Marty. They wear them because they’re in the fashion. When they really think, it’s of how to remove an incipient moustache. Oh, they’re not all like that, thank God, but that little lot mostly are. I want them to know you − what you’re like. To understand that there are qualities of mind that make common labour grace and not disgrace the purest intellectual ardour.’
‘But I’m not intellectual.’
She did not know what she was, never having analysed herself; and the disclaimer was not coquetry but disbelief.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘you’re an Intelligence − a Phantom Intelligence.’
She let the accusation pass, not knowing how to refute it; and followed her own thought.
‘But Miss Warrender, she’s not − she’s −’
‘Oh, she’s different, of course. Talks well, doesn’t she? Tremendously well-read. Get Miss Warrender talking and you’re sure to learn something you didn’t know. A perfect pit of knowledge.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have classed her with these others − should you, Luke? The ones that just wear what they know.’
Martha spoke slowly, pondering the question, which evidently exercised her.
‘I am rebuked, gentle guardian.’ Martha shrank. Luke in obeisance before her was troubling. If she were sure that he was only bantering − ! She guessed too that he was aware of her trouble. ‘Of course I shouldn’t. Not so very different either, though. Her knowledge is merely hers, not her. It makes no sort of alteration in the essential man. She knows a few hundred times more now than when I met her first, and she hasn’t grown an atom with it all. It gets no farther in than her brain. When her brain suffers dissolution, so will the knowledge. Food for worms. She’ll waken up to her next incarnation with horribly little to put on. Now you, on the other hand, Marty − you know things with the whole of you. Your knowledge pervades your whole personality. It’s pure spirit. A rare and subtle essence.’
He took an arrogant delight in troubling her, having decided that she was insufficiently aware of her own worth and ought to be made to see herself through other eyes. He had a fine intellectual apprehension of her quality arid tried to show her herself as he perceived her.
‘You are big enough to stand the knowledge. Nothing will spoil you, Marty − there’s flame enough in you to burn the danger up.’
She began to comprehend that she was for him an earnest of the spiritual world; its ministrant; his Beatrice.
‘I don’t worship you. You worship a goddess through flame, don’t you? − But I have learned through you to worship flame. The flame of life. Like Beatrice. Making me aware of hierarchies of being beyond our own. − I’m not making love to you, you know, Marty.’
She said, ‘Luke!’ with a tongue so astounded that he laughed audibly; and in a moment so did she. The absurdity of the idea was palpable.
‘I suppose to some fools it would sound pernicious,’ he reflected. ‘To tell a woman that you love her and at the same time that you haven’t the least intention of wooing her − well! − It can be done, though.’ He was a little magisterial again, liking his theories. ‘There are two sorts of woman to whom one can say these things with impunity. There’s the quite worthless woman, frivolous, nothing in her. The ichor of her life’s too thin and weak to receive anything in solution − all her experience is precipitated immediately − it doesn’t even cloud the liquor − simply doesn’t touch her. You can say any mortal thing you like to her and be safe. And then there’s the woman in whom the life is so strong and powerful that it receives all experience into solution − makes a strange rich-flavoured compound of the liquor; and crystal clear. You can trust a woman like that with any knowledge. You can tell her the truth. We lie to most of the women we know. I’m telling you the truth.’
She remained silent so long that he turned to look at her. They had left the woodland and the moon was strong. He saw her face, held straight ahead and as though she walked without seeing where she went. Rossetti’s picture of the Annunciation came irresistibly to his mind. She had Mary’s rapt tranquillity.
It did not occur to him that that was her very mood; that she carried it home with her; that, lying still on her bed, among threadbare sheets that were patched with stuff of different tone and texture from themselves, under matted and dun-coloured blankets, she was undergoing the awe and rapture of annunciation. Humbly she cried, ‘I am not worthy,’ and the wonder deepened within her till it brimmed and flooded her consciousness. She lay without moving, nor were there articulate words even in her thought; but her whole being was caught up in passionate prayer that she might be able for her destiny. The place was holy; neither Madge’s noisy and rancid breathing, nor Flossie’s muttering and the constant twitch of her limbs, could disturb its solemn air. Let the whole world despise her now, in Luke’s dower was her peace. He made her great by believing her so. Because unwittingly she loved him she became the more fully what he had imagined her. She fell asleep in ecstasy, and woke in ecstasy, carrying to the tasks of early morning a sense of indwelling grandeur that redeemed them all. So strong and bright was this interior life that the things she touched and saw no longer wore their own significance. Their nature was subjugated to her nature; and she handled without disgust, in the confined and reeking closet where the boys had slept, the warm and smelly bed-clothes and the flock mattress that had sagged in holes and hardened into lumps, because her mind had no room for the realization that they were disgusting. As she cleaned the bairns’ boots, there fell on her so strong a persuasion of the very immediacy of unseen presences that she stood still, a clumsy boot thrust upon her fist, staring at the stubbly brush.
‘You’re a dreamy Daniel as ever I saw,’ cried Emmeline as she poked fresh sticks beneath the kettle. ‘A real hinder o’ time, you and yer glowerin’. Fa’s the time to wait on you? − Haud, Willie! − ye thievin’ randy.’ And she clutched Willie’s nieve, birsing the cakes he had been stealing into mealy crumbles that spilt over the floor.
Martha returned to the brushing of the boots without comment, tied the strings of her petticoats for Flossie, who was wandering about half-clad among everyone’s feet, and went back to the bedroom to make ready for town.
‘Am I the daughter of this house, or are you?’ she found herself asking Madge, having rubbed her sleeve against some of her untidy pastes that Madge had larded on a chair-back.
Madge, fourteen years old and done with her education, required, like Martha herself, a wider life than the cottage allowed, and was finding it in the glare of publicity afforded by the baker’s shop, whither she took her jewelled side-combs and fiery bows attached to the very point of her lustreless pigtail, to enliven the selling of bath-buns and half panned loaves and extra strongs, and the delivery of morning baps and ‘butteries’ at the villas round Cairns. She ate in these pleasant precincts more chocolates and pastries than were at all good for her complexion, which had considerably more need now of her geranium petals than it had had two years before; instead of scarlet, however, on the assumption that the more of pallor the less of plebeian was accused by one’s appearance, she spent her meagre cash on the cheapest variety of face powder, which she smeared with an unskilful hand across her features. Martha shrank from her tawdry ostentation, but was worsted in every attempt at remonstrance by Madge’s complete indifference to what she had to say. It was useless to lose one’s temper with Madge; and quite ridiculous to waste one’s irony. She stared and answered, ‘You are, of course,’ and completed the tying of her pigtail bow. Madge would go her own way though the heavens fell upon her: or though Emmeline fell upon her, a much more probable, and to the girl’s imagination more terrifying, catastrophe. She asked no one’s advice and sought no one’s approval. Martha was grateful for at least her silences, dearly as she resented the visible signs of her presence. She had long since ceased to share a bed with her, allowing Madge and Flossie the one respectable bed the room contained, and sleeping herself on a rackety trestle-bed underneath the window. There she could watch Orion, or hear, in the drowsy dawn, a blackbird fluting and the first small stir of wings.
On