She took up the morning paper, at which she had not yet cared to look. The black line had not moved either backwards or forwards, but there was a long list of casualties. She read it, and found that it contained notices of intimate bereavement for some half-dozen of her friends, to whom she must write a line of condolence. Then, in imagination, she saw herself reading some similar list, on a morning but a few months ahead, and finding it contained the beloved name concerning which she had already received communication from the War Office. At that the great wave of loneliness soared high above her and engulfed her.
On that day, so vivid at the moment to her imagination, that she felt that it was already actually here, there would be nothing whatever left for which she cared to live. She made no sentimental pictures of herself as a mother bereaved of her only son, or of the blow killing her, for a blow, in order to kill, has to strike some vital place, and there was nothing vital in her to strike. She would just go on living, if that could be called life, which had not enough keenness of edge to it to be termed either happy or unhappy, until the dark door opened, or, as she had phrased it once to herself, the great fish gulped down the fly that floated, water-logged on the stream, and she went back into the nothingness out of which she came.
What had it all been about, this tedious story, which she had once read with such intense interest? Hitherto life had denied her nothing which she cared to take, and she had taken freely, grasping it by the armful, and sucking out of it the utmost of its sweetness. But henceforth life seemed to hold nothing that was worth taking; she no longer cared what it gave her or denied her, since “desire had failed.” No longer had she any part in it: all those who hitherto had been active with herself in its pageants and movements, seemed no longer to be alive, but to be mere marionettes, bobbing about in meaningless antics, while she had become the one spectator of the show, quite alone in this infinite array of empty benches....
By a violent effort she pulled herself together: she was meeting trouble before it came, in imagining what the world would be to her when there was Robin’s name in the daily list of casualties. She knew it was utterly unlike her to indulge in that sort of profitless speculation, but the billow of loneliness had for the moment completely submerged her, blotting out all else but the consciousness of itself. Now it had broken, and her head was above water again, and there was still a beach somewhere near, a shore to which she might struggle, and the engrained habit of life, the eager planning of the hours so as to fill them in a manner as diversified and entertaining as possible, came back to her a little, striking feeble pulses in the arteries of her emotions. Perhaps the apathy of these last weeks had been leading up to a crisis like that she had just passed through; perhaps now the worst was over, and some hint of recuperation and of returning vitality was coming back to her.
Yes, faintly but unmistakably she wanted to be interested in the world again, until such time as the great fish gulped her down. So few months ago, without egotism and conceit, there had been nobody she knew who had more than a fraction of the intensity of interest with which the world, just the human race, inspired her. All sorts and conditions of men held for her their own talisman: once she had bidden to dinner a black bishop, a lion tamer and a suffragette, and had passed an entrancing evening, in the effort to realize what was the fascination of converting cannibals, of cowing lions and of destroying works of art in order to show how fit you were to have a hand in the government of the country. None, literally none, had excelled her in the cult of mankind; never had there been a more ardent worshipper.
Then suddenly, owing in the main to an emotional shock, life had lost its coherence for her: instead of its being a clamour of entrancing topics, it had become a meaningless babble. On the top of that had come this detestable war. If she was to win her way back to the ranks of the living, to enable herself to realize the world again as something more than a mere congregation of marionettes watched drowsily by a single spectator, she must somehow escape from this paralyzing influence of the war, which was sapping the intelligence just as it was monopolizing the entire energies of bishop, lion-tamer and suffragette alike. Of the women she knew there was scarcely one who was not knitting or sewing or learning to nurse: they were dead to every form of human interest except counting stitches, and to every pursuit except that of dropping them and beginning again with a pulled-out heap of crinkled wool.
Gracie Massingberd was a ringleader among these. She had taken possession of Ardingly House, and had established her Sewing and Knitting Society there. The ballroom was full of small tables round which sat little parties of her workers who made shirts all day and turned out yard after yard of woollen scarves. It seemed to give them a sense of doing something for their country, and there they sat and knitted and talked all day in a pessimistic manner about the war, hatching as in the warmth of an incubator a hundred rumours of peril and disaster. Helen had attended these gatherings for two or three days, but instead of finding an anodyne to her dull aching in manual employment, she merely found a physical and emotional atmosphere that were equally intolerable. These ladies ate sandwiches out of little paper packets at lunch-time, and consumed a good deal of tea, and Gracie moved among them with the air of a high-priestess. And all seemed to think that their personal discomfort, the sitting on high chairs and eating disgusting food, and turning out woollen scarves, somehow helped the war.
In the drawing-room next door was a depot for packing the fruits of their labours and old clothes of all sorts which were sent them in vast numbers. But after some three days in this rag and bone shop Helen had judged it better to retire, while, in case those woollen scarves were really of use to somebody, she left a standing order at a shop for a woollen scarf to be sent to Lady Massingberd’s depot every other day, with her compliments. She was delighted to supply them, provided she was not obliged to make them, and did so with a greater prodigality than that with which they would have materialized under her unaccustomed fingers. But she thought with a sort of contemptuous envy of the type of mind which can evolve an approving conscience out of knitting and lugubrious conversation. In her it only produced a longing for fresh air and an escape from the nightmare that it wove about her. If all that she could do was to knit scarves, and admire Gracie standing waist high in a rubbish heap of old shoes and darned trousers, she would sooner admire and wonder at Gracie’s notion of what she called “personal service” at a distance, and buy scarves that were much better made than any she could herself make.
All this for the past week or two had formed the drab curtain of loneliness and depression in front of which her life had been enacted. All the relief from it that she had got lay in her exertions to obtain a post for Robin which would give him some useful and necessary job and prevent his exposure to the grim Moloch that sat in flaming hunger along the battle-line in France. But this morning, when Robin had passed by with a shake of his head what she had procured for him, there had come this crisis of loneliness which, when it subsided again, left her not dully, drowsily aching any more, but had stabbed her, though with a piercing point, into some sort of vitality.
Hitherto, she had just let the hours go on guttering away to form days, the days accumulate into weeks, content that time should waste itself, provided only that it definitely ran away. But now that dull ache passed into a pain that awoke her, from which somehow it was necessary to escape: it was as if she had been dreaming of pain, and awoke in a sweat of anguish, encompassed by the added terror of the dark—dark, and the faint outline of Robin against it, as against a drawn blind behind which burns some remote and terrible conflagration. At all costs she must turn on, here in the room of her own heart, some light that would blot out and extinguish that lurid smouldering of flame from without.