A Long Time Ago

by Margaret Kennedy

I little thought that I so soon

  Should know despair!

  I wish I had a silent tomb

  In a lonely situation.

  Where the rustic population

  Would come with sighs and gloom

  And lay the willow wreath above

  And say This Maiden died of love,

  She knew despair!

  Will you honestly and truly tell me if you think this is as good as Rosamund’s poetry? I will now close as I have not got any more forget-me-not paper.

  With kindest regards,

  Yours affectionately,

  HOPE.

  Letter from Maude

  DEAREST MAMMA,—

  You will be glad to hear that Barny seems to be standing the climate here very well. But, oh! How I wish you were here to help me with him! He wants to go rock-climbing!!!

  Of course I pretend to agree, and say how lovely! But I have persuaded him to wait till Dick comes, IF Dick ever does come. (He has stopped writing to Ellen! But we suppose he is still in London.) Don’t you agree with me that it would be VERY risky? Or am I merely being fussy? Do write and tell me what line I ought to take.

  Of course I cannot blame him for getting a little bored here, for there are really no interests for him, except of course the music, which we get almost more of than even he wants. He said to me yesterday—only jokingly of course—that he never expected to entirely spend his summer holiday in a conservatoire!

  Louise of course is quite taken up with her new friend. You know what I think, Mamma, and I have not changed my mind about the good lady. I do think somebody ought to say something. Barny agrees with me absolutely, and, as he says, we pay part of the rent and we ought to have some say in who comes here. I find it very difficult to get him to be polite to her even, but I do want to keep the peace if I can. Luckily he does not have to see much of her. I take him off for whole day expeditions. He thinks that Dick will make a fuss about it, but I am not so sure.

  Kerran and Ellen just laugh at me. They say the whole thing is platonic because they spend all their time learning Vurgil. But a woman like that simply couldn’t be platonic. You have only to look at her. Barny says she has eyes like a basilisk, or an odelisk, I forget which, and I am sure that all the servants are talking. What I mean is there are times when the very best of men act very strangely. They cannot help it. Don’t you agree with me, Mamma? Even a man like Gordon is a man, I suppose, like everybody else. I wonder if Louise will find that out to her cost one of these days. Could you drop her a little hint, perhaps? Anything you say she would listen to. If you said something, sort of joking, that might make her think. It would be such a dreadful thing, with all the children in the house, it is too horrible to think of! But when one has had some experience of the seamy side of life, one knows what can happen. It would ruin his position, a divorce, I mean. And even if they shared custody of the children, it would never be the same thing.

  I can see you smiling at me, ever so wisely, and telling me not to cry “wolf! wolf!” Am I an alarmist? Of course I am! But I do WISH you were here to tell me so! Do send me just one line about what I ought to do. At a word from me Barny would put his foot down. But I do not want to wilfully make trouble if I can help it.

  Ellen seems to be keeping very well, but I think Dick ought to write to her. But I suppose that is sentimental. You do not say how your rheumatism is. A bulletin in your next letter, please!

  Your very loving

  MAUDE.

  P.S.—I have tried to stir up Barny to write, but you know what he is! I shall not say anything against the climbing idea till Dick comes, as if Dick doesn’t come, then it will all fall through. Do you think that is wise?

  M. A.

  Letter from Louise

  … I have discovered that letter writing is a futile occupation. A letter reflects the mood of the moment and moods change. I feel exquisitely happy to-day, but on Friday, when you read what I have written, I may be feeling wretched and all that I have said will be false.

  But I must write, for I feel that some of the others are against me, and I do not know what they are telling you. I want you to understand how inspiring and how beautiful a thing is this influence which has come into my life.

  You know I have never been a very happy woman. I live in a prison—a prison where everyone is very kind to me but where I never have room to stretch my wings. I have been cut off from the friendship of people who would have been really sympathetic to me. All that I am asking is that I may take a little holiday from my prison, and from the conventions and insincerities that are stifling me. Here, in this beautiful place, I am able to do so, and to live naturally: not to say this and do that because I ought, but because I wish: to enjoy the freedom of an intercourse which expresses the “genial current of the soul.” Is this too much to ask?

  In Elissa Koebel I have found much more than a friend. She is all that I was meant to be, and that I can never be. If I had been brought up in different surroundings, and if I had not been married so young! I do not blame you, Mother. You wanted to see me a happy woman. And I daresay that I am happier than I would have been if I had followed my stars. Some people are destined for tragedy, and if they deny their destiny they must remain, in doing so, unfulfilled.

  What has Maude been saying about Elissa? I can well imagine how that narrow, provincial mind must see her. But, Mother, I want you to understand this. Elissa never denies that her life has been unconventional. She has told me a great deal of her experiences and I must say that I find in them much beauty and much tragedy, but nothing which I can dare to blame. Her friendship with Gordon gives me no uneasiness. It is purely intellectual, so much so that we have laughed about it, Elissa and I. And even if there were, as Maude would say, “something in it,” what harm would that do? A thing is only wrong if it makes people sad or angry. I do not know that it would make me either sad or angry to know that Gordon was enjoying some beautiful emotional experience. His life has been too parched and academic.

  But I know who will fall in love with her, and that is Guy Fletcher. They are made for one another, those two, and it will be wonderful to bring them together. I have talked about him a great deal and she is already anxious to see him. She said to me to-day: “I feel that happiness is coming near to me.” And I feel so, too. There is a wonderful sense of anticipation in these beautiful days which we all enjoy so much. I am glad that he did not come before, when we were not properly settled into the rhythm of life here. Ellen is perturbed because she has had no letter from him. But I can understand that. He may not be in the mood to write. Dick, I mean.

  Your

  LOUISE.

  Letter from Ellen

  DEAREST MOTHER,—

  Just a note to tell you that it is all right about Dick. We have had a wire to say that he comes this evening, and I am just off down in the boat to Killross to meet him. I am so relieved.

  Your loving

  ELLEN.

  12

  IT was not until they got out of the train at Dunclough that Guy Fletcher could be certain. In London he had seen a tall, sandy-haired man hurrying down the platform, a man who might be Dick Napier, but he could not be sure, even when they encountered one another again on the boat. This person was not quite up to the standard of his memories.

  They had only met once, at a dinner party in the Woodstock Road. It had been one of those undonnish parties which Louise sometimes succeeded in giving, in spite of her environment. Guy had enjoyed himself and had always looked back upon the occasion as having been a good evening. The conversation had struck him as having something of that range and ease which comes more easily to people who are in touch with the larger world of affairs than to those who live in a narrow and cultured circle. Nothing very brilliant or memorable had been said, but he had felt at the time that Louise was right when she complained that the academic mind is often so unbearably “poky.”

  It was obvious that she thought the world of her brother-in-law, and Guy, who was somet
hing of a hero-worshipper, was inclined to agree with her. Dick Napier was impressive, not only by reason of his formidable good looks, but also because of the amazing self-confidence which expressed itself in everything that he said or did. It was the confidence of a man who knows his own abilities to be so first-rate that he has no need to display them, who can afford to be commonplace and yet hold his own in the pack. Guy was not absolutely sure whether he liked this or not. There was something a little depressing about so much superiority, and he could never imagine himself growing fond of Napier in the way that he was fond of Gordon Lindsay. But he was impressed. Their conversation had given him a sense of value and expansion and he hoped that they might meet again.

  But there was nothing of this glamour about the problematic stranger on the journey to Dunclough. Guy took a good look at him on the boat and decided that he must have been mistaken. The two men could not be the same. There was a similarity of build and colouring, but this was altogether a slighter, a less important individual. Also he seemed to be drinking a good deal, and that did not fit in. When he was not morosely prowling round the deck, he was morosely gulping down whisky-and-soda in the bar.

  Yet, when they landed, they came on in the same train together.

  “If he gets out at Dunclough I shall know,” thought Guy.

  He did get out at Dunclough. They alighted at that lonely little station together, late in the afternoon, and discovered that no vehicle had been sent to meet them. They would have to walk seven miles into Killross.

  Guy ventured to make himself known.

  “We met, do you remember, at the Lindsays’?”

  Dick nodded. It was possible that he remembered nothing about it, and that he was displeased at the prospect of company on the walk. He explained that he had telegraphed to Inishbar, but that they might not have heard in time, at the island, to send a conveyance up from Killross. And then it seemed as though he was pulling himself together in an effort to be more civil. He suggested, with a kind of dim geniality, that they might get a drink somewhere before they started.

  Guy’s heart sank. But it turned out that no drinks could be had in the neighbourhood. Outside the tiny station a desolate road led away across a brown bog. They set off resignedly upon their seven miles’ trudge.

  It was an uneasy walk. Guy made a few nervous remarks, and he got short, inattentive replies which were not exactly surly but which damped his spirits. Covertly, from time to time, he examined his companion, trying to make out what was wrong and in what way his memory had played him false. He found that he had always thought of Dick Napier as one thinks of an admirable, high-powered machine, and now it was as if the machine was not working. The dynamic quality had left it: the whole personality seemed to have come to a standstill, obscured in a queer kind of frigidity and inertia. The frigidity had been there before, he thought, even at the Lindsay dinner party. It was an unsympathetic nature. But its coldness had been tempered with brilliance, energy and pace. No trace of that agreeable combination was now to be found. The man was “not himself.” He was plodding along the road as if he had been walking in his sleep, staring always in front of him into the middle distance as if he expected to see there some obstacle which might force him to turn back. How little he knew of his surroundings was made plain when, after a couple of miles, they came to a bend in the road where a rough cart track ran off in a straight line across the moor. He went straight on over this track, not noticing the turn of the road, and had got some yards away before Guy’s shout recalled him.

  “Isn’t this the road?”

  “What?”

  He started, stared and came back. Guy realised suddenly and uncomfortably that he was drunk. That was the solution of the whole thing, and a very unpleasant one it was.

  He resented it the more because their walk, in other circumstances, would have been so immensely enjoyable. It was exasperating that the central figure in such a scene should be a drunken man. He tried to put Dick out of his mind and to see only the line of hills, indigo against a primrose sunset, and the pale horizons of the sea, of which they caught a glimpse whenever they climbed a hill. The air was soft and melancholy, full of aromatic memories, whiffs of peat smoke and bog myrtle. It was a moment to remember for ever, if only it had not been for this piece of human discord at his side. Discord of any kind was anathema to Guy. It worked in his mind like yeast, fermenting and leavening his whole being until he felt himself almost coming out in a rash with irritation. Things like this were always happening to him. He worshipped beauty, and pursued it, but he was seldom allowed to enjoy it in peace.

  “It is not,” he reflected, “the world’s slow stain that I am afraid of, but the bits of orange peel left on the top of Snowdon.”

  He had long ago given up all efforts at conversation, but during the last mile or two his companion began to talk. He said suddenly:

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Of course not,” agreed Guy, who feared that he might have reached the truculent stage.

  “Merely sleepy. Had a very difficult case. Been out of bed three nights running, counting last night on the boat. Forty-seven hours it lasted. They called me up—let me see, when was it?—in the small hours of Tuesday morning, and as I was anxious I went round at once. I’d been anxious about the case all along, you see. Do you know a man called Ensor Thring? … No. I suppose not. He’s got influenza.”

  For a few moments Guy imagined that Ensor Thring must have been the patient, but when Dick began to talk about pregnancy he realised his mistake.

  “I’d been worried all the time, you see, weighing the risk of abortion against the risk of this thing flaring up again.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Guy, quickening his pace.

  The word abortion was so ugly that he wanted to get away from it, but Dick’s long legs were more than a match for his and he had to listen.

  “It was an appendix abscess … quite a small one … and it had ruptured. She was in a bad way when I got there, very thirsty and restless, and speaking in a whisper. I operated at once. She took the anæsthetic well enough, but she had peritonitis. There were a lot of adhesions, and I had to decide how to get proper drainage …”

  The story, the inexpressibly horrible story, proceeded in a mist of details that were mostly incomprehensible but none the less revolting for that. It went on and it went on. Guy almost began to believe that the operation itself must have lasted for forty-seven hours. He had always felt a morbid aversion for such topics: the sight of blood made him feel sick, and the thought of a human body (perhaps, some day, under an evil star, his own body) being cut up, the inhuman knife ripping through flesh and muscle, was quite intolerable. When obliged to think of it, he had imagined that surgery must be something quick, daring and miraculous, a terrible kind of conjuring trick. It was not a man who did such things, but a pair of hands backed by an unerring brain. But this sounded like a most ghastly muddle. The brain behind the hands had been harassed and frightened, trying this, and seeing that had failed, not infallible at all. And the woman had been pregnant, a thought which could only have beauty, for Guy, when divorced from its physical significance.

  Nausea clutched him. He strove to shut his mind, not to listen, but in vain.

  “I ought to have risked an operation in the quiescent stage. It would have been possible to drain the abscess without letting the infection get into the abdomen …”

  This was the worst thing that had ever happened to anybody, this enforced listening, this progress through hell upon hell of uncertainty and defeat. Some time, at some point, this nameless being, “the patient,” would die and be out of it. But that was not all. The end was still going on. The end was panic.

  Over the last steep hill they struggled. A clear twilight had fallen and they could see below them the quiet lake and the little white town. A few lights had begun to twinkle and thin threads of smoke rose up in the calm air.

  “I shall be sick,” Guy kept saying to himself. “I shall be sick.” />
  Thring had come back into the story, and he thought now that Thring must be the husband.

  “I shall give him the facts, just as I’ve given them to you. He can make what he likes of them. It doesn’t matter what he thinks or what anyone thinks, because they won’t get another chance to say I’ve made a mess of it. I’m not going to make any more. The strain’s too much, and I can’t stand it. I’ve known I couldn’t, for months. I’ve been expecting something like this, and I’ve been saying to myself: ‘When it happens, then I’m done for.’ I can’t stand failure, in the state I’ve got into. Just lately I haven’t been able to tackle the simplest jobs without sweating like a pig. It’s been a perfect nightmare. Take Monday. I had a hysterectomy. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that’s one of the easiest …”

  “Look! There’s Killross.”

  “But this is the end. I shall go into the country and start a chicken farm.”

  They stumbled in the twilight down the rough road towards the roofs and the scattered lights. A few minutes brought them out on to a little quay where all the male inhabitants of Killross seemed to be standing about in small, murmuring groups. A couple of public-houses did a roaring trade, and towards one of these Dick began to drag his unwilling companion.

  “We can get a drink here.”

  “Hadn’t we better see if they’ve sent the boat?”

  Down on the water, a little way off, they could see that a boat was waiting. Two fishermen were resting on their oars and in the stern there sat a woman in a hat, not a country woman. Dick, as he caught sight of it, fairly took to his heels and bolted into a doorway.

  “That’s my wife,” he muttered. “She’s come to meet us. Look here, Fletcher …” he clutched Guy’s arm…. “I’ll get a drink and come on later. I’ll get one of these chaps to row me up. But you go, and you tell her what I’ve told you. I can’t do it. Tell her everything.”

  He fled into the inn and left the protesting Guy outside. Guy thought that the people in the waiting boat had seen them. It drew nearer and a call came from the woman in the stern.