Outrageous Fortune (10 page)

He slept again.

XII

“It's eleven o'clock,” said Caroline.

Pansy Arbuthnot ran a pencil through her hair and turned a page. The gate-leg table at which she sat was strewn with sheets of manuscript. Ernest Hughes Mottson's last poem lay on her left, Alicia Spence-Lely's last short story on her right. Verses and essays by other members of the Vicious Circle occupied the rest of the space. In her hand she held a single sheet of what looked rather like packing-paper.

Caroline was curled up by the fire. It had been a very pleasant fire. One can almost bear a cold August for the sake of old apple-wood burning on a low brick hearth. This particular log came from the crabby Worcester Pearmain which had blown down in the gale a week ago. Its logs were a great deal better than its apples had ever been. Caroline's grandmother used to say that,

An applewood fire

Will show you your heart's desire.

The log had broken into red embers, and the embers were turning grey. No one likes to see their heart's desire turn grey.

Caroline twisted round.

“It's ever so late, Pansy Ann.”

“Caro—”

“Are you going to read those things all night?”

“Some of them,” said Miss Arbuthnot, “are very striking.” She sounded a little vague and she ran her pencil through her hair again.

“You look struck.”

“Very striking
indeed
! I
would
like to read you this one.”

Caroline sat back against the warm brick of the chimney arch and clasped her hands about her knees.

“Why?”

“It's so very striking.”

Caroline's eyes danced.

“All right—get it over!”

“It's by a new man who's just joined the Circle. He signs himself ‘Abaddon.'”

“How bad is it?” said Caroline.

“It's very striking,” said Pansy in rather a dazed voice. She held the sheet of brown paper farther off and said,
“Query.”
Then she stopped. “That's the title—only he hasn't written it like that, which is rather puzzling. He has just put an enormous question mark, so I don't quite know how to read it. Would you say Query, or would you say Question-mark?”

“Question-mark,” said Caroline.

Pansy brought the paper a little nearer and read:

?

Illimitable maximum

Star glutinous space cataract

Crushed platinum

Inevitably wracked

A tortuous torment of lamenting gloom

Till lightning cracked

The whole steep firmament

Tilts shrieking blindly its impermanent

Resistless unresisted blast of doom.

“Golly!” said Caroline.

Pansy looked a little awed.

“There are no stops!” she said.

“There wouldn't be—not in a star glutinous space cataract. You don't have time—you're too busy tilting and shrieking.”

“I like this one better,” said Pansy. She paused, and then added—“
really
. It's quite different.”

She picked up a neatly written sheet and read:

I went to look for violets,

There were no violets there;

But every single widowed leaf

Had shed a shining tear of grief

For violets that were.

I went to look for roses,

The roses all were fled
—

Caroline went off into a gurgle of laughter.

“That's not a poem—it's a foregone conclusion! I can tell you exactly what the other rhymes are going to be before you come to them. It's not another ‘Abaddon,' I suppose?”

“No. She signs Gwendoline, but her name is really Dobbs.”

Caroline scrambled to her feet.

“Sorry, Pansy Ann, I'm going to bed—I don't think I can bear any more Gwendoline.”

She went up the stairs, which ended on a tiny landing with a door on either side. Her room was on the left, and you went down two steps to it. Both the steps and the floor of the room were odd polished boards, very wavy and uneven. The window, which looked to the front of the house, was set in a deep embrasure. Caroline had given it curtains of green sprigged chintz, a pattern of little holly leaves on a shiny white ground. There were green rush mats on the floor, and an old hand-quilted bedspread worked with pink and green flowers on the wide, low bed.

Caroline was very fond of her room. The bedspread had been worked by her great great-great-aunt Caroline, who had been called after Caroline of Anspach. The bed had belonged to her too, and it was much too big for the room. Caroline had slept in it ever since she was six years old.

She shut the door and turned on the light in the lamp beside her bed. Hazelbury West had had electric light for the last eight years and considered itself very up to date in consequence.

Caroline turned down her bed, folding the quilt carefully and laying it on the chest in which she kept her hats. She had said she wanted to come to bed, but she wasn't really sleepy. If the fire had not died, she would have gone on sitting there beside it; but it is the saddest thing in the world to sit by a dying fire. And as for Pansy Ann's Circle and their appalling balderdash—with the least encouragement Pansy would have read her the whole lot.

She opened the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers which faced the window and took out a bundle of letters tied with a twist of pale blue knitting silk. Then she went over to the bed. Sitting down on the edge of it, she untied the bundle and turned the letters over. There were not a great many of them. Two the first year after Jim went out—one for her birthday, and one for Christmas—and two again the second year, and the third. In the fourth year he only wrote for Christmas. The pain of that missed birthday came across the three years interval and hurt her still. She had counted on her letter, and it hadn't come. Her birthday was in June, so it was six months since Christmas, and it would be six months before it was Christmas again. Six months is a most frightfully long time when you are nineteen.

In the fifth year there was no letter at all. On her birthday and on Christmas day Caroline read the old letters and tried to make believe that they had just come. It was not a very successful make-believe.

In the sixth year there were still no letters.

And then in the seventh year—this year—they began again. He had written at Christmas from New York.

Caroline got out the letter and read it again. It was a very nice letter. She hugged herself a little over it. It began, as all his letters always had begun, “Darling Caroline”; and it was quite long. He had been in lots of exciting places. He had been building a bridge in Mexico, and he had been in Chile, and Peru, and up in wild places in the Andes. He had also been inventing something which he hoped would make his fortune. He was burnt pretty nearly as dark as an Indian. And he had become a pretty good shot, because you needed to be. He was hers, Jim. He always signed just like that—“Yours, Jim.”

That was the Christmas letter. Caroline answered it at once. She told him she was living with Pansy Ann, and she told him just how dreary and lonely and neglected Hale Place was getting to look—weeds in the drive, and green mould on the pineapples at the entrance—“and if you don't come home soon, Jim, the trees will meet across the drive, and the cedar and the copper beech will grow in at the west windows. There's ivy across the glass already, and the wisteria is over the old schoolroom. Aren't you ever coming home? I do so want you to come. Your loving Caroline.”

She had always signed like that to Jim from the time that she wrote him her very first letter when she was seven years old and he had sent her a doll for her birthday. It had real hair, and brown eyes that opened and shut. Jim was sixteen. He loomed heroic to little Caroline. He could climb trees. He could swim two miles—as far as from Hazelbury West to Packham. He could make a swing. He could make a kite. He could swing you right up into the air over his head and hold you there. He wasn't a grown-up. Grown-ups said, “Don't—” and “You mustn't!” Jim was just Jim. She was his loving Caroline.

He wrote again in February. He was very hopeful about his invention. He couldn't tell her about it, because it was all extremely confidential. Elmer Van Berg might be going to back it. If he did, the thing was made. He wrote at length about Elmer Van Berg, for whom he seemed to have a high admiration—“The bother is, he's interested in too many things. He takes turns at them. Whilst he's riding one, the others might as well be dead. Just as I thought I had brought my job off, his uncle, old Peter Van Berg, died and left him an extraordinary collection of jewels. Elmer's too busy with them to have time for me and my affairs.” There was a lot more about the Van Bergs. Susie Van Berg was awfully pretty, and awfully kind. They were great friends.

In March he wrote that the Van Bergs were coming to England for the summer—“Susie wants to go to Court in as many of old Peter Van Berg's jewels as possible. There are some emeralds which beat the band. They are said to have belonged to Atahualpa, the last of the Incas. I shouldn't mind having what they would fetch—you can't launch an invention without capital. If this thing of mine can only get a start, it's bound to go big.”

After that there was nothing for a couple of months. Then he wrote again, still from New York. The Van Bergs were in England. He was half thinking of coming over after them. Susie thought it might be worth his while—she thought Elmer was working up for a change of hobbies. They had taken Packham Hall for the summer—“You might go over and call as it's so near.”

Caroline had gone over to call with Pansy Ann; but it was June, and the Van Bergs were taking their London season very seriously and only coming down for week-ends. Caroline and Pansy had been asked to lunch on a Sunday—and of course it had to be just that one particular Sunday which Robert Arbuthnot had already commandeered. he was a distant cousin of Pansy's, a still more distant cousin of Caroline's, and trustee to both of them. He was an able solicitor, and a blinding bore. Caroline maintained that he only came to see them when he had something unpleasant to impart with regard to their investments. On this occasion he left Pansy the poorer by about twenty pounds a year, and made it impossible for Caroline to meet the Van Bergs.

In July Caroline went north to visit her father's sister, who kept open house every year in the Highlands. It was whilst she was at Craigellachie that Jim wrote to say he was in London. He was given a warm invitation to join Mrs Ogilvie's party.

Caroline passed quickly over the time when they waited for his answer. He would come—of course he would come. They would go for tremendously long walks, and tell each other all the things that you couldn't put into letters. If he got Aunt Grace's letter on Wednesday morning, he might catch the night train and come right through. Caroline had gone about in a queer warm dream of happiness which it hurt her to think about now. Because Jim hadn't come. He hadn't written for three days, and then it was just a few lines to Grace Ogilvie. He thanked her very much, and he hoped perhaps he might be able to get up later on, but just at the moment he was afraid he couldn't spare the time. He didn't write to Caroline at all, not until the beginning of August, and then it wasn't what you could call a letter; just half a dozen lines, all scrawled in a hurry:

“I may be able to get off on the 8th if Grace can still have me. I shall probably take a steamer up the coast.”

And that was all. That was the very last letter. It might have been written to anyone—to a hotel, or to someone you disliked, or to a Mere Acquaintance. It wasn't the kind of letter to be Jim's last letter to his loving Caroline. It gave her a very desolate, grey, hopeless feeling. It made her feel, quite illogically, that Jim was drowned. The
Alice Arden
had sailed on the eighth of August and had gone to bits on the Elston rocks. If Jim wasn't drowned, where was he? The only address they had ever had was his bank. She had been to the bank, and had been told that they had no address, and that Mr Randal had not called for his letters since the sixth of August.

That was a very frightening thing to hear. It seemed to make it certain that Jim had sailed on the
Alice Arden.
A cold shiver passed over Caroline. She put the letters together again with hands that moved a little stiffly. When she went over to put them away, the room felt very cold. She drew a sobbing breath as she shut the drawer. It felt as if she were shutting Jim away. The tears began to run down her face, and all at once she couldn't bear the light any more. It is only happy people who want to stand in the light. Caroline pushed down the switch, and was glad of the dark.

She cried bitterly, crouching down by the bed and pressing her face into the pillow lest Pansy Ann should hear. Pansy had come upstairs and was moving about in the room across the tiny landing. Caroline cried all her tears away. She had held them in for a long time; now they were all gone, and she felt rather like a ghost, weak and light and insubstantial.

She went to the window and opened it, kneeling on the deep window-ledge and leaning out to get the air. It was a still night that would come near to frost before morning. There was moonlight, but the moon was not visible. The elm-trees opposite rose up dark and vague as smoke. All the shadows were soft and formless. The white phloxes in the border looked like spilled milk.

Something in Caroline's mind said quickly, “It's no good crying over spilled milk.” She thought that was very odd.

She leaned out farther. There was something strange about the night. Or perhaps the strangeness was in herself. She felt as if everything was a very long way off and out of reach. A ghost might feel like that if it came back. There is a ballad in which a dead man comes to his lover's window an hour before the day: