A ROMANTIC In the station in a cold subaqueous light there was the smell of stale smoke. Behind the lavatory, where they were hidden from view, two youths were holding an earnest conversation. One, whose age was about seventeen, was small; he had jet-black hair and a dark-skinned face with features of a curious intensity. His nervous gestures and manner drew attention to the shabbiness of his clothes. The other, who was about three years older, was attired as a postman. He had a drowsy, handsome face with bright blue eyes and a good-natured, almost feminine, smile. ‘You’ll get over it,’ he said incredulously. ‘The other shook his head gloomily. ‘You will, you will! I know. Sure I was through it.’ ‘No, no. This is different.’ ‘Who is she anyway?’ ‘Don’t ask me.’ ‘Where do she live?’ ‘I dunno. I only saw her once, at Mass.’ ‘Describe her.’ The younger lad did so, with half-shut eyes in a tone of melancholy rapture. ‘I know her.’ ‘Who is she?’ ‘Ferriter is the name.’ ‘Ferriter?’ ‘Her mother is on the Corporation.’ The other drew his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘She’s a clever piece,’ continued the postman. ‘She was in school in Germany.’ ‘Have she a fellow?’ ‘No one regular anyway.’ ‘Where do they live?’ ‘Montenotte. There are steps down to the house. You’ll recognise it by the lilac-bush over the gate. ... Man, you’d be well got there.’ ‘How?’ ‘The standing thing. The mother gets the Financial Times.’ ‘Ah, what chance have I? A bloody messenger boy!’ ‘You’d never know now. You hear every day about people marrying their chauffeurs.’ ‘And that same I’m not sure of,’ the other added bitterly, pursuing his own thought. ‘Why? Is Dooley at you again’ ‘He is.’ ‘Some of them bloody railway clerks think they’re gentlemen. You’re very unfortunate, Noel. ‘’Tis strange, but you don’t seem to get on anywhere.’ ‘I am. I’m cursed. Sometimes I think I’ll drown myself.’ ‘I wouldn’t.’ ‘I will.’ ‘No. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. There’s nothing them upstarts would like better.’ ‘What’s her name?’ ‘Who?’ ‘The Ferriter girl?’ ‘Oh! Anne. Her name is Gwendolen but she calls herself Anne.’ ‘Noel, for the drapery business, you do not seem to be suited. When you came here I didn’t ask what caused you to lose your job on the railway. I didn’t enquire how many times you were previously employed or why you hadn’t a reference. I only asked if you were honest and obedient. There was one question I should have asked. I should have asked if you were a dreamer.’ The little man, smooth as his own shirt-cuff, lowered his voice to a solemn whisper. ‘Noel, are you a dreamer?’ The youth reddened angrily and muttered something under his breath. ‘Because if you are I can do nothing for you. I can’t even pray for you. I can only say, in the words of our Blessed Lord, that ’twould be better if a millstone was tied round your neck.’ One wild March evening he was crouching in the shadow of a high wall, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a girl came out of a gateway at the opposite side of the road. She had a small face with small imperious eyes and a nose like a fox’s. She crossed the road towards him, but he gave no sign of recognition. ‘What are you always following me for?’ she asked irritably. He stood with bowed head before her. The wind shrieked among the naked boughs it tossed and strained. ‘You’re always hanging around this gate or following me or something,’ she continued accusingly, her anger giving her a suggestion of a stutter. ‘The next time I see you at it I’ll call a policeman.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without looking at her. He kicked at a bunch of dead leaves which the wind had heaped on the footpath about his feet. She looked at him with exasperation that gradually gave place to doubt. His lips were set but his dark face had a look of the most intense melancholy and it seemed as if in a moment he would break into tears. Moodily, savagely, without once looking up he continued to kick and crush the dead leaves. She seemed to have exhausted her capacity for abuse. Though her next words were pronounced in the same denunciatory tone, it merely formed a transition about the sense. ‘I’m going down the road now, and for goodness’ sake, don’t come trailing after me. Come with me if you want to, but don’t follow me.’ Again he did not reply. ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ ‘I’ll come with you.’ They walked down the road in silence. Her volubility seemed suddenly to have deserted her. Outside the chemist’s shop at the cross she paused. ‘Well,’ she asked, ‘what are you going to do now?’ ‘I’ll wait.’ The wind made whirlpools about the cold, deserted crossways. Sometimes it blew the clouds clear of the moon, and the old church came out, its spire swimming white on the wind- black sky. ‘The wind is full of voices,’ he said in a rapt and gloomy tone. ‘What voices?’ she snapped. ‘I think you’re dotty.’ Though they had been walking out for months he had not dared to make love to her. He was afraid he might scare the vision, and without it life would now be unendurable. Instead he threw soundings. But deep as ever he threw, there seemed to be fathoms still to sound. He invented a tale about an imaginary friend called Bob who was in love with a girl called Josephine Dunn. Josephine (also imaginary) was in love with Bob, but he was too shy to make the necessary advances. It ended by his hating Bob as heartily as if he had been a real person, and it was all no use. Anne was tangential, she answered questions six months after they were asked, and it was only when he had forgotten Bob and Josephine Dunn that she was ready to discuss them. He might have gone on in doubt indefinitely. But one summer evening he saw his father come out of a pub. It was, he knew, the beginning of a new drinking bout. In his humiliation he felt as if he would never escape from the squalor of his existence, never reach the good, substantial workaday world where people lived happily and well. That evening when he and Anne walked over the hill to the river, he was unusually silent. The dwindling light was ripe like corn; the shadows of the trees stretched across two fields to the edge of the hill where the pines were silhouetted against the mist that hovered over the valley of the city. A lane wound down before them in shadow. Trembling, he rested his arms upon the wall looking down at the river. ‘Aren’t you well?’ asked Anne anxiously. ‘Yes. Why?’ ‘You’re so pale.’ ‘I only wanted to look.’ Her bare arm rested on the wall beside his. Everything had narrowed down to the crook of it, sunburnt and freckled, the lustre on the bone, the two folds of creamy flesh within. He touched it tentatively, and at the contact his hand dropped dead to his side. ‘If you’re sick,’ she said in alarm, ‘we’ll go home.’ To the depths of his being he felt he had thrown away a chance that might never recur. As her slight figure disappeared down the moonlit pathway to her door, the spectre of loneliness stretched out its cold hand and touched him. ‘Anne!’ he whispered. The footsteps stopped. He advanced timidly down the weed-covered steps as she returned slowly, puzzled and vexed. She stood on the step beneath him, frowning up at him in the moonlight. ‘Well?’ she snapped. ‘Do you want to keep me here all night in the cold?’ Without a word he bent and kissed her and then bolted, leaving her standing there, a slight figure under the overhanging boughs of lilac, with one hand raised to her mouth in an attitude of the utmost stupefaction and indignation. Joan was the postman’s sister. She was tall and broadly built with heavy voluptuous limbs and face; she used brilliant lipstick and strong scent; there was something Southern about her; he told her she should wear roses in her hair. Sometimes her broad, dark-skinned face with its open features was vivacious, brilliant and naïf, sometimes sullen and dark as though emptied of life. She was a creature of instinct and fantasy, given to day-dreaming and wildly and elaborately impractical. Her mother was a small, tranquil woman, moved by periodical shortage of funds to similar flights of fancy. For three years she and Joan had been backing horses unknown to Peter. During the same period Peter had been backing horses and concealing it from them. Alone with her, even for a few minutes, Noel found himself making love to her absentmindedly. At first he did so in the spirit of an acrobat who, having performed some particularly dangerous trick, repeats it merely to satisfy himself that he has not lost the knack. But her kisses were vaguely disturbing. They were unlike Anne’s, for Anne kissed as a duty, without pleasure; besides Joan talked and talked sensibly; she answered questions when they were asked and not six months later. Left to themselves, his feet naturally gravitated towards her house. One evening, returning from a walk with her, he realised that he had taken up with Anne merely because he had been lonely. A lovely illusion. Joan was not lovely nor was she an illusion. Sometimes she sat for hours, unwashed and half dressed, telling her fortune with cards. Frequently—far too frequently—she backed horses and lay in bed until the results came in, planning what to do with her winnings. One morning he woke with a sick feeling of doubt. On the previous evening he had started out for a walk with Joan who was in a perverse and gloomy mood. ‘They had been very silent, both of them. And passing by a dark laneway, Joan had disappeared. He had waited. It was cold, damnably cold. And he had grown angrier and angrier. At last he had gone home alone. For some reason he kept thinking of Anne. That evening he walked as if by accident past her house. The moon had risen and in a milky hollow the city slept, a terrace here and there taking the light on its frosted slates like a mirror. Each day he went to work with a heavier heart. It was mid-winter. Mist narrowed the horizons and evening coloured it with frosty browns and reds; the ice-green sky seemed to explode through the tangle of dark boughs. Then came two days of uninterrupted rain. As he was returning from work he saw her emerge from a shop. She seemed to shine in the melancholy December twilight. ‘Well? he asked bitterly. ‘What does it mean?’ ‘What does what mean?’ She was taken aback. ‘Are you coming with me this evening?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘I’m not good enough for you, I suppose?’ he said bitterly. ‘Don’t be silly.’ He fell into step beside her. The crowds, the shining flagstones astir with deep shadows, the first lights distracted him. ‘What do you mean by dropping me?’ ‘You told me a lie,’ she said slowly and distinctly with what was clearly an enormous effort at relevance. ‘I did?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A lie?’ ‘Yes, you said you were at the Gaelic League the last night you didn’t turn up.’ ‘Did I say that?’ ‘You did.’ ‘Oh, well, maybe I forgot. I can’t remember where I happen to be every night, can I? Of course, on the other hand, I might have been tired, I might have wanted to spare your feelings. It wouldn’t be the first time. But you couldn’t be expected to realise that I was acting in your interests. You’d call it a lie. Very well, then, call it a lie. Anything else? You surely have some better reason. You don’t drop people just because you misunderstand what they say, do you?’ Rain fell softly. She opened her umbrella. A woman in a black shawl went by, dragging a weeping child by the hand; she was singing in a high, cracked voice—about love. Anne looked after her and laughed. She caught his outraged glance and became serious again, but with the guilty air of one who has unwittingly let down the dignity of a passionate scene. ‘When am I going to see you again?’ he asked in sepulchral tones. ‘Can’t you go with Josephine Dunn?’ she replied with sudden rancour. ‘With who?’ ‘Josephine Dunn. You’re never done talking of her.’ ‘What Josephine Dunn?’ ‘I suppose you think I didn’t know why you were always raving about her. You were jealous of that silly fellow—what’s his name? You were trying to do him out.’ On Christmas Eve it rained all day. ‘They went to Midnight Mass together. The church was crowded but they squeezed their way into a recess. They could hear the splash of torrential rain on the flags of the porch. A procession came up the aisle led by eight surpliced boys with sleepy eyes and dripping candles; they were followed by the choir in surplices with yellow facings and by still more acolytes; last came three priests, their birettas cocked forward on their foreheads, their vestments stiff with gold. One, walking a little in front, carried the smiling Bambino on a red-plush cushion. Helen Dwyer was secretary of all the various committees in the Gaelic League (they defied calculation); she organised dances, excursions, picnics, flag days, plays and concerts. It was not that she wanted to. As earnest and pure a group of idealists as were to be found in a land of idealists would have rapidly brought everything down in disaster if she hadn’t. ‘To his surprise he discovered that she had an exceptionally intimate knowledge of the intrigues, feuds and jealousies that rent them. He, noticed too that her face had a delicate spirituality which animated its rather heavy contours and flowed about the corners of her melancholy, sensuous mouth. For days he found himself dreaming of it, and of the dark hair that drooped over her broad forehead. She had brilliant dark eyes which sloped upward and gave her face an almost Oriental delicacy. His feeling for her was something new in his life. With her he felt—it seemed strange—only reverent. No violent emotion swept him away; it was as if he could find as much joy in resigning as in winning her. When he went walking with her he was as well pleased to talk as to make love. He savoured to the full all the melancholy joy of resignation before he went on to the first embrace. In his first job, as messenger boy in a publichouse, he had called on the Newberys with beer from the pub. Mrs Newbery, attracted by his dreamy, forlorn air and precociously affected manner of speech, had made him tea, lent him books and given him a lot of good advice, to which he had paid no attention. When he visited them again it was as a guest. He was twenty, neatly dressed in a navy-blue suit, and with a deceptive air of practicality. He was growing a small moustache, had developed a masterful, incisive manner and a perfect passion for argument. His quick and daring mind made him a good debater, and frequently a more than usually brilliant triumph would confirm him in an opinion for weeks at a stretch. At the same time, under his aggressiveness, his masterful, argumentative manner, there was still something helpless and appealing that begged for understanding and affection. It was his eyes that gave him away, large eyes of a deep brown. The Newberys made him welcome. Maureen Newbery had scarcely changed. She was pretty, avid of self-improvement, shrewd and ambitious. Ted suffered from a bad stomach, took a gloomy view of the world, and though he constantly complained that he was unfitted to be a commercial traveller (having a bad stomach and a shockingly weak head for whiskey) he made no effort to do anything else. Noel took to dropping in when he was there, and later, when he wasn’t. For about the same time he began to feel the curious quality which Helen called out in him. It was a side of his nature he had scarcely been aware of till now: cold, brutal and sensual. One night he came home, utterly downcast, and, standing before his own door, swore to drop them all. For somehow it happened that whenever he gave himself to a girl she instantly produced from a box of readymades an image that resembled him, that might even have been taken for him, but was never more than a gross and ignorant caricature. With a sick heart he turned his face away from them and towards a real world he hated. As they passed through the bare cold hall of the station, Anne, as her way was, almost running, he was moved to say, ‘Anne, you’d better marry me.’ They moved out into the bustle of the roadway in the grey of evening, leaving behind them the sea and the screaming gulls, the clouds like cream-coloured scrolls, the frog-backed, frog-coloured rocks and the rank sewage smell of rotting weed. Suddenly Anne looked up and smiled. ‘I’ll be killed and it’s all your fault. I should have been home hours ago. Mammy had people to tea.’ ‘Anne,’ he said indignantly. ‘Do you hear me? Will you?’ ‘Will I what?’ ‘Marry me.’ ‘Why? Did you ask me to marry you?’ ‘I did. Didn’t you hear me?’ ‘Yes, of course, but I thought you were saying—oh, I don’t know what I thought you were saying—something silly anyway. You talk such an awful lot, and sometimes I don’t understand a word you say. I know another man who talks just like you.’ ‘Anne!’ he exclaimed, stopping dead. ‘What’s wrong now?’ ‘I asked if you’d marry me!’ ‘I will, I will, I will, but is that any reason for stopping me up in the street when you know I’m in a hurry? It’s two years since I was with you last, and now you want to marry me! I can’t marry you here, can I? And the Lord knows what people will say if they see us gaping at one another like this.’ He would have liked to make their engagement known, but Anne was afraid of what her mother might say. Two years! It was true. When he had seen her on the cliffs that day it was as if something had melted from about his heart. He had not known himself how tired he was of the Newberys and their friends, the good-natured, decent, hard-working men and women who would have been shocked to the depths of their being if he had told them of the wild fancies that exploded within him at times. He was heartily sick of them all, of dances and race-meetings, stout and smutty stories. It was good to get back to the Gaelic League, for all the infectious, ineffectual life it represented; the enthusiasms, the operatic vanities and night-long arguments. It was good to call there on a wet half-holiday and find the hall in darkness, the light of an old gas-lamp reflected on the ceiling from the narrow dirty street below, and see four or five familiar faces grouped about the fire. It was good that there was still something remote and dear and vague to live for. With Helen it was just as if nothing had happened. The only reproach came from his own conscience, when he realised that she bore him no malice. That hurt, and weeks of friendly intercourse, only deepened the hurt and made it more imperative that he should apologise and explain. He dreaded the ordeal, but two years of rigid self-discipline had made it plain that such things were better faced. And he could not bear to feel she was misjudging him; his old delicacy of feeling had returned; a sunset, the boom of an organ in a twilit street, an old beggar-woman supping in rags on the pavement, would wring his heart. One winter evening when she had left the hall, alone, he pulled himself sternly together, snatched his hat and rushed down the stairs after her. He caught up with her at the corner of the street, and they crossed the city in silence, but for a few casual remarks which neither asked nor received an answer. ‘Do you forgive me, Helen?’ he asked at last in a tight voice. ‘I never blamed you,’ she replied without looking up. A long silence ensued. She looked at him shyly by the light of a street-lamp. Her face was strained but her smile was very sweet. So sweet that all at once he recognised the enormity and folly of his own behaviour and was drowned in a wave of belated remorse. They mounted the hill from the river. From the dark road a network of tiny lanes ran off, uphill and down, some with battered street lamps that revealed whitewashed cottages framed in narrow archways. The uncurtained windows in the tall dirty houses to right and left showed in pale-green or yellow splashes the brass knobs of a bedstead, a picture of the Pope, a woman’s tousled head, a red-haired man in shirt-sleeves. And here and there some laneway sloped towards the valley of the city, the grey mass of the cathedral. ‘I know you must think I’m a brute.’ ‘I don’t. I never did.’ They had reached the laneway to her house. He took her hands. He drew her closer to him and looked into her brilliant dark eyes which seemed at the same time to be fascinated and repelled. ‘No, no,’ she said hastily, ‘don’t do that.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you mustn’t.’ ‘Don’t you care for me any more?’ ‘Go away, Noel,’ she said. ‘I was getting used to being alone when you came back. It took me so long. Go away!’ ‘I was a fool, but I’ve got sense now. Helen, you must promise me something.’ ‘What?’ ‘That you’ll marry me if I can get free!’ ‘No, I won’t.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I can’t.’ ‘Why, I say?’ ‘Because——— ’ She bit her lip and looked at him imploringly. ‘I’m afraid of you, Noel. Let me alone. You have no idea how miserable you make me.’ He took her face in his hands and drew her closer to him. He saw that she really was afraid, and was thrilled with a feeling of intense tenderness by his consciousness of power. He woke next morning as dawn was breaking. The feeling of power was gone. In the cold light over the riverside he remembered that he was engaged to two women. He rose, sat on the window-ledge and lit a cigarette. The old warehouses, the square before the theatre, the narrow lanes, all were hushed. He heard his father snoring in the next room. He must write to one or other immediately and stop it. But to which? Anne? Helen? Equally impossible! At the same time he felt if he broke it off with one he must do the same with the other. It seemed to him that he was going mad. He could inflict himself on the Newberys for three evenings, but hardly for four. And so, in a distracted state, he called for Peter. His luck was out. Peter was not at home and the door was opened by Joan. Joan was engaged, that was one consolation. Her fiancé was sitting in the kitchen. He was a man of about forty, grey-haired, good-tempered and in every sense reliable. It was the first time Noel had seen himself and Joan together, and he watched their behaviour with interest. He could scarcely restrain a pang of jealousy at his successor’s simple pride and happiness, shut out, as he was, from happiness by his own folly. Joan, wearing a crimson jumper with her grey skirt, looked radiant. ‘They were all sitting about the range. The charm of the house came home to him anew, the casualness, the warm human feeling. She was amusing her young man with a description of Peter, who in despair of finding a wife had decided to enter a monastery. He was the first to go. Joan accompanied him to the door. The pang of jealousy that went through Noel was real enough now. ‘What do you think of him?’ asked Mrs Glynn confidentially. ‘Joan’s fellow, I mean?’ ‘He seems a fine fellow.’ ‘That’s what I think too. Now, she had three or four fellows before Tom—after yourself, I mean—and I couldn’t stand them at all. I said to Peter, “What Joan wants,” I said, “is a man that’ll keep her in order.”’ He knew of old Mrs Glynn’s weakness for discussing her daughters’ fellows. He had suffered from it himself. It was a long time before Joan returned. Her face was flushed and her eyes were shining. ‘I’ll leave ye and go to bed,’ said her mother. ‘Bella will be back any minute and Peter won’t be long after her.’ Joan drew her chair closer to the range, her feet raised on the guard, her hands about her knees. ‘Cripes!’ she exclaimed. ‘’Tis cold.’ What he had intended to say was something quite simple. What he did say was very different, in substance and tone; to his own surprise the phrase broke from him in the form of a groan. ‘You seem to have done well for yourself.’ ‘Think so?’ she asked, with an impertinent flick of her eyebrows. ‘He seems to be a fine fellow,’ he repeated with false heartiness. ‘So me old one thinks. She’s gone about him.’ ‘I don’t wonder.’ ‘Was she gassing to you about him?’ ‘She was.’ ‘I expected that. And I wish to the Lord God she’d marry him as she’s about it.’ ‘Why?’ he asked in stupefaction. ‘Because, if you want to know,’ replied Joan with coarse energy, ‘he bores me looney, even to look at him. A girl that knew told me once to beware of men that smoked pipes, and I didn’t take her advice, worse luck.’ ‘You seem to get on well enough with him.’ ‘I didn’t want to give it to say to you, naturally. Here, give us a fag!’ ‘But if you felt like that, why did you get engaged?’ he asked. ‘There was something in Joan’s tone that alarmed him. Frowning he lit her cigarette and leaned back, digging his hands into his trousers pockets and planting his feet beside hers. ‘Well, what was I to do? You chucked me. I suppose I should have gone into a convent.’ ‘I didn’t mean that.’ ‘Because I’m not like me bloody fool of a brother. The only convent for me is a Kerry one —two heads on one pillow.’ He felt there were abysses opening before him. As she bent forward to relight her cigarette, her face, dark and sulky, puckered in the firelight, he felt a strange fluttering at his heart. Blowing out a thin stream of smoke she sat back, composing herself. A complex of emotion mounting to the surface gave her an unreal brilliance he had already learned to dread. ‘You paid me out all right for leaving you that night,’ she continued. ‘I hope you’re satisfied.’ ‘Don’t say things like that!’ ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? That’s why you chucked me. You damn well paid me out.’ ‘You don’t have to marry him.’ ‘I can’t break it off.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I haven’t the guts, that’s why.’ ‘There’s a pair of us,’ he confessed gloomily. ‘Lord God,’ she went on without heeding him, ‘if I knew how you were going to take it I’d have chucked myself in the river first.’ ‘There’s a pair of us, I tell you.’ ‘Why? Don’t tell me you’re engaged too?’ ‘Worse than that,’ he said between his teeth. ‘It can’t be much worse, judging from my experience.’ Her experience, he thought bitterly, was limited. He knew the time had come for him to go. But again what he did was entirely different. He reached out and took her hand, which she surrendered without looking at him. Outside a score of furies were waiting to seize on him. The moon was rising over the hill behind. It flooded the opposite hillside, which looked like a piece of theatre scenery with its lanes and houses and churches heaped together above the river. He glared up at the milky sky. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘what have I done? Am I mad? Pity ... dear God, have pity! ... I love her,’ he declared frantically to the stars. ‘I must marry her. But what am I to do? What am I to do?’ ‘The stars gave no answer, only winked blankly at one another as though heliographing the question across the empty spaces of the sky. He remained awake all night. At dawn he was sitting on the window-ledge once more, chilled to the bone. Now and then he pulled the blanket about him with a feverish gesture or lit another cigarette. The reaction—he had almost begun to expect it—had come. For some reason he no longer wanted to marry Joan. He went up the river, but this reminded him too keenly of Helen. He retraced his steps and sought the jetties. It all looked peaceful, absurdly peaceful, in its moonlit blue, the river, the bright sky laced with the ropes and spars of a Finnish three-master, the heaped-up ballast of sand and gravel, the lights of Montenotte caught like Chinese lanterns among their bare boughs. He recognised Anne’s house—a fresh pang. Everywhere, in the whisper of lovers, the rustle of the full tide, the purity of the night sky, there was the repose of life dematerialising itself anew. His own substance weighed upon him like a nightmare. He went to the edge of the jetty and looked down where the water was black and sulky in its shadow. He shivered. He returned again and stood before the three-master. Its tall hull rose up from the quay wall, black with reflections of dull gold, and the masts and spars had taken a tinge of blue as they swayed with quiet triumph. He mounted the gangway to chat with the watch. At another time he would have enjoyed it, but now these descriptions of distant ports, of long voyages and storms at sea, were too immediate in their personal application. He said good-night and hastened up the quay. Out of sight of the ship he halted panting and close to tears. ‘The city stretched down the hills into the narrow gulf of the river, roofs glinting, spires moon-blanched, trees a black wintry scribble. All this was what he must leave, and a transport of longing, misery and indignation shook him at the very thought, till he rose on tiptoe and clenched his fist at the naked sky, ready to scream with rage and scold it with the fury of a market-woman. Returning, he saw a light in the Newberys’ window. Mrs Newbery was alone. He was shivering; she made him a hot drink and for a long time they sat and talked. In this comfortable sitting-room which had served him for an ideal of content, he was more than ever conscious of the imminent end of all his bright hopes. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked. ‘Why?’ ‘You look as if you’d seen a ghost.’ He shivered. ‘I have.’ ‘Really?’ she asked lightly. ‘I’ve come to say good-bye,’ he continued in a low tone, his knuckles white upon the arms of his chair. ‘I’ve made a mess of things. I must clear out. You were right, you see. You told me to be steady, and I was, for a while. But I’m a fool. Oh, such a mess I’ve made of everything. Dear God, such a damned mess!’ ‘What in heaven’s name have you done?’ she asked. ‘I can’t tell you.’ ‘But I may be able to help.’ ‘No, you couldn’t. No one could—now.’ ‘Aren’t you being rather silly about it? Have you been playing the fool?’ ‘Oh, haven’t I just?’ he said between his teeth. ‘Is it money?’ ‘No.’ ‘I suppose it’s a woman then.’ ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear!’ ‘Who is it?’ ‘I can’t—oh, for goodness’ sake don’t ask me any more questions! I feel as if I were going crazy.’ ‘I suppose she’s ten years older than you?’ she exclaimed angrily. Noel did not reply, but his eyes filled with tears. She nodded. ‘I can guess the rest. Oh, you young fellows! Has she anything in writing?’ ‘No, nothing.’ ‘Then you can brazen it out.’ ‘I can’t, I can’t. I wish to God I could!’ ‘Oh!’ There was a pause. She looked at him in surprise. ‘So it’s like that, is it?’ He awoke with a feeling of the most extraordinary melancholy. The swinging mirror of the dressing-table looked back at him with a blank glare; before it a travelling clock ticked angrily away. Faintly coloured, the uncertain morning light streamed through the yellow print curtains. A bell was ringing somewhere with a stiff clangour. He saw something dark on the floor and fingered it cautiously. It proved to be a black eiderdown quilt. Then he saw something that astonished him. From under the bedclothes emerged a toe, and when he cautiously pulled up his own feet the toe remained in exactly the same position. He closed his eyes tightly and opened them again in the vain hope that it was only a hallucination. But still the toe pointed upwards like an admonishing finger. He felt a sinking sensation at his heart and sweat began to break out at each temple. He questioned the mirror with a despairing look but it refused to answer. ‘Look for yourself,’ it seemed to say. Turning his head with elaborate precaution, he screwed up his eyes. It was just as he feared. He had a sense of the most appalling desolation. Even the melancholy moonlight on the river, the three-master and the sailor of the evening before, seemed to exist in an ideal world, far far above him; a world that contained the magical lost beauty of Anne. First love and last, there was no one like her. Never before had she seemed so lovely, so pure and selfless. But he had lost the way to her. The world would be magical again, but not for him. Never again would he see it as in the days when he tramped the quays whistling with his basket of bottles. And the experience—it was nothing! He had fallen, and wasn’t a ha’porth the wiser for his fall, and the woman of the night before had become a liability as substantial as Joan or Helen. Why? Oh, God in heaven, why, why, why was it that all his assets became liabilities? Too late and only for a while he recognised the appalling truth that we evade nothing: the heavenly income-tax collector smiles and charges it up to the next assessment. A cart clattered noisily by over the cobbles. Clank, clank, clank went the bell. All about him was the whisper and stir of a world renewed. He saw that the woman’s pyjama-jacket was open and beneath it he could see her breasts rising and falling. He could not cover it without waking her, so he modestly averted his eyes.