2
Helena’s death is of signal importance in the history of Sheila because it was the occasion of her first serious quarrel with God. And though, as the years went on, she did in a measure make it up with Him, the reconciliation was never complete. She never ceased, from that day, to relish Mr. Hardy’s gestures of contempt for the President of the Immortals. The name of God, none the less, resumed something of its old majesty. She depersonalized Him, disembodied Him, transmuted Him from solid substance into a kind of immanent gas, a presence that disturbed her with the sense of elevated thoughts. She dabbled in the literature of popular mysticism, deriving comfort from its comfortable abstract phrases, its Cosmic Urges, its Universal Self. She read a text-book on Hegel; and the Hegelian paradox, ‘Being and not-being are identical,’ she rolled on her tongue until it assumed the flavour of truism. While she was on the crest of this enthusiasm Kay Wilton came, to renew the promise of a transcendental happiness.
But let us turn the pages more quickly until we come upon a Sheila of nineteen years, with the Kay adventure past but still fresh in her mind. With her school-friend Hypatia Fairfield she sat in a coign of the cliff at Selborne and gazed musingly at sea and sky. Sheila was too busy with her dream to be very interested in Hypatia’s talk about her clever brother who had just gone to Cambridge: his profound knowledge of history, his intellectual honesty, and his sarcasm poured so liberally on a certain Paley whose Evidences of Christianity he had been forced to study for the Little Go. Slightly bored by the recital of this brother’s deeds and sayings, Sheila began a little to scorn her friend’s sisterly partiality. Even the severe, the rational, the proudly unconventional Hypatia was not immune from that human weakness.
‘Have you ever liked anybody very much, Hypatia?’
‘Liked anyone?’
‘A boy, I mean.’
‘Why, of course, Edward——’
‘Oh, not your brother.’ Sheila waved an impatient hand. ‘Have you never been....’
‘Do you mean in love?’ asked Hypatia, in some surprise.
‘Well, yes, in love.’
‘No.’ Hypatia shook her head, firmly, but without the scorn that Sheila had half-expected to see. ‘I never have. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, I just wondered.’
For a moment Hypatia contemplated a distant ship. ‘Look at the sun on that sail,’ she said.... ‘Have you ever been?’
Sheila nodded, scrutinizing closely a smooth white stone she had dug up with her fingers from the chalky soil.
‘Yes.’
‘Did he know?’
‘Yes. There was a kind of engagement. It was while I was at St. Margaret’s.’
‘Do you mean it’s over now?’
Sheila began trying to explain everything. The effort took her away for a moment to the first dim beginnings of love, four or five years back, and then brought her swiftly to the greater glory and deeper pain of the year just gone. Hypatia listened with quiet attention to the rambling, shy, and inadequate narration.
‘It was at a Band of Hope that I first saw him,’ began Sheila.
‘Whatever made you go to a Band of Hope?’ asked Hypatia.
‘I had a friend, Sophie Dewick. She used to go. And they used to have lantern lectures and concerts and things. It wasn’t bad.’
The lantern slides had been a disappointment, being concerned almost entirely with graphical statistics about alcohol. The only picture worth while was that of a flea, magnified some thousandfold, happily reminiscent of the New Geology Reader and of Poe’s stories. This was an inadequate sugar coating to the pill of chemical analysis. But Mr. Beak made everything worth while—Mr. Beak, with spare figure, polished pate, and black bushy eyebrows. When he rose, lifting his hand for silence in order that he might announce ‘Hymn Number twenty-thwee—the twenty-third hymn,’ he seemed like a military commander admitting defeat but determined not to surrender; he seemed, to himself perhaps as to his sympathizers, the last champion of sobriety in a drunken world. This sense of desperate purpose pervaded the whole proceedings of which Mr. Beak had the conducting: the religious service had always this invincible air of being held round an open grave—the open grave of one who, without doubt, had sipped claret-cup at some festival in his youth and in riper years had taken to wife-beating, smoking, swearing, and the other vices incidental to dipsomania. Mrs. Beak, plump, rosy, and smiling, chatted pleasantly to every one and made optimistic secretarial announcements.
‘And that was where I met him,’ Sheila told Hypatia.
‘Did you lose your heart at once?’
‘Not a bit. There was something about him: I don’t know how to express it—a sort of mute poetry in his face. But I didn’t really give a thought to him then. He seemed a nice boy; nothing more.’
Later she discovered that he had sad grey eyes, a submissive mouth, untidy light brown hair. He wore his high double collar and his black tie with an incongruous effect, like a cherub masquerading as a clerk. Sheila’s interest in Kay, her urgent desire to protect him, led her into strange places; for he was a youth of inscrutable impulses. The Band of Hope was good fun; and to accept sometimes the hospitality of Sophie’s pew in a strange chapel full of green gloom was a defection from Wesleyanism that Aunt Hester found it easy to forgive: the easier when she reflected that it was a further step from the dreaded Popery. But the Seven Days’ Mission was something that taxed Sheila heavily. A new humility was growing upon her; the beatific vision of Kay drew her with a power she found irresistible. So innocent, so shy a boy, so unaware of his own attractiveness, he seemed to be crying out for sympathy. She read an unspoken appeal in his big eyes; she discovered a pathos of inexpressiveness in his lame confused speeches. That he admired her was a gradual revelation that at first she hardly dared to face: that she longed to know him and to be his friend she admitted to herself at once with her usual candour. Why then did this young prince, this strayed denizen of the celestial meads, choose such odd ways of spending his time? What force impelled him to attend that curious orgy of emotion, the Seven Days’ Mission? She found the riddle hard to read. Humbly and patiently she set herself the task of trying to understand these religious fervours.
Sheila and Kay talked rarely, and never of matters more deep than the Band of Hope, Pickwick Papers, the weather, the oddities of common acquaintances, and the mock-tragedy in blank verse that Clive Bunter had written for the Social Evening. The rehearsals for this play drew them together every Tuesday for four weeks; but the play was never presented to the public, for the dress-rehearsal was attended by Mr. Beak and Mr. Turley, and these gentlemen, deacons both, were seized with alarm at the prospect of theatricals, however innocuous, taking place in a lecture-hall so near the sacred precincts of the church.
Gloomily the actors dispersed to their several homes.
‘What rot it is!’ said Kay.
‘But they were awfully funny, those two,’ Sheila remarked. ‘People so comic must have a spark of goodness in them somewhere.’
‘Goodness!’ said Clive Bunter, ‘Gallons and gallons of it. It ought to be put a stop to, this monopoly of goodness. But as for brains—all the brains in the Band of Hope wouldn’t fill a pin’s head.’
‘You’re not including your own, are you?’ asked Kay.
Sheila, who considered Clive rather conceited, laughed with relish. She was at some pains to show her appreciation. Perhaps it was this that encouraged Kay to ask, when, later, she turned to leave the others: ‘May I come a little way with you?’
She said ‘Please do,’ and pointedly refrained from calling out ‘Good night’ to Sophie, who was walking some yards ahead with the Hero of the doomed play, a gentleman by whom of late she had been rather engrossed.
Sheila and Kay walked for a while in silence down a broad avenue of trees bordered on one side by dark woods, and on the other by scattered houses. A yellow strip of moon hung, glowing in the blue, above the woods.
She began telling him that she was to be sent away to St. Margaret’s, a school in Selborne; that the term was thirteen weeks long; and that her aunt talked of going to live in Selborne permanently. This meant that she and Kay might never meet again.
Kay surveyed this prospect dismally. They discussed it in elaborately casual tones. And all the while she was thinking how delicious were the stillness and the moonlight and this unspoken love. Even the impending separation was beautiful, tragic, uplifting. When at his suggestion they sat down on a borough council seat facing the woods, she caught her breath and trembled at the exquisite beauty of his shy avoidance of her eyes.
‘Frightfully thick those woods are,’ he said.
But that was said to gain time, she knew. A feeling almost of fear came over her. He was going to try to put into words this wonderful, this unutterable love.... If only it could remain unspoken, and they sit here for ever in silence!
‘I say, Sheila,’ he burst out. ‘I wish you weren’t going!’
‘Do you?’ She stared at the dark gravel path.
‘Dash it all—I’m awfully fond of you.’
She turned to him with flushed cheeks and fluttering heart, trying to speak.
‘I think ... I think you’re a perfect dear,’ she said. ‘Oh, Kay!’
His eyes filled with light. Rather awkwardly he put his hand on her shoulder.
They kissed shyly, hesitatingly, as though afraid lest by doing so they should break the spell of beauty that bound them.
Hypatia listened, slightly frowning.
‘After that dress-rehearsal,’ said Sheila, ‘he told me.’
‘Told you?’
‘Told me that he ... liked me. I knew before, but he told me then.’
Her voice died away into silence.
‘Nothing can ever come near that,’ she said, in a low tone. ‘Nothing, ever.’
She resumed her story after a pregnant silence. The sound of the sea soothed her with its rhythm.
‘A few days afterwards I came to St. Margaret’s. And then....’
She stopped speaking. Hypatia looked up to find her gaze fixed upon the horizon.
‘Well?’ said Hypatia gently, after a long pause. ‘Did he forget all about you or something of that sort?’
‘No,’ answered Sheila, ‘he didn’t forget. He kept writing me letters.’
‘Why, of course! Didn’t you want him to?’...
The first letter made her eyes moist with tenderness; but every one that followed came with a whisper of impending tragedy. He wrote always of the church, of the office, of the garden, of the Band of Hope: round these things his immortal soul revolved.
Next Sunday fortnight I am to give a paper at the Young People’s Bible Class. Mr. Dewick asked me if I would and he said he would be very pleased if I would say yes and I could not very well get out of it as I had no excuse ready. I have chosen for my subject Sunday Observance; it is a good subject but I find it hard to put many thoughts down on paper about it. I will write and tell you how I get on. We had a really broad-minded sermon last Sunday on the text ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ it upset some of the very strict people I fancy but Mr. Dewick liked it and so did I. The preacher, whose name I forget, he was from Barnet, said that there had been some quite good atheists, but I thought he took a very extreme view when he said that some atheists lived much better lives than the average christian. It seemed to me that he put that bit in just so as to sound paradoxical and daring. Father has been very busy in the garden, pruning his roses, as the weather has greatly improved these last few days. There is a new fellow now at the office, but I cannot say I like him much, he is a bit of a rough diamond; rough anyhow, I am not so sure about the diamond. I think he drinks and he certainly uses bad language, but if one tells him of it he only gets more offensive. By the by, isn’t it funny that you should be still at school while I’m at business when we are both seventeen and within a few months of each other?
Passages like this frightened Sheila by indicating a gulf of mental disparity fixed between Kay and her. ‘It’s only superficial,’ whispered her love. ‘He’s not like that really. He’s not a good letter-writer: that’s all.’ And she tried to silence her own critical spirit with tender memories of his wooing. ‘Can love be scared away by a bad literary style?’ she asked herself. But her mind worked on against her: by no manner of violence could she prevent its probing into the substance of Kay’s frequent letters. In spite of her protests it coined for her a new word, Kayesque, to express a certain indefinable quality, a taint, manifest in his way of thinking and writing. Indefinable or not, it was undefined, for she dared not define it. To have confessed even to herself that it meant complacency, mediocrity, total absorption in the commonplace, would have precipitated disaster.
And to quicken her faculty for detecting the Kayesque there was the constant companionship of Hypatia Fairfield. From the moment when Sheila woke, one midnight, to find Hypatia sitting up in bed reading by candlelight The City of Dreadful Night the two girls were fast friends. This was but one book from the secret hoard of five that Hypatia discovered to Sheila on that exciting night. She found the school library altogether too prim, too like Miss Fry the head, to suit her taste.
‘They starve you here, don’t they?’ she said, opening her locker and exhibiting her treasures one by one.
Each one had a brown-paper cover bearing in large block letters a title specially designed to propitiate the eye of Authority, should Authority happen to come round some day with a master-key. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs clothed with righteousness the impious pages of Spencer’s First Principles, and The Life of Livingstone invested Monte Cristo with a garb of sanctity. Shelley beat his luminous wings behind the broad back of Robinson Crusoe.
‘It’s a pity Miss Fry is such a frump,’ said Sheila, when they had got into their beds and Hypatia had blown the light out.
Hypatia agreed. ‘I’m awfully glad you woke up. We might never have got to know each other if you hadn’t caught me reading.’
‘I don’t expect we should,’ responded Sheila, glowing with the excitement of a new friendship.
‘I was absolutely isolated,’ Hypatia said. ‘Oh, why ever didn’t you come to St. Margaret’s before?’
Sheila laughed. ‘I would have done it if I’d known, perhaps. And yet I was sorry to leave my other school.’
‘Was it decent there?’
‘Well, they didn’t teach us much, but it was very comfortable and homelike. I’d practically grown up there. It was a day school. They didn’t worry me much. Two or three of us in the Sixth used to spend a lot of our school hours producing a school mag.’
‘Unofficial, I suppose?’
‘Very. We wrote it out by hand and handed it round.’
‘Did you write stories, or what?’
‘Oh, things, you know,’ said Sheila. ‘It was only a lark. A kind of skit on the official journal.’
‘They’re too ladylike here for anything so vulgar as journalism,’ complained Hypatia to the darkness.
‘I expect so.’
‘Miss Fry with her Ministering Children!’ added Hypatia scornfully.... ‘By the way, are you church, chapel, or what?’
‘The last,’ said Sheila. ‘I’m rather keen on Edward Carpenter just now. Have you read him?’
‘Yes. Whitman and water,’ replied Hypatia. ‘I’m an agnostic personally. So are my people.’
‘Your people too!’ exclaimed Sheila. ‘I thought one’s people were always orthodox.’
Hypatia laughed. ‘Are you Irish?’
‘Part of me is.’
‘The voice part,’ said Hypatia.
‘Mother was Irish, and father had some Irish blood—just a drop or two.’
‘Your voice is lovely.’
Sheila heard Hypatia’s bed creak, and then the sound of a match being struck. Hypatia bent over her.
‘And you’ve Irish eyes too,’ she said. The match flickered out, and she went back to her bed. ‘They’re blue. Blue eyes and dark hair.’
She struck off at a tangent.
‘You’ll like Spencer. He makes your brain simmer. I said that before, didn’t I? Especially on the Unknowable. Funny, some people think there’s nothing unknowable.’
‘Beautiful people,’ said Sheila. ‘The salt of the earth. You’d think, to hear them talk, that they were present at the Creation of the world taking shorthand notes.’
There was silence for a few minutes.
‘I believe I’m too excited to sleep,’ said Sheila presently. ‘But I suppose we ought to....’
For weeks together, in defiance of Kay’s letters, Sheila abandoned herself to her dream of love, and the Kay of her imagination was a lover beyond criticism. It was become an article of her faith that it was this perfect lover, not the author of the letters, whom she would meet again on her return from school. Him she had indeed seen on the night of their love’s visible flowering. They had but to be together again, and she would know him for what he was, master of a speech more eloquent than words. And while she dreamed of this blissful reunion a letter came that rent her heart.
Darling Sheila.—Do not be surprised if I don’t write for several days. Dad died suddenly yesterday.
Your loving Kay.
She recalled Helena’s death, re-living some of that agony; and compassion for Kay wrung bitter tears from her. Into her letter she poured a torrent of love and pity and passionate protest. She yearned for the moment when she would see him face to face and offer for his comfort the balm of her lips.
‘You see,’ explained Sheila, ‘I couldn’t tell you then, Hypatia. It would have been disloyal. I didn’t admit even to myself that there was anything to spoil our happiness. I thought that as soon as I saw him again, and touched him, that horrible doubt would vanish.’
‘And didn’t it?’
‘Yes, for a moment or two. Then it came back ... and grew and grew ... to a hateful certainty.’
‘Yes?’
‘The separation had lasted for the best part of a year, because I didn’t go home for the long summer holiday: Auntie came here instead. And during that time we’d both developed, he and I.’
‘He was more Kayesque than ever?’
Sheila flinched.
‘Oh, don’t remind me of that detestable invention of mine,’ she begged.... ‘He’d changed—oh, incredibly! Even his appearance. There were still wonderful moments—sometimes when the light fell on his hair ... and he was slightly freckled, you know,’ she added.
‘But he was changed.’
‘He was just like his letters. And when he was saying certain things—stuffy things—he even looked like his letters.’
‘And the mute poetry?’ asked Hypatia presently.
Sheila stared miserably at her own feet.
‘I don’t know what became of that,’ she confessed. ‘It was there, you know,’ she added, seeing a gentle incredulous smile flit over her friend’s face. ‘Hypatia, it was, really. I saw it.’
‘And then——’ suggested Hypatia after a silence.
‘Well, as soon as I was certain,’ said Sheila simply, ‘I had to tell him, of course.’
‘That it was hopeless?’
Sheila nodded.
‘We lived in different worlds.... And of course he didn’t understand.’
‘No,’ said Hypatia. ‘He wouldn’t. That was the whole tragedy, wasn’t it?’
‘He thought—’ Sheila began, with a little bitter laugh ... then stopped, and looked at Hypatia with pain in her eyes. ‘He thought I had stopped caring, Hypatia!’
She rose to her feet.
‘It must be getting on for teatime,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’