Posters on the platform at Durlingham announced in red letters that Professor Lee Ramsden, M.A., F.R.S.L., would lecture in the Town Hall at 8 p.m. She heard Miss Kendal saying, “If it had been at three instead of eight we could have gone.” She had a supreme sense of something about to happen.
Heavenly the long, steep-curved glass roof of the station, the iron arches and girders, the fanlights. Foreign and beautiful the black canal between the purplish rose-red walls, the white swans swaying on the black water, the red shaft of the clock-tower. It shot up high out of the Marketplace, topped with the fantastically large, round, white eye of its clock.
She kept on looking up to the clock-tower. At four she would see him.
They walked about the town. They lunched and shopped. They sat in the Park. They kept on looking at the clock-tower.
At the bookseller’s in the Marketplace she bought a secondhand copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. …
A black-grey drive between bushes of smutty laurel and arbutus. A black-grey house of big cut stones that stuck out. Gables and bow windows with sharp freestone facings that stuck out. You waited in a drawing-room stuffed with fragile mahogany and sea-green plush. Immense sea-green acanthus leaves, shaded in myrtle green, curled out from the walls. A suggestion of pictures heaved up from their places by this vigorous, thrusting growth.
Curtains, cream-coloured net, sea-green plush, veiled the black-grey walks and smutty lawns of the garden.
While she contemplated these things the long hand of the white marble tombstone clock moved from the hour to the quarter.
She was reading the inscription, in black letters, on the golden plinth: “Presented to Thomas Smythe-Caulfield, Esqr., M.P., by the Council and Teachers of St. Paul’s Schools, Durlingham”—“Presented”—when Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield came in.
A foolish, overblown, conceited face. Grey hair arranged with art and science, curl on curl. Three-cornered eyelids, hutches for small, malevolently watching eyes. A sharp, insolent nose. Fish’s mouth peering out above the backward slope of cascading chins.
Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield shook hands at a sidelong arm’s-length, not looking at you, holding Miss Kendal in her sharp pointed stare. They were Kate and Eleanor: Eleanor and Kate.
“You’re going to the lecture?”
“If it had been at three instead of eight—”
“The hour was fixed for the townspeople’s convenience.”
In five minutes you had gathered that you would not be allowed to see Professor Lee Ramsden; that Professor Lee Ramsden did not desire to see or talk to anybody except Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield; that he kept his best things for her; that all sorts of people were trying to get at him, and that he trusted her to protect him from invasion; that you had been admitted in order that Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield might have the pleasure of telling you these things.
Mary saw that the moment was atrocious; but it didn’t matter. A curious tranquillity possessed her: she felt something there, close to her, like a person in the room, giving her a sudden security. The moment that was mattering so abominably to her poor, kind friend belonged to a time that was not her time.
She heard the tinkle of tea cups outside the hall; then a male voice, male footsteps. Mrs. Smythe-Caulfield made a large encircling movement towards the door. Something interceptive took place there.
As they went back down the black-grey drive between the laurel and arbutus Miss Kendal carried her head higher than ever.
“That is the first time in my life, Mary, that I’ve asked a favour.”
“You did it for me.” (“She hated it, but she did it for me.”)
“Never mind. We aren’t going to mind, are we? We’ll do without them. … That’s right, my dear. Laugh. I’m glad you can. I dare say I shall laugh myself tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to laugh,” Mary said. She could have cried when she looked at the grey gloves and the frilled mantle, and the sad, insulted face in the bonnet with the white marabou feather. (And that horrible woman hadn’t even given her tea.)
The enormous eye of the town clock pursued them to the station.
As they settled into their seats in the Reyburn train Miss Kendal said, “It’s a pity we couldn’t go to the lecture.”
She leaned back, tired, in her corner. She closed her eyes.
Mary opened Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
The beginning had begun.
Chapter XXX
I
“What are you reading, Mary?”
“The New Testament. … Extraordinary how interesting it is.”
“Interesting!”
“Frightfully interesting.”
“You may say what you like, Mary; you’ll change your mind some day. I pray every night that you may come to Christ; and you’ll find in the end you’ll have to come. …”
No. No. Still, he said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” If the Greek would bear it—within you.
Did they understand their Christ? Had anybody ever understood him? Their “Prince of Peace” who said he hadn’t come to send peace, but a sword? The sword of the Self. He said he had come to set a man against his father and the daughter against her mother, and that because of him a man’s foes should be those of his own household. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”
He was not meek and mild. He was only gentle with children and women and sick people. He was brave and proud and impatient and ironic. He wouldn’t stay with his father and mother. He liked happy people who could amuse themselves without boring him. He liked to get away from his disciples, and from Lazarus and Martha and Mary of Bethany, and go to the rich, cosmopolitan houses and hear the tax-gatherer’s talk and see the young Roman captains swaggering with their swords and making eyes at Mary of Magdala.
He was the sublimest rebel that ever lived.
He said, “The spirit blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you can’t tell where it comes from or where it goes to. Everybody that is born from the spirit is like that.” The spirit blows where it wants to.
He said it was
