"Nobody knows. Nobody knows anything." But silence, the old man felt, was what he wanted. Not complaints, not self-accusations, not the kind of confession that is wrung by torture from brittle emotions. Not words; above all, not words.
"I've got to talk," George said defiantly, as if he had read the other's thoughts. "If I have to stay bottled up, I'll go out of my mind." Haggard, limp, lost to all sense of proper reserve, he was not, even in his naked misery, entirely without charm. Something large, simple, primitive, and unashamed, looked out of his pain-streaked face and his wide grey eyes, which were darkened by the shadow of injury and defeat. He was not only unhappy, the General realized, but indignant because he was compelled to submit; and his indignation, even more than his unhappiness, made him appear simple and human.
"Are you sure," General Archbald inquired, "that you wouldn't be better in the visitors' room?"
"God, no! What do you imagine I'd be doing out there?"
"It is sometimes better to be in the midst of people."
"Not for me. I like people as long as things are easy; but I take to cover when I begin to break."
"Well, after all, don't you think you are taking it too hard? Bridges thinks she has a fine chance--"
"He says that, but he doesn't mean it. He talked to me. It's the worst they can do, the very worst. Even if she comes through, she'll be an invalid. She'll never come up again. I know Eva." His voice flinched and quivered as if it were a living nerve. Yes, it was impossible to doubt that he loved her. Deception was nothing; infidelity was nothing; only that authentic passion endured.
"Many women have gone through this, my dear boy, and lived happily. John assured Cora most positively that there is no sign of—that there is not the slightest sign of an incurable malady."
"Bridges says that, too, but there must be a test. He can't be absolutely sure until afterwards." He raised his head with a jerk and stared out into the rain. "Why, in God's name, should it have to be Eva?" A groan burst from him, and he exclaimed in a smothered voice, "I could bear it better if I had measured up!"
The General sighed. He wished Cora would come back. Cora knew the right tone to take, even with grief. "You have measured up," he answered, after a pause. "You have made her happy."
"No, I haven't made her happy."
"Well, even if you haven't, she isn't aware of it. She has never known that you failed."
"You can't tell what she has known. That's the worst of it now. I could never tell what she was thinking all those months—all those years."
"She thinks the best of you. She believes in you."
"You don't know," he repeated obstinately. "Nobody knows. If only she hadn't smiled all the time. I could bear it better if she would stop smiling."
"That is the habit of a lifetime. Nothing can change it."
"It isn't natural. I am always thinking she will smile like that when she is dead."
"Morbid thoughts. You should try to govern your mind."
"I sometimes wish," George said desperately, "that she didn't believe in me. If she saw me as I am, I might be able to measure up better. But she would idealize me. She expected too much. I always knew it was hopeless."
"It wasn't hopeless." The old man altered the tense quickly. "It isn't hopeless. So long as she feels that you've made her happy."
"I tell you she isn't happy," George rejoined, almost angrily. "She has never been happy. It was all too big for me, that was the trouble, what she is, what she feels, what she thinks, what she expects—everything. I am not worth her little finger. Nobody need tell me that. But, after all, you can't make a man bigger than he really is. I know I'm not a big man, and when I come up against anything that is too much for me, beauty, goodness, unhappiness, I give way inside. I can't stand but so much of a thing, and then I break up, and that's all there is of me. When that happens, I am obliged to get out of it. Anywhere. No matter which way. Sport, women, drink. No matter."
It was incredible; it was distressing; it was uncivilized. How much better to have smoked a cigar on the porch, or to have taken a brisk walk in the rain. "There is some brandy on the table," General Archbald said, observing the bottle. "A stiff drink might steady your nerves."
George shook his head again in stubborn despair. He was determined, the old man realized, to bear his martyrdom to the end, to inflict as many stabs as his tormented mind could endure. "No, I said I wouldn't drink or smoke, and I won't. I'd give anything—my soul almost—for a cigarette, but I won't even look at one."
How utterly lacking in logic, General Archbald sighed, with annoyance, are human emotions. Night after night, Eva must have waited for George in disappointment, when by staying at home, by sacrificing some trivial inclination, he might have made her perfectly happy. Yet now, when she was beyond his power to help or hurt, when she was indifferent to his remorse, he insisted upon making this savage display of grief. The truth is, however much we disguise it, that a Red Indian lurks in every man we call civilized. There is cruelty in the last one of us, even if it has turned inward. "He doesn't give me a thought," the old man pondered. "Well, I'm used to that. Nobody gives me a thought unless he wants something, except, of course, Cora, who thinks of me entirely too much. After all, there is freedom in not being loved too deeply, in not being thought of too often. Possessive love makes most of the complications and nearly all the unhappiness in the world."
Yes, it was a relief to drift alone into old age and beyond. Life ceased to be complex as soon as one escaped from the tangle of personalities. Rising from the small, hard chair on which he had dropped a few moments before, he crossed the room and looked out of the window. Rain was still falling. A slow, sad, very straight rain, like splinters of desolation. Had he felt cheerful, he reflected, no doubt the rain would have reminded him of splinters of joy. And the fading sweetness of the violets would have seemed, not the odour of melancholy, but the fragrance of happiness. For his spirit created the mood and perhaps painted the living hues of the scene. A lifetime before, he had walked in the rain under an English heaven, and had asked himself why he could not escape, why he submitted to life. In another lifetime that was. Yet that English rain was still falling, slow, silent, eternal, somewhere within a lost hollow of memory. For years, for a generation, he had forgotten—or at least forgotten sufficiently. Then yesterday, without warning, he had stumbled again into that lost hollow.
"This shower won't wet the ground," he said, turning. "What the country needs is a hard rain."
A coloured maid, holding a brush and a dustpan, looked in and retreated abruptly at sight of them. The door had no sooner shut behind her than it opened again, and a pupil nurse, with folded sheets and pillow-cases in the crook of her arm, entered and murmured apologetically that the maid wished to come in and clean. "If you will go over to the sun-room for a few minutes." Then, just as they started away nervously, driven out among strangers, they saw Mrs. Archbald coming toward them down the long hall. Though her face looked puffy in contour and faintly greenish in colour, as if she were fighting off sickness, her expression was still bright and hopeful.
"I never saw any one so brave," her voice was low but firm. "She sent you word that there is nothing to worry about. Before the door shut, she smiled and waved her hand to me."
"Good God!" George exclaimed, frowning at vacancy.
"I may go now," the old man thought. "I may leave him with Cora. She will know how to manage him." It was true that George had his good points; but there were occasions when he seemed to wear too thin a veneer of civilization. "Sincere and selfish. His emotion will probably blow over before Eva is well." Walking slowly down the hall, beyond the sound of Mrs. Archbald's comforting voice, the old man came to the sun-room at the back of the hospital. Here the same visitors, or others like them, lounged dejectedly in wicker chairs and turned over the pages of magazines, while they stared now and then through the blurred window-panes. Sinking on one end of a sofa, he gazed steadily at nothing, until it seemed to him that the anxious expectancy brimmed over from the faces around him and flowed into his own. A woman in a green hat; a woman in a black hat; a woman in a red hat; a woman wearing no hat at all. In a far corner, a man, young, thin, and poorly clad, was bowed over a florist's box on his knees, and in his face also there was this look of anxious expectancy. What were they thinking, those human beings, within touch but beyond reach, under that thin wash of reserve? Each spinning its separate cocoon. Each an ephemeral cluster of cells. Each, perhaps, an eternal centre of consciousness. Each as brittle and fugitive as life itself.