CHAPTER V
SHE might feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she imagined him resigned, if not converted, to her alternative plan. She carried a bunch of late roses and said that she had been having a lovely drive with a dear old friend from Denver, who had managed to get to Boulogne to see her.
“Your friends all come from such distant places,” said Oldmeadow with a pretended fretfulness that veiled an indescribable restlessness. “California, Denver, Chicago. They have, all of them, an implacably remote sound, as if they were carrying you, already, off to other planets.”
“Well, it doesn’t take so long, really, to get to any of them,” said Adrienne, placing the roses in a glass of water by his side, a close, funny little bunch, red roses in the middle and white ones all round. She had taken off her cloak and laid a newspaper down on the little table, seating herself, then, in the window and keeping in her hands a pocket-book that, in its flatness and length and the way she held it, reminded him of the little blue and grey fan of the dinner-party where she had told her first lie. His mind was emptied of thought. Only pictures crossed it, pictures of Adrienne and the tall, fair youth with the ingenuous eyes, wandering by the French river; and, again, Adrienne on that night, now as distant as California, when, with her fan and pearl-wreathed hair, she had met his persiflage with her rebuking imperturbability. But under the pictures a sense of violent tension made his breathing shallow. He fixed his eyes on the pocket-book and wondered how she had nursed people with those ineffectual-looking hands.
“Where were you trained for nursing?” he asked her suddenly. “Out here? or in England?”
“In England. In Oxford. Before Palgrave was taken,” said Adrienne. “I gave up my philosophy very soon for that. I worked in a hospital there.”
“And how came you to go out to Salonika? Tell me about it. And about your hospital here,” he went on with a growing sense of keeping something off. “It’s your own hospital I hear, and wonderfully run. Sir Kenneth was talking to me about you this morning.”
“What a fine person he is,” said Adrienne. “Yes, he came to see us and liked the way it was done.” She was pleased, he saw, to tell him anything he chose to ask about. She told him about her hospital and of all its adventures—they had been under fire so often that it had become an everyday event; and about how admirable a staff she had organized—“rare, devoted people”—and about their wounded, their desperately wounded poilus and how they came to love them all. He remembered, as she talked, that she was rich; even richer than he had thought, since she could leave a fortune to Palgrave and yet equip hospitals in France and in Salonika. She told him about Salonika, too. It had been a fever hospital there and the misery and suffering had seemed worse than the suffering here in France. Yes; she had caught the fever herself and had nearly died.
She had no gift for the apt or vivid word. Her nature had been revealed to him as barbarous, or sublime, in its unconventionality, yet it expressed itself only in the medium of trite convention. But his time of jibbing at her platitudes was long since passed. He listened, rather, with a tender, if superficial interest, seeing her heroic little figure moving, unconcerned, among pestilences and bombardments. “It’s not only what you tell me,” he said, when she had brought her recital up to date. “I heard so much from Sir Kenneth. You are one of the great people of the war.”
“Am I?” she said. That, too, unfeignedly, left her unconcerned.