The third week came. There was rain, rather sad September rain, for a
day or two. They sat in the evenings before the wide fireplace where
logs blazed. Mrs. Baldwin, at his suggestion, read aloud to them Fabre’s
_Souvenirs Entomologiques_. She read French prettily, better than he did
himself, and he was a little chagrined once or twice to find that she
knew it better, priding himself on his French as he did. He had lived
for a year in Paris, with Ronnie, before the war.
The horrors of the grim, complicated underworld revealed by the French
seer distressed him. Mrs. Baldwin did not feel them as he did, feeling
the marvels rather than the horrors, perhaps. She laughed a little,
rather callously, at the ladies who devoured their husbands, and seemed
pleased by the odious forethought of the egg-laying mothers. She shared
Fabre’s humorous dispassionateness, if not the fond partiality which,
while it made him the more charming, didn’t, Guy insisted, make his
horrid wasps and beetles a bit more so. As usual, she vexed him a
little, even while, more and more, he felt her intelligent; perhaps she
vexed him all the more for that.
“She’s so devilishly contented with the world,” he said to himself
sometimes, even while he smiled, remembering her laughter.
Old Mr. Haseltine fell asleep one night while she read, and to be
together there before the fire, the old man sleeping beside them, made
them nearer than they had ever been before. Guy was aware of this
nearness while he listened and while he watched her hand, short, like a
child’s (and her face was so short) support the book, and her eyelashes
dropping down the page or raised to a fresh one.
When he went to his room that night, he stood still for a long time, his
candle in his hand, listening to the soft beat of the rain against the
window. He was hardly ever now afraid of being alone, or of the dark,
and he stood there musing and listening, while he still seemed to see
Mrs. Baldwin’s hand as it held the book, and her reading profile. Her
life seemed to breathe upon him and he rested in it. He slept
deliciously.
“Did you know that I write?” he asked her next day. He had wondered
about this once or twice before.
“Oh, yes; your cousin, in her letter, you know, told me that you wrote,”
said Mrs. Baldwin.
They were in the living-room after midday dinner, and alone. She looked
up at him very kindly from the papers and letters she was sorting at her
desk.
“You’ve never heard of my effusions otherwise, though?” He put on a
rueful air. “Such is fame!”
“Are you famous?” Her smile was a little troubled. “I don’t follow
things, you know, living here as I do.”
“You read the papers. I _have_ had reviews: good ones.”
“I don’t read them very regularly,” she admitted. “And I so often don’t
remember the names of people in reviews, even when I’ve liked what is
said of them. Have you any of your poems here? Perhaps you’ll let me
read them.”
He felt, with the familiar chagrin, that she would never, of herself,
have thought of asking him.
“Yes, my last volume. It’s just out.”
He was going for a walk in the rain with Mr. Haseltine that afternoon.
There was an old church in the neighbouring village that his friend
wanted him to see. Mrs. Baldwin had letters to write. “Will you have
time to look at it while we are out?” he asked.
Although she had shown so little interest in him, he was eager,
pathetically so, he felt, that she should read and care about his poems.
She said that it was just the time: her letters would not take long. And
so he ran up to his room and got the little book for her: _Burnt
Offerings_.
All the time that he was walking with Mr. Haseltine and seeing the
church, and the old manor house that took them a half mile further, he
wondered what she was thinking about his poems.
By the time they had returned the rain had ceased. A warm September
sunlight diffused itself. Veils lifted from the stream and trailed upon
the lower meadows. The sky grew clear and the leaves all sparkled. They
found that Mrs. Baldwin had had her cup of tea, for it was past four;
but all had been left in readiness for them, the kettle boiling; and
after Guy had swallowed his, he went out and saw her walking down among
the crocuses.
“Oh, you are back?” she said when he joined her. “I wanted to be there
to give you your tea. Was it all right?”
“Perfectly,” he said. “We put in just your number of spoonfuls.”
Mrs. Baldwin wore her little knitted jacket and had put on her white,
rubber-soled canvas shoes against the wet; but her head, with its thick,
close braids, was bare to the sunlight.
“I had to come out as soon as it stopped raining,” she said; “and I’m
afraid I simply forgot to look out for you and father.”
Her gentleness had always seemed contentment; this afternoon it seemed
happiness, and he had never seen her look so young. He wondered if she
were going to take him so dreadfully aback as not even to mention his
poems; if she had simply forgotten them, too. Already her demeanour,
unclouded, almost radiant, inflicted a wound; she had either forgotten,
or she had cared little indeed, since she could look like that. But,
after he had commented, consentingly, on the lovely hour, she went on
with a change of tone, a voice a little shy, “I’ve read the poems. Thank
you so much for letting me see them.”
“You read all of them?”
“Yes. I didn’t write my letters.”
“I hope you read them, then, because you cared for them.”
She didn’t answer for a moment, walking along and placing the small
white feet carefully among the crocuses. “They are very sad,” she then
said.
He was aware, after an instant of adjustment to the blow, that she made
him very angry. Terrible, his poems, searing, scorching; wicked, if one
would; but not sad.
“Oh!” he murmured; and he wondered if the divided feeling she had from
the first roused in him had been this hatred, not perhaps of her, but of
her unvarying acquiescence, her untroubled inadequacy.
“They interested me very much,” she said, feeling, no doubt, that,
whatever he was, he was not pleased. “They made me see, I mean, all the
things you have been through.”
“Sad things, you call them. You know, I rather feel as if I’d heard you
call hell sad.”
She looked up at him quickly, and it was now she who was taken aback
and, as she had been the other day, at a loss. And, as on the other day,
she found the same answer, though she offered it deprecatingly, feeling
his displeasure. “But hell doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t you think anything horrible exists?”
They turned at the end of the meadow. It seemed to him, although he felt
as if he hated her, that they were suddenly intimate in their
antagonism. He would force that antagonism, and its intimacy, upon
her--to its last implication.
“Horrible? Oh, yes, yes!” she said, startled, and that was, he reflected
grimly, to the good. “But it would have to be irretrievable, wouldn’t
it, to be hell?” she urged.
“Do you suggest that it’s not irretrievable? You own it’s horrible.
Irretrievably horrible, I call it. And that’s what I call hell. Yet all
that you can find to say of my poems is that they are sad.”
She hesitated, feeling her way, hearing in the recurrent word how it had
rankled. “I meant sad, I think, because of you; because you had suffered
so much.”
“You seem always to imply that one might _not_ have suffered!” And
thrusting aside her quickly murmured, “Oh, no, no!” he went on: “I can’t
understand your attitude of mind. Do you realize at all, I sometimes
wonder, what it has all meant, this nightmare we are living in--we, that
is, to whom it came? Can you imagine what it was to me to see boys, dead
boys, buried stealthily, at night, under fire? Boys so mangled, so
disfigured--you read that poem, 'Half a Corpse'?--that their mothers
wouldn’t have known them; featureless, dismembered boys, heaped one upon
the other in the mud. Has your mind ever dwelt upon the community of
corruption in which they lie, as their mothers' minds must dwell? I do
not understand you. I do not understand how you can dare to call such
things sad.”
His own wrath shook and yet sustained him, though he knew a fear lest he
had gone too far; but in her silence--they had reached the other end of
the meadow and turned again in their walk--he felt that there was no
resentment. It was as if she realized that those who have returned from
hell cannot be asked to stop and pick their words with courtesy, and
accepted his vehemence, if not his blame; and again, when she spoke at
last, he felt that her bewilderment had settled into thought.
“Yes, I can imagine,” she said. “But no, I don’t think that my mind has
dwelt on those things. If I were their mothers, I don’t think that my
mind would dwell, as you say. Something would burn through. There are
other kinds of suffering--better kinds; they help, I believe. And, for
that kind, it is worse, but is it so much worse than in ordinary life?
That is what happens all the time when there is no war; dreadful changes
in the dead; and burials. They are not quite so near each other in a
churchyard, and their graves are named; but do you think that makes it
easier to bear?”
He felt now as if it were insult she was offering him.
"You deny all tragedy to war, then? It’s all to you on a level with an
Elegy in a Country Churchyard, with curfew and rector and
primrose-wreaths? You read 'His Eyes,'"--Guy’s voice had a hoarser
note, but, mingled with the sincerity of what, at last, he knew he was
to tell her, the very centre of his sick heart, went a surface
appreciation of what he had just said and of how curfew and rector and
primrose-wreaths would go into a bitter poem one day,--"you read that
poem of mine at the end of the book. ‘His Eyes’ is about myself and my
friend Ronnie Barlow, the artist; you never heard of him, I know. He
hung, with shattered legs, dying, just in front of us, on the barbed
wire, for three days and nights. When he could speak, it was to beg to
be shot. We tried to get to him, four, five times; it was no good. There
was barbed wire between, and the Germans spotted us every time. He died
during the third night, and next morning I found him looking at me--as
he had looked during these three days--his torment and his reproach. And
so he went on looking until the rats came and he had no more eyes to
look with. Will you tell me that that is no worse than the deaths died
in the parishes of England? Will you tell me that it’s the sort of death
died by the cheery, mature gentlemen who ate their dinners and slept
warm and dropped a tear--while they did their ‘bit’ in their Government
offices--over the brave lads saving England?"
He had taken refuge from Ronnie in hatred of those whom, in the poem, he
called his murderers, and his voice was weighted with its fierce
indictment. In the pause that followed he had time to wonder if she
found him, at last, intolerable. She walked beside him, still looking
down, and it might well have been in a chill withdrawal. He almost
expected to hear her, in another moment, find the conventional phrase
with which to leave him. But no,--and in his own long sigh he recognized
the depth of his relief,--she was not going to punish him with
convention; she was not going to leave him. And what she said at last
was, “I’m so sorry! Please believe that I’m so very, very sorry!
Only--why do you speak, and write, as though it were some one’s fault?”
Ah, here then, at last, they had come to it, the barrier, on one side of
which he stood with his hell and she on the other in her artificial
paradise.
“I write it and speak it because it is the truth,” he said. “Millions of
innocent creatures, of gifted, beautiful creatures, like my friend, have
been slaughtered, tortured, driven mad, because of greasy, greedy
wire-pullers in their leather chairs at home.”
“In this war, too?”
“In this war preëminently.”
“You don’t feel that the crime was Germany’s?”
“Oh, of course!” his laugh sneered the facile acquiescence. “Let us put
it on Germany, by all means. We’ll sleep the sounder! Certainly, I grant
it to you freely--Germany struck the match and lighted the fuse.”
“And weren’t we all responsible for the fuse--you and I, I mean, as much
as the people in the leather chairs?” There was no irony in her
repetition. “The people who fought, as much as the people who didn’t
fight? Wasn’t the fuse simply our conception of our national safety? of
our national honour? That is what I feel so sad about your
poems,--though I should never have wanted to explain it,--that you are
so wrong, so ungenerous, so vindictive.”
In all his life it had rarely been his lot to know such astonishment.
Astonishment came first; and then the deep, deep hurt that rose, wave
after wave, within him. Was this, then, what she felt for him--only
this? Hadn’t he told her about Ronnie--her alone of all the world?
Should not that have made her reverent of him, and pitiful? Should a man
who had endured such griefs receive such blows? Waves of colour, too,
flooded his face and tears rushed to his eyes. He thought, when he was
able at last to gather thoughts together, that it should now be for him
to find the conventional phrase and leave her. But, glancing again at
her profile, finding it, though singularly pale, so much more gentle
than severe, the impulse dropped. He was not strong enough for
convention. He was shaken, shattered; too weak even for
self-preservation.
He walked, miserable, and his mind full of a whirling darkness, beside
her, determining only that she should be the first to speak again. She
was. She had quite come out of her shyness,--if it had ever been
that,--and though it was with something faltering, something that was,
he made out, sorry for them both in the predicament to which, after all,
he, and not she, had brought them, it was more than all with resolution
that she said,--
“I am so sorry if I seem presumptuous. But you asked me. And your poems
aren’t the first I’ve read. So many young men, who have been so brave,
like you, and who have been through it all so that they have the right
to speak, seem to feel more than anything that hatred, not against
war,--we all hate war,--but against people, some groups of people, they
make responsible. There are bad and selfish people everywhere,--among
poets, I feel sure, just as much as among statesmen; but hasn’t this war
proved--since everybody has gone--that no one group is bad and selfish;
that there are men in every group who have been glad to die for their
country? I know I have no weight with young men like you; I am not a
person of any importance for opinion; but how I wish that I could make
you believe that you ought not to write like that--with hatred in your
heart. Can great poetry be written out of hatred? And it’s not only
yourself it hurts: it hurts other people; harms them, I mean. It spreads
a mood of darkness and fever just when they are so in need of light and
calm. And for the mothers, for people who have lost, cruelly, those whom
they loved as much, perhaps even more, than you loved your friend--do
you not see how your poems must sicken them? Do you not see that it all
becomes just that--a community of corruption? You imprison them, force
them back into their helpless suffering; when what they pray for is
strength to rise above it and to feel all the goodness and love that has
been given for them; to feel what is beautiful, not what is horrible; so
as to be worthy of their dead.”
As he listened to her,--and with a slow revulsion of all his nature, as
if, against his very will and mind, she moved his heart to breaking with
something passionate that spoke in her words,--an overwhelming
experience befell him.
The crocuses beneath their feet, her sunlit shape beside him, her voice,
as she spoke to him thus, with her very soul, blended together in a
rising wave of light, or music, piercing, sweeping him, lifting him up
to some new capacity, leaving the old inert and dangling, lifting and
still lifting him, until at last, as if with a great, emerging breath,
he came into a region bright and fair, whence, looking down on the dark
and tattered past, he saw all life differently, even Ronnie’s death,
even Ronnie’s eyes. Ronnie was with him, with Mrs. Baldwin, in the
bright stillness.
Upborne, sustained, like a swimmer in some strange, new element, he
seemed to gaze down through its golden spaces at the inert, alien
darkness that had been himself. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” he seemed to hear
himself say. Yet all was not left behind; all was not rubbish; else how
could he be here, with her, with Ronnie? It was bliss to see himself as
he had been, since something else was so immeasurably secure. Oh--could
one stay always like this! This was to taste of everlasting life. His
longing, as if with a cry, a grasp from the swimmer, marked the soft
turning of the tide. He sank, but it was sweetly, if with a strange, an
infinite sadness, a sadness recorded, accepted, while he sank, as making
forever the portion of the temporal consciousness. And the bliss still
stayed in the acceptance, and purple ripples seemed to glide back
rhythmically as the crocuses swam before his eyes. It had all been only
an instant then, for her last words came to him as if she had but spoken
them and he heard his own voice murmuring, as if from very far away,
“Perhaps you are right.”
The ripples stayed themselves. He looked down at the crocuses and saw
Mrs. Baldwin’s white shoes standing still among them. Lifting his eyes,
which felt heavy, he found her looking at him with attention, with
anxiety.
“It’s nothing,” he tried to smile. “Nothing at all. I mean--you’ve done
me good.” He saw that she hadn’t an idea of how she had done it.
“Do take my arm,” she said. “I ought to have remembered that you are not
strong yet.”
He took her arm. Perhaps he needed it. His normal consciousness was
gathering about him once again, but no longer with the old close
texture. It was all more permeable to light--that was how he tried to
put it. And he heard his voice go on, “You see--what it all amounts
to--oh, I’m not thinking about the poems, I know that you must be
right--it’s not what you say, is it? It’s something far more right than
what you say. But I love you. That’s why you can do it to me. I wonder I
didn’t see it before. You made me angry with your peacefulness. I didn’t
understand. I needed your peace. You, you were what I needed. You will
forgive my speaking? Surely you’ll understand. Perhaps you feel you
hardly know me, while you are like my life. Is it possible that some day
you might love me back and marry me?”
He had used the words that came. They were the words of the normal
consciousness. How else could he ask her to keep him always near her so
that he might never lose that sense of paradise?
But she had stopped still and had drawn her arm from his. Was it
possible that after what she had done to him, for him, she could see him
only thus? “Oh, no,” she said. “No. No.” Never had he seen a human face
express with such ineffable gentleness such repudiation. And she
repeated it, as if he had given her too much to bear; as if for her own
reassurance; as if to efface even the memory of his words: “No; no;
no!” She began again to walk towards the house.
Had it not been for the initiation that had passed he knew so clearly
now, in all unawareness from her spirit to his, he would have felt to
the full the shame of his rejection, the deserved shame. For he was a
stranger and she had given him no right to believe that she even liked
him. But he could feel no shame. Had he really thought that she could
love him? Had it not been only that he wanted to tell her that he loved
her, and had wanted her, as it were, to keep him safe? He found himself
trying to explain this to her,--not pleading,--only so that she should
not be angry. “I had to tell you. You’d done me so much good. Everything
came different. Really, I’m not so presumptuous. I never meant to ask
anything.”
But she was not angry. “Forgive me,” she said. “I hardly know what I am
saying. You so astonished me. Forgive me. But I don’t feel as if I knew
you at all. Please don’t think me reproaching you. I begin to
understand. You are not at all strong. It was like the other day when
you cried, I mean--I feel sure you think you care for me; but you
couldn’t have said it, when we know each other so little, if you had
been well.”
She was putting it aside, for his sake, as an aberration, and he really
smiled a little as he shook his head. “No; really, really, it’s not
that; not because I’ve been on edge and ill. It was something that came
to me from what you are; something that’s been coming ever since I saw
you. I know that I am nothing to you; but for a moment, just now, it
seemed, when I had received so much, that you must know what you had
given; it seemed that a person to whom so much could be given, could
not be so far away. But even then I saw quite clearly what you saw in
me; a vain, pretentious, emotional creature; insincere, too, and proud
of my suffering. I am that. But I had never seen it before. And when it
came to me from you and, instead of crushing me, lifted me up, I knew
that I loved you.--No; I won’t try to explain. Only you do forgive me?
You will let me go on as if it hadn’t happened? I promise you that I’ll
never trouble you again.”
Oh, the gentleness, the heavenly gentleness! It breathed through him
like the colour of the crocuses, although she was as impersonal, as
untouched, and as mysterious as they. He was nothing to her--nothing;
but she stood before him, looking at him, and though she gave nothing
but the gentleness, he knew that he received all that he needed. It was
enough that she was there.
“But it’s _I_ to be forgiven--_I_,” she repeated. “Of course we will go
on. Oh, you look very tired. Please take my arm again. I spoke so
strangely to you. But--but--” She had flushed: for the first time he saw
the colour darken her face as if with a veil of pain, and in her voice
was the passion, deeper, stiller, that he had heard a little while ago
and that had enfranchised him. “I am married--I mean, my husband is
dead, but I am married. Perhaps you don’t understand. Perhaps you will
some day, if you should lose some one you love and feel them still your
very life. We were like that. He is always with me.”
They had said nothing more as they walked up the meadow to the house,
his arm in hers. He had no sense of loss; rather, from her last words
to him, came a sense of further gain. She would be like that. He saw now
that her peace, against which he had pressed and protested, was
something won, was depth, not emptiness. She, too, had lost and
suffered. She was made dearer to him, more sacred. As for his love, it
did not belong--he had seen this even before she told him why--to this
everyday world to which he had returned. But it was everything to have
found it, with that other world, and to know that there it had its
being, its reality, forever. What was it that had enlarged, transformed
his life, but that very certitude of an eternity where all good was
secure? He could not explain it to himself in any words. Words were the
keys of temporality. But he had seen, if only for the few shining
moments, that Ronnie was not lost; that nothing had been in vain.
If he found no difficulty, it was evident to him that Mrs. Baldwin felt
none, and he was glad to believe that this might be because he showed
her so completely, in his candid contentment, that he would never
trouble her again. She was not more kind to him; but she took, perhaps,
even more care, as if feeling that she had miscalculated something in
his recovery. She inaugurated a glass of hot milk, instead of spiced hot
water, at bedtime, and a rest on the sofa, with a rug, before the midday
dinner. “You will look so much better when you go back than when you
came,” she said.
For the time of going back drew near, and he did not dread it, though
loving Thatches and all it meant more and more with every day. But of
course, even in the temporal world, he was not to lose Thatches. That
was quite understood between them. The P.G. would be welcome whenever
he cared to come.
V
He was playing chess on the afternoon before his departure. Tea was over
and Mrs. Baldwin had gone out. Guy had noticed that she had been perhaps
a little stiller than usual that day, when he had seen her, and that he
had seen her little. The game did not go very well; they were neither of
them keen on it; and when the old gentleman had won an easy victory, he
leaned back in his chair, the board still on its little table between
them, and said, “Poor Effie! She’s still in the church, or in the
churchyard, I expect.”
Guy felt the shock of a great surprise. Strangely enough, though Mrs.
Baldwin had spoken of her husband and of his death, and though his books
were there, he did not associate him with Thatches, nor with the
churchyard. And with the word, “churchyard,” a painful anxiety rose in
him.
“Is it an anniversary?” he asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Haseltine nodded, sighing and rubbing his hand over his head.
“September twenty-ninth. I’d forgotten myself till just a little while
ago. Oliver died on this day. Her husband. Poor Effie!”
“They lived here?” Guy asked. He had imagined that it had been after her
bereavement that she and her father had found and made a home of
Thatches.
“Oh, yes. They lived here. All their married life,” said Mr. Haseltine.
“Ten years or so. It was a great love-match. They were very happy. I
never saw a happier couple--until the end.”
“Did anything part them?”
Mr. Haseltine had put his hands into his pockets and was gazing at the
board as if with a painful concentration, and though he shook his head
he answered, “It was the malady. Cancer, you know. Cancer of the face.
Such a handsome fellow, too: beautiful, bright, smiling eyes; beautiful
mouth. All gone. All disfigured, cruelly disfigured, and with horrible
suffering.”
Guy felt his breath coming thickly. “Was it long?” he asked.
“Yes. Long. Eighteen months, I think. Morphia did little good at last.
He couldn’t swallow; could hardly speak; begged to be killed and put out
of his torment. She was with him in it all. She never left him, day or
night; nor could he have borne it if she had. Nothing quieted him except
her hand in his. But at the end,” said Mr. Haseltine, pushing away the
table and rising, “at the end, it attacked his brain and then he raved
at her. She couldn’t go into the room at the last.”
The old man, with step lagging, as if weighted, walked away to the
window and stood looking out, while Guy, at the table, felt his heart
turn to stone.
“Poor Effie!” Mr. Haseltine repeated after a little while. He came back
into the room and moved up and down, pausing to look at the books and
pictures. “She has never been the same since. For a long while we were
afraid she couldn’t live. She hardly slept for months; and when she did
sleep, she used to wake crying, crying, always for him. When she became
stronger, she used to walk up and down those meadows, sometimes for
hours at a time. Very gentle; no complaint; always ready to talk to
people, to go on with things as best she could; but changed; completely
changed. We speak very little of him; but when we do, it’s quite
naturally. She goes to the church sometimes, and there are always
flowers on his grave; but I don’t think she has any orthodox beliefs; I
don’t know that she has any beliefs at all. Still, she seems helped. She
is a very dear, unselfish woman; a dreamer, she was always a dreamer;
but always meaning well; and she does good in her quiet way. And I think
she likes this plan of having people come and stay and seeing after
them; especially now that they are so often people who have had a bad
time. Dear me, dear me!” Mr. Haseltine again shook his head, stationed
again at the window and looking out. “You would hardly have recognized
her had you seen her ten years ago. She had bright hair and a charming
colour; and full of gaiety and mischief. You’d hardly believe it now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Guy heard himself saying. He remembered that those were
the words Mrs. Baldwin had used to him about Ronnie.
“Yes, it’s very sad,” said Mr. Haseltine. “Life is certainly very
difficult for some of us, and Effie has had her share. Somehow one
doesn’t remember it when one is with her. I only recalled the day by
chance.”
Guy was walking in the meadows when Mrs. Baldwin returned. He saw her in
the garden, reading the letters that the evening post had brought, and
his first impulse was to remove himself as speedily as might be from her
sight, to cross the bridge and the farther meadow, and turn into the
lane that led away from it. But then he saw, as he stood irresolute,
that she was coming down to him, and he stood there, helpless, watching
her approach in the soft radiance of the late afternoon. She wore one
of the lavender-coloured dresses and the little knitted jacket. In her
hand were the opened letters. Her face was tranquil. She was, of course,
unaware of what had happened to him.
She joined him. “You are having your last look at the crocuses?”
It was their last look together. That, of course, was why she had come,
full of care and of kindness.
“Yes. Yes. My last look for the year.” He heard that his voice was
strange. And his heart seemed to lie like a cold hard block in his side.
“Aren’t you feeling well?” she asked.
He walked beside her in silence. What could he say? But how was it
possible not to tell her?
They had turned towards the sunset and came now to the bridge. She was
looking at him, with solicitude. He stopped before they crossed.
“I must say something to you,” broke from him. “I must. I can’t go away
without your knowing--my shame--my unutterable remorse.”
She looked at him with the look he knew so well. Kindly, firmly, if with
anxiety, she prepared to hear him thrust some new torment upon her.
“Shame? Remorse?” she murmured.
“About my poems. About my griefs. What I’ve said to you. What I’ve given
you to bear. I thought I’d borne so much. I thought you unfeeling,
without experience. I thought I’d been set apart--that all of us had
been set apart, who suffered in the war. Stop me at once if you won’t
hear it from me. But your father told me, just now, about your husband’s
death.”
She became very pale. She looked away from him, but she said nothing.
“That’s all,” said Guy after a long silence. He saw that there was
nothing more to tell her. She had understood.
“Let us walk up and down,” said Mrs. Baldwin.
They crossed the bridge. He saw the stream sliding brightly below them
between the old, black planks. In the farther meadows the crocuses grew
more thickly and opened widely their pale purple chalices.
“We have all suffered,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “You mustn’t have remorse or
shame. Nothing is harmed between us.”
The horrible stricture around his heart relaxed, and as they went very
slowly up and down he felt his throat tighten and tears rising, rising
to his eyes. He could not keep them back. He wasn’t really quite strong
enough for this. They fell and fell, and from time to time he put up his
hand to brush them away.
“We have all suffered,” Mrs. Baldwin repeated gently.
“Some, more! some, more!” he said brokenly. “Some, most of all!”
They came back to the bridge, but though they crossed over, they did not
pass out through the high gate that barred the other end. The gate was
closed, and Guy stopped at it and leaned on it and put his face on his
hands. Mrs. Baldwin stood at the gatepost beside him, her hand holding
it and her head leaned against her hand.
“He would have liked you,” she said. “He was so interested in young men,
young poets. He was not old himself; and he wrote, too, did you know?
All those books in the living-room are his. He used to work there. I
will give you his two books if you care to have them. They were thought
very good; I think you will like them.--It was because of the crocuses
we came here,” she went on. “We found them one September, just like
this, and the three little ruined cottages, and we knew at once that we
must live here. He so loved them. When he was very ill--but before the
very end when nothing could come to him any longer, when he was quite
shut away--he used to lie at the window and look out at them--that big
window above the living-room.”
Divinely she was helping him. It was as if, taking him by the hand, she
led him again away from his darkness and into her own light.
Yes, brokenly it came to him, it was there, secure; how won, he knew
not. Through her he had found it; but that was because her feet had
passed before him up the calvary. She had gone through everything; and
she knew everything.
And, to his new hearing, something of the infinite weariness of that
ascent was in her voice when she next spoke, although it was a voice as
peaceful as the evening air around them. “Are they not beautiful?” she
said.
He raised his head and looked at the flowers through his tears. They had
never been so beautiful. “They make me think of you,” he told her.
“Do they?” Mrs. Baldwin still leaned her head against her hand, still
looked out over the meadows. “But there are so many of them,” she said.
“So many. That is what I feel first of all about them. I could not think
of them as like one person. Multitudes. Multitudes.--And so silent! They
make me think always of the souls of the happy dead.”
_The Riverside Press_