Getting up, she wandered about the room, touching its kind and familiar objects; stroking the desk, examining a pen, grown rusty from long disuse as it lay there; then she opened a little drawer in the desk and took out the key of her father’s locked bookcase. Her mother had told her to take what she pleased—she would take one or two of her father’s books. She had never examined this special bookcase, and she could not have told why she suddenly did so. As she slipped the key into the lock and turned it, the action seemed curiously automatic. She began to take out the volumes slowly and with listless fingers, scarcely glancing at their titles. It gave her something to do, that was all—she thought that she was trying to distract her attention. Then she noticed that on a shelf near the bottom was a row of books standing behind the others; the next moment she had one of these in her hand, and was looking at the name of the author: Krafft Ebing—she had never heard of that author before. All the same she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes—She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly. For a long time she read; then went back to the bookcase and got out another of those volumes, and another. … The sun was now setting behind the hills; the garden was growing dusky with shadows. In the study there was little light left to read by, so that she must take her book to the window and must bend her face closer over the page; but still she read on and on in the dusk.
Then suddenly she had got to her feet and was talking aloud—she was talking to her father: “You knew! All the time you knew this thing, but because of your pity you wouldn’t tell me. Oh, Father—and there are so many of us—thousands of miserable, unwanted people, who have no right to love, no right to compassion because they’re maimed, hideously maimed and ugly—God’s cruel; He let us get flawed in the making.”
And then, before she knew what she was doing, she had found her father’s old, well-worn Bible. There she stood demanding a sign from heaven—nothing less than a sign from heaven she demanded. The Bible fell open near the beginning. She read: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. …”
Then Stephen hurled the Bible away, and she sank down completely hopeless and beaten, rocking her body backwards and forwards with a kind of abrupt yet methodical rhythm: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, upon Cain. …” she was rocking now in rhythm to those words, “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain—upon Cain—upon Cain. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain. …”
That was how Puddle came in and found her, and Puddle said: “Where you go, I go, Stephen. All that you’re suffering at this moment I’ve suffered. It was when I was very young like you—but I still remember.”
Stephen looked up with bewildered eyes: “Would you go with Cain whom God marked?” she said slowly, for she had not understood Puddle’s meaning, so she asked her once more: “Would you go with Cain?”
Puddle put an arm round Stephen’s bowed shoulders, and she said: “You’ve got work to do—come and do it! Why, just because you are what you are, you may actually find that you’ve got an advantage. You may write with a curious double insight—write both men and women from a personal knowledge. Nothing’s completely misplaced or wasted, I’m sure of that—and we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this, but meanwhile there’s plenty of work that’s waiting. For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good, and I’m here to help you to do it, Stephen.”
Book III
XVIII
I
A pale glint of sunshine devoid of all warmth lay over the wide expanse of the river, touching the funnel of a passing tug that tore at the water like a clumsy harrow; but a field of water is not for the sowing and the river closed back in the wake of the tug, deftly obliterating all traces of its noisy and foolish passing. The trees along the Chelsea Embankment bent and creaked in a sharp March wind. The wind was urging the sap in their branches to flow with a more determined purpose, but the skin of their bodies was blackened and soot clogged so that when touched it left soot on the fingers, and knowing this they were always disheartened and therefore a little slow to respond to the urge of the wind—they were city trees which are always somewhat disheartened. Away to the right against a toneless sky stood the tall factory chimneys beloved of young artists—especially those whose skill is not great, for few can go wrong over factory chimneys—while across the stream Battersea Park still looked misty as though barely convalescent from fog.
In her large, long, rather low-ceilinged study whose casement windows looked over
