Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 28

As he had expected, his companion replied, "Ah, no; he died eight, nine years since." And Mr. Haseltine then went on to tell, taking the war as the obvious interest, and not without the satisfaction that Guy had so often met and so often loathed, that he had lost dear ones. "Children of my eldest son. Fine lads. Brave boys. One in the first month--at the Marne; the other only last year, flying. Yes; I've done my bit," said Mr. Haseltine, with the fatuity that he was so plentifully companioned in displaying.

"Bit." Odious word. His "bit." Why his? Had any one written a poem on the formula coming from the lips of those for whom others had died? A scattered, flagellating line or two floated through Guy's mind.

Something about barbed wire came in. He wondered how old Mr. Haseltine would have felt about his "bit," hung up on that and unable to die. He wondered where the fine lads now lay. No more coffee for them, with cream in it; no more robins singing; no more strolling smokes among mignonette in the sunlight. How they were forgotten, already, except for trophies, for self-glorification to display! How pleased, how smug this rescued, comfortable world! Something of his distaste attached itself even to Mrs. Baldwin when she next appeared. Something irritating him in her peacefulness. She, too, had seen nothing and lost nothing. But, at all events, she wouldn't, he knew that, take any stand on the two nephews to claim her "bit." There was nothing fatuous about Mrs.

Baldwin. The slight distaste still lingered, however, and he found himself wondering once or twice, during the day that pa.s.sed, in spite of it, so pleasantly, whether she wasn't, for all his idealizing similes, a stupid as well as a sweet woman. It was not because of filial self-effacement that she let her father do all the talking at meals: it was simply because she had nothing to say, and the good old boy was quite right in taking his responsibility for granted. The person who could talk was the responsible person. Her mind, though so occupied, was quite singularly inactive and, he was sure, completely uncritical. She didn't find her father in the least a bore, or suspect that anybody else might find him so. She did find, Guy felt sure, satisfaction in all her occupations. He heard her laughing--a quiet little laugh--with Cathy in the kitchen; and in the afternoon, when he helped her to p.r.i.c.k out seedlings, her attentive profile--as, after he had dug each hole, she dropped in the little plant, pressed the earth about its roots, and fixed it in its place--made him think of the profile of a child putting its dolls to bed. They planted three beautiful long rows, and Guy was quite tired by tea-time, for though they had high tea at half-past six, they were not deprived of the precious afternoon pause, taking place as it did at the unaccustomed but pleasing hour of four.

After tea she went to see some people in the village, Mr. Haseltine dozed in his chair, and Guy took a long walk.

So the days went on, and at the end of a week he was able to write to Dorothy and tell her that he was sleeping wonderfully and that Mrs.

Baldwin's cottage was all that she had pictured it. By the end of the week he had even grown rather attached to Mr. Haseltine, and he enjoyed playing chess with him every evening; and sometimes they had a game in the afternoon when tea was over. The undercurrent of irritation still flowed, but he had learned to put up with the old gentleman and to circ.u.mvent his communicativeness, and in the case of Mrs. Baldwin he more and more felt that she was the sort of person to whom one would, probably, forgive anything. It had become evident to him that what might be dulness might also be unawareness. That was a certain kind of dulness, it was true, but it didn't preclude capacity for response if the proper stimulus were applied. It amused him to note that if none of the nearly inevitable jars of shared life seemed ever to occur between her and her father, it was simply because, when a difference arose, she remained unconscious of it unless it were put before her. Nothing could have been less in the line of selfishness; it was she who thought of him, of his comfort and happiness, and who ordered her life to further them; he, in this respect, was pa.s.sive; but Guy felt that the poor old boy often brooded in some disconsolateness over small trials and perplexities that a companion more alert to symptoms would have discerned and dispelled at once. Mr. Haseltine even, sometimes, confided such grievances to the P.G.

"I don't want to bother Effie about it," he said;--E. had stood for Effie--"she's a dreamy creature and very forgetful. But it's quite evident to me that the rector and his wife have been expecting to be asked to tea to meet you. I've just been talking to them in the lane, and I saw it plainly. They had asked us to bring you before you arrived, hearing we were to have another guest,--they've always been most kind and neighbourly in helping us to entertain our new friends,--and I really don't know why Effie should have got out of it. I usually have to remind her, it's true. But I sometimes get tired of always having to.

She doesn't care for them herself; but that's no reason why you might not. We have few enough interests to offer visitors."

Guy was glad to have escaped the rectory tea, though he did not say this in a.s.suring Mr. Haseltine that the entertainment offered at Thatches was absolutely to his taste. He was completely out of place at any rectory; he could imagine no rector who would not find his poems pernicious; but he felt that there was justice in Mr. Haseltine's contention. He _might_ have cared for them. As it was, Mr. Haseltine was brought once again to reminding her. It was evident then that she was ready to please anybody or everybody.

"Ask them? Ought I to ask them?"

"My dear, it's ten days since they sent their invitation. They spoke again--and it's the second time--of having been so sorry not to see us, when I met them yesterday, in the lane. I don't know why you did not go."

"I thought it would bore Mr. Norris, father. He came here for quiet, you know. But would it bore you?" she asked Guy. "They are very nice. I don't mean that."

"It's certainly very pleasant being quiet," said Guy; "but if Mr.

Haseltine likes having them, I a.s.sure you that people don't frighten me in the least."

"Oh, not on my account," Mr. Haseltine protested. "I see our good friends continually. It is of them I am thinking, as well as of Mr.

Norris. He might find them more interesting than you do, Effie, and they will, I fear, be hurt."

Now that it was put before her, Mrs. Baldwin did it every justice, rising from the breakfast-table, where she had just finished, to go to her desk, and murmuring as she went, "I hadn't thought of that. They might be hurt. So, if it _won't_ bore you, Mr. Norris."

And the Layc.o.c.ks were asked, and did indeed bore Guy sadly.

It was on the night after their visit--Mr. Layc.o.c.k had questioned him earnestly about his personal impressions of the war and to evade him had been wearying--that Guy, for the first time, really, since he had come, found sleep difficult and even menaced. It was because of that, he felt sure, looking back on it, that the curious occurrence of the next day took place--curious, and, had it taken place in the presence of any one else, embarra.s.sing. But what made it most curious was just that; he had not felt it embarra.s.sing to break down and sob before Mrs. Baldwin.

The morning had begun badly. The breakfast-table papers had been full of the approaching victory. Mr. Haseltine read out pa.s.sages from the _Times_ as he broke his toast and drank his coffee. He had reiterated the triumph of his long conviction, and Mrs. Baldwin had murmured a.s.sent. "All's well with the world," was the suffocating a.s.surance that seemed to breathe from them both. "All's blue." Was h.e.l.l forgotten like that? What if the war were won? Of course, it had to be won--that was an unquestioned premise that had underlain his rebellions as well as Mr.

Haseltine's complacencies since the beginning. But what of it? No victory could redeem what had been done.

He went out into the garden, to be away from Mr. Haseltine, as soon as he could, and took a book into the summer-house; and it was here, a little later, that Mrs. Baldwin, seeing him as she pa.s.sed, her garden-basket on her arm, paused to ask him, with her smile of the shy hostess, if he were all right. She didn't often ask him that, and he saw at once that his recent recalcitrancy to rejoicing had pierced even her vagueness. He knew that he still looked recalcitrant, and he was determined not to soften the overt opposition rising in him; so he raised his eyes to her over his book and said that he was not, perhaps, feeling very fit that morning.

Mrs. Baldwin hesitated at the entrance to the summer-house. She looked behind her at the garden and up at the roses cl.u.s.tering over the lintel under the thatch; she even took out her scissors, in the uncertainty that, evidently, beset her, and snipped off a dead rose, and she said presently, "It was all that talk about the war, wasn't it--when what you must ask is to forget it."

"Oh, I don't ask that at all," said Guy. "I should scorn myself for forgetting it." She glanced in again at him, mildly. "I want to forget what's irrelevant, like victory," he said; "but not what is relevant, like irremediable wrong."

Her awareness had not, of course, gone nearly as far as this. She kept her eyes on him, and he was glad to feel that he could probably shock her. "You see," he found himself saying, "I saw the wrong. I saw the war--at the closest quarters."

"Yes--oh, yes," Mrs. Baldwin murmured.

"For me, tragedy doesn't cease to exist when it's shovelled underground.

If one goes down into h.e.l.l, one doesn't want to forget the fact--though one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to remember that h.e.l.l exists--and to try and square life with that actuality."

There was silence after this for a moment, and he imagined that she was very much at a loss. Her next words seemed indeed to express nothing so much as her failure to follow--that and a silliness really rather adorable, had he been in a mood to find it anything but exasperating.

"But, still--h.e.l.l doesn't exist, does it?" she offered him for his appeas.e.m.e.nt.

Guy laughed. "Doesn't it? When things like this war can happen? How could it ever have existed but in men's hearts? It's there that it smoulders and, when its moment comes, leaps out to blast the world."

He could talk to her like this because she was too simple to suspect in him a poetical att.i.tudinizing; any one else would of course suspect it.

Guy was even aware that to any one else that was what it would have been. She looked kind and troubled and as much as ever at a loss. She didn't know at all how to deal with the patient, and she was evidently uncertain what to do, since it might seem heartless to go away and leave him to his black thoughts, yet intrudingly intimate to come and sit down beside him. Nothing could be less intimate than Mrs. Baldwin. It was he, of course, who was tasteless in talking to her in a vein appropriate only to intimacy.

"Don't bother over me," he said, offering her the patent artifice of a smile. "I'm simply a bad case. You mustn't let me trouble you. You must just turn your back on me when I'm like this."

It was not poetic att.i.tudinizing now; there was in his voice a quaver of grief and she responded to it at once.

"Oh, but I don't like to do that. I do wish I could be of some help. I see you haven't slept, for you look so tired, as you did when you first came. And Mr. Layc.o.c.k did bore you. It's wrong of people to talk to you about the war."

For the first time he saw in the eyes fixed upon him, pity, evident pity and solicitude. And before it he felt himself crumble suddenly. He saw all the reasons she had for pitying him, did she but know. He saw Ronnie's face again; he saw his own haunted night and his own grief. He wanted her to see it. "Oh--one can't be guarded like that," he murmured; "I must try to get used to it. But--I didn't sleep; that's true. I'm so horribly afraid of not sleeping. You can't imagine what it is. I've the most awful visions." And leaning his elbows on the table, he put his hands before his face and began to cry.

She stood there; he did not hear her move at first; and then she entered and sat down on the seat beside him. But she said nothing and did not touch him. He had had in all the tumult of his disintegration, a swift pa.s.sage of surmise; would she not draw his head upon her shoulder, like a mother, and comfort him? But that would have broken him down heaven knew how much further.

He cried frankly, articulating presently, "It's my nerves, you know; they have all gone to pieces. I lost my friend; my dearest friend. For months I didn't sleep."

Mrs. Baldwin's silence was not oppressive, or repressive either. He heard her hands move slightly on the basket she held on her knees and the soft chafing in the folds of her linen bodice that her breathing made. It was an accepting stillness and it presently quieted him; more than that, it enabled him at last to lift his head and look at her without feeling ashamed of himself. Oddly enough, he knew that he, perhaps, ought to be. He _could_ have helped himself. There had been an element of wilfulness in his breakdown; he had wanted her to see; but, even had she known this about him, he would not have felt ashamed. She was so curiously a person with whom one could not a.s.sociate blames and judgments. She was an accepting person.

She wasn't looking at him, but out at the sweet, bright, autumnal little garden; and as her eyes came to him, he felt them full of thought; felt, for the first time, sure that, whatever she might be, she was not dull.

He could not remember, looking back at the little scene, that she had said a single further word. He did not think that he had said anything further. He was helping her, a little while after, to prune the Aimee Vibert rose that had grown with great unruliness over the little tool-house near the kitchen door. "It will really pull it down unless we cut out some of these great branches," she had said, as, equipped with stout gloves, they had worked away together, unfastening the tangled trails and stretching them out on the ground. So displayed, the Aimee Vibert was drastically dealt with, and it was midday before they finished fastening the thinned and shortened shoots into place.

She had said nothing further; but he believed that, for the first time, her thought really included him. He had been put before her. She was different afterwards. He had become an individual to her, and had ceased to be merely the paying guest.

IV

The third week came. There was rain, rather sad September rain, for a day or two. They sat in the evenings before the wide fireplace where logs blazed. Mrs. Baldwin, at his suggestion, read aloud to them Fabre's _Souvenirs Entomologiques_. She read French prettily, better than he did himself, and he was a little chagrined once or twice to find that she knew it better, priding himself on his French as he did. He had lived for a year in Paris, with Ronnie, before the war.

The horrors of the grim, complicated underworld revealed by the French seer distressed him. Mrs. Baldwin did not feel them as he did, feeling the marvels rather than the horrors, perhaps. She laughed a little, rather callously, at the ladies who devoured their husbands, and seemed pleased by the odious forethought of the egg-laying mothers. She shared Fabre's humorous dispa.s.sionateness, if not the fond partiality which, while it made him the more charming, didn't, Guy insisted, make his horrid wasps and beetles a bit more so. As usual, she vexed him a little, even while, more and more, he felt her intelligent; perhaps she vexed him all the more for that.

"She's so devilishly contented with the world," he said to himself sometimes, even while he smiled, remembering her laughter.

Old Mr. Haseltine fell asleep one night while she read, and to be together there before the fire, the old man sleeping beside them, made them nearer than they had ever been before. Guy was aware of this nearness while he listened and while he watched her hand, short, like a child's (and her face was so short) support the book, and her eyelashes dropping down the page or raised to a fresh one.

When he went to his room that night, he stood still for a long time, his candle in his hand, listening to the soft beat of the rain against the window. He was hardly ever now afraid of being alone, or of the dark, and he stood there musing and listening, while he still seemed to see Mrs. Baldwin's hand as it held the book, and her reading profile. Her life seemed to breathe upon him and he rested in it. He slept deliciously.

"Did you know that I write?" he asked her next day. He had wondered about this once or twice before.

"Oh, yes; your cousin, in her letter, you know, told me that you wrote,"

said Mrs. Baldwin.

They were in the living-room after midday dinner, and alone. She looked up at him very kindly from the papers and letters she was sorting at her desk.

"You've never heard of my effusions otherwise, though?" He put on a rueful air. "Such is fame!"