HELEN and I have a failing, though you may not have thought that such a thing was possible. It is a foolish weakness for old bits of rubbish. We can neither of us without anguish and unutterable rendings bear to throw old and useless things away. The weakness has to be got over sometimes, but we keep putting the work of destruction off, just as one puts off a visit to the dentist, with the result that when it comes to pass we find that it would have been far better to have done it long ago. However, if we did not occasionally tear things up, and throw things away, the house would become uninhabitable, so this morning we vowed to each other to spend the hours till lunch in the work of destruction. Our rubbish collects chiefly in the room that is called mine, where she has a knee-hole table with nine{282} drawers. She opened these one after the other. They were all full, and despair seized her.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Here are nine drawers all quite full of heart’s blood. O Jack, look!’

And she brought across to me a photograph I had taken of Legs jumping the lawn-tennis net. He was sitting in the air apparently in an easy attitude. One knee seemed crossed over the other, and his mouth was wide open.

‘It will be harder than ever this year,’ she said, half to herself. ‘And there are nine drawers full!’

‘Circumscribe the drops of heart’s blood as they come,’ said I. ‘Don’t think there are nine drawers full. Only keep thinking of the particular thing that has to be kept or thrown away.’

‘Oh, but it’s only the fact that there are nine drawers full that makes it possible to throw anything away at all,’ said she.

‘Hush, woman!’ said I.

Personally, I am extremely methodical over the work of destruction. I clear a table and dump upon it a pile of heart’s blood. This I{283} sort into three heaps, one of which is for destruction, one for preservation, and one for further consideration. I proceeded to do so now.

There were many pieces of string. Throughout the year I keep pieces of string, because I know I shall use them. As a matter of fact, when I want a piece of string I cut it off Helen’s ball, and never use any of the bits that I have saved, because I don’t know where they are, and they would prove to be the wrong length if I did. So on the day of destruction I consign them to the dust-bin, and begin to collect again immediately. Then there was a pill-box full of soft yellow powder, which Legs and I had collected from the little cedar-cones at some house where we were staying in the autumn. That I put on to the heap of destruction, but transferred it to the heap of consideration. Then there were a dozen little bits of verd-antique which I had picked up years ago on the beach at Capri, and which I had periodically tried to throw away. But I never could manage it, and this morning, knowing it was useless to strive{284} against the irresistible, I made no attempt whatever to steel myself to their destruction, but put them at once into the pile that was predestined unto life. There was a chunk of amber that I had picked up at Cromer, equally imperishable; yards and yards of indiarubber tape that is the filling of a rubber-cored golf-ball; a small bottle with a glass stopper, clearly impossible to throw away, since it might come in useful any day, and how foolish I should feel if this afternoon I wanted a bottle with a glass stopper, and had to send into the town for one, whereas, if I had been less iconoclastic, I might have airily produced the exact thing needed out of the left-hand top drawer. Then came a little tin box full of pink powder, which I concluded was rouge. This was puzzling.

‘When did I use rouge?’ I asked Helen.

‘I don’t know. Was it Legs’, do you think, when he acted the Red Queen last year?’

No, I couldn’t throw that away. The Red Queen had been a piece of genius. And next came the telegram from him to me saying that he had passed into the Foreign Office. Then there was a vile caricature of myself at the{285} top of my so-called swing at golf—quite unrecognizable, I assure you, but....

Then came a mass of letters, receipted bills, and accounts rendered. Accounts rendered always fill me with suspicion, and I have to hunt among unpaid bills to find the items of the account rendered, as I feel a moral certainty that this is an attempt to defraud me. But they are invariably correct. But these and the receipted bills, which had to be docketed and tied up together in a bundle, took time. Probably, however, I could tie them up with one of those many pieces of string which I had so diligently collected. By a rare and happy chance I found one that would do exactly, and tied them up with a beautiful hard knot, and put them on the predestination heap. A moment afterwards I found several more to join the same packet, split my nail over trying to untie my beautiful knot, and had to go upstairs for nail-scissors to cut it smooth, and brought them down to cut the knot. No other piece of string in my collection would do, and so I cut a piece off Helen’s ball, for she had left the room for the moment.{286}

Then I came upon a large quantity of boxes of fusees, all partly empty. How it happens is this: I go to play golf on a windy day, and, of course, have to buy at the club-house a box of fusees. These, on my return, or what remains of them, I methodically put in a drawer on reaching home. By an oversight I forget to take them out again when I play next day, and so buy another box, which I similarly place in a drawer. And if you play golf four or five times a week on these downs, where there is almost always a high wind, it follows that in the course of a year the amount of partly filled boxes of fusees which you collect about you is nothing short of prodigious. I did not know how great a supporter I was of home industries.

My methodical mind saw at once how these had to be treated. Of course, throwing them all away was out of the question, and the right thing to do was to produce out of every dozen of partly filled boxes some eight or nine completely full. This plan I began to put into practice at once.

It was necessary, of course, to find how{287} many matches a full fusee-box contained, but they are awkward to pack, and some seemed to hold ten and others only seven; so when Helen came back, the table was covered, among other things, with fusees. So I waved my arms violently, and said: ‘You shall not!’ This was because the female nose, and the male nose if it is unaccustomed to tobacco-smoke, likes, positively likes, the smell of fusees; but to anyone who smokes tobacco the smell of them is, for some reason, perfectly nauseating, and that is why we only use them in the open air.

Then Helen’s mean nature asserted itself. She said, ‘Oh, I forgot you don’t like the smell,’ and soon after (not at once, mark you) called my attention to some non-existent object of horticultural interest out of the window. I turned, and in a moment she had lit a fusee, and positively inhaled the sickening perfume of it. I only wished she had inhaled it all.

The upshot was that we took a turn on the lawn, while the room with open door and windows recovered from its degrading odour.

‘How were you getting on?’ she asked.{288}

‘Not very well. I decided to destroy some string. I nearly destroyed a pill-box with some cedar-flower dust in it. But I reserved that. At least, I think I did.’

‘Why?’

‘Legs and I collected it, and I know Legs wouldn’t have thrown it away, so I can’t.’

Helen was silent a moment; then,

‘Do you miss Legs very much?’ she asked. ‘His bodily presence, I mean, of course.’

‘Of course I do, just as you do. I miss him all the time. Oh, he is in the room, and he laughs at us, or with us. I know that.’

‘Then what do you miss?’ she asked.

‘The young body about the house.’

Then Helen said: ‘Oh, you darling!’

That sort of remark is always extremely pleasant, but I had no notion of her artfulness. I am glad to say that she has often said it before, so that it was not particularly stupid of me not to guess that it meant anything especial. And with her artfulness she changed the subject to that which I happened to be thinking about, thus making no transition.

‘I gave up,’ she said. ‘I found all my{289} things were so connected with Legs that I couldn’t destroy them. It is just what you said. We want to keep the young thing in the house, since we are getting old—yes, it’s no use saying “Pouf!”—and I can’t destroy anything connected with him. So shall we move our rubbish straight into Legs’ room, and make a sort of young museum? Then, when we feel particularly middle-aged, we can go up there and sit among the young things. If we don’t do that, we must clear out his room as well, and I can’t see how we can. There are rough copies of letters to that dreadful Charlotte; there is a letter in his handwriting, there on his table, beginning——’

‘Beginning “You’re a damned fool!”’ said I, ‘“but I don’t intend to quarrel with you.” Did you mean that one?’

‘Then you have been there, too?’ she said.

‘Why, of course, every day. I go when you attend to household affairs after breakfast; you go when you say you are going to bed. Didn’t you know?’

‘Certainly I did, but I thought you didn’t know that I went there,’ she said.{290}

‘Ditto,’ said I.

There was a huge rushing wind out of the south-west, and we stood a little while inhaling the boisterousness of it. All spring was in it, all the renewal of life.

‘How Legs is laughing at us!’ she said.

‘I don’t care. Let’s have the museum of young things. Let’s put there all the things we can’t throw away. Oh, Helen, there are photographs, too! There is one of him in his last half at Eton.... There is one of you and me when the Canadian canoe sank gently, and as we stood dripping on the shore he photographed us. And I photographed him and you when you said you would skate a rocking-turn together, and fell down. Heart’s blood, heart’s blood! There ought to be a law which makes it a penal offence to keep photographs,’

I suppose I had got excited, for Helen took my arm and said:

‘There, there!’

But even that did not do.

‘Oh, the pity of it,’ I cried—‘the pity of it! Why didn’t he take a train to come down? Why didn’t that omnibus pull up? He was{291} ours, and he would have married, and still been ours, and there would have been young things about the house again.’

I suppose I had torn away from her, for now we were apart, facing each other, at the end of this; and she smiled so quietly, so serenely.

‘Do you think that I don’t feel that, too?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you see that the wife who is mother of nothing must feel it more than the husband who is father of nothing? Besides, you make your books—you are father to them. What do I do? I order dinner.’

And yet—it seems to me so strange now—I did not see. There was bitterness in her words, but all I thought was that there was no bitterness in her voice, or her face, or her smile. I did not quite understand that, I remember, but Helen has told me since that she did not mean me to. She wanted—well, her plan evolves itself.

And then she took my arm again.

‘It is nearly a month since dear Legs went away,’ she said, ‘since we have actually heard and seen him. The last we heard was that he wanted us to buck up. Do you know, I think{292} we have bucked up. But we have been doing that singly; we have somehow lived rather apart, dear. Surely it is better to buck up together. I think the idea of a young museum is a very good one. Let us put all the things we can’t throw away into his room. We have never used the room before, because Legs might always rush down and want a bed; and so let us keep it like that. We might call it the nursery.’

And so the young museum was started. Helen had all manner of tender trifles for it, all connected with Legs. She had all sorts of things I had known nothing of: little baby garments, Legs’ bottle, some baby socks. Then there were child things as well: ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ the depressing Swiss family called Robinson, a far better Robinson called Crusoe.

 

And thus the nursery grew. ‘Treasure Island’ went there; a rocking-horse, which I remembered of old days, was brought down from an attic. Oh, how well, when I saw him again, I remembered him! He had a green base, nicely curved, on which he pranced to and fro, and my foot{293} had once been under it when he pranced, so that I lost a toenail, and was rewarded with sixpence for stopping crying. He had a hollow interior, the only communication with which were the holes of the pommels, and on another dreadful day my sister had dropped a three-penny-bit into one of them, with some idea of making a bank. A bank it was, but the capital was irrecoverable. The coin was still there, for now I took up the whole horse with ease, that steed which had so often carried me, and heard a faint chink from his stomach. He had a wild eye, too, and flaming red nostrils, and the paint smelt just the same as ever. And Helen produced a Noah’s ark, in which the paint was of familiar odour, but different, and there was Ham without a stand, and Mrs. Noah in a neat brown ulster, and Noah with a beard, and one good foot, but the other was a pin. Elephants were there with pink trunks (I never could understand why), and enormous ducks with pink bills (which now threw a light on the colour of the elephants’ trunks, since I suppose that a brush full of pink was indiscriminately bestowed), and small spotted tigers, and nameless{294} beasts which we called lynxes, chiefly because we did not know what they were, and did not know what lynxes were, so they were probably the ones. The ark itself had Gothic windows, and a mean white bird, with a piece of asparagus in its mouth, painted on the roof, probably indicated the dove and the leaf.

We must have spent two days over the nursery, and during those days we concentrated there all the young things of the house, and when it was finished it was a motley room. There were photographs of Legs everywhere; all his papers were kept; everything that had any connection with Legs and with youth was crammed into it. And when it was finished we found that we sat there together, instead of paying secret visits to the room, and we played at Noah’s ark, sitting on the carpet, and played at soldiers, clearing a low table which had been Helen’s nursery-table (for you cannot play soldiers on the floor, since they stagger on a carpet), and peas from pea-shooters sent whole rows of Grenadiers down like ninepins. But we could neither of us ride the rocking-horse, so instead we tilted him backwards and for{295}wards, and pretended he was charging the foe.

Of course, all reasonably-minded readers will say we were two absurd people. We both of us disagree altogether. For you have to judge of any proceedings by its effects, and the effect in this case was that Legs’ injunction that we should ‘buck up’ became a habit. That inimitable youth which Legs gave the home, he, his bodily presence, had gone. But somehow the atmosphere was recaptured. We played at youth, at childhood, till it became real again. For a household without youth in it is a dead household; a puppy or a kitten may supply it, or an old man of eighty may supply it. But youth of some kind must be part of one’s environment. Else the world withers.

Another thing has happened to me personally. I have said that at the beginning of the year I looked forward into the future through two transparencies, one sunlit, the other dark. But now the dark one (I can express it in no other way) had been withdrawn. Dear Legs’ death was not quite identical with it, for it was not withdrawn then. But during the month that{296} followed it gradually melted away. I can trace just two causes for it.

The first was this: In ineptitude of spirit I had reasoned to myself that the death of the body logically implied the merging of the life into the one central life. But after his death Legs became to my spirit more individual than ever. And the second cause was this establishment of the nursery. Though youth might have passed for oneself, it still lived. One was wrong, too (at least I was), in thinking it had passed from oneself. Else how did I feel so singularly annoyed when Helen shot down with a wet pea a whole regiment of my Life Guards? I was annoyed; I am still. It was a perfect fluke that the Colonel on horseback fell in such a way that he more than decimated his own regiment. And I am sure Helen shook the table, else why should the Brigadier-General, posted in the extreme rear, have fallen off the table altogether? She won.

Meantime in this first week of March the winds were roaring out of the south-west, and for a while, days together sometimes, squalls which the Valkyrie maidens might have bridled{297} to make steeds for their swift going came in unbroken procession from the Atlantic. Helen is a lover of the sea, and these gales coming out of the waste of waters touch something within her as mysterious as the sixth sense of animals, who feel and are excited by things that the five-sensed mortal is unaware of. To-day, however, was quiet and calm, and we stormed the steep ascent of the downs till we stood on the highest point of the Beacon, which looks down on all other land towards the south-west, so that the river of wind that flows from the Atlantic comes here unbreathed and untamed by traverse of other country, and you get it fresh and salt as it was when it left the ocean.

In that interval of quiet weather there was nothing to be perceived by the ordinary sense, but she sniffed the air like a filly at grass.

‘Wind is coming,’ she said, ‘the great wind from the sea. I don’t care whether your little barometer has gone up or not; what does it know of the winds? We shall be at home before it comes, but I will tell you then, as we sit close to the fire, what is happening in the big places.{298}’

She was quite right; though the silly barometer had gone up, we were but half through dinner when the wind, which had been no more than a breeze all afternoon, struck the house as suddenly as a blow. The wood fire on the hearth gave a little puff of smoke into the room, and then, thinking better, suddenly sparkled as if with frost, as the passage of the air above the chimney drew it up. At that Helen’s eyes were alight. She ate no more, but sat with her elbows on the table, while I, who have not the sixth sense, went gravely through mutton and anchovies on toast and an orange. Then they brought in coffee, and she shook her head to that. Meantime that first warning of the wind had been justified; a Niagara of air poured over us, screaming and hooting, and making a mad orchestra of sound. At times it ceased altogether—the long pause of the conductor—and then, before one heard the wind at all, a tattoo of the drums of rain, sounded on the window-pane. Then, heralded by those drums, the whole mad orchestra burst into a great tutti of screaming, hooting, sobbing. So much I could hear, but {299}Helen was of it somehow. Something secret and sensitive within her vibrated to the uproar.

I have seen her in the grip of the wind, as she expresses it, perhaps half a dozen times, and it always makes me vaguely uneasy. It is no less than a possession, and yet I can think of no one whom I would have imagined less liable to such a thing. I can imagine her surrounded by the terrors of fire or shipwreck, or any catastrophe that overthrows the reaso............