The House by the River Part 15

"'_Dear Sir_:

"'I have seen your infamous article. It is a cruel and disgusting libel. I wish to state publicly that I had nothing to do with the death of Emily Gaunt; that so far as I know no suspicion does rest upon me here or elsewhere; and that, if indeed there is suspicion, it is not in the minds of any one whose opinion I value, and I can therefore ignore it. In any case I should prefer to do without your dirty a.s.sistance.'"

"Can't say 'dirty'--can we?" said John.

"Why not? They _are_ dirt--filth--muck! Well, then--put 'dishonouring'--'your dishonouring a.s.sistance.' Go on:

"'I am not a rich man, and I cannot afford to bring an action for libel against you. A successful suit would cost me far more money and trouble than I should like to waste upon it. You, on the other hand, could easily afford to lose and would probably be actually benefited by a substantial increase in your circulation.

"'I must ask you to print this letter in your next issue and insist also on an unqualified apology for your use of my name.

"'I am sending this letter to the local Press.'"

The editor of _I Say_ did not print this letter, as the Rev. Peter had fondly imagined he would, but he referred in his second article, which was similar to the first, only more outspoken, to "the receipt of an abusive letter from the suspected person."

Slowly that week a copy of _I Say_ found its way into every house in The Chase; and the article was read and discussed and argued about, and the whole controversy of May, which had been almost forgotten, sprang into life again. And the following week the local papers were bought and borrowed and devoured, and John's spirited and courageous letter was admired and laughed at and condemned. The Chase fell again into factions, though now the Whittaker (pro-John) faction was the stronger.

For n.o.body liked _I Say_, though it was always exciting to read when there was some special excuse for bringing it into the house. Besides, the honour of The Chase was now at stake.

John and the Rev. Peter had reckoned without the generosity and communal feeling of the people of The Chase. They were never so happy as when they had some communal enterprise on foot, a communal kitchen, or a communal creche or a communal lawsuit, some joint original venture which offered reasonable opportunities for friendly argument and committee meetings and small subscriptions. This spirit had of course unlimited scope during the war, and perhaps it was the communal Emergency Food-Kitchen that had been its most ambitious and perfect expression.

But it lived on vigorously after the war. Several of the busiest and earliest workers among the men shared a communal taxi into town every day. There was a communal governess, and one or two semi-communal boats.

There was also a kind of communal Housing Council, which met whenever a house in The Chase was to be let or sold, and exerted pressure on the outgoing tenant as to his choice of a successor. Outside friends of The Chase who desired and were desired to come into residence were placed upon a roster by the Housing Council, and when the Council's edict had once gone forth, the outgoing tenant was expected at all costs to see that the chosen person was enabled to succeed him, and if he did not, or if he allowed the owner of the house to enter into some secret arrangement with an outsider, unknown and unapproved by the Council, it was a sin against the solidarity of The Chase.

And there had already been a communal lawsuit, that great case of _Stimpson and Others_ versus _The Quick Boat Company_--an action for nuisance brought by the entire Chase, because of the endless and intolerable noise and smell of the defendant company's motor-boats, which they manufactured half a mile up the river and exercised all day snorting and phutting and dashing about with loud and startling reports in the narrow reach between the Island and The Chase.

Nine gallant champions had stood forward with Stimpson for freedom and The Chase. But all The Chase had attended the preliminary meetings; all The Chase had subscribed; all The Chase and all their wives had given evidence in Court; and before this unbroken, or almost unbroken, front (for there were a few black sheep) the Quick Boat Company had gone down heavily. Judgment for the plaintiffs had been given in the early spring.

So that when it was widely understood that for lack of money John Egerton, a member of The Chase, was unable to defend himself from a scurrilous libel in a vulgar paper, the deepest instincts of the neighbourhood were aroused. A small informal Committee met at once at the Whittakers' house--Whittaker and Mr. Dimple (for legal advice) and Andrews and Tatham and Henry Stimpson. Stephen Byrne was asked to come, but had an engagement.

Mr. Dimple's advice was simple. He said that subject to certain reservations--as to which he would not bother the Committee, since they related rather to the incalculable niceties of the law, and lawyers, as they knew, were always on the nice side (laughter--but not much)--and a.s.suming that Mr. Egerton won his case, as to which he would express no opinion, though as a man he might venture to say that he knew of no one in The Chase--he had almost said no one in London--of whom it would be more unfair--he would not put it stronger than that, for he liked to a.s.sume that even a paper such as _I Say_ was sincere and honest at heart--to make the kind of suggestion which he knew and they all knew had been made in that paper, about Mr. Egerton--a quiet, G.o.d-fearing, honest citizen--but they all knew him as well as he did, so he would say no more about that--subject then to what he had said first and a.s.suming what he had just said--and bearing in mind the proverbial--he thought he might say proverbial (d.i.c.kens, after all, was almost a proverb) uncertainties and surprises of his own profession, he thought they would not be wildly optimistic or unduly despondent--and for himself he wanted to be neither--if they estimated the costs of the action at a thousand pounds, but of course--

Waking up at the word "pounds"--the kind of word for which they had been subconsciously waiting--the Committee began the process of unravelling which was always necessary after one of Mr. Dimple's discourses. And their conclusion was that it was up to The Chase to subscribe as much of the money as possible, as much at any rate as would enable John Egerton to issue a writ without the risk of financial ruin.

Henry Stimpson was naturally deputed to collect the money. Stimpson was an indefatigable man, a laborious Civil Servant who worked from 10 till 7.30 every day (and took his lunch at the office), yet was not only ready but pleased to spend his evenings and his week-ends, canva.s.sing for subscriptions, writing whips for meetings, or working out elaborate calculations of the amount due to Mrs. Ambrose in money and kind on her resigning from the communal kitchen after paying the full subscription and depositing a ham in the Committee's charge which had been cooked by mistake and sent to Mrs. Vincent. He genuinely enjoyed this kind of task, and he did it very, very well.

Henry Stimpson duly waited on the Byrnes and explained the position.

Stephen Byrne had read the articles in _I Say_, and Margery had read them. And a gloom had fallen upon Stephen, for which Margery was unable wholly to account as a symptom of solicitude for his friend's troubles--especially as they never seemed to see each other nowadays. To her knowledge they had not met at all since the summer holidays.

Nor had they. They avoided each other. This resurrection of the Emily affair, these articles and the new publicity, and now on top of that the prospect of a libel action, was to Stephen like a slap in the face. He had almost forgotten his old anxieties in the absorption of work and the soothing atmosphere of his new resolutions. But he would not go to John; he had been lucky before; he might be lucky again; he would wait. Old John might be trusted to do nothing precipitate.

So he promised to subscribe to the fund for the defence of John Egerton's good name, and Stimpson went away. The money was to be collected by that day week, and on the following Thursday there would be a general meeting to consider a plan of campaign. Stimpson's eyes as he spoke of "a general meeting" were full of quiet joy.

And Stephen went on with his work--very slowly now, but he went on. The poem was nearly finished; he had only to polish it a little. But he sat now for long minutes glowering and frowning over his paper, staring out of the window, staring at nothing. Margery, watching him, wondered yet more what work he was at, and what was the secret of this gloom. She began to think that the two things might be connected; he might be attempting some impossible task; he might be overworked and stale. This had happened before. But in his worst hours of artistic depression he had never looked so black as sometimes she saw him now. And she noticed that he tried to conceal this mood from her; he would manufacture a smile if he caught her watching him. And that, too, was unusual.

Then one evening when she went to her table for some small thing she saw there the unmistakable ma.n.u.script of this new work lying in an irregular heap on the blotter. Her eyes were caught by the t.i.tle--"The Death in the Wood"--written in large capitals at the head; and almost without thinking she read the first line. And she read the few following lines. Then, urged on by an uncontrollable curiosity and excitement, she read on. She sat down at the table and read, threading a slow way through a maze of alterations and erasions, and jumbles of words enclosed in circles on the margin or at the bottom or at the top and wafted with arrows and squiggly lines into their intended positions. But she understood the strange language of creative ma.n.u.script, and she read through the whole of the first section--Gelert riding through the forest, the battle in the forest, and the death of the maiden. And as she read she was deeply moved. She forgot the problem of Stephen's gloom in her admiration and affectionate pride.

At the end of it Gelert stood sorrowing over the body and made a speech of intense dignity and poetic feeling. And at that point she heard the voice of Stephen at the front door, and started away, remembering suddenly that this reading was a breach of confidence. But why--why was she not allowed to see it?

Yet that, after all, was a small thing; and she went to bed very happy, dreaming such golden dreams of the success of the poem as she might have dreamed if she had written it herself.

XV

The Chase was true to its highest traditions. Before the week was over it was known that the sum determined on by the Egerton Defence Fund Committee had been already promised, and more.

Stephen Byrne, with a heavy heart, went to the "general meeting" on Tuesday evening. To have stayed away would have looked odd; also he was anxious to know the worst. He walked there as most men go to a battle, full of secret foreboding, yet dubiously glad of the near necessity for action. If, indeed, there was to be a libel action, backed by all the meddlesome resources of The Chase, things would have to come to a head.

This was a development which had never been provided for in his calculations and plans. It would have been easier, somehow, if John had been arrested, charged by the Crown with murder. He would have known then what to do--or he thought he would. He wished now that he had been to see John, found out what he was thinking. But he was nervous of John now, or rather he was nervous of himself. He could not trust himself not to do something silly if he met John in private again; the only thing to do was to try to forget him, laugh at him if possible. And that was the devil of this libel business. He would have to be there himself, he would have to give evidence again, and sit there probably while poor old John was stammering and mumbling in the box. Yet he had done it before--why not again? Somehow he felt that he could not do it again. It all seemed different now.

And that poem! Why the h.e.l.l had he written it? Why had he sent it to _The Argus_. He had had it typed on Thursday, and sent it off by special messenger on Friday, just in time for the October number. _The Argus_ liked long poems. What a fool he had been! Or had he? He knew very well himself what it all meant--but how could any one else connect it with life--with Emily Gaunt? No, that was all right. And it was d.a.m.ned good stuff! He was glad he had sent it. It would go down well. And another day would have meant missing the October number.

Yes, it was d.a.m.ned good stuff! He stood at the Whittakers' door, turning over in his head some favourite lines from Gelert's speech in the forest. d.a.m.ned good! As he thought how excellent it was, there was a curious sensation of tingling and contraction in the flesh of his body and the back of his legs.

When he came out, an hour later, he was a happier man. He was almost happy. For it had been announced at the meeting, with all the solemnity of shocked amazement, that Mr. Egerton had refused to avail himself of the generous undertakings of The Chase and neighbourhood. The money promised would enable him to sue with an easy mind. But he would not sue.

There was nothing to be done, then, but put and carry votes of thanks to the unofficial Committee for their labour and enterprise, to Whittaker for the use of his house, to Henry Stimpson for his wasted efforts. The last of these votes was felt by most to be effort equally wasted, since they knew well that Henry Stimpson had in fact thoroughly enjoyed collecting promises and cash, and had now the further unlooked-for delight of having to return the money already subscribed.

This done, the meeting broke up with a sense that they had been thwarted, or at any rate unreasonably debarred from a legitimate exercise of their communal instincts.

But apart from this intelligible disappointment there was a good deal of head-shaking, and plain, if not outspoken, disapproval of Egerton's conduct. Stephen, moving among the crowd, gathered easily the sense of The Chase, and it had veered surprisingly since Whittaker's announcement. For John Egerton had advanced, it seemed, the astounding reason that he might _lose_ the case. To the simple people of The Chase--as indeed to the simple population of England--there was only one test to a libel action. Either you won or you lost. The complex cross-possibilities of justification and privilege and fair comment and the rest of it, which Mr. Dimple was heard to be apologetically explaining in a corner to a deaf lady, were lost upon them. If you failed to win your case, what the other man said was true, and if you were not confident of winning, your conscience could not be absolutely clear. The meeting rather felt that John Egerton had let them down, but they were certain that he had let himself down. And it was clear that even his staunchest supporters, men like Whittaker and Tatham, were shaken in their allegiance.

But Stephen Byrne was happy. He had trusted to luck again, and luck, or rather the quixotic lunacy of John Egerton, had saved him again. It was wonderful. It was all over now. John had finally made his bed, and he must lie on it. He thought little of what this must mean to John, this aggravation of the local suspicions. He saw only one thing, that yet another wall had been raised between himself and exposure, that once more his anxieties might be thrust into the background. That he might settle down again with a comfortable mind to literature and domestic calm. He had forgotten with his fears his compunction of an hour ago; he had forgotten even to feel grateful to John; and if he thought of him with pity, it was a contemptuous pity. He saw John now as a kind of literary figure of high but laughable virtue, a man so virtuous as to be ridiculous, a mere foil to the heroic dare-devils of life--such as Gelert and Stephen Byrne.

So he came to his own house, thinking again of those excellent lines of Gelert's speech. In the hall he composed in his mind the description of the meeting which he would give to Margery.

But Margery, too, was thinking of Gelert. She was reading the ma.n.u.script of "The Death in the Wood." She had watched Stephen go out in a slow gloom to the meeting, and then she had hurried to the table and taken guiltily the bundle from the special ma.n.u.script drawer. For Stephen, with the sentimental fondness of many writers for the original work of their own hands, preserved his ma.n.u.scripts long after they had been copied in type and printed and published. Twice during the last week she had gone to that drawer, but each time she had been interrupted. And at each reading her curiosity and admiration had grown.

She had suspected nothing--had imagined no sort of relation between Stephen's life and Gelert's adventures. There was no reason why she should. For she detested--as she had been taught by Stephen to detest--the conception of art as a vast autobiography. Stephen's personality was in the feeling and in the phrasing of his work; and that was enough for her; the substance was a small matter.

Even the incident of the maiden in the wood, her death and her concealment in the lake, had scarcely stirred the memory of Emily. For the reverent and idyllic scene in which the two knights had "laid" the body of the maiden among the reeds and water lilies of the lake, to be discovered by her kinsmen peeping through the tangled thickets of wild rose, was as remote as possible from the sordid ugliness of Emily's disposal and discovery in a muddy sack near Barnes.

But now she had finished. And she did suspect. When she came to the pa.s.sage describing Gelert's remorse for the betrayal of his old companion-at-arms, his gloomy bearing and penitent vows, she thought suddenly of Stephen's late extravagant gloom, which she was still unable to understand. And then she suspected. Idly the thought came, and idly she put it away. But it returned, and she hated herself because of it.

It grew to a stark suspicion, and she sat for a moment in an icy terror, frozen with pain by her imaginations. Then in a fever of anxiety she went back to the beginning of the ma.n.u.script, and hurried through it again, noting every incident of the story in the hideous light of her suspicions. And as she turned over the untidy pages, the terror grew.

In the light of this dreadful theory so many things were explained--little odd things which had puzzled her and been forgotten--Stephen's surprising anxiety when Michael was born (and Emily disappeared), and that evening in the summer, when they had all been so silent and awkward together, and the drifting apart of Stephen and John, and John's extraordinary evidence, and Stephen's present depression. It was all so terribly clear, and the incidents of the poem so terribly fitted in. Margery moaned helplessly to herself, "Oh, _Stephen_!" When he came in, she was almost sure.

It was curious that at first she thought nothing of Gelert's illicit amours in the castle, the stealing of his own friend's lady. That part of the poem, of course, was a piece of romantic imagination, with which she had no personal concern. But while she waited for Stephen, turning over the leaves once more, the thought did come to her, "If one part is true--why not all?" But this thought she firmly thrust out. She was sure of him in _that_ way, at any rate. She flung a cushion over the ma.n.u.script and waited.

He came in slowly as he had gone out, but she saw at once that his gloom was somehow relieved. And as he told her in studied accents of distress the story of the meeting, there came to her a sick certainty that he was acting. He was not _really_ sorry that John had thought it best not to take any action; he was glad.

When he had finished, she said, in a hard voice which startled her, "What _do_ you make of it, Stephen? Do you think he really did it?"

Stephen looked at the fire, the first fire of late September, and he said, "G.o.d knows, Margery; G.o.d knows. He's a funny fellow, John." He sighed heavily and stared into the fire.

And then she was quite sure.

She stood up from the sofa, the ma.n.u.script in her hand, and came towards him.