And as for letting ‘those other blokes’ get in first – the Americans – she knew that he would be the first to grasp the hand of the sportsman who beat him.
He sprang to his feet as an old general in mufti made his way through the jazzing couples towards them. The general shook him warmly by the hand, but made a gesture of refusal of the chair Asshe placed for him.
‘No, I mustn’t stop. I’m with some people over there. You’re getting away any time now, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, sir, with any luck. Off to Ireland tonight.’
‘Everything all right?’
‘I think so, sir. Don’t see why I shouldn’t do it, bar accidents.’
‘Well, I know you don’t mind an old Moses like me envying you young Joshuas a bit. We’ve done what we could. I hope they won’t mob you out of sheer joy when you get to the other side. Au revoir, Asshe – best of luck –’
And the old general, sighing a little, but thanking his God he had been allowed to live to see what he had seen, was lost among the dancing couples again.
But the interruption had broken the current of Asshe’s thoughts. He sat down again. He was dropping his fiancée presently and going on to dine with some men, and this was their goodbye. It was rather rotten to rag her. He glanced at her as she sat moodily stretching the gloves.
He hoped for her sake that he should be able to do it; anything else he could have given her would merely have meant writing out a cheque. It was largely swank on her account that had made him lavish money on his aeroplane, care on his preparations. His tail was well-up, so was his navigator’s, the weather was ideal, and so forth . . . still, it was the Atlantic and its leagues he was pitting himself against, and he knew far too much to make light of them. The chances remained against him. And it would no more have occurred to him to tell her of a certain dream he had had than to have discussed petrol-tanks that leaked in the air or the precise effects of a direct hit.
This dream, that would rather have put the wind up her, had been curious in its way. It had begun many months ago, with his dreaming that he was out for the height-record; and at first he seemed to remember that his altimeter had stood at something like eight thousand metres. He would have thought nothing of this dream had it not presently occurred again, this time with the altimeter at eight thousand five hundred. Then it had come again, and again after that, with the reading each time higher than the last. The record was something over 30,000 feet, and he now stood pretty close to that figure. He had refused to admit even to himself that the beastly dream was becoming something of a nightmare, but he hoped it would keep off till he got away on his flight, as it left him rather a rag the morning after.
And if, as he fancied he had heard somewhere, these ascending dreams were unlucky, all the more reason she should know nothing about it.
‘Do smoke or something,’ he said presently. ‘No hurry – we’ve half an hour yet.’
As she took the cigarette she lifted her troubled eyes to his.
‘Can’t I come over to Ireland tonight with you? Nancy Burrowes would come with me – I could ring her up from here –’
‘No-can-do, darling,’ he replied promptly. ‘I shouldn’t have any time to spare, and you’d only be in the way. You be practising the “Conquering Hero”, and then when I come back you can start buying your ter-rousseau.’
‘Can’t I see you at the station tonight?’
‘Wouldn’t do. Might be blotto. I say, what about a couple of Martinis now?’
Again the gloves were stretched, again the pink jujube of a shoe poked at the table. More than ever he was glad he had not told her of that dream. He could see that she was full up to the back teeth already.
Then, quite openly, he took her hand, lightly dandling the fingers that lay limp over the arm of her chair. He bent over her.
‘Little boots full of sand, darling, eh? I tell you it’ll be quite all right. You do your little God-talks every night – you know – make Reggie a good boy and let him fly the Atlantic – and I say, don’t forget to have a bit on Eclair – what a jape if I could pull off the Cup and the Atlantic too! Where’s Riccardo? We’ll drink to it . . . Riccardo, two Martinis, and then the bill –’
He scrawled his name on the back of the bill, and put the little glass into her hand.
‘Good ’ealth – say good ’ealth – stiff lip now,’ he said, touching the glasses.
Obediently she said it after him; and then suddenly she put the glass down on the table and flung her gloves after it. She rose, and without a word held out her hands to him. For England’s women had learned that too – that when you live on the edge of a volcano the only thing to do is to dance. You can’t alter the volcano – you can make yourself and everybody about you miserable – so why not make the most of life while it lasts? Her ‘little God-talks’ would fill her heart no less that those small pink jujubes of her feet moved to the cacophony of the Ethiopians’ banging and blaring. Whether she ever saw him again or not, at any rate she had him now
He, too, had sprung laughing to his feet.
‘Esker noo jazz?’ he said blithely.
‘Yes, old thing – come on,’ she said hurriedly.
And hand in hand they chasséd towards the space where the dancers turned and pointed and poised.
And so, not an age or two ago, nor a century or two ago, but as it might have been yesterday, another young man went off the deep end, leaving another young woman to pester the Admiralty, and to look haggardly down the lists, and to ache for wireless-messages that never came, until the rolling months told her that all was useless and that she waited in vain.
There is no dream that has not been dreamed before.
And another young man will be dreaming the same dream tomorrow.
The Honey in the Wall
Qu’es la morso
Que nous forço
De bela vers ta cremour
Se lou mètre
Dóu celèstre
Noun t’a facho pèr l’amour?
Frédéric Mistral: A Ève
1
They found it in the fragment of Norman wall just across the grass-court – twenty pounds weight and more of it, the labour of the bees of none of them knew how many years. It was packed away in a cavity as long as a man’s arm, and in order to get at it they had to fetch a ladder, to hack down the masses of ivy, and to clear away the grass and valerian and wallflower from the wall-top. Clot after clot it was taken out, unsightly lumps, black as pitch, caked and crusted with earth and scurf and bits of mortar. But the housekeeper cut and scalded the outer grime away, and there was enough of the stored sweetness of long-vanished flowers to fill the row of waiting jars.
Then they gathered up and burnt the ivy and the wallflowers, but left the gap in the wall for people to see whence the honey had been taken.
The Abbey guests had waved to Gervaise to come and see, but she had remained where she stood, in the window-recess of the little picture-gallery, looking down on them. It was one of the days when she wondered what they were doing with guests in the house at all. Guests! Who were they to have guests? As if, in the pass to which things had come, they, she and her mother, could afford to entertain! Oh yes, things might look very well on the surface. The Abbey made a stately showing there on its rounded hill, with its farmlands about it (but farmed by somebody else), its grass-courts between the stubs of its Norman towers, the ruins of its refectory walls, the twisted chimney stacks and stepped gables of the house proper, and, for timber, oaks that were a county’s glory, making hillocks upon the hill behind. People passing in Ford cars or on bicycles or afoot turned to look at its widespread magnificence.
But sometimes a car drew up at the great gates and somebody descended from it who was not a guest. They were hardly guests, those people who came by appointment from Spinks’ or
Christies’ or somewhere else in King Street or Pall Mall. And it was Gervaise who received these strangers. Sometimes she spent whole days with them – estate agents, cataloguers, valuers, photographers, minions of one sort and another. She talked to them civilly when she could. When she could not she fell back on her mother’s unvarying plaint. ‘Spread the rest out a bit – don’t take it all from one room – leave it as nearly the same to look at as you can – but you must, you must find the money!’
The money, Gervaise reflected bitterly as she stood in the little picture-gallery! Money for what? For accumulated debts, running expenses, repairs? For nightmare taxation, the overdraft at the bank, interest on mortgages, first, second and third? Pah! little as she knew about these things, she knew that it would take a staff of lawyers and accountants, and something in the nature of a Consolidation Act, before the problem could be as much as touched! And it was no good talking to her mother. Her mother always made such aimless haste to agree with everything she said.
‘Yes, darling, I know, I know!’ Lady Harow would murmur, moving the patience-cards on the little padded table or putting another jig of the large dissected puzzle into its place. ‘It’s too dreadful! But we’ve shut up all the north and west parts, and even the billiard-room when there isn’t anybody here. We only live in one teeny corner of it. There used to be twelve gardeners when you were a tot and now there’s only one, and the Giles boy. You do so much your-self, darling, that you are –’
Yet, with the vines choking under the glass, and the jungles called gardens untouched since the beginning of the war, and wood and iron perishing for want of paint, and half a dozen of the houses’ eyes put out where windows had mysteriously broken themselves – with at least one chimney stack unsafe, and cattle straying on the lawns, and the remaining domestics to pay and feed, and those appalling letters of threat or demand – in the face of all this her mother still had guests!
‘Yes, darling, I know, I know! It’s terrible! But it’s only Freddy and Philip and darling Pam! They perfectly understand! Why, Pamela says she won’t come if she isn’t allowed to do her own room, and it’s so long since we’ve seen dear Philip –’
And now Pamela and Philip and Freddy and the rest were waving up to her from the court below, calling her to come and see the honey they had found in the wall.
Gervaise turned abruptly away. It seemed to her that in a very little while they might be glad of that honey as mere food.
2
It was only a small gallery in which she stood, three diamonded windows long and not more than half a dozen strides across. (The other pictures were – that is to say they had been – at the place in Ireland.) It was on a side of the house far removed from the occupied quarters, and, except for the pictures, was bareness itself. Its carved stone fireplace was yawning and empty, and the single piece of furniture the apartment contained, a shallow sofa, was covered with a holland dust-sheet, that hid its contours and trailed on the floor. The mantelpiece had nothing on it but a broken keyhole-plate and an empty box that had held kitchen matches. Thank goodness, in that clean country there was little dust.
But the walls facing the diamonded windows showed ravages worse than dust. They were hung with a crimson rep material, and on them the results of her mother’s ‘spacing out’ showed indeed. When you move an object that has stood for a long time on grass, you get a patch of dead and de-chlorophylled white; but ah, the wounds, crimson and recent, where the hatchet had fallen on that gallery! . . . Gervaise had done what she could, but a smaller picture cannot be made to cover the space of a larger one. Here it was a flap of a wound shaped like a carpenter’s square. A corresponding carpenter’s square, but in reverse, showed a little farther along. And between the two the four Raeburns had hung.
Raeburns! Four of them, no fewer! That small gallery had once been as rich as that!
And now the wall showed no more than a couple of tedious Zoffanys, a Sir Peter on either side of them, a hurried gathering-together of anything in a frame from a cabinet or corridor, and those cruel-looking carpenter’s squares, like red incisions for a graft. These were all – these and the ‘Artist Unknown’, the full length Lady Jane, that hung in the very middle of the wall.
Gervaise stood indifferently before the Zoffanys and the Sir Peters. They were trite, without poignancy, mere occupiers of that once-glorious space. But she was never quite calm in the presence of the Lady Jane. That always came near, a little too near, as if Gervaise herself had not skipped very many stages in the direct line of her blood. Brown and blackened like sodden winter leaves it was, and, like those same leaves skeletonised, minutely varnish-cracked from top to bottom and from side to side of its frame. Wintry, too – wintry as the family fortunes – were the rigid galloons of cramped bodice and stuffed sleeves, their gold now no more than dying flowers on a December wall. Yet two features, yellowed like old harpsichord keys, still stood palely out. These were the lace-cuffed, taper-fingered hands, one of them holding a tiny valentine of a handkerchief; and the second feature was the face in its angular card-castle of linen. The picture was unglazed, and these portions of it came forward. But they did not come, so to speak, equally forward. So much had vanished beyond recall. If ever there had been pink on those cheeks or living glint on those bony brows, not a trace now remained. All had gone with the fugitive pigment. And at the same time the lashless eyes had darkened to round balls of bitumen black. It was as if the paint had changed chemically and simultaneously in two directions, the one a blanching away to nothing, the other to the night that had swallowed up the ‘Artist Unknown’ and his sitter alike.
Gervaise was twenty-six, and, if pride of bearing be a sin, in Sheol already. And her beauty but thrust her down deeper. The rough country skirt above the flat-heeled brogues, the knitted leaf-brown jumper, showed the hips and shoulder-lines and breasts of that woman-form that has been padded and veiled, compressed and overlaid through the ages, but that remains today, as it will still be tomorrow, the same that Adam, waking, saw. The shapeless felt hat framed the resentful dark eyes and the scornful mouth, scornful of the whole dying place about her, scornful of itself that it should betray that it cared . . . all this in the light of the gallery so even and secondary that it filled every corner like the air itself; without a shadow even under the sheeted couch, without a shadow even where the decorated fire-back disappeared behind the wall. For it was the borrowed, honey-coloured light reflected from the Norman wall across the grass-court. No flashing, no dazzling; only the equable light on those walls of red rep, their scars, the thin line where Gervaise’s soles met the floor, and every hair and lash of the lovely turbulent face distinct within the hollow of the shabby felt hat –
It was another of the days when she hated the Lady Jane. She hated her for her fixity, her achieved unchangingness, the mockery in her jet-black following eyes. Change – she! What had she known, living in the times before these? Had she been in Gervaise’s place, Gervaise in hers! It is all very well not to change when nothing changes about you, but it is another matter when strangers come from King Street or Pall Mall, gash your walls, pay you money that you must immediately pay out again, and then depart! Gervaise knew very well that other pictures would have to follow the Raeburns. The solitary Sir Joshua downstairs would have to go. The moving little thing in her own sitting-room, that somebody with spectacles and a magnifying-glass had said was not a Watteau, would have to go. Perhaps the Zoffanys and the Sir Peters would go too.
But the Lady Jane would stay. Dealers did not commonly pay large sums of money for ‘Artists Unknown’.
And Gervaise believed very little in the woman herself either. Strait-waistcoated enough she might look up on the wall there, with those tapering fingers holding the handkerchief and the unshaded eyes dark-dead in a white-dead face – virtuous enough if you could trust the look of her – but Gervaise didn’t. In spite of that card-castle of a headdress and the trussed-
up breasts and the mouth a mere black brush-thread where the red had been, Gervaise wouldn’t have trusted her an inch. She didn’t believe in the shape of those handkerchief-dropping fingers. She didn’t believe that the foot in that bodkin-case of a shoe had never pushed at a door it should not have pushed at. She didn’t believe that those pitchy eyes had never softly glanced, though they only stared now. Great-great-great-Somebody the Lady Jane mustn’t tell Gervaise that . . . True, she might have had her head chopped off for it. But then she had not had her head chopped off. She had been circumspect in her day. And in any case she had not had to stand by while they photographed and valued, nor to listen, in library or muniment-room, to their flat voices saying: ‘Any special feature? Charles the First? Priest’s Hole, what? Anything a bit out o’ the common – that’s what gets the nibbles –’
That was what got the nibbles from these millionaires from Whitechapel and this option-chivalry of Palestine –
Yes, things had been simpler for the woman on the wall there, whom Gervaise sometimes hated and never, never believed in –
‘Gervaise! Gervaise!’
Again they were calling her from the grass-court below.
But she kept away from the window in order that they might think she was no longer in the gallery. For Freddy Lampeter had called too, and there were times when Freddy Lampeter troubled her more than all her troubles put together.
3
They were not to be seen when she returned to the inhabited portion of the house. Only her mother was there, with her soft grey hair piled high as a guardsman’s bearskin over her finely-tooled features, smiling at the large jigsaw-puzzle that at present resembled a map of Iceland in its shallow box.
The Dead of Night Page 17
