry with me. Ask me why I played Kralin’s game, and how. We did run away together, T’chiquo and I. As I told you, Scylla. But that did not matter. Men run away like that for their amusements. I knew that she was wise enough to let us run and laugh at that. But though I did not know that he did not write to her, I knew that ‘le Kralinism’ had bitten into him, and I did nothing. I, who knew enough to know that they were the condemned and that the grey web had been thrown over them. I let myself be its instrument. I suppose if I had Judas’s sensibility I would hang myself. But again it is true that at the time I did not know how much I knew.”

Nanna was sitting with them, as she often did. To the torrent of hard clear words a listener might have heard an accompaniment of tears, four cryings, from two women and two men. The words stopped; the crying went on. What is more curious than tears? A sensation in the mind, one spot of consciousness illuminated, a vibration there like a plucked string, plucked and replucked. A storm of blindness and one point of intolerable light. The result in each case a trickle of warm salt water, attended quickly by the ridiculous—a leak sprung from the nose. The salt-flood brings temporary relief. The images that formed in the tension before it fade. As the pictures in their minds—Aphrodite-in-hiding in a room with eight walls, or a ghost on light-sandalled feet crossing sun-white harbour stones.

Meanwhile a number of hands shuffled and groped for handkerchiefs. Boris had his arms round Nanna, whose old servant’s patience mourned less openly than they the child she had nursed.

It then occurred to them all that though Boris had been illuminating and even truthful—that is to say a miracle had been thrown in—they did not know very much more about what had actually happened. Scylla said:

“What was the real name of this man she loved?” He told them. Picus whistled, his bird call, Mozart-whistler through the impediment of a last sob.

“He ought to have been what she wanted if she could have got rid of Kralin.”

“Once you begin to find out things,” said Felix faintly, “there is no end to the things you begin to find out. But if he’s gone to pot, he won’t be able to help us.”

A tranquillity of suffering fell upon them. Outside the fair night hung like a winged face over the sea.

*  *  *  *  *

Next morning, the farm boy who brought the milk told Nanna that the gentleman who had been Miss Felicity’s husband had come back to live in her house. This was quick work. It had all been quick work. One day Boris had arrived, and on the next Kralin had come and Boris nearly gone; and on the same evening Kralin had been driven away and Boris returned. Next day there had been no Kralin, and the house open to them. The day after, Kralin was back, and the house closed to them for ever.

They had not examined the assumption that in Felicity’s house there was something for them to discover, for them to preserve. Something which Kralin had come to destroy or put to his own use. After Boris’s night-speech, they were impatient to know more, and did not know what more would come their way, exasperated at a time which seemed to crawl between intervals of violence.

In the same part of the country, ten miles inland, north of the sea and the Taverner houses, over their hill and the long valley which held Stone End and Starn at its mouth—north of Starn hills and the great heath, a large blue Daimler, reeking of prosperity, drew up before a house. A house, this time, not of grey stone, but of stucco, with sashed windows and doric candle pillars; set with its lawn and its gravel sweep in a ring of polished evergreens, laurel and rhododendron, pointed with arbutus and laurustinus. All dark, shiny and green, clipped and banked with firs, a melancholy place and neat. Adrian Taverner sniffed at it. His mother reasoned with him:

“It isn’t for long,” she said, “and it’s as well for us to be down here. You said so yourself.”

Her son said it was like a public lavatory run away into the country for a treat. His mother—Scylla’s Aunt Julia, mother of Felicity Taverner lately dead, evaded this. A country-woman by instinct, what she missed was the spring green. Inside the house, she retired to organise it with her cook and her London servants; while Adrian toured the rooms for victorian relics, of which there were many, and some very modish indeed.

He was like his cousin, Felix Taverner, and he was not like. That is to say, they had the same looks and did the same things—the town things—but on a different rhythm. He was not at all like Scylla and detested her, analysed his dislike for her in terms at once gross and affected—until it was pointed out to him that even such reactions were a symptom, and so remained in a dumb dislike at the thought or the presence of her. While Scylla, who, except in relation to Felicity had forgotten all about him, did not know that he was not able to forget her.

The presence of the mother and the son in the far south was sudden, and their affair a delicate one. The younger Taverners did not quite realise yet, nor Picus Tracy, that, on a pretence of wishing to be again where he and his wife had lived on their marriage, Kralin had rented the house from Adrian for some months. Nor anything of the proposal he had made them, once the agreement had been signed, that he proposed to stay on there indefinitely, to buy the house from them, refusing to take their first “No” for an answer. In fact it seemed to these Taverners that there would be no getting rid of him. Aware that there must be something behind this, they had come down to negotiate. Felicity’s small house was a treasure, set by itself in a patchwork of what was left of their once wide estate. If Kralin would pay high, it might be worth their while to part with it. For this it was necessary to nurse Kralin, court him, and eventually to intimidate him, if possible. They had none of Boris’s magical estimate of him, nor did they understand him. They had come down to a house they had taken, not too near and not too far, to keep an eye on him and on a possibly profitable deal. It was a natural occupation for both mother and son, a tribal hunting for a stock by no means played out, used to its own way and to war, and to getting what it wanted out of war.

Kralin was perfectly aware of their intentions, which were as strictly dishonourable as his own. Mrs. Taverner had called on him after Felicity’s death, at the beginning of his insistence about the house, and arch, stately and sweet, had made it clear that he was still one of the family. Still one? More perhaps than he had been before. A common sorrow united them; which, a little later in the interview, began to appear quite openly as a joint relief. Even Kralin had been surprised before he smiled, giving rein for once to his faculty for appreciation. He had taken his time, secured his tenancy, had not haggled over rent or committed himself as to the ultimate price, and had only just taken possession of the house again. Now a further idea had come over him, a “fancy chaste and noble” to surprise his mother-in-law. Though he, in his turn, was ignorant that they had taken the dower house at Pharrs to settle the matter with him once and for all.

But for his car’s mysterious breakdown at Stone End—Boris’s fun—it seemed to Kralin that so far nothing undue had happened. It had been tiresome to find the cousins at their house and have to accept their help; but before he had let them in, he had done what he had to do there. The young women had been a gesture. He had sent them back. The russian boy he had dismissed as an embarrassment, possibly of psychopathic origin; one he would examine later should he meet him, so that it should not trouble him again. He did not see him as a possible enemy or as a possible friend of his dead wife. On whom he had a perfect revenge to consummate. On reflection it seemed that it was just as well for her cousins to be there. There might be an experiment to be tried out on them also.

Efficiently he controlled himself. Not with pleasure, to whom neither wife nor kinsfolk had significance, nor the ancient land nor the spring. No meaning and no delight that he must not immediately destroy by an examination which, though he called it scientific, was actually obscene. This was part of the alchemy he had, a curious formula for the philosopher’s stone.

So the next days found them all settled, at the points of a tall triangle, its apex in the north with old Mrs. Taverner and her son; ten miles separating it from its narrow base, the mile and a half of valley between the two Taverner houses, set in their trees upon the sun-worked bases of the chalk downs, the sea laid out before them.

Three days passed at the house in the wood, days of recovery, of silence about their dead cousin, of Boris’s pranks. Ten watchful eyes were kept on the other house. Nanna, of course, had sources of information denied to them. It was clear, for instance, that Kralin must be there alone, or he would have taken in more milk. Some relics of his father’s anarchist snobbery had brought him there servantless, and even prevented him asking for village help. This had annoyed the archaic settlement which lay below the house. Women who had known Miss Felicity and had worked for her wanted to know what he meant by it, wanted to see how he was bearing it, and food for speculation had been stopped at its source. After the fifth day, however, Nanna, troubled for the exquisite order she had left, was relieved when he sent for a woman to come in every day; insisting, and this was taken to show proper feeling, that she should be someone who had served his wife.

“Mrs. Cobb,” said Nanna, “and she’s no slattern, but a terrible one for gossip.”

There was little gossip that came across. He had some shocking pictures hung up, slept in the room where his lady had been; and when he wrote, threw ink about on the carpet. Said he didn’t mind what he ate, took no pleasure in his meals and was mighty particular what you did. Sober a gentleman as she’d met, but “it didn’t seem to do him any good, what he’d take and what he’d not take.”

“Just Kralin,” said the Taverners, “going on as he used to do.”

So two more days passed, while much was digested and nothing said. They had learned silence, the brother and the sister, to whom silence did not come naturally, whose nature was expressed in terms of enthusiasm and passion; to whom silence had once meant suffering, who had wanted daylight everywhere. Daylight and draughts, whose pleasure it was to ride on a flood tide. Too much silence imposed from without could make them ill, Felix especially; and Picus’s capacity for reserve troubled his wife to distraction. It was not until they had found out that silence is a most effective part of courage that they endured it and practised it.

For Boris, the effort he had made to satisfy them was quite enough to be going on with. He did not actually resent what they had imposed on him, no more than a man might who had been baptised against his better judgment into a new faith. And it was their turn now to be sympathetic. He took Felix for long walks, and told him about the perplexities he had left behind in Paris; to which the very young man gave ideal solutions which could not possibly be put into use. Felix was getting an education in how not to live, and how, in spite of it all, a great number of people do live. A lesson, too, in the destruction of an order of society, which happened to have earned to be destroyed. A lesson also in the slav temperament, in folk-movement, an acquaintance uncannily sharp for one at second-hand. And it was the measure of Felix’s quality and his progress in virtue that the sharing of Boris’s saga steadied him, become now so far less petulant than he had been before his cousin’s death. So much could be learned from Boris, and there was one thing that coloured all the rest, an experience which came with a colour and tang to it like poetry, unexpectedly, in little shocks. It was this strangeness, this poet’s quality in him, that lay at the bottom of their loyalty to Boris, who set no great value on the quality—or even the fact—of his love.

It was the sixth day, and the brother and sister were beginning to say out loud that it was time for something to happen again, when Boris went out for a walk by himself. He did not return to tea, he did not return to dinner. They began to speculate, but incorrectly, on what had happened to him.

Many hours before, Boris had been seen by other people, walking under a lattice of air green and leaf green, and air and leaf gold, up an avenue of old trees in young leaf, that led to a celebrated ruin outside Starn. Mrs. Taverner had gone over with Adrian to pay it her annual visit of inspection and respect; pilgrimage to a shrine, of a hunter to his totem, there was a ritual quality about these visits, very pleasing because proper to her. Adrian had gone with her, principally in order that she should not play. She could not endure it not to have him with her, but she would have liked to be allowed to enjoy herself. If Adrian sulked, she would return, unhappy; but occasionally he would break down and be gracious. Then they were really happy, the mother and the son. So, on this as on all occasions, she kept an old weather-eye open for anything that might prove a distraction for him.

A great deal about Adrian Taverner—though finally inexplicable and as mysterious as anything else, could be indicated in known terms by saying that he was one of the numberless young men who can neither live with their mothers nor without them. And Mrs. Taverner, innocent of psychology and avid of power, was not averse to this; too ignorant to understand its dangers, even when she suffered by them, which she often did. Or was it ignorance? Is there not a worse answer than that? Anyhow, two people were unhappy, who, not spiritless or ungifted, had a capacity for their kind of joy; two people often wounded the other, who might have blessed. Two people had each worn the other out of his proper shape, become like two trees interlocked, each of a different kind, neither strong enough to strangle the other.

So, that day, as always, the mother was on the look-out for a diversion for her son which would leave her to enjoy Starn’s ruins, and a recent discovery after a fall of masonry of coins and bones. While it was a point of Adrian’s honour to look a gift distraction in the mouth, a petulance which had kept him young, but the wrong kind of young; which made “old boy,” if any of his friends had been vulgar enough to call him that, unpleasantly apt. Up to that time, he had criticised his way through the world, finding fault with things with which he was only too akin, and which his mother still loved, was wise enough to love still, but not for want of being told, in season and out, of their worthlessness, and how all true judgment consists in cutting away your own roots. Yet it is dangerous to throw away your mana-objects, let alone exhaust your personal mana. It is much more fatal than throwing away your tabus. Adrian thought that he had disembarrassed himself of mana-object and taboo, which was not true; and made a very troubled creature of him, who was making a wilderness of his life, and had too much wits to call it peace.

So Mrs. Taverner, who wanted her tea and was not certain if she would be allowed to have it, was getting desperate. They had gone back to their car and were sitting in it, beginning to argue, when she saw a male creature, moving between the trees, on a step which seemed to have sprung down to earth out of the sky.

“Look at that young man,” she said, trying to distract her son, “how well he walks.” Adding to his furious annoyance a quotation to the effect that he trod some kind of heather “like a buck in spring,” and “looked like a lance” held firmly over the left shoulder. This would have ruined it, if Adrian had not seen him too, wondered what a body so strange and so desirable was doing there. He saw the little chalk-pale head with its close black curls, the eyes which were clear green, smudged on the under socket, the tartar-pitched cheek-bones, the elegant height, the candid smile, the wolf-flash of the teeth—took it all in. As Boris took them all in, did not hesitate a second, came up to the car and asked the way to the ruins in French.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Taverner drove away thankfully to her tea, leaving Adrian to take the young man round; who, left to himself with a stranger, explained with science and enthusiasm the antiquities of his native land.

An hour later, he was standing Boris a drink at Starn, and had heard where he came from and who he was.

Adrian and his mother’s war against Kralin was barely open yet, nor had they reckoned on the Taverner cousins, whom they rarely saw. It might be as well not to discount them, and for that to encourage this young man. So thought Mrs. Taverner, but Adrian was Felix’s cousin, a rather older Felix, with a mother, and some minute sap-gland left out of him. Boris amused and interested him. Boris was his cousins’ friend. It might be amusing to supplant those cousins. More disillusioned than they and with more imagination, Boris, for his part, took Adrian’s measure at a glance.

“The best thing for us to do,” said Mrs. Taverner to Boris, “is to run you home with us to dinner, and then take you back to the top of your hill. There is no road to the house, and this car is too heavy for the turf; but you can find your way, can’t you, on a clear night?”

Boris was enchanted. These people, so much more of the world he had lost than their cousins, went to his senses, and even at the start to his wits. Babbling with appreciation, spilling his charm out before them, he went back with them to the white house in the dark bushes. Out of the spring.

There he found everything that he understood as the comme il faut. Not of novelty, but of memory. This was a sober variation of how life ought to be lived. Here was the right formality, just enough. There was none at the Taverners, who were poor, who hurried over ritual through poverty, ritual not décor, because they were poor, because their essential attention was on other things, learning and thinking, pre-occupations with sport and nature and art. They wanted to live and know. These people wanted nothing so exhausting. It escaped Boris’s notice that they were much less happy people, let alone less good. Or even agreeable. And Adrian, who had got Boris taped also, was elaborately free with drinks. In fact, it practically escaped his notice that these two were the mother and brother of Felicity Taverner, as he made himself handsome at Adrian’s dressing-table, and ran downstairs to say charming things to his mother. He did it so well that he wished her kinsmen could see him. It was that which recalled them to his attention, made him wonder why he was not feeling quite so happy; until he began to remember too much, and packed his thoughts away, burying them on a system of his own with all things he resented. For he did resent it, and very sharply, that it might, in the future, be disloyal for him to be there.

At dinner Mrs. Taverner very properly set herself to find out what she wanted to know, which was, principally, the relations between her niece and nephew and Nick Kralin. How much Boris was in their confidence; how much he would talk. Now it is true about human beings that, with very few exceptions, when they are under an obligation, it gives them pleasure to convey something to the discredit of their benefactors. (It is part of the larger question that “la mediocrité croit toujours se grandir en rebaissant la mérite.”) Boris was too bad a character quite for mediocrity, but the instinct was there; and he did not quite understand Mrs. Taverner’s traps. Or, if he did, he did not care. If he excused himself, it was to say that there was no harm in seeing all round a question, and useful for Scylla to have a friend in the enemy’s camp. In the end Mrs. Taverner gathered: that they were at civil daggers drawn with Nick Kralin, daggers which were not likely to return to their sheaths: that Scylla had her daughter’s crystal beads: that none of them had been able to find any papers of hers, though they had been anxious about them, had even looked for them on their own responsibility. (Kralin, she remembered, seemed to have been curious there also.) That Felix had been in love with his cousin and knew something—here Boris was elaborately vague—to Adrian’s discredit with regard to his sister. It did not disconcert the old woman in the least, roused her instincts, sharpened her appetite for battle. She was delighted with Boris, having no experience of his type. Adrian liked and despised him, who saw nothing but what was amusing or ignoble in any man.

It was a happy young man, not in the least bit thoughtful, who plunged back under the bright stars, over the hill.

No one had waited up for him, but doors are not locked at night in that country. There was a tray laid with food. He was eating a little of it, busy with pleasures past and pleasures to come, when he heard steps on the stairs. Felix came down, and when he heard what Boris had been doing, he showed interest, no pleasure whatever, developing into excitement; and Boris, who had not his story arranged, felt at a loss, most unfairly on the defensive and misunderstood. It seemed to do no good to repeat that Adrian Taverner was a “charmant garçon,” and his mother a “grande dame véritable.” It did not please. The first was a lie, the second an impertinence. He had enough sense to retreat to bed, and Felix not to rouse the house. The youngest Taverner lay awake, listening to the passion-laden stirring of the Sacred Wood, intelligible, unintelligible, their lives’ tune:

“Supreme is the genius loci.” Next morning Boris awoke to a world that was the whole of such comfort and salvation as he had known since he became a man. Pure, perfect and kind, “mysterious, beautiful.” From the instant of waking, it came into his room, displayed itself to him. And he felt at once, as was most natural, that he wanted nothing of the sort. He wanted, he wanted—what he wanted was an indefinite saturation in the life of old Mrs. Taverner and her son. Ten years of repression had been loosed in one evening. This place, for all its utter detachment, appeared to his mind as something that had its eye on him. And hadn’t his host an axe to grind, if it was only about his soul? Then he remembered that he had an appointment that day with Adrian Taverner in Starn.

It was because of the genius loci that at breakfast he lied about that; told a transparent tale about an american tourist he had also met; answered their questions without intelligence; made them, though he did not see it, blush for him. Then he tried to pick a light quarrel which would hurt them, and flung out of the house on his ten mile walk to the enemy’s camp.

“Good riddance,” said Felix. And then—“we’re too sensitive by half.”

“We are,” said his sister. “Let’s use it. Why have those two got him so cheap?” Picus said:

“What did you suppose he’d do?” And when pressed began to tell them in verse about persons who

“If it wasn’t us,” said Felix, “what would you say had happened?”

It became suddenly easier at this, easier to look at, and then apparent that Mrs. Taverner must have come down, for reasons as yet unknown, to keep an eye on Kralin. While what Boris had told them and what he had not told them, instead of bewildering, helped, and cautious surmise became a delight. Once less personal, the affair became clearer, and once clearer, amusing. They had stepped out of the circle of Boris’s power, who had often been prisoned in it, for fine reasons as well as foolish. The trick of detachment worked its old miracle; they were no longer angry with him; understood the repression and the reaction. Until they felt so cheerful about it that Felix suggested that they should go over and call on Nick Kralin.

*  *  *  *  *

Kralin lay on Felicity Taverner’s bed, on his back on the sea-blue cover, stiff with silver threads. Not as a young man lies and relaxes or waits with impatience. He was not at ease or attentive for who should come to him there. About the room his gear over-laid his dead wife’s, properties of a man whose interests were all cerebral, in the abstractions we have made for our convenience out of life. Formulæ about things, means for discussing them, not ways even for acting on them directly. There were books on psychology, but principally on the oddities of human behaviour and the curiosities of sex, and what young children may be thinking about. Books of theory like the “Decay of the West.” There was a typewriter, a row of pipes and a pair of leather slippers, very worn and strong, and a dressing-gown of undyed wool. The man’s touch; yet it seemed forced. A piece of protective disguise? But Kralin was in no way effeminate. It was perhaps that his things wore an air of openness, of un-secrecy, who was neither an open nor an innocent man. The illusion of candour was everywhere, flannel pyjamas sticking out from under the blue bolster, and seven steel razors which Felicity had given him in a shagreen case. And he would apologise for its lovely lacquer, in which any man would have been delighted; which he appreciated as much as any man. So he superimposed himself upon the eight-walled room, roughly against its delicacies, not put away but pushed back, and somehow accentuated. Books of ferocious reasoning, pipe-dottel and mud from heavy shoes. While there hung along the walls a series of etching by Rops, rather extreme examples of the specialities of that master, beautifully framed; an evidence of correct taste and sufficient wealth. While, as though wax had been poured and set over it, his attractive body was thickening. No more than that, and not evenly, round the waist and thighs and lower part of the cheeks, ageing the mouth, and filling out the thought-furrow which had divided the forehead between the eyes in youth. Lying-down, he had the air of a content man who did not relish his peace; a thoughtful man who expected no solution from thought; a chaste man from choice, whom the choice irritated; a sensitive man who wounded his own sensibility in order to display a stoicism he did not consider in any way admirable or necessary. A voluptuous man who could not yield himself to pleasure; a cruel man who could be exceedingly kind—to cats or people, without caring the least for either people or cats. A man who would say “no” on instinct, and if forced into saying “yes”—and to his own advantage, would deny the profit. A man who, though conventionally respectful of other men’s freedom, had a pleasure, the only pleasure which ran in him too strong to be denied, to thwart it, to see its not-fulfilment, to bring it to his Nothing. Again, a man so indifferent to moral interests that men’s acts seemed to him no more than arrangements, pieces on a board without even the significance of a game or a technique; to be judged, if they could be judged, without even the aesthetic excuse, like the formal arrangements of a work of art. Yet, with his impeccable taste, he had no delight in art. With health and wits, intelligence, security, learning and his significant luck, he had no delight in anything. In one thing alone he took pleasure, in the desert which can be made and is called peace. Into that he poured his sensuality, his creative desire, so that, where there had been a garden, there should be a solitude—with a few bones about. This he admitted to himself, without an attempt either to justify or to condemn, who had disciplined himself out of elation. Who felt no remorse. Who had no belief in discipline. Or fear of the elation he denied to himself.

Because there was nothing vulgar about him, there had grown in him a dry terrible power. Awful, it had mounted and spread, fused between his pairs of opposites. It was his formula of Not-Being which prevented that: Not-Being, Un-Meaning, Un-Doing, not with war or fury, but—find the linch-pin, the key-stone. Take it out softly and the arch will crumble, the wheel fall out. Nodens, God of the Abyss.

It was no common spite that had brought him south to a house he did not want. In a cheap cardboard attaché case beside him were his wife’s papers, whose finding had made the place essential to him from the start; which he had found in the first hours of his arrival—but not in her bureau, which had cost him as well as Felix some trouble; before he had seen Scylla or Boris. So abstract was his imagination, that it had hardly occurred to him that they would try to keep her papers from him, what it meant to them to have been fore-stalled, and by him. Yet he had fore-stalled them knowingly. In the same way, there was no richness of satisfaction in his un-making and super-imposing upon his dead wife’s room. Nor was it in the least unintentional. It was the appropriate, the necessary undoing of what had been made beautiful, of what had been made out of love, for love. A god could not have acted more in accordance with its divine will; only a demon could have taken less delight.

To anyone else on earth it would seem incomprehensible that there was no raw revenge in what he was about to do, in what he had come to the house in the south to ascertain and to act upon. The situation he saw before him was full of the abstract measure of perfection his nature demanded. He would win on the swings and on the roundabouts—with the joy of negotiation for a valuable piece of property thrown in. One of the chemically pure pleasures that he permitted to himself.

He got up whistling, serene in his evil version of the magical secret, his poise of a winged worm hovering over a world displaying itself in antitheses, as Felix came to the door.

After the morning conversation Felix had gone over to visit him alone, across the valley, spring-hot and noisy with life. It had rained in the night, and the morning was one when the spring comes whiffling, and the underground, up-stem, down-leaf race is audible almost to sight and ear, and wholly to some nerve which is unconnected with ear or eye. That unheard sound is strange, a continuous cry or like the exultation of some bird of sustained song; like a deep breath or a shout that never stops, and of an intensity which would be unbearable if we were ever fully aware of it. Felix was too old and not old enough to understand how in order to be part of it he must relax and give himself to it again. While his senses enjoyed it, piece by piece, and all his vigorous body, his spirit was in a fret, about Felicity and Boris and his aunt and the man he was going to see, and what he must say, and what he must find out and what he might find out.

Kralin opened the door and received him very pleasantly. (It was one of the Taverner simplicities that they warmed to friendliness.) He did not take him into Felicity’s room, told him to thank Scylla, and that Nanna had left the place in flawless order and gave him a pound note for her. Then he asked him if he had seen his aunt yet, and admitted that it mitigated his widowhood to be in his late wife’s house. Told Felix that he intended to settle there, though there might be difficulties with his mother-in-law, suggesting that in his dealings with the country people he would need help. Also how he wished to restore the garden, and not raise the ghost of Felicity with geraniums and lobelias, which as a Londoner was as far as his vocabulary, if not his imagination, went.

While Felix, quite politely, showed perfectly that he disliked and distrusted him, that he had come over to find out anything that he could to his discredit and was not clever enough either to succeed or to hide his intention. Knew his own awkwardness and stumbled over it. We all know these painful dislocations. Then Kralin played-up and was a little shy too, until Felix began suddenly to feel—not sick, but uneasy and strange, as though nerves in him were being uncovered, which once exposed would hurt horribly, with a new pain, go on hurting all the rest of his life with a pain that had not been felt before. There would be a new agony let loose in the world. This was a new agony being let loose in the world. This was all nonsense. Then, that he must get away very quickly.

Kralin did not attempt to keep him, but faintly smiling saw him to the door.

When Felix had turned down the lane, out of sight of the house, he began to run, forcing himself—or being forced—beyond his pace, who was built for long-distance, not sprinting. But what he wanted was wings.

Winded, he pulled up. He was out in the open valley, on the path across it that led back to his house. He had run through a primrose-sown lane under immense oaks all in freshest leaf, out onto the new-bladed turf under the downs. Straight through mild cows and sheep who stared and scattered, through a copse in whose heart flowed a sheet of wild mustard, whose scent is that of gold, if gold were alive, or flame, if flame were not a hurried, eating thing. He had snatched extra breaths of it, but it had not stopped him, driven by the storm of an unexperienced fear. He was not now on a spear-bright square, where later the corn would set to partners with the wind. All his life he had known that long cornfield, the years when his mouth had been level with its ears, the years he had risen over it, foot by foot, which in harvest now stood to his waist. He knew it, red and purple under plough and harrow, gull-pecked and shadowed. He knew it stripped and emptied and gathered together into high bowed assemblies of itself. Then the cornfield held him, as tree and flower had not been able to do; made him wait for an instant. He crossed it, slowing down in spirit.

Once home again, he explained his failure, which they had expected, for which they were prepared; then tried to explain his fear; and they were not surprised at that. For the first, Kralin would see through them anyhow (even if there were nothing to see through); while the danger a year or so before would have been to Felix’s self-esteem, against whose wounds he would have re-acted atrociously. But Felix was changing, what old guardians of youth called “hardening-out.” By contact with the world, by quiet out of it—which was making his land endurable to him again, and more than endurable, blessed—he was beginning to find his own measure for life. He was saying:

“I spilt the beans—so far as showing our estimate of him. I couldn’t help it. Then I found I had to run away and I ran. I found I knew suddenly what Felicity knew about the ‘grey thing.’ Not what it is. But I shall. We all shall.” Then, more soberly: “What is it in that man that turns you up?”

“What we’ve got to find out, for it’s what killed Felicity. And it will do the same to every felicity it finds. C’est son métier.”

“It had a shot at me to-day, whatever it is. It comes on you suddenly. And on top it was comic. With his books on the poet’s suppressed wishes and how the complex sees it through.” It occurred to them that Boris, who had hardly heard of fashionable psychology, nor the joke-screen we keep between it and ourselves, had been able to say more interesting things about it than they had. So Kralin represented a new variety of man, did he, and with aims that were essentially destructive? No life. Un-Doing, Not-Making. Not a child of wrath and tempest and resurrection, but oblique and gentle, so that impulse should fail like a falling leaf, and will do no more steering. Something like that. And not to serve his own turn even, though it should do so, it must. Man cannot detach himself so easily from his own will. They were in very queer country. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. In the tower was an evil will that was also not-will, and because it was will, will and imagination and able to look steadily at antitheses, exceedingly strong.

“It was as though,” said Felix, “a little white worm living inside his heart, poked out its head at me. That amused him politely, and I ran. And I didn’t get my wits back till I was lost again, outside in the wind and the sun.”

“But,” said Picus, “Boris will want to know why Adrian should consent to sell him the house and have him down here at all.”

*  *  *  *  *

It happened that Boris was asking this, as he lunched with Adrian at Starn.

“Have the house?” said Adrian. “Not unless he likes to pay three times what it is worth. That’s why we’re down here. He says he hates dealing through lawyers in a family matter, and my mother imagines that he has something up his sleeve. Or else that he wants to keep in with us, and we may make a good deal of money out of that simple ambition.” He noticed that the last didn’t satisfy Boris, who was saying: “Have it your own way” to himself; who for all his avid need of Adrian, thought him stupid.

It was then that Adrian gave him a message from his mother to take over the hills; how she had hardly seen Scylla since her marriage, and could she come over to their house for lunch, and would they ask Kralin? She would write to him, of course, but if they could all meet there, she had some business to discuss.

A message Boris gave them late that night, very pleased with himself and only a little discontented that they did not seem discontented with him.

“Have them all over at once. Find out what’s up. If Kralin gets the house, we can settle down and watch him.” At the back of Scylla’s mind was a belief that the wild serene land would be too much for him, either change him or drive him away. Felix’s mind ran on strange visitors who might come there—a touch of “Sapper” sophisticated, not observed, and when noticed, repudiated with horror. Until he laughed at himself.

Picus Tracy went down to the shore and repaired a boat, until the smack, smack of the short sea and the smell of tar did something to him, what the use of his hands and the stilling of his senses also helped to do, making him aware in another version of the way his wife was aware, of the turn of the event. The “awareness” always came one way, when, unless he took care to correct it, such things as “right” and “left,” “before” and “after” became interchangeable, and he would say “yesterday” when he meant “to-morrow,” and it was as if there was no difference between them. Confusing for others, but all right for him, because he acted as though he were living in both at once. Which he felt he was, but not what it felt like. So that afternoon the hours passed in a “now” inclusive of “after” and “before.” Or altogether outside them, for his “now” was not what is commonly meant by “now.” When he noticed he was in it, he did not enjoy that state.

He looked up from the beach up the short cliff, and saw Kralin watching him. The two young men looked up and down at each other. Then Kralin sprang down the cliff-path and said that it was years since they had met. Picus agreed, and with his vague bright courtesy indicated a seat on an empty lobster pot. Kralin sat down on it and watched him at work.

“When I settle here for good,” he said, “I must ask you people to teach me how to sail a boat.” Picus indicated that he had better not ask him, who had a gift for being sick, without warning, at any moment of danger or decision. He went on working. Nicholas Kralin sat on and watched him, until Picus asked him if he would not find it a lonely place in which to live. People give curious answers to that standard politeness. Picus, a connoisseur in his way in human futilities, wondered which one he would get. But Kralin answered by telling him several things that he did not know: that the land surrounding their land, lying on the boundaries of several old estates within its half circle of hills and the sea, was very much of it for sale. In patches, here, there and everywhere, which by judicious purchase could be made to link-up: that he proposed Felicity’s house for a personal nucleus, putting his capital into a field here and a field there. He would then build a hotel and a row of bungalows along the low cliff, light the sea lane and drain it. One of the least-known places in England, he would then advertise it. The village, perfect as a single unit of antique building, would do half of the publicity for him. The bathing was the difficulty. He would have to find a place for people who could not swim. In ten years’ time he supposed that he would be buying the Taverners out—at their own price.

Picus listened to this, and all that he was sure that he felt was a pain somewhere deep in the middle of his inside. He heard Kralin telling him about a golf-course, and where the garages and the parking-ground could be. As he listened he could hear at the same time a long cry, a wail, a lamentation from outside that never stopped. A mourning somewhere in creation that the freshest earth there is should lose its maidenhood, become handled and subservient to man, to the men who would follow Nick Kralin. “Felicity is dead, and her land is to die too.” He could hear his wife say that. There was a wound going through his long thin body. His feet and her feet and her brother’s would walk on knives always after this. He found, as he cocked his head on one side to listen to Kralin, that he was staring very hard at his exceedingly powerful hands.

“You’re sure,” he said, “that they’ll sell?” (‘What were they given me for? To fight with.’ “Not then,” said his distorted time-sense gone into reverse, when another man would have said “Not yet.”) Kralin waived the question serenely:

“I got your note asking me to lunch. I’ll be over to-morrow and meet them there with you. Now I’ll stop wasting your time.” He said that wistfully, as a man who knows he is not liked, and wishes to be asked back to tea. It was then that he noticed for the first time Picus’s hands, that they were atrociously strong for a man of his bird-like air and delicate height, not an inhuman man, but as if he knew a delicate tune only very rare birds sing. The hands now lay idle. A tool had fallen into the sand. For an instant Kralin was almost uneasy, until he saw him feel for a cigarette. He went away, and then Picus knew why Felix had run. He was feeling odd too, because as Kralin had been humble with Felix, he had been wistful with him. He put away his tools in the boat-house and walked home alone up the path through the Sacred Wood, up from the sea. Many years ago it had been pebbled, with the polished, colour-taking sea-moulded eggs of local marble, a tender fancy of Victorian gardeners in that part of the south. Now moss almost covered them, and rarely swept twig and leaf; while the centre was trodden back to its earth, clay in this case, and bound with roots, their ridges polished down to the core of the wood. On the blackest night they had each learned where not to stumble, an exercise when they were children in disaster and pride. Yet, on his way back, Picus tripped and fell flying, and lay for more than a moment, face-down, spread-out, the young light dappling his body. He got up, bewildered like a man who has been knocked down in his own house. Once there, he said nothing whatever about what Kralin had told him.

All the next morning Picus watched the house being put into a state for the reception of old Mrs. Taverner. Not for Adrian, whom they would willingly have fed on boiled limpets, but for his mother. It is necessary to human nature that the more it dislikes and distrusts, the more it must find a formula for showing off. Elaborate rudeness will do. Or a last revenge of hate may be accompanied by a parade of hospitality and all possible splendour. Picus went down to the cellar, whose size for what they could afford to keep in it reminded him of the man who put a cathedral on the mouse. Felix took a bicycle and went over to Starn for ice, ice which melted in the carrier and did duty for a water-cart, all the miles of white velvet dust to the top of their hill. Stern-faced, Nanna and Scylla worked over the house. Unfortunately, Mrs. Taverner’s wedding-present had been changed for something else, and Adrian’s pendant was officially at the jeweller’s for repairs. Would he be too refined to understand? Too rich if he wasn’t or too stupid. Or spiteful enough? They were doubtful, and Picus, chased from the cellar for wine, to the shore for lobsters, to the kitchen-garden for salad, to the bathroom to wash, wished he had never married, and was in pain all the time because of what he knew; what Kralin had said, which the others did not know; which he had not told them, and in knowledge of which he was living. In which he had no business to be living, for it hadn’t happened yet. Would it happen? Was the spoiling of their land a horror already begotten? Was time quick with it? It felt so to his perception, but he could not be sure. Out of the two cards or three, the one that might be drawn. He brushed his fine hair over his thin skull and disliked the processes of living, each one of which he knew how to handle, expert in the almost lost art of enjoying himself—as distinct from having a good time.

Downstairs he found a stern young goddess, looking at the dining-room table, her head on one side. With her was a sybil, ancient, prophetic, and he heard that if Mrs. Taverner found anything wrong with that, some doom known only to old women who had nursed her children would fall on her. Scylla gave Picus the same look she had given to the table setting, critical, ruthless, of one who is making the very worst do for the very best. He heard himself included in her “Nanna, I suppose this will have to do,” and went and hid in the dark library, where it was a house-understanding that no one spoke to anyone else. Felix came in and ignored it with a tirade on the hollowness of family life, rather in his earlier manner. Picus wished life would stop, every form of life; and a few minutes later heard the steps of Adrian and Mrs. Taverner on the path out of the wood.

For her husband’s brother’s children Mrs. Taverner felt neither respect, interest nor love; for Picus, son of old Mr. Tracy, her true nephew, her brother’s son, she would have felt a great deal, if Picus, from the hour he had first screamed at her in his cradle, had ever let her get within affection’s distance of him. The rude, elusive child had become the exceedingly remote young man, yet she thought about him—old woman of her tribe—and sincerely pitied him his marriage with Scylla. Easy to account for her doubts on the cousinship, but—her sons apart—what she disliked was Taverners. Taverners, speculative, high-minded, secretive through over-sensibility, whose instincts ran a little counter to their judgment, with their intellectual passions, their fastidious courage, their white heats. Their “moody haughty minds, essentially religious”—she had not the least idea what they were about. Any more than she understood their capacity for love and self-giving they were at pains to hide, whose instinct was to exploit it with the rest of the world. Nor their over-strained horror of the pretentious, who had no objection to extremes of family advertisement. Their world, for all its country similarities was one of which she knew nothing and imagined the worst. Boris happened to be the only one of their friends who appealed to her—a gentleman this time, and a wolf-cub of romantic misfortune; but Mrs. Taverner was quite shrewd enough to know that the bizarre was not her hunting-ground, nor the exotic her pack. It was different for Adrian, but Adrian, she noticed, was an odd mixture of interest about Boris tinged with contempt.

She came in to lunch with one intention, not to leave until she had made matters clear with Nick Kralin; make the best bargain with him, put him in his place; saucing the dish with a few Taverner scalps. It was not that she was nothing but an ill-natured woman. It went deeper than that. For one thing she was not a person to examine and correct the instinct which makes men—and women especially—desire the abasement—not too serious and not public—of the family into which they have married. Often they feel that they have given more than they have got (in Mrs. Taverner’s case most unfairly, left a widow early and exceedingly well-provided for out of Taverner wealth). But everything that was not her own, she grudged to others in imagination, who, once it became hers, could be generous. Even with Adrian she was trying to trade his possession of his sister’s house with him against his debts.

At lunch it was Scylla’s mild ambition to prevent her aunt from feeling mistress of the situation. She did it rather well, the old woman thought, inadequately backed up by Felix, who shared his sister’s desire to exaggeration, and was young enough still to be rude. While Picus, who was unhappy, was only polite. Kralin, if possible more civil, said very little, and it was Boris who took the situation in hand. One of those people who are able to forget that part of their audience have heard their stories before, he entertained the mother and son, at the same time provoking Kralin to almost visible dislike.

The exasperated feast went on, false for the givers of it. Emotions like these did not suit the house in the Sacred Wood. “It’s the worst of her that she makes people like us behave like people like that.” Scylla sighed, and wondered when it would be over, and they could get back to their own lives, learning and thinking and loving, and being out of doors, to the great work she and Felix had planned. What was the power in her aunt to make it all look contemptible? The exquisite but rather too spare arrangement of the table, the plain delicate food—Mrs. Taverner could better both by opening her mouth to give an order. While of what was unpurchasable in them and untouchable she did not know the existence. Scylla sat back while they finished their tart, of the youngest rhubarb and Nanna’s special crust, said a prayer over the coffee, and then everything about her but her body went out of the room, arrow-quick, on a flight to a place she did not know, across pain. Would they never be rid of them, rid of the world that was not their world; rid of the living, rid even of the dead, even of Felicity’s ghost? Then the thought: ‘This won’t do. Our business is to bring order, proportion, light into what is happening. That where there has been falsehood and muddle, there shall be knowing and clearness, conception for misconception. That is how life is handled. Get on with it.’ Then: ‘I don’t want to any more. Felicity died because it was too much for her. And it’s too much for me.’ Her flight began like that, but instantly she was away in a faint world of travelling images, flying fast like sand, through dirty clouds to nowhere. Through nowhere, then into something burning-cold or ice-hot that she knew for Nick Kralin’s mind, and whirled back from it into her version of the horror which had possessed the others. She found herself pouring out the coffee and hearing her aunt say:

“I hear from Monsieur Polteratsky that you found our poor Felicity’s crystals over at the house.”

Scylla had not forgotten them, had every intention of keeping them; because they were beautiful, because they were particularly like the dead, because she did not want Kralin or Adrian or Adrian’s mother to have them. Felix stepped into the breach:

“I gave them to her, Aunt. Now she is dead, I want my sister to wear them.” This was not true. The only thing they had been sure about was that the beads had not been a present either from her family or from Kralin.

“Indeed,” said Mrs. Taverner, “I remember them. They are exactly like a string that belonged to your Aunt Jean. I believe she gave them to her.”

“You can write to the jeweller and ask,” said Felix, a shade too haughtily; but as Mrs. Taverner had invented her sister as the giver as much as they had invented themselves, it passed, until Kralin said quietly:

“I don’t want them, Scylla.”

Everyone was thinking that they had not an idea where Felicity had got them, everyone that is but Kralin. Brother and sister registered hauteur. Picus had the tact not to laugh.

Mrs. Taverner finished her coffee: “Never mind the beads just now. I have really come over—to see you, of course, but to talk to Nicholas about the house. In spite of our dreadful loss—I might even say because of it—there is no reason why we should not—” she nearly said “be friends”; judged that to be going too far and added “consult each other’s wishes.” (Now that Felicity is dead. Was that one of her wishes?) Her hosts looked stonily at her.

They got up from the table, dispersed to re-collect in the long salon where the family assembled its works of art. Nucleus of a new collection, who had each that instinct and fair luck. Adrian was irritated and impressed, Kralin was amused, who also understood such things and could afford better. To Mrs. Taverner they were suspect, as symbolic of some new form of the indecent, which she called decadent.

The french windows were open, and carried in on light airs, the sun put out the small fire, making it look like paint. She sat upright on a Spanish gilt settee of extraordinary discomfort, strategically ill-placed, since it left her head in the light. Kralin, deprecating, took a tall chair opposite, with wings that threw a double shadow onto his face.

“Would you rather we left you?” said Scylla.

“Why should you? Unless Nicholas wishes. I have only to tell him the price we are asking for the house, and he can tell us, now or later, if it suits him to pay it.” She turned the folds of her hard, old, painted face to the sun. They had heard it all before, and how many times must Adrian have heard his mother saying what she wanted, what was due to her, what she meant to have. What she usually got.

They seated themselves. Adrian looked round, bored; bored and sulky and not sure of himself, neither sufficiently interested nor aloof; cynical at his mother’s parade of authority and ashamed, yet subject to it. His cousins knew that he was as much her prisoner, as certainly mutilated by her as any eastern prince with hands cut off, led by a cord through his tongue. For which knowledge he could never forgive them, to whom contact with his mother was like the hunting of big game. So the son looked away, the nephew stared. At twenty-five, Felix’s jaw was hardening, his rings of hair, retracting a little, threw his tall forehead into relief. He was ready for a spectacle, and to speak a piece of his mind. While the niece was wondering how to keep her brother quiet, unless or until her aunt went too far and gave excuse to one of those climaxes of indignation and denunciation in which Felix excelled. Boris, who ought to have left them, was immovable with curiosity, curiosity and caution and a kind of loyalty and a kind of mistrust. Whatever the Taverners were going to talk about they should not give him away, or give themselves away either if he could help it, however much they were provoked. Bad conscience, for they were incapable of trying to discredit him. But to Boris his bad conscience was their fault. Only Picus Tracy, shadowy beside the ancient curtains printed with birds, was in pure pain. Without joy of battle, or the consciousness of durée, the being and becoming of life, on which the others were travelling like a wave-crest, he was alone, in a quiet pool of that evil which would be served out for them in transit, drop by drop, whose waters would pour off them as they poured on. Or so it seemed to him. Only he had it for what it was. All of it. All the time. And when had he asked for that, whose life was in laughter and pure sensations the delights of the ear and eye and skin, as far away from human evil as from the intellectual love of God? His instincts had been sufficient for him, because they were fine, and he fastidious and subtle. Taverners were not subtle, or only laboriously, on technique. They were deep and direct, lovers of truth, and their simplicity different from his distilled perception. He saw himself, explaining all this to himself, making it into intellectual seeing for the first time, and shook as though at the pains of a new birth. “So this is marriage,” said his merry devil. Then “She is my aunt too”; and he thought of his evil father and then of Nick Kralin.

Mrs. Taverner began again:

“You must understand, Nicholas, I don’t want to be unkind, and I quite understand why you would want Felicity’s house. There were faults on both sides, as I know only too well; but I do want you to understand that you are asking us to make a great sacrifice in suggesting that we should part with it at all. Of course you don’t know how our estates lie. Felix owns this house and land up to the foot of the downs and the strip of wood down to the sea. Scylla no land at all, though it would belong to her should he never leave an heir, and he, very wisely and rightly, allows her and Picus to make their home with him. But his property stops on the side of the wood that looks over the fields. We own nothing more till we come to you. What was Felicity’s house is the only other piece here that belongs to us; with not much land, as you must know, though the high orchard behind it commands the whole valley. But over the hills, towards Stone End, we still own some. And it has always been my plan, by judicious buying, to try and link up the estate again. Of course, I know that the piece you want is really my son’s, but he has come to an arrangement with me about it, and he so dislikes talking business. —So you see that what you are really doing is asking me to part with family land, when my object is to re-acquire it. As a business man, you must know how valuable a security it is these days.”

Aunt Julia’s bibful. Variations on a theme familiar to her family since childhood. She went on:

“And as you all know—and I’m sure that if Nicholas doesn’t, he’ll understand now—that my great desire has been, apart from the benefit to my family which can be got by good farming, to keep this exquisite part of the earth in the hands of people who will never let it be spoiled. It would break all our hearts to think of it vulgarised by bungalows, or by the sort of people who might come here. Certainly would, if they knew anything about it, and there was land to be had.”

Picus, who had been upright till this, so light on his feet that his standing gave no impression that he was not at ease, whose sitting down was more like a movement poised for flight, caught at the curtains and slipped heavily into the window-seat. How much would the man pay? Probably a great deal to have so much power over them. Scylla was saying:

“It’s always been a fear of ours, Nick, lest anything should happen, lest anything could happen to this—this bit of England.” So she said, and what she meant was to the flawless, clean and blessed, mana and tabu earth; strictly of their flesh, whose birds and beasts and eggs and fish, and fruit and leaf and air and water had nourished their bodies, “composed their beauties”; whose pattern was repeated in them, the stuff of a country made into man.

“Quite,” said Nick Kralin. Mrs. Taverner now felt that she had her family on her side on an issue there could be no two opinions about. She went on:

“So I don’t feel justified in asking less than ten thousand pounds for the house and garden as it stands, and that price is in consideration of our kinship.” There was silence. As price it was fantastic. She went on:

“I’m sorry, my dear boy, but you see, we can’t take less. I’ve my family to consider. My late husband would turn in his grave at the idea of my selling it at all.” Silence for the entry of Uncle Henry’s ghost. Listen for the grave turning. Kralin looked up innocently.

—“But don’t answer me now. Go back to the house and think it over. But don’t try offering me a penny less, for I won’t take it. And don’t think you can try and get at Adrian either. It’s practically my property now.” Her claws were out. They even felt for Kralin. Was an old bully any better than a young—? What was Kralin? They thought of Felicity on her path between this cruel power and that. Path down the cul-de-sac, to the blind well, to the dead end that was her grave. While Boris noticed that a woman like that would have no scruples about bullying a man like him; tyranny which might be more disagreeable than the Taverners’. Filed it for reflection.

“No,” said Kralin. “I don’t know that I need go home. I think we might finish it now.” He looked up, coyly: “You see, Maman—now you will listen to this, won’t you—” (She made a movement of haughty assent)—“I’m very anxious myself that there should be some sort of lasting memorial to my wife. In fact, I even feel I must do it myself. I mean I could do it, if Scylla and Felix would help me. Now I’ve got all her papers—she kept diaries, you know; and sorted all her correspondence into packets, tied with the appropriately-coloured ribbon—” He sniggered, deprecating with thrust-out hands.

“I’m proposing to issue them with a preface, in a limited edition to subscribers. I know a man who does that sort of thing, who’d jump at it. And in her house there is just the right atmosphere for the selecting and editing I must do. So you see?”

So he had got them. The faultless instinct that had sent them searching, ineffective.

“What papers?” said old Mrs. Taverner. “Her private letters? I don’t quite understand.”

“Yes,” said Kralin, patiently: “her letters from her friends, and some by her which she must have asked for back. And her diaries and comments on people and on herself. It might become quite a classic of its kind.” He waited. Mrs. Taverner spoke again:

“I can’t at the moment quite see any objection. You would be on your honour, of course, not to publish anything which would offend her family. I can’t imagine there would be much sale for such a book. You don’t think so yourself, or you wouldn’t propose a limited edition. But what has that to do with the house?”

They heard a sigh from Picus. A bubble had broken in his mind and let out understanding. Kralin was speaking again:

“You’ll see in a minute. I don’t think its sale would be as small as that. In these days of psychoanalysis, it might be very widely read. It would have to be a book people subscribe for because it is so very frank. It’s that which makes it interesting, of course. Felicity had the art of telling the truth as she saw it. And she was—shall we say—an erotic expert. Of course, we are not the people who think of these things as indecent; but you know what the British Public can be like. James Douglas and the smut-hands. As for the letters to her, I expect I shall have to find out about the law, if the writers are still alive. Initials and asterisks, I expect, will be all I shall be allowed. Or we may come to terms.”

“You mean,” said Mrs. Taverner, slowly, “that there are things among my late daughter’s papers that all the world might not see?”

“If you like to put it that way, Aunt Julia.” He spoke with a touch of friendly impatience. “I doubt it, from that point of view, whether even her family ‘ought to see’ them. They are, I assure you, wonderfully frank and impassioned. That’s why I think they might become a classic, an erotic classic. After my editing.” He smiled, adding—“And incidentally, you may be quite sure that her death was an accident, not suicide. She would hardly have left such papers about if she had meant to kill herself.”

“What do you mean?” said Mrs. Taverner, her hauteur turning a little shrill, glancing with rising fury at Scylla.

“Yes, what d’you mean?” said Scylla, slowly. All three turned towards him, staring.

“You see my point of view?” he said. “I am a man without prejudices. It seems to me that my wife’s papers contain so much valuable material, throw so many lights on the ultimate psychology of our behaviour, that the fact that I was married to her ought not to influence me. After all, if I were to take that point of view, I might complain of the treatment I have received. I don’t propose to. I have many most charming recollections of her. While, if it occurs to any one to blame me, I have my answer in this little memorial that I propose.”

Mrs. Taverner did not understand. The others did at once, without analysis, by pure impression, as though they were made of hot wax to take the seal of Nick Kralin. Picus sighed again, but more easily. The bubble had burst now. He was less alone. They knew, his wife and her brother and her brother’s friend. Adrian Taverner knew too. His first thought was pleasure. His mother was not getting her own way. Picus glanced at him, saw an avid spiteful look forming round the corners of his mouth. Mrs. Taverner said:

“I don’t think any of her papers ought to be published if there is anything in them to bring discredit on our family. And I do not see in the least what all this has got to do with the house.”

“What we mean is,” said Scylla, “that now we know what your game is, we’ll see what can be done on this earth to stop you.” Kralin shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“I see you realise the position, Scylla. But if you feel like that about it—and you probably knew what Felicity was like better than I ever did—we can come to an arrangement. I am quite ready, Aunt Julia, to return you your daughter’s papers in exchange for the house.” Mrs. Taverner stared, as what served her for light broke on her; and nearly shouted at him:

“The house in exchange for my daughter’s papers. Never on your life. The impudence of you! After what you’ve told us, we can go to law about it.”

“This is blackmail,” said Felix. Kralin deprecated:

“It is, if you like. But the position is one which makes one quite sure that you will not go to law. You see, Maman, I have Felicity’s reputation—your family’s reputation, if you like, to do what I chose with. Do try and understand. But I am quite willing to exchange it, to hand you over those writings in exchange for the house.”

Mrs. Taverner understood now blindly, as an angry old animal understands a challenge to fight. And she accepted it hardly for her daughter’s fame, in some part for her family honour, for her thwarted authority, furiously. Women like that, whose strength is based on their emotional violence, are apt to lose their judgment in a moment of crisis. Discharge of emotion being all that matters to them, they will rush alike an enemy and friend—sometimes more on friend than enemy—frantic to give an instant exhibition of power. There are men like that, but not usually so dangerous or so silly. She forgot that the Taverners must be on her side, forgot common blood and common generosity. There was something fatal about it. She began:

“What’s all this? What is it you’ve the impudence to think you’ll try and get out of me? I believe you’re all in it together. You, Felix! I’ve heard it said that you were in love with her. I hope you’ll like it when your silly indecent letters come out in print. It would be what you deserve. Give him the house, indeed, to save you! And you, Scylla, stealing her beads and pretending your brother gave them to you. I’m sick of you all. You’re going to advertise yourself through your poor wretched cousin.”

“Aunt,” said Picus, “you mustn’t make a fool of yourself now.” Kralin nodded at him, intelligently, saying to no one in particular, “But think of the money I save.” Felix and Scylla sat close to one another, like people under torture, whom torture has taken by surprise, who have not remembered to scream. What Kralin had in his mind to do about Felicity, pointed, underscored, somehow made septic by what the old woman had said. Scylla said at last:

“I wouldn’t take this man’s side too quickly if I were you, Aunt Julia. He means what he says.”

“And I mean what I say.”—

“A moment,” said Picus. “Aunt, when you say things like that, you are fouling your own nest. This isn’t the time.”

“I don’t care what you say, Picus. I believe they are all rotters; that they’re all in it together. Anyhow he shan’t have the house.”

“It’s ‘publish and be damned’ then, is it?” said Kralin with his weary smile: “And don’t misunderstand. Felix and Scylla figure, quite creditably, but prominently, very prominently. What she has to say about him and Clarence Lake will interest Picus. And about his father—that’s your brother, isn’t it?” Picus said:

“He means that there is plenty about you, Aunt.”

“About me.” She was one of the people who use the echo of the last person’s speech for springboard.

“Plenty,” said Nick Kralin. “Material for a practically complete study of the Electra-complex.”

“That means you murdered Uncle Henry,” said Felix, “and she knew it.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. Do you suggest that I let this man have my house because he chooses to print some beastliness my daughter chose to write about me?”

“My house,” said Adrian Taverner, softly, and tried to catch Kralin’s eye.

“None of us are proposing anything yet,” said Scylla. “We are only trying to make you see what Kralin means.”

“What Kralin means! Thank you. I know that he’s a blackmailer, and there’s a law for that. And that you’re all in it with him, and there’s a law for you too.” Kralin shook his head:

“You’re quite wrong there, Maman. They’ve nothing to do with me. They’re all on your side; they can’t help it. Only they can’t do anything, that’s all.” Boris, who was sitting rather behind them, leant over Felix’s shoulder:

“But why,” he said, “does he not ask for money? Why should he want that house?” Kralin staged a yawn:

“Picus can tell you what I told him yesterday.”

“Tell us yourself,” said Scylla, after a glance at her husband. “We are hardly here to save you the embarrassments of explanation.”

Kralin regretted that confidence. If Picus had asked him to tea the day before, he would not have made it. It had been a bad move. Still, without hesitation, he explained.

Mrs. Taverner sat listening. Her wits were coming back. Her rage against her family had been the destructive, intensive rage, nourished in this case by its impotence. Impotence of an old woman against the young, the strong, mindless, universal, insufficiently examined, insufficiently understood passion. Even though her daughter had made her escape by death, it had been an escape; and if Adrian had remained, in her heart she despised him for it. In the destruction of her daughter’s fame there was even a pleasure hidden; while as for disclosures about herself, they were something she could ignore, who did not fully understand what it was that Kralin could do. But the threat to their countryside was a plain issue, clear to her, touching less that was savage in her and all that was generous.

“Oh,” she said, simply: “not content with having driven my daughter to her death, he wants to destroy our land also.”

“The temptation,” said Kralin, “is too much. You people talk about poverty and high taxation when you’ve got a gold-mine, above your ground, not under it. And your wretched peasants here lead such repressed lives. They’re all—except one or two of the old ones—for something which would brighten things up, and bring a bit of money into the place. To show you I’m really a philanthropist, I’m thinking of running a cinema—at a loss—with all the new sex films.”

It was no time to think of sheep or stars, or of the ghost in the cove or of York and Lancaster roses; of barrows or badgers or bee-pastures. Other words forced themselves, ringing, into Scylla’s head: remembrance of:

That was what was really happening. Kralin was saying:

“The links will run along the side of the wood, Felix. You’ll make a bit on lost balls.”

They were now more stupefied than old Mrs. Taverner, to whom his alternatives were suddenly clear, with whom lay the choice. It was now for her to say which she would keep, her daughter’s fame or her land’s. Drawing closer and closer to each other, her kinsmen sat without speaking.

Mrs. Taverner had sprung at her decision. She did not care a rap about Felicity, published in a dirty book only nasty-minded people, not her friends, would read. Adrian might make difficulties, but she could deal with Adrian. It was the land, the land that mattered. She would never have sold it for such a purpose—there she was utterly sincere—while as for giving away any part of it— This horrible young man had gone too far. Thank God there was no child. Now she knew, she could buy up all that was for sale, as fast as she could. She saw that the others could not help being with her there, while it annoyed her to think that she had better not have scolded them, to whose nature apology was a kind of self-violation. She turned to Kralin.

“It does not seem to concern us, Mr. Kralin, what you choose to publish about your relations with your wife. But it is quite another question to give you our land to spoil. You may do anything you like, but you will not do that. While if you publish anything immoral or impertinent, there is a legal remedy. I think that my people here will all agree with me.”

“What we agree about will come later,” said Felix.

“Then that is all we have to say. Scylla my dear, will you ask him to go?” Scylla got up. They all got up but the old woman, and her son, trying to look non-committal and bored. Kralin rose and said pleasantly:

“Well, if I can’t have Felicity’s house for a nucleus, I suppose I can’t. I shall be there for another two months. Rent paid in advance, you know. I can get on with my memoir there. And I’ll see you all get presentation copies. And special terms when I build my Hydro. Au revoir, Maman, au revoir to you all.”

The delicately panelled door of the long room shut behind him, and he passed before their eyes again through the windows, crossing the terrace, on his way to the path to the east out of the wood.

“Well,” said Mrs. Taverner into a cold silence. “Did you ever hear anything so monstrous?” Silence. —“But you surely agree with me that it would be infamous to let him spoil our land?”

“Yes,” said Scylla, “we agree about that.”

Mrs. Taverner took the plunge. These pride-ridden children were sulky with her. Perhaps she had been hasty.

“On thinking it over I feel sure that you had no part in what that infamous young man proposed. I take back what I said. Scylla can keep Felicity’s beads. While I’m sure Felix’s love was generous and disinterested.”

“Be quiet,” said Felix, “about that.”

“Don’t talk of us,” said Scylla, wearily; unyielding, with the ungenerosity born of long experience and memory of Felicity. Mrs. Taverner felt sincerely hurt. What was the good of an apology to be sniffed at like a piece of poisoned meat?

“I’m sorry. I can’t say more than that. And is this the moment to be quarrelling among ourselves?” Still no response to her harsh voice saying this. Then Boris leaned forward and spoke sweetly:

“If it is permitted to me to say anything, may I felicitate Madame Taverner on her choice? You see—” He had turned their eyes on him, pair by pair; his voice was a little tune—“the choice she has made is in all ways the just one. He can now, as was said, ‘publish and be damned.’ But he can do that anyway.”

“You mean,” said Felix, “that if my aunt, in memory of Felicity, had sold him the land”—

“In exchange for some papers. Yes. And an agreement. Papers. He will have copies. Others that you know nothing of. An agreement. And his imagination. He would have got round it—if only in speech. Or taken a chance with your laws.” They nodded at him. Mrs. Taverner got up.

“I am going home,” she said, “to telephone my solicitors to invest all my spare capital in every acre of land round here. Felix, are you in a position to help me in any way? We must all meet later. If I were you, I shouldn’t quarrel too much with him, not yet, not more than you need. Keep an eye across the valley on Mr. Kralin. Coming, Adrian?”

As Felix said later: “Out she flew.”

It was next day, and Boris was on his way to Starn to meet Adrian. He sat on a stone stile, reflecting. Perched like a gay gracious bird, his little head up, his green oblique eyes turned to the sky’s unattainable blue, he reviewed the situation. It brimmed with possibilities, a sea of trouble in which it should be possible for a man of ability, and especially of Boris’s ability, to boil his own egg.

The first thing that had to be done, even if he had to do it, was to prevent his high-minded English friends from losing their sense of proportion and making fools of themselves by quarrelling too violently with Kralin, and ineffectually with their aunt. For, among other things, Boris desired to see them through. It would help him to help them, and besides he was curious. Particularly he was curious about Kralin. That man was no more than half a Russian—more than half a Jew—he was sure of it. Boris had a quite different race-tradition, and quite different ideas about Jews. And he was sure that there was a great deal more going on behind that young man’s activities than any Taverner could suspect. He thought: ‘If I deliver them, I am sure of this—that they will never forget. Perhaps they will never understand, but they will never be what is called ungrateful to me. On the other hand—’ “The other hand” was that loyalty to them was going to make it difficult for him to go his own way, develop, in both their interests, his relations with Adrian Taverner and his mother. His Taverners were in a rage, a rage they had very little under control, with both of them. The old woman’s brutality, and disloyalty to them before Kralin, had ripped open old wounds and the memory of Felicity’s agony. While against Adrian they seemed to have a feeling, an instinct, a reaction, that Boris did not understand. What if he were treacherous, a sensualist? What of it? A coward? A bad brother? Why did his dear friends want people to go about being so good? Valiant and disinterested, men of honour, men of heart and head? Excellent when people are, but it so rarely happens, and only under certain conditions, and obviously only with certain people. Really the Taverners were carrying rather far their demand for virtue when they were annoyed at not finding it in Adrian. A man who wanted to be let alone and amuse himself and attend to his connoisseurship, by which his family would ultimately be enhanced and enriched. Boris, famished for décor and setting, was nourishing the hope that a chance and one appropriate to him had come his way at last; that Adrian, properly handled, would take him into his business. Then—it was a good dream—he would spend his days looking for the things he loved, which would at least have passed through his hands. Until, one day—here he dropped off the stile, and strode along across the fields at the thought of it—somewhere, in a back street or a remote farm, he would find the Treasure. A T’ang Bhoddisat, a Fragonnard, a jewel,

an ikon from the Porphyry Chamber, the pearls of Ivan the Terrible’s boy-friend. A game he played with Felix, who had the same dream. Not with Adrian, who found and bought with prudent business sense, with moderate, not fanciful, fortune.

And when he had found it, he would, if necessary, steal it. (So would Felix, but his dream ended with a fifty-fifty cheque to the victim.) And stolen, he would sell it; and live for the rest of his life, theoretically, on what it had done for him. Free and free and free again for ever. A slave, to Boris, was a man who is aware of the existence of economic pressure; and to him the question was simple, that it is not possible to demand of the son of boyards in distress the honesty, industry and adaptability which is asked of a slave. Which, on his definition, is asked of the majority of humanity. The courage, cunning, cruelty of an outlaw—yes. Qualities he was not particularly asked to use on his english visits, but he was quite prepared for their exercise. Meanwhile, he utterly refused to quarrel with Adrian Taverner.

He had told the others this. His final words had been: “Listen to me. I will be your liaison officer. It will serve all our advantages. This is no time for small dignity.”

“Go and boil your egg, Boris,” Scylla had said, bitterly: “of course we know that you must look after yourself. The world is too filthy for us, that’s all. No, we aren’t calling you disloyal, but can’t you see that if Aunt Julia is out against Kralin, it is no more than a falling-out among thieves. Those three people, and what they are, and what it is that drives them, killed Felicity. Felicity is being killed again. Her mother hates her fame as she did her beauty. Can’t you see her triumph? Her property will be augmented and her power. With revenge on her child thrown in. That’s what she has done.”

“Of course,” said Boris, irritated and with no tact to spare.

“What we have to do,” said Felix, “is to leave it to her to save the place, while we save Felicity. I don’t see how, but it’s got to be done. Can’t you understand, Boris, our aunt would like Kralin to do what he intends to do?”

“But if in those papers there are letters which will compromise her?”

“She doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t understand what it means. Nor what Kralin can invent and spread about. She has no imagination. She thinks her brutal illiterate letters are those of a mother, who is also head of a family, reigning over a set of ungrateful morons, who all owe her something. It’s a mania with her sort of woman to imagine everyone is in her debt.”

Scylla said passionately, “The kind of person who has never found out that to ask for gratitude is not only the way to lose it, but to lose, instantly, all right to it.” Boris shrugged his shoulders.

“You will only be able to do less than you should, if you let her know what you know about her. And does it not occur to you that there is Adrian to watch?” It was explained to him that their only reaction to Adrian was to kick him where it would hurt most.

“When”—Boris was more and more impatient with them—“it is actually his house?”

“D’you mean,” said Felix, “that he’d get behind with Kralin and sell it?”

“Yes. Sell. In exchange—if he is what you say he is—a free hand, with Kralin, over his sister’s papers. It does not seem to have occurred to you the possibilities of intrigue in this affair.”

“The house, not as a gift, but cheap. And the papers?” They mused. It was then that Boris left them.

The Taverners were not stupid, but english family life has come to such a pass, that it was outside their nervous strength to put aside old wrongs, go for exactly what they wanted, act from their race-solidarity, which is the strength of persistent strains and families with power. It was not a question of will. They knew what they ought to do, and that their aunt, who had a bully’s weakness, was finally manageable—if anyone had ever been found with sufficient magnanimity or sufficient detachment to handle her; induce her to understand what she did not wish to understand, do what seemed to her of no advantage to do. Cynics had achieved this in the past, feathered their nests out of hers with no profit but to themselves. But she had made her own suffer too much, until they were past comprehension, forgiveness, or even the necessary tact; people the ignorant violence of her manner had made afraid. They knew that they should go to her, praise her, be genial with her, make it easy for her to understand. By a tactful use of family sentiment and fear of effective scandal, it should be possible to rouse her to every danger inherent in Nick Kralin. She had the position, the wealth, the long habit of authority, which had not yet come, through the drag of their poverty, to its full flower in them. It is often a tragedy for women of her kind that they are left to the mercy of the interested or to their own mercy; that in all their lives they meet no one who has the chance, the courage or the character to possess them and put them to their full and valuable use. The Taverners could not do it, their imaginations rehearsing in advance her incredulity, her stupidity, her lewd suppositions, her sentimentalities, her sneers. There is no more fatal habit than to anticipate someone’s future behaviour from disagreeable memories of the past. They knew that, and were not proud of themselves, shrugged their shoulders at Boris, and piqued themselves on their indifference to his plans. At the same time, they envied Boris his realism, even Adrian his egotism. To such a state of shattered morale can one power-abusing head of a family reduce its cadets.

Arrived at Starn, Boris was investigating how far that egoism went. He had come to know the room well, the dining-room of the Star at Starn. Admirable food and art furniture, windows onto a ravishing garden and a thrust-up shoulder of down. With his head propped on his cool slim hands, he listened to Adrian. A connoisseur of hands, he observed his, that they were well-made, but large, fleshy and pink for the display of rings, several of which Boris would have liked transferred. Adrian Taverner was developing his point of view.

“I don’t know if you knew my sister.”

“A little,” said Boris, wary.

“It was the same when we were children. I don’t suppose you’ll understand. You had either to do what she wanted, or make her cry. I admit it was often fun doing what she wanted, but it was just as much fun—when it wasn’t too easy—to make her cry. Until, I suppose, it became more fun always to make her cry. More fun and easier, just not too easy. You know. And one could always put things right later by doing something she liked, and she’d forget all about the crying and play like mad.”

“By the way, I’d no idea Felix was in love with her.” Boris was non-committal.

“I suppose he’s told you I was a bad brother. But did I ask to have her for a sister? Why should a tiresome cliché be synonymous with simple truth? People seem to forget that you can no more choose who your parents will have as well as you, than you can choose them.”

“Mine,” Boris said, “are dead.”

“That makes a difference, as they say.”

There was a perfunctory pause,

“But, my dear, if you wish to preserve an affectionate interest, you know, as well as I do, that the grave has its points.” The talk went on, guided by Boris, until with his candid voice, his direct glance and lightly veiled smile, he asked:

“I wonder what there is to be found in those papers that he has got hold of, your Kralin.”

Adrian brightened: “Quite sufficiently shame-making, I’m sure, to stimulate even my curiosity.” Then to Boris’s joy, he began the following confidence: That the house was entirely his in point of law; that he had promised to trade it with his mother, ostensibly in discharge of his debts. Those debts were really all fakes, but what he wanted was capital to finance a really important purchase in tapestries, far beyond his means, and not immediately resaleable. The kind of maturing investment of great ultimate value that his mother had been stupid about. It was implied that Boris was not so stupid, who, trying to appear as intelligent as possible, looked a little mad. As can happen to the cleverest faces.

Adrian’s plan was this, and it included the death of at least three birds with one stone. His mother was busy, trying to buy up land to forestall Kralin. That would safeguard that. He would go to Kralin, get as good a price for the house as he could, plus permission to go on with the papers if he were allowed to play too. If Kralin’s comments and the letters from Mrs. Taverner were startling enough, he would put no difficulties in the way of publication. Kralin was almost sure to accept this, for who could help him better than Adrian, with scandal? While, if his sister had really said exactly what she meant, he would be in a position to restrain him. With only the house, Kralin could not do much harm to the land; with its price in Adrian’s pocket, he hoped to detach himself finally from his mother. By the publication of the papers to pay off several scores against her. What did Boris think of that?

Boris sat, like a king on a fence, or a god whose head faces two ways, clapping his heels for joy. This was the sort of thing he had been expecting. He applauded, he approved, he embroidered the project. Twisting Adrian Taverner round his little finger, they set out together to call on Kralin.

Two young men—is this a speciality of our age?—can go off on deadly business in the spirit of a boyish prank. They laughed in Adrian’s two-seater all the way over the downs to Felicity’s house from Starn. Laughed at innocent things, a new song, a new “camp.” Among other things, Adrian was a collector in snob-degrees. So was Boris, who, exquisitely tuned, exchanged follies with such radiant lightness, that passing countrymen looked at him and were inclined to bless his bright face.

“You’d better come in, darling,” said Adrian, at the door. Kralin opened it and welcomed them with a politeness that seemed to have become a little deferential, making them more uneasy than any hostility or any triumph.

These three young gentlemen went indoors, into the manly disorder of the sitting-room. Adrian began:

“As the actual owner of this place, which I assure you I am at perfect liberty to dispose of as I wish, I thought it best to come over and see you myself. You must not take my mother too seriously. None of us do.” Kralin smiled. Adrian developed his plan.

It was Boris’s opinion that there are no cool hands like english hands. He had also thought, as he laughed his way over from Starn, that it would never have occurred to him to trade on his sister’s reputation. Still less on his mother’s. While even his Taverners would not see it quite like that. Their concern was with the individual, their passionate desire was to preserve the memory of Felicity, not because she was their cousin, but because of the person that she was herself. While little thought of her family, none for their kinship or her age restrained them about their aunt. At Adrian, now that he had squeezed the amusement out of him, Boris was almost horrified. Was he of the same stuff as Kralin? Infinitely more stupid in his egotism than Kralin, who had passed through his own personality. Where to? Boris forgot all about Adrian, setting himself to watch this man.

He was agreeing to what Adrian proposed, easily, attentively, like a good man of affairs. Not committing himself, but encouraging the man who would bargain with him. He had Adrian’s measure at once. Left Boris out. One thing at a time. Until across his easy dealing there came an awareness of that young man. An awareness of something it was his natural destiny to destroy. Not for his personal satisfaction and no questions to be asked. “I am, that there may be no more of him,” would have been the answer. “It does not matter to me, but I am to destroy that.” Kralin did not quite like this. It seemed an order, and he, who had no conception of obedience except to his personal decision, must know from whence it had come. Interrogating his sub-conscious, he was annoyed, until it occurred to him that a great many young men of Boris’s kind have been dying lately, within the last three decades, half a world-generation, a nation-full or so. Then he thought that he knew. It was because in the past, as he had known so well that the knowledge had put itself away, his people had suffered at this man’s people’s hands. It must be that. He adjusted himself, satisfied by the analysis. Boris was suddenly aware of the same thing. His surprise had horror in it, as of a man meeting his race-tragedy face to face, in terms of one man or two; or as lover and lover came upon themselves, walking to meet themselves, hand in hand, in a wood. He had a moment of horror, from which he came out, very quiet. Then a daimon spoke to him:

“Now that you know; do not think, do not feel. Keep very still.” He thought it was his guardian-angel. Whatever it was, he would obey it. He saw Kralin move to open a drawer in a bureau, unlock it discreetly, and bring out the commonest kind of cardboard attaché case, with tin locks, and the initials “F.T. Bona Roba” scrawled on it fancifully with a red-hot poker.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I find literary allusion a release. Here they are.” There were manuscript books bound in french batique, there were letters on many kinds and qualities of paper, tied with ribbons whose knots had been sealed.

“These,” he went on, picking up a packet of heavy grey paper with a black ribbon and a pendant of wax, “are from your mother, Taverner.” He threw them over. Adrian pulled the knot.

“The references to them and the drafts of some of the replicas are in these books. My index will give the places.” He consulted some slips, wrote for a few moments and pushed one over to Adrian. Boris read over his shoulder, struggling with the written word that was not in his own tongue. Both were a little puzzled. Why were they shown these? The letters were just like Mrs. Taverner, scolding and insisting, with less drama than usual, who had not the use of her pen. Insensible letters, full of accusations, the words trivial and heavy. Letters of an unfriendly mother to a scolded child, uncuddled, not mothered, a target for waning against waxing life, for an old woman against a young, for brute power against a tender spirit. For one kind of knowledge against another.

“My mother’s usual style,” said Adrian, not trying to hide his disappointment: “about nothing in particular. Things my sister needed and she didn’t mean her to have.”

“Ah,” said Kralin, “wait. It appears, as you will see from some notes Felicity made, that what they chiefly refer to is some sort of claim she had on your family estate. I’m not sure yet whether it was legal or wholly moral; though it might have been the former, if she had known what to do about it. Something quite considerable, at least enough to have given her what she wanted. When she died without a child, she was worth very little and this house reverted to you. But as her husband I should be entitled to my share of whatever it is. You know that, of course?”

Adrian said amiably: “You have been busy.” Kralin took no notice:

“You see this letter from your mother, ‘prying into our family affairs. Let me tell you that no respectable lawyer would ever hear of such a claim.’ ‘You ought to be very thankful you inherited anything.’ Very non-committal all through. But—” He looked closely now at Adrian, nodding at him. “What inclines me on the whole to think that the claim was only a moral one is this: Felicity knew.—(It pleased her mother to dislike her very largely because, if you follow me, she knew that she knew it.)— You, Adrian—there is not the least doubt of it, she had all the proofs—are not your father’s son.” Adrian Taverner just saved the pause from becoming silence:

“Indeed,” he said. “What a relief. I never could stand Taverners. But who was he, and how do you make it all out?”

“Your sister knew all about it, as I will show you in a moment.”

“But this is fascinating,” said Adrian. “My mind is racing through such a series of possibilities. To which of the Older Married Set shall I be singing ‘Now I have to call him Father’? I suppose you mean to say that Felicity tried to hold-up my mother with the news. Ravishing, but why not me?”

Boris spoke, not quite conscious of his intentions: “It would seem, surely, that she did not tell you, did not perhaps claim this money, because she did not wish to injure you, Adrian.”

“Misguided woman!”

“It seems,” said Kralin, “though not quite conclusively, that before he died, Mr. Taverner came to know about this. He either altered or intended to alter his will. (If he did, I should imagine that your mother managed to suppress it.) While, on thinking it over, I find I am in doubt again as to Felicity’s death. It all turns on this. If she expected to die—that is if she killed herself—would she have left us all these papers to be found? About her family, yes; but about herself? She was hardly an exhibitionist. It’s a question for very nice judgment.” And for the first time, Boris saw his supple hands playing together, in a way that was not like his earlier deference.

“It seems to me,” said Adrian, “that one only orders a coffin to let several cats out of it. I feel quite giddy. I’m sure, Kralin, you’ll excuse us and postpone the rest of our conversation for a few days. I must go home and find out who my father really was. (Oh, I’m sure you know, but I’d sooner have it straight from the stable, so to speak.)”

They left the house. The afternoon was spoiling, clouds running up from the west. Boris wanted to get back at once across the valley to the Taverners, but Adrian would not let him go. He rushed the car back to Stone End, where they ordered drinks. Adrian was silent. Suddenly he leaned over the inn table and burst into furious tears, repeating:

“Damn the woman, damn her. D’you suppose I’d have let her take me in all these years if I’d known?” Boris deprecated, less from sympathy than from boredom and strain. He had had enough of Adrian for the moment. At Kralin’s he had admired his nerve. He wanted to get away and think it over. Adrian wanted to tell him everything his mother had made him feel and endure. Adrian wanted to be sure which stick to beat her with. Adrian wanted to hear all about it. Adrian wanted to find his father. Adrian wanted to cry in his mother’s arms. Adrian wanted to get drunk. Boris had to give his opinion on almost endless series of paternal possibilities, before he got Adrian into his car, and mistrusting his driving, went home alone on foot.

The Taverners were not specially glad to see him, who had been out with their cousin all day and a good part of the night. Boris made up a long moral sentence, to their intense surprise, about ingratitude, and then refused to speak until he was fed. But after he had eaten, he had his reward.

*  *  *  *  *

Their moral temperature had been rising all day, the natural steadying after shock of characters accustomed to adventure and strain. But at the story of their aunt their feelings underwent an extraordinary release, their judgment of her mellowing at once into greater charity and some facetiousness. So Aunt Julia had been passionate once. Victorian women did not do these things out of levity or temper or sheer absence of mind. It was the kindest interpretation, characteristic of them, whose hearts had not grown cold; though the charity was really Scylla’s. Felix revised his version later; and no one ever knew what Picus, her blood-kinsman, thought.

“This will take the stiffening out of her,” they said, feeling as though they were being revenged, devouring what Boris had to tell them, praising him. Even Adrian, it was agreed, had shown style. Until Scylla said:

“It seems to me that it is only the villains within this piece who, up to now, have anything to be proud of. Kralin has shown himself flawless, a master in his vileness; and Aunt Julia has kept her character if she lost it once. Even Adrian only went to pieces with you.” They did not add what they were thinking, that Boris, their pest, had played nobly.

“You see what I mean? It is our turn now. Up to us, who are friends and lovers, to put up as good a show.”

“Meaning?” said Picus.

“What we have come to mean since this began. Felicity’s fame preserved. The making her illustrious can come later. That’s our secret. We’ve got to fight now for her name.”

“Before and over and above that,” said Felix, “we’ve got to fight Nick Kralin. The thing is getting bigger. We began with Felicity dead, and how much we minded it, and how we wanted to find out about her death. And then we became determined to keep her memory bright. Now we know that she was, in some way, killed; and that there are people who aren’t satisfied with that, but will have her remembered falsely. That’s how things stand now. Boris, how much did you read over there for yourself, how much were you only told?”

“I read all that I could, over Adrian’s shoulder. I even held a journal in my hand, and there was a page—I saw it was an important page—loose.” He laid a paper before them. “It was all I could bring you. I snatched it when they turned away.” A shiver of pain-sharpened memory went through them at the sight of her hand. Felix read:

“To think that Adrian and I are only half-brother and sister. (Unless I’m in it, too.) Half a brother, but a whole sister, I think. Or I would have been if he’d let me. And I knew his father, too. We had a game when I was little called Treasure Hunts, when we chose what we wanted out of the past and made up the adventures we had in finding it. That began my History. I chose once Cleopatra’s Needle, because I thought it was a needle. And there was the sword, Joyeuse—”

They said, as though they had been practising it together for weeks:

“Now, who was he?”

“Kralin knows,” said Boris. “Adrian was intelligent enough not to let him tell.”

Scylla repeated, passionately:

“Our end is plain enough, for once. We have to be for honour what they are for dishonour; for truth what they are for lies; for charity what they are for spite; for loveliness what they are for filth. And be their equals in wits and courage.”

“Let’s start,” said Felix. Picus assented. Boris looked at them, frowning.

A release that felt like a glory came about them, as though separate and converging paths of light lay to be walked on at their feet. It was, at that moment, as though all that Kralin had done was to open a door onto a stadium set for the players of the sacred game. On which field he had his place also. They also felt that they understood a great many things which had previously happened to man. At Eleusis an initiation, the appearance and disappearance of the Sanc-Grail, the meaning of the Waste Land. The splendour was full of joy and the divine sense of danger, and hope and the love of daring were powers of pleasure, not of temptation or fear. They knew, too, that they would find their way, and were without desire to coax God for success. Boris watched their faces and did not understand, face to face with a power that he did not share. It was he who brought them back, but without a sense of loss, to earth.

“One thing is necessary,” he said. “I had better go and stay with Adrian. I must be known to be in his company, not yours.”

“Nanna,” said Scylla, “shall have the story of an unbecoming row to tell. Kralin’s maid will hear of it. So will he.”

“The next thing,” said Boris, “it is wholly necessary for you to know more what is in your cousin’s papers, and on what exactly he intends to defame her. If I am with Adrian, I think I can manage that.”

“D’you know,” said Felix slowly, “I have an idea. I don’t believe her love-affairs matter a row of pins. Kralin’s worked it out this way. There may be erotics for sauce, but he’s incapable, psychologically, of seeing that she was not the same sort of person as himself. He’ll read or put into her draft letters to her mother and to Adrian nothing but a series of threats to expose them, if they don’t help her. That she was unsuccessful—and with such a pull—because they didn’t help her, won’t matter to him. He’ll twist it round or invent what he wants. But his ‘Portrait of My Dead Wife’ and his introduction of the ‘Electra-Complex’ will be a picture of a blackmailer. You’ll see. It’s going to work out like that.”

His sister said:

“Won’t it sound thin?”

“Thin as Picus’s hair, but people will believe it. Three-quarters of our darling friends and all the psychology crowd. Until it reaches the world. Kralin’ll understand scientific publicity, and he writes well, you know. Hate is good for the style. And it’s his habit to be thorough.”

“I don’t think,” said Picus, “that he hates.” And he smiled a terrible smile like the man in the french romance, who had come looking for a woman who must have passed this way, for I see a corpse.

“We must not let him,” said Scylla, “give us the creeps.” Boris took his own plunge into the affair’s abyss. It had just occurred to him as relative to the whole situation that Kralin and he were partly of the same race. He put it differently:

“Kralin is a Jew. Now I have always refused to be prejudiced about them. At our château—”

“And now the golden rule,” said Picus, “is broken.” Boris did not laugh, and was not vexed at being laughed at. Then it occurred to them that he had his memories.

*  *  *  *  *

Adrian Taverner had returned home that night to the house set in laurels on the moor. Under a moon like a dying lady the night air had torn past him, ribbons of cold parted on his right and left cheeks. Slowly the elation of drink ran down and its release. He felt his tear-stiffened eyelids, the exhaustion in his throat. He had meant to go into his mother, but the house seemed so shut, so put away to sleep. He was deadly tired, and part of his mind told him that it would be more prudent to wait.

On waking, his reaction was the usual one, that this could not have happened, that the day before he had been dropped into another kind of life and pulled out again. He felt that he could not see Boris, and knew that somehow he would have to see Boris. A great deal of Boris. It was outside his choice now what he would see of Boris. After what he and Boris had done together, it would be like that. Reflections of a young man, who piqued himself on disembarrassing himself of persons likely to become a nuisance. A self-indulgent man, he was badly shaken, and not yet quite conscious of his hurts.

At breakfast he saw that his mother ate very little, and that her face was sagging and old.

“I have bad news for us, Adrian. Yesterday, as you know, I spent with the various agents. And the up-shot of it is that Kralin already has an option on every piece of the valley land that there is for sale. I can offer a larger price, but that would be what he wants. We should be ruined before we had bought the land, which we don’t need at the price that he would run up. Look at this surveyor’s map. He had it all worked out before.” She spoke in candid distress. Troubled and grave and anxious for her son’s help. A generous preoccupation with the beauty of England was the largest thing about her, a passion for and some knowledge also of its antiquities and local characteristics, especially in her own land, in the south. There her energies and habits of domination had found a serviceable outlet. More than one valley and cliff she had kept unbuilt on, because of her many a stream ran pure, many a copse endured. Not through her did the public house lose its licence. The “wicked old woman” did not “feel well-bred,” not in that way. “Let them walk, if their cars won’t take them,” had been her last word, when extension of road facilities had been up before the County Council, on which she sat, a scourge to its committees, who had Surveyor and Architect beneath her feet.

Adrian listened. He shared her dislikes on the matter, not her enthusiasm; caring less for threatened beauty, but loathing the people who marred it. Then what she told him and the memory of all that had happened at Kralin’s met and fused, and he saw what was before them. “I saw Kralin yesterday,” he said. “Mother, why did you never tell me that I—” (‘ “am not my father’s son”? Too silly. How does one say these things?’)—“that I had a different father from the others?” (‘Was I the only one?’)

“Who told you such a thing,” she began, raising her voice.

“I went over to Kralin’s yesterday. It is plain enough from Felicity’s papers. I have no objections, I assure you, but I should like to know who it was.”

Mrs. Taverner did not speak. Her mouth was open. She did not shut it. She held on to the edge of the table with both hands, her mouth falling a little, her breath just audible.

“Let’s cut the protests, Mother, and tell me about it. You owe me that.” About a minute later, she said suddenly:

“Yes, I fought for you all right.”

“Who was he?” He wanted to add: “don’t you know?” And was too frightened, not too ashamed.

“I prefer not to tell you.” Adrian knew that tone and laughed at it for the first time.

“You needn’t. I shall know soon enough. So will everyone.” The old woman said, almost sadly:

“He is dead. I find it hard to understand sometimes how you can be his son.”

“Well,” said Adrian, “I suppose you’re sure I’m the one. Or are we a Harleian Miscellany? If it had been Felicity, it would have explained a lot. . . . Mother, don’t. I don’t mind in the least.” Mrs. Taverner said in a voice of extraordinary bitterness:

“He used to talk as though he wished she had been his.” Then she drew herself up slowly into the chair. Now that it was inevitable, she accepted what had happened; as though she had told it to Adrian herself; as long before she had rehearsed it.

“My son, I would like you to try and see how it could have happened. I was married when I was very young. Your stepfather—as I suppose I must say—misunderstood me. For months I was left alone, all the years of my marriage. Not even because he trusted me, but because he was too indifferent to think whether he trusted me or not. Women, as I think you ought to know, can put up with anything but indifference. He was a better person than I. I suppose people would say that his mind was set on higher things. But I couldn’t understand the way he laughed about them as well. All I had was you children to see after and the estate. Then the man who was your father came to live near us, and he cared for what happened to me. He didn’t see through me. And it may be a wicked thing to say, but I was a better woman those years. It was he who showed me how to do things for the land. And you, my youngest son, were his.”

“Did—what are we to call him—the man you married—find out?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, and then it occurred to Adrian that this might be painful to her, and that if it were she was doing it rather well.

—“Just before he died.”

“Changed his will?” (All this time a part of Adrian wanted to fling himself down and howl, with his head on her lap. He suppressed it. This was his chance and he knew it.) Mrs. Taverner hesitated a second, then answered him almost sweetly, in a voice which in youth would have been charged with all that is appealing and evokes protection in men.

“He said he was going to, but I persuaded him not to. I went down on my knees to him, that he should not injure you who were innocent. Besides, it was too late.”

“You mean he died?”

“Yes, but I doubt if any lawyer would have acted for him in the state he was, at the last moment, like that—” In a voice of incredible bitterness, she added—“Changing his will for the benefit of his daughter—” By this she had made it clear to Adrian that she had still something to hide. He reflected.

“That is the story we must stick to,” he said. Formidable and unscrupulous woman. He was free of her now, or he never would be.

“Stick to? What do you mean?”

“Yes. Everyone is going to hear about this. Kralin has an option on us as he has on the land. But you haven’t told me. What did I get out of my real father for this?” Mrs. Taverner looked steadily at her son.

“It was a strange thing. I have always wondered at it very much. Lovely boy though you were, he never liked you. He always said you had no heart. No, it was—I suppose I might as well tell you it all. It was Felicity that he cared about. He did not leave very much, but he wanted the money he left to me for you divided between you both.”

“Did he?”

“Why should I? She was no daughter of his.”

“She seems to have been pretty popular with your two husbands. What surprises me is that she didn’t blow the gaff.”

Extraordinary was the contempt with which his mother answered:

“I suppose she hadn’t the courage.”

“Well, she didn’t,” said Adrian, thoughtfully.

“Do what?”

“Give you away. Any more than you gave her the money my father intended her to have. I admit that if I’d known it, I’d have done something. And, by the way, who was he?” Mrs. Taverner recovered herself.

“You can ask Kralin.”

“I certainly shall, since we are sold to him.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “What are we going to do about that?”

It is a tribute to her immense vitality that she passed on to this, refusing to be overcome, as she had always refused; preparing, as she had always done, to do what must be done; helped by the sang-froid of old age, which has, after all, the least to lose.

“Who,” she asked, “knows about this, yet?”

“Only me and Polteratsky. He was with me.”

“And ran off to tell your cousins, I suppose.”

“He stayed with me for some time. I was upset. I think—” Adrian reflected. Boris wanted things neither Taverners nor Tracys over the hills could give.

—“I think on the whole it might have been some one worse than that young man.” The telephone bell rang. Adrian answered it and returned to his mother.

“That was him, speaking from Starn. I gather there has been a row. We were seen calling on Kralin, he says, and they asked questions. He says he refused to tell, and doesn’t feel that he can stay there now any longer. We might do worse than ask him over here. At least he’d be less likely to talk.” Mrs. Taverner felt the reluctance of a victorian-bred woman to meeting a man who knew such things about her, but with her strength of mind she put it away.

“I told him to hold on. Shall we fix it? I can talk to him when he comes. He wants me to be useful to him.” She agreed. An hour later their car brought him to the house.

*  *  *  *  *

Boris descended happily at the plaster-candle porch. This was going according to programme. He ran indoors, into the room where Mrs. Taverner was sitting, came in quietly, dropped down on one knee and with respectful tenderness kissed her hand. That got it over. Mrs. Taverner liked it. In a confusion that was somehow delightful, a blessed release, she found herself almost in tears.

“Boris, you must help us,” she said.

“As if you were my own mother,” he said, “whom they killed.” It was then that she did cry a little.

After lunch he walked in the garden, in consultation with Adrian and told how his honourable reticence had made it impossible to stay with his cousins. Adrian then told him about Kralin’s option on the land. The two young gentlemen sought for what was best to do and did not find it.

Boris disposed of, Picus, Scylla and Felix sat down to the same consultation, over the hills. At tea-time a telegram came from him to tell them that Kralin was already in treaty for the land. Scylla said:

“There are things which must be tried, though they won’t do any good. One of us must go and see Kralin again, and it had better be me, for he is said to like women. I’m the only one of us who has not spoken to him alone. When I have, it will round things off. At worst I can only find out that things are as bad as we think. At best I may discover something. No harm can come to me.” Then they agreed, and walked with her to the inland edge of the wood.

“Good-bye, sweetheart,” said Picus, and kissed her.

“Good-bye, my sister,” said Felix, and held her close. Delicately dressed and made-up, she crossed the valley through the young corn’s crystal spikes.

Kralin let her in, his excellent manners touched with that becoming shyness which made people attach the word “charming” to him. He took her into Felicity’s room, because she must know it so well, and because it was delightful there. She curled herself back on the divan, her head on a silver cushion against the wall, displaying herself as was necessary. Her face was turned to the light. From there she saw the Rops, looked at them carefully, and then was careful not to look again. Kralin sat at the bureau they had once ransacked, so that again the shadow fell on him.

“Kralin,” she began, “do you really mean to do all this?”

“Well, yes,” he said, “I do.”

“You will buy up this land in order to make money which you don’t want out of the ruin of one of the fairest places on earth. And you will publish my cousin’s paternity, make semi-scientific pornography of the life of his sister and your wife?”

“If you like to put it that way.”

“Do you really want to?”

“ ‘Want’ isn’t quite the word. As a practising psychologist, I am interested; as a man who likes to make money, who am rather good at making money, I see an opportunity too good to throw away.” He spoke neatly, without hesitation, opening the interview like a game of chess.

—“Besides, I don’t think you are quite fair. There is—or was—an ‘or’ between the two clauses.”

“That is not true,” said Scylla. “A farmer here has told me that you held an option on the land before ever you came to us. And even if you had struck a bargain with us for her papers, would that really prevent you from telling or writing what you know?” Kralin laughed this time, as pleasant a laugh as you could wish to hear.

“There is always the libel action.” Scylla shook her head:

“Come off that; and you are far too intelligent to expect me to accept the reasons you give. If you aren’t frank, you’ll get one of your repressions. Kralin, you are out for your pleasure. Personal immediate pleasure, not abstract delight in scientific truth, or a business speculation which means a lot of hard work. Only very rare people get their pleasure out of the first, and as for the second, you’ve never been a business man.”

“Perhaps I am a very rare person.”

“I think you are.” Looking at him, she noticed that already she was beginning to feel cold.

“I hold out. You want your fun. Revenge on Felicity. Revenge on her mother, and there I don’t blame you. And if that includes a general vendetta on all Taverners, so much the better. And on anything they are or care about. Perfect. So many birds dead, and with only two stones.”

“Quite so, but you misunderstand. All this effective stone-throwing and bird-killing is to me purely a by-product. Convenient, if you like, witty and amusing, but I do assure you, Scylla, not my aim.” She managed to smile up at him, her eyes wide open, with the stare of a swift gentle animal before a deadly animal. A stare she managed to veil, to make provocative, inquisitive, anything but the look of a woman who has not even Zeus-of-the-Lost-Battle by her side.

“Go on, Kralin. Explain to me, then.”

“You really should not think me an unmoral man because I like to reduce morals to their origins, to their exact meaning, to their social use. Clear them from their confusions, sentimentalities and inutilities. Especially I am interested in the way people will permit themselves what would ordinarily be considered crimes, if they had not given a moral re-christening to their actions. A sublimation is not necessarily an improvement. I am sure Felicity had very good reasons for leaving me, and told them very prettily to the rest of the world; but I am not concerned with that. What I should like to show is how her repressions with regard to her family made her capable of conduct which she would have called criminal, if she had not found another name for it. Yes, blackmail. It is not that her eroticism was so peculiar, generally too cerebral to be convenient for analysis; it was that with her nature, so apparently ‘fine,’ so ‘exaltée,’ she should have persuaded herself to trade on the knowledge of Adrian’s paternity.” (A generation that is learning to treat sex only too scientifically. So Felix had guessed right.) She felt her cheeks begin to burn, saw Kralin admire the colour-tide. There had even been a touch of indignation—the moral kind—in his voice. She felt sick. Must not feel sick. Felt like a creature poised on some quivering wire over a pit of snakes.

(‘You will fall into the snake-pit. What will you do there? Sing like the saga-man? You won’t be brave enough.’)

“Prove it,” she said. “Show me what you have read in her papers that makes this true.”

“My dear Scylla, it is obvious. What else was it all about? They knew she knew. Their reaction, foolish perhaps but quite normal, was to make life as unpleasant for her as they could. I admit she was not the woman to do what she wanted very effectively. But after her accident—I ask you, Scylla, why shouldn’t I clarify and continue what my wife began? Put it another way, and I should be avenging her.”

How useful abstract statements are, to cover action. Into this distorted lucidity she had been dropped like a fowl trussed up. She must not stammer nor weep.

“Kralin,” she said, “you know as well as I that the exact opposite is the truth—it was her life—or her death—that she would not use her knowledge, or do what, God help her innocence, she thought would injure Adrian, or her mother. Even on her she would not strike back. As to that—accident—what do we know about the strength of several evil wills? There were three against her if you count Adrian.—” How foolish is flat contradiction. She saw the beginning of polite ennui in his face.

“Anyhow, show me the papers so that I can judge.”

“You can read my analysis of the Electra-complex, if you like.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“I think I have shown all the papers that I intend to for the present. I suppose it was your russian friend who told you about Adrian. He came with him. Then, I suppose, in an excess of family feeling, you turned him out of the house?”

She had made a slip from the start, who had to account for a supposed quarrel on Boris’s reticence. This was easier going, mean and sharp and of the ways of the world, a condition of the game, which they, who could not win, must play to win.

“Boris Polteratsky? No, he was rather too discreet, that was all. It seemed to me that he preferred Adrian’s friendship to ours. Later, we met Adrian in Starn and he told us himself.”

That went down. Kralin nodded: “I should say that he was more of a temperament with Adrian than with you.”

It was going easily again, the wire widened and slackened to a swing, an easy perch over the snake-pit. ‘Swing in a wind off hell, south-country child. Be civil to your demon, deceive him if you can. Love your enemies. Had this case been provided for, even in God’s mind? There was a man who gave his enemy his plank and plunged aside to die. Would we?’ Then she noticed that hatred was not what she felt for Kralin, any more than it was love. What she felt was a cold awed thing; and with the awe a spirit was contending, cold and serviceable, to control the awe and teach her what she had to do. Like a person recovering from vertigo, she felt that now she could look again into the abyss.

“I think,” she said, “that you’re in Shakespeare, the man who made evil his good.”

“My dear Scylla, what does evil mean?”

“What does good mean? That is what you can’t tell me, for you don’t know.”

“Tell me, then,” he said, coaxingly.

(‘I ought to be able to tell him. I ought to be able to say something. If I don’t, I shall go away more afraid than when I came. Not only failure, but more fear. Good and evil. Good and evil. “Good and evil are different, as their names imply. . . . But they are both aspects of my Lord. He is present in the one and absent in the other. . . . But his absence implies his presence, and therefore I have the right to say ‘come.’” Come, daimon, come. I have played as well as I know. I have been quiet. There is nothing here that you can tell. That is what you have to say.’)

—“What is good? That is exactly what I cannot tell you, Kralin. Not because it is difficult, but because it is impossible. For since you do not know anything about it, it is as though you were blind to colours or to the art of painting, or insensible to the touch-difference between silk and stone, or glass and jade. But I’m sure, if it is any comfort to you, that you’re a connoisseur in bad smells.”

“Thanks,” said Kralin, making a little face, “and cats like valerian, you know; and you like cats. But, I admit, these spiritual specialities are not in my line of business. While—” glancing at the Rops—“I’ve an eye for the memento mori.”

“I must go,” said Scylla. “You won’t let me see her papers and judge for myself. That’s a weak position, you know. You will hold Felicity’s memory up to infamy. You will broadcast Adrian’s birth and buy up our land to destroy it. There never was an ‘or’ in it. A pretty complete job.”

“That’s it,” he said, getting up. “You should go to Russia, Scylla. You’re an intelligent woman, really, yet you are cramping your mind with stereotyped ideas.”

“Yours aren’t original. There have been blackmailers before.” She could have sworn for a second that he looked hurt.

“There have been husbands who carried out their dead wives’ wishes.” She changed her tone quickly.

“As to Russia, after our departed friend, we’ve had enough of the place. Have you been there lately?” (‘As I might ask if he had been to Paris.’)

“I go there on and off.”

“I suppose your politics are not those of our rather treacherous boy-friend.” He shook his head.

“You should go there, if there is anything about me you want to understand.”

“But you’re a Jew, aren’t you? Not a Slav.”

He said, a little stiffly:

“Mixed.”

She brought herself away from the house, intact, but as if bit by bit. She walked slowly down the garden path, reassembled herself in the lane, wished that she was out of sight, and could faint, so as to be in a state of not-knowing. Knew that the walk would steady her, that she must take it, that oblivion was not allowed; that when she got back they would have to get down to business, business that would include the understanding that things were as bad as they thought.

*  *  *  *  *

“This is wickedness,” said Felix, “what are we going to do about it?” That is what they did not know, that no one knows to-day, for we have lost the habit of stating problems in moral terms. It is very awkward, reducing virtue to a state of emotions, without rules and without chart. Since their childhood, talk of sin to the Taverners would have been like an act of exhibitionism. Yet here it was, something that could not be excused or paraphrased or renamed. Charity would not cover it, or anger or disgust or a shrug. It was there, risen in their green pastures, writhing through their sun-pierced copses; and like the row of bungalows Kralin proposed, scurfing their hills. The Lover calls on the Elemental Spirits to protect the Beloved. They would call, but to what effect? What had they with which to meet Kralin?

“Stoop, heaven,” said Scylla, “for we have loved virtue. Whatever virtue is.”

“Will it matter so much what is said of us,” said Picus—“even of Felicity?”

“No,” said Felix, “But the ruin of the land will unquiet her ghost and bring vileness that we cannot foresee. Multiplying vileness. Kralin will do it thoroughly. That has been his move, whether he knew it or not, behind the chances of his marriage.”

“There is movement in this,” said Scylla, “like a sound that has been waited for. The old stone waits for something at Stone End.”

“Hush,” said Picus. “It’s no good our getting lost in that country.”

“And what’s the good of our observation, our Boris, our use of the world’s tricks? We ought to be strong as death.”

“We’ve got to be as strong as we are able to be, and see what comes of it. Kralin isn’t God, Felix.”

“I think,” said his wife, “that what’s wrong with us all is that we see God moving in Kralin, and nowhere else. We can see law moving in him and purpose, and most of the time we are blind to our own. Or we say, ‘a poor little thing my piece of work and imagination. I daresay it’s only a complex my desire for truth, for the intellectual love of God. I don’t like to mention it, but I do think the beautiful is rather pretty, don’t you know.’ For fear of the bogey of rhetoric! While we’ve an angel’s courage in our disbeliefs. Picus, you silent devil, isn’t that true?”

“It’s what I’ve been trying to say,” said Picus, injured. He got up and began to straighten pictures on the walls; vanishing on his bird-step into the corridor, where they heard him sing:

But Scylla and Felix sat looking ahead, at the wall, as though it were not there, holding fast to each other’s hands.

A week before they had been living in a life that ran its course, alternating adventures of country and town. The double adventures of life out-of-doors, and life indoors, their life alone and their life as social animals, face to face with the weather and their work and themselves. Country-bred, they went to capital cities in the same way as their ancestors, for their amenities and for the people they would find there. To the country they returned, as head-hunters or sea-raiders, to examine spoil, but never as though their home could be anywhere else.

Three weeks before they had tumbled out of the train at Starn—stale with parties, high-speed transit and the excitements that private mourning no longer interferes with, into the spring. The week that followed had been a sacre du printemps. A rite that was like a bath, a purification, a becoming mana again, with which goes tabu. A separation for them from other people, from all that is inessential, a time to reject what they had experienced or make it their own; a taking-back, in a profound sense, into caste. They had begun to move at leisure, think quietly, speak only when they had something to say, enjoy each act of living. There Picus became a musician again and a gardener, a maker in wood and wax of the “phantasies of his peculiar thought”: Felix, a bird-watcher and a naturalist. Scylla’s passion, shared with the innocent man in the Adventure of Miss Annie Spragg, was—spending if necessary her life over it—to leave behind her the full chronicle of their part of England, tell its historiê with the candour and curiosity, the research and imagination and what to-day might pass for credulity of a parish Herodotus. There was material there, for ten miles round about them, which had not been touched; not only manor rolls and church registers or the traditions which get themselves tourist-books. She had access to sources, histories of houses, histories of families, to memories that were like visions, to visions which seemed to have to do with memory. To her the people talked, the young as well as the old; and there were times when the trees and stones and turf were not dumb, and she had their speech, and the ruins rose again and the sunk foundations, and copse and clearing and forest changed places, and went in and out and set to partners in their century-in, century-out dance. There were times, out on the high turf at sunrise and set, when in the slanted light she saw their land as an exfoliation, not happening in our kind of time, a becoming of the perfected. She did not know how she knew, Kilmeny’s daughter, only what it looked like—the speechless sight of it—her thread to the use of the historic imagination, Ariadne to no Minotaur in the country of the Sanc-Grail.

Into this life and land Boris had broken and been absorbed. Who was there to stand out against them in their own land? After Boris had come Kralin; after Kralin, what Kralin would bring. The timeless active life of lover and sister and brother had been changed—for something which seemed to them to be like the cold arms and legs and abstractions of machinery, an abstract of the cerebral life of towns. For the realities that held them in activity and in vision, realities of the blood and the nerves and the senses and what is meant by the spirit, was to be substituted contact with the chill, the purpose, the strength of a machine, and of the impure values begotten by the machine upon raw human nature and re-begotten by them in turn.

The Taverners were the kind of people who, if they have to choose, choose a boat and a library rather than a car and a club; cherry blossom before orchids, apples before tinned peaches, wine to whiskey, one dress from Chanel to six “from a shop.” Who listen to jazz and Mozart, not to Massenet: who cannot endure imitations of anything: who do not tire of real things once they have got them home to play with. They knew what in relation to Chardin has been called “all the splendour and glory of matter.” Like him, they were in love. “Could that exceptionally dark scullery really be packed with miracles of beauty?” Could that wall of loose stones have so rare a surface, or a bowl of eggs in the green light, filtered through the larder-window, glow like pearls? The polish on a horse’s coat, the china-red lacquer of Adrian’s car, two shots at a half-mirror, were to them surfaces as pleasant as petal or silk or fruit. A gull overhead, the sky’s travelling cross, the treble howl of his note—what is the name for the satisfaction these things give? Like others of our age, they had re-discovered also the still-life, that, however it may get itself painted, it is not nature mort, but that each haphazard arrangement can be composed of formal perfections of shape and light—plates on a table, a basket of folded linen, a sea-scape off the beach in a glass dish. They knew that the twenty-four hours of the day and night are a cinema, an actualité, a continuous programme, whose hero is the sun and whose heroine the moon, whose play is the modification of light, whose “pathos” is sunset, with sunrise for epiphany.

Spending a great part of their lives in terms of these pleasures, they were rarely bored. With her house-keeping and adorning, her bees and boats and her love-making, Scylla’s chronicle had grown, story of a site, of a name on a grave, the low-down—or for that matter—the high-up of a ghost, a family or a village; the story of what happened, or if not that, Aristotle’s thing that would have happened, in the nation-breeding doings, plain or secret, of part of an english shire. There Picus grew his garden and enjoyed himself, whose chief art was that vanishing grace, lost by people who set out not to enjoy themselves, but to be amused. Then Felix watched his birds, with an attention human beings would have found wanting in tact, the first persistence he had shown, to whom impatience had once seemed a part of happiness. From the quiet that overtook him out of doors, they hoped for the development of his exquisite turn for observation—of life as it flew or swam or ran on four feet, or walked with a shell for house. Life that came up out of the ground, or flew in from the rim of the sky; life that mounted a few inches further each year, taller and taller into a man or a tree: life that spun for an hour in the air, a column of bright transparencies; that opened for a week in petals, soft as Felicity’s skin, poised like her head; life that for ages lay on the hill-side, weathering, patined with the lichens’ coloured leather, charged in some places with magic and always with wisdom. Science would come later, the machinery for handling his observations, but what was the explanation of the instrument that Felix was in himself, that just such and such phenomena should affect him and in such a way? All three loved as much, could observe some detail almost as well, but what was it that made the whole lucid to Felix, as if water, wind, air and earth-processes were all one thing, whose exterior workings were the signature of their nature, actual and invisible?

From this being and becoming they had been snatched; and there, in their own country, had been imposed on them the desires and purposes of Nick Kralin. About him and his evil they sensed something urban and mechanical, as of a large intricate machine in full use. Machines are ultimately a work of nature, since they are a work of man, the work of her cleverest animal, devising tools to meet his special needs. Only needs which are not always true needs, or the tool has not been adapted to the needs’ best satisfaction, but become an object in itself. Tools and machines are not like thought or art or love. They do not exist for themselves, but to do something. Once they do not fit their proper use, or their use is an unwholesome one, they become a curse. For man does not always scrap them. Adoring their parts, he will see in their making, or in their makers, an end in itself. Hence the unparalleled faith shown to-day in the expert, forgetting that the man who knows all about one thing, may know nothing about anything else. This is particularly true of the applied sciences. Or, even more, since the concoction of poison gas is a wholly bad thing, there is no conceivable reason for perfecting its technique. But men to-day will perfect that technique, largely for the joy of doing it, fabricating a value and a need—how well one knows the process—by saying that, though it will never be used, it is still as well to know how to do it; that man has a right and a duty to have command over nature, so that knowledge of process must be followed for this and for its own sake.

That was a song about it, fifty years ago. So it seemed to them that Kralin was derived in part from such values as these, a fabricated man. Not wholly, whose choice of evils must have had its springs deep in one of the natural orders, but who, on some such basis, had “arranged” himself, in the serene conviction of the town-bred that Nature is only here to listen to what he has to say about her.

It seemed to them also that in this situation they had been given a chance to make it glorious, and that they did not know how. What redeeming feature had it, or excuse for the exercise of courage and imagination? They could not hope so much as to preserve Felicity’s memory, who had dreamed of making her illustrious. And before and behind and over-towering her memory was the threat to the land. The passion of the earlier hours was gone. Fatigue succeeded it and disgust and disquiet, endurance, but without ardour. This they knew was the hardest part of what they had to bear, but the knowledge hardly sweetened it. They sent a letter to Boris with what little Scylla had learned. Days passed, and they waited for news of him.

The days passed merrily for Boris at the house on the moor. The evergreens did not depress him, and from a ridge behind it, a moor-crest planted with pines in whose tops the wind made harp-sounds, he went to hide, to be placated by the sound of stringed instruments, to escape from Adrian and Mrs. Taverner, to meditate, not on the situation, but on whatever came into his head. Which is not the worst way of finding out what one wants to know. The sun drew russian smells out of the wood-sap and the needle-sap and the un-russian prospect. He would fling himself down there to stare over the moor. Away to the south, to the extreme horizon, it threw up a black surf, more pines, here and there, away to where the long green-shining downs rose between it and the sea.

One day, about a fortnight after his arrival, he found himself glad to be alone there. He did not fear his own company, nor was it usual for him to notice it, who was continually at a rehearsal—a re-mime necessary to him—of the hurried drama of his life. For thirteen years he had been scampering about Europe, borne on the froth of a wave whose body was of blood. Up-sparkle and flash, tumble and leap in air, but the body of it blood, substance of the wave of russian emigration, folk-wandering in a hurry, not by choice, but by the argument of blood. He had begun by now to know a few important truths about that pilgrimage to nowhere, not only the stock-phrases of his kind, but truths about himself and about the whole event. Court-page, young officer, he had been twenty-two when the real business had begun. Then there had been Petrograd, insanity and plots; then the long flight which had ended at Constantinople through Odessa. A dead father, a lost sister, a mother hiding in fear. Constantinople. Then a passage worked to Marseilles and his french odyssey; until two years ago Felix had discovered him; his shelter, his springboard, his established refuge, but whose friendship and hospitality made its own demands. A refuge that could be a discipline, friendship that asked for no payment, that all the same cost something, and in a special coin—payment in Taverner values and standards. How he had resented this, resented it still; and this visit was the first on which he had doled them out, centime by centime, something in their own coin. His own he lavished on them, the change of his harsh bright devilries. And had he not asked now for their dirty work to do? In a way, too, he knew that he had the right of it. No man can really pay in spiritual cash that is not his own. His Taverners would not be content with that, asking him to part with some of his egotism, invest in a little common honesty, a little truth. Not for their sakes, but for virtue’s. He had understood very well. It was a thing he could not really do. They were stupid to ask it of him. He could never do that, not for his own sake even, much less for theirs or for the idea of good. The thought of the demand drove him into a petulance that had madness behind it. One of his bad spells was coming to him. He sprang up from his pine bed as though the needles had turned into steel and pricked him. Memory for him was no mother of the muses, but a machine-gun for which he was target, each shot of its endless fire-belt telling on his bound body. Memories of how he had left Russia; dirty trains full of people in flight who had never been dirty before. (Scylla had a silly joke about the man who lost a day’s shaving in the War and had never caught up.) Think of something silly and you’re safe. For years now he had raised flight from machine-gun memory to a desperate art. Never in time, of course, but it was something to be able to get away after the first bullet-storm. That was why he drank, took cocaine, lied, cheated, throwing away what was at least a tradition of self-respect, as a man might throw his old father to the wolves. Dodging the memory-storm, he also dodged the poignant arts and the finer intimacies of love. Not always, but Felix had been the sole real exception. But even there with precaution, with cynicism, with defiance, with gestures sometimes as voulu, as deliberately grotesque, as Stavrogin’s when he bit the General’s ear.

That was the worst of his Taverners; they had led him into thought again, they and their land. For the life he had learned to live, towns were essential, and the country a menace, crouched waiting at the end of every pavement and every street. From every point of the earth’s circumference it lay waiting for him, like an animal for a cub that has been torn out of its womb. What was town house or palace to the field and the forest-bred boy, to whom trees spoke and the air’s blue flights, autumn’s wonder and winter’s chill? While there was no one who enjoyed a palace more, who had its conventions by inheritance. He knew what a palace was there for, how to serve it, how to get the most fun out of it, whose training had been to enjoy splendour. So thoroughly taught that he was incapable, as his Taverners approved, of pretension about it, or about any of the things which a boy of less birth would have displayed, bragged about or traded on—with Americans and other impressionables—(and who is not impressionable? Who does not want to know what the Queen has for tea?) Boris did not do that, assumed no rank or dignities; concealed those he had. Could not be brought to speak of his youth except to friends, or—and then impersonally—when he was very drunk. Let his walk speak for him, his hands and his feet.

He was on his feet now, panting a little, his eyes staring, uttering words in Russian and little cries. All because he saw a tree in front of him, standing away on the moor by itself, a tree that he had seen before. It was the same tree that he had seen when they had been turned out of a train, onto a countryside half under water, on a grey plain, at dusk. He and his sister, his father and his mother, on their flight east across Russia. They had woken up, sitting on foul boards, to a complete awareness of train-dirt. His sister, bleeding from a hæmorrhage, could hardly stand. Stunned past the sense of danger. They were all like that. They had nothing. Knew they had nothing. Nothing was the only thing they knew. Who had had everything. They each had a nothing, like a great corpse hung by a string that cut their dirty necks.

It was the same tree as the one which had stood there, a little way off the railway-track, on the plain. He was back there again where the train had stopped; and some way off up the line there were huts and people shouting. No lights. Their nothings hung down till they stumbled over them. His sister with tiny steps splashed into a puddle and stood still. She had his mother’s arm round her. His angry father did not swear at them. The weight of his nothing had silenced even his cruel rage. It was the same tree. It had seen him now, and it was growing larger. It was coming to meet him. . . .

There by the train he had flung his nothing across his back, in order to do his best for his women and because he was still able to hate his cruel, stupid father, who would play a game of abjectness and low birth, and then let flash his selfish rage and habit of authority. Blind brute. Why could he not think of his wife and his daughter? Or his son, for that matter? He had looked at the buttons on his father’s coat. Now he could see them again, round-plaited leather buttons of an old shooting-coat; and behind every one there was a space hollowed out and the shank replaced; and inside each one there was a jewel, a single stone, torn out of a necklace or a ring. Four down the front and three on each sleeve and one over each pocket. Coloured eyes. He had expected to see them burn through and betray them. Ever since then he had been afraid of single stones. He’d half-a-dozen himself the old man didn’t know about. The old man who might run away and leave them at any minute. Another bullet tore through his breast, one that the memory-fire repeated constantly. He had shifted the weight of his nothing, he had kept an eye on his father that he should not run away. But then, for the first time, in sight of that tree—it was the one thing he saw, the one thing in the growing night—there came upon him hatred of his sister and his mother. Because with his youth leaping in him, it would have been easy for him to shift for himself. But because he must stay with them, help them, shift for them, they might all three die. (If they did, his father should go with them. He would see to that.) He was wary and attentive about death, his still unflawed youth strung like a tightened bow against it. What had he to do with these women? Did they care so much? Did they matter so much? The old man, their mate and their parent, was looking for a chance to abandon them. He spat again as he had spat at his father’s back. Into that pit of the spirit he had sunk with his father. That is what happens in that kind of revolution—that the persecuted become base. Then he had seen his mother, her arm about his sister in the puddle, and heard her say:

“It does not matter, so long as we love each other enough.” Ai, Ai. She had dissolved the grain of his evil thought then as she always did. He had given her his arm, and very slowly they had stumbled through the mud towards the huts. Past the tree, which seemed to turn and look at them, as it was looking at him now.

At the huts they were making enquiries, not very dangerous ones, as they were only among peasants at this end of the earth. There, also driven off the train, he had seen a man he had been at school with, still dressed in ragged elegance, teasing the men who were trying to find out whether or not to kill him:

“Son of the people! Son of the people yourself! Worker! What d’you suppose I am?” It was an ancient peasant who had answered, whose words had by some mystery passed for truth:

“Of course, he’s a worker. He is a poor man like us. Look, he has only been able to buy a glass for one of his eyes.” So the single eyeglass, whose bravura made Boris envious, had saved his life; as now the memory saved him, taking cover under the fun of it against the bullet-storm.

He moved up a few trees along the ridge. He sat down again and lit a cigarette. The tree had taken its place again in the landscape.

Like a man in whom some incurable malady recurs, he was not quite steady. That had been a bad turn. In his mind there was plenty of room, not for sins, but for the state of sin. Of which hatred of his mother was a symbol. It was more, it was bad luck. From the dreadful moment when he had been tempted to abandon her—(he had not abandoned her, left her in the Crimea with forged papers, in an obscurity whose misery was tempered by comparative safety)—he had felt that he had come under a curse. A curious outlook which made the fact of temptation significant, not its resistance. His father had finally left them all, landed up in prison and was now almost certainly dead, and Boris rejoiced at it. For his sister he had good reason to believe that one of the new officials had violated her, and that she had then killed herself. Anyhow, she was dead. But his belief in the curse was confirmed by what had happened to him later, explaining a gesture his friends noticed, by which when excited, he clutched at the base of his throat, as though feeling for a chain or a ribbon that was not there. There had been a ribbon once, because, before they parted, his mother had given him an ikon, an ancient one that was also a jewel, had hung it round his neck and told him never to take it off. Never to give it away or to sell it in whatever distress; still less never to lose it or allow it to be stolen. Good mother-magic. But in Constantinople, not six months later, he had gone out one night to get drunk. That was allowed them, the life of the russian exiles a saturnalia within a saturnalia in the life of that city, occupied then by Allied Armies, each on a national spree. He remembered the evening well, the scots officers, often beautiful to look at, who were exceedingly kind to him, with whom the party had begun. One of them had tried to take him home, but the minute devil-who-will-not-go-to-bed was already his familiar. Nor had he much of a bed to go to. He had run away, and the scots officer had run after him, and they had both nearly fallen into the Bosphorus. Then he had dodged away and the scots officer had given it up; and he had run into a Turk and danced round him, trying to recite the ninety-nine names of God; and got them wrong and tried the names of the eighty-eight ways of making love, and annoyed the Turk and made it up with the Turk, and they had gone off to a “dancing” together.

All he remembered after that was waking up on a seat in the gardens at Péra. It was winter and still dark, and as his hand went up to his throat to feel for the ikon, it was not there. Feeling down his body, he had mistaken the edge of a button for the jewel where it had slipped, and the horror of disappointment had done something to make him mad. In his waistcoat pocket he had found a packet of cocaine. Had he traded his jewel for that? He did not know. He could never remember what had happened at the “dancing.” Nor could he ever forget. Nor be persuaded that his vital misfortune, something very like the ruin of his soul, had not begun that night. On that night something had been settled about him. Something that Felix could not undo, friends, food or fair surroundings. Something that made vice and dissipation equally a matter of no importance. There was one help—the usual one—not to think, to scurry through life to artificial oblivion. Again it was part of his resentment against his Taverners that they led him into experiences which were sincere. It was like a diet of fresh food to a connoisseur in tins. He had not, up to then, observed that his plans for getting amusing employment out of Adrian Taverner implied a partial acquiescence in what his own Taverners offered him. For years he had been trying to find a happy-go-lucky way to kill himself. Nothing but his pure blood and the scrupulous physical care of his up-bringing had kept him alive; his body’s perfection, except for intervals of starvation, hardly touched. The disintegration worked in his spirit. It was already reaching his nerves, and it was curious to watch the effect of inward experience on a body that hardly of itself knew how to be ill.

Even Felix Taverner did not know that Boris said to himself: ‘If I had not spoken to myself that day on the railway lines, and said “It’s not my business to save my mother and my sister,” I should be to-day un homme sauvé.’ They knew about the loss of the ikon, not that to Boris it was the consequence of a thought beside a railway line, looking at a tree. Nor would they have understood it, because it is not understandable; an indecency of unreason, men, especially Englishmen, knew they had better leave alone. But, as Felix pointed out, it was no use saying that Boris ought not to be like that when Boris was like that. While a sound instinct told them not to probe too far, nor lose themselves in the insane, enchanted no-man’s-land of the slav spirit.

Their Slav sat down again, propped his back against the rough purple bark of a fir. He was feeling a little better, as people do whose skeletons have done rattling, popped out and done their dance and gone back to their cupboard. His head was full of fairy-stories, and he was remembering the girl in the red shoes. She had stolen a loaf to spare those shoes, and now they would never come off her feet, nor she stop walking. While he remembered that she would never say: “Cut off my feet in the red shoes.” Identifying himself with her, he approved. Stuck out his feet and admired his ankles. What was he going to think about now? The Taverners’ troubles, and that person across the valley called Kralin? A lapse of cuddles with cheese and nearly bats. The haunting phrase repeated itself. And repeated. Repeated itself. Repeat and repeat and repeat and self and self and self. . . .

The Taverners were expecting his help. He remembered this suddenly. It was a good thing for them that they did not know that, since he had left them to stay with their aunt, he had forgotten all about it. Not quite. The tune of their distresses had kept up a kind of disagreeable ground bass in his head. But what with his scheme to become Adrian’s partner, and the tact necessary to insure that and handle Adrian’s mother, and Adrian’s cry-parties over which he called his illegitimacy and the agreeable life they otherwise led, he had left the complicated sufferings and vendettas over the hill to pass out of his imagination. Twinges of conscience had made him deal very grimly with their intrusion. He had written to Felix to borrow sweaters, riding things, shirts. Paid great attention to his toilette, which repaid him.

Now, sensitised and made vulnerable by memory and the sight of the tree, their situation returned to him; vague, but as though it were already a stage advanced, setting into a new form and ripening—and clarifying round the figure of Kralin.

It was his opinion that, however far the Taverners might regard him as a trial by God or an attention from the Devil, the Taverners had deserved Kralin. What on earth did a family of their sort, or the society they represented, mean by knowing such a man? He thought he knew the type, and that every nation had its variant of it, and that it was only in England that they are not suspect. The Taverners’ answer to that would be that trust had evoked trust. This was childish to Boris. He was not anti-semitic; pogroms in theory he abhorred. But intimacy? Marriage? Felicity, unhappy in her home and in her youth, detested by her mother, had been deceived—by looks, glamour, and a chance of escape. That he could admit. But once undeceived, why had not her family got her out of it, if only for their own sakes? (Unless, of course, his Taverners were right, and they had considered her marriage the least compromising short-cut to her decease.) He saw the man spinning the kind of web round them that Boris’s race for one had not taken the trouble to cut. And paid for the omission.

Before Boris’s eyes, in the tender heat, the stretch of moor-country was coming to the new life proper to it, its salute to the sun as complex and exquisite as that of any greenwood, any pasture, any garden of flowers. Already there was bee-stirring, and a warming of tint; praise in obscure music, but praise. Spring having its way with England. A new shock went through him, not of pain, but of sudden awareness. Had he been allowing England to put him to sleep, setting back the clock for him that had struck the hours of hell? He sat forward. Whatever Kralin was, he sprang up before him for reminder. There, in this land. Kralin, whatever he was, a sculptured grave-stone, a ghost? A daimon pointing? A demon beckoning? While he had been playing around, breathing again, feeling again, sleeping again deep. Now Kralin was standing before him. Like the tree. In Russia the tree had been tall and lean, standing by itself. Able to move about, pass from there and travel from land to land. Kralin was like that tree. Risen up in England to remind Boris of what had been done to him; of what he had become because of what had been done to him. He was not to forget, who the Taverners would have over-laid with saving thoughts, with Scylla’s loved word, sôphrosynê. He was the happy lad who had once stood up in the seat of his troika on its bird-rush across sparkling snow. He was the young officer in bright uniform on guard about an Empress. He was the ragged shadow helping two women in torn clothes, their feet wrapped in rags, into a stinking train. Teaching them names that were not their own. “Adieu, adieu, mein klein garde offizier. Adieu, adieu.” He was the laughing drunk déclassé in Constantinople, whom ordinary men still wished to help. He was the scamp of Paris Felix had stood before like a shield. He was the man who had begun to accept help, running away over the water to Felix’s home for refuge, like a thief running away from his cross. He had even been making up his mind that his was a cross that might be lost. Until this vision of Kralin. Kralin, whom he now saw as a Red agent, as confidently as the newspaper-doped man recognises a little bearded man with a scowl carrying a bag of Moscow-labelled gold.

Boris understood little of the public events of his Revolution, perplexed by what had happened as any young gentleman not trained to politics might be. Scylla and Felix were far better informed. But certain things that he knew, he knew well. Something the Taverners could not know, that few Englishmen realise, the lives of people who may be called the under-tow of the world’s tides. People of mixed or exiles’ up-bringing; of fallen, uncertain or bastard origin; or of no fixed caste or situation. A world not necessarily criminal, though criminals are drawn from it; nor a world—as it sometimes poses—of thwarted talent or genius, though creative intelligences are found there. The untraditional part of humanity, poor materially, supplying the ordered ranks of societies with crooks, cranks, criminals, creators. For these are not always rebels or throw-outs at first-hand from the world groups. Discontent, protest, gifts, misfit or sheer bad character or sheer brilliance may run in families; and these, unless they inherit wealth or their women stop them, have a way of turning up in the under-tow. These are international waters, not properly charted, and little of any value is known or has been written about them to-day—though the picaresque novel, from the Satyricon down, is full of them. For their picture-making qualities are obvious, and their nature is that any fish can come out of them (including the fish whose chief ambition is to find the upper sea again and rejoin its shoal).

Russian emigration is making a world within this world. Persons whose position in society has been taken away with their goods, and who lack the chance or the will to re-establish themselves. Slavs who have given in to the slav character. Boris, his short flat nose in the air, had been running about in it, curious, fatalistic and amused. To his Taverners it was a world for an occasional spree, suspicious of it and aware that it had nothing to do with the Bohemia of the arts where they were perfectly at home, to which it pleased them to think that they belonged.

Boris was now sure that Kralin came from there; could hear Felix place him. Assuming that he had made Felix understand, he could hear the Englishman say: “Son of a crank with no known history behind him but his crank. One of old Tolstoy’s hangers-on. A son who doesn’t follow in father’s footsteps, or make a bee-line for the opposite camp. He was a pacifist of sorts in the War.” Then Felix would add: “but isn’t he the fish who finds his shoal again?” Then Boris would answer that it was not so, that Kralin was doing his own fishing with a hook to open up the gullet of his catch so that it could never close again. “Throats like ours, and that’s why we’re called poor fish?” Boris would agree with that, but all the same Felix would not quite have understood. He did not realise what Boris had learned, that there are people in the world with nothing to lose; with nothing to lose in the sense that a peasant has, a mechanic, a manufacturer, a landed gentleman, an actor or a parson; than Felix; than Boris had once had. Having nothing to lose—a nothing which includes an indifference in their inner selves—they are free to make things happen; bizarre or violent things, stupid or intelligent things; secret or open—with often an odd preference for the secret. Sober theories or experiments, delirious irresponsibilities, grotesque, monstrous, idealistic or savagely realistic things—anything is possible to persons whose isolation and liberty have freed themselves from common inhibitions. Boris did not think of it in these terms, but he sensed it, and with some of its implications.

A group chorus. Not the song the fish of the under-tow sing. Reverse the second line, and you have the majority of the men of Boris’s Revolution—especially the men behind its scenes—the earth’s majority of bad men and a few of its best. A rather large proportion of its brains. He would as soon join it as not, who had no fears of being drowned in the under-tow. (Not politically, that he would never do. Before that he would enter the Roman Church—as he sometimes thought of—and turn monk.) But there was another thing, that his Taverners spoke of and seemed to set store by—the fact of european civilisation. So much less conscious, so much less informed than they, he was beginning to see in his own way what they meant by it, the nature of the force that threatened it. So there were moments when he felt as if there was a terror about, a small iced wind, part of whose furtive body was blowing in from his own country, running in and out of Europe’s cities, along back streets and the noble rooms of palaces; in and out the intricacies of a machine; about a factory, through a spring wood, across a heath. His fairy-tale mind saw Kralin as a man carrying that wind in a bag under his arm, as a sower carries seed; letting it out now and then in little draughts and puffs. Sometimes he saw him letting it out of his mouth like a breeze, like putti puffing in a picture; but then his face was not that of a fat boy angel, but awful. An unspeakable face, with cheeks drawn in, and his teeth sticking out below his lip.

Boris noticed that this morning he was finding solitude difficult. He decided to go back to the house and find Adrian and ask him a few questions. If Kralin were really some kind of political agent, the police—little use as Boris had for the police—might be questioned. But, instead, he found himself settling his back again against a fir-trunk, making up a song which went in English something like this:

‘If Kralin is a man of that kind, everything that has been happening falls into its place, and the attack on my Taverners is not an isolated devilry, but part of a large plan.

‘If Kralin is one of those men, the attack on the Taverners’ honour and on their prestige becomes essentially more reasonable. Such elaborate acts, in mere private revenge, are rare.

‘If Kralin is that kind of man, the attack on the land might also be part of a scheme. A great scheme, and so far more intelligent than château-burning.

‘If Kralin is one of those men, he is doing very subtle work to discredit an english family; and if it is all part of something larger than that, he will not get tired of it. Private revenge becomes a bore.

‘If Kralin is that kind of man, he is not among their fanatics. He is serving his own end as well. And having a cause and himself, himself and a cause, his power will be doubled.

‘If Kralin is that kind of man, where is this to end? What is the plan behind the plan? The plan they have behind the plan in Russia also?

‘Where do I, Boris Nicolaivitch, come in? There are the people my Taverners call mystics, who say that none of this is by chance, that an appropriate design runs through our lives, a pattern; that what happens on the great stage is played again on the small, as it is played in heaven and again in hell. They believe in something like this, and I think that it may be true.

‘If Kralin is one of those men, he will think it necessary that I and Felix, Scylla, Picus, even Adrian and his mother, must be destroyed.

‘If Kralin is that kind of man, I am face to face with a man who has destroyed my Russia. With the man who killed my father and my two brothers; with the man who made my sister kill herself.

‘Also with the man who has made me what I am like. For I was not wicked once. I was not good, but there was a good person in me. That good they killed. Only my Taverners were sorry about it, and I can only laugh at them. But I am not laughing now, not even at myself. Those men killed the good that there was in noble Russia, and when they did not do it to our bodies, they did it to our souls. They will do it to the souls and bodies of the world, and first of Felix’s world. For they have learned the attack which looks as though it were part of a different war about something else; and their move is like the knight’s move in chess. I have seen this in Paris.

‘If Kralin is that kind of man, I do not know what it is that I should do. If I were good and still Boris I should know, for I know now a great deal about it. But I am bad, and the worst of bad is that it does not know how to be good. My Taverners are good, but they are weak because they do not yet know enough, because their lives have been gracious—’

Then he began to laugh, on his feet now, striding between the trees; and against their harsh trunks it seemed as if there was, suddenly, a heavier bulk of manhood about him.

Inside the house on the moor, masked by Mrs. Taverner’s habit of domineering, Adrian’s cynicism and Boris’s airy delight, Nemesis had taken possession. The Nemesis who is called “If,” inserting itself into the phrases the mind speaks, rising to his mother’s and even sometimes to Adrian’s lips with a sigh. While Boris was meditating, pacing and reclining in fir-plantation, they were sitting on the verandah; looking onto the small, square lawn the shrubbery hedge surrounded, whose borders only seemed to send up flowers because they were made to, sulky, even in spring, like a child coerced.

It was in the dead hours between lunch and tea, the worst hours of the day, the only hours which really die on man of the day or the night. But half-past two to half-past four can, if they like, be intolerable. Too early and too late, harshly lit, too long and not long enough. Not for sleep, not for play, not for talk, they insist on work and are not friendly to it. The morning Mrs. Taverner had spent gardening. She gardened well, yet with the instinct of those who have “the green finger” she knew that the soil and the young roots and the small leaves were not responsive. Only the savage dark shrubs, striking into the earth with an animal’s strength, flourished there. Outside, the heather was watching, the gorse and the bracken. If man the cultivator took his hands off that garden and his tools away, they would get in within a year. They had covered the garden-ground before and the ground where the house stood. It occurred to Mrs. Taverner that they wanted to have it again. It was the kind of thought she referred to as “unwholesome fancies,” but to-day her imagination, deep as well as narrow, was seized. It was as though she could hear the fierce plants waiting; the uncurling bracken-fronds were snakes poised to strike, ready to glide in; the fire-scent of the gorse a smell of conquest, the camp-fire of the vegetable world.

After lunch she had given it up. Adrian joined her, who had spent the morning idling with grim thoughts. Some days before, his cousins had brought over clothes for Boris, and Boris had seen fit to disappear. His cousins had then taken Adrian for a walk, and told him some of the opinions they held about their aunt. The one thing they had seemed prepared to forgive her was Adrian’s birth. While they had parted from him with some of the forgiveness which comes from speaking one’s mind. Picus had not been with them. Adrian, finally and against his will, had been interested. Something in their attitude towards his sister had impressed him, made him begin almost to suffer.

Glancing up to catch his mood, his mother sighed and nearly shrank from him. But, on her morality, she must bear for a punishment both his moods and his coming desertion of her. Besides, it was possible that by that way she might not lose him. He had the habit of brutality with her, and she had drawn a certain pleasure from it. But she knew that the time-interval before them was going to do its worst.

So two people sat down together in whose minds was the same ghost. And out of the dark green ivory shrubs the ghost came, until it stood before them and looked at the small memory-ghost of itself each of them was nursing like a doll. As the true ghost passed, the flowers looked up, lawn daisies opened like white buttons, mother and son heard a blackbird give a sudden mellow shout.

“I suppose,” said Adrian, “finding a worm would justify this afternoon to some people.”

“The first brood,” said his mother, “must be fledged and flown off.”

“Ah, that accounts for it,” said Adrian. “Or he’s just pitched out the cuckoo’s egg. Which is what I am.”

“The hen sits on it; and anyhow I don’t believe she’d let him.”

“Very handsome of her. More than we’d do.” Mrs. Taverner had a most literal mind.

“Your father would never—” Adrian gave his contemptuous sophisticated giggle:

“I didn’t mean that. I was thinking we go the other way about it. Kick out your own off-spring for the cuckoo’s sake.” Her “What d’you mean?” had lost some of its assurance.—“Push out our own, while showing the cuckoo’s every attention. I was thinking of Felicity.” The ghost’s eyes looked out under a frown. It watched Adrian.

“You know as well as I do that she went off and married that man of her own will.”

“You know as well as I do that she was driven to it.”

“How can you say that? She had her home, her friends, everything she wanted—” Adrian glanced at his own doll-ghost:

“Versicles and responses of an edwardian dowager. Cut it out. You know what a sensitive little fool she was. She didn’t think it was much of a home when her friends came and you showed her what you thought of them, and presumed at once that they were vulgar or vicious or interested. Or both. Or all three. What you meant was not smart. They weren’t. But they were a change for her; a new kind of person, people who were kind to her. When everything she cared about, the idiotic enthusiasms we all have, was called silly or affected or dirty at home—especially dirty—” Here he squeezed his doll a moment, as though to make memory articulate in a squeak:

“—I’ve an idea it was the last she hated most. You know, Mother, we always used to say in our simple childish phrase that you’d a mind one could make toast at. You have, you know. Like most women of your education. It was the way you were brought up. But when you don’t see the point of a story, you’re sure it’s a dirty one. You’ve a set of verbal symbols, paraphrases for the things which are ‘coarse’ or ‘improper,’ and you use them in the voice of a nasty old priest telling a lavatory story. You must have been a queer bride, appallingly shocked, and appallingly curious. The two made a pretty amalgam by the time we were growing up. You think you are chaste and reticent, and quite broad-minded—so as to get on with me, but, Oh, Baby—! You’re scared, you know, with a temperament that’s gone bad on you—(Allow me to get this off my chest.). If it were done now, you’d go in for rescue-work. Beat the girls to make them tell you all about it. You should see the look in your eye when you hear of a young woman, married or not, having a romp in bed. While you simmer with jealousy. I hardly like to think of the time I’ve had to spend telling you about the complex and the repression, so you can’t pretend not to understand. If my or your—I mean one of our fathers—had picked you out of the Gaiety chorus, instead of the refined victorian home you came from, you’d be quite human.—No, Mother, you’re going to hear this.”

She had been trained to listen to Adrian on sex, and with any amount of personal reference. Talk she enjoyed and feared. This time she found herself admitting that it might all be true. Her doll-ghost wouldn’t squeak when she pinched it. The real ghost looked at them with trembling lips.

“—I admit I mightn’t have seen all this about Felicity. It was Scylla who gave me more than a hint, the other day, when they brought over Boris’s clothes. I’m no connoisseur in female virtue, but I see it now that my sister was the chastest maid that breathed. Which was exactly what you could not see. I knew that for a fact at the time, of course, but as Scylla explained—rather intelligently—her quality of purity was explained by you as your old favourite ‘coarseness of mind.’ It wasn’t fear in her—as you thought it ought to be, or chill, or ignorance or abnormality, or the least indelicacy either. It was so rare as to be normal and exquisitely sane. Prochaine Aphrodite, if you like. She knew passion was coming to her, but in its own time. She hurried nothing, feared nothing, despised nothing. It was like a flower. Only not passive, not a vegetable love—” The ghost’s lips quivered, smiling at its brother. A breeze sighed and spent itself on the grass at their feet.

“You got this rigmarole from Scylla?” said the mother of the ghost.

“From Scylla and from Felix. But what I can see, without Scylla and Felix, is that her kind of modesty must have got a nasty jar from you.” There was something like regret, or at least defence, in her voice as she answered:

“I know I am grown more broad-minded since my children were young. But wasn’t I right to protect my daughter from dangers she seemed to talk about with what I was taught to consider disgraceful knowledge, and to care nothing for?”

“You were, you know, because it wasn’t like that. They weren’t the real dangers. You didn’t try to protect her from anything that mattered. Look at Kralin. While ignorance isn’t even fashionable to-day. But do you remember that summer when we played Comus, and I was the first brother and she the sister? You wanted my best speech cut because it might put ideas into Felicity’s head!”

“I admit I was foolish, but when I was her age I shouldn’t have known what it meant. Only that it was something unpleasant.” But Adrian was staring right through the ghost on the lawn and saying:

He spoke coldly, but the contempt was gone out of his voice:

“We’ve had that in the house. And it’s dead.”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” said his mother, “but when Felix played your part next day, he did it much better.” But Adrian did not seem to hear.

“It’s a wonder,” he said, “being what she was, that it didn’t kill her off young, being told by you she was filthy, when she was clean. Still, we can none of us quite see what drove her into Kralin’s arms.”

“I believe that his attitude about the War had something to do with it.” Adrian looked at her sharply.

“After a particularly vile scene with you here, I suppose?” (This had been Felix’s supposition. None of them knew.) Mrs. Taverner did not answer.

“—Scylla said it may have been because he had an abstract mind; after I had been so cattish and you so female, and life full of chit-chat and scandal and talk about nothing but personalities. She said she wanted to warm him to life and wit and show him his perfection; being too young to know that you can’t make your man over from what he is. And she reminded me when Kralin was young, how beautiful they looked together.”

Mrs. Taverner still said nothing. Her own little ghost would not squeak. The night before the girl had gone away and got married to Kralin, its original had also kept silent; had stared at her mother as if she did not understand her mother’s accusation. Who had said:

“Pretending not to know what I mean, Miss. I mean to tell you in very plain language—the kind you prefer—what I mean. In the words the servants understand—” And when she had finished the girl had only said:

“What do you mean, Mother? You can’t mean such a thing as that. You’re my mother. You can’t think that.” (She had been too young to understand that the period in Mrs. Taverner’s life made her irresponsible. When, later, she had thought of that, she had assumed that her mother had forgotten all about it.) But she had not, in fact, been quite able to forget.

The real ghost was still there, at whom the blackbird was still singing like mad. Adrian looked at the sun through a branch of cherry-blossom, on a discontented small tree, standing alone on the grass.

“—‘Without cherry-blossom,’ ” he said. “Kralin wouldn’t have love with it and you wanted it artificial, like the silk flowers they sell in the shops.”

“No,” said his mother, in her rare lowered voice—“only not wild.”

A cloud moved across the sun. It was suddenly colder. A little air waved the cherry-branch at them. A poor tree, not body enough for the fair tall ghost the blackbird was shouting at to stay; who did not stay easily in a dark, poisoned garden, hollowed out of rank shrubbery, out of savage moor. Trying not to grow.

“I’ve half a mind,” said Adrian, “to go to a séance in town. The kind where they guarantee a Direct Voice Manifestation. I presume that one is allowed to answer back. This place is somehow full of Felicity. How she’d have disliked it.”

“I believe such things are irreligious when they aren’t frauds.”

“There are several things I want to find out.”

“What things?”

“Well, I’d like to feel surer, I’d like to hear her say that it was all sheer accident. That nothing pushed her off against her will. Neither despair of us—nor anything. Nor malice. Unless,” he added, “Kralin killed her.” The mother shuddered:

“Don’t say that. Isn’t he doing enough?”

With a little weeping note the air pushed past them; surrounding them, touching them, all about their faces. Adrian moved fretfully. Mrs. Taverner shut her eyes. Opened them again and blinked quickly, because of the picture, the coloured cinema that had sprung to life under her lids. It was not one of the worst scenes between them, but a repeat of an old theme of childhood. There was Felicity, half grown-up, her legs delicate as a crane’s. And she was telling the girl, and it was the kind of thing she told her constantly, that she had climbed over the wall in order that the gardeners might see her legs. Not the common maternal injunction at that date, that at no time might a gardener see legs; that the good gardener is pained, and that the bad gardener—and gardeners are chiefly bad—are moved by the sight of shins to unspeakable thoughts. In her attempts to dominate the child, she had reached a further stage which insisted that all such gestures were an invitation on the girl’s part to “the lower orders” to “think.” Nor did she—and this was where the fun began—spare the girl their thoughts. This was where she became eloquent, reading shame into the young bewilderment, untruth into the young dignity, immodesty into its laugh. It was dead now, the long-legged child. A thousand liveried angels . . . only daughter of Richard and Julia Taverner. Born at Pharrs. . . . Died at Villefranche-sur-Mer . . . in the thirty-third year of her age . . .

Soon after his adolescence she had nipped the sweetness out of Adrian’s boy’s love for his sister. Derided it, clouded it with innuendo and suggestion; playing on the young man’s insatiable taste for luxury and chic, his fear of certain forms of public opinion. Bribed him. As it usually happens, this was made easy for her both by her daughter’s weakness and her strength. She could not bribe; she would not plead. She could only love. If Adrian had lifted his little finger, it would have been different; but at first she had not understood, then she had not been quite brave enough, and then too convinced he had actively rejected her, to fight. So fear and pride, reticence and an innocence that was sometimes fatuous, had driven her off, and on the light grass of her greenwood love was laid bleeding, and a fawn sobbed out its breath.

So Mrs. Taverner had had her way. She sat back in the garden chair, trying to find her ease. Told herself that she had had her way. Not, for once, that it had been God’s way; not even that she had done it for the best, but grimly that it had been her way; admitting that it now seemed that there might have been a better way. While what chiefly concerned her was the way her son was going to take it now—with all the rest. Their situation was unbearable, so difficult also in its complications that they could only be aware of it, all the time, in detail. They could not think of it or deal with it as a whole. All she could think of then was how his sister’s death would affect his relations with her. She looked at him again, sitting sideways in his chair, as ill at ease as she.

“What are you thinking of now, Adrian?” He had wanted to be asked this, in whose mind bitter sentences were shaping to be shot out to stick in his mother. He began to speak deliberately, simplifying his words:

“Oh, what it feels like to be blackmailed and a bastard.”

“I’ve told you over and over again that you’re not that. Your father—my husband, I mean—never repudiated you. He couldn’t—”

“Yes, he died conveniently. But are we not both beginning to notice what it feels like to get what one wants—or what one has wanted? Felicity is well out of it. She has got the laugh over us now. And looks like getting any revenge she wanted—” The blackbird stopped in the middle of a note with his beak open.

“—This is our punishment. We have got what we wanted. We have got her out of the way. And I for one should prefer the body of her now to any ghost.”

His mother was thinking: “How well he speaks. In such clear sentences, not like his real father, nor like me. Like his cousin Felix, only better, of course.” She was playing the old woman’s game of “where did he get it from?”; whose life had held too few of the more normal excitements of that kind. But Adrian still did not mean to let her off.

“It seems obvious to me that the way we let her die, the way you, at least, wanted to be rid of her, has let—I don’t know whether it would be in or out—a very unpleasant series of consequences. This business with Kralin isn’t only unpleasant, it’s damned dangerous. Hell alone knows where he intends to stop—” He stopped talking to the air, turned round on his mother, snatched the sprig of lad’s love she had been pinching and smelling, and threw it away.

“—Felix’s comment is that we’ve pulled the plug out of the bath that kept in the waters of life. Graceful sanitary metaphor, and there was another about the main-drain of evil pouring in. Charming of Felix, but there’s too much truth about it for my taste.” His mother said:

“I am beginning to wish now that we’d never interfered with her in the way we did.”

“If you consider it, it would be pleasanter if we were all three sitting here, having our tea.”

The blackbird gave an impatient clutter and flew off; perched again on the further side of the little lawn. Their ghost-dolls had fallen unnoticed under their chairs. The true ghost stood now a little further off, under the tree, beside the hedge, near the bird. It had been weeping. It was now watching the man and woman in the chairs; driven off as it had been driven before, in life. All hope gone and curiosity dawning, trying to smile at them and at itself.

“—Something tells me that without Kralin to point the situation, it would be just as bad. He’s called our attention to the pleasure of getting what we wanted. That’s all. We now know a little more what an empty bore life can be. Just now I felt a kind even of physical emptiness about us—there had been a sort of presence before. While I don’t believe, dead or alive, that my sister was ever bored. It is really one up to conventional morality. I’ve been a bad brother; you’ve been a bad mother. While what have we got out of it?” There was an echo of Felix in his slight vehemence.

“—Why don’t they bring tea?” Then he tried again:

“—Conventionally bad. That’s it. I never thought I was a young man of convention before.—Not originally or even thoroughly bad like Kralin. Now we’ve nothing in ourselves to allow us to deal with him. It is perhaps humiliating. Neither Scylla nor Felix expect us to be the least use. Nor does Picus. At least where Felicity is concerned.”

“All they expect is for me to ruin myself buying-up the land because she chose to marry a scoundrel.”

“There we go round again and round and round and round. Amusing, isn’t it? You drove her into Kralin’s arms. Together we three drove into her grave. Now Kralin, our hitherto-loyal partner, intends to drive us into ours. But what I am finding most painful is the way those two keep pointing out what might have been—”

“I suppose Felix imagines himself with a wife seven years older than himself.”

“No. Agreeable as it is to be a spectator of human folly, I shouldn’t say he does that. His idea seems to be, that like another Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus with the nun left out, Felicity came down on earth to faire aimé l’amour:

They think that when her destiny took a practical turn, it aroused, in unblest persons like Kralin and ourselves, a kind of inevitable wish to destroy her. They seem to think that in her papers would be found miraculous accounts of imaginative passion, courage, with a devotion to the service of love. A genius for love, victorious or not, in all its forms. They seemed to think that we wished to be rid of her because we represent—it’s nice to be bracketed with Kralin—the opposite set of values. (Not that they seem to think that it absolves us of any blame.) They seem to think that we serve Kralin’s purpose as he serves his own; and both of us an unknown master in Hell. They seem to think that Felicity died, as someone like Keats died, with some of her work done. That the story of it is written in her papers, which they proposed to get hold of and deal with before Kralin came down. These are the papers he must destroy. Whatever he publishes from them, however he distorts them, it’s as much his business to destroy them as to edit and defame. They seem to think that it is equally their business to find some way, even now, to preserve her name and make it illustrious. Then there’s the land. To them it is part of her—‘part of her body’ Felix said; and there Kralin has got them. While their final conclusion seems to be, though here, as Scylla says, the hope may be the bastard of the wish, that we’ve dug our own graves when we helped dig Felicity’s.

“There Mother! You are au courant with opinion in the Younger Married Set. What they are actually going to do about it, I can’t say. Probably nothing in the end. What can they do? My God, what is it we can do? While it is you we have to thank for saying all those years that you were trying to do your duty. My teeth on edge for the rest of my life, and Scylla and Felix aren’t any too happy. Though I’d sooner be them now. Sooner be Felix—”

She hardly understood a word of this. Excepting that it meant that she was to blame. Which she could not admit; which she resented with the strangled bitterness that made her dangerous.

“You have learned your lesson very well off them. But at least you did not marry your cousin Scylla.”

“I’m not so thankful for that as I used to be.”

This was too much. Her hatred for powerful attractive young women came raving out of her.

“Scylla! That immoral calculating woman. You’d be wishing yourself dead. I’ve heard the most dreadful things said about her.” Adrian giggled. Her voice stopped suddenly, as it rarely did on the congenial subject; and the coming words turned into an escape of angry breath, then a sigh.

A sense of immense futility came over them. Into the garden, now empty of bird or ghost, it poured, filling it instantly like a change of air. With it the fight went out of the old woman, the momentary understanding out of the young man. They saw the activities of their lives as those of insects, without the insect’s self-preserving end. Looking into the boredom of it, Adrian turned white. With something like terror on their faces, fear they tried to mask with a sneer, the vilest of man’s gestures, they ate their tea. Deliberately, as though here was a sole and certain pleasure. It was then that Boris joined them.

A week after this, Scylla walked over to meet Boris at Stone End. They sat once more outside the inn where Boris had played tricks on Kralin, from where six weeks before this adventure had begun. The place from where Kralin had seen them on the high downs as tea-leaves, and one tea-leaf knock the other down. Where Kralin had hidden from them in the barn. Where in the middle of the green there was a stone, lost on its way to Stonehenge, unsculptured, tilted a little to one side, its top rounded into something the shape of a sausage. Round the green and the stone were the houses that would not change either; the ancient rose-hung farm, eye-lashed with roof-ferns; the Tudor façade that was no more than a shell; the coy house at once coy and bleak with the laburnum, the basement and the flagstaff. As before, they sat outside the inn, in afternoon light now strengthening to summer, looking at the stone. Boris asked:

“D’où vient-il, ce pierre?” She considered, careful as one is with a foreigner, put all the facts before him:

“Stones like that—they are either left by a glacier and later they become a magic, and later still a curiosity, if they aren’t broken up and built into a house. Or else they were brought here—God knows how—because they were wanted for a magic.”

“From where a glacier had left them then, somewhere else?” This seemed to cover the ground.

“In either case they are generally said to be stones that an angel threw at the Devil, or the Devil at an angel.”

“Outside my father’s park there were five, which several angels threw at each other. That is like russian history—” They sat silent, looking at the stone. Tilted-up on end, it looked, even in that light, like a pale slug; going to nowhere, like a slug. Yet it had gathered no moss. Clean as if it had been scrubbed, she had always felt that she would rather not touch it.

“Why,” said Boris, “are snails adorable, even to eat, and slugs, even to think about, disgusting?” She agreed, except about eating snails. They talked idly, feebly, about food. Looking at the stone. Then she noticed that the stone made you think. It stopped what you were thinking about and made you think of nothing. Then even the thought of nothing went out, like a candle when you “puff,” and you were nowhere. She felt sleepy. She had come here to meet Boris, almost secretly because of Adrian. Felix and Picus were out in the boat. She must remember everything he had to say to tell them.

Her eyelids were slipping down like weights over her eyes. At Stone End were there any more stories about the stone? It wasn’t a devil’s nine-pin. Archaeologists did not connect it with sacrifice or the sun. It was a local stone, the wrong kind really for Stonehenge. Nobody carved their names on it. It wasn’t a tryst. It was just there, and the real village dodged away from it along the valley. It was said, vaguely, to be unlucky. They said that it had brought about the ruin of the family who had lived in the tudor house. (Was Boris falling asleep, too?) Her eyes closed. Then she thought that just as some trees have character and personality, so also have rocks. If one has had time to know them, a very long time. Of course, a very much longer time than persons, and a longer time than trees. ‘That old stone—silly—all stones are old—is a bad stone. I have known it all my life, and I have only just found it out. What is bad stone-nature? Not bad man-nature or tree-nature. That’s the mistake. Bad stone-nature. What is it? I don’t know, but my body feels it. Try it on Boris.’

—“Boris, is there something bad about that stone?” His voice also seemed to be coming back from a long flight of thought.

“I think that it knows something—that it has a bad secret about nothing. A bad nothing is what it knows.” And then: “I call it Kralin’s Stone.” Scylla was saying to herself:

They moved their chairs away from the door to have tea in the garden, out of sight of it.

Scylla was poised for this meeting with Boris like a gymnast on a trapeze. They had sent him over to Adrian and to Adrian’s mother to have a friend—a friend who was also a spy—in the lesser of the enemies’ camps. It had seemed a prudent thing to do and the right kind of intrigue, giving them at least the illusion of action. It excites passionate and idealistic people to play at savoir faire. For three weeks they had waited for his news, and there had been no news. Only requests for clothes, and the day they had taken them over, Boris had disappeared; and their only satisfaction had been the walk with Adrian, and what they had been able to tell him about himself, the praise they had made him listen to of Felicity, his sister. It had given them in retrospect very little pleasure. They had impressed Adrian, as his mother knew, but he had been clever enough not to let them see it. So, with that over-sensibility which was their curse, the symbol of their weakness, they had felt next day, not that they had spoken a part of the truth, but only that they had given themselves away to him. There is no petty suffering to match this. They writhed at the thought. But Adrian had taken them in.

If Adrian had taken them in, Boris had let them down. This they had feared, this they were prepared for, but with that turn of hopefulness which kept them young, they had hoped to have hope in Boris. He would be doing all he could for them; he would have forgotten all about them. Their minds swung from side to side. The last was nearly true, yet Scylla came to their meeting ready to hear and judge what he had to tell, like an athlete prepared for some supreme use of all the body’s faculties.

Remembering to be feminine and not too feminine, remembering to have tact, she did not let her impatience leap at him. Talk about the stone had served for an opening, an opening that had chosen itself.

She poured out his tea, coarse tea which pulled you together, or might equally make you sick. Then she said:

“Alors, Boris, what has happened while you have been over on the moor?”

“Très peu. If you had not made it so very clear that the little quarrel we pretended was serious, I should have returned a week ago.” She was furiously disappointed. Their three weeks had been spent in useless waiting, during which Kralin had gone away for ten days. (They had not seen him. Only a letter he had sent them, to say that he had gone to London to see his publisher, and that it would be useless for them in his absence to search the house.) Their minds had been turned on Boris, Boris who would not write, but would come when he had something to tell. While Picus had not dared to point out that, news or no news, Boris would only be certain to return when he was bored.

“Que veux-tu? I have done what you told me. I have watched them, only there was nothing to watch. I have amused myself. I have done, I think, what I wanted with Adrian. Would you grudge me that?” He was pettish. So was she, through frustration and suspense and tension relaxed in the wrong way. He pointed out to her that it was unworthy of her to show nervous strain. Unworthy and ungrateful, but women were like that. He begged her pardon for not having been able to create events. They spoke in French, and their words clattered like angry bird-noises. To his fury and alarm, she began to cry. He called her a bitch. She called him a gigolo, exploiting Adrian for his pleasure, instead of joining them in a holy war. The scene between the tea-leaves seemed about to repeat itself. Then she cried out that she had been unjust and that she took it back. He sprang up and strode about the torn rose-garden, with broken arbours in its hedges. She sat where she was, staring, a dreadful pain like a steel bubble in her breast, rising and sinking, a balanced agony, quite intolerable, of the body and mind. Then Boris did a thing he did not do. He came back and comforted her, more inexpertly, she thought, than any man had ever done, but from Boris a kind of queer miracle.

—“Ma petite chérie. We must not. It is what Kralin would have us do.” A quick run-through of unworthy emotions had created understanding. Reconciled, they sat once more side by side. Then she said:

“But Adrian—hadn’t he some plan of double-crossing everyone and selling the house to Kralin himself?”

“Yes, but he has done nothing.”

“Does he know yet who his father was?”

“Yes. He has got it out of Madame Julia.”

“Well—” But Boris had forgotten the name. Wild with impatience, she tried him with a dozen. It was hopeless. She would not believe that it was not cruelty—until Boris had the sense to swear that it should be repeated to him again that night.

—“But why—? They seem to have all gone dead. Why is it?” She saw that he paused to consider.

“I think that it is natural. They have had a great shock. To them now it is all, for the moment, the matter of Adrian’s father. That was her secret that she kept. Now it is found out. And she did not tell him, Kralin told him. They are filled up with that, and the changes it will bring.” It was well-observed. She began to forgive him.

“You mean that Adrian has to consider his mother—and his own life—all over again? Can you guess how it is shaping in his mind?”

“To me they seem like people who are partly paralysed. He takes small revenges on her all day long, but he does not know yet what will happen to him. And she is old. It is too much for them all at once.”

Then Scylla settled down to listen to him. Slowly she pieced together how the time had passed. Felt how bad conscience was carrying its impure lamp, and memory throwing an acid ray over the house on the moor. She told Boris what they had been doing, the enquiries they had made among the estate agents, and the map Felix had drawn to show exactly what part of the downs and the valley Kralin intended to buy. He had bought nothing yet, but Felix’s map of his intentions showed their world nearly all gone red, and for the names of old bee-pastures, the words “golf-links,” “bungalows” and “shops.”

“He was getting ready before Felicity died. This began when she had left England for the last time. You don’t mean, do you, that in the excitement over Adrian’s father, they’d forgotten about the land?”

“You must remember that Adrian does not care, and that he is not allowing her to think about anything but him.”

“You are friends with him now, and it’s as well; but I am going to show you the letter she wrote to us last week. It is characteristic. When we saw what the map really meant, Felix decided that whatever the cost he would buy the middle stretch of the shore, which would at least hinder Kralin’s plans. We had plans for what we would do with it, something like Kipling’s story about the Bloody Picknickers and Angélique the pig. (You must remember that these places were hardly on the market. It was Kralin who went round and offered a big price if they would sell.) It would be very hard for Felix to afford it, but worth it, he thought, and right for Felicity’s sake. So he wrote to Aunt Julia, very civilly, and told her that he would go in with her for so much. But he got an answer, thanking him with that insolent coldness for which she is famous; and saying that if anything could be done, she preferred to do it herself. It is that kind of ungenerosity that rouses people against her. While if she is off her stroke now by having had a different father for Adrian, she may do nothing at all. D’you see?”

What Scylla thought malignant, Boris thought silly, and a consequence of giving women power. They went on talking, gently and eagerly to one another. Then Scylla said:

“How did you get away to-day?”

“I pretended I was going to see some Americans I had met in Starn. Adrian was lunching in Gulltown and he dropped me there. I said I might stay there to-night.”

“Kralin should be back. Come and spend it with us.”

“Bien.” They got up and walked out onto the green, past the stone. She said:

“Sad little war we’re fighting.”

“I see now that when our Revolution came it was like this. We fought of course, but we’d no chance. Europe wouldn’t help us—”

“That doesn’t explain why the Bolsheviks stayed in power. They might have seized power, but how did they keep it?” Boris did not know. Scylla did not know. They stood side by side, ash-fair waves and black tendrils of hair stirring on their temples, their eyes raised to the long green hill they must cross between them and the sea.

They went by the road, because the lower fields of the hill-path were down for corn, and the track invisible. To the right of them and to the left, the inland valley ran wide and shallow between the downs. A river of green, its length squared into strips, corn or roots or hay or pasture, patched with round trees or triangular roofs of grey luminous stone. But in spite of its field-squaring, the valley flowed between its windy banks, and the high downs’ dim green. Flowed from Starn in the east, out of the sunrise, down to a bay in the west; flowed out into the sunset between Gault’s vast cliffs and the green paws of the downs. Birds crossed the valley by air, men and cattle climbed by stony paths. There was one road down it and one road across, the road by which they were mounting, over one shoulder of its banks, to the open sea: to the two houses and their village; to Taverner-land. Not an exciting valley nor an enchanting; not a spectacle or a diversion; without nucleus or “a place to see.” (Starn with its towers supplied that, and few people looked further.) In no way celebrated, without special mana, not like Taverner-land; but a river, a stream of life, in its small tide of men and its larger tide of beasts, in its wind and fruit and leaf and corn-flow. One of the streams of England, whose spring where it rises is the life-source of a people.

—“Kralin would make this also his kingdom?”

“He has precedent in England,” said Scylla bitterly.

The hill road was very long, and whoever first chipped it out of chalk and flint, and slung its links across the high downs, the Romans had nothing to do with it. Near the crest, scarlet face turned to scarlet face.

“I am not,” said Boris, “a snob, but it would be intolerable now if Kralin overtook us in his car.”

Over the crest, the wind met them, delicately off the fish-patterned sea. They drew aside from the road a little onto the grass, so that if anyone passed on the road they might see them and not be seen. A mile and more away the ribbon of the Sacred Wood widened at the top into its fan. Below them the chimneys of Felicity’s house pointed grey fingers among the orchard tops. Below it the village wandered seawards. The Sacred Wood hid the Taverners’ house, but the field-path that bound the two houses like a ribbon, was clear at that height.

“The links,” said Scylla, “are to go in the middle of everything. The bull that Marshallsea, the farmer, keeps in the middle field, footpath or no footpath, will go. So will the hazel copse where you find the best small birds.

“Comment?” said Boris.

“A description of Kralin. Two fair specimens your land has sent to this oldest of the old part of oldest England.” She laid her hand on his and he smiled.

“We must be the only Russians it has seen.”

“There was another. A tale I heard from my father. About seventy years ago there was a wreck here, and another Russian was washed up. A passenger on a ship coming to England with furs, his own furs, to sell. There’s a cottage not far from here with a rug in it, now worn and trimmed and declined and fallen to a bedroom mat, which came out of his cargo. Well, the vicar put him up, and they salvaged what they could, though everyone round about that winter was wearing furs. Then the vicar’s wife fell in love with him. Went away with him to Russia, and years later, the Russian sent back her body to be buried in the churchyard. It was the same vicar, and he didn’t know what to do about it, or how he was going to bury his own wife under the circumstances. The curate did it, I think. A year or so after that a russian son turned up, saying that he had come to fetch some furniture that had belonged to his mother. There was a new vicar by then, and they couldn’t find any for him to take. But to quiet him down and get rid of him—it seemed that he upset the people very much—they told him to take something out of the vicarage. He chose a grandfather clock, and drove off with it in a fly, with its head sticking out of the window, ticking like mad and striking at the wrong times and nearly all the time. He took it out at Starn Station and stood it on the platform, and went off with it in the train; and that was the last that was seen of him. But the old station-master when I was a child remembered the clock.”

The afternoon began to hint of evening, like a loved guest taking his leave, introducing delicately, confidently, his successor. With the turn of the tide, the sea, a mile away below them, called attention to itself. The light on it had changed, for the flashing diaper of light-scales, a plain of pure colour, a looking-glass for the sky. From one grey finger on Felicity’s roof rose a question-mark of smoke.

—“That’s the library fire. Kralin must be back.” The slight coil that the wind broke as it rose above the tree-level, recalled them to themselves, to what was being done to them. For an hour they had been released from what they knew, climbing the hill, sitting on the top of their world, recalling old tales of its valleys. Nature has arranged this forgetfulness, but the recall is violent, as if the organism had only been rested for a sharper realisation of its pain.

“Ouf,” said Scylla, adjusting herself to it. Boris stared. He was beginning to see more what this meant to them, not to their pride or their pockets or their ambitions, not even to their personal loyalties and affections. The death of Felicity Taverner—the double death, to the body and to the memory of her—that was terrible, it held much of the horror of life, but as if in a crystal, in miniature. Full of anguish, it was at the same time, a manageable tragedy, and so to be endured. But behind it lay the second attack, immeasurably the most formidable, the attack on their bodies, nerves, roots, the essence of their make-up, in the attack on their land. To begin with—where would they live with Kralin in possession? Alongside of him and his friends? Scylla was asking this, and in her voice there was exultation and anguish, not under strict control:

“It is awful to see it now, in one mode of the perfected. And to know what is to be done to it.” Boris answered:

“I remember my sister a few nights before the Revolution began. It was very quiet of course in Petrograd, there were none of the great court assemblies, but she was going to a little party, almost her first one, of the great nobility. I was on leave and I took her. She wore pearl and silver shoes, and a little coronet of pearls and silver in her hair. She looked like a fairy-tree. Like you see them in Russia on winter nights. She is dead now, but I understand when you say it is the same here.” She nodded; one of the unsatisfactory gestures which shows sympathy, when the imagination is running away as fast as it can from someone else’s pain. She took up the burden.

“The links sprawl in the middle of everywhere. The road to the sea is tarred and widened and straightened. Along the shore there is a row of little bungalows, called High Jinks and Mon Repos. One side of the green is the parking-ground, and on the other side, a terrace of seaside houses, shops below and flats above. The barn below Felicity’s has the movies in it—he told me about that. He told the agents what he meant. They were most of them horrified on our account; could not understand why Adrian consented to sell. He is building a garage, so they tell me, with petrol pumps ‘in sight of the old house.’ Felicity’s ghost can look out through the windows and look at that.”—

A breeze shivered in the grass beside them, the short grass of the high places that springs out of the earth upright, with a kind of sturdy passion, as the ghost of Felicity Taverner trod their light crest, looking down into the sea-valley over her cousin’s head.

—“By each midsummer it will be trodden, worn and a little shabby; by autumn, bare and patched and tired out. The rest of the year it will be trying to cleanse itself, and as it begins to get clean again, the people will come back. All summer the greasy papers of their meals will blow about, the torn newspapers and the tins. They will blow to the boundaries of the Sacred Wood and clog in its thorns. They will clot in the hollows, and the rats will nose in and out of them after scraps. Until the land gives it up; and horrible weeds that stink will grow on rubbish-heaps, and it gets the sullen, chained, savage look that comes over country-places once man comes to defile them. Look. It is exquisitely civilised now. For centuries it has been doing that to itself. It is a nucleus, capable now of perfect expansion in terms of itself. It is for us to apply the terms, not destroy the formula.”

Boris nibbled pennywort leaves, squashy and saladish, growing between some stones. She nibbled too, for company, and the glow of evening began to adorn the land below them. As the shadows lengthened, it took the contours and moulded them into relief, and the slanting light showed the texture of each field, the character of each bush and tree. Felicity’s ghost sat down beside her cousin, who moved a little, as though disturbed by an unaccountable breeze.

“It is nothing,” she said; and Boris heard her begin to sing softly the letter song from Figaro.

Two men came towards them over the soundless turf, Adrian and Nick Kralin. The ghost left them.

It was Boris who suggested first that he was surprised that Adrian should visit Kralin secretly. Adrian answered that he had supposed Boris to be visiting friends in Starn. Boris explained that they were ill, and that meeting Scylla there, they had made up their differences.

“When I saw Boris in Starn,” she said, “I realised that we were too old friends to waste time on misunderstandings. To put things right, we came over here to wait for Picus and Felix, who are out in the boat. Are you—” she added, “coming to an arrangement of your own with Kralin?” All three ignored the man, until he said pleasantly:

“I think I’ll be getting back now—to the house.”

“Have you sold it to him, Adrian?” his cousin cried sharply. Adrian’s plans had changed. He had gone over to Kralin’s secretly, in several minds, but chiefly, as Scylla had gone herself, to find out if he really meant what he had said. No mystical perception of evil had seized on him. He had found Kralin a dirty piece of work, no doubt, but an interesting man; and instead of business, they had talked antiques. Nothing could have been further from their mood than to find two Parcae, under the shape of Scylla and Boris, sitting on a hill-top, looking down onto the roof of their house. Kralin said again:

“I suppose I can’t ask you all three back to a dinner of sorts.”

When he said that, a kind of grey blur moved across Scylla’s eyes. For weeks she and those she loved best had been living in anticipation of what this man would do. They had had no respite, on whom the fullest knowledge lay. The power that feeds anger began to work in her to the last ounce of its strength. Her delicately-cut face became a mask of short harsh lines, her breathing altered, there was something menacing in the unconscious movements of her arms and her hands.

“You dare to ask us to eat with you?” Boris glanced at her. This was the Scylla that he feared, the Scylla that he knew he could not restrain. At that moment, from the west, two long shadows announced their bodies across the grass. Felix and Picus joined them.

“We saw you two up here through the glass. What is happening?”

“He has just asked us to eat with him, in Felicity’s house—” Felix saw his sister’s face and stood beside her. Spat openly. Picus frowned. Boris deprecated. Adrian shrugged his shoulders and hesitated, standing between Kralin and his kinsman.

“Go and feed with him, Adrian”—and her voice chilled even the men who loved her—“Go and eat with the blackmailer, your sister’s murderer, the man who would sell the body of our land to the Jews.” Kralin answered her softly:

“You seem to be demonstrating to me, Scylla, that hard words break no bones.”

“But you will not leave here,” said Felix, “till you have heard them. From me as well from my sister.”

“You look,” said Kralin, “as if it is only fear of the law that keeps you from going for me.” To which Felix could only make the answer that he was not worth hanging for.

“I have called you by your right names,” said Scylla, in the same short hushed voice. Their horrible impotence, impotence fallen on persons who had once made short work of people like Kralin, was strangling her, as it strangled them all. She made three steps toward him, ahead of her men. Kralin stepped back. She stumbled forward onto the grass. Felix gathered her in his arms, saying to Adrian—“Get out.” Boris knelt down beside her and whispered in her ear. Got up slowly and turned to Adrian with his enchanting smile and led him a few paces off.

“It is better to leave them. It is they who suffer, they who despair.” Then to Kralin who joined them:

“You see, Monsieur, it is not possible for me to accept any hospitality of yours.”

“I suppose it has occurred to you,” said Adrian, “that you will hardly find them genial as next-door-neighbors.”

“I know, but is there anything like money with which to counter—or even persuade—difficult neighbours?” Adrian smiled uncertainly. Boris said amiably:

“That, Monsieur, sounds like the remark of a devil.”

Picus, Scylla, Felix, were standing with their backs to them, looking out to sea. To this melodrama their impotence had driven them. Their arms were round her as if they were holding her up. Without looking back they walked away along the down top, in the now level light, straight into the sun.

“Where, mon ami,” said Boris, “is your car?”

“Outside the house.” With his arm in Adrian’s, Boris made off, east to the gate onto the road and the hill, then due south to Kralin’s front-door. Kralin followed them just behind. There Boris turned.

“Now that we have made our little gesture, may we come in and eat with you?”

It occurred to Kralin to wonder why this young man should be taking it so easily. Yet it was reasonable to see why he should, why he should wish at least to keep all the Taverners as quiet as possible. Kralin guessed at his position. Too occupied with their own affairs, they might be too busy for his. But he had left his original Taverners very quickly to return with Adrian to his house. Probably Adrian Taverner was of more importance to him; but it had the air of a volte-face. He must have decided to follow Adrian’s fortunes at all costs. Yet it did not quite fit. He would keep the tenth of an eye on him, the fraction of attention one gives to such side-issues. He had a stranglehold on the Taverners. He had nothing to hesitate about, and little to fear. Suppose the young man had come spying—? Let him, if he could afford the devotion that implied. What could he expect from people as poor as his Taverners? Kralin knew also that this might only be his cynicism making the easiest assumptions. Knew, allowed for it, and did not care. He would find out though about his family in Russia. The evening passed, and all that Boris said about their native land—to Adrian’s surprise, who had heard a version of the truth—was that he had been too young to remember much about the Revolution; that his family was a Kadet branch, and that several of them had found employment under the new régime. He assumed Kralin’s views to be in sympathy and asked no questions. Once he was seen to look pale, spoke of the fire’s heat and went out into the garden in the dark. When he came back, Adrian said:

“When we go back to London, I hope Boris is coming in with me.” And Boris had hoped that he would. An understanding was created; that no good could be done by discussing a painful matter—Boris deprecated at the idea before a stranger like himself—; that reflection might produce a better feeling; that Kralin might possibly modify his plans. He had no objection to this. Let them think that they might at least save their faces. So again they talked about acquaintances and about antiques. Kralin then told them that he had a friend in Paris with a taste for the baroque, and how when he had been in Spain he had found for him some pyxes of that period. Gilt tin trash, but decorative; they had painted over the signature of Christ on the plaque with more amusing symbols; and arranged for them to glitter along the dark furniture of the studio like altar-lights.

“How french,” sighed Adrian.

“Did you know,” said Kralin, “that there are such things as obscene ikons? I was given one the other day. A whole lot are being made cheap to be sent out to Russia. A friend of mine is doing them.” He went to fetch it. It was the same subject as the ikon Boris had lost; and, as Kralin said, obscene. Boris—intermittently devout—surprised Adrian by saying amiably:

“It is for your campaign against superstition?” Kralin assented. Adrian as well as surprised was uncomfortable. Vile taste one would expect from Kralin, and he had not thought Boris capable of such control. He began to talk at once about removing the over-painting from ikons of the old schools.

Again Kralin did not know quite what to make of it. He had noticed Boris say something to himself when he recognised the subject of the ikon; saw that his eyes were looking through his surroundings, and then the nod he had made to himself as of some decision taken. He reflected and dismissed it all again, with the solution that this young déclassé had decided to make the best of things, and to try and get something out of him also. It would be as well to find out what that was.

“I am going over to Moscow shortly, but before I go, you must come and see me in London. You draw, don’t you? I’ve a commission on my hands, illustrations from the Gospels for a People’s Chapbook. What you might call a restatement of the story in terms of those ikons. In the traditional manner, but with a proletarian rendering. If you would care to do some sketches, it strikes me that your name might have propaganda value.” Adrian fidgeted.

“I don’t think you can expect Boris to be as sympathetic as that—” Boris shrugged his shoulders.

“Not quite perhaps. But one wants to live, my dear Adrian.”

“I suppose,” said Kralin, “that you are in touch with many of your émigrés. All sorts of propaganda is to be found there if it could be tapped. Napoleon showed us what could be done with royalist names. If you can think of anyone. We might meet in Paris also. You live there, don’t you? I shall be there on my way back.”

“My family,” said Boris, “were exceedingly liberal. My father used to say that changes were necessary and would happen. He has certainly lived to see them—” Adrian gasped. They got up to go. But this time it was Adrian’s car that refused to move. They did things to it, while Kralin held a lamp that wavered and finally blew out. Adrian said that they would go to the inn. Kralin insisted that they should stay the night. Once indoors again, Boris astounded Adrian by refusing more than a final glass to drink.

An hour later, in their bedroom, alone with him, he said:

“Boris, what on earth do you mean? Even I do not understand why you should alter your whole family history to be au mieux with the worst enemy my family and your friends are ever likely to have. What do you think you’ll get out of it?” Boris sat on the foot of his bed, looking, as he noticed, very wise and serene.

“What, my dear Adrian, do you?”

“With me it’s different. I’m hanging about the man for my people’s sake, for my dead sister’s sake if you like. To find out what he really means, and how far he will go. To try and get round him if I can. It’s my duty, I suppose. (If I have to sell him this house, it will be for both our advantages.) Someone has got to do this, and not hide in hysterics, like my cousins in that place of theirs they call enchanted, and I call a ghost parade.” Boris nodded. Adrian resented his air of acceptance and indifference.

—“While considering your relations with them, do you think it quite decent for you to be here?”

“It is all right, mon ami. I want you to believe that I am doing it so that I may find out something. Something which may be useful to us all. Remember that we come from the same country. But to do what you all want, it is necessary that I play this rôle. Quite soon you will understand—”

“You want me to believe this, but I want to know if it is true. What is this plan?”

“I cannot explain yet. You will see. We could not think of anything, Scylla and I. We sat on the hill together, and then it came. It was I who saw it. Like a little baby born by her wild anger that I have brought home— But I must have a little more time to think.” He giggled and sprang into bed.

—“Do not ask me any more now. To-morrow you will see. My English is all going, but let me instead ask you why your mother will not let Felix help her to buy the land.” Adrian had need of new stories to fortify him against his mother. He listened to Boris, collecting material for a fresh scolding of her. The day had been long. The two young gentlemen fell asleep.

The next morning Boris went on puzzling a drowsy Adrian by being the first to get up. As he watched him dress it seemed that in his quick precise movements there was something of a soldier, and that his toilette that morning was one that a fastidious man might make before a campaign or even before a battle. When he was ready he came over to Adrian’s bedside.

“Listen to me, mon ami. I cannot tell it to you all now, but I have found something out. Something for the discredit of this man, something that he has done. If we use it against him, it may give us power and save us. But as it is I who have found it out, it is better that I should tell him. So, do you make the car to march this morning, while I take him out and talk to him—” Adrian meditated on this as he in turn got up. Boris came back again, his shoes brushed with dew.

“You will do this for us, Adrian? You will leave him to me until mid-day?” Adrian said that he would. It was too early in the day to have opinions. After breakfast they found the car still immovable. Adrian said that he would go and find help in the village. Boris said to Kralin:

“Do you feel it is yet too early for us to go for a swim?”

“Yes,” said Kralin, decidedly, and went on to explain how rocky the cove below the village was, and how necessary it was for him to find the best places.

—“I see I shall have to buy Cousin Taverner out. He has places of his own, the further side of the wood, along the coast.”

“Come with me. I will show them to you. I know that they are all three going to Starn to-day.” Adrian could hardly believe it when he saw them setting off together down the village road to the sea. Boris seemed to be talking all the time, and Kralin strode along beside his light step, glancing right and left, as a man does when he is placing where things should go.

Then it occurred to Adrian, left alone in the house, that it might be possible to find out where Kralin kept the papers. He knew the furniture of the house. It had an ancient safe, and he had seen Kralin use its key and knew that he carried it with him. By process of elimination he decided, in less than an hour, that his sister’s papers must be inside. He left the house to see to his car.

Outside the morning passed with heavenly quickness. The moon had pulled the tide out early, a spring tide; and the great flood, the Channel wind had roughened, hung chafing, balanced on its turning-line. Travelling inland, the wind fell, and split up into little breezes and catches, dying against the huge wall of the downs, like another, invisible sea. They walked round the bay, and halted first on the Dancing Rocks, the squared spur of gold stone that ran out from the end of the Taverners’ wood, smooth and flat, gently under the sea. Kralin said:

“Your Taverners are safe, I think. I shall hardly want to buy this off them to drown my visitors. They will need an alternative to a dive-off rock into dangerous currents or lying scorched and cooking in a tide-pool.”

“Ah,” said Boris, “but if you like I will show you their secret place. You will not know it, but round the point there is a small cove that the cliffs hide, and a perfect pool to swim in whether the tide is in or out. A place they would not show me. I found it. Perhaps your wife would not even show it to you. It is opposite a rock that makes an island, out there in the sea. The island has a cave, which you cannot see from this side, and a rock-path when the tide is out between it and the cave. Shall we go there? We can walk out to it now before the tide comes in.”

“Pity,” said Kralin, “it is really too far off.”

“But when your houses reach all around the bay—And you could cut a path to it direct through the wood. Allow me to show it to you, at least.” The day was beautiful. Kralin assented.

He followed Boris round the coast. Between huge boulders they went, Boris leaping, Kralin stumbling and splashing through pools, until they came to a sheltered angle of the coast, and Boris sprang onto the round back of a boulder and called to Kralin to look. They had left the low shores of the Taverners’ bay, above them were the downs, breaking off into the precipices of Gault cliffs. A trackless, sheep-wandered land, savage with thistles; bird-flown, sea-hammered, a desolation of loveliness whose “visible Pan” has not yet found its real name.

Kralin peered round a boulder and saw a tiny cove, and a little cascade, hung with ferns, not trickling down the rock-face, but undulating in a trembling scarf, and then running clear across a sand-arrow into the sea. A piece of pure pastoral, unvisited. And beside the sand there was a basin of rock, a swimming-pool, just as Boris had said. And from the swimming-pool a rock-track, flat as pavement, linked the place with a little island out in the great bay, under Gault.

“You see,” said Boris, “and the little island. It has grass on it and birds. On the other side there is a cave. It is large and full of interest. If you really intend to possess yourself of this land, you must make your people go there and give them things to eat. And since it was I who showed it to you, I shall expect a commission.” He laughed—his laugh which could not be thought of in the same breath as money—“Come with me, Monsieur Kralin, and we will see the cave.” Kralin demurred.

—“No, but you must. You cannot see it from here. There is a sheltered place on the other side and one or two little trees. And the cave. Before the turn of the tide.”

“I’m afraid it is too far to be of any use.” But he let Boris lead him, across the causeway, to the island, towards the returning sea.

“Go first,” said Boris. “What I have to show you must come to you as a surprise. When we arrive, keep to the left of the rock.” He walked across after Kralin, following him quickly and once or twice he looked back, to the high empty land, to the untrodden beach. The eyes of man, if there had been any eyes, would have seen two men walking along a rock-path, at low tide, to an island in the sea. Two men, and then he might have rubbed his eyes, and asked if there was a third, or what was making the confused transparency, that the sea-sparkle and weed-dark showed through, as of a shadow threaded with brightness that followed them.

“Ai, Ai,” a gull cried overhead. They reached the island. For some minutes there had been a stirring in the tide pools, their surface not yet broken, their cups not over-flown, but as if they were troubled from beneath. It was the first turn of the tide.

On the island, gulls were mewing like cats over some sea-scraps, débris from a ship. On the sea-face, cutting them off from sight of land, the cave opened its mouth. Caves are a fascination for the greater part of mankind, which is seized with a proper desire to explore them at once. But one of the instincts which had been left out of Kralin was the wish to visit caves. He peered in. Boris glanced for a second out to sea. There was a steamer on the horizon, a fishing-boat low down also, and they almost below the level of the sea.

“Isn’t it generally under water?” asked Kralin, who knew almost as little as it is possible for a man to know of such places, hardly enough to judge the tide marks, not hiding his discontent. Without the slightest taste for anything he had been shown, he had been brought a very long, rough, empty way, by a man who probably wanted to get something out of him. People had often wanted to sell him things, but—it made him laugh—no one had ever before tried to sell him a cave. How pleased his Taverners would be with their friend. He had seen the place long ago from the cliffs. Then he remembered how one afternoon he had amused himself, when Felicity had wanted to take him to the island. He had come part of the way with her, and stopped half way and staged some sulks. Now some one was wanting him to buy her precious place. Well, he might see if anything could be made of it, with a motor-boat for excursions and a faked story of its history. Boris was saying:

“The tide does not come to the upper end. I have kept something inside to show you.” They went further in, and Kralin noticed that by some action of the sea on a chalk out-crop, the cave’s wet floor was paved with round pebbles which were white, very pure white; and in the pools as pure a green; and there were jelly-fish like red flowers. He appreciated the sight. Altogether the lighting was strange, and inside they were standing so low down that they could only see the wave-sparkles out to the horizon and not the sky. A connoisseur in sensations, he relished a fear that came to him—that where they were walking was really underneath the sea; that already it was creeping back on them; that in three hours they would be standing underneath the ocean, in the darkness of the roots of the rocks.

“Further on,” cried Boris, mounting what looked like a wall, a partition between the place where they were and an inner cave. A very long, very dark cave, full of water up to the barrier and at the end, a patch of what looked like the beginning of more light, from what must be an opening, a lunette high up on the landward side of the rock.

“Up here,” called Boris, and gave him his hand. The barrier that divided the caves was broader than it seemed, and ran in a path round one side of the inner cave, beside a pool of water that filled its floor, absolutely clear and still.

“You see,” said Boris. “You see that light high up, far off at the end? You understand? That is a siffleuse, a blow-hole. What a spectacle when the tide is high and the wind is driving the sea—” (Lesson he had learned from Scylla. Lesson that it had wearied him to learn. Lesson he had learned for this moment.) “When the tide is high it fills this cave and the other. Always it forces in more water and more. Till this cave can hold no more. And it bursts—bursts—out of that window at the end—bursts out of the island—in a spout of water and a voice that is like a bull. A little further—” Edging Kralin a few feet round the path by the side of the pool, he fell back a pace.

—“Look into the water, Kralin. It is flat, like glass, and you will see a man drowned.” Kralin said, after staring at his own face:

“I see nothing.”

“But you see yourself. That is what I have brought you here to see. Bien.” Instantly as he said it, Kralin understood. Why he had been brought there; what was to be done to him; what Boris was. In a single flash that was like an image, but shapeless—as a stone is shapeless. It made no difference that he heard himself told not to move, that Boris was covering him with Felix’s automatic borrowed for practice with Adrian. He had not been trained in the kind of courage that is of use at such a time. He stared: “Felicit—” he said and swallowed, tasting his death.

“You know,” said Boris. “It is good. It is enough. You are to die for what you have done; for what you were going to do. But I shall not die for making you die—” and with his whole strength he hit Kralin a blow on the jaw, knocking him backwards, so that his head struck a point of rock sticking out of the wall of the cave. He fell full length on the path. Boris knelt beside him, turned him over, considered the torn contusion at the back of his head. Examined his body attentively. He was not in the least dead. He rolled his body over into the pool, and when it had sunk, weighted its chest with some stones.

Then he withdrew to the outer cave; then carefully, from behind a rock, lest eyes should come and stare at him out of the sea, he considered the tide. It was coming in fast. In an hour the caves would be awash. He had only to stay there and see that Kralin did not recover consciousness and struggle up before he was drowned. He was drowning now inside, stunned at the bottom of a sea-pool. He had feared for a moment lest he should die before he was drowned. There was very little more to do, but he must not be seen. “It is all over, Scylla, Felix, Picus. All over for you, mes biens aimés. Hush, Scylla, hush. You can forgive him if you like. Hush, Felicity, hush. Have you met his ghost yet? Are you afraid of his ghost? But is not this right? Ghost of Felicity, is not this what had to be? You know that, for we’ve felt you about us and you have not prevented us. One thing I have put right, who have not put many things right. If ghost meets ghost and he can torment you again, you know that no more of his harm can come to friends or lovers or islands or trees—” A little wave broke over his shoe— “It was stupid of you, Kralin.” A flicker of water iced his ankle. He looked and saw the sea-floor dancing in on them. He went back into the inner cave. Kralin was lying on his back, as he had left him, his limbs spread out a little under the water. Then Boris remembered what he had forgotten to do, and that he must not return wet. He stripped, taking off his clothes carefully and laying them on his raincoat, he let himself down into the pool, deep as his waist, and searched Kralin’s pockets for his keys. Found them in a pocket-book, laid them on his clothes and went through the papers. Replaced the case on the body with Kralin’s cards and his ticket for the Reading Room of the British Museum. Kept some letters and seven pounds, ten shillings in notes. “The payment of the executioner,” he said. Then he rolled the stones off his chest and dressed again. Went out of the cave and returned quickly to the shore by the causeway, now just awash. Once on shore, he left the little cove until he found a place where it was possible to climb the cliff. Mounted to the top and then stood about in view of all Nature, giving a perfect mime of a man looking anxiously up and down a dangerous coast for a friend who is out of sight. Along the cliff-top he made his way back to the Dancing Rocks, turned up through the narrow end of the Sacred Wood, along its green pebbled path to the house.

He had sent a note to the Taverners early that morning. They were waiting for him. Their night had been an exhausting interlude. Scylla had lain in fever. Picus had sat up in bed watching her by the light of a candle, whose star-flame made their room seem enormous. Felix, also sleepless, had joined him. They had watched together, giving her to drink, and as she seemed not to hear them, talking in whispers. In spite of the windows wide open, the room seemed impenetrable by the spring night, to have become an organism in itself, a presence, full of secrets—and memories—not of their bridal-nights. They were shut inside this room become a thing, as if they were unborn organisms inside an egg. Scylla’s fever mounted. The air seemed to grow hot, but not from the small fire Picus fed with dried bog-myrtle and scented sticks.

“I feel I am going to be hatched,” Felix whispered, “and not out of the right egg or into the right nest.” The hours passed and they dozed, Picus beside her, Felix across the foot of the bed. In turns they fed the fire and gave her to drink. With some reaction from anger or vision, she had been ill from the moment they had led her away along the hill. They did not know what Boris had said to her, hope of whose loyalty they had given up. With the light, Felix left them and they all three slept. Lover by lover, side by side. Once she had murmured to them: “It will be all right only if we love each other enough.” And Picus had seen Felix weeping quietly.

After breakfast Boris’s note came. In it he said what he had told Adrian, that they were to say nothing and to wait for him. Scylla had dressed and come downstairs and gone about the house with Nanna. And Nanna had given them all three things to do, as she had done when they were children.

It was after mid-day when they heard whistling in the wood, and saw Boris come out of it and cross the lawn. The men sprang to meet him, but Scylla stood still against the door of the house.

“Quickly,” he said—“Kralin is caught on the little island by the tide. See, I have his keys. He dropped them. I have told him what I know about him and that it would send him to prison; and I have made your peace, such peace, with him. He will do nothing now. And he is expecting you to lunch. He cannot leave the island till the tide goes out. He is standing on it, shouting. But I do not know that he is there. You must go over as though you were expecting him. And Scylla, you must get rid of Adrian. While you, Felix, will get the papers. Here are his keys.”

Warm cordial of revenge, of action, poured into Felix. He took the keys, took his sister’s arm and swung her up; and no one but Boris saw, as the two sprang off, that the look in her eyes had changed. Star-dark and charged with awe as they had been all day. While Felix’s were suddenly star-bright.

“Remember. He is expecting us to lunch. Our differences are settled. Picus and I have gone to meet him.” He saw them skim away like lapwings. Once they were out of sight, he led Picus into the wood, out of earshot of anything but the trees.

“Scylla knows already,” he said. “Do you know, Picus? Kralin will not come back. He was stunned and fell into the pool at the back of the cave. But we must pretend that he is coming back. Go back and tell Nanna. Tell her that we are going to his house for lunch, that we are now going to meet him, who went for a walk along the coast. And you must say that it is true to yourself. Till you believe it. Tell the story to yourself. In half-an-hour, when we do not find him, you must begin to be unquiet. A very little unquiet. This is what you have to play, Picus. Picus, do you understand? He sent me back to invite you. We are not really anxious, not for some time yet. Not until the big tide and the strong wind with the voice like a bull blow his body up the siffleuse—”

“Be quiet, Boris.” Then, looking at him, Picus saw that it was not hysteria, but rapture.

—“How does Scylla know?” (How had he known she had known? How did he know now that he had known himself all the time, that his time-sequences had gone into reverse so perfectly that he had not troubled to consider it?)

—“How did you do it, Boris?”

“Do you want to know now?”

“Only if I’d better. And I had better not. But now what we have to do is to tell the same story. I burned your note.”

“Bien. Then I will tell you what we have to tell. We walked upon the cliffs along the coast and discussed an agreement between us and some employment he could give me. We sat down on the grass. Below us we saw the little island, still to be reached on foot. He said to me that his wife had greatly loved this island, and that he would go there and remember her alone. He climbed down the cliff. (It can just be done there. I have tried it.) I did not wait for him. I said I would take his message back to you, and we would return and meet him. To give him time, I went for a walk—yes—to the rabbit-warren, a little inland. It is all right, I have been there. There I stayed, watching the rabbit-play, from where the island cannot be seen. Then I came up to the house to tell you. It is without fault. When he fell into the water in the inner cave, he was not yet dead.

“Attention, Picus. We are going to meet him now, meet the man who has been mourning for his wife, your cousin, on an island which she loved. We walk, we expect, we stare, we pause, we call—”

At the end of the wood they met a shepherd and asked him if he had seen a gentleman anywhere on the cliffs or below them on the rocks. The shepherd had seen no one about that morning. They walked along the edge of the rising cliffs till the island came in sight, and between the island and the shore ran a hundred yards of shallow bright water. “In there,” said Boris, pointing to the island. Picus repeated to himself, “In there.” In the island tomb. But neither of them knew that. They were walking to meet a kinsman, who had gone out there dry-shod to meditate in a place dear to his dead wife. He heard Boris say to himself: “I spoke of Felicity.” Wondered what sort of pre-funeral discourse had been forced upon Kralin. How had the man faced his death? Had he stared or whimpered, fought or entreated? Boris was intact. He could hardly have protested much.

A few minutes later, for the benefit of possible spectators and for their own, they were calling “Kralin! Kralin!” A gull-noise it made, repeated. “Kralin! Kralin.” They followed it with a perfect mime of bewilderment, not yet growing to anxiety, but to annoyance. “Damn the man,” said Picus to the earth. Until they set off back to the house by two different ways, with gestures of separation to show that they did not intend to miss him. Entering the wood by a side track, Picus noticed that he was almost forgetting that the man was dead.

At the house he went at once into the kitchen, to tell Nanna that they would not be back to lunch. How they must have missed Kralin, and would go over to his house to wait for him. How Mr. Boris had found a way out, how Kralin had agreed and their troubles were over. That if he came back their way, she was to send him across the valley quickly to join them at his house. The old nurse, topping and tailing gooseberries, did not look up from her work. Boris followed him into the kitchen.

“I cannot see him anywhere. Where is it that he has got to?” The old nurse looked up at him.

“Is that you, Mr. Boris dear? Be off with you to Mr. Adrian’s house. If the man who married Miss Felicity doesn’t come, you had best tell the coast-guards. The tide will be in by then.” They left the kitchen softly. Crossing the first field, Boris said:

“When will his body come up?”

“I don’t know. The tide may pull it out to sea, and it will never be found.”

“Then it will not blow out from the top?” Picus explained how that could only happen if there was a great storm, and the blow-hole worked in a jet with the strength of the Atlantic behind it.

The sea was entering the cave, swilling round it and falling back; swilling round it faster and faster; mounting to the brim of the dividing rock. Spilling over it, a few drops, then a lip of water, splashed and then stirred the laden pool within. Until a sudden water-crest broke in on it, setting its weeds awave, stirring the body of the man who lay on its white floor. Stirred the body, shifted it; and now with its full rush was lifting it as the sea piled up the long gallery of the cave.

That is what they did not know. They were going to have their lunch and wait for him; for a man just out of sight, meditating in some cleft in a rock, or walking the downs in remorse for his wife, or hiding because he intended them some discourtesy.

In the warm dust of the lane, it seemed a long way from the sea. As though there was no sea. Telling themselves that they were hungry (Boris was hungry), and that Kralin must be somewhere. —He might have returned, by some trick, before them, and had no business to keep them waiting—they opened the garden gate. On the threshold, Felix met them.

“Scylla’s taken Adrian for a walk. I wish it had been for a ride. S.A. comes in useful. I’ve got the lot. Out of the safe. Went down the lane—no good trusting Adrian anywhere near them, and they’re under the hay in the barn.” Scylla and Adrian came in.

“We are very obedient to you, Boris. Have you time now to tell us what it is all about?”

“Plenty,” said Picus, “unless Kralin is cut off somewhere by the tide, he seems to have disappeared.”

“Let us eat our lunch,” said Boris.

“I must know what has happened,” said Adrian. They followed one another into the dining-room.

“Wait,” said Boris to Adrian, “he will tell you himself when he returns.”

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.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of Death of Felicity Taverner, by Mary Butts.]