“One can never tell,” she said. “People like him often have little private resurrections. But I hope he is dead if, in order that he should dictate me another play, I should have to go through that sort of thing again. For he lived just a little too near Hell.”
The shudder of goose-flesh repeated itself, and she drew a cloak about her shoulders. Sunset had ceased to flare in the sky, and with the withdrawal of its lights it had grown a little chilly.
“Come, Peggy,” she said, “let us walk a little. I am very grateful to you. You have stirred me up, and I expect I was getting indolent. We’ll see if I can’t raise the ghost of Andrew Robb, anyhow. I want to write again, and Hugh wants me to. He says it is absurd that he should go toiling away at his singing if I don’t toil. You see, my darling boy has a very high opinion of Andrew Robb. He wants to see more of him. But he didn’t see him in the acts of the new play that I read. But I will make an effort. It is time I did. I suppose I have got stupefied with happiness.”
They left the lawn and went up the broad gravel walk by the herbaceous bed, at the far end of which was the doorway in the box-hedge into the kitchen garden. It still flamed in this wonderful warm September, its Indian summer was still coaxing it into fresh flower, bidding it forget the frosts that were soon coming. And the sight of it and what it suggested perhaps made the dead Andrew Robb to stir in his tomb of roses and love.
“Isn’t it Dumas who says that if you hesitate in an artistic choice, between one course and another, that you only hesitate because neither are really good?” asked Edith. “That is my trouble over the play. I can’t decide. One development seems reasonable, and then another becomes just as reasonable. Oh, Peggy, is it pain that I need again? I don’t want to be quickened any more. I want to have a few more years like the year I have just had. My God, how content I should be with that.”
Peggy entirely disapproved of this attitude.
“Oh, I hate you talking about a few more years!” she said. “Darling, don’t be so graveyard. Why, of course, we’ve all got to die, but, for Heaven’s sake, don’t let us contemplate that depressing fact. When I, which is rare with me, even begin to think about my latter end, I always get up and do something. It doesn’t matter what you do. Go and do it, before you die. And I supplement that by a small dose of some kind, because though death is real, the thought of it is almost invariably liver. Consider what a great girl you are, as somebody said in your divine ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ only don’t cry. And don’t resuscitate that dear Andrew. He is dead, and peace be with him. But resuscitate Mrs. Grainger.”
Edith turned her an enquiring face.
“Is it that which is the matter with me?” she asked.
“There is nothing the matter with you,” cried Peggy. “But get on, get on, get on!”