“Tuesday?”
“Yes, your nephew’s birthday.”
I said I hadn’t settled anything.
“Haven’t you asked your nephew if you’re to go?” he said, as if I were a housemaid afraid of being given notice.
“No, I haven’t. If I did, it would sound as if I was asking him to let me stay on.”
“Do you want to stay on?”
“No. I don’t want to be bustled out of the house, but I don’t think I really want to stay. In fact I should only stay if he showed me that he really needed me here. And he won’t.”
“I see. So Tuesday brings no tragedy for you.”
I spent a few minutes wondering what he meant by that. It was all leading up to his tragedy, I supposed. Well, there was no need for him to have any tragedy, if only he’d be sensible. He was waiting for me to speak, but I decided to say nothing. Besides, I had a good deal to think about. What was I going to do on Tuesday if Ronnie said, “Out you go!”? Dolly Headford had let her flat and had gone to some cousins near Whitby, so I couldn’t ask her to put me up. Could I ask Isabel to give me a bed? No, I should be miserable there. The only thing to do was to go to a hotel—but where? In London and look round for a flatlet? It might be rather fun, setting up a little place on my own. Perhaps Ronnie would let me take some of the drawing-room furniture. After all, I’d spent my own money having it done up; and the curtains were certainly mine. (They’ll find the old ones in one of the oak chests in the hall.) Not that I’m very satisfied with the way my new curtains have worn. Ever since Flora left the window open that wet day in April there have been stains on the curtains behind the writing-desk. If Ronnie knew how much I’d thought about that writing-desk, and how much that bottom drawer had meant to me, he’d give me it outright. The bottom drawer is still locked. Whoever opened it once can open it again, if he wants to put the box back. I shall look there after tea to-morrow. If the box is there, I shall give it to Ronnie and tell him I’ve been keeping it for him since Claude died. I shall say, “That’s your father’s writing on the label. I found the box hidden under his tennis clothes, when I went through his things after he died. I can’t help what’s inside the box, and, now, I don’t really care.”
I thought all this (just as I’m still thinking some of it now) while Stephen was silent after his remark about Tuesday bringing no tragedy to me. When, at last, I looked up at him, he seemed to be asleep.
“Stephen!”
“Yes, Dora?”
“You can’t sleep here. You promised to go for a walk with Miss Carlice.”
“Do you suppose she wants me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dora.”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to help me with Rusper?”
“I can’t do anything.”
“Yes, you can. Let me tell you.”
And he started a long explanation of how I could give evidence in court that Don was acting against the wishes of the family in his capacity of trustee. He said there wouldn’t even be any need to go to court, because Don would crumple up the moment he knew I was really against him. It all depended on me. If only I’d take a firm line, everything would be all right. Would I promise to take a firm line? I said I wouldn’t promise.
“Then you really are with him against me,” Stephen said. “Dora, what does that great brute mean to you?”
“Oh, nothing special,” I said, feeling that I was blushing. “Only,” I went on, “he did come closer to Daddy than you ever did, and I can’t honestly say I think he isn’t carrying out Daddy’s wishes. I think he is carrying them out. You mayn’t like his manner, but there it is. Daddy would have acted just the same if he’d been alive. In fact, if Daddy had been alive, you’d have still been a solicitor or a schoolmaster.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I still would have been expelled from the school.”
“You wouldn’t have dared to let yourself go like that. You only gave way because you knew you had four-fifty a year behind you.”
Without even looking at me, he got up and went through the French window into the garden—leaving the flap of the window open.
I got up from the sofa, shut the window, lay down and went to sleep.
Chapter XII: STEPHEN PAYNE
1
I’M done for now.
Utterly. Hopelessly. And through my own fault. They may have been right about me the whole time. I am unfit to be let loose. The third time, one can’t hope to be given another chance. I got over that business at Barling House School because Duparc was a sensible fellow. Besides, I hadn’t really antagonised Rusper then. He was only bullying me as he bullied everyone. He hadn’t singled me out. I got over my second breakdown—though it was really a piece of bad luck, not a break-down at all—by running away from Rusper to Thurlow. By this time I’d made Rusper my enemy—and I made him still more an enemy when I paid him that idiotic visit on my way to Cornwall. (After all, I was only doing what Dora had urged me to do.) But this last exhibition I’ve made of myself is too much. I’ve put myself completely in Rusper’s hands for good and all.
I suppose my attempt to have a talk with Dora after lunch was the beginning of it. I saw that she intended to give me no chance of talking to her, and I had to force the conversation on her. A bad move. But I couldn’t wait for ever. She knew why I’ve come here, and she must have known, if she has troubled her head about me the least bit, that I should never have been able to screw myself up to invading her here unless I’d been desperate. Yet she allows me to loaf about the house and garden like an ordinary guest. She tells me, in fact, that I am an ordinary guest—“Miss Carlice’s guest,” till Tuesday. And on Tuesday, what then? Oh, she isn’t even sure about her own arrangements. We’ll see what happens on Tuesday when Tuesday comes.
There was really no need for her to drive me out of the drawing-room into the garden. I should have gone of my own free will. Otherwise I should have let myself go too far. I should have told her that she was as selfish as I am, without the same good cause. I should have told her—but I’m making myself ill with these recriminations. It does no good to think of that now, it’s all so very unimportant—and it wouldn’t have done any good if I had stayed on in the drawing-room and spoken all that was in my mind. It was just as well I went out and ambled round the garden, till punctually at three o’clock Miss Carlice came out of the side door, and we began our walk together.
Beyond one or two preliminary words, we remained silent for a longer time than I should have thought possible. I can’t remember ever having gone for so silent a walk with anyone. It was as if I were following her, not walking by her side, through the birch plantation, where a rabbit scuttled under my feet, out into the fields. When we had gone about a mile, she stopped suddenly and looked at the sky and then at me.
“It’s going to rain,” she said. “I ought to have told you to bring a mackintosh.”
I said, “Oh, I don’t mind getting wet. I’ve got another suit with me”; and we walked on in another long silence. I felt she was thinking as hard as I was—thinking about Tuesday, too, though for very different reasons. I hardly noticed the country we were passing—I, who, in my right mind, would have taken in the colours of every hedge and every tree-trunk, would have smelt the growing dampness of the breeze and the first trace of autumnal decay in the fluttering leaves. She too was looking at nothing, and all her thoughts were turned inwards. It seemed as if she were solving some problem with her feet, as she tramped like a man over the fields.
At length—we must have been walking for half an hour at least—I found myself saying:
“I can get no help from Dora.”
She didn’t reply for a minute, as though she were finishing up a private line of thought, and then she said
, “Oh, Dora. It seems strange to think of anyone wanting her help. I haven’t tackled her yet. I’ve had other things to think of. But I’ve another plan.”
I interrupted, almost eagerly, “You mean, for me?”
“Yes, for you. It’s on quite different lines. Something you don’t know about. But don’t let’s talk about that now. I promise I won’t forget when the proper time comes.”
Can I build on that? Not now. Not after what has happened since then.
We came, silent as before, to the summit of a little hill. In the distance we could see the top of a line of beeches, and between them the side of the Abbey, melting into a background of grey sky. Miss Carlice stopped and looked at the view for some time, and then, making something of an effort, she began to talk, telling me about the boundaries of the estate, how her great-grandfather’s land went so far, how her grandfather added this farm and her father sold that, how her brother had cut things down and made the place more compact, and how, for her own part, she wasn’t wedded to the land outside the home boundary, except for a few special trees—“those beeches above all.”
“We shall pass them when we go back by the road,” she said. “You passed them when you were carrying your bag from Busley station. Good heavens, that was only yesterday afternoon. It seems more like a month.”
I said, “That shows what a tedious guest I’ve been.”
She didn’t even pretend to laugh, but said, as the first drops of the rain-squall struck us, “You’ll be wet through by the time we get to Noakes’ cottage. You must go straight back from there and change, while I’m seeing Mrs. Noakes. I shall be all right in this.”
I helped her on with a light mackintosh she had carried, and we changed our direction and got into a lane overhung by trees. It was raining so hard that the leaves were dripping already, and I soon felt my suit sticking to my body, while the water leaked in through my wretched shoes.
“This rain really marks the end of summer,” she said. “This year, it’s come too early. But we’ve been spoilt by the good summers of the last two or three years.”
It took us about ten minutes to reach the cottage, where she dismissed me with the words, “You go straight on. You can’t miss the way. When you get to the front door, ring, and Eames or Charles will deal with your wet clothes. Tell Dora that Mrs. Noakes will give me some tea. I’ll be back later.”
As she finished, a girl came hurrying out of the cottage. I said “Good-bye” and walked on up the road.
It was nearly a quarter to five when I got back. I told Charles, who took my wet suit away, what Miss Carlice had said about tea, and he told me that Dora had already had hers. Rather boldly I asked if he could bring me a cup of tea to my bedroom, and when he had done so, I sat there for a long time enjoying the spaciousness of the room and the sombre colours of the sky and garden. The rain was still falling heavily, and from time to time there was a flash of lightning to the west. I forgot my anxieties. I began “just living” again—fusing myself into the reality of that corner of Wiltshire as it reacted to the passing of that first autumnal storm. It was so dark, I might have turned on the light, but I didn’t, and sat in a chair near the deep-set window, feeling in that unnaturally early darkness the coming darkness of winter, with its climax of mistletoe berries squashed in the carpet and sudden glimpses of a pale inactive sun seen in the intervals of cloud. Though it was only the first week in September, I had already begun to enjoy the winter—winter in the country, needless to say—days of damp mist followed by a sudden day of spring sunshine, wet soggy lawns, holly berries and ivy (lost in summer, but now coming into its own), the bare trees, most faithful of the friends that will outlive us, long meditative evenings by the fire, the exhilaration of white frosty mornings, the first snowdrop—the first faint sign of spring. The vividness of these delightful images was intensified by the desperateness of my own affairs. How would these thoughts flow behind the bars of Dr. Ebermann’s asylum?
No, I would not submit myself to that. Damn Rusper and damn Dora. I would taste the joys of the sticky pavement oozing through my shoes, as I sold newspapers, or cadged at the street corner. Perhaps if I sold newspapers I should learn to be bored by the headlines. I could amuse myself with their posters, count the number of times they used the words “sensation” and “crisis” in a year. There is something in all life, provided you’re not in overwhelming pain and are alive—by which I mean possessed of your own personality, which is your only means of contact with reality. But if Dr. Ebermann was to give me a personality of his choosing—well, as I’ve said before, we might as well kill Stephen Payne and let someone else be born in his place. And Stephen Payne has no wish to die just yet.
2
I sat in my bedroom till about half-past six. Then, as luck would have it, I thought I’d like a drink and was going downstairs, when I met Dora’s stepson, Ronnie, on the landing.
He said, “Hello! Come and have a drink in the library, won’t you?”
I said, “You’re very kind. I don’t want to bother you. Has Miss Carlice got back?”
He said, “I don’t know,” rather shortly and opened a door in the middle of the passage. It was a finely proportioned room, with a kind of arch in the middle and four windows looking on to the main lawn. I should say the walls must have been three feet thick. There were five or six bookcases against the walls, some shelves full of gramophone records and two corner cupboards containing china. I remember thinking, “I suppose this is all genuine antique stuff—bought by his ancestors at the proper time.”
I asked him this, when he had settled me in a big carved wing-chair, and poured me out a very strong whisky-and-soda. His reply was so uninterested that I can’t recall it. “He’s doing his bit to entertain the unwanted guest,” I thought, “but he might do it more gracefully than this.” Then I recollected that in less than forty-eight hours he was going to turn Dora and Miss Carlice out of their home and give it to the Communist party. I supposed one couldn’t feel quite normal before taking a step like that—it needed probably as much courage as I should need voluntarily to enter Dr. Ebermann’s asylum—and I resolved to be indulgent to him.
Non-committally, I said to him, “How you must love having a room like this, where you can get away from people.”
He answered, “What makes you think I want to get away from people? Privacy is a piece of anti-social luxury. In twenty years the word will have lost all meaning.”
I said, “I hope not,” realising that I had already taken sides against him, and he said, “I hope so.”
After this unpromising beginning, we talked vaguely for a while. He asked me what I did. I told him that I had been in a solicitor’s office and a master in a private school, but that if I had any gift at all—gift, that was to say, regarded from a public point of view—it was for novel-writing.
His reply to this was, “Then I’m sorry for you.”
I asked him why, and he went on, “Because of all art-forms, the novel is the most bound up with the present very transitory form of society. Almost by definition, it is rooted in individualism, and it will perish when individualism perishes.”
I said, “You might almost say, ‘When life perishes’,” but he said, “Oh, no, I mightn’t. I amused myself three or four months ago at Oxford, by analysing three pages from a typical modern novel, and marking everything which in a few years will either be meaningless or censored. I don’t mean obsolete details like the kitchen-range, that will be superseded by newer inventions, or even references to private property or class-distinctions. I mean passages which indicate a meaningless or criminal psychology—sentences like, I picture myself sitting in that old garden on summer evenings.”
I said, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, can’t you see?” he answered testily, “that it adopts altogether too egotistical an attitude towards life? We shall have lost t
he taste for so-called imaginative reveries. To indulge in them will be looked up as selfish, retrograde and vicious. I could elaborate the iniquities of that sentence for about half an hour. Old garden, too. As if there’s any virtue in age. Of course, all novels aren’t on those lines. It’s quite true that attempts have been made to write the proletarian novel—praiseworthy attempts, too—but I should think, from the novelist’s point of view, that the theme is even more restricted than the eternal triangle. You can’t have a novel without characters, and the moment you begin to characterise you begin to individualise, which destroys your proletarian basis. I’m afraid the proletarian novel can never be really successful propaganda.”
I replied, “Well, I’m afraid I’m not a proletarian novelist.”
He said, “I gathered you weren’t. I suppose you write for a few dyspeptic escapists who feel as you feel, and then you’re surprised at not being a best-seller. There’s no future for art which appeals only to a small and moribund class, you know.”
“I certainly write for people who can read,” I said. “And for people with personalities developed by some kind of traditional cultivation. I don’t write for ants or illiterates. But one hopes that in due time everyone will be able to read and develop a personality.”
“You write for people you think count,” he said. “Well, I don’t think they’ll count much longer. That’s hardly encouraging, is it?”
He gave me a forced little smile. I guessed he felt hypocritical even in forcing a smile.
“You said something just now about propaganda,” I went on. “Do you think propagandist art can survive? Don’t you think it becomes dead—as dead as an out-of-date scientific textbook—as soon as the cause for which it’s written ceases to exist? We still read Milton’s Comus, but who bothers about his Treatises against Salmasius and Morus? Personally, I think that of all art, propagandist art has the smallest chances of survival.”
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