A AMONG THE OF LETHE George declined from this time. I went to see him two years later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he let the business slip, how he drank, what a he was in drink, and how afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was ruining her life and the children's. I felt very sorry for her as she sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the "." When he had an extra bad on he went up there, and stayed sometimes for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the "" when he had recovered—"though," said Meg, "he's sick every morning and almost after every meal."
 
All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or eight years, with a mouth and nervous dark eyes. He sat watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble. I called at the "Ram" and saw George. He was half drunk.
 
I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie's last child had been born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.
 
When I went up to talk to her about George I found her in the bedroom nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George's children towards their father and mother, she glanced from the baby to me, and exclaimed:
 
"See how he watches the light flash across your spectacles when you turn suddenly—Look!"
 
But I was weary of babies. My friends had all grown up and married and them on me. There were storms of babies. I longed for a place where they would be , and young, , mothers might be a forgotten tradition. Lettie's heart would quicken in answer to only one pulse, the easy, light ticking of the baby's blood.
 
I remembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Cross on my way from France, that that was George's birthday. I had the feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the depression. I put it down to travel , and tried to dismiss it. As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found myself asking: "But—what's the matter? I've not had bad news, have I, to make my chest feel so weighted?"
 
I was surprised when I reached my in New to find no letters for me, save one fat budget from Alice. I knew her , handwriting on the envelope, and I thought I knew what contents to expect from the letter.
 
She had married an old acquaintance who had been her particular aversion. This young man had got himself into trouble, so that the condemnations of the righteous pursued him like clouds of on a summer evening. Alice immediately rose to sting back his vulgar enemies, and having rendered him a service, felt she could only wipe out the score by marrying him. They were fairly comfortable. Occasionally, as she said, there were displays of small fireworks in the back yard. He worked in the offices of some iron foundries just over the Erewash in Derbyshire. Alice lived in a dirty little place in the valley a mile and a half from Eberwich, not far from his work. She had no children, and practically no friends; a few young matrons for acquaintances. As wife of a superior clerk, she had to preserve her dignity among the work-people. So all her little crackling fires were sodded down with the sods of British respectability. Occasionally she smouldered a fierce smoke that made one's eyes water. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, she wrote me a whole venomous budget, much to my amusement.
 
I was not in any haste to open this fat letter until, after supper, I turned to it as a resource from my depression.
 
"Oh dear Cyril, I'm in a bubbling state, I want to yell, not write. Oh, Cyril, why didn't you marry me, or why didn't our Georgie Saxton, or somebody. I'm deadly sick. Percival Charles is enough to stop a clock. Oh, Cyril, he lives in an eternal Sunday suit, holy broadcloth and righteous three inches of ! He goes to bed in it. , he wallows in Bibles when he goes to bed. I can feel the covers of all his family Bibles sticking in my as I lie by his side. I could weep with , yet I put on my black hat and to with him like a lamb.
 
"Oh, Cyril, nothing's happened. Nothing has happened to me all these years. I shall die of it. When I see Percival Charles at dinner, after having asked a , I feel as if I should never touch a bit at his table again. In about an hour I shall hear him hurrying up the entry—prayers always make him hungry—and his first look will be on the table. But I'm not fair to him—he's really a good fellow—I only wish he wasn't.
 
"It's George Saxton who's put this seidlitz powder in my cup of cocoa. Cyril, I must a tale unfold. It is fifteen years since our George married Meg. When I count up, and think of the future, it nearly makes me scream. But my tale, my tale!
 
"Can you remember his faithful-dog, wounded-stag, gentle-gazelle eyes? Cyril, you can see the whisky or the brandy combusting in them. He's got d—t's, blue-devils—and I've seen him, and I'm myself with little red devils after it. I went up to Eberwich on Wednesday afternoon for a pound of fry for Percival Charles' Thursday dinner. I walked by that little path which you know goes round the back of the 'Hollies'—it's as near as any way for me. I thought I heard a row in the paddock at the back of the stables, so I said I might as well see the fun. I went to the gate, basket in one hand, ninepence in in the other, a deacon's wife. I didn't take in the scene at first.
 
"There was our Georgie, in leggings and breeches as of yore, and a whip. He was flourishing, and striding, and yelling. 'Go it old boy,' I said, 'you'll want your stocking round your throat to-night.' But Cyril, I had spoken too soon. Oh, lum! There came raking up the croft that long, wire-springy racehorse of his, ears flat, and, clinging to its neck, the pale-faced lad, Wilfred. The kid was white as death, and 'Mam! mam!' I thought it was a bit rotten of Georgie trying to teach the kid to jockey. The race-horse, Bonny-Boy—Boney Boy I call him—came bouncing round like a spiral egg-whish. Then I saw our Georgie rush up screaming, nearly spitting the moustache off his face, and fetch the horse a cut with the whip. It went off like a flame along hot paraffin. The kid and clung. Georgie went rushing after him, running staggery, and swearing, fairly screaming,—awful—'a lily-livered little swine!' The high race-horse went larroping round as if it was going mad. I was dazed. Then Meg came rushing, and the other two lads, all screaming. She went for George, but he lifted his whip like the devil. She daren't go near him—she rushed at him, and stopped, rushed at him, and stopped, striking at him with her two fists. He waved his whip and kept her off, and the race-horse kept tearing along. Meg flew to stop it, he ran with his drunken totter-step, his whip. I flew as well. I hit him with my basket. The kid fell off, and Meg rushed to him. Some men came running. George stood fairly . You would never have known his face, Cyril. He was mad, demoniacal. I feel sometimes as if I should burst and shatter to bits like a sky-rocket when I think of it. I've got such a weal on my arm.
 
"I lost Percival Charles' ninepence and my nice white cloth out of the basket, and everything, besides having black looks on Thursday because it was mutton chops, which he hates. Oh, Cyril, 'I wish I was a cassowary, on the banks of the Timbuctoo.' When I saw Meg over that lad—thank goodness he wasn't hurt—! I wished our Georgie was dead; I do now, also; I wish we only had to remember him. I haven't been to see them lately—can't stand Meg's ikeyness. I wonder how it all will end.
 
"There's P. C. bidding 'Good night and God Bless You' to Brother Jakes, and no supper ready——"
 
As soon as I could, after reading Alice's letter, I went down to Eberwich to see how things were. Memories of the old days came over me again till my heart hungered for its old people.
 
They told me at the "Hollies" that, after a bad attack of tremens, George had been sent to Papplewick in the lonely country to stay with Emily. I borrowed a bicycle to ride the nine miles. The summer had been wet, and everything was late. At the end of September the was heavy green, and the wheat stood dejectedly in stook. I rode through the still sweetness of an autumn morning. The mist was folded blue along the hedges; the elm trees up along the dim walls of the morning, the horse-chestnut trees at hand with a few yellow leaves like bright blossoms. As I rode through the tree tunnel by the church where, on his last night, the keeper had told me his story, I smelled the cold rotting of the leaves of the cloudy summer.
 
I passed silently through the lanes, where the chill grass was weighed down with grey-blue seed-pearls of dew in the shadow, where the wet woollen spider-cloths of autumn were spread as on a . Brown birds in flocks like driven leaves before me. I heard the far-off of the "loose-all" at the pits, telling me it was half-past eleven, that the men and boys would be sitting in the narrow darkness of the mines eating their "snap," while shadowy mice for the , and the boys laughed with red mouths with grime, as the bold little creatures peeped at them in the dim light of the lamps. The dogwood berries stood on the hedge-tops, the bunched scarlet and green berries of the convolvulus and bryony hung amid golden trails, the blackberries dropped ungathered. I rode slowly on, the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy mouths, and for the birds, the men underground below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges.
 
Swineshed Farm, where the Renshaws lived, stood quite alone among its fields, hidden from the highway and from everything. The lane leading up to it was deep and unsunned. On my right, I caught glimpses through the hedge of the corn-fields, where the shocks of wheat stood like small yellow-sailed ships in a widespread flotilla. The upper part of the field was cleared. I heard the clank of a and the voices of men, and I saw the high load of sheaves go lurching, rocking up the incline to the stackyard.
 
The lane debouched into a close-bitten field, and out of this empty land the farm rose up with its buildings like a of old, painted floating in still water. White went stepping through the mild sunshine and the shadow. I leaned my bicycle against the grey, silken doors of the old coach-house. The place was breathing with silence. I hesitated to knock at the open door. Emily came. She was rich as always with her large beauty, and stately now with the stateliness of a strong woman six months gone with child.
 
She exclaimed with surprise, and I followed her into the kitchen, a glimpse of the pans and the white wood baths as I passed through the scullery. The kitchen was a good-sized, low room that through long course of years had become absolutely a home. The great beams of the ceiling bowed easily, the chimney-seat had a bit of dark-green curtain, and under the high mantel-piece was another low shelf that the men could reach with their hands as they sat in the ingle-nook. There the pipes lay. Many generations of peaceful men and fruitful women had passed through the room, and not one but had added a new small comfort; a chair in the right place, a hook, a stool, a cushion, a certain pleasing cloth for the sofa covers, a shelf of books. The room, that looked so quiet and crude, was a home evolved through generations to fit the large bodies of the men who dwelled in it, and the fancy of the women. At last, it had an individuality. It was the home of the Renshaws, warm, lovable, . Emily was in perfect accord with its brownness, its shadows, its ease. I, as I sat on the sofa under the window, felt rejected by the kind room. I was with a sense of ephemerality, of pale, fragility.
 
Emily, in her full-blooded beauty, was at home. It is rare now to feel a kinship between a room and the one who inhabits it, a close bond of blood relation. Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from the torture of strange, complex modern life. She was making a pie, and the flour was white on her brown arms. She pushed the hair from her face with her arm, and looked at me with pleasure, as she worked the paste in the yellow bowl. I was quiet, before her.
 
"You are very happy?" I said.
 
"Ah very!" she replied. "And you?—you are not, you look worn."
 
"Yes," I replied. "I am happy enough. I am living my life."
 
"Don't you find it wearisome?" she asked pityingly.
 
She made me tell her all ............