The Elderbrook Brothers (16 page)

WITHOUT knowing why, Felix began collecting facts about Ellen Winter. She was the youngest child of a Monmouth solicitor, fruit of his late second marriage. Her half-brother, born a quarter of a century earlier, had been the second husband of the lady who was now Mrs Meldreth. It was the kind of confusing family concatenation that provokes most people to humorous impatience; but Felix managed to get it clearly mapped out in his mind. He found also, from conversations with Kate, Mrs Meldreth, and Ellen herself, that losing her father while still a very small child she had passed into the sole care first of her young mother, who was delicate and did not long survive him, and then of a spinster aunt who lived in a northern suburb of London. For several years now she had been private secretary to an economist who, in addition to being a lecturer and a member of parliament, was in the habit of writing somewhat formidable books on world affairs. Scrutinizing these arid items, Felix saw or thought he saw that they fitted in very well with his personal impressions of her. She was country-born and town-bred. She had a certain odd directness, like a child's, and a certain sophistication. With nothing that could be called an accent, her speech yet had a subtle musical quality, a softness and a lilt, that was certainly not of London, where the greater part of her life had been spent, and was perhaps, at least in its ancestry, Welsh. And perhaps it was not. The doubt that enshrouded this small point was somehow, he felt, characteristic of her whole personal effect. The facts of her life were simple and unexciting, but she was not contained in them. By something, yet by nothing in particular that she said or did, his curiosity was stirred.

Seeing her one morning in church, unexpectedly, he spent an hour and a half in more or less continuous study of her profile, looking for a clue, if not an answer, to a question he did not even formulate. The atmosphere of morning church was very grateful to his senses, and to his spirit too, his spirit that was not so much restless as in a state of precarious balance or suspense. Here the urgencies of spring, the rising sap, the incitement of sunshine, the birds busy with love, were translated into a mild and genial holiness, an agreeable decorum. The tall interior gave fancy room to soar, but not too far; the solemn music of the prayers, even of the most obsequious, kept imagination within decent bounds; the gentle, well-bred voice of the Vicar, now intoning, now reading, now speaking as a man to other men, and commending by this triple mode the doctrine of a trinity-in-unity, was for Felix the voice of all the Sundays he had known, a long vista of them, a luminous tunnel through past time and a golden ladder into the kingdom of heaven. It was familiar, seemly, soothing. It kept his nerves quiet while he learned by heart this one human face, at least in those aspects that were visible from where he sat. It was an idle occupation, or seemed so; for he had no sense of being urgently or intimately concerned in it. As sometimes he would watch a thrush or a blackbird intent on its affairs in the garden of Stanton House, so now he watched Ellen Winter. Her profile gave him, nevertheless, a moment's astonishment. Compared with the complexity of her general effect as he remembered it, her air of decision and of mature self-possession, it was an artless and candid scripture, a child's confession. It was as if all she essentially was were written in that one naked eloquent line.

‘Now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost …'

On his way home from the service he dawdled and was presently overtaken by Mrs Meldreth and her party. The rigours of politeness restrained him from openly staring at Ellen, but his covert glances searched her face for the pensive
child he had surprised in her profile. Visually he could not quite recapture that moment's revelation; but it was clear in memory, clear and indubitable, and he knew he would never see her again with his earlier purblind vision. Whether suddenly or by imperceptible gradations, he was now conscious of her in a new way. He realized, without phrasing it, the simple fathomless truth of her existence as a spirit, a living centre of consciousness, an
I
living alone, even as he was, even as he did.

Though busy in his silences, he felt it necessary to make some conversation.

‘I was surprised to see you in church, Aunt Ellen.'

With his bantering tone, his playful mode of address, he was back in the unreal world of social exchanges. But that other, who held a watching brief in him, was still alert.

‘Why?'

‘Oh, I don't know. I had an idea you, didn't much go in for such things.'

‘She came to please me,' said Mrs Meldreth cosily. ‘Didn't you, my dear?'

Ellen smiled, as if to say that that theory was as good as another. But after a moment's hesitation she said: ‘I don't know why I should have to have a special reason. After all, we've all been to church, haven't we? Why did you go, Felix?'

‘Yes,' Kate chimed in. ‘And what did you do, Felix, when you got there?'

Felix almost blushed, wondering what lay behind the seeming innocence of the question; but Florrie said, not to be left out: ‘Did you think it a good sermon? I did.'

Everybody laughed at this pronouncement. Ellen remarked: ‘Florrie has a nice sense of what's due. We should discuss the sermon on our way home, not argue about why we went to church.'

‘We're not arguing,' said Felix. ‘I haven't heard a single word of argument yet.'

‘How disappointing for you!' Ellen retorted. ‘No one can say you haven't done your best to provoke one.'

‘All this,' said Felix, in injured tones, ‘because I asked a meek question!' He made gestures of mock admiration and despair. ‘How like a woman!'

‘Well, she is a woman, silly,' said Kate. ‘What would you expect her to be?'

‘We're all women,' Florrie contributed.

‘Except you, Florrie,' said Kate. ‘You're Mother's little chick.'

Florrie tossed her fair head in disdain of this pleasantry. ‘Male and female created he them,' she remarked. ‘It's not a question of how old you are.'

The devastating justice of the rebuke flattened out the conversation for a while, and Felix saw that Florrie, hiding embarrassment under a scowl of indifference, was wishing she had not spoken. The incurable frivolity of her elders was a constant trial to Florrie, but their present silence seemed to convict her of gaucherie and she was filled with chagrin. Of the four female persons whose company Felix was now enjoying, she knew herself to be the least interesting to him. He treated her always with a casual, an all-too-brotherly kindness. He had never, she believed, really looked at her; and, had he looked, what could he have seen but what she herself so discontentedly saw in her glass every morning and night?—an overgrown lump of a girl, too fat, too blond, too pink, too raw, too everything that Kate was not. If only she had been dark like Kate, and gentle like Mamma, and mysterious like Aunt Ellen! If only she could find and follow the middle way between moodiness and self-assertion! If only people were not too stupid to see how much she adored them!

Released for a moment from his concentration on the problem of Ellen, Felix privately contemplated each of his companions in turn. Kate, he coolly supposed, was the beauty of the party; and it just crossed his mind that perhaps had he not seen her growing towards this present perfection from her unalarming
schoolgirlhood, were he in fact seeing her for the first time, her extreme attractiveness would frighten him away. Yes, Kate was a dazzler, and Mrs Meldreth was a charmer, and Florrie was a nice serious child whom one liked and was a little sorry for. He was happy and at home with any or all of them.

With Ellen, too, he was at home in some sense. He had lost his shyness of her; he felt her to be a friend; he no longer found difficulty in talking with her. Yet Ellen was somehow different. Ellen was real. He had, even now, a sense of being alone with her.
You
are here, he said. You. And we are in the world together.

THE spell of fine weather showed no signs of breaking. Showers there were, sudden and brief and freshening, but they too seemed like sunshine, sunshine translated into another element, crystal sprinklings of light falling into a world of spun glass. Wiseacres hinted darkly at the chance of late frosts, fatal to the precocious plum; but to less anxious spirits, and to Felix especially, it was a timeless time, without past or future, the kind of golden interval that makes one marvel to remember having ever heard evil of our English climate. Yet measured by days it was perhaps not long. It was the days themselves that were long, though midsummer was months away, and the boys were not yet back at school.

For Felix the days were long and full, each one a lifetime. There was an unresolved tension between his idly active mind and another and profounder part of him in which a new universe was being brought to birth. His imagination was pregnant with an idea which even now he could scarcely bring himself to acknowledge or understand. But the veiled angel of his destiny was hovering on the verge of consciousness; and at last the knowledge confronted him, bewildering in its implications, that yesterday and to-day and for many days and nights the unseen palpable presence of Ellen Winter had been
with him. He fell asleep thinking of her, and in the morning she was still there in his mind, her voice, her look, her very self. With this realization came a change, a fear, a resistance. What had been easy and almost inevitable became difficult, a matter for conscious contrivance. Hitherto scarcely a day passed without his encountering her. It had seemed natural, a happy chance, that they should talk and walk together. But now that he
must
see her, now that not to be with her was suddenly unbearable, he betook himself to the Meldreths' house with dragging feet, conscious of every step, except in those moments when a state of dream supervened.

He found Florrie in the garden. She was gathering flowers for the house.

‘Hullo, Felix!'

He had no eyes for her shining look, her suppressed eagerness. But the sight and sound of her, so ordinary and reassuring, roused him from trance.

‘Hullo, Florrie! What a lovely morning!'

‘Yes, isn't it!' She stood at gaze, her hands dangling their flowers.

‘Where's everybody?'

‘They're in the house somewhere. At least, Kate and Mother are.'

But I'm in the garden. Florrie's manner seemed to say. This is me, here.

‘I see.'

He waited impatiently to hear more. Was Florrie being obstinate, or merely obtuse? Would she force him to ask outright for what he wanted?

‘Aunt Ellen's gone out somewhere.'

‘Has she? Where, I wonder?'

Florrie turned back to her occupation. ‘On the wold, I suppose. One of her famous solitary walks,' she said strangely.

On the wold told him nothing. She might almost as well have said on the world, for all the help it was. He turned away, mumbling that he must go.

‘Aren't you coming in to see them?' she called after him.

‘Not now.' He was already some yards away. ‘Back presently.' He smiled and waved a purposely vague gesture designed to eke out his meagre speech. ‘Goodbye!'

That he should find her seemed to him so improbable that when in fact he did find her, walking in the woods, he had the sense of being part of a prearranged pattern. The setting of this moment, the luminous leaves and dappled umbrage of the woods, was perhaps worth a glance; but he had none to spare for it. It was as if his own thought of her had taken shape before him. But she was more real than thought, and different. Imagination was at once fulfilled and put to derision. She was actual, a living woman. She, not he (as of her phantom he had been), was the animating principle of herself.

She was actual and tangible. He longed to touch her, to put that to the proof; and but for his longing he could have done so, even so recently as yesterday he could have done so, could have touched her hand lightly in passing and said: is it you, or am I dreaming?

Shyness held him aloof. ‘Hullo, Ellen!' His voice was unnaturally quiet, with a quietness that cancelled the implied surprise at seeing her. ‘They told me you were out.'

She smiled, friendly and indifferent. ‘Did they?'

‘I was afraid I shouldn't find you,' he said breathlessly.

‘Dear me!' she said. Her voice had the Warmth that amusement always imparted to it. ‘That
would
have been a disaster.'

‘Well, yes,' he said, ‘it would.' He looked at her, and looked away. ‘Shall we sit down?'

She seemed surprised by the' question, even more than by this grave unsmiling manner; but following his indication she saw that they happened to be only a pace or two from a fallen tree, ancient and mossgrown, upon which some few days ago they had sat together for half an hour, contentedly talking.

‘If you like,' she said. ‘Is anything the matter?' Feeling
the weight of his silence she said quickly: ‘Have you brought me bad news?'

‘No, no. No one's dead or anything. Don't worry.' He laughed. His voice sounded to himself forced and over-loud. ‘I'm the only bad news.'

‘You?'

He felt suddenly abashed, and angry with himself for having destroyed, as he thought, the easiness there had been between them. But this anger was brief and superficial. In the moment of raising his eyes again to look at her, all minor emotions were forgotten, lost to view, in the astonishment of a new experience. He was seeing her for the first time. Later he was to wonder how he could have supposed, in the beginning, that she was not beautiful; but in this moment of looking, of seeing, of realizing the sensual mystery of her being, he could not think in such categories; even in his mind there was silence. As if by a miracle he found his callow fantasies embodied not in ivory and roseleaves, not in a vision of ideal perfections, but in a living woman, earthly and actual.

With a sense of returning from a long voyage, he withdrew his glance. He had said nothing. Her composure told him that even his eyes had said nothing. She still looked at him with grave, questioning, but untroubled eyes. The generous curve of her mouth had lost nothing of its gentleness and humour.