Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 21

My study at Compton Dally, where I type and write and do accounts, opens on the west terrace, and from my bureau I seemed, at most hours of the days that followed, to have a view of Mollie Thornton's little figure wandering, as it were, on the outskirts, not plaintive,--there was never a touch of plaintiveness,--but pa.s.sive. With her sewing or knitting or a book she sat a good deal under the shade of the cedar that stands at the corner of the terrace, and she spent a good deal of time drifting up and down the vistas of the lawns and park watching birds, a binocular in her hand. She was certainly a most comfortable person to relegate, since she never looked melancholy and usually contrived to seem occupied, and Vera, when she pa.s.sed behind her on the terrace on her way to the dream-garden, Captain Thornton beside her, would pause and put her hand on her shoulder and say, "Happy, dear?" in the most dulcet tone. And when Mrs. Thornton, lifting those meditative eyes, answered, "Yes, thank you," Vera, all bland benevolence, would say, "That's right," and pa.s.s on. Leila Travers-Cray and Lady Dighton sometimes exchanged a few friendly remarks with her, and she read the morning papers to Colonel Appleby when his eyes hurt him; but she was relegated far, far away, as completely as any human being could be who could in any way count as a guest.

I was very busy and had not much time to be with her, though all the time I had was hers; but I knew accurately what she was feeling. I related it always with that dreadful Victoria platform, with those moments of pain and yet of rapture which we had both known, when we had felt ourselves, in our suffering, stand for England, lifted up in accepting sacrifice to the august and beautiful spirit that claimed our dearest. One would expect, after that transcendent suffering, to find as transcending a joy; but how was joy possible to a young wife caught into what might be to her husband a fairyland or a paradise, but to her was a cruel and complicated machine where her only part was to turn round with the other wheels and pretend to like it? I knew that it must not be taken too seriously. It was only to last for six weeks, and then she would have her Clive back again; yet while it lasted it must make the months of suffering pa.s.sed through seem happy by comparison. There had then been nothing between them but distance and the fear of death; and now everything was between them--everything Vera stood for; her house, her friends, her smile, her pearls, her dream-garden.

On morning after morning I saw Vera leading him away to it, with her armful of books, and Chang, her Pekinese, trotting at her heels. I perfectly understood Vera's state of mind in regard to Captain Thornton.

There was no occasion for commonplace jealousy. He merely made her feel cheerful and rejuvenated. Everything she had to show and tell him was new to him. She became new to herself, poor old Vera! and gained from the quiet regard of his sane and simple eyes--handsome eyes under straight, dark brows--a sense of freshness and worth in everything. She liked him better than any of the wounded heroes she had yet had. Some of them had been merely stupid, and one or two had been gloomy, sardonic men--men of her own world, to whom nothing she had to say would seem new. Clive Thornton was neither stupid nor sardonic, and he was simple enough to accept Vera's fancy tricks--her talk of dreaming dreams and solitude--as part of an angel's manner, and he was just clever enough to be able to appreciate anything she had to say. I could quite see how endearing Vera must find his steady gaze and his considering silences.

Even with my vigorous espousal of his wife's side I never felt angry with him. His not seeing that she was unhappy was part of the same innocence that made him not see that Vera was a cat. Mollie, besides, took quite as much care to conceal her unhappiness as Vera to behave like an angel. It never crossed his mind that his wife was relegated; it never crossed his mind that they were separated. He did not feel separated; they were both, as far as he knew, in fairyland together. And yet I knew it might not all be so trivial and transient as it seemed. A new standard was being formed for him; a new idea of what it was to be an angel. It was possible that all unconsciously he would no longer think of Mollie as one when he left Compton Dally; and when I took this in I began to gather up my weapons.

I found Mollie one afternoon sitting on the bench under the willow-tree where we had had our first talk. She had her knitting, but her hands were still, and she was gazing before her at the water. If she were not a tragic figure, it was only because there are some things sadder than tragedy. She had faced everything, been through everything, she had gone down into the Hades where so many of us were still living, and now she found herself baulked and menaced by commonplace daylight. Tragedy is, in some ways, an easy thing to bear.

"Well, what are you doing here by yourself?" I asked her, advancing.

There was a look on her face, startled and steadied, that showed me what she had been thinking about in the fancied security of her solitude. But she managed at once the vague smile that concealed so much, and said that she had been, as usual, resting. "I seem to find out every day more and more how tired I was," she added.

"You didn't care to go with the others, motoring?" I took my place beside her. "You'd have liked Marjorams. It's a lovely old place. Some people think it beats Compton Dally, though, naturally, I'm not one of them."

"I'm sure you're not," said Mollie, laughing a little. "That was one of the things that first struck me about you--how you loved it. I felt that you were a fiercely loyal person."

"I think I am--narrow loyalties, but fierce ones," I said. "But you haven't answered my question."

"About motoring? I don't care much about it, you know. And there really wasn't room enough for me."

I knew there hadn't been; but I was deliberately eschewing tact.

"Has Captain Thornton gone?" I inquired, knowing, also, that he hadn't.

"No; Lady Vera is reading to him in the flagged garden," said Mollie in the voice that showed me how little she had to learn about spiritual control. "Lady Vera is going to take him out for a run in her two-seater before dinner. He enjoys that a great deal more than the big car."

"It's far pleasanter, certainly," I agreed. And I went on: "They are reading, you mean, in the dream-garden. You mustn't forget that it's a dream-garden--where one goes to be alone."

She looked round at me quickly, and after a moment I saw that she faintly coloured. She said nothing, leaving it to me to follow up my graceless gibe. I was quite ready to follow it up.

"As a matter of fact," I said, knitting the loops along the side of my heel, "Vera hardly ever is alone there. It's always, with Vera, a _solitude a deux_. She's not at all the sort of woman for real solitude.

She is the sort of woman who likes to feel, or, rather, to look lonely and not to be alone."

To this, after a pause, Mollie said:

"She is very charming; Clive finds her very charming." And, forced to it, apparently, by my crudity, she added, "Aren't you fond of her, then?"

"No, I'm not; not particularly," I said. "Especially not just now. Vera is not at her best, to my mind, when she is being angelic to young married men."

Mollie Thornton now blushed deeply.

"I am perfectly contented that she should be angelic to Clive," she said.

"You are very loyal," I returned. "But you'll own that he is getting more out of it than you are. It's a place, Compton Dally, for wounded heroes rather than for a wounded hero's wife."

"Do you mean," she asked after a moment, "that I oughtn't to have come?"

She had indeed owned to everything in the bewilderment of the question.

I laughed at it.

"Oughtn't to have been with your husband at a time like this! Even Vera could hardly ask that, could she? And that's my quarrel with her; that it's the time of all times that you should be together and that she never lets you see him, practically."

She looked away, and after a moment I saw that her eyes had filled with tears.

"He hasn't an idea of it," she said at last.

"That fact doesn't make you happier, does it?"

"He thinks I'm as happy as he is. He thinks that we are together in it all, and that she is an angel to me, too," said Mollie. "She always is an angel to me when she sees me."

"All men are rather stupid when it comes to knowing whether their wives are happy," I remarked. "I think your Clive is a great dear; but I like you best because you see things he doesn't. You, for instance, see that Vera isn't an angel, though she may look like one."

"He has no reason to think anything else, has he?" said Mollie, and I saw that I had brought her to the point to which I had intended to bring her. "I don't let him guess that I'm not happy; it would be horrid of me if I did, for it would only mean that he'd feel at once that we must go away, and all this loveliness would be over for him. A stuffy little flat in Bayswater isn't a very alluring alternative; and that's where we'd have to go--to my aunt's--till Clive was better."

"How you'd love the stuffy flat! How glad you'd be to be there with him!

And, to do him justice, how happy he'd be there with you! He will be in a month's time. The only question is, the month. No, Vera isn't an angel. If she were an angel, she'd have seen to it that you were happy here, too. But when it comes to being nice to other women,--really nice, I mean,--she can be a cat. And what I'd like very much to see now is what she'd make of it if you could show her that you could look like an angel, too. It's so much a matter of looks."

"Make of it? But I couldn't look like an angel."

"You could look like a rival; that's another way of doing it. You could look like another woman of her own sort. You could make her see you. She simply doesn't see you now. I suspect that if Vera saw you and saw that you were charming, she'd show her claws. I'd like Captain Thornton to see her showing her claws."

In silent astonishment, her blue eyes fixed upon me, Mollie gazed.

"No, I don't hate Vera, if that's what you're wondering," I said. "I like you, that's all, and I don't intend that she shall go on making you unhappy."

"But I don't want Clive made unhappy," Mollie said. "I can't imagine what you mean; but, whatever it is, I don't want it. I couldn't bear all this to be spoiled for him. I couldn't bear it not to be always, for him, a paradise."

It was my turn to gaze at her, and I gazed penetratingly.

"And what if it all came to mean that you yourself, because of it, were never to be more to him than a second-rate paradise? What if she were to spoil you for him?"

I brought out the cruel questions deliberately, and for a moment Mollie faced them and me.

"Why do you say that? How cruel to say that!" she murmured, and then suddenly she bowed her head upon her hands. "It's been my terror. I'm ashamed of myself for thinking it. And now--you see it!"

I put my arm around her shoulders.

"I'm not cruel. I only want us to see things together. I don't really think they'd ever come to that; and, at all events, he would never know that they had."

"But I should," Mollie said.

"Yes, you would. And it's horribly true that real things can be spoiled and blighted by false things. I've often seen it happen. You do see the danger, and you must take up the burden, my dear, of being cleverer than your husband, and save him along with yourself. If Vera were what she looks and seems to him, he might be right in feeling that he found in her something he couldn't find in you. You must show him that she isn't what she looks and seems and you must show him that you can be a first-rate paradise, too."

"In a little flat in Bayswater! On a chicken-farm! No, it can't be done.

Paradises of this sort don't grow in such places," poor Mollie moaned.

"You can keep up the real paradise in them--the one he has already--when you get there. The point is that you must show him now that you can look like this one here. And the way to look it is to dress it. I'm sure you've realized the absolutely supreme importance of dress for women of the paradise type--the women you see here, all these sweet ministering angels to the Tommies and the young husbands. I don't mean to say that, with the exception of Vera, they're not as nice as you are in spite of being well dressed; but I do mean that if they dressed as you do they'd not be women of the paradise."

Mollie's hands had fallen, and she was gazing again with eyes childlike, astonished, and trusting.