Part 8

There, for instance, are the croquet-hoops still standing, though it must be a month since we had played. A few withered leaves of the plane have drifted against the wires, and the worms have been busy on the neglected lawn, that speaks only of November. But that corner hoop has a significance beyond paint and wire. It is the record of the telegram that came out to me one morning in late September which I showed Legs. After that we abandoned the game, and went to the house. It may have more for us yet, that corner hoop--more, I mean, than that memory of which I have spoken. Joy or sorrow may be so keen, so poignant on some day yet hid behind the veil of the future, when I shall be looking at it, that till the day of my death it will never again be seen by my mortal eye without rousing an immortal and imperishable memory. It is thus, in a manner antimaterialistic, so to speak, that men, material things, are woven into the psychical web of life, so that, almost before the eye has seen them, they have sent the message of their secret significance to the brain.

Everywhere, wherever I look, the tangle of these subtle threads is spread, even as on summer dawns the myriad spinning of gossamer makes network on the grass, so that each is crossed and intertwined with a woof of others. There is the bank where I lay all one hot July day doing nothing, thinking nothing, just lapped in the tide of living things. That has gone home. That bank and the hours I passed there are part of me now, even as I feel that I am part of it, and I have but to look at it now to bask again in the absorbing stupor of the midsummer. There, in its blades of grass and shadowed turf, is written my doing for the day. The bank holds it in kind, safe keeping, so that when God inquires of me what I have done with that day that He gave me, the bank will be able to answer for me. Nor does it tell my secret to the croquet-hoop that holds another, nor to the clematis that on that day was a heaven full of purple stars spread over the trellis. There was nothing in all the treasure of the summer so beautiful, so triumphant as that; but what to me now is the memory of the clematis? The memory of a friendship that is over. At least, I was looking at it when I know that somebody I had loved and trusted was neither trustworthy nor lovable. It was as if a friend had pushed back the carpet from the boards of the room where he and I had so often been merry and intimate together, and showed me, with a sort of secret hideous glee, that a sewer flowed beneath the floor. Poor clematis! it is sick at heart. Its thin, bare stalk shivers mournfully as this golden afternoon begins to turn a little grey with the chill wind of evening.

Ah, if only he had said he was sorry! If only he had said that he knew it was wrong, but that the flesh was weak! If only he had even contemplated the step, which to some extent undoes the wrong that has been done, I do not think the clematis would have shed a single one of its purple stars. All of us, saints or sinners, do dreadful things, the memory of which is sufficient to make us long to sink into the earth for shame. But he only smiled behind his hand, and with whispered gusto told me about it, licking the chops of memory. It is _that_ which matters.

* * * * *

That corner of the garden had delayed me long, and it was already getting dark when I had gathered up and fingered the gossamer threads that lay so thickly down the border that led to the gate from which descend the steps of the rose-garden. There were so many messages there. The bare stalks of phloxes and campanulas, Oriental poppies and hollyhocks, Japanese anemone and iris--all had something to say. Some memories were a little vague, faint, and dim even as the odour of the phloxes; some were tall and resplendent like the hollyhocks; some were vivid as the poppies. And then I went through the gate of the rose-garden and stood there. There was nothing there but the rose-trees; there was no one there but Helen.

* * * * *

So the tale of the garden was told, and by the time it was finished dusk had begun to deepen, and cheerful beckoning lights were gleaming from the house. It was time to go in to take up, and with what love and alacrity, the pleasant hour of the present again; for it is not ever good to linger too long over memories, or for however short a time to indulge in regrets, unless those regrets are to be built into the fabric of the present, making it stronger and more courageous. All other regrets, all other regarding of the past, which says, ‘It is past; it is irretrievably done,’ is enervating and poisonous, and but paralyzes our energies. Indeed, it is better not to be sorry at all for the unwise, unkind, and mistaken things we have done if our sorrow tends to unfit us for doing better in the future.

But just as I crossed the lawn, going towards the house, another memory started up out of the dusk so clearly that I almost thought that I heard my name called from the garden, and almost expected, when I got indoors, to hear again the sound of shuffling, unshod feet on the stairs. The memory of that mysterious midnight hour, though I have not spoken of it again, is seldom out of my thoughts. It does not sit, so to speak, in the front row, but in the dimness that lies at the back of one’s mind, out of which come those vague vapours which are, if they have body enough, eventually condensed into thought, just as out of thought is coined speech and action. There in that dark kitchen of the mind I know that the thought of that night has ever been simmering on the fire. Something within me is not content with the fact that even at the moment that the voice cried from the garden, at the moment when Legs saw the white face smiling at him, that dear soul passed to the other side. There is more to come yet. Else--here is the vapour taking the shape of thought at last--else why did Legs, who scarcely knew her, receive that warning? No echo of any memory of that night, strangely also, has ever come back to him. He knows no more about it now than he did the next morning, when he asked me if I had been sitting up late talking.

I have told Helen all about it; I have told her too--for there is nothing so wild and fantastical that I would not tell it her--that there is some uneasy guest sitting at my hearth who stays in the shadow, so that I cannot see his face. And she answered with a serenity that was almost reassuring, saying that, if something more was coming, there was still, whatever it was, nothing to fear; if otherwise, the uneasy guest was moonshine of the imagination. That seems to cover the whole ground. But the fact is that I am afraid of my fear--a thing for which it is idle to try to find excuses.

* * * * *

We are leaving quite early to-morrow morning, so, when I entered the house that evening after the tour of the garden, I had definitely finished with the country for some weeks to come. So, too, had Helen and Legs, for tea had already gone into the drawing-room. And even as I locked the garden-door behind me, I heard a sudden gust of wind come and shake the panes, as if this calm, golden day had been sent just for us, and that the moment we had finished with it the winds, overdue, but kindly waiting for us, began to drive their cloud-flocks out of the south-west. Nor was the coming of the rain long delayed. Even while we sat at tea, a sheet of it was flung with a sudden wild tattoo against the panes, and there hissed on to the logs of the open hearth a few stray drops. Legs paused, with his mouth full of crumpet.

‘It makes me feel twice as comfortable as I was before,’ he said. ‘It must be so beastly out of doors.’

Legs had just uttered this thoroughly Lucretian sentiment, when--

The door opened, and Mr. Holmes was announced. I have refrained from mentioning Mr. Holmes before because I expected he would come in about now, big with purpose. He is a kind little gentleman, about forty-five years old, who lives with his sister, and does not do anything whatever. He is generally known as the Bun-hander, because no tea-party has ever been known to take place for miles round at which Mr. Holmes was not handing refreshments to the ladies. That is his strength, his forte. His weakness is just as amiable--though, perhaps, hardly so useful--for his weakness is Rank.

He constantly comes to see Helen--about once a fortnight, that is to say (for in the autumn he is very busy going to tea-parties)--for the reason, so Legs and I believe, that she is the daughter of the younger son of a peer. Helen will have none of this, and maintains that he comes to see her for Herself. Personally, I can behave beautifully when Mr. Holmes finds Helen and me alone, but I am rather nervous if Legs happens to be in the room, for he is quite unable to take his eyes off Mr. Holmes, but stares at him in a sort of stupor of wonderment. Once (that is a year ago now) he left the room very suddenly. Choking and muffled sounds were heard from the hall and the stamping of feet. Helen and I talked very loud to overscore this, and I trust Mr. Holmes did not hear. But when Legs is there, I am afraid (it is a sort of nightmare) that I shall be overtaken, too, with helpless giggling. If I begin, Helen will go off, and I can imagine no way of satisfactorily terminating the interview. Because if once I began laughing at Mr. Holmes, I do not see how I could ever stop. His appearance, his voice, his conversation, are all quite inimitable.

He is small and inclined to stoutness, and has a fierce little moustache, so much on end that it looks as if it had just seen a ghost. Not long ago he had no teeth to speak of; now they are as dazzling and continuous, as Mr. Wordsworth said, as the stars that shine. He has rather thin brown hair, which I will swear used to be streaked with grey, but is so no longer, and he wears three rings with stones in them. One is an emerald, so magnificent that it is almost impossible to believe in it. He is dressed in the very height and zenith of provincial fashion, and would no more be seen in shabby clothes than he would be seen without stays. Yes; I maintain it, and even Helen, who was a perfect St. Thomas about it for long, has admitted that occasional creaks proceed from Mr. Holmes’s person for which it is difficult to offer any other explanation. It was a creak, in fact, more than usually loud that made Legs leave the room on the occasion I have referred to. Down his trousers he has the most beautiful creases, and all his clothes nearly fit perfectly. He wears brown boots with cloth tops, above which when he sits down you can see socks with clocks on them stranglingly suspended. In the winter he wears a hat with a furrow in it, and in the summer a panama. He wears a knitted tie (just now it is rather the fashion here for young men to have ties knitted for them by their friends), which Helen says is certainly machine-made, with a pin in it. His shirt always has some stripe or colour in it, and his links are invariably the same colour as the stripe. To-day the links were turquoise and the stripe light blue. And from top to toe it is all a little wrong, though since I do not know how clothes are made, I cannot tell you what is wrong. The effect, however, is that, though so carefully arrayed, Mr. Holmes looks like a rather elderly shop-assistant going out on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Holmes goes out much oftener than that, for he may be seen in the window of the club every morning from about half-past eleven till one. I have often seen him sitting in the window there looking at illustrated papers, and smoking a cork-tipped cigarette, ladies’ size. Then he goes home to lunch, and after lunch either drives with his sister in a hired fly, or else, if it is very fine, goes round the ladies’ golf-links, which are a good deal shorter than the men’s. He has tea at the club and sits there till dinner. Then, after a blameless day, he goes home to dine and sleep. I suppose no one in the world has ever done less of any description.

I have alluded to his weakness--rank; he has another, which is gossip. He knows who was dining at the Ampses last Wednesday, and who lunched with the Archdeacon on Sunday, and how the Bishop’s wife is. It is he for whom also the fashionable intelligence is written in the daily papers, and, though he never goes there, he knows who is in town, and who lunched at Prince’s last Sunday, or walked in the Park, and how the Marquis of God-knows-what is after his operation. (He always refers to a Marquis _as_ a Marquis, to an Earl _as_ an Earl.) But, best of all, perhaps, he loves infinitesimal intrigue, especially if it concerns Rank.

And here my portentous secret must burst from me. For the fact is that for the last three days the town has been convulsed, and I have been holding it all back, assuming an unnatural calm, so that it might all come in a deluge. For three days ago a Duchess came here to open a window, or shut a door in the town-hall, which had been put up in memory of something, and was entertained to luncheon afterwards by the Corporation. And on this eye-opening occasion Helen was sent in before the wife of the younger son of a Baronet. And in consequence the wife of the younger son of the Baronet cut her afterwards, as with a knife; yet knife was no word for it: the averted eye was more like a scimitar. Before the assembled company, when Helen went to shake hands with her after lunch, she cut her, and she turned from her, revolving on her own axis like the eternal stars. Upon which, very properly, after two days’ heated discussion, and a great demand for Debrett, public opinion sided with the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, on the ground that Helen took her husband’s rank, which in this case happened to be none at all. What made it worse was that the Duchess, who should have known better, being an old friend of Helen’s, came to tea with her afterwards in a motor-car covered with coronets for all the world to see.

You may imagine that the fat was in the fire after that. Helen had no idea why the wife of the Baronet’s younger son had cut her, and perhaps might never have known had not Mr. Holmes dropped in only yesterday and told her, adding that he was sure he could clear it up. I was not at home when this interview took place, but when he entered the room this afternoon, after having called only yesterday, it was certain that he must have come on this subject. He had a book in his pocket, which made an unusual bulge.

Legs was steeped in wide-eyed contemplation as Mr. Holmes had his tea. From time to time I glanced at him, and saw that the corners of his mouth were faintly twitching. His eye travelled from Mr. Holmes’s face to his jewelled hands; it lingered about his clothes, but came back, loverlike, to his face. In a few minutes we had learned about everybody--how the Lord-Lieutenant of the county had driven through in his motor--not the Daimler, but a new Panhard--yesterday afternoon, stopping only at the fishmonger’s, and taking the London road afterwards; how there had been a party at the barracks last night, at which there was music; but not very good music, Mr. Holmes was afraid; how the Bishop had not influenza at all, but only a bad cold; how The Pines had been taken by the Hon. Alice Accrington, who had a cork foot--so sad. A rhinoceros had trodden on the original one.

I had ceased to be able to look at Legs, but here I heard him give a little whimper, as a dog does when it wants a door to be opened for it. Helen all the time had been of impeccable behaviour. She had asked just the right questions, and appeared so genuinely interested that I felt I had never known before of what depth of hypocrisy she was capable. Then Mr. Holmes’s wealth of information began to grow thin, even as the stars burn thin at daybreak, and I knew that he was going to dawn, and that the true reason for which he came was going to break forth. He put down his cup on the tea-table, took a cigarette, and suddenly creaked.

If you can imagine a sneeze, a cough, a spit, the strangled wheeze caused by a fish-bone in the throat, and the noise an empty siphon of soda-water makes when you press the handle, all combined, you will faintly grasp what Legs did. His effort to swallow the whole of this mixed convulsion was most praiseworthy, though I should think dangerous, and it came to my ears only as if someone had done it half a mile away. Mr. Holmes, I am sure, heard nothing this time, and Legs left the room with his handkerchief to his mouth in the manner of mourners in the second coach at a funeral. There was no sound outside, but soon after a muffled tread overhead, where is his bedroom. Then for a moment I caught Helen’s eye. She looked so inexpressibly grave that I nearly asked her who was dead. Then dawn came. Mr. Holmes has a high cackling voice, and the bulgy volume in his pocket was ‘Whitaker’s Almanack.’

‘I should have come before,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to come to you last, and really the afternoon has flown. About Tuesday now. Dear lady, you only took your right place. There is no question about it. I have been to the Mayor, I have been to the Archdeacon. Look.’

He found a page in Whitaker, and gave Helen the volume. It was a table of precedence. I saw ‘Eldest sons of younger sons of peers’ underlined.

‘Look at the next column,’ he said. ‘The sister takes the rank of her husband _or_ her elder brother. Now see where younger sons of Baronets and their wives come!’

Far away below eldest sons of younger sons of peers, in an outer darkness below even members of the fifth class of the Victorian Order, I saw that obscure relationship. My emotions of various kinds almost suffocated me. Helen was justified before all the world. It was _her_ turn to cut the wife of the younger son of the Baronet if she chose.

So we talked very pleasantly for a quarter of an hour about the movements of the aristocracy, and then Mr. Holmes ‘rose to go.’ His cab was waiting, and I helped him on with a very magnificent fur coat in the hall, which in the somewhat indistinct light seemed to be made of the purest rabbit skin. In the dimness of the landing above I thought I could see an obscure shadow leaning over the banisters which resembled Legs.

‘I hope, after this, your wife will take her proper place,’ said Mr. Holmes. ‘Of course, everyone knows the Duchess came here to tea.’

He lit a cigarette, and I heard the banister tremble slightly, as if from an infinitesimal earthquake.

‘It is so kind of you to have taken so much trouble,’ said I firmly.

‘It was nothing. I am sure you need have no further anxiety.’

* * * * *

I went back to the drawing-room. Helen’s face was buried in a sofa-cushion, and Legs came downstairs in three jumps.

So we laughed till it was time to dress for dinner. Occasionally we seemed to be recovering, but then somebody said ‘Creak,’ or ‘Baronet,’ and a fresh relapse took place.

I pity all poor souls who do not know Mr. Holmes. It is so sad for them--sadder than the lady with the cork foot. Oh, think of it! This triumphant vindication of Helen (which is all wrong, by the way) will last him a long, long time. It has been a campaign, triumphantly concluded, and I should not in the least wonder if he has half a bottle of champagne to-night. And after a time the excitement will die away, fading like a golden sunset, and he will settle down to his ordinary life again, and read the paper in the morning, and go for a little drive in the afternoon, and have tea and toast at the club afterwards. And in the spring the Panama hat will come out, and the rich fur coat be put away, and he will hand strawberries instead of buns, and iced coffee instead of tea, and perhaps play a little croquet. But this week has been a great week for him--it really has. If you want to understand the gloriousness of Mr. Holmes, you must take my word for it that nothing so engrossing has happened to him for months.

DECEMBER

This once-happy family has suddenly returned to the pit whence it was digged, and it is impossible to imagine any more depressing spectacle than we present. Dawn in faint flickers is beginning to shine on the wreck, and occasionally for a moment or two, though we may be over-sanguine, Helen and I can dimly imagine being happy again. Legs cannot do that yet; it is still midnight gloom with him.

The intelligent reader will scarcely need to be told that it is the influenza that has blackened the world like this. Helen began, and Legs and I followed within twenty-four hours. That, somehow, is a relief to her, since she feels she did not give it us. As if it mattered where it came from! Besides, personally I would rather catch it from her than anyone else. Legs has had the worst visitation, because, after it was quite certain he had got it, he persisted in attending the last night of the autumn opera season, did not enjoy it at all, of course, by reason of a splitting headache, and was really ill for a day or two. I was infinitely wiser. As soon as the nymph touched me with her fairy hand I went firmly to bed, turned my face to the wall like Hezekiah, and stopped there till the fever was over. After five days I tottered downstairs to find an old, old woman sitting by the fire. It was Helen.

I think that was the most dreadful day I ever remember. She told me again and again how ill I looked until I was goaded into a sort of depressed frenzy, and said I couldn’t possibly look as ill as she. We both had beef-tea in the middle of the morning, and to my horror, when it was brought, it was brought not by Raikes, my man who is as indispensable to this house as is the carburetter to a motor-car (for it won’t run without), but by an Awful Thing that I never saw before. In answer to an inquiry, I was told that Raikes felt very ill, and had asked the Awful Thing to bring us our beef-tea instead of him. So I sent her back to Raikes with a thermometer that he was to be so good as to put under his tongue for one minute, and then return. It came back recording 102 degrees. I gave the Awful Thing the thermometer to wash, and she instantly dropped it on the floor. It was, of course, broken into twenty million fragments, but I remembered that, though I was a worm, I was a Christian worm, and said: ‘Never mind. Please tell Raikes that he is to go to bed instantly.’ I then picked up the twenty million fragments, and cut myself severely. I said ‘Damn!’ quite softly.

Helen winced, which was merely intended to annoy me, and it succeeded admirably.

So there we sat exactly like that awful picture called ‘Les Frileux,’ in which an old man and an old woman sit apart under a leafless tree. The ground is covered with the dead leaves. Soon they will die, too.

It is impossible to depict the dreariness of that morning. Outside a sort of jaundiced day showed the soupy mud that flooded Sloane Street, through which motor-buses, which once I thought so fine, splashed their way. A few sordid people under umbrellas bobbed by the windows, and as the darkness increased a man with a long stick began to turn up the lamps. Then it instantly got rather lighter, and another man (not the same one) with another long stick came and turned them down again. Upon which Egyptian darkness settled down over the town, and I must suppose that the first man had caught the influenza, for he never turned them up any more.

Helen was not reading; she was sitting by the fire looking mournfully at the coals. This would not do at all, and in the intervals of a paroxysm of coughing I asked:

‘How is Legs this morning?’

‘Worse,’ said Helen.

I took up the _Daily Telegraph_, and read the list of the people who were dead. I knew one of them slightly. Then my cut finger began to bleed again, which reminded me of the Awful Thing.