Venus Over Lannery

by Martin Armstrong

  Elsdon held out his hand. “May I see?”

  “There’s nothing to see. This is from Mr. Rocket. I arranged for him to wire me at once. He was to wire’ All well’ if she was acquitted, ‘Not so bad’ if it was manslaughter, and’ As foreseen’ if it was the death-sentence.”

  “And it’s ’ As foreseen’?”

  She nodded. “I shall go up to London tomorrow.”

  Elsdon glanced at her sharply. “What are you going to do, Emily?”

  “Simply going to see Daphne, if they’ll let me. Rocket is to try and arrange it.”

  “But ought you to go?” asked Elsdon.

  “Certainly I ought to go,” she said conclusively. “She’s a friend of ours. She has stayed here. I feel responsible for her. Besides, she probably has no one else.”

  “Has she no parents?” asked Elsdon.

  “She left them years ago, so she once told Cynthia. It’s quite possible that they know nothing of what’s happened. Daphne Trent isn’t her real name.”

  “Bless my soul, what is her name then?”

  “If ever I knew, I’ve forgotten. Daphne Trent! Poor little creature, so obviously a name out of a cheap novel!”

  “Well, if you feel you ought to go, I’ll come with you,” said Elsdon.

  “No, George,” she replied. “I’d rather go alone.”

  “But it will be terribly agitating for you.”

  “Not if I’m alone. I shall be all right if I’m alone. I’d much rather know that you’ll be waiting for me here when I get back.” She crumpled the telegram and threw it into the fire and sat watching it burn. “The whole thing seems so incongruous,” she said, as if thinking aloud. “She was such a flippant little butterfly of a thing that it’s impossible to connect her with anything so human and so deep as death. Do you know what I mean? If Frank were to die it would seem at least—how can I put it?—in harmony with him. Frank’s nature is so real and so profound that one could reconcile any human experience with the thought of him. He belongs to the mysteries of life. And Joan too: she has real feelings. If she had killed herself when Norman left her, one would have had, anyhow, a sense of completion, of a consistency with Joan as we knew her. Do you understand what I’m trying to express?”

  “I understand perfectly,” said Elsdon. “You mean that ... that what they’re going to do to Daphne will be like breaking a butterfly on a wheel.”

  “And it’s not only her death, it’s Roy’s too. I can’t fit it on to Daphne as we knew her, or thought we knew her.”

  Elsdon did not reply. He was trying to recall the first time he had met Daphne, and all at once there flashed across his mind that strange glimpse of her when, standing under the lamp on the piano, reading Plato in the deserted drawing-room—the very room in which they were sitting now—he had caught sight of her staring into the room from the dark opening of the French window with an expression on her face half stealthy, half desperate. Yes, that was a Daphne who might have shot her lover. He glanced uneasily at the window, with the brief, instinctive conviction that she was standing there now. How horrible! Henceforward he would always associate the window with that grim vision. But why talk of it? It would be much better not to tell Emily. His mind, under the stimulus of that memory, began to spin fantasies. He was standing there again, under the lamp, just as he had stood before. The room was empty. He raised his eyes from the book and was frozen with horror. She was there again, but not as before. It was ghastly. He screwed up his eyes as if to shut out some actual sight, and said in commonplace tones to Emily: “I was rather afraid a year or so ago that she was getting hold of Eric.”

  “So was I,” said Emily. “There was something going on, but it blew over.” . . .

  Chapter XXVII

  Mrs. Dryden, as she was being conducted next day down the clean stone passages, so grimly hygienic and so horribly sterile, was not agitated. She was far too set on what she desired to do to feel any selfish weakness. She was ready for everything, ready for a Daphne far more inhumanly transformed than the one she actually found. Daphne, it seemed, had not been prepared for her visit and at the sight of Mrs. Dryden she burst into tears. For that Mrs. Dryden was neither prepared nor unprepared. She had not allowed herself to speculate on their meeting, knowing that for such a terrible occasion all speculation and preparation were useless. She had gone into it armed only with her irresistible impulse towards a fellow creature in the most terrible straits. But, for a moment, Daphne’s sobbing shook her courage. Had she done wrong to come? Wouldn’t it have been kinder to have left her unmoved by any intrusion from the world she was so soon to leave? She felt her hands trembling as she waited for the girl’s weeping to spend itself. She had brought a bunch of violets from Lannery and their scent came to her across the cold, arid smell of the little room.

  She looked round to see if the door had been shut. It was shut, and a warder, the one who had guided her down the passage, was standing beside it. Well, what did it matter? The presence of a witness seemed to her at such a time a thing of no importance. Soon Daphne raised her face from her hands. “Don’t mind,” she said. “Don’t mind my going on like this. It was simply your coming in so unexpectedly and your extraordinary kindness.”

  Mrs. Dryden was herself again: she was no longer waiting helplessly: the way was open. “It isn’t kindness, my dear child,” she said. “I’ve come because I wanted to come, because I had to come. I wanted to make sure that everything was well with you.”

  “You think it can be well, then?” said Daphne.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Dryden. “When everything is finished, when there’s nothing left to do or think about, it’s bound to be well, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Daphne. “It’s true. But how do you know? You don’t know what happened, you don’t know why . . .”

  “I don’t have to know how or why,” said Mrs. Dryden. “I know it happened and that it’s all over, and that’s enough.”

  Daphne looked straight at Mrs. Dryden, as if searching her thoughts, and the search seemed to satisfy her. “I always knew,” she said, “that you were good, that there was nothing you didn’t understand, and that, even if you hadn’t understood, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would tell you everything you wanted to ask.”

  Mrs. Dryden shook her head. “I didn’t come to ask questions; I just came to see you.”

  Daphne gazed at her with unseeing eyes. “They asked me lots of questions, all sorts of absurd, muddling questions; but I just told them I’d done it on purpose. It wasn’t true, but I was afraid they might let me off. Something happened: there was an explosion—I can hear it still.”

  “Don’t think about it, Daphne,” said Mrs. Dryden. “Don’t think about anything at all. Just set your mind at rest and then ... go quietly through the process.”

  “Yes,” said Daphne, and it seemed to Mrs. Dryden that her face had the ascetic purity of a nun’s; “it’s a simple process. I wish they’d do it now.”

  Mrs. Dryden felt a touch on her shoulder. She stood up. “You’re all right, aren’t you?” she said, giving Daphne a brief, hearty kiss. “Don’t think. Don’t bother. Just wait quietly and then do what they tell you.”

  Daphne smiled at her. “I shall think of you,” she said, “and everything will be quite all right.”

  The old lady went quickly out. She was still clutching the violets in her hand. She had thought it better not to give them.

  Chapter XXVIII

  Ten years later, Elsdon travelled down to Lannery for the last time and with none of those feelings of warm anticipation with which he had approached the place on every occasion throughout all these years. Two days before, he had had a letter from Cynthia; at the sight of her writing on the envelope he had known what it had to tell him and his heart had turned to stone. Emily had died on the previous morning and now he was on his way to her funeral. A spare, grim, little old man, dressed in black, with his top hat and his gloves on the seat beside him, he sat idle in his empty first
-class carriage—he had taken a first-class ticket in the hope of avoiding others who might be going down—and though his eyes watched the wheeling landscape he did not notice that the leaves were already turning, that the poplars trembling against the unclouded blue had already faded to a daffodil yellow and that yellows and browns were breaking out among the green of the beeches. Well, this was the end of it. He had always hoped that he would be the first to go, but Emily had stolen a march on him and left him with the burden of dying twice. For a few more years he would shuffle to and fro between his house and his club, occasionally he would stay with the Buxteds and, if ever again he could get up enough energy and interest, he would go abroad once or twice more. And then some little hitch would occur: he would catch a cold, perhaps, that would go on to his lungs, or have a little trouble with his heart, and then would come his second and easier death. He sighed heavily. It would be a weary business filling in the interval.

  He dreaded every moment of the day before him—his arrival at the station, the drive, more and more painful as he approached the house, and, more painful still, the house itself, empty and derelict, though full of intruders, all rigged out in the horrible travesty of mourning. He shrank into himself at the thought of parading his grief before strangers and, worse still, before friends. He had seen familiar faces on the platform at Paddington—Eric and his wife Joan, and the two Pennants—and had hurried past, avoiding recognition. He had avoided even the Buxteds, whom he had seen just ahead of him, looking for an empty carriage. But he would join the Buxteds when they all got out of the train: they would provide a barrier between him and the rest.

  Clark, Emily’s chauffeur, was waiting on the platform, and, catching Elsdon’s eye, went up to him. “The car’s waiting for you, sir, and Mrs. Todd told me to look out for Colonel and Mrs. Buxted as well.”

  The three old friends got into the car, embarrassed and ashamed in their unfamiliar clothes. Ida Buxted seemed to have shrunk to half her size in her strange black dress and hat. Elsdon realised that he had never seen her in black before. “How I hate these damned hats,” barked the Colonel angrily, smoothing his top hat with the sleeve of his black coat and setting it carefully on his knee; and Bob’s familiar voice and his familiar irritability comforted Elsdon. It seemed that things had become human again, that Emily was no longer quite shut away from them.

  “Emily would laugh at us if she saw us,” he said, and that too—the thought of Emily laughing and heaping humorous scorn on them—comforted him. He noticed, as they drove away, that people in black were getting into a private bus.

  Ida too noticed it. “How good of Cynthia,” she said, “to think of keeping us away from the others.”

  Hypnotised by the pulse of the car and sheltered by the unobtrusive presence of his two friends, Elsdon felt a protective numbness take hold of him. The drive would soon be over and the arrival at the house; in an hour or two the whole dreadful occasion would be over. Meanwhile he would go through his part in a state of suspended animation. They turned into the drive and the cream-coloured front of the house began to show through the hanging beechboughs. Then the whole front swung into view. It was a strange house. He faced it apathetically for the first time, resolutely blind to its familiarity. Cynthia, with a waxen face, met them on the steps and led them to the smoking-room.

  “I thought you would rather wait in here,” she said. “I shall take the rest into the drawing-room. There’s still half an hour before we start.”

  Her last phrase brought upon Elsdon a sudden invasion of reality, and as he sat, a little apart from the Buxteds, there grew up in him a shuddering aversion from the grim mummery which was soon to begin. What had it all got to do with Emily? Why, because Emily was dead, should they dress themselves up in hideous disguises and go through all that mopping and mowing? It was sacrilege. It did violence not only to the thought of her but to his own feelings. He would never be able to go through with it. But what else could he do? He had dressed himself up, he had come down. He sat there, fingering the arms of his chair, defenceless before this seizure of aversion and fear and hopeless indecision. A sound roused him. Bob had got up and was coming over to speak to him. Panic seized him. He must do something at once if he was to do it at all.

  “Do you think,” he asked feebly, before Bob could speak, “that Cynthia would misunderstand if I didn’t go, if I stayed here during the ... the . . .” He groped for some other word than funeral.

  “Of course she wouldn’t, George.” It was Ida’s voice. “I’ll just go and speak to her.” She went to the door and Bob sat down in the chair beside his. Neither of them spoke and soon the door opened again and Ida returned with Cynthia.

  Cynthia went up to his chair. “Stay here, Uncle George,” she said. “I would much rather you did. There’s not the smallest need for you to come.”

  He nodded his thanks and the three of them went out, leaving him alone. He leaned back in his chair, immensely relieved. A bee buzzed on the window. From outside came the sound of wheels on the gravel. Shuffling footsteps passed the smoking-room door. And gradually, as if by some sixth sense, he felt the house empty itself and silence flow in until the whole house was full of it. Ah, how much better to sit here alone! Here he need no longer cower away from reality. The house became real. He could recognise and accept now the familiar room in which he had so often sat with her; and he could think of her, recall the warm tones of her voice, varying perpetually like an old Italian tune, and the mocking gleam in her eyes when she teased him. He remembered how she had spoken of Daphne’s death. “It’s so incongruous,” she had said, and she had gone on to say that there was no incongruity between Frank and death or Joan and death, that their natures were deep enough to include it. He was glad he had remembered that. It was as if she herself had reconciled him to her death. He could accept it now. It was as inevitable and harmonious as the final verse of a poem or the closing bars of a piece of music. His thoughts dropped back to old days at Lannery, to visits over thirty years ago, not long after Arthur Dryden’s death and Naomi’s flight, when he and the Buxteds would spend a week with Emily and her two children. When Maurice, who had died twenty years ago, was a little chap of ten or twelve and Cynthia four years younger. And those other visits, years and years later, when the house seemed to be full of young people, those creatures that had seemed to him so restless and unbalanced. They were no longer such very young people now; a new generation was following on their heels, and in one way or another they had, it seemed, solved their problems or had a solution forced upon them. That poor little wretch Daphne had solved hers violently and unlawfully and selfishly. There was a logical justice in Daphne’s end: she had extorted from life what her nature demanded, sacrificing that splendid young animal Roy to her own exorbitant needs. But Roy, poor chap, had demanded no such solution; there was no logic and no justice about his end. Life had inflicted a horrible wrong on him, and his name, which one had seen for a time plastered about under the portico of the Lyceum, displayed in huge capitals along the sides of London buses and extolled in the cheap Press over the names of earlier idols such as Lewis Waller and Fred Terry, had blazed up for a few days into a new and horrible significance and then vanished for ever. His dead rivals had superseded him long since in the popular memory. And Norman? Norman was no doubt still pursuing his charming, ineffectual way. His solution was that of the rolling stone, to roll on till he stopped. He and his rather magnificent new wife, whom he had once, at Emily’s invitation, brought down to Lannery, had separated. Probably he had found a third, and in the end he would doubtless settle down as poor Naomi had done, from lack of momentum. Norman and Naomi! It had never before occurred to him how alike they were—alike in their charm, which they used as the angler-fish uses its filaments to lure and devour other fishes; alike in their rapacity and in their inability to give. They were parasites. Some fatal influence of parents or circumstance had warped them and turned them out into the world—poor creatures—ravening after what they were
incapable of receiving, fatally following, like Daphne, the law of their unlucky natures. The Pennants had been luckier: they had quite evidently found happiness. Roger had grasped and then Edna had grasped, but both had been willing to give more than they claimed, and now, as Emily had predicted, they had struck a balance and were satisfied. Most lucky of all were Joan and Eric and Frank and Cynthia. They were givers by nature and each had found a partner who could receive what they offered. “Give and you shall receive: grasp and you shall lose”—that seemed to be the law of human relationships. And yet it was not quite that, for that left out those who, like himself, had offered and had their offering refused. He had tried to give everything to Emily, but she would accept only a part. Well, even so, he had had more happiness than most people. Yes, during the last thirty years, in a quiet, uneventful way, he had been happy. A sob caught his breath, but he swallowed it down. Even though he was alone he preferred to keep control of himself.

  A muffled sound like a very distant train disturbed the silence, then the same sound again and yet again. The servants were pulling up the blinds of the front windows... .

  He had wondered, after hearing of Emily’s death, what would become of the house. It was strange that Emily had never mentioned the subject and that he had never thought of asking her. He hated the thought of it passing into other hands, and yet would Cynthia and Frank abandon their work in London and settle here? He feared not. And now, as he walked for a few minutes with Cynthia on the lawn before starting for the train with the Buxteds, he asked her about it.

  “You won’t sell it, I hope?” he said.

  “O, no,” said Cynthia. “We shall carry out the plan, of course.”

  “The plan?”

  “Yes, build three new hostels and start our community.”

  “A community?” he said, aghast. “I hadn’t heard ... I didn’t know ...”

  “I’m so sorry, Uncle George,” she said. “I forgot we’d never told you. Mother thought it might pain you.”