She had spoken slowly with long pauses, and now they had passed the gates and were in the public road. Miss Geary turned and tugged the iron gate until it was close−shut behind them.
“I think it must be this sense of spring,” she said as they turned towards Paston Hall, “that has revived those old ideas of mine. I haven't thought of them since my cousins and I and Rachel Sterne used to discuss art and life and the meaning of things when we were girls, about your age, years ago. In the arrogance of our youth we thought we knew the meaning of things. Well, I've lost my youth, and I hope I've lost my arrogance, but I still think Rachel's wrong as I thought her wrong then. I wonder if she has begun to think so herself? It was a moral question we used to debate—that the creation of a thing of permanent beauty was the highest good and justified any means, and of course that implies any exploitation or distortion or even destruction of life. But can a thing be permanent or beautiful if it disregards the laws of life?”
They walked on in silence for some distance.
“Some clever scientist, I suppose,” Miss Geary mused aloud, “might make something that appeared to be alive and that could go on for ever. But could anyone ever create something as subtle as a coltsfoot, which lives and develops quite independent of anyone's will, just freely obeying the impulses of its own nature and yet taking part with such perfect harmony in the whole grand design? That's it, you see, Clare: we are part of a pattern; the sum of all our natures, from coltsfoot to cabinet−ministers, is a balanced and beautiful design. A mutable one, I know, but deriving immortality from its very mutability. If one of us should seek to be false to her own nature by resisting age and change she would mar the pattern. We have a duty to life, my dear.”
They had reached the gates of Paston Hall. Miss Geary looked through them at the school, then back, up the road again.
“That is where I used to disagree most with Rachel Trethewy—Sterne, of course, she is now,” she said. “She was wrong, and she went beyond all reason in defending her ideas. She used to say then that she'd like to have a son and bring him up to know no right and wrong except what she called the ethics of beauty. I wonder if she has done so?”
10
Clare fell ill that night. She had sat through the evening with her books in a corner of the Prefects' Room, hearing the chatter of the group of Sixth−Formers round the fire, knowing that they eyed her curiously from time to time, but taking no part whatever in their society. She had long felt herself isolated from Paston Hall life, but now she knew herself cut off from all life, expunged from the design. He had talked of tranquillity if she obeyed him, but there was no tranquillity such as she had known earlier, only a sad apathy. She could not keep her eyes from filling with tears, nor suppress the sighs that swelled at intervals and distended her heart unbearably. She could no longer think clearly and actively; she could see images and words with her mental vision, but she could not reason about them. The pictures of the afternoon were there, but they were static and they excited no feelings—or none beyond this immeasurable sadness. She could see a picture of the immediate future, too: Jennifer in the lamplight of the studio, Jennifer with wild excitement in her sparkling blue eyes, playing with him, leaping to his arms; and yet Clare could feel no fear, no anxiety, nothing that could serve as a stimulus to action. Then she could read, written on the page of her memory, the words Miss Geary had spoken that afternoon; they were clear and definite, she saw their shape, but she could not read their significance. She could dwell on them until they were magnified as by an enormous lens, until one phrase filled all her vision, and one word towered like a mountain before her; yet she could not tell what it meant.
She could see that Miss Geary understood or guessed what Niall was doing; she could see that the old lady was aware that some conclusion had been reached between Niall and her that afternoon in Brackenbine. Clare saw her shutting the gate of Brackenbine, which never had been shut, as a sign that she knew that she would never go there again. Miss Geary understood, but Clare felt neither alarm nor hope in seeing that. She was beyond all apprehension of human displeasure now, and equally beyond all expectation of human aid.
The physical weakness that had become a familiar accompaniment of Niall's embrace, had today lasted longer than she had ever known it, and with it there were sensations she had never felt before: a dull aching in all her bones and joints and an alternate tingling and numbness in her arms and legs, and sometimes her hands and feet felt mortally cold. Before supper−time she had a violent headache, her face burned and swift pains stabbed behind her eyes.
She could eat no supper, but crept slowly up to her own room. Only by an effort of will did she reach the top corridor, and there she could get no further than the bathroom. She was sick until her legs would no longer support her, and she sank to the floor.
It was Reenie Ford who found her a few minutes later; Reenie, apologising rather nervously for having followed her up, confessing to having noticed that Clare was looking ill; and it was Reenie who, having helped her to her own room, went and found the Under−matron.
Clare did not know much of what else happened that night. She was aware of being carried down, swathed in blankets, to the Matron's room on the ground floor, and from there through the short passage to the Sanatorium, a spacious room with sashed windows which contained half−a−dozen cots where the Matron could look after any children who were too unwell to be left in their dormitories. She was aware of having her temperature taken by the Matron, of being looked at, very briefly, by Miss Sperrod, and then by Miss Geary and a number of other people. There were whisperings and stealthy movements round her.
Then time became nothing but a forest of pain in which there was no other living thing but herself. She struggled in thickets that held her, tore and bruised her, and all her efforts, so fierce that they made her moan, were ineffectual. She was bound down by all her limbs, and within, tortured by forces that gripped and ground every bone.
Only after a very long time, after many hours of struggle, when her efforts to free herself from her bonds were no more than convulsive twitchings which went on of their own accord, did she find that somewhere at the centre of a frightening melee in her skull, some processes of the mind were going on. She was observing something other than her own endurance of pain. Someone was trying to get in through an aperture—a window that was shut. It was some other girl and she was frantic to get in, and Clare was struggling to wrench open the window and help her in. But she could not, for the window was made of the bone of her own skull and the wrenching, battering pain mounted unbearably. She could only scream the girl's name aloud; scream so that someone would come and help them; but the hammering on the bones of her head swelled so loud it drowned the utmost effort of her lungs. She saw the other girl's face distorted through glass that bent and pulsed with the swinging blows; the face advanced and receded, always contorted, frightened and frightening, yet recognisable; and still Clare screamed out her name and could not hear what she screamed.