‘Crying, Hey, Lackaday!
The ice will give way,
And we shall fall in----’
He pulled off his boots; and finished:
‘If Miss Earle they’d not met
They’d be standing there yet.’
‘Pretty poor,’ cried Julian.
‘Oh, I think it’s awfully good,’ said Judith.
Charlie bowed, and said:
‘I can do more like that.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Not now. Pouf! I’m tired.’
He looked it. Save for the bright flush on each cheek his pallor was
startling. His eyes looked dark in their shadowy rings, and he leaned
back against Mariella while she gravely fastened his shoes and buttoned
up his coat. When she put on his muffler he dragged it off again,
crying:
‘Oh, Mariella. _No!_ I’m so hot.’
‘You’re to wear it,’ she said quietly. ‘You’ll catch cold,’ and she
wound it round his neck again, while he submitted and made faces at her,
his eyes laughing into hers, like a child coaxing an elder to smiles.
Watching him, Judith thought:
‘Are you conceited and spoilt?’
All that gaiety and proud indifference, all that unconscious-seeming
charm, that confident chatter--all might be the product of a complete
self-consciousness. Surely he must look in the glass and adore his own
reflection. She remembered her old dream of marrying him, and thought
with a vast sorrowful prophetic sense of the many people who would yearn
to him silently for love, while he went on his way, wanting none of
them.
Against the dusk, his head, his face shone as if palely lit.
Narrowly she watched him; but there was no sign for her: all that
brilliance of expression glancing and pausing around him, and nothing
for her beyond a light smile or two, a casual appreciation of her
temporary uses. He and Mariella had scarcely once said: ‘Do you
remember?’ If they still cherished any of the past she was not in it. It
was strange to think of such indifference, when they, with the other
three, were all the pattern, all the colour and richness that had ever
come into life.
In the dying light their mystery fell over them again, and they were as
unattainable as ever. If only with the rare quality of their physical
appearance they must always enslave her; and she felt worn out with the
stress of them.
‘To-morrow,’ said Charlie, ‘we’ll bring Roddy.’
‘Yes. Come on,’ said Mariella. ‘We must hurry for our train.’
They tramped in silence across the cold solitude of the marsh, and the
wind came after them, keen and menacing. When they arrived at the
river’s edge, Charlie stood still, and looked across, saying dreamily:
‘There’s a light in the old house. I suppose that’s the caretaker
person. We might look in to-morrow and surprise her. Doesn’t it look
lonely?... I wish we would live there again. Where’s your house, Judith?
I thought it was next door.’
‘So it is, but the trees hide it.’
‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’
Then she ferried them across the river in the punt, and parted from them
on the other side, where the lane to the station branched off.
‘Well, see you to-morrow.’
Julian looked up at the sky.
‘I believe it’s thawing,’ he said. ‘I believe it’ll rain in the night.’
‘Rot!’ said Charlie. ‘Why--feel the ground.’
‘Yes, but the air’s milder. And look at the sky.’
To the east and north the frosty stars pointed their darts; but in the
smoky, tumultuous west, black clouds devoured the last of the sun.
Panic seized Judith, and she hated Julian, wanted to strike him.
‘Rot! that doesn’t mean anything,’ said Charlie uneasily.
‘And listen to the wind.’
The wind was in the treetops, full and relentless, and driving the
clouds.
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Charlie. ‘Can’t there be a wind without a thaw? And
come on, can’t you, or we’ll miss our train.’
‘Good-night then.’
‘G’night, Judith. We’ll look out for you.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘Goo’night.’
‘Good-night.’
Judith ran home, shutting eyes to the clouds, ears to the wind, and with
the slam of the front door behind her striving to ignore the God of
envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness whose portents were abroad
in the sky.
‘To-morrow they are coming again and bringing Roddy. To-morrow I shall
see Roddy. O God, be merciful!’
* * * * *
Towards dawn she woke and heard the blind, drearily sighing, futile
hurry and hiss of the rain,--and said aloud in the darkness: ‘How can I
bear it?’
Yet lured by sick fantastic hope she crossed the river that morning and
made her way to the pond.
There was nobody there, save one small boy, sliding upon the ice through
several inches of water and throwing up before him in his swift career
two separate and divided fountains.
Then that was the end. They were lost again. They would not come back,
they would not write, she would never go to London to see them. Even
Julian would forget about her. They did not care, the rain was glad,
there was nothing in the wide world to give her comfort. She turned from
the rain-blurred place where their unreal lost images mocked at and
confused her,--dreams within the far-off dream of happy yesterday.
3
It was some time in the middle of the war that she knew for certain that
Julian was at the front. She heard it from the old next door gardener,
who had given her apples and pears long ago, and it was from the
grandmother herself that he knew it. She had written to tell him to
plant fresh rose-buds and to keep the tennis lawn in perfect order, for
very soon, directly the war was over, the grandchildren were to have the
house for their own, as a place for week-ends and holidays.
Mr. Julian was at the front, safe so far, God be thanked, and Mr.
Charlie had just been called up; but the fighting, so the grandmother
said, would be over before ever he went to France.
Then, nourished afresh on new hopes, desires, and terrors, the children
next door came back night after night in dreams.
Julian in uniform came suddenly into the library. He said:
‘I’ve come to say good-bye.’
‘Good-bye? Are you going back to the front?’
‘Yes. In a minute. Can’t you hear my train?’
She listened and heard the train-whistle.
‘Charlie’s going too--He’ll be here in a minute. Good-bye, Judith.’
She put out her hand and he took it and then bent down with a sort of
grin and kissed her. He said:
‘That’s what men do when they’re going to the front.’
She thought with pleasure: ‘Then Charlie will want to kiss me too;’ and
she looked out of the window, hoping to see him.
It was impenetrably dark, and she thought anxiously: ‘He won’t be able
to find his way. He always hated the dark.’
‘Come on,’ said Julian. ‘You must come and wave good-bye to me.’
But still she delayed and peered out, looking with growing panic for
Charlie.
All at once she saw him in the darkness outside. He was not in uniform,
but in grey flannel shorts and a white shirt open at the neck,--the
clothes of his childhood. He trailed himself haltingly, as if his feet
hurt him.
‘Sh!’ said Julian in her ear. ‘He’s disguised himself.’
‘Ah, then he won’t get killed....’
‘No.’
She caught sight of his face. It was a terrible disguise,--the
shrivelled, yellow mask of an ancient cretin. He looked at her vacantly,
and she thought with a pang: ‘Ah! I must pretend I don’t know him.’
He passed out of sight with his queer clothes and his limp and his
changed face,--all the careful paraphernalia of his travesty. Looking at
him, she was seized with sudden horror. There was something wrong: they
would see through it.
She tried to reach him, to warn him; but she was voiceless and he had
disappeared.
* * * * *
It was Charlie himself, so the old gardener said, who wrote to tell him
that he and Mariella were to be married. Master Charles had always been
the beloved one,--the one to be ready with a smile and a pleasant word,
and never a bit of haughtiness for all his Grannie made such a little
prince of him.
‘And when this old war’s over, Lacey,’ he says, ‘we’ll be coming back to
live in the dear old house. Grannie wants us to,’ he says, ‘and you may
be sure we want to. We were never ones to like London. So look out for
us before long.’ But ah! he had to come through the fighting first. They
were to get married at once, for he was off to the front. Speaking for
himself, said the old gardener, he’d have had enough of life if anything
happened to Master Charlie.
The next day, the announcement of their marriage at a registry office
appeared in the “Times.”
‘Why, they can’t be more than nineteen,’ said Mamma, ‘and first cousins,
too. A dreadful mistake. However, I suppose the chances are----’ and
she sighed, settling her V.A.D. cap before the mirror. ‘I must write to
the old lady. They were good-looking children--one of them especially.
Why don’t you send a nice little note to the girl, Judith? You used to
play together such a lot.’
‘Oh, she wouldn’t remember me,’ said Judith, and went quickly away, sick
with shock.
Married, those two. Mariella a wife: Mrs. Charles Fyfe.
‘I am _young_ Mrs. Fyfe. This is Charlie, my husband.’
How had it happened?
‘Mariella, you must marry me, you must, you _must_. Oh, Mariella, I _do_
want to marry you, and I’m going to the front so I _do_ think I might be
allowed to have what I want. I may be killed and I shan’t have had
anything out of life. Oh, Mariella, please! You know you’re happiest
with us, Mariella. You couldn’t marry anyone outside and leave us all,
could you? Nor could I. I couldn’t bear to be _touched_ by any other
woman. You and I understand each other so well we _couldn’t_ be unhappy.
We are different from other people, you know. Marry me and I’ll come
back from the war. But if you say no I’ll just go out and let myself be
killed at once....’
And Mariella, pale and childish and not understanding, went away. She
went--yes--to Julian, and looking at him full with her dazed look said:
‘Charlie has asked me to marry him.’ He said not a word, but looked dark
and shrugged his shoulders and turned away as who should reply: ‘What is
that to me?’ So Mariella went straight back to Charlie and said:
‘All right.’
Her mouth quivered and she nearly cried then, but not quite: neither
then nor afterwards. And the grandmother wept bitterly, till in the end
Charlie comforted her; and after that, implacably she would give and
sacrifice all to Charlie.
No, no, that was too stupid, too abnormal. People only behaved like that
in your unbalanced imagination.
Mariella would never have wept, never have gone to Julian, never dreamed
of being in love with him,--him or Charlie or any one else you would
have thought, childless, sexless creature that she had always seemed,
years behind you in development. How she must have changed to be now
liable to passion! All at once she had to be thought of as a woman, the
gulf of marriage fixed between you and her.
Had she consented then in her usual placidly agreeable way, just to
oblige Charlie, without a notion of what it meant to be in love and
marry? Had she gradually fallen in love with him during all the years
they were growing up together, or had it been suddenly, with a shock of
realization, when he told her he was going to France? Or had he come
home one day excited, full of emotion at the thought of what lay ahead
for him, and found her looking beautiful, strange, and thrilling to his
troubled eyes, and taken her suddenly in his arms, charming her into his
own illusion of love?
Or had it been gentle and certain all the time,--an idyll?
‘My dear, you know I shall never love anyone but you.’
‘Nor I anyone but you.’
‘Then let’s marry before I go.’
‘Oh yes,--at once.’
So they married, with all the others gentle and certain, and acquiescent
as a matter of course, saying, whatever their secret thoughts: ‘Ah well,
it had to be.’
They would spend their few days contentedly together, saying quietly:
‘If anything should happen we shall have had this happiness at least:’
their few nights....
When people married they slept in the same room, perhaps in the same
bed: they wanted to. Mariella and Charlie would sleep together: that
would be the only change for them who had lived in the same house since
childhood and knew all about each other. Why had they wanted to make
that change--what had impelled them to seek from each other another
intimacy? Charlie’s beauty belonged to someone now: Mariella of all
people had claims upon it. She might have a baby, and Charlie would be
its father....
It was all so queer and unhappy, so like the dreams from whose
improbabilities she woke in heaviness of spirit, that it was impossible
to realize. This thing had happened and she was further than ever from
them, perplexed in the outer darkness, unremembered, unwanted, nothing
at all. She might hold on all her life but they would never be drawn
back to her.
She was certain now that Charlie was going to be killed. There was that
in the fact of his marriage, of his leaping to fulfil the instincts of
normal man for life which proclaimed more ominously by contrast the
something,--the fatal excess--that foredoomed him; which made darker the
shadow falling ever upon the bright thing coming to confusion.
There seemed nothing now in life but a waiting for his death.
* * * * *
They came and came in her dreams--some that caused her to wake with the
happiness of a bird, thinking for a moment: ‘Then he’s safe ...;’ others
that made her start into bleak consciousness, heavy with the thought
that he was even now dead.
There were dreams of Mariella with a child in her arms; of Mariella and
Charlie walking silently up and down, up and down the lawn next door,
like lovers, their arms about each other, and kissing as they walked.
Then Mariella would turn into Judith, and very soon the whole thing
would go wrong: Charlie would cease to walk up and down like a lover,
and falter and disappear.
She dreamed of standing in the doorway of the old next door schoolroom
looking out into the hall. Between the inner glass doors and the outer
white-painted wooden ones, in the little passage where tubs of
hydrangeas and red and white lilies stood upon a mosaic floor, Mariella
was talking to one of the boys. She must be saying good-bye to Charlie.
The back of her neck was visible, the short curls tilting back as she
lifted her head to him. Tall and shadowy, faceless, almost formless, he
bent over her, and mysteriously, silently they conferred; and she
watched, hidden in the doorway. Suddenly Mariella broke away and ran
past through the hall. Her face was white and wild, streaming with
tears; she bowed it right forward in her hands and fled up the stairs.
‘Oh, look! Mariella is crying for the first time in her life....’
In the doorway the dark figure still stood. It turned and all at once
had a face; and was not Charlie but Julian. She sprang back thinking:
‘He mustn’t see me here, spying;’ and in the agitation of trying to slip
away unobserved, the dream broke.
There was a dream of playing some game among them all in the next door
garden, and of Charlie stopping suddenly, and crawling away with a weak
fumbling step, his hand on his heart.
‘He’s got a weak heart.’
‘Ah, then he won’t go to the front.’
‘No, he’s quite safe.’
She woke up happy.
But sometimes Charlie had been to the front and had come back with that
feebleness and sickness upon him. He was going to die of it. He came
all pale into the schoolroom and stopped, leaning against the big oak
cupboard. He put his hand on his heart, sighing and moaning, looking
about him in appalling distress. He said:
‘I feel ill. I don’t know what it is.... I’d like to consult my
brother.’
He had the face of a stranger, an emaciated and elderly man,--nobody in
the least like Charlie; but it was he. He shuffled out again, almost too
weak to move, looking for Julian, who would not come. In horror-struck
groups the others watched him. He was dying beyond a doubt. She woke,
aghast.
* * * * *
It was at the close of a day in February. Outside, where the gentle dusk
glimmered on rain-wet branches, the bird-calls were like sudden pale
jets of light, coming achingly to the mind; and all at once the sun,
like a bell, struck out a poignant richness, a long dark-golden evening
note with tears in it, searching all the land with its fullness and
dying slowly into an obscurer twilight. The tree-tops were quiet against
the sky. There was no leaf upon them: yet, in that liquid mauve air they
stirred in her a sudden soft pang, a beating of the heart, and were, for
a moment, the whole of the still hidden spring.
She stood staring through the window; and wars and rumours of wars
receded, dwindling into a little shadow beyond the edge of the enchanted
world.
She went out into the garden, towards the river. Ah, these shapely
boughs, this smell of buds, that tenderly-trailing blue smoke from the
rubbish heap, this air like clear greenish water, washing in luminous
tides, those few stars cast up and glowing upon translucent strands
between the riven pale deeps of clouds!... Bearing her ecstasy
delicately, she came to the bottom of the garden, where the connecting
pathway ran towards the house next door. She heard a heavy trailing step
she knew, and she waited to bid good-night to the old gardener coming
home from work.
‘Good-night, Lacey.’
His mumbling voice said from the shadows:
‘Good-night, Missie.’
‘_Lovely_ evening, Lacey.’
‘Ah, grand.’
‘How does your garden look next door?’
‘Ah, a bit forward. There’ll be frosts later, you may be bound.’
He sounded tired to-night; he was getting very old. Now for the
customary last question.
‘When are they coming back, Lacey? It’s high time, isn’t it?’
He paused; then said:
‘You maybe won’t have heard, Miss....’
‘What?’
‘Master Charlie’s been killed.... Yes, Miss. We ‘ad word from London
this afternoon. Ah, it’s cruel. It’ll about kill his Grannie, that’s wot
I sez first thing--about kill her it will. He was the apple of her eye.
That’s what we all said--the apple of her eye. She says to me once she
says: “Lacey,” she says, “Master Charlie’ll live ‘ere when I’m gorn. I’m
keepin’ the place on for ’im,” she says. “It shall never be let nor
nothing. It’s ‘is, for ’im to bring ‘is wife to. Ah, pore little Miss
Mariella, pore soul....” He broke into feeble weeping. “Ah, it’ll about
be the death of ‘is Grannie. Pore Master Charlie--pore little chap ...
everybody’s favourite, I remember ’im when ‘e was.... Yes, Missie, yes,
Miss Judith....’
His voice failed; and with a hand touching his hat over and over again
in mechanical apology, confused distress and appeal, he went shuffling
away into the shadows.
* * * * *
But of course, of course he was dead; she had expected it all the time.
Now it had happened she could turn to other things. She thought: ‘It’s
not bad now; it’ll be worse later: then some time it will stop. I must
bear it--bear it--bear it!’
That wheezing voice echoed in the solitude and complained: ‘Pore Master
Charlie, pore little chap,’ over and over again through the dark lane
among the poplars, above the wall of the garden where the poor little
boy had lived long ago.
Had he really lived? Forget him, forget him. He was only a shadow any
way, a romantic illusion, a beautiful plaything of the imagination:
nothing of importance. Put him away, be sensible, be indifferent, gather
round you once again the imperturbable mysteries of nature, be blinded
and made deaf with them for ever. He was much better dead. He was weak
and spoilt, selfish; he wouldn’t have been any good.... He never could
bear blood: he must be thankful to be dead.
Where was he? He seemed to be near, listening to what you had to say of
his death.
‘Charlie, my darling, if only you’d known how I loved you!’
‘I know now. I shall always be watching you.’
Then there is no cause for weeping: he is alive, he is in God’s keeping.
“Lord, into thy hands I commend his spirit.” What did that mean?
Pretend, pretend to believe it, cover the blankness with confident
assertions.
What had become of that shining head? How did he look now?
At this very moment they were all weeping for Charlie shot dead in
France. It was really true: he was dead and in the earth, he had
vanished for ever. Her mind wavered and fainted under the burden of
their grief: her own she could endure, but theirs was intolerable.
She went back, out of the unregarding night, to the Greek verbs which
must be learnt by to-morrow.
* * * * *
A long time after, came the last terrible dream.
They were all bathing together from the next door raft, in a sort of dim
luminous twilight. She saw her own white legs reaching out to touch the
water; and she stepped in and swam about. Roddy was there, a dark head
bobbing vaguely near her. Sometimes he touches her hand or her shoulder,
smiling at her in a friendly way. The others made a dim group on the
bank. They were all very happy: she felt ecstasy swelling within her,
and passing from her among them all.
Charlie suddenly came into the group. Oh, there was Charlie safe and
well and alive after all, and nobody need be unhappy any more!
He did not speak. He emerged swiftly from among them, and they all
watched him in silence while he stooped to the dim river and slipped in.
He turned his face, his hidden face, downstream, and went floating and
swimming gently along. He too was happy.
A dark misty solitude of night and water was ahead of him, and he went
into it without pause or backward look, and it folded around him. Horror
crept in: for he was disappearing.
A voice broke ringingly, in anguish:
‘Come back!’
It shattered itself, aghast, upon emptiness.
Softly he vanished.
She cried aloud and woke into a night streaming, blind with the rain’s
enormous weeping.
He never came again.
His son was born and his grandmother died; but he was too far, too spent
a ghost to raise his head at that.