1
ALL roads led to Edward Fairfield. His atheism, his sister, Aunt Hester’s opposition, all conspired to fling Sheila into the polite dispassionate arms of that rational young graduate from Cambridge. Kay had offered romance without intellectual comradeship: Edward offered a kind of business partnership in the propagation of rational atheology, and this proved an irresistible bait for a spirited girl hustled by disaster into premature cynicism. Edward concerns us no further, save that he married her, respected her, and practised upon her the editorials that appeared week by week in his own paper The Iconoclast. Everything that he did was in perfect taste and supported by a perfect reason. When, for example, she declared their marriage a failure, he provided her with a pair of admirable rooms in his own well-appointed house, and lived thereafter in contented celibacy. He was just to the point of inhumanity; but she, a disappointed woman, was not just. The efficient elegance of her home afflicted her. It seemed a mere piece of machinery for the daily manufacture of well-bred happiness. Her two rooms, until she had transformed them, seemed sleek, complacent: they announced to her, with the patient smile and in the incisive tones of a secularist lecturer, the supremacy of Reason. In herself, reason was far from supreme.
A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it without stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and more, before that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife, gave birth to a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what medley of motives, visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in a room pervaded by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself at intervals on the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of a dark yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed oval mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. There were photographs on the mantelpiece of Sophie’s father, of Sophie’s child, of Sophie, and one of Kay standing stiffly with a book in his hand—a cruel photograph, courageously signed by the photographer. Sheila gave no second glance to it.
She interrupted a remark of Sophie’s about the chapel Dorcas Society by saying, ‘Oh I forgot to ask—you don’t mind Bernard being here, do you?’
‘Bernard?’ Sophie was mystified.
Sheila pointed to the Irish terrier that was frisking round her.
A little ripple of merriment came from Sophie.
‘Do you call the dog Bernard? How funny! I love dogs, but father doesn’t care for them.... But of course he won’t mind yours,’ she added hastily.
Sheila tried to puzzle out how Mr. Dewick could even have a chance of objecting to her dog, but just then a diversion was created by the entry of a rather plump old-young man in a morning coat rubbing his hands together and making an indeterminate noise in a vague endeavour to be hospitable. He wore a little brown moustache and short side-whiskers near the ears. His hair had receded considerably, more especially where the parting was, and had left an expanse of shining brow.
‘Well, well,’ he said, nervously cheerful. ‘How are you after all this while? I’m sure we’re very pleased.’
Sheila recognized him instantly, although there seemed indeed nothing of the old Kay left to recognize. Yet this was Kay. This was he who years ago under the moon had whispered to her, with eyes full of dreams, his boyish love. Shades of the meeting-house had closed on that boy for ever.
Almost sick with disappointment, she shook hands with him, and quickly sought refuge in responding to the terrier’s still frantic demonstrations.
‘I hope you like my dog,’ she remarked to Kay, shy of using his name.
‘Yes, yes, fine fellow,’ responded Kay. ‘Come on, good dog, good dog!’
He patted the dog awkwardly.
‘We call him Bernard,’ explained Sheila, afraid of the smallest hiatus. ‘George Bernard, because he’s Irish and vivacious.’
Kay looked puzzled. ‘But why ... do you call him George Bernard? I didn’t quite catch....’
‘After Shaw, you know,’ Sheila explained. ‘We suspect Bernard of having been a distinguished playwright in a previous incarnation.’
‘Oh I see!’ said Kay, his brow clearing.
But it was knitted again the next moment.
‘What was it the Reverend Aitken was saying about Shaw last Sunday, mother?’
‘I remember something,’ Sophie answered. ‘I think he said he was a mountaineer, didn’t he?’
‘Mountaineer,’ murmured Kay. ‘I think not. Ah no, mountebank! That was the word.’
Here Sheila joined the conversation in a mildly argumentative vein, but Kay sidetracked by waxing indignant over the attempted introduction of a liturgy into divine service. He had set his face against that, he assured them: every true nonconformist at the church meeting had set his face against that, and right feeling had ultimately triumphed over the incipient popery. It appeared indeed that the cosmos was being conducted in an entirely proper manner, except for the wanton behaviour of the east wind. He considered the east wind very dangerous. He became impressive and told a long story about a man of his acquaintance who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat, caught a chill, developed pneumonia, and had to take to his bed.
‘Dead in a week!’ finished Kay, dramatically and with relish.
Except for an appreciative murmur from his wife, the story was received in silence. Sheila with a stunned sensation was telling herself: ‘I would never have let him get like this.’ But Kay, misinterpreting the silence, began another story. It concerned another man who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat. This man had a similar series of adventures, his experience differing from the first man’s only in that he lingered for two days and then died, leaving a widow and five children. Kay could not remember whether there were three boys and two girls, or three girls and two boys. He began naming them on his fingers. There were Horace and George, Margaret and Vera. That made four. He was sure there was another one—he remembered the child perfectly as a baby, but he could not for the life of him recall its sex. He felt sure that its name began with F.
He became perplexed.
‘Mother, can’t you remember?’ he asked. The question was an accusation.
‘Remember what, dear?’ inquired Sophie in her gentle way.
‘The name of Tomlinson’s youngest. You remember Tomlinson.’
‘I don’t believe I do,’ said Sophie.
Sheila sat silent, limp under the burden of her disillusionment. She felt something like fear when Sophie, with a rapturous cry, ‘She’s awake!’, rose and darted from the room to fetch her little girl. To hide her nervousness she said, ‘Such an unusual name you gave her, didn’t you? What made you think of Robina?’
While Kay was losing himself in explanations Sophie came back, leading her baby daughter by the hand. The mother’s face was shining.
‘Oh!’ A passionate cry broke from Sheila. In a moment she was on her knees gazing with adoration at the flaxen-haired, elf-like child. For from the big dreaming eyes her vanished Kay looked at her; the wonderful boy dead and buried in a prematurely old man, lived again in this two-year old girl. Hungrily Sheila kissed the tiny face ... and once again she felt his arm about her and heard his boyish whispers.
‘Oh, give her to me!’ she cried, looking up over the child’s head at its father.
Kay’s face lit up.
‘I’ve got it now. I remember,’ he said triumphantly.
‘What?’ asked Sophie, troubled by Sheila’s emotion, and yet gratified by it.
‘Why,’ said Kay, ‘the name of Tomlinson’s youngest. It was Freddie. I told you it began with an F.’
He looked round with modest pride, and was surprised to see Sheila burst into tears.
So that was the solution of the problem. The beauty of life was only for the young, the very young. In a child’s heart and nowhere else the kingdom of heaven was to be found, a frail gossamer thing vanishing with the years. This was the common lot: by contact with the world to rub the down of paradise off our souls, to grow drab and dull in spirit, drab and dull in mind, even before that waning of physical strength which alone could assuage the bitterness of the process. In Kay youth had died; in Edward—Edward had never been young; but in herself youth lived and craved more life. Yes, it lived still, but now it was stricken and dying.
It flashed upon her then that she too could renew her youth. In a child she could live again.
But a child had been denied her.
She deemed her life to be already virtually finished. She would age from this moment: after a brief fever her mind would dim and even the desire for beauty would sink into oblivion. She tried to hope it would be soon, but the struggling youth in her cried out against the hope.