I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out
of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these
fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than
very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too
deep for their poor reasons. I don’t mean that _your_ wanting to go
home is anything gregarious, but I do think _their_ insisting on your
coming back at once might be. And I know you won’t visit this stuff on
me as anything more than just my “scum,” as Grisel calls the fine
flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really _want_ to say is
that we should both be more than delighted if you’d stay just as long
as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you’re heartily
tired of us. Go back now, if you _must_; tell them how much better you
are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He’ll say complete rest—change of
scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not
take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another
it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I
mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!’

Lawford listened. ‘I wish—,’ he began, and stopped dead again. ‘Anyhow,
I’ll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I’ve been playing truant. It was
all very well while—To tell you the truth I can’t think _quite_
straight yet. But it won’t last for ever. Besides—well, anyhow, I’ll go
back.’

‘Right you are,’ said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. ‘You can’t
expect, you really can’t, everything to come right straight away. Just
have patience. And now, let’s go out and sit in the sun. They’ve mixed
September up with May.’

And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find
his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair. Grisel had taken her brother’s place, with a little pile of needlework
beside her on the grass, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the
rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking. ‘How long have I been asleep?’ he said at last. She started and looked up from her needle. ‘That depends on how long you have been awake,’ she said, smiling. ‘My
brother tells me,’ she went on, beginning to stitch, ‘that you have
made up your mind to leave us to-day. Perhaps we are only flattering
ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has—is that, do you think,
quite wise?’

He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. ‘It’s because—it’s
because it’s the only “must” I can see.’

‘But even “musts”—well, we have to be sure even of “musts,” haven’t we? Are _you_?’ She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the
falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it
might be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work. ‘Supposing,’ he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself,
‘supposing Sabathier—and you know he’s merely like a friend now one
mustn’t be seen talking to—supposing he came back; what then?’

‘Oh, but Sabathier’s gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy—a
mood. It was only you—another you.’

‘Who was that yesterday, then?’

She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture. ‘Yesterday?’

‘Oh, very well,’ he said fretfully, ‘you too! But if he did, if he did,
come really back: “prey” and all?’

‘What is the riddle?’ she said, taking a deep breath and facing him
brightly. ‘Would _my_ “must” still be _his_?’ The face he raised to her, as he
leaned forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless,
cadaverous and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed
seem little more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness
might dispel. ‘You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even
thinking of defeat now?’

‘“We”!’

‘Oh no, you!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘You do not answer my question.’

‘Nor you mine! It _was_ a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a
reason why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?’

‘Only,’ said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, ‘only because
I love you’: and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch
a bird that has escaped for ever and irrevocably out of its cage,
steadily flying on and on till lost to sight. For an instant the grey eyes faltered. ‘But that, surely,’ she began in
a low voice, still steadily sewing, ‘that was our compact last
night—that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you
trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the
shaggy dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,’
she added, her fingers trembling, ‘in this odd shuffle of souls and
faces, I _am_ that mother, and most frightfully anxious you should not
give in. Why, even because of the tiredness, even because the cause
seems vain, you must still fight on—wouldn’t she have said it? Surely
there are prizes, a daughter, a career, no end! And even they
gone—still the self undimmed, undaunted, that took its drubbing like a
man.’

‘I know you know I’m all but crazed; you see this wretched mind all
littered and broken down; look at me like that, then. Forget even you
have befriended me and pretended—Why must I blunder on and on like
this? Oh, Grisel, my friend, my friend, if only you loved me!’

Tears clouded her eyes. She turned vaguely as if for a hiding-place. ‘We can’t talk here. How mad the day is. Listen, listen! I do—I do love
you—mother and woman and friend—from the very moment you came. It’s all
so clear, so clear: _that_, and your miserable “must,” my friend. Come,
we will go away by ourselves a little, and talk. That way. I’ll meet
you by the gate.’




CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


She came out into the sunlight, and they went through the little gate
together. She walked quickly, without speaking, over the bridge, past a
little cottage whose hollyhocks leaned fading above its low flint wall. Skirting a field of stubble, she struck into a wood by a path that ran
steeply up the hillside. And by and by they came to a glen where the
woodmen of a score of years ago had felled the trees, leaving a green
hollow of saplings in the midst of their towering neighbours. ‘There,’ she said, holding out her hand to him, ‘now we are alone. Just
six hours or so—and then the sun will be there,’ she pointed to the
tree-tops to the west, ‘and then you will have to go; for good, for
good—you your way, and I mine. What a tangle—a tangle is this life of
ours. Could I have dreamt we should ever be talking like this, you and
I? Friends of an hour. What will you think of me? Does it matter? Don’t
speak. Say nothing—poor face, poor hands. If only there were something
to look to—to pray to!’ She bent over his hand and pressed it to her
breast. ‘What worlds we’ve seen together, you and I. And then—another
parting.’

They wandered on a little way, and came back and listened to the first
few birds that flew up into the higher branches, noonday being past, to
sing.