On a morning of early January, 1917, I was awakened by a banging on my bedroom door. I sat up in bed with a start, sniffed the frosty air, and got back into the blankets, deciding that the noise was an imagination of dream. The banging came again, more urgently. “Who’s there?” I shouted.
“Me—Annie.”
I stepped out of bed into the piercing cold. The bedside lamp showed me that it was five o’clock. I slipped on a dressing-gown and opened the door. There was Annie Suthurst, clutching a shapeless garment of red flannel across her chest and looking more upset than I had ever seen her.
“Eh, Mr. Essex! Ah’m that scared. Miss Maeve hasn’t coom home. Ah can’t get a wink o’ sleep.”
Her fear communicated itself to my own heart, but I said reasonably: “She’s often late, Annie. I expect she’s dancing.”
“Dancing! Don’t be daft, man! Who’d be dancing at five in t’morning?”
It didn’t seem unusual, in that strange hectic world from which I was withdrawing more and more. But I let that pass. “You’d better make yourself a cup of tea,” I suggested.
“Tea! Ah’ve done nowt but drink tea all t’neet.”
“Well, perhaps you’ll make me a cup,” I suggested.
“No need to mak’ it. Pot’s on t’hob.”
So I went up to Annie’s room, more and more affected by the concern in her face. “Now you’d better go to bed,” I said when I had drunk the tea. “You can do no good by sitting up. If there’s anything to be done, we shan’t be able to do it for a few hours anyway.”
“Ah’ll not go to bed,” she said obstinately. “Ah’ll sit here till Ah know what’s happened to Maeve. No good, Ah reckon.”
So we sat there together, in that room containing the memorials of Annie’s long-dead husband, and we passed the time by playing draughts. Our pretended absorption in the game did not prevent us from keeping our ears skinned for every murmur of sound from the dark, bitterly cold street.
Maeve came in at seven o’clock. She looked dead tired, yet excited, almost exalted. She threw her hat and coat upon Annie’s bed, then sat on the bed herself. “For the love of Mike, Annie, give us a cup of tea,” she said. Then with a pale smile: “I find you two in very compromising circumstances.”
Neither Annie nor I spoke. Annie fussed about, making a fresh pot of tea. I looked at Maeve, trying to decipher the mood of excitement that was on her. The silence made her uneasy. She got up and walked about the room for a while, then burst out: “Oh, why do they send troop trains away at such a godless hour of the morning!”
“Troop trains?”
“Yes. Trains with troops in them. You know, men who are going out to be killed, wounded, shot to bits. You ought to go and see them some day, Mr. William Essex. You ought to see all sorts of things, you damned old mole, shutting yourself up night after night, hiding from real things. Oh, I know it’s all horrible, contemptible, a complete breakdown of all the lovely things that keep the world cushy for you. But all the same, you ought to see it. It’s happening, you know, however much you shut your eyes.”
The colour that I disliked had come back to her cheeks. Her eyes were burning. I remembered the time when she had stood before Dermot, shouting: “You’ve killed Rory! You’ve killed Rory!” So she stood before me now, her hands clenched at her sides. Then the strength seemed to go out of her. She sank into a chair and murmured: “I’ve just been seeing Oliver off.”
“Get her to bed,” I said; and Annie nodded like a wise old hen over Maeve’s bowed head.
That was a Sunday morning. I went back to bed, but I didn’t sleep. At nine o’clock Annie, who had had no sleep at all, brought me my breakfast in bed. “You’ll need it, Mr. Essex, after a neet like that,” she said, as though I, not she, had kept vigil. “Miss Maeve’s sleeping, an’ Ah’m going to let ’er sleep an’ all.” She nodded grimly, and drew the curtains, letting in the light of the pale frosty morning.
“Tell me as soon as she’s awake,” I said.
I knew a man who would lend me a car, and as soon as I had had breakfast I went and borrowed it. I had not driven for years, but I would chance that. There was not much traffic on the roads in those days when petrol was hard to come by. I drove the car back to Berkeley Square and waited for Maeve to wake.
It was two o’clock when Annie came to say that Maeve was sitting up in bed, having breakfast. She looked intolerably small and fragile, propped up by pillows, nibbling a piece of toast.
“This is the first time I’ve seen Maeve O’Riorden in bed since she was so small that there was no thrill in it.”
“Was I a lovely baby, Bill?” She stretched out her hand to lay it on mine. I put it firmly back on her lap.
“You keep that hand to help some food to your mouth. You look half-starved.”
“Oh, Man! Svelte... vivacious... you’ll never make a gossip-writer.” She obstinately put her hand on mine again. “Mr. William Essex, it occurs to me that I was rude to you last night.”
“Last night, indeed! You’ve lost your sense of time, my girl. And if you were rude, you’re going to atone for it. Have you any engagements today?”
“As it happens, no.”
“Marvellous!”
“Isn’t it?”
“Yes. And if you had, you would have had to cancel them.”
She raised her eyebrows in a question.
“Because your Uncle Bill has got you booked for the rest of the day. When you’ve finished breakfast, dress up warm and report to me.”
She came down sheathed in a coat of blue-grey fur, with dark blue violets pinned at her breast. The collar went up as a cosy-looking background to the dark hair on which a fur Cossack hat was pulled down.
“Good! You’ll need all that. It’s an open car.”
“Then put a muffler round your neck,” she ordered.
I did so, and, plentifully swathed, we went down to the car. It was three o’clock. The sun had already lost its strength and was declining, an orange disc, towards the horizon of roofs. The frost, which it had not wholly vanquished all day, was getting the upper hand.
There was no wind. The cold air tingled in our faces as we drove westwards. It was a small two-seater car, and Maeve snuggled comfortably into my side, under the rugs.
Neither of us said a word for a long time. I think she knew what was in my mind: to have done for a while with words, with gadding, with rushing, with all the fevered circumstances in which she had been living. We were together, and we comforted one another by being together, with the wind on our faces, and the hedges slipping by with the tall leafless elms rising out of them and etching their lacy patterns on the pale winter air.
After a long time Maeve said: “Miss Maeve O’Riorden presents her compliments to Mr. William Essex and begs to know whether his prolonged silence denotes continued resentment.”
“Resentment!” I snorted. “I know you too well, my dear, to be resentful. I know what these months are meaning to you—what you’re doing and suffering. But don’t let’s even talk about it. Just for these few hours.”
She smiled gratefully and gave a long relaxing stretch of the body. The sun went down; the frost sharpened its edge; the western sky became a rich smother, damson in colour, velvet in texture. An owl, with short stubby-looking wings, drifted silently, ahead of the car, from an elm on one side of the road to an elm on the other.
“‘The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold,’” said Maeve. “Bill, these are fine feathers, but I’m a bit shiversome. What do we do about that?”
“You should eat more food,” I said pedantically. “However, I’ll deal with that.”
We were under the shoulders of the Berkshire downs which ahead and to our right loomed up darkly against the sky’s last light. I stopped at the next village we came to. There was an old coaching inn on the high street, and I remembered that once, driving back from Cornwall, Martin had stopped the car there and we had eaten a famous dinner. I didn’t know how the war had affected the place, but I had had it in mind as our objective, and it did not fail us. The landlord seemed surprised to have any custom at all, outside the bar. He spoke disparagingly of his resources, but said he would do his best. He led us to a small room where a fire was burning and a lamp hung by a hook from an immense black beam as thick as my thigh. The red curtains drawn across the windows gave us a fine sense of intimacy. Presently two old-fashioned silver covers were set on the table. Under one were thick hearty rashers of ham grilled to a golden brown, flanked by potatoes thinly sliced and fried. The other yielded half a dozen fried eggs, and this was a meal with which we were well content. We drank beer. I had never seen Maeve drink beer before. She boasted that it was one of her chief accomplishments, raised the large silver tankard to her red lips, and smiled happily at me over the top. It was a joy to see her eat, heartily and well, here in this quiet room, where we were scores of miles from anyone who could say: “Shall we dance?” or “Where are we going on to now?” or “Do let’s fix something for lunch tomorrow.”
The landlord looked in and asked: “All right, sir?”
“Excellent. They’re not starving you down here.”
“We manage,” he said. “There’s a nice bit of cheese...”
“A nice bit of cheese is the cue I’m longing for,” said Maeve.
It was good Stilton, and when we had done we had that feeling that now is the time to draw in a chair to the fire and talk. So we did that. I lit my pipe and gave Maeve a cigarette, and as she lay back with her feet to the blaze, blowing a small smoke-ring through a large one, I said: “So Oliver’s gone back?”
She nodded. “I knew it was coming, but I didn’t want to bother you with it, Bill. You don’t mind, do you? It would have been—no good, you know.”
“Yes. I see that. Would you like to tell me anything about Oliver? You’ve been seeing a lot of him.”
“Every day. You know how it started, don’t you? That night you were at the theatre? I wanted to take him away from Livia. Because you wanted Livia.”
So that was it! Of course that was it, you fool! Couldn’t you see it without having it put into words? And I hadn’t wanted Livia after all. I couldn’t find a word to say. I was suddenly aware of myself as a black selfish incubus, obscuring the clarity of three young lives: Oliver, Maeve, Livia; and myself now wanting, now not wanting, an ageing inconstant interferer, sending all awry. I licked my dry lips before I could speak again.
“You succeeded. You certainly had all Oliver’s attention.”
“I succeeded!” she said bitterly. “Only too well. I had no idea he’d be in England all this time. I thought it would be a short leave, and back he’d go and little damage done. Then he got his home job, and what could I do? I had to go on with it. You can’t cut a man off because his leave’s been lengthened. Not even in these days when everybody seems more or less mad.”
“Didn’t you want to go on with it? Wasn’t it—agreeable?”
She got up and began to pace the room in agitation. The flush came back to her cheeks. She threw her cigarette impatiently into the fire. All the old restless symptoms that I had hoped to banish for this one day broke out again. I rose and put my arms about her shoulders and tried to calm her. “Maeve... I’m sorry... I didn’t want to talk about upsetting things. Let’s leave this now. Let’s make this one day of peace.”
She put me aside. “Sit down,” she said. “It’s no good trying to shut things up. Let’s have this out, Bill.”
She pushed me down into my chair, then said: “I know I made a mistake. That’s what made me angry with you this morning. Because I’m angry with myself, see? You don’t love Livia. You don’t want Livia.”
I shook my head miserably.
“You’ve been a long time finding it out,” she said.
“I didn’t think you knew.”
She almost snorted in her impatience. “You didn’t! Does it take much finding out? Does a man who loves a woman and is pursuing her spend all his leisure time stewing in a flat? For God’s sake, Bill, give me credit for a little common sense. And there I was landed with Oliver for weeks and weeks. He wouldn’t go back to Livia. Heavens, no! There you are: grand theatre, isn’t it? Heroine’s generous gesture recoils on her own head. How do we go on from there? You’re a playwright. Tell me.”
What was there to tell? Abased, I had nothing to say. Presently Maeve sat down and lighted a cigarette, more composed. “Don’t think I’ve been suffering,” she said, “except from a flat feeling that I had made a fool of myself. You’ve done a great deal for me in your time, Bill, and here was the golden opportunity to do something for you. It wasn’t nice to see it wasted. But Oliver’s not bad.”
I looked up at that more hopeful note. She smiled at me like someone encouraging a despondent child. “Light your pipe,” she said. “No, he’s not bad,” she went on, “You know I never really liked him, but at least I’ve liked him better this last few weeks than ever before. He’s more real now. There’s something rather terrifying in his realness. At times I felt frightened with him. He would be silent and brooding for hours together, melancholy-mad. But at least he’s not the little boy in black silk pyjamas. You remember that odious little boy?”
“I do.”
“Well, he’s dead, believe me. Oliver’s on his own feet now.”
“Tell me about this morning. You frightened Annie Suthurst out of her wits.”
“I ought to have let her know,” Maeve apologised. “I didn’t intend to be out all night. The train went at six. I’d promised Oliver to dance after the show. We danced till about two, and then when I wanted to go home that Pogson man proposed that we should all go on to Oliver’s hotel. There was quite a party of us. It was four o’clock before we knew where we were, and then Oliver said he saw no sense in going to bed at all, so we stayed there till it was time to go to the station.”
I remembered my promise to Dermot, and I asked point-blank: “Does Oliver want to marry you?”
“They all do,” she said wearily, “but I suppose I’m not a marrying sort. Hadn’t we better be getting back?”
I packed her up in the rugs. We had not been travelling half an hour before she was sound asleep, her head resting on my shoulder.
*
A week later Oliver was reported missing, believed killed. A few days after that he was reported to be a prisoner. During the days between the two reports Maeve was in a daze. She had cut out a great many of her promiscuous engagements and lunched with me every day. We were lunching together when a man I knew at the War Office rang me up to give me the first news that Oliver was safe. Maeve broke down and cried. Then she put her arms round my neck and kissed me. “Oh, Bill,” she sobbed, “I couldn’t have borne it if he’d been dead. You pretend to be so cold and restrained, it breaks my heart to look at you. But you love him so much. It would have killed you. You do love him, don’t you?”
“So much,” I said firmly, “that I wish to God we were all twenty years younger. I might make a better fist of things. I haven’t been a conspicuous success, have I?”
“Oh, you dear, you dear. I can’t bear to hear you say that.” She was in my arms, her eyes, swimming with tears, a foot from my own. “Everything’s gone against you since Nellie died.”
“I’ve been my own fool and made my own folly.”
“Don’t, don’t! I couldn’t stand it if life made you bitter. It could all have been so different. I love you so much.”
Her head sank on to my shoulder, and my grip about her tightened.
At that she thrust me away. “But now—it’s too late.”
She strained her tear-marked face back from mine and gazed at me wildly. Then she ran out of the room and up to her own flat.
*
Towards the end of February I received a letter from Dermot. It contained some trivial message which he asked me to pass on to Maeve. After breakfast I ran up to her flat, and went straight into the sitting-room. The door leading thence to the bedroom was open, and I could see Annie Suthurst standing outside the door of the bathroom which opened off the bedroom. She was bent down in a listening attitude, with her ear to the door. Her face was drawn and haggard. Presently she saw me and beckoned me to the bathroom door, putting her finger to her lips to enjoin silence. I heard the sound of a faint moan, followed by painful retching.
Annie took my arm, walked me through the bedroom to the sitting-room and then sank into a chair. She rocked to and fro, stricken with grief. “The same yesterday morning, Mr. Essex. God help us! Oh, Miss Maeve! Miss Maeve!”
*
The man whose car I had borrowed to take Maeve for a drive was Sir Charles Blatch, a physician who lived in Wimpole Street. Blatch, like myself, was a member of the Savile Club. We had nodded to one another occasionally, and then one day he sat in a chair next to mine in the smoking-room and began to talk. He knew my books well and confessed that he had seen Every Street more than once. I have always found it difficult to resist an admirer, and Blatch was frankly that: an admirer of my own work and of Maeve’s. When we had talked for a time, I found that he wanted me to do something for him. He had written a book. I was on my guard at once. They were to be met so often, these people who flattered your work and then asked you to read theirs. But somehow I couldn’t take Blatch that way. He was an honest man. He spoke so diffidently about what he had written and seemed so sincerely to value my opinion that I consented to read his manuscript.
I liked the book, and I liked the way it was written; and I was able to arrange with my own publishers to publish it without alteration. The book had a modest success, and Blatch was very pleased about it all.
There was a chapter on euthanasia. Blatch was a believer in it. He wrote of the many men coming back from the war, doomed to a maimed and tortured life, who would prefer to end their days rather than live on as grim wrecks of the men they had been. “Uneasy ghosts,” he wrote, “tethered by the frailest threads to the ruined habitations that once were those proud mansions their bodies, how gladly many of them would welcome the hand at once courageous and pitying enough to give them release.”
Our friendship warmed a little, though it never became really deep. He invited me to dinner at his house in Wimpole Street. He was a rugged, thick-set fellow with strong hairy hands and a clean-shaven granitic face. He was a widower, and his only son was serving in the Air Force. There wasn’t much in his life to make him cheerful, and he wasn’t. He was not pessimistic or depressing: sombre is the word for him. He was strong as an oak, and his character seemed as umbrageous.
There were no other guests, and after dinner we sat in his small oak-panelled library with a decanter of whisky on a table between us. Like me, he smoked a briar pipe. He was a good talker, and he liked talking shop, but as it was not my own shop I didn’t mind that. He got on to euthanasia, which was something of a bug with him, and from that to suicide.
“Have you read Richard Middleton on the subject?” he asked.
I recalled that Middleton had himself committed suicide, but said that I had not read the essay he referred to. He took a blue volume down from the shelves and flicked over the leaves with his powerful stubby fingers. “Here you are: ‘We can forgive a man for booing or creating a disturbance in the theatre of life, but we cannot forgive him for going out with a yawn before the play is over.’”
“That’s true enough,” Blatch said, sitting back in his chair with a finger still in the pages of the book, “barring ‘with a yawn.’ It’s not only boredom that leads to suicide. Frustration, more often, I should say.”
He seemed to consider this for a while, then put the book on the table, pulled at his pipe, and said: “I should feel completely frustrate if Roger were killed.” (Roger was his son.) “My wife’s dead, I have no other relative in the world. You can tell me there’s my work. Well—” Then he dismissed the work with a wave of the hand. “No. It wouldn’t do. I couldn’t live without a sense of human continuity.
“Mind you,” he said with a smile, pushing a tobacco jar towards me, “I’m not contemplating suicide, even in the eventuality I mentioned. But, as a possibility, it can’t be dismissed. And,” he said, looking at me narrowly, “if it ever came to that, I should be the only man, I should think, who exemplified in his own life two things I believe in: that in certain circumstances a doctor should be allowed to take life, and in certain circumstances a man should be allowed to take his own.”
He had gone too far to draw back. He saw that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “Dangerous ground—eh, Essex?” he said.
“Very,” I agreed. “Shut up if you want to; but, if there’s a story you want to get off your chest, here I am. I understand the importance of confession, and I can be as dumb as a Trappist.”
He told me the story: of his early life of poverty in Birmingham, of the struggles of himself and his mother after his father had died. There was a little back-street shop in the story, and there was the indomitable courage of the boy and the woman, his taking at last of his medical degree, and all the wild storm of hope raised thereby.
“Now—don’t you see, Essex?—now she was going to have everything—comfort, growing at last to affluence: servants, a carriage, God knows what. You know how dreams go when you’re young. But all she got was inoperable cancer, agony...”
Blatch poured himself another whisky, drank, and put the glass down with a steady hand.
“I gave her the means to die,” he said.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, then Blatch continued: “It took me a long time to do it. She begged me to do it, and at last—well, I did it.” He paused. “And I got away with it.”
“Suicide,” he said after another thoughtful pause, “mind you, not any suicide—not any weak-willed chucking down of a bearable burden—but suicide of the sort I’m thinking of is simply saving someone else the trouble of administering euthanasia. And,” he added with his rare smile, “I’m not speaking as a certified medicine man: only as a private disreputable philosopher.”
Well, that was Sir Charles Blatch. That cold Sunday morning when I called to borrow the car I found him alone in his library, standing with his back to the fire, reading a letter. “Talk of the devil,” he said, “or rather of a close friend of the devil’s—” He went on reading. “Excuse my reading this. It’s only the hundredth time. It’s from Roger.”
When he had finished, he said: “This young devil has met your Maeve O’Riorden. He talks about hopes of leave and says”—Blatch read from the letter—“‘We must go again to see that show Choose Your Partner, so as soon as I give you a date, book seats. Book for every night I’m home if you like. We’ve got all Maeve’s songs for the mess gramophone, and I just can’t make the chaps believe I once took her out to dinner. You never knew that yourself, did you? Well...’”
And as Blatch read on, I was able to identify this Roger. I could see Maeve looking through the window into Berkeley Square, talking to me over her shoulder. “You never saw such a boy. He looked about sixteen, with blue eyes and smooth round cheeks.” I remembered, too, how Maeve had told me that Roger, seeing some lambs, had said: “My mother’d like to see that.” So Blatch’s widowerhood was very recent. It had been last April that Roger took Maeve driving. Well—last April—nearly a year. He’d been lucky for an Air Force boy.
“I should like to meet this Maeve of yours,” Blatch was saying. “She seems good value.”
“She is,” I said with conviction. “She’s tearing herself to pieces for these boys.”
“Well, introduce me some day, will you? I’d like to know her.”
*
The thought of Blatch was in the back of my mind as I stood looking down at Annie Suthurst crumpled in a chair. I took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Annie! Pull yourself together! Remember, Maeve wants your help now more than ever she did. Are you listening to me?”
She nodded her grey head. “Well, I’ve got to go out now. Remember, Maeve’s in your charge. Do nothing to upset her, and for goodness’ sake don’t let her know that you suspect anything is wrong. Can you manage now?”
She got up and began to put her face to rights. “Yes, Mr. Essex.”
“Good. I shall be lunching with her. Get out of the room as soon as you can. I want a good talk with her. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you can do. We’ll manage this between us.”
“Eh, Mr. Essex, it looks to me like summat that’s got to manage itself this time.”
Uncomfortable words! They were in my head as I sat at the table facing Maeve a few hours later. She was pale as usual, but quite composed. I thought that she had given if anything more than customary care to her appearance. Her dark hair reflected like polished metal a beam of light from the window. The lips were very red on her white still face. Annie put coffee on the table and slid out of the room, giving me an admonitory look from the doorway.
“Have you heard,” Maeve asked, “that Livia’s gone away?”
I poured out her coffee, shaking my head. Livia’s movements seemed of extraordinarily little importance to me then.
“Yes; she’s gone to France. Joined some nursing unit or other. Tired of waiting for you, Bill.”
“Oh, I don’t think that. I don’t imagine that she has any more use for me now than I have for her.”
She looked at me gravely and said: “So wasteful! So wasteful! What a bad schemer I make. My parts should always be written for me.”
“Perhaps they are,” I said sententiously.
Her face brightened. “You mean predestination and all that. What must be will be. D’you know, Bill, I’d like to believe that. Do you believe it?”
“It’s one of those things you could argue till Doomsday. I don’t see how you can ever reach a solution. I’d like to believe myself that I had occasionally by my own free will turned a corner here and there.”
She looked crestfallen. “It would be such a comfortable doctrine,” she said, “ that whatever I did had been prearranged and was unalterable—that I couldn’t personally be blamed, whatever I did.”
Whatever I did. God forgive me for the blindness of my heart. There was something tragical in her stillness, in the way her beloved mouth let drop those words; but all I did was to say: “My dear child, I cannot imagine you doing anything very terrible.”
“Very terrible—I wonder? Bill, why do you call me your dear child? You’ve always thought of me as a child, haven’t you? I wonder why you should think me a child and Livia a marriageable woman? Have I ceased to please you as I’ve grown up? D’you prefer to think of me always as a little girl snuggling into your coat?”
“Maeve, my sweet...”
“No, no. Don’t protest. I shouldn’t blame you if...”
She turned away suddenly, her eyes full of tears. “I just wanted you to tell me that I haven’t disappointed you,” she sobbed. “You expected so much of me, I know.”
I sprang out of my chair. “Disappointed me?” I shouted. And I knew that in all the sad tangle I had made of my life, Maeve stood clear and uncomplicated, the one thing that had never given me a pang, the one presence in which disappointment could never be felt. I crossed the room to her and took her in my arms. “Maeve, my love,” I said.
She looked up at me in wonder. “My love,” she whispered. “You’ve never called me that before... my love...”
“Let me call you that always. My love... my love... my love.”
I tried to get my face upon hers. She forced her head backwards, away from me, gazing deep into my eyes; and suddenly I saw a look of horror born into her face. She gave a little cry and dragged herself free. She sat down and buried her face in her hands, moaning.
“My love, my sweet,” I besought her. “What is the matter? Maeve, I love you. I love you.”
“I have loved you always,” she murmured, “and I have known I loved you ever since the night we saw the swans flying across the moon. So free... so beautiful...”
“Look at me, Maeve. Look at me now, my dear one, my lovely one.”
“God help me, Bill,” she said in a sobbing whisper, “I love you so that I could lie down and let you walk on me and the child that’s in me.”
“I know about that; don’t be afraid about that.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid of. It’s you. You didn’t want Livia till Oliver wanted her. You didn’t want me till Oliver wanted me. What is it about you that seems to prey on young lives? There was something... in your face... It frightened me.”
“My dear, you’re ill. You’re imagining things. God forgive me if my face could bear anything but love for you.”
“No, no! It’s the look that Oliver’s got now—hungry—a look that wants to consume lives. It was the look he had that night... You know that night I told you about? I lied to you. We went back alone to his hotel. This is Oliver’s child. You can’t have me. Christ! You can’t pretend to be the father of your grandchild.”
She reached a hand out blindly across the table, and I took it and as blindly stroked it. Presently she raised her head and I could have cried at the wreckage of her face, especially when a pale wisp of smile waked like a ghost amid its desolation. “So there we are, Bill,” she said. “There we are.” She lifted her free hand and let it fall with a little helpless gesture.
“Maeve, we must talk about this child. What are you going to do? How can I help you?”
“You can’t help me. I expect you think I’m a pretty fool.”
“God forgive me if I think of anything except how to help you.”
“You can’t! You can’t!” she repeated. “But you do understand, don’t you, Bill? You don’t despise me?”
“Despise you?” The tears were stinging my eyes. “Could anyone in the world despise you if they knew you as I do?”
“There have been so many of them,” she said in a low, rapid voice turning her face away from me. “They’ve all wanted it, even the ones who were too nice to say so. Some of those were the hardest: they looked so dumbly miserable and hungry. I tried to be everything to them—except that. And I felt it wasn’t fair. I felt like a rich man who gives and gives so long as giving won’t hurt him. So many of them have died, and I thought what a little thing it would have been, after all. They have been like waves battering me. You know that line in the Bible, Bill—All Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me. I’ve wakened up in the morning like that—feeling battered and defeated: the gay Maeve O’Riorden, having such a lovely hectic time. Ask the dirty little gossip papers. You’ll find it all there—my frivolous, heartless career...”
I stroked her hand. “Hush, my dear. Don’t go on with this.”
But she went on rapidly: “You know, it had to come. There would be a wave too many. I should be undermined. Well, it happened with Oliver. We danced and danced, and then he asked me to go back to his hotel to have a farewell drink. We went to his room. He didn’t say a thing, but just locked the door and stood leaning against it looking at me. He looked frightening, with those wounds of his twitching. I knew what he wanted. I said: ‘No. No, Oliver. Please!’ He went on looking at me. Then he laughed. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘You women! You take the cake. You hand us white feathers, you raise hell’s delight in our hearts with your leg-shows and lascivious songs, and you expect the whores in the red-lamp houses in France to do the rest for you. There you are then. Good-night.’ He flung the key down at my feet and started to undress. It was horrible, filthy, and yet it was true. ‘You know, you ought to be a bishop,’ he said. ‘Bless the banners and hand out tracts on purity. Sublimate your passions, lads, by sticking Germans in the guts. And if you want a nice clean change from that, listen to the Lena Ashwell party singing A long, long Trail, or when you’re on leave hear Maeve O’Riorden intone When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful. There’s the key. Aren’t you going?’
“And I couldn’t, Bill. I stood there, fascinated. He had taken off his tunic. He kicked the key towards me. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Go, or by God—’ Then he sat down in a chair with his head in his hands and began to sob. I went across and put my hand on his hair, and—and that was it.”
“Thank you for telling me.” The words sounded idiotic as I looked at the white wreck of Maeve. “Don’t think about it any more. Let’s consider the present.”
“There’s only one thing to be done at present. That’s go to bed, or I shall be no good tonight.”
“Ought you to go on? Shall I ring up Wertheim?”
“Only to wangle a ticket. I’d like to be there tonight. He’ll find you a place. Come round and bring me home afterwards. Will you?”
*
“Shall I try to get a cab?” I asked.
“No. Let’s walk.”
She put her hand on my arm, and we jostled through a little crowd clustered at the stage door. One man said simply: “Thank you, Miss O’Riorden.” Another stuck a book and pencil under her nose. “D’you mind, Miss O’Riorden?”
“Come on,” I whispered. “Don’t let ’em bother you.” But she stopped and signed the book and showered smiles on the people pressing round her. “I hate to disappoint them,” she said.
Then we were free. She took my arm again. “You and your opera-hat!” she teased me, looking up at me overtopping her small fragile figure. “You big important man! You don’t frighten me any more.”
“Was I ever very frightening?”
She gave my arm a sharp little hug. “Not so very,” she said.
We walked in silence for a while, then she said: “Well, well. That’s that. That’s over now. Was I all right, Bill?”
“Lovely.”
“No one would have guessed?”
“Guessed? Oh, that... No, no. No one.”
She was very quiet after that, her little hurrying footsteps trying comically to adjust themselves to my long strides. I don’t remember that we exchanged another word till we came to the front door. It is those footsteps I shall always remember—like a child’s footsteps trying eagerly to keep up.
I have said that her flat was above mine. At my door I said: “Good-night, Maeve. Unless you’d like to come in for a moment. A drink or a chat?”
“No... No, Bill... Bill...?” She took the lapel of my coat and began to twist it in her fingers, looking up into my face. “Say—what you said this afternoon.” She whispered: “Say ‘My love.’”
“Why, Maeve, my love, my darling,” I said, and bent down and took her in my arms. “Sleep well, my love.”
I watched her go slowly to the turn of the stairs. “Good-night,” I called.
“Good-night. Good-night, Bill. Good-bye.”
*
At seven the next morning Annie Suthurst came knocking at my door. One look at her distraught face set my heart racing. I did not wait for her to speak. She could not speak: she just stood there with her shaking lingers fumbling at a shaking mouth. I pushed past her and ran up the stairs, through the sitting-room to Maeve’s bedroom. She lay with one long white arm hanging out of the bed. Her head was fallen a little to one side. The face, framed by the black hair, looked childish and hurt and puzzled.
At eight o’clock I rang up Sir Charles Blatch. He answered the telephone himself, and seemed surprised at my vehemence when I asked him to come round at once. “Yes—urgent—most terribly urgent.”
I met him outside the door of my flat, and led him to the next floor. I had told Annie to stay in her own room. Outside the door of Maeve’s bedroom I paused. “You have wanted to meet Maeve O’Riorden,” I said. I opened the door softly. “There she is.”
He went in alone. I shut the door behind him and waited for him in the sitting-room. He joined me about ten minutes later, and sat down beside me on a divan. His big rough-hewn face was moved as though Maeve had been his own child. “Poor little thing,” he said, “poor little thing. She looks so small.” He sat with one hand spread palm downward on each knee and looked thoughtfully at the floor between his feet. “You know, Essex, in all my practice, that’s the first suicide I’ve seen. You’d think she’d died in her sleep.”
“Yes,” I said, not looking at him, “if she’d had a weak heart, say. I suppose if she had been quietly seeing a doctor—keeping it to herself—for the last twelve months or so, and he had warned her that her heavy work at the theatre, with all this dancing and dining and sleeplessness thrown in, was very dangerous—if she had been seeing, say, you—then you wouldn’t be surprised to find she had died in her sleep?”
He gave me a shrewd sidelong look. “No,” he said at last, “it would be in the usual course of nature to expect it.”
“And in those circumstances, of course, there would be no difficulty about granting a death certificate?”
He got up, stood looking down at me, fingering his chin thoughtfully. “I have no record of the case on my books,” he said, “because I was charging her nothing. She never came to my place in Wimpole Street. I always saw her here. It was purely a friendly arrangement, because I’d taken such a personal interest in her ever since you introduced us—about a year ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, about that, I should say.”
“You wouldn’t have got my car out of me, you know, if I hadn’t liked her so much.”
“No, of course not. I couldn’t have expected it.”
“And I grant this death certificate the more readily because I was present when she died. What time did she get home from the theatre last night?”
“Just before midnight.”
“She must have been taken queer almost at once, because it was immediately after midnight that you rang me up... Oh, damn this pretence, Essex, I was rung up just after midnight, and I didn’t get in till seven. No one on God’s earth knows where I’ve been, and it may as well have been here. I saw her die as I warned her she would die...”
He strode unhappily about the room. “If she were a nobody... but she isn’t. Think of the stink in the papers...”
“I had thought of it. And I thought of our talk about suicide. She had good reasons, Blatch.”
“The poor child. Tell me some day. Not now, not now. Well, I’ll spill no mud on her corpse... It was veronal... Who else knows?”
“One old woman who was devoted to her. I’ll answer for her, Blatch.”
Suddenly he asked with difficulty: “Was there a baby behind this?”
I nodded. He wiped perspiration from his face with a large silk handkerchief. “I was—thinking of Roger,” he said. “He tells me he’s been about with her.”
“It wasn’t Roger, Blatch. I knew about Roger. That was a year ago.”
“The leave before last. Well, thank God for something.” He held out his hand. “Essex, I’m going to commit a crime, and you’re conniving at it. Let us both be proud. It will be as decent a piece of work as will be done in England today.”
He left me then, and I braced myself for the long ordeal of the day. First, to ring up Dermot...
NOTE.—It would have been impossible to give these particulars if Sir Charles Blatch were still alive. He died soon after his son Roger was killed in 1918. The circumstances of his death were such that it was necessary to hold an inquest at which a verdict was returned of “Death from Misadventure.” The posthumous book in which he advocated euthanasia, excused suicide in certain circumstances, and told fully the story of his mother’s death, created a sensation. He left no relative, and so no one will be injured by the disclosure here made.
The person to be consulted was Dermot, to whom I had confided the facts only after Sheila’s death, which took place in 1930. He offers no objection to this publication.