The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  ‘I thought you’d gone out with the others,’ she smiled, looking up. Then, looking down again, but still smiling, she added, ‘Would you draw the blind just one inch, darling?’

  ‘Jane will have to go,’ said Gervaise abruptly, returning from the adjustment of the blind.

  ‘Jane go!’ Lady Harow echoed in mildest surprise, but this time without looking up from the puzzle. ‘But you can’t possibly get rid of another servant – and the Wyburghs coming next week –’

  ‘I don’t mean Jane the housemaid. I mean the portrait.’

  ‘Oh! . . . But never mind about it now. You look tired. Go out and have a good blow. I think they said they were going past Giles’s.’

  ‘I’d better write about it now. I do hope they don’t send that young man with the spots again.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Lady Harow murmured to the puzzle, ‘do take a short rest from things! You’ll wear yourself out. Did you see the honey? Such a mass! They brought it in for me to look at. There should be enough to last the winter.’

  The beautiful lips were pursed. ‘I don’t think I shall be here for the winter, mother.’

  ‘What? Not Switzerland, my own! Those foolish Swiss! They got across with the French during the war – so unwise of them, with all these German places one can’t possibly go to – I’ve been reading about it –’

  ‘Switzerland!’ The tone was too tired to be impatient. ‘Shall I never make you see, mother?’

  ‘But I do see, darling! Must we sell more pictures? Is there nothing else? There seem to be cabinets and cabinets full of things – or the trees –’

  ‘I think the Lady Jane.’

  ‘But, my sweet – is she valuable?’

  The words seemed to slip out of themselves, yet not without a certain impact of concentration.

  ‘I really don’t know! They can have her for nothing if they’ll only take her away!’

  Lady Harow’s arched brows rose to the springing of her tower of hair.

  ‘My precious! . . . Now you know this is only one of your moody-moodies, and they’re so bad for you! Now do run away and have a blow. I think they said past Giles’s. Do you see a piece anywhere with a little bit out like this?’

  Gervaise’s mother turned to the puzzle again.

  Gervaise went out, but only to enter the house again a few minutes later by another way. She passed to her own small sitting-room – the room she still retained, with a key thank heaven, to turn in the door when things got too much for her. But she did not sit down. From a drawer she took a large cluster of other keys, ringed and tabbed, and lettered and numbered. Then, passing out again, she locked the door of her room behind her.

  She knew that what her mother called her ‘moodies’ were not good for her. But Lady Harow’s unvarying prescription – to go out and have a blow – never did any good. On the other hand, by precipit­ating matters, a ramble through the vast house often did. When a thing cannot be avoided it is best to face it and get it over.

  She had always felt the house to be much more hers than her mother’s. Switzerland, the Riviera, London, Normandy, Scotland – this had been her mother’s itinerary as long as the family fortunes had stood the expense; but Gervaise had always been dragged un­willingly at her heels, and her heart had always lifted again at the first glimpse of the Abbey on its rounded hill. The house was as much a part of her as her bones were. And – though not lately – she had had dreams about its labyrinthine windings. Maze enough it was as it stood in its actuality, with its hundreds of real doors, its dozens of real passages, its solid staircases. These things were the house itself. But in her dreams all had been strangely and adventurously enlarged. The very fabric of the Abbey had been a theme on which the oddest variations had been played. She had crept (in her dreams) through gullet-like apertures low down in walls, always remembering that this was not the first time she had passed through them, always knowing they would issue into some other chamber, which also she would remember the moment she saw it. She had found herself (in her dreams) in sheeted rooms (and, dreaming or waking, one set of rooms or another always was sheeted) – bedroom after bedroom with furniture piled on the stripped beds, sitting-rooms turned into lumber-rooms, through dream-known doors into chambers com­pletely empty . . . and so (when the moment of waking came) through yet another door of baize or leather, into a staircase all at once part of the daily world again with maids moving about, ordinary hats and crops and sticks on the stands, and a bright square of grassy court, where puppies rolled and mats lay out in the sun.

  And besides being thus shiftingly mapped, the place had been peopled too. The curious thing was that between the mapping and the peopling was a certain correspondence. Just as those chambers had been – what shall one say? – darkly expected, recognised the moment they were seen, and another getting ready to be recognised after that, so the people were imminently familiar. Awake, she could not remember one of them. Until the very moment of dream-meeting she did not quite remember them. But once met they were centuries old and known. She was not in the least afraid of these guessed-at people of her dreams. Curiously, the vanishing of their fringes when her eyes opened again gave her far more fear.

  But the last dream, either of people or place, was some time ago. She had had other things to think about. Especially she had Freddy Lampeter to think about.

  She thought of Freddy as she stood in a preposterous apartment that extended over half a dozen rooms below. It was a ballroom, with three chandeliers like breaking crystal rockets. Sofas were dwarfed by the walls they stood against, and a long row of southward windows looked out over hills of softly-rolling arable, farmed to their tops. And the scorn died away out of her face. She forgot for a moment the secret of that Abbey on its rounded hill – the weight of its taxation, its looming foreclosures, the ways and means of its maintenance. She knew that it might end by overwhelming her. But she forgot that in the thought of Freddy Lampeter.

  She had no illusions about him. She was aware that he was a butterfly here, there and everywhere, passing from this house to that, his name now lightly linked with one girl’s name, now as lightly with that of another. Oh, Gervaise could guess his kind – she was no fool! And, to be fair to him, it was not all his doing. They ran after him, could not leave him alone. But for some restraining quality in her that they apparently had not, Gervaise would have run after him too. She didn’t like to think how often she had been on the point of it. That was why at those times she had answered him curtly or not at all. Obviously it was his gift. She saw through him clearly. But she was not at the beck of a finger.

  And yet, when she had seen through him, and shown him that she saw through him, there he would be at her side again, always as if by some happy accident, murmuring smilingly and understandingly, as if everybody but they two were puppets in an amusing show and he and she privately commenting behind the scenes of it all. Yes, it was his gift. Half the girls she knew probably had their share of it. But some­how even the sharing made the thought of it none the less sweet.

  Tall mirrors behind her reflected the showery chandeliers and the arable across the smooth valley. Turning, she saw herself in one of them, and advanced to meet herself.

  Those others – Blanche Chayter, for example? Blanche had her forthright attractions, open and declared and made the most of; but had Gervaise not beauty too? That body of hers in the rough skirt and leaf-brown jumper, was it not a Toledo blade for suppleness and temper? The arrogant face within the shabby hat, was it inferior in loveliness to Blanche’s? And what treasure, disordered it might be, the bitter with the sweet, the dross with the gold, the honey caked with mortar and scurf and chaff; did not her tumultuous heart con­tain? Standing before the mirror she asked herself this.

  But she turned away from the mirror again and walked with quick­ened pace out of the ballroom. Too well she knew the answer to her own question.
The honey was there, but it was walled up, and it was she herself who was unable to release it. She could give of her care, her brain, the labour of her body, but not of her inmost heart. It had always been so. Others might laugh through their lives, cease from thinking, or never have begun. They might turn their backs upon burdens, leaving anybody to shoulder them who cared. They might be all open honeybags, for Freddy or somebody else to sip. But not she. She was different. Why?

  Entering a corridor that turned away from the smiling sweep to the south, she saw them in the distance, trooping down the hill from Giles’s.

  4

  They had been what they called ‘Maying’, though the month was July and the time afternoon. That meant that they had straggled in twos and threes across the fields, picking flowers, throwing stones, running short races, hindering Giles’s men at their work, dropping sixpences into the money-boxes of the Giles’s children. They were still laughing at these things when Gervaise entered the drawing-room.

  ‘Do pull yourself together, Pamela – this is merely absurd!’ some­body admonished a buttercup-haired girl, who had laughed herself into semi-hysterical tears and was still unable to stop.

  ‘Deplorable! Don’t take any notice of her!’

  ‘Pamela!’

  ‘Really, Pam!’ they scolded the uncontrolled girl.

  Freddy Lampeter was watching indulgently from among cushions. His small dark head was against the sunny window-opening, and the spare spread of his shoulders was emphasised by the position of his arms along the couch-back. The light hid the little healed wound at the left corner of his mouth – the little pucker that always made Gervaise think of him as two men, the one whose letters came at wide intervals from places where things of that kind were to be picked up, the other who might have lounged among cushions all his life. His soft voice too always seemed the softer for the scar, and it was with an irony that she took no trouble to hide that Gervaise made herself his handmaid.

  But on this occasion it was he who waited upon her. One of the girls turned as Gervaise entered.

  ‘Here she comes! Gervaise, where have you been? Freddy, don’t be so abominably lazy – get up and get her some tea –’

  Freddy Lampeter rose. He brought her the tea. He was taller than she, who was herself tall, and he stood bending a little over her, smiling the fixed smile of the scar. When he spoke his lips hardly moved. This, too, seemed to give whatever he said its own privacy.

  ‘Why didn’t you come down?’ he said in her ear.

  She merely made a gesture – she didn’t know –

  ‘Haven’t you been out?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d have stayed behind if I’d known,’ he remarked. These were the things she hated him to say. How did he know that she would have liked him to stay behind? And if he did know it, was it not a thing he would have done better to keep to himself?

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘Don’t ask me. Pamela took charge. Look at her – she hasn’t finished yet –’

  And indeed Pamela’s laughter was of the inordinate kind that sometimes seizes the young in church. She called across to Freddy.

  ‘Isn’t it anybody’s birthday?’ she implored. ‘Oh, I do so want it to be a birthday! Do have been born today, Freddy!’

  Freddy Lampeter sent her a smile, but did not move from Ger­v­aise’s side.

  ‘Let her alone, she’ll run down,’ he remarked to Gervaise, and again it was as if he and she were apart, commenting on the spectacle of the overstrained girl.

  Then suddenly he addressed her on her own account.

  ‘What were you doing in the picture-gallery?’ he asked her.

  Her reply was as briefly informative as she could make it.

  ‘I’m going to sell the Lady Jane.’

  He expostulated softly. ‘Oh! must you?’

  ‘It isn’t a question of “must”. I needn’t if it comes to that.’

  ‘Then why sell her?’

  Were her private reasons any of his business? She had turned to the verandah, but he moved with her. After them floated Pamela’s voice. ‘Oh, do let’s all dress up tonight!’ Gervaise and Freddy Lam­peter stood outside, at the top of the flagged steps that descended to the lawn.

  ‘Is she by one of the big men?’ he broke silence after a minute.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, as if she had forgotten what they had been talk-ing about.

  ‘The Lady Jane.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then – ’ Apparently he would not let it alone. He meant why, in need such as hers, and with a Sir Joshua still in the house, sell ‘Artists Unknown’ for a negligible sum?

  ‘You know we are selling pictures,’ she said as they moved together a little way along the lawn.

  ‘Raeburns – yes,’ was his half-heard reply.

  Then suddenly he employed the gift that disturbed her most of all. He walked by her side in complete silence.

  Of their encounters it was these unprepared-for ones that always troubled her the most. Give her but a little time in which to take hold of herself; and she could always contrive to strip him of some of his wonderfulness. Nay, with a little preparation, she could dissect him, reduce him to quite ordinary components. That voice of his, she could steel herself against its pitch and quality; such-and-such things he said in it – she could sift his meanings through and through, run them through her fingers like sand. And it was always heartsease to her to analyse him in this way and to find nothing whatever at the bottom . . . But that was only possible when she spent some hours with him. Away from him, all was to do again. Though she scattered him as Lady Harow might have scattered her jigsaw map of Iceland, he always reassembled, to trouble her as profoundly as ever at their next impromptu meeting.

  Therefore, as with the oppression of the house itself; better face it and get it over. She cared little at these times what thrusts she gave him; it was even prudent to be a little rough. He wanted to know her real reason for selling the Lady Jane. She would not have told him even if she could. So she allowed her silence to match his.

  An iron fence crossed the park, with a gate in a semicircular opening that only allowed their passage one at a time. It closed with a clash behind them, and they climbed the hill among the grazing cattle. In silence they still mounted. From the unseen lower road came the light pattering of a quick-stepping horse in a rubber-tyred trap. An oak half as big as the world hid the Abbey from their view.

  Then, as they rose higher and ever higher, the Abbey was seen again, a roof-view, with oblique peeps into its towers, and the valerian and the wallflowers marking the plan of its crumbling walls.

  When at last he spoke he did so without lifting his amused eyes from the ground. He returned to the charge again.

  ‘I wonder why you want to sell the Lady Jane,’ he repeated.

  She felt that his finger-tips were on her nerves; he was experi­ment­ing with her. She gave him the coldest of glances.

  ‘You seem to have that picture on your mind,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t call mine a mind,’ he laughed softly.

  She knew that if she was to free herself from him now was the time. She faced him haughtily.

  ‘Do you really suppose that I don’t know perfectly well what you mean?’ she asked him.

  He looked quickly up. ‘What do I mean?’ he asked with curiosity.

  ‘You aren’t wondering about the Lady Jane at all. You’re wonder­ing about me, and I’d much rather you didn’t.’

  He knew that that was not true, but she now wanted to have him like her mother’s puzzle, all scattered into little pieces. She wanted him handable, without that tormenting glamour, powerless over her. She had come out with him for that very purpose.

  But he merely acquiesced, with an appea
rance of gravity even.

  ‘I do often wonder about you, Gervaise. You know that.’

  Thereupon she laughed. ‘Oh, yes, I know! I know quite well how often that is! You wonder about me when you happen to remember me!’

  He made no sign of resentment. He seemed to be examining himself.

  ‘Well, you may be right,’ he said at last. ‘And anyway, I’m not putting in for extra leave.’

  And that also she knew in him – the modestly picturesque attitude with which he could admit a fault. He meant that he would be off in October, perhaps to get another of those little puckers in the flesh from an Afghan bullet or a knife. He was reminding her how perilously he lived.

  But if he hoped by this to get under her guard, again he failed.

  ‘You’re going on to the Chaytors, aren’t you?’ she abruptly chall­enged him.

  ‘Yes. I promised Blanche. Why don’t you come? She’d love to have you,’ was his reply.

  ‘Has she said so?’

  ‘Why,’ he said, suddenly stopping, ‘you haven’t had a row, have you?’

  For answer she laughed again. Blanche ask her! If Blanche had said that she wanted Gervaise in the house, Gervaise did not believe her. On that rounded hill, with the mountainous oaks behind them and the Abbey laid out in plan below, an invisible Blanche Chaytor stood between Freddy Lampeter and Gervaise Harow. Gervaise knew it by his very readiness with her name; much better to be ready than to wait to be accused. Once more she laughed. He was actually helping in his own dismembering now, by laying bare his processes. And oh the immediate comfort she found in it! Already she had faced the ob­session of him, was half-way through with it, and felt her approach­ing liberation. What (she wondered) must it be to be married to a man like that! To find no ease in him save in his imperfections, no love but when he was not there! Let Blanche have him! By and by Blanche would know as much as Gervaise knew!

  The blessedness, once more, to have laid the ghost of him!