“GOODLORD!” Oldmeadow heard himself groaning.
Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst part of war had been to see the sufferings of others. This was at last the real thing; but it was so mingled with acquiescence that it ceased to be the mere raw fact. “We’re all together, now,” he thought, and he felt himself, even as he groaned, lifted on a wave of beatitude.
Until now he had not, as a consciousness, known anything. There was a shape in his memory, a mere immense black blot shot with fiery lights. It must symbolize the moment when the shell struck him, bending, in the trench, over his watch and his calculations. And after that there were detached visions, the ceiling of a train where he had swung in a hammock bed, looking up; clean sheets, miraculously clean and the face of a black-browed nurse who reminded him of Trixie. The smell of chloroform was over everything. It bound everything together so that days might have passed since the black blot and since he lay here, again in clean sheets, the sweet, thick smell closing round him and a raging thirst in his throat. He knew that he had just been carried in from the operating room and he groaned again “Good Lord,” feeling the pain snatch as if with fangs and claws at his thigh and belly, and muttered, “Water!”
Something sweet, but differently sweet from thesmell, sharp, too, and insidious, touched his lips and opening them obediently, as a young bird opens its bill to the parent bird, he felt a swab passed round his parched mouth and saw the black-browed nurse. “Not water, yet, you know,” she said. “This is lemon and glycerine and will help you wonderfully.”
He wanted to ask something about Paris and the long-distance gun firing on it every day and he seemed to see it over the edge of the trench, far away on the horizon of No-man’s-land, a tiny city flaming far into the sky. But other words bubbled up and he heard himself crying: “Mother! Mother!” and remembered, stopping himself with an act of will, that they all said that when they were dying. But as he closed his eyes he felt her very near and knew that it would be sweet to die and find her.
A long time must have passed. Was it days or only the time of daylight? It was night now and a shaded light shone from a recess behind him and thoughts, visions, memories raced through his mind. Nancy; Barney; he would never see them again, then: poor Lydia and civilization. “Civilization will see me out,” he thought and he wondered if they had taken off the wings of the Flying Victory when they packed her.
A rhythm was beating in his brain. Music was it? Something of Bach’s? It gathered words to itself and shaped itself sentence by sentence into something he had heard? or read? Ah, he was glad to have found it. “Under the orders of your devoted officers you will march against the enemy or fall where you stand, facing the foe. To those who die I say: You will not die: you will enter living into immortality, and God will receive you into hisbosom.” He seemed to listen to the words as he lay, quietly smiling. But it was music after all for, as he listened, they merged into the “St. Matthew Passion.” He had heard it, of course, with Lydia, at the Temple. But Lydia did not really care very much for Bach. She might care more for “Litanei.” She had sung it standing beside him with foolish white roses over her ears. How unlike Lydia to wear those roses. And was it Lydia who stood there? A mental perplexity mingled with the physical pain and spoiled his peace. It was not Lydia’s, that white face in the coffin with wet ivy behind it. What suffering was this that beat upon his heart? The music had faded all away and he saw faces everywhere, dying faces; and blood and terrible mutilations. All the suffering of the war, worse, far worse than the mere claws and fangs that tore at him. Dying boys choked out their breaths in agonies of conscious loneliness, yearning for faces they would never see again. Oh, how many he had seen die like that! Intolerable to watch them. And could one do nothing? “Cigarettes. Give them cigarettes,” he tried to tell somebody. “And marmalade for breakfast; and phonographs, and then they will enter living into immortality”—No: he did not mean that. What did he mean? He could catch at nothing now. Thoughts were tossed and tumbled like the rubbish of wreckage from an inundated town on the deep currents of his anguish. A current that raced and seethed and carried him away. He saw it. Its breathless speed was like the fever in his blood. If it went faster he would lose his breath. Church-bells ringing on the banks lost theirs as he sped past so swiftly and made a trail of whiningsound.—Effie! Effie! It was poor little Effie, drowning. He saw her wild, small face, battling. Bubbles boiled up about his cry.
Suddenly the torrent was stilled. Without commotion, without tumult, it was stilled. There was a dam somewhere; it had stopped racing; he could get his breath. Still and slow; oh! it was delicious to feel that quiet hand on his forehead; his mother’s hand, and to know that Effie was safe. He lay with closed eyes and saw a smooth waterfall sliding and curving with green grey depths into the lower currents of the stream. He remembered the stream well, now; one of his beloved French rivers; one of the smaller, sylvan rivers, too small for majesty; with silver poplars spaced against the sky on either bank and a small town, white and pink and pearly-grey, clear on the horizon. Tranquil sails were above him and the bells from the distant church-tower floated to him across the fields. Soundlessly, slowly, he felt himself borne into oblivion.
The black-browed nurse was tending him next morning. “You are better,” she said, smiling at him. “You slept all night. No; it’s a shame, but you mayn’t have water yet.” She put the lemon and glycerine to his lips. “The pain is easier, isn’t it?”
He said it was. He felt that he must not stir an inch so as to keep it easier, but he could not have stirred had he wanted to, for he was all tightly swathed and bandaged. He remembered something he wanted specially to ask: “Paris? They haven’t got it yet?”
“They’ll never get it!” she smiled proudly. “Everything is going splendidly.”
The English surgeon was such a nice fellow. He had spectacles on a square-tipped nose and a square, chubby face; yet his hair was nearly white. Oldmeadow remembered, as if of days before the flood, that his name was a distinguished one. Perhaps it was morphia they gave him, after his wound was dressed, or perhaps he fainted. The day passed in a hot and broken stupor and at night the tides of fever rose again and carried him away. But, again, before he had lost his breath, before he had quite gone down into delirium, the quiet hand came and sent him, under sails, to sleep.
Next day Oldmeadow knew, from the way the surgeon looked at him, that his case was grave. His face was grim as he bent over the dressing and he hurt horribly. They told him, when it was over, that he had been very brave, and, like a child, he was pleased that they should tell him so. But the pain was worse all day and the sense of the submerging fever imminent, and he lay with closed eyes and longed for the night that brought the hand. Hours, long hours passed before it came. Hours of sunlight when, behind his eyelids, he saw red, and hours of twilight when he saw mauve. Then, for a little while, it was a soft, dense grey he saw, like a bat’s wing, and then the small light shone across his bed; he knew that the night had come, and felt, at last, the hand fall softly on his head.
He lay for some time feeling the desired peace flow into him and then, through its satisfaction, another desire pushed up into his consciousness and he remembered that, more than about Paris, he had wanted to speak to the nurse about what she did for him and thank her.
“It’s you who make me sleep, isn’t it,” he said, lying with closed eyes under the soft yet insistent pressure. “I’ve never thanked you.”
She did not reply. She did not want him to talk. But he still wanted to.
“I couldn’t thank you last night,” he said, “I can’t keep hold of my thoughts. And when morning comes I seem to have forgotten everything about the night. You are the nurse who takes care of me in the daytime, too, aren’t you?”
Again, for a moment, there was no reply; and then a voice came. “No; I am the night nurse. Go to sleep now.”
It was a voice gentle, cold and soft, like snow. It was not an English voice and he had heard it before. Where had he heard it? Rooks were cawing and he saw a blue ribbon rolling, rolling out across a spring-tide landscape. This voice was not like a blue ribbon; it was like snow. Yet, when he turned his head under her hand, he looked round at Adrienne Toner.
The first feeling that came uppermost in the medley that filled him at the sight of her was one of amused vexation. It was as if he went back to his beginnings with her, back to the rooks and the blue ribbon. “At it again!” was what he said to himself, and what he said aloud, absurdly, was: “Oh, come, now!”
She did not lift her hand, but there was trouble on her face as she looked back at him. “I hoped you wouldn’t see me, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said.
He was reminded of Bacchus and the laying on of hands; but a classical analogy, even more ridiculous, came to him with her words. “Like Cupid andPsyche,” he said. “The other way round. It’s I who mustn’t look.”
The trouble on her face became more marked and he saw that she imagined him to be delirious. He was not quite himself, certainly, or he would not have greeted Adrienne Toner thus, and he made an effort to be more decorous and rational as he said, “I’m very glad to see you again. Safe and sound: you know.”
She had always had a singular little face, but it had never looked so singular as now, seen from below with shadows from the light behind cast so oddly over it. The end of her nose jutted from a blue shadow and her eyes lay in deep hollows of blue. All that he was sure of in her expression was the gravity with which she made up her mind to humour him. “We want you to be safe and sound, too. Please shut your eyes and go to sleep.”
“All right; all right, Psyche,” he murmured, and he knew it wasn’t quite what he intended to say, yet in his flippancy he was taking refuge from something; from the flood of suffering that had broken over him the other night after he had seen that dead face with white roses over its ears. This queer face, half dissolved in blue and yellow, was not dead and the white coiffe came closely down about it. If he obeyed her he knew that she would keep the other faces away and he closed his eyes obediently and lay very still, seeing himself again as the good little boy being praised. This was Psyche; not Ariane. “Ariane ma sœur,” he murmured. It was Ariane who had the white roses—or was it wet ivy? and after her face pressed all the other dying faces. “You’ll keep them away, won’t you?” he murmured,and he heard her say: “Yes; I’ll keep them quite away,” and, softly, a curtain of sleep fell before his eyes crossed by a thin drift of mythological figures.
“I thought it was you who sent me to sleep,” he said to the English nurse next day. He could hardly, in the morning light, believe it was not a dream.
She smiled with an air of vicarious pride. “No indeed. I can’t send people to sleep. It’s our wonderful Mrs. Chadwick. She does a good deal more than put people to sleep. She cures people—oh, I wouldn’t have believed it myself, till I saw it—who are at death’s door. It’s lucky for you and the others that we’ve got her here for a little while.”
“Where’s here?” he asked after a moment.
“Here’s Boulogne. Didn’t you know?”
“I thought I heard the sea sometimes. It’s for cases too bad, then, to be taken home. Get her here from where?”
“From her hospital in the firing-line. Now that we’re advancing at the front everything there is changed and she could come away for a little. Sir Kenneth’s been begging her to come ever since he saw her. He knew she would work marvels here, too.” The nice young nurse was exuberant in her darkness and rosiness with a Jewish streak of fervour in her lips and eyes. “It’s a sort of rest for her,” she added. “She’s been badly wounded once. You can just see the scar, under her cap, on her forehead. And she nearly died of fever out in Salonika. She had a travelling ambulance there before she came to France.”
“It must be very restful for her,” Oldmeadow remarked with a touch of his grim mirth, “if shehas to sit up putting all your bad cases to sleep. Why haven’t I heard of her and her hospital?”
“It’s not run in her name. It’s an American hospital—she is American—called after her mother, I believe. The Pearl Ambulance is what it’s called and everybody here knows about it; all of us nurses and doctors, I mean. Her organizing power is as wonderful as her cures; her influence over her staff. They all worship the ground she walks on.”
“Pearl, Pearl Toner,” Oldmeadow was saying to himself. How complete, how perfect it was. And the nurse went on, delighted, evidently, to talk of an idol, and rather as if she were speaking of a special cure they had installed, a sort of Carrel treatment not to be found anywhere else: “Everything’s been different since she came. It’s almost miraculous to see what the mere touch of her hand can do. Matron says she wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out she was a sort of nun and wore a hair shirt under her dress. Whatever she is, it makes one feel better and stronger just to see her and one would do anything for her just to have her smile at one. She has the most heavenly smile.”
It was all very familiar.
“Ah, you haven’t abandoned me after all, though I have found you out,” he said to Adrienne Toner that night.
He was able at last to see her clearly as she came in, so softly that it was like a dream sliding into one’s sleep. She was like a dream in her nurse’s dress which, though so familiar on other women, seemed to isolate and make her strange. Her face was smaller than he had remembered it and had the curious look, docile yet stubborn, that one sees onthe faces of dumb-mutes. She might have looked like that had she been deafened by the sound of so many bursting shells and lost the faculty of speech through doing much and saying nothing among scenes of horror. But she spoke to him, after all, as naturally as he spoke to her, saying, though with no touch of his lightness: “You mustn’t talk, you know, if I come to make you sleep. Sir Kenneth wants sleep for you more than anything else.”
“I promise you to be good,” said Oldmeadow. “But I’m really better, aren’t I? and can talk a little first.”
“You are really better. But it will take a long time. A great deal of sleeping.”
“No one knew what had become of you,” said Oldmeadow, and he remembered that he ought to be sorry that Adrienne Toner had not been killed.
She hesitated, and then sat down beside him. He thought that she had been going to ask him something and then checked herself. “I can’t let you talk,” she said, and in her voice he heard the new authority; an authority gained by long submission to discipline.
“Another night, then. We must talk another night,” he murmured, closing his eyes, for he knew that he must not disobey her. All the same it was absurd that Adrienne Toner should be doing this for him; absurd but heavenly to feel her hand fall softly, like a warm, light bird, and brood upon his forehead.
THEYnever spoke of Coldbrooks, nor of Barney, nor of Palgrave; not once. Not once during all those nights that she sat beside him and made him sleep.
He had heard from Coldbrooks, of course; letters came often now. And the dark young nurse had written for him since he could not yet write for himself. He had said no word of seeing Adrienne. Nor had he let them know how near to death he had been and, perhaps, still was. He would have liked to have seen Lydia and Nancy if he were to die; but most of all he wanted to be sure of not losing Adrienne. And he knew that were he to tell them, were they to come, Adrienne would go.
She never spoke to him at all, he remembered—as getting stronger with every day, he pieced his memories of these nights together—unless he spoke to her; and she never smiled. And it came upon him one morning after he had read letters that brought so near the world from which she was now shut out, that she had, perhaps, never forgiven him. After all, though he could not see that he had been wrong, she had everything to forgive him and the thought made him restless. That night, for the first time, she volunteered a remark. His temperature had gone up a little. He must be very quiet and go to sleep directly.
“Yes; I know,” he said. “It’s because of you. Things I want to say. I’m really so much better. We can’t go on like this, can we,” he said, lookingup at her as she sat beside him. “Why, you might slip out of my life any day, and I might never hear of you again.”
She sat looking down at him, a little askance, though gentle still, if gentle was the word for her changed face. “That’s what I mean to do,” she said.
“Oh, but—” Oldmeadow actually, in his alarm and resentment, struggled up on an elbow—“that won’t do. I want to see you, really see you, now that I’m myself again. I want to talk with you—now that I can talk coherently. I want to ask you; well, I won’t ask it now.” She had put out her hand, her small, potent hand, and quietly pressed him back, and down upon his pillow while her face took on its look of almost stern authority. “I’ll be good. But promise me you’ll not go without telling me. And haven’t you questions to ask, too?”
Her face kept its severity, but, as he found this last appeal, her eyes widened, darkened, looked, for a moment, almost frightened.
“I know that Barney is safe,” she said. “I have nothing to ask.”
“Well; no; I see.” He felt that he had been guilty of a blunder and it made him fretful. “For me, then. Not for you. Promise me. I won’t be good unless you promise me. You can’t go off and leave me like that.”
With eyes still dilated, she contemplated this rebellion.
“You must promise me something, then,” she said after a moment.
He felt proud, delighted, as if he had gained a victory over her.
“Done. If it’s not too hard. What is it?”
“You won’t write to anybody. You won’t tell anybody that you’ve seen me. Only Lady Lumley knows that I am here. And she has promised not to tell. Probably, soon, I shall have left France for ever.”
“I won’t tell. I won’t write. I can keep secrets as well as Lady Lumley. She does keep them, you know. So it’s a compact.”
“Yes. It’s a compact. You’ll never tell them; and I won’t go without letting you know. I promise. Now go to sleep.”
She laid her hand on his forehead, but, for a little while, he heard her breathing deeply and quickly and the sense of his blundering stayed with him so that sleep was longer in coming.
All the same he was much better next day. He was able to sit up and had the glory and excitement of a chop for his midday dinner. And when the pleasant hour of tea arrived it was Adrienne herself who came in carrying the little tray.
He had not seen her in daylight before and his first feeling was one of alarm, for, if she were afoot like this, in daylight, must it not mean that she was soon to leave the hospital? He felt shy of her, too, for, altered as she was by night, the day showed her as far more altered. Whether she seemed much older or much younger he could not have said. The coiffe, covering her forehead, and bound under her chin in a way peculiar to her, left only, as it were, the means of expression visible.
She sat down by the window and looked out, glancing round from time to time as he drank his tea and it was she who found the calm little sentences,about the latest news from the front, the crashing of Bulgaria, that carried them on until he had finished. When he had pushed down his tray she turned her chair and faced him, folding her hands together on her white apron, and she said, and he knew that she had come to say it, “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
He had had, while she sat at the window, her profile with the jutting nose, and her face, as it turned upon him now, made him think suddenly of a seagull. Questing, lonely, with vigilant eyes, it seemed to have great spaces before it; to be flying forth into empty spaces and to an unseen goal.
“Are you going away, then?” He had not dared, somehow, to ask her before. He felt now that he could not talk until he knew.
“Not yet,” she said. “But I shall be going soon. The hospital is emptying and my nights on duty are very short. I have, really, only you and two others to take care of. That’s why I am up so early to-day. And you are so much better that we can have a little talk; if you have anything to ask me.”
“It’s this, of course,” said Oldmeadow. “It seems to me you ought to dislike me. I misunderstood you in many ways. And now I owe you my life. Before we part I want to thank you and to ask you to forgive me.”
Her eyes, seen in daylight, were of the colour of distance, of arctic distances. That had always been their colour, though he had never before identified it.
“But there is nothing to thank me for,” she said. “I am here to take care of people.”
“Even people who misunderstood you. Evenpeople you dislike. I know.” He flushed, feeling that he had been duly snubbed. “But though you take care of everyone, anyone may thank you, too, mayn’t they?”
“I don’t dislike you, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said after a moment. “And you didn’t misunderstand me.”
“Oh,” he murmured, more abashed than before. “I think so. Not, perhaps, what you did; but what you were. I didn’t see you as you really were. That’s what I mean.”
The perplexity, which had grown, even, to amazement, had left her eyes and she was intently looking at him. “There is nothing for you to be sorry for,” she said. “Nothing for me to forgive. You were always right.”
“Always right? I can’t take that, you know,” said Oldmeadow, deeply discomposed. “You were blind, of course, and more sure of yourself than any of us can safely afford to be; but I wasn’t always right.”
“Always. Always,” she repeated. “I was blinder than you knew. I was more sure of myself.”
He lay looking at her and she looked back at him, but with a look that invited neither argument not protest. It remained remote and vigilant. She might have been the seagull looking down and noting, as she flew onward, that the small figure on the beach so far below had ceased to be that of an assailant in its attitude. How remote she was, white strange, fleeting creature! How near she had been once! The memory of how near rushed over his mind. He had, despite the delirious visions of her stricken face, hardly thought at all, since really seeingher again, of that last time. Everything had fitted itself on, rather, to his earliest memories of her, tinged all of them, it was true, with a deeper meaning, but not till this moment consciously admitting it. It rushed in now, poignant with the recovered smell of wet, dark ivy, the recovered sound of her stifled sobs as she had stumbled, broken, beside him in the rain. And with the memory came the desire that she should again be near.
“Tell me,” he said, “what are you going to do? You said you might be leaving France for ever. Shall you go back to America?”
“I don’t think so. Not for a long time,” she answered. “There will be things to do over here, out of France, for a great many years I imagine.”
He hesitated, then took a roundabout way. “And when I get home, if, owing to you, I ever get there, may I not tell them that you’re safe and sound? It would be happier for them to know that, wouldn’t it?”
Her vigilance still dwelt upon him as though she suspected in this sudden change of subject some craft of approach, but she answered quietly:
“No; I think it will be happier for them to forget me. They will be told if I die. I have arranged for that.”
“They can’t very well forget you,” said Oldmeadow after a moment. “They must always wonder.”
“I know.” She glanced away and trouble came into her face. “I know. But as much as possible. You must not make me real again by telling them. You have promised. You care for them. You know what I mean.”
“Yes; I’ve promised. And I see what you mean. But,” said Oldmeadow suddenly, and this, of course, was what he had been coming to. “I don’t want to forget. I want you to stay real. You must let me know what becomes of you, always, please.”
Astonishment, now, effaced her trouble. “You? Why?” she asked.
He smiled a little. “Well, because, if you’ll let me say it, I’m fond of you. I feel responsible for you. I’ve been too deeply in your life, you’ve been too deeply in mine, for us to disappear from each other. Don’t you remember,” he said, and he found it with a sense of achievement, ridiculous as it might sound, “how I held the tea-pot for you? That’s what I mean. You must let me go on holding it.”
But she could feel no amusement. She was pressing her hands tightly together in her lap, her eyes were wide and her astonishment, he seemed to see, almost brought tears to them. “Fond? You?” she said. “Of me? Oh, no, Mr. Oldmeadow, I can’t believe that. You are sorry, I know. You are very sorry. But you can’t be fond.”
“And why not?” said Oldmeadow, and he raised himself on his elbow the more directly to challenge her. “Why shouldn’t I be fond of you, pray? You must swallow it, for it’s the truth and I’ve a right to my own feelings, I hope.”
She put aside the playfulness in which his grim earnest veiled itself. “Because you saw. Because you know. All about me. From the first.”
“Well?” he questioned after a moment, still raised on his elbow but now with the grimness unalloyed. “What of it?”
“You remember what I was. You remember what you saw. You would have saved them from me if you could; and you couldn’t. How can you be fond of a person who has ruined all their lives?”
“Upon my soul,” said Oldmeadow laughing, his eyes on hers, “you talk as though you’d been a Lucrezia Borgia! What were you worse than an exalted, stubborn, rather conceited girl? Things went wrong, I know, and partly because of me. But it wasn’t all your fault, I’ll swear it. And if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had brought a note of anguish to her voice. “It wasn’t that. It was worse than that. Don’t forget. Don’t think you are fond of me because I can make you sleep. It’s always been so; I see it now—the power I’ve had over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is good; unless one is using it for goodness.”
“Well, so you were,” Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. “It’s not because you make me go to sleep that I’m fond of you. What utter rubbish!”
“It is! it is!” she repeated. “I’ve seen it happen too often. It always happens. It binds people to me. It makes them cling to me as if I could give them life. It makes them believe me to be a sort of saint!”
“Well, if you can help them with it? You have helped them. The war’s your great chance in that, you’ll admit. No one can accuse you of trying to get power over people now.”
“Perhaps not. I’m not thinking of what I may be accused of, but of what happens.”
“It doesn’t happen with me. I was fond of you—well, we won’t go back to that. And you did use it for goodness. Power came by the way and you took it. Of course.”
“I thought I was using it for goodness. I thought I was good. That was the foundation of everything. We must go back, Mr. Oldmeadow. You don’t see as I thought you did. You don’t understand. I didn’t mean to set myself up above other people. I thought they were good, too. I was happy in my goodness, and when they weren’t happy it seemed to me they missed something I had and that it was a mistake that I could set right for them. I’m going back to the very beginning. Long before you ever knew me. Everything fell into my hand. I loved people, or thought I did, and if they didn’t love me I thought it their mistake. That was the way it looked to me, for my whole life long, until you came. I couldn’t understand at first, when you came. I couldn’t see what you thought. I believed that I could make you love me, too, and when I saw, for you made it plain, that you disliked me, it seemed to me worse than mistake. I thought that you must be against goodness; dangerous; the way you pushed me back—back—and showed me always something I had not thought I meant at the bottom of everything I did. I felt that I wanted to turn away from you and to turn people who loved me away from you, lest you should infect them. And all the while, all the while I was trying to escape—the truth that you saw and that I didn’t.” She stopped for a moment while, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow stared at her. Her breath seemed to fail her, and she leaned forward and put her elbowson her knees and bent her forehead on her joined hands. “It came at last. You remember how it came,” she said, and the passion of protest had fallen from her voice. She spoke with difficulty. “Partly through you, and, partly, through my failure; I had never failed before. My failure with Barney. My failure to keep him and to get him back. I couldn’t believe it at first. I struggled and struggled. You saw me. Everything turned against me. It was as if the world had changed its shape and colour when I struggled against it. Everything went down. And when I felt I wasn’t loved, when I felt myself going down, with all the rest, I became bad. Bad, bad,” she repeated, and her voice, heavy with its slow reiteration, was like a clenched hand of penitence beating on a breast: “really bad at last, for I had not known before what I was and the truth was there, staring me in the face. I did dreadful things, then. Mean things; cruel, hateful things, shutting my eyes, stopping my ears, so that I should not see what I was doing. I ran about and crouched and hid—from myself; do you follow my meaning?—from God. And then at last, when I was stripped bare, I had to look at Him.”
She raised herself and leaned back in her chair. Her voice had trembled more and more with the intensity of the feeling that upheld her and she put her handkerchief to her lips and pressed it to them, looking across at him. And, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow looked back at her, motionless and silent.
Was it sympathy, pity or tenderness that almost overwhelmed him as he gazed at her? He could not have said, though knowing that the unity that wasin them both, the share of the eternal that upheld their lives, flowed out from his eyes into hers as he looked and from hers to his. They were near at last; near as it is rarely given to human beings to experience nearness, and the awe of such a partaking was perhaps the ground of all he felt.
“You see,” he said, and a long time had passed, “I was mistaken.”
She did not answer him. Perhaps she did not understand.
“I never knew you were a person who could come to the truth like that,” he said.
Still holding her handkerchief to her lips, she slightly shook her head.
“Even you never thought that I was bad.”
“I thought everybody was bad,” said Oldmeadow, “until they came to know that goodness doesn’t lie in themselves. The reason you angered me so was that you didn’t see you were like the rest of us. And only people capable of great goodness can know such an agony of self-recognition.”
“No,” she repeated. “Everyone is not bad like me. You know that’s not true. You know that some people, people you love—are not like that. They need no agony of recognition, for nothing could ever make them mean and cruel.”
He thought for a moment. “That’s because you expected so much more of yourself; because you’d believed so much more, and were, of course, more wrong. Your crash was so much greater because your spiritual pride was so great. And I thought you were a person a crash would do for; that there’d be nothing left of you if you came a crash. That was my mistake; for see what there is left.”
She rose to her feet. His words seemed to press her too far. “You are kind,” she said in a hurried voice. “I understand. You are so sorry. I’ve talked and talked. It’s very thoughtless of me. I must go now.”
She came and took the tray, but he put his hand on her arm, detaining her. “You’ll own you’re not bad now? You’ll own there’s something real for me to be fond of? Wait. I want you to acknowledge it, to accept it—my fondness. Don’t try to run away.”
She stood above him, holding the tray, while he kept his hold on her arm. “All I need to know,” she said, after a moment, and she did not look at him, “is that no one is ever safe—unless they always remember.”
“That’s it, of course,” said Oldmeadow gravely, “and that you must die to live; and you did die. But you live now, really, and life comes through you again. Your gift, you know, of which you were so much afraid just now, lest it had enveigled me. Don’t you see it? How can I put it for you? You had a sort of wholeness before. There must be wholeness of a sort if life is to come through; harmony of a sort, and faith. It wasn’t an illusion even then. When you were shattered you lost your gift. The light can’t shine through shattered things; and that was when you recognized that without God we are a nothingness; a nothingness and a restlessness mingled. You know. There are no words for it, though so many people have found it and tried to say it. I know, too, after a fashion. I’ve had crashes, too. But now your gift has come back, for you are whole again; built up on an entirely newprinciple. You see, it’s another you I am fond of. You must believe in her, too. You do believe in her. If you didn’t you could not have found your gift.”
She had stood quite still while he spoke, looking down, not at him but at the little tray between her hands, and he saw that she was near tears. Her voice was scarcely audible as she said: “Thank you.” And she made an effort over herself to add: “What you say is true.”
“We must talk,” said Oldmeadow. He felt extraordinarily happy. “There are so many things I want to ask you about.” And he went on, his hand still on her arm, seeing that she struggled not to cry and helping her to recover: “You’re not going away for some time, yet, I hope. Please don’t. There’ll soon be no need of hospitals of this sort, anywhere, will there? and you must manage to stay on here a little longer. I shan’t get on if you go. You won’t leave me just as you’ve saved me, will you, Mrs. Barney?”
At the name, over-taxed as she was already, a pitiful colour flooded her face and before his blunder made visible his own blood answered hers, mounting hotly to his forehead. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he murmured, helpless and hating himself, while his hand dropped. She stood over him, holding herself there so as not to hurt him by the aspect of flight. She even, in a moment, forced herself to smile. It was the first smile he had seen on her face. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said, as she had said before. “You’re very kind to me. I wish I could tell you how kind I feel you are.” And as she turned away, carrying the tray, she added: “No; I won’t go yet.”
HEdid not see her again for two days; and she did not even come at night. But he now kept possession of his new strength and slept without her help. The sense of happiness brooded upon him. He did not remember ever having felt so happy. His life was irradiated and enhanced as if by some supreme experience.
It was already late afternoon when, on the second day, she appeared; but in this month of August his room was still filled with the reflection of the sunlight and the warm colour bathed her as she entered. She wore a blue cloak over her white linen dress and she had perhaps been walking, for there was a slight flush on her cheeks and a look almost of excitement in her eyes.
She unfastened her cloak and put it aside and then, taking the chair near the window, clasping her hands, as before, in her lap, she said, without preamble and with a peculiar vehemence: “You hear often from Barney, don’t you?”
Oldmeadow felt himself colouring. “Only once, directly. It rather tires him to sit up, you know. But he’s getting on wonderfully and the doctors think he’ll soon be able to walk a little—with a crutch, of course.”
“But you do hear, constantly, from Nancy, don’t you,” said Adrienne, clasping and unclasping her hands but speaking with a steadiness he felt to be rehearsed. “He is at Coldbrooks, I know, and Nancy is with him, and his mother and Mrs. Averil.It all seems almost happy, doesn’t it? as happy as it can be, now, with Palgrave dead and Barney shackled.”
Startled as he was by her directness Oldmeadow managed to meet it.
“Yes; almost happy,” he said. “I was with them before I came out this last time and felt that about them. Poor Mrs. Chadwick is a good deal changed; but even she is reviving.”
“She has had too much to bear,” said Adrienne. “I saw her again, too, at the end, when she came to Palgrave. She can never forgive me. Meg is happy now, but she will never forgive me either. I wrought havoc in their lives, didn’t I?”
“Well, you or fate. I don’t blame you for any of that, you know,” said Oldmeadow.
“I don’t say that I blame myself for it,” said Adrienne. “I may have been right or I may have been wrong. I don’t know. It is not in things like that that I was bad. But what we must face is that I wrought havoc; that if it hadn’t been for me they might all, now, be really happy. Completely happy. If I had not been there Palgrave would not have been so sure of himself. And if I had not been there Nancy and Barney would have married.”
“I don’t know,” said Oldmeadow. “If Barney hadn’t fallen in love with you he might very probably have fallen in love with some one else, not Nancy.”
“Perhaps, not probably,” said Adrienne. “And if he had he would have stayed in love with her, for Barney is a faithful person. And it may have been because I was so completely the wrong person for him that he came to know so quickly that Nancywas completely the right one. What I feel is that anybody but Nancy would always have been, really, wrong. And now that he loves her but is shackled, there’s only one thing more that can be done. I have often thought of it; I needn’t tell you that. But, till now, I could never see my way. It’s you who have shown it to me. In what you said the other day. It’s wonderful the way you come into my life, Mr. Oldmeadow. You made me feel that I had a friend in you; a true, true friend. And I know what a friend Nancy and Barney have. So the way opens. We must set Barney free, Mr. Oldmeadow. He and Nancy must be free to marry. You and I can do it for them and only you and I.”
“What do you mean?” Oldmeadow murmured as, after her words, the silence had grown deep between them. He repeated, using now the name inevitably and forgetting the other day. “What do you mean, Mrs. Barney?”
To-day she did not flush, but to-day there was a reason for her acceptance. It was, he saw in her next words, only as Barney’s wife that she could help him.
“He must divorce me,” she said. “You and I could go away together and he could divorce me. Oh, I know, it’s a dreadful thing to ask of you, his friend. I’ve thought of all that. Wait. Let me finish. I’ve thought of nothing else since the other day. It came to me in the night after you had been so wonderful to me; after that wonderful thing had happened to us. You felt it, too, I know. It was as if we had taken a sacrament together. I’m not a Christian. You know what I mean. We felt the deepest things together, didn’t we. And it’s becauseof that that I can ask this of you. No one else would understand. No one else would care for me enough, or for him. And then, you could explain it all to him and no one else could do that. You could explain that it had been to set him free. To setmefree. Because they’d have to think and believe it was for my sake, too, that you did it, wouldn’t they? so as to have it really happy for them; so that it shouldn’t hurt. When it was all over you could go and explain why you had done it. All we have to do, you know, is to stay in a hotel together; I bearing your name. It’s very simple, really.”
He lay staring at her, overwhelmed. The tears had risen to his eyes as her beauty and her absurdity were thus revealed to him, and as she spoke of their sacrament; but amazement blurred all his faculties. He had never in his life been so amazed. And when he began to emerge, to take possession of himself again, it was only of her he could think; not of himself or Nancy and Barney. Only of her and of her beauty and absurdity.
“Dear Mrs. Barney,” he said at last, and he did not know what to say; “it’s you who are wonderful, you alone. I’d do anything, anything for you that I could. Anything but this. Because, truly, this is impossible.”
“Why impossible?” she asked, and her voice was almost stern.
“You can’t smirch yourself like that.” It was only one reason; but it was the first that came to him.
“I?” she stared. “I don’t think it is to be smirched. I shall know why I do it.”
“Other people won’t know. Other people will think you smirched.”
“No one I care for. Everyone I care for will understand.”
“But to the world at large? Your name? Your reputation?” Oldmeadow protested. “Do they mean nothing to you?”
A faintly bitter humour touched her lips. “You’ve always taken the side of the world in all our controversies, haven’t you, Mr. Oldmeadow? and you were probably right and I was probably wrong; but not because of what the world would think. I know I’m right now, and those words: name: reputation—mean nothing to me. The world and I haven’t much to do with each other. A divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and fever hospitals just as well as the most unsmirched woman of the world. I’m not likely to want to be presented at courts, am I? Don’t think of me, please. It’s not a question of me. Only of you. Will you do it?”
“I couldn’t possibly do it,” said Oldmeadow, and he was still hardly taking her monstrous proposal seriously.
“Why not?” she asked, scrutinizing him. “It’s not that you mind about your name and reputation, is it?”
“Not much. Perhaps not much,” said Oldmeadow; “but about theirs. That’s what you don’t see. That it would be impossible for them. You don’t see how unique you are; how unlike other people. Nancy and Barney couldn’t marry on a fake. The only way out,” said Oldmeadow, looking at her with an edge of ironic grimness in his contemplation, “if one were really to consider it, would be for you to marry me afterwards and for us to disappear.”
She gazed at him and he saw that she weighed the idea. “But you’d be shackled then,” she said, and her thoughts were evidently clear. “It would mean, besides, that you would lose them.”
“As to being shackled,” Oldmeadow, still grimly, met the difficulty, “that’s of no moment. I’m the snuffy, snappy bachelor type, you remember, and I don’t suppose I’d ever have married. As to losing them, I certainly should.”
“We mustn’t think of it then,” said Adrienne. “You and Barney and Nancy mustn’t lose each other.”
“But we should in either way. I could hardly take up my friendship with them again after Barney had divorced you on account of me, even if you and I didn’t marry. It would give the whole thing away, if it were possible for them to meet me again. As I say, they’d feel they had no right to their freedom on such a fake as that.”
“They couldn’t feel really free unless some one had really committed adultery for their sakes?” Again Adrienne smiled with her faint bitterness and he wondered if a man and woman had ever before had a more astonishing conversation. “That seems to me to be asking for a little too much icing on your cake. Of course it couldn’t be a nice, new, snowy wedding-cake; poor Mrs. Chadwick wouldn’t like it at all, nor Mrs. Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should think that when people love each other and are the right people for each other they’d be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good deal burned around the edges,” Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.
“But they wouldn’t see it at all like that,” said Oldmeadow, now with unalloyed gravity. “They’d see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they had no right to. It’s a question of the laws we live under. Not of personal, but of public integrity. They couldn’t profit by a hoodwinked law. It’s that that would spoil things for them. According to the law they’d have no right to their freedom. And, now that I am speaking seriously, it’s that I feel, too. What you are asking of me, my dear friend, is no more nor less than a felony.”
She meditated, unmoved, still almost sternly, turning her eyes from him and leaning her elbow on the window-sill, her head upon her hand. “I see,” she said at last. “For people who mind about the law, I see that it would spoil it. I don’t mind. I think the law’s there to force us to be kind and just to each other if we won’t be by ourselves. If the law gets tied up in such a foolish knot as to say that people may sin to set other people free, but mayn’t pretend to sin, I think we have a right to help it out and to make it do good against its own will. I don’t mind the law; luckily for them. Because I won’t go back from it now. I won’t leave them there, loving each other but never knowing the fullness of love. I won’t give up a thing I feel right because other people feel it wrong. So I must find somebody else.”
Oldmeadow looked at her in a culminated and wholly unpleasant astonishment. “Somebody else? Who could there be?”
“You may well ask,” Adrienne remarked, glancing round at him with a touch of mild asperity. “You are the only completely right person, becauseonly you and I feel enough for them to do it for them. What I must do now is to find some one who would feel enough, just for me, to do it for me. It makes it more unfair for him, doesn’t it. He’ll have only the one friend to help. But on the other hand it will leave them without a scruple. They’d know from the beginning that with you and me it was a fake; but with him it might seem quite probable. Yes; it’s strange; I had a letter from him only yesterday. I shouldn’t have thought of him otherwise. I might have had to give up. But the more I think,” Adrienne meditated intently, her head on her hand, her eyes turned on the prospect outside, “the more I seem to see that Hamilton Prentiss is the only other chance.”
“Hamilton Prentiss?” Oldmeadow echoed faintly.
“You met him once,” said Adrienne, looking round at him again. “But you’ve probably forgotten. At the dinner we gave, Barney and I, in London, so long ago. Tall, fair, distinguished looking. The son of my Californian friend; the one you and Mrs. Aldesey thought so tiresome.”
He felt himself colouring, but he could give little thought to the minor discomfiture, so deeply was his mind engaged with the major one.
“Did we?” he said.
“And you thought I didn’t see it,” said Adrienne. “It made me dreadfully angry with you both, though I didn’t know I was angry; I thought I was only grieved. I behaved spitefully to Mrs. Aldesey that night, you will remember, though I didn’t know I was spiteful. I did know, however, that she was separated from her husband”—again Adrienne looked, calmly, round at him—“and it wasa lie I told Barney when I said I didn’t. Sometimes I think that lie was the beginning of everything; that it was when I told it that I began to hide from myself. However—” She passed from the personal theme. “Yes; Hamilton is, I believe, big enough and beautiful and generous enough to do it.”
“Oh, he is, is he?” said Oldmeadow. “And I’m not, I take it. You’re horribly unkind. But I don’t want to talk about myself. What I want to talk about is you. You must drop this preposterous idea of yours. Really you must. You’ve had ideas like it before. Remember Meg; what a mess you made there. I told you then that you were wrong and I tell you you’re wrong now. You must give it up. Do you see? We’re always quarrelling, aren’t we?”
“But I don’t at all know that I was wrong about Meg, Mr. Oldmeadow,” said Adrienne. “And if I was, it was because I didn’t understand her. I do understand myself, and I don’t agree that I’m wrong or that my plan is preposterous. You won’t call it preposterous, I suppose, if it succeeds and makes Barney and Nancy happy. No; I’m not going to drop it. Nothing you could say could make me drop it. As for Hamilton, I don’t set him above you; not in any way. It’s only that you and he have different lights. I know why you can’t do this. You’ve shown me why. And I wouldn’t for anything not have you follow your own light.”
“And you seriously mean,” cried Oldmeadow, “that you’d ask this young fellow—I remember him perfectly and I’m sure he’s capable of any degree of ingenuousness—you’d ask him to go about with you as though he were your husband?Why, for one thing, he’d be sure to fall head over heels in love with you, and where would you be then?”
Adrienne examined him. “But from the point of view of hoodwinking, that would be all to the good, wouldn’t it?” she inquired; “though unfortunate for Hamilton. He won’t, however,” she went on, her dreadful lucidity revealing to him the hopelessness of any protest he might still have found to make. “There’s a very lovely girl out in California he’s devoted to; a young poetess. He’ll have to write to her about it first, of course; Hamilton’s at the front now, you see; and I must write to his mother. She and Carola Brown are very near each other and will talk it out together and I feel sure they will see it as I do. They’ll see it as something big I’m asking them to do for me—to set me free. I’m sure I can count on Gertrude and I’m sure Hamilton can count on Carola. She’s a very rare, strong spirit.”
Oldmeadow, suddenly, was feeling exhausted, and a clutch of hysterical laughter, as she spoke these last words, held his throat for a moment. He laid his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes, while he saw Adrienne and Hamilton Prentiss wandering by the banks of a French river where poplars stood against a silver sky. He knew that he had accepted nothing when he said at last: “Shall we talk about it another time? To-morrow? I mean, don’t take any steps, will you, until we’ve talked. Don’t write to your beautiful, big friend.”
“You always make fun of me a little, don’t you,” said Adrienne tranquilly. She seemed aware of some further deep discomposure in him and willing,though not comprehending it, to meet it with friendly tolerance. “If he is big and beautiful, why shouldn’t I say it? But I won’t write until we’ve talked again. It can’t be, anyway, until the war is over. And I’ve had already to wait for four years.”
SHEmight feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she imagined him resigned, if not converted, to her alternative plan. She carried a bunch of late roses and said that she had been having a lovely drive with a dear old friend from Denver, who had managed to get to Boulogne to see her.
“Your friends all come from such distant places,” said Oldmeadow with a pretended fretfulness that veiled an indescribable restlessness. “California, Denver, Chicago. They have, all of them, an implacably remote sound, as if they were carrying you, already, off to other planets.”
“Well, it doesn’t take so long, really, to get to any of them,” said Adrienne, placing the roses in a glass of water by his side, a close, funny little bunch, red roses in the middle and white ones all round. She had taken off her cloak and laid a newspaper down on the little table, seating herself, then, in the window and keeping in her hands a pocket-book that, in its flatness and length and the way she held it, reminded him of the little blue and grey fan of the dinner-party where she had told her first lie. His mind was emptied of thought. Only pictures crossed it, pictures of Adrienne and the tall, fair youth with the ingenuous eyes, wandering by the French river; and, again, Adrienne on that night, now as distant as California, when, with her fan and pearl-wreathed hair, she had met his persiflage withher rebuking imperturbability. But under the pictures a sense of violent tension made his breathing shallow. He fixed his eyes on the pocket-book and wondered how she had nursed people with those ineffectual-looking hands.
“Where were you trained for nursing?” he asked her suddenly. “Out here? or in England?”
“In England. In Oxford. Before Palgrave was taken,” said Adrienne. “I gave up my philosophy very soon for that. I worked in a hospital there.”
“And how came you to go out to Salonika? Tell me about it. And about your hospital here,” he went on with a growing sense of keeping something off. “It’s your own hospital I hear, and wonderfully run. Sir Kenneth was talking to me about you this morning.”
“What a fine person he is,” said Adrienne. “Yes, he came to see us and liked the way it was done.” She was pleased, he saw, to tell him anything he chose to ask about. She told him about her hospital and of all its adventures—they had been under fire so often that it had become an everyday event; and about how admirable a staff she had organized—“rare, devoted people”—and about their wounded, their desperately woundedpoilusand how they came to love them all. He remembered, as she talked, that she was rich; even richer than he had thought, since she could leave a fortune to Palgrave and yet equip hospitals in France and in Salonika. She told him about Salonika, too. It had been a fever hospital there and the misery and suffering had seemed worse than the suffering here in France. Yes; she had caught the fever herself and had nearly died.
She had no gift for the apt or vivid word. Her nature had been revealed to him as barbarous, or sublime, in its unconventionality, yet it expressed itself only in the medium of trite convention. But his time of jibbing at her platitudes was long since passed. He listened, rather, with a tender, if superficial interest, seeing her heroic little figure moving, unconcerned, among pestilences and bombardments. “It’s not only what you tell me,” he said, when she had brought her recital up to date. “I heard so much from Sir Kenneth. You are one of the great people of the war.”
“Am I?” she said. That, too, unfeignedly, left her unconcerned.
“You’ve the gift of leadership. The gift for big things generally.”
She nodded. “I’m only fit for big things.”
“Only? How do you mean?”
“Little ones are more difficult, aren’t they. My feet get tangled in them. To be fit for daily life and all the tangles; that’s the real test, isn’t it? That’s just the kind of thing you see so clearly, Mr. Oldmeadow. Big things and the people who do them are just the kind of things you see through.”
“Oh, but you misunderstood me—or misunderstand,” said Oldmeadow. “Big things are the condition of life; the little things can only be built up on them. One must fight wars and save the world before one can set up one’s tea-tables.” He remembered having thought of something like this at Lydia’s tea-table. “Tea-tables are important, I know, and the things that happen round them. But if one can nurse a ward of typhus patients single-handed one must be forgiven for letting the tea-potslip. Really I never imagined you capable of all you’ve done.”
“I always thought I was capable of anything,” said Adrienne smiling slightly, her eyes meeting his in a tranquil partaking of the jest, that must be at her expense. “You helped me to find that out about myself—with all the rest. And I was right enough in thinking that I could face things and lead people. But I wasn’t capable of the most important things. I wasn’t capable of being a wise and happy wife. I wasn’t even capable of being truthful in drawing-rooms when other women made me angry. But I can go on battle-fields and found hospitals and tend the sick and dying. Shells and pestilences”—her smile was gone—“if people knew how trivial they are—compared to seeing your husband look at you with hatred.”
She had turned her eyes away as she was thus betrayed into revealing the old bitternesses of her heart and he dropped his to the little pocket-book that now lay still between her hands. The feeling in her voice, the suffering it revealed to him, with the bitterness, woke an unendurable feeling in himself. He did not clearly see what the test was to which he put himself; but he knew that what he must say to her was the most difficult thing he had ever had to say; and he found it only after the silence had grown long.
“Mrs. Barney—everything has changed, hasn’t it; you’ve changed; I’ve changed; Barney may have changed. It was only, after all, a moment of miserable misunderstanding between you. He never really knew what you were feeling. He thought you didn’t care for him any longer, when, really, youwere finding out how much you cared. Don’t you think, before you take final decisions, that you ought to see Barney again? Don’t you think you ought to give him another chance? I could arrange it all for you, when I got home.”
The flood of colour, deep and sick, had mounted to her face, masking it strangely, painfully, to where the white linen cut across her brow and bound her chin. And, almost supplicatingly, since he saw that she could not speak, he murmured: “You can be a wise and happy wife now; and he loved you so dearly.”
She did not lift her eyes. She sat there, looking down, tightly holding the pocket-book in her lap.
“Let me tell him, when I get home, that I’ve seen you again,” he supplicated. “Let me arrange a meeting.”
Slowly, not lifting her eyes, she shook her head and he heard her, just heard her say: “It’s not pride. Don’t think that.”
“No; no; I know it’s not. Good heavens, I couldn’t think it that. You feel it’s no good. You feel that his heart is occupied. It is. I can’t pretend to hide from you that it is. But your place in it was supreme. There would be no unfairness if you took it again. Nancy would be the first person to want you to take it. You know that that is true of Nancy.”
“I know. I heard her plead for me,” said Adrienne.
The sentence fell, soft and trenchant; and he remembered, in the silence that followed, what she had heard. He drew a long breath, feeling half suffocated. But he had met his test. It was inevitable,he knew it now, that she should say “Barney and I are parted for ever.”
Silence dropped again between them. He did not know what was passing behind its curtain and whether bitterness or only grief was in her heart.
He lay, drawing the slow, careful breaths of his recovery, and saw her presently put out her hand and take up herNew York Heraldand unfold it. She looked down the columns unseeingly; but the little feint of interest helped her.
Slowly the colour faded from her face and it was as if the curtain lifted when, laying the paper down, she said, and he knew that she was finding words to comfort him: “Really everything is quite clear before me now. I shall write at once to Hamilton, and to his mother. If he agrees, if they all agree, he and I can go away very soon I think. Afterwards, I shall stay over here. I’ve quite made up my mind to that. There’ll be so much to do; for years and years; for all one’s lifetime. Ways will open. When one is big,” she smiled the smile at once so gentle and so bitter, “and has plenty of money, ways always do. I’m adéracinéecreature; I never had any roots, you know; and I can’t do better, I’m sure, than to make soil for the uprooted people to grow in again. That’s what’s most needed now, isn’t it? Soil. It’s the fundamental things of life, its bare possibilities, that have been so terribly destroyed over here. America has, still, more soil than she can use, and since I’m an American, and a rich one, my best plan is to use America, in my fortune and my person, for Europe. Because I love them both and because they both need each other.”
She had quite recovered herself Her face hadfound again its pale, fawn tints and she was looking at him with her quietest contemplation while he, in silence, lay looking at her.
“It’s not about the things I shall do that I’m perplexed, ever,” she went on. “But I’m sometimes perplexed about myself. I sometimes wish I were a Roman Catholic. In an order of some kind. Under direction. To put oneself in the hands of a wise director, it must be so peaceful. Like French friends I have; such wise, fine women; so poised and so secure. I often envy them. But that can’t be for me.”
She must feel in his silence now the quality of some extreme emotion, and that she believed it to be pity was evident to him as she went on, seeking to comfort him; and troubled by his trouble: “You mustn’t be sorry. I am not unhappy. I am a happy person. Do you remember that Sunday morning at Coldbrooks, long ago? How I said to Mother—to Mrs. Chadwick—that I had no doubts? You thought me fatuous. I dimly saw that you thought me fatuous. But it’s still true of me. I must tell you, so that you shan’t think I’m unhappy. I’ve been, it seems to me, through everything since then. I’ve had doubts—every doubt: of myself; of life; of all the things I trusted. Doubt at last, when the dreadful darknesses came—Barney’s hatred, Palgrave’s death—of God. We’ve never spoken of Palgrave, have we? I was with him, you had heard, and at the very end it was he who helped me rather than I him. He held me up. When he was dying he held me up. He made me promise him that I would not kill myself—for he guessed what I was thinking; he made me promise to go on. And he savedme. The light began to come back to me while I sat beside him after he had died.”
She had not looked at him while she spoke, but down at her hands that, trembling, turned and returned the little pocket-book. And controlling her voice as she sought to control the trembling of her hands, she said: “Perhaps it is always like that. When one confesses one’s sin and hates it in oneself, even if it is still there, tempting one, the light begins to come back. After that it came more and more. What you call my gift is part of it. Isn’t it strange that I should have had that gift when I was so blind? But what you said was true. I had a sort of wholeness then, because I was blind. And now that I see, it’s a better wholeness and a safer gift. That is what I wanted to say, really. To explain, so that you shan’t be sorry. No one who can find that light can be unhappy. It comes to me now, always, when I need it. I can make it shine in other people—as Palgrave made it shine in me. Love does it. Isn’t it wonderful that it should be so? Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness.”
All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands, he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him, as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.
He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney, Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia—poor Lydia—and that they were being borne away from him for ever. He saw nothing before him but Adrienne; and for howlong was he to keep her? That was his supreme risk; but he could not allay it or step back to the further brink. It was his very life that had fallen in two while she had spoken and without the sense of choice; though he dimly saw that, in the restlessness and urgency of the hours since he had seen her last, the choice had been preparing.
He was taking the only step possible for him to take on the narrow foothold of the present when he said, in a voice so quiet that she might even be unaware of his seeming gross irrelevance, “Do you know, about your plan—for Barney and Nancy—I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided that it must be I, not Hamilton.”
HEReyes met his for a long time before he realized that she might find not only irrelevance but even irreverence. She had shown him her very soul and he had answered with this announcement. Of course it had been because of what she told him that he had seen at last his own necessity; but he could not tell her that.
“I’m not sorry for you,” he said. “I envy you. You are one of the few really happy people in the world.”
“But I’d quite given that idea up, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said. “What has made you change?”
He saw the trouble in her face, the suspicion of her power and its compulsion over the lives of others. He took the bull by the horns.
“You, of course. I can’t pretend that it’s anything else. I want to do it for you and with you.”
“But it’s for Barney and Nancy that it’s to be done,” she said, and her gravity had deepened. “It’s just the same for them—and you explained yesterday that it would spoil it for them.”
“It may spoil it somewhat,” said Oldmeadow, contemplating her with a curious tranquillity; she was now all that was left him in life to contemplate; and she was all he needed. “But it won’t prevent it. I still think it a wrong thing to do. I still think it a felony. But, since I can’t turn you from it, what I’ve come to see is that it’s, as you said, for you and me, who care for them, to do. It’s not right, not decent or becoming, that anyone who doesn’t even know them should be asked to do such a thing.”
“But Hamilton wouldn’t do it for them,” she said. “It would be for me he would do it. And he wouldn’t think it a felony.”
“All the more reason that his innocence shouldn’t be taken advantage of. I can’t stand by and see it done. It’s for my friends the felony will be committed and it’s I who will bear the burden for them. As to his doing it for you, I know you better than he possibly can know you, and care for you more than he possibly can. If you’re determined on committing a crime, I’ll share the responsibility with you.”
“I know you care more. You are a wonderful friend. You are my best friend in the world.” She gazed at him and he saw that for once he had troubled and perplexed her. “And it’s wonderful of you to say you’ll do it. But Hamilton won’t feel it a burden; not as you will; and for him to do it won’t spoil it for them. If you do it, it will spoil it for them. You said so. And how can I let you do a thing you feel so wrong for my sake?”
“You’ll have to. I won’t have Hamilton sacrificed in order that their cake shall have no burnt edges. They’ll have to pay something for it in social and moral discomfort. It would be nothing to the discomfort of Miss Brown, would it? I shall be able to put it clearly to Barney when I write and tell him that it’s for your sake as well as his and that he and Nancy, who have never sought anything or hoped for anything, are in no way involved by our misdemeanour. I won’t emphasize to Barney what I feel about that side of it. He’s pretty ingenuous, too. It will be a less tidy happiness they’ll have to put up with. That’s all it comes to, as far as they are concerned.”
She was looking at him with the trouble and perplexity and she said:
“They’ll have to pay in far more than social and moral discomfort.”
“Well? In what way? How?” he challenged her.
“You said they’d lose you.”
“Only, if you married me,” he reminded her.
But she remembered more accurately. “No. They’d lose you anyway. You said so. You said that if they could ever see you again it would make it too blatantly a fake. And it’s true. I see it now. How could you turn up quietly, as if nothing had happened, after Barney had divorced me with you as co-respondent? There’s Lady Cockerell,” said Adrienne, and, though she was so grave, so troubled, it was with a touch of mild malice. “There’s Mr. Bodman and Johnson, to say nothing of Mrs. Chadwick and Nancy’s mother. No, I really don’t see you facing them all at Coldbrooks after we’d come out in the ‘Daily Mail’ with head-lines and pictures.”
Her lucidity could indeed disconcert him when it sharpened itself like this with the apt use of his vocabulary. He had to stop to think.
“There won’t, at all events, be pictures,” he paused by the triviality to remark. “We shan’t appear. It will be an hotel over here and the case will be undefended. We needn’t, really, consider all that too closely. At the worst, if they do lose me, it’s not a devastating loss. They’ll have each other.”
“Ah, but who will you have?” Adrienne inquired. “Hamilton will have Carola and they will have each other. But who will you have?”
He lay and looked at her. There was only one answer to that question and he could not make it. He was aware of the insufficiency of his substitute. “I’d have your friendship,” he said.