This Was Tomorrow

M
UCH OF THE
background material for the 1930’s is drawn from my own personal experience in England during those years. Because I could not return to get the answers to questions which naturally arose, my thanks are due to several old friends there who took time and trouble to supply me with reliable details—especially to Derrick de Marney, Percy Marmont, Eric Sleight, Daphne Heard, Mary Clarke, and Dr. Joan Walker. As might be expected, Thomas Cook’s obliged (through Mr. Walmisley) with the necessary travel schedules to the Continent in 1938—now a matter of history which is no longer even current.

There is a point to be underlined, outside the framework of the story, regarding the religious movement in which Evadne becomes involved, and which Hermoine plays up merely to get her own way. I do not disparage any sincere belief which can comfort or guide any honest disciple. But I do deplore the use, so easily made, of vague emotional dogmas which can be prostituted to a selfish or harmful purpose. They do not seem to be the right answer to Stephen’s old-fashioned query: “Have you been to church lately?”

E. T.

1951

J
EFF
D
AY
laid a gentle hand on the low white gate with its cannon-ball weight and chain, passed through, and heard it close quietly behind him. For a moment he stood still just inside, on the curving red brick walk which ran up to the white pillared porch between low-cut box borders. No one came to meet him, because Aunt Sue was dead. Otherwise everything about the house looked normal and reassuring. They had buried her while he was still in Europe, and now even the scent of the funeral flowers would be gone from the rooms. The blinds were raised, the windows shone and twinkled in the late afternoon sunlight, the brass knocker on the closed front door was freshly polished. He had asked them to keep the house just as she had left it, till he came. It was his now. She had willed it to him. He was the last of them named Day.

Carrying his small travelling bag, he walked slowly towards the porch—tall, thin, seeming casually hung together, but with a breadth of shoulder and an easy way of holding himself that had often sent Sue’s mind back proudly to her brother Dabney, who lost a leg at Richmond in ’64, back to her father, whom General Lee had loved, back to stories of Great-grandfather Julian, who married little Tibby Mawes after the British surrender at Yorktown. Jeff was a Day throughout all his lanky inches, and now at twenty-one his likeness to Julian’s portrait over the mantelpiece in what had been Great-grandmother Tibby’s bedroom was even more marked than even Sue had ever realized.

Diffident, yet sure of movement, with the sobering weight of his inheritance upon him, Jeff mounted the two shallow steps to the porch and the panelled white door opened inward before
him. Hagar stood there in her old-fashioned white kerchief and apron, stout and comfortable, with her broad white smile.

“We been expectin’ you, Marse Jeff.”

He knew that the “we” was habit or euphemism, for Hagar was all the household Aunt Sue had had for years, except for a couple of bright-eyed young nieces who came in extra to oblige when there was company. But somehow the wide-open front door and the soft-voiced coloured woman with her hand on the knob constituted a little ceremony of arrival, as though the hall was full of curtseying, bowing servants as he crossed the threshold and set down his bag.

Hagar took his hat and asked if he would care for a cup of tea.

“Perhaps a little later,” he said kindly. “I’d like to just look round a bit first. It seems a long time since I was here.”

“Hopin’ to see somepun of you from now on, suh.”

“Thanks, Hagar, I expect you will.”

She watched him go from her into the drawing-room, and returned with the cheerful philosophy of her race to the pantry to set out the silver tea service, which required no extra polishing on this momentous day.

Jeff paused again inside the drawing-room doorway, and as memories rushed over him his eyelids stung. Everything was just as Sue had left it, yes. But empty. Or was it? He crossed the room to where a sweet grass basket held some soft blue knitting with the needles still in it—the stuff was somehow warm in his fingers.

He picked up the small basket between both his hands and sat down on the sofa which faced the white mantelpiece. The fire was laid ready for lighting, though the day was mild. And as he sat there, the basket in his lap, almost as though he was waiting for something, he met the knowing, greenish eyes of the portrait which faced him from above the mantel-shelf.

That was Great-grandmother Tibby, painted when she was in her forties and the mother of three, in the days when Dolly Madison was setting the style for rather buxom beauty. Tibby looked frail and childish in the high-waisted white satin gown
which left her arms bare above the elbow and was cut low over her small bust. And Sue could remember her well, as a wise, serene, beloved presence in the upstairs front bedroom where the family had taken all its dilemmas, just as more lately it had run confidingly to Sue herself.

Jeff sat cherishing the basket between his hands, remembering how he had first come to this house as a child. It was the second year after he had been so ill—everything dated from that—when he first saw Williamsburg to recognize it, although he had been born here, in the same room where Tibby had died. He was at school in England when the illness began, in 1925, and nobody seemed to know what it was at first, though there was a parade of doctors—he just ached all over and felt very queer. When he got better and stopped aching his heart had begun to beat in a funny way, and in the spring he was brought back to New York to see a doctor there, who was very nice, but a bit gloomy. Jeff spent most of that year in bed, not allowed to study and getting very bored with the light amusements which were all that they permitted him. But the year after that, when he was fourteen, Dinah brought him down here to Aunt Sue in this house where, waited on by Hagar and her youngest niece, whose name was Salomey, he had thoroughly enjoyed himself, except for the process known as feeding him up, which meant that he had to eat practically all the time.

He was given the same room as his grandfather Dabney had slept in as a boy, and lying there in the big bed with the morning sunlight streaming in, he absorbed in detail the simple, touching stories Sue loved to tell of the big family the house had sheltered in her youth, and of the Sprague cousins across the way in England Street.

This was the house which Great-grandfather Julian had bought eight years after Yorktown—bought with the proceeds of his flourishing little school eked out with a generous loan from St. John Sprague, his devoted friend. Here he and Tibby had settled in, not long before the birth of their third child. Till then they had lived in a couple of rooms above the school, and Tibby, who had been born in a cabin down by the Landing,
must have been very proud of having such a grand house to keep.

It was here in this house, Aunt Sue had told him, that Bracken’s mother was courted by the Yankee newspaper correspondent she had fallen in love with before the war began—the War Between the States, that was—and it was a dreadful thing, in those days in the South, to love a Yankee. And it was here to this house that Sue had brought Cousin Segdwick, wounded in the battle at Fort Magruder—right through the Yankee Army she had brought him, with only a half-grown coloured boy to help her with the horses when she went down to the battlefield herself to find him. That story broke off there, in a mysterious way. The childhood devotion between those two had come to nothing, and Sue had never married at all, while Sedgwick married Melicent Murray, and Sylvia was their granddaughter….

The journey which had brought him back to Williamsburg now in this smouldering autumn of 1934 seemed a strange one, in the sanctuary of Sue’s drawing-room, back from an apprehensive Europe through a still normal London, where he had paused briefly to attend the wedding of an English cousin, all white satin and orchids, and on a fast boat to oblivious New York and by the first train South. He needed Sue now, again. He needed to know what she would have said to a man—he was twenty-one—who had to live out his life, such as it was, with his handicap. He wanted to tell her what he knew about himself, though no one had told him the whole truth about it, as he was now aware. He wanted to tell her how he had discovered that although he wasn’t frightened—he had got through all that, and there was nothing to dying, when you came right down to it—living could be rather a nuisance.

He wanted to ask her if there was some
way
to live, some magic formula, so that no one need ever know what he knew about himself. Because he might live as long as anybody—they said—if he remembered all the Better-nots. Perhaps even if he didn’t. But the nuisance was that if he got careless about them, or if he ran into something—unexpected—it might show. His
most secret dread was of some kind of public collapse which would give the thing right away to people who had thought till then that he was all right. And was it morbid to hate the times when he couldn’t ask a girl to dance, couldn’t ride to hounds with the rest of the house-party, couldn’t dive into cold water, couldn’t suddenly clasp hands and race up hill….

Was it just childishness to want to be like everybody else, or was it some perverted kind of conceit which perhaps really
enjoyed
being a crock? Some people were able to give themselves airs about a disability. Some people, he knew, even invented imaginary ailments to get sympathy and attention. Why was he so unable to endure the sympathy and attention he was unfortunately entitled to? How—if only he could have asked Aunt Sue before it was too late—how could he get himself into some kind of reasonably disciplined state of mind about his Better-nots, instead of having to wear them like a ruddy crown of thorns?

The blue wool in the work-basket between his hands had no answer for him. She was gone. But was she? The house was silent, seemingly empty, but it was not, somehow, deserted. The house itself was alive all round him, the air he breathed was vital and fresh and stirring, the answer was here, he was sure, a part of Aunt Sue’s legacy, if only he could find it, if only she had left him some sort of clue—

“Jeff, darling, I came in the back way with some flowers for the house and Hagar said you’d arrived on the afternoon train!”

He turned his head slowly towards the open doorway into the hall, without rising. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen stood there, her arms full of long-stemmed greenhouse flowers. The Sprague greenhouse was famous. He simply sat there, looking at his Cousin Sylvia.

He had known before he reached New York on his homeward journey that Sylvia would be in Williamsburg now, and yet at the last moment he had deliberately omitted to wire her
of his arrival. This afternoon when he left the station on foot, carrying his bag, he had avoided the Sprague house in England Street and come straight to Aunt Sue’s alone. Because he knew now, quite definitely, that he and Sylvia were going to have to slow down on this thing somehow. And he would have liked to ask Aunt Sue’s help on that too.

The blue wool in the work-basket could have been something she was making for Sylvia, who was fifteen when he had come to Williamsburg that first time in 1927—a leggy girl with straight shoulders and soft brown hair curling on her little neck. The fact that she was a year older was a sore point with him, but she never rubbed it in. She had brought him handfuls of flowers from the greenhouse, and tirelessly played games with him—quiet games like checkers and Authors and cribbage. He had always looked forward to her coming, and always hated to see her go. She was easy and cheerful and didn’t seem to pity him. He was grateful to her for that. And she looked so frail and small-boned herself that her obviously adequate health did not intrude itself on his consciousness. It was hard for him not to envy or resent people who were too robust and rather threw it in your teeth. Sylvia was not a strenuous girl, and her tact in a convalescent’s presence was flawless. The first walk he had ever taken in Williamsburg was with Sylvia—once down to the College Gate and back, and never mind the house where she lived in England Street until the next time.

When he left Williamsburg the following year he was practically well again, until he tried to do whatever he liked, and then someone was sure to say Better-not-to-day. That summer was spent in England, renewing acquaintance with his English cousins, whom he had not seen for more than two years. It was a widely scattered family, knit by strong bonds of tradition and articulate devotion, its relationships complicated by the marriage of cousins, its generations mingling without effort in the same households, its perpetual travels punctuated by faithful reunions at holidays and times of crisis, at one or another of its several headquarters abroad and at home. To his own surprise, Jeff found himself thinking of
Williamsburg as home, once he had been there. He and Sylvia had promised never to lose touch, and they wrote long letters often. Hers were good, she wrote just as she talked, and not everyone can do that. He himself, already in training as Bracken’s assistant and successor on the newspaper, never found writing letters a chore, and he tried to keep her straight on the English branch of the family, which was centred in the Gloucestershire house called Farthingale.

At Christmas-time in 1929 everyone available rallied to Williamsburg because of Aunt Sue—Sedgwick had died in the autumn. She was very good about it, but quieter now, and the sparkle had gone out of her. Sedgwick’s widow clung to her and wept, and Sue was the brave one, reminding her that nothing could take from them the years they had had him, and the laughter he had given them. She was so glad to see the family again, some of whom had come all the way from England and France to be with her, that her cheeks were often wet with tears which she swore were only happy ones.

Sylvia was seventeen that Christmas, ahead of him as usual, and she was taller than he remembered her, but only came up to his cheek because like all the Day men he was himself unusually tall, and she was thinner than when he had seen her last, and her eyes had got very large and blue, and they looked straight at you, honest and kind. After dinner her brother Stephen and her older sister Rhoda had rolled up the rugs and everybody danced to old tunes played on the piano by her mother, who used to be on the stage. Everybody but Jeff, who wasn’t allowed to dance because it was one of the Better-nots.

The family had just received with its usual tolerance the astounding news that Stephen and Rhoda had actually signed contracts to do a speciality dance number in their father’s new musical comedy when it opened in New York in the spring. As children, they had always danced at the family gatherings, steps their mother had taught them and that they had invented themselves. When they grew older they had been allowed to study under the best and most thorough instruction to be found in New York. And before long the word went out on the
Broadway grapevine—Fitz Sprague’s kids had something new—everybody recalled that their mother had been a dancer, though few could really claim to remember Gwen LaSalle’s one appearance as a star before her marriage and retirement—agents and snoopers began to haunt the school where Stephen and Rhoda worked—but Fitz was firm—nothing doing—not till they shaped, he said. Their first brief appearance together at a routine school entertainment caused a small riot. And now they were in. There hadn’t been anything like it since the Castles, said the grapevine. And so far from having to use his influence to get his offspring a job, Fitz had had to fight to keep them for his own show. Just a couple of hams, he said philosophically, grinning at Gwen, who had never given her career another thought after she fell in love with him.