Part 17

The rule of the house was that there was no rule of any sort as regards breakfast. Anybody who came into the dining-room at most hours of the morning would find the breakfast perennials (bread, butter, sugar, milk, the morning paper and marmalade) on the table, and would, on ringing a bell, be given the annuals--_i.e._, fresh tea and a hot dish. Similarly, anybody who did not come into the dining-room was supposed to be breakfasting either elsewhere or not at all. So on this last morning of May, on coming down, I rang the bell, and read the paper till bacon came. An hour before I had just looked into Helen’s room, and seen that she was still asleep.

* * * * *

The bacon was rather long coming that morning--I try to reconstruct the day exactly as it happened--and I had already skimmed the news, and found there was not any, and in default of it was reading a superb account of the visit of a member of the Royal Family to Naples, who in the afternoon had ‘honoured’ (so said the loyal press) the volcano of Vesuvius with a visit. How gratifying for the immortal principle of fire! One hoped it would not become swollen in the head. This fortunate volcano, whose cone had been blessed----

At the moment I heard a step outside. It was not from the kitchen: it was coming from upstairs, and it came very quickly. Then, instantaneously, terror seized me, for time and place were no longer now and here, but it was the evening when I heard my name called in the garden, and thereafter heard Legs running downstairs. And quickly as the steps came, they seemed to me to go on for ever; yet I had only just time to get up, when there came a fumbling hand on the door, and Helen’s maid came in.

‘If you please, sir, would you send at once,’ she began. ‘The nurse---- ’

There were quicker ways than sending, and next minute I was flying up the road on my bicycle. My mind, as I think must always happen with any mind in such moments, seemed curiously inactive, though somewhere there was inside me a little bit of tissue, so to speak, that agonized, and hoped, and prayed. But for the most I only thought of one thing--that once before I had gone on just the same errand, from this same house, up the same road, to fetch the doctor for her, my dearest friend. O Margery! I go quickly to God and tell Him.... We want Him.

And then the tissue that agonized and prayed sank out of sight again, and I was just speeding up the sunny, dusty road, on which, as I got nearer the town, the traffic became denser. Once a butcher’s cart pulled suddenly out into the middle of the road in front of me, and I thought collision was inevitable, except that I knew that it was not possible that I should be stopped when going on such an errand as this, and several times I passed people I knew, yet, though I knew them, their faces were meaningless: they conveyed names, but nothing whatever more. And then--whether very soon or countless ages later, I had no idea--I was at the doctor’s door in the quiet, decorous street, which also was meaningless--neither strange nor familiar, but purely without significance. Everything I saw was detached; nothing had any relation to life, except just one thing: his dog-cart, which was at the door, concerned me.

He had not yet started on his rounds, and it was not five minutes before he was ready. He had only to pick up a little bag, into which he put a case of some kind, and something bright, that I turned my eyes from, and a bottle which he wrapped up--it seemed to me very neatly and slowly--which clinked against that which was already in the bag.

Then he turned to me.

‘Now, if you take my advice,’ he said, ‘you won’t come back with me, but will go for a ride on this beautiful morning. You will not see your wife, and for the next hour or so it is not possible that I should have anything to tell you. We don’t want you in the house: we don’t want to be bothered with you.’

He got briskly into his dog-cart, nodded to me over his shoulder, and, instead of driving himself, gave his servant the reins. I know I shouted something after him, telling him, I think, to be careful, and so found myself on the doorstep, looking at a bicycle which was leaning against the pillar of the porch, and was evidently not mine. But, like the dog-cart, it was not meaningless, for it was Helen’s, which I must have used by mistake. I must take it back; it was careless of me.

Then his advice occurred to me, but it sounded ridiculous, as senseless as some nursery-rhyme. And at the thought there suddenly started in my head the first two lines of ‘Humpty-Dumpty.’ I could not remember the last two lines, but the first went round and round in my brain, keeping time to my pedalling.

Soon after I was home again, only a moment behind him, for he was just getting out when I came to the gate, and I waited till he had gone in, so that he should not know I had failed to follow his advice--at least, I believe that was the reason, but I am not sure.

I went round by the back way into the garden, and sat down in the veranda outside my own room, where Fifi was lying in the sun. But I had to coax her silently indoors, for I could not bear that she should lie there, lest suddenly she should again look out into the garden, and howl at something she saw there. She would not come in at first, and once she pricked her ears at something she saw outside, and I stopped mine, lest I should hear her howl. And all the time ‘Humpty-Dumpty’--the first two lines of it--went on and on. It was so terribly lonely, too--just that silly rhyme, and I all alone. If only Legs were here, or anybody--anybody. You see, this was not expected to-day, nor for weeks yet. My mother was coming to stay with us next week, until....

Then I heard the muffled sound of steps in the room just above my head--Helen’s room--and at that for a little the babble and confusion of my troubled brain cleared, and ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ ceased, and I was not afraid of Fifi howling, for there was no room for anything except the thought of Helen, who lay there, and of the life yet unborn. And I could not help--I could not bear any of it for her. I could not even be with her: birth was as lonely as death.

Outside the garden lay basking in the heat of the early summer, and everywhere the expansion of life, which had seemed to us so wonderful and glorious a thing through all these weeks of May, suddenly became sinister and menacing. What travail may not go to the opening of a single flower, or the maturing of its casket of seeds? It would all be of a piece with the cruelty and the anguish that runs through life like a scarlet, bleeding thread, beginning, as now, even before birth, and not even ending with death, since those who remain have the wound of that yet to be healed. Right through life goes the scarlet thread, knotted on the farther side at each end, so that it shall not slip. And--‘Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall.’ Ah, yes! I had it all now. ‘The King’s horses’ was what I could not remember. And at that the crowd of trivialities again came between my mind and me.

We had set up the croquet-hoops again only last week, and had argued over the position of that particular corner one by which my ball had rested when last autumn a telegram had been brought me from the house. Helen had said it was square with the corresponding corner; I knew it was not, and from here it was perfectly easy to see that she had been wrong. I hate an awry disposition of hoops. ‘All the King’s horses’ ... they really should bring these rhymes up to date; it ought to be motor-cars instead of horses.

These things passed very slowly through my mind, for it acted as if it was numbed and half-paralyzed, and the croquet-hoop occupied the foreground of it for a considerable time. I had let Fifi out again, and she was racing about the lawn in the attempt to catch swallows, a feat of which she never realized the unreasonableness, and I had left the doors into my room, both from the hall and from here outside, open. And then, with the same rapidity as they had come, all these nonsense things passed away again, for I heard steps on the stairs, and, going in, saw the doctor standing on the landing above, talking in low tones to the nurse. He saw me, made a little movement of his hand as if to detain me, and when he had finished what he had to say to her, came downstairs.

‘I will have a word with you,’ he said gravely; and we went into my room. I saw him looking at me rather curiously, and was wondering why, when he suddenly seemed to lean up against me. Then I perceived that it was I who was swaying on my feet. He put me in a chair.

‘I suppose you have not had breakfast,’ he said. ‘You are to eat something immediately; I will ring the bell. And now listen. It is going to be difficult, and, I am afraid, dangerous, and it is better that you should know it now.’

And then the dear, kind man just laid his hand on my arm.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he said; ‘you can’t think how I hate to tell you this. I hope it will be all right; there is nothing yet that forbids me to hope that. Please God, we shall pull her through, but--well, well.’

He broke off as the door opened, and a servant came in.

‘Just bring a tray in here,’ he said. ‘Tea? Yes, tea, and an egg and a couple of bits of toast. Thank you.’

‘Remember, I still hope it will be all right,’ he said. ‘And even if--well, you are both young still. Now I shall be back here in an hour at the outside.’

‘You are not going,’ I said. ‘You mustn’t.’

‘Yes, yes. I know what you feel,’ he said. ‘But there is nothing for me to do here yet, and I have to make arrangements so that I can come back and remain here till all--is satisfactory.’

‘You don’t stir from this house,’ I said.

‘Do you think I should go if there was the slightest possibility of your wife needing me?’ he said quietly.

‘No; I beg your pardon.’

‘That’s all right. Now when your breakfast comes, eat it, and read a book if you can, or go and garden. I am sure those roses of yours want looking after, and I tell you it’s a hard thing for a man in your position, and a thing which we doctors respect, to go and occupy himself. If you can’t, you can’t, but you might have a try.’

The servant brought in a tray before many minutes, and with it the morning paper. When I had eaten, I took it up and looked at it. There was no news, but the middle page contained an account of a visit to Vesuvius by an English Prince. He ‘honoured’ the volcano with a visit. And then I knew that I had seen the paper before. But when? Years and years ago, or this morning?

What the doctor had said to me needed no time or thought for realizing it. I felt as if I had known it all along--known it all my life. But--what happened next, if that all happened long ago? Was the room overhead the chamber of death or the chamber of birth? Next door to it was the nursery, with its Noah’s ark and its soldiers and its rocking-horse. Who going to ride on that? And the dolls’-house, with its tottering inhabitants--who next was to play with those, and open the wall? Oh, Helen, Helen, you and your child, will it be? Or will it be you and I again, but after a long time, hoping once more? Or--dear God, no, not that!

* * * * *

Daffodil-day, and its sisters of the spring! And Rose-day will come next month. Roses ... heaped for the beloved’s bed. Dear God, not that: it does not mean that bed. Indeed--indeed it does not. You have so many souls already in Your house of many mansions. Give us a few more years together, for they are so sweet, and a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday. And we should so like a young thing, one of our own, in the house. But ... thank You very much for the years that have been so sweet. They have been--they have been. And, please don’t let her suffer or be frightened.

Then I went across the lawn and into the rose-garden. Though we had been very industrious there, I never saw yet the rose-tree on which there is nothing to be done, and for a little my hands made themselves busy. Then quite suddenly it all became impossible, and there was nothing in the world except what the doctor had told me, and floating on the top of that ‘Humpty-Dumpty, Humpty-Dumpty.’

So it was within the hour that I got back again to the house, and the doctor had not yet returned. I missed something familiar on the lawn, without at once knowing what it was, and then I saw that the birds’ breakfast was not there. That took me to the dining-room, where I found lunch was already laid, and with bread-crumb and little bits of cheese, and cold meat mixed, I made a plateful for them, though, as you know, it was the last day of May, and I suppose it was but pauperism among the thrushes that I encouraged. But Helen all these days had done so. I knew she would not like them to miss their provision.

Soon after--so soon that the news of their belated meal had not yet become public among the birds--the doctor returned. I heard him go upstairs, and after that I crept into the hall, and sat down on the lowest step of the seventeen that led to the landing. Legs used to jump down them in two bounds, taking eight steps first, and then nine, and get up (with a run) in three--two sixes and a five.... What am I maundering about? And before very long I must have been sitting higher up the stairs, for I could see out of the window on the staircase. The dog-cart had drawn away from the door into the shade, and the groom had got down, and was gently stroking the mare’s nose. Then he laid his smooth young cheek against it, and she stood quite still, liking it. I expect he is kind to her.

The sun had swung round farther to the west, and it came in through the window. But now I was nearly at the top of the stairs; there were but three above where I sat. The house was very still; below me on the ground-floor there had been no step or sign of life, and there was nothing from behind the second door to the left just above me. Then came the sharp tingle of an electric bell. There was only one room from which it could have come.

I tapped very gently, though my heart beat so that I thought it must have been a hammer-noise to those inside. The door opened a chink, and a level, quiet voice said: ‘Some hot water, please--very hot.’ Perhaps a minute afterwards I tapped again, and a hand took the can of hot water from me.

I went back again, this time to the top step, and still waited. Since I had done something, though it was but the handing of a can of hot water into the room, that nightmare of incoherent thoughts began to clear more completely, and, like some remembered sunlight breaking clouds, and shining with the serene quietude of eventide, Helen--she herself, no intercepted vision, no vision even of remembrance only or anxiousness--shone out. Whatever happened, she was I, and I was she, and the Will of God, whatever It might ordain for us, could not alter that. She and I, I think, have never feared anything when we were together, and surely of all days that life or death could hold for us, we could never be more together than to-day. So, surely, of all hours this is the one when fear should be farthest from us, for never have we been together like this. Yet, O my God, my God, since Christ was born of a woman, let Him go in there, the second door....

And the next door, You know, is the nursery.... No, not the farther one, but the one this side. Yes, yes, of course You know, but You might have forgotten. There’s the Noah’s ark there, and the dolls’-house, and the lead soldiers. We had hoped....

* * * * *

Red light came in through the window on the stairs--light of sunset. Once more the stinging sound of the electric bell came to me; once more I took up a can of hot water.

Then it grew dark; in the hall below the lamp had been lit, and from the window, after the last red of sunset had faded, there came the distant shining of stars, endlessly remote. Then the door opened again, and the nurse came hurrying out, forgetting to close it. From within came the cry of a child.

* * * * *

_June 1._--I overstep the bounds of the year, but you may like to know. Quite early this morning I was allowed to go in and look. They were sleeping, both of them--she and he.

Afterwards I went into the nursery.

THE END.

* * * * *

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