“Oh, of course!” his laugh sneered the facile acquiescence. “Let us put it on Germany, by all means. We’ll sleep the sounder! Certainly, I grant it to you freely—Germany struck the match and lighted the fuse.”
“And weren’t we all responsible for the fuse—you and I, I mean, as much as the people in the leather chairs?” There was no irony in her repetition. “The people who fought, as much as the people who didn’t fight? Wasn’t the fuse simply our conception of our national safety? of our national honour? That is what I feel so sad about your poems,—though I should never have wanted to explain it,—that you are so wrong, so ungenerous, so vindictive.”
In all his life it had rarely been his lot to know such astonishment. Astonishment came first; and then the deep, deep hurt that rose, wave after wave, within him. Was this, then, what she felt for him—only this? Hadn’t he told her about Ronnie—her alone of all the world? Should not that have made her reverent of him, and pitiful? Should a man who had endured such griefs receive such blows? Waves of colour, too, flooded his face and tears rushed to his eyes. He thought, when he was able at last to gather thoughts together, that it should now be for him to find the conventional phrase and leave her. But, glancing again at her profile, finding it, though singularly pale, so much more gentle than severe, the impulse dropped. He was not strong enough for convention. He was shaken, shattered; too weak even for self-preservation.
He walked, miserable, and his mind full of a whirling darkness, beside her, determining only that she should be the first to speak again. She was. She had quite come out of her shyness,—if it had ever been that,—and though it was with something faltering, something that was, he made out, sorry for them both in the predicament to which, after all, he, and not she, had brought them, it was more than all with resolution that she said,— “I am so sorry if I seem presumptuous. But you asked me. And your poems aren’t the first I’ve read. So many young men, who have been so brave, like you, and who have been through it all so that they have the right to speak, seem to feel more than anything that hatred, not against war,—we all hate war,—but against people, some groups of people, they make responsible. There are bad and selfish people everywhere,—among poets, I feel sure, just as much as among statesmen; but hasn’t this war proved—since everybody has gone—that no one group is bad and selfish; that there are men in every group who have been glad to die for their country? I know I have no weight with young men like you; I am not a person of any importance for opinion; but how I wish that I could make you believe that you ought not to write like that—with hatred in your heart. Can great poetry be written out of hatred? And it’s not only yourself it hurts: it hurts other people; harms them, I mean. It spreads a mood of darkness and fever just when they are so in need of light and calm. And for the mothers, for people who have lost, cruelly, those whom they loved as much, perhaps even more, than you loved your friend—do you not see how your poems must sicken them? Do you not see that it all becomes just that—a community of corruption? You imprison them, force them back into their helpless suffering; when what they pray for is strength to rise above it and to feel all the goodness and love that has been given for them; to feel what is beautiful, not what is horrible; so as to be worthy of their dead.”
As he listened to her,—and with a slow revulsion of all his nature, as if, against his very will and mind, she moved his heart to breaking with something passionate that spoke in her words,—an overwhelming experience befell him.
The crocuses beneath their feet, her sunlit shape beside him, her voice, as she spoke to him thus, with her very soul, blended together in a rising wave of light, or music, piercing, sweeping him, lifting him up to some new capacity, leaving the old inert and dangling, lifting and still lifting him, until at last, as if with a great, emerging breath, he came into a region bright and fair, whence, looking down on the dark and tattered past, he saw all life differently, even Ronnie’s death, even Ronnie’s eyes. Ronnie was with him, with Mrs. Baldwin, in the bright stillness.
Upborne, sustained, like a swimmer in some strange, new element, he seemed to gaze down through its golden spaces at the inert, alien darkness that had been himself. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” he seemed to hear himself say. Yet all was not left behind; all was not rubbish; else how could he be here, with her, with Ronnie? It was bliss to see himself as he had been, since something else was so immeasurably secure. Oh—could one stay always like this! This was to taste of everlasting life. His longing, as if with a cry, a grasp from the swimmer, marked the soft turning of the tide. He sank, but it was sweetly, if with a strange, an infinite sadness, a sadness recorded, accepted, while he sank, as making forever the portion of the temporal consciousness. And the bliss still stayed in the acceptance, and purple ripples seemed to glide back rhythmically as the crocuses swam before his eyes. It had all been only an instant then, for her last words came to him as if she had but spoken them and he heard his own voice murmuring, as if from very far away, “Perhaps you are right.”
The ripples stayed themselves. He looked down at the crocuses and saw Mrs. Baldwin’s white shoes standing still among them. Lifting his eyes, which felt heavy, he found her looking at him with attention, with anxiety.
“It’s nothing,” he tried to smile. “Nothing at all. I mean—you’ve done me good.” He saw that she hadn’t an idea of how she had done it.
“Do take my arm,” she said. “I ought to have remembered that you are not strong yet.”