IT was impossible to keep pace with the headlong rapidity of the Crownes. They were not unreasonable; they would listen to advice if it was given in time, but nobody had ever been quick enough to catch them in the breathless instant between thought and action. Their boats were always burnt before their would-be counsellors had time to grasp what was afoot, and this was the secret of their singular immunity from family interference.
The news of William’s intention to buy Monk’s Hall had scarcely reached Oxfordshire before his sister appeared in person to coerce her seniors into immediate, dazed compliance. It seemed that William himself was unable to leave London because he was producing a play, but Emily came down for a week to Water Hythe, set them all by the ears, concluded the deal, and darted off again. Had she stayed a fortnight the bewildered Bobbie would have begun to ask for time, and Catherine’s heavy artillery of criticism and conclave would have been got into action. But a week, as she pointed out to William, would be quite long enough; the initial advantages of the scheme were such as to strike anyone in a moment, and the less they all talked it over among themselves the better.
“I agree,” said William. “If once they begin discussing, it’ll be endless. All the oldest inhabitants will be called in. It’s a funny thing, you know, Emmie. I’ve often noticed it. The shorter the time that’s left to anyone to do things in, the longer he takes to think it over. You’d have thought it would be the other way round. We can afford to take our time, and they ought to be in a hurry. But just think what it will be like if we are all held up till Philip, or somebody like that, has given his considered opinion.”
“Philip will be on our side,” said Emily quickly. “He always is, really, though he’s too polite to say so.”
“Oh, I daresay his opinion will be perfectly sound when he produces it, but he’ll keep us all waiting. I suppose when you get to be elderly one day seems so very much like another that you don’t notice how quickly …”
“He’s not really so old … Philip. He isn’t fifty.”
“Being elderly is a state of mind. I don’t suppose poor old Philip was ever anything else. You nip down there and buy that house before anybody has time to ask his advice.”
So Emily nipped, and had got affairs well under way by the time that Catherine had posted her first frantic appeal to Philip at Ratchet.
“Please come over at once,” she wrote, “or go up to Monk’s Hall and talk to Bobbie. It is really urgent. Emily has come down on a most extraordinary piece of business. It seems that William wants to buy Monk’s Hall. Of course the idea delighted me at first; but it is not a step which should be taken without a great deal of careful consideration, and the children seem determined to arrange everything in a violent hurry. I am not surprised that they never consulted me. I am quite used to that. And I am very much afraid that it has all been Trevor’s fault. The twins could not have been capable of such an idea if it had not been put into their heads. Of course it must be prevented. Not the actual purchase, I mean. I daresay we may approve of that, when we have thought it over. But their plans seem to be so extraordinary. I gather that they are going to put the house to a very shocking purpose. And Bobbie is so inert. You must talk to him, Philip. Come over and see me first. Come over to-morrow. We really have no time to lose.”
Philip could not imagine what was going on, and as he hurried over to Water Hythe he changed his mind several times as to the shocking purpose to which the house was to be put. Sometimes he thought of racing-stables and sometimes of a gambling-hell, and then he wondered whether William could have married three wives at once, and was proposing to keep them all at Monk’s Hall. But, on the whole, it mattered very little. His pleasure and excitement at the thought of seeing Emily were such that he would not have minded if she had proposed to dynamite every house in the countryside.
For some years now he had been devoted to her, but it was romance of a placid, impersonal sort. He looked forward to his rare meetings with her very much as some people look forward to the performance of a favourite symphony. They were tremendous events, keenly anticipated and remembered with thankfulness, but they were governed by forces over which he had no control. He was content to wait until chance brought her in his way. He never sought her out, for to do so would have been to brush some of the bloom off his idyll: it would have given a busy, scheming little touch to a relationship which, he liked to believe, was entirely passive. He never went to London to see her, nor did he write very often. It was better that her comings and goings should have all the charm of unexpectedness, like fine weather.
In fact, he felt for her all that he was no longer able to feel for Lise, but with the attentuated vigour, the more delicate idealism of his increased years His attachment to Lise had begun in desire, and with the waning of that flame it had lapsed into mere sentiment. But for Emily he had never felt anything short of passion, and the selflessness which passion breeds. It had invaded him when she was still so very young as to be infinitively remote. She was more unattainable than Lise had ever been, for no mere common obstacle, no husband or friend, stood between them. It was the essence of her, the lovely youth which he had left so far behind him.
It seemed to him as though the flowery lanes between Ratchet and Water Hythe had taken a sudden leap into summer at her coming. He discovered that he had himself been dead all the winter. He had accomplished nothing. His recaptured leisure, the long, quiet evenings by his solitary fireside, had all been so much waste. They were tedious. They petrified him. He supposed that he must have looked forward to it all too much. In Mesopotamia he had longed so terribly to be at home, but now, though he had been repossessed of his kingdom for six months, he still found himself a stranger in his own place. The good things were all there, but the mood to enjoy them had been shattered. He realised that he would have to grow fresh roots, but he grudged the time that it would take, since more than half of his life was already over.
“For in some ways I feel younger than I ever did before,” he explained to himself.
Like most solitary people he was inclined to conduct long imaginary conversations with a sort of second self, a mute, sympathetic, but rather stupid auditor to whom everything had to be made exceedingly clear. And to this person he now confided a humiliating truth:
“You know, I’ve suffered all my life from being two men at once.”
“Everybody does,” said his companion.
“Not as much as I do,” insisted Philip. “My two are deadly enemies. When one cries the other laughs. When one is noble, the other sneers. When one is ignoble, the other nags. They lead a cat-and-dog life. It’s not the jaded contest between good and bad. The truth of the matter is that one is a very old gentleman and the other is a promising young fellow.”
At this point he caught sight of Emily, a couple of fields away, running by the river-bank. And his argumentative companion vanished like the flame of a candle that has been blown out.
She had not seen him. She was running and throwing sticks for the youngest of the Water Hythe dogs, a wheezy veteran at most times, but to-day a little above himself by reason of the spring air. The grass beneath her feet was thick with daisies, neat and gay, like the flowery field in some old Italian picture. They seemed to spring up from the earth where she trod. She was bareheaded to the cold, laughing wind, the sun and clouds of an April sky. She was almost as lovely as he had imagined her to be.
Ravished at the sight, he stood quite still. For an instant he had made as though to pursue her, but he checked himself in time. Pursuit was not for him; he knew too much. He knew that spring is a flame which burns upon no hearth, and he was glad to be so old and so wise. If he had been younger, this ecstasy in his bosom might have driven him on to commit some folly. And then he would surely have lost her, since it is man’s lot to pursue one woman and to capture another, to woo a maid and to win a wife. Because he wished to love her for ever, unchanged, because he wished to keep her perfect in his heart, he let her pass, unhailed.
“And, besides,” he explained to his companion, who was with him again as he hurried to Water Hythe, “if I had called to her, she would have been bored. I can talk of nothing that would interest her. She has her own friends … her own life …”
“Very true, Philip. But as a matter of fact, you were shy, and nothing else.”
Relieved, and yet full of regret, complacent, yet a little ashamed, he passed out of the bright, changing airs of the spring day into the immutable gloom of the hall at Water Hythe. The portrait of Frobisher by Watts glowered down at him from over the fireplace with a forceful vagueness. The past shut him in. He remembered that it was still possible for people to think, in this house, as they had thought in the days of Frobisher. For Catherine, despite years of warfare and disaster, had succeeded in preserving something of the spacious regimen of the ’eighties. And she had done it simply by reason of her invincible obstinacy, her blindness to the new heaven and earth which had come into being beyond her doors. She believed in the ways of her own generation so passionately, was so determined that all innovation must be an accident, that she had really kept, intact and vital, some of the spirit and tradition which had gone to the making of her house. Philip could never visit her without immediately feeling its influence; a desire was sure to rise in him to sing with her a dirge for the good old days.
She plunged, as usual, into her subject before the polite murmurs of convention had got past his lips.
“Oh, Philip! How good of you to come so promptly. You got my letter, I suppose? I’m afraid, perhaps, I put it all rather strongly, but the whole idea was such a shock. Since I wrote to you, I’ve thought it over. I’ve slept on it. And really, I don’t feel we need to worry so much. They must come to see for themselves that it’s impossible.”
“What is it, exactly, that they want to do?”
“Well, in the first place, as I told you, they want to buy Monk’s Hall. And that part of it seems to me very sensible. In fact, between ourselves, it’s been largely my doing. I’ve been working for it for some months.”
“Have you?” cried Philip in surprise.
Catherine nodded.
“I gave William a pretty broad hint, the last time he was down here. And I talked to Bobbie.”
This was the first that Philip had heard of it. But he was quite ready to believe that she spoke the truth. If William had got a sensible idea in his head, it must certainly have been put there by somebody else.
“Of course,” he suggested, “it’s a little hard on Trevor.”
“Oh, no, no! I don’t think of it in that light at all. I don’t consider that prospects of that sort would be at all good for Trevor just now: they must encourage him in these silly, idle ideas. And in any case, the possession of such a place, nowadays, must always be a burden rather than an advantage.”
“And it would surely be a good thing to keep the house in the family. You must be glad of that.”
“Yes. And that is my difficulty. I don’t want to stop the actual purchase. To oppose that would be very unwise One doesn’t want to coerce them. I mean, one doesn’t want to seem to coerce them.”
“What do they want to do?” asked Philip anxiously.
He was beginning already to adopt her point of view. He always did, simply because her ideas were definite and his were not Although he normally thought of Trevor, Charlotte, William and Emily as very distinct and individual creatures, he was apt, in Catherine’s company, to discuss them collectively, as though the common denominator of their youth had reduced them all to a type.
“They say that they are going to start a Settlement,!’ exclaimed Catherine in an irritated voice.
“A Settlement? For slums or something?”
“No, no. Much worse. For artists, and writers, and that sort of people.”
“Great heavens! What for?”
“That’s what I asked.”
“You mean to say that Emily …”
“I’m afraid it isn’t so much Emily,” Catherine told him mysteriously, “or William. I’m very much afraid it’s Trevor. Emily merely talked about buying Monk’s Hall, and how convenient it would be for Lise and Bobbie. But then Trevor wrote a letter to Charlotte which cast an entirely new light on the whole idea. It’s quite ridiculous, really.”
“But does Trevor mean to start a Settlement?”
“It’s the merest excuse, my dear Philip. He means, of course, to come down and live here himself. I know he is doing it simply as a sort of childish defiance to me. I asked Emily about it, and she, as usual, was very vague. She said that she and William had merely intended to offer a home for a little time to some friends who were badly off. But even that seemed to me a foolish plan. Why should they burden themselves with these pensioners?”
“It’s just the sort of thing the twins would do.”
“I said to her: ‘You’ll merely surround yourselves with a crowd of second-rate hangers-on.’ I told her: ‘Respectable writers don’t sponge on their friends. I’ve had experience of that sort of thing all my life, and I know the way that class of people get hold of you.’ I said: ‘Your uncle had a dozen letters a week from starving poets with twelve children.’ But, of course, she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Poor child! One knows so well. At that age, these things seem so easy to put right.”
“And to crown everything, Charlotte is egging them on! She talks of going there too! She says she will get more time for her work, as she calls it. As if she couldn’t write here all day long! But it seems that she finds a difficulty in living her own life, to use an expression which they all seem very fond of. It seems odd, when you think how I’ve urged her to take up some regular profession, instead of idling away her time here.”
Philip snorted. He had no sort of sympathy for Charlotte.
“She doesn’t feel that the atmosphere of my house is congenial,” went on Catherine bitterly. “Though, as I told her, some of the greatest writers of her father’s day did their best work here. ‘My dear child,’ I said, ‘if you only knew how you make me laugh!’ Because really it is laughable. When you think of the people who have stayed here. People whom I knew intimately.”
“But the whole idea is simply preposterous,” broke in Philip, who had begun to grasp it. “Do you mean to say that William wants to buy Monk’s Hall simply to house Bobbie and Lise and Trevor and Charlotte?”
“Yes, and that’s not all.” Catherine’s voice sank, and she leant forward, peering at Philip through the shadows of the room. “I’m afraid that’s not the worst. Trevor talks in his letter of bringing his friends here. Those people whom I refused to have in this house. He means to bring them to Monk’s Hall. To my mother’s home.”
“As part of this extraordinary Settlement?”
“Apparently. These … these people … the sort of people that one simply never used to mention, Philip. The … the worst sort of people … really low, bad women …”
“Oh, my dear Catherine!” Philip could not help a protest. “I don’t think you can quite say that. You mean this Mr. Cuffe? Even though his affairs are not exactly regular, I think you are making a mistake …”
“Oh, I know I’m out of date. I understand from Trevor that this sort of thing is quite usual nowadays. It seems that no writer can be happily married in the ordinary way. They used, in our day, to manage it, but …”
“Ruskin,” began Philip, “Meredith, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray …”
And he stopped uncomfortably, remembering that first wife of Frobisher’s who had run away.
“They had domestic troubles,” conceded Catherine. “But people nowadays don’t even seem to try to be decently married. This Mr. Cuffe … I think it’s horrible! Taking this girl about with him, into respectable houses!”
“It’s an uncomfortable, uncivilised way of going on,” suggested Philip.
Her stern eye challenged him: adjured him to keep faith; and he added:
“Yes, and I do definitely agree with you, it’s wrong. It’s immoral. By all our standards, it can’t be accepted. But what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” she said slowly. “At least, nothing at present. I’ve come to that conclusion, since writing to you. The actual sale will take a certain amount of time, and they can’t do anything silly until that goes through. If we opposed them too much now, it might lead to their buying another house, not Monk’s Hall. We don’t want that. We must let them have their own way, until the house is bought. After that, we must take steps.”
“What sort of steps?”
“One has a certain amount of influence still. It’s unthinkable that such a piece of folly should be allowed to go on.”
“It is, quite unthinkable. And really, you know, Catherine, I don’t think that any particular steps need to be taken. We … you … need do nothing at all. If you leave them entirely alone, I should have thought …”
“I can’t allow that woman to be brought to Monk’s Hall. I shall speak to Bobbie …”
“You’ve said yourself that the whole plan is absurd. It is. Can you imagine any such scheme as this Settlement lasting for a month? Only the stimulant of opposition will get it together at all. They don’t know what they’re in for They’ll come to see that life isn’t as simple as they think.”
“They will indeed, poor children.”
“If you leave it to time …”
“You mean … simply do nothing and let all their plans come to grief?”
She looked at him with doubt and entreaty, for she was less hardened to the guiltiness of being wise. She was less prepared to accept the thought that her children must, in the end, pay the dire price of experience. Womanlike, she had cherished somewhere the divinely foolish notion that they might possibly escape. She was a better friend to youth than he, despite her many bitter railings.
For a while they sat silent, in that mute understanding which binds the old when they discuss the young, the burden of knowing so much and believing so little. And Emily, who came in with the tea-things, thought to herself that they looked very bleak. Probably they had been talking about people who were dead, or cancer. It must be awful, she thought, to be old enough to be frightened of cancer. As a very little girl she had once overheard two old women discussing their symptoms, and the impression it made had been acute and lasting. She hoped that she herself might be dead long before reaching this age of whispered fear.
She hailed Philip with a warm-hearted joy which shamed him. Quite obviously she was pleased to see him, and she spoke with regret of having missed him on the road.
“I can’t think how I didn’t meet you,” she exclaimed, “if you came by Beckett’s Lane. I suppose you did? I only turned off into the field for ten minutes, to throw some sticks for Cæsar. I suppose you must have passed by just then. Shall I pour out, Aunt Catherine?”
Philip felt bound to say that he had caught sight of her in the distance, and she looked puzzled. Why had he not shouted?
“You were too far away.”
“Oh, Philip! The next time you come to see me, you’ll have to invent a better excuse than that.”
Catherine frowned a little.
As a matter of fact, my dear, Philip did not come to see you at all, strange as it may seem. He came to talk to me.”
Emily made round eyes at her aunt, and then at Philip. She knew as well as either of them that he was, in his way, her admirer. She hid her laughter behind the tea-urn.
“I never go anywhere unless I’m asked,” said Philip, a little heavily
“Well, and haven’t I asked you?” Emily poked her head reproachfully round the urn. “If I’ve asked you once, I’ve asked you a dozen times. Ever since we went to London.”
“I never go to London, Emily.”
“Ah, but you do. I know you do. With Uncle Bobbie to the Chelsea Show. Once a year. You go round and look at everything and you write down, in little note-books, the names of a lot of new flowers that you’ll never grow in your gardens, just to flaunt them in the faces of your gardeners. And then you dine at Uncle Bobbie’s Club. Really, you both hate going, but you’ve got into a sort of habit of it. Are you going this year?”
“If your Uncle Bobbie insists on it, I daresay …”
“Didn’t I know it! Well, listen. You must combine it this time with coming to see us. It’s not very far from Chelsea to Edwardes Square.”
“I shall be delighted,” began Philip doubtfully.
She felt impatient, for her advances were not usually received with so much hesitation. For many months now she had lived upon adulation, and she had begun to grow a little imperious.
“You must come and stay with us,” she commanded. “And we’ll all go to see William’s play. It ought to be on by then.”
Catherine again had to take her down, with a suggestion that Philip was a busy man, and had a good deal to do on his annual visit to London. But Philip was not grateful to her. He was aware suddenly of a great longing and a great rebellion. It was ridiculous that he should be perpetually grouped with Catherine, whom he did not love, against Emily, who was the apple of his eye. With a look of speaking gratitude he accepted the invitation to Edwardes Square, and declared that he would like to see William’s play better than anything in the world. Emily leant back, satisfied.
“That’s a promise,” she said, nodding at him.
Catherine, looking from one to the other, thought to herself:
“It’s a pity he’s so old. If he were ten years younger, she really might do worse than take him, poor child.”
For to Catherine’s way of thinking, the sooner that Emily stopped being a Crowne, the better.
Trevor was greatly put out when he heard that Baxter had agreed to produce William’s play. Aghast at Tilli’s iniquity, he vowed that the thing must be stopped. Everybody who had read “The Seven Dawns” (and there were few people in London who had not) said the same thing. Its very promise was a reason why so immature a piece of work should be forgotten as soon as possible. Somebody ought to tell William so; his eyes must be opened to the dangers of his own unfortunate surname.
Trevor wrote a long letter to his cousin and forgot to post it. And then he wondered whether Tilli was not the right person to scold, since the thing was entirely her fault. It was well known that she kept the peace between William and Baxter in their frequent disputes, and without her intervention the scheme would have foundered at a very early stage. It was she who had persuaded William to write in a bazaar scene, and Baxter to swallow a long argument between two priests, which had, as Baxter complained, “no dramma.” If she were to withdraw her efforts the project might still come to nothing.
But the business of reprimanding her was not going to be easy, and Trevor put it off from day to day. He had made up his mind to break with her, and it was most tiresome of William to involve him with her again. If he went to see her once he might find that he had again become a regular visitor, for she was not the woman to let slip any advantage. He had managed to keep away from the little flat in the mews for nearly six weeks, though it had not been easy. No weeks were ever duller Funds were running very low, and all his means of amusement were correspondingly straitened His social diversons were complicated by the fear of meeting Tilli at one of his friends houses.
He had been forced, in fact, to do some work, and he tried to settle down to a translation of Crébillon Fils.
But he was not comfortable, for the image of Tilli haunted his dreams and disturbed him whenever his thoughts were not resolutely fixed upon something else. Her little figure flitted through all the intrigues with which his pen dealt so nimbly; all conversations on the printed page echoed to his ear in her voice. She had such a pretty voice; and such an air of being clever to speak English at all, that the flat stupidity of what she said could be overlooked. And in French she was sometimes subtle; almost, to his mind, witty. He could hear her saying all the things said by Crébillon’s ladies, who talked their reasonable way through amorous adventure as though a seduction were, essentially, an opportunity for conversation. It occurred to him, more than once, that Tilli would talk very well under such circumstances. He had never seen her disordered or embarrassed. He did not think that she could lose poise, or control of situation. She would always be the same dark little mystery
“I suppose,” he thought, “… if I’d liked … I could have …”
And then, in a revulsion, he reproached himself for a fatuous fool. Tilli was an honest woman for all he knew to the contrary, nor could she really be accused of having made advances to him. Of course she had been kind, and she demanded that personal style of conversation which is inevitable with a certain type of woman; but then she had often snubbed him. She had given him no direct cause for thinking her accessible, and he could not understand his own uncertainty. Perhaps it was simply the effect of living so much in the mental vicinity of Crébillon Fils.
One day, in the King’s Road, Chelsea, he met Nigel Cuffe, who said:
“You’re looking very yellow! Where have you been all this time? We heard that you’d gone into the country to start a communist settlement.”
“I’m going to do that, in the autumn. But the place hasn’t been bought yet. You and Sally are coming, aren’t you?”
“First I’ve heard of it.”
“I know. I’ve only just decided to ask you.”
“I don’t propose, my dear Trevor, to share my royalties with anyone.”
“You won’t have to. The communism isn’t the strong point of the idea. All that it amounts to is that my Cousin William is going to buy a house for me, so that I and my friends may live there at his expense.”
“Why is he doing that?”
“Because the gods wish to destroy him. Will you come?”
“I’ll see. It might be amusing. Where are you going now? What are you looking for?”
“A cure for concupiscence,” said Trevor.
Nigel’s suggestions did not appeal to him, and he explained:
“You don’t understand. I’m suffering from a diseased imagination. Something has happened to shake my sense of proportion: I need a dose of unadulterated reality in some shocking, some startling form. I want to be made aware of the vanity of man and the smallness of his obsessions.”
“I understand perfectly. And I’ll tell you what you must do. Go to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.”
“The dead Zoo? Why there?”
“Look in the entrance-hall at all the exhibits of human parasites. They’re in glass cases, and they jump to the eye the minute you get inside. I often go and have a look at them; they have a wonderfully cathartic effect for a fit of the spleen. You can see the common flea, magnified to a hundred times its natural size; also lice of every sort, liver-fluke, sheep-bot, bugs of all sorts, including the big black bug of the pampas grass. Also some very beautiful and interesting ticks, especially a tick which infests the buffalo, which is enamelled all over in the most exquisite batik, like Sally’s Liberty shawl. But in your present state of mind I should advise you to concentrate on the parasites of man.”
“Thank you,” said Trevor. “I will. I’ll go now.”
After half an hour spent in the manner recommended by Nigel, he felt very sane, very collected. And he knew a great deal more natural history than he had ever known in his life before. He was inclined to think, as he came out of the building, that the moment might have arrived for going to expostulate with Tilli over William’s play. His mind was still primed with facts about liver-fluke, and it would be wise to make use of the opportunity, since so beautiful a detachment could not last for ever.
“But I’ll come very often,” he vowed to himself. “I’ll come whenever I feel to need it.”
He looked about for a taxi and remembered, with a slight loss of complacency, the state of his bank balance. Through a drizzle of rain he walked to the nearest ’bus route.
It seemed to him that the chauffeurs, cleaning their cars in Tilli’s mews, grinned to one another as though they recognised him. Very nearly he turned back, but he could not face the return journey under so many mocking eyes. He rang the bell, hoping that she would be out, and heard the flat-footed maid come shuffling down the steep little flight of stairs to the door. Tilli was at home and would see him. Also she was alone, for which he was sorry, for he selected an hour when she generally had company. He felt that he could have put his points better if he had had an audience to help him, and he feared that she might be reproachful, immediately taxing him with neglect and demanding the cause of his long absence. But the excellent creature did nothing of the sort.
“You have been in the country with your mother?” she asked. “Will you have some tea?”
“Thanks. I will. No, I’ve not been away. I’ve been working.”
“Aha! I did not know. You did not tell me.”
“It’s only since I last saw you,” he explained.
“Only since then? Quite a little time, then.”
“Six weeks,” began Trevor, and then checked himself.
“So long as that? I forget; when did we last meet, Trevor?”
“At the Martins’ party.”
“Ah, yes. I had forgotten.”
He wondered, irritably, if she was lying or not.
“I’ve come to scold you,” he explained.
“But … what have I done?”
“This play of William’s.” He now spoke very seriously. “You can’t let it go on.”
“Cannot go on? But it is all arranged. In one week we shall begin rehearsing.”
“‘We’? Are you in it, Tilli?”
“I am to play the dancing-girl: the beloved of the prince.”
“The dancing-girl?” Trevor stared at her. “What dancing-girl? I don’t remember one.”
“You do not, perhaps, know very much about this play,” suggested Tilli smoothly.
“I know quite enough to be sure that it’s a mistake to produce it. It won’t even be a vulgar success.”
“Of that I do not suppose that you are a very good judge.”
“It hasn’t the vigour or the pace to attract the attention of the average playgoer, however gorgeously you get it up. And as a work of art it simply doesn’t exist. It would be fatal for William’s future reputation to call attention to this piece of work; everybody says so. It’s so very bad. And we all have great hopes of William, you know. Even I have hopes of him, though goodness knows I’ve called him a fool often enough. It’s not so much anything that he’s done, but something in him. Something that he is. You must know what I mean. One can’t put one’s finger on it, and it may never solidify into any concrete expression. It hasn’t yet. But some day it may; he’s always writing. Some of that personal magic that he has, that they both have, must some day bear fruit, one would have thought. I don’t know.”
“I am surprised,” said Tilli slowly, “that you should think so well of him. You do not often speak well of him.”
“I know. He annoys me. He always has. I’ve always felt an insane desire to score off him, yet it’s so easy to do that I’m ashamed of myself.” Trevor was still in the candid mood produced by the liver-fluke. “But in a way you can never quite score off him, because he never minds. He’s an extraordinary fellow.”
“I think,” said Tilli, “that sometimes you succeed very well.”
She had heard rumours of the Monk’s Hall plan and had divined at once the self-interest which lay behind Trevor’s share in it.
“Of course his work, so far, has been negligible,” said Trevor, without listening to her. “The best that can be said of this play is that the faults are on a grand scale. It takes a certain magnificence to write as badly as that. His critical faculties don’t seem to be developed at all.”
“Eugene Baxter thinks well of this play.”
“Baxter!”
“He is a man of great experience, Trevor. Of more experience than you, perhaps. He has produced …”
“Oh, I know he’s a successful producer. And I can’t think why, for I really don’t believe he has a mind of any sort. But I suppose that success was in his stars; it is a gift which people seem to have, quite apart from any special capacity. Probably he’d have done equally well in any profession. Anyhow, he doesn’t know a good play from a bad one.”
“He has also said that it is immature. It has been improved. They have altered it together.”
“You may take it from me that all Baxter can do is to destroy any sort of merit that the piece has got. I shudder to think what it’ll be like when he’s had a turn at it. No, I can’t allow it. And all William’s friends agree with me.”
“I think you are all jealous,” said Tilli calmly. “Because you cannot get your plays taken by any manager at all.”
“Nor would William, if his name was Smith, and he hadn’t got more money than is good for him. Don’t tell me that Baxter is taking much risk over this.”
“I know nothing of all that.”
“Frankly, you know, you’re making use of William for your own ends. And you’re behaving very badly.”
“You also.”
“I?”
“You have persuaded him to buy a house, that you might live in it.”
“I did nothing of the sort. He made up his mind without any persuasion from me.”
“But you will profit by it.”
“In a way. But I shan’t be the only one. Other people will live there too. It’s to be a sort of Settlement, you know.”
“I have told you,” said Tilli, smiling, “that all his friends will make use of him. I am no worse than you.”
“He will pay the initial expenses, but you needn’t think that we shall all continue to live on him indefinitely. We shall contribute; it’s to be communal. Each pays 60 per cent. of his earnings into the common stock. In these days, when the young artist can’t live at the expense of any one patron …”
“Bah! The people who make money will not come. Or, if they do, they will not stay. Tell me something more easy to believe. No, I do not think I am very much worse than you, Trevor. I make him produce a play because I wish to work, and you make him buy a house because you do not wish to work.”
“It won’t injure his reputation to start this Settlement. Not as your play will injure him.”
“But it is a mad idea. Admit that it is a mad idea.”
“It’s an experiment. Worth trying.”
“Also the play is an experiment.”
“I’m thinking of the cause of literature.”
“And I,” said Tilli, “am thinking of myself.”
Trevor laughed.
“Poor William!” he said.
Tilli laughed too, and looked at him more kindly. Up to a point she sympathised with him, for really it seemed hard that so clever and personable a young man should have to see his rightful inheritance in the hands of a much inferior cousin. She liked William well enough, but she found that a little of him went a long way. He had none of the qualities which she truly admired, and his want of commonsense drove her at times almost to distraction. In her heart she could not blame Trevor for wanting to get Monk’s Hall back, especially as the element of intrigue in the affair diverted her.
“In the end,” she stated, “you will do him more harm than I. You will spend his money. That is serious.”
“Well? He’s got more than he can get through.”
“This poor William! I find him so agreeable.”
“Do you, Tilli? More agreeable than I am?”
“Perhaps He is more amiable.”
“Very amiable,” agreed Trevor, “up to a point. But he’s a devil when he loses his temper.”
“That intrigues me. He does, then, lose his temper?”
“Insanely. But it’s soon over. He’s never the same two minutes. He’s like a cloud that changes its shape while you look at it. Belongs to air rather than earth. They both do.”
“Both?”
“He and his sister.”
“Ah, yes. He often speaks of her. I have never met a man so much occupied with his sister.”
“It’s a mercy for him that he is. He’d be always getting into shocking scrapes if he wasn’t.”
“With women? You surprise me.”
“Anybody could make a fool of him. He’s always ready to worship any woman with the faintest pretensions to beauty.”
“He has no mistress, then?”
“None that I know of.”
Tilli did not believe him. For though she had found William a little obtuse, she had no reason to suppose that he was sexless.
“He is not in any way abnormal?” she asked thoughtfully. “His father …”
Whereupon they disinterred the Crowne case, very cosily, for half an hour. And they were still at it when new visitors arrived, a distraught and rebellious William and a blandly obstinate Baxter, looking very much as Faust and Mephistopheles must have looked in their sinister wanderings through the town. It seemed that William had struck afresh against this infernal companionship and Baxter had brought him to Tilli for treatment.
Trevor made no effort to go. He was too much interested. He determined to stay where he was, unless he was positively thrown out. Making himself as unobtrusive as possible, he watched how she went to work with them.
The small room seemed to be full of Baxter; he existed there so very copiously that the life was almost crushed out of the other three. He produced a sensation of deadness; he talked a great deal, but no quickening idea was ever to be discerned in any of his words. He was like a huge, talkative carcase. And the effect of so much flesh and so little spirit was really appalling because it was not natural, since the very obese are usually supplied with a vitality in proportion to their girth.
He was explaining, patiently, the many advantages of making the play a little shorter, and Tilli supported him.
“I want to have you cut this Temple scene, Mr. Crowne. It’s not dramatic the way you’ve got it. It won’t help on the story at all. You mayn’t just see how it is, and I can’t explain it to you But the whole play loses grip. And personally, I’d like to have you cut it right out.”
“I won’t cut a word of it,” cried William. “It’s the crucial scene of the whole play It’s the point that I’ve been working up to from the very beginning. It’s …”
“Personally I’d like to cut it right out,” went on Baxter, relentlessly. “But I know you have quite a little weakness for that scene, Mr. Crowne. So I won’t say cut it altogether. But it’s too long, anyway.”
“It is a very beautiful scene,” observed Tilli.
“Why, yes!” cried Baxter. “You mustn’t get thinking I don’t appreciate that scene. I do. It certainly is a piece of delicate poetic phantasy. And it creates atmosphere. Even reading it you get atmosphere. You see this temple and this old priest, and it gives you the East. I’ve thought a lot about that scene, and the way it appears to me, the value of it is atmosphere. I had an idea—I don’t know what you’ll think of it, Tilli; I’d like to have you give an opinion. It’s just an idea, remember, and I wouldn’t press it on you, Mr. Crowne, but couldn’t we have these temple bells ringing all the time this scene is going on? It would all help to create atmosphere, if you get me …”
“Perfectly horrible idea!” William was heard to mutter.
“But it must be short, if it’s to give any sort of effect. Because, as a matter of fact, it’s just a little bit late in the play to nave in a scene at all which only creates atmosphere …”
“Damn you, it isn’t intended to create atmosphere!”
“And, mind you, I’m not in any way talking against the value of atmosphere. It’s necessary in all real dramma. It was a perfectly right instinct of yours to put it in. But a piece of delicate, poetic phantasy ought to be short….”
“It’s not a piece of delicate, poetic phantasy,” stated William furiously.
Baxter looked at Tilli, as if to ask what else he was expected to say. He had never, in the whole of his life, met a more unreasonable young man. Tilli asked if some other scene could not be shortened.
“It was short enough,” growled William, “before I wrote in that bazaar scene at the beginning. You can cut out that if you like. Or the tiger-hunt. That has nothing to do with the story really. I just wrote it in for fun, and because I wanted to hold the action up a little before the decisive scene in the temple.”
“And you were quite right, Mr. Crowne. Your instinct guided you right there. That scene creates suspense, and we want to create suspense. We want to have every man, and (what’s more) every woman, in that audience sitting up and wondering what in hell’s going to happen next. Besides, I’ve engaged the tigers.”
William looked about him with a glassy eye. These references to his instinct quite confounded him. Baxter had a way of so describing all his most cherished ideas, the fruit of severest mental toil. It was as though only producers could create atmosphere or suspense on purpose, the work of the playwright being a mere happy accident. For experience was Baxter’s stronghold. He had, after all, produced many successful revues, and William had only written one tragedy in blank verse.
But Tilli perceived that the victim’s patience was wearing thin, and she began, adroitly, to take his part. She knew better than Baxter, how likely it still was that the whole thing might fall through.
“Must it be cut?” she asked. “If you begin at eight …”
“My dear Tilli!” Baxter was on his own ground now. “That’s not possible. When you’ve been on this job as long as I have, you’ll know it’s not possible. You can’t expect a West End audience to be in the theatre by eight o’clock. There’s no sort of use expecting it …”
“Couldn’t they eat less?” demanded Trevor suddenly.
Baxter laughed immoderately at this diverting suggestion. The experience of a lifetime had taught him that a West End audience will not be hurried over its dinner. Trevor began to feel uncomfortable, as though he was at William’s funeral. He took his departure, and as Tilli came with him down the little flight of stairs to let him out, he said to her:
“Your play will come to grief. He’ll never stay the course. Baxter talking about poetic phantasy has a very hypnotic effect, but William’s beginning to come round.”
“He does not like trouble,” said Tilli sagely. “Soon it will be less trouble for him to go on than to give it up. When he is quite disgusted, he will be more reasonable. In the end he will allow Eugene to manage everything.”
“I daresay. The man’s stupidity is overpowering. It’s crushing. Well! I’ve said what I could. I wash my hands of it. Don’t blame me if it’s a gigantic failure.”
“Nobody will blame you, Trevor. You have been very noble. You have even taken risks for William.”
“Risks?”
“You have so bravely come here.”
Her black eyes mocked him, and she added:
“I shall not, I suppose, see you again?”
“Not just yet,” he admitted. “I have to go a good deal, just now, to the Natural History Museum.”
“Why must you go there?”
“To study Nature.”
“C’est gentil. I also, I adore Nature.”
He paused in the doorway, irresolute, uncertain before her mockery. Baxter’s voice, continuous as the babbling brook, came drifting down the stairs.
“You want to have every man and woman in that audience go home saying …”
Very swiftly Trevor caught his charmer round her slim waist and kissed the tip of her nose.
“That’ll teach her!” he thought, as he ran out into the mews.
Philip had almost persuaded himself into a belief that Emily’s invitation was not serious. She could not really want to see him in London; she had spoken on an impulse which was now regretted, if not forgotten, and it would be tactless of him to remind her. It appeared that “The Seven Dawns” was to be produced during the very week of the Flower Show, and she would be far too busy, at such a time, for an old, dull friend like himself. Unless she wrote, repeating the invitation, he would steal back to the country with Bobbie, and he would read about William’s play next morning in the newspapers.
But he wanted, desperately, to see her, and his decision was not reached without many waverings. Several letters to Emily were begun. Some of them, written in a lightly bantering tone, said nothing at all of the proposed visit, their object being to provoke an answer in which she should again take the first move. Others were grave and fatherly, and entreated her to say honestly if he was really wanted. But in the end he came to the conclusion that it would be better not to write at all Everything should be left to her. And as the weeks went by without a message, he discovered that he had been a blockhead
Not until the eve of the show, when all his arrangements were completed, did the fatal postcard arrive.
“Mattie says dinner at seven, so come any time before then. Of course you’ll stay the night. And William says to wear a white tie, because we shall be in the stalls. I’m reading Hudibras. What is it all about?”
Philip knew two tunes; the first was “Pretty Polly Oliver,” and he always whistled it when he was very happy. The other, “Loath to Depart,” beset him when he was sad. He had given his household a good dose of it during the past weeks. But now, for nearly twenty-four hours, the halls and staircases of Ratchet re-echoed to the adventures of the pretty little drummer-boy. A telegram was sent to Edwardes Square and the housekeeper was instructed to pack a suit-case full of white ties. Bobbie was told that he would have to dine alone.
At a quarter-past six on the following evening, Philip knocked at Emily’s blue front door It was opened immediately by William, ready dressed for the evening, and in such a state of nervous alarm that he hardly knew what he said.
“I’m afraid I must go! How do you do, Philip? So glad you can come. Emily’s there. I have to go. I’m having dinner with Baxter. You’re going to take Emily. I’m afraid I can’t come with you. I must go.”
“It’s quite early yet,” said Philip soothingly.
They stood in the hall, which smelt of fields and not like anything in London.
“The thing begins at 8.15,” jabbered William. “Really, I ought to go. I’m having dinner with Baxter and Mrs. Van Tuyl. I’m afraid she’ll be terribly nervous. Some people find these things very upsetting, you know. But I’ve got her some flowers. We bought some flowers for her this afternoon. Did you get Emmie’s postcard? I said you’d better wear a white tie. We’ve got a party afterwards. But it doesn’t matter, you know. You could quite easily wear a black one if you liked. I don’t think these things matter very much, myself. I feel it’s rather a pity to go too much by what people think. At least, I’d like to be able to think that. But Emmie’s got a new dress. She looks very nice. You’re to go with her.”
Here Mattie appeared and took Philip’s suit-case.
“You’ll want to dress at once, sir,” she told him. “There’s not any too much time. Why didn’t you show Mr. Luttrell his room, Mr. William, instead of standing talking there?”
“I have to go,” expostulated William. “Where’s Emmie? She ought to be looking after Philip.”
“She’s dressing herself. You run along and say good-bye to her, and I’ll look after Mr. Luttrell. This way, sir.”
She took Philip up to the spare room, which was the most adult room in the house, because the twins never scattered their little things over it. And kneeling down beside the suit-case, she began to unpack it for him. He asked after her lumbago.
“Oh, Mr. Luttrell, I don’t hardly have it now the warm weather’s come. It just catches me once and again. Miss Emily, she got me some wonderful stuff for it.”
“How is she, Mattie?”
“She’s very well, sir. And looking as lovely as … as …”
“As usual?”
“Well, now, that’s asking! In a way she is, and in a way she isn’t. She’s very nervous. But she’s got this new dress, and she looks like a little queen in it.”
“I suppose, even with Emily, a dress makes a difference.”
“She’s the same whatever she wears. Always was. Such a lovely little girl she used to be! And William! Such beautiful children! People used to turn round and stare in Kensington Gardens, when I took them out in their pram. And I used to feel so proud. Everyone staring at my children. I always call them my children. I had them, you see, from the month. And now they call Miss Emily the most beautiful woman in London.”
“Who calls her that?”
“The papers, sir. I have a bit that I cut out and kept that said: ‘Among the early arrivals was Miss Emily Crowne, in silver lammy. Miss Crowne is the daughter of Norman Crowne, the poet, and is said to be the most beautiful woman in London.’”
“How does she like that sort of thing?”
“Oh, I didn’t show it to her. It’s beneath her. She’d scorn the impidence of it. You’ll excuse me telling you all this, sir. I wouldn’t, only you,—you’ve known them for so long and prepared Miss Emily for confirmation, and give her that lovely prayer-book, it seems like speaking to one of the family. You’ll ring, sir, if you want anything?”
She hurried off upstairs to Emily’s room at the top of the house, where William was taking a final, distraught farewell of his sister. The new dress, of gold tissue all brocaded with jewels, filled the room with its glitter. Emily wore it nobly, like a robe of state.
“I’m very beautiful,” she said placidly, as she glanced over her shoulder in the glass.
“Humph!” said William. “You keep your cloak on, or nobody will look at my play. Shan’t you wear earrings?”
“Mattie! Shall I wear ear-rings?”
“No, my lamb. Your ears is so lovely without.”
“I must go,” said William for the hundredth time. “Is my tie straight? Oh, Mattie! Where’s my hat?”
“I’ve put it in the hall for you. Have you a handkerchief? Clean?”
“Three. Good-bye, Emmie. I’ll come round afterwards and fetch you. Wait in the foyer.”
He kissed Emily and Mattie, and rushed downstairs. From the hall a loud bawling was heard.
“Mattie! Mattie! Where did you say my hat was?”
“On the chest!” called Mattie over the banisters. “Right under your nose.”
“Here? Oh, thanks! I must go!”
He crushed his hat on to the back of his head and burst out of the house. The blue door banged behind him.
Dinner was rather a mournful little meal, for Philip and Emily had not very much to say to each other. He looked at her a good deal, and she smiled whenever she caught his eye, but they were both oppressed by the importance of the occasion, and Emily exclaimed at last:
“Oh, dear! I’m being very bad company You must forgive me.”
“You’re excited, and no wonder.”
“I wish I wasn’t so … nervous.”
“That’s natural.”
“It’s been so hard to hide from William. I’ve been in dreadfully low spirits all day. Silly of me.”
“You don’t really approve of this play, do you?”
“I don’t like the way he’s altered it. No, and I never did like it. But I’m sure he’s right, and one ought to see it acted to judge. I’ve never been to any of the rehearsals, so I’ve quite an open mind about it.”
And in the car she turned to him suddenly and took his hand, exclaiming;
“Oh dear!”
He realised, for the first time, that an element of courage had gone to make the twins’ success in life. Somehow he had always thought of them simply as children of good fortune, beautiful, rich, prosperous, accepting their luck serenely, as a matter of course. But now he perceived their fundamental isolation: they shared a unique misfortune which cut them off for ever from the rest of mankind. They were shockingly vulnerable. The boldness of their attack upon the world had been born, in some degree, of a spirit of despair. Emily’s radiance was a torch, deliberately brandished, not so much in defiance of external dangers as against some half-realised, inward doubt.
“I don’t believe,” she murmured, looking out of the window, “that it is at all a good play. But I shan’t say so. Is that dishonest, do you think?”
“Not always. Won’t you say it to William?”
“Oh, yes. To him I shall. In a day or two, when it’s all calmed down. But to other people, you know, we always pretend that everything we do is quite right. It makes us feel safer.”
“Families ought to back each other up.”
“Yes. And then, you see, we are such a very small family. We’ve only got ourselves. Look! Just look at that awfully thin dog!”
It was with a new comprehension that he watched her sweep into the theatre. In the face of the world, she made the usual sensation. Everybody looked at her and everybody knew that she had come. But as they crowded round her he thought for a moment of some fine, defenceless creature at bay among wild beasts. He found himself under the wing of Trevor, who was being very ubiquitous and important, and managing to look as though he must have written “The Seven Dawns,” and produced it, and be going forthwith to write all the criticism thereon. He had been talking successfully to seven people at once in the vestibule, but he managed to detach himself in time to become associated with Emily’s entrance into the stalls.
“I wish,” he murmured into Philip’s ear, “that it were bedtime and all well over.”
“Tell me who everybody is,” whispered Philip.
Trevor had some satisfaction in pointing out his acquaintances. He felt that he had never liked Philip so well.
“I’m glad you’ve come with Emily,” he said. “I’m sorry for her.”
“So am I.”
This annoyed Trevor, who felt that such sensibility was out of place in a dullard like Philip. At the moment his cousin appeared to be in small need of compassion, as she walked down the gangway, giving little bits of herself to everyone in her orbit.
“She looks quite pleased with herself,” he said quickly.
Just then the lights went down, and they sought their places. An orchestra struck up a tune, feverish with a heavy languor, full of queer chromatic cadences, the throbbing of tom-toms and the tinkle of little bells. Philip, as he stowed his hat under the seat, was reminded of pale hands like lotus-buds and the nightingales in Damascus. He was too unsophisticated to know why he thought this, but the association was immediately established in his mind.
“This isn’t …” he whispered to Emily.
“No, it’s not,” she replied. “But it’s dreadfully like, isn’t it?”
She drooped a little and added:
“It’s a pity, I think, to have music at all.”
The curtain went up on the gorgeousness of a city bazaar in Northern India. Priests, beggars, Brahmins and veiled women jostled one another. A weaver wove a real carpet in the foreground, and a small boy sold melons.
Solitary amid the throng, the young disguised prince watched and mused over the human tide, its uneasy ebb and flow, its small drama, its nothingness. Deaf to the world-wise counsels of his faithful friend, he cried out that all was vanity. A soldier, statesman, scholar, husband and father he had played his part, but the secret of existence was hidden from him. He questioned one and another, in the throng, and heard many words of folly, but met with nobody wiser than himself.
A company of hill-women, sold for their beauty into the courts of southern Rajahs, were carried through the crowd in litters. And, breaking loose from one of these, a sinuous, lovely creature flung herself without warning at the feet of the disguised prince, hailing him as her deliverer and beseeching him to set her free. He raised the woman and questioned her; she told him of the hill-country whence she had come.
Tilli’s voice was beautiful when she talked of the mountains. Her features, already Mongolian, seemed to have taken on a Tartar look: she belonged to China rather than to India. Having won the price of her freedom, she fell into the dust at the feet of the young man, and the extravagance of William’s blank verse was drowned in the clamour of a nautch.
Philip had been thankful that the lights would remain down between the scenes, for he felt that the obscurity might be a kindly shield for his companion. But in the end he was sorry, for a group of people with loud voices, who had come in late, were sitting in the row immediately behind. It was obvious that they did not, in the darkness, perceive any reason for taking care.
“Nearly as bad as one expected,” said a voice, emerging from the faint applause at the fall of the first curtain. “What a waste!”
“Of promising talent?”
“Of expensive production. All you can say is that it isn’t as good as a pantomime. And the literary pretentiousness of it makes one feel a little sick.”
Emily, turning her head to Philip in the gloom, nodded slightly, as though she was forced to agree.
“I said you wouldn’t like it,” a woman behind them was crying. “But you would come.”
“I had to come,” said the first voice, in tones of some pride. “I’ve a record to keep up. I always attend the Crowne shows. I didn’t miss a day of the trial.”
“That dates you!”
And somebody else said warningly:
“Ssh! You never know …”
“Only twenty years ago. Less.” The voice was a little huffy. “It was more amusing than this.”
“You knew him quite well, didn’t you, Mr. Saule?”
“Who? Crowne? Oh, intimately, poor fellow. I used to dine with him, on an average, once a week at one time. Of course, you don’t remember it, my dear Betty. You were in your cradle.”
“Trials nowadays aren’t half so interesting.”
“I suppose all his friends went?”
“Everybody went. I assure you, the audience at that trial was a very distinguished audience indeed. And it would be again, if this young Crowne here were to …”
“I think that’s disgusting.”
“Not at all, my dear child. You’d go yourself if …”
“I don’t think I would. He dances divinely. And, after all, his father’s trial was so peculiar …”
At this point they really did drop their voices, as they went over, in memory, the details of the last Crowne show. And Emily said to Philip that the carpet-weaver should not have sat so near the front of the stage. One watched him instead of listening to the prince. Her calmness showed her to be not unpractised in such a situation Perhaps she was quite used to it.
The short interval came to an end, and the curtain rose again, but Philip had lost all interest in the piece. His thoughts were for the girl who sat so very still beside him. He was dreading for her the long interval between the acts when she would have to face the light. On the stage he was conscious of an uninterrupted, vulgar brilliance of production. There were tiger-hunts, and temples with silver bells, and sunsets in the Himalayas. A great deal, meanwhile, was said. The young prince, after several very long speeches, decided to become a hermit. His musings were haunted by the woman from the hills, who pursued him everywhere like a bright gadfly. At length she bathed in the marble tank of a palace garden, under a canopy of burning stars. The audience began to get excited, and the prince, from being an inveterate looker-on, was roused into something like an active frame of mind. He retired with the lady into a pavilion hung with cloth of gold. Emerging shortly afterwards, he stated that he was weary of the flesh. And the curtain fell on the first act.
There was some little applause, and Philip wished that it might last longer. He observed, however, that Emily was going to carry it all off with a high hand. She had grown rather pale, but her eyes were very bright. She stood up, gathering her cloak about her, and, turning round, she studied gravely the people in the row behind her. An instant’s petrified silence showed that she had been recognised, and then he heard sounds of a stampede. He too, turned round, to behold the party, scurrying off to smoke a cigarette outside, and scattering a few panic-stricken nods and smiles in Emily’s direction as they went. The last to escape were a pretty girl and an old-young man of the type that is born a little past middle age. Emily bowed to him and said: “How do you do, Mr. Saule?”
“Miss Crowne! How brave of you to come! We thought you’d be pacing the Embankment with William. Where is he?”
“Behind, somewhere.”
“Ah, well, no doubt we shall see him before the end of the evening. A most remarkable performance …”
He fled, and his pretty companion added, as she followed:
“My complaint is that so little of your brother is left in it. That seems such a pity.”
“That’s Betty Beamish,” said Emily to Philip. “William is a little in love with her. She’s very pretty, don’t you think?” She left him and went to scatter pale vivacity among another group of vehement friends. Philip’s heart bled for her. He kept by Trevor, who began at once:
“Isn’t it awful? And yet, you know, in a way, it’s quite extraordinary how impressive the little bits of William are. Of course, it’s only grand language, and he uses it much too recklessly, but now and then, for a line or two, it’s magnificent. I’ve never felt quite so certain that William, for all his sins, is a poet. Once he gets going …”
“But how could he ever have allowed such a thing to be produced?” broke in Philip. “I should have thought that he must have seen, right at the very start, how unsuitable …”
“Baxter and Tilli did it between them. They’re both determined creatures, and William’s got no sense of humour. Nor has he any guts. He does what he’s told rather than fight. What does Emily think of it all?”
“I don’t think she’s altogether happy,” said Philip cautiously.
“She’s always had the most common sense of the two. But William is bound to come off badly in an affair like this, because he has no vulgarity. If you are to cope successfully with vulgar people, you must have a pinch of it yourself.”
“Then he oughtn’t to lead this sort of life.”
“You’re right. He oughtn’t. He’d much better join us down at Monk’s Hall. We’d never let him in for this sort of thing.”
The interval was cruelly long, but it came to an end at last, and Philip was once more beside Emily in the darkness. They were listening to that temple scene which William had refused to cut. It stood out bleakly from the rest of the play, free, for a few minutes, of the luxurious trappings provided by Baxter. Philip became almost interested. It seemed to him that the rest of the piece had a dignity and a sort of sedate dullness, distinct from the earlier passages. The hill-woman, scorned by the prince, flung herself from a high precipice, and they all got on very comfortably without her. Their friends in the row behind spoke with guarded criticism, in the short intervals, but in a manner which need hurt no feelings. Emily was quite silent.
The play came to an end before a little mountain shrine. The prince, in the guise of a holy man, sat there in meditation, withdrawn at last from the stream of life, while before him, on the steps of his shrine, two wayfarers squabbled endlessly over the possession of an earthenware pot. They came to blows and one slew the other. The curtain fell on the splendours of a mountain sunrise, the shrine, the saint, and the dead man. Under cover of the clapping, Emily turned to Philip and said hurriedly:
“Let’s get away from this … quickly!”
He recognised some urgency in her tone, and knew that she could bear it no more. Luck, however, was against them, and they could not immediately get away. Philip groped for his hat; his coat was stuck between two seats. They were in the middle of the row, and their departure was blocked. While they were fighting their way out, the curtain went up once or twice upon a bowing prince. Some people began to shout for William. The last glimpse they had, as they left the theatre, was of Baxter dragging on a white-faced, ashamed young man to face these plaudits.
“Didn’t he tell you to wait for him?” asked Philip in the foyer.
“Oh, I can’t … not now! I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anybody Take me away. I want to go home.”
He found the car and put her into it, and then he despatched a messenger to William, saying that Emily was very tired and had gone home. It was all that he could do for the helpless pair.
He drove back with Emily, through streets which had changed from sunset to blue night in the time that they had been in the theatre.
Emily spoke when they were nearly home
“He was quite right,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Saule.”
“When he said that it … wasn’t very good?”
“Oh, no! Anyone might say that. But when he said that … that all the same people would be there if William … if William … Oh, Philip! So many of them are friends who …”
“My dearest child,” babbled Philip, “you mustn’t take this sort of thing too hard. Everybody gets a shock, at one time or another, over the callousness of human nature. Some people become obsessed with it. They let themselves forget that there is such a thing as real kindness and sympathy …”
“I looked at their faces in the interval. I couldn’t help it. I seemed to see, suddenly, how cruel they could look. Oh, Philip, I’m so frightened of people, really. Just think what it must have been for my father! To be there, day after day, and see his friends … his friends! Oh, I don’t want to see any single one of them ever again.”
“Don’t be foolish. Your father had real friends, like any other man. I know he had. And they suffered with him. They didn’t go to gape at him in his misery. But not all agreeable companions are friends in that sense. Only an imbecile or an infant would expect it.”
“Oh, I know. I know. But I think that we … William and I … have no real friends at all. Except, perhaps, you, Philip. Everybody draws away from us. They won’t forget … they don’t want to forget …”
“Here we are. Come in, my dear, and let Mattie put you to bed. Try to realise that William, both as a man and a poet, will have to come out and hold his own in a very hard world. It’s no worse for him than for anybody else.”
“Oh, yes, it is. It’s unbearable. I … can’t stand it any longer. We’d much better both jump into the river and give them another Crowne show We’ve tried … it’s no use …”
“Get out, Emily. Don’t keep Fordyce up late. There’s no reason why he should be kept out of his bed because you are feeling discouraged about things.”
“I suppose there isn’t.”
She got out of the car and suffered him to lead her up to the drawing-room. Then she broke out again:
“If only anything could ever be over! But it’s all still going on. We are part of it. Nothing is ever done with as long as it goes on in people’s minds.”
Philip stood by the window and looked away from her, out into the clean green twilight of the square. A few lamps twinkled among the trees and in a distant house a piano and violin were playing the Frühlings Sonata, a clear, gay stream of melody flowing out into the night. Its limpid melancholy reminded him of Emily when she was a little girl. The undercurrent of pathos had been there, always.
“My dear,” he said, “I wish that I could help you.”
“Nothing … nobody can help us.”
“Ever since you were quite small I’ve been dreading a moment like this for you. A moment when you might feel that it was all too hard.”
“A moment! It’s all my life. I can never get away from it. We neither of us can. We’ve tried to live as if it just … wasn’t so … but there’s no end to it.”
Philip could see no end to it either. The long martyrdom, begun for Crowne, was by no means over yet.
“I can’t … go on with this life. I haven’t any more courage. I won’t bear it any more.”
“You’ve got William to consider, besides yourself. He has the same trouble to bear. And you can help him.”
“No, I can’t. I make it worse for him. We ought never to have tried living together. We aren’t any protection to each other. We’re only more of a target.”
“But you wouldn’t be happy apart.”
“Could any wretchedness be worse than this? And we couldn’t be really apart, Philip. Not if the whole distance of the world was between us. Distance is only an imaginary thing. I used to feel that when he was away in the war.”
“Then you really want to run away from this?”
“I must get away.”
“Where to?”
“Ah, that …”
“Your safety will have to be in yourself. No place will do it for you.”
“You mean I must get away … to being another person?”
“It’s not as hard as you might suppose, my dear. Time does it for all of us.”
“Was there ever a time … did you ever say, ‘I can’t bear it. I can’t go on any more’?”
“I have said it.”
“But you went on?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I grew tougher. You’ll have to.”
“I don’t want to change. I don’t want to be different. I want to stay the same and have outside things different.”
“Baby!”
“If I can’t live in this world on my own terms, I’d rather not live in it at all.”
“It’s a choice, and we all have to make it.”
“Whether we’ll go on living or …”
She leant past him, out over the street, brushing his arm with the soft folds of her cloak. The faint, limpid stream of music was still flowing out into the darkness.
“They’re playing very well in that house,” she said.
Philip took her hand and pulled her back into the room.
“My heart’s love! If there was anything … anything in the world that I could do for you …”
“Would you really do anything, Philip? Really?”
“You know I would.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you so much.”
“I know.” She searched his face intently. “I know. Then will you marry me?”
“Emily!”
He fell away from her aghast.
“Are you … are you serious?”
“Most serious. If I married you … I … I would be another person, wouldn’t I? I’d be your wife; and I’d go away from here, to Ratchet. A place I know. All safe and settled.”
“Marriage isn’t very safe, as far as I know. When did this idea occur to you?”
“Just this minute.”
“Then you should think it over. You should consider the drawbacks. I’m much too old for you. And are you sure that there is no one …”
“No, indeed. I’m sure I shall never be in love with anyone, I’ve thought that for a long time.”
“At your age that’s a highly dangerous conclusion.”
“And if I married you there’d be one person happy, anyway.”
“Who?”
“Why, you. You want to marry me, don’t you?”
“No!”
He had told the truth before he could stop himself. It burst out of him in a single, disastrous ejaculation, and he saw her flinch away from it.
“But if you love me …” she stammered. “If you love me …”
“You don’t love me, Emily.”
“But that isn’t the reason why you don’t … you don’t”
As he had begun, he had better go on. He tried to explain:
“It’s because I love you so much. Because you are, to me, like a flame. Like poetry. That feeling has nothing to do with marriage. I’m too old to deceive myself. If I was a younger man, the risks …”
“I see. I understand. I’m so sorry, dear Philip. I wouldn’t for the world have involved you in such an embarrassing discussion if I’d understood. I … I know it’s a great honour that you feel like that about me. Please believe that I’m not hurt. And we’ll forget all about this. We won’t ever speak of it again. I was stupid. Do let’s forget it. Good-night.”
She spoke dizzily; her humiliation was so terrible that her whole body ached with it. But she managed a difficult little smile as she took his hand again.
“Good-night, dear Philip. And please don’t let this worry you. It’s nice that we can be such friends as to talk things over in this way without having to be insincere. It’s a great comfort. It has been a great comfort to me—having a friend like you. God bless you.”
But he knew that she had needed other friendship than that. He remembered, with bitter self-reproach, his own unmeaning offer of help. He had failed her. He cried after her, like a man in danger:
“Emily! Oh, Emily! Help me.”
“Help you? How?”
She turned back.
“I’ve been a fool all my life. I was a fool not to ask you to marry me a long time ago. You’ve heard … I’ve just explained to you why I didn’t. There’s a part of me that wants to marry you very much. And now I’m losing you.”
“Oh, no, no! I quite understand … you were quite right.”
“I’ve been such a stick-in-the-mud all my life. All these doubts and difficulties! They’ve stood between me and happiness. And they will again unless you’ll give me a chance. You must forget what I said, and marry me. You must …”
“You just say this not to hurt my feelings. I’ve told you. They’re not hurt. I understand …”
“No, you don’t. At least, only part of it. You don’t understand all of it. I’ve never had my life. I never shall unless you can manage to see what I mean. I’ve got so used to arguing with myself instead of doing things. It’s been the curse of my life. Whenever I’ve wanted anything, I’ve always begun by cataloguing the reasons against trying to get it. Because I’m afraid of getting what I want.”
He took a little time to convince her, but for the moment he really was so very anxious to marry her that she began at last to believe him. She yielded before the evidences of his distress, and when they parted for the night they were plighted lovers. Too much distraught to sleep, he went out and walked round Edwardes Square. Dire anguish pursued him, but extravagant elation drew him on. He had won a wife and he was very proud. He was determined to be happy. But never again, in any spring, would he behold this lost Emily, this airy virgin, running lightly over the flowers and the grass.
“I am a fool. I have deserved it all,” said Tilli to herself.
And she mopped her eyes on a little lace handkerchief, the only present which she had ever got out of Eugene Baxter.
It was not usually her way to cry in private, but it was a wet Sunday evening, and there was nothing else to do. A conversation on the telephone with Baxter had been the chief event of the day, and this had been enough to dash the gayest spirits. It had given the death-blow to her hopes.
“The Seven Dawns” had run for a week, and was an absolute failure. Baxter took it all with tolerable cheerfulness: he adopted a tone of rueful but good-natured martyrdom, and said to Tilli, with a shake of the head, that the public did not seem to appreciate delicate poetic phantasy as much as it ought. But she understood that a flat in a mews must be her lot for life, for all that this play would ever do to get her out of it.
It seemed to her that during this week the whole world had deserted her. Nobody came to see her, not even William, and she supposed that he must be blaming her for the whole affair. Very bitterly did she regret her own obstinacy in disregarding Trevor’s warnings. He had been right, and she should have listened to him.
Now, in the long, chilly English dusk, she sat and sobbed for Trevor. At the end of the mews a church bell tolled, in a perfunctory monotone, a dirge over her hopes, and the footsteps of the late worshippers went pattering through the rain. If it had been a Catholic church she would have run out and prayed; a little religion would have done her a lot of good. But she knew better than to seek consolation at a Protestant Evensong. So she cowered in the obscurity, among the scarlet cushions of her divan, and lamented the bad luck which seemed, through life, to have pursued her.
Tilli’s past had been discouraging. She had never been a child; she was born grown-up. Her first recollections were of work, devastating, unsparing effort in a ballet school at Prague. Her mother took her there in the morning, and brought her home in the evening, and whipped her if she had been lazy. There had been, of course, occasional holidays when, with red bows on her black hair, she drove out with her mother into the country. But even in those days the business of gain and bargain was begun, and she learnt that an engaging display of pretty ways would bring in a harvest of sweets and trinkets from her mother’s cavaliers. She was a useful little messenger, and she knew how to hold her tongue; by nature she understood the elements of intrigue.
At fourteen she had been sent to a convent to finish her education, and of that epoch she could remember little, save that it had been acutely boring. She was enchanted when a marriage was arranged for her some three years later, though at the time she was puzzled to know how it was that her mother had contrived to make up so good a match. Van Tuyl was rich and well-born, advantages which, in the eyes of both mother and daughter, outbalanced the fact that he was an elderly rake. He had seen Tilli for a few minutes when she was home from her convent on a holiday, and from that moment he had taken an unceasing interest in the child. But she could never make out at what point he had been driven to offer marriage. She only knew that he was a man, and that from men must come all the good things which are most to be desired on this earth. They were to be her eternal opponents, and success, for her, must lie in giving as little and getting as much as possible in the conflict of sex.
Pondering upon all the squalid woe of her married life, she made a little grimace of disgust. For Van Tuyl had done worse things than throw her out of a window; he was vicious, brutal, and very mean. The bare necessaries of life were scarcely allowed to her; when her baby was born, he would not pay for proper attendance. He shut her up in a horrible gloomy, old farmhouse which he had bought, and when she was very ill he would not send to The Hague for a good doctor, but called in the local apothecary, a dirty little man, who pulled out the kitchenmaids’ teeth for sixpence apiece. Tilli always believed that her baby’s death was due to his carelessness.
Nobody in England knew of this child that she had had. Her other wrongs were freely canvassed, and she never spared her friends any detail of Van Tuyl’s ill-treatment. But this one sorrow was a secret that she kept. As far as she had ever loved anybody, she had loved her son. Dimly, during the months before he was born, she had thought and planned for him. She had groped after the idea of a better life somehow; a conviction that there must be, for this child, finer things than she had ever known. But all that he ever got was a little grave in his father’s garden, and his memory became a fount of bitterness. Somehow, at the bottom of her heart, she blamed all the men in the world for the cruelty of one man, and she meant to pay them out.
In this mood she had first formed an intimacy with Trevor. She had meant to make use of him and to cast him aside, with Van Tuyl, with William, with Baxter, with all the others who had served her turn. But he had got the better of her, and she began to be aware of it. She could not hate him, as she hated all the rest. To begin with, she had merely admitted to herself that she might have loved him if he had been rich, and it was not until he had kissed her, mockingly, upon the doorstep, that she repented of this vain boast. Rich or poor, she wanted that young man and she could not get him out of her head for two minutes together. He was so amusing and so clever and so handsome.
For a little time, in her excitement over the play, she had succeeded in forgetting him. But now, in her disappointment, she had no protection against his dangerous image. She was beginning to regret her vow of coldness, of caution. For prudence had not, after all, served her very well in the past; and if she was not to be rich, she might at least be happy. He was an easy conquest and she had forborne, yet she would have been no worse off if she had indulged herself. Now he had deserted her, and that was because she had been so unkind.
“I am a fool,” she sobbed. “I have deserved it all.”
Darkness crept into the room. The lamps of the mews, shining in an aura of wetness, cast faint spots of light on the ceiling. The church bell stopped, and the hurrying footsteps. Tilli wept in a silence broken only by the soft whisper of rain in the gutters.
A shattering ring at the door startled her back into practical efficiency. She remembered that the maid was out, and that she was alone in the flat. Either she must ignore this ringing or answer the bell. She half decided to ignore it, but a second peal sounded so like the sort of ring Trevor used to give that she could not help going to see, A man was standing in the rain upon her doorstep and she cried out joyfully:
“But, Trevor! It is you then! Come in.”
“I’m so very sorry to disturb you, Tilli.” He made no effort to come in. “I came to find William.”
“William? He is not here. I do not expect him.”
“What a nuisance! I must get hold of him. I rang up Edwardes Square and they said he was probably here. And then I tried to get him here, but they said your line was out of order. I’ve chased over half London, looking for him.”
“Perhaps he is already on his way here. Come in and wait a little while.”
“Thanks very much,” He paused irresolute. “I’m in a violent hurry, as a matter of fact.”
Tilli looked up at him. In the light of the street lamp he was startled to see that she had been crying. Everything about her was soft and sad; the old mockery was gone. He remembered the last time that they had stood there. For he had not been to her house since the night when he had kissed her upon this very spot. It struck him that, for the first time, he beheld her pliant and off her guard.
“Ah,” she murmured, “you do not wish to come in. You are like the others. They all desert me now. But you have more right than the others, for you have warned me. You have always said that this play is a mistake. I wish now that I had listened to you.”
“Poor Tilli! Cheer up. I won’t throw it up at you.”
“I have deserved it. Trevor! Will you not come in? Will you always be angry because I would not take your advice? Even though I now say you are right?”
He felt so sorry for her that he came in. After all, she was a good creature; she bore no grudges. He hung up his wet hat in the little hall which he thought to have deserted for ever, and went with her into the quiet warmth of the sitting-room. She made him sit on the divan and sank, herself, upon a low hassock at his feet. Her humility touched him, and he spoke as kindly as he could of the play and her part in it. They were in darkness, save for a distant, faintly rosy lamp.
“It is strange,” she said, “that you, who were so angry about this play, are the first of my friends who has come to me since the failure. All the others!” She made a gesture to show how far they had run. “Even William …”
Trevor forbore to say that he himself had merely come in search of William.
He patted her shoulder.
“Have you seen William?” she asked. “Does he also hate me since this play has failed?”
“Oh, my dear! I’m sure he doesn’t But he’s been very busy. His sister is going to be married.”
“The beautiful Emily? And who is she to marry?”
“An old parson, down at Ratchet. Near where my mother lives. Very dull. Nobody can think why she’s doing it. She went off down there yesterday, and she’s going to be married in three weeks’ time.”
“That is very soon. Is it a sudden engagement?”
“Positively a thunderclap. I think she’s crazy. He’s the sort of man no right-minded girl would marry unless she had no other choice.”
“Marriages of that kind are often made very quickly,” observed Tilli drily. “Perhaps she has some very good reasons.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. It may be. The Crownes can certainly never do things like anybody else. It’ll be a devastating sort of wedding, but not without its humours. I hope I shall behave.”
“You are going down, then?”
“Yes. In fact, I’m off to-morrow.”
“To-morrow? Then your mother …”
“She’s practically sent for me. In a gathering of the clans like this, it wouldn’t do for me to be away She wouldn’t like it.”
“And after the wedding … where will you go? You will come back to London?”
“I don’t think so. I may stay down there for good … if this Monk’s Hall plan comes off.”
Her heart seemed to turn right over, and she gave a little gasp.
“I am very sorry that you are going away,” she said, in a low voice.
Trevor patted her shoulder again; he liked to feel that he would be missed.
“Poor little Tilli! There’ll be other plays …”
But she drew herself away with a cry of despair.
“Plays! What do I care for plays! It is the loneliness of my life that is insufferable. I cannot endure it any longer! What have I done that I should always be alone?” She started to her feet and turned on him. “What have I done that you should despise me? Have I asked for so much, then? Go! Go away! If you are so much afraid of me, I shall not ask you to come here any more.”
He sat rigid, his thoughts taking a great leap forward into darkness. The cosy pretence of sentiment had fallen away from them. He knew that she was his for the taking, and that in a moment all the torment and unease of the past months might be assuaged. They were quite alone in this quiet, warm place. At last he got to his feet and approached her.
“Tilli?” he whispered. “Tilli?”
And in the same low tone she answered:
“Now.”
The dream of many broken nights was coming true. She was ardent and unresisting, as he had never quite dared to imagine her. He began to tremble.
A bell, shrilling loudly in the passage, caught at him and held him back.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Nothing. The door. Let it ring.”
But the outer world and its thousand complications clamoured to him. The bell rang again, and he pushed Tilli away. She saw that her moment had gone by, and she went sullenly to open the door. Trevor could hear her talking to William in the passage.
A cold wind blew from the street into the room. The turmoil of his senses subsided. Reason nagged at him. He looked with startled eyes at the drawn curtains and the tumbled scarlet cushions. And as William came in, he turned on all the lights, flooding the room with a hard glare. Tilli had run into her bedroom to powder her nose.
William, on the threshold, blinked a little, for the passage had been dark. He greeted Trevor with that deceiving mildness of his which always signified the brewing of a storm.
“Haven’t seen you to speak to, Trevor, since my first night”
“No.”
He peered at Trevor, aware of something amiss. Tilli had been odd, too, when she came to the door. Before that, when he was waiting on the step, a premonition had come to him, and he had nearly gone away between his first and second ring It occurred to him now that Tilli and Trevor might have been … but he dismissed the idea. He knew how Trevor disliked entanglements, and he was accustomed to think of Tilli as an honest woman.
“Seen the notices of my play?” he asked.
“Some of them.”
“Aren’t they bad?”
“Awful!”
“I’m sorry for Baxter.”
“Baxter! I don’t suppose he’s suffered much.”
“No But I’m sorry for him.”
“Why?”
“It must be awful to be him. I don’t know how he ever keeps alive at all. I’ve always an uncomfortable feeling that he may begin to go bad, somewhere. I mean … it’s not natural for anybody to have so much body and so little mind. After all, it’s mind that keeps people alive: that makes the difference between a man and a corpse. He hasn’t enough to go round. I believe that one day he’ll begin to putrefy.”
“Personally, if I were you, William, I wouldn’t waste any pity on Baxter. I should be much more sorry for myself.”
“I was sorry for myself on the night,” said William with a grin. “I said to myself, as soon as it had begun: ‘It’s as bad as it can be. Nothing can be worse than this. I always knew something like this would happen to me’”
“I told you it was a bad play,” said Trevor peevishly.
“Yes. But I had an idea … it was partly Baxter’s fault … that it might seem better when it was acted. And then, once I’d got started with it, I didn’t like to let him down. After he’d got all his elephants and tigers! However—it’s over now. And I can never make a worse fool of myself.”
“One would hope not.”
“But I wish you’d been behind on Wednesday, when I told Baxter that the tigers had got loose. I’ve never laughed so much, though I was as sick as mud all the time.”
“What did you tell him that for?”
“Just to see him sweat. He quite believed it, and you should have seen him edging away down the passage, turning round every other minute to see if a tiger hadn’t nipped a bit out of his backside.”
Trevor was a little scandalised at William’s levity.
“I think the whole thing was a ghastly mistake,” he said severely. “You can’t expect to persuade people that you did it all so as not to hurt Baxter’s feelings.”
“I never expect to persuade people of anything,” said William, suddenly lowering. “Their minds were made up before I was born.”
He laughed again, and Tilli, who had come in and was sitting by the fire, looked up quickly. She did not see William as Trevor saw him. She knew how diverse the effects of a sudden disaster can be. To her mind the young man was broken-hearted. He was half stunned, as though he had fallen from a great height: he seemed scarcely to know what he was saying.
His despair surprised her, for she had never supposed that he set any great store by this play. But she hardly cared, one way or the other. She had too many troubles of her own, and she could not forgive him for this untimely intrusion. Her whole being was still shaken by that delirious moment which he had interrupted. She tried to make Trevor look at her, but he would not, and she began to suspect that he was drifting away from her with every moment of delay.
Her fears were justified, for Trevor was longing to make an escape. His thoughts had swung back to Monk’s Hall, to all his plans and resolutions. His brief madness was over, and he wanted to remove himself as soon as possible. It was not safe for him to be alone with Tilli.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, turning to William. “I wanted to see you. I think that Monk’s Hall should be entirely redecorated, and I want your views.”
William looked blank and said that he had no views.
“Well, but you’d better have some,” expostulated Trevor “Seeing that you’ve bought the house.”
“Do it up any way you like. I shan’t live there. I’m going to Japan. Now that Emmie …”
He jerked his head towards an imaginary Ratchet.
“I shall go to Japan,” he said again.
“Then shall I get on with it on my own responsibility?” asked Trevor briskly. “I’m going down to-morrow, and”
“To-morrow?” said William.
“To-morrow?” said Tilli.
“Yes. I’ve no more use for London than you have. I expect I shall stay at home until we can move into Monk’s Hall. You’ll be coming down for the wedding, I suppose?”
“I suppose I must.”
“Well, we can discuss all this then. Meanwhile I’ll get some estimates made.” Trevor got up. “Good-bye, Tilli. Good-bye, William. No, don’t bother. I’ll let myself out.”
She had made a move to come with him to the door. But she saw in time that it could not avail her, so she let him go. There were small sounds in the passage, while he found his coat and hat. The street door banged.
Tilli and William, equally bewildered and forlorn, sat together in the cheerless room. She looked at him with a smouldering animosity, because he had driven Trevor away If she could have hurt him more than he was already hurt, she would have done so with the greatest satisfaction. He and Trevor! They were both of them her enemies. She almost believed that they were allied against her. She remembered that she had heard William laughing when she was in her bedroom, and in her distorted fury she imagined that Trevor had whispered the whole story to him. They should be sorry for it. They should not laugh over her humiliation for very long. They should find something else to make them laugh.
“It’s very late,” said William at last.
“I suppose that it is.”
“I’ll have to go.”
He thought of the empty house in Edwardes Square, and shivered.
“Can I have a drink?” he said.
“But surely. It is over there. Bring one for me too.”
He mixed a brandy-and-soda for himself, and one for Tilli, at the rickety little table between the windows.
“You’re very tired,” he said, observing her “You ought to go to bed.”
“It has been a fatiguing day.” She sipped her brandy and looked at him sourly. “Why did you come to see me?”
“Why? Oh, not for anything special. Just to pass the time of day. I haven’t seen you since Wednesday, and I thought we ought to condole with each other.”
“I thought, perhaps, you would not come again.”
“Why ever not?”
“We are companions in misfortune; it is not likely that we should love one another. The same blow has fallen upon us both.”
“The same blow? But you hardly knew my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Oh, you mean the play!”
He smiled again. The play, to him, was getting to be nothing but the faint, ludicrous memory of Baxter and the tigers. But his smile enraged Tilli.
“To you it is a small thing that this play has failed. To me it is everything. I am ruined. I shall not easily find a new engagement. And I lost a good one when I took your part.”
“Did you? Tilli! Why didn’t you tell me? I’m most terrible sorry. I hadn’t the least idea.
“It is nothing to you. You will go away now. To Japan. You will forget it.”
“If there was anything that I could do …”
“You are going very soon?”
“In about a month.”
It flashed upon her that Trevor would thus be left in complete possession of Monk’s Hall. And that was intolerable. For she knew very well that Monk’s Hall and not William had been the immediate cause of her failure. If Trevor had not had this refuge, he might have stayed with her.
She looked contemptuously at William, who was standing before her with a face of compassion and apology. It was plain that he knew nothing of her relations with his cousin. He was a fool, a mere gull, whom anyone could cheat. He was accepting, without question, her statement of advantages foregone. She could have no difficulty in getting a fortune out of him, simply by asking for it. It was ridiculous that anybody with so little capacity for self-protection should be so rich.
Her own criminal stupidity was suddenly borne in upon her. She could scarcely believe it. From the beginning she ought to have been aware of the possibilities in William. But for the last weeks she had been so much occupied by Trevor’s image that she had not thought with fit seriousness of any other man. She had viewed his cousin simply as a playwright. In their first conversation she had set him down as a bad subject, easy to deceive but not easy to attract. And she had not considered him again. She had been quite mad. But if she was to snatch anything from these ruins, she must waste no time now.
“If there was anything I could do …” he was saying.
“My poor friend,” she murmured. “We are both in trouble together. But no one is to blame. It is life. I am used to it. I have been already so unhappy.”
“I’m very sorry, Tilli.”
“And you, perhaps, are not so used to it. Perhaps it is the first time that you have known what it is to fail.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m all right …”
He knew that he was miserable, but he would not say so. When the world goes to pieces, it is safer to insist that nothing has happened at all. And the shock of Emily’s desertion was still so recent as to be almost unreal. Tilli saw that he was in need of another kind of comfort. Really, he wanted to laugh, and, if possible, to laugh at Baxter.
“Eugene has rung me up to-day …” she began.
A small, irrepressible giggle burst from William. He came and sat down beside her on the divan. It was difficult to go away. His house was so cold and empty; not even Mattie was left, for Emily had taken her to Water Hythe, and for company he had only a charwoman with a cold in her head. It was better to be sitting in the warmth with Tilli. It was wonderfully soothing. He had never realised that she could be so nice. Simply to be with her was like coming into a temperate climate after hours of cheerless cold. And she was so amusing.
She was more than that. Dimly he felt that she had something which he had always needed. Soon he would need it more than ever before. While they made merry together, his mind moved imperceptibly towards imagined caresses, the narcotic, the warm oblivion of sensual enjoyment. He had thought of these things before, spasmodically, but other vital occupations had crowded them out.
At last, when the church clock near by had struck midnight, he tore himself away.
“But to-morrow I’ll come and see you,” he said. “Can I? We might go into the country if it’s fine.”
Tilli reflected, and said that on Monday she would be busy. He might come on Tuesday. She took him to the door and put him into his coat. And on the step, where Trevor had once kissed and left her, she whispered a laughing farewell.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked her in the darkness.
“Because it is raining, and you do not wish to go away.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
“For our reputations, it is better.”
“Well … good night.”
“Good night, William. Dream of … pleasant things.”
“I shall dream of Tuesday. What’ll you dream of?”
“Of Eugene.”
“No, don’t; he’s a nightmare.”
The clock struck the quarter.
“William! Positively you must go.”
“All right. I’m going.”
But he lingered, standing beside her in the darkness. Half protesting, she seemed to sway into his arms. They kissed closely, desperately, as if they were in love and about to be parted for ever. And then, with a sob and a laugh, she pushed him out into the rain. She heard his footsteps going away up the mews. They were very slow.