There was a time when the idea of spending six months or more out of England, with plenty of money and no one but myself to please, would have fascinated me. Now it would fascinate me no longer. I had done it, and I was glad to be home again.
I had got rid of The Beeches, passed the winter in a quiet London hotel, taken Oliver to Heronwater for his Easter holiday, and then, when he was back at school, set out. I had found a house on the Spaniards Road, overlooking the Heath, and Dermot was to see to its furnishing and decoration. This was the end of old Moscrop. He had been in my life since I could remember any life at all. Now he was going.
I felt as excited as a child as I paced the platform of Victoria which was bustling and cheerful in the May weather. I had never been abroad before. There would have seemed to Nellie something a little immoral in going abroad, and so long as Nellie was alive the idea of going abroad alone had not entered my mind. And as my thoughts turned back to Nellie and to the grey streets of Hulme and to the flat depressing acres of Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, I saw Livia Vaynol, vivid and disturbing, hurrying along the platform. Maeve followed her slowly, and slower still came Dermot, more like Shaw than ever in foxy-red tweeds, and Sheila, a little out of breath, looking, I noticed for the first time, a shade on the stout side, sedate and matronly. I glanced from her to Maeve, and “Good God!” I thought, “Maeve must be twenty, and Sheila might easily be a grandmother.”
“Quite a deputation!” I mocked them, but in my heart I was glad they were there, glad there were a few people in the world to whom it seemed to matter that they would not be seeing me for six months or more.
The doors began to slam, and I got into my compartment andleaned from the window. Livia pushed a dozen newspapers and magazines through to me. Sheila and Dermot shook hands, and as I leant out to wave, Maeve suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed me. “Good-bye, Uncle Bill,” she said. Then Livia Vaynol pulled her aside, crying, “Me, too!” and as the train gathered speed, through the scabby back-yards and tottering chimneypots beyond the station I sat back in my corner thinking, as though there were no such person as Maeve in the world: “Livia kissed me.”
I had no scheme, no time-table. I stayed where I liked as long as I liked and then passed on. By land and sea I visited most countries in Europe and some in Asia, and in Constantinople I decided suddenly to take a ship home. I had avoided tourist routes, and whenever possible had travelled on cargo boats. I did so on the homeward journey. There was one other passenger on the ship, and we met at dinner in the captain’s cabin. The captain introduced us— “Mr. William Essex, Mr. Josef Wertheim”—but, so far as I was concerned, there was no need for the introduction. I should have known Josef Wertheim anywhere. His fat, pale, dark face, bald head and brooding melancholy eyes were familiar to anyone who saw the newspapers and weekly magazines. I could well understand his presence on that ship. To avoid publicity would be a grateful thing to Wertheim.
There was a small saloon on the ship, and after dinner we sat there and talked. I had a whisky and soda at my side, and smoked a pipe. Wertheim was a teetotaller but a large cigar was rarely out of his mouth. His reputation was tyrannical; it was said that he worked his artists to the bone. He had a genius for finding them everywhere: the latest Spanish dancer, the coming world’s champion heavyweight, the biggest giant and the smallest midget, jugglers, trick cyclists and troupes of equestrian acrobats: it didn’t matter to Wertheim what they were so long as they were the best in the world. I asked him if he had been scouring Asia for exotic talent, and he said No, he had been visiting his mother who, I gathered, lived in a small house in a suburb of Constantinople. He spoke of her with deep affection, and I felt a sympathy for the man, guessing a childhood which, for all its difference of environment, had been much like my own. Looking at Wertheim’s burly rigid body that seemed to move, when it moved at all, all of a piece, I had difficulty in envisaging the days of which a hint dropped here and there, of his young body lying on his father’s raised feet, thrown into the air, twirled barrel-wise, the father back-down on a carpet strip, a small sister collecting the offerings of a niggardly street audience.
The recollection did not move Wertheim to mirth. He never smiled. He merely let the story drop out in a few hints, then struck the bell at his side. To the steward who answered he did not give a look; he merely indicated without words my empty glass.
He asked me what I thought of Reach for the Sky, the musical show which he had on at the Palladian. When I said I hadn’t seen it, he apologised with grave courtesy for having taken up so much of my time with talk of his affairs and began to draw me out about my own books. He had read a number of them, and showed an understanding of life in the North of England that surprised me. He had put on several big shows in Manchester, and confessed that Manchester audiences frightened him. If you could get past them you were all right.
I said that I felt I had said everything that I wanted to say about Manchester. I wanted to settle in London and try my hand at a play.
“A play,” he said, looking gravely at the glowing end of his cigar. “That is something now.” He pondered, and added: “I have never done a play. That would be satisfying. Musical shows, circuses, boxing—yes, all that is amusing, and with wisdom one makes much money. But a play—that might be to make money and to satisfy something here—eh?” He tapped his enormous chest. “I have thought I would do it some day.”
“You have only to make it known, Mr. Wertheim,” I said, “and you’ll have a hundred young men of genius on your doorstep every morning.”
“Ach, I know, I know,” he exclaimed, throwing out his hands in a wide gesture of despair; and I thought of all the stories that were told of the sorrows of Wertheim. He could hardly stay at an hotel, it was said, without the chambermaids turning out to be chorus girls in disguise, anxious to display the beauty of their legs when they brought up the morning tea.
It was not till the last day of the voyage that Wertheim reverted to this conversation. We got on very well together, chiefly, I think, because we kept out of one another’s way all day, and met only in the evenings. He was as lethargic bodily as he was alert mentally. He liked to spend most of the day in his bunk with a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose and a book in his hand. After dinner we talked till midnight and became very easy and intimate with one another. It was on the last night that he said: “You know, Essex, I have been thinking about what you said—all those young men of genius on my doorstep with plays in their pockets. Well, here you’ve been, on my doorstep for days and you haven’t tried to interest me in that play you’re going to write.” He got up to go to his bunk and laid his heavy hand on my shoulder. “I like that. You let me see that play when it’s ready.”
He went off with his heavy shambling walk, and I went to my cabin to give a look at the skeleton of the play on which I had been quietly working since I got aboard.
*
We came into London river at night. Wertheim at once went ashore, but I slept aboard. I had told nobody I was coming home, and the next morning I walked happy and unembarrassed about London which still had for me the lure of novelty. It was a grey and lowering November day, but any day was good to be home on, and the only thing I lacked was agreeable company for lunch. With that idea in my head, my footsteps automatically made their way up Regent Street, into Oxford Street, and through Orchard Street to Baker Street. In a turning to the right was the house where Maeve and Livia shared their flat. What more could I ask, to complete the benediction of homecoming, than the company of Maeve and Livia at lunch?
I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and knocked at the door of the room I had visited several times before going away. It was a long room with a large skylight. Receiving no answer to my knock, I pushed open the door and saw Livia standing before an easel under the skylight. She was wearing a green overall. The nimbus of her hair shone, as improbably round as a dandelion clock, in the light that fell from above. With a brush full of sepia water-colour she was “squiggling,” as Sheila would have called it: producing upon paper pinned to a large board a series of flowing and somehow curiously related curves. Maeve was not in the room, and though I had been telling myself all the way to the flat that I wanted to take Maeve and Livia to lunch, I was aware of a leap of gladness at finding Livia alone.
“Good-morning,” I said, and Livia whirled round in surprise. Then, seeing me, she stuck her brush into a pot and hurried across the room. “Oh, the brown man!” she exclaimed, putting a hand on each of my shoulders and looking me up and down. “What a bit of holiday will do! Thinner, if anything. And greyer—but most handsomely grey. And brown as a gipsy. You look like a handsome colonel just back from service in the East—little clipped moustache and all.”
“Thank you. That’s the first time anyone has called me handsome, and I must say I like it.”
“Well,” she qualified, pulling me into the room and taking my hat and coat, “at least you’re thin. I always feel that if a man can’t be truly handsome, thinness is the next best thing.”
There was a healthy fire burning and an inviting divan stretched before it. I sat down, and Livia produced sherry. She sat at my side. “You know, this is really very charming,” she said. “I had no idea you were homeward bound, much less home.”
“I only got into the Thames last night, and I slept aboard.”
“Then I must be the first person you’ve called on.”
“You and Maeve. I called on Maeve, too, you know, though she isn’t here. I wanted to take you both out to lunch. But I seem to be interfering with some work.” I glanced towards the easel.
“Oh, that! Poof!” And Livia gave that comical push to her hair that had amused me in Manchester. “You wait till you see your house,” she said mysteriously.
“Have you been allowed to trespass?”
“I’ve seen one or two things. I have even,” she added proudly, “designed one or two things—the curtains.”
“Well, I’m glad to know that,” I said, genuinely pleased. “I suppose Dermot commissioned them?”
“Yes. He liked some of those things,” waving towards the easel, “and got me to do them on linen. They look nice.”
“I’m sure of it. I hope he paid you well.”
“Seeing that it’s an ‘exclusive design by O’Riorden,’ for which he’ll charge you, I hope you won’t think he paid me too well,” she said with a little malicious grin.
“I shall be really glad to have something by you in the house,” I assured her. “And now, what about lunch? Is it any use waiting for Maeve? Will she be in?”
“She will not,” said Livia. “The show she was in ended last week. She’d worked all the year with hardly a day off, and now she’s taking a holiday. She’s earned it.”
“Oh! Is she gone away?”
“To Ireland. She’s visiting her brother.”
“Rory. How’s he getting on?”
“I know nothing about him. I’ve never seen him, you know. All I can tell you is that Maeve’s potty about him. They write to one another two or three times a week, and not long ago I was present at a pretty little row between Maeve and her father. She wants the boy to be brought back.”
I sighed. “Yes, I know all about that. It’s an old, old story now. Well, let’s lunch alone. Café Royal?”
Livia got up and shook her head. “Oh, no—please,” she said. “I’ve just got you back after months of wandering in the wilderness, and now you want me to share you with a crowd of chatterers. Let’s have lunch here. I was just going to put out my own. There’s so much I want to know—where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, what you’ve done—”
I followed her into the kitchen. She put a cloth, glasses, cutlery, on to a tray. “Here, fix the table in the studio. I’ll knock up an omelette.”
She knocked up an omelette very efficiently, and with that and a crusty French loaf and butter, followed by fruit and coffee, we made a good meal.
“Light your pipe,” she said.
I did, and felt at ease and at home. Livia carried the dishes into the kitchen. I liked that. I detest seeing the débris of a meal lying about a room. While she was away the sky, overcast all day, darkened. Besides the skylight, there was one window in the room. It looked on to nothing but a tumble of roofs and chimneypots, and upon that wry landscape a heavy leaden rain began to fall. It rattled on the skylight, and, looking up, I could see it sliding past, giving me the impression of being under a little stream in spate.
Livia came out from the kitchen. She had shed her overall and was wearing a grey skirt and a red woollen pullover that fitted closely to her body. She reached up to a cord and pulled a blind that slanted down across the face of the skylight. “I can’t stand seeing this sort of weather,” she said, “and I can’t stand seeing the stars or the moon through that skylight. I always shut it out at night. Maeve laughs at me. But I hate to feel an immensity above me when I’m shut in. Now this one,” she added, pulling the curtains across the window. “Ugh! Those grey roofs under the rain!”
She threw some coal upon the fire and then sat down on a comfortable chair over to my right. “There!” she said. “Isn’t that better? Isn’t that cosier and more human?”
The room was filled with a comfortable dusk, livened by the leaping flames. “Now,” she prompted me. “Tell me of strange cities and marvellous seas.”
I would much rather have told her how glad I was to be there, how enchanting I found her company; but I repressed that desire and did my best at a lively travel lecture. When I told her of my meeting with Wertheim she became excited. “There’s a man to know, now,” she exclaimed. “What a thing it would be to design for a show by Wertheim! Stage settings, dresses—couldn’t something marvellous be made of it?”
“Poor Wertheim!” I laughed. “No wonder he looks pale and sad and travels on cargo boats. Everybody wants to use him or to be used by him. You want to design for him. I was dying to talk to him about a play, but thought it better policy not to. And above everything else, I want him to see Maeve act and give her a good push off.”
“Let’s think of something for Oliver while we’re at it,” she chaffed me. “What can Wertheim do for him?”
“I don’t know yet that Oliver has any talents Wertheim can use. You and Maeve have. I have. But what about Oliver? Tell me, how did you get on with him?”
During my absence that summer Dermot had looked after Oliver’s holiday. Rory had remained in Dublin; Maeve’s play was still running; so the party at Heronwater was small: Sheila and Dermot and Eileen, Oliver and Livia Vaynol. I gathered from letters I had received that Oliver had invited Livia.
“Who wouldn’t get on with him?” Livia now asked. “I think he’s the most marvellous person for getting on with that I’ve ever met. Perhaps, after all, Wertheim isn’t his man. You ought to put him into the diplomatic service.”
Once she was launched, she talked for a long time about Oliver. There was one adventure that evidently remained vividly in her mind. Oliver had taken her out in the Maeve after dinner, and though Sam Sawle had warned him about tides, he had made a mess of things. He had taken the boat up the Percuil river on a falling tide—a mad thing to do. They had thrown out an anchor and gone ashore in the dinghy.
“It was a marvellous night,” Livia said. “There was a huge moon, and you know up that river in the evening it’s as quiet as the grave.”
“It would be,” I said, “with the tide falling. Certainly no one in his senses would be there to disturb you at such a time.”
Livia looked up sharply. “You sound cross.”
“He seems to have been inconsiderate,” I said, aware that I was feeling very cross indeed. I didn’t want to hear the end of the adventure, and yet for the life of me I couldn’t leave the subject alone.
“I suppose while you were ashore the last of the tide went?”
“It was all right for the dinghy,” Livia said. “We rowed alongside the Maeve, and there was water under us, but the Maeve’s pretty heavy. She was on the mud. We had to get back ashore. It was lucky there were plenty of rugs.”
“Lucky! It sounds providential,” I said, and again across the darkened room, with the rain tap-dancing on the skylight and the fire flickering, Livia looked up sharply at the tone of my voice.
“Providential,” I repeated. “To provide for. To cater. To prearrange.”
“You mean, you think Oliver—”
“Well, one doesn’t usually, when going for an after-dinner run, provide for a night out,” I said bluntly. “You must have been there all night. You’d get no more water up that river till the morning.”
“No,” she said tartly. “The tides come twice a day.” She fluffed her hair and shook her head as though she were annoyed at my persistence. “Naturally, we were there all night. It’s possible to make yourself comfortable. The hillside’s covered with bracken, and what with that and the rugs, we were quite well off under some bushes. There was a moon. It was hardly dark at all, and we were warm.” She seemed to be talking to herself now, to be re-living and re-enjoying an experience.
“It must have been very upsetting for Dermot and Sheila.”
“I suppose it was.”
“I know pretty well where you must have camped. Do you know that if you climb up through those fields you come to a road, and that on the road you find houses with telephones? Oliver could have got through to Heronwater. He knows all I’m telling you. He knows all that country like the back of his hand. I suppose Dermot had his car there?”
She nodded.
“Well, it would have been easy for him to get to you by road.”
“It sounds more and more—providential,” she smiled.
But I didn’t like it. The more I heard of it, the less I liked it. I put down my pipe, walked across, and sat on the arm of her chair. She turned her heart-shaped face up and smiled at me. “You know, Livia,” I said, “this seems to me to have been a rather foolish adventure.”
The smile faded from her face. She got up and left me stranded awkwardly on the arm of the chair. Colour mounted to her cheeks as she faced me from the hearthrug. “I don’t think it was foolish,” she said. “I’m not a child. I know what I’m doing.”
“But Oliver’s little more than a child.”
“Is he?” Her brows went up, and there was in the question a depth of meaning that shocked me. “He must have done a great deal of growing without your noticing it. I apologised to Dermot and Sheila for the uneasiness I caused them, and I’m sorry for that. But for the rest, I regret nothing that happened—nothing.”
The strength of feeling in that repeated “nothing” made my heart bound. I slipped down into the chair she had vacated and lit my pipe. The rain had ceased, and in the sudden silence of the room there was a vibrant tension. Livia broke it by harshly rattling the curtains back from the window, revealing the wilderness of wet gleaming roofs, and letting the skylight blind run back with a snap. Daylight flooded the room, dimming the electric lamp that was still burning. Livia knocked up the switch with a defiant flick, and as the cold calm daylight gave everything solidity and proportion again, and the dirty sparrows fluttered and chattered in the roof-puddles, I felt as though I had awakened from a nightmare full of implications that were the more horrible because they were so illusive and ill-defined.
*
“Let’s have a look at you,” I said, and I was pleased with what I saw. Oliver had said he would whistle across the landing when he was ready and he had whistled, and I had gone to his room to see him in his first dinner-jacket. To reach his bedroom, I had to go through his sitting-room, and opening out of his bedroom was a bathroom. It was a convenient arrangement. He need disturb nobody, and nobody need disturb him. I wanted that house at Hampstead to be something final. I didn’t want to be always on the shift, and, while providing for myself, I had provided for Oliver. Here, surely, was a useful and necessary part of the machinery for his living. Soon he would go to Oxford or to Cambridge. He would decide what he wanted to do with his life, and here, during the vacations, and afterwards when he was done with the university, he could get on with preparations for doing it. I imagined a young student of law or medicine, or perhaps a young writer, thanking his stars for this excellent provision of quiet and privacy.
Nothing was lacking. There was a comfortable desk, well-furnished: stationery, pens, ink, blotter. The bookshelves, which on two sides of the room went half-way up the wall, had been beautifully made in Dermot’s workshops. I had spent some thought in filling them. There was all sorts of stuff that I believed was calculated to stir a boy’s imagination, give him hints, open gates. At sixteen something should be happening to a boy’s mind. Sometimes, when Oliver was out, I would go into the room hoping to find open on the table or left lying on a chair some book that would give me a hint of the way his mind was tending. How I should have taken such a hint, fostered it, blown it to life! But so far, all I had found were books I had not bought, novels with garish pictures on their shiny paper covers: Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, that sort of thing. These and such-like seemed to be the whole of Oliver’s reading, and there were plenty of weekly journals lavishly illustrated with racehorses and lovely actresses. Since Oliver had come home for the Christmas holiday there had been no other signs than these of mental stirrings. He liked to loll in his large chair with his feet on the desk, the Heath spread before his gaze, and an occasional cigarette in his mouth.
Time enough, time enough, I consoled myself. Here, in these surroundings, he will find himself one of these days. And what were you doing at sixteen? Well, I was lodging in Ancoats with the O’Riordens. I was earning my living. I was catching the flavour of Dermot’s enthusiasms. I was eating my way through all the good stuff in old O’Riorden’s book-cases. I was dreaming of making a fortune; I was beginning to scribble.
Can you imagine Oliver doing any of these things? No, nor do I want him to. Time enough for that. But all the things you were not doing at that age he is doing already; dressing up to the times, smoking, making eyes at girls. I wondered how far he was going with that.
Oliver turned round proudly from his dressing-table. He was shooting up in the most astonishing fashion. He must have been five foot ten, slender, graceful as a young tree. He had given himself a lot of attention. His longish curly hair was gleaming from the brush. His blue eyes had an almost childish diffidence as he stood there asking: “Well, will I do?”
“Let’s have a look at you,” I said. “Yes. You can wear evening clothes with anybody.”
“Who’s coming tonight?”
“Your Uncle Dermot and Sheila. A man named Wertheim—I’ve mentioned him to you, haven’t I?—and his wife. I don’t know her. She’s an actress. They’re the only people you don’t know. Then there’ll be me and Livia Vaynol, and you and Maeve. Are you ready to come down now?”
“Yes. D’you know what I was thinking as I dressed?”
“What?”
“Something you’d never guess. Something you’ve probably forgotten.”
“Well?”
“Do you remember when I was very small and you bought me a suit of black pyjamas? You came upstairs and dressed me in them. It was a birthday or something and Maeve was there to tea, with Rory and Eileen. We went downstairs hand-in-hand, and everybody laughed at me.”
“I remember it very well. You never wore those pyjamas. Never. Not once. Good money wasted. Well, no one will laugh at you tonight.”
“Rather not! I think I look pretty good.” He surveyed himself in the mirror. “Yes.”
“Come on, then. We must be downstairs when people come.”
We went out through his sitting-room, and I detained him for a moment, holding his arm. “You find this all right? You can work here?”
“Top hole,” he agreed.
“I see you have been doing some reading. What is it this time?”
I picked up the book lying face downwards on the desk. It was another of the prolific Mr. Boothby’s—The Beautiful White Devil.
“You seem to like this chap.”
“He’s jolly good,” he grinned. “I wish you could turn out books like that.”
“How do you know what I turn out? Have you read any of them?”
“I’ve tried.”
“But not got far?”
“Not very.” Abruptly changing the subject, he said: “By the way, guv’nor, Christmas is coming. I wish you’d give me a good cigarette case.”
“Gold? Jewelled?”
“Don’t twit me. Something decent. Something you can offer people. You don’t mind my smoking, do you? I’m not doing much.”
“So long as you keep it in reason. Were you really thinking of tonight?”
He nodded.
“Well, put this in your pocket. It’s full. I make you a present of it now.”
I handed him my gold cigarette case.
“Oh, no,” he protested. “I can’t take yours.”
“Take it. I don’t mind offering people a cigarette from a yellow cardboard packet. If they don’t like it they can lump it.”
He put the case in his pocket. “Normally, of course,” he conceded, “I think you’re right. But when one’s wearing evening clothes it’s rather different, don’t you think?”
I grunted, and we went downstairs together.
*
Dermot walked up and down the drawing-room, poking out his red beard inquisitively at this and that. He walked with his hands behind him, body bent forward, almost prodding with the beard. Occasionally he passed a hand over a table, fingered a curtain, stood back from a picture.
“D’you remember those first things I made, Bill?” he suddenly demanded. “Those bookshelves for father, that dining-room table with the atrocious bulgy legs for mother? God! How I’ve got on! How I’ve got on!”
“Let him stand up on a chair,” said Maeve. “He’s going to crow.”
“Something to crow about, my girl,” said Dermot, “and don’t you forget it. And don’t misunderstand me. When I say ‘got on,’ I’m not thinking of filthy lucre. I’m thinking of the mind—the soul—the imagination—all that.” He gestured vaguely with his white, longfingered hands. “They don’t know what they’re talking about, this generation that gets everything done for it.”
Sheila smiled at him affectionately, and patted the hand of Maeve who was sitting on a footstool at her feet. “Let him be,” she said. “It’s just the way of him. He always was an orator.”
There was a lot of grey in Sheila’s hair. She was making no pretence of being a young woman. She was dressed like a matron. Her face and figure were stoutening, but her eyes remained grave and beautiful. She held out her hands to the flames.
The two girls were excited at the prospect of meeting Wertheim. “How does one tackle a rich Jew who has everything to give away that one desires?” Livia asked. “Does one say: ‘O Jew! Rich as thou art, the talents of thine handmaiden will enrich thee still further if thou wilt deign to employ them?’ Is that the line, or something more direct and slashing: ‘Look here, Ikey-Mo, my designs are pretty hot and there’s money in ’em?’ ”
“When you see Wertheim,” I answered her, “you won’t think much of either of those lines. And here he is.”
Dark, unsmiling, immense, Wertheim came into the room with his wife clinging to his arm. Clinging is the word. I had heard that Wertheim had married an actress, and, as I came to know the story later, the facts were these. Josephine Robbins was a New York girl who worked in a big store. It was the first of the stores founded by Dermot’s uncle, old Con O’Riorden. Josephine was stage-struck, worked like the devil, and at last found herself in the front row of the chorus. There she stuck. She had a lovely figure but the plainest and most homely face you could imagine. Nor had she any talent for anything but dancing, and she was no good at that except in a regiment. But Wertheim saw her, fell in love with her, and married her. He said she reminded him of his mother. From that moment, she wanted to forget that she had ever been a “chorus lady.” Nor did Wertheim want to remember it. So it was that Josephine’s clothes were always of the demurest, her deportment of the most serious. She was Josie to Wertheim; he was Jo to her; and they were a devoted and happy couple. She came into the room that night holding on to her mighty man like a slender and undistinguished bear-leader whom you would hardly notice in the presence of its sulky-looking powerful charge.
This was the first dinner-party in my new house. I was anxious to make it a success, and, frankly, I was anxious to put everyone on good terms with Wertheim. I was careful when I made the introductions to mention the things about them that would interest him.
“This is Dermot O’Riorden, my oldest friend. Perhaps you’ve seen his shop in Regent Street?”
Wertheim nodded his head. “We have, haven’t we, Josie? Very expensive. Very expensive. But very lovely.”
“This room is done by Mr. O’Riorden,” I explained. “Everything in it.”
“Not everything,” said Wertheim, advancing to look closer at a winter landscape by Vlaminck over the fireplace. “Not this—eh?”
“Well, I chose it,” Dermot said, “and induced him to pay a lot of money for it. I got on to these fellows early. They didn’t cost me much.”
“And there’s something else that he chose but didn’t do,” I said, displaying the curtains. Wertheim gazed at them hard, making with his hands passes in the air that the decoration of the curtains seemed to suggest. “Yes. That is good now,” he admitted. “That is good. There is a sense of design here. Something original. I could imagine this done on the grand scale. In the theatre—eh? Curtains—very important.”
“They are the work of Miss Vaynol here,” I explained and was rewarded with a “God bless you, my child,” look from Livia.
“We meet all the talents,” Wertheim exclaimed, shaking hands.
“Including Maeve O’Riorden, the actress,” I said. “She trained with Mary Latter, and was all through the run of Mid-Winter Harvest.”
“Yes, yes. We saw it three times, didn’t we, Josie?”
Josie nodded. She seemed to have no other role than that of agreeing with her husband. Seemed to: but as I got to know her better I found that she was his most effective dragon, too, and that no nuisance could come at him that had not first overcome Josie.
“A charming piece,” said Wertheim, “and we remember your part very well, Miss O’Riorden. And this, no doubt,” he added, bearing down on Sheila, who had shyly kept aloof, “is Miss O’Riorden’s mother. I can see that. I can see that this is what Miss O’Riorden will be like in a few years’ time, if she is lucky.”
“Jo!” said Josie sharply.
“Yes, Josie?”
“Control your emotions.”
“There!” he exclaimed with comical despair. “She thinks I am too much of the East. She has been reading Disraeli and Queen Victoria. Ah! When will they let us have a play about that: Disraeli, Gladstone and Victoria. Poetry, prose and the heart of a woman. There’s a theme for you, Essex! And this—this Phœbus in black trousers—whose son is this?”
He took Oliver by the hand and gazed earnestly into his smiling and lightly flushed face.
“Mine,” I said simply.
“Ach, God!” said Wertheim, dropping Oliver’s hand and lifting his eyes to the ceiling. “To be young and beautiful! I never was either.”
*
I sat at the head of the table, with Wertheim on my left and Mrs. Wertheim on my right. Next to Mrs. Wertheim sat Oliver with Livia beyond him. He was very attentive to Livia all through the meal, exchanged hardly a word with Mrs. Wertheim and scarcely a look with Maeve who was opposite him. Poor Maeve, I am afraid, was left disconsolate, for she was sitting between her father and Wertheim. Wertheim recurred to the subject of the French Impressionists of whom Dermot had a splendid collection, some in his flat, some in the gallery he had opened at his Regent Street shop. This was a matter on which Wertheim was deeply informed, and the pair of them talked over Maeve’s head in the most shameless fashion. At last, Dermot threw even the pretence of courtesy to the winds. “Here, Maeve, change places with me,” he said, upsetting the arrangements I had carefully made; but now everybody seemed happy: Dermot and Wertheim swopping stories of the men they had known in the Paris studios when you could pick up dirt cheap pictures now declared to be masterpieces; Maeve and Sheila hobnobbing the more happily because they saw little of one another in those days; Livia and Oliver exchanging heaven knows what quiet sweetnesses; and Josie Wertheim and I.
She astonished me by saying: “Jo tells me you are going to write a play for him. I want him to do plays, you know. The big showman business is all very well, but I think he’s got more in him than making a nice background to show off girls’ legs.”
This was pretty good from Josie, whose own adorable legs, though I did not then know it, had been her fortune. But Wertheim interjected a growl: “Essex, don’t let her run down the loveliest things God ever made—a woman’s legs. They kicked me into Park Lane.”
Josie waited till he was deeply immersed with Dermot once more, then said: “Seriously, now that his mind’s turning to this, help me to keep him up to it. He’s talked a lot about you lately. He’s spent his life finding new things, and now that he’s thinking of the legitimate stage, he won’t look at the men who’ve had a long list of successes. He’ll find a new dramatist. It might as well be you. How is the play going? What do you call it?”
“It’s finished. I don’t know yet what it will be called.”
“You’re a quick worker!”
“Oh, no, I had six months’ holiday. The thing was working in my head all that time, and bits of it had got written. During the voyage home I roughed it out. Since being back, I’ve been completely undisturbed and I’ve had nothing else to do.”
“Would you like to tell me what it’s about?”
I did; and Josie said: “You must call it Every Street.”
“That’s splendid! That fits it perfectly.”
“Are you free tomorrow?” she asked, rummaging in the handbag which she kept on her lap. She produced an engagement book. “Eleven o’clock?”
I said that would suit me.
“Very well, then.” She made a note in the book. “Bring the play with you.”
I liked her intense practicality. I liked the way I found her the next day, sitting in an anteroom through which one reached Wertheim’s study that looked out on to a garden in which a plane tree held up its bleak winter arms to the sky.
“You won’t be disturbed,” she promised, opening the door and allowing me to see Wertheim’s back, as he stood, hands behind him, brooding through the window upon the grey, grisly day; and I knew that we were indeed safe enough from any intrusion, with Josie posted on guard.
I had imagined that Wertheim and I would have an hour’s talk about the play, that perhaps I would read a bit here and there, and that then I would leave it for him to turn over in his mind. I hadn’t known my Wertheim. He sank into a great leather chair by the fireside, a cigar in his mouth, and commanded me to read. I hadn’t read two sentences of stage directions for the first act before he exclaimed sharply: “No!” and proceeded at once to let me see how little I knew about the facts of the stage.
“Essex,” he said, “a friend of mine received a manuscript which began: ‘The curtain rises at the moment of dawn. A cock is crowing on a dunghill. Nearby, a hen, with busy cackling, lays an egg. Enter a farm servant who picks up the egg.’ Now try to see your stage and everything that’s done on it. I think we’ll have to alter those directions to read like this...”
So we were at it from the word Go. Lunch was brought in, and I stayed to dinner, and after dinner we were at it again. It was eleven o’clock when I called a taxi and set out for the Spaniards Road. In my pocket I had a sheaf of notes; in my mind an immense respect for Wertheim. He had been through that play with a small comb. He refused to suggest a word of dialogue. That, he said, was my job. But he was ruthless in insisting when he thought dialogue must be cut. He could will himself into the audience, see the thing, and hear the thing, as from a theatre seat, and I knew he was right. It was an exhausting, illuminating day. “And now, Essex,” he said, laying his heavy hand on my shoulder as we came through the anteroom where Josie was reading a novel, “now we’re on the way to making something of it.”
And we were. Every Street went on in the following spring—1913—and ran till the war broke and killed it. But by then Wertheim knew what Maeve could do, and that was the important matter.