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Practical Applications of Computational Intelligence for Adaptive Control

Jiming Liu
Jianbing Wu
MULTI-AGENT
ROBOTIC
SYSTEMS
Boca Raton London New York Washington, D.C.
CRC Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liu, Jiming, 1962-
Multi-Agent robotic systems / Jiming Liu, Jianbing Wu.
p. cm.—(International series on computational intelligence)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8493-2288-X (alk. paper)
1. Robots—Control systems. 2. Intelligent agents (Computer software) I. Wu,
Jianbing. II. Title. III. CRC Press international series on computational intelligence
TJ211.35 .L58 2001 2001025397
disclaimer Page 1 Tuesday, April 10, 2001 4:41 PM

Preface
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that
counts can be counted.1
An autonomous agent is a computational system that acquires and analyzes
sensory data or external stimulus and executes behaviors that produce effects in
the environment. It decides for itself how to relate sensory data to its behav-
iors in its efforts to attain certain goals. Such a system is able to deal with un-
predictable problems, dynamically changing situations, poorly modeled environ-
ments, or conflicting constraints.
The motivation behind the research and development in multi-agent robotic
systems comes from the fact that the decentralized multi-robot approach has a
number of advantages over traditional single complex robotic systems approaches.
Distributed robots can readily exhibit the characteristics of structural flexibility,
1A sign hanging in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton.

reliability through redundancy, simple hardware, adaptability, reconfigurability,
and maintainability. The robots can interact with their local environments in the
course of collective problem-solving. Responding to different local constraints re-
ceived from their task environments, they may select and exhibit different behav-
ior patterns, such as avoidance, following, aggregation, dispersion, homing, and
wandering. These behaviors are precisely controlled through an array of parame-
ters (such as motion direction, timing, lifespan, age, etc.), which may be carefully
predefined or dynamically acquired by the robots based on certain computational
mechanisms.
In order to successfully develop multi-agent robotic systems, the key method-
ological issues must be carefully examined. At the same time, the underlyingcom-
putational models and techniques for multi-agent systems engineering must be
thoroughly understood. As a companion to Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent
Systems by Jiming Liu, World Scientific Publishing, 2001, this book is about
learning, adaptation, and self-organization in decentralized autonomous robots.
The aims of the book are to provide a guided tour of the pioneering work and the
major technical issues in multi-agent robotics research (Part I), and to give an in-
depth discussion on the computational mechanisms for behavior engineering in a
group of autonomous robots (Parts II to IV). Through a systematic examination,
we aim to understand the interrelationships between the autonomy of individual
robots and the emerged global behavior properties of the group in performing a
cooperative task. Toward this end, we describe the essential building blocks in
the architecture of autonomous mobile robots with respect to the requirements on
local behavior conditioning and group behavior evolution.
This book has a number of specially designed features to enable readers to
understand the topics presented and to apply the techniques demonstrated. These
features are:
1. The contents have a balanced emphasis on the recent and pioneering work,
the theoretical/computational aspects, and the experimental/practical issues
of multi-agent robotic systems.
2. The materials are structured in a systematic, coherent manner with
implementation details, comprehensive examples, and case studies.
3. Many graphical illustrations are inserted to explain and highlight the
important notions and principles.
4. MATLAB toolboxes for multi-agent robotics research, experimentation,
and learning are provided, which are available for free download
from http : ==www:crcpress:com=us=ElectronicProducts=
downandup:asp?mscssid =.

After reading this book, we hope that readers will be able to appreciate the
strengths and usefulness of various approaches in the development and application
of multi-agent robotic systems. They will be able to thoroughly understand the
following five issues:
1. Why and how do we develop and experimentally test the computational
mechanisms for learning and evolving sensory-motor control behaviors in
autonomous robots.
2. How do we enable group robots to converge to a finite number of desirable
task states through group learning.
3. What are the effects of the local learning mechanisms on the emergence of
global behaviors.
4. How do we design and develop evolutionary algorithm-based behavior
learning mechanisms for the optimal emergence of (group) behaviors.
5. How do we use decentralized, self-organizing autonomous robots to
perform cooperative tasks in an unknown environment.
Jiming Liu
Jianbing Wu
Summer 2001

Acknowledgements
First, we would like to thank the pioneers and fellow researchers as well as the au-
thors of books, papers, and articles in the fields of intelligentsystems, autonomous
agents and multi-agent systems, and robotics for providing us with insights, ideas,
and materials in preparing the surveys in this book.
Second, we wish to offer our thanks to our home institutions, Hong Kong Bap-
tist University (HKBU) and University of Calgary, for providing us with pleasant
working environments that enable us to pursue our research. Without these en-
vironments, it could take longer for us to come up with this synthesis. Part of
this book was written during Jiming’s sabbatical leave in the Computer Science
Department of Stanford University. Here we would like to thank Prof. Oussama
Khatib for his kind invitation and also thank HKBU for granting this opportunity.
Third, we wish to acknowledge the research grants support provided by Hong
Kong Baptist University under the scheme of Faculty Research Grants and by the
Hong Kong Research Grants Council under the scheme of Earmarked Research
Grants. Without that support, the theoretical and experimental studies reported in
this book would not be possible.
In addition, we wish to thank X. Lai, K. P. Chow, and K. K. Hui for providing
research assistance in some of the related studies. Our special thanks go to the
editor of the series, Prof. Lakhmi C. Jain, for his vision and encouragement, and
to Jerry Papke and Dawn Mesa of CRC Press for professionally managing and
handling this book project. We also want to thank Madeline Leigh of CRC Press
for carefully editing the draft version of this book.
And finally, to our families, to Meilee, Isabella, and Bernice from Jiming Liu,
and to Audrey from Jianbing Wu, our heartfelt thanks for their love, inspiration,
support, and encouragement.

Other Credits
Grateful acknowledgement is made to IEEE and ACM for permission to reuse
some of our IEEE/ACM-copyrighted material in this book.
Portions of Jiming Liu et al., Learning coordinated maneuvers in complex envi-
ronments: a SUMO experiment, Proceedings of the IEEE/IEE Congress on Evo-
lutionary Computation (CEC’99), pages 343-349, Washington, D.C., July 1999,
are reused in Chapter 10. Portions of Jiming Liu and Jianbing Wu, Evolutionary
group robots for collective world modeling, Proceedings of the Third Interna-
tional Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS’99), 1999, ACM Press, are
reused in Chapters 12 and 13.
Figures 6.2, 6.11, 9.1-9.3, and 9.5-9.13 and Tables 7.1 and 9.1 are adopted, and
Figures 6.15, 7.3(a), 8.6(a), 8.7(a), 8.8(a), 8.9(a), and 8.14(b) are modified, based
on the figures and tables in Jiming Liu, Jianbing Wu, and Y. Y. Tang, On emer-
gence of group behavior in a genetically controlled autonomous agent system,
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation
(ICEC’98), pages 470-475, Anchorage, May 1998.
Figures 11.1 and 11.4-11.10 are adopted, and Figures 11.2 and 11.3 are modi-
fied, based on the figures in Jiming Liu, Jianbing Wu, and Xun Lai, Analytical and
experimental results on multiagent cooperative behavior evolution, Proceedings
of the the IEEE/IEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC’99), pages
1732-1739, Washington, D.C., July 1999.
Figures 12.3, 12.4, 12.12, 13.5-13.13, and 14.28 are adopted, and Figures 13.3
and 13.4 and Table 13.1 are modified, based on the figures and table in Jiming
Liu, Jianbing Wu, and David A. Maluf, Evolutionary self-organization of an ar-
tificial potential field map with a group of autonomous robots, Proceedings of
the IEEE/IEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC’99), pages 350-357,
Washington, D.C., July 1999.
Omissions of credit acknowledgement in this book, if any, will be corrected in
future editions.
Jiming Liu
Jianbing Wu
Summer 2001

Contents
I Motivation, Approaches, and Outstanding Issues
1 Why Multiple Robots?
1.1 Advantages
1.2 Major Themes
1.3 Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
1.4 Multi-Agent Robotics
2 Toward Cooperative Control
2.1 Cooperation-Related Research
2.1.1 Distributed Artificial Intelligence
2.1.2 Distributed Systems
2.1.3 Biology
2.2 Learning, Evolution, and Adaptation
2.3 Design of Multi-Robot Control
3 Approaches
3.1 Behavior-Based Robotics
3.2 Collective Robotics
3.3 Evolutionary Robotics
3.4 Inspiration from Biology and Sociology
3.5 Summary

4 Models and Techniques
4.1 Reinforcement Learning
4.1.1 Markov Decision Process
4.1.2 Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
4.1.3 Temporal Differencing Techniques
4.1.4 Q-Learning
4.1.5 Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
4.2 Genetic Algorithms
4.3 Artificial Life
4.4 Artificial Immune System
4.5 Probabilistic Modeling
4.6 Related Work on Multi-Robot Planning and Coordination
5 Outstanding Issues
5.1 Self-Organization
5.2 Local vs. Global Performance
5.3 Planning
5.4 Multi-Robot Learning
5.5 Coevolution
5.6 Emergent Behavior
5.7 Reactive vs. Symbolic Systems
5.8 Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous Systems
5.9 Simulated vs. Physical Robots
5.10 Dynamics of Multi-Agent Robotic Systems
5.11 Summary
II Case Studies in Learning
6 Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Technique
6.1 Autonomous Group Robots
6.1.1 Overview
6.1.2 Sensing Capability
6.1.3 Long-Range Sensors
6.1.4 Short-Range Sensors
6.1.5 Stimulus Extraction
6.1.6 Primitive Behaviors
6.1.7 Motion Mechanism
6.2 Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
6.2.1 Formulation of Reinforcement Learning
6.2.2 Behavior Selection Mechanism
6.3 Summary
7 Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Results
7.1 Measurements

7.1.1 Stimulus Frequency
7.1.2 Behavior Selection Frequency
7.2 Group Behaviors
7.2.1 Collective Surrounding
7.2.2 Cooperation among RANGER Robots
7.2.2.1 Moving away from Spatially Cluttered Locations
7.2.2.2 Changing a Target
7.2.2.3 Cooperatively Pushing Scattered Objects
7.2.2.4 Collective Manipulation of Scattered Objects
7.2.3 Concurrent Learning in Different Groups of Robots
7.2.3.1 Concurrent Learning in Predator and Prey
7.2.3.2 Chasing
7.2.3.3 Escaping from a Surrounding Crowd
8 Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: What Matters?
8.1 Collective Sensing
8.2 Initial Spatial Distribution
8.3 Inverted Sigmoid Function
8.4 Behavior Selection Mechanism
8.5 Motion Mechanism
8.6 Emerging a Periodic Motion
8.7 Macro-Stable but Micro-Unstable Properties
8.8 Dominant Behavior
9 Evolutionary Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
9.1 Robot Group Example
9.1.1 Target Spatial Distributions
9.1.2 Target Motion Characteristics
9.1.3 Behavior Learning Mechanism
9.2 Evolving Group Motion Strategies
9.2.1 Chromosome Representation
9.2.2 Fitness Functions
9.2.3 The Algorithm
9.2.4 Parameters in the Genetic Algorithm
9.3 Examples
9.4 Summary
III Case Studies in Adaptation
10 Coordinated Maneuvers in a Dual-Agent System
10.1 Issues
10.2 Dual-Agent Learning
10.3 Specialized Roles in a Dual-Agent System
10.4 The Basic Capabilities of the Robot Agent

10.5 The Rationale of the Advice-Giving Agent
10.5.1 The Basic Actions: Learning Prerequisites
10.5.2 Genetic Programming of General Maneuvers
10.5.3 Genetic Programming of Specialized Strategic Maneuvers
10.6 Acquiring Complex Maneuvers
10.6.1 Experimental Design
10.6.2 The Complexity of Robot Environments
10.6.3 Experimental Results
10.6.4 Lightweight or Heavyweight Flat Posture
10.6.5 Lightweight Curved Posture
10.6.6 Lightweight Corner Posture
10.6.7 Lightweight Point Posture
10.7 Summary
11 Collective Behavior
11.1 Group Behavior
11.1.1 What is Group Behavior?
11.1.2 Group Behavior Learning Revisited
11.2 The Approach
11.2.1 The Basic Ideas
11.2.2 Group Robots
11.2.3 Performance Criterion for Collective Box-Pushing
11.2.4 Evolving a Collective Box-Pushing Behavior
11.2.5 The Remote Evolutionary Computation Agent
11.3 Collective Box-Pushing by Applying Repulsive Forces
11.3.1 A Model of Artificial Repulsive Forces
11.3.2 Pushing Force and the Resulting Motion of a Box
11.3.4 Fitness Function
11.3.5 Examples
11.3.5.1 Task Environment
11.3.5.2 Simulation Results
11.3.5.3 Generation of Collective Pushing Behavior
11.3.5.4 Adaptation to New Goals
11.3.5.5 Discussions
11.4 Collective Box-Pushing by Exerting External Contact Forces and
Torques
11.4.1 Interaction between Three Group Robots and a Box
11.4.2 Case 1: Pushing a Cylindrical Box
11.4.2.1 Pushing Position and Direction
11.4.2.2 Pushing Force and Torque
11.4.3 Case 2: Pushing a Cubic Box
11.4.3.1 The Coordinate System
11.4.3.2 Pushing Force and Torque

11.4.6 Examples
11.4.6.1 Task Environment
11.4.6.2 Adaptation to New Goals
11.4.6.3 Simulation Results
11.4.6.4 Adaptation to Dynamically Changing Goals
11.4.6.5 Discussions
11.5 Convergence Analysis for the Fittest-Preserved Evolution
11.5.1 The Transition Matrix of a Markov Chain
11.5.2 Characterizing the Transition Matrix Using Eigenvalues
11.6 Summary
IV Case Studies in Self-Organization
12 Multi-Agent Self-Organization
12.1 Artificial Potential Field (APF)
12.1.1 Motion Planning Based on Artificial Potential Field
12.1.2 Collective Potential Field Map Building
12.2 Overview of Self-Organization
12.3 Self-Organization of a Potential Field Map
12.3.1 Coordinate Systems for a Robot
12.3.2 Proximity Measurements
12.3.3 Distance Association in a Neighboring Region
12.3.4 Incremental Self-Organization of a Potential Field Map
12.3.5 Robot Motion Selection
12.3.5.1 Directional1
12.3.5.2 Directional
12.3.5.3 Random
12.4 Experiment 1
12.4.2 Experimental Result
12.5 Experiment
12.6 Discussions
13 Evolutionary Multi-Agent Self-Organization
13.1 Evolution of Cooperative Motion Strategies
13.1.1 Representation of a Proximity Stimulus
13.1.2 Stimulus-Response Pairs
13.1.5 The Algorithm
13.2 Experiments

13.2.2 Comparison with a Non-Evolutionary Mode
13.3 Discussions
13.3.1 Evolution of Group Behaviors
13.3.2 Cooperation among Robots
13.4 Summary
V An Exploration Tool
14 Toolboxes for Multi-Agent Robotics
14.1 Overview
14.2 Toolbox for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
14.2.1 Architecture
14.2.2 File Structure
14.2.3 Function Description
14.2.4 User Configuration
14.2.5 Data Structure
14.3 Toolbox for Evolutionary Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
14.4 Toolboxes for Evolutionary Collective Behavior Implementation
14.4.1 Toolbox for Collective Box-Pushing by Artificial Repul-
sive Forces
14.4.1.1 File Structure
14.4.1.2 Function Description
14.4.1.3 User Configuration
14.4.1.4 Data Structure
14.4.2 Toolboxfor Implementing Cylindrical/CubicBox-Pushing
Tasks
14.4.2.1 File Structure
14.4.2.2 Function Description
14.4.2.3 User Configuration
14.4.2.4 Data Structure
14.5 Toolbox for Multi-Agent Self-Organization
14.5.1 Architecture
14.5.5 Data Structure
14.6 Toolbox for Evolutionary Multi-Agent Self-Organization
14.6.1 Architecture

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content

creature’s face. I knew that well enough. So I said the first words
that came, in my lowest voice, lest they should hear.
But they were talking. They did not hear.
“I’m sure that Great-aunt knew.” Indeed I thought so. I think that
Great-aunt would always be kind and guessing with a girl. Then I
wondered at myself for daring it and thought nervously—‘He’ll snub
me. He’ll be right to snub me——’
But he looked across at Great-aunt kindly and said, in just such a
withdrawn voice as mine—
“Yes, of course, if ever there was a time when——” Then he half
smiled. “Poor old lady! But she’s changed. She used to be so brisk
and managing, more like fifty than seventy. But this year’s aged her.
She wanted, you know, to give some pearls—her own pearls. But
pearls spell sorrow. And Anita would have objected. She told me all
about it.”
“She was speaking of them tonight.” We both turned again and
looked at her. She had dropped her knitting, or it had slipped from
her knee, and she sat in her chair staring down at it with a terrible,
comical air of helplessness. Then she caught his eye and forgot the
knitting and nodded at him.
“I think—” I said, “I don’t think she understands. She asked me—
she forgets I’m a stranger. She asked me——” I broke off. I couldn’t
say to him—‘She asked me about Miss Grey and she doesn’t realize
that she’s dead.’ One’s afraid of the brutality of words. But he
understood. There was a simplicity about him that re-assured one.
And he never said—‘It’s Anita’s business. It’s not your business,’ as
anyone else might have done. He just said, once again—
“Poor old lady!” and hesitated a minute. Then he got up and went
across to her and picked up her wools. I don’t think the others
noticed him go. Anita didn’t. She was talking too fast.
“—left a trunk-full of papers and so on. I’d often stored boxes for
her. Somehow it never got sent down. I came across it only

yesterday. I thought to myself that there was no harm in putting
things straight. You know I’m literary executor? Oh yes. She said to
me soon after her marriage, half in joke, that she supposed she had
got to make a will—and what about her MSS.? ‘I can’t have him
worried.’ I offered at once. You see I know so exactly her attitude in
literature. There’s a good deal of unpublished stuff—early stuff. But
all in hopeless confusion. Tumbled up with bills and programmes and
one or two drafts of letters—or so I imagine. She had that annoying
habit—that ugly modern habit—of beginning without any invocation,
and never a date. But there’s one letter—there’s the draft of a letter
that’s important from my point of view.” She broke off with a half
laugh. “It sounds a ridiculous statement to make about Madala Grey
of all people, but do you know that she couldn’t express herself at all
easily on paper?”
Miss Howe nodded.
“Do I know? I’ve known her re-write a letter half a dozen times
before she got it to her liking—no, not business letters, letters to her
intimates. A most comical trick. Scribble, scribble, scribble—slash!
and then crunch goes the sheet into a ball, into the grate, or near it,
till it looked as if she were playing snow-balls, and then Madala
begins again—and again—and again. Yet she talked well. She talked
easily.”
“Isn’t that in keeping?” Mr. Flood struck in. “She didn’t express so
much herself in her speech as the mood of the moment.”
“As the mood of the companion of the moment more likely,” the
blonde lady corrected.
He nodded agreement.
“But for herself—go to her books.”
“Or her letters—her careful, conscientious letters. But she was
careless about her drafts,” said Anita significantly.
Mr. Flood looked at her curiously.
“What’s up that sleeve of yours, Anita?”

She was quick.
“You shall read it, in its place. But the trouble is——” She
hesitated. She gave the little nervous cough that always ushered in
her public lectures. “We’ve all written books,” she said, “all except
you, Blanche——”
The blonde lady blinked her sleepy eyes.
“You’re all so strenuous,” she purred. “I love to watch you being
strenuous. So soothing.”
“Well, I was going to say, it’s easy enough to end a book, but have
you ever got to the beginning? I never have. One steps backward,
and backward again——”
“I know,” cried the Baxter girl. “Till you get tired of it at last and
begin writing from where you are, but you never really get your foot
on the starting-point, on the spring-board, as you might say.”
“That’s it. Yes, Jasper, I’ve got material up my sleeve, but frankly, I
don’t know how to place it. I don’t know where to begin. The facts
of her life, her conversation, her literary work, her letters—I go on
adding to my material till I am overwhelmed with all that I have got
to say about her. But I don’t want to begin with facts. Facts are well
enough, but think how one can twist them! I want the woman
behind the facts. I want the answer to the question that is the cause
of a biography such as mine is to be—the question—‘What was
Madala Grey?’ Not who, mark you, but further back, deeper into
herself—‘What was Madala Grey?’”
“Why, a genius,” said the Baxter girl glibly.
Anita neither assented nor dissented.
“Ah—” she said, frowning, “but that’s not the beginning either. At
once we take our step backward again—‘What is genius?’”
“Isn’t talent good enough?” said Mr. Flood acidly.
“But does one mean talent?” She was still frowning. “Everyone’s
got talent. I’m sick of talent. But she—she mayn’t be a great one—

how she’d have laughed at being called a great one!—but she makes
her dolls live. And isn’t that the blood-link between the greatest gods
and the littlest gods? Life-givers? Life-makers? Oh, I only speak for
myself; but she made her book-world real to me, therefore for me
she had genius. Whether or not I convince you is the test of whether
my life-work, my Life of her—fails or succeeds.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t trust it to Madala?” said Miss Howe softly.
“Trust what?”
“To convince us.”
She answered, suspicious rather than comprehending, for indeed
Miss Howe’s tone was very smooth—
“What do you mean? I’m writing her life.”
Miss Howe was inscrutable.
“Of course you are. Fire ahead. Genius, wasn’t it?”
Anita shrugged her shoulders.
“What’s in a name? It’s the quality itself that fascinates me. I want
to account for it. I want to trace it to its source. Worth doing, isn’t
it? But do you realize the difficulties? Sometimes I feel hopeless. I’ve
known her five years, and her books I know by heart, and I’m only
just beginning to decide whether to call her a romantic or a realist.”
“A realist. Look at Eden Walls,” said the Baxter girl.
“A romantic. Look at The Resting-place,” said Miss Howe.
Mr. Flood over-rode them.
“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people
always confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who
depicts what we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt
and misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or
woman) who lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the
imagination? Out of that secure world of his he peers curiously at
ours, and writes of it as we dare not write, writes down every sordid,

garish, tragic-comic detail. Your so-called realist can afford the
humour of Rabelais, the horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and
blood of Fielding. Why shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world.
Don’t you see? But your so-called romantic, he lives in this real
world. He knows it so well that he has to shut his eyes or he would
die of its reality. So he escapes into the world of romance, the world
of beauty within his own mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who
is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley, the realist! Blake jogged elbows
with poverty and squalor all his life, and he was the prophet and the
king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And Goethe—the biographers will
tell you that Goethe began as a realist and ended as a romantic. I
say it was the other way round. What did he know of reality in the
twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of his young
genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote
his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you
should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——”
“It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the
Elephant and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the
crawfishes! Let’s keep to our own generation!”
“Well, if I were Anita I should begin by showing Madala as a
romantic—as the young romantic producing the most startlingly
realistic book we’ve had for a decade. Indeed to me, you know, her
development is marked by her books in the sharpest way. It’s the
young, the curious, the observant Madala in Eden Walls. The whole
book is a shout of discovery, of young, horrified discovery, of the
ugliness of life. It’s as if she said—‘Listen! Listen! These things
actually happen to some people. Isn’t it awful?’ She dwells on it. She
insists on every detail. She can’t get away from it. And yet she can
hardly believe it, that young Madala. But in Ploughed Fields already
the tone’s changing. It’s a pleasanter book, a more sophisticated
book. It interests profoundly, but it’s careful not to upset one—an
advance, of course. Yet I, you know, hear our Madala’s voice in it
still, an uneasy voice—‘Hush! Hush! These things happen to most
people. Pretend not to notice.’ And in the last book, in the pretty,
impossible romance, there you have your realist full-fledged—‘Shut

your eyes! Come away quickly! These things are happening to me!’”
He leant back again, folding his arms and dropping his chin. And
then, because Miss Howe was looking at him as if she were amused
—“I tell you I know. I recognize the symptoms. I’m a realist myself.
That’s why I write romantic poetry. Have to. It’s that or drugs. How
else shall one get through life?”
“Jasper!” said the blonde lady. But for once he didn’t turn to her.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t worry. Who’ll believe me?”
The Baxter girl was breathless.
“Oh, but I do. It’s a new Madala, of course. But I believe it
explains her.”
“But the facts of her life don’t agree,” began Miss Howe.
“Ah, Anita’s got to make ’em,” said Mr. Flood languidly. “Isn’t that
the art of biography?”
But Anita was deadly serious.
“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is
Madala? but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate
birth? or is it begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say
—is it inspiration or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you
understand, not of the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or
stone. That’s craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was
not a genius in the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the
argument’s sake—but even you will concede her the beginnings of it.
So my difficulty is just the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive
genius. Yet how can she, at twenty, have had the experience (that
she had the craft is amazing enough) to cope with Eden Walls?
Romantic curiosity isn’t enough explanation, Jasper! Look at her
certainty of touch. Look at her detail. Look how she gets inside that
woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of it. It’s such a document.
Now how does she know it? That’s what intrigues me. Madala and a

street woman! Where’s the connection? How does she get inside
her? Because she does get inside her.”
“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.
“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received!
Amazing, some of them.”
“Anita, they amazed her. I remember her getting one while she
was staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said
—‘But, Lila, I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing,
she says it’s true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’
You know, she was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who
had read the book. But Madala always believed in people. I know
she wrote to her. I believe she helped her. But she never told you
much about her doings.”
“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself
is—how does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her
wretched drab of a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”
“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the
explanation.”
“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from
the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal
experience. Not in Eden Walls, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re
discussing Eden Walls. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the
imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that
imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest
rootlet of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing.
But the older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less
he trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination
flags and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—
as the recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions.
It’s only the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do
you think that Madala did? Look at Eden Walls. Remember what we
know about her. Can’t you see that the skeleton of Eden Walls is
Madala’s own life? Consider her history. She leaves what seems to

have been a happy childhood behind her and sets out on adventure
—very young. So does the woman in Eden Walls. The parallel’s
exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the Breckonridge of the novel are
the same place. The house, the lane, the country-side, she doesn’t
trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s adventure is ushered in by
calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist transmuting the mere
physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to the woman in
Eden Walls. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the sense
of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of
something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official
emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that
show that she was depending on her experience rather than on her
imagination, fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case?
Then, in America, she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere
existence. So does the woman in Eden Walls. Madala does not go
under. The woman in Eden Walls does. It’s the first real difference.
But I maintain that in reality the parallel still continues, that, in
imagination, Madala did go under over and over again: that she had
ever in front of her the ‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the
woman in Eden Walls, she is saying to herself—‘Here, but for the
grace of God, go I.’ And then, you know, when you think of her,
hating that big city, saving up her pennies, and coming home at last
in a passion of homesickness (if it was homesickness—sickness
anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of that other
woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not
immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you
can always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I
possess that underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact
to guide me in deciphering her method in the first book, therefore,
in the second book and the third book, I find it safe to deduce facts
to cover the stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that
I’m justified, that Eden Walls justifies me. Don’t you?”
“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.
“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve
never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it

into shape, Miss Serle——”
“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”
“And that?” said Anita swiftly.
“Only Madala’s own account.”
“She never discussed her methods,” said Anita sharply.
“Just so! You’re not the only person who’s—pumped. I remember
seeing her once surrounded, in her lion days. I remember her
ingenuous explanations. She did her best to oblige them—‘Honestly,
I don’t know. One just sits down and imagines.’ And then—‘That’s
quite easy. But it’s awfully difficult writing it down.’ That’s the
explanation, Nita. A deliberate, even unconscious self-exploitation is
all nonsense. Madala’s not clever enough.”
“Not clever enough!”
“No. You’re much cleverer than she was. You have twice her
brains. You can’t think, Anita, what brains you’ve got. You’ve got far
too many to understand a simple person. I don’t agree, you know,
with ‘genius.’ I can’t throw a word like that about so lightly. But as
far as it went with Madala, it was the same sort of genius that
makes a crocus push in the spring. Your theory—oh, it’s plausible, as
Jasper says, but don’t you see that it destroys all the charm of her
work? It’s the innocence of her knowledge, the simplicity of her
attitude to her own insight that to me is moving. She touches pitch,
yet her fingers are clean. It’s her view of her story that arrests one,
not her story, not her facts, not her mere plot.”
“No, the plot is conventional, I’ll grant you that. She was always
content with old bottles.”
“Yes, and when the new wine burst them and made a mess on the
carpet, Madala was always so surprised and indignant.”
Mr. Flood giggled.
“Pained is the word, dear lady—surprised and pained. Do you
remember when Eden Walls was banned?”

“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss
Howe sharply.
“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of
the affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent
to Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement,
and she would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”
“Wasn’t it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.
“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she
insisted on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the
critics had ‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it
made her doubt her own motives—that she felt dirtied and
miserable. And yet she wouldn’t alter one of those scenes.
Obstinate! She could be very obstinate.”
“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table
and her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle,
did you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her
too?”
“My daughter—very kind to young people!”
It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase.
Anita didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.
“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”
“But——” said Mr. Flood.
“But—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to
forget that, are we, darling?”
“Oh, I knew that,” said the Baxter girl, trying to be tactful. “But
Eden Walls was written before you knew her, wasn’t it? I understood
—I didn’t know, I mean,” she explained to them, “that Miss Serle
had—blue-pencilled——”
“I did and I didn’t.” Anita laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I
confess I thought at the time that it needed revision. Mind you, I
never questioned the quality, but I knew what the public would

stand and what it wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t want the essentials
altered. But there were certain cuts——However, nothing would
move her.”
“That’s funny. She never gave me the impression that she believed
in herself so strongly.”
“Oh, her pose was diffidence,” said the blonde lady.
“But she didn’t believe in herself. It was obvious. When I went
through her MS. and blue-pencilled, she was most grateful. She
agreed to everything and took the MS. away to remodel.”
“And then?”
“I heard nothing more of her—for weeks. Finally I wrote and
asked her to come and see me. She came. She was delightful. I had
told her, you know, about the Anthology the first time I met her. I
remember that I was annoyed with myself afterwards. I’m not often
indiscreet. But she had a—a knack—a way with her. I hardly know
how to describe it.”
“One told her things,” said the Baxter girl.
“Just so. One told her things. And she had brought me a mass of
material—some charming American verse (you remember? in the
last section but one) that I had never come across. She had been
reading for me at the British Museum in her spare time. I confess I
was touched. We talked, I remember——” She sighed reminiscently.
“It was not until she made a move to go that I recollected myself.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘and how about Eden Walls?’ She fidgeted. She looked
thoroughly guilty. At last it came out. She hadn’t altered a line. She
had tried her utmost. She had drafted and re-drafted. She had finally
given it up in despair and just got work in some obscure newspaper
office—‘a most absorbing office!’ But there—you know Madala when
she’s interested—was interested——”
“Don’t,” said Miss Howe softly.
But Anita went on—

“‘Well but—’ I said to her—‘that’s all very well. But you’re not
going to abandon Eden Walls, are you?’ Then it all came out. Yes,
she was. She knew I was right. She wasn’t conceited. She quite saw
that the book was useless. It just meant that she couldn’t write
novels and that she mustn’t waste any more time. ‘But, my dear
Miss Grey,’ I said, ‘you mean to say that you’d rather leave the book
unpublished than alter a couple of chapters, remodel a couple of
characters?’ ‘But I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t. They happened that way.’
‘Then make them happen differently,’ I said. But no, she couldn’t.
‘Oh well,’ I said at last—‘if you’re so absolutely sure of yourself, if
you’re prepared to set up your judgment——’ That distressed her. I
can hear her now. ‘But I don’t set up my judgment. I’ll burn the
wretched stuff tomorrow if you say it’s trash. I knew it would be, in
my heart. But—I can’t alter it, because—because it happened that
way.’ Then I had an idea. ‘To you?’ I said. She looked at me. She
laughed. She said—‘Miss Serle, you’ve written ten books to my one.
Don’t pretend you don’t know how a story happens.’” Anita nodded
at us. “You see? Evasive. I think it was from that moment that I
began to have my theory of her.”
“Well—and what next?” demanded Miss Howe.
“She would have said good-bye if I had let her. I stopped her.
‘Reconsider it,’ I said. She beamed at me, chastened but quite
cheerful. ‘Oh, I’ll try another some day,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not
old enough. I was a fool to think I could.’ At that, of course, I gave
in. I wasn’t going to lose sight of Eden Walls. I told her to bring it as
it was and I’d see what I could do. As you know, Mitchell and Bent
jumped at it.”
“But it was banned,” said the Baxter girl.
“Yes, but everybody read it. You can get it anywhere now. And I
can say now—‘Thank the gods she didn’t touch it.’”
“Then she was right?”
“Of course she was right. I knew it all the time.”
“And she didn’t?”

“Of course she didn’t. Mine was critical knowledge. Hers the mere
instinct of—whatever you choose to call it. I was afraid of the critics.
She didn’t know enough to be afraid.”
“There’s something big about you, Anita!” said Miss Howe
suddenly.
Mr. Flood gave the oblique flicker of eyes and mouth that was his
smile.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “it fits her quite well.”
“What?” said Anita sharply.
“The mantle, dear lady.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah—Gentle dullness ever loves a joke. What, Beryl?”
“I don’t see,” the Baxter girl had harked back, “how you can call a
book that has been banned conventional.”
“Only the plot——”
“Ah, that plot!” Nobody could snub Mr. Flood. “Think, dear lady!
Village maiden—faithless lover—lights o’ London—unfortunate
female—what more do you want?”
“Of course.” Anita resumed the reins. “It’s as old as The Vicar of
Wakefield.”
“Oh, that!” The Baxter girl looked interested. “Do you know, I’ve
never seen it. One of Irving’s shows, wasn’t it?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But they were all quite solemn, even
Anita. But then she never did listen to the Baxter girl. She had talked
straight through her sentences.
“But it’s not the material. It’s the way it’s handled. It’s never been
done quite so thoroughly, from the woman’s point of view—so
unadornedly. People are afraid of their ‘poor girls.’ There’s a formula
that even the Immortals follow. They are all young and beautiful,
and they all die. They must. They wouldn’t be tragic in continuation.

But Madala’s woman doesn’t. That’s the point. There’s no pretence
at making her a heroine. She’s just the ordinary stupidish sheep of a
creature, ‘gone wrong.’ There’s no romantic halo, no love-glamour,
no pity and terror, just the chronicle of a sordid life. And yet you
can’t put the book down. At least I couldn’t put it down.”
“Do you like it?” I said to Kent Rehan, as he paused beside me in
his eternal pacing from room to room.
He looked at me oddly.
“I respect it,” he said. “I don’t like it. People misjudged——”
“If it had been the recognized love story”—Mr. Flood’s high voice
silenced him—“the regularized irregularity, so to speak, it wouldn’t
have been banned. It was the absence of a love story that the
British public couldn’t forgive. It was cheated. It was shocked.”
“But there is a love story at the beginning, isn’t there?” I said. “I
haven’t read far.”
Instantly the Baxter girl exhibited me—
“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”
“I’ve read The Vicar of Wakefield,” I said. And then I was annoyed
that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me.
Miss Howe was always nice to me.
“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well,
after that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the
inevitable way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”
Mr. Flood looked acute.
“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but
Magdalen unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten
gains—no, that’s not quite nice.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the
spirit it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful
thing I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature,
saving and sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I

was interested—“She wants to get away, you know, to get back into
the country. It’s her dream. The homesickness——”
“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.
“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with
some people, that animal craving for some special place was like
love—a passion that could waste you. She said that every woman
must have some devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place
—every woman. And that for a beaten creature like that, it would be
place—the homing instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it,
religion—the vague shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all
that the wretched creature tries to express in her phrase—‘getting
out and living quiet’—that Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It
meant much to Madala. Don’t you remember that passage towards
the end of the book where she meets the man, the first man, and
brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even recognize her, and
she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of tattered proofs
and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling hand she
had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips.
“Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it
down.
“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It
was the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult
to read. But I made it out at last.
With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase for
ever from her mind—
“And that’s that!”
She had long been accustomed thus to summarize her clients,
dispassionately, as one classes beasts at a show; and she judged them,
not by their clothing or their speech, not by the dark endured hours of
their love or by the ticklish after-moment of the reckoning, but rather, as
she hovered at the door with her provocative night smile dulled to a
business friendliness, by their manner of leaving her.
Always there was the fever to be gone; but some went furtively, with
cautious, tiptoe feet that set the stairs a-squeak with mockery. Her smile
did not change for the swaggerer who stayed long and took his luck-kiss

twice, but her eyes would harden. Mean, cheating mean, to kiss again
and never pay again! And some she watched and smiled upon who left
her in a brutal silence. For them she had no resentment, rather the
sullenness beneath her smile reached out to the revulsion of their
bearing as to something welcomed and akin. And some gave back her
smile with kindly words—and those she hated.
But when, after his manner, the man had gone, she had, as always,
her ritual.
She locked her easy door and pulling out the key, put it before her on
the table at the bedside. Left and right of it she laid her money down,
adding to the night’s gains the meagre leavings of her purse. Left and
right the little piles grew, one heaped high for the needs of her day and
her night, for food and roof and livery, and one a thin scatter of coppers
and small silver that took long weeks to change into the dear, the
exquisite, the Eden-opening gold. It was the bigger pile that she thrust
so carelessly back into her bag, and the scattered ha’pence that she
warmed in the cup of her two hands, holding them, jingle-jingle, at her
ears, dropping them to her lap again to count anew, piling them before
her to a little, narrowing tower, before she opened the child’s jewel-case
beside her, and, lifting the sheaf of letters that she never read but kept
still and would always keep, for the savage pain they gave her when her
eyes saw them and her fingers touched them, she poured out the new
treasure upon the sacred hoard beneath.
Tenpence saved—and yesterday a shilling! Five shillings last week. Fifty
pounds! She would soon have fifty pounds!
She put away the box of money, and so, surrendering at last to the
awful bodily fatigue, lay down again upon the tousled bed, not to sleep—
her sleeping time was later in the day—but to shut her eyes.
For, by the amazing pity of God, a secret that is not every man’s, was
hers—the secret of the refuge appointed, behind shut eyes, of the return
into eternity that is the shutting down of lids upon the eyes. The window
glare, the screaming street below, the blank soiled ceiling with the flies,
the walls, the unending pattern of the hateful walls, the clock, the finery,
the beastly scents, the loathed familiars of stuff and wood and brass that
blinked and creaked at her like voices crying—“Misery! misery! misery!”—
these were her world. Yet not her only world. She, who was so dim and
blunted a woman-thing, could pass, with the warm dark velvet touch of
dropping lids, not into the nullity of sleep, but into the grey place,
limitless, timeless, where consciousness knows nothing of the flesh.

She shut her eyes with the sigh of a tired dog, and instantly her soul
lay back and floated, resting.
There was no time, no thought, no feeling. There was peace—quiet—
greyness. At unmeasured intervals realization washed over her like
waves, waves of peace—quiet—greyness. Greyness—she worshipped the
blessed greyness. She wanted to give it a beloved name and knew none.
‘When I am dead!’—‘For ever and ever, Amen!’—So she came nearest to
‘Eternity.’
Peace—quiet—greyness: greyness enduring for ever, that could yet be
rent asunder like a temple veil and let in misery—the window glare, the
reeking room, the clodding footsteps, the fingers tapping at her door—a
frail eternity whose walls were slips of flesh.
She called harshly—
“Get out! Get away! Put it down outside then, can’t you?”
There was a mutter and the clank of a scuttle-lid, and a thud. The
footsteps shuffled out of hearing.
She shut her eyes again.
Peace—quiet—greyness. The waves were rocking her.
She did not dream. There are, by that same pity of God, no dreams
permitted in the place of refuge. But, as she lay in peace, she watched
her own memorial thoughts rising about her, one by one, like bubbles in
a glass, like cocks crowing in the dark of the dawn.
A white road ... the hill-top wind panting down it like a runner ... dust
... bright blue sky ... sky-blue succory in the gutter ... succory is so
difficult to pick ... tough ... it leaves a green cut on one’s finger ...
succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ... the fire’s too hot for
flowers ... hot buttered toast ... the armchair wants mending ... the
horsehair tickles one’s ears as one lies back in it and warms one’s toes
and watches the rain drowning the fields outside ... empty winter fields,
all tousled and tussocky from cow dung ... grey skies ... snow ... not a
soul in sight ... and succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ...
because one’s back in Eden ... summer and winter are all one in Eden ...
picking buttercups in Eden as one used to do ... all the fields grown full
of buttercups ... fifty buttercups make a bunch ... fifty golden buttercups
with the King’s head on them ... hurry up with the buttercups ... one
more bunch of buttercups will buy back Eden—Eden—ah!
So, with a long gasping sigh would come the end. “Eden—” and the
longing would be upon her, tearing like a wild beast at her eyes and her

throat and her heart—“I want to go home. Oh, God, let me go home! Let
me out! I want to go home——”
The chapter ended.
“And does she?” I looked up at the Baxter girl. “I’m always afraid
of a bad ending. Does she get back in the end?”
The Baxter girl fluttered through the pages.
“The money’s stolen first—a man takes it—while she’s asleep——
Oh, it’s beastly, that scene. She has to save it all up again. It takes
her years. But—oh, yes, she does go back.”
“The railway journey,” said Miss Howe. “Do you remember?”
“If you want happy endings”—the Baxter girl flattened out the last
page with a jerk—“there you are!”
I read over her shoulder. The strong scent that hung about her
seemed to float between me and the page.
“Here we are—where she gets to the station. ‘Eden,’ Madala calls
it, but the woman calls it ‘Breckonridge.’
At last and at last the station-board with the familiar name flashed past
her window. She thrilled. The station lamps repeated it as the train
slowed down. She thought—how long the platform’s grown! ... a
bookstall! ... a bookstall on each side! ... there used not to be ... wasn’t
the station smaller?...
She spoke to the ticket collector shyly, blushing, like a girl going to an
assignation and thinking that all the world must know it.
He answered, already catching at the ticket of the traveller behind her
—
“How far to Breckonridge? A mile, maybe—but you get the tram at the
corner.”
She stared. She would have questioned him again, but the throng of
people pressed her forward.
A tram through the village? ... queer! ... not that it mattered to her ...
she would take the old short cut through the fields outside the station
yard.... There was a stile ... and a wild cherry tree....

She left the yard, the unfamiliar yard with asphalt and motors and a
great iron bridge, crossed the road, and stopped bewildered.
There were no fields.
‘Station Road.’ The labelled yellow villas were like a row of faces. Eyes,
nose, mouth—windows, porch, steps—steps like teeth. They grinned.
In a sort of panic she ran past them down the road, a lumbering,
clumsy woman. She trod on her skirt, and recovered herself with
difficulty. She heard a small boy laugh and call after her. She clambered
on to the tram.
“I want to go to the village—to Breckonridge——”
“It’s all Breckonridge. ’Ow far?”
She stared.
“I don’t remember. He said a mile.”
“Town ’All, I expect.” He took his toll and passed on.
She turned vaguely to a neighbour.
“Town Hall? I don’t remember. The road’s all different Where are the
fields?”
The neighbour nodded.
“Built over. When were you here last? Thirty years? My word, you’ll find
changes! I notice it, even in five. Very full it’s getting. Good train service.
My husband can get to his office under the hour.”
She said dazedly—
“It was—it is—a little village.”
The woman laughed.
“I daresay. But how long ago?”
“There were fields,” she said under her breath. “There were flowers
——”
“Here’s the Town Hall. Didn’t you want the Town Hall?”
Unsteadily she rose and got out. The tram clanged forward.
She stood on an island where four roads met and looked about her.
The sun stared down at her, a brazen city sun. The asphalt was hot and
soft under her feet. Road-menders were at work in the fair-way. They
struck alternately at the chisel between them and it was as if the rain of
blows fell upon her. She felt stupid and dizzy. She did not know where to

turn. There was nothing left of her village, and yet the place was familiar.
There were drab houses and rows of shops and a stream of traffic, and
the figures of women and men—menacing, impersonal figures of men—
that hurried towards her down the endless streets.
“Well?” said the Baxter girl.
“But that’s not the end?” I said.
The Baxter girl looked at me oddly.
“Why not?” And then—“How else could it end? How would you
make it end?”
“Oh, I don’t mean——” I began. I hesitated. “I don’t think I quite
understand,” I said.
That was the truth. At the time I couldn’t follow it. It moved me.
It swept me along. But whether it was good or bad I didn’t know. I
hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was driving at. I felt in a vague
way that the people at home wouldn’t have liked it.
“What does it mean?” I said to the Baxter girl.
“That you can’t eat your cake and have it, I suppose. You can get
out of Eden, but you can’t get back.”
Anita answered her contemptuously—
“Is that all it means to you?”
And yet we had spoken very softly. But Anita had eyes that ate up
every movement in a room, and her small pretty ears never seemed
to miss a significant word though ten people were talking. I had
seen her glance uneasily at us and again at the two in the other
room. I knew Great-aunt’s mutter was too low even for her, and Kent
Rehan only nodded now and then, but even that annoyed her. She
lifted her own voice to be sure that they should hear all that she
said, as if afraid lest, even for a moment, she should be left out of
their thoughts.
“Oh!” she said loudly and contemptuously, “I tell you what I see.”

She succeeded, if that pleased her. Kent Rehan raised his head
and stared across at her with that impersonal expression of attention
that, I was beginning to realize, could always anger her on any face.
She had said a little while ago that she only cared for Miss Grey as
an artist, and I believe that she believed it. But I don’t think—I shall
never think it true. I think Anita depended—depends, on other
people more than she dreams. Poor Anita! I can see her now, her
whole personality challenging those dark abstracted eyes. But she
spoke to the Baxter girl—
“When Madala Grey chose Eden Walls for her title—when she
flung it in the public face——”
I saw him give a shrug of fatigue or distaste—I couldn’t tell which.
Great-aunt, who had been sitting, her head on one side, with her
sharp poll-parrot expression, crooked her finger at me. I went across
to her and behind me I heard the Baxter girl—
“You talk as if she were in a passion——”
And Anita—
“So she was. I’m telling you. It’s the wrongs, not of one woman,
but of all women, of all ages of women, that burn behind it.”
“Votes for Women!” It was Mr. Flood’s voice.
There was a laugh and I lost an answer. I caught only a vehement
blur of words, because Great-aunt had me by the wrist.
“Chatter, chatter! I can’t hear ’em. What’s my daughter talking
about?”
I hesitated.
“About books, Auntie.”
“Whose books?” she pounced.
“Some writer, Auntie.”
“What’s she saying about her, eh?” She held me bent down to her.
I glanced at Kent Rehan. He was listening to us. I felt harried.

“About—oh—whether a genius—whether she was a genius——”
“Madala, eh?”
“Yes, Auntie.”
I thought I heard him sigh. And at that—why, I don’t know—I
turned on him. I was rude, I believe. I sounded silly and cruel, I
know. Yet, heaven knows, that that was the last thing I wanted to
be.
I said angrily to him—
“Oh, why do you stand there and listen? Don’t you see that I can’t
help myself? Why don’t you go away? What good can it do you to
stay here, to stay and listen to it all?”
Then I stopped because he looked at me for a moment, and
flushed, and then did turn away, back again to his old dreary post at
the street window.
Great-aunt chuckled.
“That’s right, little Jenny. Take your own way with them, Jenny!”
I said—
“Let me go, Auntie dear,” and I loosed her hand from my wrist and
went after him; for of course the instant the words were out of my
mouth I was ashamed of myself. I couldn’t think what had
possessed me. I was badly ashamed of myself.
I came to him and said—
“Mr. Rehan—I don’t mean to be rude. Great-aunt—she doesn’t
understand. She made me talk. It wasn’t rudeness; but you stood
there, and I knew—I thought I knew, what you must think, must be
thinking—” (but ‘feeling’ was the word I meant) “and I was sorry. I
was angry because I was sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”
He said—
“It’s all right. I didn’t think you rude.”

Then I said—
“But I meant it. Why do you stay? What good can it do you? Why
don’t you go away from it all?”
And he—
“Where is there to go? I’ve been tramping all day.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Up and down streets. It’s—it’s blinding, it’s stifling
——”
“The fog is,” I said quickly. But we didn’t mean the fog.
He let himself down into the low wicker chair. I stood leaning
against the sill, watching him.
“You’re just dead tired,” I said.
He nodded. Then, as if something in my words had stung him—
“Where else? I’ve always come here. Every month. It was natural
to come.”
“But now” I said (and I was so urgent with him because of all
their talk that drummed still in my mind like a wasps’ nest)—“I’d go
away if I were you. What good does it do you? They talk. It’s—it’s
rather hateful. I’ve been listening. I’d go.”
“Where?” he said again. And I—
“Haven’t you anyone—at home?”
But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he
wore good clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all
over him that he looked after himself and did it expensively and
badly. He had, too, that other look that goes with it—of a man who
has never found anyone more interesting to him than himself. And
the queer part was that it didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it
wasn’t. It was just like the way a child takes you for granted, and
tells you about its own big affairs, and never guesses that you have
your own little affairs too. I suppose it was a fault in him; but it

made me like him. And he talked to me simply and almost as if he
needed helping out; as if he’d been just anybody. I never had to
help out anyone before: it had always been the other way round. I’d
thought, too, that celebrated people were always superior and
brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But he wasn’t.
He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I felt happier,
more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt since I had
been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking to me
too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She tilted back
her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed, and
leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy
girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken,
hating her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew
what hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she
was pleasing you.
But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising
excitedly in answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter
girl.
“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of
her promise in Ploughed Fields. It’s as good as Eden Walls in matter
and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her
place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been
her master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of
pearls, and she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth
solving? Won’t people read the Life for that if for nothing else? Am I
the only person who has asked what happened to her between her
second and her third books?”
“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic
has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of
romance.”
“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we
mean the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She
has been walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in
her case, the all-obscuring fact?”

“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one
thing. Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”
“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief.
“Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was
announced——”
“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.
“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of
her. I thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all
my affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get
over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only
repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she
reminded the blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no
comment. She just changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been
introduced to a new Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”
“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.
“But she was altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala
would have laughed.”
“Yes, she was altered,” said Anita. “Her whole attitude to herself
and her work changed that spring. How she horrified me one day. It
was soon after Ploughed Fields came out, and we were talking about
her new book, at least I was, pumping a little, I confess, and
suddenly she said—‘Anita, I don’t think I’ll write any more. This stuff
—’ she had her hands on Eden Walls, ‘it’s harsh, it’s ugly; and so’s
Ploughed Fields. Isn’t it?’ ‘It’s true to life,’ I said, ‘that’s the triumph
of it.’ ‘Is it?’ she said. She looked at me in an uneasy sort of way.
And then—‘I’d like to write a kind book, a beautiful book.’ I told her
that she couldn’t, that she was a realist. ‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I
don’t think I’ll write any more.’ I laughed, of course. Anybody would
have laughed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I haven’t an idea in my
head. I’m tired and empty. I think I shall go away for a wander.
There’s always the country, anyhow.’ ‘Well, Madala,’ I said, ‘I think
you’re ungrateful. You’re a made woman. You’ve got your name:
you’ve got your line: you’ve got your own gift——’ ‘Oh, that!’ she

said, as if she were flicking off a fly. I was irritated. It was so
arrogant. ‘What more do you want?’ I asked her. ‘What more can
you want?’ She said—‘I don’t know,’ looking at me, you know, as if
she expected me to tell her. I disliked that mood of hers. One did
expect, with a woman of her capacity, to be entertained as it were,
to have ideas presented, not to be asked to provide them. Then she
began, à propos of nothing at all—‘If I ever marry——’ That startled
me. We’d never touched on the subject before. ‘Oh, my dear
Madala,’ I said, ‘you must never think of anything so—so
unnecessary. For you, of all people, it would be fatal. It would waste
your time, it would distract your thoughts, it would narrow your
outlook, it would end by spoiling your work altogether. I’ve seen it
happen so often. It’s terrible to me even to think of a woman with a
future like yours, throwing it away just for the——’ She interrupted
me. ‘I wouldn’t marry for the sake of getting married, if you mean
that. Not even for children.’”
“You didn’t mean that, did you, Anita?” said Miss Howe smiling a
little.
“Certainly not. But I had always been afraid that she might be
tempted to marry for the adventure’s sake, for the mere experience,
for the——”
“Copy,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said so. Yes?”
“‘Oh well, Madala,’ I said to her, ‘you know what I think. I’m not
one to quote Kipling, but—He travels fastest who travels alone.’ She
looked at me so strangely. ‘Alone?’ she said. ‘Alone. Its the cruellest
word in the language. There’s drowning in it.’ ‘Well, without conceit,
Madala,’ I said, ‘I can affirm that I have been alone, spiritually, all my
life.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re different.’ And that,” Anita broke
off, “was what I liked in Madala. She did recognize differences. She
could appreciate. She wasn’t absorbed in herself. She said to me
quite humbly—‘I’m not strong, I suppose; but I don’t suffice myself.
I can’t bear myself sometimes. I can’t bear the burden of myself.
Can’t you understand?’ ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m a modern
woman, and the modern woman is a pioneer. She’s the Columbus of

her own individuality. She must be. It’s her career. It’s her destiny.’
She answered me pettishly, like a naughty child—‘I don’t want to be
a pioneer.’ ‘You’re that,’ I said, ‘already, whether you want to be or
not.’ Then she said to me, with that dancing, impish look that her
eyes and her lips and her white teeth used to manage between
them—‘All right! If I’ve got to be, I will. But I’ll be a pioneer in my
own way. I swear I’ll shock the lot of you.’”
“Oho!” said Mr. Flood with exaggerated unction.
“Exactly!” Anita gave his agreement such eager welcome. “That
put me on the qui-vive. Knowing her as I did, it was a very strong
hint. I awaited developments. Frankly, I was prepared for a scandal,
a romance, anything you please in the way of extravagance. That’s
why the Carey marriage, that tameness, upset me so. It was not
what I was expecting. Really, I don’t know which was more of a
shock to me, The Resting-place or the marriage. Hardly had I
recovered from the one when——”
“Oh, The Resting-place was the shock of my life too.” He giggled.
“I mourned, I assure you that I mourned over it. That opening, you
know—‘There was once’—And the end again—‘So they were married
and had children and lived happily ever after.’ Pastiche! And then to
be invited to wade through a conscientious account of how they
achieved it! Too bad of Madala! As if the poor but virtuous artist’s
model weren’t a drug on the market already! And the impecunious
artist himself—stooping, you know! Oh, I sat in ashes.”
Miss Howe clapped her hands.
“Jasper, I love you. I do love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both
legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”
Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.
“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole
thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s
been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the resting-
place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”

“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”
“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”
“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in
love she’s quite hopeless.”
“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in.
“Anybody reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest.
That’s the tragedy of it.”
“The literary tragedy?”
“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not
art, it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened,
tragically, to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the
happy-ever-after. But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into
Family Herald romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life.
I’ve always felt a certain weakness in her character, you know—a
certain sentimentalism.”
“In the author of Eden Walls?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.
“No, dear lady! But in the author of The Resting-place.” Mr. Flood
had recovered himself.
“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in
undertones while Anita summed up the situation.
“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”
“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.
“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”
“Episodes?” he amended.
“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of
the Ploughed Fields period. It may have been later, it may have been
the following summer while she was working at The Resting-place.
I’m open to conviction there. But an episode there must have been.
In The Resting-place she wrote it down as it ought to have
happened.”

“Why ought?”
“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become
Mrs. Carey.”
“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”
“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”
“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And
then in sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”
“Not a bit. In sheer weak longing——”
“I see. If your theory is correct—I don’t know what you base it on
——”
“Internal evidence,” said Anita airily.
“Then I can imagine that The Resting-place was a relief to write.
Poor Madala!”
“And then,” concluded Anita triumphantly, “then appears Carey,
and she’s too worn out, too exhausted with her own frustrated
emotions to care what happens. The book’s in her head still, and she
her own heroine. He appears to her—I admit that it’s possible that
even Carey might appear to her—as a refuge, a resting-place.”
“Yes, but you don’t like Mr. Carey,” said the Baxter girl. “But if
Madala did? Isn’t it possible that in Madala’s eyes——? Why
shouldn’t the hero be Mr. Carey himself?”
Anita’s eyes were bright with the cold anger that she always
showed at the name.
“My good girl, you know nothing about John Carey, or you’d rule
that out. Have you ever seen him? I thought not. And yet you have
seen him. All day. Every day. When you talk of the man in the street,
whom do you mean? What utterly common-place face is in your
mind? Shall I tell you what is in mine? John Carey. Ordinary!
Ordinary! The apotheosis of the uninspired! Oh, I haven’t any words.
Look for yourself.” She rummaged furiously in the half-opened desk

and flung out a fading snapshot on a mount. “There he is! That’s the
thing she married!”
“What’s he doing in your holy of holies?” Mr. Flood’s eyes seemed
to bore into her desk.
Anita, still thrusting down the overflowing papers, answered coldly
—
“Madala sent it to Mother. She said that it wasn’t good enough but
that it would give her an idea.”
“It certainly gives one an idea,” said the blonde lady languorously.
“And then she put in a post-script that it didn’t do him justice
because the sun was in his eyes. Defiantly, as it were. Isn’t that
significant? She’d never own to a mistake. Pride! She had the devil’s
own pride. Look at the way she took her reviews! And in this case
she would be bound to defend him. She’d defend anything she’d
once taken under her wing.”
“Well, you know,” drawled the blonde lady, her eyes on the
photograph, “according to this he topped her by two inches. I don’t
somehow see him under Madala’s wing.” And then—“After all, there’s
something rather fascinating in bone and muscle.”
“Yes, and I don’t see,” the Baxter girl hurried into defiance,
“honestly I don’t see, Miss Serle, why she shouldn’t have been in
love with him. Of course, it’s not a clever face, but it’s good-
tempered, and it’s good-looking, and there’s a twinkle. Madala loved
a twinkle. And I don’t see——”
Anita crushed her.
“We’re discussing the standards of Madala Grey.”
“That’s not the point either, Anita.” Mr. Flood would sometimes
rouse himself to defend the Baxter girl. “You know something. You
own to it. What do you know?”
“Simply that she was in love with someone else. I’ve papers that
prove it. Now it was either some man whom none of us know, whom

for some reason she wouldn’t let us know, or——” she hesitated.
Then she began again—“Mind you, I don’t commit myself, but—has
the likeness never struck you? Hugh Barrington in The Resting-place
and——?” Her eyes flickered towards Kent Rehan.
Mr. Flood whistled.
“Be careful, Anita.”
“He?” Miss Howe laughed, but kindly. “He’s lost to the world. He’ll
be worse than ever now.”
“There!” Anita dropped upon the sentence like a hawk upon a
heather bird. “You see! You say that! And yet you tell me there was
nothing—nothing—between them? Didn’t she rave about him? his
talents? his personality? his charm? And then she goes and writes
the story of an artist’s model!”
Miss Howe laughed again.
“When a thing’s as obvious as that, it probably isn’t so. Besides,
the artist’s model marries the artist.”
“Exactly. She leaves them, and us, cloyed with love in a cottage. I
repeat, the artist’s model marries the artist because Madala Grey
didn’t. It’s the merest shadow of a solution as yet, but—isn’t that a
living portrait in The Resting-place? Oh, I know it by heart—
“Maybe it was his height that gave you the impression, less of
weakness than of vagueness, as if his high forehead touched cloud-land,
and were obscured by dreams; for his cold eyes guarded his mind from
you, and his dark beard hid his mouth.”
“You do know it by heart!” said Miss Howe.
“Of course I know it by heart. It was the first clue. Can anybody
read those lines without recognizing him?”
The Baxter girl persisted—
“But I don’t see it. Oh, of course it is like him—but because she
borrowed his face, the story needn’t be about him. Why couldn’t she

just imagine the story? If she was a genius?”
“That remains the point,” said Mr. Flood.
“She was,” insisted Anita stubbornly.
Miss Howe smiled and said nothing.
He continued—
“The mere fact that she was a genius would prevent such a
descent into milk and sugar, unless she were money-making or love-
sick.”
The blonde lady spoke—
“Just so! Love-sick—sick of love—savage with love—savaging her
holy of holies. A parody. Lila’s right.”
But Miss Howe shook her head.
“No, no. I didn’t mean that sort of parody. Madala may have had
her emotions, but she’d always be good-tempered about them. She’s
laughing at herself in The Resting-place as well as at us.”
“But why do you cavil at it so?” said the Baxter girl slowly.
“Only at its plain meaning. Grant the parody and——”
“But why can’t you just read it as it stands? Why do you say
sentimental? I—I liked it.”
Anita took the book from her hand.
“But, my dear child, anybody can write this sort of thing. Where’s
the passage the ladies’ papers rave about, where they have a day on
the river together?” She whipped over the pages while I said to the
Baxter girl—
“What is it? What’s it about? What’s the plot?”
“Oh, there isn’t any. That’s what they complain of. It’s just a little
artist’s model who sits to an elderly, broken-down dreamer, and
thinks him a god. The duke and door-mat touch. It’s just how two

people fall in love and find it out. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But
people ate it when it came out.”
“Treacle, I tell you,” insisted Mr. Flood.
Anita overheard him.
“Exactly! Listen to this—
... and they landed at last in a meadow of brilliant, brook-fed grass.
She had no words in which to say a thousand times ‘How beautiful!’
Words? She had never known a country June. She had never seen whole
hedges clotted with bloom, she had never in all her life breathed the
perfume of the may or heard a lark’s ecstasy. She had never—and to her
simplicity there was no break in the chain of thought—she had never
before been alone with him, unpaid, not his servant but his equal and
companion. How should she have words?
She sat in the grass with the tall ox-eyes nodding at her elbow and
looked at him from under her hat with a little eased sigh. This, after the
dust of the journey, of the day, of her life, was bliss. She prepared herself
for this bliss, deliberately, as she did everything. She was too poor and
too hungry to be wasteful of her happiness: she must have every crumb.
Therefore she had looked first at herself, critically, with her trained eye,
fingering the frill of her blouse, flinging a scatter of skirt across her dusty
city feet, lest her poverty should jar his thoughts of her.
Then she looked at him. She saw him for a moment with undazzled
eyes, the blue sky enriched with clouds behind him. She was saying to
herself—‘I’m not a fool. I can see straight. I know what he is. He’s just an
ordinary man in a hot, black suit. He stoops, I suppose. He’s worn out
with work. He’ll never be young again. And there’s nothing particular
about him. Then what makes me like him? But I do. I do. He has only to
turn and smile at me——’
Then he turned and smiled at her, and it seemed to her that the
glamour of the gilded day passed over and into him as he smiled,
glorifying him so that she caught her breath at his beauty. She knew her
happiness. She knew herself and him. He was the sum of the blue sky
and green, green grass, and the shining waters and the flowers with their
sweet smell, and the singing birds and the hum of the little things of the
air. All beauty was summed up in him: he was food to her and sunshine
and music: he was her absolute good: and she thought that someone
ought to see that his socks were mended properly, for there was a great
ladder down one ankle, darned with wrong-coloured wool.

“Well?” She shut the book.
“I like it,” said the Baxter girl stubbornly.
Mr. Flood twisted uneasily in his seat.
“Oh, pretty, of course. Of course it’s pleasant enough in a way. But
Madala oughtn’t to be pretty. Think of the stuff she can do.”
“But can’t you see,” Miss Howe broke in, “how it parodies the
slush and sugar school?”
Anita shook her head.
“She used another manner when she was ironical. I wish you were
right. Oh, you may be—I must consider—but I’m afraid that she is in
earnest. That phrase now—‘The green, green grass,’ (why double
the adjective?) ‘the shining waters, the singing birds’—pitiful! And
that anti-climax—‘He was her absolute good: and she thought that
someone ought to see that his socks were mended properly.’ I ask
you—is it art?”
“Not as serious work, of course,” said Miss Howe, “but——”
“I wish I could think so,” said Anita.
“Well, I wish I could do it,” said the Baxter girl. “What do you say,
Jenny?”
But it had brought back the country to me. It had brought back
home. I hadn’t anything to say to them.
“And she wouldn’t discuss it, you know. She came in after supper
that night, just as I was reading the last chapter. It had only been
out a day. There she sat, where you are now, Lila, smiling, with her
hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on her hands, waiting for me to
finish.”
“Oh—” Miss Howe gave a little gushing scream, “that reminds me
—d’you know, Anita, somebody actually told me that nobody had
seen The Resting-place before it was published, not even you. I was
amused. I denied it, of course.”

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