But Lester, mounting, came to Betty’s room, and opening no door passed on into it. This time indeed she knew she went through the door, but then the door, when she came to it, was no longer a serious barrier. It was still a door; it did not become thin or shadowy. But being a door, it was also in itself her quickest way. To open it would have been to go round by a longer path. She was growing capable of the movement proper to her state. She could not so have passed through the empty rooms or dim façades of her earlier experience; those shadowy images retained for her the properties of the world they imaged. But in this real world she could act according to her own reality. She went through the door. There, before her, stretched motionless in her bed, was Betty. Lester saw her clearly in the dark. She went on till she came to the foot of the bed; then she stood still.
She had never seen anyone look so exhausted and wan. The living girl’s eyes were shut; she hardly drew breath; she too might have been dead, except that now and then she was shaken by a sudden convulsion. The dead Lester gazed at the seemingly dead Betty. Her heart sank; what help for her was here? what power in that shaken corpse to hold its own images at bay? If it were a corpse, then she and Betty were parted perhaps for ever. She might have left this reconciliation also too late, as she had left Richard. She had pushed Richard away; she had not gathered Betty in. She was to be left with her choice. She thought: “It isn’t fair. I didn’t know,” and immediately regretted it. She had known—not perhaps clearly about Richard, for those unions and conflicts were of a particular kind, and the justice which must solve them was more intimate than she could yet understand, but she had clearly known about Betty. She had been very young then. But her refusal had been as definite and cold as the body at which she looked was definite and cold. Death for death, death to death, death in death.
The curtains at the windows were drawn back. The sun was rising; the room grew slowly bright with day. Lester stood there because she had nothing else to do. No impulse was upon her and no wish. She had nowhere to go. Evelyn was not in her mind. She knew she could do nothing unless she had help and her only help lay useless before her. Presently she was aware of a step outside the room. There was a tap on the door; another. The door was gently opened, and a maid came in and paused. She looked at Betty; she looked round the room; she looked at Lester without seeing her. Lester looked back at her without interest; she was remote and irrelevant. It was not odd to be unseen; that, of course. Only Betty mattered and Betty lay without sign. The maid went away. The morning light increased.
Suddenly Betty’s eyes had opened. They were looking at Lester. A small voice, hardly audible even to Lester, inaudible to mortal ears, said, “Lester!” Lester said, “Yes,” and saw that the other had not heard. The eyes widened; the voice said, “Lester!… but you’re dead. Evelyn and you are dead.” It added, dying on the sentence, “I’m so glad Evelyn’s dead.” The eyes closed. Exhaustion swallowed her.
Lester heard the relief in the dying words. She had forgotten Evelyn, but, fresh from that ghostly world where Evelyn and she had wandered, she retained some sense of companionship, and the relief—which was hostility—filled her with fear. She felt—though indirectly—the terror and the despair of those of the dead who, passing from this world, leave only that just relief behind. That which should go with them—the good will of those they have known—does not. There are those who have been unjustly persecuted or slain; perhaps a greater joy waits them. But for the ordinary man or woman to go with no viaticum but this relief is a very terrible thing. Almost, for a moment, Lester felt the whole City—ghostly or earthly or both in its proper unity—draw that gentle sigh. Disburdened, it rejoiced: at Evelyn’s death? at hers? Was this to be all Betty and earth could give? a sigh of joy that she was gone? The form on the bed held all the keys. If she could speak so of one, that other waiting spirit felt no surety that she too might not be excluded, by failing voice and closing eyes, from the consciousness on which so much depended. It was awful to think how much did depend—how much power for everlasting decision lay there. Verdict, judgment, execution of judgment, hid behind those closed eyelids. Lester’s impetuosity swelled in her. She wished to wake Betty, to bully her, to compel her to speak, to force help out of her. But she knew all such impetuosity was vain; and however, in her past, she had wrangled in private with Richard—and that was different; yes, it was different, for it was within the nearest image to love that she had known; it might be better or worse, but it was different; it was less permissible and more excusable—however that might be, she did not brawl in public. And she was in public now, in the full publicity of the spiritual City, though no inhabitants of the City except Betty were there. She had waited; she must wait. It was pain and grief to her sudden rage. She waited. The house, earthly, warm, lightened by the great luminary planet, was still to her a part of the City while Betty was there. Everything depended on Betty, and Betty on—on nothing that Lester yet knew.
The door of the room again opened. Lady Wallingford came in. She went to the bed and bent over Betty. She peered into her eyes, felt temples and wrists, and rearranged the bedclothes. Then she crossed to the window and drew one of the curtains a little, so that the sunlight no longer fell on her daughter’s face. In so moving, she had passed round the foot of the bed. Lester began to step back; then she checked herself. She knew it did not matter; she was becoming different—how or why she did not know; but coincidence no longer meant contact. She had a faint sense, as she had done when she passed through the door, of something brushing against her. Her eyes blinked and were clear. Lady Wallingford went through the space which Lester seemed to herself to occupy, and so returned; it was all that could be said. The same space was diversely occupied, but the two presences were separate still. Lady Wallingford, exactly like a competent nurse, looked round the room and went out. Body and visionary body were again alone together. Outside the house a car was heard to start up and move off. Lady Wallingford was on her way to Holborn. Thither Richard was now walking along Millbank, while Jonathan in his room waited, with a fantastic but failing hope, for some word of Betty. And beyond them all, three continents murmured of their great leaders, and the two vegetable images of the Clerk swayed by his single will such crowds as he could sway, and he himself prepared for the operation which is called “the sending out,” its other name being murder.
As the car’s sound died away, Betty sat up. Bright in the shadow her eyes opened on Lester, tender and full of laughter. She pushed the bedclothes back, swung out her legs and sat on the side of the bed. She said, “Hallo, Lester! What are you doing here?” The voice was full of a warm welcome; Lester heard it incredulously. Betty went on. “It’s nice to see you anyway. How are you?”
Lester had waited for something, but hardly for this. She had not begun to expect it. But then she had never seen, face to face, the other Betty who had gone almost dancing through the City, nor guessed the pure freshness of joy natural to that place. She had heard only the high hill-call, and now (subdued as it might be to gay and friendly talk) she recognized the voice. She knew at once that a greater than she was here; it was no wonder she had been sent here for help. She looked at the girl sitting on the bed, whose voice was the only sound but Evelyn’s that had pierced her nothing since she died, and she said, hoping that the other might also perhaps hear, “Not too frightfully well.”
Betty had risen to her feet as Lester spoke. She showed signs of going across to the window, but on the other’s words she paused. She said, “What’s the matter? Can I do anything?”
Lester looked at her. There was no doubt that this was Betty—Betty gay, Betty joyous, Betty revitalized, but still Betty. This was no sorrowing impotence of misery, but an ardor of willingness to help. Yet to ask for help was not easy. The sense of fatal judgment was still present; the change in Betty had not altered that, and her glowing shape was vivid with it. The slightest movement of that hand, the slightest aversion of those eyes, would be still like any similar movement of those dea
d hands or that white face would have been, frightful with finality. To ask that this should be set aside, even to plead, was not natural to Lester. But her need was too great for her to delay. She said at once, “Yes, you can.”
Betty smiled brilliantly at her. She answered, “Well, that’s all right. Tell me about it.”
Lester said, rather helplessly, “It’s all those times … those times at school and afterwards. I can’t manage them without you.”
Betty wrinkled her forehead. She said in some surprise, “Those times at school? But, Lester, I always liked you at school.”
“Perhaps you did,” said Lester. “But you may remember that I didn’t behave as if I particularly liked you.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” Betty answered. “I know you didn’t particularly want me, but why should you? I was so much younger than you and I expect I was something of a nuisance. As far as I can remember, you put up with me nobly. But I don’t remember much about it. Need we? It’s so lovely of you to come and see me now.”
Lester realized that this was going to be worse than she had supposed. She had prepared herself to ask for forgiveness, but that, it seemed, was not enough. She must herself bring the truth to Betty’s reluctant mind; nothing else than the truth would be any good. She would not be able entirely to escape from those swirling images of the past, if they were indeed images and not the very past itself, by any other means than by Betty’s dismissal of them. They were not here, in this room, but they were there, outside the door, and if she left the room she would be caught again among them. She did not understand how this different Betty had come to be, but the City in which she moved did not allow her to waste time in common earthly bewilderment. The voice was the voice she had wanted to imitate, the voice of the hill in the City. If the Betty of that moment and of this moment were the same, then perhaps Betty would understand, though there was in fact nothing to understand except her own perverse indolence. She said—it was the most bitter thing she had ever done; she seemed to taste on her tongue the hard and bitter substance of that moment—she said, “Try and remember.”
Betty’s eyes had been again wandering towards the sunlight at the window. She brought them back to look attentively at Lester, and she said quickly and affectionately, “Lester, you’ve been crying!”
Lester answered in a voice from which, for all her growing vision and springing charity, she could not keep a rigidity of exasperation, “I know I’ve been crying. I——”
Betty interrupted. “But of course I’ll remember,” she said. “It was only that I didn’t understand. What is it exactly you want me to remember?” She smiled as she spoke, and all the tenderness her mortal life had desired and lacked was visible in her. Lester felt an impulse to run away, to hide, even at least to shut her eyes. She held herself still; it had to be done. She said, “You might remember how I did behave to you at school. And afterwards.”
There was a long silence and in it Lester’s new life felt the first dim beginnings of exalted peace. She was not less troubled nor less in fear of what might come. She was, and must be now, the victim of her victim. But also she was now, in that world, with someone she knew, with someone friendly and royally disposed to good, with someone native to her and to that world, easy and happy. The air she breathed was fresh with joy; the room was loaded with it. She knew it as a sick woman knows the summer. She herself was not yet happy, but this kind of happiness was new to her; only, even while she waited, she recollected that once or twice she had known something like it with Richard—one night when they had parted under a street-lamp, one day when they had met at Waterloo. They belonged here, those times; yet those times were as true as those other sinful times that danced without. Her heart was tranquil. If she must go, she must go; perhaps this hovering flicker of known joy might be permitted to go with her. All that was noble in her lifted itself in that moment. The small young figure before her was her judge; but it was also the center and source of the peace. She exclaimed, as if for Betty to know all was necessary to the fullness of the moment and to her own joy: “Oh remember! do remember!”
Betty stood attentive. The times of her happiness had been hitherto on the whole unclouded by her mortal life, except as she might sometimes vaguely remember an unpleasant dream. She set herself now to remember, since that, it seemed, was what was wanted, something she could lately have been contented to leave forgotten. It seemed to her also something of a waste on this glorious morning, with time happily before them, to spend it—however, she knew she wanted to remember. As soon as she knew that Lester wanted it, she too wanted it; so simple is love-in-paradise. She stood and thought. She was still smiling and she continued to smile, though presently her smile became a little grave. She said, “Oh well, how could you know?”
Lester said, “I knew quite enough.”
Betty went on smiling, but presently the smile vanished. She said, more seriously, “I do think Evelyn was rather unkind. But I suppose if she liked that sort of thing—anyhow we’re not thinking of her. Well, now, that’s done.”
Lester exclaimed, “You’ve remembered?” and Betty, now actually breaking into a gay laugh, answered, “Darling, how serious you are! Yes, I’ve remembered.”
“Everything?” Lester persisted; and Betty, looking her full in the eyes, so that suddenly Lester dropped her own, answered, “Everything.” She added, “It was lovely of you to ask me. I think perhaps I never quite wanted to remember—Oh all sorts of things—until you asked me, and then I just did, and now I shan’t mind whatever else there is. Oh Lester, how good you are to me!”
The tears came into Lester’s eyes, but this time they did not fall. Betty’s figure swam indistinctly before her and then she blinked the tears away. They looked at each other and Betty laughed and Lester found herself beginning to laugh, but as she did so she exclaimed, “All the same——!” Betty put out her hand towards the other’s lips, as if to hush her, but it did not reach them. Clear though they saw and heard each other, intimate as their hearts had become, and freely though they shared in that opening City a common good, still its proper definitions lay between them. The one was dead; the other not. The Noli me tangere of the City’s own Lord Mayor was, in their small degree, imposed on them. Betty’s hand dropped gently to her side. They half recognized the law and courteously yielded to it. Betty thought, “Of course, Lester was killed.” She also thought, and she said aloud, “Oh but I was glad Evelyn was killed.” Her voice was shocked; stricken, she looked at the other. She said, “How could I be?”
Lester had again forgotten Evelyn. She remembered. She became aware of Evelyn running, not now from her but towards her, towards them both. She herself now was at the other end of Evelyn’s infinite haste; she shared with Betty the nature of the goal, and she felt at a distance Evelyn hurrying and almost there. She threw up her head, as she had thrown it up at the first call from the hill. She said—and now nothing deadened her speech; she said—in the voice that was to Richard her loveliest and lordliest, “I’ll deal with Evelyn.”
Betty answered, half-laughing and half-embarrassed. “I can’t think why she scares me a little still. But I didn’t mean to want her to be dead. Only she’s all mixed up with there. I usen’t to think of that much when I was here.” There was no need to explain what she meant by “there” and “here.” Their hearts, now in union, knew. “But lately I seem to have to sometimes. Now you’ve made me remember, I don’t so much mind. Stay with me a little while, if you can; will you, Lester? I know you can’t settle that; things happen. But while you can … I’ve a feeling that I’ve got to get through something disagreeable, and I don’t want to make a fuss again.”
“Of course I’ll stay—if I may,” said Lester. “But make a fuss—you!”
Betty sat down on the bed. She smiled again at Lester; then she began to talk, almost as if to herself, or as if she were telling a child a story to soothe it to sleep. She said, “I know I needn’t—when I think of the lake; at least, I suppose it was a lake.
If it was a river, it was very broad. I must have been very small indeed, because, you know, it always seems as if I’d only just floated up through the lake, which is nonsense. But sometimes I almost think I did, because deep down I can remember the fishes, though not so as to describe them, and none of them took any notice of me, except one with a kind of great horned head which was swimming round me and diving under me. It was quite clear there under the water and I didn’t even know I was there. I mean I wasn’t thinking of myself. And then presently the fish dived again and went below me, and I felt him lifting me up with his back, and then the water plunged under me and lifted me, and I came out on the surface. And there I lay; it was sunny and bright, and I drifted in the sun—it was almost as if I was lying on the sunlight itself—and presently I saw the shore—a few steps in a low cliff, and a woman standing there. I didn’t know who she was, but I know now, since you made me remember—Lester, I do owe you such a lot—it was a nurse I once had, but not for very long. She bent down and lifted me out of the water. I didn’t want to leave it. But I liked her; it was almost as if she was my real mother, and she said: ‘There, dearie, no one can undo that; bless God for it.’ And then I went to sleep, and that’s the earliest thing I can remember, and after that only some things that belonged to it: some of the times I’ve been through London, and the Thames, and the white gulls. They were all in that part and in the other part too, the part I’m only just beginning to remember. And so were you, Lester, a little.”
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