LATE AND SOON. E. M. Delafield

      V

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      Looking into the fire away from Valentine, he spoke, hesitatingly at first.

      "It's difficult to begin. You see, it's hard to make you understand what she was like. (Her name was Laurence, by the way.) I should imagine that you've never come very much across the kind of French people that she belonged to, however much you've lived abroad. French provincial bourgeoisie, keeping themselves to themselves, in a little close circle of relations and old family friends.... The father had a job with one of those big firms that used to import wines. He wasn't a partner, nor anything like that, but he was important, in his own way. They'd a house at Saumur—one of those tall, pink, narrow houses with a garden at the back that ran down to the river and a tonnelle where they always had their meals in summer."

      Lonergan paused; conscious of confusion, laughing a little.

      "The way I'm going on—It's because I'm finding it difficult to describe Laurence to you."

      Valentine helped him.

      "Where did you meet her?"

      He threw her a look of gratitude.

      "In her own home. It was when I was doing a whole lot of sketches of provincial France for a newspaper, and they sent me down to the Loire country. One of the introductions they gave me was to Monsieur Houlvain, and I went to his office in Saumur. He was a nice old friendly chap. I don't think he'd have asked me to the house, if I'd been an Englishman and a Protestant instead of an Irish Catholic. But he invited me there for a Sunday déjeuner and off I went, little knowing what awaited me."

      He recaptured, for a fleeting, unexpected instant, the blinding heat-haze of the long-ago July morning when he had walked the streets of Saumur, looking for the house of Monsieur Houlvain—le numéro dix-huit.

      "A holy show I made of myself, that day! For some reason I couldn't find the house, and it was a scorching hot morning and I arrived late, and then I was only wearing some old shabby clothes I'd been walking in, and Madame Houlvain was all in black satin and a white collar, and monsieur in a new alpaca coat. I don't suppose he'd put it on in my honour, but it made me feel what kind of a mannerless lout was I, not to have taken a bit more trouble to look decent. They were rather ceremonious, too, to start with. You know how French people are."

      Valentine assented.

      "Laurence didn't come in till the déjeuner was ready. I imagine she'd been cooking it, and a nice time of it she must have had with everything getting spoilt because I'd not arrived. I didn't fall for her straight away, though I thought her extraordinarily pretty—she'd dark hair and eyes, and that sort of dead-white skin, and she was slim and rather tall, with good bones. Her forehead was lovely—I honestly can only think of one word that could ever describe the kind of breadth and purity of it, with dark thin eyebrows and very deep dark eyes underneath—and that's luminous. She had that quality, and it was all in that beautiful wide brow."

      "How old was she?"

      "Twenty-one. Nine years younger than I was. Well, you know what it's like in a French family. She never batted an eyelid all through lunch. Monsieur laid down the law a bit about politics, and madame asked questions about what I was doing, and told me which were the best restaurants in practically every town in the Loire country. And they asked about Ireland, and we agreed that the English were difficult for the more civilized races to understand. Am I being very rude?"

      "I don't think so. We are uncivilized, compared with the French. I'm not quite so sure about the Irish, but then I've never been to Ireland."

      "Well," said Lonergan, "I don't know that I'm quite so sure myself, nowadays. But anyway, I agreed with monsieur. I daresay I'd have agreed with whatever he said. It was my idea of the way to make myself agreeable, I suppose."

      He broke off abruptly.

      "I'm making this story too long. It was all very simple, really. I did the sketches, going down the river, and then I went back to Saumur to finish them off because I'd liked the town; and I wanted to see the cadre noir, and Monsieur Houlvain had said he could take me there.

      "He and madame were very kind to me—I saw a lot of them, off and on—and Laurence and I fell in love. We thought it wouldn't be any use, I was a foreigner, and hadn't any money except what I earned, and anyway, who wants their daughter to marry an artist?"

      Lonergan fell silent.

      Valentine asked:

      "Was she their only child?"

      "There was a son, doing his service militaire, and an older daughter, married. And there was a parti being arranged for Laurence. They still do that, in provincial France—or they did then. No compulsion, exactly, but the whole of the families talking it over—uncles and aunts, and a couple of priests, and the married ones and their husbands and wives. Laurence told me she liked the boy, and she'd been quite ready to say she'd marry him until she met me. We were crazy about one another. I'd decided long ago I wasn't ever going to marry—domesticity has never appealed to me, nor fidelity either for that matter, and I knew I'd be no sort of a husband for any woman, let alone a girl of twenty-one. But I had to ask Laurence to marry me. I was mad about her, and I thought I'd never get her any other way."

      Again Lonergan was silent, and this time it was a little while before he spoke again.

      "It's hard to make the next bit clear. But what happened was that Laurence told me she'd come and live with me in Paris, and not marry me.

      "She knew I didn't want marriage. That was the thing about Laurence—she understood and accepted things that were quite outside her own tradition.

      "I didn't know what to do. Or perhaps I did, and couldn't bring myself to do it. There was a terrible, mad, muddled week when I told monsieur I'd fallen in love with his daughter and he assured me that he was very sorry but she was already promised, and madame gave me a lot of good advice of which the whole point was that I must go back to Paris at once and not see Laurence again, and Laurence and I said goodbye in the tonnelle, and I told her it wasn't any good, she was too young and I couldn't ruin her life for her. Even if we were to marry, it would mean breaking with her family—her mother'd made that quite clear—and I couldn't afford to keep a wife.

      "I can see her now—the little, poor child—with the tears streaming down her face, telling me that she wasn't too young—she knew what she wanted. I don't know how I ever left her.

      "I went back to Paris and I thought, God forgive me, I'd forget her in time, the way I'd forgotten other girls before. But I found I didn't. And one day, about two months after I got back, I had a telegram asking me to meet her train that same afternoon—she was coming to Paris.

      "From their point of view monsieur and madame had made the most idiotic mistake they could have made. They'd tried to rush her into this marriage, and she'd got angry and told them she wouldn't be persecuted and there'd been some terrible rows