My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  I entered the theatre just before the rise of the curtain; just in time to catch the animated buzz of talk that contended with the music of the orchestra dashingly dispensing the opening airs of Choose Your Partner. From floor to gallery in a vast overpowering bourdon the voices rose, and already the air was heavy with the blue smoke of tobacco. There was a sense of expectancy, an eagerness to clutch at the coming hours of gaiety and brightness, that perhaps we shall never know again.

  I took my place between a Cabinet minister and an officer whose shoulder strap was decorated with a baton crossed by a sword. The lights dimmed, the curtain swung up, and the piece began with the customary swirl of legs. You couldn’t beat Tiller girls for that sort of thing: that precise regimented prancing, that rhythmic swaying of twenty bodies as one, that dipping forward of necks bearing feathered heads. And as they pranced and swayed, arms interlocked, making of themselves a barrier behind which nothing could be seen, the principals of the show came one by one, and one by one were revealed by the twenty dancing girls breaking into two walls of ten, leaving a gap for the principal to emerge.

  Each came in his own way: the leading comedian with a leap and a smile; his lugubrious foil with a frightened shamble; but there was never any doubt whose show this was. Maeve appeared last of all. The dancing girls parted their ranks; and this time kept them apart, standing still. And there was Maeve, with that intensely black hair, that white face, those red, red lips. She wore for that first appearance the dress that Livia had designed: the dress of white stiff icy lines, decorated with one crimson rose in which, later, she sang the song that now was in a million mouths. She didn’t come forward. She just stood there, strangely still, and the dancing girls closed their ranks behind her. As the house rose and cheered, clapped and stamped and whistled, she looked, to me who knew her so well, intolerably lonely and somehow dedicated.

  It was a long time since I had last seen the show. I had forgotten how hard Wertheim was working her. In scene after scene, with song, and dance and dialogue, she was the focal point, the personality on which all pivoted, and she threw herself into it that night with a self-abnegation that I did not remember to have noticed in her rendering of the part before. Do you think it strange that in such a production as this—light, frothy, bubble after gay bubble—a woman could literally be giving all that was in her? Then you have understood neither Maeve nor the nature of an inspired artist. I felt as I watched her that all the passionate sorrow that was in her heart, all the grief for dead men and for those who were about to die that I knew obsessed and burdened her, was here transmuted into the provision of the most perfect moments which she had it in her to create. This was the only assuagement she could offer to those on the dolorous way, and she offered it with every particle of her art and every fibre of her being.

  Only once did she come on to the stage alone, and that was when she sang When it’s with you, it’s Wonderful. The song preceded the fall of the curtain at the end of the first part of the show, and I knew it was now I should see Oliver. Maeve had told me how for some time Wertheim had been working a new trick—turning a spotlight for a moment here and there upon members of the audience so that the song seemed to be personally addressed. Maeve hated it. “Oh, Man! It’s bad enough, that song, without seeing some poor face shining at you and drinking in the words. There was one in the stalls, with a great red scar across his forehead. I dreamed about him. I dream about lots of them.”

  The curtain went up and there she was, on the stage that was darkened of all light save the blue cone that fell upon her white, still, lonely figure. The stiff satin folds of the dress seemed to have icy edges. She was very remote and withdrawn, and the silence of the audience as her small, faintly husky voice floated out into the dark of the auditorium emphasised this. All the thousands there who for an hour and more had been teased and titillated and shocked into laughter and charmed with superb arrangements of form and colour were now intent and withdrawn, held lightly in the hollow of Maeve’s little hand.

  She didn’t stir. She stood in the attitude I have called hieratic, her arms hanging down, her hands cupped together before her, her eyes closed.

  All by myself the night seems long,

  And the stairs are hardly worth climbing,

  But when it’s with You, it’s Wonderful.

  It was on that third line that Wertheim’s spotlight rayed through the dark of the theatre, found a box, and lighted up the face of Oliver. He must have been recognised by hundreds of people. His photograph had been in all the papers. The illustrated weeklies had run him—“Captain Oliver Essex, V.C., dining at Frederico’s.” “Captain Oliver Essex, V.C., with Miss Livia Vaynol. A happy snap in the Green Park”—all that sort of thing; but so deep was the enchantment of Maeve’s singing that not a sound broke the silence of the house.

  There they were: the two who had played together on the lawn at The Beeches, the two who had swum and sailed and wrangled at Heronwater: Maeve twenty-four, Oliver twenty, each famous now, each the sort of personality that in those fevered and distraught days could bring the thousands to gape. On each a spotlight rested: on Maeve a blue and softened ray, on Oliver a harsh white light that made him blink. But between them was a great space of darkness.

  I could see that Livia Vaynol was sitting at Oliver’s side. I could see that what Maeve had told me of him was the simple truth: there was something frightening about Oliver now. I turned my glasses upon the remembered face, and it held little that I could remember. The upward pull at the side of one eye, the downward pull of the mouth, had changed the whole aspect of the face grotesquely, and everything of youthful softness was gone from it for ever. What had been good looks of a most melting sort had been changed to a startling mature beauty, scratched, damaged and half-effaced, sinister even, as Maeve had said, but daunting by its harsh rigid composition of lines that all had meaning. I watched him blink with annoyance, take up his cap from the floor of the box and hold it before his eyes. The action showed another wound: a livid scar that ridged the back of the hand.

  Maeve sang on, and now she opened her eyes and looked at Oliver, seemed to be singing to him alone. And now and then, over the top of his cap, Oliver looked at Maeve.

  When it’s with You, it’s Wonderful,

  The most wonderful thing in the world.

  The song ended, the curtain swung down, and pandemonium broke loose. Half the crowd shouted “Maeve! Maeve!” and half shouted “Essex!” The curtains parted and Maeve appeared. People waved their programmes, waved their handkerchiefs, stood on seats and shouted “Maeve!” “Essex!” “Essex!” “Maeve!” The house lights were still dimmed. The spotlight remained upon Oliver’s box. He sat for a long time, impassive and unsmiling, till someone shouted “Three cheers for the hero!” He got them; and then stood up, unsmiling still, and raised a hand in a stern greeting to the mob. Then he turned and bowed stiffly towards Maeve. She dropped in a curtsey, then blew him a kiss, which set the house howling with delight, and then the curtain fell. The lights came up in the auditorium. Certainly Wertheim knew what a hero was worth.

  *

  At the final curtain, Maeve gathered up the bouquets—the bouquets which would contain the notes that broke her heart. Proposals of marriage, invitations to dine, to dance, to fill in this way and that the brief interlude between one slice of hell and another. Invitations, too, from the War Office embusqués and the meat contractors and little Dolly Daydream officers whose unsullied uniforms were worn on adventurous inspections of mills and factories and workshops. Maeve was a giver—a giver without stint—but she knew where to give.

  Her dressing-room was cluttered with flowers when I went round, and cluttered with the customary mob of men and women. The bright spot was burning again on her cheek. She was at once animated, gay, and dead tired. But no one there save myself seemed to notice the tiredness. They all had their demands to make on her spirit and vitality and she denied them nothing. I put my arm through hers and drew her aside. “Come
along home,” I said. “Leave all these people for once.”

  I don’t know what she would have answered, but at that moment Wertheim came bustling into the room. With him were Oliver and Livia Vaynol. I only noticed then that Oliver’s very uniform was no longer the uniform of the stripling I had last seen. He wore it as though proud of its shabby distinction: the leathern patches on elbows and cuffs, the old dim stains of use and weather. He spoke to no one, he smiled at no one, but the chattering crowd in the room instinctively parted to give him passage.

  I saw that he had something of an entourage. As well as Livia Vaynol, three or four men and women came in behind him. One of them, I now saw, was Pogson, metamorphosed, but not so completely, so incredibly, as Oliver. Pogson looked fitter, less gross and loathsome. He was the breezy officer, monocle in eye, laugh ready and hearty.

  The last thing I had expected was that Oliver would appear in the dressing-room. I cursed Wertheim in my heart for bringing him: he had known I was there. The situation was beyond me, but not beyond Maeve. Oliver must have seen me, but she gave him the opportunity to appear not to have done so. She slipped quickly in front of me and went to meet him with hand outstretched. Other people closed in behind her. I was able to maintain a decent pretence of being obscured. But between heads, over shoulders, I was able to see all that happened.

  Maeve greeted him radiantly, as though he were a long lost lover. She had never looked more charming. “I’m so glad you came round,” she said. “I hoped you would.”

  Oliver looked round for somewhere to lay his hat, contemptuously moved aside a bouquet or two, and put it on the table. “It was a good show,” he said brusquely. “I congratulate you.”

  “Oliver, old boy, introduce your pals,” Pogson said. “I’ve never met Miss O’Riorden, you know.” He screwed the glass into his slightly bulging eye and ogled Maeve.

  “Oh, yes, you have, Poggy,” Oliver answered, “but you wouldn’t remember it. You were tight—leaning against a lamp-post.”

  He said it without a smile, cuttingly, cruelly; and Maeve said: “If we met, we certainly were never introduced, and I’m sure I don’t remember even the meeting. So do your duty, Oliver.”

  “Major Pogson,” Oliver said briefly, and introduced the other people who were with him. One of them was a Pogson, too—one of “Pogson’s people.” But Oliver looked as if he didn’t give a damn for Pogson’s people now.

  “Look, Maeve,” he said. “I want to take you out to supper. Can you manage it?”

  “But I’d love it!” Maeve cried, clapping her hands.

  “Bravo!” Pogson shouted. “We’ll make it a party. Livia, Polly, Jack—are you all on?”

  There was a delighted chorus of approval. Everyone was “on.”

  Oliver looked at them with the cold, almost insolent, stare that seemed to be now his customary expression. The lifted eye and the slightly twisted lip gave it a sort of savage authority. He picked up the cloak that was over the chair near which Maeve was standing. “This yours?” he asked curtly.

  She nodded, and he put it around her and took up his cap. “Come, then. I’ve got a cab outside. Excuse me, Poggy, I don’t feel like a crowd tonight.”

  Again the crowd opened for him. Maeve put her hand on his arm. “Good-night, Livia,” she said.

  *

  I had thought of Livia at the moment when Oliver was putting the cloak round Maeve’s shoulders. I wondered if she recalled the occasion that flashed to my mind: that night when first she had met him—a wet and muddy schoolboy in disgrace. While he changed, she and Maeve and I were waiting for him—waiting to go to dinner at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Then he came, and while Maeve helped me to my feet, for I was lame, he took up Livia’s cloak and put it round her shoulders.

  As this memory invaded my mind, I watched her face, saw her eyes narrow, scrutinising Maeve and Oliver with the wary vigilance of a cat. Oliver seemed unaware of the scrutiny. He seemed unaware of Livia. But Maeve saw all. She must have seen the spasm of hatred that shot across Livia’s face when she said “Good-night”—a spasm instantly suppressed as Livia “poofed” at her hair and turned with a quick laugh to the others of the party. “Well, are we going on anywhere?” she asked.

  The other Pogson—not Oliver’s “Poggy”—a prosperous-looking beefy chap in full evening kit, said: “Well, I’m damned. That’s what I call a bit thick. He’s doing the God Almighty all right, isn’t he?”

  Poggy said: “Well, I leave him to it, for one. A, he’s earned it, and B, you don’t catch me across his path.”

  He buttoned up his stylish British warm—a resplendent garment so bright that there was a hint of salmon-pink in it. “Well, I’m for bye-byes. Won’t hurt us for once.”

  The other Pogson and the all but anonymous Jack and Polly stood sulky and undecided for a moment, then they all drifted away, Poggy asking over his shoulder: “You staying here, Livia?”

  “For a while,” she said; but I could see that this was only a ruse to be alone, to have done with them. She didn’t want Oliver’s crowd: she wanted Oliver; and now that these others were gone she could go, too, to wonder what had happened: to make what she could of the fact that Oliver had walked out as though she didn’t exist and as though Maeve existed in a very lively fashion indeed.

  *

  I didn’t go home at once. I wandered through the darkened streets: darkened, that is, of lamplight. But there was a full moon that cast shadows. It had an effect of great strangeness. You didn’t expect to see the pale wash of moonlight lying along one side of a street in the middle of London; the darkness of shadow on the other. You had looked up sometimes, and there, far above the roar and dazzle of the streets, alien and remote, was a moon impotent to leave its silvery impress. But now, there it was, quietly triumphing over the blare and gabble that had been obliged for once to efface themselves.

  My wanderings brought me, at about midnight, into Bond Street. It was there that I noticed the long fingers of the searchlights feeling their way across the sky. I paused to watch them for a few moments. Beautiful and damnable. Then the bark of anti-aircraft guns broke out. I could see nothing of the prey those lovely tentacles of light were trying to seize, the intruder at whom those watchdog guns were barking. But he was there. A bomb crashed... another. They seemed a long way off, but I might as well get a roof over my head. Not that a roof would be much good if the fellows up there... But somehow one irrationally preferred to be under a roof. It would keep off splinters, anyway.

  I turned into Bruton Street, and there was Livia Vaynol. Impossible for me to avoid her, or for her to avoid me. We were face to face. Indeed, my hat was off, I had said “I beg your pardon” before I saw it was Livia.

  She gave a little uneasy laugh, glanced up at the sky. “It looks as though I ought to be getting home,” she said.

  “It’s a longish way, isn’t it? You’re welcome to a chair in my flat and a drink till this is over.”

  She hesitated a moment, then: “Thanks,” she said, “but I think one’s as safe in the street as anywhere, don’t you? I’ll just plod along.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes. D’you know what I’ve been doing? Keeping on the shadowed side of the street so that they”—she jerked her finger upwards—”shan’t see me. I didn’t know I was doing it. It’s just struck me. What extraordinary things our minds do! Well, good-night.”

  She turned into Bond Street, and I went on down Bruton Street to my flat. What on earth was she doing here? I wondered. Waiting for Oliver, I suppose; waiting for Oliver to bring Maeve home.

  I mixed myself a drink, lit a pipe, and sat there with no light but the dim fire-glow, thinking of Livia waiting in the street, waiting for Oliver. The Oliver, I guessed, who would now mean so much more to her: the hero, the man of the moment. And I found that I was thinking of her without emotion, without love, without so much as the pity one would accord the discarded mistress of a comedy. It seemed incredible that I had told Maeve a few hours ago that
I would marry Livia if I could. Now I knew that I had been lying—lying to her, lying to myself, to keep alive a romantic notion that now dangled before me with the sawdust dribbling from its punctured artificiality. All very well, I saw clearly in that disillusioning morning hour, with the guns still barking beyond my window, all very well to cherish the notion of love lying like the Sleeping Beauty this more than two years dead but ready to be awakened by a kiss. But what if the Sleeping Beauty is really a lovely lifelike corpse that crumbles to dust at the breath of reality? And I knew that that was what had happened, that those few words in the street, that confrontation that had not quickened my pulse, or speeded my heart, or tied my tongue, called the emotional bluff that I had been playing on myself too long.

  The raid lasted a long time. More than one airship came over that night. I felt undisturbed, aware of nothing but a sense of the hopeless boredom of this war that had gone on too long, A war that brought you to this senseless level of a beast crouched in the dark of a burrow. My only concern was for Maeve. I couldn’t go to bed till she had returned. Presently the gunfire died to a receding mutter, and I lit my lamp and took up a book. At about three o’clock I heard a taxi stop in the street. Then there was Maeve’s step on the stair. It stopped outside my door. She tapped and came in.

  “Late hours, sir!” she said with mock gravity. Her eyes were dancing. All her face was animated.

  I knocked my pipe out into the fire that had withered to a few warm ashes, and yawned. “I was just going to bed.”

  “You weren’t by any chance waiting up for me?”

  “Well—”

  She came right into the room, put her arms round my neck and kissed me. “Good-night,” she said. “I’ve had a lovely time.”

  *

  Oliver and Maeve made an even more attractive pair for the picture-papers than Oliver and Livia had done. “Captain Oliver Essex, V.C., and Miss Maeve O’Riorden, the popular star of Choose Your Partner, as our camera man saw them supping somewhere in Soho.”