in the course of time, janet philimore and her attendant father, the general, arrived at their house on the point, and as olivia, apprised of their advent, did not tie a white satin bow on her gate, general and miss philimore left cards on the newly wedded couple, or, more exactly, a pencilled leaf torn out of a notebook.
thus arose a little intimacy which olivia encouraged on alexis’s account. had not her father and brothers trained her in the ways of men, one of which vital ways was that which led to the social intercourse of man with man? besides, it was a law of sex. if she had not a woman to talk to, she declared, she would go crazy. it was much more comforting to powder one’s nose in the privacy of the gyn?ceum than beneath man’s unsympathetic stare. conversely it had been a dictum of her father’s that, in order to enjoy port, men must be released from the distracting chatter of women.
“if i’m not broad-minded, i’m nothing,” said olivia.
“?‘broad’ is inadequate,” replied her husband, thrusting back his brown hair. “the very wonder of you is that your mind is as wide as the infinite air.”
which, of course, was as pleasant a piece of information as any bride could receive.
the magic of the halcyon days was intensified by the satisfaction of the sex cravings which, by the symbolism of nose-powdering and port-drinking, olivia had enunciated. in the deeps of her soul she could find no consuming passion for sitting scorched in a boat with a baited and contemptuously disregarded line between expectant finger and thumb. she could not really understand the men’s anxiety to induce a mentally defective fish to make a fool of itself. yet she would have sat blissfully for hours at his bidding, for the mere joy of doing as she was bidden; but not to be bidden was a great relief. similarly, alexis could not vie with olivia in concentration of being over the selection of material (in the fly-trap of a great watering-place previously mentioned) and over the pattern and the manufacture by knitting of gaudy hued silk jumpers. his infatuated eye marvelled at the delicate swiftness of her fingers, at the magical development of the web that was to encase her adorable body. but his heart wasn’t in it. janet’s was. and general philimore brought to the hooking of bass the earnest singleness of purpose that, vague years ago, had enabled him to ensnare thousands of huns in barbed-wire netting.
the primitive laws of sex asserted themselves, to the common happiness. the men fished; the women fashioned garments out of raw material. we can’t get away from the essentials of the stone age. and why in the world should we?
but—and here comes the delight of the reactions of civilization—invariably the last quarter of an hour of these exclusive sex-communings was filled with boredom and impatience. alone at last, they would throw themselves into each other’s arms with unconscionable gracelessness and say: “thank heaven, they’ve gone!” and then the sun would shine more brightly and the lap of the waves around them would add buoyancy to their bodies, and myra, ministering to their table wants, would assume the guise of a high priestess consecrating their intimacy, and the moon would invest herself with a special splendour in their honour.
now and then the four came together; a picnic lunch at some spot across the bay; a wet after-dinner rubber at bridge, or an hour’s gossip of old forgotten far-off things and battles of the day before yesterday, or—in the general’s house—a little idle music. there it was that olivia discovered another accomplishment in her wonderful husband. he could play, sensitively, by ear—knowledge of notated music he disclaimed. having been impressed as a child with the idea that playing from ear was a sin against the holy spirit of musical instruction, and gaining from such instruction (at landsdowne house—how different if she had been trained in the higher spheres of blair park!) merely a distaste for mechanical fingering of printed notes, she had given up music with a sigh of relief, mingled with regret, and had remained unmusical. and here was alexis, who boasted his ignorance of the difference between a crotchet and an arpeggio, racking the air with the poignant melancholy of russian folk-songs, and, in a puckish twinkle, setting their pulses dancing with a mad modern rhythm of african savagery.
“but, dear, what else can you do?” she asked, after the first exhibition of this unsuspected gift. “tell me; for these shocks aren’t good for my health.”
“on the mouth-organ,” he laughed, “i’ve not met any one to touch me.”
it was not idle boasting. on their next rainy-day visit to the neighbouring town, olivia slipped into a toy shop and bought the most swollenly splendid of these instruments that she could find, and alexis played “the marseillaise” upon it with all the blare of a steam orchestrion.
the happy days sped by in an atmosphere of love and laughter, yet filled not only with the sweet doings of idleness. olivia discovered that the poet-artist must work, impelled thereto by his poet-artistry. he must write of the passing things which touched his imagination and which his imagination, in turn, transmuted into impressions of beauty. these were like a painter’s sketches, said he, for use in after-time.
“it’s for you, my dear, that i am making a hoard of our golden moments, so that one of these days i may lay them all at your feet.”
and he must read, too. during the years that the locust of war had eaten, his educational development had stood still. his english literary equipment fell far short of that required by a successful english man of letters. vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had as yet left unexplored. the great elizabethan dramatists, for instance. thick, serious volumes from the london library strewed the furniture of the wind-swept sitting-room. olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius, read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty of marlowe, the subtle beauty of beaumont and fletcher, the haunting gloom of webster. in the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage, he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the burning words. it was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch.
once, reading beaumont and fletcher’s philaster, he clutched her tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked unheeding heaven, and declaimed:
“and then have taken me some mountain girl,
beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed
with leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ beasts,
our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
my large coarse issue! this had been a life
free from vexation.”
“but, alexis, darling, i’m so sorry,” she cried.
“why? what do you mean?”
“you said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart. i’m not a bit like that.”
they laughed and kissed. a dainty interlude.
“you’ve never really felt like that?”
“never.”
“the idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed olivia, with grand inversion of chronology. “tennyson has something like it in locksley hall. how does it go?”
with a wrinkling of the brow she quoted:
“then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space
i will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
“iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,
catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“so he did!” cried triona. “how wonderful of you to remember! why—the dear beautiful old thief!” he forgot the point at issue in contemplation of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “well, i’m damned! such a crib! with the early victorian veil of prudery over it! oh, lord! give me the elizabethan, any day. yet, isn’t it funny? the period-spirit? if tennyson had been an elizabethan, he would have walked over beaumont and fletcher like a colossus; but in a world under the awe of queen victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing elizabethan thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”
“dear,” said olivia, “we have much to be thankful for.”
“you and i?” he queried.
“our generation. we live in the sun. no longer under the shadow of the red flannel petticoat.”
rapturously he called her a marvel among women. olivia’s common sense discounted the hyperbole; but she loved his tribute to her sally of wit.
the book slipped to the floor, while she began an argument on the morality of plagiarism. how far was a man justified in stealing another man’s idea, working up another man’s material?
his sudden and excited defence of the plagiarist surprised her. he rose, strode about the room and, talking, grew eloquent; quoted shakespeare as the great exemplar of the artist who took his goods from everywhere he found them. olivia, knowing his joy in conversational fence, made smiling attack.
“in the last three hundred years we have developed a literary conscience.”
“a commercial matter,” he declared. “a question of copyright. i granted that. you have no right to exploit another man’s ideas to his material loss. but take a case like this”—he paced before her for a few seconds—“on the spur of the moment. it must have happened a thousand times in the war. an unknown dead man just a kilometre away from a bleak expanse of waste covered with thousands of dead men. some one happens upon him. searches him for identification. finds nothing of any use or interest save a little notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper next his skin. and he glances through the book and sees at once that it is no ordinary diary of war—discomfort of billets, so many miles’ march, morale of the men and so forth—but something quite different. he puts it in his pocket. for all that the modern world is concerned, the dead man is as lost as any skeleton dug up in an ancient egyptian grave-yard. the living man, when he has leisure, reads the closely written manuscript book, finds it contains rough notes of wonderful experiences, thoughts, imaginings. but all in a jumble, ill expressed, chaotic. suppose, now, the finder, a man with the story-teller’s gift, weaves a wonderful thrilling tale out of this material. who is injured? nobody. on the contrary, the world is the richer.”
“if he were honest, he ought to tell the truth in a preface,” said olivia.
triona laughed. “who would believe him? the trick of writing false prefaces in order to give verisimilitude is so overworked that people won’t believe the genuine ones.”
“i suppose that’s so,” she acquiesced. her interest in the argument was only a reflection of his. she was far more eager to resume the interrupted reading of philaster.
“it’s lovely that we always see things in the same way,” said he, sitting down again by her side.
besides all this delightful work and play there was the practical future to be considered. they could not live for ever at “quien sabe” on the point, nor could they live at the lord knows where anywhere else. they must have a home.
“before you stole over my being and metamorphosed me, i should have asked—why?” he said. “any old dry hole in a tree would have done for me, until i got tired of it and flew to another. but now——”
“now you’re dying to live in a nice little house and have your meals regular and pay rates and taxes, and make me a respectable woman.”
they decided that a house was essential. it would have to be furnished. but what was the object of buying new furniture at the present fantastic prices when she had a great house full of it—from real chippendale chairs to sound fish-kettles? the answer was obvious.
“why not medlow? olifant won’t stay there for ever. he hinted as much.”
she shook her head. no. medlow was excellent for cabbages, but passion-flowers like her alexis would wilt and die. he besought her with laughing tenderness not to think of him. from her would he drink in far more sunlight and warmth than his passion-flower-like nature could need. had she not often told him of her love for the quaint old house and its sacred associations? it would be a joy to him to see her link up the old life with the new.
“besides,” he urged, attributing her reluctance to solicitude for his happiness, “it’s the common-sense solution. there’s our natural headquarters. we needn’t stay there all the year round, from year’s end to year’s end. when we want to throw a leg we can run away, to london, paris, “quien sabe,” john o’ groats—the wide world’s before us.”
but olivia kept on shaking her head. abandoning metaphor, she insisted on the necessity of his taking the position he had gained in the social world of art and letters. hadn’t he declared a day or two ago that good talk was one of the most stimulating pleasures in life? what kind of talk could medlow provide? it was far more sensible, when major olifant’s tenancy was over, to move the furniture to their new habitation and let “the towers” unfurnished.
“as you will, belovedest,” he said. “yet,” he added, with a curious note of wistfulness, “i learned to love the house and the sleepy old town and the mouldering castle.” the practical decision to which she was brought out of honeymoon lotus-land was the first cloud on her married happiness. it had never occurred to her before that she could have anything to conceal from her husband. not an incident in the lydian galley had her ingenuousness not revealed. but now she felt consciously disingenuous, and it was horrible. how could she confess the real reason for her refusal to live in medlow? was she not to him the fairy princess? he had told her so a thousand times. he had pictured his first vision of her glowing flame colour and dusk beneath the theatre portico, his other vision of her exquisite in moonlight and snowflake in the great silent street. his faith in her based itself on the axiom of her regality. woman-like, she had laughed within herself at his dear illusions. but that was the key of the staggering position; his illusions were inexpressibly dear to her; they were the priceless jewels of her love. with just a little craft, so sweet, so divinely humorous, to exercise she could maintain these illusions to the end of time. . . .
but not at medlow.
she had gone forth from it, on her pilgrimage, in order to establish herself in her mother’s caste. and she had succeeded. the name of her grandfather, bagshawe of the guides, had been a password to the friendships which now she most valued. marriage had defined her social ambitions. they were modest, fundamentally sane. her husband, a man of old family and gentle upbringing, ranked with her mother and general and janet philimore. he was a man of genius, too, and his place was among the great ones of the social firmament.
she thought solely in terms of caste, gentle and intellectual. she swept aside the meretricious accessories of the sydney rooke gang with a reactionary horror.
a few days before, alexis, lyrically lover like, had said:
“you are so beautiful. if only i could string your neck with pearls, and build you a great palace . . .” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in the manner of the adoring, but comparatively impecunious poet.
and she had replied:
“i don’t want pearls, palaces or motor-cars. they’re all symbols, my dear, of the unreal. ordinary comfort of food and warmth and decent clothes—yes. but that’s all. so long as you string my heart with love—and my mind with noble thoughts.”
she longed passionately to live with him, above herself. and yet, here at the outset, was she living below herself. she would wake in the morning and, sleepless, grow hot and clammy at the thought of her deception. and the whole of her medlow life drifted miserably through her consciousness: the schoolgirl’s bitter resentment of the supercilious nose in the air attitude of the passing crocodile of blair park; of the vicar’s daughters’ condescending nod—he was a canon of somewhere and an “honourable” to boot—at “that pretty miss gale”; her recognition, when she came to years of sense, of the social gulf between her family and the neighbouring gentry whose lives, with their tennis parties and dances and social doings, seemed so desirable and so remote. to bring her wonderful husband into that world of “homely folk,” the excellent, but uncultivated trivetts, the more important tradespeople, the managers of the mills, the masters of the county school, her father’s world, and to see him rigidly excluded from that to which her mother and he himself belonged, was more than she could bear. she tortured herself with the new problem of snobbery—rating herself, in this respect, beneath lydia, who was frankly cynical as to both her own antecedents and her late husband’s social standing. but for the life of her she could not bring herself to explain to alexis the real impossibility of medlow. when she tried, she found that his foreign upbringing failed to seize the fine shade of her suggestion.
his gay carelessness eventually lulled her conscience. as soon as olifant had done with “the towers,” they could transfer the furniture to whatever habitation they chose and let the house.
“i feel you couldn’t find it in your heart to sell the old place,” he said. “besides—who knows—one of these days——”
she thought him the most delicately perceptive of men.
“no, dear,” she said, her cheek against his. “i couldn’t sell it.”
then all medlow danger was over. she breathed freely. but still—the little cloud of deceit hung over her serene mind and cast ever so tiny a shadow over her rapturous life.
they had been four weeks in the deliciously sure uncertainty of “quien sabe,” when, one noon while they were drying themselves in the hot sand and sunshine of their tiny bay, after a swim, myra came down gaunt through the whin-covered hill-side with a telegram in her hand. with the perversity of her non-recognition of the household paramountcy of her master, she handed the envelope to olivia. the name was just “triona.” olivia was about to open it instinctively when alexis started to a sitting position, and, with an eager glance, held out his hand.
“i think it’s for me. i was expecting it. do you mind?”
she passed it over with a smile. alexis rose to his feet, tore the envelope open, and moving a few yards away towards the surf read the message. then slowly he tore it up into the tiniest fragments and scattered them on the last wavelets of the ebb tide, and stood for a second or two, staring across the sea. at last he turned. olivia rose to meet him. myra was impassively making her way back up the rough slope.
“what’s the matter?” asked olivia, puzzled at his scrupulous destruction of the telegram and reading something like fear in his eyes.
“i’ve had bad news,” he said. he picked up his bath-gown, shook it free from sand, and huddled it around him. “let us get up to the house.” he shivered. “it’s cold.”
she followed him wonderingly.
“what bad news?” she asked.
he turned his head, with a half-laugh. “nothing so very desperate. the end of the world hasn’t come yet. i’ll tell you when i’ve changed.”
he rushed up the steps of the veranda and into his little dressing-room. olivia, dry and warm, sat in a sun-beat chair and anxiously waited for him. the instinct of a loving woman, the delicacy of a sensitive soul, forbade her teasing with insistent questions a man thrown for the moment off his balance. yet she swept the horizon of her mind for reasons.
a quarter of an hour afterwards—it had seemed a quarter of a century—he appeared, dressed, not in his customary flannels, but in the blue serge suit of their wedding day. the sight of it struck a chill through her heart.
“you are going away?”
he nodded. “yes, my dear, i have to.”
“why? what has happened?”
“i can’t tell you, dear. that’s the heart-rending part of it. it’s secret—from the foreign office.”
she reacted in laughter. “oh, my darling—how you frightened me. i thought it was something serious.”
“of course it’s serious, if i have to leave you for three or four days—perhaps a week.”
“a week!” she stood aghast. it was serious. how could she face a lonely epoch of seven days, each counting twenty-four thousand halting hours? what did it mean?
“there are not many men who know russian as i do. i’ve been in touch with the intelligence department ever since i landed in england. that’s why i went to finland in the autumn. these things bind me to inviolable secrecy, beloved. you understand, don’t you?”
“of course i understand,” she replied proudly.
“i could refuse—if you made a point of it. i’m a free man.”
she put her two hands on his shoulders—and ever after he had this one more unforgettable picture of her—the red bathing cap knotted in front, dainty, setting off her dark eyes and her little eager face—the peignoir, carelessly loose, revealing the sweet, frank mould of her figure in the red bathing suit.
“my father and my two brothers gave their lives for england. do you think i could be so utterly selfish as to grudge my country a week of my husband’s society?”
he took her cheeks in his hands. “more and more do you surpass the princess of my dreams.”
she laughed. “i’m an englishwoman.”
“and so, you don’t want to know where i’m going?”
she moved aside. “of course i do. i shall be in a fever till you come back. but if i’m not to know—well—i’m not to know. it’s enough for me that you’re serving your country. tell me,” she said suddenly, catching him by the coat lapels. “there’s no danger.”
he smiled. “not a little tiny bit. of that you can be assured. the worst is a voyage to helsingfors and back. so i gathered from the telegram, which was in execrable foreign office russian.”
“and when are you going?”
“by the first train. i must report to-night.”
“can’t i come with you—as far as london?”
he considered for a moment. “no,” he said. “where would you sleep? in all probability i shall have to take the midnight boat to havre.”
an hour later they parted. she returned to the empty house frightened at she knew not what, insecure, terrifyingly alone; she was fretted by an uncanny sense of having mated with the inhabitant of another planet who had suddenly taken wing through the vast emptiness to the strange sphere of his birth. she wandered up and down the veranda, in and out of the three intimate rooms, where the traces of his late presence, books, papers, clothes, lay strewn carelessly about. she smiled wanly, reflecting that he wore his surroundings loosely as he did his clothes. suddenly she uttered a little feminine cry, as her glance fell on his wrist watch lying on the drawing-room mantelpiece. he had forgotten it. she took it up with the impulsive intention of posting it to him at once. but the impulse fell into the nervelessness of death, when she remembered that he had given her no address. she must await his telegram—to-morrow, the next day, the day after, he could not say. meanwhile, he would be chafing at the lack of his watch. she worried herself infinitely over the trifle, unconsciously finding relief in the definite.
the weary hours till night passed by. she tried to read. she tried to eat. she thought of going over the road to the philimores’ for company; but her mood forbade. for all their delicacy they would ask reasons for this sudden abandonment. she magnified its importance. she could have said: “my husband has gone to london on business.” but to her brain, overwrought by sudden emotion, the commonplace excuse seemed inadequate. she shrank from the society of her kind friends, who would regard this interplanetary mystery as a matter of course.
if only alexis had taken his watch! perhaps he would have time to buy another—a consoling thought. meanwhile she strapped it on her own wrist, heroically resolved not to part with it night or day until he returned.
she sat by the lamp on the sitting-room table, looking out over the veranda at the pitch blackness of a breathless night in which not even the mild beat of the surf could be heard. she might have been in some far pacific desert island. her book lay on her lap—the second volume of motley’s dutch republic. all the alvas and williams, all the heroes and villains, all the soldiers and politicians and burghers were comfortably dead hundreds of years ago. what did these dead men matter, when one living man, the equal of them all, had gone forth from her, into the unknowableness of the night?
myra came into the room with an amorphous bundle in her hand.
“the camp bed in the dressing-room isn’t very comfortable—but i suppose i can sleep on it.”
olivia turned swiftly in her chair, startled into human realities.
“no. it’s a beast of a thing. but i should love to have you to be with me. you’re a dear. you sleep in my bed and i’ll take the dressing-room.”
“you once gave signs of being a woman of sense,” said myra tonelessly. “it seems i was mistaken.”
she disappeared with her bundle. olivia put out the light and went to bed, where she lay awake all the night, fantastically widowed, striving with every nerve and every brain-cell to picture the contemporaneous situation of her husband. three o’clock in the morning. he would be in mid-channel. had he secured a berth? or was he forced to walk up and down the steamer’s deck? thank heaven, it was a black still night. she stole out of bed and looked at the sea. a sea of oil. it was something to be grateful for. but the poor boy without his watch—the watch which had marked for him the laggard minutes of captivity, the racing hours of approaching death, the quiet, rhythmic companion and recorder of his amazing life.
she forced all her will power to sleep; but the blank of him there on the infinite expanse of mattress she felt like a frost. the dawn found her with wide and sleepless eyes.
and while she was picturing this marvel among men standing by the steamer’s side in the night, in communion with the clear and heavy stars, holding in his adventurous grasp the secret of a world’s peace, alexis triona was speeding northwards, sitting upright in a third-class carriage, to newcastle-on-tyne. and at newcastle he expected no ship to take him to finland. lucky if he found a cab in the early morning to take him to his destination three miles away.
for the telegram which he had torn to pieces had not come from the war office. it was not written in russian. it was in good, plain, curt english:
“mother dying. come at once.”
