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ONE of the last stories Faust wrote was a long novel, "After April." According to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post: "'After April' ... is the strange and disturbing love story of a man and a woman who had experienced in their lives the worst which a war, already old and skilled in the flagellation of human hearts, can bestow. For persons who have looked upon death and those other things which are more unbearable, there can be no happy ending—nor any unhappy ending, either. For their sufferings are merely historical warp and woof in the tapestry of human experience." In this novel we catch a glimpse of Faust's literary maturity. It makes one wonder what Faust might have produced, had he averaged writing only one book a year rather than twenty.
—Quoted from: Jon Tuska & Vicki Piekarski, The Max Brand Companion, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1996.
The Saturday Evening Post, 10 Jun 1944, with 1st part of "After April"
Miraculously, Peter Gerard had found his lost wife—but she was a stranger who neither knew him nor wanted him. Beginning the dramatic story of a pilot who deliberately hunted death in the sky.
THE hospital was an old barn made over, and in May of 1940 the acrid smell of antiseptics had not yet killed the fragrance of centuries of stored hay in what had been the loft. It was the time of Dunkirk, when the RAF was trying to maintain a shelter above the refugee thousands on the beach, and therefore the hospital beds were fairly filled with the wounded, but for the moment there was only one patient in the office of Dr. John Grace. This was a thirty-year-old Hollander, Peter Gerard, who had been flying hardly ten days with the English, although already he carried other marks of the battle. He stood before the doctor, stripped to the waist, with a bit of old bandage around his head where he had been grazed by shrapnel, and another high on his left arm, which a bullet had nicked. The doctor finished dressing a small but ragged cut across his ribs made by another shrapnel fragment in the air over Dunkirk this day. Now Doctor Grace held in his hand the hospital record of this man and shook his head over it.
"In ten days, this is your fourth visit," he said in his loud voice. He had been a baby specialist, a famous pediatrician, and he used to say that was why he was at home taking care of the RAF. "Because they're all babies," he would say; "just little babies that have to be petted and spoiled and spanked."
Now he looked up at Flight Lieutenant Gerard with a great scowl. "How many Jerries on your score?" he asked.
"I'm not quite sure, sir," said Gerard, his English accent perfect, though he had to labor over it a little. He was one of those dark Hollanders, straight-standing, with a fine head, and all the flesh thumbed from the body by hard exercise. Every breath he took showed his ribs from top to bottom.
"You're not quite sure of your score? Why the devil aren't you?" asked the noisy doctor. "Is it so good that you have to be modest?"
Peter Gerard was not annoyed. He had been looking out the window, now dimmed by coming twilight and a heavy fall of rain, so that there was hardly a view of the hills of Kent, but rather a mere smudge of green, like a stain in the glass; now he withdrew his attention from this and looked back at the doctor.
He said in his slow, careful way, "There were three before this afternoon, I believe. I'm not sure how many will be credited to me today."
"What would you guess?" asked Doctor Grace, peering up under his brows; and the young nurse in attendance held her breath as she listened.
"I believe there were four," said Peter Gerard. His lips twitched into a smile that came and went in a flash as he tasted pleasure infinitely deep and savage. "Yes, five, perhaps."
And his glance dropped slowly, as though he were watching something at a distance plunging rapidly through the air.
"Let's say you've got eight of them, then," said the doctor, staring at the nurse until her eyes lost their brilliance and she started breathing again. "Eight of them, and, therefore, we'll have to take good care of you."
"Sir?" said the Dutchman, touched instantly with concern.
"The fourth time you've been in here, and the third patch on you," said the doctor, and he looked at Peter as though he were a smoky glass that could not be seen through, like the green panes of the window. "Look here, my fine-feathered Dutch friend, a patch beside a patch is neighborly, but a patch upon a patch, that's outright beggarly."
"Very good, sir; very amusing, doctor," said Peter, still anxious.
"Look at his sour face," said the doctor to the nurse. "I wish you'd take him out for an evening and make him laugh once or twice, Nelly."
"I can't do that, sir," she answered. "He has his own private war with Hitler, and he's all wrapped up in it."
"He doesn't like women," said the doctor, terribly outspoken. "For instance, you're a pretty girl, Nelly, a damned pretty girl, but he won't look at you."
"No, sir?" said Nelly, smiling at the flier.
Peter turned on her a troubled eye that had not the least recognition in it. "But naturally, yes, yes," said he, doing his best.
"That's no good," said Doctor Grace. "Don't try to hide yourself from me. You can't slam doors in my face, young man; not if I decide to find out about you. These surface scratches don't matter, but what's your invisible wound? I'm going to put you to bed here for a month and find out."
"No, sir; I can't do that," said Peter, alarmed.
"Afraid, eh?" the doctor roared. "Afraid of the long rest and the monotony, are you, the rows of white beds, the days without end, the chatter of voices that you have to hear?"
"I'm in perfectly good flying shape, sir," Peter told him, picking up his shirt. "I can't stay here."
"You can't, eh? I'm your superior officer. Lieutenant Gerard, and I can order you into this hospital as long as I please."
Peter stopped, halfway into his shirt, and stared helplessly.
The voice of the doctor might be mere friendliness or it might be the voice of authority. With this nation, one never knew what to do. A slap on the shoulder may make a friend for life—or shake the Empire to its foundations.
"Go into that next room," commanded Doctor Grace. "Do as I tell you and step along."
Peter Gerard clicked his heels and made of himself as much of a soldier as he could without a shirt.
"Yes, sir," he said. "With the major's permission, I will merely check over my plane first and—"
"What the devil do we have ground crews for? Why do we have plane captains?" broke in the doctor. "They'll check the plane better than you can... What's your profession?"
"A lawyer, sir."
"Well, you can't talk yourself out of my hands, even if you use Dutch. Get on in there."
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I have a necessary engagement this evening, and if I am permitted to report tomorrow morning—" said Peter.
"You have received an order, sir," said the major coldly.
"Yes, sir," said Peter Gerard and, turning slowly, he forced his feet to carry him through the doorway into the next room.
"Blood count!" roared the doctor after him.
"Yes, sir," said a distant voice, and the door closed behind Peter.
"What do you think of that, Nelly?" asked Doctor Grace.
"He seemed, actually, to be a little afraid of the hospital, doctor, didn't he?"
"Of course he is. He's afraid of anything that may keep him out of the air. Don't you understand why?"
"No, doctor."
"Can't you guess?"
"Perhaps it's because he's so eager to make a great score?"
"Do you really think that?"
"No," decided Nelly, "I don't think he's very eager about anything."
"You're wrong again," declared Doctor Grace. "He's eager to do one thing in the whole world."
"To do what, doctor?"
"To die.... Come, come, now, don't fall into a state of shock. Hamlet was only a fellow in a book, but there have been crowds like him who've lost their taste for living. How do we know what the war has taken from Peter Gerard or what's left for him? He's lost something—he's lost his country and perhaps something more. I intend to find out what it is." He commenced to walk the floor. "Babies, babies, all of them," he growled. "Babies that can't speak or won't."
The door opened from the hall and into the room came a young air-force group captain, big and broad enough to be a weight- lifter. Two sergeants were behind him.
"Yes, Allan, what do you want?" snapped the doctor, continuing to pace the room.
"Good afternoon, doctor," said the big young man. "I understand that a Lieutenant Gerard has just reported to you?"
"What of it?"
"I'd like very much to have a word with him."
"You can't."
"Is he that badly hurt, doctor?" asked the captain.
"No. But in a way, yes. Don't bother me."
There was a moment of pause.
"Very well," said the captain stiffly. "Good afternoon, sir."
He had turned to the door again when the doctor said, "Wait a minute, Denham. Come back here. How long have you known this Gerard?"
"I've never seen him, but—"
"Then you're no use to me.... Hold on a minute. Why do you want to see him?"
"Will you tell me one thing first?" asked Denham. "Perhaps."
"Was he badly wounded this afternoon?"
"No. Not this afternoon."
"I'm glad—I'm very glad of that," said Denham, taking breath.
"Why?" asked the doctor. "What's the matter with you three?" He looked at the two sergeants. "What does Lieutenant Gerard mean to you?"
"He's been keeping the flies off Baby all afternoon," said Denham, grinning. "Baby Blue is our bomber, you know, and the Jerries almost had us. One motor gone and the other coughing. When we began to trail smoke, you should have seen the Jerries come for us, zooming."
"And this Gerard kept them away, did he?"
The older of the two sergeants said, "The finest thing I ever saw, sir."
"Stood up there over us and knocked them away," said Denham. "I think he got four, didn't he, Joe?"
"And another one was awful sick," said Joe.
"He stayed upstairs for us all the way home," said Denham. "Didn't have a pint left when we landed. We went over to the fighter strip and asked for the pilot of that Spitfire, but he wasn't there, and when we found out that he was in the hospital—"
"What do they think of him in his squadron?" cut in the doctor.
Denham hesitated. "Well," he said, "the fact is—"
"They don't like him, do they? Too dark and deep, eh? Good Englishmen don't like faces that haven't the look of plenty of beef and beer. The man won't talk; looks as though he had a bellyache all the while?"
"They seem—well, not very fond of him. But we are, doctor. May we see him for a moment?"
"The three of you? I wouldn't crowd him."
"I'm sorry, boys," said Denham.
"All right, sir," said Joe. "You'll talk for all of us, sir."
The sergeants went out.
"Step in there and get Gerard for me, Nelly," said the doctor.
She hurried into the next room.
"Is something very wrong?" asked Denham.
"About as wrong as could be, Allan," said the doctor. "This Dutchman is one of the suicide boys. You understand?"
Peter Gerard came back, with his shirt on once more.
"This is Captain Allan Denham. Peter Gerard," said the doctor. "He flew the bomber you herded in today."
"It was a sweet piece of flying, and shooting, too, mind you," said Captain Denham, as they shook hands. "It was a bit of all right."
"Captain Denham," said Peter, "you make too much of it. It was like fishing. Your plane was perfect bait, and as their fighters kept rising, I only had to sit on the bank, so to speak, and keep dropping in my hook. I was too small for them to see."
Denham looked at him for a moment and then made up his mind to laugh.
"I'm glad you're here, Allan," said the doctor. "I've just remembered your park at Denham Hall. A good place for resting. Well, I want you to take this fellow home with you and find out what's thinned his blood."
"I beg your pardon," said Peter, troubled.
But the doctor went on loudly, "Or else I'm putting you in a hospital bed for a fortnight. You hear me, lieutenant? ... He's a sick man, Allan, and I may not have the right kind of medicine here."
"You are under the weather?" said Denham, looking him over. "They've nicked you too often and taken too much out of you. I'm for home tomorrow, if you can arrange to come."
"I'll do the arranging," said the doctor.
SO, on Friday, Peter Gerard was with Denham in a big charabanc
loaded with men off on leave. The captain did what he could to
make conversation, but it was little use. The Hollander was
perfectly but formally polite and his attention wandered away
from time to time toward the hills and big, open woodlands, as
though all that beauty were something far removed and dimly to be
wondered at. His silence was that of a man enduring constant
pain. They got out at Denham Hall and walked up through the park
to the house. It was the classical country home, with trees as
old as England, lawns smoothed by centuries of rolling, and all
the romantic nonsense of evergreen labyrinths, a model little
Chinese garden, and iron deer standing alert in the clearings.
The hall itself was a big Georgian place with Ionian columns
about the entrance. Denham led the way past this.
"We live in the south wing," he said. "You know how it is since all the fugitives have been crowding into England; every room is working and the owners just take what's assigned to them. It's the only way."
Denham's wife opened the door to them. She was a pretty girl, but as still as a mouse, and one had to look twice to discover her charm. She held Peter's hand for an extra instant as they met.
"Allan has told us about you," she said, "and we're very, very happy to have you here."
In spite of her quiet, he had a sense of entering her life deeply and intimately.
For living quarters they had only the great hall of the house, a fifty-foot room screened into sections. The kitchenette was arranged around the huge fireplace to use its flue; the dining- room portion contained a big table with a mosaic top and gilded legs. There were tall mirrors everywhere and several ancestors were framed on the walls—a woman with a starched ruff choking her, a dyspeptic gentleman in armor, and other faces looking out at them through darkening windows of the past.
There were no closets, but there were improvised racks for hats and coats and clothes thrust out from the wall which gave an effect like a laundry or a cleaner's shop. A bow window was curtained off for the bedroom of Denham's sister, and Peter was to sleep on the living-room couch. While he was being shown around, the sister came home from the factory across the fields. She wore overalls thick with grease, and had a black smudge across the bridge of her nose. She was one of those rare girls who are not tied up in the hips and shoulders, and she walked with a good easy swing and brought down the heels of her brogans with as hard a thump as any boy. She slumped into a Louis Quinze chair, hands in pockets and feet far apart.
"Man, am I tired!" she said. "We came within five pieces of the plant record today, my gang did; and my boss says I'm as good a man as any of the lot of them."
"This is Peter Gerard. Charlie," said her sister-in-law.
"Hello, Peter," said the girl.... "Is that beef I'm smelling, Audrey? You haven't some real beef in that oven, have you?"
"Charlie!" said Audrey. "Don't you understand? This is the man who brought Allan back safe from Dunkirk."
"Oh, no, is it?" said Charlie. All the pertness faded out of her instantly. She came over to Peter and took his hand. "But you don't seem so terribly—I mean, I wouldn't have expected you to—" she said.
She had fallen into such confusion that she could not finish the sentence, except with a bit of laughter.
"I'm not a bit that way, I hope," said Peter, smiling a little, and just then there was a tremendous crashing fall on the floor above them, and a prolonged struggling.
"It's that pair of Danes practicing jujitsu again," said Audrey. "They have a plan for kidnaping Hitler, I think."
But while Denham laughed with the others, he was watching his Hollander with a curiously deepened interest, for he had not expected this lighter touch. It was like laughter in a sickroom.
"Go wash your dirty face, darling," said Audrey, loving her with her eyes.
"All right," said Charlie.
"And put on that blue frock."
"Do you like blue?" Charlie asked Peter, over her shoulder. "It's my lucky color."
"It's my favorite," he said, and once more Denham felt deep approval.
"Gin and bitters?" asked Denham. "It's the making of the British navy, you know."
You can tell a great deal about a man by the way he takes his gin and bitters. Peter absorbed his like a fellow with an iron palate.
"We're awfully crowded here," said Denham. "I hope you won't mind."
Then dinner came on, and Charlie appeared in the blue dress with a red flower in her hair. Now that her hair was up and the smudge off her nose, she was a very pretty thing to look at. But it was the roast beef that had to be admired in wartime, not a mere girl. There were only two ribs of it, but the family stood about with exclamations, and then Allan carved it with geometrical precision, into four exact quarters. His wife put away the trimmed bones for soup.
Charlie wanted to talk about the war.
"Tell me the best tricks you have in the air," she said to the guest. "What do you think up in the pinches?"
"It's just a matter of patience and training," he told her.
"Ah, is that it? ... Listen. Allan," said Charlie, "and maybe you can learn to be something more than just an old soldier."
"You train your plane very carefully," Peter explained to her, "and then, when you get in trouble, your Spitfire does all the thinking for you, just like a circus seal."
It pleased Charlie. They all laughed, and doors were opening to admit him more deeply to their company.
"And when you see the Jerries," she said fiercely, "what's the first thing you think of?"
"I only hope they won't hurt me too much, too soon," he told her.
Charlie shone on him. "I'm so glad you brought him home, Allan," she said. "You never had such good taste before. Why, he's just silly and one of us—just exactly!"
She was so wholly bright and gay that even Peter seemed to be forgetting everything except this moment. There was added to the cheerfulness a phonograph somewhere in the house, playing a concerto by Mozart, as careless and beautiful as bird song, and no louder. Still farther off in the house, men's voices began suddenly to sing Holland's great marching song that has carried her men to war so many times.
"Those are the Dutchmen that were moved into the north wing today," said Charlie. "Ah, I forgot that they are your people, Peter. Perhaps you'll have friends among them?"
"Friends? Yes, perhaps," he answered.
The song kept rising. When there is food and any drinking, the spirits of young men cannot help lifting, but as the volume swelled and the words entered the room more clearly, the eyes of Peter forgot his companions and looked away at something that faded and dwindled in an unhappy distance. Audrey and Allan looked quickly down at the table, but Charlie kept her eyes fixed upon his face of pain.
THE couch made an ample bed for Peter that night, but as he
tried to sleep, the moon slipped through the window and shone in
his eyes. He sighed, utterly spent, but an old premonition told
him that he would wait vainly for sleep now, hour after hour, so
he got up and dressed and went, as soundlessly as he could, out
of the house, with his image walking beside him in the great
mirrors.
It was warm summer night in the park. No matter how late, the phonograph still kept alive the tremor of Mozart's violins, so that the music followed him among the trees until he came to a fountain that was tossing its bright head in the moonlight and keeping up a murmur like the soft rushing of wind. The fountain figure was a Diana, with bow in one hand and the other arm over the neck of a deer. On the big stone bench, with her chin on her fist, Charlotte was contemplating Artemis with a frown.
"This is a bit late, Charlie, isn't it?" he asked her.
"I'm all right," she said. "I'm not a wounded aviator."
She was a little sharp about it, and instead of walking on, he said, "May I sit down?"
"Just bend your knees," said Charlie.
He took the place beside her and offered a cigarette. She said no, brusquely, so he lighted one and blew the white smoke at the moon. They were silent for a time.
"What do you think of that Diana?" she asked, breaking in on him.
"Silly, isn't she?" he said.
"You bet she is," agreed Charlie, sourly. "I don't like her or anything she stands for."
"Am I wrong in thinking that you don't talk very much like most English girls?" he asked.
"I had an American friend, is why," said Charlie. "He was swell. So I picked up some of his lingo. No good?"
"I like it very much," he told her. "I think it goes."
"With me, you mean?"
"Yes. Because you're brisk. And you go about things with a good swing."
"Like a boy?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm not a boy."
"Of course not," he agreed.
"I don't feel so brisk and easy just now, either," she told him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You didn't sleep well?"
"I did not. And why, do you think?"
"A little indigestion?" he inquired, with concern.
"Indigestion?" she said, and looked at him with disgust. "I wish it were only that!"
He waited. She said nothing.
Then she said, "I went and fell in love. Bang! Just like that."
"But isn't that all right?" he asked.
"No, it's miserable. I can't even draw a deep breath.... Did you ever?"
"Draw a deep breath?"
"No, fall in love?"
He was startled. "Yes," he said, after a moment.
"Just like that—bang?"
"Yes," he confessed, "Just like that—bang!"
"You would," she said. "You'd be that way, all right. But did you fall in the right place?"
"Yes," he said; "right while it lasted."
At this, she looked quickly up to him, then she began to stroke the lion's head that made the arm of the bench.
"Tell me about it, will yon?" she asked.
"No, please."
"Poor Peter," she said, "you're in dreadful pain. I know what it is. Oh, I know!"
"Will you tell me about him?"
"No.... But why shouldn't I? He's a foreigner, and that's bad, isn't it?"
"I'm a bit foreign, too, you know."
"Yes. I suppose you are," said Charlie, sighing.
"He must be very happy about it," he suggested.
"No. It's all rotten," said Charlie. "Tell me something."
"Yes?"
"You're one of those forever-and-ever people, aren't you?" she asked, sharply and suddenly.
"Perhaps," he answered, smiling at her. "I'm afraid so."
"I am too," said Charlie. "And don't smile."
"Certainly not," said he.
"Oh, Peter, it's so horrible. And I'm so sick, sort of, in the stomach."
"That's the way it is," he told her. "It would do you good to talk about him, probably."
"He's glorious and wonderful and modest and gentle and sweet and everything," she said. "Do you believe me?"
"Of course I do, Charlie."
"Isn't it rotten to have a name like that? How can a man be serious about a girl named Charlie?"
"Millions of men could, I'm sure," he said.
She jumped up. "I'm going for a walk. I can't stand it here. It's so stuffy. I wish—I wish there were a storm or something," she said.
"Shall I go with you?" he asked.
"No, no, no. I want to be alone," said Charlie. She changed her voice, "I don't mean to be rude."
"You're not, my dear," said he. "And I hope you'll be happier, too, someday."
"Thank you, Charlie."
"But I should wish just one thing—that you could see a little more clearly—especially by moonlight."
"But I see very well, actually," he answered, astonished.
However, she was already hurrying away at a walk, and then at a run. He looked after her and shook his head, but he had realized long before that he never would be able to understand any of these English very well.
IT was strange what peace and what relief from pain there was
for Peter with the Denhams. But by noon Sunday he was growing
nervous. From the windows, the three of them watched him striding
off through the garden that morning, moving at an eager, quick
step.
"What is it?" asked Audrey softly. "What do you think. Allan?"
"Look here," said Denham. "A man loses his country, his friends, his property—everything. Is it surprising that he's pretty much down? Expect him to be the life of the party? At that, he tries to do his share."
"He as much as told me. It's a woman," said Charlie.
"I don't think so, dear," said Audrey. Why not?" said Charlie. "Because it's old-fashioned for a man to be quite like that about a woman," she answered.
"He is old-fashioned," said Charlie, half angrily.
"Some of the refugees actually go out of their heads, you know," suggested Denham through pipe smoke.
"He makes the best sense I ever heard," said Charlie, "but his heart's gone."
"I don't think it's a girl, old thing," said Denham, "If it were, he's had something to make him forget her."
"Such as what, please?" asked Charlie,
"You, Charlie," said Audrey, smiling.
"Me? Oh, good Lord, Audrey, he thinks I'm nothing. I'm a juvenile. I'm a boy. That's all."
"You're plenty," said her brother, "and you've been handing yourself to him on a silver tray."
"He doesn't like that, does he?" asked Charlie wistfully. "He wants something that has to be hunted down and won, and all that. Men don't want gifts. They want to gamble."
"Darling," said Audrey, "aren't you a little embarrassed?" She smiled as she spoke, but she was a bit shocked.
"Why should I be embarrassed?" asked Charlie, opening her eyes. "Do you think I'm proud? I'd beg, borrow or steal him, if I could."
"Well, that's what will happen, then," said Denham.
"His heart's in the highlands, his heart is not here," said Charlie. "His heart's in the highlands, a-followin' the deer. Oh, damn it all. He'll be leaving by noon, you know."
"He's here for a fortnight. Doctor's orders," said Denham. "I told you all about that."
"What's doctor's orders to that kind of a man?" asked Charlie. "You'll see."
They had a chance, actually, before noon. Peter Gerard came in with a bit of color from his walk, but with a troubled look. He took Denham aside to say, "I find I have unfinished business that will take me back to camp."
"You're here under doctor's orders, you know," Denham warned him.
"Of course, I shall see Major Grace as soon as I return," said Peter. He went to put his things in his bag.
"Was I right," whispered Charlie.
"You were," agreed Denham.
"Oh, I wish I'd been wrong—I wish I'd been wrong," said Charlie, and flung out of the house.
They watched her hurrying over the lawn. A group of the young Dutchmen hailed her, but she went past them with lowered bead and left them staring after her.
"This is all getting too romantic and silly," declared Denham, but his wife silenced him with a look as Peter joined them again, carrying his baggage.
"Have you rested a little here, really?" Audrey asked him.
"It was like catching up with year of sleep," he said. "Won't I have a chance to say good-by to Charlie?"
Audrey looked at him with an odd smile. "She's having the blues," she said.
"I hope she won't be too serious about that fellow, whoever he is," Peter ventured to say.
"Has she told you about him?" asked Audrey suddenly.
"Yes. Do you know him? She told me that he wasn't English," said Peter, "and that bothered me a little."
"Did it?" said Audrey, lifting her brows.
"I mean, it's somewhat difficult to judge people who are strange to one's ways of living and speaking, don't you think?" asked Peter.
"Not always," said Denham curtly.
"You know this man quite well, do you?" said Peter.
"Yes, I know him well."
"And, of course, he's all right?" asked Peter of Audrey.
"I think he is," she answered. "I think he's very much all right. Poor Charlie!"
"Come along," said Allan.
Peter went down the path with him toward the bus stop.
"Just a bit enigmatic, aren't they—young girls, I mean?" suggested Peter.
"Some of the men are a little balmy too," said Allan, strangely sour.
DOCTOR GRACE discouraged the loitering of malingerers in the
waiting-room of his hospital by filling it only with benches that
had no backs, and on one of these Peter spent four hours that
afternoon, sitting erect and permitting the world to recede until
the sounds and motions were no more important than the winds and
rains and voices of last year, which he never could feel or bear
again.
The doctor himself opened the door presently, and, seeing the dreamer who had forgotten the world, he walked to him and sat down on the bench at his side.
There he remained for a moment, steadily watching, but there was not a sign from Peter.
After a while the doctor said, "Pleasant place, that Denham Hall, isn't it? And what did you think of Lady Maud?"
Peter, opening the invisible shutter that had closed off his brain, saw Major Grace sitting near him on the bench.
"I hadn't the pleasure of meeting Lady Maud, sir," he said.
"You couldn't help it," said the doctor. "For three hundred years she's been hanging on the wall and scratching out everybody's eyes. How's Charlie?"
"She's fallen in love," said Peter.
"Not seriously," said the major. "Wait a moment.... Yes, by heaven, she's old enough now. My sweet Charlie in love! Who's the man?"
"Not English, it seems," said Peter, with concern, "and that's, perhaps, a difficulty."
"You think so?"
"I mean that emotions aren't readily translated, for one thing. And Charlie is so wholehearted that, if she were wrong, she might continue wrong the rest of her life. Don't you agree?"
"You like her?"
"I think she's very charming. She's like—well, she's like nothing but herself."
"I hope you told her that," said the doctor.
"I wonder if I did?" mused Peter.
"This foreigner—what do Audrey and Allan think of him?"
"They both seem to approve, as a matter of fact."
"Tell me his name, will you?"
"Wasn't it stupid of me not to ask?" said Peter, shaking his head at himself.
The doctor drummed his fingers for a time on his bared teeth, an ugly habit of his, and studied Peter with a blank eye that was like a piece of witless optical glass.
"So you couldn't stay down there for a couple of weeks?" he asked.
"With your permission, sir?" asked Peter hopefully.
"You come from Rotterdam," said the doctor. "When were you last there?"
"On May fifteenth, sir."
"That was the day after the bombing?"
"Yes, sir."
"As I remember it, the Jerries told the Rotterdam people to show red flares if they surrendered, so as to avoid being bombed. They showed the flares and then the Jerries came right on in to bomb?"
"Yes, sir."
"And strafe?"
"They flew over just above the tops of the houses," said Peter. He spoke very slowly and began to draw himself up straighter. "They machine-gunned the people in the streets. All together, I think thirty thousand died."
"Your own family, Peter?"
"My grandmother, my wife."
The doctor was silent for a long moment. "I don't think we'll insist on hospitalization for you," he said at last. "You may report to your commander when you please."
"Thank you, sir. Then permit me?"
"Certainly," said the doctor, and watched the Dutchman turn smartly and retire with a thirty-inch step in a soldier's cadence.
IT was not long after this that Peter's squadron was ordered
to France, where the sky was filling with the German planes and
the panzer divisions set the country thundering and echoing like
an iron bridge. The squadron was always in retreat, based on one
airfield after another, closer and closer to Paris. When Peter
had a chance to take a look at the city, it was because his plane
had been shot out from under him, and he had to wait for a new
ship.
Those days of the fall of France were not like anything else that ever was on earth. A whole continent, twenty centuries of thought and being were burning like a grass fire, and yet there was a sort of gaiety in the air, a crazy, reckless laughter; for France, as she burned, cast a bright light. Time was the only thing that mattered—time for help to come from England, time to halt the Germans or time to escape from them. Money was nothing. People spent the savings of years in a day, and the night places were jammed. Napoleon brandy was the drink, and the oldest Burgundies and Bordeaux.
Peter wandered through the Paris night, watching the queer ways of people who are dying before they have been touched by death, for the soil of France is as close as flesh to the Frenchman, and now there were conquerors devouring the country, sacred name by name.
That night the Place de la Madeleine was jammed with people, so that the busses had to crawl through at a walking pace, their horns screeching. Peter was far out in the street, away from the curb, when he was passing that famous old restaurant, Larue's. A gay party from the place was taking taxicabs—men in white ties, women in dinner dresses and summer furs. But all he was seeing of them was one girl with dark hair and eyes as she looked up to the man beside her. The shock in his blood and in his brain made him dumb for a moment, but then he shouted, "Nancy! Nancy!" in such a voice that people twisted about to look at him.
The pressure of the crowd was too great to permit rapid motion. Peter struggled like a fly on sticky paper. He yelled her name again, waving his hand frantically, and now she looked directly toward him. Her eyes met his, dwelt on them, and passed him over without the slightest recognition. The next moment she had disappeared in the cab. He saw it move away through the crowd, cutting a way with its horn, and still he was shouting, helplessly far away.
He went hack to his hotel, bewildered, like a man walking between two worlds, for he had forgotten the hope of happiness.
At his hotel, when the concierge saw Peter's face, he was amazed. "Has the war ended for you, monsieur?" he asked. Peter had him put two men on the telephones to check every hotel in Paris where there was any likelihood that Nancy might stay. There was a surer way than that of getting her address. He tried to put through a call to Nancy's Aunt Olivia in England, who would be in touch with her, certainly, but, of course, he discovered at once that all the lines were pre-empted by the government or the military.
Then he thought of the newspapers. He could go to a newspaper and advertise.
On the advertising form at a newspaper office he wrote, "Leaving Larue's restaurant at ten last night was Mrs. Peter Gerard, five feet, five inches tall, dark hair, blue eyes, age twenty-two, wearing a black dress, a white summer fur. Two thousand francs reward for quick information giving her address."
When be finally got to the window to put in his ad, the clerk was reading out the notice turned in by the woman who had preceded him, his pencil checking the number of the words and his dull voice reciting, "Lost, one chow dog, answering to the name of Alex, soot-black around the muzzle, with a distinguished carriage."
The evening went by in confusion, like the shuffling of a peck of cards. In the Crillon Bar he discovered that alcohol once more had a taste and an effect. It was tremendously jammed and people were tipping with hundred-franc notes.
Midmorning of the next day. Madame Charent came to see Peter with a copy of his advertisement in her hand. She was a lean old crow, but she still dressed her feathers smartly. If one did not see the hungry evil of her face, she still had the outline and the air of any young cocotte on the hunt for men.
"You have seen my wife?" asked Peter.
"Wife?" said Madame Charent, and grinned horribly at him. "Yes, monsieur!"
Peter grew a little sick, but he could not have said why. "You know where she is now?"
"She is with me," said this hag.
Peter stared at her. It was impossible not to think certain thoughts that took the blood out of his brain and left him dizzy.
"Let us go at once, then," he said.
"Certainly, monsieur, after we have made our little arrangement."
"Will you tell me why you are sure that it is she?" he asked.
"Monsieur, she was last night at Larue's. She wore a black dress. She had a white summer fur. And she is five feet and five inches tall."
"And her name?" asked Peter, still strangely dubious.
"Monsieur, names are not people."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean that I am a busy woman. Do I return alone or does monsieur come with me?"
He put two big, garish thousand-franc notes into her hand, which closed hard over the money to digest its meaning. Then she took him to the house.
It was a mansion not far from the Étoile, four tall stories of dignity under a classical cornice, and half a dozen expensive cars parked up and down the curb seemed to go with it.
"Monsieur Henri Lavigny's house," said Madame Charent. "His widow is studying ways of forgetting him."
To illustrate her point, a burst of laughing voices, men and women together, came ringing from an open window through the warm June air.
They went into a great entrance hall paved with a checkering of black-and-white marble, and the eyes of Peter touched on a pedestal that supported a Greek head in marble, a girl's head with a pathetic, mutilated smile; nothing else entered his mind except the sense of cool space as he went up the grand staircase with Madame Charent.
"They are all in madame's room," she said, as they entered the upper hall. "She doesn't sleep well, except when she has company. So she keeps around her the people who have lost.
"Lost?" asked Peter.
"Yes, yes," said Madame Charent. "You meet them everywhere today. Those who have lost an address, a country, a fortune or a wife."
She pushed open a door. Cigarette smoke misted the interior and a pungent fragrance like that of an expensive bar came out to Peter.
"One moment, please," said Madame Charent, and stepped into the doorway.
"Pardon, messieurs-'dames," said Madame Charent in a loud voice. "There has arrived Monsieur Peter Gerard, who has lost a wife. He believes that she is here."
A woman's voice said, "I don't recognize the name, but then, names are so variable. Has any of you misplaced a husband?"
There was laughter.
"Who is this Monsieur Gerard?" asked the woman.
"An English aviator, madame," said the porter's wife.
"A flier? Then bring him in and let the poor fellow see with his own eyes that she isn't here."
Madame Charent turned to Peter.
"You see, monsieur, that you are welcome; you are almost waited for," she said and, drawing him into the room, she closed herself out.
There was a mist of smoke, and beyond the mist a dazzle of sunshine slanted from a window, and beyond the dazzle sat his wife. The rest of the world was lost to him. If the moment of coming death floods the mind with a swift montage of the life that is about to end, then this instant was the end of dying, and as he looked toward Nancy the saddest moments of his grief since be had lost her came back in pictures now made rather beautiful because this joy was in the ending.
In this way, blindly, for a second, be was drifting out of unhappiness into a glory; but then reality returned and he saw that the girl found nothing in him. She had looked at him and her eyes were passing on, and to her he was nothing.
The pain from which he had almost escaped poured back through the familiar channel in his heart. The room closed around him.
There were seven people, still in dinner clothes, and two servants. In the bed, against a heap of pillows, reposed Madame Lavigny in a nightgown ruffled about the throat and sleeves. A crisp little maid leaned over the bed to brush the hair of her mistress. Madame Lavigny was in her early thirties, still pretty, though somewhat damaged about the eyes. By dieting and exercise, she had scrupulously adhered to her original lines. She said, "I'm so sorry for your loss. Won't you rest here with us a while?" She held out her hand.
Peter, all trembling, kissed the hand. Yonder by the window he had seen the bright ghost of Nancy again.
"You are overwrought, my poor friend," said Madame Lavigny kindly. "Perhaps we can help you a little, because we are trying to pretend that nothing matters.... Hal, introduce Peter to everyone.... Gaston, some wine for monsieur." Hal was an Englishman of fifty, silver-haired, lean and hard of face. He had the sardonic air of one who observes life without sharing in it. He shook hands with Peter, his eyes touching intelligently on the barred ribbons which decorated Peter's uniform. He began to speak with an impersonal detachment.
There was a blond girl with a smile that kept persisting as though through the force of a life habit, though her eyes were emptied of happiness.
"This is Elsa," said the Englishman.
"How do you do, Peter?" she said, and looked at him with a mournful touch of hope that died instantly.
"We have decided to use first names only," explained Hal, "in the short time that's left to us.... Elsa has left a title and everything but a few family jewels behind her in Leipzig, because at the last moment the Nazis discovered just how anti-Hitler she is.... And this is Sonya."
Sonya was dark, with high coloring and an ugly intelligent face. She stood up to shake hands. "I'm very happy to see you. My brother also, it was in the air that he was fighting," she said.
"Sonya is Russian, of course," said Hal. "She and I are old friends of Madame Lavigny, but now there is no difference between old and new, because there is a very near and dear fraternity of pain.... And here by the window is someone we find so lovely that it is extremely difficult to see, at times, the shadow that goes with her brightness. This is Adrienne."
He was bowing to this strange duplication of Nancy.
"How do you do, Peter," she said, and the voice also was familiar, yet it did not seem quite Nancy. It lacked something, he felt, of the clear small music of that voice, which, over a telephone, sounded like a child, desolate, lost. Or perhaps he was too shocked to hear clearly, for the girl looked at him without the least recognition. Was not this Adrienne older also? And even while smiling she established distances between herself and the world. His voice stopped in his throat. He could not speak.
The Saturday Evening Post, 17 Jun 1944, with 2nd part of "After April"
THE Englishman continued kindly, covering his silence, "The two hundred and twenty pounds yonder drinking champagne out of a tumbler—that handsome young man is Jimmy. He is a football hero; he sells automobiles, and he practices yoga so be can drink more champagne and have smaller headaches. As for me, I am the skeleton at the feast. If there is beauty, there ought to be also a beast, don't you think? But I've almost overlooked André. He is a racing driver, a little too rough to win many races."
Being much the nearest, André shook bands with Peter first.
"Be careful of him, Peter," said Madame Lavigny. "He sometimes breaks fingers, he's so rugged.... Aren't you rugged, André?"
André grinned at Peter. "Very happy," he said, and bore down with the full force of his grip. But there is a trick, in shaking hands, of holding out the forefinger and pressing it against the wrist tendons. Peter had learned it years ago from his fencing master.
"Damn!" said André. "So you know about that?" He laughed very cheerfully. "This is a real one," he said.
"Of course he is," said Hal. "Unhappiness is always real. How do I know that I am, that I have being? Well, sir, in spite of Bishop Berkeley, let someone step on my toe and all doubt leaves me. I suggest that you talk to Sonya. She is real, too, and sorrow kills sorrow, you know. Like cancels like."
The manservant, who wore a crisp white coat, gave Peter a glass of champagne as he remained standing beside Adrienne at the window.
"Nancy," he said.
A small ripple of shadow ran over her face. "Nancy?" she echoed, with a touch of concern.
He had counted up the differences between her and that which was lost to him, and yet the similarity remained so overwhelming that he could not believe in a chance exquisitely cruel as this nearness which, it seemed, was merely cold illusion.
Nothing rose in her eyes to greet him as he showed her a golden medal struck with the bearded head and the name of the great Admiral de Ruyter. It was a little twisted, and marred with a sharp indentation. "Do you remember?" he asked. "Nothing?" She shook her head as she looked. The big American was quite drunk. Now he stared at Peter with huge, solemn eyes.
"He thinks she may have forgotten him," he said. Someone laughed, but Madame Lavigny said, "Hush, hush! No one, please, be unkind."
From the corner of his eye, Peter could see her touch her finger to her forehead. They thought him out of his mind. Now this Adrienne was humoring him.
She looked up at him with the kindest eyes in the world, saying, "Sit down here in the window seat, please, and talk to me."
He sat down as a woman in the street below began to scream, not wordlessly, but with such a rapid flow of protest that not a syllable was clear.
"Quick, Hal," said Madame Lavigny. "Drown her out with the radio."
The Englishman spun the dials, and after an instant a loud voice exclaimed from the air, "The planes of France are swept from the sky. The Maginot Line now is helpless, taken from the rear. Our brave armies are dashed to pieces by a metal monster. Paris is declared an open city. Our time grows short, but, nevertheless, let it be glorious. The final judgment on a man or a country is not how we live, but how we die."
Hal snapped off the radio quickly, but Madame Lavigny already was weeping silently. "I'm very sorry," said Hal.
"You have reason, monsieur," said the maid, looking at him almost with hate. "She's started again, and may God tell me what to do now!"
"Give her more air," said Jimmy.
He went to the bed, and in his enormous arms swept up Madame Lavigny together with the bedding that covered her. This bundle he walked with, lightly, up and down before the windows. She kept sobbing with bitter, hopeless grief.
"There, there, honey," said the giant. "Don't you be worrying too much, but just let yourself go. Let go all holds. Henri's not in the room, but he may be mighty close to us. Why, Louise, a man's out of sight the minute be just steps around a corner, but the thing that counts is knowing what a fellow is, not where he is. Jimmy's going to take you out to Texas, where there's two- three hundred miles for your eyes to handle of a morning, and he's going to put you on a rocking-chair mustang and ride you right into the blue of the hills where you can't tell how the mountains leave off and the sky begins."
The maid had been following as her mistress was carried back and forth. Presently, she said softly, "She is asleep. Monsieur Jimmy, and God reward you."
He took her back to the bed and laid her down gently. She remained deeply asleep, one arm falling out helplessly beside her.
"Shall we go now?" asked Sonya, whispering.
"No, no," said the maid, "but keep on talking or she'll be awake in a moment again."
Adrienne had been following all this with an interest so intense that her face was open to the study of Peter, and by this time be had looked into her as deeply as into a well. She began to give him her attention again.
"You seem better now," she said. "Aren't things beginning to clear up for you a little?"
"May I ask you a few questions—Adrienne?" he asked.
She smiled at him as though pleased to hear him use the name. "None of us asks questions here," she said gently.
"It's only to find out to whom you belong."
"Oh, Peter, must we all be owned by someone?"
"I mean your mother and father?"
"Everyone in my life is dead."
"Adrienne?"
"Yes, Peter?"
"If I speak to you about your uncle and your Aunt Olivia in England, does that mean nothing?"
"You terribly want it to mean something, don't you?"
"Yes, terribly."
"And it seems to you that once we were very close and dear to each other?"
"Yes, so it seems."
"I'm so, so sorry," she said, with infinite kindness.
He was unable to speak, and, as though she could not endure his pain, she put her hand over his.
He heard Elsa saying softly, "André, when they reach me, will you promise to be close?"
"Yes, always."
"And they're not to have me? You will make it so that I die?"
"Yes, yes. Elsa."
The moaning voice of Madame Lavigny said, "Poor Peter, he also has lost something forever. He must bring his things and stay with us here."
"I shall be very happy to," said Peter, rising.
"Then I can sleep again," she sighed, and closed her eyes.
"If I take my eyes from you," said Peter to Adrienne, "you won't dissolve in thin air? I won't lose you?"
"I'll stay flesh and blood, I promise," she answered, trying to smile.
IT was not easy to move in Paris that day. Peter had thought
of rushing to his hotel and quickly back again, but even in the
last hour there was a change and the whole population seemed to
be pouring into the streets in flight.
Loudspeakers in the squares, here and there, were bawling out details of the fall of France. The panzer divisions were everywhere. The German army had become ubiquitous throughout the land and the world was falling in ruins. Peter found himself struggling against strong currents of people who had in their eyes a vision. It was a long time before he found a taxi stopped in a traffic jam.
The taxi drivers of Paris are a race apart. They are only half French and the rest is pure devil. Rain cannot penetrate their hides, wine cannot make them drunk. They have the voices of foghorns, the manners of pirates, and, like cats, they can see in the dark. This fellow Peter had found was like a cat with a shaved face. However, he got Peter to the hotel, where he packed his bag and then found nobody at the desk to receive the money for his bill. He put a generous amount on the counter, and, even as he was turning, saw it snatched up by another hand, but that hardly mattered. Perhaps before long in this dissolution of the universe he would stop making even the gesture of honesty.
He was back in the taxi now, passing a hundred francs to the driver to encourage him to hasten. But there was no need. Inspired, the man blasted holes in the thickest traffic with his screeching horn. Even so, they were at a crawling pace most of the way, and thought came back into the mind of Peter. This land, famous for beauty, was to be possessed by Germans, just as Nancy was now possessed of another name and soul. However, there is in this world courage to endure and love that may heal.
When he reached the house of dead Henri Lavigny, he saw the front door standing wide open, and somehow this was a curious shock to him. He asked the driver to wait, and hurried inside. The wind passed before him into the lofty hall. In a panic now, be ran up the staircase to the room of madame.
It was empty. It looked as though a looting army already had passed through. Chairs were overturned. The great pier glass which had held the beauty of Louise Lavigny so often was cracked across from top to bottom, and the clothes of the bed slumped in a long twist onto the floor. Drawers had been jerked open, a hundred small objects littered the room, and the chair by the window seat was empty.
He fled out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs with a wild voice that rang in his ears, calling, "Nancy! Adrienne! Nancy!" But it was unlike any sound he had ever uttered before. To have lost her once was nothing, but this was forever.
On the lower floor, he turned back into the house, through a great formal drawing room with a silk Persian rug on the floor, then into a state dining room, where he found the same butler who had been serving the guests in the room of madame. He sat now with a wine cooler at his side and two bottles in it. On a silver platter before him was an omelet, and be was serving himself a portion of it onto a plate of white, exquisite china. He did not look up.
"They are gone? All?" cried Peter.
"All," said the butler, and took a good bite of the omelet, which he savored with care.
"Have you a ghost of an idea where?" asked Peter.
"Where?" asked the butler, and dismissed the idea with a shrug.
Peter dropped a handful of paper money beside the man. The fellow blew on it, and when it floated to the floor he laughed.
"To a new world, monsieur," he said, and drained a glass of the champagne.
Peter ran from the room and the house. His taxi driver, with a raised monkey wrench, was keeping back a crowd that wanted to enter his cab.
"Where are they going? What road are the people taking?" Peter asked him.
"South, on the Bordeaux road, monsieur," said the driver. He laughed, totally at ease. "This is like the Marne in reverse."
"Bordeaux, then," said Peter, committing himself to the gamble.
THAT road to Bordeaux was a picture of the end of the world.
There was no place to flee, but all France was fleeing, five
millions in Paris, three millions took to the road, and most of
them seemed to be on the way to Bordeaux.
There were automobiles of every size and kind; there were wagons, trucks and the huge, clumsy carts drawn by the stallions of the peasants; hayracks appeared, loaded with the goods of a whole family, even including the stove; dogs had packs strapped on their backs; there were handcarts with the man pushing at the handles, the wife and children tugging on a rope ahead.
The driver stopped his car. "There is no use, monsieur," he said.
"The traffic will clear presently," urged Peter.
"Listen, my friend!" said the driver, holding up a finger for attention, and far up the road into the horizon, chorus after chorus, Peter heard the horns singing out in protest. The jam was thick as far as yelling horns could be heard.
"Now we have the real democracy again," said the driver. "And every man does better on foot."
"I think you're right," said Peter, and paid three times the bill.
"Thank you, my friend," said the driver. "But if I were you, I would get out of that uniform. You see?" He pointed up, and high, high against the upper clouds Peter saw a great wedge of planes flying in threes. Into the motor uproar along the road the noise of the huge engines descended hoarsely, like the calling of wild geese on an autumn day when all the countryside lies asleep.
For hours, Peter struggled up the edges of the road or through fields beside it. There was not one automobile that he could afford to miss, for in the one he skipped might be Adrienne.
It was nearly five o'clock when he found her. She was almost lost in the rumble seat of a big roadster driven by Jimmy, the American, and at Jimmy's side was Madame Lavigny. Peter stepped on the rear bumper, and the girl turned her head to him with startled eyes. But a moment later she was smiling and holding out her hand.
"How have you found me?" she asked.
"Because there is something that keeps us from being too far apart," he said.
"Oh, is that it?" she said, shaking her head sadly over him.
"You still think that it's all illusion?" he said.
"We won't speak of it. The war gives visible and invisible wounds," she said, "but in all this dreadfulness, you and I will be kind to each other, won't we?"
"Yes, Adrienne. Yes, my dear."
She shrank from the word. She went on, "And if I say the smallest thing that gives you pain, will you tell me?"
The misery of speaking to the new ghost that now inhabited her was too much for him. He broke out, "Adrienne, isn't it possible for you to look back and remember something?"
"Do we have to look back?" she asked.
"Not if it makes you unhappy. Nothing that makes you unhappy."
"There is today, and isn't that enough?"
"Yes," he said. "Then that makes everything all right, so long as I'm here with you."
"Will that be half enough?" she asked, with such a wistfulness that his heart gave a great knock against his ribs.
"It must be. I shall make it enough," he said.
"And no questions, please, please?" she begged.
"There are no questions. Nothing matters. Everything else is gone."
"How kind you are!" she said. "How lovely and kind! No one else has been like this."
She looked more like Nancy than ever, for no matter how quick the flight from the Maison Lavigny had been, they had had time to change, and now she wore a gray suit of light summer tweed with a scarf of airy red chiffon about her throat.
"Don't you want this seat?" she asked, pointing to the place beside her.
Jimmy turned from behind the wheel and shook a finger at them.
"Steady; voices may wake her," he whispered.
And Peter saw that Madame Lavigny was soundly asleep, as though the frantic chorus of the horns were a soothing lullaby.
"I was so sorry to run off," Adrienne was explaining, "but the radio news became frightful all at once, and everybody wanted to leave. I simply blew along with the others, like a leaf."
Just ahead, voices shouted, and then, like sirens running up close to the ear in a nightmare, three dive-bombers screamed down out of the sky—straight down, it seemed. They flattened out, machine guns began to rattle like riveting machines. They were gone overhead, so close that Peter could see the smile of a pilot. After that, the automobile horns were silent as chickens after a hawk has swooped on the henyard, but from the swath which the Nazis had cut along the traffic, voices began to cry out in agony.
It was a fine, intimate taste of horror, and yet it meant wonderfully little to Peter compared with what he had seen in Adrienne during the attack. People had been throwing themselves out of cars to the road, crawling under the machines, regardless of the fact that long before they had found shelter, the attack would be past them at three hundred miles an hour, but Adrienne, with an odd smile, had sat up and watched the murder with a sort of bright interest. Nancy, who had been so timorous, what would the real Nancy have done? Another thought began to chill the blood of Peter, for just as he himself had flown against the Germans with a smile, because they could do him no further harm, so it seemed to him that there was the same cold heart behind the smile of the girl as she watched the machine guns spitting their rapid tongues of fire. It was mere illusion, be told himself, but he knew that it made of this moment something he never would forget.
"The thing to do is to try it on foot," said Peter.
"I wonder," said Adrienne calmly.
"We ought to get away from the main road and follow the side lanes that travel in the same direction. There might be even a lift for us, now and then."
She looked at him intently, patiently trying to read something in his face.
"I won't be bothering you with questions, Adrienne," he said.
"No, you won't, will you?" she decided. "Then I'll go.... Jimmy, good-by."
"Hush," Jimmy whispered. "She's still asleep. Can you beat that?"
THEY walked down crooked lanes that vaguely wound toward
Bordeaux among the thrifty fields of France and under spots of
shade from the pollarded trees which, every year, gave up their
crop of firewood. Nearly the whole way was deserted, except when
a stray automobile, now and then, rushed past them and left a
mist of dust in the air, slowly settling. And yet the fear of the
Germans had preceded them, and several times they saw, vanishing
far off on some other side way, the carts of peasants, hugely
piled with their belongings.
Adrienne, whether she thought him touched in the mind or not, had come to accept him in the most cheerful and friendly manner. And when he looked back upon it, he felt that there was something touching, something greatly surprising in the way she had left Jimmy and gone with him. She managed to maintain her smiling, though he could not be sure whether it was a sort of desperate indifference or real courage. And every moment he studied her, his assurance that she was Nancy grew dimmer. The resemblance that had seemed so absolute at first, now was by no means so complete. Every moment his heart was lifting in recognition or failing again in doubt.
The day grew old. The sun stretched their shadows longer and longer down the white road before them when she asked if they could stop for a moment. A clear little rivulet flowed across the road under a culvert, and Adrienne, sitting beside it, pulled off shoes and stockings and dipped her feet in the stream. The skin was chafed red; a round raw spot was on one heel.
"But you haven't been limping," said Peter, sitting on his heels to look at the damage.
"Limping? Because of this?" she said, and laughed a little at the thought. "Of course not."
He looked up at her, remembering how the best of soldiers will straggle when they are footsore, but he said nothing. His mind was too full of the realization that Nancy hardly could have had the grit to act like this.
"We can't go on far with your foot in this shape," he said. "There's a peasant's cottage over there. We'll see if they can put us up for the night."
Luckily, he had a perfectly fresh handkerchief of thin linen, and after he had tied it over the chafed heel, she still was able to draw on her shoe.
They came up through the barnyard of the cottage, of hard- compacted dirt with an ancient pump on a wooden platform in the middle of it. It was time for chickens to be at roost, but several of them were picking about here and there, and at the sound of footfalls, a dozen more flew down out of a shed and came cackling about them. A moment later, cows were mooing in the barn.
"What's the matter with this place?" asked Peter.
"I don't think there's a soul here," she said.
"But I see a light." he pointed out.
They went to the window and looked into a dimly-lit bedroom with a great old-fashioned bed built into a corner and in the opposite wall a crucifix in a little niche with a candle, down to its last quarter of an inch, burning in front of it.
They went back to the kitchen door and knocked. The echo walked briefly through the house and was still.
"No one here," said the girl, and pushed the door open.
In the kitchen there was a stove, a heavy wooden table, scrubbed white, two chairs, a bench, and on the walls a pair of gay posters, relics of the last World War, and now kept, probably, rather as decorations than as mementos.
"Hello, hello!" called Peter.
He crossed the room and opened the next door into a sort of parlor with a faded carpet on the floor, some family photographs under glass on the wall, also a memorial wreath in wax. There were some stiff little chairs with plush seats badly worn, and on a center table there was a strip of cheap brocade on which rested a few books sustained by a pair of brass book ends.
"Not a soul, not a soul here," said Peter, and only discovered then that the girl had not followed him.
He found her in the bedroom, lighting a fresh candle at the weltering flame of the old one, and he watched her put the new taper in place.
The glow of it was now stronger than the daylight, and it stained her face and hands with rosy gold. Her fingers, he thought, were thinner than the hands of Nancy.
"They've run away," she said, when she felt the eyes of Peter on her. "They ran so fast they even left money behind them. I found this on the floor." She held up a fifty-franc note. "Besides, look on the kitchen stove," said Adrienne, and led him back to it.
She lighted a lamp that rested on a wall bracket, and then he was able to see the black iron soup pot, a third full, with a crust of white grease over the liquid; and a smaller pot that was full of dark beans. On the table, part of a loaf had dried hard.
"They were just about to eat," said Adrienne. "Soup and beans and bread."
Peter looked into the shadowy soup pot with a face of disgust. "Horrible," he said.
She took a big iron spoon out of a table drawer and scraped the upper white layer from the soup.
"Delicious!" she said. "Carrots and small onions and herbs and good beef stock. It just hasn't been clarified yet. Let's see what's the matter with those cows; they're making such a racket, they probably need to be milked. Can you milk a cow?"
"Everybody in Holland can do that," he answered.
She was rolling up her sleeves, then taking a gingham apron from its hook on the wall.
"There's a lantern on that peg," she said. "Will you light that, and then we'll see what needs to be done."
She went briskly on the rounds with him. There was a little creamery room adjoining the kitchen, and in it stood a cooler made of burlap drawn over a frame, so that water from a pan on top could siphon down over the cloth and keep the contents of the cooler chilled. The siphon rags were dry, and on the shelves inside several pans of milk had soured.
"What a waste!" said the girl, sniffing.
But she gathered up a small round cheese while Peter refilled the water pan. Then they went into the barn. It was very old. The lantern light floated up among great beams that were sagging in the center from the weight of centuries. From the mow, which was half filled, came the ineffable sweetness of hay. And above an empty manger, two cows in head stalls stopped lamenting and looked with great expectant eyes toward these humans. Beyond them was a gray mule with eyes that turned green in the lantern light, and past the mule was its harness-mate, a pleasantly fat brown mare.
The cow's swollen udders made Adrienne exclaim. "Poor things," she said. "Hurry, Peter. There's a pail back there in the dairy room. You take care of the livestock—and you won't forget to water them, will you? I'll rouse up a fire and start supper."
He worked busily for an hour, milking, stowing the milk in the broad-faced tin pans of the cooler, then laboring at the big handle of the pump until the small trough beside it was full. The cows alone drank it dry; the mule and the horse consumed a second filling.
When he had finished his work, he came back through the barnyard and stood a moment to breathe the odors of the fields. Adrienne began to sing a little French nursery air. He listened with a great, hungry query in his mind, but so far as he could remember, he never had heard Nancy sing during their brief weeks together.
He went slowly into the room. She was flushed with the heat of the stove, and the savor of good cookery filled the sir. In a skillet, an omelet was browning through its last delicate moments; two bowls of thick kitchen-ware stood on the table, filled with steaming soup; there was a display of cheese and bread broken into chunks, and two glasses beside a bottle of white wine.
She displayed the bottle on high. Suddenly his heart filled so full that it almost burst. He could not speak.
"Poor Peter, what is it?" she asked anxiously. "What has gone wrong?"
"May I say it?"
"Yes; whatever will help you," she said, and came up close to search his face.
"Then tell me how could God, if there is any kindness in Him, make two women so like?"
"Is it terrible for you? To keep seeing me and thinking of her?"
"It makes me take a deep breath now and then. That's all," be said.
"But you're holding fast to one thing, aren't you? You know now that I'm only Adrienne?"
"I try to know it, but I'm still half blind," said Peter.
"You're so kind, so good and so dear to me that I wish I could help you and that poor, poor girl."
He took hold of himself strongly. "But there's nothing to do," he said, "and the omelet is overcooking, the wine is getting too warm, and Adrienne can't be an angel forever." He hastened to pull up her chair on the far side of the table. He uncorked the wine and poured for them both. "To happy endings!" said Peter, and they drank.
THE soup was strong and full of good savors. They drank it and
he watched her way of handling the bread, not daintily, as an
English girl like Nancy is taught to do, but with a more honest
and hungry abandon, such as one sees in Continental table
manners. The omelet came on then, done to a turn.
"Adrienne," he said, "you are a chef—a Cordon Bleu. I salute you."
They had a coarse green salad with cheese. Then coffee, the bitter French coffee, perfectly made, blacker than the River Styx. As they sipped it, she took one of his cigarettes and they smoked together. Nancy never had touched cigarettes, but Adrienne breathed tho smoke in deeply, like an addict.
After a moment she covered a yawn. "I can't sit up long," she said, "but if I lie down in there, will you come and talk?"
"You should sleep."
"No, I'll rest enough lying flat."
Once she was stretched on the great bed in the adjoining room, she groaned softly. She lay with her arms thrown out and her eyes closed while the waverings of the candlelight flowed dimly over her face and her smile.
When he had drawn up a chair beside her, she said, "Now tell me about Nancy."
"I'd better not start on that."
"The more you talk it out, the more you'll see the differences between us. It will do you good. There are no troubles that words can't help—except for sore feet," she added, and chuckled a little.
"Do they burn like fire?"
"No. Not really...." Her voice had grown slower.
"I think you could sleep," said Peter.
"No, I'd like to lie just this way and taste the sleep that's going to come. The falling asleep is the thing, not the sleeping.... Do you know something?"
"Yes, I know that this is happiness."
"For me too," she said. "I don't suppose there are ten acres in the farm, but I think that would be enough to make a life for me.... Tell me how you first saw her, Peter."
"Were you ever in Rotterdam?" he asked. "It was on a Rotterdam pier. There was a breeze—the kind that only blows in April.... What is your favorite month?"
"Should I say April?"
"Yes, if you please,"
"All right. April is the loveliest month in the year."
"Yes, because it's the time of the returning year. One day the trees are still black as iron, and the next, there are level streaks of green in the branches. She was like April. With a promise in her, you know? Now, you, Adrienne, you are really beautiful, but Nancy was only pretty; she seemed barely started in life, almost transparent. If you looked in her eyes steadily enough, you could see her soul."
"Her whole soul?"
"Yes. All of it.... Do you draw or paint or anything like that?"
"No, not a bit. Did she?"
"She was sitting on the pier doing a color sketch of the laundry that had been hung out on a barge. She was trying to put in the swing and slant the wind gave the wet underwear. That was when I met her." He paused, thinking back.
"And then?" she asked.
"She was a tourist, and presently she had to catch a train, so, of course, I offered to take her in my car. When she saw it she began to laugh. It was one of those gas-savers, no bigger than a beetle. But I told her that one day it might grow up, and already it could find its way about."
Adrienne laughed. "I like that," she said.
"Well, I managed to make her miss the train by pretending to believe the time that an old clock was telling—the hands hadn't moved for a hundred years. And I got her into the old church where other Peter Gerards were buried six hundred years ago. But at last we were there on the station platform, with the train disappearing down the track. I think I'd better stop there."
"But why?"
"Because I remember how she stood there on the platform and looked up to me like a frightened child, and how my heart gave a tremendous knock against my ribs. I could hardly speak out loud, I was so busy vowing to love her and keep her and care for her forever."
"Yes," whispered Adrienne.
Peter, astonished, saw that tears were appearing on her face. He sprang up and leaned over her.
"Nancy! Nancy!" he cried. "Have you come back to me?"
"No—hush!" said Adrienne, without opening her eyes. "But it hurta me terribly when I hear about you two, because then I see—"
"What is it, Adrienne? But you've been in tears."
"It's only that I see how much you've both lost.... But would she always have been like that—like April to you always?"
He thought back before he said solemnly, "Yes, always. There was a spirit in her, Adrienne, that never could be changed."
THE parlor couch was as hard as a road, but on it Peter fell
sound asleep and dreamed once more of the Holland sky, with great
white clouds sailing through it barely over the church steeples.
But it was still thick night when the sleep left him like a dark
cloth twitched from his face, and he lay for a moment looking up,
a sense of ruinous disaster aching in his nerves.
He stood up and looked from the window. In the east, the first pallor of dawn was commencing, by no means as bright as the stars, and the chickens had not yet left their roosts.
He took a lighted lamp through the kitchen and tapped on Adrienne's door. The moment he had done it he was sorry, because when her voice answered, there would be nothing for him to say unless it was to confess that he had waked up in the night like a child, afraid. But, in fact, no answer came. He rapped again, then hastily pushed the door open and found no Adrienne. Nothing lived in the room, except the last gutterings of the candle-flame under the crucifix. She had made up the bed neatly. On the table she had left two hundred-franc notes for the peasants, if they returned, and the money gave him assurance that she was gone.
The first pink was staining the east when he left the cottage and stepped out into the empty world. Now the sun was rising; the chill of the night left the air, and from a hill's low crest he saw a cart in the next hollow, the driver on the seat, a woman in peasant costume on top of the load of hay. There was no Adrienne.
A baby Austin paused beside him, a bearded man at the wheel.
"To Bordeaux, monsieur?" he called.
Of course be accepted gladly. For where would Adrienne be heading except to Bordeaux?
The owner of the car was a Jacques Cordier, middle-aged, ebullient, like a man traveling toward a lifelong happiness. He began to sing as he started up his car, and stopped his song to apologize.
"This is a sad time for our beautiful France," he said, "but it is release from prison for Jacques Cordier. In Rouen I have a factory and put metal caps on shoelaces—a business that comes to me with a childless wife. Instead, I have a brother-in- law with five terrible infants. But now, thanks to Herr Goering, the factory is gone—pouf! My miserable people have fled to Dijon. May the Germans be there soon and pull the whiskers of my brother-in-law, and let me die for my country in peace. The planes fly over, the bombs fall. I stand in the open and hold up my hands like a peasant in summer praying for rain. Quickly, I am blessed. First on the engine-house, crash! It is gone. Then on the machine-shop, bang! And they are gone too. I come home, I laugh, I drink some good red wine, I swallow some excellent Roquefort. 'Madman!' yells my wife. 'Fool and thief!' screams my brother-in-law. 'Do you not see that this is the end?' 'My dear friends, my loved ones,' say I, 'do you not see that it is the beginning?' So they are behind me, and I laugh and sing. That Normandy is behind me also, the curse of Saint Martin upon it. There is a Norman mold that grows in Norman cellars, a Norman cold that breeds in Norman walls, a Norman wind that moans and howls like a dog all winter long. Adieu, Rouen; forward, Jacques Cordier!"
The Saturday Evening Post, 24 Jun 1944, with 3rd part of "After April"
THAT evening the rumors flew through Bordeaux that the cabinet had resigned; Raynaud was out, Pétain was in. Into Bordeaux, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand people, three millions were packed, and the three millions cheered the name of Pétain. "He will do something, that Pétain," they said. Other rumors multiplied. Churchill had come in person and promised an English division a day until the German tide was checked. The Americans would help all they could. There was still hope.
Other rumors poured on the heels of this—Pétain had offered to surrender France, had ordered the French army to cease fighting. It was news more terrible than the German bombs which began to fall on the harbor that night.
Through the blackout, through the pressure of the blind three million, through the sense of a falling world and a confusion in which life itself no longer could have much meaning, Peter maintained his search. He went where there were lines of people formed to wait their turn at food, their chance to board one of the ships leaving the harbor. In the night light, a dozen times his heart jumped, a dozen times he was peering closely at another woman. It was like searching in hell, and even if he found the ghost he wanted, it would be only Adrienne.
Then he was on a wharf to which a tender was fastened, with a tight cluster around the gangplank, with the voice of the inspector saying loudly, hoarsely, "Madame, you have no papers; you have no identity; you are only a name to me! How can I give you a place?"
And a woman answered quietly, "Very well, monsieur."
He got quickly through the press, for it was the voice of Adrienne. But what would he say when he came to her, seeing how she had fled from him? However, even by the dull night light he knew her silhouette instantly.
"Adrienne," he said, "isn't this a strange chance?"
And as she turned to him with an exclamation, he drew her quickly out of the group.
"I didn't want to desert you, Peter," she was saying, "but I saw that I could do nothing but torment you. Then I tried to write a note, but the words simply wouldn't come."
"What ship is the tender for?"
"The Tridholm."
"For England?"
"For Lisbon."
"Very well, we'll try the after gangplank."
"But England is where you have to go!" she insisted.
He sidled through the mob, one arm about her, breaking a way. "Never mind," he said. "My place is with you."
They came to the after gangway, and he showed his papers to the inspector. The ribbons on Peter's coat meant more than papers.
"And the lady?"
"My wife," said Peter.
"Very well. Pass, pass."
They got down to the deck of the tender and stood against the opposite rail. Under his feet was the quiet vibration of the engines of the tender, in his nostrils the sour, free smell of the sea. Adrienne stood close to him, looking straight up into his face.
"Are we here?" she said. "Is it true? Have you broken down the wall and set me free?"
He was so happy that he could not keep from laughing. "You see for yourself," he said. "We don't do very well apart, but we have wonderful luck together."
A GERMAN bomber screamed close overhead; the people on the
deck crouched and made moaning sounds, but there was no outcry,
as though they feared to betray themselves by too much noise,
like chicks making subdued complaint under the wings of the hen.
Then the noise broke out again when the bomber was gone, and
continued till they were on the ship and through the darkness off
the Pointe de Grave the steamer Tridholm was stealing out
to sea, bound for Lisbon. Peter and Adrienne had a tarpaulin
beside the forward hatch of the freighter, with a pair of
blankets that Peter had managed to buy from a steward. Silence
had come as the big ship got under way.
The decks were loaded down with refugees swept from all corners of Europe into Paris, from Paris again fugitive to the south—Danes, Norwegians, Czechs, Austrians, Hungarians, Dutch, Belgians, English, Americans, random Poles and the French. They drew together in national clusters, quiet groups of men and women, a few children, black huddlings of silhouettes against the night light that lived on the face of the sea. They were not clear of the harbor before a magnetic mine exploded close by. It threw up a shadowy column of spray toward the stars and hurled at the ship a wave filled with red and yellow flames, purpling toward the edges. Under the shock, the Tridholm heeled far over. All the things on deck not yet secured slid to port with an immense rattling, people were thrown off their feet, but there was only one sharp outcry of terror and surprise, then a quick silence, as though a hand had been clapped on every mouth. The fear of death still remained with them freezing up speech, until by degrees the crowd realized that the engines of the ship carried on and the rustling of the bow-wave still curved away from the prow. But through the long moment there was silence, and all Peter heard was the pulse of sound from a frightened child, sobbing against closed lips.
Only by degrees the certainty of safety, at least for the time, spread through the ship. There were excited chatterings, exclamations, and gradually a great number of the people gathered along the rail to watch the last outlines of France disappear beneath the stars. All voices were hardly more than murmurings now, until a man began to wail in a language that Peter could not understand. He was saying farewell to his world and grieving over it. The others drew back from his place at the rail and left only his woman beside him. Peter watched the placating gestures she made and the way he kept throwing up his hands.
"Poor devil!" said Peter.
But Adrienne had turned her back on the scene. "Doesn't it sicken you to hear him howling like a beast?" she asked. "And yet he's a Czech, and they're supposed to be brave."
"How did you learn Czech?" he asked.
"One of those useless things that a person picks up," she said. "I'll never do anything with it."
"Isn't it strange how little I know about you, Adrienne? Not even your name, actually. So if I lose you, you're really gone."
"I'm Adrienne von Osten."
"Von Osten?" he echoed, greatly surprised. "A married name, I suppose?"
"No."
"But look, Adrienne, you're English, of course." She was silent. He yearned for a light by which to see her.
"I've never said so," she replied.
"You mean that you actually might he German!"
"Well?" she said coldly.
"I don't believe it," broke out Peter. He added at once, "I'm sorry I said that." She was silent.
"I've offended you, Adrienne," he said.
"No," she said. "It's all right. Please don't apologize."
He felt the distance between them had grown as though he had fallen down a well, and he could not understand how they had come so suddenly to such an impasse unless he had been childishly importunate. Two men went by them, talking. "But I have to reach Lisbon!" said one. "This is a disaster for me."
"There'll be ways to get to it from England," said the companion.
Adrienne suddenly was roused. "Did you hear, Peter? It can't be that the Tridholm is bound for England!"
"But isn't that far, far the best place to go?"
"England? For me?" she cried.
"Adrienne, Adrienne," he said, "what harm could come to you in England? Why are you afraid, my dear?"
"Help me." she pleaded. "Go quickly. Peter, and find out for certain. Ask someone who may know."
"Of course," he answered, and hurried aft. It was not hard to learn. The first petty officer he met told him readily that the sailing orders had been changed—before they left port, in fact. And the ship was bound for Falmouth. He came forward again to the tarpaulin by the hatch, but Adrienne was not there.
He leaned over a huddled family group near by.
"There was a lady here," he said. "Have you seen her leave?"
"She asked some questions of one of the crew, and then she went away," they told him.
"Went where?" begged Peter, suddenly and horribly alarmed.
But they had not noticed in what direction she had disappeared. He tried to think, but his mind did not dare to follow the direction his fear was taking. Then two men crossed the deck toward him.
"This is the man, I think," said one of them.
"You are lieutenant Gerard?" said the other. "Your wife is on board with you?"
"Yes. She was here only a moment ago and—"
"Come with me, please."
Peter followed them into the quarters of the ship's officers and to the doctor's cabin. The door opened. He was ushered in to a little man with a puckered, weary face who sat near a smoking samovar, sipping tea.
"Doctor Conrad, this is Lieutenant Gerard," said Peter's companion, and left at once.
The doctor turned to Peter. "Tea?" he said.
"No, thank you, doctor," answered Peter.
"You make an error," said Doctor Conrad. "Tea, with lemon and a good finger of rum, removes our troubles to a distance. Doesn't kill them as schnapps or vodka does, but takes them out of the realities—reduces them to the world of memory or art. Tea and black Jamaica rum wedded together by a little lemon juice, and presently the beauty of distance is added to everything."
He offered a cup, and Peter could do nothing but accept it. In his uncertain hand the spoon kept up a soft shivering sound against the saucer. "They spoke to me about my wife. I'd lost sight of her on the deck. What is it, doctor?" he asked.
"It is with deep regret," said the doctor, "that I tell you that you are almost without a wife."
"Will you, for God's sake, tell me what happened?" cried Peter.
"There is a curious truth implied in your remark," said the doctor. "Only God, in fact, can embrace in His understanding the infinitely multiple impulses that are expressed in human action. The naked fact—for what it is worth—I can offer to you, however. Your wife has attempted to step aside from life; she would have thrown herself into the sea, except that a seaman observed her and reacted instinctively. He did not ask himself what right he had to interfere with one who—"
Peter broke in, "She is safe? Will you tell me that?"
"How can I tell you that?" asked the doctor. "Perhaps the taste of death lingers in her soul, for of all mortal passions nothing so overmasters us as the desire for the deep, deep draught of oblivion. Perhaps, as she has in her bed, she wishes that her body were, in fact, streaming with the wake of the Tridholm into the east, over the edge of the world."
"Is it possible for me to see her?"
"Why not? But is it wise?"
"She's in a state of terrible shock, of course?"
"No. Rather in a dreamy mood, still not quite withdrawn from the mystery which she was about to enter. You may see her. But first I advise that you consider what you will say. Are you to demand that she stay with you? Are you to reproach her for attempting an escape, as though we knew that death is less beautiful than life? Or are you to inherit the dignity of wisdom and give to her the noble respect that brave souls should command from us, saying, 'My love, the door to escape is always beside you. Whenever you will, it may be opened by a touch.'?"
The doctor finished a cup of tea darkened rum, and added, "She is in here, lieutenant, if you have made up your mind."
"I want to be governed entirely by your advice," said Peter unhappily, confused.
"I want to govern nobody," said Doctor Conrad. "I'm only a ship's doctor. I mend broken bones and quiet troubled stomachs. What have I to do with disturbed consciences, say? But this lovely young wife of yours refuses sedatives. She doesn't wish to sleep. Is she afraid that the world might steal up and listen to her breathing or hear her whisper in her sleep? Is she ashamed of her name and place of origin or has she literally the truth?"
"Forgotten?" echoed Peter.
"Have you yourself been entirely open and clear with me?" asked Doctor Conrad. "Isn't it true that she has endured some great shock recently?"
"That's true," said Peter.
"Well, sir," asked the doctor sharply, "am I wrong in demanding to know why you have not told me at once that she is suffering from amnesia?"
"Because I can't be sure," Peter broke out, "and sometimes it seems as though a different—"
He paused, and the doctor said, "Is she as far away in the dark as that? Is this poor girl so lost to both you and herself that you doubt her identity? God have pity on you. I thought this was a mere case of had nerves and unhappiness, but if she is lost in the fog, I can do nothing for her. She needs a more capable and perhaps a more cruel man than I. Go in to her, Lieutenant Gerard, and I hope you can find the best way."
"Thank you," said Peter. "I think you've given me something to hold to."
He opened the door into a cabin large enough to contain four narrow beds.
THERE was a girl of ten, red-faced and glassy-eyed with fever.
Next to her was a man with both arms stiffly extended in splints,
and beyond him was an old woman in a state of collapse, her face
gray, her lips blue. But they seemed to Peter almost untouched by
trouble compared to the fear which he saw in the eyes of
Adrienne. She had tried to escape from the world. She had been a
step from freedom, and now she was once more imprisoned in
reality. He had found in Adrienne a coolness, a self-sufficiency
that removed her by light-years from Nancy, but now that she was
desperate and helpless, the full recognition poured in upon him.
This was Nancy, withdrawn into such a twilight that she had lost
herself, and he could bless Conrad for giving him a strong hold
upon that one surety.
There no longer could be any doubt. Cases of double identity were for fiction, not for fact. This was Nancy indeed, but with a fugitive spirit in her. There had been confusion and fear in him, but now there was overmastering compassion.
At first, as she looked up to him, he could see little except the passion to escape, a wild and terrible impulse to be locked up in this delicate body, but then recognition flickered in her eyes.
"Peter, forgive me," she whispered.
"Of course I forgive you," he said. "There aren't any reproaches. I'm only here to help as I can."
"Then don't let them drug me," she begged desperately. "Don't let them give me anything that will take my wits away. Don't let them put me to sleep."
"It's to be as you want," he said.
"Thank you," she murmured, and relaxed so suddenly and deeply that her eyes closed and her lips parted.
She put out a band, which he took. It was cold, trembling. "Don't leave me, Peter," said her voiceless lips.
"I'll stay right here," he told her.
Her lips were dry and the shudder that possessed her whole body was quivering in them. From the pitcher on the bedside table he poured a glass of water and offered it to her.
"Plain water," he explained. "Absolutely nothing in it."
He proved it by taking a swallow. Still for a moment she watched him with a sort of weary doubt, as though already she were exhausted from being on her guard; then, convinced, she swallowed the water eagerly. She finished another glass and lay back on the pillow, breathing fast, as though she were exhausted from a long journey, and, in fact, in those few minutes since he last saw her, she had been far away, almost beyond recall.
"I mustn't sleep," she whispered "Don't let me sleep... and talk," she added drowsily. "There are so many horrible dreams."
He said nothing. There was a streak of black soot on her forehead. With his handkerchief be touched it away, and she roused enough to smile at him a little. The tremor was passing away.
He must ask no questions as to what had frightened her or as to why it had seemed better to her to die than to go to England. By degrees he might find out a hint here and there to make up an answer.
The hand which lay in his had grown warm and relaxed, but from moment to moment it caught hard at his fingers again. His heart ached with an immensity of love. She had almost left him hopelessly behind; she had almost escaped beyond the stars, and how could he keep her hereafter from completing that breathless journey which can be made in a single step?
He began to remember the prayers the minister, Dominie Olden, had taught him, the words spoken to his memory by that large and resonant voice, but nearly all seemed to ask mercy for oneself, not for another. Yet, for Nancy, sinless, gentle and true, why should one need to ask for mercy at all?
A murmur from her made him lean over close. He could not be sure what she said, but it seemed to be his name, and he saw, with inexpressible joy, that she was smiling in her sleep.
THERE was no need for sedatives. Once sleep actually came to
her, she was never really conscious for twenty hours, and during
that time he watched the coming of color into her face once more
and saw the shadows beneath her eyes clearing away. For his own
part, he rarely left the chair at her bedside, sometimes drowsing
with his head on his chest, more often gazing into her face, and
always seeming to find there what he had lost, and at the close
of the next afternoon, in murky weather, he found himself on the
forward deck with her again. Doctor Conrad had said to him,
merely, "When she is a little steadier, you must try to bring her
to a good doctor, a far better doctor than this poor Conrad. In
the meantime, I see that you have what you need—faith, and,
like an early Christian, almost a belief in the value of pain. So
go forward, lieutenant, humbly, but at attention, like a good
soldier."
It was only when the day turned dusky that she would go out into the open air and stand with Peter in an obscure corner. She kept turned to him, so that other eyes might not find and recognize her, so that, in a sense, she seemed to be trusting everything to his eyes, his guidance.
An Englishman with a pipe was talking to a companion only a few steps away. He was saying, "It's like a game of chance, you know. You play a number and it wins against the whole board several times in a row, just the way England has stood against the Armada, against Louis the Fourteenth, against Napoleon, against the Kaiser. But after a while we have to lose. So we'll lose now. These larger nations are spread out over continents, and England is just a little island. Can't stand forever, my dear fellow. Can't possibly."
The companion was a younger man. He listened with a baffled air. "But there's still the good old Channel between us and the Jerries," he said.
"Tut, tut," said the older Englishman. "You don't put your faith in that little ditch, do you?"
"Partly in that," said the other, "and partly in the British navy and the Britishers that man it."
"Good fellows," agreed the older. "As a matter of fact, I hope that we'll all know how to die well, and together."
Peter, studying the girl, saw that she was listening in deep attention, yet faintly smiling.
"But how will they cross the Channel before they control the sea?" the younger man was asking.
And the older answered, "They'll throw a canopy of planes across that blessed Channel, which never will be called English again. They'll fill the sky and darken this sun with their airplanes. Some of those planes will disgorge tanks on the English beach. Others will drop showers of parachutists. The bridgehead will be formed. The Germans will line the passage across the Channel with submarines. And they'll come in ships, in row-boats; they'll float across on automobile tires. But come they will. And England will go down. Man, the mechanized force of England today is zero!" The two strolled away.
"They always talk that way, don't they?" commented Adrienne. "Oh, for three hundred years Englishmen have been seeing the poor little island done for and sinking in the sea. Tomorrow is always to be the last day. But they keep on fighting just the same."
"They do; they always do," he answered, heartily relieved, for this affection with which she spoke of the English, and this understanding, seemed worthy of being balanced against the fear which had been in her the day before.
"When we land. I'm going to take you down into Devon to stay a while with the most English family you ever saw."
She looked up at him for a moment without answering. Then she said, "Peter, you've been everything that's kind and gentle and good. But when we land, you're going to keep remembering that I'm not your wife?"
"Yes. If you wish it that way."
"And you'll let me shift for myself?"
"It's to be as you want," he said, forcing out the words. "But the Denhams are a wonderful lot."
"And put myself on charity with strangers?" she asked. "Please, Peter—"
"They're not strangers, but very close to me. There's nothing they wouldn't do."
"Please let me tell you something that will never change. I can't stay in England."
"Very well, then," he managed to say. "As soon as you're rested and more yourself, I'll help you to go wherever you wish."
"You will," she said. "It isn't just humoring me. You mean what you say." She kept wondering over him, and she said, "I could cry like a baby because you're so endlessly good to me. Will you tell me more about the Denhams?"
"Yes, yes, I'm happiest to talk about them. They're the very best, the very finest. Audrey is an angel—that's Denham's wife. And he's like a brother. You'll be happy with Charlie too."
"Who is he?"
"It's a she, Adrienne. Rather a tomboy. Free-swinging, you know. Like the Americans she admires so much. But a lady from her slang to the tip of her toe."
"She sounds interesting."
"Yes." He chuckled, looking far back into his remembrance of her. "There's no one actually like her. You'd be aware of Charlie in spite of an air raid."
Adrienne was studying him. "If I went there—" she began, and then paused.
"You will go, Adrienne? You've no idea how happy that makes me!"
She was intensely serious. "You know how people are, Peter? They're always probing at one with questions, and that's a wretched business."
"But I'll say one word to them and they'll never ask a single question," he declared to her.
"Could you do that? And they wouldn't mind a person who insisted on being a stranger?" she asked.
"You still can't guess what they are until you see them," he said. "Actually, I think they'd do anything for me. You will let me take you down to them?"
"Yes," she said. "If they'll take me just a little while. Till I can look around and see what way I have to go. And it will be one more thing to thank Peter for."
He felt a huge relief, for at least she would not be lost to him the moment they reached the shore.
THEY were nearing the coast by Falmouth now, and the rain came
on. There were faint glimpses of green England, better to him
than the face of a friend, and at the close of the day they
entered the harbor. A hundred ships had taken refuge in it,
nearly all in gray war-paint which through the downpour made them
look the color of the sea, and about most of the hulls was the
white line which indicated that they had been degaussed to
immunize them from magnetic mines.
It was as gray and depressing a scene as the wet old island ever had offered to the eye, but there were hundreds of fugitives on board the Tridholm to whom that murky stretch of gray and green and shadow was brighter than any Mediterranean shore. A group began to sing softly the air of God Save the King, but in foreign words; and then another and another cluster of refugees, each in a differing language, each with an enthusiasm that poured like sunshine on their faces; and Peter remembered that the old air had been a national anthem in several European countries. He looked down at the tense face of the girl.
"Do you like it, Adrienne?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, and waited to find the right words. "It's so pitiful, isn't it? It's so terribly sad!"
The debarkation went slowly ahead. Many of the passengers remained on board because it was said that the dock was crowded with people who had waited for twenty-four hours just to get into town, and at the custom-house the line ran blocks long, enduring in the rain. But Peter took Adrienne ashore, because he had that new sense of superior strength which could carry them through every obstacle.
Adrienne did not argue or protest, for since their talk in the morning she had fallen into a half-troubled, half-dreaming mood, and to whatever he asked her the answer was always "Yes," as though she were passing through a trance of thought, so that the voices of the actual world came only obscurely, half heard, to her mind.
He used the tarpaulin to protect her from the rain, and got straight up to the custom-house. If he failed to win through. they would have to return to the very end of the long, bedraggled line which waited like so many cattle, as though already the refugees had inherited the stubborn English patience that breeds on the green island century by century, always true to its strain.
He had to talk to a sergeant, a great impassive man bent on doing his duty with religious thoroughness.
"I need written orders to pass anybody ahead of the line," he said. "If you got written orders, let me see them. Otherwise, back to the end of the line with you."
"But the lady is not very well," said Peter. "And I'm sure you can see your way clear to—"
"There's sicker people down the line than her," said the sergeant. Then he looked again at the rain-soaked ribbons and the wings on Peter's breast. "Foreign, sir. I see by your passport, ain't you? But there's no mention of a wife on it."
"Because I've just found her," said Peter.
"Found her?" said the sergeant, stunned.
"In all of that," said Peter, gesturing toward the wreck of the world. "Think what good luck God gave me, sergeant!"
The sergeant had seen uplifted men before this, but when he narrowed his eyes, he knew, through some inward stroke of sympathy, that this was not alcohol. The gate of understanding opened in his mind.
"Pass right on through, sir," he said. "You'll find a taxi down there."
When they were in the taxi, Peter said. "I was sorry to say again that you were my wife. Adrienne." How hard it was, at times, to remember to call her by that name. "But it was all that came to me."
"Yes," said Adrienne, only half roused from her dream.
"You don't mind?" he inquired anxiously, hopefully.
She glanced toward him, an object seen in far distance, it seemed.
"No, Peter," she said, and passed back into the vague forest of her thoughts.
THEY were at the hospital. "I'll only be a moment inside," he
said to her. "You'll wait here. You won't worry?"
"No, Peter."
"You'll be all right? You're not hungry?"
"No. Peter."
"Then I'll pop inside for an instant."
He went on the run up to the office of Doctor Grace. Major Grace was raising the devil with someone. His voice leaked right through the door, "Not only will you not get him today but you won't get him tomorrow or the day after or the day after that! Go back and tell General Thingumbob to go to the devil for men; he can't get a soul out of this hospital until I give the word! Not the fat-headed general or even Winston Churchill can budge me an inch! And furthermore—"
Peter opened the door. An angry lieutenant was standing at strict attention in front of the major.
"Get out!" shouted Doctor Grace. But before Peter could step back and close the door, the major added, "Come in, come in! How did I know it would be you? Come in and let me see you!"
The lieutenant saluted and walked out with a sort of goose-step.
"And don't forget a word I said!" the major shouted after him.
The door closed with a slam.
"Damned puppies!" said the doctor. "Nothing worse for a country than a damned army! Nothing! Rots away good manners, decency! Starches everything up inside a uniform! I wouldn't be in an army if they offered me a marshal's baton! Or do the idiots carry batons these days?"
"It seems to me that you are in the army, sir," said Peter, smiling.
The doctor glanced down at his uniform and shrugged his shoulders.
"Come here and let me look at you," he commanded. "Well, well, well! The cat has swallowed the canary, and now it can sing, eh? What the devil has happened to you? First love sickens you; second love makes you well again, eh? Is that what's happened?"
"Sir, I have found her," said Peter.
"Another 'her,' what?"
"I have found my wife, sir."
"What? Where the devil What are you talking about? How could you find her? The angel of the Lord couldn't find his first cousin in that pother across the Channel."
"I found her, sir. I am sure it is she."
"Come, come, come," said the major. "Let me have another look at you. How much have you been sleeping lately?"
"It isn't illusion, sir. She's down in front of the hospital in an automobile."
"What? You actually have her? Well, I'll be utterly damned," said the major. "Why the devil didn't you bring her up with you?"
He jerked open a drawer. "I have a bottle here somewhere. The scoundrels keep stealing it. Ah, here it is! Fetch a couple of those measuring cups off that shelf. Now—and so, Peter, God bless you. I've had you on my mind all these days. Thank God I can get you off it now.... But why didn't you bring her pretty face up here with yon?"
Peter coughed against the raw burn of the whisky. "Thank you, sir," ha said. "But the truth is that she's not entirely well."
"So? So? Indigestion. That's what's wrong with all of 'em when they get over here."
"The shock, sir, that she has passed through, it's had a lasting effect. In fact, she doesn't quite realize that she's my wife."
The major had a second glass of the whisky at his lips. He put it down again. "Ah?" he said.
"I found her using a different name. She is Adrienne Von Osten, for the moment."
"Adrienne—Where did she pick up a filthy name like Von Osten?"
"I can't find out. It's just a bit of fancy ... and it's hard for her to remember anything before—"
"You're saying amnesia to me, of course?"
"Yes, sir. Undoubtedly."
"Oh, my boy, I don't like that."
"But it's curable, sir, of course?" Peter, turning cold.
"Of course it is. Of course it is. Don't sicken yourself with any doubts. Keep that fool smile on your face. I like to see it. Only, amnesia is one of the great invisible wounds, you know. And though the thing may be cured, sometimes it leaves scars."
"It will not. Not in your hands, sir."
"So I'm to take care of her, am I?" asked the doctor gently.
Peter grew confused. "Of course, I see the difficulty, sir," he said. "Your time is limited to—"
"My time is unlimited, where you're concerned," said the doctor. "I'll see her whenever you want, but after what she's been through, probably she should rest for a few days first. What's your plan?"
"She has an aunt and uncle, sir. I thought that at their house—"
"A little too much of a good thing, though, perhaps. The point is to get at her recent life. To make her remember living with you, and then what happened. Reconstruct that for her, if you can."
"Yes, sir. I thought of asking the Denhams if they would be kind enough to permit her, for a few days—"
"If they would be kind enough—if they would permit—nonsense! Of course, they'll be the happiest people in England to make some return to you."
"Yes, sir. Then I'm to keep questioning her?"
"About the crisis, but don't nag her with questions. Let her rest until you've made up your mind about what happened. Then reconstruct it for her, if you can. And when the critical moment comes, be prepared for an explosion."
"Sir?"
"When the memory comes back on them, they may do anything. They may faint. They may start in screaming. Hysteria is the word as the whole past comes roaring and tumbling about their ears. A chaos, you can understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"But when you've done your best—and in a case like this, love is a good surgeon, Peter—but if you fail, then call on me. I hope to heaven that you don't have to though. Because it can be a nasty business. You'll find that out. But I see you smiling. That's what I want. An ounce of confidence is better than a pound of science in a case like this."
IN Denham Hall, Audrey and Charlie were ironing their clothes.
Audrey selected, sprinkled, folded, put away. Charlie did the
ironing because she had the strength in her arms. You have to use
a cool iron on rayon, and that means you have to bear down a bit;
a hot iron sticks. You have to press exactly right or you may
injure the material. Charlie kept her tongue between her teeth
and pressed exactly right. When a knock came at the door, Audrey
answered it and brought in Captain Stephen Windus, RAF.
The captain was a twenty-five-year-old flier with an excellent record in fighter planes. He was long, lean and easy in his ways, a smiling young man with a quiet voice and a glint in his eye. He took off his overcoat, black about the shoulders with the rain that drummed on the roof and whacked the window panes.
"Do you want to be alone with Charlie?" asked Audrey. "I can take on the ironing."
"Don't be silly," said Charlie. "You haven't the stuff it takes.... How you doing, Steve?"
"I'm fair enough," said the captain. "Besides, I don't have to be alone. My talk is to the family."
Charlie poised her iron and looked at him, frowning. "Are you dead sure of what you're going to say?" she asked.
"I am." said Windus.
"Fire away, then," said Charlie, and resumed her ironing.
"First off," said Windus, "how do I stand—in or out, I mean?"
"With me?" said Charlie, scowling at her work.
"With you."
"Why, Steve, I love you to pieces. You know that."
"I think I'm going to be in pieces before all this is over," said Windus, with much good humor. "But may I blaze away?"
"Shoot," said Charlie.
"I ought to speak to Denham," said Windus.
"Oh, take him for granted," said Charlie. "Are you going to ask me to marry you?"
"I had it vaguely in mind." said Windus.
Charlie turned to Audrey. "Isn't that the devil?" she asked.
"Why, Charlie?" asked Audrey. "I mean, a month ago I would have screamed and grabbed you, Steve," said the girl.
"But not now, I take it?" he asked.
"I'm terribly sorry," said Charlie. "I've fallen in love."
"Of course you have," said Windus. "You always do, a couple of times a year. I was thinking of something permanent."
"This is. It's forever," she answered. She put the iron away and offered him a cigarette.
"Smoke?" she said.
"Thanks," said Windus, and lighted the cigarette.
"Drink?" she suggested. "I'll do without that. I want to be clear.... Audrey?"
"Yes, Steve?" said Audrey, tears in her eyes.
"I see how it is," he answered, studying her. "It's final, you think?"
"I'm afraid so." said Audrey.
"On the other hand," said Windus, "we've seen the old girl here fall into a good many spins, but she's always righted herself before a crash."
"That's true," agreed Audrey.
"But this is different?"
"I'm afraid it is, Steve. I'm so sorry."
"All right," said Windus. "I'll take that drink, thank you."
Charlie poured him a double. He looked at it and laughed.
"Charlie," ha said, "you know exactly my size—you know everything. Well, it would have been too good. Here's health."
She put a drop in another glass. "Here's how, Steve," aha said.
They drank.
He stood up and drew hard on his cigarette,
"Don't run away," said Charlie.
"I'm better where I can cool off. How about kissing me good- by?"
"Why not?" asked Charlie, tilting up her face.
He took her in his arms and kissed her. "Well, good-by." he said as he released her.
"Good heavens!" said Charlie, with her hand at her lips. "Who taught you to kiss a girl like that?"
"The Windus people are just born with understanding," he said.
Audrey went to the door with him.
"This other fellow—soldier boy, I suppose?" he said.
"Yes."
"A flier, of course,"
"Yes, Steve, I'm so sorry, Steve. It's all so unhappy."
"You don't mind passing the name on?"
"I would if it were settled."
"How do you mean that? It seems to be settled as far as she's concerned?"
"He's not quite convinced, but it won't take long—you know how Charlie is."
"I know," he agreed, and stood a moment in thought as he pulled his arms into his overcoat.
The telephone rang in the big room behind them.
"But you tell Charlie from me," he said as he opened the door, "that a stern-chase is usually a pretty long one. She's sailed a boat, so she'll know what I mean."
He went out into a fierce eddy of wind and rain, and pulled the door shut behind him. Audrey was turning the latch, dejected, when she heard a sharp outcry from Charlie.
She ran back to find her sitting with a white face of shock, the telephone in her hand.
"Take it! Can't talk! It's he!" gasped Charlie.
"Lie down and get your feet up," said Audrey rapidly and fiercely. "Yes?" she said, into the telephone. She waved Charlie away. "Oh, I'm so glad to hear from you. Of course we've been thinking a lot about you. And when there wasn't a word for a while—"
"Ask him when he's coming!" breathed Charlie.
"...Room? Naturally, there's always room."
"Oh, bless him!" said Charlie. "Isn't that a mind reader for you, Audrey?"
"Yes, and for your friend.... Certainly, as long as you wish.... But it isn't any trouble. Allan comes home tomorrow, and how happy hell be.... Don't even think of it, but just hurry down home to us. Good-by." She rang off the call.
"You mustn't be this way, Charlie," she said. "Please lie down, you look frightfully ill."
"He's coming? He's coming?" asked Charlie.
"Yes."
Charlie closed her eyes. "Isn't it a lovely, lovely, lovely world?" said Charlie.
"Don't cry, darling, please, please," begged Audrey.
"I'm not crying; it's just that sometimes you get so full up that you brim over a little.... Did he sound happy?"
"Yes. Quite different."
"Audrey, did he say that he loved Charlie?"
"Dearest, you mustn't let yourself go so completely."
"Me? I'm an iron woman; only, it hit me so by surprise. What about a friend?"
"Coming along with him."
"What a bore," said Charlie. "What a hideous bore. But you can take care of him, Audrey. Where does be come from?"
"Someone Peter brought from France. And it a 'she,' Charlie."
"A woman?" said Charlie, rather alarmed. "From France? I hate Frenchwomen, Audrey. I hate their parlay-voo and all that.... What would Peter be doing picking up a woman in France? Personally, I can't imagine it."
"Can't you?" said Audrey, smiling. She added cautiously, "He says that she's a very dear friend."
"Oh, is that it?" sighed Charlie, relieved.
"Is what it, dear?"
"Don't you see? She's an old family friend. You know how they are on the Continent. Relatives everywhere. All tied in knots. Out in Wyoming it's not that way."
"Why Wyoming?"
"That's where we're going to live, Peter and I. You step out in the morning and give a holler, and you rock a whole mountain range a hundred miles away. We're going to go riding together so fast and far, the dust we raise will be coyote fur that we've scared out of them. Wow!" cried Charlie.
"We'll have to get a cot down out of the attic," said Audrey. "You were up there last. Where did you put the key?"
"How do I know?" asked Charlie. "Let her sleep on the floor, the old hag."
Audrey found the key. "Come along," she said. "It's too clumsy for one person to carry."
"Wait till I get my breath," said Charlie. "He's coming, he's coming, he's coming! I didn't imagine that he called? It was true that he did call, wasn't it, Audrey, darling?"
"I seem to remember talking to him," said Audrey. "Come on, silly goose."
"He was in a rush to get here, wasn't he?"
"He did seem in a hurry."
"Of course he's in a hurry, and nobody guesses why except Charlie. It's just beginning to come over him. The blond girl with the silly ways. He can't forget her. She's in his blood. Zingo! Audrey, I'm so glad I was born. Isn't life frightfully worthwhile? I'm going to write a book!"
The Saturday Evening Post, 1 Jul 1944, with 4th part of "After April"
ON the way up the stairs they passed Monsieur and Madame Louis Bonheur. He was seventy, she almost ten years older, but very straight and sprightly; she seemed as quick as a girl, except that her steps were so much shorter.
"Hello." said Charlie, turning as they passed the old people. "How is it with you and the friar?"
"Oh, Charlie," said the old woman in ecstasy, "he came to kiss my hand today and talked very sweetly."
"Because he adores you, of course," said Charlie, running to catch up with Audrey.
"Who in the world is the 'friar'?" asked Audrey.
"It's a gray squirrel in the park. Madame Bonheur has worked on him until he'll take bread from her fingers. Sweet old thing. I love her, don't you?"
"But I hardly know her. You work all day, and yet you manage to see all the people in the house. How do you manage it, dear?"
"It's the American system," said Charlie. "You circulate. See? You put on pressure, and then you circulate. It's great stuff. Pressure stuff, Audrey. They have whole books written about it."
"Listen to me, Charlie, and stop dancing up the stairs, before you break a leg."
"I don't want to dance." said Charlie, panting, "but my feet won't stop. The right one always does whatever the left one starts, and the left one is simply a crazy thing."
"Do you know something, Charlie?"
"Go on and tell me."
"You're a thousand miles from being a Yankee."
"Of course I'm not a Yankee. Yankees all have long noses and count their pennies and drink rum and wear ear-flaps. What I am is Western, sister."
In the upper hall they passed an open door that showed a one- armed man crouched over the model of a clipper ship. The cordage shone like dewy spider-webbing. Charlie paused at the door.
"Evening, Sam," she said.
The man turned his grizzled head, rose, bowed, making inarticulate sounds.
"Everything going right?" asked Charlie.
He waved his hand to the model, nodding and smiling.
"But his name isn't Sam," said Audrey
"It is to me," said Charlie.
"And he can't understand a syllable of anything but Norwegian, poor old thing."
"He can understand me, though," declared Charlie. "It's a funny thing, Audrey, how many people can speak Charlese. It's a sort of international language. That's how I'm going to write the book."
"How?" echoed Audrey, dazed.
"In Charlese," said Charlie.
They decided that, no matter how they tried to shift things around, the only place to put the cot for Peter's friend was in Charlie's alcove, so there they installed it and laid on the mattress, and made it up with blankets and sheets.
"It's such a jumble here, I hope she won't be shocked," said Audrey wistfully, shaking her head as she looked things over.
"Why should she be shocked?" asked Charlie. "We've got a whole bow window to ourselves and we're simply crowded with view. I hope she can't stand a draft; I hope it gives her pneumonia."
FOR dinner they had rice, a fish curry with shredded coconut,
and a dozen small dishes of chutney, chopped eggs, onions and
other devices.
"Use a lot of curry," said Charlie. "You know how the French are. They can't taste a thing unless it's poisoned with spices. That's why I can't stand them. They are never simple. They can't just say 'hello' and 'good-by.' They make me sick."
"Charlie, dear, don't be so furious just on spec."
"Why does he have to bring her and spoil everything?"
"She's probably young, beautiful and a countess!"
"How horrible! You make it sound like an affair."
"Isn't Peter a little bit human?"
"No, he's much too preoccupied. If he had children, he'd never know how many. By the way, when am I to be an aunt?"
"After the war, Charlie."
"That's just silly. The minute I marry a man, I'm going to have twins before he can turn around."
"Charlie, don't!"
"Why not? That's the way we do in Wyoming.... And, Audrey?"
"Yes?"
"You know that new red dress of yours?"
"Do you want it tonight?"
"Well. Peter couldn't even see where I was, when I wore that old blue thing. He hates blue. It hurts his eyes."
"Well, put it on, dear. Of course."
"And would you help me fix my hair? Up high, I mean."
"Wouldn't that seem a little like Hollywood?"
"That's all men are used to looking at," said Charlie. "But no matter what we do, we haven't the gold dust they put in the hair or the stardust in their eyes. It isn't fair. Audrey."
Afterward, Audrey helped her to pile her hair.
"You look quite wonderful, Charlie," she said.
"I hope I look better than that old French what-not," said Charlie. "But you know something?"
"Tell me," said Audrey.
"In Hollywood they have throats like swans, but all I've got is a neck."
The rain came down with a crash.
"I hope the old family friend gets wet and all her feathers draggle," said Charlie.
The rain was still a steady drumfire when Peter arrived. Charlie had climbed on a chair to replace the burned-out globe in the entrance-hall, because she wanted to dawn on Peter with a glory in her hair and the beauty of the red dress shining in his eyes. When the ring at the door came, she ran to open it and found Peter with an obscure figure beside him against the background of the rain, and behind it the long English twilight sliding away over the lawns. The fresh smell of the turf came in with them; Audrey hurried from the kitchen to help with the wraps, and the stranger was being introduced as Miss von Osten.
Charlie could have shouted with surprise and dismay, for all her preconceptions were falling in heaps. This was no "old family friend," complete with middle age and glasses. It was true that the gray summer tweed she wore was limp and sagging from the rain, and when she took off her hat, a head of bright hair went straggling, but she was surprisingly young and pretty. She seemed not ill at ease so much as plain frightened, so that she reminded Charlie of a rather older pupil, lost in the fear of the first day at a new school. Yet she managed to smile a little as she shook hands.
She said to Audrey, who had hurried to them, "You're so kind to take me in this way." And to Charlie, "I know you more than you'd think, because Peter has told me so much."
"I haven't told you a thing about this lady. She's entirely new to me," said Peter, beginning to laugh. It was rather shattering to hear him laugh aloud; it dispelled illusions; it stole away the sadness of the mystery.
"Carry on, Peter," said Charlie. "How do you mean I'm different?"
"Well, you look much older. I hope that's not the wrong thing to say," he suggested.
"It's just about exactly right," said Charlie. "The last time you saw me I was nothing but a half-grown schoolboy."
"No, no.... But how has she changed herself, Audrey?"
"Is it her hair?" asked Audrey, smiling at the girl.
"So high; it wouldn't do in a wind, would it?" asked Peter, and laughed a little.
"You don't like it," said Charlie gloomily.
He was puzzled. "I do, though, I think. It makes you so tall."
"I hate tall women," said Charlie. "The great, gawky things with their knees always sticking out and their elbows in everybody's face. Zingo!" she said, and swept down the bright tower with both hands.
"Don't do that, Charlie!" protested Audrey.
But Charlie was giving her hair a twist and a tuck at the back of her neck. "Now I'm more comfortable," she said. She added to Peter, grimly, "I suppose I look about fifteen again?"
"You look just right," said Peter seriously. "Because this is the way I remember you. I was afraid for a moment that you'd grown up."
"How much do I have to grow to be up?" she asked. "This much?" and she stood on tiptoe.
They all laughed, even Adrienne, though she seemed to be looking at the scene through a veil of thought and kept watching Peter to find the key to these strangers.
Nothing really mattered to Charlie except the change in Peter. Action, action, action is what a man needs, she knew, and, in France, Peter had had enough of it to be remade, or was it the return to Denham Hall that made him so much younger and brighter, with that smile which would not disappear? Such thoughts poured through the mind of Charlie, so that she grew a little dizzy, like standing in a wind that blows the wits away. But if Peter had taken on him the burden of bringing this girl all the way from France, it was her turn to do something and show that she was not just a handless creature. In a word, Charlie decided to take charge.
She said to Adrienne, "You need a hot bath and a change. Won't you come along with me?"
"You turn yourself right over to Charlie and she'll do all the thinking for you," said Peter.
So Charlie carried away Adrienne's overnight bag to the alcove.
"Now get out of those wet things," she directed. "Then I'll show you the bathtub upstairs."
She scouted out some towels and soap.
"Men are silly, aren't they?" she asked Adrienne.
"Silly?" echoed Adrienne, and looked fixedly through years in which she seemed to find little that was amusing.
"I mean, I mustn't change. I've got to stay put. Six, eight, ten—my father hated to see me grow up. He used to say, every time he looked at me, that he thought something was wrong with his glasses.... But what has made Peter so gay, can you guess?"
"Isn't he always this way?" asked Adrienne.
"Heavens, no," said Charlie.
"Well, he loves England, and now he's back in it," said Adrienne. "In the best part of it, for him, and that's Denham Hall."
"Is it, really, for him? How nice," said Charlie, and felt suddenly that Adrienne was a very sensible and charming girl.
She held a bathrobe, and Adrienne slipped into it and pulled slippers on her feet.
"When you come down," said Charlie, drawing the curtain that covered her dresses, "pick out any one of these that you like. They don't amount to much, but at least we're about the same size."
"You're very kind to me," said Adrienne, studying her with the faintest of smiles. "But then, Peter said you would be. He seems to know you so well."
"Of course he does," answered Charlie. "Everybody knows me."
They left the room and she took Adrienne's arm as they passed up the stairs. A flight of young Dutchmen came clattering down the steps like horses over a cobbled street. They waved and shouted "Hi!" at Charlie as they thundered past.
"It's a crazy house," said Charlie. "You can find almost anything in it. Terrific uproar sometimes. But you won't be alarmed?"
Adrienne smiled at her quickly. "No," she said, "I won't be alarmed."
Something in her way of saying it made Charlie feel a little young, a little foolish.
"Of course it won't bother you," said Charlie. "What are little rackets in a house, compared with what you've been through?"
"Does Peter say I've been through a lot?" asked Adrienne, a little too casually.
"No," said Charlie. "Is it a terrific story?"
"Not very. There's nothing new about it," said Adrienne, but there was something in her voice that made a chill skip up Charlie's back.
They turned into the bathroom, where Charlie was busy starting the water and hanging on the rack the towels she had carried up. Adrienne got out of her clothes slowly.
"You're worried," said Charlie, above the rush of the water, "but that's the way with everyone who gets here from the Continent. The horror doesn't go away for a while."
Adrienne dropped her head quickly and looked away. "Not for a while," she agreed.
"I know exactly how it is." said Charlie, all the woman and mother in her warming her voice, "but the best is not even to think about what's happened."
Lightly, with both hands, she touched the girl and cherished her.
"But try to think that this crazy place of ours is home, and remember how happy we are to have you. You'll see that the fear will slip out of you little by little. When we're unhappy, it's like being ill—if one can only think of it that way—and after a while one is well again. Poor Adrienne, when you start looking back too far and getting dizzy, you lean on me, and you'll find I'm a rock."
"I know you will be," said Adrienne.
She managed to raise her head and smile, but she was white and she could not quite lift her eyes to Charlie's.
"I'll be better later on," said Adrienne, trying to smile. "I won't always be such a lost loon."
When Charlie was back in the hall, she stood for a moment to take breath, but she could not tell why the horror of the war had come home to her as never before, like the gleam and whir of an arrow close to her ear.
When she got back to the kitchen, Audrey was alone, and Peter, probably changing from his wet outfit, was singing snatches of song in the living room. At this. Charlie quite forgot Adrienne.
"Did you ever see such a change in a man?" asked Charlie. "Did you ever?" She had to keep her voice down, for fear that Peter might hear. "He's so glad to be here," said Charlie, "that he can't keep from smiling. Did you notice? And he gave my hand a tremendous squeeze, and he looked at me as though he were seeing me for the first time. The way you look at somebody you like— one, two, three looks all in one."
Audrey was lifting the cover from a kettle and peering into the enshrouding steam.
"And that's a sweet girl, Audrey," went on Charlie. "Quite, quite pretty, in a way. Do you think? She's had a tough time. But girls have such thin skin that you never can tell. They miss a train and you'd think it was the end of the world, almost."
Audrey looked up at her and replaced the cover on the kettle.
"Audrey," whispered the girl, "is that steam in your eyes—or tears?"
"Listen to me, dear," said Audrey.
"What are you going to say?" gasped Charlie. "Was there a telephone call? Has something happened to Allan? What is it, Audrey?"
"It's nothing about Allan," said Audrey, the tears thickening in her eyes. "But will you hold hard. Charlie?"
Charlie doubled her hands into good, solid fists. "Peter?" she whispered.
"Adrienne is his wife," said Audrey.
Charlie got hold of the back of a chair and lowered herself into it. "She can't be!" she gasped. "It's not possible! She doesn't even know him well!"
"Charlie, it's true," said Audrey.
"But her name is von Osten, Audrey."
"That's just something she picked up. The Germans bombed Peter's house in Rotterdam—it's shell-shock—she doesn't remember Peter or anything.... Here, darling. Take a sip of brandy."
"I don't need it." said Charlie. "I don't want it."
"Oh, Charlie, my dearest," said Audrey, "I'm so sorry; I'm so sad for you."
"Stop being that way," Charlie answered, getting out the words by pauses. "What do I matter? They're the ones with the real trouble."
The voice of Peter came more clearly to them. He was a wretched but noisy singer, and he seemed to forget that he had an audience. Charlie pointed in his direction, her eyebrows lifted.
"If he's a stranger to her, you wonder how he can sing. But he's been through such agony—he thought she was dead," said Audrey—"and now just to have her up from the grave—don't you see it's a happy miracle? He's sure that she'll remember everything someday."
"Of course she will," said Charlie. "Of course! We'll make her well—I'll make her well."
Peter came in on them, still humming. His jollity disappeared in a flash.
"But what's wrong. Charlie?" he asked. As one might approach a child, he sat down on his heels and searched her face. "Are you ill?" he asked.
"Don't trouble, Peter," said Audrey, terribly anxious, for fear the whole truth might come out naked before them. "She'll be all right in a moment."
"Yes," said Charlie, and made a tremendous face. "It's a tooth, and the nerve's exposed, and it's the devil."
She jumped up with a hand to her cheek, which also gave her a chance to brush moisture from her eyes, and began to pace the floor. Peter took her arm and paced with her.
"Bad luck," he said. "A bit of nutmeg's very good to stop the pain."
"Damn the nutmeg," said Charlie.
"I beg pardon?" said Peter.
"Nutmeg!" gasped Charlie. "No good for this kind of pain!"
"Frightful, I'm sure," said Peter. "Did you bite on something tough?"
"Yes, hard candy." said Charlie.
"Good old Charlie, what can I do?"
"Nothing, I suppose."
He put an arm around her. "Hold hard, and it will pass," he said.
She stood still with her eyes closed, letting herself be drawn in to him.
"Is it a little better?" he asked.
"Yes," murmured Charlie, "a lot better."
He removed his arm. "I'm glad of that." he said. "You need a dentist."
"It's not a dentist I need," she said, half fiercely. But she rallied at once and added, "I haven't said a word about how happy we are that you found Adrienne."
He answered with that warm outgoing of spirit which was so characteristic of him when he spoke to Charlie, "I know you're happy about the finding of her. And before long, with you helping, she'll find herself. Don't you think?"
"Of course I think so," said Charlie.
There was a heavy bang at the door, twice repeated.
"It's Bingo," said Charlie. "Of course he can't stay home when it rains. He doesn't know enough."
She opened the door and a wide, thick young man came in, wearing an army slicker. The water pattered down from him audibly and began to build a pool. He carried a basket over his arm.
"Bingo," cried Charlie, "you've been swimming with your clothes on! Won't you ever learn to keep dry? ... Lieutenant Gerard, this is Lord Wending."
She hardly allowed them time to speak to each other.
"What have you got in that basket, Bingo?" she demanded. "If it's not something to eat, you go straight home."
"Give me a drink, Charlie, and I'll show you what it is."
"There's the gin with the bitters beside it. Go help yourself."
"Isn't there any Scotch?"
"You know there isn't. When did you start rating Scotch?"
"I guess war is hell," said his impassive lordship.
He went to the gin, water squelching in his shoes as he left wet footprints behind him. He kept the basket over his arm and with the free hand poured half a tumbler of gin, gave it three splashes of bitters.
"Zusammen," he said, offering the glass to Charlie.
"I hate the miserable stuff," said Charlie, shuddering at the size of the drink.
"Zusammen," he insisted in his husky voice, still proffering the glass.
She gave way, took the glass, closed her eyes hard and tasted the mixture.
"Ghastly!" she said, and gave the drink back.
He blinked at her, totally unmoved. "Audrey?" he asked.
"Yes, Bingo?"
"When can I ask Charlie to marry me?" said Lord Wending.
"Why don't you people talk like this when you're alone with me?" asked Charlie.
"What people?" asked Bingo. "Go on, Audrey, give me an answer."
"Next year, perhaps," said Audrey.
"Here's to next year, perhaps," said Bingo, and tossed off the gin.
"You'll be sick," said Charlie.
"Control yourself, Charlie." said Lord Wending, and looking into the glass with care, he discovered a few drops which he rolled into his mouth. "Filthy gin they're making now," he said.
"Now, Bingo," said Charlie, "show me."
"Show you what?" asked Bingo, pouring another drink.
"What's in the basket, you idiot?"
"You're the Flying Dutchman, aren't you?" Bingo asked Peter. "I mean, you're the friend of Allan. I'm a little slow, but I'm glad to meet you now."
"Thank you," said Peter.
"Show me. Don't be a pig," said Charlie.
Lord Wending want on, unmoved, "If you get tired of gin, I have a little Scotch left; you come and see me." His voice never raised, never lowered, never altered in rhythm more than a metronome.
Here Adrienne came in, and she was wearing, of all the choices she might have made, the same unlucky blue dress that had cost Charlie so much grief. But what had been merely a frock on Charlie was a gown on Adrienne; not a line was altered, but still the difference was there. She had a couple of small, white tuberous begonias at her breast, and they seemed to cast light on the beauty of Adrienne. Charlie's heart gave a great knock against her ribs, a great pulse in her throat, then something from her spirit departed, like the ebbing of a silent tide.
She heard Audrey introducing Lord Wending and Adrienne. His lordship shook hands and then produced from the basket a long silver-shining salmon, a streamlined beauty.
"Miss von Osten," he said, "I hope you like fish."
"Of course I do," said Adrienne. "That's a wonderful salmon."
"I brought it for Charlie," said Lord Wending, "but perhaps you'll accept it and help me to forget her."
"I'll try," said Adrienne, with an apparent seriousness as profound as his own. "But for how long?"
"For a year," said Bingo. "Now that I look closer, perhaps forever. Do you like to go fishing?"
"Yes. But I always fall flat."
"So do I, as you see.... Dry fly?"
"Except that I always catch the hook in a tree."
"So do I. I get my exercise climbing trees when I fish.... Can you drink gin and bitters?" asked Wending.
"Yes. Depending a little on the gin."
"We'll change that with time. Miss von Osten?"
"Yes?"
"Where have we been hiding from each other?"
"But isn't it wonderful to be out in the open at last?" she asked.
"How much time can you spend on me?"
"How much time is there, my lord?"
"Stay for dinner. Please, Bingo." said Audrey.
"No, mother is waiting for her boy.... Charlie?"
"Yes, Bingo."
"You never looked like this in the old blue."
"You're rather horrible," said Charlie.
"That's a lord's privilege," said Bingo. "Good night all."
SUPPER went off very well with a little badinage about Bingo.
Charlie defended him. "There's one thing about Bingo," she said.
"The estate usually owns the Lord Wending that inherits it, but
it will never own Bingo.
"Not if he can throw it away," agreed Audrey.
"That's what things are for," said Charlie. "They're not worth having unless they're worth throwing away."
"What in the world do you mean?" asked Audrey, baffled.
"I can't explain. But you know, Adrienne. Don't you?"
"Whatever you have, there's something else better?" asked Adrienne.
"Yes. that's it!" said Charlie, excited. "So the first thing you throw away—"
"And then you're a happy beggar?" asked Audrey, smiling.
"If I could beg for happiness and have it." said Charlie, "what else would I do in the world?"
"That doesn't seem very English, does it?" asked Audrey.
"I don't care a hang," said Charlie. "None of us do, out in Wyoming!"
As they ended, Adrienne wanted to help with the dishes, but Audrey took charge with a firm hand.
"You two wander in there and make yourselves comfortable," she said. "You have a lot to talk over—all the way from Paris to Denham Hall—and the dishes will take only a little time. In five minutes, Charlie can finish washing everything she doesn't break."
That was why Adrienne and Peter sat in the living room, with the stern eye of Lady Maud fixed upon them out of her century of gloom. Adrienne sat down at the piano and began touching the keys lightly. Perhaps it was to keep Peter from talking. He leaned against the shoulder of the old grand and gazed upon her.
"You like them?" he asked. She nodded and smiled, half of her attention given to the music she was bringing into quiet life.
"Audrey?" he asked.
"So good, so charming," she answered.
"And Charlie?"
"Oh, there's somebody!"
"I knew you'd like her."
"No wonder his lordship wants her."
"Or you."
"He'd give ten of me for one for one glance from her bonny e'en."
"Queer little, forthright sort of a girl."
"There's nothing little about her."
"So young, I meant."
"Old enough to make mischief, Peter. What would you think of a man who might have her, and passed her by?"
"He'd be a fool. But what do you mean? Ah, the foreigner that she's lost her heart to?"
Adrienne looked surprised. "Yes, the foreigner," she said.
"Did she talk about him?"
"She doesn't need to talk. She writes it on her forehead."
"Who is it?"
"Do you want terribly to know?"
"No, but I'm curious."
"When you want terribly, then I might tell you."
"But when I go away tomorrow, you'll be a little happy with these Denhams?'?
"Dear Peter, must you always worry?"
"There's something about them that makes you uncomfortable?"
"Uncomfortable?" She dropped her hands from the keys and looked at him. Then resuming the fingering of the random notes, "Peter, I could be comfortable on a granite rock with only a bit of Devonshire sky for a roof." He was troubled by this, but she went on, "Do you like Lieder at all? The old folk songs and that sort of thing?"
"Yes," he said, "I rather like them."
She began to sing in German, very, very softly. And, roughly, the words of the old song, translated line by line according to this fashion:
"My love, if you, in truth, have forgotten.
Do not try too hard to remember.
For a new sky is now over your head.
But out of my nights the same stars.
Those that shone for both of as, now on me,
Now on me alone they are shining.
On the stream they look and on the bridge above it.
On the meadows and the hedge in bloom.
On the barn, the hayrick and the house.
On all my life they still are shining,
And in it, from afar, they see no change."
She sang this hardly above the volume of a whisper, smiling a
little, lifting her brows as she came to the higher notes, but in
the midst of the song it seemed to Peter that in the words or the
music or in both, there was a message for him. His whole mind
began to reach out desperately to find understanding, but now the
voice ended and the music no longer led him along those strange
paths.
"Do you like it?" she asked, as her hands wandered without meaning over the piano.
"More than liking or not liking," said Peter, "because there is a meaning in it. Tell me about that, Adrienne. Tell me what you think it's saying."
"But the words are quite clear, aren't they?"
"Perhaps, but the music adds something to them. And the whole song makes one seem terribly lost, somehow."
"Does it?" Adrienne asked, looking up not to him, but toward the vanishing sounds.
"Is there anything else at all like it?" he said.
"Let me think," said Adrienne. She pursed her lips and thought. The flowers at her breast moved a little with her breathing.
"Adrienne," he said, "when you sing—"
"Yes?"
"—You are deliriously beautiful."
"Peter, Peter, I haven't much of a voice at all."
"It's almost an art," he said, "this gift of yours for never quite understanding, and always keeping me at a distance."
"No, Peter. See how close we are?" she said, and, reaching out, she touched him with a fingertip. And then, smiling a little, she went on, "I've thought of another one. Not exactly the same, of course. Shall I sing it?
"Yes, please."
He bowed his head and waited: he never had learned to pray as devoutly in church as be prayed now for understanding, for, whether she knew it or not, he felt the deep conviction that something was to speak to him out of the music, directly from her.
She sang:
"The shadow of the hill pours to the west
In the morning. It covers the valley and shrinks.
By degrees, as the day grows older.
At noon the shadows falling to the north
Barely cover the feet of the hill.
But in the evening the night flows eastward
And rises to cover the knees of the house.
The breast it covers and the eyes also.
And at last we are deeply lost in darkness."
After the ending of the song, her hands still moved among
obscure chords. Finally, he could look up.
"If we could be lost together," he said. "There would be a beauty in that. It would be enough for me. Do you understand?"
She seemed a little bewildered, but still it was as though more of her mind were given to the music than to him.
"What do you mean, Peter?"
"But if the darkness—I mean, if you alone are covered by it, as though—do you see, Adrienne?—as though the day never would come again—"
"But, Peter, is it anything more than a song? Do you think so?"
"Nancy," he whispered.
"No, Peter. Please, no."
"I'm sorry," he said.
She stood up from the piano.
"You seem to be so frightfully lovely," he said.
"But I'm not; it's only your dream about me."
"And if I could take you and hold you—"
"Peter, dear," she said, "you may, of course."
And she held up her hands so as to give his arms a free way to enclose her.
"No," he decided, "because I'd be holding nothing but the thought of her, and she isn't here. She's not you. She has no part in you. That's what you meant when you were singing about the other sky and the other stars. They're not over my head."
"Hush, Peter. Not so loud, please."
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I think I'm going a little crazy. Could they have heard me?"
"No, I'm sure they didn't."
He sat in the nearest chair with his head in his hands, and she stood by him, as he knew by the thin rustle of the silk and the fragrance she was wearing. He could barely feel the hand that touched his shoulder. "Can I help you," she said, "if I stay here a while, quietly?"
"No. it's no good. Thank you."
"An Adrienne isn't a great deal of use, is she?"
"You're very sweet to me, and gentle, and unbelievably patient."
"If it helped, I'd be glad to stay, and with a great deal of love and pain for you. Peter."
"Thank you, my dear," he said, "but I think I'd better be alone. I despise myself for giving way like this."
"It has to be Nancy, doesn't it?" she said. "Nancy and all April. There simply isn't any other month in the year?"
"It seems to be like that," said Peter.
IN the kitchen, they had heard the raised voice of Peter for a
moment, a sound without words. They paused and looked at each
other; Audrey with a glass in the drying towel, Charlie in mid-
scrub on a skillet.
"Is he angry?" asked Audrey, with great eyes.
"No. no." said Charlie. "He's hurt—he's terribly hurt." She gritted her teeth and said through them, "Doesn't she know what he is?"
Then they were silent. The scouring-brush worked on the skillet and the glass squeaked against the polishing towel. They almost had finished the work when Adrienne appeared and showed an old tweed coat of Charlie's.
"Do you mind if I wear it?" she asked. "I thought I'd take a bit of a walk. It's stopped raining and the air will be so fresh and clear.
"Of course," said Charlie. "I'll go along with you."
"Thank you," answered Adrienne, "but if you don't mind. I'll go alone. I'm a night walker," she added, "and I'm so used to wandering by myself, just breathing deep and thinking about nothing. It's good for me."
"Have a good time," Audrey said. "The paths ought to be fairly dry by now."
Charlie broke out, "But if Peter knows you're away—" She struck a hand over her mouth, frightened by the words.
Adrienne renamed serene. "Should I tell him that I'm going?" she asked. "He worries a great deal, but I don't think he'll know that I'm gone."
"Of course, you know best," said Audrey.
At the door, Adrienne turned back. "You're such good friends to Peter," she said. "Tell me what you think I should do, and then I can be turning it over in my mind as I walk."
Charlie could only stare, but Audrey said, "You can't remember a thing, Adrienne? It's all blank?"
"Except that if I'd been married to him, don't you think there'd be an instinct?"
"Of course there would!" said Charlie.
"I'm glad you agree," said Adrienne.
"May I talk to you?" asked Charlie.
"Why, of course you may."
"Is it frightful. Adrienne, to have everything lost under a cloud behind you and to be dizzy in a whole new world?"
"Except that it doesn't seem new, but rather old," said Adrienne.
"We want to help you," said Charlie.
"Yes," added Audrey.
"With my whole heart, I really want to," repeated Charlie. "If you want to talk about anything, or ride, or walk, or go sailing, or whatever you please—I'll take off time from the factory; I have it coming to me. And somehow I'll manage to be a help, if you want me."
"That would stop your war work," said Adrienne.
"Too much time at the job is no good," said Charlie. "I have a lay-off coming, and I'd better take it. Otherwise your fingers turn into thumbs and stutter at the work, and the brain gets full of cobwebs. I want to be useful to you."
Adrienne turned half away quickly, and bowed her head.
"Don't be unhappy, please," Charlie begged, going close to her with her hands extended, as though she wished to lift a burden from this soul, but hardly knew how to take hold upon it.
"I'm sorry," murmured Adrienne. "But it's queer, isn't it? Kindness is what breaks us down. Only, don't think about me. There's Peter, and that's the real problem. Try to help me. What can I do?" She was facing them again, and with a handkerchief touching away the moisture in her eyes.
"You're terribly good and right," said Charlie, greatly moved. "And of course we'll find the best thing to do. Look at us—three of the hardest-headed women in Britain, and all concentrating on one point. You buck up, Adrienne, and remember Wyoming."
"Wyoming?" asked Adrienne, expectantly smiling.
"She's never been there," said Audrey.
"I'm going to be, though," said Charlie. "Wyoming needs me, and I need Wyoming, where there's nothing that can't be solved with a war whoop. We'll corral this problem and put a saddle on it. Only, about Peter, I suppose that there is a best way of doing?"
"Sometimes," said Adrienne softly, "I think that it's all clear, and that he knows that his wife is dead. But I suppose that there's a dreadful loneliness that comes to people when they've been deeply in love and then find half of themselves taken away. And, you see, out of that the illusion builds itself again in Peter. He knows that I'm older, and taller, and in many ways different from Nancy, but there must be a real similarity, and so the hope rushes back on him—and what shall I do?"
"Aren't you a little fond of him?" asked Charlie.
It seemed to give Adrienne a moment of pause.
"Hush, Charlie," said Audrey. "Of course she's fond of him, but not enough for that."
"Will you give him a little hope?" begged Charlie. "When he thought that Nancy was gone, he was like a wild man with the RAF. He was asking and hunting and hoping for death."
"Was he?" asked Adrienne, taking a deep breath.
"He was here, but only half of him," said Charlie, "and the other half was always away, wishing to die."
"Would it be right," said Adrienne faintly, "if I pretended?"
"No," declared Audrey, with a sudden supreme judgment. "It wouldn't."
"You won't have to pretend," said Charlie. "You don't know how he is. You've had France crashing and dashing about your ears, and you've had Peter pouring himself at you, but that isn't the way he really is. There's a whole world of Peter, and if you just wait, quietly and kindly—if you just wait, one day you'll find yourself inside it."
"I'll walk out and think. I must try to think it through all straight," said Adrienne. "Thank you both."
Charlie went to the door with her. The moonlight whitened the outer world.
"I know that everything will be right," said Charlie.
"We'll make it right, won't we?" said Adrienne. "And I'm so, so glad that I've found you, Charlie."
Charlie closed the door slowly, so slowly that she saw the girl cross the drive and strike out blindly through the wet of the grass. Her black steps followed her and her shadow drifted small at her side. Charlie went back to Audrey.
"She's good, Audrey," she said. "She's not Nancy, but she's sick because of Peter. But isn't it my damned luck that she should be so beautiful? That there should be so much grace and dignity; and yet she's quite gay too. But of course I don't want Peter to so much as look at me now, anyway. I only want his happiness, don't I?"
"Of course," said Audrey. "And then we have to remember that, in spite of everything, this girl may be Nancy."
"I only know one thing," said Charlie darkly.
"What is that, dear?"
"That I'd like to go to hell with a whoop and a holler—anything to get away from myself!"
ALL night, without sleep, Charlie lay flat on her back and
looked into the darkness above her. The long procession of her
thoughts turned at last, suddenly, up a new street; by the time
the full light of day was with her, the idea had grown so strong
and living that she needed air and space for it. So she hurried
into her clothes and got quickly into the open. As if it had been
all arranged for her, Peter Gerard was strolling up and down
before the house.
"I wish I were a poet," he said, "and then the clatter of these birds would be all musk and no noise."
She listened to the sharp chorus out of the trees. "Did they wake you up, the beasts?" she asked.
"They waked me half an hour too soon," he said.
By the darkness under his eyes, she knew that he had not slept a wink.
"They did me, too," said Charlie. "That's why I'm here. The birds I prefer are the ones that are worth eating."
"You shouldn't be such a little liar, Charlie," he said, looking at her with a smile.
"About what?" she asked.
"About sleeping. You haven't closed your eyes."
"Neither have you," said Charlie.
"Because you spend your time thinking about other people," Peter went on. "And so we've both been worrying about the same thing."
"Don't spoil me," Charlie said, "but I think I have an idea."
"That's what I want to hear."
"Here are three of us," said Charlie, "Audrey, you and I, all bearing down on her at close quarters, and every time she looks at us, she feels us saying; 'Find yourself again, Adrienne; find that you're Nancy, hurry and find yourself. She hears our thoughts as clearly as you and I hear church bells ringing on Sunday morning."
"Are we as insistent as that?" said Peter sadly.
"And I don't think she'll stand it. We'll drive her away. So the best thing is to keep her with us and still let her be alone."
"Isn't that a riddle, Charlie?"
"You come along and see."
She took him briskly on through the garden. The sun was brightening every moment and shining as it only shines in England after a rain, dusty bright through the mist.
"Here we are," said Charlie, as they came to a blunt, flat- roofed outbuilding with a wave of bright ivy breaking over it. "It used to be a tower, but now it's only a storage place."
She pulled open the door and they looked in on a great clutter of battered trunks and boxes, bedsteads, a quantity of picture- frames with some of the gilding knocked off them, a huge cluster of fire-irons, and all sorts of furniture which had weakened with time or died out of favor as new fashions came in.
"Aren't we a junky lot?" said Charlie, waving to the heaped masses. "Nobody knows what his grandson is going to like. If you build a castle, you leave out central heating. But I thought last night that we could take all of this stuff out and furnish the room decently, and then it might be like a separate home for Adrienne. You see?"
"A home for her?" said Peter.
"Yes." said Charlie eagerly, "if you can tell us what sort of things she likes to have around her."
"I can't be sure." said Peter slowly. "We were married such a short lime, you see. And I was busy watching my everyday world made so much larger that it could contain her. All those years—you know? Imagining things and daydreaming about what happiness could be, and then, all at once, there it was—mine—in my eyes, in my hands and filling my brain. So that I didn't ask questions about where and how and what it might be; I only knew that it was there in my own house."
"Then perhaps we can find the same things over here—just what made her happy there."
"Furnish the room exactly like our place in Rotterdam?" said Peter.
"That's the idea." said Charlie.
"If people have amnesia, the doctor tells me they must be shocked suddenly back into memory. And suppose she were to walk back, all at once, out of Denham Hall into the home we used to have—that would be a shock, wouldn't it?"
"But then, if she didn't remember?" asked Charlie. "Could you stand it?"
He made no answer to this, but stood a moment considering. "Who could help being happy here? It's a perfect place for peace." he said.
"We'll do everything we can," said Charlie. "And then you know Devon is famous for its air. Plowboys turn into soldiers and ad writers into poets. It's almost as good as Wyoming. Tell me some more about how happy it was there in Rotterdam," she added, sighing.
"Every morning, every noon, every evening different. As though all the seasons of the year were shuffled together, the best of everything, long summer evenings, winter nights that make you love a fire and your home, mornings like autumn to wake you up happily, and then every day was April."
"April. April," said Charlie, almost petulantly. "It's such a young, green, new month in the year, you know."
"I thought all the English were so fond of that month," said Peter.
"Only the poets." said Charlie. "'Oh. to be in England now that April's there,' and all that; they have the birds making melody all night and only sleeping with one eye. But that's the month I always get a cold in the head. I'm sorry I'm not very romantic—not in April, anyway. Back there in Rotterdam—"
"Yes?"
"—you weren't just a little delirious, were you?"
"Do I sound like that?"
"It doesn't matter. I thought that sort of thing was just in books.... But we have a job now—to make this room just like one of her days with you."
"Do you think we can?" asked Peter.
"Of course. You and I, with our sleeves rolled up, we could move Devon into Cornwall," said Charlie.
The Saturday Evening Post, 8 Jul 1944, with 5th part of "After April"
ADRIENNE was still fast asleep when Peter left to take the bus which would return him to his command. He would not have her wakened, and Charlie saw him down to the bus stop. The old trees, the garden places growing wild, the lawns on either side moved slowly past Charlie, and everything offered her a new face.
"It's queer, you know," said Charlie. "I feel like a stranger to myself since I've met you, Peter. I mean," she added quickly, "the war has always been on the other side of the Channel, but now it's right here in Denham Hall."
"I want to think about that," said Peter, troubled.
"No, don't think about it," she broke in hastily. "But the main thing is being happy, because to be sad is like being afraid; it darkens the eyes a little."
"Charlie, I think you could be happy enough for two," he told her. "But will you watch Adrienne?"
"Every step and every word," she promised.
They stood at the side of the road and watched the bus bowling toward them.
"And hold hard, Peter, won't you?" she said, as be left her.
He waved back to her, smiling. And when the bus was half a mile away, he looked again and saw her standing to watch him out of sight.
THE bus stopped in a village which was hardly more than a mile
from the fighter strip, and Peter went into the tavern for a
glass of ale before he walked out to the field. It carried before
the entrance a swinging shield on which was painted the grotesque
semblance of a white medieval greyhound that for fifty years had
been losing color. The rest of The White Hound was dingily
antique also. Even on a bright day the sun could not progress
more than a step or two from the windows before it was soaked up
among the shadows of darkening oak, and on this late afternoon
once more the brightness had been rubbed out of the Devon skies,
and the rain was hurrying down when Peter came into the taproom
as into the deep murk of twilight.
The farmers in their smocks had been driven from their work in the fields by the wetness, and now sat, not at the comfortable round table, but on benches against the walls, like a frieze worked in high relief. If they spoke, it was in voices no louder than the rain, so that they seemed as mute as figures in stone also. They looked as rough as the sea dogs who followed Drake out of Devon to the Spanish Main, and thence around the world, gathering the treasure they called the Dew of Heaven, but so much kindness and good had come to Peter out of this England, out of this very Devon, that he had to offer a round to all in the taproom.
They lifted the glasses and jogged their heads toward Peter without much enthusiasm or gratitude. They had heavy faces, and square brows with deep wrinkles between the eyes. Yet, dull as they seemed, it was not hard for Peter to realize that they were part of the English tree whose branches overshadowed the world.
"Wet weather for the crops, I'm afraid, isn't it?" Peter asked at large.
All heads turned to the oldest man in the room, a patriarch whose beard flowed creaming down his breast. He combed this beard twice before be was ready with an answer.
"Niver zeen laike o' thissy." he said at last.
There was a pause as all heads turned to the second most elderly, who had sunken temples and long teeth, like an old horse. Peter was glad of a moment's delay that permitted him to translate what he had heard from the rich gutturals of Devon into more modern words.
The leathery old man was saying. "Don't be a vule, Vred. Niver was zummer wutt hadn't watter in herzell."
Now that the two ancients had spoken, the rest seemed at liberty to express themselves, but they were more interested in arguing than in talking directly to Peter. With heat, as though they were striving together before an election, they disputed whether there had ever been a summer without plenty of water in "herzell." And Peter was getting to the bottom of his ale when a sergeant of the RAF ground force came in with four armed soldiers as guard for a captured German flier.
The man had been slightly wounded and wore a crude bandage around his head, a red stain leaking through the gauze.
Two types of German airmen were familiar to Peter—the rank and file who looked like wild boars, and a scattering of superior men who rather resembled boarhounds. This fellow definitely was of that upper stratum. In spite of wounds and capture he had an alert, aggressive air, as though he were ready at any moment to break the leash and spring at his quarry. A dozen children had come along in the wake of the German and now were pooled an instant at the door, looking curiously in, but the rest of the villagers paid not the least attention to this rare captive, and the farmers in the taproom carried on about the weather with unabated vigor.
Peter knew in his bones that every one of the farmers burned with curiosity, for here was one of those airmen who had slaughtered the English on the beach at Dunkirk, cleared the skies of France and now came hawking over the hills of England, yet these peasants were prevented by some code from gloating over an enemy who was down. Neither would they gratify him by showing the least interest. No one needed to tell them what to do. They were like gentry long schooled in proper manners.
The sergeant called out briskly to the barman, "Look lively there and tell us what you can bring this man to eat... What have you, father?"
The host, who also tended the tap, was somewhat angered by this easy address. "Thee knows I'm not thy veyther," he said, "but for that 'n over yanner. I can bring un mooton and whaten bradd."
"Bring it on then, and lively," said the brisk sergeant.
At this point the argument about the weather reached a new tension as one of the older farmers announced, "Wuttever thee says, bain't no meanness in the sky. If it wull rain, latt 'im goo, missus, says I."
There is an unwritten rule of chivalry among the airmen of all countries except Japan. It is a knightly inheritance from the last World War, and Peter felt himself bound by it to make some approach to the German.
"Sergeant." said Peter, "may I speak to the prisoner?"
"At your pleasure, sir," said the sergeant, "but the order is for me always to remain within earshot, if you please."
"Naturally," said Peter. He added to the prisoner, "Are you comfortable, sir? Is there anything I can do to make you more at ease?"
The German looked him squarely in the eyes, but he said nothing. Peter pretended not to notice the insult, though he knew that the German he spoke was as good as could be found in Hanover.
"There happens to be some good white wine of Alsace in this place. Or ale, if you please. It will be a pleasure to me to offer you some," he went on, but he was talking to a face of stone, except that a far-off glimmer of satisfaction was appearing in the eyes.
The sergeant, who had been watching closely, broke in, "Pardon me, sir. Aren't you the Lieutenant Gerard with the eight Jerries to your credit?"
"My name does happen to be Gerard," said Peter mildly.
"Very good, sir, thank you," said the sergeant, and stepped farther off with a shining face of respect.
"You're a Dutchman. I see," said the captive, in perfectly adequate English, "but what makes you stupid enough to be wearing an English uniform?"
"It's an old Dutch habit." said Peter. "We've stood with the English before this."
He called for an ale, which was brought at once and put down before the German.
The captive tried it and made a face. "In Germany we would not give such swill to beasts." he said. He looked around, but no one seemed to hear. He raised his voice, "Even English malt is flat and stupid."
A little clamor broke out from the Devonshire men, and the German seemed pleased, but presently he realized that the Devon outcry was still simply the argument about the summer rains.
"There's no use in shouting," said Peter. "They won't let themselves hear you.
"Won't let themselves?" echoed the German blankly.
"You see, they understand," said Peter. "If you couldn't die in the air, at least you want to make trouble on land, but they won't make a martyr of you. The English never put hands on a helpless man."
"That, they say, is not cricket?" asked the German, struggling to get a better comprehension of this strange attitude. "You see what sport has done to the English brain. It has unfitted it for war."
"They still seem to be fighting." said Peter, without animosity.
"They endure only for a moment, while the Führer holds up England in his hand and turns it around, so that the world of history may see the target before he strikes the blow."
"I don't think we gain a great deal by this sort of talk," suggested Peter.
"Little man, little man." said the German, "What do you wish me to talk about?"
"Isn't there something besides war?" asked Peter.
"Little brains from little countries." said the German, "they waste their time talking about the past while we seize on the future. Little and old. We are the young nations. The Axis is freshly born. All our destiny is new. Get out of our way, old nations, little nations. The world is tired of you. It aches in the marrow of its bones because of you. We must have living space. It is not given. So we take it. The new years belong to the new peoples."
One of the soldiers of the guard was a cockney. He had been listening to this outpouring with a brightening eye, and now he laughed. "'Ark at 'im sing!" he said.
"I am not singing," said the German. "What does the fool mean?"
"Balmy, ain't 'e?" asked the soldier, and turned his attention away.
"Balmy?" said the German, ready to be furious.
"I fear." said Peter, "that he thinks you are a little touched in the mind. I'm sorry to repeat what he says."
"You are the ones that are touched in the brain—the English and all you little people," broke out the flier. "Singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied, we shall trample you down, our heels in your faces. Good-by, little people; good-by. England. German cattle shall browse her pastures. German sheep shall eat in her meadows, and we will use the proud Englishman for a swineherd."
"'Ark at 'im only 'alf," said the cockney, and there was a hearty burst of laughter all around the room, the men of Devon joining in with a great brazen roar.
Peter went back to his table and left the aviator standing stiffly erect, his arms folded high on his chest, but in spite of himself he had been moved; no forewarning had prepared him for ridicule, and the soldier of the master race was crimsoned by a hot shame for which he had no name or understanding.
PETER started for the fighter strip, walking up the grade
under the big trees, and hardly aware of the rain that still was
misting down, for his mind was full of what he had seen in the
taproom. Somehow, the rough Devonshire men had seemed to
represent the heart of England, rich in the possession of their
country, their special place in life, and it was this strength of
the soil which had enabled them to disregard the passion of the
German flier. As for himself, he was a stranger in this land, a
bubble that floated on the surface of life; but for Adrienne, if
indeed she was making a return to her own nation, there must be a
thousand influences to work on her. The savor of every breath she
drew, the sound of every voice must be working a chemical change
of blood and spirit. There were Audrey and Charlie, too, as
English as the green of Devon, who must be helping her by degrees
back to the forgotten life. Such a nation is like a family,
widely scattered, but aware of its blood, so that in a time of
need it draws close together.
An RAF car passed him, stopped with a groan of brakes, and Major Grace got out of it. The automobile went on and the doctor waited for Peter to catch up with him.
"This is good," said Grace. "When a man does his thinking with his head up, instead of down, it's a sign that he's getting along. So she is better?"
"Very much better, I think," said Peter.
"Does she talk of leaving England?"
"No, sir. Did you expect that?"
"Never mind. How does she treat you?"
"Very considerately."
"What?" cried the doctor.
"Is that a surprise also?"
Doctor Grace grunted. "Not nervously on edge, you would say?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"Quite so, quite so.... Not bothered by sleeplessness, either?"
"I believe not, but I'm not sure."
"She doesn't confide in you—am I to understand that? Doesn't talk very familiarly with you?"
"On the contrary, sir. I'd say that she's quite open. The fact is—" He paused, embarrassed by what he found himself about to say.
"The fact is what?" snapped the major.
"She seems to feel a degree of concern about me, a friendly interest, as though I were the person to be considered, sir."
"Pities you? Is that what you mean?" asked Doctor Grace.
"I'm afraid that that's about it," admitted Peter.
"Interesting," said the major. "Very interesting." He walked on with a darkened brow for some time.
Peter finally found the courage to ask, "You don't seem pleased with the way things are going, sir?"
"The other people down there—how does she get on with them?"
"Just about the way she gets on with me, sir."
"No difference, eh?"
"None to speak of, I should say. Is that unexpected?"
"Let it go. What are your specific plans about her?"
"They've found a room that I can refurnish exactly like the one we lived in in Rotterdam, Nancy and I. And when it's all complete, then we plan to bring her into it by surprise. Don't you think that might bring back her memory suddenly?"
"Of course it might," said the doctor. He repeated, in a heartier voice, "Of course it might bring her back. An excellent idea!"
It might have seemed a forced enthusiasm in any other man, but Peter trusted in the absolute frankness of the major. Therefore he walked on with a smile and his head high again. A wind began to press against them. He leaned cheerfully into it.
EACH day there was flying for Peter, each evening he
telephoned to the Denhams, and each night he slept heavily,
without dreams. The third afternoon he met Charlie in Bristol and
she took him to the shops where he could find Dutch furnishings.
He found even copies of the etchings which had hung on the walls
of their bedroom, and the very facsimile of the clumsy old bed;
there was not a thing lacking, as far as he could remember,
except a replica of the blue-and-white-porcelain clock which had
stood on the mantelpiece. In place of that, he took a charming
little version in pure white marble.
Even the weather remained clear and sunny for them until everything had been paid for and delivery arranged for the next day, and by the time it started raining they were ready for tea—a high tea, because Charlie was ravenous. She consumed a mountain of scones while Peter questioned her.
Already the room in the outbuilding was prepared. The lumber stored in it had been cleared out and the walls given a wash of white. She had put little bags of lavender everywhere, and now the place no longer smelled of dust and mold, but as though it had been lived in pleasantly for a long time. Finally, there was Adrienne to talk about.
"However she got the name of von Osten," said Charlie, "she's as English as I am."
"That's good news, Charlie," Peter said. "How can you be sure?"
"She's been in an English girls' school," said Charlie, adding up items on the tips of her fingers; "she's ridden horses over English hedges and walls; she has English table manners; but there's one surest sign of all—she likes English hats; she actually prefers them!"
"Will you tell me, please, how English hats are different?" he asked.
"Well, they don't make any sense."
"And she likes them?" asked Peter, almost too eagerly.
"I have a box full of old hats and junk that's come off them," said Charlie, "and Adrienne spent most of yesterday putting together a concoction that was to be a present for Audrey. It was finished last night."
"Perfectly silly, was it?" asked Peter.
"Most ridiculous thing you ever saw," said Charlie. "But Audrey loved it, and so did I. Still, right down in the marrow of my bones, I knew that only English hands could have made such a joke. All at once, half the distance between us was gone—just like that." She snapped her fingers.
"English, yes." said Peter. "You couldn't be wrong about it. Not possibly. What does Audrey think?"
"She agrees."
"If you're both sure of it, that's enough for me. Then she is English." said Peter, half to himself, "and with all the other resemblances, as the book says, the proof increases in geometrical progression."
"What does that mean. Peter?"
"It means that you're making me tremendously happy."
"That's jolly good," said Charlie. "I like that. And you look better, Peter. Pounds better."
"Because I've known that she was down there with you and Audrey—two pairs of better hands than mine, and wiser heads too. Has there been anything else?"
"Let me see," murmured the girl, and looked askance into her memories. "I've watched her so closely that every day is as long as a book. Let me find a good place to start. We went walking this morning, for instance, out to the sea."
"Tell me about that, then."
"She walks well," said Charlie, critically remembering every detail. "I hardly had to slow up for her at all. We climbed up to the heather and walked out to the end of Cumber Head.... She doesn't mind high places, does she?"
"But I think she does, actually," he said, trying to remember.
"She stood right out on the edge against the wind. I was a bit scared and dizzy, looking down at the waves. But she was enjoying it, I think; smiling a little."
"That smiling, sometimes it doesn't mean a great deal," said Peter.
"Doesn't it? No, perhaps not.... After a moment I began to enjoy the scene too. Adrienne breathed it all in for a long time, and then she said something a little odd.... Let me see if I can remember." She half closed her eyes and went on, "'Does the sea ever frighten you?' she asked me. I told her of course it did. when it began doing its stuff in a big way. She said, 'When I was a youngster. I never liked the seashore. Every wave seemed to be hunting for me. It wasn't how they came in, with a roll and a crash, but the way they snaked, afterward, up the sand without a sound, and then slipped away back when they missed me. Now it's very different. Do you see how the waves lift as though there were breath under them? It seems like motion in sleep, and is there any peace in the world like this?'"
On the mind of Peter came again the picture of the streaming wake of the Tridholm, dropping away over the edge of the earth.
"I hope you got her away from the edge of that rock." he said.
"Does this bother you, Peter?" asked Charlie.
"No. I suppose not," he said, settling back in his chair.
Her clear eyes fixed on him for a moment. When she began to speak again, she talked slowly, obviously with half her mind studying his reactions, "Then Adrienne went on, 'Under the surface, you go past the roots of the waves and then there's no movement except the tides going out and coming in, rocking back and forth, sifting out every unclean thing that all the rivers of the earth bring down to it. Actually, there's nothing pure except the sea.'"
"Wait a moment." said Peter.
"Is there something about it that disturbs you? There was for me too. I don't know exactly why. What is it, do you think?"
He said quietly, "All at once I remember."
"What Is it?"
"Why, she hardly had the courage to stand on the top of a stepladder."
"But how on earth can she have changed so much?" asked Charlie.
"I can't tell." said Peter slowly. "I can't be sure of anything that's worth knowing."
ON the morning of the great day when the furniture was to arrive, it was planned that Audrey should take Adrienne out of the way by going marketing to town and wasting as much time as possible.
Audrey had a moment alone with Charlie before she left.
"It's going to be a perfect day for your trip," said Charlie. "Not a cloud in the whole silly sky. Maybe that's an omen."
"Of what, Charlie?"
"Why, a sign that all the clouds will be cleared away for Peter."
"Are you a little bitter?"
"Of course not. Why should a goon like me be bitter? All I need to do is help stow the furniture in the right places and tack up pictures and straighten rugs and keep smiling and make everything ready for Adrienne to be happy ever after. That ought to make me happy, too, shouldn't it?"
"Darling, you're not saying what you think."
"All right. I suppose all I want is to see Peter happy. But sometimes I could do a bit of screaming. Out loud, is what I mean.... I shouldn't have said all this."
"I haven't heard it, dear," said Audrey.
Charlie took a breath.
"It would choke me to be as good a woman as you are, Audrey," she said, through her teeth.
Less than an hour after Audrey departed with Adrienne, the furniture arrived. They had plenty of hands to take it out of the boxes. Allan Denham was there, and Peter, and Captain Stephen Windus, expert at pulling nails so straight that they could be hammered home again. These pairs of hands established the heavy bed in its corner and set the iron stove into the fireplace. They brought in the chairs, set up the couch and removed the heavy litter while Charlie ran the curtain rods through the rings and put up the etchings on the wall in the exact places which Peter had marked with pencil. The immense clutter began to take shape before long.
"Now look," said Charlie to Peter. "How does it seem to you?"
He pointed to the Persian rug on the floor. "That was the great stroke of luck," he said. "To find that pine-tree pattern. Think of that, Charlie!"
"Yes, think of it," said Charlie, a little dryly.
"You know what she used to say?" he asked.
"Peter, I don't care what she used to say!" exploded Charlie. He was stunned.
"I'm terribly sorry," Charlie said. "I don't know what's the matter with me." She threw herself down on the couch.
"Take it easy," Allan advised Peter. "Charlie is burned up, I don't know about what."
Prom the background he made violent signs to her. Windus carefully observed them.
"What have I done?" asked Peter miserably, coming close to Charlie.
"Nothing," said Charlie viciously. "You couldn't say anything that wasn't right."
"Don't pay any attention to her. We never do," said her brother. "When the devil gets into Charlie, we resign."
"You're tired, Charlie," said Peter to her.
"Tired, my foot," said Charlie. "I could crack the marrowbones of a saber-toothed tiger.... Just step back and look things over." She indicated the room. "Is everything all right?"
"I think it is," said Peter. "I'm so sorry that you've exhausted yourself, Charlie. I only hoped you could give me an opinion about the whole effect."
"It's perfectly good Rotterdam, I'm sure," said Charlie.
"Leave her alone," Allan cautioned Peter. "Let's get out of here.... You stay with Charlie, Steve. You know all about her tantrums."
Peter and Allan went out. In the open air, Peter stared with bewilderment at Allan Denham.
"It's something I've said without knowing," said Peter. "I'll never be able to say the right thing in English. Or is it only that she's exhausted herself pulling and hauling?"
"Who knows?" asked her brother, shrugging his great shoulders. "The thing for us is a gin and bitters. Two or three shots and you'll find it easier to understand Charlie."
Inside the room Windus walked up and down as be packed and lighted a pipe.
"That's a terrible incinerator you carry around with you," said Charlie.
"You're rude," answered the captain. "This is Uncle Jeremy's pipe."
"Nothing could get to smell like that during only one life." said Charlie. "Put it out, will you?"
"No," said the captain.
"A sweet thing it would be, married to you," said Charlie, keeping her eyes fast shut.
"I knew you were thinking about that," said Windus.
"You knew I was thinking about what?"
"About marrying me."
"Steve, you're a terrific fathead."
"But if you only want me to wring the damn Dutchman's neck, you don't need to marry me. I'll do it for fun."
"Wring what? Are you a little crazy, Steve?"
"I hate like the devil to get you on the rebound," said Windus. "But I'd rather have you on the rebound than no way at all," he continued. "When will you marry me?"
"I'm not even thinking of such a thing."
"Would the Dutchman be pretty sick if he saw you really gone away? But more than half seriously, don't you see that the fellow's out of his mind about another woman? Why sing your song to a deaf-mute when old Steve Windus is so handy close by?"
"There may be something in what you say," said Charlie thoughtfully.
"Go right ahead," said Windus. "I like what you're saying."
"Steve, be terribly kind, will you?"
"Softer than rain water."
"Do you think I could ever forget him?"
"That's what Dutchmen are for—forgetting."
"I hope you never feel this way."
"Slightly nauseated and lost and alone?"
"How do you know so well?" she asked, rousing a little in her surprise.
"You've made me feel that way for years."
"I'm terribly glad that you're not a stranger," she said, sighing.
He leaned over the couch.
"Don't touch me, though," said Charlie.
"I'm not going to.... But I think we could get along together pretty well for forty or fifty years."
"You know, Steve," she said plaintively, "I get terribly tired of having my heart break every day."
"I wouldn't stand for it, if I were you," said Windus.
"But think how horrible it would be for you, if we planned marrying and then, at the last, I couldn't forget him at all?"
"We won't name a day at all. Well just wait till all the Dutchmen in the world are five cents a dozen with you."
"Old Steve," she said, "what a comforter you are! Shall we make it a go?"
"The moment you say the word," said Windus.
They went together into the house, where Allan was mixing drinks. Windus took her hand.
"Well, here we are," he said.
Allan Denham gradually collected the sense of the scene and broke into a shout.
"You and Steve, Charlie!" he cried. "It's the best thing I ever heard of! It's wonderful! Where did you ever get such good sense?" He gave Charlie a whack on the shoulder and gripped the hand of his friend. "You'll be damned happy," he said.
"Of course they will," said Peter, "and I congratulate you, sir. I am only a stranger—"
"Oh, you're more than that," broke in Windus.
"But there is no one else in the whole world like her," said Peter, with enthusiasm. "One couldn't find the word for her in any other language."
"Hear, hear!" said Windus.
"How lovely it makes you. Charlie," said Peter.
"Does it?" she answered tersely. "There must be a terrific change."
"I know now," said Peter, smiling, "why you were upset. I was afraid it was because of something I had done or said. But it was this all the time!"
"Peter—" she said, while Windus watched her narrowly.
"Yes, Charlie?"
"Am I a bit more grown-up now?"
"Almost. Yes, you are—quite."
"You and I," she said, "will be awfully good friends, won't we?"
"As long as you'll have me," said Peter with devotion, and put his arm lightly around her.
"Don't!" cried Charlie under her breath, and shaking his arm away she ran suddenly into the curtained alcove which was her bedroom.
"But what's wrong?" asked Peter, keeping his voice down to a whisper, so that she might not hear.
As the men stared at one another, they heard two great sobs, not like the easy weeping of a woman, but the grief of a heartbroken man.
"This is rotten," said Allan... "Steve, go in there and straighten her out."
"Not for a million dollars." said Windus. "She needs some time and space to herself."
There was no really audible sobbing now, but only a choked pulsation as she fought with herself.
"Why don't you try your hand with her?" said Windus to Allan.
"There's no use," answered Allan. "Let's get our drinks and give her time."
Peter murmured in Allan's ear, "Is it the foreigner that she's upset about?"
"Damn the foreigner," said Allan heartily.
He turned away toward Windus, but was uneasily aware that Peter, drawn by his great concern, had wandered close to the alcove's curtained entrance.
"Charlie," said Peter, "they won't believe this. Not in Wyoming, will they?"
A great gasp came from Charlie. Peter stood by with his troubled eyes on the ceiling, quite forgetting the others.
The voice of Charlie, half strangled, was saying, "Peter, you—"
"That fellow," muttered Windus. "He'll catch it now."
"It's never done. Not in Wyoming," said Peter, faintly smiling.
"You idiot! You great, staring idiot!" said Charlie.
"Here's your drink," murmured Allan to Windus anxiously, but Windus, gray as stone, made no answer.
"But we'll tell everyone that it was only hay fever," Peter was saying. "Won't we?"
The curtain of the alcove was flung back with a rattling of curtain rings. Denham and Windus shrank as Charlie appeared, but Peter, as though blessed by ignorance, did not stir.
"All right," said Charlie, defying the world. "I've been a fool again, so what of it?"
"Hay fever isn't foolishness. It's an allergy," said Peter, smiling down at her. He took out his handkerchief and touched her eyes with it.
Charlie steadied herself by pinching the edge of Peter's jacket as she stood, patiently, under this ministration.
"Well," she said, "from now on, I suppose that I've got to act grown-up, too!"
CHARLIE went to put a cold towel across her eyes. Allan began
to finger the dials of the radio.
"Nice work, Gerard," said Windus. "You have the touch with women."
"No, actually not at all," explained Peter, "but a girl like Charlie, so forthright and honest, is bound to have a low flash- point, don't you think?"
"I'll try to remember that when we're married," said Windus coldly.
But Peter was too deep in the subject to notice the coldness, "And when anyone as right and strong as she is in an outburst," he went on, "I suppose it's better not to sympathize, but try to make them laugh."
"Sir, you talk like a professor on the subject," said Windus in such a voice that Peter looked suddenly at him with a hard and steady eye.
"I don't like that," he said and rose to his feet
Windus was up quickly also, but Allan came between them, carrying drinks.
"What's this?" he demanded.
"There's something Captain Windus wished to explain to me." said Peter, bowing a little to Steve, "and we'd better go outside for a walk and a talk."
"Very happy," said Windus.
"Is this fighting talk?" asked Denham. "What's the matter with you two?" He called to Peter, "Come back here."
For Peter was already at the door. Now he turned reluctantly.
"Mr. Windus is so well-bred," he said, "that I'm sure he is never unintentionally rude."
The radio was making vague sounds in the background.
"This insufferable boor," said Windus, white with anger.
"This is the damnedest thing I ever heard of," roared Denham. "And just when we were about to drink healths."
"I think we understand each other, sir." said Peter to Windus.
"None better," answered Windus.
"Charlie!" called Denham.
"You will say nothing to her about this," said Peter.
"You won't speak a word to her?" urged Windus.
"Won't I?" asked Denham, beginning to grow hot. "And why not?"
"It is my request; we must not disturb her," said Peter.
"But, Steve!... Peter!" broke out Denham. "I love both you fellows, and there can't be bad blood between you."
Here Charlie came hurrying in. "What is it, Allan?" she asked breathlessly.
Peter took charge as an instant of silence began to grow. "We can't drink your happiness without you," he said. He lifted his glass and added. "May your whole life be filled with love and happiness, and God bless you, Charlie."
"Give me a glass, Allan," said Charlie. "I want to drink all of that, even if it makes me dizzy."
A loud voice on the radio broke in: "Gentlemen of England, I speak to you in confidence once more. All of you who are intelligent will listen and the others don't matter."
"It's that German blighter," said Allan, "trying to talk us into the soup. Let's listen to him. But first, here's to you, the best of everything, Charlie."
He downed his glass and then sat close to the radio.
The voice of the propagandist continued in the smoothest of English accents: "Consider yourselves, Englishmen. From Bordeaux to Vladivostok, the heart of the world is organized and arranged against you. Against you little forty millions, four hundred millions are engaged under the direction of a greater military genius than Caesar or Napoleon. A gesture will crush you, but still the Führer delays, in the hope that you will see reason. You will see that there is nothing to hope. From your empire, twenty millions more might rally to your aid, but they have oceans to cross, and they would arrive only to lose themselves with a lost cause. Why does not the Führer strike before even these can come? Because he is inspired not with hate but with the profoundest knowledge of the future. He sees the nations organized under the leadership of the Axis, and a thousand years of peace will follow for those who—"
"I think he makes himself clear," said Peter. "Won't the rest be rather a bore?"
"Quite," said Allan, and snapped the radio off.
They looked at one another for a moment, while the echoes died out of their minds.
"I've been a fool," said Windus quietly to Peter.
"No, sir; foreigners are always irritating," answered Peter in the same voice. "But we're never sure when we cross the bounds."
"Has something been up, in here?" asked Charlie, looking curiously around.
"Not a thing," said Allan. "Why?"
"You're the worst liar I ever saw," said Charlie. "If I couldn't lie better than you do, I'd go back to school. Never mind. I'll find out everything."
Here Audrey came in with Adrienne, their arms filled with packages.
"There's nothing to be had," said Audrey unhappily. "The shops are stripped as bare as a bone. You never saw anything like it. This is war."
"Can you come look at something while there's still sun?" Peter asked Adrienne when her arms were emptied of their load.
"Of course I can," said Adrienne.
They went out of the room, leaving it suddenly silent behind them. In the open, the late afternoon was waiting for them, the trees already adding their shadows to one another, so that beneath them the evening was gathering while the sky was still bright. Birds, returning from their last hunting of the day, quarreled cheerfully in the branches, and a whole horizon of peace was drawn closely around Denham Hall.
"You've been angry, and that's good for you always," said Adrienne. "It gives you a fine color."
"These people are a queer lot," he told her. "They fight a war with the best spirit in the world, but when it comes to love and marriage they start showing their teeth."
"Marriage?" asked Adrienne.
"Windus and Charlie."
"Not your Charlie! I don't believe it!"
"Why not? She's known Windus always, but they no sooner agree on marriage than Charlie is rude to me."
"Charlie rude to you? I'm bewildered."
"I think she's terribly upset," said Peter. "This marriage with Windus—a good fellow, I'm sure—but I understood she was in love with another man."
"That doesn't sound like Charlie," said Adrienne. "Do you know who it is?"
"No. A foreigner, I believe. A fellow who pays no attention to her. Strange, isn't it, how blind men are?"
"Yes," she said, looking closely at him, "men are very blind. And Charlie is attractive."
"Not now, particularly, but in a few years. However, men can't use their imaginations. They slog along, nose to grindstone, never looking up to see what may happen tomorrow."
"This other man—a foreigner, you said?"
"So I hear. Poor Charlie!"
"Foreigner," said Adrienne, half to herself. "I begin to understand a great many things."
"I can't imagine her doing well except where she's invested her whole heart and soul. Marriage of convenience? Nonsense! Not for Charlie," said Peter.
"What do you think of Charlie, actually?" asked Adrienne.
"I love her—" said Peter.
"But—"
"Oh, of course she's entirely immature. I hope she'll stay that way."
"Immature?"
"I mean, with that freshness and clarity."
"I begin to wonder," said Adrienne, "if you're not very young, Peter."
"Young?" said Peter. "Sometimes I feel like the oldest man in the world."
"Do you believe at all in this Windus affair?" asked Adrienne.
"I hope, but I can't believe. She has to give her whole self. She can't deliver herself in parcels. Shall we stop talking about her?"
"If you, wish," said Adrienne, carefully watching him.
"Did you have a good day with Audrey?"
"She's so quiet and so careful She makes me feel like a very expensive convalescent."
"Are you happy with the Denhams?"
"Oh, yes."
"Extremely?"
"No. Not extremely, but you get along, don't you?"
"Of course I do...."
"Where are we heading?"
"Over here. Let's look inside the old storehouse."
He pulled open the door and let her pass in ahead of him. The westering sun slanted through the two windows, thin gold in the misty air and brighter on the Persian rug.
Adrienne made two or three steps into the room and then paused. He realized that he should have managed to get inside first, so that he could watch her face; all he could notice from the back was that she seemed to straighten suddenly. He must remember every breath, every word, every gesture, for the doctor, but already his heart was failing, for she had received the major shock of the picture—and in silence.
The Saturday Evening Post, 15 Jul 1944, with 6th part of "After April"
HE went over to the farther window and leaned beside it.
"How pleasant!" she said. "And really Dutch, isn't it?" She went around the room, admiring.
"There's something about old wood, worm holes and all," she said, lifting the top of an ancient chest. "All the hands that have worked over them—it ought to give one patience. And no fear of death. You think of the day when it was the new fashion, and then it's simply stale, and then it comes to life again because it's old and dead."
She was laughing a little as she went on. She had a word about almost everything, and the ease of her voice was what broke Peter's heart. It was not possible to be completely disappointed at a stroke, but by degrees he realized how utterly his scheme had failed. All that be had hoped for was a gesture in the dark. It meant nothing to her whatever.
She went toward the hearth stove. "That's one of their queer little stoves too," she said. "It would keep the room very snug, I suppose."
"It's your room," he told her. "The idea is that it may be better for you to be out of the crowd and clutter where the Denhams are living."
"How lovely of them!" said Adrienne. "But I can't let them do so much for me. But no! Peter, Peter, it's you who've done it all. If I were a collector—but how did you find the pewter on that plate-rail?"
"It's all Bristol stuff—and Charlie knew the shops," he said.
"Of course Charlie would help." she said. "Isn't it almost as though she were a Dutch girl and knew exactly what to look for?"
"There's a kindness in her, isn't there?" said Peter. "And I suppose the best sort of understanding comes out of that."
"Of course it does," said Adrienne, with that same impersonal brightness.
He drew a handkerchief across his wet forehead. A shadow had come over Adrienne.
Her glance swept the room. "Isn't there an extra meaning?" she asked.
"What sort of meaning, Adrienne?"
"Do I understand?" she was saying sadly. "Has all this been done to make me remember?"
He seemed to be listening with two minds, in one of which he noted the words which destroyed utterly the hopes which he had gathered about this project; but with another ear he heard only the music which her voice made for him, so different from the clear boyish force of Charlie, so modulated and warmed with overtones of sympathy.
"Yes," he answered. "This is almost exactly the room in Rotterdam where—Well, I've missed again."
She said, "It's dreadful to want you to be happy and yet always to wound you. I should think it would make you hate me."
He studied her a moment from brow to chin. "No," he said, smiling a little. "No."
"If wishing with all my might could take me back to this and to you," said Adrienne, "I'd be there again with everything clear. But since I can't, don't you think this is final, Peter? If actually I'd ever seen this place, before, don't you believe that the memory would come rushing over me?"
"I don't know," said Peter. "It seems pretty final, yes."
"But even this way—you still want me to have this room with all you've brought into it?"
"Yes, yes."
"Are you sure? I know how you must have hunted for every detail, and each time you saw what you wanted, you said to yourself, 'This is it. She'll remember this like a face. Nancy can't help remembering this.'"
Peter nodded. "Yes, Adrienne, that was the way of it," he admitted.
"And don't you think that it may sadden you, after a while, to know that Nancy is not in here, but only Adrienne?"
"I want you to have it, if you will."
"Very well," said Adrienne, and he could see her mood change. "I can't say 'no' to anything so lovely.... But that rug shouldn't be on the floor. Most people would hang it on a wall. It's silk, Peter, isn't it?"
"Yes."
She had crouched down to run her hand over the texture.
"It's delicious," she said, and stood up.
"Ill let you look things over alone," he said. "I won't stand around like a mourner."
"Don't go for a minute," she said. "But the clock has stopped. I suppose the first thing is to bring it to life. I'll wind it."
He was standing by the door as she crossed the room, glancing over her shoulder toward him with a smile. No other woman in the world moved as she moved, no other had such music in her throat. The misty brilliance of the sunlight flowed about her and now she was standing in the dimness at the farther end of the room where the little clock of white marble stood on the mantelpiece. A devil of jealousy suddenly twisted his heart because of that other man, someplace in her life, from whom she would not move away like this. He noticed, with a shock that opened his eyes and his mind, that when she had taken the clock down she had not turned it around to wind it from the back or swung up the hinged glass that covered its face; instead, she was prying with the tips of her fingers at the bottom of the side panel. He hurried across the room.
"Why are you trying to open it here?" he asked.
"But, Peter, what's the matter?" she said, frightened.
"It's the one thing I couldn't replace," he said. "There was a blue-and-white porcelain clock in the room at home, and the key to wind it fitted in at the side—a key with a long shank—never saw that arrangement on another clock. And you've been trying—do you see?—your fingers were trying by their own instinct to open that panel."
Her hands jumped up and covered be face,
"Now you understand?" he said "Whatever you've been thinking, your thoughts are wrong. There's that darkness in your mind, but when you push the curtain aside, you'll find Nancy beyond it. Do you doubt it now?"
Through the stifling hands, she said "No. Will you hold me close to you?" He took her in his arms. He could not tell whether it was his body or hers that trembled.
"You know now that it's true?"
"Yes," she whispered. "It must be."
"And that you are my wife?"
"Yes."
"How can God be so kind to me?" said Peter.
"Make Him be kind to me also. Make me remember; let me love you."
"It will happen."
"I pray for it. I want my whole heart to be free; I want it to open to you. Oh, listen, there's no other soul in the world who means half a breath to me. I want to come out of the darkness; I don't want to be locked away from happiness."
She was shuddering so violently that he carried her to the deep chair beside the hearth. From the foot of the bed he snatched up the blue knitted throw which lay folded there and wrapped it round her. He knelt by the chair with his arms around her again.
"My heart is as cold as a stone," she whispered at his ear. "And it keeps sinking. Peter, I want to love you. Make it right and good. And God have mercy on me!"
EVENING began to darken the windows of Denham Hall, and
Charlie remembered that the time for Peter's return bus had
almost come. She grabbed his raincoat and cap.
"I'll be gone a minute, Steve," she said to Windus. "Keep up the fire; there's bread baking in the oven. I've got to get Peter away.
"Can't the man tell time?" asked Windus.
"I always see him off to the bus," said Charlie, and left the house on the run.
She began calling from a distance, "Peter! Bus time, Peter!"
Out of the dimness of Adrienne's new room she saw him appear at the door and turn to wave good-by. Then he was out with her, taking the coat over his arm and striding so large that she was half running to keep up.
"It's a great day for both of us!" he told bar. "The room turned the trick! What a great day, Charlie! You're on the way to your marriage, and Nancy has almost found herself!"
"Has she?" gasped Charlie. "Has she come back to you?"
The breath left her, but she had to keep on hurrying at full speed, so that it was like swimming under water. A stitch came in her side. She put her hand over the pain.
"But that's only half of it," he went on. "You and Windus—that's the great news. Fine fellow, I know. A little touchy, but men have to have pride. Never will know how I offended him; I hadn't the least intention. You'll let him know that?"
She could not speak for another instant. Then she was able to say, "But Adrienne—"
"It's Nancy now. Not von Osten any longer. She doesn't know where the name came from. The clock was what did the trick. The one thing that we couldn't duplicate. She tried to open a side panel where there wasn't anything. Her hands remembered what her mind had forgotten. And that was proof to her."
Charlie stumbled and almost fell. He grabbed her arm and steadied her.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "Has something hurt you?"
"No; stitch in the side—nothing," she managed to say.
He shortened his step a little, and, putting his arm around her, he supported part of her weight. The happiness that filled him overbrimmed in laughter.
"What a day!" he repeated. "You begin your life, and I get my second chance. I wouldn't have it any other way. God bless Denham Hall and all of your people. When I first came here, there was nothing ahead of me. Only fog. Like going full speed, blind. There had to be a crash soon. Then down here, and a bit of light. Hope before there was anything to hope about. Chiefly you."
He was laughing again.
"Something shining about you, Charlie—very beautiful, terribly young, clean, right. How could a man help but care about life again? Then Nancy. Queer. I kept remembering you people—mostly you—as though you'd held the light that helped me find her. I hope there'll be happiness in heaps and heaps ahead of you—and there will be. But don't forget. Friends can be better than money in the bank, and you have a friend to count on, day or night, no matter what happens. You won't forget?"
"Never," said Charlie. They came out of the park to the roadside. The bus loomed, half seen, around the bend.
"Are you better now? I shouldn't have hurried you so."
"She's remembered?" said Charlie. "How—how good!"
"She hasn't remembered, but she's remembering. She knows now that she's Nancy Gerard, and the whole truth will begin to pour back on her, you see. The great thing is that she wants to be part of my life again. But still there was a certain element of shock—you can understand that—like finding a face in a mirror and discovering that it belongs to you," Peter said. "She's lying down. She wants to be alone for a while. She says she can't eat any supper. But if you'd bring her a cup of tea?"
"I'll take care of her," said Charlie.
"Good-by, my dear old Charlie," he said. He held her in his arms and kissed her forehead.
"She knows how I adore you, Charlie, and she's terribly fond of you too. She says that everything seems a little wrong, compared with you. Actually, I don't think I could leave her, except that you're here. But you never miss a trick. How happy I am for you and Windus! Find out what he wants, so that I can give him some gadget. Good-by again. It's a glorious old world, Charlie, isn't it?"
THE bus took him sway, its motor roaring; the sound diminished
around the next bend before she turned back into the park, both
hands pressing hard over the pain in her side. After a moment,
she grew so dizzy and blind that her feet lost the path. She
crouched on the lawn for fear of falling. Rhythmic, overwhelming
waves of nausea began to pour through her, but the chilly damp of
the lawn and the fresh air of the evening were fighting against
the sickness. Words formed in her throat and almost reached her
lips; a monody that kept repeating, "It will pass. Nothing lasts
long. Everything changes. It will pass. Nothing lasts long."
The lawn would leave a great wet spot on her skirt, so she would have to tell them that she had fallen down, and Allan and Windus would be deceived; but Audrey would know. She shut away the thought of Audrey's knowledge because it brought back the dizzy sickness more strongly than ever. Only by faint degrees her mind cleared and into her ears came the wide voice of the summer fields, the night chorus of the frogs. It always had seemed to her a drowsy song of peace and contentment, but though she had heard this music rehearsing a thousand times, only now it spoke clearly to her, and the words were eternal despair. She had been like one who doesn't know the story of a play and thinks it is a comedy in spite of all the grim faces on the stage, but then the third act comes.
She could look around her at the trees now, as they receded into the night, and it came to her that the daylight truth about their beauty and their dignity was only a portion of reality, because they lived as much in darkness as in the day, obscure and formless and cold.
She sneezed and stood up. There were jobs ahead of her that had to be done, and she had no right to give way like this and permit influenza to knock her out. He had commissioned her with a special trust about Adrienne—Nancy she must be called now, perhaps. Mrs. Peter—Nancy—Gerard. When she was an old woman with grandchildren of her own, she would visit the Gerards in Holland, and sit in the same room with Nancy, and find that Nancy had not aged so much, but retained her spirit, her fire, her charm of deep femininity which Peter had seen in her at a glance and known how to love forever.
Her knees had lost all strength, but still she could make a slow progress toward the house, putting one foot ahead of the other, picking out as a goal the nearest shrub and fighting to reach that point first, then another one farther along. Whatever happened, she must not permit Audrey to see her until her heart had begun to beat again. But life would, in fact, begin again before very long, since it isn't in fashion to die of a broken heart.
In the house, Audrey was busying herself in the kitchen while Allan and Windus smoked their pipes and had their before-dinner drinks, when a familiar triple knock came at the door and Audrey opened it on Lord Wending.
He had a gun under his arm, and he said at once, "Nothing tonight for you, ma'am. Had rotten luck; the birds kept behind my back all day.... Hello, Allan. Who's your skinny friend?"
He helped himself to a glass of the gin, but neglected to add bitters to it.
"Sit down, Bingo," said Allan.
"No, keep on your feet," advised Windus, "I'm going to take you for a walk. Leave your gun behind, so you don't shoot me before we get back."
They went out together.
"This will hurt Bingo." said Allan, "but he's such a good- blooded one that he won't show it. I think he's as good a man as Steve, at that."
Audrey said nothing. Her husband rose and began pacing.
"When will Charlie bring us a report on Adrienne and Peter?" he wanted to know. "I thought I heard the bus go by a few minutes ago."
"She may be talking to Adrienne now," said Audrey.
She looked at her big husband with compassion, but also with a slight degree of contempt, for sometimes he seemed to her little more than a superior mechanic, capable of considerable deeds with an airplane, with a horse behind foxhounds, or in the hurly-burly of an army camp, but what did he know about people? Like many women of quiet manners, Audrey's mind was never still, and though she was capable of great devotion, she was never blind. It was easy for her to love her husband and her friends, but it was impossible for her to stop judging them; she saw with daylight clarity that trouble for many people was gathering around them at Denham Hall, and it shocked her to find that Allan was so oblivious of what was sure to come.
Denham went on walking and talking. "Frankly," he said, "that Wyoming nonsense used to worry me a little, it's a burden gone to know that she'll settle down with Steve and lead a normal life. I suppose a lot of girls start out with giddy brains and an emotional overplus, but after a while they settle down. Take this business with Peter; just for a little while it bothered me because there's so much impulse in Charlie. However, it was just a childish flare, wasn't it?"
He was stating a fact rather than asking the question, and Audrey made no answer, but continued to mix a salad-dressing. Allan, relighting his pipe, took sudden note of her silence.
"You agree, don't you?" he asked.
"No," said Audrey.
It was like a voice from another world to him. "Hello!" cried Allan. "Are you there?"
"Yes, dear," said Audrey.
"I thought you might be woolgathering. Are you suggesting that Peter is still the man?"
"Yes, dear," said Audrey.
"Hold on!" said Allan.
"What is there to hold on to?" asked Audrey, in a tone be never had heard from her before. He was without words. He could only wait.
"Oh, darling," said Audrey, "why don't you take a good look at Charlie and see that her eyes are full of only one man in the world!"
"Peter?" asked Allan. "But she's been dizzy about twenty men before him."
"She's not dizzy now. She's as clear as a well, and just as deep."
"But Peter's out of his mind about another woman, and—"
"I didn't say that Charlie was being practical and level- headed. I merely said that she was in love."
"You don't mean one of these do-or-die affairs—one of these ever-forever businesses?"
"There isn't much use in my talking," said Audrey. "Either you'll see it for yourself or else it will never be real to you."
"But Charlie's a tomboy. Just a happy-go-lucky youngster."
"She's not happy-go-lucky any more."
"Why didn't you tell me this?"
"There's no use telling such things."
"Damn these foreigners, A man never knows what they're up to."
"Are you damning Peter? He hasn't the foggiest notion that there's anything in Charlie's mind."
"No, of course not. But Charlie—Windus will be heartbroken if the marriage crashes."
"It may not crash. A lot of girls are married with only half their hearts."
"Don't say that, Audrey. I almost think that you—" He paused, the words failing.
"Don't begin to think," said Audrey, faintly smiling.
"There wasn't anybody else?"
"No, dearest. Not anybody. Not for a single moment, ever."
"Thank God!" said Denham. "There's something rather terrible about women who—But poor Charlie! What are we to do?"
"Absolutely nothing," said Audrey. "There's totally nothing in the world that we can do, except to pray and wait." She was as definite and final as a judge.
Furthermore, she did not enlarge the remark, but, pouring the dressing over the lettuce in a bowl, she began to mix it industriously with a wooden fork and spoon. It came home to Allan with devastating effect that from the beginning he had depended sheerly on the loving kindness of his wife and never had considered her mind as a critical factor in their life together. Now he was surmising, aghast, that thought never ceased behind those quiet eyes of hers, and he resolved to know her better from now on, not merely to blow into her life like a blustering wind, but to talk seriously with her—about books and things—to collect her opinions, to compare thoughts. An instinct told him that she would be uncomfortably clear, easy and quick in her decisions. At least half of his marital ego was subtracted from him during this moment of consideration. He had looked upon himself as being at least nine tenths of the world to Audrey; now he began to suspect that he was merely a sector of a large circumference. He remembered the time-honored saying that love is blind, and he decided that from now on he must keep his eyes open.
Wending came in, with Windus behind him, looking a little blank. Lord Wending said, "Been hearing quite a piece spoken by Steve here. Doesn't amount to a thing. But I want another drink."
"No, you've had your share, Bingo," said Audrey.
"I'll take my tomorrow's share, then," said Bingo, pouring. He added, "Windus may come and Windus may go, but in the end Charlie's going on with Bingo forever. Where is she?"
"She's probably over with Adrienne," said Denham, frowning, still distracted by his thoughts.
"Well, here's to her and me." said Bingo. "Sorry for you, Windus." He took the drink. "You tell Charlie what I said, will you?" he asked Audrey. "Good night, everybody."
BY the time Charlie got to the house, she was able to breathe
deeply again. It was like getting a second wind in running cross-
country, which she had learned to do when Allan took her out for
a morning jog, stretching his long legs with a cruel disregard
for her comfort. "You've got to be super," he used to say to her.
"Don't ever be anything else."
She said this to herself as she came up to the house. A phonograph somewhere was playing swing, an absurd voice to be coming out of the massive dignity of Denham Hall. She sang a phrase or two of the song to make sure that she had everything under control, and then she made her entrance with a smile. Allan, in a corner, gloomed over his pipe; Windus was blandly contented, and looked at her expectantly as Charlie made up a tray for Adrienne and brightly gave the news.
"It worked!" she told them. "Peter had to bolt for the bus, but he told me to say good-by to everybody and say that Adrienne is coming out of it."
She felt that they were rather watching her than listening to her words, and it seemed to her that all motion, all hope was to be taken from her existence, drifting out of it with Peter and leaving her in a static world of those who watch, silent and far off. She made herself hurry on.
"The room did the trick; she knows now that she's Nancy Gerard. Only she can't remember any details. But of course that will come. You can't hold Peter. He's running with his head up. He's in full cry. You never saw such a happy man. But, of course, Adrienne is a bit knocked out and has to be quiet. Imagine reading a book and suddenly finding you're part of it! It's like that. I'm going to bring her a tray."
"Let me carry it, Charlie." said Windus.
The huge form of Allan rose and possessed itself of the tray. "I'm doing this little job," he said.
"Look at Allan being the handy man." said Charlie. "I'm going to drop dead."
She laughed and glanced at Audrey, but there was something in the eyes of Audrey that stopped her laughter short. She hurried out behind Allan. He moved with great steps.
"You'll spill things; be careful!" she warned him. "Don't waddle like a great auk. Walk on your toes."
"Listen to me, shorty," he said.
"Yes?"
"Things are going to settle down," said Allan.
"What things?" she asked.
"You know what things. They're going to turn out all right. I'll make them turn out right. Are you hearing me?"
"Yes. Allan."
He growled at her, "You're like a stranger in the house. It kills Audrey and it makes me sick. We've got to be all together, don't we?"
She said, "We always will be."
"I wish I'd never brought Gerard down here," said Denham.
"Hush, Allan. You don't mean that!"
"I do."
"No. You love him like a brother."
"Maybe. But that's not the way you love him," said he. And stood still to wait for her answer.
The silence grew for an instant, and from the fields she heard the voice of the night arising once more and welling up coldly around her.
"No, that's not the way for me," she admitted.
"It's the big thing? The whole big business?" asked Allan.
"Yes," said she. "It's sort of the beginning and end, all mixed in together."
"Poor old shorty!" murmured Allan. "Poor Steve too."
"There'll be a way out." said Charlie. "You and Audrey have your own lives. I don't want you to be breaking your hearts about me."
"Lean on me, shorty," he said, as she hesitated and gasped.
She put her forehead against his shoulder, a big rubbery cushion of muscle.
"There's a lot we can't understand, but we can find a way to live through it. Take everything in your stride," he said. "Easy, easy, Denham."
"Just wait ... till I get ... my breath." said Charlie.
He stood like a moveless tower, solid, unshakable in loyal affection.
"Always super," said Allan.
"Yes," she whispered.
"Always ahead at the finish," he said.
"I'm all right now," she told him.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes,"
"Come on, then."
When they reached Adrienne's room, Charlie tapped, and then, as a voice answered, she pulled the door wide on a twilight interior; one oil-lamp burning with the wick turned down low. Allan stepped inside with the tray.
"Hello, Nancy," he said.
"Hello, Allan," she answered, and sitting up on the bed, startled, she stared in surprise at him and at the cast shadow on the ceiling.
He put the tray on the table, "lie down again and take it easy," said Denham.
She obeyed, saying, "But I'm all right."
"No, you're not," he declared. "Don't be proud. You're among friends. So relax. You've had a bit of a shock. Gets anybody. Biggest men take the hardest falls."
He pulled up a chair and sat by the bed, holding her hand.
He said, "You've got three Denhams all in harness for you. Raise the old sun early and make it set late for you. So nothing can go wrong, Nancy. Comes over me what a pretty name that makes—Nancy Gerard. First time I was with Peter, if I'd had sense enough to look close, I would have seen this Nancy in his eyes, and known exactly what he was missing. You weren't with us in those days, and it was a hard time for Peter. You know what he did for me and my crew that day over Dunkirk, but it was only partly for us. Mostly it was because he didn't care whether school kept or not. He wanted to get out and play on the grass. He was tired of every day before he woke up in it. All he wanted was a good long sleep for the sake of the dreams he could have in it. And—well, there's only one sleep that hasn't an ending, you know. So we were pretty badly worried. He couldn't live without you because he only had half a life; he'd left the other part with you. But now you're together and nothing is going to put you apart while the Denhams have an inch of ground to stand on. Just lie back and be easy. Good night, my dear."
He patted her hand, rose and left the room. His heavy feet crunched on the ground outside and then were silent over the grass.
"He's so big—and so gentle, isn't he?" asked Nancy. "You go back with him, Charlie. I'll bring the tray over in a few minutes."
"Nonsense," said Charlie. "I'll do the moving around for you." She was piling pillows. "You just slide back on these and try to eat something," she said. "You don't have to be big and brave. There's been a shock and it's knocked the breath out of you. So do what Allan says. Relax and let us take a little care of you. Shall I give you more light?"
"No, please," said Nancy. "Thank you so much." She lay back on the pillows and exclaimed a little as she lifted the covers. "It smells delicious," she said.
"It is. too," Charlie told her. "Audrey's a chef. She's a regular cordon bleu. Give her a bay-leaf and a chicken bone, and she makes the best soup in the world." She walked around the room a little, looking things over. "It's awfully snug, isn't it?" she said. "We had to turn Bristol upside down to get the rug, and even this one would hardly do because it wasn't quite so old as the one in Rotterdam."
"What a world of kindness and trouble you've spent on me!" said Nancy.
"Trouble?" said Charlie. "Why, you and Peter are part of us."
"But you all have your own wars to fight. And you shouldn't waste a minute on me now. I know Steve Windus is missing you terribly."
"Steve?" said Charlie. "Oh, he can do without me. He's just got into the habit of thinking a bit about me, but it's not like you and Peter. No do-or-die about it."
She avoided looking at Nancy because there was something unreal, something stereotyped about the girl's smile, as though a great sham and pretense had to be carried forward. She had expected to find Nancy overwhelmed, indeed, but merely by happiness; yet, no matter how the smiling was sustained, it seemed to Charlie that Nancy's world was as hollow and sad as night. She refused to let herself believe this; therefore, she kept her eyes away as much as possible, and maintained a cheerful voice.
"I walked down with Peter to the bus," she said. "I never saw anybody the way he was. So happy. I mean."
"Was he? Happy?" asked Nancy, and looked up toward the ceiling, as though she were trying to remember something from long, long ago, not a portion of this very day.
"He couldn't keep his feet still," said Charlie. "He was always getting up in the air. He was so light he could have walked on water."
Nancy laughed a little, her voice faint. "No one can be so gay," she said.
"He makes the world stand still," said Charlie.
"As though there were only that one five minutes," said Nancy.
"Yes," said Charlie, "and everything had to be seen and breathed and tasted exactly then."
"Because the world might end," said Nancy.
They looked at each other, smiling.
Charlie began to shake her head. "When it all comes clear to you, how happy, happy, happy you're going to be," she said.
Nancy, still smiling, closed her eyes.
"When I think of all the women there are in the world." said Charlie, lifted by enthusiasm, "I see what a miracle it is that be found you."
Nancy turned her head a little toward the wall, as though she were striving to look away into the past.
"Because you're the same sort of people," said Charlie. "Who was it said that only bell metal makes the bell? And you and Peter are as like, somehow, as two chimes from the same bell. It's going to be—oh, it's going to be like music, the way you will be happy together."
Her voice stopped, for she had seen, suddenly, that though the smile remained by force, dimly, yet tears were rolling down Nancy's face. And all at once it seemed to Charlie that she had been praising someone dead, in the presence of the bereaved; she had been calling back something long since gone. Her impulse was to hurry to Nancy and try to speak words of comfort, but then she realized that she did not know what words to use. It seemed best to pretend that she had not seen.
So she said, as cheerfully as she could, "Well, I'll come back in a little while and get the tray."
There was no answer from Nancy, and Charlie got through the door. As she looked back into the dim light, the fragrance of roses that had been placed in the room followed after her with a sad sweetness, and she closed the door as softly as though she were leaving a room of death.
DOCTOR GRACE'S pretty nurse came on him when he was pouring a
green liquid into a blue one and watching the result change to
red. The doctor swore steadily; the result was wrong.
"Science is a damned tyrant, Nelly," said Major Grace. "The only pleasure it gets is making fools of us. Now what do you want?"
"There's a young friend of yours to see you, sir," she said.
"What's her name?" asked the doctor.
"It's not a she, sir," said Nelly.
"I have no young male friends," answered the doctor. "The male, Nelly, doesn't grow a brain until he's forty. Go away and leave me alone."
"Lieutenant Gerard, sir," she said.
"Ah?" said the doctor. "What's be grousing about now?"
"Not at all, sir," she said. "He's very cheerful.
"I don't believe it," replied Grace. "Where is this cheerful Dutchman?"
He went into the outer office without waiting for the answer.
"What are you standing so high on your toes about?" he asked Peter Gerard.
"It's happened," said Peter.
"What's happened?"
"The room did the trick," said Peter.
"Good, good," said the major.
"I almost thought it was a blank failure," said Peter happily. "For a few moments it seemed to me that if she felt anything at all, it was shock and dislike."
"That's characteristic—very," said the major, nodding, much satisfied.
"But then she did something instinctively. Had to do with the mere winding of a clock."
"Excellent," said the major. "We touch them usually with the little things. And after that?"
"Why, she realized that what I had been telling her and hoping for her must be true. In a stroke, you see, she understood that she was my wife."
"And the reaction?" snapped the doctor.
"There was shock."
"Naturally. Of course. Very good, Peter. Tell me every detail."
"Well, bewilderment, and then tears."
"Mild reaction. Very mild." said the doctor. "Go on; get on with it."
"I could tell you every word."
"There were plenty of words, I'll wager."
"No, very few."
"You surprise me!"
"Do I? Almost the first thing—as she clung to me, you see—"
"Clung to you?" demanded the doctor, opening his eyes,
"That was natural, I suppose?"
"Perhaps, perhaps," grunted the doctor.
"She told me that she wanted to remember; she wanted nothing so much as a clear, daylight realization that she was My wife."
The major frowned. "Very well; very well." ha said. "And then? A sort of great outpouring, I suppose?"
"No, sir. A great stillness rather. She was trembling a good deal. Eventually, I covered her up warm on the bed and sat close to her. She could only whisper now and then. And she wanted to know everything."
"How is that?" asked the major brusquely.
"About our first meeting, the first days, the marriage, even the music in the church, and about Dominie Olden—the minister. She was like a child listening to a story of what she'd done and said before the age of memory. Everything was important. Everything made her happy."
"Happy?" said the doctor, sharp again.
"Surely there was nothing wrong in that?"
"Of course not. Well, carry on."
"She kept smiling at the ceiling as though she were seeing the pictures on it. Several times she put out a hand toward me."
"What occasions were those?"
"Well, about the wedding. And then how we arranged our house. And the war coming. Most of all, when I returned and found our house wrecked by the bombing."
"She had a strong reaction to that?"
"No, she was very quiet."
"Astonishing," said the doctor gloomily. "No outbreak?"
"No. I told her about finding the small golden medal my grandmother had given her—of de Ruyter. Then there were a few tears."
"No passion? No explosion of emotion?"
"No. She asked me not to talk any more for a while, and to be very close to her."
"Only that?"
"Yes, and then suddenly it was time for me to leave. But all through it seemed to me that I could see the happiness gathering in her; and the nearness to knowledge, as though when she put out her hand she were about to open a door and the whole past would be there, clearly, before her. The next time I see her, I know it will all come back. It's almost there now."
"Interesting. Very interesting," said the doctor gloomily. "No particular restlessness in her? No desire to get away from everything?"
Peter was astonished. "Get away from what, sir?" he asked.
"Why, from all England, for instance."
"Leave her own country? Leave this England of hers? No, sir. I imagine it is a great influence to heal her and keep her happy—"
"She wants to be close to you. She doesn't shrink from anything in her past.... Let me be unpleasantly frank. It doesn't make sense. Medically, it doesn't make sense at all. Let me tell you. A person shocked into amnesia is afraid of the moment that produced the shock; usually afraid or angered by everything that might suggest the lost life. Of course, different minds react in different ways, but to be near you might well drive her wild by suggesting to her the thing her subconscious mind wants to forget. That subconscious brain is telling her every moment to be on her guard against the past, because in the past somewhere the nightmare is concealed, and out of her memory it may spring at her like a monster at any time.... This sickens you. my boy."
"I can stand it," said Peter. "I can stand anything that may help. It seems that I've been happy and hoping like a fool."
"I don't say that. If I were a blasted angel, I wouldn't know enough to say that. It's simply that all my expectations about this case seem to be wrong. But steady yourself, Peter. I don't want to make you unhappy. If you're cheered up, that's the most important fact of all."
"I thought we were only one step from the end," said Peter, "but I see that I'm wrong."
"Wrong, I'm sure." said the doctor, "until we've restored the gap in her memory. That gap, that vacuum, in itself seems to breed mental trouble that grows greater and greater. To make an ugly comparison, it's like flesh through which the living blood doesn't circulate. It's hard to tell what to encourage or what to avoid. Only remember that in Adrienne—or Nancy—the past is represented by sensations rather than thoughts. The pressure we put on her to remember may suddenly restore her to the light, just as when you repair a broken wire, and once the circuit for the electricity is complete, the whole house fills with light. But, on the other hand—"
"Yes, sir?"
"Well, Peter, to continue the metaphor. When one tampers with the wires, even with the best intentions in the world, one may burn out the entire system and leave the house in darkness forever."
"You mean, sir," said Peter steadily, "that there may be danger of a total breakdown?"
"There is eventually a damned surety of it unless the mental gap is bridged," answered the doctor. "The time has come when you must put on pressure and take the chance, but it's a serious business—serious enough for prayer."
Doctor Grace took Peters arm in a strong grip.
"You need a drink," he said.
"No, sir," said Peter. "I want to be clear.... All that gentleness and closeness—"
"That's partly what troubles me. Usually, I would expect an opposite reaction. Remember that she is inspired by a sort of buried horror, and if the earth above the grave is stirred, the dead thing may spring up to look her in the face. I would have been happier if you'd found no kindness in her at all, but a screaming hysteria instead."
"Are you growing a little hopeless, sir?" asked Peter.
"Hopeless? No, damn it, I'm not hopeless. We're only beginning to fight this. Get the blood back in your face. Tell your heart to start beating again. I know that you've been in a fool's paradise, Peter, and the return to reality is pretty tough. But we're going to bring her back to you. Her whole mind, clear as sunlight. What we must do now is to devise the next step."
He paced the floor for a time, Peter turning a pale face to follow him.
"Always remember that I can be wrong," the major said. "I haven't even talked to your girl yet. We have to arrange that soon. Remember always that I can be wrong. No two of these poor people react exactly the same way. But the next thing is to try plain shock on her. Get her up to her aunt's house. Let her see a bit of her actual past. And you, Peter, be prepared for a screaming fit that may be the thunder and darkness before the dawn."
The Saturday Evening Post, 22 Jul 1944, with 7th part of "After April"
THAT was why Peter, when be got his next leave from the field, picked up Nancy in a car which had been arranged for by Major Grace and took her swiftly up the road. She sat back comfortably, smiling at the wind that whipped her hair.
"What did you say to Charlie as we were leaving?" she asked.
"Didn't you hear?"
"No. I was too busy watching her face. It's always so different when you're with her."
"Is it?" said Peter. "In what way. Nancy? Do I upset her?"
"That's hardly the word." said Nancy, looking at him with eyes that were suddenly curiously straight and thoughtful. "But what was it you said?"
"Why. I simply noticed the shadows under her eyes. She doesn't look very well, do you think?"
"She's perfectly lovely," stated Nancy calmly.
"I think I said something about there being a cloud over England when she was not shining. Horribly silly it sounds, doesn't it?"
"It seemed to do Charlie a great deal of good," said Nancy. "I think it may give her a lot better appetite."
Peter looked askance. "What a man says to a girl," he observed, "generally sounds ridiculous afterward."
"I only hope you appreciate her," said Nancy.
"I love her," said Peter, carefully considering the idea. "I love her better than any friend I've ever had, except Anton Leewak."
There was a bit of silence from Nancy.
"You don't remember Anton." he said. "But he was a tremendous boor—and a great fellow. Truest kind of blue. Steel blue, you might say, when it came to the pinches."
"It's really beautiful, the way you love people." said Nancy. "And how they love you back too. Like Charlie, for instance."
"My good old Charlie!" he said, smiling. "I thought for an instant that you felt that she and I—I mean to say—"
"Peter, dear, I know what you feel about her."
"Do you?" he asked, relieved.
"Yes. It's the sort of thing that heaven must be full of; there's so little on earth."
"She's about the youngest thing in the world, wouldn't you say?" he asked.
"I don't think she's as young as she was," said Nancy. "But there'll always be a freshness and a cleanness about her."
"Yes." nodded Peter. "Pure and clear—like April.... Am I driving too fast?"
For Nancy had suddenly winced. Now she shook her head, looking away across the fields.
"You'll be back at Denham Hall in a few days," he said. "You don't mind traveling under sealed orders?"
She smiled up at him. "No. I don't want to be told where we're going. Its beautiful just to be in motion."
"Like a sailor before the mast?" he suggested.
"They go by the same sea lanes over and over," she objected.
"Like a sea bird, then." said Peter. "Some of them never land, and they can even sleep while they sail along, I've been told."
"Think of that!" said Nancy, charmed by the idea. "Think of sleeping on the wing!"
"Just to be on the move, would that be perfect?" he asked her.
"Heavenly perfect," she said.
"Never stop even long enough to find friends?"
She said, her eyes half closed as she dreamed of happiness, "Never to have anything left from any day. But to be clear and clean every morning for a fresh start."
He thought it was abnormal and strange, because women are the ones who want fields and harvests and home, and yet there was a sort of beauty in this way of thinking, this approach to a life which should never become a pattern, but always be freshly designed from moment to moment; as though the brush were to tell the painter what the picture was to be.
The mere sweep of the countryside past the car enchanted Nancy.
AS they drew nearer to the Wakeham country in which Nancy had
spent so many years with her aunt and uncle, Peter watched her
more closely, but she never roused from her dreamy content.
Little estates of a dozen acres each bordered the road with
hedgerows and orchards and yellowing crops. He drove more slowly.
It was a warm day, rich with the sense of summer, and clouds were
rolling slowly down the arch of the sky.
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"I almost seem to have been here before," she answered, and his heart jumped.
"Which place do you like the best?" he asked.
The game pleased her. She sat up straight and looked at the houses as though they had been friendly faces.
"This one!" she called presently, and pointed to the Sinclair house. "This is much the nicest."
"Then we'll stop here," he said, frowning to keep his joy from showing.
"You mean just drive in on strangers?" she said, shocked.
"And see what we find," said Peter.
She became grave as the car rolled over the gravel of the driveway.
"What do you mean, Peter?" she asked, when they were standing at the door. "Is this the place you meant to bring me?"
He rang the bell and heard the sound of it walk softly away through the house.
"Your aunt and uncle live here," he told Nancy. "They know you're coming and they're prepared to find that you don't recognize them. But the doctor thinks that we must bring you back to places you've known."
She drew suddenly close to him. "But if I can't recognize them and that hurts them terribly—" she said.
"They know what to expect and they'll do anything in the world," he told her. "Are you afraid?"
"A little. Yes."
She was pale and her lips were parted by the difficulty of getting her breath. Perhaps he should have prepared her more carefully for this moment, but the doctor had said that there should be a certain ruthlessness. Then the door was opened by Mrs. Sinclair, a small woman with shining white hair. She made a gesture as though she would embrace Nancy, but controlled it instantly, seeing how the girl stood back beside her husband, withdrawn and frightened.
"Come in, Nancy," she said.... "Peter, I'm so glad you've brought her."
Nancy failed to move or speak.
"Shall we go it?" asked Peter, urging her a little.
"I'm making you unhappy," said Nancy to Aunt Olivia, "and I'm so sorry." She stepped into the arms of Mrs. Sinclair and kissed her.
"My darling," said Aunt Olivia. "My poor darling girl! It's all right. It's just what you mean to us, to begin with; and the rest may follow later."
"I know it must," said Nancy, and let herself be drawn into the house.
"Harry, she's here!" called Aunt Olivia.
The living room was bright with glazed chintz and there were French windows opening on a garden where vegetables were growing in the neat flower-beds. A big, ruddy Englishman dressed in rough working clothes was hurrying in, his face radiant.
"Nancy, Nancy, here you are!" he cried, holding out both hands to her. "This old house has been aching and empty for you!"
She seemed to try to maintain a smile that began to waver. Her eyes flashed toward Peter.
"It's your Uncle Harry," he said.
"That's all right," said Harry Sinclair. "Don't worry about not remembering." He patted her hands. "We'll make it come," he said. "We'll make it come, of course."
The words were well enough, but his voice had broken badly, and Peter saw emotion drain the color and beauty out of Nancy's face.
"There'll be a way of thinking back," she said, "or else I'll start again and love you all over again."
"That's my Nancy," he said. "You've always had the pretty way of saying things. But now you're not to worry. You're to rest."
Aunt Olivia glanced anxiously at Peter and he shook his head. This was not the effect of happy shock, as the doctor had hoped it would be.
Mrs. Sinclair took charge. "We'll go to your room," she said. "You must lie down and rest, my dear, after the trip."
She started for the stairs, but Nancy looked rather helplessly back to Peter, so he went along with them up the wide stairway with its comfortably sweeping curve; and from the landing above, Peter looked back into the well of the hall at Mr. Sinclair, standing just where they had left him, with his head fallen. He was a brave man, prepared for all the wounds that the war could give him, except this strangely unexpected one.
Mrs. Sinclair opened the door to Nancy's room. It had been carefully prepared for this home-coming and was full of blooming fruit branches, one big spray of it arching across the window with pin-hearted flowers.
"It's so sweet; it's so pretty," said Nancy.
"Every inch of the chintz is your own choice," said Aunt Olivia.
There was a fireplace, and above it a picture of Nancy at fifteen in a white dress, a sentimental photograph done with a diffused lens.
"You remember that your dresses are in this closet, dear," Aunt Olivia was saying. "And perhaps you'll want to change into a negligée before you rest?"
She opened a door. Inside, there was a combination clothes- closet and dressing room, with a small window giving it light and air.
"Are they all mine, really?" asked Nancy, looking at the masses of soft fabrics on the padded hangers.
"All yours, dearest," said her aunt.
"I've hurt them both," whispered Nancy to Peter, grown desperate. "Tell me what to say."
"Don't make an effort. Not one," he advised her.
Mrs. Sinclair was rallying strongly. "Your bathroom is in here, you know," she was saying. "And this is your balcony. So now I'll leave you alone. And if you lack anything, this is the bell to ring."
Nancy, with great, stricken eyes, thanked her. When Peter got out into the hall with Mrs. Sinclair, he thought she would faint. "No sign," he heard her whisper. "Not one hint of remembering. Oh, not this, please God!"
"Time will help. It has to," said Peter.
They went downstairs. Mr. Sinclair was at a sideboard, looking like a man just struck by a bullet. He was pouring whisky at a glass and making a puddle around it; be had to use both hands to steady the drink to his lips.
"They seem to be all thrown away," he said. "All the years we've had her, they're gone, Olivia."
A glance of sunshine was on the empty glass, trembling in it. All that Peter had seen of the Nazis' work—the fugitive crowds, the dead and the skeleton cities—seemed less to him than the big man so broken and the sunlight shaking in the glass he held.
And Peter realized how much trust he had placed in this return home, for, after all, he was half a stranger to Nancy, but with these people she had grown up and every inch of the house should have spoken to her and called her back to reality. If all this was lost from her mind, he could guess to what a distance he was removed.
Mrs. Sinclair was saying, "We have trouble, Harry. Perhaps it's the biggest trouble that we've ever had to face, but we'll meet it a bit at a time, won't we?"
PETER and Harry Sinclair had lunch together, vaguely making an
effort at conversation; Aunt Olivia was busy taking a tray to
Nancy. She came back with a troubled face, but with more life in
her eyes.
"I think she's going to remember," she told them in great excitement. "I found her sitting by the window with three snapshots taken years ago when she was eight, and twelve, and fifteen; and she seemed to be happy, in a misty way.... Harry, her eyes followed me as though she were trying to draw herself closer. It won't be long now. I know it won't."
"Of course it won't. You have the touch and the way," said Uncle Harry.
"Do you think I may see her presently?" asked Peter.
"That's what troubles me," she said. "She asked me to tell you that she would like to spend a little while here quietly. So that the sense of things may come back to her by degrees."
He wondered at the difficulty she found in telling him this. "That's natural and right, of course," he said. "I have to get back very soon, so I'll just say good-by." He stood up, adding, "What a godsend that she has you people here! I know what you can do for her, Aunt Olivia."
He was about to leave the room when she said, "Peter, I'm terribly upset about it, but she doesn't wish to see you—just for the time being."
"But to say good-by," said Peter. Then he paused, reading much in her face. "She doesn't want to see me at all," he interpreted. "It's pain for her, and she can't stand it?"
"Not for a little while," said Aunt Olivia.
He thought for a moment. "In spite of that," he said, "I think I'd better speak to her, if you'll excuse me for a moment."
Then he left the room and went slowly up the stairs, with a sense that he never would be able to go deep enough into this house to find her, really, for she had slipped away from him into a more profound security, no doubt. It was not happiness she wanted so much as peace, and here she would have it. It seemed to Peter that he should have known when he stood in front of the house with his hand at the bell; he should have realized by the very pattern of the shadows under the trees and the headlong flight or singing of the birds by the hedgerows that this was a whole way and pattern of existence into which she could slip away from him and never return. Aunt Olivia must have known all this, and that was the reason for her look of pity, with a stain of horror in it.
He tapped at Nancy's door, and, after a moment, she opened it a little, saw him, hesitated, and then stepped back with her head bowed. She was wearing a fluffy negligée, white as a summer cloud, and she held it together with one hand. Peter closed the door softly behind him as he entered.
"Aunt Olivia told me you didn't want to see me," he said, "and she feels that perhaps you'll change later, but I have an idea that this may be the good-by between us."
"Do you think that?" she said, not as though she agreed, but as though the prospect was not at all unpleasant.
She was looking almost at him, but not quite, her glance slipping away and moving a little at a distance, perhaps over the garden trees beyond the window and into the sky that surrounded them.
"I don't think, for instance," he said, "that you'll want to return to the Denham place again?"
"No, no, please!" she exclaimed.
"In some way, it made you unhappy, though you didn't entirely realize it until you came up here to the old place; and I think, in the same way, you weren't altogether sure why you were troubled by being with me until you came back to Aunt Olivia."
"Yes, that's true," she admitted.
"It wasn't exactly pretending," he went on explaining, "when you said you wanted to remember Mrs. Peter Gerard again, and to be her. It was simply that some sort of identity was better than none."
"Yes, Peter," she said, her head bowing again suddenly.
"You mustn't worry about this too much," said Peter, touching her lightly. "You have been pretending a little bit because you didn't want to hurt me too much."
"No, Peter," she said, and she began to take the first deep and quick breaths that go before weeping.
"It's ail right," he told her. "They tell me this sort of trouble wears itself out and fades away. It will be that way with me. And all the more because I can think of you being down here among people who love you."
Her breath caught heavily and she covered her face with both hands.
"Good-by, my dear," said Peter, and left the room hastily.
He went down the hall and the stairs very slowly, because he needed to steady himself, as though after the whirl and rush of battle in the air—the shock had been like that. Aunt Olivia came straight to him, with her husband a step behind, as he reached the hall beneath. He answered the questions in her eyes at once.
"It's all right," he said. "She's a little upset and perhaps crying just now. But it won't last. I've said good-by to her, and that takes away a burden, obviously. I won't come down again unless she asks for me, and of course that's not very likely to happen. You ought to know that ever since I found her again, she's been trying to escape from me, but now she comes to her own people, which seems safe and right. There's another thing. She'll be needing some money, of course."
"I'll take care of that," said Harry Sinclair quickly. "And besides, I can't believe that you're out of her life so suddenly."
"She's been through a good deal," said Peter, "and people can't help changing. About the money; my family lost something at Rotterdam, of course, but we have English property and I'll have my solicitor get things in order for Nancy. I think that's about all, unless something comes to your mind."
"This is dreadful, dreadful," said Aunt Olivia in a breaking voice.
"All of war is dreadful, and this is just part of it," said Peter.
"I wish you wouldn't hurry off," said Sinclair.
"I'd better," answered Peter. "It will do Nancy a bit of good to hear the car leave and take to the road actually."
The last moments of this farewell were very trying, for they were trying to say something or be something that would serve as a small consolation to him; they were trying to express a miserable combination of gratitude and pity, and he could not breathe deeply again until the car was whipping him up the road as fast as it would go.
HE went straight to the hospital, only to hear that Doctor
Grace had been called to London and would not be back for a
matter of days. He listened vaguely to this news with a feeling
that the last of his hopes had been put under the heel and
crushed, but there was a sudden consolation. An hour later, his
squadron at the fighter airfield was called to be at readiness,
and he found himself getting into his flying togs, adjusting his
helmet and then walking out into the late afternoon with his
parachute banging against the backs of his legs.
Ten minutes later, they had their call. The Hurricane took off with Peter as lightly as a tiptoe dancer. He circled above the field, climbing until the hills beneath him flattened out, the land shrank, the sea drew in closer beneath him, looking like hammered silver with cloud shadows tarnishing it here and there. And his earphones picked up the chatter of the squadron as they ragged one another. It seemed to Peter like the cackling of a barnyard chorus, busy, cheerful and close to the earth, no matter how high the motors roared them into the upper air. Now the squadron was in close formation, still climbing, working gradually toward the east. He went on oxygen, a faintly sweet and pungent taste.
Someone was calling "Here they come—high, at nine o'clock."
Then the Messerschmitts drifted into his sight like little rags of paper high above. The squadron turned, climbing. The Jerries were increasing in size as suddenly as though he had glanced at them with a magnifying glass. He picked his man and let him have it.
The Jerry went pouf, all to pieces—a single bright flash, then a patch of smoke, and he had darted through a mass of flying debris. Something had been odd about the encounter, but he had no time to think because tracers began to fly past him; there was another Jerry on his tail. He sideslipped into evasive action and ducked through a cloud. When he came out on the other side, he was alone in the sky. There was nothing for him to see except, to the east, a few little particles like ragged bits of paper blown in the wind.
He turned for them, climbing. Three, six, nine, eleven he counted. In his earphones a voice was calling for him, commanding him back to the fighter field. He snapped the phones off instinctively, because he needed no thought to realize that it was absurd for him to return to little, green England, where men maintain the count of hours and days. Eastward lay the battle; he flew at full throttle out of the past, into the future.
He knew his Hurricane could outfly anything the Nazis had in the air, but he could not gain on them as fast as this. They had turned, all eleven of them, and were sweeping back to brush this touch of British insolence out of the sky. Somewhere in the back of his brain words were drifting, dimly remembered, exhorting fighter pilots not to attempt impossible odds, but they seemed to have been spoken so long ago that they had to do with another war. It was more important to remember another thing—the oddity of that last combat in the air. The strangeness, he realized, lay simply in this: that he had laid his course straight at the Jerry, ruling the line as direct as possible. It seemed to him extremely silly that he had not thought of doing that before. To begin at about two hundred yards and go straight in—that was the thing.
The enemy came swiftly in, the many guns winking like fireflies in a summer evening, fireflies with their functions speeded up to an electric haste. Four hundred, three hundred, two hundred yards, far too rapidly to be counted, except by thought. Then he had his man dead center and started ruling the line right through him. He saw bits fly from the Jerry. The fellow at the last instant veered up to the right—and the ruled line of Peter's fire was plunging into his belly. The plane brushed over him like a shadow, and Peter turned, still climbing.
They were all about him, multiplying their flashes, three in a row plunging at him head on; others from the rear setting up a clanging of bullets through his ship. And down there to his left streaked a long line of smoke leading toward the dim sheen of the Channel waters. He saw the plane strike, a spark of silver as it cast the wave aside and disappeared. All this with one glance, for a fighter pilot learns never to look more than an instant in any direction.
The central plane of the three ahead was the chosen target. The hundred-yard markers nicked past his eyes—four, three, two—he opened fire; be thought he felt his bullets plummeting through the Jerry; then his engine coughed and the Hurricane staggered, so that he could not rule that line home through the middle of the target. Behind him flew a plume of smoke. The ruined engine shook the plane for an instant, as though it were trying to knock the fabric off and get clear for unimpeded flight of its own; then it died in the air.
He saw a Jerry dart past him with lips working over set teeth as he cursed. The sky was lifting; the sea rose rapidly; then the horizon began to whirl as he dropped into a spin. As he bailed out, the cockpit burst into a leap and welter of blue flame; then he was plummeting down toward a sea that opened and defined itself in darkening little ridges, then in waves. As he counted ten, he pulled the rip cord. The parachute opened, jerked him erect, and as his head cleared from this shock, he looked up and saw little holes and slashes appearing in the silk of the great bag above him. The rattle of gunfire swooped on him; a Messerschmitt darted past—the same Boche with the set teeth and the lips writhed in curses over them. The fellow almost kissed the water with his plane, then swept angling away. Overhead, another looping tangle of the sky writing in thin mist; only nine planes pulling off into the east.
The explanation lay in another parachute which was settling on the Channel not a hundred yards away. He had not ruled his line all the way through that second fellow, but apparently it had been enough.
THEN the sea came up and struck him violently, jerking a deep
shadow over his brain. In his ears began a roaring as of
approaching motors. The air in his lungs seemed to be expanding;
the darkness that had been drawn over his brain grew suddenly
opaque.
He had a sense of great cold, of a trundling motion, of obscure sounds like human voices, and he felt a great shock of surprise that there was, after all, life after death. Dominie Olden—how sure the good man had been! But then a nearer voice said, "I think he'll do now," and Peter opened his eyes to find himself lying on a narrow, pitching deck with a man in oilskins leaning above him, asway with the motion of the little powerboat. He had a face with a month of beard on it that made him look owlish.
"Let's have these wet clothes right off him," the man with the owl's face went on, "and then roll him in some dry blankets, if there's anything dry on this damned tidewater tub."
Consciousness lapsed softly and sweetly out of Peter again. Then he was half awake and the man with the beard was sitting by him.
"Two out of eleven—pretty scoring, lieutenant," he said. "But what did you have on your conscience, young man, that needed to be cleaned out like that? None of these heroics, boy. We need you boys for tomorrow, and a tomorrow we're damned well going to have."
"There was a German down under another parachute," said Peter. "Did you manage to—"
"We fished him out, and he's been damning us ever since. Rotten manners these Jerries," said the doctor. "Just a sulky swine."
"Are you an American?" asked Peter.
"Yeah. Why do you ask?"
"I only wondered. Wyoming, perhaps?"
"Texas, brother, Texas. Not enough elbow-room in Wyoming for the real men."
CHARLIE came to see him in the hospital two days later.
"They'll only let me stay a minute," she said.
"Well, I'll let you stay an hour. Seeing you is the beet medicine I know of. How is Audrey and everything?"
"She's all right. Everything is all right," said Charlie. "You'll be down soon to recuperate, the doctor says."
"That would be wonderful," he answered, but she saw him darken a little. "But as a matter of fact, I don't need to recuperate. Nothing but a few bruises. Nothing at all."
"Going right back into the air?" she asked.
"That's it. I learned a few things on the last flight and they may be useful later on."
She stood up from her chair.
"No, stay there, Charlie," he protested. "I just had a good view of you with your head in the sky. And I want to hear about Windus. He's one of the ones, as Allan says. You're going to be fantastically happy with Steve."
She left the window and stood over his bed. "Let's be honest," she said. "You're never coming back to Denham Hall, are you?"
"Never? Of course I am, if you'll have me there."
"You know something?" she asked.
"Not much. What is it?"
"When I came here today, I thought I'd have a hard time to keep from crying over you. But you only make me mad. Isn't there any fight in you? Isn't there anything worth fighting for?"
He looked up at her steadily for a time. "We don't talk like this, Charlie," he said at last.
"No," she agreed. "I'm only half grown and I can't really see anything under the surface.... Peter!"
"Yes, Charlie. Please don't be this way."
"Won't you give time a chance and see if things don't straighten out a little?"
"I shall, Charlie. Yes, I shall, of course."
"You don't lie very well," she told him. "You're not a very good liar at all."
He stared at the ceiling. "I don't suppose I am," he admitted.
"Listen to me. It's all happened before. But after a while there's an end to war. You find your country again. You have your friends once more. Just try to count up what you'll have."
"I've counted it up," said Peter. "And you're right. Time is the thing to wait for."
"I know you don't mean it," she said. He was silent.
"It seems as though the days are too long, but the nights never end," she said.
"How do you know that?" he asked her, startled.
"It's just something I happen to know.... How do you think Nancy will feel when she guesses?"
"She'll never guess," said Peter hastily. "I mean, there's nothing really to guess."
"Allan knows, Audrey knows, I know. How can Nancy keep from guessing in the end? What will you do but leave a lot of misery behind you? Don't you see it's so crazy and wrong? I know new beginnings are hard to make, but they've got to be made."
"You're right," said Peter. "They do. And I shall. Please don't cry, Charlie."
"I knew I'd spoil everything with this crying," said Charlie. "I despise myself.... I'll come back another time."
"No. Stay a minute. Charlie. I want to promise you that I'll—"
"Hush," she said; "don't promise anything."
Afterward she sat in the doctor's office till he could see her.
He came in from a long operation and sat stripping off his rubber gloves and mopping his forehead after the heat of the operating room.
He said wearily, "What have you been crying about?"
"I haven't been," she answered.
"Don't forget that I'm a babies' doctor," said the major.
"Well, I haven't been crying much," she said. "I've been getting too mad for crying."
"Don't be mad," said the doctor. "If he'd seen you first, he would have followed you around the world."
"No," said Charlie.
"Why not? You've a very pretty face and it's not violating a doctor's sacred trust, these days, to tell the world that you're made like a Swiss watch. What else does a girl need to have?"
"Zingo," said Charlie.
"They made the word on account of you. What else?"
"Distances. A lady has to be full of distances."
"What are you talking about?" asked the doctor.
"Reserve and mystery and all that."
"I'd rather have one of you than a dozen of those. But what are you so mad about?"
"At you," said Charlie.
"All right. What should I have done? Poisoned Nancy?"
"She doesn't want Peter," said the girl.
"That seems pretty obvious. They never want the fools that are ready to die for them."
"I wish you'd tell me, in the first place, why he has to be so hysterical about her?"
"That's easy enough. He's made a transfer."
"I wish you wouldn't talk like a tram conductor. A transfer to where?"
"Listen to me. Our Holland firebrand lost everything—house, grandmother, church, dominie, country. In addition, be happened to lose his new wife at the same time, and he's wrapped it all up together. He thinks that he's only sad about her, but actually he's grieving for everything that makes life worth-while. And the Dutch are a fierce lot. Caesar had hell's own trouble with the Nervii, a long time ago."
"Uncle John—" said the girl.
"Yes, darling?"
"Tell me one thing. Are you going to let him die? You're not. You're going to make Nancy see the truth."
"You tell me what the truth is, will you?"
"That ten minutes of Peter is worth a whole lifetime of her to the world."
"You think that I should tell Nancy that?"
"Suppose that she doesn't absolutely love him—he's her husband, isn't be? Would it kill her precious self to just pretend that she's a little fond of him?"
"Charlie, you're a baby. Do you think that Peter wouldn't see through the pretense in an instant?"
She whispered, aghast, "Uncle John, you're not going to just sit there and do nothing when the finest man in the world—the most honorable—"
The doctor sprang up and hurried to her. He took her in his arms.
"There, there," he said.
"—the bravest—" she gasped.
"I'll do something," promised Grace.
"—the gentlest—" choked the girl.
"I'd promise to do something, if it tears the world apart," groaned the doctor.
"—the truest—" sobbed Charlie.
The Saturday Evening Post, 29 Jul 1944, with 8th part of "After April"
IN the Sinclair garden there was a swimming pool where the stopped-up water of the brook extended back under the trees and where water lilies could be grown in the shallows. There was a small island in the middle of the pool with a humpbacked Chinese bridge leading to it, and on this island, the next afternoon. Doctor Grace sat with Nancy and had tea. The sunlight sifted through the trees here and there, and the small waves of the pool cast up reflections that trembled on the trunks and the overhanging branches.
"If I were not a stranger," said the doctor, "it would be a great deal easier for us to talk."
"On the other hand," said Nancy, "perhaps it will be simpler because we're new to each other."
She had a way of speech so direct and quiet that the doctor wondered over her a little. He remembered what Charlie had said about the necessary distances and mysteries.
"It is Peter that you've come to talk about?" she asked him.
"About you, first of all. But about Peter also," he said. "He was putting on weight after he found you. Before that, he was starving, because, of course, you can't fatten a man without hope in his diet. But he can't have all the good luck. He's found you. and you've forgotten him, so that you're not much more use to him than a picture in a frame, but it's a very pretty picture indeed."
She looked steadily at the doctor. "Do you know what's happened to me?" she asked.
"What's happened to thousands and tens of thousands."
"Are there so many just like me?"
"Myriads of them." said Major Grace, "There is a breaking point in all of us. We snap for varying reasons. It may be a shock like that of a shell exploding; it may be a long, gradual strain, such as soldiers have when their conscious patriotism and sense of duty tell them to face the gunfire, and their subconscious common sense tells them to get out of that hot spot as soon as possible. It's like a tug-of-war between the two parts of the mind, the one you know and the one you don't know. And the rope they pull on begins to fray; the strands commence to break; suddenly it snaps and the two teams lose touch with each other. The conscious self, the person you know as you, seems to disappear."
"It's rather terrible—and yet exciting too." said Nancy. "I mean," she added, "that there can be two people inside of each of us."
"No, two halves of one entity," said the doctor. "We need them both. Now this conscious self of yours has to hunt around and find what it used to be."
"But there's such a horrible darkness back there," said Nancy, shuddering a bit.
"Of course," said the doctor. "There's another way of telling you what happened. Suppose a soldier is near a shell that explodes and buries him under a cart-load of earth. The conscious self falls into a frightful panic. It tells the soldier that he's buried alive, that he's going to die. The shock and the strain might literally kill him as his nerves give way. So then the subconscious self comes to his aid.... You see the bright inside of that cup shining? Now, as you pour in the tea, all that brightness is covered; there's only a shadow and a darkness. That's the way the subconscious takes control, and when the soldier wakes up an hour, a day or a month later—he can't remember any of that horror. All the details are lost. There's only a sense that back there somewhere in his life there was a horror. He has a sense of being lost; he needs to join the vanished part of his life to the present portion."
"But why should he have to make the return?" asked Nancy.
"Because all those other years would otherwise be lost," said the doctor.
"But bow beautiful and free to have all those burdens thrown away!" said Nancy. "And to live in a fresh, pure morning with no darkness near it at all, and never to think back, never to look back, never to go back—never!"
The doctor had emptied a couple of cups of tea, and now lighted a cigarette. Now he was hauling down big drafts of smoke.
"That's one point of view, of course," he said heartily.
Nancy was pleased. "I'm glad you think so," she said, smiling on him. "That's the way to escape from time, and time is what rusts one away, isn't it, and puts a tarnish over everything?"
"After all." admitted the doctor, making his voice brisk, "one can't deny that time is what makes people old."
"Isn't it true?" agreed Nancy, with her dreaming smile. "And wouldn't it be perfect if a life could be just between dawn and dark, so to speak?"
The doctor managed a laugh, with some difficulty. "Like a Mayfly, for instance?" he suggested.
"That's a nice idea," said Nancy. "It has wings and it keeps in the sun."
The doctor leaned forward a little, eying her. "That's right," he said. "It never has to sit in a room where the shadows pile up in the corners until dark things begin to creep about in them."
Nancy closed her eyes and drew in a breath through her teeth. "No. It never has to do that," she agreed.
"You've told me a good deal," said the doctor.
"Have I?" she asked, surprised. "I hardly see in what way, but I'm glad."
"You have to understand," he told her, "that every case like this is a mystery, and a doctor has to try to be a detective. Will you mind if I tell you frankly how I've been working it out?"
"Of course I don't mind," she said.
"I may say many foolish things, but then we can be sure that the rest of the world never will know about them.... You know why that Chinese bridge is humped?"
"No. I've never heard," she said, smiling.
"Chinese devils can't climb hills," he answered. "They only can go on the level; so we're perfectly safe here."
She laughed a little, but there was a new gleam of watchfulness in her eyes.
"What I struggled to find was the key to this existence of yours," went on the major. "So I began to look for reactions. People in a state of shock usually are overwhelmed by the repetition of some phase of the catastrophe. Sometimes our amnesia victims can't endure certain colors; again, types of people or individual names and faces are too much for them. They shrink from the association. If it's pressed on them, they may fly into any violence to be delivered and free again. Actually these avoided presences may be those of people who were the nearest and the dearest to them before the shock. As you, for instance, find it best not to be close to Peter."
She closed her eyes and sighed.
"I'm sorry to give you added pain." he said, "but, after all, I won't be long about this."
"Thank you, doctor. It's quite all right," she said.
"As I looked into your case from a distance," he added, "it seemed to me very curious that literally none of the stimuli of loud sounds, places, and so forth, had any effect on you. You remained calm, alert, though you carried around with you a sense of depression that was a hidden thing. I must admit that my surprise kept growing. The only strong reaction I found in you was your desire to be at a distance from Peter—a desire so strong that on one occasion you almost succeeded in stepping out of his life—out of all life forever."
"On the ship," she said quietly. "Yes. It's true."
"But that attempt was not preceded by what I would have expected—hysteria, frantic fear, perhaps a screaming voice because of the terror in you. Then I considered Peter himself. Few people have outstanding qualities either of mind or spirit, but I think it's fair to say that there rarely are men so filled with the capacity for faithful, unflinching devotion. Wouldn't you agree?"
"I do agree," she raid. "But must we talk very much more about him?"
"Only a little. The chief point is that, outside of your attitude toward Peter, there was literally nothing that would indicate a mental illness brought on by shock. That led me to examine other possibilities—other ways of explaining why you wished to maintain a distance between yourself and Peter. War makes rapid changes in us, but I could not feel that there had been enough time for you to alter so much that he had become personally distasteful to you. You see my quandary?"
She looked at him helplessly, as though she were struggling to find the meaning of words that were far beyond her comprehension.
"It seems very difficult and confused," she said. "Doctor, don't you think that we've talked enough for today?"
He leaned toward her, physically pressing home his charge.
"It isn't that you're confused, but you want to stop because you're frightened," he said.
"No, doctor, really," she said.
"I'm afraid you see that I've come at the truth you've been trying so hard to hide," he persisted with the utmost gentleness. "How amazingly well you've done it! What a guard you've kept on yourself night and day! But the strange truth is that there is no amnesia. You have been pretending, but you have forgotten nothing at all!"
Her hands were crossed at the base of her throat, pressing hard as she stared at him. As though the day had darkened suddenly into twilight, the color left her and shadows hollowed her eyes.
"I realized also," said the doctor, "that you have been shrinking from Peter not because of an aversion but because you love him with such a perfect and entire devotion that you could not endure stepping back into his life when you felt that you no longer were worthy of sharing it. I realized that there was a time in your existence which you could not permit yourself to remember, and that it seemed better to you to die rather than that Peter ever should know—how you went from Rotterdam to Paris, and through what hands—"
She stood up slowly, and the doctor rose with her, watching her with distorted eyes, as though the nightmare she was seeing were his own. He took her hands.
He said rapidly, "There are ways of erasing horrors from the mind, poor Nancy, poor child. And whatever has happened to you, nothing touches the spirit that is pure."
A great breath left her, and he steadied her strongly. Her head had fallen to one side, powerless.
"Now it's known," she whispered.
She had so nearly fainted that her whole weight was coming into his arms. He sat down with her.
"Why am I living?" she whispered. "I should be dead."
He managed to make his voice steady and strong, saying, "There's too much that you must live for."
She put her hands over her eyes hard, as though she wished to blind them forever. "I see him—and the others afterward! I'll never stop seeing them!" she cried. She sat up, clinging to him.
"You will stop," he told her. "The body lives on after frightful wounds, and so does the spirit. There is love to work for you; there is Peter."
She cried out in a sharp hysteria that distorted her face. She had to fight for breath before she could entreat him. "No, no, no! Not Peter! Keep him from knowing! Promise me that you'll never tell him!"
"No; because you will."
"If it were anyone other than Peter—But I never can see him again! I never can touch him again, never, never, never!"
"Do you think he's so brutally gross and stupid that he'll blame you for what was out of your power to prevent? There's not a man in England that wouldn't take you back with a greater tenderness and a greater love."
"If we'd had longer together—if we'd only had a little common, everyday living—but when he thinks back, it's always April—April—"
Her head leaned on the shoulder of the major and every outgiven breath was a faint moan.
He said, "I have to tell you why I've come today. Peter has gone hunting for death in the sky again."
"No, no, no!" gasped Nancy. "He was perfectly calm and steady when he left me."
"Fellows like that don't blow trumpets to tell the world what they're about to do. They simply do it. Nancy, he left formation and attacked eleven Messerschmitts over the Channel. They shot him down. He was picked out of the water only bruised, but just an instant from dying; and he's back in the hospital, waiting for his next chance in the sky. Are you going to let him take it?"
"Oh, God, have mercy." whispered Nancy. "I'll do whatever you say."
"You'll go back to him then, and tell him why you called yourself Adrienne von Osten."
"It will kill him. There's never been a scratch or a stain on the Gerard name. All the world will come to know, and it will look at me, and at Peter. What has he done but good and right? What has he done that such a shame should come to him? I know how the love will die out of him and there'll be nothing left but wretched pity."
"You're going back today, and you're going to tell him."
"I'll go back," she said, "but give me one day before I have to talk. Give me only one day, please, please? So that I can think of how to say it?"
"One day?" said the doctor hesitantly. "Very well. Now see if you can stand. There we are. My brave girl, my sweet, brave Nancy. We're going back into the house. That's the first test. To tell them that you remember every day of your life in this house."
"Will you stay close to me?"
"Yes, my dear. Every moment,"
"If I have to talk, I'll be weeping."
"It's all right. They won't understand why."
"They'll never have to know?"
"God forbid that! ... Wait till you're breathing a little better."
"I'm ready now," she said.
THE doctor stood by Peter Gerard's bed in the hospital. "I'm
going to drive you down to Denham Hall," he said.
"Thank you, sir. I'm not quite up to that." said Peter.
He was still withdrawing his thoughts from the dark limbo in which they had been wandering.
"Nancy hoped you'd meet her there this evening," said the doctor.
"Nancy," repeated Peter. He sat up. "She hoped that I'd meet her there?"
"That's what she says, and that's what I believe."
"You haven't compelled her in some way? Nancy—happily, freely—she asks me to come to Denham Hall? What does it mean?" cried Peter.
"It means that she remembers every moment of her life with you."
Peter stood up from the bed like a sleepwalker. A purple bruise ran across his right temple and down the upper side of his face; it stood out doubly clear because of his pallor.
"Come, come," said the major. "Don't be passing into trances. We have no time to waste."
THE late afternoon was darkening with great thunderheads, so
that the green fields looked brighter than the sky as they
traveled toward Denham Hall.
"How did you manage it? How in the world—with one talk—it's a miracle," said Peter.
"No miracle at all. Damn miracles! They always blow up in your face," said the doctor. "Just a little common sense turned the trick."
"Sometime," said Peter, almost grimly, "I'm going to find words and a way of telling you how much—"
"Stuff!" said the doctor. "But you're feeling better already, I see."
"Good old England!" said Peter, almost laughing out the words. "How could a man stay unhappy in such a country! Tell me what she said, and how she looked—and was she happy?"
"Matters as serious as this are not all a flip and a frolic," answered the doctor. "She may have ten bad minutes when she sees you again. But not more than ten. I'll guarantee."
"Will you tell me exactly when she'll arrive?"
"Before dark. Is that good enough for you?"
"It will have to be good enough," said Peter. "But all at once the world has stopped turning. Time is standing as still as a stone. But I know that the dark will come, finally."
At Denham Hall, Charlie came running out to meet the car. From a distance she could see the light in Peter's face, and she cried out to him, "Nancy's coming back to us! And everything is going to be all right! Peter, Peter, Peter, what a lovely day!"
"Everything is going to be all right forever," said Peter. "The doctor has cleared up all the shadows. Stand still a moment, Charlie.... Look at her, sir. When I tell you that a man can't be unhappy long in England, here's what I mean. Answer me. How could unhappiness come within fifty miles of Charlie?"
Afterward, while Charlie and Peter brightened the new room with bowls of roses and great vases of rhododendrons, the major had a word with Audrey.
"War makes the world old-fashioned," he said. "Men and women die of other things than bombs and bullets; love becomes a mortal disease; and, in fact, it's all too damned mid-Victorian and silly for words."
"Secretly, you're pleased," said Audrey.
"No. Except that I'm glad to see that science can't explain a human being like a machine. There's something still that escapes from the test-tubes and the atom-smashers.... How is Charlie coming out of this hullabaloo?"
"I've had some bad days worrying about her," said Audrey, "but I never can tell how she'll turn. You know her better than anyone else."
"Listen!" warned the doctor, holding up a finger for silence.
From beyond the house they could hear the laughter of Charlie, small with distance, and musical.
THE sun set, but still they had the long, long twilight of the
English summer before them, and the promise had merely been that
Sinclair would arrive with his niece before dark. The major was
making himself at home with one of Allan's pipes, Charlie helped
Audrey with the cookery, and Peter roamed uneasily up and
down.
"There's plenty of time. Be patient," said the major. "Sit down, man."
But here the windows darkened with a sudden fall of rain that seemed to bring the night on them at a step.
Peter went to the nearest window and peered out into the dimness. He looked up anxiously, but the storm made the sky gloomier than the lawns of the park.
"I don't like it," he said. "It seems bad to me."
"Very well, very well," said the doctor. "We'll telephone to Olivia Sinclair and find out just when they left."
THE storm was widespread over Southwestern England and Aunt
Olivia was busily closing shutters and locking windows when the
telephone called her.
She said over the line. "But she ought to have been there by this time.... No, Harry was called by his colonel's committee, but he turned over his permit and the car to Nancy.... Don't worry a bit. She's the safest driver in the world.... No, no, she's quite her old self; a little dreamy, perhaps, but that's all."
So deep a dream held Nancy, in fact, that she had lost the road twice before the rain fell with a crash and brought the night about her. Through the misting windshield she made out the road for a time by the brighter dashing of the rain on the pavement, but after that, as the real darkness closed over England from the west, she had to feel her way by clinging to the downcurve at the side of the grade. She was making hardly more than ten miles an hour, but even so, she felt that she was approaching the end of her journey with breathless speed. The road had become almost completely blind and it was like driving into the face of a mountain. Yet that was nothing compared with the vast wall of darkness which confronted her mind.
She had given up trying to find words and rehearse speeches. At Denham Hall would be Doctor Grace, infinitely wise and kind, but remorseless also; and if she did not put the whole truth before Peter, the doctor himself would do so. She had promised, and the promise held her steady to her purpose, yet she could not believe that she was coming, moment by moment, closer to the scene. She tried most of all to imagine the face of Peter while he listened, but she never was able to compass it; she could only conceive of his voice answering, as though out of darkness.
The years that lay ahead seemed to her clearer. After all, Holland was at the very door of Germany and she could envisage herself walking arm in arm with Peter down a street when through the crowd came a pair of Prussian shoulders and a face that was one of them. Or she was with Peter, entering a restaurant, when from a table one of their faces looked suddenly up at her, and the eyes narrowed with recognition, and the horror of the smile began. She tried to take shelter from these pictures of what was to come by remembering what the major had said: The body is nothing, the spirit is all.
A siren sounded down the road. Another joined it in a hideous, wailing duet that drew nearer. She halted her car obediently at the edge of the ditch. An escort of two motorcycles drove shadow- like out of the storm; behind them followed a thundering procession of lorries, rolling slowly, huge humpbacked forms at which she could hardly more than guess; only the unlighted head lamps were really visible, like empty eyes.
The last of the close procession roared by and she started up her car again, swerving it back toward the center of the road a little. Strange phrases from books, from classrooms were singsonging in her brain: "The tree that falls in the desert makes no sound." "That which is unremembered, never has been."
That last was not from a book or a teacher. He had said it, faintly smiling, the handsome face, hard as brown iron, the mustaches twisted sharply up at the corners, the eyes small and insatiate—Herr Oberst Wolfgang von Osten.
She looked down and took breath. Before she glanced up again, she knew that something had taken form in the night just ahead. A horn blasted; brakes screamed at her like a dying beast and a great lorry skidded sidelong, huge as a moving mountain, before her. The shock jerked at the roots of her brain. Her last sense was of breaking glass or metal that made a chiming jingle, as when a draft stirs the thousand little pendants of a crystal candelabra. This icy music penetrated her brain and a sharp pang thrust into her body.
Then someone was pulling at her shoulders. Rain fell on her, blown by the sweet air of the open night. The light of an electric torch blinked across her face.
"Denham Hall," she said. "Do you know where it is?"
"Only two bends down the road. But I we'd better get you to the first hospital. You ain't well, ma'am."
"There's a doctor at Denham Hall. Will you take me there, please?"
There was only a small pain, deep in the breast, but she could speak clearly and easily. Perhaps, because of this, whole days might be allowed to pass mercifully before she had to talk to Peter.
CONSCIOUSNESS was like a candle-flame that shrinks to nothing
in a draft and then comes up brightly in still air. One of the
brighter moments was a picture of light streaming from the open
door of Denham Hall, many faces closing around her, and the voice
of Peter speaking clearly, unhurried—the soldier rising
above confusion in a crisis.
After that, she was seeing only a cloudy design of light and shadow, with the voice of Doctor Grace saying, "Now the scissors... another gauze pack... and there we are."
Her eyes cleared, so that she could see his face, totally unperturbed, a slight sheen of perspiration across the forehead, the eyes lowered on his work. Past his shoulder was Charlie, so pale that a freckle or two had appeared on the bridge of the nose.
"Get Peter now, please," Doctor Grace said.
"Yes, doctor," said Charlie, and disappeared.
"Am I going to die?" Nancy asked.
"It would be too ridiculous for you to die now, wouldn't it?" the doctor replied. "Just keep your voice down. Be easy, easy."
She closed her eyes. "Where am I?" she asked, whispering.
"In the room Peter made for you," he said.
"Peter and Charlie, yes," she said.
"Are you in much pain?"
"No, thank you. But does the bandage have to hold me quite so tight?"
"It had better."
"Yes, doctor. Do you think that I should tell him just now?"
"I think you should do exactly as you feel."
"Do you mean that all at once I'm my own judge of what's right and wrong?"
"Yes, I mean that."
"That's rather beautiful, and surprising, and free," she said, and gave a single breath that was like a whisper of laughter. "Ah, that hurts," she said.
"Be careful of every breath you spend, Nancy. I've kept Peter out to save you from shock. If it's hard for you to see him, I can still keep him away...."
"No. he's all that I want.... Doctor—"
"Yes?"
"I feel so much better after a little blood and pain. Will the horror come back on me when I have to face Peter? Or will God make me clean again in his sight and let him love me?"
He looked at her with a curious care, distantly but tenderly.
"I'll tell you what I think, out of my heart," he said. "Everything you want will happen."
She smiled at him with a perfect understanding. "That's because you don't dream how much I want," she said, and with her hands indicated a great round world of desire. "I wish I didn't have to tell Peter, and that it didn't make me so weak—so weak!"
He took out his handkerchief and touched the soft linen to the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes.
"It will be better now not to tell him a word," he suggested.
"Do you think so?" she asked, looking with fear into her own mind. "No. I see now that I want him to know. He mustn't go through one more night or day without understanding. Otherwise, it isn't Nancy that he cares about, but that other girl I hardly knew at all, she was so young."
"It should be just as you please," he said. "Would it help you if I told him first?"
"Would you do that? Only, you don't know—"
"I know everything," said the doctor hastily.
"Then, quick, quick. He's here," she warned him.
The step was coming off the silent grass onto the gravel; the doctor hurried to meet Peter outside the door. The rain was ending, the sky an incredible smoke of clouds with a moon radiant in one of them.
Suddenly it seemed to the doctor that the young man in the uniform, limping toward him, was no longer a foreigner.
"Walk up and down with me here for a moment," he said, taking Peter's arm. "We only have a moment, because Nancy is in there counting the steps that we take."
"You've kept me away for a long time—a long, long time," said Peter.
The doctor halted, which swung Peter around, so that they faced each other closely. It seemed to Grace that all other moments in his life had been trivial compared with this instant.
"I'm here to say a word to you in place of Nancy," he said.
"Something that's hard for her to say?" asked Peter.
"I've advised her to let it go, but she wants you to know the full truth. There never was amnesia, Peter," said the doctor. "She's forgotten nothing. But she was afraid of you because there were things after Rotterdam that she remembered too well."
A pause came between them. Major Grace could see merely the empty outline of a face, but the breathing was audible, like that of sleep, in a faster rhythm. If only the boy had come to the years of maturity, he thought, he could foretell what the reaction would be, but young men are apt to live from word to word, from phrase to phrase of remembered ideals, and they will not allow time to pass between them and their judgments. Therefore, he could not tell whether this was the gathering of a storm in the darkness or the great stroke of horror and pity combined.
"Do you understand?" asked Major Grace at last.
"Yes," said Peter. "You make me able to guess. But what have I done, sir? What have I done to make her doubt me?"
"Because she's very young, and she thought the beauty of her life with you was something she never could return to, once you knew what had happened."
"May I go to her now?"
"Yes, But quietly, quietly. She's a very sick girl."
"Is she going to die?"
"Yes, Peter. Nothing can save her."
"Does she know?"
"I think that she has guessed."
After an instant. Peter said, "I thank God and you that I can have this second chance.... Will you stay close?"
"I'll walk up and down here. If she grows a little breathless—"
"I'll call you at once."
It was only Nancy's mind that the doctor had persuaded, for in her heart she never had been able to understand how she could face him after he knew the truth, but when she saw Peter come through the door, standing straight and stepping quickly, like a soldier, she could tell by his smile that there was no need for explanations, but that this understanding, this tender and wonderful nearness, could be as wordless as the coming of love itself. She held up her arms to him and, as he leaned over her, she knew, by the delicate caution of his touch, that she was to die.
She whispered at his ear, "Dearest, how long have we?" And when she felt the tremor of shock in his body, she added, "I'm not afraid."
He sat back, so that he could look at her. The question was like a shadow on his face, but it disappeared at once.
"We haven't a great deal of time." he said, "but it will be perfect, and that makes it as good as eternity. Only, save every breath."
"Like this, can you hear me?"
"Yes, every syllable."
"Am I ugly and drawn and white?"
"No, more lovely; more and more."
"Then there's only one last thing for me to fear."
"Tell me. Nancy. What is it?"
"The loneliness that will come for you."
"How can there be loneliness," he said, "when I'll have this to remember forever? My hands can't hold it. There's hardly room in my heart. All I can do is thank God for it."
"How will you think of me?"
"As if at any moment the door were to open and you were to come into the room."
She laid a finger on his lips.
"Is that wrong?" he asked.
"I think so."
"Whatever you want is the way it shall be."
"Then never let yourself be cold and alone, as though you were waiting for me. But keep living as though I were there in the room with you."
"Dearest, that may be very hard."
"Don't you see that only half of me dies and the rest wants to keep breathing in this world with you?"
"I'll try to see that, Nancy."
"There's only one great, hollow emptiness in me."
"Can you tell me what it is?"
"The place where our child should have been, under my heart."
"It would have been something to share, but it couldn't add to this."
"I want to say that over to myself. If only God had let me see that before!"
"Dearest, dearest, we only need to know it once."
"That if ever we are perfectly together, we never really can be apart?"
"Never."
"Let's be quiet for a little while," she whispered, "and try to remember everything from the first."
"Yes," he said. "We'll begin with the day in the harbor."
"And see if we keep in step all the way through."
After a moment, she murmured, "Where are you?"
"Just entering the church."
"Oh, I was a step before you. I was spelling out 'Peter Gerard' on the tombstone. Hurry, Peter, and catch up."
"Yes. I'll hurry. Are you a little breathless, Nancy?"
"Just a little."
"The doctor will help that," he said, and went quickly out into the night.
The doctor was there, as he had promised, with Charlie beside him.
"There is that difficulty beginning," said Peter.
"Just stay here a moment," said the doctor. "Then you can come in again."
"May I help, Uncle John?" asked the girl.
"No, dear," he said, and passed away from them through the door of the room.
"Shall I talk or be still?" Charlie asked brokenly.
"Talk, Charlie," he said.
He heard her take breath; then her voice was steady, "Do you think—is it just possible. Peter, that the great things can't always go on very long?"
"Perhaps," he said.
"I mean, there have to be endings, and they only seem unhappy to us.... Do you mind me saying this?"
"No, Charlie. You couldn't say a wrong thing."
"If only we could remember," she said, "that all the happy meetings come to endings also. I mean, they're both part of the same thing?"
"How can you be so wise, Charlie?"
"I'm not wise," she said. "If you walk a little bit up and down, won't it help you to get a new breath?"
"Perhaps you're right," he said. They walked up and down together. "There's a good, clear, sharp tang to the air after the rain," he said.
"Yes," she said, but her voice suddenly was strangled.
He put his hand on her arm. "Steady, Charlie," he said.
"Yes. I'm sorry," she whispered. The doctor came back to them. "You can go to her," he told Peter.
"It won't be long now, I suppose?" asked Peter.
"No. Not long. It will be a quiet falling asleep, I hope."
"Thank you," said Peter, and returned to Nancy.
She had altered a good deal in the last moments, seeming more pale, with thin stains of blue about the eyes and temples.
When he sat by her again, she held up her arms.
"Closer, Peter," she said. He leaned and put his arms about her and already he felt the deadly chill that was entering her body.
"Are we thinking forward?" she said. "Is it a silly game?"
"We're thinking forward," he said. "Where are you now?"
"I'm at the station."
"Just as the train draws out?"
"Just exactly... with the flags snapping behind the last car."
"Isn't it wonderful to be so perfectly in step?" she said. "To be in one rhythm, like dancing and music?... Where are you now?"
"I'm at the birthday party."
"Yes, Peter, yes! And the little golden de Ruyter? I always intended to read about his battles, but he beat the English, and because of that it made me angry. Perhaps I wouldn't have been a very good Hollander?"
"You would have been—you are... Where are you now?"
"The wedding day. It isn't long now, Peter. A sort of cold sleep, but I'm not afraid. Hold me a little closer. All the life that is leaving me is love for you.... The wedding—are you with me there?"
"Yes. yes, Nancy. The organ is making the church tremble."
"How happy—how happy—" she said, and he felt one quick tension of her body, then perfect, deep, long relaxation that let her head sink in the pillow and turned it toward him, faintly smiling.
The wind came in cold from the sea and the doctor turned up the collar of his overcoat.
"You go into the house, Charlie," he said. "I don't want you out here catching cold."
She merely walked on beside him, her arm hooked through his.
"Do you hear me?" he said.
"No. Uncle John." she said. "We're going to stay here together. Or will he want to see you alone?"
"I don't know." said the doctor. "But you don't want to have red eyes and all that."
"No, I could be cheerful if I only knew. I mean, if he only isn't to throw himself away. But even before he lost her—"
"Hush. Charlie." said the doctor. "That was when he was apart from her and couldn't come near."
"But now she's gone completely.... Uncle John, will he try to follow her?"
"No, my dear. Perhaps she isn't really gone from him. Some things we keep with us all our lives because we lose them young."
"I wish—I wish you could teach me to understand that," she said. After a moment she said, "When be comes out, I'd better be waiting here alone."
"It may be hours. Dawn or later," he argued.
"It won't seem long."
"I don't like it," said the major.
"Because it doesn't seem very English or proud, just to wait here?"
"It isn't a damned bit English!"
"You know, Uncle John, I used to be proud, terribly. Wasn't I?"
"Yes, thank God. The finest word in the language. Pride."
"In the whole of me just now there isn't enough pride to fill a thimble."
"But I can't stand this. I won't permit you to make an appeal to the man's pity," said the major.
"Don't you understand, Uncle John? " she said. "He's been perfectly blind. And now I want him to see everything at a glance."
"Well, my dear," said the major, "after you've been thoroughly chilled by that sea wind, you'll be a—you'll be a cold comfort to him."
She looked at him in silence.
"That wasn't a very good joke, was it?" he added.
"Not very funny, perhaps," she said.
"But you'll find, in the pinch, that there's not a word to say to him."
"Oh, but I wouldn't try. Talking doesn't say anything, usually.... Dear Uncle John, I think you'd better go in now."
"Very well," said the major. "God bless you and keep you."
He walked slowly back to the house and turned st the door. She was sitting on a low stone bench with her face turned to the wind from the sea, which kept running lines of shadow and moonlight brightness over the lawn toward her, like waves around a ship, and he had a strange sense that she actually was in motion, as though toward another life.
An odd feeling of loneliness made the major go quickly into the house.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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