# The Climber/Chapter 9

CHAPTER IX
Lucia was alone in her white sitting-room on the afternoon of her twenty-third birthday. She had been married rather more than two years; for it was mid-June, and just a month ago her husband had given her the most delightful wedding-anniversary present in the shape of an enormous black pearl. He had been rather mysterious about what he was going to give her for her birthday, and had only said that he was sure she would like it very much. She had liked it, and at this moment she was looking at it, or at least looking at bits of it, for it was large, and there was not the possibility of seeing it all together, since the human eye is the human eye. It was enormous, being the entire Kelmscott Press on vellum. But after the black pearl, and Edgar's admission that she would like the new gift very much, she had—no doubt without sufficient grounds—expected that her birthday-present would be more pearls, or perhaps diamonds. The Kelmscott Press was delightful; Lucia liked it enormously. But she liked pearls also very much, and just now, in the middle of the season, there seemed more time for them than for Chaucer. Of course, it was charming of Edgar to present her with so magnificent a birthday-gift, and she had gasped deliciously when he brought her to it (for it was physically impossible to bring it to her with any ease), but she had certainly expected jewels. For when, a week ago, he was wondering what he should give her—what was worthy of her was his exact phrase—she had told him point-blank she wished for nothing, that she had all, all that she desired, and hoped he would not spend his money on her. Immediately afterwards, she had referred to a sale of jewels that was coming on that week at Christie's, and had said there was a diamond necklace (necklet rather, for it was only an affair of twenty stones) that was a dream. She blamed herself now for that miscarriage; she ought to have said it two or three times to make sure. Oh yes, it was her fault, for in an unthinking ​moment directly afterwards she had, still reading snippets from the paper, told him that there was a book-sale at Sotheby's.
As a girl Lucia never wasted much time over regrets, and she wasted very little time over this now. She was going to have a little dinner-party this evening, and a North Pole explorer had sent regrets this morning, saying that he had influenza and could not come. That seemed very absurd, and it was ridiculous that people who exposed themselves to the rigours of these extreme latitudes should get these mild complaints; but there it was, and she was a man short. Edgar (he was a little old-fashioned in some ways) had then volunteered to go out and see if at the club or elsewhere he could find a man, rejecting her proposal to telephone instead until somebody said "yes." That, again, had seemed to her absurd. What were telephones for except to get people at the last minute? Edgar, however, held a husband's and a dissentient view. He said that anyone who came to fill up a place at the last moment was a benefactor, and that such a man ought to be approached verbatim, with gratitude and apology, not with a telephone. So he went out, armed with gratitude and apology, to seek one.
Lucia, having looked with chastened appreciation at the back of the vellum Kelmscotts, devoted a little time to the general contemplation of those reflections to which Edgar's scruples gave rise. It was her birthday, and therefore a day on which, most naturally, the thoughts are as a header-board to project the person who has been born into either the future or the past. Lucia took a neat plunge into the past.
It was a very sunny sea; all had gone extremely well, and even if there were occasional clouds, the amount of sunshine registered was certainly above the normal. She did not seek to deny that she had made certain sacrifices to keep it at the desirable level, but up to the present she saw that her sacrifices had been quite worth while. Yet they had not been inconsiderable. For the first year of their marriage Edgar and she had hardly been in England at all, but had widened their mental horizon by prolonged foreign travel. They had been through Canada, through Egypt, through Japan, through India, and had spent certain dolorous veeks in the South Sea Islands. Then they had come to London for some six weeks of the season, and had started off again almost immediately afterwards to visit other more rarely-travelled countries. There was nothing haphazard, there was no idea of ​merely passing the time about this; it was the fulfilment of preconceived and thought-out ideas which he had broached to her before marriage. The upshot of them, as she went over it in her mind now, did not really give a fair idea of them, since, taken in bulk, they savoured of too rooted a passion for education. But the various items of this menu had been suggested singly; it was only when they were put together that they became excessive. But to her mind now they formed a sort of soliloquy, delivered in Edgar's smooth voice, to this effect:
"You will like to see Canada, my darling, will you not? So let us go there directly after our marriage. The yacht will meet us at Liverpool, and we will go by the Northern route, where we shall certainly see an iceberg or two. Then we will leave the yacht at Quebec, and travel by the Canadian-Pacific to San Francisco. I am told that American enterprise has already largely repaired the destruction caused by the earthquakes. It will interest me, no less than you, to see the speed with which the most terrific convulsion of Nature is overcome by the industry of man. Think of us! Little pigmies, little ants on a planet, yet whatever Nature destroys is repaired by us in a minute. It is as if you stir up an ants' nest with a stick. How quickly they rebuild!
"Egypt, Lucia! How I long to see the valley of the tombs of the kings with you! What lights you will strike for me! How, with our imaginations helping each other, we will conjure up out of the past the spectre of bygone civilization! I think of my life before I knew you as the vision of the dry bones in Ezekiel. There were facts then, there were cut and plucked ideas then—all dry bones, and I wandered among them. Then you came; bone went to his bone, and already there is standing an army. But I want twenty armies—fifty armies!
"My darling, you don't appreciate Japanese art. I have often noticed that. I shall drag you to Japan; perhaps there I may be of use to you. Give me that chance, Lucia.
"Then for what we neither of us know. Let us see the Southern Islands; see where Stevenson lived, and where he voyaged. Tusitala, the teller of tales. We should both like to see Apia, should we not, and Vailima, and pluck a little of the sensitive plant which he warred against? Oh yes, it will take time; but nothing that is worth doing is waste of time. Two years. Shall we give ourselves two years, more or less, to get what is to be got from other lands, from the contemplation of other peoples? ​And then, my Lucia, we will come back to make our home, not complete—Heaven forbid I should say that!—but open—open, and ready to catch any thistledown of suggestion that floats by, learning, not by hearsay only, but by sight and experience, all that there is of wonder and interest among the other civilizations. And Russia—we must certainly go through Russia on our way back from Japan. And let us end up with Greece, and the Isles of Greece. The yacht can meet us at Constantinople."
To Lucia now this formed one concrete speech. The voice paused, and made one addition.
"And Minorca on the way home," it said. "Chopin, you know. That Polish exile in the blue sea."
Lucia knew that she parodied in her own mind her husband's voice and her husband's ideas. She made it sound priggish to herself, but she knew that she might have projected any part of that programme, or the whole of it, without the slightest taint of priggishness coming in. He loved Chopin, for instance, and what could be more simple and natural than that he should suggest that they should stop at Minorca (or was it Majorca?) on the way home, to see the place where the preludes were written, and where the rain dropped on the iron roof? Yet she framed the sentence he had spoken about it in priggish fashion. She, in her own mind, made him say priggish things even about San Francisco. As a matter of fact, it was she who had suggested the interest of seeing a town spring up mushroom-like again after the catastrophe. He had merely adopted her suggestion, and had—had phrased it. But that made the whole difference.
He phrased things; that was one of the occasional clouds. He could not avoid seeing things in an improving light. If they went to the National Gallery to see the new Velasquez, he would not look at the picture; he would only look at the impression the picture made on him. And all the time it was she, he told her, who had re-created the world anew for him; it was she who had put into words, and therefore into being, his earlier ideals. She was responsible for the realization of what he had dreamed of—that cultured, critical life of the educated and trained taster. He had only vaguely striven after a life that should be less idle, less card-playing, than that of the ambient world. So, while the world went to Goodwood, Lord and Lady Brayton went to Japan; while the world watched horses racing, they rode donkeys to the tomb of the kings; while the world (which was crazy on teetotalism just now) drank barley-water, he and Lucia imbibed knowledge.
​But the two years they had given themselves to learn all that could possibly be learned by foreign travel was over, and only this morning he had spoken to her of the home-life which they would lead in the autumn, between the time when they came down from Scotland and Christmas. They would be at Brixham a great deal, and the house would be constantly full. They would have a dozen big parties at least. And as in those first dear days at Brixham she had opened his eyes to his opportunities which he had no more than dreamed about, so again now she would have to show him the way. They had educated themselves; it was time now to let the world have the privilege of observing two educated people at home, the centre of a cultured, critical circle.
The last sentence was invented parody; he had never said that, but it was, though a parody of other words of his, no parody of the idea that prompted them. Put into words, it was that he meant, and that was another of the occasional clouds. And for this cloud Lucia knew that she was largely responsible. Deliberately and of set purpose, in order to make herself real to him, in order to attract him to her, she had at the beginning of their acquaintance, which had ripened so rapidly, said exactly that sort of thing to him about his life and his opportunities. She had told him what a magnificent rôle he might play—how he might spread culture round him (this was scarcely even a parody of what she had said), and in this idle and pleasure-loving age form a new and wonderful cult for all that was lovely. Her own sentences, in fact, though with the stamp of his personality upon them, were repeated to her. They had inspired him in the first instance, but she did not find them inspiring now. But she had not been altogether insincere when she first found words for his aims; for before that she had imagined for herself a life of brilliance, not brilliant only from the merely worldly point of view, but keen with culture, eager after what was beautiful, quick to perceive. And he had taken her by the hand and said: "Lead me; be my guide to the beautiful life."
Hitherto, in these two years of travel, they had been learning, but somehow, though in it there had been much that was edifying (and, indeed, hardly anything that was not), Lucia had not found anywhere the magic that she had once told him was in Schubert, in a la France rose. Though Egypt, for instance, was most interesting, and though a knowledge of the history of the Pharaohs was undeniably a proper ingredient in that complex affair called ​culture, she felt that neither of them had assimilated the mysterious land of the ancient river. She did not find Egypt—Egypt itself, that is to say, Egypt assimilated—in the neat list of dynasties of which Edgar had made two copies, one of which he pinned up above the washing-stand in her cabin, and the other beside the looking-glass in his, so that he could learn it while shaving; nor was she any nearer attaining it when they said the dynasties to each other at breakfast, nor when they rode across the noon-struck desert to where, on the grey hill-side, Hatasoo (eighteenth dynasty, succeeded by Thothmes III.) had raised the temple of Deir-el-Bahari. Nor did Egypt pass into her blood even when on the deck of their dahabeeah after dinner, with the stars burning large and low down to the horizon, and waking points of wavering reflection in the steel-coloured water of the river, Edgar repeated to her in his precise and even voice Shelley's "Ozymandias' Sonnet." Indeed, one thing only in Egypt, if the truth was known (which it was not to her husband), had made any really vital impression on her. That was when one evening at Cairo they had gone together to a café to see native-dancing. It was a tawdry affair enough in itself: there were a couple of Nubian girls laden with brass necklaces, and blue beads and wisps of staring Manchester-dyed clothing, who performed the dance de ventre to the accompaniment of a couple of drums stretched over half a tortoise-shell, and three or four squealing, tuneless pipes. The floor was sanded, the walls, decked with a few prints better not looked at very closely, and soiled fragments of embroidery, streamed with moisture, and two or three dozen natives, with a stray tourist or so like themselves, squatted on the floor, and watched the dancers with growing excitement. The air was hot and stifling, but somehow genuine: it was heavy with the smell of cheap incense and street-scrapings and cigarettes. They had scarcely been in the place for a minute, for Edgar had taken her arm and led her out again as soon as the style of the entertainment was manifest to him, and had apologized to her afterwards for not finding out about it first, and had spoken severely to their dragoman for letting her ladyship go into such a place. And all the time Lucia had longed to stop; there was nothing shocking in it: it was merely primitive. And it was real, it was human; it was, though not ancient Egypt, modern Egypt, and in that one moment modern Egypt had become more real to her than ancient Egypt had ever been, even though they evoked its spectre with neat dynastic lists, endless ​visits to temples, and the repeating of the most suitable poetry. They both of them had large quantities of its history by heart before they left Port Said again to go eastward, but that assimilation which is necessary before facts can become the food of culture, that kindling of the blood, as with romance, had not occurred. Lucia felt that she had got no more nourishment, mentally speaking, from Egypt than she would have got in a bodily sense by swallowing quantities of Brazil nuts without cracking their shells. Indeed, the simile might be pressed a little further. Instead of receiving nourishment, she was conscious merely of a violent mental indigestion, and the very mention of a temple gave her qualms of nausea. She had digested just that one thing—the grinning Nubian dancing-girls, the heat, the eager faces of the natives, the good, stuffy, sweet smell of living things—hot, southern, living things.
It was the same wherever they went. Lucia, quick to learn and retentive of memory, was a positive encyclopaedia of Indian affairs, of its art, its history, its flora and its fauna, before they touched at Bombay. But there was the assimilation still wanting; the country did not get into her blood, though here again she had a vital moment, when at the close of a day of great heat they saw Delhi smouldering under the dusty crimson sky of sunset.
But Edgar, though she did not believe that he assimilated any more than she did, seemed not to want to assimilate. It was enough for him, apparently, to place in the well-ordered shelves of his mind the volumes of knowledge now profusely illustrated by the memory of the places they had seen. To sit with her at Colonus, and read Mr. Murray's translation of the famous chorus, was sufficient; that appeared to make Colonus his. Or to read the account, in Mr. Grote's history, of the battle of Marathon while seated on the shore of the little bay was to make Marathon his own. He went even further than this. On one day of the sudden Greek spring he repeated to her the stanzas of the first chorus from Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon." That, for a moment, reached her, and when he recited the line, "Blossom by blossom the spring begins," and she saw the thickets and broken ground at the foot of Pentelicus starred with the crimson anemone and feathered with orchids, her emotion was stirred; the line became part of her, and beat in her blood. But Minorca (it turned out to be Minorca) had been a dismal failure as far as she was concerned. He had played her the prelude where the rain drops on the roof, but the piano on the yacht was not in very good tune, ​and she felt no more than she had felt when she played it on Aunt Cathie's piano at Fair View. But this performance, very meritorious in itself, for he played well, had been quite sufficient for him. He had put Chopin into his bag. That was just it; he put everything into a bag, having wrung the neck of each thing first. His bag bulged with dead, genuine specimens. Lucia's bag was nearly empty, but what there was in it was alive, and pulsating with her own blood. The tawdry Nubian dancing-girls were there, the smell of Egypt was there; there was a dusty crimson sunset, a wild thicket at the foot of Pentelicus. And privately she thought that, little as she had really got from this long tour, she had got far more than he. He, if you will, had learned a dozen new languages; the defect was that he had nothing worth saying to say in them, while she had but a few babbling words in the tongues in which he was so glib, but her words meant something; they signified.
There was one cloud more dangerous than all these, which she thought about also. It was no bigger than a man's hand, but it was well above the horizon at the close of their second year of marriage. Sometimes she questioned herself as to whether, if she had gone to all these magical lands, either alone, or with Maud, or even with Aunt Cathie, she would not have had a richer harvesting. And as soon as she asked herself that question, there was no longer any need to ask it, for it was already answered. There was something in Edgar that, for her, killed romance. More than once, on an evening on the Nile, for instance, she had felt the romance of the ancient mysterious land floating like some dim beautiful bird above her, drawing nearer to her in the dusk. Then Edgar, with an apt quotation, or a few remarks about Amen-hotep, had shot it quite dead, so that not a single heart's beat was left in it, when it fell, a bundle of bones, at her feet. He, satisfied both with his fresh addition to the bag, and also with Lucia's lip-appreciation, so to speak, of his marksmanship, remained completely unconscious of his fatal aim, but Lucia already wondered what would happen when that man's-hand-cloud cast a shadow over him also, when he saw that he, who should have been for her incarnate romance, was the agent who, not in Egypt only, or in Greece, but wherever the two were together, unintentionally and unerringly destroyed all romance for Lucia.
Probably he would never know that; Lucia felt that it would be a supreme stupidity on her part if she let him.
​But in spite of these clouds she was extraordinarily content. She had not asked life to give her romance, but success, and that, as far as she had gone, it lavished on her. She had, from the social points of view, that most brilliant gift of all—namely, the faculty of enjoying herself, compared to which wit and mere cleverness is but as the copper change of a new sovereign. From the first moment of her appearance in town as Edgar's fiancée, the whole world saw that she had that splendid birthright; wherever she went, whatever she did, she brought with her the splendour of her pleasure, the invigoration of her superb spirits. Even in the scarcely detached limits of Fair View, it has been seen how, when she took herself in hand and determined to make the best of her cabined circumstances, she so quickened the lives of her aunts that the one learned French and the other a new patience; and now, when every door was open to her, and everything that money and youth and health can offer were waiting her pleasure, it was little wonder that the outpouring flood of her delight was irresistible. In the first few weeks that she had spent in town a year ago, she, knowing that she was new to the game of enjoying yourself as much as you possibly can, had watched with attention and perception what people who were successful at it did and did not do—what were the rules, in fact—and it took her a very short time to perceive that there were no rules at all that she was in the least likely to transgress. A man might not wear his hair long (unless a pianist) or cheat at cards; a woman—there really was nothing she might not do, except be brought into the divorce court. Apart from these things the only road to success and popularity was to enjoy yourself. Plenty of people get on excellently by pretending to enjoy themselves; Lucia in this, at any rate, was genuine—she was in love with life.
This sketched analysis must be taken as the dissection of her consciousness of her attitude towards external things as she stood looking at the backs of the vellum edition of the Kelmscott Press; and from it, it will be seen that the last two years had altered her very little, but it seemed as if she had lived a dim, subaqueous existence until the time of her marriage, like the chrysalis of some water-breeding fly. Then the moment had come; she had floated up to the sunlit surface, had crawled out from her confining sheath, and had spread gauzy, iridescent wings to the summer air. Not that she ever floated aimlessly about; it was no brainless life that she so strenuously enjoyed, ​with nothing but a waltz tune singing in her head, and nothing but her own replete engagement book to read. She enjoyed with her brain as well as her body, looking not only with her eyes on the kaleidoscope of life, but interested, almost absorbed, in the instincts and impulses that made it move and glitter. She read much, she studied drama and music, she loved the rapier-flash of argument and criticism, and if she lay awake at night, it was not with the memory of a waltz, but with the excitement of some well-played scene in a play, or the relentless tragedy of the dusk of the Gods. But as a matter of fact, she lay awake very seldom.
Lucia, after an interval of a year, had been in London only a fortnight, and that fortnight had been very busy. In fact, but for a hand-press and a smile of genuine pleasure at a dance, she had not yet seen Maud. That was nearly a week ago, but on that occasion she had urged Maud to come to lunch any day, since she made a rule always to be in at lunch. But no sign had come from Maud till this morning, when, over the telephone, she proposed coming in to see Lucia about five, if she would naturally be in then, and they could have a talk together. Lucia had been just a little piqued by Maud's apparent indifference to the fact that she could come and have lunch any day; of old she felt that Maud would probably have appeared not only any, but every day; indeed, before coming to London this year, Lucia had hoped that, though it would be delightful to see her old friend again, Maud would understand that one's time was really not one's own, and that the old long talks, prolonged into the night, and the mornings spent together, were out of Lucia's power now. She did not mean to drop Maud at all—nothing was further from her thoughts; but in these weeks of whirl and rush, one's duties had to come first, one's pleasures afterwards.
But she awaited Maud's arrival to-day with eagerness; indeed, she did not like to think that they had been in the same town for two weeks and had only once set eyes on each other. She felt inclined to blame her friend a little for this; Maud could not possibly have nearly as much to do as she, and yet she had never once come near her. Yet, after all, perhaps it was not her fault: everybody was up to the eyes in June; June was a close time for friends. You only saw a million acquaintances. But when London was over, she would insist on Maud's coming with them on the yacht, or spending a fortnight at least with them in Scotland. Real friendships, so Lucia considered, must ​not be lightly broken. She herself had not changed at all towards Maud; she was quite as willing as ever to be adored. But even now, when Maud had made this appointment for five, she was late. The goddess was waiting; why "lagged the tardy worshipper"?
Lucia never wasted time on regrets, and now she began making out the arrangement of the table for her little party this evening, while she waited for her friend. It was going to be quite small, but she proposed to enjoy it very much; and in asking her guests, she had told them all that nobody must go on to dances or music afterwards till half-past eleven at the earliest, since she wanted a talk with everybody. But the table could not be completely arranged, since Edgar had gone out to seek a man instead of letting her order one by telephone. She could not tell who he might be; he might be important, or he might not. But, after all, it was going to be a perfectly informal evening, so whoever he was, he must sit on her left and take in Fay Alderson, who was amusing enough for anybody. That was the best way to settle it, and——
Ah, Maud at last! Lucia got up, feeling very cordial, and putting an added touch of eagerness to her manner to show that she was not hurt by Maud's neglect of her.
"Ah, you darling," she said, "how delightful to see you! Here am I, quite, quite alone, according to your orders, with all my engagements until dinner ruthlessly cancelled, so that we might be alone and have a real, real talk. I am at home to nobody, Rackson, whoever it is. No, don't sit down at once, dear; I want to have a good look at you first. Maud, I almost wish I had sore eyes: they would be quite well again now. There now, you may sit down: you haven't changed a bit in this last year. You are absolutely my own Maud."
Lucia almost felt all she said. Maud was such a satisfactory person; she was so genuine, so sterling, you could completely rely on her. She, on her side, too, was delighted to see Lucia, and the old glamour and charm asserted themselves at once. But she was a little embarrassed, and had not the gift, like Lucia, of working the embarrassment out of her system by voluble but slightly exaggerated speech. The exaggeration was only slight, but it was there, and consisted in the fact that in the matter of friendship Lucia took the part to-day rather of the wooer than the wooed, knowing that she reversed their positions. Maud took refuge in sincerity instead.
​"It is dreadful that I haven't set eyes on you all these weeks," she said, "for I don't count meeting you at a ball as setting eyes on you. One never truly meets a friend at a ball; people don't go to balls, they only send their society-wraiths there."
There was a neatness of phrase about this that surprised Lucia. Maud was not apt in speech; she was reticent, and found expression difficult, and this little bit of social criticism was astonishingly trenchant. Lucia loved all that was clean-cut.
"Ah, that is quite brilliant," she said. "I have long wanted to know what gave the air of unreality to all parties. You have absolutely defined it; there is nobody there; it is only the society-wraiths of people one knows that crowd the room. Yet is there nobody who is genuine all the time? I should have thought that you were. To have moods doesn't mean that you are not genuine, for moods are not poses. Though one is all sorts of different people, they are all oneself. But don't let us talk about abstract questions yet. I want to know all your year's history; I want you to know mine. Let us talk about ourselves entirely for half an hour."
Maud smiled at her with that old sweetness and serenity that Lucia knew so well, and at this moment somehow envied. Three years ago Maud had been the fairy godmother who gave Lucia London treats, and though the positions were reversed, for Lucia quite meant to give her old friend treats now, she wondered if it was really possible to do anything for one who was so evidently happy. That word came to Maud's lips, too.
"Of course, I want to know everything in detail," she said, "but it is all summed up in a word. I do hope you are quite happy, Lucia."
Suddenly Lucia thought she was not, if she compared herself to Maud. She had certain clouds, after all; Maud looked as if she had none. She enjoyed herself quite enormously, and never till this moment had she wondered whether that was the same as happiness. For the present, in any case, she assumed that it was.
"Happy? Yes, brilliantly happy," she said. "It has all been the most wonderful success, and I am sure Edgar is happy, too. We both want still; that is such a good thing, for I think that happiness really ends when you have all you wish for. That must be so dull."
​Maud thought she could only be speaking of one thing—namely, her childlessness.
"Ah yes, of course, dear, I understand," she said. "But when you have one child, which pray God you may, you will want another. And then you will want to see them grow up."
Lucia had not been thinking of this at all; all that was in her mind was the little clouds that have been spoken of. But she picked up her cue instantaneously.
"Yes, of course, there is that big want," she said; "but even apart from that it is nice to know that the little wants are not dimmed or diminished. Oh, Maud, delightful as all our wanderings have been, it is nice to settle down. I want—oh, I want to squeeze every ounce out of life. I want everything, all the arts, all the witty and beautiful things of the world, to yield their uttermost. And the amazing and glorious thing is that they never can. Even while you suck one orange another is ripening. Worldly? I don't think it is worldly. It is to make the best possible out of this world, to use all that is given us."
Maud laughed.
"Anyhow, you haven't changed in the least," she said. "You are still quite deliciously rapacious."
Here again was neat phrasing. Lucia just noted it, but her egotism for the time was in excelsis, and she went on.
"That is what dear Edgar does not quite understand," she said. "He is not insatiable as I am. He does not want all there is. I told him so the other night, and it rather puzzled him. I want him to get me the Pleiades to wear in my hair; I want to wear the moon as a pendant round my neck; I want Saturn and Jupiter to shine in my girdle; I want Venus. But I was out of breath, and so I told him I would be Venus myself. And there is so little time; the years pass so quickly; since I married two have already gone, and I haven't begun. I know I have all the time there is, but they ought to have made much more. The days became weeks, and the weeks months, and there are only twelve months in a year, and even if I live to be eighty I have only fifty-seven years more. And by then I shall be old and ugly, and probably deaf, but I hope not dumb, and all the sap will have run out of my life, and I shall be raddled in the face and rheumatic in the joints. Oh, it's damnable! Have some more tea."
Lucia laughed, then stopped abruptly.
"I don't know why I laugh," she said. "It is all serious ​enough, and most depressingly true. I am made that way, and it's not my fault, and it's no use blaming me. You might as well blame a colt because it isn't a cow. Thank goodness I'm not a cow. There are only two sorts of people: colts and cows. The cows are the good ones, who are quite content, and give quantities of warm, white milk to other people. The rest are colts; they want to kick up their heels and snuff the morning air and neigh, and then run as hard as they possibly can because they have such beautiful limbs. Already, you know, to do me justice, I have run a good long way. Three years ago I was in that awful little Fair View, with the railway embankment behind, and that was all I had, living with two perfectly delightful old aunts, it is true. But to live with aunts wasn't much for a girl who even then wanted the heavenly constellations to stick into her bodice. And the horizon was bounded—except when you were a darling, and gave me a heavenly week in town—by the roofs of the Laburnums and the Hollies and the Pomegranates. How I stifled! It seems to me perfectly incredible that it was me—this me—who used to talk French with one sloppy girl, and play duets with another, while Aunt Cathie beat time. And those were the comparatively palmy days."
Lucia paused a moment; the hour of sincerity was hers; she spoke that which she was.
"Before that," she said—"before that I lived in Brixham, and there was, so I thought, nothing whatever there of any sort or kind. There was, really. There were all the materials of what I have called the palmy days, but for a year or two I lived there—this identical, actual I—without seeing anything that broke the endless grey monotony of my days, or any way of escape. And what pleasant memories and associations were mine! A home broken up, a father dying in disgrace. Maud, it is awful to confess it, but all that really went on in my emotions concerning him was something very like hate. Otherwise I had no emotions except always the frantic sense of wanting, and the utter incapability of ever getting. I held Aunt Elizabeth's skeins of brown wool—oh, everything was brown—and she made head-rests of them, because antimacassars was a vulgar word. I know it was quite suitable, really; she had an antimacassar mind, and warded life off. Yes, that's what she did, she warded life off—shut the windows and drew the curtains so that by no chance could it ever come in. Then she sat down and played Miss Milligan. After which, Miss M. being shy, and not wishing to ​come out, we all kissed each other and went to bed, to prepare ourselves for the duties and fatigues of the next intolerable day."
Lucia drew down the corners of her mouth, making what she called "archdeacon face."
"Not that we hadn't our times of delirious excitement," she said, "which gave us headaches. There were the garden-parties. The Bishop came once, and the garden, being exactly eight feet by ten (I used to play lawn-tennis in it with Aunt Cathie, who wore sand-shoes), and there being nine people present as well as a tea-table, it was quite a crush. The Bishop drank three cups of tea, and said the flower-bed was a blaze of colour. He preached next Sunday about the gardens of our souls, which made us feel public characters. Aunt Elizabeth almost deprecated such publicity. Everybody knew he had called the flower-bed a blaze of colour."
Lucia suddenly became quite serious.
"Oh, Maud, I could cry to think of the wasted years! What wouldn't I give for just the time I spent there, or the time that Aunt Elizabeth is spending now! She doesn't care for it. She gets no enjoyment from it, any more than she gets from the best silver teapot which was presented to my grandfather the Dean, and is never taken out of its tissue-paper. It's not fair. I grudge people having things they don't use and don't enjoy, when I could use them so beautifully. They ought to be mine—they really ought."
Lucia had not changed in the least; Maud felt that more strongly than ever at the end of this brilliant piece of egotism, but she had certainly developed. Whether that development was satisfactory or not, Maud did not, for the present, inquire. The charm of Lucia's vitality held her again; it was mental champagne to be with anyone who felt so keenly, who desired so greatly.
She laughed.
"Then would you propose to kill everyone who was not enjoying himself," she asked, "and put the years he would otherwise have lived to your credit balance?"
Lucia's eyes lit up.
"Ah, if it could be done!" she said. "Surely it would be an admirable arrangement. It would be a true kindness to put them out of their boredom, just as you put suffering animals out of their pain. Can't we manage it? Edgar shall bring in a Bill for the extinction of the bored in the House of Lords. It ​won't be a party measure. Besides, being bored is one of the worst social crimes; it is an infectious disease, too. You catch it, if it is about, unless you are very strong. Ah! I should take away from everybody not only the time they don't enjoy, but the things they don't enjoy. Somebody would be the happier, I shouldn't wonder, for Aunt Elizabeth's teapot. Certainly, he ought to have it, then."
"Leave me something," said Maud.
"Yes, dear; you shall be left all you have got, and shall have heaps of things besides. You look tremendously happy. I hope you have been getting all sorts of nice things."
"I have been. And I'm going to get the nicest of all."
"Maud! Tell me at once! Why haven't you told me?"
"You really haven't given me an opportunity," remarked Maud.
"I give you one instantly. I will never open my lips again. I guess, of course, you are going to be married. How very nice! Women never begin to count until they are married. Quick! Who is it?"
"Charlie Lindsay. He is a cousin of Lord Brayton's. But I don't think you know him, though I think you met him once at Brayton."
"And why didn't you tell me before?"
"Because he didn't tell me before. He only told me yesterday. Nobody knows yet, except you. I had to tell you at once, Lucia, because——"
Maud paused a moment; words were always difficult to her when she felt deeply.
"Because I knew you must often have wondered, dear, whether you had come between me and my happiness. I was such a little brute to you down at Littlestone, when I didn't instantly congratulate you when you told me you were engaged. I know you must often have causelessly reproached yourself. So I had to tell you at once."
Lucia came and knelt down by her friend.
"You darling!" she said. "It is sweet to be believed in like that. Maud, you are the best friend a woman ever had. Now——"
Lucia, contrary to custom, found it hard to proceed.
"Now perhaps you will think me utterly heartless," she said, "but I will confess. I didn't reproach myself. It was inevitable; I couldn't help it. You can't help love, can you? You ​said so to me immediately immediately afterwards. Now I want to ask such heaps of intimate questions."
"You needn't ask the intimate questions," said Maud. "I can give you the intimate answers. I don't think my first—you know—was—was much. It wasn't like this, anyhow. There is nobody else but Charlie. That, frankly, was why I haven't been to see you these two or three weeks. Wasn't it horrible of me? I simply didn't want you."
"And now?" demanded Lucia.
"I am so happy that I want everybody, and you most of all. So I came."
"And you've allowed me to run on about my little wee concerns, while you were bottling this up?" said Lucia. "How could you?"
Maud smiled deep down in her brown eyes.
"Oh, it was such fun," she said. "When you were small, didn't you ever put an arm out of bed on a cold night, to have the joy of putting it back again? I kept myself in the cold just like that, hugging myself to think how nice and warm it would be when I told you. Oh, Lucia, I am so happy—so utterly happy!"
And once again Lucia wondered whether, compared to this, she was happy. This time she knew she was not. And she felt herself envious of her friend's bliss; she wanted it herself.