Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He took her arm. Perhaps he needed it. His normal consciousness was gathering about him once again, but no longer with the old close texture. It was all more permeable to light—that was how he tried to put it. And he heard his voice go on, “You see—what it all amounts to—oh, I’m not thinking about the poems, I know that you must be right—it’s not what you say, is it? It’s something far more right than what you say. But I love you. That’s why you can do it to me. I wonder I didn’t see it before. You made me angry with your peacefulness. I didn’t understand. I needed your peace. You, you were what I needed. You will forgive my speaking? Surely you’ll understand. Perhaps you feel you hardly know me, while you are like my life. Is it possible that some day you might love me back and marry me?”

He had used the words that came. They were the words of the normal consciousness. How else could he ask her to keep him always near her so that he might never lose that sense of paradise?

But she had stopped still and had drawn her arm from his. Was it possible that after what she had done to him, for him, she could see him only thus? “Oh, no,” she said. “No. No.” Never had he seen a human face express with such ineffable gentleness such repudiation. And she repeated it, as if he had given her too much to bear; as if for her own reassurance; as if to efface even the memory of his words: “No; no; no!” She began again to walk towards the house.

Had it not been for the initiation that had passed he knew so clearly now, in all unawareness from her spirit to his, he would have felt to the full the shame of his rejection, the deserved shame. For he was a stranger and she had given him no right to believe that she even liked him. But he could feel no shame. Had he really thought that she could love him? Had it not been only that he wanted to tell her that he loved her, and had wanted her, as it were, to keep him safe? He found himself trying to explain this to her,—not pleading,—only so that she should not be angry. “I had to tell you. You’d done me so much good. Everything came different. Really, I’m not so presumptuous. I never meant to ask anything.”

But she was not angry. “Forgive me,” she said. “I hardly know what I am saying. You so astonished me. Forgive me. But I don’t feel as if I knew you at all. Please don’t think me reproaching you. I begin to understand. You are not at all strong. It was like the other day when you cried, I mean—I feel sure you think you care for me; but you couldn’t have said it, when we know each other so little, if you had been well.”

She was putting it aside, for his sake, as an aberration, and he really smiled a little as he shook his head. “No; really, really, it’s not that; not because I’ve been on edge and ill. It was something that came to me from what you are; something that’s been coming ever since I saw you. I know that I am nothing to you; but for a moment, just now, it seemed, when I had received so much, that you must know what you had given; it seemed that a person to whom so much could be given, could not be so far away. But even then I saw quite clearly what you saw in me; a vain, pretentious, emotional creature; insincere, too, and proud of my suffering. I am that. But I had never seen it before. And when it came to me from you and, instead of crushing me, lifted me up, I knew that I loved you.—No; I won’t try to explain. Only you do forgive me? You will let me go on as if it hadn’t happened? I promise you that I’ll never trouble you again.”

Oh, the gentleness, the heavenly gentleness! It breathed through him like the colour of the crocuses, although she was as impersonal, as untouched, and as mysterious as they. He was nothing to her—nothing; but she stood before him, looking at him, and though she gave nothing but the gentleness, he knew that he received all that he needed. It was enough that she was there.

“But it’s I to be forgiven—I,” she repeated. “Of course we will go on. Oh, you look very tired. Please take my arm again. I spoke so strangely to you. But—but—” She had flushed: for the first time he saw the colour darken her face as if with a veil of pain, and in her voice was the passion, deeper, stiller, that he had heard a little while ago and that had enfranchised him. “I am married—I mean, my husband is dead, but I am married. Perhaps you don’t understand. Perhaps you will some day, if you should lose some one you love and feel them still your very life. We were like that. He is always with me.”

They had said nothing more as they walked up the meadow to the house, his arm in hers. He had no sense of loss; rather, from her last words to him, came a sense of further gain. She would be like that. He saw now that her peace, against which he had pressed and protested, was something won, was depth, not emptiness. She, too, had lost and suffered. She was made dearer to him, more sacred. As for his love, it did not belong—he had seen this even before she told him why—to this everyday world to which he had returned. But it was everything to have found it, with that other world, and to know that there it had its being, its reality, forever. What was it that had enlarged, transformed his life, but that very certitude of an eternity where all good was secure? He could not explain it to himself in any words. Words were the keys of temporality. But he had seen, if only for the few shining moments, that Ronnie was not lost; that nothing had been in vain.

If he found no difficulty, it was evident to him that Mrs. Baldwin felt none, and he was glad to believe that this might be because he showed her so completely, in his candid contentment, that he would never trouble her again. She was not more kind to him; but she took, perhaps, even more care, as if feeling that she had miscalculated something in his recovery. She inaugurated a glass of hot milk, instead of spiced hot water, at bedtime, and a rest on the sofa, with a rug, before the midday dinner. “You will look so much better when you go back than when you came,” she said.