‘The hell you are!’ Hector began to feel angry too. Damned unreasonable, he thought.
Elizabeth slapped the hand he was trying to caress her with.
He got off the bed.
‘I might as well go and get roaring drunk,’ he said, making for the door.
Elizabeth sprang after him. ‘If you do,’ she said, ‘I’ll come and get drunk too.’
Her threat sounded like mere bravado even to herself. A sense of weakness came over her.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I can’t do without you.’
The reconciliation made them very happy. It also blinded them to the real issue between them which had obtruded itself nakedly enough in their quarrel, and as they sat cheek by cheek agreeing together what fools they had been their unanimity was more apparent than real. Elizabeth meant that she had been a fool to be miserable at all, since their love could never die, while Hector meant that he had been a fool to be jealous of a half-man like the minister. Elizabeth was now ready to regard Hector’s sojourn with Mabel merely as an attempt to distract himself from his unhappiness, and Hector was ready to look on Elizabeth’s friendliness to the minister as the polite amiability of a hostess; but they did not recognize that in so construing each other’s actions they had each left out a good deal of the truth.
‘We need a change of some kind,’ said Elizabeth finally, after turning over in her mind the various circumstances preceding the outburst. She was glad to lay the blame of it on Calderwick. ‘Let’s take a day off to-morrow.’
But perhaps it was an obscure sense of some change in herself that prompted her to use these words, for in the small hours she awoke with an anguished feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was. She had been dreaming that she was at home, but now the window, faintly perceptible, was in the wrong place, and she knew without seeing it that she would collide with unfamiliar furniture were she to get out of bed. There was sweat on her brow and her heart was thumping; the world stretched out on all sides into dark impersonal nothingness and she herself was a terrifying anonymity. She took refuge in a device of her childhood. I’m me, she thought; me, me; here behind my eyes. Mechanically she moved her arm and crooked her little finger as she had often done before. It’s me making the finger move; I am behind my eyes, but I’m in the finger too…. But the clue she was striving to grasp still eluded her, and if she could not seize it she would be lost for ever. When she was almost rigid with terror the name ‘Elizabeth Ramsay’ rose into her mind, and the nightmare vanished. Her body relaxed, but her mind with incredible swiftness rearranged the disordered puzzle of her identity. She was Elizabeth Ramsay but she was also Elizabeth Shand. Hector was there. She put out her hand and gently touched the mass of his body under the coverings on the neighbouring bed.
Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and the more years she traversed the more inalterably would she become Elizabeth Shand. Those years of the future stretched endlessly before her; with that queer lucidity which is seldom found in daytime thinking she could see them as a perspective of fields, each one separated by a fence from its neighbour. Over you go, said a voice, and over she went, then into the next and the next and the next. But this was no longer time or space, it was eternity; there was no end, no goal; perhaps a higher fence marked the boundary betwen life and death, but in the fields beyond it she was still Elizabeth Shand. She was beginning to be terrified again, and opened her eyes. Mrs Shand, she said to herself. It was appalling, and she had never realized it before.
Hector’s quiet breathing rose and fell like 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