Time was not good to you. Time was cruel. Time made you see.
Yet somehow they had gone through time. Nights of August and September
when you got up before daybreak to listen at her door. Days when you did
nothing. Mamma sat upright in her chair with her hands folded on her lap.
She kept her back to the window: you saw her face darkening in the dusk.
When the lamp came she raised her arm and the black shawl hung from it
and hid her face. Nights of insane fear when you _had_ to open her door
and look in to see whether she were alive or dead. Days when you were
afraid to speak, afraid to look at each other. Nights when you couldn't
sleep for wondering how Mark had died. They might have told you. They
might have told you in one word. They didn't, because they couldn't;
because the word was too awful. They would never say how Mark died. Mamma
thought he had died of cholera.
You started at sounds, at the hiss of the flame in the grate, the fall of
the ashes on the hearth, the tinkling of the front door bell.
You heard Catty slide back the bolt. People muttered on the doorstep. You
saw them go back past the window, quietly, their heads turned away. They
were ashamed.
You began to go out. You walked slowly, weighted more than ever by your
immense, inexplicable fatigue. When you saw people coming you tried to go
quicker; when you spoke to them you panted and felt absurd. A coldness
came over you when you saw Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin with their heads on
one side and their shocked, grieved faces. You smiled at them as you
panted, but they wouldn't smile back. Their grief was too great. They
would never get over it.
You began to watch for the Indian mail.
One day the letter came. You read blunt, jerky sentences that told you
Mark had died suddenly, in the mess room, of heart failure. Captain
Symonds said he thought you would want to know exactly how it
happened.... "Well, we were 'cock-fighting,' if you know what that is,
after dinner. Peters is the heaviest man in our battery, and Major
Olivier was carrying him on his back. We oughtn't to have let him do it.
But we didn't know there was anything wrong with his heart. He didn't
know it himself. We thought he was fooling when he dropped on the
floor.... Everything was done that could be done.... He couldn't have
suffered.... He was happy up to the last minute of his life--shouting
with laughter."
She saw the long lighted room. She saw it with yellow walls and yellow
lights, with a long, white table and clear, empty wine-glasses. Men in
straw-coloured bamboo armchairs turning round to look. She couldn't see
their faces. She saw Mark's face. She heard Mark's voice, shouting with
laughter. She saw Mark lying dead on the floor. The men stood up
suddenly. Somebody without a face knelt down and bent over him.
It was as if she had never known before that Mark was dead and knew it
now. She cried for the first time since his death, not because he was
dead, but because he had died like that--playing.
He should have died fighting. Why couldn't he? There was the Boer War and
the Khyber Pass and Chitral and the Soudan. He had missed them all. He
had never had what he had wanted.
And Mamma who had cried so much had left off crying.
"The poor man couldn't have liked writing that letter, Mary. You needn't
be angry with him."
"I'm not angry with him. I'm angry because Mark died like that."
"Heigh-h--" The sound in her mother's throat was like a sigh and a sob
and a laugh jerking out contempt.
"You don't know what you're talking about. He's gone, Mary. If you were
his mother it wouldn't matter to you how he died so long as he didn't
suffer. So long as he didn't die of cholera."
"If he could have got what he wanted--"
"What's that you say?"
"If he could have got what he wanted."
"None of us ever get what we want in this world," said Mamma.
She thought: "It was her son--_her_ son she loved, not Mark's real,
secret self. He's got away from her at last--altogether."