“You have that now,” said Adrienne. “And though I’m so your friend, I’ll be leaving you, soon, probably for ever. We’ll probably never meet again, Mr. Oldmeadow. Our paths lie so apart, don’t they? My friendship will do you very little good.”
Her words cut into him, but he kept a brave countenance. “I’d have the joy of knowing I’d done something worth while for you. How easily I might have died here, if it hadn’t been for you. My life is yours in a sense and I want you to use it rather than Hamilton’s. I have my work, you know; lots of things I’m interested in to go back to some day. As you remarked, a divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and in the same way a co-respondent can write articles and go to concerts.”
“I know. I know what a fine, big life you have,” she murmured, and the trouble on her face had deepened. “But how can I take it from you? A felony? How can I let you do, for my sake, something you feel to be so wrong?”
“Give it up then,” said Oldmeadow. And if he had found it difficult to make his plea for Barney a little while before, how much more difficult he found it to say this, and to mean it, now. “Give it up. That’s your choice, and your only choice. You owe that to me. Indeed you do. To give it up or to accept me as your companion in iniquity. I’m not going to pretend I don’t think it iniquity to give you ease. You’re not a person who needs ease. And I can do without it, too. For your sake. So there you have it.”
“Not quite. Not quite,” she really almost pleaded. “I couldn’t ask it of Hamilton if he felt about it in the least little way as you do. And Carola doesn’t care a bit about the law either. She’s an Imagist, you know.”—Adrienne offered this fact as if it would help to elucidate Carola’s complaisances. “She’s written some very original poetry. If it were Hamilton no one would lose anything, and Barney and Nancy would be free. Indeed, indeed I can’t give it up when it’s all there, before me, with everything to gain and nothing to lose for anybody, if it’s Hamilton.”
“Then it must be me, you see,” said Oldmeadow. “And I shan’t talk to you about the iniquity again, I promise you. I’ve made my protest and civilization must get on as best it can. You’re a terrible person, you know”—he smiled a little at her, finding the banter so that she should not guess at the commotion of his heart. “But I like you just as you are. Now where shall we go?”
HEcould not have believed that it would be so delicious to live with Adrienne Toner.
Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been, though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of the discrepancies between them, and during the three months that separated them, he at Cannes, she nursing in Paris, he knew many doubts; never of his love, but of what it was making him do and of where it was going to lead them. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what was to become of them if his hopes were fulfilled, for he hardly saw himself following her off to Central Europe—it was to Serbia, her letters informed him, that her thoughts were turning—nor saw them established in London under the astonished gaze of Lydia Aldesey.
She had selected Lyons as their place of meeting, because of the work for therapatriésthat she wished to inspect there, and from the moment that he saw her descend from the Paris express, dressed in dark civilian clothes and carrying, with such an air of competence, her rug and dressing-case, all doubts were allayed and all restlessness dispelled.
He had arrived the day before and had found an old-fashioned hotel with spacious rooms overlooking the Saône, and, as they drove to it on that November evening, she expressed herself, scrutinizing him with a professional eye, as dissatisfied with his recovery.
It was because of the restlessness, of course, thathe had not got as well as he should have, and he knew that he must, in the stress of feeling that now beset him, look strangely, and he promised her, feeling that he spoke the truth, that now that he had his nurse again complete recovery would be only a matter of days.
“I want you to see our view,” he said to her when the porter had carried up her little box and they were left alone in the brocaded and gilded salon that separated their rooms; “I chose this place for the view; it’s the loveliest in Lyons, I think.”
There was still a little twilight, and standing at the window they looked down at the lighted quai with its double row of lofty plane-trees and across the jade-green Saône at St. Jean, the grey cathedral, and at the beautiful whitearchevêchéglimmering in a soft, dimmed atmosphere that made him think of London.
“There’s a horrible modern cathedral up on the hill,” he said; “but we don’t need to see it. We need only see the river and thearchevêchéand St. Jean. And in the mornings there’s a market below, a mile of it, all under huge mushroom-coloured umbrellas; flowers and cheeses and every kind of country produce. I think you’ll like it here.”
“I like it very much. I think it’s beautiful,” said Adrienne. “I like our room, too,” and she turned and looked up at the painted ceiling and round at the consoles and mirrors, inlaid tables and richly curved, brocaded chairs. “Isn’t it splendid.”
“Madame Récamier is said to have lived here,” Oldmeadow told her. “And this is said to have been her room.”
“And now it’s mine,” said Adrienne, smilingslightly as though she found the juxtaposition amusing.
Already the stealing sense of deliciousness was breathing over him. The very way in which she said, “our room,” was part of it. Even the way in which she said that made him feel the peace, comfort, and charm of a shared life as he had never before felt it. And the sense grew and grew on that first evening.
It was delicious to hear the waiters address her as Madame, and to know that it was his madame they imagined her to be, when he sat opposite to her at their little table in the dining-room. She wore a grey dress now and, with her quiet, her calm glances cast about her, might indeed have been the veritable Madame Oldmeadow inscribed at thebureau. If they had the aspect of a devoted, long-mated couple, it was because of her calm. But she would have been as unperturbed, he felt sure, had she been stopping there under her own name instead of his and looked upon as his well-established mistress. Situations would never embarrass her as long as she knew what she was doing with them. That night when she gave him her hand at bedtime she said, looking at him with the affectionate, professional eyes: “I’ll come and put you to sleep if you need me; be sure to let me know.”
But he had no need to call her. He slept as soundly as though she sat beside him with her hand upon his brow.
So the mirage of conjugal felicity was evoked about him.
She poured out his coffee for him in the morning wearing a silknégligéedged with fur, and said, asthey buttered their rolls, that they must buy some honey for their breakfasts. She said, too, that they must do a great deal of sight-seeing in the afternoons. “There is so much to be seen in Lyons. And I shall finish with myrapatriéwork in the mornings.” He asked if he might not come with her to therapatriéwork, but was told that he was not yet strong enough for more than one walk in the day. “In our evenings, after tea,” she went on, “I thought perhaps you’d like to study Dante a little with me. My Dante is getting so rusty and I’ve brought a very fine edition. Are you good at Italian?”
He said he wasn’t, but would love to read Dante with her.
“And we must get a piano,” she finished, “and have music after dinner. It will be a wonderful holiday for me.”
So the days fell at once into a series of rituals. He saw that she had always mapped them out conscientiously, as Mrs. Toner had doubtlessly taught her to do, careful of the treasure of time—as Mrs. Toner would have said—entrusted to each soul by life. So, no doubt, Adrienne would put it still. And what he would, in first knowing her, have found part of her absurdity, he found now part of her charm.
That was what it all came back to. He saw, reconstructing their past, that from the beginning she had had her deep charm for him.
It was the trivial word for the great fact; the compulsion of personality; the overflow of vitality; the secret at once of the saint and of the successful music-hall singer. Her own absorption in life was so intense that it communicated itself. Her confidencewas so secure that it begot confidence. Her power was implicit in all she did. It was not only therapatriésshe dealt with, as, at the first, she had dealt with the wounded. She dealt as successfully and as accurately with the little things of life. Honey was on their breakfast-table; flowers on the consoles; music on the piano. The gilded hotel salon became a home.
She was still, in demeanour, the cultured, travelled American, equipped always, for their walks, with a guide-book or history, from which she often read to him as they paused to lean on the parapets of the splendid quais. There were few salient facts in the history of the potent city that were not imparted to him; and with anyone else what a bore it would have been to have to listen! But he was more than content that she should tell him about the Romans or Richelieu. It was everything to him to feel that they shared it all, from the honey to Richelieu.
And with all the intimacy went the extreme reserve.
She had showed him, when it was necessary for their understanding as friends, the centre of her life; yet she remained, while so gentle, so absorbed, and even loving, as remote, as inaccessible, as he had felt her to be on those first days in the hospital. She never referred to her own personal situation not to any emotion connected with it. She never referred to herself or expressed a taste or an opinion touched with personal ardour. He did not know what she was really feeling, ever. Though, when he looked at her, sitting opposite him in her grey and addressed by the assiduities of the waiters, he could imagine that he was living with a wife, he could imaginemore often that he was living with a nun. Her control and her selflessness were cloistral. He could not think her in any need of a director.
They walked one afternoon along the Quai des Brotteaux, returning from the park of the Tête d’Or, where they had wandered on the gravel under the tall, melancholy trees and fed the deer. The ugly yet magnificent city was spread before them in one of its most splendid aspects, climbing steeply, on the further banks of the Rhône, to the cliff-like heights of the Croix Rousse and marching, as it followed the grandiose curve of the river, into a sunset sky where the cupola of the Hospice hung like a dark bubble against the gold and the Alps, not visible from the river level, seemed yet to manifest themselves in the illumined clouds ranged high above the horizon.
Ten days of their appointed fortnight had now passed and while Oldmeadow kept a half unseeing yet appraising eye upon the turbulent glories of the river, he was wondering when and how he should make his revelation and his appeal. If her reserve made it more difficult to imagine, her intimacy did not make it more easy. It was because she was so intimate that she had remained so unaware. For all his self-command he felt sure that in any other circumstances she could not, for these ten days, have remained so blind.
Here she walked beside him, the Madame Oldmeadow of the hotel, looking before her as she walked and thinking, he would have wagered, not of him but of Serbia.
She wore a beautifully adjusted little costume, conveying in its sober darkness the impression ofrichness and simplicity that her clothes had always given him. Fur was turned up about her ears and a small hat of fur and velvet was turned down over her eyes as she had always worn her hats. The straight fringe of gold showed under its brim and under the gold were those calm, those questing, melancholy eyes.
Or perhaps—he carried further his rueful reverie—she was thinking about the date of the Hospice. He had the guide-book in his pocket.
“Isn’t it jolly?” he suggested, as she looked up at him, indicating the prospect spread before them and adding, since he knew that his English instinct for boyish understatement still puzzled her: “Like a great, grim queen in shabby clothes; raised on such a throne and crowned with such jewels that one feels her glorious rather than ugly.”
Adrienne studied the shabby queen attentively and then looked back at him. Perhaps something dwelling in his eyes, something for her only and not at all for Lyons, caught her more special attention, for she said suddenly, and so unexpectedly that, with a sort of terror, he felt that his crisis might be coming: “You’ve been very dear to me, Mr. Oldmeadow, in all our time here. I feel it to have been a great privilege, you know; a great opportunity.”
“Really? In what way?” He could at all events keep his voice quiet and light. “I thought it had been you who made all the opportunities.”
“Oh, no. I never make any of the opportunities I am thinking of,” said Adrienne. “I only know how to take them. It isn’t only that you are more widely and deeply cultured than I am—though your Italian accent isn’t good!”—she smiled; “but I alwaysfeel that you see far more in everything than I do, even when you seem to be seeing less. I have to go carefully and pick up fact by fact, while you see things in a sort of vision and they are all related as they enter your mind. That’s where my privilege comes in. You make me share your vision sometimes. You have the artistic mind, and I am not really artistic at all—though Mother always wanted that for me more than anything; with all that goes with it.”
She was speaking of herself—though it was only in order to express more exactly her gratitude, and, as he walked beside her, he was filled with the mingled hope and terror. After all he had still four more days of her. It would be terrible to spoil them.
“No; you aren’t artistic,” he agreed. “And I don’t know that I am, either. Whether I am or not, I feel mine to have been the opportunity and the privilege.”
“I can’t understand that at all,” she said, with her patent candour.
“It may be part of the artistic temperament to feel things one can’t understand. Though I do understand why I feel it,” he added.
“And it’s part of the artistic temperament not to try”—Adrienne turned their theme to its more impersonal aspect. “Never to try to enjoy anything that you don’t enjoy naturally. I don’t believe I ever enjoy any of the artistic things quite naturally. I’ve always been trained to enjoy and I’ve always tried to enjoy; because I thought it was right to try. But since I’ve been here with you I’ve come to feel that what I’ve enjoyed has been my own effort and my mastery of the mere study, andI seem to feel that it might be as well to give up trying and training and fall back on the things that come naturally; scenery artists would think sentimental, and babies; and patriotic songs.” She smiled a little as she found her list. But she was grave, too, thinking it out and adding another to her discovered futilities.
“It may be as well to limit your attention to the sentimental scenery and the babies, since you’ve so many other things to do with it,” he acquiesced. “We come back to big people again, you see; they haven’t time to be artistic; don’t need to be.”
“Ah, but it’s not a question of time at all,” said Adrienne, and he remembered that long ago, from the very first, he had said that she wasn’t stupid. “It’s a question of how you’re born. That’s a thing I would never have admitted in my old days, you know. I would never have admitted that any human soul was really shut out from anything. Perhaps we’re not, any of us, if we are to have all eternity to grow in. But as far as this life is concerned I see quite clearly now that some people are shut out from all sorts of things, and that the sort of mistake I made in my old time was in thinking that anyone who had the will could force eternity into any given fragment of our temporal life. I did do a little philosophy, you see! That’s what I mean and you understand, I know. All the same I wish I weren’t one of the shut-out people. I wish I were artistic. I’d have liked to have that side of life to meet people with. I sometimes think that one doesn’t get far with people, really, if all that one has to give are the fundamental things like the care of their minds and bodies. One goes deep, of course; but one doesn’t go far. You can do something for them; but there’s nothing, afterwards, that they can dowithyou; and it makes it rather lonely in a way—when one has time to be lonely.”
He did not know, indeed, whether she saw the beauty of the scene spread before them as they walked, and he was remembering, with a sort of tranced tenderness, the flower-wreathed shepherdess and her crook; and Mrs. Toner with her lilies and seagulls. But why should she see beauty when she made it? It was all that he could see in her now.
“What you can do for them afterwards is to pour out their coffee for them in the most enhancing way,” he suggested, “and make sight-seeing a pleasure, and arrange flowers and place chairs and tables so that a hotel salon becomes loveable. If you find the person to whom you can give the fundamental things and do all sorts of homely things with afterwards, why be lonely? We are very happy together, aren’t we? We get a great deal out of each other. I can speak for myself, at all events; and you’ve just told me that I give something, too. So why should you go off to Central Europe next week? Why not go back with me to the South,” he finished, “and wander about together enjoying, quite naturally, the sentimental scenery?”
He held his breath after he had thus spoken, wondering with intensity, while he felt his heartbeats, what she would make of it. He knew what he could make of it, seizing his opportunity on the instant, if only she would recognize the meaning that underlay the easy words. And framed in the little hat on the background of transfigured Lyons, Adrienne’s face was turned towards him and, afterhe had made his suggestion, she studied him in silence for what seemed to him a long lapse of time. Then she said, overwhelmingly:
“That’s perfectly lovely of you, Mr. Oldmeadow.”
“Not at all; not perfectly lovely at all,” he stammered as he contradicted her and he heard that his voice sounded angry. “It’s what I want. I want it very much.”
“Yes. I know you do. And that’s what’s so lovely,” said Adrienne. “I know you want it. You are sorry for me all the time. And you want to cheer me up. Because you feel I’ve lost so much. But, you know; you remember; I told you the truth that time. I don’t need cheering. I’m not unhappy. One can be lonely without being unhappy.”
“I’m not sorry for you,” poor Oldmeadow rejoined, still in the angry voice. “I’m not thinking of you at all. I’m thinking of myself. I’m lonely, too, and I am unhappy, even if you aren’t.”
She stopped short in her walk. He saw in her eyes the swift, almost diagnosing solicitude that measured his need and her own capacity. It was as though his temperature had gone up alarmingly.
“Dear Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said; and then she faltered; she paused. She no longer found her remedies easily. “It’s because you are separated from your own life,” she did find. “It’s because all this is so bitter to you; what you are doing now—how could I not understand?—and the war, that has torn us all. But when it’s over, when you can go home again and take up your own big life-work and find your own roots, happiness will come back; I’m sure of it. We are all unhappy sometimes,aren’t we? We must be; with our minds and hearts. Our troubled minds; our lonely hearts. But you know as well as I do, dear Mr. Oldmeadow, that our souls can find the way out.”
Her nature expressed itself in platitudes; yet sometimes she had phrases, rising from her heart as if from a fountain fed by unseen altitudes, that shook him in their very wording. “Our troubled minds. Our lonely hearts,” echoed in his ears while, bending his head downwards, he muttered stubbornly: “My soul can’t, without you.”
She still stood, not moving forward, her eyes raised to his. “Please don’t say that,” she murmured, and he heard the trouble in her voice. “It can’t be so, except for this time that you are away from everybody. You have so many things to live for. So many people near you. You are such a big, rare person. It’s what I was afraid of, you know. It happens so often with me; that people feel that. But you can’t really need me any longer.”
He said nothing, still not raising his eyes to hers, and she went on after a moment. “And I have so many things to live for, too. You’ve never really thought about that side of my life, I know. Why should you? You think of any woman’s life—isn’t it true?—as not seriously important except on its domestic side. And you know how important I think that. But it isn’t so with me, you see. I have no hearth and I have no home; I have only my big, big life and it’s more important than you could believe unless you could see it all. When I’m in it it takes all my mind and all my strength and I’m bound to it, yes, just as finally, just as irrevocably as a wife who loves is bound by her marriage vows;because I love it. Do you see? They are waiting for me now. They need me now. There are starving people, dying people; and confusion; terrible confusion. I have a gift for all that. I can deal with it. Those are just the things I can deal with. And I mustn’t put it off any longer—when our time is up. I must leave you, my dear, dear friend, however much I’d love to stay.”
She was speaking at last with ardour, and about herself. And what she said was true. He had never thought about her work except in the sense that he thought her a saint and knew that saints did good deeds. That she was needed, sorely needed, by the starving and dying, was a fact, now that it was put before him, silencing and even shaming him. It gave him, too, a new fear. If she had her blindness, he had his. His hopes and fears, after all, were all that he had to think of; she had the destinies of thousands. He remembered Sir Kenneth’s tone in speaking of her; its deep respect. Not the respect of the man for the tender-hearted, merciful woman; but the respect of a professional expert for another expert; respect for the proved organizer and leader of men.
“I have been stupid,” he said after a moment. “It’s true that I’ve been thinking about you solely in relation to myself. Would you really love to stay? If it wasn’t for your work? It would be some comfort to believe that.”
“Of course I’d love to stay,” she said, eagerly scanning his face. “I’d love to travel with you—to pour out your coffee in Avignon, Nîmes, Cannes—anywhere you liked. I’d love our happy time here to go on and on. If life could be like that; ifI didn’t want other things more. You remember how Blake saw it all:
‘He who bends to himself a joyDoth the winged life destroy.’
‘He who bends to himself a joyDoth the winged life destroy.’
I mustn’t try to bend and keep this lovely time. I must let it fly—and bless it as it goes. And so it will bless me.”
She seldom made quotations nowadays. For this one he felt a gratitude such as his life had rarely known.
“It’s been a joy to you, too, then?”
“Of course it has,” said Adrienne smiling at him and turning at last towards the bridge that they must cross. “It’s been one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me.”
OLDMEADOWsat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off speaking to Adrienne till their last evening, so he had put off writing to Barney and to Lydia Aldesey till this last afternoon, and he saw now how difficult it would be to write coherently while his thoughts stretched themselves forward to those few hours of the night when his fate would be decided.
Adrienne had gone out. She had written her short communication to Barney and brought it in with its envelope and laid it before him, asking him in the voice that, again, made him think of snow: “Is that quite right?”
It was, quite, he told her, after glancing through it swiftly. It stated, in the most colourless terms, the facts that Barney was to take to his solicitor. “Quite right,” he repeated, looking up at her. “Are you going out? Will you post it?—or shall I?”
“Will you post it with yours? Yes. I must go out. But I’ll try to be back by tea-time. It’s very disappointing; our last afternoon. But that poor woman from Roubaix—the one with consumption up at the Croix Rousse—is dying. They’ve sent for me. All the little children, you remember I told you. I’m going to wire to Joséphine and ask her if she can come down and look after them for a little while.”
“Joséphine?” he questioned. He had, till now, entirely forgotten Joséphine. Adrienne told himthat she was with her parents in a provincial town. “They lost their only son and are very sad. Fine, brave old people. He is a baker, the old father, and makes the most wonderful bread. I went to see them last summer.”
Their packing was done and the room denuded; the men had taken away the piano that morning. He had his letters to write; so there was really no reason why she should not go. And there was, besides, nothing that they had to say to each other, except the one thing he had to say.
The silence that overtakes parting friends on a station platform had overtaken them since the morning, though, at lunch, Adrienne had talked with some persistence of her immediate plans and prospects and about the unit of doctors and nurses who were to meet her in Italy. There was no reason why she should not go, and he would even rather she did. He would rather see no more of her until evening when everything but the one thing would be over and done with. And so he was left with his letters, leaning his elbows on the table over the hotel paper and staring out at the Saône and the whitearchevêché.
Both letters were difficult to write; but beside the one to Lydia, the one to Barney was easy. Barney, after all, was to gain everything from what he had to tell him, and Lydia was to lose; how much was Lydia to lose? He recalled their last evening together and its revelations and saw that the old laughing presage was now more than fulfilled. Lydia was to lose more than her toes and fingers; in any case. Even if he returned to her alone, she cared for him too much not to feel, always, the shadow ofhis crippled heart; his heart not only crippled, but occupied, so occupied that friendships, however near, became, in a sense, irrelevancies. And if he returned with Adrienne—but could he return with Adrienne? What kind of a life could he and Adrienne lead in London?—even if Lydia’s door, generously, was opened to them, as he believed it would be—knowing her generous.
He laid down his pen and fixed his eyes on the river and he tried to see Lydia and Adrienne together. But it was a useless effort. From this strange haven of the Lyons hotel where he had spent the happiest fortnight of his life, he could not see himself into any future with familiar features. He could only see himself and Adrienne, alone, at hotels. To attempt to place her in Lydia’s generous drawing-room was to measure more accurately than he had yet measured it the abyss that separated him from his former life. If it could be spanned; if Adrienne could be placed there, on the background of eighteenth-century fans and old glass, she became a clipped and tethered seagull in a garden, awkward, irrelevant, melancholy. Lydia might cease to find her third-rate and absurd; but she wouldn’t know what to do with her any more than she would have known what to do with the seagull. So what, if Adrienne became his wife, remained of his friendship with Lydia?
He put aside the unresolved perplexity and took Barney first.
“My dear Barney,” he wrote,—“I don’t think that the letter Adrienne has written to you will surprise you as much as this letter of mine. You will understand from hers that she wishes to free herselfand to free you. You will understand that that is my wish, too. She only tells you that she has been staying here with me, for a fortnight, as my wife; that’s for your solicitor; you will read between the lines and know that it seemed worth while to both of us to make the necessary sacrifice in order to gain so much for you and for her. I hope that you and my dear Nancy will feel that we are justified, and that you will take your happiness as bravely as we secure it for you. You’ll know that our step hasn’t been taken lightly.
“But, now, dear Barney, comes my absolutely personal contribution. It is a contribution, for it will make you and Nancy happier to know that I have as much to gain as you and she. I have fallen in love with Adrienne and I hope that I may win her consent to be my wife. Yes, dear Barney, unbelievable as it will look to you, there it is; and she dreams of it as little as you could have dreamed of it. I met her again, as her letter informs you, at the Boulogne hospital. She asked me to say nothing about our meeting. She wanted to disappear out of your lives. She saved my life, I think, and I saw a great deal of her. What I found in her that I had not seen before I need not say.
“My great difficulty, my burden and perplexity now, lie in the fact that she has no trace of feeling for me that might give me hope. We became, at Boulogne, the best of friends; such friends that this plan suggested itself to her; and we remain, after our fortnight here, the best of friends; and that is all. Yet I have hope, unjustified and groundless though it may be, and had I not had it from the beginning I couldn’t have entered upon the enterprise;not even for you and Nancy. From one point of view it’s possible that you may feel that I’ve entered upon it in spite of you and Nancy. You may feel inclined to repudiate and disown the whole affair and to remain unaware of it. In that case it would come down to an appeal from me to you to carry it through for my sake. But from another point of view it makes it easier for you; easier for you to accept, since my hope gives integrity to the situation. That’s another thing that decided me. If it had been mere sham I don’t think I could have undertaken it. Adrienne felt none of my scruples on this score. She walked over legal and conventional commandments like a saint over hot ploughshares. But I haven’t her immunities. I should have felt myself badly scorched, and felt that I’d scorched you and Nancy, if my hope hadn’t given everything its character ofbona fides.
“Dear Barney, dear Nancy, please forgive me if I’ve been selfish. It hasn’t all been selfishness, that I promise you; it was in hopes for you, too; and I have to face sacrifices. The worst of them will be that if Adrienne takes me I’ll have to lose you. You can measure the depth of my feeling for her from the fact that I can make such sacrifices. Perhaps you’ll feel that even if she doesn’t take me I’ll have to lose you. I hope not. I hope, in that case, that mitigations and refuges will be found for me and that some day you’ll perhaps be able to make a corner in your lives where I may creep and feel my wounds less aching. In any case, after Adrienne, you are the creatures dearest to me in the world and I am always and for ever your devoted friend,
Roger.”
And now Lydia. There was no use in thinking about it. The plunge must be taken.
“My dear Lydia,” he wrote,—“I have fallen in love with Adrienne Toner. I feel that with such a friend as you it’s better to begin with the bomb-shell. She doesn’t know it, and if we are here in this Lyons hotel together, it’s only, she imagines, because she wishes to set Barney free and that I’ve undertaken, for her sake and for Barney’s, a repugnant task. It is a repugnant task, in spite of what it may mean to me of happiness. I hate it for her, and for Barney and for myself. But since she was determined on it and since, if it wasn’t I it was to be another friend, and since I have fallen in love with her, I saw that it was only decent that the co-respondent in the case should be the man who married her afterwards. For I hope to become her husband, and I haven’t one jot of ground for my hope. We are studying Dante together, and she shows me the sights of Lyons. She is just the same. Yet completely altered.
“I don’t know whether you’ll feel you can ever see me again, with or without her. I don’t want to cast myself too heavily on your compassion, so I’ll only remind you that even if I return to England alone I shall probably have to lose Nancy and Barney and that you will be my only refuge. It will be the culmination of my misfortunes if I have to lose you.
“Dear Lydia, I am always your devoted
“Roger”
But he hadn’t lost her. He knew he hadn’t lost her; in any case. And the taste of what he did wassharp and bitter to him, for she was generous and loyal and he had cut off her very limbs. When he had addressed and stamped the letters he went downstairs, and, for the sense of greater finality, carried them to the post instead of dropping them into the hotel-box.
He had almost the sense of disembodiment as he returned to the empty and dismantled room. He seemed to have become a mere consciousness suspended between two states of being. The past was gone. He had dropped it into the post-box. And he saw no future. He felt, for the moment, no hopes. At the moment it seemed absurd to think that Adrienne could ever love him. He tried to picture Coldbrooks and Somer’s Place when the bomb-shell struck them. Would Barney show Nancy the letter? Nancy would be pale, aghast, silent. Barney would have to wait for days, perhaps, before saying to her: “But, after all, it’s for their sakes, too, Nancy dear. See what Roger says.” Mrs. Averil would cast up her hands and cry “That woman!”—but, perhaps, with as much admiration as repudiation, and Meg, if she were summoned to the scene of confusion, would say, “So she’s got hold of Roger, too.” Funnily enough it was the dear March Hare, he felt sure, who would be the first one to stretch out a hand towards the tarnished freedom. “After all, you know,” he could hear her murmuring, “it would be muchnicerfor Barney and Nancy to be married, wouldn’t it? And Adrienne wasn’t a Christian, you know, so probably the first marriage doesn’treallycount. We mustn’t be conventional, Monica.” Yes, perhaps it would go like that at Coldbrooks. But at Somer’s Place Lydia would sitamong her fans and glass and wish that they had never seen Adrienne Toner.
He paced up and down before the windows and he had never been so lonely in his life. He was so lonely that he became aware at last that his mere negative state was passing into a positive and that grief at the severance of old ties had become fear of losing Adrienne. The fear and the loneliness seemed actualized when, at five, the waiter appeared bearing the tea-tray on his shoulder. He had never had tea alone before in this strange, foreign room. Adrienne always made a complicated and charming ritual of the occasion, boiling the water on their own little spirit-kettle and measuring the tea from her own caddy—the very same kettle and caddy, she told him, that had accompanied herself and her mother on all their travels. And to see the cups and bread and butter and not to have her there, added a poignant taste of abandonment to his loneliness.
She kept the kettle in her room and when the boy was gone he softly opened the door and went in. It would keep his heart up to have the water boiling in readiness for her arrival. He recognized, as he stood, then, and looked about him, that his instinct had also been that of taking refuge. In her room he could more closely recover the sense of her presence.
She had finished all the essentials of her packing and her box stood with its lid open ready for the last disposals. Yet the room seemed still full of her personality. He noted it all gazing around him with eyes almost those of a solemn little boy permitted to glance in at a Christmas-tree.
Her dressing-table, improvised from the mantelpiece, was neatly laid out with small, worn, costly, and immaculate appurtenances. He moved forward and looked at them, not touching. The initials intertwined on the backs of the ivory brushes were her girlish ones: A. T. She had discarded, long since, no doubt, her wedding toilet set.
If he became her husband, the thought crossed his mind and quickened his heart, he might brush her hair for her, that wonderful golden hair, before many months were over.
Near the ivory hand-glass stood two photographs in a folding frame of faded blue leather. He stooped to look and saw that one was of Mrs. and the other certainly of Mr. Toner, in their early days. Remote, mysterious and alien, their formally directed eyes looked back at him and in the father’s ingenuous young countenance, surmounted by a roll of hair that was provincial without being exactly rural, the chin resting upon a large, peculiar collar, he could strangely retrace Adrienne’s wide brow and steadfast light-filled eyes. Mrs. Toner wore a ruffled dress and of her face little remained distinct but the dark gaze—forceful and ambiguously gentle.
The room was full of the fragrance that was not a fragrance and that had, long ago, reminded him of Fuller’s earth. A pair of small blue satinmulesstood under a chair near the bed.
Only after he had withdrawn, gently closing the door behind him, did he realize that he had forgotten the kettle and then he felt that he could not go back again. A moment after the boy returned with a note, sent, by hand, he was informed, from the Croix Rousse.
“I am so dreadfully sorry, so disappointed,” he read. “Our last afternoon, but I can’t get away yet. Don’t wait dinner for me, if I should be late, even for that. I won’t be very late, I promise, and we will have our evening.”
The note had no address. He rushed forth and down to find the messenger gone. Had he only known where to seek her in the vast, high, melancholy district of the Croix Rousse he would have gone to join her. His sense of loneliness was almost a panic.
Of course, he tried to fix his mind on that realization, as he went back to the salon, her rapatriés had no doubt preoccupied her mind, from the first, quite as much as their own situation. She had spoken to him in especial of this family and of their sorrows. One child they had left dead at Evian and the mother, on the eve of their return to their Northern home, had become too desperately ill to travel. “Such dear, good,gentlepeople,” he recalled her saying. No; he must not repine. After all he had only the one thing to say to her; and the evening would be long enough for that.
It was nearly seven when he heard her quick footstep outside. When she entered, the brim of her little hat, in the electric light, cast a sharp shadow over her eyes, but he saw at once that she had been crying.
She came in so quickly that he had not time to rise and, going to him, behind his chair, she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down, saying: “I’m so sorry to have left you all alone.”
It was astonishingly comforting to have her put these fraternal hands upon him like this. She hadnever done it before. Yet there was a salty smart in her words to him. What else did she intend to do but leave him all alone for always?
“I’m dreadfully lonely, I confess,” he said, “and I see that you’re dreadfully tired.”
She went round to the other side of the table and sat down, not looking at him and said, in a low voice: “Oh—the seas—the seas of misery.”
“You are completely worn out,” he said. He was not thinking so much of the seas of misery as of his few remaining hours. Were they to be spoiled by her fatigue?
“No; not worn out. Not at all worn out,” said Adrienne, stretching her arms along the table in front of her as she sat, and though she had wept he could see something of ardour, of a strength renewed, in the lines of her pallid lips. “I’ve sat quite still all afternoon. I’ve been with him. She died soon after I got there. At the end she was talking about the little girl’s grave at Evian. I was able to comfort her about that. She was so afraid it would not be tended. That it would have no flowers. Joséphine will go to Evian afterwards and see about it. There are always dear nuns to do those things. There was a nun with her to-day. That was the greatest comfort of all; and the priest who came. But I was with the father and the five poor little children; so frightened and miserable. I could not leave them, you see. He talked and talked and talked. It helped him to talk and tell me about their home and how they had had everything so nice and bright. Linen, a garden, a goat and fowls. Oh, if only she could have seen her home again! That was what he kept saying and saying. They werefull of hope when they got to Evian. He told me how the children sang at dawn when the train panted up the mountain among the golden trees. Like birds, he said, andVive la France! They all believed they were to be safe and happy.Et, Madame, c’était notre calvaire qui commencait alors seulement.”
She spoke, not really thinking of him, he saw, absorbed still in the suffering she had just left, measuring her power against such problems and the worse ones to which she was travelling to-morrow.
“Joséphine will be with them, I hope,” she went on presently, “in three or four days. She will help them to get home and then she will come back and go to see about the grave at Evian. Joséphine is a tower of strength for me.”
Her eyes were raised to him now, and, as they rested, he saw the compunction, the solicitude, with which they had met him on her entrance, return to them. “I’m not so very late, am I?” she said, rising. “I’ll take off my hat and be ready in a moment.”
“Don’t hurry,” said Oldmeadow.
She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke, and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their salon: “Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for an hour. Until nine. It’s not unselfishness. I’d rather have half of you to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all.”
“How dear of you,” she said. She looked at him with gratitude and, still, with the compunction. “It would be a great rest. It would be better forour talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like Napoleon,” she added with a flicker of her playfulness.
When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself, he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of Adrienne’s life—her “big, big” life—looming there before him, becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a vocation?—for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa. How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them. He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. Afterall, she wasn’t really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour. Couldn’t she, after a winter in Serbia, found crêches and visit slums in London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its justification. Women weren’t meant to go on, once the world’s crisis past, doing feats of heroism; they weren’t meant for austere careers that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her in Serbia or California.
THEgilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to Adrienne’s door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his heart sank as he wondered if she might not sleep on, in her fatigue, sleep past all possible hour for their colloquy. Yet he did not feel that he could go in and wake her. The analogy of the cathedral loomed before him. It would be like waking Saint Theresa.
He walked up and down the empty, glittering salon; walked and walked until the clock struck ten. Desperation nerved him then and he went again to her door and knocked.
With hardly a pause her voice answered him; yet he knew that he had awakened her and it echoed for him with the pathos of so many past scenes of emergency when it must so have answered a summons from oblivion: “Coming, coming.” Among bombings, he reflected; and sudden terrible influxes of dying men from the front.
“Coming,” he heard her repeat, on a note of dismay. She had sprung up, turned on her light and seen the hour.
He was reminded vividly, as he saw her enter—and it was as if a great interval of time had separated them—of his first meeting with her. She was so changed; but now as then she was more composed than anyone he had ever met.
But it was of much more than the first meeting that the pale, still face reminded him. His dreams were in it; the dream where she had come to himalong the terrace, lifting her hand in the moonlight; and the dream of horror when he had again and again pushed it down to drown.
“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and he saw that it was with an effort she smiled. The traces of her weeping were now, after her sleep, far more visible, ageing her, yet making her, too, look younger; like a child with swollen lids and lips. “I didn’t know I was so tired. I slept and slept. I didn’t stir until I heard your knock. Never mind. We’ll talk till midnight.”
She was very sorry for him.
She sat down at the table and under the electric chandelier her braided hair showed itself all ruffled and disarranged. She had on her dark travelling dress and she had thrust her feet into the pale blue satinmules. The disparity of costume in one so accurate, her air of readiness for the morrow, made him feel her transitoriness almost more than her presence, though his sense of that pressed upon him with a stifling imminence. Even though she sat there the room kept its look of desolate, glittering emptiness and more than their shared life in it he remembered the far places from which she had come and to which she was going. It was as if she had just arrived and were pausing for the nighten route.
As he had seen them years ago, so he saw again the monster engines crossing the prairies at night and flying illumined pennons of smoke against the sky as they bore her away from blue seas, golden sands, a land where the good and gifted lurked behind every bush; and before her stretched the shining rails, miles and miles of them, running throughruin and desolation, that were to bear her ever onwards into the darkness. This was what life had brought her to. She had been only a sojourner among them at Coldbrooks. The linked life of order and family affection had cast her forth and he saw her, for ever now, unless he could rescue her, with only hotels to live in and only the chaos she was to mould, to live for. She seemed already, as she sat there under the light with her ruffled hair, to be sitting in the train that was to bear her from him.
“I think you owe me till midnight, at least,” he said. He had not sat down. He stood at some little distance from her leaning, his arms folded, against a gilded and inlaid console. “We’ve lots of things to talk about.”
“Have we?” Adrienne asked, smiling gently, but as if she humoured an extravagance. “We’ll be together, certainly, even if we don’t talk much. But I have some things to say, too.”
She had dropped her eyes to her hands which lay, lightly crossed, on the table before her, and she seemed to reflect how best to begin. “It’s about Nancy and Barney,” she said. “I wanted, before we part, to talk to you a little about them. There are things that trouble me and you are the only person with whom I can keep in touch. You will know how I shall be longing to hear, everything. You’ll let me know at once, won’t you?”
“At once,” said Oldmeadow.
“There might be delays and difficulties,” Adrienne went on. “I shall be very troubled until all that is clear. And then the money. You know about the money? Barney isn’t well off and he was worse off after I’d come and gone. I tried to arrangethat as best I could. Palgrave understood and entered into all my feelings.”
“Yes; I’d heard. You arranged it all very cleverly,” said Oldmeadow.
He moved away now and, at the other end of the room, his back to her, came to a standstill, while his eyes dwelt on a large gilt-framed engraving that hung there; some former Salon triumph; a festive, spring-tide scene where young women in bustles and bonnets offered sugar to race-horses in a meadow, admired by young men in silk hats.
“Do you think this may make a difficulty?” Adrienne asked. “Make him more reluctant to take what is to come to him? It’s Mrs. Chadwick’s now, you know.”
“You’ve arranged it all so well,” said Oldmeadow, noting the gardenias in the young men’s button-holes, “that I don’t think they can get away from it.”
“But will they hate it dreadfully?” she insisted, and he felt that her voice in its added urgency protested, though unconsciously, against his distance; “I seem to see that they might. If they can’t take it as a sign of accepted love, won’t they hate it?”
“Well,” said Oldmeadow, trying to reflect, though his mind was far from Barney and Nancy, “dear Eleanor Chadwick doesn’t mind taking it, whatever it’s a sign of. And since it will come to Barney through her, I don’t think there’ll be enough personality left hanging about it to hurt much.”
“I wish they could take it as a sign of accepted love,” Adrienne murmured.
“Perhaps they will,” he said. “I’ll do my best that they shall, I promise you.”
It was one thing to promise it and another to know his hope that it might be a promise never to be redeemed. The cross-currents in his own thought made him light-headed as he stood there, his back to her, and examined the glossy creatures in the meadow. “Do you think it will all take a long time?” Adrienne added, after a little pause. “Will they be able to marry in six or eight months, say?”
“It depends on how soon Barney takes action. Say about a year,” he suggested. “They’d wait a little first, wouldn’t they?”
“I hope not. They’ve waited so long already. I hope it will be as soon as possible. I shall feel so much more peaceful when I hear they’re married. Could you, perhaps, make them see that, too?”
And again he promised. “I’ll make them see everything I can.”
He turned to her at last. She sat, her face still downcast in its shadow, while the light glittered on her wreaths of hair. Her hands still lay before her on the table, and the light fell on her wedding-ring. Perhaps she was looking at the ring.
“It all depends on something else,” he heard himself say suddenly.
She turned her head and looked round at him. His attitude, his distance from her, drew her attention rather than his words, for she repeated mildly: “On something else?”
“Whether I can keep those promises, you know,” said Oldmeadow. “Yes, it all depends on something else. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
He hardly knew what he was saying as he approached the table and pushed the brocaded chair,companion to the one in which she sat, a little from its place. He leaned on its back and looked down at her hands and Adrienne kept her eyes on him, attentive rather than perplexed.
“May I talk to you about it now?” he asked. “It’s something quite different.”
“Oh, do,” said Adrienne. She drew her hands into her lap and sat upright, in readiness. And, suddenly, as he was silent, she added: “About yourself? I’ve been forgetting that, haven’t I? I’ve only been thinking of my side. You have quite other plans, perhaps. Perhaps you’re not going back to England for ever so long. Is it an appointment?”
“No; not an appointment,” he muttered, still looking down, at the table now, since her hands were no longer there. “But perhaps I shan’t be going back for a long time. I hope not.”
“Oh,” she murmured. And now he had perplexed her. After what he had just promised her, his hope must perplex and even trouble her. “Do tell me,” she said.
“It’s something I want to ask you,” said Oldmeadow—“And it will astonish you. You may find it hard to forgive; because I’ve meant to ask it from the beginning; from our deciding to go away together. As far back as the time in the hospital.”
“But you may ask anything. Anything at all,” she almost urged upon him. “After what I’ve asked you—you have every right. If there’s anything I can do in the wide, wide world for you—oh! you know how glad and proud I should be. As for forgiveness”—he heard the smile in her voice, she wastroubled, yet tranquil, too—“you’re forgiven in advance.”
“Am I? Wait and see.” He, too, tried to smile, as he used the tag; but it was a mechanical smile and he felt his heart knocking against the chair-back as he went on: “Because I haven’t done what you asked me to do as you asked me to do it. I haven’t done it from the motive you supposed. It’s been for Barney and for Nancy and for you; but it’s been most of all for myself.” He screwed his glass into his eye as he spoke with a gesture as mechanical as the smile had been and he looked at her at last, thus brought nearer. “I want you not to go on to-morrow.” It was the first, the evident, the most palpable desire that rose to his lips. “I want you never to go on again, alone. If you can’t stay with me, I want you to let me follow you. When the time comes I want you to marry me. I love you.”
The light as it fell on her seemed suddenly strange, almost portentous in its brilliancy. Or was it her stillness, as she sat and gazed at him after he had spoken the words, that was strange and portentous? It was as if they arrested the currents of her being and she sat tranced, frozen into the fixed shape of an astonishment too deep for emotion. Her eyes did not alter in their gentleness; but the gentleness became tragic and pitiful, like the inappropriate calm on the mask of a dead face at Pompeii, fixed in an eternal unreadiness by the engulfing lava.
She put up her hand at last and pushed back her hair. With her forehead bared she became more like the photograph of her father. When she spoke her voice was slow and feeble, like the voice of a person dangerously ill. “I don’t understand you.”
“Try to,” said Oldmeadow. “You must begin far back.”
She still kept her hand pressed upon her hair. “You don’t mean that it’s the conventionally honourable thing to do? Oh, no; you don’t mean that?” Her face in its effort to understand was appalled.
“No; I don’t mean anything conventional,” he returned. “I’m thinking only of you. Of my love. I’ll come with you to Serbia to-morrow—if you’ll let me. I could kneel and worship you as you sit there.”
“Oh,” she more feebly murmured. She sank back in her chair.
“My darling, my saint,” said Oldmeadow, gazing at her; “if you must leave me, you’ll take that with you; that the man who destroyed you is your lover; that you are dearer to him than anything on earth.”
“Oh,” she murmured again, and she put her hands before her face. Her eyes were hidden; she had spoken no word of reproach and he could not keep himself from her. He knelt beside her, grasping the chair across, behind her. She was so near that he could have laid his head upon her breast. “Don’t leave me,” he heard his pleading voice, but she seemed so much nearer than his own voice; “or let me come. Everything shall be as you wish and when you wish. Tell me that you care, too; or that you can come to care. Tell me that you can think of me as your husband.”
She was there, with her hidden eyes, within his arms, and inevitably they closed around her, and though he heard her murmur, “Please, please, please,” he could not relinquish her. She was freeand he was free. They had cut themselves off from the world. They were alone in the strange city; in the strange, bright, hallucinated room; and he knew from the ache and rapture of her nearness how he had craved it.
But, gently, he heard her say again, “Please,” and gently she put him from her and he saw her face, and her eyes full of grief and gentleness. “Forgive me,” she said.
“My darling. For what?” he almost groaned. “Don’t say you’re going to break my heart.”
She kept her hand on his breast, holding him from her while she looked into his eyes. “It is so beautiful to be loved,” she said, and her voice was still the slow, feeble voice of exhaustion. “Even when one has no right to be. Don’t misunderstand. Even when one may not love back; not in that way. Forgive me; not in that way; my dearest friend.”
“Why mayn’t you love back? Why not in that way? If it’s beautiful, why mayn’t you?”
“Sit there, will you? Yes; keep my hand. How weak I’ve been, and cruel. It can’t be. Don’t you know? Haven’t you seen? It has always been for him. He must be free; but I can never be free.”
“Oh, no. No. That’s impossible,” Oldmeadow said, leaning towards her across the table and keeping her hand in both of his. “I can’t stand that. I could stand your work, your vocation, better. But not Barney, who loves another woman. That’s impossible.”
“But it is so,” she said, softly, looking at him. “Really it is so.”
“No, no,” Oldmeadow repeated, and he raised her hand to his lips and kept it there, a talismanagainst the menace of her words. “He lost you. He’s gone. I’ve found you and you care for me. You can’t hide from me that you care for me. Just now. For those moments. You were mine.”
“No,” she repeated. “I was weak and cruel, but I was not yours.”
She had been incredibly near so short a time ago before. Now, looking at him, with her difficult breaths and gentle, inflexible eyes, she was incredibly remote. “I am his, only his,” she said. “I love him and I shall always love him. It makes no difference. He loves Nancy, but it makes no difference. He is my husband. The father of my baby.”
She tried to speak on steadily while she thus gave him the truth that ended all his hope; but the desperate emotion with which he received it made real and overpowering to her her outlived yet living sorrow. With all that she must relinquish laid bare to her in the passion of his eyes she could measure all that she had lost, as she had, perhaps, till then, never measured it. “Don’t you know?” she said. “Don’t you see? My heart is broken, broken, broken.”
She put her head down on her arms as she said the words and he heard her bitter weeping.
He knew, as he listened, that it was all over with him. Dimly, in the terrible suffering that wrenched at him, he received his further revelation of the nature already nearer him than any in the world. Her strength would be in all she did and felt. She had loved Barney and she would always love him. Her marriage had been to her an ultimate and indissoluble experience. That was why she had beenso blind. She could not have thought of herself as a woman to be again loved and wooed.
Her hair lay against his hands, still holding hers, and he found himself stroking it, without tenderness or solicitude it seemed. It seemed to be only automatically that his fingers passed across it, while he noted its warmth and fineness and bright, lovely colour, remembering that he had thought it at the first her one indubitable beauty.
They sat there thus for a long time. The gilt clock paused, choked, then in a voice of hurrying, hoarsened silver rang out eleven strokes. Footsteps passed and faded up the corridor; doors closed. A tramway on the quai clashed and clanged, came to a noisy standstill, and moved on again with a rattling of cables and raucous blasts from a horn; and in the profound silence that followed he seemed to hear the deep old river flowing.
“Really, you see, it’s broken,” said Adrienne. She had ceased to weep, but she still leaned forward, her head upon her folded arms. “You saw it happen,” she said. “That night when you found me in the rain.”
“I’ve seen everything happen to you, haven’t I?” said Oldmeadow.
“Yes,” she assented. “Everything. And I’ve made you suffer, too. Isn’t that strange; everybody who comes near me I make suffer.”
“Well, in different ways,” he said. “Some because you are near and others because you won’t be.”
His voice was colourless. His hand still passed across her hair.
“Don’t you see,” she said, after a moment, “that it couldn’t have been. Try to see that and to acceptit. Not you and me. Not Barney’s friend and Barney’s wife. In every way it couldn’t have done, really. It makes no difference for me. I’m adéracinée, as I said. A wanderer. But what would have become of you, all full of roots as you are? You can live it down without me. You never could have with. And how could you have wandered with me? For that must be my life.”
“You know, it’s no good trying to comfort me,” said Oldmeadow. “What I feel is that any roots I have are in you.”
“They will grow again. The others will grow again.”
“I don’t want others, darling,” said Oldmeadow. “You see, my heart is broken, too.”
She lifted her head at last and he saw her marred and ravaged face.
“It can’t be helped,” he tried to smile at her. “You weren’t there to be recognized when I first met you and now that you are there, I’ve come too late. I believe that if I’d come before Barney, you’d have loved me. It’s my only comfort.”
“Who can say,” said Adrienne. Her gaze, as she looked at him, was deep with the mystery of her acceptance. “Perhaps. It seems to me all this was needed to bring us where we are—enmity and bitterness and grief. And my love for Barney, too. Let me tell you. It’s in the past that I think of him. As if he were dead. It’s something over; done with for ever; yet something always there. How can one be a mother and forget? Even when he is Nancy’s husband and when she is a mother, I shall not cease to feel myself his wife. Perhaps you think that strange, after Meg and what I believed right forher. But it is quite clear to me, and simple. It isn’t a thing of laws and commandments; only of our own hearts. If we can love again, we may. But for me it would be impossible. With me everything was involved. I couldn’t, ever, be twice a wife.”
Silence fell between them.
“I’ll see about the little girl’s grave,” said Oldmeadow suddenly. He did not know what had made him think of it. Perhaps something that had gone on echoing in him after she had spoken of her maternity. “I’ll go to Evian to-morrow. It will spare Joséphine the journey and give me something to do. You’ll tell me the name and give me the directions before you go.”
Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him; but they did not fall. They could need no controlling. The springs of weeping must be nearly drained. “Thank you,” she said, and she looked away, seeming to think intently.
It was now too late for the tramways. They had ceased to crash and rattle by, but a sound of belated singing passed along the quais, melancholy in its induced and extravagant mirth.
The horrible sense of human suffering that had beaten in upon him at the hospital, pressed again upon his heart. He saw himself departing next day to find the abandoned grave and he saw himself standing beside her train and measuring along the shining rails the vast distances that were to bear her away for ever.
“That’s the worst,” he said. “You’re suffering too. I must see you go away and know that you are unhappy. I must think of you as unhappy. With a broken heart.”
Her eyes, after she had thanked him, had been fixed in the intent reverie. She, too, perhaps, had been seeing those tides of misery, the sea of which she had spoken, breaking in tragic waves for ever; so unchanged by all the alleviations that love or mercy could bring; and it was perhaps with despair that she saw herself as one with it. Her eyes as she turned them on him were full of distance and of depth and, with sickening grief, he felt that a woman with a broken heart could do nothing more for herself or for him.
But her thought, whatever the voids of darkness it had visited, drew nearer and nearer to his need as she looked at him. Something of her own strong vigilance was in the look, bringing the seagull to his mind. The seagull caught and battered by the waves, with sodden wings, half dragged down, yet summoning its strength to rise from the submerging sea.
“But you can be happy with a broken heart,” she said. Their hands had fallen apart long since. She stretched out hers now and took his in her small, firm grasp.
“Can you?” he asked.
“You mustn’t think of me like this,” she said, and it was as if she read his thoughts and their imagery. “I went down, I know; like drowning. Sometimes the waves break over you and pull you down, and there seems nothing else in all the world but yourself and what you’ve suffered. But it doesn’t last. Something brings you up again.”
Something had brought her up again now. His darkness. His misery. It was as if he saw her spread her wings and saw her eyes measuring, for them both, the spaces of sea and sky.
He remembered a picture in a book he had loved as a little boy: little Diamond held to the breast of the North Wind as she flies forth in her streaming hair against a sky of stars. So he felt himself lying on her breast and lifted with her.
“I’ve told you how happy I can be. It’s all true,” she said. “It’s all there. The light, the peace, the strength. I shall find them. And so will you.”
“Shall I?” he questioned gently. “Without you?”
“Yes. Without me. You will find them. But you won’t be without me,” said Adrienne.
Already she was finding them. He knew that, for, as she looked at him, he felt an influence passing from her to him like the laying of her hand upon his brow. But it was closer than that. It was to her breast that her eyes held him while, in a long silence, the compulsion of her faith flowed into him. First quietness; then peace; then a lifting radiance.
“Promise me,” he heard her say.
He did not know what it was he must promise, but he seemed to feel it all without knowing and he said: “I promise.”
She rose and stood above him. “You mustn’t regret. You mustn’t want.”
She laid her hands upon his shoulders as she spoke and looked down at him, so austere, so radiant. “Anything else would have spoiled it. We were only meant to find each other like this and then to part.”
“I’ll be good,” said Oldmeadow. It was like saying one’s prayers at one’s mother’s knees and his lips found the child-like formula.
“We must part,” said Adrienne. “I have mylife and you have yours and they take different ways. But you won’t be without me, I won’t be without you. How can we be, when we will never, never forget each other and our love?”
He looked up at her. He had put out his hands and they grasped her dress as a donor in a votive altarpiece grasps the Madonna’s healing garment. It was not, he knew, to keep her. It was rather in an accepting relinquishment that he held her thus for their last communion, receiving through touch and sight and hearing her final benison.
“I will think of you every day, until I die,” she said. “I will pray for you every day. Dear friend—dearest friend—God bless and keep you.”
She had stooped to him and for a transcending moment he was taken into her strong, life-giving embrace. The climax of his life was come as he felt her arms close round him and her kiss upon his forehead. And as she held him thus he believed all that she had said and all for which she could have found no words. That he should find the light and more and more feel their unity in it: that the thought of her would be strength to him always; as the thought of him and of his love would be strength to her.
After she had gone, he sat for a long time bathed in the sense of her life, and tasting, for that span of time, her own security of eternal goodness.
THE END
Typographical error was corrected by the etext transcriber: