But I don’t know why I bother about him at all, when you, you, you are the one thing filling my heart. Oh, my darling, my Petra, my heart’s heart! You are coming back. Nothing else is of importance in the whole world. The sun’s shining and everything is happy. I went out to do some shopping today – silly, trivial things for the house – and I could have kissed the bread and the potatoes as I put them into my basket, just for joy that you and I and they exist in the same world together! Petra, beloved, you and I, you and I – oh, darling, isn’t it wonderful!
Your happy
Lolo
43. The Same to the Same
15, Whittington Terrace
August 2nd, 1929
Petra, oh, my dear!
Oh, darling, never say now that the luck isn’t on our side sometimes. Something even bigger than luck, perhaps. That we should save that last, wonderful evening out of the wreck – so perfect, so unspeakably wonderful – our evening of marvellous love. Just think – that it should be your last night, and that he should be called out suddenly like that, and ask you, himself, not to go before he got back. And even then, if it hadn’t been the girl’s night out, we shouldn’t have been safe. But it was, by such incredible luck, Petra mine.
Do you know, there was a moment when I was frightened. I thought, for a horrible minute, that he had suspected something after all, and had only pretended to go out, and would come slinking back on purpose to catch us. Did that occur to you? And were you afraid to say anything, lest I should be frightened? I was. And then, quite suddenly, I felt certain, absolutely certain that it was all right. We were being watched over, Petra. We had been given that great hour – a little bit of eternity, just for you and me. God must be sorry for us. I can’t believe it was sin – no one could commit a sin and be so happy. Sin doesn’t exist, the conventional kind of sin, I mean – only lovingness and unlovingness – people like you and me, and people like him. I wonder what Mr Perry would say to that. He is just crossing the road now to Benediction, as he calls it. He thinks he knows all about what is right and what is wrong, but lots of people think his candles and incense wicked, and call him a papist and idolater and things like that. And yet, out of his little, cold, parish experience, he would set himself up to make silly laws for you, darling, who are big and free and splendid. How absurd it all is! He preached such a funny sermon the other day, about the Law and the Gospel. He said, if we wouldn’t do as the Gospel said, and keep good for the love of God, then we should be punished by the Law.
And he said that didn’t mean that God was vindictive, only that the Laws of Nature had their way, and worked out the punishment quite impartially, just as fire burns you if you touch it, not to punish you, but because that is the natural law of fire.
I am wandering on, darling, am I not? I only wondered what kind of natural revenge Mr Perry thought God would take for what he would call our sin. It does seem so ridiculous, doesn’t it? As if God or Nature would trouble about us, with all those millions and millions of worlds to see to. Besides, our love is the natural thing – it’s the Gorgon who is unnatural and abnormal. Probably that’s his punishment. He denies me love, and our love is Nature’s revenge on him. But, of course, he wouldn’t see it that way.
Oh, darling, what a wonderful time these last weeks have been. I enjoyed every minute. I have been so happy, I didn’t know how to keep from shouting my happiness out loud in the streets. I wanted to run and tell the people who passed by, and the birds and the flowers and the stray cats how happy I was. Even the Gorgon being there couldn’t spoil it altogether. Do you remember how angry he was about The Sacred Flame? And you were holding my hand, and your hand was telling mine how true and right it was that the useless husband should be got out of the way of the living, the splendid wife and her lover and child. Darling, I think that play is the most wonderful and courageous thing that’s ever been written. What right have the useless people to get in the way of love and youth? Of course, in the play, it wasn’t the husband’s fault, because he was injured and couldn’t help himself – but that’s Nature’s law again, isn’t it? Get rid of the ugly and sick and weak and worn-out things, and let youth and love and happiness have their chance. It was a brave thing to write that, because it’s what we all know in our hearts, and yet we are afraid to say it.
Petra, darling, my lover, my dearest one, how can we wait and do nothing, while life slips by? The time of love is so short – what can we do? Think of a way, Petra. Even – yes, I’m almost coming to that – even if the way leads through shame and disgrace – I believe I could face it, if there is no other. I know so certainly that I was made for you and that you are all my life, as I am yours.
Kiss me, kiss me, Petra. I kiss my own arms and hands and try to think it’s you. Ever, my darling, your own
Lolo
44. The Same to the Same
15, Whittington Terrace
5th Oct., 1929
‘Oh, Petra, I am so frightened. Darling, something dreadful has happened. I’m sure – I’m almost quite sure. Do you remember when I said Nature couldn’t revenge herself? Oh, but she can and has, Petra. What shall I do? I’ve tried things, but it’s no good. Petra, you’ve got to help me. I never thought of this – we were so careful – but something must have gone wrong. Petra, darling, I can’t face it. I shall kill myself. He’ll find out – he must find out, and he’ll be so cruel, and it will all be too terrible.
Petra, I was so desperate I tried to make him – don’t be angry, Petra – I mean, I tried to be nice to him and make him love me, but it wasn’t any good. I don’t know what he will do to me when he discovers the truth. Darling, darling do something – anything! I can’t think of any way, but there must be one, somehow. Everybody will know, and there will be a frightful fuss and scandal. And even if we got a divorce, it wouldn’t be in time – they are so slow in those dreadful courts. But I don’t expect he would divorce me. He would just smother it all up and be cruel to me. I don’t know. I feel so ill, and I can’t sleep. He asked me what was the matter with me today. I’d been crying and I look simply awful. Petra, my dearest, what can we do? How cruel God is! He must be on the conventional people’s side after all. Do write quickly and tell me what to do. And don’t, don’t be angry with me, darling, for getting you into this trouble. I couldn’t help it. Write to me or come to me – I shall go mad with worry. If you love me at all, Petra, you must help me now.
Lolo
45. Statement of John Munting [Continued.]
The next news I had about the Harrisons was about the middle of October, 1929, when I got a note from Lathom, written, rather unexpectedly, from ‘The Shack, Manaton, Devon’. He said that he was staying with Harrison, who was having his annual ‘camp’ among the water-colour ‘bits’ and the natural food-stuffs. Harrison, it appeared, had been so pressing that he really had not known how to refuse, especially as he was really feeling rather played-out after several months’ strenuous work in Paris. After the unbearable hot and prolonged summer, the prospect of pottering about a bit among the lush grass and deep lanes of Devon had seemed attractive, even when coupled with the boredom of Harrison’s company. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, ‘the old boy is not so bad when you get him in the country by himself. This is the kind of life that really suits him. As a family man he is a failure, but he quite comes out and blossoms doing the odd bits of work about the shack. And he certainly is a first-class cook, though up to the present I have successfully avoided his nettle-broth and stewed toadstools, not wishing to be cut off in my youth. This is a pretty place – miles away from everywhere, of course, stuck down on a circumbendible lane which runs down from Manaton (half a dozen houses and a pub) to the deep valley which separates the Manaton Ridge and Becky Falls from Lustleigh Cleave. The only neighbours are the sheep and cows – an old ram walked into the kitchen the other day. Harrison was grunting over the stove and didn’t see him at first, “Be-hey-hey,” says the ram; “Eh-heh-heh,” bleats Harrison, looking up; and damn
it, he was so exactly like the old fellow that he wanted nothing but a pair of horns to complete the resemblance! We wash the crockery, and then Harrison takes his newest superfine painting-box, with the collapsible legs and all the rest of it, and trundles away into the valley, where he sits all day in a gorse-bush, trying to put the tumbling of the stream on paper. The drought has dried it up a good bit, but never was anything so desiccated as the arid little plan of it he produces with pride for me to see, painted with a brush with three hairs in it – peck, peck, scratch and dab – like a canary scrabbling for seed. Why don’t I take the opportunity to do some work in this glorious place? No, thanks; I’m a figure and portrait wallah – besides, I’ve come here for a rest. It is not mine to sing the stately grace – I smoke my pipe in the doorway, drive the cattle out of the back garden, and see that the stewpot doesn’t boil too fast.
‘So here I am, in comfortable exile with Menelaus, while Helen sits at home and sews shirts. And it’s a better way, too. One mustn’t take these things too seriously. Damned if Harrison hasn’t got the right idea after all. Look after the grub and leave women to their own fool devices. They give a man no peace. You, being married, have perhaps got your house in order. Do you find it as easy to do your work, now that you’re hooked up to a whirlwind? But, of course, your whirlwind works too, and helps to turn the mill-wheel, which no doubt makes all the difference.’
Lathom went on in this strain for a page or so. Cynicism from him was something new, and I took it to spell restlessness of some sort or other. Either, I thought, he was getting fed up with the lady’s exactions, or the trio had arrived at a modus vivendi. It was no affair of mine.
He ended up by saying that he would be running up to town in a day or two and would look me up. I was then living in Bloomsbury – in fact, in my present house – and my wife was away with her people. I had arranged to go with her, but at the last moment an urgent matter turned up – an Introduction to an anthology, which had to be rushed out in a great hurry before some other publisher got hold of the idea, and I had to stay behind to get the thing fairly going, as it meant a good deal of work at the British Museum.
When Lathom turned up at about one o’clock on the 19th, I explained this to him and apologised for having no lunch to offer him. Like most men, and women, too, when left to themselves, I found solitary meals uninspiring. So, apparently, did ‘the girl’, whom, till my wife left me, I had imagined to be a good cook. Not that I had ever expected Elizabeth to leave her writing to see after my meals, I can only suppose that her moral influence was enough to make the difference between roast mutton and raw.
Lathom commiserated with me, and we went and had some grub at the ‘Bon Bourgeois’. He seemed to be in high spirits, when he thought about it, but had a way of going off into fits of abstraction which suggested nerves or preoccupation of some kind. He asked about the anthology and my work generally with apparent interest, and then, to my surprise, broke suddenly into my description of the plot of my new novel by saying:
‘Look here, if the wife’s away, why don’t you come down to the Shack with me for the weekend? It’ll do you good, freshen you up and all that.’
‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘it’s Harrison’s place. He won’t want me.’
‘Oh yes, he’d love to have you. Oh, rather. In fact, he only said to me, when I was starting off, he wished I could bring you back with me. He’s quite forgotten all that misunderstanding. He’s rather distressed about it, really. Thinks he did you an injustice. Would like to make it up. He says you must be harbouring resentment, because you’ve been in town all this time and haven’t been to see them.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘You know why I’ve thought it best to keep out of it.’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t. Naturally he thinks you’re offended.’
‘Didn’t you tell him I was busy?’
‘Of course. Oh, yes. Played up the popular literary man for all it was worth. So he said, of course you were too important nowadays to remember your old friends.’
‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘what a tactless devil you are, Lathom. You needn’t have hurt his feelings.’
‘No, but look here. Why not come down? It’ll please the old boy no end, and as neither of the women will be there, there won’t be any awkwardness. It’s a damned good opportunity for being civil to him without involving your wife.’
‘Civil is a good word for it,’ I objected. ‘I don’t know that it’s particularly civil to plant myself on the man like that, and make him feed me and so on, without notice, when he probably doesn’t want me. Just at the weekend, too, when it’s difficult to get extra supplies.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ said Lathom, ‘we’ll take some grub down with us. I was going to in any case. Everything has to be brought out there by a carrier twice a week. Frightful desolate hole. We’ll take a bit of beef and a couple of pounds of sausages. That’ll see us through all right.’
I considered it.
‘I say,’ said Lathom, suddenly. ‘Do come, old man. I wish you would. It’s all right there, you know, but I do get a bit bored at times. I’d like to have a yap with somebody who talks my language.’
‘If you’re fed up,’ I said reasonably, ‘why do you stay?’
‘Oh, well – I promised I would, don’t you see. It’s not bad really, but it would do us both good to have a bit of a change.’
‘Now, look here, Lathom,’ said I, ‘I don’t like the idea particularly. I’m not particularly puritan’ (I don’t know why one uses that phrase – I suppose it is easier to disown one’s decencies when one represents them as something grotesque in a black suit and steeple-hat), ‘but considering the way you behaved to Harrison, I think it’s rather thick to go and push your friends on to him. What you do is your own business’ (looking back on it, I seem to have extracted a great deal of satisfaction from this original thought), ‘but it’s rather different for me.’
‘Punk!’ said Lathom. ‘That’s all absolutely over. Finished. Washed out. It’s you who keep on digging it up again. Can’t you forget it and come down and help me out with old Harrison?’
‘Why so keen?’
‘Oh, I’m not particularly keen. I thought you’d like it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing this afternoon? B.M. again?’
I said, no; I avoided the Reading Room on Saturday afternoons, because it was so crowded, and asked him about his work.
He talked about it a little, in the same vague way as before, saying how difficult it was to settle to anything, and displaying some irritability with his sitters of the moment. His triumph at the Academy had made him fashionable, and fashionable women were all alike, it seemed; small-minded and featureless. One might as well paint masks. All of which I had heard so often from other painters that I put Lathom down as already spoilt.
I suggested that he should stay up in town and do a show with me, but he said he was fed up with shows. He had only come up to see his agent, and was catching the 4.30. Why didn’t I change my mind and come with him?
It ended in my changing my mind, and going. I hardly know why, except that I was only six mouths married and my wife was away, which, to the well-balanced mind, is no good reason for idle behaviour.
The express ran us down in smooth, stuffy comfort, and reached Newton Abbot dead on time at 9.15. I cannot say – though I have tried – that I remembered any particular incident on the way down. I hate talking on railway journeys, anyway, and Lathom did not seem very conversational. I read – it was Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica – an overrated book, I think, considered as a whole, but memorable for that strange and convincing description of the earthquake. The thick heat and silence, and then the quick, noiseless shift of sea and shore, like the tilting of a saucer. Good, that. And the ghastly wind afterwards. And the child, not realising that anything out of the way had happened, because nobody gave the thing its proper terrifying name. That is very natural. I do not care for the part about the pirates. It is a
n anti-climax.
I know we dined on the train, but railway meals are seldom memorable. Lathom grumbled and left his portion half-eaten, and I said something about his acquiring a taste for hedgehog-broth and stewed toadstools – some silly remark which he took as a deadly insult.
At Newton Abbot we changed into the local, and dawdled through Teigngrace, Heathfield and Brimley Halt, taking over half an hour about it, till we were turned out, twenty minutes late, on the platform at Bovey Tracey. It was a quarter-past ten and dark, but the smell of the earth came up pleasantly, with a welcome suggestion of rain in the air. I stood on the platform, clutching an attaché case in one hand and the bag with the beef and sausages in the other, while Lathom transacted some occult business with a man outside. Then he came back, saying briefly, ‘I’ve got a man to take us,’ and we stumbled out to where an aged taxi thrummed mournfully in the gloom. Lathom bundled in, and I parked my bags at his feet.
‘What the devil’s that?’ he said crossly.
‘The grub, fathead,’ said I, following him in.
‘Oh, yes, of course, I’d forgotten,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get going, for God’s sake!’
Being used to Lathom, I ignored his irritability. We jolted off.
The taxi had a churchyard smell about it, and I mentioned the fact. Lathom slammed the window down with an impatient grunt. I remarked, foolishly, that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the trip. He said:
‘Oh, don’t talk so much.’
It seemed to me that the prospect of seeing Harrison again had rather got on his nerves, and I looked forward to an exasperating weekend.
‘Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin,’ I reflected, and lit a cigarette resignedly. The narrow road heaved and sank between dark hedges, but climbed on the whole, wriggling determinedly up and round to the ridge. A dim light or so and a cluster of black roofs announced civilisation, and Lathom roused himself to say: ‘Manaton – there’s a good view from here by daylight.’