While he dressed for dinner Lady Lane came into his bedroom, more diplomatic but no whit less insistent. As his mother, she was prepared to make the best of everything and to suppress her own feelings; but, if Eric had committed a crime, he could not have felt greater distaste in putting her off with half-truths.
"You"ll tell us--when there"s anything to tell?" begged his mother, as they went down to dinner; and Eric felt that he might have saved his elaborate prevarications for a more gullible audience. Sir Francis made no direct allusion throughout the week-end, but, as they sat over their wine on the first night, he enquired spasmodically how old Eric was, how much money he had made during the last year and what literary ventures he had in contemplation.
It was a relief to walk over to Red Roofs next day and have tea with Agnes Waring and her father. For an hour he was spared even indirect references to the unhappy interview, though in his over-sensitive condition he fancied that Agnes was unwontedly frigid in manner, as though a new barrier had been placed between them. Conversation centred about her brother. Humanly speaking, he would be released from Switzerland within a few weeks and would come either to Paris or London; he was, of course, debarred from active service, but the War Office would no doubt test his capabilities of health and brain either in Whitehall or at the Ministere de la Guerre. Eric could count on seeing him almost any day--in England, or, if he could invent a mission, in Paris.
Only when she had walked through the garden to send him on his way across the fields did Agnes touch on the offending article. They were standing on opposite sides of a sun-dial at the end of a fruit-walk; and both were recalling the earlier Sundays when Eric had asked with sympathetically lowered voice: "No news of Jack, I suppose?"
"You"re looking as if you wanted a holiday," Agnes volunteered.
"I"ve been rather worried lately," Eric answered vaguely.
"Not about that----" She looked at him and moved round, slipping her hand through his arm. "_I_ shouldn"t worry about a thing like that!
She"s so well-known that the papers are on to her like cats on a mouse.
. . . I liked her that night I met her, Eric."
"It makes my relations with her rather difficult," he laughed.
"But all you"ve got to do is not to meet her!" Agnes explained in a tone of convincing reason.
"She"s--_one_ of the greatest friends I"ve got," he said.
Agnes rubbed gently at the tarnished motto on the dial.
"That makes it rather difficult, of course," she said at length.
And then it seemed easiest for him to shake hands and walk away without adding anything.
His family by itself on one side, Agnes by herself on the other would not have spurred Eric to action. He was precipitated by the felicitations of an almost complete stranger in the train on Monday morning and held to his course by a succession of congratulatory notes and telephone messages.
"_I don"t know_," he wrote to Barbara on reaching home, "_whether you have seen this week"s "_World and His Wife_." There"s a rather broad hint at our engagement, and I"m receiving congratulations. Isn"t this a golden opportunity for publishing the news?_"
Barbara"s reply was tuned to an uncompromising note which Eric had met but once before--at the beginning of his last illness, when he had threatened to go away from her and the threat had misfired; when, too, he--"one of our conquerors"--had broken down and cringed to her; and she, with drawn cheeks and leaden eyes, had laid his head on her bosom and caressed him, not as a conqueror or a lover, but as a tired, sick child.
"_I am so very miserable_," she wrote. "_Sometimes I could almost wish to die--just to get us all out of this terrible tangle. You"d be happier--after a time, when you"d got over the first feeling of loss and loneliness; and, however lonely and unhappy you"d be without me, it would be nothing to the misery I should bring you, if we were foolish enough to marry. Let me be your devoted, your very loving, very grateful friend! If you try to marry me, you"ll be marrying my name, my voice, my clothes, my body; you won"t be marrying me; you"ll waste your divine love on a woman whose soul is at the other end of the world. Whatever happens, I must do you a hideous wrong._"
Eric read the letter three times and left it unanswered.
A very little more of this erotic battledore-and-shuttlec.o.c.k would send them both out of their minds. It was a mistake to write, when both needed a holiday. He telephoned to his agent and walked to Covent Garden for a consultation about the lecturing-tour in America.
"I"m worn out, I must have a complete change," said Eric. "And I want to start at once."
Grierson was surprised out of his habitual placidity by the nervous vehemence of Eric"s manner.
"You"ll need a month or two to prepare your lectures," he pointed out.
"You can begin making the arrangements immediately. London"s getting on my nerves rather. Three months in the country, three months out there--oh, the war may be over by then. . . . I"m sick of England. . . .
If the war"s still going on, I shall stay away and go on to j.a.pan.
You"ll fix that, Grierson?"
He jumped up restlessly and was starting for the door when his agent recalled him.
"Are you in a hurry?" he asked. "There are one or two things I want to talk to you about. Rather good news," he added. "Staines have accepted your novel on our terms. I had a fight over the advance, but your name carried you through."
Eric was not interested in the figures. He was recalling the mood in which he had sent the ma.n.u.script to Grierson, when he was working under inspiration. He had grudged the hours wasted on sleep and food when he might have been working for Barbara.
"I seem to have more money than I know what to do with," he answered shortly. "By the way, has Manders given tongue yet about the play?"
""Mother"s Son"? Yes, I wrote you last night. Didn"t you get my letter?
Oh, he"s quite enthusiastic about it. He suggests a few small changes----"
"Manders would," Eric rejoined from habit rather than resentment. He did not care if he never wrote another play; he did not care if they returned to him battered and dog"s-eared after months of delay and desultory travel--as in the old days. Manders might cut the thing about to the top of his vulgar Philistine bent.
"He wants to begin rehearsing at once," Grierson went on slowly. "And the "Divorce" is being revived at the Emperor"s. You"ll have three plays running in London at the same time."
"I"m not going to stay in England to please Manders," Eric interrupted.
"He"d like to have a talk with you about it before you leave London,"
said Grierson.
Eric caught himself yawning. It was such futility to discuss a play in which he had lost all interest.
On his return, he yawned again over his letters. It was futile to hear from people in whom he had lost all interest, though a Swiss stamp and a hand-writing which he had almost forgotten quickened the beating of his heart.
"_My dear Eric_," he read.
"_Your letter was a joy to me! Please go on writing. You cannot imagine how home-sick I feel. I want the smell of London again, I want to hear people talking my own language and I want to see "em in bulk, drifting slowly down the Strand from the Temple. Do you remember the old days when we lived together in Pump Court? I want to go and lunch at the club again and have a little dinner at the Berkeley, say, and go on to a theatre, decently dressed with other people decently dressed too.
There"s a chance--one lives on hope from day to day--that I may be sent home; I don"t seem to be getting any better here: all goes well for a time, and then I get such a head-ache as I would not sell for the minted wealth of the world. Of course, that makes work of any kind rather a problem, and I see myself looking out for a job which I can do at my own convenience, when I feel up to it. The bar doesn"t look particularly hopeful, if I"m unable to last out a long case or if I can"t appear at all; I"m afraid my standing"s hardly good enough to convince any one if I say I"ve got a case in another court. I think you"ll have to expound to me the whole art of writing plays; that"s the sort of thing for my one-hour-on-and-six-hours-off condition._
"_You"re such a celebrity nowadays that I suppose you simply won"t look at your humble friends! I saw your first thing the last time I was home--it seems like the Dark Ages now, before my little sojourn in Mittel-Europa. I imagine you"re sick of hearing it praised, especially by people who don"t know anything about it, but I thought it was an amazingly good play. The moment I was within range of English papers--this was before I got your letter--I went through the advertis.e.m.e.nts to see if you were still "drawing all London" (I believe that"s the phrase) and found that yet another was going very strong. You seem to have struck oil. The best of good luck to you._
"_There"s really nothing to tell you about this place. I believe you know Chateau d"Oex; well, there"s a little colony of British prisoners of war here, some more knocked about than others, but all pretty glad to be out of Hunland. The Swiss gave us a great reception, and we"re allowed pretty fair liberty, though we can"t wander at large over the whole of Switzerland. The War Office is very busy trying to start industries out here to keep the men employed and to give training to the unskilled so that they"ll have something to do when they"re discharged.
You may remember that before I was called, I spent a year with a firm of chartered accountants, so I"m supposed to know something of book-keeping. I don"t put a very high price on my service, however, because my attendance is rather erratic._
"_I suppose it"s out of the question for you to come here? Yet a holiday would do you good, I"m sure. If you can"t manage it, we must wait till the end of the war or till I"m sent back. And then I dine with you--sumptuously--and make you take me to the latest of your popular successes._
"_Write again, old man. Your letter did me no end of good._
"_Ever yours_
"_Jack Waring._"
Eric read the letter twice and then locked it in a drawer. It was characteristic of the writer in that he said hardly anything of himself.
That might have been expected, and there was no need to be frightened by the hand-writing. A moment later he unlocked the drawer and enclosed the letter in a note to Barbara, reminding her that he had long ago promised to let her have any news that came to him. The promise was before their engagement; but the letter would shew her that Jack was capable of writing.
A week later Jack wrote again.
"_I"ve been shifted to Paris, no longer a prisoner of war, but a more or less free man. I could probably get discharged to-morrow, if I liked, but the army does pay me SOMETHING, and I haven"t yet found anything else that will._