“I’m not sorry for you,” poor Oldmeadow rejoined, still in the angry voice. “I’m not thinking of you at all. I’m thinking of myself. I’m lonely, too, and I am unhappy, even if you aren’t.”
She stopped short in her walk. He saw in her eyes the swift, almost diagnosing solicitude that measured his need and her own capacity. It was as though his temperature had gone up alarmingly.
“Dear Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said; and then she faltered; she paused. She no longer found her remedies easily. “It’s because you are separated from your own life,” she did find. “It’s because all this is so bitter to you; what you are doing now—how could I not understand?—and the war, that has torn us all. But when it’s over, when you can go home again and take up your own big life-work and find your own roots, happiness will come back; I’m sure of it. We are all unhappy sometimes, aren’t we? We must be; with our minds and hearts. Our troubled minds; our lonely hearts. But you know as well as I do, dear Mr. Oldmeadow, that our souls can find the way out.”
Her nature expressed itself in platitudes; yet sometimes she had phrases, rising from her heart as if from a fountain fed by unseen altitudes, that shook him in their very wording. “Our troubled minds. Our lonely hearts,” echoed in his ears while, bending his head downwards, he muttered stubbornly: “My soul can’t, without you.”
She still stood, not moving forward, her eyes raised to his. “Please don’t say that,” she murmured, and he heard the trouble in her voice. “It can’t be so, except for this time that you are away from everybody. You have so many things to live for. So many people near you. You are such a big, rare person. It’s what I was afraid of, you know. It happens so often with me; that people feel that. But you can’t really need me any longer.”
He said nothing, still not raising his eyes to hers, and she went on after a moment. “And I have so many things to live for, too. You’ve never really thought about that side of my life, I know. Why should you? You think of any woman’s life—isn’t it true?—as not seriously important except on its domestic side. And you know how important I think that. But it isn’t so with me, you see. I have no hearth and I have no home; I have only my big, big life and it’s more important than you could believe unless you could see it all. When I’m in it it takes all my mind and all my strength and I’m bound to it, yes, just as finally, just as irrevocably as a wife who loves is bound by her marriage vows; because I love it. Do you see? They are waiting for me now. They need me now. There are starving people, dying people; and confusion; terrible confusion. I have a gift for all that. I can deal with it. Those are just the things I can deal with. And I mustn’t put it off any longer—when our time is up. I must leave you, my dear, dear friend, however much I’d love to stay.”
She was speaking at last with ardour, and about herself. And what she said was true. He had never thought about her work except in the sense that he thought her a saint and knew that saints did good deeds. That she was needed, sorely needed, by the starving and dying, was a fact, now that it was put before him, silencing and even shaming him. It gave him, too, a new fear. If she had her blindness, he had his. His hopes and fears, after all, were all that he had to think of; she had the destinies of thousands. He remembered Sir Kenneth’s tone in speaking of her; its deep respect. Not the respect of the man for the tender-hearted, merciful woman; but the respect of a professional expert for another expert; respect for the proved organizer and leader of men.
“I have been stupid,” he said after a moment. “It’s true that I’ve been thinking about you solely in relation to myself. Would you really love to stay? If it wasn’t for your work? It would be some comfort to believe that.”
“Of course I’d love to stay,” she said, eagerly scanning his face. “I’d love to travel with you—to pour out your coffee in Avignon, Nîmes, Cannes—anywhere you liked. I’d love our happy time here to go on and on. If life could be like that; if I didn’t want other things more. You remember how Blake saw it all:
‘He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.’