Random Harvest (35 page)

muttering, “The nights are drawing in,” as if it were a spell to

invoke the vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter.  Indeed no

phrase, he once said, better expressed the feeling of curtained

enclosure, of almost stupefying cosiness, that blankets London

throughout the dark months—a sort of spiritual central heating, warm and sometimes weepy, but not depressing—a Dickensian, never a Proustian fug.

Those were the happy days when Smith began to write.  As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.  He turned out countless articles and sketches that gave him pleasure only because they contained a germ of what was in his mind; but he was never fully satisfied with them himself and consequently never more than slightly disappointed when editors promptly returned them.  He did not grasp that, because he was a person of no importance, nobody wanted to read his opinions at all.  Presently, by sheer accident, he wrote something that fitted a formula; it was promptly accepted and—even more important for him at the time—paid for.

After he had worked all morning he would often set out in the afternoon with Paula on a planless excursion decided by some chance-met bus; or sometimes they would tramp haphazardly first to the left, then to the right, mile after mile, searching for books or furniture in old, gas-lit shops, and returning late at night through the narrow defiles of the City.  They liked the City, the City with a capital C, and especially at dusk, when all the tea-shops filled with men, a curious democracy within a plutocracy— silk-hatted stockbrokers buying twopenny cups while at the same table two-pounds-a-week clerks drank similar cups and talked of wireless or motor bicycles or their suburban back gardens.  And afterwards, as Paula took his arm on the pavement outside, they would be caught in the human current sweeping along Old Broad Street in a single eastward stream, then crossing Liverpool Street like a flood tide into the vast station delta.  He loved to see those people, so purposeful and yet so gentle, so free and yet so disciplined, hurrying towards the little moving boxes that would carry them home to secret suburbs—secret because they were so unknown to one another, so that a bus shuttling all day between Putney and Homerton gave one a mystical curiosity about all the people in Homerton who had never seen Putney, and all the people in Putney for whom Homerton was as strange as—perhaps stranger than—

Paris or New York.  There was something fantastic, too, in that morning and evening migration, huger in man-miles than any movement of the hordes of Tamerlane, something that might well be incomprehensible to the urban masses of the future, schooled to garden cities and decentralization.  But there could never be such romance as in the pull of steam through the Bishopsgate tunnels, or faces that stared in friendly indifference as trains raced parallel out of Waterloo.

He wrote of such things, and he wrote as he saw—a little naïvely, as if things had never been seen before—like the line drawings of a child, with something of the same piercing simplicity.  It probably helped him, as Blampied said, to have forgotten so much about himself, because into that absence came an awareness far beyond the personal reach—the idea of the past as something to be apprehended in vision rather than explored in memory.  He wrote, too, of the countryside as he had seen it: of the men in the pubs with their red faces shy over mugs of beer—old couples outside their cottages on summer evenings, silent and close, yet in that silence and closeness telling all there is in the world—a pedlar unlatching a gate with slow steps towards a lonely house—farm workers at midday, asleep under trees—a little road over the hill, curving here and there for no reason at all . . . scene after scene, as a child turns pages in a loved picture book, yet behind the apocalyptic wonderment of it all there was something to which talks with Blampied had added shape and quality—the vision of a new England rooted far back in the old, drawing its strength from a thousand years instead of its weaknesses from a hundred.

“Follow that vision,” Blampied once said.  “Follow it wherever it leads.  Think it out.  Write it down.  I’d say PREACH it if the word hadn’t been debased by so many of my own profession.”

“I couldn’t preach, anyhow.  No more public appearances for me after the last one.”

“But preaching doesn’t need a pulpit.  All it needs is what you have—a faith.”

“Is yours the same faith?”

“You have your vision of England, I have mine of the world—but your England will fit into my world.”  He added, after a pause:

“Does that sound arrogant?  Maybe.  We mustn’t be afraid of a secret arrogance.  After all, we are spies of God, mapping out territory lost to the enemy when faith was lost.”  His eyes twinkled as he touched his collar.  “It isn’t THIS, you know, that makes me say so.  Religion’s only one of the things that can die without faith.  Take another, for the sake of something you may feel I’m more impartial about—take the League of Nations.  It’s sickening now of that deadliest of modern diseases—popular approval without private faith; it will die because it demanded a crusade and we gave it a press campaign, because it’s worth our passion and we deluge it with votes of confidence and acts of indifference.  It might have sprung alive out of the soul of a saint; it could only be stillborn out of a clause in a treaty.  It should have been preached until we were all aflame with it; instead of which it’s been flattered and fawned upon till most of us are already bored with it.  Sometimes I’ve even thought we should have given it ritual—a gesture to be made whenever the name’s mentioned, like the sign of the Cross for the faithful, or—for the faithless—blowing out the match after the second man’s cigarette.” As if reminded by that he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it as he continued:  “This is a good moment to say how much I hope you’ll stay with me here—both of you.  That is, if you’re happy.”

“We’re very happy.  But I have to think of how to make a living.”

“Life’s more important than a living.  So many people who make a living are making death, not life.  Don’t ever join them.  They’re the grave-diggers of our civilization—the safe men, the compromisers, the money-makers, the muddlers-through.  Politics is full of them, so is business, so is the Church.  They’re popular, successful—some of them work hard, others are slack, but all of them can tell a good story.  Never were such charming grave-diggers in the world’s history—and part of their charm is that they don’t know what they are, just as they don’t know what WE are, either.  They set us down as cranks, oddities, social outsiders, harmless freaks who can’t be lured by riches or placated by compliments.  But a time may come when we, the dangerous men, shall either be killed or made kings—because a time may also come when it won’t be enough to love England as a tired business man loves a nap after lunch.  We may be called upon to love her as the Irish love Ireland— darkly, bitterly, and with a hatred for some who have loved her less and themselves more.”

After another of their talks he told Smith of a friend of his in Liverpool, editor of a provincial paper with a small but influential circulation.  Apparently Blampied, unknown to Smith, had sent some of his literary work for this man to see; and now had come a request to see not only more of the work, but the writer of it.  “So I hope you’ll pay him a visit, because whatever project he has in mind, or even if he hasn’t one at all, I know you’ll like him personally.”

“Another dangerous man?” Smith queried.

Blampied nodded with an answering smile.

Smith was eager to go as soon as possible; after further communication an appointment was made for just after Christmas.  Paula and he spent the intervening week in a glow of anticipation, culminating in a Christmas dinner in their own attic room, with Blampied as a guest.  They decorated the place like children and found him like a third child in his own enjoyment of the meal and the occasion.  Later in the evening he gave them, to their complete astonishment, an almost professional display of conjuring tricks; after which Paula offered some of her stage impersonations, including one of a very prim Victorian wife trying to convey to her equally prim Victorian husband the fact that she rather thought she was going to have a child.  Towards midnight, when Blampied had drunk a last toast with them and gone down to his rooms below, they sat on the hearth-rug in the firelight happily reviewing the events of the evening, and presently Smith remarked that her impersonation of the Victorian wife was new to him—he didn’t remember her ever doing it on the stage, but he thought it would have gone very well if she had.

“But it wasn’t written then,” she answered.  “I write all my own sketches—I always did—and I wrote this one last night when you were downstairs talking to Blampied.  I suppose it was on my mind— the subject, I mean—because I’m in the same position, except that I’m not going to be prim about it.”

He took her into his arms quietly, sexlessly, as they sat before the fire.  Those were the happy hours.

The next day, as if their happiness were not enough, Blampied brought them news of another kind.  It was now many weeks since they had last seen any mention of the Fulverton case, and though they felt easier about it they still opened newspapers with a qualm.  But that morning Blampied had been searching old papers for something he wished to trace and by sheer accident had come across something else.  “It seems that your Thomas Atwill left hospital more than a month ago, and though of course that doesn’t mean the case is closed, I daresay the news will be a load off your mind.”

It so definitely was that the idea occurred to them to celebrate by doing things they had been nervous of for so long—a regular evening out.  They asked Blampied to join them, but he excused himself on the score of work; before they left the house, however, he shook hands with Smith and wished him a pleasant trip, for it had been arranged that he should leave that night for Liverpool.  Even though it would only be for a few days, the impending separation added spice to the evening.  They went first to the Holborn Empire to see Little Tich, then for supper to an Italian restaurant in Soho.  When they emerged, still with a couple of hours until train time, he saw a hansom cab swinging along Coventry Street, temptingly out of place on a cold December night, but for that very reason he waved to it, telling the man to take them anywhere, just for the ride.  Under the windy sky the blaze of Christmas still sparkled in the shops as they drove away, jingling north and west along Regent Street, through Hanover Square and past Selfridge’s to Baker Street, with ghosts of Londoners stepping out of their tall houses (“And if I mistake not, my dear Watson, here is our client just arriving”), bidding them godspeed into the future; and because they both had faith in that future they were drenched in a sort of wild ecstasy, and had the cabby drive them round and round Regent’s Park while they talked and laughed and whistled to the parrots every time they passed the Zoo.

Those were the happy moments.

Later, on the platform at Euston, walking up and down beside the

train, she said she wished she were going with him, though she knew

they couldn’t afford it, the little money he was beginning to make

by writing wasn’t nearly enough for such unnecessary jaunts.  “I

know that, darling, but I still wish I were going with you, and if

you were just to say the word, like the crazy man you are, I’d rush

to the booking-office and buy a ticket—which would be stupid.  I

don’t really mean it, Smithy—I’m only joking, of course.  But I’m

part of you—I’ll only be half alive while you’re away—we belong

to the same world, as Blampied says about his friends—“

“I know that too.  There’s something RIGHT about us—about our being together here.  And Blampied wants us to stay.”

“I’d like to stay too.  I love that old ugly house.”

“So do I.  And d’you know, I don’t WANT to remember anything now— anything I’ve ever forgotten.  It would be so—so unimportant.  My life began with you, and my future goes on with you—there’s nothing else, Paula.”

“Oh, what a lovely thing to tell me!  And by the way, HE said he hoped you wouldn’t remember.”

“Blampied?”

“Yes.  He’s devoted to you.”

“I should be proud to think so, because I’m equally devoted to him.”  He kissed her laughingly.  “Must we spend these last few seconds talking of someone else?”

“But he isn’t altogether someone else.  He’s part of us—part of our happiness—don’t you feel that?”

“Darling, I do—and I also love you!”

“I love you too.  ALWAYS.”

“The whistle’s going—I’d better get inside.  Good-bye, Paula.”

“Good-bye, old boy.”

“That’s the first time you’ve said ‘old boy’ for weeks!”

“I know, I’m dropping it.  Now I’m not a touring-company actress I don’t have to talk like one.  I can impersonate anybody, you know— even the wife of a writer on a secret errand to an editor in Liverpool. . . .”  The train began to move.  “Oh, DARLING—come back soon!”

“I will!  Good-bye!”

He reached Liverpool in the early morning.  It was raining, and in hurrying across a slippery street he stumbled and fell.

PART FIVE

Rainier began to tell me most of this during the drive back from Melbury that night; a few minor details, obtained afterwards from other sources, I have since fitted in.  We drove to his Club, because Mrs. Rainier was at Stourton; after perfunctory greetings to a few members in the lobby he ordered drinks to be sent up to the suite he usually lived in when Kenmore was not in use.

He had talked rapidly during the car journey, but now, in quieter surroundings, he seemed to accept more calmly the fact that there was much to tell that he could at last quite easily recall.  Once, when I thought he was growing tired and might remember more if he rested for a while, he brushed the suggestion aside.  “You see, I want to tell you all I can in case I ever forget it again, and if I do, you must remind me—you MUST—understand?”  I promised, and he continued:  “Not that I think I shall—it’s too clear in my mind ever to be lost again.  I could find Blampied’s old house in Vale Street now if I tried—Number 73, I think it was—or maybe 75--that much I HAVE forgotten, but I suppose I can’t expect memory to come back without the normal wear-and-tear of years.  Or can I?  Has it been in a sort of cold storage, with every detail kept fresh?”