What was the look he saw there? What made it seem so old, though seen by him for the first time? For she seemed both aware of his nearness and yet unutterably far away. Readiness and yielding were in those silvery eyes, but there was something else also. Was it fear lest, having got her, he should not always be able to keep her? Was it a still deeper need, a need of something more even than he could give, some nearer fellowship, worship, identity?
And why did her eyes go upwards so to the torn sleeve fluttering from the bough overhead?
The look only lasted for a moment. Then he was covering the arm with kisses, as much of it as he could reach without letting her go. And she was lifting eyes to him in which were now neither fear nor any other need, but only the readiness.
‘If you like, Pearce,’ she said.
‘But I say, you’ll catch cold,’ he said by and by. ‘I’ll get it down and you can fix it up with a pin.’
But she answered rather quickly. ‘No, no – leave it there.’
‘But it’s only the seam that’s gone.’
‘No, no. Leave it. And I’ll get just one sprig of mistletoe. We’ll get the rest somewhere else.’
She swathed the white arm in the less-white muffler, and placed in her bosom a bit of mistletoe she had brought down in her fall.
Naturally she had no idea the same thing had ever been done before.
The Real People
1
Just because Aubrey Kneller came to grief there, the little street shall not be given its real name. We will call it Fountney Place. It is in the London Postal District S.W.1, and Harrods’ and the Oratory are near its upper end. At the other end a glimpse of pale Belgravia stucco closes its short perspective of hardly more than a couple of hundred yards. No great volume of traffic passes along it; in fact it has that air some women have, whom one does not know, would just a little like to know, yet somehow never takes the trouble to be better acquainted with. Aubrey Kneller had never set foot in it until that May afternoon. Then he yielded to its lure and entered it, noting its shy Hogarth frontages, its bright but modest sunblinds, and the windows of its couturières and florists and antique dealers and makers of glossy and expensive boots.
Until that afternoon or thereabouts, Aubrey had not been the kind of man to spy out secrets, of streets or anything else. He had always kept, as one might say, to the Brompton Road of life, well content with its plate-glass frontages and elaborated window-displays. He knew his business, which in a sense was plate-glass too – the writing of books that people wanted and were willing to pay for, and not of those they didn’t want and would not have had given. He had the air of a fortunate and well-paid man – faultless suit of navy blue, gold-mounted stick and yellow gloves, and new light-grey Homburg hat. And it was his fate that he wandered into that coy little street instead of sticking to the Brompton Road.
He was vaguely conscious that for some months past he had not been altogether himself. The trouble, if trouble there was, seemed to be about his latest book, Delia Vane. There was no doubt that, in one way and another, it had led him the devil of a dance. Even now that it was finished, sealed, registered and handed over the Post Office counter hardly an hour before, he was somehow not rid of it. It still echoed. He half wished he had the manuscript back. A telephone-call to his publishers would bring it back. He couldn’t make up his mind about it. It was a risk, in that it was a marked break-away from his former manner. In some way that he could not explain, the thing itself had taken charge, and Aubrey was very uneasy in his mind about it.
For, originally, Delia Vane was not to have been the title of his book at all. It was not even to have been about anybody called Delia Vane, nor to have had a character of that name in it. Merely, at an early stage of his work, he had felt the need of some nondescript minor personage, the needy-governess kind, meek, self-effacing, the loving-but-not-loved sort and so forth, to be used as he wanted and shoved into the background again when he had finished with her. And note that it is necessary to speak of this purely imaginary character in Aubrey’s book as if in some sort she had had a real and corporal existence.
Precisely such a character, then, had stepped forward from wherever it is that these figments do come from, and had humbly applied, as it were, for the situation. And Aubrey, judging that she would suit very well, had hardly given her a second glance. Out of the ragbag of his mind he had tossed her a skimpy little frock, a pair of thread stockings and resoled shoes. Not for a moment had he dreamed that she would not be as good as gold.
But mark what had followed. One afternoon Aubrey had put aside his work, well content with it, happy to think that it was running on the same smooth lines as the eight or ten books that had preceded it. And he had taken it up again the next morning to find that this foundling, this poor relation, this waif who ought to have thought herself lucky to be in a book at all, had so far forgotten her station in life as to set her cap at his principal male character.
Naturally such a thing was not to be thought of for a moment. In that illimitable little world of a few inches wide that separates an author from the paper he writes on there had been something like a scene. Aubrey was a kindhearted man, reluctant to hurt the feelings even of a puppet in a printed book, but this was rank insubordination, calling for firm action. Later he regretted that he had not been still firmer, even at the expense of some kindness. As it was, he had had her up on the magic carpet, next his blotting-pad, had pointed out her offence to her, and had left the rest to her proper feeling. A tear, as one might say, had trembled on her lashes – the length and curve of which, by the way, he had not hitherto noticed. She had hung her head in contrition. Then, the lecture over, she had vanished whence she had come. The creator must be master of his creatures.
But barely a week afterwards he had had to rap her over the knuckles once more. Again we must suppose that we are watching something that happened in that mysterious little realm that lies between an author and his desk. The following dialogue had, to all intents and purposes, taken place between Aubrey Kneller and this little starveling who ought to have been washing down somebody’s front steps.
‘But it’s so dull there!’
‘Dull where?’
‘Where we all are till you think of us.’
‘I can’t help that. It’s your proper place. Suppose I hadn’t thought of you at all?’
‘I shouldn’t have minded that so much. I hadn’t been out then. I didn’t know anything else.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be hard on you, but you must do as you’re told or else get somebody else to think of you,’ Aubrey had informed her.
‘If I’m not to have any fun why didn’t you let me alone?’ she had sulked.
‘Now that’s quite enough. Off you go. I’m busy.’
And off she had trotted, with downhung but mutinous head. When next she had popped up the scene had been almost painful.
‘But I want to!’ she had flung at him.
‘Well, you’re not going to, and there’s an end of it.’
‘Who says?’
‘Annie – ’ this is solemn warning from Aubrey, ‘ – now you be a good girl!’
‘What’s the good of being good if you don’t get anything for it?’
‘You must be good because it’s the proper thing to be. Understand that Pat’s far above you in station, and he’s going to marry Rosamond. That’s what my readers expect, and it’s what they’re going to have.’
‘Rosamond!’ (One would have said real contempt, real disdain.) ‘She’s only a showroom dummy! And you’ve given her every decent thing there is to wear in the book! That’s all she is – clothes and a lot of words by you! You ask Pat!’
‘Pat! Do you mean Sir Patrick Archdale?’ Aubrey had demanded.
‘Yes, if you’re going to be pompous about it!’
‘Now look
here, Annie –’
‘I don’t think I like that name very much,’ she had remarked coolly. ‘I shall think of another one.’ And then, with sudden coaxing, for when all was said it was in his power to forbid her the book altogether, ‘Please, Mr Kneller! Just a tiny little!’
‘I’ve told you no.’
‘Then – ’ here had come a gleam of temper swift as the flash of a blade, ‘ – then I shall do just whatever I like and I shan’t tell you anything about it! So send me back, there! I’d rather be there than in that mouldy crowd you’ve written!’
You see the kind of thing that was running in Aubrey Kneller’s mind as he strolled along Pountney Place, unaware that anything in particular was lying in wait for him.
2
His eyes rested on a little antique shop with a single Sheraton chair in the window, its price-ticket carefully hidden. Then they fell on a similar window, with nothing in it but a cabinet with a blue jar on the top. And again he was conscious of the prim, quakerish aspect of the whole street. Its shops, small and expensive, were really old Georgian houses, put to their present purpose with hardly any attempt at conversion at all. They had fanlights and rod-bellpulls and old knockers, domestic for all their double life. The Sheraton chair, although for sale, hardly ceased to be part of the furniture of the room within, and the cabinet with the blue jar had only turned its back on the interior for a moment, and would turn round again when it discovered that there was nobody in the street to look at but Aubrey Kneller.
And Aubrey was restless, and in two minds whether he would not telephone for that manuscript back after all.
For he lived in an expensive flat in King Street, St James’s, and was fond of such things as first editions, watercolours by Cox, and intaglios in exquisite little nests of trays. He liked his stall at first nights, the quietude of his club, and his luncheons chez Bellomo or Jules. And these things run into a certain amount of money. He wanted rather to increase his income than to check the source of it, and he could only increase it by diligent tillage of that Tom Tiddler’s Ground, the few inches of space between him and his writing table in which everything in his books happened. If all went well there, money flowed. If anything went amiss it did not flow. In the event of things going very badly indeed, the news would quickly spread that he had lost touch and exhausted his freshness. There were twenty eager young rivals straining every nerve to take his place. Well-to-do as he was, he merely lived on his wits, and must take care to keep them bright and in good running order.
And now a chance-found little nobody whose insignificance appeared in her very name – Annie Thompson – had seriously interfered with his style.
For she had been as good as her word. She had begun to act precisely as she pleased, without consulting him at all. Meek, self-effacing and unloved, she? By no means! He had long since begun to go in dread of her. And at first, fearing that he had been sticking at it too closely, he had tried a change of air. He had gone into the country for a few days, and had almost succeeded in putting her out of his mind, where she ought never to have been at all.
But God only knew what had happened during those few days’ absence. How, indeed, could anything happen to his book, and him away? Yet there it was. Whether this upstart wanted Pat for his own sake, or to come between him and Rosamond, or merely to be evens with Aubrey Kneller, maker of all three of them, made not an atom of difference in the result. Simply, behind Aubrey’s back, she had dug herself in past dislodging, and Rosamond, with a noble gesture, had stalked clean out of the book. Vain to ask where she had gone. Perhaps she had never really been there. Perhaps she had merely been something Aubrey had thought of a long time ago and had gone on copying ever since because people paid him to do so. It was not even in his power to call his heroine back. That would have been to knock his book on the head once for all. Annie Thompson reigned supreme; and for the unusual reason that she was the only real person it had ever entered his head to describe.
Perhaps you begin to see the grief to which Aubrey Kneller came that afternoon in Pountney Place.
The rest had followed very quickly.
‘I’ve been thinking it over about my name,’ Annie Thompson announced one day, her voice thrilling through that mystical little world in which she ruled. ‘I’ve chosen Delia. Delia Vane. You’re to call me that. And of course when I marry Pat, I shall be Lady Archdale.’
‘Oh,’ was all that the unhappy Aubrey had been able to say.
‘And you’d better make a note of the book’s title too. Aubrey, my dear. That’s to be Delia Vane too, after me.’
And since she decreed it, so it had come to pass.
One more of these author-and-character colloquies and we can be getting on. The question of Miss Vane’s clothes had arisen.
‘But there are plenty of clothes in the book,’ the wretched Aubrey had demurred. ‘There are all Rosamond’s.’
‘Rosamond’s!’ the answer had come back with a little explosion of laughter. ‘Do you mean those Jaegers? Do you think I’d be found dead in those? Now don’t you bother about making me too pretty, Aubrey. I can do without the peaches-and-cream. But clothes I must have. You give me clothes and leave the rest to me. I’ve pinched one or two things as a matter of fact – on credit, sort-of – look –’
And with one finger she had fished up from her bosom about an inch of some black, cobwebby stuff or other – a black lace chemise.
‘I won it,’ she had purred. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I never gave Rosamond that!’ the startled Aubrey had cried. ‘She’d have blushed to wear such a thing!’
‘Course. I tell you I won it. Some blusher, Rosamond; she nearly blushed me out of my book – jam-angel!’
‘But look here, Delia,’ Aubrey had miserably expostulated. ‘What about my public? Don’t you see that’s the way to get us banned?’
‘What’s banned?’
‘Not stocked at the libraries. What’s going to happen to us then?’
When it came to a point of that sort Delia always knew on which side her bread was buttered. She had drawn as it were closer, snuggling up to Aubrey with an affectionate look.
‘What a shame to tease the nice old thing!’ she had cooed. ‘Do you know, Aubrey, I think it’s so clever of you to have written Pat and me! I can’t think how you do it! How do you think of it all? Is it just genius? Where do you get the ideas? Do they just come? . . . And I will be good. I promise. I’ll be as good as Rosamond. And you will get me oodles of readers, won’t you – Aubrey – dear?’
But the most curious thing of all was that, even now, with his book finished, Aubrey was never quite sure of the personal appearance of this creature who, from being nobody at all, had ended by thrusting everybody but Pat and herself clean off the stage. Of her caprices, impulses, ingrained selfishness, he was overwhelmingly sure; but of her exterior manifestation – no. Only her voice he sometimes almost heard, fickle and soft. For the rest, she might have been fair or dark, tall or small, blue-eyed or speckled or brown. Her features were composite, picked up here and there, in streets or tubes or restaurants. Often he lingered at shop-windows, in search of clothes that seemed appropriate to his creation.
And suddenly something that looked rather like Delia’s style caught his eye on the other side of Pountney Place.
‘Hallo, we’ll have a look at that,’ said the suddenly wide-awake Aubrey; and he crossed the street.
The object that had caught his eye was a hat, half hidden behind the sunblind of one of those so private-looking little shops. It was the only thing in the window, a ruffle of pale green and white, as if a seabird had alighted in a rock-pool. He looked round the awning at it on its slender wooden stand.
At the same moment he was aware that he was being looked at in return.
Now privacy or no privacy, if there is one kind of window into which one ma
y peer without offence, surely it is the window of a shop. And yet those small-paned Pountney Place windows had such an intimate look as well! Nobody peers into intimate interiors. All the same, Aubrey was being watched through the chink of a net half-curtain. He was caught, moreover, in a divided mind. He would have felt singularly foolish if he had had to explain that he had crossed the street to try the effect of a hat upon a person who had no existence, and yet that was the simple truth. So he turned away, walking past the sunblind.
The watcher made a simultaneous movement to the other side of the window.
Now Aubrey Kneller was engaged to be married. He had, therefore, a perfectly good reason for buying a hat if he wished to. And he felt piqued and played with, and in a sense challenged. He stepped back to take a look at the frontage. The sunblind was a new one and bore no name; obviously the shop had not been opened very long. The bricks of that house-shop were old and mellow, its windows flat-sashed, and many-angled zinc chimney-cowls made ragged the skyline over the parapet. Below was a whitewashed area, and four whitened steps rose to the door, which stood open. But the door just within on the right was closed, and bore a brass plate with the words ‘Please ring’ on it.
As if he had been dared to do so, Aubrey mounted the steps. It must have been a very lightly-poised bell, for Aubrey was hardly aware that his finger had touched it. But from somewhere inside the shop there came a low silver trilling. And after all, a shop is a shop, even if one does have to ring for admittance.
The door opened; but so negligible was the mien of the person who opened it that Aubrey entered with hardly a glance at her.
3
The parlour was all a soft pigeon-grey, with a grey carpet fitted close up to the walls and sheeny grey curtains giving access to the room or rooms behind. Its smell was that of the Burlington Arcade, a public sort of mingling of anybody’s powder, sachet, cream. Half a dozen small water-colour carnivals hung on the walls, done with much white, which pervaded their thick impasto like a bloom of cosmetic. The slanting sunblind outside gave the place the cool light of the interior of a marquee. But for the hat in the window, the room was to all appearances a living-room – barring again the tall cheval-glass and a half-unpacked carton, frothing with tissue-paper. Aubrey looked round for the person in charge – for the child who had admitted him could hardly be she.
The Dead of Night Page 53
