Edith was lying on a sofa under the trees at the edge of the lawn at
Chalkpits, in charge, so a stranger would guess, of a private lunatic
asylum. A knight in silver armour was drinking tea out of a slop basin,
while Little Red Riding Hood and the gentleman in the railway-carriage
in Alice in Wonderland, who was dressed entirely in paper, having
finished tea, were employed in rolling down the bank on to the lawn to
see who could “get giddiest.” This was not very good for the costume of
the gentleman in newspaper, as he tore, and also was getting so green
that Lohengrin warned him that there wouldn’t be a square inch readable
anywhere if he went on. But he retorted that he had read all of himself
that he wanted to, and had got knickerbockers on underneath, which was
an unassailable position.
Lohengrin lived in a swan, of course; Red Riding Hood in a cottage, and
the other gentleman in a railway-carriage; and they were all pirates as
well, and had to get trophies from each other’s houses without being
caught, and no householder, of course, was allowed to hang about his own
front-door or else he couldn’t help catching any pirate who had been
paying him an official visit. Daisy and Jim finally were allowed to run,
whereas Hugh might only walk, and if he got any more trophies without
being caught he was going to be confined to hopping, because he had
already got nine, whereas Red Riding Hood and the gentleman in newspaper
had only got three each, and twelve was game. The costumes had been
adopted partly because it was such fun to dress up, and partly because
it was so easy in ordinary clothes to avoid being seen if you crouched
among the bushes, and so nobody got caught at all. But it was almost
hopeless for a knight in silver armour or a person in a scarlet cloak or
one in newspaper to find any background against which protective mimicry
would offer concealment.
Lohengrin had not quite finished the contents of the slop-basin when he
slowly sank out of sight behind the tea-table, and whispered “Mutual
enemies” to the other pirates, for a carriage was coming up the drive,
and it might be callers who would come out to have tea. From there by
crawling on the hands and knees it was possible to get behind an elm
without leaving cover; and to get from there behind the box-hedge that
separated the lawn from the kitchen-garden without being seen was
child’s-play to any proper pirate. But the carriage, whatever it was,
only drove to the front door, left cards and departed.
Edith thought of calling to the pirates to tell them the coast was
clear, but on second thoughts she did not, for she was, as a matter of
fact, not sorry to have a little cessation of the riot that had been
going on since lunch. This hot day of mid-September, to her so languid
and enervating, seemed but to have strung up to the highest pitch of
activity the other children, among whom she included her husband, though
not her two-months-old baby. Peggy was with them, too, and people had
come to lunch, and frankly she felt that a little truce from the high
spirits with which she was surrounded might tend to raise her own. She
wanted to sit and think, she wanted to examine the causes of a
depression under which she had been suffering for the last week or two,
and assure herself that it was all groundless, or at any rate, had root
merely in physical soil, and was not concerned with essential things.
She told herself she knew that it must be so, but at the present moment
she did not realise it in at all a convincing manner.
Her son had been born in the middle of July, and from that day to this
had grown and thriven in the most satisfactory way. Even in the midst of
her present tiredness and unexplained depression the glow of
retrospective happiness kindled in her face when she thought of the
moment when she had seen this child in Hugh’s arms, and from that day to
this the miracle of motherhood had to her lost no whit of its wonder.
All had gone excellently well with her also; her recovery had been rapid
and sound, until one day in August when she had caught a little chill.
She soon, however, recovered from that, too, but letting herself dwell
for a moment on this purely physical side of things, she knew that she
had not felt quite well since. Yet she did not think that her discomfort
was anything more than was easily accounted for by the birth of her
baby, the chill following, and the very hot and oppressive weather that
had continued right up till to-day. She must look further than that for
the cause.
A large hopping figure in silver mail crossed the opening in the yew
hedge that led into the kitchen garden, pursued by a diminutive one in
scarlet. They were visible only for a second, but immediately afterward
there came a passionate cry of protest in a tenor voice and shrill
treble scream of exultation. And that she well knew contained a deeper
cause for disquietude than any she had thought of yet. Once last spring
she had reminded Hugh that he was in actual years nearer Daisy’s age
than her own, and Hugh, all unconscious, was now demonstrating to her
the truth of her own statement. Deep and abiding, as she had no need to
tell herself, as was his love for her, thoroughly as she satisfied all
the needs of his spirit, yet, so she told herself now, that was not all
he wanted. At his age he must want somebody to play with, not only as
regards the riotous activities of pirates, but in the corresponding play
of the mind. Everyone, whatever his age was, wanted, perhaps most of
all, the society of contemporaries. The abandonment with which he romped
with Peggy’s children was no more than a superficial and bodily example
of the sort of thing he needed. With his lightness and activity of youth
it was more nearly his natural mode of progression to jump flower-beds
than to walk slowly as he had done so often and so delightedly by her
bathchair; and his mind, she told herself, was more like a child’s in
its processes and manner of progress than it was like hers. It was not
only in the body that she was beginning to feel the difference of age
between them.
It was rather a dreadful thought, but Edith could not help thinking that
Daisy, in the childish, unformulated manner of eleven years old, was
conscious of this. Months ago now she had told Hugh that Daisy did not
like her, and was jealous of her, considering that she had taken “her
Hugh” away. But to-day it seemed to her that Daisy understood the
position better, that she knew now that “her Hugh” very largely remained
to her, as indeed, so Edith felt, he did. Not that Daisy for a moment
felt anything of malicious or precocious pleasure in it; merely her
childish instinct realised that though in a way her aunt had taken Hugh,
yet this appropriation had not caused any change in her idol. He still
played as beautifully as ever, and took exactly the same comprehending
interest in her affairs as he always had done--a trait, in Daisy’s
experience, not very common among grown-up people, who merely played as
if they were playing, not as if it all were real. To Hugh it was real;
that made the line of demarcation between him and her mother or her
aunt; or, in other words, he was young. Indeed, only this morning Daisy
had said she was busy, for she was going to amuse Hugh. They were found
playing Tom Tiddler’s Ground immediately afterward, and Hugh was quite
certainly being amused.
And then poor Edith had a very bad quarter of an hour indeed. She
suddenly saw that in all those moments in which Hugh had seemed to
himself to be most utterly absorbed in her, and to be, in his own
phrase, searching after her as she shone above him, he was in truth
feeling most keenly the difference in their years. She had said it
herself, too, to him; she had told him in that talk they had with regard
to the question of Nelson’s letters that there was no impulse of
kindness she could give him, it was merely a question of practice in
deeds of kindness until the habit was formed, practice in the rejection
of anger till the root of anger in the soul had withered. It was as if
her words had been steeped in the bitter brine of truth, and had been
sent back to her. On all those innumerable occasions when he had
besought her to teach him, to show herself to this loving pupil, his
words and his feelings interpreted and looked at by the dry light of
truth meant simply “Make me older.” She was powerless to do it, and even
if she had not been, dearly as she prized his love and companionship,
she would not have done so selfish a thing. It was possible indeed to
get old in mind and soul quickly, as she at one time had been in danger
of doing, in the heat and airlessness of sorrow and bitterness, and she
knew well how unremitting the struggle had been to her to get back into
kindly ways again. No one could desire for one they loved the forcing
heat, so to speak, of pain instead of the slower maturity that was
arrived at through the joys of living, and in any case it could not be
applied at will. God had bitter drugs in his huge pharmacy, it is true,
but none might use them but He.
Her baby, that was to have made their union perfect, that was to have
fused them so that there was no joint visible, what of that? There again
she had made a mistake, for, as she saw now, she had construed
fatherhood by the word motherhood. What it had been to her she had
underrated, but (it is as well to say it) she had overrated what it had
been to him. As Peggy had said, the morning stars shouted together when
a woman saw her child in his father’s arms, but that music of the
spheres sounded louder in her ear than in his. Hugh had been delighted,
overjoyed at the event, and even a month afterwards it had taken all her
persuasion to get him to go away up to Scotland for a few weeks’
shooting, from which he had returned only a couple of days ago, but he
had gone, and his letters, so frequent, so long, so full of affection,
had all unconsciously reeked of his own immense enjoyment. She had read
them over and over again, pleased at his pleasure, thrilled at the
excitement of the heavy fish he had played so long, almost stunned by
its tragic loss, and revelling in the good time he was having. Yet every
now and then, like some faint internal pain, had come the thought, “He
can be absorbed in those things!”
Yet the fact that this pained her contradicted all the feelings of her
best self. It had required great persuasion to make him go; it required
persuasion also to make him stay away and not curtail his visits; and
all that was best in her wished him to see his friends, wished him to
enjoy himself immensely, for the very simple reason that his pleasure
was hers, and that at his age it was natural and proper and right for
him to be active and sociable. She would not really have had him tied to
her apron strings; nothing was so selfish and unwomanly as that, nothing
also, so her worldly wisdom had taught her, was so unwise. Women--it was
the old banal simile, but she felt it was applicable--were like the ivy;
as long as they could clasp the oak they wanted no more. But how
different was the oak; birds built in it, it threw out strong,
unsupported branches into the sky, it liked the wind to sing in it, and
the rain to cleanse it, and the sun to lighten it. It could not grow
without these things. But the ivy wanted to cling only; there was the
difference. And the older it grew its instinct was to cling the more
tightly.
Yet women, as she had proved, as the crowded playhouse and the tears and
laughter which rained over her play had proved, could do more than
cling. She until her marriage had been both busy and happy, and never a
day passed which did not seem too short for her occupations. She had
been used to weed, to garden, to plan the procession of flowers, so that
her beds would always have the torch of flower-life burning, and yet all
the time she planned the busy current of her mental life would be
flowing on still, so that again and again she would stop in her manual
employment, or in the exercise of the more superficial ingenuity that
the beds demanded, to register some dramatic conclusion, some outcome of
the life of her imaginary folk. How intensely she had been absorbed in
the ordering of the vegetable life around her, and how much more
intensely absorbed in the creations of her mind, and how happy she had
been in it all! Then came a much larger happiness, one infinitely more
absorbing, more possessing. And--was it from mere indolence, or
what?--she had suffered the other to wither, she had let the lights go
out in the theatre of her mind, leaving it dark and tenantless. Hugh had
called her out into the true sunshine. Often and often during this last
year she had gone indoors, so to speak, to look after the theatre of her
mind and construct and plan fresh adventure for her puppets, but she had
not been able to attend to them with that conscious enthusiasm which
alone, as she well knew, is able to make the creations of the brain
alive both to their creator and the world; if she propped one up she let
another fall down, and left it lying, and if she made one speak she let
another yawn. She felt herself not really believing in them; at the best
they were only part of herself, and even with them she was alone still.
It was that which was the matter with her.
And at that word the very gate of hell began to swing open; no hell of
flames and burning, but the hell of cold darkness, which is always ready
to be called into being by any soul who believes in it. At that moment
she felt hideously alone; in spite of Hugh, in spite of her child, there
was nothing that could really bear her company. Her soul was alone.
Then, almost at the first touch of that cold, unpierceable darkness,
she, dear gallant soul as she was, refused to believe in it. She sat up
quickly, and as a man scares away by some rapid movement the birds that
are eating his ripe fruits that he has tended to maturity, so in her
mind she scattered the penetrating claws and digging beaks that were
preying on her legitimate harvest. Again and again she flapped and
clapped her hands at them; whatever they had spoiled in the past they
should spoil no more. And those depredations had been her own fault,
too; she had gone to sleep in the sun, instead of being active and busy.
Who planned the garden now? Hugh. Who planned and delved in the garden
of her brain? Nobody. She had been indolent, letting her mind rest and
doze, no wonder, as she drowsed and dreamed, the preying flocks had
descended, for, of all enemies to happiness, laziness and indolence are
the most aggressive. No wonder the very door of hell’s darkness had
swung ajar, making her believe for the moment in the loneliness of
souls.
And here, as if in reward for her own gallant rejection of that
execrable creed, came another beautiful interruption to the further
consideration of it, in the shape of Peggy, who had just returned from a
mothers’ meeting at St. Olaf’s, where, at the earnest entreaty of Agnes
and Canon Alington, she had consented to give an address of some kind.
There was going to be a garden-party for mothers (who included sisters
and fathers), and in a moment of mental weakness she had promised to
talk to them on the importance, so she had said at lunch, of Things in
General. Just at this moment that was exactly what Edith wanted to hear
about, for the doctrine of the lonely soul excludes things in general;
its very creed, in fact, includes the negation of their existence, and
she was eager to hear what Peggy had found to say on the subject. She
also wanted to confess, to that beloved confessor, to whom all her life
she had confessed so much, and also to make spoken and audible
resolutions. For to her, as to everybody who lives much in the
imagination, the spoken word has almost the authenticity of deed; to say
a thing meant that the doing of it was made real.
“Tea, or I die!” said Peggy, seizing the tea-pot. “Where are the
children? And Hugh?” she added, clearly as an afterthought. “How are
you, Edith? You look slightly melodramatic, sitting on a brocade sofa;
very beautiful, but quite alone in the midst of opulent surroundings.”
There were abundant topics to choose from out of this. Edith began at
the first that struck her.
“The children and Hugh is unnecessary,” she said; “our three children
are playing a mixture of ‘Lohengrin,’ ‘Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Alice in
Wonderland,’ and pirates, but Hugh may only hop.”
“The darlings!” said Peggy enthusiastically. “Have they really dressed
up as they intended? I want to dress up, too. Oh, what fortunate people
you and I are!”
This was already cheering.
“Of course we are,” said Edith. “But why did you say that then? Yes, the
ones with sugar on the top are excellent,” she added, as Peggy’s fingers
hovered indecisively over the tea-table.
Peggy took one, and spoke with her mouth full.
“Why, by contrast, of course!” she said. “So many prosperous people
aren’t fortunate. Because they haven’t got a mind, which is so
important. Mind really became the text of ‘Things in General,’ which was
an enormous success, and, oh, Edith, there was a shorthand writer there,
who took it all down, and it’s going to appear in St. Olaf’s _Parish
Magazine_. There’s fame for you!”
“Tell me about ‘Things in General,’” said Edith.
“I fully intended to. There will probably be parentheses. There’s one
now, in fact. Do you know, I never understood Canon Alington’s mind till
to-day, and then it all flashed on me. The explanation is that he
hasn’t got one. He is a mosaic of ‘Things in General,’ golf, history,
mottoes, the apostolic succession, the Literific, you, Hugh, Ambrose,
me--not his wife, by the way, she is another him--but it’s all mosaic.
It’s bits of things. It doesn’t make up It, which is ‘Things in
General,’ and which is Life. With him you can pick pieces out--they
aren’t fused together. Each bit is alone. And if you picked them all
out, so that there was nothing left, he would go on buzzing still,
like--a motor-car that throbs and won’t start.”
This was rather difficult to follow for anybody who had not heard the
address on “Things in General,” but Edith was on the right tack.
“But you called him a ‘Mosaic of Things in General,’” she said. “Isn’t
that something?”
“No, worse than nothing,” said Peggy. “You don’t see, nor, I think, did
the mothers, but that wasn’t their fault. The whole point of ‘Things in
General’ is that each thing is part of you, and you could no more pick
it out of your life and go on working just the same as before than you
could pick Hugh out of your life. The gospel of ‘Things in General’ is
that they are all fused into you and you can never be alone, or cut off,
or isolated. And it is mind, _ego_, what you like to call it, that fuses
them. You mustn’t stick them about you like jewels, or clothes, or
wigs--all you do must be part of yourself. It is of no use doing
anything unless it is you.”
Edith was listening now, and attending like a child; as if it had been a
fairy-story, which to children is true, she asked questions.
“But is all you do then part of you?”
“Yes, if you are always being wise,” said Peggy, “which we
unfortunately are not. The perfectly wise person--good gracious! I am
becoming like Dr. Emil Reich--and the perfectly sincere person, which I
almost think are the same, always expresses himself in his acts, and
what is more, never does and never thinks anything not expressive of
himself. Of course we aren’t like that, any of us. We all make dreadful
mistakes, and do things utterly uncharacteristic, and inexpressive of
ourselves. That is another parenthesis, by the way; I never could
arrange my thoughts.”
“Well, go on with it,” said Edith, “what is one to do, then?”
“Why, my darling, who knows better than you? Live down your mistake,
forget about it, and don’t blame either God or other people or yourself
for it. And if possible don’t be sorry even for very long, even if it
has been quite clearly your fault, because to continue being sorry is
vain repetition and waste of time, and though we have each of us got all
the time there is, there happens to be such a very little of it. I
wasn’t so metaphysical to the mothers and fathers of St. Olaf’s, by the
way. But what it comes to as regards ‘Things in General’ is that
everybody ought to make external things, sewing, gardening, reading,
friends, parts of themselves, so that when they have a little time on
their hands they can go and really be themselves, instead of sitting
down and brooding over how much pleasanter it would be if--or how much
happier they would be if--or how much anything, so long as it only ends
in ‘if.’ I hate ‘if.’ ‘If’ always implies the regret that something
happened or didn’t happen.”
“Oh, but surely ‘if’ may belong to the future?” said Edith.
“No, that is a great mistake; at least it is a great mistake ever to
regard the existence of ‘if.’ The future is really as certain as the
past; each of us has built his future, and yet a man or woman is
surprised when he sees rising up exactly what he has planned.”
“That is rather a Delphic utterance,” observed Edith.
“Yes, I feel Delphic. There again ‘Things in General’ come in. Don’t you
see the idea? I want you to help me think it out. It is only the stupid
people, who haven’t really made the things of life their own and part of
them, who can be shocked or dismayed, or knocked down. You have to fuse
your pursuits, your friends into your very soul, so that they are part
of you. You have to grow into the world, yet not so that it becomes you,
but you become it. That is what I mean by life; it is the fusion of
other things, ‘Things in General’ with yourself. Lacking that one is
dead--one’s soul is alone.”
This was coming very near the seat of Edith’s disquietude.
“Then what is the trouble of the lonely soul?” she said. “It is
imperfect sympathy, isn’t it?”
There was a certain change in her voice, when she asked this, that Peggy
noticed. It was no longer the voice of an enquirer into abstract
problems external to itself, it had the ring of a personal question, a
personal anxiety about it. But she did not regret it; she had meant to
make her confession to Peggy, and she had as good as told her now.
“Yes, Peggy,” she went on, “I’ve been having a little attack of lonely
soul this afternoon, and perhaps you can prescribe for me.”
Peggy laughed.
“You darling,” she said, “you and your imperfect sympathies. You are so
selfish, aren’t you, so self-centred! Tell me all about it now. How did
it come on?”
Edith hesitated a moment, wondering whether it was wiser to speak of it
even to Peggy or not. Yet there was no such excellent dispeller of
phantoms as her sister and--and she was convinced it was a phantom. To
be silent about it, too, would imply that she was not sure whether it
was real or not. And she wanted to be sure either one way or the other.
She sat up on her sofa.
“It came on,” she said, “by the sight of Hugh and the children playing
together. It made me feel old and lonely. And I wondered whether he did
not feel young and lonely. Ah, don’t interrupt, Peggy, let me get
through with it! I think, honestly, I think that it was the thought of
his being lonely with me that hurt most, so perhaps it wasn’t imperfect
sympathy that was the trouble. Truth may have been the trouble. Now, you
know, Peggy, you warned me, you dissuaded me. You told me I was too old
to marry him. And now, to-day, do you think you were right? If you do,
you will find me”--Edith paused a moment--“you will find me more ready
to listen to you, now that it is too late.”
Tragic as the words were, Edith could scarcely help smiling, for
opposite her Peggy was sitting with her mouth wide open, in order to
begin to speak the moment her sister left off.
“Pooh!” she said very loud. “I ought to have told you before, by the
way, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Here to-day then I confess. As far
as I can see, and as far as the trained eye of the pessimist can see,
there is no cloud on all your shining heavens. Whether you or Hugh has
been the happiest, I can’t say, but I know of nobody in the world more
happy than you both. Hugh has matured, too, grown older, yet without
losing his youth, in the most wonderful way. You did that. You took him
in your dear hands and made a man of him. It didn’t occur to me that it
could be done. And you have given him a son. As for your attack of
lonely soul starting with seeing him play the fool with the children,
good gracious, what were you thinking about that you let it start? Do
you want him not to? I should like a definite answer.”
Edith gave a long sigh.
“Ah, you know I love his doing it!” she said.
“Then lonely soul probably started not with seeing that, but with
something at lunch,” remarked Peggy.
“Oh, Peggy, you are good for me!” said Edith. “But there’s more lonely
soul to come.”
“Well, I hope it’s more sensible than the last,” said Peggy. “At least I
don’t, but you see what I mean. Out with it.”
“Well, it’s this. Since my marriage I have cared less about all other
‘Things in General’ except Hugh. I used to spend delightful days all
alone here, always busy, busy with the garden, busy with books, busy
with my writing. I’ve dropped them, and they used to be friends, and I
feel ungrateful because, good heavens, how they helped me in those other
years, and pulled me out of the mire and clay. I was so absorbed in my
writing, and now all the creatures of my brain are dead. And that gave
me a touch of lonely soul. ‘Gambits,’ for instance, used to be part of
me, fused into me, and now it’s only a bit of mosaic, as you said, and
I’m sure if anybody picked it out, I shouldn’t even know it was gone.”
Peggy did not say “pooh!” to this. Instead, she nodded her head quite
gravely.
“Yes, I can quite understand how that gives you twinges of lonely soul,”
she said.
“It only has this once,” said Edith in self-defence, “and that time it
was started by something else.”
“That may be, but I do think there is material for lonely soul there.
It’s quite true. You have dropped your friends, Edith, all but music,
that is to say, and that is part of Hugh. How did it happen? Tell me.”
“Oh, my dear, so naturally. All last winter down here I used to try when
Hugh was practising to go on with the new play. But it all seemed
remote, and it is no good, I think, working, creating, at any rate,
unless for the time that is more important to you than anything else.
And it couldn’t be that any longer. Love and happiness came between my
brain and me. All that winter, and all the spring till we came up to
town, I never for a moment got _used_ to my happiness. It never grew
less wonderful; I never could think of anything else. Oh, of course, I
wrote a little, I wrote an act and a half, I believe, but it
wasn’t--what shall I call it--it wasn’t intimate stuff. It was puppets,
marionettes, instead of flesh and bones and brains. And then in London,
after the first tremendous excitement of Hugh’s singing was over, I
thought I would begin again, and yet I couldn’t. I was tired, I think.
Then came the month of waiting here for what July was going to bring,
and now two months more have gone, and I haven’t touched it. And as for
the garden, I’ve forgotten, the names of those things almost,” she said
pointing to a rose-bed.
But Peggy felt nearly as strongly on this point as she did on the other.
“Well, dear Edith, it’s time you sat up and began again,” she said.
“Doesn’t your conscience tell you so? It would be a great pity if,
simply because you were happily married, you become a cow, you know, and
just grazed. I really think you are being rather indolent. It’s
odd--it’s unlike you.”
For the moment it occurred to Edith to tell her sister that there was
perhaps an explanation for that, as she knew that she had not felt well
for the last month. She had been easily tired when she ought every day
to have been gaining in vigour, and growing robust again. But this would
lead to further questions, and very likely end in her promising to see a
doctor, a thing which she had not the slightest intention of doing, at
present, at any rate. For she was one of those splendid and shining
lights in a hypochondriacal world, who, naturally of serene health,
refuse to admit illness till they are on the point of dropping. Besides,
more important than all, she was going to Munich with Hugh in a
fortnight’s time to hear a cycle of the ‘Ring.’ That she fully intended
to do; if necessary she would see a doctor after that.
But the pause had somehow aroused Peggy’s perceptions to a supernormal
acuteness.
“You are well, dear, aren’t you?” she asked, as if following Edith’s
unspoken thought.
“Do I look ill?” said Edith in a voice of earnest enquiry.
“No, I can’t say you do. So do take up your other ‘Things in General’
again. Hugh is the only thing in particular, which we all ought to
have.”
“Yes, but what is to be done if one’s work seems dull?” asked Edith.
“One can’t go on hammering at a thing if it seems dull. At least, the
only effect would be to produce something dull. I read through what I
had written the other day. It seemed lifeless to me. I don’t really care
what happens to the people.”
She paused a moment again.
“Yes, and here we come again to imperfect sympathies,” she said. “It
seems to me that perhaps after all it was sorrow and bitterness, and the
need of fighting them, that awoke my perceptions, and let me see and say
what after all did go home to people. Was it that, do you think? Was
that God’s plan? Is happiness such as afterward was mine, so embracing
and divine a gift that it is sufficient in itself, so that our other
faculties are dulled and rendered sleepy? That would be a bitter choice
to be obliged to make, to be happy for one’s own sake, or to feel the
sting of misery, in order that one might comprehend the sorrow of the
world. Which would you choose? I know which I should. I should always
choose to be happy, I am afraid. Yet perhaps the other lot is the
nobler. Is that a wee bit Ambrosian?”
Peggy laughed, but from the lips only. It was rather a disquieting
question.
“Oh, I can’t believe that!” she said quickly. “I can’t believe that God
gives misery to quicken us, and does not give happiness to do the same.
He must fulfil Himself through joy surely. He must mean us to be happy,
or else the world becomes a very tragic thing.”
“And supposing it is?” asked Edith.
“Ah, you are supposing the impossible!” said Peggy quickly. “The world
isn’t tragic, not in the main at any rate. We’ve got to go on from
strength to strength, not from misery to misery. You of all people in
the world have proved that. You came out of hell into the sunlight.
Don’t tell me that wasn’t intended. Of course it was. And for the rest
of your difficulty, I think you have been rather indolent, and it has
been your own fault. Use your happiness as you used your misery. I hate
letting things go to waste. Why, I know we agree about that. You have
this gift, you have shown it. Really, you are behaving rather in the way
Hugh behaved about his singing. You are well again, dear, you have had
this huge stimulus of bearing a son to your husband. I really do think
that it’s time for you to begin again.”
“But I’m going to Munich almost at once,” said Edith.
“Yes, in a fortnight. Get through something first. You have no idea how
much more you will enjoy it if you have rather tired yourself first. I
suggest also that you read us your play as far as it has gone, after
dinner to-night. And if we think it dull, why, we will tell you so, and,
if you trust our judgment, you can begin it all over again. What nice
plans I make for you.”
“I have read it to Hugh,” said Edith in a moment, “and--well, Hugh has
got a great deal of perception, you know--his comment was that it wasn’t
really by Andrew Robb at all. That seems to me to be the case. You see,
Andrew Robb was a lonely old gentleman, who was forever fighting against
the bitterness within himself, and trying to be reasonable and kind in
spite of it all. And I expect that struggling to be kind makes one
sympathise with the strugglers. I am too sleek now, too contented.”
“Ah, I am sorry!” said Peggy. “Andrew Robb was such a dear. Do you think
he is really dead?”
Edith got up with a little shudder of goose-flesh.
“One can never tell,” she said. “People like him often have little
private resurrections. But I hope he is dead if, in order that he should
dictate me another play, I should have to go through that sort of thing
again. For he lived just a little too near Hell.”
The shudder of goose-flesh repeated itself, and she drew a cloak about
her shoulders. Sunset had ceased to flare in the sky, and with the
withdrawal of its lights it had grown a little chilly.
“Come, Peggy,” she said, “let us walk a little. I am very grateful to
you. You have stirred me up, and I expect I was getting indolent. We’ll
see if I can’t raise the ghost of Andrew Robb, anyhow. I want to write
again, and Hugh wants me to. He says it is absurd that he should go
toiling away at his singing if I don’t toil. You see, my darling boy has
a very high opinion of Andrew Robb. He wants to see more of him. But he
didn’t see him in the acts of the new play that I read. But I will make
an effort. It is time I did. I suppose I have got stupefied with
happiness.”
They left the lawn and went up the broad gravel walk by the herbaceous
bed, at the far end of which was the doorway in the box-hedge into the
kitchen garden. It still flamed in this wonderful warm September, its
Indian summer was still coaxing it into fresh flower, bidding it forget
the frosts that were soon coming. And the sight of it and what it
suggested perhaps made the dead Andrew Robb to stir in his tomb of roses
and love.
“Isn’t it Dumas who says that if you hesitate in an artistic choice,
between one course and another, that you only hesitate because neither
are really good?” asked Edith. “That is my trouble over the play. I
can’t decide. One development seems reasonable, and then another becomes
just as reasonable. Oh, Peggy, is it pain that I need again? I don’t
want to be quickened any more. I want to have a few more years like the
year I have just had. My God, how content I should be with that.”
Peggy entirely disapproved of this attitude.
“Oh, I hate you talking about a few more years!” she said. “Darling,
don’t be so graveyard. Why, of course, we’ve all got to die, but, for
Heaven’s sake, don’t let us contemplate that depressing fact. When I,
which is rare with me, even begin to think about my latter end, I always
get up and do something. It doesn’t matter what you do. Go and do it,
before you die. And I supplement that by a small dose of some kind,
because though death is real, the thought of it is almost invariably
liver. Consider what a great girl you are, as somebody said in your
divine ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ only don’t cry. And don’t resuscitate that
dear Andrew. He is dead, and peace be with him. But resuscitate Mrs.
Grainger.”
Edith turned her an enquiring face.
“Is it that which is the matter with me?” she asked.
“There is nothing the matter with you,” cried Peggy. “But get on, get
on, get on!”
A wild shriek arose and tore the quiet of the evening into shreds.
“No, the other way, Jim,” screamed Daisy, “and you’ll catch him at the
corner!”
Another yell took it up.
“Oh, I saw you walk,” shrieked Jim, “and you might only hop!”
A tall figure in silver armour bounded across the lawn and fell at
Edith’s feet.
“Home,” he said, “Aunt Edith was home, and she happens to have moved. O
Lord, Edith, what a Godsend you are!”
Red Riding Hood came flying up the path, and the remnant of the
gentleman in paper closed in from the other side of the lawn.
“But Aunt Edith’s moved!” shrieked Daisy. “We should have caught you
long before you got to the trees.”
“There was no rule!” panted Hugh. “Aunt Edith was home, wasn’t she?”
Peggy was inflamed at this.
“Yes, Hugh is home,” she said, “but do not let us have one more Tom
Tiddler’s Ground. Aunt Edith is still one home, and the tea-table is the
other.”
Hugh still lay on the steep grass bank up from the lawn to the path by
the flower-bed, touching Edith’s shoe.
“Very well, I’ve won then,” he said, “if Aunt Edith is home.”
Then the flush and effervescent tide of his youth came over Edith. She
wanted to play, too, to be a child again, like Peggy with all these
children.
“But I am not going to be ‘home’ in Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” she said.
“I’m going to play, too. You and I, Hughie, on one side, and Peggy and
Daisy on the other, and Jim shall be Tiddler.”
“Hurrah, I’m Tiddler!” shouted Jim.
The sides arranged themselves, and in a moment the chant began:
Here we come picking up silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Here we come picking up silver and gold,
All on Tom Tiddler’s ground.
For a little while caution was shown on both sides, while Jim darted to
left and right, trying to catch the cautious figures that did not
venture far out. Then Edith started to run in earnest, and Jim flew
after her. She ran up the bank trying to dodge him, and just as she
felt him touch her she felt a sudden warm, choking sensation in her
throat that made her cough.
“Hurrah!” screamed Jim. “I touched you, Aunt Edith!”
“Yes, Jim, I’m caught,” she said.
Then she put up her handkerchief to her mouth, and looked at it as she
withdrew it again. There was a little stain on it, very bright red.