DAFFODILS

I

THOUGH he knew that he was going to die, Marmaduke Follett as he lay in

the hospital on the French coast had never in his life been so happy.

Until these last days he had not been able to feel it in its

completeness. Of the great engagement where he had fallen he remembered

only the overwhelming uproar, the blood and mud; and after that,

torments, apathies, dim awakenings to the smell of ether and relapses to

acquiescent sleep. Now the last operation had failed--or rather, he had

failed to recover from it--and there was no more hope for him; but he

hardly suffered and his thoughts were emerging into a world of

cleanliness, kindness, and repose.

The hospital before the war had been a big hotel, and his was one of the

bedrooms on the second floor, its windows crossed by two broad blue

bands of sea and sky. As an officer he had a room to himself. The men

were in the wards downstairs.

One of his nurses--both were pleasant girls but this was the one who

with a wing of black hair curving under her cap reminded him of his

cousin Victoria--had put a glass of daffodils beside his bed, not

garden daffodils, but the wild ones that grow in woods; and if she made

him think of Victoria how much more they made him think of the woods in

spring at Channerley!

He was dying after a gallant deed. It was a fitting death for a Follett

and so little in his life had been at all fitted to that initial

privilege: it was only in the manner of his death that his life matched

at all those thoughts of Victoria and Channerley.

He did not remember much of the manner; it still remained cloaked in the

overwhelming uproar; but as he lay there he seemed to read in the

columns of the London papers what all the Folletts were so soon to

read--because of him:--

"His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to award the Victoria

Cross to the under-mentioned officers, non-commissioned officers and

men:--

"Sec. Lt. Marmaduke Everard Follett. For most conspicuous bravery.

“He was directed with 50 men to drive the enemy from their trench and

under intense shell-and machine-gun fire he personally led three

separate parties of bombers against a captured 325 yards of trench;

attacking the machine gun, shooting the firer with his revolver, and

destroying gun and _personnel_ with bombs. This very brave act saved

many lives and ensured the success of the attack. In carrying one of his

men back to safety Sec. Lt. Follett was mortally wounded.”

He felt himself smile, as he soberly spaced it out, to remember that the

youths at the office used to call him Marmalade. It was curious that he

most felt his present and his present transfigured self, when he thought

of Cauldwell’s office, where so many years of his past had been spent.

When he thought of that, of the jocund youths, of the weary hours and

wasted years, it was to feel himself transfigured; when he thought of

the Folletts and of Channerley, to feel that he matched them; to feel at

last as if he had come home. What to the grimy, everyday world counted

as transfiguration, counted as the normal, the expected, to the world of

Channerley.

He wondered, lying there and looking out past the daffodils, where

Victoria was; he had heard that she was nursing, too, somewhere in

France; and again, as he had smiled over the contrast of “Sec. Lt.

Marmaduke Everard Follett” and the “Marmalade” of Cauldwell’s office, he

smiled in thinking of the difference between Victoria and the nice young

nurse who, for all her resembling curve of hair, was also second-rate.

It would have been very wonderful to have been nursed by Victoria, and

yet his thought turned from that. There had never been any sweetness,

never even any kindness for him, in Victoria’s clear young gaze; when it

came to nursing, he could imagine her being kind to a Tommy, but not to

him, the dull, submerged cousin; and the nice though second-rate nurse

was very kind. He would rather die under her eyes than under Victoria’s.

And he would rather think of Victoria as he had last seen her at the big

London dance to which, most unexpectedly, he had found himself asked

last spring--the spring before the war. He had decided, as with nervous

fingers he tied his white cravat,--how rarely disturbed had been that

neat sheaf lying in his upper drawer!--that he must have been confused

with some other Follett, for he was so seldom asked anywhere, where he

would be likely to meet Victoria. However, it was a delight to see her

in her snowy dress, her beautiful hair bound with silver, and to feel,

as he watched her dancing, that she belonged, in a sense, to him; for

he, too, was a Follett.

How much more did she belong to him now! And not only Victoria, but all

of them, these Folletts of his and the Folletts of past generations; and

Channerley, centre of all his aching, wistful memories. It had been for

him, always, part of the very structure of his nature, that beautiful

old house where he had spent his boyhood. Perhaps it was because he had

been turned out of the nest so early that he never ceased to miss it.

His thought, like a maimed fledgling, had fluttered round and round it,

longing, exiled, helpless.

If, now, he could have survived, his eldest brother, he felt sure, must

have asked him oftener to stay at Channerley. It still gave him a pang,

or, rather, the memory of many pangs, to recall that Robert had not

asked him for two years, and had seemed to forget all about him after

that. They had all seemed to forget about him,--that was the trouble of

it,--and almost from the very beginning: Robert, who had Channerley;

Austin, who had gone into the army and was now in Mesopotamia; Griselda,

married so splendidly up in her northern estate; and Amy, the artistic

bachelor-girl of the family, whom he associated with irony and

cigarette-smoke and prolonged absences in Paris. Even cheerful Sylvia,

of South Kensington, with her many babies and K.C. husband, whom he

always thought of, for all her well-being, as very nearly as submerged

as himself,--even Sylvia saw little of him and asked him only to family

dinners,--Mr. Shillington’s family, not hers,--at depressingly punctual

intervals.

But Sylvia, the one nearest him in years, was the one who had forgotten

least, and she had, after her fashion, done her best for him. Confused

at study, clumsy at games, shy and tongue-tied, he had not in any way

distinguished himself at a rather second-rate public school; and to

distinguish himself had been the only hope for him. The Folletts had

never had any money to spare, and Eton and Oxford for Robert and

Sandhurst for Austin fulfilled a tradition that became detached and

terse where younger sons who could not distinguish themselves were

concerned. Still, he had always felt that, had his father lived,

something better would have been found for him than to be bundled,

through the instrumentality of Mr. Shillington, into a solicitor’s

office. There he had been bundled, and there he had stuck for all these

years, as clumsy, as confused as ever; a pallid, insignificant little

fellow (oh, he had no illusions about himself!) with the yellow hair and

small yellow moustache which, together with his name, had earned for him

his sobriquet.

They had not disliked him, those direfully facetious companions of his.

_Noblesse oblige_ was an integral part of his conception of himself,

however little they might be aware of his unvarying courtesy towards

them as its exercise. He suspected that they thought of him as merely

inoffensive and rather piteous; but shyness might give that impression;

they could not guess at the quiet aversion that it covered. He was aware

sometimes, suddenly, that in the aloofness and contemplative disdain of

his pale sidelong glance at them, he most felt himself a Follett. If

his mind, for most practical purposes, was slow and clumsy, it was sharp

and swift in its perceptions. He judged the young men in Cauldwell’s

office as a Follett must judge them. In the accurate applying of that

standard he was as instinctively gifted as any of his race; and if he

knew, from his first look at her, that the nice young nurse was

second-rate, how coldly and calmly, all these years, he had known that

the young men who called him Marmalade were third-rate. And yet they

none of them disliked him, and he wondered whether it was because, when

he most felt disdain, he most looked merely timid, or because they

recognized in him, all dimly as it might be, the first-rateness that was

his inherently and inalienably.

Just as the third-rate young men might recognize the first-rate but

dimly, he was aware that to the world the Folletts, too, were not

important. It was not one of the names, in spite of centuries of local

lustre, to conjure with; and he liked it all the better because of that.

They had never, it was true, distinguished themselves; but they were

people of distinction, and that was, to his quiet, reflective,

savouring, an even higher state. He sometimes wondered if, in any of

them, the centring of family consciousness was as intense as in himself.

If they were aloof about third-rate people, it was not because they were

really very conscious about themselves. They took themselves for

granted, as they took Channerley and the family history; and only Amy

was aware that some of the family portraits were good.

The history--it was not of course accurate to call it that, yet it

seemed more spacious and significant than mere annals--pored over

during long evenings, in faded parchments, deeds, and letters, was known

in every least detail to him. How the Folletts had begun, very soberly

but very decorously, in the fifteenth century, and how they had gone on:

rooting more deeply into their pleasant woodlands and meadows;

flowering, down the centuries, now in a type of grace--that charming

Antonia who had married so well at James the First’s court; and of

gallantry--a Follett had fallen at Naseby, and a Follett had fought at

Waterloo; or of good-humoured efficiency, as in the eighteenth-century

judge and the nineteenth-century bishop. And he, who was neither

graceful nor gallant nor good-humoured (sour and sad he felt himself),

never could resist the warming, revivifying influence of these

recognitions, stretching himself, sighing, smiling happily before his

Bloomsbury fire on a winter’s evening, as he laid down the thick pile of

yellowed manuscripts to think it all over and feel himself, in spite of

everything, a link with it all.

Robert had always been very decent about letting him have and keep the

documents for as long as he liked.

It was strange to think that he was never to see his Bloomsbury lodgings

again, and stranger, really, that a certain tinge of regret was in the

thought; for how, for years, he had hated them, place of exile, of

relegation, as he had always felt them! Yet he had come to be fond of

his little sitting-room, just because, to his eye, with its mingled

comfort and austerity, it was so significant of exile. If a Follett

couldn’t have what he wanted, that was all he would have--his rack of

pipes, his shelves of books, his little collection of mostly marginless

mezzotints ranged along the dark, green walls. The room was a refuge and

did not pretend to be an achievement, and in that very fact might, to an

eye as sharp as his for such significance, suggest the tastes that it

relinquished. He had indeed all the tastes and none of the satisfactions

of Channerley.

There it was; he had come back to it again, as, indeed, he had, in

spirit, never left it--never for a moment. He felt himself, lying there

in the hospital on the French coast, with the soft spring sea lapping

upon the beach under his window--he felt himself drop, drop, softly,

sweetly, deeply, back to his childhood. From his high nursery-window he

saw the dewy tree-tops,--the old hawthorn that grew so near the house,

and the old mulberry,--and the rooks wheeling on a spring sky so many

years ago. The dogs, at that early hour, just released, might be racing

over the lawns: idle, jovial Peter, the spaniel, and Jack, the plucky,

hot-tempered little Dandy-Dinmont.

Below the lawns were the high grey garden walls, and above, rising a

little from the flagged rose-garden, were the woods where the daffodils

grew, daffodils like those beside him now, tall and small, their pale,

bright pennons set among warrior spears of green. Little bands of them

ran out upon the lawn from under the great trees, and one saw their gold

glimmering far, far along the woodlands. Oh, the beauty of it, and the

stillness; the age and youth; the smile and the security! How he had

always loved it, shambling about the woods and gardens; creeping

rather--he always saw himself as creeping somehow--about the dear, gay,

faded house! Always such an awkward, insignificant little boy; even his

dear old Nanna had felt dissatisfied with his appearance, and he had

always known it, when she sent him down with the others to the

drawing-room; and his mother, she had made it very apparent, had found

him only that.

He shrank from the thought of his mother; perhaps it was because of her,

of her vexed and averted eyes, her silken rustle of indifference as she

passed him by, that he saw himself as creeping anywhere where she might

come. He only remembered her in glimpses: languidly and ironically

smiling at her tea-table (Amy had her smile), the artificial tone of her

voice had even then struck his boyish ear; reading on a summer

afternoon, with bored brows and dissatisfied lips, as she lay on a

garden chair in the shade of the mulberry tree; querulously arguing with

his father, who, good-humoured and very indifferent, strolled about the

hall in his pink coat on a winter morning, waiting for the horses to be

brought round; his mother’s yellow braids shining under her neatly

tilted riding-hat, her booted foot held to the blaze of the great

log-fire. A hard, selfish, sentimental woman; and--wasn’t it really the

only word for what he felt in her?--just a little shoddy. He

distinguished it from the second-rate nicely: it was a more personal

matter; for his mother, though certainly not a Follett, was of good

stock; he knew, of course, all about her stock. It always grieved him to

think that it was from her he had his yellow hair and the pale grey of

his eyes; his stature, too, for she had been a small woman; all the

other Folletts were tall; but she had given him nothing more: not a

trace of her beauty was his, and he was glad of it.

It was curious, since he had really had so little to do with him, as

little, almost, as with his mother, how blissfully his sense of his

father’s presence pervaded his childish memories. He was so kind. The

kindest thing he remembered at Channerley, except his dear old Nanna and

Peter the spaniel. It used to give him a thrill of purest joy when,

meeting him, his father, his hands clasped behind his back after his

strolling wont, would stop and bend amused and affectionate eyes upon

him; rather the eyes, to be sure, that he bent upon his dogs; but

Marmaduke always felt of him that he looked upon his children, and upon

himself, too, as parts of the pack; and it was delightful to be one of

the pack, with him.

“Well, old fellow, and how goes the world with you to-day?” his father

would say.

And after that question the world would go in sunshine.

He had always believed that, had his father lived, he would never have

been so forgotten; just as he had always believed that his father would

never have allowed one of his pack to be bundled into the solicitor’s

office. For that he had to thank, he felt sure, not only Sylvia’s

negative solicitude, but his mother’s active indifference. Between them

both they had done it to him.

And he never felt so to the full his dispossession as in thinking of

Robert. He had always intensely feared and admired Robert. He did not

know what he feared, for Robert was never unkind. But Robert was

everything that he was not: tall and gay and competent, and possessing

everything needful, from the very beginning, for the perfect fulfilment

of his type. The difference between them had been far more than the ten

years that had made of Robert a man when he was still only a little boy.

There had been, after all, a time when they had been a very big and a

very little boy together, with Austin in between; yet the link had

seemed always to break down after Austin. Robert, in this retrospect,

had always the air of strolling away from him--for Robert, too, was a

stroller. Not that he himself had had the air of pursuit; he had never,

he felt sure, from the earliest age, lacked tact; tact and reticence and

self-effacement had been bred into him. But his relationship with Robert

had seemed always to consist in standing there, hiding ruefulness, and

gazing at Robert’s strolling back.

The difference from Austin had perhaps been as great, but it had never

hurt so much, for Austin, though with his share of the Follett charm,

had never had the charm of Robert. A clear-voiced and clear-eyed,

masterful boy, Austin’s main contact with others was in doing things

with them, and that sort of contact did not mean congeniality. Austin

had made use of him; had let him hold his ferrets and field for him at

cricket; and a person whom you found useful did not, for the time being,

bore you.

But he had bored Robert always--that was apparent; and beautiful

Griselda, who was older than either of them, and Amy, who was younger.

Griselda had gazed rather sadly over his head; and Amy had smiled and

teased him so that he had seldom ventured on a remark in her presence.

Even fat little Sylvia, the baby, had always preferred any of the others

to him as she grew up; had only not been bored because, while she was

good-humoured, she was also rather dull. And at the bottom of his

heart, rueful always, sore, and still patiently surprised, he knew that,

while he found them all a little brutal, he could not admire them the

less because of it. It was part of the Follett inheritance to be able to

be brutal, unconsciously, and therefore with no loss of bloom.

And now, at last, he was not to bore them any longer; at last, he was

not to be forgotten. How could he not be happy,--it brought back every

blissful thrill of boyhood, his father’s smile, the daffodil woods in

spring, heightened to ecstasy,--when he had at last made of himself one

of the Folletts who were remembered? He would have his place in the

history beside the Follett who fell at Naseby. No family but is glad of

a V.C. in its annals. They could no longer stroll away. They would be

proud of him; he had done something for all the Folletts forever.