Next morning it appeared that the chauffeur had taken the car up to town
to get a part replaced, and Margaret could not be brought from
Wealdstone till the afternoon. It fell to me to fetch her. "At least,"
Kitty had said, "I might be spared that humiliation." Before I started I
went to the pond on the hill's edge. It is a place where autumn lives
for half the year, for even when the spring lights tongues of green fire
in the undergrowth, and the valley shows sunlit between the tree-trunks,
here the pond is fringed with yellow bracken and tinted bramble, and the
water flows amber over last winter's leaves.
Through this brown gloom, darkened now by a surly sky, Chris was taking
the skiff, standing in the stern and using his oar like a gondolier. He
had come down here soon after breakfast, driven from the house by the
strangeness of all but the outer walls, and discontented with the
grounds because everything but this wet, intractable spot bore the marks
of Kitty's genius. After lunch there had been another attempt to settle
down, but with a grim glare at a knot of late Christmas roses bright in
a copse that fifteen years ago had been dark he went back to the
russet-eaved boat-house and this play with the skiff. It was a boy's
sport, and it was dreadful to see him turn a middle-aged face as he
brought the boat inshore.
"I'm just going down to fetch Margaret," I said.
He thanked me for it.
"But, Chris, I must tell you. I've seen Margaret. She came up here, so
kind and sweet, to tell us you were wounded. She's the greatest dear in
the world, but she's not as you think of her. She's old, Chris. She
isn't beautiful any longer. She's drearily married. She's seamed and
scored and ravaged by squalid circumstances. You can't love her when you
see her."
"Didn't I tell you last night," he said, "that that doesn't matter?" He
dipped his oar to a stroke that sent him away from me. "Bring her soon.
I shall wait for her down here."
Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open
country, and at the end of every street rise the green hills of Harrow
and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red
and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the
skyline with red, angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stood
little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper
lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures,
as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they
would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way
they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who
could not do as they liked.
And here Margaret lived in a long road of red-brick boxes, flecked here
and there with the pink blur of almond-blossom, which debouched in a
flat field where green grass rose up rank through clay mold blackened by
coal-dust from the railway. Mariposa, which was the last house in the
road, did not even have an almond-tree. In the front garden, which
seemed to be imperfectly reclaimed from the greasy field, yellow crocus
and some sodden squills just winked, and the back, where a man was
handling a spade without mastery, presented the austere appearance of an
allotment. And not only did Margaret live in this place; she also
belonged to it. When she opened the door she gazed at me with watering
eyes, and in perplexity stroked her disordered hair with a floury hand.
Her face was sallow with heat, and beads of perspiration glittered in
the deep, dragging line between her nostrils and the corners of her
mouth. She said:
"He's home?"
I nodded.
She pulled me inside and slammed the door.
"Is he well?" she asked.
"Quite," I answered.
Her tense stare relaxed. She rubbed her hands on her overall and said:
"You'll excuse me. It's the girl's day out. If you'll step into the
parlor--"
So in her parlor I sat and told her how it was with Chris and how
greatly he desired to see her. And as I spoke of his longing I turned my
eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in
velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up
in front of her, and she had to clasp them with her seamed, floury
hands. I could see that the skin of her face was damp. And my voice
failed me as I looked round the room, because I saw just what Margaret
had seen that evening fifteen years ago when she had laid her cheek to
the parlor window at Monkey Island. There was the enlarged photograph of
Margaret's mother over the mantelpiece, on the walls were the views of
Tintern Abbey framed in red plush, between the rickety legs of the china
cupboard was the sewing-machine, and tucked into the corner between my
chair and the fender were a pair of carpet slippers. All her life long
Margaret, who in her time had partaken of the supreme dignity of a
requited love, had lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house.
I turned my eyes away again, and this time looked down the garden at the
figure that was not so much digging as exhibiting his incapacity to
deal with a spade. He was sneezing very frequently, and his sneezes made
the unbuckled straps at the back of his waistcoat wag violently. I
supposed him to be Mr. William Grey.
I had finished the statement of our sad case, and I saw that though she
had not moved, clasping her knees in a set, hideous attitude, the tears
were rolling down her cheeks.
"Oh, don't! Oh, don't!" I exclaimed, standing up. Her tear-stained
immobility touched the heart. "He's not so bad; he'll get quite well."
"I know, I know," she said miserably. "I don't believe that anything bad
could be allowed to happen to Chris for long. And I'm sure," she said
kindly, "you're looking after him beautifully. But when a thing you had
thought had ended fifteen years ago starts all over again, and you're
very tired--" She drew a hand across her tears, her damp skin, her
rough, bagging overall. "I'm hot. I've been baking. You can't get a girl
nowadays that understands the baking." Her gaze became remote and
tender, and she said in a manner that was at once argumentative and
narrative, as though she were telling the whole story to a neighbor over
the garden wall: "I suppose I ought to say that he isn't right in his
head, and that I'm married, so we'd better not meet; but, oh," she
cried, and I felt as though, after much fumbling with damp matches and
many doubts as to whether there was any oil in the wick, I had lit the
lamp at last, "I want to see him so! It's wrong, I know it's wrong, but
I am so glad Chris wants to see me, too!"
"You'll do him good." I found myself raising my voice to the pitch she
had suddenly attained as though to keep her at it. "Come now!"
She dipped suddenly to compassion.
"But the young lady?" she asked timidly. "She was upset the last time.
I've often wondered if I did right in going. Even if Chris has
forgotten, he'll want to do what's right. He couldn't bear to hurt her."
"That's true," I said. "You do know our Chris. He watches her out of the
corner of his eye, even when he's feeling at his worst, to see she isn't
wincing. But she sent me here to-day."
"Oh!" cried Margaret, glowing, "she must have a lovely nature!"
I lost suddenly the thread of the conversation. I could not talk about
Kitty. She appeared to me at that moment a faceless figure with
flounces, just as most of the servants at Baldry Court appear to me as
faceless figures with caps and aprons. There were only two real people
in the world, Chris and this woman whose personality was sounding
through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room,
and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them. You know how the saints
and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles; so
they were standing, in flowing white robes on rocks against a
pitch-black sky, a strong light beating on their eyes upturned in
ecstasy and their hand outstretched to receive the spiritual blessing of
which the fierce rays were an emanation. Into that rapt silence I
desired to break, and I whispered irrelevantly, "Oh, nothing, nothing is
too good for Chris!" while I said to myself, "If she really were like
that, solemn and beatified!" and my eyes returned to look despairingly
on her ugliness. But she really was like that. She had responded to my
irrelevant murmur of adoration by just such a solemn and beatified
appearance as I had imagined. Her grave eyes were upturned, her worn
hands lay palm upward on her knees, as though to receive the love of
which her radiance was an emanation. And then, at a sound in the
kitchen, she snatched my exaltation from me by suddenly turning dull.
"I think that's Mr. Grey come in from his gardening. You'll excuse me."
Through the open door I heard a voice saying in a way which suggested
that its production involved much agitation of a prominent Adam's apple:
"Well, dear, seeing you had a friend, I thought I'd better slip up and
change my gardening trousers." I do not know what she said to him, but
her voice was soft and comforting and occasionally girlish and
interrupted by laughter, and I perceived from its sound that with
characteristic gravity she had accepted it as her mission to keep
loveliness and excitement alive in his life.
"An old friend of mine has been wounded," was the only phrase I heard;
but when she drew him out into the garden under the window she had
evidently explained the situation away, for he listened docilely as she
said: "I've made some rock-cakes for your tea. And if I'm late for
supper, there's a dish of macaroni cheese you must put in the oven and a
tin of tomatoes to eat with it. And there is a little rhubarb and
shape." She told them off on her fingers, and then whisked him round and
buckled the wagging straps at the back of his waistcoat. He was a lank
man, with curly gray hairs growing from every place where it is
inadvisable that hairs should grow,--from the inside of his ears, from
his nostrils, on the back of his hands,--but he looked pleased when she
touched him, and he said in a devoted way:
"Very well, dear. Don't worry about me. I'll trot along after tea and
have a game of draughts with Brown."
She answered:
"Yes, dear. And now get on with those cabbages. You're going to keep me
in lovely cabbages, just as you did last year, won't you, darling?" She
linked arms with him and took him back to his digging.
When she came back into the parlor again she was wearing that yellowish
raincoat, that hat with hearse plumes nodding over its sticky straw,
that gray alpaca skirt. I first defensively clenched my hands. It would
have been such agony to the finger-tips to touch any part of her
apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had
hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that
ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love
was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she
existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this
damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had
promised to bring her to him.
She said:
"I'm ready," and against that simple view of her condition I had no
argument. But when she paused by the painted drainpipe in the hall and
peered under contracted brows for that unveracious tortoiseshell handle,
I said hastily:
"Oh, don't trouble about an umbrella."
"I'll maybe need it walking home," she pondered.
"But the car will bring you back."
"Oh, that will be lovely," she said, and laughed nervously, looking very
plain. "Do you know, I know the way we're coming together is terrible,
but I can't think of a meeting with Chris as anything but a kind of
treat. I've got a sort of party feeling now."
As she held the gate open for me she looked back at the house.
"It's a horrid little house, isn't it?" she asked. She evidently desired
sanction for a long-suppressed discontent.
"It isn't very nice," I agreed.
"They put cows sometimes into the field at the back," she went on, as if
conscientiously counting her blessings. "I like that; but otherwise it
isn't much."
"But it's got a very pretty name," I said, laying my hand on the raised
metal letters that spelled "Mariposa" across the gate.
"Ah, isn't it!" she exclaimed, with the smile of the inveterate
romanticist. "It's Spanish, you know, for butterfly."
Once we were in the automobile, she became a little sullen with shyness,
because she felt herself so big and clumsy, her clothes so coarse,
against the fine upholstery, the silver vase of Christmas roses, and all
the deliberate delicacy of Kitty's car. She was afraid of the chauffeur,
as the poor are always afraid of men-servants, and ducked her head when
he got out to start the car. To recall her to ease and beauty I told her
that though Chris had told me all about their meeting, he knew nothing
of their parting, and that I wished very much to hear what had happened.
In a deep, embarrassed voice she began to tell me about Monkey Island.
It was strange how both Chris and she spoke of it as though it were not
a place, but a magic state which largely explained the actions performed
in it. Strange, too, that both of them should describe meticulously the
one white hawthorn that stood among the poplars by the ferry-side. I
suppose a thing that one has looked at with some one one loves acquires
forever after a special significance. She said that her father had gone
there when she was fourteen. After Mrs. Arlington had been taken away by
a swift and painful death the cheer of his Windsor hostelry had become
intolerable to the man; he regarded the whole world as her grave, and
the tipsy sergeants in scarlet, the carter crying for a pint of
four-half, and even the mares dipping their mild noses to the trough in
the courtyard seemed to be defiling it by their happy, simple appetites.
So they went to Monkey Island, the utter difference of which was a
healing, and settled down happily in its green silence. All the summer
was lovely; quiet, kind people, schoolmasters who fished, men who wrote
books, married couples who still loved solitude, used to come and stay
in the bright little inn. And all the winter was lovely, too; her
temperament could see an adventure in taking up the carpets because the
Thames was coming into the coffee-room. That was the tale of her life
for four years. With her head on one side, and the air of judging this
question by the light of experience, she pronounced that she had then
been happy.
Then one April afternoon Chris landed at the island, and by the first
clean, quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could
imagine that it would be so. He was wonderful when he was young; he
possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like
the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed
into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. When the
sunlight lay on him, disclosing the gold hairs on his brown head, or
when he was subject to any other physical pleasure, there was always
reserve in his response to it. From his eyes, which, though gray, were
somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by
participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy
with him, so that one might intervene between this body, which was
formed for happiness, and this soul, which cherished so deep a faith in
tragedy. Well, she gave Chris ducks' eggs for tea. "No one ever had
ducks' eggs like father did. It was his way of feeding them. It didn't
pay, of course, but they were good." Before the afternoon was out he
had snared them all with the silken net of his fine manners; he had
talked to father about his poultry and had walked about the runs and
shown an intelligent interest, and then, as on many succeeding days, he
had laid his charm at the girl's feet. "But I thought he must be some
one royal, and when he kept on coming, I thought it must be for the
ducks' eggs." Then her damp, dull skin flushed suddenly to a warm glory,
and she began to stammer.
"I know all about that," I said quickly. I was more afraid that I should
feel envy or any base passion in the presence of this woman than I have
ever been of anything else in my life. "I want to hear how you came to
part."
"Oh," she cried, "it was the silliest quarrel! We had known how we felt
for just a week. Such a week! Lovely weather we had, and father hadn't
noticed anything. I didn't want him to, because I thought father might
want the marriage soon and think any delay a slight on me, and I knew we
would have to wait. Eh! I can remember saying to myself, 'Perhaps five
years,' trying to make it as bad as could be so that if we could marry
sooner it would be a lovely surprise." She repeated with soft irony,
"Perhaps five years!"
"Well, then, one Thursday afternoon I'd gone on the back-water with Bert
Batchard, nephew to Mr. Batchard who keeps the inn at Surly Hall. I was
laughing out loud because he did row so funny! He's a town chap, and he
was handling those oars for all the world as though they were teaspoons.
The old dinghy just sat on the water like a hen on its chicks and didn't
move, and he so sure of himself! I just sat and laughed and laughed.
Then all of a sudden, _clang! clang!_ the bell at the ferry. And there
was Chris, standing up there among the poplars, his brows straight and
black, and not a smile on him. I felt very bad. We picked him up in the
dinghy and took him across, and still he didn't smile. He and I got on
the island, and Bert, who saw there was something wrong, said, 'Well,
I'll toddle off.' And there I was on the lawn with Chris, and he angry
and somehow miles away. I remember him saying, 'Here am I coming to say
good-by, because I must go away to-night, and I find you larking with
that bounder.' And I said: 'O Chris, I've known Bert all my life through
him coming to his uncle for the holidays, and we weren't larking. It was
only that he couldn't row.' And he went on talking, and then it struck
me he wasn't trusting me as he would trust a girl of his own class, and
I told him so, and he went on being cruel. Oh, don't make me remember
the things we said to each other! It doesn't help. At last I said
something awful, and he said: 'Very well; I agree. I'll go,' and he
walked over to the boy, who was chopping wood, and got him to take him
over in the punt. As he passed me he turned away his face. Well, that's
all."
I had got the key at last. There had been a spring at Baldry Court
fifteen years ago that was desolate for all that there was beautiful
weather. Chris had lingered with Uncle Ambrose in his Thames-side
rectory as he had never lingered before, and old Mr. Baldry was filling
the house with a sense of hot, apoplectic misery. All day he was up in
town at the office, and without explanation he had discontinued his
noontide habit of ringing up his wife. All night he used to sit in the
library looking over his papers and ledgers; often in the mornings the
housemaids would find him asleep across his desk, very red, yet looking
dead. The men he brought home to dinner treated him with a kindness and
consideration which were not the tributes that that victorious and
trumpeting personality was accustomed to exact, and in the course of
conversation with them he dropped braggart hints of impending ruin which
he would have found it humiliating to address to us directly. At last
there came a morning when he said to Mrs. Baldry across the
breakfast-table: "I've sent for Chris. If the boy's worth his salt--" It
was an appalling admission, like the groan of an old ship as her timbers
shiver, from a man who doubted the capacity of his son, as fathers
always doubt the capacity of the children born of their old age.
It was that evening, as I went down to see the new baby at the lodge,
that I met Chris coming up the drive. Through the blue twilight his
white face had had a drowned look. I remembered it well, because my
surprise that he passed me without seeing me had made me perceive for
the first time that he had never seen me at all save in the most
cursory fashion. On the eye of his mind, I realized thenceforward, I had
hardly impinged. That night he talked till late with his father, and in
the morning he had started for Mexico to keep the mines going, to keep
the firm's head above water and Baldry Court sleek and hospitable--to
keep everything bright and splendid save only his youth, which ever
after that was dulled by care.
Something of this I told Margaret, to which she answered, "Oh, I know
all that," and went on with her story. On Sunday, three days after their
quarrel, Mr. Allington was found dead in his bed. "I wanted Chris so
badly; but he never came, he never wrote," and she fell into a lethargic
disposition to sit all day and watch the Thames flow by, from which she
was hardly roused by finding that her father had left her nothing save
an income of twenty pounds a year from unrealizable stock. She
negotiated the transfer of the lease of the inn to a publican, and,
after exacting a promise from the new hostess that she would forward all
letters that might come, embarked upon an increasingly unfortunate
career as a mother's help. First she fell into the hands of a noble
Irish family in reduced circumstances, whose conduct in running away and
leaving her in a Brighton hotel with her wages and her bill unpaid still
distressed and perplexed her. "Why did they do it?" she asked. "I liked
them so. The baby was a darling, and Mrs. Murphy had such a nice way of
speaking. But it almost makes one think evil of people when they do a
thing like that." After two years of less sensational, but still uneasy,
adventures, she had come upon a large and needy family called Watson who
lived at Chiswick, and almost immediately Mr. William Grey, who was Mrs.
Watson's brother, had begun a courtship that I suspected of consisting
of an incessant whining up at her protective instinct. "Mr. Grey," she
said softly, as though stating his chief aim to affection, "has never
been very successful." And still no letter ever came.
So, five years after she left Monkey Island, she married Mr. William
Grey. Soon after their marriage he lost his job and was for some time
out of work; later he developed a weak chest that needed constant
attention. "But it all helped to pass the time," she said cheerfully and
without irony. So it happened that it was not till two years after that
she had the chance of revisiting Monkey Island. At first there was no
money, and later there was the necessity of seeking the healthful
breezes of Brighton or Bognor or Southend, which were the places in
which Mr. Grey's chest oddly elected to thrive. And when these obstacles
were removed, she was lethargic; also she had heard that the inn was
not being managed as it ought to be, and she could not have borne to see
the green home of her youth defiled. But then there had come a time when
she had been very much upset,--she glared a little wildly at me as she
said this, as if she would faint if I asked her any questions,--and then
she had suddenly become obsessed with a desire to see Monkey Island once
more.
"Well, when we got to the ferry, Mr. Grey says, 'But mercy, Margaret,
there's water all round it!' and I said, 'William, that's just it.'"
They found that the island was clean and decorous again, for it had only
recently changed hands. "Father and daughter the new people are, just
like me and dad, and Mr. Taylor's something of dad's cut, too, but he
comes from the North. But Miss Taylor's much handsomer than I ever was;
a really big woman she is, and such lovely golden hair. They were very
kind when I told them who I was; gave us duck and green peas for lunch
and I did think of dad. They were nothing like as good as his ducks, but
then I expect they paid. And then Miss Taylor took William out to look
at the garden. I knew he didn't like it, for he's always shy with a
showy woman, and I was going after them when Mr. Taylor said: 'Here,
stop a minute. I've got something here that may interest you. Just come
in here. He took me up to the roller desk in the office, and out of the
drawer he took twelve letters addressed to me in Chris's handwriting.
"He was a kind man. He put me into a chair and called Miss Taylor in and
told her to keep William out in the garden as long as possible. At last
I said, 'But Mrs. Hitchcock did say she'd send my letters on.' And he
said, 'Mrs. Hitchcock hadn't been here three weeks before she bolted
with a bookie from Bray, and after that Hitchcock mixed his drinks and
got careless.' He said they had found these stuffed into the desk."
"And what was in them?"
"For a long time I did not read them; I thought it was against my duty
as a wife. But when I got that telegram saying he was wounded, I went
up-stairs and read those letters. Oh, those letters!"
She bowed her head and wept.
As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried
her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would
think it wet, and lighted here and there with snowdrops and scillas and
crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and
bramble and fern. There is no esthetic reason for that border; the
common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse
and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims
that here we esteem only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have
its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated
into felicity. Surely, she must see that this was no place for beauty
that had been not mellowed, but lacerated, by time, that no one
accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as
hers. But instead she said: "It's a big place. Chris must have worked
hard to keep all this up." The pity of this woman was like a flaming
sword. No one had ever before pitied Chris for the magnificence of
Baldry Court. It had been our pretense that by wearing costly clothes
and organizing a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But
she revealed the truth that, although he did indeed desire a magnificent
house, it was a house not built with hands.
But that she was wise, that the angels would of a certainty be on her
side, did not make her any the less physically offensive to our
atmosphere. All my doubts as to the wisdom of my expedition revived in
the little time we had to spend in the hall waiting for the tea which I
had ordered in the hope that it might help Margaret to compose her
distressed face. She hovered with her back to the oak table, fumbling
with her thread gloves, winking her tear-red eyes, tapping with her foot
on the carpet, throwing her weight from one leg to the other, and I
constantly contrasted her appearance by some clumsiness with the new
acquisition of Kitty's decorative genius that stood so close behind her
on the table that I was afraid it might be upset by one of her spasmodic
movements. This was a shallow black bowl in the center of which crouched
on all fours a white, naked nymph, her small head intently drooped to
the white flowers that floated on the black waters all around her.
Beside the pure black of the bowl her rusty plumes looked horrible;
beside that white nymph, eternally innocent of all but the
contemplation of beauty, her opaque skin and her suffering were
offensive; beside its air of being the coolly conceived and leisurely
executed production of a hand and brain lifted by their rare quality to
the service of the not absolutely necessary, her appearance of having
only for the moment ceased to cope with a vexed and needy environment
struck me as a cancerous blot on the fair world. Perhaps it was absurd
to pay attention to this indictment of a noble woman by a potter's toy,
but that toy happened to be also a little image of Chris's conception of
women. Exquisite we were according to our equipment, unflushed by
appetite or passion, even noble passion, our small heads bent intently
on the white flowers of luxury floating on the black waters of life, he
had known none other than us. With such a mental habit a man could not
help but wince at Margaret. I drank my tea very slowly because I
previsioned what must happen in the next five minutes. Down there by
the pond he would turn at the sound of those heavy boots on the path,
and with one glance he would assess the age of her, the rubbed surface
of her, the torn fine texture, and he would show to her squalid mask
just such a blank face as he had shown to Kitty's piteous mask the night
before. Although I had a gift for self-pity, I knew her case would then
be worse than mine; for it would be worse to see, as she would see, the
ardor in his eyes give place to kindliness than never to have ardor
there. He would hesitate; she would make one of her harassed gestures,
and trail away with that wet, patient look which was her special line.
He would go back to his boyish sport with the skiff; I hoped the brown
waters would not seem too kind. She would go back to Mariposa, sit on
her bed, and read those letters.
"And now," she said brightly as I put down my cup, "may I see Chris?"
She had not a doubt of the enterprise.
I took her into the drawing-room and opened one of the French windows.
"Go past the cedars to the pond," I told her. "He is rowing there."
"That is nice," she said. "He always looks so lovely in a boat."
I called after her, trying to hint the possibility of a panic breakdown
to their meeting:
"You'll find he's altered--"
She cried gleefully:
"Oh, I shall know him."
As I went up-stairs I became aware that I was near to a bodily collapse;
I suppose the truth is that I was physically so jealous of Margaret that
it was making me ill. But suddenly, like a tired person dropping a
weight that they know to be precious, but cannot carry for another
minute, my mind refused to consider the situation any longer and turned
to the perception of material things. I leaned over the balustrade and
looked down at the fineness of the hall: the deliberate figure of the
nymph in her circle of black waters, the clear pink-and-white of Kitty's
chintz, the limpid surface of the oak, the broken burning of all the gay
reflected colors in the paneled walls. I said to myself, "If everything
else goes, there is always this to fall back on," and I went on, pleased
that I was wearing delicate stuffs and that I had a smooth skin, pleased
that the walls of the corridor were so soft a twilight blue, pleased
that through a far-off open door there came a stream of light that made
the carpet blaze its stronger blue. And when I saw that it was the
nursery door that was open, and that Kitty was sitting in Nanny's big
chair by the window, I did not care about the peaked face she lifted,
its fairness palely gilt by the March sunlight, or the tremendous
implications of the fact that she had come to her dead child's nursery
although she had not washed her hair. I said sternly, because she had
forgotten that we lived in the impregnable fort of a gracious life:
"O Kitty, that poor battered thing outside!"
She stared so grimly out into the garden that my eyes followed her
stare.
It was one of those draggled days, common at the end of March when a
garden looks at its worst. The wind that was rolling up to check a show
of sunshine had taken away the cedar's dignity of solid blue shade, had
set the black firs beating their arms together, and had filled the sky
with glaring gray clouds that dimmed the brilliance of the crocuses. It
was to give gardens a point on days such as these, when the planned
climax of this flower-bed and that stately tree goes for nothing, that
the old gardeners raised statues in their lawns and walks, large things
with a subject, mossy Tritons or nymphs with an urn, that held the eye.
Even so in this unrestful garden one's eyes lay on the figure in the
yellow raincoat that was standing still in the middle of the lawn.
How her near presence had been known by Chris I do not understand, but
there he was, running across the lawn as night after night I had seen
him in my dreams running across No-Man's-Land. I knew that so he would
close his eyes as he ran; I knew that so he would pitch on his knees
when he reached safety. I assumed naturally that at Margaret's feet lay
safety even before I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a
gesture that was not passionate, but rather the movement of one carrying
a wounded man from under fire. But even when she had raised his head to
the level of her lips, the central issue was not decided. I covered my
eyes and said aloud, "In a minute he will see her face, her hands." But
although it was a long time before I looked again, they were still
clinging breast to breast. It was as though her embrace fed him, he
looked so strong as he broke away. They stood with clasped hands looking
at one another. They looked straight, they looked delightedly! And then,
as if resuming a conversation tiresomely interrupted by some social
obligation, they drew together again, and passed under the tossing
branches of the cedar to the wood beyond. I reflected, while Kitty
shrilly wept, how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to
lovers innumerable things do not matter.