1
SOMEWHERE, no doubt, in Sheila’s personality, the story was written down; and she could have turned for young Redshawe the pages that she so seldom and so reluctantly turned for herself. She was an emotional but not a sentimental woman, and retrospect was a melancholy luxury that for the most part she denied herself. So far as she could she denied it to herself now, although the young man had troubled the deep waters of her mind. If for a moment she looked back her life appeared to her as a fruitless quest for something—who knows what?—for beauty, for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. Intimations of such a reality had again and again quickened desire within her. But, even in the moment of stretching out the hands to clasp it, ‘beauty vanishes, beauty passes’....
Half a century before, in her early teens, Sheila had emerged from her sister’s bedroom into the green distempered corridor of the school infirmary, hotly denying in her heart that Helena was dying. She wondered at the obtuseness of these people who had seen the sweet bloom of Helena’s cheeks and the lustre of her eyes, and yet drained their vocabulary of euphemisms hinting at death. Weak and wasted indeed she was, but full, still, of the serene joy that was her peculiar gift to the world. God couldn’t be so foolish or so cruel as to let Helena die. That would surely have been too sorry a joke even for the deity of Aunt Hester’s imagination.
‘Why is every one so silly?’ she complained to Aunt Hester, who had waited in trembling silence till her coming. ‘Helena’s getting better. Of course she is.’
‘Yes, dear,’ agreed Aunt Hester submissively. ‘Did you have a nice talk?’
‘We couldn’t let her talk much. She’s still so weak. But she said she would soon be out and about again.’
Tears began trickling down the lined leathery cheeks of Aunt Hester: cheeks that had suddenly the grotesque air of having been corrugated for the sole purpose of being wept upon. ‘Poor darling! Did she say that?’
‘Oh, aunt, why will you believe those silly people?’ Sheila’s voice rang out. ‘She must get well—she must!’
‘We must hope on,’ quavered Aunt Hester, furtively dabbing her eyes with a little sodden ball of handkerchief.
Sheila, alone in her faith, succumbed to the fear that tried to hide itself in anger. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘It’s a beastly shame ... to give up hope. Think how well she looks! She’s been making plans for the summer holidays.’
At that Aunt Hester turned away her head, hunched up her back, and frankly sobbed, leaning against the back of a chair. All her prim dignity had vanished, and for the first time Sheila saw in her aunt an old frail woman. The shock of that discovery passing, she stared for a moment in sullen misery at the queer-shaped convulsive figure; then turned abruptly away and went, dry-eyed, into their bedroom.
In bed she thought she could hear her sister’s voice in delirium, although she knew that there were two walls and a passage between them: it muttered interminably until she had to bite her lips together to prevent herself from screaming. Aunt Hester soon came into the room, undressed herself by moonlight, and tumbled on to her knees. She remained kneeling, with her face and arms lying limply across her bed, for what seemed hours; and Sheila stared stupidly at the ceiling and strained her ears at every trivial sound. For a moment she closed her eyes....
And when she opened them again, birds were chattering outside her window and pale dawnlight, like a ghost, was in the room. ‘Like a ghost,’ Sheila said, and shuddered. Aunt Hester was not there; her bed had not been slept in.
Sheila got quickly out of bed, a dry sob of fear breaking from her, and ran barefooted into the green corridor. She stood quite motionless for a while, one hand resting on the door handle, and listened; tiptoed a few steps up the passage, her eyes fixed dreadfully on the room that held Helena; and drew back again. Time became a throbbing agony. Her thought dizzied itself by ceaselessly revolving round the glazed white door that had brass figures, 17, screwed upon its middle panel, but her eyes steadily stared. ‘Seventeen,’ said some chattering thing in her brain: ‘that’s her age. Is that why they put 17, or is it a coincidence?’ But she was not to be distracted by silly questions. The door began to open.
Slowly the glazed white door that had stared back at her for so long, mutely reiterating ‘17,’ began to open, as though it had come to life. ‘A big white waistcoat,’ said Sheila’s chattering brain. Like a silly flat face it moved aside to make room for something that with funereal step passed out: a bent figure in black tight-fitting bodice and white lace cap. Aunt Hester’s right hand drew the door to behind her, and with an abrupt resolute gesture she flung up her head and stood, regally tall, a black figure of doom framed in the white doorway. In a silence like death itself the eyes of these two stricken creatures met.
That meeting of eyes was an icy blast in the green twilit corridor. It froze the running water of Sheila’s thought and made her catch her breath. Gradually, while they looked at each other, Aunt Hester crumpled and shrank again to the meagre dimensions of a bent old woman; she stumbled forward to meet her niece with feebly gesticulating arms. The next morning she had answered the mute question of Sheila’s eyes and was enfolding her rigid passive body.
The single word she saw forming on her aunt’s lips released the locked flow of Sheila’s thought. Her mind became once more almost insanely active. One dry gasp escaped her, and no other sound. The springs of pity were barren in her: this sobbing woman was a stranger. Helena was dead. She turned away from her aunt and went slowly back into the bedroom. Helena was dead. ‘Very well,’ said Sheila’s mind, and she, ignoring that, suddenly thought that if God were to appear to her at that moment she would strike him with her hand. And that would have been how silly! He would only laugh. Helena was dead. She stared, dry-eyed, out of the window and saw the sun newly risen in his glory. The leaves of the acacia were a luminous green; a thrush in its branches poured out bubbling melody. All the universe was alive with a stabbing futile beauty. Helena was dead.
No tears came to release the pent grief. Why was that? ‘Like the woman in the poem,’ muttered that mental chatterbox and began iterating ‘Home they brought her warrior dead. Home they brought her warrior dead.’ It was in a little red book. ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years.’ Was it ninety or eighty? And Rose was a girl’s name, but it wasn’t the nurse’s name. Rose a nurse. A nurse rose. Rise, rose, risen. And on the third day he rose again from the dead. Who was it did that? The little red book had an odd name on its cover.... And suddenly Helena came before her, alive, alive, and happy as she had always been. What nonsense. Helena was dead.... Like a city besieged Sheila fought against the cruel memories that invaded her.
Aunt Hester came with food on a tray, and urged her to try to eat something, just a morsel, just a sip. What was the good of it all? And the voice of Aunt Hester stayed with her interpolating dull remarks about funerals, trains, Penlington, nice to be home again, poor dear mother, make a friend of Jesus, try not to brood, into Sheila’s busy thought. But Sheila pushed them all from her. She was eager to brood. Without brooding, life was empty: a dry husk. She surrendered herself now, opened her heart to that host of memories: they tumbled in, a looting rabble. She lived over and over again her days with Helena: her thought sped through the years ever more quickly, until in a sickening rush it reached the dead wall of the present. Helena was dead, God had stupidly killed her. And would they have to try to sing a hymn about—what was it?—each within his narrow bed, safe home at last, Jesu’s breast, blend the living with the dead.... Aunt Hester was back again, urging her to cry. ‘You do the crying, aunt.’ Had she said that or only thought it? She wished Aunt Hester would go away with her talk of the kind nurse, just a sip or two, quite a peaceful passing dear, try to pray, home again soon, take her with us. What was the sense in saying ‘take her with us’ when Helena was dead? There was nothing to take home. There was nothing to take home except what was in the white room, number seventeen. They’d put it in a box ... not Helena; Helena was gone away ... Sheila was jealous of anything that came to thrust itself between her and her memories; but she could not still the almost febrile activity of her aching brain: her random thoughts danced on dizzily over the bottomless black pit.
Back in the house at Penlington. A locked room now, with It, shut up in a shiny coffin, on trestles. And to-day, at noon, It was to be taken away.
Noon. The long-tailed black horses trampled on Sheila’s heart. Six men entered the house and mounted the stairs—tramp, tramp, tramp—and stopped.... They returned more slowly, their breathing more noisy, their footsteps less regular. Sheila turned her face from the window lest she should find horror made visible.
She stood in the stuffy room, waiting for the others to come downstairs. Although the windows were wide open the atmosphere was stiflingly hot. The drowsy hum in which all summer sounds were merged floated in oppressively, and the clock’s ticking was a burden.
She was very uncomfortable and wretched in her black clothes; her gloved hands perspired. She caught sight, through the trees in the garden, of the waiting carriage.... Why were all these things necessary?
Uncle Peter came downstairs, followed by Aunt Hester and a school chum of Helena’s. Other draped figures came, including a strange girl-cousin with her husband; but none was of the slightest consequence.
In the crawling carriage now; and idiot birds were singing happily outside. Sunshine, dusty roads, blue cloudless sky, hot air, silly singing birds, the window-fittings in the carriage, Uncle Peter with his expanse of waistcoat and great gold chain and perspiring face, the split in the third finger of her black glove, the ill-repressed sniffling of the cousin, a scratch in the paint over Uncle Peter’s head, the houses and hedges moving slowly past them, people at the side of the road with raised hats, a team of cricketers in a distant field and the gleam of their white flannels in the sunlight: of all these things she was conscious, and of the black pit, Helena dead, and the slow miserable rumble of wheels.
She wondered why God would not speak to her. A new hope flickered. She would listen for His voice, that still small voice in the soul. But the only voice she heard, whether within or without, was Uncle Peter’s. ‘It really is hot,’ he said conversationally, as they got out of the carriage.
And now added to the horror and the heat was the sight of the coffin being borne into that squat evil building, that house of death, the cemetery chapel, and, presently, a dull droning voice in melancholy monotone:
‘In the morning it is green and groweth up; but in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered. For when thou art angry all our days are gone; we bring our years to an end as it were a tale that is told. The days of our years are three score years and ten.’
And Sheila, a tiny girl again, was having happy romps with Helena in a garden full of flowers and sunshine. Helena was clapping her hands and laughing; Helena was lifting her, shoulder-high, to kiss a very tall rose that was really a princess imprisoned by black magic.... And then she was going to Helena for her music lesson, and Helena pretended she was just an ordinary pupil (for that was part of the game) named Linda Smith. ‘And what are you going to play this afternoon, Linda?’...
‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’
The man was still there, the long-faced cadaverous man droning out his words. And now they were out again in the scorching sun, standing, the men bare-headed, round an open grave. She heard the women sobbing; she saw Uncle Peter with bent head, a great red boil peeping over his collar from the pink folds of neck. And now the coffin was being lowered. Something seemed to clutch her by the throat; but the tears would not come.
‘For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy....’
‘Come along, dear,’ said Aunt Hester, taking her arm. And Sheila, waking as from an evil dream, saw compassion looking out of the eyes of Uncle Peter. She was the centre of this tragedy. For an instant she luxuriated in the emotion of her position; enjoyed the accession of self-importance; rolled mourning like syrup on her tongue. She caught herself in the act; and her heart turned sour and said to her, ‘How hateful you are!’