Nor Many Waters Page 3

  “How little one’s handwriting alters,” he said at last. “It’s odd, that, you know. Twenty-five years. A long time. The quarter of a century. In twenty-five years one passes out of youth into middle age. Perhaps we wouldn’t even recognize, were we to meet them now, the people we haven’t seen for all that while. There would be so much gone: the gold in the hair, the silver in the voice. And yet the handwriting upon an envelope: that doesn’t alter; that’s the same, whatever else is changing. It’s odd, isn’t it? that that should be the one thing to last, the one thing that you can recognize after twenty years. The handwriting upon a wrapper.”

  And I, who now know his story, can well imagine how at that moment his thoughts were travelling backwards to that spring day twenty-five years earlier when the fingers that addressed that wrapper had turned for the first time the handle of that office door.

  II

  I Have never seen a photograph of James Merrick as he was in early manhood, nor have I met anyone who knew him intimately in those days; but from what he has become and from what he has told me I can picture him clearly enough as he was then. He would have been twenty-seven years old; four years down from Magdalen; with a flat in Air Street, work in his father’s office as a salaried partner that filled his time without exhausting his energies on a yearly salary which, his friends insisted not quite justly on describing as an allowance, of five hundred a year; a large number of friends, an honest array of debts; a bedroom mantelpiece crowded with invitation cards. The typical young man of fashion, the Balzacian young man, the type of young man that Rastignac might not exactly have wished to be, but would have been content to be. And life for such a one was enviable enough in the early days of the century.

  No war had come to shatter his belief in the divine right of privilege. There were no general strikes; no menacing roll of tumbrils. Socialism was an amusing game, like metaphysics, bearing no practical relation to real affairs. Surtax and capital levies could not have figured in the wildest election programme. So much, indeed, has the political outlook changed that the statesmen against whose radically inspired doctrine the Conservative press was solemnly warning its wavering adherents are regarded to-day by those same papers as the bulwarks and defenders of tradition. The leading articles of the Westminster Gazette in programme if not in temper might figure not inappropriately in the present columns of the Morning Post. The prosperity that had continued through a hundred years seemed perdurable. And though James Merrick barely bothered about such things, being concerned with only two out of the twenty-four pages that comprised his morning paper, he had the self-confidence that comes from standing upon firm ground. He could feel certain of the morrow. And that the young man of to-day can feel no longer. He has had his faith in tradition broken. Consols are down to fifty. Super-tax and death duties have reduced comfortably proportioned incomes to meagre allowances that it is no simple thing to supplement. He has no longer the comfortable belief that eventually all will be made smooth for him, that relations will die, that bonds and property will pass into his hands, that fifteen minutes’ work upon a cheque-book will clear off the encumbrances of as many years. He has no such confidence in the future. He knows what havoc ten years have made of properties and incomes. What has come once may well come again. And it is with an air of reckless defiance that he orders three new suits on the strength of a post-dated cheque for one and signs bills in West End restaurants.

  It was in a mood, however, of genial arrogance that James Merrick sauntered down Savile Row to Piccadilly. The world was a well-ordered place. And he was grateful to the kindly providence that had placed him among those for whom its several excellences seemed to have been particularly designed. And it was with a happy swagger that on Sunday mornings he would stroll between the green seats of the Park, bowing low to an acquaintance, pausing to chat a moment with a friend; and it was in a mood of comfortable well-being that he would seat himself at his Father’s table before the traditional trencher of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding that would be followed by apple tart and the Stilton for which he had assisted before lunch in the decanting of an admirably mellow port. And afterwards there would be the succession of calls; for in the observance of his social duties Merrick would be modishly punctilious, being a wise young man and knowing that the ‘shooting’ of cards is a valuable prelude to a second invitation, and that ten boring minutes are no heavy price to pay for dances and theatre tickets and drives to Hurlingham.

  And I can picture him when the round is finished at six or half-past six sauntering home eastwards to the narrow street which the expanding demands of capital has now demolished; I can picture him mounting the rickety wooden stairs to the little fourth-story flat, with its narrow hall and narrow bedroom and its gabled living-room. A cosily cushioned, deeply carpeted little room, with book shelves running round it; and upon the elaborately papered walls, for these days were lit still by the fading light of the Morris movement, are one or two framed prints of Beardsley drawings, and over the mantelpiece between the two brass candlesticks there is an enlarged photograph of a cricket group, taken during Merrick’s last year when he was captain, and over its corner he has hung, in continuance of a school custom, the blue and yellow cap of the first eleven. And I can picture him glancing slowly round the room, at the books, the pictures, the furniture, the ornaments, with a contented smile. The world is a goodly place. And he lifts his arms in a lazily happy languor, as though he were lifting some load or other from his shoulders. As, indeed, in a way he is. For the formalities of the day are over, and his evening clothes have been laid upon his bed, and it is among men, young men of his own age and set, that he will be dining, and it is in localities the reverse of formal that there is every possibility of the evening ending. And as the water splashes into his bath, as he watches the crystal salts dissolve and cloud the steaming water, as he slides back into those scented depths, letting his head sink backward, so that the water rises over his hair on to his forehead, he muses pleasantly on the varied and agreeable hazardings of life.

  And he is very worldly about it all. For the young man of fashion has passed beyond the capacities of surprise. He is not disenchanted, for the human comedy is an engrossing spectacle. But he has exhausted Life and its Experiences, and when the young man of fashion talks about experience and life with a big ‘E’ and a big ‘L,’ he does not mean that he has been chased by Dyak head-hunters in Sarawak, or been shipwrecked on a Paumotus atoll; he means something quite other and much simpler than that. To such a one life and experience mean one thing only. And James Merrick has explored this woman business, so that when he glanced at the row of cards along the crowded mantelpiece, it was certainly with a sense of anticipation, with a foreknowledge of possible adventure, but with a sense of anticipation very similar to that with which he went out on to the cricket field to bat. He might make fifty, he might make a duck. But he had made fifties and he had made ducks before, had made plenty of them. There was nothing particularly novel about either. James Merrick conformed very adequately to type.

  No, it is not difficult to imagine what manner of man it was that on an afternoon of middle spring, in the early days of the twentieth century, strolled, swinging his stick with the mental and physical exhilaration that follows two dozen oysters and a pint of stout, from the First Avenue Hotel, down Chancery Lane to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A handsome, well-groomed, admirably tailored man, admirably well pleased with himself and the world he lives in, arrogant and generous and vain and open-hearted, with no suspicion that the remainder of his life will not resemble in every delightful detail the steady flow of days that have brought him to this contented garden: little suspecting that it is for the last time that that particular person will be turning out of Chancery Lane through the iron gate into Stone Buildings; little suspecting that it will be somebody quite other with another present, another future, another past, who will be swinging through them on the next and following days: the next and following months and years; little suspecting th
at for that particular young man the sands of that particular fortune have run dry.

  Little suspecting. He had had no warning clue. How was he to guess that that card jutting out of an envelope bore a date to which all his life he would turn back as to a landmark. It had been so very ordinary a letter. Just a note of introduction from a friend.

  MY DEAR MERRICK (it had run),—

  Some time during the course of the day you will receive a visit from Mrs. Herbert Eagar, who has asked my advice about a solicitor. She is in some sort of personal trouble, and was in a high state of panic. I could not gather quite what it was all about: you know, my dear Merrick, what women are. And anyhow, I felt that yours was the right sort of brain to disentangle matters of this sort. So I gave her a note to you. You’ll be nice to her, won’t you? And you should be grateful to me, for I imagine that I’ve put at least six and eightpence in your pocket!!!

  The name of Mrs. Herbert Eagar had conveyed nothing to Merrick, and when some two hours later a clerk had brought up a further letter of introduction, he had seen no reason why he should telescope a number of quite important interviews to see her immediately. It was probably some quite trivial matter, which she would take a vast number of minutes explaining to him, and in all probability her time was of no value to her.

  “Is she waiting downstairs?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you might tell her, will you, that I’m most fearfully sorry, but I’m terribly busy all the morning with appointments right up to lunch. Ask her if she could manage to come round afterwards.”

  In a couple of minutes the boy was back.

  “Mrs. Eagar says that if half-past two would be all right for you, sir, may she come back then?”

  Merrick nodded his head. “Tell her that’ll do splendidly, and explain to her, won’t you,” he added, “how really sorry I am not to be able to see her now.”

  But even as he spoke, a client was being brought into the room; in two minutes he was immersed deeply and unromantically in matters of conveyance. And long before lunch-time came Mrs. Herbert Eagar had become part of his routine. So much so, indeed, that when the boy came up to announce that she had arrived, he could not think for the moment who she was.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “I remember. Show her up.”

  He experienced not the slightest tremor of anticipation as he heard the flutter of her footsteps on the stairs. He could not have been more unprepared for the sight in the doorway of a familiar figure, for a sudden gasp of astonishment, a pause, and then a ripple of laughter, and a merrily cried “Why, but of all people in the world that it should be you!” There had been nothing in the note nor in the name to associate his prospective client with the bright-eyed, fair-haired, lightly laughing girl who, on a night of revelry and tinkled glasses, had been introduced to him boisterously as Marian.

  “Y-you!” was all that he could stammer. “Y-you!”

  Stammered it on a note of nervous alarm that accorded ill with that manner of unperturbed detachment that is proper to the man who has explored experience, and is beyond the boundaries of surprise. As indeed the whole incident with which this unexpected visitor was associated accorded ill with that knowledge of men and women, that sense of fitness and proportion on which every well-equipped young man prides himself. It was an incident, which for three months James Merrick had been unsuccessfully endeavouring to forget. For it was at a party for which no other generic label than Bohemian exists that he had met Marian Eagar, and he had made the kind of mistake with regard to her that in that atmosphere young gentlemen out of another world are fatally inclined to make.

  §

  It was a mistake, however, that other and more experienced men might have well made. Merrick had been told that it was going to be “that kind of party.”

  “It’ll be a really good show,” the friend who had brought a third-hand invitation had said to him. “I’ve never been to the place myself, but I’m told it’s one of the jolliest houses to have a party at in London. It’s bound to be pretty gay. They’d thought of making a dressing-gown and pyjama party of it, so you can guess what it’ll be like from that. And they only decided not to because they said that one associated pyjamas too much with sleep and not enough with ragging, and that if people put on pyjamas and lolled about on cushions after midnight they were certain to start feeling drowsy. Pyjamas, they said, should come at the end not at the beginning of a party. So we ought to enjoy ourselves pretty thoroughly. Don’t get there before twelve.”

  He had been told it was to be that kind of party. And it looked as though it were that kind of party. There was a scented, exotic, cushioned atmosphere about the discreet, creeper-covered house in the quiet square at whose front door the cab deposited him. A friendly, intimate, reassuring and at the same time exciting sense of warmth had swept to meet him as the front door swung open and he saw beyond the butler’s shoulders a wide, thick carpeted staircase curving upwards towards the sound of music. The hall was brightly but softly lighted; the dull gold wallpaper shone dimly like the panels of some gentle furnace that exuded a gentle heat. His footsteps made no sound on the deep pile carpet. At the turn of the stairs there was a shadowed passage, a passage or perhaps an alcove; he could not tell. And though the party was centred between the two main rooms of the front floor, in the larger of which there was music and dancing, and in the smaller a large buffet table piled high with sandwiches, tomato and foie gras and caviare; with fruit salads and cold pies, with a large ham and a basket of hard-boiled eggs; with variously coloured jugs of claret and hock and cider cup; with beneath the table a long trough of ice in which an array of champagne bottles were laid out side by side: though the majority of the guests were divided between these rooms, there seemed to be a constant overflow of trios and couples and quartets wandering up and down stairs to and from the upper reaches of the house.

  “Please don’t imagine,” his hostess assured him, “that there’s only a party going on down here; there’s all the noise and dancing here, but you won’t want to be dancing and rowing all the time, there are a couple of sitting-rooms upstairs, and there’s quite a nice flat roof that you can wander about on if it’s not too cold. Just wander about and amuse yourself. It won’t be a large party, not more than forty, so there’ll be plenty of room for every one.”

  She smiled gaily and there was a glitter and a meaning in her smile; and through the glitter and meaning might well have sprung from an innocent mingling of the exhilaration of champagne with the exhilaration of being a hostess—both heady potions —Merrick, whose experience of Bohemia was very slight, who divided society into two halves, the disreputable and the respectable, who assumed that the woman who was generous in her affections was promiscuous in them too, interpreted in his own fashion that glitter and that meaning. This, he thought, was going to be a party. And I mustn’t, he added, spoil it for myself by being rash. For as is proper to one who has mastered the technique of gallantry James Merrick had a distrust of haste. He knew that there were many hours in front of him. And so instead of precipitating himself upon any adventurous quest, he strolled into the smaller room, poured himself out a glass of Monopole, and leaning against the corner of the wall took stock of the position.

  It was very much as he had expected. There was a great deal of noise and a great deal of chatter. There was a bandying of Christian names, a hailing of acquaintances across the room; there were men leaning on each other’s shoulders and men standing with their arms round women’s waists, and on the sofa beside the fire there was a couple holding hands; there seemed to be a good deal being drunk, and the party was scarcely an hour old.

  With a contented smile upon his lips James Merrick leant back and watched it all. He did not know a great many of the people there,—not more than two or three, in fact. But he knew that he would find no difficulty in attaching himself to any of the fluid groups that shifted at hazard from room to room. He had no wish, however, to commit himself too soon. He had always r
emembered and put to profit the advice given by an older friend on the eve of a long ocean cruise.

  “Never,” he had been told, “embark on a flirtation till the third day out. Give people time to sort themselves, have a look round, and what is more important, give people time to think about you and wonder who you are and what you’re like. Don’t be precipitate.”

  It was advice that he had acted on very profitably during his visits to London’s less advertised resorts; and he was not now going to waste his time and enterprise on someone who had already made other arrangements for the conclusion of the evening. There were a number of attractive women in the room, but there was plenty of time ahead; he could wait and he could look round a bit and he felt no embarrassment at standing by himself alone. He had sufficient self-confidence and sufficient poise to feel that the impression he would be making would not be, “There’s a poor chap standing by himself because no one will talk to him”; but, “There’s a fellow alone of his own choice because he doesn’t see anyone in the room worth talking to.” And whether or not that actually was the impression that Merrick made, it is the impression that we think we give that decides our conduct: so he drank his drink and munched a sandwich and waited patiently.

  Nor had he to wait long for his patience to be rewarded.

  Suddenly, above the murmuring ebb and flow of talk there rose a rather husky but gay and not unmusical, a friendly, welcoming, appealing voice.

  “Gerry, my sweet,” it cried, “oh, what a heavenly surprise!”

  And a small figure, neat and vibrant, had run into the room, had flung a white arm about the neck of a young well-dressed, theatrical-looking man and kissed him on the mouth.

  “Such a surprise, such a heavenly surprise!” she cried. “I was feeling so lost. I came here with Barry Terrance; and before we’d been here three minutes in came May Santon and of course he deserted me, and I suppose if Gladys is here you’ll be treating me just the same.”