Maggie nodded. “Yes. But Mr. Essex doesn’t want to hear about the discontented Irish,” she smiled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “you won’t meet Oliver, Rory. He’s not coming home for Easter. I wish you had let him know you were coming. Then I’m sure he’d have changed his plans. He’s going to some people in Scotland.”
“But—” Rory began, his face clouding; then: “Ach, well. There’ll be another time.”
“Maggie, come and put on your hat,” said Maeve. “Uncle Bill’s going to take us all to lunch.” She led her away to the bedroom.
I walked across the room to look out of the window, which, like that of the bedroom, gave a glimpse of Berkeley Square. With my back to him, I said: “I’m sorry, Rory. You mean, Oliver did know you were coming over?”
He came to me impulsively and put his arm through mine, looking down with me into the garden. “Ach, now, that’s nothing at all,” he said. “It’s a good chance for Oliver. Scotland doesn’t offer every day. Now isn’t Maeve the lucky one, with this flat, and this bit of a view and all?”
“God bless the boy! He’s got the jargon of a stage Irishman!”
“And why not?” Rory grinned. “You just wait a bit now, and all Ireland will be a stage. You’ll see.”
*
After lunch Rory and Maggie left us. “She doesn’t know the first thing about London,” said Rory, “and all I know is what I learned those times when we were on the way to Heronwater. We’ll have a grand afternoon.”
They went out together, Maggie half a head taller than he. “Poor young things,” said Maeve. “They seem terribly fond of one another.”
“Dear, dear! And how many decades does Maeve give these deplorably young creatures?”
“I know I’m being silly,” she smiled. “Actually, I’m only four years older than Rory. But they make me feel sad, all the same. They are so terribly in earnest, and terribly in love, I think, though they don’t know it. I hope they won’t know it for a long time. I don’t think a pair of babes like that ought to be up to the neck in a ‘cause.’ D’you know, they were actually arguing last night as to whether a certain house in Dublin was or was not a safe place to hide rifles in? It makes me impatient. I hate it all. They have a doomed look, those two.”
“Your father was up to the neck in it,” I said, “at Rory’s age. I was fifteen when I knew him first. He’s a little older than I am—a couple of years, I think. He’d be seventeen or so. He was mad to avenge the Manchester martyrs and all that sort of thing. Sheila was in it, too. They’ve grown out of it. I expect Rory will.”
“Do you?” she said briefly. “Then you don’t know Rory as I do. And father’s grown out of it? Yes; he’s grown out of it as Abraham did when he laid Isaac on the altar.”
“But God intervened,” I cheerfully reminded her.
“Good old God,” she said gloomily. “Can you see Him intervening today? I can’t. Bill, my dear, I don’t like the world we’re living in. Lord Roberts blowing off hot air, the Germans blowing off hot air. I’ve a feeling that anyone who places a sacrifice on the altar today has got more than an even chance of finding that God isn’t intervening this time. The sacrifice is going to be snatched up. Thank you very much for a nice burnt offering. And a fine sort of author you are, allowing your leading lady to get into this state of mind half an hour before rehearsals begin. Come on. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
*
And now those rehearsals in a dreary hall in a back street were over, and the later rehearsals at the St. John’s Theatre were over; and Maeve and I got up from dinner in the Café Royal and walked out into Regent Street. The street was agleam with light, the pavement jostling with walkers, the road noisy with traffic.
“Sorry, my dear,” I said. “I gave Martin the very second to draw alongside here. I hate to see you jostled tonight of all nights.”
“I’m all right,” she said, “but d’you know what I want you to do? When we get in, just talk to me all the time till we reach the theatre about that night at Heronwater when the swans flew across the moon.”
“I will,” I said, “it was a lovely night.”
“It was the loveliest night of my life. Their wings sounded so strong. They were creaking like wicker. I can always hear it when I think about them. Ah, here’s Martin.”
“Sorry, sir,” Martin apologised, “half a minute late. Miss Vaynol stopped me just along the road.”
Unexpectedly, Livia was sitting in the car. I had arranged to meet her at the theatre. Now, as we climbed in, she exclaimed: “I just couldn’t resist being here to waylay Martin and accompany the important man to the theatre. You forgive me, Maeve darling?”
“No swans, Bill.”
“No swans.”
“Swans?” said Livia, as the car swung into the traffic eddying at the Circus. “What are you talking about?”
“Shall we tell her, Bill?”
“No,” I teased.
“Just one of our secrets,” Maeve explained with a laugh. “It goes back a long way.”
“I’ll bet it does,” said Livia with sudden venom that took me by surprise. “You’ve been barmy about Bill all your life.”
Then silence, horrified, all three of us looking at one another in the dim light of the car, dim light cut up by wheels of greater light as lamps and street signs flashed by. Maeve, always white, seemed to shrink into a shadow even of her little self. Livia, usually vibrant, seemed as though her words had snapped some spring in her, so that when she, first to speak, said “I’m sorry,” it was a tiny sound.
There was another long silence before Maeve said in a quick passionate voice: “All right, then, you might as well know it, Bill might as well know it. I have loved him—always—always. And that’s the difference between you and me, Livia. I know what I want. I hope you do this time. Do you? Do you?”
Livia did not answer. Then we arrived at the theatre.
*
It was all right. From the rise of the curtain, almost, I knew it was going to be all right. Wertheim had made me write the opening sentences seven or eight times. Every word had to tell. The first ten minutes of a play, he insisted, are tremendously important. You have to fight against late-comers and the apathy of the audience. You must get ’em quick. And as I sat in my box with Livia and Rory and Maggie Donnelly, I knew that we were doing that. There was a laugh in the first line, and we got it. The audience was anxious to settle down; it was chiding the blundering late-comers. Soon there was that grand satisfactory silence which means that everyone in the theatre, from the stalls to the back of the gallery, is gripped by the play and is intent on every word.
I relaxed, I allowed myself to look about. In a box opposite were Dermot and Sheila and Eileen, with Josie Wertheim. Wertheim himself, a stout, uneasy ghost, was now standing at the back of the box, now vanished. I next caught sight of him materialised suddenly on an end seat in the stalls; then he was gone again, to appear at the back of the circle. I had heard of his first-night peregrinations to sense the temper of the house and to test the audibility of the players. Towards the end of the first act, the door of my box opened quietly and his soft heavy hand rested on my shoulder. It remained there as the curtain fell, and I felt it grip a little till the applause started, then it relaxed, and he joined in. It was applause well deserved. The company had put the act over beautifully, and Maeve, it seemed to me, had fulfilled all our expectations. I joined in the clapping; Rory and Maggie followed my example rapturously, and Livia more decorously.
I need not go through all the incidents of that evening. Even today, Every Street is well enough known. I am told I have never written a better play. It was a success from the start. When the final curtain went down the audience remained to cheer and cheer again. It was a demonstration to warm any author’s heart, to still any qualms. Wertheim, his pale broad face faintly flushed, was there to hustle me down to the stage, and first I faced the audience in the midst of the smiling, weary, gratified company, t
hen with Maeve alone. I took her hand and felt it give mine a warm, reassuring pressure. “This is it, Bill,” she whispered. “This is the moment after all these years. Now say something. It’ll never come again—this first night of your first play.” And still holding her small warm hand, the hand that had lain in mine when she and I so long ago had seen Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in Manchester, I told the audience just that: how I had taken Maeve to her first play, how I had seen her grow up loving the theatre; how I had promised that some day I would write her a play, and how this was the play. And when a loud voice from the back of the gallery shouted: “And a damn good ’un, too,” and the audience roared with laughter and started to applaud anew, I realised that I had, stumbling on it unwittingly, said the right thing.
Wertheim thought so too. Grasping me by the shoulders when I moved into the wings, he exclaimed: “God, Essex! What a story! Every paper in London will print it. You’re a fox.” There was no fox about it. It all happened simply and without premeditation; but it was, nevertheless, as Wertheim predicted. Every paper printed the story. Some called it a “romance of dramatist and actress” and printed photographs of me and Maeve. Reporters were sent to interview both of us, and though I had said all that was to be said, we had to say it over again, and it was printed over again. This “romance” atmosphere did the play a world of good and kept the theatre full till Every Street settled down to run on its own merits.
*
Wertheim bore Maeve triumphantly away, his arm round her waist. “Jo, control your emotions,” said Josie severely. The other actors and actresses were gone. I was left alone on the stage and loitered there for a moment, feeling unreal and deflated. Through the chink between the curtains I could see that the house was already empty and the lights were going out. God! What a place for moralising an empty theatre is! I shook myself, and made my way to Maeve’s dressing-room.
It was seething with people. There was hardly a soul I knew except Livia and Maggie, the Wertheims and the O’Riordens. My entry nevertheless was the signal for shouts of welcome, cries of felicitation, back-slapping. “You’ve done it, Essex.” “Never felt more certain on a first night.” There was a lot of drink flowing, and I was toasted, and Maeve was toasted, and a man I had never seen in my life lurched up and said: “I always said you had it in you, ole boy.”
“I always thought it was the dead that attracted the vultures,” said Livia, taking my arm. “The legend needs revising.”
We made our way through the mob to where Maeve was sitting. Rory, flushed in the face and trying not to look self-conscious in evening clothes, stood beside her, pride and happiness shining in his eyes. Dumpy little Eileen—poor Eileen who would never look distinguished in any circumstances—stood beside her chair; and suddenly it rushed upon my mind with a burst of poignant memory that exactly thus had I seen Maeve sitting and those two children standing by her on the green grass at The Beeches when she played at being Queen Maeve holding her high court. Oliver had been there, too, tall and beautiful and supercilious, the only one who had not entered into the game’s spirit.
It was almost as though the thoughts in my mind struck a responsive chord in Rory’s heart, for he said: “I’m sorry Oliver’s not been here tonight, Uncle Bill. He would have enjoyed the play. Maggie and I did—immensely. And we’re so proud of Maeve.”
It made me feel very lonely—that all these O’Riordens were there and no one of mine—and I turned to get my arm, for reassurance, through Livia’s. But Livia had moved nearer to Maeve, and was saying “It was a good performance. Very creditable, Maeve.”
Maeve did not answer. She could afford to let such tepid praise go. People known and unknown were besieging her, pressing her to drink, which she would not do, giving her invitations, praising her. She sat there with an aloof dignity which suddenly made me think of Mrs. Bendall. And then I laughed aloud, because I was sure that Maeve was thinking of the old lady, and, little chit, trying to act like her. “May I pour out your tea, madame?” I twitted her. “And if I did, would you give me a rose?”
She looked up with a smile.
“Tea?” said Livia.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said Maeve. “It’s just another of our little secrets.”
22
From my side of the Heath I could reach Dermot’s house by walking across Parliament Fields. My play had been running for about a month. May had come, and soon Rory and Maggie Donnelly would be returning to Dublin. I had seen a great deal of them, and now I was walking among the greening hawthorns to Dermot’s house where I was to meet them once more at tea.
It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue; a lark went up from the grass; but, still, in those days four o’clock of a May afternoon was four o’clock, not three as it is now, and there was a bite in the wind. So I was glad when I was in Dermot’s study, up on the first floor, where a fire was burning, and some of his loveliest things were collected. He had never sold the Gauguin, the first good picture he had ever bought. It hung over the fireplace, the only picture in the room. I stood at the window, looking down the short garden. Grey squirrels were swinging through the branches of the trees that grew inside the garden wall. Beyond the wall the setting sun made the new green of Parliament Fields shine celestially bright.
I turned to see if Dermot had finished reading the letter which was in his hand when I came into the room. It gave me a pleasant feeling of superiority to see that he now used spectacles for reading. My eyes were as good as ever; but then my hair was grey. Dermot’s was still ruddy. It had darkened from the fierce red of his youth. Sheila called it “Titian,” and Dermot wore it abundantly.
There he sat, one long elegant leg over the padded arm of his easy chair. He took the spectacles from his nose, placed them and the letter on a little table beside him.
“It’s from Uncle Con,” he said.
Uncle Con—one of the two small boys whom that old fanatic Michael Flynn had pushed into Cork on a hand-cart during the famine of ’45. The other, Dermot’s father, my own old friend, had been dead these two years; but Conal O’Riorden, who must have been of a great age, still lived, and, I gathered from Dermot now and then, still flourished. Most of his business affairs had been handed over to Dermot’s brother; for many years Uncle Con had been digging himself deep into United States politics.
“He’s all awake, the old man,” said Dermot. “He can see what’s coming.”
“And what is coming?” I innocently asked.
Dermot leapt lightly to his feet, and faced me, back to the fire, head outthrust. “For God’s sake, Bill! What sort of a world do you live in?” he demanded. “What sort of a fool’s paradise? Here’s an old codger of eighty or thereabouts, living five thousand miles away, and he’s more alive to the realities of the world than you are with all the facts under your nose. Haven’t you heard the treasonous hounds yapping for this past twelve months?”
It was a long time since I had seen Dermot lit up. He was lit up now, his face pale, the point of his beard quivering, his eyes flashing their old sparks.
“Well, seriously, I haven’t been paying much attention to all the hot air that’s been blowing off in Ulster. I suppose that’s what you mean?”
“Hot air! Hot air be damned!” Dermot shouted, clenching his fists. “As for Asquith’s Home Rule Bill, you know what he can do with it so far as I’m concerned. ‘It recognises no Irish nation.’ That’s Arthur Griffith, and that’s me, too. The Liberal Party and that dirty dog Redmond can keep their Home Rule Bill till they learn the elementary meaning of words.”
He struck a match, suddenly threw match and cigarette into the fire, and waved his hands in the air.
“Then why the outcry?” I asked mildly.
“Who’s making the outcry? Carson and Co. This miserable, stinking pretence of Home Rule has set a quarter of a million people squealing, running to sign a Covenant. A Covenant! It tells the government: ‘Go to hell! We shall defy you. We shall take up arms against you. We don’t believe
in law and order unless it’s our law and our order and suits our book.’ And they’ve got permission—permission, mind you! They’re not doing it in a corner—they’ve got permission to arm and drill. Have you never heard of the Crimes Act of 1887?”
“Never.”
“You wouldn’t. Well, listen to old Con.” He took up the letter from the table. “‘Arms are pouring into Ulster every day. Bonar Law, I see, declared that rather than be ruled by Nationalists, the Unionists would prefer to be ruled by a foreign power. Germany, I suppose. My dear Dermot, things are pretty dicky between Britain and Germany at the moment. The Germans over here open their mouths freely. And these patriotic Unionists are willing to demonstrate their unity by splitting away and invoking the aid of their country’s most powerful and dangerous Continental enemy. Why doesn’t Asquith use the Crimes Act of 1887? Innumerable Irish patriots have been gaoled under it for so-called seditious utterances. Is this army that the Unionists are gathering seditious or isn’t it? Of course it is. Gaol ’em.’”
“Gaol who?” asked Rory, coming into the room at that moment with Maggie Donnelly.
“These damned Carsons and Craigs and Smiths,” Dermot shouted. Rory did not shout. He brought a chair for Maggie, and when she was seated, turned to his father with a quiet smile. “Don’t bother about them,” he said.
“Don’t bother? D’you want to read this letter from your grand-uncle?”
Rory shook his head. “No. I’ve no use for American-Irish patriots—only for their cheque-books. And don’t bother. These people will be dealt with when the time comes. Won’t they, Maggie?”
Maggie nodded. “We are not asleep,” she said.
They staggered me—these two whom I had looked upon as children. Suddenly old Con O’Riorden’s dollars seemed mean, and Dermot’s shouting seemed futile and theatrical. With a sure thrust of knowledge, I felt myself in the presence of authentic players in whatever tragedy Ireland might be staging. It seemed as though Dermot and I were infants in the presence of two resolute adult intelligences. We were babblers of words. Here were two who had done with words and understood the nature of action.
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