Theo took the instrument mechanically and returned to the platform. The roar of shouts and hand-clapping died down suddenly as he raised his bow. Then came silence, and he realised that he had nothing to play. He looked out over the sea of faces, blankly; his memory was a washed slate; not a note remained on it, not the name of a composer.
Yet he must play something; the people down there with the upturned faces were waiting, waiting; and he had nothing to give them. A thin mist spread between him and the glaring lights; there was a dim space at the further end of the hall, and he fixed his eyes upon it, trying to remember. A room seemed to grow out of the shadows; half-
darkened, wholly grief-stricken and cheerless; his mother, with her drawn face white upon the pillow, her wasted, piteous hands; and beside the bed a watching figure, silent, weary-eyed.
He began to play. As for the audience, he had forgotten it; he was playing, not for the concert-goers of Paris, but for Jack and Helen. When he ended there was silence; then thunderous applause burst out again. He shuddered as he went down the steps.
In the artist's room Conrad caught him by the arm. "Theo," he said hoarsely, "was that... your own?"
Theo looked round him desperately; the maddening sound of applause filled him with terror; there seemed no escape from its malignant pursuit.
"I... made it up as I went along. Was it... was it very bad? Uncle Conrad, stop them; make them let me alone! I..."
He was white and shivering. Conrad, too, was pale, but from another cause. He laid a solemn hand on the lad's shoulder.
"Render thanks to God," he said, "for His great gift of genius."
Theo burst suddenly into passionate sobs. "And mother is dying..."
For the remainder of the winter he took no Continental engagements. The impresario argued, coaxed, and threatened in vain; then resigned himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and made arrangements for London concerts. These, fortunately, brought in enough money to keep the little household in comfort, and to surround Helen with small luxuries which did something to soften the hardness of a hard death.
Towards the end she partly lost the suppressed manner which she had worn, like a nun's grave-clothes, through all the years of her widowhood. Conrad, who come twice from Paris to see her, even recognised at moments the girl Helen whom he had known in his youth. Sometimes in the evening, holding Jack's hand as he sat by her low couch before the fire, while Theo lay full-length on the hearth rug and watched her with adoring eyes, she would tell the two lads fragmentary stories of her life in Arctic deserts, of her husband and his death there, of her tragic youth and dreary middle age. But it was not often that she had strength to spare for anything but silent endurance. Her pain was borne with heroic cheerfulness; but it wore her out none the less surely for that.
It was only during this last winter that she recovered something of the gift of improvisation for which in her youth she had been remarkable. On the rare "good days" when she was neither suffering acutely nor faint and exhausted, she would slip unconsciously, while talking to Jack or Theo, into a rhapsodic form of expression, now in verse, now in prose, sometimes in an irregular rhythm like that of a chant.
The last time that she left her room was in the beginning of March. Between two periods of bad weather came a few cloudless spring days, and the earliest flowers burst into sudden bloom. In Kew Gardens the shady spaces under trees were gracious with the drooping heads of snowdrops, and broad grassy slopes flashed back the sunlight from royal chalices of yellow crocus flowers.
On the warmest afternoon Jack and Theo laid her upon her couch and carried her out into the Gardens, that she might see the coming of spring before she died.
They took her to a wide, open space where crocuses, white and gold and purple, bloomed by tens of thousands, their bright heads erect, their stems a silver forest in the grass. Jack sat on a bench beside her; Theo, as usual, flung himself full-length upon the ground, his clasped hands behind his head, Helen lay looking out across the crocus field; the stillness of her face made the two lads silent, as in the presence of death.
"Mother," Jack said at last, "I'm afraid you ought to come in now."
"One moment, dear; I shall not see this again. Look!" Her eyes turned back to the crocus flowers. "They are my people."
Jack misunderstood her meaning; he lacked her gift of keen imagination.
"Do they grow wild in your home?" he asked, and turned his eyes away that he might not look upon the nakedness of this eternal, unhealed grief.
"Don't you see?" Theo murmured from the grass. "They are an army."
The sudden light leaped up in Helen's eyes.
"An army for an instant and for ever; an army that recks not of victory or of defeat. Gain and loss are one to them; the doom of battle is upon them before they have seen the sunlight; they fail and die, and it afflicts them nothing, for they are warriors to all eternity; the very earth around their feet is thick with spears."
The listeners held their breath as they heard; she was like a thing transfigured, full of light.
"See how weak and defenceless they are, how easily crushed under foot; and yet how erect and patient an army. There is not one that has cast away his colours as the roses do; not one that shrivels on the stalk in the shame of a withered heart. As each man's time is come, he falls where he stood; and a new soldier fills his vacant place, never turning to look where the dead comrade lies. Then in a little while all is over, and the place where
they died has forgotten them. Rank weeds of summer hide the withered husks and the bitter seed within. But so surely as spring comes back when winter is over, so surely shall our soldiers rise up from the dead, and stand in armoured ranks for battle, the weapon ready to the hand and every man in his place."
Long silence followed; then she turned with a sigh.
"Let us go, children; our spring is not yet come."
Jack was still silent as they carried her in, and his eyes were very sombre. Assuredly she would be justified of her belief; seed time and harvest shall not fail. Yet what use, when the seed is so bitter, and all the harvest is death?
CHAPTER XI
After Helen's death Jack spent two years studying in Paris. He then returned to London for a year's work in the hospitals, before going to Vienna, where he intended to finish his course of study. Helen's small legacy would have been enough, with his frugal habits, to cover his expenses till he could get a post in some hospital; but he took all opportunities to add to it by coaching, microscope work, and library research, and laid aside every spare shilling for Molly. He had at first hoped that she would come to live and study with him in Paris, but to all such suggestions she replied by cold letters saying that she "could not leave home." They still corresponded, but in a formal, set way, like strangers. Jack had sometimes tried to break down the barrier between them, but met with no response; her letters continued to arrive at stated times, always worded in the same conventional manner, always stiff with the same hard reserve. Apparently she had been taught to look upon him as a reprobate whose kinship disgraced her. The thought was bitter to him; but he accepted it, as he had accepted so many things.
One day, soon after his return from Paris, he received a letter, addressed in Molly's hand, but with a London post-mark. It was merely a curt announcement that she had come to town to attend the St. John's ambulance course and was now in Kensington, boarding with Aunt Sarah's town relatives, and that if he cared to call on Sunday afternoon he would find her in.
He went, of course, but with a desolate sense of the futility of things. This was the sister for whom he had been pinching and saving, working and planning all these years; and he was going to call upon her ceremoniously, just as he had to call, now and then, on the wives of the professors. The only difference was that with his sister he was less sure of a welcome.