EVENING PRIMROSES
T had been a hot day and there seemed to be thunder in the air, but she was afraid there would be no rain that night. The abandoned garden needed it sadly; though, as she reflected, rain would encourage weeds rather than the few remaining flowers. Poppies had sown themselves everywhere, degenerates of the Shirleys which, three years ago, had spread their silken cups in the large bed at the foot of the lawn. Their withered stalks cracked beneath her steps in the paths and glimmered under the unpruned branches of the cordon apple trees. There were thistles, too, sorrel, and tall nettles, a matted carpet of bindweed and groundsel in the little kitchen-garden, once so neat, and, of course, as poor Charlie had predicted, the Michaelmas daisies had eaten up nearly everything in the herbaceous border. That was one of the last questions he had written to her: “How are my pink phloxes? Have the Michaelmas daisies smothered them?” They had. It was the season at which the phloxes should be in fullest flower, but not one was to be seen; the dense, fine foliage of the daisies had advanced in a wall of green nearly to the border’s edge.
It was still oppressively warm. A toad hopped indolently away and paused at the box edging, lying up against it, his front feet extended, as if so wearied by the heat that he took his chances of discovery. She stopped to look at the clumsy creature, in which so little of nature’s accurate grace was expressed; and as she stood there, a sudden rustle in the box betrayed another inhabitant—this time a baby hedgehog which, too young for fear, moved busily about among the flat dandelion plants that rosetted the path, and even, encountering the tips of her shoes, stopped to examine them carefully before moving on again. The baby hedgehog would have amused Charlie. He had always been delightful about animals; he and the boys had always had that great interest in common.
Yes, the bird-boxes were still there. She could see one in the big apple tree and one fixed to the porch of the house, under the rose. How well she remembered the frantic delight that hailed the hatching of the first brood of tits. And the day when Charlie had deemed it prudent to withdraw the door for a peep at the beautifully fitted mosaic of bright little heads and bodies within, lifting up Giles in his holland pinafore for a long, blissful gaze. Six years ago that must have been.
The light was altering now, and when she turned at the end of the path, a great moon had risen across the lane and seemed to hang in the branches of the walnut tree that grew in the field beyond. A great, shining, heavy moon, and mournful, it seemed to her; her desolate thoughts, she was aware, lending their colour to everything. Heavy, mournful, desolate; that was the rhythm of her own steps passing along in the twilight, pursued by the unformulated consciousness that lay behind all these pictures of the past; pausing at last, as if to let the dogging sorrow overtake her, as she came to where, near the summer-house, against the wall, the evening primroses grew.
It was years since Charlie had first planted them there, and she had said to herself at the time that they would never be rid of them, tenacious, recurrent things, sowing themselves patiently, and coming up loyally even when there was no one to wish them well. She felt touched by their presence; for though she had always found them untidy and uninteresting, she saw, really now for the first time, that they could be beautiful. Homely, loyal flowers; yet—was it the invading sense of sorrow colouring them, too?—a little uncanny, showing at this neutral hour of mingled dusk and moonlight their pale, evident gold; becoming conscious, as it were, becoming personal at the time when other flowers became invisible. Not that it was a sinister uncanniness; not that of ghosts; of fairies, rather; the very strangeness, sadness, sweetness of the moon, to which, from them, she lifted her eyes. And they reminded her of something, but what, she could not say. Not of Charlie. There had never been anything strange or sad about Charlie, except the fact, pursuing her now in his deserted garden, that he was dead and would never see it again.
It was a year to-day since he had been killed, and she had come down to the country with the sense of commemoration. She wanted, alone in the little place so full of thoughts of him, to find him, to recall him; and she had been doing that at every turn. Yet the evening primroses shining there brought a pang deeper than any vision of him. They, though so homely, seemed to personify loneliness; they seemed to be missing something; and although she was desolate because Charlie was dead, because he would never again delight in his garden, it was, in a sense, for him rather than for herself that she sorrowed, and, in a sense, she did not miss him at all.