"Off to-morrow."
He sighed again.
"It was not until last evening,"--her voice changed oddly--"that I
heard you were at home."
"Nice of you to come and see me," he said. "You must excuse the room
being in a litter." There was a table in the center on which was a
drawing board, geometrical instruments, many sheets of paper. "I've
been trying to work. I'm always trying ... but ... you need eyes to be
an architect ... you need eyes."
Sally was suddenly pierced by the thought of his ambition and his
passion for work. He was going to do so much, he had begun so well.
"I have an idea for a new cathedral for Louvain. Been studying
ecclesiastical architecture for years in my spare time." As he paused
his face looked ghastly. "It's all in my head ... but...."
"Is it possible"--she could hardly speak--"for any one to help you--in
the details, I mean?"
"They would have to get right inside my mind ... some one practical ...
yet very sympathetic ... and then the chances are that it wouldn't work
out."
"It might, though."
"Somehow, I don't think so." He was curiously frank. "I tell myself it
might, just to keep going. There's always the bare chance if I get the
right person to help me ... some one with great intelligence, great
insight, great sympathy, yet without ideas of their own."
"You mean they wouldn't have to know too much?"
"That's it ... not know too much. They would have to sink their
individuality in ... in one who couldn't.... Your father suggested
a partnership. But it wouldn't be fair, would it? Besides I should
be terribly trying to work with ... terribly trying ... perhaps
impossible."
"Do you think you would be?"
"In a partnership, yes. It couldn't answer. I'm so creative.... I have
always to stamp myself on my work ... if you know what I mean. Then
... as I say ... I don't know yet ... that ... I can pick up all the
threads that have been...."
"You need," said Sally slowly and softly, "some intelligent amateur,
capable of drawing a ground plan, who would give himself up to you."
He threw up his head eagerly. "That's it ... somebody quite
intelligent ... but without ambition ... who would"--the voice began to
tail off queerly--"have the courage ... not to mind ... the ferocious
egotism ... of the ... baffled." Suddenly he covered his face with his
hands.
"It wouldn't take me very long to learn the rudiments, I think," said
Sally. "I'm rather quick at picking up the things that interest me.
It would be enormously interesting to see what could be done with
this--this----"
"But you are off to France to-morrow."
"The war won't last forever."
The tone of her voice startled him. His heart leapt queerly. There was
a time, not so long ago, when he would have given his soul to have
surprised just that note in it. He began to shake violently.
With all the will his calamity had left him he strove to hold himself
in. Her voice was music, her nearness magical; what she offered him now
was beyond his wildest hopes. Once he had jumped at her too soon, in
a moment of delirium; but he had always known, by force of the strong
temperament, that was such a torment to him now, that she was the only
woman in the world he would ever really care for.
"I see just the kind of helper you need." Divinely practical, yet
divinely modern! "I could mug up my drawing in a week or two and I
should never know enough to want to interfere with anything that
mattered."
He held himself tensely like one who sees a precipice yawning under
his feet. "America coming in, do you think?" It was a heroic change of
voice. "I wish she would. I'm afraid it may be a draw without her."
Sally, with all her ribbons and her uniform, could rise to no immediate
interest in America.
"Our poor lads have had an awful grueling on the Somme. Seven hundred
thousand casualties and nothing to show for it so far."
"I know." The sightless eyes were lacerating her. "They ought to help
us. It's their war as much as it's ours."
"We can't blame them for staying out. Can't blame anybody for staying
out. But we'll never get the right peace unless they help us."
"Some people think they'd not make much difference."
"My God!" It was the vehemence she used not to like. "They'd simply tip
the scale. Have you ever been there?"
"No."
"I have. Some country, America. They've pinched our best Torrington,
curse them ... not that that took me there. One afternoon, though, I
happened to be looking for it in a moldy, one-horse museum just off
Washington Square--I forget the name of it--when I walked straight into
the arms of dear old Jim Stanning who had actually come all the way
from Europe on purpose to gaze at it."
Sally emitted becoming surprise.
"If you read that in a novel you'd say it was the sort of thing that
doesn't happen. But it did happen. Fancy old Jim coming all those miles
by flood and field to look at a strip of canvas not as big as that
drawing board. 'The Valley of the Sharrow on an afternoon in July.' By
the way, did you ever happen to meet him?"
Sally had never met Stanning the painter.
"One of the whitest men that ever lived. Lies out there. A great chap,
Jim Stanning. Another Torrington almost for a certainty ... although he
doubted himself, whether he was big enough to fight his own success.
See what he meant?"
It thrilled him a little when he realized that she did.
For an instant the extinguished eyes seemed to well with light. "That
picture of his, 'As the Leaves of the Tree,' carries technique to a
point that makes one dizzy. Some say technique doesn't matter, but
there's nothing permanent without it." He sighed heavily. "Of course
the undaunted soul of man has to shine through it. And that's just what
Jim Stanning was--an undaunted soul. Dead at thirty-nine. We shan't
realize ... if we ever realize ... however...."
Overcome by his thoughts for a moment, he could not go on. Sally sat
breathing hard.
"If I were a rich man, as rich as Ford or Carnegie, I'd buy that
picture of old Jim's and send it to them in Berlin. Some day it might
help them to ask themselves just what it was that brought the man who
painted it, a man who simply lived for beauty, to die like a dog, half
mad, in a poisoned muckyard in Flanders."
Suddenly he stopped and the light seemed to die in his face. Then he
turned round on the piano stool and broke delicately into the opening
bars of the haunted, wild and terrible Fifth Symphony. For the moment
he had forgotten that Sally was there.
She got up from her chair and came to him as a child to a wounded and
suffering animal. Putting an arm round his clean but frayed collar she
kissed his forehead.
"I shall come and see you again ... if I may."
His sightless flesh seemed to contract as he lifted his thin hands from
the keyboard. "Don't!" he gasped. "Better not ... better not ... for
both of us."
She knew he was right and something in her voice told him so. "... If I
may," she repeated weakly.
He didn't answer. She pressed her lips again upon his forehead, then
took up her coat and went hastily from the room.
The old woman was in the act of turning the latchkey in the front door.
She had got her coupons and was returning in triumph with a full basket.
"Not going, Miss Sally, are you? I should like you to have seen his
decorations--D.S.O. with two Bars and such a wonderful letter from the
General."
"I'm afraid I simply must go, Mrs. Nixey. Off to France to-morrow, and
I've got to pack."
"Yes, my dear, I suppose so. Very good of you to come and see him."
"Don't say that."
At the sight of Sally's eyes the voice of the old woman changed
suddenly. "He thinks, my dear, he'll get better ... he quite thinks
he'll get better ... but ... but, Dr. Minyard...." Again the voice of
the old woman changed. "Ah, there he is playing again. How beautifully
he does play, doesn't he? Hours ... and hours ... and hours. So soft
and gentle ... the bit he's playing now reminds him of the wind in
Dibley Chase. Yes, and that bit too ... he says it makes him see the
sun dancing along the Sharrow on an afternoon in July. Beautiful
piano! So kind and thoughtful of your dear father! He quite thinks ...
he'll...."