It appeared that he had sent for her. He had told Jacob that she would take charge of affairs. There were complications; a doctor had not been summoned until too late and there would have to be something in the nature of an inquest. Lewis, utterly bewildered by all the responsibilities thrust upon him, had sent for his wife.
‘She’s been ill for some time,’ said Florence thoughtfully. ‘Growing too fast, you know. And you say the crossing was bad. It could easily be accounted for. Did you see her?’
‘No. They had taken her away, to the mortuary I think.’
‘But Lewis was there?’
‘Yes. He hardly knows what he is doing. He says that she belongs to you now.’
‘And he wired for me this morning? Yes!’ she tapped her foot pensively. Then she resumed, with energy: ‘He was quite right. My arriving here today will make all the difference. I represent her guardians, if there is any fuss. There’s more chance of the thing being hushed up. We could say that they came on ahead … This woman, Mdme Marxse, she’ll help us out? She’ll tell the same story as we do, if we have to invent something to put a good face on it?’
‘Reine will swear to anything that keeps her out of trouble with the police,’ Jacob assured her. ‘She is half mad with terror. She will be quite easy …’
‘I’ll have to see Lewis,’ Florence decided. ‘It’s going to be difficult. The whole thing looks so bad. She was under sixteen, you know. The law …’
‘It depends on you,’ said Jacob, staring at her curiously. ‘It is for you to say whether he persuaded her to leave the protection of her friends …’
He broke off. He was amazed and a trifle shocked at her composure. He found himself wishing that she would be a little grieved. She seemed to view the business simply in the light of a threatened disgrace., He saw it like that himself, though he was very sorry for his young sister-in-law; his mind, as he hurried back to the hotel, had been full of uncomfortable possibilities. He had dreaded the scene with Florence, supposing that his shocking news would utterly prostrate her. He had seen himself, the only practical person at hand, dealing with doctors and policemen, and persuading his lofty-minded companion of the necessity for some sort of compromise. But it had seemed so impossible that Reine and Florence could ever be brought to any concerted action. Now, finding it perfectly possible, beholding the young woman no less anxious to avoid a scandal than the old one, meeting cold competency where he had expected distress and indignation, he was relieved but not happy.
She asked him if Lewis was likely to be reasonable, and he said in a lugubrious voice that he did not know. Not to anyone, not even to Tony, could he have described the impression which Lewis made upon him. If Florence was showing too little sensibility, Lewis, as usual, was showing too much. Jacob, a plain man, was harassed between them. Florence went on speaking in her quiet, dry voice, mentioning steps that must be taken. How could he describe to her that little, untidy room where Tessa had died, and where Lewis had sat all day, after they took her away, in a dazed and timeless trance among the strewn sheets of music? There had been something in that rigid petrifaction of grief which frightened Jacob. He said to Florence:
‘He should not stay at that place.’
‘Would he come here do you think?’
‘Perhaps. I believe he will do what he is told.’
‘Well then, bring him here. We shall have to stay in Brussels evidently, till this business is settled. I must send for my father. Can you get Lewis a room?’
‘Certainly, Mrs Dodd. Will you see him now?’
She thought not. She did not feel quite prepared, yet, for that interview. But Jacob was to look after him. And his letters! They had better be taken down; they were on the dressing-table. Jacob went to pick them up and saw beside them several notices of the Dodd Symphony which she had contrived to collect on the preceding day, in spite of its disorganisation.
‘I suppose he won’t have seen those,’ she said with a slight blush.
‘I think not,’ said Jacob rather grimly. ‘He left England less than ten hours later.’
‘Perhaps you’d better take them down then,’ she suggested.
‘Du lieber allmächtiger Gott!’ thought Jacob as he put them in his pocket and left her. ‘Perhaps I had better not! All women are wonderful, but this one …’
He was not a tactful man and he had a great regard for Press notices, but the civility of showing these to Lewis seemed to him, at the moment, hardly well chosen.
Florence, left to herself, was also a little surprised at her own calm detachment. It was as if she had always foreseen this resolution of events, so instant was her response to the call for prompt thought and action. She sat down and mustered her powers, that she might lay her case before her father, and make him understand that Lewis, now so unexpectedly given back to her, was the most precious thing on earth. She had him completely in her hands, and for the sake of a securer future it was imperative that she should dismiss the past as though it were something irrelevant.
‘You’ll think I’m hard,’ she wrote to Charles. ‘But you must see that I have to be. Try to think of it as I do. Don’t be so sorry for her that you forget me. It’s not her death but my life that matters. I cannot live without him. And I have the future still to think of.’
Teresa had had her chance and had lost him. And she had escaped from life so easily. Florence could not, really, even pretend to pity her, just now. To go on living, to be confronted every day with the necessity of thinking, to look forward into the empty years and make plans for them, to build up upon wrecked love a monument of worthy achievement, this seemed to her a much harder thing.
Jacob, going down, found Lewis in the vestibule, waiting, withdrawn in a secret, shocked meditation, while streams of people pushed past him into the hotel restaurant. He looked as if he had been there for ever. Jacob tapped him on the shoulder and commanded him, with awkward compassion, to come in and have something to eat. They went into the restaurant, where a hand was playing and much food was displayed. Jacob, despite the gravity of the occasion and a real pity for the man beside him, could not help brightening up a little. He glanced richly round and a table was at once found for them.
‘Your wife,’ he said to Lewis, ‘is resting. She will see you later.’
Lewis looked at him vaguely and nodded.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘She thinks that you had better come to this hotel.’
Lewis said all right again and added, as an afterthought, that he had no money. He was given to understand that he need not concern himself on that point Jacob ordered a meal and they began to eat in silence.
Presently Lewis said:
‘Sanger never liked him either.’
‘Who?’ asked Jacob, rather startled.
‘Trigorin.’
‘Trigorin! Oh, yes. We were speaking of him?’
‘No.’ Lewis frowned and explained, with an effort, ‘they’re playing the ballet music from “Akbar”.’
‘Ach! So they are. And Trigorin did the dances. Yes!’
Both men listened to the vigorous measures which, since Sanger’s death, had become so popular. Jacob thought that he should produce ‘Akbar’ at one of his places. He began to estimate in his mind the risk and the probable vogue which was just beginning. He thought of the immense volume of work left by Sanger and still unproduced, and exclaimed:
‘That man! His influence, as yet, is scarcely felt. He has left so much behind him that is vital!’
Lewis did not hear. He was thinking of Trigorin and had escaped for a moment into the mountain Spring. He was breakfasting with the absurd creature in the little inn at Erfurt. He breathed again the heavenly air as the train panted up through the pine woods; he heard the cow-bells in the high pastures. And again he teased Trigorin as they steamed across the lake to the landing-stage where Tessa waited. Here the memory turned to present anguish, for at the end of it, as at the end of every thought, lay the discovery of Tessa dead. He
had got there before he had quite done smiling at Trigorin on the boat, and Jacob asked what the joke was.
‘I was thinking of our loss,’ he explained. ‘Tessa … I mean … loss …’
He whispered the word to himself once or twice as though he was trying to get accustomed to it. Jacob, who supposed that he would feel like this himself if Tony were dead, attempted diffident consolation.
‘It will pass,’ he said. ‘You will forget. Everything, in time, becomes easier. We do not continue to suffer.’
‘No,’ responded Lewis.
But he looked rebellious, as though he could not endure the thought that we do not continue to suffer, as though he would have liked to insist that our memories are immutable. He did in truth detest that pliant, slavish adaptability which enables the human race to survive. He cried out, in a sort of horror, to Jacob:
‘I shall forget her.’
Certainly he was not showing much disposition to be reasonable. Jacob, remembering the inordinate reasonableness of the lady upstairs, was inclined to sympathise with this mood. Still, he was harassed between them, and he understood how it was that the young Teresa, bewildered by two such monitors, had relinquished the problem.
Sanger’s ballet crashed to a final chord, and above the din of plates and knives, the babel of conversation in many languages, there rose up a faint crackle of applause. ‘Akbar’ was a favourite number. Jacob sighed heavily and looked with a rare indifference at the red mullet on his plate. He wished himself at home and thought with a little stab, half pleasure and half pain, how Tony, when she heard his news, would sob and cry and turn to him for comfort. She needed him so seldom, and her tears were so beautiful, and it was fitting, in his opinion, that tears should be shed by somebody over this heavy day’s work.
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Copyright © Margaret Kennedy 1924
Introduction copyright © Joanna Briscoe 2014
Margaret Kennedy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1924
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The Constant Nymph Page 32
