Yet even as a child she had sat at the piano and picked out little tunes of her own inventing. He had done his best; she had been taught to play by Miss Morrison of the next-door village, since music alone seemed able to tame her. And as Jamie had grown so her tunes had grown with her, gathering purpose and strength with her body. She would improvise for hours on the winter evenings, if Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen. He had always made Barbara welcome at the manse; they had been so inseparable, those two, since childhood—and now? He had frowned, remembering the gossip.
Rather timidly he had spoken to Jamie. “Listen, my dear, when you’re always together, the lads don’t get a chance to come courting, and Barbara’s grandmother wants the lass married. Let her walk with a lad on Sabbath afternoons—there’s that young MacGregor, he’s a fine, steady fellow, and they say he’s in love with the little lass. …”
Jamie had stared at him, scowling darkly. “She doesn’t want to walk out with MacGregor!”
The minister had shaken his head yet again. In the hands of his child he was utterly helpless.
Then Jamie had gone to Inverness in order the better to study music, but every weekend she had spent at the manse, there had been no real break in her friendship with Barbara; indeed they had seemed more devoted than ever, no doubt because of these forced separations. Two years later the minister had suddenly died, leaving his little all to Jamie. She had had to turn out of the old, grey manse, and had taken a room in the village near Barbara. But antagonism, no longer restrained through respect for the gentle and childlike pastor, had made itself very acutely felt—hostile they had been, those good people, to Jamie.
Barbara had wept. “Jamie, let’s go away … they hate us. Let’s go where nobody knows us. I’m twenty-one now, I can go where I like, they can’t stop me. Take me away from them, Jamie!”
Miserable, angry, and sorely bewildered, Jamie had put her arm round the girl. “Where can I take you, you poor little creature? You’re not strong, and I’m terribly poor, remember.”
But Barbara had continued to plead. “I’ll work, I’ll scrub floors, I’ll do anything, Jamie, only let’s get away where nobody knows us!”
So Jamie had turned to her music master in Inverness, and had begged him to help her. What could she do to earn her living? And because this man believed in her talent, he had helped her with advice and a small loan of money, urging her to go to Paris and study to complete her training in composition.
“You’re really too good for me,” he had told her; “and out there you could live considerably cheaper. For one thing the exchange would be in your favour. I’ll write to the head of the Conservatoire this evening.”
That had been shortly after the Armistice, and now here they were together in Paris.
As for Pat, she collected her moths and her beetles, and when fate was propitious an occasional woman. But fate was so seldom propitious to Pat—Arabella had put this down to the beetles. Poor Pat, having recently grown rather gloomy, had taken to quoting American history, speaking darkly of blood-tracks left on the snow by what she had christened: “The miserable army.” Then too she seemed haunted by General Custer, that gallant and very unfortunate hero. “It’s Custer’s last ride, all the time,” she would say. “No good talking, the whole darned world’s out to scalp us!”
As for Margaret Roland, she was never attracted to anyone young and wholehearted and free—she was, in fact, a congenital poacher.
While as for Wanda, her loves were so varied that no rule could be discovered by which to judge them. She loved wildly, without either chart or compass. A rudderless bark it was, Wanda’s emotion, beaten now this way now that by the gale, veering first to the normal, then to the abnormal; a thing of torn sails and stricken masts, that never came within sight of a harbour.
III
These, then, were the people to whom Stephen turned at last in her fear of isolation for Mary; to her own kind she turned and was made very welcome, for no bond is more binding than that of affliction. But her vision stretched beyond to the day when happier folk would also accept her, and through her this girl for whose happiness she and she alone would have to answer; to the day when through sheer force of tireless endeavour she would have built that harbour of refuge for Mary.
So now they were launched upon the stream that flows silent and deep through all great cities, gliding on between precipitous borders, away and away into no-man’s-land—the most desolate country in all creation. Yet when they got home they felt no misgivings, even Stephen’s doubts had been drugged for the moment, since just at first this curious stream will possess the balm of the waters of Lethe.
She said to Mary: “It was quite a good party; don’t you think so?”
And Mary answered naively: “I loved it because they were so nice to you. Brockett told me they think you’re the coming writer. He
