CHAPTER XV

Edith finished writing the words “gigantic success,” and then laid down her pen, having filled the very small space allotted to correspondence on a picture postcard that bore on its back a highly-coloured view of the opera-house in Munich, and on the space allotted to the address the name of Peggy. Then she tore it up. She wanted to say more than that to Peggy, and though she was tired, she felt she must write her a letter which should give her in less meagre quantity (and in quality things more private than could be sent face upward through Europe) some little impression of the week that had elapsed since she left England. And in order to do that she found that she must arrange and sound her thoughts and her memory, for she had lived simply from the minute to the minute, enjoying each to the uttermost, yet somehow not grudging their passage, for each was sufficient in itself.

Her windows were wide open, but the sun had slanted westward, so that the balcony outside was in shade, though ever so little way beyond the white glare fell on the road with its avenue of dusty trees. Though September was near to its end, and during the first three days of their stay here there had been cold and frosty nights, it seemed as if the sun had repented of his winter-heralding withdrawal, and had come back to give them a few hours more of summer days. And at this moment it struck Edith, yet with no touch of sadness, how like to this beneficent return of June-like heat was her own case. In London, ten days ago, the forerunning foot of winter had struck her, yet now in her life, no less than in the ordering of the season of the year, summer with shout and banners renewed for a moment its miracle. Outside it was hot and windless and dry, and as she moved to her window she drew in a long breath of the eternal, unfading air. There even the sensitive leaves of the white poplars were still; there was but little traffic in the street, the awnings below her room and above her balcony neither stirred nor flapped in the blazing tranquillity. Calm, omnipotent summer reigned. And to-night Hugh was to sing in “Tristan.”

It was not in Munich, so she felt, it was not on the Cornish coast, it was not by the banks of the Scheldt or the Pegnitz, nor even in the giant-built towers of Walhalla, that she had lived during this week that would come to a close to-night. She and Hugh had lived far away from any human place, yet in a place that, lovers and music-lovers, each had felt to be his own, and more familiar and dear than any other home. Heart and treasure lay there, and even Walhalla was leagues, immeasurable leagues, below it. Trouble and anxiety and fear were strangers to it, or at the most (and that only for one of them) lay as some thunderstorm in an Alpine valley lies far below the feet and the eyes of those who have climbed above it into the clear, passionate altitudes that are domed in sky and floored by ice. All week long they had mounted, mounted through the fine austere air; and life, all they knew of life, had been put in a crucible and distilled for their drinking. All that was to be, whatever that was, had for these days been expunged from memory and from anticipation; it had been all to sit on this rose-coloured peak, hand-entwined, without seeing the troubled cloud below, without hearing the thunder and the voices that cried out of it. She had determined not to think of the descent, not to conjecture about the dangers and misty passages of the journey till the time for descent had come. It would come to-night, but before it came there would come the divinest hour of all, the rosiest flames of sunset, when she would sit in the hushed house and hear....

The week had been her treat to Hugh, and the compact had been that he should ask no questions. Possibly it was child-like, possibly it was a barbaric notion of hospitality; but it had given her enormous pleasure to throw money about for him, to take the most expensive suite of rooms, to have masses of fresh flowers in day after day, to have a really smart carriage always waiting, to have meals in a private dining-room. Somehow, on the material plane, infinitesimal though it all was, she wanted to express that which so filled and flooded her; she would have liked to furnish this room afresh, to have railings of gold for the balconies and frescoes for the walls, and then at the end of the week to burn and destroy it all. She had, in fact, gone as far as was consistent with sanity, but not being insane had not gone farther.

Tired! Oh! how tired she had been again and again, and how indomitably she had spurned fatigue! The glory, the jest of it, too! Again and again Hugh had said that he really must, if she didn’t mind, lie down and rest, if he was to keep awake during the opera. She had beaten him at his own game, at youth, and time and again he had confessed as much. He had even confided to her his projected errand to Sir Thomas on their last day in London, in order to satisfy himself that she was “up to Munich.” Now it was he who had wondered if he was. But all the time she had clung to her supposed cold; she had insisted that she had a really bad one, and that she would not permit Hugh the least risk of catching it. And at such moments a cloud came over her sun, there was an echo of heart-breaking things from the valley below, and hunger on these heights.

Yes; fear had been there; she knew that her ears had heard that echo and her heart had felt that hunger, though for a stray moment or two only. As quick as hands could move her fingers had stopped her ears, and nimbly had put before her heart the feast that was spread for it now. And it was only of the perfection of the present hour that she wrote to Peggy; no hint of the coming winter was there, though measured by the actual lapse of minutes it was but an hour or two before summer would cease. But before summer ceased she would see Tristan once more, her Tristan.

By the time her letter to Peggy was finished it was time for her to dress for the opera. Hugh had already gone down to the house, and she had a little soup and a cutlet only, for, as usual, they were going to have supper together after the opera. To-night, however, since Hugh was going to sing, he had eaten nothing for some hours before, and their supper was to be of substantial nature. She had planned it all; she had ordered the dishes that she liked as well as he. They were going to have some cold soup, a dish of blue trout, a partridge, and a savoury. All this was bathed in the setting rays of this last day of summer sun; it would illumine, too, their coffee, and the cigarette which Hugh would smoke with it. And during that cigarette, so she determined, summer was to cease. It was then she would tell him.

* * * * *

For a moment, as she dressed for the opera, she wondered how he would take it. It was worse for him than her; her whole attitude toward life and her instinct told her that with the same certainty with which she knew that it was easier, vastly easier for her to know that she had consumption than it would have been to learn that Hugh had. That was what love meant; just that one simple fact that to the woman who loves, her husband is more truly herself than she. That was no news to her; she had known it ever since she had known Hugh. And it could not have been true of her if it had not been true of him also. Oh, poor Hugh, poor Hugh!

Then with complete erasure she banished the thoughts of what that hour round about midnight this evening would bring. She was still in love with life, with the huge exultant happiness that is the birthright of clean and normal souls who love another. Such happiness, the highest and the best of all earthly bliss, is no niggardly distillation of human life; to produce it a hundred or a myriad souls have not to be boiled down in torment of fire or refined through starvation of joy so that, basil-like, it may put forth its flowers from roots that have been enriched with the life-blood and tears of the many, nor is it rare or recondite and only to be perceived by the Æolian harps of the world. Instead it is a common, common bliss; none seek it or strain after it, but there are but few who do not find it. Her sweet simple soul loved Hugh; Hugh, as simple as herself, loved her. And if shadows of the dark valley were near, that would be the all-sufficing lamp which would dissipate them.

Then crowning this crown, which was hers, was a further gem-like circlet. To him the supreme gift of song had been given, to her the supremacy of appreciation.... And it was time to go downstairs and drive to the opera to hear “Tristan.”

* * * * *

It had been arranged that, since the opera-house was so close to their hotel, she should not wait for Hugh when it was over, but come straight home, and she waited there some time before he joined her in an exultation of happiness. The ceasing of summer, which was now so close in the measure of minutes, not hours any longer, was banished from her consciousness. Hugh and Tristan, inextricably intermingled, usurped it all. She tried to reconstruct the events of the evening, and found them misty. She only knew that the audience, German, instinctively opposed to an English artist, but critical, lancet-like, and, after all, when their emotions were roused, fair, had lost their heads. Fat London had been moved over Hugh’s Lohengrin; but Germany, not fat, like London, in matters of perception and appreciation, had been much more than moved.

What had happened exactly?... The end of the first act? Yes, Hugh had been nervous, quite obviously nervous, and had not done himself justice, nor had he done justice to the glorious _rôle_ for which he was cast. And then? Edith had sent round a note to him, saying:

“My darling, I am playing Isolde, and I don’t find you. Isolde, Isolde.”

And a note had come back to her.

“I’m so nervous I can’t do anything. But I’ll try, Isolde.”

It appeared that he had tried. As the curtain went down on the second act the theatre rose as if the Emperor had entered. But it was Hugh.

It was Hugh in the third act. Hugh! And critical Germany during the third act committed a unique fault of taste. It had been foreshadowed in a way, because once and again as Tristan yearned for the coming of the ship a sort of under-breathed groan had gone through the packed house. Then, when Tristan had sung his last note, the interruption occurred. The play was stopped; the orchestra, inaudible beneath the shouts, were stopped also, and a huge roar of applause went up, damning the artistic reputation of Munich for years to come. “Tristan! Tristan!” was the cry. But to Edith the cry was “Hugh!”

Ah! but how proud she was of him then, not for that which he had done, but for that which he did not do. He had fallen, loose jointed, and lay with face toward the house, and not a quiver of eyelash, not a movement of the nightingale throat, not a curl of his mouth answered the thunder of the applause. Edith had not, even when that thunder rose to its highest, been afraid that he would respond, but it was glorious to her to see how still he lay. An almost irresistible appeal had come from the thousand throats, but the artist since it was personal, since it was to his voice and his personality to which it was made, was utterly unconscious of it. Tristan, who he was, lay dead. Soon after Isolde sang the _Liebestod_.

“The death song,” thought Edith. “What if I sing another? Oh, Hugh, Hugh!”

It was then that Hugh came in, as she sat in the window, while the table laid for their supper stood ready. Munich had gone mad about him, and from where she sat in the window she had heard the distant roar that had greeted him as he came out of the theatre, which had grown gradually louder and louder till now the square outside was packed with the music-mad. She had guessed at once what that distant roar meant, and her guess had grown into certainty as it grew louder and nearer. And Hugh came in.

“Ah! your note to me,” he said--“it was that. Oh! isn’t it fun? I told you it would be! And they took the horses out and dragged me, the darlings!”

The agitated proprietor tapped and entered, and a short conference ensued. The upshot was that if the high-born would of his graciousness show himself or sing on the balcony, all would be well, otherwise the inhabitants of the hotel might have a night that began very late. If the high-born gave permission, the proprietor would announce the fact.

“But I’m so hungry!” said Hugh.

The proprietor had been present at the opera.

“I beseech you!” he said.

“Yes, Hugh,” said Edith.

“Then you will come with me?” asked Hugh.

Ah! but how the summer sun blazed then. She but nodded to him, and with a reverence of extraordinary amplitude to them both, the proprietor shouted a few guttural words from the balcony. Then he bowed and came back into the room.

Hugh took Edith’s arm.

“Together,” he said; and together they went out on to the balcony. The night was windless, and the flame of the gas-lamps burned without wavering. The whole square was packed with faces, and full of a low hubbub of talk. But when the two appeared the hubbub ceased and silence like an incoming tide spread everywhere. Then Hugh turned quickly to the proprietor.

“Hi! did you say I was going to sing?” he asked.

“I said it was possible. A thousand pardons,” said this perfidious man, manœuvring into a better place.

Hugh drew a long breath, and with his arm in Edith’s stepped on to the edge of the balcony. Then he turned side-face to the crowd, unlinked his arm from hers, and took both her hands in his. He did not look out over the crowd; he looked at her. And he sang:

“_Du meine Seele, du mein Herz._”

At the end there was dead silence, for he unloosed one of his hands and held it to the crowd.

“Good-night, friends,” he said in good, firm German; “and we are all going to sleep. Hush! Thank you.”

Then he took Edith’s arm again, and they went back to the waiting supper. The window, through which they had entered again, he had left wide open, but the only sound that came in was the movement of feet dispersing.

“And that was the best of all, Hughie!” said she.

* * * * *

Edith could not quite rise to the superficial heights of gaiety during their supper, but it was even more impossible for her to rise--or sink--to any tragic level. Some equable level was there; she neither feared what she had to tell, nor did she rise to it by any exaltation of spirit that commanded her to think that nothing mattered, when happiness shone like this. Life and death and sickness and health in her mind took their natural level; all of them were to her the commonplace of souls that lived; to every soul these things happened; they were all on the same plane, because they were so big.

* * * * *

Just as she had anticipated, Hugh took a cigarette with his coffee, and she watched the burning ash get nearer to his fingers. When it got quite close she would speak. At present it was half an inch off. So she still talked of that of which they had talked.

“But why Tristan did not come to life when the _Liebestod_ was sung over him,” she said, “is what I cannot imagine. Surely it was enough to make the dead live.”

“Sing it over me, then,” said Hugh, “when you watch by my corpse. I will come to life, I promise you, which is more than I did to-night. What Vandals, to interrupt like that!”

“Yes, Vandals,” said she; “but I didn’t feel surprised.”

“O, that’s all rot,” said Hugh. “But how I loved the interruption, and how I longed to open one eyelid. But I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Hugh leaned forward over the table, his eyes and his hands toward his wife.

“My life!” he said. “How stupid that sort of phrase used to sound until one knew that it was true. My life! Yes, I look at you, my life; that has become literally true. Oh, true in big ways and small ways alike.”

The cigarette was getting shorter, and Hugh took a long inhalation of it, and flipped off a piece of charred paper.

“Yes, big ways and small ways,” he repeated. “Big ways, because you gave me myself, which is you, and small ways because I sang to-night, both in the silly opera-house and on that silly balcony, because I was you. Don’t you understand? Sometimes I think you don’t and it is so odd that you shouldn’t.”

Still Edith was silent, for she would have to speak very soon now, and without a pause Hugh went on--

“Considering that it is you who made me begin to understand,” he said, “it is odd that you shouldn’t know what you have done. I don’t know who and what you are, or who or what I am, but I do know that we are It. It, life, call it what you please. And how is your cold?” he asked suddenly, placing his cigarette-end in his coffeecup.

The burning ash hissed in protest, and was still. Then Edith answered him.

“It isn’t any better, Hughie,” she said. “It won’t be better for a long time. Are you comfortable there? If not, let us move, because I have to talk to you.”

Once before she remembered having said to Peggy that she almost wanted Hugh to be unhappy so that she might comfort him, for she knew, or thought she knew, that she could always do that. But she had to make him unhappy first--strike this dreadful blow. Already, so to speak, he had seen her arm raised against him in the few words she had just spoken: he knew that some blow impended, and though his face was still eager and vivid, the expression on it seemed suddenly fixed. He waited--tense, rigid, while his hand that had just dropped the cigarette-end into his cup turned over at the wrist, like a dead hand, and dropped on to the table-cloth. Then he spoke below his breath.

“Quick--tell me quickly,” he said; “I can bear anything except waiting.”

She took the hand that lay on the table-cloth in both of hers, but it still lay, as if dead, not responding to her pressure.

“I have got consumption,” she said.

Hugh drew back his head a moment, blinking and wincing as if from a physical blow, and summer stopped.

Neither moved, neither spoke. Edith, having struck the inevitable blow, laid down the weapon, and her soul stood waiting, so to speak, listening eagerly for Hugh to call to her in his pain, so that she might go to him and comfort him and bind up the wound she had made. There was nothing nearer to her heart than that, nothing that she so desired, and nothing of all that had been could be so exquisite. Summer might have stopped, but on this winter’s day there was splendour of sun and snow. She had not foreseen that.

But just yet Hugh could not call to her, he could not even need her yet, for he was dizzy and reeling with the blow. He had no power to move: the very fact that a moment before all the depths of his nature--all the strength of his love for her--had been so dominant, so triumphant, made this paralysis the more complete. And in this stunning of his true and essential self, the surface perception, the mere habitual work of eyes and ears and touch seemed suddenly quickened, just as Edith’s had been when Sir Thomas told her this same thing. A little odour as of caramel came from the cup where he had dropped his cigarette-end, from the sugar no doubt, which had been burned before the sweet dregs quenched the red-hot ash: as his hand turned over on to the table-cloth he had knocked the spoon out of the saucer, and the clink of it as it fell sounded in his ears more clearly than even those four words which Edith had spoken. The lace curtains by the window out of which so short a time ago he and Edith had stepped on to the balcony just stirred in a little breeze that had arisen during the last half-hour; on the mantelpiece a striking clock jarred to show the hour was approaching. And the touch of Edith’s hands on his meant no more to him than would the touch of any other hand have meant. Hands touched him, anybody’s hands. Eyes looked at him, too, from that beloved face opposite, but they were anybody’s eyes, it was anybody’s face.

Then the sensitiveness of surface-perception grew a little deadened as the paralysis of the internal perception began, very slowly, starting from the surface and working gradually inward, to pass off.

“And we were so happy!” he said.

So he was beginning to need her.

“Yes, thank God, my darling,” said she. “Let us often think how happy we have been.”

He could not receive, assimilate more than that at once. It was for the moment no use, so she felt, to speak hopefully, determinedly of the future, of her unquenchable resolve to get well. He would be ready for that soon, but not quite yet, poor darling. So she waited.

“When did you know?” asked he quietly.

“Just before we left London. I could not do without this beautiful week we have just had, Hughie. So I did not tell you till it was over.”

“Then--then your having a cold meant that?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Hugh pushed back his chair with sudden vehemence, got up, and roughly, strongly, so that she was both hurt and startled, flung his arms round her, pinioning hers, and kissed her. He devoured her face with kisses, eyes and mouth, forehead and hair and neck were sealed with the redness and fervour of his lips. It was vain for her to struggle with this almost savage outburst of love; it was in vain for her to remonstrate, for he stopped her breath with his. Yet she tried; but, oh, how sweet it was to find her struggle, her remonstrance, useless. How during this last ten days she had missed and yearned for the caress of his eager breath, the roughness and smoothness of his face, his eyes burning close to hers as they burned now. And for him that physical contact which the tumult of his love demanded shook off the paralysis and the stunning. It was as if a man struck by apoplexy had had his blood let, as in the primitive surgery of old days. It was this strong flow of it that restored him to himself.

“Oh, my soul, my soul,” he whispered, “to think that you have borne it alone. Thank God, that is over. But you cut me to the heart in not telling me. I didn’t deserve that from you.”

His lip quivered, his eyes were brimming with tears that soon ran over, and it was she who kissed them away. Just for that moment she could not help it. “Be sensible, not kiss anybody”--the words of the doctor sounded like gibberish. Hugh was crying, the doctor did not allow for that contingency. Nothing in the world mattered at this moment but that she should comfort him. He had never cried before, as far as she knew, and the sobs came from so deep within him.

“Oh, if it was selfish, forgive me,” she said; “but it was not thus that I meant it. I did want one week more so much, my darling, one week to crown all the others.”

She had told Peggy that she meant quite distinctly to lie to Hugh, to tell him that Sir Thomas had recommended her to go to Munich. But quite suddenly she found she could not lie to him. No question arose in her mind as to the morality of telling the truth or the immorality of falsehood. It was not a moral choice that was now flashed before her, it was a mere question of what was possible and what was not.

“It has crowned the others,” she said, “and I am exultant that we have got it. Oh, Hughie, we have captured this week, snatched it from all the foolish physicians who forbade it. Yes, dear, my selfishness went as far as that. He told me not to come. So I came, and I am more glad than I can say. He told me also to be sensible, not to kiss anybody. I have disobeyed him there too. So forgive me for both.”

Hugh had drawn his chair close to hers.

“Oh, forgive, forgive,” he said. “What word is that between us?”

“No; it is a foolish word from me to you,” she said; “but understand then. Can’t you understand? Just now you wondered at me for not understanding what you said I had done. I wonder at you now for not understanding what joy your joy has been to me. Why, it is mine, and more mine because it is yours. Hughie, though I asked you just now to forgive, I tell you that I am delighted with what I have done. It is like--a dog that has stolen a bone, and looks deprecating. All the time he licks his lips. He has had it; it tasted so good, and though he may be beaten subsequently, his mouth still waters at the remembrance. Mine does. There would have been a shadow over this week if you had known.”

“There would never have been this week at all,” he broke in.

“Oh, don’t be too sure--I am very obstinate when I want a thing.”

Yes; she was comforting him already, and though he did not know it, she