1921
I
When the doctor had gone, and the two women from the village he had been
waiting for were upstairs shut in with her dead father, Lucy went out
into the garden and stood leaning on the gate staring at the sea.
Her father had died at nine o'clock that morning, and it was now twelve.
The sun beat on her bare head; and the burnt-up grass along the top of
the cliff, and the dusty road that passed the gate, and the glittering
sea, and the few white clouds hanging in the sky, all blazed and glared
in an extremity of silent, motionless heat and light.
Into this emptiness Lucy stared, motionless herself, as if she had been
carved in stone. There was not a sail on the sea, nor a line of distant
smoke from any steamer, neither was there once the flash of a bird's
wing brushing across the sky. Movement seemed smitten rigid. Sound
seemed to have gone to sleep.
Lucy stood staring at the sea, her face as empty of expression as the
bright blank world before her. Her father had been dead three hours, and
she felt nothing.
It was just a week since they had arrived in Cornwall, she and he, full
of hope, full of pleasure in the pretty little furnished house they had
taken for August and September, full of confidence in the good the pure
air was going to do him. But there had always been confidence; there
had never been a moment during the long years of his fragility when
confidence had even been questioned. He was delicate, and she had taken
care of him. She had taken care of him and he had been delicate ever
since she could remember. And ever since she could remember he had been
everything in life to her. She had had no thought since she grew up for
anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so
completely did he fill her heart. They had done everything together,
shared everything together, dodged the winters together, settled in
charming places, seen the same beautiful things, read the same books,
talked, laughed, had friends,--heaps of friends; wherever they were her
father seemed at once to have friends, adding them to the mass he had
already. She had not been away from him a day for years; she had had no
wish to go away. Where and with whom could she be so happy as with him?
All the years were years of sunshine. There had been no winters; nothing
but summer, summer, and sweet scents and soft skies, and patient
understanding with her slowness--for he had the nimblest mind--and love.
He was the most amusing companion to her, the most generous friend, the
most illuminating guide, the most adoring father; and now he was dead,
and she felt nothing.
Her father. Dead. For ever.
She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.
She was going to be alone. Without him. Always.
She said the words over to herself. They meant nothing.
Up in that room with its windows wide open, shut away from her with the
two village women, he was lying dead. He had smiled at her for the last
time, said all he was ever going to say to her, called her the last of
the sweet, half-teasing names he loved to invent for her. Why, only a
few hours ago they were having breakfast together and planning what they
would do that day. Why, only yesterday they drove together after tea
towards the sunset, and he had seen, with his quick eyes that saw
everything, some unusual grasses by the road-side, and had stopped and
gathered them, excited to find such rare ones, and had taken them back
with him to study, and had explained them to her and made her see
profoundly interesting, important things in them, in these grasses
which, till he touched them, had seemed just grasses. That is what he
did with everything,--touched it into life and delight. The grasses lay
in the dining-room now, waiting for him to work on them, spread out
where he had put them on some blotting-paper in the window. She had seen
them as she came through on her way to the garden; and she had seen,
too, that the breakfast was still there, the breakfast they had had
together, still as they had left it, forgotten by the servants in the
surprise of death. He had fallen down as he got up from it. Dead. In an
instant. No time for anything, for a cry, for a look. Gone. Finished.
Wiped out.
What a beautiful day it was; and so hot. He loved heat. They were lucky
in the weather....
Yes, there were sounds after all,--she suddenly noticed them; sounds
from the room upstairs, a busy moving about of discreet footsteps, the
splash of water, crockery being carefully set down. Presently the women
would come and tell her everything was ready, and she could go back to
him again. The women had tried to comfort her when they arrived; and so
had the servants, and so had the doctor. Comfort her! And she felt
nothing.
Lucy stared at the sea, thinking these things, examining the situation
as a curious one but unconnected with herself, looking at it with a kind
of cold comprehension. Her mind was quite clear. Every detail of what
had happened was sharply before her. She knew everything, and she felt
nothing,--like God, she said to herself; yes, exactly like God.
Footsteps came along the road, which was hidden by the garden's fringe
of trees and bushes for fifty yards on either side of the gate, and
presently a man passed between her eyes and the sea. She did not notice
him, for she was noticing nothing but her thoughts, and he passed in
front of her quite close, and was gone.
But he had seen her, and had stared hard at her for the brief instant it
took to pass the gate. Her face and its expression had surprised him.
He was not a very observant man, and at that moment was even less so
than usual, for he was particularly and deeply absorbed in his own
affairs; yet when he came suddenly on the motionless figure at the gate,
with its wide-open eyes that simply looked through him as he went by,
unconscious, obviously, that any one was going by, his attention was
surprised away from himself and almost he had stopped to examine the
strange creature more closely. His code, however, prevented that, and he
continued along the further fifty yards of bushes and trees that hid the
other half of the garden from the road, but more slowly, slower and
slower, till at the end of the garden where the road left it behind and
went on very solitarily over the bare grass on the top of the cliffs,
winding in and out with the ins and outs of the coast for as far as one
could see, he hesitated, looked back, went on a yard or two, hesitated
again, stopped and took off his hot hat and wiped his forehead, looked
at the bare country and the long twisting glare of the road ahead, and
then very slowly turned and went past the belt of bushes towards the
gate again.
He said to himself as he went: 'My God, I'm so lonely. I can't stand it.
I must speak to some one. I shall go off my head----'
For what had happened to this man--his name was Wemyss--was that public
opinion was forcing him into retirement and inactivity at the very time
when he most needed company and distraction. He had to go away by
himself, he had to withdraw for at the very least a week from his
ordinary life, from his house on the river where he had just begun his
summer holiday, from his house in London where at least there were his
clubs, because of this determination on the part of public opinion that
he should for a space be alone with his sorrow. Alone with sorrow,--of
all ghastly things for a man to be alone with! It was an outrage, he
felt, to condemn a man to that; it was the cruellest form of solitary
confinement. He had come to Cornwall because it took a long time to get
to, a whole day in the train there and a whole day in the train back,
clipping the week, the minimum of time public opinion insisted on for
respecting his bereavement, at both ends; but still that left five days
of awful loneliness, of wandering about the cliffs by himself trying not
to think, without a soul to speak to, without a thing to do. He couldn't
play bridge because of public opinion. Everybody knew what had happened
to him. It had been in all the papers. The moment he said his name they
would know. It was so recent. Only last week....
No, he couldn't bear this, he must speak to some one. That girl,--with
those strange eyes she wasn't just ordinary. She wouldn't mind letting
him talk to her for a little, perhaps sit in the garden with her a
little. She would understand.
Wemyss was like a child in his misery. He very nearly cried outright
when he got to the gate and took off his hat, and the girl looked at him
blankly just as if she still didn't see him and hadn't heard him when he
said, 'Could you let me have a glass of water? I--it's so hot----'
He began to stammer because of her eyes. 'I--I'm horribly thirsty--the
heat----'
He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He certainly
looked very hot. His face was red and distressed, and his forehead
dripped. He was all puckered, like an unhappy baby. And the girl looked
so cool, so bloodlessly cool. Her hands, folded on the top bar of the
gate, looked more than cool, they looked cold; like hands in winter,
shrunk and small with cold. She had bobbed hair, he noticed, so that it
was impossible to tell how old she was, brown hair from which the sun
was beating out bright lights; and her small face had no colour except
those wide eyes fixed on his and the colour of her rather big mouth; but
even her mouth seemed frozen.
'Would it be much bother----' began Wemyss again; and then his situation
overwhelmed him.
'You would be doing a greater kindness than you know,' he said, his
voice trembling with unhappiness, 'if you would let me come into the
garden a minute and rest.'
At the sound of the genuine wretchedness in his voice Lucy's blank eyes
became a little human. It got through to her consciousness that this
distressed warm stranger was appealing to her for something.
'Are you so hot?' she asked, really seeing him for the first time.
'Yes, I'm hot,' said Wemyss. 'But it isn't that. I've had a
misfortune--a terrible misfortune----'
He paused, overcome by the remembrance of it, by the unfairness of so
much horror having overtaken him.
'Oh, I'm sorry,' said Lucy vaguely, still miles away from him, deep in
indifference. 'Have you lost anything?'
'Good God, not that sort of misfortune!' cried Wemyss. 'Let me come in a
minute--into the garden a minute--just to sit a minute with a human
being. You would be doing a great kindness. Because you're a stranger I
can talk to you about it if you'll let me. Just because we're strangers
I could talk. I haven't spoken to a soul but servants and official
people since--since it happened. For two days I haven't spoken at all to
a living soul--I shall go mad----'
His voice shook again with his unhappiness, with his astonishment at his
unhappiness.
Lucy didn't think two days very long not to speak to anybody in, but
there was something overwhelming about the strange man's evident
affliction that roused her out of her apathy; not much,--she was still
profoundly detached, observing from another world, as it were, this
extreme heat and agitation, but at least she saw him now, she did with a
faint curiosity consider him. He was like some elemental force in his
directness. He had the quality of an irresistible natural phenomenon.
But she did not move from her position at the gate, and her eyes
continued, with the unwaveringness he thought so odd, to stare into his.
'I would gladly have let you come in,' she said, 'if you had come
yesterday, but to-day my father died.'
Wemyss looked at her in astonishment. She had said it in as level and
ordinary a voice as if she had been remarking, rather indifferently, on
the weather.
Then he had a moment of insight. His own calamity had illuminated him.
He who had never known pain, who had never let himself be worried, who
had never let himself be approached in his life by a doubt, had for the
last week lived in an atmosphere of worry and pain, and of what, if he
allowed himself to think, to become morbid, might well grow into a most
unfair, tormenting doubt. He understood, as he would not have understood
a week ago, what her whole attitude, her rigidity meant. He stared at
her a moment while she stared straight back at him, and then his big
warm hands dropped on to the cold ones folded on the top bar of the
gate, and he said, holding them firmly though they made no attempt to
move, 'So that's it. So that's why. Now I know.'
And then he added, with the simplicity his own situation was putting
into everything he did, 'That settles it. We two stricken ones must talk
together.'
And still covering her hands with one of his, with the other he
unlatched the gate and walked in.