by E. F. Benson
“I quite agree. I knew Mr. Boyton had been saying things of the sort, and since then I haven’t seen him. What did you do after dinner?”
“We danced. There was a band and a great supper, as if it had been a regular ball. But only about a dozen people came.”
“Aline is not a very clever woman,” remarked his mother. “I warned her not to give a ball.”
Robin hesitated a moment.
“Have you had any sort of row with her?” he asked. “She was a good deal vexed with me when I saw her last, more than a couple of months ago,” she said.
She longed to ask if Aline had said anything unfriendly about her, but that was just the sort of thing she never did ask. Robin would tell her if he thought fit.
“I gathered as much,” he said. “I’m sorry I went, but what was I to do? As I say, she asked me heaps of times, and I thought she was a friend of yours.” Again it would have been very simple to have said: “Did she appear not to be?” but Helen left that question unuttered.
“Poor Aline,” she said, “I’m sorry her ball did not go off well.”
“Yes: it upset her. It must be horrid to stand at the top of your stairs and wait for people who don’t come. Is that enough about them, do you think?”
“Yes: just this one thing more,” she said. “I’m glad you went. Aline would like it. Now, Robin, will you take me for a walk? I’m still breathing ether, and I want to get rid of it.”
“Yes, but why are you so full of ether?”
“I attended an operation this morning. One of these poor boys had to have his leg off, and he had taken rather a fancy to me, and wanted me to be with him.” —
“How horrible for you. Didn’t you hate it?”
“Loathed it, but I couldn’t help myself, could I?”
“You might have gone away, as soon as he was under the anæsthetic.”
“I meant to, but when it came to, I just couldn’t.”
Robin smiled at her with the beautiful mouth Miss Jackson admired so much.
“And he’d actually taken a fancy to you, had he?” he asked. “I expect they’re all in love with you. Lord! I should flirt with you if you weren’t my mother.”
“You darling. But I’m a little old for you, aren’t I? You’d better stick to Miss Diphtheria.”
“She’s so damned respectable. She wouldn’t let me kiss her. Now, you’re not respectable: you don’t mind.”
Helen thought she had disciplined herself into acquiescing in Robin’s going out to France, had got used to it. But at the sight and the touch of him on this his last morning in England, her fortitude wavered like a blown flame. For the moment she could not face it at all.
“Ah, Robin, Robin!” she said.
He guessed what was in her mind, for the two read each other like open books.
“There never was such a mother,” he said. “Now let’s go out.”
It was the mildest of mid-winter days: all the autumn had been warm, too, and chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies still lingered, though already the squills and aconites, first messengers of the spring, had opened their blue bells and their yellow stars. Overhead the pale azure of the winter sky was flecked with little wrinkled clouds, as if some quiet sea had retreated, leaving the marks of breaking ripples on the ribbed sand. There was a chirruping of sparrows in the house-eaves, and a chatter as of razor-stropping from varnished starlings in a hawthorn bush, where they were lunching on the red berries, which they threw about in the rudest manner. Below the terrace the beech-woods, with trunks powdered by the green lichen growth of the autumn, and branches round which hovered a faint purple haze, clothed the steep hill-side down to the river.
At the bottom of the avenue the water, running high with rains, had flooded part of the valley, and the lowest of the trees stood mirrored in it. A pheasant with burnished copper back got up from the rough grass, and rose above the beeches with downward beating wings, and a rabbit scuttled silently into the fringe of undergrowth. Across the river the red roofs of the villages gleamed among the bare elms, and no more peaceful winter day could have been imagined. Only above the house there drooped the Red Cross flag, and in the loggia were sitting half a dozen blue-clad men with slings or crutches, and a nurse moved about among them. And yet all England was becoming one camp, one arsenal to brew the beer of war.
“Pheasant!” said Robin. “They’ve got peace on earth this autumn, anyhow.”
“I know. I wish it was the other way about. Oh, Robin, would you like to shoot this afternoon? I told the keeper to come up to see.”
“Well, then, I shouldn’t. I’ve told you once why I came down here.” —
“I thought I should like to hear it twice,” said she. Robin threw back his head. “I Came To See You!” he shouted.
“That will do beautifully. I think you’ve deafened me. You can stop and dine here, can’t you, and drive back afterwards?”
“Rather!” said Robin hoarsely. “That was my plan. I’ve broken a vocal chord. May I have an operation, and will you sit by me?”
“Operation for acute idiocy,” said she.
“Yes, inherited. Mother’s side,”
She looked at him a moment in silence, summing him up, reckoning what he was to her.
“Robin, one of the next things I want to be is a grandmother,” she said at length. “Do manage it for me before very long. Nobody else in the world can do it except you.”
“All right,” said he, “I’ll go and propose to Diphtheria, if you like. But if we’re to be married to-day, I must go back to town before dinner.”
“Then it must be put off. Oh, there’s the men’s dinner-bell. I shall have to go in for ten minutes and see that everything is right.”
“Mind you’re not longer,” said he.
The winter twilight closed in early, and after tea she had to leave him again to see to her duties, but they dined together, and she had nothing more to do in the hospital, which she could not delegate for once, until he would have to leave. Not until his car was round did either of them speak of what was coming, but talked exactly as they would have talked if weeks of quiet, unsundered life were in front of them. Then, at this last moment, she slipped from her chair and knelt by his side, as he sat in front of the fire in her white sitting-room upstairs where they had dined.
“Robin, there is only one word from me to you, and even that is unnecessary, for you know it already. My whole heart is yours, my darling, and it goes with you ever so bravely, and is always by your side, praying God to protect and bless you, and let you come back to me. I went to church in the big ward yesterday, on Christmas morning, and there was a jolly verse in the Psalms that made me think of you: ‘Good luck have thou with thine honour,’ it said.... My dear, the treasure of my heart!”
He leaned forward to her and kissed her.
“It has been the best day of all the days,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve ever loved each other so much. Absolutely top-hole. And now I’m going. Don’t come down with me, mother. I want to say good-bye to you here in your white room. It’s you. I shall see the last of you together. And as I leave the room, I shan’t look back.”
His lip quivered for a moment.
“And we’re brave and gay, both of us,” he added. “Good-bye.”
There were no spoken words between them after that, just a whisper passed between them, and in a couple of minutes he had left her. Presently there came the sound of his motor-wheels crunching the gravel.
From that hour there began in Helen Grote a change, vital and immense, in the spirit in which she devoted herself to the hospital. Her pride had hitherto demanded of her that she should do her work as perfectly and conscientiously as she was able, and there was no actual difference now in the quality of her performance of it. But now love began to inspire it, in that the men she looked after had been injured in the cause for which Robin was now in France. They and he were fellow-workers, she was looking after members of his brotherhood; more than that, she ev
en at times seemed to herself to be directly serving him, for all those who fought were part of a corporate body, individuals who could not be dissevered from each other. Faintly at first, but with increasing splendour, even as dawn floods the sky and heralds the day, dimming the stars and turning the moon to ashes, so the New Spirit permeated her, extinguishing the lesser lights of self-respect which demanded of her an efficient performance, and filling the inter-stellar darkness with the glory of the sun not yet risen upon the earth.
She walked as in clear shadow, with the brightness still high and far above her, for often her heart was faint, and her soul was utterly lonely and quivered with apprehensions that she would not of her best will give a home to; but visible above her, brightening as it descended the stair of heaven, dawn stepped down towards the earth with luminous feet. And if sometimes her pulses were feeble with fear, there were other moments when they beat strong with the impulse of some new perception....
Often the light of this new dawn was hidden, so thickly clouded over that the emptiness and rebellion of those autumn months seemed to have returned, with this added, that Robin was now out in the peril of the storm, and any day or hour might bring some news which would drive dawn altogether from the sky. But she no longer sought relief from that thought in running away from it, but in plunging herself into all that could most intimately bring home to her the horror of war. Her soul’s escape lay not in trying to hide her eyes and screen herself from it, but by going with open vision into the very thick of it. Constantly her work bored, discouraged and disgusted her: she would feel for whole days together that the stupidest woman in the world could do all she was doing with no less efficiency than she, and that a finer sympathy than hers would have gilded routine with splendour.
Here was the discouragement: that she was doing the best she could, but that anybody else would have easily done better; but that served, thanks to the spirit which was now beginning to inspire her devotion, not as a hindrance to her labours, but as a spur to their complete performance, and her humility exalted her. So too with the boredom and disgust that at times assailed her over menial and repeated tasks: she did not slur over them or delegate them to others, but only struggled with her own littleness in thinking anything little. Her life, which once she had consecrated, as with vows, to her own amusement, vows that, when the war broke out, she sacrificed everything to keep, had slid from under her own hands, and shook itself free of the benumbing touch of her own self-centred aims.
To-day she made no fresh vows, she did not even trouble to repudiate the former ones, or register a new intention. She simply went straight forward with industry and simplicity. She had never been the least inclined to introspection, and did not waste time or energy in dwelling with regret on the years she had so devoted to her own satisfaction; indeed, if she had stopped to examine herself, she would have found no shred of regret hidden away in the cupboards of her mind. The past was over and done with, and, after all, she had enjoyed her years enormously. It was foreign to her nature to regret what had yielded her so much pleasure.
But the past was over and done with in this sense also, that she felt there was no going back to it. Already, even though but a few months had passed since August, for her the cleavage seemed complete, and if she looked forward to the day when the war was over, and leisure and security returned, she could not think herself back into the spirit of the days when Grote was a temple consecrated to the splendour and extravagance and desires of herself and her world. Perhaps it would be so; but she did not busy herself with such speculations, for in the conditions and with the occupations in which she now lived, she came to regard the old life as something phantasmal. All that was truly real, so far as reality concerned her, was comprised in the wards and workrooms of the hospital, and in a certain unlocated trench in France.
Robin was there somewhere: that was never wholly out of her mind. Whatever her occupation was, that fact stayed and regarded her. Sometimes it gave her strength and resolution, sometimes it made her hand falter and her knees fail, but in one aspect or another it was always there. She had moments in which she forgot everything else, when among her letters she would find the thin envelope, with its Army Post Office stamp and its rather faint pencilled inscriptions: she had moments of sick suspense when a telegram was brought her. On one such occasion she felt herself unable to open it, and, giving it to the matron, waited, feeling sure that it brought some intolerable message, until that not unsympathetic person asked her whether the consignment of cigarettes, to which it referred, had arrived. Miss Hawker had clearly guessed the cause of her being asked to open it, for she said, “It’s a mere waste of good anxiety to anticipate trouble, Sister.”
But as constant as the consciousness that Robin was away in France, and much more real, was the consciousness that Robin was here and was hers, and could not be parted from her. He partook of an immortal quality, and though for herself she had always looked forward, without fear and without any further expectation, to the moment when the great fish would gulp her down, as she floated all water-logged on the surface of spent life, she could not apply the same image to him, or to her relations with him. The image of her thought was at first vague and veiled, but it began to assume a firmer outline, as of a conviction in process of crystallization.
In front of this background, the life full of boredoms, and discouragements and disgusts went on its busy way. Independent of that which worked behind them, turning them to something that was in its essence gold, there were encouragements and surprises as well. Among these were the events of the evening of the New Year. The men had asked if they might give an entertainment to the staff, doctors and nurses, and housemaids and servants, and Helen had expressed her cordial assent. Thereafter for three days the lives of the staff, especially the female portion of it, had been rendered quite intolerable from sheer overwork.
All was wrapped in mystery, but for the sake of the entertainment those of the staff who could sew were bidden to make blouses, and shirts and scarves, and all the appurtenances of dress, which, it might have been thought, wounded men in hospital would certainly not have required. An eye had to be kept on seven-tail bandages; anything that could be converted into “attire” of any kind was requisitioned. Every member of the staff, of course, had been told in confidence what the ‘pièce de résistance of this entertainment was to be, but the fact that everybody knew, having been confidentially informed, kept the secret safe and inviolable.
A stage had been constructed at the end of the long dining-room (this was Helen’s responsibility as regards the entertainment), and for the rest, everybody knew (though nobody knew) precisely what was going to happen. But during those three days Helen was in strong request, and she had to see that there was a curtain broad enough to cover the stage — two would do, to be parted in the middle, but this would be less satisfactory — a piano somewhere in front of the stage, and a practically unlimited amount of furniture. If there was a printing-press in the house, so much the better (there wasn’t): if not, her typewriter could, with industry, produce enough programmes to go round. She, above all, must be under an inviolable seal of secrecy.
The evening arrived, and in the front rows, immediately before the curtain, were those whom the doctor in charge permitted to be carried down recumbent from the wards. Behind them were seats for the staff, and the rest of the audience consisted of the minority who were not otherwise engaged, either directly, as entertainers, or, hardly less usefully, as scene shifters or dressers. The first part of the programme consisted of songs and recitations, all charged with the highest degree of sentiment, except a comedian, who made the most unblushing references to matrimony, mothers-in-law and high cheese. It concluded with a horn-pipe danced by two men with one leg apiece. They had arms interlaced round each other’s necks, and roared with laughter themselves.
The second part of the programme unveiled the complete mystery about the need for female attire, for it consisted of a revue. There was no plot of any
kind, as Helen had already learned was the proper thing in revues, but there were numberless topical allusions to every member of the staff except herself, and these in the main constituted the dramatic action. But the weight of the occasion fell on the sumptuous ballet, that was a perpetual decoration both to eye and ear. When a parody of the hospital surgeon appeared, armed with a wood-saw and a meat-chopper, they sang, “Here comes the knifey-man;” when the anaesthetist glided on with the ghost-walk, and a football-bladder under his arm, this galaxy of bass-voiced maidens sang, “Hush-a-bye, baby.” In the intervals they danced, and never was there seen so light-hearted a chorus. Some had slings, some were bandaged, some were on crutches, but all were amazingly attired in the height of feminine fashion.
But still, not even after the ballet-girls had been recalled till they were surfeited with success, was there any allusion to Lady Grote. She would rather have liked them to laugh at her, too; the dignity of not being laughed at did not quite compensate in her mind for the fun of being derided. It was very nice of these boys not to laugh at her, but she felt that somehow she had not found the way to their hearts, in not having presented some ridiculous feature to them. But the whole feeling lasted no longer than lasts a breath in the frosty air, for as soon as the chorus ceased to be recalled, it was her nervous duty to say what is called “a few words.”
The curtain had at last been drawn again without the renewal of applause that demanded a fresh appearance of the chorus, and she was waiting for the turning-up of lights that should precede the “few words,” when it was drawn back again, and the stage-manager appeared. The chorus was trooping in at the back of the room, and he waited till they had all entered.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve made fun of you all, and if you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have, why — you’ve enjoyed it as much as us. But there’s one of you as we haven’t said a word about yet, for you can’t laugh at such as her. We’ve laughed at the surgeon, and the doctors and the nurses, and everyone, because they’ve been jolly good to us, and at the same time have worried us with their knives and their dressings, and their beastly medicines, and we thought it fair to get our own back over that, and now to thank them very kindly for their care. But there’s just one other as we can’t make fun of, because of her blessed love and goodness, and if anybody here doesn’t know whom I’m talking about, why, he don’t deserve to be here at all. I won’t even name her name, but she’ll be so good as to keep her seat, while everyone else in this room will just stand up and give her three of the biggest cheers as ever was, and wish her of the best.”