He found the crocuses open, before breakfast. Only Cathy was in the
living-room, sweeping, when he crossed it, though he thought he heard
Mrs. Baldwin in the kitchen. A robin was singing on a spray over the
summer-house. The sky arched pale and high; and though there was no mist
in the air, its softness made him think of milk.
From the garden he passed into the meadows, and, almost at once, saw,
everywhere, the fragile, purple flowers about him, if purple were not
too rich a word for their clear, cold tint. Lower down, near the stream,
they made him think of the silver bobbins set playing by great rain
drops when they fall heavily upon wide, shallow pools of water; and they
seemed to grow even more thickly in the farther meadow beyond the wooden
bridge. A sense of bliss was upon him as he walked among the flowers. He
had never seen anything more lovely, and all but the darker buds were
open, showing pale golden hearts to the sun.
Yet, by the time that he had crossed the bridge, leaning on the high
rail to look down into the limpid, sliding water, he knew that it could
never stay at that or mean that for him. He had seen fields of flowers
in France, and, while the horrors there had been enacted, these fields
of crocuses, year after year, had bloomed. What they meant for his mind
was the unbridged chasm between nature and the sufferings of man. Only
when one ceased to be a man, ceased to remember and to think, could such
a day, such sights, bring the unreasoning joy.
Walking back, he saw, as he approached the house, that Mrs. Baldwin was
standing at the garden-gate, and, bare-headed, in the linen dress of
pale lavender, she made him at once think of the crocuses, or they of
her. Their gentleness was like her, their simplicity, and something,
too,--for he felt this in her,--of unearthliness. More perhaps, than any
other flower they seemed to belong to the air rather than to the ground,
and, with their faint, pale stalks, their fragile petals unconfined by
leaf or calyx, to be rising like emanations from the sod and ready to
dissolve in mist into the sunlight.
“You’ve had a little walk?” Mrs. Baldwin asked him as they met.
He said he had been looking at the crocuses. “Are they really crocuses?”
he questioned. “I’ve never seen them wild before.”
“They’re not real crocuses,” she said, “though those grow wild, too, in
a few places in England. These flowers are always called autumn crocuses
hereabouts; but they are really, botanically, meadow saffron; and they
grow wild in a great many places. You see they are not so dark a purple
as the wild crocus, and they are much taller, and the petals are more
pointed. Much more beautiful flowers, I think.”
“Meadow saffron. That’s a pretty name, too. But I think I’ll go on
calling them autumn crocuses. They were one of the reasons that made me
want to come here,” he told her.
They were leaning on the little garden-gate looking over the meadows.
“Really? Did you hear about them?”
He told her what Dorothy had said, passed on from the appreciative
Tommy, and she said again, “Really!” and with surprise, so that,
laughing a little, he said that he believed she would never have thought
of Mr. Barnet as an appreciator of crocuses. She laughed a little, too,
confessing to a community of perception where Tommy was concerned, and
remarked that it was very nice of him to have cared. “What he talked
about,” she said, “was the food. He was never done praising my coffee.
It’s time for coffee now,” she added.
Guy, as they went in, said that, after all, if that was what Tommy
talked about, he wondered that his caring for the crocuses should have
surprised her, for he was sure that the one was almost as poetical as
the others. It was poetical, indeed, as she made it, in a delightful and
complicated apparatus, glass and brass and premonitory scented steam;
and the milk was as hot as the water had been, and there was cream. “How
do you manage it, in these days?” he asked. But she said that it wasn’t
wickedness and bribery, really: she and Cathy skimmed it from the milk
that was brought from the nearest farm.
He realized that he was himself talking about the food just as Tommy had
done; just as the chattering women at Aunt Emily’s tea-party had done;
just as everybody, of course, had been doing in England ever since food
became such an important matter. But it was Mrs. Baldwin who made him do
it; for though unearthly, she was deliciously prosaic. He felt that anew
when he heard her going about the house in her low-heeled little shoes,
with Cathy. They did, evidently, all the work, and how fresh, composed,
and shining everything was. The living-room, with its happy southern
windows, its tempting writing-tables, its flowers and books, was an
embodiment of the poetry that only such prose can secure.
Guy, while Mr. Haseltine sat behind his rustling _Times_, strolled
before the shelves, surprised, presently, at their range of subject.
Surely not Mrs. Baldwin’s, such reading; hardly, he thought, Mr.
Haseltine’s. He took down a volume of Plotinus and found, on the
fly-leaf, “Oliver Baldwin,” written in a small, scholarly hand. That
explained it, then. Her husband’s. The Charles d’Orleans, too, the
Fustel de Coulanges, the Croce, and the Dante, with marginal notes. He
had been a man of letters, perhaps. Of the dozen books he took down to
examine, only one was initialled “E. H.,” and that, suitably, was
_Dominique_. But it had been given her by “O. B.”
As in the garden, presently, he and the old gentleman walked up and
down, smoking, Guy asked him, with the diffidence natural to the
question, whether his son-in-law, Mrs. Baldwin’s husband, had been
killed in the war; though he couldn’t imagine her a war-widow. One
didn’t indeed think of her in connection with marrying and giving in
marriage--that was part of the unearthliness; yet widowhood, permanent
widowhood, seemed a suitable state. She was not girlish, nor was she
wifely. She was widowed, and it had happened, he felt sure, in spite of
his question, long ago.
As he had expected, his companion replied, “Ah, no; he died eight, nine
years since.” And Mr. Haseltine then went on to tell, taking the war as
the obvious interest, and not without the satisfaction that Guy had so
often met and so often loathed, that he had lost dear ones. “Children of
my eldest son. Fine lads. Brave boys. One in the first month--at the
Marne; the other only last year, flying. Yes; I’ve done my bit,” said
Mr. Haseltine, with the fatuity that he was so plentifully companioned
in displaying.
“Bit.” Odious word. His “bit.” Why his? Had any one written a poem on
the formula coming from the lips of those for whom others had died? A
scattered, flagellating line or two floated through Guy’s mind.
Something about barbed wire came in. He wondered how old Mr. Haseltine
would have felt about his “bit,” hung up on that and unable to die. He
wondered where the fine lads now lay. No more coffee for them, with
cream in it; no more robins singing; no more strolling smokes among
mignonette in the sunlight. How they were forgotten, already, except for
trophies, for self-glorification to display! How pleased, how smug this
rescued, comfortable world! Something of his distaste attached itself
even to Mrs. Baldwin when she next appeared. Something irritating him in
her peacefulness. She, too, had seen nothing and lost nothing. But, at
all events, she wouldn’t, he knew that, take any stand on the two
nephews to claim her “bit.” There was nothing fatuous about Mrs.
Baldwin. The slight distaste still lingered, however, and he found
himself wondering once or twice, during the day that passed, in spite of
it, so pleasantly, whether she wasn’t, for all his idealizing similes, a
stupid as well as a sweet woman. It was not because of filial
self-effacement that she let her father do all the talking at meals: it
was simply because she had nothing to say, and the good old boy was
quite right in taking his responsibility for granted. The person who
could talk was the responsible person. Her mind, though so occupied, was
quite singularly inactive and, he was sure, completely uncritical. She
didn’t find her father in the least a bore, or suspect that anybody else
might find him so. She did find, Guy felt sure, satisfaction in all her
occupations. He heard her laughing--a quiet little laugh--with Cathy in
the kitchen; and in the afternoon, when he helped her to prick out
seedlings, her attentive profile--as, after he had dug each hole, she
dropped in the little plant, pressed the earth about its roots, and
fixed it in its place--made him think of the profile of a child putting
its dolls to bed. They planted three beautiful long rows, and Guy was
quite tired by tea-time, for though they had high tea at half-past six,
they were not deprived of the precious afternoon pause, taking place as
it did at the unaccustomed but pleasing hour of four.
After tea she went to see some people in the village, Mr. Haseltine
dozed in his chair, and Guy took a long walk.
So the days went on, and at the end of a week he was able to write to
Dorothy and tell her that he was sleeping wonderfully and that Mrs.
Baldwin’s cottage was all that she had pictured it. By the end of the
week he had even grown rather attached to Mr. Haseltine, and he enjoyed
playing chess with him every evening; and sometimes they had a game in
the afternoon when tea was over. The undercurrent of irritation still
flowed, but he had learned to put up with the old gentleman and to
circumvent his communicativeness, and in the case of Mrs. Baldwin he
more and more felt that she was the sort of person to whom one would,
probably, forgive anything. It had become evident to him that what might
be dulness might also be unawareness. That was a certain kind of
dulness, it was true, but it didn’t preclude capacity for response if
the proper stimulus were applied. It amused him to note that if none of
the nearly inevitable jars of shared life seemed ever to occur between
her and her father, it was simply because, when a difference arose, she
remained unconscious of it unless it were put before her. Nothing could
have been less in the line of selfishness; it was she who thought of
him, of his comfort and happiness, and who ordered her life to further
them; he, in this respect, was passive; but Guy felt that the poor old
boy often brooded in some disconsolateness over small trials and
perplexities that a companion more alert to symptoms would have
discerned and dispelled at once. Mr. Haseltine even, sometimes, confided
such grievances to the P.G.
“I don’t want to bother Effie about it,” he said;--E. had stood for
Effie--“she’s a dreamy creature and very forgetful. But it’s quite
evident to me that the rector and his wife have been expecting to be
asked to tea to meet you. I’ve just been talking to them in the lane,
and I saw it plainly. They had asked us to bring you before you arrived,
hearing we were to have another guest,--they’ve always been most kind
and neighbourly in helping us to entertain our new friends,--and I
really don’t know why Effie should have got out of it. I usually have to
remind her, it’s true. But I sometimes get tired of always having to.
She doesn’t care for them herself; but that’s no reason why you might
not. We have few enough interests to offer visitors.”
Guy was glad to have escaped the rectory tea, though he did not say this
in assuring Mr. Haseltine that the entertainment offered at Thatches was
absolutely to his taste. He was completely out of place at any rectory;
he could imagine no rector who would not find his poems pernicious; but
he felt that there was justice in Mr. Haseltine’s contention. He _might_
have cared for them. As it was, Mr. Haseltine was brought once again to
reminding her. It was evident then that she was ready to please anybody
or everybody.
“Ask them? Ought I to ask them?”
“My dear, it’s ten days since they sent their invitation. They spoke
again--and it’s the second time--of having been so sorry not to see us,
when I met them yesterday, in the lane. I don’t know why you did not
go.”
“I thought it would bore Mr. Norris, father. He came here for quiet, you
know. But would it bore you?” she asked Guy. “They are very nice. I
don’t mean that.”
“It’s certainly very pleasant being quiet,” said Guy; “but if Mr.
Haseltine likes having them, I assure you that people don’t frighten me
in the least.”
“Oh, not on my account,” Mr. Haseltine protested. “I see our good
friends continually. It is of them I am thinking, as well as of Mr.
Norris. He might find them more interesting than you do, Effie, and they
will, I fear, be hurt.”
Now that it was put before her, Mrs. Baldwin did it every justice,
rising from the breakfast-table, where she had just finished, to go to
her desk, and murmuring as she went, “I hadn’t thought of that. They
might be hurt. So, if it _won’t_ bore you, Mr. Norris.”
And the Laycocks were asked, and did indeed bore Guy sadly.
It was on the night after their visit--Mr. Laycock had questioned him
earnestly about his personal impressions of the war and to evade him had
been wearying--that Guy, for the first time, really, since he had come,
found sleep difficult and even menaced. It was because of that, he felt
sure, looking back on it, that the curious occurrence of the next day
took place--curious, and, had it taken place in the presence of any one
else, embarrassing. But what made it most curious was just that; he had
not felt it embarrassing to break down and sob before Mrs. Baldwin.
The morning had begun badly. The breakfast-table papers had been full of
the approaching victory. Mr. Haseltine read out passages from the
_Times_ as he broke his toast and drank his coffee. He had reiterated
the triumph of his long conviction, and Mrs. Baldwin had murmured
assent. “All’s well with the world,” was the suffocating assurance that
seemed to breathe from them both. “All’s blue.” Was hell forgotten like
that? What if the war were won? Of course, it had to be won--that was an
unquestioned premise that had underlain his rebellions as well as Mr.
Haseltine’s complacencies since the beginning. But what of it? No
victory could redeem what had been done.
He went out into the garden, to be away from Mr. Haseltine, as soon as
he could, and took a book into the summer-house; and it was here, a
little later, that Mrs. Baldwin, seeing him as she passed, her
garden-basket on her arm, paused to ask him, with her smile of the shy
hostess, if he were all right. She didn’t often ask him that, and he saw
at once that his recent recalcitrancy to rejoicing had pierced even her
vagueness. He knew that he still looked recalcitrant, and he was
determined not to soften the overt opposition rising in him; so he
raised his eyes to her over his book and said that he was not, perhaps,
feeling very fit that morning.
Mrs. Baldwin hesitated at the entrance to the summer-house. She looked
behind her at the garden and up at the roses clustering over the lintel
under the thatch; she even took out her scissors, in the uncertainty
that, evidently, beset her, and snipped off a dead rose, and she said
presently, “It was all that talk about the war, wasn’t it--when what you
must ask is to forget it.”
“Oh, I don’t ask that at all,” said Guy. “I should scorn myself for
forgetting it.” She glanced in again at him, mildly. “I want to forget
what’s irrelevant, like victory,” he said; “but not what is relevant,
like irremediable wrong.”
Her awareness had not, of course, gone nearly as far as this. She kept
her eyes on him, and he was glad to feel that he could probably shock
her. “You see,” he found himself saying, “I saw the wrong. I saw the
war--at the closest quarters.”
“Yes--oh, yes,” Mrs. Baldwin murmured.
“For me, tragedy doesn’t cease to exist when it’s shovelled underground.
If one goes down into hell, one doesn’t want to forget the fact--though
one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to
remember that hell exists--and to try and square life with that
actuality.”
There was silence after this for a moment, and he imagined that she was
very much at a loss. Her next words seemed indeed to express nothing so
much as her failure to follow--that and a silliness really rather
adorable, had he been in a mood to find it anything but exasperating.
“But, still--hell doesn’t exist, does it?” she offered him for his
appeasement.
Guy laughed. “Doesn’t it? When things like this war can happen? How
could it ever have existed but in men’s hearts? It’s there that it
smoulders and, when its moment comes, leaps out to blast the world.”
He could talk to her like this because she was too simple to suspect in
him a poetical attitudinizing; any one else would of course suspect it.
Guy was even aware that to any one else that was what it would have
been. She looked kind and troubled and as much as ever at a loss. She
didn’t know at all how to deal with the patient, and she was evidently
uncertain what to do, since it might seem heartless to go away and leave
him to his black thoughts, yet intrudingly intimate to come and sit down
beside him. Nothing could be less intimate than Mrs. Baldwin. It was he,
of course, who was tasteless in talking to her in a vein appropriate
only to intimacy.
“Don’t bother over me,” he said, offering her the patent artifice of a
smile. “I’m simply a bad case. You mustn’t let me trouble you. You must
just turn your back on me when I’m like this.”
It was not poetic attitudinizing now; there was in his voice a quaver of
grief and she responded to it at once.
“Oh, but I don’t like to do that. I do wish I could be of some help. I
see you haven’t slept, for you look so tired, as you did when you first
came. And Mr. Laycock did bore you. It’s wrong of people to talk to you
about the war.”
For the first time he saw in the eyes fixed upon him, pity, evident pity
and solicitude. And before it he felt himself crumble suddenly. He saw
all the reasons she had for pitying him, did she but know. He saw
Ronnie’s face again; he saw his own haunted night and his own grief. He
wanted her to see it. “Oh--one can’t be guarded like that,” he murmured;
“I must try to get used to it. But--I didn’t sleep; that’s true. I’m so
horribly afraid of not sleeping. You can’t imagine what it is. I’ve the
most awful visions.” And leaning his elbows on the table, he put his
hands before his face and began to cry.
She stood there; he did not hear her move at first; and then she entered
and sat down on the seat beside him. But she said nothing and did not
touch him. He had had in all the tumult of his disintegration, a swift
passage of surmise; would she not draw his head upon her shoulder, like
a mother, and comfort him? But that would have broken him down heaven
knew how much further.
He cried frankly, articulating presently, “It’s my nerves, you know;
they have all gone to pieces. I lost my friend; my dearest friend. For
months I didn’t sleep.”
Mrs. Baldwin’s silence was not oppressive, or repressive either. He
heard her hands move slightly on the basket she held on her knees and
the soft chafing in the folds of her linen bodice that her breathing
made. It was an accepting stillness and it presently quieted him; more
than that, it enabled him at last to lift his head and look at her
without feeling ashamed of himself. Oddly enough, he knew that he,
perhaps, ought to be. He _could_ have helped himself. There had been an
element of wilfulness in his breakdown; he had wanted her to see; but,
even had she known this about him, he would not have felt ashamed. She
was so curiously a person with whom one could not associate blames and
judgments. She was an accepting person.
She wasn’t looking at him, but out at the sweet, bright, autumnal little
garden; and as her eyes came to him, he felt them full of thought; felt,
for the first time, sure that, whatever she might be, she was not dull.
He could not remember, looking back at the little scene, that she had
said a single further word. He did not think that he had said anything
further. He was helping her, a little while after, to prune the Aimée
Vibert rose that had grown with great unruliness over the little
tool-house near the kitchen door. “It will really pull it down unless we
cut out some of these great branches,” she had said, as, equipped with
stout gloves, they had worked away together, unfastening the tangled
trails and stretching them out on the ground. So displayed, the Aimée
Vibert was drastically dealt with, and it was midday before they
finished fastening the thinned and shortened shoots into place.
She had said nothing further; but he believed that, for the first time,
her thought really included him. He had been put before her. She was
different afterwards. He had become an individual to her, and had ceased
to be merely the paying guest.