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THE DOLOROUS BLOW

In the Green Pheasant Inn at Taunton. a little oit-of-the-way tavern in a back street of that ancient town on one of the chilliest mornings of this eventful March, Persephone Spear sat on the bed where she and Philip had been spending the night. She sat there in her white slip, her straight Artemis shoulders bare, pulling on her black stockings. Philip had just gone to the end of the passage to take a bath and the girl could detect now amid the other early morning sounds in that small hostelry—such as the bootblack replacing the commercial travellers* boots at their several doors, such as the house-girl bringing cans of shaving-water to their doors and giving bold, shameless knocks, such as the barking of dogs in the cobbled yard, the trampling of an old horse in its stable, the scrubbing of a motor car in an open garage by a whistling boy, the sound of the rush of water from the bath-faucet. The girl's whole nature felt as if it were drawing itself together into a little round ball, tying itself up into a little tight knot, and making itself as small and hard and unattractive as it could possibly make itself. She treated her slim boyish legs very roughly as she pulled on her stockings. She thought, “Oh, if I can only get my stockings and skirt on before he comes back he won't touch me any more!” With vicious jerks she did get her stockings on; and then, heedless of the dust on the carpet, she stepped into her skirt, allowing it to trail upon the floor. The pattern upon the carpet consisted of big* bunchy roses, each rose encased in a square frame of dull, brown lines. The disgust she felt at seeing her nice grey skirt in contact with this horrible carpet made her prick her fingers as she pinned its black band with a big safety pin. “My waist has never looked so small!” she thought, and indeed the use of the safety pin had come about because, after the excitement of her experience in Wookey Hole, the band of her skirt had become too wide. Hurriedly she rushed to the chair where her grey jacket was lying and pressed one arm— and then another—breathlessly and violently into its reassuring tailor-made protection.

Artemis-like, she had found that by far the worst part of hei4 affair with Philip—and it had been just the same with Dave— was the fact that she had to undress and be made love to without the defence of her sweet-smelling Harris-tweed jacket and skirt. “I like driving through the lanes,” she thought, “by Philip's side, while he gets fonder and fonder of me, but can't touch me! I like his kissing me and hugging me so hard the moment he gets me alone when the long drive has excited him to such a pitch. I like the way his cheeks smell of the wind and of the fresh dust of the road. I like the dinners we have together in these places with the shy young waitresses at table and the impudent hussies in the bar and the yard-boys touching their cropped foreheads and sneaking a look at my ankles and staring so respectfully at Phil! It's these nights that are so awful. Oh, why are men made as they are? Why are they made as they are? What's the matter with me that I shrink from these nights with Philip so . . . and yet enjoy the days with him? Do other women feel what I feel? Is there some deep, secret conspiracy among us to be silent about this loathing of skin to skin, this disgust of the way they are when they have their will of us? Am I betraying some tragic silence that Nature from the beginning has imposed in dark whispers upon her daughters? Is the pain of ravishment only one of the inevitable sufferings of girls . . . laid upon us since the dawn of time? Is this shrinking, this loathing, something that every girl feels?” She took up the comb to comb out her short, clipped curls. “Damn!” she muttered aloud. Her anger rose up suddenly against all the intolerable things a person had to put up with. Her anger rose against the washing-stand—with the two white basins side by side and the soap-dish into which she had put a piece of lavender soap which Philip had now carried off to the bathroom.

“I wonder,” she thought, “whether those double-dyed asses of Glastonbury aldermen, now that they've elected Geard, will do what I suggested to Dave and try and start a real communistic factory . . . something on a much bigger scale than this silly souvenir business?” She stood in the middle of the room holding the comb in her hands. Impelled by a lurid fascination, she moved to the door and opened it gently . . . gently . . . biting her lower lip as she turned the handle. She was met by that combination of curious stuffy smells which a bedroom passage in a small inn always exhales. The passage was full. too. of thai particular morning light that seems to have nothing to do with the sun at all. that seems to come from some reservoir of pallid, terrestrial illumination that is neither natural nor artificial, but is a light especially dedicated to inn-passages when only the Boots and the oldest of the house-maids are stirring, and a smell of cigar-smoke and stale cheese pervades the staircase. She continued to hold the door ajar, as she leaned forward listening, her unwashed eyelids still heavy with sleep and her chestnut curls all tumbled and rumpled.

There was the sound of Philip's splashing! It came from behind that door, with a white marble plate upon it carrying the word “Bath.” Persephone listened to it with petrified attention. CiDo all girls/' she thought, “feel these queer sensations of lurid attraction and nervous disgust towards men? How much more conscious a girl is than a man of the relations between men and women! I know that at this moment Phil is enjoying his bath, its precise depth, its exact heat, the fact that he brought his big sponge, just as a child might enjoy these things! He's forgotten altogether about my jumping out of bed and staying so long at the window in the middle of the night. He's practically forgotten that I exist!”

She was not far wrong. Extended at full length in the bath, luxuriating in its hot water—for there was no bathroom at The Elms—Philip's thoughts might be expressed as follows: “”Warm . . . nice . . . soap . . . nice . . . stain on wall shaped like Barter's profile . . . start digging at Wookey . . - Except for old Merry, not a soul knows ... a lot of tin in Wookey . . . diabolus metallorum . . . plumbum candidum . . . Hermes • . . stream-tin . . . alluvial deposit . . . tourmaline . . . spar . . . quartz . . . stannic oxide . . . cassiterite . . ? stannic chloride . . . purple precipitate . . . purple of Cas. ius . . . ... tin salt ... tin crystal . • . tin-ash/' He began to derive extraordinary satisfactory from taking up his great sponge, filling it with water and squeezing it over his knees with both hands. The sponge became the hill above Wookey where he intended to mine for tin and his knees became jagged fragments of this precious alluvial deposit and the water on either side of his thighs was the subterranean river. u;Let Geard have his Pageant“ he thought. ”Let him dig for Merlin's tomb! I'm going to dig for tin . . . diabolus metallorum . . . I'll turn this town into something different from a humbugging show-place! Ill sell my dyes and 111 sell my tin to all the dealers in Europe . . . What a good thing I'm not responsible for Perse! Let Monsieur Agitator support my sweet Coz, while I enjoy her at my leisure!'

He began to squeeze his sponge with still fiercer pressure and still deeper satisfaction. He found that there was a little window-pane opposite him where the coloured glass had been replaced by ordinary glass and out of this window he could see quite a long way over the roofs of Taunton. He even fancied he could see the ridge of the Polden Hills between two chimneys. He propped himself up in the hath on the palms of his hands. But the ridge vanished then, and in its place rose one of the great Taunton Church Towers celebrated all over Somersetshire and only rivalled by St. John's at Glastonbury. The sight of this religious edifice, so tall and massive, disturbed the current of his thoughts. He sank back in the bath. Once more that little far-off line between the chimneys re-appeared. Automatically he began squeezing his big sponge again, but the water was getting cold and the sight of that tower had broken up his complacency.

“What did she do that for?” he asked himself, thinking, with a frown, of the incident in the night when the girl had jumped out of bed and stayed so long at the window. “I don't believe she'll bear me a child,” he said to himself. "There's something about her------No! she's not the maternal type, my sweet Perse,

there's no getting over that!" He gave himself up then, as he got out of the bath and began hurriedly drying, to his own peculiar and favourite voluptuous thoughts. Every man has his own set of voluptuous images with which his mind tends to dally at such a moment when his body is glowing and refreshed. Philip's thoughts had to do with Persephone's bare shoulders as they looked—not w. her night-gown, for she dreamed like a boy at night and though this would have pleased John it did not suit Philip, but in her slip. It was therefore no little blow to him—for he had anticipated quite the contrary—when, on his entering their room with a quick, sharp knock, he found her fully dressed and sealed ai-ain by that accursed window.

That moment was indeed a fatal and mcmoraLk* moment in the history of their relations. It was as if in the process 01 his bath and of her combing her hair a deadly gulf h?d vawned between them. She was seated on the arm of a chair arid leaning against the window-sill. Her pose was withdrawn. chaste, reserved, remote, her face cold and pale, her eyelids half closed. She was intently surveying the head of the old carriage horse whose hoofs trampling on its stable floor had drummed a Lilter tune into her mind at certain intervals during that night. The old horse was peering out of a small square window and the lad who had been cleaning the motor car was stroking its neck. He was still whistling the same tune, and as Philip paused at their window to follow the girl's gaze he started singing. “Tve made up my mind to sail away . . . sail away . . . sail away ... In the Colonies I mean to try . . . mean to try . . .” The lad sang in a silly drawling voice. “He's heard that tune on a roundabout,” remarked Percy, drawing in her head and evading the arm with which Philip attempted to capture her. "I used to hear it when

I first came to Somerset."

They stood side by side for a moment without touching, watching some pigeons that were fluttering about on the stable roof. Philip felt obscurely angry with these sleek birds whose wings gleamed like the metallic shimmerings in Wookey Hole. Their chucklings and croonings made an orchestral accompaniment to the lad's voice. Persephone said to herself: “Damn! Damn! Damn! How can I get out of having to submit to this sort of thing with him again?” As she turned back into the room their eyes met and both of them knew without the passage of a word between them that a barrier had sprung up which it would be very hard to destroy,

“Well! Well!” he now remarked with forced jocularity, “if you're satisfied wTith your concert, run down, while I dress, and see how long we've got to wait for breakfast! I'm due at the office by nine this morning. There's a lawyer from Yeovil coming in, by the early train, to see me.”

She looked at him coldly and quizzically, “What trouble are you in now, Phil? Have you been found out at last?” She spoke at random, but when she had spoken she wished that she hadn't said just that.

Philip's swarthy cheeks had darkened, and she saw that this “lawyer from Yeovil” icas coining on some unpleasant errand. As a matter of fact Philip had summoned him because of a paragraph in the Western Gazette that looked extremely like a coven reference to Jenny Morgan and her child Nelly. “Good Lord, Perse!5' he cried, pushing her to the door. ”Don't begin inventing reasons for my legal interviews. Why, I've got a whole series of lawyers coming to the office this week. Today's is the most harmless of 'em!"

The day that had begun for Philip and Persephone with the croonings of these pigeons and the sing-song tune of “I've made up my mind to sail away,” waxed unusually hot for the last fortnight of March when it reached its noon hour.

Sam and his father, having had occasion to visit a house in Hill Head, which is a street leading to the foot of Wirral Hill, happened to be making a short cut home to their early dinner across the grassy expanse of the Abbey Ruins. They had carefully avoided the dangerous topic hitherto that day, being occupied with an attempt to bribe, threaten, cajole, persuade, or terrify, one of their recalcitrant choir-boys into giving up his habit of waylaying tbe girls of Hill Head as they passed a piece of common land out there on their way home from school. There were several ancient thorn bushes growing on this patch of Waste Land, some of them the merest stumps, which Mr. Evans, in his daily ramblings about the place, had already decided were far older than the more famous one in St. John's churchyard. Indeed, in the heat of his frenzies and his fancies, Mr. Evans had got so far as to persuade himself that this particular tract of land —which certainly wears even at our epoch a somewhat forlorn look—was the actual site of that Terre Gastee, of the mediaeval romances, which became withered and blighted after the Dolorous Blow delivered by the unlucky Balin upon King Pelleas, the Guardian of the Grail.

Young Chinnock's "Dolorous Blows'*—aimed from the shelter.

of these desolate thorn stumps—were directed no“: a^u::>: ar.v man, king or otherwise, but against an><::* i;;<;i;s iwg \ -julhii:I !>::> ininity. and took the form of rudely fiu::g sti..*L* a.'.'* =>:jl-( a::,{ still more rudely flung taunts of a kind mure 2Tuss:> t.i.j.^.w ti:^t even these sturdy wenches were accustomed lo. The idldest of these taunts of which Chinnock was accused was the repetition c: the phrase—shouted in the ears of several grown-up }oui.g w :>j:^a as well as children: cTd like to, Dolly!” “Td like to. Lc-t !:•//” "Fd like to, RosieP accompanied, on each occasion, by the tilling of some kind of natural missile. It was in a visit from old Mr. Sheperd, the aged Glastonbury policeman, that ilal Dekkei was informed that his sweetest-voiced choir-boy was in seriuus danger of arrest, and in his anxiety to suppress this outburst of barbarity, while he saved the boy from jail, he had begged Sam. whose power over boys—though he did not like them—was a! ways great, to accompany him on this disturbing errand.

In nothing does the grotesque injustice and thoughtless self-righteousness of human beings show itself more blindly than in these matters of sex-abuse. The two Dekkers were certainly justified in their invasion of the retreat of this perverse thrower of sticks and stones in the Terre Gastee of Hill Head Road. But when their own dialogue touched the dangerous topic of Nell Zoyland there was just the same uFd like to, Nell!“ at the back of their rugged skulls. And between this CiFd like to, Nell!” felt by these two grown men and the uFd like to, Rosier' shouted by Tom Chinnock, there could have been very little difference in the eyes of that Christ worshipped by Sam who uttered those searching words: “Whoever Iooketh at ... to lust after . . . hath committed . . . already ... in his heart.” It was as they were passing the north doorway of St. Mary's ruined church that this dialogue began to take its dangerous “Fd like to” form. Confronting this old edifice of the end of the twelfth century the two men paused, their eyes attracted automatically by the lavish blaze of sunshine which fell from that cloudless noon sky upon this richly carved entrance. An arcade or frieze of interlacing arches cut in bold relief, alternately round and pointed as the curves intersect, and decorated with Norman zig-zag ornament, is broken, in the centre of the doorway, by a pyramidal cornice of delicate moulding, which covers, like a high peaked helmet, the interior arch-mouldings. These are in four concentric rings, containing numberless medallions of deeply cut carvings, telling the story of the Nativity and of the Massacre of the Innocents. Only trained experts in such matters can today interpret this dim, confused, obscure entanglement of animals, leaves, flowers, angels and impassioned human figures. Neither of the Dekkers was an expert of this kind, and to their simple naturalist eyes it was comfort enough to contemplate in that rich confusion of organic shapes a general impression of earth-life that resembled some sumptuous entanglement of moss and rubble and lichen, amid the twisted roots of old forest trees.