“I understand you, my dear man. The more talk there is, the less meaning there seems to be in the chatter. You are not one of the frothy people.”
“We shall never forget.”
“Nor I. I once had a wife, Luce, and when she was dying I could do nothing but sit by the bed and hold her hand. Nothing to be said that was adequate. She left me feeling always alone in the world.”
“The secret sources of one’s compassion, sir.”
“O, possibly. Yet, even the things that one has felt most fiercely leave behind them at my age just a little vague perfume. But here’s your train.”
They walked back to where Luce had left his suitcase.
“I will let you have a letter now and again. It may come from Rome, or Honolulu or Santa Fé, or Cochin China. And my addresses may be impermanent.”
“Wherever you are may the knees of the gods be merciful.”
The train drew in, and Luce, entering a third-class smoker, and putting his suitcase in the rack, leaned out of the window. There were two other men and a girl in the compartment.
“By the way, sir, if you should see Miss Reubens, tell her I shall be staying with my sister.”
“And the address?”
“O, Lavender Cottage, Mousehole, Cornwall.”
Mr. Temperley crinkled up his eyes.
“I’ll remember it. Good-bye, my dear Luce.”
“Good-bye, sir.”
Luce took off his hat to Mr. Temperley, sat down in his corner, and felt in his pocket for his pipe.
Soon after eleven o’clock he got off a bus at Highbury Corner, and carrying his suitcase, walked to Canonbury Square. He found sister Mary at home, immersed in household matters, and for the moment minus a maid. She was large and fair and placid, and as accustomed to her brother’s vagaries as she was to the domestic shocks of post-war England. Either Natalie had measles, or the kitchen boiler had declared a lightning strike, or Edward was deploring the public’s taste in books. Edward was a junior partner in a minor publishing house, more refined than prosperous. Yet nothing surprised Mary or upset her temper, and when she found her very large brother on her doorstep she accepted him with a kiss and a smile.
“Hallo, John. Yes, it’s an apron day. No wench.”
“Then I’m not going to worry you.”
“Don’t be silly. Can you stay?”
“A night or two. But, look here, my dear——”
“Don’t be silly, John. I see you about once in a century. I can’t do you proud, but there is the spare room.”
She stood back to let him in.
“Tom and Joyce are at school, and Natalie at grandma’s for a few days. I was having a house-clean.”
“Rig me up with an apron, and I’ll help. How’s Edward?”
“O, quite fit. Books a little depressed.”
“Sorry. Not serious?”
“They have not had a spring book that has sold more than two thousand. But Edward & Co. are rather pixsome. And where have you sprung from?”
“Surrey. Went caravaning, and came back to find my funny old place burnt out. So I am going abroad in a day or two.”
“For a big thing you do move, John.”
“Well, there’s nothing to keep me anchored, my dear. Shall I get rid of this suitcase?”
“Yes, I’ll show you the room.”
Mary Garden, unlike the lady in the old rhyme, had absorbed a sweet savour from the very contrariness of things. She had much of her brother’s serene solidity, and a mind that had reacted to the rubs of fortune without being either dulled or roughened by them. She could say, “My dear, we shall always be short of money, and I shall never be able to afford the particular fur coat that I see in the window, but I have three healthy children and a husband who does not give me shocks. I don’t like shocks. I’m really a complete Tabby.” Though, to her brother, the simile of a very large sunflower of the annual variety might have seemed more appropriate.
Luce, having unpacked his suitcase, went below in search of Mary, but his sister had disappeared. “Hallo, Mary. What’s become of you?” Her voice answered him from the kitchen. He found her exploring the larder.
“I was going to have a cheese and apple lunch, John. Yes, this steak is for Edward’s dinner, but we’ll put forward the programme.”
“You will do nothing of the sort, my dear. Take off that apron and the Martha complex, and we’ll go down and lunch in Soho. I have some shopping to do.”
“I’d love to, John.”
“Good girl. Edward shall not be deprived of his steak.”
For Luce the day had a pleasant sadness, something autumnal and retrospective. Mary might ask questions, but her curiosity was warmed by affection, and Luce had a tale to spin, and the future to paint in vagrant colours. Yes, he was going abroad, and rather indefinitely so. Not that he had the genius and the brilliant and tragic temperament of D. H. Lawrence, who, when he was in Italy, hungered for New Mexico, and when he was in Mexico wished himself in the Bavarian Alps. Luce confessed to his sister that he had the wander lust, and that perpetual motion or the Stylite’s idea might be equally futile. It all depended upon whether you were interested or bored. But in talking to his sister across a Soho table and contemplating her serene face, she seemed to symbolize the England he was leaving, and to cause him gentle qualms. Compassion was drinking wine with him and reminding him that if the adventure was somewhat final for the man it would be so much more final for the woman.
With seeming irrelevancy he was heard to say, “Women shouldn’t make us feel combative. There is enough of Mars in most men without shield-clashings by Martian women.”
His sister was peeling a peach.
“Why don’t you marry again, John?”
“Encores can be so unexpectedly crushing to the vanity of the performer.”
Luce bought a lobster and a bottle of Burgundy, and took them back to Canonbury to supplement the steak. He and Mary could digest lobster, but poor Edward was more delicately membraned, and his digestion was as eclectic as his taste in books. He seemed unable to select or to digest the good red flesh of a best seller. He had a taste for things winsome or for the faintly macabre. A pale man, with thin lips and hair, gently cynical save where Mary was concerned, he refused the lobster, but was obediently masticating the steak. Mary believed, and she was right, that Edward’s metabolism should be set to deal with good tough English. She did not say to him, “If you literary people would only discover for yourselves an Edgar Wallace, or even a Warwick Deeping, things might be so much more comfortable. I should like to make a lap at life.” But knowing her Edward and his refined limitations she refrained. Edward was a delicate creature, and his digestion, mental and otherwise, had to be cherished.
Luce could never find much to say to his sister’s husband. Moreover, as they sat at the open window of this very English house in the very English square, Luce felt himself to be more and more like a man with his loins girded for some strange journey. Let Edward smoke his one cigarette, and prattle, while wondering whether the Burgundy and the steak would enter into an argument and keep him awake. Mary was washing up, and had refused male help.
“Stay and talk to Teddie.”
Edward’s prattle was like the cigarette smoke, delicate and inconclusive, and Luce’s pipe seemed a gross object, but Edward Garden did say one significant thing.
“I think if I had my time over again, John, I should grow tomatoes.”
“Why tomatoes?”
“Something red and obvious. You give the public just tomatoes. So inevitable.”
“Rather acid things, Ted.”
“Yes, they tell me that I have always suffered from an insufficiency of hydrochloric acid. Even one’s work seems limited by one’s secretions.”
Luce, with his blond head sinking into the shadow, supposed that it might be so, and that poor Edward’s anæmia and lack of gastric juice might be the inspiration of those who produce belles-lettres.
4
; A summer gale, grey scuds of rain over a grey and tumbled sea, water coming aboard, an almost universal nausea prevailing. Luce, like many big men with large heads, did not suffer from qualms. He could smoke a pipe and watch the waves, and feel like a sea-rover sailing to new, strange lands.
Yes, the strangeness of life, the bitter-sweet tang of it, salt on the lips, the sharp flavour of fruit before too cloying a ripeness. Assuredly, most of the world’s manipulators would call him a fool, but in some supreme folly, life, like the earth, renews itself. Could he not imagine some preposterous pessimist dismissing the spring as the earth’s supreme piece of silliness?
“All this old sentimental flowery stuff served up again like light opera, and the damned public swallowing it?”
The day itself had been strange in its minor incidents. He was very new both as to luggage and clothes. He had bought second-class tickets, the beginnings of a disinterested thriftiness. If anything were to happen to him she would not have a penny. On the platform at Victoria he had been accosted by a man whom he had known somewhat intimately in the old days.
“Hallo, John! You look all dressed up.”
“Hallo, Peter my lad. Where are you for?”
“Salzburg.”
“Musical as ever.”
At Dover the official person had examined his passport with particular care. As though it mattered now! Authority was always a little late in clapping the cover on the forbidden dish. Had not Adam and Eve pinched the apple before God had intervened? Also, he was spared the friendly questions of Peter Laverack, who was travelling Pullman, and who, on the boat, remained inconsolably sick in the gentlemen’s saloon.
There were breaks in the sky above the dune country, and the great sandhills were pale gold. He discovered a strangeness even in those distant and sophisticated sea-fronts with their slate-coloured, precipitous terraces. On just such a day as this he could remember watching a British destroyer bucking along the Belgian coast. And such haunted, windy weather had made shells tear the air with a more menacing message.
Ostend Plage looked deserted, though errant sunlight ran along the little tents, touching them like notes of coloured sound. He was one of the first off the boat, and again there was a strangeness in his being served by the same porter, though the fellow did not remember him.
“Bruges, second class.”
“Bien, monsieur.”
More sunlight and less wind. He saw the wind in the poplars and the willows, dulling the silver of the dykes, or racing across crops that had not yet been harvested. The little white farmsteads seemed to flutter their aprons at him. But why should he think of them as feminine? He remembered that he had sent her no warning, and as he sat there watching the green country slide by he was conscious of a rich and sensuous compassion. He felt that he would see her always as he had seen her on that drenched spring evening, breathless and blind-eyed, like some bird blown against a window. That was the supreme morality, a love that did not wound.
At Bruges he took a taxi. It trundled him through the bustle of those ever-mysterious streets, and unloaded him and his luggage in the quiet courtyard of the Grand Hotel. The little, smiling page-boy scuttled out, his freckles as friendly as his smile. Bienvenu to monsieur, and madame was in the garden.
Luce left his luggage and a five-franc piece with Master Freckles and passed round the high white flank of the hotel into the garden. He had an immediate glimpse of her sitting in that queer little iron arbour, with a French book in her lap, and a dictionary on the table. She was in the act of looking up a word in the dictionary, and he was able to stand and possess her. She looked so serious and douce and cherishable.
“Hard at work!”
She rose with one swift movement, and the book slid from her lap. Both of them forgot that the hotel had windows.
“O, my dear, my dear.”
“You mustn’t tremble so, little one.”
“I can’t help it, John.”
“Hold on to me; I’m solid.”
Neither of them saw Monsieur Van den Berghe in the doorway, and being both human and a man of the world, Monsieur smiled upon them and went to tell his wife.
5
She would always remember that hour spent after dinner on the Grand Place. They had come to sit outside one of the cafés opposite the Belfry. A regimental band was playing, and the place was full of people listening to the music, or strolling together over the grey stones. The wind had died away, and the Belfry sunned itself in the afterglow. Luce had ordered coffee and a packet of cigarettes. The cigarettes were for her, but she chose to be old-fashioned and did not smoke.
He said to her, almost irrelevantly, “It is a plain race, this, but genius is generally ugly.”
The tables near them were vacant, and she was aware of him looking at her with a tender, teasing kindness. Most certainly she was not a plain person, and if he found in her all manner of secret loveliness, he could laugh gently at an infatuation that joined June and September. To-night she had the face of an exquisite and rather shy child. Her mood was mated to his solidity. His eyes looked at her with a steady, half-humorous kindness. He was not one of those men who devoured. She felt that she could shelter under his strength and she was one of those who asked for shelter.
Security, tranquil days, nights of unhaunted sleep, things done for him, her hands and head busy, the sound of his wise, deliberate voice. Yet, in a social sense, how insecure they were, she more than he was, for she was but the masquerading ghost of another woman. Always she would be at his mercy.
She sat and watched the Belfry growing grey. Was it true that even in an emancipated world the sensitives were ever at the mercy of a robust and bustling egotism? Emancipation! The world must always have its word, some topical tag. In spite of her tragedy, or perhaps because of it, she had retained some of the exquisite wild clarity of the child’s outlook upon life. Intuition had not been smudged by sex. She wanted to go on loving and having faith in someone.
“Ten thousand pounds, Rachel.”
He saw her sensitive lashes quiver.
“It is not for sale, John.”
Would it be? Was he a mere material fool? He was going to make a new sort of book of life. A waiter in a white coat fluttered down on them. Did monsieur require anything else? Luce tipped the man.
“We have everything that we want, thank you.”
But was that a valid statement? To proclaim satiety? And then he realized that there was something in her face that brought back that most tragic night. A frightened, dark-eyed spirit trembling on the edge of the unknown. Was life for her so sharp and poignant and unsure? Was he so unknown?
Faces were growing dim, and then the lamps began to open their eyes. He saw one of her hands resting on the table, and with a gentle and deliberate stealth he put out a large hand and covered hers. Nothing was said. He felt her hand turn over and the fingers clasp his, and in that silent holding of hands there was peace.
XXV
The spring.
There was just room for her to stand between his writing-desk and the window. It was a very spacious window for so small a house, and on their first day she had said to him,—“Your desk must be here.” From the window she could see a little sloping meadow, very green and pied with flowers, cherry trees in bloom, and far below the steep grey-shingled roofs of a cluster of cottages. But that was not all. There were the mountains, the woods, the lake. She had come to know them all so well, and yet their strangeness remained, for their moods were many. Through much of the winter this world of theirs had been smothered in snow, snow on the mountains, on the meadows, in the woods. Their garden had become a bird sanctuary. She had fed finches, blackbirds, tits. Even two splendid woodpeckers had visited them occasionally, and as for the bullfinches, they had grown almost as bold as sparrows.
She could remember days when the lake had been invisible. The sun had shone on a sheet of silver mist. Luce had taught her to use skis, and they had luged together all the way down to Cerisy to sho
p.
Winter nights with the stove aglow, the silence of the snow everywhere, the stars brilliant and multitudinous, the air like white and sparkling wine. They had had their wireless and their books, and the feeling of being together.
The door opened.
“I have finished, madame.”
She turned to smile at the girl who came up from the village twice a week to help her in the chalet.
“Thank you, Marie. What a beautiful day!”
“Very beautiful, madame.”
When the girl had gone she turned again to the window. Need she ask herself if she was happy? She could say that she was happy on the edge of a precipitous fear, her dread of his ceasing to care, or of the past resurrecting and involving them both in some final tragedy. For, sometimes her very happiness suggested impermanence. Her world in England had been narrow and confined, but what if some fortuitous figure out of the past should rise from it like some accusing ghost? She did not divulge this secret fear, but kept it concealed from him behind the tranquillity of restful eyes.
He had gone down to Cerisy for tobacco.
Flowers. The hillside was a world of flowers. The painted carpet had begun to lay itself in March, with crocuses, primroses, violets, squills. She could remember him bringing her that first bunch of primroses. Strange that a man should love flowers as he did, and be so happy with them! But was it strange? They worked together in their garden. They had an orchard to care for and, on the mountainside high above, a little summer hut under the edge of the pines. They were going to camp there when the sun came to its full force. And his writing-desk? She faced about and moving round the desk, sat down in his chair. She sat there for a few minutes each day and read what he had written in that spacious, steady hand of his. Beautiful words. If this book of his was the book of a dreamer, the dreams were serene and splendid, and like this immense landscape. He wrote like a man whose soul was at peace. She could read in this book that which was him, yet trembling a little as though she feared to find the edge of some shadow stealing across the page. She asked of life, “No more violence.”
The Woman at The Door Page 27