‘It comes out every evening like this,’ she said softly, with curious joy.
‘And that was August, and now it’s February!’ he exclaimed. ‘It must be psychological, you know. You make it come — the smart; you invoke it.’
She looked up at him, suddenly cold.
‘I! I never think of it,’ she answered briefly, with a kind of sneer.
The young man’s blood ran back from her at her acid tone. But the mortification was physical only. Smiling quickly, gently —’
‘Never?’ he re-echoed.
There was silence between them for some moments, whilst Louisa continued to play the piano for their benefit. At last:
‘Drat it,’ she exclaimed, flouncing round on the piano-stool.
The two looked up at her.
‘Ye did run well — what hath hindered you?’ laughed Byrne.
‘You!’ cried Louisa. ‘Oh, I can’t play any more,’ she added, dropping her arms along her skirt pathetically. Helena laughed quickly.
‘Oh I can’t, Helen!’ pleaded Louisa.
‘My dear,’ said Helena, laughing briefly, ‘you are really under no obligation whatever.’
With the little groan of one who yields to a desire contrary to her self-respect, Louisa dropped at the feet of Helena, laid her arm and her head languishingly on the knee of her friend. The latter gave no sign, but continued to gaze in the fire. Byrne, on the other side of the hearth, sprawled in his chair, smoking a reflective cigarette.
The room was very quiet, silent even of the tick of a clock. Outside, the traffic swept by, and feet pattered along the pavement. But this vulgar storm of life seemed shut out of Helena’s room, that remained indifferent, like a church. Two candles burned dimly as on an altar, glistening yellow on the dark piano. The lamp was blown out, and the flameless fire, a red rubble, dwindled in the grate, so that the yellow glow of the candles seemed to shine even on the embers. Still no one spoke.
At last Helena shivered slightly in her chair, though did not change her position. She sat motionless.
‘Will you make coffee, Louisa?’ she asked. Louisa lifted herself, looked at her friend, and stretched slightly.
‘Oh!’ she groaned voluptuously. ‘This is so comfortable!’
‘Don’t trouble then, I’ll go. No, don’t get up,’ said Helena, trying to disengage herself. Louisa reached and put her hands on Helena’s wrists.
‘I will go,’ she drawled, almost groaning with voluptuousness and appealing love.
Then, as Helena still made movements to rise, the elder woman got up slowly, leaning as she did so all her weight on her friend.
‘Where is the coffee?’ she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy. She was full of small affectations, being consumed with uneasy love.
‘I think, my dear,’ replied Helena, ‘it is in its usual place.’
‘Oh — o-o-oh!’ yawned Louisa, and she dragged herself out.
The two had been intimate friends for years, had slept together, and played together and lived together. Now the friendship was coming to an end.
‘After all,’ said Byrne, when the door was closed, ‘if you’re alive you’ve got to live.’
Helena burst into a titter of amusement at this sudden remark.
‘Wherefore?’ she asked indulgently.
‘Because there’s no such thing as passive existence,’ he replied, grinning.
She curled her lip in amused indulgence of this very young man.
‘I don’t see it at all,’ she said.
‘You can’t, he protested, ‘any more than a tree can help budding in April — it can’t help itself, if it’s alive; same with you.’
‘Well, then’— and again there was the touch of a sneer —‘if I can’t help myself, why trouble, my friend?’
‘Because — because I suppose I can’t help myself — if it bothers me, it does. You see, I’— he smiled brilliantly —‘am April.’
She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy, metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering:
‘But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to me — and — and go through a kind of danse macabre —’
‘But you bud underneath — like beech,’ he said quickly.
‘Really, my friend,’ she said coldly, ‘I am too tired to bud.’
‘No,’ he pleaded, ‘no!’ With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She looked in the fire, forgetting him.
‘You want March,’ he said — he worried endlessly over her —‘to rip off your old leaves. I s’ll have to be March,’ he laughed.
She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile, then broke out once more.
‘You must start again — you must. Always you rustle your red leaves of a blasted summer. You are not dead. Even if you want to be, you’re not. Even if it’s a bitter thing to say, you have to say it: you are not dead. . . . ’
Smiling a peculiar, painful smile, as if he hurt her, she turned to gaze at a photograph that hung over the piano. It was the profile of a handsome man in the prime of life. He was leaning slightly forward, as if yielding beneath a burden of life, or to the pull of fate. He looked out musingly, and there was no hint of rebellion in the contours of the regular features. The hair was brushed back, soft and thick, straight from his fine brow. His nose was small and shapely, his chin rounded, cleft, rather beautifully moulded. Byrne gazed also at the photo. His look became distressed and helpless.
‘You cannot say you are dead with Siegmund,’ he cried brutally. She shuddered, clasped her burning arms on her breast, and looked into the fire. ‘You are not dead with Siegmund,’ he persisted, ‘so you can’t say you live with him. You may live with his memory. But Siegmund is dead, and his memory is not he — himself,’ He made a fierce gesture of impatience. ‘Siegmund now — he is not a memory — he is not your dead red leaves — he is Siegmund Dead! And you do not know him, because you are alive, like me, so Siegmund Dead is a stranger to you.’
With her head bowed down, cowering like a sulky animal, she looked at him under her brows. He stared fiercely back at her, but beneath her steady, glowering gaze he shrank, then turned aside.
‘You stretch your hands blindly to the dead; you look backwards. No, you never touch the thing,’ he cried.
‘I have the arms of Louisa always round my neck,’ came her voice, like the cry of a cat. She put her hands on her throat as if she must relieve an ache. He saw her lip raised in a kind of disgust, a revulsion from life. She was very sick after the tragedy.
He frowned, and his eyes dilated.
‘Folk are good; they are good for one. You never have looked at them. You would linger hours over a blue weed, and let all the people down the road go by. Folks are better than a garden in full blossom —’
She watched him again. A certain beauty in his speech, and his passionate way, roused her when she did not want to be roused, when moving from her torpor was painful. At last —
‘You are merciless, you know, Cecil,’ she said.
‘And I will be,’ protested Byrne, flinging his