The Doll Maker

9

Clare had come away from Brackenbine with her most urgent task still undone. She blamed herself for the coward haste of her retreat that afternoon. Why could she not have waited for Niall to come? He would have turned up about tea−time. But she knew well that she had not the courage to wait alone with her thoughts, now, in the empty house.

She did not know who at Paston Hall might know that Mrs. Sterne had gone away, and she dared not enquire. She could only wait, trusting that no one would mention the fact to her before the next afternoon. So, somehow, she went through her routine of opening books and appearing to study; but all that evening she was turning over and over the obscure and tangled affairs of Jennifer and herself with Niall, and of Niall with his other models. She could make the facts she knew fall into no sort of significant order, nor point to any acceptable conclusion. All they did point to was a huge, frightening shadow of imminent danger.

Clare's night was as troubled as the previous one; and, as on that night, her ear smarted and throbbed with pain which in comparison with the great bulk of her fears, was ridiculously small, but which was frightening in its petty, persistent malice.

Morning, again, was some relief, for the daylight hours crawled less slowly than the dark. This day she must see Niall; she did not know how she could live through another twenty−four hours if she should miss him again. But she believed he would be there this afternoon. He had told Jennifer to go to Brackenbine this night. Clare never doubted that Jennifer would obey. She saw her during the morning, crossing the Great Hall, just behind a knot of her form−mates. The younger girl's expression was all but beatific; her eyes seemed extraordinarily large and brilliant and there was a settled calm on her face, the tranquil assurance of one who can imagine no bounds to the happiness that buoys her up; Clare recognised that look for the expression of a feeling she herself had known. It proved to her that Jennifer's subjection was complete: heart, mind and body, she was Niall's slave and she was drunk with the honey−dew of the reward he offered for such entire submission.

The afternoon was as cold and dismal as the one before. No one, either teacher or pupil, who saw Clare going out of the building after lunch remarked on her setting out. To her, filled as she was with the strange wrong into which her life had fallen, her deception seemed transparent; but to the school, it seemed, nothing had happened to break in the slightest the monotony of term. She walked at her best speed up the road and along the muddy, plashing ride through the wood. As she stripped off her macintosh in the hall of Brackenbine she saw that this time Niall was at home.

His wet coat lay on the chest in the hall; there were slight movements audible from upstairs, and when she set foot on the bottom step, Grim came bouncing down with complacent little purrs to meet her.

Niall was at his bench in the studio. Her first glance went straight to the loose sheets of paper that lay among his tools there, then to the open door of the press she had investigated the day before. He laid down the tool he was using and grinned.

“By the pricking of my thumbs...” he declaimed. “Or should I say, By the tingling of your ear?”

“You do know, then,” she breathed, startled at once into an admission of a belief in his influence over her which she had meant to deny.

“Know what?” he asked, smiling cheerfully, inviting her to come close.. “I know you're angry. That sticks out a mile. I know you know I've been thinking about you— yes, even talking about you. It's a sign of that when your ear burns, isn't it? An old superstition, you know. Come here and let me look at it!”

But Clare halted when she was six feet away from him, resting her hand on the corner of his bench. It was not easy to speak. His mocking tone, and his half−gay, half−malicious smile put something like a wall of glass between them. She looked at the small intricately−shaped piece of wood in his vice at the other end of the bench. The two puppets he was working on were far advanced now. She took courage and looked straight at him.

“Oh Niall,” she said. “Jennifer has told me....”

His expression changed. He looked neither embarrassed nor angry, but concerned and thoughtful. He came forward, and, taking her by the arm, led her to the end of the room by the fireplace and made her sit in one of the old leather armchairs there. She did not resist, but sat disconsolately looking up at him.

“Why,” he asked, after studying her for some time, “why has that upset you so?”

“I don't know,” said Clare unhappily. It had seemed to her before that in this interview today she must both reproach him and appeal to him. But it was not like that at all.

“I think I can understand,” he said, gently, “and partly guess what's happened. I should have told you before. I don't know why I didn't. A kind of uncertainty, I suppose. It was such a bizarre coincidence. I didn't quite know how to take it, how to put it to you, what to make of it myself. Imagine: not long after I get to know you by your tumbling over our wall in the dark of night another girl from the same place does exactly the same thing. Lord! for a moment when I caught her I thought it was you. I believe I let your name slip out before I realised the mistake. But then I find that this child has not come over by accident. In fact, by a little questioning I got out of her that she knew you had been over the wall once since Christmas. The night the snow lay on the ground. She was curious to know what you had been up to. I was puzzled. Frankly, I didn't know what to do. I even suspected at one time that you might have told her something about your meeting me in the wood. What was I to do? The kid's adventurous. All my instincts are against damping that spirit. I wouldn't forbid her the wood. Upon my soul, I'd encourage all Spoil−the−Child's little wretches to escape and make free of our grounds if they have the enterprise.”

He spoke so frankly, with such an apparently open confession of his mistake, that Clare felt tempted to accept all that he said and think no further into the matter. It would be so easy not to bother any more, just to believe what he said and be taken in his arms. But something nagged at her: he was not telling all the truth; and then, this affair was not just a matter of words in this studio, of an explanation between him and her. He was trying to make her believe that, but there was another person concerned and there were actions, too, that belied these words. She sat straight up and though it wrung her heart to speak so to him, she said:

“Don't lie, Niall. She's told me more than you know. Oh, it doesn't matter to me how she began to come here. You mustn't fall into this vein of explaining—excusing yourself to me for inviting another girl to your house. It's wrong. It puts me in the wrong. And it hurts me. You could have told me that she was coming here at nights, but I've no right to ask to be told; I don't ask....”

He had drawn a little away while she was speaking, and stood now leaning against the other side of the chimney−arch, looking down.

“I'm not insulting you,” he said slowly, “by assuming that you have feelings about this that have to be met with lies. In fact I've told you none. That is how I met Jennifer, a few nights after I had shown you the puppets here. Chance—or at least, something quite independent of my intentions—brought her here; I dealt with the chance in my own way. Believe me, I'm bitterly sorry that it's a way that's hurt you.”

“Oh Niall!” she exclaimed, and the tears started into her eyes. “I'm not, I'm not hurt in that way. I only meant I couldn't bear you to think I was in some way making you say something you should be too proud and independent to say.”

A smile did then pass quickly over his features, but there was something bitter in its brightness. “And yet you are troubled,” he said.

She clasped her hands. “Yes. Yes, I am. But it's fear, Niall. I'm afraid. Ah, don't you see that I don't care about myself. I love you, Niall. Nothing can alter that. It's gone too deep. Whatever you do or say, wherever you go, what's happened can't be altered. What has been is, for ever. It's what's to come that may still be changed. Don't play with Jennifer, Niall. Do what you like with me. But she's such a child. She doesn't understand. Ah, and think of the risks; she might be found out again, coming here, and I shouldn't be able to cover it up another time. But it's not that only. Don't you see, she believes in it all. She may talk like a grown−up, but she's really a child. You can make her believe anything—you, because she's infatuated with you. But it's heartless. You must tell her—tell her as gently as you can, but tell her, that it's all a game. You mustn't let her believe in it.”

Niall had listened to this with his head bent, frowning a little. He looked up now, raising his face until he was looking high over Clare's head, and she saw something like exultation gleam in his eyes and lighten the harsh lines of his face.

“Yes,” he said softly, and drew in his breath. “Yes, she believes in it. Ah, the wonder of that swift comprehension of a child. She has carried over something from the age of magic. That is the thing I saw in her. There was something. Something that brought her, too, to Brackenbine. It was not just curiosity. I felt it wasn't. I gambled on that, and I won! I felt that remnant of the ancient understanding in her. Did I not tell you that the craftsman must feel the willingness of his material? He must know by a subtle sense what he can shape and what he can't. Ah, if only my perceptions were more perfect! Had I the nose for the right kind of blood that Grim, there, has, I should succeed every time. I had no doubts about Jennifer and there was no resistance in her blood. There is such sweet satisfaction when the material and the artificer's hand are so harmoniously intent on the purpose! If you could have seen with what glad obedience she offered her ear to the awl and shed the droplet of life!”

Clare kept her eyes on him with a mounting fear and agony in her heart.

“Oh Niall, don't play with me!” she begged. “I'm deadly serious. Ah yes, it was a delightful game between you and me. I loved your make−believe. But this has gone too far. It's not safe. It's not right. It's—it's not a game any more. You must think what she is. She doesn't exist just in this room, just at the times you see her, at night. She's a schoolgirl; she belongs to Paston Hall, she's got friends, teachers, a sister, a mother and father. She may be quite a different girl to them, you see: just an ordinary young schoolgirl with all the ordinary faults and limitations of her age that every girl has and that you are forgetting about just because you see something in her that attracts you as an artist—that suits your particular game....”

Niall suddenly jerked himself away from the fireplace, strode into the middle of the room and wheeled about.

“Game? Game?” he exclaimed with a sharp impatience. “That's three or four times you've said it. Is it a game?”

Clare stood up. She had gone chalk−white at his new tone, and she trembled uncontrollably. “Isn't it?” she whispered.

He moved back to her, staring straight into her wide, fixed grey eyes.

“Have I played a game with you?” he asked. “Have I pretended to love you?”

His intent stare bore down her eyes. The weakness of will and body she knew so well was assailing her again. But she struggled still to cling to the truth and break the meshes of pretence.

“I didn't think so,” she said unhappily. “I thought you loved me sincerely. But now I don't know.”

With his hands on her shoulders he forced her to sit down once more, and, bending above her he spoke with ardour, but with no tenderness in his voice.

“It is not pretence. I love you. But it is love after my fashion, and that's something deeper and stronger and more enduring than anything you have ever known, than anything you could ever know from any other man. These are not fine phrases: they're words that tell the fact. The reason I love you is that you, alone among the girls I've known, can understand such words. Ah!” his exclamation was angry. “Admit without more ado that it's you who're pretending, taking cover behind your daylight, book−fed reason to hide from your own understanding. Does your heart, does your understanding by night deny the power I have over you? Does this?”

He shot out his hand and seized the lobe of her left ear between his thumb and finger, pinching it brutally. She would have cried out with pain, but no utterance came, only a weak gasp. She could neither move nor speak; the waves of pain flowed through her entire body, seeming to lift her helplessly on their surges, and after a time she ceased even to feel the unrelenting pressure as a pain; it was more a force that coursed through her, spreading busily and brutally into every corner of her body, establishing his domination over every parcel of her being. In the first second she might have fought against the invader, but the power he sent in was too strong and too quick, she was subjugated before the first physical pain could rouse her to battle.

It was a long time before he released her. She had shut her eyes, and when at last the waves began to ebb she thought she must have fainted for a moment or two, for she found herself on her knees in front of him, weakly holding to his legs to support herself, for forehead pressed against his knees. She wanted to rise, but with his hand on her head he prevented her; his hand lay lightly, but it was enough: she no longer had any power of her own. Her mind only was active, and, after the temporary obliteration of every thought and every image from her brain while the waves surged through her, she found a clean simplicity of understanding. The darkness was purged of its terrors as the world may be purged by a great storm, and she saw the whole complex of Niall's powers and his purpose leached and exposed in coherent, comprehensible order: comprehensible in his own terms but irreconcilably alien to all other experience by which she might have judged his purpose.

The things she had feared were all his creatures and her sole protection, she understood, was in the source of the fear itself. She clung to Niall because he was all the authority and the refuge there was in this new, storm−washed, inhuman world. He was at once the evil and the exorcist; from his hand came both pain and healing; he destroyed and he gave life. She trembled and waited.

He spoke after a time, very calmly, and she sighed with relief to catch a faint tinge of tenderness, or at least friendliness in his voice again.

“You see, you do admit my power. I knew you understood too well to rebel, though there were still some few shreds of wilfulness from the ephemeral world trammelling your true comprehension. I'm sorry. But fear nothing more. Put fear quite out of your heart. There will be neither pain nor fear, nor anything else but joy once the material work is done. And until then, if you will only obey me, you shall live in utter tranquillity, and when the moment comes you shall enter the trees immune from all pain and harm, guarded by a shining circle. You shall dream the days away until then and the nights shall be all a soft delight.”

He spoke slowly, and Clare felt each word dropping into the empty, wave−purged world of her mind and peopling it again, bringing colour and life, populating it with images that lived, though they were his creations. She found her voice again, and asked submissively:

“Will it be long?”

His hand travelled from her head down to the nape of her neck and he caressed her there, stroking her with a strong firm touch.

“A few days!” he said, and she heard the triumph and joy in his voice. He continued stroking her for a few moments, then raised her gently and seated her in the chair again. She sat where he had placed her, like an invalid. The great weakness was still upon her, but she had stopped trembling. Niall moved away and went lightly about the room, laughing, talking, as brisk and gay as she had ever known him. He collected up the small parts of the puppets he had been working on and put them away in one of the presses which he opened with a key from his pocket and locked again. The working drawings he threw on to the top shelf of the cupboard Clare had looked into.

Then, when he had tidied up, as casually and genially as he had ever done before, he remarked that he would make some tea, and began to bustle about, raking glowing embers under the iron stand on which he boiled the studio kettle, getting out tea−pot and cups and saucers from a cupboard in the corner. Clare saw that his confidence in his mastery was complete; nor could she resent it or rebel against it; she had submitted and there was a curious peace now in being entirely his—the peace of conformity, of joining the company of all who had submitted to him, Anne and Janet and Margaret Raines. Yet, though she felt no more anguish, though she knew that he could protect her from everything she feared, when the picture of Margaret Raines came into her mind she felt two tears trickle down her cheeks.

He noticed them, and as he set out the tea−cups he smiled and lifted his brows enquiringly. “For whom?”

“For Margaret,” she said. “For the one that failed.”

He nodded slowly and sadly. “It was my fault; perhaps I was mistaken. I thought I saw what I wanted there, but I was wrong.”

He paused and stared into the fire, and when he spoke again it was as if to himself. He frowned and muttered:

“Yet it would have succeeded. If she had not refused at the last moment. She let me think she was willing, but in her heart she resisted me. I saw it when I came to put the heart in. The blood had died. But it was too late then.”

He stared a minute longer into the embers, then shook his shoulders and jumped up and began to pour out the tea, throwing off his gloom again and laughing down at Clare.

“I'll not fail with you!” he said. “Or Jennifer. Be glad for Jennifer. She'll both delight and be delighted. There are merry boys among my people who'll give her pleasure she can't imagine now. Ah! wait until her beauty is displayed in the summer woods when the bright streams invite! We'll see her dance, too, in the courts, between the fountains on summer nights. You'll see her happy then, and you'll hear what laughter comes from lips of unchanging youth, of unimpairable loveliness. I shall have brought my people a flower they'll cherish and rejoice in —for ever!”

“You'll not hurt her?” Clare asked timidly. “She has been frightened.”

He made a gesture of denial, or dismissal with his hand. “Nothing. She's a child yet, and has a child's waywardness sometimes. But there's no real rebellion in her. I shan't need to open up the castle dungeons for her! Some tears and scratches, perhaps, but what are those in an eternity of adventure? There are laws, too, beyond the trees, but I can be a merry judge and contrive my sentences to end in laughter.”

Clare sighed. “Yes, she's seen that. You've shown her what happens to your disobedient slaves, I know. And she accepts it. She's glad to be under your rule. I expect she'd fawn on you if you punished her. We're slaves already. You have our minds now. What does it matter what you do with our bodies?” Her tone was quiet; her words were suited to the naked, rain−washed bones of truth she saw so clearly now.

“And is that a little thing?” he rejoined with energy, throwing back his head proudly. “Is it a little thing to live under my lordship? I tell you I shall set you free from your servitude to Time and Change, and when you have found that freedom my chains will be bonds of flowers, my laws as light as the brilliant air, and you will put on my livery as gladly as the tree puts on its leaves in spring.”

He jumped up and began to pace about the open space in the middle of the room. Grim joined him with one bound and trotted close at his heels. Niall threw a glance up at the skylight. The day seemed lighter now than when Clare had come, as if the fine rain had stopped and the clouds had parted.

“It is too long, too long already!” he exclaimed. “And here I am wasting hours of daylight!” He swung about to the bench and stopped short, as if he had forgotten that he had cleared his work away. Then he pulled his keys from his pocket and threw open the locked press and began taking the things out. Clare felt that he had dismissed her. She rose, but could not go until he gave her some order. Seeing that he took no notice of her, but bent busily over his vice, she approached and looked at his work. He neither forbade her nor invited her, but after a while, when she picked up one part of a puppet that was lying on the bench, he straightened up and watched her as she examined it.

She handled the thing with a queer, timid care now, as she would have held some small animal in her hands. It was the torso of one of the puppets—Jennifer's—and it was almost finished; the hair was fixed, though un−trimmed yet, and the features were carved. The body seemed to lack only painting, but towards the left side, below the breast there had been drilled a round hole half−way through the body, of a diameter such that a large pea would have entered. Clare put her finger on the mouth of the hole, touching it wonderingly, concerned, as if it were a wound. He smiled.

“That will be filled,” he remarked. “That's the last job of all.”

She watched him for a long time in silence as he worked. Her interest was intense, but she felt no excitement, no apprehension, even, any more; only a calm patience within which she could admire dispassionately the exceedingly fine workmanship of all the little figure's intricate joints, the grace of its lines and the surpassing skill of the long fingers that worked on them.

By−and−by her eyes strayed to the press where he kept his work. She had never seen inside it before, for it was always kept locked. Now she observed that things were kept much more tidily in it than in the one where he put his sketch−books. The top−shelf seemed to be occupied by pieces of glass apparatus, small retorts and tubes held in wooden stands—small stoppered tubes such as she had seen in his hand once, containing some tiny blobs or pellets of dark stuff. On the shelf below were stacked many pieces of wood of varying shape and sizes, and in the front, something that impelled her, with a sharper curiosity to move closer and examine it: another puppet torso, less finished than Jennifer's, but still, nearing completion. Then, in looking into those small, exquisitely fashioned features, some more active feelings of pity and fear began to constrict her heart. It was herself she was looking at, or the thing that she would be when she had ceased to be herself. It was she, and yet not a perfectly true likeness: she would wear a fairer form, she saw, than in this life. Hesitantly and fearfully, she put out her forefinger to touch that small hole in the breast, the hollow where the heart should lie. He came across then and, mistaking what she was looking at, said pleasantly: “Has the Captain's coach taken your eye?” She drew back, uncomprehending. Then he bent and showed her something at the back of the shelf which she had missed in her concentration on her own doll. It was a most elaborate model of a coach—a massive vehicle in the style of the seventeenth century, richly carved and gilded and provided with complete sets of tiny harness so finely stitched and riveted that Clare could scarcely believe it to be the work of ordinary human hands. Jennifer's words sprang into Clare's mind, and her eyes grew wide with fear; but the coach was empty now. Niall opened the door to show her the inside, stroking the upholstery with the tip of his finger, but Clare dared not touch those cushions, knowing full well what form Jennifer had seen reclining on them. Niall exhibited all the coach to her, handling it with loving care, bidding her admire it.

“Did you make it?” she whispered.

He put it back on the shelf, and shook his head.

“No. I only discovered it, buried under God knows what rubbish, broken and dirty. I was fourteen when I found it;—more than a year younger than Jennifer is now, but the day is as fresh in my memory as if it were last week. That's why I showed it to her, in use, in the Park. That day when I was fourteen, examining this treasure that I'd found, I first made the astounding discovery and first glimpsed the power I might acquire, and I swore to myself that I would see the Captain's coach in motion one day. Well, I've seen it many times, but I could never recapture that first amazement and fresh wonder of discovery until the night I saw it through Jennifer's eyes. For that great pleasure she has given me I've promised that she shall ride in it by my side, and she shall have an escort of handsome boys and girls in the finest array, and she shall drive to the ball in the gayest cavalcade that's been seen in all the long years of Brackenbine.”

Clare lifted her head and fixed her eyes on him. They were wide, and their troubled grey was as sad as a winter sea under a dull sky.

“Who did make it?” she asked in a voice so low he could scarcely catch the question.

He slowly shook his head. “That's still to be known. Perhaps Captain Trethewy—or if he did not, he certainly knew who did. Perhaps those people who...”

He broke off suddenly, wheeling round towards the door, listening with a frown on his brow. Clare realised that she had been aware of some slight noises below, as if someone were in the hall, but her mind had been so preoccupied she had given them no conscious attention. They both listened now, but the sounds were not repeated. A minute passed, then there was a soft, rapid scuffling and Grim, whose absence they had not noticed, flew back into the room, his tail fluffed out to enormous size and every hair of his body standing on end. He bounded across the studio, up on to a table and from there to the ledge of the skylight, where he crouched down, his ears flattened and his sharp teeth showing in a true wild−cat snarl. Niall looked at him, and back again to the door, listening and waiting.

“What is it?” Clare asked, frightened. “Has someone come?”

“No, no, it can't be,” he muttered. Then, after listening still for a few moments, he strode out, and Clare heard him run down the stairs and into the rooms on the ground−floor. He returned in a little while, grinning cheerfully.

“Some enemy of Grim's, I suppose, of his own sort,” he said. He went over to the bench and picked up his tool again. “I did think for a moment it might be my mother—though she should be well on her way to Cornwall now and, anyway, he wouldn't have got into that state about her.”

Clare watched him work for some time. She had looked at her watch and found that it was time for her to set off back to Paston Hall, and yet she felt she could not move without his permission. He looked up at length.

“Shall I come again?” she asked, in a faltering tone. He considered the question.

“No. Better not, perhaps.” He frowned and looked towards the door again, uncertain about something. “It ought to have been all right; and yet—No. They'll be long days when you don't come, but you had better not take the risk. It might be known now that you have no excuse for coming.”

He went down with her to the hall and helped her on with her coat; then, at the door took her in his arms. She accepted his kisses obediently; when she was thus encircled his power was absolute.

“Ah, if there could be no interval,” he said. “But the time is only counted in days. When we meet again it will be never to part.”

Clare walked back along the drive with bent head, seeing nothing. The purpose with which she had come to Brackenbine this afternoon had been utterly defeated, and she could feel no anger at his victory. How could there be any rebellion in her soul when every thought and feeling she possessed now she had on lease from him? He was incontestably her owner. Even her rebellion against Paston Hall was no longer hers; she could break all the rules now without the least sense of risk or the least doubt of her tightness, for she broke them by his authority. She walked, and it seemed to her that the very motion of her legs was directed by him. She understood all Niall's purpose now and understood, too, the process by which he achieved it. The only wonder to her was that she had ever thought it obscure, had ever turned and twisted in an agony of desire to understand. There was so clearly no need to understand, to rack her brains, to think what to do; for very simply, there was nothing for her to do. Only she wished the next few days were over. They would be a blank, an utter emptiness: she hoped that he would cast a merciful spell of oblivion on her to help her across the nothingness of those days: or, if he would be kind to her, he might fill them with dreams, so that she would be living in the enchanted wood even before her actual awakening among its groves.

She walked on, not feeling the ground beneath her feet or the air on her cheek, or noticing the pale sunlight that now shone on the tops of the Brackenbine oaks. An impalpable but impenetrable sphere immured her. Yet something, some remote, vague disturbance from outside was distracting her. It seemed an age before she could decide that it was some real sound that she was hearing, and as long again before she was well aware that the sound was a human voice, a known voice, speaking her name.

She had stopped, without knowing it, and was standing near the great flat rock not far from the gates. Very slowly, she found her bodily eyes asserting their functions, and little by little the sphere of insulation about her dissolved and she saw a human figure sitting on a boulder at the foot of the bank. It was a grey−haired figure, wearing an old grey coat which showed a tweed skirt and lisle stockings below it.

Clare heard her own voice saying, without surprise, “Yes, Miss Geary?”

The gaunt old lady stuck the point of her umbrella into the ground between her worn brogues. She arched her brows and smiled—the lofty, mysteriously amused smile that the school knew so well.

“You were so rapt,” she said, “I had to speak three times; but what I tell you three times is true; I am convinced that you are Clare Lydgate. Where did I bring you back from? Vergil's Rome? Or were you walking in a stranger place, with another guide?”

“Oh, Miss Geary,” Clare said, with a kind of pitiful little appeal in her voice, going and standing near the teacher, “I didn't know you were coming for me.”

“Indeed, I didn't know myself until the rain stopped,” said Miss Geary, looking up and studying her, drawing back her head, as her habit was, as if to get Clare's face in better focus. “I set out quite early and had a walk through the wood. In fact, I went as far as the house, but you evidently hadn't finished your lesson, so I walked slowly back and thought I would wait for you here. I haven't been out for so long. The gleam of sunshine tempted me. And here, see! I've found the world has woken up since I was last out.”

She pointed with her umbrella, and there, on the wet, bare earth of the bank beside her, Clare saw two or three round heads of yellow flowers.

“Coltsfoot!” she exclaimed softly, and stopped above them, then lifted her head again, gazing with curious expectation round about her. The wood was still fast−bound in winter; the oak boughs were black and bare against the sky; a few rags of withered leaves still hung forlornly here and there, and no fresh green lightened the sombre wall of laurels. The earth beneath was barren, yet the sky was light. The uniform roof of cloud that seemed to have been spread across heaven for as long as Clare could remember, was broken: between the delicately−shaded masses of pearl and smoky grey were rifts of blue, and from the south−west, from behind white ramparts, shone brave, bright lances of the sun. Clare stooped again to gaze upon the coltsfoot that lifted their little round lamps of life from the dark, dead ground, and as she bent her head she felt the tears well up in her eyes and a great sigh seemed to tear the heart loose in her breast. Miss Geary rose and slipped an arm through hers. “I thought it would be very pleasant to walk along to meet you,” she said, beginning to walk towards the gates. “And I think I've had my reward. It's just such a winter's day as you sometimes, rarely, chance on when you perceive life beginning again. You can't say it's spring yet. I expect we shall see the country deep in snow after this, and yet we've seen the change. Oh dear! What commonplace sentiments I have! I'm just saying what people have been saying for thousands of years, and yet, Clare my dear, it's something that it's right to say. Immutability is wrong, you see; life is life because it is change: birth, growth, flowering, reproduction and death—these are the right things. We should not seek to preserve anything for ever, for what is living and true and lovely will always reproduce itself. I was young once and I wished I could be young for ever. But it's better to grow old and change as life will have us change. It's better to live the appointed seasons and then sleep peacefully.”

She had spoken slowly with long pauses, and now they had passed the gates and were in the public road. Miss Geary turned and tugged the iron gate until it was close−shut behind them.

“I think it must be this sense of spring,” she said as they turned towards Paston Hall, “that has revived those old ideas of mine. I haven't thought of them since my cousins and I and Rachel Sterne used to discuss art and life and the meaning of things when we were girls, about your age, years ago. In the arrogance of our youth we thought we knew the meaning of things. Well, I've lost my youth, and I hope I've lost my arrogance, but I still think Rachel's wrong as I thought her wrong then. I wonder if she has begun to think so herself? It was a moral question we used to debate—that the creation of a thing of permanent beauty was the highest good and justified any means, and of course that implies any exploitation or distortion or even destruction of life. But can a thing be permanent or beautiful if it disregards the laws of life?”

They walked on in silence for some distance.

“Some clever scientist, I suppose,” Miss Geary mused aloud, “might make something that appeared to be alive and that could go on for ever. But could anyone ever create something as subtle as a coltsfoot, which lives and develops quite independent of anyone's will, just freely obeying the impulses of its own nature and yet taking part with such perfect harmony in the whole grand design? That's it, you see, Clare: we are part of a pattern; the sum of all our natures, from coltsfoot to cabinet−ministers, is a balanced and beautiful design. A mutable one, I know, but deriving immortality from its very mutability. If one of us should seek to be false to her own nature by resisting age and change she would mar the pattern. We have a duty to life, my dear.”

They had reached the gates of Paston Hall. Miss Geary looked through them at the school, then back, up the road again.

“That is where I used to disagree most with Rachel Trethewy—Sterne, of course, she is now,” she said. “She was wrong, and she went beyond all reason in defending her ideas. She used to say then that she'd like to have a son and bring him up to know no right and wrong except what she called the ethics of beauty. I wonder if she has done so?”