Into every marriage there come times of crisis, when man and woman gaze at each other dumbly across a great wall of misunderstanding. Peter’s homecoming from hospital provided that crisis in his life and Patricia’s.

Poor Patricia! she had looked forward so rapturously to having him at Sunflowers; worked so hard to make the place perfect. And now it seemed to her as though not only house and children but she herself must be distasteful to him; as though even palship were ended. Night after night, his placid kisses banished her to loneliness. Night after wakeful night, she watched the light in his dressing-room glimmer through the chinks of the door between them. Poor Patricia! unable to realize that this man who annoyed her by the very placidity of his demeanour, was struggling—every minute of the day, and every hour of the night—to prevent his hands from trembling, his voice from quivering, his every tone and every attitude from betraying the terrors which were eating away his self-respect.

Poor Peter! he strove so desperately to conceal his miseries. Poor Peter, who only succeeded, by not voicing them, in finally convincing his wife that the something he strove so obviously to conceal from her must be lack of affection....

Thus brick by reticent brick: he with his nameless shameless fears, she with her certainty of love lost for ever: these two built up their pathetic wall of misunderstandings.

In all their lives they had never had so many opportunities for companionship: in all their lives they had never been so uncompanionable. They were always together—but they were never in harmony. Mutual existence turned to a game of finesse—“I mustn’t let her know this,” “I mustn’t let him see that.” Yet, outwardly, they remained a very ordinary married couple. No visiting stranger, not even Francis whom they saw almost daily, perceived the barrier between them.

Walking together, talking together, in the dining-room with the children, in the garden with Fry, morning and evening, the game of misunderstanding went on.

And the man used to say to himself: “O God, am I going mad? I am afraid, afraid. Everything frightens me. One day she will know I am afraid. Then, she will despise me. The servants know I am afraid: they talk about me: I cannot hear what they say, but I know they are talking about me, they talk about me all the time. The children know I am afraid.... O God, what am I afraid of? Of what am I not afraid? I wish to God I could go back to the front. Death is simpler out there. And I am only fit for death, because I am afraid to go back to the front.... She mustn’t know that I am afraid, she must never guess that I am afraid.”

And the woman used to say to herself: “O God, what is behind Peter’s eyes? He hates it all—me, the children, this house I have made for him. His voice praises, but his heart condemns me. O God, if he’d only say what he is thinking. We used to be pals once—and that was not enough for me. I used to call myself his chattel. Now, I am not even chattel to him. We are strangers in a strange house. He hates me. He mustn’t guess that I know of his hatred.”

The woman, at any rate, had work for anodyne. By now, Patricia began to realize that country life on a moderate income is not the simple paradise which town dwellers imagine it. She was not yet fully aware of the robberies practised on her; but she had learned, at least, the necessity of personal supervision. Children, house, servants, garden, animals—all needed her. The man Fry, grown arrogant on the proceeds of speculation (he had utilized her absence to dispose of the apple-crop to a confederate—and the two were now holding forty bushels of pippins for the ultimate rise) turned lazy, insubordinate; required constant prodding. Fanny and Elizabeth—half-trained, utterly uneducated, liars by inheritance of serfdom—could not be trusted to work unwatched. Also, accounts had begun to roll in.

None of these inevitable pettinesses would have been a burden, if she could have laughed over them with Peter. But household affairs had always been taboo between them: her job and hers only. They had made that rule in the prosperity of three thousand a year; and she was not the type of woman to break it in the adversity of six hundred. Moreover, intuition warned her that he must, for the present, be shielded from financial anxieties.

Peter, who had no work for anodyne and cherished all the prejudices of the caste which is not accustomed to see its womenfolk labour, watched her busied about the house, feeding her chickens, educating the children, till the Fear of Poverty wiped out all other fears and he said to himself: “This is the way my clerks used to live. I’ve brought her to this. I shall bring her to worse than this....” Then he would take his twelve-bore from the case in his dressing-room, drop a couple of No. 5’s into the breech, and slip through Tebbits’ Farm, down the hill to Francis Gordon’s cottage.

“Why the devil do you always bring that gun of yours?” Francis used to ask.

“Might see a rabbit.” Invariably Peter gave the same answer to his cousin’s question; invariably he felt shamed by it. For the real reason of that gun-carrying was Fear, the Fear of Open Spaces.

And when Peter used to ask, “Done any work, old man?” Francis would answer, “Oh, I’m just lying fallow for a bit.” For Francis Gordon had passed beyond the Fears into the land of No-Incentive.