Chapter V

She might feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she imagined him resigned, if not converted, to her alternative plan. She carried a bunch of late roses and said that she had been having a lovely drive with a dear old friend from Denver, who had managed to get to Boulogne to see her.

"Your friends all come from such distant places," said Oldmeadow with a pretended fretfulness that veiled an indescribable restlessness. "California, Denver, Chicago. They have, all of them, an implacably remote sound, as if they were carrying you, already, off to other planets."

"Well, it doesn't take so long, really, to get to any of them," said Adrienne, placing the roses in a glass of water by his side, a close, funny little bunch, red roses in the middle and white ones all round. She had taken off her cloak and laid a newspaper down on the little table, seating herself, then, in the window and keeping in her hands a pocket-book that, in its flatness and length and the way she held it, reminded him of the little blue and grey fan of the dinner-party where she had told her first lie. His mind was emptied of thought. Only pictures crossed it, pictures of Adrienne and the tall, fair youth with the ingenuous eyes, wandering by the French river; and, again, Adrienne on that night, now as distant as California, when, with her fan and pearl-wreathed hair, she had met his persiflage with her rebuking imperturbability. But under the pictures a sense of violent tension made his breathing shallow. He fixed his eyes on the pocket-book and wondered how she had nursed people with those ineffectual-looking hands.

"Where were you trained for nursing?" he asked her suddenly. "Out here? or in England?"

"In England. In Oxford. Before Palgrave was taken," said Adrienne. "I gave up my philosophy very soon for that. I worked in a hospital there."

"And how came you to go out to Salonika? Tell me about it. And about your hospital here," he went on with a growing sense of keeping something off. "It's your own hospital I hear, and wonderfully run. Sir Kenneth was talking to me about you this morning."

"What a fine person he is," said Adrienne. "Yes, he came to see us and liked the way it was done." She was pleased, he saw, to tell him anything he chose to ask about. She told him about her hospital and of all its adventures--they had been under fire so often that it had become an everyday event; and about how admirable a staff she had organized--"rare, devoted people"--and about their wounded, their desperately wounded _poilus_ and how they came to love them all. He remembered, as she talked, that she was rich; even richer than he had thought, since she could leave a fortune to Palgrave and yet equip hospitals in France and in Salonika. She told him about Salonika, too. It had been a fever hospital there and the misery and suffering had seemed worse than the suffering here in France. Yes; she had caught the fever herself and had nearly died.

She had no gift for the apt or vivid word. Her nature had been revealed to him as barbarous, or sublime, in its unconventionality, yet it expressed itself only in the medium of trite convention. But his time of jibbing at her platitudes was long since passed. He listened, rather, with a tender, if superficial interest, seeing her heroic little figure moving, unconcerned, among pestilences and bombardments. "It's not only what you tell me," he said, when she had brought her recital up to date. "I heard so much from Sir Kenneth. You are one of the great people of the war."

"Am I?" she said. That, too, unfeignedly, left her unconcerned.

"You've the gift of leadership. The gift for big things generally."

She nodded. "I'm only fit for big things."

"Only? How do you mean?"

"Little ones are more difficult, aren't they. My feet get tangled in them. To be fit for daily life and all the tangles; that's the real test, isn't it? That's just the kind of thing you see so clearly, Mr. Oldmeadow. Big things and the people who do them are just the kind of things you see through."

"Oh, but you misunderstood me--or misunderstand," said Oldmeadow. "Big things are the condition of life; the little things can only be built up on them. One must fight wars and save the world before one can set up one's tea-tables." He remembered having thought of something like this at Lydia's tea-table. "Tea-tables are important, I know, and the things that happen round them. But if one can nurse a ward of typhus patients single-handed one must be forgiven for letting the tea-pot slip. Really I never imagined you capable of all you've done."

"I always thought I was capable of anything," said Adrienne smiling slightly, her eyes meeting his in a tranquil partaking of the jest, that must be at her expense. "You helped me to find that out about myself--with all the rest. And I was right enough in thinking that I could face things and lead people. But I wasn't capable of the most important things. I wasn't capable of being a wise and happy wife. I wasn't even capable of being truthful in drawing-rooms when other women made me angry. But I can go on battle-fields and found hospitals and tend the sick and dying. Shells and pestilences"--her smile was gone--"if people knew how trivial they are--compared to seeing your husband look at you with hatred."

She had turned her eyes away as she was thus betrayed into revealing the old bitternesses of her heart and he dropped his to the little pocket-book that now lay still between her hands. The feeling in her voice, the suffering it revealed to him, with the bitterness, woke an unendurable feeling in himself. He did not clearly see what the test was to which he put himself; but he knew that what he must say to her was the most difficult thing he had ever had to say; and he found it only after the silence had grown long.

"Mrs. Barney--everything has changed, hasn't it; you've changed; I've changed; Barney may have changed. It was only, after all, a moment of miserable misunderstanding between you. He never really knew what you were feeling. He thought you didn't care for him any longer, when, really, you were finding out how much you cared. Don't you think, before you take final decisions, that you ought to see Barney again? Don't you think you ought to give him another chance? I could arrange it all for you, when I got home."

The flood of colour, deep and sick, had mounted to her face, masking it strangely, painfully, to where the white linen cut across her brow and bound her chin. And, almost supplicatingly, since he saw that she could not speak, he murmured: "You can be a wise and happy wife now; and he loved you so dearly."

She did not lift her eyes. She sat there, looking down, tightly holding the pocket-book in her lap.

"Let me tell him, when I get home, that I've seen you again," he supplicated. "Let me arrange a meeting."

Slowly, not lifting her eyes, she shook her head and he heard her, just heard her say: "It's not pride. Don't think that."

"No; no; I know it's not. Good heavens, I couldn't think it that. You feel it's no good. You feel that his heart is occupied. It is. I can't pretend to hide from you that it is. But your place in it was supreme. There would be no unfairness if you took it again. Nancy would be the first person to want you to take it. You know that that is true of Nancy."

"I know. I heard her plead for me," said Adrienne.

The sentence fell, soft and trenchant; and he remembered, in the silence that followed, what she had heard. He drew a long breath, feeling half suffocated. But he had met his test. It was inevitable, he knew it now, that she should say "Barney and I are parted for ever."

Silence dropped again between them. He did not know what was passing behind its curtain and whether bitterness or only grief was in her heart.

He lay, drawing the slow, careful breaths of his recovery, and saw her presently put out her hand and take up her _New York Herald_ and unfold it. She looked down the columns unseeingly; but the little feint of interest helped her.

Slowly the colour faded from her face and it was as if the curtain lifted when, laying the paper down, she said, and he knew that she was finding words to comfort him: "Really everything is quite clear before me now. I shall write at once to Hamilton, and to his mother. If he agrees, if they all agree, he and I can go away very soon I think. Afterwards, I shall stay over here. I've quite made up my mind to that. There'll be so much to do; for years and years; for all one's lifetime. Ways will open. When one is big," she smiled the smile at once so gentle and so bitter, "and has plenty of money, ways always do. I'm a _déracinée_ creature; I never had any roots, you know; and I can't do better, I'm sure, than to make soil for the uprooted people to grow in again. That's what's most needed now, isn't it? Soil. It's the fundamental things of life, its bare possibilities, that have been so terribly destroyed over here. America has, still, more soil than she can use, and since I'm an American, and a rich one, my best plan is to use America, in my fortune and my person, for Europe. Because I love them both and because they both need each other."

She had quite recovered herself Her face had found again its pale, fawn tints and she was looking at him with her quietest contemplation while he, in silence, lay looking at her.

"It's not about the things I shall do that I'm perplexed, ever," she went on. "But I'm sometimes perplexed about myself. I sometimes wish I were a Roman Catholic. In an order of some kind. Under direction. To put oneself in the hands of a wise director, it must be so peaceful. Like French friends I have; such wise, fine women; so poised and so secure. I often envy them. But that can't be for me."

She must feel in his silence now the quality of some extreme emotion, and that she believed it to be pity was evident to him as she went on, seeking to comfort him; and troubled by his trouble: "You mustn't be sorry. I am not unhappy. I am a happy person. Do you remember that Sunday morning at Coldbrooks, long ago? How I said to Mother--to Mrs. Chadwick--that I had no doubts? You thought me fatuous. I dimly saw that you thought me fatuous. But it's still true of me. I must tell you, so that you shan't think I'm unhappy. I've been, it seems to me, through everything since then. I've had doubts--every doubt: of myself; of life; of all the things I trusted. Doubt at last, when the dreadful darknesses came--Barney's hatred, Palgrave's death--of God. We've never spoken of Palgrave, have we? I was with him, you had heard, and at the very end it was he who helped me rather than I him. He held me up. When he was dying he held me up. He made me promise him that I would not kill myself--for he guessed what I was thinking; he made me promise to go on. And he saved me. The light began to come back to me while I sat beside him after he had died."

She had not looked at him while she spoke, but down at her hands that, trembling, turned and returned the little pocket-book. And controlling her voice as she sought to control the trembling of her hands, she said: "Perhaps it is always like that. When one confesses one's sin and hates it in oneself, even if it is still there, tempting one, the light begins to come back. After that it came more and more. What you call my gift is part of it. Isn't it strange that I should have had that gift when I was so blind? But what you said was true. I had a sort of wholeness then, because I was blind. And now that I see, it's a better wholeness and a safer gift. That is what I wanted to say, really. To explain, so that you shan't be sorry. No one who can find that light can be unhappy. It comes to me now, always, when I need it. I can make it shine in other people--as Palgrave made it shine in me. Love does it. Isn't it wonderful that it should be so? Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness."

All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands, he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him, as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.

He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney, Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia--poor Lydia--and that they were being borne away from him for ever. He saw nothing before him but Adrienne; and for how long was he to keep her? That was his supreme risk; but he could not allay it or step back to the further brink. It was his very life that had fallen in two while she had spoken and without the sense of choice; though he dimly saw that, in the restlessness and urgency of the hours since he had seen her last, the choice had been preparing.

He was taking the only step possible for him to take on the narrow foothold of the present when he said, in a voice so quiet that she might even be unaware of his seeming gross irrelevance, "Do you know, about your plan--for Barney and Nancy--I've been thinking it over and I've decided that it must be I, not Hamilton."