Part 29 (1/2)

”Are you famous?” Her smile was a little troubled. ”I don't follow things, you know, living here as I do.”

”You read the papers. I _have_ had reviews: good ones.”

”I don't read them very regularly,” she admitted. ”And I so often don't remember the names of people in reviews, even when I've liked what is said of them. Have you any of your poems here? Perhaps you'll let me read them.”

He felt, with the familiar chagrin, that she would never, of herself, have thought of asking him.

”Yes, my last volume. It's just out.”

He was going for a walk in the rain with Mr. Haseltine that afternoon.

There was an old church in the neighbouring village that his friend wanted him to see. Mrs. Baldwin had letters to write. ”Will you have time to look at it while we are out?” he asked.

Although she had shown so little interest in him, he was eager, pathetically so, he felt, that she should read and care about his poems.

She said that it was just the time: her letters would not take long. And so he ran up to his room and got the little book for her: _Burnt Offerings_.

All the time that he was walking with Mr. Haseltine and seeing the church, and the old manor house that took them a half mile further, he wondered what she was thinking about his poems.

By the time they had returned the rain had ceased. A warm September sunlight diffused itself. Veils lifted from the stream and trailed upon the lower meadows. The sky grew clear and the leaves all sparkled. They found that Mrs. Baldwin had had her cup of tea, for it was past four; but all had been left in readiness for them, the kettle boiling; and after Guy had swallowed his, he went out and saw her walking down among the crocuses.

”Oh, you are back?” she said when he joined her. ”I wanted to be there to give you your tea. Was it all right?”

”Perfectly,” he said. ”We put in just your number of spoonfuls.”

Mrs. Baldwin wore her little knitted jacket and had put on her white, rubber-soled canvas shoes against the wet; but her head, with its thick, close braids, was bare to the sunlight.

”I had to come out as soon as it stopped raining,” she said; ”and I'm afraid I simply forgot to look out for you and father.”

Her gentleness had always seemed contentment; this afternoon it seemed happiness, and he had never seen her look so young. He wondered if she were going to take him so dreadfully aback as not even to mention his poems; if she had simply forgotten them, too. Already her demeanour, unclouded, almost radiant, inflicted a wound; she had either forgotten, or she had cared little indeed, since she could look like that. But, after he had commented, consentingly, on the lovely hour, she went on with a change of tone, a voice a little shy, ”I've read the poems. Thank you so much for letting me see them.”

”You read all of them?”

”Yes. I didn't write my letters.”

”I hope you read them, then, because you cared for them.”

She didn't answer for a moment, walking along and placing the small white feet carefully among the crocuses. ”They are very sad,” she then said.

He was aware, after an instant of adjustment to the blow, that she made him very angry. Terrible, his poems, searing, scorching; wicked, if one would; but not sad.

”Oh!” he murmured; and he wondered if the divided feeling she had from the first roused in him had been this hatred, not perhaps of her, but of her unvarying acquiescence, her untroubled inadequacy.

”They interested me very much,” she said, feeling, no doubt, that, whatever he was, he was not pleased. ”They made me see, I mean, all the things you have been through.”

”Sad things, you call them. You know, I rather feel as if I'd heard you call h.e.l.l sad.”

She looked up at him quickly, and it was now she who was taken aback and, as she had been the other day, at a loss. And, as on the other day, she found the same answer, though she offered it deprecatingly, feeling his displeasure. ”But h.e.l.l doesn't exist.”

”Don't you think anything horrible exists?”

They turned at the end of the meadow. It seemed to him, although he felt as if he hated her, that they were suddenly intimate in their antagonism. He would force that antagonism, and its intimacy, upon her--to its last implication.

”Horrible? Oh, yes, yes!” she said, startled, and that was, he reflected grimly, to the good. ”But it would have to be irretrievable, wouldn't it, to be h.e.l.l?” she urged.