“I had quite made up my mind that you were dead,” said Dennis when,
later on, he and Alan walked back to his rooms in Tavistock Square.
Alan laughed. “Did you think I’d been storming trenches single-handed,
and that my V.C. had been sent home to my weeping mother?”
“Something of the sort. I knew well enough that you’d expose yourself to
every possible risk—as you are doing, only on the right side, thank
heaven, instead of the wrong.”
“I’m running no greater risks than you are: perhaps imprisonment,
perhaps death. I should think the latter quite probable if they attempt
to force us to do war-work in prison—dirty trick, that, but they are
quite capable of it.”
Dennis said nothing. For himself, he had long ago contemplated these
possibilities. It was different to contemplate them for Alan. He wished
somehow that Alan need not incur such risks, and yet was proud of him
for incurring them ... and realised that on the other side, the
militarist side, they felt precisely the same: those who sent their
lovers and sons to the fighting-line and dreaded their going, yet would
not hold them back....
“It’s all a bloody shame,” he said aloud, “such a bloody shame....”
“Yes, and when you think of all the labour and ingenuity that are being
spent in the invention of more and yet more diabolical means of
destruction.... I’ve watched big guns being made, and shells in
munition-factories.”
“And how did you contrive to get into a munition-factory?”
“The name of my never-sufficiently-to-be-respected father was disguise
enough for my revolutionary tendencies when I was up North,” said Alan,
“but when I was going about the country, trying to get at the people’s
outlook in various branches of industry, I had to assume alternately the
disguise of a sanitary inspector, a newspaper-reporter or a workman.
I’ve been temporary railway-porter and ship-builder’s apprentice, and
followed all manner of trades since I saw you last.”
“And hasn’t your father cast you off for ever yet? Mine would like to,
but he can’t quite do it because of mother. She, poor dear, is the
victim of the complicated Eastwold table of weights and measures,
namely: Do one son and one son-in-law in the trenches outweigh one
conscientious objector, or do two in the trenches equal one in quod?”
“My father’s done more than cast me off,” said Alan, “he’s tried to get
me run in before now—beery old buffer, making pots of money out of the
war; sitting at home and joining in the hue-and-cry: ‘We want more
men—more ships—more munitions....’ They’re tearing up the young manhood
fast enough to make soldiers, and tearing up the forests to get wood to
line the trenches and dug-outs. There was a pine-forest I passed through
in Devon—or rather the remains of a pine-forest ... a wilderness of
prostrate tree-trunks, with sticky pale-red stumps, lying crippled and
bruised, with their branches crushed under them. And the sight and the
smell of the resin oozing from where the boughs had been sawn off was a
thing that hurt you—a damnable thing!”—his voice suddenly tightened—“it
was like seeing the forest bleed to death before your very eyes. And all
the time men were at work hacking, hacking and sawing ... you couldn’t
get away from the rasping of those saws and the dull blows of the
choppers. While I watched they were stabbing at the trunk of a great
giant of a tree, and I saw its crown waver and rock and sway, and heard
a sort of groaning crash as it fell to the ground among the litter of
mutilated boughs and bleeding roots.... And all around were neat piles
of stacked-up logs and sawn planks, ready to be despatched to France.
The glory of that forest once—and now——”
“I know,” replied Dennis, “they’re felling the old beech-trees around my
home, too—trees that have taken centuries and centuries to grow; and
when I’ve cried out at the pity of it—‘_Every tree that can be of
service to the country must come down!_’ It’s terrible and wonderful,
this ruthless, relentless concentration of will and effort. The men
going out, and the women taking over their jobs—even inanimate nature
pressed into service to ‘help to win the war!’”
Alan nodded. “Yes, and with all that force pushing against us, we’ve got
to use the same concentration of will and effort to win peace.”
They had reached Tavistock Square. Dennis opened the door with his
latch-key and went up to his room. Alan followed him. And thus he had
once followed Alan, by the light of a guttering candle, up a rickety
wooden staircase at Crannack. And thus, in imagination, he had often
felt himself being followed by Alan. As they were about to enter the
room, Dennis wheeled sharply round. Alan smiled back at him with
half-impudent confidence. “Well?”
“All right, I only wanted to see if you were really there—you’ve had
such a way of dogging my heels, just like that, and then vanishing when
I turned to look at you.”
Alan said: “You were a coward to run away that time at Crannack,
Dennis.”
“You know why I had to run away—why I had to make myself run away. It
wasn’t easy, Alan.”
“It’s no use running away. Because you’ll never _get_ away. We’re made
like that; why not look things straight in the face?”
“Antoinette said something of that kind a long while ago, without having
the vaguest idea what she was talking about.”
“Antoinette?”
“The girl who was with me at the tea-shop to-day. The girl with whom I
sought safety from you.”
“And did you find it?”
“Do you need to ask?”
Alan sat down on the floor, and with hands clasped round his knees,
gazed into the fire.
“Then what do you want with the girl now?”
Dennis shrugged his shoulders.
“She’s mad on you,” Alan persisted, “I could see that. But you don’t
want her, Dennis—we don’t want her.... Cut her out altogether!”
Dennis answered sadly: “She is out altogether, poor Antoinette, to all
intents and purposes.”
Alan turned his head with a slow smile. “Good ...” he murmured.
“Damn you, don’t talk and look like that!” Dennis blazed out in sudden
rage, “you might be a woman, intolerant of all favourites but yourself!”
“I am intolerant of other favourites. And they’re no good to you, no
earthly good ... are they?”
“No ...” said Dennis dully.
“You admit it! Then why continue to strive after what can’t really
satisfy you?”
“Because I mustn’t take what would really satisfy me.”
“Then at least accept the fact that you are as you are, and don’t try to
pervert yourself into something you never will be. We’re both right over
the border-line of the normal—I more than you, because no woman could
ever attract me in the least—and we’ve got to have the courage to face
out that knowledge and, above all, to be true to ourselves. You want to
make our love an abstraction. Believe me, you’ll only succeed in making
it unnatural.”
“Unnatural, good Lord! Isn’t it that already?”
“You’ve been brooding too much in secret, Dennis, you’ve grown morbid.
Why will you persist in regarding it as something vicious and
degenerate? For people made as we are it’s natural and it’s beautiful to
love as we love, and it’s perversion in the true sense to try and force
ourselves to love differently.”
“I know ... I know all that, yet I can’t accept it as justification ...
even though love like this is little short of crucifixion, as long as
some remote principle nails us to the cross and forbids expression.”
“Then in God’s name, Dennis, why deny yourself and torture yourself like
this?”
Dennis flung out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Alan looked at him....
Then, very softly, he spoke. “All right, Dennis, it shall be as you say.
Hang on to your foolish Quixotic principles, if you must ... if you must
... but you’ll never get away like that—never, no, never in this
life....”
* * * * *
So now the shadowy danger, that she had perhaps not taken so very
seriously, just because it was shadowy, had materialised in the shape of
that boy. Dennis had warned her, and she had said: “Yes, I know....”
With her brain she had accepted his warning, with her brain understood
what it implied. But she had not felt anything. Even now the poison had
not begun properly to work.... It was still difficult to overcome the
initial sense of absurdity, of having to be jealous of a—man. Certainly,
if Dennis had chosen to make love to her at Amberhurst, she would have
given him every right to be jealous of—Hester. Crazy world ... and all
these years she had lived with her eyes shut, never perceiving how crazy
it was! She could not hazard any conjecture as to the future. All her
previous experience was powerless to assist imagination. She was on
entirely new ground now, ignorant of the significance of such landmarks
as she might encounter; instinct her sole guide, and one whom her reason
and her sense of humour were still half-inclined to mistrust.
At least she was glad that no decisive action was called for on her
part. On the spur of the moment she had offered to back out, and he had
not accepted her offer. She could remain passive now, and await
developments.
Mrs. Taylor rang her up while she was awaiting them, and invited her to
tea at the studio. Antoinette went, and found the Taylors’ house a low,
rambling building in a tree-shaded street in Chelsea. The studio was
connected with the house by a glass corridor, but it had another
entrance that led through a walled passage into the street. A third door
opened into a tangled garden, overgrown with weeds.
Pegeen met Antoinette at the side-entrance, and impressed her to keep
silence during the brief transit from the street to the studio. She
explained in her inimitable fashion that since the studio had been let
to Conn O’Farrell, her husband and parents-in-law did not think it
suitable for her to frequent it.
“But glory be to God, I have a latch-key of my own, so I say I’m taking
a walk, and just pop out of the front door and into here by this
side-entrance, when no one’s about. It’s like watch-dogs they are over
me, my dear.... William’s at the office all day and Special-Constabling
most nights, but he’s always telling his mother and his father to look
after his ‘little floweret’—that’s me, dearie—while he’s gone.”
“So they do their duty by you!” laughed Antoinette.
“They do that, in the true Christian-martyr spirit; for it is a very,
very bitter thing for Mother Taylor to have a wild Irish scaramouch like
me for a daughter-in-law. Her Willie should have married one of the
Vicar’s daughters from next door; they play croquet all the
afternoon.... It is really a vicarage next door, my dear, and that’s the
truth of it!”
Antoinette was taking in every detail of her environment. A square of
blue was visible through the big skylight; an oak chest, left untidily
open, disclosed a collection of gorgeous-coloured fabrics; garments of
all hues and all periods; a very old carved table was littered with
paints, cigarette-ends, lip-salve, pencil-stumps and chocolates; the
originals of Conn’s political cartoons were upon the walls, and formed a
queer contrast to the more imaginative examples of his art—the
illustrations to old Irish fairy-tales and the designs for scenic
decorations. And then Pegeen, with a childish and charming absence of
false shame, exhibited Conn’s drawings of herself in all manner of
poses....
“But aren’t you afraid that someone will see them and find out?” said
Antoinette.
“Oh, there’s never a soul in here but Conn and me and our friends. The
servants from the house aren’t allowed in. I do all his dusting for him,
bless the lad! We want no strangers here, and for another reason that
I’ll be telling you now....” Pegeen cast a glance over her shoulder,
lowered her voice to a mysterious whisper, and kicking aside one of the
rugs on the polished floor, disclosed a sliding panel. “Look!”
Antoinette looked, and as the panel slid back beheld a cavity some six
feet deep. “A trap-door, Pegeen, a real trap-door?”
“Hush, my dear ... there are papers in there that could get the whole
lot of us put in prison this very minute—” (Surely this was all a
child’s game of “conspirators?”)—“we must get them safely over to
Ireland and into the hands of our leaders before the month is out. We’re
going together, Conn and I, when the time comes.”
... This was more lurid even than anything Antoinette had anticipated
from Barnaby’s descriptions. Pegeen replaced the rug, offered her the
cigarettes, and curled herself up in one of the deep armchairs.
“To-night there’ll be company in the house—they have a bishop to dinner,
my dear, all in gaiters, and I talking to him as if butter wouldn’t melt
in my mouth.... And Conn will stand in the glass passage, just this side
of the curtain, and strain his ears for a sound of my voice among the
other voices ... and after dinner maybe I’ll slip away and steal down
the passage for one minute and feel his arms round me in the dark—then
back again to old Gaiters, and the talk of how they’d like to have the
parish church restored, and how well this bloody England is doing in the
war.”
“How marvellous, Pegeen, that’s better than anything I’ve ever
accomplished!” Antoinette told her of her own campaign of lies invented
to elude Grand’mère’s vigilance. “It’s so neat, pretending to your
parents-in-law that you are miles away, when you’re really in here,
separated from them only by a curtain.”
“Yes, it was a happy thought, that curtain. I advised my mother-in-law
to have it put there when we let the studio to Conn, because I said,
’tis for the look of the thing, and with artists you never know.... And
she said I was after showing a bit of proper feeling at last!”
“Where did you meet Conn?” queried Antoinette, and was rewarded with the
entire history of Pegeen’s life.
“I was left an orphan at the age of six, my dear, and I had two aunts in
Ireland and one in England. And they played battledore and shuttlecock
with me right enough, for not one of them was pleased to have me in the
house with her own brats. You see,” Pegeen added with delightful
simplicity, “they were never quite sure if my mother had been married to
my father, so they thought it best not to give me the benefit of the
doubt....” Followed the account of her marriage to Mr. Taylor, and the
freakish impulse that had led her into it.
“It made me laugh so the way he said: ‘Margaret, I don’t understand
you,’ every time I opened my mouth ... and when he asked me to marry him
I said ‘Yes’ just to annoy my aunts, who said they never would have
believed it of me.”
Antoinette suggested that in the course of Pegeen’s married life she
might have heard that remark of Mr. Taylor’s once too often.
“Yes, indeed, my dear. And the night I met Conn, I felt I’d be
suffocated dead by the morning if something didn’t happen! So I wandered
out for a walk by myself, and there in the middle of Trafalgar Square
there was a recruiting-meeting, and a man with a big banner telling all
those poor fools of Englishmen to go and fight for their country.... I
made a face at him—I did that! And Conn—he was in the crowd, too, with
his friend Rutherford—he saw me make that face, and came and spoke to
me. And, dearie, when I heard that boy’s voice, I could have put my arms
round his neck and wept....”
“When Irish meets Irish,” murmured Antoinette, “it must have been rather
wonderful.”
Pegeen’s greenish eyes shone. “It was that....”
* * * * *
Later on Conn came in, having just returned from Rutherford’s tribunal
at the House of Commons. “They’ve not heard his case yet, but I thought
I’d have time to slip down here for a cup of tea, and back again.” He
drew Pegeen towards him and kissed her lips. “I’ve brought you these
primroses, the first I’ve seen this spring—let’s have that great green
bowl, and I’ll be arranging them while you get the food.”
Pegeen disappeared into the pantry adjoining the studio, and called to
Antoinette to come and watch her fry the eggs. Conn was left dreamily
putting the primroses one by one into the jade bowl.
“Wouldn’t you rather I went?” Antoinette suggested to Pegeen, “I’m sure
you want to have him all to yourself.”
Pegeen laughed. “What a child for talking nonsense! We like to have you
here. It’s a poor sort of hospitality that wishes one friend to go, when
another arrives.”
But all the same when Conn joined them in the pantry, and kissed
Pegeen’s neck as she bent over the gas-ring, Antoinette felt that she
was an intruder—a feeling which, to do them justice, neither Conn nor
Pegeen seemed to share. They had a composite meal of eggs and tea and
cakes, all among the cigarette-ends and the lip-salve, with the massed
bowl of primroses as table-decoration in the centre. Then Conn declared
that he must go. “I don’t want to miss Rutherford’s speech; it’ll be
worth the hearing.”
Pegeen made a grimace. “I hate that person.”
Conn said warmly: “You’ve no need to say that now, Pegeen, love....”
Antoinette asked, “Is anyone else at the tribunal, Mr. O’Farrell?”
“Barnaby’s there and Dennis Blackwood. Will I give him your love, Miss
de Courcy?”
“Oh, never mind about it ...” she laughed; but the thought of Dennis as
a spectator at Alan’s tribunal made her heart give a sudden painful
jump.
“Good-bye, Pegeen; it’s William’s night on duty, isn’t it? Will I leave
the side-door open...?”
Pegeen shook her ruffled head. “It’s the footsteps I’m thinking of,
Conn, the two lots of footsteps all down the gravel-path. You’ve no idea
how they show up!”
“Then I’ll have to carry you”—Conn’s eyes rested fondly on her—“that’ll
only make one lot.”
“There’s another way, too,” Pegeen broke into her impish laughter, “the
house on the left of this stands empty. If I can get into that garden
from the street and over the wall into ours——”
Conn laughed. “Then William will spot you with his lantern, burgling
your own house! Well, I don’t care how you find your way in, as long as
you do—after the bishop’s left....”
The door banged behind him. Antoinette reflected that here indeed were
combined melodrama and romance and farce of the most highly-coloured
variety. Oh, certainly romance for those two mad, delightful people who
loved each other; romance in the need for secrecy, and their peculiar
methods of ensuring it; melodrama in the existence of the trap-door
concealing the papers; farce in the idea of the respectable household
adjoining this anything but respectable studio, the vicarage next door,
the stolid Special Constable patrolling the streets.
“And to think I might never have known this happiness!” said Pegeen,
“that objectionable person Rutherford was for ever advising my Conn not
to take the studio. He said I was a harpy and that I didn’t really love
him. So Conn believed him, and would not come near me, and I thought I
would kill myself.... I told that to Benny Joseph, that nice Jew-boy
when he came to tea here. And I cried into his handkerchief. And he made
it all right, speaking to Conn and saying I was not a harpy, and did
really love him truly. Now, I’m asking you, do I look like a harpy?”
“You’re a darling,” laughed Antoinette, and Pegeen gave her a warm broad
smile. “I liked you the first time I set eyes on you. I don’t know why
Dennis Blackwood didn’t bring you here before; he and Mr. Barnaby often
come to see Conn.... I like Dennis,” she mused, “he’s a dear fine
fellow, he is that, and he plays the piano like an angel. Aren’t you of
the same opinion, my dear?”
Antoinette said softly: “I am....”
“It’s glad I am to hear that! It means that there’s a great day of
happiness coming for you just as it’s come for me.”
“I’m afraid not, Pegeen.”
“But why, my dear?” Pegeen came and sat on the arm of Antoinette’s
chair. “Why not?”
“It—it’s difficult to say....” Incredibly difficult.
Pegeen put her arms round her with a gesture impulsive and almost
maternal. “Oh, my dear, won’t you tell me what it is?” She seemed to
have lost for the moment her elfin devilry, and to have become softer,
less of an imp, more of a woman. “I’ve had to go through sorrow too, to
know happiness.... Tell me, dear: is it another woman that’s come
between you?”
“No, Pegeen, it’s not another woman....” She was beginning to feel
frightened. Dennis was at the tribunal, every nerve drawn tense with the
hope that Alan would get his exemption. Quickly she chased from her mind
the half-hope that he would not get it. That ... was ungenerous.... Was
it, though, in the face of such a dangerous enemy? How dangerous,
exactly, was Alan? Could he be fought on equal terms, or was his
advantage over her so great that the conflict was already decided in his
favour? If only she knew.... But how, and by what standards was she to
measure the power of this strange enemy? She was oppressed by fear of
the unknown; longed to be able to confide in Pegeen.
“It’s not another woman, it’s——”
But that was the sort of thing one could not say. Not to anyone. Not
ever.
“Then it’ll all come right in the end, you’ll see”—Pegeen was still
gently stroking her hair—“he’s a silly fellow and perhaps doesn’t know
his own mind yet, but one day you’ll be as happy as Conn and me, and
that’s what I’m wishing you with all my heart.”
Antoinette raised her head, and with an effort smiled. “Yes, I expect
it’ll all come right....” She would not spoil the picture of herself and
Dennis pairing off as a secondary couple to Pegeen and Conn. But it had
been hard not to tell Pegeen. Pegeen’s warm-hearted sympathy would have
soothed, if not comforted her. It would have been such a relief to tell
someone. But—_one could not tell that sort of thing_. However much one
longed to. However frightened one was. However lonely.