For one second Marion covered her face with her hands.

Unseeingly he piped on: "I'm happy now. Always happy." He broke into thin, causeless laughter. "When I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn't ever been born as I wasn't any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel lovely and warm. And I've got earthly happiness as well. I've got Poppy.

Oh, I'm a lucky man, lucky man! And I've got a lifework instead of being an odd-come-short. I'll always have something to do now. They've had experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into soldiers for Jesus. Surely they'll be able to find some work for me, even if they don't want me to preach. Look at what I'm going to do now.

Even if I don't do anything but clerk work, it's helping the Labour Colony along--helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living under Bible influence when, if they weren't, there they'd be, roaming about the streets hungry and in sin. I'll be doing my bit, won't I, mother?"

She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.

Ellen felt contemptuous. She had read about those Hallelujah Army Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions. The very consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter (which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard talk of revolution. She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that made this world as unsightly as himself. And it was like him to talk about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of things that weren't true. The spectacle of this mean little intelligence refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingrat.i.tude to the great and wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society. She leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone: "But you must know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the fringe of the problem. There's no way of settling the question of unemployment until the capitalist system's overturned."

He looked at her with wide eyes and a.s.sumed an air of being engaged in desperate conflict. It was evident that his egotism was transforming this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon. "Ah! You're a Socialist. They only think of giving people money. But it isn't money people need. Oh, no. 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' It's Jesus they need. Give them the Bible and all their wants will be satisfied," he cried in a shrill peewit cry.

"But the Bible isn't final. There's lots of things we know more about than the people who wrote it. Look at all yon nonsense they put in about Adam and Eve because they didn't know about evolution. That alone shows it's absurd to rely solely on the Bible...."

She looked round for signs of the others' approval. She knew that Richard agreed with her, for among his Christmas presents to her had been Huxley's Essays, and when he had talked to her of science she had seen that research after that truth was to him a shining mystic way which he would have declared led to G.o.d had he not been more reverent than Church men are, and feared to use that name lest it were not sacred enough for the ultimate sacredness. But to her amazement he kept his eyes on the crumbs which he was picking up from the tablecloth, and through his parted lips there sounded the faintest click of exasperation. She looked in wonder at Marion, and found her eyes also downcast and her forefinger tapping on her chin as if she were seeking for some expedient to stop this dangerous chatter. Ellen despised them both. They had been terribly exercised at the thought that Roger was going to preach in the streets, but they did not care at all that he was delivered over to error. She looked at him sympathetically over the table, feeling that since these horrid people with whom she had got entangled did not like him, he might be quite nice, and found him exchanging a long, peculiar glance with Poppy, which was followed on both sides by a slow, meaning nod.

He looked in front of him again and his round eyes vacillated between Richard and Ellen, growing rounder at each roll. Presently he swallowed a lump in his throat and addressed himself to her. "Ah, you're an unbeliever," he said. "Well, Captain Sampson says there's always a reason for it if people can't believe." He moistened his lips and panted the words out at her. "If you've been doing anything that's wrong--"

A sob prevented him. "Oh, I can't go and spoil this lovely tea, even if I ought to for Jesus' sake!" he cried. "We're all so happy, I can't bear to break it up by telling you what it's my duty to do! Poppy, doesn't mother have everything nice? I've often thought of this tea-table when I've been eating at places where they did things, roughish. Look at the flowers. Mother always has flowers on the table, even when it's winter.

Jesus wouldn't expect me to break this up." His face became transfused with light. "I believe Jesus loves everything that's done nicely, whether it's a good deed or bread-and-b.u.t.ter cut nice and thin. That's why," he mourned, so wistfully that all of them save the impa.s.sive woman in uniform made a kind, friendly bending towards him, "I mind not to be able to do anything really well. But Jesus loves me all the same. He loves me whatever I'm like!" His brow clouded. "But because He loves me I owe Him a debt. I ought to preach Him wherever I am, in and out of season. But I can't spoil this. Aren't we all happy, sitting here? I'll tell you what. They've asked me to take the Sat.u.r.day evening service to-night because the Commandant and the two under him are all down with influenza. If you'll come and hear me I'll tell you what Jesus wants you to hear. Oh, mother, Richard, do, do come!"

"Yes, Roger dear, we'll come."

"You won't ... make fun of it?"

"Oh no! Oh no!" Her voice was hesitant, intimate, girlishly shy. "We haven't seen nearly as much of each other as a mother and son ought.

There are lots of things about me you don't know. For all you know, what you said of Richard a moment ago ... might be true of me...."

"What I said about Richard?..."

"About times when one feels life too difficult and wants Someone to help one...."

She spoke seductively, mysteriously, as if she were promising him a pleasure; and he answered in a voluptuous whining: "Oh, mother, if I could bring you to Jesus! Oh, Jesus! you are giving me everything I want!" But in the midst of his rapture his face changed and he started to his feet, so violently that his chair nearly fell backwards. "Yes,"

he cried reproachfully, "Jesus gives me everything, and this is how I reward Him!"

They all stared at him, except Poppy, who was gloomily reading the tea-leaves in her cup.

"I told a lie!" he answered their common mute enquiry.

"A silly, vain lie. I told you they'd asked me to take the Sat.u.r.day evening service to-night. They didn't. I offered to take it. n.o.body ever asks me to preach. They say I can't. Mind you, I don't think they're right. I think that if they would let me practise I wouldn't speak so badly. But that's not the point. I told a lie. I distinctly said they'd asked me to preach because I wanted to pretend that I was making a success of things like Richard always does. Oh, what a thing to do to Jesus!"

"But, dear, that was only because you were speaking in a hurry. It wasn't a deliberate lie."

"Oh, mother, you don't understand," he fairly squealed. "You haven't been saved, you see, and you're still lax about these things. It does matter! It was a lie! I ought to wrestle this thing out on my knees.

Mother, will it put anybody out if I go into the parlour and pray?"

Marion answered tenderly: "My dear, of course you can," but Poppy clicked down her cup into its saucer and said in a tone of sluggish, considered exasperation: "You haven't time. We ought to be at the chapel half an hour before the meeting. It's a quarter to six now."

"Oh dear! oh dear! Is it as late as that? I wanted to write on a piece of paper what I'm going to say! Now I won't have time! Oh, and I did want to preach well! Oh, where's my cap?" He began to stumble about the room.

Presently he caught his foot in one of the electric light cords and set an alabaster lamp on the mantelpiece rocking on its pedestal. Richard and Marion watched him and it with that set, horrified stare which the antic.i.p.ation of disorder always provoked in them. "Tcha!" exclaimed Poppy contemptuously. "But it's there! On the armchair!" cried Ellen: she could not bear the look on Richard's and Marion's faces. "Where?"

asked Poppy. It was the first time she had spoken directly to Ellen.

"There! There! Among the cushions," she answered, and rose and went round the table to pick it up herself. Richard came and helped her.

Roger seemed a little annoyed when Richard and Ellen found the cap for him among the cushions. Having to thank them spoiled, it could be seen, some valedictory effect which he had planned. He stood by while they shook hands with Poppy, who turned her head away as if to hide some scar, and when she had gone across to Marion tried to get in his designed tremendousness. By the working of his face, which made even his ears move a little, they knew they must endure something very characteristic of him. But into his weak eyes there bubbled a spring of joyful tenderness so bright, so clear, so intense that, though it would have seemed more fitting on the face of a child than of a man, it yet was dignified.

"You make a handsome couple, you two!" he said.

"Richard, you're a whole lot taller than me. When I'm away from you I forget what a difference there is between us. And the young lady, she's fine, too."

"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.

He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well, good-bye, mother."

"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out myself, my dears."

Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door: Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger, which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all, the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark.

But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body, and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to their own lives.

When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps save the candlesticks on the table. She pa.s.sed through the amber, fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have known that Ellen had been sitting there too.

Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words.

Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."

"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the cla.s.sic Edinburgh formula.

"But you must have an eclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appet.i.te which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be, little, sweet, and moderate.

Marion brought her an eclair on a plate. She took it and stood up, asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."

"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable--this tall man who could a.s.sail all things with his outstretched strength, this broad-bodied woman whom nothing could a.s.sail because of her crouching strength.

Marion stretched out her hand to the fire. Her insanely polished nails glittered like jewels.

She said in that indifferent tone: "Well, it wasn't so bad."

Some pa.s.sion shook him. "Mother! Mother! To think of him bringing that woman into this house--to meet you and Ellen!"

"Hush, oh hush! He does not know."

"But, mother! He ought to! Anyone could see--"

"What she was. Yes, poor woman. But remember I made a bad job of Roger.

I gave him no brains."

"Mother--it mustn't happen again. She can't come here again."

She grew stern. "Richard, you must say nothing to Roger. Nor to her.

She's his love and pride. So far as he's concerned, she's a better woman than I am. I never put my love and pride in his life. If you speak to either of them you will ... add to my already heavy guilt. Besides ...