Late and Soon (33 page)

“So'll you.”

“I shall.”

“I shan't be seeing you again. I'm going back to London to-morrow.”

“So Sedgewick gets his slice of luck.”

“If that's what you call it,” she agreed.

“It is,” said Lonergan, and in his voice was a smile that she could not see.

They were nearing the house.

“Primrose, you'll call this a lot of nonsense —but I want to tell you that there's a good deal that I'm terribly sorry about. Forgive me.”

“Forget it,” Primrose said, in her indifferent drawl.

The car jolted its way round the oval grass plot before the stone pillars. Primrose swayed deliberately to the movement and, as her whole slim length fell against him, she put her hand over Lonergan's on the gear-lever.

He slipped the clutch into neutral, and the car stopped.

For a moment they both remained motionless. Then Primrose pulled herself upright and opened the door of the car.

She swung her long legs over the step.

“Good-night, Rory. Thanks for the lift.”

“Good-night, my dear.”

“Damn this black-out, I can't see a thing.”

He saw the flash of her torch as she stumbled forward, under the lead-roofed portico.

“Are you all right, Primrose?”

“I'm okay.”

The tiny light of the torch went out.

“In case I don't see you again, good luck and all that.”

Her voice reached him through the darkness and the echo of it was immediately lost as the doors banged-to behind her.

As he walked into the hall Lonergan's eyes sought anxiously for Valentine.

He saw her at once, and that she looked pale and very tired. The others were there too—Lady Rockingham and the General and Jess — sitting in silence, whilst the voice of a B.B.C.. announcer passionlessly enunciated the cheerless items of the Nine O'Clock News.

Lonergan began an apology for his lateness, but was immediately checked by an impatient gesture and portentous glare from the General.

He looked at Valentine with a despair born of fatigue, urgency and exasperation, and she got up and came towards him.

The telephone bell cut shrilly into the careful silence, the General ejaculated angrily and Jess scrambled up from her seat on the floor.

“It'll be for me,” said Lonergan. “I've a call to Roscommon.”

He strode to the telephone, and Valentine sank back into her chair again.

Lonergan, pushing into the dark corner where the telephone so inconveniently stood on a bracket in an angle of the wall, fumbled for the electric-light switch, failed to find it, and cursed.

He was in a mood of acute nervous impatience that he knew well and had reason to dread.

The stereotyped phrases and unexplained delays to which the telephone operator subjected him did nothing to allay it.

He had three times repeated his own number and explained his requirements before, through a variety of buzzing noises and fragmentary directions, the connection was made.

“Kilronan
post-office,”
said the far-away voice, putting the authentic Irish stress on the last word.

Lonergan explained that his call was for the young French girl living at Miss Lonergan's house opposite. Could she be fetched at once, please?

“I'll ask me brother will he step over. Is it Miss Nellie you're wanting?”

“It is
not.
It's her niece, that's staying with her.”

“The young foreign girl would that be?”

“It would. If you could have her fetched to the telephone, I'd be grateful. It's urgent. I'll hold on.”

The disembodied voice ejaculated sympathetically and Lonergan was left to the strange, intermittent sounds that penetrated through the receiver into his right ear.

The time seemed endless.

He made another effort to find the light-switch with his disengaged hand and failed again.

“Have you finished?” enquired the thin English accents of the local operator.

“I have not. Don't cut me off, please. They've gone to fetch someone.”

“Okay.”

The three-minute signal sounded.

He was afraid the operator would cut him off, and his urgent request to her not to do so seemed to fall into space and met with no reply.

Lonergan began to rehearse what he would say to Arlette, as he had been doing at snatched intervals throughout the day.

She'd be distressed, the poor little thing, and she'd
written that she so much wanted to see him. Nellie was the kindest creature in the world, but she was narrow-minded, provincial and inclined to domineer, and it was plain that Arlette wasn't happy with her.

And now this—She'd think it was her last hope gone.

Lonergan wished to God she'd come to the telephone quickly and reminded himself with dismay that Nellie, as likely as not, would come with her. But they'd talk in French, anyway, and Nellie could make what she liked of it.

The time signal sounded again and Lonergan groaned.

A noise like that of an exploding cracker assaulted his hearing.

A voice spoke, but the words were indistinguishable.

“Arlette?”

Suddenly the voice became clearly audible.

It was the Irish operator in Kilronan post-office again.

“You're out of luck entirely, sir. Believe you me or believe you me not, that house is empty only for old Maggie Dolan.”

“What?” said Lonergan blankly.

“They've gone into town for the St. Vincent de Paul Grand Concert and they'll not be home till all hours, says Maggie Dolan.”

Lonergan thanked her mechanically.

It must be the only night in the whole year, he thought, that Nellie would be setting foot out of doors after dark and taking Arlette with her.

He slowly replaced the receiver, and found that his hand was shaking and his forehead damp.

I'll try again to-morrow morning early, he told himself—but without any conviction.

His nerves were on edge and he was in the grip of that panic desolation of spirit that, in its degree, periodically assails all artists.

Oh, God, I mustn't let myself go, he thought. If only
all these people would get to hell out of here and leave me

alone with Val——

Resolved to see her at once and alone, he went back into the hall.

Only Lady Rockingham still sat there, her hands idle in her lap, the wireless on the table now silenced.

She bestowed upon Lonergan a smile that held all the conscious grace in the world.

“I'm really rather waiting to ring up a London number but one hasn't got the courage to retire to that arctic spot, don't you know what I mean. Did you get through to Ireland?”

“I did, thank you.”

He looked round.

“I suppose they haven't all gone to bed? “

“No, no. Val is in the little breakfast-room, where I'm sure she's waiting for you. Poor darling Val. She's looking quite shattered to-night and I hate leaving her in the midst of all this agitation, but alas, duty calls.”

Lonergan hated her.

“I'll go in to her,” he said curtly.

“Do, my dear. Too wretched for you both. She poured out the whole thing to me, of course—we've always been rather specially devoted to one another in spite of being in-laws, which I always think is such an odious expression. I just wanted to tell you that I'll do everything I can to calm down Reggie, poor old pet, and make the family behave itself. I hear you're off at once?”

“I've forty-eight hours' leave before I go,” he answered with cold, deliberate significance.

Lady Rockingham seemed wholly unperturbed.

“Too nerve-racking, all these comings and goings,” she murmured. “Still, things settle themselves, one always feels, and I did so want you to know that Valentine will have me behind her, poor lamb, whatever happens. I always say I'm the most broad-minded woman of my acquaintance.”

Lonergan turned on her a furious look.

“I'd like to know, if I may, in what way it's become necessary for you to be broad-minded where Valentine is concerned. Would it be because she's promised to marry me?”

“My dear, she can promise to marry the crossing-sweeper if she likes. She's quite old enough to know her own mind, as I've told her. But, since we're talking so frankly, we do—all of
us
I mean—feel that it will be a thousand pities if she rushes just now into any rather irrevocable affair like marriage, don't you know what I mean. One saw so much of that in the last war.”

“Just what is the insuperable objection to Valentine's marrying me if she does me that honour? My nationality, or my religion, or my profession, or the class to which—I'm proud to say—I belong?”

Lady Rockingham got up from her seat, still smiling.

“I always think this sort of discussion is so embarrassing, don't you? Personally, I detest the word class but then I'm democratic. Practically a socialist. One only feels that poor darling Val, out of her setting, Devon and Coombe, and the family and all that—would be too utterly lost and wretched, don't you know what I mean. I mean, she's not really adaptable, is she—even if she was a younger woman. One's only thinking of her happiness, which I'm quite sure is all you're thinking of either.”

She smiled at him again.

“Do forgive me. I must now wrestle with a trunk call. So impossible, nowadays. They always tell one the junctions are engaged, whatever that may mean, don't they?”

Lonergan gave her a long, level look of anger and dislike.

“You're right about one thing—which is as well, since you're wrong about everything else on earth. I want nothing but Valentine's happiness and I've the arrogance to be perfectly convinced that she'll find it with me, and
that she's completely and entirely missed it with you and all the rest of her relations, God help her! It's well she's the courage to break away from the whole lot of you, and I'm going to see to it that she does so, the very first minute it can be done.”

He walked into the breakfast-room and shut the door.

“Val! I've been almost out of my mind—not able to get next or near you all day. Forgive me, love. Did Jess meet you this afternoon?”

“Yes. I got all your messages.”

She looked exhausted and distraught.

“I knew you'd understand how it was. There was everything in the world to do, and I'm not through yet. I've to go out again in an hour. Oh, God, Valentine, I'm not a free agent any more. I'm caught up in this machinery of war and now that I've found you, I can't stay with you.”

He saw the wild look of pain in her eyes and it increased his sense of frenzied helplessness.

“When must you go, Rory?”

“My leave is up at nine o'clock on Friday morning.”

“I mayn't even know where they're sending you, may I?”

“I don't actually know myself. But it doesn't follow we shall sail immediately, sweetheart. We may be kept hanging about for weeks at the port of embarkation. Or, of course, we may sail directly.”

“I can't bear it,” said Valentine, and she hid her face in her hands.

“What'll we do?” he asked desperately. “I've a special licence, Val, that'll be available to-morrow. We could be married before the Registrar immediately and have the next two days together. You might even join me for a while after that, if we're not to be sent off at once. God knows I never meant to rush you like this, though.”

He knew, from her immobility, that he was hurting
her, but the bitter anger and dismay that Venetia Rockingham's insinuations had roused in him drove him on.

“It's a mad thing, to have to take the decision of a lifetime in five minutes. It's asking you to go against all your family, and your tradition and theirs. It's asking you to take on something more or less blind, as things are now. How can I ask you to do that?”

“Rory——” she said entreatingly.

He went on recklessly, disregarding alike her suffering and his own.

“Dearest, dearest love—God knows I adore you, but the risk of it is so immense. I've been here, in your house, I've seen something of your life, of the people it's linked up with—and I've nothing,
nothing
in common with any of it. Supposing I get through the war and come back to you—what'll happen to us? What would we do? I could never live this kind of life, and what do you know of my kind? You'd be bewildered by my friends—riffraff of the artist world, most of them—and my good, simple, middle-class Irish relations. And there's Arlette. I'm out of my mind about Arlette, now this minute. I couldn't get her on the telephone just now and when I do, what can I say? That I'm leaving her in a place where she obviously isn't happy, and that even if I come back after the war, I won't be having her to live with me in Paris the way she thinks I will.”

“Arlette could come here,” Valentine said in a very low voice.

“Ah, you don't understand. That isn't what would ever make her happy. She's used to an artist's life—the kind that Laurence and I led. Freedom, and every sort of mad contact—a whole lot of drinking even—and conversation that really means something. Not the chitter-chatter about who So-and-so was before she married somebody's first cousin from the next county. … Forgive me, Val!”

“Go on,” she said.

“Why do you say ‘Go on' when it's clear that every word I say is nearly killing you?”

The anger in his own voice horrified Lonergan as he heard it, even though it was not directed against her, and he strove to control it.

“You see, darling, I'm terrified—plain terrified—at the thought that we'd do this thing in a desperate hurry—as we must, if we're to do it at all—and then not know how to make a success of it afterwards—if there's to be any afterwards. I'm afraid of myself. Life is too complex for people of our age—there are too many adjustments to make. If we'd come together as we ought to have done, when we loved one another in youth, we'd have made a go of it. But we've had to make our lives separately. You belong to Coombe, and to these people—who all think you'd be ruining yourself by marrying an Irishman like me—someone who just draws pictures. You've got your own responsibilities, that you take so seriously.”