changed; Barney may have changed. It was only, after all, a moment of
miserable misunderstanding between you. He never really knew what you
were feeling. He thought you didn't care for him any longer, when,
really, you were finding out how much you cared. Don't you think,
before you take final decisions, that you ought to see Barney again?
Don't you think you ought to give him another chance? I could arrange it
all for you, when I got home."
The flood of colour, deep and sick, had mounted to her face, masking it
strangely, painfully, to where the white linen cut across her brow and
bound her chin. And, almost supplicatingly, since he saw that she could
not speak, he murmured: "You can be a wise and happy wife now; and he
loved you so dearly."
She did not lift her eyes. She sat there, looking down, tightly holding
the pocket-book in her lap.
"Let me tell him, when I get home, that I've seen you again," he
supplicated. "Let me arrange a meeting."
Slowly, not lifting her eyes, she shook her head and he heard her, just
heard her say: "It's not pride. Don't think that."
"No; no; I know it's not. Good heavens, I couldn't think it that. You
feel it's no good. You feel that his heart is occupied. It is. I can't
pretend to hide from you that it is. But your place in it was supreme.
There would be no unfairness if you took it again. Nancy would be the
first person to want you to take it. You know that that is true of
Nancy."
"I know. I heard her plead for me," said Adrienne.
The sentence fell, soft and trenchant; and he remembered, in the silence
that followed, what she had heard. He drew a long breath, feeling half
suffocated. But he had met his test. It was inevitable, he knew it now,
that she should say "Barney and I are parted for ever."
Silence dropped again between them. He did not know what was passing
behind its curtain and whether bitterness or only grief was in her
heart.
He lay, drawing the slow, careful breaths of his recovery, and saw her
presently put out her hand and take up her _New York Herald_ and unfold
it. She looked down the columns unseeingly; but the little feint of
interest helped her.
Slowly the colour faded from her face and it was as if the curtain
lifted when, laying the paper down, she said, and he knew that she was
finding words to comfort him: "Really everything is quite clear before
me now. I shall write at once to Hamilton, and to his mother. If he
agrees, if they all agree, he and I can go away very soon I think.
Afterwards, I shall stay over here. I've quite made up my mind to that.
There'll be so much to do; for years and years; for all one's lifetime.
Ways will open. When one is big," she smiled the smile at once so gentle
and so bitter, "and has plenty of money, ways always do. I'm a
_déracinée_ creature; I never had any roots, you know; and I can't do
better, I'm sure, than to make soil for the uprooted people to grow in
again. That's what's most needed now, isn't it? Soil. It's the
fundamental things of life, its bare possibilities, that have been so
terribly destroyed over here. America has, still, more soil than she can
use, and since I'm an American, and a rich one, my best plan is to use
America, in my fortune and my person, for Europe. Because I love them
both and because they both need each other."
She had quite recovered herself Her face had found again its pale, fawn
tints and she was looking at him with her quietest contemplation while
he, in silence, lay looking at her.
"It's not about the things I shall do that I'm perplexed, ever," she
went on. "But I'm sometimes perplexed about myself. I sometimes wish I
were a Roman Catholic. In an order of some kind. Under direction. To put
oneself in the hands of a wise director, it must be so peaceful. Like
French friends I have; such wise, fine women; so poised and so secure. I
often envy them. But that can't be for me."
She must feel in his silence now the quality of some extreme emotion,
and that she believed it to be pity was evident to him as she went on,
seeking to comfort him; and troubled by his trouble: "You mustn't be
sorry. I am not unhappy. I am a happy person. Do you remember that
Sunday morning at Coldbrooks, long ago? How I said to Mother--to Mrs.
Chadwick--that I had no doubts? You thought me fatuous. I dimly saw that
you thought me fatuous. But it's still true of me. I must tell you, so
that you shan't think I'm unhappy. I've been, it seems to me, through
everything since then. I've had doubts--every doubt: of myself; of life;
of all the things I trusted. Doubt at last, when the dreadful darknesses
came--Barney's hatred, Palgrave's death--of God. We've never spoken of
Palgrave, have we? I was with him, you had heard, and at the very end it
was he who helped me rather than I him. He held me up. When he was dying
he held me up. He made me promise him that I would not kill myself--for
he guessed what I was thinking; he made me promise to go on. And he
saved me. The light began to come back to me while I sat beside him
after he had died."
She had not looked at him while she spoke, but down at her hands that,
trembling, turned and returned the little pocket-book. And controlling
her voice as she sought to control the trembling of her hands, she said:
"Perhaps it is always like that. When one confesses one's sin and hates
it in oneself, even if it is still there, tempting one, the light begins
to come back. After that it came more and more. What you call my gift is
part of it. Isn't it strange that I should have had that gift when I was
so blind? But what you said was true. I had a sort of wholeness then,
because I was blind. And now that I see, it's a better wholeness and a
safer gift. That is what I wanted to say, really. To explain, so that
you shan't be sorry. No one who can find that light can be unhappy. It
comes to me now, always, when I need it. I can make it shine in other
people--as Palgrave made it shine in me. Love does it. Isn't it
wonderful that it should be so? Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing
is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through
and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness."
All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands,
he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him,
as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.
He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to
widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney,
Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia--poor Lydia--and that they were being borne
away from him for ever. He saw nothing before him but Adrienne; and for
how long was he to keep her? That was his supreme risk; but he could
not allay it or step back to the further brink. It was his very life
that had fallen in two while she had spoken and without the sense of
choice; though he dimly saw that, in the restlessness and urgency of the
hours since he had seen her last, the choice had been preparing.
He was taking the only step possible for him to take on the narrow
foothold of the present when he said, in a voice so quiet that she might
even be unaware of his seeming gross irrelevance, "Do you know, about
your plan--for Barney and Nancy--I've been thinking it over and I've
decided that it must be I, not Hamilton."
CHAPTER VI
Her eyes met his for a long time before he realized that she might find
not only irrelevance but even irreverence. She had shown him her very
soul and he had answered with this announcement. Of course it had been
because of what she told him that he had seen at last his own necessity;
but he could not tell her that.
"I'm not sorry for you," he said. "I envy you. You are one of the few
really happy people in the world."
"But I'd quite given that idea up, Mr. Oldmeadow," she said. "What has
made you change?"
He saw the trouble in her face, the suspicion of her power and its
compulsion over the lives of others. He took the bull by the horns.
"You, of course. I can't pretend that it's anything else. I want to do
it for you and with you."
"But it's for Barney and Nancy that it's to be done," she said, and her
gravity had deepened. "It's just the same for them--and you explained
yesterday that it would spoil it for them."
"It may spoil it somewhat," said Oldmeadow, contemplating her with a
curious tranquillity; she was now all that was left him in life to
contemplate; and she was all he needed. "But it won't prevent it. I
still think it a wrong thing to do. I still think it a felony. But,
since I can't turn you from it, what I've come to see is that it's, as
you said, for you and me, who care for them, to do. It's not right, not
decent or becoming, that anyone who doesn't even know them should be
asked to do such a thing."
"But Hamilton wouldn't do it for them," she said. "It would be for me he
would do it. And he wouldn't think it a felony."
"All the more reason that his innocence shouldn't be taken advantage of.
I can't stand by and see it done. It's for my friends the felony will be
committed and it's I who will bear the burden for them. As to his doing
it for you, I know you better than he possibly can know you, and care
for you more than he possibly can. If you're determined on committing a
crime, I'll share the responsibility with you."
"I know you care more. You are a wonderful friend. You are my best
friend in the world." She gazed at him and he saw that for once he had
troubled and perplexed her. "And it's wonderful of you to say you'll do
it. But Hamilton won't feel it a burden; not as you will; and for him to
do it won't spoil it for them. If you do it, it will spoil it for them.
You said so. And how can I let you do a thing you feel so wrong for my
sake?"
"You'll have to. I won't have Hamilton sacrificed in order that their
cake shall have no burnt edges. They'll have to pay something for it in
social and moral discomfort. It would be nothing to the discomfort of
Miss Brown, would it? I shall be able to put it clearly to Barney when I
write and tell him that it's for your sake as well as his and that he
and Nancy, who have never sought anything or hoped for anything, are in
no way involved by our misdemeanour. I won't emphasize to Barney what I
feel about that side of it. He's pretty ingenuous, too. It will be a
less tidy happiness they'll have to put up with. That's all it comes to,
as far as they are concerned."
She was looking at him with the trouble and perplexity and she said:
"They'll have to pay in far more than social and moral discomfort."
"Well? In what way? How?" he challenged her.
"You said they'd lose you."
"Only, if you married me," he reminded her.
But she remembered more accurately. "No. They'd lose you anyway. You
said so. You said that if they could ever see you again it would make it
too blatantly a fake. And it's true. I see it now. How could you turn up
quietly, as if nothing had happened, after Barney had divorced me with
you as co-respondent? There's Lady Cockerell," said Adrienne, and,
though she was so grave, so troubled, it was with a touch of mild
malice. "There's Mr. Bodman and Johnson, to say nothing of Mrs. Chadwick
and Nancy's mother. No, I really don't see you facing them all at
Coldbrooks after we'd come out in the 'Daily Mail' with head-lines and
pictures."
Her lucidity could indeed disconcert him when it sharpened itself like
this with the apt use of his vocabulary. He had to stop to think.
"There won't, at all events, be pictures," he paused by the triviality
to remark. "We shan't appear. It will be an hotel over here and the case
will be undefended. We needn't, really, consider all that too closely.
At the worst, if they do lose me, it's not a devastating loss. They'll
have each other."
"Ah, but who will you have?" Adrienne inquired. "Hamilton will have
Carola and they will have each other. But who will you have?"
He lay and looked at her. There was only one answer to that question
and he could not make it. He was aware of the insufficiency of his
substitute. "I'd have your friendship," he said.
"You have that now," said Adrienne. "And though I'm so your friend, I'll
be leaving you, soon, probably for ever. We'll probably never meet
again, Mr. Oldmeadow. Our paths lie so apart, don't they? My friendship
will do you very little good."
Her words cut into him, but he kept a brave countenance. "I'd have the
joy of knowing I'd done something worth while for you. How easily I
might have died here, if it hadn't been for you. My life is yours in a
sense and I want you to use it rather than Hamilton's. I have my work,
you know; lots of things I'm interested in to go back to some day. As
you remarked, a divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and in the same way
a co-respondent can write articles and go to concerts."
"I know. I know what a fine, big life you have," she murmured, and the
trouble on her face had deepened. "But how can I take it from you? A
felony? How can I let you do, for my sake, something you feel to be so
wrong?"
"Give it up then," said Oldmeadow. And if he had found it difficult to
make his plea for Barney a little while before, how much more difficult
he found it to say this, and to mean it, now. "Give it up. That's your
choice, and your only choice. You owe that to me. Indeed you do. To give
it up or to accept me as your companion in iniquity. I'm not going to
pretend I don't think it iniquity to give you ease. You're not a person
who needs ease. And I can do without it, too. For your sake. So there
you have it."
"Not quite. Not quite," she really almost pleaded. "I couldn't ask it of
Hamilton if he felt about it in the least little way as you do. And
Carola doesn't care a bit about the law either. She's an Imagist, you
know."--Adrienne offered this fact as if it would help to elucidate
Carola's complaisances. "She's written some very original poetry. If it
were Hamilton no one would lose anything, and Barney and Nancy would be
free. Indeed, indeed I can't give it up when it's all there, before me,
with everything to gain and nothing to lose for anybody, if it's
Hamilton."
"Then it must be me, you see," said Oldmeadow. "And I shan't talk to you
about the iniquity again, I promise you. I've made my protest and
civilization must get on as best it can. You're a terrible person, you
know"--he smiled a little at her, finding the banter so that she should
not guess at the commotion of his heart. "But I like you just as you
are. Now where shall we go?"
CHAPTER VII
He could not have believed that it would be so delicious to live with
Adrienne Toner.
Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been,
though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of
the discrepancies between them, and during the three months that
separated them, he at Cannes, she nursing in Paris, he knew many doubts;
never of his love, but of what it was making him do and of where it was
going to lead them. He couldn't for the life of him imagine what was to
become of them if his hopes were fulfilled, for he hardly saw himself
following her off to Central Europe--it was to Serbia, her letters
informed him, that her thoughts were turning--nor saw them established
in London under the astonished gaze of Lydia Aldesey.
She had selected Lyons as their place of meeting, because of the work
for the _rapatriés_ that she wished to inspect there, and from the
moment that he saw her descend from the Paris express, dressed in dark
civilian clothes and carrying, with such an air of competence, her rug
and dressing-case, all doubts were allayed and all restlessness
dispelled.
He had arrived the day before and had found an old-fashioned hotel with
spacious rooms overlooking the Saône, and, as they drove to it on that
November evening, she expressed herself, scrutinizing him with a
professional eye, as dissatisfied with his recovery.
It was because of the restlessness, of course, that he had not got as
well as he should have, and he knew that he must, in the stress of
feeling that now beset him, look strangely, and he promised her, feeling
that he spoke the truth, that now that he had his nurse again complete
recovery would be only a matter of days.
"I want you to see our view," he said to her when the porter had carried
up her little box and they were left alone in the brocaded and gilded
salon that separated their rooms; "I chose this place for the view; it's
the loveliest in Lyons, I think."
There was still a little twilight, and standing at the window they
looked down at the lighted quai with its double row of lofty plane-trees
and across the jade-green Saône at St. Jean, the grey cathedral, and at
the beautiful white _archevêché_ glimmering in a soft, dimmed atmosphere
that made him think of London.
"There's a horrible modern cathedral up on the hill," he said; "but we
don't need to see it. We need only see the river and the _archevêché_
and St. Jean. And in the mornings there's a market below, a mile of it,
all under huge mushroom-coloured umbrellas; flowers and cheeses and
every kind of country produce. I think you'll like it here."
"I like it very much. I think it's beautiful," said Adrienne. "I like
our room, too," and she turned and looked up at the painted ceiling and
round at the consoles and mirrors, inlaid tables and richly curved,
brocaded chairs. "Isn't it splendid."
"Madame Récamier is said to have lived here," Oldmeadow told her. "And
this is said to have been her room."
"And now it's mine," said Adrienne, smiling slightly as though she
found the juxtaposition amusing.
Already the stealing sense of deliciousness was breathing over him. The
very way in which she said, "our room," was part of it. Even the way in
which she said that made him feel the peace, comfort, and charm of a
shared life as he had never before felt it. And the sense grew and grew
on that first evening.
It was delicious to hear the waiters address her as Madame, and to know
that it was his madame they imagined her to be, when he sat opposite to
her at their little table in the dining-room. She wore a grey dress now
and, with her quiet, her calm glances cast about her, might indeed have
been the veritable Madame Oldmeadow inscribed at the _bureau_. If they
had the aspect of a devoted, long-mated couple, it was because of her
calm. But she would have been as unperturbed, he felt sure, had she been
stopping there under her own name instead of his and looked upon as his
well-established mistress. Situations would never embarrass her as long
as she knew what she was doing with them. That night when she gave him
her hand at bedtime she said, looking at him with the affectionate,
professional eyes: "I'll come and put you to sleep if you need me; be
sure to let me know."
But he had no need to call her. He slept as soundly as though she sat
beside him with her hand upon his brow.
So the mirage of conjugal felicity was evoked about him.
She poured out his coffee for him in the morning wearing a silk
_négligé_ edged with fur, and said, as they buttered their rolls, that
they must buy some honey for their breakfasts. She said, too, that they
must do a great deal of sight-seeing in the afternoons. "There is so
much to be seen in Lyons. And I shall finish with my _rapatrié_ work in
the mornings." He asked if he might not come with her to the _rapatrié_
work, but was told that he was not yet strong enough for more than one
walk in the day. "In our evenings, after tea," she went on, "I thought
perhaps you'd like to study Dante a little with me. My Dante is getting
so rusty and I've brought a very fine edition. Are you good at Italian?"
He said he wasn't, but would love to read Dante with her.
"And we must get a piano," she finished, "and have music after dinner.
It will be a wonderful holiday for me."
So the days fell at once into a series of rituals. He saw that she had
always mapped them out conscientiously, as Mrs. Toner had doubtlessly
taught her to do, careful of the treasure of time--as Mrs. Toner would
have said--entrusted to each soul by life. So, no doubt, Adrienne would
put it still. And what he would, in first knowing her, have found part
of her absurdity, he found now part of her charm.
That was what it all came back to. He saw, reconstructing their past,
that from the beginning she had had her deep charm for him.
It was the trivial word for the great fact; the compulsion of
personality; the overflow of vitality; the secret at once of the saint
and of the successful music-hall singer. Her own absorption in life was
so intense that it communicated itself. Her confidence was so secure
that it begot confidence. Her power was implicit in all she did. It was
not only the _rapatriés_ she dealt with, as, at the first, she had dealt
with the wounded. She dealt as successfully and as accurately with the
little things of life. Honey was on their breakfast-table; flowers on
the consoles; music on the piano. The gilded hotel salon became a home.
She was still, in demeanour, the cultured, travelled American, equipped
always, for their walks, with a guide-book or history, from which she
often read to him as they paused to lean on the parapets of the splendid
quais. There were few salient facts in the history of the potent city
that were not imparted to him; and with anyone else what a bore it would
have been to have to listen! But he was more than content that she
should tell him about the Romans or Richelieu. It was everything to him
to feel that they shared it all, from the honey to Richelieu.
And with all the intimacy went the extreme reserve.
She had showed him, when it was necessary for their understanding as
friends, the centre of her life; yet she remained, while so gentle, so
absorbed, and even loving, as remote, as inaccessible, as he had felt
her to be on those first days in the hospital. She never referred to her
own personal situation not to any emotion connected with it. She never
referred to herself or expressed a taste or an opinion touched with
personal ardour. He did not know what she was really feeling, ever.
Though, when he looked at her, sitting opposite him in her grey and
addressed by the assiduities of the waiters, he could imagine that he
was living with a wife, he could imagine more often that he was living
with a nun. Her control and her selflessness were cloistral. He could
not think her in any need of a director.
They walked one afternoon along the Quai des Brotteaux, returning from
the park of the Tête d'Or, where they had wandered on the gravel under
the tall, melancholy trees and fed the deer. The ugly yet magnificent
city was spread before them in one of its most splendid aspects,
climbing steeply, on the further banks of the Rhône, to the cliff-like
heights of the Croix Rousse and marching, as it followed the grandiose
curve of the river, into a sunset sky where the cupola of the Hospice
hung like a dark bubble against the gold and the Alps, not visible from
the river level, seemed yet to manifest themselves in the illumined
clouds ranged high above the horizon.
Ten days of their appointed fortnight had now passed and while Oldmeadow
kept a half unseeing yet appraising eye upon the turbulent glories of
the river, he was wondering when and how he should make his revelation
and his appeal. If her reserve made it more difficult to imagine, her
intimacy did not make it more easy. It was because she was so intimate
that she had remained so unaware. For all his self-command he felt sure
that in any other circumstances she could not, for these ten days, have
remained so blind.
Here she walked beside him, the Madame Oldmeadow of the hotel, looking
before her as she walked and thinking, he would have wagered, not of him
but of Serbia.
She wore a beautifully adjusted little costume, conveying in its sober
darkness the impression of richness and simplicity that her clothes had
always given him. Fur was turned up about her ears and a small hat of
fur and velvet was turned down over her eyes as she had always worn her
hats. The straight fringe of gold showed under its brim and under the
gold were those calm, those questing, melancholy eyes.
Or perhaps--he carried further his rueful reverie--she was thinking
about the date of the Hospice. He had the guide-book in his pocket.
"Isn't it jolly?" he suggested, as she looked up at him, indicating the
prospect spread before them and adding, since he knew that his English
instinct for boyish understatement still puzzled her: "Like a great,
grim queen in shabby clothes; raised on such a throne and crowned with
such jewels that one feels her glorious rather than ugly."
Adrienne studied the shabby queen attentively and then looked back at
him. Perhaps something dwelling in his eyes, something for her only and
not at all for Lyons, caught her more special attention, for she said
suddenly, and so unexpectedly that, with a sort of terror, he felt that
his crisis might be coming: "You've been very dear to me, Mr. Oldmeadow,
in all our time here. I feel it to have been a great privilege, you
know; a great opportunity."
"Really? In what way?" He could at all events keep his voice quiet and
light. "I thought it had been you who made all the opportunities."
"Oh, no. I never make any of the opportunities I am thinking of," said
Adrienne. "I only know how to take them. It isn't only that you are more
widely and deeply cultured than I am--though your Italian accent isn't
good!"--she smiled; "but I always feel that you see far more in
everything than I do, even when you seem to be seeing less. I have to go
carefully and pick up fact by fact, while you see things in a sort of
vision and they are all related as they enter your mind. That's where my
privilege comes in. You make me share your vision sometimes. You have
the artistic mind, and I am not really artistic at all--though Mother
always wanted that for me more than anything; with all that goes with
it."
She was speaking of herself--though it was only in order to express more
exactly her gratitude, and, as he walked beside her, he was filled with
the mingled hope and terror. After all he had still four more days of
her. It would be terrible to spoil them.
"No; you aren't artistic," he agreed. "And I don't know that I am,
either. Whether I am or not, I feel mine to have been the opportunity
and the privilege."
"I can't understand that at all," she said, with her patent candour.
"It may be part of the artistic temperament to feel things one can't
understand. Though I do understand why I feel it," he added.
"And it's part of the artistic temperament not to try"--Adrienne turned
their theme to its more impersonal aspect. "Never to try to enjoy
anything that you don't enjoy naturally. I don't believe I ever enjoy
any of the artistic things quite naturally. I've always been trained to
enjoy and I've always tried to enjoy; because I thought it was right to
try. But since I've been here with you I've come to feel that what I've
enjoyed has been my own effort and my mastery of the mere study, and I
seem to feel that it might be as well to give up trying and training and
fall back on the things that come naturally; scenery artists would think
sentimental, and babies; and patriotic songs." She smiled a little as
she found her list. But she was grave, too, thinking it out and adding
another to her discovered futilities.
"It may be as well to limit your attention to the sentimental scenery
and the babies, since you've so many other things to do with it," he
acquiesced. "We come back to big people again, you see; they haven't
time to be artistic; don't need to be."
"Ah, but it's not a question of time at all," said Adrienne, and he
remembered that long ago, from the very first, he had said that she
wasn't stupid. "It's a question of how you're born. That's a thing I
would never have admitted in my old days, you know. I would never have
admitted that any human soul was really shut out from anything. Perhaps
we're not, any of us, if we are to have all eternity to grow in. But as
far as this life is concerned I see quite clearly now that some people
are shut out from all sorts of things, and that the sort of mistake I
made in my old time was in thinking that anyone who had the will could
force eternity into any given fragment of our temporal life. I did do a
little philosophy, you see! That's what I mean and you understand, I
know. All the same I wish I weren't one of the shut-out people. I wish I
were artistic. I'd have liked to have that side of life to meet people
with. I sometimes think that one doesn't get far with people, really, if
all that one has to give are the fundamental things like the care of
their minds and bodies. One goes deep, of course; but one doesn't go
far. You can do something for them; but there's nothing, afterwards,
that they can do _with_ you; and it makes it rather lonely in a
way--when one has time to be lonely."
He did not know, indeed, whether she saw the beauty of the scene spread
before them as they walked, and he was remembering, with a sort of
tranced tenderness, the flower-wreathed shepherdess and her crook; and
Mrs. Toner with her lilies and seagulls. But why should she see beauty
when she made it? It was all that he could see in her now.
"What you can do for them afterwards is to pour out their coffee for
them in the most enhancing way," he suggested, "and make sight-seeing a
pleasure, and arrange flowers and place chairs and tables so that a
hotel salon becomes loveable. If you find the person to whom you can
give the fundamental things and do all sorts of homely things with
afterwards, why be lonely? We are very happy together, aren't we? We get
a great deal out of each other. I can speak for myself, at all events;
and you've just told me that I give something, too. So why should you go
off to Central Europe next week? Why not go back with me to the South,"
he finished, "and wander about together enjoying, quite naturally, the
sentimental scenery?"
He held his breath after he had thus spoken, wondering with intensity,
while he felt his heartbeats, what she would make of it. He knew what he
could make of it, seizing his opportunity on the instant, if only she
would recognize the meaning that underlay the easy words. And framed in
the little hat on the background of transfigured Lyons, Adrienne's face
was turned towards him and, after he had made his suggestion, she
studied him in silence for what seemed to him a long lapse of time. Then
she said, overwhelmingly:
"That's perfectly lovely of you, Mr. Oldmeadow."
"Not at all; not perfectly lovely at all," he stammered as he
contradicted her and he heard that his voice sounded angry. "It's what I
want. I want it very much."
"Yes. I know you do. And that's what's so lovely," said Adrienne. "I
know you want it. You are sorry for me all the time. And you want to
cheer me up. Because you feel I've lost so much. But, you know; you
remember; I told you the truth that time. I don't need cheering. I'm not
unhappy. One can be lonely without being unhappy."
"I'm not sorry for you," poor Oldmeadow rejoined, still in the angry
voice. "I'm not thinking of you at all. I'm thinking of myself. I'm
lonely, too, and I am unhappy, even if you aren't."
She stopped short in her walk. He saw in her eyes the swift, almost
diagnosing solicitude that measured his need and her own capacity. It
was as though his temperature had gone up alarmingly.
"Dear Mr. Oldmeadow," she said; and then she faltered; she paused. She
no longer found her remedies easily. "It's because you are separated
from your own life," she did find. "It's because all this is so bitter
to you; what you are doing now--how could I not understand?--and the
war, that has torn us all. But when it's over, when you can go home
again and take up your own big life-work and find your own roots,
happiness will come back; I'm sure of it. We are all unhappy sometimes,
aren't we? We must be; with our minds and hearts. Our troubled minds;
our lonely hearts. But you know as well as I do, dear Mr. Oldmeadow,
that our souls can find the way out."
Her nature expressed itself in platitudes; yet sometimes she had
phrases, rising from her heart as if from a fountain fed by unseen
altitudes, that shook him in their very wording. "Our troubled minds.
Our lonely hearts," echoed in his ears while, bending his head
downwards, he muttered stubbornly: "My soul can't, without you."
She still stood, not moving forward, her eyes raised to his. "Please
don't say that," she murmured, and he heard the trouble in her voice.
"It can't be so, except for this time that you are away from everybody.
You have so many things to live for. So many people near you. You are
such a big, rare person. It's what I was afraid of, you know. It happens
so often with me; that people feel that. But you can't really need me
any longer."
He said nothing, still not raising his eyes to hers, and she went on
after a moment. "And I have so many things to live for, too. You've
never really thought about that side of my life, I know. Why should you?
You think of any woman's life--isn't it true?--as not seriously
important except on its domestic side. And you know how important I
think that. But it isn't so with me, you see. I have no hearth and I
have no home; I have only my big, big life and it's more important than
you could believe unless you could see it all. When I'm in it it takes
all my mind and all my strength and I'm bound to it, yes, just as
finally, just as irrevocably as a wife who loves is bound by her
marriage vows; because I love it. Do you see? They are waiting for me
now. They need me now. There are starving people, dying people; and
confusion; terrible confusion. I have a gift for all that. I can deal
with it. Those are just the things I can deal with. And I mustn't put it
off any longer--when our time is up. I must leave you, my dear, dear
friend, however much I'd love to stay."
She was speaking at last with ardour, and about herself. And what she
said was true. He had never thought about her work except in the sense
that he thought her a saint and knew that saints did good deeds. That
she was needed, sorely needed, by the starving and dying, was a fact,
now that it was put before him, silencing and even shaming him. It gave
him, too, a new fear. If she had her blindness, he had his. His hopes
and fears, after all, were all that he had to think of; she had the
destinies of thousands. He remembered Sir Kenneth's tone in speaking of
her; its deep respect. Not the respect of the man for the
tender-hearted, merciful woman; but the respect of a professional expert
for another expert; respect for the proved organizer and leader of men.
"I have been stupid," he said after a moment. "It's true that I've been
thinking about you solely in relation to myself. Would you really love
to stay? If it wasn't for your work? It would be some comfort to believe
that."
"Of course I'd love to stay," she said, eagerly scanning his face. "I'd
love to travel with you--to pour out your coffee in Avignon, Nîmes,
Cannes--anywhere you liked. I'd love our happy time here to go on and
on. If life could be like that; if I didn't want other things more. You
remember how Blake saw it all:
'He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.'
I mustn't try to bend and keep this lovely time. I must let it fly--and
bless it as it goes. And so it will bless me."
She seldom made quotations nowadays. For this one he felt a gratitude
such as his life had rarely known.
"It's been a joy to you, too, then?"
"Of course it has," said Adrienne smiling at him and turning at last
towards the bridge that they must cross. "It's been one of the most
beautiful things that has ever happened to me."
CHAPTER VIII
Oldmeadow sat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon
of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off
speaking to Adrienne till their last evening, so he had put off writing
to Barney and to Lydia Aldesey till this last afternoon, and he saw now
how difficult it would be to write coherently while his thoughts
stretched themselves forward to those few hours of the night when his
fate would be decided.
Adrienne had gone out. She had written her short communication to Barney
and brought it in with its envelope and laid it before him, asking him
in the voice that, again, made him think of snow: "Is that quite right?"
It was, quite, he told her, after glancing through it swiftly. It
stated, in the most colourless terms, the facts that Barney was to take
to his solicitor. "Quite right," he repeated, looking up at her. "Are
you going out? Will you post it?--or shall I?"
"Will you post it with yours? Yes. I must go out. But I'll try to be
back by tea-time. It's very disappointing; our last afternoon. But that
poor woman from Roubaix--the one with consumption up at the Croix
Rousse--is dying. They've sent for me. All the little children, you
remember I told you. I'm going to wire to Joséphine and ask her if she
can come down and look after them for a little while."
"Joséphine?" he questioned. He had, till now, entirely forgotten
Joséphine. Adrienne told him that she was with her parents in a
provincial town. "They lost their only son and are very sad. Fine, brave
old people. He is a baker, the old father, and makes the most wonderful
bread. I went to see them last summer."
Their packing was done and the room denuded; the men had taken away the
piano that morning. He had his letters to write; so there was really no
reason why she should not go. And there was, besides, nothing that they
had to say to each other, except the one thing he had to say.
The silence that overtakes parting friends on a station platform had
overtaken them since the morning, though, at lunch, Adrienne had talked
with some persistence of her immediate plans and prospects and about the
unit of doctors and nurses who were to meet her in Italy. There was no
reason why she should not go, and he would even rather she did. He would
rather see no more of her until evening when everything but the one
thing would be over and done with. And so he was left with his letters,
leaning his elbows on the table over the hotel paper and staring out at
the Saône and the white _archevêché_.
Both letters were difficult to write; but beside the one to Lydia, the
one to Barney was easy. Barney, after all, was to gain everything from
what he had to tell him, and Lydia was to lose; how much was Lydia to
lose? He recalled their last evening together and its revelations and
saw that the old laughing presage was now more than fulfilled. Lydia was
to lose more than her toes and fingers; in any case. Even if he returned
to her alone, she cared for him too much not to feel, always, the shadow
of his crippled heart; his heart not only crippled, but occupied, so
occupied that friendships, however near, became, in a sense,
irrelevancies. And if he returned with Adrienne--but could he return
with Adrienne? What kind of a life could he and Adrienne lead in
London?--even if Lydia's door, generously, was opened to them, as he
believed it would be--knowing her generous.
He laid down his pen and fixed his eyes on the river and he tried to see
Lydia and Adrienne together. But it was a useless effort. From this
strange haven of the Lyons hotel where he had spent the happiest
fortnight of his life, he could not see himself into any future with
familiar features. He could only see himself and Adrienne, alone, at
hotels. To attempt to place her in Lydia's generous drawing-room was to
measure more accurately than he had yet measured it the abyss that
separated him from his former life. If it could be spanned; if Adrienne
could be placed there, on the background of eighteenth-century fans and
old glass, she became a clipped and tethered seagull in a garden,
awkward, irrelevant, melancholy. Lydia might cease to find her
third-rate and absurd; but she wouldn't know what to do with her any
more than she would have known what to do with the seagull. So what, if
Adrienne became his wife, remained of his friendship with Lydia?
He put aside the unresolved perplexity and took Barney first.
"My dear Barney," he wrote,--"I don't think that the letter Adrienne has
written to you will surprise you as much as this letter of mine. You
will understand from hers that she wishes to free herself and to free
you. You will understand that that is my wish, too. She only tells you
that she has been staying here with me, for a fortnight, as my wife;
that's for your solicitor; you will read between the lines and know that
it seemed worth while to both of us to make the necessary sacrifice in
order to gain so much for you and for her. I hope that you and my dear
Nancy will feel that we are justified, and that you will take your
happiness as bravely as we secure it for you. You'll know that our step
hasn't been taken lightly.
"But, now, dear Barney, comes my absolutely personal contribution. It is
a contribution, for it will make you and Nancy happier to know that I
have as much to gain as you and she. I have fallen in love with Adrienne
and I hope that I may win her consent to be my wife. Yes, dear Barney,
unbelievable as it will look to you, there it is; and she dreams of it
as little as you could have dreamed of it. I met her again, as her
letter informs you, at the Boulogne hospital. She asked me to say
nothing about our meeting. She wanted to disappear out of your lives.
She saved my life, I think, and I saw a great deal of her. What I found
in her that I had not seen before I need not say.
"My great difficulty, my burden and perplexity now, lie in the fact that
she has no trace of feeling for me that might give me hope. We became,
at Boulogne, the best of friends; such friends that this plan suggested
itself to her; and we remain, after our fortnight here, the best of
friends; and that is all. Yet I have hope, unjustified and groundless
though it may be, and had I not had it from the beginning I couldn't
have entered upon the enterprise; not even for you and Nancy. From one
point of view it's possible that you may feel that I've entered upon it
in spite of you and Nancy. You may feel inclined to repudiate and disown
the whole affair and to remain unaware of it. In that case it would come
down to an appeal from me to you to carry it through for my sake. But
from another point of view it makes it easier for you; easier for you to
accept, since my hope gives integrity to the situation. That's another
thing that decided me. If it had been mere sham I don't think I could
have undertaken it. Adrienne felt none of my scruples on this score. She
walked over legal and conventional commandments like a saint over hot
ploughshares. But I haven't her immunities. I should have felt myself
badly scorched, and felt that I'd scorched you and Nancy, if my hope
hadn't given everything its character of _bona fides_.
"Dear Barney, dear Nancy, please forgive me if I've been selfish. It
hasn't all been selfishness, that I promise you; it was in hopes for
you, too; and I have to face sacrifices. The worst of them will be that
if Adrienne takes me I'll have to lose you. You can measure the depth of
my feeling for her from the fact that I can make such sacrifices.
Perhaps you'll feel that even if she doesn't take me I'll have to lose
you. I hope not. I hope, in that case, that mitigations and refuges will
be found for me and that some day you'll perhaps be able to make a
corner in your lives where I may creep and feel my wounds less aching.
In any case, after Adrienne, you are the creatures dearest to me in the
world and I am always and for ever your devoted friend,
ROGER."
* * * * *
And now Lydia. There was no use in thinking about it. The plunge must be
taken.
"My dear Lydia," he wrote,--"I have fallen in love with Adrienne Toner.
I feel that with such a friend as you it's better to begin with the
bomb-shell. She doesn't know it, and if we are here in this Lyons hotel
together, it's only, she imagines, because she wishes to set Barney free
and that I've undertaken, for her sake and for Barney's, a repugnant
task. It is a repugnant task, in spite of what it may mean to me of
happiness. I hate it for her, and for Barney and for myself. But since
she was determined on it and since, if it wasn't I it was to be another
friend, and since I have fallen in love with her, I saw that it was only
decent that the co-respondent in the case should be the man who married
her afterwards. For I hope to become her husband, and I haven't one jot
of ground for my hope. We are studying Dante together, and she shows me
the sights of Lyons. She is just the same. Yet completely altered.
"I don't know whether you'll feel you can ever see me again, with or
without her. I don't want to cast myself too heavily on your compassion,
so I'll only remind you that even if I return to England alone I shall
probably have to lose Nancy and Barney and that you will be my only
refuge. It will be the culmination of my misfortunes if I have to lose
you.
"Dear Lydia, I am always your devoted
"ROGER"
* * * * *
But he hadn't lost her. He knew he hadn't lost her; in any case. And the
taste of what he did was sharp and bitter to him, for she was generous
and loyal and he had cut off her very limbs. When he had addressed and
stamped the letters he went downstairs, and, for the sense of greater
finality, carried them to the post instead of dropping them into the
hotel-box.
He had almost the sense of disembodiment as he returned to the empty and
dismantled room. He seemed to have become a mere consciousness suspended
between two states of being. The past was gone. He had dropped it into
the post-box. And he saw no future. He felt, for the moment, no hopes.
At the moment it seemed absurd to think that Adrienne could ever love
him. He tried to picture Coldbrooks and Somer's Place when the
bomb-shell struck them. Would Barney show Nancy the letter? Nancy would
be pale, aghast, silent. Barney would have to wait for days, perhaps,
before saying to her: "But, after all, it's for their sakes, too, Nancy
dear. See what Roger says." Mrs. Averil would cast up her hands and cry
"That woman!"--but, perhaps, with as much admiration as repudiation, and
Meg, if she were summoned to the scene of confusion, would say, "So
she's got hold of Roger, too." Funnily enough it was the dear March
Hare, he felt sure, who would be the first one to stretch out a hand
towards the tarnished freedom. "After all, you know," he could hear her
murmuring, "it would be much _nicer_ for Barney and Nancy to be married,
wouldn't it? And Adrienne wasn't a Christian, you know, so probably the
first marriage doesn't _really_ count. We mustn't be conventional,
Monica." Yes, perhaps it would go like that at Coldbrooks. But at
Somer's Place Lydia would sit among her fans and glass and wish that
they had never seen Adrienne Toner.
He paced up and down before the windows and he had never been so lonely
in his life. He was so lonely that he became aware at last that his mere
negative state was passing into a positive and that grief at the
severance of old ties had become fear of losing Adrienne. The fear and
the loneliness seemed actualized when, at five, the waiter appeared
bearing the tea-tray on his shoulder. He had never had tea alone before
in this strange, foreign room. Adrienne always made a complicated and
charming ritual of the occasion, boiling the water on their own little
spirit-kettle and measuring the tea from her own caddy--the very same
kettle and caddy, she told him, that had accompanied herself and her
mother on all their travels. And to see the cups and bread and butter
and not to have her there, added a poignant taste of abandonment to his
loneliness.
She kept the kettle in her room and when the boy was gone he softly
opened the door and went in. It would keep his heart up to have the
water boiling in readiness for her arrival. He recognized, as he stood,
then, and looked about him, that his instinct had also been that of
taking refuge. In her room he could more closely recover the sense of
her presence.
She had finished all the essentials of her packing and her box stood
with its lid open ready for the last disposals. Yet the room seemed
still full of her personality. He noted it all gazing around him with
eyes almost those of a solemn little boy permitted to glance in at a
Christmas-tree.
Her dressing-table, improvised from the mantelpiece, was neatly laid out
with small, worn, costly, and immaculate appurtenances. He moved forward
and looked at them, not touching. The initials intertwined on the backs
of the ivory brushes were her girlish ones: A. T. She had discarded,
long since, no doubt, her wedding toilet set.
If he became her husband, the thought crossed his mind and quickened his
heart, he might brush her hair for her, that wonderful golden hair,
before many months were over.
Near the ivory hand-glass stood two photographs in a folding frame of
faded blue leather. He stooped to look and saw that one was of Mrs. and
the other certainly of Mr. Toner, in their early days. Remote,
mysterious and alien, their formally directed eyes looked back at him
and in the father's ingenuous young countenance, surmounted by a roll of
hair that was provincial without being exactly rural, the chin resting
upon a large, peculiar collar, he could strangely retrace Adrienne's
wide brow and steadfast light-filled eyes. Mrs. Toner wore a ruffled
dress and of her face little remained distinct but the dark
gaze--forceful and ambiguously gentle.
The room was full of the fragrance that was not a fragrance and that
had, long ago, reminded him of Fuller's earth. A pair of small blue
satin _mules_ stood under a chair near the bed.
Only after he had withdrawn, gently closing the door behind him, did he
realize that he had forgotten the kettle and then he felt that he could
not go back again. A moment after the boy returned with a note, sent, by
hand, he was informed, from the Croix Rousse.
"I am so dreadfully sorry, so disappointed," he read. "Our last
afternoon, but I can't get away yet. Don't wait dinner for me, if I
should be late, even for that. I won't be very late, I promise, and we
will have our evening."
The note had no address. He rushed forth and down to find the messenger
gone. Had he only known where to seek her in the vast, high, melancholy
district of the Croix Rousse he would have gone to join her. His sense
of loneliness was almost a panic.
Of course, he tried to fix his mind on that realization, as he went back
to the salon, her rapatriés had no doubt preoccupied her mind, from the
first, quite as much as their own situation. She had spoken to him in
especial of this family and of their sorrows. One child they had left
dead at Evian and the mother, on the eve of their return to their
Northern home, had become too desperately ill to travel. "Such dear,
good, _gentle_ people," he recalled her saying. No; he must not repine.
After all he had only the one thing to say to her; and the evening would
be long enough for that.
It was nearly seven when he heard her quick footstep outside. When she
entered, the brim of her little hat, in the electric light, cast a sharp
shadow over her eyes, but he saw at once that she had been crying.
She came in so quickly that he had not time to rise and, going to him,
behind his chair, she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him
down, saying: "I'm so sorry to have left you all alone."
It was astonishingly comforting to have her put these fraternal hands
upon him like this. She had never done it before. Yet there was a salty
smart in her words to him. What else did she intend to do but leave him
all alone for always?
"I'm dreadfully lonely, I confess," he said, "and I see that you're
dreadfully tired."
She went round to the other side of the table and sat down, not looking
at him and said, in a low voice: "Oh--the seas--the seas of misery."
"You are completely worn out," he said. He was not thinking so much of
the seas of misery as of his few remaining hours. Were they to be
spoiled by her fatigue?
"No; not worn out. Not at all worn out," said Adrienne, stretching her
arms along the table in front of her as she sat, and though she had wept
he could see something of ardour, of a strength renewed, in the lines of
her pallid lips. "I've sat quite still all afternoon. I've been with
him. She died soon after I got there. At the end she was talking about
the little girl's grave at Evian. I was able to comfort her about that.
She was so afraid it would not be tended. That it would have no flowers.
Joséphine will go to Evian afterwards and see about it. There are always
dear nuns to do those things. There was a nun with her to-day. That was
the greatest comfort of all; and the priest who came. But I was with the
father and the five poor little children; so frightened and miserable. I
could not leave them, you see. He talked and talked and talked. It
helped him to talk and tell me about their home and how they had had
everything so nice and bright. Linen, a garden, a goat and fowls. Oh, if
only she could have seen her home again! That was what he kept saying
and saying. They were full of hope when they got to Evian. He told me
how the children sang at dawn when the train panted up the mountain
among the golden trees. Like birds, he said, and _Vive la France_! They
all believed they were to be safe and happy. _Et, Madame, c'était notre
calvaire qui commencait alors seulement._"
She spoke, not really thinking of him, he saw, absorbed still in the
suffering she had just left, measuring her power against such problems
and the worse ones to which she was travelling to-morrow.
"Joséphine will be with them, I hope," she went on presently, "in three
or four days. She will help them to get home and then she will come back
and go to see about the grave at Evian. Joséphine is a tower of strength
for me."
Her eyes were raised to him now, and, as they rested, he saw the
compunction, the solicitude, with which they had met him on her
entrance, return to them. "I'm not so very late, am I?" she said,
rising. "I'll take off my hat and be ready in a moment."
"Don't hurry," said Oldmeadow.
She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke,
and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their
salon: "Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for
an hour. Until nine. It's not unselfishness. I'd rather have half of you
to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all."
"How dear of you," she said. She looked at him with gratitude and,
still, with the compunction. "It would be a great rest. It would be
better for our talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like
Napoleon," she added with a flicker of her playfulness.
When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the
quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and
as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed
to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the
grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast
fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself,
he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the
analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of
Adrienne's life--her "big, big" life--looming there before him,
becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere
and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a
vocation?--for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as
involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa.
How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need
and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a
discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and
his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his
shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the
cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless
branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of
the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them.
He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. After all, she wasn't
really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour.
Couldn't she, after a winter in Serbia, found crêches and visit slums in
London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its
justification. Women weren't meant to go on, once the world's crisis
past, doing feats of heroism; they weren't meant for austere careers
that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of
intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was
guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He
would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her
in Serbia or California.
CHAPTER IX
The gilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to
Adrienne's door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his
heart sank as he wondered if she might not sleep on, in her fatigue,
sleep past all possible hour for their colloquy. Yet he did not feel
that he could go in and wake her. The analogy of the cathedral loomed
before him. It would be like waking Saint Theresa.
He walked up and down the empty, glittering salon; walked and walked
until the clock struck ten. Desperation nerved him then and he went
again to her door and knocked.
With hardly a pause her voice answered him; yet he knew that he had
awakened her and it echoed for him with the pathos of so many past
scenes of emergency when it must so have answered a summons from
oblivion: "Coming, coming." Among bombings, he reflected; and sudden
terrible influxes of dying men from the front.
"Coming," he heard her repeat, on a note of dismay. She had sprung up,
turned on her light and seen the hour.
He was reminded vividly, as he saw her enter--and it was as if a great
interval of time had separated them--of his first meeting with her. She
was so changed; but now as then she was more composed than anyone he had
ever met.
But it was of much more than the first meeting that the pale, still face
reminded him. His dreams were in it; the dream where she had come to
him along the terrace, lifting her hand in the moonlight; and the dream
of horror when he had again and again pushed it down to drown.
"I'm so ashamed," she said, and he saw that it was with an effort she
smiled. The traces of her weeping were now, after her sleep, far more
visible, ageing her, yet making her, too, look younger; like a child
with swollen lids and lips. "I didn't know I was so tired. I slept and
slept. I didn't stir until I heard your knock. Never mind. We'll talk
till midnight."
She was very sorry for him.
She sat down at the table and under the electric chandelier her braided
hair showed itself all ruffled and disarranged. She had on her dark
travelling dress and she had thrust her feet into the pale blue satin
_mules_. The disparity of costume in one so accurate, her air of
readiness for the morrow, made him feel her transitoriness almost more
than her presence, though his sense of that pressed upon him with a
stifling imminence. Even though she sat there the room kept its look of
desolate, glittering emptiness and more than their shared life in it he
remembered the far places from which she had come and to which she was
going. It was as if she had just arrived and were pausing for the night
_en route_.
As he had seen them years ago, so he saw again the monster engines
crossing the prairies at night and flying illumined pennons of smoke
against the sky as they bore her away from blue seas, golden sands, a
land where the good and gifted lurked behind every bush; and before her
stretched the shining rails, miles and miles of them, running through
ruin and desolation, that were to bear her ever onwards into the
darkness. This was what life had brought her to. She had been only a
sojourner among them at Coldbrooks. The linked life of order and family
affection had cast her forth and he saw her, for ever now, unless he
could rescue her, with only hotels to live in and only the chaos she was
to mould, to live for. She seemed already, as she sat there under the
light with her ruffled hair, to be sitting in the train that was to bear
her from him.
"I think you owe me till midnight, at least," he said. He had not sat
down. He stood at some little distance from her leaning, his arms
folded, against a gilded and inlaid console. "We've lots of things to
talk about."
"Have we?" Adrienne asked, smiling gently, but as if she humoured an
extravagance. "We'll be together, certainly, even if we don't talk much.
But I have some things to say, too."
She had dropped her eyes to her hands which lay, lightly crossed, on the
table before her, and she seemed to reflect how best to begin. "It's
about Nancy and Barney," she said. "I wanted, before we part, to talk to
you a little about them. There are things that trouble me and you are
the only person with whom I can keep in touch. You will know how I shall
be longing to hear, everything. You'll let me know at once, won't you?"
"At once," said Oldmeadow.
"There might be delays and difficulties," Adrienne went on. "I shall be
very troubled until all that is clear. And then the money. You know
about the money? Barney isn't well off and he was worse off after I'd
come and gone. I tried to arrange that as best I could. Palgrave
understood and entered into all my feelings."
"Yes; I'd heard. You arranged it all very cleverly," said Oldmeadow.
He moved away now and, at the other end of the room, his back to her,
came to a standstill, while his eyes dwelt on a large gilt-framed
engraving that hung there; some former Salon triumph; a festive,
spring-tide scene where young women in bustles and bonnets offered sugar
to race-horses in a meadow, admired by young men in silk hats.
"Do you think this may make a difficulty?" Adrienne asked. "Make him
more reluctant to take what is to come to him? It's Mrs. Chadwick's now,
you know."
"You've arranged it all so well," said Oldmeadow, noting the gardenias
in the young men's button-holes, "that I don't think they can get away
from it."
"But will they hate it dreadfully?" she insisted, and he felt that her
voice in its added urgency protested, though unconsciously, against his
distance; "I seem to see that they might. If they can't take it as a
sign of accepted love, won't they hate it?"
"Well," said Oldmeadow, trying to reflect, though his mind was far from
Barney and Nancy, "dear Eleanor Chadwick doesn't mind taking it,
whatever it's a sign of. And since it will come to Barney through her, I
don't think there'll be enough personality left hanging about it to hurt
much."
"I wish they could take it as a sign of accepted love," Adrienne
murmured.
"Perhaps they will," he said. "I'll do my best that they shall, I
promise you."
It was one thing to promise it and another to know his hope that it
might be a promise never to be redeemed. The cross-currents in his own
thought made him light-headed as he stood there, his back to her, and
examined the glossy creatures in the meadow. "Do you think it will all
take a long time?" Adrienne added, after a little pause. "Will they be
able to marry in six or eight months, say?"
"It depends on how soon Barney takes action. Say about a year," he
suggested. "They'd wait a little first, wouldn't they?"
"I hope not. They've waited so long already. I hope it will be as soon
as possible. I shall feel so much more peaceful when I hear they're
married. Could you, perhaps, make them see that, too?"
And again he promised. "I'll make them see everything I can."
He turned to her at last. She sat, her face still downcast in its
shadow, while the light glittered on her wreaths of hair. Her hands
still lay before her on the table, and the light fell on her
wedding-ring. Perhaps she was looking at the ring.
"It all depends on something else," he heard himself say suddenly.
She turned her head and looked round at him. His attitude, his distance
from her, drew her attention rather than his words, for she repeated
mildly: "On something else?"
"Whether I can keep those promises, you know," said Oldmeadow. "Yes, it
all depends on something else. That's what I want to talk to you about."
He hardly knew what he was saying as he approached the table and pushed
the brocaded chair, companion to the one in which she sat, a little
from its place. He leaned on its back and looked down at her hands and
Adrienne kept her eyes on him, attentive rather than perplexed.
"May I talk to you about it now?" he asked. "It's something quite
different."
"Oh, do," said Adrienne. She drew her hands into her lap and sat
upright, in readiness. And, suddenly, as he was silent, she added:
"About yourself? I've been forgetting that, haven't I? I've only been
thinking of my side. You have quite other plans, perhaps. Perhaps you're
not going back to England for ever so long. Is it an appointment?"
"No; not an appointment," he muttered, still looking down, at the table
now, since her hands were no longer there. "But perhaps I shan't be
going back for a long time. I hope not."
"Oh," she murmured. And now he had perplexed her. After what he had just
promised her, his hope must perplex and even trouble her. "Do tell me,"
she said.
"It's something I want to ask you," said Oldmeadow--"And it will
astonish you. You may find it hard to forgive; because I've meant to ask
it from the beginning; from our deciding to go away together. As far
back as the time in the hospital."
"But you may ask anything. Anything at all," she almost urged upon him.
"After what I've asked you--you have every right. If there's anything I
can do in the wide, wide world for you--oh! you know how glad and proud
I should be. As for forgiveness"--he heard the smile in her voice, she
was troubled, yet tranquil, too--"you're forgiven in advance."
"Am I? Wait and see." He, too, tried to smile, as he used the tag; but
it was a mechanical smile and he felt his heart knocking against the
chair-back as he went on: "Because I haven't done what you asked me to
do as you asked me to do it. I haven't done it from the motive you
supposed. It's been for Barney and for Nancy and for you; but it's been
most of all for myself." He screwed his glass into his eye as he spoke
with a gesture as mechanical as the smile had been and he looked at her
at last, thus brought nearer. "I want you not to go on to-morrow." It
was the first, the evident, the most palpable desire that rose to his
lips. "I want you never to go on again, alone. If you can't stay with
me, I want you to let me follow you. When the time comes I want you to
marry me. I love you."
The light as it fell on her seemed suddenly strange, almost portentous
in its brilliancy. Or was it her stillness, as she sat and gazed at him
after he had spoken the words, that was strange and portentous? It was
as if they arrested the currents of her being and she sat tranced,
frozen into the fixed shape of an astonishment too deep for emotion. Her
eyes did not alter in their gentleness; but the gentleness became tragic
and pitiful, like the inappropriate calm on the mask of a dead face at
Pompeii, fixed in an eternal unreadiness by the engulfing lava.
She put up her hand at last and pushed back her hair. With her forehead
bared she became more like the photograph of her father. When she spoke
her voice was slow and feeble, like the voice of a person dangerously
ill. "I don't understand you."
"Try to," said Oldmeadow. "You must begin far back."
She still kept her hand pressed upon her hair. "You don't mean that it's
the conventionally honourable thing to do? Oh, no; you don't mean that?"
Her face in its effort to understand was appalled.
"No; I don't mean anything conventional," he returned. "I'm thinking
only of you. Of my love. I'll come with you to Serbia to-morrow--if
you'll let me. I could kneel and worship you as you sit there."
"Oh," she more feebly murmured. She sank back in her chair.
"My darling, my saint," said Oldmeadow, gazing at her; "if you must
leave me, you'll take that with you; that the man who destroyed you is
your lover; that you are dearer to him than anything on earth."
"Oh," she murmured again, and she put her hands before her face. Her
eyes were hidden; she had spoken no word of reproach and he could not
keep himself from her. He knelt beside her, grasping the chair across,
behind her. She was so near that he could have laid his head upon her
breast. "Don't leave me," he heard his pleading voice, but she seemed so
much nearer than his own voice; "or let me come. Everything shall be as
you wish and when you wish. Tell me that you care, too; or that you can
come to care. Tell me that you can think of me as your husband."
She was there, with her hidden eyes, within his arms, and inevitably
they closed around her, and though he heard her murmur, "Please, please,
please," he could not relinquish her. She was free and he was free.
They had cut themselves off from the world. They were alone in the
strange city; in the strange, bright, hallucinated room; and he knew
from the ache and rapture of her nearness how he had craved it.
But, gently, he heard her say again, "Please," and gently she put him
from her and he saw her face, and her eyes full of grief and gentleness.
"Forgive me," she said.
"My darling. For what?" he almost groaned. "Don't say you're going to
break my heart."
She kept her hand on his breast, holding him from her while she looked
into his eyes. "It is so beautiful to be loved," she said, and her voice
was still the slow, feeble voice of exhaustion. "Even when one has no
right to be. Don't misunderstand. Even when one may not love back; not
in that way. Forgive me; not in that way; my dearest friend."
"Why mayn't you love back? Why not in that way? If it's beautiful, why
mayn't you?"
"Sit there, will you? Yes; keep my hand. How weak I've been, and cruel.
It can't be. Don't you know? Haven't you seen? It has always been for
him. He must be free; but I can never be free."
"Oh, no. No. That's impossible," Oldmeadow said, leaning towards her
across the table and keeping her hand in both of his. "I can't stand
that. I could stand your work, your vocation, better. But not Barney,
who loves another woman. That's impossible."
"But it is so," she said, softly, looking at him. "Really it is so."
"No, no," Oldmeadow repeated, and he raised her hand to his lips and
kept it there, a talisman against the menace of her words. "He lost
you. He's gone. I've found you and you care for me. You can't hide from
me that you care for me. Just now. For those moments. You were mine."
"No," she repeated. "I was weak and cruel, but I was not yours."
She had been incredibly near so short a time ago before. Now, looking at
him, with her difficult breaths and gentle, inflexible eyes, she was
incredibly remote. "I am his, only his," she said. "I love him and I
shall always love him. It makes no difference. He loves Nancy, but it
makes no difference. He is my husband. The father of my baby."
She tried to speak on steadily while she thus gave him the truth that
ended all his hope; but the desperate emotion with which he received it
made real and overpowering to her her outlived yet living sorrow. With
all that she must relinquish laid bare to her in the passion of his eyes
she could measure all that she had lost, as she had, perhaps, till then,
never measured it. "Don't you know?" she said. "Don't you see? My heart
is broken, broken, broken."
She put her head down on her arms as she said the words and he heard her
bitter weeping.
He knew, as he listened, that it was all over with him. Dimly, in the
terrible suffering that wrenched at him, he received his further
revelation of the nature already nearer him than any in the world. Her
strength would be in all she did and felt. She had loved Barney and she
would always love him. Her marriage had been to her an ultimate and
indissoluble experience. That was why she had been so blind. She could
not have thought of herself as a woman to be again loved and wooed.
Her hair lay against his hands, still holding hers, and he found himself
stroking it, without tenderness or solicitude it seemed. It seemed to be
only automatically that his fingers passed across it, while he noted its
warmth and fineness and bright, lovely colour, remembering that he had
thought it at the first her one indubitable beauty.
They sat there thus for a long time. The gilt clock paused, choked, then
in a voice of hurrying, hoarsened silver rang out eleven strokes.
Footsteps passed and faded up the corridor; doors closed. A tramway on
the quai clashed and clanged, came to a noisy standstill, and moved on
again with a rattling of cables and raucous blasts from a horn; and in
the profound silence that followed he seemed to hear the deep old river
flowing.
"Really, you see, it's broken," said Adrienne. She had ceased to weep,
but she still leaned forward, her head upon her folded arms. "You saw it
happen," she said. "That night when you found me in the rain."
"I've seen everything happen to you, haven't I?" said Oldmeadow.
"Yes," she assented. "Everything. And I've made you suffer, too. Isn't
that strange; everybody who comes near me I make suffer."
"Well, in different ways," he said. "Some because you are near and
others because you won't be."
His voice was colourless. His hand still passed across her hair.
"Don't you see," she said, after a moment, "that it couldn't have been.
Try to see that and to accept it. Not you and me. Not Barney's friend
and Barney's wife. In every way it couldn't have done, really. It makes
no difference for me. I'm a _déracinée_, as I said. A wanderer. But what
would have become of you, all full of roots as you are? You can live it
down without me. You never could have with. And how could you have
wandered with me? For that must be my life."
"You know, it's no good trying to comfort me," said Oldmeadow. "What I
feel is that any roots I have are in you."
"They will grow again. The others will grow again."
"I don't want others, darling," said Oldmeadow. "You see, my heart is
broken, too."
She lifted her head at last and he saw her marred and ravaged face.
"It can't be helped," he tried to smile at her. "You weren't there to be
recognized when I first met you and now that you are there, I've come
too late. I believe that if I'd come before Barney, you'd have loved me.
It's my only comfort."
"Who can say," said Adrienne. Her gaze, as she looked at him, was deep
with the mystery of her acceptance. "Perhaps. It seems to me all this
was needed to bring us where we are--enmity and bitterness and grief.
And my love for Barney, too. Let me tell you. It's in the past that I
think of him. As if he were dead. It's something over; done with for
ever; yet something always there. How can one be a mother and forget?
Even when he is Nancy's husband and when she is a mother, I shall not
cease to feel myself his wife. Perhaps you think that strange, after Meg
and what I believed right for her. But it is quite clear to me, and
simple. It isn't a thing of laws and commandments; only of our own
hearts. If we can love again, we may. But for me it would be impossible.
With me everything was involved. I couldn't, ever, be twice a wife."
Silence fell between them.
"I'll see about the little girl's grave," said Oldmeadow suddenly. He
did not know what had made him think of it. Perhaps something that had
gone on echoing in him after she had spoken of her maternity. "I'll go
to Evian to-morrow. It will spare Joséphine the journey and give me
something to do. You'll tell me the name and give me the directions
before you go."
Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him; but they did not fall. They
could need no controlling. The springs of weeping must be nearly
drained. "Thank you," she said, and she looked away, seeming to think
intently.
It was now too late for the tramways. They had ceased to crash and
rattle by, but a sound of belated singing passed along the quais,
melancholy in its induced and extravagant mirth.
The horrible sense of human suffering that had beaten in upon him at the
hospital, pressed again upon his heart. He saw himself departing next
day to find the abandoned grave and he saw himself standing beside her
train and measuring along the shining rails the vast distances that were
to bear her away for ever.
"That's the worst," he said. "You're suffering too. I must see you go
away and know that you are unhappy. I must think of you as unhappy. With
a broken heart."
Her eyes, after she had thanked him, had been fixed in the intent
reverie. She, too, perhaps, had been seeing those tides of misery, the
sea of which she had spoken, breaking in tragic waves for ever; so
unchanged by all the alleviations that love or mercy could bring; and it
was perhaps with despair that she saw herself as one with it. Her eyes
as she turned them on him were full of distance and of depth and, with
sickening grief, he felt that a woman with a broken heart could do
nothing more for herself or for him.
But her thought, whatever the voids of darkness it had visited, drew
nearer and nearer to his need as she looked at him. Something of her own
strong vigilance was in the look, bringing the seagull to his mind. The
seagull caught and battered by the waves, with sodden wings, half
dragged down, yet summoning its strength to rise from the submerging
sea.
"But you can be happy with a broken heart," she said. Their hands had
fallen apart long since. She stretched out hers now and took his in her
small, firm grasp.
"Can you?" he asked.
"You mustn't think of me like this," she said, and it was as if she read
his thoughts and their imagery. "I went down, I know; like drowning.
Sometimes the waves break over you and pull you down, and there seems
nothing else in all the world but yourself and what you've suffered. But
it doesn't last. Something brings you up again."
Something had brought her up again now. His darkness. His misery. It was
as if he saw her spread her wings and saw her eyes measuring, for them
both, the spaces of sea and sky.
He remembered a picture in a book he had loved as a little boy: little
Diamond held to the breast of the North Wind as she flies forth in her
streaming hair against a sky of stars. So he felt himself lying on her
breast and lifted with her.
"I've told you how happy I can be. It's all true," she said. "It's all
there. The light, the peace, the strength. I shall find them. And so
will you."
"Shall I?" he questioned gently. "Without you?"
"Yes. Without me. You will find them. But you won't be without me," said
Adrienne.
Already she was finding them. He knew that, for, as she looked at him,
he felt an influence passing from her to him like the laying of her hand
upon his brow. But it was closer than that. It was to her breast that
her eyes held him while, in a long silence, the compulsion of her faith
flowed into him. First quietness; then peace; then a lifting radiance.
"Promise me," he heard her say.
He did not know what it was he must promise, but he seemed to feel it
all without knowing and he said: "I promise."
She rose and stood above him. "You mustn't regret. You mustn't want."
She laid her hands upon his shoulders as she spoke and looked down at
him, so austere, so radiant. "Anything else would have spoiled it. We
were only meant to find each other like this and then to part."
"I'll be good," said Oldmeadow. It was like saying one's prayers at
one's mother's knees and his lips found the child-like formula.
"We must part," said Adrienne. "I have my life and you have yours and
they take different ways. But you won't be without me, I won't be
without you. How can we be, when we will never, never forget each other
and our love?"
He looked up at her. He had put out his hands and they grasped her dress
as a donor in a votive altarpiece grasps the Madonna's healing garment.
It was not, he knew, to keep her. It was rather in an accepting
relinquishment that he held her thus for their last communion, receiving
through touch and sight and hearing her final benison.
"I will think of you every day, until I die," she said. "I will pray for
you every day. Dear friend--dearest friend--God bless and keep you."
She had stooped to him and for a transcending moment he was taken into
her strong, life-giving embrace. The climax of his life was come as he
felt her arms close round him and her kiss upon his forehead. And as she
held him thus he believed all that she had said and all for which she
could have found no words. That he should find the light and more and
more feel their unity in it: that the thought of her would be strength
to him always; as the thought of him and of his love would be strength
to her.
After she had gone, he sat for a long time bathed in the sense of her
life, and tasting, for that span of time, her own security of eternal
goodness.
THE END
Typographical error was corrected by the etext transcriber:
"Adriennes mustn't fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only
justification for Adriennes is to be in the right. => "Adrienne mustn't
fail," said Mrs. Averil dryly. "The only justification for Adrienne is
to be in the right. {pg 241}