Chapter III: Part 3

Dick Alington and I were very old friends: we had been at school together, and his father’s house was next to ours in the country, the woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park paling. In consequence, from our frequent passages the one to the other, a beaten track lay through the woods in a bee-line from house to house, and the paling at the particular point where the bee-line crossed it, was, from the frequent scrambling over it, broken and splintered, till after the lapse of some years it was no more than a stile, that could be walked over without any scrambling at all, and the path was known as the ‘boys’ path.’ We had remarkably kindred tastes, because we both of us liked practically everything except parsnips and being indoors, even down to London fogs, when we used to have games of hide-and-seek in Berkeley Square--where we also both lived--which for sheer mysterious excitement beat any pursuit in which I have ever been engaged, either before or since. The game itself is one of the utmost simplicity. I stood in the porch of either house while Dick was given ten seconds’ law. He had then, without leaving Berkeley Square, to remain uncaught for five minutes, while I pursued him blindly in the fog. We were not allowed to run nor to hide, but only to walk about the square, and we were properly dressed with tall hats and gloves, so that in case of the fog clearing rapidly we should appear respectable. Of course, for the whole of that five minutes we were both utterly lost, and the hider was usually caught by walking straight into the seeker. Hence the excitement: the pursued guiltily sneaked aside from every figure that loomed through the fog, the pursuer eagerly peered at such, to vanish precipitately again if this was not his quarry, to merely annex it if it was. At the end of the five minutes, if the pursued was yet uncaught, both returned--if they could find it--to the house from which they set out, and pursued and pursuer changed rôles.

I have not, indeed, yet heard of the employment with which we did not amuse ourselves, and we ranged from birds’ eggs to carpentering, from chess to squash-rackets, from football to the writing of Tennysonian lyrics, with equal fervour. We also revived the pentathlon as follows: Dick won the toss and said ‘Golf,’ and I retorted with ‘Tennis.’ He then chose the hundred yards and I croquet. The odd event was, of course, selected by the winner of the toss. Two games were barred, namely, single wicket at cricket, because we neither could ever get the other out, and long-jump, because Dick could jump just about twice as far as I. The whole pentathlon had to be decided on one day, so that staying powers counted for something.

Then a stormy day would come, too bad for man or beast to be abroad in, and we had pentathlons of the intellect, playing chess, draughts, backgammon, the poetry-game, and Halma in feverish succession. Here, too, games at cards were barred, because of Dick’s strange inability to grasp the hang of any card-game whatever. He merely fell asleep over them, so that made it quits in the matter of the long-jump; in fact, the balance was in my favour, since there is only one long-jump, but there are many games of cards, and I could have named all the events of which I had the call from among them.

So from school we passed out into life. Dick went into the army, and I took up as a profession the work on which I am at this moment engaged. We had many mutual friends, and there never came, as long as Dick was alive, any break in our intimacy; nor, until a certain day, did we either of us, as far as we were aware, grow any older. The pentathlons continued with unabated fervour, and I should be ashamed to say now how old we both were when we last played hide-and-seek in Berkeley Square. It would appear hardly credible to any serious and right-minded person, while those who did believe it would be filled with contempt for us; and, as it is bad to be contemptuous, I will not mention the ages.

Now, there had always been in our lives a third person, a girl rather younger than either of us, a neighbour both in town and country and a distant cousin of Dick’s. For years Dick and I had liked Margery, but had necessarily despised her because she was a girl. Then there succeeded years when we had begun to be men, not boys, and Margery not a girl, but a woman. The contempt ceased (that was so kind of us), and we three formed what I may call an alliance of laughter. Margery was always present at the pentathlons, acted as umpire in case of dispute, and was even allowed to join in them herself. Then quite suddenly I became aware that I had fallen in love with her. And it was in this manner I knew it:

It was at the conclusion of the golf item in the pentathlon, and on the eighteenth green. Dick had holed out his last putt and won from me. He had also won from Margery, and Margery had a long putt of ten yards to halve with me. She looked at it for some time. She was standing with her back to the sun, so that her brown hair was flushed and gilded with it; her eyes, very blue and vivid with thought, were intent on the line to the hole, her mouth was a little drooped, and the white line of her teeth showed below her lip.

Suddenly she said, ‘Yes, I see,’ and putted.

The ball travelled smoothly along the turf, and she threw her arms wide.

‘It’s going in,’ she cried. ‘_What_ a darling!’ and as the ball dropped into the hole she looked up at me. Then something caught in my breath, and it was no longer the Margery that I knew that stood there, but She. She who was completion and perfection--woman to me a man.

For a time the old intimacy of the alliance of laughter went on externally, I suppose, as before. I think we laughed no less. We contested as many pentathlons. We made plans for every day of Dick’s leave, and usually abandoned them for subsequent improvisations. Then, not more than a week afterwards, there came a day when Margery had to go to town, and Dick and I were left alone. She was coming back in the evening, and we were to go to the station to meet her, have tea there, and ride our bicycles back over the ridge of Ashdown Forest, down home in time to be exceedingly late for dinner.

The afternoon was very hot and sultry, and Dick and I abandoned the game at tennis we had begun, for we were both slack and heavy-handed, and strolled through the woods up the ‘boys’ path’ for the coolness and shelter of the beech-trees. The ground rises rapidly near the broken paling, and, finding a suitable bed of bracken, we lay down and smoked, looking out from cover over the great ridge of gorse and heather that stretched below us. The air was full of the innumerable murmurs of a hot day, and a warm heathery smell hung idly on the air. Near at hand was a flaming bank of gorse, and as we lay there, far more silent than our wont, we could hear the popping of the ripened seeds. The birds, too, were very silent in the bushes; only the grasshopper chirped unweariedly in the grass. Dick, I remember, was cleaning his pipe with yellow grass-stems, his straw hat tilted over his eyes. I, though lying there, was in reality waiting for the train at Victoria, No. 6 Platform. It started in five minutes, and had two hours’ run before it. Then Dick sat up.

‘Look here,’ he said: ‘I’ve something to tell you. There’s no doubt about it--I’ve fallen in love.’

I think I knew, almost before he spoke, what he would say; certainly before he spoke again I knew what was coming.

‘Yes, Margery,’ he went on: ‘my God! I have fallen in love.’

He turned his brown eyes suddenly from the hot reeling landscape in front to me.

‘Why, Jack,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter? You look queer, somehow.’

‘Dick, are you--are you sure?’ I asked.

‘That you look queer?’

‘No--that you have fallen in love with Margery?’

‘Sure? You’ll be sure enough when you do the same. There’s no mistake about it, I can tell you. Why, Margery is the whole point of the pentathlons now.’

‘She has been so to me for the last week,’ said I.

Dick said nothing for a minute. Then, below his breath, ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘That you and I are in the same boat,’ I said.

‘How long have you known this?’ he asked.

‘A week yesterday.’

‘And you didn’t tell me.’

‘No; I couldn’t. It has been too wonderful to speak of. I’m made like that. I should have told you, though, before long.’

‘Have you spoken to Margery?’ he asked. ‘No, of course you haven’t.’

‘No; I haven’t spoken to anybody.’

Dick got up.

‘Come away,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this place. And what are we to do?’

I looked at my watch.

‘Start for Braceton at once,’ I said, ‘or the train will be in before we get there.’

Dick put his arm in mine.

‘I say, Jack,’ he said, ‘whatever happens, we’ll behave decently, won’t we?’

‘Yes, probably,’ said I.

‘That’s all right, then. We must talk this over to-night. It must simmer a bit before we can get used to it. Don’t let us say another word about it now.’

So we rode off through the heat to Braceton, found the train already in, and Margery waiting for us on the platform, looking, for all the oppressive stagnation of the day, like some nymph of Grecian waterways. And Dick and I looked thirstily on her, but feared to meet each other’s eye, for life and love were in the balance, and we were friends.

That evening, when the others had gone to bed, we sat on in the chairs that had been taken for coolness out of the smoking-room on to the lawn. The odour of the hot summer night hung heavily, and nothing stirred in the windless air, except that from time to time a faint ghost of a tired breeze whispered from the bed of tobacco-plant, and brought with it a waft of the thick scent.

The sky had grown overcast, and from a bank of cloud which rose slowly in the west the fires of lightning flickered, and a drone of distant thunder answered. In the rooms downstairs the lights were already put out, but the bedrooms above showed illuminated squares of blind. Nearly opposite us was Margery’s room, and now and then her shadow crossed it. Then that light was put out, and presently afterwards we heard the scream of the blind updrawn, and at the open window through the darkness her white figure glimmered dimly.

We could neither of us move nor speak, and in the silence I remember hearing the creak of Dick’s shirt grow more rapid as his breathing quickened. Then, in a bush close at hand, a nightingale suddenly burst into bubbling song--no lament, as the Greeks thought it, but the lyric passion of mating-time, when the stir of love goes through the world, and the lion seeks the lioness, and the Libyan hills re-echo to the roaring of his irresistible need; when the feathered and bright-eyed birds lie breast to breast in their swaying habitations; when the man seeks the woman, and cannot rest till he has found her.

Then a flash of lightning, somewhat more vivid, lit up for a moment the lawn and the house, and she must have seen us there, for from her window came a little stifled exclamation, and before the thunder answered she was gone.

‘The storm is coming up,’ said Dick. ‘Let’s go indoors, and talk there. Besides, I’m as dry as dust, and I want a drink. We’ll go upstairs; all the lights are out down here.’

Our rooms were next each other, communicating by a door, and, drawing our chairs up to the window for coolness, we sat down.

‘Somehow or other we’ve got to settle it now,’ said he--‘settle it, that is, as far as we are able.’

How long we talked I do not know, but before we had finished we had to shut the window, for the storm came nearer, and burst round us in sheets of heavy rain and violet fires of lightning. Then it passed, and still we sat there, till at the end the moon came out, and rode high in a clean-washed heaven, with the stars clustering round her like swarming bees, while to the east the sky grew dove-coloured with the first hint of dawn. At last I rose.

‘It remains, then, just to toss,’ said I, and spun a coin.

‘Heads!’ said he.

‘It is. You speak to Margery first, then,’ I said.

He got up too, irresolute, and we looked at each other gravely, rivals in that which makes life sweet, but friends. And that makes life sweet, too.

‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said rather huskily, ‘we will do our very utmost not to let this stand between us, and to keep all knowledge of it from her.’

‘Yes, whatever happens,’ said I. ‘Time to go to bed, Dick. Good-night.’

I went into my room, closing the door of communication; but before I was half undressed it opened, and Dick came in.

‘One thing more,’ he said: ‘we didn’t settle when.’

‘That must be left to you,’ said I; ‘but oh, Dick, for God’s sake let it be soon! Surely it had better be soon.’

His face lit up with the unimaginable light of love.

‘Yes; the sooner the better,’ he said.

I slept long and late that night, from the mere exhaustion, I suppose, of thought and suspense; did no more than turn and sleep again, when I was called; and woke finally to find it was after ten, and the calmness of the promise in the dawn had been fulfilled by a perfect day of unclouded blue. I went through into Dick’s room, but he had already dressed and gone down, and even as I passed the window I saw him and Margery come from the conservatory and out on to the lawn, surrounded, as was her wont, by a wave of dogs. But this morning it seemed that Dick had no word for any of them; and thus they passed out of sight behind the bushes. I knew as surely as if the thing had already happened that Dick would have something to tell me when they came back, but what that should be I had no kind of idea. We three had played like children together for years: had Margery her secret, even as Dick and I had had? Or had she none? Were both of us her playmates?

It cannot have been very long before Dick came back, for I was still in the dining-room, staring blankly at the morning paper, with my breakfast yet untasted. As soon as I saw him I knew.

‘So it is you,’ I said, and stopped. Then our compact and our friendship aided me. ‘Oh, make her happy, Dick!’ said I.

The dear man sat down on the edge of the table.

‘Jack, I’m cut in two about it all,’ he said, and never have I seen so intense a happiness on the face of living being. ‘Really I am. Oh, damn it all! And Margery told me to come and tell you, and she wants to see you. She says she’ll see you alone first, and then we’ll all play the fool together, as we’ve always done. So I had to lie to her. First thing I did was to lie to her, and I told her that you were not particularly fit this morning--thunderstorm kept you awake--and that I didn’t know if you’d be up to a pentathlon.’

He broke off suddenly.

‘My God, if it only wasn’t you!’ he said.

I remember feeling then as if I was a piece of mechanism external to myself. This mechanism saw Dick sitting on the edge of the table, saw breakfast waiting and ate it, and spoke and moved in obedience to an instinct that seemed to have nothing to do with me. Behind somewhere sat Me, watching what went on.

‘No; a pentathlon by all means,’ said the tongue of the mechanism. ‘We’ve got to have one more to settle the last, and you go back to-morrow. It begins with croquet. Margery chose that.’

Dick’s eyebrows suddenly grew into a frown, and he bit his lip.

‘Oh, Jack!’ he said.

Then for a moment I took possession of the mechanism.

‘It’s no use talking,’ I said, ‘The thing is so, and all I can do at present is to behave with some semblance of decency--anyhow, so that Margery shall not know. I can manage that perfectly, and it will give me something to do. It’s no use your being sorry for me. Besides, it’s not humanly possible for you, nor would it be for me if I was in your place, to have sorrow predominant. Margery fills the world for you--she does for me----’

‘No, not fills it,’ said he. ‘You don’t understand----’

‘I understand perfectly. You’re a decent sort of fellow, and--well, I am your friend. It’s no manner of good talking about it. All we settled last night I feel fully--fully! Do you understand? I can only assure you it is so. Whatever happens--do you remember saying that? I do, and--oh, for God’s sake, don’t worry!’

Dick got off the table, turned his back to me, and blew his nose very long and loudly, and, drawing up a chair, sat down by me with a quivering lip.

‘I’ve made a fool of myself, I suppose,’ he said, ‘and I’ve done not a particle of good, but only made it harder for you. That’s like me. I’m happier than I thought it was allowed for a man to be, and I’m wretcheder than I hoped was permitted. That’s all; there was no need to say it, because you knew it. But I had to.’

Then again the mechanism moved, and I sat and watched. And now I find it is quite easy to write down what happened, for I only watched. But it was hard to write down what happened when, as on the last page, I was doing it myself. If you think of it you will see it must be so.

‘Where is Margery?’ I said. ‘Oh, Dick, don’t be a fool!’

Again he blew his nose.

‘Out in the garden,’ he said. ‘Are you going now?’

‘Yes. The pentathlon begins in ten minutes. Nothing has happened. Just the pentathlon!’

I walked out of the dining-room, leaving him still there, into the blinding blaze of sunshine. She--the She--was sitting in a chair at the end of the lawn, and my mother beside her. The latter got up as I came near.

‘You have heard?’ she said; and in her beloved face there was that look which I have seen three or four times in my life, when great sorrow or great joy has brought us into that union which, so I verily believe, can only exist between mother and son. I knew that she had guessed what unspoken word to Margery had been on my lips.

‘Yes; Dick told me,’ said I.

‘Be a man, then,’ said she, seeing that I knew that she knew. ‘And God bless you, my darling, and comfort you.’

It was but a step to where Margery sat, and I held out both hands.

‘Oh, Jack, I am so happy!’ she said, and with that she rose on tiptoe, put her arms round my neck, and kissed me. It was all right, you see, that she should do that now, for she was my friend, and I was Dick’s friend, and she loved Dick.

* * * * *

There is but little more to say about that May, since even in a diary one has to avoid certain depths of egotism, in order to avoid being unbearable. The pentathlon was played, and I won. Also I had ten minutes with my mother that night, while Dick and Margery were together. Nothing much was said on either side, but I knew again, with the vividness that usually comes only with a thing heretofore unrealized, that she was my mother and that I was her son--part of her being, born from her body, indivisibly, while the ages lasted, hers. Hers was every little effort that I made towards ordinary human decency of behaviour; hers was the resolve I made then, and have tried (with how many failures!) to keep since, to realize that these things could not have happened with any but a benignant purpose, blind and incomprehensible as it might seem to me or to her; and that to become in the least degree embittered, or to fail in the smallest particle of friendship to my friend, or of love to the woman whom I loved, was to miss the Divine purpose, and to make of one’s self a senseless animal. For then, and even now as I write, and do know the human outcome of that love, who knows now what the meaning and the great purpose of all this is? A flaw, a failure--can one say that? Not so do I believe, for I _know_ it is all a fragment of the circumference of that great circle, the centre of which and the whole of which--you and me, and the drunkard in the street, and the prostitute in the street, and summer rain, and love and death, are included, and none higher or lower than another--is God.

One word more; for the tired, puzzled entity which I know as myself turns back to the time when it was neither puzzled nor tired, and turned then in childlike faith to what never failed it, even as it now, mute, with its years of experience to back its childlike faith, turns to her whom it now knows can never fail it.

Mother, mother! I hope you are asleep, for this is an unseasonable and timeless hour of night, but I know that before you slept you prayed for your child. You prayed that God of His great grace would continue to keep him unembittered, for he humbly hopes that no touch of that has ever come near him because of what May brought; you prayed that the wound in his heart would be healed, and your prayer was heard; you prayed that some day he would find his Margery--not she of whom June will tell you, for she was Dick’s, but another--the one predestined in the eternal purpose of God.

JUNE

The early-planted sweet-peas are in flower; so, too, are the nasturtiums. It was Margery’s plan always to sow seeds very early in the year; indeed, she was supposed to have been seen sowing in a snowstorm. Then she used to cover the earth up with matting if it was very cold, and uncover it for any glint of sun. Her gardening was of the most unorthodox order. She would pull up seedlings to see how their roots were getting on, disturb sown earth to see what was occurring below; if a plant looked sickly, she took it up and shook it, and replanted it again with a warning; but everything answered with her, and it was she who taught me to sow sweet-peas in March, so that you got the first flowers early in June.

The year after the events of this May, I remember, she sowed a long row of sweet-peas, running right up from the house to the end of the garden. The garden was not a large one, any more than was the house, for she and Dick were not rich, and the whole row was not a hundred feet long. But there was a pleasant piece of lawn, with a thicket of lilac and syringa at one end, and on each side of the path she had placed old petroleum barrels, sawn in half, for flower-tubs. These she and I had painted green, and in the process had painted ourselves too, and everything tasted and smelt of green paint for a week afterwards. In these she planted nasturtiums and love-lies-bleeding, and both sweet-peas and nasturtiums were in flower early in June, just as mine are flowering now. She always loved sweet-peas. They gave her ‘a feeling,’ she said; therefore they grow thick in a certain place.

Dick and she had been married in the September of the same year when they were engaged. In October the Boer War broke out, and Dick’s regiment was among the first to go out, and she and I went down to Southampton to see the _Maplemore_ off. It was a bleak, gray day, with an angry, fretful wind which raised little ripples on the water, and, as soon as raised, cut their heads off. There was a good deal of delay, and she did not sail for two hours after the advertised time, and we all three said openly to each other that we wished she would be quick. But when the time came I think that Margery would have given her life for half an hour more--had she known.

Then in December came the week which no one can think of even now without a shudder, when Stormberg was succeeded by Magersfontein, and Magersfontein by Colenso. But those wintry days passed, and the scars they left in many homes began to heal, and the year and the tide turned.

I saw Margery many times that spring, and I went to stay with her for two days on the 24th of May, for the 25th was the anniversary of her engagement to Dick, and she had long ago settled that we should spend it together. The 24th had been a very hot day, close and sultry, and by a curious coincidence late that night the storm which had for several hours flickered and grumbled in the west came very quickly closer, and burst over us in appalling riot. Sleep was out of the question, and about two in the morning I got up and sat at the window watching it, thinking very intently of how just a year ago Dick and I had sat together through it, until the ivory calmness of the moon and the dove-coloured dawn had succeeded the tumult. Step by step I went through the talk we had had together, while overhead the violence of the storm abated and passed into the distance again. And whether I actually went to sleep or not I do not know, though in any case I was unconscious of having done so; but suddenly I heard Dick’s voice, as I thought, close to me.

‘And whatever happens, Jack,’ he said.

Then, whether I had been asleep or not, I was awake now, and alone. Outside a moon rode high and clear amid the swarming stars, and in the east the sky was dove-coloured with the approaching dawn.

The next day we spent very quietly. There was no one there but Margery’s mother and myself, and we hardly went beyond the garden; for Margery’s time, you will understand, was nearly come, and in a week or two she would be the mother of Dick’s child. After tea that afternoon we had a long talk together, for her mother had gone out on some household business, and she spoke to me of that which was coming to her, with all the simplicity of her nature, all the triumph and glory of her loving heart.

‘I want you to come down again as soon as possible after it,’ she said, ‘because it seems so inevitable that you must be here to take part in this great joy of Dick’s and mine. You see, Jack, I can’t remember a single joy or sorrow of my life with which you and Dick were not bound up, as it were. And this--the greatest of all. Do come as soon as mother writes to you.’

The dusk began to fall in layers over the sky, and the evening breeze got up and tossed the incense of the flowers’ evensong over the garden. Then, as night closed in, the smell of syringa and lilac fell asleep, and the sweet-peas closed, and the benediction of the stars shone from the heights of heaven. Then Margery rose from her chair, and held out both hands to me.

‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘every day I thank God for giving me you as my friend and Dick’s. For years I have done that, even when I was a child. And now that I am a woman, and the crown of womanhood is coming to me, I tell you this, and I ask you to continue to be the friend of all of us. I thank you, Jack; I bless you with my whole heart.’

And once again she kissed me.

My God, how content I was at that moment! For at that moment the foe which I had been fighting all the year, whose sword was jealousy of Dick, whose spear was bitterness of heart, whose armour was the human longing and the crying of the flesh for this woman, dropped dead. No longer would I have had anything different: all was utterly good; and she whom I loved stood over me in the gathering silence of the night, and under her feet lay that devilish enemy whom her goodness and sweetness had slain.

We dined with great gaiety and foolishness, and dinner was succeeded by absurd games, in which the two members of the alliance of laughter did wonders for the cause. Then Margery and her mother went upstairs, and I strolled into the garden again to smoke for half an hour before going to bed, with the reaction of laughter rather strong upon me, and feeling, in spite of what had happened before dinner, vaguely disquieted and depressed, and my mind went back and dwelt with curious insistence on the hallucination of Dick’s voice the night before. Then, even while I was pondering on the strangeness of it, and telling myself that I must have been asleep, I suddenly heard the clang of the gate leading from the road to the front-door on the other side of the house, followed by the crunching of gravel, and after a moment the sound of the front-door bell. At that a sudden nameless fear leaped into my heart, and before the bell sounded again I was at the front-door. Outside was a telegraph-boy, with a War Office telegram addressed to Margery. I took it from him, closed the door quietly, and stood there with it in my hand, struck motionless and incapable of thought.

Then upstairs I heard a door open, and next moment my name was called by Margery, her voice half strangled and struggling for utterance. ‘Jack, Jack, what is it?’ she called. ‘What is it? what is it?’ Next moment I saw her leaning over the banisters of the landing above, her hair down, and with a dressing-gown on, and she saw what I held in my hand.

‘Will you bring it up to me, please, Jack, or open it there?’ she said faintly, and I heard the banisters creak as she leaned on them and clutched them. Then her mother hurried out of her room and put her arm round her.

I can hear the tearing of that envelope now, the rustle of the unfolding sheet. The few words it contained for a moment meant nothing. Then they became coherent.

‘Is it about Dick?’ whispered Margery. ‘Is he wounded? Tell me quick.’

I looked up, and I do not remember whether I said anything or not. But she knew, and in the dim light from the turned-down lamp in the hall I saw her rise to her full height, with arms outstretched, then sway, and fall back into her mother’s arms.

The telegram fluttered to the ground, and I ran upstairs. Together we lifted her up, carried her into her room, and laid her on the bed.

‘Dick is killed?’ whispered her mother to me, and I nodded. Then at her request I left them, and ran to wake one of the servants.

‘Don’t go to bed,’ she said, as I left the room; ‘you may be wanted. Would you sit up till I see you? Have your bicycle ready.’

The drawing-room, through which I had come a minute before in answer to the bell, looked out through French windows on to the garden, and here I sat waiting for her mother. As yet the news to me was inconceivable; it seemed merely impossible that it should be so. Something would happen: another telegraph-boy would come, or, what seemed more likely, I should wake to find that I was not here and the time was not now. Perhaps the place would be Braceton, perhaps the time would be a year ago. Yet how could that be? For she had spoken to me of Dick, and of Dick’s child. There was nothing in the world so real as those minutes. And in this dumb, dazed mood I went once into the hall to see if my bicycle was there; for if these things were a dream, surely I should find some incongruity, and perhaps that which should have been a bicycle might be Dick. But the bicycle stood there, with its lamp already lit, as I had left it.

Then came quick steps descending the stairs, and I went out into the hall.

‘Please go into the town at once, Jack,’ said her mother, ‘and bring Dr. Carlton. Make him come at once. If he is not in, bring somebody.’

‘What--what! Oh, tell me something!’ I said.

‘Her child will be born sooner than we expected,’ said she. ‘Oh, be quick!’

The road was empty of passengers and very dark. Once a man--a policeman, I think--shouted something after me; once the shadow of a dog raced me for awhile, snarling and snapping. Otherwise all I know of that four miles is a round space of illumination on the road cast by my lamp, I seemingly motionless, while to right and left trees and houses went noiselessly by, and a wind blew steadily, in spite of the turns of the road, from the direction in which I was speeding. Then the lamp-posts of the town began, and I had the sense to go somewhat more slowly for fear of being taken up, and so delayed. Then, crossing the High Street, I came to the square red-brick house.

For an interminable time, so it seemed to me, I waited on the doorstep, and then the door was opened by an impassive man-servant. Dr. Carlton was at dinner, and there was a party, but as soon as he came out the message should be delivered; and I remember saying that I would go into the dining-room myself unless I could see him at once. Then, after another interminable delay, Dr. Carlton, whom I knew slightly, came out.

‘Come at once,’ I said--‘Mrs. Alington.’

‘Not her confinement?’ he said, frowning.

‘She has just had news of Dick’s death,’ said I, ‘and her mother told me that--that the baby might be born sooner than they expected. Oh, man, don’t argue!’

‘How did you come?’ said he.

‘Bicycle. It’s outside.’

He turned to his servant.

‘Tell them to put the pony in at once,’ he said, ‘and bring it round. And’--he looked at me sharply a moment--‘bring some brandy.’

I suppose I made some gesture of impatience, for he laid his hand on my arm with a quieting force.

‘Now, be sensible,’ he said; ‘I am going to get what I may require, and shall go off on your bicycle. You will follow in the cart, and, until it is ready, you will sit down here and drink a wine-glassful of brandy--neat, mind: I order it.’

He nodded at me, pointing to a chair, and I stumbled towards it, conscious for the first time of an overpowering exhaustion. My blood beat through my temples very thin and far away, but with frightful rapidity, and something sang in my ears like the whistle of a distant train. Then I became conscious that the butler had put a glass of brandy into my hand, and I drank it.

‘The cart will be round in ten minutes, sir,’ he said.

‘But Dr. Carlton?’ I asked.

‘Rode off a couple of minutes ago, sir. I should sit still, sir, if I were you.’

It can hardly have been an hour from the time the telegram first came to when the cart with me inside it drew up at Margery’s house. Against the porch leaned my bicycle, the lamp still burning, and lights, I saw, were burning in her bedroom directly over the door. Standing on a chair inside the hall was Dr. Carlton’s hat and a small black bag; on the floor close by was the pink sheet of the telegram, which I must have dropped when I ran upstairs. Even then I remember clinging in some desperate, dazed fashion to the hope that it was all a dream, and that the telegram would prove to be some trivial absurdity, and I picked it up and read it again.

Then I sat down and waited.

From time to time there was some muffled sound of footsteps and movement above, then silence again, then more steps. Then I heard a door open above, and a droning voice which I knew to be Margery’s speaking in level, meaningless tones. Then the doctor’s voice said sharply:

‘Yes, it is in my bag. Bring it all upstairs if you don’t understand.’

With the bag in my hand, I met the servant hurrying downstairs, sobbing in a helpless manner. She took the bag from me without a word, and went up again. And step by step, after I had heard the door close, I moved to the top of the stairs and sat there. Below, the clock in the hall beat out metallic minutes, and once the hour--twelve only--struck. Through the fanlight above the front-door I could see the lamps of the doctor’s dogcart; three or four times they moved away, and after a minute or so returned again to the same spot. At intervals that terrible droning voice came from Margery’s room.

How long these things lasted I cannot say, but it must have been less than two hours, for I knew the hall clock struck once only. Then the droning voice ceased altogether, and in its place came short, incisive sentences in a man’s voice, the purport of which, of course, I could not hear. Then came the cry of a child, and I knew that in the midst of death we are in life.

Then, as if I had been drawn by cords, I crept nearer and nearer to the door of the room, and the crying of the child still sounded--the cry of Dick’s child. And Dick? Oh, Dick! if your brave, blithe spirit in the paradise of God, now free of its habitation of flesh, keeps watch, as it surely must, over those it loves, come here, come here, where there is so sore a need of you and your comforting. Speak to her through that frail tabernacle of time and space; comfort the soul you love, if the laws of your world permit it. Come!

* * * * *

Later in that long night Dr. Carlton told me all he could tell. The child had been born, and it lived. There was no reason why it should not live, for it was quite healthy, though it had been born before its time. About Margery he could not say. She had not rallied satisfactorily. She had been perfectly conscious for a time after the birth of the child, but with her consciousness had returned the knowledge of her husband’s death, and she had relapsed again into a semi-comatose state. He proposed to wait, visiting her from time to time, till he could feel more happy about her.

Twice before the dawn broke I tried to go to bed, and as many times I crept downstairs again to where Dr. Carlton sat in the drawing-room, his genial, florid face looking more anxious and troubled each time he returned from a visit upstairs. Then, just as morning broke in thin red lines on the horizon, I heard his voice call to me, and I went upstairs. He beckoned to me to come in.

Margery was lying in bed, propped up on pillows, and her eyes were closed. I sat by the bedside and waited. They had taken the baby away, and only her mother knelt there, with her eyes fixed on Margery’s face. Suddenly she raised her head a little, opened her eyes, and saw me.

‘Thank you,’ she said--‘thank you for being here, Jack. Dick is waiting for me. Yes, Dick!’

She raised herself a little more, and seemed to struggle for breath.

‘Is it morning?’ she said. ‘Let in the morning.’

And even as I pulled the curtains aside and raised the blinds there dawned on her the Everlasting Day.

JULY

I have told you about the May of three years ago, and the June of two years ago, because those two months are so dedicated in my mind to what happened then, that, while the months are running, I cannot free myself from them and live in the present year. Have you not certain such dates in your year--days on which you live, not on the day that is now passing, but on a certain day in some year long past? There is a foolish proverb that says that those people are happy who have no history. In other words, it is better to be a cow than a man. I cannot see it. But if it will not bore you, and if, in fact, my May and June are ever so little human to you, I will tell you quite shortly a little more of them. If, on the other hand, this does bore you, leave out the next four pages.

Believe me, death is not so terrible; what is terrible is the thought that it is so. But learn how false that thought is, and death will not terrify you. For what lies behind? God and He who died for us. And if I am wrong, if it is not so, nothing whatever seems to me to matter, and we can look on death as on a flea-bite. But believing, as I do, that beyond death--even as on this side of it--is God, when lives have ended, as those of Margery and Dick, so utterly without reproach, when two souls have been so splendidly human as they were, it seems that God must have been knowing what He was about when He allowed that bullet--blindly illogical as it may seem to us--to end her life as surely as it ended his. I can understand the existence of a lifelong regret and bitterness _if a thing had not been well done_, if a man died from obvious carelessness of any kind, or from weak persistence in a bad habit. Then one might say, ‘If it had been otherwise!’ But he had done his duty, and his duty implied death. And his death--I only grope dimly after what I believe to be true--implied hers. Does this seem to you a stoical, unhuman view? Ah! believe me, it is not so. It would have been very easy for one who loved them both to take another point of view, and find life dull, objectless, without interest or merriment. But--but would that have been better? Would it have been better to have turned aside from all other things, saying ‘I cannot,’ rather than to have steadfastly said ‘I can,’ until--well, until one could? Some day I know, on that day when Slam’s kitten stands between earth and heaven in the midst of the four pines, and Slam says, ‘Oh, it is nice!’ there will meet me one who died on the African uplands, and one on whose grave the sweet-peas are yearly odorous; and we shall know each other, and God will look on the greeting we give each other, well pleased. How that will be I cannot guess; I am only sure that it will be so. Atheists and dyspeptics (the two are much the same) may laugh, and if they enjoy their laugh so much the better for them.

* * * * *

So I am living now on the outskirts of the town where Margery and Dick lived together for one month of their lives, and on this morning of the 1st of July I know that May and June have ended, and go back to the ordinary little daily affairs I had been telling you about up till the end of April. Many great little things have happened, and the extraordinary conduct of the Jackmanni which the cat from next door once disinterred seems to me to claim the first attention. It had been planted against a warm south-westerly wall; it had been pampered like an only child; for yards round the soil had been enriched; its dead leaves were diligently picked off. I really did all I could to make it happy. But instead of being happy, it sulked. It did not die--that would have been a regrettable incident, but, anyhow, a proper decisive line of conduct--but it sulked. It grew a little for a week, and put out several leaves; then it couldn’t be bothered, and the leaves withered again. Then it sent out a long tendril across the gravel path instead of climbing up the stick that led to the house-wall. I coaxed that tendril gently back, gave it an alternative route to the house-wall, but nothing would please it. Finally I tied it to the alternative route. So it died.

I was willing to give the thing every facility for behaving itself, so I transplanted it to a different place, where it got less sun and more wind. Also I tried watering it less. For a week it appreciated this enormously, and set about growing in earnest. Then one morning, I suppose, it got bored again, and began to wither slowly from the top downwards.

Now, I could not spend my life in moving one absurd Jackmanni from place to place, though I have no doubt that if I had done so, taken it to stay in other houses, given it champagne one day, coffee the next, and perhaps some fish or pudding on the third, it would have flourished. But I was tired of being kind, and towards the end of May I took it up for the third and last time, planted it on a north wall, where it never saw the sun and was starved by a thick growth of ivy. It was further shaded by an apple-tree growing about a yard from it. Then for a month I carefully refrained from looking in its direction; it had no water, no attention, and was put in the most undesirable situation. To-day I see it has leapt across to the apple-tree, up which it is diligently climbing, and clusters of purple buds are showing among its green leaves. Certainly severity is needed when you deal with Jackmanni.

To-day, on this 1st of July, a hot day full of the odours of complete summer, I sat for an hour in the big wooden shelter that now stands finished on my strip of lawn, and squared accounts. It happens to be my birthday, and I am thirty years old--no less--and as I added up profit and loss I was horribly puzzled how to make my affairs balance. For if one sits down by one’s self, with no conceivable object in the world but to see how one stands, it is probable that one is moderately honest with one’s self, for to be otherwise would be like cheating at Patience, one of the few forms of villainy which has never in the least tempted me. With regard to the big item on one page, ‘_What good have you done?_’ and on the other, ‘_What harm have you done?_’ I am bound to say I did not much concern myself, for to add up, even for one’s own information, on what rare occasions one has behaved decently is a priggishness of which, so I humbly trust, I am incapable; while to add up all the harm one has done would require a great deal of time, and would be productive of no good result whatever when it was added. For, short of being wicked, the next worst way of wasting time is to devote one’s time to thinking how wicked one has been. To repent in a horror of wickedness and a burning fire of contrition is one thing; to sit down in cold blood and count missed opportunities is another. The one is on certain occasions, as when one passionately desires to break an evil habit, inevitable and salutary, but to sit at ease in Hell is worse than sitting at ease in Zion.

No, it was not with the big item that I concerned myself. I wanted to see what cash I had in hand, rather than examine the main account--the bank-book of credit or deficit. Where was the small cash of thirty years, in fine--and God in His mercy give me a big loan. Indeed I do not wish to be profane, nor in intention am I. No doubt it would have been better to have felt an agony of contrition for all the bad things I had done, and for all the good things I had left undone. Daily I have thoughts which for no sum mentionable would I reveal to anyone whose respect I in the smallest degree desired to retain; daily and hourly I make some sort of brute of myself, not necessarily in deed, but anyhow in thought. Daily I say to myself, ‘If only there were not some kind of decency to be observed, social or moral, what an excellent time I could have! If only the Ten Commandments--hang them!--did not awake some glimmer of reflection in this muddy pool of my soul, I should----’ Anyone may fill in the rest according to his own shortcomings. In the same way, on the credit side, I believe I should be a better man if I lived on the bare necessities of life, and gave the rest to deserving charities. I had no earthly business, for instance, to buy the charming table at which I am writing, when that which I spent on it would have fed a starving family for months. Even the Jackmanni, which has cost me a week’s work, what with transplanting and cat-squirting, would, irrespective of this, have given several meals to a penniless man, for it was big when I bought it. All this, in my meditation, I took for granted. I did not concern myself with radical changes in my nature. I did not repent of the table and the Jackmanni, nor of the dinner I ordered, nor of the wine I have drunk, nor of the hours I have spent in mere amusement. In the main it was not in the least an edifying performance; I accepted the general lines of myself as being what they were. What, in fact, I wished to examine was not my nature, but my policy, and to this effect:

Two great things have happened to me--the one a great joy, the other a great sorrow. The great joy was when Margery thanked me with her dying breath, though Dick’s name came after. The great sorrow was when she died. Had she lived--though I do not for a moment believe I should ever have been her husband, nor do I believe I should ever have asked her to be my wife--I should have had some sort of mission, some constant pursuit, namely, to see that she was as happy as it was in my power to make her. Had I been a telegraph-boy, I should have done well if I had delivered my telegrams without loitering; had Margery lived, I should have done well to have given my life to that. But she did not live, and I am too old to be a telegraph-boy. But I have had a great joy, and it is great because she did not know how hardly it was earned. And that is my record. That is the sum earned, and the credit already given is thirty years. It does not look at all promising when the addition comes.