 5 After the automobile had taken Margaret away, Chris came to us as we sat in the drawing-room, and after standing for a while in the glow of the fire, hesitantly said, I want to tell you that I know it is all right. Margaret has explained to me." Kitty crumpled her sewing into a white ball. You mean, I suppose, that you know I am your wife. I am pleased that you describe that as knowing it's all right, and grateful that you have accepted it at last, on Margaret's authority. This is an occasion that would make any wife proud. Her irony was as faintly accurate as a caraway-seed, and never afterward did she reach even that low pitch of violence, for from that mild forward group of the head with which she received the mental lunge, she realized suddenly that this was no pretense, and that something as impassable as death lay between them. Thereafter his proceedings evoked no comment but suffering. There was nothing to say when all day, save for those hours of the afternoon that Margaret spent with him, he sat like a blind man waiting for his darkness to lift. There was nothing to say when he did not seem to see our flowers, yet kept till they rotted the daffodils which Margaret brought from the garden that looked like an allotment. So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, face downward on a sofa, with one limp arm dangling to the floor, or protruding stiff feet in fantastic slippers from the end of a curtained bed, and I tried to make my permanent wear that mood which had mitigated the end of my journey with Margaret, a mood of intense perception in which my strained mind settled on every vivid object that came under my eyes, and tried to identify myself with its brightness and its lack of human passion. This does not mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation. It means that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high spring sky, while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body in my attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert. Water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand. One snarls at one's company. Thoughts prick one through sleep, like mosquitoes. A week after my journey to Wealdstone I went to Kitty to ask her to come for a walk with me, and found her stretched on her pillows, holding a review of her underclothing. She refused bitterly and added, Be back early. Remember Dr. Gilbert Anderson is coming at half past four. He's our last hope. And tell that woman she must see him. He says he wants to see everybody concerned. She continued to look onely at the frail, luminous silks her maid brought her as a speculator, who had cornered an article for which there had been no demand might look at his damnably numerous, damnably unprofitable frails. So I went alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds, under which there ran quick, fresh currents of air and broken shafts of insistent sunshine, that spread a gray clarity of light, in which every colour showed sharp and strong. On the breast that harrow-wield turns to the south they had set a lambing-yard. The pale lavender hurdles and gold strewn straw were new gay notes on the opaque winter-green of the slope, and the apprehensive bleatings of the ews wound about the hill like a river of sound, as they were driven up a lane hidden by the hedge. The lines of bare elms darkening the plains below made it seem as though the tide of winter had fallen, and left this bare and sparkling in the spring. I liked it so much that I opened the gate and went and sat down on a tree which had been torn up by the roots in the great gale last year, but had not yet resigned itself to death, and was bravely decking its bowels with purple elm flowers. That pleased me too, and I wished I had someone with me to enjoy this artless little show of the new year. I had not really wanted Kitty—the companions I needed were Chris and Margaret. Chris would have talked as he loved to do when he looked at leisure on a broad valley, about ideas which he had to exclude from his ordinary hours, lest they should break the power of business over his mind. And Margaret would have gravely watched the argument from the shadow of her broad hat to see that it kept true, like a housewife watching a saucepan of milk, lest it should boil over. They were naturally my friends—these gentle, speculative people. Then suddenly I was stunned with jealousy. It was not their love for each other that caused me such agony at that moment. It was the thought of the things their eyes had rested upon together. I imagined that white hawthorn among the poplars by the ferry on which they had looked fifteen years ago at Monkey Island, and it was more than I could bear. I thought how even now they might be exclaiming at the green smoke of the first buds on the brown undergrowth by the pond. And at that I slid off the tree-trunk and began walking very quickly down the hill. The red cows drank from the pond, cupped by the willow-roots. A raw-boned stallion danced clumsily because warmth was running through the ground. I found a stream in the fields, and followed it till it became a shining dike embanked with glowing green and gold mosses in the midst of woods, and the sight of those things was no sort of joy, because my vision was solitary. I wanted to end my desperation by leaping from a height, and I climbed on a knoll and flung myself face downward on the dead leaves below. I was now utterly cut off from Chris. Before, when I looked at him, I knew an instant ease in the sight of the short golden down on his cheeks, the ridge of bronze flesh above his thick, fair eyebrows. But now I was too busy reassuring him by showing him a steady, undistorted profile, crowned by a neat, proud sweep of hair. Instead of the tear-darkened mask, he always feared, ever to have enough vitality left over to enjoy his presence. I spoke in a calm voice, full from the chest, quite unfluted with agony. I read country life with ponderous interest. I kept my hands, which I desired to ring, in dough-skin gloves for most of the day. I played with the dogs a great deal, and wore my thickest tweeds. I pretended that the slight heaviness of my features is a correct indication of my temperament. The only occasion when I could safely let the sense of him saturate me as it used was when I met Margaret in the hall as she came or went. She was very different now. She had a little smile in her eyes, as though she were listening to a familiar air played far away. Her awkwardness seemed indecision as to whether she should walk or dance to that distant music. Her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child, who had been so eager to get to the party, that it has not let its nurse finish fastening its frock. Always she extended a hand in an unbuttoned black-thread glove, and said, It's another fine day again. Or diffidently as Kitty continued to withhold her presence. I hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping well. Then, as our hands touched, he was with us, invoked by our common adoration. I felt his rough, male texture, and saw the clear warmth of his brown and gold colouring. I thought of him with the passion of exile. To Margaret it was a call, and she moved past me to the garden, holding her hands in front of her, as though she bore invisible gifts, and pausing on the step of the French window to smile to herself, as if in her heart she turned over the precious thought. He is here. This garden holds him. My moment, my small soul's subsistence, ended in a feeling of jealousy, as ugly and unmental as sickness. This was the saddest spring. Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our rejection. You may think we were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely the delusion of a madman, but every minute of the day, particularly at those trying times when he strolled about the house and grounds with the doctors, smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive commercial traveller in a hotel's smoking-room, it became plain that if madness means a liability to wild error about the world, Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If he had said to Kitty and me, I do not know you, we would have gaped. If he had expanded his meaning and said, You are nothing to me, my heart is separate from your hearts. We would have wept at an unkindness he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me only as a disregarded playmate, and Kitty, not at all, save as a stranger would somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the order of his meals, he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay weeping at it on the dead leaves, I was sensible of the bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold and intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity, and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much sayner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the unessential and the irritating. I was even willing to admit that this choice of what was to him reality, out of all the appearances so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him. But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life. I could not think clearly about it. I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul, and in me the type that mediates between the soul and body and makes them run even and unhasty, like a well-matched pair of carriage-horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty that I could think of only as a conjunction of calamitous images. I think of it happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud-flats made steel-bright with floods pitted by the soft slow rain. There, past a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous with patches of bare bricks that show like sores, through the ripped-off plaster and uncovered rafters that stick out like broken bones. There are people still living here. A slouchy woman sits at the door of a filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arm at some passing soldiers, and at another house there is a general store, with strings of orange onions and bunches of herbs hanging from the roof, a brown gloom rich with garlic and humming with the flies that live all the year round in French village shops, a black cat rubbing her sleepiness against the lintel. It is in there that Chris is standing, facing across the counter an old man in a blouse, with a scar running white into the gray thickets of his beard, an old man with a smile at once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with dirt, and yet magnificent by reason of the Olympian structure of his body. I think he is the soul of the universe, equally cognizant and disregardful of every living thing, to whom I am not more dear than the bare-armed slouchy woman at the neighbouring door. And Chris is leaning on the counter, his eyes glazed. This is his spirit, his body lies out there in the drizzle at the other end of the road. He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her knotting plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there. Then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight, and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent. He is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly enclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world. I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking of the globe, and cried out, Gilbert Anderson! Gilbert Anderson must cure him! Heaven knows that I had no reason for faith in any doctor, for during the last week so many of them, as sleek as seals with their neatly brushed hair and their frock coats, had stood round Chris and looked at him with the consequence less deliberation of a plumber. Their most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had submitted to it as a good-natured man and submits to being blindfolded as a children's party, and under its influence had recovered his memory and his middle-aged personality, had talked of kitty with the humorous tenderness of the English husband, and had looked possessively about him. But as his mind came out of the control, he exposed their lie that they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process, by pushing away this knowledge, and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know. I had accepted that it would always be so. But at that moment I had so great a need to throw off my mood of despair, so insupportably loaded with all the fantastic images to which my fevered mind transmitted the facts of our tragedy, that I filled myself with a gasping urgent faith in this new doctor. I jumped up and pushed through the brambles to the hedge that divided the preserves in which I was trespassing from my own woods, breathless because I had let it go past four, and I still had to find Chris and Margaret for the doctor's visit at the half-hour. There had been a hardening of the light while I slept that made the dear familiar woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, tropical, the dual bright buds on the soot-black boughs, the blue valley distances, smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen between the black and white intricacies of the birch trunks and the luminous grey pillars of the beaches, hurt my wet eyes as might beauty blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger, too, for I walked as apprehensively as there was snake coiled under every leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her without looking at her, or thinking in silence while he played with her hand. Embraces do not matter—they merely indicate the will to love, and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh. I know it must be so. A lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out. I could not have borne to see signs of how he had achieved this intimacy with the woman whom a sudden widening of the downward vista showed as she leaned her bent back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a birch that some special skill of our forester had made wonderful for its straight slenderness. Against the clear colours of the bright, bare wood, her yellow raincoat made a muddy patch, and as a dead bough dropped near her she made a squalid, dodging movement like a hen. She was not so much a person, as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage in the screams of children. Doubtlessly he sat somewhere close to her, lumbishly content. I thought distractedly how necessary it was that Gilbert Anderson should cure him, and try to shout to her, but found my throat full of sobs. So I broke my way down through the fern and bramble, and stood level with them, though still divided by some yards of broken ground. It was not utter dullness not to have anticipated the beauty that I saw. No one could have told. They had taken the Macintosh rug out of the dinghy, and spread it on this little space of clear grass. I think so that they could look at a scattering of early prim-roses in a pool of white anemones to Oak Tree's foot. She had run her hands over the rug, so that it lay quite smooth and comfortable under him. When at last he felt drowsy and turned on his side to sleep. He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his hands unclenched, and his head thrown back, so that the bare throat showed defencelessly. Now he was asleep, and his face undarkened by thought. One saw how very fair he really was. And she, her mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the cold river of air sent by the advancing evening, through the screen of rusted gold bracken behind her, was sitting by him, just watching. I have often seen people grouped like that on the common outside our gates on bank holidays. Most often the man has a handkerchief over his face to shade him from the sun, and the woman squats beside him and peers through the undergrowth to see that the children come to know harm as they play. It is some time seemed to me that there was significance about it. You know when one goes into the damp, odorous coolness of a church in a Catholic country, and sees the kneeling worshippers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like a sword, and one says to oneself, If humanity forgets these attitudes, there is an end to the world. But people like me, who are not artists, are never sure about people they don't know. So it was not till now, when it happened to be my friends, when it was my dear Chris, and my dear Margaret, who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I knew it was the most significant, as it was the loveliest attitude in the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul, and is keeping it warm and love and peace, so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I know there are things at least as great for those women whose independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this, which had given sleep to the beloved. I had known that he was having bad nights at Baldry Court in that new room with the jade-green painted walls and the lapis lazily fireplace, which he found with surprise to be his, instead of the remembered little room with the fishing rods, but I had not been able to do anything about it. It was not fair that by the exercise of a generosity which seemed as fortuitous a possession as a beautiful voice, a woman should be able to do such wonderful things for a man. For sleep was the least of her gifts to him. What she had done in leading him into the quiet, magic circle out of our life, out of the splendid house which was not so much a house, as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe, and decorated partly for beauty, and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of the garden where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow, and the wood made as formal as a pillared aisle by forestry, may be judged from my anguish in being left there alone. Indeed, she had been generous to us all, for at her touch our lives had at last fallen into a pattern. She was the sober thread that the interweaving of which with our scattered magnificences had somewhat achieved the design that otherwise would not appear. Perhaps even her dinginess was part of a generosity, for in order to fit into the pattern one has sometimes to forego something of one's individual beauty. That is why women like us do not wear such obviously lovely dresses as cacots, but clothe ourselves in garments that by their slight neglect of the possibilities of beauty declare that there are such things as thrift and restraint, and care for the future. And so I could believe of Margaret that I determined dwelling in places where there was not enough of anything. Her continued exposure of herself to the grime of squalid living was unconsciously deliberate. The deep internal thing that had guided Chris to forgetfulness had guided her to poverty. So that when the time came for her meeting with her lover there should not be one intimation of the beauty of suave flesh distract him from the message of her soul. I looked upward at the supreme act of sacrifice, and glowed at her private gift to me. My sleep, though short, was now dreamless. No more did I see his body rotting into union with that brown texture of corruption which is no man's land. No more did I see him slipping softly down the parapet into the trench. No more did I hear voices talking in a void. Help me, old man, I've got no legs. I can't, old man, I've got no hands. They could not take him back to the army as he was. Only that morning as I went through the library, he had raised in a pooled face from the pages of history of the war. Jenny, it can't be true that they did that to Belgium. Those funny, quiet, stingy people. And his sojournly knowledge was as deeply buried as this memory of that awful August. While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul. I was so grateful that I was forced to go and sit down on the rug beside her. It was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near her. She did not look surprised when she turned to me her puckered brows, but smiled through the ugly fringe of vagrant hairs the weather had plucked from under the hard rim of her hat. It was part of her loveliness that even if she did not understand an act she could accept it. Presently she leaned over to me across his body and whispered, It is not cold. I put the overcoat on him as soon as he was fairly off. I've just felt his hands, and there is warmest toast. If I had whispered like that, I would have wakened him. Soon he stirred, groped for her hand, and lay with his cheek against the rough palm. He was awake, but liked to lie so. In a little she shook her hand away and said, Get up and run along to the house and have some hot tea. He'll catch a death lying out here. He sought her hand again. It was evident that for some reason the moment was charged with ecstasy for them both. It seemed as though there was a softer air in the small clearing than anywhere else in the world. I stood up with my back against a birch, and said negligently, knowing that now nothing could really threaten them. There is a doctor coming at half-past four who wants to see you both. It cast no shadow on the serenity. He smiled upward, still lying on his back, and hailed me. Hello, Jenny! But she made him get up, and help her to fold the rug. It's not right to keep a doctor waiting in these times," she declared. So overworked they are poor men since the war. As I led the way up through the woods to the house, I heard her prove a point by an illustrative anecdote about something that had happened down her road. I heard too their footsteps come to a halt for a space. I think her grey eyes had looked at him so sweetly that he had been constrained to take her in his arms. A cold hand closed round my heart as we turned the corner of the house and came on Dr. Gilbert Anderson. I was startled to begin with by his unmedical appearance. He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the profile of an amiable cat, and a lively taste in spotted ties, and he had lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished practitioners. He was at once more comical and more suggestive of power than any other doctor I had ever seen, and this difference was emphasised by his unexpected occupation. A tennis-ball which he had discovered somewhere had roused his sporting instincts, and he was trying at what range it was possible to kick it between two large balls and it was possible to kick it between two large stones which he had placed close together in front of the steps up to the house. It was his chubby absorption in this amusement which accounted for his first moment of embarrassment. Nobody aboutened there. We professional men get so little fresh air," he said, bluffly, and blew his nose in a very large handkerchief from the folds of which he emerged with perfect self-possession. You," he said to Chris, with a naive adoption of the detective tone, are the patient. He rolled his blue eye on me, took a good look, and as he realised I did not matter, shook off the unnecessary impression like a dog coming out of water. He faced Margaret as though she were the nurse in charge of the case, and gave her a brisk little nod. Your Mrs. Gray, I shall want to talk to you later. Meantime, this man, I'll come back." He indicated by a windmill gesture that we should go into the house, and swung off with Chris. She obeyed, that sort of woman always does with the doctor orders. But I delayed for a moment to stare after this singular specialist, to sidetrack my foreboding by pronouncing him a bounder, to wish, as my foreboding persisted, that like a servant I could give notice, because there was always something happening in the house. Then, as the obedient figure at the top of the stairs was plainly shivering under its shoddy clothes in the rising wind, that was polishing the end of the afternoon to brightness, I hastened to lead her into the hall. We stood about uneasily in its gloming. Margaret looked round her and said in a voice flattened by the despondency she evidently shared with me. It's nice to have everything ready that people can want in everything in its place. I used to do it at Monkey Island Inn. It was not grand like this, of course, but our visitors always came back a second time. Abstractly, and yet with joy, she fingered the fine work of the table leg. There was a noise above us like the fluttering of doves. Kitty was coming downstairs in a white, surged dress, against which her hands were rosy—a woman with such lovely little hands never needed to wear flowers. By her kind of physical discipline she had reduced her grief to no more than a slight darkening under the eyes, and for this moment she was glowing. I knew it was because she was going to meet a new man, and anticipated the kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I smiled, contrasting her probable prefiguring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable retundity we had just encountered. Not that it would have made any difference if she had seen him. Beautiful women of her type lose, in this manner of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of class distinction. They are obscurely aware that it is their civilising mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they shall desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future. There is, you know, really room for all of us. We each have a peculiar use. The doctor's talking to Chris outside, I said. Ah! breathed kitty! I found, though the occasion was a little grim, some entertainment in the two women's faces, so mutually intent, so differently fair, the one a polished surface that reflected light, like a mirror hung opposite a window, the other a lamp grime'd by the smoke of careless use, but still giving out radiance from its burning oil. Margaret was smiling, wonderingly up at this prettiness, but kitty seemed to be doing some brainwork. How do you do, Mrs. Gray? she said, suddenly shaking out her cordiality as one shakes out a fan. It's very kind of you. Won't you go upstairs and take off your things? No, thank you," answered Margaret, shyly. I shall have to go away so soon. Ah! do! begged kitty, prettily. It was, of course, that she did not want Margaret to meet the specialist in those awful clothes. But I did not darken the situation by explaining that this disaster had already happened. Instead I turned to Margaret in expression which conveyed that this was an act of hospitality, the refusal of which we would find wounding. And to that she yielded, as I knew she would. She followed me upstairs, and along the corridors very slowly, like a child paddling in a summer sea. She enjoyed the feeling of the thick carpet underfoot. She looked strangely at the pictures on the wall. Occasionally she put a finger to touch a vase, as if by that she made its preciousness more her own. Her spirit, I could see, was as deeply concerned about Chris as was mine. But she had such faith in life that she retained serenity enough to enjoy what beauty she came across in her period of waiting. Even her enjoyment was indirectly generous. When she came into my room the backward flinging of her head and her deep— Oh! recalled to me what I had long forgotten. How fine were its proportions! How clever the grooved arch above the window! How like the evening sky my blue curtains! And the lovely things you have in your dressing-table! she commented. You must have very good taste! The charity that changed my riches to a merit! As I helped her to take off her raincoat, and reflected that kitty would not be pleased when she saw that the removal of the garment disclosed a purple blouse of stuff called moirette that servants use for petticoats, she exclaimed softly kitty's praises. I know I shouldn't make personal remarks, but Mrs. Baldry is lovely. She has three circles round her neck—I've only two. It was a touching betrayal that she possessed that intimate knowledge of her own person, which comes to women who have been loved. I could not for the life of me had told you how many circles there were round my neck. Plainly discontented with herself in the midst of all this fineness, she said diffidently, Please, I'd like to do my hair. So I pulled the armchair up to the dressing-table, and leaned on its back, while she, sitting shyly on its very edge, unpinned her two long braids, so thick, so dull. You lovely hair! I said. I used to have nice hair, she mourned. But these last few years I've let myself go. She made half-hearted attempts to smooth the straggling tendrils on her temples, but presently laid down her brush and clicked her tongue against her teeth. I hope that man's not worrying Chris, she said. There was no reassurance ready, so I went to the other side of the room to put her hat down on a chair, and stayed for a moment to pat its plumes, and wonder if nothing could be done with it. But it was, as surgeons say, an inoperable case. So I just gloomed at it, and wished I had not let this doctor interpose his plumpness between Chris and Margaret, who since that afternoon seemed to me as not only a woman whom it was good to love, but as a patron saint must appear to a Catholic, as an intercessory being, whose kindness could be daunted only by some special and incredibly malicious decision of the supreme force. I was standing with eyes closed, and my hands abstractedly stroking the hat, that was the emblem of her martyrdom, and I was thinking of her in a way that was a prayer to her, when I heard her sharp cry. That she, whose essence was a patient silence, should cry out sharply startled me strangely. I turned quickly. She was standing up, and in her hand she held the photograph of Oliver that I keep on my dressing-table. It is his last photograph, the one taken just a week before he died. Who is this? she asked. The only child Chris ever had. He died five years ago. Five years ago? Why did it matter so? Yes, I said. He died five years ago. My dick! Her eyes grew great. How old was he? Just two. My dick was two. We were both breathing hard. Why did he die? We never knew. He was the loveliest boy, but delicate from birth. At the end he just faded away with the merest cold. So did my dick, a chill. We thought he would be up and about the next day, and he just— Her awful gesture of regret was suddenly paralyzed. She seemed to be fighting her way to a discovery. It's—it's as if—she stammered. They each had half a life. I felt the usual instinct to treat her as though she were ill, because there was evident that she was sustained by a mystic interpretation of life, but she had already taught me something, so I stood aside while she fell on her knees, and wondered why she did not look at the child's photograph, but pressed it to her bosom, as though to staunch a wound. I thought, as I have often thought before, that the childless have the greatest joy in children, for to us they are just slips of immaturity lovelier than the flowers, and with the power over the heart, but to mothers they are fleshly cables binding one down to such profundities of feeling as the awful agony that now possessed her. For although I knew I would have accepted it with rapture, because it was the result of intimacy with Chris, its awfulness appalled me. Not only did it make my body hurt with sympathy, it shook the ground beneath my feet. For that her serenity, which a moment before had seemed as steady as the earth and as all enveloping as the sky, should be so utterly dispelled, made me aware that I had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated. Children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life. The pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure. The Parliament knocked at the door. Mrs. Baldry and Dr. Anderson waiting in the drawing-room, mum. Margaret resumed her majesty, and put her white face close to the glass as she pinned up her braids. I knew there was a something, she moaned, and set the hairpins all awry. More she could not say, though I clung to her and begged her, but the slow gesture with which, as we were about to leave the room, she laid her hand across the child's photograph, somehow convinced me that we were not to be victorious. When we went into the drawing-room, we found Dr. Anderson, plump and expository, balancing himself on the balls of his feet on the hearth-rug, and enjoying the caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, showing against the dark frame of her oak chair like a white rosebud that was still too innocent to bloom, listened with that slight reservation of the attention customary in beautiful women. A complete case of amnesia, he was saying, as Margaret, white-lipped, yet less shy than I had ever seen her, went to a seat by the window, and I sank down on the sofa. His unconscious self was refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life, and so we get this loss of memory. I've always said, declared Kitty, with an air of good sense, that if he would have made an effort— Effort! he jerked his head round about. The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. You've been stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called self-control, a sort of barmaid of the soul that says, times up, gentlemen, and here you've had enough. There's no such thing. There's a deep self in one, the essential self that has its wishes, and if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self, the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbours, it takes its revenge. Into the house of conduct directed by the superficial self, it sends an obsession, which doesn't, owing to a twist that the superficial self, which isn't candid, gives it, seems to bear any relation to the suppressed wish. A man, who really wants to leave his wife, develops a hatred for pickled cabbage, which may find vented performances that lead straight to the asylum. But that's all technical. He finished, bluffly. My business to understand it, not yours. The point is, Mr. Baldra's obsession is that he can't remember the later years of his life. Well—his winking blue eyes drew us all into a community we hardly felt. What's the suppressed wish of which it's the manifestation? He wished for nothing, said Kitty. He was fond of us, and he had a lot of money. Ah! but he did. Counted the doctor, gleefully, he seemed to be enjoying it all. Quite obviously, he's forgotten his life here, because he is discontented with it. What clearer proof could you need than the fact that you were just telling me when these ladies came in, that the reason the war-office didn't wire to you when he was wounded, was that he had forgotten to register his address? Don't you see what that means? Forgetfulness! shrugged Kitty. He isn't business-like. She had always nourished a doubt as to whether Chris was really, as she put it, practical, and his income in his international reputation weighed nothing as against his evident inability to pick up pieces at sales. One forgets only those things that one wants to forget. It's our business to find out why he wanted to forget this life. He can remember quite well when he is hypnotised. She said obstructively. She had quite ceased to glow. Oh, hypnotism's a silly trick. It releases the memory of a disassociated personality which can't be related, not possibly in such an obstinate case as this, to the waking personality. I'll do it by talking to him, getting him to tell his dreams." He beamed at the prospect. But you! it would be such a help if you would give me any clue to this discontent. I tell you," said Kitty, he was not discontented till he went mad. He caught the glint of a rising temper. Ah! he said. Madness is an indictment not of the people one lives with, only of the high gods. If there was anything, it's evident that it was not your fault. A smile sugared it, and knowing that where he had to flatter his dissecting hand had not an easy task, he turned to me, whose general appearance suggests that flattery is not part of my daily diet. You, Miss Baldry, you've known him longest. Nothing and everything was wrong. I said at last. I've always felt it. A sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed my deep, old suspicion that she hated me. He went back further than I expected. His relations with his father and mother now. His father was old when he was born, and always was a little jealous of him. His mother was not his sort. She wanted a stupid son who would have been satisfied with shooting. He laid down a remark very softly, like a hunter setting a snare. He turned then to sex with a peculiar need. It was Margaret who spoke, shuffling her feet awkwardly under her chair. Yes, he was always dependent. We gaped at her, who said this of our splendid Chris, and I saw that she was not as she had been. There was a directness of speech, a straight stare, that was for her a frenzy. "'Doctor,' she said, her mild voice roughened. "'What's the use of talking? You can't cure him.' She caught a lower lip with her teeth, and fought back from the brink of tears. "'Make him happy, I mean. All you can do is make him ordinary.' "'I grant you that's all I do,' he said. It clearly seemed as though he was experiencing the relief one feels on meeting an intellectual equal. It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling at the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.' She continued without joy. "'I know how you can bring him back, a memory so strong that it would recall everything else in spite of his discontent.' The little man had lost in a moment his clear assurance, his knowingness about the pathways of the soul. "'Well, I'm willing to learn.' "'Remind him of the boy,' said Margaret. The doctor ceased suddenly to balance on the balls of his feet. "'What boy?' They had a boy. He looked at Kitty. He told me nothing of this.' "'I didn't think it mattered,' she answered, and shivered and looked cold, as she always did at the memory of her unique contact with death. He died five years ago.' He dropped his head back, stared at the cornice, and said with a soft malignity of a clever person dealing with the slow witted. These subtle discontents are often the most difficult to deal with. Sharply he turned to Margaret. How would you remind him?' Take him something the boy wore, some toy he played with. Their eyes met wisely. "'It would have to be you that did it.' Her face assented. Kitty said, "'I don't understand. How does it matter so much?' She repeated it twice before she broke the silence that Margaret's wisdom had brought down on us. Then Dr. Anderson, rattling the keys in his trouser pockets, and swelling red and perturbed, answered, "'I don't know, but it does.' Kitty's voice soared in satisfaction. "'Oh, then it's very simple. Mrs. Gray can do it now.' Jenny, take Mrs. Gray up to the nursery. There are lots of things up there.' Margaret made no movement, but continued to sit with her heavy boots resting on the edge of their soles. Dr. Anderson searched Kitty's face, exclaimed, "'Oh, well,' and flung himself into an armchair so suddenly that the springs spoke. Margaret smiled at that and turned to me. "'Yes, take me to the nursery, please.' Yet as I walked beside her up the stairs, I knew this compliance was not the indication of any melting of this new, steely sternness. The very breathing that I heard as I knelt beside her at the nursery door, and eased the disused block, seemed to come from a different and harsher body than had been hers before. I did not wonder that she was feeling bleak, since, in a few moments, she was to go out and say the words that would end all her happiness, that would destroy all the gifts her generosity had so difficultly amassed. Well, that is the kind of thing one has to do in this life." But hardly had the door opened and disclosed the empty, sunny spaces swimming with motes before her old sweetness flowered again. She moved forward slowly, tremulous and responsive and pleased, as though the room's loveliness was a gift to her. She stretched out her hands to the clear sapphire walls, and the bright fresco of birds and animals with a young delight. So I thought might a bride go about the house her husband secretly prepared for her. Yet when she reached the hearth and stood with her hands behind her on the fire-guard, looking about her at all the exquisite devices of our nursery to rivet health and amusement on our reluctant little visitor, it was so apparent that she was a mother that I could not imagine how it was I had not always known it. It has sometimes happened that painters, who have kept close enough to earth to see a heavenly vision, have made pictures of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin, which do indeed show women who could bring God into the world by the passion of their motherhood. Let there be life, their suspended bodies, seem to cry out to the universe about them, and the very clouds under their feet change into cherubim. As Margaret stood there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin, and a blind smile on her face, she looked even so. Oh, the fine rom! she cried. But where's his little cot? It isn't here. This is the day-nursery. The night-nursery we didn't keep. It is just bedroom now. Her eyes shone at the thought of the cockard childhood this had been. I couldn't afford to have two nurseries. It makes all the difference to the wee things. She hung above me for a little as I opened the ottoman and rummaged among Oliver's clothes. Ah, the lovely little frocks! Did she make them? Oh, well, she'd hardly have the time with this great house to see to. But I don't much care for baby-frocks. The babies themselves are none the happier for them. It's all show. She went over to the rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a ride. For long she hummed a tuneless song into the sunshine, and retreated far away into some maternal dream. He was too young for this, she said. His daddy must have given it him. I knew it. Men always give them presents above their age. They're in such a hurry for them to grow up. We like them to take their time—their loves. But where's his engine? Didn't he love puffer trains? Of course he never saw them. He's so far from the railway station. What a pity! He'd have loved them so. Dick was so happy when I stopped his pram on the railway bridge on my way back from the shops, and he could sit up and see the puffers going by. Heard a stress that Oliver had missed this humble pleasure, darkened her for a minute. Why did he die? He didn't overtax his brain. He wasn't taught his letters too soon. Oh no! I said. I couldn't find the clothes I wanted. The only thing that taxed his little brain was the prayers his scotch nurse taught him, and he didn't bother much over them. He would say, Jesus, tend a leopard, instead of Jesus, tend a shepherd, as if he liked it better. Did you ever—the things they say? He'd a scotch nurse. They say they're very good. I've read in the papers the Queen of Spain has one. She had gone back to the hearth again, and was playing with the toys on the mantelpiece. It was odd that she showed no interest in my search for the most memorable garment. A vivacity which played above her tear-wet strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's fire on the mast of a stout ship, made me realise she was still strange. The toys he had. His nurse didn't then have them all at once. She yelled him up and said, Baby, you must choose. And he said, Teddy, please, nanny, and wagged his head at every word. I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that I had not. Yet, of course, it had to be. That's just what he did do, I said. As she felt the fine kid's skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to twitch. I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give him. But if a baby could leave all this— She cried flatly, as though constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction to suffering as a moan. I want a child. I want a child. Her arms invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. It's all gone so wrong! she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper. They each had only are for life. I had to steady her. She could not go to Chris and shock him, not only by her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took her the things that I had found in the ottoman in the toy cupboard. I think these are the best things to take. This is one of the blue jerseys he used to wear. This is the red ball he and his father used to play with on the lawn. Her hard hunger for the child that was not melted into a tenderness for the child that had been. She looked broodingly at what I carried. Then laid a kind hand on my arm. You've chosen the very things you will remember. Oh, you poor girl! I found that from her I could accept even pity. She nursed the jersey and the ball, changed them from arm to arm, and held them to her face. I think I know the kind of boy he was—a man from the first. She kissed them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on the ottoman, and regarded them with tears. There, put them back—it's all I wanted them for. All I came up here for. I stared. To get Chris's boy, she moaned. You thought I meant to take them out to Chris? She wrung her hands, her weak voice quavered at the sternness of a resolution. How can I? I grasped her hands. Why should you bring him back? I said. I might have known there was deliverance in her yet. Her slow mind gathered speed. Either I never should have come, she pleaded, or you should let him be. She was arguing not with me, but with the whole hostile, reasonable world. Mind you, wasn't sure if I ought to come the second time, seeing we were both married in that. I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really, till you go to it for help. But I've lived a hard life, and I've always done my best for William, and I know nothing in the world matters so much as happiness. If anybody's happy, you ought to let them be. So I came again. Let him be. If you knew how happy he was just pottering round the garden. Men do love a garden. He could just go on. He can go on so easily. But there was a shade of doubt in her voice. She was pleading not only with me, but with fate. You wouldn't let them take him away to the asylum. You wouldn't stop me coming. The other one mired, but you'd see she didn't. How do just let him be? Put it like this. She made such explanatory gestures as I have seen cab men make over their sources of tea round a shelter. If my boy had been a cripple, he wasn't. He had the loveliest limbs. And the doctors had said to me, well, straighten your boy's legs for you, but he will be in pain all the rest of his life. I had not have let them touch him. I seemed to have to tell them that I knew a way. I suppose it would have been sly to sit there and not tell them. I told them anyhow. But oh, I can't do it. Go out and put an end to the poor love's happiness. At the time, he's had. The war in all. And then I'll have to go back there. I can't. I can't." I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Everything was going to be right. Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love. There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs only to loss and calamity. He was to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea as lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for centuries beneath the sod is dead. Yet Margaret continued to say, and irritated me by the implication that the matter was not settled. I oughtn't do it ought I? Of course not! Of course not! I cried heartily. But the attention died in her eyes. She stared over my shoulder at the open door, where Kitty stood. The poise of her head had lost its pride. The shadows under her eyes were black like the marks of blows, and all her loveliness was diverted to the expression of grief. She held in her arms her Chinese sleeve-dog, a once-prized pet that had fallen from favour, and was now only to be met whining upward for a little love at every passer in the corridors, and it sprawled leaf-brown across her white frock, wriggling for joy at the unaccustomed embrace. That she should at last have stooped to lift the lonely little dog was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why she had come up, I do not know. Nor why her face puckered with tears as she looked in on us. It was not that she had the slightest intimation of our decision, for she could not have conceived that we could follow any course, but that which was obviously to her advantage. It was simply that she hated to see this strange ugly woman moving about among her things. She swallowed her tears and passed on, to drift like a dog about the corridors. Now why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but I had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draught that we must drink, or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult, one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white hands held to him, and turned to Margaret with this vast, trustful gesture of his loss of memory. And helped by me, she had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies, nor the boy peering through the hedge, should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly negligent of his future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For if we left him in his magic circle, there would come a time when his delusion turned to a senile idiocy, when his joy at the sight of Margaret disgusted the flesh, because his smiling mouth was slack with age. When one's eyes no longer followed him caressingly as he went down to look for the first primroses in the wood, but flittered here and there defensively, to see that nobody was noticing the doddering old man. Gamekeepers would chat kindly with him, and tap their foreheads as they passed through the cops. Horrors would be tactful and dangle-bright talk before him. He who was as a flag, flying from our tower, would become a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the countryside. The full-mannered music of his being would become a witless piping in the bushes. He would not be quite a man. I did not know how I could pierce Margaret's simplicity with this last cruel subtlety, and turn to her, stammering, but she said, give me the jersey and the ball. The rebellion had gone from her eyes, and they were again the seat of all gentle wisdom. The truth the truth, she said, and he must know it. I looked up at her, gasping, yet not truly amazed, for I had always known she could not leave her throne of righteousness for long, and she repeated, the truth the truth. Smiling, sadly, the strange order of this earth. We kissed not as women, but as lovers do. I think we each embraced that part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love. She took the jersey and the ball, and clasped them as though they were a child. When she got to the door, she stopped and leaned against the lintel. Her head fell back, her eyes closed, her mouth was contorted as though she swallowed bitter drink. I lay face downward on the ottoman, and presently heard her poor boots go creaking down the corridors. Through the feeling of doom that filled the room as tangibly as a scent, I stretched out to the thought of Chris. In the deep days of devotion which followed recollection of the fair down on his cheek, the skin burned brown to the rim of his grey eyes, the harsh and diffident masculinity of him. I found comfort in remembering that there was a physical gallantry about him which would still, even when the worst had happened, leap sometimes to the joy of life. Always to the very end, when the sun shone in his face, or his horse took his fence as well, he would screw up his eyes and smile that little stiff-lipped smile. I gnawed a feeble glow with that. We must ride a lot, I planned. And then Kitty's heels tapped on the polished floor, and her skirts swished as she sat down in the armchair, and I was distressed by the scents, more tiresome than a flickering light, of someone fretting. She said, I wish she would hurry up. She's got to do it sooner or later. My spirit was asleep in horror. Out there Margaret was breaking his heart and hers, using words like a hammer, looking wise, doing it so well. Aren't they coming back? asked Kitty. I wish you'd look. There was nothing in the garden, only a column of birds swinging across the lake of green light that lay before the sunset. A long time after, Kitty spoke once more. Jenny, do look again. There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost had she dissolved into the shadows. In another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness. Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the overarching house, as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass. Lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He were a dreadful, decent smile. I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose limb like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me, that bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders, he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that no-man's land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead. — Jenny, aren't they there? Kitty asked again. They're both there. — Is he coming back? — He's coming back. — Jenny, Jenny, how does he look? — Oh, how could I say it? Every inch a soldier. She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder, and saw. I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction. He's cured, she whispered slowly. He's cured.