He was glad that he had come, although Mr. Haseltine’s beard was too long and he feared that he would prove talkative in the worst way, the deliberate and retaining way. He liked the smell of everything,—a mingling of sweet-peas, rush-matting, and China tea,—and the look of everything; good, unpretentious old oak furniture, fresh, if faded, chintzes, and book-lined walls; and he presently liked the taste of everything too.
“I feel already as if I should sleep to-night,” he said to Mrs. Baldwin.
She sat behind the tea-urn a little distracted, if anything so mild could be called distraction, by the plunging movements of the little maid as she moved about the table. “That will do nicely, Cathy,” she said. “We can manage now. You can bring in some more hot water if I ring.—Oh, I do hope you’ll sleep. People usually sleep here.”
She was hardly middle-aged, though, after Dorothy’s bright browns and pinks, Tommy might well have thought her so. Many years older than Dorothy, of course, yet how many he could not in the least compute. There was an agelessness, with something tough and solid, about her; she was as little slender as she was stout; she might, with her neutral tints,—hair, skin, dress,—have looked almost the same at sixty as she did now. She wasn’t pale, or sallow, or sunburned; yet her complexion seemed so to go with her hair that the whole head might have been carved in some pleasantly tinted stone. Only her eyes gave any depth of difference; gentle eyes, like a grey-blue breadth of evening. She had a broad, short face and broad, beautifully drawn lips, and looked almost mysteriously innocent.
Guy took her in to this extent, swift as he was at taking people in, and sensitive as he was to what he found. He felt sure—and the depth of comfort it gave him made him aware of all the reluctances Dorothy’s decision had overborne—that she hadn’t the ghost of a method or of a theory. Shell-shock people had merely happened to come and had happened to get well quickly. He even gathered, as the peaceful evening wore on,—Cathy clearing, placid lamps lighted, the windows still left open to the twilight—that she didn’t really think very much about her cases, in so far as they were cases and not guests. Having done her best in the way of blankets, hot water, and spirit-kettles, and seen them settled down into the life she had made for herself,—and not at all for them,—she went her own way, irresponsible and unpreoccupied.
To-night she didn’t attempt to entertain him. It was Mr. Haseltine, at supper, who kept up the conversation, and with the air of always keeping it up, with even the air, Guy imagined once or twice, of feeling it specially his part to make amends, in that sort of resource, for his dear daughter’s deficiency. She was, Guy saw, very much his dear daughter; but he felt sure that it had never entered the old gentleman’s head that any one would find her interesting when he himself was there.
After supper she was occupied for a little while at her desk, adding up figures, it appeared, in house-books; for she came to her father and asked him if he would do a column for her. “It has come out differently three times with me,” she confessed, but without ruefulness. “I’m so dull at my accounts!”
Guy, as Mr. Haseltine fumbled for his large tortoise-shell eyeglasses, offered to help her, and then came over and sat beside the desk and did the rest of the sums for her. She was tidying up for the month, she told him, and always found it rather confusing. “It’s having to put the pennies, which are twelves, into pounds, which are twenties, isn’t it?” she said, and thanked him so much.
But this could hardly be called entertaining him, nor could it, when he accompanied her across the lane in the now deepening dusk, to shut up her fowls. After that, there was the game of chess, during which Mrs. Baldwin absented herself a good deal, helping Cathy, Guy imagined, with the beds and hot-water bottles; and at nine-thirty they all lighted their candles and went upstairs.
Bedtime had been, for many months, his most dreaded moment. The door shut him in and shut away the last chance of alleviation. There was nothing for it but to stretch himself haggardly on his couch and cling to every detail in the day’s events, or in the morrow’s prospects, that might preserve him from the past. To fight not to remember was a losing game, and filled one’s brain with the white flame of insomnia. He had found that it was when, exhausted by the fruitless effort, he suffered the waiting vultures to settle upon him, abandoned himself to the beaks and talons, that, through the sheer passivity of anguish, oblivion most often came.