Spella Ho

The Atlantic Novel

BY H. E. BATES

CHAPTERS 20-29

THE beginning of SPELLA HO

SPELLA HO is the name of a great stone country house built in the eighteenth century and standing out like a clipper ship above the rolling English Midlands. The house was empty and deserted at the beginning of the novel, yet the wealth and power it represented were a living tradition in the minds of the Shadbolts, whose miserable home was within sight of its chimneys.

At twenty, Bruno Shadbolt was no credit to himself. His father was a drunken carter who did odd jobs in the village of Castor, and as his assistant Bruno once went up to the great house 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. Not until a young widow took pity on his uncouth ignorance and helped to clean him up did he have even a vestige of self-respect.

He was a swart, powerful figure, very broad, coarse-haired, blunt-featured. So he saw himself one evening in a pier glass at Spella Ho as he prowled through the empty rooms. But through his being there ran a vein of iron determination, which had been roused by the widow and was to give him power over men and an irresistible magnetism for women.

The boundaries of his world expanded. From Coutts, a loan shark, he heard of ‘business,’ ‘discount,’ ‘speculation,’ and from the trickery practised upon him he began to learn the use of money.

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, when the bailiff took to drink, Bruno replaced him. 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.

Louise explained to Bruno the dishonesty of his agreement with the loan shark, and when Coutts next came to collect his interest Bruno kicked him off the estate. In his rage Coutts returned to Castor and roused the townsfolk, who 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, and her intuition told her that they both had something to lose if they deserted Mrs. Lanchester before her death. So Bruno stayed on at Spella Ho, captivated by his love of Louise and being smartened up through his friendship with that flashy townsman, Rufus. Then Louise was taken ill. The country physician could do nothing to 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, the wife of the doctor in Castor. She was a soft, blonde German without friends in this provincial English town. Loneliness brought them together, and magnetism did the rest.

With the years, Mrs. Lanchester came to rely upon Bruno, and as her last illness set upon her she turned to him 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. As the frequency of Dr. Black’s visits increased, Bruno had increasing opportunity for snatched-at meetings with the doctor’s wife. When Mrs. Lanchester died and Spella 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. After weeks of fruitless searching he was reduced to sharing a miserable attic room with the anarchist-clerk Bandy. . . .

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR

SPELLA HO.

BY H. E. BATES

XX

BRUNO went to a meeting of the Workers Democratic Federation two nights later, sitting at the back of a small square-pillared Russian Orthodox church lighted by hanging oil lamps. In an atmosphere of suppressed fervor and stale odors of incense and oil he listened for two hours to speeches he did not understand, his mind inattentive, forced back to the bitter preoccupation of his own case. Towards the end of the meeting he was no longer listening, and it seemed as though the voices of the speakers boomed up from some interminable tunnel beyond the altar.

This feeling persisted after the meeting had broken up and he and Bandy were walking together in the street. All this time he felt an increase of physical depression, and his head had begun to ache a little at the back. He was also thirsty. ‘Let’s get a gin,’ he said.

‘I can’t afford it,’ Bandy said.

‘I’ll pay — it’s on me,’ he said; and then for a moment it seemed as if he had not said it, and he repeated it. ‘I’ll pay — it’s on me. I’ll pay,’ he said.

In the gin palace he took out his purse, fumbling for silver, feeling that there was no coördination between his brain and hands. It was as though he were partially drunk. Suddenly the purse slipped out of his hands and fell down between the counter and the brass footrail, not spilling anything. He moved to pick it up, but Bandy had already stooped. Bandy looked at the amount in the purse and said: ‘You’re almost a capitalist, after all. You want to take care of it.’

Bruno drank three gins, breaking a purely economical resolution not to drink, and after them felt a temporary spasm of relief. His head was still being bumped continually by regular throbs at the back. Bright mirrors shot out a wild reflection of himself. He got up without warning, knocking over his stool, and elbowed Bandy into the street again. ‘Come on, let’s go somewhere.’

Then he was in a music hall, not knowing how he got there, not remembering anything. He and Bandy were standing up, at the back, in darkness. He clutched the promenade railing, felt behind and about him a crush of other people, men, tarts waiting for the lights to go up. Impressions began to assail him in waves, thundering in from the back of his head: dimmed gaslights, the red lights of exits, faces of women averted to look at him, long, dusty scent-waves of powder and cheap perfumes. Then in the interval he knew vaguely that he was ill, that he had never in his life felt like this.

A girl was on the stage, frilled skirts lifted to show soft pink thighs among frizzed swan’s-feather whiteness. She was very dark, slim for music-hall taste, bare white arms picking up the skirts with easy devilry. He watched her and had the sudden feeling, as in the street, that he could reach out and touch her. He lifted his hands from the railing and felt the world go round, the girl swinging away down a revolving slope of light and blackness. Then he got it into his head that somewhere, at some odd moment of time, he had seen the girl on the stage before. The sense of familiarity, frustrated, became a secondary pain. He struggled to get at the reason for her familiarity. It eluded him, and in a few minutes she also had gone. Then he was pushing his way out, trying to catch sight of the girl’s name on the programme bill. He saw it at last outside, under the green-white gaslight. ‘Italian Nightingale.’ The name meant nothing to him.

After that he did not know what happened. He knew now that he was ill. He wanted to lie down. His head was on the verge of explosion. Then after a long time he was lying down, vaguely conscious that there had been some trouble, a scuffle, dirty names, Bandy struggling to get him upstairs, taking off his coat and trousers. ‘You drank the gins too quick.’ He lay fighting with the explosive waves of pain in his head, knowing it was not the gin, but pain and the girl on the stage complicated again into hideous nightmare.

When he roused in the morning Bandy had gone. He did not try to get up. He could hear rain pouring on the skylight. He had the occasional impression that there was no skylight, that the rain was pouring in on him, pricking his skin.

He lay there all day, alone, far-off feet bumping in the tenement below him, but no one ever coming. It continued to rain and he continued to have the impression that the rain was falling down in small sharp drops on his face and hands. Towards evening he raised himself up in bed and groped over to the box where Bandy kept his candle. He made three attempts to light the candle, all unsuccessful. Then he made a great effort and succeeded. Pale warm yellow light fell on his hands, momentarily comforting him.

Then he had a shock. It seemed as if the impression of rain falling on his hands must have a basis in reality. His hands were covered with spots.

He waited what he knew to be hours. Then Bandy was in the room, standing over him, lighting a new candle from the old stump.

‘By God, it’s what the landlady’s kid had.’

‘What? What is it?’

Bandy looked scared, mouth open in the candlelight. ‘Scarlet fever. The kid died.’

Bandy began to undress, giving way to fear. ‘How do you feel? Mean my job, if I get it. How did it start?’ Then the candle went out, but it still seemed, for a long time, as though Bandy were walking about the room. Bruno’s coat and trousers were hung on a nail on the wall, and once during the night it seemed as if they fell down and that Bandy was there, picking them up. He tossed and turned about in the wet bed all night, not caring, taking no notice of even the rats under the bed.

Then, in the morning, he woke to find Bandy lying fully dressed on his bed. ‘I got as far as Elephant and Castle and could n’t go no further. My head’s banging like hell. Mean my job. Mean the sack if I can’t get there’s afternoon.’

They lay there all day together, Bandy never attempting to get up. Bruno felt desperately weak, but calmer. All day he was puzzled by something about his trousers and coat. Whereas he had been sure that at first the coat had hung over the trousers, the trousers were now hanging over the coat.

Towards evening he struggled up on the bed and got down the coat and trousers. Lying down again, he went through his pockets. He could not find his money. Hammers banged in his mind: fear, desperation, weakness.

Twice that evening he went through his pockets again. Then he would lie down and the loss of the money would seem momentarily part of sickness and nightmare. In this way he had periods of false security, and in one of them he fell asleep.

He woke to hear Bandy groaning, light-headed, now very ill. It was almost morning. He called down for the landlady, and in about ten minutes she came upstairs.

‘ Get a doctor,’ he said. ‘ We both want a doctor.’

‘Can you pay for a doctor?’ she said. ‘Because I know he can’t.’

‘Do something.’

‘You can’t do nothing,’ she said, ‘but let it take its course.’

‘Undress Bandy anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s sleeping in his kit.’

So she undressed Bandy. ‘ Clothes are wringing wet,’ she said, and suddenly as she flung coat and trousers over her arm he heard the chink of money in the pockets and he knew by some extraordinary flash of intuition whose money it was.

That day he felt he struggled through all the possible conflicts of fear and bitterness, his soul prostrate at the bottom of a pit. He was conscious enough to hear Bandy groaning, to think: ‘Sooner or later I can get up. I can go down. I can get it back.’ Bandy was obsessed by delirious terror.

Two mornings later he woke and turned over to call Bandy. He felt better for the first time and had slept well. ‘Bandy,’ he said. Bandy did not move or answer. ‘Bandy,’ he began again. Then he saw the mouth of Bandy lying open, the lip stiff over the brown teeth.

Later in the day the landlady came up with an old walnut-faced woman wearing a large Inverness cape and a cockney bonnet, and between them they laid out the worn undernourished body of the clerk-anarchist.

Too weak to move, he lay there with Bandy for another day and a night. He woke later, feeling still another stage better, to hear the bump of Bandy’s coffin being set down on the small landing outside. As the men opened the door and brought in the coffin and whipped the sheet off Bandy’s body he could bear it no longer. He pulled on his trousers and, holding them up with his hands, went down to find the landlady.

‘Money?’ she said. ‘I ain’t seen no money.’

‘In a purse,’ he said. ‘Bandy took it. He took it the night I was taken so bad, the night before he was bad.’

‘That’s a funny thing to say if you can’t prove it.’

‘I could prove it,’ he said, ‘if I could see the purse.’

‘You can look through his pockets,’ she said, showing him Bandy’s trousers and coat hanging on the airing line above the stove, ‘but I ain’t found no purse. Wish I had.’

He looked through Bandy’s pockets, out of pure formality, finding nothing.

‘As soon as I can get out I’ll tell the police.’

Before he could speak again she laid the purse on the table. ‘Don’t fall over yourself,’ she said. ‘How can you prove it’s yours?’

He took the purse and opened the flap. His initials, ‘B. S.’ had been pokered on the inside.

‘He could never keep his flappers off anything,’ she said.

He began to count his money. It was not all there. Where there had been almost five pounds there was now less than forty shillings. ‘ Depend he spent it,’ she said, and he knew he could never prove it otherwise.

Bandy was buried on the following day, and Bruno stayed in the room for another week, feeling strength return in slow hesitant cycles. At the end of the week he paid the rent he owed, a whole week and a broken week at half rent, a whole week at full rent, a total of fifteen shillings.

He came out of the house with a little over a pound in his pocket. As he walked along, peeling off the old dead skin from his hands, he did not know what to do or where he was going.

XXI

He struggled through December, into January: doss houses, sleeping out, days with the sandwich boards, his shoes like paper, his money slowly but inevitably dwindling, days when he could have eaten cat’s meat. The thing that kept him going was the thought that he could reclaim and sell the horse and trap, buy himself food and boots, and then walk back to Castor; or he could sell the trap and ride back to Castor. He would sell the outfit for anything — ten pounds, whatever he could get. But he would do it only in some insurmountable extremity.

He felt this extremity on January 17, of the new year.

Nothing happened; the day was no worse than others; but suddenly he could stand it no longer. He walked slowly, by painful stages, down to Stratford. It was bitter cold. He did not notice it. His defeat was concentrated into the pain of the sole of his left foot. He walked with it cringed up in the almost soleless boot, the flesh blistered like a scorch mark, so that he was almost lame. He had fifteen pence in his pocket, and he got down to Ash Wilmer’s coach and undertaker’s stables about two o’clock in the afternoon.

‘Mr. Ash Wilmer about?’

‘Ash Wilmer?’ The stable hand was shoveling muck.

‘Yeh.’

‘Well,’ the stable hand said, ‘he’s about, if you call it about. About somewhere. He’s been dead about three weeks.’

Bruno stood dead still. He did not say anything.

Five minutes later he stood talking to a man he knew to be Ash Wilmer’s son. He told him about the horse and trap, the arrangement. He was too tired to struggle against defeat.

‘Come on,’ the man said, ‘bloody well git off while your shoes are good.’

Bruno turned and went slowly out of the yard. As he reached the stables he saw the stable hand still shoveling muck. The stable hand spoke. Bruno stopped, and something made him say, ‘Ain’t got a mite o’ leather I could tack on this sole?’

‘Leather?’

‘Harness leather. A strap or something like that. Anything.’

The man went into the stables and came out after a few minutes with a leather strap and buckle. ‘How’s this?’

Bruno took it. He wound the strap twice round his boot and buckled it over his instep. From the sudden thick tightness of the leather he gained momentary comfort. The strap kept his blistered foot off the ground. Leather, he thought. Better if I’d stopped in Castor, with Stokes, and sold leather. Better if I’d got a job with Chamberlain. He walked out of the stable yard, his foot slightly better. Castor, he thought. Castor’s where I should have stopped — where I ought to go — where I can go.

He began to make his way, slowly, slightly less painfully, up through Hackney and Holloway, out towards Highgate. Some long time after darkness he was going on towards Colney Hatch. He stopped to spend a penny on bread and cheese, going to the back door of a small pub. There he had a piece of luck. ‘Don’t want no sticks chopping? No wood or anything?’ he said. And the woman said: ‘I don’t know’s we don’t. It damn well blows cold enough.’ She gave him an axe and a candle, and he chopped a pile of kindling for her in a small outhouse, working for more than an hour. Back in the pub kitchen she gave him bread and cheese and a glass of stout.

‘Want anything else?’ he said. ‘I’ll clean the privy out. Empty the bucket. Anything.’ So she let him do that, surprised that he should ask to do it, surprised enough to say, when he asked if he could sleep in the woodshed, ‘Yes, I don’t know’s you can’t. Only it’s a funny place to want to sleep.’

‘I can sleep anywhere,’ he said, and she said: ‘Well, you’re welcome. It’s cold enough indoors, let alone out. Cold enough for snow.’

He slept that night in the woodshed, covering himself with sacks, lying down on a mass of sawdust, bark, shavings. There was a sack that rats had chewed beyond usefulness. He ripped it to single lengths and tied it round his boots. During the night his feet were almost warm, and when he set out, on the following morning, it was as though he walked on cushions.

The morning was intensely cold, the wind east, the sky a driven mass of snowcloud. He walked steadily on, northward, less mindlessly than on the previous day, but still as though his thoughts were set in a void. About nine o’clock it began to snow. He did not mind it. The light fast-driven flakes gave him the illusion that he was moving fast. For a time it snowed thinly, with reluctance, the flakes hard, not settling. Then as he went on he looked up to see a mass of snow advancing out of the east and north, blotting out distance. He walked into it and it covered him, the sodden fury of the wind holding him momentarily still.

He walked on for a space of time which snow and his own blindness made it impossible to measure. During this time he did not stop to rest and the snow did not stop. He rammed mouthfuls of bread and cheese into his mouth as he walked along. He was driven by the same mindless forces as before. Thought had the repetitive quality of some inward pain. He knew that if he stopped there was some possibility that he would never go on again.

He stopped about four o’clock in the afternoon. He saw a pub, red-brick walls white-crusted with snow, row of empty beer barrels lying in the yard outside buried to the pure white shape of a switchback, and he went inside without thought or hesitation, as though he had been making for the place since morning. It was still snowing, and he could still see the white wall of it advancing out of the now-darkening northern sky.

‘By crikey,’ the landlord said. ‘You know you’re the first man in here since ten o’clock this morning.’

‘Eh?’

‘You ain’t come fur?’

‘Colney Hatch.’

‘God!’ the landlord said. He could not believe it. He stood looking at Bruno, at the fantastic snow-covered bandaged boots. ‘In them baffs? You better take ’em off and git warm.’ Bruno stared and did not move.

When finally he did move, it was to put money on the table: a shilling. ‘All I got,’ he said. ‘Something t’eat. You let me sleep in the woodshed? I can sleep anywhere. It’s all I got.’

‘You git summat hot down you,’ the landlord said, ‘and we’ll talk about money.’

His wife came in, a robust, reddlenecked woman, kind-eyed. Bruno sat staring while she looked at him.

‘From Colney Hatch,’ the landlord marveled. ‘Walked it. In them baffs. In this lot.’

She too marveled, voice soft, to Bruno soft and also far off. ‘You must be daft,’ she said, ‘ daft to do it. You better get your boots off. Quick!’

He did not speak. He felt daft: dumb and daft, like a man lying half over the edge of sanity. He tried to bend down to his boots. His hands went to the knots in the sacking. He touched them, made an immense effort to grapple with them. Where there should have been some point of contact there was nothing. His hands were frozen beyond feeling, and he began groping about like a child.

He saw the landlord’s wife stoop down and begin to untie the rough snow-sodden knots in the sacking. ‘Arth,’ she said, ‘you rub his hands. He ain’t got no feeling nor nothing. That right? Can’t feel nothing, can you?’

‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘that’s right.’ Whatever she said was right. He sat dumb, with no feeling, helpless, she untying his boots, the landlord chafing his hands.

The landlord held his hands sandwiched between his own, as though between lumps of warm meat. His wife went out, returned. ‘Ask me, it’ll snow all night. Think yourself lucky you got in when you did.’ Bruno sat still, listening, his mind working. Agony slid slowly back into pain, pain itself into an ache of understanding.

He stayed that night with Arth and Emma Watford, sleeping in a bed, food inside him — his first turn of luck for weeks. The names of the man and woman fixed themselves in his mind, indelibly imprinted by gratitude and pain. In the morning the snow, ceased now, lay to a depth of three feet, in places drifted to six or seven feet.

All that day he and Arth Watford and sometimes the woman worked at the job of shoveling the snow from the house. He worked strongly, not tired, only his eyes weak sometimes in the freezing wind.

The sky remained sunless. ‘Lick me if we don’t git some more,’ Watford said. ‘You see if we don’t git more tonight. You’ll be lucky if you ain’t here a week.’

He was there four days. On the fourth the wind turned and he could feel the warmth in it. People had also begun to move, and there was a man, a packman with a wicker basket of stockings, card buttons, bootlaces, and odd drapery, who came in an hour or so before Bruno set out again.

They talked. ‘Well, there’s a living in it,’ the packman said, ‘if you call it a living. What’s your line?’

‘Nothing.’

‘If you’re going far,’ the man said, ‘it’s no trouble to sell a thing or two while you’re going. Take laces. Everybody wears boots.’

‘Fat profit on laces.’

‘Sixty per cent. If you’re going far, why don’t you take something like that? I’ll sell you laces at threepence a dozen. You sell ’em at sixpence. Take three or four dozen — you’d sell that in a day. Shilling profit. That’ll keep you going.’

When he said good-bye to the Watfords, an hour later, he had two dozen ladies’ bootlaces in his pocket. That day he walked another ten miles. The next day he walked almost twenty miles, working his way up through Bedfordshire. Everywhere the land was ironfrozen now under broken islands of snow, and men were not working.

At midday that day he got into a barn to eat, and to his surprise, as he sat there, three laboring men came in. He told them who he was. ‘Peddling a bit. Can’t sell you a pair o’ laces for the women ? ’

One, the youngest, said: ‘That is what I want. I bust my missus’ high-legged ’uns last Sunday, lacing ’em up.’ They all laughed. ‘How high do they lace up?’ They went on for a time pulling the young man’s leg. He was eating his dinner out of a sheet of newspaper, and when they left, half an hour later, he left the paper lying on the snow. Bruno picked it up. It was an old newspaper, bacon-stained, slightly yellow. He sat there for some minutes, reading it.

Suddenly he was not reading any longer. He sat staring. Then he looked at the date of the newspaper: November. Then he was reading again what he had already read. ‘It is now learnt that in the gale off the East Coast of Friday night last the packet Northern Belle, bound for Holland out of Harwich, foundered with all hands.’

He got up and walked out of the barn. He was flung back into the old mindless state, the void in which he moved mechanically. He was not conscious of a sense of loss. He felt oppressed by a sense of fatalism: that it had to happen, Gerda going, he not going, exactly as it had happened, everything, the bitter pain of it all driving out thought.

Going on, he came into Castor on the following afternoon. On his left foot the old blister, opened again, was stinging as if with salt. He walked with a slight limp, head unconsciously down in the wind, the stubble black and frowzy on his face, his eyes wind-bleary. He felt the bitterness of things to be complete.

XXII

‘Gapin’ at you? I should think they was gapin’ at you. Folks everywhere talkin’ about you. Everybody lookin’ for you high and low for months. Mr. Carmichael got notices in the papers about you.’

‘Mr. Carmichael?’ He was talking to Maria, back at the old Shadbolt place. Maria had got married, her husband an ex-soldier, a tall handlebar-moustached man who loafed about in carpet slippers tied on with bits of string. ‘Mr. Carmichael? What Carmichael?’

’You forgot that too ? Mr. Carmichael, the London man. The solicitor. Her solicitor.’

‘Her?’ He was a man trying to pick up the too-fine threads of the old life, his mind too numbed and coarsened to feel them.

‘Her. Yes, her. The old lady. Her at Spella.’

‘What about her?’ he said.

‘She’s left you money. Two or three thousand pounds and property in London,’ Maria said.

He could not say anything.

‘I heard,’ the soldier said, ‘it were fifteen thousand and a row of houses in London and some land at Spella.’

It was still beyond him to speak.

‘You got to get in touch with Mr. Carmichael,’ Maria said.

‘How? In touch, how?’

‘Through Mason and Freebody. On the Square. They been here times. Said they were acting for you.’

‘Acting?’

‘Gettin’ the dough,’ the soldier said.

He had nothing to say. He felt that nothing could excite him now.

He went to see Mason and Freebody on the following day. They spoke to him, treated him, as a man who had come back from the dead. They called him ‘Mr. Shadbolt,’ and once Mr. Amos Mason’s clerk called him ‘Mr. Shadbolt, sir.’

In another two days he was talking to Mr. Carmichael, again in the office of Mason and Freebody. ‘But Mr. Shadbolt, where have you been?’

‘London,’ he said.

‘London? Where in London? Where did you stay in London?’

Trying to make an answer, he could think only of the bookseller. ‘Near Gray’s Inn Road,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Mr. Carmichael said. ‘Well. Did you ever! I was just round the corner.’

He tried to show interest in this extraordinary coincidence. Mr. Carmichael went on talking. Bruno listened, registered understanding through a series of impressions: papers taken from Mr. Carmichael’s pocket, seals, a reading of extracts from the papers, figures, the sum of £250, more figures, the name of a piece of land, Anchor’s Quick, connected with Spella Ho, more figures, then talk of property in London. Then more figures, more explanations. Finally a proposition from Mr. Carmichael, in terms of advice.

‘If you will take our advice, Mr. Shadbolt. The land now, Anchor’s Quick, here in Castor. To you, as land, useless. Sell it. Benefit yourself to the extent of another fifty pounds. Then the houses, in London. To you, here, in the country, more bother than they are worth — as houses. Repairs, rates, trouble with tenants, a source of endless worry. Sell them too. We could get you, say for the sake of argument, another £750. Give you a thousand pounds in all, Mr. Shadbolt. Make you a rich man, Mr. Shadbolt, a rich man.’

‘I dare say,’ he said.

He sat thinking. Houses in London, Bandy, the room in the tenement house. For one room he and Bandy had paid seven-and-six — a room without windows, with no air except by the broken door and the skylight. In that house he knew there were ten other rooms. On the basis of seven-and-six a room, he tried to calculate the value of the house in rents. He knew it must come to somewhere between £150 and £200 when Mr. Carmichael spoke again.

‘I may tell you,’ he said, ‘for what it’s worth, that the rates in London are bound shortly to go up. There is an agitation for raising wages. Trade-unions, labor agitators, hot-headed fellows everywhere. If wages go up, rates are bound to go up.’

‘If wages go up,’ Bruno said, ‘rents can go up.’

Mr. Carmichael went on talking, trying in a slightly aggrieved voice to induce him to sell the property in London. All the time he was not listening. He remembered then that Mr. Carmichael had said nothing about rents, that it was possible that rents might be higher or lower than he himself had imagined.

‘What are the rents?’ he said.

‘On these six properties? Well, that would have to be gone into, Mr. Shadbolt — have to be gone into.’

‘Gone into be damned!’ He was suddenly out of patience, on the verge of anger. ‘You’ve been solicitor to Mrs. Lanchester for God knows how many years, and yet you don’t know the rents and prices of her property?’

‘Well — ’

‘Well, well! What the hell’s the use of a well without water? If you don’t know the rents, give me a rough idea.’

Mr. Carmichael turned over his papers, found the figures, gave them out at last. ‘The gross rental is £954.11.3 per annum.’

‘Means a year?’

‘Yes, Mr. Shadbolt.’

He made his decision. ‘I keep the property,’ he said. ‘I want rents collected weekly and forwarded here every week, less your commission. Mason and Freebody’ll act for me here.’

Coming out of the office and going across the Square, he met Stokes. Stokes appeared to have changed. He looked alert, more in command of himself. He began to tell Bruno about it as they walked together to the workshop. ‘I got converted.’ He was a man being tossed on the waves of religious fervor. ‘Happened while you was away. Come on me all of a pop. I got the blues one night and went into the Plymouth Brethren and suddenly it got me. I see God. See Him as plain as daylight. I never bin the same since, Shadbolt. I see Him. I feel His Presence. I know He’s with me. It made a big difference, Shadbolt. You see if it ain’t made a big difference.’

They went together to the workshop, and no sooner was the door opened than Bruno saw the difference. The shop had been fitted with benches, and four men, shoemakers, were standing at them, working over lasts. The place was alive with hammering, dancing of tacks and sprigs, the smell of hot wax and leather and warmed heelball. ‘As soon as this thing come over me,’ Stokes said, ‘I went to old Abel Sanders and told him how it was. He said, “I thank the good God, Stokes. And if you can get the men I’ll give you the work.”’

‘What profit are you making?’

‘That’s all right, don’t worry about it.’ He took Bruno into the office. ‘Every week since this happened your fifty per cent has been put aside just as if you was here.’

‘You want me to come in and work?’

‘What, now? With this money the old lady left you ? ’

’There ain’t no money. It’s all in bricks and mortar.’

Stokes looked immediately depressed. ‘Pity, pity. What we want is money, Shadbolt. If we had money we could build a business. See? Trade’s coming on. See what I mean? All we want is money.’

‘How much?’

‘A hundred and fifty.’

‘I’ll find it,’he said.

And when, an hour later, he came out of Stokes’s workshop, he felt as though he were walking upside down. It was as though the world had been turned upside down. He was caught up again by the old ideas of money and profit, ambition and progress, and the effect on his starved mind was exactly that of a sudden meal on a starved body. Intoxicating ideas of money, property, business, profits, drove him into a state where, momentarily, he did not know what he was doing. His mind went through a period of brief but complete blankness.

When this blankness had gone he found himself walking up the avenue to Spella Ho, as though the old lady had never died and he had never gone away. He did not know quite how he had got there. He walked along under the bare trees and went up on to the terrace and stood looking at the house.

It was empty. He stood there looking at it for a long time, the white stone faintly outlined against the winter sky, and then he walked slowly round it, his head slightly down, unconsciously, like a man who had come back to look for something lost.

XXIII

From this moment he began to get on — not solidly and slowly, with the old blundering determination of a man advancing in darkness, but suddenly, shot up like a rocket. In the summer of 1882 he and Stokes moved their premises, taking the empty factory Stokes had suggested, the partnership under new agreement, Bruno putting up £150, Stokes £50. These sums seemed to him colossal. Colossal days, colossal sums of money, but who knew? — perhaps colossal profits.

At first he and Stokes employed only six girls on the sewing machines and about a dozen men in the making and clicking rooms. By the end of 1883 they employed twenty girls and about fortyfive men. Profits rose too: a bare £85 on the first year’s working, a good £300 on the second. ‘All due,’ Stokes would say, ‘to God watching over us.’

Bruno knew nothing about leather, less about making boots. He never learned. It was his job to interview commercial travelers, hard workers and often weary men who walked the five miles from Orlingford Station with large leather bags of samples, thread, eyelets, linen, buckram, grindery — men who did not like Castor, a dead-alive town without a railway or a hotel or even, in those days, a decent place to eat. He found it easy to intimidate these tired men, who hated the town but hated still more the thought of walking another five miles without an order in their pockets. It was his system to set himself a figure as far below their figure as he dared, and then browbeat them down to it.

He interviewed travelers at the top of the stairs, never in the office. There on the matchboarding partitions were tacked printed notices of Stokes’s invention or selection: ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want’; ‘To whomsoever it may concern: There Are Many Roads in Life, the Rough and the Smooth, the Narrow and the Wide. Take Rough and Narrow, rather than Smooth and Wide, for Smooth is the Way and Wide is the Gate that leadeth to Destruction’; and in larger letters than the rest: ‘You HAVE COME TO SHOW

US YOUR SAMPLES. REMEMBER THERE ALSO COMETH A DAY WHEN YOU MUST LAY OUT YOUR SAMPLES BEFORE HIM.’

Under these notices Bruno browbeat dozens of sun-weary or half-famished travelers, adamant to a farthing or an eighth or even a sixteenth of a penny.

In this way, hard, unsentimental, consistently relentless, he felt that he gained a revenge on a world that had been for so long hard and relentless towards him. He gained something else. As far as the gossip of travelers could extend at that time of day, for a radius of twenty or thirty miles, he gained the reputation of being a hated man.

Gradually the form of ambition had crystallized, become unchangeable. Money — he thought of it as with capital letters. He knew that money made money; and where, to Stokes, money was linked with a creed that was itself beautiful and powerful, to him money teas a creed, unconscious but wonderful, a force that inspired and obsessed him. It was inevitable that he should be driven by this force to try, as time went on, to make more money.

During this period he was very friendly with Rufus Chamberlain. He began to dress like Chamberlain: the latest in swank hats and collars, oiled hair, pointed shoes, an inclination towards dandyism in canes and colored waistcoats. Flashy clothes sat on him with an air of discomfort and a slightly ludicrous depravity, accentuating his ugliness, the tight coats bringing out the long arms, the light-colored shoes making the great feet seem larger and flatter, the high choker collars raising up the huge head, with the protuberant determined eyes, as though it had been barbarously cooked and served up in a basin too small for it.

He was never aware of this. It made him conspicuous wherever he and Chamberlain went, and throughout the eighties they began to be known in every pub and hotel and ballroom and penny gaff and traveling vaudeville all over the country. All the time the legend of notoriety, begun by the fight at Spella Ho and the gossip of the inheritance from Mrs. Lanchester, grew up about him steadily and fantastically. He became a man regarded not only with hatred by tired commercial travelers whom he outwitted on farthings, but with jealousy by almost everyone who knew anything of his history.

He saw much not only of Rufus Chamberlain but of Charles Walker Chamberlain, too. The older man now had something like reverence for the younger. They found a dozen questions which argument could never settle. They talked of the old, vexed, and now much more pressing question of the railway. Chamberlain held that a long new main line would come, starting from Bedford, going on through Castor and so to Uppingham and the small towns between. It would come through the south and southwest sides of the town.

‘You only think that,’Bruno said, ‘because you own half the damn land there.’

Chamberlain agreed. ‘Of course I do. I should n’t have bought the land there in the first place if I had n’t thought that. You’re so cocky, where do you think it’ll come?’

Bruno said: ‘I don’t know. But not from Bedford. That’s certain. There’s no place between here and Bedford that’s worth a passenger a week to a railway company.’

They would argue with unrelenting stubbornness on these questions until the early hours of the morning. They were agreed only on one thing: that Castor was not, and could never be, a town of any importance until the railway did come. ‘Even if it’s only a damn single line,’ Bruno said.

One evening he stayed very late arguing the railway question with Chamberlain. Just before twelve o’clock Chamberlain felt hungry, and they sat and argued for another hour with hunks of bread and cheese under their thumbs. At home, Bruno had a vivid and terrifying dream. He was standing in his field, Anchor’s Quick. He had lately let the field for bullock grazing, and now, at one end of it, a herd of bullocks were massed ready to stampede. Suddenly they moved towards him at a great pace, in one immense roaring mass of flesh, and he tried to run. In his sleep he could not run at all. He could only turn round. When he did turn round he saw that it was not a herd of bullocks that was pursuing him, but a railway train. He saw it with terrible clarity coming down a single track. As it roared and shrieked behind him he flung himself with a great effort off the track, falling just in time to see the small-tendered engine and half-adozen coaches go rumbling past. A second later, waking up, he found himself lying on the floor, his body oily with cold sweat.

In the morning the dream remained with him. He went to the factory, but he could not forget it. That afternoon he walked up to Anchor’s Quick. The bullocks were there, grazing quietly, and he climbed over the gate, standing in the field much as he had stood in it in the dream. Anchor’s Quick was on the east side of the town, below but separated by a road from Spella Ho itself. He went back to the factory and got down a map from the wall of the office. He laid a ruler along the east side of Castor; the line made by the ruler ran down to Orlingford. From that moment he felt there was no doubt that the railway, when it came, would come from Orlingford. It would be a little branch line, on a single track, and it would go through Anchor’s Quick.

From that time he began to go about with almost nothing else in his mind but this inspired idea of the railway. He went again and again to look at Anchor’s Quick and the fields stretching away on a straight line on either side of it. Who owned this land? Was there a chance of buying it? He went to see Mason and Freebody. ‘Parker owns about a hundred and twenty acres of it,’they said. ‘Candlestick Parker.’ Then he remembered Parker, an old man now, a man who for forty years had gone about with the legend of patent candlestick clinging to him like a comic story.

Bruno decided to go and see him. He found Parker alone in a large house of sienna-colored ironstone which Parker had himself built in the forties. He had told Parker that he had come because he was interested in inventions, and the old man, feeble, a little weak-minded, and egg-bald under the plum-colored smoking cap, took him upstairs to a large room, empty except for a plain mahogany table, on which stood the famous candlestick. Up to that moment Bruno had imagined a candlestick of normal height, shape, and size. Parker’s invention, built of solid brass, stood almost four feet. It looked like some complex and silent chronometer: an affair of dials and weights, a hopeless, polished intricacy of beautiful and insane mechanism.

’Il works,’ Parker said, and he touched a spring. The wheels revolved; a small blue flame on a methylated taper blobbed up and lighted the wick of a candle. ‘If you have enough candles,’ Parker said, ‘it can go on forever and you never need be without light. You like it ?’

’I thought it was smaller,’ Bruno said. ‘A thing I could do in a small way. It’s SO big.’

‘ You don’t think it’s any good?’

’I think it’s a knockout. But how ever am I going to develop it? Two thousand to you, then I got to buy land and build a foundry. Then put it on the market.’

He stayed talking for another two hours. Parker brought in an almost empty bottle and glasses. ‘Rum,’ he said. ‘ You see, when I was a boy I went to sea for a time. It has always been my greatest ambition to make a boat that would not sink.’

That night they did not even talk about the land. It was a subject that came to be approached gradually, over many weeks and over many bottles of rum, supplied as time went on by Bruno. When it came to be discussed at last it seemed that Parker also had ideas about the land. ‘It has been my idea to invent a new kind of steel. Steel that would not stain or rust. Yon see what it would mean? In engineering, in the house, on railways.’

‘Well, what’s that got to do with the land?’

‘There’s iron there. Don’t you know? Don’t you ever look at the color of the soil there?’

‘That red color? Is that iron?’

‘Of course, yes. Thirty years ago I mined enough there to experiment on. You come with me. I mined enough to build this house.’

He took Bruno into the back yard of the house and there, in an outhouse, showed him a small experimental furnace. Steel in many shapes and sizes, and in degrees of color from dull blue to silver, was littered about the place. ‘I can’t do it now. I have n’t the strength.

I got it so that it would not stain, but it broke just like slate. Then I got it hard, but it was a bad color. Always something. I wanted twenty more years.’

They would talk on about steel and land and Parker’s schemes until the old man was feebly drunk. One night, as they were drinking, Bruno said: —

‘ Well, if you can’t sell the land, I can’t buy the candlestick.’

Parker began to cry. When he had ceased crying he said: —

‘What makes you so anxious to buy the land?’

‘The candlestick. I got to develop it. You can’t develop a thing like that on ten pole of ground.’

Parker thought it over. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to keep the land.’

‘Because of the iron? The steel?’

’Yes.’

‘Look, Mr. Parker. I tell you what, I’ll buy the candlestick and the land. But you can reserve the mineral rights in half the land as long as you live. Then they come back to me. How old are you now?’

’I’m almost seventy-five.’

‘Nothing! You got another twenty years.’

‘ You think so?’

‘Why not? Another thing. You keep on with the steel experiments and some day you’ll hit it. Then we’ll go into partnership.’

Looking into Parker’s eyes, he saw them illuminated with a slightly insane delight, and he knew that it was settled. He knew also that he had no more belief in the steel than in the candlestick, and no more belief in either than in Parker himself.

XXIV

Irish’s Traveling Vaudeville Theatre came into Castor at the beginning of the second week of August, feast week, in the same year. That Monday night Bruno turned down Rufus Chamberlain’s suggestion to go into Irish’s and stayed working in the office, going over the books, until midnight. The next morning Chamberlain came round to the office before nine o’clock in a state of immense excitement.

’Irish’s got the hottest bird I’ve ever set eyes on. God, you can burn your fingers on her from the back row.’

‘ What’s she do?’

‘It’s not what she does, man, it’s what she looks like. She picks her skirts up above her knees and you can see her legs. No tights, nothing. Anyway, if they’re tights, they’re the tightest tights I ever seen. Everybody went barmy.’

’You did n’t get near her?’

‘No bloody fear. All we want tonight,’ he went on, ‘is a pair of field glasses.’

They sat that night on the plank seats of Irish’s Vaudeville Theatre, hearing from outside the faint moan and crack of fair organs and shooting galleries, and waited for her to appear. All about them there was a state of suppressed tension. The crowd let out a roar when the girl came on. She was full-breasted but otherwise rather slightly built, with slim legs and very slender thighs. It was the thighs, covered with smooth flesh-colored tights and suddenly revealed by uptossed scarlet skirts, that set the house roaring. Chamberlain fixed his eyes to a pair of large black field glasses like a man eagerly watching a race horse, and the girl was singing her last song, rolling large dark eyes, before Bruno could get the glasses from him.

When he first looked through the glasses the focus was wrong. He had the impression of looking at the girl through mist. Gradually he altered the focus, and in a moment he could see her with a strange magnified proximity. He could see the slightly unreal painted expression on her face, and it was as though he could reach out and touch her.

Then he knew, suddenly, where he had felt that odd emotion before. He was standing at the back of the music hall with Bandy, ill, fainting down slopes of space, and he was looking at this same girl with the smooth pink tights, his sick mind occupied with the impression that he could stretch out his arms and touch her. He looked hard through the glasses. There was something he recalled very vividly about her. She had white, slim arms. Then he saw that the girl on the stage also had white, slim arms, and suddenly he knew that she was the same girl. He was overcome immediately with a tremendous, fatalistic sense of familiarity, the idea that at some moment of his existence, perhaps far back in time, he had known this girl before.

In another moment she had finished singing and had disappeared. He went outside and looked up at the names of the artistes painted up on the paraffinlighted boards above the platform entrance. She was there, slightly changed, but the same without any doubt at all: ‘Italian Jenny.’

’What’s up?’ Chamberlain said. ‘God, she’s good, is n’t she?’

‘I know her,’ Bruno said. ’I met her in London.’

‘You what?’

He did not speak. He felt that he did know her. The sense of familiarity bred in him a sense of unshakable certainty.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Where do I come in?’

’I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I come in myself.’

They went together to see her dancing and singing in Irish’s hot cheap tent, two houses a night, for the next four nights. Bruno could not rest. On the fourth night he lost Chamberlain in a boxing booth after the second performance at Irish’s and went round, alone, to the back of the theatre. He could not see her. He saw Irish himself, a tremendous cask-shaped man with topper and white waistcoat, talking to some of his men, and from Irish, after a moment’s reluctance, he got to know which was her traveling van.

‘Who are you?’ Irish asked, and something made Bruno answer, with natural promptitude, that he was a shoe manufacturer. ‘She send for you?’ Irish said, and he said yes, she had sent for him. ‘All right. In the yellow van.’

He went up the steps of a long yellow living van at the back of the tent and knocked on the door. He could see a lamp burning inside, and heard her voice: ‘Who is it?' He opened the door, his mind made up now as to his reason for coming. He stopped a foot or so inside the van. The van, shut up all day in the August sun, smelt hot and airless, and he saw her lying down, in her red performing dress, on one of the bunks. ‘Who the hell and blazes are you?’ she said.

He told her. As he spoke he looked straight at her, fascinated beyond himself by the small dark eyes shining with familiar indignation. ‘I saw your feet to-night through a pair of field glasses. You’ll kill yourself if you don’t get some different shoes.’

‘What difference does it make to you if I do?’

‘You’re a hot dancer,’ he said. ‘You want good shoes.’

‘Hot’s about it.’ She dropped her arms, exhausted. ‘Well, I got no money for new shoes. So that settles that.’

‘We shan’t charge,’ he said. ‘Not a cent. Nothing.’

‘You don’t mean you’re giving shoes away? ’

He had not once taken his eyes from her. Now she looked at him, for the first time, with the same unremoved directness. ‘Funny,’she said. ‘I thought I’d seen you somewhere before. You know that funny feeling you get about some folks?’

’I seen you before,’ he said.

‘What?’ she said. She sat up, trying to straighten the stiff ruffles of the dress over her knees. They sprang up again from her hands, like scarlet springs. ‘How do you mean you seen me before?’

He told her: where it was, what year, the exact night, as near as he could remember it.

‘That was you?’ he said. ‘The Italian Nightingale. ’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was me.’

He did not know what else to say. For the first time his eyes left her face and he looked instead at her feet. She was not wearing shoes.

‘What shoes do you walk in?' he said.

‘Slippers.’

‘They’re no good,’ he said. ‘You want something to rest your feet and support ’em as well.’

‘Go on, tell me next I want crutches.’

‘Your feet hurt, don’t they?’

‘They hurt like hell and blazes,’ she said. ‘And you’re a good man if you can do anything about it. I never had shoes to fit me yet.’

He raised his eyes slowly from her feet, looking gradually up the legs and thighs and body to her face. ‘I’ll make you a pair o’ shoes that’ll fit you like your tights do your legs,’he said.

‘That’ll be close enough,’ she said.

They looked at each other in silence again for about half a minute, she drowsy and ironical, dark eyes tired but shining, he with the sense of familiarity, at intervals almost hypnotic. Finally she lay down on the bunk again. ‘When do I get these free shoes? With a pound of tea?’

‘I’ll come and measure you to-morrow,’ he said. ‘What time you like.’

’Don’t come before twelve,’she said.

He went away, five minutes later, with a sense of elation that was more like a feeling of hot illumination than any emotion. He felt at once burning and dazzled, his mind like a lamp glass, ready to crack with the heat inside it.

He began to be oppressed by an increasing sense? of inevitability. The next day, soon after twelve, he went round to the back of Irish’s and knocked on the door of her traveling van and heard her voice asking ‘Who is it?’ again. He went in and she was lying on the bunk, in the same tired attitude as before, bare arms branched over her head, as though she had not moved since the previous night except to take off the red dress and the tights. Her legs were bare under a gray dressing gown, and old red velvet slippers hung on her toes, showing bare heels and ankles.

’I come to measure you for the shoes,’ he said. He had paper and pencil and a piece of buckskin in his hands.

‘Well, knock me down!’ she said. ’I thought it was a joke.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘You mean you’ll just give me a pair of shoes? Like that? I thought you were boozed when you said that.’

’No. Stand up,’he said.

‘Eh?’ Her eyes shot open, black splits of indignation. ‘First you kid me and then you order me about.’

‘Stand up.’ He unfolded a large sheet of drawing paper. ’I want to draw your feet.’

She grinned then, and stood up. He spread the paper on the floor. ‘Stand on it,’he said. ’Both feet. Natural.’

She stood on the paper, bare feet apart. ‘Thought you were kidding. I get hot-tempered all of a sudden if folks kid me.’

He drew the pencil slowly round the shape of her right foot.

‘Whatever you do, for God’s sake don’t tickle me. Is this for dancing shoes?’

‘No.’ He explained: ‘You got to have special lasts, special patterns. I don’t think we could do it.’

‘I always wanted a pair of high-legged buckskin, right up,’ she said. ‘White. With black laces and a bow and high heels.’

’Just what you like,’he said.

She went on talking of how she would love the high-legged buckskin boots. He drew the pencil round her other foot: a man moved by some inexplicable force of inevitability, by something just beyond reason and emotion.

‘How long to make them?’ she said.

‘Tuesday,’ he said.

‘Tuesday? We go on to-morrow morning.’

He already knew this. ‘Where to?’

‘ Peterborough.’

‘I’ll come to Peterborough,’ he said.

He had finished the drawing of her feet, and she stepped off the paper and he rolled it up. She moved to lie down on the bunk again. ‘Stand still,’ he said.

‘You give your orders, don’t you? Hell and blazes!’

‘If you’re going to have high-legged,’ he said, ‘I got to measure your legs.’

‘Me all over.’ She grinned. ‘Hottempered.’

‘Hold your dressing gown up. How high do you want the legs?’

She held up t he dressing gown. ‘ Right up. Real swanky right up to the knees.’ He ran the tape measure up her white legs, to the small knees, hard and round, like apples. ‘ Funny, you seeing me down the Waterloo Road there.’

’Yes.’ He told her how he had been taken ill soon afterwards.

‘Compliment to me. Stomach-ache?’

‘I got scarlet fever. I got lodgings and there was an infected bed.’

‘NO!' she said. ‘Go on! Just like me. I got lodgings and picked up a germ or something and got landed with congestion of the lungs. Pleurisy. Laid me flat, and I lost my bookings. That’s how I came to be landed with Irish.’

He finished measuring her legs, but she still stood looking down at him, holding up the dressing gown, smiling. ‘A nice free look for you. Think yourself lucky.’

‘Why do they call you Italian?’ he said. ‘Italian Jenny?’

‘Simple. My name’s Jenny and my mother was Italian.’

As he listened to her telling him things about herself he felt himself drawn slowly and inevitably towards a central point of intimacy. In his mind he saw her in the white high buckskin boots. He saw her traveling in the van to places at immense and impossible distances away. He saw that there was some possibility of his never seeing her again. ’Where do you go after Peterborough?’

‘Grantham,’she said. ‘Then Lincoln. Oh! I don’t know where then. Nottingham Goose Fair, anyway, in the autumn.’

Outside someone began banging a spoon on a tin frying pan, and she got up off the bunk. ‘Cook house,’ she said. ‘You’d better go.’ He went out of the van and across the fair ground like a man in a dream. She called after him: ’I believe you about the boots when I see ’em! ’ — laughing.

It was still in the same dream of inevitability that he drove the thirty miles to Peterborough on the following Tuesday to take her the boots. He saw her in the afternoon. She was asleep in the van when he arrived and got up, frowzy and sleep-muddled, her hair still in pigtails, to ask who the hell and blazes it was. ‘Well, knock me down!’ she said. ‘Come in.’ He went in and she tried on the boots, more excited than a child. He took her leg and held her foot between his knees, pulling up the laces firm and tight with his fingertips. ‘How do they feel ?’

She was in a rapture. ‘Grand. Skintight. I feel as if I’d wore them months.’ Then, when she had both boots on, she strutted up and down the van, holding up her wrap, swinging her hips, looking over her shoulder to see how the boots looked. ‘Swanky,’ she kept on saying, ’terrible swanky.’ And then: ‘Are they fast?’ ‘Yes,’he said. She laughed and clicked her heels together. ‘Fast is just how I wanted them.’

She flushed her arms up and down and then rested them on her hips, fingers spread fan-wise. He saw the shine of a wedding ring. He felt dismay. ‘I did n’t know you were married.’

‘Married? Me? Don’t make me laugh! ’

‘The wedding ring,’he said.

‘Just a blind. Like barmaids. Must wear it or I’d never get any peace at all.’

They talked like this for about an hour. He told her he would make her not only a pair of red boots but a pair of black. ’You want to spoil me?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going the right way.’

‘I could bring the black over one day,’he said. ‘Friday or Saturday.’

‘We’ll be here till Saturday,’ she said.

All the time, in the van, and again as he drove back through the stormy hot countryside to Castor, he could feel the thick moist heat of thunder increasing. That night the storms broke. They kept on all night, and he got up to see a land flooded and steaming slightly in the sun. The air did not clear that day, and the storms began to gather up again in the late afternoon, breaking at dusk, lightning splitting over Spella Ho all night, with the same immense roar of rain.

On Friday he decided to go by train to Peterborough. He did not arrive until after twelve o’clock and he went straight to the fair ground, knowing that it would be a good time for her.

He stood looking at the empty fair ground for almost five minutes before realizing what had happened. He stared at the blank churned mud and listened to the voice of a man telling him all about it. ‘You should ha’ seen ’em! Mud! Water! Looked like Noah’s bloody ark.’

‘Where’d they go?’

‘Grantham, they said.’

Back at the railway station he found that there was no train to Grantham until nearly three o’clock. He did not think of going back. He got to the fair ground in Grantham, just before six o’clock. It was trying to rain again, and the girl, when he found her, was in a fit of depression. ‘Boots? You better make me a pair o’sea boots. I’m sick of it. Smashed the whole theatre down at Peterborough, one man killed by lightning, everybody flooded out. We pulled out of there at three o’clock in the morning. Have n’t got over it yet.’

She looked out of the window, pulling back the lace curtain, and Bruno could see the rain steadily falling on the awnings of shut-up shows and roundabouts, the warm straight rain of the aftermath of days of thunder. ‘See that? Nice how-de-do again. Irish’ll be happy.’

‘No performance?’

’Not likely. Still, I got to dress up and show up. That’s Irish’s rule whether it snows cats.’

‘Want me out?’

’Go out and get me a bag o’ buns from somewhere, there’s a duck. I’ll be ready when you get back. Have n’t eaten a morsel since dinner.’

He went out and bought a loaf and a pound of cheese and some Grantham cakes and four bottles of beer. ‘Oh! You’re a duck,’she said. ‘First you give me a pair of boots, and now this.’

‘You want to try the boots on before we eat?’ he said.

‘No. Let’s eat first.’ She began to cram cakes into her mouth. ‘Oh! You ’re a real duck.’

By the time they had drunk half the beer and had eaten most of the food it was almost dark. He sat on the bed, all of a sudden, and put his hands on her bare arms. She did not say anything. He ran his hands up her arms to the shoulders and then down again, very slowly, looking at her. She continued to say nothing and she looked at him in a way, as though with some latent accumulation of passion or anger, that made him wonder what she was going to do. He moved his hands along her arms again, slowly upward, and then suddenly she pulled him down.

Some long time afterwards she told him to get up and turn the key of the door. It was dark, and when he moved back to her he put out his hands and touched the frills of her frock. ’Take it off,’he said.

Her voice was surprisingly quiet and remote: ‘You give your orders, don’t you?’

‘Take it off,’ he said.

She lay in complete acquiescence, in a dead stillness that he knew afterwards to be a sign of immense passion. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You do it for me.’

XXV

He stayed with her for two days, going back to Castor on Sunday. More and more he felt as though it were all the recurrence of something that had happened before. He felt as though he were being driven, arms and hands tied, to some inevitable and preconceived point of time.

In Castor, Stokes was troubled. He had become prominent among Plymouth Brethren, wore a semi-frock coat on Sundays, and battled hard for a religion of fire and blood, talking of a new Jerusalem. With a position to keep up, he was ashamed of a partner in business who treated morals with contempt and latitude and had never entered chapel or church in his life. For a long time he had been tolerant; now he felt obliged to speak. ‘This gadding about with women, Sundays an’ all, I don’t hold with it.’

‘Who asked you to?’

‘You been away half the week with some woman or other.’

‘Who said it was a woman?’

‘All right. I suppose you had white buckskin boots made for yourself?’

This position grew worse; Stokes suspicious, troubled by conflict between respectability and immorality. Gradually there arose a second point of difference between them. Stokes was for caution in all things. ‘Steady does it. Expand gradual.’ Bruno was for opening out, taking risks; he wanted to enlarge the existing factory, if possible build a new factory. Stokes would not hear of it. This conflict between ambition and vegetation went on for the rest of that year, iron grinding itself on stone, sharpening itself but gradually wearing stone down and away, until, towards the end of the year, Stokes surrendered. They would build a new factory. ’The biggest factory in Castor,’Bruno said. ' We’re going up, and don’t forget it.’

Building on the new factory started in the new year. It began to rise in a huge raw rectangle of brick on the east side of the town, and was filled with a hundred and twenty workers by July.

It was a year in which he was hardly conscious of the progress of time. He was caught up by the fascination, almost the hypnotism, of two dreams: the factory and the woman, Italian Jenny. She moved about the country with Irish’s Traveling Vaudeville from the August when he first met her on through the winter and spring of the following year, never staying more than a week in one place, and there were times when, momentarily, he lost touch with her. Yet her existence in his mind remained unshakably fixed. He never thought of her as being at a distance. From time to time he wrote short, painfully conceived letters to her, and after an interval of a week or even a month he would get a reply, from as far north as Newcastle or as far west as Bristol: ’Dear, dear Bruno.’ Then suddenly she would move and come down to the Midlands, to Nottingham or Oxford, and he would get her hastily scrawled postcard, or even a telegram, urging him to meet her there.

In May that year she moved back from traveling vaudeville to music hall. In this way he saw her more often. She was more in big towns, and he made slow roundabout railway journeys, twice and sometimes three times a month, to see her, leaving Castor on Friday and not coming back till Monday. There was one difference: she took lodgings, and they would live for three days as man and wife, sleeping in cheap rose-papered rooms, lying late on Sunday mornings like a newly married couple, luxurious sometimes in great brass bedsteads.

In the August of that year he went as far as Halifax, late on a Friday afternoon. When he got there she met him at the station and told him how, that morning, there had been a small fire at the theatre. ‘It was n’t much, but it burnt the stage quite a lot, and while they’re at it the management are going to shut shop and put in a new stage altogether. It means a week off.’ She was excited, had made plans. ‘We’ll go to Blackpool.’ They went on the following day and took lodgings for the whole week. He bought her a red silk dress and a red parasol to match her red boots, and he smoked cigars while they drove in a landau along by the sea and out into the country. She was ecstatically happy, and he went back to Castor like a man who could not see straight.

When he arrived, Stokes was furious. Bruno had not written a word of his whereabouts. Stokes argued: ‘Here we are with a brand-new place, overheads enough to kill us, trade slack, and you go gadding off for ten days and don’t say a word.’

‘Trade slack?’

‘We had a gross in last week. A gross! A month like that and we’ll go broke.’

‘ Keep your hair on, for God’s sake.’

‘ Leave God out of it!’

‘All right, leave God out of it. But don’t horseface at me!’

They quarreled in the new office all that afternoon. In the morning, for Bruno, it was all over, a thing of the past, and he interviewed and browbeat a dozen commercial travelers as though nothing had happened. For Stokes it was different; he could not forget it. It seemed to him that there was some connection between the immorality of Bruno and the fall of trade. By the reasoning of his religion the one was fruit of the other. He began to go about obsessed by this idea. Women, immorality, loose living, bad trade, bankruptcy, one terrible thing producing another. It began gradually to bring the pressure of some malignant growth on Stokes’s mind. Trade hung slack all through September and October, men standing off, rooms silent. Stokes saw it more and more as the fruit of Bruno’s behavior.

On the last Saturday in October, Bruno set off for Nottingham. He came to the office dressed in his best clothes, but to Stokes it was as though he had come naked. The factory was not working, and the huge silence of it closed in about the office like some depressing vacuum. Stokes could not bear it any longer. ‘We’re losing money, but you can throw money about on women as if it growed on trees! I won’t have it! It can’t go on! I won’t stand for it!’

Bruno remained calm. Stokes began to shout about sin and God, punishment and wickedness. ‘I was wicked, but not like this! Not like this! Not this wickedness.’ He continued to shout, his voice wild and righteous, and he was shouting about sin and redemption and fire when a sweeper-up from downstairs came into the office to see what was the trouble. ‘ Fire! The eternal fire of eternal damnation! That fire! That’s what you’ll have to face.’

The sweeper-up asked if anything was the matter.

‘Nothing’s the matter!’Stokes shouted. ‘Get out!’ He slammed the door so that the key bounced out of the lock. He turned and continued shouting at Bruno.

To Bruno the way out was simple. He had a train to catch at Orlingford at twelve-five, and at eleven, with Stokes still raging in the office, he went to catch it.

For another hour Stokes remained in the office. The pressure on his mind seemed to increase. He sat with his head on the deal desk, trembling, like a man in a conflict of prayer. Towards midday he locked the office and went out. He felt weak and faint. He walked slowly into the centre of the town like a man coming out of a long illness. His hands were trembling and he did not know what to do. Then eventually, driven by sheer physical necessity, he did something he had not done for a long time. He walked into the Swan and had a glass of brandy. After it he felt better. The fire of fresh confidence began to burn out the weakness of his mind. He sat drinking till four o’clock, more and more driven by self-pity towards the idea of taking some kind of revenge on Bruno.

Soon after four o’clock he went out of the Swan and back to the factory. He did not know what he was doing. He could not fit the key into the lock of the office door, and as he stood there fumbling a man going by with a barrowload of potatoes stopped to unlock the door for him. Stokes went in and down to the making rooms. He dragged a heap of scraps of kip leather together with his feet. He overbalanced and fell down and then stood up again, clinging to a bench. His obsession with fire had at last become a realization. He put a heap of newspapers and linen lining over the leather and a half-empty wax pot on the paper. He then lit a match and dropped it on the heap. As the first flames sprang up he felt as if they were the consummation of all his confused anxiety for revenge. Crawling out of the factory, holding on to the benches, forgetting to turn the key in the door, he felt suddenly purified and frightened.

By six o’clock the whole of Castor and the surrounding countryside could see the furnace of Shadbolt and Stokes against the night sky. While it burned, Stokes sat in the dark front room of his new house, crying in the scared way of a child after nightmare.

XXVI

Bruno was arrested at Orlingford Station as he came off the two-forty-seven from Nottingham on the following Monday afternoon. He spent that night in the two-cell lockup at Castor. He was brought up in the courtroom, with Stokes, on the following morning, on a charge of conspiring with Stokes to set fire to the factory, maliciously, in order to get the insurance money. Stokes, without the advice of a solicitor and in a fit of tears and remorse, pleaded guilty. He was persuaded to revise the plea, and both he and Bruno were committed for trial at the Quarter Sessions.

From the first, things went against them : the evidence of a sweeper-up hearing their quarreling, Stokes shouting the word ‘fire,’ on the morning of the day when the fire broke out; the evidence of the landlord of the Swan, as to Stokes drinking until the late afternoon like a man trying to put courage into himself; the evidence of the man with the potatoes, letting Stokes into the factory because he was too drunk to put the key into the lock; the evidence of a courting couple just off for an evening walk who had seen Stokes, but whom Stokes had not seen, as he half crawled, half fell, down the factory steps an hour before the alarm was given.

This was not evidence against Bruno, but it began to build up against him, slowly, an atmosphere of prejudice. Fixed in his own mind was the knowledge that he was innocent — nothing could shake or alter that. Nothing, it seemed to him, was needed to prove or disprove that. It came as a terrific shock, like an explosion near his face, when Stokes was sentenced to two years and he himself to six months.

He went into Northampton Jail towards the end of the year. While he was there, something important happened in Castor. On a mild February afternoon Dr. Black came home from a meet of hounds; it was warm, he was hot with sweat, and he unbuttoned his coat. That night he took a chill. He lay very ill for five days, dying of pneumonia on the following Sunday. Long before this, even before Bruno had come back to Castor from London, Black had given it out that Gerda had gone home to Germany. ‘The climate never suited her, and she did n’t seem to get on with people. She is German, and Germans are not English, you understand.’

When Black died a search was made for Gerda’s German address. It could not be found. There was a letter from Gerda instead. She had written it on the night before she and Bruno had reached Harwich. It was a very simple letter. ‘Dear Alistair: I am running away from you. I am running away with a man named Bruno Shadbolt, who has been kind to me and has lent me German books. We are in love with each other and to-morrow we shall got a boat for Harwich, to go back to Germany. We have been staying on a little farm and I think we shall try to get a little farm in Germany. My Aunt Anna Maria has a little farm on the Rhine and perhaps we shall go there.’

In two days it was all over the town: not merely that Bruno had run away with Gerda, but that he had come back without her; not simply the scandal of it, the immorality, but the treachery. ‘Take her away, then leave her stranded. By God, that gets me.’ The bitterness of opinion against him, already strong, went sour. It spewed itself up like some rank and acid sickness, stinking.

The stink of his reputation had not died down at all when he came out of jail in the early summer of that year. When he came out he had the hope, very faint, but stimulated by sudden freedom after confinement and loneliness, that someone — perhaps Maria, just possibly Jenny—might be there to meet him. He came out into an empty street.

He began to walk along it, slowly, a little dazed, in the early morning sunlight. Suddenly, at the end of it, he saw the wave of an unmistakable straw hat.

‘Shadbolt! Bruno!’ Charles Walker Chamberlain shook hands enthusiastically. ‘I’m glad to see you, I’m glad, I’m glad. Don’t say anything. Don’t talk. You ’re a great man, Bruno, a great Spartan. Don’t say anything! I got things to tell you. Come and have something to eat. I got news for you.’

Over a meal of coffee and bacon and eggs he listened to Chamberlain talking.

‘What d’ye think happened? What d’ye think’s going to happen?’

‘I don’t know. A hell of a lot of things have happened to me.’

Chamberlain tilted his straw hat forward and put a hand over his mouth.

‘The railway’s coming.’ ‘Eh?’

‘It’s coming. The railway. It’s been settled.’

Bruno felt his heart stand still. ’Where? Where’s it coming?’

Chamberlain put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. ‘ Where d ’ye think it’s coming? Where’s the only place it could come?’ Bruno waited. ‘Where I’ve been saying for twenty years it would come! Where d’ye expect?’

Bruno could not believe it. ’It’s a rumor. A tale.’

‘No, Bruno. No. Not this time. They’ve been to see me. They’ve been to look at the land. They’re making a valuation now.’

Bruno could not speak. He drove home in almost complete silence in Chamberlain’s trap. He walked on to his sister’s. She was nursing a baby of three months, and he felt somehow that he could not breathe in the small house, with the crying baby and the rest of the family and the sourish smell of baby clothes drying by the stove. He walked outside into the yard and found Maria’s husband, the ex-soldier, nailing and sawing at a rabbit hutch. ‘ Paying game, rabbits.’ He talked to the soldier for a moment or two, and then got over the fence, into the meadow that led up to Spella Ho. He had a sudden longing to go up to the house, to stand and look at something substantial and large and familiar, some immense bulwark against which his mind could rest.

’Here, where are you off?' the soldiersaid.

‘Up to Spella.’

‘Not bloody likely. Look.’

He looked up at the house. He could see then the smoke of its fires blowing in small dark clouds above the bank of summer trees. ‘Who is it ?' he said.

‘Hell of a big family. Arkwright. Twenty-three servants and about forty horses and I don’t know what. Much as you dare do to look at the place.’

Bruno climbed back over the fence and went into the house.

’A lot of things can happen in six months,’Maria said. ‘You seem to think you can come out and find things just as they was when you went in.’

‘Any letters for me?’ he said.

‘They was some,’ she said. She found four letters, gave them to him. He looked at them, seeing his own handwriting on two of them, the address to Italian Jenny crossed out and a new address written and then crossed out, and finally the penciled ' Return to sender.’ He looked at the others, at the postmark; they were from her, posted in January from Newcastle, in February from Manchester. ‘Dear, dear Bruno.’ She wrote as he knew she would write: in distress, tenderly, wondering what had happened, why he had never written. In the letters she gave him addresses of places where she knew she would be. They were all out of date. In despair and rage against himself and Stokes and everything, he tore up the letters and threw them into the empty fireplace.

Maria swooped down on him. ‘Ah, go on, litter up the place now you have come back.’

‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘What the hell have I done?’

’Done?' she said. ‘What you done?’ She got up off her knees, her face flushed. ‘Things I never thought you’d do.’

He was quiet. ‘What things?’

’Jail’s too good for you!’ she cried.

’What?' he said. ’What?’

’After the bits you done, the dirty bits you done to some folks, after the bits you done.’

‘What bits? What bits I done?’

‘Make out you don’ know! Make out you never run away with her, never had nothing to do with her. Now he’s dead it’s all come out—it’s all come out.’

’Now who’s dead?’

‘Black. Dr. Black.’

He did not say anything. He opened the door and walked out, carrying his bag. She came to the door shouting after him, beside herself. ‘I’m ashamed on you if you ain’t! Gittin’ folks in trouble—I’m ashamed on you, downright ashamed.’

He walked down the road and back into the town. In the lower end of Castor, by the river, there was a district nicknamed the Rookery. He went down to it: rows of dog-kennel houses, broken windows nailed over with cardboard, fences broken and torn up for firewood, hopscotch chalked on yards and pavements, a man playing a cornet in a bedroom; and there, some time later, he got lodgings with a family named Brand.

After he had some tea he went out to buy a chair and some candles. Forced in upon himself, he wanted to read. It was early evening, and before buying the chair and the candles he went up to see Chamberlain. In the library, he looked for books, still not fully himself, unable to make a decision. ‘You better take the encyclopædia,’Chamberlain said. ‘That’s got everything.’

XXVII

He took home Volume One of Chamberlain’s encyclopædia that night. It went up to the letter H, and for the next week he sat in his room reading it, solidly and systematically, with the iron attention of a man condemned to do something in penitence.

One night he read for so long that his eyes ached. He had reached the letter G. And soon, after resting his eyes, he found himself reading about Gas. And suddenly he was struck by the enormous stupidity of the situation in which he found himself: here he was reading by candlelight when there was such a thing as gaslight. Incandescence, the whitegreen brilliant light—he remembered it in London. He got up, excited, and looked out of the window over the dark countryside. The railway, expansion, building, new houses, new works — they all needed light. He felt suddenly as though his mind had been illuminated. He wondered them what time it was. He went downstairs. It was not quite ninethirty by the clock in the Brands’ kitchen, and he walked straighl out of the house and up to Chamberlain’s. Rufus was there, and Bruno told both him and Charles Walker Chamberlain what he felt about gas. ‘ Everything’ll need gas — the railway, the station, factories, everything. Only a dead-alive place like this would have been without gas so long.’ They talked until three o’clock in the morning, Rufus and Bruno on one side, Chamberlain on the other. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with it. Rufus may do what he likes. He has money of his own. But me — no. I’ll sell you a piece of suitable land if you like. Near the railway, You’ll need that.’

A week later Bruno met the creditors of Shadholt and Stokes in the offices of Mason and Freebody. He talked to them in an atmosphere of hostility and distrust. He and Rufus Chamberlain had raised, together, almost £2000 towards the formation of a gas company. It was not enough. He told them how he would pay them in full on the old account, how he was about to form a new company, how he could give them, as business men of the town and locality, the first refusal of taking up part of the issue of shares.

‘What company?’ a man said. ‘What sort of company?’

‘Gas.’

The man put his hat on. ‘That’s about all you do! Gas—and women!’

The creditors left one by one. He stood alone in the room with Mason and Charles Walker Chamberlain. Hostility had hardened him, made him bitterly resolute.

‘You can make a public issue of shares,’ Chamberlain said.

‘And if there’s no response?’

‘There will be a response. But whether there’s a response or not I’ll stand as your guarantor at the bank. For ten thousand.’

‘I thought you did n’t believe in it?’

‘Who said I believed in it?' He tilted his absurd ancient straw hat back on his head, defiantly. ‘I believe in you.’

So he gradually got it moving: the Castor Gas Light and Coke Company. The public response was slow, distrustful. He moved it forward by his own energy and determination, by a colossal, stoical refusal to be defeated. He worked late at night, not tiring, working over plans, schemes, finances, interviewing applicants for posts. From the North of England came a burly young man with yellow-white hair and hairy fingers, who looked as though some inner fire burned just beneath the skin of his face. He was a chemist, had come through a university, and was named Preston. He understood what was still, to Castor, the new miracle of gas, was eager and ready to rip up any cobble in any pavement, cherished dreams of gasometers, retorts, wholesale illuminations. Gas seemed to burn with candescent white energy in his own heart.

All the time the railway itself was approaching, a huge furrow of clay ploughed by river diggers and men across the bare countryside from the south, past the little outlying villages, through flat acres of grass and corn. There began to spring up in Castor and on the fringe of it box-like workers’ dwellings, in long rows. Run up fast, they were like red scabs on the face of the land. Bruno saw the urgent need for such houses and began, in the spring of the following year, to build them himself. Whenever he looked at these houses he thought of his mother, the house in which he and Maria and the rest had been born; he remembered the tenement in London. By comparison he felt he was putting up palaces.

Then, as though to support the idea, he went to live in one of them himself, an end house, from the windows of which he saw a permanent and to him almost beautiful picture of gasometers, red-lead color in the sun, the new raw houses, the white steel railway track running in its bank almost level with the upstairs windows of the houses. He could see at night the white or orange glow of house windows, lit by gas; he felt in a way that they were lit by his own energy, by his own bitter and irrepressible determination to gel on. He knew now that he would get on. ‘ Nothing can stop me,’he thought, ‘if I want to do it. Nothing can stop me. Nothing is going to stop me.’

That year he used Chamberlain’s influence to try to get the town itself lit by gas, the streets, the few old-fashioned public buildings. Instantly it was as though he had come up against the old solid wall of prejudice. He saw the need for a miracle, some realistic revolution that would make a staggering impression : a wholesale display of illumination, an advertisement in light. With Preston he tried to evolve some scheme, knowing it must be outside the range of official prejudice. It did not come to him until Preston said: ‘Some big building, some big house — if we could light that,’ and he was caught up instantly by the fascination of a new dream: to light Spella Ho.

Almost blindly, the scheme not fully developed in his mind, he went up to the house. He had not met the Arkwrights; knew them only as living behind a guard of livery and horses, held aloof by the impenetrable network of class. In his mind he conceived the Arkwrights as stuffed birds, old, fat, pouch-eyed; drinkridden, perhaps. He was surprised to find Julius Arkwright a young man, with no interest in the world except, apparently, water. The lake at Spella Ho had been drained and cleaned, and now Arkwright was planning a complicated system of weirs and fountains, arrangements by which he could raise and lower the level of water. He had introduced a pumping system, a costly steam-driven plant housed in a converted summerhouse on the edge of the lake; it was his aim to take the water by pipe to Spella Ho, lay it to the kitchens and stables and even perhaps the garden. He was a man so blinded by the passion of an idea that he saw Bruno and talked to him for an hour without knowing who he was or inquiring who he was, taking him for a foreman of the gang of laborers already cutting the first trench across the park, walking up and down the lake edge with him, arguing, waving his small fine hands or brushing them against his thick aristocratic moustache, laying out before Bruno, in elaborate language, all the details of a marvelous scheme for laying water to the house.

’I come about another scheme,’ Bruno said.

‘Eh? I beg your pardon?’

‘My name’s Shadbolt.’

‘You mean to inform me you’re not the foreman?’

‘ No.’

‘How fatuous of me! A mental aberration on my part. Don’t you know that’s a damned remarkable necktie you ’re wearing?’

Arkwright was dressed like a laborer: corduroys, string round the legs, a black muffler, thick flannel shirt. Bruno did not know whether to like or dislike a man so much the poseur and so much the idealist at the same time. Uncertain, he began to talk of his scheme for lighting Spella Ho, what a magnificent thing it could be.

‘Yes, yes, magnificent.’ Arkwright agreed with everything, effusively, with elaborate aristocratic politeness. ‘I agree, magnificent. A noble scheme. But perhaps later. When I have finished my water scheme.’

‘Yes? When would that be?’

‘Impossible to forecast. A year, two years. Five years.’

‘ As long as that?’

‘Why not? Why not longer?' Arkwright said. ‘I’m young. I bought Spella Ho with the specific purpose of reconstructing the lake and the water arrangements. I can wait twenty years.

I’ve nothing else to do.’

Bruno went back to Castor, not depressed by Arkwright’s remarks, but fired. He called a meeting of his three directors that afternoon; told them what had happened, how they could never hope for another chance like it in the history of the company or the house, ‘He’s opening a trench a mile long. If we’re quick we could use it. It would save time, money, everything.’

All that afternoon he bullied the three directors, with Preston supporting him, as he had once bullied tired commercial travelers on the stairs of Shadbolt and Stokes. After they had gone, unconvinced but bullied at least into temporary acquiescence, he stayed on in the office with Preston, preparing plans, roughing out estimates. Just before eight o’clock he went home, washed, changed his clothes, putting on a spotted black and white cravat, and then drove up to Spella Ho. ‘Name, please?' the butler said, and he answered with a halfsavage feeling of resentment. ‘Shadbolt. And tell him it’s about the waterworks.’

After a few moments he went straight in. Arkwright was in the library, playing chess with a woman. They were both in evening dress, the woman in a long, tight-waisted gray-blue gown, silk, low at the neck. He looked at her, arrested. She was very fair, with pure Nordic skin and ice-blue eyes, with magnificent shoulders. ‘My wife,’ Arkwright said, and she shook hands. He felt an immediate emotional response, a slight start of sickness. She spoke with a full, heavily round voice. ’Don’t tell me it’s about the water again. We’ll all have water on the brain.’

He told them, speaking to her rather than Arkwright, why he had come. He became aware of a recurrent sensation of magnetism when he looked at the woman. He felt words drawn out of him with unexpected readiness. He felt slightly shaken.

‘Yes, an interesting scheme, Mr. Shadbolt,’Arkwright said, ‘but hopelessly uneconomic.’

‘Uneconomic!’ she said. ‘You to talk about uneconomic!’

‘Now, my dearest —’

‘Hark to him talking about uneconomic, Mr. Shadbolt. He with a waterworks scheme that’s economic from first to last!’

‘Now, my dearest, you know how —’

‘Am I teasing?’ she said. ‘Well, I can only say that a gaslight would be very useful at the head of the stairs. Where the two extra steps go up. Before I break my neek.’

’Yes, it ’s bad there,’ Bruno said.

They looked at him, astonished. ‘How do you know?’

He told them how he knew, how every inch of the house was as familiar to him as his own hand. ’Well, that’s wonderful,’ they said.

’I know how much this house needs light,’ he said.

‘We had gas in the town house in London before I was married,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘It was great fun. We liked it. My sister blew the ceiling out of the music room. An explosion.’

‘I have no sort of doubt,’ Arkwright said, ‘that that is what would happen here. Water at least can’t explode.’

Suddenly Arkwright stood up. He stood up as though startled and began to walk round and round the room like a man with some form of mental toothache, clenching and unclenching his hands. He walked round the room five or six times. ‘Water. We could illuminate the water. The lake. We could illuminate the lake! ’

He continued to walk round and round. All the time Bruno and the woman stood looking at each other, detached, faintly ironic, not saying anything, as though there were things between them that did not need to be said.

XXVIII

On a midsummer night of that same year, 1896, he saw Spella Ho illuminated as lie had wanted to see it. The house and gardens and park were thrown open to the public and were crowded, the lake like some miniature sea on a Bank Holiday: fairy lights piped among the embroidery of trees along the water edge, the water oar-rippled and rainbow colored, shining as oil. And all the time, a background to the noise of voices, there was a sibilant hissing of gas, drowned finally by the string band on the terrace, the Strauss waltzes, the laughter, the shuffle and swish of feet and skirts, dancing on lawn and stone. He stood on the terrace and made a speech, his crude strong voice like a tear in the plush fabric of the evening, and felt it to be the supreme moment of his life.

On the following Monday morning he sat in his office with the slightly lost, dead feeling of a man who has completed a piece of creative work and does not know how to go on. About eleven o’clock his office boy came into the dark, pitch-pine, slightly gas-odored office to say that a lady was waiting to see him.

’Who is it ?' he said.

’It looks like Mrs. Arkwright,’ the boy said.

‘Show her in,’ he said.

When she came in she was dressed as he had never seen her before, in a pure cream silk dross, with large cream hat and cream parasol to match. He got up to shake hands with her. ‘Lady Caroline?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said.

He stood looking at her, dumb for a moment. Then he knew she was fooling him. ‘You were last time I saw you,’ he said, ‘and that was Saturday.’

* No,’ she said. ’No. I was n’t—all the same.’ She was smiling. All the time there was something about her he could not get quite straight in his mind.

Finally he gave it up. ‘If you’re not Lady Caroline, you’re her twin sister.’

‘I am her twin sister,’ she said.

He sat down in his office chair, baffled, then remembered himself and got up again.

‘You talked to me long enough on Saturday,’ she said. ‘You knew me then.’

’I was talking to Lady Caroline,’ he said.

‘You were talking to me down there by the lake.’

‘Down there? By the lake? That was you?’

‘Down there by the lake.’

She was still smiling. He could not speak. He could only look at her again and see the extraordinary resemblance between the two women, with the slight difference only of the eyes, a difference between two shades of light, between ice and water. He walked away and looked at her from another angle. ‘It beats me. I can’t get it. I can’t believe it,’ he said.

‘On Saturday,’ she said, with the slow ironical smile, ‘you were n’t so slow, Mr. Shadbolt.’

‘Saturday,’ he said, ‘Saturday was different.’

‘ You were talking to me.’

‘So you came to explain things.’

’If you’re going to tickle women, Mr. Shadbolt, you ought to know one from the other.’

‘It’s a bad habit I got,’ he said.

He grinned and she widened her beautiful ironical smile and they stood looking at each other exactly as he and her sister had first stood looking at each other, amused, in instant contact, the point of intimacy preëstablished. She stayed in the office for almost another hour, talking. It ended by her asking him to dinner at Spella Ho. That, she said, was what she had come for. She would be there for the rest of the summer.

On the following night he went to dinner at Spella Ho in the same incongruous vaudeville rig-out he had worn Saturday evening — top hat, ordinary suit, white dicky, white waistcoat, pale brown shoes. They were clothes which brought out in him some curious quality of strength and attraction, making the ugliness itself fascinating. All through dinner — the plates whisked away before he could decide whether to turn them over or not — he sat looking at the two women, with their clear cream-white flesh as alike as two statues made from the same cast, only the emotional response of the blue eyes different.

He stayed at the house until after midnight, talking, laughing, bantering, lifted off his feet by a remarkable sensation of light happiness. He was talking for the first time in his life with people who had been born with money, to whom the problem of the struggle for existence meant nothing and had always meant nothing. He felt it color and illuminate the way they spoke and walked and behaved, what they spoke about, how they lived. It awed and fascinated him. All the time he was fascinated too by the sight of two lovely creatures who looked at him all evening with candidly ironic, teasing blue eyes, with brief moments of fixity when they appeared to have been suddenly fascinated by him. In this way, like a man who, looking at one thing, sees two of it, he began to feel that he was looking only at one woman but that he saw her, by a miracle, twice. Then, just as he saw her as two, he began to see himself as double — double in everything, in size, importance, money, power, prospects, achievement, fascination, the big man of Castor, the little king of a new era of light, the moving force behind the gasworks, a man who could and would do anything. He was not now merely going somewhere — he had got somewhere: a man of achievement now, a man of new ambition, seeing himself as the potential builder of a new Castor.

XXIX

That was it: the builder of a new Castor. Suddenly, even in his sanest and most phlegmatic moments, he began to toy with that not quite crazy idea. It was at first rather nebulous, a colored cloud, real but remote, pleasant to contemplate. He did not yet think of it as even possibly concrete.

During that summer he was always at Spella Ho. They liked him there; their word for him was unconventional. Arkwright, aping the workingman with his string-tied corduroys and neck muffler, a devotee of Tolstoyan philosophy, slightly ahead of his time in England as a socialist aristocrat, saw and admired in Bruno all the raw virtues of the selfmade man. As the purest sort of product of his own class, he had come to the point where he did not believe in class. He had picked up from Tolstoy, believing it to be new, something very old: that all men are equal and free, the gospel that under another name was already two thousand years old.

The two sisters were unconventional too, but differently. They had that curious godlike gift of twins, a double dose of divine devilry. They were not thirtyfive, an age when, in Castor, women still began to think of black and the long staid years beyond the forties, their spirits caged in corsets of a terrific convention. They flew into the crow-black small-town Castor world like two bright hummingbirds. Castor tried to peck them for a bit: swift, dazzling, outrageous creatures. ‘Did you ever? I never would! I’d never be seen out like it, I would n’t — not for love or money I would n’t.’ But it could not go on pecking forever two creatures who for every fault had some lovely virtue. And so finally Castor took them to its heart rather as the public takes an actress, as an ideal, as something lovely and romantic that each one might have been if things had been different.

At Spella Ho, Bruno saw them, almost always, together. Dressed differently, so that even Julius Arkwright should know them, they still baffled him. If they saw him as unconventional, he saw them as female revolutionaries. They loved talking, and they talked, in long heated discussions over the dinner table or the after-dinner brandy at Spella Ho, as he had never heard women talk: anarchy, social equality, William Morris, divorce, votes for women, education for women, the virtues of bloomers, Fabianism, sport, free love. They talked terrifically.

On a hot afternoon in August of that year he drove up to Spella Ho and saw them coming down the slight incline of the lime avenue on a bicycle, Lady Virginia steering and pedaling but not sitting, her sister sitting with legs wide’ out. They were not dressed for cycling, and when they saw him coming Virginia, in a panic, steered into the grass. He saw them go over with legs and skirls flying high. As he came up they lay flat on the grass in hysterics, laughing so much that they forgot his standing there looking at them, in natural fascination. At last they sat up. ‘Oh, great heavens! Here’s Bruno looking at our legs. I hope you like them, Bruno.’

That set them laughing again. He got down out of the trap to look at the bent front fork of the bicycle. Seeing it too,

Caroline was sorrowful. ‘ First she tries to make a water bicycle out of her own and sinks it. And now she must ride tandem on mine and bust that.’

‘Put the bike in the trap and I’ll drive it back,’ he said.

She held the handle bars and worked the front wheel. It responded. ’No. I’ll ride back,’ she said. She felt her waist with one hand, grinning. ‘Something’s gone in the underwear department. If anything’s coming down I’d rather it came down on the bicycle.’

She rode back up the avenue, magnificent even on the absurd seat of a bent bicycle, waving her hand as she went out of sight.

‘You’d be safer in the trap,’ he said to Virginia, ‘than on that thing.’

‘Safe!' Terrifically scornful. ‘Who wants to be safe?’

‘Take you for a drive,’ he said.

‘If you drive fast, yes,’ she said.

‘Fast as you like.’

‘All right,’she said. ‘Fast as hell.’

They drove off out of the great gates of Spella Ho like a couple of eloping lunatics, at something under fifteen miles an hour, and off along white August-dusted roads towards woods and cornfields in the east. He drove at a furious pace, Virginia bouncing up and down on the seat, the horse lathering. He cut a corner and they bounced briefly up and down in the air like two acrobats falling into the safety net. They drove later under an avenue of low beech, and he felt more than ever as if he were doing tricks in a circus.

They shot out into the open and she made him drive on the verge, a wheel prancing on the ruts, the horse slightly frightened. Terrific. He had known women—but not like this. ‘Drive over the stones!' she shrieked. He drove over a heap of roadside stones. The world went drunk on its axis and they looked for a second over the edge. He did it again and saw ahead of him a long white chain of stone heaps. ‘We’ll bust the damn trap,’he said. ‘Good. Bust it. Over! Bust it.’ Woods again, and the piles of stones lying in shadow. He was caught suddenly between two hazards, stones and branches, and the trap went over, the horse rearing in air like the rampant figure on a crazy coat of arms.

He lay still among summer-flattened leaves of bluebell, feeling his bones, and then knew it was all right. He got up to look for Virginia. She was sitting on the verge, between tears and laughter. ‘All right. I fell where all nice ladies ought to fall. Accidents will happen.’ He looked at the trap, heeled over, the horse still struggling. Between them they righted it.

‘A cracked shaft,’he said. He bound it up with string and a strap. ‘Well, we gotta walk it.’

‘Need we? Must we all at once? Let’s stay a bit.’

‘Quiet, then. It’s hot.’

‘Ladylike,’she said. ‘Let’s walk through the wood and see what’s at the other end.’

At the far end of the wood, cornfields opened out and ran away, almost white, the farthest tented with shadowy shocks, on a little hillside. They walked along the small gap between corn and trees and sat down, and then she lay down, looking up, strong fair face almost the color of the wheat. ‘Lie down,’she said, ‘and look at the sky.’ He lay down and looked up, and then, after about five minutes, he came to himself — knew suddenly that women did not lie in cornfields simply to look at the sky, and put his arms round her, quite quietly, wondering how she would take it. ‘You want me?’ she said. He nodded, fired with anxiety. She looked at him, conveying something more powerfully than by words. ’Promise it’ll be all right?' she said. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said, and he saw a small look of fear beat itself into anxiety and then out again.

They stayed there, between the high corn and the sunless woodland, until most of the light had gone, talking things out. With other women it had never been necessary to talk things out. Passion spent itself, was renewed, petered out, there was an end. He had played with most women, Gerda, Louise, and Italian Jenny excepted, but there was less playing here than ever before. Now he found himself up against an affection that was like silk, rare and delicate and almost in a way untouchable.

Her effect on him was quiet, but very powerful. She softened his character, brought out something in it that had never been even remotely touched before. He was happy, but it was the conscious and controlled happiness of the mind. He rose to a new plane.

She, in turn, was the first complete woman he had ever met. She satisfied mind, senses, body, ambition. She could not bear secrecy. She could not bear the idea of hushing up the thing that had happened to them. It must come out into the light. She wanted to share it with the world on the principle that the food you share has a finer taste. ‘We must tell Caroline.’ She was drawn back to her sister as if they were tied together by some invisible natal thread. ‘We must tell her. I can’t bear not to tell her.’

So they told her on the following day, simply, without formality. ‘We’re engaged.’ She immediately began to cry. ‘Oh, darling, darling!’ She put her arms round Virginia and they cried and laughed together for about five minutes. Sometime afterwards Arkwright shook hands with him and Caroline said, ‘Oh, Bruno, I’m glad. I’m happy. I could kiss you.’

‘ Kiss him,’ Virginia said.

So Caroline kissed him, and it was almost like being kissed by Virginia. He felt that it was all like a baffling dream, that he was being kissed by two creatures so alike that they had been sent to torment him.

Then they had a small family conference. ‘We must announce the engagement.’ It was Caroline speaking. ‘Yes, but no fuss, please.’ It was Virginia. ‘We could wait a little. Give an immense supper after harvest.’ It was Arkwright.

Finally Arkwright rang for the port and they stood, five minutes later, looking up through the raised glasses, all very happy, with the sentimental, tearful happiness of people who are happy for each other: the most romantic moment of his life.

(To be concluded)