IN the course of time, Janet Philimore and her attendant father, the
General, arrived at their house on The Point, and as Olivia, apprised of
their advent, did not tie a white satin bow on her gate, General and
Miss Philimore left cards on the newly wedded couple, or, more exactly,
a pencilled leaf torn out of a notebook.
Thus arose a little intimacy which Olivia encouraged on Alexis’s
account. Had not her father and brothers trained her in the ways of men,
one of which vital ways was that which led to the social intercourse of
man with man? Besides, it was a law of sex. If she had not a woman to
talk to, she declared, she would go crazy. It was much more comforting
to powder one’s nose in the privacy of the gynæceum than beneath man’s
unsympathetic stare. Conversely it had been a dictum of her father’s
that, in order to enjoy port, men must be released from the distracting
chatter of women.
“If I’m not broad-minded, I’m nothing,” said Olivia.
“‘Broad’ is inadequate,” replied her husband, thrusting back his brown
hair. “The very wonder of you is that your mind is as wide as the
infinite air.”
Which, of course, was as pleasant a piece of information as any bride
could receive.
The magic of the halcyon days was intensified by the satisfaction of the
sex cravings which, by the symbolism of nose-powdering and
port-drinking, Olivia had enunciated. In the deeps of her soul she could
find no consuming passion for sitting scorched in a boat with a baited
and contemptuously disregarded line between expectant finger and thumb.
She could not really understand the men’s anxiety to induce a mentally
defective fish to make a fool of itself. Yet she would have sat
blissfully for hours at his bidding, for the mere joy of doing as she
was bidden; but not to be bidden was a great relief. Similarly, Alexis
could not vie with Olivia in concentration of being over the selection
of material (in the fly-trap of a great watering-place previously
mentioned) and over the pattern and the manufacture by knitting of gaudy
hued silk jumpers. His infatuated eye marvelled at the delicate
swiftness of her fingers, at the magical development of the web that was
to encase her adorable body. But his heart wasn’t in it. Janet’s was.
And General Philimore brought to the hooking of bass the earnest
singleness of purpose that, vague years ago, had enabled him to ensnare
thousands of Huns in barbed-wire netting.
The primitive laws of sex asserted themselves, to the common happiness.
The men fished; the women fashioned garments out of raw material. We
can’t get away from the essentials of the Stone Age. And why in the
world should we?
But—and here comes the delight of the reactions of
civilization—invariably the last quarter of an hour of these exclusive
sex-communings was filled with boredom and impatience. Alone at last,
they would throw themselves into each other’s arms with unconscionable
gracelessness and say: “Thank Heaven, they’ve gone!” And then the sun
would shine more brightly and the lap of the waves around them would add
buoyancy to their bodies, and Myra, ministering to their table wants,
would assume the guise of a high priestess consecrating their intimacy,
and the moon would invest herself with a special splendour in their
honour.
Now and then the four came together; a picnic lunch at some spot across
the bay; a wet after-dinner rubber at bridge, or an hour’s gossip of old
forgotten far-off things and battles of the day before yesterday, or—in
the General’s house—a little idle music. There it was that Olivia
discovered another accomplishment in her wonderful husband. He could
play, sensitively, by ear—knowledge of notated music he disclaimed.
Having been impressed as a child with the idea that playing from ear was
a sin against the holy spirit of musical instruction, and gaining from
such instruction (at Landsdowne House—how different if she had been
trained in the higher spheres of Blair Park!) merely a distaste for
mechanical fingering of printed notes, she had given up music with a
sigh of relief, mingled with regret, and had remained unmusical. And
here was Alexis, who boasted his ignorance of the difference between a
crotchet and an arpeggio, racking the air with the poignant melancholy
of Russian folk-songs, and, in a Puckish twinkle, setting their pulses
dancing with a mad modern rhythm of African savagery.
“But, dear, what else can you do?” she asked, after the first exhibition
of this unsuspected gift. “Tell me; for these shocks aren’t good for my
health.”
“On the mouth-organ,” he laughed, “I’ve not met any one to touch me.”
It was not idle boasting. On their next rainy-day visit to the
neighbouring town, Olivia slipped into a toy shop and bought the most
swollenly splendid of these instruments that she could find, and Alexis
played “The Marseillaise” upon it with all the blare of a steam
orchestrion.
The happy days sped by in an atmosphere of love and laughter, yet filled
not only with the sweet doings of idleness. Olivia discovered that the
poet-artist must work, impelled thereto by his poet-artistry. He must
write of the passing things which touched his imagination and which his
imagination, in turn, transmuted into impressions of beauty. These were
like a painter’s sketches, said he, for use in after-time.
“It’s for you, my dear, that I am making a hoard of our golden moments,
so that one of these days I may lay them all at your feet.”
And he must read, too. During the years that the locust of war had
eaten, his educational development had stood still. His English literary
equipment fell far short of that required by a successful English man of
letters. Vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had
as yet left unexplored. The great Elizabethan dramatists, for instance.
Thick, serious volumes from the London Library strewed the furniture of
the wind-swept sitting-room. Olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud
to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius,
read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty
of Marlowe, the subtle beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher, the haunting
gloom of Webster. In the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book
between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an
astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage,
he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the
burning words. It was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch.
Once, reading Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Philaster_, he clutched her
tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked
unheeding Heaven, and declaimed:
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,
Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
Whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,
Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue! This had been a life
Free from vexation.”
“But, Alexis, darling, I’m so sorry,” she cried.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“You said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart.
I’m not a bit like that.”
They laughed and kissed. A dainty interlude.
“You’ve never really felt like that?”
“Never.”
“The idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed Olivia, with grand inversion of
chronology. “Tennyson has something like it in _Locksley Hall_. How does
it go?”
With a wrinkling of the brow she quoted:
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“So he did!” cried Triona. “How wonderful of you to remember! Why—the
dear beautiful old thief!” He forgot the point at issue in contemplation
of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “Well, I’m damned! Such a
crib! With the early Victorian veil of prudery over it! Oh, Lord! Give
me the Elizabethan, any day. Yet, isn’t it funny? The period-spirit? If
Tennyson had been an Elizabethan, he would have walked over Beaumont and
Fletcher like a Colossus; but in a world under the awe of Queen
Victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing Elizabethan
thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”
“Dear,” said Olivia, “we have much to be thankful for.”
“You and I?” he queried.
“Our generation. We live in the sun. No longer under the shadow of the
red flannel petticoat.”
Rapturously he called her a marvel among women. Olivia’s common sense
discounted the hyperbole; but she loved his tribute to her sally of wit.
The book slipped to the floor, while she began an argument on the
morality of plagiarism. How far was a man justified in stealing another
man’s idea, working up another man’s material?
His sudden and excited defence of the plagiarist surprised her. He rose,
strode about the room and, talking, grew eloquent; quoted Shakespeare as
the great exemplar of the artist who took his goods from everywhere he
found them. Olivia, knowing his joy in conversational fence, made
smiling attack.
“In the last three hundred years we have developed a literary
conscience.”
“A commercial matter,” he declared. “A question of copyright. I granted
that. You have no right to exploit another man’s ideas to his material
loss. But take a case like this”—he paced before her for a few
seconds—“on the spur of the moment. It must have happened a thousand
times in the War. An unknown dead man just a kilometre away from a bleak
expanse of waste covered with thousands of dead men. Some one happens
upon him. Searches him for identification. Finds nothing of any use or
interest save a little notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper next
his skin. And he glances through the book and sees at once that it is no
ordinary diary of war—discomfort of billets, so many miles’ march,
morale of the men and so forth—but something quite different. He puts
it in his pocket. For all that the modern world is concerned, the dead
man is as lost as any skeleton dug up in an ancient Egyptian grave-yard.
The living man, when he has leisure, reads the closely written
manuscript book, finds it contains rough notes of wonderful experiences,
thoughts, imaginings. But all in a jumble, ill expressed, chaotic.
Suppose, now, the finder, a man with the story-teller’s gift, weaves a
wonderful thrilling tale out of this material. Who is injured? Nobody.
On the contrary, the world is the richer.”
“If he were honest, he ought to tell the truth in a preface,” said
Olivia.
Triona laughed. “Who would believe him? The trick of writing false
prefaces in order to give verisimilitude is so overworked that people
won’t believe the genuine ones.”
“I suppose that’s so,” she acquiesced. Her interest in the argument was
only a reflection of his. She was far more eager to resume the
interrupted reading of _Philaster_.
“It’s lovely that we always see things in the same way,” said he,
sitting down again by her side.
Besides all this delightful work and play there was the practical future
to be considered. They could not live for ever at “Quien Sabe” on The
Point, nor could they live at the Lord knows where anywhere else. They
must have a home.
“Before you stole over my being and metamorphosed me, I should have
asked—why?” he said. “Any old dry hole in a tree would have done for
me, until I got tired of it and flew to another. But now——”
“Now you’re dying to live in a nice little house and have your meals
regular and pay rates and taxes, and make me a respectable woman.”
They decided that a house was essential. It would have to be furnished.
But what was the object of buying new furniture at the present fantastic
prices when she had a great house full of it—from real Chippendale
chairs to sound fish-kettles? The answer was obvious.
“Why not Medlow? Olifant won’t stay there for ever. He hinted as much.”
She shook her head. No. Medlow was excellent for cabbages, but
passion-flowers like her Alexis would wilt and die. He besought her with
laughing tenderness not to think of him. From her would he drink in far
more sunlight and warmth than his passion-flower-like nature could need.
Had she not often told him of her love for the quaint old house and its
sacred associations? It would be a joy to him to see her link up the old
life with the new.
“Besides,” he urged, attributing her reluctance to solicitude for his
happiness, “it’s the common-sense solution. There’s our natural
headquarters. We needn’t stay there all the year round, from year’s end
to year’s end. When we want to throw a leg we can run away, to London,
Paris, “Quien Sabe,” John o’ Groats—the wide world’s before us.”
But Olivia kept on shaking her head. Abandoning metaphor, she insisted
on the necessity of his taking the position he had gained in the social
world of art and letters. Hadn’t he declared a day or two ago that good
talk was one of the most stimulating pleasures in life? What kind of
talk could Medlow provide? It was far more sensible, when Major
Olifant’s tenancy was over, to move the furniture to their new
habitation and let “The Towers” unfurnished.
“As you will, belovedest,” he said. “Yet,” he added, with a curious note
of wistfulness, “I learned to love the house and the sleepy old town and
the mouldering castle.” The practical decision to which she was brought
out of honeymoon lotus-land was the first cloud on her married
happiness. It had never occurred to her before that she could have
anything to conceal from her husband. Not an incident in the Lydian
galley had her ingenuousness not revealed. But now she felt consciously
disingenuous, and it was horrible. How could she confess the real reason
for her refusal to live in Medlow? Was she not to him the Fairy
Princess? He had told her so a thousand times. He had pictured his first
vision of her glowing flame colour and dusk beneath the theatre portico,
his other vision of her exquisite in moonlight and snowflake in the
great silent street. His faith in her based itself on the axiom of her
regality. Woman-like, she had laughed within herself at his dear
illusions. But that was the key of the staggering position; his
illusions were inexpressibly dear to her; they were the priceless jewels
of her love. With just a little craft, so sweet, so divinely humorous,
to exercise she could maintain these illusions to the end of time. . . .
But not at Medlow.
She had gone forth from it, on her pilgrimage, in order to establish
herself in her mother’s caste. And she had succeeded. The name of her
grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, had been a password to the
friendships which now she most valued. Marriage had defined her social
ambitions. They were modest, fundamentally sane. Her husband, a man of
old family and gentle upbringing, ranked with her mother and General and
Janet Philimore. He was a man of genius, too, and his place was among
the great ones of the social firmament.
She thought solely in terms of caste, gentle and intellectual. She swept
aside the meretricious accessories of the Sydney Rooke gang with a
reactionary horror.
A few days before, Alexis, lyrically lover like, had said:
“You are so beautiful. If only I could string your neck with pearls, and
build you a great palace . . .” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in the
manner of the adoring, but comparatively impecunious poet.
And she had replied:
“I don’t want pearls, palaces or motor-cars. They’re all symbols, my
dear, of the Unreal. Ordinary comfort of food and warmth and decent
clothes—yes. But that’s all. So long as you string my heart with
love—and my mind with noble thoughts.”
She longed passionately to live with him, above herself. And yet, here
at the outset, was she living below herself. She would wake in the
morning and, sleepless, grow hot and clammy at the thought of her
deception. And the whole of her Medlow life drifted miserably through
her consciousness: the schoolgirl’s bitter resentment of the
supercilious nose in the air attitude of the passing crocodile of Blair
Park; of the vicar’s daughters’ condescending nod—he was a Canon of
somewhere and an “Honourable” to boot—at “that pretty Miss Gale”; her
recognition, when she came to years of sense, of the social gulf between
her family and the neighbouring gentry whose lives, with their tennis
parties and dances and social doings, seemed so desirable and so remote.
To bring her wonderful husband into that world of “homely folk,” the
excellent, but uncultivated Trivetts, the more important tradespeople,
the managers of the mills, the masters of the County School, her
father’s world, and to see him rigidly excluded from that to which her
mother and he himself belonged, was more than she could bear. She
tortured herself with the new problem of snobbery—rating herself, in
this respect, beneath Lydia, who was frankly cynical as to both her own
antecedents and her late husband’s social standing. But for the life of
her she could not bring herself to explain to Alexis the real
impossibility of Medlow. When she tried, she found that his foreign
upbringing failed to seize the fine shade of her suggestion.
His gay carelessness eventually lulled her conscience. As soon as
Olifant had done with “The Towers,” they could transfer the furniture to
whatever habitation they chose and let the house.
“I feel you couldn’t find it in your heart to sell the old place,” he
said. “Besides—who knows—one of these days——”
She thought him the most delicately perceptive of men.
“No, dear,” she said, her cheek against his. “I couldn’t sell it.”
Then all Medlow danger was over. She breathed freely. But still—the
little cloud of deceit hung over her serene mind and cast ever so tiny a
shadow over her rapturous life.
They had been four weeks in the deliciously sure uncertainty of “Quien
Sabe,” when, one noon while they were drying themselves in the hot sand
and sunshine of their tiny bay, after a swim, Myra came down gaunt
through the whin-covered hill-side with a telegram in her hand. With the
perversity of her non-recognition of the household paramountcy of her
master, she handed the envelope to Olivia. The name was just “Triona.”
Olivia was about to open it instinctively when Alexis started to a
sitting position, and, with an eager glance, held out his hand.
“I think it’s for me. I was expecting it. Do you mind?”
She passed it over with a smile. Alexis rose to his feet, tore the
envelope open, and moving a few yards away towards the surf read the
message. Then slowly he tore it up into the tiniest fragments and
scattered them on the last wavelets of the ebb tide, and stood for a
second or two, staring across the sea. At last he turned. Olivia rose to
meet him. Myra was impassively making her way back up the rough slope.
“What’s the matter?” asked Olivia, puzzled at his scrupulous destruction
of the telegram and reading something like fear in his eyes.
“I’ve had bad news,” he said. He picked up his bath-gown, shook it free
from sand, and huddled it around him. “Let us get up to the house.” He
shivered. “It’s cold.”
She followed him wonderingly.
“What bad news?” she asked.
He turned his head, with a half-laugh. “Nothing so very desperate. The
end of the world hasn’t come yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve changed.”
He rushed up the steps of the veranda and into his little dressing-room.
Olivia, dry and warm, sat in a sun-beat chair and anxiously waited for
him. The instinct of a loving woman, the delicacy of a sensitive soul,
forbade her teasing with insistent questions a man thrown for the moment
off his balance. Yet she swept the horizon of her mind for reasons.
A quarter of an hour afterwards—it had seemed a quarter of a
century—he appeared, dressed, not in his customary flannels, but in the
blue serge suit of their wedding day. The sight of it struck a chill
through her heart.
“You are going away?”
He nodded. “Yes, my dear, I have to.”
“Why? What has happened?”
“I can’t tell you, dear. That’s the heart-rending part of it. It’s
secret—from the Foreign Office.”
She reacted in laughter. “Oh, my darling—how you frightened me. I
thought it was something serious.”
“Of course it’s serious, if I have to leave you for three or four
days—perhaps a week.”
“A week!” She stood aghast. It was serious. How could she face a lonely
epoch of seven days, each counting twenty-four thousand halting hours?
What did it mean?
“There are not many men who know Russian as I do. I’ve been in touch
with the Intelligence Department ever since I landed in England. That’s
why I went to Finland in the autumn. These things bind me to inviolable
secrecy, beloved. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course I understand,” she replied proudly.
“I could refuse—if you made a point of it. I’m a free man.”
She put her two hands on his shoulders—and ever after he had this one
more unforgettable picture of her—the red bathing cap knotted in front,
dainty, setting off her dark eyes and her little eager face—the
peignoir, carelessly loose, revealing the sweet, frank mould of her
figure in the red bathing suit.
“My father and my two brothers gave their lives for England. Do you
think I could be so utterly selfish as to grudge my country a week of my
husband’s society?”
He took her cheeks in his hands. “More and more do you surpass the
Princess of my dreams.”
She laughed. “I’m an Englishwoman.”
“And so, you don’t want to know where I’m going?”
She moved aside. “Of course I do. I shall be in a fever till you come
back. But if I’m not to know—well—I’m not to know. It’s enough for me
that you’re serving your country. Tell me,” she said suddenly, catching
him by the coat lapels. “There’s no danger.”
He smiled. “Not a little tiny bit. Of that you can be assured. The worst
is a voyage to Helsingfors and back. So I gathered from the telegram,
which was in execrable Foreign Office Russian.”
“And when are you going?”
“By the first train. I must report to-night.”
“Can’t I come with you—as far as London?”
He considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Where would you sleep? In
all probability I shall have to take the midnight boat to Havre.”
An hour later they parted. She returned to the empty house frightened at
she knew not what, insecure, terrifyingly alone; she was fretted by an
uncanny sense of having mated with the inhabitant of another planet who
had suddenly taken wing through the vast emptiness to the strange sphere
of his birth. She wandered up and down the veranda, in and out of the
three intimate rooms, where the traces of his late presence, books,
papers, clothes, lay strewn carelessly about. She smiled wanly,
reflecting that he wore his surroundings loosely as he did his clothes.
Suddenly she uttered a little feminine cry, as her glance fell on his
wrist watch lying on the drawing-room mantelpiece. He had forgotten it.
She took it up with the impulsive intention of posting it to him at
once. But the impulse fell into the nervelessness of death, when she
remembered that he had given her no address. She must await his
telegram—to-morrow, the next day, the day after, he could not say.
Meanwhile, he would be chafing at the lack of his watch. She worried
herself infinitely over the trifle, unconsciously finding relief in the
definite.
The weary hours till night passed by. She tried to read. She tried to
eat. She thought of going over the road to the Philimores’ for company;
but her mood forbade. For all their delicacy they would ask reasons for
this sudden abandonment. She magnified its importance. She could have
said: “My husband has gone to London on business.” But to her brain,
overwrought by sudden emotion, the commonplace excuse seemed inadequate.
She shrank from the society of her kind friends, who would regard this
interplanetary mystery as a matter of course.
If only Alexis had taken his watch! Perhaps he would have time to buy
another—a consoling thought. Meanwhile she strapped it on her own
wrist, heroically resolved not to part with it night or day until he
returned.
She sat by the lamp on the sitting-room table, looking out over the
veranda at the pitch blackness of a breathless night in which not even
the mild beat of the surf could be heard. She might have been in some
far Pacific desert island. Her book lay on her lap—the second volume of
Motley’s _Dutch Republic_. All the Alvas and Williams, all the heroes
and villains, all the soldiers and politicians and burghers were
comfortably dead hundreds of years ago. What did these dead men matter,
when one living man, the equal of them all, had gone forth from her,
into the unknowableness of the night?
Myra came into the room with an amorphous bundle in her hand.
“The camp bed in the dressing-room isn’t very comfortable—but I suppose
I can sleep on it.”
Olivia turned swiftly in her chair, startled into human realities.
“No. It’s a beast of a thing. But I should love to have you to be with
me. You’re a dear. You sleep in my bed and I’ll take the dressing-room.”
“You once gave signs of being a woman of sense,” said Myra tonelessly.
“It seems I was mistaken.”
She disappeared with her bundle. Olivia put out the light and went to
bed, where she lay awake all the night, fantastically widowed, striving
with every nerve and every brain-cell to picture the contemporaneous
situation of her husband. Three o’clock in the morning. He would be in
mid-Channel. Had he secured a berth? Or was he forced to walk up and
down the steamer’s deck? Thank Heaven, it was a black still night. She
stole out of bed and looked at the sea. A sea of oil. It was something
to be grateful for. But the poor boy without his watch—the watch which
had marked for him the laggard minutes of captivity, the racing hours of
approaching death, the quiet, rhythmic companion and recorder of his
amazing life.
She forced all her will power to sleep; but the blank of him there on
the infinite expanse of mattress she felt like a frost. The dawn found
her with wide and sleepless eyes.
And while she was picturing this marvel among men standing by the
steamer’s side in the night, in communion with the clear and heavy
stars, holding in his adventurous grasp the secret of a world’s peace,
Alexis Triona was speeding northwards, sitting upright in a third-class
carriage, to Newcastle-on-Tyne. And at Newcastle he expected no ship to
take him to Finland. Lucky if he found a cab in the early morning to
take him to his destination three miles away.
For the telegram which he had torn to pieces had not come from the War
Office. It was not written in Russian. It was in good, plain, curt
English:
“Mother dying. Come at once.”