Now that it was put before her, Mrs. Baldwin did it every justice, rising from the breakfast-table, where she had just finished, to go to her desk, and murmuring as she went, “I hadn’t thought of that. They might be hurt. So, if it won’t bore you, Mr. Norris.”
And the Laycocks were asked, and did indeed bore Guy sadly.
It was on the night after their visit—Mr. Laycock had questioned him earnestly about his personal impressions of the war and to evade him had been wearying—that Guy, for the first time, really, since he had come, found sleep difficult and even menaced. It was because of that, he felt sure, looking back on it, that the curious occurrence of the next day took place—curious, and, had it taken place in the presence of any one else, embarrassing. But what made it most curious was just that; he had not felt it embarrassing to break down and sob before Mrs. Baldwin.
The morning had begun badly. The breakfast-table papers had been full of the approaching victory. Mr. Haseltine read out passages from the Times as he broke his toast and drank his coffee. He had reiterated the triumph of his long conviction, and Mrs. Baldwin had murmured assent. “All’s well with the world,” was the suffocating assurance that seemed to breathe from them both. “All’s blue.” Was hell forgotten like that? What if the war were won? Of course, it had to be won—that was an unquestioned premise that had underlain his rebellions as well as Mr. Haseltine’s complacencies since the beginning. But what of it? No victory could redeem what had been done.
He went out into the garden, to be away from Mr. Haseltine, as soon as he could, and took a book into the summer-house; and it was here, a little later, that Mrs. Baldwin, seeing him as she passed, her garden-basket on her arm, paused to ask him, with her smile of the shy hostess, if he were all right. She didn’t often ask him that, and he saw at once that his recent recalcitrancy to rejoicing had pierced even her vagueness. He knew that he still looked recalcitrant, and he was determined not to soften the overt opposition rising in him; so he raised his eyes to her over his book and said that he was not, perhaps, feeling very fit that morning.
Mrs. Baldwin hesitated at the entrance to the summer-house. She looked behind her at the garden and up at the roses clustering over the lintel under the thatch; she even took out her scissors, in the uncertainty that, evidently, beset her, and snipped off a dead rose, and she said presently, “It was all that talk about the war, wasn’t it—when what you must ask is to forget it.”
“Oh, I don’t ask that at all,” said Guy. “I should scorn myself for forgetting it.” She glanced in again at him, mildly. “I want to forget what’s irrelevant, like victory,” he said; “but not what is relevant, like irremediable wrong.”
Her awareness had not, of course, gone nearly as far as this. She kept her eyes on him, and he was glad to feel that he could probably shock her. “You see,” he found himself saying, “I saw the wrong. I saw the war—at the closest quarters.”
“Yes—oh, yes,” Mrs. Baldwin murmured. “For me, tragedy doesn’t cease to exist when it’s shovelled underground. If one goes down into hell, one doesn’t want to forget the fact—though one may hope to forget the torments and horrors; one wants, rather, to remember that hell exists—and to try and square life with that actuality.”
There was silence after this for a moment, and he imagined that she was very much at a loss. Her next words seemed indeed to express nothing so much as her failure to follow—that and a silliness really rather adorable, had he been in a mood to find it anything but exasperating. “But, still—hell doesn’t exist, does it?” she offered him for his appeasement.