Now that the long futility of the war was over, I remained in London for many months. I would never again open that big house in Hampstead; my flat would do well enough. I had taken an affection for the place. It was quiet, a good bolt-hole for one who had no more use for public occasions. There was the night, for example, when Choose Your Partner came to an end. It was late in the February after the Armistice, and, as it happened, the night was the second anniversary of Maeve’s death. Wertheim was anxious for me to be there, but I wouldn’t go. It was a grand occasion, I heard. Men who had known the show during leaves were there singing all the old songs with tears in their eyes. Wertheim went on to the stage at that moment when, before the interval, it was customary to sing When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful. He reminded the audience that Maeve had died two years ago; then they stood in silence for her, and instead of the song being sung by the girl who had taken Maeve’s place, Wertheim had Maeve’s picture thrown on a screen, and, looking at it, the audience sang the song in unison, pianissimo. I suppose it was all very moving, but I had no use for that sort of thing any more.
I had a queer feeling that I had Maeve under my own roof. Once, when I was going to bed in the early hours of the morning, I heard light footsteps running up the stairs to the flat above mine. Just so I had many times heard Maeve run by, coming home late after the theatre. The steps were so like hers—so delicate and dancing—that my heart gave a great thud. I opened the door on to the stairway. The footsteps were still audible, and I stood listening to hear a key in the door above and the opening and shutting of the door. But I heard nothing except the steps, which ran lightly for a time and then stopped. There was no other sound.
I never heard them again, but I listened for them every night.
I was listening for other footsteps, too. I wanted to get away. After more than four years spent continuously in London I wanted to open up Heronwater again. But I stayed because I feared that Oliver might come and find me gone.
“Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air into your lungs?” Annie rated me. But I wouldn’t go far; a turn round the Square, down perhaps as far as Piccadilly, then left into Bond Street, my feet unconsciously hurrying as I neared the corner of Bruton Street.
“Any callers, Annie?” I would shout.
“Callers! Tha’s not been aht o’ t’house five minutes.”
The streets were full of emancipated men. Lorry drivers still wearing old British warms or long khaki overcoats, young flâneurs ogling the girls in Bond Street, not anxious, evidently, to settle down yet to the dull routine of earning a living. On a morning when already there was in the air a premonition of the spring that had not yet come, a ’bus conductor hung out by one hand from his ’bus to shout to a man he recognised on the pavement: “Wotcher, cocky! Better than the old Menin Road!”
“Not ’arf it ain’t!”
So here and there I saw them, the men who had come back; and soon the spring itself was in London, filling the kerbside baskets with anemones and mimosa, daffodils and tulips. And now my walks became a little longer, and as I went up the stairs to my flat I did not shout to know whether there were any callers. I knew there were none, that there would be none. Then I called on the firm that had stored my furniture and arranged to have a man sent down to put everything back into Heronwater, to air the house, and make it habitable again. I remembered that I had last seen it when waiting on there with Martin and Sam Sawle: waiting irrationally through a procession of superb autumn days to see whether Livia Vaynol would return. And then her letter had come from Copenhagen. Now, before returning there, I was waiting again: waiting this time to see whether Oliver would come back. I reflected bitterly that I had done a lot of that lately: a lot of waiting to see whether I was the sort of person to whom the young came back. Well, it looked as though I wasn’t.
I rang up Dermot at his shop and told him I was coming to see him.
“About time,” he said, “but all the same, make it short and sweet when you get here. I’m busy.”
I hurried off, and in Bond Street ran into Eileen. Eileen at twenty-four was good to look at. She had never got over her comfortable dumpiness, but happiness and good-nature made her face a thing that, so to speak, put the top on that lovely May day. And she had good reason to be looking happy that morning. Her hand was laid on the arm of a tall, handsome boy whose hatless head was a tangle of dark brown curls. “Hallo, Uncle Bill!” she greeted me; and looking up shyly at her escort: “This is Guy Langdale. I don’t think you’ve met him. This is William Essex, Guy.”
I liked the boy. I liked his frank blue eyes and his firm handgrip; but I was not so sure that I liked the excessive respect of his tone, as he said: “I’m delighted to meet you, sir.” Established... honourable... OLD... That’s what he thought me.
We loitered there for a moment, talking commonplaces, and I noticed that Eileen was very well dressed and that her happy face was happier than ever. Well, good luck to you, Eileen, I thought, as I walked on. There hasn’t been too much luck coming the way of Sheila’s children. I had heard about young Langdale. He had gone to work for Dermot in 1914, looking after the art gallery which was part of the establishment. He was something of a painter himself, but I had gathered that Dermot thought highly of him as a business man, too. He had joined the army in 1916, and now here he was, back again. Yes, Eileen, the young come back to the young. I wish you a good innings.
A girl took me up in the lift, and she was just a girl. She wasn’t a jolly tar, or a brigadier-general, or a grenadier of the Inkerman period. She was just a girl in a white blouse and a black skirt. “Merely not to be vulgar is so distinguished,” Dermot had once explained.
My entrance startled him out of a reverie. He was sitting with both hands spread out on a perfectly clear desk, sitting bolt upright, gazing before him with the end of an unlit cigar chewed to ribbons in his mouth. A portrait of Maeve, by Guy Langdale—not a bad one, either—was on the wall before him. He didn’t seem to be looking at that, or at anything, though it may well have started his reverie. His face was haggard.
“You look as if you want a holiday, my boy,” I said.
“Well, since we’re exchanging compliments, Tyburn Tree is just round the corner. You look as though you were recently cut down.”
He fell into a kind of irritable brooding for a while; then said: “I don’t like the damned news from Ireland.”
“I haven’t noticed anything in particular.”
He snorted impatiently. “You wouldn’t. You haven’t noticed that what used to be peaceful police-stations are now forts, with steel plates instead of windows, with sandbags and barbed wire. You haven’t noticed that, despite all this, these police-stations are being burned down, and policemen shot, and that those who are not shot are resigning. Resigning, my boy, with the fear of God in their hearts, though a lot of ’em are pretty near the age for pensions.”
“Well, because a lot of bobbies are resigning...”
“Bill, you’re the most maddening fool. Don’t you know that Ireland has been governed by policemen as long as anyone can remember, and that the smash-up of the police force means that government is being destroyed all over the country districts? Soon there’ll be no government left except in a few big towns. And what happens then? Something will have to take the place of the police. It won’t be anything nice, believe me. Ireland isn’t gallant little Belgium, and I can’t see you bloody English getting sentimental about her, but, of course, this all means nothing to you. You haven’t got a son out there.”
He leapt up at that and put his hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Bill. That slipped out. Let’s say no more about it.”
A telephone shrilled on his desk. He took it up and listened. “Speak to Miss Eileen about it. She’s got the whole matter in hand.”
“There’s no Miss Eileen to speak to,” I said. “I met her in Bond Street in pleasant company.”
Dermot threw up his wrist and consulted his watch. “She said she’d be in at eleven. It’s two minutes past. She must have come in on your heels. She’s a business woman.”
He went over to the telephone. “For the next half-hour put all inquiries through to Miss Eileen. Tell her I’m not to be disturbed till eleven-thirty.”
“There you are,” he said proudly. “What d’you think of that? And that will be done. One thing the war did. It taught me I had a jewel of a business woman under my own roof. She’s my under-strapper now in everything. I’m making her a director. Was she with young Langdale?”
“Yes. Looks a nice boy.”
“He’s got his head screwed on the right way. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s a director, too, before long. Or does that strike you as too mercenary a wedding present?”
“It strikes me as a good thing that one of Sheila’s children should be plain bread-and-butter.”
He nodded his head in agreement. “And now what the devil have you come to disturb me about?” he demanded.
“This is May,” I said. “In a month’s time Heronwater will be in order again. Neither of us has had a holiday for nearly five years. Come, and bring Sheila.”
“And what about my work? Now that this damned war’s over and business is picking up a bit.”
“Excellent experience for Eileen.”
“She could do it. But that would mean we should be there with no children... Just you and Sheila and I...”
We looked at one another, and suddenly the idea of being at Heronwater with no children struck us both with all its significance. Of course, they were no longer children, anyway; but, even so, they were gone. Maeve dead, and Rory married, and Eileen leaning on the arm of her tall beautiful boy; and Oliver God knew where.
We were silent for a while. I pulled at my pipe and Dermot jerked his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I wonder,” he said at last, “whether we’ve had our best times, Bill? There was one time I always think of—when Donnelly was there. That was a houseful? You and Nellie and Oliver—”
“And you and Sheila and Rory and Eileen—”
“And Donnelly and Maggie—”
“And Sam Sawle and Martin. They were good fellows—”
“Yes, and that old madman Judas over the river and his husky Viking friend in Truro. Remember him?”
“I do that. It was a good time. But Maeve wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t she?”
“No, no. She’d gone off with Mary Latter.”
“She had so. I’d forgotten that.”
“Well,” I said, “you’ll come? We’ll do our best, eh?—three old stagers.”
“Yes. I wonder what’s happened to old Judas? Ever hear of him?”
“Not a word. We shall see.”
*
He was still in the land of the living, and that is the only reason why I write of that holiday—to give some account of Captain Judas at that time.
Dermot drove us down. One of Sheila’s maids and Annie Suthurst had gone on in advance by train. We should need no one else. Dermot would look after his own car and I could look after the Maeve, which had been overhauled. She and her dinghy alone were left of our little fleet. I sat at the back of the car with Sheila, thinking of the time when Dermot had first come by car to Heronwater. Oliver and I had waited for them at the gate, and there was Sheila, little Maggie Donnelly on one side of her and Eileen on the other, young and radiant with a great chiffon scarf passing over the top of a large hat and tied in a bow under her chin. Her dark hair was white with the dust of the Cornish roads, for it was an open car. Now, so that she might lean her head back more comfortably in the big close saloon, Sheila wore no hat at all, and her hair was white not with Cornish dust but with the sorrows of the short twelve months that had seen the imprisonment of Rory and the deaths of Donnelly and Maeve. Something was gone out of Sheila. Her face was still kind and thoughtful, her smile ready to encourage, but when there was no encouraging to be done and you caught her face unawares, there was an inward brooding which suggested a life counting over the past and not much concerned with the present. Maeve had been the child of her heart; and sometimes I had an uneasy feeling that the very intensity of her thinking about that loved girl would tell her the truth, that she would suddenly say to me: “What really happened to Maeve?” So that I was never now completely at ease in Sheila’s company.
We came to Heronwater in the evening, to the abiding peace and beauty that had smiled on unchanged through the agonies and convulsions of a continent. Sheila said she would rest till dinner-time, and Dermot and I walked out to lean on the warm stone of the balustrade where, that winter night when the rain hissed through the darkness and the wind volleyed like guns, Livia Vaynol had come upon me with the brimming cup that was so soon to be spilled. Then we went down the path to the water. It seemed as though the very leaves we had left were still upon the trees, and in our scrambling descent we recognised the very pebbles we knew so well. We came out upon the little quay of level greensward and looked upon the river drifting out on the first of the ebb. “Change and decay in all around I see.” Never were words less appropriate. All the visible world seemed to mock by its calm stability the change and decay that were in our hearts alone.
“Nothing seems altered,” said Dermot, breaking a long silence. “Not even the Jezebel.”
Not even the Jezebel. There she was, the ugly old black hulk, shored up under the opposite bank, looking as she had looked when last I saw her, that day when Judas was waving good-bye to Jansen as the Kay steamed by carrying, though I knew it not, Oliver and Livia to the beginning of their momentous adventure.
I didn’t seek out the old man then; indeed, I didn’t know if he were aboard. We went back to the house, where Annie Suthurst was happy to be serving Sheila and Dermot again, and we had dinner, and then we sat in deck-chairs on the lawn, glad to do nothing after the long journey. Glad just to sit there and see the sunset smouldering behind the trees and to listen to the rooks settling noisily in for the night. Dermot held Sheila’s hand, and I saw them suddenly very clearly as people whose youth was finished, being kind and understanding with one another because they had done much and endured much together.
The next day I took the dinghy and pulled myself across to the Jezebel. Hanging down her counter was the rope I had urged Judas to fix so long ago. I hauled upon it and heard the peal within the ship’s timbers. Presently a woman’s head leaned over the rails, and a voice cried delightedly: “Why, Mr. Essex—!”
It was Mary Latter, looking old and drawn. I knew that she had given up the stage. Her company still toured, but she did not tour with it. I had heard that she was settled in a flat somewhere in Kensington. She dropped the rope ladder overboard. I tied up the dinghy and climbed to the deck. “Well, this is delightful,” she said. “I haven’t seen a soul for a week.”
A querulous voice came up the stairway. “Who’s that, Mary? Have a care, my girl, have a care. Don’t go letting every Tom, Dick and Harry aboard.”
She took my arm. “Come down and see him. He’s in bed.”
It was a nice little bedroom that the captain occupied. The walls were painted white. The windows were flung wide open and the daffodil-coloured muslin curtains fluttered in the fresh morning air. Captain Judas was sitting up in bed, with pillows piled behind him. Spectacles were on his nose and his small thin hand held a book. He looked tiny, a mannikin, in the big bed, with his hair and beard combed and glistening like fine silk.
“It’s Mr. Essex, Father,” Mary said.
I gave him my hand and was startled by the dry fragility of the claw he placed in mine. He looked at me long and earnestly over the spectacles, and asked: “Have we met before?”
“Yes, yes, Father, of course,” Mary explained patiently. “Mr. Essex from Heronwater.”
“It’s a long time since I’ve seen you, captain,” I said. “Before the war. Four and a half years.”
“The war,” he said, speaking to himself rather than to us, “the war... They came upon me with swords and bows, and their spearmen rent me in sunder.”
He let the book fall on the bed and his eyes shifted to the window, to the far green bank and the sunlight spilling on the water. He seemed to forget us altogether; Mary took my arm and drew me out of the room. “Go up on deck,” she said. “I’ll bring you some coffee.”
She came presently and put the coffee down between us. “What a dreadful thing,” she said, “young Maeve O’Riorden dying like that. It must have been a ghastly shock to you. Oh, dear! I am glad to have someone to talk to, even about horrible events like that.”
“Tell me about your father,” I said. “He looks much frailer.”
It was the sort of story I should have expected. Even down here in this dreaming backwater of the world the madness and hysteria of the war had raged. The queer and incomprehensible became sinister and portentous. Judas’s innocent lights became signals—though to whom or what God alone might tell. No one living in those parts, save me and Dermot and the children, had ever been permitted to board the Jezebel; and the most fantastic rumours spread as to the devilries that were hatched there. It was a quiet harbourage for spies; it housed a printing-press whence sedition was propagated; a German submarine had come up the Carrick Roads and an officer, getting into a collapsible boat, had been rowed at dead of night to the Jezebel. There were those who saw this with their own eyes.
One night bucolic policemen went aboard, armed with a search warrant, and all old Judas’s pitiable secrets were laid bare and trampled beneath uncomprehending feet. His queer scrawls in Greek, because to the policemen they were meaningless, took on the meaning of codes and ciphers. Excited, they turned the neat ship upside down. As the old man, hauled from his bed, alternately whined and cursed, padding after them in a night-shirt, they found the way down to the bilge, heaved up his chest of writings, and gloated over that fantastic discovery. They could make nothing of it all, and that fed their deepest fears and suspicions, and Judas, feeling his very soul outraged as these harvests of his fantasy were pawed and pored upon, was at last hauled off to gaol till the whole suspicious farrago should be elucidated.
“Nothing came of it,” Mary Latter said tiredly, “except that he became—madder—than ever.”
She took him to London, and he lived with her all through the war. “And then he wanted to come back, so I let him. He’s quite happy here, you know, in his way, and well able to look after himself. This illness now is nothing to worry about—just influenza. He’ll be up and about soon. I’ll stay till he’s quite fit.”
“Did he get his papers back?” I asked.
“They all came back most neatly done up with sealing-wax and red tape after the war. But it was too late. He didn’t know what they were and burned them all. It was a pity, because it was all harmless enough. You see, it had given his mania an outlet for ten years and more. Then the continuity of the thing went, and now there’s nothing. Except your son.”
“My son!” Her words nearly startled me out of my seat.
“Yes,” she nodded. “He still believes... Well, I expect you know what he believes.”
“But he hasn’t seen Oliver since before the war.”
She looked at me curiously. “Oh, yes, he has.”
“But—when?”
“I wasn’t here at the time. It was just after I’d brought Father back. Your son must have been just demobilised. He came down here and stayed for a week. Father wrote me a most exulting letter and—borrowed some money for the first time in his life.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry. I’m a rich woman.”
“Yes—but—that’s not the point.”
“Please forget about it,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“You don’t know where—Oliver—is now?”
She shook her head. “I know that he writes to Father, but I’ve never seen any of his letters.”
I went down to say good-bye to Captain Judas, but he was asleep, his little face, framed by the white of hair and whiskers, sunk in the pillows, his two claws lying frailly on the counterpane.
*
We had not been long back from that holiday when I got news of Oliver’s whereabouts. It was a hot July night—no night for eating in town, Dermot said; so he took me off to Hampstead. I still had no car of my own, and Dermot insisted on driving me home. He came up to the flat to have a drink, and a few minutes later Annie Suthurst brought in a card: Captain Dennis Newbiggin, M.C. There was no address. “Show him in,” I said.
“I’ll be going then,” said Dermot.
“No, no; sit down a minute. I expect I’ll soon get rid of this chap.”
Captain Dennis Newbiggin wore brown suede shoes and a neat suit of navy-blue, with a double-breasted jacket and a regimental tie. His hat, which had somehow eluded Annie, was a grey felt with a spot of bright plumage fixed into the band. He held this in his left hand, and tucked under his left arm was a silver-headed malacca cane of unusual strength and weight. The head itself was heavy, and the whole thing had the appearance of a weapon—a knobkerry. The captain held out his right hand, from which the middle finger was missing.
I didn’t like the look of the fellow, though it was difficult to say what was wrong. He was a shade—well, flash. I shouldn’t have called him jannock. He looked fundamentally a tough; yet he tried to get away with pretty airs; a little toothbrush moustache, perhaps too much oil on his abundant, well-brushed dark hair. He looked about thirty.
I shook his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Essex,” he said.
“Sit down, Captain Newbiggin,” I invited him. “Still a captain?”
“Well, no. Been out of the old mob now, you know, for some months.”
“Ah! This is Mr. O’Riorden, Mr. Newbiggin.”
Dermot gave him a rather distant nod.
“You’ll have a drink?”
“Just my time for a gargle. No, no—please don’t drown it. Thank you.”
He tossed off the almost neat whisky and wiped his moustache with a handkerchief drawn from his left cuff.
I looked at him expectantly, and he took out a morocco-leather pocket wallet and extracted a card from it. This he handed to me. “I wondered if I could interest you in this little business, Mr. Essex.” He grinned. “It’s a bit short of capital.”
Dermot got up. “Perhaps I ought to be going.”
“I’d like you to stay,” I said, “if you can spare the time. This will interest you.”
I handed him the card:
NEWBIGGIN & ESSEX
MOTOR-CARS
NEW AND SECOND-HAND
DEANSGATE MANCHESTER
Dermot sat down and considered Mr. Newbiggin more carefully.
“The poor must live, you know, Mr. Essex,” Newbiggin said cheerfully. He took from his pocket a thin gold cigarette case and held it towards me and Dermot. We shook our heads. “D’you mind if I do?” He flicked a light from an ornate lighter, let the smoke ooze slowly through his nostrils, and said: “We stuck together, Oliver and I. We stuck it for a long time before we were both pipped at Arras in ’17. Then we had hell’s delight organising escapes from a German prison camp. But we never got away with that. All the same, we got away with some high old times together, one way and another. Paris leaves...” His eyes became meditative.
“And you’re still sticking together?” I prompted him.
“Well, we parted for a time. You know, back in the dear old homeland, after two years on the Western front, and the best part of another two lodging with old Fritz, and a bit of gratuity in our pockets... well, it wouldn’t be human, would it, Mr. Essex? Boys will be boys. As a student of human nature—I speak as one who’s read your books, Mr. Essex—you realise that?”
“Realise what?” I asked him coldly.
“Well, I mean, we decided to part company for a month or two and each shake a loose leg while the dibs lasted, and then get down together to a spot of work.”
“You mean you got through your gratuities and then tried to start a business, presumably on borrowed capital?”
“That’s the size of it, sir; and believe me capital is damned hard to come by. We’re living pretty near the bone.”
There was some truculence in this last remark.
“Did my son ask you to make this call?”
“Well, not exactly, but I figured it this way. Here I am in the gay metrollops trying to raise a bit of money—and believe me it’s cost me a Savoy lunch and no end of drinks today to get nothing at all—and I say to myself ‘What about applying to the fountain-head?’ After all, a son’s a son, and a father’s a father.” There was silence for a moment before he added, gazing round the room, “You don’t look short of a bit.”
No one spoke and Newbiggin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. His legs were stretched right out in front of him. I noticed that the sole of one of the natty suede shoes was worn nearly through, and that took my eye to his coat cuffs, always another symptom. The whiskers had been trimmed down neatly with scissors.
Poor devil, I thought. And yet he’s a scoundrel. I feel it in my bones.
“Well, anything doing?” he asked jauntily. “A couple of hundred would see us on velvet.”
“I won’t say No off-hand,” I said. “I’d like to communicate with Oliver, and perhaps with some accountant up there to give me a report on the business.”
“For God’s sake, Mr. Essex, do nothing of the sort,” he implored me, suddenly completely genuine. “Oliver’d blast the skin off my back. He’d walk his legs down to the knees before he’d ask you for a penny. Don’t say a word to him. He’d get in a hell of a temper, and I can’t handle him when he’s like that.”
“Then the idea was—?”
“To get a bit of capital and work it quietly into the company without saying where it came from. See the idea?” He added brightly, fingering his gay tie, “If you could see it like that?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, well...” He got up and held out his maimed hand.
“Another drink?”
“Righty-o. Just to show there’s no ill-feeling.”
He tossed it off, and I went out with him to the landing. “Not a word to Oliver, eh?” he said.
“All right.”
“Fact is,” he confided, “I was his batman. He’s bloody good to me.”
I shook his hand, slipping a pound note into it. He looked at it in astonishment. “Thank you, sir,” he said, with a sudden humility that made me feel sick. He raised his hat with the spot of gay plumage and went away.
“Well,” said Dermot, when I got back to the study. “That was pretty amateur.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose he would have liked it in pound notes. What would the odds have been on Oliver seeing it then?”
“Have another drink?”
“No, thanks. I’ll be going. Will you look Oliver up?”
“No. Well, not yet. I’ll see.”
*
“He’d walk his legs down to his knees.” So even Newbiggin knew that, the cheap little skate. I could imagine the scene: “Well, what about touching the old man for a bit? He’s got plenty.” And the wounds in Oliver’s face twitching, pulling up the side of his eye, pulling down the side of his mouth, as he told Newbiggin he’d blast the hide off him if he mentioned the old man again. This Oliver of whom I knew nothing, this man who had been scorched and twisted by war, changed into something whose anger the likes of Newbiggin did not care to face. He was removed from me as far as the East is from the West. I had had no commerce with him since those incredible days when he lounged through life in the company of Mr. Guy Boothby, his deepest longing being to possess a gold cigarette case and a book on the management of steam yachts. What could I do to bridge the gulf between that far-off puerile figure and the formidable man who now was Oliver? Nothing.
*
Ever since leaving Manchester I had continued to read the Manchester Guardian. It was towards the end of the following winter—in March of 1920—that I came upon a paragraph in that paper which threw the next beam of light upon Oliver’s affairs. It was a report of bankruptcy court proceedings, and the Official Receiver was frank about the affairs of Messrs. Newbiggin and Essex. Books, he said, had been improperly kept insofar as they could be said to have been kept at all, and the whole conduct of the business had shown a reckless disregard for customary commercial procedure. He was not sure that the condition of things disclosed did not merit the investigation of another court; but in view of the splendid military record of one of the partners he would give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that ignorance of business practice had led them to their present position. The inquiry was closed.
It was this which led me at last to visit Manchester. Perhaps now was the time...
I went one afternoon towards the end of March, travelling from St. Pancras by the route that goes switchbacking through the Pennine Chain. There was snow in the gullies of the high hills, and frequent water tumbling in white spates among the leafless woods. There were enfilade glimpses down the length of dale after dale, and I wondered why, with all this remote loveliness to choose from, men herded themselves in great cities. Perhaps this sort of thing would be welcome to Oliver now. Perhaps he had had enough of the lone and desperate hand and would be willing to rest, if only for a while, in some place like this, or at Heronwater. Then, when he was rehabilitated, when the stink of war was out of his life, we should see...
So I pondered as we roared along the valleys, and through the tunnels, and over the viaducts of that romantic land, and shot out at length on to the Cheshire plain and the thickening agglomerations of Manchester suburbs.
I took a room at the Midland Hotel, and when I had rested for a while I was taken in a taxicab to Didsbury. At the White Lion Hotel I dismissed the man and walked on down the Wilmslow Road. This was sentimentality. Well, so be it. I walked on down the Wilmslow Road.
I wanted to recapture, if I could, the Oliver I had known. Here was the house called the Priory, at the corner of Fog Lane, where, nearly a quarter of a century before, I had met Dermot wheeling a perambulator to meet the one I wheeled myself. The trees had been trailing green branches over the wall, and there for the first time Rory and Oliver had looked at one another, clasped one another’s hands, smiled in one another’s eyes. The sunny scene was extraordinarily clear to my imagination, though now it was not sunny, and the trees were not green, but clawed with skinny fingers, dewed with fog, in the light of a street lamp.
I had not paused; the memory had come back, rounded and complete, as I passed that spot and continued my walk along the road—that road between my house and Dermot’s—which held more of my youth than any place on earth. This way all the children had come to Miss Bussell’s—Miss Bussell who had so little understood what she was up against that day when Rory had lied to make trial of his courage. This way Maeve had run and danced, eager to reach The Beeches and play out on its lawn her infant imaginings.
I passed the stone which said “St. Ann’s Square 5 Miles,” and the village shops, and so presently I came to The Beeches. It was not at all changed. The winter branches of the trees drooped weeping in the misty evening air; comfortable lights were geometrically imposed upon the darkness at the end of the long lawn. That one on the left, on the first floor, marks the room where Oliver slept; behind that bright pane on the right had been my study where, night by night, we had come close together in our “conversations.”
I thought of Nellie, peering about short-sightedly in those rooms, and of her queer cantankerous faithfulness, and of how, since her death, I had known little joy.
So pondering, I turned into the lane that runs down to the river meadows. It was dark and cold, but imagination livened it with Oliver’s small presence running at my side, wearing his first prized pair of football boots and thudding the ball with satisfying reverberations against this brick wall which now was nothing but a shadow cutting the darkness of its top into a sky only less dark.
Down here at the end of the lane there was not a soul. I did not go into the fields, but leaned on the stile by which we had been used to enter them, and in the darkness and silence listened to the whispers that came across so many years. Then, indeed, with yesterday held in the hollow of my hand, and all its details intimate and complete before my regard, it seemed that no power could destroy what then had been, that I had but to come face to face with Oliver to know him once more in all the glad out-flowing of love from one of us to the other. In the intensity of my desire, I leaned my head upon my hands there on the stile and groaned for my son.
I did not go back the way I had come, but followed the lane where it turned to the left. It climbed here to the rising sandstone hill on which stood the church and churchyard where so long ago I had first met Mr. Oliver. There was a jagged rip in the clouds over the square church tower and through it a star or two looked down like bright eyes gazing with compassion into an abyss. Here I was back not at Oliver’s childhood but at my own. I did not know that I was looking at it for the last time, that already the happenings were in train which, in their consequences, would make abhorrent any return to the place where Oliver and I had known and loved one another.
*
I was not sure where I should find Oliver. I would begin my search in the morning. As for this cold and foggy night in Manchester which was now upon me, there could be no better way of passing it than in the brightness of the Palace Theatre which was presenting a musical show. I do not remember what the show was. What remains in my mind is that during the interval I saw Mr. Dennis Newbiggin again. I was in the stalls, and by the time I had struggled through to the bar at the back of the house, the place was a welter of people trying to get to the counter, talking at the tops of their voices, filling the air so thick with smoke that it was difficult to see from one side of the room to the other.
It was this confusion which permitted me to escape the notice of Newbiggin. He and a friend had entered the fray early. They were struggling back through the forward-pushing crowd, each precariously maintaining the balance of a full tumbler. They managed to seat themselves at a table, and I stood with my back to them, unable to move, and obliged to overhear.
“Well, cheers, captain.”
“All the best, old son.”
There was the smack of tumblers on the table-top.
“Don’t forget,” said Newbiggin’s friend, “send us a line. I don’t say I won’t join you myself.”
“You’re a b.f. if you don’t, laddie. Think of it: an officer and a gentleman once more, with a quid a day guaranteed. Are you making that?”
“Am I hell-as-like.”
“There you are then. And that’s only the half of it. I’ve had it on the strict Q.T. that the pay’s nothing to the pickings. Had a letter yesterday from that young brother of mine. He’s joined the Black and Tans. Them’s the rankers. My lot—the Auxiliaries—all officers and gentlemen. But these Black and Tans, you never saw such a bloody lot. Khaki coats, with black trousers and caps. Well, this kid of ours wrote to me. Half a tick; here’s his letter. ‘Thumbs up. Went into a pub yesterday for a drink with Johnny Buckle. When it came to paying we hadn’t got a brass farthing between us. “What now?” says I. “Watch your uncle,” says Johnny. He went out into the street and was back inside five minutes. He slaps a pound note down on the counter, and I notice that he strips this off a wad of three or four. “Christ, Johnny!” I said. “That’s all right, kid,” he said, “it grows on the citizens. You just go out and pick it.” I haven’t tried this yet, but perhaps I shall.’”
Newbiggin’s voice had dropped to a conspirator’s whisper as he read this letter. In a louder voice he said: “The Black and Tans only get ten bob a day, so p’r’aps you can’t blame ’em.”
“And, of course,” rejoined his companion, “you officers and gentlemen in these—er—”
“Auxiliaries.”
“You’d never be naughty boys like that.”
“Well, laddie, it’s a case of exploring possibilities. Anything’s better than this lousy town and the lousy life I’ve been having in it. Just to have a whack at the bloody Irish will be something. Christ! It’ll be fun to have my fingers on a gun again.”
“You won’t be sorry to see the Major, either.”
“Sorry! Boy, we’re life partners. If he hadn’t been in this, I don’t suppose I should have been either. God, he’s a card. Says he’s going to win a few more medals shooting the eyes out of Irish potatoes.”
“Well, I think it’s a pity.”
“A pity? What the hell d’you mean?”
“Essex could be doing something better, if he wasn’t just a cat on hot bricks with his nerves all shot to bits.”
“D’you know anything better than money for jam?” Newbiggin demanded.
The bell buzzed, cutting off the answer. The bar slowly cleared, and at last I was able to get a drink. I felt I needed it. I didn’t want to see the rest of the show. I slowly drank the whisky in the empty, smoke-fouled bar; then claimed my hat and coat from the cloakroom and went back to my hotel through the mirk and drizzle and tramway clamour of the streets.
When I got back to town, I rang up Dermot and asked him: “Do you know anything about these Black and Tans and Auxiliaries that are going to Ireland?”
“What’s the matter with you, Bill? Are you developing a political conscience?”
“No, tell me: d’you know anything about them?”
“Yes, Bill, I can tell you in a nutshell: they’re the last nail in the English coffin over there. They’re the dirty scum and off-scouring of England sent to demonstrate what this government thinks of the rights of small nations, and by the time the demonstration’s ended there’ll be no need for any more Irish Martyrs. Not foreign imports, anyway. We’ll start making our own. We’re like that. But what’s our damned distressful country got to do with you?”
“Oliver’s joined the Auxiliaries.”
Dermot didn’t answer that. There was a silence; then I heard the receiver click back on to its hook.