The Climber/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
It was a warm still night early in May, and the electric light over the cabstand at the end of the square cast on to the pavement and dusty surface of the dry roadway the elbowed and angular shadows of the still leafless plane-trees, in unwavering lines, as if they were made of some dark marble cunningly inlaid into a grey ground. The dried seed-balls of last year still hung there, and the air was only just sufficient to stir them, so that they oscillated gently to and fro, swinging from side to side in the light breeze that was not strong enough to agitate the twigs and branches that bore them. But in other respects, apart from the merely atmospheric, the square was full enough of movement two houses at least had evening parties going on, and at the end of the square opposite the cabstand there was a dance, and rows of carriages and motors were employed, in endless procession, in unloading their occupants opposite the strip of red carpet that ran across from the curbstone of the pavement to the step of the house. Lights blazed from the windows, sedulous footmen were busy with carriage doors and, a little farther within, with pins and numbered tickets, while from the windows of the first door, open, and screened with awning, the white stripes of which showed luminously in the dark, came the enchanting lilt and rhythm of dance music. Round the other side of the square were lines of ordered carriages and expectant cabs, and from one house or another there constantly sounded the shrill whistles to summon the latter, two whistles for two wheels, and one for four, and the fineness of the night made hansoms the more popular conveyance.
The drawing-room windows of Number 36, next door to the fortunate house with the carriages and the red-carpet, were open, and in the window-seat were two girls, leaning out through the screen of red geranium, yellow calceolaria and lobelia with which the window-boxes had been lately filled, and sipping-cocoa intermittently as a medium for the conveyance of sandwiches. They had been to the theatre together, but Mrs. Eddis, mistress of the house and their chaperone, had gone to bed, on their return, while Maud Eddis and her friend had lingered to talk "things" over and in especial to watch the arrivals next door. Black and blond, they were kneeling in the window-seat looking out on to the stream of carriages and the shadows of the plane-trees. At length, about half-past eleven, there was a slackening in the arrivals, for the season was still young, and guests went to dances comparatively early, and they withdrew their attention from outside affairs and devoted themselves with more zeal to sandwiches and conversation.
Lucia Grimson began by giving a great sigh.
"Oh dear, oh dear, Maud, how happy you ought to be!" she said. "Everything is spread out for you like lunch at a picnic, when you can simply descend and grab what you like. And you are a darling: you have given me such nice grabs all this last week. And now my picnic is over. At least it will be to-morrow."
Maud, with precision, finished her sandwich and swallowed it all before she spoke. Lucia, it may be remarked, spoke with her mouth full.
"But do stay another week," she said. "Mother would be delighted, and I well, I could put up with you. There's a dance to-morrow, you know, and it's mother's opera night on Wednesday, and" Lucia waved her hands violently.
"Oh, stop, stop," she said. "I shall get perfectly green with envy if you go on, and it would not be becoming. I've got to go to-morrow; when you come down and stay with us in August you will quite understand why. You can't at present: you have never lived in a country town with two aunts who were daughters of a defunct Dean. You can't understand the rules, you lucky person. If one has settled to go home on Wednesday, on Wednesday home you go, and nothing short of an earthquake may stop you. And the earthquake would have to be a bad one. Oh, Maud, we are alone, aren't we? If so 'Damn,' but not otherwise."
Lucia got up, and took the last sandwich.
"One used always to be told to leave the last for Mr. Manners," she observed, "but I think the parlour-maid usually ate it: here Don Whiskers would. So why shouldn't I? How good! And how good the play was! And people yawned, and people went out before the end! What idiots! Weren't they?"
"I thought the last act was rather dull," said Maud.
"Then you're just as bad. You are blasée, darling: I think most people are blasés. That I can't understand. Nobody who has a plan should be blasé. And as long as one has any interest in life one has a plan. I have several."
Maud moved from the window-seat and lit the two bedroom candles that had been brought in.
"Let's go up to your room," she said, "and have a hair-brush talk. Or shall we go to my room?"
Lucia made a little impatient movement.
"Oh, let's stop here," she said. "I hate talking in bedrooms. My plans are not bedroom plans. They are much more connected with drawing-rooms and balls and life and movement. I'm not domestic, you know. At least I want my domestic arrangements to be on a particularly large scale. Yes, I dare say I sound as if I was a little intoxicated. Well, so I am; this delightful whirl of a week up in town has gone to my head. However, you need not be alarmed for me. It isn't going to become a habit. You see to-morrow I go home, back to the cold-water cure. Dear me, the very thought of it sobers me at once."
An elderly and discreet man-servant, Don Whiskers, to whom allusion has been made, came into the room, with the evident intention of putting out the lights before himself going to bed. A shade of reserved disapproval crossed his face when he saw it was still occupied, and he withdrew again, not, however, quite closing the door, as if to convey a subtle hint that it was really not worth while to do so at this time of the night. The hint was not lost on Maud.
"That's the third time Parker has come in," she said to Lucia. "Perhaps we had better go upstairs, if you don't mind. Mother doesn't like the servants being kept up late."
Lucia got up at once, stifling an impatient little sigh. What were servants for, except to serve you? Instead of which, Mrs. Eddis' plan seemed to her to be one long effort of arranging the day to please them, and so order her movements that they should be put to no inconvenience of any kind, and in particular do nothing that they could think strange or irregular. An instance in point was that the two girls had just supped on cocoa and sandwiches, though the night was hot, because it was thought in the kitchen that cocoa and sandwiches were the proper refreshments to take after a theatre. Mrs. Flagstaff, the cook, who had been with Mrs. Eddis for fifteen years, was accustomed to send up cocoa and sandwiches on these occasions; she would have thought it strange to be asked for anything else. These arrangements were of the Mede and Persian order—the human mind (as exhibited in the case of Mrs. Eddis) was incapable of conceiving a different order of things.
But Lucia had a genius for appearing rapturously contented with the ways and manners of other people; at any rate, while she was with them. She had already been complimentary on the subject of the sandwiches, and now she lit her bedroom candle at once.
"Yes, let's go upstairs," she said, "but I warn you that the first step toward going to bed is probably widely removed from the last. I've got heaps to say, simply heaps, and I shan't have another opportunity of saying it for ages. That is one of the penalties of the cold-water cure: nobody, not a soul, down at Brixham understands one single thing!"
Maud laughed.
"How do you manage to communicate, then?" she asked.
"Oh, I have learned their language, you see, though they haven't learned mine. It's quite different. So I talk about their things, which I understand perfectly. There is no misunderstanding possible. What it amounts to is: 'Be good, sweet maid, and in course of time you will become stupid and ugly.' They have, most of them, become it."
Maud took up her candle and followed her friend upstairs. Devoted as she was to Lucia, she often wished that Lucia would not talk like this. She did not believe that the real Lucia was reflected in remarks of this nature, and she concluded therefore that they were insincere, a pose, an affectation, an outcome of surface irritability. She herself was as little a prey to irritability as she was given to poses or affectations, and for a moment it rather hurt her that Lucia should say that the juster name for serious people was stupid people. And it hurt her because, though she did not believe that such a speech, as has been said, represented the real Lucia, she was aware that the real Lucia was slightly intolerant of the qualities which may be called serious. And at this point in her reflections, as she followed her up the rather narrow staircase of this house in Warwick Square, she, as usual, cut them short with a swift application of the loyal knife, and thrilled again with the thought that this wonderful Lucia was her friend.
The two had started an acquaintance that very soon ripened into intimacy at Girton College. Maud, at first sight almost, had fallen in love with this tall, laughing, golden-haired girl, while Lucia, from an attitude of tacit tolerance toward her admiration, had soon come to lean upon it, and to give in exchange the affection of which she was capable. If she felt unwell or depressed, it was always a solid comfort to have Maud in whom to confide her aches or cloudiness of spirit, and Maud's quiet and imperturbable serenity was better than smelling-salts or phenacetin. Or if (depression being rare with her) exuberance, like a hose, demanded something to squirt at, Maud's glow of sympathetic delight in her ecstatic vitality was equally satisfying. And thus the fact of the mutual attraction of unlikes was illustrated; the two girls, by the very fact of their polar dissimilitude, were closer friends than any similarity of nature would have caused them to be. Between them they completed the spirit of girlhood; fused into one, they would have formed the incarnation of womanhood. But Nature, in her inscrutable ways, is wont to pluck her incarnation in two; she gives the complement of certain adorable qualities to another person. The two halves of the ideal, however, usually find a certain consolation in these imperfections, and in the present instance a friendship almost ideal resulted from them. For the selfishness of the one was healed by the self-abandonment of the other, and what Lucia would have called the seriousness of Maud was lit by her own vivacity.
Maud arrived quickly at the hair-brushing stage of undressing, and went to her friend's room. But Lucia had been, as was her custom, the quicker of the two, and was standing in front of her glass playing conjuring tricks, as was Maud's phrase for these operations, with her hair. For it seemed part and parcel of her lambent vitality that her very hair should be full not only of the pale gold flames of its colouring, but that authentic fire should burn in it. And now, as she stood before her glass, lightly brushing it, it stood out from her head in soft billows of gold, each hair asserting itself, not lying close with the rest, but alive and individual. Her small, pale, oval face, still strangely sexless in spite of her twenty years, and more like the face of some young boy than of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, lay like a flushed jewel in the casket of its gold, a jewel to ravish the eyes and trouble the soul of the sanest. She had put on a dressing-gown of grey silk, with short arms reaching barely to her elbows, and the neutrality of its colour heightened by contrast her pale, brilliant colouring.
Maud took the hair-brush out of her hand.
"Oh, let me," she said. "I love to do it for you, Lucia. May I put the candles out and see it sparkle? I am sure it would give flashes to-night."
"Yes, but not now; before going to bed," she said. "I've got a cargo of talk on board, and I must get it landed. And I want a cigarette more than I can possibly say. Oh, it's no use frowning. I know quite well that you wish I wouldn't smoke. But you also know quite well, darling, that I don't mind the least about that."
This was perfectly true, and Maud made no further remonstrance. Indeed, she was incapable of radical disapproval with regard to anything Lucia did, for all her actions came to her through the golden haze, so to speak, of her personality. Maud could no more really judge them than the dazzled eye can judge of colour.
"Yes, cargoes of talk," she said, "all disconnected, all nonsensical, I dare say, but all me. Because if one is really absurd as I am, one is most ridiculous when one is most oneself. Most people are ridiculous, but they won't say so, and talk about politics instead, or something which is possibly not ridiculous. And afterwards you may talk about yourself for a little. Well, the real point is that I'm growing up. I've begun to realize that I am I. I didn't really know it before, and I'm only just beginning to know it now. Maud, I'm a very awful person, really. If anybody else was like me I should be shocked at her. But because it's me, I'm not. I wonder if you'll be shocked."
"Try," said Maud.
"I'm not sure that it's wise. You might get up with a Day of Judgment face in the middle, and stalk out of the room."
Maud was naturally very reserved and reticent, and it was here again that the utter dissimilarity of the two drew them closer together. If Lucia felt a thing deeply, that thing exploded in all directions in floods of talk, while the same fact in Maud's case was sufficient to tie and seal her tongue in a manner almost hermetical. If her nature was moved below its surface, the words by which it would naturally find utterance congealed, so that to the mere superficial observer, who judges only by surface, the more deeply she felt the more wooden and set (to put it inimically) she became. And if she envied Lucia anything (which, indeed, she scarcely did, since her love for her told her how meet and right it was that she should be endowed with these brilliances), she sighed for this gift of spontaneous expression expression as spontaneous as the waving of a dog's tail to express pleasure, or the involuntary quickening of the heart-beat in anticipation or suspense.
"Go on and try," she said. "I want you, Lucia—oh, dear! I wish I could express myself—I want you to show me all yourself, to let me see you from all points just as—oh, just as one revolves slowly before the dressmaker when one is trying on."
Lucia nodded appreciatively at Maud.
"Ah! that's good," she said. "That expresses what you mean, anyhow, and that is what I find it so hard to do. All those dear—well, eight-day clocks down at Brixham say I always say more than I mean, and think to themselves, 'Oh, it's only Lucia.' Yes; they are eight-day clocks—seven-day, rather—and they strike with absolute regularity, and are wound up for the week at the cathedral service at half-past ten on Sunday morning. The cathedral service is the spring and centre of our life at Brixham: we draw life and inspiration from it. My grandpapa, the Dean, said that in a volume of brown sermons which I read to Aunt Cathie and Aunt Elizabeth on Sunday evening. There! You are beginning to look Judgment Day, but I don't care."
Lucia sat down on the floor at Maud's feet, pushing her knees apart with little burrowy movements of her shoulders, so that she sat hemmed in by her with her back against the front of the sofa where Maud sat. Her preparation for hair-brushing had been more complete than Maud's, and she had taken off her stockings and evening shoes, substituting for them red morocco slippers. These, too, as she talked, she had slipped off, and was pushing her bare feet into the long white wool of the sheepskin rug that lay in front of her dressing-table. All these attitudes and movements were very characteristic of her; she loved "getting close to things, like a cat," as she once expressed it, taking a somewhat sensuous, purring pleasure in the touch of things that were soft and warm. It was all done, too, with a cat's insinuating gracefulness.
"There, that makes me quite comfortable," she said. "Aren't you glad? I hate being not quite comfortable, and if somebody has to be, I would sooner it wasn't me, because I know I hate it more than most people. Yes; they are wound up by cathedral service, and it isn't in the least profane of me to say so. Ding, dong. Pom, pom, pom. They strike quite regularly and punctually all the week, and never fail to do their duty. How Aunt Cathie can reconcile it with her conscience to say the General Confession I don't know. She never does what she ought not, or doesn't what she ought. And it does make people so dull to have no failings! It does, doesn't it? And everyone at Brixham is so old: I wonder they don't send for them all to the British Museum, and put them in the new wing. It would hold them nicely."
Maud's disapproval was rapidly melting. It was shocking, of course, to speak of your aunts like this, but somehow Lucia's frankness disarmed censure. Maud realized that had she been in Lucia's place she would almost certainly have thought these things, though her thoughts would not have been cast quite in Lucia's humorous mould, and her inimitable friend only said what she herself would have been unable to find words for. But she made one faint attempt to indicate a more proper attitude.
"Oh, Lucia, but they are so kind to you," she said. "You have often told me so."
"Yes, the darlings, but theirs is the true kindness, you know, which seeks to improve one. Of course it is very right that one should be improved, but it is nicer, you know, to be allowed to enjoy yourself. Besides—this is one of the things I have just begun to see—I am not really capable of improvement. I'm not wound up by cathedral service; what winds me up is theatres and operas and dances, and all the movement of life and its gaieties. They make me most myself, just as Aunt Cathie is most herself after early service."
Maud made a decided movement at this.
"Oh, don't, Lucia," she said. "We can all make the best of ourselves or the worst of ourselves. We can all laugh at what we know to be sacred"
Lucia interrupted.
"Oh, my dear, that is exactly where you are wrong," she said. "You can't, for instance; you couldn't do it, because you are good. Well, I'm not good. I'm a beast. But whether we are good or beasts, we all want to enjoy ourselves; we want to be happy. And we all make plans to be happy. Aunt Cathie and Aunt Elizabeth both make heaps of plans. They go to all the church congresses and hospitals, and homes for forcing people to be reclaimed, which I think is such a liberty to take with anyone. Fancy being reclaimed when you didn't want to! That is quite an unwarrantable thing to do."
Maud again stiffened.
"Oh, Lucia, you are talking nonsense," she said. "Do stop and let me brush your hair."
Lucia suddenly pulled her feet out of the rug and clasped her hands round her knees.
"But it isn't nonsense," she said. "It is interfering with a person's liberty to try to make him better, if he wants to be worse. He has got a right to be worse if he likes. Everybody is himself and especially herself, if you see what I mean."
"I don't quite," said Maud.
"Then it's very stupid of you. What I mean is that women know more about themselves, and assert their natures more than men do. Look at the undergraduates at Cambridge. They are all exactly alike. They all smoke pipes, and flirt if they have a chance, and wear the same clothes, and play games. I don't think I like men. But they like me."
That was so frightfully true that Maud could not deny it. But in the barest justice it is due to Lucia to say that she made this statement without complacency, but with complete unconcern. The immediate sequence of her discourse explained this.
"But among all the bad things which I assuredly am," she continued, "I am not a flirt. I suppose I should be if it amused me. It doesn't. I think—I think I might like a kind old man most awfully, and be willing to kiss him and—and do all that sort of thing. But I don't like young men. Oh, Maud, I am turning round like a person who is being tried on! But I want to go back a bit. It isn't the left side—that's where the heart is supposed to be, isn't it?—that I want you to look at. It's my hat you must look at—my head, my brain. Darling, it isn't a nice one. There's—what shall I say?—too much feather in it."
Maud felt a sudden impulse of loyalty to her friend, though it was Lucia who was depreciating herself.
"There isn't," she said. "Not a scrap. It's just right; it's perfect. It's you."
"That's true anyhow," said Lucia. "It is me. And that's what I have been finding out all this week. I always used to think I hadn't got anything of my own except one hundred pounds a year and a sense of the ridiculous. But I find I have: I've got myself. Not nice, but myself."
Lucia suddenly abandoned the cat-like attitude, and jumped up.
"I want, I want," she cried, "like those little people in the Blake drawing, putting the ladder up to the moon. But I don't want the moon at all, thank you. I want horses and carriages and motor-cars and dances and theatres and money. I used always to enjoy those things when they came in my way, but now I find they are what I want. It's a sad revelation, isn't it? It means I am worldly and material, and all the rest of the unedifying things on which our affections shouldn't be set, but there it is. I have been nobody before: now I am beginning to be myself. Not a nice self, oh, not nice at all, but it is so much better to be oneself than to be nobody."
Maud's natural reticence became intensely embarrassing to her, so embarrassing as to make her very self-conscious for the moment. She felt herself desiring to "take a line" with Lucia, instead of taking it. But it was Lucia's sudden and perplexing consciousness of herself that induced it, though that self-consciousness was so different in form from hers that it seemed to be but ironical to call it by the same name. Then Lucia's attack of this distressing symptom left her, and she became cruelly critical instead.
"I love you, Maud," she said. "You are all that I ought to want to be. But I don't. You are kind, and good, and sympathetic, and above all you are fond of me. That, after all, is the quality one likes best in others."
"But you said just now you didn't like men who liked you," remarked Maud.
Lucia waved her hands in a sort of impotent despair.
"Well, what if I did? It was inconsistent, I suppose. But what's the good of being consistent? It is the dullest possible state to be in. I wish you wouldn't interrupt when the spirit of—anything you like—is upon me."
Maud was obediently silent. It appeared that this attitude did not suit Lucia any better.
"Darling, you are dignifiedly mute," she said. "You adopt a disapproving silence, like Aunt Cathie when she hasn't anything to say. It does irritate me so."
"Well, then, you are talking nonsense," said Maud firmly.
"You said that before."
"Because you talked nonsense before."
Lucia took a turn or two up and down the room before she answered, setting square to each other the candles on her dressing-table, and pulling up the blind a little so that its wooden binder no longer tapped against the edge of the open window. She felt checked, as if some quiet steady force had a hand on her rein, and she instinctively felt the reasonableness of the firm and solid touch.
"Explain then," she said.
"Well, come and sit quietly again, where you sat before," said Maud. "It is no use explaining to a hurricane."
"Hurricane? Me?" asked Lucia.
"Yes, hurricane. But you know I am so bad at explaining; I feel, but I can't tell you what, even when you are patient, which you so seldom are. Whereas you can explain a thing without particularly feeling it. I agree with your Aunt Cathie, wasn't it? You say more than you mean."
"I am always patient," said Lucia with emphasis. " But do get on."
"Well, then, I think you have been talking nonsense, and rather dangerous nonsense," said Maud. "I mean it is nonsense that might become sense to you. You tell me, as you have been telling yourself, that you are not nice inside, that you want only the cushions and pillows of life, that you are willing to let a kind old man be kind to you. Oh, Lucia, thank God it is nonsense!"
Maud spoke very slowly, and her utterance was as unlike Lucia's as it is possible to imagine two products of vocal chords to be. Lucia's words flashed and twinkled with the speed and movement of her own mind, her own gestures; Maud's were slow and spaced, and each word seemed to mean what it was supposed to mean by makers of dictionaries. When she said thank God, for instance, it was perfectly clear that she meant "thank God," but when the same phrase was on Lucia's lips, it meant "I am happy to tell you," neither more nor less. And something of the consciousness of this flashed out in her reply.
"Go on, dear aunt," she said.
Maud did not seem to resent this in the least, indeed, at heart she rather liked it.
"Yes, your aunt will go on," she said, "in fact, she fully means to. Dear niece, you think you have found yourself, that you are conscious of your individuality. You aren't in the least. All you have said is quite characteristic of all you have been as long as I have known you"
"That may be," said Lucia quickly; "the point is that I am aware of it."
"Well, I'm not," said Maud slowly. "When you tell me what you want from life, I reply that you don't know what you want. If you were becoming a woman—oh, Lucia, I am so much older than you really—you would be beginning to be conscious of the want—it sounds so dreadfully indelicate—of one of the men you say you don't like. You would think about—about children, babies, soft helpless things, not motor-cars."
Lucia leaned back her head.
"Maud, you're crying," she said; "don't cry over me. Besides, why are you crying?"
"I'm not," said Maud. "And if I was, I shouldn't tell you why."
"Why? We always tell each other everything."
If she were not crying, she was somewhat perilously near it. But at this, she ceased to deserve the soft imputation.
"I don't think we always do," she said. "We both of us have our private places, I expect."
"Perhaps you have from me," said Lucia. "But I haven't from you."
To the softer but sterner spirit this was wounding.
"I'm sorry," said Maud. "I really am. I won't have private places from you. I will let you into—the only one. Indeed, indeed, I would have before, Lucia, but I didn't know about it before."
Lucia looked at her in a sort of amazed distrust.
"Do you mean you are in love?" she asked. "With a stupid young man?"
Maud took up pools from Lucia's gold cataract of hair, half burying her face in it.
"Yes, I expect that is what you would call it," she said.
"And who is he?" asked Lucia. "We promised to tell each other."
Maud, still hidden, gave a long sigh, and her voice was muffled.
"I know we did," she said. "And I can't tell you, though I thought I could. When it comes to you, you will know, Lucia. It—it is too private, at first. No doubt I shall tell you before long."
"But why 'at first'?" asked the other.
"I can't say. I only feel that I am not used to the private room myself yet, and that I can't let anybody else in. I would if I could. At least, I would let you in, no one else."
"And all the time he is probably talking about you as an 'awful ripper,'" said Lucia contemptuously.
"I wish I thought he was," said Maud, with the utmost sincerity.
There was a pause, and Maud unmuffled her face again and laid cool finger-tips on Lucia's shoulders.
"Oh, what was that?" said she. "Oh, I see. You startled me a little."
Maud was still struggling for utterance.
"Am I a beast, Lucia?" she asked.
"Yes, I think you are."
"But I don't mean to be. You—you may guess if you like."
"I have been trying to guess for the last ten minutes," remarked Lucia. "Is he good-looking?"
"I don't know if you would think so. It doesn't matter much, does it?"
"I suppose it matters more that you are. Is he clever?"
"Yes," said Maud.
"And I know him?"
"You have danced with him!"
"How enlightening! as if I knew all the people I have danced with!"
Lucia suddenly sat up again.
"Don't interrupt," she said. "His name is—is Edgar Comber. Isn't it? Heavens! Oh, Maud, how awfully nice for him! Does he know yet, do you think?"
Maud flushed.
"Oh, Lucia, how can you say such awful things?" she whispered.
"Why are they awful? A man lets a girl see that he is attracted by her fast enough. It is quite silly that a girl shouldn't let a man see that she is attracted by him. I don't think it is quite straightforward not to. It seems rather secretive. If I saw a man I really liked I should run after him as hard as I could, and not give him a chance of escaping if I could help. I think it is the sensible thing to do; it is so early Victorian to bend your head over your fancy work, or avert it with a pink blush as you walk in a grove. What is a grove? It is always coming in Jane Austin's books, which I find dull. Whatever I am I am, not early Victorian. Mind, I should only run after a man if I really meant to catch him. I think flirting is silly and not quite fair. A flirt leads a man on, and leads him on, and then suddenly puts her nose in the air as if he was a bad smell, and says, 'What do you mean?'"
Maud buried her face again in Lucia's hair.
"Oh, you do say such dreadful things," she almost moaned, "and I never can answer them. At least my answer only is that I am utterly different. Often you say the things that I only think, but sometimes you say things that I couldn't think."
"You mean I have a coarse and indelicate nature?" demanded Lucia.
"Yes, darling, just that; but it's only a tiny wee bit of you, you know."
"There again you are wrong," said Lucia. "I am altogether like that. And altogether, do you know, it is close on one o'clock. Not that it matters; it is so silly to mind what the time is. Watches are a sort of Frankenstein monster: men invented them, and then are haunted and shadowed by them."
But Maud got up.
"Nearly one," she said, "and I promised mother I would be in bed by twelve."
"You've broken it, then," said Lucia, "so let's go on talking."
"No, we really mustn't. Oh, dear, I wish you weren't going away to-morrow."
"You can't wish it more than I do. Oh, Maud, how strange you are! You think it more important to go to bed at one because you promised to do so at twelve, than to sit up and talk to your poor friend who goes to—well, purgatory by the 11.45 to-morrow! Especially when this violently exciting thing has happened to you, which I want so dreadfully to talk about. Gracious me, if ever I fall in love with anybody, you shan't be allowed to go to bed for a week."
"But I've got nothing to say," said Maud, "it's so strange. I don't know what it feels like yet; I can only feel."
Lucia looked sternly at her friend.
"I insist on hearing the symptoms," she said, "for future guidance. Do you want to be with him on a moonlight night and write poetry? Is it that sort?"
"No; it sounds delightful, but I don't think it's that sort," said Maud.
"Do you want to change hats with him?" asked Lucia inexorably.
Maud laughed.
"Don't be horrid," she said. "Oh, Lucia, your hair! Let me put the candles out and see it sparkle for a minute."
"Do you want to brush his hair?" continued Lucia. "Tell me about him, anyhow. Is he rich? Is he serious or flippant? Serious, I hope; a flippant husband would never do. Is he witty? Yes, I will allow he is good-looking, and he can dance. Ah, of course he is serious. I remember we talked about the dances of ancient Greece, and I could not understand one word he said. So it must have been serious; I always understand nonsense. Maud, I never saw anyone so reticent as you. What a lucky thing it is for us, that we have got me to do the talking."
Lucia sat down in the chair in front of her looking-glass and blew out the candles. The blinds were down over the window and the room was almost absolutely dark, so that Maud had to feel for the silver-handled brush which she had given her friend, for no glimmer of light shone on the dressing-table; and having found it, she had to feel with her hand to find the golden billows of Lucia's head. Thick and soft and warm they lay there in untroubled calm at present; soon she would raise in them that mysterious tempest of fiery life that lay in them. Then in the darkness she began to brush, and immediately almost the hidden vitality began to manifest itself. Strange little cracklings like the breaking of dry twigs was heard, and the great golden mass that lay at first so still and composed under her hands began to rise as the yeast of life worked in it. Each hair grew endued with it, and stiffened itself apart from the others, as if asserting its own individuality, and deep down in it sparks began to light themselves, like remote and momentary stars, that appeared and disappeared. Then that strange conflagration grew more general, from points of light there were flashes of pale flame, so that looking in the glass in front Maud could see lit by that mysterious illumination her friend's face, white and colourless and framed in lambent flashes. It looked like a face scarcely human; it was an abstraction of life, but half-incarnate, appearing and disappearing and glimmering in the reflecting surface with its silver frame.
"Oh, Lucia, it almost frightens me," she said. "How is it that you hold all this fire? Is it the fire in you that I love so, do you think? Where does it come from? How do you make it? Or does it make you?"
"I think you must be practising the love-duet with your young man," remarked Lucia.
"Oh, bother my young man," said Maud.
"Why should you? I shall get one, too, some day, I suppose. I hope they'll get on nicely together. Otherwise we must divorce them. Now if you've quite finished making a matchbox of me, let me find the other one and light the candles. I am so sleepy; having my hair brushed always makes me sleepy. Thanks ever so much, darling."