“Ah, with a slap in the face,” said I, “we come to life! You or I or anybody.”

  “I do understand poor Lucy,” said Luke. “Don’t you? She forgot to be flesh and blood while she was alive, and now she can’t forgive herself, nor the Colonel. That must be pretty rough, you know, not to realise it till you’re dead, and you haven’t, so to speak, anything left to go on. I mean, it’s awfully important to be flesh and blood.”

  He looked so solemnly at us, we three broke simultaneously into an uneasy laugh.

  “Oh, but I do mean it,” he said. “I’ve only realised how very extraordinary it is to be a man of flesh and blood, alive. It seems so ordinary, in comparison, to be dead, and merely spirit. That seems so commonplace. But fancy having a living face, and arms, and thighs. Oh, my God, I’m glad I’ve realised in time!”

  He caught Mrs. Hale’s hand, and pressed her dusky arm against his body.

  “Oh, but if one had died without realising it!” he cried. “Think how ghastly for Jesus, when He was risen and wasn’t touchable! How very awful, to have to say Noli me tangere! Ah, touch me, touch me alive!”

  He pressed Mrs. Hale’s hand convulsively against his breast. The tears had already slowly gathered in Carlotta’s eyes and were dropping on to her hands in her lap.

  “Don’t cry, Carlotta,” he said. “Really, don’t. We haven’t killed one another. We’re too decent, after all. We’ve almost become two spirits side by side. We’ve almost become two ghosts to one another, wrestling. Oh, but I want you to get back your body, even if I can’t give it to you. I want my flesh and blood, Carlotta, and I want you to have yours. We’ve suffered so much the other way. And the children, it is as well they are dead. They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. My spirit is like a naked nerve on the air.”

  Carlotta had ceased to weep. She sat with her head dropped, as if asleep. The rise and fall of her small, slack breasts was still heavy, but they were lifting on a heaving sea of rest. It was as if a slow, restful dawn were rising in her body, while she slept. So slack, so broken she sat, it occurred to me that in this crucifixion business the crucified does not put himself alone on the cross. The woman is nailed even more inexorably up, and crucified in the body even more cruelly.

  It is a monstrous thought. But the deed is even more monstrous. Oh, Jesus, didn’t you know that you couldn’t be crucified alone? — that the two thieves crucified along with you were the two women, your wife and mother! You called them two thieves. But what would they call you, who had their women’s bodies on the cross? The abominable trinity on Calvary!

  I felt an infinite tenderness for my dear Carlotta. She could not yet be touched. But my soul streamed to her like warm blood. So she sat slack and drooped, as if broken. But she was not broken. It was only the great release.

  Luke sat with the hand of the dark young woman pressed against his breast. His face was warm and fresh, but he too breathed heavily, and stared unseeing. Mrs. Hale sat at his side erect and mute. But she loved him, with erect, black-faced, remote power.

  “Morier!” said Luke to me. “If you can help Carlotta, you will, won’t you? I can’t do any more for her now. We are in mortal fear of each other.”

  “As much as she’ll let me,” said I, looking at her drooping figure, that was built on such a strong frame.

  The fire rustled on the hearth as we sat in complete silence. How long it lasted I cannot say. Yet we were none of us startled when the door opened.

  It was the Colonel, in a handsome brocade dressing-gown, looking worried.

  Luke still held the dark young woman’s hand clasped against his thigh. Mrs. Hale did not move.

  “I thought you fellows might help me,” said the Colonel, in a worried voice, as he closed the door.

  “What is wrong, Colonel?” said Luke.

  The Colonel looked at him, looked at the clasped hands of Luke and the dark young woman, looked at me, looked at Carlotta, without changing his expression of anxiety, fear, and misery. He didn’t care about us.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said. “It’s gone wrong again. My head feels as if there was a cold vacuum in it, and my heart beats, and something screws up inside me. I know it’s Lucy. She hates me again. I can’t stand it.”

  He looked at us with eyes half-glazed, obsessed. His face seemed as if the flesh were breaking under the skin, decomposing.

  “Perhaps, poor thing,” said Luke, whose madness seemed really sane this night, “perhaps you hate her.”

  Luke’s strange concentration instantly made us feel a tension, as of hate, in the Colonel’s body.

  “I?” The Colonel looked up sharply, like a culprit. “I! I wouldn’t say that, if I were you.”

  “Perhaps that’s what’s the matter,” said Luke, with mad, beautiful calm. “Why can’t you feel kindly towards her, poor thing! She must have been done out of a lot while she lived.”

  It was as if he had one foot in life and one in death, and knew both sides. To us it was like madness.

  “I — I!” stammered the Colonel; and his face was a study. Expression after expression moved across it: of fear, repudiation, dismay, anger, repulsion, bewilderment, guilt. “I was good to her.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Luke. “Perhaps you were good to her. But was your body good to poor Lucy’s body, poor dead thing!”

  He seemed to be better acquainted with the ghost than with us.

  The Colonel gazed blankly at Luke, and his eyes went up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down.

  “My body!” he said blankly.

  And he looked down amazedly at his little round stomach, under the silk gown, and his stout knee, in its blue-and-white pyjama.

  “My body!” he repeated blankly.

  “Yes,” said Luke. “Don’t you see, you may have been awfully good to her. But her poor woman’s body, were you ever good to that?”

  “She had everything she wanted. She had three of my children,” said the Colonel dazedly.

  “Ah yes, that may easily be. But your body of a man, was it ever good to her body of a woman? That’s the point. If you understand the marriage service: with my body I thee worship. That’s the point. No getting away from it.”

  The queerest of all accusing angels did Lord Lathkill make, as he sat there with the hand of the other man’s wife clasped against his thigh. His face was fresh and naïve, and the dark eyes were bright with a clairvoyant candour, that was like madness, and perhaps was supreme sanity.

  The Colonel was thinking back, and over his face a slow understanding was coming.

  “It may be,” he said. “It may be. Perhaps, that way, I despised her. It may be, it may be.”

  “I know,” said Luke. “As if she weren’t worth noticing, what you did to her. Haven’t I done it myself? And don’t I know now, it’s a horrible thing to do, to oneself as much as to her? Her poor ghost, that ached, and never had a real body! It’s not so easy to worship with the body. Ah, if the Church taught us that sacrament: with my body I thee worship! that would easily make up for any honouring and obeying the woman might do. But that’s why she haunts you. You ignored and disliked her body, and she was only a living ghost. Now she wails in the afterworld, like a still-wincing nerve.”

  The Colonel hung his head, slowly pondering. Pondering with all his body. His young wife watched the sunken, bald head in a kind of stupor. His day seemed so far from her day. Carlotta had lifted her face; she was beautiful again, with the tender before-dawn freshness of a new understanding.

  She was watching Luke, and it was obvious he was another man to her. The man she knew, the Luke who was her husband was gone, and this other strange, uncanny creature had taken his place. She was filled with wonder. Could one so change, as to become another creature entirely? Ah, if it were so! If she herself could cease to be! If that woman who was married to Luke, married to him in an intimacy of misfortune that was like a horror, could only cease to be, and let a new, delicately-wild Carlotta take her place!

  “It may be,” said the Colonel, lifting his head. “It may be.” There seemed to come a relief over his soul, as he realised. “I didn’t worship her with my body. I think maybe I worshipped other women that way; but maybe I never did. But I thought I was good to her. And I thought she didn’t want it.”

  “It’s no good thinking. We all want it,” asserted Luke. “And before we die, we know it. I say, before we die. It may be after. But everybody wants it, let them say and do what they will. Don’t you agree, Morier?”

  I was startled when he spoke to me. I had been thinking of Carlotta: how she was looking like a girl again, as she used to look at the Thwaite, when she painted cactuses-in-a-pot. Only now, a certain rigidity of the will had left her, so that she looked even younger than when I first knew her, having now a virginal, flower-like stillness which she had not had then. I had always believed that people could be born again: if they would only let themselves.

  “I’m sure they do,” I said to Luke.

  But I was thinking, if people were born again, the old circumstances would not fit the new body.

  “What about yourself, Luke?” said Carlotta abruptly.

  “I!” he exclaimed, and the scarlet showed in his cheek. “I! I’m not fit to be spoken about. I’ve been moaning like the ghost of disembodiment myself, ever since I became a man.”

  The Colonel said never a word. He hardly listened. He was pondering, pondering. In this way, he, too, was a brave man.

  “I have an idea what you mean,” he said. “There’s no denying it, I didn’t like her body. And now, I suppose it’s too late.”

  He looked up bleakly: in a way, willing to be condemned, since he knew vaguely that something was wrong. Anything better than the blind torture.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Luke. “Why don’t you, even now, love her a little with your real heart? Poor disembodied thing! Why don’t you take her to your warm heart, even now, and comfort her inside there? Why don’t you be kind to her poor ghost, bodily?”

  The Colonel did not answer. He was gazing fixedly at Luke. Then he turned, and dropped his head, alone in a deep silence. Then, deliberately, but not lifting his head, he pulled open his dressing-gown at the breast, unbuttoned the top of his pyjama jacket, and sat perfectly still, his breast showing white and very pure, so much younger and purer than his averted face. He breathed with difficulty, his white breast rising irregularly. But in the deep isolation where he was, slowly a gentleness of compassion came over him, moulding his elderly features with strange freshness, and softening his blue eye with a look it had never had before. Something of the tremulous gentleness of a young bridegroom had come upon him, in spite of his baldness, his silvery little moustache, the weary marks of his face.

  The passionate, compassionate soul stirred in him and was pure, his youth flowered over his face and eyes.

  We sat very still, moved also in the spirit of compassion. There seemed a presence in the air, almost a smell of blossom, as if time had opened and gave off the perfume of spring. The Colonel gazed in silence into space, his smooth white chest, with the few dark hairs, open and rising and sinking with life.

  Meanwhile his dark-faced young wife watched as if from afar. The youngness that was on him was not for her.

  I knew that Lady Lathkill would come. I could feel her far off in her room, stirring and sending forth her rays. Swiftly I steeled myself to be in readiness. When the door opened I rose and walked across the room.

  She entered with characteristic noiselessness, peering in round the door, with her crest of white hair, before she ventured bodily in. The Colonel looked at her swiftly, and swiftly covered his breast, holding his hand at his bosom, clutching the silk of his robe.

  “I was afraid,” she murmured, “that Colonel Hale might be in trouble.”

  “No,” said I. “We are all sitting very peacefully. There is no trouble.”

  Lord Lathkill also rose.

  “No trouble at all, I assure you, mother!” he said.

  Lady Lathkill glanced at us both, then turned heavily to the Colonel.

  “She is unhappy to-night?” she asked.

  The Colonel winced.

  “No,” he said hurriedly. “No, I don’t think so.” He looked up at her with shy, wincing eyes.

  “Tell me what I can do,” she said in a very low tone, bending towards him.

  “Our ghost is walking to-night, mother,” said Lord Lathkill. “Haven’t you felt the air of spring, and smelt the plum-blossom? Don’t you feel us all young? Our ghost is walking, to bring Lucy home. The Colonel’s breast is quite extraordinary, white as plum-blossom, mother, younger-looking than mine, and he’s already taken Lucy into his bosom, in his breast, where he breathes like the wind among trees. The Colonel’s breast is white and extraordinarily beautiful, mother. I don’t wonder poor Lucy yearned for it, to go home into it at last. It’s like going into an orchard of plum-blossom for a ghost.”

  His mother looked round at him, then back at the Colonel, who was still clutching his hand over his chest, as if protecting something.

  “You see, I didn’t understand where I’d been wrong,” he said, looking up at her imploringly. “I never realised that it was my body which had not been good to her.”

  Lady Lathkill curved sideways to watch him. But her power was gone. His face had come smooth with the tender glow of compassionate life, that flowers again. She could not get at him.

  “It’s no good, mother. You know our ghost is walking. She’s supposed to be absolutely like a crocus, if you know what I mean: harbinger of spring in the earth. So it says in my great-grandfather’s diary: for she rises with silence like a crocus at the feet, and violets in the hollows of the heart come out. For she is of the feet and the hands, the thighs and breast, the face and the all-concealing belly, and her name is silent, but her odour is of spring, and her contact is the all-in-all.” He was quoting from his great-grandfather’s diary, which only the sons of the family read. And as he quoted he rose curiously on his toes, and spread his fingers, bringing his hands together till the finger-tips touched. His father had done that before him, when he was deeply moved.

  Lady Lathkill sat down heavily in the chair next the Colonel.

  “How do you feel?” she asked him, in a secretive mutter.

  He looked round at her, with the large blue eyes of candour.

  “I never knew what was wrong,” he said, a little nervously. “She only wanted to be looked after a bit, not to be a homeless, houseless ghost. It’s all right! She’s all right here.” He pressed his clutched hand on his breast. “It’s all right; it’s all right. She’ll be all right now.”

  He rose, a little fantastic in his brocade gown, but once more manly, candid, and sober.

  “With your permission,” he said, “I will retire.” — He made a little bow. — ”I am glad you helped me. I didn’t know — didn’t know.”

  But the change in him, and his secret wondering were so strong in him, he went out of the room scarcely being aware of us.

  Lord Lathkill threw up his arms, and stretched quivering.

  “Oh, pardon, pardon,” he said, seeming, as he stretched, quivering, to grow bigger and almost splendid, sending out rays of fire to the dark young woman. “Oh, mother, thank you for my limbs, and my body! Oh, mother, thank you for my knees and my shoulders at this moment! Oh, mother, thank you that my body is straight and alive! Oh, mother, torrents of spring, torrents of spring, whoever said that?”

  “Don’t you forget yourself, my boy?” said his mother.

  “Oh no, dear no! Oh, mother dear, a man has to be in love in his thighs, the way you ride a horse. Why don’t we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness? Oh, mother of my body, thank you for my body, you strange woman with white hair! I don’t know much about you, but my body came from you, so thank you, my dear. I shall think of you to-night!”

  “Hadn’t we better go?” she said, beginning to tremble.

  “Why, yes,” he said, turning and looking strangely at the dark woman. “Yes, let us go; let us go!”

  Carlotta gazed at him, then, with strange, heavy, searching look, at me. I smiled to her, and she looked away. The dark young woman looked over her shoulder as she went out. Lady Lathkill hurried past her son, with head ducked. But still he laid his hand on her shoulder, and she stopped dead.

  “Good night, mother; mother of my face and my thighs. Thank you for the night to come, dear mother of my body.”

  She glanced up at him rapidly, nervously, then hurried away. He stared after her, then switched off the light.

  “Funny old mother!” he said. “I never realised before that she was the mother of my shoulders and my hips, as well as my brain. Mother of my thighs!”

  He switched off some of the lights as we went, accompanying me to my room.

  “You know,” he said, “I can understand that the Colonel is happy, now the forlorn ghost of Lucy is comforted in his heart. After all, he married her! And she must be content at last: he has a beautiful chest, don’t you think? Together they will sleep well. And then he will begin to live the life of the living again. How friendly the house feels tonight! But, after all, it is my old home. And the smell of plum-blossom — don’t you notice it? It is our ghost, in silence like a crocus. There, your fire has died down! But it’s a nice room! I hope our ghost will come to you. I think she will. Don’t speak to her. It makes her go away. She, too, is a ghost of silence. We talk far too much. But now I am going to be silent too, and a ghost of silence. Good night!”

  He closed the door softly and was gone. And softly, in silence, I took off my things. I was thinking of Carlotta, and a little sadly, perhaps, because of the power of circumstance over us. This night I could have worshipped her with my body, and she, perhaps, was stripped in the body to be worshipped. But it was not for me, at this hour, to fight against circumstances.