It was at this moment that Lester saw her. She had known that she had been withdrawn from Richard. The moment that had been given them was at once longer and more intense than the previous moments had been, and she was more content to let it go. Dimly there moved in her, since her reconciliation with Betty, a sense that love was a union of having and not-having, or else something different and beyond both. It was a kind of way of knowledge, and that knowledge perfect in its satisfaction. She was beginning to live differently. She saw Richard look where she had been, and saw him also content. The men went out of the room with Lady Wallingford. The room, but for the dead girl and the living girl, was empty. They spoke to each other freely now across the division. Betty said, “Darling, what happened?”
“Nothing.” Lester answered. “At least, very little. I think he tried to push you somewhere, and then … well, then he tried to push me.”
“You’re not hurt?” Betty asked, and Lester, with a rush of laughter, answered only, “Here?”
Betty did no more than smile; her gratitude possessed her. She stood and looked at her friend, and the charity between them doubled and redoubled, so that they became almost unbearable to each other, so shy and humble was each and each so mighty and glorious. Betty said, “I wouldn’t have lost a moment, not a moment, of all that horrid time if it meant this.”
Lester shook her head. She said, almost sadly, “But mightn’t you have had this without the other? I wish you’d been happy then.” She added, “I don’t see why you couldn’t have been. Need I have been so stupid? I don’t mean only with you.”
Betty said, “Perhaps we could go there sometime and see.” But Lester was not immediately listening; she was laboring with the unaccustomed difficulties of thought, especially of this kind of thought. Her face was youthfully somber, so that it seemed to put on a kind of early majesty, as she went on. “Must we always wait centuries, and always know we waited, and needn’t have waited, and that it all took so long and was so dreadful?”
Betty said, “I don’t think I mind. I don’t think, you know, we really did have to wait—in a way this was there all the time. I feel as if we might understand it was really all quite happy—if we lived it again.”
Lester said, all but disdainfully, “Oh if we lived it again——”
Betty smiled. She said, “Lester, you look just like you used to sometimes—” and as Lester colored a little and smiled back, she went on quickly, “There, that’s what I mean. If we were living the other times now—like this—Oh I don’t know. I’m not clever at this sort of thing. But the lake or whatever it was—and then Jonathan—and now you.… I feel as if all of you had been there even when you weren’t, and now perhaps we might find out how you were even when you weren’t. Oh well,” she added, with a sudden shake of her fair head that seemed to loose sparkles of gold about all the room, “it doesn’t much matter. But I’d like to see my nurse again. I wonder if I could.”
“I should think,” said Lester, “you could almost do anything you wanted.” She thought, as she spoke, of the City through which she had come. Were the other houses in it—the houses that had seemed to her so empty then—as full of joy as this? but then perhaps also of the danger of that other death? If now she returned to them, would she see them so? if she went out of this house and—— She broke in on Betty, who had now begun to dress with an exclamation: “Betty, I’d forgotten Evelyn.”
Betty paused and blinked. She said, with a faint touch of reserve in her voice, “Oh Evelyn!”
Lester smiled again. “Yes,” she said, “that may be all very well for you, my dear, and I shouldn’t wonder if it was, but it’s not at all the same thing for me. I made use of Evelyn.”
Betty made a small face at herself and Lester in the mirror of her dressing-table. She said, “Think of the use she was trying to make of me!” and looked with a kind of celestial mischief over her shoulder at her friend.
“So I do,” said Lester, “but it isn’t the same thing at all, you must see. Betty, you do see! You’re just being provoking.”
“It’s nice to provoke you a little,” Betty murmured. “You’re so much more everything than me that you oughtn’t to mind. I might tempt you a little, on and off.” Neither of them took the word seriously enough, nor needed to, to feel that this was what all temptations were—matter for dancing mockery and high exchange of laughter, things so impossible that they could be enjoyed as an added delight of love. But Betty swung round and went on seriously. “We had forgotten Evelyn. What shall we do?”
“I suppose I could go and look for her,” Lester answered. “If she’s still in those streets she’ll be frightfully miserable.… She will be frightfully miserable. I must go.” There rose in her the vague idea of giving Evelyn a drink, a cup of tea or a sherry or a glass of water—something of that material and liquid joy. And perhaps she ought to let Evelyn talk a little, and perhaps she herself ought to pay more serious attention to Evelyn’s talk. Talk would not have checked the death-light, but if she could be a kind of frame for Evelyn, like the frame to which she had held or by which she had been held—perhaps Evelyn could rest there a little. Or perhaps—but Evelyn had first to be found. The finding of Betty had been like nothing she could ever have dreamed; might not the finding of Evelyn be too? There was a word, if she could only remember it for what she wanted—what she was thinking—now. Richard would know; she would ask Richard—after the million years. Compensation? no; recovery? no; salvation—something of all that sort of thing, for her and Betty and Evelyn, and all. She had better get on with it first and think about it afterwards.
They were silent—so to call it—while Betty finished dressing. Then Betty said, “Well now, shall I come with you?”
“Certainly not,” said Lester. “You go down to your Jonathan. And if, by any chance, you should see Richard, give him my love.” The commonplace phrase was weighted with meaning as it left her lips; in that air, it signified no mere message but an actual deed—a rich gift of another’s love to another, a third party transaction in which all parties were blessed even now in the foretaste.
Betty said, “I wish you could come. Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to? I shouldn’t mind Evelyn a bit now, if she wanted to talk to me.”
“No,” said Lester, “I don’t suppose you would. But I don’t think it would be a terrifically good idea for Evelyn—yet, anyhow. No; you go on. And don’t forget me, if you can help it.”
Betty opened her eyes. She said, as Lester had said earlier, the sweet reminders interchanging joy: “Here?”
“No,” Lester said. “I know, but it’s all a little new still. And … Oh!”
The cry was startled out of her. Before Betty had begun dressing, she had pulled the curtains and put out the light. Lester had so turned that she was now facing the window, and there, within or without, looking at her, was Evelyn—an Evelyn whom Lester hardly recognized. She knew rather than saw that it was the girl she had once called her friend. The staring eyes that met hers communicated that, but in those eyes was the same death-light that had crept about her own feet. It was indeed so; the torment of twisted space was but the sign and result of a soul that was driven to obey because it had no energy within itself, nor any choice of obedience. Lester was by her at once; the speed of her movement depended now chiefly on her will. She disappeared in that second from Betty’s sight. She threw out her hands and caught Evelyn’s arms; the dead and living could not touch, but the dead could still seem to touch the dead. She cried out, “Oh Evelyn, my dear!”
Evelyn was mouthing something, but Lester could not hear what she was saying. That however was because Evelyn was not talking to her at all, but to the Clerk. She was saying, “I can see Lester; she’s got hold of me. I can’t see Betty.”
The Clerk said, “Speak to her. Ask her what she’s doing. Ask her to come away with you.”
“Evelyn!” Lester exclaimed. “Evelyn! What’s happening? Come with me.” She spoke without any clear intention; she had no
idea what she could do, but the sense of belonging to some great whole was upon her, and she trusted to its direction. It could save this tortured form as it had saved her.
Evelyn answered, as she had been told, “Lester, what have you been doing?” But these words, instead of gaining significance, had lost it; they emerged almost imbecilely.
“I?” said Lester, astonished. “I’ve been——” She stopped. She could not possibly explain, if indeed she knew. She went on “—putting things straight with Betty. But I was coming to you, indeed I was. Come and speak to Betty.” She was aware, by her sharpened sight, that Betty was no longer in the room, and added, “She’ll be back soon.”
Evelyn, her eyes wandering round the room, said gasping, “I don’t want to stop. Come with me.”
Lester hesitated. She was willing to do anything she could, but she never had trusted Evelyn’s judgment on earth, and she did not feel any more inclined to trust it now. Nor, especially since she had seen Evelyn’s face turned on her at the bottom of the hill and heard Evelyn’s voice outside the house, did she altogether care to think into what holes and corners of the City Evelyn’s taste might lead them. There was, she knew, in those streets someone who looked like a god and yet had loosed that death-light which had crept round her feet and now shone in Evelyn’s eyes. She was not afraid, but she did not wish, unless she must, to be mixed up with obscenity. Her natural pride had lost itself, but a certain heavenly fastidiousness still characterized her. Even in paradise she preserved one note of goodness rather than another. Yet when she looked at that distressed face, her fastidiousness vanished. If she could be to Evelyn something of what Betty had been to her——? She said, “Do you want me?”
“Oh yes, yes!” the gasping voice said. “Only you. Do come.”
Lester released her hold, but as she did so, two grasping hands went up and fastened on hers. They gave a feeble jerk, which Lester easily resisted, or indeed hardly had to resist. She had once disliked coming into this house; now, at the moment of new choice, she disliked leaving it. Her only friend in the new life was in it. But she could not refuse the courtesies of this London to her acquaintance in an early London. She gave a small sigh and relaxed her will. She moved.
Her relaxed will took her where Evelyn would, but at her own speed and in her own manner. She was aware of the space she covered but not of the time, for she took no more time than Evelyn did to turn herself back on the steps of the Clerk’s chair. Not only space but time spread out around her as she went. She saw a glowing and glimmering City, of which the life was visible as a roseal wonder within. The streets of it were first the streets of today, full of business of today—shops, transport, men and women, for she was now confirmed that not alone in the house she had left did that rich human life go on. It was truly there, even if (except through that house) she had no present concern with it. The dreadful silence she had known after death was no longer there; the faint sound of traffic, so common but oh so uncommon, came to her. It was London known again and anew. Then, gently opening, she saw among those streets other streets. She had seen them in pictures, but now she did not think of pictures, for these were certainly the streets themselves—another London, say—other Londons, into which her own London opened or with which it was intermingled. No thought of confusion crossed her mind; it was all very greatly ordered, and when down a long street she saw, beyond the affairs of today, the movement of sedan chairs and ancient dresses, and beyond them again, right in the distance and yet very close to her, the sun shining on armor, and sometimes a high battlemented gate, it was no phantasmagoria of a dream but precise actuality. She was (though she did not find the phrase) looking along time. Once or twice she thought she saw other streets, unrecognizable, with odd buildings and men and women in strange clothes. But these were rare glimpses and less clear, as if the future of that City only occasionally showed. Beyond all these streets, or sometimes for a moment seen in their midst, was forest and the gleam of marshland, and here and there a river, and once across one such river a rude bridge, and once again a village of huts and men in skins. As she came down towards what was to her day the center of the City, there was indeed a moment when all houses and streets vanished, and the forests rose all round her, and she was going down a rough causeway among the trees, for this was the place of London before London had begun to be, or perhaps after its long and noble history had ceased to be, and the trees grew over it, and a few late tribes still trod what remained of the old roads. That great town in this spiritual exposition of its glory did not omit any circumstances of its building in time and space—not even the very site upon which its blessed tale was sufficiently reared.
It was not for her yet to know the greater mystery. That waited her growth in grace, and the enlargement of her proper faculties in due time. Yet all she saw, and did not quite wonder at seeing, was but a small part of the whole. There around her lay not only London, but all cities—coincident yet each distinct; or else, in another mode, lying by each other as the districts of one city lie. She could, had the time and her occasions permitted, have gone to any she chose—any time and place that men had occupied or would occupy. There was no huge metropolis in which she would have been lost, and no single village which would itself have been lost in all that contemporaneous mass. In this City lay all—London and New York, Athens and Chicago, Paris and Rome and Jerusalem; it was that to which they led in the lives of their citizens. When her time came, she would know what lay behind the high empty façades of her early experience of death; it was necessary that she should first have been compelled to linger among those façades, for till she had waited there and till she had known the first grace of a past redeemed into love, she could not bear even a passing glimpse of that civil vitality. For here citizenship meant relationship and knew it; its citizens lived new acts or lived the old at will. What on earth is only in the happiest moments of friendship or love was now normal. Lester’s new friendship with Betty was but the merest flicker, but it was that flicker which now carried her soul.
The passage ended. Lester, exhilarated by the swiftness and the spectacle of the journey, stood in the yard, outside the hall. And Evelyn, on the steps of the chair, had been able to turn and felt the agonized rigor relax. The cramps of her spirit were eased. She stood up; she ran very fast, under the eyes of her master and under the shadow of his lifted hand, and came to Lester who, coming by an easier and longer way, became again aware of her, as she had not been on the way. Evelyn’s face was still a little set, but the hard glaring misery was gone. Evelyn smiled at her; at least her face jerked; she, like the other inhabitants of that house, bore Simon’s mark in her body. Lester looked away; it seemed to her more courteous not to meet what she privately regarded as an unspeakable grimace. But then Lester’s standard for smiles had been, that day, considerably raised.
She said, looking round her at the yard and then through the window, and speaking more pleasantly than ever in this world she had spoken to Evelyn, but firmly: “What do you want me to do here? If,” she added, still pleasantly, “you do want me to do anything.”
Evelyn said, “He does. Come in.” Her voice was stronger and more urgent; she tried again to pull Lester on. She had no power on the other; her pull was no more than a poor indication of what she wanted. Lester, having come so far, consented. She moved forward with Evelyn through the wall. She saw Simon and recognized him at once. He was no more a portent to her; the falling away of the death-light had taken from him something of his apparent majesty, and a kind of need and even peevishness showed in his face. He himself did not see her now—not even her eyes as he had done in the hall of the house. But Evelyn’s manner told him that she was there. The link between them was Evelyn; on her depended the abolition of that obstacle.
But there was only one way of action. Had the Clerk himself been able to enter that other world of pattern and equipoise, of swift principles as of tender means, he might conceivably have been able to use better means. But he never had done
, and there remained now the necessity of setting up a permanent earthly and magical link which he could control. He supposed, since he thought in those terms, that the coming of this Lester with Evelyn meant that Evelyn had some sort of hold on Lester, and not at all that Lester had merely come. He who babbled of love knew nothing of love. It was why he had never known anything of the Betty who had sprung from the lake, if lake it was, that lay in the midst of that great City, as if in the picture which Jonathan had painted the shadow of the cathedral had looked rather like water than mass, and yet (as always) light rather than water. It lay there, mysterious and hidden; only, as if from sources in that world as in this, the Thames and all rivers rose and flowed and fell to the sea, and the sea itself spread and on it vessels passed, and the traffic of continents carried news of mightier hidden continents; no ship laden in foreign ports or carrying merchandise to foreign ports but exhibited passage and the principle of passage, since passage was first decreed to the creation. Simon to turn that passage back upon itself? to turn back speech which was another form of that passage? let him first master the words of three girls and drive them as he would.