“Oh, Hughie,” she said, giving way to the pathos of little things, which are so big, “I love our home so; it was all so dear and pleasant and cheery. And you sang your exercises in our room, and I added up books in another, and the gales bugled outside. Or it was summer, and the miracle of motherhood came to me. And afterward you and Daisy and Jim, all you children, dressed up, and—and we played Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and Jim caught me, and there was blood on my handkerchief. That is all over.”
Though here it was the lower level of comfort that she required, it was something of the high level that met her. Swift as a spurred horse, Hugh answered to this.
“Over? What are you thinking of?” he said. “Nothing is over. Why, it is just because we have lived those divine days that they are not over. They are here; we have them now. They make us. We won’t look back; there is no need, for all that you say is past is present, bone of our bone, and the flesh on it. You know that. ‘Days that are no more,’ as that silly poem says. There are no days that are no more, except the days we don’t remember. All we remember and rejoice in are the days that have been and are, the days that live, and the things that live, the things that get entwined with love, so that the down above Chalkpits and the river and the water-meadows are all here, here with you and me. How can you be so foolish as to think otherwise?”
It was Edith again who was silent. As the angel moved the waters of Bethesda, so some angel, she knew, had moved Hugh’s soul, and the love-key was already turning in the wards of her own locked chambers. Already, in his last words, the door was ajar, a chink of light shone out. Sorrow, compassion, had enlightened him; it was his very weakness that gave him strength.
He sat upright, facing her, and though his mouth still quivered and his eyes were wet, those signs came from another source.
“But you don’t think otherwise!” he said. “It is the past that makes the future for us. It was we who made us love the dear home, and it is we who will make us love Davos, and, if need be, Landquart, just as devotedly. We make the place we live in.”
The door swung wide now.
“And whatever comes, God bless it,” said Hugh. “Oh, soul talks to soul, does it not, now? If I get run over by a train it is all right. If you don’t get better, if you die, it is all right. It must be, because we are lovers, you and I. There is nothing more than that in the world. Why should there be? What could there be? Supposing the world was all a hideous joke, and we little people were just puppets on a stage that meant nothing, what then? We still, you and I now, feel as if it was real. We can’t ask more than that, for there is nothing more to ask. It is real to us. We snap our fingers at cancer, consumption, fever, all that people make statistics about. Who cares? Those things are the unreal things.”
Hugh’s voice dropped suddenly; till now it had been almost song. But now it became husky and dim.
“But the down above the house is real,” he said, “since it was there that you told me of Andrew Robb. And the garden seat is real, because you sat there and cried. And, to be egotistic, the nursery at Cookham is real, because—well, because Daisy wouldn’t go to sleep. Moth and rust cannot corrupt those things. Thieves cannot steal anything that is worth stealing, whatever form the thieves take. They may take many forms, illness, disease. Oh, Edith!”