The Refuge (23 page)

But the shame persisted. I had been wanting in something, and had tried to conceal the lack with words; and the more I thought of it, there in the darkness, in the poised, watching silence of the timeless mountains, the more convinced was I that she had not been deceived, that what I had lacked, somewhere, somehow, was charity. Yet I knew now that I loved her, not only with the heart.

Thus while the long hours before dawn moved slowly on, and the earth turned eastward with ponderous, unthinkable speed, I decided to go away, for I did not see how the two of us could be together in the company of others, this coming day, so soon after the half-achieved communion of the night.

I determined upon going, leaving the two women to be at peace together, leaving Irma to compose her mind while at a distance I tried to do the same. This seemed wisest. Then, after a week had gone by, and time had passed its healing touch over us, I would return, to find what I might; and the thing which—as I knew in my heart—had by no means been concluded there in the warmth of the dying fire might come to proper issue.

There, however, I was wrong.

Jack’s note when it came on the following Thursday confounded me. For days, in fact ever since before my arrival back at my flat that Saturday morning, I had been imagining the reunion of the coming week-end, wondering how I would ever pass the time that must be passed. I would arrive once more in the dusk, this time to find the cottage not empty with a cold and polished expectancy but brimming with light and life and the clear, lilting tones of the two faintly foreign voices. Even in the darkness of my departure, as I looked back to where it stood between the fruit trees and the starry pallor of the eastern sky, I must have been imagining how it would be, because during the unhurried drive down to the city, towards the faint coming of dawn far out above the Pacific that sank unseen with my descent to the plain, I was aware of a compensating element of pleasure underlying the weary discomfort and self-criticism of my thought; and this stayed with me, and grew as clearer thinking made room for it, all through the next few days, until Thursday.

For a moment I was as confounded by Jack’s note as a child is by the calm removal of a treasured plaything. I was at once indignant and inconsolable. It was in that moment that I finally, wordlessly admitted, by what I felt without thinking, how much the image of Irma, her voice, her silences, the lightness and neatness of all her movements, the feel and weight of her abandoned person in my arms, and her self within this sensible show—and even the immortal soul within the mortal self—had come to mean to me. Imagination had been secretly feeding love more quickly than the reality could have done. The result, as I deciphered old Jack’s calm, untutored pencilling, was devastating.

Now, being poorer and richer in heart, and also wiser, I can perhaps look back with the feeling of a smile at my reactions then, and at what I felt, a week later, when I saw that
Bulletin
poster on the street corner. For all my aspirations towards what seemed to me the aloofness essential to living and working well, I was young still, and my youth gave itself away—the beating heart, the indignation as at a betrayal, and the deeper, more helpless feeling of deprivation and despair. Irma must have had her own reasons for such a sudden retreat. (Later I found out what these were, and they were simple: with my unexpected, unexplained departure, she felt once again unsafe. I had behaved unpredictably after all—twice in a matter of hours, by two improbable withdrawals from her—and all her uneasiness returned. She felt she must disappear yet more completely, and as two days passed, then three, without word from me or about me, her speculations again became fearful. The thought that returned to obsess her, until it assumed unreasonable proportions, was that in my work I was mysteriously connected with the police. On the third day, after Jack’s return from another fruitless visit to my mail-box nailed to its tree at the junction of track and road, she decided to move; and with her, decision was always action, as I might have known. By noon on the fourth day, she was gone, dragging Miss Werther with her as far as Blacktown on the way back to the city, where they parted, and the Jewess last saw her waiting, severe and unapproachable and somehow pathetically childlike, for a train that would take her beyond the mountains, which now, since her visit to Hill Farm, began to look to her like a bastion enclosing security. She seemed to think that by crossing them she would out-distance fear, and be safe.)

At the time I did not know her well enough, or know enough about her history, to have followed her reasoning for myself. The main obstacle to my understanding of what seemed her obscure motives was also simple: it would have taken much to make me believe that it was now I of whom she was now uncertain and miserably suspicious to the point of fear. In my mental arrogance I would not readily have believed that after she had been rescued, so to speak, by me and comforted by me, held in my arms and caressed and kissed by me, she could doubt my integrity or my feelings for her. What I would not have taken into account, the very thing that must have weighed most in her measuring of the situation, was the fact that—with whatever goodwill to us both mattered not—I had rejected an offer made for the first time in her life with utter unselfishness, and by a fierce stroke of irony for the first time declined. She was above all a woman, intensely conscious of the fact too, and however well her mind had been trained in the vicious schools of political cunning she had attended, this awareness of her essential self must have fretted instinct when reason might have thrust it aside. In effect, I was not to be wholly trusted; but at the same time no amount of argument would have convinced me that that was her chief reason for vanishing westward while I pleased myself, in the midst of a world poised above chaos, with dreams of our less troubled reunion in fewer days than—had I but known it—there were to be years between our parting on the genial hearth and our next meeting.

I was driven further towards desperation by McMahon. Since his tipsy collision with me in the side entrance that afternoon, he too had been from time to time obsessed with the thought of Irma, for reasons very different from my own. It seems he had seen her once in the back bar of the Newcastle Hotel in George Street, not far from the Quay, when he was hobnobbing with one of his numerous sources of political scandal in what then was the only saloon bar in the city which would serve women; and this man, a self-styled Communist I gathered, had had much to say about Irma into McMahon’s neat, uninquisitive-looking ear. Some of it was the truth, much of it hearsay and guesswork, and not a little of it simple malicious invention; for it was apparently true enough that the girl was jealously or nervously disliked now by many Australian members of the Party which she had flatly and unequivocally abandoned. Moreover, with her exotic appearance—and in the dark and shabby back bar of the Newcastle, crowded with those second-rate artists and writers and musicians and artists’ models who seemed to enjoy the glamour of being mistaken for politically intelligent thinkers, she must have looked exotic and exciting indeed—she should have been more approachable than she was; for such was her aloofness that it was even rumoured (among those who could have thought of few more slurring accusations) that she was a virgin, who had won more by unhonoured promises than her Party sisters had by enthusiastic performances.

Possibly she had seen that they were talking about her, for before he could think out some means of approaching her in person she had disappeared. Now he was sometimes quite sure, sometimes uncertain, that he had seen her in my company. Even had he known that she had vanished, shepherded by little fat Miss Werther, into the back seat of the waiting car there, it would have meant little to him then, for he did not know that the car was mine, and I took care he never should learn this. According to his state of mind, he now taxed me with having secret acquaintance with her, now settled irresistibly in my visitors’ chair for a discussion of her rumoured history.

I was nonplussed. Any too-emphatic denial, any indignation at his friendly, careless gossiping, would have made him really suspicious. That is the sort of man he was. That is why he had made such a name for himself: he missed nothing—nothing but an objective view of his own shortcomings. He was, even to me, potentially dangerous. I soon understood why it was that his political contacts talked so freely to him: they felt an urgent need to divert his attention from themselves . . .

He did me one service, however. He did talk of Irma, and so enabled me to think once more of her as apart from me, rather than a part of me. She began to stand as it were one step away, at once more vivid and more unattainable than she had ever seemed. I found the contemplation of her, thus, more painful and less soothing than one would have expected. Heard of from the neat lips of the mildly-intoxicated, friendly McMahon, who was in fact ignorant of any real connection between us, she became intolerably real, being imagined, and, being absent, wellnigh intolerably desirable. More than once I had to plead an engagement, and leave him, the room, the office itself. I was unwillingly and ridiculously in love with a girl of nineteen.

This state of mind, rather like the exultation of despair, persisted up to and beyond the ill-omened twenty-ninth of that month, August—up to and beyond the declaration of a state of war between Australia and Germany which followed Mr. Chamberlain’s announcement to the empire; it survived the voice of the Australian Prime Minister that evening of the third of September, and my own few minutes of still almost incredulous horror as I realized that Alan must now grow up in a world at war. Without interrupting work or the times of waking and sleeping, it existed along with these, so entirely that I could be said to have been living two lives. Only Barbara, and Hubble, whom I did not count as important now that Irma had disappeared even from my own ken—only they knew that something was changed in me; but only Barbara guessed what it was.

Although we spoke intimately, we did not make intimacy a personal matter; and so I was surprised when, on the afternoon of the first day of September, the official first day of Spring, after a not unusual silence during which each of us had been occupied with private thoughts, she spoke abruptly about myself.

‘Lloyd, I know it’s not my business, but I’ve been wondering—are you in love?’

Her tone was light and apologetic, as though she felt she must ask the question and be done with it, lest, unasked, it stand between us. I too had known that my preoccupation with thoughts of Irma had set up from time to time a barrier as it were of glass; but I was surprised at the direct question—surprised but not disconcerted, because after listening to McMahon on several occasions I now had a desire, the more suspect to me the more it grew in urgency, to speak of her myself, to cleanse my memory of some of the things that neat, dangerous, friendly little man had said.

Warily—and it shows my state of mind when I say I was already capable of being cautious even with Barbara—I pretended not to understand.

‘I mean with that girl,’ Barbara said.

‘You mean with Miss Martin, the model?’

‘I mean with Miss Martin the woman. Oh come on, Lloyd—forget I spoke.’

Her affectionate mockery was disarming. I had known her for more than eight years; with Irma I had not passed eight hours. How could I dissimulate further? Nevertheless, as the affair was not yet by any means clear in my mind, I avoided an answer as straight as her amiable question deserved.

‘Barbara, I don’t know what it is to fall in love. Miss Martin has made me feel pity and indignation on her behalf. She has thrown herself on my mercy—if you allow the exaggeration. What sort of a man would I be not to be moved by all this, and affected by having done all I could to help a fellow-creature who was afraid?’

‘Who
was
afraid?’ she said. ‘Then she isn’t any more?’

‘Heaven knows,’ I said. ‘I do not even know where she is, now.’

‘You mean she ran away even from you? Oh surely, Lloyd . . .’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean I ran away from her, if you like to put it like that.’

Barbara said ‘Oh’ and paused, and then said it again in a different way. I saw she was half-smiling.

‘What do you mean by that?

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that you’ve answered my question, and also I’m sorry I asked it. As I said, it is no business of mine. Forgive me, Lloyd.’

‘Nothing to forgive,’ I said. I looked at her directly, and was moved to see how good she was. The conversation drifted.

‘One sometimes asks a question thoughtlessly, and realizes too late it was a piece of juvenile impertinence.’

‘Not between you and me, Barbara.’

‘Well, thoughtlessness between you and me would be a pity, in any circumstances.’

‘I don’t think you did ask a thoughtless question. I think you wanted to know, and I can even answer it in a way. The girl seems to have become a temporary obsession, that’s all. I cannot get free of the thought of what sort of a world it must be that can create such a set of circumstances and place someone like that in the middle of them—like a moth in a spider’s web.’

How well it sounded then, and how ignobly near the truth it was, I thought afterwards.

‘What do you think of the girl herself? Is she—you know—as innocent as the moth?’

‘No,’ I said, driven to frankness. ‘To me that is the tragedy of the thing. She is a warning example of the double meaning of Henley’s claim to be the master of his fate. As for being the captain of one’s soul, that is so much nonsense. It always puts me in mind of a Manly ferry. No. This young woman, Irma, has herself to blame for her present state. That is not either tragic or abnormal, I know, in human life. What is, is this—that she had long since cut herself off completely, as she thought, from the sort of life she had been forced to life. She wasn’t forced in the beginning, but who is going to condemn a child of fourteen, barely fourteen, a precocious child at that, familiar with most of the major cities of Europe ever since she could remember first being dragged about the continent by her mad musician of a father—who is going to condemn someone like that, a mere child, for making a wrong choice from the generous fullness of her heart, and not realizing it for three or four years? Yet the fact remains that she did choose to become a Communist at that age, and now she is paying for it. The life she thought she had done with is catching up with her, even in Australia. She regards this country as her last refuge, and suddenly finds that for her it is no safer than anywhere else in the world. To you and me that might seem unbelievable, even at a time like this, but not to her. And not to me now, after I have heard what she had to say. You will be interested to know that my belief in whatever she told me was prompted in the first place by her warning, ten days before it happened, that there would be this Russo-German pact. I believed her then sufficiently to pass the information on to Scott and the police for what it was worth.’