Still She Wished for Company

by Margaret Irwin

  An enormous moon was rising over the fields as she took the short cut across them, through the little wood, and was soon in the drive. The drive was striped and chequered with a confusing maze of shadows and white patches that looked like living forms; it was familiar, and yet so alien, it seemed to be in another planet; moreover, it appeared to be waiting for her.

  She came to the gates and stood there, clutching the cold bars and looking through them at the house, staring at the windows. They were all lighted. Mr. Harris had said they hardly used this side of the house, but perhaps they were having a house party at last. She noticed that it was a soft yellow radiance, quite different from electric light; perhaps the Harrises were showing how “feudal” they were to the extent of hundreds of candles. But though she said all this to herself at the time she did not believe it.

  The lights in the rooms below went out, and presently those above went out, too, and Jan found she was still holding on to the gates and shivering, though she did not feel cold. She walked on round the gardens until she came to the side of the house and saw there a lawn enclosed by massive yew trees, and behind it three long French windows that showed a very dim light. She climbed the low wall, and walked softly by the yew trees up to the house until she stood in the shadow, close to the first of the three windows, and stood there a long time, afraid to look in. Her fear was not of being seen but of what she might see. There was no breath of sound from within. At last she looked in, looking down at the floor.

  It was a huge room and very dark. For a little way on the dark floor the moonlight lay in three paths from the three door windows, and just at the end of the centre path, it shone on a very small pair of green and silver shoes, Jan looked at them and wished there were nothing else to be seen in the room but those tiny, gleaming shoes.

  Then she looked up and saw that the shoes belonged to a figure that sat in the shadow beyond the moonlight, a small greyish figure with erect head. Behind her the room was less dark, for a candle, screened from the windows, stood on a large table. The figure of a man stood in the shadow between the shaded candle and the moonlight. He was behind the seated figure and was as motionless as she.

  Jan could see quite clearly the pale outline of his head, the powdered hair tied back by a ribbon at the neck, against the dark panelled walls. He wore a coat of some light colour that gleamed with silver here and there. She knew him, though she knew she had never seen him before, and she could distinguish nothing in his face but his eyes; they were looking not at her but at the figure in the chair, and they were very bright. She found she could not look away from those fixed and glittering eyes.

  She watched them until they appeared to change, and she saw them, not as eyes at all, but as pools of bright water reflecting the figure in the chair. She then saw that that reflected figure, though erect and motionless, was of a girl that was being slowly drowned.

  She tried to cry out, to appeal frantically to the two figures in that room, but, as in a nightmare, no sound would come, not even when she beat her hands against the closed window. They did not seem to touch the glass but to be striking out aimlessly at nothing. She found that she was standing there, her gaping mouth dry and parched, staring into a room which was empty and unlighted except for the three paths of moonlight from the windows. There was nothing at the end of the centre path, and no one in the room. She remembered now that she had seen this room before.

  It was here that the boy had sat alone, his head resting on his hand, his face hidden.

  She ran most of the way home, and all the time she was telling herself, “I’m real—real It was those others that were ghosts.”

  She saw Donald beside and a little ahead of her, looking straight in front of him, his head thrown back. He was talking and she heard all he said.

  With an obstinate pride that would not allow him to plead again for what he considered he had asked too often, he spoke little of themselves but more of his plans and prospects in America. At last he blurted out, “Well, will you come?” and then in the pause that followed, reverted to the more impersonal subject.

  Jan answered him as she got over the stile into the wood, and sat on it for a moment, cross-legged, laughing suddenly at what she was saying. It sounded solemn and pompous to be giving her gracious acceptance at last like this.

  Donald drew away the hand that had been helping her over the stile.

  “You tell me you will marry me, and you laugh,” he said. “I have not much sense of humour, and I do not see why it is funny that you should be my wife.”

  She looked into his face, which was on a level with hers where she sat, and the dull pain and resentment in it filled her with a sharp sense of humility.

  “Oh, Don!” she said. “It’s only because I saw what a conceited fool I’d been, and am, not to know all along what I should have in having you.”

  “Are you sure,” he said, “that you know what you would have?”

  His anger seemed only to have deepened. He took a step nearer to her, and she thought as she had thought before that “crossness became him.” But it did not please her that he should still be cross after her ample amends. It did not occur to her at that moment that the dark flush on his face was not of anger only, and that the abrupt movement with which he turned from her without helping her down from the stile, had in it more of enforced restraint than of boorishness.

  She hurried on ahead through the wood, feeling dissatisfied with both herself and Donald. They were always getting on the wrong side of each other—they certainly could not be meant for each other. But, then, for whom or for what was she meant? Was it for nothing but a fancy, for a face that she had seen only once and knew she would never see again?

  She had seen him standing in the unlighted window of a house in Soho one evening when it was not quite dark, and she was hurrying home through a shower of rain. He was looking out into the street, a man in a dull purple coat, his face showing dark against his powdered hair. It was the man she had seen in the library at Chidleigh. This time she could distinguish his features, the slanting eyebrows, a little like a monkey and more like a satyr, the upturned corners of his mouth, and near it a patch cut in the shape of a crescent, above all the brilliant eyes that were fixed on her. She recognized him as the “Gentleman Unknown,”

  They stood and looked at each other, it may have been for a minute. Then it appeared that the room round him was growing darker, and she could not see him so clearly. She spoke to him, begging him to stay, to speak to her; and this time it seemed that he at least heard her voice. He was straining forward as though to see and hear her the more clearly. Suddenly he flung away from the window. She thought he was coming down to her, and waited a little, but he did not come.

  Presently she noticed that the house was the restaurant where she and Donald had dined the evening before she had gone away for her holiday. She looked up again at the window and saw that the room was lighted, and that a waiter was passing to and fro, clearing the tables. Yes, it was the room on the first floor where she and Donald had sat by the chimney-piece and examined the burnt carving.

  The moment she had always been waiting for had come and gone. It had been lost through something there that was stronger than herself; stronger, even, than the will and desire of the man at the window. He had waited for her, she knew it now, as she had always waited and watched, unknowingly, for him.

  Since then, as she walked to and from work, or through the city in the lunch hour, it no longer seemed worth while to look at the faces as they passed, in search for the face she wanted. She knew now what she had sought; it was the sideward turn of the head, the quick, bright glance of the “Gentleman Unknown.” But with that knowledge had come the certainty that she would never see him again. She had wondered sometimes if it were because he had sought her and now had ceased to do so.

  Donald heard a sharp cry. He hurried after her, ducking under the barbed wire and jumping the ditch, and found her standing, white and startled, as though she had that i
nstant received some shock.

  “There—there’s no drive,” she stammered in a low voice, speaking to herself, not to him; and then, “They are cutting down all the trees in the drive.”

  For one terrifying, ridiculous instant, Jan had actually thought she had been transported as in a fairy tale to some unknown place. Now she looked on either side of her at the huge fallen trees, at the few that still remained standing in stark isolation.

  Donald said something and though she did not hear what it was, she heard his voice and knew it was not the voice she was wanting to hear. It should have been low and quick in tone, reassuring, comforting, yet with the faintest tinge of mockery in it like a subtle and surprising flavour in a sweet, cool drink.

  She sat down on one of the fallen trees and spoke in a sudden rush as though the words were flung out of her.

  “It’s no good, Donald, I can’t marry you and go to America and pretend any longer that real things matter most to me. They don’t. I know I’m a silly fool, I’m all the more a fool because I’ve lost it, and yet I can’t turn to and say ’ That’s all over like playing with dolls and now I’ll be sensible and real.’ I’ve been trying to, but I can’t forget it. It’s only left a gap.”

  He stood beside her, waiting. She twisted round on the mutilated tree-trunk and said in desperation, “You don’t want me to marry you, do you, just because I’m dull and empty and want something to fill up a gap?”

  “You can marry me for any reason you choose, as a clod of earth to stop a hole if you like. I’ll not engage to remain that clod.”

  His voice was not pleasant. Jan felt the more disturbed; but perhaps if they quarrelled it might be a quicker way of ending it. But she did not want to quarrel with Donald, and she certainly owed him an explanation, if only she knew how to explain. She said at last, “I’ve always known there was someone, I didn’t know whom. I know now it was the man in that picture I found at school—I told you about it. I laughed at you once for being jealous of a Gentleman Unknown—well— you can laugh at me now. But he’s not there any longer, he’s gone away.”

  How like a block he stood! But it was not surprising while she gibbered out such nonsense. She must try and make it clear.

  “You can call it softening of the brain. I expect it is. I used to think about that picture at school, and somehow he was always coming in. Everything I liked reminded me of him. But it was later when I’d left school that I began to feel there was someone there, someone who liked me—who And it was funny it began then because I wasn’t thinking about unreal people any more after I started work in town, everything was much too full and interesting and exciting and I was just enjoying myself all I could. But—I don’t know how”

  Her voice dropped, her expression had grown abstracted, she was talking more easily, and to herself rather than to him. “The real people were never quite as exciting or as interesting as one thought they would be. I was always expecting something a little different, other words or another way of saying them, something that would make them just right instead of just wrong. When I thought I was really beginning to be in love with anyone, the Gentleman Unknown would look at me and laugh as I put out the light, and I would wonder how he would have made love to me, and if I should ever meet anyone who would do it as he would.”

  Donald Graeme stirred a little on his feet, but did not speak, and when at his movement she glanced up at him in question his face looked as hard as ever. The sullen, tormented pride in it dismayed her.

  “Don, don’t look like that! What can all this nonsense mean to you but that I’m a fool that’s not worth having?”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “What’s the use? It only hurts you. Can’t you take it that I’m no fit body for real life or a real wife, as I believe you once told me in a rage. Well, you were quite right.”

  “I ask you to go on.”

  She wondered a little at his harsh gravity. Most men would surely be laughing at her by now, telling her she was a silly, crack-brained child that had never had the sense to leave off crying for the moon. She had told herself so often enough.

  She went on.

  “It’s as though I never even knew I had it till I lost it. And what ‘it’ was—a companion I suppose. Yes, I knew that, for. I used to find myself looking at all the people who passed, fancying that I might catch sight of someone whom I couldn’t quite remember and was always hoping I should meet. Sometimes I have thought he was just beside me and then when I turned round it was someone quite different.”

  “I have known that,” he muttered, but she was too intent now on her thoughts to notice the almost inaudible tone.

  She had put her hands over her face and was speaking in nervous, stammering desperation.

  “Oh, Don, I’m stupid, but you do see, don’t you, it’s no use? I wish it were, I wish I could, but I can’t. It was only a silly make-up game I suppose, but it’s gone, and nothing else will ever make up for it. If I married you it would still be the same. I like you, I admire you—no, it’s more than that, for sometimes, when you’re there, I feel very much in love with you. But I should still be wanting something else, something different, something I know I can never have—but that doesn’t make it any better, either for you or me.”

  She was looking at him now and thought that her words had been thrown against a wall. What was the use of trying to explain? He did not even pay attention to what she said. Oh, yes, he was a fine figure of a man; she had frequently felt an involuntary thrill of admiration when she looked at him, but now she saw him as a shadow, dark and remote from her, rather than a living companion.

  He might still want to marry her, he probably would, for he was of a dogged disposition. But he had not understood, or rather had not wished to do so, for she could not expect anyone to understand such an insane chimera. And if she gave in to him she would be alone, always, with someone who would always ignore or half unconsciously resent the thing that had mattered most in her life. She had lived in the company of a dream; it would be better to live on the memory of it than look forward to so empty a future.

  She watched him in a dull wonder while he, with a slow and rather awkward movement, knelt beside her and put his arms round her crouched and shivering body.

  “Why, what’s all this to-do?” he was saying in an unwontedly gruff voice. “Why do you put yourself to such pains to explain to me? I thought you had more to tell me; perhaps you will, some time. I have always thought you had the second sight, Rose Janet. I have felt that you were away—with someone else—when you were close beside me. I don’t say it doesn’t hurt—it does. But it doesn’t hurt as much as to see you suffer like this. I wish you were not shivering so. My lass, don’t cry like that.”

  It was a long time before she could speak again, and then stammered out, “Don—is it because you’re half Highland? That you take it so naturally, I mean. I’ve been wondering if I were going mad, or had been so all along—to have had my chief happiness in something that doesn’t exist.”

  “Why should that surprise you? It’s the reason that fills the theatres and cinemas. Any servant girl who longs to be a duchess, anyone who has dreams of successful ambition, finds their chief happiness in something that doesn’t exist. All artists do. Perhaps most lovers do also.”

  His slow smile with this delighted Jan. She must have been very stupid to think he had no sense of humour.

  “And what is it that doesn’t exist in me that gives you your chief happiness?” she asked.

  His answer was not given in words, nor was it, apparently, to something that did not exist.

  She tried to remember that it was impossible for her to marry Donald and go out to America, that she would only be wanting something else, something different. But for the moment, at any rate, she did not want anything else but Donald’s arms round her, with the knowledge that he knew and understood, that he was not even much surprised.

  They talked little. She did not wish to look ahead. Donald, she felt, was
impatient, eager for the future; soon, no doubt, she would be also. Life would begin again for her, it would “come real,” so he assured her. It would always be so. Not in the present time but in some time just ahead would lie their chief happiness, and still more, their chief security in happiness.

  The approach of a gardener’s wife recalled them sharply to the present. The gardener’s wife was tactful and would have hurried past, but Jan wished her to show them the private chapel, and to that intent entered into conversation with a question about the old drive.

  The gardener’s wife replied that the new owner was selling the timber. Mr. Harris, he’d always said it should be done, as the old drive had been useless a long time now, but for her part she thought it a shame, all those fine old trees—her father had planted some of them himself, he had. Yes, he had been gardener here a many years ago. There was a tumble-down cottage and garden in the middle of the drive then, and they had cleared it all away and planted fresh trees there.

  She consented to show them the chapel, though it would be too dark inside now to see it properly. On the way there, they asked if she had ever heard of the place being haunted, and with deprecatory giggles, she was induced to impart the usual vague, unsatisfactory things that one hears of any old house. A housemaid this summer had said she had seen a white figure at the top of the stairs, and had hysterics in the kitchen, but the butler had declared it was only the moonlight.

  The library had not been used for a very long time and people had got nervous of going into it. She had heard tell that if you sat there at night you saw a little man in a blue gown and a sort of turban come into the room carrying a candle, ” and he looks all round to see who’s there and then disappears.” But she had never known anyone who had seen it.