LATE AND SOON. E. M. Delafield
packed a bag and walked out of the house without a word to anyone. The trust she showed—the courage—coming to me like that, never having had a word or a line from me since I'd left Saumur—I'll never forget it."
A log, burnt through, fell with a soft crash into the bed of white ash on the hearth and Valentine stirred to replace it by another one.
Then she said:
"Go on."
"Will I? You've a lot of patience. We didn't ever marry—neither of us wanted it. We didn't want children, either. Does that seem to you extraordinary?"
He saw from her face that she was surprised, and wondered whether it was because she found such an attitude of mind regrettable, or incomprehensible, or because it surprised her that he should have put it into words.
When she spoke, slowly and as though she had never before expressed what she felt on this matter, he saw that he had been mistaken.
All that surprised her was they should think so much alike.
"It doesn't seem at all extraordinary. I don't know that I'd quite realized before—but I feel like that about it, too. I mean—a really perfect companionship would be interfered with, wouldn't it, if there were children?"
"Of course."
"For anything less than the best," she said, with a timidity that touched him deeply, "I think children would be a great help. They take up such a lot of time and thought."
So that's been your life, thought Lonergan. Aloud he said:
"Laurence and I never meant to have Arlette. It was a mistake. She wanted to stop it, but I was afraid of the risk for her. We fought over that like blazes, and while we were still fighting, it was too late. It would have been too impossibly dangerous, even if we'd had the money."
"But did you have a child, then?"
"We did. Laurence was nearly as upset about it as I was and she swore it shouldn't ever make any difference."
"Did it?"
"It did, a little. That was inevitable, in a tiny appartement that had one and a half rooms and a studio. When I was making more money, and Arlette was old enough, she went to the convent every day and she was very good from the start, and didn't give us much trouble. She was eight when Laurence died, and the nuns took her as a boarder. They kept her through the holidays—it's quite often like that in France, as you probably know."
"Yes. Then where is Arlette now?"
"Well, she's in Ireland, of all things. I had to get her out of France somehow, when the war started. I don't need to tell you that my family never knew of her existence, and I'd the work of the world deciding what I'd tell my poor old sister Nellie. I wrote her a letter in the end, and asked her to talk it over with Father Conroy, her confessor, who has sense—and I said the child's mother was dead and that Arlette had been brought up by the holy nuns and I wanted her in a Catholic atmosphere where I knew she'd be taken care of. I put in a lot of old cod, too, about her being the innocent result of something that had happened long ago in my youth. I felt disloyal to Laurence when I said that, well knowing that Nellie would think it was a terrible mortal sin I'd committed and repented of, please God. She did, too. I'd pages from her afterwards. But she sent me a telegram, almost directly after she got my first letter, telling me I could send Arlette to her. She's there still, the poor child, with Nellie and old Maggie Dolan, in the wilds of Roscommon."
"Is she happy there?"
"I think so. And poor old Nellie, who's been all by herself since father died, is devoted to her. I got over there once, in the beginning of nineteen forty, and saw them. It seemed to be working all right. When all this is over, if I'm still living, I'll have Arlette with me."
"Is she like Laurence?"
"Not a bit. She's like her grandmother—old Madame Houlvain. Tough and small and dark—you'd never mistake her for anything but what she is—a nice little girl of the French bourgeoisie. The only way she's different is in having a good brain. She's extremely intelligent. The funny thing is, I wasn't interested in her at all till the last year. And now I am. And I was touched, when I went over to Ireland, and she was so madly pleased to see me. Of course, she was in a nation of strangers and I was part of the only life she'd known. But I got a much deeper feeling of responsibility about her then. I'm afraid I'd never really felt it before—except that I'd got to make the money to pay her convent bills."
"I didn't think of you as having children, or a child. I thought you'd have married, though."
"To all intents and purposes Laurence and I were married. I felt the same obligations. I loved her—I wasn't always faithful to her, God forgive me—I could never have left her."
"I understand," Valentine said. "Why did she die? She must have been very young."
"She was thirty-one. It was in the autumn of nineteen thirty-four. She got pneumonia, and died in ten days."
"Perhaps," said Valentine slowly, "she'd known only the best things. I don't mean just happiness, but all the things—real pain, and hard work, and——" She stopped, and then went on speaking very diffidently. "You did say you and she had fought over things. I may be talking of what I know nothing about, but I've sometimes thought that to care enough to quarrel—not just bickering but a serious quarrel—and still want to stay together, must mean a really vital relationship."
"How right you are!"
Lonergan looked at her, drawn back from his world of Laurence and the Paris flat that was only one and a half rooms and a studio, and the pink house at Saumur, and even the little dark French girl over in Ireland. He was in the world to which Valentine belonged, and a strange survival of a world it seemed to him—an islet upon which the tide of destruction was swiftly and surely advancing, impelled now by the forces of war but inevitably due to come, war or no war.
His thoughts veered rapidly to Valentine herself.
"How good you are, to have let me go on and on, telling you all this! Have I tired you out?"
"No. I wanted to hear."
In the silence that followed Lonergan knew that, into her mind as into his, had come the remembrance of the two children they had once been, making love in the Pincio Gardens by a broken fountain.
"You didn't altogether forget, then. I mean that time in Rome?"
"I know what you mean. I did, and I didn't. There have been years during which I never thought about it at all, if that's forgetting—and yet every now and then I've got back the—the atmosphere of those afternoons and——"
She left a blank to complete the sentence, not, he thought, as though the word she wanted had eluded her but of deliberate intention. With all her poise, all the finished social technique that belonged to her class and her upbringing and was in her so highly developed, he found in Valentine the delicate shyness of a young—a very gracefully young—girl.
"It's been like that with me too," he told her. "I've forgotten for years at a time, and I've turned into quite another person since then, so that I can't even always remember what I was like, or what I thought I was like, in those days—but it used to come back to life with me too, sometimes. And when I saw you this afternoon, I remembered you perfectly. I think that was a queer thing, too."
"Yes."
"How simply you say 'Yes' as though it didn't surprise you at all, and you'd felt just the same."
"Oh, but I did," Valentine answered.
The gentle, candid manner in which she made the admission dumbfounded him completely.
He thought: "It's no good. I'm in love with her. I adore her." And following on the conviction came its graceless, inevitable concomitant: "God, what a muddle! What a complicated, god-damned muddle!"
A clock chimed, startlingly audible in the silence, and Valentine said:
"It's late. Did you mean to do any work to-night?"
"No.