1
It was Sunday, the last week of Horry's holidays. All through supper he
had been talking about cycling to Cirencester if the frost held, to
skate on the canal.
The frost did hold, and in the morning he strapped a cushion on the
carrier of his bicycle and called up the stairs to Barbara.
"Come along, Barbara, let's go to Cirencester."
Barbara appeared, ready, carrying her skates. Mr. Waddington had let her
off the Ramblings, yet, all of a sudden, she looked depressed.
"Oh, Horry," she said, "I was going with Ralph."
"You are _not_," said Horry. "You're always going with Ralph. You're
jolly well coming with me this time."
"But I promised him."
"You'd no business to promise him, when it's the last week of my
holidays. 'Tisn't fair."
Fanny came out into the hall.
"Horry," she said, "don't worry Barbara. Can't you see she wants to go
with Ralph?"
"That's exactly," he said, "what I complain of."
She shook her head at him. "You're your father all over again," she
said.
"I'll swear I'm not," said Horry.
"If you were half as polite as your father it wouldn't be a bad thing."
There was a sound of explosions in the drive. "There's Ralph come to
settle it himself," said Fanny. And at that point, Mr. Waddington came
out on them, suddenly, from the cloak-room.
"What's all this?" he said. He looked with disgust at the skates
dangling from Barbara's hand. He went out into the porch and looked with
disgust at Ralph and at the motor-bicycles. He thought with bitterness
of the Cirencester canal. He couldn't skate. Even when he was Horry's
age he hadn't skated. He couldn't ride a motor-bicycle. When he looked
at the beastly things and thought of their complicated machinery and
their evil fascination for Barbara, he hated them. He hated Horry and
Ralph standing up before Barbara, handsome, vibrating with youth and
health and energy.
"I won't have Barbara riding on that thing. It isn't safe. If he skids
on the snow he'll break her neck."
"Much more likely to break his own neck," said Horry.
In his savage interior Mr. Waddington wished he would, and Horry too.
"He won't skid," said Barbara; "if he does I'll hop off."
"We'll come back," said Ralph, "if we don't get on all right."
They started in a duet of explosions, the motor-bicycles hissing and
crunching through the light snow. Barbara, swinging on Ralph's carrier,
waved her hand light-heartedly to Mr. Waddington. He hated Barbara; but
far more than Barbara he hated Horry, and far more than Horry he hated
Ralph.
"He'd no business to take her," he said. "She'd no business to go."
"You can't stop them, my dear," said Fanny; "they're too young."
"Well, if they come back with their necks broken they'll have only
themselves to thank."
He took a ferocious pleasure in thinking of Horry and Ralph and Barbara
with their necks broken.
Fanny stared at him. "I wonder what's made him so cross," she thought.
"He looks as if he'd got a chill on the liver.".... "Horatio, have you
got a chill on the liver?"
"Now, what on earth put that into your head?"
"Your face. You look just a little off colour, darling."
At that moment Mr. Waddington began to sneeze.
"There, I knew you'd caught cold. You oughtn't to go standing about in
draughts."
"I haven't caught cold," said Mr. Waddington.
But he shut himself up in his library and stayed there, huddled in his
armchair. From time to time he leaned forward and stooped over the
hearth, holding his chest and stomach as near as possible to the fire.
Shivers like thin icicles kept on slipping down his spine.
At lunch-time he complained that there was nothing he could eat, and
before the meal was over he went back to his library and his fire. Fanny
sat with him there.
"I wish you wouldn't go standing out in the cold," she said. She knew
that on Saturday he had stood for more than ten minutes in the fallen
snow of the park to be photographed. And he wouldn't wear his overcoat
because he thought he looked younger without it, and slenderer.
"No wonder you've got a chill," she said.
"I didn't get it then. I got it yesterday in the garden."
She remembered. He had been wandering about the garden, after church,
looking for snowdrops in the snow. Barbara had worn the snowdrops in the
breast of her gown last night.
He nourished his resentment on that memory and on the thought that he
had got his chill picking snowdrops for Barbara.
At tea-time he drank a little tea, but he couldn't eat anything. He felt
sick and his head ached. At dinner-time, on Fanny's advice, he went to
bed and Fanny took his temperature.
A hundred and one. He turned the thermometer in his hand, gazing
earnestly at the slender silver thread. He was gratified to know that
his temperature was a hundred and one and that Fanny was frightened and
had sent for the doctor. He had a queer, satisfied, exalted feeling, now
that he was in for it. When Barbara came back she would know what he was
in for and be frightened, too. He would have been still more gratified
if he had known that without him dinner was a miserable affair. Fanny
showed that she was frightened, and her fear flattened down the high
spirits of Ralph and Barbara and Horry, returned from their skating.
"You see, Barbara," said Ralph, when they had left Fanny and Horry with
the doctor, "we can't live without him."
They listened at the smoke-room door for the sound of Dr. Ransome's
departure, and Ralph waited while Barbara went back and brought him the
verdict.
"It's flu, and a touch of congestion of the lungs."
They looked at each other sorrowfully, so sorrowfully that they smiled.
"Yet we can smile," he said.
"You know," said Barbara, "he got it standing in the snow, while
Pyecraft photographed him."
"It's the way," Ralph said, "he would get it."
And Barbara laughed. But, all the same, she felt a distinct pang at her
heart every time she went into her bedroom and saw, in its glass on her
dressing-table, the bunch of snowdrops that Mr. Waddington had picked
for her in the snow. They made a pattern on her mind; white cones
hanging down; sharp green blades piercing; green stalks held in the
crystal of the water.
2
"Nobody but a fool," said Horry, "would have stood out in the snow to be
photographed ... at his age."
"Don't, Horry."
Barbara was in the morning-room, stirring some black, sticky stuff in a
saucepan over the fire. The black, sticky stuff was to go on Mr.
Waddington's chest. Horry looked on, standing beside her in an attitude
of impatience. A pair of boots with skates clipped on hung from his
shoulders by their laces. He felt that his irritation was justifiable,
for Barbara had refused to go out skating with him.
"Why 'don't'?" said Horry. "It's obvious."
"Very. But he's ill."
"There can't be much the matter with him or the mater wouldn't look so
chirpy."
"She likes nursing him."
"Well," Horry said, "_you_ can't nurse him."
"No. But I can stir this stuff," said Barbara.
"I suppose," Horry said, "you'd think me an awful brute if I went?"
"I wish you _would_ go. You're a much more awful brute standing there
saying things about him and getting in my way."
"All right. I'll get out of it. That's jolly easy."
And he went. But he felt sick and sore. He had tried to persuade himself
that his father wasn't ill because he couldn't bear to think how ill he
was; it interfered with his enjoyment of his skating. "If," he said to
himself, "if he'd only put it off till the ice gave. But it was just
like him to choose a hard frost."
His anger gave him relief from the sickening anxiety he felt when he
thought of his father and his father's temperature. It had gone down,
but not to normal.
Mr. Waddington lay in his bed in Fanny's room. Barbara, standing at the
open door with her saucepan, caught a sight of him.
He was propped up by his pillows. On his shoulders, over one of those
striped pyjama suits that Barbara had once ordered from the Stores, he
wore, like a shawl, a woolly, fawn-coloured motor-scarf of Fanny's. His
arms were laid before him on the counterpane in a gesture of complete
surrender to his illness. Fanny was always tucking them away under the
blankets, but if anybody came in he would have them so. He was sitting
up, waiting in an adorable patience for something to be done for him.
His face had the calm, happy look of expectation utterly appeased and
resigned. It was that look that frightened Barbara; it made her think
that Mr. Waddington was going to die. Supposing his congestion turned to
pneumonia? There was so much of him to be ill, and those big men always
did die when they got pneumonia.
Mr. Waddington could hear Barbara's quiet voice saying something to
Fanny; he could see her unhappy, anxious face. He enjoyed Barbara's
anxiety. He enjoyed the cause of it, his illness. So long as he was
actually alive he even enjoyed the thought that, if his congestion
turned to pneumonia, he might actually die. There was a dignity, a
prestige about being dead that appealed to him. Even his high
temperature and his headache and his shooting pains and his difficulty
in breathing could not altogether spoil his pleasure in the delicious
concern of everybody about him, and in his exquisite certainty that, at
any minute, a moan would bring Fanny to his side. He was the one person
in the house that counted. He had always known it, but he had never felt
it with the same intensity as now. The mind of every person in the house
was concentrated on him now as it had not been concentrated before. He
was holding them all in a tension of worry and anxiety. He would
apologize very sweetly for the trouble he was giving everybody,
declaring that it made him very uncomfortable; but even Fanny could see
that he was gratified.
And as he got worse--before he became too ill to think about it at
all--he had a muzzy yet pleasurable sense that everybody in
Wyck-on-the-Hill and in the county for miles round was thinking of him.
He knew that Corbett and Lady Corbett and Markham and Thurston and the
Hawtreys, and the Rector and the Rector's wife and Colonel Grainger had
called repeatedly to inquire for him. He was particularly gratified by
Grainger's calling. He knew that Hitchin had stopped Horry in the street
to ask after him, and he was particularly gratified by that. Old
Susan-Nanna had come up from Medlicott to see him. And Ralph Bevan
called every day. That gratified him, too.
The only person who was not allowed to know anything about his illness
was his mother, for Mr. Waddington was certain it would kill her. Every
evening at medicine time he would ask the same questions: "My mother
doesn't know yet?" And: "Anybody called to-day?" And Fanny would give
him the messages, and he would receive them with a gentle, solemn
sweetness. You wouldn't have believed, Barbara said to herself, that
complacency could take so heartrending a form.
And under it all, a deeper bliss in bliss, was the thought that Barbara
was thinking about him, worrying about him, and being, probably, ten
times more unhappy about him than Fanny. After working so long by his
side, her separation from him would be intolerable to Barbara;
intolerable, very likely, the thought that it was Fanny's turn, now, to
be by his side. Every day she brought him a bunch of snowdrops, and
every day, as the door closed on her little anxious face, he was sorry
for Barbara shut out from his room. Poor little Barbara. Sometimes, when
he was feeling well enough, he would call to her: "Come in, Barbara."
And she would come in and look at him and put her flowers into his hand
and say she hoped he was better. And he would answer: "Not much better,
Barbara. I'm very ill."
He even allowed Ralph to come and look at him. He would hold his hand in
a clasp that he made as limp as possible, on purpose, and would say in a
voice artificially weakened: "I'm very ill, Ralph."
Dr. Ransome said he wasn't; but Mr. Waddington knew better. It was true
that from time to time he rallied sufficiently to comb his own hair
before Barbara was let in with her snowdrops, and that he could give
orders to Partridge in a loud, firm tone; but he was too ill to do more
than whisper huskily to Barbara and Fanny.
Then when he felt a little better the trained nurse came, and with the
sheer excitement of her coming Mr. Waddington's temperature leapt up
again, and the doctor owned that he didn't like that.
And Barbara found Fanny in the library, crying. She had been tidying up
his writing-table, going over all his papers with a feather brush, and
she had come on the manuscript of the Ramblings unfinished.
"Fanny--"
"Barbara, I know I'm an idiot, but I simply cannot bear it. It was all
very well as long as I could nurse him, but now that woman's come
there's nothing I can do for him.... I've--I've never done anything all
my life for him. He's always done everything for me. And I've been a
brute. Always laughing at him.... Think, Barbara, think; for eighteen
years never to have taken him seriously. Never since I married him.... I
believe he's going to die. Just--just to punish me."
"He isn't," said Barbara indignantly, as if she had never believed it
herself. "The doctor says he isn't really very ill. The congestion isn't
spreading. It was better yesterday."
"It'll be worse to-night, you may depend on it. The doctor doesn't
_like_ his temperature flying up and down like that."
"It'll go down again," said Barbara.
"You don't know what it'll do," said Fanny darkly. "Did you ever see
such a lamb, such a _lamb_ as he is when he's ill?"
"No," said Barbara; "he's an angel."
"That's just," said Fanny, "what makes me feel he's going to die.... I
wish I were you, Barbara."
"Me?"
"Yes. You've really helped him. He could never have written his book
without you. His poor book."
She sat stroking it. And suddenly a horrible memory overcame her, and
she cried out:
"Oh, my God! And I've laughed at that, too!"
Barbara put her arm round her. "You didn't, darling. Well, if you
did--it is a little funny, you know. I'm afraid I've laughed a bit."
"Oh, _you_--that doesn't matter. You helped to write it."
Then Barbara broke out. "Oh, don't, Fanny, don't, _don't_ talk about his
poor book. I can't _bear_ it."
"We're both idiots," said Fanny. "Imbeciles."
She paused, drying her eyes.
"He liked the snowdrops you brought him," she said.
Barbara thought: "And the snowdrops he brought _me_." He had caught cold
that day, picking them. They had withered in the glass in her bedroom.
She left Fanny, only to come upon Horry in his agony. Horry stood in the
window of the dining-room, staring out and scowling at the snow.
"Damn the snow!" he said. "It's killed him."
"It hasn't, Horry," she said; "he'll get better."
"He won't get better. If this beastly frost holds he hasn't got a
chance."
"Horry dear, the doctor says he's better."
"He doesn't. He says his temperature's got no business to go up."
"All the same--"
"Supposing he does think him better. Supposing he doesn't know.
Supposing he's a bleating idiot.... I expect the dear old pater knows
how he is a jolly sight better than anybody can tell him.... And you
know you're worrying about him yourself. So's the mater. She's been
crying."
"She's jealous of the nurse. That's what's the matter with her."
"Jealous? Tosh! That nurse is an idiot. She's sent his temperature up
first thing."
"Horry, old thing, you must buck up. You mustn't let your nerve go like
this."
"Nerve? Your nerve would go if you were me. I tell you, Barbara, I
wouldn't care a hang about his being ill--I mean I shouldn't care so
infernally if I'd been decent to him. ... But you were right I was a
cad, a swine. Laughing at him."
"So was I, Horry. I laughed at him. I'd give anything not to have."
"You didn't matter...."
He was silent a moment. Then he swung round, full to her. His face
burned, his eyes flashed tears; he held his head up to stop them
falling.
"Barbara--if he dies, I'll kill myself."
That evening Mr. Waddington's temperature went up another point. Ralph,
calling about nine o'clock, found Barbara alone in the library, huddled
in a corner of the sofa, with her pocket-handkerchief beside her, rolled
in a tight, damp ball. She started as he came in.
"Oh," she said, "I thought you were the doctor."
"Do you want him?"
"Yes. Fanny does. She's frightened."
"Shall I go and get him?"
"No. No. They've sent Kimber. Oh, Ralph, I'm frightened, too."
"But he's getting on all right. He is really. Ransome says so."
"I know. I've told them that. But they won't believe it. And _I_ don't
now. He'll die: you'll see he'll die. Just because we've been such pigs
to him."
"Nonsense; that wouldn't make him--"
"I'm not so sure. It's awful to see him lying there, like a lamb--so
good--when you think how we've hunted and hounded him."
"He didn't know, Barbara. We never let him know."
"You don't know what he knew. He must have seen it."
"He never sees anything."
"I tell you, you don't know what he sees.... I'd give anything, anything
not to have done it."
"So would I."
"It's a lesson to me," she said, "as long as I live, never to laugh at
anybody again. Never to say cruel things."
"We didn't say cruel things."
"Unkind things."
"Not very unkind."
"We did. I did. I said all the really beastly ones."
"No. No, you didn't. Not half as beastly as I and Horry did."
"That's what Horry's thinking now. He's nearly off his head about it."
"Look here, Barbara; you're simply sentimentalizing because he's ill and
you're sorry for him.... You needn't be. I tell you, he's enjoying his
illness. ... I don't suppose," said Ralph thoughtfully, "he's enjoyed
anything so much since the war."
"Doesn't that show what brutes we've been, that he has to be ill in
order to enjoy himself?"
"Oh, no. He enjoys himself--himself, Barbara--all the time. He can't
help enjoying his illness. He likes to have everybody fussing round him
and thinking about him."
"That's what I mean. We never did think of him. Not seriously. We've
done nothing--nothing but laugh. Why, you're laughing now. ... It's
horrible of you, Ralph, when he may be dying. ... It would serve us all
jolly well right if he did die."
To her surprise and indignation, Barbara began to cry. The hard, damp
lump of pocket-handkerchief was not a bit of good, and before she could
reach out for it Ralph's arms were round her and he was kissing the
tears off one by one.
"Darling, I didn't think you really minded--"
"What d-did you th-think, then?" she sobbed.
"I thought you were playing. A sort of variation of the game."
"I told you it was a cruel game."
"Never mind. It's all over. We'll never play it again. And he'll be well
in another week. ... Look here, Barbara, can't you leave off thinking
about him for a minute? You know I love you, most awfully, don't you?"
"Yes. I know now all right."
"And _I_ know."
"How do you know?"
"Because, old thing, you've never ceased to hang on to my collar since
I grabbed you. You can't go back on _that_."
"I don't want to go back on it.... I say, we always said he brought us
together, and he _has_, this time."
When later that night Ralph told Fanny of their engagement the first
thing she said was, "You mustn't tell him. Not till he's well again. In
fact, I'd rather you didn't tell him till just before you're married."
"Why ever not?"
"It might upset him. You see," she said, "he's very fond of Barbara."
The next day Mr. Waddington's temperature went down to normal; and the
next, when Ralph called, Barbara fairly rushed at him with the news.
"He's sitting up," she shouted, "eating a piece of sole."
"Hooray! Now we can be happy."
The sound of Fanny's humming came through the drawing-room door.