I saw Livia’s tears again that night. She rang me up and asked me to take her out to dinner. “I want to tell you about Oliver,” she said.
He had spent the morning in a public library, answering advertisements for clerks. At lunch-time he appeared at the Café Royal, very spruce—“you know, Bill, his hair was shining, and his eyes were so blue. And his clothes—I don’t know how he’s kept them so perfect in that awful Camden Town house.”
“You’ve seen it, then?”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know it.”
“So have I.”
We were silent for a moment, thinking of the long, grey vista of that satanic street.
“It’s amazing,” said Livia, “how bright and shining he keeps. He commands attention, you know. I’ve never been to a restaurant with any man who brings the waiters hovering more quickly, without a word, without a look.” She smiled, evidently recollecting many such occasions. “Were you like that when you were Oliver’s age?”
“I had never been into a restaurant at Oliver’s age, and if I had gone, I should certainly not have known what to do about waiters.”
“I couldn’t help admiring him,” Livia continued. “If I had been where Oliver is now—without a job, without a penny, at odds with everybody—why, I should be utterly crushed.”
I didn’t hurry her. I let her tell her story in her own way, and soon she got past this bright façade to the grim facts. Oliver was quite sure that he would soon get work. In the meantime, he was, as she had said, without a penny. She had tackled the matter in the business-like way I should have expected of her: told him he must pay his landlady what he owed her and keep the rooms as a base for job-hunting. She had promised to give him two pounds a week as long as he needed it. He had smiled. “Not give, Livia—lend.” Very well, then: call it a loan. And how much would he need to clear up the present mess? He thought five pounds would do, and produced from his pocket an IOU for that amount, already signed.
It was then that Livia got out her handkerchief and cried furtively. “You see, he had it ready. He knew that he was just there to raise the money.”
She took the IOU out of her bag and handed it to me, blinking back her tears. I indignantly tore it to pieces and dropped them into the ashtray. I took her hand and caressed it. “Livia, you mustn’t, my dear, you mustn’t do this. Oliver is my responsibility. As long as he needs money he shall have it—from me. Will you let me do this?”
“You really want to?”
“Desperately. God knows I want to do it. It’s little enough. But you must not let him know it is from me.”
She dabbed at her eyes and tried to smile. “Very well,” she said, and added, looking at me queerly: “You don’t deserve two bad eggs like me and Oliver.”
*
I was walking along Regent Street the next day—a fine blue and white day when I should have felt in the best of spirits. But I didn’t. A definite date had been fixed for my wedding, and not so far ahead. That should have made me gay enough, or at any rate should have lifted the feeling that wherever I moved a grey fog moved with me. I looked up at the clouds thin as lawn veils on the blue; I was conscious of the frolic wind blowing the women’s skirts and livening the air I breathed; but all the same, the thought of Oliver was more powerful than all other thoughts, and it darkened my mind.
Across the street was the long frontage of Dermot’s shop, now, as always, an attraction to loiterers. It was full of lovely things: furniture, fabrics, pictures, glass, porcelain, all unique. I lingered for a moment, letting my thoughts go back to the shop in Manchester, where the Gauguin, daringly exhibited after Dermot’s first visit to Copenhagen, had caused so much head-shaking; the shop over which were the offices of our toy company. It all seemed very long ago; it seemed to belong to a golden time, when life had more difficulties and yet was easier, the time before one was middle-aged and feeling it.
I crossed the road and went through the swinging glass doors. Within, all was silent, the feet treading a deep-piled carpet. There was not in Dermot’s shop anything of the roar of the market, the hullabaloo of the vulgar popular “emporium.” Down long vistas the eye travelled, resting on lovely and expensive things, staged superbly. The assistants looked like attachés, the managers like ambassadors. A swift, silent lift, whose door was a grille of beautiful wrought-iron, took me to the topmost floor where Dermot had his office. It was the sort of office Dermot would have. It was beautifully carpeted. Every stick of furniture had been made not only in his own workshops but by his own hands. It was cosy and intimate without being crowded, without fuss. The linen curtains were Livia’s work. A Monet landscape was over the stone fireplace where, despite the warmth of the day, a fire was burning. Dermot sat before the broad expanse of his desk, but there was not a paper on it.
He jumped up and greeted me with outstretched hands. “Well, trying to catch me out again?” he demanded, waving his long bony hand towards the workless desk.
“I’m just looking for company,” I said. “I suddenly felt lonely as I was passing the shop, so I came up.”
He looked at me sharply, the point of the beard raised, the acute nose almost visibly scenting. I knew that little which I did or thought was concealed from that penetrating intelligence. He laid a hand on my shoulder with an affection he had not shown for a long time. “You know, Bill,” he said, “since you came to London you’ve never been happy—not really happy.”
He was aware that Oliver had left home, though we had never discussed that matter. He was aware—but I am not sure how deeply aware—that all had not gone smoothly with me and Livia. His awareness of these things, his sense of the long bond between us, was in his eyes and his voice and in the sensitive fingers that rested now on my shoulder. “Old friend,” he said—and he had never used such an expression before—“old friend, it would do you good to talk about this and that.”
He spoke into the telephone on his desk, asking for coffee to be sent up. He gave me a cigar—“the sort we use,” he grinned, “when the deal is of over a hundred pounds”—and we took the coffee out on to a little balcony to which you stepped through his window. There were a couple of cane chairs, and a painted iron table, and a few tubs with bay trees and flowering plants. We were lifted up over London: a grey, smoking plain of roofs ran out before our view, punctuated with spires and towers and domes. The noise of the street came up muted and almost melodious.
We sat in silence for a while, then Dermot said: “I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’m here to listen. Go on now. Talk.”
And I did. Diffidently at first, then with gathering confidence and relief. A wonderful relief. This was what I had wanted. Too much had been bottled up in me. At the end of an hour I felt much better, happier even.
“And you’ve been keeping all this to yourself,” Dermot said then. “Well, I guessed most of it.”
“And I’ve told some of it to Maeve,” I said. “You know, Dermot, look back over my life as long as I can, I’ve had only three friends: that old parson Oliver that I’ve told you about, and you and Maeve.”
“Maeve,” he ruminated. “But you want to marry the Vaynol woman. Well, that’s how life is, and I’m not going to argue with you about it. But marry her—for God’s sake marry her quick. Don’t wait till August. And then there’s Oliver...”
He ruminated again, turning up the point of his beard and nibbling it thoughtfully with his teeth. “You can’t have him wandering about at a loose end like this, Bill. It’s damned demoralising. Taking a weekly dole from a woman... God in Heaven, man! Rory’d shoot himself first.”
I winced at the harsh truth of those words and Dermot put a hand over mine—that was Maeve’s trick, too. “Sorry, Bill. That slipped out. You send the young fool to me. I’ll give him a job. Have you seen the young sparks strutting about downstairs? I always insist on looks. He’s got looks, anyway. Yes; send him to me.”
“I can’t send him.” Hateful to have to admit that.
“No, of course not. Well, look, I’ll advertise in the Daily Telegraph. See that this woman calls his attention to it and makes him answer. We’ll hook him that way. And marry the woman! Marry her quick!”
We got up and wandered back into Dermot’s room. He picked up a newspaper from a chair and slapped the open page with his fingers. “See that? God damn England! Another nail in her coffin.”
I took the paper and looked down the column, Dermot standing there bristling at my side. I read of the Amending Bill to exclude Ulster from the operation of the Home Rule Bill.
“Marvellous, isn’t it?” Dermot snarled. “All the pukka sahibs, all the best people, all those officers at the Curragh who took the oath of loyalty to the king have told the king where he gets off. We do what we’re ordered to as long as it’s something we want to do, see, Mr. King? But don’t you step on our toes. Remember, we’ve got the guns. That’s the stuff to give the disloyal Irish. That’s the way to teach ’em loyalty, eh, Bill? So along comes this lovely Liberal Government, with the blessing of Mr. Bloody Redmond, and says: ‘Dear Boys, we wouldn’t offend you for worlds. If you want Ulster left out, it’s all one to us. Yours is the last word.’”
I thought he would have spat. Certainly he would have spat if he had been a spitting sort. But he just bristled. There was an almost palpable electric emanation of anger from him.
“But is it the last word?” he demanded, his eyes shining with fanatic light. “I’ll tell you this, Bill: it’s the last word necessary to do one important thing, and that is unite the south. They haven’t loved each other too much, believe me. But love isn’t necessary now. They’ve all got something to hate, and that’ll work just as well. Love for the same thing never makes allies. It’s always hate for the same thing.”
“And when the fight’s over the allies have nothing left but their hates. I’m not much of a politician, Dermot, but that’s why I expect there’ll be hell in Southern Ireland for a long time to come.”
“But a lot will happen in the meantime. Rory’ll see a lot happen in the meantime.”
“I expect he will,” I said.
*
All very well for Dermot to say: “Marry the woman at once.” The woman would not be married at once. But Dermot’s scheme for Oliver worked well enough. Livia told me that Oliver had found in it a matter of rejoicing because he imagined a personal score. He wrote to the box number under which the advertisement appeared, and when a reply came from O’Riorden’s he at first shied away. Then the idea lit him up. “But imagine! Getting a job off his own best friend! That would be something, Livia, eh?”
And Dermot told me of the interview at his office: Oliver looking—“Well, you know, Bill: not Angles but angels: like one of those kids, perfectly dressed by a modern tailor.”
It was a comfort to me to know that Oliver was working for Dermot and not for Pogson, and that Dermot encouraged rather than frowned upon the old name of Uncle Dermot, hoping through this intimacy to lead Oliver into confidences that might be twisted at last towards a reconciliation with me. But there he was not successful. He confessed as much to me sorrowfully. “Charm! Begod, Bill, he’s as charming as a spring morning; and then at the first sign of the cloven hoof when I drag in your name he hardens over like a winter day.”
I was still hopeful that time would cure that, and as the summer deepened I felt altogether happier, confident that a way would open out of the dead end into which my affairs had drifted.
Dermot thought that a definite effort should be made to bring me and Oliver together. “You’ve never seen the boy, Bill, except the time you talked to him on the pavement with his boozy pal. That was hardly a time for opening hearts. Now you must meet at my house.”
So he invited Oliver to dinner at Hampstead, not letting him know that I would be present, and he did not invite Livia. It was a Sunday night, so that Maeve might come, and Sheila and Eileen were there. Just a family gathering which Dermot hoped would do the trick.
It was not a success. When I went into the drawing-room Oliver was already there with all the O’Riordens. He kept his self-possession marvellously. A quick shock of surprise flashed over his face, and then was subdued. He rose with easy good-humour, and shook hands. His grasp was warm and firm, as of a friend. It affected me queerly, for Oliver and I were not accustomed to shaking hands. “Good-evening, sir,” he said, and as he uttered that formal word which I detested I could have sworn there was a light of mockery in the candid blue of his eye.
I looked beyond him to where Maeve was sitting, and saw that with both hands she was gripping the arms of her chair, as though to force herself to remain in it. I could see that the moment was for her one of agony and suspense. Actress as she was, she had not mastered the moment with the almost insolent nonchalance of this smiling boy.
All through the evening he called Dermot “Uncle Dermot,” and addressed the others with easy familiarity. For me he reserved that chill formal word, speaking to me only when I spoke to him. They all tried hard to keep the tone of the occasion friendly and happy-go-lucky, as though nothing unusual was happening, except that once, while we were at dinner, Maeve took my hand beneath the cloth and squeezed it with affectionate reassurance.
When Sheila, Maeve and Eileen got up, Oliver said: “Will you all excuse me if I go now? I have an appointment in town.”
They politely demurred, but he went, with charming apologies and insistence. Three-quarters of an hour later I asked if I might use the telephone, and rang up Livia’s flat. There was no answer. I devised in my mind a score of reasons why there shouldn’t be.
*
It was in June—on Sunday, June 21—that this humiliating dinner was given by Dermot. Perhaps the adjective is not a good one. Grieved I was, and hurt and sorrowful, but even until the end I felt no humiliation from anything Oliver did to me. No more than I felt it from what Livia had done and was yet to do.
We talked for a long time after Oliver had left us. Not one of them referred to what had happened. But there was in the manner of all of them an added solicitude, a deepening of the customary kindness, that was comforting.
It was a warm night. We had all trooped up to Dermot’s study on the first floor, because thence we had a view over the Heath. The curtains were pushed right back across the open window, and we sat round the window in a semi-circle of chairs. Not a breath was stirring. The sky was a lucent green, full of light, but light thinned out to the last tenuity. The room was in darkness. Dermot was smoking a cigar, I a pipe, Maeve a cigarette. Eileen, who did not smoke, was sitting on a footstool with her head resting on Sheila’s lap. Sheila was knitting a garment for Rory.
It is one of those clear pictures that the mind takes in and keeps for ever, unaltered through the ruin of years. I see it in every detail; the glowing points of cigar and cigarette, the clear green light of the sky over the Heath. I hear again the silence, emphasised for a long time by the click of Sheila’s needles, broken at last by Maeve saying in a low voice: “The longest day. From now on we go downhill.”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Dermot, shattering with a laugh the solemnity that had come upon us. “I’d rather go for a holiday. What about you, Bill? Can’t we join forces at Heronwater this year? I’m ready to set off in a week’s time.”
“My forces, I’m afraid, will be small,” I said. “But I’d like to come. There’s nothing to keep me in London at the moment. Perhaps Livia will come—at any rate when she’s finished the work she’s doing. She said that would be in the middle of July.”
“‘We should still be there,” said Dermot. “I’m for making it a long holiday. I’d like to stay on well into August. What about you?”
“That would be fine,” I said. I did not say what was in my mind: that as Livia and I were to be married in August, we could get married at the church of St. Just, buried in its pit of trees alongside the little lost creek. I should like Dermot and Sheila and Eileen to be there. But with Maeve in the room, her white face glimmering in the dark, her eyes fixed on the clear swim of light out over the Heath, I said nothing of that. “I’d like that,” I said.
“I shall be glad when I can take a long holiday with you all again,” Maeve said, not drawing her glance back into the room. “How long ago it all seems, Bill dear, since Mary Latter came down to visit Captain Judas, and we saw the swans flying across the moon, and you launched me.” She got up. “I must go. I hate longest days. I hate endings and things that suggest endings to come.” We all got up. “Walk across Parliament Fields with me, Uncle Bill,” she invited. “I’ll get on to the tube at Hampstead station.”
“I’ll get Martin to take you down in the car,” I offered.
“I wouldn’t bother him. Let the man enjoy his Sabbath,” she said. “But walk across the fields with me. It’s on your way.”
So I walked across the fields with Maeve. There were many people about in the warm evening, under the wonderful light which still pulsed thinly in the sky. “I shouldn’t feel tragic on such a night,” she said, “but I do. ‘From now on we go downhill.’ What a thing to say! What a daft, mad thing!”
I saw her on to her train and walked slowly home. The Crown Prince who was heir to the Austrian throne was thinking that night of his forthcoming visit to the Province at Bosnia. He set out to keep his appointment two days later.
*
Livia promised to join us at Heronwater as soon as she was able. Probably in about three weeks’ time, she said. Dermot and Sheila, Eileen and I, travelled on Sunday, June 28th. Martin had gone on with my car a few days before, taking the luggage of both families—if you could call me a family. We travelled that Sunday in Dermot’s car, he driving. We took it easy, knocking off on any excuse—for mid-morning coffee, for lunch, for tea. There were not many cars on the roads in 1914; it was a lovely day; and we were all in the best of spirits. Ahead of me, things looked clearer than they had done for many a day. I felt that Oliver would be safer, working under Dermot’s eye. I told myself that before I came back this way again I should be married to Livia. I began to think of the work I should take up when she and I were settled down with the winter ahead of us.
I was ready to be pleased with everything on that day of high June as we sped along the roads that had not yet been denuded of their country air, of their hedges and elms, their foxgloves, honeysuckle and meadowsweet. “What have we done to this chap, Sheila?” Dermot demanded. “I could almost take him for Bill Essex, that little Manchester snotty we used to know.”
Sheila, sitting in the back of the car with me, her hat tied to her head with a veil knotted under her chin, for the hood was down, turned her smile upon me and said nothing. Sheila didn’t need to say anything. She was happy when those about her were happy, and she was happy now. Her grey eyes were deep with content. Her mouth was a sweet and lovely line. The hair that escaped in wisps from under her veil was grey, but she was a desirable woman still.
The cathedral bells were calling to evening service as we threaded our way through Truro’s ugly streets. Half an hour later we were turning into the gravel drive, winding through the trees, catching the smell of the river we could not see. Dermot pulled up. “There!” he exclaimed proudly, dropping his hands from the wheel. “The slowest time ever made between Hampstead and Heronwater. That’s what I understand by motoring.”
We clambered out of the car, and as we stood there stretching our legs on the gravel a wheeze of rusty music came drifting up from the river. I turned a questioning eye on Sam Sawle who had come out to greet us. “That’s Captain Judas, Mr. Essex,” he explained. “He’s been holding a service on deck every Sunday evening this summer. That’s his harmonium you can hear.”
We all crowded to the balustrade and looked into the dense foliage that ran downwards. We could not see the Jezebel, but soon we heard the captain’s voice upraised, a thin reed of sound running with the harmonium’s wheeze:
Praise ye the Lord, ‘tis good to raise
Your hearts and voices in His praise.
His nature and His works unite
To make this duty our delight.
“Donnelly would like that,” said Dermot. “He’d be down there singing.”
“He do go through the whole thing proper,” Sawle said. “All the hymns and prayers, and a short address. And in the middle of the prayers he do shout his own ‘Halleluiahs!’ and ‘Praise be’s’ and then he reads the announcements and takes a collection from himself.”
“And what announcements does he make?” I asked.
“Always the same one, Mr. Essex. ‘The great and terrible day of the Lord is at hand. The date will be announced from this pulpit in the near future.’”
We looked at one another without speaking as the singing came to an end and Judas’s voice rose and fell across the water, calling upon his God.
“The poor man,” said Eileen quietly, and started towards the house. We all followed, somehow subdued.
But we did not feel subdued in the morning. How good it was, after all the doubts and agonies I had endured during the past few months, to be standing there with Dermot in the utter simplicity of that morning hour! We stood on the edge of the landing-stage, looking at the water sliding and whispering by. There was still a trace of the night’s mist, but the sun was gaining strength, with promise of a long day of blazing heat. A heron flew high overhead, with slow, lazy strength, but there was no other living thing to be seen and none heard save the birds twittering in the woods. Nothing stirred on the black hulk of the Jezebel. The dinghy, the Maeve and the two sailing boats curtseyed on the sliding river.
The moment was too perfect for speech. Without a word, Dermot and I slid into the water, swam round the boats, and then came ashore. A quarter of an hour later we joined Sheila and Eileen at breakfast. There was that marvellous fish a John Dory, which Sawle had somewhere procured, and a fine cold ham, with bread and butter and marmalade and jam and plenty of tea and coffee. Sawle had resolved on a good start for the holiday. I asked him if there was a newspaper in the house and he said that Martin had been in to Truro and had doubtless brought one back. Martin came in at that moment with the Western Morning News. Dermot brusquely snatched it from him. I didn’t bother. This was no time for newspapers, with Sheila handing me a cup of tea and Eileen piling John Dory upon my plate. Only when I had taken the edge off my hunger did I ask: “Well, what’s the world doing?”
“Nothing that matters to us,” he said. “Getting ready for the week’s cricket and racing. Oh, and an Austrian grand duke was assassinated yesterday while we were so comfortably driving down here. At Sara—Sarajevo. Ever heard of it?”
“No.”
“Neither have I.”
“Put down the paper and get something into you,” said Sheila. “They’re always assassinating people in those places.”
“Well,” said Dermot, tossing the paper across the room. “No news is good news.”
*
Livia joined us on Saturday, July 18th. That was the day Oliver’s holiday began. A week before this, Dermot had said to me: “There would be no harm in giving Oliver a chance to join us here. I don’t think it’s likely he’ll come, but anyway I shall write and tell him to take a fortnight’s holiday. What do you think?”
I was anxious to try anything that offered a hope of coming to terms with Oliver. I asked Dermot to point out to him that Livia would be coming on the 18th, that there were two sailing dinghies longing for work, and that the weather was glorious. All this Dermot threw out as coming from himself.
He received an answer from Oliver thanking him cordially for the holiday—“which really I don’t deserve after so short a service”—but saying nothing about Cornwall, nothing about his intentions in any way.
“That seems to be that,” said Dermot ruefully.
On the 18th I took the Maeve in to Falmouth to meet Livia. I might have sent the car to meet her at Truro, but I liked fussing about with the motor-boat, especially now that I no longer touched the wheel of a car. I was glad at any time to run over to Falmouth, to do shopping, to pick people up, or for any other purpose.
Livia looked worn out. She explained it by saying she had been working too hard. She was glad it was all over. She had done all that Wertheim wanted of her. “And I’m not sorry to get away from him, either,” she said, lying back on the cushions as I manœuvred the boat away from the pier and made out for the open water of the harbour. She looked round at the sparkling blue of sea and sky, the green hills that sloped down to the sea, the gaiety of the multitudinous craft sailing and steaming about us. “Oh, it’s so peaceful,” she exclaimed, breathing deeply of the lively air. “You simply can’t believe in war with all this about you.”
“War!” I exclaimed in surprise. “What on earth is there to go to war about?”
“It’s Wertheim,” she said. “That’s what I meant about being glad to get away from him. I expect he’s mad.”
“That man’s got war on the brain,” I soothed her. “As long ago as last January he was talking about it.”
“Well, he says it’s here now—a matter of weeks.”
I laughed, suddenly and loudly, out there on the wide water of Falmouth harbour, and at the sound Livia’s face cheered. She looked almost grateful for that quick spontaneous guffaw. “Thank you for that, Bill,” she said. “You’ve no idea how that man has got on my mind. It’s that business at Sarajevo—I expect you read about it in the papers.”
“Yes, some grand duke or other.”
“But remember,” she said swiftly, “he was the heir to the Austrian throne,” and in the way she had at once picked me up I sensed Wertheim’s tuition.
“But, good Lord,” I exclaimed impatiently, “what have Austria and Serbia got to do with us?”
“That’s what I wanted to know, and Wertheim was terribly convincing—with pepper-pots and salt-cellars and pieces of bread—you know, showing how the whole thing was going to work out. He says that Russia will simply have to back up Serbia, and Germany won’t have Russia butting in, and France will rear up as soon as Germany moves a man or a gun. I wanted to know what all that had to do with a chap being shot in Sarajevo, and he just looked pitying and said ‘Nothing, my dear Miss Vaynol, nothing at all. They’ve been ready for a long time, and what we heard at Sarajevo was only the starter’s pistol.’”
I felt my face becoming as grim and drawn as Livia’s had been. Suddenly the sunlight seemed to dim. There was just a grain of possibility in this nonsense of Wertheim’s. I could imagine him sitting there with Livia, immense, impassive, convincingly demonstrating the end of the world with pieces of bread. “But dash it all!” I cried irritably, “what do other people think? What are they saying in London?”
“Does it matter what they are saying in London?” Livia asked, suddenly contemptuous. “No, I’ve heard this only from Wertheim. Everybody else is playing about as usual.”
We had shaken off most of the traffic, for now we were in the Carrick Roads, and I let the Maeve go all out. “Well,” I said, “war seems a long way from here, and until it’s a good deal nearer I refuse to talk about it.”
Ahead of us a steamer was making her way on the rising tide up the river to Truro. “What flag’s that?” I asked Livia.
“Danish.”
Something familiar in the cut of the vessel teased my memory, and suddenly I remembered the night when Dermot and Donnelly had accompanied me and Captain Judas to Truro. Now we were near enough to verify the guess. Round the counter of the ship, which was heavily laden with timber, I read the name of the Kay of Copenhagen, and on the bridge I had a glimpse of the tall figure and sun-tanned Viking head of Captain Jansen.
“I’ve met that chap before,” I exclaimed. “A friend of Captain Judas.”
“And how is that poor old fool?” Livia asked without much interest.
“Madder than ever. Announcing the coming of the great and terrible Day of the Lord.”
“Like Wertheim.”
“Give Wertheim a rest,” I said, almost savagely.
At the head of the Carrick Roads we swung right, well ahead of the Kay. There was plenty of water in the river and very little traffic. The Maeve’s engine was in beautiful form. The richly wooded banks, broken occasionally by pasturage coming down to the water, swung past us. A heron or two flapped lazily away at our approach. All the lovely panorama of that most entrancing river unfolded itself, reach after reach; and speedily we were turning the last spit of land. I slowed down the engine, pointed the Maeve’s bow to the landing-stage, and saw that Dermot, Sheila and Eileen were all standing there, gazing across at the Jezebel. At the same moment I clearly heard the bell sound in the Jezebel’s living-room—the bell which I had myself persuaded Judas to install. A small motor-boat was alongside the black hull of the ship. A man sat at the engine which was boxed amidships, and a tall stripling stood up with his hand on the bell-pull. We were a good way off, but something familiar in that spruce upright figure started my heart beating quicker. I looked at Livia. Her face had gone white. “He must have been on my train,” she said tensely, “and he’s hired a boat to bring him on from Truro. He rang me up last night. He said he was going to do it but I thought he was fooling.”
“But I’m glad,” I said, “glad to have him. We’ll all have a great holiday.”
She looked at me wearily. “Will you? Oh, Bill, you fool! He hasn’t come to give you joy. He’s come so that his presence may taunt you. He’s not calling on Judas for fun. He’s going to stay with him.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Stay with Judas! With us on the other side of the water? It’s monstrous, impossible!”
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” she said; and then savagely: “Why couldn’t he go somewhere else? Why the hell can’t he leave me in peace! I told him not to come.”
She was trembling, her knuckles white as she clutched the gunwale. I had stopped the engine, and in the silence the bell in the Jezebel clanged again. Oliver’s clear, unmistakable voice rang out over the water. “Judas! Ahoy there, Judas! Come on! It’s me—Oliver.”
I picked up my glasses from a thwart and saw Judas appear and look over the rail. This was the first time I had set eyes on him that holiday. His always meagre face, which was all I could see, appeared to have shrunk. His cheeks seemed to have caved in, his head to be all wild white hair and whiskers. It was the face of a far-gone fanatic. I saw it light up when he caught sight of Oliver standing there in the boat, hailing him insolently. “Ho, there, old ’un! Don’t keep the Master waiting!”
With trembling hands Judas lowered his ladder. “Coming, my Lord, coming,” he quavered.
Oliver picked up a rucksack from the motor-boat, slung it on to his shoulders and climbed the ladder. The motor-boat started up and went back towards Truro. Oliver must have been well aware of the Maeve out in the river, of the little knot gathered on the Heronwater quay. He did not spare a glance for either. As soon as he was aboard, Judas pulled up the ladder, and they disappeared.
The Maeve chugged slowly in to the landing-stage. Sheila and Eileen had disappeared. I felt that they had not wanted to see me in my discomfiture. But Dermot was still there, and under pretence of helping me ashore he wrung my hand hard.
“The worst yet, Bill,” he muttered.
I nodded, unable to speak; but worse was to come.
*
In the morning, before any of us were up, the Rory, which was Oliver’s boat, was shifted from her moorings on our side of the river and tied up under the shadow of the Jezebel.
Dermot, who had walked down to the landing-stage with me, was livid with rage, and Sam Sawle, who had come up to the house to tell us what had happened, stood beside us, grave and concerned. He asked if he should row across in the dinghy and fetch her back. I pretended to consider this for a moment, then said: “No, the Rory’s his boat. He can do what he likes with it.”
I turned on my heel and walked away, Dermot following. I could feel him fighting to keep back the words that were bursting to his lips. He did not succeed. “The bloody little whippersnapper...” he began.
I held up my hand. He was silent for a moment, then fired forth again: “He’s sacked! I won’t have him! Sacked! He can go to hell.”
An hour later he was still sitting on the landing-stage, smoking morosely, glowering across the river at the Jezebel and at the Rory ducking and curtseying alongside her.
*
There were times during the following week when I could have cut and run. The situation was agonising, only made possible by a touch of the absurd which Dermot lent it. He wrote to Oliver telling him that he was no longer in the employment of the firm of O’Riorden and enclosing a week’s wages. Sam Sawle was sent over in the dinghy to deliver the note. He was asked aboard and found Oliver in undisputed command of the ship. Judas was in the galley, cooking. Oliver threw himself into an easy chair, read the note, and shouted: “Judas! Pen and ink.”
The old man came trotting out of the galley, wiping his hands on an apron, and deferentially produced all that Oliver demanded. “That’s all,” said Oliver, and Judas bowed and retired.
Oliver winked at Sawle. “Sit down, Sam,” he invited easily. “There’s an answer to this.”
“I’ll wait on deck,” Sawle said.
The letter he brought back contained the money which Dermot had sent. “I don’t need this,” Oliver wrote. “I am well provided for here, and in any case I do not accept your notice to leave the service of the firm of O’Riorden. You give me no reason connected with my work, and if you persist I shall bring an action for unlawful dismissal.”
Dermot went white with fury. “Can he do that? Can he do that?” he demanded.
I knew no more of the law on that matter than he did, and he was for rushing at once to Truro to consult a solicitor. I dissuaded him.
“I’d rather you let it drop, Dermot.”
He was contrite at once. “Sorry, Bill, sorry. Just my damned personal pride.”
How much Dermot had told Sheila and Eileen I do not know. They were aware that Oliver and I had parted, but I had no reason to believe that they associated Livia with that. Nevertheless, they were difficult and restrained with her. Some intuition was at work that made them treat her with the considered courtesy shown to a guest rather than with the equal comradeship that the rest of us enjoyed.
One day we all packed into the Maeve and went to Molunan beach. Everything should have been perfect. It was heavenly weather, with the level blue of the sea stained here and there with patches of violet deepening to purple. The gulls were dropping in cackling companies on to the water, sure indication of the presence of fish, as Eileen reminded us. She told us of how Sam Sawle used to manœuvre the boat over spots where the gulls had descended and how the lines always came up with a catch. “I’ve known all of us—me and Maeve and Rory and Oliver—to be pulling them up one after another as fast as we could go,” she said.
And the recital of the names—me and Maeve and Rory and Oliver—knelled like a litany of lost days, of days incredibly far, days filled with peacefulness and youth and hope not yet stained by any doubt, so that Dermot and Sheila and I, catching one another’s glances, and each seeming instinctively to note that the others were recording the absence of three out of the four children mentioned, all dropped our eyes again to casual things, feeling a little damped, perhaps a little older.
We anchored the Maeve off the beach and, in two companies, went ashore in the dinghy, taking our lunch things with us. Dermot and I scoured the beach for dry driftwood, and built up a fire ready for the match. Then we all bathed, and I suppose bathing from Molunan beach on a day of high summer is one of the things most calculated to make you forget the sorrows of the world. With my toes gripping and curling into the hot loose sand, with the silky blue of the Cornish sea reaching away under a dazzle of sunlight, and the blue arch of the sky too ardent to be looked upon, I stood for a moment drenched in light and warmth, watching Livia and Sheila and Eileen running down to where blue and yellow met in a white embrace of foam. Then Dermot came from behind his rock; we ran to join them; and with a great shout we all leapt upon the water and thrashed round the Maeve and back again.
“That’s enough for me, Bill,” Dermot shouted. “I’ll see to the fire.”
He ran up the beach, and the others followed him. I remained swimming slowly just beyond my depth. I could see down through the crystal water to where the light wavered in cool patterns upon the yellow sand. I could see here and there the pallid rays of a starfish, a frond of seaweed undulating to minute and unguessed currents, responsive as a polar needle to invisible compulsions. Then there came the sight I had hoped to see, the sight of all others most fascinating in those waters: a horde of tiny silver fish, swimming in a long thin procession, ten or a dozen abreast, like a small marine army on the move. Endlessly they went by, never changing their formation, wheeling now to the right, now to the left, but always precise, regimented, moving as by a common will. A small cloud drifted before the sun, and the water, still pellucid, turned grey. And the silver fish turned grey. I could see them still: a grey endless army, moving to some unknown encounter across the grey floor of the sea.
The fire was blazing, and the kettle of water which we had brought was “singing,” when I ran up the beach. They had all quickly dressed. Sheila and Eileen were unpacking a lunch basket. “Let me help,” Livia said. “Give me the plates and things. I’ll lay them out.”
“Now you sit down and make yourself comfortable,” Sheila answered. “We can manage this.”
Livia turned aside with a groan. “Oh, God!” she muttered, and threw down the cigarette she was smoking and crushed it with her foot in the sand.
When we had eaten, we leaned back relaxed against the rocks. Dermot and I were smoking our pipes. Eileen sat between us. Sheila and Livia lay extended at full length on the sand at our feet, their eyes closed. Suddenly Eileen exclaimed: “Look! The Rory! That must be Oliver!”
Livia at once started up. “Oliver! Where?” Then she seemed to be overcome by confusion.
It was like that all through the week. Wherever we went Oliver appeared. Judas we never saw. The report which Sam Sawle brought back after taking the note to Oliver was the only hint we had of his activities. One night we saw his friend Jansen come down by water from Truro and go aboard. That night, till a late hour, we could hear the Dane’s great voice booming, and song and laughter coming over the river.
Oliver we saw constantly. After the first few days his natural good looks were enhanced by the sun. The deep bronzing of his body made the blue of his eyes and the white of his teeth remarkable, and his hair was bleached and wind-blown. I was near enough to him often to notice even such particularities. He would appear before us almost, it seemed, out of the blue, and with nonchalance be unaware of our presence. He had arranged a diving platform, hanging on loops of rope over the Jezebel’s side, and it was ten to one that if any of us chanced to be near the boat he would ostentatiously appear, wearing nothing but the bathing slip that showed off magnificently his six feet of splendid golden body, and would dive, and swim by with insolent unconcern.
I knew that all this was aimed at Livia, and it had its effect. She became irritable and moody and at last professed herself unwilling to join our outings because, she said, she could not stand the situation which Oliver had forced upon us. But she continued to accompany us until the Friday. We were all going to Helston that day, a fairly long trip, and Livia at the last moment—actually when some of us were in the boat and the rest stood by the dinghy loaded with lunch and bathing things—shouted to me that she did not feel up to coming. Sam Sawle was sitting in the dinghy, holding her to the landing-steps, and Livia stood there on the steps shouting across the water to me: “No, Bill, really I can’t. I don’t feel up to it. I must rest.”
Sam Sawle looked over his shoulder towards the Maeve, waiting for my instructions. Dermot, who was aboard with me, looked at me hard and said: “Sam can manage the Maeve. Stay with her.”
I shouted: “I’ll come ashore, Livia. I shouldn’t like you to spend a lonely day.”
Her voice came very clear over the water: “No, no. I won’t have that. I’m not going to spoil your outing.”
Dermot looked towards the Jezebel, and said quietly: “Stay with her.”
I hesitated. Livia ran lightly down the steps and put her foot on the dinghy’s bow. She pushed the boat out. “Go on, Sawle,” she said.
Dermot looked grave, but he did not speak again. “All right, Sam, come aboard,” I shouted.
Only then did Dermot take his eyes from my face, as though a tension had relaxed, an important decision been taken. From me his gaze turned to Livia who, with a wave in our direction, had swung round and started up the path to the house. In a moment the bushes hid her. Dermot continued to gaze for a while at the spot where she had been. Then he said: “Gone.”
*
We in the Maeve had no sight of Oliver that day. We did not get back to Heronwater till just before dinner-time. Livia was waiting for us at the landing-stage, gay and full of fun, eager to know all that we had done and seen. She said that the rest had done her good. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’d like to do a lot of shopping in Truro. Could I have the car quite early, Bill? I’d like to be there by ten.”
I was delighted to find her in such excellent spirits, and told Martin to have the car ready. She wrote down a list of things that we all wanted: tobacco for me, wool and knitting needles for Sheila, and so on.
In the morning she was gone without my knowing it. I had been on the Maeve with Sawle, overhauling the engine, and when I got back to the house I was just in time to see the car disappearing towards the road. It was a pottering morning. We had made no communal arrangements. I went back to the river and sat there smoking, and presently Dermot joined me, bringing a newspaper. We talked desultorily about the tension that all through the week had been growing between Austria and Serbia. It didn’t seem a very serious matter to us.
“Wertheim is sure there’ll be war,” I remarked, as though I were talking about the dead certainty of a cricket fixture.
“There’ll be war all right between Austria and Serbia,” Dermot said. “The Austrian ultimatum expires today.”
He, too, spoke as though we were discussing the antics of some remote species, unrelated to any concerns that might touch us. Then we said nothing more about it. He stretched himself in the sunlight on the short turf of the landing-stage, and I sat there, smoking, idly glancing now at the newspaper, now at the river, beautiful at the top of the tide.
The sound of engines came through the drowsy morning and presently the Kay of Copenhagen, having finished her affairs at Truro, steamed round the bend, making for the sea. Jansen on the bridge set his whistle screaming as he drew near to the Jezebel. Captain Judas appeared on his deck, not aproned as Sawle had described him, but beautifully dressed, as I had been accustomed to see him. He stood with his hand raised to his cap in salute as the Kay went by: went by, though I did not know it then, a coffin-ship wherein all that I had hoped for and worked for was interred. Livia and Oliver were aboard the Kay. Livia had made her decision at last... The bone of contention... She wrote to me when they reached Copenhagen.
But that day I knew nothing of this. I wondered vaguely why Oliver had not appeared alongside Judas, but that question did not worry me for long. The Kay was an object of interest, as any ship was on the quiet river. I watched her out of sight, and then turned again to the blissful, mindless contemplation of sky and river.