“You’ll never stop war by refusal so long as the majority of men still believe in it,” said Oldmeadow. “There are not enough of you to stop it now. The time to stop it is before it comes; not while it’s on. It’s before it begins that you must bring the rest of humanity not to behave in ways that make it inevitable. I’m inclined to think that ideas can perish,” he went on, as Palgrave, to this, made no reply, “as far as their earthly manifestation goes, that is, if enough men and institutions are destroyed. If Germany could conquer and administer England, I’m inclined to think the English idea would perish. And war need not be unspiritual. Killing our fellow-men need not mean hating them. There’s less hatred in war, I imagine, than in some of the contests of peaceful civilian life. Put it fairly on the ground of humanitarianism, then, Palgrave; not of nationality. It’s the whole world that is threatened by a hateful idea, by the triumph of all you most fear and detest, and unless we strive against it with all we are and have it seems to me that we fall short of our duty not only as Englishmen, but as humanitarians. Put it at that, Palgrave: would you really have had England stand by and not lift a finger when Belgium was invaded and France menaced?”
Palgrave was not ready with his reply and he turned away while he looked for it and shuffled the papers on his desk with a nervous hand. “Yes, I would,” he said at last. “Hateful as it is to have to say it—I would have stood by.” He came back to his place at the mantelpiece and looked down at Oldmeadow as he spoke. “The choice, of course, is hateful; but I think we should have stood by and helped the sufferers and let France and Germany fight it out. It always comes back to them, doesn’t it? They’re always fighting it out; they always will, till they find it’s no good and that they can’t annihilate each other; which is what they both want to do. Oh, I’ve read too many of the young French neo-Catholics to be able to believe that the hateful idea was all on one side. Their ideals don’t differ much, once you strip them of their theological tinsel, from those of the Germans. Germany happens to be the aggressor now; but if the militarist party in France had had the chance, they’d have struck as quickly.”
“The difference—and it’s an immense one—is that the militarist party in France wouldn’t have had the chance. The difference is that it doesn’t govern and mould public opinion. It’s not a menace to the world. It’s only a sort of splendid pet, kept in a Zoo, for the delectation of a certain class and party. Whereas Germany’s thebona fidehungry tigress at large. What you really ask of England, Palgrave, is that she should be a Buddha and lie down and let the tigress, after finishing France, devour her, too. It really comes to that. Buddhism is the only logical basis for your position, and I don’t believe, however sorry one may be for hungrytigresses, that the right way to deal with them is to let them eat you. The Christian philosophy of the incarnation is the true one. Matter does make a spiritual difference. It does make a difference, a real difference, that the ideal should be made flesh. It’s important to the world, spiritually, that the man rather than the tigress should survive.”
“Christ gave his life,” said Palgrave, after a moment.
“I’m not speaking of historical personages; but of eternal truths,” said Oldmeadow.
But he knew already that he spoke in vain. Palgrave had turned away his eyes again and on his sad young face he read the fixity of a fanatic idealism. He had not moved him, though he had troubled him. No one would move Palgrave. He doubted, now, whether Adrienne herself had had much influence over him. It was with the sense of pleading a lost cause that he said, presently, “Adrienne hopes you’ll feel it right to go.”
Palgrave at this turned a profound gaze upon him. “I know it,” he said. “Though she’s never told me so. It’s the weakness of her love, its yearning and tenderness, not its strength, that makes her want it. Because she knows it would be so much easier. But she can’t go back on what she’s meant to me. It’s because of that, in part at all events, that I’ve been able to see steadily what I mean to myself. That’s what she helps one to do, you know. Hold to yourself; your true, deep self. It’s owing to her that I can only choose in one way—even if I can’t defend it properly. It seems to come back to metaphysics, doesn’t it?”
“Like everything else,” said Oldmeadow.
“Yes. Like everything else. It would take a four-years’ course in Greats to argue it out, Roger. Come back to me—if you’re here and I’m here then—and we’ll see what we can make of it.”
“I will,” said Oldmeadow, rising, for the room was growing dark. “And before that, I hope.”
“After all, you know,” Palgrave observed, “England isn’t in any danger of becoming Buddhistic; there’s not much nihilism about her, is there, but hardly much Christianity, either. England has evolved all sorts of things besides Oxford and Coldbrooks. She’s evolved industrialism and factory-towns.”
“I don’t consider industrialism and factory-towns incompatible with Christianity, you know,” Oldmeadow observed. “Good-bye, my dear boy.”
“Good-bye, Roger,” Palgrave grasped his hand. “You’ve been most awfully kind.”
“ISN’Tit becoming to him, Mother? And how tall he looks!” said Nancy, holding Oldmeadow off in his khaki for displayal.
He had only written a line of his failure and that he would come as soon as he could and see them all and tell in full of his interview with Palgrave. And he had motored over to The Little House this afternoon in early November.
Nancy was showing an unexpected gaiety. “What a nice grilled-salmon colour you are, too,” she said.
He divined the self-protective instinct under the gaiety. Most of the women in England were being gayer and more talkative at this time, in order to keep up. Nancy was thin and white; but she was keeping up. And she had put on a charming dress to receive him in.
“I’ve been grilled all right; out on the downs,” he said. “But it’s more like cold storage just now, with these frosts at night. Yes; the big cup, please. I’m famished for tea. Ah! that’s something like! It smells like your rose outside. I sniffed it as I waited at the door. Wonderful for such a late blooming.”
“Isn’t it,” said Mrs. Averil. “And I only put it in last autumn. It’s doing beautifully; but I’ve cherished it. And now tell us about Palgrave.”
He felt reluctant to tell about Palgrave. The impression that remained with him of Palgrave was that impression of beauty and distortion and he didnot want to have to disentangle his feelings or to seem to put Palgrave in the wrong. It was so sweet, too, after the long, chilly drive over the empty uplands, to sit here and forget the war, although it was for scenes like this, for girls like Nancy, women like Mrs. Averil—with so much else—that the war was so worth fighting. He turned his thoughts back to the realities that underlay the happy appearances and was aware, as he forced himself to tell, of what must seem a note of advocacy in his voice. “He can’t think differently, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s self-sacrifice, not selfishness, that is moving him.”
“He can’t think differently while Adrienne is living there,” said Mrs. Averil. “He didn’t tell you, I suppose, that she has now taken up her abode in Oxford in order to study philosophy with him?”
He was rather uncomfortably aware of the disingenuousness that must now be made apparent in his avoidance of all mention of Adrienne.
“I saw her,” he said, and he knew that it was lamely. “She was there when I got there.”
“You saw her!” Mrs. Averil exclaimed. “But then, of course you didn’t convince him. I might have known it. Of course she would not let you see him alone.”
“But she did let me see him alone. That was what she wanted. And she was there only in order to tell me what she wanted. She wants him to go.”
Mrs. Averil was eyeing him with such astonishment that he turned to Nancy with his explanations. But Mrs. Averil would not leave him to Nancy’s sympathy. “It’s rather late in the day for her to want him to go,” she said. “She may be sorry for what she’s done; but it’s her work.”
“Well, she’s sorry for her work. That’s what it comes to. And I’m sorry for her,” said Oldmeadow.
“Good heavens! The cleverness of that woman!” Mrs. Averil exclaimed. “If she can’t be powerful, she’ll be pitiful! She’s worked on your feelings; I can see that, Roger. And I thought you, at least, were immune. Well; she does not work on mine. I am not in the least sorry for her.”
“She’s being unfairly treated,” said Oldmeadow. “It’s grotesque that Meg should have turned upon her.”
“And Eleanor has, too, you know,” said Mrs. Averil. “It’s grotesque, if you like; but I see a grim justice in it. She made them do things and believe things that weren’t natural to them and now she’s lost her power and they see things as they are.”
“It’s because she’s failed that they’ve turned against her,” said Nancy. “If she’d succeeded they would have gone on accepting what she told them and making her their idol.”
“Adrienne mustn’t fail,” said Mrs. Averil dryly. “The only justification for Adrienne is to be in the right. If the blood of Saint Januarius doesn’t liquefy, why should you keep it in a shrine? She’s a woman who has quarrelled with her husband and disgraced her sister and brother-in-law, and broken her mother-in-law’s heart. You can’t go on making an idol of a saint who behaves like that.”
“She never claimed worldly success,” said Nancy. “She never told Meg to go so that she could get married afterwards; she never told Palgrave that war was wrong because it was easier not to fight.”
“Oh, yes, she did claim worldly success, really,” said Mrs. Averil, while her eyes rested on herdaughter with a tenderness that contrasted with her tone. “Her whole point was that if you were right spiritually—‘poised’ she called it, you remember—all those other things would be added unto you. I’ve heard her claim that if you were poised you could get anything you really wanted. I asked her once if I should find a ten-pound note under the sofa-cushion every morning after breakfast if I could get poised sufficiently!” Mrs. Averil laughed, still more dryly while she still maintained her tender gaze and Nancy said, smiling a little: “She might have put it there for you if she’d been sure you were poised.”
“Well, let us bury Adrienne for the present,” said Mrs. Averil. “Tell Roger about your nursing plans. She may go to London, Roger, this winter, and I’m to be left alone.”
“You’re to be left to take care of Aunt Eleanor, if I do go,” said Nancy; and Mrs. Averil said that there must certainly be some one left to take care of poor Eleanor.
Oldmeadow went up to Coldbrooks next morning. The first person he saw was old Johnson at the door and he remembered Eleanor Chadwick’s griefs on his account. Nothing, now, could have been kept from Johnson and his face bore the marks of the family calamities. He was aged and whitened and his voice had armed itself, since the downfall of his grave, vicarious complacency, with solemn cadences.
“Yes, sir. The ladies will be very glad to see you, sir. These are sad days for them—the family dispersed as it is.”
Johnson defined the situation as he felt that it could be most fittingly defined and Oldmeadow inwardly applauded his “dispersed.”
The drawing-room, into which Johnson ushered him, had, for the first time in his memory of it, a mournful air. It had always been shabby, and these were the same faded chintzes, the same worn rugs; but now, fireless and flowerless, it neither spoke nor smiled and, with the sense it gave of an outlived epoch, it was almost spectral. The photographs all looked like the photographs of dead people and the only similitude of life was the loud, silly ticking of the French clock on the mantelpiece; Mrs. Chadwick’s cherished clock; one of her wedding-presents.
“I’m afraid it’s rather chilly, sir,” said Johnson. “No one has sat here of an evening now for a long time.” He put a match to the ranged logs, drew the blinds up farther so that the autumnal sunlight might more freely enter, and left him.
Oldmeadow went to the window and turned over the magazines, a month old, that lay on a table there.
He was standing so when Meg entered, and she had half the length of the room to traverse before they met. She was in black, in deep black; but more beautiful than he had ever seen her; her tossed auburn locks bound low on her forehead with a black ribbon, her white throat upright, her eyes hard with their readiness, their resource. Beautiful and distressing. It distressed him terribly to see that hardness in her eyes.
“How do you do, Roger,” she said, giving him her hand. “It’s good to see you. Mother will be glad.”
They seated themselves on one of the capacious sofas and she questioned him quickly, competently, while the hard eyes seemed to measure him lest hemeasure her. It was almost the look of thedéclasséewoman who forestalls withdrawal in an interlocutor. But, as he answered her quietly, his fond regard upon her, her defences began to fall. “It’s the only life, a soldier’s, isn’t it?” she said. “At all times, really. But, at a time like this, anything else seems despicable, doesn’t it; contemptibly smug and safe. The uniform is so becoming to you. You look a soldier already. One feels that men will trust and follow you. Didn’t you burn with rage and shame, too, when, for those four days, it seemed we might not come in?”
“I felt too sure we should come in, to burn with rage and shame,” said Oldmeadow.
“Ah! but it was not so sure, I’m afraid,” said Meg, and in her eyes, no longer hard, wild lights seemed to pass and repass. “I’m afraid that there are nearly enough fools and knaves in England to wreck us. Not quite enough, thank heaven! But, for those four days, Eric was terribly afraid. He was killed, you know, Roger, very splendidly, leading his men.”
“I know, Meg. My dear Meg,” Oldmeadow murmured.
“Oh! I don’t regret it! I don’t regret it!” Meg cried, while her colour rose and her young breast lifted. “It’s the soldier’s death! The consecrating, heroic death! He was ready. And deaths like that atone—for the others. He was not killed instantaneously, Roger.”
“I didn’t know,” said Oldmeadow, looking at her with a pitying, troubled gaze.
“He lived for a day and night afterwards,” said Meg, looking back, tearless. “They carried him toa barn. Only his man was with him. There was no one to dress his dreadful wound; no food. The man got him some water, at the risk of his own life. He was conscious until the end and he suffered terribly.”
Oldmeadow dropped his eyes before her fierce stare while, strangely, dimly, there passed through his mind the memory of the embarrassed, empty, handsome young face in the brougham and, again, the memory of his dog John. He had seen John die and his eyes of wistful appeal. So Eric Hayward’s eyes might have looked as he lay in the barn dying.
“Oh, Roger!” Meg said suddenly, seizing his hand. “Kill them! Kill them! Oh, revenge him! I was not with him! Think of it! I would have had no right to have been with him—had it been possible. I did not know till a week later. He was buried there. His man buried him.”
“My poor, poor child,” said Oldmeadow, clasping her hands.
But, at once, taking refuge from his pity and from her own desperate pain: “So you’ve seen Palgrave,” she said. “And he isn’t going. I knew it was useless. I told Mother it was useless—with that stranger—that American, with him. She has disgraced us all.—Wretched boy! Hateful woman!”
“Meg, Meg; be soldierly. He wouldn’t have spoken like that.”
“He never liked her! Never!” she cried. “I knew he didn’t, even at the time she was flattering and cajoling us. I saw that she bewildered him and that he accepted her only because she was mine. How I loathe myself for having listened to her! How I loathe her! All that she ever wanted waspower! Power over other people’s lives! She’d commit any crime for that!”
“You seem to me cruelly unfair,” he said.
“No! no! I’m not unfair! You know I’m not!” she cried. “You always saw the truth about her—from the very beginning. You never fell down and worshipped her, like the rest of us. And she knew that you were her enemy and warned us against you. Oh—why did Barney marry her!”
“I never worshipped her; but I never thought her base and hateful.”
“You never knew her as I did; that was all. And I never knew her until I came back and found her doing to Palgrave what she had done to us. Paladin! Did you hear her call him Paladin? Always flattery! Always to make one think one was wonderful, important, mysterious! She forced us to go away, Roger. Sometimes I think it was hypnotism; that she uses her will-power consciously. We did not want to go. We did not want the divorce and the scandal.”
“What did you want, then, Meg?”
She felt the gravity of his tone but, like a fierce Maenad, she snatched at the torch, not caring how it revealed her. “What of it! What if we had been secret lovers! Who would have known! Who would have been harmed! Some people go on for years and years. His wife loved another man. He had no one. Why should we have been pushed—such pitiful fools we were—into displaying our love to the world and being crushed by it! Oh, he was so loyal, so brave; but it made him very, very unhappy. Oh, I was cruel to him sometimes! I used to reproach him sometimes! Oh, Roger! Roger!—” She broke into wild tears and stumbled to her feet.
As she reached the door, covering her face with her hands, her mother opened it and, meeting her on the threshold, Meg, with almost the effect of beating her aside with the other impediments to her rage and grief, pushed past her so that the knitting Mrs. Chadwick held was flung to the floor, the ball of khaki wool running rapidly away under a sofa and the socks and needles dangling at her feet.
She stood looking down at them with a curious apathy and, as Oldmeadow went to help and greet her, he saw that as much as Meg was wild she was dulled and quiet.
“Meg is so very, very violent,” she said, as he disentangled the wool and restored her sock and ball to her. She spoke with listlessness rather than sympathy.
“Poor child,” said Oldmeadow. “One can hardly wonder at it. But it makes a wretched existence for you, I’m afraid. You and she oughtn’t to be alone together.”
He drew her to a chair and, seating herself, her faded face and eyes that had lost their old look of surprise turned to the light, Mrs. Chadwick assented, “It’s very fatiguing to live with, certainly. Sometimes I really think I must go away for a little while and have a change. Nancy would come and stay with Meg, you know. But I can’t miss Barney’s last weeks. He comes to us, now, again. And it might not be right to leave Meg. One must not think of oneself at a time like this, must one?” The knitting lay in her lap and she was twisting and untwisting her handkerchief after her old fashion; buther fingers moved slowly and without agitation and Oldmeadow saw that some spring of life in her had been broken.
“The best plan would be that Meg should, as soon as possible, take up some work,” he said, “and that you and Nancy should go away. Work is the only thing for Meg now. She’ll dash herself to pieces down here; and you with her. There’ll soon be plenty to do. Nursing and driving ambulances.”
“Nancy is going to nurse, you know,” said Mrs. Chadwick. “But she won’t go as long as we need her here. She has promised me that. I don’t know what I should do without Nancy. I shouldn’t care to be nursed by Meg myself, if I were a wounded soldier. She is so very restless and would probably forget quite simple things like giving one a handkerchief or seeing that hot-water-bottles were wrapped up before she put them to one’s feet. A friend of mine—Amy Hatchard—such a pretty woman, though her hair was bright, bright red—and I never cared for that—had the soles of her feet nearly scorched off once by a careless nurse. Dear Nancy. I often think of Nancy now, Roger. I believe, you know, that if Adrienne had not come Nancy and Barney might have married. How happy we should all have been; though she has so little money.”
“I wish you could all think a little more kindly of Adrienne,” said Oldmeadow after a silence. Mrs. Chadwick had begun to knit. “I must tell you that I myself feel differently about her.”
“Do you, Roger?” said Mrs. Chadwick, without surprise. “You have a very judicious and balanced mind, I know; even when you were hardly morethan a boy Francis noticed it and said that he’d rather go by your opinion than by that of most of the men he knew. I always remembered that, afterwards. Till she came. And then I believed in her rather than in you. You thought us all far too fond of her from the very first. And now we have certainly changed. Meg is certainly very violent; much more violent than I could ever be.... I am sorry for Adrienne. I don’t think she meant to do us any harm—as Meg believes.”
“She only meant to do you good, I am sure of it. I saw her in Oxford, let me tell you about it, when I went in to see Palgrave. She is very unhappy. She wants Palgrave to go. She wants him to feel it right to go. It’s not she, really, who is keeping him back now.”
“My poor Palgrave. Meg is very unkind about him; very bitter and unkind; her own brother. But it was very wrong of Adrienne to go and set up housekeeping in Oxford near him. You must own that, Roger. She may not be keeping him back; but she is aiding and abetting him always. It made Barney even more miserable and disgusted than he was before. And it looks so very odd. Though I don’t think that anyone could ever gossip about Adrienne. There is something about her that makes that impossible.”
“There certainly is. I am glad she is with Palgrave, poor boy.”
“I am glad you are sorry for him, Roger”—Mrs. Chadwick dropped a needle. “How clumsy I am. My fingers seem all to have turned to thumbs. Thank you so much. I try to make as many socks as I can for our poor men; fingering wool; notwheeling, which is so much rougher to the feet. I’m sure I’d rather march, and, if it came to that, die in fingering than in wheeling. Just as I’ve always felt, foolish as it may sound, that if I had to be drowned I’d rather it were in warm, soapy water than in cold salt. Not that one is very likely, ever, to drown in one’s bath. But tell me about Adrienne and Palgrave, Roger, and what they said.”
Mrs. Chadwick’s discourse seemed, beforehand, to make anything he might have to tell irrelevant and, even while he tried to make her see what he had seen, he felt it to be a fruitless effort.
There was indeed no enmity to plead against. Only a deep exhaustion. Adrienne had pressed too heavily on the spring and it was broken.
“I’m sure she is very sorry to have made so much mischief, but she isn’t what I thought her, Roger,” she said, shaking her head, when he had finished. “I’m sorry for her, but I used to believe her to be a sort of saint and now I know that she is very far indeed from being one.”
“The mere fact of failure doesn’t deprive you of sainthood,” said Oldmeadow, remembering Nancy’s plea. “You haven’t less reason now than you had then for believing her one.”
But even with her broken spring Mrs. Chadwick had not lost all her shrewdness. It flickered in the sad eyes she lifted from the khaki sock. “Some kinds of failure do, Roger. That gift of healing, you remember; all she could do for people in that way; she has quite, quite lost it. That is a reason. It’s that more than anything that has made me feel differently about her.”
“Lost it?” He felt strangely discomposed, little as the gift of healing had ever impressed him.
“Quite,” Mrs. Chadwick repeated. “I think it distressed her dreadfully herself. I think she counted upon it more than upon anything, perhaps without knowing she did. It must have made her seem so sure to herself, mustn’t it? The first time was before the war, just a little after you were here that day in the summer—dear me, how long ago it seems; and I had one of my headaches, one of the worst I ever had. I was so dreadfully troubled, you know, about Barbara and Meg. And Adrienne came and sat by me as she used to and put her hand on my forehead; and I know it wasn’t my lack of faith, for I quite believed it would get well; but instead of the peaceful feeling, it grew much worse; oh,much. As if red hot needles were darting through my eyes and an iron weight pressing down on my head. And such tumult and distress. I had to tell her. I had to ask her to take away her hand. Oh, she felt it very much, poor thing, and grew very white and said it must be because she was still not strong; not quite herself. But I knew then that it was because she was notright; not what I had thought her. I began to suspect, from that very moment, that I had been mistaken; because hypnotizing people isn’t the same as being a saint, is it, Roger? and—I think you said so once, long ago; and that was all that she had done; hypnotized us all to think her good and wonderful. Later on, after Meg had come, I let her try once more, though it quite frightened me; she looked so strange. And!—oh, dear—it was dreadful. It distressed me dreadfully. She suddenly put her hands before her face and sat quite still and then she burst into tears and got up and ran out of the room, crying. It made mefeel quite ill. And of course I knew there could be nothing saintly about a person who made you feel like that—who could feel like that themselves, and break down.”
“Even saints have their times of darkness and dryness,” Oldmeadow found after a little time had passed. The picture she put before him hurt him. “It was an error of judgment to have believed her a saint because she could hypnotize you—if that was what it was; but the fact that she can’t hypnotize you any longer—that she’s too unhappy to have any power of that sort—doesn’t prove she’s not a saint. Of course she’s not. Why should she be?”
“I’m sure I don’t know why she should be; but she used to behave as if she were one, didn’t she? And when I saw that she wasn’t one in that way I began to see that she wasn’t in other ways, too. It was she who made me so unjust, so unkind to poor Barney.Shewas so unjust and so unkind; and I never saw it till then. I was blind till then; though you saw very well, that day you came to Connaught Square, that it was a sort of spell she cast. It was a spell, Roger. The moment I saw her, after the baby’s death, I forgot everything she’d done and felt I loved her again. She willed me to. So as to get power over me. Everything, always, with her, was to get power over other people’s lives,” said Mrs. Chadwick, and as he had, in the past, heard echoes of Adrienne in all she said, now he heard echoes of Meg, “It’s by willing it, you know. Some people practise it like five-finger exercises. You have to sit quite still and shut your eyes and concentrate. Meg has heard how it’s done. I don’t pretendto understand; but that must have been her way. And she made poor Barney miserable and set me against him at once; you said so yourself, Roger, and blinded me to all the cruel things she did. It was to punish him, you know. To make him feel he was dreadfully wrong and she quite right; about Meg, and everything else; for you came in, too. It used to be so dreadful at Torquay. I knew it would be sad there; but I never guessed how sad it would be—with that horrid blue, blue sea. She used to sit, day after day, on the terrace of the house, and gaze and gaze at the sea and if Barney would come, so lovingly, and ask her what he could do for her and take her hand, oh, it was more and more mournful, the way she would look at him; that dreadful, loving look that didn’t mean love at all, but only trying to break him down and make himsaythat he was down. I begged Barney’s pardon, Roger, for having treated him as I did. We treated him dreadfully, all of us; because she put him, always, in the wrong. Oh, no, Roger, I’m sorry for her, but she’s a dangerous woman; orwasdangerous. For now she has lost it all and has become like everybody else; quite ordinary and unhappy.”
He felt, in the little silence that, again, followed, that he could hardly better this summing-up. That was precisely what poor Adrienne Toner had become; ordinary and unhappy. The two things she would have believed herself least capable of becoming. There was nothing to be gained in urging extenuating circumstances, especially since he was not sure that there were any. Mrs. Chadwick, at bottom, saw as clearly as he did. He asked her presently, leaving the theme of Adrienne, whethershe would not seriously consider going away for a little while with Nancy. “Meg could go down to The Little House,” he said.
“Oh, no, she couldn’t, Roger,” said Mrs. Chadwick, “she won’t go anywhere. She’ll hardly speak to Monica. She just sits out-of-doors, all day, wrapped in a cloak, in the corner of the garden, staring in front of her, and she pays not the slightest attention to anything I say. And at night, in her room, I hear her sobbing, sobbing, as if her heart would break. I can’t think hardly of Eric any longer, Roger. Isn’t it strange; but it’s almost as if he were my son that had been killed. And Barney may be killed,” the poor mother’s lip and chin began to tremble. “And you, too, Roger. I don’t know how we shall live through all that we must bear and I keep thinking of the foolish little things, like your having cold feet and wearing the same clothes day after day in those horrible trenches. He suffered it all, poor Eric. No, I can’t think hardly of him. All the same,” she sobbed, “my heart is broken when I remember that they can never be married now.”
“THAT’Sthe way Mummy surprises one,” said Barney as he and Oldmeadow went together through the Coldbrooks woods. “One feels her, usually, such a darling goose and then, suddenly, she shows one that she can be a heroine.”
Barney was going to France in two days’ time and Oldmeadow within the fortnight, and the Coldbrooks good-byes had just been said. It had been poor Meg who had broken down and clung and cried. Mrs. Chadwick had, to the very last, talked with grave cheerfulness of Barney’s next leave and given wise advice as if he had been merely leaving them for a rather perilous mountain-climbing feat. Oldmeadow could hardly believe her the same woman that he had seen ten days before.
He was staying at The Little House and had come up on this afternoon of Barney’s departure to join him at Coldbrooks and walk down with him. Barney had not yet seen or said good-bye to Nancy and her mother, and Oldmeadow had seized this, his only chance, of a talk with him. But, as they left the woods and began to climb the bare hill-side, Barney went on:
“I’ve wanted a talk, too, Roger. I’m glad you managed this.”
“It doesn’t rob anyone of you, does it,” said Oldmeadow. “We’ll get to Chelford in time to give you a good half-hour with them before your car comes for you.”
“That will be enough for Nancy,” said Barney.“The less she sees of me, the better she’s pleased. I’ve lots of things I want to say, Roger. Of course you understand that in every way it’s a relief to be going out.”
“It settles things; or seems to settle them,” said Oldmeadow. “They take another place at all events.”
“Yes; just that. They take another place. What difference does it make, after all, if a fellow has made a mess of his personal life when his personal life has ceased to count. I’m not talking mawkish sentiment when I say I hope I’ll be killed—if I can be of some use first. I see no other way out of it. I’m sorry for Adrienne, after a fashion, for she’s dished herself, too. We made a hopeless mistake in getting married and she knows it as well as I do; and when a man and woman don’t love each other any longer it’s the man’s place to get out if he can.”
“It was about Adrienne I wanted to talk to you, Barney.” For the first time in their long friendship Oldmeadow felt that he spoke to an equal. Barney had at last ceased to be a boy. “I’ve seen her, since seeing you that last time in the train.”
“Well?” Barney inquired, as Oldmeadow paused. “What have you got to say to me about Adrienne, Roger? You’ve not said very much, from the beginning; but everything you have said has been true and I’ve forgotten none of it. I’m the more inclined,” and he smiled with a slight bitterness, “to listen to you now.”
“That’s just the trouble,” Oldmeadow muttered. “You’ve forgotten nothing. That’s what I feel, with remorse. That it was I who helped to spoil things for you both, from the beginning. You’d not haveseen her defects as you did if I hadn’t shown them to you; and if you hadn’t seen them you’d have adjusted yourselves to each other and have found them out together. She’d not have resented your finding them out in the normal course of your shared lives. It’s been my opinion of her, in the background of both your minds, that has envenomed everything.”
Barney listened quietly. “Yes,” he assented. “That’s all true enough. As far as it goes. I mightn’t have seen if you hadn’t shown me. But I can’t regret you did show me, for anything else would have been to have gone through life blind; as blind as Adrienne is herself. And it’s because she can’t stand being seen through that she revealed so much more; so much that you didn’t see and that I had to find out for myself. What you saw was absurdity and inexperience; they’re rather loveable defects; I think I accepted them from the beginning, because of all the other things I believed in her. You said, too, you remember, that she’d never know she was wrong. Well, it’s worse than that. She’ll never know she’s wrong and she won’t bear it that you should think her anything but right. She’s rapacious. She’s insatiable. Nothing but everything will satisfy her. You must be down on your knees, straight down, before her; and if you’re not, she has no use for you. She turns to stone and you break your head and your heart against her. It’s hatred Adrienne has felt for me, Roger, and I’m afraid I’ve felt it for her, too. She’s done things and said things that I couldn’t have believed her capable of; mean things; clever things; cruelly clever that get you right on the raw; things I can’t forget. There’s much more in her than you saw at the beginning.I was right rather than you about that; only they weren’t the things I thought.”
Oldmeadow walked, cutting at the withered way-side grasses with his cane. Barney’s short, slow sentences seemed to sting him as they came. He had to adjust himself to their smart; to adjust himself to the thought of this malignant Adrienne. Yet what he felt was not all surprise; he had foreseen, suspected, even this. “I know,” he said at last; “I mean, I can see that it would happen just like that.”
“It did happen just like that,” said Barney. “I don’t claim to have been an angel or anything like one. I gave her as good as I got, or nearly, sometimes, no doubt. But I know that it wasn’t my fault. I know it was Adrienne who spoiled everything.”
They had come out now on the upland road. The country dropped away beneath them wrapped in the dull mole-colour, the distant, dull ultramarines of the November afternoon. The smell of burning weeds was in the air and, in the west, a long, melancholy sheet of advancing rain-cloud hid the sun. Oldmeadow wondered if he and Barney would ever walk there together again, and his mind plunged deep into the past, the many years of friendship to which this loved country had been a background.
“Barney,” he said, “what I wanted to say is this: All that you feel is true; I’m sure of it. But other things are true, too. I’ve seen her and I’ve changed about her. If I was right before, I’m right now. She’s been blind because she didn’t know she could be broken. Well, she’s beginning to break.”
“Is she?” said Barney, and his quiet was implacable. “I can quite imagine that, you know.Everyone, except poor Palgrave—all the rest of us, have found out that she’s not the beautiful benignant being she thought she was, and that bewilders her and makes her pretty wretched, no doubt.”
Oldmeadow waited a moment. “I want you to see her,” he said. “Don’t be cruel. You are a little cruel, you know. It’s because you are thinking of her abstractly; remembering only how she has hurt you. If you could see her, see how unhappy she is, you’d feel differently. That’s what I want you to do. That’s what I beg you to do, Barney.”
“I can’t,” said Barney after a moment. “That I can’t do, Roger. It’s over. She might want me back if she could get me back adoring her. It’s only so she’d want me. But it’s over. It’s more than over. There’s something else.” Barney’s face showed no change from its sad fixity. “You were right about that, too. It’s Nancy I ought to have married. It’s Nancy I love. And Adrienne knows it.”
At this there passed before Oldmeadow’s mind the memory of the small, dark, hurrying figure, the memory of the words she had spoken: “Some things are like living creatures; and they can die. They can die.”
He felt rather sick. “In that case, how can you blame your wife?” he muttered. “Doesn’t that explain it all?”
“No, it doesn’t explain it all.” There was no fire of self-justification in Barney’s voice. It was as fixed and sad as his face. “It was only after Adrienne made me so wretched I began to find it out. She was jealous of Nancy from the beginning, of course. But then she was jealous of everything that wasn’t, every bit of it, hers. She had no reason forjealousy. No man was ever more in love than I was with Adrienne. Even now I don’t feel for Nancy what I felt for her. It’s something, I believe, one only feels once and if it burns out it burns out for ever. With Nancy, it’s as if I had come home; and Adrienne and I were parted before I knew that I was turning to her.”
They had begun the final descent into Chelford and the wind now brought a fine rain against their faces. Neither spoke again until the grey roofs of the village came into sight at a turning of the road. “About money matters, Roger,” Barney said. “Mother and Meg and Barbara. If you get through, and I don’t, will you see to them for me? I’ve appointed you my trustee. I told Adrienne last summer that I couldn’t take any of her money any longer, so that, of course, with my having thrown up the city job and taken on the farms, my affairs are in a bit of a mess. But I hope they’ll be able to go on at Coldbrooks all right. Palgrave will have Coldbrooks if I don’t come back, and perhaps you’ll be able to prevent him handing it over to his Socialist friends.”
“Palgrave would be safely human if it came to taking care of his mother and sisters,” said Oldmeadow.
“Would he?” said Barney. “I don’t know.”
Across the village green the lights of The Little House shone at them. The curtains were still undrawn and, as they waited at the door, they could see Nancy in the drawing-room, sitting by the fire alone.
“I want you to come in with me, please, Roger,” said Barney. “Nancy hasn’t felt it right to bevery kind to me of late and she’ll be able to be kinder if you are there. You’ll know, you’ll see if a chance comes for me to say what I want to say to her. You might leave us for a moment then.”
“You have hardly more than a half-hour, you know,” said Oldmeadow.
“One can say a good deal in a half-hour,” Barney replied.
Nancy had risen and, as they entered, she came forward, trying to smile and holding out her hand to each. But Oldmeadow was staying there. He was not going in half an hour. There was no reason why Nancy should give him her hand and Barney, quietly, took both her hands in his. “It’s good-bye, then, Nancy, isn’t it?” he said.
They stood there in the firelight together, his dear young people, both so pale, both so fixedly looking at each other, and Nancy still tried to smile as she said, “It’s dear of you to have come.” But her face betrayed her. It was sick with the fear that, in conquering her own heart, she should hurt Barney’s; Barney’s, whom she might never see again. Oldmeadow went on to the fire and stood, his back to them, looking down at it.
“Oh, no, it’s not; not dear at all,” Barney returned. “You knew I’d come to say good-bye, of course. Why haven’t you been over to see me, you and Aunt Monica? I’ve asked you often enough.”
“You mustn’t scold me to-day, Barney, since it’s good-bye. We couldn’t come,” said Nancy.
“It’s never I who scold you. It’s you who scold me. Not openly, I know,” said Barney, “but by implication; punish me, by implication. I quite understood why you haven’t come. Well, I wantthings to be clear now. Roger’s here, and I want to say them before him, because he’s been in it all since the beginning. It’s because of Adrienne you’ve never come; and changed so much in every way towards me.”
He had kept her hands till then, but Oldmeadow heard now that she drew away from him. For a moment she did not speak; and then it was not to answer him. “Have you said good-bye to her, Barney?”
“No; I haven’t,” Barney answered. “I’m not going to say good-bye to Adrienne, Nancy. It must be plain to you by this time that Adrienne and I have parted. What did it all mean but that?”
“It didn’t mean that to her. She never dreamed it was meaning that,” said Nancy.
“Well, she said it, often enough,” Barney retorted.
“Barney, please listen to me,” said Nancy. “You must let me speak. She never dreamed it was meaning that. If she was unkind to you it was because she could not believe it would ever mean parting. She had started wrong; by holding you to blame; after the baby; when you and Roger so hurt her pride. And then she wasn’t able to go back. She wasn’t able to see it all so differently—just to get you back. It would have seemed wrong to her; a weakness, just because she longed so. And then, most of all, she believed you loved her enough to come of yourself.”
“I tried to,” said Barney, in the sad, bitter voice of the hill-side talk with Oldmeadow. “You see, you don’t know everything, Nancy, though you know so much. I tried to again and again.”
“Yes. I know you did. But only on your own terms. And by then I had come in. Oh, yes, I had, Barney. You didn’t know it. It was long, long before you knew. But I knew it; and so did she and it was more than she could bear. What woman could bear it? I couldn’t have, in her place.” Tears were in Nancy’s voice.
“It’s queer, Nancy,” said Barney, “that—barring Palgrave, who doesn’t count—you and Roger are the only two people she has left to stick up for her. Roger’s just been saying all that to me, you know. The two she tried to crab whenever she got a chance. Well, say it’s my fault, then. Say that I’ve been faithless to my wife and fallen in love with another woman. The fact is there, and you’ve said it now yourself. I don’t love her any longer. I shall never love her again. And I love you. I love you, Nancy, and it’s you I ought to have married; would have married, I believe, if I hadn’t been a blinded fool. I love you, and I can say it now because this may be the end of everything. Don’t let her spoil this, too. Nancy darling, look at me. Can’t you consent to forget Adrienne for this one time, when we may never see each other again?”
“I can’t forget her! I can’t forget her!” Nancy sobbed. “I mustn’t. She’s miserable. She hasn’t stopped loving you. And she’s your wife.”
“Do you want to make me hate her?”
“Oh, Barney—that is cruel of you.”
There was a silence and in it Oldmeadow heard Barney’s car draw up at the gate. He took out his watch. There were only a few more moments left them. Not turning to them he said. “It does her no good, you know, Nancy dear.”
“No. It does her no good,” Barney repeated. “But forgive me. I was cruel. I don’t hate her. I’m sorry for her. It’s simply that we ought never to have married. Forget it, Nancy, and forget her. Don’t let it be, then, that I love you and don’t love my wife. Let it be in the old way. As if she’d never come. As if I’d come to say good-bye to my cousin; to my dearest friend on earth. Look at me. Give me your hands. It’s your face I want to take with me.”
“Five minutes, Barney,” Oldmeadow whispered, as he went past them. Nancy had given him her hands; she had lifted her face to his, and Barney’s arms had closed around her.
MRS. AVERILwas in the hall. “Give them another moment,” he said. “I’m going outside.”
Tears were in his own eyes. He stepped out on to the flagged path of the little plot in front of the house where strips of turf and rose-beds ran between the house and the high wall. Between the clipped holly-trees at the gate he saw Barney’s car, and its lights, the wall between, cast a deep shadow over the garden.
The rain was falling thickly now and he stood, feeling it on his face, filled with a sense of appeasement, of accomplishment. They were together at last. It was not too late. At such a time, when all the world hung on the edge of an abyss, to be together for a moment might sum up more of real living than many happy years. They knew each other’s hearts and what more could life give its creatures than that recognition.
Suddenly, how he did not know, for there was no apparent movement and his eyes were fixed on the pallid sky, he became aware that a figure was leaning against the house in the shadow beside him. His eyes found it and it was familiar. Yet he could not believe his eyes.
She was leaning back, her hands against the wall on either side, and he saw, with the upper layer of perception that so often blunts a violent emotion, that her feet were sunken in the mould of Mrs. Averil’s rose-bed and that the cherished shoots ofthe new climbing rose were tangled in her clothes. The open window was but a step away.
She had come since they had come. She had crept up. She had looked in—for how long?—and had fallen back, casting out her arms so that it might not be to the ground. Her eyes were closed; but she had heard and seen him. As he stood before her, aghast, unable to find a word, he heard her mutter: “Take me away, please.”
Barney’s car blocked the egress of the gate and Barney might emerge at any moment. He leaned towards her and found that she was intricately caught in the rose. Her hat with its veil, her sleeve, her hair, were all entangled.
Dumbly, patiently, she stood, while, with fumbling fingers and terror lest they should be heard within—Mrs. Averil’s voice now reached him from the drawing-room—Oldmeadow released her and, his fingers deeply torn by the thorns, he was aware, in all the tumult of his thought, more than of the pain, of the wet fragrance of the roses that surrounded her. He shared what he felt to be her panic.
She had come hoping to see Barney; she had come to say good-bye to Barney, who would not come to her; and his heart sickened for her at the shameful seeming of her plight. She knew now that it must be her hope never to see Barney again.
There was a narrow passage, leading to the lawn and garden, between the house and the stable walls. Thickly grown with ivy, showing only a narrow opening above, where chimneys and gables cut against the sky, it was nearly as dark as a tunnel, and into this place of hiding he half led, half carried the unfortunate woman.
With the darkness, the pungent smell of the wet ivy closed thickly, ominously about them. It was as if he and Adrienne Toner were buried there together. He heard a maid laugh far away and a boy passed on the green stridently whistling “Tipperary.” It was like hearing, in the grave, the sounds of the upper world.
Adrienne leaned against the wall. The ivy closing round her, nearly obliterated her, but he could dimly see the grey disk of her face, showing the unexpectedness of contour that reveals itself in the faces of the dead. The trivial features were erased and only a shape of grief remained, strangely august and emotionless.
An eternity seemed to pass before the front door opened and Mrs. Averil’s voice, steadied to a galvanized cheerfulness, came, half obliterated to a wordless rhythm. Barney’s voice answered her, and his steps echoed on the flagged path. “Say good-bye to Roger for me if I don’t see him on the road!” he called out from the gate. Then the car coughed, panted; the horn croaked out its cry and, above them, a shaft of light across the ivy, of which he had till then been unaware, flitted suddenly away, leaving the darkness more visible.
He heard then that she was weeping.
Putting his arm behind her, for the rain fell heavily and the ivy was drenched with it, he drew her forward and for a little while it was almost against his breast that she lay while her very heart dissolved itself in tears.
She had come, he knew it all, with a breakdown of her pride, with a last wild hope and, perhaps, a longing to atone, believing that she might snatcha word somewhere with her husband, and find her way, at this last moment, back to the heart she had so alienated. She had seen all. She had heard all. He was sure of it. It had been as an outcast that he had found her leaning there. He understood her through and through and the tender heaviness that had already so often visited his heart flooded it to suffocation.
Among her sobs, he heard her, at last, speaking to him. “Even Palgrave doesn’t know. He told me—only this afternoon—that Barney was here. I thought I might find him. I was going to wait in the road. And when I got here there was no car and I was afraid that there was a mistake. That I had missed him. And I went up to the house; to the open window; and looked in; to see if he was there. It was not jealousy: not now. I did not mean to be an eavesdropper. But, when I saw them, I stayed and listened. It was not jealousy,” she repeated. “It was because I had to know that there was no more hope.”
“Yes,” said Oldmeadow gently, while, with long pauses, she spoke on and on; to the impartial judge, to the one sure refuge; and he said “Yes” again, gently, after she had finished; a long time after. She still half lay against his breast. He had never felt such an infinite tenderness towards any creature; not since his boyhood and his mother’s death.
She drew away from him at last. “Take me,” she said. “There is a train; back to Oxford.” She had ceased to weep. Her voice was hoarse and faint.
“Did you walk up from the station? You’re not fit to walk back. I can get a trap. There’s a man just across the green.”
“No. Walking, please. I would be recognized. They might know me. I can walk. If you will help me.”
He drew her arm through his. “Lean on me,” he said. “We’ll go slowly.”
They went past the drawing-room windows and, softly opening, softly shutting, through the gate. The road, when it turned the corner, left the village behind; between its rarely placed trees, vague silhouettes against the sky that seemed of one texture with them, it showed its mournful pallor for only a little space before them; there was not enough light left in the sky to glimmer on its pools. The fields, on either side, vanished into obscurity. Pale cattle, once, over a hedge, put disconsolate heads and lowed and a garrulous dog, as they passed by, ran out from a way-side farm-yard, smelt at their heels, growled perfunctorily and, having satisfied his sense of duty, went back to his post. The sense of dumb emptiness was so complete that it was only after they had gone a long way that he knew that she was weeping and the soft, stifling sounds seemed only a part of nature’s desolation.
Her head bent down, she stumbled on, leaning on his arm, and from time to time she raised her handkerchief and pressed it to her mouth and nose. He did not say a word; nor did she.
As he led her along, submissive to her doom, it was another feeling of accomplishment that overwhelmed him; the dark after the radiant; after Nancy and Barney, he and Adrienne. It was this, from their first meeting, that he had been destined to mean to her. She was his appointed victim. He had killed, as really as if with a knife, the girl whomhe had seen at Coldbrooks, in the sunlight, on that Sunday morning in spring, knowing no doubts. She had then held the world in her hands and a guileless, untried heaven had filled her heart. Between her and this crushed and weeping woman there seemed no longer any bond; unless it was the strange aching that, in his heart, held them both together.
OLDMEADOWsat in Mrs. Aldesey’s drawing-room and, the tea-table between them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years, that they found each other. So it was, all over the world, Oldmeadow said to himself, that the tea-table, or its equivalent, reasserted itself in any interval where the kindly amenities of human intercourse could root themselves; though the world rocked and flames of anarchy rimmed its horizons.
It was more real, he felt that now, to sit and look at Lydia over her tea than to parch on Eastern sands and shiver in Western trenches; from the mere fact that the one experience became a nightmare while the other was as natural as waking at dawn. Horrors became the dropped stitches of life; and though if there were too many of them they would destroy the stocking, the stocking itself was made up of tea-table talks and walks in the woods with Nancy. He had just come from Coldbrooks.
So he put it, trivially, to himself, and he felt the need of clinging to triviality. The dropped stitches had been almost too much for him and the nightmare, at times, had seemed the only reality. At times he had known a final despair of life and even now he remembered that the worst might still come. One might be called upon to face the death of the whole order of civilization. Faith required one, perhaps, to recognize that the human spirit was boundup, finally, with no world order and unless one could face its destruction as one had to face the death of a loved individual, one was not secure of the spiritual order that transcended all mundane calamity. He believed, or hoped, that during these last three years, in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine, when, to the last fibre, he had felt his faiths tested, he had learned to be ready for the great relinquishment, should it be required of him; and it was therefore the easier to doff that consciousness, as he might have doffed a sword, and think of Lydia and of the order that still survived and that she still stood for.
Lydia did not look the worse for the war; indeed she looked the better. She looked as if, in spite of long days in the hospital, she digested better and, in spite of air-raids, slept better, and as they talked, finding their way back to intimacy by the comparing of such superficialities, she told him that for years she hadn’t been so strong or well. “Nothing is so good for you, I’ve found out, as to feel that you are being used; being used by something worth while. People like myself must keep still about our experiences, for we’ve had none that bear talking of. But even the others, even the people bereaved unspeakably, are strangely lifted up. And I believe that the populace enjoys the air-raids rather than the reverse; they give them a chance of feeling that they are enduring something, too; with good-humour and pluck. If anyone is pessimistic about the effect of war on average human nature, I should only ask them to come and talk to our men at the hospital. Of course, under it all, there’s the ominous roar in one’s ears all the time.”
“Do you mean the air-raids?” he asked her and,shaking her head, showing him that she, too, had seen with him and, he believed, with him accepted: “No; I mean the roar of nation after nation collapsing into the abyss. A sort of tumbril roar of civilization, Roger. And, for that, there’s always the last resource of going gallantly to the guillotine. But all the same, I believe we shall pull through.”
It was the spring of 1918 and one needed faith to believe it. She asked him presently about his friends at Coldbrooks. He had gone to Coldbrooks for three days of his one week’s leave. After this he went to France.
“What changes for you there, poor Roger,” said Mrs. Aldesey.
“Yes. Terrible changes. Palgrave dead and Barney broken. Yet, do you know, it’s not as sad as it was. Something’s come back to it. Nancy sits by him and holds his hand and is his joy and comfort.”
“Will he recover?”
“Not in the sense of being really mended. He’ll go on crutches, always, if he gets up. But the doctors now hope that the injury to the back isn’t permanent.”
“And Meg’s married,” said Mrs. Aldesey after a little pause. “Have you seen her?”
“No. She runs a hospital in the country, at her husband’s place, Nancy tells me; and is very happy.”
“Very. Has a fine boy, and is completely reinstated. It’s a remarkable ending to the story, isn’t it? She met him at the front, you know, driving her ambulance; and he has twice as much in him as poor Eric Hayward.”
“Remarkable. Yet Meg’s a person who onlyneeds her chance. She’s the sort that always comes out on top.”
“Does it comfort her mother a little for all she’s suffered to see her on top?”
“It almost comically comforts her. All the same, Eleanor Chadwick has her depths. Nothing will ever comfort her for Palgrave’s death.”
“I understand that,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “Nothing could. How she must envy the happy mothers whose boys were killed at the front. To have one’s boy die in prison as a conscientious objector must be the bitterest thing the war has given any mother to bear.”
“He was a dear boy,” said Oldmeadow. “Heroically wrong-minded.” He could hardly bear to think of Palgrave.
“He wasn’t alone, you know,” said Mrs. Aldesey after a moment. Something was approaching that he would rather not have to speak of; a name he would so much rather not name. And, evading it, feebly, he said, “His mother got to him in time, I know.”
“Yes. But all the time. She went and lived near the prison. Adrienne Toner I mean.”
Her eyes were on him and he hoped that no readjustment of his features was visible. “Oh, yes. Nancy told me that,” he said.
“What’s become of her, Roger?” Mrs. Aldesey asked. “Since Charlie was killed the Lumleys have lived in the country and I hardly see them. I haven’t heard a word of her for years.”
He was keeping his eyes on her and he knew from her expression that he showed some strain or some distress.
“Nor have I. Nancy said that they hadn’t either. She went away, after Palgrave’s death. Disappeared completely.”
“Nancy told you, of course, about the money; the little fortune she gave Palgrave, so that he could leave it to his mother?”
“Oh, yes. Nancy wrote to me of that.”
“It was cleverly contrived, wasn’t it. They are quite tied up to it, aren’t they; whatever they may feel. No one could object to her giving a fortune to the boy she’d ruined. I admired that in her, I must confess; the way she managed it. And then her disappearance.”
“Very clever indeed,” said Oldmeadow. “All that remains for her to do now is to manage to get killed. And that’s easily managed. Perhaps she is killed.”
He did not intend that his voice should be emptier or dryer, yet Lydia looked at him with a closer attention.
“Barney and Nancy could get married then,” she said.
“Yes. Exactly. They could get married.”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it, Roger?”
“Want her to be killed, or them to be married?”
“Well, as you say, so many peoplearebeing killed. One more or less, if it’s in such a good cause as their marriage—”
“It’s certainly a good cause. But I don’t like the dilemma,” said Oldmeadow.
He knew from the way she looked at him, discreet and disguised as her recognition was, that he was hiding something from her. Casting about his mind, in the distress that took the form of confusion, hecould himself find nothing that he hid, or wished to hide, unless it was the end of Adrienne’s story as Barney’s wife. That wasn’t for him to show; ever; to anyone.
“Perhaps she’s gone back to America,” said Mrs. Aldesey presently, “California, you know. Or Chicago. She may very well be engaged in great enterprises out there that we never hear of. They’d be sure to be great, wouldn’t they.”
“I suppose they would.”
“You saw her once more, didn’t you, at the time you saw Palgrave,” Mrs. Aldesey went on. “Lady Lumley told me of that. And how kind you had been. Adrienne had spoken of it. You were sorry for them both, I suppose; for her as well as for him, in spite of everything. Or did she merely take it for granted that the kindness to him extended to her?”
“Not at all. It was for her too,” said Oldmeadow, staring a little and gathering together, after this lapse of time that seemed so immense, his memories of that other tea-table set up in the chaos: Palgrave’s tea-table on that distant day in Oxford. What was so confusing him was his consciousness that it hadn’t been the last time he had seen Adrienne. “I was as sorry for her as for him,” he went on. “Sorrier. There was so much more in her than I’d supposed. She was capable of intense suffering.”
“In losing her husband’s affections, you mean? You never suspected her of being inhuman, surely? Lady Lumley blamed poor Barney for all that sad story. But, even from her account, I could see his side very plainly.”
“Perhaps I did think her inhuman. At all events I thought her invulnerable.”
“Yes. I remember. With all her absurdity you thought she had great power.” Mrs. Aldesey looked at him thoughtfully. “And it was when you found she hadn’t that you could be sorry for her.”
“Not at all,” said Oldmeadow again. “I still think she has great power. People can have power and go to pieces.”
“Did she go to pieces? That day in Oxford? I can’t imagine her in pieces, you know.”
He had a feeling of drawing back; or of drawing Adrienne back. “In the sense of being so unhappy, so obviously unhappy, over Palgrave,” he said.
He saw that Lydia would have liked to go on questioning, as, of course, it would have been perfectly natural for her to do. Was not Adrienne Toner and her absurdity one of their pet themes? Yet she desisted. She desisted and it was because she felt some change in him; some shrinking and some pain. “Well, let’s hope that she is happy, now, or as happy as she can be, poor thing, doing great deeds in America,” she said. And she turned the talk back to civilization and its danger.
They talked a good deal about civilization during their last three days together. He wanted things, during these three days of mingled recovery and farewell, to be as happy as possible between him and his friend, for he knew that Lydia’s heart was heavy, for him and not for civilization. The front to which he was going was more real to her, because it was much nearer, and his peril was more real than during his absence in distant climes. He felt himself that the French front, at this special time, would probably make an end of him and, for the first time since their early friendship, he knew conjecture as to hisrelation with Lydia; wondered, if it had not been for Mr. Aldesey in New York, whether Lydia might have been in love with him, and realized, with a curious sense of anxiety and responsibility, that her friendship for him now was the closest tie in her life. The war might to her, too, mean irreparable loss. And he was sorry that it was so; sorry to think that the easy, happy intercourse had this hidden depth of latent suffering.
Lydia’s feeling, and its implications, became the clearer to him when, on their last evening together, she said to him suddenly: “Perhaps you’ll see her over there.”
He could not pretend not to know whom she meant, nor could he pretend to himself not to see that if it troubled Lydia that he should be sorry for Adrienne that could only be because she cared far more for him than he had ever guessed.
He said, as easily as he could manage it, for the pressure of his realizations made him feel a little queer: “Not if she’s in America.”
“Ah, but perhaps she’s come back from America,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “She’s a great traveller. What will you do with her if you do find her? Bring her back to Barney?”
“Hardly that,” he said. “There’d be no point in bringing her back to Barney, would there?”
“Well, then, what would you do with her?” Mrs. Aldesey smiled, as if with a return to their old light dealing with the theme, while, still in her nurse’s coiffe and dress, she leaned back against her chair.
“What would she do with me, rather, isn’t it?” he asked. And he, too, tried to be light.
“She’ll be mended then, you think? Able to do things to people again?”
“I’m not at all afraid of her, you know. She never did me any harm,” he said.
“Because you were as strong as she, you mean. She did other people harm, surely. You warned me once to keep away from her unless I wanted to lose my toes and fingers,” Mrs. Aldesey still smiled. “She does make people lose things, doesn’t she?”
“Well, she makes them gain things, too. Fortunes for instance. Perhaps if I find her, she’ll give me a fortune.”
“But that’s only when she’s ruined you,” she reminded him.
“And it’s she who’s ruined now,” he felt bound to remind her; no longer lightly.
Leaning back in her chair, her faded little face framed in white, Mrs. Aldesey looked at once younger yet more tired than he had ever seen her look and she sat for a little while silent; as if she had forgotten Adrienne Toner and were thinking only of their parting. But all her gaiety had fallen from her as she said at last: “I can be sorry for her, too; if she’s really ruined. If she still loves him when he has ceased to care for her. Does she, do you think?”
With the question he seemed to see a fire-lit room and lovers who had found each other and to smell wet roses. Lydia was coming too near; too near the other figure, outside the window, fallen back with outstretched arms against the roses. And again he felt himself softly, cautiously, disentangle the sleeve, the hair, felt himself draw Adrienne away into the darkness where the smell was now of wet ivy and where he could see only the shape of an accepting grief.
“How could I know?” he said. “She was very unhappy when I last saw her. But three years have passed and people can mend in three years.”
“Especially in America,” Mrs. Aldesey suggested. “It’s a wonderful place for mending. Let’s hope she’s there. Let’s hope that we shall never, any of us, ever hear of her again. That would be much the happiest thing, wouldn’t it?”
He was obliged to say that it would certainly be much the happiest thing; and he was too unhappy about Lydia to be able to feel angry with her. He knew how tired she must be when, for the first time in their long friendship, she must know that she was not pleasing him, yet not be able to help herself.