The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone. Again came the check. . . . That really
was
a marvelous suit. I wonder what she gave for it?
3
    “A very good-looking woman,” said Colonel Adams to his wife as they sat over their late tea. They did not have supper, just cocoa and bread and butter when they went to bed, cocoa being cheap, so they had a late tea. It helped to pass the evening, for happy though they were together, the evenings did sometimes seem long, especially in the winter. The fact was that by the time they had done the work that had to be done in the cottage, cooked and eaten their frugal lunch and washed up afterward, they were tired and couldn’t do much more for the rest of the day except sit; out in the garden in warm weather, in front of the fire in winter.
    Colonel Adams was eighty-two and crippled with arthritis. He had suffered with a grim and humorous heroism for many years though now the joints were fixed and he was in less pain; but it was difficult to get about on his two sticks. Mrs. Adams was younger, a little creature who hardly reached to her husband’s shoulder, but her physique had not been equal to the strain of bearing her four sons, losing three of them in the war and having the fourth turn out so disappointing. Then there had been the perpetual planning and contriving that had been necessary with the cost of living ceaselessly rising and Service pensions staying where they were. And so now she was delicate. They had had a little private money once but Charles’s debts had swallowed most of that long ago. One couldn’t refuse to help one’s own son, especially one so beloved as Charles.
    But if life had been hard for Mrs. Adams it had never occurred to her to think so, and her soft face was serene as a kitten’s. It had never occurred to the Colonel to complain either. His lean brown face, with bushy white eyebrows and white cavalry mustache, was wrinkled in lines of perpetual good humor. It was only their evident exhaustion and the faded blue eyes of both of them that suggested suffering. Nothing else. They had each other. An unusually happy marriage, its selflessness strengthened by shared tragedy, had grown into something more, an identification so close that each could be said to have passed beyond the barriers of self and to live in the other with an immediacy that very largely shut out thought of the future. Largely, not entirely. The thought of death did come at times and they would smile at each other and say, “We’ll go together.” But in each was the fear, never expressed to the other, that it might not be so. They hardly realized the uniqueness of their love, and their good fortune in its possession, though they did know they were happy. The discontent and unhappiness of others was a great puzzle to them, especially if those others happened to have television. At the heart of their mutual content was this mutual longing for a TV. It was not an acquisitive longing, it was almost the mystical longing of a child for the morning star. On the few occasions when they had seen it, and had sat before it spellbound, it had seemed to them an unbelievable magic. And so their longing was not a corroding one, because no one expects to possess the morning star. They did not speak of it to each other because neither liked the other to think that they wanted anything more than the riches they had in each other.
    “A very good-looking woman indeed,” repeated Colonel Adams, who had always had a harmless eye for a pretty woman. “And looked as though she could play a good hand of bridge.”
    Now there was another thing that it would have been nice to have, more frequent bridge, and of this they did sometimes speak to each other because it was an attainable thing. It only needed a little change in the village population to bring it about. Colonel Adams