an almost imperceptible ripple of sound. He was sunk beneath the waves of sleep, she thought, flying as usual from metaphor to metaphor; he was gathered up within himself like a tightly shut bud, remote, solitary, indifferent. He was stripped of everything that made companionship possible; he was now simply himself. You are a part of myself, she had told him, but was that true? When she had first emerged from sleep she had had no consciousness of him. In the ultimate resort she too was simply herself.
She was now wide awake, and she lay staring into the darkness seeing the separateness of all human beings. But as if they had gone round an immense circle her thoughts came back to the question of her own identity. Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and she herself, that essential self which awoke from sleep, had felt lost because she had forgotten that fact.
Elizabeth liked to find significance in facts, but she confused significance with mystery. The more mysterious anything appeared to her the more she was convinced of its significance. The change in her name which she had hitherto lightly accepted now seemed to her of overwhelming importance.
Hector, separate as he is, she argued, would not be sleeping so quietly if he and I were not in harmony. So even in sleep, that last refuge of the separate personality, there must be some communion between us. He rests in me and I in him. In a sense therefore it is true that we are part of each other.
She sat up in bed and bent half over him. He was curled up on his side, facing her, and she could just discern the outline of his cheek beneath the darker hair. A great tenderness towards him flowed through her. She could not live without him. She was not only herself: she was herself-and-Hector.
Their quarrel had ended, she remembered, when she had abandoned her pride and told him she could not do without him. Pride is the stalk, she said to herself, but love is the flower. Give up the old Elizabeth Ramsay, she told herself, emotion sweeping her away, and became Elizabeth Shand.
She lay down again. She must learn to be a wife. Was that what Aunt Janet was driving at?
It was a long time before she fell asleep. But she fell asleep smiling.
FOUR
On Sunday mornings in Calderwick the streets are hushed; no whistling of baker is heard or monotonous jangling of coal-bell; the very dogs, furtively let out for a run before church time, slink more quietly along the pavements, missing the smells and sounds of weekday traffic. On this Sunday morning both sky and earth were new washed and sparkling after the storm; the air was unseasonably mild, and the people of Calderwick, as they struggled into their Sunday clothes, felt that it was real Sabbath weather.
At a quarter to eleven the church bells began to ring. With an effort one could distinguish the various bells – the four United Free, the Congregational, the Wesleyan, the Baptist, the Roman Catholic and the Episcopal bells – but all were overborne by the peal from the Parish Kirk, which rang out irregularly, gaily and yet commandingly over the town. The Parish Kirk had the only peal of bells in Calderwick, including the great bell whose deep note rang curfew every night at ten o’clock: the single tones of the free-lance churches could not but sound tinny in comparison.
In response to the summons doors opened in every street, and streams of soberly clad people began to converge in the middle of the town, where the river of churchgoers flowed strongly down the High Street, overbearing with ease a small cross-current setting towards the Plymouth Brethren. Like other large rivers it divided again near the end of its journey, and drew off congregation by congregation, leaving the main wash of the flood to spend itself in the spacious dusk of the Parish Kirk.
St James’s United Free Church, where Sarah Murray was already at her post in the manse pew, was a small building holding about six hundred souls. It was lined and seated with pine-wood in a cheerful shade of yellow; it had an organ with painted pipes, a canopy of stars shining on a blue sky above the pulpit, and windows filled with lozenges of transparent coloured glass, red, yellow, blue and an occasional purple, which combined into geometrical patterns if one looked at them long enough. High up on the wall immediately facing the pulpit was the large white dial of a clock. It was not true to say of William Murray, as Mary Watson did, that he preached with his eye on the clock, for although he gazed at the clock face he never noticed what hour it registered. He stared at the expressionless white circle because it helped him to forget the rustlings and coughings in the congregation below, and through a kind of self-hypnosis helped to lift him into a transcendental world favourable for sermons.
On this Sunday morning the minister was paler than usual, climbed very slowly up the pulpit steps, and seemed to have taken a vow not to look at his congregation. Once he cast a hasty glance at the Shand pew, then during the hymn he looked steadily again in the same direction; there were only three figures in the pew, however – John Shand, his wife and Miss Janet Shand, in her best toque. But he gave out his text in a firm voice: ‘Matthew, chapter five, verse twenty-two: “Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment … but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.’”
When the rustling of turning pages died down the congregation began to sit up. The way in which he had said ‘hell fire’ gave them a shock. Mary Watson twisted round to look at the clock, put a cinnamon lozenge into her mouth, and prepared to listen.
Because hell fire was not to be taken literally, said the minister, one dared not assume that it did not exist.
Mary began to nod her head emphatically, and kept on nodding it. This was something like. What had come over Milk-and-water Willie? His een were fair blazing.
‘Cut off from the communion of God and cast into outer darkness,’ said the minister. There was a desperateness in his voice which thrilled his hearers.
It was a pity that Elizabeth and Hector did not hear that sermon; he was never to preach another so good.
Hector and Elizabeth were escaping on bicycles, pedalling along the upland ridges to the north of Calderwick where wide fields sweep down in bare curves to the sea-cliffs and on the other side thick forests of pine run up to the flanks of the mountains. Rain never lingers on these sandy roads and winter takes little from the austere beauty of the landscape. Elizabeth and Hector tinkled their bells merrily as they ran down a slope towards a foaming brown torrent that was carrying its load of rain to the sea. Elizabeth gazed at Hector’s broad shoulders receding in front of her. It pleased her to recognize that he was both stronger and heavier than she was. That helped her to be Mrs Hector Shand.
Next day she was still happy and humble. Her new mood of dedication led her after breakfast to darn Hector’s socks ‘exactly like a wife’, as she said to herself. In the afternoon she avoided Emily Scrymgeour and went down to the sea.
The sand was firm and level; the sand-dunes had been curved by the wind as by a slicing knife into clean, exact curves; the long tawny grass above was matted and tufted like the sodden fell of a weary animal. The land was still and quiet, but the sea had not yet forgotten its rage. There was a deep swell, and the smooth backs of the rollers heaved to an incredible height before toppling and plunging in cataracts of foam. Elizabeth turned her back upon the land and revelled in the recklessness with which the walls of water hurled themselves headlong. Shock after shock of the plunging monsters vibrated through her until she was lashed to an equal excitement and hurled back again the charging passion of the sea. That was the way to live, she cried within herself. Hector and Elizabeth Shand together would transform the world.
Characteristically she did not remember that although she had turned her back on the land it was still there, quiet and unshaken.
After her orgy by the sea Elizabeth felt the need of making a large decisive gesture. She took the longer way home, which led past the manse of
