Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "What kind of things?"

  "The kind of books she read, for one thing. Plays they were, mostly, by Shakespeare and so forth. And French writers, too… especially a chap called Molly something."

  "Molière?"

  "Yes, that was it. She used to read him aloud when I wasn't around, or so the housekeeper told me. She was always dressing up, too. She'd spend hours up in her room, messing about with costumes of one sort or another. Not real clothes, you understand, but, well—fancy dresses. As a matter of fact, I thought it odd that she left most of her own clothes behind and took all those costumes away with her in that trunk. Could it be that she was still set on being an actress?"

  "I would have thought so once, but not lately. There's no security on the stage and she's sharp enough to know that."

  "But if she thought she was good enough—I mean, to become someone like Ellen Terry—wouldn't she have decided that money would come with success?"

  "It's possible, but listen here, lad. I didn't hunt you down for the purpose of discussing my daughter's castles in the air, but to persuade you to get a hold of yourself. You tell me you've had no success with your enquiries in France and I certainly haven't a notion where she is or what she's about. Neither do I care as things are, but your father and mother are my oldest friends and I feel badly enough about this to go to work on you. Sooner or later, if she doesn't turn up, you'll be well advised to get shot of her on grounds of desertion. It might take a long time, but you're young enough to live through it. And for another thing, why don't you buckle to, and drown your misery in work instead of drink? That road is no way out, not your way at all events. I'd offer you a home with me, but it's too far from your depot. Suppose you rent a house locally and I come over and run it for you?"

  He shook his head. "It's kind of you, Edith, but I need time… time to ride it out, and either find her or forget her. It's not just… well… losing Gilda. God knows that's bad enough, and there isn't an hour when I don't think of her and want her. It's looking such a damned fool, knowing everyone at the yard and out on the network and in the business men's clubs about here sees me as someone who married a girl as pretty as Gilda, showed her off everywhere I went, then woke up one morning to find she'd ditched me like an old pair of boots."

  He paused, frowning. She said nothing so he went on, "I don't have to tell you the name of Swann stands for something up here. The Gov'nor and George saw to that. How will people think of us now, I wonder? Or me particularly? A man who couldn't even stop his own wife walking out on him after five months of marriage?"

  "Most people won't think of it at all, lad. Most people have forgotten it already. Or would do, if you'd let them."

  "But how am I supposed to think and feel in these kind of circumstances? I mean, what does everyone expect me to do? Dance a jig in the Bull Ring?"

  "I imagine people who count expect you to write her off like a bad debt. One that costs far more to collect than it's worth, and it's her mother who is telling you this. Those letters you mentioned. Did you try the address on them?"

  "I'm not that much steeped in liquor," he said, with a touch of his newly acquired asperity. "I wired and wrote five times, and when the letters came back I hired a man to go over there and check on the place. The woman who wrote to her had gone, leaving no forwarding address."

  "And the universities? At Tours and in Paris?"

  "He went there, too. They couldn't help, or maybe they didn't choose to."

  "Well, at least promise me one thing. Keep in touch, and come over for the weekend whenever you feel like it. Maybe you won't but it's better than going home to Tryst, and a lot better than drooping about by yourself with your head in a tankard."

  * * *

  A few days after his conversation with Edith, he turned a corner and came headlong into collision with the realities his mother-in-law had urged him to face.

  It came about in a curious way, when he found himself in the New Street area one Saturday afternoon, with more than two hours to wait before George's train arrived. He had been surprised when George had wired saying that he was coming up for the weekend. He knew that his brother was heavily engaged with what promised to be an important development in powered transport, although it was one that, so far as Edward could determine, was unlikely to profit private enterprise. George, it was whispered, had at last talked his brother Alex into arranging a test-haul, made under the auspices of the Automobile Association, of a battalion of Guards from Aldershot to Hastings in a variety of motors, and Edward could only suppose that George saw advantages in the publicity. He did not know that Edith had written to his brother the day she had left Birmingham, urging the Managing Director to look to his crumbling defences in The Funnel.

  Time, now that Edward had lost all interest in work, hung tediously on his hands. He spent most of Saturday morning in a public-house, had lunched there on bread and cheese and finally drifted down to the station where, checking George's wire, he noted that he could not arrive until around four in the afternoon. It was now two o'clock, and his fuddled head and the sour taste on his tongue disinclined him to return to the bar. It was then, only a few steps from the station entrance, that he saw the bill-boards outside the Biograph Theatre.

  He had heard, in a general way, about these biograph entertainments, moving pictures depicting news and fictional tales flashed on a screen in a darkened auditorium, but he had never had the time or inclination to visit one. Grudgingly he examined the advertisements outside the narrow little hall, wedged between a warehouse and a shop, a display of garish posters proclaiming the new wonder of the age and, hung in a frame, under the canopy, photographs of the kind of entertainment promised within. It was some sort of desert epic, featuring Arab sheiks and camels, and away in the back of his mind he connected them with those pictures Gilda had been sent from France. The similarity caused him to take a closer look and he isolated a picture about six inches square, showing a fierce-looking Bedouin photographed in the act of thrashing a prostrate woman with his whip.

  Like the pictures in Gilda's letters, it had about it the trappings of improbable melodrama. The gestures of the victim, hands raised, eyes wide with appeal, dress disordered, revived memories of the entertainment he and his brothers had once derived from a magic lantern, and he was on the point of moving on when something in the woman's face checked him so that he looked again, peering very closely at the blurred image, then wrinkling his forehead with disbelief.

  The woman on the ground reminded him vividly of Gilda. She had Gilda's wealth of hair and Gilda's smooth, oval face. She had Gilda's petite figure, too, and he thought, It's almost surely a fancy… I'm beginning to have hallucinations… But he paid his money and went in none the less, groping his way to a seat facing a blank screen centred by a small, circular light. Then the hall went even darker and somewhere towards the front a piano began to tinkle as a series of flickering images trooped on to the screen. Isolated here in the dark he forgot his miseries, his lifelong interest in technology absorbing him as he witnessed a moving photographic record of a steeplechase in which the horses seemed to cross the screen powered by clockwork mechanism and all the stewards and sightseers had the same jerky gait and gestures, even when they raised and lowered their straw hats. A mild sense of wonder invaded him, that it was possible to make pictures move in this way, and he began to enjoy the intimacy of the place as he watched first some French Army manoeuvres, then a seaside scene, and finally a swift tour of the Earl's Court and Anglo-French Exhibition.

  The round-up of news pictures was followed by a display of conjuring and then some mimed comedy in which an actor fell into a pond, and, having emerged, pranced about on the bank shaking his fist and mouthing oaths at mocking witnesses. Then the screen went blank for a moment and after an appreciable pause projected a frame announcing the main attraction, subtitled in English, The Terror of the Desert.

  It was, Edward soon decided, a very silly story, concerning what seemed to be an expedition int
o the Sahara, attended by a caravan of camels and horsemen, and led by a wildly gesticulating young man who spent most of his time spurring up and down the line of march mouthing directions at his underlings. Once, when the face of the leader was grossly enlarged, it had about it the same hint of familiarity, but again he dismissed this as fancy or coincidence. It was only when, after the travellers had encamped at an oasis and the horseman entered his tent, that he sat up with a jolt that almost projected him from his seat. The woman rising from a silken couch was either Gilda or Gilda's double. He identified her not only by face and figure but even more surely by her mannerisms and that gliding walk of hers.

  It was an extraordinary sensation sitting there watching a shadow play involving the woman he had loved to distraction since the moment he met her at Edith Wickstead's home nearly two years ago. It was as though he was dreaming an exceptionally vivid dream, in which were incorporated elements of amazement, a deep yearning, and the wildest kind of farce, far more improbable than the scene in his room the night she left home. But then, before he could determine whether or not he was in the grip of some self-induced deception of the senses, the action of the epic changed and the oasis was attacked by a horde of Arab horsemen, who succeeded in scattering the expedition and abducting Gilda, who was carried away on the saddlebow of a bearded chieftain, whose eyes rolled like those of a man in the grip of an epileptic fit.

  There followed a short series of scenes, more or less connected, showing the chieftain's impetuous siege of his prize and her ultimate consignment to the harem where, in the presence of half-a-dozen fat, inscrutable-looking women, she alternately raised her hands to heaven and collapsed sobbing on a couch. This orgy of despair lasted perhaps five minutes before the Arab chieftain arrived with the obvious intention of thrashing his captive into submission, but hardly had he begun the work when the gesticulating horseman turned up again, firing endless volleys of shots from his revolver, and accounting, so far as Edward could judge, for rather more than half the population of the town. The chieftain went down as he tried to escape with the struggling Gilda, after which the cameras played on a fond reunion scene, with Gilda fluttering her eyelids as if they had been automatically-operated blinds, and the gallant pistoleer kneeling on one knee and running a scale of kisses up and down her arm.

  Before he could emerge from his daze of incredulity, the screen went blank and the lights came on and everybody around him got up and went out into the daylight. He had no power in his legs to follow them, but sat there with his lips parted, gazing up at the blank screen, until a man in a rusty-looking frockcoat touched him on the shoulder and said, civilly, "Nex' show five o'clock, sir. Rich, weren't it?"

  Edward hauled himself to his feet and said, "That… that actor and actress, do you know them?"

  The man looked almost as astonished as he felt and replied, "Lor' no, sir, I don't know 'em. I mean, 'ow would I? It's a French reel, rented for publick exhibition…" But then, "Wait a minnit tho', I got the contrac', 'aven't I? I'll 'ave a squint if you can 'old on a jiffy. Alwus 'as the names o' the leading actors on the contrac'." He pottered off into his little office under the balcony where the projectionist was housed, emerging again with a document that resembled a conveyance. "Now let's see. Terror o' the Desert. Made in Paris, like I said, tho' I dunno how they managed for sand and whatnot. They get up to all kinds o' tricks over there, same as the Yanks. Made by a cove called Jules Lamont, wi'—here you are, sir—Monsewer Bernard Villon an' Mamerselle Fantine Grenadier. I remember we've rented several wi' the same team and the customers like 'em, judging by the takings."

  "That picture you have in the foyer… the one of the two of them, could I buy it?"

  "Buy it?" The man scratched his head. "Well, I dunno. I don' see why not, seeing this is Sat'dy, and we got to send this lot on to Mr. Hamilton's Picksherdrome at Wolver'ampton tomorrer. But they woulden miss one display picsher. What do you say to 'alf a dollar, sir?"

  Edward gave him half a crown and they went into the foyer together where the manager removed the picture from its frame and handed it over. Edward walked blinking into the daylight and down to the station hall, noting that it wanted but twenty minutes for George's train to arrive.

  He sat on the seat he had occupied the morning of her flight and studied the picture anew. It was like Gilda and yet it was not. The delicate moulding of her features were disguised under what might have been a thick coating of actor's greasepaint and distorted, to some extent, by her simulated expression of terror or loathing. She looked a little like a doll conceived by some malevolent scarer of children and yet one knew, at a glance, that she was playacting and that the agonised look was a pretence, and a poor one at that. He thought, dully, It's her right enough, and she exchanged me for this… this mummery… She threw over the name Swann, and even the name given her by her parents, for one that goes along with this kind of nonsense… Suddenly he was persuaded that it was not love for Bernard or anyone else that had urged her to decamp with that trunkful of theatrical clothes, but the allure of seeing herself in this kind of role, a shadow on a screen to be gaped at by strangers in places like that seedy little hall he had just quitted. It seemed incredible to him someone sane could make such a choice, but in a way, at some distance below incredulity, it fitted her personality, for it was really no more than a gross extension of the self-deception she had been practising ever since he had known her and almost certainly, if Edith was to be believed, since her childhood. The yearning to be "someone special" had milked her of all her natural feelings and responses, of the capacity to love and be loved, of obligations to anyone other than herself and this, in a roundabout way, accounted for her woodenness towards a man she had married.

  Painfully and vaguely repugnant memories of their brief association returned to him like clumsy fingers probing a wound. Gilda accepting a gift. Gilda at meals. Gilda, with her lovely hair spread on a pillow and her body beneath his, but always with that blankness behind her eyes, as if, at the very moment of coition, she was transforming him into the person of that prancing horseman or eye-rolling sheik. Or perhaps not even that. Perhaps she was visualising herself drooping about a stage tent dressed as an Arab houri, wooed and whipped by other shadows. But always as a person uninvolved in life as it was lived by everybody but "special people," always pretending to situations in which she was never required to be involved emotionally, and as he thought this a kind of shudder passed through him.

  The sensation was like the quenching of an unbearable thirst—rich, satisfying, and uplifting—so that his memory revived for him a story old Phoebe Fraser, nanny to all the Swanns, had once read him and his sister Margaret, a story called Pilgrim's Progress that had promised to be dull because it was holy but had proved surprisingly absorbing and adventurous as the hero, Christian, journeyed to the Celestial City. He remembered with surprising clarity how Christian had ascended the Hill of Difficulty with his burden and struggled upward to the cross where the burden fell away, tumbling down, down, and out of sight and leaving the pilgrim untrammelled for the road ahead. Sitting here, with the hissing din of the station in his ears, he could identify with Christian at that very moment, a man miraculously freed of a weight so intolerable that it clouded his mind to the business of the day.

  Deliberately, and with a kind of dedicated joy, he tore the picture into small pieces and let them fall on to the platform. Then he glanced up to see George's train sliding in and George's face scanning the platform, and he grinned. It wasn't often anyone saw old George looking bothered.

  * * *

  The brothers had always been close. Closer than any of the others save, possibly, Joanna and Helen, so that it did not surprise him much when George understood the intricacies of the story so readily. He said, as they sat over a pint in Edward's favourite snuggery, "I don't know… marriage is always a bran-tub to a man who is interested in his job. I was damned lucky, considering, remembering the gambles I took before I fetched up with Gisela. I've played the fool
since, come to that, and might have again if I'd ever found time. Work, that's the best tonic in the long run." And then, giving his brother a shrewd look, "You're pretty much behindhand from all I hear. Maybe I can suggest a short cut or two. Or would you prefer some other distraction? A music-hall, maybe?"

  "I'd like to go down to the yard, providing you'd come along. God alone knows what's got buried in those in-trays," and for the third or fourth time since he had met George at the station he raised his left arm and scratched himself vigorously. "As if I hadn't got enough on my plate," he said, ruefully, "I caught a flea in that sleazy little theatre!" George, predictably, threw back his head and laughed and Edward joined him. It was his first laugh in a very long time.

  It was coming up to midnight when they returned to the hotel after six hours spent unravelling the muddle that had accumulated since the day Gilda had left. He was very tired, but pleasantly so, a different kind of tiredness from that induced by liquor and by his long self-pitying walks through city and suburban streets. He felt very sleepy and far closer to George than he had ever felt, judging himself extraordinarily lucky that his brother's visit had coincided with the moment of revelation. He said, thoughtfully, "Do you see any future in that moving-picture business, George? I mean, will it ever amount to more than a showman's stunt?"

  George replied, "Oh yes, there's money in it now, and there'll be a lot more as time goes on. Those biograph theatres are mushrooming in the London suburbs, but I wouldn't invest in it, although I've been urged to by several claiming to be in the know."