IN the course of time, Janet Philimore and her attendant father, the General, arrived at their house on The Point, and as Olivia, apprised of their advent, did not tie a white satin bow on her gate, General and Miss Philimore left cards on the newly wedded couple, or, more exactly, a pencilled leaf torn out of a notebook. Thus arose a little intimacy which Olivia encouraged on Alexis’s account. Had not her father and brothers trained her in the ways of men, one of which vital ways was that which led to the social intercourse of man with man? Besides, it was a law of sex. If she had not a woman to talk to, she declared, she would go crazy. It was much more comforting to powder one’s nose in the privacy of the gyn?ceum than beneath man’s unsympathetic stare. Conversely it had been a dictum of her father’s that, in order to enjoy port, men must be released from the distracting chatter of women.
“If I’m not broad-minded, I’m nothing,” said Olivia.
“?‘Broad’ is inadequate,” replied her husband, thrusting back his brown hair. “The very wonder of you is that your mind is as wide as the infinite air.”
Which, of course, was as pleasant a piece of information as any bride could receive.
The magic of the halcyon days was intensified by the satisfaction of the sex cravings which, by the symbolism of nose-powdering and port-drinking, Olivia had enunciated. In the deeps of her soul she could find no consuming passion for sitting scorched in a boat with a baited and contemptuously disregarded line between expectant finger and thumb. She could not really understand the men’s anxiety to induce a mentally defective fish to make a fool of itself. Yet she would have sat blissfully for hours at his bidding, for the mere joy of doing as she was bidden; but not to be bidden was a great relief. Similarly, Alexis could not vie with Olivia in concentration of being over the selection of material (in the fly-trap of a great watering-place previously mentioned) and over the pattern and the manufacture by knitting of gaudy hued silk jumpers. His infatuated eye marvelled at the delicate swiftness of her fingers, at the magical development of the web that was to encase her adorable body. But his heart wasn’t in it. Janet’s was. And General Philimore brought to the hooking of bass the earnest singleness of purpose that, vague years ago, had enabled him to ensnare thousands of Huns in barbed-wire netting.
The primitive laws of sex asserted themselves, to the common happiness. The men fished; the women fashioned garments out of raw material. We can’t get away from the essentials of the Stone Age. And why in the world should we?
But—and here comes the delight of the reactions of civilization—invariably the last quarter of an hour of these exclusive sex-communings was filled with boredom and impatience. Alone at last, they would throw themselves into each other’s arms with unconscionable gracelessness and say: “Thank Heaven, they’ve gone!” And then the sun would shine more brightly and the lap of the waves around them would add buoyancy to their bodies, and Myra, ministering to their table wants, would assume the guise of a high priestess consecrating their intimacy, and the moon would invest herself with a special splendour in their honour.
Now and then the four came together; a picnic lunch at some spot across the bay; a wet after-dinner rubber at bridge, or an hour’s gossip of old forgotten far-off things and battles of the day before yesterday, or—in the General’s house—a little idle music. There it was that Olivia discovered another accomplishment in her wonderful husband. He could play, sensitively, by ear—knowledge of notated music he disclaimed. Having been impressed as a child with the idea that playing from ear was a sin against the holy spirit of musical instruction, and gaining from such instruction (at Landsdowne House—how different if she had been trained in the higher spheres of Blair Park!) merely a distaste for mechanical fingering of printed notes, she had given up music with a sigh of relief, mingled with regret, and had remained unmusical. And here was Alexis, who boasted his ignorance of the difference between a crotchet and an arpeggio, racking the air with the poignant melancholy of Russian folk-songs, and, in a Puckish twinkle, setting their pulses dancing with a mad modern rhythm of African savagery.
“But, dear, what else can you do?” she asked, after the first exhibition of this unsuspected gift. “Tell me; for these shocks aren’t good for my health.”
“On the mouth-organ,” he laughed, “I’ve not met any one to touch me.”
It was not idle boasting. On their next rainy-day visit to the neighbouring town, Olivia slipped into a toy shop and bought the most swollenly splendid of these instruments that she could find, and Alexis played “The Marseillaise” upon it with all the blare of a steam orchestrion.
The happy days sped by in an atmosphere of love and laughter, yet filled not only with the sweet doings of idleness. Olivia discovered that the poet-artist must work, impelled thereto by his poet-artistry. He must write of the passing things which touched his imagination and which his imagination, in turn, transmuted into impressions of beauty. These were like a painter’s sketches, said he, for use in after-time.
“It’s for you, my dear, that I am making a hoard of our golden moments, so that one of these days I may lay them all at your feet.”
And he must read, too. During the years that the locust of war had eaten, his educational development had stood still. His English literary equipment fell far short of that required by a successful English man of letters. Vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had as yet left unexplored. The great Elizabethan dramatists, for instance. Thick, serious volumes from the London Library strewed the furniture of the wind-swept sitting-room. Olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius, read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty of Marlowe, the subtle beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher, the haunting gloom of Webster. In the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage, he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the burning words. It was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch.
Once, reading Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, he clutched her tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked unheeding Heaven, and declaimed:
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,
Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
Whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,
Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue! This had been a life
Free from vexation.”
“But, Alexis, darling, I’m so sorry,” she cried.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“You said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart. I’m not a bit like that.”
They laughed and kissed. A dainty interlude.
“You’ve never really felt like that?”
“Never.”
“The idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed Olivia, with grand inversion of chronology. “Tennyson has something like it in Locksley Hall. How does it go?”
With a wrinkling of the brow she quoted:
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
 
“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“So he did!” cried Triona. “How wonderful of you to remember! Why—the dear beautiful old thief!” He forgot the point at issue in contemplation of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “Well, I’m damned! Such a crib! With the early Victorian veil of prudery over it! Oh, Lord! Give me the Elizabethan, any day. Yet, isn’t it funny? The period-spirit? If Tennyson had been an Elizabethan, he would have walked over Beaumont and Fletcher like a Colossus; but in a world under the awe of Queen Victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing Elizabethan thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”
“Dear,” said Olivia, “we have much to be thankful for.”
“You and I?” he queried.
“Our generation. We live in the sun. No longer under the shadow of the red flannel petticoat.”
Rapturously he called her a marvel among women. Olivia’s common sense discounted the hyperbole; but she loved his tribute to her sally of wit.
The book slipped to the floor, while she began an argument on the morality of plagiarism. How far was a man justified in stealing another man’s idea, working up another man’s material?
His sudden and excited defence of the plagiarist surprised her. He rose, strode about the room and, talking, grew eloquent; quoted Shakespeare as the great exemplar of the artist who took his goods from everywhere he found them. Olivia, knowing his joy in conversational fence, made smiling attack.
“In the last three hundred years we have developed a literary conscience.”
“A commercial matter,” he declared. “A question of copyright. I granted that. You have no right to exploit another man’s ideas to his material loss. But take a case like this”—he paced before her for a few seconds—“on the spur of the moment. It must have happened a thousand times in the War. An unknown dead man just a kilometre away from a bleak expanse of waste covered with thousands of dead men. Some one happens upon him. Searches him for identification. Finds nothing of any use or interest save a little notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper next his skin. And he glances through the book and sees at once that it is no ordinary diary of war—discomfort of billets, so many miles’ march, morale of the men and so forth—but something quite different. He puts it in his pocket. For all that the modern world is concerned, the dead man is as lost as any skeleton dug up in an ancient Egyptian grave-yard. The living man, when he has leisure, reads the closely written manuscript book, finds it contains rough notes of wonderful experiences, thoughts, imaginings. But all in a jumble, ill expressed, chaotic. Suppose, now, the finder, a man with the story-teller’s gift, weaves a wonderful thrilling tale out of this material. Who is injured? Nobody. On the contrary, the world is the richer.”
“If he were honest, he ought to tell the truth in a preface,” said Olivia.
Triona laughed. “Who would believe him? The trick of writing false prefaces in order to give verisimilitude is so overworked that people won’t believe the genuine ones.”
“I suppose that’s so,” she acquiesced. Her interest in the argument was only a reflection of his. She was far more eager to resume the interrupted reading of Philaster.
“It’s lovely that we always see things in the same way,” said he, sitting down again by her side.
Besides all this delightful work and play there was the practical future to be considered. They could not live for ever at “Quien Sabe” on The Point, nor could they live at the Lord knows where anywhere else. They must have a home.
“Before you stole over my being and metamorphosed me, I should have asked—why?” he said. “Any old dry hole in a tree would have done for me, until I got tired of it and flew to another. But now——”
“Now you’re dying to live in a nice little house and have your meals regular and pay rates and taxes, and make me a respectable woman.”
They decided that a house was essential. It would have to be furnished. But what was the object of buying new furniture at the present fantastic prices when she had a great house full of it—from real Chippendale chairs to sound fish-kettles? The answer was obvious.
“Why not Medlow? Olifant won’t stay there for ever. He hinted as much.”
She shook her head. No. Medlow was excellent for cabbages, but passion-flowers like her Alexis would wilt and die. He besought her with laughing tenderness not to think of him. From her would he drink in far more sunlight and warmth than his passion-flower-like nature could need. Had she not often told him of her love for the quaint old house and its sacred associations? It would be a joy to him to see her link up the old life with the new.
“Besides,” he urged, attributing her reluctance to solicitude for his happiness, “it’s the common-sense solution. There’s our natural headquarters. We needn’t stay there all the year round, from year’s end to year’s end. When we want to throw a leg we can run away, to London, Paris, “Quien Sabe,” John o’ Groats—the wide world’s before us.”
But Olivia kept on shaking her head. Abandoning metaphor, she insisted on the necessity of his taking the position he had gained in the social world of art and letters. Hadn’t he declared a day or two ago that good talk was one of the most stimulating pleasures in life? What kind of talk could Medlow provide? It was far more sensible, when Major Olifant’s tenancy was over, to move the furniture to their new habitation and let “The Towers” unfurnished.
“As you will, belovedest,” he said. “Yet,” he added, with a curious note of wistfulness, “I learned to love the house and the sleepy old town and the mouldering ca............