“Nun Sie bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.”
“Nun Sie bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.”
“Nun Sie bedankt, mein lieber Schwan.”
London, fat London, just moved in its stalls and boxes and hushed again. For it was as if a fairy-tale had come true; it was surely the real Lohengrin who spoke in song, it must be Lohengrin himself!
Still in profile, he followed his swan with his eyes as it glided away at his bidding, and then he turned full-face to the house, and for one moment he looked straight across to where Edith sat. He—Hugh—had promised to look once at her if it was “all right,” as he had said. It appeared to be “all right.”
It is not only grief of which the brain can be so full that it can send to the memory cells no clear account of what it feels, knowing only that it is stunned by the violence of emotion and rendered unable to do its work, but joy can have the same effect. Thus the rest ofthe evening passed for Edith vaguely in point of detail. A few days ago only, on that last morning of gale at Mannington, she had thought that all that life could hold of happiness was gathered together as if under some ray-collecting lens into one point of light; but now new light had been added, a further completion was piled on what was already complete. And all through the acts that followed her mind moved as if in a dream; at one time it seemed to her that all the world of men and women, all the world even of angels and spirits was round her, looking at, absorbed in this incarnation of the spirit of music and romance, while she sat very small and quiet among them, one only among the infinite multitude, and having nothing more to do with the silver-mailed knight than any other of the listeners. Then again the aspect changed altogether, and she felt as if she was quite alone in the house, and that, as in a magic mirror, she saw some real scene of human history passing in actuality before her eyes. And then again—and this was the best of all—the mists cleared, and she knew Lohengrin, that supreme artist, nightingale-throated, to be Hugh, and Hugh was hers, and all the world were strangers in comparison. In those moments even Peggy was but an acquaintance, a moonlit figure compared to the one sunlit. It was only a play after all, and reality would begin again when she, waiting at the side entrance in her carriage for him to come, would see him step across the pavement, call “Right!” to the coachman before he got in, and sit down by her. In the interval, however, it was pleasant that Hugh was such a success, though she felt no surprise at it. Fat London was clapping its gloves to ribands at the end of the acts; it stood up again and again to welcome him. And her own darling boy was enjoying it soenormously; she could see how, as he was recalled again and again, it was no set respectful smile that was his; it was a smile of pure enjoyment, that often almost broadened into a laugh as he bowed this way and that.
Between the acts people came in shoals to her box, all talking at once in a sort of whirl of enthusiastic congratulation; but they, too, were dim; she felt as if she scarcely knew who they were. There was but little for her to say. They were all very kind and friendly, but not one of them understood in the slightest degree how utterly vague they were to her, how little it mattered just now even to her eager and kindly soul what anybody thought or said. She could only think of the moment when Hugh would step into the carriage and she would be alone with him, driving through the gleaming, crowded streets, which, too, would be so unreal and remote. Once only did her ordinary normal perceptions usurp their usual place, and that was when an elderly banker, who was famed for wealth and musical parties, asked her if her husband could possibly be induced to sing at his forthcoming concert at “Melba prices.” She could not help laughing at that, but checked it, and said she would ask him.
And then at last and at last it was all over, and it was still all quite unreal except just for a moment, when, as Peggy left her in her box, where she meant to sit for a few minutes till the staircase and gangway were emptier, she said, “You and Hugh driving home together! Oh, Edith!”
That was real. Peggy understood.
So she waited alone while the theatre slowly emptied, and, alone, reality began to reassert itself, and, lo, all the wonderful dream of the evening was true! She had seen and heard the ideal Lohengrin in flesh and bloodand voice and acting, and Lohengrin was he whose wife she was, the mother of whose child she would be. It was not a dream; she had to remind herself of that. It was all true, happening now and here to her; those people crowded round the doors and exits would be her witnesses; they, too, had seen and heard. But all that was the world’s side, “there was the wonder;” the Hugh who had driven fat London off its head to-night was but the aspect he turned to the public, to everybody who cared to pay and come and see him. That Hugh she loved; but what of the other who loved her? That was her secret Hugh.
The crowd slowly melted away from round the doors of exit, and before many minutes she went downstairs. She had told her carriage to wait at the end of the rank of those going to the side entrance, but so quickly in the last minute or two had the rank gone off that it was close to the door when she came out. So she walked a yard or two and got in, having arranged with Hugh that he should come out at this entrance. From time to time it moved a step or two nearer the door as the carriages in front of it drove off, and it was not long before she was drawn up opposite the door itself, waiting for the moment when he should appear and step in. Meantime, all the dreamlike sense of the evening was passing rapidly away; it was but a film of mist that separated her from reality. Already Lohengrin was Hugh to her, and all that was left of the dreamlike was the ignorance she was in about the other actors. She did not really know what Ortrud was like, or Telramund, still less did she know Elsa. For she, she herself, as she saw now, had been Elsa throughout. It was to her that Hugh, whether as Lohengrin, or in those few moments of reality as himself, had played. It had beenshe, in her thought, who had gone through the play with him, as so often she had done it at Mannington; all she knew of Elsa was that she had not been conspicuously bad, otherwise there would have been an interruption in the flow of her own artistic delight. But there had been none; there was never a performance so smooth, as her exterior sense now recognised, as that which she had just witnessed. And then there came what she had been waiting for. A boyish staccato voice said “Good night!” to the man at the door, there were two quick steps across the pavement, the door of her carriage was opened, and Hugh said “Right!” to the coachman and sat down beside her. Then the carriage moved, and a quick arm was thrown round her shoulders, and he kissed her.
“Well?” he said.
She sat upright, almost pushing him from her, and searched for and found his hands.
“You kissed my hands, you know, when I was Andrew Robb,” she said. “Oh, Hugh, don’t be ridiculous, give me your hands!”
“Ah, but what nonsense!” he said quickly.
“No, not nonsense. See, this is this dear hand and that dear hand! Oh, not yours, Hugh, but Lohengrin’s! My homage, Lohengrin!”
Then she held both those big hands in hers.
“That is for Lohengrin,” she said. “I can’t—I can’t say what it all has been to me, but when I kiss your hands as Lohengrin, dear, and know all the time that it is you——”
Then she leaned forward and kissed his face.
“Hughie, Hughie!” she said.
Again she paused.
“I have no more words than that,” she said gently,“and we have all the years to say them in. So let us be sensible. Tell me about it, Hugh, all from the beginning. I want to know how you felt the whole time, what you thought about while you were waiting, what you thought about when the swan came with you, what—oh, everything!”
Hugh leaned back.
“There is very little to tell,” he said. “When I was dressing I thought how frightfully cold silver mail was. And when I had dressed I don’t think I thought about anything. It was all quite blank till a call-boy or somebody tapped at the door of my dressing-room. And then I thought desperately—I thought what an idiot I had been ever to listen to your arguments. I thought how completely happy I should be if I was just going down to dinner at Mannington with you, instead of being here. And then, when I went out and saw the swan waiting, I looked upon it as a man might look on the cart which was going to take him to Tyburn to be hanged, with everybody looking on. What was going to happen was as incredible as death.”
Edith’s hand still held his, and he felt that she was trembling.
“Oh, Hugh, I guessed it,” she said, “and I wanted to come to you so, and could not! Yes, what then?”
“Then quite suddenly I caught sight of myself in a huge looking-glass, and I thought I had never seen such beautiful clothes in my life, and wondered who it was. And then I remembered it was I, and that I was going to sing Lohengrin to you on a real proper stage, with a band to play fast or slow just exactly as I wished, and a real live conductor to follow my lips and tell the band how I felt. Why, it was the biggest fun in the world! Anything so heavenly had never happened, exceptperhaps when you told me you were Andrew Robb. And there was I in my beautiful clothes and my beautiful new swan ready, and as we set off from the wings I just quivered all over with pleasure, and said, ‘Here we go—here we go!’”
This was real, and Edith leaned back in the carriage and laughed for pleasure.
“Oh, Hughie, how like you!” she said. “And you are so satisfactory; you are always yourself and never by any chance anybody else. Go on, you darling! All my beautiful, sublime thoughts are gone, but it is such fun!”
“Well, and so out we came into the very middle of the stage, and stopped without any jerk at all. Everybody was waiting for me to begin, and as soon as I said ‘Nun,’ oh, Edith, I knew I was absolutely in the middle of the note, not anywhere else, not on the side of it and not slipping about on the edge of it. I knew too when I had sung three notes that they had gone up into the gallery and to each of the stalls and into every box, and that there wasn’t the slightest suspicion of a tremolo, not even an aspen-leaf quiver. And at that, when I knew that, somehow all the sense of fun, all the ‘Here we go!’ ceased. It was hugely, splendidly serious instead. But, anyhow, I felt all right, so I looked up at you, as I said I would. Do you remember? Did you see?”
“Yes, I seemed to remember you had said something of the sort,” said she.
“Oh, well, I thought you might have forgotten! No, I don’t think I did.”
He took up her hand again.
“Yes, the fun ceased, as sometimes suddenly when you and I are playing the fool together the fun ceases,because the big thing, that which we are to each other, pops out. It was the same then. All the fun of having the band to play for me and London to listen ceased because, I suppose, music popped out. And there was Elsa looking at me—by Jove, wasn’t she perfectly splendid!—and she and I had been given this treasure, this golden story with its golden songs, to make real, to make to live. We not only were going to take you hundreds of years back, to pull up the years that had gone from the deep, cool well of the past, but we were going to show you how Wagner pulled them up and set them in jewels.”
Hugh’s voice had risen in sudden excitement, and he turned quickly now to his wife.
“And that was not all the miracle,” he cried, “for again and again it was not Elsa whom I sang to, but it was you. In the love duel it was like something ghostly; if I had not been so absorbed, so intent on it, I should have been frightened. I could have sworn that there was no Frau Dimlich there; it was you. Did you know that? I felt as if you must have known you were on the stage with me.”
“Oh, Hugh, how my heart knew it!” she said.
Hugh was silent for a moment; then he gave a great sigh, and immediately after a great crack of laughter.
“Oh, isn’t it fun?” he cried. “Here we go, Andrew Robb and I, and everybody has to have dinner early in order to see Andrew Robb’s play and to be in time to hear Hugh Robb sing. Here they go together, trotting along in their beautiful carriage through fat London!”
Edith winced and started; natural to Hugh as was this sudden change and thoroughly characteristic of him, she felt jarred. She had been so far away at that moment from all thought of herself or these streetsof London, standing with Hugh in the innermost temple and sacred place of their two souls, that she could not help that sudden revulsion of feeling that came to her lips in a sharply-taken breath. It had seemed to her so wonderful that he, too, as well as she should have looked on Elsa as herself, and the very next moment he had swum up out of the deep and was splashing again on the surface of things. He had been conscious, too, that she was startled and out of tune with this boisterous mood, and turned to her again.
“Why, what is it?” he asked. “What is the matter?”
She was not quite herself even yet.
“Oh, Hugh, you pulled me away!” she said. “I was so deep down, we were both so deep down, and—and——”
She saw his face of innocent surprise in the light of a passing gas-lamp, and her heart went out to him in the exuberance of his boyish spirits just as fully as before. It was all Hugh, she told herself, all the expression of his glorious youth which she loved so.
“I am quite ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t know what was the matter with me. What a splendid evening it has been, and what fun it was too—just that! And here go the Robbs, as you say, trotting along in their beautiful carriage.”
But it was Hugh who was grave now.
“No; there is something more,” he said. “What about my pulling you away? Oh, Edith, that is an instance, I am sure, of what I said to you the other day! You stand there shining above me. What was there in your mind that I didn’t understand? Tell me, explain to me.”
“But there is nothing to explain,” said she, laughing. “It is only that you went off above my head, you dearrocket, before I expected it, while I lingered down below, still thinking how wonderful it was that we both felt that I had been Elsa. It was only that; I didn’t expect all the coloured stars. Here we are at home. By the way, Hugh, you sang quite nicely to-night. I forgot to tell you. I think that unless I get some very pleasant invitation for next Wednesday, I shall come and hear you sing Tristan. Yet I don’t know. It does begin so dreadfully early, and I hate dining early.”
“I wouldn’t think of coming if I were you,” remarked he.
Hugh, of course, had not dined before the opera, and flew ravenously to supper. Edith’s remarks had reassured him, but she was not quite sure that they had reassured herself. She felt that something was just a little wrong, else she could not have been so startled at his transition into the boyish spirits that were, after all, just as characteristic of him as was his perception with regard to Elsa.
That was he; all that intense vividness of feeling and sudden change of mood meant “Hugh” to her. All his performance that night had been on his top level, and no less was it top level that made him shout the fun of it. Naturally (it would have been unnatural if it was not so) every nerve and fibre had been screwed up, and all his perceptions, whichever way he looked, were at concert pitch. Among them was the sheerjoie de vivre, the fun of it, the skyscraping spirits, the irresistible nonsense. Yet to that she knew she had not responded; it had startled her, and, in a way, it had given her a shock. Genuinely and whole-heartedly he had felt how close they had come to each other by virtue of his supreme art, and it was no transition to him to proclaim the fun of it immediately afterwards. But it had beena shock to her. She was not shining above him, then; it was he who shone above her. He was moving there in a light which flooded the mountain tops, but did not reach her in the valley.
Yet the matter did not just now trouble her—she joined him in a hilarious supper. She had glorious things also to say to him; first there was the request that he would sing for the Israelitish banker at “Melba prices.” Also Miss Tremington had inquired about “the master’s play-acting,” and had been told that the master acted very nicely, considering it was his first time. The master was going to act again next Wednesday, and if Miss Tremington cared to go to the upper circle, why, her mistress would give her a seat there. But she must apply for her seat to-morrow morning; lots of people wanted to hear the master sing, and perhaps there might be no seats left.
“Oh, Hugh, how heavenly!” said Edith. “Think of Miss Tremington in the upper circle looking at you as Tristan! She will say that the master looked very pale in the last act, and why didn’t he marry the lady? ‘And I didn’t understand about Cornwall, ma’am,’ she will say.”
Hugh choked suddenly, and could only wave his hands for a moment.
“And you won’t be there to explain it to her,” he said, when he could speak. “Yes, I suppose I have eaten and drunk enough. Oh, it’s after one! But if you think I am going to bed without smoking—why, you are wrong.”
“Oh, but Tristan!” she said.
“Wednesday next,” said Hugh.
She rose, feeling suddenly the flatness that succeeds every climax.
“I am so tired,” she said. “I think I shall go to bed at once.”
Hugh came close to her; the climax was not yet over for him.
“And are you satisfied at all?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“No, Hughie, I shall never be satisfied, I hope,” she said. “I shall always expect more of you than the most. It is the most now.”
Edith went up to bed immediately, leaving Hugh drinking gluttonously of cigarette-smoke after the total abstinence of the last day or two. She felt hopelessly tired, but was afraid that her tiredness was of that quality which would prevent her sleeping. But, tired though she was, she felt she would not in the least mind lying awake, for the pastures on which her mind would browse during the hours of the night were green and fresh, and there would be for her no painful wandering along stony roads, such as she had known in years gone by, no struggling through the shifting sands of an interminable desert. But, contrary to her expectation, she had no sooner put out her light than she slept, and for three hours or so slept deep and dreamlessly. Then she woke as suddenly as she had gone to sleep, woke into complete consciousness, and took up again, as if it had been never interrupted, the little thread of thought which had eluded her a few hours ago, for then it had lain asleep among the grasses and flowers, so to speak, of her pasture, only showing in tiny lengths among them. But now it had wriggled its way up, and lay in a long straight line, easy to trace. It stretched far back, too, right back to the day on which nearly a year ago Peggy had tried to dissuade her from her marriage,and it stretched forward into the future as far as her eye could follow.
Yes; she knew now why Hugh’s sudden change of mood had startled and shocked her. It was because he was so young. It was the elastic spring and shout of youth that had made her wince—the spring which darted from point to point of its happiness, exulting in each. And why could not she dart and shout with him? Because that elasticity had left her; she was so much older than he. It was as Peggy had said.
She lay quite still a moment while this was presented, as if some external agency held up a mirror to her, to her mind. It was all quite clear, and she had no impulse whatever to question its authenticity, and for the next moment or two, as if she had received some evil news in the few convincing words of a telegram, she laid it down and took note of the exterior trivial details of material things.
Outside everything was very quiet, traffic had not yet begun in their street, though from Piccadilly, a hundred yards away, she could hear the low murmur of the earliest vehicles. But dawn had begun to break, for sufficient light came in through the blinds and thin curtains of the window to enable her to see the details of the room. She could catch the glimmer of silver on her dressing-table, the white shining of the china on her washing-stand; she could see, too, that the door into Hugh’s dressing-room was open, and that the blind could not have been drawn down there, for the gray, colourless light of dawn came strongly in through the oblong of the door-frame. And then, with the first movement she had made, she turned her head and sawhim lying by her asleep, having got into bed without having awakened her. His face turned toward her, was turned toward the window also, so that she could see him very distinctly. His head lay on his hand, his tumbled hair fell low over his forehead, and his mouth, drooping a little in sleep, yet crisp and smooth with the firm flesh of youth, drew in and slowly breathed out the even, regular breath. His other arm, with sleeve turned back to the elbow, lay outside the blanket, with the forearm and hand extended a little toward her, as if, even in sleep, his hand sought hers. And there, without colour, in the hueless light of dawn, lay the subject of her thought; coldly, calmly presented to her, like some legal, unimpassioned statement of the case. It was all undeniable: he was so young.
Suddenly she found she could lie still no longer with him sleeping there, and very softly, so as not to disturb him, she slipped out of bed, and once more looked at him, to see that he still slept. Yes; he slept still, but now he smiled, as if that consciousness in man which never wholly sleeps had told him that she, his beloved, was awake and had sent a message to his inert body just to smile at her. And at that thought her heart rose to her throat and beat there. He did love her, she knew that—that and the fact that she loved him seemed the only things in the world worth knowing, and they passed understanding. Yet the gray line lay across the meadow for all that. She had to see where it went—what it was made of.
She put on a wrapper and tiptoed her way across to his dressing-room, for she could not think of that of which she had to think with Hugh in the room, even. There, as she had expected, he had left the blind undrawn and through the open window came in the faint, freshbreeze that sighs round the world as dawn comes with the weariness of another day. Dawn was coming now, the sun rising behind gray clouds that stretched over the whole sky, so that though the street and the houses opposite were quite clear and sharply defined, there was no colour in them—it was all of neutral tint, and all looked old and tired. How different from other dawns that she had seen a year ago at Mannington, when sleepless for happiness she had watched the gold and crimson flecking the east, had heard the earliest fluting of the birds in the bushes, had seen the lawn below iridescent with the dew and renewal of night, and had read into the exultation and youth of nature the exultation and sense of youth that had at last come to her, though late! And now she read into the grayness and listlessness of the coming day its omen for herself. It was all so clear, too; there was no magic mist that flushed pink in the sun; there was no dew on the pavement; it was dry and gray and tired.
And so few hours ago Lohengrin had come in silver mail....
She moved a little in the chair, leaning forward so that she could see her face in the looking-glass that stood on Hugh’s dressing-table, and for a moment her heart rose again. It was by the hard, truthful light of morning, at the hour, too, when vitality burns lowest, when those who are dying lose hold of life, and even the strong are languid and drowsy, that she looked at herself, dispassionately, as at the face of a stranger, critically, as if wishing to see a haggard image look stonily back at her, hostilely even, as if eager to see ruin there. But it was far other that the glass and the cruel pale light showed her; no wrinkles had yet begun their network round her eyes, there was no hanging of slack skin abouther mouth, no streak or line which warned her that the glorious sable of her hair would lose its hue. Yet—yes, if she turned sideways to the light, she could see tiny shadows, yet how slight, at the outside corners of her eyes, and between her eyebrows, yet how slight, there ran another shadow going perpendicularly upward, or—were there two of them?
“Remove all wrinkles, render the complexion....” Where had she seen some advertisement like that?
Then she turned away, with a little shrug of contempt at herself. It was not her face—a wrinkle or a line—that mattered. It was her mind, her soul, that she must keep soft and clear and elastic. Where would she find an advertisement that would guarantee her that?
Yes, Peggy was right; each year that passed was bringing her nearer to autumn and age, while those same years were but bringing Hugh to the prime and full vigour of his manhood. It was cruel, hideously cruel, for time was so unreal and insignificant a thing to those who, like her, believed that eternity was their possession; yet this weak, puny time—a mere crawling worm—could wreak such awful damage, could ruin, could alienate man from woman, so that their souls sat alone and starved. God should never have given such dreadful power into the hands of so mortal and fugitive a thing. And He sat so much apart with His eyes looking across all eternity.
It was the hour of loneliness of soul for her, the misery of it was incommunicable. And she had done it herself, it was all her own fault, and it was irrevocable.
She leaned her elbows on the window-sill and looked out; dawn was coming fast, gray dawn, hopeless dawn. The traffic was getting louder in Piccadilly, the earliest ’buses had begun to ply, and the milk carts to rattle.Stray passengers, birds of night perhaps, who had slept out in the Park, moved singly and furtively in the street below, and for the moment she envied anyone who was not herself.
And then in a flash, sudden as lightning, triumphant as the cry of a trumpet, all her bravery and fine courage came back to her, and she seemed to herself to take the gray line that lay across her pastures and snap it in two. She refused to acquiesce in age and the coming disabilities of it; she would not suffer it to enter her soul. Courage and strength were hers. Hugh was hers; motherhood was drawing daily nearer. She had to meet life with a heart carried high, like a light at a masthead—to meet it with laughter and welcome and by maintaining the confidence of youth and its swift choice to continue to know the romance of living. And she got up, pushing her chair quickly back, forgetful of the sleeper next door. Then she remembered again, and went back on tiptoe across her room to the bed.
But the noise had aroused him, and he sat up, looking at her with dazed, sleep-laden eyes.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he said. “Is it morning? Why are you up so early?”
Edith lay down again.
“Darling, I am so sorry I awoke you,” she said. “I had the nightmare, and got up to convince myself it wasn’t real.”
Hugh had already closed his eyes again.
“And it wasn’t, I hope?” he said.
“No; quite unreal.”
“That’s all right, then.”
HUGH, as has been indicated before, was a confirmed Cockney, and previous to his marriage was accustomed to spend some nine months out of the year in the beloved town. Since then, however, up to the time when they came up from Mannington in April for the final rehearsals before the opera, he had been as confirmed a country-lover as he had been before a lover of his town, and for him as well as for his wife the environment of their life at Mannington, with its down and garden, its little local interests, and the triumphant march of intellectuality led by Mrs. Owen and his brother-in-law, with Ambrose going before and Perpetua following after, seemed as ideal a setting as the human heart could desire or devise. Their intention, therefore, had been to go back there as soon as the Wagner season was over, and spend the rest of the summer as sensible people should, breathing the air of green and liquid things instead of the thick soup of dust and petrol vapour which in June and July supplies the place of normal air for those whom pleasure or business keeps in town. But Hugh, as Edith saw, was revelling in it all—in the bustle and fuss and hurry and festival of the season—and when his last engagement was fulfilled she determined to say nothing to him about their original plan of going down to Mannington immediately, but leave it for him to propose.
Indeed, his success—this storming of London, for it was no less than that—was extraordinarily sweet to him, and it would have been unnatural had it not beenso. He was the lion, the desired guest of the year, and only the very serious or the cynical, or the aged, can even affect indifference to such a welcome as was his. London, in fact, did its very best to spoil him, but without the slightest success, and so far from making him pompous or conceited, it did not even make him self-conscious. He was frankly, almost riotously delighted that everyone was so eager to see him; he found their friendliness enchanting, and he danced and dined, and was a centre wherever he went, without losing one jot of his simplicity. Yet that to him, artist as he was to his finger-tips, was less than the exquisite pleasure that the appreciation of those who knew gave him. If it was pleasant to be the lion, it was even pleasanter to be the nightingale. And if he was delighted at it all, not less delighted was his wife. She was absurdly proud of him; “bursting with pride,” as Peggy told her one day when Hugh had motored them down to Cookham for the afternoon, ending up a brilliantly successful drive by going full into one of the wooden gate-posts and reducing it to match-wood.
“Yes, bursting, bursting, Edith!” she had said. “And I believe you would turn up your nose at Raphael in your present state of mind.”
Edith considered this.
“Yes, I think I should,” she said.
“I’m bound to say you don’t show it in public, anyhow,” said Peggy. “And really, do you know, Hugh is a very remarkable person. Why, I could tell you of half a dozen women who openly and rapturously adore him, and he just laughs, and sits with them in dark corners two and three at a time, and asks silly riddles. Now, is that natural, or is it very, very clever? And you are remarkable, too, dear. You just smile at himin the midst of his harem, and ask if he is coming away now, or shall you send the carriage back.”
“Peggy, you’re rather coarse,” said Edith.
“No, I’m not, but London is. Oh, dear! did you see Julia Sinclair just swooning at him at dinner last night? I thought I should have died. She looked just like a bird of Paradise with a pain inside.”
Edith could not help exchanging notes.
“Mrs. Barrington is even funnier,” she said. “She takes the line of being a mother to Hugh, and tells me he doesn’t wrap up enough. And that darling of mine thinks they are all so kind and friendly.”
“So they are,” said Peggy.
Edith got grave again.
“And he is just exactly the old simple Hugh all the time. Oh, Peggy! I almost want the years to run on quickly in order to show you how wrong you were. Yet in the same breath I want it to be to-day always, not to-morrow, not next week, not next month even.”
This set Peggy off on to the obvious train of thought which this suggested.
“When are you going down to Mannington?” she said.
“I don’t know; I haven’t the slightest idea. But I can’t suggest it to Hugh, when he is having such a splendid time.”
Tea arrived at this moment, a fact of which Peggy was rather glad, for it gave her manual occupation so that she could think over in a natural silence what she wanted to say.
“But you are quite well?” she asked.
“Gorgeously well! But I——”
“Ah, you’re tired!” put in Peggy quickly.
“Yes, frightfully tired. But—oh! Peggy, it is only my happiness that makes me tired.”
“Happiness doesn’t make one tired,” said Peggy decisively. “That won’t do!”
She fidgeted with the tea-cups a moment.
“Oughtn’t you to go down into the country and just rest and live?” she asked.
“No; I am told to go down at the end of the month, and then—not exert myself. I shall do exactly as I am told to do, and you needn’t be afraid.”
“Then what tires you?” asked Peggy again.
Edith took up her tea-cup, and while she thought over what she would say made a natural pause just as Peggy had done, with the manual occupation of putting in sugar and milk. All the time she knew perfectly well what tired her, and that was the inward necessity, for it was no less than that, of living up to the level of youth which Hugh enjoyed without question or effort, simply because he was young. Her resolution after the dawn of nightmare, the hopeless dawn, had been exactly that. She had, by this inward necessity, to play at youth. She could do it, and did it admirably. But what was natural and instinctive to the young was obtained by her with effort. She did it wonderfully well; nobody guessed that it was an effort to her, and but admired the vitality to which years brought no diminution. But she knew, though nobody else knew, that the effort was there. And though Peggy’s question had struck to the root of the matter, there was nothing further from Edith’s mind than to tell her.
“But it is my happiness that tires me,” she said. “It is this living in a flame.”
But Peggy was not satisfied.
“Then were you tired all the time at Mannington?” she asked.
Edith laughed.
“Oh, Peggy, what a good inquisitor you would have made!” she said. “No, I wasn’t, and I shan’t be when I get down there again. But you know we have been living at rather high-pressure up here as well, and I will allow that that may have had something to do with it. It is rather exciting to see your husband go up like a rocket in the way Hugh has done.”
Peggy did not want to insist on this too much, or call Edith’s attention to the fact that she was concerning herself about her sister’s fatigue, for she meant secretly to speak to Hugh about it; a thing which Edith would certainly have forbidden her to do if she guessed that such a plan was in her mind. So she slid quietly off the topic, seeming to yield.
“After all, I think that it is a sort of disgrace not to get rather tired every day,” she said. “One hasn’t done as much as one should in a day if one is not more than ready to go to sleep at the end of it. But it’s a bad plan to have a deposit of tiredness on board, to which one adds every day.”
It required no great exertion of diplomacy on Peggy’s part to secure a quiet stroll with Hugh after tea, and hardly more to introduce the subject of their move to Mannington.
“You will be leaving London at once, I suppose,” she said. “I remember you meant to go down as soon as your engagement was over.”
“Why, I believe we did!” said Hugh; “but I suppose we both forgot. I don’t think the thought of Mannington ever occurred to either of us. London is such fun, isn’t it? And, do you know, we are such swells. People are asked to meet us! And if Edith got proud she made it a rule to go to the opera and hear me sing, and if I got proud I went to ‘Gambits.’ Wasn’t it a good plan?”
“But she can’t go and hear you now,” remarked Peggy.
“No but I can go to ‘Gambits.’ Peggy, I believe that play will be crammed night after night until the Day of Judgment. And even then the audience won’t know, and Gabriel will have to come on to the stage and say: ‘I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but the last trump sounded ten minutes ago.’ I wish I had written ‘Lohengrin.’”
“Yes—you weren’t born soon enough. But if you are going to stop on in London, you will come to my big dance, won’t you, the week after next?”
“Rather! That is to say, unless I am having a rest-cure. Do you know, Edith is much the most indefatigable person I ever saw. She never seems to be tired at all.”
Peggy did not reply at once. A whole new situation burst on her at that guileless remark. She herself knew, from Edith’s own lips an hour ago, that she was “frightfully” tired, but yet Hugh, who knew her best and loved her most, asserted the opposite. Edith told Peggy how tired she was; she not only did not tell Hugh, but she produced on him the impression of being indefatigable. And with that the purport of Edith’s nightmare in the gray dawn suggested itself to her mind. Why should she not tell Hugh she was tired? Or why should she not appear so to him?... Was Edith “keeping it up”? But she answered before the pause was noticeable.
“I know; she is very strong,” she said. “But, Hugh, don’t you think people are sometimes tired without knowing it? Gallant people, I mean, like Edith, who would never give in?”
Hugh’s face completely changed. The glow andboyishness of it died out, leaving the face of a thinking man. Also he chucked away a cigarette he had only just lit into the long herbaceous border.
“Go on!” he said. “Go on!”
Peggy thought “God forgive me for being such a liar.” Then she went on:
“It is only a guess of mine,” she said. “But I thought to-day that she looked most awfully tired. And I really suspect that she is. You see, Hugh, the excitement of it all has prevented you feeling it. One never feels tired if one is excited, and you are naturally still excited at the splendid success you have had. But the excitement was over for Edith when you had the success. Remember I only say she looked very tired to-day. Nothing more.”
Hugh was silent a moment.
“Oh, Lord, what a selfish devil I am!” he said. “It never occurred to me. She has always been so keen about everything. But if you are right, why didn’t she tell me she was tired?”
Peggy looked him straight in the face.
“Just because you were not,” she said.
Hugh stopped, frowning.
“She has been stopping up here, and tiring herself out for me?” he said. “Why, it makes me hideous.”
“It’s only my conjecture,” said Peggy lying with extraordinary naturalness.
“I wonder if you are right. What a beast I am never to have thought of it! I have often thought she looked tired, but she always behaved so untiredly. I’m awfully obliged to you for having told me. Thanks, awfully, Peggy!”
Then he remembered another thing he had intended to say to her.
“I have felt unfriendly to you,” he said, “for your advice to her about our marriage. I should like to say that I know you only desired our happiness.”
“Yes, dear Hugh—you may be quite sure of that,” said she gently.
They began walking toward the house again.
“Of course, we’ll go down to Mannington to-night,” he continued. “I’ll have my motor round at once. I can telegraph to London, and the servants can catch the last train down. Oh! I forgot—you have to get back to town. Would it do if I just drove you to the station, and you took a train?”
Peggy sat down on a garden bench and began to laugh.
“I never heard such a bad plan,” she said.
“Plans, plans?” broke in Hugh. “What’s the use of plans? We want to get Edith down into the country.”
“But that’s just where plans come in,” said Peggy. “Why, if you do that, she will say that I have been suggesting it to you (which is perfectly true), and she will trouble me to mind my own business, and refuse to leave London at all.”
“What are we to do then?” asked Hugh.
“That’s just what we’ve got to make a plan about. It’s obvious that since she won’t leave London while she thinks you want to stop, you must seem not to want to stop.”
“Yes, I see—I see!” said Hugh. “Shall I tell her now?”
“Certainly not. She would instantly connect me with it. Do it about next Wednesday, and by degrees. Oh, good gracious! a woman could do it so easily, and you will probably make a hash of so simple a thing.”
“I have lots of tact,” said Hugh confidently.
“Yes, but it’s visible tact, which is as bad as none. The only tact worth having is the tact that you can’t see—the invisible tact.”
The weather in London this year was, contrary to the habit of June, extraordinarily hot, and Hugh made use of it a day or two later, with tact that for a mere man showed signs of invisibility. He and Edith returning home from a concert had been put down in the Park, to walk up the shaded alley by the ladies’ mile, and be waited for at the end by their carriage. The rhododendrons were in full flower, making up for fifty weeks sombreness of foliage by the incredible brilliance of their brief blossoming, and the trees were pyramids of pink and red blossoms. The herbaceous bed, too, at the corner of the Serpentine was a flaming mass of colour, and Hugh saw his opportunity.
“Oh! it’s all very well to say that it is a beautiful bed,” he said in answer to Edith’s commendation, “but it’s all out of place. All gardens and flowers are out of place in London; and if I was the Commissioner for gardening, or whoever does it, I should have made numbers of tin flowers, brilliantly painted, so that you could wash and dust them.”
“Then you would show execrable taste,” said his wife. “Why, it is just the fact that you can turn out of Piccadilly and in a moment be in this beautiful garden that makes London so perfect.”
“I don’t think it’s perfect at all,” said he. “Why, when I looked at that bed the other day, I positively felt home-sick. I don’t now because you are here, but alone it made me feel home-sick. One ought never to come into the Park, if one is living in town.”
Edith transferred her eyes from the bed to his face.
“Now we’re going to play the truth game, two questions each,” she said; “and I’ll begin.”
“Oh, we always toss!” said Hugh, really invisibly tactful.
“Well, we are not going to. Question one: Would you like to go down to Mannington?”
“Yes.”
“Then, dear, why didn’t you say so?”
“Is that the second question?” asked he.
Edith thought.
“I wish I’d made it three questions instead of two,” she said. “I suppose I mayn’t now?”
“Certainly not.”
“Well, then, it isn’t a question. Question two: Did Peggy tell you that I said I was tired?”
Hugh nearly heaved a sigh of relief, but just suppressed it. It was a tremendous piece of luck that the question took this form.
“No, she didn’t,” he said. “Now it’s my turn: Have you been wanting to go to Mannington?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“Is that a question?” asked she.
“Certainly.”
“Well, it was because I thought you were enjoying yourself so much, and wanted to stop here.”
Hugh nodded with moral purpose at her, as people nod at children.
“Then I hope this will be a lesson to you,” he said.
Here a man with a leather bag slung round his neck and a book of tickets came up and demanded twopence because they had sat on two green chairs. Hugh searched his pockets in vain for any coin, and Edith was equally destitute. So they had to get up and moveon, underneath a searching and scornful eye, which mewed Hugh to sudden and passionate expostulation.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I haven’t got any money, and I didn’t know they were your chairs.”
Edith laughed silently and hopelessly at this, and they continued their walk.
“Oh! and we shall be able to sit in our own garden without paying a penny to anybody,” he said. “Edith, how heavenly it will be looking! Do you remember the last day there—how the sky wept and howled? Let’s go down at once, this evening.”
“But we are dining out, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but so we are to-morrow and the next day, and for weeks. I’m ill—you are ill; we are all ill.”
But Edith maintained that there was a certain decency to be observed, and it was not till three days later that they left town. And if, during those three days, Hugh so abandoned himself to the crowded festivities of June that sometimes she almost wondered if he could be home-sick for the country, she, on the other hand, felt so inspirited by the thought of getting away from these same festivities, that he sometimes wondered whether Peggy had been right, when he saw the animation of her enjoyment. Thus they were both acting a part, and Peggy, that arch-conspirator, observed with extraordinary complacency the result of her machinations.
The arch-conspirator, in fact, was delighted when they left London—a fact that she gathered only second-hand because they did not appear at a big party she gave that evening. Indeed, from the evidence that showed on the surface, she was more than half-inclined to think that she had been really wrong, utterly astray in disapproving of the marriage. A year later, anyhow,here was Edith tiring herself out and concealing the fact with the utmost success from her husband, so that he should not be curtailed of his London days, which he enjoyed with all the exuberance of his youth and his success; while he, on the other hand, on the first hint of his wife’s fatigue went away, merely with self-cursing at his own slowness of perception, into the country. Whatever structure might be reared, there was no doubt about the foundation: each was devoted to the other, and each had shown an instantaneous and instinctive necessity to sink self for the other’s sake.
Yes, perhaps she was altogether wrong; a year ago, had Peggy been compelled to forecast the future as she saw it then, it would have been a very different future to that which was now present, and to the promise of the present. The two had spent six months at Mannington alone, and the upshot was this mutual devotion. The disruption of age which, according to the measure of years, existed between them, had shown no sign of wider tearing. Indeed, instead, Hugh had grown so much more manly, so much less boyish, while, if anything Edith had grown younger. Instead of her acquiescence in the minor joys of life, the pleasure of seed-time and flower, the pleasure in the river and the downs, the pleasure in the microscopic intrigues of Mannington, which a year ago had been sufficient to enable her to look forward to a quiet, uneventful future which should still be full of the appropriate enjoyments of middle-age, she had recaptured youth. All the tenderness for green and living things (in which class, it must be feared, Peggy put Canon Alington, his wife, Perpetua, and Ambrose) was still there, but love had come, too—fresh, seething, effervescent love. And on Hugh’s side there was no less. He, too, cursing at his blind selfishness,had gone down in mid-season to Mannington because Edith was tired.
“Bless him!” said Peggy, and in the same breath she explained to some Serene Transparency that her brother-in-law was not going to sing, unfortunately, because among other reasons he did not happen to be present.
Peggy had done this sort of thing—standing, that is to say, at the top of a staircase, while names were shouted out to her—so often that the mere mechanism of “receiving” occupied her thoughts very little, and her real thinking self was left free to pursue the windings of its ways unhindered.
There were many things about Hugh and Edith that seemed to her to be matters for that pleasant smile which was so often on her face. The year, she allowed, did not seem to have emphasised the difference of their age, but rather to have diminished it. They were devoted to each other, and, please God, before many weeks were over Edith would see her husband with her first-born in his arms. Yet her shrewdness was not quite content: it was like some wise old hound of the hearth that is restless, sometimes pricking an uneasy ear, sometimes looking out with a whine at the gathering dusk. But she knew the cause of her uneasiness, and surely it was a very little thing, for it was only that Edith had produced the effect on Hugh of being indefatigable, whereas in reality she was very tired. She was keeping it up; she was feeling her age while she was ceaseless and successful in her efforts to conceal it from him. Did she, then, fear exactly what had prompted Peggy to dissuade her from this marriage? The year that had gone had brought great happiness to both, the year to come might bring more. But would it bring more ofthis, this difficulty which must grow greater with years?
Hugh and Edith had gone down to Mannington by motor, and even to the confirmed Cockney there appeared to be certain points about the country in this month of buttercup and briar-rose. Until after they had passed Goring their road led through the delectable lowlands of the Thames, with glimpses of the silver wood-embowered river, and the sense of green and liquidness so characteristic of Peggy’s home at Cookham. But soon after the ascent began, and as the car climbed on its second speed the big hill that casts Thames valley below it, a breath of livelier air assailed them. For the thick lush growth of the valley, a more austere greenness welcomed their home-coming. Thick meadows, golden with buttercup, and spired with meadow-sweet, no longer enframed the flying riband of the road. The copses and elm-pointed hedgerows were left behind, and seen as from some eminence of balloon, and instead the empty ball-room of the downs, where fairies dance in rings of emerald green, and the yellowing grass of the chalk-hills bordered their way. Now and again, with a rest for the racing engines, they would descend into the country of the briar-rose and the dense hedgerow again, but as often with the grate of the low-speed they climbed higher yet, till the Wiltshire downs lay round and held them like the interlacing of the strong, braced muscles of the earth. Hill after hill huddled into the sunset, flocks of sheep driven westward toward the folds of eventide, and at last they reached the top of the high ridge from which descent began again into the valley of the upper waters of the Kennet. On each side stretched the great empty downs over which blew, unbreathed and untainted, the cool thin air of theheights, and Edith, with head thrown back, let it stream into her lungs, so that it seemed to be flowing through her. But her heart led her eyes onward, and there, three hundred feet below them and half a dozen miles away, she could see the happy valley of her home and her heart, where all last winter she had lived in Indian summer. There was the loop of the river outside Mannington, lying like a silver thread in the richer green of its water-meadows, and there were the trees, small as the vegetation of a child’s box of toys, which held her house. Mannington itself, nestling in a wrinkle at the base of the hills, was invisible, but she could see her own house, standing outside the town, and the gray protective tower of St. Olaf’s. And at the sight the past surged and bubbled in her heart like wine.
Just on the top of the ridge Hugh, who had been driving with the chauffeur by him while Edith sat behind, stopped the car. She, of course, made the usual remark:
“Oh! what has gone wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. It’s running as sweet as barley-sugar. But we’re at the top. We shall just toboggan all the way down. Look, there is the loop of the river and the house.”
Hugh jumped out on to the road.
“Through pleasures and palaces though we may roam,” he remarked, “there’s no place like Chalkpits. I’m going to come and sit behind with you. How clean and empty it all is! Just think of the wood-dust and the smell and the crowd of Piccadilly at this hour! Yes, Dennison, you drive, please!”
Hugh stepped over the low door into the body of the car, and sat down by Edith, while the car gathered speed again. Soon they came to the top of the longincline that led without break down to their very gates, and the driver stopped the engines and in silence they slid down the empty, unhedged road, like some great bird dropping through the viewless slopes of air toward its nest. Every moment Edith’s content broadened and deepened; here in the gentler activities of the country, in long garden-hours, in the absence of crowds, in days spent quietly, and nights that did not begin with dawn, she felt that there would be no need of making those continuous efforts, which Hugh must never know to be efforts, and which had so tired her. They had tired her body and mind alike; the effort had been physically exhausting, but the mental force, the willpower to make them appear spontaneous, the natural expression of an abundant vitality had been even more tiring. And now the thought that they and all need of them was over, unloosened from her neck completely for the first time those fingers of nightmare which had touched her on that morning of gray dawn, and though but lightly pressed had always been there. Often indeed their touch had been scarcely perceptible, but she had known all those tiring weeks of London that had followed, that at any moment they might tighten to a strangling hold. She had fought and wrestled with them incessantly and successfully, in so far that she had not yielded an inch, and that Hugh had never so much as suspected that they were there. But now, when they had stopped at the top of the ridge, when home came in sight, and Hugh climbed in beside her, it seemed that the possession dropped off her, and that they left it behind on the road, a malignant little figure, silent, and still watching them as they bowled down the smooth incline, but unable to come further, exorcised by the sight of the home in which it had never yet shown itsface. And as a bend in the road cut them off from the sight of the ridge where they seemed to have left it, she turned to Hugh with a sigh of utter content.
“Oh Hughie, what a home-coming!” she said. “I like to think that the trees are all decked out in their midsummer clothes to receive us, and the sun has been specially polished up to welcome us. Oh! and there’s the copse above which we climbed one morning, when I told you who Andrew Robb was. Do you remember?”
“No,” said Hugh gravely. “And there is the terrace where I told you something the next morning, and I can’t remember what that was, either.”
“And here’s the motor-car in which I tell you that there now sits the silliest boy in the world!” remarked his wife.
It was within a week of midsummer, and after they had dined they strolled out again into the garden to find that the reflections of sunset still lingered in the west, in bars and lines of crimson cloud floating like burning islands on a lake of saffron yellow. In that solemn and intense light everything seemed to glow with a radiance of its own: the huge, sunburned shoulder of the down above them seemed lit from within by some living flame and smouldered in the still evening air. An intenser green than ever the direct sunlight kindled burned in the towers of elm, and westward the river lay in pools of crimson. Then gradually, but in throbs and layers of darkness, the night began to flow like some clear incoming tide over the scene, drinking up the colours, as Edith had seen it once at Cookham, like some shy, wild beast. Stars were lit in the remote zenith, and again over the water-meadows below the skeins of mist spread their diaphanous expanses. Andin the soft, confidential dusk Edith spoke of the event which was coming to the father of her child. New secrets of her woman’s sweet soul were given him; one thing only she kept back, that which Peggy had guessed, and was even now thinking of as the two walked gently up and down the garden-paths between the fragrance of the night-scented beds.
“And it will be then,” she said, “that our souls will be absolutely one, and I think it is that more than anything which a first-born child means to its mother. At least, so it seems to me. I cannot imagine two people being nearer to each other than we are, dear, but I know we shall be nearer yet. Hughie, I want you to promise me one thing.”
“It is promised.”
“That you won’t be afraid, you won’t be nervous about it. That would just blunt the edge of the joy that these few weeks of waiting hold for me, if I thought that anxiety and suspense were to be yours just when my joy was being fulfilled.”
“Ah! but how can I help—” began he.
“It is that you have promised to help. There is nothing to fear. I know that in a way that I can’t explain to you—the knowledge, somehow, is bone of my bone. I must see you with my child in your arms. That is God’s will. And I want nobody to be here except you—not Peggy even. I must tell Peggy, and I hope she won’t think it very selfish or unkind of me. But I don’t want anybody else but you.”
Edith laughed.
“Perhaps we will allow her to stay at Canon Alington’s,” she added.
She stopped, and pointed at a white garden seat that glimmered in the dusk.
“I sat down there that morning and cried,” she said. “I was frightened, I think, at the happiness that was coming to me. Hughie, I could almost sit down there again now and cry. But this time your arms would be round me, and so I could not cry long. Also, I am getting used to happiness. It was a stranger to me then, and—well, happiness is all right when you know it, but you’ve got to know it first.”
Then she turned and faced him, and took both his hands in hers.
“My man!” she said.