Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 11

I've always followed your lives--always--from a distance--known what you were up to. I've made excuses to myself--in the days when I used to go a good deal about the country--to pa.s.s by Channerley and just have a glimpse of you. And when I heard that you had done this n.o.ble deed,--when I heard what you had done for England, for Channerley, for us all,--I felt I had to come and see you. You must forgive me if I seem a mere intruder. I can't seem that to myself. I've cared too much. And what I came for, really, was to thank you,--to thank you, my dear boy,--and to tell you that because of you, life must be n.o.bler, always, for all of us."

His words had effaced the silly, groping fear. It was indeed, since his colonel's visit, the first congratulation he had had from the outer world. The nurses, of course, had congratulated him, and the surgeons; but no one who knew him outside; the kindly telegrams from Robert and Sylvia did not count as congratulations. And in a way poor Mr. Thorpe did know him, and though it was only from him, it had its sweetness. He felt himself flush as he answered, "That's very kind of you."

"Oh, no!" said Mr. Thorpe, shaking his head and swinging his foot--Marmaduke knew that from the queer movement of his body as he sat with very tightly folded arms. "Not kind! That's not the word--from us to you! Not the word at all!"

"I'm very happy, as you may imagine," said Marmaduke. And he was happy again, and glad to share his happiness with poor Mr. Thorpe. "It makes everything worth while, doesn't it, to have brought it off at all?"

"Everything, everything--it would; it would, to you. So heroes feel,"

said Mr. Thorpe. "To give your life for England. I know it all--in every detail. Yes, you are happy in dying that England may live. Brave boy!

Splendid boy!"

Now he was weeping. He had out his handkerchief and his shoulders shook. It made Marmaduke want to cry, too, and he wondered confusedly if the nurse would soon come back. Had not the half hour pa.s.sed?

"Really--it's too good of you. You mustn't, you know; you mustn't," he murmured, while the word, "boy--boy," repeated, made tangled images in his mind, and he saw himself in the white socks and with the little red-and-yellow cart, and then as he had been the other day, leading his men, his revolver in his hand and the bullets flying about him. "And I'm not a boy," he said; "I'm thirty-four; absurdly old to be only a second lieutenant. And there are so many of us. Why,"--the thought came fantastically, but he seized it, because Mr. Thorpe was crying so and he must seize something,--"we're as common as daffodils!"

"Ah! not for me! not for me!" Mr. Thorpe gulped quickly. Something had given way in him--as if the word "daffodils" had pressed a spring. He was sobbing aloud, and he had fallen on his knees by the bed and put up his hand for Marmaduke's. "I cannot keep it from you! Not at this last hour! Not when you are leaving me forever!--My son! My brave son! I am your father, Marmaduke! I am your father, my dear, dear boy!"

III

It was the stillest room. The two calm bands of blue crossed the window.

In the sunlight the gulls came flying back. Marmaduke looked out at them. Were they the same sea-gulls or another flock? Then quietly he closed his eyes. Stillness--calm. But something else was rising to him from them. Darkness; darkness; a darkness worse than death. Oh! death was sweet compared to this. Compared to this all his life had been sweet; and something far dearer than life was being taken from him. He only knew the terrible confusion of his whole nature.

He opened his eyes again with an instinct of escape. There were the bands of blue, and, still pa.s.sing in their mult.i.tudes, leaving him forever, the proud, exultant sea-gulls. The man still knelt beside him.

He heard his own voice come:--

"What do you mean?"

"I never meant to tell you! I never meant to tell you!" a moan answered him. "But--seeing you lying there!--dying!--my son!--who has given his life for England!--And how I have longed for you all these years!--My romance, Marmaduke--How could I be silent? Forgive me! Forgive me, my boy. Yes, mine. My known children are dear to me, but how far dearer the unknown son, seen only by stealth, in s.n.a.t.c.hed glimpses! It is true, Marmaduke, true. We were lovers. She loved me. Do not ask. Do not question. We were young. She was very beautiful. It was springtime; daffodils were in the woods. She said that she had never known any one like me. She said that her life was hollow, meaningless. I opened doors to her, I read to her. Browning--I read Browning," he muttered on, "in the woods; among the daffodils. It was a new life to her--and to me. And we were swept away. Don't blame us, Marmaduke. If there was wrong, there was great beauty--then. Only then; for after, she was cruel--very cruel.

She turned from me; she crushed and tore my heart. Oh!--I have suffered! But no one knew. No one ever dreamed of it. Only she and I.

My G.o.d!--I see her in your hair and eyes!"

It was true. It was absolutely true. Through his whole being he felt its inevitability. Everything was clear, with a strange, black, infernal clearness. His life lay open before him, open from beginning to end: that beginning of tawdry sentiment and shame--with daffodils; and this end, with daffodils again, and again with tawdry sentiment and shame.

He was not a Follett. He had no part in the Folletts. He had no part in Channerley. He was an interloper, a thief. He was the son of this wretched man, in whose very grief he could detect the satisfaction--oh, who more fitted to detect such satisfaction!--of his claim upon a status above his own. He was all that he had always most despised, a second-rate, a third-rate little creature; the anxious, civil, shrinking Marmalade of Cauldwell's office. Why (as the hideous moments led him on, point by point, his old lucidity, sharpened to a needle fineness, seemed to etch the truth in lines of fire upon the blackness), hadn't he always been a pitiful little sn.o.b? Wasn't it of the essence of a sn.o.b to over-value the things one hadn't and to fear the things one was? It hadn't been other people, it had been himself, what he really was, of whom he had always been afraid. He saw himself reduced to the heretofore unrecognized, yet always operative, element in his own nature--a timid, watchful humility.

Oh, Channerley! Channerley! The wail rose in his heart and it filled the world. Oh, his woods, his daffodils, his father's smile--gone--lost forever! Worse than that--smirched, withered, desecrated!

A hideous gibbering of laughter seemed to rise around him, and pointing fingers. Amy's eyes pa.s.sed with another malice in their mockery; and Robert would never turn to him now, and Griselda would never look at him. He saw it all, as they would never see it. He was not one of them, and they had always felt it; and oh,--above all,--he had always felt it.

And now, quite close it seemed, softly rustling, falsely smiling, moved his loathsome mother: not only as he remembered her in youth, but in her elegant middle years, as he had last seen her, with hard eyes and alien lips and air of brittle, untouched exquisiteness.

Suddenly fury so mounted in him that he saw himself rising in bed, rending his dressings, to seize the kneeling man by the throat and throttle him. He could see his fingers sinking in on either side among the cl.u.s.tered hair, and hear himself say, "How dare you! How dare you!

You hound! You snivelling, sneaking hound! You look for pity from me, do you!--and tenderness! Well, take this, this! Everything, everything I am and have that's worth being and having, I owe to them. I've hated you and all you mean, always--yes, your fear and your caution and your admiration and your great high forehead. Oh, I see it! I see it!--it's my own! And though I am only that in myself, then take it from me that I hate myself along with you and curse myself with you!"

It came to him that he was slowly panting, and that after the fever-fury an icy chill crept over him. And a slow, cold smile came with it, and he saw Jephson, the wit of the office, wagging his head and saying, "Little Marmalade take a man by the throat! Ask me another!"

No; little Marmalade might win the V.C.; but only when he thought he was a Follett. Was that what it all came to, really? Something broke and stopped in his mind.

He heard his father's voice. How long ago it had all happened. He had known for years, hadn't he, that this was his father?

"Marmaduke! Mr. Follett! What have I done? Shall I call somebody? Oh, forgive me!"

His father was standing now beside him and bending over him. He looked up at him and shook his head. He did not want any one to come.

"Oh, what have I done?" the man repeated.

"I was dying anyway, you know," he heard himself say.

What a pitiful face it was, this weary, loosened, futureless old face above him! What a frightened face! What long years of slow disgarnis.h.i.+ng lay behind it: youth, romance, high hopes, all dropped away. He had come to-day with their last vestiges, still the sentimental, romancing fool, self-centred and craving; but nothing of that was left. He was beaten, at last, down into the very ground. It was a haggard, humiliated, frightened face, and miserable. As he himself had been. But not even death lay before this face. For how many years must it go on sinking down until the earth covered it? Marmaduke seemed to understand all about him, as well as if he had been himself.

"Sit down," he said. He heard that his voice was gentle, though he was not aware of feeling anything, only of understanding. "I was rather upset. No; I don't want any one. Of course I forgive you. Don't bother about it, I beg."

His father sat down, keeping his swollen eyes on the motoring-cap which, unseeingly, he turned and turned in his hands.

"Tell me about yourself a little," said Marmaduke, with slow, s.p.a.ced breaths. "Where do you live? How? Are you fairly happy?"

He knew that he was not happy; but he might, like most people with whom life had not succeeded, often imagine himself so, and Marmaduke wanted to help him, if possible, to imagine it.

"I live near London. I used to do a good deal of University Extension lecturing. I've a clerks.h.i.+p in the Education Office now." Mr. Thorpe spoke in a dead obedient voice. "A small salary, not much hope of advance; and I've a large family. It's rather up-hill, of course. But I've good children; clever children. My eldest boy's at Oxford; he took a scholars.h.i.+p at Westminster; and my eldest girl's at Girton. The second girl, Winnie, has a very marked gift for painting; she is our artist; we're going to send her to the Slade next year when she leaves the High School. Good children. I've nothing to complain of."

"So you're fairly happy?" Marmaduke repeated. Oddly, he felt himself comforted in hearing about the good and happy children, in hearing about Winnie, her father's favourite.

"Happy? Well, just now, with this terrible war, one can't be that, can one? It is a great adventure for me, however, this work of mine, motoring about France. I don't think I've ever done anything I cared so much about since--for years," said Mr. Thorpe. "It's a beautiful country, isn't it? and the soldiers are such splendid fellows! One gets a lot out of it. But happy? No, I don't suppose I am. I'm pretty much of a failure, and I started life with great imaginings about myself. One doesn't get over that sort of disappointment; one never really gets over it in a way." Mr. Thorpe was looking at him now, and it was as if there were a kindliness between them. "Things have been rather grey and disagreeable on the whole," he said.

"They can be very grey and disagreeable, can't they?" said Marmaduke, closing his eyes.

He was very tired, and as he lay there quietly, having nothing further to know or to suffer, having reached the very limits of conscious dissolution, something else began to come to him. It seemed born of the abolition of self and of the acceptance of the fact that he was dead to all that had given life worth or beauty. It would have been very good to be a Follett; though, he saw it now, he had over-prized that special sort of goodness--with so much else from which he had been, as really, shut out; but he was not a Follett; nor was he merely this poor, insignificant father. He did not quite make out in what the difference lay and he did not rejoice in it, for there was no rejoicing left in him. But, even if the difference were only an acquired instinct (dimly, the terms of his complacent readings in biology and sociology returned to him), even if it were only that, not anything inherent and transmissible, it was, all the same, his own possession; something that he and the Folletts had made together; so that it was as true to say that he had won the V.C. as to say that they had. The lessened self that was left to him had still its worth. To see the truth, even if it undid you, was worthy; to see so unwaveringly that it was good to be a Follett even when you weren't one, had the elements of magnanimity; and to accept the fact of being second-rate proved, did it not?--if you still cared to prove it; he felt himself smile as gently at the relinquished self as he had smiled at his father,--that you were not merely second-rate.

There was now a sound of stumbling movement; doors opening and shutting; nurses, surgeons in the room; and his father's face, far away, against the blue bands, looking at him, still so frightened and so miserable that he tried again to smile at him and to say, "It's all right. Quite all right."

At all events he had been decent to the poor old fellow. His thoughts came brokenly, but he was still seeing something, finding something; it was like a soft light growing. At all events, he had behaved as a Follett would wish to behave even when brought to such a pa.s.s. No--but it wasn't quite that, either; it was something new. He had behaved as any one decent should wish to behave. And the daffodils glimmering to his vision seemed to light him further still. "We are as common as daffodils," came back to him. Daffodils were for everybody. Foolish little boy who, on the distant spring morning in the woods of Channerley, dug them up to take them to his own garden!

He was there among them with his little red-and-yellow cart, and the thrush was singing high above him, in the rosy topmost branches of an elm.

Beautiful woods. Beautiful flowers of light and chivalry. How the suns.h.i.+ne streamed among them!

"Dear Channerley," he thought. For again he seemed to belong there.

Gentle hands were tending him and, as he turned his cheek on the pillow, it was with the comfort--almost that of the little boy at Channerley being tucked up in the warm nursery to go to sleep--of knowing that he was dying, and that, in spite of everything, he had given something to the name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: decorative bar]

PANSIES

I