I
HAT you need is a complete change, and quiet,” said his cousin Dorothy.
Guy, indeed, in spite of his efforts to keep up appearances, was a dismal figure. He had been passing the teacups and the bread and butter, enduring all the jests about sugar-rations and margarine, and enduring, which was so much worse, the complacencies over the approaching end of the war. His haggard face, narrow-jawed and high-foreheaded, expressed this endurance rather than any social amenity, and he was aware that Aunt Emily could hardly feel that the presence of her poet and soldier nephew added much to her tea-party. Indeed, the chattering, cheerful women affected his nerves almost as painfully as did the sound of the motor-buses when—every day it happened—he stopped on the curb, after leaving his office in Whitehall, and wondered how long it would take him to summon courage to cross the street. He felt, then, like breaking down and crying; and he felt like it now when they said, “Isn’t it all too splendid!”
Cousin Dorothy was as chattering and as cheerful as the rest of them, and she had every reason to be, he remembered, with Tom, her fiancé, ensconced in Paris, safe after all his perils. Dorothy, though like everybody else she had worked hard during the war, had seen nothing and lost nothing. And she had never had any imagination. All the same, he was thankful when she rescued him from the woman who would talk to him idiotically about his poetry (she evidently hadn’t understood a word of it), and took him into a quiet nook near the piano.
It might, then, have been mere consanguinity, for he had never before found intimacy possible where Dorothy was concerned; or it might have been a symptom of his state (his being at Aunt Emily’s tea-party at all was that!); but, at all events after admitting that Mrs. Dickson had been boring him, he found himself presently confessing his terrors about the motor-buses, his terror of the dark, his sleeplessness and general disintegration. His nervous laugh was a concession to Dorothy’s possible misunderstanding; but as he went on, he felt himself almost loving her for the matter-of-factness she infused into her sympathy. After all, even good old Dorothy wasn’t stupid enough to suspect him of cowardice; and although, from a military point of view, he had made such a mess of it (invalided home again and again on account of digestive complaints, and finally, last spring, transferred to his small official post in London), to any one, really, who had at all followed his career, it would be apparent that no one could have stuck harder to the loathly job. He had felt it that, and only that, even while, prompted by pride, he had made his effort to enlist, in the first months of the war. It had been with a deep relief that he had found himself at once rejected and free to stay behind, free to serve humanity with his gift rather than with his inefficiency; for he took his poetic vocation with a youthful seriousness. And when, later on, through one of the blunders of medical examinations, he was drawn into the net of conscription, no one could have denied that he marched off to the shambles with unflinching readiness.
Dorothy, he saw, took courage all along for granted: “It’s simply a case of shell-shock,” she said, as if it were her daily fare; “you’re queer and jumpy, and you can’t stand noise. It’s quite like Tommy.”
He couldn’t associate Tommy, short-nosed, round-headed, red-eared Tommy, with anything of the sort, and said so in some resentment. But Dorothy assured him that for some months—just a year ago—Tommy had been at home on sick leave, and really bad enough for anything. “He suffered in every way just as you do.”
Guy was quite sure he hadn’t, but he did not want to argue about it. For nothing in the world would he have defined to Dorothy what he really suffered.
“It’s country air you need; country food and country quiet,” Dorothy went on. “You can get away?”
“Oh, yes; I can get away all right. Old Forsyth is most decent about it. He was telling me this morning that I ought to take a month.”
“I wonder if Mrs. Baldwin could have you at Thatches,” Dorothy mused. “Tommy got well directly.”
“Mrs. Baldwin?” His voice, he knew, expressed an unflattering scepticism, but he couldn’t help it. “Is she at home—an institution?” He saw Mrs. Baldwin, hatefully tactful, in a Red Cross uniform. “No, thank you, my dear.”
“Of course not. What do you take me for?” Dorothy kept her competent eyes upon him. “It’s not even a P.G. place—at all events, not a regular one, though of course you do pay for your keep. She has very narrow means and takes friends sometimes, and, since the war, it’s just happened—by people telling each other, as I’m telling you—to be shell-shock cases rather particularly. It’s a lovely country, and a dear, quaint little cottage, and she does you most awfully well, Tommy said.”
“I don’t like the idea of settling down like that on a stranger.”
"But she wouldn’t be a stranger. You’d go through me, and I feel as if I knew her already through Tommy. He said he was at home at once. ‘Cosy,’
was how he expressed it. And you get honey on your bread at tea and
cream in your coffee at breakfast, and all sorts of delightful things en casserole, that she cooks with her own hands, quite equal, Tommy said, to the French. And, Tommy knows, now, you see."
“It’s Mrs. Baldwin herself who frightens me. She frightens me more than the motor-buses in Whitehall.” “That’s just what she won’t do. She’s perfectly sweet. Cosy. Middle-aged. A widow. Her nice old father lives with her, and Tommy liked him so much, too. You help her to garden, and with the bees, you know. And the old father plays chess with you in the evenings. There’s a stream near by where you can fish if you want to. It’s late for that, of course; but Tommy got some quite good sport; he was there at just this time of year. And he said that it was most awfully jolly country, and that the meadows all about were full of autumn crocuses.”
“Autumn crocuses? In the fields? I’ve never seen them wild.”
“They do grow wild, though, in some parts of England. They are wild there. Tommy particularly wrote about them. He said one walked down to the stream among the autumn crocuses.”
Dorothy was baiting her hook very prettily, and he gloomily smiled his recognition of it. “They do sound attractive,” he owned. He hadn’t imagined Tom a man to notice crocuses, and he was the more inclined to trust his good impressions further. After all, apart from Mrs. Baldwin and her father, the country, with honey, cream, and autumn crocuses, was a happy combination, if he had been in condition for feeling anything happy.
What would Dorothy have thought of him, could she have known that, while they talked, her rosy, bonnie face kept constantly, before his haunted eyes, dissolving into a skull? Faces had a way of doing this with him since his last encounter with the war in the spring. And all the people talking in the room squeaked and gibbered. How could they go on talking? How could they go on living—after what had happened? How could he? The familiar nausea rose in him even as he forced himself to smile and say, “Well, could she have me—Mrs. Baldwin?”
He could not have made an effort to find a place for himself. Such efforts, he felt sure, would have landed him at some God-forsaken farmhouse miles from the station, where the beds were damp and the meat tough; or, even worse, at a Bournemouth hotel, amid orchestras and people who made a point of dressing for dinner. But, if some one found it for him, he would let himself be pushed off.
“I’m sure she could,” said Dorothy with conviction. “I have her address and I’ll write to-night and tell her all about you: that you’re a rising poet, and that your friends and relations will be so grateful if she’ll do for you what she did for Tommy.”
He had an ironic glance for her “rising.” His relations—and Aunt Emily and her brood were the nearest left to him—had never in the least taken in his standing or realized that he was, among people who knew, looked upon as completely risen. At the same time, sunken was what he felt himself; drowned deep; too deep, he sometimes thought, for recovery. His last little volume had been like a final fight for breath. He had written most of it over there, after Ronnie’s death and before his own decisive breakdown, and he knew it a result as much of his malady as of his war experience.
He wondered now, anew, whether these people had really read the poems. If they had, it only showed how impervious to reality they must remain. And there had actually been one, written after one of his leaves, called “Eating Bread-and-Butter,” that should indeed have embarrassed them, had they remembered it, inviting them to eat it with him in a trench with unburied comrades lying in No-Man’s Land before them. His head, as he thought of that,—from unburied comrades passing to unburied friends,—gave a nervous, backward jerk, for he had told himself before that he must stop thinking in certain directions; and indeed the poems had helped to exorcise the obsession at the time when they had been written.
All the same, it was very strange—such a poet at such a tea-party. He had plunged into Aunt Emily’s tea-party as he plunged nowadays into anything that presented itself as offering distraction. And now, as he said, “Well, if you’ll put it through, I’ll go, and be very grateful to you,” he felt that he was making another plunge into Mrs. Baldwin’s cottage.