Lonely Road (25 page)

I drew her to me on the chesterfield. “My dear,” I said, “it wouldn’t be like you think. You’ve met the only members of my family I care two hoots about, and there’s nothing like that about Joan and Stenning, is there? And, my dear, I want you for my wife.”

She sat there by me in the firelight, stroking my hand and looking down on it. “I know you do,” she said at last. “That’s what makes it so difficult.”

She raised her eyes to mine. “I love to think of you wanting me that way,” she said simply. “And what I thought we might do, we might just try it for a bit, and see how it went.” She glanced around. “I don’t mean here. It wouldn’t do, with all your servants and that. But I thought we could go away somewhere for a month or two, where they didn’t know you.…

“We could go to Torquay,” she said hopefully, “for a sort of holiday together, like.” She loved that place. She eyed me doubtfully. “Would you like that?”

I wondered absently if King Cophetua had had this sort of thing, and if so, what he did about it. I turned to her and smiled. “We’ll go to Torquay for our honeymoon,” I said, “or for the start of it. But it’s going to be a proper honeymoon for us—no funny business.” I thought about it for a minute. “I’ve never taken girls away for holidays, and I’m too old to learn. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

She laughed. “I believe you’d learn that one all right,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not me—you should start young for that. My dear, that isn’t what I want at all. I want you to marry me in church, and be my wife.”

She stared into the fire. “I don’t know what to say.”

We sat on like that for a long time, talking in little quiet sentences, with great pauses in between. She was distressed that I had turned down her solution to the difficulty, but not, I think, surprised. I could not bring her to agree to marry me. Perhaps if I had been rough with her I might have succeeded, but I couldn’t do that. Each time I tried we came upon the same brick wall.

“Colonel Fedden would think you’d acted awfully funny, marrying like that.” I cursed Fedden heartily that night. To her he represented all the old conservatism of my family. Rather curiously, she said something once about the pictures in the dining-room. I think she had been talking to the servants, or old Robertson: she knew a lot about my family.

We sat there for an hour, or longer it may be, but we got no further. There was something in her attitude which made me curiously humble in my arguments; I could not bully her with any he-man stuff. She had no other thought than for my interest. She was so conscious of the difference in our upbringing, so certain that the marriage wouldn’t do me any good. I could not get her to see my point of view. I could not make her see that for years I have had no friends, that I have lived so much alone that class means very little to me now. It’s different when you’re young and live in a clique of people of your own sort; you live narrow then. But when you get to my age and live by yourself, it’s different. When you’re as lonely as I’ve been you get to value friends for what they are; you get a little broader-minded than you used to be.

At last:

“Let’s have a cup of tea,” I said, and rang the bell for Rogers.

She murmured composedly that that would be lovely. She was not upset, or noticeably so. Girls are so much stronger than men are in many ways; that night she sat and talked about this quietly, restrained. And her case was quite clear. She would not bind me with a marriage—that was how she looked at it—till we had lived together for a time.

“People don’t see things right when they’re in love,” she said, a little sadly. “I know.”

Rogers brought the tea, and we sat and drank it as if this evening had been ordinary. I could see no way out of this impasse except with time; in a few days I thought perhaps she’d change her mind, and I could bring her to my point of view. And so when we had drunk our tea I raised her to her feet, and said:

“My dear, I’m not going to worry you, or cag about this any
more. Let’s go to bed—and I mean go to bed alone, too.” She smiled at that. “We’ll argue this out later, when this other thing’s all straightened up. But till then, I want you to know that I love you. That … that’s all.”

She took my hand and kissed the back of it. “I don’t know what to say … ” she said at last, very softly. And so we stood like that together for a minute till I sent her up to bed.

Next morning I reviewed the situation as I dressed. Stenning was coming down, and would be with me by the afternoon. By the afternoon I expected to hear something of Norman and Billy; I rang up Fedden after breakfast, and found that he did not know when they were likely to arrive. He thought not till nightfall perhaps. He had all arrangements in hand, so that there was plenty of time.

As regards Mollie, there was nothing I could do till this thing was cleared up. I did not think she would go back up North; we had this common ground, at any rate, that it was better for us both to be together. I thought that if I left things for a day or two till the immediate rush of this affair was over it would give her time to think about it, and I hoped that then I should be able to persuade her to my point of view.

If not—well, I should have to come to hers. At the end of our honeymoon, I thought, she’d probably agree to marry me.…

I went down to the yard that day and took Mollie with me in the car. They were getting
Irene
up on the patent slip when I got there; we stood and watched them till the vessel slowly slid up out of the water on the traveller. Mollie was amazed.

“She’s ever such a size underneath the water, isn’t she?” she remarked. “You’d never think!”

I gave instructions for them to start on scraping her; there was nothing the matter with her seams. Then I put Sixpence in a pram and she went paddling around the harbour, while I went into the office and went through my letters; an hour later I went round the yard and had a look at the
Sweet Anna’s
rudder with old Sammy Gore. His pintles were all right, to
his regret I think, but he succeeded in wheedling a lot of unnecessary running gear out of me, and a new stove for the galley.

That took me all the morning. Coming off on to the quay I looked about for Sixpence, and saw the pram alongside
Runagate
. I took the quay punt and went off to her; she put her head up from the forecastle hatch as I came up alongside. “I’ve been looking at the boat,” she informed me. “It is funny in this little cooking place.”

I dropped down through the hatch beside her in the forecastle. “There’s plenty of room to cook sitting down,” I said. “And anyway, you can reach everything.”

She stared round. “It’s sort of cosy,” she remarked at last. “I never knew ships were like this inside.” She stared through at the bulkheads of the saloon. “All this polished wood.…”

We went up through the forehatch and sat upon the bitts for a few minutes, smoking a cigarette. “It’s ever so lovely here,” she said at last. “The ships, and things.”

I blew a cloud, and laughed at her. “You’d better stay here, then,” I said. “It’s up to you!”

She laughed with me. “You must think me ever so soft,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t.”

She said: “Don’t let’s talk about it now.” And a little later on she said: “It would be lovely to live here, with the ships and the seabirds, and all.” She turned to me: “Do you know, I feel as if I’d lived here all my life, and my father and mother and all before. Just as if I’d been brought up here.…” She sat there staring up the river. “As if I knew what was up there, round the bend, with the river and the sea-shore in the middle of the land, like.”

I nodded slowly. “I expect you do,” I said absently. I knew just what she meant. Where a long estuary runs into the land, an estuary with a rocky bottom, you do get just what she had spoken of—the sea-shore in the middle of the land. Little sandy beaches all among the hayfields and the woods. She knew it all, and yet I had not taken her up there.

We went ashore and got into the car, and drove up to the house. And as we went indoors she said to me:

“Is Lady Stenning coming down this afternoon?”

I shook my head. “Just Philip. Why?”

She turned away. “I think I’d like to have a talk with her,” she said quietly. “She was ever so nice to me.”

I took her hand and smiled at her. “My dear,” I said, “don’t worry about it now. Leave it for a couple of days till this other thing has quieted down, and then we’ll have a talk about it, and you can see her and hear what she has to say.”

“All right,” she said, “if that’s the best.”

I rang up Fedden after lunch and had a talk with him. He told me that Norman was coming down that night with Gordon, in readiness for the events of the following day. He said that they would not arrive till after dark—he thought about eleven o’clock at night. There were to be considerable movements of police in preparation for the landing, and it had been arranged that these movements should take place at night, to obviate the risk of a leakage of information. He asked if Gordon might remain in my house for the time being. He suggested that he should be brought straight there that night.

I said that that would be agreeable to me, and I mentioned to him that Stenning was coming down. I asked him what he wanted done about the tug.

He replied that he could not say definitely what the plans would be till he had had a talk with Norman. Could we arrange about the tug that night, after Norman came?

I frowned. “You mean to-night—after eleven o’clock?”

He said that they would probably be working all night. He had been up most of the previous night, and was going to snatch a little sleep after tea, if possible.

“All right,” I said. “You’d better come up here with him when you send Gordon. You’d better all come up, and talk about it here. You’ve got to bring up Gordon, anyway.”

“That’s very good of you,” he said.

“Not at all. I’ll expect you about half-past eleven, or some time like that?”

He agreed that that would be about the time, and I rang off.

I remember glancing at the barograph as I set down the telephone. It had gone down again and this time rather sharply: in the Range an on-shore wind was getting up.

Stenning arrived a little later in the afternoon, and I took him down to see his vessel on the slip. That was the ostensible purpose of his visit, and I thought it was as well that it should be carried out in full. As we pottered about the yard I told him all that had been going on; I found him intensely interested. He was worried that I had asked the police up to my house, that I had offered to take in Gordon. I expostulated with him over that, and he listened patiently to what I had to say.

“I see your point,” he said at last. “It’s probably as well to have Gordon. But if the police have got to have a meeting they should have it in their own place. I don’t see that you want them in your house particularly.”

We went up to the house and dined with Mollie, changing into dinner-jackets. She had been walking in the town that afternoon while we had been away, looking at the shops and exploring the streets and quays. She was especially intrigued by a crew of cadets that she had seen down on the water-front, sailing a Navy cutter. She thought they looked ever such nice boys.…

And afterwards she sang to us. We sat in the darkened library, Stenning in a chair beside the fire, and Mollie at the piano in a little pool of light. I sat over by her as she played and sang the lyrics that she knew, the dance songs that were folk tunes of the young. We made no pretence. It must have been quite obvious to Stenning that we were deeply in love; he sat apart and puffed at his cigar, and took but little notice of us at the other end of the room. Joan had probably been talking to him and he accepted us for what we may have been—a pair of silly fools behaving as if this had been our first calf love.

Presently she was tired of singing, and we went over to him
by the fire. I ordered the whisky and her tea, and we sat drinking this together, chatting of ships and of the flights that he had made, and ventures that he hoped to make. We sat there for a long time talking in that way, till at last we heard a car, and it was Fedden and his crowd.

I took them into the dining-room, as being more suitable for the meeting that we had to hold. I had had a few sandwiches and whisky placed upon the table, and a writing-pad. The room was brightly lit. The curtains were drawn over the east window looking out over the harbour mouth, but the alcove with the oriel north window was uncurtained. That window looks out on to the north lawn.

There was Fedden and Norman and a police superintendent that they had brought with them, Gordon, and Mollie, and myself, and Stenning. We started the proceedings with a drink, standing beside the table before sitting down. I was with Stenning and Norman, talking to Fedden; Mollie and her brother were a little way apart.

Till Norman put his glass down, and remarked: “I think we’d better get to work.”

T
HAT
finishes the story that I set out to write when I began this book. I started on it so that I could keep the memory of what were very happy days for me; by writing so far I have satisfied myself, and that is all that I set out to do. There is nothing more that I would wish to tell or to remember. If I go on, it is because a job once started should be finished off; I would not leave the tag end of this story hanging in mid-air. In writing what remains I shall try to stick to facts and let the fancy
go
. Cold facts should not be difficult to put down.

Perhaps cold facts are harder than I thought. I have sat for a long time, and I am at a loss to convey in writing the great suddenness and violence of the shots. For they shot at us from the garden with an automatic gun, shot from the darkness into the bright radiance of the lighted room. We were so unprepared, so stupefied, when it began.

We were in the dining-room, all standing up and about to move forward to sit down round the table. Mollie and her brother were standing a little way apart from the rest of us, to our right as we stood facing the north window. It came so very suddenly. The first thing I can remember was the crash of broken glass, and the sharp clamour of the gun outside. In the frozen silence of the moment, broken only by the gun, I heard the bullets hit.