I

There was a foam of anemones in the hollows of Furnace Wood. The wind crept over the heads of the hazel bushes, bowing them gently, and shaking out of them the scent of their budding. From the young grass and tender, vivid mosses crept up more scents, faint, moist and earthy. The sky was grey behind the stooping hazels, but glimmered with the yellow promise of noon.

Janet Furlonger and Quentin Lowe had met to say good-bye in Furnace Wood. The scent of spring was in Janey\'s clothes, and when her lover drew her head down to his shoulder he tasted spring in her hair. But there was not spring on her lips when he sought them—only the salt wash of sorrow.

"Why do you cry, little Janey? This is the beginning of hope."

Another tear slid down towards her mouth, but she wiped it away—he must not drink her tears.

"Quentin ... I hope it won\'t be for long."

"No, no—not long, little Janey, sweet, not long. It can\'t be. In six months, perhaps in less, you\'ll have a letter asking you to come up to town and marry a poor but independent journalist."

"You really think that this time you\'re going to succeed?"

[Pg 188]

"Of course. Do you imagine I\'d touch Rider\'s idiotic rag with the tongs if I didn\'t look on it as a stepping-stone to better things. There\'s a mixed metaphor, Janey. Didn\'t you notice it?"

"No, dear."

"You\'re not critical enough, little one. You\'re worthy of good prose—when I\'m too weak and heavy-hearted for poetry."

The wind sighed towards them, bringing the scent of hidden water.

"I must leave you, my own—or I shall be late. Now for months of hard work and hungry dreams of Janey, who will be given at last to my great hunger. Little heart, do you know what it is to hunger?"

She trembled. "Yes."

"Then pity me. Pity me from the fields when you walk in them, as you and I have so often walked, over fallen leaves—pity me from your fire when you sit by it and see in the embers things too beautiful to be—from your meals when you eat them—you and I have had only one meal together, Janey—and from your bed when you lie waking in it. Janey, Janey—pity me."

"Pity ... yes...."

He was holding her in his arms, looking into her beautiful, haggard face. A sudden pang contracted her limbs, then released them into an abandonment of weakness.

"Quentin ... promise me that you will never forget how much you loved me."

"Janey!"

"Promise me."

[Pg 189]

"Janey, how dare you!—\'loved you\'! What do you mean?"

"Oh, please promise!"

She was crying. He had never seen her like this. Hitherto at their meetings she had left the stress and earthquake of love to him, fronting it with a sweet, half-timid calm. Now she clung to him, twisted and trembled.

"Promise, Quentin."

"Well, since you\'re such a silly little thing, I will. Listen. \'I promise never to forget how much I loved you.\' There, you darling fool."

"Thank you ..." she said weakly.

He drew her close, kissed her, and laughed at her.

"Janey—you\'re the spring, with its doubts and distresses. You were the autumn when autumn was here, all tanned and flushed and rumpled, with September in your eyes. Now you\'re the spring, thin, soft, aloof and wondering—you\'re sunshine behind a cloud—you\'re the promise of August and heavy apple-boughs."

"And you\'ll never forget how much you loved me...."
II

The golden lights of late afternoon were kindled in London, warring with the smoky remnants of an April day. They shone on the wet pavements and mud-slopped streets—down Oxford Street poured the full blaze of the sunset, flamy, fogged, mysterious, crinkling into dull purples behind the Circus and the spire in Langham Place.

[Pg 190]

The Queen\'s Hall was emptying—crowds poured out, taxi-horns answered taxi-whistles, and the surge of the streets swept by, gathering up the units, and whirling them into the nothingness of many people. It gathered up Nigel Furlonger, and rushed him, like a bubble on a torrent, down Regent Street, with his face to the darkness of the south—lit from below by the first flash of the electric advertisements in Piccadilly Circus, from above by the first pale, useless glimmer of a star.

He walked quickly, his chin lifted, but mechanically taking his part in the general hustle, not too much in dreamland to make way, shift, pause, or plunge, as the ballet of the pavements might require. His hands were clenched in his pockets. He, perhaps alone among those hundreds, saw the timid star.

A dream was threading through his heart, knitting up the tags of longing, regret and hope that fluttered there. A definite scheme seemed now to explain the sorrow of the world. The armies of the sorrowful had received marching orders, had marched to music, had been given a nation, and a song. Nigel had heard the Eroica Symphony.

In his ears was still the bourdon of drums, the sigh of strings, the lilt of wood-wind, the restless drone of brasses. He had heard sorrow claim its charter of rights, vindicate its pleadings, fight, triumph and crown itself. He had seen the life-story of the sorrowful man, presented not as a tragedy or a humiliation, a shame to be veiled, but[Pg 191] as a pageant, a tremendous spectacle, set to music, lighted, staged, applauded.

At first the sorrowful man was half afraid, he sought refuge and disguise in laughter, he pined for distraction and a long sleep. But each time he touched his desire, the wailings of heavenly wood-wind called him onward to holier, darker things. He had dropped the dear, dustless prize, and gone boldly on into the fire and blackness.... A thick, dark cloud swagged on the precipices of frozen mountains, frowned over deserts of snow. The sorrowful man stumbled in the dark, and his loud crying and the flurry of his seeking rose in a wail against the thudding drums of fate. Gold crept into the cloud, curling out from under it like a flame, and the sorrowful man seemed to see a human face looking down on him, and a hand that held seven stars.... "Who made the Seven Stars and Orion...." It was by the light of those stars in the Hero\'s hand that the sorrowful man saw, in a sudden awful wonder, that he was not alone—he marched in the ranks of a huge army. All round him, over the frozen plain, under the cloud with its lightnings, towards the blackness of the boundless void, marched the army of the sorrowful, unafraid. They marched in mail, helmeted, plated, with drawn swords. The ground shook with the thunder of their tread, the mountains quaked, the darkness smoked, the heavens heeled over, toppled and scattered before the conquering host whom the Lord had stricken—triumphant, fearless, proud, crowned and pierced....

[Pg 192]

Footsteps overtook Nigel, and he heard the greeting of a fellow student.

"You\'re in the clouds, old man. Who sent you there? Beethoven?"

Nigel stared.

"But the only cosmic genius is Offenbach."

"You mean the \'Orphée\'?"

"Yes—and \'Hoffmann.\' Life isn\'t a triumphal march, for all Beethoven would make it—it\'s comic opera, with just a pinch of the bizarre and a spice of the macabre. That\'s Offenbach."

Furlonger was still marching with the stricken army.

"When a man suffers," continued the student, "the gods laugh, the world laughs, and last of all—if he\'s a sport—the man laughs too."

"Sorrow is a triumph," said Nigel, dreamily.

"Not at all, old man—sorrow is a commonplace. The question is, what are we to make of the commonplace—a pageant or a joke? I\'m not sure that Offenbach hasn\'t given a better answer than Beethoven."
III

In a small room in Gower Street a man lay on his bed, his face crammed into the pillow, his shoulders high against his ears, his legs twisted in a rigid lock of endurance. Now and then a shudder went through him, but it was the shudder of something taut and stiff, over which the merest surface tremble can pass.

In his hand he crushed a letter. Behind his teeth words were forming, and fighting through to[Pg 193] his colourless lips. "Janey!—my Janey! Oh, my God! I can\'t bear this."

He suddenly twisted himself round on to his back, and faced the aching, yellow square of the window, where a May day was mocked by rain. There was a pipe close to the window, and the water poured from it in a quick tinkling trickle, cheering in rhythm, tragic in tone. Quentin unfolded Janey\'s letter.

He read it—but that word is inadequate, for he read it in the same spirit as an Egyptian priest might read the glyphs of his divinity, seeing in each sign a volume of esoteric meaning, so that every jot and tittle was worthy of long minutes\' contemplation.

It was some time since Janey\'s letters had ceased to be for Quentin what she hoped. Literally they were rather bald and laboured, for Janey was no penwoman, but she put a wealth of thought and passion into the straggling lines, and for a long while he had seen this. But now he saw much more, she would have trembled to think of the meaning he read into her words—he tested each phrase for the insincerity he felt sure it must conceal, he hunted up and down the pages for that monster unknown to Janet, the arrière pensée. Her letters were a torture to h............