IT had been a hot day and there seemed to be thunder in the air, but she
was afraid there would be no rain that night. The abandoned garden
needed it sadly; though, as she reflected, rain would encourage weeds
rather than the few remaining flowers. Poppies had sown themselves
everywhere, degenerates of the Shirleys which, three years ago, had
spread their silken cups in the large bed at the foot of the lawn. Their
withered stalks cracked beneath her steps in the paths and glimmered
under the unpruned branches of the cordon apple trees. There were
thistles, too, sorrel, and tall nettles, a matted carpet of bindweed and
groundsel in the little kitchen-garden, once so neat, and, of course, as
poor Charlie had predicted, the Michaelmas daisies had eaten up nearly
everything in the herbaceous border. That was one of the last questions
he had written to her: “How are my pink phloxes? Have the Michaelmas
daisies smothered them?” They had. It was the season at which the
phloxes should be in fullest flower, but not one was to be seen; the
dense, fine foliage of the daisies had advanced in a wall of green
nearly to the border’s edge.
It was still oppressively warm. A toad hopped indolently away and
paused at the box edging, lying up against it, his front feet extended,
as if so wearied by the heat that he took his chances of discovery. She
stopped to look at the clumsy creature, in which so little of nature’s
accurate grace was expressed; and as she stood there, a sudden rustle in
the box betrayed another inhabitant--this time a baby hedgehog which,
too young for fear, moved busily about among the flat dandelion plants
that rosetted the path, and even, encountering the tips of her shoes,
stopped to examine them carefully before moving on again. The baby
hedgehog would have amused Charlie. He had always been delightful about
animals; he and the boys had always had that great interest in common.
Yes, the bird-boxes were still there. She could see one in the big apple
tree and one fixed to the porch of the house, under the rose. How well
she remembered the frantic delight that hailed the hatching of the first
brood of tits. And the day when Charlie had deemed it prudent to
withdraw the door for a peep at the beautifully fitted mosaic of bright
little heads and bodies within, lifting up Giles in his holland pinafore
for a long, blissful gaze. Six years ago that must have been.
The light was altering now, and when she turned at the end of the path,
a great moon had risen across the lane and seemed to hang in the
branches of the walnut tree that grew in the field beyond. A great,
shining, heavy moon, and mournful, it seemed to her; her desolate
thoughts, she was aware, lending their colour to everything. Heavy,
mournful, desolate; that was the rhythm of her own steps passing along
in the twilight, pursued by the unformulated consciousness that lay
behind all these pictures of the past; pausing at last, as if to let the
dogging sorrow overtake her, as she came to where, near the
summer-house, against the wall, the evening primroses grew.
It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had
said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them,
tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themselves patiently, and coming up
loyally even when there was no one to wish them well. She felt touched
by their presence; for though she had always found them untidy and
uninteresting, she saw, really now for the first time, that they could
be beautiful. Homely, loyal flowers; yet--was it the invading sense of
sorrow colouring them, too?--a little uncanny, showing at this neutral
hour of mingled dusk and moonlight their pale, evident gold; becoming
conscious, as it were, becoming personal at the time when other flowers
became invisible. Not that it was a sinister uncanniness; not that of
ghosts; of fairies, rather; the very strangeness, sadness, sweetness of
the moon, to which, from them, she lifted her eyes. And they reminded
her of something, but what, she could not say. Not of Charlie. There had
never been anything strange or sad about Charlie, except the fact,
pursuing her now in his deserted garden, that he was dead and would
never see it again.
It was a year to-day since he had been killed, and she had come down to
the country with the sense of commemoration. She wanted, alone in the
little place so full of thoughts of him, to find him, to recall him; and
she had been doing that at every turn. Yet the evening primroses shining
there brought a pang deeper than any vision of him. They, though so
homely, seemed to personify loneliness; they seemed to be missing
something; and although she was desolate because Charlie was dead,
because he would never again delight in his garden, it was, in a sense,
for him rather than for herself that she sorrowed, and, in a sense, she
did not miss him at all.
She stood still in the path, her hands clasped behind her, her head
bent, a personification of widowhood in her thin black draperies, her
intent, memorial poise. And she could have said of herself with truth
that, during all this year, she had known only a widow’s sad
preoccupations. There had been the settling of business matters; lawyers
and bankers to interview; planning for the boys, with school-masters to
visit; and the tending of bereaved relations--Charlie’s dear old parents
clung to her. But now, on the day of his death, it was as if for the
first time she had had leisure, at last, to realize that, with it all,
she had never had the widow’s heart. She had grieved over him; she had
longed to do all for him that could be done--there was nothing new in
that; but it was far worse than not being heartbroken: it was the sorry
fact that she did not even miss him. He had left, as it were, no
emptiness behind him.
She had lifted her head and looked round the garden, trying, in the
physical fact of absence, to summon the spiritual void. How he had
planned, dug, planted it; pruned his fruit trees; placed his anemones in
leaf-mould, his bulbs on sand. She saw his kindly, handsome figure
everywhere; his brown cheek, good grey eye, and close-cropped, tawny
hair. A manly, simple creature; the salt of the earth, as honest as the
day--oh, she saw it all; she had said it to herself a hundred times; and
there had, indeed, been nothing one could say against Charlie. But then,
as a wife, there had been nothing to say against her, either; he had
been perfectly happy with her--the happiest creature, even in the manner
of his death. He had been killed instantaneously, while walking, on a
sunny day, beside his men along a road in France. Every letter she had
had from his brother officers over there spoke of his gaiety and good
spirits. The war itself had, on the whole, meant happiness to him, for
all his gravity over certain of its tragedies. But he had been almost as
grave over mischances with his Boy Scouts, and it had all remained for
him an immense, magnificent form of boy-scouting.
Dear, good Charlie! Yet--was it possible that something of the old
long-conquered exasperation could still, at this hour, thrust itself
into her memories? He had not been quite boyish enough to justify his
lightness and make it loveable. That had been the final fundamental
trouble in their mistaken marriage; she had not been able to mother him.
He had not been appealing, beguiling, endearing, like a child. Not like
a child; not boyish, fatherly, rather; even, playfully didactic, and
assuming always that theirs was a completely reciprocal marital
intimacy. It had not been his fault, of course. She had been too clever
ever to let him guess how stupid she found him. She felt the possessive
arm laid about her shoulders for an evening stroll; saw the wag of his
premonitory finger as he raised himself from a border to call out a
jocose reprimand; heard the chaff with which, before friends, he counted
her mistaken opinions.
And it had been when they were alone, especially at dinner,--Charlie
across the table from her in his faultless black and white,--that the
pressure of their distance had been most difficult to protect him from.
He talked then, and she had to answer adequately. He was fond of talk,
and, while the most uncritical of Conservatives, was full of solutions
for old ills. He took Trade-Unionists, Home-Rulers, and Dissenters
playfully and held them up to kindly ridicule. “You can laugh most
people out of their nonsense,” was one of Charlie’s maxims; and if they
didn’t respond to the treatment,--he had tried it unsuccessfully on the
village cobbler who preached in the tin chapel on Sunday,--he suspected
them of being rather wicked.
In the first year of their marriage she had paid him the compliment of
disagreement, or, at least, discrimination. She had, until her marriage,
thought of herself as a Conservative; to be counted one by Charlie
disturbed her sense of rectitude. But Charlie opposed, became puzzled,
and finally aggrieved. He bothered and bothered and argued and argued,
with the air of trying to bring an erring child to reason. “Now look at
it in this light,” he would say. Or, “Try to see the thing squarely,
Rosamund”; and would turn upon her irrelevant batteries from the
_Spectator_. She had at last the sensation of flying, battered and
breathless, from his platitudes, and found, soon, her only refuge in
duplicity. After that, through all the years of their married life,
Charlie, she knew, thought of their evening hours alone together as
exceedingly pleasant and successful. He wasn’t one of your fellows who
doze over the _Field_ with a cigar after dinner. He had a clever wife
and he appreciated her and was proud--in spite of feminine aberrations
affectionately recognized and checked--of what he called her
“intellects.” He called his father and mother his “respected
progenitors” and his stomach was never other than “Little Mary.” And
while he talked and expounded and made his unexacting jests, Rosamund
knew that her silences had no provocation, her smile no irony.
So it had gone on--so it might have gone on for the normal span of life.
The only insecurity that had threatened her careful edifice was the
question of the boys. The boys were like herself, or, rather, like her
adored and brilliant father--proud, sensitive, ardent little creatures,
tender-hearted and frightfully intelligent. Physically, too, they were
of a different race from Charlie, with thick brown locks, passionate yet
gentle eyes, and full, small, closely closing mouths. As boys, Charlie
had fairly well understood them,--he got on well with the average
boy,--as persons, never; and though as boys, at least as little boys,
they got on beautifully with him, they had, as persons, almost at once
understood him, even when they were too young to evade or hide from him.
If they had not been so young, they would, already, then, have hurt him
often.
And for her the boys at once complicated everything. It had been easy,
in one way, to yield in non-essentials, though she was woman enough to
cry her eyes out when Charlie had taken Philip and Giles, at the
earliest age, to have their dear Jeanne-d’Arc heads close-cropped in
pursuit of the ideal of manliness; easy, comparatively, to steel her
heart when timid little Philip, blanched with terror, was made to ride
at six. Charlie had been right about that,--how glad she had been to
own it!--for Philip had, in a week’s time, forgotten his fears. But she
and Charlie had come near quarrelling over Giles’s rag-doll Bessie.
Giles was only three and adored Bessie, and Charlie had tossed her in
the air, mocked her, and held her up by the toe while Giles sobbed
convulsively.
“Do you really want our boys to be milksops, Rosamund?” he had asked,
as, refusing to argue, she took the doll from him, placed her in Giles’s
arms, and kept them both on her lap, pressed within her arms, her head
bent down over them so that she need not look at her husband. He had
gone away vanquished, and Giles had kept his Bessie, until, in the
course of nature, she had dropped away from him.
Worse than this came one day when Charlie had found Philip in a corner
writing poetry. He had not been altogether pleased by the children’s
literary tastes. To grind dutifully at Latin and Greek was one thing,
and he was fond of a tag from Tennyson. But he had never cared to read
Keats and Shelley when he was a kid. He took the copy-book out of
Philip’s reluctant hands and, turning from page to page, read out, in
mock-dramatic tones, the derivative, boyish efforts, which yet, to her
ear, had every now and then their innocent, bird-like note of reality.
“And now this--'To a Skylark,'” said Charlie, laying a restraining,
affectionate hand on Philip’s shoulder, wishing him to rise superior to
vanity and join in the fun, once it was pointed out to him.
"‘Glad creature from the dew upspringing
And through the sky your path upwinging!’