together, and his father’s house was next to ours in the country, the
woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park
paling. In consequence, from our frequent passages the one to the other,
a beaten track lay through the woods in a bee-line from house to house,
and the paling at the particular point where the bee-line crossed it,
was, from the frequent scrambling over it, broken and splintered, till
after the lapse of some years it was no more than a stile, that could be
walked over without any scrambling at all, and the path was known as the
‘boys’ path.’ We had remarkably kindred tastes, because we both of us
liked practically everything except parsnips and being indoors, even
down to London fogs, when we used to have games of hide-and-seek in
Berkeley Square--where we also both lived--which for sheer mysterious
excitement beat any pursuit in which I have ever been engaged, either
before or since. The game itself is one of the utmost simplicity. I
stood in the porch of either house while Dick was given ten seconds’
law. He had then, without leaving Berkeley Square, to remain uncaught
for five minutes, while I pursued him blindly in the fog. We were not
allowed to run nor to hide, but only to walk about the square, and we
were properly dressed with tall hats and gloves, so that in case of the
fog clearing rapidly we should appear respectable. Of course, for the
whole of that five minutes we were both utterly lost, and the hider was
usually caught by walking straight into the seeker. Hence the
excitement: the pursued guiltily sneaked aside from every figure that
loomed through the fog, the pursuer eagerly peered at such, to vanish
precipitately again if this was not his quarry, to merely annex it if it
was. At the end of the five minutes, if the pursued was yet uncaught,
both returned--if they could find it--to the house from which they set
out, and pursued and pursuer changed rôles.
I have not, indeed, yet heard of the employment with which we did not
amuse ourselves, and we ranged from birds’ eggs to carpentering, from
chess to squash-rackets, from football to the writing of Tennysonian
lyrics, with equal fervour. We also revived the pentathlon as follows:
Dick won the toss and said ‘Golf,’ and I retorted with ‘Tennis.’ He then
chose the hundred yards and I croquet. The odd event was, of course,
selected by the winner of the toss. Two games were barred, namely,
single wicket at cricket, because we neither could ever get the other
out, and long-jump, because Dick could jump just about twice as far as
I. The whole pentathlon had to be decided on one day, so that staying
powers counted for something.
Then a stormy day would come, too bad for man or beast to be abroad in,
and we had pentathlons of the intellect, playing chess, draughts,
backgammon, the poetry-game, and Halma in feverish succession. Here,
too, games at cards were barred, because of Dick’s strange inability to
grasp the hang of any card-game whatever. He merely fell asleep over
them, so that made it quits in the matter of the long-jump; in fact, the
balance was in my favour, since there is only one long-jump, but there
are many games of cards, and I could have named all the events of which
I had the call from among them.
So from school we passed out into life. Dick went into the army, and I
took up as a profession the work on which I am at this moment engaged.
We had many mutual friends, and there never came, as long as Dick was
alive, any break in our intimacy; nor, until a certain day, did we
either of us, as far as we were aware, grow any older. The pentathlons
continued with unabated fervour, and I should be ashamed to say now how
old we both were when we last played hide-and-seek in Berkeley Square.
It would appear hardly credible to any serious and right-minded person,
while those who did believe it would be filled with contempt for us;
and, as it is bad to be contemptuous, I will not mention the ages.
Now, there had always been in our lives a third person, a girl rather
younger than either of us, a neighbour both in town and country and a
distant cousin of Dick’s. For years Dick and I had liked Margery, but
had necessarily despised her because she was a girl. Then there
succeeded years when we had begun to be men, not boys, and Margery not a
girl, but a woman. The contempt ceased (that was so kind of us), and we
three formed what I may call an alliance of laughter. Margery was always
present at the pentathlons, acted as umpire in case of dispute, and was
even allowed to join in them herself. Then quite suddenly I became aware
that I had fallen in love with her. And it was in this manner I knew it:
It was at the conclusion of the golf item in the pentathlon, and on the
eighteenth green. Dick had holed out his last putt and won from me. He
had also won from Margery, and Margery had a long putt of ten yards to
halve with me. She looked at it for some time. She was standing with her
back to the sun, so that her brown hair was flushed and gilded with it;
her eyes, very blue and vivid with thought, were intent on the line to
the hole, her mouth was a little drooped, and the white line of her
teeth showed below her lip.
Suddenly she said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and putted.
The ball travelled smoothly along the turf, and she threw her arms wide.
‘It’s going in,’ she cried. ‘_What_ a darling!’ and as the ball dropped
into the hole she looked up at me. Then something caught in my breath,
and it was no longer the Margery that I knew that stood there, but She.
She who was completion and perfection--woman to me a man.
For a time the old intimacy of the alliance of laughter went on
externally, I suppose, as before. I think we laughed no less. We
contested as many pentathlons. We made plans for every day of Dick’s
leave, and usually abandoned them for subsequent improvisations. Then,
not more than a week afterwards, there came a day when Margery had to go
to town, and Dick and I were left alone. She was coming back in the
evening, and we were to go to the station to meet her, have tea there,
and ride our bicycles back over the ridge of Ashdown Forest, down home
in time to be exceedingly late for dinner.
The afternoon was very hot and sultry, and Dick and I abandoned the game
at tennis we had begun, for we were both slack and heavy-handed, and
strolled through the woods up the ‘boys’ path’ for the coolness and
shelter of the beech-trees. The ground rises rapidly near the broken
paling, and, finding a suitable bed of bracken, we lay down and smoked,
looking out from cover over the great ridge of gorse and heather that
stretched below us. The air was full of the innumerable murmurs of a hot
day, and a warm heathery smell hung idly on the air. Near at hand was a
flaming bank of gorse, and as we lay there, far more silent than our
wont, we could hear the popping of the ripened seeds. The birds, too,
were very silent in the bushes; only the grasshopper chirped unweariedly
in the grass. Dick, I remember, was cleaning his pipe with yellow
grass-stems, his straw hat tilted over his eyes. I, though lying there,
was in reality waiting for the train at Victoria, No. 6 Platform. It
started in five minutes, and had two hours’ run before it. Then Dick sat
up.
‘Look here,’ he said: ‘I’ve something to tell you. There’s no doubt
about it--I’ve fallen in love.’
I think I knew, almost before he spoke, what he would say; certainly
before he spoke again I knew what was coming.
‘Yes, Margery,’ he went on: ‘my God! I have fallen in love.’
He turned his brown eyes suddenly from the hot reeling landscape in
front to me.
‘Why, Jack,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter? You look queer, somehow.’
‘Dick, are you--are you sure?’ I asked.
‘That you look queer?’
‘No--that you have fallen in love with Margery?’
‘Sure? You’ll be sure enough when you do the same. There’s no mistake
about it, I can tell you. Why, Margery is the whole point of the
pentathlons now.’
‘She has been so to me for the last week,’ said I.
Dick said nothing for a minute. Then, below his breath, ‘What do you
mean?’ he asked.
‘That you and I are in the same boat,’ I said.
‘How long have you known this?’ he asked.
‘A week yesterday.’
‘And you didn’t tell me.’
‘No; I couldn’t. It has been too wonderful to speak of. I’m made like
that. I should have told you, though, before long.’
‘Have you spoken to Margery?’ he asked. ‘No, of course you haven’t.’
‘No; I haven’t spoken to anybody.’
Dick got up.
‘Come away,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this place. And what are we to do?’
I looked at my watch.
‘Start for Braceton at once,’ I said, ‘or the train will be in before we
get there.’
Dick put his arm in mine.
‘I say, Jack,’ he said, ‘whatever happens, we’ll behave decently, won’t
we?’
‘Yes, probably,’ said I.
‘That’s all right, then. We must talk this over to-night. It must simmer
a bit before we can get used to it. Don’t let us say another word about
it now.’
So we rode off through the heat to Braceton, found the train already in,
and Margery waiting for us on the platform, looking, for all the
oppressive stagnation of the day, like some nymph of Grecian waterways.
And Dick and I looked thirstily on her, but feared to meet each other’s
eye, for life and love were in the balance, and we were friends.
That evening, when the others had gone to bed, we sat on in the chairs
that had been taken for coolness out of the smoking-room on to the lawn.
The odour of the hot summer night hung heavily, and nothing stirred in
the windless air, except that from time to time a faint ghost of a tired
breeze whispered from the bed of tobacco-plant, and brought with it a
waft of the thick scent.
The sky had grown overcast, and from a bank of cloud which rose slowly
in the west the fires of lightning flickered, and a drone of distant
thunder answered. In the rooms downstairs the lights were already put
out, but the bedrooms above showed illuminated squares of blind. Nearly
opposite us was Margery’s room, and now and then her shadow crossed it.
Then that light was put out, and presently afterwards we heard the
scream of the blind updrawn, and at the open window through the darkness
her white figure glimmered dimly.
We could neither of us move nor speak, and in the silence I remember
hearing the creak of Dick’s shirt grow more rapid as his breathing
quickened. Then, in a bush close at hand, a nightingale suddenly burst
into bubbling song--no lament, as the Greeks thought it, but the lyric
passion of mating-time, when the stir of love goes through the world,
and the lion seeks the lioness, and the Libyan hills re-echo to the
roaring of his irresistible need; when the feathered and bright-eyed
birds lie breast to breast in their swaying habitations; when the man
seeks the woman, and cannot rest till he has found her.
Then a flash of lightning, somewhat more vivid, lit up for a moment the
lawn and the house, and she must have seen us there, for from her window
came a little stifled exclamation, and before the thunder answered she
was gone.
‘The storm is coming up,’ said Dick. ‘Let’s go indoors, and talk there.
Besides, I’m as dry as dust, and I want a drink. We’ll go upstairs; all
the lights are out down here.’
Our rooms were next each other, communicating by a door, and, drawing
our chairs up to the window for coolness, we sat down.
‘Somehow or other we’ve got to settle it now,’ said he--‘settle it, that
is, as far as we are able.’
How long we talked I do not know, but before we had finished we had to
shut the window, for the storm came nearer, and burst round us in
sheets of heavy rain and violet fires of lightning. Then it passed, and
still we sat there, till at the end the moon came out, and rode high in
a clean-washed heaven, with the stars clustering round her like swarming
bees, while to the east the sky grew dove-coloured with the first hint
of dawn. At last I rose.
‘It remains, then, just to toss,’ said I, and spun a coin.
‘Heads!’ said he.
‘It is. You speak to Margery first, then,’ I said.
He got up too, irresolute, and we looked at each other gravely, rivals
in that which makes life sweet, but friends. And that makes life sweet,
too.
‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said rather huskily, ‘we will do our
very utmost not to let this stand between us, and to keep all knowledge
of it from her.’
‘Yes, whatever happens,’ said I. ‘Time to go to bed, Dick. Good-night.’
I went into my room, closing the door of communication; but before I
was half undressed it opened, and Dick came in.
‘One thing more,’ he said: ‘we didn’t settle when.’
‘That must be left to you,’ said I; ‘but oh, Dick, for God’s sake let it
be soon! Surely it had better be soon.’
His face lit up with the unimaginable light of love.
‘Yes; the sooner the better,’ he said.
I slept long and late that night, from the mere exhaustion, I suppose,
of thought and suspense; did no more than turn and sleep again, when I
was called; and woke finally to find it was after ten, and the calmness
of the promise in the dawn had been fulfilled by a perfect day of
unclouded blue. I went through into Dick’s room, but he had already
dressed and gone down, and even as I passed the window I saw him and
Margery come from the conservatory and out on to the lawn, surrounded,
as was her wont, by a wave of dogs. But this morning it seemed that Dick
had no word for any of them; and thus they passed out of sight behind
the bushes. I knew as surely as if the thing had already happened that
Dick would have something to tell me when they came back, but what that
should be I had no kind of idea. We three had played like children
together for years: had Margery her secret, even as Dick and I had had?
Or had she none? Were both of us her playmates?
It cannot have been very long before Dick came back, for I was still in
the dining-room, staring blankly at the morning paper, with my breakfast
yet untasted. As soon as I saw him I knew.
‘So it is you,’ I said, and stopped. Then our compact and our friendship
aided me. ‘Oh, make her happy, Dick!’ said I.
The dear man sat down on the edge of the table.
‘Jack, I’m cut in two about it all,’ he said, and never have I seen so
intense a happiness on the face of living being. ‘Really I am. Oh, damn
it all! And Margery told me to come and tell you, and she wants to see
you. She says she’ll see you alone first, and then we’ll all play the
fool together, as we’ve always done. So I had to lie to her. First
thing I did was to lie to her, and I told her that you were not
particularly fit this morning--thunderstorm kept you awake--and that I
didn’t know if you’d be up to a pentathlon.’
He broke off suddenly.
‘My God, if it only wasn’t you!’ he said.
I remember feeling then as if I was a piece of mechanism external to
myself. This mechanism saw Dick sitting on the edge of the table, saw
breakfast waiting and ate it, and spoke and moved in obedience to an
instinct that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Behind somewhere sat
Me, watching what went on.
‘No; a pentathlon by all means,’ said the tongue of the mechanism.
‘We’ve got to have one more to settle the last, and you go back
to-morrow. It begins with croquet. Margery chose that.’
Dick’s eyebrows suddenly grew into a frown, and he bit his lip.
‘Oh, Jack!’ he said.
Then for a moment I took possession of the mechanism.
‘It’s no use talking,’ I said, ‘The thing is so, and all I can do at
present is to behave with some semblance of decency--anyhow, so that
Margery shall not know. I can manage that perfectly, and it will give me
something to do. It’s no use your being sorry for me. Besides, it’s not
humanly possible for you, nor would it be for me if I was in your place,
to have sorrow predominant. Margery fills the world for you--she does
for me----’
‘No, not fills it,’ said he. ‘You don’t understand----’
‘I understand perfectly. You’re a decent sort of fellow, and--well, I am
your friend. It’s no manner of good talking about it. All we settled
last night I feel fully--fully! Do you understand? I can only assure you
it is so. Whatever happens--do you remember saying that? I do, and--oh,
for God’s sake, don’t worry!’
Dick got off the table, turned his back to me, and blew his nose very
long and loudly, and, drawing up a chair, sat down by me with a
quivering lip.
‘I’ve made a fool of myself, I suppose,’ he said, ‘and I’ve done not a
particle of good, but only made it harder for you. That’s like me. I’m
happier than I thought it was allowed for a man to be, and I’m
wretcheder than I hoped was permitted. That’s all; there was no need to
say it, because you knew it. But I had to.’
Then again the mechanism moved, and I sat and watched. And now I find it
is quite easy to write down what happened, for I only watched. But it
was hard to write down what happened when, as on the last page, I was
doing it myself. If you think of it you will see it must be so.
‘Where is Margery?’ I said. ‘Oh, Dick, don’t be a fool!’
Again he blew his nose.
‘Out in the garden,’ he said. ‘Are you going now?’
‘Yes. The pentathlon begins in ten minutes. Nothing has happened. Just
the pentathlon!’
I walked out of the dining-room, leaving him still there, into the
blinding blaze of sunshine. She--the She--was sitting in a chair at the
end of the lawn, and my mother beside her. The latter got up as I came
near.
‘You have heard?’ she said; and in her beloved face there was that look
which I have seen three or four times in my life, when great sorrow or
great joy has brought us into that union which, so I verily believe, can
only exist between mother and son. I knew that she had guessed what
unspoken word to Margery had been on my lips.
‘Yes; Dick told me,’ said I.
‘Be a man, then,’ said she, seeing that I knew that she knew. ‘And God
bless you, my darling, and comfort you.’
It was but a step to where Margery sat, and I held out both hands.
‘Oh, Jack, I am so happy!’ she said, and with that she rose on tiptoe,
put her arms round my neck, and kissed me. It was all right, you see,
that she should do that now, for she was my friend, and I was Dick’s
friend, and she loved Dick.
* * * * *
There is but little more to say about that May, since even in a diary
one has to avoid certain depths of egotism, in order to avoid being
unbearable. The pentathlon was played, and I won. Also I had ten
minutes with my mother that night, while Dick and Margery were together.
Nothing much was said on either side, but I knew again, with the
vividness that usually comes only with a thing heretofore unrealized,
that she was my mother and that I was her son--part of her being, born
from her body, indivisibly, while the ages lasted, hers. Hers was every
little effort that I made towards ordinary human decency of behaviour;
hers was the resolve I made then, and have tried (with how many
failures!) to keep since, to realize that these things could not have
happened with any but a benignant purpose, blind and incomprehensible as
it might seem to me or to her; and that to become in the least degree
embittered, or to fail in the smallest particle of friendship to my
friend, or of love to the woman whom I loved, was to miss the Divine
purpose, and to make of one’s self a senseless animal. For then, and
even now as I write, and do know the human outcome of that love, who
knows now what the meaning and the great purpose of all this is? A
flaw, a failure--can one say that? Not so do I believe, for I _know_ it
is all a fragment of the circumference of that great circle, the centre
of which and the whole of which--you and me, and the drunkard in the
street, and the prostitute in the street, and summer rain, and love and
death, are included, and none higher or lower than another--is God.
One word more; for the tired, puzzled entity which I know as myself
turns back to the time when it was neither puzzled nor tired, and turned
then in childlike faith to what never failed it, even as it now, mute,
with its years of experience to back its childlike faith, turns to her
whom it now knows can never fail it.
Mother, mother! I hope you are asleep, for this is an unseasonable and
timeless hour of night, but I know that before you slept you prayed for
your child. You prayed that God of His great grace would continue to
keep him unembittered, for he humbly hopes that no touch of that has
ever come near him because of what May brought; you prayed that the
wound in his heart would be healed, and your prayer was heard; you
prayed that some day he would find his Margery--not she of whom June
will tell you, for she was Dick’s, but another--the one predestined in
the eternal purpose of God.
JUNE
The early-planted sweet-peas are in flower; so, too, are the
nasturtiums. It was Margery’s plan always to sow seeds very early in the
year; indeed, she was supposed to have been seen sowing in a snowstorm.
Then she used to cover the earth up with matting if it was very cold,
and uncover it for any glint of sun. Her gardening was of the most
unorthodox order. She would pull up seedlings to see how their roots
were getting on, disturb sown earth to see what was occurring below; if
a plant looked sickly, she took it up and shook it, and replanted it
again with a warning; but everything answered with her, and it was she
who taught me to sow sweet-peas in March, so that you got the first
flowers early in June.
The year after the events of this May, I remember, she sowed a long row
of sweet-peas, running right up from the house to the end of the
garden. The garden was not a large one, any more than was the house, for
she and Dick were not rich, and the whole row was not a hundred feet
long. But there was a pleasant piece of lawn, with a thicket of lilac
and syringa at one end, and on each side of the path she had placed old
petroleum barrels, sawn in half, for flower-tubs. These she and I had
painted green, and in the process had painted ourselves too, and
everything tasted and smelt of green paint for a week afterwards. In
these she planted nasturtiums and love-lies-bleeding, and both
sweet-peas and nasturtiums were in flower early in June, just as mine
are flowering now. She always loved sweet-peas. They gave her ‘a
feeling,’ she said; therefore they grow thick in a certain place.
Dick and she had been married in the September of the same year when
they were engaged. In October the Boer War broke out, and Dick’s
regiment was among the first to go out, and she and I went down to
Southampton to see the _Maplemore_ off. It was a bleak, gray day, with
an angry, fretful wind which raised little ripples on the water, and,
as soon as raised, cut their heads off. There was a good deal of delay,
and she did not sail for two hours after the advertised time, and we all
three said openly to each other that we wished she would be quick. But
when the time came I think that Margery would have given her life for
half an hour more--had she known.
Then in December came the week which no one can think of even now
without a shudder, when Stormberg was succeeded by Magersfontein, and
Magersfontein by Colenso. But those wintry days passed, and the scars
they left in many homes began to heal, and the year and the tide turned.
I saw Margery many times that spring, and I went to stay with her for
two days on the 24th of May, for the 25th was the anniversary of her
engagement to Dick, and she had long ago settled that we should spend it
together. The 24th had been a very hot day, close and sultry, and by a
curious coincidence late that night the storm which had for several
hours flickered and grumbled in the west came very quickly closer, and
burst over us in appalling riot. Sleep was out of the question, and
about two in the morning I got up and sat at the window watching it,
thinking very intently of how just a year ago Dick and I had sat
together through it, until the ivory calmness of the moon and the
dove-coloured dawn had succeeded the tumult. Step by step I went through
the talk we had had together, while overhead the violence of the storm
abated and passed into the distance again. And whether I actually went
to sleep or not I do not know, though in any case I was unconscious of
having done so; but suddenly I heard Dick’s voice, as I thought, close
to me.
‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said.
Then, whether I had been asleep or not, I was awake now, and alone.
Outside a moon rode high and clear amid the swarming stars, and in the
east the sky was dove-coloured with the approaching dawn.
The next day we spent very quietly. There was no one there but Margery’s
mother and myself, and we hardly went beyond the garden; for Margery’s
time, you will understand, was nearly come, and in a week or two she
would be the mother of Dick’s child. After tea that afternoon we had a
long talk together, for her mother had gone out on some household
business, and she spoke to me of that which was coming to her, with all
the simplicity of her nature, all the triumph and glory of her loving
heart.
‘I want you to come down again as soon as possible after it,’ she said,
‘because it seems so inevitable that you must be here to take part in
this great joy of Dick’s and mine. You see, Jack, I can’t remember a
single joy or sorrow of my life with which you and Dick were not bound
up, as it were. And this--the greatest of all. Do come as soon as mother
writes to you.’