Spella Ho

The Atlantic Novel

BY

H. E. BATES

CHAPTERS 30-40

SPELLA HO

is the name of a great stone country house in the rolling English Midlands. In 1873 it was empty and deserted, yet the wealth and power it represented were a living tradition to the Shadbolts, whose miserable home was within sight of its chimneys.

Bruno Shadbolt, the oldest son, once went up to the great house with his father, a drunken carter, to deliver a load of coal. When his mother died and his father abandoned the family, Bruno, faced with the problem of supporting them, pilfered coal from Spella Ho and peddled it through the village. A young widow took pity on him and helped to clean him up. He was a swart, powerful figure, very broad, coarsehaired, blunt-featured.

Spella Ho was reopened in the summer of 1874. The new owner was shrewd old Mrs. Lanchester, with her wealth and her shady past. Bruno beat her in a deal — and from this angry beginning came a larger opportunity; for she made him her bailiff. Bruno could neither read nor write, a defect which he confided to Louise, the secretary and companion to the old lady. His appeal won first her help and then her love.

The townsfolk were jealous of Bruno’s advance and bitter against his methods of collecting Mrs. Lanchester’s rents. Led by flashy Rufus Chamberlain, a mob stormed Spella Ho, breaking windows, pelting rotten vegetables at the façade. Bruno met the crowd head on, and beat down Chamberlain in a fist fight which was to be the talk of the county for decades.

That fight was the turning point in Bruno’s career. It earned him the increasing gratitude of his employer, Mrs. Lanchester, and the friendship of the man he had beaten, Rufus Chamberlain. It strengthened his resolve to quit Castor and make a place in London for himself and Louise. But Louise held back. She felt that London would be more than a match for Bruno. So he stayed on at Spella Ho, captivated by his love of Louise. Then Louise was taken ill. The country physician could not ease her agony, and with fear in his heart Bruno wrapped her in blankets and drove her in the phaeton fifteen miles to the nearest infirmary. Twelve hours later she was dead.

Bruno was stupefied by the loss of Louise. He lived on in a daze, meeting the increasing responsibilities at Spella Ho and seeking in his loneliness the consolation of the friendly Chamberlain family. He was much with Rufus and with Rufus’s father, Charles Chamberlain, a man of ideas and economy, and gradually his self-confidence returned. His savings he invested in a leather business, in partnership with a man named Stokes. In the winter of 1880 he met Gerda Black. She was the wife of the doctor in Castor, a soft, blonde German without friends in this provincial English town.

As Mrs. Lanchester’s last illness set upon her she turned to Bruno for courage and comfort. She poured out the story of her life — how by her wits she had acquired her property in London, and how, because of his loyalty, this property might some day be his. Bruno lifted her in and out of bed, attended her bodily needs, stood by her while she was dying. When Mrs. Lanchester died and Spello Ho was once more deserted, Bruno ran away with Gerda Black. Through the summer and harvest they lived in country lodgings, in a fickle courtship that could not last. Gerda was homesick for Germany, so Bruno took her to Harwich and watched her depart. Then, with a few pounds left, he went up to London to look for work.

Living in an attic room, Bruno fell ill with scarlet fever. When he recovered, he lived from hand to mouth; then, weak and without hope, he footed it back to Castor.

He limped into the village — to find himself a made man! Mrs. Lanchester had left him several thousand pounds and her tenement houses in London. What is more, his partnership with Stokes had flourished in his absence. In the summer of 1882, Shadbolt and Stokes moved their leather business into a new factory. Profits rose. The elder Chamberlain taught him to anticipate business: they planned for the time when the railroad would come to Castor, they discussed the possibility of iron ore in the neighborhood and the town’s need for gas. And Rufus Chamberlain smartened up Bruno’s appearance. The two young bachelors were attracted by a young dancer, ‘Italian Jenny.’ It was Bruno who followed her after the performance, broke down her defense with his kindness, and forced her to love him. His affair with Jenny incensed the evangelical Stokes, and in desperation the partner set fire to their factory. Bruno was accused of having destroyed the factory for the insurance, and was condemned to jail.

At the end of his sentence, Bruno formed a new partnership with Charles Chamberlain. They set up a Gas Light Company, and on its proceeds Bruno began the erection of long rows of workers’ dwellings on the outskirts of the town. He even carried his enterprise to Spella Ho, now occupied by a wealthy family, the Arkwrights. Bruno illuminated the house, the lake, and the grounds with gas fixtures, and in so doing established himself on a friendly footing with Mrs. Arkwright. Through her he met her twin sister, Lady Virginia, a high-spirited, impetuous girl who seemed irresistibly drawn to this man of a different cut. Virginia softened his character, brought out something in it that had never been touched before. When their engagement was confided to Caroline Arkwright, Bruno knew that he was happy. . . .

WITH EACH 12 MONTHS OF THE ATLANTIC 3 GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

SPELLA HO

BY H. E. BATES

XXX

THE engagement was announced in September; they would be married, it was hoped, in the autumn of the year 1897, the year of the second Jubilee. His stock went up in Castor like the shot of a try-your-strength machine at a fair, hitting at the top the biggest bell it was possible to hit in Castor: respectability. At Spella Ho there was a great engagement party for a hundred and fifty guests of all classes from the town and the estate; a great display of fairy lights again on lawn and terrace and lake; dancing in the warm September evening that smelt of autumn and women’s scent and corn.

The Chamberlains were there, Rufus crazy-drunk, his father in muddy boots, straw hat, dirty dicky bit, green-black coat, with the simple reason for it all as hard-put as ever: ‘A triumph for Spartanism, my boy.’

Bruno walked about among the guests, among people who had despised and envied and distrusted and even hated him, with Virginia on his arm. She had on a dress of sky-blue velvet, long in the skirt, with parallel rings of dark blue swinging round the hem and darker waist bows and shoulder bows and a bow on the throat; it was low at the breast, and her shoulders, naked to the tips, looked magnificent. The engagement ring, diamond and turquoise, had cost him a hundred and fifty pounds: more money, it crossed his mind, than his mother had ever had to scrape up a miserable existence for five years.

That engagement ring, slightly fabulous, did more than the engagement itself to swing round opinion behind him, for the first time in his life, instead of against him. You could fall in love with a woman, even a lady, for nothing, but a ring costing a hundred or three hundred or a thousand pounds spelled something.

That night, walking round among the guests with Virginia on his arm, or by himself, he saw many people he did not know at all, and a man came up to him to speak.

‘You would n’t know me. You would n’t remember me.’

‘Face seems familiar.’ He looked hard at the face: worn, scraggy, broken up under thin white hair.

‘It ought to be,’ the man said. ‘I’m your dad.’

Bruno stood impassive, not saying anything.

‘Come over from St. Neots. Walked it. I heard all about you.’

Bruno did not speak. He listened to the old voice, broken but still slick, easy. It took him back twenty-five years: the house with the canary, the woman, his father, his first conscious feeling of hatred against things.

‘Heard all about you. You got on summat wonderful. A licker.’

He still did not say anything. He remembered how he had reasoned, crudely, that something between his father and himself had to be straightened out, somehow, even if it took half a lifetime. It would happen sometime: this was it. He stood impassively still.

The man took off his cap, showed the white hair almost gone. ‘I’m sixty,’ he said. ‘Over.’

Bruno spoke for the first time. ‘What d’ye expect me to do about it?’

‘I’m done. Broke. I ain’t got nothing.’

Not speaking again, Bruno stood hard, his hatred as complete and resolute after more than twenty years as at the beginning.

‘Git us a job or summat,’ his father said. ‘You can git us a job. Handyman or summat, you could git us summat — summat like that.’

‘No.'

He walked away. He carried with him a short remembrance of his father standing there, crying, in the rainbow colors of the fairy lights. It did not touch him. The reversion to the old self, hard, relentless, almost brutal in its determination to carry out a resolution even after twenty years, was complete while it lasted.

It lasted about twenty minutes. He stood with Virginia again, talking, hearing the soft aristocratic voice that had its profoundly softening effect on him. And suddenly he had a bitter attack of remorse. He walked away from Virginia and went back to where he had seen his father, but his father had gone, and though he walked about for almost an hour he never saw him again. For the first time in his life he felt bitterly and miserably ashamed. It was a thing that could never have happened except for her.

Between the autumn of that year and the summer of the next, many more things happened that could not have happened except for her. In the November of 1896 he stood at the borough elections, getting a seat and third place in the poll. It was the beginning of something outside personal ambition; again something he would never have done except for her. She softened and broadened his ambition until it ceased to be a selfish thing, until its purpose was self-sacrificial. ‘You work for other people. The rest will come.’ She was an idealist. Because she had had the luck to be born to a personal Utopia she dreamed of an outer and much greater Utopia. Her ambition fused itself with his, and there emerged something that did not belong to politics and could not be accomplished by politics, but which she began to feel more and more must be expressed by politics.

Arkwright was a Liberal, and that year he began to pull strings. Bruno, who had made one or two pugnacious speeches at municipal council meetings, began to appear on Liberal platforms. Virginia was always with him, and once, roused by an insult, Bruno got down off the platform and took the man bodily off his seat, carried him above his head, and flung him out of the hall. Struggling, the man tore Bruno’s coat, ripping out a sleeve. Back on the platform Bruno took off the coat, revealing the thick, terrifically pugnacious arms, and the minds of people in the audience went back to the day when he had smashed Rufus at Spella Ho. From that moment he was not only accepted but feared. He continued to speak at other meetings with his coat off.

He could speak from his heart. He could demand better conditions for the poor, better wages, hours, everything. ‘Because I know, because I’m one of you and I ’ve been through it ’ — forgetting that he had once employed sweaters at sixpence a week and had browbeaten tired and ill-paid commercial travelers down to a fraction of a farthing; not aware, either, that he was a slum landlord in Camden Town himself, never having once been to see that property, not aware until some big-mouthed political heckler threw it at him one night in Castor Public Hall.

He bluffed himself out of the accusation, but Virginia was upset. ‘It’s a bad debt against us,’ she said. He never saw it like this. All his standards of living and housing were based on that miserable sack-windowed shack where his mother had struggled to keep respectable.

But Virginia was upset, seeing things differently. ‘If you’ve never seen the property I think you should see it.’ But he was against that. ‘I hate London. I went through enough there.’ ‘Then,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and see it.’ She went, and came back with a report that made Caroline and Arkwright sick. He had been drawing money for years from the living blood and sweat of the poor and did not know it. Virginia, too physically sensitive to a memory of cockroaches and stench and refuse bins fermenting on dark rat-rotten stairs, was almost ill. She wanted him to sell the houses, implored him to wipe out and heal up such a hideous fester.

Knowing what a way life had of coming up and hitting him in the face when he least expected it, he hesitated. That property, slum or not, was his only protection against bad luck. It had saved him already. He knew it might save him again.

While he fenced and hesitated, agreeing to a temporary scheme of repair for the houses, there took place in Castor the largest sale of land and property the town had ever known. The Fitzwilliam lands, with thousands of inviolate acres and whole streets and blocks of Castor property, were to be split up and auctioned. It was a sale that lasted a week, and he knew it to be the greatest opportunity of his life. Virginia saw it too; knew that if they worked together he could, with luck, control almost half the town and its land. ‘Control it,’ she said, ‘and change it.’ And it was she who stood bond at the bank for him, to treble Chamberlain’s earlier amount, doing it out of pure love and belief in him and out of the strength of an ideal that was already far too lofty.

So he emerged, that spring, as the owner of more houses, a large section of High Street frontage on the north side, and some odd sections of land in and outside the town. He knew that all that would have been beyond dreams except for her, and he put himself under a tender but powerful obligation to her. It made him slightly uneasy.

Except for that it was a wonderful year. England celebrated the Diamond Jubilee, and Arkwright, the lake finished, bought himself a new toy, a motorcar. In this daring twelve-mile-an-hour vehicle Arkwright drove Bruno and Virginia and Caroline about the soft, honeysuckled summer-dusty countryside. Bruno sat between the two women on the high back seat, he in reversed check cap, they with mauve silk veils tied over fine blonde hair. He looked like some impressive gargoyle between a pair of duplicate goddesses. And everything was all right. Sitting on that high, aristocratic, slightly grotesque seat between two lovely and adoring women, he felt that he was on top of the world. He felt that nothing could happen now.

XXXI

In London, on a hot August day of that year, Italian Jenny sat down to write a letter to Bruno. ‘Dear, dear Bruno.’ It was as though nothing had happened.

She was living on a fourth floor back in Clerkenwell. She had not seen Bruno for five years. During that time, first in 1894 and again in 1897, she had been ill with bouts of pleurisy. The second bout had knocked her out. She was writing in bed. ‘It’s no use, I’m down the course,’ she wrote. ‘I want help from somebody or I shan’t get on, and you’re the only one I know. I keep writing, why don’t you write? Why don’t you write? It’s funny. One week there we were all right and the next week you did n’t come. Have I done something? What have I done?’

During the five years she had written to Bruno, on an average, three or four times a year, perhaps fifteen or sixteen times in all. She went on writing like someone presenting a petition. This time there was a change, not in the way she wrote, but in the way she addressed the envelope. She had addressed him continually at the old Shadbolt house. She suddenly felt that in five years he might have moved. She addressed the letter to Castor S. O., marking it ‘Please forward.’

Just at that time it happened that there were other changes and developments in Castor besides the buying of property by Bruno, Arkwright’s motorcar, and the launching of the town’s newspaper, the Castor Argus and Free Press. Until that year Castor had never been more than a sub-post office, subordinate to Orlingford, and without a postmaster. Its three postmen still walked miles into the country after the one morning town delivery, and people put Castor S. O. on their letters. That year Castor ceased to be a sub-office and became a post office, with a post-office building in the High Street and a postmaster, though people were to go on putting Castor S. O. on their letters for another twenty years.

When that letter came Bruno was staggered. ‘I keep writing, why don’t you write? Why don’t you write? Have I done something?’ He could not believe it. It was like a reconstruction of a lost part of life. ‘I keep writing.’ What had happened to those letters?

He went down to see the new postmaster. If there had been letters for him, where had they gone? He felt drawn by the old feeling of inevitability to find out. He felt as though he were the victim of some dirty trick played on his conscience. The postmaster questioned his postmen. There was a fat old man who did the once-a-day delivery along the road by the Shadbolt place. Yes, he had taken letters there. How often? Well, every so often. Had they been letters for Mr. Shadbolt? They might have been. Yes, it was possible. How many letters? Could n’t he remember? No, he could n’t remember justly. One here and one there, once or twice a year. But why had he taken them there if they were addressed to Mr. Shadbolt? He had a good answer for that: he delivered by address and not name, and anyway, if they were wrong, why had n’t someone told him?

There was only one answer to that: Maria. Bruno went to see her. She stood on the doorstep, hostile, one arm elbowed against the jamb. ‘Letters? What letters? I ain’t seen no letters.’

He knew, because of the postman, that she was lying.

‘Letters for me. They come here. The post office says so.’

‘Post office, post office,’ she said.

‘They come here,’ he said.

‘Well, an’ if they did?’

‘ Where are they?’ he said. ‘Come on, where are they?’

‘Who’re you talking to?’ she said. ‘Ain’t you got no better way o’ talking to folks? First you turn on Dad and now you turn on me. Whata we done?’

‘You kept them letters.’

‘Kept’em? Kept’em. Who kept’em? I never kept ’em a minute longer’n I could help. I never said I kept ’em. Burned ’em, tore ’em up. That’s what I done. Burned ’em. I see who they were from. Burned ’em. That’s what I done.’

She was white, the pent-up anger of years released at last. He could not say anything.

‘We ain’t doing your dirty work,’ she said, ‘we ain’t. Keeping your letters. If we’re good enough to keep your letters we ’re good enough to be spoke to. Good enough for them — up there. You don’t want us, that’s the drift on it. Don’t want your own kin. Your dad. Turned on him. Turned on your own father.’

‘Who said that?’ he said. ‘Who told you?’

‘He did. Who d’ye expect did? I gotta look after him, ain’t I? Somebody’s gotta look after him. Keep him. Board him. After what you done.’

‘I never meant that,’ he said.

‘Funny, ain’t it?’ she said. ‘You never meant it. Now the time’s come you never meant it.’

‘I’ll make it right,’ he said. He took out his purse, shook sovereigns and silver into his hand.

‘We don’t want no making right!’ she said. ‘What you done ain’t goin’ be made right by money!’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here’s a couple o’ quid. Take it. It’ll help. Take it.’ He held the sovereigns out to her on the flat of his hand. ‘Go on, I —’ He had not finished speaking before she slammed the door in his face.

He went back to Castor, furious, humiliated. He felt helpless. ‘I keep writing, why don’t you write?’ It was a dirty trick played on him by a combination of circumstances. If there was anything to do he did not know how to set about doing it. He could write a letter. He would try that. ‘Dear Jenny.’ He got no further. He felt preoccupied, not with what he felt himself, but with what she felt. ‘Dear, dear Bruno.’

He took the first train to London on the following morning. For years he felt that he had hated London, that he had the bitterest of grievances against it. Now, going through hot, gray streets to find the Clerkenwell address, he felt that he hated it more. He felt the old magnetic inevitability that dragged him down.

The landlady had her hair in curling rings. ‘ It’s a nice time to call, I must say, and it’d surprise me if she was up.’ It was about ten-thirty. ‘Anyway, I suppose you can go up. End door on the fourth.’

He went upstairs and knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’

He could not speak. He opened the door. The bed was behind the door and he could not see her. He went into the room.

‘Bruno.’

He did not move. She was lying in bed as he had first seen her and as he had so often seen her — hands clasped above her head. She looked the same, not older, only thinner. Her hair was down. She lay looking at him in an agony of surprise, without reproach. She tried to say something, but nothing happened, and he went and stood by the bed. ‘ Bruno,’ she said.

He tried to say something, offer some explanation.

‘It’s all right, honey. You need n’t say anything. I don’t want you to say anything.’

They sat together. She held his head, pressing her own against it.

‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

It was she who kissed him. ‘Something happened. I know. It must have done.’

‘I did n’t get the letters,’ he said.

‘You moved?’

‘I was in quod. Then when I came out I moved.’

‘In quod? Bruno!’

He began to tell her about it. She stopped him. ‘Not now. I’ll get dressed. We’ll go out somewhere and have something to eat and drink.’

She got out of bed, in her nightgown, and began to put on her clothes under the nightgown, stooping to pull on her stockings. As she stooped he could see her body, the small creamy breasts, and he felt a more violent emotion for her than he had ever felt for any other woman.

It struck him like sickness. He put his arms round her and felt himself held by the immense inescapable force of it. Her arms were imprisoned, sleeveless, under the nightgown, and she could only respond by immobility. But in that immobility he felt the force of affection and agony complete.

About an hour afterwards they went out and got a hansom and drove slowly westward. She looked sweet, in a tired thin way. The heat of the thick, horsefusty air sucked up her energy. She lay back on the cushions of the hansom, told him how she had been ill, as much else of things as mattered.

They had lunch at Gatti’s: cold beer and steaks. To her Gatti’s was heaven; she suggested going there as a joke and when he agreed she could not believe it. Then he told her about things: how he had got on, the property he owned, the gasworks, the prospects he had. ‘You’ll be telling me you’re married with a family next,’ she said.

He did not speak. She was frightened.

‘You’re not married?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Is there anybody you’re going to marry ? ’

‘No.’

‘Does anybody stand a chance?’

‘Can you think of anybody?’ he said.

They laughed, but he felt very far from happy. He ordered more beer and it came with great heads of foam. ‘I’m old,’ he said. ‘Soon I’ll have a beard like that froth. You don’t want anybody as old as that. Not like me.’

‘I want you,’ she said.

‘When you’re forty,’ he said, ‘I shall be fifty-five.’

‘I don’t care. I just want you,’ she said.

He looked up and she was crying: large tears of illogical, genuine happiness. In the shining spontaneous tears he saw fresh manifestation of the forces against him. There was no escape without hurting her, and he felt that he could not hurt her.

‘What’s up? Why’re you crying?’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t like you to talk like that,’ she said.

‘It’s true.’

‘Even if it’s true I don’t want you to talk like it.’

‘Let’s get out,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you something.’

‘I don’t want anything. You and this — that’s all I want for one day.’

‘Some new clothes,’ he said. ‘Some glad rags. A new rig-out.’

She brightened up. ‘Know how long it is since I had any? Ages. Years. My underthings are more holey than righteous, and the rest only fit where they touch, I’ve gone that much thinner.’

They went out into hot bright streets, to walk on asphalt burnt by sun. She put her arm in his, locking it over, holding it down with the other. The thin bare arms had a kind of fierceness in them. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘now I feel as if I’d got you.’

‘Go to Brighton. Get yourself some nice lodgings somewhere and get on your feet again. Sea air. That’s what you want.’

‘You’ll come down to see me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come to see me.’

‘I might. I’ll see. I got business.’

‘You could come. You could come. Easy. They run trips. It’s easy. You could come.’

‘All right,’he said. ‘I’ll come.’

He stayed with her that night in London, going back to Castor and subsequently to Spella Ho on the following day. Before catching his own train he saw her down to Victoria, and on the platform she put her arms round his neck and kissed him. Before the train went she kissed him again, with a sudden but deliberate burst of passion, as though wanting to impress on him something that he could never forget.

And going home he knew that he never would forget it. His train did not arrive until the middle of the afternoon, and already, when he got to the house, there was a telegram. ‘ Dearest arrived twelveforty sweet little lodgings so happy love Italian.’ He put the wire in his pocket and went over to the office and tried to do some work. By a great effort of will he kept himself there until six o’clock. Shortly after six he went back to the house, made himself some tea and boiled a couple of eggs, and tried to read the paper. He was expected at Spella Ho for dinner at eight o’clock. At seven-thirty he set out to walk. During every second of this time his mind was not free of her.

He did not think of her in terms of anguish or impatience or despair or longing, but in physical terms. He saw her as she was, in a recurrent series of physical attitudes: the lovely way she lay in bed, arms branched up; the way she changed her clothes under the nightgown; the warm, excited, but tired face; the slight swagger of the hips, expression of the actress in her, as she walked in the mauve dress. She was photographed indelibly on his mind, and his mind in turn was predominated by a single idea: the old idea of the inevitability of it all. He wanted her to be angry and she was not angry. Now he wanted to escape and he knew there was no escape. He was held down and controlled by forces which he could not grasp.

Going to Spella Ho was like going back into another world. He gave reasons for his absence, talked, had dinner, talked again, drank. He was held in warm fascination by the beauty of the two women, held consciously, by clear, tangible emotions which he himself could grasp in turn.

They talked about the wedding. It was fixed now for late September. They would marry in London. It would be quiet, and they would go to Naples afterwards. ‘Italy,’ Virginia said. ‘Lovely to hear Italian spoken again. Lovely to have everything Italian. Italian food, Italian opera. Everything Italian.’ The word bounced about in his mind like a celluloid ball in a shooting gallery, mocking him, irrepressibly bobbing up every time he thought it was gone.

Then Arkwright talked. ‘A thousand pities you could n’t have been here during the week-end. We had Baumann here. Jew, of course, but a great Liberal. He was most anxious to talk to you. He’d heard about you and said there was no reason at all why you should n’t be considered for parliamentary candidature here in four or five years’ time.’

Parliamentary candidature? Another step. More than a step — a flight. He saw himself as a political figure, tophatted, frock-coated, taking the oath, addressing constituents, a man holding fresh power in his hands. ‘Then,’ Virginia said, ‘that would mean a town house.’ He saw the town house, the carriage waiting outside, he himself going to the House, his name bawled by newsboys: ‘Shadbolt’s Fighting Speech Extra.’ It was a dream, but it was by the establishment of such dreams that he had worked himself up. ‘Tories Stand Condemned by Shadbolt.’ Why should n’t it be? He would not be the first man in the House to have risen from nothing. He would not be the last. There was room for men who had risen from nothing. ‘The governments of this country,’ he had once said, ‘have been composed too long of men who have been unable to raise their voices because of the silver spoons in their mouths.’ That was the sort of utterance, as Arkwright had told him, that would be better appreciated in Westminster than in Castor. ‘You’re a fighter,’ Arkwright had also said. ‘What we want is a fighter.’

He stayed at Spella Ho, talking with these three people who had done so much for him, until after midnight. Somewhere towards one in the morning he walked out into the park with Virginia. With her he felt that he had the prospect of a life without harshness or difficulty. Existence became a piece of silk and wrapped itself round him and lay between him and the contact with things outside, insulating him. It was the sort of life he had never known; it fascinated him. It was based on beauty and adoration, on trust and nobility, the permanence of abstract things. It did not bind him by a sense of fatalism and did not need to be expressed, on her part, except in the simplest and deepest terms. ‘If anything happened now it would break my heart.’

XXXII

In the morning there was a picture postcard of the aquarium from Brighton. ‘Dear, dear Bruno. I’ve got such nice lodgings. Thirty shillings a week. I’ve been strolling on the prom all morning and I’m tired, but I feel better already. But I can’t stay a fortnight unless you come. You must come on Saturday. You promised. You please will come?’

His mind was split in two, as though by a diabolically accurate stroke. The division of his affection was balanced with crazy accuracy. He wrote to her: ‘Can’t come this Saturday. Will try next.’ Time, a fortnight, might simplify things. On Friday evening there was a wire. ‘Ill. Please come.’ He went by the first train on Saturday morning.

She was not ill. Mentally, perhaps, but not physically. He wired from London, ‘Arriving twelve-forty,’ and she met him at the station, thin and worried, but not ill. ‘I could n’t bear it, that’s all. I just could n’t bear it. That’s all. I thought you did n’t want me.’

She took him straight to her lodgings: a neat, respectable little boardinghouse with polished brass stair rods and bell and fern pots. ‘I’d love to keep a boardinghouse. It’s my ambition,’ she said. The front door was open and they walked straight in, and then, as they were going upstairs, the landlady came up out of the basement, thin locketed neck strained up.

‘Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Shadbolt. I just wondered.’

Mrs. Shadbolt. He took hold of her shoulders in the bedroom. ‘What made you tell her that?’

‘She saw my ring and asked me if I was married, and what could I say?’

‘Why do you wear that ring?’

‘I put it on when I was eighteen and now it won’t come off.’ She sat down on the bed and stretched her arms up to him. ‘Now you have come, don’t be angry.’

He did not move and she stood up and kissed him.

‘Don’t you want me?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mean it,’ she said. ‘You say it as though you did n’t mean it.’

She began crying. ‘I felt I’d throw myself off the pier if you did n’t come.’ And he believed for a moment that she meant it.

They walked on the promenade in the afternoon. Photographic touts took off their hats and wheedled them as they walked the promenade. ‘Come on, let’s have our pictures taken,’ she said. So at last they stood with their heads through the holes in the colored canvas, hands that were not theirs permanently joined in earnest bliss. All the time, with her head through the opening, she shrieked with laughter, intensely happy. His own feeling, with his great head stuck in the hole that was only just large enough to admit it, was that of being caught in a trap.

That feeling continued all day, and throughout the next, and the next. It was his intention to go home on Monday. He did not go. The feeling of inescapability increased. On Thursday they lay late in bed, like a honeymoon couple.

‘If we were married,’ she said, ‘I could love you whenever you wanted.’

‘We’re married. Mr. and Mrs. Shadbolt. The landlady married us.’

‘ I mean really.’

‘This is the same.’

‘No. I want something that can last forever.’

‘This can.’

‘No, it can’t. I lost you once already. Do you want me to lose you again? Don’t you want to marry me?’

So it went on. And gradually she forced him, for his own peace of mind, into a decision. One way or the other he had to do something. There was no escape. He wanted to be in two places at once: two men, all his affection equally divided between two women. He had to perform a miracle and make a decision.

Walking along the promenade late that night, after she had gone to bed, tarts accosting him, people strolling past him in the warm August darkness, he tried to work it out, failed, and about midnight went back to her.

They talked in bed. ‘What do you want to do?’ she said.

‘What do you want to do?’ he said.

‘You know.’

‘ Marry ? ’

‘You know that.’

‘When?’

She lay against him, beginning to cry a little. ‘As soon as we can.’

He lay silent. The strange room, the sound of sea and traffic, her arms across his chest, all seemed suddenly oppressive, forces engineered against him, holding him down.

On the following Tuesday he went back to Castor. She came with him as far as London: Mrs. Shadbolt. He had already telegraphed the office: ‘Taking few days holiday back Thursday.’ That day he wrote to Virginia. ‘I am going to tell you something. I am going to tell you I was married last Saturday to a friend I have known for a long time.’

He posted the letter in the station and caught a train to Castor about six o’clock. He arrived home about nine o’clock. It was dark. He was glad that it was dark. At the house there was a note from Virginia. Where had he been? What had happened?

This recurrent question obsessed him throughout the next day, Wednesday, and the next. Something terrific had happened, and yet it was as if nothing at all had happened. On Friday he felt he could not bear it. Silence, negation, terrified him. He decided to go up to Spella Ho and see Virginia.

He went out of the office about halfpast two, walking. He walked through back streets, over the railway, intending to cut across the fields to the house.

Newsboys came yelling down Park Street from the printing works of the Castor Argus and Free Press, waving the weekly edition of the new paper. He could not hear what they were shouting. ‘You never can,’ he thought. He walked on as far as the works and there stopped to look in the street window. The presses were still running. In the window there was a placard, ink-lettered. ‘ Terrible Tragedy at Spella Ho Latest.’ The thunder of the presses bore him out, like waves, into terror.

He stood still. A boy came rushing out of the works entrance with a pile of papers. Bruno grabbed the boy and a paper. He went all through the paper and could not see anything. He began to go through it again and then suddenly, on the back page, in the quartercolumn stop press, he found what he wanted.

He read it and stood still. He tried to walk on and then again stood still.

He leaned against the wall, sick. Virginia had been drowned in the lake. Suddenly sunlight seemed to blacken him out, the thunder of presses to bear him farther and farther out on waves of terror.

XXXIII

He had been hit by scandal before. What hit him in the autumn of 1897, and went on to be a force against him until the turn of the century, was more like a disease.

Virginia, buried under young white poplars by the lake, had drowned herself for a reason that everyone knew, and the combination of small circumstances built itself up against him — his letters to her, his long absence in London, her own final letter to him, read at the inquest; and all were magnified and bloated by gossip and hatred as they had been swollen long before in the case of Gerda. But they were touched, at first, with a slight pity: pity for a man who had the force of things against him and could not altogether, perhaps, help it. At that time no one knew of Italian Jenny, Mrs. Shadbolt. No one knew of her until the beginning of 1898.

That Christmas a man named Lichfield went with his wife to spend a holiday at Brighton. The woman had been ill with phlebitis and could not walk much, and they spent most of their time in the drawing-room of the little brass-staired boardinghouse where they were the only guests. At night, sometimes, the landlady came in and talked to them. They talked about illness. Mrs. Lichfield described the symptoms of phlebitis; went back in time to describe the symptoms of pleurisy. ’That fetches you down,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ the landlady said, ‘I remember a young Mrs. Shadbolt here — how it fetched her down.’

Shadbolt was not a common name, and the Lichfields were surprised to hear it. ‘Shadbolt? We know a man that name.’ ‘Don’t suppose it’s the same,’ the landlady said. ‘Biggish man. Ugly. She called him Bruno.’ Suddenly the Lichfields fell as excited as though they were on the verge of the solution of a detective mystery. ‘Yes, it’s him. When was this?’ they said. ‘ When were they here?’ The landlady told them. ‘August. Oh, it was his wife, all right. I’m strict on that sort of thing. Besides I do know, because I used to have confidential and friendly little chats with her like, often. I got her photo, too.’

The Lichfields went back to Castor with a story that went through the town like an infection: how Shadbolt was not only married, but had been married before Virginia drowned herself. ‘And now we know,’ they said, ‘why she did drown herself.’

A fortnight later Mrs. Shadbolt came to Castor. She was tremendously excited, in a sort of emotional fever at being with Bruno at last, and though later she was to be depressed and bored by the rows and rows of working-class streets and the huge dim factories and all the grim rawness of a town eating its way out into the countryside, she was excited that day even by Castor. She liked the house Bruno had bought for her, with the big garden and its espalier fruit trees, and the high bay-windowed rooms, with the flowery-papered walls which later she was to hang with rows of early photographs of herself as a dancer in Irish’s Traveling Vaudeville and in London music halls and on tour. She said, “ I shall be happy here. I know I shall be happy.’

Then in February she had a solitary caller. Rufus Chamberlain came, partly to see Bruno, partly out of curiosity to see what sort of woman he had married at last. Rufus called one evening just before supper. Bruno met him at the door and took him into the drawingroom and introduced him to Jenny. ‘Mrs. Shadbolt.’

Rufus took one look at her and knew who she was. She had not changed at all, and his mind went back to the week when there had been almost a minor riot to see her legs in Irish’s Traveling Vaudeville.

‘ I ’ve seen you before,’ he said. He stood with a slight bow and smiled.

‘You have?’

‘ I have,’ he said, and told her where. ‘Bruno and I almost scrapped to get a look at you.’

‘You did? Bruno never said a word!’ She was in a happy, teasing mood, glad of company. ‘Bruno, you wicked creature— all the men in Castor rioting to see me and you never said anything.’

‘When I’m on a good thing,’ he said, grinning, ‘I keep it to myself.’

That was something that Rufus could not do, and never had done. For forty years he had been the antithesis of his father: very open and very generous, liking company and talking and gossip and free-and-easiness. The meeting with Mrs. Shadbolt staggered and excited him a little. When he left the house he walked back into the town and went into the new Station Hotel, then one of the jokes of Castor, the word ‘hotel’ having no relation to fact. He went in and ordered a whiskey and said to a man, like a child with a secret it cannot keep, ‘I just dropped in on Shadbolt. Trust him to have something up his sleeve. You know who his wife is? She’s that dancing kid out of Irish’s vaudeville. She has n’t changed a minute.’

The next day it was all over Castor: ‘They say. . . . They say. . . . You know what I heard? . . . You know what they got about?' They talked about her in bars and taprooms, not as a woman, but as a piece of public property. Bruno had married a cheap music-hall dancing tart.

A day after Rufus called, Jenny had another caller. She had wanted to call ever since she had sat in the boardinghouse drawing-room and talked about her own phlebitis and young Mrs. Shadbolt’s pleurisy. A week at Brighton had helped her a lot, and now, on fine dry days, she could get out and walk a bit and take up again her collecting for Missions to the Heathen in Darkest Asia. Mrs. Lichfield went to the Shadbolt house with her subscription book, and Jenny invited her in. She went into the drawing-room and Jenny, touched by her first caller, put down a subscription of half a crown. She fetched it from her purse upstairs, and while she was gone Mrs. Lichfield sat staring at the walls, with their rows of pictures of the young dancer, and the one particular picture of Jenny and Bruno clasping cardboard hands on the Brighton seashore. She went away and spoke about this picture.

The story went through the last phases of complexity and resolved itself at last to the simplest terms. It was as though the hot air evaporated and there was left a small distillation of dirt.

Castor had been fond of Lady Virginia; had adored the gay affectionate nature so perfectly reflected in her sister. It seemed suddenly clear to people why she had killed herself: she had killed herself not merely because Bruno had married another woman, but because he had married that type of woman. That woman. Her. A cheap foreign-looking bit off the stage. For all you knew, a cheap bit off the streets.

With him gossip had gone as far as it could. It ceased to touch him. With Mrs. Shadbolt gossip had only just begun.

XXXIV

In the following year the Boer War began, and while, during the next three years, people were preoccupied with the thought of Kruger and Mafeking and Ladysmith and of the Queen sending her own guards and her own chocolate to help a cause that seemed sometimes to be going the wrong way, Bruno was occupied with the thought of something else. He was thinking of the internalcombustion engine, the power that could be harnessed to wheels, making a vehicle like Arkwright’s automobile, at first ludicrous, now accepted, and for which he foresaw tremendous possibilities.

He remembered his dream of running a carrier’s passenger service; how he had actually begun it. This dream, never forgotten, had become another. Its realization was still far off. But he felt that some day, somehow, it would be possible to run another kind of passenger service: an omnibus service that could spread itself out beyond the point where the small shortsighted one-line railway had ended.

He would sometimes speak to Jenny about this dream plan for self-propelling buses traveling between the new rising towns of the district. She always had one reply: ‘Never mind about buses. What this town needs is a real hotel. A proper hotel with dining rooms and a dance room, perhaps, and good beds. All you’ve got is that potty Temperance place and the Station Hotel, and that’s a joke.’

She was right, but he was not interested. Hotels — let somebody else build the hotels. He kept his eye on the motorcar.

By 1901 Rufus Chamberlain also had a motorcar. One night when he came to supper and stayed on, talking over the whiskey until past midnight, Jenny brought the conversation round to her own dream, the dream of that hotel she had often spoken about to Bruno.

‘When is somebody going to have the sense and initiative to put one up?’

‘Castor’s a funny place,’ Chamberlain said. ‘ People eat at home.’

‘And what,’ she said, ‘do visitors do? Have meals sitting on the pavement?’

‘They go back to Orlingford,’ Bruno said.

‘Back to Orlingford.’ She was mildly disgusted. ‘Good money coming into the town and you let it go out again and then call yourselves business men.’

It was true. They knew it. But it was not business, they said. It was not business.

That drove her beyond argument. ‘One of you is crazier than the other, but I don’t know which it is.’ She felt that they had minds of iron, which only white heat could affect. For a moment she was angry, then she got over it, and suddenly she began to flatter Chamberlain.

‘ If it had been anyone else I would have understood it. But you — with your brains and personality and business instinct. You of all people. Why don’t you do it,?’

‘Problem,’ he said.

‘What’s a problem to a man like you? Besides, I don’t see it. When a thing stares you in the face there’s no problem.’

‘What size hotel had you in mind?’ Rufus said.

‘About thirty rooms.’

‘And a bar and all that?’

‘A bar, yes, and a lounge and a hall that could be let for dances.’

‘Where’d you put it?’

‘As near the station as you could. On a corner site.’

Rufus sat thinking.

‘Land’s cheap. Building’s cheap. Times are good,’ she said. ‘You wait another five years and you’ll miss the boat.’

And gradually, not that night but on succeeding nights, she won him over. He saw that there might be more in it than a dream. Her voice had some of the same heavy hypnotic effect on him as it had on Bruno. He was drawn over to her point of view less by argument than by the sleepy emotional magnetism of her voice.

Bruno held out.

‘Hotels,’ he said, ‘are a line on their own.’

For a time he remained immovable. At last Chamberlain made a decision.

‘If you don’t do it,’ he said, ‘I shall.’

‘ We shall,’ Jenny said.

That decided him.

And that summer the new hotel, later the Prince Albert Hotel, began to go up on a waste corner site by the station. Mrs. Shadbolt loved it. It was she who suggested and then staged and made such a huge success of its opening in December of the same year. The place that night was filled mostly with men, and the hotel, with its gaslit red blinds, looked on fire, so that even Bruno, walking about in dress clothes in the heavy and rather lost way of a monkey dressed up, felt it to be a huge success.

About midnight he was standing at the bar when the porter pushed through the crowd to bring him a message.

‘Mr. Arkwright is outside and would like to speak to you.’

He went outside on to the steps of the hotel. He saw Julius Arkwright standing in the street below: an older, worn, and suppressed Arkwright. He stood by the motorcar in which he had driven down from Spella Ho. He looked at Bruno, and for a moment he could not speak, and then somehow forced himself to speak.

‘Caroline would like to speak to you. She sent me down to fetch you.’

‘Speak to me?’ He did not understand it.

‘She’s very ill,’ Arkwright said.

Bruno did not speak. They got into the car; Arkwright clenched the wheel like a man who is about to go over a precipice and is aware of it and must resist the shock. ‘She’s very ill,’ he said again. ‘She’s not going to live.’

They drove in silence to Spella Ho. Bruno felt suddenly as though his mind had been boarded up. Behind that boarding, as on a site where there is a demolition going on, his mind was in a chaos. Some part of him was falling to pieces.

Caroline lay on a sofa bed in the smaller lounge downstairs. He went into the room. There was a fire, and a small wall-bracket gaslight. He stood and looked down at her. She lifted her face and looked at him and he did not recognize her.

‘Hullo,’ she said.

‘Hullo.’

‘Find a chair,’ she said. ‘Is n’t there one? I can’t see.’

He found a chair and sat down. Arkwright had not come in. He looked at her. He remembered the lovely Nordic nobility of the face, the thick strong hair and magnificent shoulders. ‘You did n’t come to see us,’ she said. He did not answer. He was held in fascination by the change in the face. Thin, terribly tired, it bore no relation to the face he had formerly known. ‘I wanted you to come and see us,’ she said. ‘We both wanted you.’

He sat with her for half an hour. She was dying and knew it, and knew, also, the reason for it. And gradually, without her saying anything of it, he knew also why it was. It was now as though Caroline were dying a double death. She had endured the sufferings of two people, and he understood as he sat there what sort of suffering it had been. It seemed to double his own.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. ‘We never reproached you. There was no reproach here.’

Before he could speak, Arkwright and the doctor came into the room. Caroline put out her hand and shook hands with him and said good-bye. He did not know what to say and he went suddenly out of the room.

He walked back to Castor and went home without going into the hotel. He did not trouble to light the gas in the hall, but went straight upstairs in darkness. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He did not think of anything. He felt only that his mind had been shattered by the reverberation of a huge mistake, that the twin fires of selfhatred and remorse were burning him up completely.

XXXV

The death of Caroline affected him more deeply, in a sense, than the death of Virginia. He felt himself slip backward, confidence broken. He felt relieved of the obligation of ambition and dreams.

The hotel prospered. It was clear that Jenny was right; Castor needed a hotel. Castor had not realized how much it needed a hotel; still more, it had not realized how much it needed a hotel with a pretty ex-actress as manageress. The whole district flocked to the Prince Albert and talked of Mrs. Shadbolt, who remained chastely and completely faithful to Bruno, but who gained the reputation of being a sort of promiscuous tigress who kept, somewhere upstairs in the hotel, a lair where the most terrific affairs went on for those who could pay for them.

In a little town like Castor an exactress can be only one thing. Castor wanted Mrs. Shadbolt to be a Bad Woman, and gossip gradually created her: fast, licentious, common, fleshly, wicked, unfaithful. Of the hundreds of stories told about her, ranging from the rumors of her own private promiscuity to tales of a bawdyhouse of ex-chorus girls run in the hotel attics, not one was true. She remained not merely chastely and completely faithful to Bruno, but tenderly faithful. She was fixed in adoration of him as securely as when she had written the letters — ’Dear, dear Bruno’ —to which there had been no answer.

All the time he worked hard. For the next eight or nine years, up through 1902 to 1905 and so up to 1910, he consolidated his position. He did not go forward. He watched all the time the progress, in America and France especially, of the motorcar; he waited for the moment when he could start his scheme for motorbuses, a moment which at that time seemed slow in coming. He bought property, more land. At the close of the century, completely mad, decrepit, and almost helpless in a house of cobwebbed and crazy inventions, Candlestick Parker died, and the sale brought Bruno another hundred and ten acres along the east side of the town. He remained ambitious, but it was a personal ambition, without ideals.

By 1908 he was a man of considerable property, but, looking round for his friends, he found he could count them on one hand: Arkwright, the Chamberlains, Jenny. Then, during that year, Arkwright left Spella Ho. Huge sale boards went up on the outskirts of the estate and remained up, blistering and peeling, for the next six years, the house standing with the same air of sepulchral solitude as it had when Bruno had stolen coal from it in 1873. Time seemed not to have touched it at all.

During the following year something else happened. On a windy July day Charles Walker Chamberlain went out of his cupola’d, turreted house and down the hill into the town. Walking down into the town on that hot windy July day in 1909, he felt the streets suddenly too hot for him. He turned and went over the railway bridge and up out of the town. Up on the higher ground the hot wind gusted across the green wheat that came down in those days to the very edges of the streets. It lifted Charles Walker Chamberlain’s straw hat from his head and bowled it across the street and under the wheels of a brewer’s steam wagon coming down the empty hill. Charles Walker Chamberlain ran forward like a child retrieving a ball, and that afternoon the Castor Argus and Free Press carried headlines which were in a sense his epitaph: ‘Unknown Tramp Crushed by Brewer’s Lorry’ — and it was not until late that night that Castor, and Bruno, knew that Charles Walker Chamberlain was dead.

XXXVI

‘But they move, Bruno. They move about. Like ordinary people. You see them walk upstairs and in the street and sit down and eat and everything. They’re real, and it looks as if it’s raining all the time, only it is n’t.’

‘Move? How’s it done? Sort of magic lantern?’

‘No, no. They’re moving pictures.’

‘Slides?’

‘No, no. It’s a long strip of something. With pictures on it. It goes through a camera and they show it on this white cloth. It’s wonderful.’

He did not understand it. Jenny had been to London and had come back with the story of a cinematograph show. It was the year 1910. He had heard of the cinematograph, understood that it was a great invention, but had put it down as one with the phonograph and the typewriter, as a specialized toy which could never influence and benefit the masses as the automobile would. He did not understand how anyone could become excited over what seemed to him moving magic-lantern slides. ‘Next thing you’ll be taking me to a Band of Hope.’

‘You’ve got to see it!' she said. ‘You’ve got to. It’s wonderful and you’ve got to see it. You’ve got to come up to London to-morrow.’

‘Got to, got to!’

‘Please, Bruno. Yes, please. Please! Once you’ve seen it you’ll feel just what

I feel about it.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That we’ve got to have one in Castor. We must. It’s the great thing of the future. It’s a miracle. We’ve got to have one in Castor.’

‘You mean a theatre? Charge people to go in?’

‘Yes. They’re opening everywhere.’

’It sounds daft.’

‘It is n’t daft. You said the hotel was daft.’

He was slightly impressed by that. She talked of the cinematograph all that night. He went down to the Prince Albert to play a hundred up at billiards and there she was, in the bar, telling the world about it. She talked about it in bed, saying, ‘You need n’t build anything. You could hire the Public Hall in the old Corn Exchange and hire chairs and it would n’t cost much.’

He went with her to London on the following day. He saw what she had seen: people flickering on a screen, movement, life, antics of a comedian; the film broke, they sat in hushed darkness as he said in a loud voice, ‘Where was Moses?’ and the audience tittered.

It still seemed to him a trivial thing. ‘Just a craze,’ he said, ‘that’ll die out.’

They came out in silence. In the vestibule she let out a shriek and left him and almost embraced a man who stood talking to the pay-box girl. ‘Mike! Mike! Mike Livesey!’

The man stared at her and fell her shoulders with his hands, as though he could not believe his eyes.

‘Italian,’ he said. ‘Italian. It’s Italian.’

‘All tied up in a box with bows on.’

‘Alt tied up in a box,’ he said. ‘Well!’

He stood back and looked at her: sallow side-lined face, hook-nosed, heavily creased, slightly scornful, the face of a tenth-rate actor who had been touring for twenty years under the impression that he was first-rate.

‘You seen the show?’ she said. ‘Is n’t it wonderful?’

‘Seen it?’ he said. ‘I own it. It’s mine. I run it.’

‘You? You run it?’

He nodded.

‘How’s it go?’ she said. ‘You doing all right?’

‘Packed. Packed night after night. And no dead-hands either.’

She turned and snatched Bruno, who stood reading old playbills nailed on the dirty walls of the foyer. ‘ Please, Bruno.’ She brought him forward to Livesey. ‘My husband, Mr. Shadbolt,’ she said.

‘Husband?’ Livesey said. ‘Well!’ He shook hands with Bruno. ‘Well! Come into the office.’

They went into Livesey’s office. Livesey took cigars out of a drawer, gave one to Bruno, playfully offered the box to Jenny.

‘You like the show?’ Livesey said to Jenny.

‘Like it? I came yesterday. I came all the way to see it again to-day.’ She began to talk excitedly, telling him as fact things which really existed only in imagination: how, above all, they were planning to show pictures in Castor. ‘You think there’s something in it? More than a craze?’

‘We opened six months ago,’ Livesey said. ‘Never had a dead house yet. They’re opening everywhere.’

’But is it going to develop?’

‘This thing,’ Livesey said, ‘is only in its infancy.’

They talked on. Bruno, shut out, did not listen. He did not like Livesey. He did not like the cigar, which he had not cut properly and which would not burn.

‘You like to see the operating room?’ Livesey said.

‘Sounds like a hospital.’

More laughter. ‘This way,’ Livesey said.

Bruno followed Jenny and Livesey and went into the small, roughly fitted operating room at the back of the theatre. The operator was rerolling film on a spool. The room was hot, the naked electric light bared to the eyes. Livesey and the operator explained how things worked, switched on the noisy projector, and Jenny was thrilled. Bruno did not speak. More and more he felt himself shut out. He felt that the thin end of the wedge driven between himself and Jenny by the hotel and the death of Caroline was struck a blow that afternoon that drove it in almost to its extreme depths.

‘Well, if you start this thing,’ Livesey said, ‘let me know. I’ll put you in touch with the proper people and I’ll get you an operator sent down until you get a man trained.’

They went home on the late night train. Before that they went to another motion-picture show, and for the two hours in the train she talked of nothing else, of what they had seen, of Livesey, of the imperative necessity of opening a show in Castor without delay.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and who’s going to run it? You expect me to stand at the door to sell tickets?’

‘I’ll run it,’ she said. ‘Who do you think? It’s my profession. It’s what I was born to.’

‘If you think you can fill any hall in Castor with that thing, six nights a week, you’re on a bad egg.’

‘Well, we’ll run variety turns with it. Perhaps you’ll tell me now I don’t know anything about variety?’

‘I never said that.’

‘You’re trying to tell me what I do know and what I don’t know.’

‘No.’

‘Pardon me. First you tell me I’m wrong about the hotel, now you tell me I’m wrong about something else.’

‘I don’t say you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘But it’s my money, whether you’re wrong or right.’

‘Keep your money,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it.’

‘If you start this thing you ’ll want it.’

‘ Why ? Why your money ? Why yours in particular? Other people have got money. Mr. Chamberlain has got money.’

He was silenced by that, knowing it to be more than ever true. Rufus had inherited what was then the largest fortune ever left by any man in Castor, an estate of ninety thousand pounds. She said: ‘If you won’t listen I ’ll borrow from Mr. Chamberlain. He’ll lend me the little I want.’

‘ Borrow?’ he said. ‘Borrow? By God, I’ll see you don’t borrow.’

In that way, by emotion and talk, and by threats which he knew she would not hesitate in that emotional state to carry out, she won him over.

The result was that in the September of 1910 a converted Corn Exchange was opened: ‘Motion Pictures Twice Nightly Living Cinematograph’ — which to him meant nothing, but which to her was like the fulfillment of a dream. By another year it was clear, and clear even to Bruno, that the Corn Exchange would no longer do. She would not let him rest for a moment from her excited talk, at first merely insistent, but later almost threatening, of a new cinema, now on the scale of a theatre, with a stage and a circle and an orchestra pit and plush seats that tipped up.

Whenever he wavered, during this time, she held over him the threat of Chamberlain. ‘All right. If you’re so mean, I’ll go to Mr. Chamberlain. Mr. Chamberlain will listen to me.’ He did not attach any great importance to this frequent, and gradually more frequent, use of Chamberlain’s name. But it drove him at last to do what she wanted.

He built in 1911, on a site opposite the hotel, the Victoria Variety Palace and Cinema. It matched the hotel: raw, solid, ornate brick. As with the hotel, she designed it; she planned its future, organized its staff and the six-monthsahead bookings of variety turns which were to be sandwiched in between the films. She arranged its gala opening, with tickets of invitation, a six-reeler, five variety acts by London artists, and something which Castor crowded to see more than any other one thing: an act by herself.

When she appeared that night she was a woman of forty-five, almost forty-six; she looked more than ten years younger. She was as slim and firm-breasted as when Bruno had first seen her in Irish’s Traveling Vaudeville; and in the short skimped red skirts and pale flesh tights, with the grease paint coloring her face, she looked very little over thirty. But the audience was disappointed. What they saw was not something wicked at all, but a rather ordinary dance by a woman who had not danced for fifteen years, who was out of training and practice, and who had forgotten the best she had known.

After her dance Bruno came on to the stage and made a short speech. He was wearing a frock coat and a top hat. She stood by his side, half his height, slim legs as beautiful as ever, looking like a young woman. He began to speak. She nudged him and whispered, ‘Your hat,’ and suddenly he remembered and took off his hat and held it in his hand.

As he took off his hat a man at the back of the audience took his pipe out of his mouth and leaned over and spoke to his wife, behind the back of his hand.

‘Shadbolt begins to look old,’ he said.

XXXVII

It was true: he had begun to look old. At the same time he had not begun to feel old. He did not feel any older than he had ever felt. But the wedge driven between himself and Jenny by the hotel and the cinema, and most of all by the death of Caroline, began to be thickened suddenly by age. He was fifty-eight. But now it was she, and not he, who was conscious of it.

She began to spend less and less time at the house which, two years before, she had adored so much. She left the house about ten o’clock every morning and went to the hotel. Long after official closing time she still stayed on at the hotel, still pouring out emotion in the form of energy, the nervous strain of it making itself felt in that continuedchain smoking of scores of cigarettes. She got back to the house about midnight, spent a noisy half hour in the bathroom over her toilet, and then spent five minutes over a final cigarette while sitting up in bed. All the time Bruno felt himself shut more and more away from her.

Suddenly, in 1912, she got bored with the hotel and the cinema and the whole of the life she had cut out for herself in Castor. She was tired; emotion needed new outlets. She spent moody, angry days, smoking madly. ‘Let’s get away for a while,’ she said at last. ‘The south of France, or somewhere. We’ve never had what you’d call a holiday. Let’s go to Paris and then on to Nice.’

The moment was a bad one. He was on the verge of realizing a dream he had planned and cherished for more than ten years: the Castor and District Omnibus Transport Company. With a garage proprietor named Caleb Nichols he had already drawn up a deed of partnership, and they had on order two double-decker buses of the London type. In a fortnight Castor would see the first two buses, to be followed by four more buses, of the Shadbolt and Nichols company. They would run in a rough triangular course across the river valley, Castor to Orlingford, Orlingford to Lingborough, Lingborough to Castor, and reverse, a route which two railways had not touched and now never would touch. The success of the venture depended utterly on the energy of Shadbolt and Nichols. To Bruno all talk of going for a holiday, even to Brighton, was as pointless as talk of going to the North Pole.

Jenny was furious. ‘All you think about is that damned company. Work! Nichols! All I ever hear all day is Caleb this, Caleb that. All you think about is making money.'

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not quite. But this is important. This is something I’ve waited ten years to do. Longer than that. Ever since I was a kid and tried to run that carrier’s round to —’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she said. ‘If it’s not money you’re talking about it’s something you did thirty years ago.’

‘You talk like it yourself. Everybody does.’

‘Well, let’s live in the present for a bit. Go somewhere. Do something. Time was when you were glad enough to run over half the country after me. Now it’s too much to take me for a holiday.’

He walked out of the room and upstairs, hard, phlegmatic, a million miles away from her. She raised her face, screamed.

‘Why don’t you answer? You know it’s right! You know it’s right. You know it’s right.’

He went into his bedroom, out of sight. She ran upstairs, in a frenzy at his nonresistance. She wanted to quarrel. Her nerves, stretched for weeks, began to break. As she came upstairs he came out of the bedroom and went into the bathroom, locking the door. Frenzy leapt into fury. She beat on the door with the flat of her hands. She kicked it and shouted with uncontrolled nervous frenzy which he heard even above the noise of water.

‘You’re just a miser! A mean, selfcentred, rotten miser. That’s all. That’s all you are, a miser! I know it now — a miser. I’ve thought it for years, and now I know it. A moneygrabber. A cheap money-grabber. That’s all. Just a jumped-up cheap moneygrabber, that’s all, that’s all! I know it now. I’ve thought it for years and now I know it.’

He did not answer; took off his coat. He hung his coat on the door and undid his collar and took off his tie. He sat down on the bath stool and took off his boots. Slowly, deliberately, not speaking, he took off the rest of his clothes and got into the bath, keeping the hot water running. He sat still, watching the water rippling its small tide up between his thick, ugly, slightly bowed legs. She had not finished kicking the door. Almost weeping now, she yelled, ‘Mean is bad enough! But mean and ugly, that’s what you are! Ugly, that’s what you are—just mean and old and ugly. Old and miserable. Old and ugly, that’s all you are — that’s all you are!’

All she was saying was true. ‘Old and ugly and just too mean and miserable to spend a penny. Too mean and miserable. Why don’t you answer? Why don’t you answer something ? You know it’s true, that’s why! You know it’s true!’

She was crying now, nerves broken, voice weaker and more bitter. He sat calmly soaping his hands and looking at his old ugly feet. Her voice did not produce in him a single moment of anger or suffering. He sat behind a barricade unconsciously built up ever since the death of Caroline and now complete. Nothing she said could ever affect him now.

And that night, while he sat drinking to the success of the Castor and District Omnibus Transport Company in Nichols’s garage, she was unfaithful to him for the first time, at the hotel. She was unfaithful with Rufus Chamberlain. Chamberlain came into the hotel every night between eight and nine o’clock. His mother had outlived his father by only six weeks, and he had arrived at much the same point of boredom with that huge turreted Frenchified house as Jenny had reached with the cinema and the hotel. He had begun to talk of selling the house and, with typical Chamberlain meanness, of taking all his meals at the Prince Albert, where as a shareholder he was entitled to discount off the bill.

He went into the hotel that night about nine o’clock without any intention of talking about these things. He had three or four drinks and read the local paper. As usual there was nothing in it, and he got up at last and went into the lounge to look for a magazine or a woman or a crony to talk with. There were only two men in the lounge, and there was only one woman. ‘Hallo, Mrs. Shadbolt,’ he said. They all stayed talking until ten o’clock. At ten o’clock the two men left, but he stayed on, talking to Mrs. Shadbolt. He sat watching her, fascinated, and began to tell her suddenly of the idea he had: of coming to live and eat at the hotel.

‘Well, and a good idea,’ she said.

‘I get fed up with that great empty house,’ he said. ‘Four servants to one man.’

‘Well, why don’t you come?’ she said.

‘I was going to talk to you about it,’ he said. ‘Discuss it.’

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to discuss. All you’ve got to do is to choose your room and say when you’re coming and that’s that.’

‘Simple.’

‘Simple’s the word,’ she said.

They went out of the lounge and through the passages, which had become permeated now with a thick warm odor of beer and stale cooking and the dust on the topmost leaves of the artificial-looking palms, and went upstairs to the bedrooms, where, she said, Number Eleven had the best view. They went into the room, still fitted, like all the hotel, with gas, but now in darkness. She made no attempt to get a light, but went to the window and stood looking at what view there was: many lights sprinkled over the lower darkness of the town. There was the view, she said, and in daylight you could see the woods. Chamberlain came and stood beside her, close to her. She did not speak, and suddenly she was aware of him, not with mere alertness, but with the alertness of an inner part of herself. He began kissing her and she let him do it without any protest, feeling the immediate cancellation of all her tired distress. She felt emotion flood her from the lips downwards, her whole body leaping up out of passivity.

From that moment Chamberlain began to take the place of the hotel, the cinema, and Bruno himself.

Bruno did not know of this. For five or six weeks he did not even know that Chamberlain had given up the house and taken his things to the hotel, to eat and sleep there. When he did hear of it, it did not surprise him. The Prince Albert was the place for Chamberlain, who had never seemed to belong in that fantastic house on the hill.

In the same way he did not notice any change in Jenny. Since she already spent ten and twelve hours of the day away from home, another hour or two or even a night did not seem to matter. It could not lengthen the distance between them. He was too absorbed, also, in his own affairs, in the sight of his two red buses, soon afterwards six red buses, making their erratic timetable between the towns and villages.

It developed into the biggest omnibus company in a radius of forty miles. Twenty red buses made a regular and more frequent service to more towns and villages. Nichols’s crazy barn of a garage was pulled down, and there went up in its place a lofty concrete cavern in which buses roared like beasts, as drivers stepped on accelerator pedals in the early morning. All this time, in room Number Eleven at the Prince Albert, things were going on which the chambermaids and then the boots and then the commercials and finally the whole of Castor knew about. By the end of 1913 he was almost the only adult person in Castor who did not know that ChamberIain and his wife virtually lived together at the hotel.

Just at that time, with his interest in the bus company settled enough to make him take things a little easier, he suddenly remembered that Jenny had wanted to take a holiday. It was the moment when he might have found out about her, except for one thing. There appeared in the Castor Argus and Free Press an article on some excavations being made at that time on the site of Roman encampments three miles out of the town.

When Bruno read that article it was as though he had been shaken out of a deep soporific. He remembered Parker, and Parker’s slightly insane experiments with steel in that impossible, yet not wholly impossible, condenser in the back yard of a house that itself had been built out of great blocks of sepia-colored ironstone.

The idea acted on him like an explosion. He got his car and put in it a pick and shovel and drove out to the land that same afternoon. He had already seen, in a field that he had let for grazing for twenty years, the hollows, overgrown now with grass and harebell and thyme, made by Parker’s crude workings in the fifties. And what he did there that afternoon was as fantastic as anything Parker had ever done. He began to dig for iron. It was as though he expected to unearth it in ready stiffened pigs.

He worked, as he had so often worked in the past, out of ignorance. Ignorance drove him on where knowledge, even a little knowledge, would have kept him back. Through ignorance he got a sort of crude faith, not only in himself and an idea, but in the land on which, that afternoon, he shoveled and dug like a navvy. He worked with the same indomitable blind energy that brought him on foot from London through the snow. ‘Nothing,’ he thought, ‘can stop me now, nothing is going to stop me’; as though he had only to move enough earth to strike layers of iron as a man might strike a water pipe. ‘Iron,’ he thought, ‘iron. Parker was right.’ He drove the pick down into the iron-seamed earth with a tremendous blow; it snapped the pick shaft at the junction of wood and metal as though it were rotten.

He gave up then and drove home. He felt a little sobered, and did not know quite what to do. Ignorance had brought him so far, and now he felt at a dead end. He took a lump of iron ore indoors and put it on the dining-room table and then, for the third or fourth time, read the article in the weekly paper. Reading it, he had a sudden idea. He got on the telephone and rang through to the offices of the paper. At eleven o’clock that night he was still drinking whiskey with Mather, the chief reporter, and on the following Friday there appeared in the Castor Argus and Free Press another article, ‘By our Expert’: —

The metallurgical potentialities of the eastern side of the valley have long been the subject of speculation, but it has remained for Mr. Bruno Shadbolt, the inaugurator of so many of the town’s progressive enterprises, to put that speculation to the test. Recent exhaustive tests by London experts have established the fact that the valley is richer in ore than was hitherto thought. It now transpires, also, that South Wales interests are watching developments with the closest attention, and an announcement of the greatest public interest may shortly be expected. Farsighted prophets who have visualized the town as one with immense industrial possibilities may shortly be congratulating themselves on their vision.

There was no announcement. The Frome and Taylor Consolidated Iron and Steel Corporation, head offices in Yorkshire, controlled the output and furnaces at Orlingford; and they informed the Castor reporter, ‘Tests tell us that we have sufficient workable ore here to make it unnecessary to consider touching another inch of land for fifty years.’ They filed the article. Copies of it were sent to another forty concerns in Yorkshire, London, and South Wales. One filed it. The citizens of Castor, momentarily switching from gossip of Chamberlain and Jenny to talk of Bruno and iron, awaited developments. Bruno himself waited. Ignorance and faith had brought him so far. Now they held him again at a dead end. Nothing happened.

XXXVIII

He waited for months, and might have gone on waiting for years except for one thing: the declaration of war. In January of 1915 the article in the Castor Argus, pure puff at the time of writing, was turned up in the London offices of South Wales Amalgamated Iron and Steel, then already being harassed by a government department that was itself harassed by the necessity for an increased output of munitions. They sent down an expert to Castor. He came back with samples of ore and in twenty-four hours delivered a report almost identical with one that lay in Bruno’s desk at the gas office and which he had not troubled to take out. The expert penciled in the top right-hand corner of the report, ‘Offer five thousand,’ afterwards explaining this: ‘He’s a queer bird. He apparently has no notion at all of what mining for ore means. He told me himself how he dug it out with his own hands.’ In fourteen days South Wales Amalgamated had opened negotiations with Bruno.

He went to London. He got up on a dark January morning to catch the first train at 7.19. The maid got his breakfast, which he ate alone. Just before departing he went up to Jenny’s bedroom. She was still asleep. He held open the bedroom door and let, in the light from the gas globe on the landing. The light woke her and he said: ‘I’m going now. If I’m not home to-night it will be because the negotiations have n’t finished. But as soon as they’re over and the deal’s through I’ll telegraph. Then you come up.'

He went to London with one idea in

his mind. ‘Talk big,’ he thought. The offices of South Wales Amalgamated were in the City: solid, mahoganyfurnished, gloomy, giving him glimpses back into the days when he had tramped an even gloomier London, looking for work. At three o’clock in the afternoon they offered him five thousand. He went and looked out of the window. ‘Now,’ he thought, ‘is the time to say something.’

After about five minutes he went back to the table. He sat down and looked at each of the three Amalgamated Steel directors in turn. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you are talking out of the backs of your necks.’

Now they were silent.

‘You seem to take it for granted,’ he said, ‘that I’m going to sell. I don’t know that I shall sell. I don’t know that I shan’t develop it myself. If the concession is n’t worth more than five thousand, it is n’t worth more than ten thousand to develop. I could do that.’

In their minds they had a figure of twenty thousand. They said: ‘Call it ten thousand.’

Bruno said: ‘The war looks like lasting another two or three or even four years. If it does, the price of iron and steel will go up to somewhere you’ve never seen it before.’

‘No one can foresee that,’ they said.

‘ I foresee it,’ he said. ‘Another thing. Frome and Taylor foresee it. They’ve opened up nearly a mile of new workings since October last year.’

They did not speak.

He said: ‘I’ve got every reason to believe that Frome and Taylor would pay double your price merely to prevent your ever coming into that valley.’

‘Our price,’ they said, ‘is fifteen thousand.’

They talked all that afternoon and met early on the following day. The news of war was black, the people depressed. He argued with Amalgamated Steel all morning and met them again in the early evening: he took them by stages, from one deadlock to another, to a figure of forty-five thousand. This was their offer at the end of the second day. He rejected it; said, ‘Its exploitation as building land would bring me that.’ They smiled at this, and he surprised them by saying, ‘All wars are followed by a boom.'

In the middle of the third day, when the machinery of discussion had begun to turn more smoothly under the oil of a bottle or two of champagne, he threw in a spanner. He began to talk about royalties. Through the whole of the discussion it had been their aim to prevent him from ever thinking of royalties. They knew suddenly that they had underestimated him; felt that it would have been better to begin with fifty thousand and finish at sixty, rather than to begin at five thousand and finish by talking of royalties. They offered sixty thousand, and he said, ‘At your anticipated rate of output that would be the royalty for about ten years.’

It finished on the fourth day. His talk of royalties, kept up to the last, frightened them. They agreed at ninety-eight thousand. It was a price that, to both sides, seemed terrific at the moment. Later, as the war went on and the price and demand for steel rose to the heights he had predicted, they thought of it as a godsend.

He went straight out of the offices of Amalgamated Steel and telegraphed Jenny: ‘All done at a hundred thousand could you catch four-twenty will meet you St. Pancras. Bruno.’ It was then about half-past two. He went back to his hotel and changed his room for a double, with bath. He gave the page girl five pounds. ‘Pound for yourself. And get some flowers with the rest and put them in the room.’ He went down to the barber’s saloon and had a shave and a trim and then had a bath in the bath annex of the new double room. He felt immense. ‘ I’ve gone through with it,’ he thought, ‘I’ve done it. I’ve gone through with it.’ He took a taxi to St. Pancras.

The train came in at six-fifty-five. It was crowded with soldiers going back from delayed Christmas leave; there were many women. He waited at the barrier, feeling very happy, thinking, ‘Perhaps this is what we wanted, something like this. We’ve been apart — now it will be all right.’ Soldiers and women filed off the platform. It was empty at last. She had not come.

‘It did n’t give her a lot of time,’ he thought, ‘the telegram. She could n’t get the four-thirty. She’ll get the six.’ Just to make sure he went to the public telephone and put through a trunk call to the house. The line was congested, the connection poor, so that the answering voice sounded throttled.

‘Has Mrs. Shadbolt left?’

‘Yes,’ the maid said, ‘she left about five.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

He rang off and went out of the station. He had two hours before the train was due. He found a bar.

At eight-seventeen the train came in and he was there to meet it. He saw the same procession of soldiers and women, with the same result. She was n’t there. He could not understand it. As though it had lain rancid in his mind all that time the bitterness of it rose up again, mingling with the new bitterness, souring everything. ‘A hundred thousand. What is it,’ he thought, ‘unless there’s somebody to tell it to?’

He stayed at the station and met another train, the last. It was as he expected. She was not there, and he went back to the hotel.

He returned to Castor on the following day. He felt the separation between himself and Jenny to be complete. The deal with Amalgamated Steel seemed an utterly barren thing.

He arrived home in the early afternoon. When he got into the house he could hear the bath water running. Me went upstairs. ‘Is that you?’

‘Oh, Mr. Shadbolt!’ If was the maid’s voice. ‘ I did n’t know you were coming.’

‘Is Mrs. Shadbolt in?’

‘No, Mr. Shadbolt.’

‘Funny,’ he thought, ‘taking a bath in the afternoon.’ He went downstairs. ‘She’s at the hotel,’ he thought, and rang through. No, Mrs. Shadbolt was n’t there. Mrs. Shadbolt had n’t been there all day.

He waited for the maid to come downstairs. When she came down she looked hot from the bath; it accentuated her look of scared guilt.

‘What time did Mrs. Shadbolt go yesterday?’

‘About five, Mr. Shadbolt.’

‘To catch the train?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did n’t she say anything?’

‘No.’

He sat down at the telephone again. He did not know quite what to think or do. He felt that he had to speak to someone, and he rang back to the hotel. ‘Mr. Chamberlain is n’t in?’

‘No,’ the office girl said, ‘Mr. Chamberlain is n’t in.’

He put down the telephone. Turning, he saw the maid’s face. It was seared as though he had caught her in some fresh act of guilt.

‘You know something,’ he said, ‘don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘What is it? Come on. Tell me. What is it?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said.

She began to cry; great blubbering tears spread like glycerine on her hot face. She knew what all Castor already knew, and after a time she ceased crying enough to tell him what it was. In a moment he too knew that Jenny had gone away with Chamberlain.

XXXIX

‘The land will not be split, ladies and gentlemen. The land will not be split away from the house.’

He was sitting at the back of a large upstairs room at the Prince Albert on a winter afternoon in the year 1923: a man of seventy. Spella Ho was changing hands for the fourth time in his life. Voices of people numbed him; the voice of the auctioneer rose like the voice of a schoolmaster or a preacher.

‘It has always been the wish of Mr. Arkwright that the land should not be split away from the house. House and land, ladies and gentlemen, will only be sold together. Fourteen hundred and fifty acres and the house. Will you start me? Do I hear somebody start me? The house and the two home farms. They all go together. Will you start me, will somebody start me? Do I hear twenty thousand?’

‘You don’t.’ A voice, laughter.

‘Well, what do I hear?’

‘Five thousand.’

‘It’s an insult, ladies and gentlemen, a disgrace. Six thousand. It’s a most unique opportunity. More improvements have been put into this property by Mr. Arkwright than into any house in the district. The lake alone is unique. Seven thousand.’

‘You ought to knock something off,’ a voice said, ‘for the soldiers playing football in the lounge.’

Laughter. ‘True,’ the auctioneer said, ‘the use of the house as a war hospital might have knocked a little paint off the walls. But that adds to its history. It is a house, ladies and gentlemen, with a very long and extraordinary history.’

Bruno sat staring into space. What was happening seemed to have no relation to him. History? He sat looking into space. He was not bidding, did not mean to bid. The thought of buying the house did not occur to him. He had come out of a sort of curiosity.

‘Twenty-three thousand,’ the auctioneer said, and he heard the bidding rising again, reaching the thirties, halting, then stopping altogether. In the long pause that followed he experienced a feeling of relief. It was flat, without pain or exultation. He was glad, in a simple way, that no one had bought the place. It did not mean any more than this.

He went out of the room and downstairs with the crowd, no one speaking to him until he reached the corridor below, with its eternal dust-bloomed palms and smells of beer and stale cooking, smells now steeped into the flesh and bone of the place. A voice said then: ‘Should have thought it might suit you, Mr. Shadbolt ? Man with a large family.’ The man laughed at his own joke. Bruno laughed too, did not say anything, and went out of the hotel.

It was about two o’clock, the afternoon dull already, the red cinema lights ‘Now Showing “Foolish Wives” Twice Nightly’ already shining across the street. He walked along the winddried pavement back to his house, completely shut off now from the street by the limes and chestnuts and cypresses, pruned to make a barrier. It seemed to him that the air had in it a feeling of snow.

He walked steadily, upright, still smart, without an overcoat or stick. Age had hammered character into his face, so that it had an impressive sparseness, almost without flesh. It was no longer ugly; age had similarly hammered out its crudities; it had the permanence of bronze. He went out of the street into the garden, and it was only then that he remembered what had been said to him at the bottom of the stairs. Remembering it, he stood still. It was as though he had struggled for seventy years through the darkness of recurrent stupidities simply to arrive at the revelation of a single moment. Why had n’t he bought it?

He went on to the house, inside, into the drawing-room. He suddenly wanted to buy it, was suddenly as scared as a child that sees a toy in a shop window and wants it and cannot wait and is afraid in another day it will be gone. He picked up the telephone and called the auctioneers, Killick and Franklin, and said, ‘Is Mr. Killick in?’ and the clerk said, ‘No, Mr. Killick is n’t back yet from the auction.’ He asked for Mr. Franklin, and in a moment Mr. Franklin came and Bruno said, bluntly: ‘Spella Ho. What’s the reserve on that ? ’ Mr. Franklin asked who it was, and Bruno told him. Mr. Franklin said: ‘Fifty-five thousand, Mr. Shadbolt.’ ‘The asking price?’ Bruno said, and Mr. Franklin said: ‘Yes, Mr. Shadbolt, fiftyfive thousand, the asking price.’ ‘Knock five off,’ Bruno said; ‘ I’m coming down. Whatever happens, don’t do anything. I want the key.’

He went out of the house again and down into the town and into the offices of Killick and Franklin, speaking to Mr. Franklin a moment and getting the key. ‘Yes, consider it an offer,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in an hour and talk more then.’

‘Cold weather, Mr. Shadbolt,’ Mr. Franklin said, and Bruno said, ‘Cold?’ — as though suddenly he did not know what time of the year it was.

Furnaces belched smoke from the huge complicated mass of South Wales Amalgamated works as he walked out of the town on the east side. Rows of flatfronted workers’ houses dug red-blue teeth into the countryside, the road to Spella Ho going up almost under the shadow of the condenser. He heard the clank-clock-clank of shunted trucks down in the sidings, saw small armies of ant-men filing out from the seven-tothree day shift, dispersing down the hill. Steam smoke hung momentarily in the dark air, before evaporation, like snow; and beyond — and already, in ten years, it seemed a long way beyond — he could see the uplifted arms, black against the sky, of the river diggers, hoppers swinging up out of the gulleys, spewing down the clay-blue, iron-brown earth that looked in reality black in the lightless afternoon air, making a new sky line, like alps in miniature, of the naked earth. Gasometers, six in number now, stood like some vast arrangement of pillbox defenses, dull crimson, at the foot of the hill up which buses crawled like toys drawn on invisible strings. In a sense they were things spawned out of his endurance and courage. In the creation of almost all of it he had had some part.

And standing there he saw it all, suddenly, as he had not seen it before. Standing between the house and the town, he stood between much that had been created by twin forces in himself. Looking down, he could see the huge, more than tangible mass of his material endeavor for almost fifty years: the dark sprawling record of his undefeated ignorance, courage, and strength. Looking up, he could see nothing but the house. It did not seem to have changed in fifty years by as much as an inch of lichen on the limestone. There was no record, except in his own mind, of things that had happened there. There was no record of the best in himself.

He went on and unlocked the main gates at the end of the avenue; the familiarity of the key, the same as in Mrs. Lanchester’s time, troubled him. He tried not to think of it. Memory forced itself on him with bleak insistence: Louise, the daily journey with her in secret, the testing of the locks of every hay-choked and rusted gate on the place. He walked up the avenue under the bare limes, the massed claret twigs almost the only color now in the dark air. He had driven away from the avenue gates with Gerda. There was no record of it. ‘It might not have happened,’ he thought. ‘No record,’ he thought. ‘A gasometer has a record. It keeps on; you record it in figures. Pig iron has more permanence than a woman. It lasts forever; the stones of a house last with it. What happens to us?’ he thought. ‘There’s no record for us.’

He stood on the terrace. It had begun suddenly to snow a little, not fast. For some reason he did not want to go into the house. He walked round it. A ton or two of coal was still piled in the yard behind the kitchen, and it was as though he had gone back fifty years. He recalled his mother, dying of a cancer of honesty, trying to make him honest ; he could recall the death-coldness of her hands. There was no record of her except that bitter unforgettable coldness. He walked away from the coal, on which soft dabs of snow had begun to make their mark like bird droppings, and went round to the west side and again to the front of the house. He remembered the breaking of the windows, Chamberlain. He recalled Chamberlain and Jenny; had no emotion about it.

In the same way he had no emotion about the house. Now, after fifty years, it was about to be his, and he did not know what to think of it. If there was any grief attached to it, it did not touch him; familiarity lessened the force of grief in the same way as it lessened the force of pleasure. He remained on the terrace a little longer; it was snowing faster, the sky darkening and letting fall slow blobs of snow, without wind. He looked at the immense frontage of the dead house and remembered wondering, fifty years before, how any human soul could live in so large a place. ‘Now I’m going to live in it myself,’ he thought. ‘Now I shall know.'

When he unlocked the front door of the house and went in at last it was almost too dark to see. He had no matches and had some idea that the gas had anyway been cut off. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up, feeling the apple-smooth polish of the banister rail that swung up out of sight like a mahogany snake. He could smell a faint odor of carbolic, perhaps carbolic soap. Hundreds of wounded men had lain for four years in the rooms, matrons had tramped the corridors, concerts had been given, doctors had pronounced life extinct, and bright blue figures had been wheeled away on wheel beds, and there was no record of it except the chipping of plaster on the walls, here and there a naughty drawing of a nurse half sponged off a wall, and a smell of carbolic soap.

He went outside and locked the door and stood on the terrace, for a minute, before going. Already he thought: ‘I own it, it’s mine; this is what I wanted.’ Snow was falling now more quickly. He saw it settling like wool on the unmown grass of the lawns. Snow and falling darkness gave everything—the lake, the ironworks, the town, and the fields between — a strange appearance of distance. It seemed to him for a moment that he had climbed a long way up; that now at last, and for one moment, he stood on top of the world.

XL

The full heat of afternoon hung over Spella Ho as he came out on the terrace some time before three o clock on a day in July 1931. Heat shot back from the white flagstones almost like light from a mirror, tiring the eyes. He went to the edge of the terrace and looked down on the park. Patches of dark tree shade mottled the scorched, almost faun-brown grass like the flank of a deer. Far down was a white blot. Someone was down there and had been there all day.

He went down the steps of the terrace and out into the park and across it, to find out who it was. There seemed, as he got closer, to be two people, two slim white objects. Then as he got still closer he saw that there were two objects but only one person: a woman, with an easel. She was facing towards the house. He walked down to her: an old man, rather slow but erect, dressed in a pair of cream-white flannel trousers tied with a fancy green waistband of Paisley pattern, a Panama hat, and no jacket over the white shirt. Age had hammered dignity into his face, a kind of ironic handsomeness beaten out of the big-boned ugliness.

He went down to the woman and, as he got nearer, saw that she was not a woman, but a mere girl, about twenty-three. She was wearing a pretty pinkstriped wash dress and no hat, hair blonde in the sun.

When he came up to her and stood looking she did not move at all, but she spoke. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘Is it all right?’ It was a quick, self-reliant little voice, certain as an electric bell. ‘I came up to the house and asked this morning and they said you were out.’ Her legs, bare to the knees, stuck out from under the easel.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s all right.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Painting?’ he said.

‘No, pencil. Just a sketch.’

‘The house?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Who sweeps the chimneys?’

He laughed and said, ‘When they’re swept at all it takes a week, but they’re never swept. Mostly I’ve got gas fires. They’re better. They save trouble.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ’There’s enough smoke from that rotten town now.’

He did not say anything to that, but watched her drawing. He felt fascinated by her sitting there bareheaded in the sun. Then he did speak. ‘Had any dinner?’

‘Oh, yes. I bring sandwiches.’

‘Come from Castor?’ he said.

‘Oh, no. Oh, God no,’she said. ‘No fear.’ She blew, making a face. ‘No. I come from Cambridge. But I’m making drawings of the big houses in the county. Sort of holiday task.’

‘What’s wrong with the town?’ he said.

‘ What’s right with it?’ she said. ‘Look at that, for one thing. Look at it.’

She turned and looked over her shoulder, and he knew what she was looking at: South Wales Amalgamated, condensers black against the sky, the claw motions of the river diggers just visible in a gap between the trees. ‘What do you call that?’ she said.

‘ Well,’he said. He did not know what to say. There had been times when he had called it his biggest achievement. ‘I don’t know,’he said.

‘Well, I do. Hideous.’

He had an answer for that. ‘You would n’t get far without steel,’ he said.

‘Yes, but to put it there! Just to plank it down, like that, in front of this house— the one next to the other. You see any sense or reason in that?'

‘Yes,’he said. ‘I do. The iron was there before the house.’

‘That makes no odds.’

‘The iron is as important as the house.’

‘Is it? Well, anyway, I’d like to meet the man who did it.’

‘ I did it,’ he said.

She made another face and pulled at her dress, at the arms and breast, as though it were sticking to her skin. ‘I was hot enough before I said that,’ she said. ‘Now what do I do?' She was grinning. He just smiled, stood looking at the firm little figure tight and alert under the wash dress. ‘You say what you like,’ he said.

She smiled, quietly and rather gently, in apology. She looked suddenly a creature of character and affection —at once radiant and downright. ‘No nonsense about her,’he thought. Then she said: ‘You’d better tell me what else you’ve done before I put my foot in it again.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the gasworks.’

‘ God!'

‘The cinema and the hotel.’

‘Not the Prince Albert?’

‘ Yes.’

‘Perhaps you’d better not tell me anymore,’ she said. ‘ I ’m liable to go off the handle. You see, among other things I’m interested in town planning. And if there is one town that makes me see red it is this.’

‘Fifty years ago it was n’t much more than a one-street town,’ he said. ‘And one-eyed at that.’

‘Better to have kept it one-eyed,’she said.

‘How?’ he said. ‘Why? It’s given people things. Light, money, comfort. When I was a kid we had farden rushlights. No comfort. Nothing. Not even a school here.’

‘Yes, I know. No one denies progress. But you’ve planked something down that’s going to go on being an eyesore forever. What about that?’

‘We seized opportunities.’

‘Opportunities.’ She blew her little habitual sigh, half of disgust, half despair. ‘Did n’t it ever occur to you to make it beautiful while you were at it?’ she said.

‘ I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Did n’t you ever do anything beautiful?’

He did not answer. There was nothing he could say to that. If he had done anything beautiful, there was no record of it. ‘There was no record of beauty,’ he thought, ‘and affection, love, happiness— things like that. I can’t tell her that. It’s private, inside me. It’s the same for everybody,’ he thought now, as he had once thought before. ‘Everybody is shut up; part of everybody is shut away from everybody else.’

Not speaking, soon not thinking, he sat watching her in the sun. She had an air of sudden permanence: flesh-brown and strong, hair thick-curled almost like blonde marble in the golden perpendicular light. He looked in admiration at the soft, naked legs, the warm arms, the fine pink-polished fingers.

‘If I’d been younger,’ he thought, ‘I know what I should have done. I should have kissed her and tumbled her into the grass and run away with her. Things like that. Perhaps she could come back for tea? The paintings on the stairs: it’s just possible,’ he thought, ‘that she’d know all about them, would like to copy them. In that case she could stay the night. I could ask her. She could come back and I could talk to her. I like the way she talks. It’s a long time since I talked with anybody.’

Sirens spat out from South Wales Amalgamated, signaling the three-o’clock shift, cutting the thick hot silence. They woke him from the empty-eyed moodiness of speculation. He saw snow puffs of steam in the sky, heard the echo mock itself in the distances.

‘How’s that?’ she said. ‘You call that beautiful?’

‘It’s hot,’ he said, ‘if that’s anything. Would n’t you come back to the house and have some tea?'

‘Tea? What time is it?’

‘That whistle,’ he said, that’s the three-o’clock shift.’ In the split-second interval between saying this and her reply he experienced a feeling of the acutest loneliness. He felt so alone that he craved suddenly for the companionship of a strange person out of another age and another generation. She could come back. Nothing to do but sketch. She could sketch the house. Her voice struck him back into reality: —

‘Three? Not already?’

‘That’s the three shift just off,’ he said.

‘Oh, good God,’ she said, ’I’ve got to get the train at three-forty. It takes me twice as long as I expected. It must be the chimneys.’

‘You’re welcome to a room at the house,’ he said, ’if you want to finish. You could stay the night and work tomorrow.'

‘Stay the night? He’d skin me.’

‘Who would?'

‘My boy friend.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

She worked for another ten minutes because he said, ‘You’ll just do the town in twenty minutes and then you can get a bus.’ During this time he stood looking at her, and then at last she packed up the easel and campstool. She folded the easel into a long attaché case and carried the stool in the other hand. ‘You can go down through the park,’ he said. ‘A short cut. By the lake.’ And she said, ‘Oh, yes. I came that way this morning. By the two gravestones on the edge of the lake where the two women are buried.’

He did not speak. She gave her friendly little smile and tried to hold out one hand, but both hands were full, and he shook hands by grasping the hand that held the attaché case.

‘Good-bye,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely house. And thank you.’

‘Come and look at it again sometime.'

‘Perhaps. I can’t tell.’ She turned to go. Facing the South Wales Amalgamated and seeing the black mass of steel and the claw motions of the river diggers above and beyond the trees, she turned and pulled a last funny little face, friendly, ironic. ‘If there’s a war I hope they’ll bomb it to bits.’

‘It may be you,’ he said, ‘instead.’

She had begun to walk away as he spoke. She did not hear, and he was glad. As she walked down through the park in the hot sunshine she seemed suddenly like the personification of all youth. Distance lengthened between them rapidly as he turned and walked away towards the house, and once he turned and looked back. She was already far down in the park, going towards the lake that lay with glass-dead tranquillity in the great heat and unbroken light of full sun. At that distance she might have been anybody, and she became for one second the personification of all the women he had ever known.

At the bottom of the park, by the lake, she herself turned and looked back. He was about to go up the steps to the house. She saw him go up and walk along the terrace, solitary, diminutive, white in the full glare of the white sun. She set her attaché case and stool on the ground, to rest a moment and change hands. Then she stooped quickly to pick them up, ‘because,’ she thought, ‘that’s the only train and I can’t bear to miss it,’ and when she looked up again it was all she could do to make out his white figure against the great sun-white front of Spella Ho.

He had become one with the stones of the house.

(The End)