Edith finished writing the words “gigantic success,” and then laid down
her pen, having filled the very small space allotted to correspondence
on a picture postcard that bore on its back a highly-coloured view of
the opera-house in Munich, and on the space allotted to the address the
name of Peggy. Then she tore it up. She wanted to say more than that to
Peggy, and though she was tired, she felt she must write her a letter
which should give her in less meagre quantity (and in quality things
more private than could be sent face upward through Europe) some little
impression of the week that had elapsed since she left England. And in
order to do that she found that she must arrange and sound her thoughts
and her memory, for she had lived simply from the minute to the minute,
enjoying each to the uttermost, yet somehow not grudging their passage,
for each was sufficient in itself.
Her windows were wide open, but the sun had slanted westward, so that
the balcony outside was in shade, though ever so little way beyond the
white glare fell on the road with its avenue of dusty trees. Though
September was near to its end, and during the first three days of their
stay here there had been cold and frosty nights, it seemed as if the sun
had repented of his winter-heralding withdrawal, and had come back to
give them a few hours more of summer days. And at this moment it struck
Edith, yet with no touch of sadness, how like to this beneficent return
of June-like heat was her own case. In London, ten days ago, the
forerunning foot of winter had struck her, yet now in her life, no less
than in the ordering of the season of the year, summer with shout and
banners renewed for a moment its miracle. Outside it was hot and
windless and dry, and as she moved to her window she drew in a long
breath of the eternal, unfading air. There even the sensitive leaves of
the white poplars were still; there was but little traffic in the
street, the awnings below her room and above her balcony neither stirred
nor flapped in the blazing tranquillity. Calm, omnipotent summer
reigned. And to-night Hugh was to sing in “Tristan.”
It was not in Munich, so she felt, it was not on the Cornish coast, it
was not by the banks of the Scheldt or the Pegnitz, nor even in the
giant-built towers of Walhalla, that she had lived during this week that
would come to a close to-night. She and Hugh had lived far away from any
human place, yet in a place that, lovers and music-lovers, each had felt
to be his own, and more familiar and dear than any other home. Heart and
treasure lay there, and even Walhalla was leagues, immeasurable leagues,
below it. Trouble and anxiety and fear were strangers to it, or at the
most (and that only for one of them) lay as some thunderstorm in an
Alpine valley lies far below the feet and the eyes of those who have
climbed above it into the clear, passionate altitudes that are domed in
sky and floored by ice. All week long they had mounted, mounted through
the fine austere air; and life, all they knew of life, had been put in a
crucible and distilled for their drinking. All that was to be, whatever
that was, had for these days been expunged from memory and from
anticipation; it had been all to sit on this rose-coloured peak,
hand-entwined, without seeing the troubled cloud below, without hearing
the thunder and the voices that cried out of it. She had determined not
to think of the descent, not to conjecture about the dangers and misty
passages of the journey till the time for descent had come. It would
come to-night, but before it came there would come the divinest hour of
all, the rosiest flames of sunset, when she would sit in the hushed
house and hear....
The week had been her treat to Hugh, and the compact had been that he
should ask no questions. Possibly it was child-like, possibly it was a
barbaric notion of hospitality; but it had given her enormous pleasure
to throw money about for him, to take the most expensive suite of rooms,
to have masses of fresh flowers in day after day, to have a really smart
carriage always waiting, to have meals in a private dining-room.
Somehow, on the material plane, infinitesimal though it all was, she
wanted to express that which so filled and flooded her; she would have
liked to furnish this room afresh, to have railings of gold for the
balconies and frescoes for the walls, and then at the end of the week to
burn and destroy it all. She had, in fact, gone as far as was consistent
with sanity, but not being insane had not gone farther.
Tired! Oh! how tired she had been again and again, and how indomitably
she had spurned fatigue! The glory, the jest of it, too! Again and again
Hugh had said that he really must, if she didn’t mind, lie down and
rest, if he was to keep awake during the opera. She had beaten him at
his own game, at youth, and time and again he had confessed as much. He
had even confided to her his projected errand to Sir Thomas on their
last day in London, in order to satisfy himself that she was “up to
Munich.” Now it was he who had wondered if he was. But all the time she
had clung to her supposed cold; she had insisted that she had a really
bad one, and that she would not permit Hugh the least risk of catching
it. And at such moments a cloud came over her sun, there was an echo of
heart-breaking things from the valley below, and hunger on these
heights.
Yes; fear had been there; she knew that her ears had heard that echo and
her heart had felt that hunger, though for a stray moment or two only.
As quick as hands could move her fingers had stopped her ears, and
nimbly had put before her heart the feast that was spread for it now.
And it was only of the perfection of the present hour that she wrote to
Peggy; no hint of the coming winter was there, though measured by the
actual lapse of minutes it was but an hour or two before summer would
cease. But before summer ceased she would see Tristan once more, her
Tristan.
By the time her letter to Peggy was finished it was time for her to
dress for the opera. Hugh had already gone down to the house, and she
had a little soup and a cutlet only, for, as usual, they were going to
have supper together after the opera. To-night, however, since Hugh was
going to sing, he had eaten nothing for some hours before, and their
supper was to be of substantial nature. She had planned it all; she had
ordered the dishes that she liked as well as he. They were going to have
some cold soup, a dish of blue trout, a partridge, and a savoury. All
this was bathed in the setting rays of this last day of summer sun; it
would illumine, too, their coffee, and the cigarette which Hugh would
smoke with it. And during that cigarette, so she determined, summer was
to cease. It was then she would tell him.
* * * * *
For a moment, as she dressed for the opera, she wondered how he would
take it. It was worse for him than her; her whole attitude toward life
and her instinct told her that with the same certainty with which she
knew that it was easier, vastly easier for her to know that she had
consumption than it would have been to learn that Hugh had. That was
what love meant; just that one simple fact that to the woman who loves,
her husband is more truly herself than she. That was no news to her; she
had known it ever since she had known Hugh. And it could not have been
true of her if it had not been true of him also. Oh, poor Hugh, poor
Hugh!
Then with complete erasure she banished the thoughts of what that hour
round about midnight this evening would bring. She was still in love
with life, with the huge exultant happiness that is the birthright of
clean and normal souls who love another. Such happiness, the highest and
the best of all earthly bliss, is no niggardly distillation of human
life; to produce it a hundred or a myriad souls have not to be boiled
down in torment of fire or refined through starvation of joy so that,
basil-like, it may put forth its flowers from roots that have been
enriched with the life-blood and tears of the many, nor is it rare or
recondite and only to be perceived by the Æolian harps of the world.
Instead it is a common, common bliss; none seek it or strain after it,
but there are but few who do not find it. Her sweet simple soul loved
Hugh; Hugh, as simple as herself, loved her. And if shadows of the dark
valley were near, that would be the all-sufficing lamp which would
dissipate them.
Then crowning this crown, which was hers, was a further gem-like
circlet. To him the supreme gift of song had been given, to her the
supremacy of appreciation.... And it was time to go downstairs and
drive to the opera to hear “Tristan.”
* * * * *
It had been arranged that, since the opera-house was so close to their
hotel, she should not wait for Hugh when it was over, but come straight
home, and she waited there some time before he joined her in an
exultation of happiness. The ceasing of summer, which was now so close
in the measure of minutes, not hours any longer, was banished from her
consciousness. Hugh and Tristan, inextricably intermingled, usurped it
all. She tried to reconstruct the events of the evening, and found them
misty. She only knew that the audience, German, instinctively opposed to
an English artist, but critical, lancet-like, and, after all, when their
emotions were roused, fair, had lost their heads. Fat London had been
moved over Hugh’s Lohengrin; but Germany, not fat, like London, in
matters of perception and appreciation, had been much more than moved.
What had happened exactly?... The end of the first act? Yes, Hugh had
been nervous, quite obviously nervous, and had not done himself justice,
nor had he done justice to the glorious _rôle_ for which he was cast.
And then? Edith had sent round a note to him, saying:
“My darling, I am playing Isolde, and I don’t find you. Isolde, Isolde.”
And a note had come back to her.
“I’m so nervous I can’t do anything. But I’ll try, Isolde.”
It appeared that he had tried. As the curtain went down on the second
act the theatre rose as if the Emperor had entered. But it was Hugh.
It was Hugh in the third act. Hugh! And critical Germany during the
third act committed a unique fault of taste. It had been foreshadowed in
a way, because once and again as Tristan yearned for the coming of the
ship a sort of under-breathed groan had gone through the packed house.
Then, when Tristan had sung his last note, the interruption occurred.
The play was stopped; the orchestra, inaudible beneath the shouts, were
stopped also, and a huge roar of applause went up, damning the artistic
reputation of Munich for years to come. “Tristan! Tristan!” was the cry.
But to Edith the cry was “Hugh!”
Ah! but how proud she was of him then, not for that which he had done,
but for that which he did not do. He had fallen, loose jointed, and lay
with face toward the house, and not a quiver of eyelash, not a movement
of the nightingale throat, not a curl of his mouth answered the thunder
of the applause. Edith had not, even when that thunder rose to its
highest, been afraid that he would respond, but it was glorious to her
to see how still he lay. An almost irresistible appeal had come from the
thousand throats, but the artist since it was personal, since it was to
his voice and his personality to which it was made, was utterly
unconscious of it. Tristan, who he was, lay dead. Soon after Isolde sang
the _Liebestod_.
“The death song,” thought Edith. “What if I sing another? Oh, Hugh,
Hugh!”
It was then that Hugh came in, as she sat in the window, while the table
laid for their supper stood ready. Munich had gone mad about him, and
from where she sat in the window she had heard the distant roar that had
greeted him as he came out of the theatre, which had grown gradually
louder and louder till now the square outside was packed with the
music-mad. She had guessed at once what that distant roar meant, and
her guess had grown into certainty as it grew louder and nearer. And
Hugh came in.
“Ah! your note to me,” he said--“it was that. Oh! isn’t it fun? I told
you it would be! And they took the horses out and dragged me, the
darlings!”
The agitated proprietor tapped and entered, and a short conference
ensued. The upshot was that if the high-born would of his graciousness
show himself or sing on the balcony, all would be well, otherwise the
inhabitants of the hotel might have a night that began very late. If the
high-born gave permission, the proprietor would announce the fact.
“But I’m so hungry!” said Hugh.
The proprietor had been present at the opera.
“I beseech you!” he said.
“Yes, Hugh,” said Edith.
“Then you will come with me?” asked Hugh.
Ah! but how the summer sun blazed then. She but nodded to him, and with
a reverence of extraordinary amplitude to them both, the proprietor
shouted a few guttural words from the balcony. Then he bowed and came
back into the room.
Hugh took Edith’s arm.
“Together,” he said; and together they went out on to the balcony. The
night was windless, and the flame of the gas-lamps burned without
wavering. The whole square was packed with faces, and full of a low
hubbub of talk. But when the two appeared the hubbub ceased and silence
like an incoming tide spread everywhere. Then Hugh turned quickly to the
proprietor.
“Hi! did you say I was going to sing?” he asked.
“I said it was possible. A thousand pardons,” said this perfidious man,
manœuvring into a better place.
Hugh drew a long breath, and with his arm in Edith’s stepped on to the
edge of the balcony. Then he turned side-face to the crowd, unlinked his
arm from hers, and took both her hands in his. He did not look out over
the crowd; he looked at her. And he sang:
“_Du meine Seele, du mein Herz._”
At the end there was dead silence, for he unloosed one of his hands and
held it to the crowd.
“Good-night, friends,” he said in good, firm German; “and we are all
going to sleep. Hush! Thank you.”
Then he took Edith’s arm again, and they went back to the waiting
supper. The window, through which they had entered again, he had left
wide open, but the only sound that came in was the movement of feet
dispersing.
“And that was the best of all, Hughie!” said she.
* * * * *
Edith could not quite rise to the superficial heights of gaiety during
their supper, but it was even more impossible for her to rise--or
sink--to any tragic level. Some equable level was there; she neither
feared what she had to tell, nor did she rise to it by any exaltation of
spirit that commanded her to think that nothing mattered, when happiness
shone like this. Life and death and sickness and health in her mind took
their natural level; all of them were to her the commonplace of souls
that lived; to every soul these things happened; they were all on the
same plane, because they were so big.
* * * * *
Just as she had anticipated, Hugh took a cigarette with his coffee, and
she watched the burning ash get nearer to his fingers. When it got quite
close she would speak. At present it was half an inch off. So she still
talked of that of which they had talked.
“But why Tristan did not come to life when the _Liebestod_ was sung over
him,” she said, “is what I cannot imagine. Surely it was enough to make
the dead live.”
“Sing it over me, then,” said Hugh, “when you watch by my corpse. I will
come to life, I promise you, which is more than I did to-night. What
Vandals, to interrupt like that!”
“Yes, Vandals,” said she; “but I didn’t feel surprised.”
“O, that’s all rot,” said Hugh. “But how I loved the interruption, and
how I longed to open one eyelid. But I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Hugh leaned forward over the table, his eyes and his hands toward his
wife.
“My life!” he said. “How stupid that sort of phrase used to sound until
one knew that it was true. My life! Yes, I look at you, my life; that
has become literally true. Oh, true in big ways and small ways alike.”
The cigarette was getting shorter, and Hugh took a long inhalation of
it, and flipped off a piece of charred paper.
“Yes, big ways and small ways,” he repeated. “Big ways, because you gave
me myself, which is you, and small ways because I sang to-night, both in
the silly opera-house and on that silly balcony, because I was you.
Don’t you understand? Sometimes I think you don’t and it is so odd that
you shouldn’t.”
Still Edith was silent, for she would have to speak very soon now, and
without a pause Hugh went on--
“Considering that it is you who made me begin to understand,” he said,
“it is odd that you shouldn’t know what you have done. I don’t know who
and what you are, or who or what I am, but I do know that we are It.
It, life, call it what you please. And how is your cold?” he asked
suddenly, placing his cigarette-end in his coffeecup.
The burning ash hissed in protest, and was still. Then Edith answered
him.
“It isn’t any better, Hughie,” she said. “It won’t be better for a long
time. Are you comfortable there? If not, let us move, because I have to
talk to you.”
Once before she remembered having said to Peggy that she almost wanted
Hugh to be unhappy so that she might comfort him, for she knew, or
thought she knew, that she could always do that. But she had to make him
unhappy first--strike this dreadful blow. Already, so to speak, he had
seen her arm raised against him in the few words she had just spoken: he
knew that some blow impended, and though his face was still eager and
vivid, the expression on it seemed suddenly fixed. He waited--tense,
rigid, while his hand that had just dropped the cigarette-end into his
cup turned over at the wrist, like a dead hand, and dropped on to the
table-cloth. Then he spoke below his breath.
“Quick--tell me quickly,” he said; “I can bear anything except waiting.”
She took the hand that lay on the table-cloth in both of hers, but it
still lay, as if dead, not responding to her pressure.
“I have got consumption,” she said.
Hugh drew back his head a moment, blinking and wincing as if from a
physical blow, and summer stopped.
Neither moved, neither spoke. Edith, having struck the inevitable blow,
laid down the weapon, and her soul stood waiting, so to speak, listening
eagerly for Hugh to call to her in his pain, so that she might go to
him and comfort him and bind up the wound she had made. There was
nothing nearer to her heart than that, nothing that she so desired, and
nothing of all that had been could be so exquisite. Summer might have
stopped, but on this winter’s day there was splendour of sun and snow.
She had not foreseen that.
But just yet Hugh could not call to her, he could not even need her yet,
for he was dizzy and reeling with the blow. He had no power to move: the
very fact that a moment before all the depths of his nature--all the
strength of his love for her--had been so dominant, so triumphant, made
this paralysis the more complete. And in this stunning of his true and
essential self, the surface perception, the mere habitual work of eyes
and ears and touch seemed suddenly quickened, just as Edith’s had been
when Sir Thomas told her this same thing. A little odour as of caramel
came from the cup where he had dropped his cigarette-end, from the sugar
no doubt, which had been burned before the sweet dregs quenched the
red-hot ash: as his hand turned over on to the table-cloth he had
knocked the spoon out of the saucer, and the clink of it as it fell
sounded in his ears more clearly than even those four words which Edith
had spoken. The lace curtains by the window out of which so short a time
ago he and Edith had stepped on to the balcony just stirred in a little
breeze that had arisen during the last half-hour; on the mantelpiece a
striking clock jarred to show the hour was approaching. And the touch of
Edith’s hands on his meant no more to him than would the touch of any
other hand have meant. Hands touched him, anybody’s hands. Eyes looked
at him, too, from that beloved face opposite, but they were anybody’s
eyes, it was anybody’s face.
Then the sensitiveness of surface-perception grew a little deadened as
the paralysis of the internal perception began, very slowly, starting
from the surface and working gradually inward, to pass off.
“And we were so happy!” he said.
So he was beginning to need her.
“Yes, thank God, my darling,” said she. “Let us often think how happy we
have been.”
He could not receive, assimilate more than that at once. It was for the
moment no use, so she felt, to speak hopefully, determinedly of the
future, of her unquenchable resolve to get well. He would be ready for
that soon, but not quite yet, poor darling. So she waited.
“When did you know?” asked he quietly.
“Just before we left London. I could not do without this beautiful week
we have just had, Hughie. So I did not tell you till it was over.”
“Then--then your having a cold meant that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Hugh pushed back his chair with sudden vehemence, got up, and roughly,
strongly, so that she was both hurt and startled, flung his arms round
her, pinioning hers, and kissed her. He devoured her face with kisses,
eyes and mouth, forehead and hair and neck were sealed with the redness
and fervour of his lips. It was vain for her to struggle with this
almost savage outburst of love; it was in vain for her to remonstrate,
for he stopped her breath with his. Yet she tried; but, oh, how sweet it
was to find her struggle, her remonstrance, useless. How during this
last ten days she had missed and yearned for the caress of his eager
breath, the roughness and smoothness of his face, his eyes burning close
to hers as they burned now. And for him that physical contact which the
tumult of his love demanded shook off the paralysis and the stunning. It
was as if a man struck by apoplexy had had his blood let, as in the
primitive surgery of old days. It was this strong flow of it that
restored him to himself.
“Oh, my soul, my soul,” he whispered, “to think that you have borne it
alone. Thank God, that is over. But you cut me to the heart in not
telling me. I didn’t deserve that from you.”
His lip quivered, his eyes were brimming with tears that soon ran over,
and it was she who kissed them away. Just for that moment she could not
help it. “Be sensible, not kiss anybody”--the words of the doctor
sounded like gibberish. Hugh was crying, the doctor did not allow for
that contingency. Nothing in the world mattered at this moment but that
she should comfort him. He had never cried before, as far as she knew,
and the sobs came from so deep within him.
“Oh, if it was selfish, forgive me,” she said; “but it was not thus that
I meant it. I did want one week more so much, my darling, one week to
crown all the others.”
She had told Peggy that she meant quite distinctly to lie to Hugh, to
tell him that Sir Thomas had recommended her to go to Munich. But quite
suddenly she found she could not lie to him. No question arose in her
mind as to the morality of telling the truth or the immorality of
falsehood. It was not a moral choice that was now flashed before her, it
was a mere question of what was possible and what was not.
“It has crowned the others,” she said, “and I am exultant that we have
got it. Oh, Hughie, we have captured this week, snatched it from all the
foolish physicians who forbade it. Yes, dear, my selfishness went as far
as that. He told me not to come. So I came, and I am more glad than I
can say. He told me also to be sensible, not to kiss anybody. I have
disobeyed him there too. So forgive me for both.”
Hugh had drawn his chair close to hers.
“Oh, forgive, forgive,” he said. “What word is that between us?”
“No; it is a foolish word from me to you,” she said; “but understand
then. Can’t you understand? Just now you wondered at me for not
understanding what you said I had done. I wonder at you now for not
understanding what joy your joy has been to me. Why, it is mine, and
more mine because it is yours. Hughie, though I asked you just now to
forgive, I tell you that I am delighted with what I have done. It is
like--a dog that has stolen a bone, and looks deprecating. All the time
he licks his lips. He has had it; it tasted so good, and though he may
be beaten subsequently, his mouth still waters at the remembrance. Mine
does. There would have been a shadow over this week if you had known.”
“There would never have been this week at all,” he broke in.
“Oh, don’t be too sure--I am very obstinate when I want a thing.”
Yes; she was comforting him already, and though he did not know it, she
did. He thought that she spoke but of the past, she knew that she was
already bracing him for the future. And his smile assured her. And
gently, cunningly, she continued to build out of the past.
“Oh, Hughie,” she said, “it was the funniest scene--dear old Sir Thomas
told me, and then we called Peggy in, and I said, ‘Oh, Peggy, I’ve got
consumption.’ And then I burst out laughing, and Peggy laughed too. We
sat and roared.”
Hugh frowned at this.
“Peggy knew?” he asked. “She lied to me, then; that is what it comes to.
She told me that she laughed when you told her what Sir Thomas said was
the matter with you, so that I might think it was nothing.”
“Yes, dear,” said Edith, “she had already promised not to interfere. If
she had--well, not equivocated to you, she would have lied to me. It was
very awkward for her, but she did her best. It was a conspiracy----”
“Directed against me.”
“Yes, darling; directed against you. I have already asked your
forgiveness, you know.”
Hugh looked round the room with mute, appealing eyes.
“Is it real?” he asked. “Is this horror real?”
Edith said nothing. He was not facing it yet with his best self; Hugh
had better than that to give. She knew it would come, for it was there.
And the infinite pity of love waited for it. When it came it would prove
to have been worth waiting for. Soon he would speak words which came
from her own heart. He would say what _she_ felt, and more, what she
sought to feel. There was more in Hugh than was, so to speak,
accessible, unlocked in her own soul. The love-key would open it. All
the wordless sensations, impressions, strivings, of this week when she
had been alone with her secret knowledge were in him. The winter sun of
the comfort she could bring to him would be blinded by a brighter light.
It was he who was going to unveil it. Often and often, so she almost
hoped, in the weeks and months that lay before them, she would have to
light his candle of patience and hope. But all the time his sun would
light her path.
But at this moment poor Hugh wanted his candle.
“What did he--what did Sir Thomas tell you?” he asked brokenly.
“That I had an excellent chance. That I was the sort of person who got
well. That I was going to get well. That when I got well, I should be
younger and better than now. I liked that, Hugh. We shall be more of an
age, so they say.”
“Oh, that silly joke,” said he.
“Yes, it will be knocked on the head, and I shall put cold-cream on your
venerable nose and give you your gruel, and then go downstairs again to
play with the children, when I have tucked you up in bed and shut the
window for fear you should catch cold. It will be fun.”
“Don’t, don’t,” said Hugh.
But she was comforting him.
“That will not be in the immediate future, dear,” she said; “and I want
to tell now about the immediate future. Now, don’t gasp. To-morrow I
must go to Davos. I have looked out the train already; we go--because
you are coming too--we go to a place called Landquart, and up from
there. I promised Sir Thomas to do that, Hugh. I have to stop there till
I am well; it comes to that, practically.”
Then suddenly Edith found she wanted comfort herself, comfort on the
lower level, so to speak, not from the high level.
“Ah, that is dreadful,” she cried; “it may be a year, it may be more,
before I see our dear home again, and the down all gray and green above
it, and the garden and the water-meadows, and--and Mrs. Owen,” she
added, comforting herself by that eternal comforter of humour. But she
slipped out of its hands again.
“Oh, Hughie,” she said, giving way to the pathos of little things, which
are so big, “I love our home so; it was all so dear and pleasant and
cheery. And you sang your exercises in our room, and I added up books in
another, and the gales bugled outside. Or it was summer, and the miracle
of motherhood came to me. And afterward you and Daisy and Jim, all you
children, dressed up, and--and we played Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and Jim
caught me, and there was blood on my handkerchief. That is all over.”
Though here it was the lower level of comfort that she required, it was
something of the high level that met her. Swift as a spurred horse, Hugh
answered to this.
“Over? What are you thinking of?” he said. “Nothing is over. Why, it is
just because we have lived those divine days that they are not over.
They are here; we have them now. They make us. We won’t look back; there
is no need, for all that you say is past is present, bone of our bone,
and the flesh on it. You know that. ‘Days that are no more,’ as that
silly poem says. There are no days that are no more, except the days we
don’t remember. All we remember and rejoice in are the days that have
been and are, the days that live, and the things that live, the things
that get entwined with love, so that the down above Chalkpits and the
river and the water-meadows are all here, here with you and me. How can
you be so foolish as to think otherwise?”
It was Edith again who was silent. As the angel moved the waters of
Bethesda, so some angel, she knew, had moved Hugh’s soul, and the
love-key was already turning in the wards of her own locked chambers.
Already, in his last words, the door was ajar, a chink of light shone
out. Sorrow, compassion, had enlightened him; it was his very weakness
that gave him strength.
He sat upright, facing her, and though his mouth still quivered and his
eyes were wet, those signs came from another source.
“But you don’t think otherwise!” he said. “It is the past that makes the
future for us. It was we who made us love the dear home, and it is we
who will make us love Davos, and, if need be, Landquart, just as
devotedly. We make the place we live in.”
The door swung wide now.
“And whatever comes, God bless it,” said Hugh. “Oh, soul talks to soul,
does it not, now? If I get run over by a train it is all right. If you
don’t get better, if you die, it is all right. It must be, because we
are lovers, you and I. There is nothing more than that in the world. Why
should there be? What could there be? Supposing the world was all a
hideous joke, and we little people were just puppets on a stage that
meant nothing, what then? We still, you and I now, feel as if it was
real. We can’t ask more than that, for there is nothing more to ask. It
is real to us. We snap our fingers at cancer, consumption, fever, all
that people make statistics about. Who cares? Those things are the
unreal things.”
Hugh’s voice dropped suddenly; till now it had been almost song. But now
it became husky and dim.
“But the down above the house is real,” he said, “since it was there
that you told me of Andrew Robb. And the garden seat is real, because
you sat there and cried. And, to be egotistic, the nursery at Cookham is
real, because--well, because Daisy wouldn’t go to sleep. Moth and rust
cannot corrupt those things. Thieves cannot steal anything that is worth
stealing, whatever form the thieves take. They may take many forms,
illness, disease. Oh, Edith!”
The inevitable restriction bound the human soul. Reach out as we may
toward the infinite, toward what we know is true and real, and indeed
concerns us, yet the fact that we are men and women living on this earth
and bound bodily by the finite laws of time and space, imposes a similar
limitation on the spirit, else it would burst its bonds. And such is the
inevitable irony of things, this reaction, this tweak at the rope which
binds us to earth, brings about a fall more peremptory and convincing in
proportion to the height to which the fluttering soul has soared. And
with the cry, “Oh, Edith,” poor Hugh came back to earth with a thump
that was unreal perhaps, compared to the realities of which he had just
spoken, but was still a terribly good imitation of reality. And as with
jugglers some flaming torch is tossed to and fro, never extinguished,
but burning ever brighter from its swift passage, so Edith held the
light to him now.
“Ah, Hughie,” she said, “you got there, then: you got to the home of our
souls. You showed me beautiful things. But it can’t always be equally
real to us. There must come discouraging times, times when our patience
burns dim, and even hope perhaps burns dim. And it is then, dear, that
you will help us both so much just by being yourself, by laughing, by
talking nonsense, by being young and foolish. Promise me that you will
keep that up.”
The great, grave supreme moment she knew had passed: Hugh had soared up
to give to this dreadful blow that had come upon him and her the welcome
which was worthiest of him, and she was wise to remind him, though
indeed he knew it, that it was impossible to expect that he could remain
always in those high places. Reaction, despondency, even despair, was
sure to come to them, and the full realisation of things as he had seen
them then was not always at hand: the open vision could not stand open
always. But the brave little weapons of every day were there.
She looked at him gravely.
“Promise me that,” she repeated.
“I will do my best,” he said.
“And that is very good, dear. Why, Hughie, it is nearly two! I must go
to bed at once, and so must you.”
But she still held his hands in hers.
“Thank you, my darling, for Tristan to-night,” she said, “and thank you
for the huge success you made of my little treat. Thank you for love,
dear, and your courage, and--and all that you are to me, which no tongue
can tell.”
She paused a moment.
“It has been perfect,” she said.