What Janie Valentine Did

by G. B. Lancaster

WHAT JANIE
VALENTINE DID

By G. B. LANCASTER

THERE were a hundred places in which you might have met Maurice during the two years following the War, hut they were not very likely places. The few men who now and again brought word of him to the club always had it from hearsay, and rarely was it less than six months old.

Generally and silently, it seemed, Maurice spent his time drifting on and off some one of those gaily-painted little trading-boats which serve the smaller and less reputable ports of the Farther East and the South Seas. Drifting was quite evidently the word. It appeared that he made no protest against Fate, grasped at nothing to stay that increasing fluidity of thought and will which was drawing his powers from him.

"If he'd only marry a yellow girl, or a black or pink girl, it might save him," said Gethert once. "But I'm afraid he'll just do nothing. Poor old Maurice!"

That was the word. Those who had loved and admired him began to speak of Maurice as one speaks of a friend who has inadvertently betrayed one. "Poor old Maurice! He never got over the War. Bad business, that. Poor old Maurice! They called it shellshock, but, of course, any kind of letting go is called that." "Poor old Maurice! Couldn't practise what be preached. Lots of us the same, what?" And then they put Maurice from their minds with a gesture of relief.

Once Waite brought news which was very nearly first-hand. Business had taken him to some of those queer-smelling little Eastern landfalls about Java and Celebes, where cities old as time stand like match-boxes on their own sticks above incredibly blue water, and all manner of things happen in the moist and shadowed heat behind closed doors. Stories of a silent white man with reddish hair going grey, and a look of seeking in his sunk eyes, had cropped up here and there, said Waite. But he had not connected them with Maurice until, in Soerabaya, an obese and yellow keeper of a chandoo-shop had told him of such a man who lay a week up the stair smoking opium, and then cursed a little wearily, as though the bite had gone out of his brain, and went away.

"Him leavee piecee paper, too," said the man. Waite mimicked him rather cleverly. You got a suggestion of his puzzle-headed contempt of the white race. "No good. Him sorree, p'r'aps. See ghostee, but no nice opium ghostee. Savvy?"

It was here that Waite connected all those past scraps of somewhat lurid history with Maurice. "I took the paper away. Here it is. You can see for yourselves," he said. The soiled and crumpled scrap went the rounds among the empty glasses and cigar-ash, and in Maurice's fine, nervous hand they read the quotation slightly paraphrased from a Greek anthology: "Formerly the dead left their city living, but I living hold the city's funeral."

"So he hasn't come to terms with himself yet," said Gethert.

About the table there was a sudden quiet. Not a man but thought of the Maurice they had known running desperately from that lost joy of life that had been his, that lost power of magic word and craftsmanship that had been his running under the slant, incurious eyes of the little yellow men on the Kobe water-front, the blue, heavy eyes of the broad white-clad Dutchmen who gave him passage here and there, contemptuous eyes of those white men who sharpen their wits into a tool to live by, eyes of women—but women had never attracted Maurice particularly. All his poems and laudations had been for men and the labour of men. For young men especially he had been a flag-bearer, going into life with eyes lit and hair blown back by the ardour of his going. Now——

"Poor old Maurice!" said Waite, breaking the silence.

Young Barton burst out with the cruel sincerity of youth: "Poor! He's a coward, hang him! A coward! Think of all he wrote about sticking it! I had his book in my kit all through the War. It—it helped us." He gulped, staring about with light eyes and chubby face, resentful and bewildered. "He had no right to tell others to do what he couldn't do himself. Don't you see? It takes the meaning out of it all. We couldn't write those splendid things, but we can carry on now, and he can't. We honoured him for writing them. It's we should be honoured, not he. We're better than he." Again he looked round as though imploring contradiction. "Better than Maurice," he said.

The men looked at each other. There was not one had found life easy since the War. Several were shiny about the cuffs and knees, gaunt about the mouth, anxious-eyed. Barton, who had gone straight to France from the University, had lately been driving round in a closed car, delivering dress-goods samples, and his attempt at keeping up appearances was pathetic. Barton was plainly very poor now. With the sudden dramatic impulse of youth he pulled from an inner pocket a slim dark book, its soft covers stained and worn.

"This sold by thousands. So did Maurice's essays. He made money out of telling us to carry on, and he can't do it himself!" He flung the book on the table, and laughed. "He has the joke on us all right. There's not one word of truth in all that stuff. No truth."

For a few moments the little rubbed book of flaming verse lay there, pleading its justification, perhaps. Then Harrington pushed it back.

"Put it away, lad. Put it away. We don't know what broke Maurice. We might have done worse in his place."

"Can a man do anything worse than give the lie to all the big things he taught us to believe in?" cried young Barton. He went away, leaving the book on the table, and it was Harrington who squeezed it into the shelf on the wall, amongst other buried things of yesterday. Then: "Poor old Maurice!" said he also, and also went away. And it seemed that over Maurice oblivion flowed, leaving on the sounding beaches of the world nothing of his but that one damning phrase of pity.

 

II.

Maurice would not have resented their pity had he known of it. At first the business of getting ahead of memory across the world occupied him too deeply. Now—there was Janie Valentine. At first there had been that idle lying in deck-chairs and watching blue skies, ebony skies of storm, crimson fires of sunset above him and the unchanging seas. He never looked at life, if he could help it, until chance stranded him on one of those lonelier little islands of the Fijis which lie like a tuft of grass down the shimmering distance, and here he glanced to earth at last and saw—Janie Valentine.

There must have been something a little unusual about the girl to attract two such essentially different men as Maurice and young Barton. Maurice, prematurely aged, embittered, grown selfishly, drearily in upon himself; Barton with his round black head and round bright eyes, absolutely vibrant with life, and yet sacrificing all chances—as he thought—to take a billet as clerk in the sugar-cane mills on this small dull island of Hapari in order that his mother and invalid sister should live in passable comfort at home. "For the screw is mighty decent," young Barton told them, neglecting to add that the conditions and climate were not.

Two men as different as one could find anywhere, and yet it is through their eyes that one sees the tall, frank, friendly girl with her firm handclasp and the kind grey eyes below the sweep of fair hair. A good port in the storm Maurice found her when first he met her about a week after he had drifted into a casual partnership with Currie, who owned a small sugar-cane estate which he had not sufficient capital to develop. Maurice always had plenty of money, but, because he was looking for the things which money can't buy, he was poorer than Barton. But he did not know that.

It was at a bridge party that Janie Valentine first met Maurice, and encountered that experience so curious to us all when a person whose printed mind we have intimately known for years looks at us with the shuttered eyes of a stranger. Mrs. Page's party was one of those afternoon gatherings, followed by dancing, which are so common in the Fijis, where somewhat puffed and sallow women in the brightest and thinnest of frocks sit about at small tables under the palms, with fans to keep the flies of! and imperturbable house-boys to bring a continual succession of iced drinks and sweets and fruits from the deep-verandahed bungalow. There are usually children, fretful little things drained by the heat, and inevitably a long line of cars parked behind the mango hedge, and—very rarely indeed—an unmarried girl or so. At the time Maurice came there Janie Valentine was the only girl on Hapari.

Well, she could have had her pick of men to flirt with, and perhaps a man or so to marry. But to the Maurice of the printed book she had long since given that queerly passionate and secret adoration which usually heralds a young girl's awakening to womanhood. So the man stepped at once into a place already made for him; and because the silver trumpets of his poems were always making music in her heart, the tragedy of him standing there in the sunlight hit her very hard indeed. The wind was blowing Maurice's heavy, reddish-grey hair in a lock across his forehead, and his sombre eyes seemed to hold the shadow of that wind. His nervous fingers, closing on hers, were dark as his lean face, where, it seemed, the blood carrying his black thoughts ran too near the surface. He spoke a little in an elliptical, weary way, sneered at her a little when she mentioned his poems.

"Oh, those! Indiscretions of my youth. Here I can forget and be old," he said. And then she flashed her grey eyes at him.

"That's shameful!" she cried, as young Barton had done. "You've no right to take away what you've given us."

"Perhaps it wasn't worth the giving."

They were walking up a grassy hill away from the bungalow and the palms. The sea came round them on three sides, wrinkled a little under the wisdom of its thousand, thousand years. It seemed to make the conventions of man a paltry thing, a crime before the great loneliness of the soul. Janie Valentine turned quick to Maurice, dropping the flowers she held. They lay at his feet, only a little less perfect offering than the words she gave him.

"You've done so much and suffered so much, and I've done nothing. But because I've learned so much from you, if I can help you—oh, help you in any little way at all—I'd be so proud and so glad."

With girls Maurice had always taken the patronising "my dear child" manner. He did not do that now. He had been brought too low. He looked at her with miserable eyes.

"I can't write any more," he said. "I've lost the power and the will. Do you understand? The one thing I cared to do, and I've lost it. There is nothing left. I'm dead while I am alive."

"Tell me about it," said Janie softly.

And so it began, that hour on the hill, while the sunset flamed and the trade-wind sang by to the palm groves, and the fishing-boats tacked home, russet sails on the dark still blue. There were many meetings after that, with the girl walking, trembling-footed and pitying-eyed, into the black places of a man's soul, where Maurice let down those jealously-guarded floodgates at last, pouring all his wretchedness out on her. At nights in her room, with doors and windows open to the dark heat of the wind and the incessant murmur of the sea, his words would come back, hitting like stones on her gentle heart.

"Oh, yes, once I believed in work for work's own glorious sake, and so on. You'll know that. Well, it's all dead and done for, washed away in that flood of war that gutted the clear springs of the world. All is insurrection and incoherence now in me, just as it is throughout the world. I can't believe that anything is worth the doing any more." And again: "My dear, my dear, don't talk that way. The peculiarly sensitive quality of creation—it's been murdered in me by many blows. I want to forget that I ever had it. There's something unreal and curiously effortless about this small remote place of gorgeous colour and peace which is resting me as nothing else has done. Don't try to spur me on. I like to look at the moon and stars and forget the struggles of earth."

She remembered his voice, mournful, repressed, the slight shiver of his body, as though he still felt the torment he would not allow. She thought of some blind, desperate thing stumbling in a wide field where harsh winds blew. She bowed herself together, head on her knees, moaning—

"Oh, if there's anything I can do, any mortal thing. . . ."

This strange comic opera life down here seemed so empty, so little worth—sitting about and watching the dark-skinned servants—ten thousand years apart from her modernity; going with her cousin to dances, bridge parties and teas, helping to make and re-model the little girls' frocks; riding with one man and another; feeling, as all these exiled women did, the days slide useless out of her hands. . . . "Oh, if I can do anything for him!" she cried.

Just when Maurice began to love her, probably neither knew. But it soon showed itself—a searing, savage, and jealous love, as though all those checked craving impulses in him clung to this new gift, which he felt near, in a furious determination that it should never forsake him as that other gift had done. They were riding together every day now, talking much of little things, homely happy things such as a man brings to his own fireside with the world shut out and loved hands in his own. Sometimes they sat awhile in native villages by the little brown grass huts, watching the brown soft-eyed Fijian mothers and playing with the fat naked babies until the lines on Maurice's face were all broken up with laughter. Sometimes they rode home when the sunset across the sea and the tall hills was a crash of reckless beauty, like a scherzo by Tschaikowsky, with larks dropping down their linked cadences of song over the sugarcane fields that were a shimmer of silver up all the slopes to the blue horizons of the sky. And sometimes they walked in the gardens, full of thick, sweet scent from the lilies and the guava and orange blooms.

In all these places she learned what was coming to her, and fought down her fears. She did not love him. She did not believe that she ever would love him in that way. But the instinct for sacrifice is very strong in some women, and he needed her. Oh, he needed her so, and hadn't she wanted to give him what he needed?

They were riding in a long jungle road on the evening when he told her, with night-birds fluting clear, sustained notes out of the shadows, and the curve of a young moon laid like a kiss on the crest of the hill ahead. He had spoken of the torments that still racked him occasionally, using picture-words that dazzled her soul. Now they rode silent through the shadows, she visualising with every quivering pitying nerve of her what he had said. Sometimes, it seemed, when he sat on his verandah of nights, listening to the solemn music of the sea, like the thunder of a storm shaking at the closed windows of his mind would come something of the old tumultuous fire upon him, bringing him upright in his chair with leaping pulses. There—surely he could catch it, the meaning of those strong beating wings, notes of transcendent symphonies, that exultance, iridescent, full-globed as a soap-bubble in his brain. There—they would be words directly, those wheeling glories, that sudden magic of understanding which spread the world before him like a scroll. A pencil—the physical grasp of the thing—would do it now. If Currie, wearied by his long day's labour, had waked then, he would have seen Maurice pass like a grey fleet ghost to the inner room and snatch up the implements of his trade. He never carried them with him as in the old days. But already that overwhelming sense of potential life would be lessening about him. The pounding hoof-thunder of the long-wandered Valkyries riding home went by. The rejoicing of the trumpets dwindled, died; banners and colour were clean gone. In the lamp-light by the bare table only a man sat stiffly—a man who, in a kind of weak desperation, kept riding his will at the thought, as it were, and finding it always refuse the jump until he dropped the face that said too much upon the paper which said nothing, crying—

"Ah! Why wasn't I killed outright?"

With wet eyes Janie Valentine turned to that man, holding her hands out.

"Oh, can't I do anything? Anything?" she cried.

"Janie!" he said. "Janie!" And then their horses drew together, and his arm was about her, and his kisses on her lips, her forehead, and her eyes. "You'll make up for everything. You gospel of the real truth after many lies! Janie—my Janie!"

She had thought she was prepared, but it came with a shock that it took all her sweet humanity to endure. She would love him, must love him, this man who had walked with sorrow for so long. Oh, what was the matter with her that this tempest of his love beating about her made her only want to cower and cover her ears, her face? How selfish she was!

"I want to help you. I do, I do!" she cried vehemently. And he laughed, a wild, exultant laugh that somehow really frightened her.

"Help me! You're my life now. I haven't any other. You're all I have."

They rode out of the jungle path into clear starlight. She was sick and trembling, grief-filled because there was nothing in her but dread and a stupid kind of distaste. What was this love that had transfigured him and passed her by? Why couldn't she feel it? What was it?

A rider in pith hat and shabby white linens drew aside to let them pass, cried suddenly—

"Why, it's Maurice!"

Maurice pulled up, speaking coldly. "How are you, Barton? Let me introduce Miss Valentine. I heard you'd come to clerk for Maclean."

"Been here a fortnight, awfully busy. No time for calling. Have to keep an eye on the coolies all the time they're loading or unloading. Your cane's some of the best we get."

Young Barton talked on rapidly, as though he were afraid to stop. His eyes never left Janie Valentine. And hers, as she sat a little behind Maurice, never left young Barton's. She did not know that either stared. She only knew that her soul had cried to the void "What is love?" and that this man had come—quick as that!—and answered her, "It is this."

All her life Janie never cared to remember the nights that came just after that meeting. And the days were like sharp swords laid between, full of a fiery heat and the salt of the sea and colour from forest and flower and water pervading all like some blinding flame—full, too, of the greater heat, the greater colour of Maurice's wooing. All the pent-up poet in him poured out, not in verse—he believed that he never would write again—but in the passion of his love. Each day he had some new sweet name for her, some offering—wine-red shells from the beach, fragrant grass baskets, gorgeous dried berries to link in a chain, the loveliness of butterfly wings, orchids, a little box of garnets dredged from the sand. How she bore it, how she thanked him, she did not know, but it appeared to satisfy him. He was wrapped in the joy of spending himself again.

She met young Barton often—at dances, at bridge parties, where the thin-legged Indian coolies swung their thick cane-knives in the cleared spaces that looked like oxydised silver in the fading light, at sidings when she and Maurice pulled their horses to watch the little train pick up the loaded trucks of cane, while the mules that had brought the bundles stood swishing their thin tails. Barton was always busy then, riding about, taking notes, with whip tucked under his arm, shouting in lame Hindustani to the inscrutable little dark men. But always he came and for a moment held Janie's hand in his, looked into her eyes. That was all. Nor was there any more at any other meeting until that hot and terrible night before the rains scorched the earth with torment.

They had been dancing on the wide verandah of the Valentines' bungalow before Maurice got there. The moon was very bright over the stables, and at the end of the drive the coolie huts were globes of honey colour. A bread-fruit tree flung sharp, intricate patterns on the grass where Maurice walked softly. He wanted to see Janie, soak in her young white beauty before it flushed up at his coming. Just beyond an orange bush she stood with young Barton, her hand still on his arm as they had come from dancing. The scent of the flowers, the knowledge of her nearness, made Maurice giddy for the moment, so dearly did he love her. He stood still in that hot, velvety dark, winnowed by bat- wings and blooming with the frail flower-shapes of moths, and in that moment, while he stood smiling, he heard young Barton cry:

"Oh, Janie, Janie!"

With that sob of agony the two white figures in the moonlight seemed to fuse into one. The man in the shadows saw the thing as inevitable as the spilling of wine from a brimmed cup. Then again they were separated, and Janie whispering:

"How could you? How could you? I trusted you so."

"I could because I had to." Even in that moment the change in young Barton's voice startled Maurice. It seemed to challenge the world. "We love each other, and we did the first minute we met. One can't get away from such things. They are. You love me Maurice. You never loved him."

"But he loves me. He loves me .. . ."

"He thinks he does. He's good thinking and pretending. He preached work, and he's never lifted a hand to help the reconstruction of the world. He preached courage, and he ran away from life the moment it began to hurt him. He preached love, and he has never loved anyone but himself. It's not you he loves. There's nothing in him fit to understand you. He's using you to fill the place of that beastly writing of his that he was so proud of. He's egoist through and through. That's your Maurice!"

"Oh, he's had such a hard time!"

"Isn't all the world having a hard time? Does any man worth his salt go round in these days pitying himself and asking for pity? No! He gets down to his job and sweats away at it, thanking Heaven if he can scratch out a living for himself and those dependent on him. We're all having a hard time—except Maurice."

"He doesn't have to work. You don't understand. He's—he's not strong in the way you are. He's so sensitive and unhappy, and I pitied him."

"There are too many weak men ready to sponge on other folks' sympathy just now. Because Maurice can't stand on his own feet after all his hot-air talk, does he think he's going to stand on yours? By Heaven, I won't have it, Janie!"

"He's so clever. He has such beautiful thoughts."

"He's not true. He hasn't been true to himself, and so he couldn't be true to you. And truth is one of the things the world most wants just now. I despise Maurice. I don't care if you are pledged to him. Break it. He broke our belief in him. A man must be strong enough to practise what he preaches, or he's not worth consideration." He caught her hands. "Janie, you shall listen to me!"

The man standing motionless in the shadows heard that fierce, low pleading go on, heard her oppose to it her steady "No" and "No"; heard young Barton go away at last, head up, all the certainty and splendour of youth in his tread. "Two months back and I couldn't have spoken," he had told her at the last. "Now my sister has married a rich man, and my mother has gone to live with her. So I'm free to come to you. And I'm coming. A thousand Maurices couldn't keep me back, nor ten thousand!"

But she, standing with hands wrung together over her breast, had answered still, "No, no!" Then he laughed. "Oh, won't you, my darling?" he had said, going. And that laugh rode back with Maurice to his lonely verandah, and stayed with him all night, a gibing joyous accompaniment to every unforgotten word that Barton had said. Barton's was the too merciless outlook of youth, but there was truth in it. Oh, a bitter and blasting truth I thought Maurice, huddling there in his chair, with the sweat on his forehead and his hands cold in the still dark furnace of the night.

He rode with her next evening and the evening after, and if he had not known, he would have seen no change in her. It was as fine as that, her courage, he thought—as fine as that! And on the third evening he told her.

They had ridden down a level yellow beach of sand, with the sea blue as hyacinths on their left, and. on their right the brick- red cliffs crested by the shining green of bread-fruits and the vermilion of the flamboyant trees and the fretwork bronze of the palms. It was a theatre drop-scene, with a couple of fuzzy-headed Fijians launching one of their long narrow praus in the ripples, and, back in a bay, a bunch of the little grass huts, with children playing. To Maurice, after these three days of greater suffering than a man has a right to know more than once in his life, it felt suddenly that he stood off from his tragedy, like a man in the theatre wings, and watched himself go through with what had to be said. He had led up to it skilfully enough, talking of his wanderings. Now he said:

"I'm afraid I'm the born rover, after all. I thought I could stay here for ever, but I believe I want to be off again somewhere."

She glanced at him quickly, but her words came slow.

"We'll go whenever and wherever you like, Evan," she said.

"You're too good to me. I don't deserve it. I'm ashamed to think how little I deserve it. I hardly like to say it, Janie, but I'd thought. . . ."

"You would rather go alone?"

He thought he heard the quick relief in her tone, but he did not dare to think of that. He hurried on:

"I don't know how to say it. Better to hurt you now than let you find out later, perhaps. I'm an unsatisfactory sort of chap, Janie—uncertain. I'm grateful—awfully grateful. You've helped me through a hard time. I——"

Her gloved hand was caressing the horse's mane. Her head was bent. "Shall I say it for you? You thought you loved me, and you have found out that you don't. Is that what you want to say, Evan?"

"I thought I loved you greatly, splendidly. I said I did. I have been good at thinking things all my life"—he sought for young Barton's words; they would be the best to convince her with—"thinking and pretending. I'm a poet at heart, even though I don't write now. There are so many things a poet loves—old fancies, dreams, beauty of words and forms, new faces. You were a new face . . . it sounds so brutal to say . . . thought I'd best be honest about it . . . save pain later . . ."

He mumbled into silence. Her face was white. She laid a hand on his knee, speaking imperiously.

"Look at me, Evan! Now, tell me. This is not because of anything you've heard or guessed?"

Could he do it? Oh, Heavens, could he? His eyes met hers.

"No, a thousand times no! It's because of what I've found in myself. I'm not worthy of you."

"Don't put it that way. Have I failed you, Evan? I'd sooner die than that!"

So she had said in those very words to Barton. And again he used Barton's weapons in reply:

"No, I've failed myself again. I—I love too many things."

She gave a little shudder. Her hand dropped from his knee.

"Poor Harlequin!" she said softly.

They rode on. Presently she said:

"Thank you for telling me. It would have been very terrible to have known later. I think it was brave in you, Evan."

"You're so young . . . soon forget . . . worthless chap like me."

"No, not worthless. If you'd only take hold of life somehow. Oh"—she smote her little fist against the pummel—"if you'd only take hold as some men do—fight as they do!"

"That requires effort. I have told you how I abhor effort."

She was silent after that. He fathomed the motive that kept her so. She'd leave him wrapped in his selfish, idle egoism, would she? Never wound his conceit by speaking of her own heart. Like Janie, that. To the last her generosity persisted. She reached him her hand when they parted at the gate.

"I'm so glad I helped you through a hard time. If you chose, you could make me proud of my friend yet."

"That requires effort," he heard himself saying. "Temperaments like mine always take the easiest way, you know—dodge responsibilities."

He did not remember anything more until he found himself on his face in the grass somewhere. It was night, and he was tearing up the clods with his hands. He stayed there until the sun was high.

******

It was more than a year later when Janie Barton came one day to her husband with a new book in her hands and her soft eyes glowing.

"Such beautiful, beautiful things, Dick! A thousand times better than anything Mr. Maurice ever wrote before. They're wonderful. So strong!"

"I don't want to see 'em, love. I'm shut of Maurice. The truth isn't in him, and never was. Just because he's got a trick with words, he can write of what other folk feel. He can't feel. He's a trickster."

"I don't know. There are things here—little bits about love and suffering and courage—oh, Dick, they made me all hot inside! They are glorious!"

"And won't he be proud of himself to have pulled off the stunt again? Oh, he's clever! I grant you that. Chuck down that book and come here. He may pretend and bluff all he likes, but it's we who know, little Janie. It's we who know."