XXVII
In February, Hugo came home on leave, and I saw him. He wrote to me that time and said he was coming. He would be in London for a few days first, and then at Yearsly.
His letter came at breakfast time amid the clatter of plates and feeding the children. I opened it, and could think of nothing else.
Three days later, Hugo himself came. I was coming back from my afternoon walk with the children, pushing the heavy perambulator up the hill, thinking, wondering if he would come to-day. Suddenly I saw him at the end of the road, coming to meet me; a long way off still, but unmistakably Hugo.
I had not seen him in khaki before, and the silhouette was strange, and although I had expected it, it was a shock; but I knew his walk, and I knew the poise of his head. I stopped the perambulator and stood still.
My heart leaped up and throbbed. I had a wild impulse to turn round and run away. I had been counting the hours until this moment, but now that it had come, I was afraid. I dreaded this meeting with Hugo in a way that surprised myself. I felt it to be charged with emotion, painful, stirring emotion, as of all the past revoked; of lost youth, and lost joy, and that terrifying sense of regret for the passage of time and of life. As I hesitated, he saw me. He took off his cap and waved it and I had no choice, I waved back and went on to meet him.
We seemed a long time reaching each other. Then we shook hands, and stood still. I looked into Hugo’s face, and he looked into mine; it seemed at first, as though we had nothing to say.
Hugo’s face frightened me; he was smiling now, the faint half hesitating smile I knew so well, but there was something new in the very smile, in his mouth, above all in his eyes, a desperate, haunted expression, that I had not seen before.
I said:
‘I am glad to see you, Hugo, it is good of you to come up here.’
He said:
‘Why, of course I came.’
He turned to the children, and looked at them with an amused, half puzzled expression, and then back to me.
‘I can’t get used to the idea of you with children, you know,’ he said; and then he added abruptly: ‘they are neither of them like you.’
I said:
‘No; they are like Walter’s family, both of them.’
I had not admitted this before, to anyone, nor yet that I minded about it, but I did.
‘I wish I had a child,’ said Hugo suddenly, staring away across the street. ‘A son—you must have a son, Helen.’
And he turned back to me.
I said:
‘Yes, I hope I shall, next time.’
We walked on slowly, towards the house. The children were unusually quiet, staring with round eyes at Hugo.
We talked of Guy; Hugo had seen him at Amiens, and of Mollie, still nursing in Salonika. We did not talk of George. Then we reached the door of the garden and went in.
I pushed the door open and we went inside. The garden with its uncut grass looked sordid and forlorn. I was sorry Hugo should come to it like that.
I opened the door of the house with my latchkey, and lifted the children out. Eleanor ran tumbling up the steps and across the hall, Rachel I had to carry. I set her on a chair in the hall and came back for the perambulator.
Hugo helped me to lift it up the steps, and past the umbrella stand.
He hung up his hat and coat, and shut the door. I watched him as though it was a dream. It seemed so strange to see him there. I took him downstairs to the dining-room where tea was being laid.
‘We have shut the drawing-room up,’ I said, ‘because of the coal,’ and I wished I need not have him in that room where the ugly sideboard was. It looked so dull that room, and so crowded up now we used it altogether, and I wanted to have Hugo in a beautiful room.
I left him there while I went upstairs with the children. Their undressing and preparing for tea seemed to take longer than usual that day.
When I came downstairs, Mrs. Sebright was there. I had quite forgotten that she was coming to tea.
Mrs. Sebright asked Hugo about his journey, about the length of his leave, about his billets in France. Hugo answered her questions quietly, smiling very faintly his hesitating smile. Mrs. Sebright talked about submarine warfare; she asked him if he knew what the latest inventions for catching submarines were; Hugo did not know.
Mrs. Sebright seemed to find no difficulty in talking to Hugo. She asked him things that I could not have asked.
I could not talk to him at all while she was there. I sat and watched him while he talked to her. I felt the precious moments slipping away, precious, irrevocable moments, and wondered what it was that had happened to him.
‘Is it just the War?’ I wondered. ‘Is that what it is?’
I felt a passionate longing to talk to him of the War, of my soul and his, to help him and be helped.
Tea was over, and cleared away. We drew our chairs up to the fire. Nobody spoke much. Eleanor and Rachel played with wooden bricks on the floor behind us. Hugo helped them to build a little while, then he stood up to go. I went with him up the stairs into the hall.
I said:
‘Hugo, I must see you again.’
He stood looking up at me from the lower step.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When? Let us go and see some pictures.’
I said:
‘Yes; to-morrow, after lunch I will come.’
‘I will meet you at the station; at Charing Cross, at the Tube.’
I said:
‘I will be there at half-past two.’
‘Right. Good-bye till then.’
‘Good-bye.’
I stood, and looked after him; his figure was lost quickly in the shadow of the darkened street.
And I thought:
‘He has come and is gone; but I shall see him again.’
I thought:
‘To-morrow; at half-past two.’
Then I thought:
‘Hugo.’
I asked Mrs. Sebright if she would look after the children for me the next afternoon. She had done so sometimes before, when there was no maid I could trust, and she said she would.
‘I want to see Hugo again, down in London,’ I said. ‘He will only be here for two days, just now.’
‘Poor young man,’ Mrs. Sebright said, ‘he looks very ill. Has he had shell shock, do you think, at any time?’
I said I didn’t think so, but I felt a rush of gratitude to Mrs. Sebright for her kindly tone. I bent down suddenly and kissed her, and she looked surprised.
‘Poor boys,’ she said, ‘poor boys, I pity them indeed.’
And it struck me as very strange that she should class Hugo in any group—as one among others like him—he who to me had always seemed unique; so wholly different from all other people.