S.S. “Dancing Unicorn”
(somewhere in the Baltic).
My dear Stephen,
Thank you very much for your letter, which arrived the morning I was leaving Carlice for this cruise. I ought to have answered before, only, as you can imagine, I’ve been seeing so many new people and new sights that I’ve hardly had a minute.
I’m having a lovely time and it’s doing me no end of good. I had got nervy and run down before leaving home and this is just what I needed. Of course, a lot of the people aren’t the class I have been accustomed to, but some of them are very nice. There’s a Lady Evans at our table. (I don’t think she’s anything to do with the Lady Evans whom you know.) And there’s a Captain Edgbaston who is very attentive. He’s giving a cocktail party in the private dining-room to-day. In fact I must go there as soon as I’ve finished this. He’s a widower, travelling with his sister and brother-in-law. Oh, and do you know who else is here? Daphne Boswell. You must remember the Boswells in the old days. We dined with them, Daddy, you and I, the night before you went out to France for the first time. What ages ago that was! Twenty-one years, isn’t it? Daphne must have been a little girl at school then. Now she’s quite portly. She’s here with her husband—not very exciting—who’s had jaundice, and his doctor—Don Rusper!—recommended him a sea voyage. Daphne is full of South Mersley news. Some very common people have Elmcroft now. She says that Don Rusper is getting an enormous practice with some very distinguished patients—among them Sir William Smith, a millionaire who lives in the huge house in Mersley Park. (You remember we used to try to toboggan down that hill?) She says Don’s wife’s uncle is very high up in the profession and has recently got some kind of Royal appointment. She thinks that connection must have been very useful to Don.
I know you will be annoyed with me for talking about Don so much, but I do want to persuade you to go and see him. He’s much too big a man to nourish any silly grievance against you, and I’m sure he’ll overlook what happened in March, if only you’ll apologise to him. Besides, it’s the only thing you can do, unless you can make a living of your own.
That’s nasty. She knows I could only write a book that wouldn’t sell. Besides, why should I make a living, when the wherewithal is there? Surely, the fewer people who have to “make a living” in this world, the better the world is. Did her husband make a living? Does she make one? However——
I only felt a little sea-sick once, the second day. Since then everything has been delightful. I’m really rather dreading going home. I think I told you that my stepson Ronnie comes of age on September the 8th. I expect to arrive ten days before. I gather that when the Carlice heir came of age, they used to have a huge party with fireworks, and a beano for the village. This year, as we’re in mourning for Joan—I told you she was killed in the aerodrome ’bus on her way to fly to the Mediterranean—everything will be very quiet. My sister-in-law, Isabel Carlice, will be there, of course, and the family solicitor, Sir Thomas Hill. And Ronnie may have a friend or two, but he’s quite a little Bolshy and says he doesn’t want any fuss. He’s spending his summer holiday in Russia, and comes back three or four days after I do.
I’ve naturally been wondering what my own future is going to be after Ronnie’s birthday. He has already let me know—quite nicely—that he won’t want me at Carlice. I think he wants to turn the place into a Communist Club, or something of the sort. (Poor Isabel! What will she say!) I suppose I shall look for a little flat in London. I’m not sure that I shan’t enjoy the change, though it’s hard to tell, after so many years in the country. I think I should have liked the country better if I’d had a more ordinary kind of house—a house that I could really make my own.
Here’s Dolly, saying that I must come along to the cocktail party. So I must stop. This ought to be posted in Stockholm to-morrow morning. I hope you’re well. Let me hear from you again soon, and do go and see Don Rusper.
Your affec. sister,
Dora.
Dear Dora,
Thank you very much for your letter from the Baltic. I’m in Cornwall, sitting on the rocks at the foot of a wooded hill which slopes down to a creek. Beyond the creek, I can see the white line made by the little ferry plying between——
What is the use of writing this to her? She couldn’t enjoy it as I enjoy it, or understand it as I understand it. Nothing will make her realise that I have fallen in love with this county, and that people in love are justified in everything they do. Poor Dora, who, I gather, never had a love-affair. Well, I’ve tried falling in love with people, and I find it wiser and more satisfying now to fall in love with things and places. I had a passion for Thurlow, but I see now, it was too near London. It was a passion of adolescence, not, like this, the affair of a life-time.
“You wait,” said Mrs. Tregisky, when I had wearied her with my raptures, “till we have real bad weather. You wait till the rainy winter months come, and see how you like it then. Year in, year out, with the wind howling down that chimney fit to blow your boots off.”
But that’s exactly the nucleus of my passion—to taste Cornwall in each varied mood, at each season of the year, in fair weather and in foul, in winter as well as early autumn, and in spring—that spring which they all agree is a miracle. Just as I felt an urgent longing to see Thurlow harbour in November—the harbour lapped in a mist which would mute its noises and make its smells more subtle—so now I crave for Cornwall in the spring. And at all times, and for ever, as one says “for ever” when one is in love.
It might have been so easy. If my interview with Rusper had passed off differently. “Go and see him,” Dora says, as if it were an easy thing to do—but I have done it and failed. If he had been reasonable, or I had been forceful enough to master him, I should be singing a hymn of praise to Heaven. I should be living here, not staying like a visitor or a ticket-of-leave convict, not counting the hours and the money in my pocket which gives them to me. And yet how sweet, how peculiarly my own, are these hours that pass before my bankruptcy, like the last night before one goes to a war. How sweet are the hours while I can still sit here, by the water’s edge, merging myself consciously now in the motion of the stream, now in the vibration of the trees behind me, now in the line between the light and the shadows, now in the smell of salt and seaweed which pervades everything and is a background to all other smells down here. It’s funny, here, to think of the unknown me, the me of the future, cadging at street corners, selling newspapers perhaps—or could I mend broken chairs?—or stepping jauntily out of Dr. Ebermann’s asylum, five hundred a year in my bank-book—and what in my brain after that probing, that demolition and reconstruction of myself? I should come out a new man. Yes, Stephen Payne would be dead, and somebody else would be born, somebody else who might do valuable work as assistant to a vivisector or inventor of poison-gas. A new man would come out, but it wouldn’t be Stephen Payne, and Stephen Payne has no wish to die yet awhile. Better the street corner and the bundle of newspapers. “Special Boxing Report.” “Gravest hour since 1914.” “Sensation.” (Down here you read “Ultimatum—by Cornish Farmers!”)
If I could tell Dora all this, and bring it home to her, if I could make her feel as I feel, she’d have to do something for me. How far has she taken my side against Rusper? Has she threatened him with the law? Oh, yes, he’s within his legal rights, but pressure can be brought to bear. Have I the money to pay a solicitor? We couldn’t touch Rusper, but with Dora really at my back we might bluff. Trustee Act 1925. Gone, with the memory of all my other law—deliberately forgotten. Trustee Act 1925. There must be some section of it with which I could plague him, if only Dora would see me through, and be prepared to give evidence for me. It’s the sort of case they might hear in chambers—an unsavoury family affair. After all, Rusper has a reputation now, and baronets in Mersley Park are touchy about such things. “An excellent doctor, no doubt, but, my dear, there is that
nasty story about his behaviour to old Dr. Payne’s son.” That’s the kind of whisper to threaten him with. It’s there he’s vulnerable.
This means I must see Dora, and the only way to see her is to take her by surprise. If warned, she would lock the gates and turn the bloodhounds loose in the park, rather than have the black sheep grazing there.
Yet, I daresay, she’s fond of me and would like to see me settled, just as she would like to see everything settled, made comfortable, round and smooth. I must reassure her, so that the shock, when she has it, will be as small as I can make it. The Lady Evans line was good and right. It stuck, as I intended. “There’s a Lady Evans,” she says in her letter, “at our table, but I don’t think she’s anything to do with the Lady Evans whom you know.” I must show her that I know more people than Lady Evans, that I’m moving in most respectable circles quite beyond the aspirations of South Mersley.
I am scheming like a house-maid who wants to make the greengrocer’s assistant want to ravish her. It wasn’t for that that I came all the way to Cornwall. This plotting poisons me. Yet Rusper has forced it on me. Touch pitch, etc. Well, I never wanted to touch him. Forgive me, trees and rocks. Ten minutes, and I’ll be back with you again. And from that time, till the moment when I get into my third-class carriage in Falmouth station, I’ll be the man that I intend to be.
How pitiable this difference between what I am and what, if I fail, they will make of me. The difference between the athlete leaping seven feet in the sunlight and the old man he’ll become, lying motionless in bed while the impurities of his body are drained through a tangle of tubes to base receptacles, and even the nurse, on the sly, must hold her nose.
4
My dear Dora,
Thank you very much for your letter from the Baltic. I am glad you are having such a good time. I suppose one needs a change, however perfect a home one has.
You’ll be surprised to hear that I’m in Cornwall. Some American friends of Mrs. Temperley—she is the Colonel’s wife who was so kind to me in Thurlow—gave me a lift down here via London. They are nice people, not very rich as Americans go. They only stayed at Falmouth one night, and, after I parted company from them, were going to Land’s End and up the north coast through Devon, Somerset and Gloucestershire, into Wales. They seem to admire England very much, and want to see all the beauty-spots if they can.
Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to stir beyond Cornwall. I should like to live here. I am lodging with a fisherman and his wife. Rather dear, as it’s August, but I’ve no doubt their terms will come down as winter approaches. Mrs. Temperley said that if I stay here, she’ll get me an introduction to the Tremartins. Commodore Edgar Tremartin is a very big landowner between Falmouth and the Helford River.
I’ve made friends with one or two people, and the other day a Cornish farmer took me out shooting rats and rabbits.
I feel I ought to tell you that while passing through London I did slip away from my friends and visit Dr. Rusper. I wish you could understand what the effort cost me. As always, I found him utterly unreasonable about me. I did everything I could, but it was no use. I don’t want to bother you with details now, especially when you are still full of happy memories of your cruise. I’ll tell you about it later, when we meet. It is an age since I have seen you. I am sure I shan’t find you changed, though you may see a difference in me. A difference for the better, let us hope. Mrs. Temperley told me that spending this summer at Thurlow had made me look ten years younger. That only takes me back to thirty-two.
Unless I suddenly find I have the means to settle here, I shall be moving eastwards in a week or so. I am sufficiently in funds to get back to Thurlow, where my credit is good. What with the cares of household, and this birthday party in the offing, you will be too busy to send me a letter while I’m still here. I’ll give you a new address as soon as I have one.
Your affectionate brother,
Stephen.
Chapter IX: ISABEL CARLICE
1
THE day before I set off for Carlice and Ronnie’s twenty-first birthday party, I had a letter from my solicitor reminding me that I had to decide within a week whether or not I would extend the lease of my house for another seven years. I had not forgotten about it, but I had not yet made up my mind. As houses go in London, I shall find nothing better. I have tried a flat and loathed it. I have always preferred the country and still do. Why then hadn’t I got rid of my house years ago, left London and settled in the country? I know the answer to that question. So does Gwen Rashdall, who didn’t hesitate to tell me. And so, I suppose, do all my intelligent friends. I have been waiting to see what would turn up. There is only one house in which I should like to end my days.
I rambled on in this vein for quite a long time to Gwen Rashdall, when she came to see me the other day—cadging, I suspected, for an invitation to the birthday party at Carlice. As my “great friend,” she ought to have been there. But Dora hadn’t asked her, nor had Ronnie. It’s true we’re in mourning for Joan, but, through me, Gwen is almost one of the family. Perhaps not being asked—and for some reason her shooting friends haven’t asked her to stay with them either, this year—made her a little sour. She was sour in her reply, when, mentioning the lease of my London house, I said, “Gwen, if you were in my place, what would you do?”
She said, “I should kill Ronnie, and give up the lease of your town house.”
When I protested, she went on, “Well, you can’t let a silly little undergraduate go giving Carlice to the Communist party, can you? With luck, you’ll be able to enjoy it for another ten years, during which, if you’re still more lucky, you will die. It seems to me, Carlice is quite worth a murder—especially after Joan.”
I guessed what she would say, but I had to ask her what on earth she meant.
“Joan’s death brought you one stage nearer,” she said. “You don’t regard it just as a coincidence, do you?”
“Of course I do—so far as I believe in coincidences at all. I don’t really believe that anything is entirely purposeless. If I drop my bag and have to stoop to pick it up, I believe there’s some purpose even in that. I mean a particular purpose relating to me—something quite beyond the mere working of the law of gravitation.”
When she left me, she murmured, “Well, I think you’ll get what you want. You’re that kind of woman. If you will things to happen, they happen. So go on willing.”
The immediate effect of my talk with Gwen was the realisation that I must give up the lease of my London house and buy Carlice from Ronnie, when he gets it on September the eighth, even if it beggars me to do so. I know he doesn’t want me to have it, and will drive as hard a bargain as he can. Still, surely the Communist party would prefer a nice lump sum in cash to a house which, anyway, they think they’ll confiscate in a year or two, if it isn’t bombed first. I must put that point to him forcibly. I might even write to one of their officials. I suppose I could find out who deals with that sort of thing.
That’s going to be the contest at the birthday party. That’s why, two hours after I got the letter from my solicitor, I wrote telling him that I would give up my lease, and sat for hours at my desk, going through old papers and destroying what I could, and gazing round the room like the stranger that I shall make myself to it.
“I haven’t really lived here,” I thought. “It’s been a waiting-room. There isn’t a single memory glued to these pale blue walls that I want to carry away—except the memory of my waiting here. In a day or two I shall forget where the bells and the electric light switches are, while I shall always remember what stairs creak at Carlice.”
I saw my pair of Rockingham poodles on the mantelpiece—those poodles to which I had drawn Joan’s wandering attention the night before she was killed. If I died suddenly, some faint emanation of me might radiate from those poodles. I have, slightly, identified myself with t
hem. But only because there is a mantelpiece at Carlice on which I know they would look well.
I sat for hours, till half past three in the morning, tearing up old papers and receipts. Each one brought something of the last fourteen years back to me, as if it had been a page in a diary. Yet it was not my real life which most of them recorded. My real life was barely documented at all. A receipt for three hundred English irises which I planted one autumn round a small may tree at Carlice, another for two garden chairs, another for twenty bales of Sorbex peat—these, and a few others like them, were the only emblems of my proper existence.
For the last fourteen years I have been the power behind Dora, and a thorn in Ronnie’s flesh. Was that worth while? Did that give me a claim to immortality? There has also been a person called Miss Carlice who had quite an agreeable circle of London friends, gave parties for them and went to theirs, but this lady never set out as being one who would live for ever.
No, my claims to immortality go back further. I made my first when I stood enraptured, at the age of six, in front of a crimson-velvet salpiglossis. I made another claim that exquisite autumn day when Claude came back from his tennis tournament to tell me that he intended to marry Dora. And oddly enough—I say “oddly” because the scene, for once, was not laid at Carlice—I achieved quite a measure of reality on that November day which Dora, Joan and I spent at Leamington, when Ronnie and his friend let off fireworks in the hotel drawing-room, and, as soon as they had gone back to school, Eames telephoned to say that Claude had been found dead in the gunroom. Perhaps I thought that Dora would do the obvious thing, and leave the coast clear for me. I didn’t know, then, what I know now about her. But her instinct was quite right. It was her duty to stay. Ronnie would have been miserable if I had been in charge. I daresay I should have been miserable too.
Birthday Party Page 18
