Christmas Roses and Other Stories Part 27

II

It was a pretty cottage he found, as, on the September evening, his station fly drew up at the wicket-gate. They had come a long way from the station, and, after leaving a small village, the winding lane, too, had seemed long. He saw, nevertheless, as he alighted, that the rustic building, old stones below and modern thatch above, could not be far from the central group of which it formed an adjunct; for it had been contrived, by devices dear to the heart of the week-ender, from two or three labourers' cottages thrown into one and covered all over with the capacious and brooding thatch. "Quaint," Dorothy's really inevitable word, altogether expressed it, from the box hedges that ran on either side of the flagged path, to the pale yellow hollyhocks beside the door.

A round-cheeked country girl, neatly capped and ap.r.o.ned, opened the door on a square, rush-matted hall; and beyond that he saw a room full of the sunset, where a table was being laid and from which Mrs. Baldwin came out to greet him.

She was not tall, and had thick, closely bound braids. He had dreaded finding himself at once dealt with as a case; but Mrs. Baldwin's manner was not even that of one accustomed to paying guests. Her murmur of welcome, her questions about his journey, her mild directions as she led him up to his room, "Be careful at this landing, the level of the floor goes up and the beam comes down so low,"--were rather those of a shy and entirely unprofessional hostess.

He thought, as soon as he took in his room, with its _voile-de-Genes_ hangings and dear old furniture, that he pleased her by saying, "What a delicious room!" and even more when, on going to the wide, low, mullioned window, its panes open to the west, he added, "And what a delicious view!" There were meadows and tall hedgerow elms, and, running in a tranquil band of brightness, the stream that reflected the sky.

She did not say that she was glad he liked it, but her very gentle smile at the welcome it all made for him was part of the welcome. What she did say was, with the little air of shy preoccupation, while she wrung her finger-tips together, those of one hand in those of the other, "I think the water's very hot. I have a rather young little maid. You'll tell me if you want anything. Are three blankets and the down quilt enough? The nights are rather cold already."

He said that three would be perfect, secure, from his glance at the deep, comely bed, that they would be beautifully thick and fleecy.

"Then you'll come down to us when you are ready." She stood in the door to look round again. "Matches here, you see; biscuits in the little earthenware box; and the spirit-lamp is in case you should wake in the night--you could make yourself a cup of cocoa? Everything is there--cocoa, milk, and sugar. It usually sends one off again directly."

It was all the slightly shy hostess rather than the businesslike soother and sustainer; and, no, it wasn't a bit cosy. He repudiated that word indignantly, while he washed--the water _was_ very hot, admirably hot; there was a complacency about cosy, and Mrs. Baldwin had no complacency, though she was, for all her shyness and the unconscious gestures of physical nervousness, composed. Her hands, he remembered, recalling their little trick,--he had noticed it in the hall,--were like a child's; not the hands of a practical housewife. Yet, from the look of that bed (yes, thank heaven, a box-spring mattress!), from the heat of the water, and, above all, the deft and accessible grouping of the spirit-lamp and its adjuncts, she proved that she knew how to make one comfortable.

There were the meadows and--going again to the window, he wondered leaning out,--could he see the autumn crocuses? Yes, surely; even at this evening hour his eyes distinguished the pale yet delicately purpling tint that streaked the pastoral verdure. What a delicious place, indeed! He stood, absorbed in looking out, until the maid came to say that supper would be ready in five minutes.

The long room, the living-room,--for it combined, he saw, all social functions,--also faced the meadows at the back of the house, and the primrose coloured sunset still filled it as he entered. Mrs. Baldwin was busying herself with the table, and an old gentleman with a very long white beard rose, with much dignity, from the grandfather's chair near a window-seat. Mr. Haseltine, so his daughter named him, had more the air of seeing the visitor as a P.G., perhaps even as a sh.e.l.l-shock patient; but he was a nice old man, Guy felt, although his beard was too long. He wore a brown velveteen jacket, and Guy surmised that he might have been a writer or scholar of some not very significant sort.

"Yes, we think ours a very favored nook indeed," he said, as Guy again praised the prospect. "Yes; three cottages. Very happily contrived, is it not? There is a clever builder in the next town. He kept the old fireplace, you see; that end was a kitchen and the beams are all the old ones. Three gardens, too, thrown into one; but that is entirely my daughter's creation. Pig-styes used to be in that corner."

Guy looked out at the squares of colour, the low beds of mignonette, the phloxes, larkspurs, and the late sweet-peas a screen of stained-gla.s.s tints against the sky. Where the pig-styes had been was a little thatched summer-house with rustic seat and table. The bee-hives were just outside the hedge, at an angle of the meadow. Mr. Haseltine continued to talk while Mrs. Baldwin and the maid came in and out, carrying tea and eggs and covered dishes.

"I hope you don't mind high tea," she said. "It seems to go with our life here."

He felt that high tea was his favourite meal. There was a big white earthenware bowl on the table, filled with sweet-peas. "Where do you get the old-fas.h.i.+oned colours?" he asked her. "I thought the growers had extirpated them; one sees only the long-stemmed ones nowadays, with the tiresome artistic shades."

He pleased her again, he felt sure, and she told him that she always saved the seed, liking the old bright colours better, too.

He was glad that he had come, although Mr. Haseltine's beard was too long and he feared that he would prove talkative in the worst way, the deliberate and retaining way. He liked the smell of everything,--a mingling of sweet-peas, rush-matting, and China tea,--and the look of everything; good, unpretentious old oak furniture, fresh, if faded, chintzes, and book-lined walls; and he presently liked the taste of everything too.

"I feel already as if I should sleep to-night," he said to Mrs. Baldwin.

She sat behind the tea-urn a little distracted, if anything so mild could be called distraction, by the plunging movements of the little maid as she moved about the table. "That will do nicely, Cathy," she said. "We can manage now. You can bring in some more hot water if I ring.--Oh, I do hope you'll sleep. People usually sleep here."

She was hardly middle-aged, though, after Dorothy's bright browns and pinks, Tommy might well have thought her so. Many years older than Dorothy, of course, yet how many he could not in the least compute.

There was an agelessness, with something tough and solid, about her; she was as little slender as she was stout; she might, with her neutral tints,--hair, skin, dress,--have looked almost the same at sixty as she did now. She wasn't pale, or sallow, or sunburned; yet her complexion seemed so to go with her hair that the whole head might have been carved in some pleasantly tinted stone. Only her eyes gave any depth of difference; gentle eyes, like a grey-blue breadth of evening. She had a broad, short face and broad, beautifully drawn lips, and looked almost mysteriously innocent.

Guy took her in to this extent, swift as he was at taking people in, and sensitive as he was to what he found. He felt sure--and the depth of comfort it gave him made him aware of all the reluctances Dorothy's decision had overborne--that she hadn't the ghost of a method or of a theory. Sh.e.l.l-shock people had merely happened to come and had happened to get well quickly. He even gathered, as the peaceful evening wore on,--Cathy clearing, placid lamps lighted, the windows still left open to the twilight--that she didn't really think very much about her cases, in so far as they were cases and not guests. Having done her best in the way of blankets, hot water, and spirit-kettles, and seen them settled down into the life she had made for herself,--and not at all for them,--she went her own way, irresponsible and unpreoccupied.

To-night she didn't attempt to entertain him. It was Mr. Haseltine, at supper, who kept up the conversation, and with the air of always keeping it up, with even the air, Guy imagined once or twice, of feeling it specially his part to make amends, in that sort of resource, for his dear daughter's deficiency. She was, Guy saw, very much his dear daughter; but he felt sure that it had never entered the old gentleman's head that any one would find her interesting when he himself was there.

After supper she was occupied for a little while at her desk, adding up figures, it appeared, in house-books; for she came to her father and asked him if he would do a column for her. "It has come out differently three times with me," she confessed, but without ruefulness. "I'm so dull at my accounts!"

Guy, as Mr. Haseltine fumbled for his large tortoise-sh.e.l.l eyegla.s.ses, offered to help her, and then came over and sat beside the desk and did the rest of the sums for her. She was tidying up for the month, she told him, and always found it rather confusing. "It's having to put the pennies, which are twelves, into pounds, which are twenties, isn't it?"

she said, and thanked him so much.

But this could hardly be called entertaining him, nor could it, when he accompanied her across the lane in the now deepening dusk, to shut up her fowls. After that, there was the game of chess, during which Mrs.

Baldwin absented herself a good deal, helping Cathy, Guy imagined, with the beds and hot-water bottles; and at nine-thirty they all lighted their candles and went upstairs.

Bedtime had been, for many months, his most dreaded moment. The door shut him in and shut away the last chance of alleviation. There was nothing for it but to stretch himself haggardly on his couch and cling to every detail in the day's events, or in the morrow's prospects, that might preserve him from the past. To fight _not_ to remember was a losing game, and filled one's brain with the white flame of insomnia. He had found that it was when, exhausted by the fruitless effort, he suffered the waiting vultures to settle upon him, abandoned himself to the beaks and talons, that, through the sheer pa.s.sivity of anguish, oblivion most often came.

To-night, from the habit of it, his mind braced itself as he came into the room, and he was aware, as he had been for nearly a year now, that Ronnie's face was waiting, as it were, on the outskirts of consciousness, to seize upon him. But, after he had lighted the candles on his dressing-table and the candles on the mantelpiece, taken off his coat, and started undressing, he found that his thoughts, quite effortlessly, were engaged with his new surroundings, old Mr.

Haseltine's beard and eyegla.s.ses occupying them, and the clucking noise he made in drinking the gla.s.s of hot ginger and water that had been brought to them on a tray while they played; Mrs. Baldwin's accounts, her fowls, and the colour of her eyes. He decided that the colour was Wedgwood, or perhaps periwinkle blue--some very dense, quiet colour.

As he moved about the room, this protective interest came to him from the little objects he made acquaintance with: the round Venetian box, dim gilt and blue and red, on the chest of drawers in which he found a handful of tiny sh.e.l.ls--sh.e.l.ls, no doubt, that Mrs. Baldwin had picked up during a seaside outing; the faded old blue leather blotter on the writing-table, marked E. H., which had probably been hers since maiden days (and did E stand for Ethel or Edith or Ellen?); the pretty lettering in fine black script of the writing-paper so pleasantly stacked; the dear old Dutch coffee-pot and jug on the mantelpiece, and the bowl of mignonette that she, of course, had arranged. He sank his face into its fragrance, and peace seemed breathed upon him from the flowers.

He was wondering, as he got into bed, with a glance, before he blew out the candle, at the birds and branches, the whites and blacks and roses of the _voile-de-Genes_, whether he would find the autumn crocuses open in the meadows next morning; it had looked like the evening of another fine day. Then, the candle out, his thoughts, for a little while, were tangled in the magical dreamland of the _voile-de-Genes_, and the breath of the mignonette seemed to lie upon his eyelids with a soft compulsion to peace, until, all thought sliding suddenly away, he dropped into delicious slumber.

III

He found the crocuses open, before breakfast. Only Cathy was in the living-room, sweeping, when he crossed it, though he thought he heard Mrs. Baldwin in the kitchen. A robin was singing on a spray over the summer-house. The sky arched pale and high; and though there was no mist in the air, its softness made him think of milk.

From the garden he pa.s.sed into the meadows, and, almost at once, saw, everywhere, the fragile, purple flowers about him, if purple were not too rich a word for their clear, cold tint. Lower down, near the stream, they made him think of the silver bobbins set playing by great rain drops when they fall heavily upon wide, shallow pools of water; and they seemed to grow even more thickly in the farther meadow beyond the wooden bridge. A sense of bliss was upon him as he walked among the flowers. He had never seen anything more lovely, and all but the darker buds were open, showing pale golden hearts to the sun.

Yet, by the time that he had crossed the bridge, leaning on the high rail to look down into the limpid, sliding water, he knew that it could never stay at that or mean that for him. He had seen fields of flowers in France, and, while the horrors there had been enacted, these fields of crocuses, year after year, had bloomed. What they meant for his mind was the unbridged chasm between nature and the sufferings of man. Only when one ceased to be a man, ceased to remember and to think, could such a day, such sights, bring the unreasoning joy.

Walking back, he saw, as he approached the house, that Mrs. Baldwin was standing at the garden-gate, and, bare-headed, in the linen dress of pale lavender, she made him at once think of the crocuses, or they of her. Their gentleness was like her, their simplicity, and something, too,--for he felt this in her,--of unearthliness. More perhaps, than any other flower they seemed to belong to the air rather than to the ground, and, with their faint, pale stalks, their fragile petals unconfined by leaf or calyx, to be rising like emanations from the sod and ready to dissolve in mist into the sunlight.

"You've had a little walk?" Mrs. Baldwin asked him as they met.

He said he had been looking at the crocuses. "Are they really crocuses?"

he questioned. "I've never seen them wild before."

"They're not real crocuses," she said, "though those grow wild, too, in a few places in England. These flowers are always called autumn crocuses hereabouts; but they are really, botanically, meadow saffron; and they grow wild in a great many places. You see they are not so dark a purple as the wild crocus, and they are much taller, and the petals are more pointed. Much more beautiful flowers, I think."

"Meadow saffron. That's a pretty name, too. But I think I'll go on calling them autumn crocuses. They were one of the reasons that made me want to come here," he told her.

They were leaning on the little garden-gate looking over the meadows.

"Really? Did you hear about them?"

He told her what Dorothy had said, pa.s.sed on from the appreciative Tommy, and she said again, "Really!" and with surprise, so that, laughing a little, he said that he believed she would never have thought of Mr. Barnet as an appreciator of crocuses. She laughed a little, too, confessing to a community of perception where Tommy was concerned, and remarked that it was very nice of him to have cared. "What he talked about," she said, "was the food. He was never done praising my coffee.

It's time for coffee now," she added.

Guy, as they went in, said that, after all, if that was what Tommy talked about, he wondered that his caring for the crocuses should have surprised her, for he was sure that the one was almost as poetical as the others. It was poetical, indeed, as she made it, in a delightful and complicated apparatus, gla.s.s and bra.s.s and premonitory scented steam; and the milk was as hot as the water had been, and there was cream. "How do you manage it, in these days?" he asked. But she said that it wasn't wickedness and bribery, really: she and Cathy skimmed it from the milk that was brought from the nearest farm.

He realized that he was himself talking about the food just as Tommy had done; just as the chattering women at Aunt Emily's tea-party had done; just as everybody, of course, had been doing in England ever since food became such an important matter. But it was Mrs. Baldwin who made him do it; for though unearthly, she was deliciously prosaic. He felt that anew when he heard her going about the house in her low-heeled little shoes, with Cathy. They did, evidently, all the work, and how fresh, composed, and s.h.i.+ning everything was. The living-room, with its happy southern windows, its tempting writing-tables, its flowers and books, was an embodiment of the poetry that only such prose can secure.

Guy, while Mr. Haseltine sat behind his rustling _Times_, strolled before the shelves, surprised, presently, at their range of subject.

Surely not Mrs. Baldwin's, such reading; hardly, he thought, Mr.

Haseltine's. He took down a volume of Plotinus and found, on the fly-leaf, "Oliver Baldwin," written in a small, scholarly hand. That explained it, then. Her husband's. The Charles d'Orleans, too, the Fustel de Coulanges, the Croce, and the Dante, with marginal notes. He had been a man of letters, perhaps. Of the dozen books he took down to examine, only one was initialled "E. H.," and that, suitably, was _Dominique_. But it had been given her by "O. B."

As in the garden, presently, he and the old gentleman walked up and down, smoking, Guy asked him, with the diffidence natural to the question, whether his son-in-law, Mrs. Baldwin's husband, had been killed in the war; though he couldn't imagine her a war-widow. One didn't indeed think of her in connection with marrying and giving in marriage--that was part of the unearthliness; yet widowhood, permanent widowhood, seemed a suitable state. She was not girlish, nor was she wifely. She was widowed, and it had happened, he felt sure, in spite of his question, long ago.