‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Irene asked again. There were tears in her eyes; but however unhappy she might look, there was something determined and indomitable in her attitude, something obstinate in her expression and her tone of voice. Mrs. Aldwinkle had reason to fear her rival.
‘Because you’re too young,’ she said at last. It was a very feeble answer; but she had been unable to think of a better one.
‘But, Aunt Lilian, don’t you remember? You always said that people ought to marry young. I remember so well, one time, when we talked about Juliet being only fourteen when she first saw Romeo, that you said . . .’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, cutting short her niece’s mnemonic display. Irene’s memory, Mrs. Aldwinkle had often had reason to complain, was really too good.
‘But if you said . . .’ Irene began again.
‘Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with you and Hovenden,’ retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘I repeat: you’re too young.’
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Practically nineteen,’ Irene insisted. ‘My birthday’s in December.’
‘Marry in haste and repent at leisure,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, making use of any missile, even a proverb, that came ready to hand. ‘At the end of six months you’ll come back howling and complaining and asking me to get you out of the mess.’
‘But why should I?’ asked Irene. ‘We love one another.’
‘They all say that. You don’t know your own minds.’
‘But we do.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly changed her tactics. ‘And what makes you so anxious all at once to run away from me?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you bear to stay with me a moment longer? Am I so intolerable and odious and . . . and . . . brutal and . . . She clawed at the air. ‘Do you hate me so much that . . .’
‘Aunt Lilian!’ protested Irene, who had begun to cry in earnest.
Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that tactlessness, that lack of measure that were characteristic of her, went on piling question upon rhetorical question, until in the end she completely spoiled the effect she had meant to achieve, exaggerating into ludicrousness what might otherwise have been touching. ‘Can’t you bear me? Have I ill-treated you? Tell me. Have I bullied you, or scolded you, or . . . or not given you enough to eat? Tell me.’
‘How can you talk like that, Aunt Lilian?’ Irene dabbed her eyes with a corner of her dressing-gown. ‘How can you say that I don’t love you? And you were always telling me that I ought to get married,’ she added, breaking out into fresh tears.
‘How can I say that you don’t love me?’ echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘But is it true that you’re longing to leave me as soon as possible? Is that true or not? I merely ask what the reason is, that’s all.’
‘But the reason is that we want to get married; we love each other.’
‘Or that you hate me,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle persisted.
‘But I don’t hate you, Aunt Lilian. How can you say such a thing? You know I love you.’
‘And yet you’re anxious to run away from me as fast as you possibly can,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘And I shall be left all alone, all alone.’ Her voice trembled; she shut her eyes, she contorted her face in an effort to keep it closed and rigid. Between her eyelids the tears came welling out. ‘All alone,’ she repeated brokenly. Getting old, said the little clock on the mantel-piece, getting old, getting old.
Irene knelt down beside her, took her hands between her own and kissed them, pressed them against her tear-wet face. ‘Aunt Lilian,’ she begged, ‘Aunt Lilian.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.
‘Don’t cry,’ said Irene, crying herself. She imagined that she alone was the cause of Aunt Lilian’s unhappiness. In reality, she was only the pretext; Mrs. Aldwinkle was weeping over her whole life, weeping at the approach of death. In that first moment of agonized sympathy and self-reproach, Irene was on the point of declaring that she would give up Hovenden, that she would spend all her life with her Aunt Lilian. But something held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn’t do, that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved Aunt Lilian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt Lilian more than Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked prophetically forward, something that had come through innumerable lives, out of the obscure depths of time, to dwell within her, held her back. The conscious and individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But consciousness and individuality—how precariously, how irrelevantly almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the darkness of her being! The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for Hovenden.
‘But you won’t be all alone,’ she protested. ‘We shall constantly be with you. You’ll come and stay with us.’
The assurance did not seem to bring much consolation to Mrs. Aldwinkle. She went on crying. The clock ticked away as busily as ever.
CHAPTER III
In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s note-book had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet contemplation. De Lespinasse had yielded to de Guyon.
‘Do you remember, darling Jim,’ she wrote, ‘how, when we were ten, we used to discuss what was the sin against the Holy Ghost? I remember we agreed that using the altar as a W.C. was probably the unforgivable sin. It’s a great pity that it isn’t, for then it would be so extremely easy to avoid committing it. No, I’m afraid it’s not quite so straightforward as that, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s most perilously easy to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the spirit its fair chance—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s unforgivable because it’s irremediable. Last-minute repentances are no good. The sin and the corresponding virtue are affairs of a lifetime. And almost everybody commits the sin; they die unforgiven, and at once they begin again another life. Only when they’ve lived in the virtue of the Holy Ghost are they forgiven, let off the pains of life and allowed to sink into unity with All.
Isn’t that the meaning of the text? It’s terribly difficult not to commit the sin. Whenever I stop to think, I am appalled by the badness of my own life. Oh, Jim, Jim, how easily one forgets, how unthinkingly one allows oneself to be buried under a mountain of little earthy interests! The voices are muffled, the mind is blocked up, there’s no place for the spirit of God. When I’m working, I feel it’s all right; I’m living in the virtue of the Holy Ghost. For then I’m doing the best I can. But the rest of the time, that’s when I go wrong. One can’t be doing all the time, one can’t always give out. One must also be passive, must receive. That’s what I fail to do. I flutter about, I fill my mind with lumber, I make it impossible for myself to receive. One can’t go on like this; one can’t go on sinning against the Holy Ghost—not if one once realizes it.’
There was a line. The next note began: ‘To think steadily and intensely of one thing is a wonderful mental exercise; it serves to open up the mysteries that lie below the commonplace surface of existence; and perhaps, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might get through the mystery to its explanation. When I think, for example, of my hand . . .’ The note was a long one; it covered, in Miss Thriplow’s clear, cultured writing, more than two pages of the book.
‘Recently,’ she had written after that, ‘I have been saying my prayers again, as I used to when I was a child. Our Father which art in heaven—the words help to clear out one’s mind, to rid it of the lumber and leave it free for the coming of the spirit.’
The next three notes had got there by mistake. Their place was not in the secret, personal book, but in the other volume, wherein she recorded little snippets that might come in useful for her novels. Not, of course, that the entries in the secret book didn’t also come in useful for her fiction sometimes; but they were not recorded expressly for that purpose.
‘A man in riding breeches,’ the first note ran: ‘he makes a little creaking noise as he walks along, whipcord rubbing against whipcord, that is like the creaking noise that swans make, flying, when they move their big white wings.’
Then followed two lines of comic dialogue.
‘Me. I find the Fall of the House of Usher a most blood-curdling story.
‘Frenchman. Yes, yes, she bloods my curdle also.’
The third note recorded that ‘moss after a shower on a sultry
