“Yes; a delightful writing-case. I keep finding new wonderful flaps and pockets in it. Everything is remembered. And a fountain pen, too. I have never had one before. It makes one’s thoughts come so much more easily if one does not have to dip in the middle of them. I wrote to Maman with it this morning, when they were all at church. It is very happy for me, being there with Giles in his study.”
“He told me that you were one of the very few people he could imagine having who wouldn’t disturb him,” said Toppie. “He said you were the most peaceful person.”
“Did he? I am so glad. I like so very much being there— Toppie,” she found herself saying quite suddenly, “Giles is the kindest person in the world.”
Toppie looked at her. “Have you only just found that out?”
“No, I knew it the first time I saw him, I think. But he is more than that,” said Alix, feeling the inadequacy of the word. “He is good. Because he understands. Some people are only good because they do not understand. You know what I mean?”
“Perfectly,” Toppie nodded, grave and gentle. “You see things more clearly than most people, Alix. That is one of the reasons I am so fond of you.”
“I don’t see them as clearly as Giles does. Giles would see everything and never fail. It is his courage. The more there was to see, the more there was to bear, the more he would be standing there beside you.” It was strange to her, as she spoke, to feel how deeply she knew all this about Giles, though she had never before formulated it to herself. And she added: “And never would he ask for anything for himself, Toppie.”
Toppie considered her, arrested, it was evident; perhaps a little surprised. “Have you and Giles talked a great deal? Dear Giles. All that you say is true.”
“No; we have talked very little.”
Toppie continued to observe her. “You can’t talk too much with him,” she said after a little silence. “You can’t see too much of him. He’s a rock, Alix, and you can build on him.”
“You, too, can build on him, Toppie,” said Alix at this. Something changed in Toppie’s look at that. It was withdrawal rather than reproof that Alix felt as Toppie said: “I have built on Giles for years. We have known each other for a very long time, you see, Alix.”
It was only a few days after Christmas that a dreadful thing happened to Alix; the most dreadful thing that had ever happened to her.
They were all in the drawing-room after dinner—all except Francis and Jack who had gone to bed;—Ruth writing, Rosemary altering a blouse and Giles reading in his accustomed place. Alix sat beside Mrs. Bradley on the sofa, turned sideways while she held a skein of wool for her to wind, and she was never to forget the look of that heather-coloured wool.
“Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley suddenly, “how was it that Owen didn’t see you when he went to Paris on leave?—that one leave he had; in February last winter. You must have been away, I think, for he said nothing of you.”
Alix sat there, holding up the wool, and, even as she faced Mrs. Bradley thus, steadying eyes and lips and hands, she was aware, though she could only see him as a blurred form, that Giles, suddenly, was watching her.
Captain Owen’s leave! His one leave! He had come to Paris three times in that last winter, and the last had been in April only a fortnight before his death. And he had never told his family! Why had he not told them? Why! Why! The clamour of her thoughts seemed so to fill her ears that it was like sinking in the sea. She had the sensation of drowning, yet of keeping calm while she drowned, resourceful, even as she measured her calamity, and she heard her own voice speaking from far above her it seemed—while beneath Mrs. Bradley’s eyes, beneath Giles’s, her thoughts raced swiftly, swiftly;—“Yes; we should, of course, have seen him, but we were away; we were away in the country at that time.”
“At Cannes, I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a pity for Owen. How lonely he must have been. He hadn’t time to come home, you see; only the two days. And he knew nobody in Paris except the old professor’s family, where Ruth and Rosemary stayed before the war.”
“No; we were not at Cannes; we had gone to the sea in Normandy,” said Alix. It was in her tradition, that an emergency should find one resourceful, yet, had she had time for the reflection, her own swiftness in resource might now have surprised herself. “Maman has a little house on the coast that we sometimes go to, but that she usually lets. We depend very much on letting it every summer. We went that time in February to put it in order for the spring. It could not be helped; tenants were coming early,” said Alix.
“What a pity,” Mrs. Bradley repeated sadly. “Or if only he could have managed to go to you there.”
“You may be sure that we wired at once and suggested it; but the time was too short,” said Alix.
Now she was able, since Mrs. Bradley said no more, to come to the surface, alive and apparently uninjured, but to her own consciousness floating like a helpless, battered object. Something dreadful had happened to her; she knew that; and to Maman; and to them all. But she could not see it clearly. Only by degrees, as Mrs. Bradley wound her last loops of wool and said, “Thank you, dear,” and her hands could fold again in her lap, did it come to her that the dreadful thing was something that Captain Owen had done; and most of all to Maman.
He had been with them; staying with them; three times; the cherished friend; and he had never told his family. She sat there, very still, and tried to think why it could have been, and the picture that came to her was of Captain Owen sitting on one side of the fire in the little salon of the rue de Penthièvre; sitting as Giles now sat; looking across at Maman who, her finger in the pages of a half-closed book, returned his gaze with a strange sadness. And from this picture, lifting her eyes, she met Giles’s fixed upon her and saw that Giles knew, too.
She looked back at him. All she could do was to look. To pretend not to see that he knew, to look away while she pretended, would only be to reveal more glaringly to him her sense of their mutual misfortune. Giles, too, knew that Captain Owen had been with them in Paris; he would not have looked at her like that if he had not known; with that dark and heavy look.
“Oh, I say!” groaned Rosemary, stretching herself out in her chair with a wide yawn of fatigue, “why was I such a fool as to take out this sleeve! It was well enough long, and I’ll never get it in properly again.”
“I told you to cut it kimono shape; you’d have had no trouble then,” said Ruth. “Where’s your house in Normandy, Alix? We were in Houlegate, years ago, when we were kids. I never thought of you in Normandy somehow. Only in Cannes, among the orange-trees you know, romantic child.”
“It is at Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Alix. “I like Normandy better than the Riviera.”
“I never heard of Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Ruth. “Is it pretty? Has it got a sandy beach?”
“No; it isgalets, not sand; not until the tide is low; and Vaudettes is up on the cliff so that one has a long climb down to get to it. But the village is very pretty.”
“Most French seaside villas are such hideous gimcrack things; worse than ours, I always think. Is your house an old one?”
“Yes; quite old; quite unspoiled. There are no modern villas yet at Vaudettes.”
Giles got up.
“Are you going to bed, dear?” Mrs. Bradley asked.
“No; I’m going to read in my room.”
“Do we make too much noise?”
“A little too much. Good-night everybody,” said Giles.
“How tired Giles looks,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“He’s grinding too hard at his work,” said Ruth.
Alix felt that it was not his work. Giles, too, had had a blow; and he was angry with her; darkly, heavily angry; why she could not tell. Only her heart swelled with a suffocating sense of resentment and of tears.
She did not go to the study next morning. She had thought and thought in the night, and she saw now that if Giles knew something that she knew, he also knew something she did not know. She was afraid of Giles and his knowledge; afraid of what they might have to say to each other. And she was angry with him, too, for making her afraid. Pain, dark and mysterious, pain that seemed to have come to her from his eyes, pressed upon her. And it made her think of the suffering that Grand-père’s eyes had conveyed; and of Maman. What she feared was that he would speak to her of Maman.
She did not go; but Giles came to her. She was curled up in her scarf on the sofa in the cold drawing-room, and it made her think of the time that she had waited at Victoria and Giles had been so late. He was not late now; he was early; and he said at once, making no pretence about it: “Come, please, I want to talk to you.”
She had felt herself angry with Giles, because of the injustice of his anger towards herself; but as she faced him in the study, the grey January morning outside the window, the gas-fire creaking in its dismal mirth in the grate, her anger went down. She felt pity for him. He, too, had not slept; he, too, had had a horrible night; and if he looked at her thus sternly it was, she saw, more because he was suffering than because he was angry. He stood before her, his hands thrust deeply in his pockets, and what he said was: “Look here, Alix, were you lying last night?”
Astonishment almost bereft her of breath. Lying? Could he have thought it possible that she was not lying? Could he have thought it possible—turning it over and over in his mind during the night—that she did not know about Captain Owen’s leaves? It flashed across her that, if she could find another lie, now, for him, and say that she had not been lying, he might believe her. He would have no knowledge with which to contradict that lie. But, while she looked at him, feeling her face getting whiter and whiter, what strangely came to her was that she could not lie to Giles. It was better to share whatever pain there was to be shared with him than to be shut out, with her lie, in loneliness, if in safety. So, keeping her eyes on him, in a steady voice she said: “Yes. I was lying.”
Giles at this contemplated her for a long time and it seemed to be with deep thoughtfulness rather than with any other feeling.
“Why?” he said at last.
“How could I not?” asked Alix.
“How could you not?—You can invent such a story, in every detail, and then come and ask me how not? What in Heaven’s name do you mean?” said Giles. “Have you no sense of truth?”
“Your mother did not know. Captain Owen never told your mother.” Alix’s voice was trembling, for she heard the emotion in his. “Would you have had me say to her, after he had kept silence, that he had been with us three times in Paris?”
Giles’s expression altered. “Three times?”
“Yes. Three. Not the once she thought. That time in February was the first. He came twice afterwards. You did not know?”
“No,” said Giles, “I didn’t know that. I thought it was only the once.”
He stopped. He stopped for a long time after saying this and suddenly she saw the blood mounting to his face. He became, slowly, crimson. He did not know what to say. Oh, poor Giles, what was this horrible perplexity that so darkened his good face when all that he had to tell her, when it finally came, was so simple? “I wasn’t in the same part of the front as he was. I didn’t follow what he did. It was by chance that I saw him in Paris, that time in February. I had a leave, too. And I saw him there, walking in the Bois with your mother.”
Giles had seen Maman! Alix felt herself grow dim with perplexity. She looked about her and sank down on a chair before her little writing-table. “Did you not speak to them?”
“No, I didn’t speak to them.” Giles stood there, in his helplessness, before her. “I thought they wanted to be alone.”
“But Maman would so have wished to know you. I do not see why you did not speak. Yes. I remember that they went to the Bois. He was with us all the time, you see. He stayed with us,” said Alix.
Poor Giles. How overwhelming was his plight! Could shame for his brother’s inexplicable duplicity, shame for his own strange silence, that day in the Bois, account for such confusion? “Yes. I was afraid you were lying,” was all he found to mutter.
“But you knew. You knew, and yet you kept it from your mother. It was for her sake that you kept it from her. It was for her sake I lied. What else could I do?” said Alix.
“Do you often lie like that? I mean—the house on the cliff;—thegaletbeach; the wire you sent him to come to you in Normandy;—were they all invented?” Giles ignored the question of his complicity.
“Some were invented and some not.” Alix tried to steady her thoughts so that she might satisfy Giles as to this point—so irrelevant a point it seemed to her. “I do not think I could have invented it all so quickly. We have the little house at Vaudettes. We often go there. But of course we were not there then. I do not think I often lie. Only when it is necessary; like this.”
Giles’s eyes studied her. “And if you had spoken the truth last night—the whole truth—as you know it—what would you have said?”
“But what I have said to you, Giles. That he was with us three times. That all his leaves were with us;—the last a fortnight before he was killed. Was it not better that I should lie to her than that she should know her son had been disloyal to her—as well as to my mother?”
Giles, while she spoke, had put up his hand to rub in perplexity through his hair; now it paused. “To your mother?”
“Was it not a great wrong he did her, too?”
“How do you mean?” Giles’s voice was short and sharp.
It came over her with a wave of old bitterness that this was an aspect of the question he had too much ignored. “Does my mother’s dignity not count? It was as if he had something to hide in their friendship; as if he were ashamed. That was to do her a great wrong. He owed Maman so much. She had been home to him.”
The memory of all that he owed Maman, the lonely young soldier; fireside talks; happy walks; plays, pictures, people; the lavishing of all she had to give;—the best, was it not, that life had to show?—struck too deeply at her, and suddenly she felt her eyes fill with tears. For Giles, too, made part of the wrong to Maman. His silence had had its complicity. It was as if he, too, tacitly, had helped Captain Owen to hide something of which he, too, was ashamed.
“I know, I know,” Giles muttered. He saw her tears and he was dreadfully troubled. “Of course she was most awfully good to him.—I mean—I can’t imagine why he said nothing—I can’t imagine why.”
But wasn’t he lying now? He who had not spoken to his brother and to Maman in the Bois? The sharp tangle of her thoughts hurt her. She leaned her elbows on the table and her forehead on her hands. “I don’t understand,” she said, keeping herself from crying.
“Poor little kid! Poor little kid!” broke as if irresistibly from Giles. He was almost crying, too. He walked up and down behind her. She felt that he would have liked to kiss and comfort her as if she had been Ruth or Rosemary. But, turning away at last, he dropped into his chair before the fire and for a long time they were both silent.
“Look here, Alix,” he said suddenly at last. He had, it was evident, been thinking things out to quite new conclusions. “I wasn’t quite straight with you just now, and I want to be straight with you. I want you to be straight with me. Will you promise me to? Will you promise not to lie to me, ever?”
“Ever? How can I tell?” said Alix from between her hands. “It is sometimes necessary; if someone one loves is concerned.”
“Well,” Giles reflected on her proviso and, apparently, accepted it, “I can know you’llwantto tell me the truth, can’t I?”
“Yes. Oh, yes, Giles.”
“Good. I believe you’ll come to see it’s always better. Even in a hateful puzzle like this, perhaps. Well, then, I’ll begin. I wasn’t straight just now. Icanimagine why Owen didn’t tell us about those Paris leaves. And I think it best you should be able to imagine it, too. It was because of Toppie.”
“Toppie?” Alix echoed faintly.
Giles’s back was turned to her as he sat before the fire. She could not see his face as he went on: “Yes, Toppie. They were engaged. They loved each other. You’ve seen what Toppie feels about him now. He is her past and he is her present; and her future, too. There’s nobody in the world for her but him. Well. That’s it. Can you imagine Toppie, while he was away in France, seeing as much of another man as Owen saw of your mother?”
Alix sat staring at the back of Giles’s head. “She was not alone; in a strange country. Why should he not find a little peace and happiness with a friend?”
“Yes, I know. That seems all right. But why didn’t he come home and see Toppie? He could have managed to get one leave for England, instead of three for Paris; almost certainly, if he’d wanted to. And put all that aside. The worst thing of all, the thing that would shatter Toppie’s life if she could know it, is that he kept quiet about the last two leaves, and never wrote to any of us that he’d been with you and your mother for the first. What would Toppie feel if she could know that? I ask you.”
“You mean,” said Alix, pressing her forehead on her hands and staring, now, down at the table, “that he cared most for Maman?”
“Doesn’t it look like it?”
She tried to think. “He would have come back to Toppie after the war. It was perhaps because of the war. He did not know, those times he came to us, that it was the end.” The new, strange shapes of things Giles had set before her were mingling irrefutably with all her memories, and the memory of last night returned to her. Captain Owen and Maman on either side of the fire. Captain Owen’s dwelling eyes. How much he had cared for Maman! Oh, how much! And, trying to answer her own thoughts, she went on: “Maman did not care most for him. I do not think so. She cared very much. His death was a great blow. But so many people care for Maman. He could have come back to Toppie; Maman would not have kept him.”
When she had said this, it was as if the silence between her and Giles was altered in its quality. He said nothing for so long a time that the echoes of her own words began to sing in her head like brazen bells. They were true words. Yet they did not ring true. Long before Giles spoke, she wished she had not said them.
“And you think,” he said, “that Toppie would have cared to marry a man who hadn’t been kept from marrying her?” How dreadful was Giles’s voice. Dark and heavy, as his eyes had been last night.
“No; no, Giles. I do not mean that. I am sorry. Not that. It was of Maman I was thinking. You think of Toppie and I think of Maman; the ones we love most. No; I see that she would not have married him.”
“Youdosee, Alix. That’s all I wanted. You see why he didn’t tell us. And that’s all we need say about it. He was my brother, and I was awfully fond of him. But he was very wrong. He did a great wrong. And you have lied for our sakes, and we’ve profited by it; if it is profit. All I pray is that you’ll never feel you have to lie, for anyone’s sake, again. There. That’s over. We’ll get to work. Have you everything you want?” Giles got up and took his pipe from the mantelpiece and his tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “And don’t let me ever see you afraid to come in here in the morning. It made me feel quite queer to find you crouched away in the cold as if I’d been an ogre.”
“I thought you were angry with me, Giles; and I thought I was angry with you. It makes me angry, always, at once, if I think people are displeased with me unfairly. I am like that.”
“Jolly well it may have made you angry. Of course I was fairly sick about your lying; and the house on the cliff; and the wire to Owen; on the top of everything else.”
“And even the house might have been a lie, you know,” said Alix, looking up at him. “If it had needed to be invented, and if I could have invented it in time.”
“I’m afraid it could. Yes; that’s what I thought. And it made me feel sick. But you’ve promised me about lies, haven’t you; and you must promise me, besides, that if you’re ever angry you’ll come and tell me so. To work, then,” said Giles, and he dropped into his chair and took up Bergson.
Alix did not take up her pen. She sat above her paper, but she knew that the last thing she could think of doing that morning was to write to Maman. She might be able to read the book about birds, by Hudson, that Giles had given her, and she drew it towards her and opened it; but soon found she could not read. Her heart seemed to be trembling and her blood trembling. All her mind was shaken; and the picture that flashed, disappeared, and flashed again, was always that memory of Captain Owen’s eyes as he gazed across at Maman from his place before the fire. It was not Maman’s fault. How could she have averted, how could she have avoided such a devotion? A sense of intolerable grief broke down her silence.
“Giles,” she said suddenly.
“What?” He put down his book at once. He, too, was not really reading. Perhaps his heart was trembling, too.
“May I say one thing more?”
“All right.”
“It is Maman, Giles. It is what you think of her. Perhaps I am always angry with you, because of what you think of her. Let me say it now, then. He cared for her most. But if you knew her you would understand; you would not blame her; perhaps you would not blame him so much.”
Giles had turned in his chair and was looking at her over his shoulder, in deep astonishment. “I’ve never said a word against your mother, Alix,” he said in a low voice.
“It is worse than words, Giles. I am not so stupid. You put her out. You will not look at her. But if you could see her you would understand. Maman never asks for anything. Why should she? She only gives.”
“I have seen her, you know,” said Giles. In sudden, intense uneasiness, distress, even, he got up and walked away to the window and stood there, his back to her, looking out.
“Did that explain nothing?” said Alix.
“She is very beautiful,” said Giles. “I never saw anyone so beautiful.”
“Oh, more, much more than that. How could he help caring for her? How can one govern one’s love for people? I do not mean that he was right. But he had always known Toppie, had he not? While Maman was something quite strange to him. And one thinks most, perhaps, of what is strange. Oh, I do not forget Toppie. But it would not have been to keep him true to Toppie, if she had sent him away.”
“She is very beautiful,” Giles repeated, almost dully; as if that were all he could find to say.
“Oh, Giles, if you could only know her!” said Alix. It was possible to speak like this to him now. And his back was turned to her and that made it easier. She leaned her forehead on her hands and looked down at the table while she went on: “Let me tell you what Maman makes me think of always. A mountain torrent. We have them in the mountains near Montarel. So swift, and dark, and clear, with such deep pools among the rocks; and such great leaps. Oh, more than beautiful! I saw an eagle once when I was kneeling by a pool. As I looked down into the water, it was as if I looked down into the sky and there was an eagle, wheeling in the blue—far, far below me. It gave me the strangest feeling; like Maman sometimes. And her lovely, small things; like the little pinks and campanulas that grow along the banks; so sweet and tiny; and littlemésangeswith bright blue heads, hanging upside down in the birches. There is no one like her. Everyone else is still and dull beside her. Who could help loving her? Toppie would love her, I am sure. You would love her, too, Giles, if you knew her.”
He had turned, while she spoke, and was looking at her and, lifting her head, she met his eyes and saw how deeply she had touched him. Deeply touched, deeply troubled, Giles looked across at her; but she saw that he was thinking of her and not of Maman. It was as if he were so sorry for her, and so fond of her, that he hardly knew what to say. And what he did say at last was: “You are rather like a mountain torrent yourself; eagles and campanulas and all!”
“I? Oh, no.” She was glad that Giles should think that of her, but it was of Maman she wanted him to think. “I am one of the still ones; one of the dull ones, beside Maman. And I never have great shattering leaps.” She looked away from Giles as she saw further into her simile, saw things she wanted him—oh! so wanted him—to see and understand. “Let me tell you, Giles. When one loves her, that is what one fears for her—those great leaps down from the rocks. So splendid; so bright and splendid; but so dangerous. There is danger for her always. When one loves her, that is what one fears.”
He said nothing. He stood there, leaning back against the window. Never in her life had she so spoken to anybody. For no one but this young Englishman, so lately a stranger, could she have found such words. They rose up from her heart unbidden, and the impulse beneath them was the deepest impulse of her life. More than the child’s love for its mother. There was in it a maternal love, watchful and succouring, for a creature cherished and in peril.
She had not looked back at Giles, and he came presently to her table and stood above her, moving the objects upon it here and there, as if he could not find the words to use. And at last he said: “You are right to love your mother. Never think I don’t understand that.”
“Perhaps we both love in the same way, Giles,” said Alix, still not looking at him. “You think of Toppie—and I think of Maman—perhaps in the same way.”
Giles stood very still. Then he said gently: “Perhaps we do. I feel Toppie in danger; in dreadful danger of being hurt; if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, that is what I mean. And I can help you with Toppie. I can help you to keep the things that would hurt her from her. And perhaps, some day, if the time came, you would help me with Maman.”
Giles had ceased to move the inkstand and candle-sticks. He put his hands in his pockets. “What do you think of as her danger, Alix?” he brought out.
Alix had to think; it was not a new wonder; but she seemed to feel it newly, now that Giles was there to help her with it. “Perhaps you see it, Giles,” she suggested. “Is it something in her nature? Is it because she left my father? Perhaps you see the danger I can only fear. You give me that feeling sometimes. I am so much younger than you. There are things I do not understand.”
“Yes. I see. Yes.” Giles stood there. “You trust me with it all, then.”
“I trust you with everything, Giles.”
“You help me, and I’ll help you if ever I get the chance. I’ll not forget, Alix.” He put out his hand as he said these words and Alix felt that their clasp was on a pact. Yet, as he turned from her and went back to his chair, she had still the feeling that it was of her, not of Maman, that he was thinking. It was as if he sawherin danger.
It was evident to Alix, thinking and thinking of it in the day and night that followed her talk with Giles, that the best way of helping him was not to be there at all. The greater the distance between her and Maman’s life and Toppie’s life, the safer would Toppie be. She should never, oh, never, have come at all, and Maman would never have let her could she have known that Captain Owen had kept that inculpating silence. But she could not tell Maman of that now. If Toppie must not be hurt, neither must Maman. It would hurt her, terribly, even if she, like Giles, saw at once the reason for it. But she wrote to Maman the next morning, sitting there behind Giles, and begged that she might come home.
She had been long enough in England, she said. It was not that she was unhappy; they were all too kind for that. But it was not her life. She was a sea-fish—Alix found the simile, feeling that it would be helpful with Maman—and they were river-fishes, and she was not comfortable in their water.Je vous supplie, Maman chérie, laissez-moi revenir.
Eight days passed before Maman’s answer arrived. It was decisive. She could not think of having Alix back till Spring. It was everything to her to know that her darling was benefiting by all the advantages of Heathside. Even had there not been the wretched question of money, she would have chosen to have her there and Alix must not fret; how far less trying it was for her to be at Heathside with such good friends than if, like so manyjeunes filles de son âge, she had been in a convent. As for herself, she was starting in a few days with friends for a little trip to Italy and would not be back in Paris till April or May. Maman was evidently preoccupied, yet determined. There was nothing for it but to submit.
A few days after this, Alix and Giles and Mrs. Bradley motored to Oxford. She did not enjoy the drive. It was sad to be losing Giles. She did not know how she would find Heathside without him. The cold, grey day matched her mood, and as they entered the mean, modern streets of Oxford, at dusk, she thought that she had never seen sotristea town and wondered that it could harbour beauty and antiquity.
Giles’s rooms, however, were amusing. They belonged to another world. One went through old courtyards where the stone was peeling in great flakes from the walls, up narrow stone staircases, winding and winding, with names on the doors one passed, and found oneself at last, high up, overlooking a quadrangle of green, in a solid, pleasant room which might have been waiting for Giles during the years of his absence, so expressive of his personality were the blazing fire, the deep chairs, even the blue-and-white tea-cups that waited on the central table.
The books and pictures were to go up next day; but even so the room was cheerful, and a wise, middle-aged man, whom Alix at first, in some bewilderment, took to be a professor lending himself to friendly offices, perhaps in some English ritual of self-effacement, brought in an excellent tea.
“He’s what we call a scout,” Giles, smiling, explained to her.
“Not a Boy Scout!” Alix exclaimed. It was very confusing, and Giles had to explain it further.
She and Mrs. Bradley slept that night at lodgings in the town and Alix made her first acquaintance with the English lodging-house bed. There was nosommierand the mattress seemed to be filled with potatoes. One wound oneself among the lumps and contrived at last to sleep.
They helped Giles with his books and pictures next morning, and in the afternoon he said he must show her Oxford while his mother shopped. It was raining. Giles had on a raincoat turned up about his ears, and so had she. She had never seen so many bicycles, and from under a dripping umbrella, after one had dodged them, she found the Gothic quadrangles and deep emerald gardens, the meditative swans gliding, at Worcester, on the water, and the mist-washed vistas of the High, alltriste. She was depressed at the thought of leaving Giles behind in such a damp, crumbling place where it was, indeed, natural to think of philosophers drinking hemlock, and where only in the refuge of one’s own room with the wise scout to take care of one, might one find a sense of warmth and cheerfulness.
“You can’t very well imagine how jolly all this is on a fine day,” said Giles: “when the sun comes out, you know, and the distances are blue, and the stone golden, and the gardens full of flowers.”
He was sad, too, Alix felt, though he tried to speak cheerfully and the day was unbecoming to him as to everything else. He looked a gaunt, uncouth student, his nose projecting under his cap and his eyes making Alix think, in their meditative melancholy, of the swans. He would, of course, be missing Toppie.
“All the women wear velour hats of the same shape,” she observed as they made their way along the High. “All turn up behind and down in front. Now I would turn mine down behind and up in front—with a very slight curve to the side; the line is better. And forcostumes tailleursit is so needful that the skirt should hang evenly.”
“Is it?” said Giles with a gloomy grin. “I’m showing you the architecture, not the clothes of Oxford.”
“Are they all the wives of philosophers?” Alix inquired, and the question indubitably interested her more than the architecture.
“A good many of them are, no doubt,” laughed Giles. “Do you wonder if my wife will look like that?”
Alix had a sudden vision of Toppie in the rainy High Street. Yes, even dear Toppie would sink, she felt, into the fatal sameness, embody the type. She could see her, slender, in her wet grey tweed, speeding on a bicycle in just such a velour hat. They, too, were perhaps Toppies if one could have a careful look at them.
“Do you intend to live in Oxford, Giles?” she inquired.
“I’d like to.—Here is Magdalen and the tower. Let’s cross the bridge so that you can see the tower.—It’s where I want to live.”
They crossed the bridge and he told her about the tower and the May morning ceremony.
“It must be very charming, very gay,” said Alix. “And would you care to marry soon?” The question, she knew, was academic, merely. There could be no hope of marriage for Giles as long as Toppie thought only of Captain Owen. But they could both pretend.
“I couldn’t marry soon.” Giles was still laughing, though evidently a little disconcerted by her lack of appreciation. “I’ve no money.” He led her off to Christ Church meadows.
“None at all, Giles?”
“Well, only enough to have a very dowdy wife. To buy her a better hat and a smartercostume tailleurI’d need a great deal more.”
“But Captain Owen was to marry.” Alix ventured it. It was all so remote.
Giles felt it so. He elucidated the financial differences of the family. “We’ve all got a little. He went into the city, into stock-broking, and was making a very good thing of it. He could very well afford to marry.”
“And do you not care for stock-broking?”
“No; I care for philosophy. Unlucky for my wife, isn’t it, Alix?”
“I do not know. Perhaps not if she had taste. One can do so much with very little money if one has taste. But would they know—the others—if she had to live in Oxford, that her hats and dresses were different?”
“Oh—I expect women always know that—even the wives of philosophers!” laughed Giles.
In spite of her æsthetic deficiencies, she felt that she kept up his spirits.
For tea they went to a professor friend—a real professor this time—who had known Mrs. Bradley’s father. Everybody seemed to have known Mrs. Bradley’s father. He lived in the Banbury Road with two unmarried daughters, and was old but robust and bearded and jovial, and he kept a hand on Giles’s shoulder for a long time and promised Mrs. Bradley good things of him.
Giles stood and smiled and promised nothing. She had an impression of his strength and self-knowledge.
Monsieur le professeur’s daughters were middle-aged ladies with lean red faces and grey hair strained tightly back above their ears and clothes of which all that could be said was that they were warm and clean. So tall, so spare they were, the pair of them, so rigid and with such ingenuous eyes, that they made Alix think of the elongated figures on the western portals of Chartres; only the Misses Cockburn were not beautiful in their strangeness and had none of the exquisitechinoiserieof aspect upon which Maman and monsieur Villanelle had discoursed on that summer afternoon when they had visited the great cathedral. How it all rushed over her as she sat at the little table Miss Jennifer had placed for her near the window! She saw them all three, Maman in white under her white sunshade, in the hot French sunlight before the sublime object. Up into the blue it went, august, almost terrifying, so beautiful that it made one want to cry. And as they had wandered in and out, into the vast, illuminated darkness where the rose windows hung like apparitions, out into the fretted portals with the sunlight washing up their steps, Maman had told her of a Queen Alix who had borne a part in its history. Her heart contracted as she remembered it all. Maman might have been one of those queens. She so belonged to Chartres. When Chartres was in one’s blood, what could one feel for Oxford?
She had time for these comparisons. The Misses Cockburn were kind, but they paid no attention to her beyond carefully feeding her; as if, she reflected, she had been a pet dog led in by Mrs. Bradley. People in England, she had already surmised, did not feel an obligation to entertain, further than by feeding, other people’s friends.
She sat and ate her scone and drank her tea and looked out at a laburnum-tree and a hawthorn-tree, all leafless and dripping on the background of ornamental red brick opposite. All the houses were of red brick and all so singularly alike in spite of their adventurous excrescences. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” thought Alix, as she watched the tea-time lights come out in the bow-windows with Gothic points over them, and felt that they held learned, innocent people who would not be disconcerted by anything that happened in the universe. She had never seen a place that seemed to her quite so safe as the Banbury Road. And yet such safety made part of thetristesse. Dieu! howtristeit was! How dreadful it would be to be caught and imprisoned there.
Miss Grace came to draw the curtain and asked Alix if she were warm and Alix said she was. Giles seemed quite at home, seemed, indeed, part of it, lifting the scones from the little brass stand before the fire, talking about municipal elections to Miss Jennifer and about the Bach Choir to Miss Grace. With Giles as the link of identity between them, she saw that Heathside was part of the Banbury Road, too. Even Giles seemed far away as the sense of alienation grew within her.
Then as she sat there, alone, apart, the throb of a big motor came up to the gate, and a moment afterwards a lady was among them who, by her presence, dispelled the sense of loneliness. It might have been into Maman’s salon that she came, so vivid was Alix’s sense of knowing what she would do and say and of liking both beforehand. All furs and pearls and softness, and such sweet smiles, she was one of the people who could see and blow and catch the soap-bubbles, the beautiful, impalpable things of human intercourse, and while she talked to monsieur le professeur, she cast mild, bright glances at Giles, at Mrs. Bradley, at herself. Alix saw that it was at herself that she looked most, and presently, when the lady and Mrs. Bradley talked, Mrs. Bradley called her to them, and holding her hand, scanning her face, the lady said she knew her name. “It’s there behind me; where I don’t quite know;—in an old letter; a volume ofmémoires; an ancestor of mine, I feel it must have been, who knew a Mouveray in Paris before the Revolution. Yes, that was it. It comes back to me. A comte Henri de Mouveray.”
Alix remembered, too. “He was guillotined at Lyon. He was a great-uncle of Grand-père’s.”
“And where is Grand-père?” asked Lady Mary Hamble, for such was her name. “Do you live with him?”
Alix told her that she had lived with him; but that he was dead. “I live with my mother in Paris,” she said.
When Lady Mary was gone, Alix felt herself scanned by Miss Grace and Miss Jennifer as if from a spaniel she had altered to a monkey; not more interesting, but more curious. Monsieur le professeur still didn’t see her at all. He brushed aside Lady Mary and went on talking about Relativity to Giles.
“Yes; was it not strange?” said Alix, as, in Giles’s rooms again, Mrs. Bradley commented on the romantic encounter. “There was his portrait at Montarel, that Henri de Mouveray. So grave yet so gay a face, blue-eyed, and with dark hair.”
“Like you, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and Alix remembered that he was like her; very.
“And to think that someone so near you was guillotined at Lyon,” Mrs. Bradley mused. “He could have known your grandfather.”
“Yes. If he had not been guillotined, if he had lived long enough, he could have.”
“Don’t you think Lady Mary very lovely, Giles?” said Mrs. Bradley. “She must be as old as I am, I suppose; yet how lovely.”
“She’s not nearly as lovely as you are,” said Giles, poking the fire.
Mrs. Bradley laughed at the absurdity. “That’s loyal—but not accurate, my dear.”
“She’s very pretty, and she’s never had a doubt. She’s always felt that she was lovely and that everyone thought her lovely, and I suppose that preserves the complexion,” said Giles.
“But if everyone thinks one so, is it not likely that one is lovely?” Alix inquired. “And if one is so, why should one not think so oneself?” She considered that Giles was captious.
“No one is as right in every way as she thinks herself,” said Giles. “No one can be so smooth without being artificial. She’s awfully nice, I’m sure; but for beauty, give me Mummy.”
It would not be polite to contradict him, but Alix, too, thought Giles absurd.
She and Mrs. Bradley motored home together next day. It had stopped raining and the air had the unexpected softness that mid-winter in England can mitigatingly display. Alix had never yet seen so much of Mrs. Bradley as on this drive. She was the most occupied person; she was always immersed in occupations; and to have her beside one, with nothing to occupy her except driving the car, was to see her with a new completeness. Mrs. Bradley was only not intimate because absorbed in affairs remote from her own interests. She was not even intimate with her own children, for Alix could not remember ever having heard her talk with them about herself. She tenderly took them for granted and took for granted—too much, Alix considered—their capacity for directing their own lives once the main lines were laid out for them. But to-day, with its sense of interlude, no papers to read, no committees to attend, it was as if without becoming intimate she became confiding. It touched Alix to hear her. It touched her because she felt that Mrs. Bradley must so often need to confide and would not know it. She talked to her about Giles. “I know he’ll do well. I know he will be useful. Giles will always pull his weight wherever he is,” she said, and the conception of life as a boat where one’s meaning consisted in pulling one’s weight was a very new one to Alix. When his mother so spoke, she saw Giles sitting, half stripped, in the chilly English air, grey water beneath, grey sky above, bent to the oars among comrades and ready for the word of command. That was what his mother desired for him; that strenuous, rigorous life. Maman did not think of life like that. She wanted no rigours for her child. She didn’t care a bit about her being useful. Other people were to be of use to her and she was to enjoy herself. That was Maman’s idea.
“You’ve seen, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Bradley, her gentle eyes fixed before her as she drove, “how fond he is of Toppie. It’s always been so. He’s never thought of anybody else. Even before she and Owen fell in love with each other. I’ve sometimes wondered—I’ve sometimes wished—” Mrs. Bradley’s voice dropped to a musing uncertainty.
“Giles was much younger than Captain Owen, was he not?” said Alix.
“Not so much younger. He is a year older than Toppie. Twenty-five. But it wasn’t that. She would, I’m afraid, never have thought of him, with Owen there. Perhaps she had always been too sure of him and taken him too much for granted, while with Owen, until he did, at last, fall in love with her, she was never sure. He was fond of several people, you see, before he was fond of Toppie. I’m afraid she suffered, poor darling. And that’s what one feels,” Mrs. Bradley mused on, while Alix knew a growing discomfort in hearing her. “Owen could have been happy with so many girls; it wasn’t, with him, the one great thing only; whereas with Giles it was.”
“And perhaps if she had married him,” said Alix, her thoughts held by that sense of something painful, twisted, difficult to see plainly, “she would have suffered even more. If he continued to be fond of other people.”
“Oh, but that couldn’t have been after they were married!” Mrs. Bradley exclaimed, and with a shock of surprise in her voice, while her eyes, almost scared by the suggestion, turned to scan the meditative face of the little French girl beside her. “That couldn’t have been after he loved her at last; after they were engaged. Oh, no; Owen would have been faithful, always.”
“But all men are not faithful, are they?” Alix commented, keeping her eyes before her and her voice quiet and impersonal. She felt that she would like to know what Mrs. Bradley thought on this subject. Had not Giles’s horror been somewhat misplaced? “So many wives, I mean, from what one hears, have unfaithful husbands.”
Mrs. Bradley continued to scan her and with even more alarm.
“But I hope you don’t hear of such dreadful things, dear child. No good husband is unfaithful.”
“Is it so very dreadful? Can one govern one’s heart? I see that it is different for a wife,” said Alix. “She is at home and has the children. But a man—out in the world—May he not form many attachments without so much blame?—I do not understand these things, but I cannot see why it is so dreadful.”
“You are too young, dear, to understand them. Yet even you, I am sure, can imagine how terrible it would be to know that your husband, whom you loved and trusted, loved other people.”
“It might be very sad.” Alix considered the remote contingency. “I see that it might make me sad—if I loved him very much. But I should have the children, thefoyer. And then he might still love me most, while loving others, too. Do you not find that possible, here in England? In France, I am sure, we do not feel it so strange a thought.”
“We feel it strange; very strange and dreadful,” said Mrs. Bradley with as much vehemence as she ever displayed on any subject. “And you will, too, I am sure, darling, when you are older and understand what it means to trust someone with your life.—No, no; such a thing would have been impossible with Owen and Toppie. All that I meant was that his love was different in quality from Giles’s. Giles’s nature, in some ways, is deeper than dear Owen’s was.”
“Oh, yes. Deeper. One feels that at once,” Alix murmured, while the thought, seen at last clearly, pierced her through that Giles was held from his happiness by an illusion since Toppie might not have cared for Captain Owen had she known how much he cared for Maman. “Perhaps in time she will come to see what Giles is and love him. Do you not think so?”
“It’s what I hope for more than anything, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Giles has had such a sad life. You wouldn’t think it, perhaps. He doesn’t show it, unless one knows him very well. Even as a little boy I always felt him rather frustrated and sad. He adored Owen, who didn’t pay much attention to him; and he adored Toppie who never gave him a hope. And then the war came and ended his youth and he saw worse things than Owen saw. He saw the worst things. His best friends were killed beside him. He went through everything. They all had to face the problem of it, the boys like Giles. It was never such a problem to men like Owen. They accepted it and didn’t try to understand. Giles hasn’t been embittered, as some of our young men have; but there is such a weight of grief on his heart. I feel it always. I so long for some happiness to come to him.”
It was all true. Alix had seen it in Giles’s face. Under his vehemence, his gaiety, he carried dark memories in his heart; and there were darknesses his mother did not know of. Perhaps it helped him to be less lonely that she should know of them and that they should be her darknesses, too. It gave Alix courage to bear the weight of perplexity and fear, during the winter, to feel that she shared the weight with Giles. She missed him so much at Heathside; yet he was there, too, in her sense that she was helping him with Toppie, that she, too, was shielding Toppie from hurt.
He wrote to her, and though he did not ask her for news of Toppie, she knew that was what he wanted and gave him every detail when she answered. Toppie went away to Bath at the end of February, but until then Alix sent Giles her bulletins. She and Toppie often walked together; they read together, too; and she often made Toppie laugh with her stories about the people at Montarel, the funny things they did and said. Giles was told of all this, and about the Greater Spotted Woodpecker that she and Toppie saw in the birch-woods, tapping with stealthy fierceness at a tree-trunk, beautiful in his Chinese white and black and vermilion; and about Jock who always came with them on their walks and had really adopted her as his most authentic mistress. She had not much to say about the High School and Ruth and Rosemary. But then it was Toppie Giles wanted to hear of.
Spring came at last, the early flowers, the returning birds, Toppie back from Bath and the Easter holidays hovering on a near horizon. And one day at tea-time Mrs. Bradley handed her a letter she had just received from Lady Mary Hamble, a letter in its unexpectedness and sweetness that was like the Spring. Could Mrs. Bradley lend Alix to them for a week-end, Lady Mary asked. There were to be young people in the house and a little dance and they would all enjoy having her.
At first, in her pleasure, strangely compounded of a sense of relief, escape, and the soft breath of a familiar balm wafted towards her, Alix did not notice the dates. Then, after Mrs. Bradley had said, “How delightful; of course you must go, dear,” she saw that the Monday of Lady Mary’s dance was the Monday of Mrs. Bradley’s; the dance to which Toppie had promised to come; the dance for which Giles would be back; the dance to show her white taffeta dress;herdance; the invitations all out and all accepted. “But our dance is on that Monday,” she said.
“It can’t be helped,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We’ll have to give another smaller one some day later on. I don’t think you ought to miss the much prettier dance at Lady Mary’s. You have us always, you see, dear.”
“But Giles.”
“Giles doesn’t really count at a dance,” smiled Mrs. Bradley. “And he will be at home all the holidays. You won’t be missing Giles.”
Toppie was with them, and she smiled, too, looking at Alix and said: “You’re right not to go. Giles will be coming home that very Saturday. You couldn’t miss his coming home even if you did miss the dance.”
“But she really mustn’t miss the week-end at Cresswell Abbey,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It’s such a lovely place, I’ve always heard. And she’ll be back on Tuesday.”
“They’ll ask her another time,” said Toppie. “People would ask Alix another time,” and she smiled on at her young friend, well pleased with her, Alix saw.
“Of course they’ll ask her, Mummy!” cried Ruth who, with Rosemary, had sat transfixed with indignation while the invitation was thus discussed. “And it makes no difference if they don’t. Who are the Hambles, anyway! What does Alix care about them? She doesn’t know them and doesn’t want to. I’ve seen your Lady Mary’s picture in the ‘Daily Mirror’—drooping around with bare shoulders and a plume and pretending not to know she’s being snapped. I hate such empty-headed creatures, and Alix would be bored stiff by them. Of course she can’t go! Of course she must be here for our dance!”
Alix was quite sure that she would not be bored by Lady Mary; but she was also sure that she could not go. No one at Heathside would appreciate the white taffeta as Lady Mary would. There would be no one at the Heathside dance she would like as much, she felt sure of it, as those young people at Cresswell Abbey—no one, that is, except Giles; and he, as his mother had said, truly she felt sure, did not count at dances; but all the same she could not go, and Ruth and Rosemary might think, if they pleased, that it was for their reasons.
She did not tell Giles in her next letter about the visit to Cresswell Abbey; but when he came home, Ruth told him, the first thing, at tea-time, all assembled as they were in the drawing-room, Toppie and herself in their accustomed places on the sofa beside Mrs. Bradley, and Ruth sitting on the arm of her brother’s chair.
“Only think of it, Giles! Mummy actually thought she ought to go, because Cresswell Abbey is such a lovely place! The day of our dance, mind you! Toppie’s cousins here and all!”
Giles seemed taken aback. “The week-end? She’d have been going to-day,” he said.
“And missed your coming home, Giles! As if shecould!” cried Rosemary.
“And Amy expecting her puppies any day now,” said Jack. “I thought they’d have come this morning. She’d want to see them as soon as they were born, wouldn’t you, Alix?—only we must be very careful not to look at them too often. Amy’s awfully nervous when she has her pups.”
“Mummy,” said Giles, eyeing his contented sisters, “you ought to have made her go. Alix is over here to see England, all she can of it. And she really doesn’t see so very much of it with us, you know.”
“I did my best, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley, pouring out her tea. “She quite refused. And Toppie aided and abetted her.”
“Yes. I aided and abetted her, Giles,” said Toppie, and she smiled now at him with more sweetness than Alix had ever yet seen on her face for Giles. “She can go another time to Lady Mary’s.”
“Oh, one never knows about that,” Giles murmured. But now he was thinking more about Toppie’s smile than about Alix’s frustrated visit.
“Didn’t you want to go to Cresswell Abbey?” he asked Alix next morning in the study, and with the question the time of their separation collapsed and, his eyes on hers, she felt him near and familiar once more, concerned, as always, for her welfare.
That was it. He understood that it might have given her so much pleasure and Ruth and Rosemary didn’t understand that at all. And he wanted her to have gone because he wanted her to have pleasure. He was like Maman in that.
She confessed. “Yes, I did. But not so much that I could miss you and our dance. The dance was planned for me, Giles.”
Giles rubbed his hand through his hair.—His mother should have corrected him of that trick, though Alix rather liked to see him do it; it left his hair very much on end.
“It’s decent of you; awfully decent of you. But you wanted to go, of course, you dear little kid. And I’d like to think you were to get a wider look at England than you get with us.”
“I think she will ask me again, Giles. Your mother wrote and explained it to her and she wrote back and said it must be for another time. I think she likes me,” said Alix. “And I like her, too. Though Ruth and Rosemary find her empty-headed. Perhaps it is empty-headed people that I do like,” Alix smiled. “Perhaps I am empty-headed myself.”
“I saw you took to each other. I saw you belonged with each other,” Giles mused. “I’m awfully sorry you didn’t go.”
“Would you rather I were staying with her than here with you, Giles?”
“No; I’d rather you were staying here. But I’d like you to have a slice of cake now and then after all the thick bread-and-butter. Now you, of course, would like to have the cake all the time,” and Giles smiled at her, summoning her to confess to her frivolity. But when he asked her like that, there in the study, with the gas-fire and the untidy heaped books and the Greek temples and the foolish animals on the mantelpiece, Alix did not feel so sure. She liked Lady Mary. She loved the balm she wafted. She felt sure that no one here would appreciate her white taffeta; they would think Ruth’s pink silk ninon with the embroidered edges just as pretty. But there would not, she felt even surer, be any one at Cresswell Abbey who would understand as Giles did.