It was almost twenty years to a day after the adventure of Playmate
Place that Hugh met Lamoir at a party at Mace, Guy de Travest’s place.
Miss Cavell her name was. He recognised her, he said, at once, at very
first sight. She had been seven then and she was twenty-seven now, but
he knew her on sight. And when she spoke, he was quite certain. Of
course she didn’t suck her finger and say “Oo!” any longer, but without
a doubt Lamoir Cavell was the grown-up of the kid of Playmate Place. And
he actually found himself wondering, as he talked to her that first time
at Mace, if she recognised him--and then he almost laughed aloud at his
childishness, for of course the whole thing had been a boy’s dream. But
it was very odd, his dreaming about someone he was actually to meet
twenty years later. And once he fancied, as he turned to her suddenly,
that she was looking at him a little strangely, in a puzzled sort of way
maybe, with that small slanting smile of hers as though she was smiling
at something she just hadn’t said. Oh, Lamoir must have been very
beautiful then!
She was born in India, where old man Cavell was something in the Civil
Service, and she had lived in India until recently, when her father
died. Hugh, that first time, asked her if she had ever been in England
as a child, and she said, staring at him in a way that seemed so
familiar to him that his heart gave a throb: “Only in dreams.” But he
didn’t tell her about the Playmate Place then. Then was the time to tell
her, then or never. He never told her.
They walked in enchantment, those two, for the next few days. Guy de
Travest has told me since that the whole house-party went about on
tiptoe, so as not to disturb Hugh and Lamoir in their exquisite
contemplation of their triumph over the law of life, which is of course
unknowable, but must be pretty depressing, seeing what life is.
They were married in the little village church at Mace, and Hilary
Townshend was Hugh’s best man, and Hilary has told me since that he
almost wept to see them going away--knowing as he did so certainly,
Hilary said, that Hugh and Lamoir had taken the one step in life which
will wake any couple up from any dream.
Hugh continually pulled at the stiff grey affair on his upper lip as he
told me of his marriage. “It’s Playmate Place,” he said, “that is
important in the story: much more important than my married life. Lamoir
and I never quite reached Playmate Place in actual life. We were in
sight of it sometimes--when I let Lamoir have her head. But I only see
that now, I didn’t realise it then.”
He said that about the importance of Playmate Place quite seriously.
And, you know, I took it quite as seriously. A dream or vision or
whatever it was, that has lasted fresh in a man’s mind from the age of
nine to the age of forty-nine is, after all, a thing to be taken
seriously. I haven’t, as a rule, much patience with dreams; and there’s
a deal too much talk of dreams in the novels of the day, for it’s so
easy to write “dream”; but Hugh’s, as they say, rather “got” me.
He never spoke about it to Lamoir. “I began to, several times,” he said,
“but somehow I never went on. You see, there was such a difference
between our life together and the way we had been together in that
garden. I mean, such a tremendous difference in spirit. She was the
same, but I--well, I was the same, too, but only that ‘same’ which had
jeered at the word ‘playmate.’ It’s difficult to explain. I knew, you
see, as I said things that might hurt her, that I was in the wrong--and
I didn’t want to say them, either--but somehow it was in me to say them
and so I said them. It’s somehow the impulses you can’t put into words
that are the strongest.”
The marriage of Hugh and Lamoir appeared to have gone much the same way
as most marriages. At first they were very happy, and they were quite
certain that they were going to be even happier. Then they thought that
perhaps they were not so happy as they had been, and then they were
quite certain that they were not so happy as they had been. Hugh said it
was more or less like that.
Hugh, at the time, had thought privately that this was because Lamoir
did not take very much interest in his collections of fine things. Not
that he wasn’t quite contented with his marriage. Good Lord, contented!
I wonder what Lamoir thought about that. Contented! But she never
confided, that quiet Lamoir.
It was a great unhappiness to her, Hugh said, that there were no
children. A very great unhappiness. He hadn’t, he admitted, minded so
much, because year by year he was growing more absorbed in his
collections. Throughout his married life he would go off searching
Europe for pieces. Italy, Greece, Spain. At first he used to take Lamoir
with him, but later on she would stay at home. She preferred that, Hugh
said. She wouldn’t stay in the London house, but at Langton Weaver, the
house which was larger but not so clean-looking as Playmate Place.
Lamoir lived in the garden and the park. I met Hugh and Lamoir in the
last years of their life together, and whenever I went to stay at
Langton Weaver I would find Lamoir in the park. She would generally be
standing just off a path, quite still, wearing gardening-gloves, and
looking thoughtfully down at the flowers. Then she would touch one here
and there. She was gardening.
So, Hugh said, ten years passed; and he, when he thought of it at all,
would think theirs a happy enough marriage, as marriages go. Reality,
after all, couldn’t be so good as dreams, ever. That is what he thought.
And he loved Lamoir. He was a collector of fine things, and so it was
bred in his bone to love Lamoir. She loved him, too. Sometimes in quite
a strange abandoned way, for a woman who had been married so long. In
quite an un-English way, when you came to think of it--although it can’t
be in the least “un-English” to be passionate, but one gets into the
habit of saying the idiotic things that English novelists say. Lamoir
would say things unmentionable and beautiful, in the rare moments. But,
somehow, those rarest moments would never be of Hugh’s contriving, not
after the first year or so. They would come suddenly, out of the night
of ordinary marriage, they would come like angels with silent wings. And
Lamoir would be the voice of the angel with silent wings, and Lamoir in
those rarest moments would be the very body and soul of love. But Hugh
couldn’t woo those moments. Perhaps no man ever can. It may be, Hugh
said, that there’s a frontier to any woman’s love for any man, and
beyond that frontier is the unknowable darkness and unknowable light,
and from that secret place can leap a passion that no man in the world
is worthy to woo. It just comes or it doesn’t come.
These moments did not come when he thought they would, when he expected
them. She would somehow be passive then, somehow there yet not there.
Then suddenly, when he had got used to the hurt of her “coldness,” out
of the night of ordinary marriage would sweep the angel with the silent
wings in the body and the voice of Lamoir. Hugh said that sometimes the
song of the sirens was in Lamoir’s voice, but if Hugh was right about
that Ulysses must have been just a silly old man and the sirens
darlings.