‘Dear, I am yours, now, in any place, at any moment. With ceremony or without. Here we are, in a lonely pine-wood. But I should like the ceremony.’
‘The devil of it is this, you see,’ said this lover who sometimes spoke with an angel’s speech, as when he had called her ‘Spirit!’ and sometimes otherwise. ‘I mean about getting a job of some sort. I don’t mean Humphrey’s actually making a stink or anything, but I was away the dickens of a time, and he was cock of the walk, and it’s only natural. Then I blow in and pinch his girl, at any rate he thinks so’ – he looked profoundly at her – ‘but you know I didn’t pinch his girl . . . you with those stars of eyes that come and go!’
‘Barty! What are you saying?’ she cried startled.
‘Saying?’ He gave a little laugh. ‘I’m saying we’ve got to live on something, and I don’t want to crab old Humphrey, nor upset the old folks either for that matter. In fact if it wasn’t for you I think I should push off again.’
She looked at him with the last simplicity. – ‘I am yours to do what you like with, my love,’ she said.
‘We were going to get married straight away. It’s a damnable nuisance. Everything’s hanging fire.’
‘I’ll do without a church, Barty.’
‘Eh? No, no! I was a low-lived scoundrel to say that! It comes of living abroad, where they don’t bring you early-morning tea and ring gongs for dinner and send you a writ if you don’t pay your bills. We’ll manage somehow. All I meant about the church was – hanged if I know quite what I meant!’
Why not now? Why not take it as it came? Was he not right? What had this sweet dark mystery of theirs to do with the church after all? The church looked with disfavour on apparitions that came through rosewood doors in the middle of the night. It called such things heathen and evil, and put them away into outer darkness. If Barty went away into the outer darkness again he must take her with him. If he could not take her with him then something else he must take with him, to be his remembrancer when perils beset him, so that he went about with a naked sword in his hand. The wood was still, the birds songless. The hand that had taken hers on the stair-rail was in her’s now. Resolutely she drew it about her. She felt its firm closing on her.
‘We are all alone, Barty,’ she whispered.
As she spoke the barking of a dog was heard, not thirty yards away, and a man’s voice that called.
She put Barty’s arm away, rose abruptly, and shook herself free of the needles.
‘Shall we go?’ she said.
Her mind was made up. They must be married at once. She had preferred a church, and the church might be right in calling these things heathen and evil. If the church was right, then perhaps it had a remedy and a purge.
7
She went herself to the Faculty Office to get the licence. She went blithely, for the skies were smiling again. The house with the fanlighted door was to be shut up; Mr James wanted to see certain Loire châteaux again; and suddenly one evening Virginia had exclaimed, ‘James! What idiots we all are!’
‘On any particular point my dear?’ Mr James had asked.
‘Why shouldn’t Agatha and Barty have this house while we’re away?’
‘For a honeymoon?’
‘Why not? The servants will be here on board-wages.’
‘Odd nobody thought of it.’
‘Why not?’
‘But we want the car –’
‘Trust Barty to get hold of a car if he wants one –’
‘I hope Agatha won’t go bringing any more swords into the place,’ had been Mr James’s comment: and a telegram had been telephoned that same evening.
With the licence in her pocket Agatha mounted a bus that went down Ludgate Hill. On one other point she was going, if she could, to set her mind at rest. James had given her two addresses. One was in an old street in Chelsea, the other quite near it, a contractors’ place in Pimlico. She wanted to learn all she could about the rosewood door.
Why she wanted this she would have found it difficult to explain. She had so often slept in that room, and nobody had ever come into it as long as the familiar glossy-painted white door had remained there. But the moment they put in an unfamiliar door of rosewood things begin to happen. On her very first night there Barty came in with a bright sword in his hand, and eyes as bright as the sword as they had sought her own. He had not been since, for there had been no reason for his coming again that way; the very next evening he had walked into the house the proper way – in that hard-trained, solid, brown flesh of his. What had all this to do with the door? Might he not equally have come in by any other door? ‘Agatha’s door’ they had jestingly called it. But she knew that it was his door, not hers. And Barty was to enter by it once more. He would spend his bridal-night behind it.
‘Sloane Square.’
She got off the bus. She had looked at the street plan, and had found that the street she wanted was a bare ten minutes away. She set out on foot, and found the place Mr James had described to her. His description was quite accurate, for there was nothing there. There was merely a gap in the street, and a board that announced an Eligible Site for sale.
So that was that. She turned away and sought the other address.
At the other address they received so beautiful a lady with bowings and chair-placings. Indeed she was so beautiful that more heads turned to look at her in the street than did not. That was Barty’s doing. Sometimes she could almost look at herself in the glass, say to herself ‘You’re a little tired-looking under the eyes this morning, my girl,’ think of Barty, and find her eyes those of the lovely name he had called them – the eyes that came and went. She could feel as it were a gushing outward at the thought of him. And was she not thinking of him now? Trying in some way to keep him? To save him? . . . They asked her to sit down, and pressed about her, and got out their letter-books and files.
Yes (they said), that was a job of theirs. Who had been in charge of it? Here it was; young Merritt; see if he’s in. There entered a pleasant-mannered young foreman. He was told to tell the lady all she wanted to know.
But Merritt’s all was little. Yes he did remember a gentleman coming in to look at a door, a thinnish, greyish sort of gentleman, who had asked if there were any curved walls in the house and which room the door had come from. And Merritt hadn’t been able to say. Burkie might know, or Bill –
But Burkie and Bill were on a job and could not be called in.
‘What was the date of the house?’ Agatha asked.
Well, now, the dates of houses had more to do with them that built them than them that broke them up, but they might say about Charles the First. Or Second. Or George. Wasn’t the gentleman satisfied with the door?
And as Agatha could not tell them how infinite was her own satisfaction with it, she left.
She went next to her furnished lodgings. She and Barty might presently have to go into furnished lodgings, but not these; she felt a little about them as Barty had felt about the Ford. Barty would have to get a job. She herself might have to get a job. You can wait alone indefinitely on a shadowy, spiritual inheritance, a few hospitable friends and a hundred pounds a year; you can even get married on them; but what about the years to come? She wondered, she wondered . . .
That night she was taken to the theatre by some sketchy person, who of course proposed marriage to her. This pleased her, because it was yet another gift to Barty. On the following day she was to see Barty again. He was coming up to town in the Hispano-Suiza, and they would lunch at a teashop if she had her way, at the Hyde Park if he had his. Then in the afternoon he was going to drive her back . . . He duly appeared, and they lunched at the Hyde Park. They did not drive straight back to their hosts of the house with the fanlighted door, but made an excursion into the pinewoods again. They visited the very spot where she had offered herself. An
d now the licence was in her bag, and it was to be in a church after all. She was glad.
‘Agatha is looking most radiant this evening!’ Miss Virginia admired, late that night after Barty had departed. Their trunks were packed and they were off shortly before midday on the following day. They had wisely deferred their choice of a wedding-present, saying that they would wait and see what was most needed.
‘She is expected to be making rather a special effort at being beautiful,’ Mr Arthur said with a twinkle.
‘You will consider the house absolutely your own, darling?’
‘Servants, everything – except, alas, the car, which we must take –’
‘You dearest, kindest things!’ said Agatha, her heart full, and shortly after they all went to bed.
From tomorrow morning on, when they would depart, and until after the wedding, there was now one house closed to Barty, and that was the house where she was. And as she sought her room that night it occurred to her quite suddenly, so that her heart gave a momentary flutter, that the man whom she was about to marry had never seen the rosewood door she had just closed behind her. The dining-room and the drawing-room and the library of the house he knew, but he had never set foot in its upper part; indeed he had spent almost more days in the pinewoods with her than he had hours in the house all told. There was nothing strange about this. There was nothing strange about the door, except that the people who might have known seemed to know so remarkably little about it. Except for a book-entry that had been shown her the whole transaction might have been purely legendary. Then she put out her light and forgot about the door. A woman whose wedding is to be in two day’s time has other things than doors to think about.
Or at least she should have had plenty to think about; curiously, she had not. Nor apparently had he. Normally he would have been saying goodbye as a bachelor to his friends, she would have been surrounded by busy chattering girls. But he had no friends, and by midday tomorrow her own friends would be on their way to France. What would happen after their return was dark and uncertain. Furnished rooms perhaps, or Barty might want to wander again and take her with him. She had no idea how he had lived during his wanderings, but wildly enough she had little doubt. But she cared nothing about how he had lived in the past. There lodged in his body a spirit special to her own. Lacking a word for the implied lineage of love between them they spoke as it as ‘it’. For ‘it’ she had waited, and ‘it’ had brought them together in the end. Whatever happened ‘it’ would have been, and having been was a thing that all eternity could not cancel.
By midday the next day the car was ready, the luggage loaded up, and Mr James was looking at his watch.
‘Time we were off,’ he said.
‘Goodbye, my darling, and every, every happiness!’ said Virginia kissing her.
‘We all wish you more than we can tell you,’ James said.
‘We must all kiss Agatha.’
They kissed her, beginning with James and ending with Virginia again, and the car moved away.
Agatha returned to the house. A great solitude seemed suddenly to have fallen upon it; she had not realised how comfortable and livable a thing the gentle spinsterishness of these hosts of hers could be. She went from room to room. The whole house seemed to have come to pieces. Its fanlight was its own, and possibly its shining stair-rail, but, without James as its purchaser and proprietor, the Adam mantle-piece showed out suddenly as a borrowed thing. It was as borrowed as Barty’s clothes, as borrowed as their bridal-bed. The chandeliers seemed to be twinkling at some older memory; and the leaden cistern on its plinth chattered softly that it had never been meant for a fountain at all. She wished Barty would come. He could at least take her out in the car. As a matter of fact he was taking her to see his people that afternoon. Three times already she had been there, and had been glad each time that Humphrey had had the consideration to be somewhere else. She was looking out of one of the front landing windows, hoping Humphrey would do the same today, when she heard the tearing note of the electric horn and saw the rush of the car up the drive. She ran down, seizing a hat and coat as she went, and hardly knowing why she ran. Barty had thrown down his cap and was advancing along the hall.
‘Have they gone?’ he demanded.
‘More than two hours ago.’
‘Hang. I should have liked to see them. I tried to get away, but they kept me.’
‘I’m just ready. I was waiting for you.’
‘There’s no hurry, is there?’
But at something in his kiss she moved out to the steps.
‘And as I’m mistress now I suppose I’d better close the door,’ she said.
He stared a little, but ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, and fetched his cap and put it on again.
Clear of the outer gates she had to ask him not to drive so quickly, for the hedges were swimming past in a blur of grey-green.
‘Oh, we may as well get there and get it over,’ he said. ‘How I loathe it all!’
‘All what?’
‘Oh, all this infernal talk about things that don’t matter! As long as we’ve something to eat and a roof over our heads –’
‘We’ve a very nice roof over our heads, at any rate for a few weeks –’
‘All this talk about permanent arrangements! How can we tell? There may be an earthquake for all we know! As if there wasn’t enough for everybody!’
Her heart sank. – ‘Do you mean Humphrey?’ she asked. ‘Oh – all this putting things in black-and-white as they call it –’
He took a bend in a manner that brought her heart back again and into her mouth, and they drove on in silence.
She saw. There was not much doubt about who was master of the house they were approaching. It was Barty. Barty was behind everything. It was Barty who, magnificently, would not hear for a moment of Humphrey’s dispossession, but it was also Barty who would turn round on his brother with bright scorn and ask him whether he would have made a fuss about a few beggarly hundreds or whatever it was! She knew that in Humphrey’s place he would have behaved exactly as he wanted Humphrey to behave now; he hated money; and yet, even when he was saying that he didn’t see himself squatting down on a few score of acres and dozing out his days there, there still remained that in his eyes that Agatha shared with none, not even with the mother who had borne him.
The reverberations of the family discussion seemed still to linger in the dark-walled study where old Mr Paton retired after meals to slumber and Humphrey administered for him. Mrs Paton was there too, frail and twice aged, once by her son’s vanishing from the world, and again by the destroying joy of the first days of his return. Agatha shook hands with Humphrey, who seemed bent on showing himself reasonable before his outrageous and unreasonable brother. Apparently there had been a breathing-space, for Humphrey returned to the matter.
‘Well, now that we’ve all had time to think,’ he said, ‘is it too much to ask that we should at least know where we are?’
‘Not at all, my dear fellow,’ Barty replied, his hands behind his head as he lay back in a long chair. ‘I thought I’d explained that.’
‘You made a great deal of fun of people who ventured to have opinions different from your own, if that’s an explanation,’ Humphrey replied.
‘I’ve told you I’m trying to get some sort of a job. You know useful people and I don’t, or at least you ought to. I’ve made absolutely no difficulty about things as I found them.’
‘Except that we’re merely to be your bankers. We’re prepared to be your bankers. But we should like to know to what extent.’
‘Do you mean how many meals a day I eat and how many suits of clothes I want a year?’
‘Barty, it’s impossible to talk to you. I should have thought that in the circumstances – ’ poor Humphrey checked himself.
Agatha’s eyes were
beseechingly on old Mrs Paton’s. Barty’s mother rose shakily. She reached for Agatha’s arm.
‘Come and see my dahlias, Agatha.’
She was as much under Barty’s domination as the rest, and had as little to set against it as they, but she was his mother, and this was the girl he was going to marry. A single glance at Agatha had told her how it was with her; her son would be able to do little wrong in the eyes of one so much in love as that! Well, well. People had to find out these things for themselves. Her experience told her that it was better not to know what was ahead. Thinking Barty dead had in some ways been better than having him back like this – not better that he should be dead, but better that she should have thought so. It had indeed been a question whether she would survive his return. His going away again she would not survive. Her hope of Agatha was that at last her arms might keep him.
‘It is very difficult for them both,’ she complained shakily to the dahlias. ‘Don’t forget how difficult it is for Humphrey too.’
Agatha sighed. – ‘I’m the cause of the trouble.’ But she knew that it was not true, and that something that was neither herself nor Barty was the cause of the trouble.
‘You won’t expect more of him than he can give you, will you?’
‘No,’ said Agatha in a low voice.
‘He’s headlong, he’s passionate. And remember that doesn’t last. It burns itself out. He might even leave you again.’
‘I know. I’m prepared for it. We all have to take chances, and this is mine.’
‘I hope you aren’t making a promise to yourself that you won’t be able to keep,’ said the tired old mother.
‘Is it true,’ Agatha asked very slowly, as a young woman to one with all her years behind her, ‘that if people had a second chance they would do exactly the same again?’
‘I cannot tell, my dear – I have seen too much trouble to be able to tell you that.’
‘Because,’ said Agatha as she passed her arms about the old lady and looked down into her eyes, ‘I do see what Barty is. He is tyrannous. He is so wilful himself that he laughs away the wills of others without hearing what they have to say, and you can’t laugh away people’s wills like that. I don’t think I shall be happy with him for more than a very little while. I’m not sure I shall be happy at all. I think I had my chance of happiness with him, and it’s already past. But if Barty were to come to me again, as he did before, and I knew all this and a thousand times more, I know I should do the same thing again.’
The Dead of Night Page 25