SHE was waiting for him at the little South Coast station, where decorum
had to cloak the rapture of their meeting. But they sat close together,
hand in hand, in the hackney motor-car that took them home. This gave
him an intermediary breathing space for explanation; and the explanation
was easier than he had feared. Really, his journey had been almost for
nothing and had afforded little interest. The agent whom he was to
interview having been summoned back to Russia the day before he arrived,
he had merely delivered his dispatches to the British authorities and
taken the next boat to England. It was just a history of two dull sea
voyages. Nothing more was to be said about it, save that he would go on
no more fool’s errands for a haphazard government.
“Besides, it’s too dreadful to be away from you.”
“It has been awful for me, too,” said Olivia. “I never imagined what
real loneliness could feel like. All the time I thought of the poor
solitary little dab the Bryce children showed us the other day in the
biscuit-tin of water. Oh, I was the most forsaken little dab.”
He swore that she should never be lonely again; and, by the time they
reached their house by the sea, he had half-exultingly dismissed his
fictitious mission from his mind. All the apprehensions of the narrow
Northern kitchen melted in the joy of her. All danger had vanished like
a naughty black cloud sped to nothing by the sun. The mythical past had
to remain; but henceforward his life would be as clear to her as her own
exquisite life to him.
In their wind-swept home they gave themselves up to deferred raptures,
kissing and laughing after the foolish way of lovers. To grace his
return she had filled the rooms with flowers—roses and sweet
peas—which she bought extravagantly in the neighbouring seaside town.
The scent of them mingled delicately with the salt of the sea. To her
joy he was quick to praise them. She had wondered whether they would be
noticed by one so divinely careless of material things. He even found
delight in the meal which Myra served soon after their arrival—he so
indifferent to quality of food.
“Everything is you,” said he; “scent and taste and sight. You inform the
universe and give it meaning.”
Her eyes grew moist as she swiftly laid her hand on his.
“Am I really all that to you?” She laughed with a little catch in her
throat. “How can I live up to it?”
He raised her hand to his lips. “If only you went on existing like a
flower, your beauty and fragrance would be all in all to me. But you are
a flower with a bewildering soul. So you merely have to be as you are.”
He was in earnest. Women had played little or no part in his inner life,
which, for all his follies, had been lived on a spiritual plane. His
young ambitions had been irradiated by dreams of the little Princess
Tania, who had represented to him the ever-to-be-striven-for
unattainable. On his reaching the age when common sense put its clammy
touch on fervid imagination, the little Princess had been given away in
marriage to a young Russian nobleman of vast fortune, and he himself had
driven her to the wedding with naught but a sentimental pang. But the
flower-like, dancing, elusive quality of her had remained in his soul as
that which was only desirable and ever to be sought for in woman.
And—miracle of miracles!—he had found it in Olivia. And she was warm
and real, the glowing incarnation of the cold but perfect ghost of his
boyhood’s aspirations. She was verily the Princess of his dream come
true. And she had an odd air of the little Princess Tania—the same
dark, wavy hair and laughing eyes and the same crisp sweetness in her
English speech.
Save for all this rapture of meeting, they took up the thread of their
lives where it had been broken, as though no parting had taken place,
and their idyll continued to run its magic course. Triona began to write
again: some articles, a short story. The shadow shape of a new novel
arose in his mind, and, in his long talks with Olivia, gradually
attained coherence. This process of creation seemed to her uncanny.
Where did the people come from who at first existed as formless spirits
and then, in some strange way, developed into living things of flesh and
blood more real than the actual folk of her acquaintance? Her intimate
association with the novelist’s gift brought her nearer to him
intellectually, but at the same time set him spiritually on unattainable
heights. Meanwhile he called her his Inspiration, which filled her with
pride and content.
The lease of “Quien Sabe” all but expired before they had settled on
their future house. Medlow was ruled out. So was the immediate question
of the Medlow furniture, they having given Blaise Olifant another year’s
tenancy.
While discussing this step, he had said:
“It’s for you and you only to decide. Any spot on earth where you are is
good enough for me. By instinct I’m a nomad. If I hadn’t found you, I
should have gone away somewhere to the desert and lived in tents.”
Olivia, who had seen so little of the great world, felt a thrill of
pulses and put her hands on his shoulders—she was standing behind his
chair—
“Why shouldn’t we?”
He shook his head and glanced up at her. The way of the gipsy was too
hard for his English flower. She must dwell in her accustomed garden. In
practical terms, they must settle down for her sake. She protested. Of
herself she had no thought. He and his work were of paramount
importance. Had they not planned the ideal study, the central feature of
the house? He had laughed and mangled Omar. A pen and a block of paper
. . . and Thou beside me, etcetera, etcetera.
“I don’t believe you want to settle down a bit,” she cried.
He swung his chair and caught her round her slim body.
“Do you?”
“Eventually, of course——”
“But, before ‘eventually,’ don’t you want your wander-year?”
“France, Italy——” She became breathless.
“Honolulu, the Pacific, the wide world. Why should we tie ourselves to a
house until we have seen it all?”
“Yes, why? We have all our lives before us.” She sank on his knee. “How
beautiful! Let us make plans.”
So for the next few days they lived in a world of visions, catching
enthusiasm one from the other. Again he saw Salvation Yeo’s pointing
finger; and she, in the subconscious relation of her mind with his, saw
it too. House and furniture were Olifant’s as long as he wanted them.
“We’ll go round the world,” Olivia declared.
With a twirl of his finger—“Right round,” said he.
“Which way does one go?”
He was somewhat vague. An atlas formed no part of their personal
equipment or of the hireling penates of “Quien Sabe.”
“I’ll write to Cook’s.”
“Cook’s? My beloved, where is your sense of adventure?”
“We must go by trains and steamers, and Cook’s will tell us all about
them.”
She had her way. Cook’s replied. At the quotation for the minimum
aggregate of fares Alexis gasped.
“There’s not so much money in the world.”
“There is,” she flashed triumphantly. “On deposit at my bank. Much
more.”
Who was right now, she asked herself, she or the prosaic Mr. Trivett and
Mr. Fenmarch? She only had to dip her hands into her fortune and
withdraw them filled with bank-notes enough to take them half a dozen
times round the world!
Inspired by this new simplicity of things, they rushed up to London by
an incredibly early train to take tickets, then and there for the main
routes which circumnavigate the globe. The man at Cook’s dashed their
ardour. They would have to pencil their passages now and wait for months
until their turn on the waiting lists arrived.
It must be remembered that then were the early days of Peace.
“But we want to start next week!” cried Olivia in dismay.
The young man at Cook’s professed polite but wearied sorrow at her
disappointment. Forty times a day he had to disillusion eager souls who
wanted to start next week for the other side of the globe.
“It is most inconvenient and annoying for us to change our plans,”
Olivia declared resentfully. “But,” she added, with a smile, “it’s not
your fault that the world is a perfect beast. We’ll talk it over and
come to you again.”
So after lunch in town they returned to The Point, richer in their
knowledge of the conditions of contemporary world travel.
“We’ll put things in hand at once and start about Christmas,” said
Alexis. “Until then——”
“We’ll take a furnished flat in London,” Olivia decided.
* * * * *
October found them temporarily settled in a flat in the Buckingham
Palace Road, and then began the life which Olivia had schemed for her
husband before these disturbing dreams of vagabondage.
Towards the end of their stay in “Quien Sabe” various letters of enquiry
and invitations had been forwarded to Triona from people, back now in
London, with whom the success of his book had brought him into contact.
These, careless youth, he had been for ignoring, but the wiser Olivia
had stepped in and dictated tactful and informative replies. The result
was their welcome in many houses remote from the Lydian galley, the
Blenkiron home of Bolshevism and even the easy conservative dullness of
the circle of Janet Philimore. The world that danced and ate and dressed
and thought and felt to the unvarying rhythm of jazz music had passed
away like a burnt-up planet. The world which she entered with her
husband was astonishingly new with curious ramifications. At the houses
of those whose cultivated pleasure in life it is to bring together
people worthy of note she met artists, novelists, journalists, actors,
publishers, politicians, travellers, and their respective wives or
husbands. Jealously, at first, she watched the attitude of all these
folk towards her husband: in pride and joy she saw him take his easy
place among them as an equal. A minority of silly women flattered
him—to his obvious distaste—but the majority accepted him on frank and
honourable terms. She loved to watch him, out of the corner of her eye,
across the drawing-room, his boyish face flushed and eager, talking in
his swift, compelling way. His manners, so simple, so direct, so
different from the elaboration of Sidney Rooke, even from the
cut-and-dried convention of Mauregard, had a charm entirely individual.
There was no one like him in the world.
In their turn, many of the people of note they met at the houses of the
primary entertainers invited them to their homes. Thus, in a brief time,
Olivia found herself swept into as interesting a social circle as the
heart of ambitious young woman could crave. How far her own grace and
wit contributed to their success it never entered her head to enquire.
Triona, light-hearted, gave himself up to the pleasure of this new
existence. He found in it stimulus to work, being in touch with the
thought and the art of the moment. The newness of his Odyssey having
worn off, he was no longer compelled to dilate on his extraordinary
adventures; people, growing unconsciously impatient of the realistic
details of the late cataclysm, conspired to regard him more as a writer
than as a heroic personage; wherein he experienced mighty relief. He
could talk of other things than the habits of the dwellers round Lake
Baikal and the amenities of Bolshevik prisons. When conversation drifted
into such channels, he employed a craftiness of escape which he had
amused himself to develop. Freed from the obsession of the little black
book, he regarded his Russian life as a phase remote, as a tale that was
told. His facile temperament put the whole matter behind him. He lived
for the future, when he should be the acknowledged English Master of
Romance, and when Olivia’s burning faith in his genius should be
justified. He threw off memories of Ellen and the kitchen chair and went
his way, a man radiant with happiness. Each day intensified the wonder
of his wife. From the lips and from the writings of fools and
philosophers he had heard of the perils of the first year of marriage;
of the personal equations that seemed impossible of simultaneous
solution; of the misunderstandings, cross-purposes, quarrels inevitable
to the attempt; of the hidden snags of feminine unreason that
shipwrecked logical procedure; of the love-rasping persistence of tricks
of manner or speech which either had to be violently broken or to be
endured in suffering sullenness. At both fools and philosophers he
mocked. A fiction, this dogma of inescapable sex warfare. Never for a
second had a cloud arisen on their horizon. The flawlessness of Olivia
he accepted as an axiom. Equally axiomatic was his own faultiness. In
their daily lives he was aware of his thousand lapses from her standard
of grace, when John Briggs happened to catch Alexis Triona at unguarded
moments and threw him from his seat. But, in a flash, the instinctive,
the super-instinctive, the nothing less than Divine hand, was stretched
out to restore him to his throne. As a guide to conduct she became his
conscience.
Work and love and growing friendship filled his care-free days. His
novel was running serially in a weekly and attracting attention. It
would be published in book-form early in the New Year, and the
publishers had no doubt of its success. All was well with the world.
Meanwhile they concerned themselves busily, like happy children, with
their projects of travel. It was a great step to book berths for Bombay
by a January boat. They would then cross India, visit Burmah, the
Straits Settlements, Australia, Japan, America. All kinds of Companies
provided steamers; Providence would procure the accommodation. They
planned a detailed six months’ itinerary which would take a
conscientious globe-trotter a couple of years to execute. Before
launching on this eastern voyage they would wander at their ease through
France, see Paris and Monte Carlo, and pick up the boat at Marseilles.
As the year drew to its close their excitement waxed more unrestrained.
They babbled to their envious friends of the wonder-journey before them.
Blaise Olifant, who, on his periodical visits to London, was a welcome
visitor at their flat, was entertained with these anticipations of
travel. He listened with the air of elderly indulgence that had been his
habit since their marriage.
“Don’t you wish you were coming with us?” asked Olivia.
He shook his head. “Don’t you remember the first time I saw you I said I
was done with adventures?”
“And I said I was going in search of them.”
“So you’re each getting your heart’s desire,” said Triona.
“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Olifant, with a smile.
There was a touch of sadness in it which did not escape Olivia’s shrewd
glance. He had grown thinner during the year; his nose seemed
half-comically to have grown sharper and longer. In his eyes dwelt a
shadow of wistful regret.
“The life of a hermit cabbage isn’t good for you,” she said. “Give it up
and come with us.”
Again he shook his head. No. They did not want such a drag on the wheels
of their joyous chariot. Besides, he was tied to Medlow as long as she
graciously allowed him to live there. His sister had definitely left her
dissolute husband and was living under his protection.
“You should be living under the protection of a wife,” Olivia declared.
“I’ve told you so often, haven’t I?”
“And I’ve always answered that bachelors are born, not made—and I’m one
born.”
“Predestination! Rubbish!” cried Triona, rising with a laugh. “Your
Calvinistic atavism is running away with you. It’s time for your
national antidote. I’ll bring it in.”
He went out of the room, in his boyish way, in search of whisky. Olivia
leaned forward in her chair.
“You may not know it, but from that first day a year ago you made
yourself a dear friend—so you’ll forgive me if I——” She paused for a
second, and went on abruptly: “You’ve changed. Now and then you look so
unhappy. I wish I could help you.”
He laughed. “It’s very dear of you to think of me, Lady Olivia—but the
change is not in me. I’ve remained the same. It’s your eyes that have
grown so accustomed to the radiant gladness of a happy man that they
expect the same in any old fossil on the beach.”
“Now you make me feel utterly selfish,” she cried.
“How?”
“We oughtn’t to look so absurdly happy. It’s indecent.”
“But it does one good,” said he.
Triona entered with the tray, and administered whisky and soda to his
guest.
“There! When you’ve drunk it you’ll be ready to come to the Magical
Isles with us, where the Lady of Ladies awaits you in an enchanted
valley, with hybiscus in her hair.”
The talk grew light, drifted inevitably into the details of their
projected wanderings. The evening ended pleasantly. Olivia bade Olifant
farewell, promising, as he would not go in search of her himself, to
bring him back the perfect lady of the hybiscus crown. Triona
accompanied him to the landing; and, while they stood awaiting the lift,
Olifant said casually:
“I suppose you’ve got your passports?”
“Passports?” The young man knitted his brow in some surprise. “Why, of
course. That’s to say, I’ve not bothered about them yet, but they’ll be
all right. Why do you ask?”
“You’re Russian subjects. There may be difficulties. If there are, I
know a man in the Foreign Office who may be of help.”
The lift rose and the gates clashed open, and the attendant came out.
“Thanks very much,” said Triona. “It’s awfully good of you.”
They shook hands, wished each other God-speed, and the cage went down,
leaving Triona alone on the landing, gaping across the well of the lift.
He was aroused from a semi-stupor by Olivia’s voice at the flat door.
“What on earth are you doing, darling?”
He realized that he must have been there some appreciable time. He
turned with a laugh.
“I was interested in the mechanism of the lift; it has so many
possibilities in fiction.”
She laughed. “Think of them to-morrow. It’s time for good little
novelists to go to bed.”
But that night, while Olivia, blissfully unconscious of trouble, slept
the happy sleep of innocence Alexis Triona did not close an eye.
Passports! He had not given them a thought. Any decent person was
entitled to a passport. In the plenitude of his English content he had
forgotten his fictitious Russian citizenship. To attest or even to
support this claim there was no creature on God’s earth. The details of
his story of the torpedoed Swedish timber boat in which he had taken
refuge would not bear official examination. Application for passport
under the name of Alexis Triona, soi-disant Russian subject, would
involve an investigation leading to inevitable exposure. His civic
status was that of John Briggs, late naval rating. He had all his papers
jealously locked up, together with the little black notebook, in his
despatch case. As John Briggs, British subject, he was freeman of the
civilized world. But John Briggs was dead and done for. It was
impossible to wander over the globe as Alexis Triona with a passport
bearing the name of John Briggs. He would be held up and turned back at
any frontier. And it was beyond his power of deception to induce Olivia
to travel with him round the world under the incognito of Mrs. John
Briggs.
Rigid, so that he should not wake the beloved woman, he stared for hours
and hours into the darkness, vainly seeking a solution. And there was
none.
He might blind Olivia into the postponement of their adventure, and in
the meanwhile change his name by deed poll. But that would involve the
statutory publicity in the Press. The declaration in _The Times_ that
he, John Briggs, would henceforth take the name of Alexis Triona would
stultify him in the social and literary world—and damn him in the eyes
of Olivia.
In those early days after the War, the Foreign Office granted passports
grudgingly. British subjects had to show very adequate reasons for
desiring to go abroad, and foreign visas were not over-readily given. In
the process of obtaining a passport, a man’s identity had to be
established beyond question.
He remembered now having heard vague talk of spies; but he had paid no
attention to it. Now he realized that which he had heard was cruelly
definite.
There was no solution. John Briggs was dead, and Alexis Triona had no
official existence.
He could not get as far as Boulogne, let alone Japan. And there was
Olivia by his side dreaming of the Fortunate Isles.