She made no sign. She sat erect, listening to the conclusion of that matter, clapped in due course, stood, kneeled, rose again, as applause, hymns and prayers buzzed about her, filed with her cla.s.s from the hall and added her shy word to the clamour of congratulation in the long corridors. Inwardly, she was stunned by the evil that was upon her.

The irregular morning cla.s.ses (the imminent entertainment had disorganised the entire system of work) gave her time to rouse, to review her position.

She turned helplessly within herself, wondering how she should begin to think--and where. She wondered idly if this was how soldiers felt, when a sh.e.l.l had blown them to pieces? She wondered how they collected themselves afterwards? Where did they begin? Did an arm pick up the legs and head, or how?

The picture thus conjured up struck her as excessively funny. She began to giggle. The mistress's astonished voice roused her to the necessity for self-control. She picked up her pen. The thoughts flowed more clearly--yes, like ink in a pen.

So it had come.

All along she had known that she must have failed: known it from the day of the examination itself. The burden of that knowledge had been upon her for weeks like a secret guilt. Daily she had gone to prayers in cold fear, thinking: "Now--now--now--they will read it out." Daily she had studied Clare's face, to each change of expression, each abstraction or transient sternness, her heart beating out its one thought: "She had heard! she knows!" And yet behind her academic certainty of failure had lain a little illogical hope. There was just a chance--an examiner more kind than just ... a spilled ink-bottle ... an opportune fire. The child in her could still pray for miracles, for help from fairyland, and half believe it on the way.

And now the daily terrors, the daily reliefs, were alike over. Louise, who had learned, as she thought, to do without hope these many weeks, realised pitifully her self-deception. This hopelessness, this dead weight of certainty, was a new burden--a Sisyphus rock which would never roll for her. She was at the end.

Her mind, for all its forced and hot-house development, had, in matters of raw fact, the narrow outlook of the schoolgirl, superimposed upon the pa.s.sions, the more intense for their utter innocence, of the child.

Her sense of proportion, that latest developed and most infallible sign of maturity, was embryonic. The examination, so intrinsically unimportant, appeared to her a Waterloo. She could not see beyond it.

Clare, inexplicably altering, daily sterner and more indifferent, save for stray gleams of whimsical kindness, that stung and maddened the child by their sweetness and rarity, would, Louise considered, be effectually alienated. But Louise could not conceive life possible without Clare. The future was a night of black misery, without a hint of dawn.

CHAPTER XX

The morning wore to an end. Clare had come in at the mid-morning break to announce that the dress rehearsal would take place on the afternoon of the following day. All costumes were to be ready. The day-girls were to lunch at the school. She was brief and businesslike, inaccessible to questions. She did not look at Louise.

Alwynne, later in the morning, supplementing her instructions, paused a moment at the child's desk. But Louise gave no sign. Alwynne hesitated.

She herself was averse from verbal sympathy. Also she was pressed for time, and Clare, she knew, wanted her. The one o'clock bell shattered her indecision. She gave her directions and hurried away.

Louise packed her books together and went home.

She endured the cheerful noisy lunch; carried out some small commissions for her step-mother; shepherded the troop of small boys into the paddock behind the garden and saw them established at their games. She stayed a moment with the round two-year-old, sprawling by the pile of coats, but he, too, had his amus.e.m.e.nts. Every pocket tempted his enquiring fingers.

He ignored her.

She went back to the house. Habit brought her for the fiftieth time to the attic, and she had opened the door before she remembered. She looked about her. An iron bedstead, covered by a crude quilt, stood where the trunk of books had lain. A square of unswept carpet lay before it. There was a deal night-table and a candlestick of blue tin, with matches and a guttered candle. Across a chair lay a paper-back, face downwards, and a pair of soiled red corsets. The ivy had been cut away from the window, and the sunlight cast no fantastic frieze, but a squared, black shadow on the floor. The air was close, and a little rank. Louise shrank from it.

"Mother?" she said; and then: "You've gone away, haven't you? It's no use calling?"

She waited. The uneven water-jug rattled in its basin.

She spoke again--

"Mother, I know it's all spoiled here, but couldn't you come? Just for a little while, Mother? I'm most miserable. Please, Mother?"

There was no answer.

"What shall I do?" cried Louise wildly. "What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?"

She turned from that empty place, stumbled to her room, and flung herself across her bed. She was shaken by her misery, as a dog shakes a rat. She cried, her head on her arms, till she was sick and blinded.

Loneliness and longing seared her as with irons.

The clock ticked, and the sunshine poured into the room. The shouts of the children, the crack of the ball on bat sounded faintly. The house slept. Two hours pa.s.sed.

Somewhere a clock chimed and boomed. Four o'clock.

Slowly and stiffly Louise roused herself and got off her bed. She was cramped and shivering. She stood in the middle of the room and held out her hands to the bra.s.sy sunlight, but it did not warm her. She felt dazed and giddy; her head burned as if there were live coals in it. Her thoughts flowed sluggishly; she found it impossible to hurry them; they split apart into fragments that were words and meaningless phrases, or stuck like cogged wheels. Her mind moved across immense s.p.a.ces to adjust these difficulties, but she policed them in vain. There was one sentence, in particular, that she could not deal with. It would not move along and make room for other thoughts. It danced before her; its grin spanned the horizon; it inhabited her mind; it was reversible like a Liberty satin; it ticked like a clock: "What next? What next? What next?

Next what? Next what? Next what?"

What next?... Dully she reckoned it up. The tea-bell--homework--bedtime.

Night--and the false dreams. Morning--and the anger of Miss Hartill. Day and week and month--and the anger of Miss Hartill. The years stretched out before her in infinite repet.i.tion of the afternoon's agony, till her raw nerves shrank appalled. Kneeling down, she told G.o.d that it was impossible for her to endure this desolation. She implored Him, if He should in truth exist, not to reckon her doubt against her, but to be merciful and let her die. It was not the first time that she had prayed thus, but never before with such fierce insistence. If He existed He could impossibly refuse....

Speaking her thoughts, even to so indefinite a Listener, steadied her. A ghost of hope had drifted through her mind. A ghost indeed; a messenger that whispered not of waking but of sleep, not of arduous renewing but of an end. Death was life upon his lips and life, death; yet he was none the less a hope.

The familiar text upon the wall above her bed caught her eye. The message seemed no more miraculous than the pansies and mistletoe that wreathed about its gilt and crimson capitals. "G.o.d is our Refuge and Strength, a very present Help in Trouble." "Ask and it shall be given unto you" confirmed her from the other wall.

She sat between those tremendous statements and considered them.

G.o.d had never yet answered any prayer of hers.... Not, she supposed, that He could not, but because He did not choose.... He was rather like Miss Hartill.... But Miss Hartill would never understand.... At least one could explain things to G.o.d--if G.o.d were.... And she asked so little of Him--just to let her die and be at peace.... She thought He might--if He had even time for sparrows.... She wondered how He would manage it!

If He would only be quick--because red-hot wires ran through her head when she tried to think, and she was afraid--afraid--afraid--of to-morrow and Miss Hartill....

The tea-bell pealed across the garden.

She tidied her hair, and fetching the sponge and towel stood before the gla.s.s, trying to trim her marred face into some semblance of composure.

The boys would be clamouring--and one never knew.... There might be tainted food--a loose bal.u.s.ter--a tag of carpet.... He had his ways....

She must not baulk Him....

She went downstairs.

The children were tired and cross and quarrelsome--the heat had soured even cheerful Mrs. Denny. It was not a pleasant meal. But it could not oppress Louise. Outwardly docile and attentive, her mind had withdrawn into itself and sat aloof, inviolate, surveying its surroundings much as it would have watched the actors in a moving picture. She was impervious to bickerings and querulous comment. What did it matter? She would never have tea with them again.... She was going away from it all.... If only G.o.d did not forget....

All through the breathless evening she awaited His pleasure.

Long after the house was quiet, and Mrs. Denny tucking up her children, had come and gone, Louise lay wakeful--still waiting.

It was an airless night. Every other moment the little unaccountable noises of a sleeping building broke the warm silence. Shadows scurried across the counterpane and over her face like ghostly mice, as the trees outside her window bent and nodded to a radiant moon.

She was weary to the point of exhaustion. Momently her body seemed to shrink away from her into the depths of the bed--warm, fathomless depths--leaving her essential self to float free and uncontained. She would resign herself luxuriously to the sensation of disintegration, but with maddening regularity her next breath clicked body and soul together anew. Yet, as she drowsed, the s.p.a.ce between breath and breath lengthened slowly, till they lay divided by incredible aeons in which her thoughts wandered and lost themselves, grew h.o.a.r and died and were born again; while the dead-weight of her body sank ever deeper into sleep, was recalled to consciousness with ever increasing effort.

She speculated languidly upon her sensations. They recalled a day at the dentist's, years before. A tube had been placed over her mouth and she had struggled, remembering a hideous story of a woman--a French marquise--that she had read in a magazine. The name began with a "B" or a "V." "Brin--" something. The Funnel--_The Leather Funnel_--that was the name of the story.... But there came no choking water--only sweet, buzzing air.... And then her body had dropped away from her, as it was doing now.... She recalled the sensation of rest and freedom; she had pa.s.sed, like a bird planing down warm breezes, into exquisite oblivion.... She had returned, centuries later, to a dull aching pain, harsh noises, and lights that were like blows.... But if she had not returned? She would have been dead.... They would have buried her....

Such things had happened.... So that was death--that cradling, beautiful sleep. And G.o.d was sending it to her now; flooding her, drowning her in its warm comfort.... G.o.d was very good.... She was sorry--sorry that she had often not believed in Him.... But Miss Hartill didn't.... But she would never see Miss Hartill any more.... Perhaps, years after, when she was tired of sleeping, she would go back and see her again.... There was All Souls' Night, when you woke up.... But she would not frighten Miss Hartill.... She laughed a little, to think that she could ever frighten Miss Hartill.... She would just kiss her, a little ghost's kiss that would feel like a puff of air ... and then she would go back and sleep and sleep and sleep ... with only the yew-berries pattering on to her gravestone to tell her when another year had drifted past.... It was funny that people could be afraid to die.... She wondered if ghosts snored, and if you heard them, if your grave were very close? It was her last thought as she slid into slumber.

Instantly the breakfast gong came crashing across her peace. She fought against waking. Her eyelids lifted the weight upon them as violets press upwards against a clod of rotten leaves. She lay dazedly, her mind cobwebbed with dreams, her thoughts trickling back into the channels of the previous night. Slowly she took in her situation. There was the window, and a shining day without: she could hear the starlings quarrelling on the lawn, and the squeak of an angry robin.... There was her room, and the tidy pile of clothes by the bed ... the bed, and she herself lying in it.... So she was not dead! There was to-day to be faced, and Miss Hartill's anger, and all the other hundreds and thousands of days....

And she must get up at once.

Her sick mind shrank from that, as from a culminating terror. She was desperately tired; her body ached as if it had been beaten. Dressing was a monstrous and impossible feat.... It could not be.... Yet her step-mother would come--she was between G.o.d and Mrs. Denny--and G.o.d had left her in the lurch.

She lay shielding her eyes from the strong light.