CHAPTER XXIV

Mrs. Averil was in the hall. "Give them another moment," he said. "I'm

going outside."

Tears were in his own eyes. He stepped out on to the flagged path of the

little plot in front of the house where strips of turf and rose-beds ran

between the house and the high wall. Between the clipped holly-trees at

the gate he saw Barney's car, and its lights, the wall between, cast a

deep shadow over the garden.

The rain was falling thickly now and he stood, feeling it on his face,

filled with a sense of appeasement, of accomplishment. They were

together at last. It was not too late. At such a time, when all the

world hung on the edge of an abyss, to be together for a moment might

sum up more of real living than many happy years. They knew each other's

hearts and what more could life give its creatures than that

recognition.

Suddenly, how he did not know, for there was no apparent movement and

his eyes were fixed on the pallid sky, he became aware that a figure was

leaning against the house in the shadow beside him. His eyes found it

and it was familiar. Yet he could not believe his eyes.

She was leaning back, her hands against the wall on either side, and he

saw, with the upper layer of perception that so often blunts a violent

emotion, that her feet were sunken in the mould of Mrs. Averil's

rose-bed and that the cherished shoots of the new climbing rose were

tangled in her clothes. The open window was but a step away.

She had come since they had come. She had crept up. She had looked

in--for how long?--and had fallen back, casting out her arms so that it

might not be to the ground. Her eyes were closed; but she had heard and

seen him. As he stood before her, aghast, unable to find a word, he

heard her mutter: "Take me away, please."

Barney's car blocked the egress of the gate and Barney might emerge at

any moment. He leaned towards her and found that she was intricately

caught in the rose. Her hat with its veil, her sleeve, her hair, were

all entangled.

Dumbly, patiently, she stood, while, with fumbling fingers and terror

lest they should be heard within--Mrs. Averil's voice now reached him

from the drawing-room--Oldmeadow released her and, his fingers deeply

torn by the thorns, he was aware, in all the tumult of his thought, more

than of the pain, of the wet fragrance of the roses that surrounded her.

He shared what he felt to be her panic.

She had come hoping to see Barney; she had come to say good-bye to

Barney, who would not come to her; and his heart sickened for her at the

shameful seeming of her plight. She knew now that it must be her hope

never to see Barney again.

There was a narrow passage, leading to the lawn and garden, between the

house and the stable walls. Thickly grown with ivy, showing only a

narrow opening above, where chimneys and gables cut against the sky, it

was nearly as dark as a tunnel, and into this place of hiding he half

led, half carried the unfortunate woman.

With the darkness, the pungent smell of the wet ivy closed thickly,

ominously about them. It was as if he and Adrienne Toner were buried

there together. He heard a maid laugh far away and a boy passed on the

green stridently whistling "Tipperary." It was like hearing, in the

grave, the sounds of the upper world.

Adrienne leaned against the wall. The ivy closing round her, nearly

obliterated her, but he could dimly see the grey disk of her face,

showing the unexpectedness of contour that reveals itself in the faces

of the dead. The trivial features were erased and only a shape of grief

remained, strangely august and emotionless.

An eternity seemed to pass before the front door opened and Mrs.

Averil's voice, steadied to a galvanized cheerfulness, came, half

obliterated to a wordless rhythm. Barney's voice answered her, and his

steps echoed on the flagged path. "Say good-bye to Roger for me if I

don't see him on the road!" he called out from the gate. Then the car

coughed, panted; the horn croaked out its cry and, above them, a shaft

of light across the ivy, of which he had till then been unaware, flitted

suddenly away, leaving the darkness more visible.

He heard then that she was weeping.

Putting his arm behind her, for the rain fell heavily and the ivy was

drenched with it, he drew her forward and for a little while it was

almost against his breast that she lay while her very heart dissolved

itself in tears.

She had come, he knew it all, with a breakdown of her pride, with a last

wild hope and, perhaps, a longing to atone, believing that she might

snatch a word somewhere with her husband, and find her way, at this

last moment, back to the heart she had so alienated. She had seen all.

She had heard all. He was sure of it. It had been as an outcast that he

had found her leaning there. He understood her through and through and

the tender heaviness that had already so often visited his heart flooded

it to suffocation.

Among her sobs, he heard her, at last, speaking to him. "Even Palgrave

doesn't know. He told me--only this afternoon--that Barney was here. I

thought I might find him. I was going to wait in the road. And when I

got here there was no car and I was afraid that there was a mistake.

That I had missed him. And I went up to the house; to the open window;

and looked in; to see if he was there. It was not jealousy: not now. I

did not mean to be an eavesdropper. But, when I saw them, I stayed and

listened. It was not jealousy," she repeated. "It was because I had to

know that there was no more hope."

"Yes," said Oldmeadow gently, while, with long pauses, she spoke on and

on; to the impartial judge, to the one sure refuge; and he said "Yes"

again, gently, after she had finished; a long time after. She still half

lay against his breast. He had never felt such an infinite tenderness

towards any creature; not since his boyhood and his mother's death.

She drew away from him at last. "Take me," she said. "There is a train;

back to Oxford." She had ceased to weep. Her voice was hoarse and faint.

"Did you walk up from the station? You're not fit to walk back. I can

get a trap. There's a man just across the green."

"No. Walking, please. I would be recognized. They might know me. I can

walk. If you will help me."

He drew her arm through his. "Lean on me," he said. "We'll go slowly."

They went past the drawing-room windows and, softly opening, softly

shutting, through the gate. The road, when it turned the corner, left

the village behind; between its rarely placed trees, vague silhouettes

against the sky that seemed of one texture with them, it showed its

mournful pallor for only a little space before them; there was not

enough light left in the sky to glimmer on its pools. The fields, on

either side, vanished into obscurity. Pale cattle, once, over a hedge,

put disconsolate heads and lowed and a garrulous dog, as they passed by,

ran out from a way-side farm-yard, smelt at their heels, growled

perfunctorily and, having satisfied his sense of duty, went back to his

post. The sense of dumb emptiness was so complete that it was only after

they had gone a long way that he knew that she was weeping and the soft,

stifling sounds seemed only a part of nature's desolation.

Her head bent down, she stumbled on, leaning on his arm, and from time

to time she raised her handkerchief and pressed it to her mouth and

nose. He did not say a word; nor did she.

As he led her along, submissive to her doom, it was another feeling of

accomplishment that overwhelmed him; the dark after the radiant; after

Nancy and Barney, he and Adrienne. It was this, from their first

meeting, that he had been destined to mean to her. She was his appointed

victim. He had killed, as really as if with a knife, the girl whom he

had seen at Coldbrooks, in the sunlight, on that Sunday morning in

spring, knowing no doubts. She had then held the world in her hands and

a guileless, untried heaven had filled her heart. Between her and this

crushed and weeping woman there seemed no longer any bond; unless it was

the strange aching that, in his heart, held them both together.

PART II

CHAPTER I

Oldmeadow sat in Mrs. Aldesey's drawing-room and, the tea-table between

them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years,

that they found each other. So it was, all over the world, Oldmeadow

said to himself, that the tea-table, or its equivalent, reasserted

itself in any interval where the kindly amenities of human intercourse

could root themselves; though the world rocked and flames of anarchy

rimmed its horizons.

It was more real, he felt that now, to sit and look at Lydia over her

tea than to parch on Eastern sands and shiver in Western trenches; from

the mere fact that the one experience became a nightmare while the other

was as natural as waking at dawn. Horrors became the dropped stitches of

life; and though if there were too many of them they would destroy the

stocking, the stocking itself was made up of tea-table talks and walks

in the woods with Nancy. He had just come from Coldbrooks.

So he put it, trivially, to himself, and he felt the need of clinging to

triviality. The dropped stitches had been almost too much for him and

the nightmare, at times, had seemed the only reality. At times he had

known a final despair of life and even now he remembered that the worst

might still come. One might be called upon to face the death of the

whole order of civilization. Faith required one, perhaps, to recognize

that the human spirit was bound up, finally, with no world order and

unless one could face its destruction as one had to face the death of a

loved individual, one was not secure of the spiritual order that

transcended all mundane calamity. He believed, or hoped, that during

these last three years, in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine, when, to the

last fibre, he had felt his faiths tested, he had learned to be ready

for the great relinquishment, should it be required of him; and it was

therefore the easier to doff that consciousness, as he might have doffed

a sword, and think of Lydia and of the order that still survived and

that she still stood for.

Lydia did not look the worse for the war; indeed she looked the better.

She looked as if, in spite of long days in the hospital, she digested

better and, in spite of air-raids, slept better, and as they talked,

finding their way back to intimacy by the comparing of such

superficialities, she told him that for years she hadn't been so strong

or well. "Nothing is so good for you, I've found out, as to feel that

you are being used; being used by something worth while. People like

myself must keep still about our experiences, for we've had none that

bear talking of. But even the others, even the people bereaved

unspeakably, are strangely lifted up. And I believe that the populace

enjoys the air-raids rather than the reverse; they give them a chance of

feeling that they are enduring something, too; with good-humour and

pluck. If anyone is pessimistic about the effect of war on average human

nature, I should only ask them to come and talk to our men at the

hospital. Of course, under it all, there's the ominous roar in one's

ears all the time."

"Do you mean the air-raids?" he asked her and, shaking her head,

showing him that she, too, had seen with him and, he believed, with him

accepted: "No; I mean the roar of nation after nation collapsing into

the abyss. A sort of tumbril roar of civilization, Roger. And, for that,

there's always the last resource of going gallantly to the guillotine.

But all the same, I believe we shall pull through."

It was the spring of 1918 and one needed faith to believe it. She asked

him presently about his friends at Coldbrooks. He had gone to Coldbrooks

for three days of his one week's leave. After this he went to France.

"What changes for you there, poor Roger," said Mrs. Aldesey.

"Yes. Terrible changes. Palgrave dead and Barney broken. Yet, do you

know, it's not as sad as it was. Something's come back to it. Nancy sits

by him and holds his hand and is his joy and comfort."

"Will he recover?"

"Not in the sense of being really mended. He'll go on crutches, always,

if he gets up. But the doctors now hope that the injury to the back

isn't permanent."

"And Meg's married," said Mrs. Aldesey after a little pause. "Have you

seen her?"

"No. She runs a hospital in the country, at her husband's place, Nancy

tells me; and is very happy."

"Very. Has a fine boy, and is completely reinstated. It's a remarkable

ending to the story, isn't it? She met him at the front, you know,

driving her ambulance; and he has twice as much in him as poor Eric

Hayward."

"Remarkable. Yet Meg's a person who only needs her chance. She's the

sort that always comes out on top."

"Does it comfort her mother a little for all she's suffered to see her

on top?"

"It almost comically comforts her. All the same, Eleanor Chadwick has

her depths. Nothing will ever comfort her for Palgrave's death."

"I understand that," said Mrs. Aldesey. "Nothing could. How she must

envy the happy mothers whose boys were killed at the front. To have

one's boy die in prison as a conscientious objector must be the

bitterest thing the war has given any mother to bear."

"He was a dear boy," said Oldmeadow. "Heroically wrong-minded." He could

hardly bear to think of Palgrave.

"He wasn't alone, you know," said Mrs. Aldesey after a moment. Something

was approaching that he would rather not have to speak of; a name he

would so much rather not name. And, evading it, feebly, he said, "His

mother got to him in time, I know."

"Yes. But all the time. She went and lived near the prison. Adrienne

Toner I mean."

Her eyes were on him and he hoped that no readjustment of his features

was visible. "Oh, yes. Nancy told me that," he said.

"What's become of her, Roger?" Mrs. Aldesey asked. "Since Charlie was

killed the Lumleys have lived in the country and I hardly see them. I

haven't heard a word of her for years."

He was keeping his eyes on her and he knew from her expression that he

showed some strain or some distress.

"Nor have I. Nancy said that they hadn't either. She went away, after

Palgrave's death. Disappeared completely."

"Nancy told you, of course, about the money; the little fortune she gave

Palgrave, so that he could leave it to his mother?"

"Oh, yes. Nancy wrote to me of that."

"It was cleverly contrived, wasn't it. They are quite tied up to it,

aren't they; whatever they may feel. No one could object to her giving a

fortune to the boy she'd ruined. I admired that in her, I must confess;

the way she managed it. And then her disappearance."

"Very clever indeed," said Oldmeadow. "All that remains for her to do

now is to manage to get killed. And that's easily managed. Perhaps she

is killed."

He did not intend that his voice should be emptier or dryer, yet Lydia

looked at him with a closer attention.

"Barney and Nancy could get married then," she said.

"Yes. Exactly. They could get married."

"That's what you want, isn't it, Roger?"

"Want her to be killed, or them to be married?"

"Well, as you say, so many people _are_ being killed. One more or less,

if it's in such a good cause as their marriage--"

"It's certainly a good cause. But I don't like the dilemma," said

Oldmeadow.

He knew from the way she looked at him, discreet and disguised as her

recognition was, that he was hiding something from her. Casting about

his mind, in the distress that took the form of confusion, he could

himself find nothing that he hid, or wished to hide, unless it was the

end of Adrienne's story as Barney's wife. That wasn't for him to show;

ever; to anyone.

"Perhaps she's gone back to America," said Mrs. Aldesey presently,

"California, you know. Or Chicago. She may very well be engaged in great

enterprises out there that we never hear of. They'd be sure to be great,

wouldn't they."

"I suppose they would."

"You saw her once more, didn't you, at the time you saw Palgrave," Mrs.

Aldesey went on. "Lady Lumley told me of that. And how kind you had

been. Adrienne had spoken of it. You were sorry for them both, I

suppose; for her as well as for him, in spite of everything. Or did she

merely take it for granted that the kindness to him extended to her?"

"Not at all. It was for her too," said Oldmeadow, staring a little and

gathering together, after this lapse of time that seemed so immense, his

memories of that other tea-table set up in the chaos: Palgrave's

tea-table on that distant day in Oxford. What was so confusing him was

his consciousness that it hadn't been the last time he had seen

Adrienne. "I was as sorry for her as for him," he went on. "Sorrier.

There was so much more in her than I'd supposed. She was capable of

intense suffering."

"In losing her husband's affections, you mean? You never suspected her

of being inhuman, surely? Lady Lumley blamed poor Barney for all that

sad story. But, even from her account, I could see his side very

plainly."

"Perhaps I did think her inhuman. At all events I thought her

invulnerable."

"Yes. I remember. With all her absurdity you thought she had great

power." Mrs. Aldesey looked at him thoughtfully. "And it was when you

found she hadn't that you could be sorry for her."

"Not at all," said Oldmeadow again. "I still think she has great power.

People can have power and go to pieces."

"Did she go to pieces? That day in Oxford? I can't imagine her in

pieces, you know."

He had a feeling of drawing back; or of drawing Adrienne back. "In the

sense of being so unhappy, so obviously unhappy, over Palgrave," he

said.

He saw that Lydia would have liked to go on questioning, as, of course,

it would have been perfectly natural for her to do. Was not Adrienne

Toner and her absurdity one of their pet themes? Yet she desisted. She

desisted and it was because she felt some change in him; some shrinking

and some pain. "Well, let's hope that she is happy, now, or as happy as

she can be, poor thing, doing great deeds in America," she said. And she

turned the talk back to civilization and its danger.

They talked a good deal about civilization during their last three days

together. He wanted things, during these three days of mingled recovery

and farewell, to be as happy as possible between him and his friend, for

he knew that Lydia's heart was heavy, for him and not for civilization.

The front to which he was going was more real to her, because it was

much nearer, and his peril was more real than during his absence in

distant climes. He felt himself that the French front, at this special

time, would probably make an end of him and, for the first time since

their early friendship, he knew conjecture as to his relation with

Lydia; wondered, if it had not been for Mr. Aldesey in New York, whether

Lydia might have been in love with him, and realized, with a curious

sense of anxiety and responsibility, that her friendship for him now was

the closest tie in her life. The war might to her, too, mean irreparable

loss. And he was sorry that it was so; sorry to think that the easy,

happy intercourse had this hidden depth of latent suffering.

Lydia's feeling, and its implications, became the clearer to him when,

on their last evening together, she said to him suddenly: "Perhaps

you'll see her over there."

He could not pretend not to know whom she meant, nor could he pretend to

himself not to see that if it troubled Lydia that he should be sorry for

Adrienne that could only be because she cared far more for him than he

had ever guessed.

He said, as easily as he could manage it, for the pressure of his

realizations made him feel a little queer: "Not if she's in America."

"Ah, but perhaps she's come back from America," said Mrs. Aldesey.

"She's a great traveller. What will you do with her if you do find her?

Bring her back to Barney?"

"Hardly that," he said. "There'd be no point in bringing her back to

Barney, would there?"

"Well, then, what would you do with her?" Mrs. Aldesey smiled, as if

with a return to their old light dealing with the theme, while, still in

her nurse's coiffe and dress, she leaned back against her chair.

"What would she do with me, rather, isn't it?" he asked. And he, too,

tried to be light.

"She'll be mended then, you think? Able to do things to people again?"

"I'm not at all afraid of her, you know. She never did me any harm," he

said.

"Because you were as strong as she, you mean. She did other people harm,

surely. You warned me once to keep away from her unless I wanted to lose

my toes and fingers," Mrs. Aldesey still smiled. "She does make people

lose things, doesn't she?"

"Well, she makes them gain things, too. Fortunes for instance. Perhaps

if I find her, she'll give me a fortune."

"But that's only when she's ruined you," she reminded him.

"And it's she who's ruined now," he felt bound to remind her; no longer

lightly.

Leaning back in her chair, her faded little face framed in white, Mrs.

Aldesey looked at once younger yet more tired than he had ever seen her

look and she sat for a little while silent; as if she had forgotten

Adrienne Toner and were thinking only of their parting. But all her

gaiety had fallen from her as she said at last: "I can be sorry for her,

too; if she's really ruined. If she still loves him when he has ceased

to care for her. Does she, do you think?"

With the question he seemed to see a fire-lit room and lovers who had

found each other and to smell wet roses. Lydia was coming too near; too

near the other figure, outside the window, fallen back with outstretched

arms against the roses. And again he felt himself softly, cautiously,

disentangle the sleeve, the hair, felt himself draw Adrienne away into

the darkness where the smell was now of wet ivy and where he could see

only the shape of an accepting grief.

"How could I know?" he said. "She was very unhappy when I last saw her.

But three years have passed and people can mend in three years."

"Especially in America," Mrs. Aldesey suggested. "It's a wonderful place

for mending. Let's hope she's there. Let's hope that we shall never, any

of us, ever hear of her again. That would be much the happiest thing,

wouldn't it?"

He was obliged to say that it would certainly be much the happiest

thing; and he was too unhappy about Lydia to be able to feel angry with

her. He knew how tired she must be when, for the first time in their

long friendship, she must know that she was not pleasing him, yet not be

able to help herself.

CHAPTER II

"Good Lord!" Oldmeadow heard himself groaning.

Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there

was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst

part of war had been to see the sufferings of others. This was at last

the real thing; but it was so mingled with acquiescence that it ceased

to be the mere raw fact. "We're all together, now," he thought, and he

felt himself, even as he groaned, lifted on a wave of beatitude.

Until now he had not, as a consciousness, known anything. There was a

shape in his memory, a mere immense black blot shot with fiery lights.

It must symbolize the moment when the shell struck him, bending, in the

trench, over his watch and his calculations. And after that there were

detached visions, the ceiling of a train where he had swung in a hammock

bed, looking up; clean sheets, miraculously clean and the face of a

black-browed nurse who reminded him of Trixie. The smell of chloroform

was over everything. It bound everything together so that days might

have passed since the black blot and since he lay here, again in clean

sheets, the sweet, thick smell closing round him and a raging thirst in

his throat. He knew that he had just been carried in from the operating

room and he groaned again "Good Lord," feeling the pain snatch as if

with fangs and claws at his thigh and belly, and muttered, "Water!"

Something sweet, but differently sweet from the smell, sharp, too, and

insidious, touched his lips and opening them obediently, as a young bird

opens its bill to the parent bird, he felt a swab passed round his

parched mouth and saw the black-browed nurse. "Not water, yet, you

know," she said. "This is lemon and glycerine and will help you

wonderfully."

He wanted to ask something about Paris and the long-distance gun firing

on it every day and he seemed to see it over the edge of the trench, far

away on the horizon of No-man's-land, a tiny city flaming far into the

sky. But other words bubbled up and he heard himself crying: "Mother!

Mother!" and remembered, stopping himself with an act of will, that they

all said that when they were dying. But as he closed his eyes he felt

her very near and knew that it would be sweet to die and find her.

A long time must have passed. Was it days or only the time of daylight?

It was night now and a shaded light shone from a recess behind him and

thoughts, visions, memories raced through his mind. Nancy; Barney; he

would never see them again, then: poor Lydia and civilization.

"Civilization will see me out," he thought and he wondered if they had

taken off the wings of the Flying Victory when they packed her.

A rhythm was beating in his brain. Music was it? Something of Bach's? It

gathered words to itself and shaped itself sentence by sentence into

something he had heard? or read? Ah, he was glad to have found it.

"Under the orders of your devoted officers you will march against the

enemy or fall where you stand, facing the foe. To those who die I say:

You will not die: you will enter living into immortality, and God will

receive you into his bosom." He seemed to listen to the words as he

lay, quietly smiling. But it was music after all for, as he listened,

they merged into the "St. Matthew Passion." He had heard it, of course,

with Lydia, at the Temple. But Lydia did not really care very much for

Bach. She might care more for "Litanei." She had sung it standing beside

him with foolish white roses over her ears. How unlike Lydia to wear

those roses. And was it Lydia who stood there? A mental perplexity

mingled with the physical pain and spoiled his peace. It was not

Lydia's, that white face in the coffin with wet ivy behind it. What

suffering was this that beat upon his heart? The music had faded all

away and he saw faces everywhere, dying faces; and blood and terrible

mutilations. All the suffering of the war, worse, far worse than the

mere claws and fangs that tore at him. Dying boys choked out their

breaths in agonies of conscious loneliness, yearning for faces they

would never see again. Oh, how many he had seen die like that!

Intolerable to watch them. And could one do nothing? "Cigarettes. Give

them cigarettes," he tried to tell somebody. "And marmalade for

breakfast; and phonographs, and then they will enter living into

immortality"--No: he did not mean that. What did he mean? He could catch

at nothing now. Thoughts were tossed and tumbled like the rubbish of

wreckage from an inundated town on the deep currents of his anguish. A

current that raced and seethed and carried him away. He saw it. Its

breathless speed was like the fever in his blood. If it went faster he

would lose his breath. Church-bells ringing on the banks lost theirs as

he sped past so swiftly and made a trail of whining sound.--Effie!

Effie! It was poor little Effie, drowning. He saw her wild, small face,

battling. Bubbles boiled up about his cry.

Suddenly the torrent was stilled. Without commotion, without tumult, it

was stilled. There was a dam somewhere; it had stopped racing; he could

get his breath. Still and slow; oh! it was delicious to feel that quiet

hand on his forehead; his mother's hand, and to know that Effie was

safe. He lay with closed eyes and saw a smooth waterfall sliding and

curving with green grey depths into the lower currents of the stream. He

remembered the stream well, now; one of his beloved French rivers; one

of the smaller, sylvan rivers, too small for majesty; with silver

poplars spaced against the sky on either bank and a small town, white

and pink and pearly-grey, clear on the horizon. Tranquil sails were

above him and the bells from the distant church-tower floated to him

across the fields. Soundlessly, slowly, he felt himself borne into

oblivion.

The black-browed nurse was tending him next morning. "You are better,"

she said, smiling at him. "You slept all night. No; it's a shame, but

you mayn't have water yet." She put the lemon and glycerine to his lips.

"The pain is easier, isn't it?"

He said it was. He felt that he must not stir an inch so as to keep it

easier, but he could not have stirred had he wanted to, for he was all

tightly swathed and bandaged. He remembered something he wanted

specially to ask: "Paris? They haven't got it yet?"

"They'll never get it!" she smiled proudly. "Everything is going

splendidly."

The English surgeon was such a nice fellow. He had spectacles on a

square-tipped nose and a square, chubby face; yet his hair was nearly

white. Oldmeadow remembered, as if of days before the flood, that his

name was a distinguished one. Perhaps it was morphia they gave him,

after his wound was dressed, or perhaps he fainted. The day passed in a

hot and broken stupor and at night the tides of fever rose again and

carried him away. But, again, before he had lost his breath, before he

had quite gone down into delirium, the quiet hand came and sent him,

under sails, to sleep.

Next day Oldmeadow knew, from the way the surgeon looked at him, that

his case was grave. His face was grim as he bent over the dressing and

he hurt horribly. They told him, when it was over, that he had been very

brave, and, like a child, he was pleased that they should tell him so.

But the pain was worse all day and the sense of the submerging fever

imminent, and he lay with closed eyes and longed for the night that

brought the hand. Hours, long hours passed before it came. Hours of

sunlight when, behind his eyelids, he saw red, and hours of twilight

when he saw mauve. Then, for a little while, it was a soft, dense grey

he saw, like a bat's wing, and then the small light shone across his

bed; he knew that the night had come, and felt, at last, the hand fall

softly on his head.

He lay for some time feeling the desired peace flow into him and then,

through its satisfaction, another desire pushed up into his

consciousness and he remembered that, more than about Paris, he had

wanted to speak to the nurse about what she did for him and thank her.

"It's you who make me sleep, isn't it," he said, lying with closed eyes

under the soft yet insistent pressure. "I've never thanked you."

She did not reply. She did not want him to talk. But he still wanted to.

"I couldn't thank you last night," he said, "I can't keep hold of my

thoughts. And when morning comes I seem to have forgotten everything

about the night. You are the nurse who takes care of me in the daytime,

too, aren't you?"

Again, for a moment, there was no reply; and then a voice came. "No; I

am the night nurse. Go to sleep now."

It was a voice gentle, cold and soft, like snow. It was not an English

voice and he had heard it before. Where had he heard it? Rooks were

cawing and he saw a blue ribbon rolling, rolling out across a

spring-tide landscape. This voice was not like a blue ribbon; it was

like snow. Yet, when he turned his head under her hand, he looked round

at Adrienne Toner.

The first feeling that came uppermost in the medley that filled him at

the sight of her was one of amused vexation. It was as if he went back

to his beginnings with her, back to the rooks and the blue ribbon. "At

it again!" was what he said to himself, and what he said aloud,

absurdly, was: "Oh, come, now!"

She did not lift her hand, but there was trouble on her face as she

looked back at him. "I hoped you wouldn't see me, Mr. Oldmeadow," she

said.

He was reminded of Bacchus and the laying on of hands; but a classical

analogy, even more ridiculous, came to him with her words. "Like Cupid

and Psyche," he said. "The other way round. It's I who mustn't look."

The trouble on her face became more marked and he saw that she imagined

him to be delirious. He was not quite himself, certainly, or he would

not have greeted Adrienne Toner thus, and he made an effort to be more

decorous and rational as he said, "I'm very glad to see you again. Safe

and sound: you know."

She had always had a singular little face, but it had never looked so

singular as now, seen from below with shadows from the light behind cast

so oddly over it. The end of her nose jutted from a blue shadow and her

eyes lay in deep hollows of blue. All that he was sure of in her

expression was the gravity with which she made up her mind to humour

him. "We want you to be safe and sound, too. Please shut your eyes and

go to sleep."

"All right; all right, Psyche," he murmured, and he knew it wasn't quite

what he intended to say, yet in his flippancy he was taking refuge from

something; from the flood of suffering that had broken over him the

other night after he had seen that dead face with white roses over its

ears. This queer face, half dissolved in blue and yellow, was not dead

and the white coiffe came closely down about it. If he obeyed her he

knew that she would keep the other faces away and he closed his eyes

obediently and lay very still, seeing himself again as the good little

boy being praised. This was Psyche; not Ariane. "Ariane ma soeur," he

murmured. It was Ariane who had the white roses--or was it wet ivy? and

after her face pressed all the other dying faces. "You'll keep them

away, won't you?" he murmured, and he heard her say: "Yes; I'll keep

them quite away," and, softly, a curtain of sleep fell before his eyes

crossed by a thin drift of mythological figures.

"I thought it was you who sent me to sleep," he said to the English

nurse next day. He could hardly, in the morning light, believe it was

not a dream.

She smiled with an air of vicarious pride. "No indeed. I can't send

people to sleep. It's our wonderful Mrs. Chadwick. She does a good deal

more than put people to sleep. She cures people--oh, I wouldn't have

believed it myself, till I saw it--who are at death's door. It's lucky

for you and the others that we've got her here for a little while."

"Where's here?" he asked after a moment.

"Here's Boulogne. Didn't you know?"

"I thought I heard the sea sometimes. It's for cases too bad, then, to

be taken home. Get her here from where?"

"From her hospital in the firing-line. Now that we're advancing at the

front everything there is changed and she could come away for a little.

Sir Kenneth's been begging her to come ever since he saw her. He knew

she would work marvels here, too." The nice young nurse was exuberant in

her darkness and rosiness with a Jewish streak of fervour in her lips

and eyes. "It's a sort of rest for her," she added. "She's been badly

wounded once. You can just see the scar, under her cap, on her forehead.

And she nearly died of fever out in Salonika. She had a travelling

ambulance there before she came to France."

"It must be very restful for her," Oldmeadow remarked with a touch of

his grim mirth, "if she has to sit up putting all your bad cases to

sleep. Why haven't I heard of her and her hospital?"

"It's not run in her name. It's an American hospital--she is

American--called after her mother, I believe. The Pearl Ambulance is

what it's called and everybody here knows about it; all of us nurses and

doctors, I mean. Her organizing power is as wonderful as her cures; her

influence over her staff. They all worship the ground she walks on."

"Pearl, Pearl Toner," Oldmeadow was saying to himself. How complete, how

perfect it was. And the nurse went on, delighted, evidently, to talk of

an idol, and rather as if she were speaking of a special cure they had

installed, a sort of Carrel treatment not to be found anywhere else:

"Everything's been different since she came. It's almost miraculous to

see what the mere touch of her hand can do. Matron says she wouldn't be

surprised if it turned out she was a sort of nun and wore a hair shirt

under her dress. Whatever she is, it makes one feel better and stronger

just to see her and one would do anything for her just to have her smile

at one. She has the most heavenly smile."

It was all very familiar.

"Ah, you haven't abandoned me after all, though I have found you out,"

he said to Adrienne Toner that night.

He was able at last to see her clearly as she came in, so softly that it

was like a dream sliding into one's sleep. She was like a dream in her

nurse's dress which, though so familiar on other women, seemed to

isolate and make her strange. Her face was smaller than he had

remembered it and had the curious look, docile yet stubborn, that one

sees on the faces of dumb-mutes. She might have looked like that had

she been deafened by the sound of so many bursting shells and lost the

faculty of speech through doing much and saying nothing among scenes of

horror. But she spoke to him, after all, as naturally as he spoke to

her, saying, though with no touch of his lightness: "You mustn't talk,

you know, if I come to make you sleep. Sir Kenneth wants sleep for you

more than anything else."

"I promise you to be good," said Oldmeadow. "But I'm really better,

aren't I? and can talk a little first."

"You are really better. But it will take a long time. A great deal of

sleeping."

"No one knew what had become of you," said Oldmeadow, and he remembered

that he ought to be sorry that Adrienne Toner had not been killed.

She hesitated, and then sat down beside him. He thought that she had

been going to ask him something and then checked herself. "I can't let

you talk," she said, and in her voice he heard the new authority; an

authority gained by long submission to discipline.

"Another night, then. We must talk another night," he murmured, closing

his eyes, for he knew that he must not disobey her. All the same it was

absurd that Adrienne Toner should be doing this for him; absurd but

heavenly to feel her hand fall softly, like a warm, light bird, and

brood upon his forehead.

CHAPTER III

They never spoke of Coldbrooks, nor of Barney, nor of Palgrave; not

once. Not once during all those nights that she sat beside him and made

him sleep.

He had heard from Coldbrooks, of course; letters came often now. And the

dark young nurse had written for him since he could not yet write for

himself. He had said no word of seeing Adrienne. Nor had he let them

know how near to death he had been and, perhaps, still was. He would

have liked to have seen Lydia and Nancy if he were to die; but most of

all he wanted to be sure of not losing Adrienne. And he knew that were

he to tell them, were they to come, Adrienne would go.

She never spoke to him at all, he remembered--as getting stronger with

every day, he pieced his memories of these nights together--unless he

spoke to her; and she never smiled. And it came upon him one morning

after he had read letters that brought so near the world from which she

was now shut out, that she had, perhaps, never forgiven him. After all,

though he could not see that he had been wrong, she had everything to

forgive him and the thought made him restless. That night, for the first

time, she volunteered a remark. His temperature had gone up a little. He

must be very quiet and go to sleep directly.

"Yes; I know," he said. "It's because of you. Things I want to say. I'm

really so much better. We can't go on like this, can we," he said,

looking up at her as she sat beside him. "Why, you might slip out of my

life any day, and I might never hear of you again."

She sat looking down at him, a little askance, though gentle still, if

gentle was the word for her changed face. "That's what I mean to do,"

she said.

"Oh, but--" Oldmeadow actually, in his alarm and resentment, struggled

up on an elbow--"that won't do. I want to see you, really see you, now

that I'm myself again. I want to talk with you--now that I can talk

coherently. I want to ask you; well, I won't ask it now." She had put

out her hand, her small, potent hand, and quietly pressed him back, and

down upon his pillow while her face took on its look of almost stern

authority. "I'll be good. But promise me you'll not go without telling

me. And haven't you questions to ask, too?"

Her face kept its severity, but, as he found this last appeal, her eyes

widened, darkened, looked, for a moment, almost frightened.

"I know that Barney is safe," she said. "I have nothing to ask."

"Well; no; I see." He felt that he had been guilty of a blunder and it

made him fretful. "For me, then. Not for you. Promise me. I won't be

good unless you promise me. You can't go off and leave me like that."

With eyes still dilated, she contemplated this rebellion.

"You must promise me something, then," she said after a moment.

He felt proud, delighted, as if he had gained a victory over her.

"Done. If it's not too hard. What is it?"

"You won't write to anybody. You won't tell anybody that you've seen me.

Only Lady Lumley knows that I am here. And she has promised not to tell.

Probably, soon, I shall have left France for ever."

"I won't tell. I won't write. I can keep secrets as well as Lady Lumley.

She does keep them, you know. So it's a compact."

"Yes. It's a compact. You'll never tell them; and I won't go without

letting you know. I promise. Now go to sleep."

She laid her hand on his forehead, but, for a little while, he heard her

breathing deeply and quickly and the sense of his blundering stayed with

him so that sleep was longer in coming.

All the same he was much better next day. He was able to sit up and had

the glory and excitement of a chop for his midday dinner. And when the

pleasant hour of tea arrived it was Adrienne herself who came in

carrying the little tray.

He had not seen her in daylight before and his first feeling was one of

alarm, for, if she were afoot like this, in daylight, must it not mean

that she was soon to leave the hospital? He felt shy of her, too, for,

altered as she was by night, the day showed her as far more altered.

Whether she seemed much older or much younger he could not have said.

The coiffe, covering her forehead, and bound under her chin in a way

peculiar to her, left only, as it were, the means of expression visible.

She sat down by the window and looked out, glancing round from time to

time as he drank his tea and it was she who found the calm little

sentences, about the latest news from the front, the crashing of

Bulgaria, that carried them on until he had finished. When he had pushed

down his tray she turned her chair and faced him, folding her hands

together on her white apron, and she said, and he knew that she had come

to say it, "What was it you wanted to ask me?"

He had had, while she sat at the window, her profile with the jutting

nose, and her face, as it turned upon him now, made him think suddenly

of a seagull. Questing, lonely, with vigilant eyes, it seemed to have

great spaces before it; to be flying forth into empty spaces and to an

unseen goal.

"Are you going away, then?" He had not dared, somehow, to ask her

before. He felt now that he could not talk until he knew.

"Not yet," she said. "But I shall be going soon. The hospital is

emptying and my nights on duty are very short. I have, really, only you

and two others to take care of. That's why I am up so early to-day. And

you are so much better that we can have a little talk; if you have

anything to ask me."

"It's this, of course," said Oldmeadow. "It seems to me you ought to

dislike me. I misunderstood you in many ways. And now I owe you my life.

Before we part I want to thank you and to ask you to forgive me."

Her eyes, seen in daylight, were of the colour of distance, of arctic

distances. That had always been their colour, though he had never before

identified it.

"But there is nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am here to take

care of people."

"Even people who misunderstood you. Even people you dislike. I know."

He flushed, feeling that he had been duly snubbed. "But though you take

care of everyone, anyone may thank you, too, mayn't they?"

"I don't dislike you, Mr. Oldmeadow," she said after a moment. "And you

didn't misunderstand me."

"Oh," he murmured, more abashed than before. "I think so. Not, perhaps,

what you did; but what you were. I didn't see you as you really were.

That's what I mean."

The perplexity, which had grown, even, to amazement, had left her eyes

and she was intently looking at him. "There is nothing for you to be

sorry for," she said. "Nothing for me to forgive. You were always

right."

"Always right? I can't take that, you know," said Oldmeadow, deeply

discomposed. "You were blind, of course, and more sure of yourself than

any of us can safely afford to be; but I wasn't always right."

"Always. Always," she repeated. "I was blinder than you knew. I was more

sure of myself."

He lay looking at her and she looked back at him, but with a look that

invited neither argument not protest. It remained remote and vigilant.

She might have been the seagull looking down and noting, as she flew

onward, that the small figure on the beach so far below had ceased to be

that of an assailant in its attitude. How remote she was, white strange,

fleeting creature! How near she had been once! The memory of how near

rushed over his mind. He had, despite the delirious visions of her

stricken face, hardly thought at all, since really seeing her again, of

that last time. Everything had fitted itself on, rather, to his earliest

memories of her, tinged all of them, it was true, with a deeper meaning,

but not till this moment consciously admitting it. It rushed in now,

poignant with the recovered smell of wet, dark ivy, the recovered sound

of her stifled sobs as she had stumbled, broken, beside him in the rain.

And with the memory came the desire that she should again be near.

"Tell me," he said, "what are you going to do? You said you might be

leaving France for ever. Shall you go back to America?"

"I don't think so. Not for a long time," she answered. "There will be

things to do over here, out of France, for a great many years I

imagine."

He hesitated, then took a roundabout way. "And when I get home, if,

owing to you, I ever get there, may I not tell them that you're safe and

sound? It would be happier for them to know that, wouldn't it?"

Her vigilance still dwelt upon him as though she suspected in this

sudden change of subject some craft of approach, but she answered

quietly:

"No; I think it will be happier for them to forget me. They will be told

if I die. I have arranged for that."

"They can't very well forget you," said Oldmeadow after a moment. "They

must always wonder."

"I know." She glanced away and trouble came into her face. "I know. But

as much as possible. You must not make me real again by telling them.

You have promised. You care for them. You know what I mean."

"Yes; I've promised. And I see what you mean. But," said Oldmeadow

suddenly, and this, of course, was what he had been coming to. "I don't

want to forget. I want you to stay real. You must let me know what

becomes of you, always, please."

Astonishment, now, effaced her trouble. "You? Why?" she asked.

He smiled a little. "Well, because, if you'll let me say it, I'm fond of

you. I feel responsible for you. I've been too deeply in your life,

you've been too deeply in mine, for us to disappear from each other.

Don't you remember," he said, and he found it with a sense of

achievement, ridiculous as it might sound, "how I held the tea-pot for

you? That's what I mean. You must let me go on holding it."

But she could feel no amusement. She was pressing her hands tightly

together in her lap, her eyes were wide and her astonishment, he seemed

to see, almost brought tears to them. "Fond? You?" she said. "Of me? Oh,

no, Mr. Oldmeadow, I can't believe that. You are sorry, I know. You are

very sorry. But you can't be fond."

"And why not?" said Oldmeadow, and he raised himself on his elbow the

more directly to challenge her. "Why shouldn't I be fond of you, pray?

You must swallow it, for it's the truth and I've a right to my own

feelings, I hope."

She put aside the playfulness in which his grim earnest veiled itself.

"Because you saw. Because you know. All about me. From the first."

"Well?" he questioned after a moment, still raised on his elbow but now

with the grimness unalloyed. "What of it?"

"You remember what I was. You remember what you saw. You would have

saved them from me if you could; and you couldn't. How can you be fond

of a person who has ruined all their lives?"

"Upon my soul," said Oldmeadow laughing, his eyes on hers, "you talk as

though you'd been a Lucrezia Borgia! What were you worse than an

exalted, stubborn, rather conceited girl? Things went wrong, I know, and

partly because of me. But it wasn't all your fault, I'll swear it. And

if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime."

"Oh, no, no, no," said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had

brought a note of anguish to her voice. "It wasn't that. It was worse

than that. Don't forget. Don't think you are fond of me because I can

make you sleep. It's always been so; I see it now--the power I've had

over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is

good; unless one is using it for goodness."

"Well, so you were," Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her

vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. "It's not because

you make me go to sleep that I'm fond of you. What utter rubbish!"

"It is! it is!" she repeated. "I've seen it happen too often. It always

happens. It binds people to me. It makes them cling to me as if I could

give them life. It makes them believe me to be a sort of saint!"

"Well, if you can help them with it? You have helped them. The war's

your great chance in that, you'll admit. No one can accuse you of trying

to get power over people now."

"Perhaps not. I'm not thinking of what I may be accused of, but of what

happens."

"It doesn't happen with me. I was fond of you--well, we won't go back to

that. And you did use it for goodness. Power came by the way and you

took it. Of course."

"I thought I was using it for goodness. I thought I was good. That was

the foundation of everything. We must go back, Mr. Oldmeadow. You don't

see as I thought you did. You don't understand. I didn't mean to set

myself up above other people. I thought they were good, too. I was happy

in my goodness, and when they weren't happy it seemed to me they missed

something I had and that it was a mistake that I could set right for

them. I'm going back to the very beginning. Long before you ever knew

me. Everything fell into my hand. I loved people, or thought I did, and

if they didn't love me I thought it their mistake. That was the way it

looked to me, for my whole life long, until you came. I couldn't

understand at first, when you came. I couldn't see what you thought. I

believed that I could make you love me, too, and when I saw, for you

made it plain, that you disliked me, it seemed to me worse than mistake.

I thought that you must be against goodness; dangerous; the way you

pushed me back--back--and showed me always something I had not thought I

meant at the bottom of everything I did. I felt that I wanted to turn

away from you and to turn people who loved me away from you, lest you

should infect them. And all the while, all the while I was trying to

escape--the truth that you saw and that I didn't." She stopped for a

moment while, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow stared at her. Her breath

seemed to fail her, and she leaned forward and put her elbows on her

knees and bent her forehead on her joined hands. "It came at last. You

remember how it came," she said, and the passion of protest had fallen

from her voice. She spoke with difficulty. "Partly through you, and,

partly, through my failure; I had never failed before. My failure with

Barney. My failure to keep him and to get him back. I couldn't believe

it at first. I struggled and struggled. You saw me. Everything turned

against me. It was as if the world had changed its shape and colour when

I struggled against it. Everything went down. And when I felt I wasn't

loved, when I felt myself going down, with all the rest, I became bad.

Bad, bad," she repeated, and her voice, heavy with its slow reiteration,

was like a clenched hand of penitence beating on a breast: "really bad

at last, for I had not known before what I was and the truth was there,

staring me in the face. I did dreadful things, then. Mean things; cruel,

hateful things, shutting my eyes, stopping my ears, so that I should not

see what I was doing. I ran about and crouched and hid--from myself; do

you follow my meaning?--from God. And then at last, when I was stripped

bare, I had to look at Him."

She raised herself and leaned back in her chair. Her voice had trembled

more and more with the intensity of the feeling that upheld her and she

put her handkerchief to her lips and pressed it to them, looking across

at him. And, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow looked back at her,

motionless and silent.

Was it sympathy, pity or tenderness that almost overwhelmed him as he

gazed at her? He could not have said, though knowing that the unity that

was in them both, the share of the eternal that upheld their lives,

flowed out from his eyes into hers as he looked and from hers to his.

They were near at last; near as it is rarely given to human beings to

experience nearness, and the awe of such a partaking was perhaps the

ground of all he felt.

"You see," he said, and a long time had passed, "I was mistaken."

She did not answer him. Perhaps she did not understand.

"I never knew you were a person who could come to the truth like that,"

he said.

Still holding her handkerchief to her lips, she slightly shook her head.

"Even you never thought that I was bad."

"I thought everybody was bad," said Oldmeadow, "until they came to know

that goodness doesn't lie in themselves. The reason you angered me so

was that you didn't see you were like the rest of us. And only people

capable of great goodness can know such an agony of self-recognition."

"No," she repeated. "Everyone is not bad like me. You know that's not

true. You know that some people, people you love--are not like that.

They need no agony of recognition, for nothing could ever make them mean

and cruel."

He thought for a moment. "That's because you expected so much more of

yourself; because you'd believed so much more, and were, of course, more

wrong. Your crash was so much greater because your spiritual pride was

so great. And I thought you were a person a crash would do for; that

there'd be nothing left of you if you came a crash. That was my mistake;

for see what there is left."

She rose to her feet. His words seemed to press her too far. "You are

kind," she said in a hurried voice. "I understand. You are so sorry.

I've talked and talked. It's very thoughtless of me. I must go now."

She came and took the tray, but he put his hand on her arm, detaining

her. "You'll own you're not bad now? You'll own there's something real

for me to be fond of? Wait. I want you to acknowledge it, to accept

it--my fondness. Don't try to run away."

She stood above him, holding the tray, while he kept his hold on her

arm. "All I need to know," she said, after a moment, and she did not

look at him, "is that no one is ever safe--unless they always remember."

"That's it, of course," said Oldmeadow gravely, "and that you must die

to live; and you did die. But you live now, really, and life comes

through you again. Your gift, you know, of which you were so much afraid

just now, lest it had enveigled me. Don't you see it? How can I put it

for you? You had a sort of wholeness before. There must be wholeness of

a sort if life is to come through; harmony of a sort, and faith. It

wasn't an illusion even then. When you were shattered you lost your

gift. The light can't shine through shattered things; and that was when

you recognized that without God we are a nothingness; a nothingness and

a restlessness mingled. You know. There are no words for it, though so

many people have found it and tried to say it. I know, too, after a

fashion. I've had crashes, too. But now your gift has come back, for you

are whole again; built up on an entirely new principle. You see, it's

another you I am fond of. You must believe in her, too. You do believe

in her. If you didn't you could not have found your gift."

She had stood quite still while he spoke, looking down, not at him but

at the little tray between her hands, and he saw that she was near

tears. Her voice was scarcely audible as she said: "Thank you." And she

made an effort over herself to add: "What you say is true."

"We must talk," said Oldmeadow. He felt extraordinarily happy. "There

are so many things I want to ask you about." And he went on, his hand

still on her arm, seeing that she struggled not to cry and helping her

to recover: "You're not going away for some time, yet, I hope. Please

don't. There'll soon be no need of hospitals of this sort, anywhere,

will there? and you must manage to stay on here a little longer. I

shan't get on if you go. You won't leave me just as you've saved me,

will you, Mrs. Barney?"

At the name, over-taxed as she was already, a pitiful colour flooded her

face and before his blunder made visible his own blood answered hers,

mounting hotly to his forehead. "Oh, I'm so sorry," he murmured,

helpless and hating himself, while his hand dropped. She stood over him,

holding herself there so as not to hurt him by the aspect of flight. She

even, in a moment, forced herself to smile. It was the first smile he

had seen on her face. "You've nothing to be sorry for, Mr. Oldmeadow,"

she said, as she had said before. "You're very kind to me. I wish I

could tell you how kind I feel you are." And as she turned away,

carrying the tray, she added: "No; I won't go yet."

CHAPTER IV

He did not see her again for two days; and she did not even come at

night. But he now kept possession of his new strength and slept without

her help. The sense of happiness brooded upon him. He did not remember

ever having felt so happy. His life was irradiated and enhanced as if by

some supreme experience.

It was already late afternoon when, on the second day, she appeared; but

in this month of August his room was still filled with the reflection of

the sunlight and the warm colour bathed her as she entered. She wore a

blue cloak over her white linen dress and she had perhaps been walking,

for there was a slight flush on her cheeks and a look almost of

excitement in her eyes.

She unfastened her cloak and put it aside and then, taking the chair

near the window, clasping her hands, as before, in her lap, she said,

without preamble and with a peculiar vehemence: "You hear often from

Barney, don't you?"

Oldmeadow felt himself colouring. "Only once, directly. It rather tires

him to sit up, you know. But he's getting on wonderfully and the doctors

think he'll soon be able to walk a little--with a crutch, of course."

"But you do hear, constantly, from Nancy, don't you," said Adrienne,

clasping and unclasping her hands but speaking with a steadiness he felt

to be rehearsed. "He is at Coldbrooks, I know, and Nancy is with him,

and his mother and Mrs. Averil. It all seems almost happy, doesn't it?

as happy as it can be, now, with Palgrave dead and Barney shackled."

Startled as he was by her directness Oldmeadow managed to meet it.

"Yes; almost happy," he said. "I was with them before I came out this

last time and felt that about them. Poor Mrs. Chadwick is a good deal

changed; but even she is reviving."

"She has had too much to bear," said Adrienne. "I saw her again, too, at

the end, when she came to Palgrave. She can never forgive me. Meg is

happy now, but she will never forgive me either. I wrought havoc in

their lives, didn't I?"

"Well, you or fate. I don't blame you for any of that, you know," said

Oldmeadow.

"I don't say that I blame myself for it," said Adrienne. "I may have

been right or I may have been wrong. I don't know. It is not in things

like that that I was bad. But what we must face is that I wrought havoc;

that if it hadn't been for me they might all, now, be really happy.

Completely happy. If I had not been there Palgrave would not have been

so sure of himself. And if I had not been there Nancy and Barney would

have married."

"I don't know," said Oldmeadow. "If Barney hadn't fallen in love with

you he might very probably have fallen in love with some one else, not

Nancy."

"Perhaps, not probably," said Adrienne. "And if he had he would have

stayed in love with her, for Barney is a faithful person. And it may

have been because I was so completely the wrong person for him that he

came to know so quickly that Nancy was completely the right one. What I

feel is that anybody but Nancy would always have been, really, wrong.

And now that he loves her but is shackled, there's only one thing more

that can be done. I have often thought of it; I needn't tell you that.

But, till now, I could never see my way. It's you who have shown it to

me. In what you said the other day. It's wonderful the way you come into

my life, Mr. Oldmeadow. You made me feel that I had a friend in you; a

true, true friend. And I know what a friend Nancy and Barney have. So

the way opens. We must set Barney free, Mr. Oldmeadow. He and Nancy must

be free to marry. You and I can do it for them and only you and I."

"What do you mean?" Oldmeadow murmured as, after her words, the silence

had grown deep between them. He repeated, using now the name inevitably

and forgetting the other day. "What do you mean, Mrs. Barney?"

To-day she did not flush, but to-day there was a reason for her

acceptance. It was, he saw in her next words, only as Barney's wife that

she could help him.

"He must divorce me," she said. "You and I could go away together and he

could divorce me. Oh, I know, it's a dreadful thing to ask of you, his

friend. I've thought of all that. Wait. Let me finish. I've thought of

nothing else since the other day. It came to me in the night after you

had been so wonderful to me; after that wonderful thing had happened to

us. You felt it, too, I know. It was as if we had taken a sacrament

together. I'm not a Christian. You know what I mean. We felt the deepest

things together, didn't we. And it's because of that that I can ask

this of you. No one else would understand. No one else would care for me

enough, or for him. And then, you could explain it all to him and no one

else could do that. You could explain that it had been to set him free.

To set _me_ free. Because they'd have to think and believe it was for my

sake, too, that you did it, wouldn't they? so as to have it really happy

for them; so that it shouldn't hurt. When it was all over you could go

and explain why you had done it. All we have to do, you know, is to stay

in a hotel together; I bearing your name. It's very simple, really."

He lay staring at her, overwhelmed. The tears had risen to his eyes as

her beauty and her absurdity were thus revealed to him, and as she spoke

of their sacrament; but amazement blurred all his faculties. He had

never in his life been so amazed. And when he began to emerge, to take

possession of himself again, it was only of her he could think; not of

himself or Nancy and Barney. Only of her and of her beauty and

absurdity.

"Dear Mrs. Barney," he said at last, and he did not know what to say;

"it's you who are wonderful, you alone. I'd do anything, anything for

you that I could. Anything but this. Because, truly, this is

impossible."

"Why impossible?" she asked, and her voice was almost stern.

"You can't smirch yourself like that." It was only one reason; but it

was the first that came to him.

"I?" she stared. "I don't think it is to be smirched. I shall know why I

do it."

"Other people won't know. Other people will think you smirched."

"No one I care for. Everyone I care for will understand."

"But to the world at large? Your name? Your reputation?" Oldmeadow

protested. "Do they mean nothing to you?"

A faintly bitter humour touched her lips. "You've always taken the side

of the world in all our controversies, haven't you, Mr. Oldmeadow? and

you were probably right and I was probably wrong; but not because of

what the world would think. I know I'm right now, and those words: name:

reputation--mean nothing to me. The world and I haven't much to do with

each other. A divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and fever hospitals

just as well as the most unsmirched woman of the world. I'm not likely

to want to be presented at courts, am I? Don't think of me, please. It's

not a question of me. Only of you. Will you do it?"

"I couldn't possibly do it," said Oldmeadow, and he was still hardly

taking her monstrous proposal seriously.

"Why not?" she asked, scrutinizing him. "It's not that you mind about

your name and reputation, is it?"

"Not much. Perhaps not much," said Oldmeadow; "but about theirs. That's

what you don't see. That it would be impossible for them. You don't see

how unique you are; how unlike other people. Nancy and Barney couldn't

marry on a fake. The only way out," said Oldmeadow, looking at her with

an edge of ironic grimness in his contemplation, "if one were really to

consider it, would be for you to marry me afterwards and for us to

disappear."

She gazed at him and he saw that she weighed the idea. "But you'd be

shackled then," she said, and her thoughts were evidently clear. "It

would mean, besides, that you would lose them."

"As to being shackled," Oldmeadow, still grimly, met the difficulty,

"that's of no moment. I'm the snuffy, snappy bachelor type, you

remember, and I don't suppose I'd ever have married. As to losing them,

I certainly should."

"We mustn't think of it then," said Adrienne. "You and Barney and Nancy

mustn't lose each other."

"But we should in either way. I could hardly take up my friendship with

them again after Barney had divorced you on account of me, even if you

and I didn't marry. It would give the whole thing away, if it were

possible for them to meet me again. As I say, they'd feel they had no

right to their freedom on such a fake as that."

"They couldn't feel really free unless some one had really committed

adultery for their sakes?" Again Adrienne smiled with her faint

bitterness and he wondered if a man and woman had ever before had a more

astonishing conversation. "That seems to me to be asking for a little

too much icing on your cake. Of course it couldn't be a nice, new, snowy

wedding-cake; poor Mrs. Chadwick wouldn't like it at all, nor Mrs.

Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should

think that when people love each other and are the right people for each

other they'd be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good

deal burned around the edges," Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness

evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.

"But they wouldn't see it at all like that," said Oldmeadow, now with

unalloyed gravity. "They'd see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they

had no right to. It's a question of the laws we live under. Not of

personal, but of public integrity. They couldn't profit by a hoodwinked

law. It's that that would spoil things for them. According to the law

they'd have no right to their freedom. And, now that I am speaking

seriously, it's that I feel, too. What you are asking of me, my dear

friend, is no more nor less than a felony."

She meditated, unmoved, still almost sternly, turning her eyes from him

and leaning her elbow on the window-sill, her head upon her hand. "I

see," she said at last. "For people who mind about the law, I see that

it would spoil it. I don't mind. I think the law's there to force us to

be kind and just to each other if we won't be by ourselves. If the law

gets tied up in such a foolish knot as to say that people may sin to set

other people free, but mayn't pretend to sin, I think we have a right to

help it out and to make it do good against its own will. I don't mind

the law; luckily for them. Because I won't go back from it now. I won't

leave them there, loving each other but never knowing the fullness of

love. I won't give up a thing I feel right because other people feel it

wrong. So I must find somebody else."

Oldmeadow looked at her in a culminated and wholly unpleasant

astonishment. "Somebody else? Who could there be?"

"You may well ask," Adrienne remarked, glancing round at him with a

touch of mild asperity. "You are the only completely right person,

because only you and I feel enough for them to do it for them. What I

must do now is to find some one who would feel enough, just for me, to

do it for me. It makes it more unfair for him, doesn't it. He'll have

only the one friend to help. But on the other hand it will leave them

without a scruple. They'd know from the beginning that with you and me

it was a fake; but with him it might seem quite probable. Yes; it's

strange; I had a letter from him only yesterday. I shouldn't have

thought of him otherwise. I might have had to give up. But the more I

think," Adrienne meditated intently, her head on her hand, her eyes

turned on the prospect outside, "the more I seem to see that Hamilton

Prentiss is the only other chance."

"Hamilton Prentiss?" Oldmeadow echoed faintly.

"You met him once," said Adrienne, looking round at him again. "But

you've probably forgotten. At the dinner we gave, Barney and I, in

London, so long ago. Tall, fair, distinguished looking. The son of my

Californian friend; the one you and Mrs. Aldesey thought so tiresome."

He felt himself colouring, but he could give little thought to the minor

discomfiture, so deeply was his mind engaged with the major one.

"Did we?" he said.

"And you thought I didn't see it," said Adrienne. "It made me dreadfully

angry with you both, though I didn't know I was angry; I thought I was

only grieved. I behaved spitefully to Mrs. Aldesey that night, you will

remember, though I didn't know I was spiteful. I did know, however, that

she was separated from her husband"--again Adrienne looked, calmly,

round at him--"and it was a lie I told Barney when I said I didn't.

Sometimes I think that lie was the beginning of everything; that it was

when I told it that I began to hide from myself. However--" She passed

from the personal theme. "Yes; Hamilton is, I believe, big enough and

beautiful and generous enough to do it."

"Oh, he is, is he?" said Oldmeadow. "And I'm not, I take it. You're

horribly unkind. But I don't want to talk about myself. What I want to

talk about is you. You must drop this preposterous idea of yours. Really

you must. You've had ideas like it before. Remember Meg; what a mess you

made there. I told you then that you were wrong and I tell you you're

wrong now. You must give it up. Do you see? We're always quarrelling,

aren't we?"

"But I don't at all know that I was wrong about Meg, Mr. Oldmeadow,"

said Adrienne. "And if I was, it was because I didn't understand her. I

do understand myself, and I don't agree that I'm wrong or that my plan

is preposterous. You won't call it preposterous, I suppose, if it

succeeds and makes Barney and Nancy happy. No; I'm not going to drop it.

Nothing you could say could make me drop it. As for Hamilton, I don't

set him above you; not in any way. It's only that you and he have

different lights. I know why you can't do this. You've shown me why. And

I wouldn't for anything not have you follow your own light."

"And you seriously mean," cried Oldmeadow, "that you'd ask this young

fellow--I remember him perfectly and I'm sure he's capable of any degree

of ingenuousness--you'd ask him to go about with you as though he were

your husband? Why, for one thing, he'd be sure to fall head over heels

in love with you, and where would you be then?"

Adrienne examined him. "But from the point of view of hoodwinking, that

would be all to the good, wouldn't it?" she inquired; "though

unfortunate for Hamilton. He won't, however," she went on, her dreadful

lucidity revealing to him the hopelessness of any protest he might still

have found to make. "There's a very lovely girl out in California he's

devoted to; a young poetess. He'll have to write to her about it first,

of course; Hamilton's at the front now, you see; and I must write to his

mother. She and Carola Brown are very near each other and will talk it

out together and I feel sure they will see it as I do. They'll see it as

something big I'm asking them to do for me--to set me free. I'm sure I

can count on Gertrude and I'm sure Hamilton can count on Carola. She's a

very rare, strong spirit."

Oldmeadow, suddenly, was feeling exhausted, and a clutch of hysterical

laughter, as she spoke these last words, held his throat for a moment.

He laid his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes, while he saw

Adrienne and Hamilton Prentiss wandering by the banks of a French river

where poplars stood against a silver sky. He knew that he had accepted

nothing when he said at last: "Shall we talk about it another time?

To-morrow? I mean, don't take any steps, will you, until we've talked.

Don't write to your beautiful, big friend."

"You always make fun of me a little, don't you," said Adrienne

tranquilly. She seemed aware of some further deep discomposure in him

and willing, though not comprehending it, to meet it with friendly

tolerance. "If he is big and beautiful, why shouldn't I say it? But I

won't write until we've talked again. It can't be, anyway, until the war

is over. And I've had already to wait for four years."

CHAPTER V

She might feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the

same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she

imagined him resigned, if not converted, to her alternative plan. She

carried a bunch of late roses and said that she had been having a lovely

drive with a dear old friend from Denver, who had managed to get to

Boulogne to see her.

"Your friends all come from such distant places," said Oldmeadow with a

pretended fretfulness that veiled an indescribable restlessness.

"California, Denver, Chicago. They have, all of them, an implacably

remote sound, as if they were carrying you, already, off to other

planets."

"Well, it doesn't take so long, really, to get to any of them," said

Adrienne, placing the roses in a glass of water by his side, a close,

funny little bunch, red roses in the middle and white ones all round.

She had taken off her cloak and laid a newspaper down on the little

table, seating herself, then, in the window and keeping in her hands a

pocket-book that, in its flatness and length and the way she held it,

reminded him of the little blue and grey fan of the dinner-party where

she had told her first lie. His mind was emptied of thought. Only

pictures crossed it, pictures of Adrienne and the tall, fair youth with

the ingenuous eyes, wandering by the French river; and, again, Adrienne

on that night, now as distant as California, when, with her fan and

pearl-wreathed hair, she had met his persiflage with her rebuking

imperturbability. But under the pictures a sense of violent tension made

his breathing shallow. He fixed his eyes on the pocket-book and wondered

how she had nursed people with those ineffectual-looking hands.

"Where were you trained for nursing?" he asked her suddenly. "Out here?

or in England?"

"In England. In Oxford. Before Palgrave was taken," said Adrienne. "I

gave up my philosophy very soon for that. I worked in a hospital there."

"And how came you to go out to Salonika? Tell me about it. And about

your hospital here," he went on with a growing sense of keeping

something off. "It's your own hospital I hear, and wonderfully run. Sir

Kenneth was talking to me about you this morning."

"What a fine person he is," said Adrienne. "Yes, he came to see us and

liked the way it was done." She was pleased, he saw, to tell him

anything he chose to ask about. She told him about her hospital and of

all its adventures--they had been under fire so often that it had become

an everyday event; and about how admirable a staff she had

organized--"rare, devoted people"--and about their wounded, their

desperately wounded _poilus_ and how they came to love them all. He

remembered, as she talked, that she was rich; even richer than he had

thought, since she could leave a fortune to Palgrave and yet equip

hospitals in France and in Salonika. She told him about Salonika, too.

It had been a fever hospital there and the misery and suffering had

seemed worse than the suffering here in France. Yes; she had caught the

fever herself and had nearly died.

She had no gift for the apt or vivid word. Her nature had been revealed

to him as barbarous, or sublime, in its unconventionality, yet it

expressed itself only in the medium of trite convention. But his time of

jibbing at her platitudes was long since passed. He listened, rather,

with a tender, if superficial interest, seeing her heroic little figure

moving, unconcerned, among pestilences and bombardments. "It's not only

what you tell me," he said, when she had brought her recital up to date.

"I heard so much from Sir Kenneth. You are one of the great people of

the war."

"Am I?" she said. That, too, unfeignedly, left her unconcerned.

"You've the gift of leadership. The gift for big things generally."

She nodded. "I'm only fit for big things."

"Only? How do you mean?"

"Little ones are more difficult, aren't they. My feet get tangled in

them. To be fit for daily life and all the tangles; that's the real

test, isn't it? That's just the kind of thing you see so clearly, Mr.

Oldmeadow. Big things and the people who do them are just the kind of

things you see through."

"Oh, but you misunderstood me--or misunderstand," said Oldmeadow. "Big

things are the condition of life; the little things can only be built up

on them. One must fight wars and save the world before one can set up

one's tea-tables." He remembered having thought of something like this

at Lydia's tea-table. "Tea-tables are important, I know, and the things

that happen round them. But if one can nurse a ward of typhus patients

single-handed one must be forgiven for letting the tea-pot slip. Really

I never imagined you capable of all you've done."

"I always thought I was capable of anything," said Adrienne smiling

slightly, her eyes meeting his in a tranquil partaking of the jest, that

must be at her expense. "You helped me to find that out about

myself--with all the rest. And I was right enough in thinking that I

could face things and lead people. But I wasn't capable of the most

important things. I wasn't capable of being a wise and happy wife. I

wasn't even capable of being truthful in drawing-rooms when other women

made me angry. But I can go on battle-fields and found hospitals and

tend the sick and dying. Shells and pestilences"--her smile was

gone--"if people knew how trivial they are--compared to seeing your

husband look at you with hatred."

She had turned her eyes away as she was thus betrayed into revealing the

old bitternesses of her heart and he dropped his to the little

pocket-book that now lay still between her hands. The feeling in her

voice, the suffering it revealed to him, with the bitterness, woke an

unendurable feeling in himself. He did not clearly see what the test was

to which he put himself; but he knew that what he must say to her was

the most difficult thing he had ever had to say; and he found it only

after the silence had grown long.