lady harman had been married when she was just eighteen.
mrs. sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor who had been killed in a railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and she had brought up her two daughters in a villa at penge upon very little money, in a state of genteel protest. ellen was the younger. she had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then shot up very rapidly. she had gone to a boarding-school at wimbledon because mrs. sawbridge thought the penge day-school had made georgina opiniated and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an unrefined degree. the wimbledon school was on less progressive lines, and anyhow ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by seventeen was already womanly, dignified and intensely admired by a number of schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers. she was generally very good and only now and then broke out with a venturesome enterprise that hurt nobody. she got out of a skylight, for example, and perambulated the roof in the moonshine to see how it felt and did one or two other little things of a similar kind. otherwise her conduct was admirable and her temper in those days was always contagiously good. that attractiveness which mr. brumley felt, was already very manifest, and a little hindered her in the attainment of other distinctions. most of her lessons were done for her by willing slaves, and they were happy slaves because she abounded in rewarding kindnesses; but on the other hand the study of english literature and music was almost forced upon her by the zeal of the two visiting professors of these subjects.
and at seventeen, which is the age when girls most despise the boyishness of young men, she met sir isaac and filled him with an invincible covetousness....
2
the school at wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over by a lady of hidden motives and great exterior calm named miss beeton clavier. she was handsome without any improper attractiveness, an associate in arts of st. andrew's university and a cousin of mr. blenker of the old country gazette. she was assisted by several resident mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for music and shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were all quite effectively hidden from the high-road. the curriculum included latin grammar—nobody ever got to the reading of books in that formidable tongue—french by an english lady who had been in france, hanoverian german by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of english history and literature, arithmetic, algebra, political economy and drawing. there was no hockey played within the precincts, science was taught without the clumsy apparatus or objectionable diagrams that are now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young ladies and the iniquity of speaking in raised voices. miss beeton clavier deprecated the modern "craze for examinations," and released from such pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as circle in a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects. this turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not learn algebra or latin or so-forth, one did algebra, one was put into latin....
the girls went through this system of exercises and occupations, evasively and as it were sotto voce, making friends, making enemies, making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find out something about life—in spite of the most earnest discouragement.... none of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for life. most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had to pass. beyond was the sunshine.
ellen gathered what came to her. she realized a certain beauty in music in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional like miss beeton clavier and became human—like schoolfellows. and one little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much vagueness and emotion of high aims, and lent her with an impressive furtiveness the works of emerson and shelley and a pamphlet by bernard shaw. it was a little difficult to understand what these writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities of miss beeton clavier.
in that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the key, religion. she was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training dissuaded her from a free approach. her mother treated religion with a reverence that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. she never named the deity and she did not like the mention of his name: she threw a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that ellen never thoroughly cast off. she put god among objectionable topics—albeit a sublime one. miss beeton clavier sustained this remarkable suggestion. when she read prayers in school she did so with the balanced impartiality of one who offers no comment. she seemed pained as she read and finished with a sigh. whatever she intended to convey, she conveyed that even if the divinity was not all he should be, if, indeed, he was a person almost primitive, having neither the restraint nor the self-obliteration of a refined gentlewoman, no word of it should ever pass her lips. and so ellen as a girl never let her mind go quite easily into this reconciling core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few chosen coevals. it wasn't very profitable talk. they had a guilty feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal proclivity to stab the swelling gravity of their souls with some forced and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before they rose too high....
yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the girl's heart. she thought little of god by day, but had a strange sense of him in the starlight; never under the moonlight—that was in no sense divine—but in the stirring darkness of the stars. and it is remarkable that after a course of astronomical enlightenment by a visiting master and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances, then even more than ever she seemed to feel god among the stars....
a fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the dark stillnesses of death. the accident happened away in wales during the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its consequence. hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into freedoms and realities beyond. death happened, she was aware, to young people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. this termination came with a shock. the girl was no great personal loss to ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be like that. how stifled one would feel!
it couldn't be like that.
she began to speculate about that future life upon which religion insists so much and communicates so little. was it perhaps in other planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? she perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about her. was all this world a mere make-believe, and would miss beeton clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? manifestly there was a veil. she had a very natural disposition to doubt whether the actual circumstances of her life were real. her mother for instance was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping of something else. but if these things were not real, what was real? what might she not presently do? what might she not presently be? perhaps death had something to do with that. was death perhaps no more than the flinging off of grotesque outer garments by the newly arrived guests at the feast of living? she had that feeling that there might be a feast of living.
these preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her dark tall charm.
there were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against the things of every day. these too were moments quite different and separate in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation of flowers or sunshine or little vividly living things. daylight seemed to blind her to them, as they blinded her to starshine. they too had a quality of reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses and driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. such were the luminous transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service in church.
the school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and for a year and more ellen had the place at the corner from which she could look down the hazy candle-lit vista of the nave and see the congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely apprehended clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar deep and spacious rustle to sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music. certain hymns in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into another larger, more wonderful world: "heart's abode, celestial salem" for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness. of such a quality she thought the heavenly city must surely be, away there and away. but this persuasion differed from those other mystical intimations in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. and remarkably mixed up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic and kindred like a silver dagger stuck through a mystically illuminated parchment, was the angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who stood out amidst the choir below and sang, it seemed to her, alone.
she herself on these occasions of exaltation would be far too deeply moved to sing. she was inundated by a swimming sense of boundaries nearly transcended, as though she was upon the threshold of a different life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could only maintain herself long enough in this shimmering exaltation she would get right over; things would happen, things that would draw her into that music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday life again. there one would walk through music between great candles under eternal stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. but nothing ever did happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn ceased, the "amen" died away, as if a curtain fell. the congregation subsided. reluctantly she would sink back into her seat....
but all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come out of church silent and preoccupied, returning unwillingly to the commonplaces of life....
