Part 28 (2/2)

If one goes down into h.e.l.l, one doesn't want to forget the fact--though one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to remember that h.e.l.l exists--and to try and square life with that actuality.”

There was silence after this for a moment, and he imagined that she was very much at a loss. Her next words seemed indeed to express nothing so much as her failure to follow--that and a silliness really rather adorable, had he been in a mood to find it anything but exasperating.

”But, still--h.e.l.l doesn't exist, does it?” she offered him for his appeas.e.m.e.nt.

Guy laughed. ”Doesn't it? When things like this war can happen? How could it ever have existed but in men's hearts? It's there that it smoulders and, when its moment comes, leaps out to blast the world.”

He could talk to her like this because she was too simple to suspect in him a poetical att.i.tudinizing; any one else would of course suspect it.

Guy was even aware that to any one else that was what it would have been. She looked kind and troubled and as much as ever at a loss. She didn't know at all how to deal with the patient, and she was evidently uncertain what to do, since it might seem heartless to go away and leave him to his black thoughts, yet intrudingly intimate to come and sit down beside him. Nothing could be less intimate than Mrs. Baldwin. It was he, of course, who was tasteless in talking to her in a vein appropriate only to intimacy.

”Don't bother over me,” he said, offering her the patent artifice of a smile. ”I'm simply a bad case. You mustn't let me trouble you. You must just turn your back on me when I'm like this.”

It was not poetic att.i.tudinizing now; there was in his voice a quaver of grief and she responded to it at once.

”Oh, but I don't like to do that. I do wish I could be of some help. I see you haven't slept, for you look so tired, as you did when you first came. And Mr. Layc.o.c.k did bore you. It's wrong of people to talk to you about the war.”

For the first time he saw in the eyes fixed upon him, pity, evident pity and solicitude. And before it he felt himself crumble suddenly. He saw all the reasons she had for pitying him, did she but know. He saw Ronnie's face again; he saw his own haunted night and his own grief. He wanted her to see it. ”Oh--one can't be guarded like that,” he murmured; ”I must try to get used to it. But--I didn't sleep; that's true. I'm so horribly afraid of not sleeping. You can't imagine what it is. I've the most awful visions.” And leaning his elbows on the table, he put his hands before his face and began to cry.

She stood there; he did not hear her move at first; and then she entered and sat down on the seat beside him. But she said nothing and did not touch him. He had had in all the tumult of his disintegration, a swift pa.s.sage of surmise; would she not draw his head upon her shoulder, like a mother, and comfort him? But that would have broken him down heaven knew how much further.

He cried frankly, articulating presently, ”It's my nerves, you know; they have all gone to pieces. I lost my friend; my dearest friend. For months I didn't sleep.”

Mrs. Baldwin's silence was not oppressive, or repressive either. He heard her hands move slightly on the basket she held on her knees and the soft chafing in the folds of her linen bodice that her breathing made. It was an accepting stillness and it presently quieted him; more than that, it enabled him at last to lift his head and look at her without feeling ashamed of himself. Oddly enough, he knew that he, perhaps, ought to be. He _could_ have helped himself. There had been an element of wilfulness in his breakdown; he had wanted her to see; but, even had she known this about him, he would not have felt ashamed. She was so curiously a person with whom one could not a.s.sociate blames and judgments. She was an accepting person.

She wasn't looking at him, but out at the sweet, bright, autumnal little garden; and as her eyes came to him, he felt them full of thought; felt, for the first time, sure that, whatever she might be, she was not dull.

He could not remember, looking back at the little scene, that she had said a single further word. He did not think that he had said anything further. He was helping her, a little while after, to prune the Aimee Vibert rose that had grown with great unruliness over the little tool-house near the kitchen door. ”It will really pull it down unless we cut out some of these great branches,” she had said, as, equipped with stout gloves, they had worked away together, unfastening the tangled trails and stretching them out on the ground. So displayed, the Aimee Vibert was drastically dealt with, and it was midday before they finished fastening the thinned and shortened shoots into place.

She had said nothing further; but he believed that, for the first time, her thought really included him. He had been put before her. She was different afterwards. He had become an individual to her, and had ceased to be merely the paying guest.

IV

The third week came. There was rain, rather sad September rain, for a day or two. They sat in the evenings before the wide fireplace where logs blazed. Mrs. Baldwin, at his suggestion, read aloud to them Fabre's _Souvenirs Entomologiques_. She read French prettily, better than he did himself, and he was a little chagrined once or twice to find that she knew it better, priding himself on his French as he did. He had lived for a year in Paris, with Ronnie, before the war.

The horrors of the grim, complicated underworld revealed by the French seer distressed him. Mrs. Baldwin did not feel them as he did, feeling the marvels rather than the horrors, perhaps. She laughed a little, rather callously, at the ladies who devoured their husbands, and seemed pleased by the odious forethought of the egg-laying mothers. She shared Fabre's humorous dispa.s.sionateness, if not the fond partiality which, while it made him the more charming, didn't, Guy insisted, make his horrid wasps and beetles a bit more so. As usual, she vexed him a little, even while, more and more, he felt her intelligent; perhaps she vexed him all the more for that.

”She's so devilishly contented with the world,” he said to himself sometimes, even while he smiled, remembering her laughter.

Old Mr. Haseltine fell asleep one night while she read, and to be together there before the fire, the old man sleeping beside them, made them nearer than they had ever been before. Guy was aware of this nearness while he listened and while he watched her hand, short, like a child's (and her face was so short) support the book, and her eyelashes dropping down the page or raised to a fresh one.

When he went to his room that night, he stood still for a long time, his candle in his hand, listening to the soft beat of the rain against the window. He was hardly ever now afraid of being alone, or of the dark, and he stood there musing and listening, while he still seemed to see Mrs. Baldwin's hand as it held the book, and her reading profile. Her life seemed to breathe upon him and he rested in it. He slept deliciously.

”Did you know that I write?” he asked her next day. He had wondered about this once or twice before.

”Oh, yes; your cousin, in her letter, you know, told me that you wrote,”

said Mrs. Baldwin.

They were in the living-room after midday dinner, and alone. She looked up at him very kindly from the papers and letters she was sorting at her desk.

”You've never heard of my effusions otherwise, though?” He put on a rueful air. ”Such is fame!”

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