And so I leave you, your mother and the Place.
Your affectionate father,
PHILIP FITZ HENRY
David’s letter was peculiarly David.
Dear Father,
It is understanding of you to excuse me from giving details of the action. At present it is too close to see, but now that it is over I am glad I did not make a complete ass of myself. It would have been so fatally easy. War is uncomfortable, and so very inglorious and dirty. I wonder if anybody enjoys exalted moments. What remains of me is not much use for further service. I had a nice sprinkling of shrapnel and a few O.S. pieces in my chest and knee. The bits that lodged in my knee are the worst. They tell me I am going to have a decoration. I remember doing something with a machine-gun, but it seems so ridiculous. I intended to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, only I tripped over Arthur. He looked asleep on the ground. I was raging. However, there was no time to say vale to one’s brother. The rest is just noise and bewilderment and the proverbial waking up to hear someone say ‘Drink this, please’. I see nothing in war to commend it, and my mind seethes with heresies.
I cabled about my marriage which I trust will not be too great a shock. This is the day of impulsive actions. I found Felice being a Fany in Calais. Like myself she was thoroughly out of step with her world and agonising over a small kitten in undesirable surroundings. She is at her best with lame ducks, and wants a world where a cat, a dog and a bird can lie down with the lion and the lamb. Other than that she plays the piano divinely, speaks languages and runs S.P.C.A.’s in unwarlike days. Her mother went mad round fifty and Felice is haunted she may do the same thing. Her mother began by hiding under trees. In view of their preponderance round the Place I intend to take a cottage by the sea.
Just at present it’s impossible to speak of the other two, but because of their going I must mention the Place. We have discussed it before, but this is final. Let’s not be stupid because I am the eldest son. Everything must go to young Philip.He is the breed with roots, steadiness and a faculty to stay in grooves. Besides, he has a sense of duty which I have not. He will be steadfast, and the occasional tempers will be knocked out of him at school. I have my inheritance from Aunt Sarah. It was good of her not to marry, and to hoard up her pile for me. Dear old skinflint! I used to think she was poor. It’s the first time I have ever approved of thrifty spinsters.
It may comfort Mater to know that we three were together intermittently ever since we landed in France. The rest is silence until I see her. It may be easier then.
Your affectionate,
DAVID
While Philip Fitz Henry’s special patient was craning her neck to see where he lived, Lady Fitz Henry was stepping into her emerging garden. The dirty edges of the snow looked like the dwindling of a moth-eaten blanket. Through a clot of last year’s leaves green tongues poked through, showing evidence of a prodigal autumn planting.
Tall in her garden Lady Fitz Henry relaxed in the sun. Winter was taut, a season of whipcord winds, wearying to the flesh. Spring told her she was muted, but not extinguished when she could feel the pulse of the earth.
A white-skinned brunette, her sixty-four years were only apparent in skin-sag and fine lines round her eyes. Her nose was ageless, disdaining any toll the years could take. Eyes were brown, but their colour was dead. A trifle myopic, pupil and iris merged into one. Stooping to poke in the earth, she displayed the suppleness of a slender woman. It was in her hands that age was evident. Grey-white they looked bleak, and blue round the long, ridged nails.
With a quietude of content she picked her way back to the house. Inside, the hall was square with an overhead gallery of wrought-iron uprights, topped with a walnut rail. From a window at the curve of the stairs sunlight streamed in a shaft. It subtracted from walls rendered sooty by furnace-heat. It embellished the gleam of wood and the mellow paint of English landscapes. It made an ebony cap of Philip’s head as he ran downstairs.
“Morning, dear. I heard you go out.”
From his considerable height he barely stooped to touch his mother’s cheek with his own. As the faces came together their similarity was arresting. Carved noses jutted toward each other with a unity of design.
At breakfast in a wine-red dining-room with chaste furniture, she poured tea from the Georgian tea-pot saved from the fires. Sitting upright and eating little, she gazed at a conservatory lighting one side of the room. She was enjoying the velvet bloom of a cineraria when she heard Philip’s voice.
“Mater, will you do something for me this morning? It’s fit for you to go out.”
“Certainly, my son. It’s a lovely day. It makes me long to see David.”
“He’ll be out in June, dear, and I’ll be able to get away in July for two weeks’ salmon-fishing.”
“You need the rest, Philip. It’s been a hard winter. I wish Dave would stay out. It would be more company for you.”
“It’s the winds, Mater. They pick out his wounds, and Felice doesn’t like the wind in the trees.”
“M’mm,” said his mother dryly. Tolerant as she was, it was dislike a little beyond her. “What do you want me to do, my son?”
Philip was smiling at a pair of eggs. “See somebody who understands the wind in the trees.”
“Your little girl,” she said at once.
He gave her a quick look. “How did you know?”
“Easily. You pay her so many visits. It’s a remarkable survival.”
“Medical miracle!”
Still looking at the cineraria, Lady Fitz Henry pondered out loud. “Philip, why wasn’t she afraid? It’s uncanny….”
“I don’t understand that side of it.” Philip frowned with definite pleats in his white brow. “I’m not a neurologist, but she might be an elemental for all the experience has affected her nerves. There was so much nonsense talked about her.”
“Perhaps the fairies did look after her,” suggested his mother with a small smile.
The pleats in Philip’s brow looked jangled. “I’ve been trying to diminish that idea. She’s a mass of superstition, but she’s lovely to look at. At least she is now. The modelling of her face is perfect, and her skin…She’s something to see after some patients.”
“No doubt,” said his mother, regarding him with deeper interest. He was smiling to himself, and she thought his face looked younger. “Perhaps she bears out your father’s theory that the best blood in this country is in the Bays. Many old families came out in the early days, and there’s that odd tale of the line from the Irish Princess.”
Philip laughed. “I don’t know about that, Mater. Her people are simple fisherfolk, but I hope Mary will have a better chance with this endowment. I couldn’t bear to think of her going back to that narrow life.”
“It’s the crock of gold, my son.” Lady Fitz Henry’s voice was ordinary, but she was regarding her son with a mother’s scrutiny. “Is she quite recovered?” she asked gently.
“Almost, and I feel so pleased about her feet. I had to fight the surgeon against a mputation. We had many a wrangle, and he washed his hands of it and said I could take the consequence if gangrene set in.”
“You put your foot down,” said his mother, smiling.
“This time it was a good foot,” he said, smiling back.
“Philip, are you planning to pay yourself out of that money?”
Philip put down his knife and fork in frank surprise. “Certainly not, Mater. The little thing is poor. I’ll pay the hospital, which is considerable, and the rest I’ll save for education if the parents consent. They’re not to touch it so the agreement runs.”
His mother regarded him with smiling approval, but she touched his most vulnerable point when she said: “You’ll never paint the house if you’re so prodigal with visits.”
He went on eating, unperturbed. “A doctor loves a fight,Mater, and I did some research on frostbite. I feel personally responsible for her….”
“M’mm, did you hear from the mother?
”
“Yes, I did.”
Putting his hand in his pocket he produced a letter in a cheap envelope.
“It’s a curious letter, Mater. I’ll read it to you.”
Dear Sir,
It was a Christian act on your part to write me. I’ve said a prayer for your house. To think that my child is getting better, and I made up my mind she was dead. When they took her away I felt she was gone forever. It’s like the dreams of the dead. Between waking, you think it’s not so that they’re gone, then you come to and you know that they are. Her living seems as likely as that—
“An understanding woman,” interrupted his mother thoughtfully. “I dream of your father that way.”
I’m glad about the money. It seems a wonderful lot, but the poor can’t think past a dollar or two. I don’t know all that it means, but it might lift her out of the life I don’t want for her. It comforts me to think of her looked after by one of your name. Your father, and your father before you, bought the fish from our men and always treated them right. I’d be a grateful woman to hear again, and to get advice about my child. Lovely she was and she dazzled my eyes.
Respectfully yours,
JOSEPHINE KEILLY.
Philip folded up his letter, finishing his breakfast without comment.
There was a pause, during which Lady Fitz Henry gazed out unseeingly.
“Strange,” she said after a while, “the mother speaks of her in the past tense.”
“Yes,” he agreed; “it looks that way.”
Rising from the table, he bent over her, putting his arm round her shoulders. “Will you meet me at twelve-thirty, Mater? I’ll be busy until then.”
“Very well, my son. I’ll be at the hospital.”
When Philip saw his patient her bed was pulled by the window. The radiant day had gone into her face.
“Look,” she said. “Miss New has fancied me up.”
A hair-ribbon made a jaunty bow on her head, and her shoulders were covered in pale pink silk.
Then she saw Lady Fitz Henry.
At once the child acclaimed a quality she did not know. The lady seemed impressive, grand, with a grandeur that was not dependent upon externals. Her imaginative mind associated grandeur with velvets, trains, crowns and the ermines of a fairy-tale world. True the lady wore a silver fox. Mary Immaculate knew it at once, because the men often brought them home from Labrador. It wasn’t that! She couldn’t look at the doctor’s mother and not know. Her clothes were as harmonious as the smoothness of a shell round a kernel. Gloves enclosed her hands without restriction, and all of the fingers were smoothed down to the tips. Instantly there came a picture of her own mother’s hands in Mass on Sunday mornings. Gloves and a pair of grey stays represented Josephine’s difference between Sunday andMonday. Many times, kneeling beside her, Mary Immaculate had heard the creak of the corsets and noticed the cushion of her fingers seep damply through the gloves. Beyond the wet spots, there were always points the fingers could not reach.
Contrasts were beginning to shape in her mind. As she had absorbed the quality of her doctor she absorbed the fine emanation of his mother. Lambent with inner delight she greeted her without consciousness. Her mother’s world was civil but not servile.
“Oh!”she said, seeing the beautiful nose. “You’re the dead spit of him. You’ve got his nose on your face. You’re both lovely,” she finished sunnily.
Philip laughed but his face expressed relief when his mother’s finger tilted his patient’s chin. Some transfusion of gaiety went into her answering voice.
“I’m his mother, my dear. Don’t you think he might have my nose?”
“Sure,” she agreed happily. “Do your nostrils do it too?”
It was a long time since Lady Fitz Henry had heard so many personal remarks.
“Perhaps,” she admitted graciously. “I know David’s do. He’s my eldest son, and he finds his own reason for it. Many years ago we had a French ancestress who got caught up in the Revolution. David says she couldn’t express her disdain in her voice, so it went into her nose.”
“I expect it smelt bad,” said Mary Immaculate, wrinkling up her own nose. “Did they cut off her head?”
“No,” said her visitor gravely. “If they had they would have cut off our heads too. She escaped to England and founded a line of noses.”
It was a story after the child’s own heart. Laughing on an unrestrained note, she made her elders laugh with her.
Miss New placed a chair for Lady Fitz Henry, and as she sat down Philip laid a long, cone-shaped parcel on the bed.
“Open it, my dear,” said Lady Fitz Henry, “and see what I’ve brought you.”
“Me?” she gasped, with wild incredulity.
While she tore excitedly at the paper her visitor drew her own conclusions. Beauty was there, naturalness and an ingenuous unconcern for careless chatter. It was the attitude of a child so happy in itself that the world was bound to fit in. Mary Immaculate evinced her own quality in the way her motion was stilled over flowers.
“Oh!” she said wonderingly. “Oh!”
Surrounded by tendrils of fern, cultivated carnations lay on the bed. From the open paper fragrance rose like a march of cool cloves. Hands, still bearing a reddened reaction to frostbite, touched the heads of flawless blooms.
“What are they?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“They’re carnations, Mary. Don’t you know them? Smaller varieties grow in gardens.”
“No,ma’am, I don’t know them,” she said, holding up a flower and cupping it in her hand. “We don’t have flower gardens—just potatoes and turnips. But I know a lot about the flowers growing in the woods.” Bringing the flowers to her face she smelt, with eyes closed like a cat content with some rich morsel.
“How could they grow in winter, ma’am? There’s still snow on the hills.”
“In a hothouse, my dear; a place that’s heated and made of glass. Won’t you let your nurse put them in water?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said with instant obedience. “They’re the nicest thing that ever happened to me. If I could hold on to them.”
There was a shadow in the voice, and a sigh for the fading of beauty.
“There will be more flowers, Mary. When you’re well. Philip will bring you out to see my garden.”
Her son walked to the door with a buoyant step.
“Mater, I have to visit another patient. I’ll be back for you later.”
The child’s smile followed him out and then came to rest on his mother.
“He’s been like St. Joseph,” she said in a full voice, conceding her visitor a knowledge of saintly qualities.
Lady Fitz Henry’s response was benign, arresting the child with its emanation of large repose. At once her teeming veins flowed calmer, as if her stream of life widened to an estuary round the quiet woman. Shrillness was muted in an effort to emulate grace. Shyness did not oppress her, and response was ingenuous and friendly. Nor was she on her best behaviour as she had been when Father Melchior came to call. Lady Fitz Henry showed no inclination to point a moral or extinguish the Little People with a frosty note in her voice. The flavour of conversation was interest, inviting a stream of artless prattle. Unconsciously the child painted a strange picture of herself, climbing the heads to watch the sea, lying in the forests waiting for the Little People, or crouching, predacious, for observation of some wood-creature. Flowers gave them a bond, and the visitor could talk of her cloth of gold crocus while the child babbled of bouncing-bets and calvary flowers. It seemed a strange contact with reserves laid down in a spontaneous desire to please.
There was an element of novelty in visiting a hospital where illness was not mentioned. The child leaned forward in her bed as if frostbite, inflammation and incipient gangrene were distant ordeals. Lady Fitz Henry was more than capable of disguising vigilant scrutiny. Neither did she show the smallest sign when her ears received an indisputable imitation of her own
voice. It came experimentally, grew stronger, while a secret smile hovered round the child’s mouth. She looked triumphant, as if the veneer of culture could be hers for the asking. Eyes were lambent, with an animal yellow, resembling a hound starting delicately on a chase. When asked if she felt lonely without her people, the reply was forth right and spontaneous.
“No, ma’am, not much. This is an interesting place. I’m quite close to the operating-room and the nurses tell me about the groans that go past. Sometimes they go by with just a smell, but when they have little operations they wake up and nearly always cry. The men make most noise, and sometimes they curse. No, ma’am, I don’t want to go home at all. Then when the operations are over the nurses read to me, and there’s the doctor, he comes twice a day, and often three times.”
It was so much the natural truth that there was no room for filial shock. Lady Fitz Henry seemed to understand. When her son returned she was standing by the bed, looking down at a glowing face. But she shook hands in a grave adult way.
“Would you like me to come again, Mary?”
“Would you, ma’am?” she said with flattering awe. “I knew ’twas a day for the wonderful to come. Now I can look forward to your voice and not back.”
Philip laughed, touching his patient as if he couldn’t help it.
“Are you sure, Mary, you were born in a skiff?”
“I mean every word,’’ she said sunnily; “though Mom says you catch more flies with molasses than vinegar.”
Her head was back and she was laughing, laughing with a face of white incandescence, sun-illumined. She looked like a wild woodthing about to spring off a leash. Her mouth was open on even teeth and Philip’s sharp eyes saw a tiny cavity. Instinct stirred in him to rush her to a dentist to preserve the white perfection of her mouth.
Lady Fitz Henry had a sudden desire to give the child a haircut and a voice to match her face and body. She had a sense of having witnessed a supreme exhibition of classlessness. On a bedside table there was a copy of Through the Looking Glass, and for a moment she saw inside where Humpty Dumpty was explaining the meaning of “slithy”—lithe and active. She left the hospital feeling it was a “brillig” day.
Cold Pastoral Page 8