As that Saturday drew to its close we all knew—Dermot and Sheila and I, and even little Eileen—that the thin crust I had been treading for months had caved in. Lies, evasions, deceptions, hopes and fears: all were ended. There was even, at first, crazy as it sounds, a sense of relief. I knew now where I was.
It was at noon that Martin rang up from Truro to ask whether Livia had come back some other way. She had told him to stay with the car near the cathedral till she rejoined him, and there he had waited till anxiety caused him to make his inquiry.
I was up at the house when the telephone bell rang, and I answered it myself. As soon as I gathered what Martin’s worried voice was saying, my heart gave a great hurting thump in my breast. I knew in that moment that Livia would not come back.
“Don’t wait any longer,” I said; then hung up the receiver and stood there in the cool shadowed hall, looking out to the dazzle of sunlight beyond the door. Sheila passed slowly by, a white figure on the vivid yellow gravel. I called her name quietly. She came into the hall, blinking at its shadows, and then exclaimed: “Bill! What’s the matter? You look ill!”
I had the bowl of my pipe in my hand, the stem between my teeth. I did not realise till she spoke that the stem was clattering. I put the pipe down unsteadily on a table. “That was Martin, ringing up from Truro. Livia hasn’t turned up at the car.”
“Perhaps there’s been an accident?...”
“No. I don’t think we shall see Livia again.”
“My dear!” Sheila took my shaking hand in both her hands and held it tight. Unshed tears were shining in her eyes.
“I shall survive it,” I said, and gave what must have been a ghastly smile. “Have lunch without me today, there’s a sweet. Tell Dermot what I think has happened.”
“I suppose—Oliver?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
*
What was the sense of doing what I was doing—using my study as if it were the lair of a wounded beast, now sitting in my chair, with the curtains drawn, now restlessly striding up and down, now peeping through the chink of the curtains to see whether the sunny commonplace world still existed outside? Of course it did. “You’re not the first fool to be duped,” I told myself, “nor will you be the last.” But what difference did that make? I was a fool, and duped.
At four o’clock, Dermot came in, bringing a tray of tea. “I’m damned if I’ll eat that here, like a sick child petted in the nursery,” I said. “Take it out into the sunshine.”
Dermot took the tray out to a table near the balustrade, where Sheila and Eileen were at tea, their bright clothes shining against the dark green foliage of the wood.
That was better, and they had the sense not to pity me, though I guessed pity in the quiet respectful demeanour of Sawle and Martin throughout the rest of that wretched day. It was not till Sawle said to me, late in the evening: “Shall I bring the Rory across the river now, Mr. Essex?” that I saw in that one word now how completely they had weighed up the matter.
Martin was there with us on the landing-stage. He had been tinkering, like the rest of us that day, with the Maeve’s engine. I hated to think that these two men, whom I liked and respected, should be standing there shut away from me by an absurdity of convention. “Yes, bring her across,” I said. “You seem to think my son is gone.”
Sawle nodded.
“And I expect you and Martin have been having a guess about why he is gone?”
“It’s not our business, sir,” Martin chipped in. “But we naturally couldn’t help coming to certain conclusions.”
“Will you keep them to yourselves?” I said. “I would thank you.”
It was all very terse and formal, but they seemed glad I had spoken. It established something between us; and I was not sorry for that when Martin, within six months, and Sawle within a year, had been killed, the one on land and the other at sea.
*
And we were now moving swiftly to the killing days. Even then, on that Saturday ten days before England and Germany were at war, Dermot and I refused to entertain the thought which, from this point and that, had tried to slip into our lulled minds. But on the Monday Wertheim rang me up. He said he wanted Livia to return to London at once.
“She’s gone from here,” I said, “and left no address.”
I felt myself going hot as I imagined Wertheim’s heavy, intelligent face registering this news and his mind commenting upon it. There was not much that escaped him. “Hard lines, Essex,” he said. “I mean the holiday won’t be so good for you now.” I knew well enough what he meant.
“Look!” he added. “Every Street’s coming off. Yes, right away. I’m going ahead with that musical show. I shall want Maeve for that.”
“Why have you decided all this so suddenly?” I asked him.
“Suddenly! Where do you live, Essex—on this earth or in the moon? Don’t you even read the papers? Haven’t you seen that Austria and Serbia are at war—or will be by tomorrow, anyway?”
“Yes, but surely that’s all very remote?”
Something that sounded like a groan of despair shuddered over the line and into my ear. Then Wertheim hung up.
And the next day Serbia and Austria were at war; and on the Saturday Russia and Germany were in it; and on the Sunday Dermot came to me looking very grave.
“Bill,” he said, “that damned man Wertheim is right. I’m going home. I’ve got a business to look after.”
“Everybody is making very sudden decisions,” I grumbled. “When are you going?”
“Now—as soon as I can get away. Sheila’s packing.”
We looked at one another irresolutely. There was nothing to say, but there was a tension in the air. Martin appeared driving Dermot’s car round to the front of the house, and Sawle came through the front door carrying a suit-case. These trivial things moved me. More than the prognostications of Wertheim or the gathering strain that had been manifesting itself in the newspapers, the sight of Dermot’s car appearing like that, unexpectedly, ready for departure, the sight of Sawle carrying out the bags, imparted a gravity to the moment. Sudden destruction of carefully made plans, swift severance of friends: these things I understood, and these things were being caused by the shadow that was spreading from Austria.
Dermot took my arm and drew me towards the path that led down to the water. We stumbled over the flinty way, through the green umbrage, as we had so often done before. We came out into the light blazing on the river. We stood for a moment looking about us, silent in the utter peace and indifference of the summer afternoon.
“We’ve had some good times here, Bill,” Dermot said. “I shall remember them. The children. I shall remember all the fun we’ve had here with Oliver and Rory.”
“And Maeve. There was a summer night I rowed her up the river, and there was a full moon, and we saw swans flying across it—strung out they were in a line.”
“I was thinking particularly of Oliver and Rory,” Dermot said. “It’s all behind us now, you know, but I’m glad it’s there to think of. We had some good times with them.”
“Yes, we had.”
“The whole damn world is falling to bits, Bill. Did you know that? This is the big thing. This isn’t the Boer War this time.”
I didn’t answer, and after a moment he said, as though it took some saying: “Bill, you’ve often heard me say ‘God damn England.’ Well, now I say ‘God help England,’ and that’s a prayer.”
I looked at him, moved and surprised. He was standing with outthrust beard, his face pale, the cheeks twitching, not looking at me, looking across the water at the Jezebel, but I don’t think he was seeing it.
“I’m glad to hear that, Dermot,” I said. “This isn’t a bad country.”
“This is not a bad country,” he echoed. “I’ve spent my life here, and I know. If this country is in it—and I don’t see how she can fail to be—she’s going to need her men. I’d like Rory to be one of them. And begod,” he flashed, “we could have it out with you afterwards.”
“You mean that? You’d like Rory—?”
“I do.”
“You’re too late, Dermot.”
“Like you, Bill.”
He said it without anger, in no way as a taunt. It was a simple statement of the truth.
Dermot had taken me down to the river so that we should face this truth together: the truth that we had lost our sons.
*
That summer, in its fullness and in its autumn decline, was the loveliest I had ever known. I do not think this is an illusion, a nostalgic looking-back to Paradise lost. I have the clearest remembrance of day after lovely day, of evening after evening in which the light prolonged itself into blue magical dusks, and of splendid dawns arriving as if out of some inexhaustible benevolence. The summer and the autumn seemed to be the work of a God who must surely be very pleased with a creation he favoured so deeply.
It was unendurable, this weather. Had thunder and lightning and blasts that stripped the trees come on that Sunday after Dermot had left I should have rejoiced in the sense of the appropriate, but when I awoke to the house empty of my friends, and saw the sun shining through the window, and heard the green stately indifferent trees gently rustling their wings, I felt abandoned and desolate.
When I got downstairs I asked Sawle and Martin to have breakfast with me. They diffidently did so, but it was not a success. It was stressing the abnormality of the moment.
But to be alone was torment. I went down to the landing-stage and sat there smoking my pipe, looking at the woods rising up behind the Jezebel, touched here and there with a rusty streak of brown, a patch of yellow or red, the first diffused sparks of the flame that would soon be running from one end of the wooded river to the other. It was heart-breakingly beautiful there, with the silky blue of the sky stretched over the woods, and the light raining in dancing drops on the water.
The boats stood over their blue and white reflections on our side of the water. We shan’t want them again, I thought. They stirred memories that were wounds; memories of that visit when Nellie was alive and the boats were new, and the children saw them for the first time. “Boats! All our very own?”
I thought kindly of Nellie and her timid faithful ways, and I made a mental note to tell Sawle to get rid of all the boats except the Maeve and her dinghy. They hurt me too much.
Then I fell to wondering where Livia was and what she was doing; and I thought of that night in her flat when I had awakened and counted the little bony peaks that punctuated the ridge of her spine, lying like the main range of a delectable country that I had been permitted so briefly to invade and possess.
At that I got up and shook myself. This way, I should go melancholy mad. I rowed out to the Maeve, took her down the river, and when I reached the Carrick Roads let her go all out, racing across the tranquil water where the gulls dipped and screamed, racing through the heartless perfect day from the loneliness and desolation that settled again grimly on the thwart beside me when the engine’s clamour subsided to a purr and the Maeve slowed towards the white bob of the moorings.
*
All through the Monday Sawle and Martin went gravely about their affairs. We three existed there in the isolation of Heronwater as if in a vacuum. We saw no other soul that day. The weather again was hot and still. The very trees seemed to be as motionless as though all their energy were absorbed in the expectation of some mighty event. Martin had gone early to Truro and brought back all the newspapers he could buy. They echoed with the marching of armies. Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany, all were astir. Germany had invaded Luxembourg. Moving west.
Till that day, no word of the war had passed between me and Martin and Sawle. But when I went out after breakfast Martin was hovering anxiously near the door. “D’you think we’re going to be in this, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. He went away with thoughtfully pursed lips and squared shoulders.
And on Wednesday morning we knew we were in it. Martin asked: “Shall we be going back to London soon, sir?” and I knew what he meant. If I were not going back, he would be going without me. His worried face cleared when I said: “Yes, we’re going back today. As soon as you can get things ready.”
There was no reason now for me to remain at Heronwater. Some voice which I knew had no sense in it had urged me to stay there till I had heard for good or ill whether Livia would come back. Now I knew that she would not come back. Her letter from Copenhagen had reached me that morning.
She did not call me “Dear Bill.” She did not call me anything. I could imagine the debate she had had with herself as to what, in the new circumstances, she should call me. So she just plunged straight into the letter like this:
“I am doing this because I must. You asked me once whether I loved Oliver, and I said I did not know. I think I was lying to myself even then. I have loved him from the moment I first set eyes on him, though, God help me, I expect little profit from it. But I have learned not to expect profit from love, and I have loved more than one man. I think it was the utter safety you offered me that I could not stomach, for I am too young to feel the need of safety. If I have done you wrong, it is not in robbing you of the marriage you expected, for that would have been small comfort to you, but in ever allowing you to expect it. For that I ask your forgiveness.
LIVIA VAYNOL.”
That was all. The letter was addressed from a Copenhagen hotel. I saw no reason to answer it.
*
It was from Wertheim that I learned of their Odyssey. He was frantically trying to get Livia back to England. Every day he wrote and telegraphed and telephoned, threatened and cajoled. “Soon! Soon!” he shouted to me one day. “She says ‘soon’! My God, what does soon mean to me?”
I have never before seen Wertheim excited. Josie was with us. “Control your emotions, Jo,” she admonished him. “I don’t know what ‘soon’ means to you, but to me it means when one or the other of them has got it out of the system. Not a minute before.”
She was a wise woman, was Josie. When she heard that they were making for Paris she nodded her head. “Now we shall see,” she said. “In Paris that young man will see something of the war: men marching, bayonets, girls cheering. That is going to mean something to a young man without a job. And he’s had her for three months now.”
Josie was right. It was soon after this, at the beginning of December, that Wertheim said: “She’s back. She’s brought him with her.”
A day or two later I saw them. I was crossing Waterloo Bridge on a raw blustery afternoon, darkening towards twilight. The wind was combing cold ripples into the river, and water, air and sky were alike chill and foreboding. Coming towards me from the north side was a marching company of men, such as one saw then at almost every hour of the day: newly-attested men, not uniformed, marching to a station to set out for a training-camp. This was a mixed and ragged lot. A military band went before them, blowing heartily into the dank air, and they stepped out to it bravely enough: short men and tall, toffs and ragged hobbledehoys, men in caps, men in bowlers, men in felt hats, some neatly overcoated, some in threadbare coats. I could not have overlooked Oliver: no one could have overlooked him. He was the tallest man there and he carried his body straight and his head high. He had neither hat nor overcoat, and wore new blue tweeds. They struck me, because I had never seen Oliver in tweeds before. His fair hair was lifted by the light wind. Some obstruction ahead caused the column to halt, and as they stood there marking time, he did not look to right or left but kept his head up and his eyes fixed far ahead.
I felt my throat contract with emotion. The brave music. The boys marching. Oliver! He had halted very near me where I leaned on the cold parapet of the bridge. If I had called his name he would have heard me. But I dared not. I dared not risk the sightless, unacknowledging turn of those blue eyes. The sergeant at the head of the column shouted “Forward! Quick march!” and the music and the men diminished on my hearing and my vision into the murk of the afternoon. I stood there in the wind whistling up from the river till the high golden head was gone from my sight and the last far notes and drum-beats merged with the customary drone of the city.
*
The encounter emphasised my loneliness. I continued to walk across the bridge feeling sucked and dry and withered. I was very lonely indeed. Oliver, Livia, Martin, Sawle: all were by this time gone. I could have found the companionship that these men had accepted. I was forty-three. There were men of my age dyeing their hair, swearing to a youth that had passed them, scrounging a way into the army by one deception or another. I could have done the same. But I did not do it, or at any time feel an inclination to do it. Later, my reputation as a writer got me work with the Ministry of Propaganda, and I wrote much that I remember neither with pride nor pleasure. There is no need to go into any of that now, but I write this to show that I had an occupation of sorts while the war lasted. But at that time I had not even this shadowy consolation.
I had been suddenly overcome by the absurdity of a man in my position, with no family and no hope of a family, owning two large houses. I tried to sell the Hampstead house, but failed to do so. But I couldn’t live in the place. It had become a mausoleum. I had all its furniture, and all the furniture from Heronwater, put into storage, shut up both houses, sold my car, and for the first time since I married Nellie Moscrop all those years ago I was without the responsibility of a home.
During those friendless, hideous early months of the war, when everybody about me seemed buoyed up by an enthusiasm—an hysteria?—which I was unable to share, I lived in a small obscure hotel, rarely venturing out, because I equally disliked the “God bless you, Tommy” scenes of the day-time streets and the sepulchral crawling about of people in the darkened thoroughfares of night: the most hateful confession, as it seemed to me, that man has yet made on the earth. I could not stand it when lighted windows, the loveliest symbol of peaceful men dwelling quietly about their hearths, were put out.
Living thus alone, with no responsibilities, seeing no one but a few shabby strangers, doing no work, brooding upon the defection of Oliver and Livia and the more impersonal but bitter and obsessive tragedy of the war, I fell into a morbid condition of body and mind, a hypochondria in which I felt myself to be deserted by all the world, though I was deliberately concealing my whereabouts from those who could have helped me. I was hugging my griefs to me, inviting them to kill me, and they nearly did.
My walk that afternoon on which I saw Oliver was typical of the sort of thing I was doing at that time. I had been over to the south side of the river because it was unlikely I should see there anyone I knew. I had wandered about among mean streets, filling my mind and my eyes morbidly with the flaming posters that invited the sheep to the sacrifice. I lunched meanly at a greasy little coffee tavern where the tables were covered with scabby white American cloth. I was piling the agony on to myself in every way I could devise. The encounter with Oliver was the last thing needed. When he had marched by, the wind seemed shrewder, the world more bitter and I made my way to the back-street hotel that was my lair in a spirit of mental and physical hopelessness which I savoured like an opiate.
After dinner I was the sole occupant of the lounge—a dimly-lighted decrepit place with a handful of fire crumbling in the grate. An old black-beetle of a waiter came sidling in now and then, God knows why, flipped at this or that with a napkin, and sidled silently out again. Presently I gave a violent shiver, and pulled my chair nearer to the insufficient fire. That did me no good, and the next time the black-beetle crawled in I asked him to bring me whisky, hot water, sugar and lemon. There was no lemon, but I compounded a grog of sorts, drank it and went to bed.
I slept badly. The shivers returned, so that at last I dragged myself out of bed and spread my overcoat on top of the eiderdown. Then I slept, and when I woke in the morning I was drenched with sweat. All through the day I slept and woke in fits and starts, and the only thing I was conscious of was the lightness and apparent largeness of my head that seemed like a balloon eager to lift my body out of the bed and float it away.
I awoke out of one of my dozes to find the day gone and the dreary room lit by a bedside lamp. I was aware that people were in the room, but I did not know that they were a doctor and Annie Suthurst. This had been achieved by a piece of detective work on the part of the hotel manager. It was characteristic of that wretched little hotel that the play-bill of Every Street still hung in the hall, though the play had been off for some months and Wertheim’s great musical show was settling down to its success. The manager knew that I was the author of Every Street, and, being alarmed about my condition, he decided to ring up someone who might be supposed to have an interest in me. He found Maeve’s name in the telephone book, and she was just setting off for the theatre when news of my illness reached her. So Annie Suthurst was sent for a doctor, under whose sedative I slept calmly that night, and awoke in the morning weak, clear-headed and feeling very foolish.
Repentant, I think is the mood I was in when Maeve and Annie appeared soon after breakfast-time. I felt like a child who has been consciously playing the fool. It was over: there would be no more melodramatic nursing of sorrows.
But that didn’t help me with Maeve. There I was, haggard and unshaven, in that frowsy room, and Maeve without stint told me what she thought of me. I had worried my friends unpardonably; I had caused her profound anxiety at a time when she ought to have had her mind on her work—“to say nothing,” Annie Suthurst broke in, “of draggin’ you round ’ere after t’theatre last night.”
I think Maeve had not intended to say anything about that, and in fury at my learning that she had rushed to the hotel with the paint hardly removed from her face, as soon as the show was ended, she exclaimed: “Shave him, Annie. He’s disgusting.”
“I will an’ all,” Annie said, delighted; and ignominiously I had to submit to her ministrations, thankful that I used a safety razor. She sponged my face and brushed my hair, and I felt so much better that I managed a sheepish smile. “I could eat something,” I said.
I was allowed nothing but hot milk and dry toast, and then, Annie having miraculously made the bed and pillows comfortable, I was told to go to sleep again. Happy to be commanded, to be, after that morbid aberration, in competent hands, I did as I was told.
Three days later, when I had got back from a tottering walk with Maeve in a spell of winter sunshine, she raised the question which she had already settled for me.
“Where are you going to live now? You can’t stay in this place.”
I said I would think about it. “I’ve been thinking for you,” she told me sharply. “It’s high time someone did. There’s a furnished flat on the floor below mine. It’ll be empty at the end of the month.”
“Thank you. I’ll go into that. Who’ll look after me?”
“Annie Suthurst, of course. My place doesn’t take all her time.”
“I’ll speak to her.”
“I’ve done the speaking, and taken the flat, too. All you have to do is go to Brighton and get some fresh air. When you feel well, come back. The place will be ready.”
I kept the flat as long as the war lasted. When Maeve was dead, Annie remained with me.
*
I didn’t like the look of Maeve. I got back from Brighton on a crisp January afternoon, and she was at the station to meet me. For the first time since I had known her there was colour in her cheeks, or rather on her cheekbones: a pinkish suffusion that at first I put down to the sharpness of the air. Then I reflected that I had known Maeve in every sort of weather for years on end, and never had the matt pallor of her skin, which was healthy and attractive, shown any change of hue. I looked at her again, and thought her eye too bright, and when we shook hands her hand seemed dryly hot.
She seemed to be affected intensely by the hectic atmosphere of the station. It was full of jostling men in khaki, and sad-eyed women who did nothing to hide their misery, and women bravely bright, talking of ordinary things. There was a knot of private soldiers, cheerfully boozed, singing songs to the accompaniment of a mouth-organ. The organist, an old sweat with his cap pushed to the back of his head, revealing a fine oiled quiff, looked old enough to have tasted the Boer War, and the songs of that war seemed to be his favourites. He played “Dolly Grey” and “Soldiers of the Queen”; and then one of his mates said: “Give us ‘When it’s with you.’”
The player didn’t find it easy; the song hadn’t yet got fully into that triumphant swing that swept it over England and France; but the men made a go of it, and Maeve shuddered. “Come on!” she implored, dragging on my arm. “Come and see your flat.”
As we went the station echoed to the deep, spaced coughs of a departing train, and the cheers of the men, and the called good-byes of the women.
*
It was inevitable, as we lived in the same building, that Maeve and I should occasionally take a meal together. At last we developed the custom of always lunching with one another, sometimes in her flat, sometimes in mine. It depended on the caprice of Annie Suthurst, who treated us both as children subject to her discipline. On a Wednesday in March, when lunch was over, and Maeve, on the point of departing for a matinée, stood at the door with her face framed in grey fur, upturned about her ears, she said: “If you want to see Oliver, be at Charing Cross about half-past three.” She closed the door quickly and ran down the stairs.
This was the first time she had mentioned either Livia or Oliver. I was not aware that she knew anything of their movements, nor do I know now whence she obtained this information. I put on my overcoat and walked to Charing Cross, with my collar turned up about my ears, as Maeve’s fur had been, for it was a day of cutting wind. At least, I told myself that was why my collar was up, but why, also, was the brim of my hat pulled down in front? That was not a fashion I was accustomed to. I admitted an instinctive attempt at disguise. I had come to spy on my son, as I had spied on him that day in Holborn, and throughout that long bitter night in Camden Town.
The wind was harsh and gritty, the sky was as hard as flint, as I crossed Trafalgar Square under the façade of the National Gallery. When I came out into the Strand a policeman was holding up all traffic, and men and women were lined deep on the pavement outside the station. I took my place with the rest and watched the long procession of the ambulances come into the Strand. I had never known such a silence in a great city. The policeman stood with his arm still as the arm of a signpost. The men took off their hats. The white vans with their blood-coloured crosses filed out one by one. The drivers had a rigid look, taking no notice of the crowd standing there. Ten, twelve, I counted; and then something happened to the head of the convoy, and everything slowed down, stopped. It was an infinitesimal delay. In a second or two all was in motion again, but in that brief suspension of movement, breaking into the utter silence, there came from the van that stood half in and half out of the station gateway one deep groan, followed by a choked-back sob. Like a winter wind suddenly moving through frozen branches, a swift responsive sigh passed through the crowd, and men and women looked into each other’s faces, and shuffled their feet, like the helpless spectators of some supreme tragedy.
When the ambulances were all gone, and the crowd was fluid again, I passed into the station with that groan still in my ears, and all the devils of imagination showing me the proud head that had been held so high on Waterloo Bridge lying as low as Oliver’s feet.
But that was never to be his fate.
When I saw him that afternoon there was already a change from the boy whose eyes I had seen looking ahead with intensity of speculation as he marched with his comrades. Now he was here, in the present moment, and enjoying it. It was Livia whom I saw first. She was better dressed and better looking than I had ever seen her. Her cheeks glowed with health and happiness, and with a possessive pride that she did nothing to conceal she looked up now and then into the face of the man who overtopped her by several inches.
He had grown a small golden moustache. The exercise of the last few months had broadened and toughened him. His blue eyes gleamed out of a face that was tanned by weather. Brown boots, shining like chestnuts, were laced up his calves, and the skirts of a well-cut overcoat swung as he strutted. I could not avoid the word: he was strutting; and when private soldiers passed and saluted the single pip he wore upon his sleeve, a little cane that he was carrying in a gloved hand went negligently to his cap. He was enjoying himself. He was enjoying those salutes though he never looked at the men who gave them. He was enjoying having Livia there to look upon his glory and, in turn, to be looked upon as an adjunct to his splendour.
I was proud of him. How, even then, I would have outdone the father in the parable who, when his son was yet a great way off, ran! How I would have run, and abased myself before this young, jocund Mars whose body, pink and soapy, I had held in my arms, whose love had once been as unquestioningly mine as the sunshine and the rain! But I knew that I could as soon call back Nellie from the grave as hope to see those blue eyes smile at me, as they were smiling now at Livia, not turn to cold indifference.
So I lurked behind the bookstall, with my collar up and my hat-brim down, and saw two other youngsters dressed as he was, but with nothing of his size and presence, join him, and selfconsciously salute Livia, and stand there talking and casually returning salutes. Then they all made for the barrier, passing so close to me hunched furtively there that the skirts of an overcoat brushed the back of my legs, sending a shiver of excitement through me. I turned when they were gone, watched their backs disappearing through the barrier, and knew that I was looking my last on Oliver before the war swallowed him—to fashion him into what unknown similitude? I could feel the blood pulsing in my temples and overworking my heart. I pressed towards the barrier and stood there looking down the vista of the train until all the emotional activity that was strewing the platform alongside it was separated out into those who were aboard and those who were left standing to see them go.
I did not see him again. The station was filled with the deafening shrillness of escaping steam. That stopped. The engine strained and panted beneath white spreading clouds that obscured the roof, and I saw Livia Vaynol running as if to escape into the city from a scene that was unbearable. I turned my back as she came through the barrier. She did not see me as she hastened away, not smiling now, but with loneliness and desolation upon her unmasked face.