"Need we cut those blooms of the Rayon d'Or?" asked Timbs, alluding to certain roses under conical paper shades which he had been breathlessly tending for our local flower show. "We'll cut them first," said I.
Looking back through the correcting prism of time, I fancy this slaughter of the innocents may have been foolishly sentimental. But I had a great desire to lay all that I could by way of tribute of consolation at Betty's feet, and this little sacrifice of all my roses seemed as symbolical an expression of my feelings as anything that my unimaginative brain could devise.
During the forenoon I superintended the packing of the baskets of roses in Pawling the florist's cart, which I was successful in engaging for the occasion,--neither wheelbarrow nor donkey carriage nor two-seater, the only vehicles at my disposal, being adequate; and when I saw it start for its destination, I wheeled myself, by way of discipline, through my bereaved garden. It looked mighty desolate. But though all the blooms had gone, there were a myriad buds which next week would burst into happy flower. And the sacrifice seemed trivial, almost ironical; for in Betty's heart there were no buds left.
After lunch I went to the hospital for the weekly committee meeting. To my amazement the first person I met in the corridor was Betty--Betty, white as wax, with black rings round unnaturally shining eyes. She waited for me to wheel myself up to her. I said severely:
"What on earth are you doing here? Go home to bed at once."
She put her hand on the back of my chair and bent down.
"I'm better here. And so are the dear roses. Come and see them."
I followed her into one of the military wards on the ground floor, and the place was a feast of roses. I had no idea so many could have come from my little garden. And the ward upstairs, she told me, was similarly beflowered. By the side of each man's bed stood bowl or vase, and the tables and the window sills were bright with blooms. It was the ward for serious cases--men with faces livid from gas-poisoning, men with the accursed trench nephritis, men with faces swathed in bandages hiding God knows what distortions, men with cradles over them betokening mangled limbs, men recovering from operations, chiefly the picking of bits of shrapnel and splinters of bone from shattered arms and legs; men with pale faces, patient eyes, and with cheery smiles round their lips when we passed by. A gramophone at the end of the room was grinding out a sentimental tune to which all were listening with rapt enjoyment. I asked one man, among others, how he was faring. He was getting on fine. With the death-rattle in his throat the wounded British soldier invariably tells you that he is getting on fine.
"And ain't these roses lovely? Makes the place look like a garden. And that music--seems appropriate, don't it, sir?"
I asked what the gramophone was playing. He looked respectfully shocked.
"Why, it's 'The Rosary,' sir."
After we had left him, Betty said:
"That's the third time they've asked for it to-day. They've got mixed up with the name, you see. They're beautiful children, aren't they?"
I should have called them sentimental idiots, but Betty saw much clearer than I did. She accompanied me back to the corridor and to the Committee Room door. I was a quarter of an hour late.
"I've kept the precious Rayon d'Ors for myself," she said. "How could you have the heart to cut them?"
"I would have cut out my heart itself, for the matter of that," said I, "if it would have done any good."
She smiled in a forlorn kind of way.
"Don't do that, for I shall want it inside you more than ever now. Tell me, how is Tufton?"
"Tufton--?"
"Yes--Tufton."
I must confess that my mind being so full of Betty, I had clean forgotten Tufton. But Betty remembered.
I smiled. "He's getting on fine," said I. I reached out my hand and held her cold, slim fingers. "Promise me one thing, my dear."
"All right," she said.
"Don't overdo things. There's a limit to the power of bearing strain.
As soon as you feel you're likely to go FUT, throw it all up and come and see me and let us lay our heads together."
"I despise people who go FUT," said Betty.
"I don't," said I.
We nodded a mutual farewell. She opened the Committee Room door for me and walked down the corridor with a swinging step, as though she would show me how fully she had made herself mistress of circumstance.
Some evenings later she came in, as usual, unheralded, and established herself by my chair.
The scents of midsummer came in through the open windows, and there was a great full moon staring in at us from a cloudless sky. Letters from the War Office, from brother-officers, from the Colonel, from the Brigadier General himself, had broken her down. She gave me the letters to read. Everyone loved him, admired him, trusted him. "As brave as a lion," wrote one. "Perhaps the most brilliant company officer in my brigade," wrote the General. And his death--the tragic common story. A trench; a high-explosive shell; the fate of young Etherington; and no possible little wooden cross to mark his grave.
And Betty, on the floor by my side, gave way.
The proud will bent. She surrendered herself to a paroxysm of sorrow.
She was not in a fit state to return to the hospital, where, I learned, she shared a bedroom with Phyllis Gedge. I shrank from sending her home to the tactless comforting of her aunts. They were excellent, God-fearing ladies, but they had never understood Betty. All her life they had worried her with genteel admonitions. They had regarded her marriage with disfavour, as an act of foolhardiness--I even think they looked on her attitude as unmaidenly; and now in her frozen widowhood they fretted her past endurance. On the night when the news came they sent for the vicar of their parish--not my good friend who christened Hosea--a very worthy, very serious, very evangelistically religious fellow, to administer spiritual consolation. If Betty had sat devoutly under him on Sundays, there might have been some reason in the summons.
But Betty, holding her own religious views, had only once been inside the church--on the occasion of her wedding--and had but the most formal acquaintance with the good man.... No, I could not send Betty home, unexpectedly, to have her wounds mauled about by unskilful fingers.
Nothing remained but to telephone to the hospital and put her in Mrs.
Marigold's charge for the night. So broken was my dear Betty, that she allowed herself to be carried off without a word.... Once before, years ago, she had behaved with the same piteous docility; and that was when, a short-frocked hoiden, she had fallen from an apple tree and badly hurt herself, and Marigold had carried her into the house and Mrs.
Marigold had put her to bed....
In the morning I found her calm and sedate at the breakfast table.
"You've been and gone and done for both of us, Majy dear," she remarked, pouring out tea.
"What do you mean?"
"Our reputations. What a scandal in Wellingsford!"
She looked me clearly in the eyes and smiled, and her hand did not shake as she held my cup. And by these signs I knew that she had taken herself again in grip and forbade reference to the agony through which she had passed.
Quickly she turned the conversation to the Tuftons. What had happened?
I told her meagrely. She insisted on fuller details. So, flogged by her, I related what I had gleaned from Marigold's wooden reports. He always conveyed personal information as though he were giving evidence against a defaulter. I had to start all over again. Apparently this had happened: Mrs. Tufton had arrayed herself, not in sackcloth and ashes, for that was apparently her normal attire, but in an equivalent, as far as a symbol of humility was concerned; namely, in decent raiment, and had sought her husband's forgiveness. There had been a touching scene in the scullery which Mrs. Marigold had given up to them for the sake of privacy, in which the lady had made tearful promises of reform and the corporal had magnanimously passed the sponge over the terrible reckoning on her slate. Would he then go home to his penitent wife? But the gallant fellow, with the sturdy common-sense for which the British soldier is renowned, contrasted the clover in which he was living here with the aridness of Flowery End, and declined to budge. High sentiment was one thing, snug lying was another. Next time he came back, if she had re-established the home in its former comfort, he didn't say as how he wouldn't--
"But," she cried--and this bit I didn't tell Betty--"the next time you may come home dead!"
"Then," replied Tufton, "let me see what a nice respectable coffin, with brass handles and lots of slap-up brass nails and a brass plate, you can get ready for me."
Since the first interview, I informed Betty, there had been others daily--most decorous. They were excellent friends. Neither seemed to perceive anything absurd in the situation. Even Marigold looked on it as a matter of course.
"I have an idea," said Betty. "You know we want some help in the servant staff of the hospital?"
I did. The matron had informed the Committee, who had empowered her to act.
"Why not let me tackle Mrs. Tufton while she is in this beautifully chastened and devotional mood? In this way we can get her out of the mills, out of Flowery End, fill her up with noble and patriotic emotions instead of whisky, and when Tufton returns, present her to him as a model wife, sanctified by suffering and ennobled by the consciousness of duty done. It would be splendid!"
For the first time since the black day there came a gleam of fun into Betty's eyes and a touch of colour into her cheeks.
"It would indeed," said I. "The only question is whether Tufton would really like this Red Cross Saint you'll have provided for him."
"In case he does not," said Betty, "you can provide him with a refuge as you are doing now."