SHE was waiting for him at the little South Coast station, where decorum had to cloak the rapture of their meeting. But they sat close together, hand in hand, in the hackney motor-car that took them home. This gave him an intermediary breathing space for explanation; and the explanation was easier than he had feared. Really, his journey had been almost for nothing and had afforded little interest. The agent whom he was to interview having been summoned back to Russia the day before he arrived, he had merely delivered his dispatches to the British authorities and taken the next boat to England. It was just a history of two dull sea voyages. Nothing more was to be said about it, save that he would go on no more fool’s errands for a haphazard government. “Besides, it’s too dreadful to be away from you.”
“It has been awful for me, too,” said Olivia. “I never imagined what real loneliness could feel like. All the time I thought of the poor solitary little dab the Bryce children showed us the other day in the biscuit-tin of water. Oh, I was the most forsaken little dab.”
He swore that she should never be lonely again; and, by the time they reached their house by the sea, he had half-exultingly dismissed his fictitious mission from his mind. All the apprehensions of the narrow Northern kitchen melted in the joy of her. All danger had vanished like a naughty black cloud sped to nothing by the sun. The mythical past had to remain; but henceforward his life would be as clear to her as her own exquisite life to him.
In their wind-swept home they gave themselves up to deferred raptures, kissing and laughing after the foolish way of lovers. To grace his return she had filled the rooms with flowers—roses and sweet peas—which she bought extravagantly in the neighbouring seaside town. The scent of them mingled delicately with the salt of the sea. To her joy he was quick to praise them. She had wondered whether they would be noticed by one so divinely careless of material things. He even found delight in the meal which Myra served soon after their arrival—he so indifferent to quality of food.
“Everything is you,” said he; “scent and taste and sight. You inform the universe and give it meaning.”
Her eyes grew moist as she swiftly laid her hand on his.
“Am I really all that to you?” She laughed with a little catch in her throat. “How can I live up to it?”
He raised her hand to his lips. “If only you went on existing like a flower, your beauty and fragrance would be all in all to me. But you are a flower with a bewildering soul. So you merely have to be as you are.”
He was in earnest. Women had played little or no part in his inner life, which, for all his follies, had been lived on a spiritual plane. His young ambitions had been irradiated by dreams of the little Princess Tania, who had represented to him the ever-to-be-striven-for unattainable. On his reaching the age when common sense put its clammy touch on fervid imagination, the little Princess had been given away in marriage to a young Russian nobleman of vast fortune, and he himself had driven her to the wedding with naught but a sentimental pang. But the flower-like, dancing, elusive quality of her had remained in his soul as that which was only desirable and ever to be sought for in woman. And—miracle of miracles!—he had found it in Olivia. And she was warm and real, the glowing incarnation of the cold but perfect ghost of his boyhood’s aspirations. She was verily the Princess of his dream come true. And she had an odd air of the little Princess Tania—the same dark, wavy hair and laughing eyes and the same crisp sweetness in her English speech.
Save for all this rapture of meeting, they took up the thread of their lives where it had been broken, as though no parting had taken place, and their idyll continued to run its magic course. Triona began to write again: some articles, a short story. The shadow shape of a new novel arose in his mind, and, in his long talks with Olivia, gradually attained coherence. This process of creation seemed to her uncanny. Where did the people come from who at first existed as formless spirits and then, in some strange way, developed into living things of flesh and blood more real than the actual folk of her acquaintance? Her intimate association with the novelist’s gift brought her nearer to him intellectually, but at the same time set him spiritually on unattainable heights. Meanwhile he called her his Inspiration, which filled her with pride and content.
The lease of “Quien Sabe” all but expired before they had settled on their future house. Medlow was ruled out. So was the immediate question of the Medlow furniture, they having given Blaise Olifant another year’s tenancy.
While discussing this step, he had said:
“It’s for you and you only to decide. Any spot on earth where you are is good enough for me. By instinct I’m a nomad. If I hadn’t found you, I should have gone away somewhere to the desert and lived in tents.”
Olivia, who had seen so little of the great world, felt a thrill of pulses and put her hands on his shoulders—she was standing behind his chair—
“Why shouldn’t we?”
He shook his head and glanced up at her. The way of the gipsy was too hard for his English flower. She must dwell in her accustomed garden. In practical terms, they must settle down for her sake. She protested. Of herself she had no thought. He and his work were of paramount importance. Had they not planned the ideal study, the central feature of the house? He had laughed and mangled Omar. A pen and a block of paper . . . and Thou beside me, etcetera, etcetera.
“I don’t believe you want to settle down a bit,” she cried.
He swung his chair and caught her round her slim body.
“Do you?”
“Eventually, of course——”
“But, before ‘eventually,’ don’t you want your wander-year?”
“France, Italy——” She became breathless.
“Honolulu, the Pacific, the wide world. Why should we tie ourselves to a house until we have seen it all?”
“Yes, why? We have all our lives before us.” She sank on his knee. “How beautiful! Let us make plans.”
So for the next few days they lived in a world of visions, catching enthusiasm one from the other. Again he saw Salvation Yeo’s pointing finger; and she, in the subconscious relation of her mind with his, saw it too. House and furniture were Olifant’s as long as he wanted them.
“We’ll go round the world,” Olivia declared.
With a twirl of his finger—“Right round,” said he.
“Which way does one go?”
He was somewhat vague. An atlas formed no part of their personal equipment or of the hireling penates of “Quien Sabe.”
“I’ll write to Cook’s.”
“Cook’s? My beloved, where is your sense of adventure?”
“We must go by trains and steamers, and Cook’s will tell us all about them.”
She had her way. Cook’s replied. At the quotation for the minimum aggregate of fares Alexis gasped.
“There’s not so much money in the world.”
“There is,” she flashed triumphantly. “On deposit at my bank. Much more.”
Who was right now, she asked herself, she or the prosaic Mr. Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch? She only had to dip her hands into her fortune and withdraw them filled with bank-notes enough to take them half a dozen times round the world!
Inspired by this new simplicity of things, they rushed up to London by an incredibly early train to take tickets, then and there for the main routes which circumnavigate the globe. The man at Cook’s dashed their ardour. They would have to pencil their passages now and wait for months until their turn on the waiting lists arrived.
It must be remembered that then were the early days of Peace.
“But we want to start next week!” cried Olivia in dismay.
The young man at Cook’s professed polite but wearied sorrow at her disappointment. Forty times a day he had to disillusion eager souls who wanted to start next week for the other side of the globe.
“It is most inconvenient and annoying for us to change our plans,” Olivia declared resentfully. “But,” she added, with a smile, “it’s not your fault that the world is a perfect beast. We’ll talk it over and come to you again.”
So after lunch in town they returned to The Point, richer in their knowledge of the conditions of contemporary world travel.
“We’ll put things in hand at once and start about Christmas,” said Alexis. “Until then——”
“We’ll take a furnished flat in London,” Olivia decided.
October found them temporarily settled in a flat in the Buckingham Palace Road, and then began the life which Olivia had schemed for her husband before these disturbing dreams of vagabondage.
Towards the end of their stay in “Quien Sabe” various letters of enquiry and invitations had been forwarded to Triona from people, back now in London, with whom the success of his book had brought him into contact. These, careless youth, he had been for ignoring, but the wiser Olivia had stepped in and dictated tactful and informative replies. The result was their welcome in many houses remote from the Lydian galley, the Blenkiron home of Bolshevism and even the easy conservative dullness of the circle of Janet Philimore. The world that danced and ate and dressed and thought and felt to the unvarying rhythm of jazz music had passed away like a burnt-up planet. The world which she entered with her husband was astonishingly new with curious ramifications. At the houses of those whose cultivated pleasure in life it is to bring together people worthy of note she met artists, novelists, journalists, actors, publishers, politicians, travellers, and their respective wives or husbands. Jealously, at first, she watched the attitude of all these folk towards her husband: in pride and joy she saw him take his easy place among them as an equal. A minority of silly women flattered him—to his obvious distaste—but the majority accepted him on frank and honourable terms. She loved to watch him, out of the corner of her eye, across the drawing-room, his boyish face flushed and eager, talking in his swift, compelling way. His manners, so simple, so direct, so dif............