I held up my hand. He was silent for a moment, then fired forth again: “He’s sacked! I won’t have him! Sacked! He can go to hell.”
An hour later he was still sitting on the landing-stage, smoking morosely, glowering across the river at the Jezebel and at the Rory ducking and curtseying alongside her.
*
There were times during the following week when I could have cut and run. The situation was agonising, only made possible by a touch of the absurd which Dermot lent it. He wrote to Oliver telling him that he was no longer in the employment of the firm of O’Riorden and enclosing a week’s wages. Sam Sawle was sent over in the dinghy to deliver the note. He was asked aboard and found Oliver in undisputed command of the ship. Judas was in the galley, cooking. Oliver threw himself into an easy chair, read the note, and shouted: “Judas! Pen and ink.”
The old man came trotting out of the galley, wiping his hands on an apron, and deferentially produced all that Oliver demanded. “That’s all,” said Oliver, and Judas bowed and retired.
Oliver winked at Sawle. “Sit down, Sam,” he invited easily. “There’s an answer to this.”
“I’ll wait on deck,” Sawle said.
The letter he brought back contained the money which Dermot had sent. “I don’t need this,” Oliver wrote. “I am well provided for here, and in any case I do not accept your notice to leave the service of the firm of O’Riorden. You give me no reason connected with my work, and if you persist I shall bring an action for unlawful dismissal.”
Dermot went white with fury. “Can he do that? Can he do that?” he demanded.
I knew no more of the law on that matter than he did, and he was for rushing at once to Truro to consult a solicitor. I dissuaded him.
“I’d rather you let it drop, Dermot.”
He was contrite at once. “Sorry, Bill, sorry. Just my damned personal pride.”
How much Dermot had told Sheila and Eileen I do not know. They were aware that Oliver and I had parted, but I had no reason to believe that they associated Livia with that. Nevertheless, they were difficult and restrained with her. Some intuition was at work that made them treat her with the considered courtesy shown to a guest rather than with the equal comradeship that the rest of us enjoyed.
One day we all packed into the Maeve and went to Molunan beach. Everything should have been perfect. It was heavenly weather, with the level blue of the sea stained here and there with patches of violet deepening to purple. The gulls were dropping in cackling companies on to the water, sure indication of the presence of fish, as Eileen reminded us. She told us of how Sam Sawle used to manœuvre the boat over spots where the gulls had descended and how the lines always came up with a catch. “I’ve known all of us—me and Maeve and Rory and Oliver—to be pulling them up one after another as fast as we could go,” she said.
And the recital of the names—me and Maeve and Rory and Oliver—knelled like a litany of lost days, of days incredibly far, days filled with peacefulness and youth and hope not yet stained by any doubt, so that Dermot and Sheila and I, catching one another’s glances, and each seeming instinctively to note that the others were recording the absence of three out of the four children mentioned, all dropped our eyes again to casual things, feeling a little damped, perhaps a little older.
We anchored the Maeve off the beach and, in two companies, went ashore in the dinghy, taking our lunch things with us. Dermot and I scoured the beach for dry driftwood, and built up a fire ready for the match. Then we all bathed, and I suppose bathing from Molunan beach on a day of high summer is one of the things most calculated to make you forget the sorrows of the world. With my toes gripping and curling into the hot loose sand, with the silky blue of the Cornish sea reaching away under a dazzle of sunlight, and the blue arch of the sky too ardent to be looked upon, I stood for a moment drenched in light and warmth, watching Livia and Sheila and Eileen running down to where blue and yellow met in a white embrace of foam. Then Dermot came from behind his rock; we ran to join them; and with a great shout we all leapt upon the water and thrashed round the Maeve and back again.
“That’s enough for me, Bill,” Dermot shouted. “I’ll see to the fire.”
He ran up the beach, and the others followed him. I remained swimming slowly just beyond my depth. I could see down through the crystal water to where the light wavered in cool patterns upon the yellow sand. I could see here and there the pallid rays of a starfish, a frond of seaweed undulating to minute and unguessed currents, responsive as a polar needle to invisible compulsions. Then there came the sight I had hoped to see, the sight of all others most fascinating in those waters: a horde of tiny silver fish, swimming in a long thin procession, ten or a dozen abreast, like a small marine army on the move. Endlessly they went by, never changing their formation, wheeling now to the right, now to the left, but always precise, regimented, moving as by a common will. A small cloud drifted before the sun, and the water, still pellucid, turned grey. And the silver fish turned grey. I could see them still: a grey endless army, moving to some unknown encounter across the grey floor of the sea.
The fire was blazing, and the kettle of water which we had brought was “singing,” when I ran up the beach. They had all quickly dressed. Sheila and Eileen were unpacking a lunch basket. “Let me help,” Livia said. “Give me the plates and things. I’ll lay them out.”
“Now you sit down and make yourself comfortable,” Sheila answered. “We can manage this.”
Livia turned aside with a groan. “Oh, God!” she muttered, and threw down the cigarette she was smoking and crushed it with her foot in the sand.
When we had eaten, we leaned back relaxed against the rocks. Dermot and I were smoking our pipes. Eileen sat between us. Sheila and Livia lay extended at full length on the sand at our feet, their eyes closed. Suddenly Eileen exclaimed: “Look! The Rory! That must be Oliver!”
Livia at once started up. “Oliver! Where?” Then she seemed to be overcome by confusion.
It was like that all through the week. Wherever we went Oliver appeared. Judas we never saw. The report which Sam Sawle brought back after taking the note to Oliver was the only hint we had of his activities. One night we saw his friend Jansen come down by water from Truro and go aboard. That night, till a late hour, we could hear the Dane’s great voice booming, and song and laughter coming over the river.
Oliver we saw constantly. After the first few days his natural good looks were enhanced by the sun. The deep bronzing of his body made the blue of his eyes and the white of his teeth remarkable, and his hair was bleached and wind-blown. I was near enough to him often to notice even such particularities. He would appear before us almost, it seemed, out of the blue, and with nonchalance be unaware of our presence. He had arranged a diving platform, hanging on loops of rope over the Jezebel’s side, and it was ten to one that if any of us chanced to be near the boat he would ostentatiously appear, wearing nothing but the bathing slip that showed off magnificently his six feet of splendid golden body, and would dive, and swim by with insolent unconcern.
I knew that all this was aimed at Livia, and it had its effect. She became irritable and moody and at last professed herself unwilling to join our outings because, she said, she could not stand the situation which Oliver had forced upon us. But she continued to accompany us until the Friday. We were all going to Helston that day, a fairly long trip, and Livia at the last moment—actually when some of us were in the boat and the rest stood by the dinghy loaded with lunch and bathing things—shouted to me that she did not feel up to coming. Sam Sawle was sitting in the dinghy, holding her to the landing-steps, and Livia stood there on the steps shouting across the water to me: “No, Bill, really I can’t. I don’t feel up to it. I must rest.”
Sam Sawle looked over his shoulder towards the Maeve, waiting for my instructions. Dermot, who was aboard with me, looked at me hard and said: “Sam can manage the Maeve. Stay with her.”
I shouted: “I’ll come ashore, Livia. I shouldn’t l
ike you to spend a lonely day.”
Her voice came very clear over the water: “No, no. I won’t have that. I’m not going to spoil your outing.”
Dermot looked towards the Jezebel, and said quietly: “Stay with her.”
I hesitated. Livia ran lightly down the steps and put her foot on the dinghy’s bow. She pushed the boat out. “Go on, Sawle,” she said.
Dermot looked grave, but he did not speak again. “All right, Sam, come aboard,” I shouted.
Only then did Dermot take his eyes from my face, as though a tension had relaxed, an important decision been taken. From me his gaze turned to Livia who, with a wave in our direction, had swung round and started up the path to the house. In a moment the bushes hid her. Dermot continued to gaze for a while at the spot where she had been. Then he said: “Gone.”
*
We in the Maeve had no sight of Oliver that day. We did not get back to Heronwater till just before dinner-time. Livia was waiting for us at the landing-stage, gay and full of fun, eager to know all that we had done and seen. She said that the rest had done her good. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’d like to do a lot of shopping in Truro. Could I have the car quite early, Bill? I’d like to be there by ten.”
I was delighted to find her in such excellent spirits, and told Martin to have the car ready. She wrote down a list of things that we all wanted: tobacco for me, wool and knitting needles for Sheila, and so on.
In the morning she was gone without my knowing it. I had been on the Maeve with Sawle, overhauling the engine, and when I got back to the house I was just in time to see the car disappearing towards the road. It was a pottering morning. We had made no communal arrangements. I went back to the river and sat there smoking, and presently Dermot joined me, bringing a newspaper. We talked desultorily about the tension that all through the week had been growing between Austria and Serbia. It didn’t seem a very serious matter to us.
“Wertheim is sure there’ll be war,” I remarked, as though I were talking about the dead certainty of a cricket fixture.
“There’ll be war all right between Austria and Serbia,” Dermot said. “The Austrian ultimatum expires today.”
He, too, spoke as though we were discussing the antics of some remote species, unrelated to any concerns that might touch us. Then we said nothing more about it. He stretched himself in the sunlight on the short turf of the landing-stage, and I sat there, smoking, idly glancing now at the newspaper, now at the river, beautiful at the top of the tide.
The sound of engines came through the drowsy morning and presently the Kay of Copenhagen, having finished her affairs at Truro, steamed round the bend, making for the sea. Jansen on the bridge set his whistle screaming as he drew near to the Jezebel. Captain Judas appeared on his deck, not aproned as Sawle had described him, but beautifully dressed, as I had been accustomed to see him. He stood with his hand raised to his cap in salute as the Kay went by: went by, though I did not know it then, a coffin-ship wherein all that I had hoped for and worked for was interred. Livia and Oliver were aboard the Kay. Livia had made her decision at last... The bone of contention... She wrote to me when they reached Copenhagen.
But that day I knew nothing of this. I wondered vaguely why Oliver had not appeared alongside Judas, but that question did not worry me for long. The Kay was an object of interest, as any ship was on the quiet river. I watched her out of sight, and then turned again to the blissful, mindless contemplation of sky and river.
28
As that Saturday drew to its close we all knew—Dermot and Sheila and I, and even little Eileen—that the thin crust I had been treading for months had caved in. Lies, evasions, deceptions, hopes and fears: all were ended. There was even, at first, crazy as it sounds, a sense of relief. I knew now where I was.
It was at noon that Martin rang up from Truro to ask whether Livia had come back some other way. She had told him to stay with the car near the cathedral till she rejoined him, and there he had waited till anxiety caused him to make his inquiry.
I was up at the house when the telephone bell rang, and I answered it myself. As soon as I gathered what Martin’s worried voice was saying, my heart gave a great hurting thump in my breast. I knew in that moment that Livia would not come back.
“Don’t wait any longer,” I said; then hung up the receiver and stood there in the cool shadowed hall, looking out to the dazzle of sunlight beyond the door. Sheila passed slowly by, a white figure on the vivid yellow gravel. I called her name quietly. She came into the hall, blinking at its shadows, and then exclaimed: “Bill! What’s the matter? You look ill!”
I had the bowl of my pipe in my hand, the stem between my teeth. I did not realise till she spoke that the stem was clattering. I put the pipe down unsteadily on a table. “That was Martin, ringing up from Truro. Livia hasn’t turned up at the car.”
“Perhaps there’s been an accident?...”
“No. I don’t think we shall see Livia again.”
“My dear!” Sheila took my shaking hand in both her hands and held it tight. Unshed tears were shining in her eyes.
“I shall survive it,” I said, and gave what must have been a ghastly smile. “Have lunch without me today, there’s a sweet. Tell Dermot what I think has happened.”
“I suppose—Oliver?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
*
What was the sense of doing what I was doing—using my study as if it were the lair of a wounded beast, now sitting in my chair, with the curtains drawn, now restlessly striding up and down, now peeping through the chink of the curtains to see whether the sunny commonplace world still existed outside? Of course it did. “You’re not the first fool to be duped,” I told myself, “nor will you be the last.” But what difference did that make? I was a fool, and duped.
At four o’clock, Dermot came in, bringing a tray of tea. “I’m damned if I’ll eat that here, like a sick child petted in the nursery,” I said. “Take it out into the sunshine.”
Dermot took the tray out to a table near the balustrade, where Sheila and Eileen were at tea, their bright clothes shining against the dark green foliage of the wood.
That was better, and they had the sense not to pity me, though I guessed pity in the quiet respectful demeanour of Sawle and Martin throughout the rest of that wretched day. It was not till Sawle said to me, late in the evening: “Shall I bring the Rory across the river now, Mr. Essex?” that I saw in that one word now how completely they had weighed up the matter.
Martin was there with us on the landing-stage. He had been tinkering, like the rest of us that day, with the Maeve’s engine. I hated to think that these two men, whom I liked and respected, should be standing there shut away from me by an absurdity of convention. “Yes, bring her across,” I said. “You seem to think my son is gone.”
Sawle nodded.
“And I expect you and Martin have been having a guess about why he is gone?”
“It’s not our business, sir,” Martin chipped in. “But we naturally couldn’t help coming to certain conclusions.”
“Will you keep them to yourselves?” I said. “I would thank you.”
It was all very terse and formal, but they seemed glad I had spoken. It established something between us; and I was not sorry for that when Martin, within six months, and Sawle within a year, had been killed, the one on land and the other at sea.
*
And we were now moving swiftly to the killing days. Even then, on that Saturday ten days before England and Germany were at war, Dermot and I refused to entertain the thought which, from this point and that, had tried to slip into our lulled minds. But on the Monday Wertheim rang me up. He said he wanted Livia to return to London at once.
“She’s gone from here,” I said, “and left no address.”
I felt myself going hot as I imagined Wertheim’s heavy, intelligent face registering this news and his mind commenting upon it. There was not much that escaped him. “Hard lines, Essex,” he said. “I mean the
holiday won’t be so good for you now.” I knew well enough what he meant.
“Look!” he added. “Every Street’s coming off. Yes, right away. I’m going ahead with that musical show. I shall want Maeve for that.”
“Why have you decided all this so suddenly?” I asked him.
“Suddenly! Where do you live, Essex—on this earth or in the moon? Don’t you even read the papers? Haven’t you seen that Austria and Serbia are at war—or will be by tomorrow, anyway?”
“Yes, but surely that’s all very remote?”
Something that sounded like a groan of despair shuddered over the line and into my ear. Then Wertheim hung up.
And the next day Serbia and Austria were at war; and on the Saturday Russia and Germany were in it; and on the Sunday Dermot came to me looking very grave.
“Bill,” he said, “that damned man Wertheim is right. I’m going home. I’ve got a business to look after.”
“Everybody is making very sudden decisions,” I grumbled. “When are you going?”
“Now—as soon as I can get away. Sheila’s packing.”
We looked at one another irresolutely. There was nothing to say, but there was a tension in the air. Martin appeared driving Dermot’s car round to the front of the house, and Sawle came through the front door carrying a suit-case. These trivial things moved me. More than the prognostications of Wertheim or the gathering strain that had been manifesting itself in the newspapers, the sight of Dermot’s car appearing like that, unexpectedly, ready for departure, the sight of Sawle carrying out the bags, imparted a gravity to the moment. Sudden destruction of carefully made plans, swift severance of friends: these things I understood, and these things were being caused by the shadow that was spreading from Austria.
Dermot took my arm and drew me towards the path that led down to the water. We stumbled over the flinty way, through the green umbrage, as we had so often done before. We came out into the light blazing on the river. We stood for a moment looking about us, silent in the utter peace and indifference of the summer afternoon.
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