How funny that she had never consulted him. But she had always loved secrecy in her arrangements. A bell rang, steps began to make patterns of sound, and the voices rushed out of the waiting-room. They were off. A rumble which ran up to a roar and the train drew up. What a noise it was. But Mamma was dragging him along. A child’s voice, plaintive, “Mumma . . . blind, Mumma.” Yes, that was him.
“Here you are dear, jump in. The corner seat. The carriage is reserved. I shall be back in a minute. Thank you, Smith. Now . . .”
So they were off. Good-bye. He had had so many. Where was Mamma? Oh, why didn’t the train go?
[CHAPTER IV
BEGINNING AGAIN]
LONDON. He was sitting in the drawing-room of the house Uncle Edward had lent them. He was ill, ill. The sunlight streamed through the window by him, for it was spring, and ate stealthily into the plush which covered his armchair.
There was a sickly scent of flowers in the room. They had been sent up from Barwood and were fading, when once they had danced so wildly at the wind. The afternoon was heavy and the air thick with the sweetness of a dying lily just by him, a putrefaction drooping through the heat. The window was open and from beneath the noise of the street came in shafts, cutting through the steady sun. The ringing of bicycle bells shot up in necklaces of sound from the road, and jagged footsteps tore in upon his old life that was being left behind now with the song of that bird.
Oh, why had he gone blind? All these months now he had seen nothing, and he had pretended to others and even to himself that in feeling things he was as well off as one who saw them, but it was not true. For in London so much went on that there was no time to separate or analyse your sensations, everything crowded in upon you and left you dazed. But in a sense life was beginning again, for they would be so happy up here. In time he would learn to understand the streets. Mamma had found a house which would do, and soon they would be moving in. That would make another rift, for he would lose Margaret, the wife of the caretaker here. She had kept him alive, she was so vivid, and then sometimes she would dream, falling into long silences when her hand lay as if asleep in his. Probably she was hideous, but then he could not see. She must hate him with his scars.
The glass had ploughed through his face, as his blindness cut into his brain now, and they had taken him to the hospital where even the nurses had been antiseptic. Everything had felt most wickedly clean with a mathematical cleanness. But his nurse had had wonderful hands that hovered and that touched so lightly and yet helped when it hurt. Her fingers had been so lithe. It was silly to talk of “white mice” as he had with June, of how her fingers had scurried about in his; one needed strong unerring fingers. Margaret’s were like that sometimes. But even the clean stench in that hospital had been better than this of the flowers, and anyway it had been quiet, not as here where these stabbing bursts of sound tortured you. But there was a whiff of tar in the air, and he liked tar.
Listen to that bird, singing as though there were nothing better to do in the world. Barwood was so far away now, yet because he had seen there, perhaps, he could not get away. The roar of the streets reminded one of the quiet which had been over it, where sounds came as if distilled by the great distances; and then Margaret was so different to June, June who had never known her place in the order of things—there was no place for her—and Margaret who knew her position exactly, and was so sure of herself. Why had that bird chosen this house on which to sing, little inconsequent notes being flung at the blue sky, crystal notes that shattered against the tawdriness of these dying flowers and of his own discontent? A car bore down and overwhelmed the song, but it emerged once more as the car sped away and made him ask if he had done right, to leave June like that, and to take Mamma away. For the garden at Barwood would be bursting into life just now, all the birds would be singing, and if Mamma were there she would be spying over the border and endlessly conferring with Weston. He would have been able to share in the spring as well, lying on the lawn in a chair he would have passed hours feeling the leaves come out and everything changing round him, while he was out of it in London, too lost, too tired to raise his head above the clatter of the streets, where everyone except himself had work to do. He must work.