Man and Maid

Her eyelids were red and swollen, her brown hair, flattened out of its pretty curves, clung closely to her head. Ink stained her hands, and there was even a bluish smear of it on her wrist. A tray with tea-things stood among the litter of manuscript on her table. The tea-pot had only cold tea-leaves in it; the bread and butter was untouched.

She put down the pen, and went to the window. The rose-tint of the sunset was reflected on the bank of mist and smoke beyond the river. Above, where the sky was pale and clear, a star or two twinkled contentedly.

She stamped her foot.

Already the beautiful garments of the evening mist, with veiled lights in the folds of it, was embroidered sparsely with the early litten lamps of impatient workers, and as she gazed, the embroidery was enriched by more and more yellow and white and orange – the string of jewels along the embankment, the face of the church clock.

She turned from the window to the room, and lighted her own lamp, for the room was now deeply dusk. It was a large, low, pleasant room. It had always seemed pleasant to her through the five years in which she had worked, and played, and laughed, and cried there. Now she wondered why she had not always hated it.

The stairs creaked. The knocker spoke. She caught her head in both hands.

“My God!” she said, “this is too much!”

Yet she went to the door.

“Oh – it’s only you,” she said, and, with no other greeting, walked back into the room, and sat down at the table.

The newcomer was left to close the outer door, and to follow at her own pleasure. The newcomer was another girl, younger, prettier, smarter. She turned her head sidewise, like a little bird, and looked at her friend with very bright eyes. Then she looked round the room.

“My dear Jane,” she said, “whatever have you been doing to yourself?”

“Nothing,” said her dear Jane very sulkily.

“Oh, if genius burns – your stairs are devilish – but if you’d rather I went away – ”

“No, don’t go, Milly. I’m perfectly mad.” She jumped up and waved her outstretched arms over the mass of papers on the table. “Look at all this – three days’ work – rot – abject rot! I wish I was dead. I was wondering just now whether it would hurt much if one leaned too far out of the window – and – No, I didn’t do it – as you see.”

“What’s the matter?” asked the other prosaically.

“Nothing. That’s just it. I’m perfectly well – at least I was – only now I’m all trembly with drink.” She pointed to the tea-cups. “It’s the chance of my life, and I can’t take it. I can’t work: my brain’s like batter. And everything depends on my idiot brain – it has done for these five years. That’s what’s so awful. It all depends on me – and I’m going all to pieces.”

“I told you so!” rejoined the other. “You would stay in town all the summer and autumn, slaving away. I knew you’d break down, and now you’ve done it.”

“I’ve slaved for five years, and I’ve never broken down before.”

“Well, you have now. Go away at once. Take a holiday. You’ll work like Shakespeare and Michelangelo after it.”

“But I can’t– that’s just it. It’s those stories for the Monthly Multitude; I’m doing a series. I’m behind now: and if I don’t get it done this week, they’ll stop the series. It’s what I’ve been working for all these years. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had, and it’s come now, when I can’t do it. Your father’s a doctor: isn’t there any medicine you can take to make your head more like a head and less like a suet pudding?”

“Look here,” said Milly, “I really came in to ask you to come away with us at Whitsuntide; but you ought to go away now. Just go to our cottage at Lymchurch. There’s a dear old girl in the village – Mrs Beale – she’ll look after you. It’s a glorious place for work. Father did reams down there. You’ll do your stuff there right enough. This is only Monday. Go to-morrow.”

“Did he? I will. Oh yes, I will. I’ll go to-night, if there’s a train.”

“No, you don’t, my dear lunatic. You are now going to wash your face and do your hair, and take me out to dinner – a real eighteenpenny dinner at Roches. I’ll stand treat.”

It was after dinner, as the two girls waited for Milly’s omnibus, that the word of the evening was spoken.

“I do hope you’ll have a good quiet time,” Milly said; “and it really is a good place for work. Poor Edgar did a lot of work there last year. There’s a cabinet with a secret drawer that he said inspired him with mysterious tales, and – There’s my ’bus.”

“Why do you say poor Edgar?” Jane asked, smiling lightly.

“Oh, hadn’t you heard? Awfully sad thing. He sailed from New York a fortnight ago. No news of the ship. His mother’s in mourning. I saw her yesterday. Quite broken down. Good-bye. Do take care of yourself, and get well and jolly.”

Jane stood long staring after the swaying bulk of the omnibus, then she drew a deep breath and went home.

Edgar was dead. What a brute Milly was! But, of course, Edgar was nothing to Milly – nothing but a pleasant friend. How slowly people walked in the streets! Jane walked quickly – so quickly that more than one jostled foot-passenger stopped to stare after her.

She had known that he was coming home – and when. She had not owned to herself that the constant intrusion of that thought, “He is here – in London,” the wonder as to when and how she should see him again, had counted for very much in these last days of fierce effort and resented defeat.

She got back to her rooms. She remembers letting herself in with her key. She remembers that some time during the night she destroyed all those futile beginnings of stories. Also, that she found herself saying over and over again, and very loud: “There are the boys – you know there are the boys.” Because, when you have two little brothers to keep, you must not allow yourself to forget it.

But for the rest she remembers little distinctly. Only she is sure that she did not cry, and that she did not sleep.

In the morning she found her rooms very tidy and her box packed. She had put in the boys’ portraits, because one must always remember the boys.

She got a cab and she caught a train, and she reached the seaside cottage. Its little windows blinked firelit welcome to her, as she blundered almost blindly out of the station fly and up the narrow path edged with sea-shells.

Milly had telegraphed. Mrs Beale was there, tremulous, kindly, effective; with armchairs wheeled to the April fire – cups of tea, timid, gentle solicitude.

“My word, Miss, but you do look done up,” said she. “The kettle’s just on the boil, and I’ll wet you a cup o’ tea this instant minute, and I’ve a perfect picture of a chick a-roastin’ ready for your bit o’ dinner.”

Jane leaned back in the cushioned chair and looked round the quiet, pleasant little room. For the moment it seemed good to have a new place to be unhappy in.

But afterwards, when Mrs Beale had gone and she was alone in the house, there was time to think – all the time there had ever been since the world began – all the time that there would ever be till the world ended. Of that night, too, Jane cannot remember everything; but she knows that she did not sleep, and that her eyes were dry: very dry and burning, as though they had been licked into place between their lids by a tongue of flame. It was a long night: a spacious night, with room in it for more memories of Edgar than she had known herself mistress of.

Edgar, truculent schoolboy; Edgar at Oxford, superior to the point of the intolerable; Edgar journalist, novelist, war correspondent – always friend; Edgar going to America to lecture, and make the fortune that – he said – would make all things possible. He had said that on the last evening, when a lot of them – boys and girls, journalists, musicians, art students – had gone to see him off at Euston. He had said it at the instant of farewell, and had looked a question. Had she said “Yes” – or only thought it? She had often wondered that, even when her brain was clear.

Then – she pushed away the next thought with both hands, and drove herself back to the day when the schoolboy next door whom she had admired and hated, saved her pet kitten from the butcher’s dog – an heroic episode with blood in it and tears. Edgar’s voice, the touch of his hand, the swing of his waltz-step – the way his eyes smiled before his mouth did. How bright his eyes were – and his hands were very strong. He was strong every way: he would fight for his life – even with the sea. Great, smooth, dark waves seemed rushing upon her in the quiet room; she could hear the sound of them on the beach. Why had she come near the sea? It was the same sea that – She pushed the waves away with both hands. The church clock struck two.

“You mustn’t go mad, you know,” she told herself very gently and reasonably, “because of the boys.”

Her hands had got clenched somehow, her whole body was rigid. She relaxed the tense muscles deliberately, made up the fire, swept up the hearth.

The new flame her touch inspired flickered a red reflection on the face of the cabinet – the cabinet with the secret drawer that had “inspired Edgar with mysterious tales.”

Jane went to it, and patted it, and stroked it, and coaxed it to tell her its secret. But it would not.

“If it would only inspire me,” she said, “if I could only get an idea for the story, I could do it now – this minute. Lots of people work best at night. My brain’s really quite clear again now, or else I shouldn’t be able to remember all these silly little things. No, no,” she cried to a memory of a young man kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that came to sting. She trampled on it.

Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping draught.

“You see,” she explained very earnestly, “I have some work to finish, and if I don’t sleep I can’t. And I must do it. I can’t tell you how important it is.”

The doctor gave her something in a bottle when he had asked a few questions, and she went back to the cottage to go on bearing what was left of the interminable, intolerable day.

That was the day when she set out the fair white writing paper, and the rosy blotting-paper, and the black ink and the black fountain pen, and sat and looked at them for hours and hours. She prayed for help – but no help came.

“I’m probably praying to the wrong people,” she said, when through the dusk the square of paper showed vague as a tombstone in twilit grass – “the wrong people – No, there are no tombstones in the sea – the wrong people. If St Anthony helps you to find things, and the other saints help you to be good, perhaps the dead people who used to write themselves are the ones to help one to write!”