The High Heart

by Basil King

With a comic inward grimace I swallowed all my pride and thanked him.

As for Mrs. Brokenshire's protection, that was settled when, later in the afternoon, we sat on her balcony and laughed and cried together, and held each other's hands, as young women do when their emotions outrun their power of expression. She called me Alix and begged me to invent a name for her that would combine the dignity of Hugh's stepmother with our standing as friends. I chose Miladi, out of Les Trois Mousquetaires, with which she was delighted.

I begged off from dining with them that evening, nominally because I was too upset by all I had lived through in the afternoon, but really for the reason that I couldn't bear the thought of Mr. Brokenshire calling me his dear Alexandra twice in the same day. Once had made my blood run cold. His method of shriveling up a name by merely pronouncing it is something that transcends my power to describe. He had ruined that of Adare with me forever, and now he was completing my confusion at being called after so lovely a creature as our queen. I have always admitted that, with its stately, regal suggestions, Alexandra is no symbol for a plain little body like me; but when Mr. Brokenshire took it on his lips and called me his dear I could have cried out for mercy. So I had my dinner by myself, munching slowly and meditating on what Mr. Brokenshire described as "my new situation."

I was meditating on it still when, in the course of the following afternoon, I was sitting in a retired grove of the hillside wood waiting for Hugh to come and find me. He was to arrive about three and Miladi was to tell him where I was. In our crowded little inn, with its crowded grounds, nooks of privacy were rare.

I had taken the Boston paper with me in order to get further details of the tragedy of Sarajevo. These I found absorbing. They wove themselves in with my thoughts of Hugh and my dreams of our life together. An article on Serbia, which I had found in an old magazine that morning, had given me, too, an understanding of the situation I hadn't had before. Up to that day Serbia had been but a name to me; now I began to see its significance. The story of this brave, patient little people, with its one idea—an idée fixe of liberty—began to move me.

Of all the races of Europe the Serbian impressed me as the one that had been most constantly thwarted in its natural ambitions—struck down whenever it attempted to rise. Its patriotic hopes had always been inconvenient to some other nation's patriotic hopes, and so had to be blasted systematically. England, France, Austria, Turkey, Italy, and Russia had taken part at various times in this circumvention, denying the fruits of victory after they had been won. Serbia had been the poor little bastard brother of Europe, kept out of the inheritance of justice and freedom and commerce when others were admitted to a share. For some of them there might have been no great share; but for little Serbia there was none.

It was terrible to me that such wrong could go on, generation after generation, and that there should be no Nemesis. In a measure it contradicted my theory of right. I didn't want any one to suffer, but I asked why there had been no suffering. Of the nations that had knocked Serbia about, hedged her in by restrictions, dismembered her and kept her dismembered, most were prosperous. From Serbia's point of view I couldn't help sympathizing with the hand that had struck down at least one member of the House of Hapsburg; and yet in that tragic act there could be no adequate revenge for centuries of repression. What I wanted I didn't know; I suppose I didn't want anything. I was only wondering—wondering why, if individuals couldn't sin without paying for the sin they had committed, nations should sin and be immune.

Strangely enough, these reflections did not shut out the thought of the lover who was coming up the hill; they blended with it; they made it larger and more vital. I could thank God I was marrying a man whose hand would always be lifted on behalf of right. I didn't know how it could be lifted in the cause of Serbia against the influences represented by Franz Ferdinand; but when one is dreaming one doesn't pause to direct the logical course of one's dreams. Perhaps I was only clutching at whatever I could say for Hugh; and at least I could say that. He was not a strong man in the sense of being fertile in ideas; but he was brave and generous, and where there was injustice his spirit would be among the first to be stirred by it. That conviction made me welcome him when, at last, I saw his stocky figure moving lower down among the pine trunks.

I caught sight of him long before he discovered me, and could make my notes upon him. I could even make my notes upon myself, not wholly with my own approval. I was too business-like, too cool. There was nothing I possessed in the world that I would not have given for a single quickened heart-throb. I would have given it the more when I saw Hugh's pinched face and the furbished-up spring suit he had worn the year before.

It was not the fact that he had worn it the year before that gave me a pang; it was that he must have worn it pretty steadily. I am not observant of men's clothes. Except that I like to see them neat, they are too much alike to be worth noticing. But anything not plainly opulent in Hugh smote me with a sense of guilt. It could so easily be attributed to my fault. I could so easily take it so myself. I did take it so myself. I said as he approached: "This man has suffered. He has suffered on my account. All my life must be given to making it up to him."