After the automobile had taken Margaret away Chris came to us as we sat
in the drawing-room, and, after standing for a while in the glow of the
fire, hesitantly said:
"I want to tell you that I know it is all right. Margaret has explained
to me."
Kitty crumpled her sewing into a white ball.
"You mean, I suppose, that you know I'm your wife. I'm pleased that you
describe that as knowing 'it's all right,' and grateful that you have
accepted it at last--on Margaret's authority. This is an occasion that
would make any wife proud."
Her irony was as faintly acrid as a caraway-seed, and never afterward
did she reach even that low pitch of violence; for from that mild,
forward droop of the head with which he received the mental lunge she
realized suddenly that this was no pretense and that something as
impassable as death lay between them. Thereafter his proceedings evoked
no comment but suffering. There was nothing to say when all day, save
for those hours of the afternoon that Margaret spent with him, he sat
like a blind man waiting for his darkness to lift. There was nothing to
say when he did not seem to see our flowers, yet kept till they rotted
the daffodils which Margaret brought from the garden that looked like an
allotment.
So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, face downward on a sofa, with one
limp arm dangling to the floor, or protruding stiff feet in fantastic
slippers from the end of her curtained bed; and I tried to make my
permanent wear that mood which had mitigated the end of my journey with
Margaret--a mood of intense perception in which my strained mind settled
on every vivid object that came under my eyes and tried to identify
myself with its brightness and its lack of human passion. This does not
mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation; it means
that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long
looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high
spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me
to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my
attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear
melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city.
The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the
heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is
of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts
prick one through sleep like mosquitos.
A week after my journey to Wealdstone I went to Kitty to ask her to come
for a walk with me and found her stretched on her pillows, holding a
review of her underclothing. She refused bitterly and added:
"Be back early. Remember Dr. Gilbert Anderson is coming at half-past
four. He's our last hope. And tell that woman she must see him. He says
he wants to see everybody concerned." She continued to look wanly at the
frail, luminous silks her maid brought her as a speculator who had
cornered an article for which there had been no demand might look at his
damnably numerous, damnably unprofitable freights. So I went out alone
into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark
clouds, under which there ran quick, fresh currents of air and broken
shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a gray clarity of light in
which every color showed sharp and strong. On the breast that
Harrowweald turns to the south they had set a lambing-yard. The
pale-lavender hurdles and gold-strewn straw were new gay notes on the
opaque winter green of the slope, and the apprehensive bleatings of the
ewes wound about the hill like a river of sound as they were driven up a
lane hidden by the hedge. The lines of bare elms darkening the plains
below made it seem as though the tide of winter had fallen and left this
bare and sparkling in the spring. I liked it so much that I opened the
gate and went and sat down on a tree which had been torn up by the roots
in the great gale last year, but had not yet resigned itself to death,
and was bravely decking its boughs with purple elm-flowers.
That pleased me, too, and I wished I had some one with me to enjoy this
artless little show of the new year. I had not really wanted Kitty; the
companions I needed were Chris and Margaret. Chris would have talked, as
he loved to do when he looked at leisure on a broad valley, about ideas
which he had to exclude from his ordinary hours lest they should break
the power of business over his mind, and Margaret would have gravely
watched the argument from the shadow of her broad hat to see that it
kept true, like a housewife watching a saucepan of milk lest it should
boil over. They were naturally my friends, these gentle, speculative
people.
Then suddenly I was stunned with jealousy. It was not their love for
each other that caused me such agony at that moment; it was the thought
of the things their eyes had rested upon together. I imagined that white
hawthorn among the poplars by the ferry on which they had looked fifteen
years ago at Monkey Island, and it was more than I could bear. I
thought how even now they might be exclaiming at the green smoke of the
first buds on the brown undergrowth by the pond, and at that I slid off
the tree-trunk and began walking very quickly down the hill. The red
cows drank from the pond cupped by the willow-roots; a raw-boned
stallion danced clumsily because warmth was running through the ground.
I found a stream in the fields and followed it till it became a shining
dike embanked with glowing green and gold mosses in the midst of woods;
and the sight of those things was no sort of joy, because my vision was
solitary. I wanted to end my desperation by leaping from a height, and I
climbed on a knoll and flung myself face downward on the dead leaves
below.
I was now utterly cut off from Chris. Before, when I looked at him, I
knew an instant ease in the sight of the short golden down on his
cheeks, the ridge of bronze flesh above his thick, fair eyebrows. But
now I was too busy reassuring him by showing a steady, undistorted
profile crowned by a neat, proud sweep of hair instead of the
tear-darkened mask he always feared ever to have enough vitality left
over to enjoy his presence. I spoke in a calm voice full from the chest,
quite unfluted with agony; I read "Country Life" with ponderous
interest; I kept my hands, which I desired to wring, in doeskin gloves
for most of the day; I played with the dogs a great deal and wore my
thickest tweeds; I pretended that the slight heaviness of my features is
a correct indication of my temperament. The only occasion when I could
safely let the sense of him saturate me as it used was when I met
Margaret in the hall as she came or went. She was very different now;
she had a little smile in her eyes, as though she were listening to a
familiar air played far away. Her awkwardness seemed indecision as to
whether she should walk or dance to that distant music; her shabbiness
was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so
eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse finish fastening
its frock. Always she extended a hand in an unbuttoned black thread
glove and said, "It's another fine day again," or diffidently, as Kitty
continued to withhold her presence, "I hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping
well." Then, as our hands touched, he was with us, invoked by our common
adoration. I felt his rough male texture and saw the clear warmth of his
brown and gold coloring; I thought of him with the passion of exile. To
Margaret it was a call, and she moved past me to the garden, holding her
hands in front of her as though she bore invisible gifts, and pausing on
the step of the French window to smile to herself, as if in her heart
she turned over the precious thought: "He is here. This garden holds
him." My moment, my small sole subsistence, ended in a feeling of
jealousy as ugly and unmental as sickness. This was the saddest spring.
Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our dejection. You may think we
were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely
the delusion of a madman. But every minute of the day, particularly at
those trying times when he strolled about the house and grounds with the
doctors, smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their
questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive
commercial traveler in a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that if
madness means a liability to wild error about the world Chris was not
mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had
attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a
triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men
from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If
he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped;
if he had expanded his meaning and said, "You are nothing to me; my
heart is separate from your hearts," we would have wept at an unkindness
he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me
only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty not at all save as a stranger
who had somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the orderer
of his meals he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay
weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rapture
which attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold
intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity
and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed
him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded
with the unessential and the irritating. I was even willing to admit
that this choice of what was to him reality out of all the appearances
so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped
pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him.
But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life.
I could not think clearly about it. I suppose that the subject of our
tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned
from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in
me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them
run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and
had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the
soul against the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty
that I could think of only as a conjunction of calamitous images. I
think of it happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a
straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud flats
made steel-bright with floods pitted by the soft, slow rain. There, past
a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous
with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off
plaster and uncovered rafters that stick out like broken bones. There
are people still living here. A slouchy woman sits at the door of a
filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arm at
some passing soldiers. And at another house there is a general store
with strings of orange onions and bunches of herbs hanging from the
roof, a brown gloom rich with garlic and humming with the flies that
live all the year round in French village shops, a black cat rubbing her
sleepiness against the lintel. It is in there that Chris is standing,
facing across the counter an old man in a blouse, with a scar running
white into the gray thickets of his beard, an old man with a smile at
once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with dirt and yet magnificent by
reason of the Olympian structure of his body. I think he is the soul of
the universe, equally cognizant and disregardful of every living thing,
to whom I am not more dear than the bare-armed slouchy woman at the
neighboring door. And Chris is leaning on the counter, his eyes glazed.
(This is his spirit; his body lies out there in the drizzle, at the
other end of the road.) He is looking down on the two crystal balls that
the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he
sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is
transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a
glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty
and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had
suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing
more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He
sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where
Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to
crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues
to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in
the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his
chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.
I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking
of the globe and cried out, "Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert Anderson must
cure him." Heaven knows that I had no reason for faith in any doctor,
for during the last week so many of them, as sleek as seals with their
neatly brushed hair and their frock-coats, had stood round Chris and
looked at him with the consequenceless deliberation of a plumber. Their
most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had
submitted to it as a good-natured man submits to being blindfolded at a
children's party, and under its influence had recovered his memory and
his middle-aged personality, had talked of Kitty with the humorous
tenderness of the English husband, and had looked possessively about
him. But as his mind came out of the control he exposed their lie that
they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process by pushing
away this knowledge and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker
because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know. I had
accepted that it would always be so. But at that moment I had so great a
need to throw off my mood of despair, so insupportably loaded with all
the fantastic images to which my fevered mind transmuted the facts of
our tragedy, that I filled myself with a gasping, urgent faith in this
new doctor. I jumped up and pushed through the brambles to the hedge
that divided the preserves in which I was trespassing from our own
woods, breathless because I had let it go past four and I had still to
find Chris and Margaret for the doctor's visit at the half-hour.
There had been a hardening of the light while I slept that made the
dear, familiar woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, tropical. The
jewel-bright buds on the soot-black boughs, the blue valley distances,
smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen
between the black-and-white intricacies of the birch-trunks and the
luminous gray pillars of the beeches, hurt my wet eyes as might beauty
blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger,
too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every
leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her
without looking at her or thinking in silence while he played with her
hand. Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love, and
may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that
now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of
the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that
they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh. I know it must
be so; a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things
out. I could not have borne to see signs of how he had achieved this
intimacy with the woman whom a sudden widening of the downward vista
showed as she leaned her bent back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a
birch that some special skill of our forester had made wonderful for its
straight slenderness. Against the clear colors of the bright bare wood
her yellow raincoat made a muddy patch, and as a dead bough dropped near
her she made a squalid dodging movement like a hen. She was not so much
a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a
mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of
children. Doubtlessly he sat somewhere close to her, lumpishly content.
I thought distractedly how necessary it was that Gilbert Anderson should
cure him, and tried to shout to her, but found my throat full of sobs.
So I broke my way down through the fern and bramble and stood level with
them, though still divided by some yards of broken ground.
It was not utter dullness not to have anticipated the beauty that I saw.
No one could have told. They had taken the mackintosh rug out of the
dinghy and spread it on this little space of clear grass, I think so
that they could look at a scattering of early primroses in a pool of
white anemones at an oak-tree's foot. She had run her hands over the rug
so that it lay quite smooth and comfortable under him when at last he
felt drowsy and turned on his side to sleep. He lay there in the
confiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his hands unclenched, and his
head thrown back so that the bare throat showed defenselessly. Now he
was asleep and his face undarkened by thought, one saw how very fair he
really was. And she, her mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the cold
river of air sent by the advancing evening through the screen of
rusted-gold bracken behind her, was sitting by him, just watching.
I have often seen people grouped like that on the common outside our
gates on Bank holidays. Most often the man has a handkerchief over his
face to shade him from the sun, and the woman squats beside him and
peers through the undergrowth to see that the children come to no harm
as they play. It has sometimes seemed to me that there was a
significance about it. You know when one goes into the damp, odorous
coolness of a church in a Catholic country and sees the kneeling
worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with
abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to
a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees
a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like
a sword, and one says to oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes
there is an end to the world." But people like me, who are not artists,
are never sure about people they don't know. So it was not until now,
when it happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris and my dear
Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I
knew it was the most significant, as it was the loveliest, attitude in
the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into
her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can
rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I
know there are things at least as great for those women whose
independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the
home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the
occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this,
which had given sleep to the beloved. I had known that he was having bad
nights at Baldry Court in that new room with the jade-green painted
walls and the lapis-lazuli fireplace, which he found with surprise to be
his instead of the remembered little room with the fishing-rods; but I
had not been able to do anything about it.
It was not fair that by the exercise of a generosity which seemed as
fortuitous a possession as a beautiful voice a woman should be able to
do such wonderful things for a man. For sleep was the least of her gifts
to him. What she had done in leading him into the quiet magic circle
out of our life, out of the splendid house which was not so much a house
as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated
partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of
the garden where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow and
the wood made as formal as a pillared aisle by forestry, may be judged
from my anguish in being left there alone. Indeed she had been generous
to us all, for at her touch our lives had at last fallen into a pattern;
she was the sober thread the interweaving of which with our scattered
magnificences had somewhat achieved the design that otherwise would not
appear. Perhaps even her dinginess was part of her generosity, for in
order to fit into the pattern one has sometimes to forego something of
one's individual beauty. That is why women like us do not wear such
obviously lovely dresses as cocottes, but clothe ourselves in garments
that by their slight neglect of the possibilities of beauty declare that
there are such things as thrift and restraint and care for the future.
And so I could believe of Margaret that her determined dwelling in
places where there was not enough of anything, her continued exposure of
herself to the grime of squalid living, was unconsciously deliberate.
The deep internal thing that had guided Chris to forgetfulness had
guided her to poverty, so that when the time came for her meeting with
her lover there should be not one intimation of the beauty of suave
flesh to distract him from the message of her soul. I looked upward at
this supreme act of sacrifice and glowed at her private gift to me. My
sleep, though short, was now dreamless. No more did I see his body
rotting into union with that brown texture of corruption which is
No-Man's-Land; no more did I see him slipping softly down the parapet
into the trench; no more did I hear voices talking in a void: "Help me,
old man; I've got no legs--" "I can't, old man; I've got no hands." They
could not take him back to the army as he was. Only that morning as I
went through the library he had raised an appalled face from the pages
of a history of the war.
"Jenny, it can't be true that they did that to Belgium? Those funny,
quiet, stingy people!" And his soldierly knowledge was as deeply buried
as this memory of that awful August. While her spell endured they could
not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held
his body as safely as she held his soul.
I was so grateful that I was forced to go and sit down on the rug beside
her. It was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near her. She did not look
surprised when she turned to me her puckered brows, but smiled through
the ugly fringe of vagrant hairs the weather had plucked from under the
hard rim of her hat. It was part of her loveliness that even if she did
not understand an act she could accept it.
Presently she leaned over to me across his body and whispered:
"He's not cold. I put the overcoat on him as soon as he was fairly off.
I've just felt his hands, and they're as warm as toast." If I had
whispered like that I would have wakened him.
Soon he stirred, groped for her hand, and lay with his cheek against the
rough palm. He was awake, but liked to lie so.
In a little she shook her hand away and said:
"Get up and run along to the house and have some hot tea. You'll catch
your death lying out here."
He caught her hand again. It was evident that for some reason the moment
was charged with ecstasy for them both.
It seemed as though there was a softer air in this small clearing than
anywhere else in the world. I stood up, with my back against a birch and
said negligently, knowing now that nothing could really threaten them:
"There is a doctor coming at half-past four who wants to see you both."
It cast no shadow on their serenity. He smiled upward, still lying on
his back, and hailed me, "Hallo, Jenny." But she made him get up and
help her to fold the rug.
"It's not right to keep a doctor waiting in these times," she declared,
"so overworked they are, poor men, since the war." As I led the way up
through the woods to the house I heard her prove her point by an
illustrative anecdote about something that had happened down her road. I
heard, too, their footsteps come to a halt for a space. I think her gray
eyes had looked at him so sweetly that he had been constrained to take
her in his arms.