Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

She stood still in the path, her hands clasped behind her, her head bent, a personification of widowhood in her thin black draperies, her intent, memorial poise. And she could have said of herself with truth that, during all this year, she had known only a widow’s sad preoccupations. There had been the settling of business matters; lawyers and bankers to interview; planning for the boys, with school-masters to visit; and the tending of bereaved relations—Charlie’s dear old parents clung to her. But now, on the day of his death, it was as if for the first time she had had leisure, at last, to realize that, with it all, she had never had the widow’s heart. She had grieved over him; she had longed to do all for him that could be done—there was nothing new in that; but it was far worse than not being heartbroken: it was the sorry fact that she did not even miss him. He had left, as it were, no emptiness behind him.

She had lifted her head and looked round the garden, trying, in the physical fact of absence, to summon the spiritual void. How he had planned, dug, planted it; pruned his fruit trees; placed his anemones in leaf-mould, his bulbs on sand. She saw his kindly, handsome figure everywhere; his brown cheek, good grey eye, and close-cropped, tawny hair. A manly, simple creature; the salt of the earth, as honest as the day—oh, she saw it all; she had said it to herself a hundred times; and there had, indeed, been nothing one could say against Charlie. But then, as a wife, there had been nothing to say against her, either; he had been perfectly happy with her—the happiest creature, even in the manner of his death. He had been killed instantaneously, while walking, on a sunny day, beside his men along a road in France. Every letter she had had from his brother officers over there spoke of his gaiety and good spirits. The war itself had, on the whole, meant happiness to him, for all his gravity over certain of its tragedies. But he had been almost as grave over mischances with his Boy Scouts, and it had all remained for him an immense, magnificent form of boy-scouting.

Dear, good Charlie! Yet—was it possible that something of the old long-conquered exasperation could still, at this hour, thrust itself into her memories? He had not been quite boyish enough to justify his lightness and make it loveable. That had been the final fundamental trouble in their mistaken marriage; she had not been able to mother him. He had not been appealing, beguiling, endearing, like a child. Not like a child; not boyish, fatherly, rather; even, playfully didactic, and assuming always that theirs was a completely reciprocal marital intimacy. It had not been his fault, of course. She had been too clever ever to let him guess how stupid she found him. She felt the possessive arm laid about her shoulders for an evening stroll; saw the wag of his premonitory finger as he raised himself from a border to call out a jocose reprimand; heard the chaff with which, before friends, he counted her mistaken opinions.

And it had been when they were alone, especially at dinner,—Charlie across the table from her in his faultless black and white,—that the pressure of their distance had been most difficult to protect him from. He talked then, and she had to answer adequately. He was fond of talk, and, while the most uncritical of Conservatives, was full of solutions for old ills. He took Trade-Unionists, Home-Rulers, and Dissenters playfully and held them up to kindly ridicule. “You can laugh most people out of their nonsense,” was one of Charlie’s maxims; and if they didn’t respond to the treatment,—he had tried it unsuccessfully on the village cobbler who preached in the tin chapel on Sunday,—he suspected them of being rather wicked.

In the first year of their marriage she had paid him the compliment of disagreement, or, at least, discrimination. She had, until her marriage, thought of herself as a Conservative; to be counted one by Charlie disturbed her sense of rectitude. But Charlie opposed, became puzzled, and finally aggrieved. He bothered and bothered and argued and argued, with the air of trying to bring an erring child to reason. “Now look at it in this light,” he would say. Or, “Try to see the thing squarely, Rosamund”; and would turn upon her irrelevant batteries from the Spectator. She had at last the sensation of flying, battered and breathless, from his platitudes, and found, soon, her only refuge in duplicity. After that, through all the years of their married life, Charlie, she knew, thought of their evening hours alone together as exceedingly pleasant and successful. He wasn’t one of your fellows who doze over the Field with a cigar after dinner. He had a clever wife and he appreciated her and was proud—in spite of feminine aberrations affectionately recognized and checked—of what he called her “intellects.” He called his father and mother his “respected progenitors” and his stomach was never other than “Little Mary.” And while he talked and expounded and made his unexacting jests, Rosamund knew that her silences had no provocation, her smile no irony.

So it had gone on—so it might have gone on for the normal span of life. The only insecurity that had threatened her careful edifice was the question of the boys. The boys were like herself, or, rather, like her adored and brilliant father—proud, sensitive, ardent little creatures, tender-hearted and frightfully intelligent. Physically, too, they were of a different race from Charlie, with thick brown locks, passionate yet gentle eyes, and full, small, closely closing mouths. As boys, Charlie had fairly well understood them,—he got on well with the average boy,—as persons, never; and though as boys, at least as little boys, they got on beautifully with him, they had, as persons, almost at once understood him, even when they were too young to evade or hide from him. If they had not been so young, they would, already, then, have hurt him often.

And for her the boys at once complicated everything. It had been easy, in one way, to yield in non-essentials, though she was woman enough to cry her eyes out when Charlie had taken Philip and Giles, at the earliest age, to have their dear Jeanne-d’Arc heads close-cropped in pursuit of the ideal of manliness; easy, comparatively, to steel her heart when timid little Philip, blanched with terror, was made to ride at six. Charlie had been right about that,—how glad she had been to own it!—for Philip had, in a week’s time, forgotten his fears. But she and Charlie had come near quarrelling over Giles’s rag-doll Bessie. Giles was only three and adored Bessie, and Charlie had tossed her in the air, mocked her, and held her up by the toe while Giles sobbed convulsively.

“Do you really want our boys to be milksops, Rosamund?” he had asked, as, refusing to argue, she took the doll from him, placed her in Giles’s arms, and kept them both on her lap, pressed within her arms, her head bent down over them so that she need not look at her husband. He had gone away vanquished, and Giles had kept his Bessie, until, in the course of nature, she had dropped away from him.

Worse than this came one day when Charlie had found Philip in a corner writing poetry. He had not been altogether pleased by the children’s literary tastes. To grind dutifully at Latin and Greek was one thing, and he was fond of a tag from Tennyson. But he had never cared to read Keats and Shelley when he was a kid. He took the copy-book out of Philip’s reluctant hands and, turning from page to page, read out, in mock-dramatic tones, the derivative, boyish efforts, which yet, to her ear, had every now and then their innocent, bird-like note of reality.

“And now this—'To a Skylark,'” said Charlie, laying a restraining, affectionate hand on Philip’s shoulder, wishing him to rise superior to vanity and join in the fun, once it was pointed out to him.