by what, if one may ask?’
The speaker was Macallister, the only other man in the room. A huge full-blooded bovine fellow, with inflated hands and lurks of fat ruffling above his collar, he was reading for Honours in Philosophy.
‘I wish to goodness you’d stop asking that Macallister here,’ said Dussie. ‘He never looks precisely at any particular spot of you, but you feel all the same as if he’d been staring the whole time just under here. Such a sight too − all those collops of fat.’
Here indicated the waist-line. She referred to Macallister’s way of looking as ‘the Greek statue glare’.
‘That’s what comes of philosophy, you see,’ said Luke. ‘Aren’t you thankful I gave it up? − Jolly acute mind, though, for all the encumbrance.’
He continued to bring Macallister to the house. He liked to know the latest developments in philosophic thought, having never quite forgotten that as an apprentice shoemaker he had constructed a system of philosophy which he dreamed would revolutionise the world. Macallister was a useful asset.
‘Illuminated by what, if one may ask?’ Macallister was saying, waving his cigarette towards Martha and giving her the Greek statue glare with his continually roving eyes.
‘Illuminated,’ said Luke, ‘by the sun, the moon and the eleven stars. Also by a little history and poetry and the cool clear truths of the wash-tub.’
And again before Martha’s quickening eye came the figure of Emmeline, towsled and sluttish, and of herself on the sloppy kitchen floor thrusting her arms in the water. Emmeline’s voice rasped. ‘Ye’ve scleitered a’ower the place,’ she was saying. Martha felt sure that every other girl in the room was seeing the same vision as she saw, and her heart burned hot against Luke.
‘Luke, you gumpus!’ cried Dussie’s ringing voice. ‘Cool and clear indeed! Much you know about the wash-tub.’
And a girl in an immaculate white silk shirt said pettishly,
‘My blouses are being ruined, just ruined! In digs, you know − but what can one do? Last week −’
The conversation drifted to more important matters than specialisation.
‘Spanking night,’ said Luke when the guests had gone. ‘Say, Duss, let’s walk Marty home.’
‘You can walk her home if you like, but I’ve an ironing to do. − No indeed, Marty, you shan’t stay and help.’
She despatched them into the dusk.
‘Quarries car,’ cried Luke, ‘and out by Hazelwood.’
The twilight was luminous, from a golden west and a rising moon. The whole sky glowed like some enormous jewel that held fire diffused within itself. Slowly the fire gathered to points, focussed in leaping stars. They struck through Hazelwood. Stark boughs vaulted the sky, and they walked below in silence, along paths that the moon made unfamiliar. There was no purpose in breaking a silence that was part of the magic of the place and hour. Luke walked on in a gay content. Troubled, in a low voice, Martha at last remonstrated with him on the disclosure to which he had subjected her. ‘They will despise me.’
He heard the low words with some astonishment, not having supposed her susceptible to a worldy valuation. For a moment he realized that her nature might be other than he had perceived, but speedily forgot it and saw her only in his own conception of her.
‘Let them then. It’s not worth minding, Marty. Merely the price you have to pay for my determination that they shall know there are people like you in the world. They don’t think, these women − they don’t think anywhere farther up than coffee in Kennington’s and partners for the next dance.’
‘Oh Luke, that isn’t true. They know such a lot − things I don’t know. All those books they’ve read and plays they’ve been to, and concerts. I’ve never heard of half the names they used.’
‘Ornamentation, Marty. They wear them because they’re in the fashion. When they really think, it’s of how to remove an incipient moustache. Oh, they’re not all like that, thank God, but that little lot mostly are. I want them to know you − what you’re like. To understand that there are qualities of mind that make common labour grace and not disgrace the purest intellectual ardour.’
‘But I’m not intellectual.’
She did not know what she was, never having analysed herself; and the disclaimer was not coquetry but disbelief.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘you’re an Intelligence − a Phantom Intelligence.’
She let the accusation pass, not knowing how to refute it; and followed her own thought.
‘But Miss Warrender, she’s not − she’s −’
‘Oh, she’s different, of course. Talks well, doesn’t she? Tremendously well-read. Get Miss Warrender talking and you’re sure to learn something you didn’t know. A perfect pit of knowledge.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have classed her with these others − should you, Luke? The ones that just wear what they know.’
Martha spoke slowly, pondering the question, which evidently exercised her.
‘I am rebuked, gentle guardian.’ Martha shrank. Luke in obeisance before her was troubling. If she were sure that he was only bantering − ! She guessed too that he was aware of her trouble. ‘Of course I shouldn’t. Not so very different either, though. Her knowledge is merely hers, not her. It makes no sort of alteration in the essential man. She knows a few hundred times more now than when I met her first, and she hasn’t grown an atom with it all. It gets no farther in than her brain. When her brain suffers dissolution, so will the knowledge. Food for worms. She’ll waken up to her next incarnation with horribly little to put on. Now you, on the other hand, Marty − you know things with the whole of you. Your knowledge pervades your whole personality. It’s pure spirit. A rare and subtle essence.’
He took an arrogant delight in troubling her, having decided that she was insufficiently aware of her own worth and ought to be made to see herself through other eyes. He had a fine intellectual apprehension of her quality arid tried to show her herself as he perceived her.
‘You are big enough to stand the knowledge. Nothing will spoil you, Marty − there’s flame enough in you to burn the danger up.’
She began to comprehend that she was for him an earnest of the spiritual world; its ministrant; his Beatrice.
‘I don’t worship you. You worship a goddess through flame, don’t you? − But I have learned through you to worship flame. The flame of life. Like Beatrice. Making me aware of hierarchies of being beyond our own. − I’m not making love to you, you know, Marty.’
She said, ‘Luke!’ with a tongue so astounded that he laughed audibly; and in a moment so did she. The absurdity of the idea was palpable.
‘I suppose to some fools it would sound pernicious,’ he reflected. ‘To tell a woman that you love her and at the same time that you haven’t the least intention of wooing her − well! − It can be done, though.’ He was a little magisterial again, liking his theories. ‘There
