Leaning back in her chair, her faded little face framed in white, Mrs. Aldesey looked at once younger yet more tired than he had ever seen her look and she sat for a little while silent; as if she had forgotten Adrienne Toner and were thinking only of their parting. But all her gaiety had fallen from her as she said at last: “I can be sorry for her, too; if she’s really ruined. If she still loves him when he has ceased to care for her. Does she, do you think?”
With the question he seemed to see a fire-lit room and lovers who had found each other and to smell wet roses. Lydia was coming too near; too near the other figure, outside the window, fallen back with outstretched arms against the roses. And again he felt himself softly, cautiously, disentangle the sleeve, the hair, felt himself draw Adrienne away into the darkness where the smell was now of wet ivy and where he could see only the shape of an accepting grief.
“How could I know?” he said. “She was very unhappy when I last saw her. But three years have passed and people can mend in three years.”
“Especially in America,” Mrs. Aldesey suggested. “It’s a wonderful place for mending. Let’s hope she’s there. Let’s hope that we shall never, any of us, ever hear of her again. That would be much the happiest thing, wouldn’t it?”
He was obliged to say that it would certainly be much the happiest thing; and he was too unhappy about Lydia to be able to feel angry with her. He knew how tired she must be when, for the first time in their long friendship, she must know that she was not pleasing him, yet not be able to help herself.
CHAPTER II
“GOOD LORD!” Oldmeadow heard himself groaning.
Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst part of war had been to see the sufferings of others. This was at last the real thing; but it was so mingled with acquiescence that it ceased to be the mere raw fact. “We’re all together, now,” he thought, and he felt himself, even as he groaned, lifted on a wave of beatitude.
Until now he had not, as a consciousness, known anything. There was a shape in his memory, a mere immense black blot shot with fiery lights. It must symbolize the moment when the shell struck him, bending, in the trench, over his watch and his calculations. And after that there were detached visions, the ceiling of a train where he had swung in a hammock bed, looking up; clean sheets, miraculously clean and the face of a black-browed nurse who reminded him of Trixie. The smell of chloroform was over everything. It bound everything together so that days might have passed since the black blot and since he lay here, again in clean sheets, the sweet, thick smell closing round him and a raging thirst in his throat. He knew that he had just been carried in from the operating room and he groaned again “Good Lord,” feeling the pain snatch as if with fangs and claws at his thigh and belly, and muttered, “Water!”
Something sweet, but differently sweet from the smell, sharp, too, and insidious, touched his lips and opening them obediently, as a young bird opens its bill to the parent bird, he felt a swab passed round his parched mouth and saw the black-browed nurse. “Not water, yet, you know,” she said. “This is lemon and glycerine and will help you wonderfully.”