Hugh did not see the garden of the white house again. Playmate Place. Hugh, as he grew up, blushed to think of Playmate Place. He had blushed at the time, and later on he blushed at the very thought of it. He wouldn’t have dared let any of his friends at school even dream of his ever having swallowed such a soft yarn as the Playmate Place one. But, despite himself, the face of the kid whose name was to be Lamoir stayed with him, and her silver voice, and her enormous eyes. And now and then in his dreams, Hugh said, he would seem to hear the faint echo of an “Oo!”
III
It was almost twenty years to a day after the adventure of Playmate Place that Hugh met Lamoir at a party at Mace, Guy de Travest’s place. Miss Cavell her name was. He recognised her, he said, at once, at very first sight. She had been seven then and she was twenty-seven now, but he knew her on sight. And when she spoke, he was quite certain. Of course she didn’t suck her finger and say “Oo!” any longer, but without a doubt Lamoir Cavell was the grown-up of the kid of Playmate Place. And he actually found himself wondering, as he talked to her that first time at Mace, if she recognised him—and then he almost laughed aloud at his childishness, for of course the whole thing had been a boy’s dream. But it was very odd, his dreaming about someone he was actually to meet twenty years later. And once he fancied, as he turned to her suddenly, that she was looking at him a little strangely, in a puzzled sort of way maybe, with that small slanting smile of hers as though she was smiling at something she just hadn’t said. Oh, Lamoir must have been very beautiful then!
She was born in India, where old man Cavell was something in the Civil Service, and she had lived in India until recently, when her father died. Hugh, that first time, asked her if she had ever been in England as a child, and she said, staring at him in a way that seemed so familiar to him that his heart gave a throb: “Only in dreams.” But he didn’t tell her about the Playmate Place then. Then was the time to tell her, then or never. He never told her.
They walked in enchantment, those two, for the next few days. Guy de Travest has told me since that the whole house-party went about on tiptoe, so as not to disturb Hugh and Lamoir in their exquisite contemplation of their triumph over the law of life, which is of course unknowable, but must be pretty depressing, seeing what life is.
They were married in the little village church at Mace, and Hilary Townshend was Hugh’s best man, and Hilary has told me since that he almost wept to see them going away—knowing as he did so certainly, Hilary said, that Hugh and Lamoir had taken the one step in life which will wake any couple up from any dream.
Hugh continually pulled at the stiff grey affair on his upper lip as he told me of his marriage. “It’s Playmate Place,” he said, “that is important in the story: much more important than my married life. Lamoir and I never quite reached Playmate Place in actual life. We were in sight of it sometimes—when I let Lamoir have her head. But I only see that now, I didn’t realise it then.”
He said that about the importance of Playmate Place quite seriously. And, you know, I took it quite as seriously. A dream or vision or whatever it was, that has lasted fresh in a man’s mind from the age of nine to the age of forty-nine is, after all, a thing to be taken seriously. I haven’t, as a rule, much patience with dreams; and there’s a deal too much talk of dreams in the novels of the day, for it’s so easy to write “dream”; but Hugh’s, as they say, rather “got” me.
He never spoke about it to Lamoir. “I began to, several times,” he said, “but somehow I never went on. You see, there was such a difference between our life together and the way we had been together in that garden. I mean, such a tremendous difference in spirit. She was the same, but I—well, I was the same, too, but only that ‘same’ which had jeered at the word ‘playmate.’ It’s difficult to explain. I knew, you see, as I said things that might hurt her, that I was in the wrong—and I didn’t want to say them, either—but somehow it was in me to say them and so I said them. It’s somehow the impulses you can’t put into words that are the strongest.”
The marriage of Hugh and Lamoir appeared to have gone much the same way as most marriages. At first they were very happy, and they were quite certain that they were going to be even happier. Then they thought that perhaps they were not so happy as they had been, and then they were quite certain that they were not so happy as they had been. Hugh said it was more or less like that.