Part 21

“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 assuring 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 assure 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 Laycocks were asked, and did indeed bore Guy sadly.

It was on the night after their visit--Mr. Laycock 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, embarrassing. But what made it most curious was just that; he had not felt it embarrassing 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 passages 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 assent. “All’s well with the world,” was the suffocating assurance that seemed to breathe from them both. “All’s blue.” Was hell 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 passed, 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 clustering 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 hell, one doesn’t want to forget the fact--though one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to remember that hell 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--hell doesn’t exist, does it?” she offered him for his appeasement.

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 attitudinizing; 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 attitudinizing 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. Laycock 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 passage 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 associate 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 Aimée 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 Aimée 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 dispassionateness, 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!”

“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 hell 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 hell 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 hell?” 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 hell. 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 attitude 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 hell 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 hoarser 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 hell 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 preëminently.”

“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 repetition. “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.