The spring and summer passed like one of those interminable nightmares
whose horror is in the fact that it is ever about to be revealed, and
never is revealed, to the dreamer. Mrs. Cloud and Laura opened their
papers at breakfast, to read and shudder and murmur mechanically, “Their
poor wives—God help them!” but the guilty sense of reprieve would be
gone before the meal was ended. Fear was to be their portion rather than
fact: and Mrs. Cloud, for one, broke under the burden. She spoke little,
never of herself; but she grew visibly older, turning under Laura’s
anxious eyes into a silent old woman, content to sit in the sun. But
gradually Laura realized that she was aware of her own failing strength,
that she husbanded it of set purpose, that her very quietude was
deliberate. When it was necessary she had words and counsel.
She never missed writing to her son—quiet, cheerful letters in a firm
hand. And the answers she would read aloud to Laura.
“A good boy, Laura—to write so often. Three nights without sleep
again—but he writes!”
Laura had her secret marvel at it, at these letters, so like and so
unlike Justin. Their frequency amazed her: their familiar
matter-of-factness made her smile; but there were touches in them beyond
her knowledge of him. He did not take his discomforts seriously. There
was actually humour—a trifle crude, more than a trifle grim—but humour.
Once he made fun of himself. And he was anxious about his
mother—eloquent in each letter on the absurdity, nay, the sin, of
worrying. And he wanted to know how she slept. Once he said, ‘Tell Laura
to look after you!’ He said that! He trusted her, you see, in spite of
everything. He trusted her.
She lived on that phrase for weeks.
And indeed she looked after Mrs. Cloud. She spent more and more of her
time at the Priory, bringing her war-work with her, and gradually the
control of the reduced household slipped into her hands. Mrs. Cloud’s
small ailments increased in frequency, and it was natural that the
driven doctor and the anxious maid should turn to Miss Laura rather than
to the invalid. And there was Timothy. Timothy, rising five, with ideas
of his own (Coral cropping up freakishly in the sound Cloud soil)
Timothy, embarrassingly devoted, and a great deal too much for his
grandmother, had become a problem: and until the ideal nurse who did not
quarrel with Mary and did not want special attention had been discovered
(but they were all at munitions) he was inevitably Laura’s business. She
undertook, at any rate, to tire him out for a couple of hours every day,
after which ‘the temporary,’ a hare-eyed child with adenoids, was
supposed to be able to cope with him.
Timothy enjoyed that summer. He was always more than ready for his stern
Miss Valentine to take him out for a little exercise. Timothy’s idea of
exercise was a variant of tip-and-run in the field behind the barns.
Timothy tipped and Laura ran. But when human nature dropped at last,
protesting, on a haycock, Timothy was always kindly resigned to a rest.
He would dig like a terrier at the next cock, till he had shaped ‘a
armchair’ into which Laura would be inducted with much ceremony and
provided with a dock-leaf fan. These were courtesies for which stories
(“true stories, not silly old fairies,” was the typical Cloud proviso)
were considered a graceful acknowledgement.
Laura, beautifully trained before a week was out, would accordingly
parade for his criticism such desperadoes of antiquity as Daniel, Jack
the Giant Killer, Oliver Twist, Jonah, and invariably conclude the
entertainment, by request, with that favourite legend of her own
childhood—‘How Uncle Justin threw the porridge at Miss Beamish!’
“Well——” and Timothy would squirm with excitement, “once upon a
time—when Uncle Justin-at-the-war was _quite_ a little boy——” and so on
to the enthralling catastrophe:
“And there was _poor_ Miss Beamish with her hair all messed——”
“He was awful—wasn’t he?”
“Awful isn’t the word!”
“Umn. Go on.”
“Well—that’s about all.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Umn.” Then, with the careful artlessness of childhood—“Well—shall we
play a game now?”
“What shall we play?”
“Well—_you_ be Miss Beamish and _I’ll_ be Uncle Justin.”
And when Laura had been realistically pelted with hay, Timothy, still
devising deviltry, would be suddenly fatigued and would drop himself,
like a toy he was tired of carrying, solidly into Laura’s lap, and fall
asleep there and then, his knobby little grass-stained knees pressed
against her, his hands, at the least movement, tightening on her arm.
And while he slept and long after he was awake again and had run into
his dinner, she could feel those small hands clutching, not her arm, but
her very heart, and wonder that in the touch there could be such
pleasure and such pain.
Children—the very word was music.... What must it be like to have
children of one’s own—one’s own?...
But that was one of the things, she supposed, that she would have to do
without—just have to do without—unless ... unless....
And then the wild thoughts that breed in a mind grown conscious of its
needs, its spiritual and bodily needs, would rise in battle against her.
If Justin didn’t want her?... She was young.... It was a big world ...
must she starve?...
And then she would shiver away again from such rescue, perceiving that
Justin, living or dead, was like a sword between her and any other man;
that isolation, right and natural and torturing as her needs were for
love and children and the warmth of a common hearth, was the price she
must pay for all that he had taught her—he, who knew so little of what
he taught. And perceived also that if she were not to be happy—as she
reckoned happiness—it was not his fault, but the fault of her own
nature. She had railed so often at his un-imagination—but how much
greater was her own, that could conceive no happiness apart from him?
Yet knowing at last her own nature, could she wish it changed? If she
were offered Lethe, would she drink?
She believed not.
And then she would be filled with a fierce disgust at herself that she
could be thus occupied with her personal affairs, with the infinitely
unimportant pains and perplexities of her own toy tragedy, when, if she
stood quiet and the day were still, she could hear, so far away that it
was less sound than a tremor of the air, the mutter of the Flanders
guns.
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