They were walking up and down the gravel-path outside the front door, and the Canon took his wife’s arm.
“And I should not be surprised if she has done much more than that,” he said. “I daresay she has induced Edith to destroy her paper. What a revolution to have worked in an hour or two! I have no doubt that Edith is as sorry for having written it as is Hugh for having said what he did this afternoon. Blessed indeed are the peacemakers!”
It was perhaps lucky for the Canon’s peacemaker mind that he could not see what Mrs. Owen was doing at this moment. A cigarette (the second to-day) was between her lips, and she was eagerly reading the typewritten sheets which Edith had given her.
CHAPTER XIII
EDITH was lying on a sofa under the trees at the edge of the lawn at Chalkpits, in charge, so a stranger would guess, of a private lunatic asylum. A knight in silver armour was drinking tea out of a slop basin, while Little Red Riding Hood and the gentleman in the railway-carriage in Alice in Wonderland, who was dressed entirely in paper, having finished tea, were employed in rolling down the bank on to the lawn to see who could “get giddiest.” This was not very good for the costume of the gentleman in newspaper, as he tore, and also was getting so green that Lohengrin warned him that there wouldn’t be a square inch readable anywhere if he went on. But he retorted that he had read all of himself that he wanted to, and had got knickerbockers on underneath, which was an unassailable position.
Lohengrin lived in a swan, of course; Red Riding Hood in a cottage, and the other gentleman in a railway-carriage; and they were all pirates as well, and had to get trophies from each other’s houses without being caught, and no householder, of course, was allowed to hang about his own front-door or else he couldn’t help catching any pirate who had been paying him an official visit. Daisy and Jim finally were allowed to run, whereas Hugh might only walk, and if he got any more trophies without being caught he was going to be confined to hopping, because he had already got nine, whereas Red Riding Hood and the gentleman in newspaper had only got three each, and twelve was game. The costumes had been adopted partly because it was such fun to dress up, and partly because it was so easy in ordinary clothes to avoid being seen if you crouched among the bushes, and so nobody got caught at all. But it was almost hopeless for a knight in silver armour or a person in a scarlet cloak or one in newspaper to find any background against which protective mimicry would offer concealment.
Lohengrin had not quite finished the contents of the slop-basin when he slowly sank out of sight behind the tea-table, and whispered “Mutual enemies” to the other pirates, for a carriage was coming up the drive, and it might be callers who would come out to have tea. From there by crawling on the hands and knees it was possible to get behind an elm without leaving cover; and to get from there behind the box-hedge that separated the lawn from the kitchen-garden without being seen was child’s-play to any proper pirate. But the carriage, whatever it was, only drove to the front door, left cards and departed.
Edith thought of calling to the pirates to tell them the coast was clear, but on second thoughts she did not, for she was, as a matter of fact, not sorry to have a little cessation of the riot that had been going on since lunch. This hot day of mid-September, to her so languid and enervating, seemed but to have strung up to the highest pitch of activity the other children, among whom she included her husband, though not her two-months-old baby. Peggy was with them, too, and people had come to lunch, and frankly she felt that a little truce from the high spirits with which she was surrounded might tend to raise her own. She wanted to sit and think, she wanted to examine the causes of a depression under which she had been suffering for the last week or two, and assure herself that it was all groundless, or at any rate, had root merely in physical soil, and was not concerned with essential things. She told herself she knew that it must be so, but at the present moment she did not realise it in at all a convincing manner.
Her son had been born in the middle of July, and from that day to this had grown and thriven in the most satisfactory way. Even in the midst of her present tiredness and unexplained depression the glow of retrospective happiness kindled in her face when she thought of the moment when she had seen this child in Hugh’s arms, and from that day to this the miracle of motherhood had to her lost no whit of its wonder. All had gone excellently well with her also; her recovery had been rapid and sound, until one day in August when she had caught a little chill. She soon, however, recovered from that, too, but letting herself dwell for a moment on this purely physical side of things, she knew that she had not felt quite well since. Yet she did not think that her discomfort was anything more than was easily accounted for by the birth of her baby, the chill following, and the very hot and oppressive weather that had continued right up till to-day. She must look further than that for the cause.
A large hopping figure in silver mail crossed the opening in the yew hedge that led into the kitchen garden, pursued by a diminutive one in scarlet. They were visible only for a second, but immediately afterward there came a passionate cry of protest in a tenor voice and shrill treble scream of exultation. And that she well knew contained a deeper cause for disquietude than any she had thought of yet. Once last spring she had reminded Hugh that he was in actual years nearer Daisy’s age than her own, and Hugh, all unconscious, was now demonstrating to her the truth of her own statement. Deep and abiding, as she had no need to tell herself, as was his love for her, thoroughly as she satisfied all the needs of his spirit, yet, so she told herself now, that was not all he wanted. At his age he must want somebody to play with, not only as regards the riotous activities of pirates, but in the corresponding play of the mind. Everyone, whatever his age was, wanted, perhaps most of all, the society of contemporaries. The abandonment with which he romped with Peggy’s children was no more than a superficial and bodily example of the sort of thing he needed. With his lightness and activity of youth it was more nearly his natural mode of progression to jump flower-beds than to walk slowly as he had done so often and so delightedly by her bathchair; and his mind, she told herself, was more like a child’s in its processes and manner of progress than it was like hers. It was not only in the body that she was beginning to feel the difference of age between them.