Twilight, Julia Frankau [100 books to read in a lifetime txt] 📗

A COUPLE of years ago, on the very verge of the illness that subsequently overwhelmed me, I took a small furnished house in Pineland. I made no inspection of the place, but signed the agreement at the instance of the local house-agent, who proved little less inventive than the majority of his confreres.

Three months of neuritis, only kept within bounds by drugs, had made me comparatively indifferent to my surroundings. It was necessary for me to move because I had become intolerant of the friends who exclaimed at my ill looks, and the acquaintances who failed to notice any alteration in me. One sister whom I really loved, and who really loved me, exasperated me by constant visits and ill-concealed anxiety. Another irritated me little less by making light of my ailment and speaking of neuritis in an easy familiar manner as one might of toothache or a corn. I had no natural sleep, and if I were not on the borderland of insanity, I was at least within sight of the home park of inconsequence. Reasoned behaviour was no longer possible, and I knew it was necessary for me to be alone.

I do not wish to recall this bad time nor the worse that antedated my departure, when I was at the mercy of venal doctors and indifferent nurses, dependent on grudged bad service and overpaid inattention, taking a socalled rest cure. But I do wish to relate a most curious circumstance, or set of circumstances, that made my stay in Pineland memorable, and left me, after my sojourn there, obsessed with the story of which I found the beginning on the first night of my arrival, and the end in the long fevered nights that followed. I myself hardly know how much is true and how much is fiction in this story; for what the cache of letters is responsible, and for what the morphia.

The house at Pineland was called Carbies, and it was haunted for me from the first by Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton. Quite early in my stay I must have contemplated writing about them, knowing that there was no better way of ridding myself of their phantoms, than by trying to make them substantial in pen and ink. I had their letters and some scraps of an unfinished diary to help me, a notebook with many blank pages, the garrulous reticence of the village apothecary, and the evidence of the sun-washed God’s Acre by the old church.

To begin at the beginning.

It was a long drive from Pineland station to Carbies. I had sent my maid in advance, but there was no sign of her when my ricketty one-horse fly pulled up at the garden gate of a suburban villa of a house “standing high “it is true, and with “creeper climbing about its white-painted walls.” But otherwise with no more resemblance to the exquisite and secluded cottage ornee I had in my mind, and that the house-agent had portrayed in his letters, than a landscape by Matise to one by Ruysdael. I was too tired then to be greatly disappointed. Two servants had been sent in by my instructions, and the one who opened the door to me proved to be a cheerful-looking young person of the golly wog type, with a corresponding cap, who relieved me of my hand luggage and preceded me to the drawingroom, where wide windows and a bright fire made me oblivious for the moment of the shabby furniture, worn carpet, and mildewed wallpaper. Tea was brought to me in a cracked pot on a veneered tray. The literary supplement of The Times and an American magazine were all I had with which to occupy myself. And they proved insufficient. I began to look about me; and became curiously and almost immediately conscious that my new abode must have been inhabited by a sister or brother of the pen. The feeling was not psychic. The immense writing-table stood sideways in the bow-window as only “we “know how to place it. The writing-chair looked sufficiently luxurious to tempt me to an immediate trial; there were a footstool and a big waste-paper basket; all incongruous with the cheap and shabby drawingroom furniture. Had only my MS. paper been to hand, ink in the substantial glass pot, and my twin enamel pens available, I think I should then and there have abjured all my vows of rest and called upon inspiration to guide me to a fresh start.

“Work whilst ye have the light “had been my text for months; driving me on continually. It seemed possible, even then, that the time before me was short. I left the fire and my unfinished tea. Instinctively I found the words rising to my lips, “I could write here.” That was the way a place always struck me. Whether I could or could not write there? Seated in that convenient easychair I felt at once that my shabby new surroundings were sympathetic to me, that I fitted in and was at home in them.

I had come straight from a narrow London house where my bedroom overlooked a mews, and my sitting-room other narrow houses with a roadway between. Here, early in March, from the wide low window I saw yellow gorse overgrowing a rough and unkempt garden. Beyond the garden more flaming gorse on undulating common land, then hills, and between them, unmistakable, the sombre darkness of the sea. Up here the air was very still, but the smell of the gorse was strong with the wind from that distant sea. I wished for pens and paper at first; then drifted beyond wishes, dreaming I knew not of what, but happier and more content than I had been for some time past. The air was healing, so were the solitude and silence. My silence and solitude were interrupted, my content came abruptly to an end.

“Dr. Kennedy!”

I did not rise. In those bad neuritis days rising was not easy. I stared at the intruder, and he at me. But I guessed in a minute to what his unwelcome presence was due. My anxious, dearly beloved, and fidgetty sister had found out the name of the most noted ^sculapius of the neighbourhood and had notified him of my arrival, probably had given him a misleading and completely erroneous account of my illness, certainly asked him to call. I found out afterwards I was right in all my guesses save one. This was not the most noted ^Esculapius of the neighbourhood, but his more youthful partner. Dr. Lansdowne was on his holiday. Dr. Kennedy had read my sister’s letter and was now bent upon carrying out her instructions. As I said, we stared at each other in the advancing dusk.

“You have only just come?” he ventured then.

“I’ve been here about an hour,” I replied “a quiet hour.”

“I had your sister’s letter,” he said apologetically, if a little awkwardly, as he advanced into the room.

“She wrote you, then?”

“Oh yes! I’ve got the letter somewhere.” He felt in his pocket and failed to find it.

“Won’t you sit down?”

There was no chair near the writing-table save the one upon which I sat. A further reason why I knew my predecessor here had been a writer! Dr. Kennedy had to fetch one, and I took shallow stock of him meanwhile. A tall and not ill-looking man in the late thirties or early forties, he had on the worst suit of country tweeds I had ever seen and incongruously well-made boots. Now he sprawled silently in the selected chair, and I waited for his opening. Already I was nauseated with doctors and their methods. In town I had seen everybody’s favourite nostrum-dispenser, and none of them had relieved me of anything but my hardly earned cash. I mean to present a study of them one day, to get something back from what I have given. Dr. Kennedy did not accord with the blackcoated London brigade, and his opening was certainly different.

“How long have you been feeling unwell?” That was what I expected, this was the common gambit. Dr. Kennedy sat a few minutes without speaking at all. Then he asked me abruptly:

“Did you know Mrs. Capel?”

“Who?”

“Margaret Capel. You knew she lived here, didn’t you? That it was here it all happened?”

“What happened?”

“Then you don’t know?” He got up from his chair in a fidgetty sort of way and went over to the other window. “I hoped you knew her, that she had been a friend of yours. I hoped so ever since I had your sister’s letter. Carbies! It seemed so strange to be coming here again. I can’t believe it is ten years ago; it is all so vivid!” He came back and sat down again. “I ought not to talk about her, but the whole room and house are so full of memories. She used to sit, just as you are sitting now, for hours at a time, dreaming. Sometimes she would not speak to me at all. I had to go away; I could see I was intruding.”

The cynical words on my lips remained unuttered. He was tall, and if his clothes had fitted him he might have presented a better figure. I hate a morning coat in tweed material. The adjective “uncouth “stuck. I saw it was a clever head under the thick mane of black hair, and wondered at his tactlessness and provincial garrulity. I nevertheless found myself not entirely uninterested in him.

“Do you mind my talking about her? Incandescent! I think that word describes her best. She burned from the inside, was strung on wires, and they were all alight. She was always sitting just where you are now, or upstairs at the piano. She was a wonderful pianist. Have you been upstairs, into the room she turned into a music room?”

“As I told you, I have only been here an hour. This is the only room I have seen.”

My tone must have struck him as wanting in cordiality, or interest.

“You didn’t want me to come up tonight?” He looked through his pocketbook for Ella’s letter, found it, and began to read, half aloud. How well I knew what Ella would have said to him.

“She has taken ‘Carbies’; call upon her at once… let me know what you think… don’t be misled by her high spirits…” He read it half aloud and half to himself. He seemed to expect my sympathy. “I used to come here so often, two or three times a day sometimes.”

“Was she ill?” The question was involuntary. Margaret Capel was nothing to me.

“Part of the time. Most of the time.”

“Did you do her any good?”

Apparently he had no great sense or sensitiveness of professional dignity. There was a strange light in his eyes, brilliant yet fitful, conjured up by the question. It was the first time he seemed to recognize my existence as a separate entity. He looked directly at me, instead of gazing about him reminiscently.

“I don’t know. I did my best. When she was in pain I stopped it… sometimes. She did not always like the medicines I prescribed. And you? You are suffering from neuritis, your sister says. That