literary transcript

CHAPTER IX

April 2^nd 1903

At Paddington, Mr Beavis and Anthony got into an empty third-class compartment and waited for the train to start. For Anthony a railway journey was still profoundly important, still a kind of sacrament. The male soul, in immaturity, is naturaliter ferrovialis. This huge and god-like green monster, for example, that now came snorting into the station and drew up at Platform I – but for Watt and Stephenson it would never have rolled thus majestically into its metropolitan cathedral of sooty glass. But the intensity of delight which Anthony felt as he watched the divine creature approach, as he breathed its stink of coal smoke and hot oil, as he heard and almost unconsciously imitated the ch-ff, ch-ff, ch-ff of its steamy panting, was a sufficient proof that the boyish heart must have been, in some mysterious way, prepared for the advent of Puffing Billy and the Rocket, that the actual locomotive, when it appeared, must have corresponded (how satisfyingly!) with some dim prophetic image of a locomotive, pre-existing in the mind of children from the beginning of palaeolithic time. Ch-ff, ch-ff; then silence; then the terrible, the soul-annihilating roar of escaping steam. Wonderful! Lovely!

Bonneted, in black, like a pair of Queen Victorias, two fat and tiny old ladies passed slowly, looking for a compartment where they would not have their throats cut or be compelled to listen to bad language. Mr Beavis looked very respectable indeed. They paused, held a consultation; but, leaning out of the window, Anthony made such a face at them that they moved away again. He smiled triumphantly. Keeping the compartment to oneself was one of the objects of the sacred game of travelling – was the equivalent, more or less, of a Royal Marriage at bezique; you scored forty, so to speak, each time you left a station without a stranger in your carriage. Having lunch in the dining-car counted as much as a Sequence – two hundred and fifty. And Double Bezique – but this, as yet, Anthony had never scored – was being in a sleeping carriage.

The guard whistled, the train began to move.

'Hurrah!' Anthony shouted.

The game had begun well: a Royal Marriage in the very first round. But a few minutes later he was regretting those two old ladies. For, rousing himself suddenly from his abstracted silence, John Beavis leaned forward and, touching his son's knee, 'Do you remember what day of the month it is?' he asked in a low and, to Anthony, inexplicably significant tone.

Anthony looked at him doubtfully; then started to overact the part of the Calculator, frowning over a difficult problem. There was something about his father that seemed to make such overacting inevitable.

'Let me see,' he said unnaturally, 'we broke up on the thirty-first – or was it the thirtieth? That was Saturday, and today's Monday ...'

'Today's the second,' said his father in the same slow voice.

Anthony felt apprehensive. If his father knew the date, why had he asked?

'It's exactly five months today,' Mr Beavis went on.

Five months? And then, with a sudden sickening drop of the heart, Anthony realized what his father was talking about. The Second of November, the Second of April. It was five months since she had died.

'Each second of the month – one tried to keep the day sacred.'

Anthony nodded and turned his eyes away with a sense of guilty discomfort.

'Bound each to each by natural piety,' said Mr Beavis.

What on earth was he talking about now? And, oh, why, why did he have to say these things? So awful; so indecent – yes, indecent; one didn't know where to look. Like the times when Granny's stomach made those awful bubbling noises after meals ...

Looking into his son's averted face, Mr Beavis perceived signs of resistance and was hurt, was saddened, and felt the sadness turn into an obscure resentment that Anthony should not suffer so acutely as he did. Of course the child was still very young, not yet able to realize the full extent of his loss; but all the same, all the same ...

To Anthony's unspeakable relief the train slowed down for its first stop. The suburbs of Slough passed slowly and ever slowlier before his eyes. Against all the rules of the sacred game, he prayed that somebody might get into their compartment. And, thank heaven, somebody did get in – a gross, purple-faced man whom on any other occasion Anthony would have hated. Today he loved him.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Mr Beavis retired again into a private world of silence.

In the carriage, on the way from Twyford station, his father added insult to injury.

'You must always be on your very best behaviour,' he recommended.

'Of course,' said Anthony curtly.

'And always be punctual,' Mr Beavis continued. 'And don't be greedy at meal-times.' He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about to say, then launched his colloquialism: 'however excellent the “grub” may be.' There was a little silence. 'And be polite to Abigail,' he added.

They turned off the road into a drive that wound between tall shrubberies of rhododendrons. Then, across an expanse of tree-islanded grass, appeared a façade of Georgian stucco. The house was not large, but solid, comfortable and at the same time elegant. Built, you divined, by someone who could quote Horace, aptly, on every occasion. Rachel Foxe's father, Mr Beavis reflected, as he looked at it, must have left quite a lot of money. Naval architecture – and didn't the old boy invent something that the Admiralty took up? Foxe, too, had been well off: something to do with coal. (How charming those daffodils looked in the grass there, under the tree!) But a dour, silent, humourless man who had not, Mr Beavis remembered, understood his little philological joke about the word 'pencil.' Though if he'd known at the time that the poor fellow had a duedenal ulcer, he certainly wouldn't have risked it.

Mrs Foxe and Brian came to meet them as the carriage drew up. The boys went off together. Mr Beavis followed his hostess into the drawing-room. She was a tall woman, slender and very upright, with something so majestic in her carriage, so nobly austere in the lines and expression of her face, that Mr Beavis always felt himself slightly intimidated and ill at ease in her presence.

'It was so very good of you to ask us,' he said. 'And I can't tell you how much it will mean for ...' he hesitated for an instant; then (since it was the second of the month), with a little shake of the head and in a lower tone, 'for this poor motherless little fellow of mine,' he went on, 'to spend his holidays here with you.'

Her clear brown eyes had darkened, as he spoke, with a sympathetic distress. Always firm, always serious, the coming together of her full, almost floridly sculptured lips expressed more than ordinary gravity. 'But I'm so delighted to have him,' she said in a voice that was warm and musically vibrant with feeling. 'Selfishly glad – for Brian's sake.' She smiled, and he noticed that even when she smiled her mouth seemed somehow to preserve, through all its sensibility, its profound capacity for suffering and enjoyment, that seriousness, that determined purity which characterized it in repose. 'Yes, selfishly,' she repeated. 'Because, when he's happy, I am.'

Mr Beavis nodded; then, sighing, 'One's thankful,' he said, 'to have as much left to one as that – the reflection of someone else's happiness.' Magnanimously, he was giving Anthony the right not to suffer – though of courser when the boy was a little older, when he could realize more fully ...

Mrs Foxe did not continue the conversation. There was something rather distasteful to her in his words and manner, something that jarred upon her sensibilities. But she hastened to banish the disagreeable impression from her mind. After all, the important, the essential fact was that the poor man had suffered, was still suffering. The false note, if falsity there were, was after the fact – in the mere expression of the suffering.

She proposed a stroll before tea, and they walked through the garden and out into the domesticated wilderness of grass and trees beyond. In a glade of the little copse that bounded the property to the north, three crippled children were picking primroses. With a gruesome agility they swung themselves on their crutches from clump to clump of the pale golden flowers, yelling as they went in shrill discordant rapture.

They were staying, Mrs Foxe explained, in one of her cottages. 'Three of my cripples,' she called them.

At the sound of her voice the children looked up, and at once came hopping across the open space towards her.

'Look, Miss, look what I found?'

'Look here, Miss!'

'What's this called, Miss?'

She answered their questions, asked others in return, promised to come that evening to see them.

Feeling that he too ought to do something for the cripples, Mr Beavis began to tell them about the etymology of the word 'primrose.' Primerole in Middle English,' he explained. 'The “rose” crept in by mistake.' They stared at him uncomprehendingly. 'A mere popular blunder,' he went on; then, twinkling, 'a “howler,”' he added. 'Like our old friend,' he smiled at them knowingly, 'our friend “causeway.”'

There was a silence. Mrs Foxe changed the subject.

'Poor little mites!' she said, when at last they let her go. 'They're so happy, they make one want to cry. And then, after a week, one has to pack them off again. 'Back to their slum. It seems too cruel. But what can one do? There are so many of them. One can't keep one lot at the expense of the others.'

They walked on for a time in silence, and Mrs Foxe found herself suddenly thinking that there were also cripples of the spirit. People with emotions so lame and rickety that they didn't know how to feel properly; people with some kind of hunch or deformity in their power of expression. John Beavis perhaps was one of them. But how unfair she was being! How presumptuous too! Judge not that ye be not judged. And anyhow, if it were true, that would only be another reason for feeling sorry for him.

'I think it must be tea-time,' she said aloud; and, to prevent herself from passing any more judgments, she started to talk to him about those Cripple Schools she had been helping to organize in Notting Dale and St Pancras. She described the cripple's life at home – the parents out at work; not a glimpse of a human face from morning till night; no proper food; no toys, no books, nothing to do but to lie still and wait – for what? Then she told him about the ambulance that now went round to fetch the children to school, about the special desks, the lessons, the arrangements for supplying a decent dinner.

'And our reward,' she said, as she opened the door into the house, 'is that same heartbreaking happiness I was speaking of just now. I can't help feeling it as a kind of reproach, an accusation. Each time I see that happiness, I ask myself what right I have to be in a position to give so easily, just by spending a little money and taking a tiny bit of pleasant trouble. Yes, what right?' Her warm clear voice trembled a little as she uttered the question. She raised her hands in an interrogative gesture, then let them fall again and walked quickly into the drawing-room.

Mr Beavis followed her in silence. A kind of tingling warmth had expanded within him as he listened to her last words. It was like the sensation he had when he read the last scene of Measure for Measure, or listened to Joachim in the Beethoven Concerto.

Mr Beavis could only stay two nights. There was an important meeting of the Philological Society. And then, of course, his work on the Dictionary. 'The old familiar grind,' he explained to Mrs Foxe in a tone of affected self-pity and with a sigh that was hardly even meant to carry conviction. The truth was that he enjoyed his work, would have felt lost without it. 'And you're really sure,' he added, 'that Anthony won't be too much of a burden for you?'

'Burden? But look!' And she pointed through the window to where the two boys were playing bicycle polo on the lawn. 'And it's not only that,' she went on. 'I've really come to be very much attached to Anthony in these two days. There's something so deeply touching about him. He seems so vulnerable somehow. In spite of all that cleverness and good sense and determination of his. There's part of him that seems terribly at the mercy of the world.' Yes, at its mercy, she repeated to herself, thinking, as she did so, of that broad and candid forehead, of those almost tremulously sensitive lips, of that slight, unforceful chin. He could be easily hurt, easily led astray. Each time he looked at her, he made her feel almost guiltily responsible for him.

'And yet,' said Mr Beavis, 'there are times when he seems strangely indifferent.' The memory of that episode in the train had not ceased to rankle. For though, of course, he wanted the child to be happy, though he had decided that the only happiness he himself could not henceforward would come from the contemplation of the child's happiness, the old resentment still obscurely persisted: he felt aggrieved because Anthony had not suffered more, because he seemed to resist and reject suffering when it was brought to him. 'Strangely indifferent,' he repeated.

Mrs Foxe nodded. 'Yes,' she said, 'he wears a kind of armour. Covers up his vulnerability in the most exposed place and at the same time uncovers it elsewhere, so that the slighter wounds shall act as a kind of distraction, a kind of counter-irritant. It's self-protection. And yet' (her voice deepened, thrillingly), 'and yet I believe that in the long run he'd be better and spiritually healthier, yes, and happier too, if he could bring himself to do just the opposite – if he'd armour himself against the little distracting wounds of pain, and expose his vulnerableness only to the great and piercing blows.'

'How true that is!' said Mr Beavis, who found that her words applied exactly to himself.

There was a silence. Then, harking back to her original question, 'No, no,' said Mrs Foxe with decision, 'so far from feeling him as a burden, I'm really enchanted to have him here. Not only for what he is in himself, but also for what he is to Brian – and incidentally for what Brian is to him. It's delightful to see them. I should like them to be together every holidays.' Mrs Foxe paused for a moment; then, 'Seriously, she went on, 'if you've made no plans for the summer, why don't you think of this? We've taken a little house at Tenby for August. Why shouldn't you and Anthony find a place there too?'

Mr Beavis thought the idea an excellent one; and the boys, when it was broached to them, were delighted.

So it's only goodbye till August,' said Mrs Foxe as she saw him off. 'Though of course,' she added, with a warmth that was all the greater for being the result of a deliberate effort of cordiality, 'of course we shall meet before then.'

The carriage rattled away down the drive; and for a hundred yards or more Anthony ran beside it, shouting 'Goodbye' and waving his handkerchief with a vehemence that Mr Beavis took as the sign of a corresponding intense regret to see him go. In fact, however, it was just a manifestation of overflowing energy and high spirits. Circumstances had filled him, body and mind, with the deep joy of being happily alive. This joy required physical expression, and his father's departure gave him an excuse for running and waving his arms. Mr Beavis was extremely touched. But if only, he went on sadly to think, if only there were some way of canalizing this love, and his own for the boy, so that it might irrigate the aridities of their daily intercourse! Women understood these things so much better. It had been touching to see how the poor child had responded to Mrs Foxe's affection. And perhaps, he went on to speculate, perhaps it was just because there had been no woman to direct his feelings that Anthony had seemed to be so uncaring. Perhaps a child could never adequately mourn his mother for the very reason that he was motherless. It was a vicious circle. Mrs Foxe's influence would be good, not only in this matter, but in a thousand other ways as well. Mr Beavis sighed. If only it were possible for a man and a woman to associate; not in marriage, but for a common purpose, for the sake of motherless, of fatherless, children! A good woman – admirable, extraordinary even. But in spite of that (almost because of that), it could only be an association for a common purpose. Never a marriage. And anyhow there was Maisie – waiting for him there; he would not fail ... But an association for the sake of the children – that would be no betrayal.

Anthony walked back to the house whistling 'The Honeysuckle and the Bee.' He was fond of his father – found, it is true, by force of habit, as one is fond of one's native place, or its traditional cooking – but still, genuinely fond of him. Which did nothing, however, to diminish the discomfort he always felt in Mr Beavis's presence.

'Brian!' he shouted, as he approached the house – shouted a bit self-consciously; for it seemed queer to be calling him Brian instead of Foxe or Horse-Face. Rather unmanly, even a shade discreditable.

Brian's answering whistle came from the school-room.

'I vote we take the bikes,' Anthony called.

At school, people used to mock at old Horse-Face for his bird mania. 'I say, you fellows,' Staithes would say, taking Horse-Face by the arm, 'guess what I saw today! Two spew-tits and a piddle-warbler.' And a great howl of laughter would go up – a howl in which Anthony always joined. But here, where there was nobody to shame him out of being interested in spring-migrants and nest-boxes and heronries, he took to bird-watching with enthusiasm. Coming in, wet and muddy from the afternoon's walk, 'Do you know what we heard, Mrs Foxe?' he would ask triumphantly, before poor Brian had had time to get out a stammered word. 'The first whitethroat!' or 'The first willow wren!' and Rachel Foxe would say, 'How splendid!' in such a way that he was filled with pride and happiness. It was as though those piddle-warblers had never existed.

After tea, when the curtains had been drawn and the lamps brought in, Mrs Foxe would read to them. Anthony, who had always been bored to death by Scott, found himself following the 'Fortunes of Nigel' with the most passionate attention.

Easter approached, and, for the time being, 'Nigel' was put away. Mrs Foxe gave them readings, instead, from the New Testament. 'And he saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.' The lamplight was a round island in the darkness of the room, and towards it, from the fire, projected a vague promontory of luminous redness. Anthony was lying on the floor, and from the high Italian chair beside the lamp the words came down to him, transfigured, as it were, by that warm, musical voice, charged with significances he had never heard or seen in them before. 'And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.' In the ten heartbeats of silence that followed he seemed to hear the blows of the hammer on the nails. Thud, thud, thud ... He passed the fingers of one hand across the smooth palm of the other; his body went rigid with horror, and through the stiffened muscles passed a violent spasm of shuddering.

'And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.' Mrs Foxe lowered her book. 'That's one of those additions I was telling you about,' she said, 'one of those embroideries on the story. One must think of the age in which the writers of the gospels lived. They believed these things could happen; and, what's more, they thought they ought to happen on important occasions. They wanted to do honour to Jesus; they wanted to make his story seem more wonderful. But to us, nowadays, these things make it seem less wonderful; and we don't feel that they do him honour. The wonderful thing for us,' she went on, and her voice thrilled with a deep note of fervour, 'is that Jesus was a man, no more able to do miracles and no more likely to have them done for him than the rest of us. Just a man – and yet he could do what he did, he could be what he was. That's the wonder.'

There was a long silence; only the clock ticked and the flame rustled silkily in the grate. Anthony lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Everything was suddenly clear. Uncle James was right; but the other people were right too. She had shown how it was possible for both of them to be right. Just a man – and yet ... Oh, he too, he too would do and be!

Mrs Foxe picked up the book once more. The thin pages crackled as she turned them.

'Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.'

The stone ... But at Lollingdon there was earth; and only ashes in that little box – that little box no bigger than a biscuit tin. Anthony shut his eyes in the hope of excluding the odious vision; but against the crimson darkness the horns, the triangular frizz of auburn curls stood out with an intenser vividness. He lifted his hand to his mouth, and, to punish himself, began to bite the forefinger, harder, harder, until the pain was almost intolerable.

That evening, when she came to say goodnight to him, Mrs Foxe sat down on the edge of Anthony's bed and took his hand. 'You know, Anthony,' she said after a moment of silence, 'you mustn't be afraid of thinking about her.'

'Afraid?' he mumbled, as though he hadn't understood. But he had understood – understood, perhaps, more than she had meant. The blood rushed guiltily into his cheeks. He felt frightened, as though somehow she had trapped him, found him out – frightened and therefore resentful.

'You mustn't be afraid of suffering,' she went on. 'Thinking about her will make you sad: that's inevitable. And it's right. Sadness is necessary sometimes – like an operation; you can't be well without it. If you think about her, you condemn her to a second death. The spirit of the dead lives on in God. But it also lives on in the minds of the living – helping them, making them better and stronger. The dead can only have this kind of immortality if the living are prepared to give it them. Will you give it her, Anthony?'

Mutely, and in tears, he nodded his answer. It was not so much the words that had reassured him as the fact that the words were hers and had been uttered in that compelling voice. His fears were allayed, his suspicious resentment died down. He felt safe with her. Safe to abandon himself to the sobs that now mounted irresistibly in his throat.

'Poor little Anthony!' She stroked his hair. 'Poor little Anthony! There's no help for it; it'll always hurt – always. You'll never be able to think of her without some pain. Even time can't take away all the suffering, Anthony.'

She paused, and for a long minute sat there in silence, thinking of her father, thinking of her husband. The old man, so massive, so majestic, like a prophet – then in his wheelchair, paralyzed and strangely shrunken, his head on one side, dribbling over his white beard, hardly able to speak … And the man she had married, out of admiration for his strength, out of respect for his uprightness; had married, and then discovered that she did not, could not love. For the strength, she had found, was cold and without magnanimity; the uprightness, harsh and cruel uprightness. And the pain of the long last illness had hardened and embittered him. He had died implacable, resisting her tenderness to the last.

'Yes, there'll always be pain and sadness,' she went on at last. 'And after all,' a warm note of pride, almost of defiance, came into her voice, 'can one wish that it should be otherwise? You wouldn't want to forget your mother, would you, Anthony? Or not to care any more? Just in order to escape a little suffering. You wouldn't want that?'

Sobbing, he shook his head. And it was quite true. At this moment he didn't want to escape. It was in some obscure way a relief to be suffering this extremity of sorrow. And he loved her because she had known how to make him suffer.

Mrs Foxe bent down and kissed him. 'Poor little Anthony!' she kept repeating. 'Poor little Anthony!'

It rained on Good Friday; but on Saturday the weather changed, and Easter Day was symbolically golden, as though on purpose, as though in a parable. Christ's resurrection and the rebirth of Nature – two aspects of an identical mystery. The sunshine, the clouds, like fragments of marbly sculpture in the pale blue sky, seemed, in some profound and inexpressible way, to corroborate all that Mrs Foxe had said.

They did not go to church; but, sitting on the lawn, she read aloud, first a bit of the service for Easter Day, then some extracts from Renan's Life of Jesus. The tears came into Anthony's eyes as he listened, and he felt an unspeakable longing to be good, to do something fine and noble.

On the Monday, a party of slum children were brought down to spend the day in the garden and the copse. At Bulstrode one would have called them scadgers; and offensively ignored their existence. Beastly little scadgers; and when they were older, they would grow into louts and cads. Here, however, it was different. Mrs Foxe transformed the scadgers into unfortunate children who would probably never get a second glimpse of the country in all the year.

'Poor kids!' Anthony said to her when they arrived. But in spite of the compassion he was doing his level best to feel, in spite of his determined goodwill, he was secretly afraid of these stunted yet horribly mature little boys with whom he had offered to play, he feared and disliked them. They seemed immeasurably foreign. Their patched, stained clothes, their shapeless boots, were like a differently coloured skin; their cockney might have been Chinese. The mere appearance of them made him feel guiltily self-conscious. And then there was the way they looked at him, with a derisive hatred of his new suit and his alien manners; there was the way the bolder of them whispered together and laughed. When they laughed at Brian for his stammer, he laughed with them; and in a little while they laughed no more, or laughed only in a friendly and almost sympathetic way. Anthony, on the contrary, pretended not to notice their mockery. A gentleman, he had always been taught explicitly as well as by constant implication and the example of his elders, a gentleman doesn't pay any attention to that kind of thing. It is beneath his dignity. He behaved as though their laughter were non-existent. They went on laughing.

He hated that morning of rounders and hide-and-seek. But worse was to follow at lunchtime. He had offered to help in the serving of the table. The work in itself was unobjectionable enough. But the smell of poverty when the twenty children were assembled in the dining-room was so insidiously disgusting – like Lollingdon church, only much worse – that he had to slip out two or three times in the course of the meal to spit in the lavatory basin. 'Reeking with germs!' he heard his mother's angrily frightened voice repeating. 'Reeking with germs!' And when Mrs Foxe asked him a question, he could only nod and make an inarticulate noise with his mouth shut; if he spoke, he would have to swallow. Swallow what? It was revolting only to think of it.

'Poor kids!' he said once more, as he stood with Mrs Foxe and Brian watching their departure. ''Poor kids!' and felt all the more ashamed of his hypocrisy when Mrs Foxe thanked him for having worked so hard to entertain them.

And when Anthony had gone up to the schoolroom, 'Thank you too, my darling,' she said, turning to Brian. 'You were really splendid.'

Flushing with pleasure, Brian shook his head. 'It was all y-you,' he said; and suddenly, because he loved her so much, because she was good, so wonderful, he found his eyes full of tears.

Together they walked out into the garden. Her hand was on his shoulder. She smelt faintly of eau-de-Cologne, and all at once (and this also, it seemed, was part of her wonderfulness) the sun came out from behind a cloud.

'Look at those heavenly daffodils!' she cried, in that voice that made everything she said seem, to Brian, truer, in some strange way, than the truth itself. ' “And now my heart with pleasure fills …” Do you remember, Brian?'

Flushed and with bright eyes, he nodded. ' “And d-dances ...” '

' “Dances with the daffodils.” ‘She pressed him closer to her. He was filled with an unspeakable happiness. They walked on in silence. Her skirts rustled at every step – like the sea, Brian thought; the sea at Ventnor, that time last year, when he couldn't sleep at night because of the waves on the beach. Lying there in the darkness, listening to the distant breathing of the sea, he had felt afraid and, above all, sad, terribly sad. But, associated with his mother, the memories of that fear, that profound and causeless sadness, became beautiful; and at the same time, in some obscure way, they seemed to reflect their new beauty back on to her, making her seem yet more wonderful in his eyes. Rustling back and forth across the sunny lawn, she took on some of the mysterious significance of the windy darkness, the tirelessly returning waves.

'Poor little Anthony!' said Mrs Foxe, breaking the long silence. 'It's hard, it's terribly hard.' Hard also for poor Maisie, she was thinking. That graceful creature, with her languors, her silences, her dreamy abstractions, and then her sudden bursts of laughing activity – what had such a one to do with death? Or with birth, for that matter? Maisie with a child to bring up – it hardly made more sense than Maisie dead.

'It must be t-t-t …' but 'terrible' wouldn't come, 'it must be d-dreadful,' said Brian, laboriously circumventing the obstacle, while his emotion ran on ahead in an imaginary outburst of unuttered and unutterable words, 'n-not to have a m-mother.'

Mrs Foxe smiled tenderly, and, bending down, laid her cheek for a moment again his hair. 'Dreadful also not to have a son,' she said, and realized, as she did so, that the words were even truer than she had intended them to be – that they were true on a plane of deeper, more essential existence that that on which she was now moving. She had spoken for the present; but if it would be terrible not to have him now, how incomparably more terrible it would have been then, after her father had had his stroke and during the years of her husband's illness! In that time of pain and utter spiritual deprivation her love for Brain had been her only remaining possession. Ah, terrible, terrible indeed, then, to have no son!