“No, I hope you’ll never finish it,” said she. “Hugh doesn’t understand. Andrew Robb was born out of misery. Oh, let’s play that silly game where you mustn’t take any knaves!”
CHAPTER XVII
THE spire of Davos Church, so steep in pitch that even in mid-winter no snowflake could cling to it even for the moment’s space in which it could lie there and give consolidation to the next flake, was to-day no grayer than its surroundings. For weeks past the annual thaw had set in, and now the village itself and a couple of hundred feet of hillside above it were quite clear of snow. But spring was not behaving, so Hugh thought, as he sat on a pine-bole above the valley, in a Tennysonian manner. When the “last long streak of snow” fades, the “maze of quick” ought to bourgeon. What the “maze of quick” in terms of flower and leaf was he did not accurately know. But he was safe in saying that nothing of any description was bourgeoning. Nothing looked like bourgeoning, unless to bourgeon was to look flat and stale and dead.
Three months had gone since the glorious day when Peggy, Daisy, and he had passed the test for the English rink, and it was now mid-April. He had been down every morning to get a little skating, until a week ago, when the short grass below the last little patch of ice had begun to show through the surface he intended to skate on. But when that happened, it was no longer any use to pretend to Edith that he was going to skate, and should be on the rink the whole morning. For a time that excuse of enjoyable occupation had served, and often he had sat there, since the ice was unskateable, being decaying slush merely, in order to spend a few hours away from the house, in order to make her believe that he was still occupied. But when the ice finally vanished he had to make other reasons for his absence.
There was heart-break here; he longed only to be with her; she, on the other hand, longed only that he should be amusing himself, taking up the long hours of the increasing day in congenial pursuits. She, in pursuance of régime, had to stop at Davos, take slow walks, and still lie out on the balcony, looking no longer at the exhilarating fields of snow, but at the brown, drowsy landscape of spring. She had often entreated him to go back to England for a few weeks to see his friends, to hear music, to take a little jaunt, a little holiday, as she called it, and as often he had clung to the fact that he really cared more about skating than anything else. That had done well enough till about a week ago; then she had observed that the rink was no more than a brown pasturage for abstemiously-minded cattle.
Other things—the big things—troubled him also. Doctors’ reports continued to be fairly satisfactory, and they told him that it was quite unreasonable to expect that the immensely rapid improvement which Edith had recorded in the winter could possibly keep up at that rate. That could not be. They did not say that she had gone back (that was satisfactory), but during the last three or four weeks she had not, frankly, gone forward. But that was quite normal—consumptives behaved like that. Also, he must remember that the spring, even for those in good health, was always a trying season of the year; those who were not in good health felt it much more acutely. There had been a great deal of south wind, too, lately—moist, relaxing, tiring. It was reasonable to hope and to expect that when the weather improved she would continue to improve also.
It was not bad news, nor anything like it, and Hugh realised as he sat on the red bole of the fallen pine, watching the blue smoke of his cigarette hang in the relaxed air, even as below him the smoke from the chimneys of the village stood in layers and lines above the houses, unable to disperse, that the fault had been his in expecting too rapid an improvement. But, indeed, he had secret cause for disquiet; though the disease, so he was professionally assured, had made no further inroads physically, it was becoming daily more trying to Edith. For two months or more in the past winter she had been extraordinarily serene and happy, content even, Hugh would have said. But for these last weeks—every fibre and nerve of him told him so—she had been engaged in a mental conflict fiercer than any physical struggle could be, more wearing, more incessant. She had hardly ever spoken of it to him; once or twice she had said, “Oh, Hughie, it is so hard to behave decently,” but her very reticence showed him how mortal the struggle was. Had it been less fierce she could have spoken of it. She was bitterly disappointed at this cessation in her own improvement; she had come to believe that she was going to have a miraculously rapid cure. And now the pendulum had swung the other way; instead of looking forward eagerly into the future it was all she could do to bear the present.
Hugh could guess how dreadful, too, was the disappointment, the despair she felt at being unable to rise above the discomfort and fatigue of the hours. She had hoped, so gallantly, that her mind, her soul, could remain a thing apart from the body, superior to it, looking down on it, as from a mountain-top one looks incuriously on the wreaths and snakes of fog below that cannot cloud the upper sunshine. She had expected the impossible; all that gallant womanhood could do she had done; as she said to Peggy, she would always do her best, and Hugh knew how excellent the best had been. But she, poor soul, mourned over it, upbraiding herself in that it was not perfect.
Again, it was found that Davos did not at all suit her baby, and a couple of months ago the boy had been sent back to England, to be in Peggy’s care. He had been ailing, too; it was nothing serious, but Edith was not in a state to be saddled with extra weight.
Oh, it was hard, and it was not the lightest part of the burden that had to be borne that fell on Hugh, though he did not know that. Often, again, as in the first weeks, his presence seemed merely to irritate Edith; he could see, with swelling throat that nearly choked him, how great the effort was to her sometimes to be courteous even to him. Hugh was no Christian Scientist, but in general terms he believed that disease was a work of the devil, and the devil (stupid fellow or not) hit upon some extraordinarily ingenious devices. He had, in fact, hit upon this one, that just because Edith so loved her husband, she found that it was he, of all the world, who tried her most. And all the time her real self was longing, even while her tongue, perhaps, was being acidly courteous, simply to weep out her heart on his breast, saying, “Hughie, Hughie, you understand, don’t you?” and find the perfection, the crown of her life there.