I woke with a start and was at once aware of a strong smell. For a moment I thought it was the smell of cooking, and wondered if it could be breakfast-time. If so, the cook had burnt something, for there was a smell of burning too. But it couldn’t be breakfast time for not a glimmer of light showed round the window curtains. Actually, as I discovered when I turned on my bedside lamp, it was half-past two—the same hour that I had chosen for my sortie two nights before.
The smell seemed to be growing fainter, and I wondered if it could be an illusion, an effect of auto-suggestion. I opened the door and put my head into the passage and as quickly withdrew it. Not only because the smell was stronger there, but for another reason. The passage was not in darkness, as it had been the other night, for the hall lights had been turned on.
Well, let Victor see to it, I thought, whatever it is; no doubt he’s on the prowl: let his be the glory. But curiosity overcame me and I changed my mind.
In the hall the smell was stronger. It seemed to come in waves, but where did it come from? My steps took me to the library. The door was open. A flickering light came through, and a smell strong enough to make my throat smart and my eyes water. I lingered, putting off the moment of going in: then I remembered the fire buckets in the hall and ran back for one. The water had a thick film of dust over it and I had an irrational feeling that it would be less effective so, and that I ought to change it. I did not do so, however, but hurried back and somehow forced myself to go into the room.
There were shadows, of course, and there was smoke, drifting about as smoke does. The two together make a shape that is almost opaque. And the shape was opaque that I saw before I saw anything else, a shape that seemed to rise from its knees beside the fireplace and glide slantwise across my vision towards the inner wall of the library. I might not have noticed it so particularly had it not recalled to me the shape of the latecomer in my dream. Before I could ask myself what it was, or meant, it had disappeared, chased perhaps from my attention by the obligation to act. I had the bucket: where should I begin? The dark mass of the big round library table was between me and the fireplace; beyond it should have been the card-table, but that I could not see. Except on the hearth no flames were visible.
Relief struggling with misgiving, I turned the light on and advanced towards the fireplace, but I stopped half-way, for lying in front of it, beside the overturned card-table, lay a body—Victor’s. He was lying face downwards, curiously humped like a snail, under his brown Jaeger dressing-gown, which covered him and the floor around him. And it was from his dressing-gown, which was smouldering in patches, and stuck all over with playing cards, some of which were also alight, that the smell of burning came. Yes, and from Victor himself; for when I tried to lift him up I found beneath him a half-charred log, a couple of feet long, which the pressure of his body had almost extinguished, but not quite, and from which I could not at once release him, so deeply had it burnt into his flesh.
But the Persian carpet, being on the unburnt, underside of the log, was hardly scorched.
Afterwards, the explanation given was that the log had toppled off the fireplace and rolled on to the carpet; and Victor, coming down on a tour of inspection, had tripped over it and died of shock before being burnt. The evidence of shock was very strong, the doctor said. I don’t know whether Nesta believed this: shortly afterwards she sold the house. I have since come to believe it, but I didn’t at the time. At the time I believed that Victor had met his death defending the house against a fire-raising intruder, who, though defeated in his main object, had got the better of Victor in some peculiarly horrible way; for though one of Victor’s felt slippers had caught fire, and was nearly burnt through, the other was intact, while the footprints leading to the wall—though they were fainter than they had been the other time—both showed the mark of a great toe. I pointed this out to the police who shrugged their shoulders. He might have taken his slippers off and put them on again, they said. One thing was certain: Victor had literally embraced his neurosis, and by doing so had rid himself of it for ever.
UP THE GARDEN PATH
I was surprised to get a letter from Christopher Fenton with a Rome postmark, for I did not know that he had gone abroad. I was surprised to get a letter from him at all, for we had not been on letter-writing terms for some time.
‘My dear Ernest,’ he began, and the opening, conventional as it was, gave me a slight twinge; ‘How are you getting on? I’ve never had to ask you this before—I’ve always known! But it’s my fault, I’ve let myself drop out of things, and it’s a good deal thanks to all this gardening. Gardening was to have been the solace of my middle age, but it’s become a tyrant, and holds me in a kind of spell while you have been forging ahead. Well, now I am punished because I’ve had to go abroad just as the rhododendrons and azaleas were coming out. They should have been nearly over, if they had obeyed the calendar, and I timed my departure accordingly, but, as you may have noticed, spring this year is three weeks late, and they have let me down. I promised R.M. I would pay him this visit and I can’t possibly get out of it. All unwillingly I have made myself “the angel with the flaming sword”.
‘In a world bursting with sin and sorrow I oughtn’t to make a grievance of such a small matter, but I can’t bear to think of all my flowers (very good ones some of them) blooming without me. And this is where you come in, or where I hope you will. I know you’re not much interested in gardens, you have more important fish to fry, but you used to quite enjoy them in the old days, so perhaps you would do me a kindness now. Will you spend a week-end—the week-end after next would be the best from the flowers’ point of view—at Crossways? My couple are in charge. You were always one of their favourite visitors and I know they will do their best to make you comfortable. Please get what you like out of the cellar, I still have left a few bottles of the Mouton Rothschild 1929 that you used to like. Make yourself thoroughly at home—but I know you will. I always think that a host’s first duty is to absent himself as much as possible; I shall be with you in spirit, though not in the flesh. There’s just one thing—I won’t call it a condition or a stipulation, because in these days the burden of hospitality (if one can call it that) falls more heavily on the guest than on the host—what with tips, train-fares, the discomforts of travelling, etc., and, in your case, loss of valuable time. It is really for the host to write a Collins. So I will only say that if you consent to do this it will increase my sense of obligation. I know how tiresome other people’s hobbies can be—lucky you, you never needed any, your career has always been your hobby. I don’t suppose you will really want to look at the flowers very much—they toil not neither do they spin!—and a glance from the dining-room window may be all you will want to give my Eden. But all the same, I do want the flowers to be seen, even more urgently, perhaps, than I want you to see them. Somehow I feel that if no one sees them except the gardeners (who don’t care much for flowers anyhow and just take them for granted) they might as well not exist. Perhaps, if Ronald Knox’s limerick is true, they don’t exist! All that glorious colour lost, as if it had never been, and the scent of the azaleas just fading into the sky! It is the only beauty I have ever created and I should like to think it was preserved in someone’s mind. I really ought to have had the garden “thrown open” (ridiculous expression) to the public, but it needed more arranging than I now feel equal to. So would you, my dear Ernest, at four o’clock on the Sunday afternoon, stroll down what I magniloquently call the Long Walk, from the fountain at one end to what you once called the temple d’amour at the other? (The fountain is new, you haven’t seen it.) And as you go, give the flowers a good look and don’t hesitate to tread on the beds to read the names of anything that specially takes your fancy (but I don’t suppose anything will). And try to keep me in mind at the time, as though you were looking through my eyes as well as yours.
‘Will you do this for the sake of our old friendship? Will you even promise to do it?
‘I know how busy yo
u are, but perhaps you would send me a line to say yes or no.
‘Yours ever, Christopher.’
Christopher was right. I was busy and though I didn’t happen to have any engagement for the week-end he suggested, I didn’t want to travel all the way down to the New Forest to spend a lonely Sunday. And I didn’t want to get drawn again into what I felt to be the unreality of Christopher’s life, of which this proposal was such an excellent example. He had never out-grown his adolescence or improved his adolescent gift for painting. He had allowed himself to become a back number. A private income had enabled him to indulge a certain contempt for the world where men strove, but he was jealous of it really; hence the digs and scratches in his letter. I had got on at the Bar, whereas he had not been even a successful dilettante. I imagine that he did now know the way that people talked about him, but perhaps he guessed. At Oxford he had been a leading figure in a group of which I was an inconspicuous member; we looked up to him then, and foretold a future for him, but I doubt if he would have achieved it, even without the handicap of his silver spoon. Except in what pertained to hospitality he was out of touch, à côté de la vie. He was good at pouring out drinks, and his friends, myself among them, appreciated this talent long after it was clear to most of us that his other talents would come to nothing. And though a drink is a drink, the satisfaction it gives one varies with whom one takes it with. At one time Christopher could afford drinks when we couldn’t. Later, we would buy our own drinks and consume them in circumstances and in company which he couldn’t attain to. There is a freemasonry of the successful which we shared and he did not. This he must have realized, for mine was not the only defection from his circle. I didn’t dislike him—one couldn’t dislike him—but equally one couldn’t take him quite seriously as a human being.
So my first impulse was to say no, for I hate prolonging any relationship that the meaning has gone out of. But then I remembered Constantia and I thought again. I hadn’t forgotten her but I had pushed her out of my mind while reading Christopher’s letter.
Christopher hadn’t mentioned Constantia in his letter but she was there all the same, in the wistful tone of it and the scarcely concealed bitterness. Yet he had no right to feel bitter; she told me that at one time she would have married him gladly if he had asked her. She was thirty-two and wanted to get married. But he didn’t ask her. She hadn’t told me, but I am sure that their relationship was never more than an amitié amoureuse. It was a sentimental attachment with the same unreality about it that there was in everything he did, and I felt no qualms about taking her from him. It is true that I met her through him—at Crossways, as a matter of fact, at a week-end party—and to that extent I owed her to him. But that is an unreal way of looking at things, and I did not think I was betraying his hospitality or anything of that sort, when I persuaded her that I could give her more than he could. He had no right to keep her indefinitely paddling in the shallows in which his own life was passing. But though we were lovers she hadn’t said that she would marry me and I guessed it was some scruple about Christopher that stopped her.
I suppose some of her tenderness for him must have entered into me for when I read the letter again I felt that I ought to humour him, as much for her sake as for his. After all, she was the last, the only person who cared for him in the way he wanted to be cared for—whatever that was. I should get through the week-end somehow. I wrote to Christopher and I wrote to the Hancocks, Christopher’s married couple, telling them the train that I should come by.
What surprised me, when I got there, was the familiarity of it all. I had forgotten what a frequent visitor I used to be.
‘Why, Mr. Gretton,’ Hancock said, ‘you’ve deserted us, you’re quite a stranger!’ But I didn’t feel one; I could have found my way about the house blindfolded.
‘It’s over a year since you came to us,’ he reproached me. ‘We often used to ask Mr. Fenton what had become of you.’
‘And what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he said you were too busy, but as I said, you couldn’t be too busy to get away at the week-end.’
‘Oh, but I expect you have plenty of visitors without me,’ I said.
‘No, sir, we don’t, not like we used to have. Of course it’s a nuisance, food being what it is, but Mr. Fenton likes having them, and it’s always a real treat to see you, sir. The new faces aren’t the same by any means, not the same class of people either.’ I took up the Visitors’ Book and saw several names that were strange to me. Christopher had been trying out some new friends. But there weren’t many names at all; to turn back a page was to turn back a year, and I soon found my own.
‘It does seem too bad that you should be here when Mr. Fenton isn’t,’ Hancock prattled on. ‘He always looks forward particularly to you coming, sir. Though now, of course, he’s a good deal taken up with his garden. Often he works in it quite late. He’s got to be terrible fond of flowers. Those rhododendrons he’s so set on, sir, of course they looks after themselves, as you might say. But gardeners are all alike, sir, you can’t get them to weed the flower-beds. Now this herbaceous border, sir, you can see it from the window——’ His glance invited me to go to the window, but for some reason I didn’t want to go. ‘Often of an evening I go to the window and see him stooping and call out to him that dinner’s ready. Would you like to see the garden, sir? He was ever so anxious you should see it.’
‘Well, not just now,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall go and see it to-morrow. Now I think I shall have a bath. Dinner’s at eight, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, that’s Mr. Fenton’s hour, though there’s many in these times has put it earlier. The wife she sometimes has a moan about it, but of course we have to respect Mr. Fenton’s wishes.’
A question that had absurdly been nagging me all day now demanded utterance. ‘I’ve brought my dinner-jacket, Hancock,’ I said, ‘because I know Mr. Fenton likes one to change for dinner. But as I’m going to be alone, do you suppose he would mind?’
‘Well, sir, it’s just as you like, of course, but you won’t be alone because there’s a lady coming.’
‘A lady?’
‘Yes, sir, didn’t you know? But perhaps Mr. Fenton forgot to tell you. He’s been very forgetful lately, we’ve both remarked on it. Yes, sir, Miss Constantia Corwen, you know her, don’t you, you’ve stayed with her here several times. A tall lady.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know her quite well. I wonder if Mr. Fenton told her I was going to be here.’
‘Oh yes, sir, I expect so. He wouldn’t forget the same thing twice.’
It was six o’clock. I went to my room, meaning to stay there till dinnertime, but when I heard the crunch of wheels curiosity overcame me and I tiptoed out on to the landing above the hall and listened.
‘Yes, Miss,’ I heard Hancock say, ‘the master was dreadfully cut up about missing the flowers and all on account of spring being so late.’
I could understand Constantia making sympathetic noises, but there were tears in her voice as she said, ‘Yes, it was terribly bad luck. I am so sorry. Is there time to go out and see the garden now?’
‘Well, Miss, it’s just as you like but dinner’s at eight and there’s a soufflé.’
‘I shall only be a moment and I think I won’t change for dinner as I shall be alone.’
There was quite a long pause and then Hancock said, in a puzzled, different voice, ‘You won’t be altogether alone, Miss, because you see Mr. Gretton’s here.’
‘Mr. Gretton?’
‘Yes, Miss. Didn’t Mr. Fenton tell you?’
‘No, he must have forgotten. I think I’ll go up to my room now.’
‘Yes, Miss, it’s the usual one. I’ll bring your things.’
We were sitting together in the drawing-room after dinner, still a little in the shadow of our first embarrassed greeting. When we met in public we often didn’t smile; but never until now had we not smiled when we met in private.
‘Should we take a tu
rn in the garden?’ Constantia asked.
I demurred. ‘It’s too late, don’t you think? Probably all the flowers are shut up for the night.’
‘I don’t think rhododendrons shut up,’ Constantia said.
‘Well, there isn’t enough light to see them by.’
‘Let’s make sure,’ said Constantia, and unwillingly I followed her to the bay window. It was a house of vaguely Regency date and the drawing-room was on the first floor. The Long Walk ran at right angles to it, nearly a hundred yards away. It made the southern boundary of the garden. We could see the tops of the rhododendrons, they were like a line of foam crowning a long dark billow; and in front of and below them the azaleas, a straggling line, hardly a line at all, gave an effect of sparseness and delicacy and fragility. But the colour hardly showed at all.
‘You see,’ I said. ‘You can’t see.’
She smiled. ‘Perhaps you’re right, but we’ll go first thing in the morning.’
I laughed. ‘First thing with you isn’t very early.’
We went back into the room and sat one on each side of the fireplace, trying to look and feel at home; but the constraint had not left us and the house resisted us. It would not play the host. I felt an intruder, almost a trespasser, and caught myself listening for Christopher’s footstep on the stairs.