Chapter VIII

Oldmeadow sat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off speaking to Adrienne till their last evening, so he had put off writing to Barney and to Lydia Aldesey till this last afternoon, and he saw now how difficult it would be to write coherently while his thoughts stretched themselves forward to those few hours of the night when his fate would be decided.

Adrienne had gone out. She had written her short communication to Barney and brought it in with its envelope and laid it before him, asking him in the voice that, again, made him think of snow: "Is that quite right?"

It was, quite, he told her, after glancing through it swiftly. It stated, in the most colourless terms, the facts that Barney was to take to his solicitor. "Quite right," he repeated, looking up at her. "Are you going out? Will you post it?--or shall I?"

"Will you post it with yours? Yes. I must go out. But I'll try to be back by tea-time. It's very disappointing; our last afternoon. But that poor woman from Roubaix--the one with consumption up at the Croix Rousse--is dying. They've sent for me. All the little children, you remember I told you. I'm going to wire to Joséphine and ask her if she can come down and look after them for a little while."

"Joséphine?" he questioned. He had, till now, entirely forgotten Joséphine. Adrienne told him that she was with her parents in a provincial town. "They lost their only son and are very sad. Fine, brave old people. He is a baker, the old father, and makes the most wonderful bread. I went to see them last summer."

Their packing was done and the room denuded; the men had taken away the piano that morning. He had his letters to write; so there was really no reason why she should not go. And there was, besides, nothing that they had to say to each other, except the one thing he had to say.

The silence that overtakes parting friends on a station platform had overtaken them since the morning, though, at lunch, Adrienne had talked with some persistence of her immediate plans and prospects and about the unit of doctors and nurses who were to meet her in Italy. There was no reason why she should not go, and he would even rather she did. He would rather see no more of her until evening when everything but the one thing would be over and done with. And so he was left with his letters, leaning his elbows on the table over the hotel paper and staring out at the Saône and the white _archevêché_.

Both letters were difficult to write; but beside the one to Lydia, the one to Barney was easy. Barney, after all, was to gain everything from what he had to tell him, and Lydia was to lose; how much was Lydia to lose? He recalled their last evening together and its revelations and saw that the old laughing presage was now more than fulfilled. Lydia was to lose more than her toes and fingers; in any case. Even if he returned to her alone, she cared for him too much not to feel, always, the shadow of his crippled heart; his heart not only crippled, but occupied, so occupied that friendships, however near, became, in a sense, irrelevancies. And if he returned with Adrienne--but could he return with Adrienne? What kind of a life could he and Adrienne lead in London?--even if Lydia's door, generously, was opened to them, as he believed it would be--knowing her generous.

He laid down his pen and fixed his eyes on the river and he tried to see Lydia and Adrienne together. But it was a useless effort. From this strange haven of the Lyons hotel where he had spent the happiest fortnight of his life, he could not see himself into any future with familiar features. He could only see himself and Adrienne, alone, at hotels. To attempt to place her in Lydia's generous drawing-room was to measure more accurately than he had yet measured it the abyss that separated him from his former life. If it could be spanned; if Adrienne could be placed there, on the background of eighteenth-century fans and old glass, she became a clipped and tethered seagull in a garden, awkward, irrelevant, melancholy. Lydia might cease to find her third-rate and absurd; but she wouldn't know what to do with her any more than she would have known what to do with the seagull. So what, if Adrienne became his wife, remained of his friendship with Lydia?

He put aside the unresolved perplexity and took Barney first.

"My dear Barney," he wrote,--"I don't think that the letter Adrienne has written to you will surprise you as much as this letter of mine. You will understand from hers that she wishes to free herself and to free you. You will understand that that is my wish, too. She only tells you that she has been staying here with me, for a fortnight, as my wife; that's for your solicitor; you will read between the lines and know that it seemed worth while to both of us to make the necessary sacrifice in order to gain so much for you and for her. I hope that you and my dear Nancy will feel that we are justified, and that you will take your happiness as bravely as we secure it for you. You'll know that our step hasn't been taken lightly.

"But, now, dear Barney, comes my absolutely personal contribution. It is a contribution, for it will make you and Nancy happier to know that I have as much to gain as you and she. I have fallen in love with Adrienne and I hope that I may win her consent to be my wife. Yes, dear Barney, unbelievable as it will look to you, there it is; and she dreams of it as little as you could have dreamed of it. I met her again, as her letter informs you, at the Boulogne hospital. She asked me to say nothing about our meeting. She wanted to disappear out of your lives. She saved my life, I think, and I saw a great deal of her. What I found in her that I had not seen before I need not say.

"My great difficulty, my burden and perplexity now, lie in the fact that she has no trace of feeling for me that might give me hope. We became, at Boulogne, the best of friends; such friends that this plan suggested itself to her; and we remain, after our fortnight here, the best of friends; and that is all. Yet I have hope, unjustified and groundless though it may be, and had I not had it from the beginning I couldn't have entered upon the enterprise; not even for you and Nancy. From one point of view it's possible that you may feel that I've entered upon it in spite of you and Nancy. You may feel inclined to repudiate and disown the whole affair and to remain unaware of it. In that case it would come down to an appeal from me to you to carry it through for my sake. But from another point of view it makes it easier for you; easier for you to accept, since my hope gives integrity to the situation. That's another thing that decided me. If it had been mere sham I don't think I could have undertaken it. Adrienne felt none of my scruples on this score. She walked over legal and conventional commandments like a saint over hot ploughshares. But I haven't her immunities. I should have felt myself badly scorched, and felt that I'd scorched you and Nancy, if my hope hadn't given everything its character of _bona fides_.

"Dear Barney, dear Nancy, please forgive me if I've been selfish. It hasn't all been selfishness, that I promise you; it was in hopes for you, too; and I have to face sacrifices. The worst of them will be that if Adrienne takes me I'll have to lose you. You can measure the depth of my feeling for her from the fact that I can make such sacrifices. Perhaps you'll feel that even if she doesn't take me I'll have to lose you. I hope not. I hope, in that case, that mitigations and refuges will be found for me and that some day you'll perhaps be able to make a corner in your lives where I may creep and feel my wounds less aching. In any case, after Adrienne, you are the creatures dearest to me in the world and I am always and for ever your devoted friend,

ROGER."

* * * * *

And now Lydia. There was no use in thinking about it. The plunge must be taken.

"My dear Lydia," he wrote,--"I have fallen in love with Adrienne Toner. I feel that with such a friend as you it's better to begin with the bomb-shell. She doesn't know it, and if we are here in this Lyons hotel together, it's only, she imagines, because she wishes to set Barney free and that I've undertaken, for her sake and for Barney's, a repugnant task. It is a repugnant task, in spite of what it may mean to me of happiness. I hate it for her, and for Barney and for myself. But since she was determined on it and since, if it wasn't I it was to be another friend, and since I have fallen in love with her, I saw that it was only decent that the co-respondent in the case should be the man who married her afterwards. For I hope to become her husband, and I haven't one jot of ground for my hope. We are studying Dante together, and she shows me the sights of Lyons. She is just the same. Yet completely altered.

"I don't know whether you'll feel you can ever see me again, with or without her. I don't want to cast myself too heavily on your compassion, so I'll only remind you that even if I return to England alone I shall probably have to lose Nancy and Barney and that you will be my only refuge. It will be the culmination of my misfortunes if I have to lose you.

"Dear Lydia, I am always your devoted

"ROGER"

* * * * *

But he hadn't lost her. He knew he hadn't lost her; in any case. And the taste of what he did was sharp and bitter to him, for she was generous and loyal and he had cut off her very limbs. When he had addressed and stamped the letters he went downstairs, and, for the sense of greater finality, carried them to the post instead of dropping them into the hotel-box.

He had almost the sense of disembodiment as he returned to the empty and dismantled room. He seemed to have become a mere consciousness suspended between two states of being. The past was gone. He had dropped it into the post-box. And he saw no future. He felt, for the moment, no hopes. At the moment it seemed absurd to think that Adrienne could ever love him. He tried to picture Coldbrooks and Somer's Place when the bomb-shell struck them. Would Barney show Nancy the letter? Nancy would be pale, aghast, silent. Barney would have to wait for days, perhaps, before saying to her: "But, after all, it's for their sakes, too, Nancy dear. See what Roger says." Mrs. Averil would cast up her hands and cry "That woman!"--but, perhaps, with as much admiration as repudiation, and Meg, if she were summoned to the scene of confusion, would say, "So she's got hold of Roger, too." Funnily enough it was the dear March Hare, he felt sure, who would be the first one to stretch out a hand towards the tarnished freedom. "After all, you know," he could hear her murmuring, "it would be much _nicer_ for Barney and Nancy to be married, wouldn't it? And Adrienne wasn't a Christian, you know, so probably the first marriage doesn't _really_ count. We mustn't be conventional, Monica." Yes, perhaps it would go like that at Coldbrooks. But at Somer's Place Lydia would sit among her fans and glass and wish that they had never seen Adrienne Toner.

He paced up and down before the windows and he had never been so lonely in his life. He was so lonely that he became aware at last that his mere negative state was passing into a positive and that grief at the severance of old ties had become fear of losing Adrienne. The fear and the loneliness seemed actualized when, at five, the waiter appeared bearing the tea-tray on his shoulder. He had never had tea alone before in this strange, foreign room. Adrienne always made a complicated and charming ritual of the occasion, boiling the water on their own little spirit-kettle and measuring the tea from her own caddy--the very same kettle and caddy, she told him, that had accompanied herself and her mother on all their travels. And to see the cups and bread and butter and not to have her there, added a poignant taste of abandonment to his loneliness.

She kept the kettle in her room and when the boy was gone he softly opened the door and went in. It would keep his heart up to have the water boiling in readiness for her arrival. He recognized, as he stood, then, and looked about him, that his instinct had also been that of taking refuge. In her room he could more closely recover the sense of her presence.

She had finished all the essentials of her packing and her box stood with its lid open ready for the last disposals. Yet the room seemed still full of her personality. He noted it all gazing around him with eyes almost those of a solemn little boy permitted to glance in at a Christmas-tree.

Her dressing-table, improvised from the mantelpiece, was neatly laid out with small, worn, costly, and immaculate appurtenances. He moved forward and looked at them, not touching. The initials intertwined on the backs of the ivory brushes were her girlish ones: A. T. She had discarded, long since, no doubt, her wedding toilet set.

If he became her husband, the thought crossed his mind and quickened his heart, he might brush her hair for her, that wonderful golden hair, before many months were over.

Near the ivory hand-glass stood two photographs in a folding frame of faded blue leather. He stooped to look and saw that one was of Mrs. and the other certainly of Mr. Toner, in their early days. Remote, mysterious and alien, their formally directed eyes looked back at him and in the father's ingenuous young countenance, surmounted by a roll of hair that was provincial without being exactly rural, the chin resting upon a large, peculiar collar, he could strangely retrace Adrienne's wide brow and steadfast light-filled eyes. Mrs. Toner wore a ruffled dress and of her face little remained distinct but the dark gaze--forceful and ambiguously gentle.

The room was full of the fragrance that was not a fragrance and that had, long ago, reminded him of Fuller's earth. A pair of small blue satin _mules_ stood under a chair near the bed.

Only after he had withdrawn, gently closing the door behind him, did he realize that he had forgotten the kettle and then he felt that he could not go back again. A moment after the boy returned with a note, sent, by hand, he was informed, from the Croix Rousse.

"I am so dreadfully sorry, so disappointed," he read. "Our last afternoon, but I can't get away yet. Don't wait dinner for me, if I should be late, even for that. I won't be very late, I promise, and we will have our evening."

The note had no address. He rushed forth and down to find the messenger gone. Had he only known where to seek her in the vast, high, melancholy district of the Croix Rousse he would have gone to join her. His sense of loneliness was almost a panic.

Of course, he tried to fix his mind on that realization, as he went back to the salon, her rapatriés had no doubt preoccupied her mind, from the first, quite as much as their own situation. She had spoken to him in especial of this family and of their sorrows. One child they had left dead at Evian and the mother, on the eve of their return to their Northern home, had become too desperately ill to travel. "Such dear, good, _gentle_ people," he recalled her saying. No; he must not repine. After all he had only the one thing to say to her; and the evening would be long enough for that.

It was nearly seven when he heard her quick footstep outside. When she entered, the brim of her little hat, in the electric light, cast a sharp shadow over her eyes, but he saw at once that she had been crying.

She came in so quickly that he had not time to rise and, going to him, behind his chair, she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down, saying: "I'm so sorry to have left you all alone."

It was astonishingly comforting to have her put these fraternal hands upon him like this. She had never done it before. Yet there was a salty smart in her words to him. What else did she intend to do but leave him all alone for always?

"I'm dreadfully lonely, I confess," he said, "and I see that you're dreadfully tired."

She went round to the other side of the table and sat down, not looking at him and said, in a low voice: "Oh--the seas--the seas of misery."

"You are completely worn out," he said. He was not thinking so much of the seas of misery as of his few remaining hours. Were they to be spoiled by her fatigue?

"No; not worn out. Not at all worn out," said Adrienne, stretching her arms along the table in front of her as she sat, and though she had wept he could see something of ardour, of a strength renewed, in the lines of her pallid lips. "I've sat quite still all afternoon. I've been with him. She died soon after I got there. At the end she was talking about the little girl's grave at Evian. I was able to comfort her about that. She was so afraid it would not be tended. That it would have no flowers. Joséphine will go to Evian afterwards and see about it. There are always dear nuns to do those things. There was a nun with her to-day. That was the greatest comfort of all; and the priest who came. But I was with the father and the five poor little children; so frightened and miserable. I could not leave them, you see. He talked and talked and talked. It helped him to talk and tell me about their home and how they had had everything so nice and bright. Linen, a garden, a goat and fowls. Oh, if only she could have seen her home again! That was what he kept saying and saying. They were full of hope when they got to Evian. He told me how the children sang at dawn when the train panted up the mountain among the golden trees. Like birds, he said, and _Vive la France_! They all believed they were to be safe and happy. _Et, Madame, c'était notre calvaire qui commencait alors seulement._"

She spoke, not really thinking of him, he saw, absorbed still in the suffering she had just left, measuring her power against such problems and the worse ones to which she was travelling to-morrow.

"Joséphine will be with them, I hope," she went on presently, "in three or four days. She will help them to get home and then she will come back and go to see about the grave at Evian. Joséphine is a tower of strength for me."

Her eyes were raised to him now, and, as they rested, he saw the compunction, the solicitude, with which they had met him on her entrance, return to them. "I'm not so very late, am I?" she said, rising. "I'll take off my hat and be ready in a moment."

"Don't hurry," said Oldmeadow.

She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke, and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their salon: "Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for an hour. Until nine. It's not unselfishness. I'd rather have half of you to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all."

"How dear of you," she said. She looked at him with gratitude and, still, with the compunction. "It would be a great rest. It would be better for our talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like Napoleon," she added with a flicker of her playfulness.

When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself, he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of Adrienne's life--her "big, big" life--looming there before him, becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a vocation?--for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa. How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them. He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. After all, she wasn't really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour. Couldn't she, after a winter in Serbia, found crêches and visit slums in London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its justification. Women weren't meant to go on, once the world's crisis past, doing feats of heroism; they weren't meant for austere careers that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her in Serbia or California.