We started early from Heronwater, and Martin was able to make better time than on the journey out. We were at home by four, and I at once rang up Livia. She asked me to call for her and to take her out to dinner. When I reached her flat she was dressed, all ready, and was sitting down at an open grand piano. She went on playing, and nodded to me to take a chair. Her face wore a deeply concentrated expression. Now and then she tried a phrase over again, and then again and again. Presently her hands dropped to her lap. “Composing,” she said with a smile.
“Another of your accomplishments.”
“Yes, but please don’t say it like that: as though it were something like the water-colour drawing that Victorian misses were taught. Polite accomplishments they were called, weren’t they?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, this isn’t at all polite. It’s a song. I just thought of the phrase ‘When it’s with you, it’s wonderful.’ And now the tune’s coming. Don’t you think that’s a good phrase for a sentimental song?”
And she began to play again, singing in a low, crooning voice:
With anyone else it’s just comme-ci, comme-ça,
I can take it or leave it, but when you are there
It’s wonderful!
When it’s with you it’s wonderful
She got up brightly. “Well, that’s that! I’ll finish it some day. Perhaps I’ll sell it to Wertheim—let him make it the theme song of one of his big shows. And so the play is finished! Help yourself to a cigarette.”
She waved her hand towards a silver box on the mantelpiece. Resting alongside it was a letter, addressed in Oliver’s unmistakable handwriting. It rather jolted me, seeing it there.
“You’re still hearing from Oliver,” I said casually.
“I shall be glad when he knows we’re engaged,” she answered briefly.
I didn’t light the cigarette. I crossed the room and put my arm round her waist. She lifted her face to be kissed, as though she had just remembered it. I sat in a chair and pulled her down on to my knee.
“You told Maeve that we were not in a hurry to get married. You asked in your letter whether I agreed. I don’t.” I kissed her on the eyes. “My sweet, what is there to wait for? Let’s be married soon.”
She twisted the lapel of my coat in her fingers and shook her head slowly. “My dear, I’m so terribly afraid you’d be sorry.” She did not look into my face as she spoke.
“Is that really the reason?” I asked. “If it is, put it out of your head right away. But is it?”
“It’s one of the reasons.”
“And what is the other?”
“Oh, I want to be certain,” she cried, springing up. “I want to feel that there’s no doubt about it.” She had taken the letter from the mantelpiece, and on the emphatic word “doubt” she tore it across and threw the pieces into the fire. Then she came and sat on the arm of my chair and stroked my hair—very grey now, I thought, an ageing man’s hair. But she spoke kindly, as though to assure herself as well as me. “You can make me love you, Bill—can’t you—can’t you?”
“My dear,” I said, taking the restless hand and holding it between my palms, “I can give you my love. That’s all. And I can wait till you’re ready to take it.”
“You old darling,” she said, and slipped on to my knees and put her arms round my neck. “Let’s wait, shall we? I’m sure I’m going to be terribly fond of you. Where shall we have dinner?”
*
Maeve wrote to me. “DEAR BILL,—Congratulations on your engagement. Rehearsals of Every Street begin tomorrow. I suppose you’ll be there? If so, would you call for me and take me along? It’s only a sentimental idea, but I feel I’d like to take up my first stroke on your play in your company. After all, we’ve had this play in mind for a few years now, haven’t we? Besides, I want you to meet someone here at the flat. So come early. And I want you to meet the new flat, too! You’ll be surprised! I am, I assure you. I never expected to live in such luxury. I’ve had to take a five-years’ lease on the place. That takes us to 1918. Goodness knows what may have happened by then! But, as I have a twenty-first birthday not inordinately far ahead, Daddy has anticipated his present by furnishing the flat for me out of the most lavish resources of Messrs. O’Riorden’s most lavish Regent Street shop. Hence the dazzler you’re in for! But, anyway, shouldn’t the leading lady in William Essex’s gread play be living like a someone? Most certainly! And it is a grand play, Bill. I’ve been in plenty, and I know. Wertheim let me read the whole script, and I loved it. I love him, too! The dear man is risking twenty pounds a week on me! What do you think of that? And, like all my other blessings, it comes from you, dear Bill. Love from MAEVE.”
I thanked Wertheim in my heart. But to him it would be just business. “How do you keep all your great stars?” I asked him once, knowing the legend that his players never deserted him. “Like this,” he said, with no smile on his big pale face, and jingled the coins in his pocket. Well, I hoped he’d find Maeve good value. I believed he would.
Maeve’s new flat was in Bruton Street. I walked up two flights of stairs and found a door, painted a deep peony crimson, with the name “Maeve O’Riorden” on a neat brass plate affixed to it. I rang the bell, and stared, struggling with recollection, at the portly, rosy dame who opened the door.
“Nay, don’t look like that,” she said. “Tha’s forgotten me, Mr. Essex.”
“Just a minute,” I said, “don’t tell me—yes—why, Annie, I’d have known you anywhere, in a hundred years’ time. You haven’t changed a scrap.”
Annie Suthurst smiled delightedly. How long ago was it since Dermot and Sheila had taken that house in Mauldeth Road? Oh, dear! It must be the best part of twenty years ago, and Annie Suthurst, a young widow who had gloriously lost her husband in the Boer War, was their first maid. She was with them right up to the time when Dermot moved to London, and that intimidated her. “London, nay, that’s a daft place. I’ll not go to no London with thee,” she declared firmly. “And now here I am, Mr. Essex,” she explained, leading me into a small hall. “Ah’ve coom after all. But on’y because Miss Maeve were so set on it. Ah wouldn’t’ve coom for anybody but her. An’ London’s nowt to get excited about when tha’s looked at it once. Ah reckon nowt to Oxford Street. It’s nobbut Market Street, Manchester, a bit wider.”
So chattering with the delightful animation of an old hen glad to be back with a lost chick, Annie Suthurst kept me standing there, giving me time to look about at the fine carpet on the floor, the engravings on the wall, the hat-rack and seat for callers. A nice, useful little hall, with all the doors painted red like the one I had entered by, and the walls and carpet grey.
Maeve came out proudly to meet me. “Isn’t it lovely?” she asked, and when I said that indeed it was, so far as I had seen it, she took me round to see all the rest. Her own bedroom, “with two beds so that I can put up a visitor,” and with just a little sideways peep over the garden of Berkeley Square. “Not much now,” said Maeve, drawing the deep-red quilted curtain to look at the bare trunks of the planes and the dun winter grass, “but how good that’s going to be for tired eyes when everything’s green!”
“May Maeve’s eyes never grow tired,” I exclaimed piously; and Maeve said: “At least until they’re as old as Mrs. Bendall’s. You remember, Bill?”
Oh, yes, I remembered all right. Mrs. Bendall was dead now, but I remembered the dear old lady and the tiny Maeve pouring her tea.
“See,” said Maeve, and opened a drawer. There was a little cedarwood box inside, and in the box lay the dusty petals of a rose. “That’s the rose she gave me that night. And look at this.” She handed me a card which was lying under the brown shrivelled petals. “From Sarah Bendall to Maeve O’Riorden, with love.” In an old woman’s large staggering handwriting.
“Do you think I had a cheek?” Maeve asked. “I wrote to her as soon as we got to Heronwater that time, and told her I should always keep her rose. So she sent me this to keep with it. I’ve never told a soul till now. It’s my good-luck casket. It’s been on all my tours with me. Sarah Bendall’s love in a little box. What a lucky woman! Sarah Bendall’s love, Mary Latter’s training, and Bill’s play to play in!”
She shut the little box with a snap and replaced it in its drawer. Then we continued our tour. Annie Suthurst’s bedroom. “The only room in the house that hasn’t been new-furnished. Daddy tells me that when Annie first came to us in Manchester she brought her own bedroom furniture. She said, ‘That’s t’bed Ah went into when Ah were wed and that’s t’bed they’ll carry me out of to my coffin.’ She brought it all along again. She dislikes these distempered walls, so I’m going to give her a wallpaper with rosy wreaths.”
We stood on the threshold and peeped guiltily at Annie’s lares. A double bed with brass knobs as big almost as pineapples at head and foot. Such a bed as Sairey Gamp must often have come across in the course of her professional sojourns. But there had been no need of a Sairey for Annie Suthurst. An enlarged photograph in a stout oak frame of the late Private William Suthurst—curling moustaches, curly-brimmed hat upturned at one side, a young face for ever fixed in its hopefulness while Annie went marching on—hung over the head of the bed. A plain white cotton counterpane. There were three books on a three-legged table by Annie’s bed, and I ventured to tiptoe in and peep, for I can never resist the temptation to see what people are reading. The Holy Bible, Charles Dickens’ Christmas stories, and Conan Doyle’s The Great Boer War. Great! Good Lord! How! Why?
There was a fire burning cheerfully in Annie’s grate, for this was sitting-room as well as bedroom, with a sagging wicker chair alongside it, and a hassock on which, clearly, she would like to “put her feet up.” On the mantelpiece a clock, a magnificent clock, comprising both timepiece and a pair of rearing stallions in metal that was faked to look like bronze. A little plate at the base of the clock: “To William Suthurst, on the occasion of his marriage, from his friends on the warehouse staff, Heywood and Atkinson, Ltd.” On either side of the clock a blue china vase, containing faded paper flowers. The vases, I guessed, were wedding-presents, too. There was a sewing-machine under the window. Every Lancashire housewife liked to have a sewing-machine.
“This room,” I said to Maeve, “would make me cry, if I didn’t know Annie.”
“Yes,” said Maeve, “Annie’s wonderful. All her ghosts are tame now. She’s happy with them, and stronger because of them.”
“You’re lucky to have her. I’m so glad. When you said in your letter that you had someone to show me, Annie was my last guess.”
Maeve opened the door of her sitting-room. “Annie, indeed!” she said. “No. Here’s my surprise.”
Rory came forward with a smile lighting his face, and farther into the room stood Maggie Donnelly.
“Well, Rory, my dear boy!” I placed both my hands on his shoulders. It was easy to do. He had not very much grown upwards like Oliver, whose eyes now looked at me almost from the level of my own. Rory looked up at me. He had grown outwards, like a young oak, like a young bull. His shoulders seemed strong enough to batter down doors, his wrists were as thick as mine and his hands large and capable. The serious grey-eyed face had not changed much, except that it was, if anything, more serious, save now when the old shy smile set little crinkles fanwise about his eyes. I put my hand into the untidy tangle of his hair. It was like harsh wire.
“This is Maggie Donnelly,” he said rather timidly. “You’ll not have forgotten her since she was at Heronwater.”
“I haven’t forgotten her,” I declared, “but it would be small blame to me if I didn’t recognise this for the same young woman.”
And that was true enough. She, too, had retained the old gravity that sat so well upon her as a child, that accorded so excellently now with her grey eyes and dark brown hair. But, like Oliver, she had grown upwards. She had a strong, resolute look, but was tall and beautifully feminine, with long legs and narrow hips and young swelling breasts, and a complexion that was full of sunny colour.
“This is my first time in London,” she said, in a voice which I had not remembered to be so attractive. “Father sends you his love, Mr. Essex. He’s never forgotten Heronwater and Captain Judas and Captain Jansen.”
“It was a good time,” I said wistfully. How far away it seemed! They had all been children.
“I’m staying over Easter,” Rory said. “It’ll be grand meeting Oliver again. Now that I’ve got a job and am more or less self-supporting, we’ll have lots to talk about.”
“I’m afraid Oliver hasn’t got so far as thinking about a job yet,” I said. “And what’s your job, Rory? You make me feel a very old man.”
“Nonsense,” Maeve broke in sharply. “You’re one of the youngest men I know, Bill. Don’t get stuff and nonsense into your head. Don’t you think he’s looking beautiful and young, Maggie?”
“He’s not a day older than Dad,” said Maggie, “and Dad can work us all and play us all off our feet, can’t he, Rory?”
“Ay,” said Rory, with devotion in his eyes. “And shame us all with the risks he takes.”
“Well,” I said, pulling out a cigarette case—it happened to be that gold one which Oliver had coveted—and offering it to Rory. “And what is this job of yours?”
“I don’t smoke, thanks, Uncle Bill. Well, I shan’t begin working till this holiday’s over, and then I’m going in as a learner at the printing works, where Mr. Donnelly works. Printers are useful in Ireland just now—aren’t they, Maggie?”
Maggie nodded. “Yes. But Mr. Essex doesn’t want to hear about the discontented Irish,” she smiled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “you won’t meet Oliver, Rory. He’s not coming home for Easter. I wish you had let him know you were coming. Then I’m sure he’d have changed his plans. He’s going to some people in Scotland.”
“But—” Rory began, his face clouding; then: “Ach, well. There’ll be another time.”
“Maggie, come and put on your hat,” said Maeve. “Uncle Bill’s going to take us all to lunch.” She led her away to the bedroom.
I walked across the room to look out of the window, which, like that of the bedroom, gave a glimpse of Berkeley Square. With my back to him, I said: “I’m sorry, Rory. You mean, Oliver did know you were coming over?”
He came to me impulsively and put his arm through mine, looking down with me into the garden. “Ach, now, that’s nothing at all,” he said. “It’s a good chance for Oliver. Scotland doesn’t offer every day. Now isn’t Maeve the lucky one, with this flat, and this bit of a view and all?”
“God bless the boy! He’s got the jargon of a stage Irishman!”
“And why not?” Rory grinned. “You just wait a bit now, and all Ireland will be a stage. You’ll see.”
*
After lunch Rory and Maggie left us. “She doesn’t know the first thing about London,” said Rory, “and all I know is what I learned those times when we were on the way to Heronwater. We’ll have a grand afternoon.”
They went out together, Maggie half a head taller than he. “Poor young things,” said Maeve. “They seem terribly fond of one another.”
“Dear, dear! And how many decades does Maeve give these deplorably young creatures?”
“I know I’m being silly,” she smiled. “Actually, I’m only four years older than Rory. But they make me feel sad, all the same. They are so terribly in earnest, and terribly in love, I think, though they don’t know it. I hope they won’t know it for a long time. I don’t think a pair of babes like that ought to be up to the neck in a ‘cause.’ D’you know, they were actually arguing last night as to whether a certain house in Dublin was or was not a safe place to hide rifles in? It makes me impatient. I hate it all. They have a doomed look, those two.”
“Your father was up to the neck in it,” I said, “at Rory’s age. I was fifteen when I knew him first. He’s a little older than I am—a couple of years, I think. He’d be seventeen or so. He was mad to avenge the Manchester martyrs and all that sort of thing. Sheila was in it, too. They’ve grown out of it. I expect Rory will.”
“Do you?” she said briefly. “Then you don’t know Rory as I do. And father’s grown out of it? Yes; he’s grown out of it as Abraham did when he laid Isaac on the altar.”
“But God intervened,” I cheerfully reminded her.
“Good old God,” she said gloomily. “Can you see Him intervening today? I can’t. Bill, my dear, I don’t like the world we’re living in. Lord Roberts blowing off hot air, the Germans blowing off hot air. I’ve a feeling that anyone who places a sacrifice on the altar today has got more than an even chance of finding that God isn’t intervening this time. The sacrifice is going to be snatched up. Thank you very much for a nice burnt offering. And a fine sort of author you are, allowing your leading lady to get into this state of mind half an hour before rehearsals begin. Come on. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
*
And now those rehearsals in a dreary hall in a back street were over, and the later rehearsals at the St. John’s Theatre were over; and Maeve and I got up from dinner in the Café Royal and walked out into Regent Street. The street was agleam with light, the pavement jostling with walkers, the road noisy with traffic.
“Sorry, my dear,” I said. “I gave Martin the very second to draw alongside here. I hate to see you jostled tonight of all nights.”
“I’m all right,” she said, “but d’you know what I want you to do? When we get in, just talk to me all the time till we reach the theatre about that night at Heronwater when the swans flew across the moon.”
“I will,” I said, “it was a lovely night.”
“It was the loveliest night of my life. Their wings sounded so strong. They were creaking like wicker. I can always hear it when I think about them. Ah, here’s Martin.”
“Sorry, sir,” Martin apologised, “half a minute late. Miss Vaynol stopped me just along the road.”
Unexpectedly, Livia was sitting in the car. I had arranged to meet her at the theatre. Now, as we climbed in, she exclaimed: “I just couldn’t resist being here to waylay Martin and accompany the important man to the theatre. You forgive me, Maeve darling?”
“No swans, Bill.”
“No swans.”
“Swans?” said Livia, as the car swung into the traffic eddying at the Circus. “What are you talking about?”
“Shall we tell her, Bill?”
“No,” I teased.
“Just one of our secrets,” Maeve explained with a laugh. “It goes back a long way.”
“I’ll bet it does,” said Livia with sudden venom that took me by surprise. “You’ve been barmy about Bill all your life.”
Then silence, horrified, all three of us looking at one another in the dim light of the car, dim light cut up by wheels of greater light as lamps and street signs flashed by. Maeve, always white, seemed to shrink into a shadow even of her little self. Livia, usually vibrant, seemed as though her words had snapped some spring in her, so that when she, first to speak, said “I’m sorry,” it was a tiny sound.
There was another long silence before Maeve said in a quick passionate voice: “All right, then, you might as well know it, Bill might as well know it. I have loved him—always—always. And that’s the difference between you and me, Livia. I know what I want. I hope you do this time. Do you? Do you?”
Livia did not answer. Then we arrived at the theatre.
*
It was all right. From the rise of the curtain, almost, I knew it was going to be all right. Wertheim had made me write the opening sentences seven or eight times. Every word had to tell. The first ten minutes of a play, he insisted, are tremendously important. You have to fight against late-comers and the apathy of the audience. You must get ’em quick. And as I sat in my box with Livia and Rory and Maggie Donnelly, I knew that we were doing that. There was a laugh in the first line, and we got it. The audience was anxious to settle down; it was chiding the blundering late-comers. Soon there was that grand satisfactory silence which means that everyone in the theatre, from the stalls to the back of the gallery, is gripped by the play and is intent on every word.
I relaxed, I allowed myself to look about. In a box opposite were Dermot and Sheila and Eileen, with Josie Wertheim. Wertheim himself, a stout, uneasy ghost, was now standing at the back of the box, now vanished. I next caught sight of him materialised suddenly on an end seat in the stalls; then he was gone again, to appear at the back of the circle. I had heard of his first-night peregrinations to sense the temper of the house and to test the audibility of the players. Towards the end of the first act, the door of my box opened quietly and his soft heavy hand rested on my shoulder. It remained there as the curtain fell, and I felt it grip a little till the applause started, then it relaxed, and he joined in. It was applause well deserved. The company had put the act over beautifully, and Maeve, it seemed to me, had fulfilled all our expectations. I joined in the clapping; Rory and Maggie followed my example rapturously, and Livia more decorously.
I need not go through all the incidents of that evening. Even today, Every Street is well enough known. I am told I have never written a better play. It was a success from the start. When the final curtain went down the audience remained to cheer and cheer again. It was a demonstration to warm any author’s heart, to still any qualms. Wertheim, his pale broad face faintly flushed, was there to hustle me down to the stage, and first I faced the audience in the midst of the smiling, weary, gratified company, then with Maeve alone. I took her hand and felt it give mine a warm, reassuring pressure. “This is it, Bill,” she whispered. “This is the moment after all these years. Now say something. It’ll never come again—this first night of your first play.” And still holding her small warm hand, the hand that had lain in mine when she and I so long ago had seen Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Manchester, I told the audience just that: how I had taken Maeve to her first play, how I had seen her grow up loving the theatre; how I had promised that some day I would write her a play, and how this was the play. And when a loud voice from the back of the gallery shouted: “And a damn good ’un, too,” and the audience roared with laughter and started to applaud anew, I realised that I had, stumbling on it unwittingly, said the right thing.
Wertheim thought so too. Grasping me by the shoulders when I moved into the wings, he exclaimed: “God, Essex! What a story! Every paper in London will print it. You’re a fox.” There was no fox about it. It all happened simply and without premeditation; but it was, nevertheless, as Wertheim predicted. Every paper printed the story. Some called it a “romance of dramatist and actress” and printed photographs of me and Maeve. Reporters were sent to interview both of us, and though I had said all that was to be said, we had to say it over again, and it was printed over again. This “romance” atmosphere did the play a world of good and kept the theatre full till Every Street settled down to run on its own merits.
*
Wertheim bore Maeve triumphantly away, his arm round her waist. “Jo, control your emotions,” said Josie severely. The other actors and actresses were gone. I was left alone on the stage and loitered there for a moment, feeling unreal and deflated. Through the chink between the curtains I could see that the house was already empty and the lights were going out. God! What a place for moralising an empty theatre is! I shook myself, and made my way to Maeve’s dressing-room.
It was seething with people. There was hardly a soul I knew except Livia and Maggie, the Wertheims and the O’Riordens. My entry nevertheless was the signal for shouts of welcome, cries of felicitation, back-slapping. “You’ve done it, Essex.” “Never felt more certain on a first night.” There was a lot of drink flowing, and I was toasted, and Maeve was toasted, and a man I had never seen in my life lurched up and said: “I always said you had it in you, ole boy.”
“I always thought it was the dead that attracted the vultures,” said Livia, taking my arm. “The legend needs revising.”
We made our way through the mob to where Maeve was sitting. Rory, flushed in the face and trying not to look self-conscious in evening clothes, stood beside her, pride and happiness shining in his eyes. Dumpy little Eileen—poor Eileen who would never look distinguished in any circumstances—stood beside her chair; and suddenly it rushed upon my mind with a burst of poignant memory that exactly thus had I seen Maeve sitting and those two children standing by her on the green grass at The Beeches when she played at being Queen Maeve holding her high court. Oliver had been there, too, tall and beautiful and supercilious, the only one who had not entered into the game’s spirit.
It was almost as though the thoughts in my mind struck a responsive chord in Rory’s heart, for he said: “I’m sorry Oliver’s not been here tonight, Uncle Bill. He would have enjoyed the play. Maggie and I did—immensely. And we’re so proud of Maeve.”
It made me feel very lonely—that all these O’Riordens were there and no one of mine—and I turned to get my arm, for reassurance, through Livia’s. But Livia had moved nearer to Maeve, and was saying “It was a good performance. Very creditable, Maeve.”
Maeve did not answer. She could afford to let such tepid praise go. People known and unknown were besieging her, pressing her to drink, which she would not do, giving her invitations, praising her. She sat there with an aloof dignity which suddenly made me think of Mrs. Bendall. And then I laughed aloud, because I was sure that Maeve was thinking of the old lady, and, little chit, trying to act like her. “May I pour out your tea, madame?” I twitted her. “And if I did, would you give me a rose?”
She looked up with a smile.
“Tea?” said Livia.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said Maeve. “It’s just another of our little secrets.”