IMUST remind the indulgent reader, lest Helen and I should appear tediously opulent, that our Swiss trip in the winter was due to a windfall of a hundred pounds—a thing which may conceivably happen to anybody, and in this instance happened to us. Consequently, the fact that we went abroad again in April does not, if it is considered fairly, argue aggressive riches. In any case, refuse to stoop to degrading justifications. We did not go because it was good for our healths, which were both excellent, nor because foreign travel improves and expands the mind. As a matter of fact, I do not believe it does, for the majority of travellers are always comparing the foreign scenes they visit with spots in their native land, vastly to the advantage of the latter, and the farther and more frequently they go, the more deep-rooted becomes their insularity. We went merely because weenjoyed it, and had formed a careful plan of retrenchment afterwards, being about to let the Sloane Street house for the three summer months. That was rather a severe decision to come to, since we both hate the idea of strangers using ‘our things’ and sleeping in our beds; but by these means this expedition to Greece became possible, and when once it was possible it had already become necessary.
So here we sat this morning on the steps of the little temple of Wingless Victory, wingless, as the old sunlit myth said, because, when the nymph lighted on the sacred rock of the Acropolis, she stripped off her wings, which were henceforward useless to her, since she would abide here for ever, just below the great house of defence that the Athenians had raised to the Wisdom of God, Athene, who was born full-grown and in panoply of shield, and helmet, and spear, from the head of Zeus. Out of his head she sprang in painless birth, with a cry that was heard by Echo on Hymettus, and rang back in Echo’s voice across the plain, the shout of the wisdom of God incarnate.
And then Poseidon, the lord of the sea, who coveted these fair Attic plains, challenged Athene for the ownership thereof. Each must produce a sign of godhead, and the most excellent should win for its manifestor all the plain of Attica. There, high on the rock, where the great birth had taken place, were the lists set, and with his trident Poseidon struck the mountain-top, and from the dent there flowed a stream of the salt sea, which was his kingdom; and then the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom laid aside her spear, and from the waving of her white hands there sprang an olive-tree, the sign of peace and of plenty. So Poseidon went down to his realm again, where no man may gather the harvest; for none could question which was the more excellent sign.
It was after this, after the Athenians had raised the great house to the Wisdom of God, that Wingless Victory came to abide here. It was not fit, for all her greatness, to build her a house on the ground that had been given to Athene, so just outside the gates they made this platform of stone, and raised on it the shrine that looks towards Salamis.
Fables, so beautiful that they needed no further evidence of their truth, sprang from ancient Greece, as flowers from a fruitful field. Whether they were true or not, whether that peerless woman’s form that stands now in stone in the Louvre, alighting with rush of windy draperies on the ship’s prow, ever was seen here by mortal eye, or whether the myth but grew from the brain of this wonderful people, matters not at all. Beauty, according to their creed, was one with truth, just as ugliness was falsehood. They denied ugliness: they would have none of it, and it was from the practice of that conviction that there rose the flawless city of art. Never, so we must believe, during that wonderful century and a half, when from the ground, maybe, of the lifeless hieratic Egyptian art there shot up that transcendent flower of loveliness, of which even the fragments that remain to us now, battered and disfigured as they are, are in another zone of beauty compared to all that went before or has come afterwards, was anything ugly produced at all, except as deliberate caricature. It was no Renaissance—it was Naissance itself—the birth of the beautiful.On every side shot out the rays of the miraculous many-coloured star: from the marble of Pentelicus flowed that torrent of statues which make all others look coarse and unlovely, for the speed of the Greek eye was such that they saw attitudes which pass before we of slower vision have perceived them. Sometimes they saw things that were in themselves ungraceful, but how Pheidias must have laughed with glee when, among the seventy horses of the great procession on the frieze, he put in one that, cantering, stood upon one leg, while the other three were bunched underneath it. Taken by itself, it is a grotesque; taken with the others, it gives to the jubilant procession of youths and horses the one perfect touch. More than two thousand years ago a Greek saw that; two thousand years later we with our focal planes in photography can say he was right.
In all arts the Greeks were right; they cut through the onyx of the sardonyx, leaving the lucent image in the sard; in the less eternal clay they made the statuettes of Tanagra—those sketches of attitudes so natural and momentary that, looking, we can scarcely believe that theydo not move: where a woman has already made up her mind to take a step forward, but has just not taken it; where she is in act of throwing the knuckle-bones, but has yet not thrown them; where a boy has determined to push back his chiton (for the day is hot), but has just not made the movement. You cannot hope to understand the Greek genius, unless you realize that our eyes are snails as compared with theirs. They saw with the naked eye what our instantaneous photograph now tells us is the case.
And of their paintings! We have none left (and there’s the pity of it) which even reflect the Greek master at his best. But corresponding to our English paintings on china, we have the Greek vases of the fourth and fifth centuries. They were made by journeymen in potters’ shops, but there is not one that lacks the supremacy of knowledge and observation. It is as if a china-shop in the Seven Dials suddenly displayed in its window examples of the nude figure which showed a perfect knowledge not only of anatomy, but of the romance of movement. The sculptors and painters of Greece saw perfectly. Even our academiciansthemselves appear to us to be not flawless. But in Greece we are not dealing with these great lords of colour and drawing: we deal only, as far as drawing goes, with little people in back streets. The noble church of St. Paul in the City of London, which so few people visit, was lately decorated. At this moment I look on a sketch of a fragment of pottery.... It is by one like whom there were thousands. It happens to be perfect in draughtsmanship.
To think of one day in ancient Athens! In the morning I went up (I feel as if I must have done this) to see the new statue of Athene Promachos, which Pheidias had just finished. We knew little then about his work, except that he had been chosen to decorate the Parthenon, and those who had seen his sketches for the frieze (which we can see now in the British Museum) said that they were ‘not bad.’ So after breakfast my friend and I strolled towards the Acropolis, talking, as Athenians talked, of ‘some new thing’—in fact, we talked of several new things, and, being Athenians, we got quite hot about them, since we had (being Athenians) that keenness of soul that never says ‘I don’t care about that,’ or ‘I take no interest in this.’ Everything was intensely interesting. It was a hot morning, and the plane-trees by the Ilyssus looked attractive, and there was a company of people there whose talk might be stimulating, but to-day we were too busy: we had to see the Athene Promachos, a bronze statue by Pheidias, forty feet high, and after lunch (lunch was going to be rather grand, because a new play was coming out, and Pericles was going to be there, and perhaps Aspasia) we were going to Æschylus’s new tragedy, called the ‘Agamemnon.’ And my friend, who was Alcibiades, was giving a supper-party in the evening. Socrates was coming, and a man who was really very pleasant, only he listened and made notes, but seldom talked. His name was Plato.
Alcibiades was rather profane sometimes, and spoke of the great gods as if he did not really believe in them. I, knowing him so well, knew that he did, and that it was only his Puck-like spirit which made him in talk make light of what he believed. All up the steps of the Propylæa he was, though amusing, rather profane, and then we came through the centralgate, which was yet unfinished, and straight in front of us was the statue. And some jest—I know not what—died on my friend’s lips, and his great grey eyes suddenly became dim with tears at the sight of beauty, and his mouth quivered as he said:
‘Mighty Lady Athene, my goddess!’
And with that he knelt down on the rock in front of where she stood, and prayed to the wisdom of God.
He refused to go to the grand lunch after this, and insisted on our remaining up here till it was time to get to the theatre, quoting something that Socrates had said about the cleansing power of beauty; ‘so we will not soil ourselves just yet,’ quoth he, ‘with the intrigues we should hear about at lunch, but go straight from here to the theatre.’ So we bought from a peasant some cheese wrapped up in a vine-leaf, and a bottle of wine, and a loaf of bread and some grapes, and then went down the rock to the theatre. And still that divine vision had possession of Alcibiades, for he paid no attention to the greeting of his friends, and bade them be silent. And soonthe actors were come, and the watchman went up to the tower, and looked east, and saw the beacons leap across the land, to show that the ten-year siege was over, and that Troy had fallen. Then slowly began to be unfolded the tale of the stupendous tragedy. Home came Agamemnon, with his captive, the Princess Cassandra, riding behind him in his chariot of triumph. Clytemnestra, his wife, met him at the palace door, and with feigned obeisance and lying words of love welcomed him in, leaving Cassandra outside. Then there descended on the Princess the spirit of prophecy, and in wild words she shrieked out the doom that was coming. Quickly it came: from within we heard the death-cry of the King, and the palace doors swung open, and out came the Queen, fondling the axe with which she had slain him.... The doom of the gods was accomplished.
Then afterwards we went round to the green-room, and found Æschylus there, and Alcibiades, in his impulsive way—I tell him he has the feelings of a woman—must kneel and kiss the hand that wrote this wonderful play. Socrateswas there, too, putting absurd questions to everybody about the difference between the muse of tragedy and the muse of comedy; as if anybody cared, so long as Æschylus wrote plays like that! However, he got Plato to listen to him, and soon made him contradict himself, which is what Socrates chiefly cares about. Pericles came in, too, with Aspasia, to whom he kindly introduced me. Certainly she is extraordinarily beautiful, and has great wit. But she called attention to her physical charms too much, which is silly, since they are quite capable of calling attention to themselves.
Afterwards, since only Alcibiades and I had seen the wonderful statue, we all strolled up to the Acropolis again to look at it and the sunset. Socrates came, too, and after we had examined and admired the bronze goddess again, we went and sat on the steps of the temple of Athene. He tried his usual game of asking us questions till we contradicted ourselves, but before long all of us refused to answer him any more, saying that we were aware that we were totally ignorant of everything, and that there wasno longer any need for him to prove it to us. And then—exactly how it arose I don’t know, but I think it was from the questions and answers that had already passed—he began to weave us the most wonderful fable, showing us how all that we thought beautiful here on earth was but the reflection, the pale copy, of the beauty which was eternal. Round the outer rim of the earth and the stars, he said, ran the living stream of a great river, which, indeed, was heaven, and everything that we thought beautiful here had its archetype there, and all day and all night the gods drove round and round on this river of beauty in their chariots. It was our business, then, here on earth, to look for beauty everywhere, and never falter in the quest of it, for so we prepared ourselves for the sight of that of which these things were but the shadow, so that the greater would be the initiation which would be ours after death. More especially we must seek for the beauty of spiritual things, which was the real beauty, and so order our bodies, our words, and actions, that they were all in tune with it, with the beauty of prudence, and temperance,and kindness, and wisdom, for it was of these that heaven itself and the living stream was composed, and these shone from the eyes of the immortal gods.
‘So there is my prayer,’ said he, rising and stretching out his hands to the great statue, while we all rose with him. ‘O Athene, give me inward beauty of soul, and let the inward and the outward man be at one.’
So the sun set, but on the violet crown of Athens—the hills there, Hymettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes—the light still lingered, and shone like the river of beauty Socrates had told us about, till it faded also from the tops, and above the deep night was starry-kirtled.
Helen is the most delightful person in the world to tell stories to. However lamely you tell them, she is absorbed in them, and never asks about the weak points, as other children do. She might, for instance, have asked if I was correct about my dates; did the ‘Agamemnon’ come out in the year that the ‘Promachos’ was made? Instead——
‘And who was I?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tellme I was Aspasia, because I don’t like what you told me about her.’
‘No; you were not Aspasia,’ I said rather hurriedly; ‘and I rather think you had had your turn in Greece at some other time. I didn’t know you then, except, perhaps, in the myths, for I am not sure that you were not Electra.’
‘Was she nice?’ asked Helen.
‘She was very nice to Orestes.’
‘Oh, don’t! Who was Orestes? What a nice name!’
‘You were his sister. That’s all about mythology just now.’
The plain quivered under the sunlit haze of blue. To the south the dim sea was in tone like two skies poured together, and the isles of Greece floated in it like swimmers asleep. Below, to the left, lay the theatre where I had seen the ‘Agamemnon,’ empty, but ready as if the play was just going to begin. Who knew what ghosts of those supreme actors were there, what audience of the bright-eyed Greeks followed the drama? And above us stood thepresiding genius of Athens, the beautiful house built for the virgin who sprang from the brain of God. A little more, and it would be her birthday again, and we should hear the sound of horse-hoofs coming up the hill, and see the procession of the Athenian youths, and the men with the bulls for sacrifice, and the wine-carriers, and the incense-bearer, and the priests of the great goddess. Another company would be there, too—the hierarchy of Olympus—come down on Athene’s birthday to visit her in her beautiful home. With Zeus would be the mother of the gods; and Aphrodite would be there, the spirit of love that renews the earth; and Apollo, who makes it bright with sunshine; and Demeter, the mother of the cornfields; and Persephone, radiant, and returned from the gate of death; and Hermes, the swift messenger whose feet were winged; and Iris, who was rainbow, the sign of the beneficent seasons.
And ... though we saw them not, there was not one missing. Love was here, and below were the ripening cornfields, on which the sun shone; and beyond was the realm ofPoseidon, and a squall of spring rain, that passed like a curtain in front of Hymettus, showed us Iris.
Then it was time to go down townwards again, for the morning was passed; but Helen paused at the doorway at the gate of the Acropolis, and looked towards the temple.
‘Best of all, I like Socrates’ prayer,’ she said; ‘and I must say it to myself.’
Spring had been rather late this year, and a week ago, when we drove out to the foot of Pentelicus, to have a country ramble, the rubbish of last year’s autumn was still in evidence. Then the spring began to stir, and two days ago, when we had gone out again, all the anemones except one kind were in full flower. They are heralds, those mauve and violet and pink and white chalices of blossom, to tell us that the great procession of Primavera has begun. But last of all come the trumpeters, the scarlet anemones, and if the sun has been warm, and no north wind has delayed the procession, they blow their blasts over the land just two days after the heralds have appeared.So to-day after lunch we went out to hear the trumpeters; to-morrow we shall see Primavera herself.
Spring herself, the goddess Primavera, was very near to-day, for on thicket and brake and over the flank of the hill-side her trumpeters were blowing their shrill blasts of scarlet. Two days before, the land was sober-coloured; now, wherever you looked, the wonderful anemone, last to flower, stood high with full-blown petals. The movement and stir of the new life was hurrying to its climax. To-morrow, instead of the myriad buds of the cistus and the pale stalks of orchid, the flowers would be unfurled at the final touch of the spring, at the advent of the goddess herself. To-day a myriad folded bells hung from the great bushes of southern heath, like stars still cloaked in mist; to-morrow, with one night more of warm wind and a morning of sun, they would blaze and peal together; for it is thus in this wonderful Southern land that spring comes: a few heralds go before, and then the army of trumpeters. After this, She crosses the plain with the ardour of hot blood, so thatall flowers blossom together, and every bud and beast goes suddenly a-mating. Here there is none of our limitative February, our pinched hopes of March; all is quiet till the heralding of the anemones and the trumpets of their scarlet brethren. Then, in full panoply of blossom, Primavera and summer, too, are there together. For a week or two the land is aflame with flower, and then already the maturing of fruit-trees has begun.
Northerners though we are, both Helen and I claimed some strain of Southern blood in the ecstasy of those days. That for which we wait and watch for patient weeks in the shy approach of spring in England was here done with a flame and a shout. There was no hesitancy or delay; no weak snowdrop said that winter was coming to an end weeks before spring came, to die before the crocuses endorsed its message. Here all was asleep together till all woke together. Ten days ago there was no hint of spring save in the strong sunshine: the wilderness of winter still spread its icy hands. Then faster than the melting of the snow on the top of Parnescame the heralds in the wilderness, and spring was there. It was like the winter of Kundry’s soul, to whom one morning Gurnemanz said: ‘Auf! Der Winter floh, und Lenz ist da.’ And on that day came Parsifal and her redemption, and the ransomed of the Lord returned with joy and singing.
I have no skill to tell of those days: for the past, all that I knew of the history of this wonderful land, and the present, all that love meant, and the future, the dear event that was coming closer, were so inextricably mingled that no coherence is possible. But if you love a place, and are there with your beloved, and know that she will bear a child to you before many weeks are over, you may make a paradise of Clapham Junction, and find the joy of it a thing incommunicable. And how much more difficult a material is the magic of this land to work in—this little Attic plain, peopled with the ghosts of that wonderful age, which are not dead at all, but instinct with life to-day, at this moment when spring has come, so forcibly that even the slow tortoises on the side of Pentelicus hurriedbreathlessly about, with deep sighs (I assure you) till they found a congenial lady. Then they ran—positively ran—round her in ever-narrowing circles, still sighing. There were grasshoppers, too—green gentlemen and brown ladies. The brown ladies genteelly ran away, but they never ran far. The great hawks sought each other in the sublime sky, and the young men and maidens of Athens as we drove back were taking discreet walks together into the country. And from the Acropolis the maiden goddess, who is the Wisdom of God, looked down, and was well pleased.
For, thank Heaven! the Wisdom of God in no prude. To all has it given a soul, and to all souls is desire of some sort given—to one the perfection of form, to another the perfection of wit, to another the perfection of colour, to another the perfection of truth. For each there is a way; each has got to follow it; and for many there are various ways, and these many must follow them all. If a thing is lovely and of good report, we all have to hunt it home. It is no excuse to say you have no time, for youhave all the time there is. Search, search: there is the Way everywhere.
Indeed, this is no mystical affair: it is the plainest sense. Whatever happens, God is somehow revealed. But, being blind, we cannot always see the revelation.
To-night, as Helen and I sit on deck of the steamer that takes us back again to Marseilles, we wonder what gives Greece its inalienable magic. We saw the fading of its shores in the dusk, and though the phosphorescence of the sea was a thing to marvel at, it was no longer the phosphorescence of Greek waters. That little fig-leaf-fingered land has sentiment somehow in its soil; it cannot fail to move anybody. Its history since the Great Age—it is no use to deny it—has been tawdry beyond description. It yielded to the Romans, it scarcely resisted the Albanians; and though some flickering spirit of its old grandeur flamed again when its people rose against the Turkish rule in the early part of last century, what are we to say of the spirit of the people when, twelveyears ago, they again fought their ancient and ancestral enemy? The Turks strolled slowly southwards from the North of Thessaly, and only the intervention of the Powers prevented Greece again becoming a Turkish province. The Hellenic battle-cry went shrilly up to Heaven, but the Hellenic army trotted like a flock of sheep before the foe, until the Powers said that the war must cease. Only the year before there had been revival of the Olympic games, and there had been a race from Marathon to Athens in memory of Pheidippides, who bore the news of that stupendous victory, and died as he reached Athens, saying, ‘Greece has conquered the Persians.’ A Greek won that peaceful race from Marathon; the same Greek won the peaceful race home, and arrived back in Attica in the very van and forefront of the retreating army. The ‘host of hares’ was the Turkish name for the foes they never had occasion to meet, who started from their fortresses like hares from their forms, and galloped quietly away. Meantime the Greek fleet cruised in the Adriatic, and sank a fishing-boat. Whenthe war was over, they came home with the spoils of their victory—a hat, a fish, a net. Perhaps it is best to say that there was no war at all: the Turkish armies made peaceful manœuvres over Thessaly, until they came to Volo. Then the Powers of Europe said: ‘We think your manœuvres have extended far enough: kindly go home.’
Yet, somehow, the tragic futility of all this does not really touch Greece or the sentiment that the lovers of the lovely land feel for it. Supposing a Greek army, or a regiment of it, had met the Turk, and died in the cause of patriotism, that could not have added to the compelling charm of Greece, and so the fact that none of these patriotic events happened does not diminish it. In Greece, whatever may be done or left undone, you are in the country where once beauty shot up like the aloe-flower, so that all else is inconsiderable beside that, since whatever the world has achieved afterwards, whether in painting, or sculpture, or drama, or poetry, or in that eagerness of life which is the true romance of existence, ismeasured, if only it be fine enough, by the standard set then. That is the haunting, imperishable charm of this country, and, missing that, even the phosphorescence of waters by night, divided by the swift keel of the lonely ship, was for a time a soulless firework.
The magic of it—the magic of it!
Thereafter we staggered across the Adriatic, over the ridge and furrow of a grey and unquiet sea, till we found quiet below the heel of Italy. Soon to the south-west the horizon lay in skeins of smoke, and it was not for hours afterward that the cone of Etna, uprearing itself, showed whence the trouble came. Narrower grew the straits, till we passed out beside Messina, and for the pillar of smoke which Etna had raised all day we sighted Stromboli, a pillar of fire by night. Next morning we were in the narrows between Corsica and Sardinia, and saw the little villages, tiny and toy-like, in the island whence sprang the brain that was to light all Europe with the devouring flame of its burning. If the dead return, I think it is not in Elba of St.Helena, nor even in the pomp of Paris, nor on the battle-field, that we must guess that Napoleon wanders. He sees the impotence of his destructive and untiring genius. The lines of his new map of Europe have been gently defaced again by time, and he sits quiet enough by the little house, where still the descendants of his old nurse dwell, and sees the innocent campaigning of her grandchildren in their childish games. And when the time comes for unflinching justice to be done to that unflinching spirit, who spared none, nor had pity so long as by any sacrifice the realization of his ruthless imaginings came true, will not the spirit of his old nurse stand advocate, and remind Justice that, even in the midst of his gigantic schemes, he remembered her who had given him suck, and provided for her maintenance? Somewhere in that iron soul was the soft touch of childish days: he was kind who was so terrible, and that pen so unfacile and so bungling that he hated to write at all put a little paragraph of scarcely decipherable words to his will that showed(what would otherwise have been incredible) how a certain gentleness of heart underlay the iron.
Though all these sights—the chimney of Etna, the furnace of Stromboli, the island of Napoleon—were but milestones, passed before, to show us now how far we were travelling from the magic land, yet each brought us nearer in time and space to the magic of home, and of the day, yet unnamed, which must already, like some peak of an unknown range, be beginning to rear itself up in the foreground of the future.
Then, as the magnet of Greece grew more remote, the magnet of home gained potentiality, until there was no question which was the stronger. We had intended—that is to say, more than half intended—to stay a day or two in Paris; instead, we fled through Paris as if it had been a spot plague-ridden, meaning to pass the night in London. But even as we scurried from Gare de Lyon to Gare du Nord, so, too, we scurried from Victoria to Waterloo, with intention now fully declared to get down to the dear home without pause. As far as I remember, we sustained life onthick brown tea and a Sahara of currant-cake; but at the end there was the snorting motor waiting at the station, and a mile of sleeping streets, cheered by the vision of Mr. Holmes going somewhere in a neat Inverness cape and buttoned boots, a mile of spring-scented country road, and then the little house, discreet behind its shrubbery, where was the rose-garden, among other things, and among other things the nursery.
The night was very warm, and lit by the full moon of April, so, after we had dined, and run like two children from room to room in the house, first to greet all the precious things of home, with Fifi, like an animated corkscrew, performing prodigies of circular locomotion round us, we found that there was still a large part of home to greet, and so went out into the garden, to see what April had brought forth there. No sudden riot or conflagration of leaf and flower, like that which we had seen blaze over the lower slopes of Pentelicus, was there, but April day by day had done his gentle work, so that where we had left a bed still winter-nakedit was now mapped out into the claims of the plants. To-morrow there would be disputes to be settled, for the day-lily had pegged out more than her share, and between her and the iris a delphinium would be crowded out of existence. But every plant—such is our rule—may claim all the ground it can get until the end of April; then come round the judges of the court of appeal, and if any plant distinctly says, ‘I have not room to grow, because of these encroachers,’ his appeal, if he promises at all well, is usually upheld, and the encroacher is shorn of his unreasonable encroachments. Even by the moonlight it was quite certain that the court of appeal had a heavy day in front of it: there were lawsuits regarding land to settle, which would require most careful adjustment, for the court hates depriving a rightful possessor of that which his vigor has appropriated. On the other hand, the slender aristocracy of the bed (for the aristocrat grows upwards rather than sideways) must not be elbowed out of existence. One plant only is allowed to do exactly what it pleases and when it pleases—the pansy, which is ‘for thoughts’ that are always sweet, and so may roam unchecked and welcome, for who would set limits to the wanderings of so kindly and humble a soul? It but touches the ground, too (to be absolutely honest, I must confess that this has something to do with the liberties we give it), as a moth still hovering and on the wing draws from the flower the sustenance it needs. It does not, so to speak, sit down to make a square meal, or burrow with searching roots deep into the earth, and drain it of all its treasure, but it is ever on the move, like some bright-eyed beggar-girl, to whom none but the churlish would grudge the wayside halfpenny. She will not linger and settle and sponge on your bounty, but be off again elsewhere next moment, just turning to you a smiling face, and whispering a murmured thanks in the bright language of flowers. So she is privileged to wander even in the sacred territory of the roses, where I hope she has already wandered wide. There, however, we did not penetrate to-night, for it and the meadow we kept for the morrow. But on the top marginof the field against the sky I saw shapes that were unmistakable. To-morrow our hearts will go dancing with the daffodils.
But to-night we are content with the thoughts that the pansies have given us, and can even forgive Milton for speaking of them as ‘freaked with jet.’ Freaked with jet!—when Ophelia had said that they were ‘for thoughts’! But, then, Milton speaks of the ‘well-attired woodbine,’ which is almost as bad. Imagine looking at pansies, and finding it incumbent on one to say: ‘I perceive they are freaked with jet’! But, as one who had the highest appreciation of Milton remarked, to appreciate Milton is the reward of consummate scholarship, which was certainly a very pleasant reflection for himself, and perhaps if I were a better scholar I should think with appreciation of the pansy ‘freaked with jet.’ As it is, I merely conclude that Milton was flower-blind—a sad affliction.
Helen is absolutely ultra-Japanese in her observance of the flower-festivals, of which she marks some dozen of red-letter days inthe year. They cannot, of course, be celebrated on any fixed day, since, owing to the vagaries of climate, there might not be a single lily to be seen, for instance, this year on the actual day which was Lily-day a year ago. She waits instead, like the Japanese, until the particular flower is in the zenith of its blossoming, and then proclaims the festival. Other flowers, naturally, sometimes are at their best on the red-letter day of another, but this, as she observes, is canonically correct, since St. Simon and St. Jude, and St. Philip and St. James, are celebrated together. I was not, therefore, the least surprised next morning, when, after a short excursion to the garden, she came in to breakfast, saying:
‘It is Daffodil-day, and the day of its sisters of the spring.’
‘But we had the sisters of the spring in Greece,’ said I.
‘Yes; that is the advantage of going to Greece: the Greek calendar is different to ours. We had Easter Day before we started, and another Easter Day when we got there. Besides, it was Anemone-day, and the day ofits sisters of the spring. The anemone’s sisters were not the same as the daffodil’s.’
This was convincing (even if I needed conviction, which I did not), and Daffodil-day it was.
After the early heats of February the year had had a long set-back in March, and though April was nearly over, I doubt whether there had been any more gorgeous decoration in our absence than that which we found waiting this morning in the church of the daffodils and its sisters of the spring. It was not in vain that we had dug and delved last autumn with such strenuous patience, for that half-acre of field beside the rose-garden was a thing to make the blind see. A rainbow of blossom lay over it all: the early tulips had opened their great chalices of gold and damask; the blue mist of forget-me-nots seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen, and lay mutely under the trees; brown-speckled fritillaries crouched shyly in the grass, and their white-belled sister nestled beside them; narcissus was there, all yellow, and narcissus with the eye of the pheasant; primroses still lingered, waiting forHelen’s proclamation to take part in the festival; while some bluebells had hurried to be here in time; crocuses in the grass were like the dancing of the sun on green waters, or purple as the deep-sea caves; and anemones, greedy for more festivals, had hurried overland from Greece to be here before us; and clumps of iris were like banners carried in procession. These were the sisters of the spring. It was their day; but first it was Daffodil-day. Slender and single, tall and yellow, it was as if through the web of them, the golden net that they had laid over the field, that you perceived their sisters. And the sun shone on them, and the great blue sky was over them, and the warm wind made them dance together.
After a long time, Helen spoke.
‘Oh, oh!’ she said.
That about expressed it.
‘My heart with pleasure fills,’ she added.
IT always seems to me a matter for wonder why the astronomers, or Julius Cæsar, or whoever it was who took the trouble to divide time up into months and years, should have made the day of the New Year come in the middle of winter. Probably it has got something to do with the solar eclipse, or the lunar theory, or movements and motions quite unintelligible to the ordinary mind, which would easily have the point of beginning the New Year in spring—for instance, on May-day—when the season is clearly suitable for beginning again. But to make a fresh start by candlelight in a fog on the first of January implies a more vivid effort of the imagination and a sterner resolve of the spirit than most of us able to manage. You might as well try to make up for misspent years by selectingBlackfriars or Baker Street Station as a place to start afresh in.
Personally, though I think the 1st of May would be a quite reasonable occasion on which to begin a New Year, I should prefer a rather later date, when summer is more certain, and it was for this reason that when I formed this (I hope) harmless little project of putting down the quiet happenings of a year of life, I began in June. Month by month I kept this diary, and you will see when you come to the end of this month of May that my plan was endorsed by what happened then, and that New Year must, in the future, always begin for Helen and me on the first of June.
Even with the early days of May summer descended on us, and Mr. Holmes’s Panama hat and a neat new suit of yellowish flannel made their due appearance to confirm the fact. Soon, if this goes on, he will be handing ices instead of buns at tea-parties, and I have often seen him lately on the ladies’ links playing golf in his little buttoned boots. He came to call yesterday, and told me of Charlotte’s engagement, and announced the fact that my Archdeacon (I call him mine because of what happened at that dreadful Sunday-school) was giving a garden-party on the 11th, and the wife of the younger son of our Baronet had not been invited. The fact of the garden-party on the 11th was not new to us, because We Had Been Invited. Oh, revenge is sweet, and we gloated over the discomfiture of the foe. Her mother had been a governess, too. That was a new fact that Mr. Holmes had gathered in the last half-year—just a governess, and not in a noble family even, but in the employment of a retired tradesman. That accounted for the fact that her daughter spoke French so well; no wonder, since the mother had to teach it. Her knowledge of that language, scraps of which she constantly introduced into her conversation, had always puzzled Mr. Holmes; now he knew how it had been acquired. Indeed, she had come rightly by it, poor thing! We none of us grudged it her. And it was no wonder now to Mr. Holmes that she looked so thin; probably she had never had enough to eat when she was achild, and that indescribable air of commonness about her was perfectly accounted for. Indeed, Mr. Holmes became so sardonic that you would have thought that his family was one (as I dare say it is) compared to which the Plantagenets were parvenus; and Helen changed the subject, which I thought was a pity, as I wanted to hear ever so much more about the lady’s obscure origin.
We chatted very pleasantly for a long time, and learned all that theMorning Posthad said in little paragraphs during the past week, and all that the Close and the County (I recommend that expression) and the Military were doing here. We were going to be very gay indeed; there was already an absolute clash of entertainments during a week of cricket next month, so that the Mayor was forced to give a luncheon-party one day instead of a mere tea, which he would probably not like at all, since if ever there was a Mayor who collected candle-ends, this was the one. Did I remember that which was called champagne at the famous lunch which has already been spoken of?
In fact, Mr. Holmes shook his head over the general trend of affairs, and spoke quite bitterly about the wave of Radicalism which was passing over the country. The County Club, so he said, which had always prided itself on being a little exclusive, was tainted with commonness now, and had positively disgraced itself at the last election by letting in those three new members. They were nobodies—local nobodies—one the son of a doctor, another the father of a doctor; the third nobody at all. And—would I believe it?—there had been a veterinary surgeon up for election as well. Luckily, the club had pulled itself together over him, and given him a smart shower of black-balls. No doubt the club was in want of funds, but why, then, have built a new billiard-room? How much better to poke the butt-end of our cues into the chimney-piece, as we had always done when playing from over the left-hand middle pocket, than purchase increased cue-room at the sacrifice of our standing as a County Club? If we did not draw the line somewhere, where were we to draw the line? That was unanswerable. Weall said what is written, ‘Tut!’ and looked very proud. Helen, I consider, looked prouder than Mr. Holmes, but she disagrees with me, having seen her own face in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece. True, she had not the natural advantage that Mr. Holmes’s aquiline nose conferred upon him, but the assumed curl of her lip was superb: she looked like a Duchess in her own right.
How slowly these beautiful days of May passed, for when one is very happy and very expectant, time seems to stop. Exactly the opposite happens when one is spending days that are full of pleasures, and living entirely in the moment, for then hours and days pass on unregarded, so that it is Saturday again before you know the week has really begun. But happiness—I but bungle with words over a thing that is obvious to everybody who knows the difference between happiness and pleasure—is a thing quite detached from the present moment, just as the sunlight which floods these downs is notofthem. Happiness ever broods on the wing, and swings highabove the things of the earth, like some poised eagle, or like the sun itself. It illuminates what it looks on, turning dew to diamond, and striking sapphires into the heart of what has been a grey sea, but it is independent of material concerns; and were the world to be withdrawn and extinguished, it would shine still. True, it shines on the dewdrop and turns it into wondrous prismatic colours, and thus the common surface of life is always iridescent when we are happy. But happiness—that golden, high-swung sun—does not, I think, particularly regard the jewels he makes out of common things: his own bright shining, perhaps, weaves a golden haze between him and what he shines upon.
It was somehow thus, I think, that things were with us during that first fortnight of May. Below the golden haze were these entrancing facts which I have just recorded about the Archdeacon’s party, the frightful disclosures concerning the mother of the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, and the growing plebeianism of the County Club; but neitherHelen nor I could focus our attention on them; for though, as I have said, time went so slowly, yet there was not time enough to regard them: they belonged to a different plane to that on which we were living. We could penetrate down into it and giggle, but then our attention wandered, and before we knew it, we had swum up again like bubbles through water to the sunlit surface.
There took place, in fact, a revision in our list of joyful and dreadful affairs. No one could appreciate the humour of Mr. Holmes more than Helen did, but, as I have said, she could not attend to him now. Nor could she attend to the perfectly hideous fact that the greater part of the ceiling in the dining-room in Sloane Street had fallen, and that our tenants had (quite reasonably) demanded to be released from their tenancy, of which there was still six weeks to run, since the house was uninhabitable. Nor did I think she would have cared if the ceiling had smothered them as they sat at dinner. And the dreadful earthquake in China failed to move her, and so did the church crisis in France. But for certainother things she cared more than ever, though you would have said they were little enough. All the growth of the spring-time made her eyes brighten and ever grow dim again, and she would dream over the tiny buds of the rose-garden with smiles that were sped to her mouth from the inmost spring of happiness. She spread fat Heliogabalian feasts for the birds, since they wanted nourishment now that they were so busy over their nests, and many dyspeptic bachelors and spinsters, I expect, reeled daily from their table laid on the lawn to sleep off the results of their excess. She loved the sun, too, more than she had ever loved it, and the shade also, and day and night, and all the firm, great forces of the world.
Not less, too, did she love the little things of little rooms, and now we never sat in the drawing-room, with its Reynolds’ prints, but went always to the nursery, with its rocking-horse and its Noah’s ark, and its lead soldiers, and its play-table. But when there—when playing these silly games of soldiers, which Helen had been wont to play as if eternal salvation depended on the nice adjustment of asmall tin cannon, which, when you pulled a string, shot a pea—she had a change of mood most disconcerting at first. Now and again she shot down my Generalissimo, posted, as he should be, out of possibility of attack almost, in the very rear of my army, by some inconceivable ricochet which would a few weeks ago have filled her mouth with laughter. But now, when these unspeakable flukes occurred, and she upset the heaviest soldiers in my brigade, instead of being delighted, she was sorry, and apologized. To injury, which was bad enough, she added insult, which was worse, and said: ‘I am afraid I must win now.’
There is another curious thing (Helen looks over my shoulder as I write, and agrees) that, though she still loves to play soldiers, she wants me to win. Consider it: whoever before wanted to play a game (and the more childish the game, the less worth while you would have thought to play it), if he did not care about winning? Besides, it is so exceedingly unlike her—she is looking over my shoulder no more—not to play any game as if life and deathdepended on it. But now she applauds my skill and my luck, and apologizes for her own.
And then, when the game is over, and the Duke of Wellington on one side and Julius Cæsar on the other lie dead, she still sits on the ground beside the low play-table, and looks round the room with wandering, happy eyes. There are the playthings I have told you of—the Noah’s ark, the rocking-horse, the great dolls’-house, the front of which, windows and door and all, is unfastened by a neat latch in the wall of the second story, and swings open altogether, so that you must be careful not to unlatch it early in the morning or late at night, else you would see all the ladies and gentlemen at their toilet in an embarrassing state of undress. I found Helen the other morning playing at dolls all by herself. She had laid a banquet in the dining-room, and had arranged the ladies and gentlemen on the stairs, so that one could see at once that they were going down to dinner. From their attitudes, and a tendency to lean against each other orthe wall, you might have thought that they were trying to get upstairs after the banquet. But that, Helen told me, was foolish, since their faces were all turned in the direction of downstairs. The answer was that they had indulged even more freely than I had supposed, and were trying to get upstairs backwards.
Yes; we did all these extremely childish things, and so far from being ashamed of them, I set them all down here for you to laugh at if you like, or merely to be bored with. Things like these—playing at soldiers or at dolls—retained their interest, just as did the spirit of the blossoming summer, when Mr. Holmes’s discoveries or the fall of the ceiling in Sloane Street lacked the calibre to interest us. And, if you come to think of it, though I thought an explanation would be difficult, nothing in the world could be more simple. Things about children, and birth, and growth were clearly the only affairs that could concern us. One morning, I remember, it was found that the foundations of the cathedral were in a dreadful state, and that it would probably fall down. I told Helen this as she was engaged on preparing a Gargantuan breakfast for the birds. She only said:
‘Oh, what a pity!’
That was all she cared for the historic Norman pile, with all kinds of Kings and Queens buried inside it!
There is nothing more to be recorded of this month, since the only things that seemed to us to have any real importance were just the childishnesses of which I have already given you such amplitude of specimens, until the morning of the last day of May.
The rule of the house was that there was no rule of any sort as regards breakfast. Anybody who came into the dining-room at most hours of the morning would find the breakfast perennials (bread, butter, sugar, milk, the morning paper and marmalade) on the table, and would, on ringing a bell, be given the annuals—i.e., fresh tea and a hot dish. Similarly, anybody who did not come into the dining-room was supposed to be breakfasting either elsewhere or not at all. So on this last morning of May, on coming down, I rang thebell, and read the paper till bacon came. An hour before I had just looked into Helen’s room, and seen that she was still asleep.
The bacon was rather long coming that morning—I try to reconstruct the day exactly as it happened—and I had already skimmed the news, and found there was not any, and in default of it was reading a superb account of the visit of a member of the Royal Family to Naples, who in the afternoon had ‘honoured’ (so said the loyal press) the volcano of Vesuvius with a visit. How gratifying for the immortal principle of fire! One hoped it would not become swollen in the head. This fortunate volcano, whose cone had been blessed——
At the moment I heard a step outside. It was not from the kitchen: it was coming from upstairs, and it came very quickly. Then, instantaneously, terror seized me, for time and place were no longer now and here, but it was the evening when I heard my name called in the garden, and thereafter heard Legs running downstairs. And quickly as the steps came, they seemed to me to go on for ever; yet I hadonly just time to get up, when there came a fumbling hand on the door, and Helen’s maid came in.
‘If you please, sir, would you send at once,’ she began. ‘The nurse—— ’
There were quicker ways than sending, and next minute I was flying up the road on my bicycle. My mind, as I think must always happen with any mind in such moments, seemed curiously inactive, though somewhere there was inside me a little bit of tissue, so to speak, that agonized, and hoped, and prayed. But for the most I only thought of one thing—that once before I had gone on just the same errand, from this same house, up the same road, to fetch the doctor for her, my dearest friend. O Margery! I go quickly to God and tell Him.... We want Him.
And then the tissue that agonized and prayed sank out of sight again, and I was just speeding up the sunny, dusty road, on which, as I got nearer the town, the traffic became denser. Once a butcher’s cart pulled suddenly out into the middle of the road in front of me, and I thought collision was inevitable, except that Iknew that it was not possible that I should be stopped when going on such an errand as this, and several times I passed people I knew, yet, though I knew them, their faces were meaningless: they conveyed names, but nothing whatever more. And then—whether very soon or countless ages later, I had no idea—I was at the doctor’s door in the quiet, decorous street, which also was meaningless—neither strange nor familiar, but purely without significance. Everything I saw was detached; nothing had any relation to life, except just one thing: his dog-cart, which was at the door, concerned me.
He had not yet started on his rounds, and it was not five minutes before he was ready. He had only to pick up a little bag, into which he put a case of some kind, and something bright, that I turned my eyes from, and a bottle which he wrapped up—it seemed to me very neatly and slowly—which clinked against that which was already in the bag.
Then he turned to me.
‘Now, if you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you won’t come back with me, but will go for a ride on this beautiful morning. You will not seeyour wife, and for the next hour or so it is not possible that I should have anything to tell you. We don’t want you in the house: we don’t want to be bothered with you.’
He got briskly into his dog-cart, nodded to me over his shoulder, and, instead of driving himself, gave his servant the reins. I know I shouted something after him, telling him, I think, to be careful, and so found myself on the doorstep, looking at a bicycle which was leaning against the pillar of the porch, and was evidently not mine. But, like the dog-cart, it was not meaningless, for it was Helen’s, which I must have used by mistake. I must take it back; it was careless of me.
Then his advice occurred to me, but it sounded ridiculous, as senseless as some nursery-rhyme. And at the thought there suddenly started in my head the first two lines of ‘Humpty-Dumpty.’ I could not remember the last two lines, but the first went round and round in my brain, keeping time to my pedalling.
Soon after I was home again, only a moment behind him, for he was just getting out when I came to the gate, and I waited till he hadgone in, so that he should not know I had failed to follow his advice—at least, I believe that was the reason, but I am not sure.
I went round by the back way into the garden, and sat down in the veranda outside my own room, where Fifi was lying in the sun. But I had to coax her silently indoors, for I could not bear that she should lie there, lest suddenly she should again look out into the garden, and howl at something she saw there. She would not come in at first, and once she pricked her ears at something she saw outside, and I stopped mine, lest I should hear her howl. And all the time ‘Humpty-Dumpty’—the first two lines of it—went on and on. It was so terribly lonely, too—just that silly rhyme, and I all alone. If only Legs were here, or anybody—anybody. You see, this was not expected to-day, nor for weeks yet. My mother was coming to stay with us next week, until....
Then I heard the muffled sound of steps in the room just above my head—Helen’s room—and at that for a little the babble and confusion of my troubled brain cleared, and ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ ceased, and I was not afraid of Fifi howling, for there was no room for anything except the thought of Helen, who lay there, and of the life yet unborn. And I could not help—I could not bear any of it for her. I could not even be with her: birth was as lonely as death.
Outside the garden lay basking in the heat of the early summer, and everywhere the expansion of life, which had seemed to us so wonderful and glorious a thing through all these weeks of May, suddenly became sinister and menacing. What travail may not go to the opening of a single flower, or the maturing of its casket of seeds? It would all be of a piece with the cruelty and the anguish that runs through life like a scarlet, bleeding thread, beginning, as now, even before birth, and not even ending with death, since those who remain have the wound of that yet to be healed. Right through life goes the scarlet thread, knotted on the farther side at each end, so that it shall not slip. And—‘Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.’ Ah, yes! I had it all now. ‘The King’s horses’ was what I could not remember. And at that the crowd oftrivialities again came between my mind and me.
We had set up the croquet-hoops again only last week, and had argued over the position of that particular corner one by which my ball had rested when last autumn a telegram had been brought me from the house. Helen had said it was square with the corresponding corner; I knew it was not, and from here it was perfectly easy to see that she had been wrong. I hate an awry disposition of hoops. ‘All the King’s horses’ ... they really should bring these rhymes up to date; it ought to be motor-cars instead of horses.
These things passed very slowly through my mind, for it acted as if it was numbed and half-paralyzed, and the croquet-hoop occupied the foreground of it for a considerable time. I had let Fifi out again, and she was racing about the lawn in the attempt to catch swallows, a feat of which she never realized the unreasonableness, and I had left the doors into my room, both from the hall and from here outside, open. And then, with the same rapidity as they had come, all these nonsense thingspassed away again, for I heard steps on the stairs, and, going in, saw the doctor standing on the landing above, talking in low tones to the nurse. He saw me, made a little movement of his hand as if to detain me, and when he had finished what he had to say to her, came downstairs.
‘I will have a word with you,’ he said gravely; and we went into my room. I saw him looking at me rather curiously, and was wondering why, when he suddenly seemed to lean up against me. Then I perceived that it was I who was swaying on my feet. He put me in a chair.
‘I suppose you have not had breakfast,’ he said. ‘You are to eat something immediately; I will ring the bell. And now listen. It is going to be difficult, and, I am afraid, dangerous, and it is better that you should know it now.’
And then the dear, kind man just laid his hand on my arm.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said; ‘you can’t think how I hate to tell you this. I hope it will be all right; there is nothing yet thatforbids me to hope that. Please God, we shall pull her through, but—well, well.’
He broke off as the door opened, and a servant came in.
‘Just bring a tray in here,’ he said. ‘Tea? Yes, tea, and an egg and a couple of bits of toast. Thank you.’
‘Remember, I still hope it will be all right,’ he said. ‘And even if—well, you are both young still. Now I shall be back here in an hour at the outside.’
‘You are not going,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘Yes, yes. I know what you feel,’ he said. ‘But there is nothing for me to do here yet, and I have to make arrangements so that I can come back and remain here till all—is satisfactory.’
‘You don’t stir from this house,’ I said.
‘Do you think I should go if there was the slightest possibility of your wife needing me?’ he said quietly.
‘No; I beg your pardon.’
‘That’s all right. Now when your breakfast comes, eat it, and read a book if you can, or go and garden. I am sure those roses ofyours want looking after, and I tell you it’s a hard thing for a man in your position, and a thing which we doctors respect, to go and occupy himself. If you can’t, you can’t, but you might have a try.’
The servant brought in a tray before many minutes, and with it the morning paper. When I had eaten, I took it up and looked at it. There was no news, but the middle page contained an account of a visit to Vesuvius by an English Prince. He ‘honoured’ the volcano with a visit. And then I knew that I had seen the paper before. But when? Years and years ago, or this morning?
What the doctor had said to me needed no time or thought for realizing it. I felt as if I had known it all along—known it all my life. But—what happened next, if that all happened long ago? Was the room overhead the chamber of death or the chamber of birth? Next door to it was the nursery, with its Noah’s ark and its soldiers and its rocking-horse. Who going to ride on that? And the dolls’-house, with its tottering inhabitants—who next was to play with those, and open the wall?Oh, Helen, Helen, you and your child, will it be? Or will it be you and I again, but after a long time, hoping once more? Or—dear God, no, not that!
Daffodil-day, and its sisters of the spring! And Rose-day will come next month. Roses ... heaped for the beloved’s bed. Dear God, not that: it does not mean that bed. Indeed—indeed it does not. You have so many souls already in Your house of many mansions. Give us a few more years together, for they are so sweet, and a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday. And we should so like a young thing, one of our own, in the house. But ... thank You very much for the years that have been so sweet. They have been—they have been. And, please don’t let her suffer or be frightened.
Then I went across the lawn and into the rose-garden. Though we had been very industrious there, I never saw yet the rose-tree on which there is nothing to be done, and for a little my hands made themselves busy. Then quite suddenly it all became impossible, andthere was nothing in the world except what the doctor had told me, and floating on the top of that ‘Humpty-Dumpty, Humpty-Dumpty.’
So it was within the hour that I got back again to the house, and the doctor had not yet returned. I missed something familiar on the lawn, without at once knowing what it was, and then I saw that the birds’ breakfast was not there. That took me to the dining-room, where I found lunch was already laid, and with bread-crumb and little bits of cheese, and cold meat mixed, I made a plateful for them, though, as you know, it was the last day of May, and I suppose it was but pauperism among the thrushes that I encouraged. But Helen all these days had done so. I knew she would not like them to miss their provision.
Soon after—so soon that the news of their belated meal had not yet become public among the birds—the doctor returned. I heard him go upstairs, and after that I crept into the hall, and sat down on the lowest step of the seventeen that led to the landing. Legs used to jump down them in two bounds, taking eight steps first, and then nine, and get up (with arun) in three—two sixes and a five.... What am I maundering about? And before very long I must have been sitting higher up the stairs, for I could see out of the window on the staircase. The dog-cart had drawn away from the door into the shade, and the groom had got down, and was gently stroking the mare’s nose. Then he laid his smooth young cheek against it, and she stood quite still, liking it. I expect he is kind to her.
The sun had swung round farther to the west, and it came in through the window. But now I was nearly at the top of the stairs; there were but three above where I sat. The house was very still; below me on the ground-floor there had been no step or sign of life, and there was nothing from behind the second door to the left just above me. Then came the sharp tingle of an electric bell. There was only one room from which it could have come.
I tapped very gently, though my heart beat so that I thought it must have been a hammer-noise to those inside. The door opened a chink, and a level, quiet voice said: ‘Some hot water, please—very hot.’ Perhaps a minute afterwardsI tapped again, and a hand took the can of hot water from me.
I went back again, this time to the top step, and still waited. Since I had done something, though it was but the handing of a can of hot water into the room, that nightmare of incoherent thoughts began to clear more completely, and, like some remembered sunlight breaking clouds, and shining with the serene quietude of eventide, Helen—she herself, no intercepted vision, no vision even of remembrance only or anxiousness—shone out. Whatever happened, she was I, and I was she, and the Will of God, whatever It might ordain for us, could not alter that. She and I, I think, have never feared anything when we were together, and surely of all days that life or death could hold for us, we could never be more together than to-day. So, surely, of all hours this is the one when fear should be farthest from us, for never have we been together like this. Yet, O my God, my God, since Christ was born of a woman, let Him go in there, the second door....
And the next door, You know, is the nursery.... No, not the farther one, but the one thisside. Yes, yes, of course You know, but You might have forgotten. There’s the Noah’s ark there, and the dolls’-house, and the lead soldiers. We had hoped....
Red light came in through the window on the stairs—light of sunset. Once more the stinging sound of the electric bell came to me; once more I took up a can of hot water.
Then it grew dark; in the hall below the lamp had been lit, and from the window, after the last red of sunset had faded, there came the distant shining of stars, endlessly remote. Then the door opened again, and the nurse came hurrying out, forgetting to close it. From within came the cry of a child.
* * * * *
June 1.—I overstep the bounds of the year, but you may like to know. Quite early this morning I was allowed to go in and look. They were sleeping, both of them—she and he.
Afterwards I went into the nursery.
THE END.
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