The Helpmate | Page 7

them the ramparts of the spiritual life.
Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.
"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you
cannot expect. But--"
He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.
She reddened.
"It was good of you to offer to release me--" He spared her.
"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"
"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be a
good wife to you."
"Thank you."

CHAPTER III
It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was
haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had
the horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the
infamy itself.
The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an
aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from
it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless
wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an
unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he
detested, and a house.
Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that
she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is
prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets
are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale
is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown,
paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown
under a grey northeastern sky.
Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is born
in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality
struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born
at all.
To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets
clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne
remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on
the day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her.
She was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt
dimly, and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and
divine uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.
But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne
Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some
mourner for whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral

day of his beloved, she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic
Spring the immortal cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her
own heart to its burial; and each street that they passed, as the slow cab
rattled heavily on its way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable
progress; it brought her a little nearer to the grave.
From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost
to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not
indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was
grateful for that silence of his, because it justified her own.
They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely, almost
incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very
worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble.
Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all
lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At
seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence.
She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood.
Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even
from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her
suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature. It
bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time, obliterating
the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only, unlike a child, and
unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the rebound to joy.
"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of
the house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably
preparing to receive us with glee? Do you think you could manage to
look a little less unhappy?"
The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock
by recalling her to the realities outside herself. All the courtesies and
kindnesses she owed to those about her insisted that her bridal
home-coming must lack no sign of grace. She forced a smile.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know I was looking particularly unhappy."
It struck her