“‘Glad creature from the dew upspringingAnd through the sky your path upwinging!’
“‘Glad creature from the dew upspringingAnd through the sky your path upwinging!’
Up, up, pretty creature!”
Philip, twisting round under his father’s arm, burst into tears of rage, tore the book from his hand and struck him.
It had been a terrible moment, and Rosamund, reduced as she almost was to Philip’s condition, had never more admired her husband, who, turning only rather pale, had walked away, saying, “I think you’ll be sorry for that when you think it over, old fellow.” That he had been astonished, cut to the quick, she had seen, feeling it all for him at the moment of her deepest feeling for Philip.
“I’m not sorry! I’m not sorry!” Philip had sobbed, rushing to her arms and burying his head on her breast. “I’m not sorry! He’s stupid! stupid! stupid!”
“Hush, hush,” she had said—what a horrid moment it had been! “That is wrong and conceited of you, Philip. You must learn to take a little chaffing. You know how your father loves you.”
“It’s not conceited! It’s not conceited to care about what one tries to do. You know it’s not.You’renot stupid!” the boy had sobbed.
Alas, it had been only four years ago; only a year before the war! Even then, at nine, Philip had been old enough, when he recovered from his weeping, to know that he had hurt her most, had made things difficult for her; and he had been sorry about his father, too, going to him bravely with a tremulous, “Please forgive me, father.” “That’s all right, old boy,” Charlie had said. Itwasall right, too, in a sense. It left not a trace in the sweetness of Charlie’s nature. It was Philip who had been shaken, frightened to the very core, by what his own outburst had revealed to himself andto her. The boy would always have felt affection for his father; but he, too, would soon have protected him; he, too, would hardly miss him.
The moon had now risen far up out of the walnut branches, and flooded the garden with sorrowful brightness. Poor, poor Charlie! was that all it came to, then, for him? this deserted garden and a wife and children who hardly missed him? Why, was it not the very heart of his tragedy for her to see that they would be happier without him? “And hewasa dear,” she said to herself, remembering with an almost passionate determination kind, trustful looks and the happy love of fifteen years ago.
She had been standing still all this while, near the evening primroses; but now, with the great sigh that lifted her breast, she moved forward again, and a bird, disturbed in its rest, flew out from the thick tangle of honeysuckle at the entrance to the summer-house, startling her. As she stopped, her eyes drawn to the spot, she saw, suddenly, that a pale figure was sitting in the summer-house, closely shrunken to one side; hoping in its stillness,—that was apparent,—to remain undiscovered. Ever since she had entered the garden it must have been sitting there; and ever since she had entered the garden it must have been watching her. But why? How strange!
Dispelling a momentary qualm, she stooped her head under the honeysuckle and entered; and then, clearly visible, with her pale hair and face,—as pale, as evident as an evening’s primrose,—the girl sitting there, wide-eyed, revealed, with her identity, that haunting analogy of a little while ago. Of course, it came in a flash now, that was what they reminded her of. Long ago she hadthought—conceding them their most lovable association—that Pamela Braithwaite looked like an evening primrose.
“My dear Pamela,” she said, almost as gently as she would have said it to a somnambulist; for, like the flowers, again, she was sad, even uncanny; although Pamela’s uncanniness too,—sweet, homely creature,—could never be sinister. She put a hand upon her arm, for the girl had started to her feet.
“Oh—do forgive me, Mrs. Hayward!” Pamela gasped. Sad? It was more than that. She was broken, spent with weeping. “I didn’t know you were coming. I sit here sometimes in the evenings. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“My dear child, why should I mind? I’m thankful to you for coming to the sad little place. It’s much less lonely to think about, for you have always been so much of our life here.”
This, she knew, was an exaggeration; but she must be more than kind to such grief as this: she must find some comfort, if that were possible.
And to feel herself accepted, welcomed, did give comfort; for, sinking again on the seat, bending her face on her hands, Pamela sobbed, “Oh, how kind you are!”
“Poor child, poor, poor child!” said Rosamund. She was only five years older, but she felt as a mother might feel towards the stricken girl. She put an arm around her, murmuring, “Can you tell me what it is? Don’t cry so, dear Pamela.”
Pamela Braithwaite had been a girl of eighteen when they had come, in the first year of their marriage, to Crossfields. The Braithwaites lived a mile away, near the river, a large, affectionate, desultoryfamily, in a large, dilapidated house. Already Pamela mothered the younger brood, and mothered the widowed father as well—a retired tea-planter, who had brought from Ceylon some undefined but convenient complaint that enabled him to pass the rest of his days wrapped in a number of coats, eating very heartily, and, as he expressed it, “sitting about.” A peaceful, idle man, legs outstretched in sun or firelight, hat-brim turned down over his eyes (he had a curious way, even in the house, of almost always wearing his hat), pipe between his teeth; good-looking, too, tall and fair, like his daughters, and with a touch in his appearance, though not in his character, of amicable distinction.
Pamela, except for a brother already married and in Ceylon, was the eldest, with a long gap between her and the group of younger brothers, of whom Rosamund thought mainly as a reservoir of Boy Scouts until they had had to be thought of as a reservoir of volunteers. There were three or four younger sisters, too, some of whom had married and some of whom had gone forth into the world—always with an extreme light-heartedness and confidence—as companions or secretaries. These again were hardly individualized in Rosamund’s recollection, except for the fact that, since Pamela was always making blouses or trimming hats for them, she had become aware that it was Phyllis who wore pink and Marjory blue.
But whoever went, Pamela always stayed; and even when the war broke upon the world, with Frank, the Braithwaite baby, just old enough to enlist, and Phyllis and Marjory at once enrolling themselves as V.A.D.'s, Pamela remained rooted.Who, indeed, had she gone, would have taken care of Mr. Braithwaite, and of the brothers and sisters home on leave, and of the garden earnestly dedicated to potatoes, or the small family of Ceylon nephews and nieces deposited continually in her charge by their parents?
Poor little Pamela! She had had a burdened life; the assiduities of maternity and none of its initial romance. With her large, clear eyes, very far apart, she had always a wistful look; but it was that of a child watching a game and waiting for its turn to come in, and no creature could have given less the impression of weariness or routine. For she had remained, even at thirty-three, the merely bigger sister; an atmosphere of schoolroom tea and the nurture of rabbits and guinea-pigs still hanging about her; her resource and cheerfulness seeming concerned always with the organizing of games, the care of pets, and the soothing of unimportant distresses. Tall, in her scant tweed skirts, her much-repaired white blouse, her slender feet laced into heavy boots, gardening gloves on her hands, so Rosamund had last seen her, a year ago, just before Charlie had been killed, when she had straightened herself from moulding potatoes in the lawn borders and had come forward with her pretty smile to greet her visitor and take her in to tea. Frank had been killed since then, as well as Charlie, but at that time, for both households, the war was splendid adventure rather than sorrow.
Mr. Braithwaite, in the sunny, shabby drawing-room, had stumbled up among his wrappings, to point out to her his accurate flags, advancing or retreating on the many maps that were pinned upon the walls. Frank’s last letter had been readto her, and Dick’s and Eustace’s; and Pamela had come in and out, helping the maid with the tea (the Braithwaite maids were always as cheerful and desultory as the family, and Rosamund never remembered seeing one of them who had not her cap askew or her cuffs untied), standing to butter the bread herself, the side of the loaf before cutting the slice, after her old schoolroom fashion; her discreet yet generous use of the butter—the crust covered to a nicety and no lumps on the crumb—seeming to express her, as did the pouring out of the excellent tea, drawn to a point and never over, and the pleasant, capacious cups with their gilt rims and the immersed rose which, as one drank, discovered itself at the bottom.
A sweet, old-fashioned, homely creature; like the evening primroses; like them, obliterated, unnoticed in daylight; and like them now, becoming visible, becoming personal, even becoming tragic at this nocturnal hour; for was this really Pamela, sweet, prosaic Pamela, sobbing so broken-heartedly beside her? How meagre, intellectual, and unsubstantial her own grief seemed to Rosamund as she listened, almost aghast, her arm about Pamela’s shoulders; and her instinct told her: “It is a man. It is some one she loves—not Frank, but some one she loves far more—who is dead. It is something final and fatal that has broken her down like this.” And aloud she repeated: “Can you tell me, Pamela dear? Please try to tell me. It may help you to tell.” Her own heart was shaken and tears were in her own eyes.
Between her sobs Pamela answered,“I love him—I love him so much. He is dead. And sometimes I can’t bear it.”
Rosamund had never heard of a love-affair. But these years of war had done many things, had found out even the hidden Pamelas.
“I didn’t know.—My poor child!—I never heard. Were you engaged?”
She had Pamela’s ringless hand in hers.
“No! No! It wasn’t that. No—I’ve never had any one like that. No one ever knew. He never knew.” Pamela lifted her head. Her face seemed now only a message emerging from the darkness; shadowed light upon the shadow, it was expression rather than form. “May I tell you?” she said. “Can you forgive my telling you—here and now,—and to-night, when you’ve come to be with him? It was Mr. Hayward I loved. I’ve always loved him. He has been all my life. Ever since you first came here to live.”
Rosamund gazed at her, and through all her astonishment there ran an undertone of accomplished presage. Yes, that was it, of course. Had she not been feeling it, seeking it all the evening?—or had it not been seeking her? Here it was, then, the lacking emptiness. Desolate voids seemed to open upon her in Pamela’s shadowy eyes. She tightly held the ringless hand and felt, presently, that she pressed it against her heart where something pierced her. Was it pity for Pamela? or for Charlie? This was his; had always been his. And Pamela, who had had nothing, had lost everything. “My dear!” she murmured.
“Oh, how kind you are!” said Pamela. She sat quiet, looking down at their two hands held against Rosamund’s heart. And with all the austerity of her grief she had never been more childlike in Rosamund’s eyes. Like a child, once the barriers ofshyness were down and trust established, she would confide everything.
Rosamund knew how it must help her to confide. “Tell me if you will,” she said. “I am glad you loved him, if it has not hurt you too much. You understand, don’t you, that I must be glad—for him?”
“Yes, oh, yes; I understand. How beautiful of you to see it all!—Even though it’s so little, it is his; something he did; and so you must care. But I don’t think there’s much to tell; nothing about him that you don’t know.”
“About you, then. About what he was to you.”
“That would simply be my whole life,” said Pamela. “It’s so wonderful of you to understand and not to blame me. So many people would have thought it wrong; but it came before I knew what it was going to be, and I never can feel that it was wrong. He never knew. And even if he had, it couldn’t have made any difference. It must be because of that that I can tell you. If you hadn’t been so happy, if it hadn’t been so perfect—for you and him—I don’t think that I could have told. I should just have rushed away when you came in and hidden from you.”
“Why?” asked Rosamund after a moment. She heard something in her own voice that Pamela would not hear.
“I don’t quite know why,” said Pamela; “but don’t you feel it too? Perhaps if it hadn’t been so perfect, even my little outside love might have hurt you—or troubled you—to hear about. But I see now that you are the only person in the world who could care to hear. It is a comfort to tell you. I am so glad you came.” Pamela turned her eyesupon her and it was almost with her smile. “When I see you like this I can believe that he is here, listening with you, and sorry for me, too.”
How like an evening primrose she was! Rosamund could see her clearly now: the candid oval of the face, the eyes, the innocent, child forehead with thick, fair hair falling across it.
“Yes. Go on,” she said, smiling back.
She was not worthy of Pamela, and poor Charlie was not worthy of her; but no human being is worthy of a flower. And though so innocent, she was not stupid; subtlety like a fragrance was about her as she said, “You can comfort me because you have so much to comfort with.”
“So much grief, or so much remembered happiness?”
“They go together, don’t they?” said Pamela. “Every sort of fulness. But I needn’t try to get it clear. You understand. I always thought that perhaps people who had fulness couldn’t; now I see that I was mistaken.”
“Have you been very unhappy, dear child?”
"Until now? While he was here? Oh, no, I have been lonely. Even before he came, even though my life was so crowded, it was rather lonely. I never had any one of my own, for myself. But afterwards, even if I felt lonely, I was happy. At least, after just at first. Because, just at first, it was miserable, for I couldn’t help longing to see him more and to have him like me more, and that made me understand that I was in love with him, and I was frightened. I can’t explain clearly about it, even to myself. But I was very, very unhappy. Perhaps you remember the time when I was twenty, and got so run down, and they sent me toGermany to my old governess—the only time I ever went away from home, out of England. It was a miserable time. I tried not to think of him and not to care. But I had to come back, and he was there, and I knew I couldn’t stop caring, and that all I could do about it was to try to be better because of him,—you know,—and make people happier, and not think of myself, but of him and them. And everything changed after that. I was never frightened any more, and though perhaps it wasn’t exactly happiness, it was, sometimes, I believe, almost better. I can’t explain it, but what I mean is in some poetry. I never cared much about poetry till he came. Then I seemed to understand things I’d never understood before, and to feel everything that was beautiful.“You remember how dear he was to us all—to the boys and me. I always shared in everything they did. Every bit of this country is full of him; I could never bear to go away and leave it. I want always to stay here till I die.—Flowers and birds—wasn’t he wonderful about them? And our walks in the woods! He saw everything, and made us see it. I never woke in the morning without thinking, Will he come to-day? What will he say and do? I was never tired of watching him and listening to him. All his little ways—you know. When I pleased him,—sometimes I saw the bird we were watching for first, or caught my trout well,—it was a red-letter day. And in big things—to feel I should have pleased him if he’d known. It was he who helped me in every way, without knowing it. And I took more and more joy in you. At first I had felt dreadfully shy with you—and afraid of you. You were so clever, with all your books and music and friends, and you didn’t seem to need anything. But afterwards you were so kind, that, though I was always shy, I was not frightened any longer. I used to think about you so much, and imagine what he felt about you—and you about him.—You won’t mind my saying it, I know. Perhaps you remember the way I used so often, in the evenings, to walk past with the children, and say good-night over the wall. That was to see you and him walking together. You were so beautiful! You are far and far away the most beautiful person I’ve ever known. I always noticed everything you wore, and how your hair was done. I was glad when you took it down from the knot and had it all at the back, as you do now. And the lovely pale blue dress, with the little flounces—do you remember?—a summer dress of lawn. I did love that. And the white linen coats and skirts, and the big white hat with the lemon-coloured bow. Your very shoes—those grey ones you always had, with the low heels and little silver buckles. No one had such lovely clothes. And the way you poured out tea and looked across the table at one. Always like a beautiful muse—you don’t mind my saying it?—a little above everything, and apart, and quietly looking on.—How I understood what he felt for you! I felt it, too, I think, with him.”
Yes, dear flower and child, she had: offering to Charlie that last tribute of a woman’s worship, the imaginative love of the woman he loves; cherishing the cruelly sweet closeness of that piercing community. How she had idealized them both. How she had idealized Charlie’s love. Charlie had never seen her like this. Charlie had never dreamed of her as a muse, above, apart, and quietly watching.Why, with Pamela’s Charlie she herself could almost have been in love!
“What did you talk about, you and he,” she asked, “when you were together?” Their sylvan life, Pamela’s and Charlie’s, was almost as unknown to her as that of the birds they watched. She had almost a soft small hope that perhaps Pamela could show her something she had missed. “Did you ever talk about poetry, for instance?”
“No; never about things like that,” Pamela answered. “He talked more to the boys than to me; he talked to us all together—about what we were doing. But I used to love listening to him when he came and talked to father. Politics, you know; and the way things ought to be done. He was a great deal discouraged, you remember, by the way theywerebeing done. All those unjust taxes, you know. He wanted, he used always to say, togiveto the poor himself; helovedtaking care of them. But he hated that his money should be taken from him like that, against his will. And he always, always foresaw the war; always knew that Germany was plotting, and how England swarmed with spies. He thought we ought to have declared war upon her long ago and struck first.—I’m rather glad we didn’t, aren’t you? because then, in a way, we should have been in the wrong rather than they; but of course he felt it as a statesman, not like an ignorant woman.—You think Germany plotted, too?”
“Yes, oh, yes.” How glad Rosamund was to be able to think it, to be able, here, with a clear conscience, to remember that, on the theme of Germany’s craft and crime, she and Charlie had thought quite sufficiently alike.“But I am with you about not striking first.”
“Are you really?” There was surprise in Pamela’s voice. She did not dwell on the slight perplexity. “Of course, he always worsted father if he disagreed. It was rather wicked of me, but I couldn’t help enjoying seeing father worsted. He’d never thought things out, as Mr. Hayward had. But that’s what he talked about—things like that—and you.”
“Me?” Rosamund’s voice was gentle, meditative—her old voice of the encounters with Charlie. How she could hear him through all Pamela’s candid recitative!
"He was always thinking about you. ‘My wife says so and so. My wife agrees with me about it. I brought my wife last night to see it as I do.’ Oh, you were with him in everything! It was so beautiful to see and hear! I used to imagine that the Brownings were like that—after I read their lives. He was a sort of poet, wasn’t he? Any one so loving and so happy is a sort of poet—even if they don’t write poetry. Down in the meadows one day, when we were watching lapwings, he and I and the boys,—he wanted to show us a nest; you know how difficult they are to find,—you passed up on the hillside, with Philip and Giles. We could see you against the larchwood, they in their holland smocks and you in white, with the white-and-yellow hat. I shall never forget the way he stood up and smiled, his eyes following you. 'There’s Rosamund and the progeny,' he said.—You know the dear, funny way he had of saying things."
Yes—she knew it. Yet tears had risen to Rosamund’s eyes. Dear old Charlie; dear, old, tiresome Charlie! The tears had come as she saw him standing to look after her and his boys; but there wasnothing more, nothing that she could give to Pamela, not one crumb of enrichment from what Pamela believed to be her great store. Pamela had seen all—and more than all—that there was to see.
In her own silence now she was aware of a growing oppression. She was too silent, even for one mute from the depth and sacredness of memory. Might not such silence seem to reprove Pamela’s flooding confidence? She struggled with her thoughts. “The lapwings?” she heard herself murmuring. “I remember his showing me a nest. How he loved birds and how much he knew about them! Weren’t you with us on the day we put up all the nesting-boxes here? Do you remember how he planned for the placing of each one, each bird to have its own appropriate domain? It was a lovely day, in very early spring.”
“Oh—doyou remember that?” How Pamela craved the crumb was shown by her lightened face; it was almost happy, as it turned to Rosamund, with its sense of recovered treasures. "Very early spring—March. Snowdrops were up over there,—and there,—and there were daffodils at the foot of the wall. You were in blue: a frieze coat and skirt of Japanese blue, with a grey silk scarf and a little soft grey hat with a blue wing in it; and you said,—you were standing just over there, near the pond,—‘We can always count on tits.’—But you did get robins, too, and thrushes in the big boxes; and then the splendid year when the nut-hatches came to the box down in the orchard. And you were tying up one box, but it was too high and he came and did it for you. I can see you both so plainly, your hands stretching up against the sky.Tall as you are he was taller; his head seemed to tower up into the branches. Such a blue sky it was! And afterwards we had tea in the drawing-room, and the tea wasn’t strong enough for him, and you liked China and he Indian tea. And you teased him and said that you had always to make him the little brown pot all for himself. He said, ‘Tea never tastes so right as out of a brown pot.’ There were white tulips growing in a bowl on the tea-table. And then you played to us. And you sang—‘I need no star in heaven to guide me.’—He was so fond of that. Oh, do you remember it all, too?"
All—all. Rosamund, though her tears fell, felt her cheek flushing in the darkness. How often he had asked for "I need no star in heaven to guide me"! How often she had sung it to him, rejoicing so soon, while she threw the proper tumultuous fervour that Charlie loved into the foolish air, in the atoning thought that already Philip’s favourite was “Der Nussbaum” and that even little Giles asked for “the sheep song,” the bleak, beautiful old Scottish strain: “Ca' the yowes to the knowes,” with its sweetest drop to “my bonnie dearie.” “Oh—give us something cheerful!” Charlie would exclaim after it.
“I remember it all, dear,” she answered; and there was silence for a while.
“How do you bear it?” Pamela whispered suddenly.
The hour, the stillness, the hands that held her, drew her past the last barrier. Her broken heart yearned for the comfort that the greater loss alone could give. What was the strength that enabled his wife to sit there so quietly, so gently, so full of peace and pity?
Rosamund felt herself faltering, stumbling, as she heard the inevitable question, and knew, as it came, that even Pamela’s heavenly blindness might not protect her, unless she could be very careful, from horrid loss or suspicion. To touch with a breath of her daylight reality that silver world of recollection would be to desecrate. Could she hold her breath and tread softly while she answered? Yes, surely. Surely she, who had hidden through all the years from Charlie, could hide from Pamela, although Pamela already was nearer than Charlie and knew her better than he had ever done. All the old strength and resource welled up in her, protecting this lovely thing, as, after the long moment, not looking at Pamela, but into Charlie’s garden, she found the right answer.
“You see, dear, it is so different with me. You have only your memories. I have the boys—his boys—to live for.”
It was right. It was the only answer. She heard Pamela’s long, soft breaths, full of a gentle awe, and felt her hand more tightly clasped. Once the right step was taken, it was easier to go on:
"I want to tell you why I am so glad to have found you here, Pamela dear. You’ll understand, I think, when I say that motherhood lives in the present and future, and is almost cruel, cruel to everything not itself, for it forgets the past in the present. Do you see,"—she found the beautiful untruth,—“he is so much in them for me, that I might almost forget him in them—forget to mourn him, as one would if they were not there. So do you see why it comforts me to know that, while I must go on into the future with them, you will be keeping him here and remembering?”
She could look at Pamela now, in safety, and she turned to her, finding rapt eyes upon her.
“Come here often, won’t you, when I’m away as well as when I’m here. We must make it all look again as it did when he was with us—flowers and trees and bird-boxes. You will help me in it all and you will think of him here and love him. I know what happiness you meant to him—more than he was aware of. You were a beautiful part of his life. You say you were always, for him, only together, with the boys. That is only partly true. He used often to speak of you to me, the little passing things people say of any one they are very fond of and take for granted. He appreciated you and counted upon you. I came here so sad, Pamela, so burdened. I’ve never been sadder in my life than I was to-night as I walked here. And you have lifted it all. It makes all the difference to know that you are here, in his garden, remembering him. More difference than I can say.”
It was an unutterable gratitude that, with her tears, with love and pity and reverence, welled up in her, seeing what Pamela had done. The garden was no longer empty, and Charlie not forgotten. In the night of his death and disappearance this flower had become visible. Always, when she thought of him, she would think of evening primroses and of Pamela, so that it would be with tenderness, with the understanding, homely, unexacting, consecrating, that Pamela gave; Pamela herself becoming a gift from Charlie; emerging from the darkness, evident and beautiful,—almost another child whose future she must carry in her heart; though the only gift she could give her now, in return for all that she had given, was the full and free possessionof the past, where, outside the garden wall, she had been a wistful onlooker. She felt that she opened the gate, drew Pamela in, and put into her keeping all the keys that had weighed so heavily in her unfitted hands.
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“WHAT you need is a complete change, and quiet,” said his cousin Dorothy.
Guy, indeed, in spite of his efforts to keep up appearances, was a dismal figure. He had been passing the teacups and the bread and butter, enduring all the jests about sugar-rations and margarine, and enduring, which was so much worse, the complacencies over the approaching end of the war. His haggard face, narrow-jawed and high-foreheaded, expressed this endurance rather than any social amenity, and he was aware that Aunt Emily could hardly feel that the presence of her poet and soldier nephew added much to her tea-party. Indeed, the chattering, cheerful women affected his nerves almost as painfully as did the sound of the motor-buses when—every day it happened—he stopped on the curb, after leaving his office in Whitehall, and wondered how long it would take him to summon courage to cross the street. He felt, then, like breaking down and crying; and he felt like it now when they said, “Isn’t it alltoosplendid!”
Cousin Dorothy was as chattering and as cheerfulas the rest of them, and she had every reason to be, he remembered, with Tom, herfiancé, ensconced in Paris, safe after all his perils. Dorothy, though like everybody else she had worked hard during the war, had seen nothing and lost nothing. And she had never had any imagination. All the same, he was thankful when she rescued him from the woman who would talk to him idiotically about his poetry (she evidently hadn’t understood a word of it), and took him into a quiet nook near the piano.
It might, then, have been mere consanguinity, for he had never before found intimacy possible where Dorothy was concerned; or it might have been a symptom of his state (his being at Aunt Emily’s tea-party at all was that!); but, at all events after admitting that Mrs. Dickson had been boring him, he found himself presently confessing his terrors about the motor-buses, his terror of the dark, his sleeplessness and general disintegration. His nervous laugh was a concession to Dorothy’s possible misunderstanding; but as he went on, he felt himself almost loving her for the matter-of-factness she infused into her sympathy. After all, even good old Dorothy wasn’t stupid enough to suspect him of cowardice; and although, from a military point of view, he had made such a mess of it (invalided home again and again on account of digestive complaints, and finally, last spring, transferred to his small official post in London), to any one, really, who had at all followed his career, it would be apparent that no one could have stuck harder to the loathly job. He had felt it that, and only that, even while, prompted by pride, he had made his effort to enlist, in the first months of the war. It had beenwith a deep relief that he had found himself at once rejected and free to stay behind, free to serve humanity with his gift rather than with his inefficiency; for he took his poetic vocation with a youthful seriousness. And when, later on, through one of the blunders of medical examinations, he was drawn into the net of conscription, no one could have denied that he marched off to the shambles with unflinching readiness.
Dorothy, he saw, took courage all along for granted: “It’s simply a case of shell-shock,” she said, as if it were her daily fare; “you’re queer and jumpy, and you can’t stand noise. It’s quite like Tommy.”
He couldn’t associate Tommy, short-nosed, round-headed, red-eared Tommy, with anything of the sort, and said so in some resentment. But Dorothy assured him that for some months—just a year ago—Tommy had been at home on sick leave, and really bad enough for anything. “He suffered in every way just as you do.”
Guy was quite sure he hadn’t, but he did not want to argue about it. For nothing in the world would he have defined to Dorothy what he really suffered.
“It’s country air you need; country food and country quiet,” Dorothy went on. “Youcanget away?”
“Oh, yes; I can get away all right. Old Forsyth is most decent about it. He was telling me this morning that I ought to take a month.”
“I wonder if Mrs. Baldwin could have you at Thatches,” Dorothy mused. “Tommy got well directly.”
“Mrs. Baldwin?” His voice, he knew, expressedan unflattering scepticism, but he couldn’t help it. “Is she at home—an institution?” He saw Mrs. Baldwin, hatefully tactful, in a Red Cross uniform. “No, thank you, my dear.”
“Of course not. What do you take me for?” Dorothy kept her competent eyes upon him. “It’s not even a P.G. place—at all events, not a regular one, though of course you do pay for your keep. She has very narrow means and takes friends sometimes, and, since the war, it’s just happened—by people telling each other, as I’m telling you—to be shell-shock cases rather particularly. It’s a lovely country, and a dear, quaint little cottage, and she does you most awfully well, Tommy said.”
“I don’t like the idea of settling down like that on a stranger.”
"But she wouldn’t be a stranger. You’d go through me, and I feel as if I knew her already through Tommy. He said he was at home at once. ‘Cosy,’was how he expressed it. And you get honey on your bread at tea andcream in your coffee at breakfast, and all sorts of delightful thingsen casserole, that she cooks with her own hands, quite equal, Tommy said, to the French. And, Tommy knows,now, you see."
“It’s Mrs. Baldwin herself who frightens me. She frightens me more than the motor-buses in Whitehall.”“That’s just what she won’t do. She’s perfectly sweet. Cosy. Middle-aged. A widow. Her nice old father lives with her, and Tommy liked him so much, too. You help her to garden, and with the bees, you know. And the old father plays chess with you in the evenings. There’s a stream near by where you can fish if you want to. It’s late for that, of course; but Tommy got some quite good sport; he was there at just this time of year. And he said that it was most awfully jolly country, and that the meadows all about were full of autumn crocuses.”
“Autumn crocuses? In the fields? I’ve never seen them wild.”
“They do grow wild, though, in some parts of England. They are wild there. Tommy particularly wrote about them. He said one walked down to the stream among the autumn crocuses.”
Dorothy was baiting her hook very prettily, and he gloomily smiled his recognition of it. “They do sound attractive,” he owned. He hadn’t imagined Tom a man to notice crocuses, and he was the more inclined to trust his good impressions further. After all, apart from Mrs. Baldwin and her father, the country, with honey, cream, and autumn crocuses, was a happy combination, if he had been in condition for feeling anything happy.
What would Dorothy have thought of him, could she have known that, while they talked, her rosy, bonnie face kept constantly, before his haunted eyes, dissolving into a skull? Faces had a way of doing this with him since his last encounter with the war in the spring. And all the people talking in the room squeaked and gibbered. How could they go on talking? How could they go on living—after what had happened? How could he? The familiar nausea rose in him even as he forced himself to smile and say, “Well, could she have me—Mrs. Baldwin?”
He could not have made an effort to find a place for himself. Such efforts, he felt sure, would have landed him at some God-forsaken farmhousemiles from the station, where the beds were damp and the meat tough; or, even worse, at a Bournemouth hotel, amid orchestras and people who made a point of dressing for dinner. But, if some one found it for him, he would let himself be pushed off.
“I’m sure she could,” said Dorothy with conviction. “I have her address and I’ll write to-night and tell her all about you: that you’re a rising poet, and that your friends and relations will besograteful if she’ll do for you what she did for Tommy.”
He had an ironic glance for her “rising.” His relations—and Aunt Emily and her brood were the nearest left to him—had never in the least taken in his standing or realized that he was, among people who knew, looked upon as completely risen. At the same time, sunken was what he felt himself; drowned deep; too deep, he sometimes thought, for recovery. His last little volume had been like a final fight for breath. He had written most of it over there, after Ronnie’s death and before his own decisive breakdown, and he knew it a result as much of his malady as of his war experience.
He wondered now, anew, whether these people had really read the poems. If they had, it only showed how impervious to reality they must remain. And there had actually been one, written after one of his leaves, called “Eating Bread-and-Butter,” that should indeed have embarrassed them, had they remembered it, inviting them to eat it with him in a trench with unburied comrades lying in No-Man’s Land before them. His head, as he thought of that,—from unburied comrades passing to unburied friends,—gave a nervous,backward jerk, for he had told himself before that hemuststop thinking in certain directions; and indeed the poems had helped to exorcise the obsession at the time when they had been written.
All the same, it was very strange—such a poet at such a tea-party. He had plunged into Aunt Emily’s tea-party as he plunged nowadays into anything that presented itself as offering distraction. And now, as he said, “Well, if you’ll put it through, I’ll go, and be very grateful to you,” he felt that he was making another plunge into Mrs. Baldwin’s cottage.
ITwas a pretty cottage he found, as, on the September evening, his station fly drew up at the wicket-gate. They had come a long way from the station, and, after leaving a small village, the winding lane, too, had seemed long. He saw, nevertheless, as he alighted, that the rustic building, old stones below and modern thatch above, could not be far from the central group of which it formed an adjunct; for it had been contrived, by devices dear to the heart of the week-ender, from two or three labourers' cottages thrown into one and covered all over with the capacious and brooding thatch. “Quaint,” Dorothy’s really inevitable word, altogether expressed it, from the box hedges that ran on either side of the flagged path, to the pale yellow hollyhocks beside the door.
A round-cheeked country girl, neatly capped and aproned, opened the door on a square, rush-matted hall; and beyond that he saw a room full of the sunset, where a table was being laid and from which Mrs. Baldwin came out to greet him.
She was not tall, and had thick, closely bound braids. He had dreaded finding himself at once dealt with as a case; but Mrs. Baldwin’s manner was not even that of one accustomed to paying guests. Her murmur of welcome, her questions about his journey, her mild directions as she led him up to his room, "Be careful at this landing, the level of the floor goes up and the beam comes down so low,"—were rather those of a shy and entirely unprofessional hostess.
He thought, as soon as he took in his room, with itsvoile-de-Gèneshangings and dear old furniture, that he pleased her by saying, “What a delicious room!” and even more when, on going to the wide, low, mullioned window, its panes open to the west, he added, “And what a delicious view!” There were meadows and tall hedgerow elms, and, running in a tranquil band of brightness, the stream that reflected the sky.
She did not say that she was glad he liked it, but her very gentle smile at the welcome it all made for him was part of the welcome. What she did say was, with the little air of shy preoccupation, while she wrung her finger-tips together, those of one hand in those of the other, “I think the water’s very hot. I have a rather young little maid. You’ll tell me if you want anything. Are three blankets and the down quilt enough? The nights are rather cold already.”
He said that three would be perfect, secure, from his glance at the deep, comely bed, that they would be beautifully thick and fleecy.
“Then you’ll come down to us when you are ready.” She stood in the door to look round again.“Matches here, you see; biscuits in the little earthenware box; and the spirit-lamp is in case you should wake in the night—you could make yourself a cup of cocoa? Everything is there—cocoa, milk, and sugar. It usually sends one off again directly.”
It was all the slightly shy hostess rather than the businesslike soother and sustainer; and, no, it wasn’t a bit cosy. He repudiated that word indignantly, while he washed—the waterwasvery hot, admirably hot; there was a complacency about cosy, and Mrs. Baldwin had no complacency, though she was, for all her shyness and the unconscious gestures of physical nervousness, composed. Her hands, he remembered, recalling their little trick,—he had noticed it in the hall,—were like a child’s; not the hands of a practical housewife. Yet, from the look of that bed (yes, thank heaven, a box-spring mattress!), from the heat of the water, and, above all, the deft and accessible grouping of the spirit-lamp and its adjuncts, she proved that she knew how to make one comfortable.
There were the meadows and—going again to the window, he wondered leaning out,—could he see the autumn crocuses? Yes, surely; even at this evening hour his eyes distinguished the pale yet delicately purpling tint that streaked the pastoral verdure. What a delicious place, indeed! He stood, absorbed in looking out, until the maid came to say that supper would be ready in five minutes.
The long room, the living-room,—for it combined, he saw, all social functions,—also faced the meadows at the back of the house, and the primrose coloured sunset still filled it as he entered. Mrs. Baldwin was busying herself with the table, and an old gentleman with a very long white beard rose, with much dignity, from the grandfather’s chairnear a window-seat. Mr. Haseltine, so his daughter named him, had more the air of seeing the visitor as a P.G., perhaps even as a shell-shock patient; but he was a nice old man, Guy felt, although his beard was too long. He wore a brown velveteen jacket, and Guy surmised that he might have been a writer or scholar of some not very significant sort.
“Yes, we think ours a very favored nook indeed,” he said, as Guy again praised the prospect. “Yes; three cottages. Very happily contrived, is it not? There is a clever builder in the next town. He kept the old fireplace, you see; that end was a kitchen and the beams are all the old ones. Three gardens, too, thrown into one; but that is entirely my daughter’s creation. Pig-styes used to be in that corner.”
Guy looked out at the squares of colour, the low beds of mignonette, the phloxes, larkspurs, and the late sweet-peas a screen of stained-glass tints against the sky. Where the pig-styes had been was a little thatched summer-house with rustic seat and table. The bee-hives were just outside the hedge, at an angle of the meadow. Mr. Haseltine continued to talk while Mrs. Baldwin and the maid came in and out, carrying tea and eggs and covered dishes.
“I hope you don’t mind high tea,” she said. “It seems to go with our life here.”
He felt that high tea was his favourite meal. There was a big white earthenware bowl on the table, filled with sweet-peas. “Where do you get the old-fashioned colours?” he asked her. “I thought the growers had extirpated them; one sees only the long-stemmed ones nowadays, with the tiresome artistic shades.”
He pleased her again, he felt sure, and she toldhim that she always saved the seed, liking the old bright colours better, too.
He was glad that he had come, although Mr. Haseltine’s beard was too long and he feared that he would prove talkative in the worst way, the deliberate and retaining way. He liked the smell of everything,—a mingling of sweet-peas, rush-matting, and China tea,—and the look of everything; good, unpretentious old oak furniture, fresh, if faded, chintzes, and book-lined walls; and he presently liked the taste of everything too.
“I feel already as if I should sleep to-night,” he said to Mrs. Baldwin.
She sat behind the tea-urn a little distracted, if anything so mild could be called distraction, by the plunging movements of the little maid as she moved about the table. “That will do nicely, Cathy,” she said. “We can manage now. You can bring in some more hot water if I ring.—Oh, I do hope you’ll sleep. People usually sleep here.”
She was hardly middle-aged, though, after Dorothy’s bright browns and pinks, Tommy might well have thought her so. Many years older than Dorothy, of course, yet how many he could not in the least compute. There was an agelessness, with something tough and solid, about her; she was as little slender as she was stout; she might, with her neutral tints,—hair, skin, dress,—have looked almost the same at sixty as she did now. She wasn’t pale, or sallow, or sunburned; yet her complexion seemed so to go with her hair that the whole head might have been carved in some pleasantly tinted stone. Only her eyes gave any depth of difference; gentle eyes, like a grey-blue breadth of evening. She had a broad, short face and broad,beautifully drawn lips, and looked almost mysteriously innocent.
Guy took her in to this extent, swift as he was at taking people in, and sensitive as he was to what he found. He felt sure—and the depth of comfort it gave him made him aware of all the reluctances Dorothy’s decision had overborne—that she hadn’t the ghost of a method or of a theory. Shell-shock people had merely happened to come and had happened to get well quickly. He even gathered, as the peaceful evening wore on,—Cathy clearing, placid lamps lighted, the windows still left open to the twilight—that she didn’t really think very much about her cases, in so far as they were cases and not guests. Having done her best in the way of blankets, hot water, and spirit-kettles, and seen them settled down into the life she had made for herself,—and not at all for them,—she went her own way, irresponsible and unpreoccupied.
To-night she didn’t attempt to entertain him. It was Mr. Haseltine, at supper, who kept up the conversation, and with the air of always keeping it up, with even the air, Guy imagined once or twice, of feeling it specially his part to make amends, in that sort of resource, for his dear daughter’s deficiency. She was, Guy saw, very much his dear daughter; but he felt sure that it had never entered the old gentleman’s head that any one would find her interesting when he himself was there.
After supper she was occupied for a little while at her desk, adding up figures, it appeared, in house-books; for she came to her father and asked him if he would do a column for her. “It has come out differently three times with me,” she confessed, but without ruefulness.“I’m so dull at my accounts!”
Guy, as Mr. Haseltine fumbled for his large tortoise-shell eyeglasses, offered to help her, and then came over and sat beside the desk and did the rest of the sums for her. She was tidying up for the month, she told him, and always found it rather confusing. “It’s having to put the pennies, which are twelves, into pounds, which are twenties, isn’t it?” she said, and thanked him so much.
But this could hardly be called entertaining him, nor could it, when he accompanied her across the lane in the now deepening dusk, to shut up her fowls. After that, there was the game of chess, during which Mrs. Baldwin absented herself a good deal, helping Cathy, Guy imagined, with the beds and hot-water bottles; and at nine-thirty they all lighted their candles and went upstairs.
Bedtime had been, for many months, his most dreaded moment. The door shut him in and shut away the last chance of alleviation. There was nothing for it but to stretch himself haggardly on his couch and cling to every detail in the day’s events, or in the morrow’s prospects, that might preserve him from the past. To fightnotto remember was a losing game, and filled one’s brain with the white flame of insomnia. He had found that it was when, exhausted by the fruitless effort, he suffered the waiting vultures to settle upon him, abandoned himself to the beaks and talons, that, through the sheer passivity of anguish, oblivion most often came.
To-night, from the habit of it, his mind braced itself as he came into the room, and he was aware, as he had been for nearly a year now, that Ronnie’s face was waiting, as it were, on the outskirts of consciousness, to seize upon him. But, after he hadlighted the candles on his dressing-table and the candles on the mantelpiece, taken off his coat, and started undressing, he found that his thoughts, quite effortlessly, were engaged with his new surroundings, old Mr. Haseltine’s beard and eyeglasses occupying them, and the clucking noise he made in drinking the glass of hot ginger and water that had been brought to them on a tray while they played; Mrs. Baldwin’s accounts, her fowls, and the colour of her eyes. He decided that the colour was Wedgwood, or perhaps periwinkle blue—some very dense, quiet colour.
As he moved about the room, this protective interest came to him from the little objects he made acquaintance with: the round Venetian box, dim gilt and blue and red, on the chest of drawers in which he found a handful of tiny shells—shells, no doubt, that Mrs. Baldwin had picked up during a seaside outing; the faded old blue leather blotter on the writing-table, marked E. H., which had probably been hers since maiden days (and did E stand for Ethel or Edith or Ellen?); the pretty lettering in fine black script of the writing-paper so pleasantly stacked; the dear old Dutch coffee-pot and jug on the mantelpiece, and the bowl of mignonette that she, of course, had arranged. He sank his face into its fragrance, and peace seemed breathed upon him from the flowers.
He was wondering, as he got into bed, with a glance, before he blew out the candle, at the birds and branches, the whites and blacks and roses of thevoile-de-Gènes, whether he would find the autumn crocuses open in the meadows next morning; it had looked like the evening of another fine day. Then, the candle out, his thoughts, for a littlewhile, were tangled in the magical dreamland of thevoile-de-Gènes, and the breath of the mignonette seemed to lie upon his eyelids with a soft compulsion to peace, until, all thought sliding suddenly away, he dropped into delicious slumber.
HTfound the crocuses open, before breakfast. Only Cathy was in the living-room, sweeping, when he crossed it, though he thought he heard Mrs. Baldwin in the kitchen. A robin was singing on a spray over the summer-house. The sky arched pale and high; and though there was no mist in the air, its softness made him think of milk.
From the garden he passed into the meadows, and, almost at once, saw, everywhere, the fragile, purple flowers about him, if purple were not too rich a word for their clear, cold tint. Lower down, near the stream, they made him think of the silver bobbins set playing by great rain drops when they fall heavily upon wide, shallow pools of water; and they seemed to grow even more thickly in the farther meadow beyond the wooden bridge. A sense of bliss was upon him as he walked among the flowers. He had never seen anything more lovely, and all but the darker buds were open, showing pale golden hearts to the sun.
Yet, by the time that he had crossed the bridge, leaning on the high rail to look down into the limpid, sliding water, he knew that it could never stay at that or mean that for him. He had seen fields of flowers in France, and, while the horrors there had been enacted, these fields of crocuses, year after year, had bloomed. What they meant for his mindwas the unbridged chasm between nature and the sufferings of man. Only when one ceased to be a man, ceased to remember and to think, could such a day, such sights, bring the unreasoning joy.
Walking back, he saw, as he approached the house, that Mrs. Baldwin was standing at the garden-gate, and, bare-headed, in the linen dress of pale lavender, she made him at once think of the crocuses, or they of her. Their gentleness was like her, their simplicity, and something, too,—for he felt this in her,—of unearthliness. More perhaps, than any other flower they seemed to belong to the air rather than to the ground, and, with their faint, pale stalks, their fragile petals unconfined by leaf or calyx, to be rising like emanations from the sod and ready to dissolve in mist into the sunlight.
“You’ve had a little walk?” Mrs. Baldwin asked him as they met.
He said he had been looking at the crocuses. “Are they really crocuses?” he questioned. “I’ve never seen them wild before.”
“They’re not real crocuses,” she said, “though those grow wild, too, in a few places in England. These flowers are always called autumn crocuses hereabouts; but they are really, botanically, meadow saffron; and they grow wild in a great many places. You see they are not so dark a purple as the wild crocus, and they are much taller, and the petals are more pointed. Much more beautiful flowers, I think.”
“Meadow saffron. That’s a pretty name, too. But I think I’ll go on calling them autumn crocuses. They were one of the reasons that made me want to come here,” he told her.
They were leaning on the little garden-gate looking over the meadows.
“Really? Did you hear about them?”
He told her what Dorothy had said, passed on from the appreciative Tommy, and she said again, “Really!” and with surprise, so that, laughing a little, he said that he believed she would never have thought of Mr. Barnet as an appreciator of crocuses. She laughed a little, too, confessing to a community of perception where Tommy was concerned, and remarked that it was very nice of him to have cared. “What he talked about,” she said, “was the food. He was never done praising my coffee. It’s time for coffee now,” she added.
Guy, as they went in, said that, after all, if that was what Tommy talked about, he wondered that his caring for the crocuses should have surprised her, for he was sure that the one was almost as poetical as the others. It was poetical, indeed, as she made it, in a delightful and complicated apparatus, glass and brass and premonitory scented steam; and the milk was as hot as the water had been, and there was cream. “How do you manage it, in these days?” he asked. But she said that it wasn’t wickedness and bribery, really: she and Cathy skimmed it from the milk that was brought from the nearest farm.
He realized that he was himself talking about the food just as Tommy had done; just as the chattering women at Aunt Emily’s tea-party had done; just as everybody, of course, had been doing in England ever since food became such an important matter. But it was Mrs. Baldwin who made him do it; for though unearthly, she was deliciously prosaic. He felt that anew when he heard her goingabout the house in her low-heeled little shoes, with Cathy. They did, evidently, all the work, and how fresh, composed, and shining everything was. The living-room, with its happy southern windows, its tempting writing-tables, its flowers and books, was an embodiment of the poetry that only such prose can secure.
Guy, while Mr. Haseltine sat behind his rustlingTimes, strolled before the shelves, surprised, presently, at their range of subject. Surely not Mrs. Baldwin’s, such reading; hardly, he thought, Mr. Haseltine’s. He took down a volume of Plotinus and found, on the fly-leaf, “Oliver Baldwin,” written in a small, scholarly hand. That explained it, then. Her husband’s. The Charles d’Orleans, too, the Fustel de Coulanges, the Croce, and the Dante, with marginal notes. He had been a man of letters, perhaps. Of the dozen books he took down to examine, only one was initialled “E. H.,” and that, suitably, wasDominique. But it had been given her by “O. B.”
As in the garden, presently, he and the old gentleman walked up and down, smoking, Guy asked him, with the diffidence natural to the question, whether his son-in-law, Mrs. Baldwin’s husband, had been killed in the war; though he couldn’t imagine her a war-widow. One didn’t indeed think of her in connection with marrying and giving in marriage—that was part of the unearthliness; yet widowhood, permanent widowhood, seemed a suitable state. She was not girlish, nor was she wifely. She was widowed, and it had happened, he felt sure, in spite of his question, long ago.
As he had expected, his companion replied, “Ah, no; he died eight, nine years since.” And Mr.Haseltine then went on to tell, taking the war as the obvious interest, and not without the satisfaction that Guy had so often met and so often loathed, that he had lost dear ones. “Children of my eldest son. Fine lads. Brave boys. One in the first month—at the Marne; the other only last year, flying. Yes; I’ve done my bit,” said Mr. Haseltine, with the fatuity that he was so plentifully companioned in displaying.
“Bit.” Odious word. His “bit.” Why his? Had any one written a poem on the formula coming from the lips of those for whom others had died? A scattered, flagellating line or two floated through Guy’s mind. Something about barbed wire came in. He wondered how old Mr. Haseltine would have felt about his “bit,” hung up on that and unable to die. He wondered where the fine lads now lay. No more coffee for them, with cream in it; no more robins singing; no more strolling smokes among mignonette in the sunlight. How they were forgotten, already, except for trophies, for self-glorification to display! How pleased, how smug this rescued, comfortable world! Something of his distaste attached itself even to Mrs. Baldwin when she next appeared. Something irritating him in her peacefulness. She, too, had seen nothing and lost nothing. But, at all events, she wouldn’t, he knew that, take any stand on the two nephews to claim her “bit.” There was nothing fatuous about Mrs. Baldwin. The slight distaste still lingered, however, and he found himself wondering once or twice, during the day that passed, in spite of it, so pleasantly, whether she wasn’t, for all his idealizing similes, a stupid as well as a sweet woman. It was not because of filial self-effacement that shelet her father do all the talking at meals: it was simply because she had nothing to say, and the good old boy was quite right in taking his responsibility for granted. The person who could talk was the responsible person. Her mind, though so occupied, was quite singularly inactive and, he was sure, completely uncritical. She didn’t find her father in the least a bore, or suspect that anybody else might find him so. She did find, Guy felt sure, satisfaction in all her occupations. He heard her laughing—a quiet little laugh—with Cathy in the kitchen; and in the afternoon, when he helped her to prick out seedlings, her attentive profile—as, after he had dug each hole, she dropped in the little plant, pressed the earth about its roots, and fixed it in its place—made him think of the profile of a child putting its dolls to bed. They planted three beautiful long rows, and Guy was quite tired by tea-time, for though they had high tea at half-past six, they were not deprived of the precious afternoon pause, taking place as it did at the unaccustomed but pleasing hour of four.
After tea she went to see some people in the village, Mr. Haseltine dozed in his chair, and Guy took a long walk.
So the days went on, and at the end of a week he was able to write to Dorothy and tell her that he was sleeping wonderfully and that Mrs. Baldwin’s cottage was all that she had pictured it. By the end of the week he had even grown rather attached to Mr. Haseltine, and he enjoyed playing chess with him every evening; and sometimes they had a game in the afternoon when tea was over. The undercurrent of irritation still flowed, but he had learned to put up with the old gentleman and tocircumvent his communicativeness, and in the case of Mrs. Baldwin he more and more felt that she was the sort of person to whom one would, probably, forgive anything. It had become evident to him that what might be dulness might also be unawareness. That was a certain kind of dulness, it was true, but it didn’t preclude capacity for response if the proper stimulus were applied. It amused him to note that if none of the nearly inevitable jars of shared life seemed ever to occur between her and her father, it was simply because, when a difference arose, she remained unconscious of it unless it were put before her. Nothing could have been less in the line of selfishness; it was she who thought of him, of his comfort and happiness, and who ordered her life to further them; he, in this respect, was passive; but Guy felt that the poor old boy often brooded in some disconsolateness over small trials and perplexities that a companion more alert to symptoms would have discerned and dispelled at once. Mr. Haseltine even, sometimes, confided such grievances to the P.G.
“I don’t want to bother Effie about it,” he said;—E. had stood for Effie--“she’s a dreamy creature and very forgetful. But it’s quite evident to me that the rector and his wife have been expecting to be asked to tea to meet you. I’ve just been talking to them in the lane, and I saw it plainly. They had asked us to bring you before you arrived, hearing we were to have another guest,—they’ve always been most kind and neighbourly in helping us to entertain our new friends,—and I really don’t know why Effie should have got out of it. I usually have to remind her, it’s true. But I sometimes get tired of always having to. She doesn’t care for them herself; but that’s no reason why you might not. We have few enough interests to offer visitors.”
Guy was glad to have escaped the rectory tea, though he did not say this in assuring Mr. Haseltine that the entertainment offered at Thatches was absolutely to his taste. He was completely out of place at any rectory; he could imagine no rector who would not find his poems pernicious; but he felt that there was justice in Mr. Haseltine’s contention. Hemighthave cared for them. As it was, Mr. Haseltine was brought once again to reminding her. It was evident then that she was ready to please anybody or everybody.
“Ask them? Ought I to ask them?”
“My dear, it’s ten days since they sent their invitation. They spoke again—and it’s the second time—of having been so sorry not to see us, when I met them yesterday, in the lane. I don’t know why you did not go.”
“I thought it would bore Mr. Norris, father. He came here for quiet, you know. But would it bore you?” she asked Guy. “They are very nice. I don’t mean that.”
“It’s certainly very pleasant being quiet,” said Guy; “but if Mr. Haseltine likes having them, I assure you that people don’t frighten me in the least.”
“Oh, not on my account,” Mr. Haseltine protested. “I see our good friends continually. It is of them I am thinking, as well as of Mr. Norris. He might find them more interesting than you do, Effie, and they will, I fear, be hurt.”
Now that it was put before her, Mrs. Baldwin did it every justice, rising from the breakfast-table,where she had just finished, to go to her desk, and murmuring as she went, “I hadn’t thought of that. They might be hurt. So, if itwon’tbore you, Mr. Norris.”
And the Laycocks were asked, and did indeed bore Guy sadly.
It was on the night after their visit—Mr. Laycock had questioned him earnestly about his personal impressions of the war and to evade him had been wearying—that Guy, for the first time, really, since he had come, found sleep difficult and even menaced. It was because of that, he felt sure, looking back on it, that the curious occurrence of the next day took place—curious, and, had it taken place in the presence of any one else, embarrassing. But what made it most curious was just that; he had not felt it embarrassing to break down and sob before Mrs. Baldwin.
The morning had begun badly. The breakfast-table papers had been full of the approaching victory. Mr. Haseltine read out passages from theTimesas he broke his toast and drank his coffee. He had reiterated the triumph of his long conviction, and Mrs. Baldwin had murmured assent. “All’s well with the world,” was the suffocating assurance that seemed to breathe from them both. “All’s blue.” Was hell forgotten like that? What if the war were won? Of course, it had to be won—that was an unquestioned premise that had underlain his rebellions as well as Mr. Haseltine’s complacencies since the beginning. But what of it? No victory could redeem what had been done.
He went out into the garden, to be away from Mr. Haseltine, as soon as he could, and took a book into the summer-house; and it was here, a littlelater, that Mrs. Baldwin, seeing him as she passed, her garden-basket on her arm, paused to ask him, with her smile of the shy hostess, if he were all right. She didn’t often ask him that, and he saw at once that his recent recalcitrancy to rejoicing had pierced even her vagueness. He knew that he still looked recalcitrant, and he was determined not to soften the overt opposition rising in him; so he raised his eyes to her over his book and said that he was not, perhaps, feeling very fit that morning.
Mrs. Baldwin hesitated at the entrance to the summer-house. She looked behind her at the garden and up at the roses clustering over the lintel under the thatch; she even took out her scissors, in the uncertainty that, evidently, beset her, and snipped off a dead rose, and she said presently, “It was all that talk about the war, wasn’t it—when what you must ask is to forget it.”
“Oh, I don’t ask that at all,” said Guy. “I should scorn myself for forgetting it.” She glanced in again at him, mildly. “I want to forget what’s irrelevant, like victory,” he said; “but not what is relevant, like irremediable wrong.”
Her awareness had not, of course, gone nearly as far as this. She kept her eyes on him, and he was glad to feel that he could probably shock her. “You see,” he found himself saying, “I saw the wrong. I saw the war—at the closest quarters.”
“Yes—oh, yes,” Mrs. Baldwin murmured.“For me, tragedy doesn’t cease to exist when it’s shovelled underground. If one goes down into hell, one doesn’t want to forget the fact—though one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to remember that hell exists—and to try and square life with that actuality.”
There was silence after this for a moment, and he imagined that she was very much at a loss. Her next words seemed indeed to express nothing so much as her failure to follow—that and a silliness really rather adorable, had he been in a mood to find it anything but exasperating. “But, still—hell doesn’t exist, does it?” she offered him for his appeasement.
Guy laughed. “Doesn’t it? When things like this war can happen? How could it ever have existed but in men’s hearts? It’s there that it smoulders and, when its moment comes, leaps out to blast the world.”
He could talk to her like this because she was too simple to suspect in him a poetical attitudinizing; any one else would of course suspect it. Guy was even aware that to any one else that was what it would have been. She looked kind and troubled and as much as ever at a loss. She didn’t know at all how to deal with the patient, and she was evidently uncertain what to do, since it might seem heartless to go away and leave him to his black thoughts, yet intrudingly intimate to come and sit down beside him. Nothing could be less intimate than Mrs. Baldwin. It was he, of course, who was tasteless in talking to her in a vein appropriate only to intimacy.
“Don’t bother over me,” he said, offering her the patent artifice of a smile. “I’m simply a bad case. You mustn’t let me trouble you. You must just turn your back on me when I’m like this.”
It was not poetic attitudinizing now; there was in his voice a quaver of grief and she responded to it at once.“Oh, but I don’t like to do that. I do wish I could be of some help. I see you haven’t slept, for you look so tired, as you did when you first came. And Mr. Laycock did bore you. It’s wrong of people to talk to you about the war.”
For the first time he saw in the eyes fixed upon him, pity, evident pity and solicitude. And before it he felt himself crumble suddenly. He saw all the reasons she had for pitying him, did she but know. He saw Ronnie’s face again; he saw his own haunted night and his own grief. He wanted her to see it. “Oh—one can’t be guarded like that,” he murmured; “I must try to get used to it. But—I didn’t sleep; that’s true. I’m so horribly afraid of not sleeping. You can’t imagine what it is. I’ve the most awful visions.” And leaning his elbows on the table, he put his hands before his face and began to cry.
She stood there; he did not hear her move at first; and then she entered and sat down on the seat beside him. But she said nothing and did not touch him. He had had in all the tumult of his disintegration, a swift passage of surmise; would she not draw his head upon her shoulder, like a mother, and comfort him? But that would have broken him down heaven knew how much further.
He cried frankly, articulating presently, “It’s my nerves, you know; they have all gone to pieces. I lost my friend; my dearest friend. For months I didn’t sleep.”
Mrs. Baldwin’s silence was not oppressive, or repressive either. He heard her hands move slightly on the basket she held on her knees and the soft chafing in the folds of her linen bodice that her breathing made. It was an accepting stillness andit presently quieted him; more than that, it enabled him at last to lift his head and look at her without feeling ashamed of himself. Oddly enough, he knew that he, perhaps, ought to be. Hecouldhave helped himself. There had been an element of wilfulness in his breakdown; he had wanted her to see; but, even had she known this about him, he would not have felt ashamed. She was so curiously a person with whom one could not associate blames and judgments. She was an accepting person.
She wasn’t looking at him, but out at the sweet, bright, autumnal little garden; and as her eyes came to him, he felt them full of thought; felt, for the first time, sure that, whatever she might be, she was not dull.
He could not remember, looking back at the little scene, that she had said a single further word. He did not think that he had said anything further. He was helping her, a little while after, to prune the Aimée Vibert rose that had grown with great unruliness over the little tool-house near the kitchen door. “It will really pull it down unless we cut out some of these great branches,” she had said, as, equipped with stout gloves, they had worked away together, unfastening the tangled trails and stretching them out on the ground. So displayed, the Aimée Vibert was drastically dealt with, and it was midday before they finished fastening the thinned and shortened shoots into place.
She had said nothing further; but he believed that, for the first time, her thought really included him. He had been put before her. She was different afterwards. He had become an individual to her, and had ceased to be merely the paying guest.