Yet it was not so much Florrie’s bathroom and breakfasts, or even Florrie’s kindness, that overbore her protests as Florrie’s determination, her way of knowing so much better than you yourself could know what was not only good, but happy for you. There was never an answer to be found to her; and though Florrie’s flat, with all its sumptuousness, dazed and even tired Miss Glover a little, just as dear Florrie herself sometimes dazed and tired her, she found herself installed there always, feeling her own pursuits, her little tea-parties, her concerts, her timid, bewildered shopping, to be very humdrum and inappropriate as issuing from such a base of operations. The only return she was able to make was to emboss Florrie’s sheets and towels and table-linen with beautifully embroidered monograms, and she had always a slight and pleasant sense of being, at all events, a country mouse who had contributed its little offering of grain or honey when she recognized these trophies of her craft on her bed and on the table and in the bathroom.
But the last time she had gone up that summer, only, now, three weeks ago, she had found herself suddenly of a significance almost as great as that of any of Florrie’s brilliant friends. To become significant to Florrie one had either to be brilliant or piteous, and she was piteous. Florrie had gone with her to the doctor’s, and it was Florrie, kind Florrie, an arm about her shoulders and a breast spread to her tired head, who had broken to her the verdict.
She was menaced, gravely menaced.—Yes; it did not surprise her—she had thought it might be that. She had seen her father and two sisters die of it—And unless she could go away and spend a year in a Swiss open-air cure, the doctor didn’t think she’d live through the winter.
Seated on Florrie’s frilled sofa, while Florrie, all encompassing tact and urgency, passed on the verdict, it was not of it that she first thought. Her mind, perhaps in an instinctive recoil, fixed itself upon the oddly insistent impression of pinkness that she was aware, suddenly, of receiving. Florrie’s blouse, under her cheek, was a bright blur of pink; and when she turned her eyes away from that they met, everywhere, garlands of roses looped with knots of blue ribbon on a background of white and pink stripes. Too much pink: this was the absurdly irrelevant criticism that, dimly, but as if culminatingly, emerged. She must have felt it as too pink for many years, but only now was she aware of it. And then, with a sense of refuge, came the vision of her pansies: those borders of white and purple pansies under the dull brick wall that she had looked at so fondly that morning before starting for her journey. But she would have to leave her pansies, then; not only for a season; perhaps forever.
It was in this form and in this roundabout way that the thought of death became real to her; with pathos rather than poignancy and with yearning regret rather than fear. She did not feel afraid of dying. Her quiet little faith that, though so still, was deep enough for all her needs, had sunken wells of wordless security in her. She was not afraid; but the thought of leaving her flowers, her garden, the skyey view from her bedroom window, symbolized for her all the sadness of death. There was, indeed, nothing else to regret much. Every one she had loved most dearly was gone; and when all was said and done, and in spite of the peace of the last five years, she was a battered, tired little creature, with few of the springs of desire left in her. Her life, as she looked back on it, seemed to have been spent, for the most part, in crowded buses on wet evenings, with not enough lunch behind and not enough dinner before her; in those, and in going up and down steps of strangers' houses. There had been, of course, more than that; she had never, except when her dearest young sister died, been very unhappy, and there had been interests and alleviations always—beautiful evening walks across the Park and relaxations over tea with a book before the fire in her lodging-house sitting-room; but the past, when she called it up in an image, seemed always to crumple into that jolting, rattling, wet, and crowded omnibus. So there was not much strength now left in her for resistance or regret; but she would do her best to live, and that really meant that she would do her best not yet to leave her garden.
When she was older, too old to dig a little, divide the pansies in autumn and sow the penny packets in spring, too old to care for the Madame Alfred Carrière or the Pyrus japonica, would be time enough to go. But in coming back to it that evening, she knew how deeply, how tenaciously she loved her garden. It was the only thing she had ever owned in her life, the only thing she had ever made: her work and creation; its roots seemed to go down into her heart; and she could not feel that in heaven there would be old white roses and white and purple pansies and mignonette and sweet peas that one had sown one’s self from penny packets.
II
AT first, when Florrie told her, the verdict had seemed unescapable. She had said, after the little silence in which she received it,—the silence in which much had happened to her,—she had said, in a very quiet voice that had surprised herself, “I’m afraid it’s no good, then, Florrie dear. I can’t afford to go away.”
Aunt Kate had left her only the house and its contents. She had saved only the tiniest sum herself—just enough to yield an income that paid for her food and light and coal. To pay for Jane, her good old servant, to pay for her clothes and washing, to pay for the trips to London and the crumpets and cakes that she gave her friends at tea in Acacia Road, she had still to depend upon the pupils that, fortunately, she had found in the small Surrey town. On three afternoons a week she sallied forth, peacefully indeed, with no sense of anxiety or pressure, and made her way to the houses of the doctor, the rector, the big London manufacturer, and instructed their young daughters in the excellent Munich method that she had imbibed in youth. With these delightfully convenient strings to her bow she could manage perfectly. But to give them up and to pay for an open-air cure in Switzerland was outside the bounds of her possibilities.
So she explained, in the quiet voice, to Florrie; and it was then that Florrie, revealing herself as a more wonderfully kind friend than even in Miss Glover’s grateful eyes she had always been, said, the tears suddenly hopping down her cheeks and making dark spots on the pink silk blouse,—