Oliver wrote:
“MY DEAR FATHER,—I’m afraid that after all I must let you have my address, because there are so many things I need. When I left home I could take no more than my suit-case would hold. Now I am particularly in need of clothes. Would you be kind enough to send all the clothes I have, not forgetting my dinner suit? Pogson will be home soon for the Christmas vacation, and he may want me to go out now and then. Indeed, he has several times written, suggesting a few dinners—just he and I in the West End. I am rather looking forward to this, as I have never done it before. So please send the clothes. The studs and cuff-links are in one of the drawers of my desk. I rely upon you not to look me up here. I am all right.
Your affect. son OLIVER.”
I packed everything myself, and when I had done and stood there looking at the empty wardrobe and chest-of-drawers—drawers gaping, wardrobe doors swung open, litter of papers and odds and ends scattered about the carpet—I felt desolate. There was so little of Oliver left once his clothes were gone.
*
Annie Suthurst rang me up, trembling with wrath. “Look ’ere, Mr. Essex, when’s Miss Maeve going to ’ave an ’oliday? She’s fair worn out, an’ I don’t know ’ow you expect flesh an’ blood to stand it, wot wi’ night shows an’ matneys an’ Lord knows wot all. You see she gets an ’oliday.”
I had no opportunity to answer. Annie slammed on the receiver.
An hour later I rang up Maeve. “What’s your idea of a holiday? Wertheim is announcing a ‘slight indisposition’ and your understudy’s going on tonight. The world’s yours for a week.”
Uncomplaining Maeve gave a gasp of pleasure. “Oh, Bill, you’re always thinking of me! I’ve only got one idea in my head: a busman’s holiday. Let’s have a nice long dinner together, and then go and see a show. What about the Palladium? Harry Weldon and Little Tich. Can you beat it?”
“Very well, so long as you let me prescribe for the rest of the holiday.”
“Go on, doctor.”
“Pack off to Heronwater in the morning. It’s lovely there in the winter. Take Annie Suthurst with you, and Eileen, too, and do nothing for a week. I’ll telegraph right away to Sawle. Agreed?”
“It’ll be heavenly. And tonight?”
“I’ll call for you at half-past seven.”
*
We dined at an obscure restaurant. It had to be obscure, because a paragraph in the evening papers had announced Maeve’s “slight indisposition,” and it would not have done for her to be recognised merrily feeding out. She was very happy, like a child on a day off from school.
Only over the coffee did she become suddenly grave. We had an alcove to ourselves in that fusty, amusing little restaurant; and not many people were there, anyhow. As soon as Maeve turned to me and placed her hand upon mine I knew she was going to say something serious. I could always tell from the gravity of her white face, the intense blue-blackness of her eyes. She pushed aside the little pink-shaded lamp, pulled an ashtray towards her, and knocked the ash off her cigarette. “Do you think it necessary for Mr. Wertheim to change his name?” she asked.
“Why on earth should he?”
“He’s going to, anyway. He came to see me this afternoon—to see if I really were ill. He’s an awfully kind person, I think.”
“I think so, too. He’s a grand man.”
“Well, he stayed there talking for an hour, and said the most extraordinary things. He said we should be at war before this year was out.”
She looked at me with the deep wells of her eyes troubled. “Is it very terrible, a war, Bill? You see, I know nothing about these things. I can’t remember a war, except in a vague sort of way the Boer War. And that seemed to mean nothing except wearing buttons with generals’ photographs. I can remember their names: White, Methuen, Gatacre, Buller.”
I pressed her hand gently. “It means more to grown-up people, my dear. It meant more to Annie Suthurst, didn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But tell me: what was Wertheim getting at? What makes him think there’ll be a war?”
“Oh. I don’t know. He just sat there—you know how immense and unstirring he is—and looked into the fire and talked as if he were prophesying. He made my flesh creep. Of course, he’s always on the move, all over Europe and Asia, watching things and thinking, and he is very wise.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Well, he says things are approaching a smash-up, and he predicted it would come this year. And that’s why he’s going to change his name. He says anyone with a German name will have a terrible time in England before the year’s out. So he’s going to become an English citizen and change his name by deed-poll to Worthing.”
“Extraordinary.”
“D’you think so? D’you know, Man, while he was talking I couldn’t help believing every word he said! He was so queer, mixing up his business arrangements with all this visionary talk.”
“How did he do that?”
“Well, he said that the war would be a terrific one, and that when there was a terrific war on, people would want big bright shows. And so he intended to have this new revue of his ready down to the last detail.”
“Extraordinary,” I repeated; and yet, looking up from the bright circle projected upon the table by the pink-shaded lamp, looking up into the dim spaces of the badly-lighted restaurant, full of eddying smoke-wreaths, I felt suddenly a tremor of the spine. From five thousand miles away, old Con O’Riorden had predicted this same thing; and now Wertheim, the cosmopolitan wanderer and watcher, and, I was by now half prepared to believe, the sensitive medium, repeated the warning.
“And Wertheim thinks it’s coming this year? Where are we?”
“1914. Sounds like any other year, doesn’t it? I wonder whether it will ever sound different? You know, there are dozens, hundreds of years that mean nothing, and a few that sound different. 1066. 1660. 1837. I wonder whether 1914 will ever have its own special sound?”
I signalled the waiter for the bill, and, standing up, pinched her ear. “Let’s try and believe that Wertheim’s all wrong,” I said. “Let’s try and believe that things are all right with a world in which we may see Harry Weldon and Little Tich on the same bill.”
Maeve got up, gathered her bag and gloves, and smiled valiantly. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s try.”
I said, when we came out of the Palladium: “Tired, my dear? Shall I call you a taxi?”
“No, it’s so lovely, let’s walk. Come with me as far as the door. I don’t want you in tonight. Annie will riot if I don’t go straight to bed.”
So we set off to walk to Bruton Street. It was a dear frosty night, with a sharp wind blowing and a glitter of stars above the roofs. Maeve put her arm through mine and we hit up a good pace, threading our way through the crowds. Suddenly I felt Maeve’s gloved hand constrict sharply upon my arm. I looked down in some surprise. (Maeve’s head was hardly higher than my shoulder.) She had almost stopped in her tracks; and then, aware that I had sensed her perturbation, she quickened her pace again. But I had followed the direction of her eyes, seen what she had seen. On the other side of the street, clearly illumined by the light of a street lamp, were two young men in evening clothes: Pogson with an opera-hat askew, and Oliver, hatless. Pogson leant against the lamp, his hands in his trousers pockets, his chin sagging; Oliver stood by him, one arm through Pogson’s, looking from him to a pair of girls wearing immense hats and skirts foaming with frills. As I interpreted the situation, Pogson’s collapse had held up a procession of four.
“Stay here,” I said to Maeve. But Maeve would not stay. She still held to my arm as I crossed the road. Oliver looked up, saw us coming, and made a not ungraceful inclination of the head to Maeve. But she seemed frozen at my side, and looked at him like death.
“Poggy,” Oliver said, shaking Pogson’s arm gently, “my father.”
The young women at that word took their skirts in their hands and faded with gentle susurration round the corner.
Oliver continued to shake Pogson, whose opera-hat had now slipped to a more precarious angle at the side of his head. “My father,” he repeated.
Pogson looked up, stood up, levering himself forward from the lamp by pressure from his shoulder-blades, pushed back his hat, and recognised the presence of myself and Maeve. His hand fumbled towards his hat. “G’evening,” he said. Then he relapsed upon the lamp and said no more.
A taxi cruised by and I held up my hand to the driver. “Do you know Pogson’s address?” I said to Oliver.
“Yes, sir. I’ll see him home. I’m perfectly sober.”
He certainly was. He even looked fresh, debonair. He and the driver helped Pogson into the cab. They drove away.
Maeve and I continued our walk to Bruton Street. She had said no word from the moment she caught sight of Oliver, but the intensity of her grip on my arm was maintained all the way home. Even when we reached her door she kept her head averted and said nothing. I knew that she would not trust herself to speak because her voice, like her eyes, was full of tears.
*
I continued my walk, alone, round Berkeley Square, trying to fake up an interest in the vigour of the night, the black etching of the bare plane-tree boughs against the stars, the beautiful ironwork of some of the gates, and the old extinguishers fixed alongside them. But my mind wouldn’t focus on any of these things. I wandered on past the Berkeley Hotel into Piccadilly, where the walkers now were few. It was past midnight. I turned left towards the Circus, and all the way, walk as I would, that recent encounter possessed my mind.
“Yes, sir.” Somehow that stuck in my gizzard more than anything else. More than the women. More than Pogson’s deplorable condition. The icy formality of it was like a stab in the heart, for never before had Oliver so addressed me. It labelled me a stranger; it showed me the fence and told me to keep on my own side of it.
Well, for God’s sake—what was I going to do about it? Was I going to allow a seventeen-year-old boy so coldly and resolutely to put me out of his life, to bring to nought so much hoping and striving and loving? Suddenly I was besieged by a multitude of recollections sprung from the days of Oliver’s utter dependence: Oliver in the bath, so soapy that he slipped through my hands like a trout; Oliver so small that I could put my hands under his armpits, heave him aloft and drop him on to my shoulders, his legs clutched round my neck, drumming my chest; Oliver, wearing his new football boots, a diminutive figure in a red jersey, looking comically inadequate between the goal-posts; Oliver in the porch of the boarding-school when I delivered him there for his first term, looking at me vanishing towards the turn of the drive which would hide me from him, waving, waving, frantically, as though he could not, dared not, sever the tremendous bond that had held us so close for so long.
A taxi crawled along the roadside. I stopped the driver, gave him Oliver’s address in Camden Town, and told him to hurry.
“I rely upon you not to look me up here.”
Rely on what you like, my boy: I can’t let all that go, I can’t see so much that was so good founder so miserably.
*
Pogson, I knew, lived at Sydenham. It would take a taxi a good time to get there. I could easily reach the house in Camden Town before Oliver got back. I did not wish to intrude on him in the house: I could understand his wishing me not to see the sort of place he was living in. Not that he need have feared to shock me. I had known Shelley Street, Hulme, and Ancoats. And this street in Camden Town was not unlike a Hulme street when we reached it. Under the moonlight, lying like silver rime on the slate roofs, giving one side of the street a brightness almost of day, the other an almost solid blackness, the long thoroughfare stretched its lifeless uniformity. Every downstairs window was a bay; every upstairs window was flat; and the smokeless chimneys cut at precise intervals into the cold radiance of the sky like turrets on the long precision of a prison wall.
It was one o’clock, and in all the length of the street there was no stirring save the dry rustle of paper in the gutters and the occasional prowling of a cat between the bright clearing of the moonlight and the sinister thicket of the shadow. Not a window anywhere was open; linen blinds were down, and the white light gave to the window-panes a subaqueous and insubstantial quality.
In this dead and moonstruck cañon I waited for Oliver and from the first I knew that I waited in vain. Something in the very air of the place smote a chill to my heart and told me that I might as well expect to encounter warm flesh and blood in the craters of the moon.
The driver and I, by unspoken consent and compulsion, spoke to one another in grave quiet voices. He asked me, on a note of surprise, if this was the place, and I said it was. I told him we might have some time to wait, and gave him a sovereign. I remained in the car; he got down and began to beat his arms gently across his chest. There was frost in the air; you could see it glittering on the roofs like a dusting of mica. We had drawn up at a corner, alongside a little general shop. I pointed out to the man the house where Oliver lived, and asked him to let me know if a young man in evening clothes arrived there. I was feeling overpoweringly sleepy, worn with emotion, and feared that I might fall asleep in the car.
And that was what I did. I was aware of nothing more till the driver was shaking me gently and telling me it was four o’clock.
“No one’s come to this ’ouse, guvnor,” he said, “an’ the world’s beginnin’ to wake up.”
I stumbled out of the car, feeling drugged and stupid, and there was not much sign of the world’s awakening. The moon was gone, and the touch of frost. The morning was raw, damp, and utterly black. But presently the sound of a hob-nailed boot echoed along the pavement.
Then here and there pale lights appeared at upper windows and behind fanlights. Against the pewter of the sky the paler grey of smoke wavered from chimneys.
“Early risers ’ereabouts,” the driver volunteered, speaking out loud now that the mystery had gone from the world and its grey misery had returned. “I don’t reckon it’s any good ’angin’ around any longer. I could do with a drop of ’ot coffee.”
I agreed that there was nothing to wait for. I could picture the boozed magnanimous Pogson. “An’ Essex better stay the ni’. Goo’ ole Essex.”
So we drove to a coffee-stall, and then the driver took me home to Hampstead. And for all the hobnails that had echoed through Camden Town, it was still dark when I got into bed and fell heavily asleep.