got up and tossed the incense of the flowers’ evensong over the garden.
Then, as night closed in, the smell of syringa and lilac fell asleep,
and the sweet-peas closed, and the benediction of the stars shone from
the heights of heaven. Then Margery rose from her chair, and held out
both hands to me.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘every day I thank God for giving me you as my
friend and Dick’s. For years I have done that, even when I was a child.
And now that I am a woman, and the crown of womanhood is coming to me, I
tell you this, and I ask you to continue to be the friend of all of us.
I thank you, Jack; I bless you with my whole heart.’
And once again she kissed me.
My God, how content I was at that moment! For at that moment the foe
which I had been fighting all the year, whose sword was jealousy of
Dick, whose spear was bitterness of heart, whose armour was the human
longing and the crying of the flesh for this woman, dropped dead. No
longer would I have had anything different: all was utterly good; and
she whom I loved stood over me in the gathering silence of the night,
and under her feet lay that devilish enemy whom her goodness and
sweetness had slain.
We dined with great gaiety and foolishness, and dinner was succeeded by
absurd games, in which the two members of the alliance of laughter did
wonders for the cause. Then Margery and her mother went upstairs, and I
strolled into the garden again to smoke for half an hour before going
to bed, with the reaction of laughter rather strong upon me, and
feeling, in spite of what had happened before dinner, vaguely disquieted
and depressed, and my mind went back and dwelt with curious insistence
on the hallucination of Dick’s voice the night before. Then, even while
I was pondering on the strangeness of it, and telling myself that I must
have been asleep, I suddenly heard the clang of the gate leading from
the road to the front-door on the other side of the house, followed by
the crunching of gravel, and after a moment the sound of the front-door
bell. At that a sudden nameless fear leaped into my heart, and before
the bell sounded again I was at the front-door. Outside was a
telegraph-boy, with a War Office telegram addressed to Margery. I took
it from him, closed the door quietly, and stood there with it in my
hand, struck motionless and incapable of thought.
Then upstairs I heard a door open, and next moment my name was called by
Margery, her voice half strangled and struggling for utterance. ‘Jack,
Jack, what is it?’ she called. ‘What is it? what is it?’ Next moment I
saw her leaning over the banisters of the landing above, her hair down,
and with a dressing-gown on, and she saw what I held in my hand.
‘Will you bring it up to me, please, Jack, or open it there?’ she said
faintly, and I heard the banisters creak as she leaned on them and
clutched them. Then her mother hurried out of her room and put her arm
round her.
I can hear the tearing of that envelope now, the rustle of the unfolding
sheet. The few words it contained for a moment meant nothing. Then they
became coherent.
‘Is it about Dick?’ whispered Margery. ‘Is he wounded? Tell me quick.’
I looked up, and I do not remember whether I said anything or not. But
she knew, and in the dim light from the turned-down lamp in the hall I
saw her rise to her full height, with arms outstretched, then sway, and
fall back into her mother’s arms.
The telegram fluttered to the ground, and I ran upstairs. Together we
lifted her up, carried her into her room, and laid her on the bed.
‘Dick is killed?’ whispered her mother to me, and I nodded. Then at her
request I left them, and ran to wake one of the servants.
‘Don’t go to bed,’ she said, as I left the room; ‘you may be wanted.
Would you sit up till I see you? Have your bicycle ready.’
The drawing-room, through which I had come a minute before in answer to
the bell, looked out through French windows on to the garden, and here I
sat waiting for her mother. As yet the news to me was inconceivable; it
seemed merely impossible that it should be so. Something would happen:
another telegraph-boy would come, or, what seemed more likely, I should
wake to find that I was not here and the time was not now. Perhaps the
place would be Braceton, perhaps the time would be a year ago. Yet how
could that be? For she had spoken to me of Dick, and of Dick’s child.
There was nothing in the world so real as those minutes. And in this
dumb, dazed mood I went once into the hall to see if my bicycle was
there; for if these things were a dream, surely I should find some
incongruity, and perhaps that which should have been a bicycle might be
Dick. But the bicycle stood there, with its lamp already lit, as I had
left it.
Then came quick steps descending the stairs, and I went out into the
hall.
‘Please go into the town at once, Jack,’ said her mother, ‘and bring Dr.
Carlton. Make him come at once. If he is not in, bring somebody.’
‘What--what! Oh, tell me something!’ I said.
‘Her child will be born sooner than we expected,’ said she. ‘Oh, be
quick!’
The road was empty of passengers and very dark. Once a man--a policeman,
I think--shouted something after me; once the shadow of a dog raced me
for awhile, snarling and snapping. Otherwise all I know of that four
miles is a round space of illumination on the road cast by my lamp, I
seemingly motionless, while to right and left trees and houses went
noiselessly by, and a wind blew steadily, in spite of the turns of the
road, from the direction in which I was speeding. Then the lamp-posts of
the town began, and I had the sense to go somewhat more slowly for fear
of being taken up, and so delayed. Then, crossing the High Street, I
came to the square red-brick house.
For an interminable time, so it seemed to me, I waited on the doorstep,
and then the door was opened by an impassive man-servant. Dr. Carlton
was at dinner, and there was a party, but as soon as he came out the
message should be delivered; and I remember saying that I would go into
the dining-room myself unless I could see him at once. Then, after
another interminable delay, Dr. Carlton, whom I knew slightly, came out.
‘Come at once,’ I said--‘Mrs. Alington.’
‘Not her confinement?’ he said, frowning.
‘She has just had news of Dick’s death,’ said I, ‘and her mother told me
that--that the baby might be born sooner than they expected. Oh, man,
don’t argue!’
‘How did you come?’ said he.
‘Bicycle. It’s outside.’
He turned to his servant.
‘Tell them to put the pony in at once,’ he said, ‘and bring it round.
And’--he looked at me sharply a moment--‘bring some brandy.’
I suppose I made some gesture of impatience, for he laid his hand on my
arm with a quieting force.
‘Now, be sensible,’ he said; ‘I am going to get what I may require, and
shall go off on your bicycle. You will follow in the cart, and, until it
is ready, you will sit down here and drink a wine-glassful of
brandy--neat, mind: I order it.’
He nodded at me, pointing to a chair, and I stumbled towards it,
conscious for the first time of an overpowering exhaustion. My blood
beat through my temples very thin and far away, but with frightful
rapidity, and something sang in my ears like the whistle of a distant
train. Then I became conscious that the butler had put a glass of brandy
into my hand, and I drank it.
‘The cart will be round in ten minutes, sir,’ he said.
‘But Dr. Carlton?’ I asked.
‘Rode off a couple of minutes ago, sir. I should sit still, sir, if I
were you.’
It can hardly have been an hour from the time the telegram first came to
when the cart with me inside it drew up at Margery’s house. Against the
porch leaned my bicycle, the lamp still burning, and lights, I saw, were
burning in her bedroom directly over the door. Standing on a chair
inside the hall was Dr. Carlton’s hat and a small black bag; on the
floor close by was the pink sheet of the telegram, which I must have
dropped when I ran upstairs. Even then I remember clinging in some
desperate, dazed fashion to the hope that it was all a dream, and that
the telegram would prove to be some trivial absurdity, and I picked it
up and read it again.
Then I sat down and waited.
From time to time there was some muffled sound of footsteps and movement
above, then silence again, then more steps. Then I heard a door open
above, and a droning voice which I knew to be Margery’s speaking in
level, meaningless tones. Then the doctor’s voice said sharply:
‘Yes, it is in my bag. Bring it all upstairs if you don’t understand.’
With the bag in my hand, I met the servant hurrying downstairs, sobbing
in a helpless manner. She took the bag from me without a word, and went
up again. And step by step, after I had heard the door close, I moved to
the top of the stairs and sat there. Below, the clock in the hall beat
out metallic minutes, and once the hour--twelve only--struck. Through
the fanlight above the front-door I could see the lamps of the doctor’s
dogcart; three or four times they moved away, and after a minute or so
returned again to the same spot. At intervals that terrible droning
voice came from Margery’s room.
How long these things lasted I cannot say, but it must have been less
than two hours, for I knew the hall clock struck once only. Then the
droning voice ceased altogether, and in its place came short, incisive
sentences in a man’s voice, the purport of which, of course, I could not
hear. Then came the cry of a child, and I knew that in the midst of
death we are in life.
Then, as if I had been drawn by cords, I crept nearer and nearer to the
door of the room, and the crying of the child still sounded--the cry of
Dick’s child. And Dick? Oh, Dick! if your brave, blithe spirit in the
paradise of God, now free of its habitation of flesh, keeps watch, as it
surely must, over those it loves, come here, come here, where there is
so sore a need of you and your comforting. Speak to her through that
frail tabernacle of time and space; comfort the soul you love, if the
laws of your world permit it. Come!
* * * * *
Later in that long night Dr. Carlton told me all he could tell. The
child had been born, and it lived. There was no reason why it should not
live, for it was quite healthy, though it had been born before its time.
About Margery he could not say. She had not rallied satisfactorily. She
had been perfectly conscious for a time after the birth of the child,
but with her consciousness had returned the knowledge of her husband’s
death, and she had relapsed again into a semi-comatose state. He
proposed to wait, visiting her from time to time, till he could feel
more happy about her.
Twice before the dawn broke I tried to go to bed, and as many times I
crept downstairs again to where Dr. Carlton sat in the drawing-room, his
genial, florid face looking more anxious and troubled each time he
returned from a visit upstairs. Then, just as morning broke in thin red
lines on the horizon, I heard his voice call to me, and I went upstairs.
He beckoned to me to come in.
Margery was lying in bed, propped up on pillows, and her eyes were
closed. I sat by the bedside and waited. They had taken the baby away,
and only her mother knelt there, with her eyes fixed on Margery’s face.
Suddenly she raised her head a little, opened her eyes, and saw me.
‘Thank you,’ she said--‘thank you for being here, Jack. Dick is waiting
for me. Yes, Dick!’
She raised herself a little more, and seemed to struggle for breath.
‘Is it morning?’ she said. ‘Let in the morning.’
And even as I pulled the curtains aside and raised the blinds there
dawned on her the Everlasting Day.
JULY
I have told you about the May of three years ago, and the June of two
years ago, because those two months are so dedicated in my mind to what
happened then, that, while the months are running, I cannot free myself
from them and live in the present year. Have you not certain such dates
in your year--days on which you live, not on the day that is now
passing, but on a certain day in some year long past? There is a foolish
proverb that says that those people are happy who have no history. In
other words, it is better to be a cow than a man. I cannot see it. But
if it will not bore you, and if, in fact, my May and June are ever so
little human to you, I will tell you quite shortly a little more of
them. If, on the other hand, this does bore you, leave out the next four
pages.
Believe me, death is not so terrible; what is terrible is the thought
that it is so. But learn how false that thought is, and death will not
terrify you. For what lies behind? God and He who died for us. And if I
am wrong, if it is not so, nothing whatever seems to me to matter, and
we can look on death as on a flea-bite. But believing, as I do, that
beyond death--even as on this side of it--is God, when lives have ended,
as those of Margery and Dick, so utterly without reproach, when two
souls have been so splendidly human as they were, it seems that God must
have been knowing what He was about when He allowed that bullet--blindly
illogical as it may seem to us--to end her life as surely as it ended
his. I can understand the existence of a lifelong regret and bitterness
_if a thing had not been well done_, if a man died from obvious
carelessness of any kind, or from weak persistence in a bad habit. Then
one might say, ‘If it had been otherwise!’ But he had done his duty, and
his duty implied death. And his death--I only grope dimly after what I
believe to be true--implied hers. Does this seem to you a stoical,
unhuman view? Ah! believe me, it is not so. It would have been very
easy for one who loved them both to take another point of view, and find
life dull, objectless, without interest or merriment. But--but would
that have been better? Would it have been better to have turned aside
from all other things, saying ‘I cannot,’ rather than to have
steadfastly said ‘I can,’ until--well, until one could? Some day I know,
on that day when Slam’s kitten stands between earth and heaven in the
midst of the four pines, and Slam says, ‘Oh, it is nice!’ there will
meet me one who died on the African uplands, and one on whose grave the
sweet-peas are yearly odorous; and we shall know each other, and God
will look on the greeting we give each other, well pleased. How that
will be I cannot guess; I am only sure that it will be so. Atheists and
dyspeptics (the two are much the same) may laugh, and if they enjoy
their laugh so much the better for them.
* * * * *
So I am living now on the outskirts of the town where Margery and Dick
lived together for one month of their lives, and on this morning of the
1st of July I know that May and June have ended, and go back to the
ordinary little daily affairs I had been telling you about up till the
end of April. Many great little things have happened, and the
extraordinary conduct of the Jackmanni which the cat from next door once
disinterred seems to me to claim the first attention. It had been
planted against a warm south-westerly wall; it had been pampered like an
only child; for yards round the soil had been enriched; its dead leaves
were diligently picked off. I really did all I could to make it happy.
But instead of being happy, it sulked. It did not die--that would have
been a regrettable incident, but, anyhow, a proper decisive line of
conduct--but it sulked. It grew a little for a week, and put out several
leaves; then it couldn’t be bothered, and the leaves withered again.
Then it sent out a long tendril across the gravel path instead of
climbing up the stick that led to the house-wall. I coaxed that tendril
gently back, gave it an alternative route to the house-wall, but nothing
would please it. Finally I tied it to the alternative route. So it died.
I was willing to give the thing every facility for behaving itself, so
I transplanted it to a different place, where it got less sun and more
wind. Also I tried watering it less. For a week it appreciated this
enormously, and set about growing in earnest. Then one morning, I
suppose, it got bored again, and began to wither slowly from the top
downwards.
Now, I could not spend my life in moving one absurd Jackmanni from place
to place, though I have no doubt that if I had done so, taken it to stay
in other houses, given it champagne one day, coffee the next, and
perhaps some fish or pudding on the third, it would have flourished. But
I was tired of being kind, and towards the end of May I took it up for
the third and last time, planted it on a north wall, where it never saw
the sun and was starved by a thick growth of ivy. It was further shaded
by an apple-tree growing about a yard from it. Then for a month I
carefully refrained from looking in its direction; it had no water, no
attention, and was put in the most undesirable situation. To-day I see
it has leapt across to the apple-tree, up which it is diligently
climbing, and clusters of purple buds are showing among its green
leaves. Certainly severity is needed when you deal with Jackmanni.
To-day, on this 1st of July, a hot day full of the odours of complete
summer, I sat for an hour in the big wooden shelter that now stands
finished on my strip of lawn, and squared accounts. It happens to be my
birthday, and I am thirty years old--no less--and as I added up profit
and loss I was horribly puzzled how to make my affairs balance. For if
one sits down by one’s self, with no conceivable object in the world but
to see how one stands, it is probable that one is moderately honest with
one’s self, for to be otherwise would be like cheating at Patience, one
of the few forms of villainy which has never in the least tempted me.
With regard to the big item on one page, ‘_What good have you done?_’
and on the other, ‘_What harm have you done?_’ I am bound to say I did
not much concern myself, for to add up, even for one’s own information,
on what rare occasions one has behaved decently is a priggishness of
which, so I humbly trust, I am incapable; while to add up all the harm
one has done would require a great deal of time, and would be
productive of no good result whatever when it was added. For, short of
being wicked, the next worst way of wasting time is to devote one’s time
to thinking how wicked one has been. To repent in a horror of wickedness
and a burning fire of contrition is one thing; to sit down in cold blood
and count missed opportunities is another. The one is on certain
occasions, as when one passionately desires to break an evil habit,
inevitable and salutary, but to sit at ease in Hell is worse than
sitting at ease in Zion.
No, it was not with the big item that I concerned myself. I wanted to
see what cash I had in hand, rather than examine the main account--the
bank-book of credit or deficit. Where was the small cash of thirty
years, in fine--and God in His mercy give me a big loan. Indeed I do not
wish to be profane, nor in intention am I. No doubt it would have been
better to have felt an agony of contrition for all the bad things I had
done, and for all the good things I had left undone. Daily I have
thoughts which for no sum mentionable would I reveal to anyone whose
respect I in the smallest degree desired to retain; daily and hourly I
make some sort of brute of myself, not necessarily in deed, but anyhow
in thought. Daily I say to myself, ‘If only there were not some kind of
decency to be observed, social or moral, what an excellent time I could
have! If only the Ten Commandments--hang them!--did not awake some
glimmer of reflection in this muddy pool of my soul, I should----’
Anyone may fill in the rest according to his own shortcomings. In the
same way, on the credit side, I believe I should be a better man if I
lived on the bare necessities of life, and gave the rest to deserving
charities. I had no earthly business, for instance, to buy the charming
table at which I am writing, when that which I spent on it would have
fed a starving family for months. Even the Jackmanni, which has cost me
a week’s work, what with transplanting and cat-squirting, would,
irrespective of this, have given several meals to a penniless man, for
it was big when I bought it. All this, in my meditation, I took for
granted. I did not concern myself with radical changes in my nature. I
did not repent of the table and the Jackmanni, nor of the dinner I
ordered, nor of the wine I have drunk, nor of the hours I have spent in
mere amusement. In the main it was not in the least an edifying
performance; I accepted the general lines of myself as being what they
were. What, in fact, I wished to examine was not my nature, but my
policy, and to this effect:
Two great things have happened to me--the one a great joy, the other a
great sorrow. The great joy was when Margery thanked me with her dying
breath, though Dick’s name came after. The great sorrow was when she
died. Had she lived--though I do not for a moment believe I should ever
have been her husband, nor do I believe I should ever have asked her to
be my wife--I should have had some sort of mission, some constant
pursuit, namely, to see that she was as happy as it was in my power to
make her. Had I been a telegraph-boy, I should have done well if I had
delivered my telegrams without loitering; had Margery lived, I should
have done well to have given my life to that. But she did not live, and
I am too old to be a telegraph-boy. But I have had a great joy, and it
is great because she did not know how hardly it was earned. And that is
my record. That is the sum earned, and the credit already given is
thirty years. It does not look at all promising when the addition comes.
Hesitatingly, as I sat in the shelter, I put down another item to the
sum earned, which is this: I still have a childlike pleasure in little
things; I can play soldiers with absorbing zest; I can imagine that I am
a white man in tropical forests, who has to get through with tricks that
presuppose an almost pitiable stupidity on the part of my enemies; I can
devote quite as much energy to the flowering of a nasturtium as Mr.
Pierpont Morgan finds it necessary to give to the formation of a company
with a capital of £30,000,000. That, with all deference to financiers,
is an advantage. My nasturtium, in fact, implies as much energy as his
colossal schemes, and it does not hurt anybody, except perhaps the
nasturtium. Meantime, it unloads me of my force, and, considering what
harm force can do, it is a great saving of suffering to expend it
harmlessly. If I was richer, I would have a string quartet attached to
this villa, and I would spend my force in devising programmes, and
reconciling the second fiddle and the viola. But I am not, and the
string quartet has not yet to be engaged. I know whom I shall have, and
I shall be much disappointed if they have made other engagements.
For happiness consists not in getting a thing, but in hoping that one
may get it. With satisfaction walks surfeit; but to keep your ambition
steadily a little ahead of your possibilities is to be constantly eager.
There is nothing in the world which, if I got, would make me happy.
There are a million things in the world which the desire to get and the
hope of getting make me happy. And it is this which a man sets out to
seek when he falls in love, which is the best form of happiness devised
in the world at large, and, thank God! the commonest. If man or woman
knew _all_ of the man or woman each sought, would either be content? On
the contrary, the world would be full of spinsters and bachelors. It is
_because_ one is not certain, _because_ there are ‘silver lights and
darks undreamed of,’ that man seeks woman and woman man as the ultimate
possible happiness. And for the same reason one plays silly games of
croquet or bridge.
To want, to want! Do you know Blake’s picture of the two little men
setting up a ladder on a bare headland towards a crescent moon. ‘I want,
I want!’ is what the artist wrote beneath. The two little men
wanted--they put a puny ladder up towards--the moon. That is the genius
of the man, for through all the bad drawing and faulty perspective the
‘I want, I want!’ is clamorous. Others have attained. God help them!