§ 8
Oswald knocked for some time at the open green door of The Ingle-Nook before attracting any one’s attention. Then a small but apparently only servant appeared, a little round-faced creature who looked up hard into Oswald’s living eye—as though she didn’t quite like the other. She explained that “Miss Phyllis” was not at home, and that “Miss Phœbe mustn’t be disturved.” Miss Phœbe was working. Miss Phyllis had gone away with Mary——
“Who’s Mary?” said Oswald.
“Well, Sir, it’s Mary who always ’as been ’ere, Sir,”—to Windsor to be with Miss Joan. “And it’s orders no one’s allowed to upset Miss Phœbe when she’s writing. Not even Lady Charlotte Sydenham, Sir. I dursn’t give your name, Sir, even. I dursn’t.”
“Except,” she added reverentially, “it’s Death or a Fire.”
“You aren’t the Piano, per’aps?” she asked.
Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.
The little servant looked sorry for him.
And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose Stitchwoman papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought, were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning, secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of Stitchwoman papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!” old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”
“I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently seeking advice.
“Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had parted from Dolly six years ago.
The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space, beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her, until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?” So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their disaster.
“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”
Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between the dahlias and sunflowers.
It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache that now mingled with the sunshine.
“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.
Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then, turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....
Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in grey flannel trousers.
He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.
The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.
“You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.
“Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”
“So I did.”
He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.
Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.
“It was you, used to tell me stories.”
“You don’t remember my telling you stories?”
“I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t you remember?”
Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never before set eyes on a European....