When I look back across the gulf of horror—the world’s horror and my own—to the years before the war, that April of 1913 shines with an especial radiance. It seems now as though there was something fatal about it, as though we were all too happy. The gods couldn’t put up with it. Maeve, I think, was the only one in whose heart there was a premonition.
There we incredibly were, she and I, dining in the Café Royal, redeeming the ancient vow that we would dine together on the night when she was to make her first appearance in a play I had written for her. We had to dine very early, so that she could go on to the St. John’s Theatre, where Every Street was to try its luck. That was a thing we had not thought of in those days—how early that dinner must be—for we had been very innocent in matters of the theatre. We were learning. We had had difficulty in getting away. Everybody had wanted us: Jo and Josie, Livia, Sheila and Dermot, Rory and Maggie Donnelly. They were over, those two, on the first visit they had made to England since Rory’s Irish apprenticeship.
But Maeve and I had got away. We should all meet at supper, anyhow, to count our laurels or lick our wounds. We leaned back on the red plush, with coffee before us. I gave Maeve a cigarette and lit it for her.
“Nervous?”
She shook her head, and asked in her turn: “Happy?”
“Very—but with a fearful joy. Shivering in my shoes.”
“You did really write Every Street for me?” Maeve asked, suddenly clapping a hand over mine and looking into my face.
“Yes. Isn’t Annie Hargreaves your part—down to the bone?”
“I’m very pleased with it. Oh, Man, I’m so glad—so proud—this moment has come at last. But, you know,” with a valiant smile on her colourless face across which the scarlet of her lips made a vivid mark, “I didn’t think that when the moment came you’d be engaged to another woman.”
“My dear—” was all I could say.
She suddenly stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s go.”
*
If my engagement to Livia was painful to Maeve, it was incredible to me. It had happened so suddenly. It was on the night that I have written about, when I had a few people to dinner, that I knew I loved Livia. I had loved no woman before. I suppose I had come as near to loving Maeve as a man can come while yet feeling use and wont in the way, and an affection too level and kindly for passion.
When we went into the drawing-room that night after sitting for a while over our cigars, I was conscious that the first face I looked for was Livia’s and that the first face Livia looked for was Oliver’s. He walked straight up to where she was sitting, took the cigarette case from his pocket, and sprang it open expertly. She took a cigarette; he lit it for her, and she patted the settee on which she was sitting. He sat down beside her, plucking with a dandy gesture at the knees of his trousers. “Phœbus in black trousers.” That wasn’t bad, Wertheim.
Oliver had drunk no wine; I did not permit that; but his face was flushed and excited; his eyes shone; and the curls of his hair seemed almost to radiate vitality. No one, I thought to myself, could fail to be aware of his extraordinary physical attractiveness; and on the thought my mind pulled up with a jerk. Physical? That was the first time I had qualified, even in the secret thoughts of my heart, Oliver’s attractiveness.
But what else did I know of him but the envelope that met my eye? I faced that squarely, and admitted that we had grown apart. When he was a child, I grew down to him. I did not stoop down to him. There was no condescension. It was a growth, as though I had been endowed with the happy faculty of shedding my years. I enjoyed our games as much as he did, and the happy explorations of ideas that he had called our “conversations.”
There had been no “conversations” for a long time. It seemed to me that the time had come when my growth downwards towards Oliver’s mind must cease, and contact must now be established by his reaching up to me. He was on the verge of young manhood; I was ready, I was aching, to improve the first signs of his wanting me on wider, manlier terms. But there was no sign. Oliver the child had been my comrade. Oliver the youth had receded far from me. I saw him with sudden shattering clarity as beautiful, commonplace and vain.
It is a fearful thing when one love wars with another. Watching him and Livia, hearing no word they said, seeing the understanding in their looks, their smiling acceptance of one another that tortured me with implications of secrets, experiences shared, I felt my heart turning over, because I knew then that I wanted Livia Vaynol for myself, and that my desire for her, and nothing else, was depreciating Oliver in my eyes.
I knew that night, as I had theoretically known long enough, what it was to desire a woman. Liking, affection, even the brief stirring of passion that sweeps you into bed: since Nellie’s death I had known all those; but this was irrational, tyrannical, the dark fusing of body and mind in the desire to possess.
Dermot was quizzing Josie Wertheim about a legend that had come to his ears that once, when she had been gardening at Wertheim’s country cottage, she had chased down the village street, long garden fork in hand, a girl who had tried to intrude into the quiet of Wertheim’s week-end. “One jab and four punctures,” Dermot cried ecstatically. “How could a girl with such a spread of stern hope to get into a chorus? What a forkful of ham!”
“It was four jabs and one puncture,” Josie corrected. “That just shows the nonsense that gets about.”
Wertheim was telling Sheila about his mother in Constantinople. She was listening with her beautiful serenity, as though she and the mother were contemporaries and Wertheim a small boy.
I sat down beside Maeve. She put her hand over mine, a gesture she had used since childhood. “Well, Man,” she said, “it’s a lovely house, and it was a lovely dinner, and I thank you very much and hope you’ll be happy here.”
“I’m sure I shall,” I said, and I told her of the play I had written for her and of Josie’s encouragement.
“Does that please you?” I asked, patting her hand and looking down at the whiteness of her, rising out of the crimson velvet dress. Never any colour. White, sloping shoulders—perhaps a thought too thin—and the neck lifted up proudly between them, bearing the snow-white face, with its resolute little chin, its eyes that were both blue and black, like damsons, its red shapely mouth. Her hair was as black as coal, with no blue in it at all.
“Dear Bill,” she said—she did not call me Uncle Bill any more—“it pleases me very much, but now the idea of having me in the play has got to please Mr. Wertheim—hasn’t it?—if he likes it.”
“If he likes it, there is one condition on which he can have it,” I assured her. “And that is that Maeve O’Riorden plays Annie Hargreaves.”
“You’ve always thought of me, and thought for me. I should never have been on the stage if it hadn’t been for you.”
“And you still think being on the stage is the right thing?”
“Oh, Man, how can you ask!” The look and tone made me feel happy that there was something I had done about which there could be no doubt.
“Livia seems pleased with herself,” Maeve suddenly remarked, bringing my thoughts back to the focus round which they had been swaying. I looked across the room. Oliver had said something which left on his face a smile hovering between impertinence and doubt of its reception. Livia responded by reaching up a hand to tousle his hair. The whole scene bit into my mind: the long white arm, the sudden shift of the half-exposed breast, the fingers, sinking in Oliver’s curls, the light of affectionate raillery on Livia’s face. My hand gripped hard on Maeve’s, and she looked up with sharp surprise.
“Tell me,” I said. “What do you think of Livia?”
The surprise deepened on Maeve’s face. Her dark brows for a moment contracted and brought out a puckered frown that made my mind leap incongruously to a thought of Nellie. Then Maeve said: “She’s wanton.”
“Good God!” I cried. “What an old-fashioned word.”
“There are more modern ones,” said Maeve, and she got up at once to go and talk to Josie.
*
I threw the end of my cigar into the fire and walked across the room. Oliver rose from the settee. “I think perhaps Sheila would like a word with you,” I said. “You haven’t seen much of her this holiday.”
He went away, exchanging a bright smile with Livia. I sat down at her side, aware that my heart was knocking and that I should have difficulty in controlling my voice. I was overpoweringly aware of her; of the perfume of her hair, of the long white lines of her arms, meeting now in hands cupped in her lap, of the swell of her breasts and the shape of her legs, emphasised by the hands pressing down the rich material of her dress, stretching it tight across her thighs.
“I should like to drive you home tonight,” I said, and to me the words had a choked unnatural sound. She appeared not to notice that. “I had arranged for a taxi to call for me,” she said.
“For you and Maeve?”
“No. Maeve’s going home with her people for once.”
Then the room and everyone in it seemed for a moment to black out. I was aware only of Livia’s hands lying in her lap, of her calm voice saying: “Maeve’s going home with her people for once.”
I was hardly conscious that it was myself speaking when I said: “Taxis have been sent away before now.”
“Or even shared.”
The words brought me to myself again with an extraordinary sting of hope. “You mean—?”
Her only answer was a clear ringing laugh. For one dreadful moment I thought she was going to tousle my hair as she had tousled Oliver’s. Then a parlourmaid came in and announced: “Miss Vaynol’s taxi.”
She got up. “Good-bye. And thank you a thousand times. A lovely evening.”
*
Wertheim and the play kept me busy throughout that holiday of Oliver’s. I didn’t see much of Oliver except at meals. We went to a pantomime together, but it was a poor thing compared with the Manchester pantomimes; and once or twice we walked together on the Heath. But we never got near one another. He was at a stage which baffled me. I could not meet him on a child’s ground any more, because he was not a child; and he did not seem to have advanced a step towards meeting me on my ground.
Walking among the gnarled thorns with their winter-rusty haws, watching the grey squirrels nip from bough to bough, I thought his eyes were as bright, unresting, as theirs; and he was as difficult to get hold of.
“You’ll be finishing at school in a year or so, Oliver.”
“Good egg.”
“What about the university? Have you thought about that? Have you any reason for preferring Oxford to Cambridge, or for not wanting to go to either?”
“Pogson’s going to Oxford.”
“Yes, but you?”
“Oh, I dunno. Is it a point to settle just yet?”
“Well, I’d like to see ahead a bit. There’s the possibility that that sort of thing may not interest you at all. I don’t think one should go to a university just for the fun of it.”
“You mean the place should be kept for the good old swotters?”
“Well—I mean if we knew what you wanted to do, we could settle the best way to go about it. You might want to do something which made the Manchester College of Technology the place for you.”
“Oh, God forbid! Manchester! Have a heart.”
“Well, the law? Medicine—?”
“Isn’t there plenty of time to make up my mind?”
I had to leave it at that.
The path dropped sharply into a little hollow, a basin carpeted that December afternoon with sodden leaves, brown and yellow, and filled with mist in which the tree trunks were twisted gnomelike. A youth, with his checked cap knocked askew, was sitting on a fallen trunk, awkwardly clutching his girl, whose hair was radiant with a dew of pearls. We plunged down so suddenly upon them, lost in their wraithy world, that the girl looked up with sharp surprise and fear in eyes like a fawn’s, then buried her face in the boy’s neck. I hurried on, striking out at the leaves and flints with my stick, and as we reached the farther lip of the hollow Oliver momentarily paused, looked back, and I felt that if I hadn’t been there he would have stopped and stared. Well, there was something he was interested in.
He continued to spend a lot of time sitting about in his room. I noted that Oppenheim’s The Mysterious Mr. Sabin and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were added to his library. Occasionally Pogson called for him with a car. They would smoke a cigarette or two in Oliver’s room. There would be a lot of guffawing, and then off they would go. If I asked Oliver at dinner where they had been, he would reply: “Oh, we just belted about. Poggy can make her go!”
Pogson, pimply, with a downy upper lip, was a brewer’s son. I didn’t like him. He was at Oliver’s school and was leaving at the end of the summer term. He looked to me as though he should already have left.
How much Oliver was seeing of Livia, where he saw her, I never inquired. She turned up at St. Pancras to see him off when the holiday was over. I was surprised to see her there. He introduced her proudly and proprietorially to Pogson whom she stared at as though he were a slug she had found unpardonably intruding on her cabbage at dinner. Oliver looked hurt, and whispered: “He’s Pogson of Pogson’s Entire,” as though that were almost equivalent to being Hodson of Hodson’s Horse. “I don’t care a damn whether he’s entire or in little pieces,” said Livia warmly. “Of the two I should prefer the latter.” Oliver’s blue eyes turned sulky, but she was very sweet with him and he went away, happy and smiling, with Pogson’s loathsome countenance—Hyperion and the satyr—craning out above his through the carriage window.
Livia and I walked together out of the station, steamy and echoing with an incoming train. It was the first chance I had had to speak to her since the night of the dinner-party. I could have made a chance, but I had carefully refrained from doing so. I had told myself that I would wait till Oliver was gone, and now Oliver was gone—he was gone no farther than the tunnel beyond the station, but he was gone—and there was Livia at my side.
*
I said to her: “I’ve been working over a play with Wertheim.”
“Yes. Maeve told me about it.”
“Wertheim and I have done all that’s possible together. I must finish it off alone now. I can do it in a fortnight.”
“Good. I hope it will be a whacking success.”
“I shall take it down to Heronwater tomorrow. I’ve never been there in the winter. Would you like to come with me?”
“You’d never work with me about the place.”
“Oh, yes, I should. I can do all that’s necessary by working between nine in the morning and one o’clock. Authorship, you know, is one of the soft jobs, though authors like to pretend that it’s arduous.”
We stood beside my car, exchanging this banal chat, while my heart was beating so furiously that I wondered whether it could be heard by Martin, standing there with his face politely averted.
“I’ve heard a lot about the pains of creation,” said Livia, keeping the game going.
“All nonsense. A professional writer who can’t turn out a thousand words in a few hours is a bad workman. And think what that means. A thousand words a day; three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Give the poor hard-working chap the sixty-five days to play with—that’s two months’ holiday a year, and he still produces 300,000 words! Enough to fill three novels—more than anyone has a right to ask the public to accept. No. The successful novelist is on a soft option.”
“Well,” with a little embarrassed laugh, “thank you for the inside information. Wasn’t that Pogson child loathsome?”
“I’m beginning to be troubled altogether about Oliver’s friends.”
She cocked her head up at me sharply. “Do you want my companionship in Cornwall to see whether I’m worthy? I’m not sure that I ought to come, anyway. My reputation’s bad enough as it is.”
I took her by the elbow and led her along the pavement, away from the car. “Would it help to regularise the position if we were engaged to be married?”
She came to a halt, and gave a restless shake to her body. “Oh, send that blasted car away,” she said. “We can’t talk about these things walking like a couple of fools in front of all this—this ghastly—” She helplessly waved a hand at the monstrous, the monumental, ugliness of the station façade.
So I sent Martin away, and we walked out into the hardly more inspiring atmosphere of the Euston Road, where the buses roared by and the taxis honked, and we were beset on either hand by that filthy and unco-ordinated thoroughfare. A grey gritty wind was blowing, and a sky of blotched unpolished pewter pressed upon the roofs. We walked towards Marylebone.
“For the best part of last year,” I said, “I was gallivanting about the loveliest places in Europe. If you had been with me, I could have proposed to you on the pont d’Avignon, or on the ramparts of Montreuil, or in an olive field looking over the Mediterranean, or beside a lake in Sweden, or on the shores of the Bosphorus. As it is, I propose in a gritty January wind in the Euston Road, with those awful caryatides holding up the church across the street.”
“Listen, Bill,” she said, taking my arm snugly, “cut out all the pretty things, and look at the grisly facts. I wanted to like you from the beginning. You remember—when you were in the nursing-home in Manchester and I motored Maeve up?”
I nodded.
“Well, I did like you. I knew your work, and I liked that. You didn’t have much to say that day, you know. You were not brilliant, and I liked that, too. I loathe talking to people who try to make every phrase sound as though it’s the one good thing Oscar Wilde forgot to say to Whistler. I couldn’t live with a person like that.”
“That’s lucky for me.”
“But, you see, that was just an elementary first impression. After all, we were only together for a few hours, and then Oliver came along.”
“And that altered things.”
“That altered things.”
“Are you—are you—in love with Oliver?”
“I think all day about his beauty. I don’t know whether I’m in love with him or not, but he obsesses me.”
“Have you seen much of him this holiday?”
“Very little. I’m not so bad as Maeve thinks.” She said that rather bitterly. “I have tried to do without him.”
We walked on without speaking for a while, and facing into the dour gritty wind I thought suddenly of a night long ago when Dermot and I had sat up late under a swinging lamp in his workshop, arranging the fate of our sons who were not born. “If I have a son,” I said, “I just want him to have everything. I’ll work my fingers to the bone to give him every damn thing he asks for, and seeing him enjoying it, I’ll enjoy it myself and live my life over again.” The words rattled dryly in my memory like the soiled scraps of paper rasping dryly along the gutter in the wind. I found no comfort in them. Now Oliver was asking for Livia, and I was not enjoying it.
Was he asking for her? Well, here was a point where Give, Give, Give, came to an end, and I began to question the demand. That Oliver was infatuated was clear. That night on the Percuil River. The excited glances that I had caught between him and Livia. But what did it all come to? Calf love. Hay fever. The traditional explanations marshalled themselves obediently to my aid. Let him wait, find a woman of his age.
Or was this the one thing that mattered? What if the truth were this: that I might with impunity have refused him all those advantages—those superfluities?—he had till now enjoyed, but that here was something come at last which I should refuse him at his peril? At my peril? At the peril of everything there had ever been between us? I wouldn’t allow myself to work it out. Not then. I have worked it out since, walking again in imagination that arid road, with the ghosts of Maeve and Rory and Oliver blowing beside me down the bitter wind. And the ghost of the man I never knew; for if our deeds determine anything, the fourth ghost, too, was predestined from that day.
It seemed a long time since either of us had spoken. We walked on, with her hand resting on my arm, a contact which I found unbearably dear, unbearably precious. Once she removed it, and I took it and put it back, and patted it, and said: “Let it stay there.”
She was tall, I think I have told you, and free-striding like a fawn, and that day she was wearing a brown skirt and an astrakhan coat and hat, Russian-looking. The wind had whipped colour into her cheeks, and I suppose the colour was heightened by the agitation of the moment.
At last she said: “I didn’t know you were so serious about it,” and the words were rather hoarse and strained, as though the constriction of my own throat had communicated itself to her.
“I have never been so serious in my life,” I said unsteadily. “I’m terribly in love with you, Livia. I’ve never loved a woman before. Do you believe that? I’ve never known any of the things that I imagine marriage to mean.”
“It’s a hell of a fix,” she said with a shaky laugh. “Why do you think I shall be able to give you the things you’ve lacked?”
“Oh, don’t ask me to reason about it. My first marriage, believe me, was completely reasonable.”
“You don’t know me. You don’t know what a bad lot I am.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I must say it. At least let me be honest. Let me stand up and shout in your fool’s paradise.”
“No, no. Take me or leave me. I’m willing to take you.”
“I’m terribly susceptible to men. There! Now I’ve said it.”
“I didn’t hear it.”
“The more fool you.”
“Will you marry me, poor fool as I am?”
“If I married you, it would be because I liked you and because you were a very distinguished man. I’m vain. But you see, I’m honest. Oh, God,” she added, “I wish you weren’t Oliver’s father!”
“Can’t you forget Oliver, or think about him differently?”
“I don’t know how I think about him. Why don’t you wait? We’re in a tangle. It will clear itself up if you give it time. Why don’t you? You see, you offer such tremendous inducements. It’s a pressure upon me. I don’t think it’s fair.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me.” I called a taxi, and set her down a few moments later at the door of her flat. She looked shaken and excited, standing there waiting to wave to me as I turned the corner into Baker Street.
*
Martin drove me down to Heronwater the next day. How different from the first journey! We had gone by train from Manchester. Nellie... Sheila... Dermot... all the children... maids... luggage. What a business! “Good-bye, Belle Vue!” And, of course, it was summertime, holiday-time, time without a care. How different!
“A bad day, sir,” Martin said, when I came out to the car after a very early breakfast. It was. The Heath was a cheerless place under the rain; the sky seemed to be on top of our heads. All England lay under the weeping; the day got no better, no worse, as we went westward.
I didn’t sit with Martin, as I usually did; I sat behind, looking through the streaming windows at flooded ditches, and bare dripping trees, and villages that flashed by with their shoulders greyly hunched, and the downs, dull as slate, losing their heads in vast convolutions of creeping mist.
The whole world seemed inimical, and Cornwall, when we came to it in the last washed-out dregs of daylight, was a forlorn and fabulous province that seemed to resent intrusion. I had wanted to put up at Plymouth, but Martin made it a matter of pride to reach Heronwater that night. His headlights reached out into the gloom and through them the incessant arrows of the rain rushed from darkness to darkness. I pulled down the blind in front of me, wearied by their hypnotic attraction, and then it was as though I were in a dark box, hurtling through chaos.
The wind got up, strengthened quickly, and hurled the rain against the windows in gusty, pebbly handfuls. I could feel the push of the wind on the car, sudden powerful blows that made me uneasy despite her great strength and weight. I was utterly lost, completely confounded, and when, now and then, the lighted window of a cottage or the sparsely scattered lights of a hamlet shone briefly through the dark glass, there was no comfort in them, but only a will o’ the wisp eeriness from which I was glad to be flying.
I gave it up; I left it to Martin; despite the now bellowing wind and the undiminished ferocity of the rain, I must somehow have slept, for the crunch of the tyres on gravel, the gentle sliding to immobility, jerked me up like a blow. Martin’s face was at the open door of the car—a face that, even after those gruelling hours, seemed unchanged save for a smile of quiet pride. “We’re here, sir,” he announced. “She’s a grand car.”
“A grand car would have been precious little use without a grand driver,” I said. “I’m glad we didn’t stop at Plymouth. Thank you.”
The door was open, and Sam Sawle was standing there under the light. “Bring me my gum-boots and oilskin,” I shouted. They were always kept just within the door. Sam brought them out and I stepped into them right away. “Glad to see you, Mr. Essex,” he said.
“And I’m glad to see you. I’ll be in in a moment. Put the car away, Martin, and get something hot into you.”
I squelched across the wet lawn to the stone balustrade. I wanted to see my Cornwall on this winter night—the first winter night I had spent there. I rested my hands on the cold stone that I had always known honey-mellow, warm and ripe with summer. The rain pattered on my oilskin. The wind roared through the dark gulf into which I looked: roared through the leafless trees, roared over the dark water that I could not see. I looked up and could see the tortured branches, a darker black against the blackness of the night, lashing and thrashing, and no star shone upon their frenzied dance. But down on the water that I could not see, incredibly calm amid the mad carnival of the elements, two orange squares of light lay side by side, and I wondered what riot of emotion was stirring the brain of Captain Judas this night behind those placid faces.
I turned to go back to the house, then stood as if rooted to the ground, leaning back, gripping the wet balustrade with both hands thrust behind me. I had seen her looking white and tired, waving to me as I turned into Baker Street. The day’s apocalyptic journey seemed to have set a gulf between that moment and this that could not easily be bridged.
“It can’t be you!” I said foolishly, and indeed in the hissing of the rain and the howling of the wind, in the intense darkness of that spot on the topmost edge of the falling wood, it was hard to make out the features of the face that glimmered whitely before me.
“Yes,” said Livia.
“But, my child—my dear—in such a night! What are you wearing?” I reached out my hand and felt the fragility of the dress, sodden with rain, gummed to her body.
“I’m being melodramatic.” Her laugh was low and provoking. “I wanted to surprise you. Have I done it?”
I took her suddenly in both arms and drew her to me, straining her to the creaking armour that I wore. She threw back her head, and I crushed my mouth upon her wet mouth, and upon her hair and her throat. She was dripping like a dryad, and I kissed the rain out of her eyes. Then I picked her up and waded awkwardly in those great boots of mine through the wet grass. She was easy to carry for all her weight. I put her down in the porch and saw that her eyes were starry. “For God’s sake, go and change,” I said. “You’ll catch your death.” The rain had sleeked her like a seal. She kicked off her soaking shoes and ran upstairs.
I took off my gum-boots and oilskin, and Sawle brought me some slippers. I was dazed by what had happened. I followed Sawle into my study. A log fire roared; the curtains were drawn; I felt elated, like a child that has come on some uncovenanted pleasure.
“When did Miss Vaynol come?”
“She’s been here some time, Mr. Essex. She came by train to Truro and then on by car. She’s been having a fine laugh, saying give her trains any day to beat cars on a long run.”
“You shouldn’t have let her go out, dressed like that.”
“I don’t have the dressing of her, Mr. Essex, and as for going out, I didn’t know she had gone.”
“Well—right. You’ve got this place looking very comfortable.”
“And a bath ready for you, too, but by the sound of things someone’s got it before you.”
Bless the girl, let her have the bath. I was dry enough. I went up to my room to wash, and while I did so Sawle unpacked my bag.
“Well, how do you like winter visitors?” I asked him. “You’re not used to this.”
“I’ll manage, Mr. Essex,” he said confidently, “though I didn’t expect two of you. I thought there’d just be you to look after, and I reckoned Martin and I could do that between us, cooking an’ all. But when Miss Vaynol come, that was a different story. ‘I reckon you can take the cooking off my hands,’ I said to her.”
“Quite right. And what did she say to that?”
“She said ‘So long as you cook the breakfast, I’ll do the rest. I’m a poor getter-up.’ Well, that suits me. I reckon I can knock up a bit of breakfast.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“As for dinner tonight, I cooked most of it, but Miss Vaynol did some fancy bits.”
“For example?”
“Well, I roasted a shoulder of lamb, and she made onion sauce. Then I thought you’d like some bread and cheese, but she said biscuits and cheese, with what she calls Charlotte russ to come first. She’s been a long time messing about with that. She pinched some of the best brandy for it. And she said perhaps she’d better make the coffee. I was surprised to find her so keen on playing about in the kitchen. She wasn’t like that in the summer when she was here—when you wasn’t, you know, Mr. Essex. Mrs. Essex, now—I could understand that. She was always a one for the kitchen.” He looked at me shyly. “I was sorry about that.”
It was only then that I remembered I had not seen Sawle since Nellie’s death. “She was all right, was Mrs. Essex,” he said. “And didn’t that chap Donnelly know how to bring her out!”
He hovered round for a while, turned down the sheets of the bed, then made off, announcing that his shoulder of lamb would be just about done.
I sat down in a chair and listened to the tumult of the storm. Now that Sawle’s slow steady voice was gone there was nothing else to listen to: the rain dashing with an angry hiss at the window, the wind raving in the trees. But now I could listen without disturbance, with comfort even, savouring the rich contrast of the wild weather without and the peace within—the peace and the sure, unobtrusive companionship of Sawle and Martin. And Livia.
She was already in the study when I went down. She was standing with a bare arm white on the mantelpiece, a foot on the fender, looking into the fire. She was wearing that dress of night-blue fabric sown with silver stars which she had worn in Manchester. The train flowed over the hearthrug in lovely lines.
When I entered the room she turned, her face lighted by a welcoming smile. “It’s more than a year,” I said, “since I first—and last—saw you in that dress. I’m glad you don’t throw away your clothes too quickly. I shall always love you in that.”
She kicked her train into position and glanced down her slender body appraisingly, to the tiny slippers peeping from beneath the hem of the dress. “My own design,” she said, “my own make. I think I could earn a living as a dressmaker.”
“There seem to be so many things you could earn a living at,” I said, passing her a glass of sherry.
“Yes; and I stick to none of them.” She sighed. “You see, I’m inconstant.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to constancy. There’s nothing I admire more.”
“Here’s to Livia, and constancy.”
Sam Sawle entered and announced: “The lamb’s on the table, Mr. Essex. Eat it while it’s hot.”
“How I love servants who are not flunkeys,” Livia whispered. I agreed with that. We went in to dinner.
*
I filled my pipe and settled in a big chair by the study fire. Livia poured out the coffee which stood on a small table between us. A tall standard lamp with a shade of loose-hanging primrose silk shed a soft light to augment the light of the flames leaping in the chimney. Now and then a sharp hiss of rain upon flame reminded us that the storm was not over, but the wind had ceased to buffet. It had fallen to an occasional rumble in the throat of the night.
“Ever since I bought Heronwater,” I said, “I have imagined what it would be like to come down here in the winter, work all day long with no one but Sam Sawle to look after me, and to spend long evenings, tired out, sitting alone under this lamp, reading all the books I ought to read. Well, here I am under the lamp. But I am not alone. Why?”
Livia sipped her coffee. “Of all the men! Didn’t you invite me?”
“I formed a painful impression that my invitation had been refused.”
“But I’ve told you, I’m a very inconstant and changeable woman. You must learn never to take me at my word. If I had accepted, you might even now be enjoying your heart’s desire—reading all those books that one ought to read but never does: Grote’s Greece, Gibbon’s Rome, Motley’s Dutch Republics, oh, and those dingy little rows and rows of bound volumes of the Spectator that go for thirty shillings the set in the second-hand bookshops... Poof!” She tossed her fingers at her hair. “May I have a cigarette?”
I gave her one, and lit it. “Well, now that the preliminary is achieved, tell me—why did you change your mind and come?”
She drew in the smoke, exhaled it in a slow deliberate plume, considering my face thoughtfully. “You are one of those men who will not accept the accomplished fact. They must have all the reasons. Was that not an accomplished fact, in the garden, when you held me in your arms? Oh, dear! I have never before been hugged by a man in oilskins. I should hate to be a sailor’s bride.”
“You are not serious,” I said resentfully.
Livia got up and threw her cigarette into the fire. “Serious!” she cried, suddenly dead white with seriousness. “Why should I be serious? Is there anything to be serious about? Isn’t it self-evident that when a girl has to choose between a schoolboy of sixteen who will probably be nothing, whom she knows to be as conceited as the devil and as greedy as hell—when she has to choose between that and a famous wealthy man, I ask you, isn’t it self-evident that she’ll choose the man? Let her do it without worrying her for reasons. What reasons can there be? One would think you were afraid of what Oliver could do against you. You’re not, are you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not a question of fear—”
“Right. So long as you’re sure of that. Here I am. I’m yours. It’s your job to keep me now you’ve got me.”
I had risen, too, and I put my arms about her and felt her head sink on to my shoulder. She began to cry without restraint. I held her close and whispered comforting words to her. My heart was smitten to see her so distressed. “Don’t keep on w-worrying me about r-reasons,” she sobbed. “I want to b-be fixed—safe.”
“You’ll be safe. You’ll be safe,” I murmured, “as safe as love can make you.”
She looked up at me with eyes brimful of tears. “Oh, Bill! I do like you so much. If I loved you, it would be wonderful.”
“You will. You will,” I promised her.
She managed a smile, reached up her lips to be kissed, and said: “Let me go to bed now. I’m tired out.”
*
In the morning there was no sign of the storm. The rain had ceased, the wind was gone. I looked from my bedroom window through the trees down towards the river. The trees were snared in nets of mist. The air was still and full of the drip and dribble of falling drops.
I went about my affairs with a head buzzing with thoughts of Livia. I commended to myself everything that I had done. It was excellent all round. She had said she wanted to be safe. She should be safe. What greater safety could there be than in marriage to a solid established person like myself? As for me, I wanted the woman—wanted her in every sense of the word. She obsessed my imagination as no other woman had done. The way she walked, how she looked, the way she spoke, the way her hair sat on her head and her hat sat on her hair; everything about her, the great things and the little things, had taken on for me the magical and momentous proportions of obsession. There was no arguing about it.
And Oliver? Well, it was best for Oliver, too, I comfortably assured myself. The idea of Oliver at sixteen being in love with a girl of twenty-one was monstrous, absurd. If I helped to cure him of premature notions romantic, so much the better.
I went down to breakfast and found Livia there before me, already busy with coffee and eggs and bacon. She kissed me, rather dutifully I thought. “Now,” I teased her, holding her tight, “a warmer kiss than that.”
She sat down at the table. “You’re lucky to get a kiss at all,” she said, “coming down to breakfast at this hour. Shall I pour you some coffee? I thought I should have to go without seeing you.”
“Go!” I said in dismay. “What do you mean—go?”
“Clear out. Partir. Vamoose. Abscond,” she replied, buttering a roll. “Can you spare Martin to take me in to Truro?”
“But why Truro at this time of day?”
“Because the train to Paddington stops there.”
“But today! The first day of our engagement? I thought we’d get about—see things.”
“You see! I told you you’d do no work with me about! No. As soon as I’m gone, you’ll settle down to your work. Please. Look what a lovely wretched day it is! Perfect for work.”
“Will you make a habit of running off just when I want you?” I asked miserably.
“I’m the most impulsive creature in the world. I don’t make habits. So you see, you’ll never be just one of my habits. That should be gratifying to a husband.”
She said it charmingly, but I was inclined to sulk. She shook a finger under my nose. “William Essex,” she said, “you’re no end of a great man and all that sort of thing; and I’ve told you frankly that, in getting me for a wife, that has been useful to you. But—I’m not allowing my great celebrated man to sulk and frown over what I choose to do. I won’t have that any more than if you were a Covent Garden porter. Now, what about Martin? My bag’s packed, and there’s just time to catch the train.”
I ordered the car. She gave me a much warmer kiss than the first one, and a moment later she was gone.
I had never formulated the thought, but deep in my mind, whenever I had considered the question of a second wife, had been the idea of someone completely different from Nellie. Well, it looked as though I had got what I wanted. And this very property of airy lightness, of incalculability, strangely charmed me as I made my way to my study and straightened out the notes for Act I of Every Street.
“You can see across the river now, Mr. Essex,” Sawle said as I was getting up from lunch. “You can read Captain Judas’s announcements.”
I slithered down the path to the landing-stage. The black hulk of the Jezebel loomed up through the still murky night. Painted in scarlet upon the planks of the hull I read: “The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord cometh.” “Sheep—rejoice! Goats—ah-ha!”
I didn’t like that last grim chuckle. The old man seemed to be smacking his lips as he contemplated the discomfiture of the unredeemed. I had intended to call on him, but this new turn was not encouraging.
“Have you seen much of the captain lately?” I asked Sawle, who had accompanied me to the water’s edge.
“Not so much, except when he was hanging overside painting that up.”
“It’s a long time since I saw him.”
“Ay, but he saw plenty of Oliver last summer when you wasn’t here. They were as thick as thieves. There was a night when Oliver didn’t turn up. Got stranded. You may have heard of that, Mr. Essex?”
I nodded briefly.
“Well, we were all pretty well worked up. Old Judas heard about it overnight—that they were missing. We didn’t know till the next day, but the old madman was out all night. What d’you think of that? Out all night, rowing about in a dinghy at his age! It was moonlight.”
“Yes, I heard so.”
“Well, he rowed from here to the Percuil river. Right down the roads, round by St. Mawes Castle, and right up the river! At his age! He was pretty well done up, I can tell you. And he found Oliver all right. What d’you think of that? Animal instinct, I call it. They took him on to the Maeve and gave him a ride back, towing his dinghy behind their own. I was down here when they come in. He stood up in the bows, waving his hat and shouting ‘The Lord’s anointed cometh! We have found the Lord’s anointed.’ Mr. O’Riorden said he’d like to do the anointing with strap oil.”
“It might have been a good thing,” I conceded, and Sawle grunted, “Ay, maybe.”
We gazed across the water at the enigmatic shell of the Jezebel.
“It was a pretty poor party altogether last year,” Sawle said at last, “without you and Mrs. Essex and Rory and Maeve. I missed Maeve. They tell me she’s becoming quite a famous woman.”
“She’s getting on.”
“She’s all right, she is. She’s a grand ’un. I missed her most. And I wouldn’t mind seeing that Mr. Donnelly again. He was a caution. They say Rory’s living with him now in Ireland. That’s a funny idea.”
But I was not prepared to discuss the humour of that idea with Sam Sawle. “I think I’ll pull across and see Captain Judas,” I said. “He’s bound to find out that I’m here, and he’ll expect me.”
I pulled the dinghy across the water in the utter stillness of the hushed, grey afternoon. There was no sign of life aboard. The ladder had been hauled in. The windows were fastened. The day was so quiet that I didn’t like to shout, and as I hesitated there, looking up at the frieze of gulls that decorated the rail, I made up my mind to suggest to Judas that he should arrange a bell, with the pull-rope hanging overboard. “You see, if anyone tries to surprise you by swarming up the rope, that will automatically ring the bell. If they’re unwelcome visitors, you can easily slash the rope and drop ’em into the river.” I’d put it to him like that.
I had to shout at last, sending the gulls wheeling and crying, and my voice echoing down the misty tunnel of the river. Then Judas came, his hair and beard seeming more abundant than ever, his eye more glittery, the caution with which he peered over the rail as great as a most nervous beast would use, fearing an enemy presence.
“Essex here!” I shouted, standing up in the dinghy with one hand on the Jezebel’s side, and gazing upward at that wild apocalyptic headpiece, white against the grey ambiguity of the sky. The anxious face cleared, and the voice came down to me as thin as ever, but warm and welcoming. He threw open the port in the bulwarks, dropped the ladder, and a moment later I had scrambled aboard. He pulled up the ladder and closed the door, then took me by both hands. He didn’t come much higher than my shoulder, but there he stood like some game bantam, fierce yet joyous, driving his one piercing eye into my face. He was, as always, impeccably clean; a triangle of white handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket of his navy-blue jacket.
He had heard of my travels, and when he had taken me below he was all agog for news of the ports I had visited. The rest of my story didn’t interest him, but Havre and Marseilles, Stockholm and Copenhagen, Constantinople and Naples: all these were evidently bells in his head and they rang old tunes that he was glad to hear.
This was the first time I had been aboard the Jezebel in the winter, and I praised the captain’s quarters sincerely. The big room was as cosy as the snug of an old inn, with the fire burning brightly and the cushioned settles on either side of it inviting to repose.
“I think I could work better here than across at Heronwater,” I said.
“Ay, one can work,” he agreed. “But when will the work end? There is so much—so much. I did not get on very well with the Greek.”
I expressed my sorrow, and assured him, without seeing how it could comfort him, that I knew none of it.
“But now it’s going better,” he said. “I am in league with the enemy.”
He looked at me craftily. “Light your pipe and listen,” he said; and he told me how he had bought book after book, but the cursed language would not yield its secrets. So in Truro he had looked out a curate who was glad to augment his doubtless wretched stipend by giving him lessons in Greek. This had been going on twice a week now for a year. “Poor fool, I think. Little do you know whom you are entertaining unawares! But I sit there quietly and suck his brains, and it’s all high explosive—all dynamite.” The captain chuckled in his beard. “Woosh! Bang! Wallop! But,” he added despondently, “it’s slow work.”
He had decided that he must make his own translation of the Greek Testament. He produced his work, which had not yet advanced very far into the first chapter of the first Gospel. Already, it appeared, he had discovered enormous discrepancies between the Greek and the accepted translation, and it was not for me to inquire whether the mistakes were possibly his.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, John,” he said. “But where is Peter? Not a word did that fellow commit to paper. Peter! Fishmonger! Probably he couldn’t write. But we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll get him yet. Old Judas is on his trail. Ta-ta to the Triple Tiara. Excuse me a moment. I’ll make a note of that. It’s a good heading for a chapter.”
He wrote for a while in a book that he took from his breast pocket, then asked: “And how is the Lord God? Has He announced the date of His Second Coming?”
I looked at him coldly, and he shook his head. “It has not been revealed unto him,” he murmured; and then, with that quick birdlike agility of his, he leapt to his feet, putting the whole matter from him. “Tea!” he cried. “Come and see the galley.” And, as sane as any man in Christendom, he proudly pointed to the good work he had been doing with the paintbrush, making the walls of his galley shine.
In this happier, less exalted mood, we sat down to tea, looking out through the window at the winter-grey river, where a few white gulls dipped and flashed, and at the close-congregated skeletons of the trees on the opposite banks. It was then that I suggested the bell-pull to him. He discussed the idea very intelligently, pointing out that to bring the rope through the deck to a bell in his sitting-room, he would have to bore a hole in his deck and that would let in the rain. But he could overcome this difficulty, he said, by fixing a wire to the rope and passing the wire through the deck. That would need only an infinitesimal puncture. And, so keenly did the old man’s mind welcome anything to keep it in the realm of sanity, by the next day he had carried through the whole scheme. Being on the river in my dinghy, I saw him at the root of his ladder hauling on the rope and through his open window could hear the clear answer of the bell.
*
It had been my idea to be at my desk every morning at nine, to work till one, to spend the afternoon out of doors, and to read every night after dinner. But things didn’t work out like that after all. I began each day by writing to Livia. I found that there was an immense amount to say; the letter usually took an hour to write. Everything I had done and seen, the progress of the work; it all had to be told. I felt it was only half realised till it was shared with Livia. And when the letter was written I couldn’t get Livia out of my mind, so that it was not before eleven o’clock that I could begin work. Thus it came about that there was no reading, after all. I had to make up after dinner for the dilatory morning.
Livia replied regularly every day. Every time I read one of her letters, I had that feeling: that it was a reply. She never opened out, never let herself go; she just took my points and answered them or commented upon them. She was glad the weather was not too bad. She was delighted that the play was making progress. She was dismayed to find that writing to her was interfering with my work. So her letters went: always short, always subscribed “Yours with much love.”
There were only two points that were, so to speak, from Livia to me. “By the way, Maeve finds the flat rather small. She has decided she ought to have a place of her own. I told her, of course, about us. You wanted that, didn’t you? Yours with much love, Livia.”
That was one point, and I felt, somehow, I would rather have told Maeve myself. I ought to have told Maeve myself.
The second point was this. “By the way, I have just received a letter from Oliver, and it is pretty clear that he knows nothing about our engagement. Will you tell him, or shall I? Personally, I’d rather you did. Yours with much love, Livia.”
*
“My dear Oliver,—Livia Vaynol and I are engaged to be married...”
Dreadfully abrupt! “You may be surprised to know that Livia and I...”
“My dear Oliver,—I have noticed that ever since you met Livia Vaynol you have felt affectionately towards her, and I think, therefore you will be pleased to know...”
Pleased! My God! Would he be!
“It is now more than a year since your mother died...”
I tore that up, too.
*
“MY DEAREST LIVIA,—You said that by being here you would make it difficult for me to work. I wonder if you realise how much more difficult your being away makes it! If you were here, I could look up and say to myself: ‘There she is—sitting in that chair—reading that book.’ And then I would bend over my work again and get on like a house on fire. Or I would know that you were on the river, or gone into Truro to buy chops for dinner, or were giving Captain Judas a taste of heaven.
But as it is, I am unable to get through an hour without asking myself a hundred questions. Is she up yet? Is she brushing that lovely, absurd, adorable, altogether delicious poofy hair? Is she going shopping in Oxford Street? Oh, God! Let her be careful at the corners! Don’t let her be run over! Is she thinking—just one small crumb of thought spared for that humble sparrow, her bloke—is she thinking of him, working on his play, doing everything he knows to make it good, so that when the crowds get up and cheer on the first night, Livia will be pleased?
Oh, my love, do believe that all day long and every day a thousand, a million, loving, absurd and tender thoughts of you fly about in my head. God! What a fate for an eminent novelist—to be an aviary! That’s what I am, my love, a crazy cage filled with cheeping, chirping, fluttering thoughts of Livia Vaynol. You could still the whole riot with a kiss; but there you are, so unaware of your power to soothe me that you think your being away keeps my mind easy. Absurd delusion! I shall know no peace till I am home again and my love in my arms.
I’m glad you haven’t told Oliver of our engagement. I intended to do so myself, but have now decided that it would be better to wait till I see him again. There’s no reason why he should know at once. The Easter holidays are not so far off as all that. Don’t you agree?
The play goes well. After all, having written it once, and having talked it over so thoroughly with Wertheim and made such sheaves of notes, there’s little to be done but write what is already clear in my mind. I sent Wertheim the first act, and he is very pleased with it. The second goes to him today. The third I begin to write tonight. I find writing at night here is delightful. Not a sound but the fire and an occasional moan of wind. Whatever time it is when I finish, I go out for five minutes’ air before turning in to dream of Livia, and my fellow scribe Judas has always outstayed me! This morning, it was one o’clock. His lights were burning steadily. What concentration there is when everything is focused to a point of madness!
But hurrah! and three big cheers for the glorious sanity of my love for Livia Vaynol!
For ever and ever your lover, servant, husband, BILL.”
*
“MY DEAR BILL,—Yes, perhaps it would be better if you told Oliver when you next see him. How good to know that you find Heronwater so congenial to your work and that Mr. Wertheim likes the first act! I’m sure he’ll like the second, too, and that you’ll soon be through with the third.
I find it hard to believe that my being with you would make all that difference, and you may rest assured I’m very careful of buses!
Poor Captain Judas! What a sad case he is! So sane at times, and terribly fond of Oliver. He seems to idolise him.
Maeve has found a flat and moves out tomorrow. She asked if we would be getting married soon. In that case, she would have stayed on and kept the flat after I had left. But I said we should not be hurrying things. Don’t you agree? Yours with much love, LIVIA.”
*
“MY DEAR FATHER,—I’m afraid this letter will disappoint you because it is to ask whether I may be permitted not to come home at all in the Easter holidays. You know that Pogson is leaving school when we break up for the summer, so this coming holiday will probably be the last when he will have much use for me. I mean, when he goes to Oxford he will meet older people, and after all he’s two years older than I am.
His people have a place in Scotland, and Pogson would like me to go up there this hols. There would be no point in coming south first, as all Pogson’s people will be picking him up here and going on by car.
The point is, Pogson’s people have a yacht up there in Scotland, and Pogson always goes up in the Easter hols, and helps to overhaul her for the summer because he’s a practical seaman and likes doing these things himself. It’s not as though he couldn’t afford to have it done for him if he wanted.
I should very much like to be up there in Scotland with Pogson and to see this yacht and learn something from Pogson about overhauling a yacht. It’s a steam yacht, and I only know about small sailing and motor-boats. Pogson says we might even cruise a little in the yacht if the weather is fine and if his people agree.
If you agree to this, would you be so kind as to have my dinner suit sent on when I give you the address, as Pogson says they dress for dinner, and you will know, of course, how much money you ought to send me, and you might give me a hint about the scale of tipping when I discover what staff Pogson’s people keep.
There is one matter I am ashamed to mention, but must do so. I think I should take the gold cigarette case that you were so kind as to give me. Unfortunately, I pawned this during the Christmas hols, being rather short of money and not wishing to bother you. Do you think you could get it out and send it on? I should like to send you the money, but am rather short. You will find the pawn-ticket in an envelope marked ‘Pawn-ticket’ inside the cover of a book called Across the World for a Wife by Guy Boothby in the top left-hand drawer of the desk in my room.
I gather from your last letter that it will be about the time of the Easter holiday that your first play will be going on in London. I should have liked to have been present to have seen it, but I have no doubt it will survive long enough for me to have that pleasure in the summer hols or even at Xmas.
Well, that’s all except to say how deeply sorry I am about the cigarette case, but you will, I am sure, appreciate the importance of me having it.
Love from OLIVER.”
I was back in Hampstead when Oliver’s letter came. I went at once to his room and found the envelope labelled “Pawn-ticket.” Then I went to town and redeemed my cigarette case.
*
“MY DEAR OLIVER,—I shall naturally be disappointed at not seeing you during the Easter holidays, especially as I was looking forward to your being present when Every Street goes on. However, this seems an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. You will have a chance to learn something about engines and to be with new people. Both those things are worth while.
I shall send on your clothes and some money. As to the tips, ask Pogson about it. There’s no need to make any pretence of being accustomed to staying in houses that keep large staffs. I have no doubt Pogson is an intelligent fellow and will understand.
I have rescued the cigarette case from pawn, and you can have it any time you repay me the amount I paid to the pawnbroker. Let me make no bones about it: I was disappointed to find what had happened, though glad you told me. When you are short of money, let me know, and if the purpose for which you want it is intelligent, you know you can have it. And I’m not stingy, either, in interpreting the word intelligent. But don’t start borrowing, whether from pawnbrokers or anyone else. Meantime, I’m afraid you’ll have to imitate my degrading habit of offering fags from the packet. Alternatively, you needn’t, for some time, offer them at all.
You see what a moralist and skinflint I am becoming! But there it is.
I’ve had a very good time down at Heronwater, working on the play. Captain Judas came to breakfast with me on the morning I left, and impressed upon me at least a dozen times that I was to send you his love.
Accept mine, too, and believe me always your devoted FATHER.”
So that was how it was that the Easter holiday went by without Oliver’s knowing anything of my engagement to Livia.