Chapter VII

He could not have believed that it would be so delicious to live with Adrienne Toner.

Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been, though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of the discrepancies between them, and during the three months that separated them, he at Cannes, she nursing in Paris, he knew many doubts; never of his love, but of what it was making him do and of where it was going to lead them. He couldn't for the life of him imagine what was to become of them if his hopes were fulfilled, for he hardly saw himself following her off to Central Europe--it was to Serbia, her letters informed him, that her thoughts were turning--nor saw them established in London under the astonished gaze of Lydia Aldesey.

She had selected Lyons as their place of meeting, because of the work for the _rapatriés_ that she wished to inspect there, and from the moment that he saw her descend from the Paris express, dressed in dark civilian clothes and carrying, with such an air of competence, her rug and dressing-case, all doubts were allayed and all restlessness dispelled.

He had arrived the day before and had found an old-fashioned hotel with spacious rooms overlooking the Saône, and, as they drove to it on that November evening, she expressed herself, scrutinizing him with a professional eye, as dissatisfied with his recovery.

It was because of the restlessness, of course, that he had not got as well as he should have, and he knew that he must, in the stress of feeling that now beset him, look strangely, and he promised her, feeling that he spoke the truth, that now that he had his nurse again complete recovery would be only a matter of days.

"I want you to see our view," he said to her when the porter had carried up her little box and they were left alone in the brocaded and gilded salon that separated their rooms; "I chose this place for the view; it's the loveliest in Lyons, I think."

There was still a little twilight, and standing at the window they looked down at the lighted quai with its double row of lofty plane-trees and across the jade-green Saône at St. Jean, the grey cathedral, and at the beautiful white _archevêché_ glimmering in a soft, dimmed atmosphere that made him think of London.

"There's a horrible modern cathedral up on the hill," he said; "but we don't need to see it. We need only see the river and the _archevêché_ and St. Jean. And in the mornings there's a market below, a mile of it, all under huge mushroom-coloured umbrellas; flowers and cheeses and every kind of country produce. I think you'll like it here."

"I like it very much. I think it's beautiful," said Adrienne. "I like our room, too," and she turned and looked up at the painted ceiling and round at the consoles and mirrors, inlaid tables and richly curved, brocaded chairs. "Isn't it splendid."

"Madame Récamier is said to have lived here," Oldmeadow told her. "And this is said to have been her room."

"And now it's mine," said Adrienne, smiling slightly as though she found the juxtaposition amusing.

Already the stealing sense of deliciousness was breathing over him. The very way in which she said, "our room," was part of it. Even the way in which she said that made him feel the peace, comfort, and charm of a shared life as he had never before felt it. And the sense grew and grew on that first evening.

It was delicious to hear the waiters address her as Madame, and to know that it was his madame they imagined her to be, when he sat opposite to her at their little table in the dining-room. She wore a grey dress now and, with her quiet, her calm glances cast about her, might indeed have been the veritable Madame Oldmeadow inscribed at the _bureau_. If they had the aspect of a devoted, long-mated couple, it was because of her calm. But she would have been as unperturbed, he felt sure, had she been stopping there under her own name instead of his and looked upon as his well-established mistress. Situations would never embarrass her as long as she knew what she was doing with them. That night when she gave him her hand at bedtime she said, looking at him with the affectionate, professional eyes: "I'll come and put you to sleep if you need me; be sure to let me know."

But he had no need to call her. He slept as soundly as though she sat beside him with her hand upon his brow.

So the mirage of conjugal felicity was evoked about him.

She poured out his coffee for him in the morning wearing a silk _négligé_ edged with fur, and said, as they buttered their rolls, that they must buy some honey for their breakfasts. She said, too, that they must do a great deal of sight-seeing in the afternoons. "There is so much to be seen in Lyons. And I shall finish with my _rapatrié_ work in the mornings." He asked if he might not come with her to the _rapatrié_ work, but was told that he was not yet strong enough for more than one walk in the day. "In our evenings, after tea," she went on, "I thought perhaps you'd like to study Dante a little with me. My Dante is getting so rusty and I've brought a very fine edition. Are you good at Italian?"

He said he wasn't, but would love to read Dante with her.

"And we must get a piano," she finished, "and have music after dinner. It will be a wonderful holiday for me."

So the days fell at once into a series of rituals. He saw that she had always mapped them out conscientiously, as Mrs. Toner had doubtlessly taught her to do, careful of the treasure of time--as Mrs. Toner would have said--entrusted to each soul by life. So, no doubt, Adrienne would put it still. And what he would, in first knowing her, have found part of her absurdity, he found now part of her charm.

That was what it all came back to. He saw, reconstructing their past, that from the beginning she had had her deep charm for him.

It was the trivial word for the great fact; the compulsion of personality; the overflow of vitality; the secret at once of the saint and of the successful music-hall singer. Her own absorption in life was so intense that it communicated itself. Her confidence was so secure that it begot confidence. Her power was implicit in all she did. It was not only the _rapatriés_ she dealt with, as, at the first, she had dealt with the wounded. She dealt as successfully and as accurately with the little things of life. Honey was on their breakfast-table; flowers on the consoles; music on the piano. The gilded hotel salon became a home.

She was still, in demeanour, the cultured, travelled American, equipped always, for their walks, with a guide-book or history, from which she often read to him as they paused to lean on the parapets of the splendid quais. There were few salient facts in the history of the potent city that were not imparted to him; and with anyone else what a bore it would have been to have to listen! But he was more than content that she should tell him about the Romans or Richelieu. It was everything to him to feel that they shared it all, from the honey to Richelieu.

And with all the intimacy went the extreme reserve.

She had showed him, when it was necessary for their understanding as friends, the centre of her life; yet she remained, while so gentle, so absorbed, and even loving, as remote, as inaccessible, as he had felt her to be on those first days in the hospital. She never referred to her own personal situation not to any emotion connected with it. She never referred to herself or expressed a taste or an opinion touched with personal ardour. He did not know what she was really feeling, ever. Though, when he looked at her, sitting opposite him in her grey and addressed by the assiduities of the waiters, he could imagine that he was living with a wife, he could imagine more often that he was living with a nun. Her control and her selflessness were cloistral. He could not think her in any need of a director.

They walked one afternoon along the Quai des Brotteaux, returning from the park of the Tête d'Or, where they had wandered on the gravel under the tall, melancholy trees and fed the deer. The ugly yet magnificent city was spread before them in one of its most splendid aspects, climbing steeply, on the further banks of the Rhône, to the cliff-like heights of the Croix Rousse and marching, as it followed the grandiose curve of the river, into a sunset sky where the cupola of the Hospice hung like a dark bubble against the gold and the Alps, not visible from the river level, seemed yet to manifest themselves in the illumined clouds ranged high above the horizon.

Ten days of their appointed fortnight had now passed and while Oldmeadow kept a half unseeing yet appraising eye upon the turbulent glories of the river, he was wondering when and how he should make his revelation and his appeal. If her reserve made it more difficult to imagine, her intimacy did not make it more easy. It was because she was so intimate that she had remained so unaware. For all his self-command he felt sure that in any other circumstances she could not, for these ten days, have remained so blind.

Here she walked beside him, the Madame Oldmeadow of the hotel, looking before her as she walked and thinking, he would have wagered, not of him but of Serbia.

She wore a beautifully adjusted little costume, conveying in its sober darkness the impression of richness and simplicity that her clothes had always given him. Fur was turned up about her ears and a small hat of fur and velvet was turned down over her eyes as she had always worn her hats. The straight fringe of gold showed under its brim and under the gold were those calm, those questing, melancholy eyes.

Or perhaps--he carried further his rueful reverie--she was thinking about the date of the Hospice. He had the guide-book in his pocket.

"Isn't it jolly?" he suggested, as she looked up at him, indicating the prospect spread before them and adding, since he knew that his English instinct for boyish understatement still puzzled her: "Like a great, grim queen in shabby clothes; raised on such a throne and crowned with such jewels that one feels her glorious rather than ugly."

Adrienne studied the shabby queen attentively and then looked back at him. Perhaps something dwelling in his eyes, something for her only and not at all for Lyons, caught her more special attention, for she said suddenly, and so unexpectedly that, with a sort of terror, he felt that his crisis might be coming: "You've been very dear to me, Mr. Oldmeadow, in all our time here. I feel it to have been a great privilege, you know; a great opportunity."

"Really? In what way?" He could at all events keep his voice quiet and light. "I thought it had been you who made all the opportunities."

"Oh, no. I never make any of the opportunities I am thinking of," said Adrienne. "I only know how to take them. It isn't only that you are more widely and deeply cultured than I am--though your Italian accent isn't good!"--she smiled; "but I always feel that you see far more in everything than I do, even when you seem to be seeing less. I have to go carefully and pick up fact by fact, while you see things in a sort of vision and they are all related as they enter your mind. That's where my privilege comes in. You make me share your vision sometimes. You have the artistic mind, and I am not really artistic at all--though Mother always wanted that for me more than anything; with all that goes with it."

She was speaking of herself--though it was only in order to express more exactly her gratitude, and, as he walked beside her, he was filled with the mingled hope and terror. After all he had still four more days of her. It would be terrible to spoil them.

"No; you aren't artistic," he agreed. "And I don't know that I am, either. Whether I am or not, I feel mine to have been the opportunity and the privilege."

"I can't understand that at all," she said, with her patent candour.

"It may be part of the artistic temperament to feel things one can't understand. Though I do understand why I feel it," he added.

"And it's part of the artistic temperament not to try"--Adrienne turned their theme to its more impersonal aspect. "Never to try to enjoy anything that you don't enjoy naturally. I don't believe I ever enjoy any of the artistic things quite naturally. I've always been trained to enjoy and I've always tried to enjoy; because I thought it was right to try. But since I've been here with you I've come to feel that what I've enjoyed has been my own effort and my mastery of the mere study, and I seem to feel that it might be as well to give up trying and training and fall back on the things that come naturally; scenery artists would think sentimental, and babies; and patriotic songs." She smiled a little as she found her list. But she was grave, too, thinking it out and adding another to her discovered futilities.

"It may be as well to limit your attention to the sentimental scenery and the babies, since you've so many other things to do with it," he acquiesced. "We come back to big people again, you see; they haven't time to be artistic; don't need to be."

"Ah, but it's not a question of time at all," said Adrienne, and he remembered that long ago, from the very first, he had said that she wasn't stupid. "It's a question of how you're born. That's a thing I would never have admitted in my old days, you know. I would never have admitted that any human soul was really shut out from anything. Perhaps we're not, any of us, if we are to have all eternity to grow in. But as far as this life is concerned I see quite clearly now that some people are shut out from all sorts of things, and that the sort of mistake I made in my old time was in thinking that anyone who had the will could force eternity into any given fragment of our temporal life. I did do a little philosophy, you see! That's what I mean and you understand, I know. All the same I wish I weren't one of the shut-out people. I wish I were artistic. I'd have liked to have that side of life to meet people with. I sometimes think that one doesn't get far with people, really, if all that one has to give are the fundamental things like the care of their minds and bodies. One goes deep, of course; but one doesn't go far. You can do something for them; but there's nothing, afterwards, that they can do _with_ you; and it makes it rather lonely in a way--when one has time to be lonely."

He did not know, indeed, whether she saw the beauty of the scene spread before them as they walked, and he was remembering, with a sort of tranced tenderness, the flower-wreathed shepherdess and her crook; and Mrs. Toner with her lilies and seagulls. But why should she see beauty when she made it? It was all that he could see in her now.

"What you can do for them afterwards is to pour out their coffee for them in the most enhancing way," he suggested, "and make sight-seeing a pleasure, and arrange flowers and place chairs and tables so that a hotel salon becomes loveable. If you find the person to whom you can give the fundamental things and do all sorts of homely things with afterwards, why be lonely? We are very happy together, aren't we? We get a great deal out of each other. I can speak for myself, at all events; and you've just told me that I give something, too. So why should you go off to Central Europe next week? Why not go back with me to the South," he finished, "and wander about together enjoying, quite naturally, the sentimental scenery?"

He held his breath after he had thus spoken, wondering with intensity, while he felt his heartbeats, what she would make of it. He knew what he could make of it, seizing his opportunity on the instant, if only she would recognize the meaning that underlay the easy words. And framed in the little hat on the background of transfigured Lyons, Adrienne's face was turned towards him and, after he had made his suggestion, she studied him in silence for what seemed to him a long lapse of time. Then she said, overwhelmingly:

"That's perfectly lovely of you, Mr. Oldmeadow."

"Not at all; not perfectly lovely at all," he stammered as he contradicted her and he heard that his voice sounded angry. "It's what I want. I want it very much."

"Yes. I know you do. And that's what's so lovely," said Adrienne. "I know you want it. You are sorry for me all the time. And you want to cheer me up. Because you feel I've lost so much. But, you know; you remember; I told you the truth that time. I don't need cheering. I'm not unhappy. One can be lonely without being unhappy."

"I'm not sorry for you," poor Oldmeadow rejoined, still in the angry voice. "I'm not thinking of you at all. I'm thinking of myself. I'm lonely, too, and I am unhappy, even if you aren't."

She stopped short in her walk. He saw in her eyes the swift, almost diagnosing solicitude that measured his need and her own capacity. It was as though his temperature had gone up alarmingly.

"Dear Mr. Oldmeadow," she said; and then she faltered; she paused. She no longer found her remedies easily. "It's because you are separated from your own life," she did find. "It's because all this is so bitter to you; what you are doing now--how could I not understand?--and the war, that has torn us all. But when it's over, when you can go home again and take up your own big life-work and find your own roots, happiness will come back; I'm sure of it. We are all unhappy sometimes, aren't we? We must be; with our minds and hearts. Our troubled minds; our lonely hearts. But you know as well as I do, dear Mr. Oldmeadow, that our souls can find the way out."

Her nature expressed itself in platitudes; yet sometimes she had phrases, rising from her heart as if from a fountain fed by unseen altitudes, that shook him in their very wording. "Our troubled minds. Our lonely hearts," echoed in his ears while, bending his head downwards, he muttered stubbornly: "My soul can't, without you."

She still stood, not moving forward, her eyes raised to his. "Please don't say that," she murmured, and he heard the trouble in her voice. "It can't be so, except for this time that you are away from everybody. You have so many things to live for. So many people near you. You are such a big, rare person. It's what I was afraid of, you know. It happens so often with me; that people feel that. But you can't really need me any longer."

He said nothing, still not raising his eyes to hers, and she went on after a moment. "And I have so many things to live for, too. You've never really thought about that side of my life, I know. Why should you? You think of any woman's life--isn't it true?--as not seriously important except on its domestic side. And you know how important I think that. But it isn't so with me, you see. I have no hearth and I have no home; I have only my big, big life and it's more important than you could believe unless you could see it all. When I'm in it it takes all my mind and all my strength and I'm bound to it, yes, just as finally, just as irrevocably as a wife who loves is bound by her marriage vows; because I love it. Do you see? They are waiting for me now. They need me now. There are starving people, dying people; and confusion; terrible confusion. I have a gift for all that. I can deal with it. Those are just the things I can deal with. And I mustn't put it off any longer--when our time is up. I must leave you, my dear, dear friend, however much I'd love to stay."

She was speaking at last with ardour, and about herself. And what she said was true. He had never thought about her work except in the sense that he thought her a saint and knew that saints did good deeds. That she was needed, sorely needed, by the starving and dying, was a fact, now that it was put before him, silencing and even shaming him. It gave him, too, a new fear. If she had her blindness, he had his. His hopes and fears, after all, were all that he had to think of; she had the destinies of thousands. He remembered Sir Kenneth's tone in speaking of her; its deep respect. Not the respect of the man for the tender-hearted, merciful woman; but the respect of a professional expert for another expert; respect for the proved organizer and leader of men.

"I have been stupid," he said after a moment. "It's true that I've been thinking about you solely in relation to myself. Would you really love to stay? If it wasn't for your work? It would be some comfort to believe that."

"Of course I'd love to stay," she said, eagerly scanning his face. "I'd love to travel with you--to pour out your coffee in Avignon, Nîmes, Cannes--anywhere you liked. I'd love our happy time here to go on and on. If life could be like that; if I didn't want other things more. You remember how Blake saw it all:

'He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.'

I mustn't try to bend and keep this lovely time. I must let it fly--and bless it as it goes. And so it will bless me."

She seldom made quotations nowadays. For this one he felt a gratitude such as his life had rarely known.

"It's been a joy to you, too, then?"

"Of course it has," said Adrienne smiling at him and turning at last towards the bridge that they must cross. "It's been one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me."