It was Dermot who found Heronwater. I did not move about a lot. I don’t want to intrude myself or my work too much into this book, but let me just say this: that by this time my reputation as a novelist stood higher, and my sales were greater, than I had hoped in my most cheerful dreams that they would be. But that seemed to me no reason for rushing away at once to set up house in London. My work had its roots in the North, so I myself stayed in the North, which I still hold to be healthier and more vigorous than the South; but Dermot’s work took him everywhere. It took him to Cornwall during the week after my meeting with Kevin Donnelly, and when he had been there for a few days he wrote asking if I could come down and join him. He was staying then in Falmouth. I had been working hard, and welcomed the excuse to take a few days’ holiday. I packed a bag and travelled to London, saw my publishers, stayed the night at the old Golden Cross Hotel, and left Paddington for Falmouth the next morning. It was the first time I had travelled into the West country, and once I had crossed the Saltash bridge, leaving Devonshire behind, and had entered upon the strange, riven countryside of Cornwall, with the railway passing over viaduct after viaduct, carrying us above chasms filled with dusky woods, and though tilted, angular pastures, and alongside the great white cones of the clay works that rose against the sky like giants’ tents, and giving us here and there glimpses of a distant sea bluer than any I had known, and nearer views of unaccustomed vegetation: eucalyptus and palms and a profusion of hydrangeas: why, then I felt the North fall like a smoky burden from my back and a deep willingness for lotus-eating take possession of me.
Dermot was waiting at the station. Even a few days in that climate—days that had been all sunshine—had put a bronze veneer upon his pale cheeks, and his red beard jutted forward with aggressive healthiness. He was casually dressed. He wore no hat; his shirt was open at the neck.
I had nothing but a handbag with me. I gave that to a boy to carry to the hotel. Then Dermot and I walked together through the narrow twisting street that led to the Market Strand, so narrow that two carts had much ado to pass one another. There were a good many windjammers at their work about the seas in those days, and when we came down to the strand and the blue sparkling floor of the harbour stretched away from my feet, it happened that one of them was coming in under the white towering pride of her sail, making for anchorage in the Carrick Roads. Already some of the canvas was dropping from her, shouted orders came faintly across the water, reaching our ears with the beauty and mystery of all sound that comes across the sea.
Dermot waved his hand towards the harbour—that loveliest of all British harbours—towards the great ship, and the little steamers, and the yachts that danced like toys upon the sunlit water, hulls of yellow and red, blue and green, trembling above their own shadowed loveliness, towards the green, distant land and the blue enveloping air. “What did you know about that when you lived in Gibraltar Street?” he said. “Is it any wonder Van Gogh went off his head when he found the sunlight of Arles after the grey misery of Brabant? I feel half-crazy myself. Let’s get in and take some of those ridiculous clothes off you.”
The hotel stood just back from the strand, which was then a more care-free place than you see today. It had no concrete pier and clicking turnstiles and pierrot advertisements. It was just the simplest sort of place for embarking and disembarking.
It was thence we embarked the next morning. Dermot was full of mystery. “You don’t think I brought you down here just to show you the scenery?” he demanded. “Get aboard.”
I walked down the granite steps, past the wall hung with rags of seaweed and set here and there with iron mooring-rings, to the boat that rocked gently on the water. She rocked and she also shuddered, for she was that fairly new thing a motor-boat. An oily-handed customer, wearing a peaked white cap, was in charge of her. Dermot brought down a large luncheon basket, and then from under the cool sea-smelling shadow of the wall we shot out into the sunlight showering down upon the harbour.
“You don’t see this place from the shore,” Dermot shouted above the clatter of the engine. “Look at it now.”
How often have I looked at it since! But always if I think of it when I am away from it now, I see it as I saw it then for the first time: see Dermot knotting a handkerchief upon his head and shouting: “You don’t know what sunshine is till you get down here. Keep your neck covered, Bill!” See the grey old town rising above the water, street drawn parallel above street, the sunshine falling upon hundreds of flat windows that climbed up and up from the water’s edge to the high blue of the sky. See the multitudinous craft, faltering under sail before the light summer wind, or driving purposefully under steam, or, like ourselves, roaring under the new power that soon would dominate everything. See the prospect open up, the water stretch away westward to the broad Atlantic and eastward to the lovely landlocked anchorage of the Carrick Roads. I see all that, and the little villages upon the shore as we speed by them: Mylor and Pill and Restronguet, and St. Just, glimpsed at the head of its creek, and over all the blue sky, beneath us the blue dancing sea, and the wind of our going cool to the feeling, as the hovering gulls were to the eye.
And then, when we came to the eastern end of Carrick Roads, to the view of the pillared mansions standing on its hill, the summit of the parkland that rolled smoothly down to the wooded fringes of the water, I saw that there was a way out of the roads.
“You can go right up to Truro,” Dermot shouted, “when the tide’s high. It’s rising now.”
And on the rising tide we went up the river, cool between the banks clothed with green fleeces of wood right down to the water’s edge. The lower branches of the trees reached out over the water and were bitten off in a long straight line as cleanly as though the tide had had teeth.
No other traffic was on the water. We chattered on alone between the green cañon-walls. Here and there the water drove right or left into a creek where long-legged herons waded till our coming caused them to spread their wide wings and drift away with slow powerful beats. The river twisted and turned, boring deeper and deeper into the green heart of solitude and peace; and I said to Dermot: “Are we making for the end of the world!”
“Yes,” he said. “And we’re nearly there.”
Another twist of the river and we were indeed there. Looking ahead as the boat chugged forward, I could see on the right-hand bank a small landing-place. As we drew nearer, it defined itself as a quay whose side to the water had been stoutly fortified by a wall of grey granite blocks. There were steps leading up to the level land that had been cut in the bank. A few sheds and outhouses stood there, and behind them the trees rose to the line of the blue sky.
“Look!” said Dermot. “Half-way up. Can you see the house?” You could just see it, deep among the cliff-side trees, and you could not imagine anything more peaceful, anything more free from strain and fret, than that house with the elms and oaks about it, and the water below it, and the high lift of the sky above it.
“That’s it,” said Dermot. “That’s what I brought you to see.” The engine was shut off. In perfect silence the boat drifted in to the steps. The boatman grasped a ring in the wall and we stepped ashore.
“Heronwater,” said Dermot. “That’s what they call this place. Lovely, isn’t it?”
He strutted up and down the little quarterdeck of quay that was somewhat thrust out into the river, so that you could look up and down, comprehending the whole of the lovely reach in a glance to right and left. We sat on a log and lit our pipes, while the man brought up our luncheon basket.
“It’s almighty quiet,” said Dermot. “Just listen to it.”
It was indeed a quiet that you could listen to, broken by nothing but a few harmonious sounds: the suck and gurgle of the green water at the foot of the quay, the low drooling of doves in the wood, the almost imperceptible murmur of wind stroking millions of leaves. And those sounds, filtering through the sunlight that burned down upon us where we sat, were good.
“And the name of the place isn’t a cod,” Dermot said. “There really are herons. Look at that one.” The big grey bird ceased his slow cruising along the edge of the opposite wood, dropped his long legs, and came to a stand in the tide-ripples. “The place is for sale,” Dermot added casually. “I thought you might like to buy it.”
I nearly fell off the log. “Good God!” I said. “Have you had the cheek to drag me down here to make an idiotic proposal like that?” But even as I spoke I knew that the idea had hit at my imagination.
“Yes,” Dermot said brazenly. “The thing’s ideal. You’ll never find a better place to work in. The house is quite small. We’ll go and look at it by-and-by. I’ve got the key in my pocket.”
“You’re all wrong, my boy,” I said. “I’m one of the few northern novelists who believe in staying in the North.”
“Nonsense. And who wants you to leave the North, anyway? But you ought to vary it a bit. Have two places. Come down here when you feel like it. You’re rich enough. I can’t help knowing what you’re making out of Easifix, and your books must be making a pretty penny.”
I said nothing, but sat silent under the captivation of the place and the moment.
“Don’t be afraid of the water,” went on the tempter. “You’re not dependent on the tides. If you climb up through the woods behind the house you find yourself on quite a good road. You can be in and out of Truro in no time. I suppose you’ll be buying a motor-car soon.”
“Hell!” I cried. “You are arranging my life for me! I suppose I’ll have a motor-boat on the river next.”
“I’d advise it, if you come to live here,” said the boatman gravely.
At that I burst into laughter. It was too much. Dermot knocked out his pipe and patted me on the back. “Don’t get excited,” he said. “Let’s have a swim. I’ve brought two bathing-suits and towels.”
“You’ve thought of everything. I’m to miss none of the amenities of my estate.”
“That’s the idea, Bill.”
He began at once to strip, and I followed his example. “I’ll be making a fire, Mr. Essex,” the man Sawle said, “an’ you can have a nice cup o’ tea when you come out.”
“That’s fine,” said Dermot. “Come on, Bill. Did you ever imagine having anything like this on your own property?”
No, I said to myself, I had never imagined anything so heavenly. I stood on the edge of the little quay, the granite warm and sparkling under my feet, and looked down into the green enticement of the water. It was so clear that when Dermot suddenly let out a wild yell and plunged, I could see his white limbs going down and down till his fingers pointed upwards, rose and splintered suddenly the silver mirror of the surface. He trod water, shaking the drops from his red beard, and shouted: “Come on!” Then I was in after him, and we thrashed the water like schoolboys, and splashed one another, before settling down to serious swimming. I was out first, sitting on the steps, half in and half out of the water, watching him float on his back with his beard sticking up like a pennon. “Oliver will love this!” I shouted. He swung over and came over-arm towards me. “Of course he will,” he said.
We stood with towels draped round our loins and felt the sun kissing our backs and the warmth of the fire that Sawle had lit warming our shins. We sipped hot tea and ate sandwiches, and then sat down with our backs to the log and our pipes going. It was a grand feeling: the relaxation of body and mind, the sun soaking into every pore, the utter silence.
In the afternoon we climbed the hill behind the quay by a narrow path twisting through the undergrowth of hazel. It led us to the house, standing on a cleared platform of land. The platform was a fine look-out. A stone balustrade faced towards the water, glimpsed through the trees. There was no attempt at a garden: just a big lawn, reaching back from the balustrade to the house. Behind the house the trees rose again, but here a good roadway had been cut, winding through them for a few hundred uphill yards till it ended in a fine pair of iron gates, with the name Heronwater wrought into them in delicate lettering. The gates opened into the high-road and alongside them was a notice board “For Sale.” It offended me. I wanted to see it taken down at once. I didn’t want anyone else to butt in and snap up Heronwater.
We turned and looked back down the drive. Not a stone or chimneypot was visible. I noticed that each side of the carriage-way was heavily planted with rhododendrons. That would look good in their flowering season. There would be other seasons. There would be winter nights, with the wind roaring down the gully of the river, and the trees moaning, and the water a dark confusion, where wind and tide contended. There would be a great wood fire, and me writing. I could come down with just one servant. But could you desert Oliver? Well, Oliver will be going away to school soon. So my imagination began racing ahead. “Come on,” I said aloud. “Let’s go and see the house.”
The shingled roadway came round in a fine sweep to the front door which looked towards the balustrade. It was a plain and simple house, built of grey granite. Inside, it was roomy and comfortable and unpretentious. The entrance hall was panelled in oak, and one of the rooms that opened from it had a good fireplace that Dermot explained had been brought in from elsewhere. “Adam,” he said. “This is the best room in the house. I can see you are already mentally pinching it and fixing it up for your own.”
I admitted the charge. This was the room for those winter nights. Plenty of wall-room for books; plenty of hearth-room for logs.
“How much do they want for the place?”
He told me.
“Well,” I said. “I hereby invite you and Sheila, Maeve, Eileen and Rory to be my guests here throughout August. The place won’t be furnished, but I’ll have enough done by then to make it livable. We’ve never spent a holiday together, Dermot. And Rory has never spent a holiday with Oliver. I’d like it.”
“And so would I.”
“We’ll spend many holidays here together.”
“There’s nothing I’d like better,” said Dermot.
*
And so it was that it became a convention for the O’Riorden and Essex families to spend August at Heronwater. The one of those holidays that remains most vividly in my mind is that of 1906, when Rory and Oliver were ten, and Eileen was eleven, and Maeve was fourteen, and I was thirty-five. Dermot was a bit older than I.
To begin with, there had been trouble with Oliver that year. He and Rory were still at Miss Bussell’s, and on the last day of the term I allowed my walk to take me towards the school, so that I might meet him and walk home with him. But though it was past the time for school to end, I had not met him when I reached the school gates. I had seen other children walking homewards, so I went into the school to see if he was there. Miss Bussell saw me and called me into her private room, where Oliver was standing, flushed and defiant, side by side with Rory, whose forehead was creased by worry. He kept looking uneasily from Oliver to Miss Bussell and frowning in his queer grown-up way.
The white-haired old lady sat in her wicker chair, looking terribly perturbed. “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Essex,” she said. “I’m rather worried by a problem of conduct.”
Problems of conduct were dear to Miss Bussell’s heart. She had plagued me with a good many of them—problems for which growing-up was the only cure. I sat down prepared to hear of another peccadillo.
“You know,” said Miss Bussell, “I always give a prize at the end of term for some subject or other. I told the children last night that this term the prize would be for freehand drawing. They were to make their drawings this morning—anything they liked. Miss Dronsfield, who teaches drawing, examined the work during the lunch interval, and brought me Oliver’s as the best. But she didn’t notice what you can see for yourself if you look at this.”
Miss Bussell handed me the drawing. She had ringed it with red ink here and there, and clearly enough inside the rings you could see where Oliver’s pencil had failed to work over the incredibly light carbon tracing.
“I’m afraid,” said Miss Bussell, in her prim, acid way, “that Miss Dronsfield hasn’t seen this week’s Punch. But I have. And all that Oliver has failed to do is sign his work Phil May.”
I turned over in my hand the picture of the Cockney woman with her flaunting feathered hat and her tray of flowers. Miss Dronsfield must be a fool, anyway, I thought, to have imagined that a child would choose such a subject.
“Where does Rory come in?” I asked sadly.
“The incredible thing is,” said Miss Bussell, “that Rory, who was sitting next to Oliver, swears that he saw Oliver do the drawing on a clear sheet of paper.”
“Yes, I did,” said Rory, going very white.
“Will you, please, Miss Bussell, leave them both to me?” I asked. She nodded her head and looked relieved. “I don’t want to make a mountain of it,” she said. “Naturally, the other children don’t know.”
“Let’s walk home with Rory,” I said when we got into the street.
Both the boys seemed glad to be out in the air, away from the magisterial atmosphere.
“Well,” I said, when we had walked a little way, “it was cheating, Oliver. You draw very well. You could probably have got the prize without that sort of thing. Why did you do it?”
“Because I wanted to do something so good that Miss Dronsfield would always be saying: ‘Remember that marvellous drawing that got the prize!’ And that would make me work very hard.”
“I don’t see how that would help you. It wasn’t your marvellous drawing that took the prize. What’s wrong with saying: ‘What a marvellous drawing by Phil May! I must try and do one as good’?”
“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” he said. “The point is, I wanted other people to expect me to do marvellous drawing.”
“And as it turns out, other people will now wonder, when you do a decent piece of work, whether it’s a copy or a tracing. Don’t you think you’ve been a little fool?”
He sighed and looked martyred. “I suppose so,” he said. “But I meant well.”
“And what about you?” I said to Rory. “Didn’t you see what Oliver was doing?”
Rory still looked white—more worried than Oliver, who seemed to see no reason why the matter should not now be closed. “I was putting myself on trial,” he said. “I was hoping she’d cane me. She did cane a boy once.”
I looked at him, mystified. “Supposing it was in Ireland,” he said, the words rushing out of him, “and Miss Bussell was the police, and I knew something that would get Oliver into trouble, perhaps something they’d shoot him for—they do, you know. Well, then I’d have to tell a lie so as to be loyal, wouldn’t I? If Miss Bussell hadn’t asked me, I wouldn’t have said anything. But she asked me whether I’d seen Oliver cheat, and suddenly I thought this was a trial, and I said No.”
What could I say to the child, so white, so earnest and over-wrought? In my heart I said: “God bless you, Rory, and God help you,” and to him I could only say: “I see. I thought perhaps it was something like that.”
We left him at the gate, and Oliver and I walked home. Miss Bussell, I thought, had been up against something that would have surprised her had she guessed it.
*
What are you to do with a child when you catch him out in wrong-doing? You are aware of so many tortuous streaks in your own makeup, so many small things and great things that you have kept hidden, and which, if known, would make the moralists recoil, that to cast the first stone at your own child would cause you to stink of the Pharisee. Perhaps self-complacency comes into it, too. Whatever those things may be that the world knows nothing of, you are, on balance, a decent person, Well, so will the child be, no doubt. The theft of his friend’s book? An attempt to bluff a silly drawing-mistress? Well, Academicians had been known to paint over photographs.
So I consoled myself as I walked after dinner that night over the hump-backed bridge that crosses the Mersey and on to Cheadle. There were so many things I could have done: all, it seemed to me, the inventions of human stupidity: I could stop Oliver’s pocket-money, I could send him to bed early for a week, I could take away small privileges. If I were completely demented I could lock him in a dark closet, or I could use a stick on him. At the thought of this, I broke out into a prickle of sweat and my footsteps quickened.
But behind my attempts at gay self-assurance there was a trace of fear, for Oliver’s misdemeanours were not spontaneous: they were worked out to the last detail. I remembered the case of The Cuckoo Clock; and I had found tonight, on looking for Punch, that he had carefully destroyed the traces of his small crime. The paper, which it was customary to leave lying on the hall table till the next issue appeared, was gone, I found it at last pushed below the rubbish of the dust-bin, and precaution had gone even further than that, for the Phil May drawing had been torn out, and doubtless burned.
So it was on the whole with a troubled mind that I returned home.
I was about to run straight upstairs to my study, as was my custom, when the drawing-room door opened and Nellie came out. It was twilight in the street, but in the house it was nearly dark: no lamps had yet been lit. She stood like a grey uneasy ghost in the doorway, and said: “What are you going to do about Oliver?”
“Do?” I said.
She went into the drawing-room, and I followed her. I sat down by the fireplace, but she would not sit down. She moved restlessly about the room for a while, then came to a stand at the window, her back towards me. She was a black silhouette between the drooping white of the curtains.
“Miss Dronsfield happened to be passing by,” she said tonelessly. “I was in the garden, and she stopped to talk. She told me what happened at school, and said you knew about it. You might have told me.”
“I didn’t see that that would help.”
“In what way do I help? Am I any help at all now? Do I matter?”
“My dear Nellie—”
She swung round, and demanded in a rising voice: “Why didn’t you tell me? Whether I’m anything to you or not, you great man, I’m the child’s mother, aren’t I? D’you think it doesn’t matter to me that he’s growing up a cheat and a liar?”
I had never known her so perturbed. She stood there at the window, grasping in her agitation a curtain in each hand, as though her emotion might overcome her and she needed support. “What are you going to do about it?” she insisted.
“I don’t see that we can do anything except give the boy our care and love.”
At that she laughed, almost hysterically. “Love!” she cried. “A pretty idea you’ve got of love! Do you call it love to bring a child up to think he can do what he likes without taking the conse-quences? Give him everything—more money in a week than I saw in a year at his age, more clothes than any child needs, presents, games, expensive schools, everything he fancies or dreams of—give it to him—that’s your idea of love. Well, it isn’t mine. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
She came away from the window and walked excitedly up and down the darkening room. “Oliver is my child,” she said at last, “as well as yours. Bear that in mind. I know I’m nobody in this house. I know that the first thing you do when you come through the door is to dash up to your room as though I didn’t exist. But so far as Oliver’s concerned, I’m going to exist from now on. D’you hear?”
“What do you propose should be done about the present case?” I asked as calmly as I could.
She gave another of her strange hysterical laughs. “The present case! There’s more in it than the present case. You love the child so much that you can’t see what’s going on under your eyes, I suppose?”
In her agitation, her spectacles swung off her nose and dangled from her ear. She brushed at them impatiently and swept them to the ground. “I have found Oliver lying and thieving, and not caring if other people are suspected of his thefts. I have said nothing about it. You have always made the child’s upbringing your business, and now when he commits this crime in public, before his schoolfellows and teachers, you are going to do nothing about it.”
“Crime is a heavy word,” I said. “And as for his schoolfellows, they don’t know what happened.”
“Does that matter? Does your love only see wrong when it’s found out?”
“Don’t shout,” I said impatiently. “You’ll be heard in the kitchen.”
“Do I care where I’m heard? The kitchen knows well enough what you think of me. You think I ought to be in the kitchen myself.”
It was hopeless. Clearly, Nellie had for years been brooding on the gulf that there was no denying—the gulf across which we found it increasingly difficult to get at one another. And all this had surged up in her mind, complicated by her conviction that I was bad for Oliver.
I got up. “Quarrelling will get us nowhere,” I said. “What do you think should be done about Oliver?”
“I think he should be thrashed.”
“I don’t.”
“You haven’t got the strength to do your duty.”
“Put it that way if you like. If you have no other suggestion, I may as well go.”
I went. In my room I drew the curtains but did not light my lamp. I sat in the dark, in no mood to read or to write. I heard Nellie’s step pass the door, and assumed that she was going to bed. A moment later Oliver’s voice could be heard, murmuring uncertainly, as though he had been awakened from sleep. Then the voice sharpened to a cry of protest: “No! Don’t!”
I leapt from the chair, and as I hurried across the landing that divided my room from his, he gave a howl of pain. The door was open. Nellie had placed a lighted candle on the table. She had pulled back the bedclothes and stripped off his pyjama jacket. With her left hand she was holding Oliver face-downward on the bed. With her right she was lashing his back with a cane, “Cheat! Liar! Thief!” she cried. Her face was inhuman with cold fury. The child’s cries were terrible. They tore my heart, and every blow seemed to bite into my own shrinking flesh.
I was across the room in a stride, and seized her wrist as her hand was aloft for another blow. “Stop!” I shouted. “Are you mad?”
She turned towards me, panting. “I am doing your work,” she gasped.
Oliver had stopped shrieking when the blows ceased. He lay with his head buried in his arms, his body shaking with sobs. In the dim light I could see the weals livid on his skin. The sight raised in my heart a fury that almost blinded me. As on that night when the youth Ackroyd had terrified Nellie in old Moscrop’s shop, I felt an irresistible impulse to strike. I tore the cane from her hand and swung it up over my head.
She faced me calmly, though her cheeks were ashen and her breast was stormy with effort and emotion. “Strike me,” she said. “That’s all it needs now—strike me.”
My arm, lifted above my head, remained as though frozen, and then suddenly I felt the cane wrested from my hand. Oliver had leapt erect upon the bed. “Don’t!” he screamed hysterically. “Don’t hit my mother!” He lashed with the cane swiftly at my head, his face contorted with passion. I ducked, and took the puny blow on the shoulder. Then, as though all life had gone suddenly out of her, Nellie collapsed in a weeping heap upon the bed. Oliver threw the cane to the floor and knelt over her, fondling her and murmuring endearments. She cast herself full-length on the bed and took him in the crook of her arm. “Oliver! Darling—darling!” she sobbed, and he snuggled closer to her, crooning like a dove. “Mummy! Dear, dear mummy!”
I shook my head as though to clear it of illusions and went back to my room.