Dusty Answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

  He passed out of sight with his queer clothes and his limp and his changed face, – all the careful paraphernalia of his travesty. Looking at him, she was seized with sudden terror. There was something wrong: they would see through it.

  She tried to reach him, to warn him; but she was voiceless and he had disappeared.

  It was Charlie himself, so the old gardener said, who wrote to tell him that he and Mariella were to be married. Master Charles had always been the beloved one, – the one to be ready with a smile and a pleasant word, and never a bit of haughtiness for all his Granny made such a little prince of him.

  ‘And when this old war’s over, Lacey,’ he says, ‘we’ll be coming back to live in the dear old house. Granny wants us to,’ he says, ‘and you may be sure we want to. We were never ones to like London. So look out for us before long.’ But ah! he had to come through the fighting first. They were to get married at once, for he was off to the front. Speaking for himself, said the old gardener, he’d have had enough of life if anything happened to Master Charlie.

  The next day, the announcement of their marriage at a registry office appeared in The Times.

  ‘Why, they can’t be more than nineteen,’ said Mamma, ‘and first cousins, too. A dreadful mistake. However, I suppose the chances are –’ and she sighed, settling her V.A.D. cap before the mirror. ‘I must write to the old lady. They were good-looking children­ – one of them especially. Why don’t you send a nice little note to the girl, Judith? You used to play together such a lot.’

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t remember me,’ said Judith, and went quickly away, sick with shock.

  Married, those two. Mariella a wife: Mrs Charles Fyfe.

  ‘I am young Mrs Fyfe. This is Charlie, my husband.’

  How had it happened?

  ‘Mariella you must marry me, you must, you must. Oh Mariella, I do want to marry you, and I’m going to the front so I do think I might be allowed to have what I want. I may be killed and I shan’t have had anything out of life. Oh Mariella, please! You know you’re happiest with us, Mariella. You couldn’t marry anyone outside and leave us all, could you? Nor could I. I couldn’t bear to be touched by any other woman. You and I understand each other so well we couldn’t be unhappy. We are different from other people, you know. Marry me and I’ll come back from the war. But if you say no I’ll just go out and let myself be killed at once …’

  And Mariella, pale and childish and not understanding, went away. She went – yes – to Julian, and looking at him full with her dazed look said: ‘Charlie has asked me to marry him.’ He said not a word, but looked dark and shrugged his shoulders and turned away as who should reply: ‘What is that to me?’ So Mariella went straight back to Charlie and said:

  ‘All right.’

  Her mouth quivered and she nearly cried then, but not quite: neither then nor afterwards. And the grandmother wept bitterly, till in the end Charlie comforted her; and after that, implacably she would give and sacrifice all to Charlie.

  No, no, that was too stupid, too abnormal. People only behaved like that in your unbalanced imagination.

  Mariella would never have wept, never have gone to Julian, never dreamed of being in love with him, – him or Charlie or anyone else you would have thought, childless, sexless creature that she had always seemed, years behind you in development. How she must have changed to be now liable to passion! All at once she had to be thought of as a woman, the gulf of marriage fixed between you and her.

  Had she consented then in her usual placidly agreeable way, just to oblige Charlie, without a notion of what it meant to be in love and marry? Had she gradually fallen in love with him during all the years they were growing up together, or had it been suddenly, with a shock of realization, when he told her he was going to France? Or had he come home one day excited, full of emotion at the thought of what lay ahead for him, and found her looking beautiful, strange, and thrilling to his troubled eyes, and taken her suddenly in his arms, charming her into his own illusion of love?

  Or had it been gentle and certain all the time, – an idyll?

  ‘My dear, you know I shall never love anyone but you.’

  ‘Nor I anyone but you.’

  ‘Then let’s marry before I go.’

  ‘Oh yes, – at once.’

  So they married, with all the others gentle and certain, and acquiescent as a matter of course, saying, whatever their secret thoughts: ‘Ah well, it had to be.’

  They would spend their few days contentedly together, saying quietly: ‘If anything should happen we shall have had this happiness at least:’ their few nights …

  When people married they slept in the same room, perhaps in the same bed: they wanted to. Mariella and Charlie would sleep together: that would be the only change for them who had lived in the same house since childhood and knew all about each other. Why had they wanted to make that change – what had impelled them to seek from each other another intimacy? Charlie’s beauty belonged to someone now: Mariella of all people had claims upon it. She might have a baby, and Charlie would be its father …

  It was all so queer and unhappy, so like the dreams from whose improbabilities she woke in heaviness of spirit, that it was impossible to realize. This thing had happened and she was further than ever from them, perplexed in the outer darkness, unremembered, unwanted, nothing at all. She might hold on all her life but they would never be drawn back to her.

  She was certain now that Charlie was going to be killed. There was that in the fact of his marriage, of his leaping to fulfil the instincts of normal man for life which proclaimed more ominously by contrast the something, – the fatal excess – that foredoomed him; which made darker the shadow falling ever upon the bright thing coming to confusion.

  There seemed nothing now in life but a waiting for his death.

  They came and went in her dreams – some that caused her to wake with the happiness of a bird, thinking for a moment: Then he’s safe …’, others that made her start into bleak consciousness, heavy with the thought that he was even now dead.

  There were dreams of Mariella with a child in her arms; of Mariella and Charlie walking silently up and down, up and down the lawn next door, like lovers, their arms about each other, and kissing as they walked. Then Mariella would turn into Judith, and very soon the whole thing would go wrong: Charlie would cease to walk up and down like a lover, and falter and disappear.

  She dreamed of standing in the doorway of the old next door schoolroom looking out into the hall. Between the inner glass doors and the outer white-painted wooden ones, in the little passage where tubs of hydrangeas and red and white lilies stood upon a mosaic floor, Mariella was talking to one of the boys. She must be saying good-bye to Charlie. The back of her neck was visible, the short curls tilting back as she lifted her head to him. Tall and shadowy, faceless, almost formless, he bent over her, and mysteriously, silently they conferred; and she watched, hidden in the doorway. Suddenly Mariella broke away and ran past through the hall. Her face was white and wild, streaming with tears; she bowed it right forward in her hands and fled up the stairs.

  ‘Oh look! Mariella is crying for the first time in her life …’

  In the doorway the dark figure still stood. It turned and all at once had a face; and was not Charlie but Julian. She sprang back thinking: ‘He mustn’t see me here, spying;’ and in the agitation of trying to slip away unobserved, the dream broke.

  There was a dream of playing some game among them all in the next door garden, and of Charlie stopping suddenly, and crawling away with a weak fumbling step, his hand on his heart.

  ‘He’s got a weak heart.’

  ‘Ah, then he won’t go to the front.’

  ‘No, he’s quite safe.’

  She woke up happy.

  But sometimes Charlie had been to the front and had come back with that feebleness and sickness upon him. He wa
s going to die of it. He came all pale into the schoolroom and stopped, leaning against the big oak cupboard. He put his hand on his heart, sighing and moaning, looking about him in appalling distress. He said:

  ‘I feel ill. I don’t know what it is … I’d like to consult my brother.’

  He had the face of a stranger, an emaciated and elderly man, – nobody in the least like Charlie; but it was he. He shuffled out again, almost too weak to move, looking for Julian, who would not come. In horror-struck groups the others watched him. He was dying beyond a doubt. She woke, aghast.

  It was at the close of a day in February. Outside, where the gentle dusk glimmered on rain-wet branches, the bird-calls were like sudden pale jets of light, coming achingly to the mind; and all at once the sun, like a bell, struck out a poignant richness, a long dark-golden evening note with tears in it, searching all the land with its fullness and dying slowly into an obscurer twilight. The tree-tops were quiet against the sky. There was no leaf upon them: yet, in that liquid mauve air they stirred in her a sudden soft pang, a beating of the heart, and were, for a moment, the whole of the still hidden spring.

  She stood staring through the window; and wars and rumours of wars receded, dwindling into a little shadow beyond the edge of the enchanted world.

  She went out into the garden, towards the river. Ah, these shapely boughs, this smell of buds, that tenderly-trailing blue smoke from the rubbish heap, this air like clear greenish water, washing in luminous tides, those few stars cast up and glowing upon translucent strands between the riven pale deeps of clouds! … Bearing her ecstasy delicately, she came to the bottom of the garden, where the connecting pathway ran towards the house next door. She heard a heavy trailing step she knew, and she waited to bid good night to the old gardener coming home from work.

  ‘Good night, Lacey.’

  His mumbling voice said from the shadows:

  ‘Good night, Missie.’

  ‘Lovely evening, Lacey.’

  ‘Ah, grand.’

  ‘How does your garden look next door?’

  ‘Ah, a bit forward. There’ll be frosts later, you may be bound.’

  He sounded tired tonight; he was getting very old. Now for the customary last question.

  ‘When are they coming back, Lacey? It’s high time, isn’t it?’

  He paused; then said:

  ‘You maybe won’t have heard, Miss …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Master Charlie’s been killed … Yes, Miss. We ’ad word from London this afternoon. Ah, it’s cruel. It’ll about kill his Granny, that’s wot I says first thing – about kill her it will. He was the apple of her eye. That’s what we all said – the apple of her eye. She says to me once she says: “Lacey,” she says, “Master Charlie’ll live ’ere when I’m gorn. I’m keepin’ the place on for ’im,” she says. “It shall never be let nor nothing. It’s ’is, for ’im to bring ’is wife to.” Ah, pore little Miss Mariella, pore soul …’ He broke into feeble weeping. ‘Ah, it’ll about be the death of ’is Granny. Pore Master Charlie – pore little chap … everybody’s favourite. I remember ’im when ’e was … Yes, Missie, yes Miss Judith …’

  His voice failed; and with a hand touching his hat over and over again in mechanical apology, confused distress and appeal, he went shuffling away into the shadows.

  But of course, of course he was dead; she had expected it all the time. Now it had happened she could turn to other things. She thought: ‘It’s not bad now; it’ll be worse later: then some time it will stop. I must bear it – bear it – bear it!’

  That wheezing voice echoed in the solitude and complained: ‘Pore Master Charlie, pore little chap,’ over and over again through the dark lane among the poplars, above the wall of the garden where the poor little boy had lived long ago.

  Had he really lived? Forget him, forget him. He was only a shadow anyway, a romantic illusion, a beautiful plaything of the imagination: nothing of importance. Put him away, be sensible, be indifferent, gather round you once again the imperturbable mysteries of nature, be blinded and made deaf with them for ever. He was much better dead. He was weak and spoilt, selfish; he wouldn’t have been any good … He never could bear blood: he must be thankful to be dead.

  Where was he? He seemed to be near, listening to what you had to say of his death.

  ‘Charlie, my darling, if only you’d known how I loved you!’

  ‘I know now. I shall always be watching you.’

  Then there is no cause for weeping: he is alive, he is in God’s keeping. “Lord into Thy hands I commend his spirit.” What did that mean? Pretend, pretend to believe it, cover the blankness with confident assertions.

  What had become of that shining head? How did he look now?

  At this very moment they were all weeping for Charlie shot dead in France. It was really true: he was dead and in the earth, he had vanished for ever. Her mind wavered and fainted under the burden of their grief: her own she could endure, but theirs was intolerable.

  She went back, out of the unregarding night, to the Greek verbs which must be learnt by tomorrow.

  A long time after, came the last terrible dream.

  They were all bathing together from the next door raft, in a sort of luminous twilight. She saw her own white legs reaching out to touch the water; and she stepped in and swam about. Roddy was there, a dark head bobbing vaguely near her. Sometimes he touched her hand or her shoulder, smiling at her in a friendly way. The others made a dim group on the bank. They were all very happy: she felt ecstasy swelling within her, and passing from her among them all.

  Charlie suddenly came into the group. Oh, there was Charlie safe and well and alive after all; and nobody need be unhappy any more!

  He did not speak. He emerged swiftly from among them, and they all watched him in silence while he stooped to the dim river and slipped in. He turned his face, his hidden face, downstream, and went floating and swimming gently along. He too was happy.

  A dark misty solitude of night and water was ahead of him, and he went into it without pause or backward look, and it folded around him. Horror crept in: for he was disappearing.

  A voice broke ringingly, in anguish:

  ‘Come back!’

  It shattered itself, aghast, upon emptiness.

  Softly he vanished.

  She cried aloud and woke into a night streaming, blind with the rain’s enormous weeping.

  He never came again.

  His son was born and his grandmother died; but he was too far, too spent a ghost to raise his head at that.

  Part Two

  1

  They were coming back. When she knew this she dared not venture beyond the garden for fear of encountering them unexpectedly. Only the dark was safe; and night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen window into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long tree-shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank moon-blanched level of the grass. All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the border shone up with a glimmer as of phosphorus, and the budding tree-tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash of light.

  She went dancingly down the garden, feeling moon-changed, powerful and elated; and paused at the river’s edge. The water shone mildly as it flowed. She scanned it up and down; it was deserted utterly, it was hers alone. She took off her few clothes and stepped in, dipping rapidly; and the water slipped over her breasts, round her shoulders, covering all her body. The chill water wounded her; her breath came shudderingly, in great gasps; but after a moment she started to swim vigorously down-stream. It was exquisite joy to be naked in the water’s sharp clasp. In comparison, the happiness of swimming in a bathing suit was vulgar and contemptible. To swim by moonlight alone was a sacred and passionate mystery. The water was in love with her body. She gave herself to it with reluctance and it embraced her bitterly. She e
ndured it, soon she desired it; she was in love with it. Gradually its harshness was appeased, and it held her and caressed her gently in her motion.

  Soon next door loomed lightless among its trees. If they were there, they were all sleeping. No eyes would be staring in the darkness, gazing at the enchanted water, wondering at the dark object moving upon its surface.

  But no, they had not come yet: the moon came from behind a cloud and illumined the face of the great house; and it was grief-stricken as ever, bowed down with the burden of its emptiness. She turned back and swam home.

  The night of full moon came, warm and starry. As she swam towards the willows at the far edge of the next-door garden, – her usual goal – she saw lights in the windows. The long house spread itself peacefully under the moon, throwing out its muffled warmth of lamplight like a quiet smile.

  So they had come.

  Somebody might be in the garden, – on the river even. She clung close under the bank, by a willow stump, not daring to move, feeling her strength ebb from her.

  Then all at once their forms, their voices were near her. Somebody started to play a nocturne of Fauré: Julian. Before her she saw someone tall, in a pale frock, walking along the lawn: Mariella. A moment after a man’s figure came from the shadows and joined hers. Which was he? The twin glow of their cigarettes went ahead of them as they paced slowly, arm in arm, across the lawn, just as Charlie and Mariella had often paced in the dreams.

  They were so near they must in a moment look down and see her; but they passed on a few steps and then paused, looking out over the river, and up at the resplendent moon. The piano stopped, and soon another figure came and joined them. They were three tall shadows: their faces were indistinguishable.

  ‘Hullo,’ said the small clear unchanged voice of Mariella, ‘I can’t understand your music, Julian. Nor can Martin, can you Martin?’

  ‘Well, it’s so damned dull. No tune in it.’

  Julian’s brief laugh came for answer.

  It was like all the dreams to listen to these voices dropping, muted but distinct, from invisible lips close to you in the dark, saying trivial things that seemed important because of the strangeness and surprise of the occasion.