Chapter I

Oldmeadow sat in Mrs. Aldesey's drawing-room and, the tea-table between them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years, that they found each other. So it was, all over the world, Oldmeadow said to himself, that the tea-table, or its equivalent, reasserted itself in any interval where the kindly amenities of human intercourse could root themselves; though the world rocked and flames of anarchy rimmed its horizons.

It was more real, he felt that now, to sit and look at Lydia over her tea than to parch on Eastern sands and shiver in Western trenches; from the mere fact that the one experience became a nightmare while the other was as natural as waking at dawn. Horrors became the dropped stitches of life; and though if there were too many of them they would destroy the stocking, the stocking itself was made up of tea-table talks and walks in the woods with Nancy. He had just come from Coldbrooks.

So he put it, trivially, to himself, and he felt the need of clinging to triviality. The dropped stitches had been almost too much for him and the nightmare, at times, had seemed the only reality. At times he had known a final despair of life and even now he remembered that the worst might still come. One might be called upon to face the death of the whole order of civilization. Faith required one, perhaps, to recognize that the human spirit was bound up, finally, with no world order and unless one could face its destruction as one had to face the death of a loved individual, one was not secure of the spiritual order that transcended all mundane calamity. He believed, or hoped, that during these last three years, in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine, when, to the last fibre, he had felt his faiths tested, he had learned to be ready for the great relinquishment, should it be required of him; and it was therefore the easier to doff that consciousness, as he might have doffed a sword, and think of Lydia and of the order that still survived and that she still stood for.

Lydia did not look the worse for the war; indeed she looked the better. She looked as if, in spite of long days in the hospital, she digested better and, in spite of air-raids, slept better, and as they talked, finding their way back to intimacy by the comparing of such superficialities, she told him that for years she hadn't been so strong or well. "Nothing is so good for you, I've found out, as to feel that you are being used; being used by something worth while. People like myself must keep still about our experiences, for we've had none that bear talking of. But even the others, even the people bereaved unspeakably, are strangely lifted up. And I believe that the populace enjoys the air-raids rather than the reverse; they give them a chance of feeling that they are enduring something, too; with good-humour and pluck. If anyone is pessimistic about the effect of war on average human nature, I should only ask them to come and talk to our men at the hospital. Of course, under it all, there's the ominous roar in one's ears all the time."

"Do you mean the air-raids?" he asked her and, shaking her head, showing him that she, too, had seen with him and, he believed, with him accepted: "No; I mean the roar of nation after nation collapsing into the abyss. A sort of tumbril roar of civilization, Roger. And, for that, there's always the last resource of going gallantly to the guillotine. But all the same, I believe we shall pull through."

It was the spring of 1918 and one needed faith to believe it. She asked him presently about his friends at Coldbrooks. He had gone to Coldbrooks for three days of his one week's leave. After this he went to France.

"What changes for you there, poor Roger," said Mrs. Aldesey.

"Yes. Terrible changes. Palgrave dead and Barney broken. Yet, do you know, it's not as sad as it was. Something's come back to it. Nancy sits by him and holds his hand and is his joy and comfort."

"Will he recover?"

"Not in the sense of being really mended. He'll go on crutches, always, if he gets up. But the doctors now hope that the injury to the back isn't permanent."

"And Meg's married," said Mrs. Aldesey after a little pause. "Have you seen her?"

"No. She runs a hospital in the country, at her husband's place, Nancy tells me; and is very happy."

"Very. Has a fine boy, and is completely reinstated. It's a remarkable ending to the story, isn't it? She met him at the front, you know, driving her ambulance; and he has twice as much in him as poor Eric Hayward."

"Remarkable. Yet Meg's a person who only needs her chance. She's the sort that always comes out on top."

"Does it comfort her mother a little for all she's suffered to see her on top?"

"It almost comically comforts her. All the same, Eleanor Chadwick has her depths. Nothing will ever comfort her for Palgrave's death."

"I understand that," said Mrs. Aldesey. "Nothing could. How she must envy the happy mothers whose boys were killed at the front. To have one's boy die in prison as a conscientious objector must be the bitterest thing the war has given any mother to bear."

"He was a dear boy," said Oldmeadow. "Heroically wrong-minded." He could hardly bear to think of Palgrave.

"He wasn't alone, you know," said Mrs. Aldesey after a moment. Something was approaching that he would rather not have to speak of; a name he would so much rather not name. And, evading it, feebly, he said, "His mother got to him in time, I know."

"Yes. But all the time. She went and lived near the prison. Adrienne Toner I mean."

Her eyes were on him and he hoped that no readjustment of his features was visible. "Oh, yes. Nancy told me that," he said.

"What's become of her, Roger?" Mrs. Aldesey asked. "Since Charlie was killed the Lumleys have lived in the country and I hardly see them. I haven't heard a word of her for years."

He was keeping his eyes on her and he knew from her expression that he showed some strain or some distress.

"Nor have I. Nancy said that they hadn't either. She went away, after Palgrave's death. Disappeared completely."

"Nancy told you, of course, about the money; the little fortune she gave Palgrave, so that he could leave it to his mother?"

"Oh, yes. Nancy wrote to me of that."

"It was cleverly contrived, wasn't it. They are quite tied up to it, aren't they; whatever they may feel. No one could object to her giving a fortune to the boy she'd ruined. I admired that in her, I must confess; the way she managed it. And then her disappearance."

"Very clever indeed," said Oldmeadow. "All that remains for her to do now is to manage to get killed. And that's easily managed. Perhaps she is killed."

He did not intend that his voice should be emptier or dryer, yet Lydia looked at him with a closer attention.

"Barney and Nancy could get married then," she said.

"Yes. Exactly. They could get married."

"That's what you want, isn't it, Roger?"

"Want her to be killed, or them to be married?"

"Well, as you say, so many people _are_ being killed. One more or less, if it's in such a good cause as their marriage--"

"It's certainly a good cause. But I don't like the dilemma," said Oldmeadow.

He knew from the way she looked at him, discreet and disguised as her recognition was, that he was hiding something from her. Casting about his mind, in the distress that took the form of confusion, he could himself find nothing that he hid, or wished to hide, unless it was the end of Adrienne's story as Barney's wife. That wasn't for him to show; ever; to anyone.

"Perhaps she's gone back to America," said Mrs. Aldesey presently, "California, you know. Or Chicago. She may very well be engaged in great enterprises out there that we never hear of. They'd be sure to be great, wouldn't they."

"I suppose they would."

"You saw her once more, didn't you, at the time you saw Palgrave," Mrs. Aldesey went on. "Lady Lumley told me of that. And how kind you had been. Adrienne had spoken of it. You were sorry for them both, I suppose; for her as well as for him, in spite of everything. Or did she merely take it for granted that the kindness to him extended to her?"

"Not at all. It was for her too," said Oldmeadow, staring a little and gathering together, after this lapse of time that seemed so immense, his memories of that other tea-table set up in the chaos: Palgrave's tea-table on that distant day in Oxford. What was so confusing him was his consciousness that it hadn't been the last time he had seen Adrienne. "I was as sorry for her as for him," he went on. "Sorrier. There was so much more in her than I'd supposed. She was capable of intense suffering."

"In losing her husband's affections, you mean? You never suspected her of being inhuman, surely? Lady Lumley blamed poor Barney for all that sad story. But, even from her account, I could see his side very plainly."

"Perhaps I did think her inhuman. At all events I thought her invulnerable."

"Yes. I remember. With all her absurdity you thought she had great power." Mrs. Aldesey looked at him thoughtfully. "And it was when you found she hadn't that you could be sorry for her."

"Not at all," said Oldmeadow again. "I still think she has great power. People can have power and go to pieces."

"Did she go to pieces? That day in Oxford? I can't imagine her in pieces, you know."

He had a feeling of drawing back; or of drawing Adrienne back. "In the sense of being so unhappy, so obviously unhappy, over Palgrave," he said.

He saw that Lydia would have liked to go on questioning, as, of course, it would have been perfectly natural for her to do. Was not Adrienne Toner and her absurdity one of their pet themes? Yet she desisted. She desisted and it was because she felt some change in him; some shrinking and some pain. "Well, let's hope that she is happy, now, or as happy as she can be, poor thing, doing great deeds in America," she said. And she turned the talk back to civilization and its danger.

They talked a good deal about civilization during their last three days together. He wanted things, during these three days of mingled recovery and farewell, to be as happy as possible between him and his friend, for he knew that Lydia's heart was heavy, for him and not for civilization. The front to which he was going was more real to her, because it was much nearer, and his peril was more real than during his absence in distant climes. He felt himself that the French front, at this special time, would probably make an end of him and, for the first time since their early friendship, he knew conjecture as to his relation with Lydia; wondered, if it had not been for Mr. Aldesey in New York, whether Lydia might have been in love with him, and realized, with a curious sense of anxiety and responsibility, that her friendship for him now was the closest tie in her life. The war might to her, too, mean irreparable loss. And he was sorry that it was so; sorry to think that the easy, happy intercourse had this hidden depth of latent suffering.

Lydia's feeling, and its implications, became the clearer to him when, on their last evening together, she said to him suddenly: "Perhaps you'll see her over there."

He could not pretend not to know whom she meant, nor could he pretend to himself not to see that if it troubled Lydia that he should be sorry for Adrienne that could only be because she cared far more for him than he had ever guessed.

He said, as easily as he could manage it, for the pressure of his realizations made him feel a little queer: "Not if she's in America."

"Ah, but perhaps she's come back from America," said Mrs. Aldesey. "She's a great traveller. What will you do with her if you do find her? Bring her back to Barney?"

"Hardly that," he said. "There'd be no point in bringing her back to Barney, would there?"

"Well, then, what would you do with her?" Mrs. Aldesey smiled, as if with a return to their old light dealing with the theme, while, still in her nurse's coiffe and dress, she leaned back against her chair.

"What would she do with me, rather, isn't it?" he asked. And he, too, tried to be light.

"She'll be mended then, you think? Able to do things to people again?"

"I'm not at all afraid of her, you know. She never did me any harm," he said.

"Because you were as strong as she, you mean. She did other people harm, surely. You warned me once to keep away from her unless I wanted to lose my toes and fingers," Mrs. Aldesey still smiled. "She does make people lose things, doesn't she?"

"Well, she makes them gain things, too. Fortunes for instance. Perhaps if I find her, she'll give me a fortune."

"But that's only when she's ruined you," she reminded him.

"And it's she who's ruined now," he felt bound to remind her; no longer lightly.

Leaning back in her chair, her faded little face framed in white, Mrs. Aldesey looked at once younger yet more tired than he had ever seen her look and she sat for a little while silent; as if she had forgotten Adrienne Toner and were thinking only of their parting. But all her gaiety had fallen from her as she said at last: "I can be sorry for her, too; if she's really ruined. If she still loves him when he has ceased to care for her. Does she, do you think?"

With the question he seemed to see a fire-lit room and lovers who had found each other and to smell wet roses. Lydia was coming too near; too near the other figure, outside the window, fallen back with outstretched arms against the roses. And again he felt himself softly, cautiously, disentangle the sleeve, the hair, felt himself draw Adrienne away into the darkness where the smell was now of wet ivy and where he could see only the shape of an accepting grief.

"How could I know?" he said. "She was very unhappy when I last saw her. But three years have passed and people can mend in three years."

"Especially in America," Mrs. Aldesey suggested. "It's a wonderful place for mending. Let's hope she's there. Let's hope that we shall never, any of us, ever hear of her again. That would be much the happiest thing, wouldn't it?"

He was obliged to say that it would certainly be much the happiest thing; and he was too unhappy about Lydia to be able to feel angry with her. He knew how tired she must be when, for the first time in their long friendship, she must know that she was not pleasing him, yet not be able to help herself.