Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

I saw already that Mrs. Thornton had taken to me. It was natural that she should. I had taken to her quite tremendously, and she must have felt it; and, besides, a great many women do feel confidence in me at once. I, to be sure, look like anything but an angel, though I, like Vera, have small, pale features and dark hair. But mine’s not a melancholy or mysterious face. My eyebrows dip together over my nose, and my mouth is at once placid and irascible. I look, in my straight, austere clothes,—the silver buckles on my shoes and the fob of old trinkets at my waist for all adornment,—like a cross between a young priest in his soutane and a Blue-Coat boy; and I think it is the boyish woman, curt and kind and impersonal, who gains the confidence of others of her sex.

“I don’t know that it was more of a wrench,” I said. “I expect that you and I felt pretty much the same sort of thing on that Victoria platform when we said good-bye to them. What do you and your husband intend doing, now that he has to give up his profession?”

“Well, we had thought of having a chicken-farm somewhere. We are both so fond of the country, and I’ve a cousin who has a chicken-farm, and I’ve helped her with it, and she has made it pay. Even if Clive’s leg stays so bad, I am very strong. But we’ve had, really, no time yet to talk things over.”

“You don’t look very strong,” I observed, “but that may be because you are over-tired. You look very tired. I should say that you got up at six this morning, and raced around London shopping in the heat, and packed, and had no lunch, and a journey on top of it all. So no wonder you are tired.”

“How clever of you!” Mrs. Thornton cried, laughing. “That is exactly what I have been doing. And I’ve been in a Belgian refugee hostel ever since Clive went, and that is tiring, though it keeps one going, too. Don’t you find it difficult just to go on from day to day?” She was leaning forward on her knee now to look up into my face while I knitted. “I mean, when one wakes in the morning, for instance, to think that one has to get up and brush one’s teeth and do one’s hair and all the rest of it. It seems impossible when what one is feeling is that one wants to be chloroformed till it is all over. It was then that the hostel was so sustaining; one had to get up whether one felt like it or not.”

“I know; yes,” I said, nodding. “I’ve work, too, though it’s not so sustaining as a hostel. I’m my cousin’s secretary, and we have all these Tommies now; they take up a good deal of time. It must be curious, having it all over, all that weight of anxiety.”

“It is, it is,” said little Mrs. Thornton, eagerly, with her look of gratitude for finding some one with whom to talk about it. “It’s almost like losing a limb. I feel crippled, as well as Clive. Isn’t it absurd? But it’s almost like loss. And one is dazed with the relief of it.”

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Only a year and a half,” she told me, and that Clive’s mother and hers had been great friends, and that she had often gone to stay with his people in the country, so that she had always known him. Her mother had died when she was a child and her father only two years ago. She had lived in London with her father, who had been an artist. She was just twenty. And after she had told me about herself, she asked me about Jack, and I found myself telling her all about him and about those plans of ours for living together in London if he ever comes back.

The party at Compton Dally was small, and they were all there (except Sir Francis who was an old family friend and who was paying a long visit), to help Vera with her Tommies. The only other officer besides Captain Thornton was poor Colonel Appleby, a pale, frightened, middle-aged man invalided home with nervous shock. At dinner that night Lady Dighton, who is the embodiment of lassitude and acquiescence, had him, and Mrs. Travers-Cray had Sir Francis, and Vera had Captain Thornton, so that Percival fell to the share of Mollie Thornton, and I wondered how she liked him. If she was already feeling herself out of it, to have Percival at dinner wouldn’t make her feel herself in; quite the reverse. Percival’s appearance is always summed up to me by the back of his head: the wedge of fat, red neck above his high collar, the sleek, glittering black hair, and the rims of his red ears curving forward on each side. The back of his head seems really as characteristic as the front, though that is jovial and not unkindly. Percival looks sly over his food, and looks over his wine like the sort of man who is going to tell a story that no one else will find at all amusing. He told Mollie several such stories that night, I inferred, though she was evidently neither shy nor shocked; it was in the quality of her smile that I read her kindly endurance.