Mary was wonderfully happy in these days—happier in a sense than she had ever been, for she had found, beyond all question, the full work for hands to do. And to her love for her children there was added not merely her maternal tenderness for Stefan, but a deep and growing admiration.
For Stefan was changed not only in the body, but in the spirit. Everybody remarked it. The fierce fires of war seemed to have burnt away his old confident egotism. In giving himself to France he had found more than he had lost; for, by a strange paradox, in the midst of death he had found belief in life.
“Mary, my beautiful,” he said to her one day in September, as he worked at an adjustable drawing board which swung across his knees, “did you ever wonder why all my old pictures used to be of rapid movement, nearly all of running or flying?”
“Yes, dearest, I used to try often to think out the significance of it.”
They were in the studio. Mary had just dropped her pencil after a couple of hours' work on a new serial she was writing. She often worked now in Stefan's room. He was busy with a series of drawings of the war. He had tried different media—pastel, ink, pencils, and chalks—to see which were the easiest for sedentary work.
“It's good-bye to oils,” he had said, “I couldn't paint a foot from the canvas.”
Now he was using a mixture of chalk and charcoal, and was in the act of finishing the sixth drawing of his series. The big doors of the barn were opened wide to the sunny lawn, gay with a riot of multicolored dahlias.
“It's odd,” said Stefan, pushing away his board and turning the wheels of his chair so that he faced the brilliant stillness of the garden, “but I seem never to have understood my work till now. I used always to paint flight partly because it was beautiful in itself but also, I think, with some hazy notion that swift creatures could always escape from the ugliness of life.”
Mary came and sat by him, taking his hand.
“It seems to me,” he went on, “that I spent my life flying from what I thought was ugly. I always refused to face realities, Mary, unless they were pleasant. I fled even from the great reality of our marriage because it meant responsibilities and monotony, and they seemed ugly things to me. And now, Mary,” he smiled, “now that I can never shoulder responsibilities again, and am condemned to lifelong monotony”—she pressed his hand—“neither seems ugly any more. The truth is, I thought I fled to get away from things, and it was really to get away from myself. Now that I've seen such horrors, such awful suffering, and such unbelievable sacrifice, I have something to think about so much more real than my vain, egotistical self. I know what my work is now, something much better than just creating beauty. I gave my body to France—that was nothing. But now I have to give her my soul—I have to try and make it a voice to tell the world a little of what she has done. Am I too vain, dearest, in thinking that these really say something big?”