I
Alas, it is a pity I know so little of trees and flowers, and how I
shall tell this tale without their help I cannot imagine, for it is a
tale that demands a profound knowledge of still, gentle things. But I
daresay it will get itself written somehow, and saying that leads us to
quite another question, for serious men will have it that that is the
pity of nearly all the writing of our time, it just gets itself written
somehow.
Now it is difficult not to think a little of my own life in telling of
Hugh and Lamoir, for they helped me when I was very young, for a long
time they were my only friends in London, and ever since they have
remained the dearest. But it was only the other day that Hugh told me
about the tree. I suppose he must have had a sort of idea of what might
happen and wanted to tell someone about it while he could. But it’s odd
that I had known him all those years, him and Lamoir, and he had never
so much as mentioned the tree--when out he suddenly comes with it!
Of course there will be those to say that he hadn’t concealed anything
worth concealing, that it’s an impossible story anyhow, and who could
believe it? But I do believe it decidedly, for how could Hugh have made
it up? Hugh wasn’t an imaginative man, not a bit. That, in point of
fact, is what the story is about. Of course, he had a passion for fine
things, a passion for touching fine things, but your collector or your
connoisseur isn’t generally anything of an imaginative man. Lamoir, now,
she was quite different, and she might easily have thought of the garden
and the tree and the whole business, but so far as I can make out Hugh
and Lamoir never once breathed a word to each other about it.
I have never been able to think of Lamoir quite steadily, I liked her
too much. I know a writer is supposed to be impersonal, but that can’t
be helped. She knew the very hearts of trees and flowers, Lamoir did,
and she was always so still and quiet, like a flower herself, that you
never knew what she was thinking of. And that is more or less how the
trouble between them began, so Hugh told me the other day. He never knew
what she was thinking of, but he hoped for the best, and then one day he
found that she had been thinking away from him all the time. That is
what Hugh said. But I feel that the truth of it was that he never
thought Lamoir was thinking of anything at all, except maybe about what
a good husband he was, and then one day he got a shock. Many men seem to
be like that, they have happy natures, for when their wives are quiet
and thoughtful they never dream that those thoughts might be out of
accord with their own, and when they do at last realise that something
has been wrong all the time they are surprised and hurt and want to know
why they were not told sooner. As though, you know, some things can be
told sooner, as though some things _can_ be told until it is too late!
Now Hugh and Lamoir were a difficult pair to know, together or singly.
Hugh wasn’t at all your democratic sort, there was nothing at all
easy-going about him. I remember once seeing him in a crowded room and
thinking he was like an island of nerves in an ocean of grins. Lamoir
said he was proud. He simply didn’t seem to concern himself at all with
other people’s opinions; it was as though he just hadn’t the time to go
about dealing in the slack forms of geniality which pass for manners in
this century. That is Hugh’s phrase, not mine. Lamoir left him about
nine years ago.
They say that people made a great fuss over Lamoir when she first came
from India, because she was so lovely. That must have been about
twenty-five years ago, and about nine years ago she packed up a lot of
trunks and went to Algeria. People were very surprised at that, for
Lamoir was beloved of everyone, and she seemed to be liking her life in
England--as much, anyhow, as anyone ever does seem to like his or her
life in England, for there seems to be a feeling in people that one
shouldn’t like living in England. I like it very much myself, but then I
am not English. People said vaguely that she was going away because her
heart was weak--quite all right, but weak, and that she must have quiet.
She never came back.
I went to see her in Algeria two winters ago. I wanted very much just to
see how she was in that solitary new life. Naturally I didn’t tell Hugh
the main reason why I was going to Algeria, and I think he had an idea
I was going there to try to write a book about it, one of those
marvellous books about sheiks and sand and suburban Englishwomen with
love flaming in their eyes to such a degree that none of their friends
at home would ever recognise them. As Hugh never used to speak of his
wife one had nothing to go on as to what his feelings about her were,
and so, of course, one said nothing about her either.
Just the same, that is how I found Lamoir. She had the grace of silence,
of reflection, to a rare degree. Some people found her frightfully dull,
but then imagine what “some people” are, it can be said that their
disapproval is a distinction that no fairly admirable person should ever
be without. The house she was living in had been the palace of the last
of the Admirals of the Dey’s fleet, Lamoir said, and one could well
believe it. There were dungeons below, deep, dark, crooked, with chains
and iron clamps on the walls where the poor devils of Christian slaves
used to be kept, and on the morning Lamoir was showing me round there
was a vampire-bat hanging asleep from the black broken walls. From the
dungeons there was a secret passage, Lamoir said, down to the bay two
miles away at the foot of the hill, and through this passage the old
Admiral scoundrel had tried to escape when the French stormed the town
about eighty years ago--or maybe it was more or less than eighty years
ago; I don’t know when it was, and Lamoir didn’t know either.
One morning we were walking about on the pink tiles of the flat, uneven
roof, not talking much, while below the sea slept. Lamoir asked after
Hugh, just how he was, and I said he was quite well. “Lonely,” I added.
We sat on the parapet of the roof, looking down the hill at the white
untidy town. There was an American liner in the bay, like a smudge. At
last Lamoir said: “Yes, he was always lonely. Lonely and proud. Hugh is
very proud. Don’t you think so?”