I
“WHAT you need is a complete change, and quiet,” said his cousin
Dorothy.
Guy, indeed, in spite of his efforts to keep up appearances, was a
dismal figure. He had been passing the teacups and the bread and butter,
enduring all the jests about sugar-rations and margarine, and enduring,
which was so much worse, the complacencies over the approaching end of
the war. His haggard face, narrow-jawed and high-foreheaded, expressed
this endurance rather than any social amenity, and he was aware that
Aunt Emily could hardly feel that the presence of her poet and soldier
nephew added much to her tea-party. Indeed, the chattering, cheerful
women affected his nerves almost as painfully as did the sound of the
motor-buses when--every day it happened--he stopped on the curb, after
leaving his office in Whitehall, and wondered how long it would take him
to summon courage to cross the street. He felt, then, like breaking down
and crying; and he felt like it now when they said, “Isn’t it all _too_
splendid!”
Cousin Dorothy was as chattering and as cheerful as the rest of them,
and she had every reason to be, he remembered, with Tom, her _fiancé_,
ensconced in Paris, safe after all his perils. Dorothy, though like
everybody else she had worked hard during the war, had seen nothing and
lost nothing. And she had never had any imagination. All the same, he
was thankful when she rescued him from the woman who would talk to him
idiotically about his poetry (she evidently hadn’t understood a word of
it), and took him into a quiet nook near the piano.
It might, then, have been mere consanguinity, for he had never before
found intimacy possible where Dorothy was concerned; or it might have
been a symptom of his state (his being at Aunt Emily’s tea-party at all
was that!); but, at all events after admitting that Mrs. Dickson had
been boring him, he found himself presently confessing his terrors about
the motor-buses, his terror of the dark, his sleeplessness and general
disintegration. His nervous laugh was a concession to Dorothy’s possible
misunderstanding; but as he went on, he felt himself almost loving her
for the matter-of-factness she infused into her sympathy. After all,
even good old Dorothy wasn’t stupid enough to suspect him of cowardice;
and although, from a military point of view, he had made such a mess of
it (invalided home again and again on account of digestive complaints,
and finally, last spring, transferred to his small official post in
London), to any one, really, who had at all followed his career, it
would be apparent that no one could have stuck harder to the loathly
job. He had felt it that, and only that, even while, prompted by pride,
he had made his effort to enlist, in the first months of the war. It had
been with a deep relief that he had found himself at once rejected and
free to stay behind, free to serve humanity with his gift rather than
with his inefficiency; for he took his poetic vocation with a youthful
seriousness. And when, later on, through one of the blunders of medical
examinations, he was drawn into the net of conscription, no one could
have denied that he marched off to the shambles with unflinching
readiness.
Dorothy, he saw, took courage all along for granted: “It’s simply a case
of shell-shock,” she said, as if it were her daily fare; “you’re queer
and jumpy, and you can’t stand noise. It’s quite like Tommy.”
He couldn’t associate Tommy, short-nosed, round-headed, red-eared Tommy,
with anything of the sort, and said so in some resentment. But Dorothy
assured him that for some months--just a year ago--Tommy had been at
home on sick leave, and really bad enough for anything. “He suffered in
every way just as you do.”
Guy was quite sure he hadn’t, but he did not want to argue about it. For
nothing in the world would he have defined to Dorothy what he really
suffered.
“It’s country air you need; country food and country quiet,” Dorothy
went on. “You _can_ get away?”
“Oh, yes; I can get away all right. Old Forsyth is most decent about it.
He was telling me this morning that I ought to take a month.”
“I wonder if Mrs. Baldwin could have you at Thatches,” Dorothy mused.
“Tommy got well directly.”
“Mrs. Baldwin?” His voice, he knew, expressed an unflattering
scepticism, but he couldn’t help it. “Is she at home--an institution?”
He saw Mrs. Baldwin, hatefully tactful, in a Red Cross uniform. “No,
thank you, my dear.”
“Of course not. What do you take me for?” Dorothy kept her competent
eyes upon him. “It’s not even a P.G. place--at all events, not a regular
one, though of course you do pay for your keep. She has very narrow
means and takes friends sometimes, and, since the war, it’s just
happened--by people telling each other, as I’m telling you--to be
shell-shock cases rather particularly. It’s a lovely country, and a
dear, quaint little cottage, and she does you most awfully well, Tommy
said.”
“I don’t like the idea of settling down like that on a stranger.”
"But she wouldn’t be a stranger. You’d go through me, and I feel as if I
knew her already through Tommy. He said he was at home at once. ‘Cosy,’
was how he expressed it. And you get honey on your bread at tea and
cream in your coffee at breakfast, and all sorts of delightful things
_en casserole_, that she cooks with her own hands, quite equal, Tommy
said, to the French. And, Tommy knows, _now_, you see."
“It’s Mrs. Baldwin herself who frightens me. She frightens me more than
the motor-buses in Whitehall.”
“That’s just what she won’t do. She’s perfectly sweet. Cosy.
Middle-aged. A widow. Her nice old father lives with her, and Tommy
liked him so much, too. You help her to garden, and with the bees, you
know. And the old father plays chess with you in the evenings. There’s a
stream near by where you can fish if you want to. It’s late for that,
of course; but Tommy got some quite good sport; he was there at just
this time of year. And he said that it was most awfully jolly country,
and that the meadows all about were full of autumn crocuses.”
“Autumn crocuses? In the fields? I’ve never seen them wild.”
“They do grow wild, though, in some parts of England. They are wild
there. Tommy particularly wrote about them. He said one walked down to
the stream among the autumn crocuses.”
Dorothy was baiting her hook very prettily, and he gloomily smiled his
recognition of it. “They do sound attractive,” he owned. He hadn’t
imagined Tom a man to notice crocuses, and he was the more inclined to
trust his good impressions further. After all, apart from Mrs. Baldwin
and her father, the country, with honey, cream, and autumn crocuses, was
a happy combination, if he had been in condition for feeling anything
happy.
What would Dorothy have thought of him, could she have known that, while
they talked, her rosy, bonnie face kept constantly, before his haunted
eyes, dissolving into a skull? Faces had a way of doing this with him
since his last encounter with the war in the spring. And all the people
talking in the room squeaked and gibbered. How could they go on talking?
How could they go on living--after what had happened? How could he? The
familiar nausea rose in him even as he forced himself to smile and say,
“Well, could she have me--Mrs. Baldwin?”
He could not have made an effort to find a place for himself. Such
efforts, he felt sure, would have landed him at some God-forsaken
farmhouse miles from the station, where the beds were damp and the meat
tough; or, even worse, at a Bournemouth hotel, amid orchestras and
people who made a point of dressing for dinner. But, if some one found
it for him, he would let himself be pushed off.
“I’m sure she could,” said Dorothy with conviction. “I have her address
and I’ll write to-night and tell her all about you: that you’re a rising
poet, and that your friends and relations will be _so_ grateful if
she’ll do for you what she did for Tommy.”
He had an ironic glance for her “rising.” His relations--and Aunt Emily
and her brood were the nearest left to him--had never in the least taken
in his standing or realized that he was, among people who knew, looked
upon as completely risen. At the same time, sunken was what he felt
himself; drowned deep; too deep, he sometimes thought, for recovery. His
last little volume had been like a final fight for breath. He had
written most of it over there, after Ronnie’s death and before his own
decisive breakdown, and he knew it a result as much of his malady as of
his war experience.
He wondered now, anew, whether these people had really read the poems.
If they had, it only showed how impervious to reality they must remain.
And there had actually been one, written after one of his leaves, called
“Eating Bread-and-Butter,” that should indeed have embarrassed them, had
they remembered it, inviting them to eat it with him in a trench with
unburied comrades lying in No-Man’s Land before them. His head, as he
thought of that,--from unburied comrades passing to unburied
friends,--gave a nervous, backward jerk, for he had told himself before
that he _must_ stop thinking in certain directions; and indeed the poems
had helped to exorcise the obsession at the time when they had been
written.
All the same, it was very strange--such a poet at such a tea-party. He
had plunged into Aunt Emily’s tea-party as he plunged nowadays into
anything that presented itself as offering distraction. And now, as he
said, “Well, if you’ll put it through, I’ll go, and be very grateful to
you,” he felt that he was making another plunge into Mrs. Baldwin’s
cottage.