“You will excuse me if I go back rather far. It was in '74, when I had
been ill with Cuban fever. To keep me alive they had put me on board a
ship at Santiago, and at the end of the voyage I found myself in London.
I had very little money; I knew nobody. I tell you, sir, there are times
when it's hard for a fighting man to get anything to do. People would
say to me: 'Afraid we've nothing for a man like you in our business.' I
tried people of all sorts; but it was true—I had been fighting here and
there since '60, I wasn't fit for anything—” He shook his head. “In the
South, before the war, they had a saying, I remember, about a dog and a
soldier having the same value. But all this has nothing to do with what
I have to tell you.” He sighed again and went on, moistening his lips:
“I was walking along the Strand one day, very disheartened, when I heard
my name called. It's a queer thing, that, in a strange street. By the
way,” he put in with dry ceremony, “you don't know my name, I think: it
is Brune—Roger Brune. At first I did not recognise the person who called
me. He had just got off an omnibus—a square-shouldered man with heavy
moustaches, and round spectacles. But when he shook my hand I knew
him at once. He was a man called Dalton, who was taken prisoner at
Gettysburg; one of you Englishmen who came to fight with us—a major in
the regiment where I was captain. We were comrades during two campaigns.
If I had been his brother he couldn't have seemed more pleased to see
me. He took me into a bar for the sake of old times. The drink went to
my head, and by the time we reached Trafalgar Square I was quite unable
to walk. He made me sit down on a bench. I was in fact—drunk. It's
disgraceful to be drunk, but there was some excuse. Now I tell you, sir”
(all through his story he was always making use of that expression, it
seemed to infuse fresh spirit into him, to help his memory in obscure
places, to give him the mastery of his emotions; it was like the piece
of paper a nervous man holds in his hand to help him through a speech),
“there never was a man with a finer soul than my friend Dalton. He was
not clever, though he had read much; and sometimes perhaps he was too
fond of talking. But he was a gentleman; he listened to me as if I had
been a child; he was not ashamed of me—and it takes a gentleman not to
be ashamed of a drunken man in the streets of London; God knows what
things I said to him while we were sitting there! He took me to his home
and put me to bed himself; for I was down again with fever.” He stopped,
turned slightly from me, and put his hand up to his brow. “Well, then
it was, sir, that I first saw her. I am not a poet and I cannot tell you
what she seemed to me. I was delirious, but I always knew when she was
there. I had dreams of sunshine and cornfields, of dancing waves at sea,
young trees—never the same dreams, never anything for long together; and
when I had my senses I was afraid to say so for fear she would go away.
She'd be in the corner of the room, with her hair hanging about her
neck, a bright gold colour; she never worked and never read, but sat and
talked to herself in a whisper, or looked at me for a long time together
out of her blue eyes, a little frown between them, and her upper lip
closed firm on her lower lip, where she had an uneven tooth. When her
father came, she'd jump up and hang on to his neck until he groaned,
then run away, but presently come stealing back on tiptoe. I used to
listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the knock, the door flung
back or opened quietly—you never could tell which; and her voice, with a
little lisp, 'Are you better today, Mr. Brune? What funny things you say
when you're delirious! Father says you've been in heaps of battles!”'
He got up, paced restlessly to and fro, and sat down again. “I remember
every word as if it were yesterday, all the things she said, and did;
I've had a long time to think them over, you see. Well, I must tell you,
the first morning that I was able to get up, I missed her. Dalton
came in her place, and I asked him where she was. 'My dear fellow,'
he answered, 'I've sent Eilie away to her old nurse's inn down on the
river; she's better there at this time of year.' We looked at each
other, and I saw that he had sent her away because he didn't trust me. I
was hurt by this. Illness spoils one. He was right, he was quite right,
for all he knew about me was that I could fight and had got drunk; but
I am very quick-tempered. I made up my mind at once to leave him. But
I was too weak—he had to put me to bed again. The very next morning he
came and proposed that I should go into partnership with him. He kept a
fencing-school and pistol-gallery. It seemed like the finger of God; and
perhaps it was—who knows?” He fell into a reverie, and taking out his
caporal, rolled himself a cigarette; having lighted it, he went on
suddenly: “There, in the room above the school, we used to sit in the
evenings, one on each side of the grate. The room was on the second
floor, I remember, with two windows, and a view of nothing but the
houses opposite. The furniture was covered up with chintz. The things on
the bookshelf were never disturbed, they were Eilie's—half-broken cases
with butterflies, a dead frog in a bottle, a horse-shoe covered with
tinfoil, some shells too, and a cardboard box with three speckled eggs
in it, and these words written on the lid: 'Missel-thrush from Lucy's
tree—second family, only one blown.'” He smoked fiercely, with puffs
that were like sharp sighs.
“Dalton was wrapped up in her. He was never tired of talking to me about
her, and I was never tired of hearing. We had a number of pupils; but
in the evening when we sat there, smoking—our talk would sooner or
later—come round to her. Her bedroom opened out of that sitting—room;
he took me in once and showed me a narrow little room the width of a
passage, fresh and white, with a photograph of her mother above the bed,
and an empty basket for a dog or cat.” He broke off with a vexed air,
and resumed sternly, as if trying to bind himself to the narration of
his more important facts: “She was then fifteen—her mother had been dead
twelve years—a beautiful, face, her mother's; it had been her death that
sent Dalton to fight with us. Well, sir, one day in August, very hot
weather, he proposed a run into the country, and who should meet us
on the platform when we arrived but Eilie, in a blue sun-bonnet and
frock--flax blue, her favourite colour. I was angry with Dalton for not
telling me that we should see her; my clothes were not quite—my hair
wanted cutting. It was black then, sir,” he added, tracing a pattern in
the darkness with his stick. “She had a little donkey-cart; she drove,
and, while we walked one on each side, she kept looking at me from under
her sunbonnet. I must tell you that she never laughed—her eyes danced,
her cheeks would go pink, and her hair shake about on her neck, but
she never laughed. Her old nurse, Lucy, a very broad, good woman, had
married the proprietor of the inn in the village there. I have never
seen anything like that inn: sweetbriar up to the roof! And the scent—I
am very susceptible to scents!” His head drooped, and the cigarette fell
from his hand. A train passing beneath sent up a shower of sparks. He
started, and went on: “We had our lunch in the parlour—I remember that
room very well, for I spent the happiest days of my life afterwards in
that inn.... We went into a meadow after lunch, and my friend Dalton
fell asleep. A wonderful thing happened then. Eilie whispered to me,
'Let's have a jolly time.' She took me for the most glorious walk. The
river was close by. A lovely stream, your river Thames, so calm and
broad; it is like the spirit of your people. I was bewitched; I forgot
my friend, I thought of nothing but how to keep her to myself. It was
such a day! There are days that are the devil's, but that was truly one
of God's. She took me to a little pond under an elm-tree, and we dragged
it, we two, an hour, for a kind of tiny red worm to feed some creature
that she had. We found them in the mud, and while she was bending over,
the curls got in her eyes. If you could have seen her then, I think,
sir, you would have said she was like the first sight of spring....
We had tea afterwards, all together, in the long grass under some
fruit-trees. If I had the knack of words, there are things that I
could say.” He bent, as though in deference to those unspoken memories.
“Twilight came on while we were sitting there. A wonderful thing is
twilight in the country! It became time for us to go. There was an
avenue of trees close by—like a church with a window at the end, where
golden light came through. I walked up and down it with her. 'Will you
come again?' she whispered, and suddenly she lifted up her face to be
kissed. I kissed her as if she were a little child. And when we said
good-bye, her eyes were looking at me across her father's shoulder,
with surprise and sorrow in them. 'Why do you go away?' they seemed to
say.... But I must tell you,” he went on hurriedly, “of a thing that
happened before we had gone a hundred yards. We were smoking our pipes,
and I, thinking of her—when out she sprang from the hedge and stood in
front of us. Dalton cried out, 'What are you here for again, you mad
girl?' She rushed up to him and hugged him; but when she looked at me,
her face was quite different—careless, defiant, as one might say—it hurt
me. I couldn't understand it, and what one doesn't understand frightens
one.”