He stood and glared at the uncomprehending adults to whom all his thoughts had to be explained.
“Very well,” said Nellie. “But don’t go farther than the Priory. And mind the crossings on the way back.”
“Oh, as if I wouldn’t,” said Oliver; and he seized Rory’s arm and hurried him away, leaving Eileen to toil after.
As soon as they were gone, Maeve clutched my hand and squeezed it frantically, all grown-up pretence vanished. “Oh, Uncle Bill! Won’t it be lovely! Lovely! The first time I’ve ever been to a theatre!”
I patted her slender hand. “And lovely for me, too,” I said. “This will be the first time I’ve ever taken a lady to the theatre. D’you know that?”
“No!”
“Yes! It’s going to be a grand night for us both. But I wish it was the depth of winter.”
“Why do you wish that?”
“Because that’s the time for going to the theatre, and because we’re going to have dinner first in a restaurant, and the winter’s the best time for doing that, too. You go in out of the cold draughty streets and get a lovely slap in the face from the smell of soup and fish and meat and pastry and gaslight. Oh, yes. That’s much nicer in the winter.”
“We’re not going to a restaurant!”
“Oh, yes, we are.”
She was so excited that she didn’t answer. She merely looked down appraisingly at her red dress. “That’ll do,” I said with a smile. “That’ll do fine. I’ll be proud to be with you. Now if we were in London I’d put on a lovely white shirt; but I needn’t do that in Manchester, not even for the stalls, where I’ve got seats. Not even for Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.”
We had gone into the house and were climbing the stairs to my study, Maeve still hanging on my arm. “Oh, tell me about them,” she said with a squeeze.
“Now what’s the good of telling you when you’re going to see them with your own eyes inside a few hours?”
“Well, tell me about the play,” she insisted as we went into the study.
“Here’s somebody who can tell you about that better than I can,” I said, pulling Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare out of the book-case. “But I expect you’ve read this already.”
“I have not then,” she said, seizing the book and throwing her lithe young body into a chair. “It’s all Irish stuff we get at home. You’d never believe—it’s all wonderful or all woeful. Marvellous tales of Cuculain and the heroes, or miserable tales about patriots and potato famines. I’m getting sick of it, but Rory laps it up. And there’s such a lot in it about hating the English. I don’t hate you, Uncle Bill. Why should we hate the English?”
“I don’t see any sense in hating anybody,” I said, rather professorially.
“Well, then, I wish you’d ask father to give us a change.”
“Ah, that’s another matter. Get on with that while you have a chance.”
So Maeve drew her long legs up under her on the couch and settled down to The Merchant of Venice. I filled a pipe, pulled a chair to the open window, and sat looking down the long front garden towards the beech trees.
“This will be the first time I’ve ever taken a lady to the theatre.” Extraordinary! Before my marriage I had had little time for the theatre. I had gone occasionally with Dermot; less often with old O’Riorden; but they were not enthusiastic. The old man preferred to have his feet on the hob and Dickens on his lap, and Dermot wanted to spend all his time with planes and chisels and gouges. Soon after marriage there came the time when I worked harder than I had ever worked before, harder than I have ever worked since: building up the Easifix Company all day, working on my books at night.
Then suddenly came success with both my endeavours. Easifix took up little time. The mornings were all I needed to give to my writing. In the afternoons I walked. The nights were mine to do with as I pleased.
It was at this time that I tried consciously to draw Nellie nearer to the things that were of my heart’s desire. The very effort was evidence of breach. It must have been three years ago now—more than three years, for it was on a winter morning—that I said at breakfast: “There’s a grand play at the Prince’s Theatre this week, Nellie. What about going along there? We could have dinner somewhere first.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t like the theatre.”
“But you’ve never been. That is, so far as I know.”
“No. I’ve never been.”
“Then how do you know whether you like it or not?”
“Well, I don’t approve of it, then.”
She gave me the blank and dogged look with which I knew there was no arguing.
“Well, we could do something else. If we only had a bit of dinner in a restaurant. We might go on to a Hallé concert. You don’t object to music, do you?”
“I don’t see any sense in wasting money in restaurants,” she said. “The food’s nothing like so good as we get at home, and it costs about four times as much.”
“I don’t call it waste,” I defended myself. “You pay for more than the food—the change, the service—all that.”
“I hate eating in public, and I dislike waiters hovering about.”
I found it difficult to be patient; but I persisted. “Well, if there was a Hallé concert you thought you’d like, we could have an early dinner here and go straight there.”
She shook her head, got up, and began piling the breakfast things, a job she could never leave to the maid. “What would be the good?” she said. “I don’t understand music, and I should feel out of place. Besides, I don’t want to leave Oliver at night.”
I knew this was the last time I should ever try to walk in step with Nellie. I would see it through. I strode over to the fireplace and stood there filling my after-breakfast pipe. “Nellie,” I said, “just leave the things alone for a moment and listen to me.”
She ceased her clattering and sat down. “What’s wrong with leaving Oliver?” I asked. “We’re fairly rich people, and so far as I can see, we’re likely to get richer. If I wanted to do it, or if you wanted to do it, we could leave this house tomorrow and go into one twice as big, where there’d be room for a nursery-governess who’d have nothing to do but give all her time and thoughts to Oliver. Would you like that?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Why not? It would give you much more freedom.”
“I don’t want it!” she burst out. “I don’t want women looking after the child. Can’t you see that he’s got too much already? Don’t you know that you’re ruining him by pouring into his lap anything he thinks or dreams of? I’ll look after him myself. It won’t do him any harm to see there’s someone who’s not gallivanting about and having this and having that. And I don’t want a new house. I never wanted this house. I never wanted servants about me. I was happy where I was.”
“Servants?” I raised an eyebrow, thinking of our one small maid; but it was no use. Had I been squandering our last few sovereigns on uniformed flunkeys I clearly could not stand more deeply damned in Nellie’s eyes.
So I had never taken a lady to the theatre, which, I thought with a wry smile, sitting at the open window, was one of the pleasures of life that a civilised man should have pretty often. I had accepted the situation: that Nellie and I must rub along as best we could. After all, I had never pretended to love Nellie. I had nothing to blame her with. There was a lot with which I might blame myself. I had given her a great many things which, I saw with increasing clearness, she did not value in the least. She was stubborn, narrow, but, above all, she was honest and of integrity. She had a dislike and distrust of affluence which I now believe to have been grounded in reason. She didn’t like the smell of riches, and I myself have more and more come to think that riches have a bad smell.
Well, there it was. We lived together; to the end we shared the same bed; we never quarrelled; and things might have been worse.
I looked across the room at Maeve’s dark hair which, like a black drooping wing, hi
d her face bent over the conflict of Shylock and Antonio. Just such black hair as that, just such a healthy pallid face, had been Daisy Morton’s. It was soon after that definitive talk with Nellie that I met Daisy. She would be in her middle twenties, I suppose, and she was beautiful and rich and had a quality of generosity that I have found in few women. I mean, her spirit came out to meet you, and you were aware of an absence of bodily prudery that was unusual and delightful. She was not the woman to expect marriage to follow a kiss. Not that I ever kissed her; but I knew in my heart that she was mine for the taking.
I never took Daisy to the theatre, but it was there I met her. I made the habit now of going every Saturday night, usually alone, sometimes with Dermot. It was Dermot who introduced me to Daisy Morton. She was an only child whose father, a cotton merchant, had died and left her all he had. Dermot had been out to Bowdon to overhaul the mansion in which old Sir Anthony Morton had been accumulating costly rubbish for half a century. Daisy gaily bade him sell, if he could get a cent for them, the lush Alma-Tademas and Marcus Stones that sprawled largely upon the walls, and to sweep away the combination of spidery knick-knackery and cumbrous pieces that made up the furniture.
She was interested when Dermot introduced us at the theatre. Novelists were not too common in Manchester then, though I believe they are now almost as numerous as knights, and my reputation had gone considerably beyond the boundaries of a local fame.
Daisy had read my books. She could talk intelligently about them. She criticised them with a good deal of common sense. She developed a habit of being wherever I was to be found. We had a few meals together at restaurants, and I discovered that I was dressing with unusual care.
She was so gay and happy, so full of good conversation, that I, who had known no woman well save Nellie and Sheila, was captivated by her company. It was so easy to envisage a life different from my present one—if Daisy were my wife.
For a couple of months I lunched with her one day a week—the day on which I went into Manchester to supervise the Easifix affairs. It was after lunch one day, when we were shaking hands outside a restaurant, that our hands didn’t part. We could feel the hot currents of awareness passing from one to the other of us, and looking into her face I saw for the first time colour burning in her pallid cheeks.
She said: “Mr. O’Riorden has finished now up at the house. You’ve never seen it. Do come. Do come—now.”
Her voice shook a little and I was never more certain of anything in my life than of the meaning of her words. I could go—and it would never be the same with me and Nellie again. I didn’t go. I owed Nellie that.
Well, there it was. That’s how things were with us.
Maeve threw down her book. “That’s a big sigh,” she said.
“Come along,” I said gaily. “The cab will be here in a moment, and I’m going to take a lovely lady to the theatre.”
*
Although both windows were down, the old four-wheeler smelt of mouldering leather. It was almost falling to pieces. It might have been the very cab from which, so many years ago, I had seen my brother’s face looking out as he followed my mother’s body to the grave. That was the night I had wandered into Moscrop’s: the night I had knocked out the bully who was terrorising Nellie. So much had begun from that night. I sniffed the cab’s odours with displeasure.
But to Maeve, lovely summer evening though it was, and all the circumstances hopelessly inappropriate to the theatre, the occasion was perfect. Hatless, she sat back in her red dress, her black hair falling about her shoulders, and watched the trees of the Fallowfield gardens wavering slowly past the windows. Her hands were in her lap, knotted, writhing with excitement. But her voice was unexcited when she spoke. “It’s strange, isn’t it, Uncle Bill, that I know how much I’m going to love the theatre tonight. I’ve never been, but I love the thought of it. I’ve been reading in Villette how Lucy Snowe went in Brussels to see Rachel act, and I’ve been reading everything else that I can find about actresses and plays.”
I patted her hand. “Good. If there’s anything you love very much, stick to it. Never let go till it’s given you all it’s got.”
“I shall,” she said gravely. “I want to be an actress. I must be an actress.”
“Very well,” I laughed. “One of these days I’ll write a play for you.”
She took me up seriously. “Will you? Really?”
I looked down at the blue-black eyes, earnest in the white oval of her face. I was surprised at their intensity. “Promise?” she demanded.
“Honest to goodness,” I said. “I’ll remember this promise.”
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re a good man, Uncle Bill. I wish Oliver was as good as you are.”
“But my child, my child,” I protested, “he’s got to be better than I am—much better.”
She shook her head slowly, doubtingly.
“Why don’t you like Oliver?” I challenged her suddenly. I had noticed her disapproval of him more than once.
“I don’t know,” she said, laughing it off. “Perhaps he looks too good to be true.”
“Rory likes him.”
“Oh, Ugly-Mugly likes everyone. Every night now when he’s getting into bed he says: ‘God damn England—except Uncle Bill and Oliver and all my friends.’ And that means everybody.”
“But it’s a pity he says that at all.”
“Oh, man,” she said, relapsing into a touch of Irish that I loved to hear in her, “oh, man, it is that then. He gets it from father.”
“It’s a pity,” I repeated.
“It gives me the creeps to hear it,” she said. “’Twas but the other night I rushed downstairs and into father’s room when he was sitting smoking his pipe and reading. ‘Father,’ I shouted, ‘some day you’ll have something to answer for.’ He jumped up as if I had hit him, and stood in front of the fireplace with his teeth biting his pipe hard. He looked at me in a way he’s never looked at me before—very pale and cold, and believe me, Uncle Bill, his eyes had little green specks in them.”
I knew those little green specks. I said nothing.
“He said,” she went on, “‘If there’s any answering to be done, I’m ready to do it.’ So I just went out of the room.”
Well, we had a meal, and Maeve enjoyed it because she wasn’t used to dining out; but I didn’t enjoy it much because I was thinking of pug-faced little Rory so carefully excluding his friends from his damnations; and of Dermot with the green flecks still lighting up his pale eyes, which looked so much lighter now that he had that red pointed beard; and of Maeve, growing so beautiful and talented—hadn’t she told me that little story with real dramatic power?—and yet troubled so early by the madnesses of her elders. The Manchester Martyrs, and that brave fighting rat Flynn, and Dermot, and now Rory. A cold whiff of doom seemed to touch my spine. Why couldn’t old quarrels die? There seemed to be always someone blowing on the coals. Politics... politicians... I hated them then; and today I hate them more: foul old men of the sea, astride the shoulders of the nations.
We went across the road and saw the curtain swing up, saw Irving and Ellen Terry walk the boards in the grand old theatre where now you can see nothing but shadows mouthing the inanities of little minds. So we progress.
I shall always feel a grudge when I think of the Theatre Royal going over to the “pictures.” I have a personal sense that it should have remained true to the drama if only because there Maeve saw her first play, drew her first breath of the purpose of her life. But perhaps by now Maeve herself is forgotten: Maeve O’Riorden who flamed so splendidly and expired so soon. We do not long remember.
For myself, I have little remembrance of the play, but a most clear remembrance of a hot hand that hardly left mine all through the evening, of a small voice that whispered when I bent over her in the first interval “No, don’t talk,” and of a strange blow that suddenly hit my mind when I heard a voice speaking the words:
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
What memory did they stir? And my thoughts rushed back to the fantastic Flynn pausing on an Ancoats street corner at midnight and reciting those words to me and Nellie. He had added: “God bless you,” and then he disappeared.
So for the second time that night the thought of Flynn came back to me, and it was somehow with a foreboding heart that at last I found myself holding Maeve’s hand among the jostling crowd in the gaslight outside the theatre. I looked down at her small form, and she looked up at me with a face illumined by more than the gaslight. “I’m so happy,” she said, “so happy and so tired.”
I got her into a cab and sat her upon my knee, with her head upon my shoulder. Although it was a fine summer night there was a nip in the late air, so I opened my coat and pulled it round her. She was asleep long before the cab reached Dermot’s house.
*
Sheila came to the door and took Maeve from my arms. She looked rather strained and anxious, which was not usual with her. “Thank you, Bill. You’re a dear to have taken her,” she said. “Did she enjoy it?”
“It was the night of her life,” I boasted.
Sheila opened the door into the drawing-room and said: “Good-night, Dermot. I’m taking Maeve straight up. Good-night, Mr. Donnelly.”
A clear, pleasing voice from within the room said: “Good-night then, Mrs. O’Riorden, good-night.”
“Come on in here, Bill,” Dermot shouted, and I went into the drawing-room. Dermot and the man who was with him rose. “This is Kevin Donnelly, Bill. Mr. Donnelly, this is William Essex.”
Donnelly shook my hand. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Essex,” he said in his pleasant silvery voice, “and, what’s more, I’ve read one of your books. Only one. I don’t get much time for fiction.”
He looked a typical artisan. He was short and thick-set, dressed in comfortable homely clothes. His hair was rather thin, his moustache full and inclined to be ragged, his face as homely as his coat.
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