PART TWO (continued 3)

I thought:

‘I must see more of Sophia.’

I felt sorry for her somehow, and attracted by her as I had been at school, but I did not see much of her. She came once more to lunch, and I went to tea with her, and then I think she went away for a time; I can’t remember quite, and after that it was the War.

XXXVII

Walter had very few friends. There were elderly ladies, friends of his mother’s who called on us, and two cousins who lived at Southsea, and sometimes came up for the day.

I did not care for the Southsea cousins; they were effusive and rather stupid, and seemed somehow to be pretending, always, to be different from what they were.

Some of the old ladies were rather nice; there was a Miss Mix, who had blue Persian cats. She gave us a kitten. She was very small, much smaller than Mrs. Sebright, and more lively. She had a sense of fun, and seemed to find her life rather funny, though she lived all alone with her cats in a flat near Earl’s Court, and was very poor.

Then there was Mrs. Allsopp, big and fat, and more earnest. She worked for the same church as Mrs. Sebright, and she had a girls’ club connected with the church. She tried to ‘interest’ me in the girls’ club and was ‘very disappointed’ that I would not come and help with it.

And there were two Miss Fergusons who wrote books on Italy and talked about Art, but foolishly, I thought, as if they did not really know what it meant at all.

Miss Mix was much the nicest.

Then there were Walter’s colleagues at the University.

Several of them lived at Hampstead, and their wives came to call on me. They were quite kind and quite friendly, but dull, I thought. They talked about University affairs which I did not know about; not like Maud, but more as dutiful wives, who were bound to be interested in examinations and students because their husbands were.

They asked me how I saw my husband’s pupils, and I said I did not see them.

Walter had never suggested my seeing his pupils. He did not care about them very much I think; he cared far more for the stuff he taught than the people he taught it to; but they said I ought to see them.

Sunday lunch was best, they said, or Sunday tea in the Oxford fashion. I did not even know that it was the Oxford fashion, but I invited some of the students to lunch and tea on Saturday; I rather liked them. They were shy and awkward, not like the young men at Oxford that I had met. I thought they were more interesting than the Oxford young men, but one did not get much further with them, and Walter did not seem very anxious to go on. He saw quite enough of them through the week, he said.

He had two friends at Oxford, ‘dons’ at Oxford, who came sometimes to see us. They had been at our wedding.

They counted as Walter’s friends, those two, and Mr. Furze, but they were much more remote sort of friends than mine had been. When they met they talked about their work and nothing else; it seemed to me that they had nothing else to talk about, but perhaps that was not true.

Mr. Furze was different. Freddy Furze he was, but Walter never called him Freddy. He was more like my own people, at least more nearly like; I felt too that he liked me, and that we could have talked and got to know each other quite well if we had had the chance; but the chance did not quite come, for he lived at Cardiff, and only came to stay with us twice, for about a week.

He had been engaged to a girl who was drowned, Walter told me; Walter had not known the girl, but she was odd and unsatisfactory, he believed, ‘not Furze’s sort, I should think,’ he said; and I had an idea, I don’t know why, that, perhaps, I reminded him of her. Maud would certainly have called me ‘odd and unsatisfactory.’ And he was so kind to me; I wondered how she had been drowned, and all about her, but I could not ask him, and Walter did not know.

I thought we would see more of him; I hoped so; but that first year went past so quickly, and then the War came, and it was too late.

XXXVIII

Walter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’

And I kissed him, and said I would.

I would rather dance with him, I said, than with Hugo; that was what he wanted me to say, I knew, and I believed it when I said it.

In the meantime he tried to teach me Greek. I told him how Hugo had begun once, but we had not got on very far. He said he could teach me better than Hugo.

‘Then we could read things together,’ he said, ‘and you could help me a great deal too, if you would. You could look up things for me in the Museum. You might even learn Syriac, you know; that would be a great help.’

I thought I should like to help him in his work. I tried very hard to learn Greek, but the lessons were more difficult than they had been with Hugo, and Walter got annoyed if I made mistakes. I was afraid of annoying him, and that made me afraid of the lessons.

‘Shall we try the Syriac first?’ I suggested one day, but Walter would not.

‘Greek first,’ he said, ‘was essential’; and so we went on.

In the evenings he took me sometimes to lectures. He belonged to several Archæological Societies who gave lantern lectures in the evening. Walter considered the theatre a luxury. That seemed odd to me at first, but I did not mind, for I was happy, and I wanted to please Walter; I wanted to fit in with his way of life and to leave my own behind me; but one cannot do that, ever, quite successfully, I believe.

XXXIX

Hugo came back from India in June.

He came to see me one morning, soon after he got back.

I was upstairs, tidying a cupboard. I had an overall on, and was dusty. When Louise came to tell me that he was there, I was surprised, for I did not know he had come home. I wondered if I was pleased to see him or not; I did not know; I went downstairs to the dining-room. The drawing-room was being turned out, and we could not go in there.

We sat down on each side of the dining-room table. There were wild roses, in a glass vase on the table, and the water in the vase was cloudy. I had meant to change the water that morning, and had forgotten. I hoped Hugo would not notice the water; I thought he would. I wished we had not to be in the dining-room where the sideboard was, that Hugo did not like. I did not know what to say to Hugo; he seemed so far away; so long ago.

Hugo said:

‘I came back on Tuesday.’

I said:

‘Oh, I did not know you were back.’

I said:

‘Was it interesting in India?’

Hugo said:

‘Yes, it was very interesting. The colours are wonderful there. You can’t imagine what the colours are like.’

I said:

‘Like Holman Hunt, are they?’

He said:

‘Almost; the purples, not the green, so much.’

I said:

‘That must be jolly.’

Hugo said:

‘Yes.’

Then he said:

‘It is funny to visit you like this, married.’

I laughed. I kept laughing a little, foolishly, I felt.

I said:

‘I was married before you went away.’

He said:

‘Yes, but hardly; now you are quite used to it, I suppose?’

I said:

‘Yes.’

He wanted to know if I was happy. I knew he wanted to, and I wanted to tell him that I was, but we seemed too awkward, somehow, to talk in that way, seriously; it was as though we were afraid. He only laughed a little, and said:

‘And how do you like it?’

And I said:

‘Very much, thank you.’

And then we both laughed.

I wanted to tell him about my baby; that I was going to have one very soon now, though I suppose he knew; but I could not speak about that either. It was odd, and painful, the way we could not talk.

I thought:

‘It is because we have not met for so long, and so much has happened in between, at least to me.’

I thought:

‘It will be different when we get used to each other again. We will soon.’

I said:

‘Walter is out. He will be awfully sorry to miss you.’

‘Yes. Oh—I am awfully sorry to miss him. I am going down to Yearsly to-morrow. I suppose you and Walter couldn’t come for the week-end? It would be nice if you could.’

And I said:

‘It would be awfully nice, but I am afraid we can’t. Walter’s mother is coming to supper, and besides he has some work to do in the morning.’

I said it quickly. We could have put off Mrs. Sebright, I knew that really, but I did not want to go, and Walter would not want to go either. We had been twice for week-ends to Yearsly; it did not do, somehow, with Walter. He did not fit in, though Cousin Delia was the same as she had always been.

I think Hugo knew too, for he only said:

‘I was afraid you would not be able to. Well, we will meet again soon. I shall be back in a week or so.’

He stood up to go, and we shook hands.

‘It is nice to see you again,’ he said.

And I said:

‘It was nice of you to come.’

The dining-room was downstairs in the basement. We went up to the front door.

He went down the front steps and the garden path and out of the gate. He turned at the gate and waved his hat, and I waved my hand to him in turn.

Then I went in and shut the door.

XL

Eleanor was born on the 30th of June.

I could see the poplar tree in the garden through the window. The leaves of the poplar fluttered and shimmered, and I watched them from my bed. There have always been trees in my life, always, somehow, at times that were important to me.

And I thought:

‘Other people have been through this before, thousands and millions of people, always, from the beginning of the world. If they could bear it, I can. Cousin Delia,’ I thought, ‘and Grandmother and Mrs. Simms and the women in the bus.’

And later I thought:

‘I can never have any more children! I can never face this again.’

And then they told me it was a girl; and I could not believe it; it seemed such waste; I had wanted a son so much; I had been so sure it was a son; and now it seemed that he had not been real at all; I could not bear it, and I cried.

When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby, and I loved babies.

Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s work.

He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought, a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.

‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’ he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’

She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week old.

I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.

Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.

The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links; it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was glad in a way.

‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about it too.

Mrs. Simms had said to me once:

‘My Simms was a standby to me; you never would believe what a standby ’e was.’

And I wished sometimes that Walter were like Simms.

XLI

People came to see me and Eleanor.

Mrs. Sebright came nearly every day; and Miss Mix and Mrs. Allsopp, and of course Maud. Grandmother came too, and Cousin Delia. I was glad to see them, especially Cousin Delia. I had not seen her for such a long time.

‘Dear,’ she said. ‘How happy you are! Is the world perfect now?’

And I said:

‘Very nearly perfect, Cousin Delia.’

Cousin Delia was lovely with a baby, so quiet and so sure.

I said:

‘Will it seem quite ordinary to me soon, Cousin Delia?’

And she said:

‘I don’t know; to me it never has; to me when Guy and Hugo are there, it is still almost like this. It has never got “ordinary” at all.’

I said:

‘Were you very glad they were sons?’

And she said:

‘Yes; I was glad. I wanted a daughter too, but you were like having a daughter.’

I said:

‘Cousin Delia, I do so wish I had been really your daughter.’

She looked out of the window.

‘I used to think it was better as it was,’ she said, ‘but after all it did not make any difference, did it, in the end?’

I said:

‘It did make a difference, I think.’

She said:

‘Yes; but not in the way I meant. I used to think that you and Hugo would be married one day. It is foolish to make plans.’

I said:

‘I don’t think you made plans in a way that mattered. I don’t think you ever made a mistake.’

She looked round at me, surprised. I was surprised at myself. I had never tried to tell Cousin Delia how I felt about her, and now, suddenly, I wished I could; and I went on:

‘I think you are the most perfect person in the world.’

She said:

‘Dear Heart, thank you: I wish it were true’; and she kissed me.

Then she talked about Yearsly, and Cousin John, and the garden.

Cousin Delia brought roses with her, and all the room was sweet when she had gone. I wished she could have stayed longer. I wished she would come again. I wished I could go back with her to Yearsly. I felt like a child left alone at school.