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by Henry Green

She was just saying aloud to the cat, “And what’d become of you, Panzer?” when there was the knock, like a rap right on her heart. Her mouth fell open. She covered it with a hand, as Mrs Grant had done.

  Charley had easily been able to persuade James to come along without having to tell him who, or what, he was to find. One of the reasons was that James did not want to lose sight of Summers. At one time he could have thought Charley was seeing too much of Rose, but he now found Charley would be the main link left with the happy days which were fast slipping into the past. Also he considered him affected by his war experiences.

  As he rang, Summers got behind so that, when she answered the door, her heart pounding, all she saw was the stranger. She took it very hard.

  “So it’s come,” she said, dead white, and made way.

  Charley naturally imagined this to be her reaction at being exposed. He could not understand, but he felt desperately ashamed of his part in bringing them together again. And, as James moved forward, Charley wished once more that he could be unseen.

  But of course, the moment Miss Whitmore saw Charley she knew the stranger could not be a Ministry snooper, and she was so relieved that she grew angry.

  “So it’s you, is it?” she said.

  With acute dread and anxiety Summers slowly raised his eyes to James’ face. He was terribly frightened to see on it the last expression he had expected. So that he was made to feel crazy. For James stood, just watching, polite and lost, though his upper lip trembled.

  Then Charley knew he was back in a trap.

  “What is it now?” she asked him.

  He could not answer.

  James thought the best thing was to introduce himself.

  “I’m James Phillips,” he said, quite ordinarily.

  “Rose’s husband?” she said. It was obvious that she was profoundly shocked. “You?”

  “That’s right,” he said, with what seemed to be complete calm. “Why, did you know her?”

  There was a pause. Charley listened to his heart thumping.

  “I’ll tell you what this is,” she said then, violently, yet as if searching in herself. “It’s not proper, that’s all.”

  “What?” Charley said. He could not believe his ears again.

  She turned on him. “Bringing this man here,” she shouted, and slammed the door shut, so she could not be heard on the staircase. “Think of it. Him that’s met his wife naked in bed with him, and you bring him along to me. Oh, it’s not proper,” she repeated.

  Mr Phillips had gone rather white in his turn. But he kept his temper.

  “I don’t see that you’re at all alike,” he said with truth and absolute conviction.

  But Charley was beside himself. They must be playing some frightful game, and he blamed it on her. He remembered her bigamy that, as he thought, Mr Grant had spoken of.

  “All very well acting the innocent,” he said, trembling all over, “but you’ve been married, haven’t you?”

  “You swine,” she yelled, coming up to him. “You keep Phil’s name out of this, d’you hear? He died fighting for you,” she shouted and, bringing her hand up, she slapped his face hard, and it hurt.

  “Here, that’s enough of that,” James said, pushing his way between them. But the harm was done. Charley sat down, quick, in the chair over which he had spilt the tea on another occasion, covered his face with his hands, and began uncontrollably trembling. “Died for me?” he kept on repeating.

  “He’s been out in it, too,” James said quietly. “He’s just been repatriated.”

  She burst into tears.

  “What’s a girl to do?” she wailed.

  Mr Phillips thought he was the most hurt of them all. Everything considered it was he who had been widowed, who had to look after their son, who could only show the boy microfilms of his mother. And what was this about? The girl was not like his Rose, quite apart from her dark hair. Certainly she did not behave in the least like. But he said gently,

  “Well, my word, this is a party I mean to say …”

  “Never knew such filth existed,” Charley muttered recovering.

  “That’s plenty now,” James objected.

  “Well it’s right, isn’t it?” Charley Summers asked.

  “You’re not yourself, Charley, old man,” Mr Phillips said. “And I’m thinking there’s the little lady we should apologise to,” he added. “My dear, this is the war. Everything’s been a long time. Why only the other day in my paper I read where a doctor man gave as his opinion that we were none of us normal. There you are.”

  “I’m not your dear,” she answered. “And I’m not his lost one, as he seemed to imagine the last time.” She showed, by her look at Charley, who it was she had in mind. This direct reference to Rose, and to Charley’s possible relations with her, was too much for James. Yet he still remained polite.

  “Well I’ve got to get back now. I’ve someone waiting for me,” he said. He closed the door gently behind him. And his last words made Miss Whitmore pity herself the more. She began to cry again, this time quietly, and with zest.

  Charley felt ten years older, cynical as never before.

  “What filth,” he repeated, as though from a great height.

  She cried on.

  “The end of my life,” Charley said, thinking aloud. “That’s what it is. I’m finished,” dramatising it.

  Still she cried.

  “Well, I’m off, Rose,” he said. “You’ll not see me again, now.”

  He got up to make his way out.

  “No, don’t go,” she said.

  He waited. She blew her nose vigorously.

  “I’ll have this out with you, if it’s the last thing I do,” she began. Apparently she had got over her rage with him.

  “What can you say?” he asked, helpless.

  “It was what Mr Phillips told me about your having been out there as well,” she began. “Maybe I’ve misjudged you. Were you blown up or what?”

  “I was not.”

  “All right, a girl can only ask, can’t she? And when she finds a man making a fool of himself, perhaps ruining his whole life, it’s only natural if she wants to put him wise, even when that man is a cracked stick like you. After what you’ve done to me I’d be justified in just showing you the door, now wouldn’t I?”

  “What have I done?” Charley asked, injured. He would not look at her, and wore an absurd expression of dignity.

  “Bringing Mr Phillips like you did. How d’you suppose it makes a girl feel?”

  “Up to some low game, the two of you,” Charley muttered, beginning to get frantic.

  “Being the man you are, I didn’t suppose you’d get it. Why, you’re so proud you can’t see out of your own eyes. If it wasn’t for that thought, I doubt if I’d be sitting here trying to get the truth. No, it was a dirty wrong to bring that individual to me, to be reminded of his own son’s mother. It was vile.”

  She spoke with dignity, while he thought of her as a dirty double crosser. Actually she was intensely proud of the terrible likeness to her late half sister, and had been ever since she first learned of it. Then he had another idea which flooded all over him, he was so sure it was right.

  “You’re in this together,” he shouted.

  She burst into tears again. “All right, I’ve tried, haven’t I?” she brought out between sobs and hiccups. “They ought to lock you up. Yes, well then, go now as you said, and I never want to see you more.”

  He went. It was not until the room was empty of him that she remembered to be afraid. For she saw he must be a shell shock case, and dangerous.

  The whole thing had been so unpleasant for James that he decided to put it out of mind. But the evening he got back from London he picked up one of the literary reviews his wife had liked, and to which he had kept up the subscriptions after marriage while hardly ever reading. And he came on a translation which seemed so close to Charley’s situation that he thought he would forward it, even though he was sore at the man
. Accordingly he wrote on the cover “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,” signed his initials, drew attention to the story with a cross, and sent the thing to Summers, whom he forgave the moment he had posted the packet.

  Meantime Charley had gone sick. He told the office he had ’flu. He kept to his bed. What he thought of himself was, that he was going to lose his reason.

  When Mary carried up the thick envelope, he recognized this review as one that used to lie about in the old days, missed what James had written, ignored the date, which was recent, and, uninterestedly, turned over the pages until he came to the cross with which James had marked the place. His heart gave a twist. Just for a moment he thought it must be an old kiss from Rose. Then he asked himself why it could have been sent. Finally he was not even going to look through the thing, he felt too ill, when his eye caught a bit about a girl fainting. So he turned back to the beginning, and went into it, as it is printed here:

  “From the Souvenirs of Madame DE CREQUY (1710–1800) to her infant grandson Tancrède Raoul de Créquy, Prince de Montlaur.

  “I must tell you about Sophie Septimanie de Richelieu who was the only daughter of Marshal de Richelieu and the Princess Elizabeth of Lorraine. She was far more sensible of the honour that was hers from her mother’s side of the family than she was of her father’s ancestors. Indeed she did not always bother to hide this from her father, for which he occasionally gave her a rap over the knuckles.

  “Septimanie was indefinably gracious. You could say she held a mirror to all that was the France of old days. She was a mixture of wit, of manners, with a sense of tradition, yet always absolutely herself. She had exquisite ways. She had a kind of full dress elegance but underneath there was all the time a hint of the dreadful death in store for her so soon. She was tall and lithe; she had brown black or grey eyes according to the mood she was in. There have never been eyes like hers to show changes of mood more brilliantly or, for anyone lucky enough to be under their spell, to make a gift of such a magical effect.

  “My grandmother thought to marry her to the son of Marshal de Bellisle, the Count de Gisors. This young man was in his day what you are going to be we hope, the best looking, the finest, and the most lovable of them all. But Septimanie’s father did not think a great deal of the family. ‘Really,’ he said to my grandmother with malice, and this is to show you what sort of a man he was, ‘the two young people can always meet after Septimanie has a husband.’ And so it was that, against her will, Septimanie became Madame d’Egmont.

  “Her husband Casimir-August d’Egmont Pignatelli was the most reverential, silent, and most boring of men.

  “Thus it came about that Mademoiselle de Richelieu, my very dear friend, became Countess d’Egmont, with all that this means, and that is, as we have the simplicity and good taste to say nowadays, that she had married into a family which was one of the best connected in Europe. In other words she was a Princess de Cleves and of the Empire, Duchess de Gueldres, de Julliers, d’Agrigente, as well as a Grandee of Spain by the creation of Charles V, and therefore on the same footing as the Duchesses of Alba and Medina-Coeli, who are of course the first ladies in Europe. I could run on for four pages more with the titles belonging to the great and mighty house of d’Egmont, which is descended in a direct line from the Reigning Dukes de Gueldres, and which the great aristocracy in all countries has had the mortification to see die out for want of an heir. And afterwards it was always said that this was Mademoiselle de Richelieu’s fault.

  “However Madame d’Egmont got on quite well with her husband. No more than that. And, in the meantime, a marriage was arranged between a Mademoiselle de Nivernais and Monsieur de Gisors. But the young man was killed a few months after the ceremony.

  “So the two lovers never had the chance to meet after Septimanie had a husband.

  “But Madame d’Egmont could so little forget him that she fainted if his name came up in conversation. This actually happened when the Prince Abbot de Salm purposely named him, and the young woman was taken with appalling convulsions on the spot; after which all decent people shut their doors to that wicked old hunch back.

  “Now there was at this time an old man, a member of the well-known family de Lusignan who, if no one knew him by sight, was at least familiar to everyone by name. He was called the Vidame de Poitiers. It was generally understood that he vegetated away in a great house, but he was never seen because he was so extremely eccentric. So you can imagine the Countess d’Egmont’s surprise when one day she had a letter from the Vidame asking her to be so good as to pay him a visit, in order that he might put before her a matter of some importance. He said he could not wait upon her in her own home as he would have wished because, as he put it, he was not ‘transportable’; a phrase which, as things turned out, and if you have the patience to read your old grandmother to the end, was, as you will come to realize, ever afterwards of significance at the Richelieu’s.

  “Madame d’Egmont did not want to go, but rather unexpectedly her father the Marshal insisted, and she had to give in.

  “So one afternoon she started off, in her carriage with six horses, only to find the outriders did not know the way because no one went there any more. But she arrived at last and when she was shown in at the door she found, without giving the least idea of it from the outside, that the Vidame’s house was nothing more or less than a kind of dream palace. Used as Madame d’Egmont was to the elegance of her father’s residence, and to the magnificence of her great uncle, the Cardinal’s, mansion which is unequalled, she was amazed at what she now saw. The entrance hall and marble staircase were stately with statues and evergreen shrubs, the antechambers were full of liveried footmen drawn up in two ranks, all the saloons were of an unparalleled grandeur and led to a long, high gallery in the form of a winter garden along which, under a vault of orange, myrtle, and flowering rose trees she was escorted towards nothing less than a sort of rustic retreat raised above floor level. Even the steps up were formed out of the trunks of forest trees, with a handrail of gnarled branches. She was left to climb this alone, and she found herself in a sort of elegant cowshed, in which was an old gentleman fast asleep on a little bed, with his head carefully wrapped up. Madame d’Egmont felt dreadfully embarrassed. Then, while she waited for the Vidame to come out of his sleep, she looked about. The walls were whitewashed, and there actually were five or six cows feeding peacefully in their stalls. A few pieces of simple furniture were between his bed and one wall. She particularly noticed that everything was spotlessly clean. All this affectation of a peasant simplicity in the centre of Paris, and in a palace, began to amuse Madame d’Egmont. She sat down on a little cane-bottomed chair to wait. After a quarter of an hour she coughed, then she coughed louder, until at last she threw modesty to the winds and coughed as loud as she could, enough to make her spit blood. In the end when she saw it was no use, and that the old gentleman would not wake up, she thought it would be comic to go away without saying anything to the Vidame’s page who was waiting for her below.

  “We were all waiting for Madame d’Egmont at the Richelieu’s when she got back. While she was telling us, and we were in shouts of laughter, her father the Marshal unexpectedly came in. All at once he began working his little mouth and shutting his eyes, a sure sign that he was displeased. ‘Countess d’Egmont,’ he brought out in his nastiest voice, which is saying a great deal, ‘in my opinion you should not have behaved as you did before a man of his age, as well born as he, ill as he is as well. I advise you to go back no later than tomorrow morning.’

  “‘Alas Monsieur,’ she replied, making her voice, that was always so soft, even softer, and turning on him her eyes which literally enchanted you, and which, on this occasion, were half appealing and half malicious, ‘but how am I to set about waking the gentleman?’

  “In the end Madame d’Egmont had to agree, after which the Marshal tried to change the conversation without, however, being able to hide his anger. As soon as he left the room, which he did a
t the first opportunity, Madame d’Egmont complained that she thought he was being most frightfully difficult. She said it would prove to be almost impossible to avoid laughing in the Vidame’s face, and that in any case she would find herself with the old man in the undignified position of a little girl who has played a trick. But then she went on to put her real reason, which was that she had been overcome by a presentiment of evil, that evil must result from a second visit to the Vidame.

  “The second time she visited him she found the old gentleman sitting up in bed. But he seemed very poorly, so much so that with a real feeling of horror she realized he could not have long to live. However he did not appear at all embarrassed by what he had to tell, and set about it at once, and quite methodically.

  “After thanking her in the most respectful way for calling on him, without referring to the previous visit which he had slept through, Monsieur de Poitiers handed Madame d’Egmont a bundle of old letters from the late Count de Gisors addressed to himself, and begged her to read them. She found, poor thing it nearly suffocated her, that they were all almost entirely about herself. The Count de Gisors wrote of her so passionately, as she told me afterwards, that she felt as though her heart were in a vice. But there was also mention of an unhappy child his father, the Marshal de Bellisle, had abandoned, and for whom the young man desired the Vidame to do what he could. ‘I shall not come back, I am sure of it, I shall not come back from this war,’ he had written in the last letter, ‘and I call on you to look after Severin, that I may die easy at least on that.’

  “Madame d’Egmont cried her heart out for some minutes by the old man’s bed. When she was a little easier the Vidame opened his eyes which he had kept shut all this time.

  “‘Madame,’ he said, ‘he for whom you are weeping, and whom we both regret, had no secrets from me. For he left behind him a young fellow, of about his own age, who is his double’. The old gentleman went on that this boy, Monsieur de Guys, was believed to be the natural son of the Marshal de Bellisle. Finally the Vidame said he wished to do something for this young man, because he did not think that he himself had long to live. He desired Madame d’Egmont, appealing to the love they both had for the dead Count de Gisors, to take certain bearer bonds and, as soon as he himself passed on, to hand these over to Monsieur de Guys. He explained that this was the only way to circumvent his creditors and heirs at law, and begged Madame d’Egmont not to say a word to anyone, repeating once more that she was the only person left whom he could trust. Madame d’Egmont reluctantly agreed to do as the Vidame asked, subject to certain safeguards with which I do not propose to trouble you, and within five or six days the Vidame had died.