'Hm, hm.' The lawyer nodded. 'I think, though, you partly illustrate the view I've been trying to put-that everyone consciously or unconsciously thinks that it's the duty of someone else to make him or her happy. In your case the assumption would be that you don't hit it off with your wife — I'm being brutal, but I know you won't mind.'

'Lord, no,' said Jim. "That is n't near the bone with me, you know. That's what I'm trying to say. Why should I "hit it off," as you call it? I've never made that my first object. Not even when I was what used to be called "courting" her. It's never been more than a poor second with me. I know it. Unfortunately she does not know that exactly the same is true of her. Although, in her heart of hearts, she no longer expects happiness through me, she hoards a sort of grudge against me for not making her happy. And that even while she's trying to get it through other people! Not that I blame her for the others; what I do blame her for is not seeing that flitting about is obviously fatal; if you shift your aim you cannot hit the bull's-eye, and she is intelligent enough to see that. Poor Lisa. I think that she really is rather unhappy, largely because, for her, happiness is still a fruit on a tree - and a fruit somehow just out of her reach. And she has too much time to think about it.'

For a few minutes we all sat silent. Of course, I thought to myself, we are all laying far too much stress on this. Happy or unhappy. Most people at any given moment are neither. The pulse beats normally until you stop to feel it. When you stop to ask yourself the question, the act brings dreams about your head. Variable as is human disposition, happiness surely can only be defined as the dictionaries

VOL. 140-NO. 4

define it as 'a state of being content with one's lot'; and contentment obviously depends not only on the lot but on the temper but on the temper and the digestion - of the individual in it. Our lawyer friend would have added, 'And on the degree to which he has learned not to ask others to give him what he cannot give them.' Human variation means that happiness cannot be a constant; means that Tolstoi was wrong when he declared, in words put most specifically in the opening sentence of the French version of Anna Karenina, "Tous les bonheurs se ressemblent.' Externally viewed, it would seem that some of the incidents of mortality are happy, others not. Yet it was not on any calculus of incidents that I could classify the people I knew. Past joys made some bitter; past sufferings left others with a curious serenity — a detachment from themselves that rose above troubles under which others fretted and fumed. And, looking at it, I seemed to see this internal variability as independent of station, class, or 'lot' in life. To the wellto-do, the poor may seem sunk in a drab wretchedness; to the poor, the rich lapped in happy comfort. Acquaintance with either dissipates such uniformities.

I looked around me, across the dim spaces of the garden. Then my eyes came back to our group and rested upon Jenny. She sat, her chin on her hand, staring out in front of her. Her expression did not suggest that she had heard what we had been saying; she was looking out, not in. As I watched her I seemed to see in that absorbed abstraction of hers the answer, or what was as near to the answer as I was likely to get, to the puzzle that teased me. Jenny was happy. She had said so, and I knew her well enough to know that it was true. Judging by extrinsic standards, there

seemed no particular reason why she should be so; her life, for a girl of her age, was none too amusing. She was the youngest of a large and poor family; there were several girls in it, all attractive, none of them very successful, none of them quite in tune with their 'period.' She herself was not in tune; her work was good, but not in the fashionable modern way. That hardly seemed to perturb her. She was invincibly honest, and nothing could induce her, I knew, to paint anything but what she saw, and as she saw it. All her interest was in doing that. Her honesty in this and other respects, again, made her angular; she could not adjust her standards to what was expected. But there it was, for her, in its absoluteness and security. Her standard, her centre, was firmly fixed outside herself. Outside herself, but not, I thought, in someone else. There might be someone else' in her life, but she was not, in the last resort, dependent on that. She was disinterested; the pattern, of which she had spoken to us, weaving before her eyes had for her a beauty and a concern that were independent of her own part in it. And in her disinterestedness she found happiness a kind of

happiness, too, that in its degree, and with its necessary variations, was open to all.

Yes, I felt that Jenny gave me the key. It might be hard to fit it into the lock, but, as the Greeks knew and told us, all beautiful things are hard. So long as the question we put to life is 'What are you giving to us?' the soul will get but a dusty answer. So soon as it is transformed into an effort after understanding, the motes assemble into a beam of light.

'Here are the others coming back.'

Lisa and Mr. Norton were in fact drifting toward us over the lawn. Lisa was a few steps ahead of her companion. Jim inspected them as they approached. He was very longsighted, and anyhow the result of long sitting in the dark is to give one something of the cat's vision.

"That, apparently, has not worked,' he murmured. 'Lisa's fur is all stroked the wrong way.'

She was by now near enough to us to speak. 'What have you been doing, all this time?' she asked.

'We have been discussing happiness,' replied the lawyer.

'Oh, happiness!' she exclaimed. 'I am sure there is no such thing!'

On the high down above the sea, in the corner of the last rough grazing field, stands a linhay, half fallen into ruin. It is built of boles of spruce fir, unhewn but barked, and boarded with rough wooden boards. It has a roof of corrugated iron. The roof is intact, but many of the wooden boards have fallen with the rusted nails. Those boards remaining are green and damp, and shaggy with gray lichens.

The linhay had been built with its eastern end open for bullocks to shelter in stormy weather; but the gentleman farmer had sold the down with his other land after the Great War, and the new owner had let it fall ruinous. Battering winds and rain straight from off the Atlantic, and the hot sun of summer, had warped and rotted the boards, and opened two other walls to the weather.

On windy days buzzard hawks lie over the down on crooked wings, watching for rabbits in the heather slope below, or turn and glide over the line of the hill. It is a beautiful and desolate place, where the spirit can spread itself wide and airy as the sea and the sky. One morning I set out for the linhay with a companion. As we climbed the road to Windwhistle Cross the wind blew harder, and found cold places in our clothes. Past the spinney the way lay over fields, cutting across the broad and rushing gale. I was more hardened than my companion, who covered her face with her gloved hands and walked with bowed head. After a while we reached a wall of stone and earth, tunneled by rabbits and lying broken in

gaps. The wind, seeking to level all things, was whipping up bits of stone and earth over the wall, and we had to shield our eyes. Plants growing on the crumbling riband of earth remaining on the top of the stones were pressed tightly down, guarding their leaves among the mosses from the stripping storms. White splashes marked the stones, where in still weather the buzzards had waited and watched for rabbits to lollop out of their buries.

We reached the ruined linhay, and realized it would give no shelter for a fire, as in other expeditions. The hollow was frigid in shadow, and scoured by the wind. The last stone wall before the heather and brambles of the wild seaward slope stood a few strides away, and behind this we sat down and rested. An easy matter to break the old boards with a fifty-pound slab of ironstone fallen from the wall, but not so easy to make a fire. Half a box of matches and chips sliced with a knife, however, changed the acrid smoke of deal wood into flame, and the flame. into red and black brittle embers, which wasted in sparks over the grass.

While we were munching our sandwiches in the sunshine my companion, who had been staring into the shadowcut interior of the linhay ten yards away, asked me if I saw anything above a stone against the inner wall. Yes, I saw a pair of ears upraised, and a dark brown eye below them.

I stood up, and the ears went down flat; but the brown eye continued to watch. A rabbit was squatting there.

I sat down out of the wind, and soon afterward the ears were raised again. The wind tore at the flames, and rocked a loose stone on the wall behind us. It was blowing harder. We moved away, spreading a raincoat before a derelict plough which old grasses had partly covered. Sea gulls, shifting and slanting in swift, uneven gliding, began to appear above our heads, first in pairs, and then in many numbers. The sunlight was put out, and it was instantly chilly. I got up and looked over the wall.

I saw a grand and terrible sight. The headland, which lay out into the bay, dark and puny under the vastness of sky that seemed to begin just beyond my feet, was blurred and lost. Beyond a mile or two from the extended sands below, where hundreds of gulls were standing, still and tiny as scattered whitish seeds, all was chaos. It was as though the sky was falling; as though a monstrous spectre had risen out of the vast sea and was moving to overthrow the land.

We picked up our raincoats, gathered them back from the wind, and allowed ourselves to be billowed into the linhay. The air blows thudded against the boards of the intact side the shippen was open west, south, and east, except for the round support posts, gnawn with damp at the base, which remained upright. Wind, rebounding from the single wall, flung over us like a comber, dropping dust and straw specks in our ears and the corners of our eyes. It was cold on the rough trodden floor, whereon lay flakes of blard, and dried dung of bullocks. The slabs of stone lay against the wall, about six inches from the bottom board, and in the space the rabbit was crouching, its ears pressed on its shoulders, its life quivering behind the staring dark eyes.

The headland was gone; the sky was falling. Beyond the forming ridges of

distant waves the sea seemed to be taking on a wrinkled dull gray skin, like molten lead in a trough; and as we watched, the falling blackness was riven, and in the rift a snout arose, and spread upward into the shape of a funnel as it traveled over the surf to the shore. We saw the tiny white seeds sprout with wings, and settle on the sands again. The open linhay trembled, and we buttoned our coats to the neck.

A ladder was fixed to the middle post of one side of the linhay, leading to the tallat, or loft, through an open trapdoor seven feet above our heads. We climbed up, and were in an open space crossed by beams under slanting corrugated iron sheets, lit at the seaward end by a window frame without glass. The floor was rotten in places. Wooden pegs of shares, some with tarnished brass-wire loops, were thrown in one corner, with a sack. The skull of a mouse, with brittle bones interlocked in grayish fur, lay on one beam, where an owl had roosted. I looked through a break in the floor; the rabbit was still beside the stone.

Wind noises ran through the bleak tallat, coming in at the eaves, the floor cracks, the window frame stripped of putty and paint, where owls had perched. They filled the loft, like the hollow and curious voices of straying things, never of the earth or its life. The light drained from the rafters, the floor, each other's face. The plaining voices were lost in the buffets of the iron roof. The skull of the mouse rolled on the beam, and the bones fell aslant, joining a trickle of broken straws along the floor. My companion wrapped her coat closer round her legs. I peered through an empty square of the window, and saw grayness rushing up the heather slope of the down. I saw the fire by the wall, already gutted of embers, kicked as though by an invisible foot. The charred lengths of board.

flecked with yellow and red points of flame, rose up and flew yards, and fell flat, smoking violently in the grass.

The voices wailed and shrieked, seeming to dissolve the substance of the tallat in a pallor of darkness. Straw specks and mice bones whirled on the floor, suddenly to rise up and scatter. The linhay was shuddering in the wind. Would the inner core of its uprights hold in the storm? I trod a careful way to the trapdoor, and the wind threw up the wide skirt of the raincoat into

my face.

We waited, our backs to the screaming drafts racing up the corrugations of the iron roof. Suddenly a hatch in the walled angle above the trapdoor burst its wooden latch and flung half open, before wedging against the floor and shaking on the ragged grass background of the field below. An amazing object moved slowly across the grassy rectangle cut by the lichen-frayed door. My companion saw it and clutched my arm.

The object moved on three thin legs, threw its head up and down with a roll and a flop. It paused, got its hind legs under it, and took another hop forward, dragging something on the ground. Each forward movement, which needed about five seconds to prepare, took it perhaps six inches nearer shelter. By its head and tail it was a fox - but was it a fox? The tail hung like a piece of old rope, the small head was almost without hair, the ribs showed under creases of skin muddy and stuck with tufts, through which the sharp points of shoulders and hips seemed about to break with the weight of the swelled body. I had just turned my glass into focus and seen that it was a vixen, dragging the chain and iron peg of a rusty rabbit gin clamped on its foreleg, when the first hail smote the roof with an immense clattering crash, and the linhay rocked with the hollow thunder of the wind. I feared it would

turn over, crumple, and be carried through the stone wall immediately behind. The field space below the door was a gray blank; the day was torn up and hurtling past us. Jets of icy air were driven through the floor, and up between body and clothes. The sack slid over the green and rotting floor boards, reached the square of the trapdoor, jumped to the rafters, on which it moulded itself before falling. It was snatched through the hatch. I yelled in my companion's ear that it would be best to stand by that hatch, to jump clear when the linhay should buckle and rise. I took her hand, cold as stone, and guided her along one of the joists, lest the floor break under our shoes.

We had reached the eastern end when the black of the storm fell on the down. Immediately we were under a torrent. I saw alarm with the misery in the dim face beside mine. The linhay was lurching under the falling flood. Skits blown in from the open window tasted salt on my lips. And the sea was a mile away, at the end of a downward slant of fifteen degrees! It must have been a waterspout we saw rising in the rift.

The earth under the linhay was awash. The water ran in wrinkled sheets prickled with rain. I could see nothing of fox or rabbit. The smashing of wood for the fire had given me warmth, but this warmth was used and gone after five more minutes in the tallat. My companion was rigid, as though being enclosed in an icicle; her teeth chattered. The wind pushed thorns under our nails and in our jawbones, and drew its brambles down our ears and cheeks. Our toes were broken in glacial gins.

There was no grandeur in the elements now; imagination was disharmonized from the sun. Nature was indifferent to the sufferings of all life. I could bear the screeching icy jets with fortitude, but my companion suffered,