Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 29

"Are you famous?" Her smile was a little troubled. "I don't follow things, you know, living here as I do."

"You read the papers. I _have_ had reviews: good ones."

"I don't read them very regularly," she admitted. "And I so often don't remember the names of people in reviews, even when I've liked what is said of them. Have you any of your poems here? Perhaps you'll let me read them."

He felt, with the familiar chagrin, that she would never, of herself, have thought of asking him.

"Yes, my last volume. It's just out."

He was going for a walk in the rain with Mr. Haseltine that afternoon.

There was an old church in the neighbouring village that his friend wanted him to see. Mrs. Baldwin had letters to write. "Will you have time to look at it while we are out?" he asked.

Although she had shown so little interest in him, he was eager, pathetically so, he felt, that she should read and care about his poems.

She said that it was just the time: her letters would not take long. And so he ran up to his room and got the little book for her: _Burnt Offerings_.

All the time that he was walking with Mr. Haseltine and seeing the church, and the old manor house that took them a half mile further, he wondered what she was thinking about his poems.

By the time they had returned the rain had ceased. A warm September sunlight diffused itself. Veils lifted from the stream and trailed upon the lower meadows. The sky grew clear and the leaves all sparkled. They found that Mrs. Baldwin had had her cup of tea, for it was past four; but all had been left in readiness for them, the kettle boiling; and after Guy had swallowed his, he went out and saw her walking down among the crocuses.

"Oh, you are back?" she said when he joined her. "I wanted to be there to give you your tea. Was it all right?"

"Perfectly," he said. "We put in just your number of spoonfuls."

Mrs. Baldwin wore her little knitted jacket and had put on her white, rubber-soled canvas shoes against the wet; but her head, with its thick, close braids, was bare to the sunlight.

"I had to come out as soon as it stopped raining," she said; "and I'm afraid I simply forgot to look out for you and father."

Her gentleness had always seemed contentment; this afternoon it seemed happiness, and he had never seen her look so young. He wondered if she were going to take him so dreadfully aback as not even to mention his poems; if she had simply forgotten them, too. Already her demeanour, unclouded, almost radiant, inflicted a wound; she had either forgotten, or she had cared little indeed, since she could look like that. But, after he had commented, consentingly, on the lovely hour, she went on with a change of tone, a voice a little shy, "I've read the poems. Thank you so much for letting me see them."

"You read all of them?"

"Yes. I didn't write my letters."

"I hope you read them, then, because you cared for them."

She didn't answer for a moment, walking along and placing the small white feet carefully among the crocuses. "They are very sad," she then said.

He was aware, after an instant of adjustment to the blow, that she made him very angry. Terrible, his poems, searing, scorching; wicked, if one would; but not sad.

"Oh!" he murmured; and he wondered if the divided feeling she had from the first roused in him had been this hatred, not perhaps of her, but of her unvarying acquiescence, her untroubled inadequacy.

"They interested me very much," she said, feeling, no doubt, that, whatever he was, he was not pleased. "They made me see, I mean, all the things you have been through."

"Sad things, you call them. You know, I rather feel as if I'd heard you call h.e.l.l sad."

She looked up at him quickly, and it was now she who was taken aback and, as she had been the other day, at a loss. And, as on the other day, she found the same answer, though she offered it deprecatingly, feeling his displeasure. "But h.e.l.l doesn't exist."

"Don't you think anything horrible exists?"

They turned at the end of the meadow. It seemed to him, although he felt as if he hated her, that they were suddenly intimate in their antagonism. He would force that antagonism, and its intimacy, upon her--to its last implication.

"Horrible? Oh, yes, yes!" she said, startled, and that was, he reflected grimly, to the good. "But it would have to be irretrievable, wouldn't it, to be h.e.l.l?" she urged.

"Do you suggest that it's not irretrievable? You own it's horrible.

Irretrievably horrible, I call it. And that's what I call h.e.l.l. Yet all that you can find to say of my poems is that they are sad."

She hesitated, feeling her way, hearing in the recurrent word how it had rankled. "I meant sad, I think, because of you; because you had suffered so much."

"You seem always to imply that one might _not_ have suffered!" And thrusting aside her quickly murmured, "Oh, no, no!" he went on: "I can't understand your att.i.tude of mind. Do you realize at all, I sometimes wonder, what it has all meant, this nightmare we are living in--we, that is, to whom it came? Can you imagine what it was to me to see boys, dead boys, buried stealthily, at night, under fire? Boys so mangled, so disfigured--you read that poem, 'Half a Corpse'?--that their mothers wouldn't have known them; featureless, dismembered boys, heaped one upon the other in the mud. Has your mind ever dwelt upon the community of corruption in which they lie, as their mothers' minds must dwell? I do not understand you. I do not understand how you can dare to call such things sad."

His own wrath shook and yet sustained him, though he knew a fear lest he had gone too far; but in her silence--they had reached the other end of the meadow and turned again in their walk--he felt that there was no resentment. It was as if she realized that those who have returned from h.e.l.l cannot be asked to stop and pick their words with courtesy, and accepted his vehemence, if not his blame; and again, when she spoke at last, he felt that her bewilderment had settled into thought.

"Yes, I can imagine," she said. "But no, I don't think that my mind has dwelt on those things. If I were their mothers, I don't think that my mind would dwell, as you say. Something would burn through. There are other kinds of suffering--better kinds; they help, I believe. And, for that kind, it is worse, but is it so much worse than in ordinary life?

That is what happens all the time when there is no war; dreadful changes in the dead; and burials. They are not quite so near each other in a churchyard, and their graves are named; but do you think that makes it easier to bear?"

He felt now as if it were insult she was offering him.

"You deny all tragedy to war, then? It's all to you on a level with an Elegy in a Country Churchyard, with curfew and rector and primrose-wreaths? You read 'His Eyes,'"--Guy's voice had a hoa.r.s.er note, but, mingled with the sincerity of what, at last, he knew he was to tell her, the very centre of his sick heart, went a surface appreciation of what he had just said and of how curfew and rector and primrose-wreaths would go into a bitter poem one day,--"you read that poem of mine at the end of the book. 'His Eyes' is about myself and my friend Ronnie Barlow, the artist; you never heard of him, I know. He hung, with shattered legs, dying, just in front of us, on the barbed wire, for three days and nights. When he could speak, it was to beg to be shot. We tried to get to him, four, five times; it was no good. There was barbed wire between, and the Germans spotted us every time. He died during the third night, and next morning I found him looking at me--as he had looked during these three days--his torment and his reproach. And so he went on looking until the rats came and he had no more eyes to look with. Will you tell me that that is no worse than the deaths died in the parishes of England? Will you tell me that it's the sort of death died by the cheery, mature gentlemen who ate their dinners and slept warm and dropped a tear--while they did their 'bit' in their Government offices--over the brave lads saving England?"

He had taken refuge from Ronnie in hatred of those whom, in the poem, he called his murderers, and his voice was weighted with its fierce indictment. In the pause that followed he had time to wonder if she found him, at last, intolerable. She walked beside him, still looking down, and it might well have been in a chill withdrawal. He almost expected to hear her, in another moment, find the conventional phrase with which to leave him. But no,--and in his own long sigh he recognized the depth of his relief,--she was not going to punish him with convention; she was not going to leave him. And what she said at last was, "I'm so sorry! Please believe that I'm so very, very sorry!

Only--why do you speak, and write, as though it were some one's fault?"

Ah, here then, at last, they had come to it, the barrier, on one side of which he stood with his h.e.l.l and she on the other in her artificial paradise.

"I write it and speak it because it is the truth," he said. "Millions of innocent creatures, of gifted, beautiful creatures, like my friend, have been slaughtered, tortured, driven mad, because of greasy, greedy wire-pullers in their leather chairs at home."

"In this war, too?"

"In this war preeminently."

"You don't feel that the crime was Germany's?"

"Oh, of course!" his laugh sneered the facile acquiescence. "Let us put it on Germany, by all means. We'll sleep the sounder! Certainly, I grant it to you freely--Germany struck the match and lighted the fuse."

"And weren't we all responsible for the fuse--you and I, I mean, as much as the people in the leather chairs?" There was no irony in her repet.i.tion. "The people who fought, as much as the people who didn't fight? Wasn't the fuse simply our conception of our national safety? of our national honour? That is what I feel so sad about your poems,--though I should never have wanted to explain it,--that you are so wrong, so ungenerous, so vindictive."

In all his life it had rarely been his lot to know such astonishment.

Astonishment came first; and then the deep, deep hurt that rose, wave after wave, within him. Was this, then, what she felt for him--only this? Hadn't he told her about Ronnie--her alone of all the world?

Should not that have made her reverent of him, and pitiful? Should a man who had endured such griefs receive such blows? Waves of colour, too, flooded his face and tears rushed to his eyes. He thought, when he was able at last to gather thoughts together, that it should now be for him to find the conventional phrase and leave her. But, glancing again at her profile, finding it, though singularly pale, so much more gentle than severe, the impulse dropped. He was not strong enough for convention. He was shaken, shattered; too weak even for self-preservation.

He walked, miserable, and his mind full of a whirling darkness, beside her, determining only that she should be the first to speak again. She was. She had quite come out of her shyness,--if it had ever been that,--and though it was with something faltering, something that was, he made out, sorry for them both in the predicament to which, after all, he, and not she, had brought them, it was more than all with resolution that she said,--

"I am so sorry if I seem presumptuous. But you asked me. And your poems aren't the first I've read. So many young men, who have been so brave, like you, and who have been through it all so that they have the right to speak, seem to feel more than anything that hatred, not against war,--we all hate war,--but against people, some groups of people, they make responsible. There are bad and selfish people everywhere,--among poets, I feel sure, just as much as among statesmen; but hasn't this war proved--since everybody has gone--that no one group is bad and selfish; that there are men in every group who have been glad to die for their country? I know I have no weight with young men like you; I am not a person of any importance for opinion; but how I wish that I could make you believe that you ought not to write like that--with hatred in your heart. Can great poetry be written out of hatred? And it's not only yourself it hurts: it hurts other people; harms them, I mean. It spreads a mood of darkness and fever just when they are so in need of light and calm. And for the mothers, for people who have lost, cruelly, those whom they loved as much, perhaps even more, than you loved your friend--do you not see how your poems must sicken them? Do you not see that it all becomes just that--a community of corruption? You imprison them, force them back into their helpless suffering; when what they pray for is strength to rise above it and to feel all the goodness and love that has been given for them; to feel what is beautiful, not what is horrible; so as to be worthy of their dead."

As he listened to her,--and with a slow revulsion of all his nature, as if, against his very will and mind, she moved his heart to breaking with something pa.s.sionate that spoke in her words,--an overwhelming experience befell him.

The crocuses beneath their feet, her sunlit shape beside him, her voice, as she spoke to him thus, with her very soul, blended together in a rising wave of light, or music, piercing, sweeping him, lifting him up to some new capacity, leaving the old inert and dangling, lifting and still lifting him, until at last, as if with a great, emerging breath, he came into a region bright and fair, whence, looking down on the dark and tattered past, he saw all life differently, even Ronnie's death, even Ronnie's eyes. Ronnie was with him, with Mrs. Baldwin, in the bright stillness.

Upborne, sustained, like a swimmer in some strange, new element, he seemed to gaze down through its golden s.p.a.ces at the inert, alien darkness that had been himself. "Rubbish! Rubbish!" he seemed to hear himself say. Yet all was not left behind; all was not rubbish; else how could he be here, with her, with Ronnie? It was bliss to see himself as he had been, since something else was so immeasurably secure. Oh--could one stay always like this! This was to taste of everlasting life. His longing, as if with a cry, a grasp from the swimmer, marked the soft turning of the tide. He sank, but it was sweetly, if with a strange, an infinite sadness, a sadness recorded, accepted, while he sank, as making forever the portion of the temporal consciousness. And the bliss still stayed in the acceptance, and purple ripples seemed to glide back rhythmically as the crocuses swam before his eyes. It had all been only an instant then, for her last words came to him as if she had but spoken them and he heard his own voice murmuring, as if from very far away, "Perhaps you are right."