Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  She was invited to spend a month in Venice by a young woman who, whilst her husband was in France, had worked with her in the Admiralty. It was a young and joyous party. The yellow bathing sands with their long, lazy days and colourful company; the dinners suddenly organised in the open air outside some little inn in a tiny square of the town; the silent gliding in a gondola at night along black and narrow canals between precipices of lofty and decaying palaces, where the gentle splash of the oar was the only sound; the new friends; an occasional dash out to the islands in a motor-boat; the life and beauty of the Piazza all made up a glamorous month which repeated for Lois her mother’s cruise on the Sea Flower.

  The same revelation, the same novelty, the same magic. But mother and daughter took their hours of loveliness and made of them very different things. By one they were set apart as a treasure of good memories, by the other as a nursery of resentments.

  On the morning before Lois was to return to England, there appeared on the beach of the Lido a French nobleman with a resounding name, whose claim to reputation depended upon the circumstance that he had run through three immense fortunes of three successive American wives and written a book about it afterwards. He was declaiming to a young English Lieutenant-Colonel there recovering from wounds, on the vulgarity of the scene.

  “It is all disgusting,” he cried. “There is no taste. There is no nobility. I go from here to Aix. I shall find the same disheartening medley there.”

  “Why do you go there?” the Lieutenant-Colonel asked bluntly. “And why do you come here?”

  The great nobleman waved his stick.

  “It is the ruin of an era. As a philosopher I like to see “ — and he broke off suddenly with a most unphilosophical gleam in his eyes. A girl slim and tall, a goddess in a blue bathing suit and green shoes, sauntered past them. “Quelle jolie démarche!” he exclaimed, with all the enthusiasm of a connoisseur in such matters.

  The goddess in the bathing suit and the green shoes was Lois Perriton; and that night the young Lieutenant-Colonel, whose name was Derek Crayle, sat next to her at a dinner-party at the Grand Hotel. He told her of the great nobleman’s change of humour when he had seen her stroll past him, and having thus broken the ice they began to discover how interesting they were compared to the rest of the party. Then they both fell upon a gentle melancholy.

  “I don’t know what I shall do now,” said Derek Crayle. “Of course I can’t keep my present command. With all the brigadiers about, we’ve got to tumble down the ladder as fast as we went up it. My uncle Tony Westram would like me to go on. I should get a company, no doubt.”

  “Your trouble’s only an eclipse. Mine’s an axe,” Lois replied ruefully, and she told him of her four years and how she had risen from a cellar in the basement to the fine room overlooking the Horse Guards Parade.

  “And you mean to say the Admiralty is going to do without you!” cried Derek in a stupefaction.

  Lois nodded.

  “It’s going to try to.”

  “It’s mad,” said Derek Crayle emphatically.

  This was only one of the points on which the couple found themselves in agreement. The old men were coming back again. The world apparently had learnt nothing — absolutely nothing. The moment the danger was over it was once more “Make way for the aged.” Fine young brilliant tacticians must go back to the barrack-square and, still worse, wonderful girls must leave the Admiralty. Lois’ neighbour on the other side had a continuous view during that dinner-party of a charming young white shoulder draped in a pale green frock, whilst the lady next to Derek Crayle was offered the contemplation of the back of his dinner-jacket. They slipped away together when the company rose.

  “I have a gondola at the Luna Steps,” Derek Crayle suggested. “What do you say? Less stuffy than dancing — what?”

  Lois nodded and, fetching a gay cloak of lame, she draped it about her shoulders. They returned to the Piazza towards midnight and found it thronged. A great singer, Venetian-born, had announced that on that night he would sing to Venice, and Lois and Derek Crayle had hardly taken their places at one of the little tables before the triumphant voice rose, carried aloft upon the music of the violins, as a conqueror upon the shields of his warriors. Lois drew in her breath with a gasp. The spell-bound silent throng, the balm of the air, the moon sailing lustrously white above the domes of St. Mark’s, and the lovely voice rising and falling and beating against the walls of a square itself so beautiful that it seemed made of the texture of a dream, swept Lois away into a silent and unearthly ecstasy. Yet all the while there was a whisper at her heart.

  “This is the perfect night. You will never know such another. You are only vouchsafed this night so that the memory of it may embitter all your days to come. You will never come here again.”

  As the singer’s voice mingled with a woman’s in the final duet of “Aïda,” the whisper grew louder and louder in Lois’ hearing. Derek Crayle saw her lean back in her chair, her face upturned, her slim white throat bared; and for a moment he believed her to have been seized by some intolerable distress. She shook her head, however, when he moved towards her, and when the song was over and the throng moving from the square she seemed to have recovered her high spirits.

  “I was thinking that...” she began, and broke off. “But it was nonsense. I shall come back here. I shall bring my mother here.” The voice dropped, she gazed about her, drawing a deep breath. Then she bade him good night and good-bye with an admirable composure.

  Lois left for London on the next morning by the Simplon Express. She allowed herself the costliness of that train in the confidence that she would find work to her hand. But to her surprise and indignation she found herself answering advertisements and tramping round the agencies in vain. There were no domestic servants, but the world was full of accomplished young secretaries with nothing to do, whilst well-meaning ladies of title were busy collecting money to train yet more young women to crowd the already over-crowded.

  Lois was here and there offered work at a starvation wage. She obtained one engagement at a salary of four pounds a week from an employer who required for that remuneration a secretary plus a mistress. Lois departed. She then became accountant and book-keeper to an over-hopeful film company. After the liquidation of that concern she sold dresses for a few months, or rather tried to sell dresses, in one of the little wooden huts which stood in the Strand on the site of what is now Bush House; and since she worked chiefly upon a commission, both her savings and with them her cherished dream faded and grew thin.

  And after that unlucky venture the blank days followed. The crasher, in fact, had crashed. She was living in a bed-sitting-room at the back of Fitzroy Square, eating meagrely, nursing what was left of her savings, and conscious that both her courage and her vitality were dwindling in the heat of an exotic summer. There came upon her an overwhelming desire to see again her adored mother and herself learn, if by any means she could, something of that mother’s proud acquiescence. Long ago she had said to herself, when she had turned her back on Glebe Villa:

  “I will never go into that house again.”

  But in the ruin of her plans the resolve weakened and died. She wrote to her mother:

  “I am coming to see you, darling,” and, though she strove to hide it, the bitterness of her disappointment pierced through the careful phrases and wrung her mother’s heart.

  Mona sat with the letter upon her knee, looking out upon Acacia Grove, her eyes quite blinded with tears. She too had resolved that Lois should never return. She was more than ever resolved now. For life in Glebe Villa had gone from worse to worse. Quarrels were more frequent, if that could be called a quarrel which was a long upbraiding upon one side and a persistent silence upon the other; the morose drinker drank deeper; expenses were higher and less money was earned.

  “My dear, my dear, I can’t let you come here,” Mona cried aloud. She gave way for a moment to a despairing impression that they were a doomed family. Then she argued
:

  “It’s only because I am stubborn...If I could force myself to be willing never to see Lois again, except for some rare moments, surely I could force myself, too, to extinguish this last little spark of pride...After all, I don’t matter now...my darling does.”

  She rose up in a bitter spirit. A possibility often pondered, as often rejected, and yet always resurgent, was now accepted and to be made definite fact. A long debate was at an end; a long and doubtful struggle closed. Mona was actually relieved. She put on her hat and sent a telegram to Lois:

  Don’t come. I shall join you for a few days tomorrow.

  She sent this telegram on a morning of the first week of July.

  XVI. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

  IN JUNE OF that year Derek Crayle crossed over from Gissens and lodged at Upper Theign. A Mr. Arthur Hoyle, a sharp-visaged, alert little cloth manufacturer from Bradford, was also a visitor, and an atmosphere of subdued excitement pervaded the house. The most impervious of persons could not pass along the corridors without feeling a curious tingle of expectation. Some great affair was in the balance. The time was weighty; and Derek, in spite of the pellucid air and the cool cradle-song of running water, slept no less fitfully than Lois in the parching heat of Fitzroy Square.

  In the early hours of one of these mornings he rose from his bed and looked eastwards out of his window. It was still dark. Nightingales and sweet perfumes had the wide park to themselves except at one point. Three hundred yards away, at the edge of a cluster of elms, a bright light struck upwards from a big window in a roof and gave to the leaves which over-canopied it the burnished luxuriance of the foliage of Ceylon. Derek Crayle watched that lonely illumination with anxiety.

  “It won’t do!” he said to himself. “It’s high time that I mounted the bridge and put a stop to the nonsense.”

  He slipped a pair of flannel trousers and a thick jacket over his pyjamas, twisted a long scarf round his throat, drew on his high rubber boots and, passing along a passage, knocked upon a door.

  “Olivia!” he called in a low voice. “Olivia!” The answer was returned at once.

  “Come in, Derek.”

  He went into the big bedroom. All the windows were open, all the blinds raised. Olivia was wide awake with a lamp burning by her bedside and an open book upon the coverlet. She was leaning upon her elbow, her eyes watching her visitor with apprehension.

  “What is it, Derek?...Has anything happened?”

  “No, no,” Derek Crayle reassured her. “But something’s going to happen. I want your consent for it to happen. I want to fetch out Hoyle with his key.”

  Olivia Thewliss turned her head from the two windows in the front of the room to the one big window on her left-hand side. From her bed she could see the bright glare from the skylight gilding the green boughs above it. She did not answer.

  “This is the third night, Olivia. Three nights and days. And he’s not a young man...”

  “Just for that reason, you see, Derek...” she argued doubtfully. “He won’t want this ordeal a second time. And besides, he wants the results in his own time...Oh, I don’t mean the money — but seeing it done everywhere — his work. He insisted that he shouldn’t be interrupted. He foresaw that we might want to interrupt him.”

  For a few moments both of them stared in silence at the steady light across the park.

  “He’s putting a heavy strain upon himself,” Derek continued stubbornly. “It’s up to you, Olivia, of course, to say yes or no. But three nights and days! It’s too long.”

  “He had food for that length of time and for longer,” Olivia contended. “He was prepared to spend that time.”

  “Yes,” Derek admitted. “But suppose that something happened which he wasn’t prepared for. He’s alone over there. He may have fallen and hurt himself. He may have fainted...”

  “He switched on the light yesterday when the dusk came. I don’t see any reason to fear.” She was silent again, staring through the open window across the darkness to the square of bright light under the coppice. “Of course, it’s a long time...a long strain.”

  Derek Crayle’s anxiety was increasing her own. Olivia had married Mark Thewliss without bringing to the marriage, as she had warned him, any passion of love. He had wanted her help in the making of his life’s completeness, her companionship, and she had given him both. Certainly little diffidences had disappeared, he had become at home in his new incarnation as a country gentleman. He sought her advice, too, on matters of bigger moment, and very often took it. There had grown up between the two a strong and solid affection, a little stronger perhaps on Olivia’s side, because she had not given him that child for which as she knew he had poignantly longed.

  There was an element of remorse in her affection, of gratitude too. For he had not allowed any complaint of his to wound her. He had given her much, a pleasant house, the opportunities of kindness and hospitality, a constant consideration, a share in his plans She was no longer pinched, as Mr. Wyatt a few years back would have described her; she was no longer a dependent on her rich relatives. Great advantages all of them, and making for a comely life. And the one return he had wanted — she had never forgotten his revealing glance from herself to Angela at the luncheon table at Gissens — she had not made. She was all the more anxious to-night that Mark should find this other hope of his fulfilled.

  “There’s a better way,” she said. “We must wait till the morning, and it will be here very soon now. We’ve no reason to think that anything has happened to Mark. But for your fears I shouldn’t be worried at all.”

  “Oh! And the lamp burning by your bed? And the open book?” Crayle rejoined. “You’re as nervous as I am. You know as well as I do that the experiment has taken too long.”

  Olivia shook her head. She remembered the strict orders Mark Thewliss had given.

  “We’ll wait until morning. If when the daylight comes the light in the laboratory is turned out, then we’ll go on waiting. For we shall know that Mark has not finished and wishes to be undisturbed. But if the light still burns in the broad day, then we shall—” she would not say “know.” She caught the word back, “we shall have a right to fear that some accident may have happened. We shall be justified for sending for Hoyle and his key.”

  Derek Crayle could get no other answer, though he argued a little more, giving her instances from the War of how a man’s endurance may snap.

  “I won’t listen to you, Derek!” she cried. “Go away and let me sleep.”

  Derek grumbled himself out of the room.

  “Women! My word! Gentle, did you say? Compared with ’em, a tank’s a sponge-cake.”

  But Olivia sat up in her bed anxiously looking out. The black cap of the night was lifted a little, as though the earth-goddess wanted air and wind to blow through her curls. Light seeped in under the tilted rim, the pale invader, hung a drapery of mist to the branches of the trees, and mocked the dew-drenched meadows with a mimicry of winter frosts. Suddenly the grey was shot with lilac, and the lilac hemmed with gold, and to a great noise of blackbirds and thrushes and cawing rooks, a burning arc of the sun cut the sky. The long, low laboratory which Mark Thewliss had built for himself at the edge of the elms was visible now with its shuttered windows and its barred door. And as Olivia looked, the yellow glare in the skylight died away.

  “That just shows,” she said contentedly, “I was right,” and she slipped down into her bed and went to sleep.

  Meanwhile Derek Crayle had crept quietly down the stairs and let himself out of the house. He crossed the park towards the laboratory and saw the spurt of a match and then the waxing and waning of tobacco in the bowl of a pipe. On the edge of the small gravel clearing in front of the laboratory a man wrapped in a weather-beaten British warm was smoking, seated on a length of tree-trunk.

  “Good morning, Brent,” said Derek.

  “Mornin’, sir,” replied Brent.

  “Nothing happened, I suppose.”

  “Not a thing.”


  “You’ll be relieved in half an hour.”

  “That’s all right, sir. I have done sentry-go under worse conditions,” said Brent with a laugh.

  He smoked for a little while in silence. Then he resumed: “They do say that if this ‘yer experimentation works out O.K. it’ll mean a lot o’ difference.”

  “I should think so,” returned Crayle. “It’ll cheapen production — put pleasant things within easier reach of the public.” He was remembering the homilies or Mark Thewliss.

  Brent knocked the ashes of his pipe into the palm of his hand and filled the bowl again.

  “The public. Yes,” he said. “You gentlemen dandles the public and gives it plenty o’ pap. But the public ain’t the sort o’ defenceless baby you thinks it. You just go on strike for a bit and inconvenience it. It’ll learn you. What I was thinkin’ of was us. It’ll mean new machinery, very like, new installations.”

  “Yes, I suppose it will,” said Crayle.

  “Well, there’s some firms that can’t afford it, see? They’ll go under. There’s Mr. Hoyle, my boss. He’s a rich man but he ain’t looking forward to the moment when Lord Thewliss throws open that door there and says, ‘Make a statue of me. I’ve done it!’ There’s two sides to these questions, Colonel Crayle. And I’m incomplete there. For there’s a third. I never saw a piece of new machinery which didn’t make the workman’s job just a tiny bit more soulless than it was before. You watch, watch, watch, watch, watch and then you touch a little lever. Then you watch, watch, watch, watch, watch and touch the little lever again. And you do it twice a minute for eight hours a day for forty-five years. Foolproof, no doubt, sir, but foolproof and soulless are two words for the same thing.”

  Derek Crayle was disinclined to enter upon a discussion of economics at so unsuitably pristine an hour. He said lightly: