ST. MAWR

Lou Witt had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn’t know where she was. Having one’s own way landed one completely at sea.

To be sure for a while she had failed in her grand love affair with Rico. And then she had had something really to despair about. But even that had worked out as she wanted. Rico had come back to her, and was dutifully married to her. And now, when she was twenty-five and he was three months older, they were a charming married couple. He flirted with other women still, to be sure. He wouldn’t be the ‘handsome Rico if he didn’t. But she had ‘got’ him. Oh yes! You had only to see the uneasy backward glance at her, from his big blue eyes: just like a horse that is edging away from its master: to know how completely he was mastered.

She, with her odd little museau, not exactly pretty, but very attractive; and her quaint air of playing at being well bred, in a sort of charade game; and her queer familiarity with foreign cities and foreign languages; and the lurking sense of being an outsider everywhere, like a sort of gipsy, who is at home anywhere and nowhere: all this made up her charm and her failure. She didn’t quite belong.

Of course she was American: Louisiana family, moved down to Texas. And she was moderately rich, with no close relation except her mother. But she had been sent to school in France when she was twelve, and since she had finished school, she had drifted from Paris to Palermo, Biarritz to Vienna and back via Munich to London, then down again to Rome. Only fleeting trips to her America.

So what sort of American was she, after all?

And what sort of European was she either? She didn’t ‘belong’ anywhere. Perhaps most of all in Rome, among the artists and the Embassy people.

It was in Rome she had met Rico. He was an Australian, son of a government official in Melbourne, who had been made a baronet. So one day Rico would be Sir Henry, as he was the only son. Meanwhile he floated round Europe on a very small allowance — his father wasn’t rich in capital — and was being an artist.

They met in Rome when they were twenty-two, and had a love affair in Capri. Rico was handsome, elegant, but mostly he had spots of paint on his trousers and he ruined a neck-tie pulling it off. He behaved in a most floridly elegant fashion, fascinating to the Italians. But at the same time he was canny and shrewd and sensible as any young poser could be and, on principle, good-hearted, anxious. He was anxious for his future, and anxious for his place in the world, he was poor, and suddenly wasteful in spite of all his tension of economy, and suddenly spiteful in spite of all his ingratiating efforts, and suddenly ungrateful in spite of all his burden of gratitude, and suddenly rude in spite of all his good manners, and suddenly detestable in spite of all his suave, courtier-like amiability.

He was fascinated by Lou’s quaint aplomb, her experiences, her ‘knowledge’, her gamine knowingness, her aloneness, her pretty clothes that were sometimes an utter failure, and her southern ‘drawl’ that was sometimes so irritating. That singsong which was so American. Yet she used no Americanisms at all, except when she lapsed into her odd spasms of acid irony, when she was very American indeed!

And she was fascinated by Rico. They played to each other like two butterflies at one flower. They pretended to be very poor in Rome — he was poor: and very rich in Naples. Everybody stared their eyes out at them. And they had that love affair in Capri.

But they reacted badly on each other’s nerves. She became ill. Her mother appeared. He couldn’t stand Mrs. Witt, and Mrs. Witt couldn’t stand him. There was a terrible fortnight. Then Lou was popped into a convent nursing-home in Umbria, and Rico dashed off to Paris. Nothing would stop him. He must go back to Australia.

He went to Melbourne, and while there his father died, leaving him a baronet’s title and an income still very moderate. Lou visited America once more, as the strangest of strange lands to her. She came away disheartened, panting for Europe, and, of course, doomed to meet Rico again.

They couldn’t get away from one another, even though in the course of their rather restrained correspondence he informed her that he was ‘probably’ marrying a very dear girl, friend of his childhood, only daughter of one of the oldest families in Victoria. Not saying much.

He didn’t commit the probability, but reappeared in Paris, wanting to paint his head off, terribly inspired by Cézanne and by old Renoir. He dined at the Rotonde with Lou and Mrs. Witt, who, with her queer democratic New Orleans sort of conceit, looked round the drinking-hall with savage contempt, and at Rico as part of the show. “Certainly,” she said, “when these people here have got any money, they fall in love on a full stomach. And when they’ve got no money, they fall in love with a full pocket. I never was in a more disgusting place. They take their love like some people take after-dinner pills.”

She would watch with her arching, full, strong grey eyes, sitting there erect and silent in her well-bought American clothes. And then she would deliver some such charge of grape-shot. Rico always writhed.

Mrs. Witt hated Paris: “this sordid, unlucky city,” she called it. “Something unlucky is bound to happen to me in this sinister, unclean town,” she said. “I feel contagion in the air of this place. For heaven’s sake, Louise, let us go to Morocco or somewhere.”

“No, mother dear, I can’t now. Rico has proposed to me, and I have accepted him. Let us think about a wedding, shall we?”

“There!” said Mrs. Witt. “I said it was an unlucky city!”

And the peculiar look of extreme New Orleans annoyance came round her sharp nose. But Lou and Rico were both twenty-four years old, and beyond management. And, anyhow, Lou would be Lady Carrington. But Mrs. Witt was exasperated beyond exasperation. She would almost rather have preferred Lou to elope with one of the great, evil porters at Les Halles. Mrs. Witt was at the age when the malevolent male in man, the old Adam, begins to loom above all the social tailoring. And yet — and yet — it was better to have Lady Carrington for a daughter, seeing Lou was that sort.

There was a marriage, after which Mrs. Witt departed to America, Lou and Rico leased a little old house in Westminster, and began to settle into a certain layer of English society. Rico was becoming an almost fashionable portrait-painter. At least, he was almost fashionable, whether his portraits were or not. And Lou, too, was almost fashionable: almost a hit. There was some flaw somewhere. In spite of their appearances, both Rico and she would never quite go down in any society. They were the drifting artist sort. Yet neither of them was content to be of the drifting artist sort. They wanted to fit in, to make good.

Hence the little house in Westminster, the portraits, the dinners, the friends, and the visits. Mrs. Witt came and sardonically established herself in a suite in a quiet but good-class hotel not far off. Being on the spot. And her terrible grey eyes with the touch of a leer looked on at the hollow mockery of things. As if she knew of anything better!

Lou and Rico had a curious exhausting effect on one another: neither knew why. They were fond of one another. Some inscrutable bond held them together. But it was a strange vibration of the nerves, rather than of the blood. A nervous attachment, rather than a sexual love. A curious tension of will, rather than a spontaneous passion. Each was curiously under the domination of the other. They were a pair — they had to be together. Yet quite soon they shrank from one another. This attachment of the will and the nerves was destructive. As soon as one felt strong, the other felt ill. As soon as the ill one recovered strength, down went the one who had been well.

And soon, tacitly, the marriage became more like a friendship, platonic. It was a marriage, but without sex. Sex was shattering and exhausting, they shrank from it, and became like brother and sister. But still they were husband and wife. And the lack of physical relation was a secret source of uneasiness and chagrin to both of them. They would neither of them accept it. Rico looked with contemplative, anxious eyes at other women.

Mrs. Witt kept track of everything, watching, as it were, from outside the fence, like a potent well-dressed demon, full of uncanny energy and a shattering sort of sense. She said little: but her small, occasionally biting remarks revealed her attitude of contempt for the ménage.

Rico entertained clever and well-known people. Mrs. Witt would appear, in her New York gowns and few good jewels. She was handsome, with her vigorous grey hair. But her heavy-lidded grey eyes were the despair of any hostess. They looked too many shattering things. And it was but too obvious that these clever, well-known English people got on her nerves terribly, with their finickiness and their fine-drawn discriminations. She wanted to put her foot through all these fine-drawn distinctions. She thought continually of the house of her girlhood, the plantation, the negroes, the planters: the sardonic grimness that underlay all the big, shiftless life. And she wanted to cleave with some of this grimness of the big, dangerous America, into the safe, finicky drawing-rooms of London. So naturally she was not popular.

But being a woman of energy, she had to do something. During the latter part of the war she had worked in the American Red Cross in France, nursing. She loved men — real men. But, on close contact, it was difficult to define what she meant by ‘real’ men. She never met any.

Out of the débacle of the war she had emerged with an odd piece of débris, in the shape of Geronimo Trujillo. He was an American, son of a Mexican father and a Navajo Indian mother, from Arizona. When you knew him well, you recognised the real half-breed, though at a glance he might pass as a sunburnt citizen of any nation, particularly of France. He looked like a certain sort of Frenchman, with his curiously-set dark eyes, his straight black hair, his thin black moustache, his rather long cheeks, and his almost slouching, diffident, sardonic bearing. Only when you knew him, and looked right into his eyes, you saw that unforgettable glint of the Indian.

He had been badly shell-shocked, and was for a time a wreck. Mrs. Witt, having nursed him into convalescence, asked him where he was going next. He didn’t know. His father and mother were dead, and he had nothing to take him back to Phoenix, Arizona. Having had an education in one of the Indian high schools, the unhappy fellow had now no place in life at all. Another of the many misfits.

There was something of the Paris Apache in his appearance but he was all the time withheld, and nervously shut inside himself. Mrs. Witt was intrigued by him.

“Very well, Phoenix,” she said, refusing to adopt his Spanish name, “I’ll see what I can do.”

What she did was to get him a place on a sort of manor farm, with some acquaintances of hers. He was very good with horses, and had a curious success with turkeys and geese and fowls.

Some time after Lou’s marriage, Mrs. Witt reappeared in London, from the country, with Phoenix in tow, and a couple of horses. She had decided that she would ride in the Park in the morning, and see the world that way. Phoenix was to be her groom.

So, to the great misgiving of Rico, behold Mrs. Witt in splendidly tailored habit and perfect boots, a smart black hat on her smart grey hair, riding a grey gelding as smart as she was, and looking down her conceited, inquisitive, scornful, aristocratic-democratic Louisiana nose at the people in Piccadilly, as she crossed to the Row, followed by the taciturn shadow of Phoenix, who sat on a chestnut with three white feet as if he had grown there.

Mrs. Witt, like many other people, always expected to find the real beau monde and the real grand monde somewhere or other. She didn’t quite give in to what she saw in the Bois de Boulogne, or in Monte Carlo, or on the Pincio: all a bit shoddy, and not very beau and not at all grand. There she was, with her grey eagle eye, her splendid complexion and her weapon-like health of a woman of fifty, dropping her eyelids a little, very slightly nervous, but completely prepared to despise the monde she was entering in Rotten Row.

In she sailed, and up and down that regatta-canal of horsemen and horsewomen under the trees of the Park. And yes, there were lovely girls with fair hair down their backs, on happy ponies. And awfully well-groomed papas, arid tight mamas who looked as if they were going to pour tea between the ears of their horses, and converse with banal skill, one eye on the teapot, one on the visitor with whom she was talking, and all the rest of her hostess’s argus eyes upon everybody in sight. That alert argus capability of the English matron was startling and a bit horrifying. Mrs. Witt would at once think of the old negro mammies, away in Louisiana. And her eyes became dagger-like as she watched the clipped, shorn, mincing young Englishmen. She refused to look at the prosperous Jews.

It was still the days before motor-cars were allowed in the Park, but Rico and Lou, sliding round Hyde Park Corner and up Park Lane in their car, would watch the steely horsewoman and the saturnine groom with a sort of dismay. Mrs. Witt seemed to be pointing a pistol at the bosom of every other horseman or horsewoman and announcing: “Your virility or your life! Your femininity or your life!” She didn’t know herself what she really wanted them to be: but it was something as democratic as Abraham Lincoln and as aristocratic as a Russian czar, as highbrow as Arthur Balfour, and as taciturn and unideal as Phoenix. Everything at once.

There was nothing for it: Lou had to buy herself a horse and ride at her mother’s side, for very decency’s sake. Mrs. Witt was so like a smooth, levelled, gunmetal pistol, Lou had to be a sort of sheath. And she really looked pretty, with her clusters of dark, curly, New Orleans hair, like grapes, and her quaint brown eyes that didn’t quite match, and that looked a bit sleepy and vague, and at the same time quick as a squirrel’s. She was slight and elegant, and a tiny bit rakish, and somebody suggested she might be on the movies.

Nevertheless, they were in the society columns next morning — two new and striking figures in the Row this morning were Lady Henry Carrington and her mother, Mrs. Witt, etc. And Mrs. Witt liked it, let her say what she might. So did Lou. Lou liked it immensely. She simply luxuriated in the sun of publicity.

“Rico dear, you must get a horse.”

The tone was soft and southern and drawling, but the overtone had a decisive finality. In vain Rico squirmed — he had a way of writhing and squirming which perhaps he had caught at Oxford. In vain he protested that he couldn’t ride, and that he didn’t care for riding. He got quite angry, and his handsome arched nose tilted and his upper lip lifted from his teeth, like a dog that is going to bite. Yet daren’t quite bite.

And that was Rico. He daren’t quite bite. Not that he was really afraid of the others. He was afraid of himself, once he let himself go. He might rip up in an eruption of life-long anger all this pretty-pretty picture of a charming young wife and a delightful little home and a fascinating success as a painter of fashionable, and at the same time ‘great’ portraits: with colour, wonderful colour, and at the same time, form, marvellous form. He had composed this little tableau vivant with great effort. He didn’t want to erupt like some suddenly wicked horse — Rico was really more like a horse than a dog, a horse that might go nasty any moment. For the time, he was good, very good, dangerously good.

“Why, Rico dear, I thought you used to ride so much, in Australia, when you were young? Didn’t you tell me all about it, hm?” — and as she ended on that slow, singing hm?, which acted on him like an irritant and a drug, he knew he was beaten.

Lou kept the sorrel mare in a mews just behind the house in Westminster, and she was always slipping round to the stables. She had a funny little nostalgia for the place: something that really surprised her. She had never had the faintest notion that she cared for horses and stables and grooms. But she did. She was fascinated. Perhaps it was her childhood’s Texas associations come back. Whatever it was, her life with Rico in the elegant little house, and all her social engagements seemed like a dream, the substantial reality of which was those mews in Westminster, her sorrel mare, the owner of the mews, Mr. Saintsbury, and the grooms he employed. Mr. Saintsbury was a horsey, elderly man like an old maid, and he loved the sound of titles.

“Lady Carrington! — well I never! You’ve come to us for a bit of company again, I see. I don’t know whatever we shall do if you go away, we shall be that lonely!” and he flashed his old-maid’s smile at her. “No matter how grey the morning, your ladyship would make a beam of sunshine. Poppy is all right, I think...”

Poppy was the sorrel mare with the no white feet and the startled eye, and she was all right. And Mr. Saintsbury was smiling with his old-maid’s mouth, and showing all his teeth.

“Come across with me, Lady Carrington, and look at a new horse just up from the country. I think he’s worth a look, and I believe you have a moment to spare, your Ladyship.”

Her Ladyship had too many moments to spare. She followed the sprightly, elderly, clean-shaven man across the yard to a loose-box, and waited while he opened the door.

In the inner dark she saw a handsome bay horse with his clean ears pricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely round to stare at the open doorway. He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with a sharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betrays an animal that can be dangerous.

“Is he quiet?” Lou asked.

“Why — yes — my Lady! He’s quiet, with those that know how to handle him. Cup! my boy! Cup, my beauty! Cup then! St. Mawr!”

Loquacious even with the animals, he went softly forward and laid his hand on the horse’s shoulder, soft and quiet as a fly settling. Lou saw the brilliant skin of the horse crinkle a little in apprehensive anticipation, like the shadow of the descending hand on a bright red-gold liquid. But then the animal relaxed again.

“Quiet with those that know how to handle him, and a bit of a ruffian with those that don’t. Isn’t that the ticket, eh, St. Mawr?”

“What is his name?” Lou asked.

The man repeated it, with a slight Welsh twist — ”He’s from the Welsh borders, belonging to a Welsh gentleman, Mr. Griffith Edwards. But they’re wanting to sell him.”

“How old is he?” asked Lou.

“About seven years — seven years and five months,” said Mr. Saintsbury, dropping his voice as if it were a secret. “Could one ride him in the Park?”

“Well — yes! I should say a gentleman who knew how to handle him could ride him very well and make a very handsome figure in the Park.”

Lou at once decided that this handsome figure should be Rico’s. For she was already half in love with St. Mawr. He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him. But in his big black eyes there was a lurking afterthought. Something told her that the horse was not quite happy: that somewhere deep in his animal consciousness lived a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility. She realised that he was sensitive, in spite of his flaming, healthy strength, and nervous with a touchy uneasiness that might make him vindictive.

“Has he got any tricks?” she asked.

“Not that I know of, my Lady: not tricks exactly. But he’s one of these temperamental creatures, as they say. Though I say, every horse is temperamental, when you come down to it. But this one, it is as if he was a trifle raw somewhere. Touch this raw spot, and there’s no answering for him.”

“Where is he raw?” asked Lou, somewhat mystified. She thought he might really have some physical sore.

“Why, that’s hard to say, my Lady. If he was a human being, you’d say something had gone wrong in his life. But with a horse it’s not that, exactly. A high-bred animal like St. Mawr needs understanding, and I don’t know as anybody has quite got the hang of him. I confess I haven’t myself. But I do realise that he is a special animal and needs a special sort of touch, and I’m willing he should have it, did I but know exactly what it is.”

She looked at the glowing bay horse that stood there with his ears back, his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning-conductor. He was a stallion. When she realised this, she became more afraid of him.

“Why does Mr. Griffith Edwards want to sell him?” she asked.

“Well — my Lady — they raised him for stud purposes — but he didn’t answer. There are horses like that: don’t seem to fancy the mares for some reason. Well, anyway, they couldn’t keep him for the stud. And as you see, he’s a powerful, beautiful hackney, clean as a whistle, and eaten up with his own power. But there’s no putting him between the shafts. He won’t stand it. He’s a fine saddle-horse, beautiful action, and lovely to ride. But he’s got to be handled, and there you are.”

Lou felt there was something behind the man’s reticence.

“Has he ever made a break?” she asked, apprehensive.

“Made a break?” replied the man. “Well, if I must admit it, he’s had two accidents. Mr. Griffith Edwards’s son rode him a bit wild, away there in the Forest of Dean, and the young fellow had his skull smashed in against a low oak bough. Last autumn, that was. And some time back, he crushed a groom against the side of the stall — injured him fatally. But they were both accidents, my Lady. Things will happen.”

The man spoke in a melancholy, fatalistic way. The horse, with his ears laid back, seemed to be listening tensely, his face averted. He looked like something finely bred and passionate that has been judged and condemned.

“May I say how do you do?” she said to the horse, drawing a little nearer in her white, summery dress and lifting her hand that glittered with emeralds and diamonds.

He drifted away from her, as if some wind blew him. Then he ducked his head and looked sideway at her from his black, full eye.

“I think I’m all right,” she said, edging nearer, while he watched her.

She laid her hand on his side and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her, through the lacquer of red-gold gloss. So slippery with vivid, hot life!

She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse’s sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young woman’s soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in. She wanted to buy St. Mawr.

“I think,” she said to Saintsbury, “if I can, I will buy him.” The man looked at her long and shrewdly.

“Well, my Lady,” he said at last, “there shall be nothing kept from you. But what would your Ladyship do with him, if I may make so bold?”

“I don’t know,” she replied vaguely. “I might take him to America.”

The man paused once more, then said:

“They say it’s been the making of some horses, to take them over the water, to Australia or such places. It might repay you — you never know.”

She wanted to buy St. Mawr. She wanted him to belong to her. For some reason the sight of him, his power, his alive, alert intensity, his unyieldingness, made her want to cry.

She never did cry: except sometimes with vexation, or to get her own way. As far as weeping went, her heart felt as dry as a Christmas walnut. What was the good of tears, anyhow? You had to keep on holding on in this life, never give way, and never give in. Tears only left one weakened and ragged.

But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her Awn world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question, while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power.

What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him.

She hid herself away from Rico. She could not bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships. Looming like some god out of the darkness was the head of that horse, with the wide, terrible, questioning eyes. And she felt that it forbade her to be her ordinary, commonplace self. It forbade her to be just Rico’s wife, young Lady Carrington, and all that.

It haunted her, the horse. It had looked at her as she had never been looked at before: terrible, gleaming, questioning eyes arching out of darkness, and backed by all the fire of that great ruddy body. What did it mean, and what ban did it put upon her? She felt it put a ban on her heart: wielded some uncanny authority over her, that she dared not, could not understand.

No matter where she was, what she was doing, at the back of her consciousness loomed a great, over-aweing figure out of a dark background: St. Mawr, looking at her without really seeing her, yet gleaming a question at her, from his wide, terrible eyes, and gleaming a sort of menace, doom. Master of doom, he seemed to be!

“You are thinking about something, Lou dear!” Rico said to her that evening.

He was so quick and sensitive to detect her moods — so exciting in this respect. And his big, slightly prominent blue eyes, with the whites a little bloodshot, glanced at her quickly, with searching and anxiety, and a touch of fear, as if his conscience were always uneasy. He, too, was rather like a horse — but forever quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust, which he covered with anxious love.

At the middle of his eyes was a central powerlessness that left him anxious. It used to touch her to pity, that central look of powerlessness in him. But now, since she had seen the full, dark, passionate blaze of power and of different life in the eyes of the thwarted horse, the anxious powerlessness of the man drove her mad. Rico was so handsome, and he was so self-controlled, he had a gallant sort of kindness and a real worldly shrewdness. One had to admire him: at least she had to.

But after all, and after all, it was a bluff, an attitude. He kept it all working in himself deliberately. It was an attitude.

She read psychologists who said that everything was an attitude. Even the best of everything. But now she realised that, with men and women, everything is an attitude only when something else is lacking. Something is lacking and they are thrown back on their own devices. That black fiery flow in the eyes of the horse was not ‘attitude’. It was something much more terrifying, and real, the only thing that was real. Gushing from the darkness in menace and question, and blazing out in the splendid body of the horse.

“Was I thinking about something?” she replied in her slow, amused, casual fashion. As if everything was so casual and easy to her. And so it was, from the hard, polished side of herself. But that wasn’t the whole story.

“I think you were, Loulina. May we offer the penny?”

“Don’t trouble,” she said. “I was thinking, if I was thinking of anything, about a bay horse called St. Mawr.” — Her secret almost crept into her eyes.

“The name is awfully attractive,” he said with a laugh. “Not so attractive as the creature himself. I’m going to buy him.”

“Not really!” he said. “But why?”

“He is so attractive. I’m going to buy him for you.”

“For me? Darling? How you do take me for granted. He may not be in the least attractive to me. As you know, I have hardly any feeling for horses at all. — Besides, how much does he cost?”

“That I don’t know, Rico dear. But I’m sure you’ll love him, for my sake.” — She felt, now, she was merely playing for her own ends.

“Lou dearest, don’t spend a fortune on a horse for me, which I don’t want. Honestly, I prefer a car.”

“Won’t you ride with me in the Park, Rico?”

“Honestly, dear Lou, I don’t want to.”

“Why not, dear boy? You look so beautiful. I wish you would. — And, anyhow, come with me to look at St. Mawr.”

Rico was divided. He had a certain uneasy feeling about horses. At the same time, he would like to cut a handsome figure in the Park.

They went across to the mews. A little Welsh groom was watering the brilliant horse.

“Yes, dear, he certainly is beautiful: such a marvellous colour! Almost orange! But rather large, I should say, to ride in the Park.”

“No, for you he’s perfect. You are so tall.”

“He’d be marvellous in a Composition. That colour!” And all Rico could do was to gaze with the artist’s eye at the horse, with a glance at the groom.

“Don’t you think the man is rather fascinating too?” he said, nursing his chin artistically and penetratingly. The groom, Lewis, was a little, quick, rather bow-legged, loosely-built fellow of indeterminate age, with a mop of black hair and a little black beard. He was grooming the brilliant St. Mawr out in the open. The horse was really glorious: like a marigold, with a pure golden sheen, a shimmer of green-gold lacquer upon a burning red-orange. There on the shoulder you saw the yellow lacquer glisten. Lewis, a little scrub of a fellow, worked absorbedly, unheedingly at the horse, with an absorption that was almost ritualistic. He seemed the attendant shadow of the ruddy animal.

“He goes with the horse,” said Lou. “If we buy St. Mawr we get the man thrown in.”

“They’d be so amusing to paint; such an extraordinary contrast! But darling, I hope you won’t insist on buying the horse. It’s so frightfully expensive.”

“Mother will help me. — You’d look so well on him, Rico.”

“If ever I dared take the liberty of getting on his back —  — !”

“Why not?” She went quickly across the cobbled yard. “Good morning, Lewis. How is St. Mawr?”

Lewis straightened himself and looked at her from under the falling mop of his black hair.

“All right,” he said.

He peered straight at her from under his overhanging black hair. He had pale grey eyes, that looked phosphorescent, and suggested the eyes of a wild cat peering intent from under the darkness of some bush where it lies unseen. Lou, with her brown, unmatched, oddly perplexed eyes, felt herself found out. — ”He’s a common little fellow,” she thought to herself. “But he knows a woman and a horse at sight.” — Aloud she said, in her Southern drawl:

“How do you think he’d be with Sir Henry?”

Lewis turned his remote, coldly watchful eyes on the young baronet. Rico was tall and handsome and balanced on his hips. His face was long and well-defined, and with the hair taken straight back from the brow. It seemed as well-made as his clothing, and as perpetually presentable. You could not imagine his face dirty, or scrubby and unshaven, or bearded, or even moustached. It was perfectly prepared for social purposes. If his head had been cut off, like John the Baptist’s, it would have been a thing complete in itself, would not have missed the body in the least. The body was perfectly tailored. The head was one of the famous ‘talking heads’ of modern youth, with eyebrows a trifle Mephistophelian, large blue eyes a trifle hold, and curved mouth thrilling to death to kiss.

Lewis, the groom, staring from between his bush of hair and his beard, watched like an animal from the underbrush. And Rico was still sufficiently a colonial to be uneasily aware of the underbrush, uneasy under the watchfulness of the pale grey eyes, and uneasy in that man-to-man exposure which is characteristic of the democratic colonies and of America. He knew he must ultimately be judged on his merits as a man, alone without a background: an ungarnished colonial.

This lack of background, this defenceless man-to-man business which left him at the mercy of every servant, was bad for his nerves. For he was also an artist. He bore up against it in a kind of desperation, and was easily moved to rancorous resentment. At the same time he was free of the Englishman’s water-tight suffisance. He really was aware that he would have to hold his own all alone, thrown alone on his own defences in the universe. The extreme democracy of the Colonies had taught him this.

And this, the little aboriginal Lewis recognised in him. He recognised also Rico’s curious hollow misgiving, fear of some deficiency in himself, beneath all his handsome, young-hero appearance.

“He’d be all right with anybody as would meet him halfway,” said Lewis, in the quick Welsh manner of speech, impersonal.

“You hear, Rico!” said Lou in her sing-song, turning to her husband.

“Perfectly, darling!”

“Would you be willing to meet St. Mawr half-way, hm?”

“All the way, darling! Mahomet would go all the way to that mountain. Who would dare do otherwise?”

He spoke with a laughing, yet piqued sarcasm.

“Why, I think St. Mawr would understand perfectly,” she said in the soft voice of a woman haunted by love. And she went and laid her hand on the slippery, life-smooth shoulder of the horse. He, with his strange equine head lowered, its exquisite fine lines reaching a little snake-like forward, and his ears a little back, was watching her sideways from the corner of his eye. He was in a state of absolute mistrust, like a cat crouching to spring.

“St. Mawr!” she said. “St. Mawr! What is the matter? Surely you and I are all right!”

And she spoke softly, dreamily stroked the animal’s neck. She could feel a response gradually coming from him. But he would not lift up his head. And when Rico suddenly moved nearer, he sprang with a sudden jerk backwards, as if lightning exploded in his four hoofs.

The groom spoke a few low words in Welsh. Lou, frightened, stood with lifted hands arrested. She had been going to stroke him.

“Why did he do that?” she said.

“They gave him a beating once or twice,” said the groom in a neutral voice, “and he doesn’t forget.”

She could hear a neutral sort of judgment in Lewis’s voice. And she thought of the ‘raw spot’.

Not any raw spot at all. A battle between two worlds. She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico’s, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr’s world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hippolytus, had known it.

With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sensitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed. — ”Meet him half-way,” Lewis said. But half-way across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step. It was a step, she knew, that Rico could never take. She knew it. But she was prepared to sacrifice Rico.

St. Mawr was bought, and Lewis was hired along with him. At first, Lewis rode him behind Lou, in the Row, to get him going. He behaved perfectly.

Phoenix, the half Indian, was very jealous when he saw the black-bearded Welsh groom on St. Mawr.

“What horse you got there?” he asked, looking at the other man with the curious unseeing stare in his hard, Navajo eyes, in which the Indian glint moved like a spark upon a dark chaos. In Phoenix’s high-boned face there was all the race misery of the dispossessed Indian, with an added blankness left by shell-shock. But at the same time, there was that unyielding, save to death, which is characteristic of his tribe; his mother’s tribe. Difficult to say what subtle thread bound him to the Navajo, and made his destiny a Red Man’s destiny still.

They were a curious pair of grooms, following the correct, and yet extraordinary, pair of American mistresses. Mrs. Witt and Phoenix both rode with long stirrups and straight leg, sitting close to the saddle, without posting. Phoenix looked as if he and the horse were all one piece, he never seemed to rise in the saddle at all, neither trotting nor galloping, but sat like a man riding bareback. And all the time he stared around at the riders in the Row, at the people grouped outside the rail, chatting, at the children walking with their nurses, as if he were looking at a mirage, in whose actuality he never believed for a moment. London was all a sort of dark mirage to him. His wide, nervous-looking brown eyes with a smallish brown pupil, that showed the white all round, seemed to be focused on the far distance, as if he could not see things too near. He was watching the pale deserts of Arizona shimmer with moving light, the long mirage of a shallow lake ripple, the great pallid concave of earth and sky expanding with interchanged light. And a horse-shape loom large and portentous in the mirage, like some prehistoric beast.

That was real to him: the phantasm of Arizona. But this London was something his eye passed over as a false mirage. He looked too smart in his well-tailored groom’s clothes, so smart, he might have been one of the satirised new rich. Perhaps it was a sort of half-breed physical assertion that came through his clothing, the savage’s physical assertion of himself. Anyhow, he looked ‘common’, rather horsey and loud.

Except his face. In the golden suavity of his high-boned Indian face, that was hairless, with hardly any eyebrows, there was a blank, lost look that was almost touching. The same startled blank look was in his eyes. But in the smallish dark pupils the dagger-point of light still gleamed unbroken.

He was a good groom, watchful, quick, and on the spot in an instant if anything went wrong. He had a curious quiet power over the horses, unemotional, unsympathetic, but silently potent. In the same way, watching the traffic of Piccadilly with his blank, glinting eye, he would calculate everything instinctively, as if it were an enemy, and pilot Mrs. Witt by the strength of his silent will. He threw around her the tense watchfulness of her own America, and made her feel at home.

“Phoenix,” she said, turning abruptly in her saddle as they walked the horses past the sheltering policeman at Hyde Park Corner, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have something a hundred per cent American at the back of me when I go through these gates.”

She looked at him from dangerous grey eyes as if she meant it indeed, in vindictive earnest. A ghost of a smile went up to his high cheek-bones, but he did not answer.

“Why, mother?” said Lou, sing-song. “It feels to me so friendly — !”

“Yes, Louise, it does. So friendly! That’s why I mistrust it so entirely — ”

And she set off at a canter up the Row, under the green trees, her face like the face of Medusa at fifty, a weapon in itself. She stared at everything and everybody, with that stare of cold dynamite waiting to explode them all. Lou posted trotting at her side, graceful and elegant, and faintly amused. Behind came Phoenix, like a shadow, with his yellowish, high-boned face still looking sick. And at his side, on the big brilliant bay horse, the smallish, black-bearded Welshman.

Between Phoenix and Lewis there was a latent, but unspoken and wary sympathy. Phoenix was terribly impressed by St. Mawr, he could not leave off staring at him. And Lewis rode the brilliant, handsome-moving stallion so very quietly, like an insinuation.

Of the two men, Lewis looked the darker, with his black beard coming up to his thick black eyebrows. He was swarthy, with a rather short nose, and the uncanny pale-grey eyes that watched everything and cared about nothing. He cared about nothing in the world, except, at the present, St. Mawr. People did not matter to him. He rode his horse and watched the world from the vantage ground of St. Mawr, with a final indifference.

“You have been with that horse long?” asked Phoenix. “Since he was born.”

Phoenix watched the action of St. Mawr as they went. The bay moved proud and springy, but with perfect good sense, among the stream of riders. It was a beautiful June morning, the leaves overhead were thick and green; there came the first whiff of lime tree scent. To Phoenix, however, the city was a sort of nightmare mirage, and to Lewis, it was a sort of prison. The presence of people he felt as a prison around him.

Mrs. Witt and Lou were turning at the end of the Row, bowing to some acquaintances. The grooms pulled aside Mrs. Witt looked at Lewis with a cold eye.

“It seems an extraordinary thing to me, Louise,” she said, “to see a groom with a beard.”

“It isn’t usual, mother,” said Lou. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. At least, I think I don’t. I get very tired of modern, bare-faced young men, very! The clean, pure boy, don’t you know! Doesn’t it make you tired? — No, I think a groom with a beard is quite attractive.”

She gazed into the crowd defiantly, perching her finely-shod toe with war-like firmness on the stirrup-iron. Then suddenly she reined in, and turned her horse towards the grooms.

“Lewis!” she said, “I want to ask you a question. Supposing, now, that Lady Carrington wanted you to shave off that beard, what should you say?”

Lewis instinctively put up his hand to the said beard. “They’ve wanted me to shave it off, Mam,” he said. “But I’ve never done it.”

“But why? Tell me why?”

“It’s part of me, Mam.”

Mrs. Witt pulled on again.

“Isn’t that extraordinary, Louise?” she said. “Don’t you like the way he says Mam? It sounds so impossible to me. Could any woman think of herself as Mam? Never! — Since Queen Victoria. But, do you know it hadn’t occurred to me that a man’s beard was really part of him. It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show. I shall always remember Lewis for saying his beard was part of him. Isn’t it curious, the way he rides? He seems to sink himself in the horse. When I speak to him, I’m not sure whether I’m speaking to a man or to a horse.”

A few days later, Rico himself appeared on St. Mawr for the morning ride. He rode self-consciously, as he did everything, and he was just a little nervous. But his mother-in-law was benevolent. She made him ride between her and Lou, like three ships slowly sailing abreast.

And that very day, who should come driving in an open carriage through the Park but the Queen Mother! Dear old Queen Alexandra, there was a flutter everywhere. And she bowed expressly to Rico, mistaking him, no doubt, for somebody else.

“Do you know,” said Rico as they sat at lunch, he and Lou and Mrs. Witt, in Mrs. Witt’s sitting-room in the dark, quiet hotel in Mayfair, “I really like riding St. Mawr so much. He really is a noble animal. — If ever I am made a lord — which heaven forbid! — I shall be Lord St. Mawr.”

“You mean,” said Mrs. Witt, “his real lordship would be the horse?”

“Very possible, I admit,” said Rico, with a curl of his long upper lip.

“Don’t you think, mother,” said Lou, “there is something quite noble about St. Mawr? He strikes me as the first noble thing I have ever seen.”

“Certainly I’ve not seen any man that could compare with him. Because these English noblemen — well! I’d rather look at a negro Pullman-boy, if I was looking for what I call nobility.”

Poor Rico was getting crosser and crosser. There was a devil in Mrs. Witt. She had a hard, bright devil inside her that she seemed to be able to let loose at will.

She let it loose the next day, when Rico and Lou joined her in the Row. She was silent but deadly with the horses, balking them in every way. She suddenly crowded over against the rail in front of St. Mawr, so that the stallion had to rear to pull himself up. Then, having a clear track, she suddenly set off at a gallop, like an explosion, and the stallion, all on edge, set off after her.

It seemed as if the whole Park, that morning, were in a state of nervous tension. Perhaps there was thunder in the air. But St. Mawr kept on dancing and pulling at the bit and wheeling sideways up against the railing, to the terror of the children and the onlookers, who squealed and jumped back suddenly, sending the nerves of the stallion into a rush like rockets. He reared and fought as Rico pulled him round.

Then he went on: dancing, pulling, springily progressing sideways, possessed with all the demons of perversity. Poor Rico’s face grew longer and angrier. A fury rose in him, which he could hardly control. He hated his horse, and viciously tried to force him to a quiet, straight trot. Up went St. Mawr on his hind legs, to the terror of the Row. He got the bit in his teeth and began to fight.

But Phoenix, cleverly, was in front of him.

“You get off, Rico!” called Mrs. Witt’s voice, with all the calm of her wicked exultance.

And almost before he knew what he was doing, Rico had sprung lightly to the ground, and was hanging on to the bridle of the rearing stallion.

Phoenix also lightly jumped down, and ran to St. Mawr, handing his bridle to Rico. Then began a dancing and a splashing, a rearing and a plunging. St. Mawr was being wicked. But Phoenix, the indifference of conflict in his face, sat tight and immovable, without any emotion, only the heaviness of his impersonal will settling down like a weight, all the time, on the horse. There was, perhaps, a curious barbaric exultance in bare, dark will devoid of emotion or personal feeling.

So they had a little display in the Row for almost five minutes, the brilliant horse rearing and fighting. Rico, with a stiff, long face, scrambled on to Phoenix’s horse and withdrew to a safe distance. Policemen came, and an officious mounted policeman rode up to save the situation. But it was obvious that Phoenix, detached and apparently unconcerned, but barbarically potent in his will, would bring the horse to order.

Which he did, and rode the creature home. Rico was requested not to ride St. Mawr in the Row any more, as the stallion was dangerous to public safety. The authorities knew all about him.

Where ended the first fiasco of St. Mawr.

“We didn’t get on very well with his lordship this morning,” said Mrs. Witt triumphantly.

“No, he didn’t like his company at all!” Rico snarled back. He wanted Lou to sell the horse again.

“I doubt if anyone would buy him, dear,” she said. “He’s a known character.”

“Then make a gift of him — to your mother,” said Rico with venom.

“Why to mother?” asked Lou innocently.

“She might be able to cope with him — or he with her!” The last phrase was deadly. Having delivered it, Rico departed.

Lou remained at a loss. She felt almost always a little bit dazed, as if she could not see clear nor feel clear. A curious deadness upon her, like the first touch of death. And through this cloud of numbness, or deadness, came all her muted experiences.

Why was it? She did not know. But she felt that in some way it came from a battle of wills. Her mother, Rico, herself, it was always an unspoken, unconscious battle of wills, which was gradually numbing and paralysing her. She knew Rico meant nothing but kindness by her. She knew her mother only wanted to watch over her. Yet always there was this tension of will, that was no numbing. As if at the depths of him, Rico were always angry, though he seemed so ‘happy’ on top. And Mrs. Witt was organically angry. So they were like a couple of bombs, timed to explode some day, but ticking on like two ordinary timepieces, in the meanwhile.

She had come definitely to realise this: that Rico’s anger was wound up tight at the bottom of him, like a steel spring that kept his works going, while he himself was ‘charming’, like a bomb-clock with Sevres paintings or Dresden figures on the outside. But his very charm was a sort of anger, and his love was a destruction in itself. He just couldn’t help it.

And she? Perhaps she was a good deal the same herself. Wound up tight inside, and enjoying herself being ‘lovely’. But wound up tight on some tension that, she realised now with wonder, was really a sort of anger. This, the mainspring that drove her on the round of ‘joys’.

She used really to enjoy the tension, and the élan it gave her. While she knew nothing about it. So long as she felt it really was life and happiness, this élan, this tension and excitement of ‘enjoying oneself’.

Now suddenly she doubted the whole show. She attributed to it the curious numbness that was overcoming her, as if she couldn’t feel any more.

She wanted to come unwound. She wanted to escape this battle of wills.

Only St. Mawr gave her some hint of the possibility. He was so powerful, and so dangerous. But in his dark eye, that looked, with its cloudy brown pupil, a cloud within a dark fire, like a world beyond our world, there was a dark vitality glowing, and within the fire another sort of wisdom. She felt sure of it: even when he put his ears back, and bared his teeth, and his great eyes came bolting out of his naked horse’s head, and she saw demons upon demons in the chaos of his horrid eyes.

Why did he seem to her like some living background, into which she wanted to retreat? When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her. And there she wanted to go.

She kept it utterly a secret to herself. Because Rico would just have lifted his long upper lip, in his bare face, in a condescending sort of ‘understanding’. And her mother would, as usual, have suspected her of side-stepping. People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained within their cardboard let’s-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness, or fun, or the-best-ever. This ghastly cheery-o! touch, that made all her blood go numb.

Since she had really seen St. Mawr looming fiery and terrible in an outer darkness, she could not believe the world she lived in. She could not believe it was actually happening, when she was dancing in the afternoon at Claridge’s, or in the evening at the Carlton, slid about with some suave young man who wasn’t like a man at all to her. Or down in Sussex for the week-end with the Enderleys: the talk, the eating and drinking, the flirtation, the endless dancing: it all seemed far more bodiless and, in a strange way, wraith-like, than any fairy story. She seemed to be eating Barmecide food, that had been conjured up out of thin air, by the power of words. She seemed to be talking to handsome, young, bare-faced unrealities, not men at all: as she slid about with them, in the perpetual dance, they too seemed to have been conjured up out of air, merely for this soaring, slithering dance business. And she could not believe that, when the lights went out, they wouldn’t melt back into thin air again and complete non-entity. The strange nonentity of it all! Everything just conjured up, and nothing real. ‘Isn’t this the best ever!’ they would beamingly assert, like wraiths of enjoyment, without any genuine substance. And she would beam back: ‘Lots of fun!’

She was thankful the season was over, and everybody was leaving London. She and Rico were due to go to Scotland, but not till August. In the meantime they would go to her mother.

Mrs. Witt had taken a cottage in Shropshire, on the Welsh border, and had moved down there with Phoenix and her horses. The open, heather-and-bilberry-covered hills were splendid for riding.

Rico consented to spend the month in Shropshire, because for near neighbours Mrs. Witt had the Manbys, at Corrabach Hall. The Manbys were rich Australians returned to the old country and set up as squires, all in full blow. Rico had known them in Victoria: they were of good family: and the girls made a great fuss of him.

So down went Lou and Rico, Lewis, Poppy and St. Mawr, to Shrewsbury, then out into the country. Mrs. Witt’s ‘cottage’ was a tall red-brick Georgian house looking straight on to the churchyard, and the dark, looming big church.

“I never knew what a comfort it would be,” said Mrs. Witt, “to have grave-stones under my drawing-room windows, and funerals for lunch.”

She really did take a strange pleasure in sitting in her panelled room, that was painted grey, and watching the Dean or one of the curates officiating at the graveside, among a group of black country mourners with black-bordered handkerchiefs luxuriantly in use.

“Mother!” said Lou. “I think it’s gruesome!”

She had a room at the back, looking over the walled garden and the stables. Nevertheless, there was the boom! boom! of the passing-bell, and the chiming and pealing on Sundays. The shadow of the church, indeed! A very audible shadow, making itself heard insistently.

The Dean was a big, burly, fat man with a pleasant manner. He was a gentleman, and a man of learning in his own line. But he let Mrs. Witt know that he looked down on her just a trifle — as a parvenu American, a Yankee — though she never was a Yankee: and at the same time he had a sincere respect for her, as a rich woman. Yes, a sincere respect for her, as a rich woman.

Lou knew that every Englishman, especially of the upper classes, has a wholesome respect for riches. But then, who hasn’t?

The Dean was more impressed by Mrs. Witt than by little Lou. But to Lady Carrington he was charming: she was almost ‘one of us’, you know. And he was very gracious to Rico: ‘your father’s splendid colonial service.’

Mrs. Witt had now a new pantomime to amuse her: the Georgian house, her own pew in church — it went with the old house: a village of thatched cottages — some of them with corrugated iron over the thatch: the cottage people, farm labourers and their families, with a few, very few, outsiders: the wicked little group of cottagers down at Mile End, famous for ill-living. The Mile-Enders were all Allisons and Jephsons, and in-bred, the Dean said: result of working through the centuries at the Quarry, and living isolated there at Mile End.

Isolated! Imagine it! A mile and a half from the railway station, ten miles from Shrewsbury. Mrs. Witt thought of Texas, and said:

“Yes, they are very isolated, away down there!”

And the Dean never for a moment suspected sarcasm.

But there she had the whole thing staged complete for her: English village life. Even miners breaking in to shatter the rather stuffy, unwholesome harmony. — All the men touched their caps to her, all the women did a bit of reverence, the children stood aside for her, if she appeared in the street.

They were all poor again: the labourers could no longer afford even a glass of beer in the evenings, since the Glorious War.

“Now I think that is terrible,” said Mrs. Witt. “Not to be able to get away from those stuffy, squalid, picturesque cottages for an hour in the evening, to drink a glass of beer.”

“It’s a pity, I do agree with you, Mrs. Witt. But Mr. Watson has organised a men’s reading-room, where the men can smoke and play dominoes, and read if they wish.”

“But that,” said Mrs. Witt, “is not the same as that cosy parlour in the ‘Moon and Stars’.”

“I quite agree,” said the Dean. “It isn’t”

Mrs. Witt marched to the landlord of the ‘Moon and Stars’ and asked for a glass of cider.

“I want,” she said, in her American accent, “these poor labourers to have their glass of beer in the evenings.”

“They want it themselves,” said Harvey.

“Then they must have it — ”

The upshot was, she decided to supply one large barrel of beer per week and the landlord was to sell it to the labourers at a penny a glass.

“My own country has gone dry,” she asserted. “But not because we can’t afford it.”

By the time Lou and Rico appeared, she was deep in. She actually interfered very little: the barrel of beer was her one public act. But she did know everybody by sight, already, and she did know everybody’s circumstances. And she had attended one prayer-meeting, one mothers’ meeting, one sewing-bee, one ‘social’, one Sunday School meeting, one Band of Hope meeting, and one Sunday School treat. She ignored the poky little Wesleyan and Baptist chapels, and was true-blue Episcopalian.

“How strange these picturesque old villages are, Louise!” she said, with a duskiness around her sharp, well-bred nose. “How easy it all seems, all on a definite pattern. And how false! And underneath, how corrupt!”

She gave that queer, triumphant leer from her grey eyes, and queer demonish wrinkles seemed to twitter on her face.

Lou shrank away. She was beginning to be afraid of her mother’s insatiable curiosity, that always looked for the snake under the flowers. Or rather, for the maggots.

Always this same morbid interest in other, people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

Mrs. Witt was a pure psychologist, a fiendish psychologist. And Rico, in his way, was a psychologist too. But he had a formula. “Let’s know the worst, dear! But let’s look on the bright side, and believe the best.”

“Isn’t the Dean a priceless old darling!” said Rico at breakfast.

And it had begun. Work had started in the psychic vivisection laboratory.

“Isn’t he wonderful!” said Lou vaguely.

“So delightfully worldly! — Some of us are not born to make money, dear boy. Luckily for us, we can marry it.” — Rico made a priceless face.

“Is Mrs. Vyner so rich?” asked Lou.

“She is quite a wealthy woman — in coal,” replied Mrs. Witt. “But the Dean is surely worth his weight even in gold. And he’s a massive figure. I can imagine there would be great satisfaction in having him for a husband.”

“Why, mother?” asked Lou.

“Oh, such a presence! One of these old Englishmen that nobody can put in their pocket. You can’t imagine his wife asking him to thread her needle. Something after all so robust! So different from young Englishmen, who all seem to me like ladies, perfect ladies.”

“Somebody has to keep up the tradition of the perfect lady,” said Rico.

“I know it,” said Mrs. Witt. “And if the women won’t do it, the young gentlemen take on the burden. They bear it very well.”

It was in full swing, the cut and thrust. And poor Lou, who had reached the point of stupefaction in the game, felt she did not know what to do with herself.

Rico and Mrs. Witt were deadly enemies, yet neither could keep clear of the other. It might have been they who were married to one another, their duel and their duet were so relentless.

But Rico immediately started the social round: first the Manbys: then motor twenty miles to luncheon at Lady Tewkesbury’s: then young Mr. Burns came flying down in his aeroplane from Chester: then they must motor to the sea to Sir Edward Edwards’s place, where there was a moonlight bathing party. Everything intensely thrilling, and so innerly wearisome, Lou felt.

But back of it all was St. Mawr, looming like a bonfire in the dark. He really was a tiresome horse to own. He worried the mares, if they were in the same paddock with him, always driving them round. And with any other horse he just fought with definite intent to kill. So he had to stay alone.

“That St. Mawr, he’s a bad horse,” said Phoenix.

“Maybe!” said Lewis.

“You don’t like quiet horses?” said Phoenix.

“Most horses is quiet,” said Lewis. “St. Mawr, he’s different.”

“Why don’t he never get any foals?”

“Doesn’t want to, I should think. Same as me.”

“What good is a horse like that? Better shoot him, before he kill somebody.”

“What good’ll they get, shooting St. Mawr?” said Lewis. “If he kills somebody!” said Phoenix.

But there was no answer.

The two grooms both lived over the stables, and Lou, from her window, saw a good deal of them. They were two quiet men, yet she was very much aware of their presence, aware of Phoenix’s rather high square shoulders and his fine, straight, vigorous black hair that tended to stand up assertively on his head, as he went quietly drifting about his various jobs. He was not lazy, but he did everything with a sort of diffidence, as if from a distance, and handled his horses carefully, cautiously, and cleverly, but without sympathy. He seemed to be holding something back all the time, unconsciously, as if in his very being there was some secret. But it was a secret of will. His quiet, reluctant movement as if he never really wanted to do anything; his long, flat-stepping stride; the permanent challenge in his high cheek-bones, the Indian glint in his eyes, and his peculiar stare, watchful and yet unseeing, made him unpopular with the women servants.

Nevertheless, women had a certain fascination for him: he would stare at the pretty young maids with an intent blank stare when they were not looking. Yet he was rather overbearing, domineering with them, and they resented him. It was evident to Lou that he looked upon himself as belonging to the master, not to the servant class. When he flirted with the maids, as he very often did, for he had a certain crude ostentatiousness, he seemed to let them feel that he despised them as inferiors, servants, while he admired their pretty charms, as fresh, country maids.

“I’m fair nervous of that Phoenix,” said Fanny, the fair-haired girl. “He makes you feel what he’d do to you if he could.”

“He’d better not try with me,” said Mabel. “I’d scratch his cheeky eyes out. Cheek! — for it’s nothing else! He’s nobody — common as they’re made!”

“He makes you feel you was there for him to trample on,” said Fanny.

“Mercy, you are soft! If anybody’s that it’s him. Oh, my, Fanny, you’ve no right to let a fellow make you feel like that! Make them feel that they’re dirt, for you to trample on: which they are!”

Fanny, however, being a shy little blonde thing, wasn’t good at assuming the trampling role. She was definitely nervous of Phoenix. And he enjoyed it. An invisible smile seemed to creep up his cheek-bones, and the glint moved in his eyes as he teased her. He tormented her by his very presence, as he knew.

He would come silently up when she was busy, and stand behind her perfectly still, so that she was unaware of his presence. Then, silently, he would make her aware. Till she glanced nervously round, and with a scream saw him.

One day Lou watched the little play. Fanny had been picking over a bowl of blackcurrants, sitting on the bench under the maple tree in a corner of the yard. She didn’t look round till she had picked up her bowl to go to the kitchen. Then there was a scream and a crash.

When Lou came out, Phoenix was crouching down silently gathering up the currants, which the little maid, scarlet and trembling, was collecting into another bowl. Phoenix seemed to be smiling down his back.

“Phoenix!” said Lou. “I wish you wouldn’t startle Fanny!” He looked up and she saw the glint of ridicule in his eyes.

“Who, me?” he said.

“Yes, you. You go up behind Fanny to startle her. You’re not to do it.”

He slowly stood erect and lapsed into his peculiar invisible silence. Only for a second his eyes glanced at Lou’s, and then she saw the cold anger, the gleam of malevolence and contempt. He could not bear being commanded, or reprimanded, by a woman.

Yet it was even worse with a man.

“What’s that, Lou?” said Rico, appearing all handsome and in the picture, in white flannels with an apricot silk shirt.

“I’m telling Phoenix he’s not to torment Fanny!”

“Oh!” — and Rico’s voice immediately became his father’s, the important government official’s. “Certainly not! Most certainly not!” He looked at the scattered currants and the broken bowl. Fanny melted into tears. “This, I suppose, is some of the results! Now look here, Phoenix, you’re to leave the maids strictly alone. I shall ask them to report to me whenever, or if ever, you interfere with them. But I hope you won’t interfere with them — in any way. You understand?”

As Rico became more and more Sir Harry and the government official, Lou’s bones melted more and more into discomfort. Phoenix stood in his peculiar silence, the invisible smile on his cheek-bones.

“You understand what I’m saying to you?” Rico demanded, in intensified acid tones.

But Phoenix only stood there, as it were behind a cover of his own will, and looked back at Rico with a faint smile on his face and the glint moving in his eyes.

“Do you intend to answer?” Rico’s upper lip lifted nastily. “Mrs. Witt is my boss,” came from Phoenix.

The scarlet flew up Rico’s throat and flushed his face, his eyes went glaucous. Then quickly his face turned yellow.

Lou looked at the two men: her husband, whose rages, over-controlled, were organically terrible: the half-breed, whose dark-coloured lips were widened in a faint smile of derision, but in whose eyes caution and hate were playing against one another. She realised that Phoenix would accept her reprimand, or her mother’s, because he could despise the two of them as mere women. But Rico’s business aroused murder pure and simple.

She took her husband’s arm.

“Come, dear!” she said in her half-plaintive way. “I’m sure Phoenix understands. We all understand. Go to the kitchen, Fanny, never mind the currants. There are plenty more in the garden.”

Rico was always thankful to be drawn quickly, submissively away from his own rage. He was afraid of it. He was afraid lest he should fly at the groom in some horrible fashion. The very thought horrified him. But in actuality he came very near to it.

He walked stiffly, feeling paralysed by his own fury. And those words, Mrs. Witt is my boss, were like hot acid in his brain. An insult!

“By the way, Belle-Mère!” he said when they joined Mrs. Witt — she hated being called Belle-Mère, and once said: “If I’m the bell-mare, are you one of the colts?” — She also hated his voice of smothered fury — ”I had to speak to Phoenix about persecuting the maids. He took the liberty of informing me that you were his boss, so perhaps you had better speak to him.”

“I certainly will. I believe they’re my maids, and nobody else’s, so it’s my duty to look after them. Who was he persecuting?”

“I’m the responsible one, mother,” said Lou.

Rico disappeared in a moment. He must get out: get away from the house. How? Something was wrong with the car. Yet he must get away, away. He would go over to Corrabach. He would ride St. Mawr. He had been talking about the horse, and Flora Manby was dying to see him. She had said: “Oh, I can’t wait to see that marvellous horse of yours.”

He would ride him over. It was only seven miles. He found Lou’s maid Elena, and sent her to tell Lewis. Meanwhile, to soothe himself, he dressed himself most carefully in white riding-breeches and a shirt of purple silk crepe, with a flowing black tie spotted red like a ladybird, and black riding-boots. Then he took a chic little white hat with a black band.

St. Mawr was saddled and waiting, and Lewis had saddled a second horse.

“Thanks, Lewis, I’m going alone!” said Rico.

This was the first time he had ridden St. Mawr in the country, and he was nervous. But he was also in the hell of a smothered fury. All his careful dressing had not really soothed him. So his fury consumed his nervousness.

He mounted with a swing, blind and rough. St. Mawr reared.

“Stop that!” snarled Rico, and put him to the gate.

Once out in the village street, the horse went dancing sideways. He insisted on dancing at the sidewalk, to the exaggerated terror of the children. Rico, exasperated, pulled him across. But no, he wouldn’t go down the centre of the village street. He began dancing and edging on to the other sidewalk, so the foot-passengers fled into the shops in terror.

The devil was in him. He would turn down every turning where he was not meant to go. He reared with panic at a furniture van. He insisted on going down the wrong side of the road. Rico was riding him with a martingale, and he could see the rolling, bloodshot eye.

“Damn you, go!” said Rico, giving him a dig with the spurs. And away they went, down the high-road, in a thunderbolt. It was a hot day, with thunder threatening, so Rico was soon in a flame of heat. He held on tight, with fixed eyes, trying all the time to rein in the horse. What he really was afraid of was that the brute would shy suddenly as he galloped. Watching for this, he didn’t care when they sailed past the turning to Corrabach.

St. Mawr flew on, in a sort of élan. Marvellous the power and life in the creature. There was really a great joy in the motion. If only he wouldn’t take the corners at a gallop, nearly swerving Rico off! Luckily the road was clear. To ride, to ride at this terrific gallop, on into eternity!

After several miles, the horse slowed down, and Rico managed to pull him into a lane that might lead to Corrabach. When all was said and done, it was a wonderful ride. St. Mawr could go like the wind, but with that luxurious heavy ripple of life which is like nothing else on earth. It seemed to carry one at once into another world, away from the life of the nerves.

So Rico arrived, after all, something of a conqueror at Corrabach. To be sure, he was perspiring, and so was his horse. But he was a hero from another, heroic world.

“Oh, such a hot ride!” he said, as he walked on to the lawn at Corrabach Hall. “Between the sun and the horse, really! — between two fires!”

“Don’t you trouble, you’re looking dandy, a bit hot and flushed like,” said Flora Manby. “Let’s go and see your horse.”

And he exclamation was: “Oh, he’s lovely! He’s fine! I’d love to try him once — ”

Rico decided to accept the invitation to stay overnight at Corrabach. Usually he was very careful, and refused to stay, unless Lou was with him. But they telephoned to the post office at Chomesbury, would Mr. Jones please send a message to Lady Carrington that Sir Henry was staying the night at Corrabach Hall, but would be home next day. Mr. Jones received the request with unction, and said he would go over himself to give the message to Lady Carrington.

Lady Carrington was in the walled garden. The peculiarity of Mrs. Witt’s house was that, for grounds proper, it had the churchyard.

“I never thought, Louise, that one day I should have an old English churchyard for my lawns and shrubbery and park, and funeral mourners for my herds of deer. It’s curious. For the first time in my life a funeral has become a real thing to me. I feel I could write a book on them.”

But Louise only felt intimidated.

At the back of the house was a flagged courtyard, with stables and a maple tree in a corner, and big doors opening on to the village street. But at the side was a walled garden, with fruit trees and currant bushes and a great bed of rhubarb, and some tufts of flowers, peonies, pink roses, sweet williams. Phoenix, who had a certain taste for gardening, would be out there thinning the carrots or tying up the lettuce. He was not lazy. Only he would not take work seriously, as a job. He would be quite amused tying up lettuces, and would tie up head after head, quite prettily. Then, becoming bored, he would abandon his task, light a cigarette, and go and stand on the threshold of the big doors, in full view of the street, watching, and yet completely indifferent.

After Rico’s departure on St. Mawr, Lou went into the garden. And there she saw Phoenix working in the onion-bed. He was bending over, in his own silence, busy with nimble, amused fingers among the grassy young onions. She thought he had not seen her, so she went down another path to where a swing bed hung under the apple tree. There she sat with a book and a bundle of magazines. But she did not read.

She was musing vaguely. Vaguely, she was glad that Rico was away for a while. Vaguely, she felt a sense of bitterness, of complete futility: the complete futility of her living. This left her drifting in a sea of utter chagrin. And Rico seemed to her the symbol of the futility. Vaguely, she was aware that something else existed, but she didn’t know where it was or what it was.

In the distance she could see Phoenix’s dark, rather tall-built head, with its black, fine, intensely-living hair tending to stand on end, like a brush with long, very fine black bristles. His hair, she thought, betrayed him as an animal of a different species. He was growing a little bored by weeding onions: that also she could tell. Soon he would want some other amusement.

Presently Lewis appeared. He was small, energetic, a little bit bow-legged, and he walked with a slight strut. He wore khaki riding-breeches, leather gaiters, and a blue shirt. And, like Phoenix, he rarely had any cap or hat on his head. His thick black hair was parted at the side and brushed over heavily sideways, dropping on his forehead at the right. It was very long, a real mop, under which his eyebrows were dark and steady.

“Seen Lady Carrington?” he asked of Phoenix.

“Yes, she’s sitting on that swing over there — she’s been there quite a while.”

The wretch — he had seen her from the very first!

Lewis came striding over, looking towards her with his pale-grey eyes, from under his mop of hair.

“Mr. Jones from the post office wants to see you, my Lady, with a message from Sir Henry.”

Instantly alarm took possession of Lou’s soul.

“Oh! — Does he want to see me personally? — What message? Is anything wrong?” — And her voice trailed out over the last word, with a sort of anxious nonchalance.

“I don’t think it’s anything amiss,” said Lewis reassuringly.

“Oh! You don’t,” the relief came into her voice. Then she looked at Lewis with a slight, winning smile in her unmatched eyes. “I’m so afraid of St. Mawr, you know.” Her voice was soft and cajoling. Phoenix was listening in the distance.

“St. Mawr’s all right, if you don’t do nothing to him,” Lewis replied.

“I’m sure he is! — But how is one to know when one is doing something to him? — Tell Mr. Jones to come here, please,” she concluded, on a changed tone.

Mr. Jones, a man of forty-five, thick-set, with a fresh complexion and rather foolish brown eyes, and a big brown moustache, came prancing down the path, smiling rather fatuously, and doffing his straw hat with a gorgeous bow the moment he saw Lou sitting in her slim white frock on the coloured swing bed under the trees with their hard green apples.

“Good-morning, Mr. Jones!”

“Good-morning, Lady Carrington. — If I may say so, what a picture you make — a beautiful picture — ”

He beamed under his big brown moustache like the greatest lady-killer.

“Do I! — Did Sir Henry say he was all right?”

“He didn’t say exactly, but I should expect he is all right — ” and Mr. Jones delivered his message, in the mayonnaise of his own unction.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Jones. It’s awfully good of you to come and tell me. Now I shan’t worry about Sir Henry at all.”

“It’s a great pleasure to come and deliver a satisfactory message to Lady Carrington. But it won’t be kind to Sir Henry if you don’t worry about him at all in his absence. We all enjoy being worried about by those we love — so long as there is nothing to worry about, of course!”

“Quite!” said Lou. “Now won’t you take a glass of port and a biscuit, or a whisky and soda? And thank you ever so much.”

“Thank you, my Lady. I might drink a whisky and soda, since you are so good.”

And he beamed fatuously.

“Let Mr. Jones mix himself a whisky and soda, Lewis,” said Lou.

“Heavens!” she thought, as the postmaster retreated a little uncomfortably down the garden path, his bald spot passing in and out of the sun, under the trees: “How ridiculous everything is, how ridiculous, ridiculous!” Yet she didn’t really dislike Mr. Jones and his interlude.

Phoenix was melting away out of the garden. He had to follow the fun.

“Phoenix!” Lou called. “Bring me a glass of water, will you? Or send somebody with it.”

He stood in the path looking round at her.

“All right!” he said

And he turned away again.

She did not like being alone in the garden. She liked to have the men working somewhere near. Curious how pleasant it was to sit there in the garden when Phoenix was about, or Lewis. It made her feel she could never be lonely or jumpy. But when Rico was there, she was all aching nerve.

Phoenix came back with a glass of water, lemon juice, sugar, and a small bottle of brandy. He knew Lou liked a spoonful of brandy in her iced lemonade.

“How thoughtful of you, Phoenix!” she said. “Did Mr. Jones get his whisky?”

“He was just getting it.”

“That’s right. — By the way, Phoenix, I wish you wouldn’t get mad if Sir Henry speaks to you. He is really so kind.”

She looked up at the man. He stood there watching her in silence, the invisible smile on his face, and the inscrutable Indian glint moving in his eyes. What was he thinking? There was something passive and almost submissive about him, but underneath this, an unyielding resistance and cruelty: yes, even cruelty. She felt that, on top, he was submissive and attentive, bringing her her lemonade as she liked it, without being told: thinking for her quite subtly. But underneath there was an unchanging hatred. He submitted circumstantially, he worked for a wage. And even circumstantially, he liked his mistress — la patrona — and her daughter. But much deeper than any circumstance or any circumstantial liking, was the categorical hatred upon which he was founded, and with which he was powerless. His liking for Lou and for Mrs. Witt, his serving them and working for a wage, was all side-tracking his own nature, which was grounded on hatred of their very existence. But what was he to do? He had to live. Therefore he had to serve, to work for a wage, and even to be faithful.

And yet their existence made his own existence negative. If he was to exist, positively, they would have to cease to exist. At the same time, a fatal sort of tolerance made him serve these women, and go on serving.

“Sir Henry is so kind to everybody,” Lou insisted.

The half-breed met her eyes, and smiled uncomfortably. “Yes, he’s a kind man,” he replied, as if sincerely. “Then why do you mind if he speaks to you?”

“I don’t mind,” said Phoenix glibly.

“But you do. Or else you wouldn’t make him so angry.”

“Was he angry? I don’t know,” said Phoenix.

“He was very angry. And you do know.”

“No, I don’t know if he’s angry. I don’t know,” the fellow persisted. And there was a glib sort of satisfaction in his tone.

“That’s awfully unkind of you, Phoenix,” she said, growing offended in her turn.

“No, I don’t know if he’s angry. I don’t want to make him angry. I don’t know — ”

He had taken on a tone of naïve ignorance, which at once gratified her pride as a woman, and deceived her.

“Well, you believe me when I tell you you did make him angry, don’t you?”

“Yes, I believe when you tell me.”

“And you promise me, won’t you, not to do it again? It’s so bad for him — so bad for his nerves, and for his eyes. It makes them inflamed, and injures his eyesight. And you know, as an artist, it’s terrible if anything happens to his eyesight — ”

Phoenix was watching her closely, to take it in. He still was not good at understanding continuous, logical statement. Logical connection in speech seemed to stupefy him, make him stupid. He understood in disconnected assertions of fact. But he had gathered what she said. “He gets mad at you. When he gets mad, it hurts his eyes. His eyes hurt him. He can’t see, because his eyes hurt him. He wants to paint a picture, he can’t. He can’t paint a picture, he can’t see clear — ”

Yes, he had understood. She saw he had understood. The bright glint of satisfaction moved in his eyes.

“So now promise me, won’t you, you won’t make him mad again: you won’t make him angry?”

“No, I won’t make him angry. I don’t do anything to make him angry,” Phoenix answered, rather glibly.

“And you do understand, don’t you? You do know how kind he is: how he’d do a good, turn to anybody?”

“Yes, he’s a kind man,” said Phoenix.

“I’m so glad you realise. There, that’s luncheon! How nice It is to sit here in the garden, when everybody is nice to you! No, I can carry the tray, don’t you bother.”

But he took the tray from her hand and followed her to the house. And as he walked behind her, he watched the slim white nape of her neck, beneath the clustering of her bobbed hair, something as a stoat watches a rabbit he is following.

In the afternoon Lou retreated once more to her place in the garden. There she lay, sitting with a bunch of pillows behind her, neither reading nor working, just musing. She had learned the new joy: to do absolutely nothing, but to lie and let the sunshine filter through the leaves, to see the bunch of red-hot-poker flowers pierce scarlet into the afternoon, beside the comparative neutrality of some foxgloves. The mere colour of hard red, like the big Oriental poppies that had fallen, and these poker flowers, lingered in her consciousness like a communication.

Into this peaceful indolence, when even the big, dark-grey tower of the church beyond the wall and the yew trees was keeping its bells in silence, advanced Mrs. Witt, in a broad Panama hat and a white dress.

“Don’t you want to ride, or do something, Louise?” she asked ominously.

“Don’t you want to be peaceful, mother?” retorted Louise.

“Yes — an active peace. — I can’t believe that my daughter can be content to lie on a hammock and do nothing, not even read or improve her mind, the greater part of the day.”

“Well, your daughter is content to do that. It’s her greatest pleasure.”

“I know it. I can see it. And it surprises me very much. When I was your age, I was never still. I had so much go — ”

“No, but, mother, I only take life differently. Perhaps you used up that sort of go. I’m the harem type, mother: only I never want the men inside the lattice.”

“Are you really my daughter? — Well! A woman never knows what will happen to her. I’m an American woman, and I suppose I’ve got to remain one, no matter where I am. — What did you want, Lewis?”

The groom had approached down the path.

“If I am to saddle Poppy?” said Lewis.

“No, apparently not!” replied Mrs. Witt. “Your mistress prefers the hammock to the saddle.”

“Thank you, Lewis. What mother says is true this afternoon, at least.” And she gave him a peculiar little cross-eyed smile.

“Who,” said Mrs. Witt to the man, “has been cutting at your hair?”

There was a moment of silent resentment.

“I did it myself, Mam! Sir Henry said it was too long.”

“He certainly spoke the truth. But I believe there’s a barber in the village on Saturdays — or you could ride over to Shrewsbury. Just turn round, and let me look at the back. Is it the money?”

“No, Mam. I don’t like these fellows touching my head.” He spoke coldly, with a certain hostile reserve that at once piqued Mrs. Witt.

“Don’t you really!” she said. “But it’s quite impossible for you to go about as you are. It gives you a half-witted appearance. Go now into the yard and get a chair and a dust-sheet. I’ll cut your hair.”

The man hesitated, hostile.

“Don’t be afraid, I know how it’s done. I’ve cut the hair of many a poor wounded boy in hospital: and shaved them too. You’ve got such a touch, nurse! Poor fellow, he was dying, though none of us knew it. — Those are the compliments I value, Louise. — Get that chair now, and a dust-sheet, I’ll borrow your hair-scissors from Elena, Louise.”

Mrs. Witt, happily on the war-path, was herself again. She didn’t care for work, actual work. But she loved trimming. She loved arranging unnatural and pretty salads, devising new and piquant-looking ice-creams, having a turkey stuffed exactly as she knew a stuffed turkey in Louisiana, with chestnuts and butter and stuff, or showing a servant how to turn waffles on a waffle-iron, or to bake a ham with brown sugar and cloves and a moistening of rum. She liked pruning rose trees, or beginning to cut a yew hedge into shape. She liked ordering her own and Louise’s shoes, with an exactitude and a knowledge of shoe-making that sent the salesmen crazy. She was a demon in shoes. Reappearing from America, she would pounce on her daughter. “Louise, throw those shoes away. Give them to one of the maids.” — ”But, mother, they are some of the best French shoes. I like them.” — ”Throw them away. A shoe has only two excuses for existing: perfect comfort or perfect appearance. Those have neither. I have brought you some shoes.” — Yes, she had brought ten pairs of shoes from New York. She knew her daughter’s foot as she knew her own.

So now she was in her element, looming behind Lewis as he sat in the middle of the yard swathed in a dust-sheet. She had on an overall and a pair of wash-leather gloves, and she poised a pair of long scissors like one of the Fates. In her big hat she looked curiously young, but with the youth of a bygone generation. Her heavy-lidded, laconic grey eyes were alert, studying the groom’s black mop of hair. Her eyebrows made thin, uptilting black arches on her brow. Her fresh skin was slightly powdered, and she was really handsome in a bold, bygone, eighteenth-century style. Some of the curious, adventurous stoicism of the eighteenth century: and then a Certain blatant American efficiency.

Lou, who had strayed into the yard to see, looked so much younger and so many thousand of years older than her mother, as she stood in her wisp-like diffidence, the clusters of grape-like bobbed hair hanging beside her face, with its fresh colouring and its ancient weariness, her slightly squinting eyes, that were so disillusioned they were becoming faunlike.

“Not too short, mother, not too short!” she remonstrated, as Mrs. Witt, with a terrific flourish of efficiency, darted at the man’s black hair, and the thick flakes fell like black snow.

“Now, Louise, I’m right in this job, please don’t interfere. Two things I hate to see: a man with his wool in his neck and ears: and a bare-faced young man who looks as if he’d bought his face as well as his hair from a men’s beauty-specialist.”

And efficiently she bent down, clip — clip — clipping! while Lewis sat utterly immobile, with sunken head, in a sort of despair.

Phoenix stood against the stable door, with his restless, eternal cigarette. And in the kitchen doorway the maids appeared and fled, appeared and fled in delight. The old gardener, a fixture who went with the house, creaked in and stood with his legs apart, silent in intense condemnation.

“First time I ever see such a thing!” he muttered to himself, as he creaked on into the garden. He was a bad-tempered old soul, who thoroughly disapproved of the household, and would have given notice, but that he knew which side his bread was buttered: and there was butter unstinted on his bread in Mrs. Witt’s kitchen.

Mrs. Witt stood back to survey her handiwork, holding those terrifying shears with their beak erect. Lewis lifted his head and looked stealthily round, like a creature in a trap. “Keep still!” she said. “I haven’t finished.”

And she went for his front hair, with vigour, lifting up long layers and snipping off the ends artistically: till at last he sat with a black aureole upon the floor, and his ears standing out with curious new alertness from the sides of his clean-clipped head.

“Stand up,” she said, “and let me look.”

He stood up, looking absurdly young, with the hair all cut away from his neck and ears, left thick only on top. She surveyed her work with satisfaction.

“You look so much younger,” she said, “you would be surprised. Sit down again.”

She clipped the back of his neck with the shears, and then, with a very slight hesitation, she said:

“Now about the beard!”

But the man rose suddenly from the chair, pulling the dust-cloth from his neck with desperation.

“No, I’ll do that myself,” he said, looking her in the eyes with a cold light in his pale-grey, uncanny eyes.

She hesitated in a kind of wonder at his queer male rebellion.

“Now, listen, I shall do it much better than you — and besides,” she added hurriedly, snatching at the dust-cloth he was flinging on the chair — ”I haven’t quite finished round the ears.”

“I think I shall do,” he said, again looking her in the eyes, with a cold, white gleam of finality. “Thank you for what you’ve done.”

And he walked away to the stable.

“You’d better sweep up here,” Mrs. Witt called.

“Yes, Mam,” he replied, looking round at her again with an odd resentment, but continuing to walk away.

“However!” said Mrs. Witt, “I suppose he’ll do.”

And she divested herself of gloves and overall and walked indoors to wash and to change. Lou went indoors too.

“It is extraordinary what hair that man has!” said Mrs. Witt. “Did I tell you when I was in Paris, I saw a woman’s face in the hotel that I thought I knew? I couldn’t place her, till she was coming towards me. ‘Aren’t you Rachel Fannière?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you Janette Leroy?’ We hadn’t seen each other since we were girls of twelve and thirteen, at school in New Orleans. ‘Oh!’ she said to me. ‘Is every illusion doomed to perish? You had such wonderful golden curls! All my life I’ve said, Oh, if only I had such lovely hair as Rachel Fannière! I’ve seen those beautiful golden curls of yours all my life. And now I meet you, you’re grey!’ Wasn’t that terrible, Louise? Well, that man’s hair made me think of it — so thick and curious. It’s strange what a difference there is in hair; I suppose it’s because he’s just an animal — no mind! There’s nothing I admire in a man like a good mind. Your father was a very clever man, and all the men I’ve admired have been clever. But isn’t it curious now, I’ve never cared much to touch their hair. How strange life is! If it gives one thing, it takes away another. — And even those poor boys in hospital: I have shaved them, or cut their hair, like a mother, never thinking anything of it. Lovely, intelligent, clean boys, most of them were. Yet it never did anything to me. I never knew before that something could happen to one from a person’s hair! Like to Janette Leroy from my curls when I was a child. And now I’m grey, as she says. — I wonder how old a man Lewis is, Louise! Didn’t he look absurdly young with his ears pricking up?”

“I think Rico said he was forty or forty-one.”

“And never been married?”

“No — not as far as I know.”

“Isn’t that curious now! — just an animal! No mind! A man with no mind! I’ve always thought that the most despicable thing. Yet such wonderful hair to touch. Your Henry has quite a good mind, yet I would simply shrink from touching his hair. I suppose one likes stroking a cat’s fur, just the same. Just the animal in man. Curious that I never seem to have met it, Louise. Now I come to think of it, he has the eyes of a human cat: a human tom-cat. Would you call him stupid? Yes, he’s very stupid.”

“No, mother, he’s not stupid. He only doesn’t care about most things.”

“Like an animal! But what a strange look he has in his eyes! A strange sort of intelligence! and a confidence in himself. Isn’t that curious, Louise, in a man with as little mind as he has? Do you know, I should say he could see through a woman pretty well.”

“Why, mother!” said Lou impatiently. “I think one gets so tired of your men with mind, as you call it. There are so many of that sort of clever men. And there are lots of men who aren’t very clever, but are rather nice: and lots are stupid. It seems to me there’s something else besides mind and cleverness, or niceness or cleanness. Perhaps it is the animal. Just think of St. Mawr! I’ve thought so much about him. We call him an animal, but we never know what it means. He seems a far greater mystery to me than a clever man. He’s a horse. Why can’t one say in the same way of a man: ‘He’s a man?’ There seems no mystery in being a man. But there’s a terrible mystery in St. Mawr.”

Mrs. Witt watched her daughter quizzically.

“Louise,” she said, “you won’t tell me that the mere animal is all that counts in a man. I will never believe it. Man is wonderful because he is able to think.”

“But is he?” cried Lou, with sudden exasperation. “Their thinking seems to me all so childish: like stringing the same beads over and over again. Ah, men! They and their thinking are all so paltry. How can you be impressed?”

Mrs. Witt raised her eyebrows sardonically.

“Perhaps I’m not — any more,” she said with a grim smile.

“But,” she added, “I still can’t see that I am to be impressed by the mere animal in man. The animals are the same as we are. It seems to me they have the same feelings and wants as we do in a commonplace way. The only difference is that they have no minds: no human minds, at least. And no matter what you say, Louise, lack of minds makes the commonplace.”

Lou knitted her brows nervously.

“I suppose it does, mother. — But men’s minds are so commonplace: look at Dean Vyner and his mind! Or look at Arthur Balfour, as a shining example. Isn’t that commonplace, that cleverness? I would hate St. Mawr to be spoilt by such a mind.”

“Yes, Louise, so would I. Because the men you mention are really old women, knitting the same pattern over and over again. Nevertheless, I shall never alter my belief that real mind is all that matters in a man, and it’s that that we women love.”

“Yes, mother! — But what is real mind? The old woman who knits the most complicated pattern? Oh, I can hear all their needles clicking, the clever men! As a matter of fact, mother, I believe Lewis has far more real mind than Dean Vyner or any of the clever ones. He has a good intuitive mind, he knows things without thinking them.”

“That may be, Louise! But he is a servant. He is under. A real man should never be under. And then you could never be intimate with a man like Lewis.”/

“I don’t want intimacy, mother. I’m too tired of it all. I love St. Mawr because he isn’t intimate. He stands where one can’t get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That’s the mystery. That great burning life in him, which never is dead. Most men have a deadness in them, that frightens me so, because of my own deadness. Why can’t men get their life straight, like St. Mawr, and then think? Why can’t they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do? Why isn’t men’s thinking quick like fire, mother? Why is it so slow, so dead, so deadly dull?”

“I can’t tell you, Louise. My own opinion of the men of to-day has grown very small. But I can live in spite of it.”

“No, mother. We seemed to be living off old fuel, like the camel when he lives off his hump. Life doesn’t rush into us, as it does even into St. Mawr, and he’s a dependent animal. I can’t live, mother. I just can’t.”

“I don’t see why not! I’m full of life.”

“I know you are, mother. But I’m not, and I’m your daughter. — And don’t misunderstand me, mother! I don’t want to be an animal like a horse or a cat or a lioness, though they all fascinate me, the way they get their life straight, not from a lot of old tanks, as we do. I don’t admire the caveman, and that sort of thing. But think, mother, if we could get our lives straight from the source, as the animals do, and still be ourselves. You don’t like men yourself. But you’ve no idea how men just tire me out: even the very thought of them. You say they are too animal. But they’re not, mother. It’s the animal in them has gone perverse, or cringing, or humble, or domesticated, like dogs. I don’t know one single man who is a proud living animal. I know they’ve left off really thinking. But then men always do leave off really thinking when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”

“Because we have minds — ”

“We have no minds once we are tame, mother. Men are all women, knitting and crocheting words together.”

“I can’t altogether agree, you know, Louise.”

“I know you don’t. — You like clever men. But clever men are mostly such unpleasant animals. As animals, so very unpleasant. And in men like Rico, the animal has gone queer and wrong. And in those nice clean boys you liked so much in the war, there is no wild animal left in them. They’re all tame dogs, even when they’re brave and well-bred. They’re all tame dogs, mother, with human masters. There’s no mystery in them.”

“What do you want, Louise? You do want the cave man, who’ll knock you on the head with a club.”

“Don’t be silly, mother. That’s much more your subconscious line, you admirer of Mind — I don’t consider the cave man is a real human animal at all. He’s a brute, a degenerate. A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he’d be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he’d never cease to wonder, he’d breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He’d be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves. — Ah, no, mother, I want the wonder back again, or I shall die. I don’t want to be like you, just criticising and annihilating these dreary people, and enjoying it.”

“My dear daughter, whatever else the human animal might be, he’d be a dangerous commodity.”

“I wish he would, mother. I’m dying of these empty danger-less men, who are only sentimental and spiteful.”

“Nonsense, you’re not dying.”

“I am, mother. And I should be dead if there weren’t St. Mawr and Phoenix and Lewis in the world.”

“St. Mawr and Phoenix and Lewis! I thought you said they were servants.”

“That’s the worst of it. If only they were masters! If only there were some men with as much natural life as they have, and their brave, quick minds that commanded instead of serving!”

“There are no such men,” said Mrs. Witt, with a certain grim satisfaction.

“I know it. But I’m young, and I’ve got to live. And the thing that is offered me as life just starves me, starves me to death, mother. What am I to do? You enjoy shattering people like Dean Vyner. But I am young, I can’t live that way!”

“That may be.”

It had long ago struck Lou how much more her mother realised and understood than ever Rico did. Rico was afraid, always afraid of realising. Rico, with his good manners and his habitual kindness, and that peculiar imprisoned sneer of his.

He arrived home next morning on St. Mawr, rather flushed and gaudy, and over-kind, with an empressé anxiety about Lou’s welfare which spoke too many volumes. Especially as he was accompanied by Flora Manby, and by Flora’s sister Elsie, and Elsie’s husband, Frederick Edwards. They all came on horseback.

“Such awful ages since I saw you!” said Flora to Lou. “Sorry if we burst in on you. We’re only just saying ‘How do you do!’ and going on to the inn. They’ve got rooms all ready for us there. We thought we’d stay just one night over here, and ride to-morrow to the Devil’s Chair. Won’t you come? Lots of fun! Isn’t Mrs. Witt at home?”

Mrs. Witt was out for the moment. When she returned she had on her curious stiff face, yet she greeted the newcomers with a certain cordiality: she felt it would be diplomatic, no doubt.

“There are two rooms here,” she said, “and if you care to poke into them, why, we shall be delighted to have you. But I’ll show them to you first, because they are poor, inconvenient rooms, with no running water and miles from the baths.”

Flora and Elsie declared that they were “perfectly darling sweet rooms — not overcrowded.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Witt, “the conveniences certainly don’t fill up much space. But if you like to take them for what they are — ”

“Why, we feel absolutely overwhelmed, don’t we, Elsie? — But we’ve no clothes — !”

Suddenly the silence had turned into a house-party. The Manby girls appeared to lunch in fine muslin dresses, bought in Paris, fresh as daisies. Women’s clothing takes up so little space, especially in summer! Fred Edwards was one of those blond Englishmen with a little brush moustache and those strong blue eyes which were always attempting the sentimental, but which Lou, in her prejudice, considered cruel: upon what grounds she never analysed. However, he took a gallant tone with her at once, and she had to seem to simper. Rico, watching her, was so relieved when he saw the simper coming.

It had begun again, the whole clockwork of ‘lots of fun’!

“Isn’t Fred flirting perfectly outrageously with Lady Carrington! — She looks so sweet!” cried Flora, over her coffee-cup. “Don’t you mind, Harry!”

They called Rico ‘Harry’! His boy-name.

“Only a very little,” said Harry. “L’uomo è cacciatore.”

“Oh, now, what does that mean?” cried Flora, who always thrilled to Rico’s bits of affectation.

“It means,” said Mrs. Witt, leaning forward and speaking in her most suave voice, “that man is a hunter.”

Even Flora shrank under the smooth acid of the irony. “Oh, well now!” she cried. “If he is, then what is woman?”

“The hunted,” said Mrs. Witt, in a still smoother acid. “At least,” said Rico, “she is always game!”

“Ah, is she though!” came Fred’s manly, well-bred tones. “I’m not so sure.”

Mrs. Witt looked from one man to the other, as if she were dropping them down the bottomless pit.

Lou escaped to look at St. Mawr. He was still moist where the saddle had been. And he seemed a little bit extinguished, as if virtue had gone out of him.

But when he lifted his lovely naked head, like a bunch of flames, to see who it was had entered, she saw he was still himself. Forever sensitive and alert, his head lifted like the summit of a fountain. And within him the clean bones striking to the earth, his hoofs intervening between him and the ground like lesser jewels.

He knew her and did not resent her. But he took no notice of her. He would never ‘respond’. At first she had resented It. Now she was glad. He would never be intimate, thank heaven.

She hid herself away till tea-time, but she could not hide from the sound of voices. Dinner was early, at seven. Dean Vyner came — Mrs. Vyner was an invalid — and also an artist who had a studio in the village and did etchings. He was a man of about thirty-eight, and poor, just beginning to accept himself as a failure, as far as making money goes. But he worked at his etchings and studied esoteric matters like astrology and alchemy. Rico patronised him, and was a little afraid of him. Lou could not quite make him out. After knocking about Paris and London and Munich, he was trying to become staid, and to persuade himself that English village life, with squire and dean in the background, humble artist in the middle, and labourer in the common foreground, was a genuine life. His self-persuasion was only moderately successful. This was betrayed by the curious arrest in his body: he seemed to have to force himself into movements: and by the curious duplicity in his yellow-grey, twinkling eyes, that twinkled and expanded like a goat’s, with mockery, irony, and frustration.

“Your face is curiously like Pan’s,” said Lou to him at dinner.

It was true, in a commonplace sense. He had the tilted eyebrows, the twinkling goaty look, and the pointed ears of a goat-Pan.

“People have said so,” he replied. “But I’m afraid it’s not the face of the Great God Pan. Isn’t it rather the Great Goat Pan!”

“I say, that’s good!” cried Rico. “The Great Goat Pan!”

“I have always found it difficult,” said the Dean, “to see the Great God Pan in that goat-legged old father of satyrs. He may have a good deal of influence — the world will always be full of goaty old satyrs. But we find them somewhat vulgar. The goaty old satyrs are too comprehensible to me to be venerable, and I fail to see a Great God in the father of them all.”

“Your ears should be getting red,” said Lou to Cartwright. She, too, had an odd squinting smile that suggested nymphs. so irresponsible and unbelieving.

“Oh no, nothing personal!” cried the Dean.

“I am not sure,” said Cartwright, with a small smile. “But don’t you imagine Pan once was a great god before the anthropomorphic Greeks turned him into half a man?”

“Ah! — maybe. This is very possible. But — I have noticed the limitation in myself — my mind has no grasp whatsoever of Europe before the Greeks arose. Mr. Wells’s Outline does not help me there, either,” the Dean added with a smile.

“But what was Pan before he was a man with goat legs?” asked Lou.

“Before he looked like me!” said Cartwright, with a faint grin. “I should say he was the god that is hidden in everything. In those days you saw the thing, you never saw the god in it: I mean in the tree or the fountain or the animal. If you ever saw the God instead of the thing, you died. If you saw it with the naked eye, that is. But in the night you might see the God. And you knew it was there.”

“The modern pantheist not only sees the God in everything, he takes photographs of it,” said the Dean.

“Oh, and the divine pictures he paints!” cried Rico.

“Quite!” said Cartwright.

“But if they never saw the God in the thing, the old ones, how did they know he was there? How did they have any Pan at all?” said Lou.

“Pan was the hidden mystery — the hidden cause. That’s how it was a Great God. Pan wasn’t he at all: not even a great God. He was Pan. All: what you see when you see in full. In the day-time you see the thing. But if your third eye is open, which sees only the things that can’t be seen, you may see Pan within the thing, hidden: you may see with your third eye, which is darkness.”

“Do you think I might see Pan in a horse, for example?”

“Easily. In St. Mawr!” — Cartwright gave her a knowing look.

“But,” said Mrs. Witt, “it would be difficult, I should say, to open the third eye and see Pan in a man.”

“Probably,” said Cartwright, smiling. “In man he is over-visible: the old satyr: the fallen Pan.”

“Exactly!” said Mrs. Witt. And she fell into a muse. “The fallen Pan!” she re-echoed. “Wouldn’t a man be wonderful in whom Pan hadn’t fallen!”

Over the coffee in the grey drawing-room she suddenly asked:

“Supposing, Mr. Cartwright, one did open the third eye and see Pan in an actual man — I wonder what it would be like?”

She half lowered her eyelids and tilted her face in a strange way, as if she were tasting something, and not quite sure.

“I wonder!” he said, smiling his enigmatic smile. But she could see he did not understand.

“Louise!” said Mrs. Witt at bed-time. “Come into my room for a moment, I want to ask you something.”

“What is it, mother?”

“You, you get something from what Mr. Cartwright said about seeing Pan with the third eye? Seeing Pan in something?”

Mrs. Witt came rather close and tilted her face with strange insinuating question at her daughter.

“I think I do, mother.”

“In what?” — The question came as a pistol-shot.

“I think, mother,” said Lou reluctantly, “in St. Mawr.”

“In a horse!” — Mrs. Witt contracted her eyes slightly. “Yes, I can see that. I know what you mean. It is in St. Mawr. It is! But in St. Mawr it makes me afraid — ” she dragged out the word. Then she came a step closer. “But, Louise, did you ever see it in a man?”

“What, mother?”

“Pan. Did you ever see Pan in a man, as you see Pan in St. Mawr?”

Louise hesitated.

“No, mother, I don’t think I did. When I look at men with my third eye, as you call it — I think I see — mostly — a sort of — pancake.” She uttered the last word with a despairing grin, not knowing quite what to say.

“Oh, Louise, isn’t that it! Doesn’t one always see a pancake! Now listen, Louise. Have you ever been in love?”

“Yes, as far as I understand it.”

“Listen, now. Did you ever see Pan in the man you loved? Tell me if you did.”

“As I see Pan in St. Mawr? — no, mother!” And suddenly her lips began to tremble and the tears came to her eyes.

“Listen, Louise. I’ve been in love innumerable times — and really in love twice. Twice! — yet for fifteen years I’ve left off wanting to have anything to do with a man, really. For fifteen years! And why? Do you know? Because I couldn’t see that peculiar hidden Pan in any of them. And I became that I needed to. I needed it. But it wasn’t there. Not in any man. Even when I was in love with a man, it was for other things: because I understood him so well, or he understood me, or we had such sympathy. Never the hidden Pan. Do you understand what I mean? Unfallen Pan!”

“More or less, mother.”

“But now my third eye is coming open, I believe. I am tired of all these men like breakfast cakes, with a teaspoonful of mind or a teaspoonful of spirit in them, for baking-powder. Isn’t it extraordinary: that young man Cartwright talks about Pan, but he knows nothing of it all. He knows nothing of the unfallen Pan: only the fallen Pan with goat legs and a leer — and that sort of power, don’t you know.”

“But what do you know of the unfallen Pan, mother?”

“Don’t ask me, Louise! I feel all of a tremble, as if I was just on the verge.”

She flashed a little look of incipient triumph, and said goodnight.

An excursion on horseback had been arranged for the next day, to two old groups of rocks, called the Angel’s Chair and the Devil’s Chair, which crowned the moor-like hills looking into Wales, ten miles away. Everybody was going — they were to start early in the morning, and Lewis would be the guide, since no one exactly knew the way.

Lou got up soon after sunrise. There was a summer scent in the trees of early morning, and monkshood flowers stood up dark and tall, with shadows. She dressed in the green linen riding-skirt her maid had put ready for her, with a close bluish smock.

“Are you going out already, dear?” called Rico from his room.

“Just to smell the roses before we start, Rico.”

He appeared in the doorway in his yellow silk pyjamas. His large blue eyes had that rolling, irritable look and the slightly bloodshot whites which made her want to escape.

“Booted and spurred! — the energy!” he cried.

“It’s a lovely day to ride,” she said.

“A lovely day to do anything except ride!” he said. “Why spoil the day riding?” — A curious bitter acid escaped into his tone. It was evident he hated the excursion.

“Why, we needn’t go if you don’t want to, Rico.”

“Oh, I’m sure I shall love it, once I get started. It’s all this business of starting, with horses and paraphernalia — ”

Lou went into the yard. The horses were drinking at the trough under the pump, their colours strong and rich in the shadow of the tree.

“You’re not coming with us, Phoenix?” she said. “Lewis, he’s riding my horse.”

She could tell Phoenix did not like being left behind.

By half-past seven everybody was ready. The sun was in the yard, the horses were saddled. They came swishing their tails. Lewis brought out St. Mawr from his separate box, speaking to him very quietly in Welsh: a murmuring, soothing little speech. Lou, alert, could see that he was uneasy. “How is St. Mawr this morning?” she asked.

“He’s all right. He doesn’t like so many people. He’ll be all right once he’s started.”

The strangers were in the saddle: they moved out to the deep shade of the village road outside. Rico came to his horse to mount. St. Mawr jumped away as if he had seen the devil. “Steady, fool!” cried Rico.

The bay stood with his four feet spread, his neck arched, his big dark eye glancing sideways with that watchful, frightening look.

“You shouldn’t be irritable with him, Rico!” said Lou. “Steady then, St. Mawr! Be steady.”

But a certain anger rose also in her. The creature was so big, so brilliant, and so stupid, standing there with his hind legs spread, ready to jump aside or to rear terrifically, and his great eye glancing with a sort of suspicious frenzy. What was there to be suspicious of, after all? — Rico would do him no harm.

“No one will harm you, St. Mawr,” she reasoned, a bit exasperated.

The groom was talking quietly, murmuringly, in Welsh. Rico was slowly advancing again to put his foot in the stirrup. The stallion was watching from the corner of his eye, a strange glare of suspicious frenzy burning stupidly. Any moment his immense physical force might be let loose in a frenzy of panic — or malice. He was really very irritating.

“Probably he doesn’t like that apricot shirt,” said Mrs. Witt, “although it tones into him wonderfully well.”

She pronounced it ap-ricot, and it irritated Rico terribly. “Ought we to have asked him before we put it on?” he flashed, his upper lip lifting venomously.

“I should say you should,” replied Mrs. Witt coolly.

Rico turned with a sudden rush to the horse. Back went the great animal, with a sudden splashing crash of hoofs on the cobble-stones, and Lewis hanging on like a shadow. Up went the forefeet, showing the belly.

“The thing is accursed,” said Rico, who had dropped the reins in sudden shock, and stood marooned. His rage overwhelmed him like a black flood.

“Nothing in the world is so irritating as a horse that is acting up,” thought Lou.

“Say, Harry!” called Flora from the road. “Come out here into the road to mount him.”

Lewis looked at Rico and nodded. Then soothing the big, quivering animal, he led him springily out to the road under the trees, where the three friends were waiting. Lou and her mother got quickly into the saddle to follow. And in another moment Rico was mounted and bouncing down the road in the wrong direction, Lewis following on the chestnut. It was some time before Rico could get St. Mawr round. Watching him from behind, those waiting could judge how the young baronet hated it.

But at last they set off — Rico ahead, unevenly but quietly, with the two Manby girls, Lou following with the fair young man who had been in a cavalry regiment and who kept looking round for Mrs. Witt.

“Don’t look round for me,” she called. “I’m riding behind, out of the dust.”

Just behind Mrs. Witt came Lewis. It was a whole cavalcade trotting in the morning sun past the cottages and the cottage gardens, round the field that was the recreation-ground, into the deep hedges of the lane.

“Why is St. Mawr so bad at starting? Can’t you get him Into better shape?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Beg your pardon, Mam!”

Lewis trotted a little nearer. She glanced over her shoulder at him, at his dark, unmoved face, his cool little figure. “I think Mani is so ugly. Why not leave it out!” she said. Then she repeated her question.

“St. Mawr doesn’t trust anybody,” Lewis replied. “Not you?”

“Yes, he trusts me — mostly.”

“Then why not other people?”

“They’re different.”

“All of them?”

“About all of them.”

“How are they different?”

He looked at her with his remote, uncanny grey eyes.

“Different,” he said, not knowing how else to put it.

They rode on slowly, up the steep rise of the wood, then down into a glade where ran a little railway built for hauling some mysterious mineral out of the hill in war-time, and now already abandoned. Even on this countryside the dead hand of the war lay like a corpse decomposing.

They rode up again, past the foxgloves under the trees. Ahead the brilliant St. Mawr and the sorrel and grey horses were swimming like butterflies through the sea of bracken, glittering from sun to shade, shade to sun. Then once more they were on a crest, and through the thinning trees could see the slopes of the moors beyond the next dip.

Soon they were in the open, rolling hills, golden in the morning and empty save for a couple of distant bilberry-pickers, whitish figures pick — pick — picking with curious, rather disgusting assiduity. The horses were on an old trail which climbed through the pinky tips of heather and ling, across patches of green bilberry. Here and there were tufts of harebells blue as bubbles.

They were out, high on the hills. And there to west lay Wales, folded in crumpled folds, goldish in the morning light, with its moor-like slopes and patches of corn uncannily distinct. Between was a hollow, wide valley of summer haze, showing white farms among trees, and grey slate roofs.

“Ride beside me,” she said to Lewis. “Nothing makes me want to go back to America like the old look of these little villages. — You have never been to America?”

“No, Mam.”

“Don’t you ever want to go?”

“I wouldn’t mind going.”

“But you’re not just crazy to go?”

“No, Mam.”

“Quite content as you are?”

He looked at her, and his pale, remote eyes met hers. “I don’t fret myself,” he replied.

“Not about anything at all — ever?”

His eyes glanced ahead, at the other riders.

“No, Mam!” he replied, without looking at her.

She rode a few moments in silence.

“What is that over there?” she asked, pointing across the valley. “What is it called?”

“Yon’s Montgomery.”

“Montgomery! And is that Wales — ?” she trailed the ending curiously.

“Yes, Mam.”

“Where you come from?”

“No, Mam! I come from Merioneth.”

“Not from Wales? I thought you were Welsh?”

“Yes, Mam. Merioneth is Wales.”

“And you are Welsh?”

“Yes, Mam.”

“I had a Welsh grandmother. But I come from Louisiana, and when I go back home, the negroes still call me Miss Rachel. ‘Oh, my, it’s little Miss Rachel come back home! Why, ain’t I mighty glad to see you — u, Miss Rachel!’ That gives me such a strange feeling, you know.”

The man glanced at her curiously, especially when she imitated the negroes.

“Do you feel strange when you go home?” she asked.

“I was brought up by an aunt and uncle,” he said. “I never want to see them.”

“And you don’t have any home?”

“No, Mam.”

“No wife nor anything?”

“No, Mam.”

“But what do you do with your life?”

“I keep to myself.”

“And care about nothing?”

“I mind St. Mawr.”

“But you’ve not always had St. Mawr — and you won’t always have him. — Were you in the war?”

“Yes, Mam.”

“At the front?”

“Yes, Mam — but I was a groom.”

“And you came out all right?”

“I lost my little finger from a bullet.”

He held up his small, dark left hand, from which the little finger was missing.

“And did you like the war — or didn’t you?”

“I didn’t like it.”

Again his pale grey eyes met hers, and they looked so nonhuman and uncommunicative, so without connection, and inaccessible, she was troubled.

“Tell me,” she said. “Did you never want a wife and a home and children, like other men?”

“No, Mam. I never wanted a home of my own.”

“Nor a wife of your own?”

“No, Mam.”

“Nor children of your own?”

“No, Mam.”

She reined in her horse.

“Now wait a minute,” she said. “Now tell me why.”

His horse came to standstill, and the two riders faced one another.

“Tell me why — I must know why you never wanted a wife and children and a home. I must know why you’re not like other men.”

“I never felt like it,” he said. “I made my life with horses.”

“Did you hate people very much? Did you have a very unhappy time as a child?”

“My aunt and uncle didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them.”

“So you’ve never liked anybody?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “Not to get as far as marrying them.” She touched her horse and moved on.

“Isn’t that curious!” she said. “I’ve loved people, at various times. But I don’t believe I’ve ever liked anybody, except a few of our negroes. I don’t like Louise, though she’s my daughter and I love her. But I don’t really like her. — I think you’re the first person I’ve ever liked since I was on our plantation, and we had some very fine negroes. — And I think that’s very curious. — Now I want to know if you like me.”

She looked at him searchingly, but he did not answer.

“Tell me,” she said. “I don’t mind if you say no. But tell me if you like me. I feel I must know.”

The flicker of a smile went over his face — a very rare thing with him.

“Maybe I do,” he said. He was thinking that she put him on a level with a negro slave on a plantation: in his idea, negroes were still slaves. But he did not care where she put him.

“Well, I’m glad — I’m glad if you like me. Because you don’t like most people, I know that.”

They had passed the hollow where the old Aldecar Chapel hid in damp isolation, beside the ruined mill, over the stream that came down from the moors. Climbing the sharp slope, they saw the folded hills like great shut fingers, with steep, deep clefts between. On the near skyline was a bunch of rocks: and away to the right another bunch.

“Yon’s the Angel’s Chair,” said Lewis, pointing to the nearer rocks. “And yon’s the Devil’s Chair, where we’re going.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Witt. “And aren’t we going to the Angel’s Chair?”

“No, mam.”

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing to see there. The other’s higher, and bigger, and that’s where folks mostly go.”

“Is that so! — They give the Devil the higher seat in this country, do they? I think they’re right.” And as she got no answer, she added: “You believe in the Devil, don’t you?”

“I never met him,” he answered evasively.

Ahead, they could see the other horses twinkling in a cavalcade up the slope, the black, the bay, the two greys and the sorrel, sometimes bunching, sometimes straggling. At a gate all waited for Mrs. Witt. The fair young man fell in beside her, and talked hunting at her. He had hunted the fox over these hills, and was vigorously excited locating the spot where the hounds first gave cry, etc.

“Really!” said Mrs. Witt. “Really! Is that so!”

If irony could have been condensed to prussic acid, the fair young man would have ended his life’s history with his reminiscences.

They came at last, trotting in file along a narrow track between heather, along the saddle of a hill, to where the knot of pale granite suddenly cropped out. It was one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood flows still in a few Englishmen, Welshmen, Cornishmen. The rocks, whitish with weather of all the ages, jutted against the blue August sky, heavy with age-moulded roundness.

Lewis stayed below with the horses, the party scrambled rather awkwardly, in their riding-boots, up the foot-worn boulders. At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow valley with farms, and then the rather bare upheaval of hills, slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slantingly. Yet it had a strange effect on the imagination.

“Oh, mother,” said Lou, “doesn’t it make you feel old, old, older than anything ever was?”

“It certainly does seem aged,” said Mrs. Witt.

“It makes me want to die,” said Lou. “I feel we’ve lasted almost too long.”

“Don’t say that, Lady Carrington. Why, you’re a spring chicken yet: or shall I say an unopened rose-bud,” remarked the fair young man.

“No,” said Lou. “All these millions of ancestors have used all the life up. We’re not really alive, in the sense that they were alive.”

“But who?” said Rico. “Who are they?”

“The people who lived on these hills in the days gone by.”

“But the same people still live on the hills, darling. It’s just the same stock.”

“No, Rico. That old fighting stock that worshipped devils among these stones — I’m sure they did — ”

“But look here, do you mean they were any better than we are?” asked the fair young man.

Lou looked at him quizzically.

“We don’t exist,” she said, squinting at him oddly.

“I jolly well know I do,” said the fair young man.

“I consider these days are the best ever, especially for girls,” said Flora Manby. “And, anyhow, they’re our own days, so I don’t jolly well see the use of crying them down.”

They were all silent, with the last echoes of emphatic joie de vivre trumpeting on the air, across the hills of Wales.

“Spoken like a brick, Flora,” said Rico. “Say it again, we may not have the Devil’s Chair for a pulpit next time.”

“I do,” reiterated Flora. “I think this is the best age there ever was for a girl to have a good time in. I read all through H. G. Wells’s History, and I shut it up and thanked my stars I live in nineteen-twenty odd, not in some other beastly date when a woman had to cringe before mouldy, domineering men.”

After this they turned to scramble to another part of the rocks, to the famous Needle’s Eye.

“Thank you so much, I am really better without help,” said Mrs. Witt to the fair young man, as she slid downwards till a piece of grey silk stocking showed above her tall boot. But she got her toe in a safe place, and in a moment stood beside him, while he caught her arm protectingly. He might as well have caught the paw of a mountain lion protectingly.

“I should like so much to know,” she said suavely, looking into his eyes with a demonish straight look, “what makes you so certain that you exist?”

He looked back at her, and his jaunty blue eyes went baffled. Then a slow, hot, salmon-coloured flush stole over his face, and he turned abruptly round.

The Needle’s Eye was a hole in the ancient grey rock, like a window, looking to England; England at the moment in shadow. A stream wound and glinted in the flat shadow, and beyond that the flat, insignificant hills heaped in mounds of shade. Cloud was coming — the English side was in shadow. Wales was still in the sun, but the shadow was spreading. The day was going to disappoint them. Lou was a tiny bit chilled already.

Luncheon was still several miles away. The party hastened down to the horses. Lou picked a few sprigs of ling, and some harebells, and some straggling yellow flowers: not because she wanted them, but to distract herself. The atmosphere of ‘enjoying ourselves’ was becoming cruel to her: it sapped all the life out of her. “Oh, if only I needn’t enjoy myself,” she moaned inwardly. But the Manby girls were enjoying themselves so much. “I think it’s frantically lovely up here,” said the other one — not Flora — Elsie.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it! I’m so glad you like it,” replied Rico. And he was really relieved and gratified, because the other one said she was enjoying it so frightfully. He dared not say to Lou, as he wanted to: “I’m afraid, Lou, darling, you don’t love it as much as we do.” — He was afraid of her answer: “No, dear, I don’t love it at all! I want to be away from these people.”

Slightly piqued, he rode on with the Manby group, and Lou came behind with her mother. Cloud was covering the sky with grey. There was a cold wind. Everybody was anxious to get to the farm for luncheon, and be safely home before rain came.

They were riding along one of the narrow little foot-tracks, mere grooves of grass between heather and bright green bilberry. The blond young man was ahead, then his wife, then Flora, then Rico. Lou, from a little distance, watched the glossy, powerful haunches of St. Mawr swaying with life, always too much life, like a menace. The fair young man was whistling a new dance tune.

“That’s an awfully attractive tune,” Rico called. “Do whistle it again, Fred, I should like to memorise it.”

Fred began to whistle it again.

At that moment St. Mawr exploded again, shied sideways as if a bomb had gone off, and kept backing through the heather.

“Fool!” cried Rico, thoroughly unnerved: he had been terribly sideways in the saddle, Lou had feared he was going to fall. But he got his seat, and pulled the reins viciously, to bring the horse to order, and put him on the track again. St. Mawr began to rear: his favourite trick. Rico got him forward a few yards, when up he went again.

“Fool!” yelled Rico, hanging in the air.

He pulled the horse over backwards on top of him.

Lou gave a loud, unnatural, horrible scream: she heard it herself, at the same time as she heard the crash of the falling horse. Then she saw a pale gold belly, and hoofs that worked and flashed in the air, and St. Mawr writhing, straining his head terrifically upwards, his great eyes starting from the naked lines of his nose. With a great neck arching cruelly from the ground, he was pulling frantically at the reins, which Rico still held tight. — Yes, Rico, lying strangely sideways, his eyes also starting from his yellow-white face, among the heather, still clutched the reins.

Young Edwards was rushing forward, and circling round the writhing, immense horse, whose pale-gold, inverted bulk seemed to fill the universe.

“Let him get up, Carrington! Let him get up!” he was yelling, darting warily near to get the reins. — Another spasmodic convulsion of the horse.

Horror! The young man reeled backwards with his face in his hands. He had got a kick in the race. Red blood running down his chin!

Lewis was there, on the ground, getting the reins out of Rico’s hands. St. Mawr gave a great curve like a fish, spread his forefeet on the earth and reared his head, looking round in a ghastly fashion. His eyes were arched, his nostrils wide, his face ghastly in a sort of panic. He rested thus, seated with his forefeet planted and his face in panic, almost like some terrible lizard, for several moments. Then he heaved sickeningly to his feet, and stood convulsed, trembling.

There lay Rico, crumpled and rather sideways, staring at the heavens from a yellow, dead-looking face. Lewis, glancing round in a sort of horror, looked in dread at St. Mawr again. Flora had been hovering. — She now rushed screeching to the prostrate Rico:

“Harry! Harry! you’re not dead! Oh, Harry! Harry! Harry!”

Lou had dismounted. — She didn’t know when. She stood a little way off, as if spellbound, while Flora cried: Harry! Harry! Harry!

Suddenly Rico sat up.

“Where is the horse?” he said.

At the same time an added whiteness came on his face, and he bit his lip with pain, and he fell prostrate again in a faint. Flora rushed to put her arm round him.

Where was the horse? He had backed slowly away, in an agony of suspicion, while Lewis murmured to him in vain. His head was raised again, the eyes still starting from their sockets, and a terrible guilty, ghost-like look on his face. When Lewis drew a little nearer he twitched and shrank like a shaken steel spring, away — not to be touched. He seemed to be seeing legions of ghosts, down the dark avenues of all the centuries that have lapsed since the horse became subject to man.

And the other young man? He was still standing, at a little distance, with his face in his hands, motionless, the blood falling on his white shirt, and his wife at his side, pleading, distracted.

Mrs. Witt, too, was there, as if cast in steel, watching. She made no sound and did not move, only from a fixed, impassive face, watched each thing.

“Do tell me what you think is the matter,” Lou pleaded, distracted, to Flora, who was supporting Rico and weeping torrents of unknown tears.

Then Mrs. Witt came forward and began in a very practical manner to unclose the shirt-neck and feel the young man’s heart. Rico opened his eyes again, said “Really!” and closed his eyes once more.

“It’s fainting!” said Mrs. Witt. “We have no brandy.” Lou, too weary to be able to feel anything, said:

“I’ll go and get some.”

She went to her alarmed horse, who stood among the others with her head down, in suspense. Almost unconsciously Lou mounted, set her face ahead, and was riding away.

Then Poppy shied too, with a sudden start, and Lou pulled up. “Why?” she said to her horse. “Why did you do that?”

She looked round, and saw in the heather a glimpse of yellow and black.

“A snake!” she said wonderingly.

And she looked closer.

It was a dead adder that had been drinking at a reedy pool in a little depression just off the road, and had been killed with stones. There it lay, also crumpled, its head crushed, its gold-and-yellow back still glittering dully, and a bit of pale-blue showing, killed that morning.

Lou rode on, her face set towards the farm. An unspeakable weariness had overcome her. She .could not even suffer. Weariness of spirit left her in a sort of apathy.

And she had a vision, a vision of evil. Or not strictly a vision. She became aware of evil, evil, evil, rolling in great waves over the earth. Always she had thought there was-no such thing — only a mere negation of good. Now, like an ocean to whose surface she had risen, she saw the dark-grey waves of evil rearing in a great tide.

And it had swept mankind away without mankind’s knowing. It had caught up the nations as the rising ocean might lift the fishes, and was sweeping them on in a great tide of evil. They did not know. The people did not know. They did not even wish it. They wanted to be good and to have everything joyful and enjoyable. Everything joyful and enjoyable: for everybody. This was what they wanted, if you asked them.

But at the same time, they had fallen under the spell of evil. It was a soft, subtle thing, soft as water, and its motion was soft and imperceptible, as the running of a tide is invisible to one who is out on the ocean. And they were all out on the ocean, being borne along in the current of the mysterious evil, creatures of the evil principle, as fishes are creatures of the sea.

There was no relief. The whole world was enveloped in one great flood. All the nations, the white, the brown, the black, the yellow, all were immersed, in the strange tide of evil that was subtly, irresistibly rising. No one, perhaps, deliberately wished it. Nearly every individual wanted peace and a good time all round: everybody to have a good time.

But some strange thing had happened, and the vast mysterious force of positive evil was let loose. She felt that from the core of Asia the evil welled up, as from some strange pole, and slowly was drowning earth.

It was something horrifying, something you could not escape from. It had come to her as in a vision, when she saw the pale gold belly of the stallion upturned, the hoofs working wildly, the wicked curved hams of the horse, and then the evil straining of that arched, fish-like neck, with the dilated eyes of the head. Thrown backwards, and working its hoofs in the air. Reversed, and purely evil.

She saw the same in people. They were thrown backwards, and writhing with evil. And the rider, crushed, was still reining them down.

What did it mean? Evil, evil, and a rapid return to the sordid chaos. Which was wrong, the horse or the rider? Or both?

She thought with horror of St. Mawr, and of the look on his face. But she thought with horror, a colder horror, of Rico’s face as he snarled Fool! His fear, his impotence as a master, as a rider, his presumption. And she thought with horror of those other people, so glib, so glibly evil.

What did they want to do, those Manby girls? Undermine, undermine, undermine. They wanted to undermine Rico, just as that fair young man would have liked to undermine her. Believe in nothing, care about nothing: but keep the surface easy, and have a good time. Let us undermine one another. There is nothing to believe in, so let us undermine everything. But look out! No scenes, no spoiling the game. Stick to the rules of the game. Be sporting, and don’t do anything that would make a commotion. Keep the game going smooth and jolly, and bear your bit like a sport. Never, by any chance, injure your fellow-man openly. But always injure him secretly. Make a fool of him, and undermine his nature. Break him up by undermining him, if you can. It’s good sport.

The evil! The mysterious potency of evil. She could see it all the time, in individuals, in society, in the press. There it was in socialism and bolshevism: the same evil. But bolshevism made a mess of the outside of life, so turn it down. Try fascism. Fascism would keep the surface of life intact, and carry on the undermining business all the better. All the better sport. Never draw blood. Keep the hemorrhage internal, invisible.

And as soon as fascism makes a break — which it is bound to, because all evil works up to a break — then turn it down. With gusto, turn it down.

Mankind, like a horse, ridden by a stranger, smooth-faced, evil rider. Evil himself, smooth-faced and pseudo-handsome, riding mankind past the dead snake, to the last break.

Mankind no longer its own master. Ridden by this pseudo-handsome ghoul of outward loyalty, inward treachery, in a game of betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. The last of the gods of our era, Judas supreme!

People performing outward acts of loyalty, piety, self-sacrifice. But inwardly bent on undermining, betraying. Directing all their subtle evil will against any positive living thing. Masquerading as the ideal, in order to poison the real.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. But go on saving life, the ghastly salvation army of ideal mankind. At the same time secretly, viciously, potently undermine the natural creation, betray it with kiss after kiss, destroy it from the inside, till you have the swollen rottenness of our teeming existences. — But keep the game going. Nobody’s going to make another bad break, such as Germany and Russia made.

Two bad breaks the secret evil has made: in Germany and in Russia. Watch it! Let evil keep a policeman’s eye on evil! The surface of life must remain unruptured. Production must be heaped upon production. And the natural creation must be betrayed by many more kisses, yet. Judas is the last God, and, by heaven, the most potent.

But even Judas made a break: hanged himself, and his bowels gushed out. Not long after his triumph.

Man must destroy as he goes, as trees fall for trees to rise. The accumulation of life and things means rottenness. Life must destroy life, in the unfolding of creation. We save up life at the expense of the unfolding, till all is full of rottenness. Then at last we make a break.

What’s to be done? Generally speaking, nothing. The dead will have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace.

Lou came to the farm, and got brandy, and asked the men to come out to carry in the injured.

It turned out that the kick in the face had knocked a couple of young Edwards’s teeth out, and would disfigure him a little.

“To go through the war, and then get this!” he mumbled, with a vindictive glance at St. Mawr.

And it turned out that Rico had two broken ribs and a crushed ankle. Poor Rico, he would limp for life.

“I want St. Mawr shot!” was almost his first word when he was in bed at the farm and Lou was sitting beside him. “What good would that do, dear?” she said.

“The brute is evil. I want him shot!”

Rico could make the last word sound like the spitting of a bullet.

“Do you want to shoot him yourself?”

“No. But I want to have him shot. I shall never be easy till I know he has a bullet through him. He’s got a wicked character. I don’t feel you are safe with him down there. I shall get one of the Manbys’ gamekeepers to shoot him. You might tell Flora — or I’ll tell her myself, when she comes.”

“Don’t talk about it now, dear. You’ve got a temperature.”

Was it true St. Mawr was evil? She would never forget him writhing and lunging on the ground, nor his awful face when he reared up. But then that noble look of his: surely he was not mean? Whereas all evil had an inner meanness, mean! Was he mean? Was he meanly treacherous? Did he know he could kill, and meanly wait his opportunity?

She was afraid. And if this were true, then he should be shot. Perhaps he ought to be shot.

This thought haunted her. Was there something mean and treacherous in St. Mawr’s spirit, the vulgar evil? If so, then have him shot. At moments, an anger would rise in her, as she thought of his frenzied rearing, and his mad, hideous writhing on the ground, and in the heat of her anger she would want to hurry down to her mother’s house and have the creature shot at once. It would be a satisfaction, and a vindication of human rights. Because after all, Rico was so considerate of the brutal horse. But not a spark of consideration did the stallion have for Rico. No, it was the slavish malevolence of a domesticated creature that kept cropping up in St. Mawr. The slave, taking his slavish vengeance, then dropping back into subservience.

All the slaves of this world, accumulating their preparations for slavish vengeance, and then, when they have taken it, ready to drop back into servility. Freedom! Most slaves can’t be freed, no matter how you let them loose. Like domestic animals, they are, in the long run, more afraid of freedom than of masters: and freed by some generous master, they will at last crawl back to some mean boss, who will have no scruples about kicking them. Because, for them, far better kicks and servility than the hard, lonely responsibility of real freedom.

The wild animal is at every moment intensely self-disciplined, poised in the tension of self-defence, self-preservation and self-assertion. The moments of relaxation are rare and most carefully chosen. Even sleep is watchful, guarded, unrelaxing, the wild courage pitched one degree higher than the wild fear. Courage, the wild thing’s courage to maintain itself alone and living in the midst of a diverse universe.

Did St. Mawr have this courage?

And did Rico?

Ah, Rico! He was one of mankind’s myriad conspirators, who conspire to live in absolute physical safety, whilst willing the minor disintegration of all positive living.

But St. Mawr? Was it the natural wild thing in him which caused these disasters? Or was it the slave, asserting himself for vengeance?

If the latter, let him be shot. It would be a great satisfaction to see him dead.

But if the former —

When she could leave Rico with the nurse, she motored down to her mother for a couple of days. Rico lay in bed at the farm.

Everything seemed curiously changed. There was a new silence about the place, a new coolness. Summer had passed with several thunderstorms, and the blue, cool touch of autumn was about the house. Dahlias and perennial yellow sunflowers were out, the yellow of ending summer, the red coals of early autumn. First mauve tips of Michaelmas daisies were showing. Something suddenly carried her away to the great bare spaces of Texas, the blue sky, the flat, burnt earth, the miles of sunflowers. Another sky, another silence, towards the setting sun.

And suddenly she craved again for the more absolute silence of America. English stillness was so soft, like an inaudible murmur of voices, of presences. But the silence in the empty spaces of America was still unutterable, almost cruel.

St. Mawr was in a small field by himself: she could not bear that he should be always in stable. Slowly she went through the gate towards him. And he stood there looking at her, the bright bay creature.

She could tell he was feeling somewhat subdued, after his late escapade. He was aware of the general human condemnation: the human damning. But something obstinate and uncanny in him made him not relent.

“Hello! St. Mawr!” she said, as she drew near, and he stood watching her, his ears pricked, his big eyes glancing sideways at her.

But he moved away when she wanted to touch him. “Don’t trouble,” she said. “I don’t want to catch you or do anything to you.”

He stood still, listening to the sound of her voice, and giving quick, small glances at her. His underlip trembled. But he did not blink. His eyes remained wide and unrelenting. There was a curious malicious obstinacy in him which roused her anger.

“I don’t want to touch you,” she said. “I only want to look at you, and even you can’t prevent that.”

She stood gazing hard at him, wanting to know, to settle the question of his meanness or his spirit. A thing with a brave spirit is not mean.

He was uneasy as she watched him. He pretended to hear something, the mares two fields away, and he lifted his head and neighed. She knew the powerful, splendid sound so well: like bells made of living membrane. And he looked so noble again, with his head tilted up, listening, and his male eyes looking proudly over the distance, eagerly.

But it was all a bluff.

He knew, and became silent again. And as he stood there a few yards away from her, his head lifted and wary, his body full of power and tension, his face slightly averted from her, she felt a great animal sadness come from him. A strange animal atmosphere of sadness, that was vague and disseminated through the air, and made her feel as though she breathed grief. She breathed it into her breast, as if it were a great sigh down the ages, that passed into her breast. And she felt a great woe: the woe of human unworthiness. The race of men judged in the consciousness of the animals they have subdued, and there found unworthy, ignoble.

Ignoble men, unworthy of the animals they have subjugated, bred the woe in the spirit of their creatures. St. Mawr, that bright horse, one of the kings of creation in the order below man, it had been a fulfilment for him to serve the brave, reckless, perhaps cruel men of the past, who had a flickering, rising flame of nobility in them. To serve that flame of mysterious further nobility. Nothing matters, but that strange flame, of inborn nobility that obliges men to be brave, and onward plunging. And the horse will bear him on.

But now where is the flame of dangerous, forward-pressing nobility in men? Dead, dead, guttering out in a stink of self-sacrifice whose feeble light is a light of exhaustion and laissez-faire.

And the horse, is he to go on carrying man forward into this? — this gutter?

No! Man wisely invents motor-cars and other machines, automobile and locomotive. The horse is superannuated for man.

But alas, man is even more superannuated for the horse.

Dimly in a woman’s muse, Lou realised this, as she breathed the horse’s sadness, his accumulated vague woe from the generations of latter-day ignobility. And a grief and a sympathy flooded her, for the horse. She realised now how his sadness recoiled into these frenzies of obstinacy and malevolence. Underneath it all was grief, an unconscious, vague, pervading animal grief, which perhaps only Lewis understood, because he felt the same. The grief of the generous creature which sees all ends turning to the morass of ignoble living.

She did not want to say any more to the horse: she did not want to look at him any more. The grief flooded her soul, that made her want to be alone. She knew now what it all amounted to. She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men. And this left him high and dry, in a sort of despair.

As she walked away from him, towards the gate, slowly he began to walk after her.

Phoenix came striding through the gate towards her.

“You not afraid of that horse?” he asked sardonically, in his quiet, subtle voice.

“Not at the present moment,” she replied, even more quietly, looking direct at him. She was not in any mood to be jeered at.

And instantly the sardonic grimace left his face, followed by the sudden blankness, and the look of race misery in the keen eyes.