The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions

"Oh, that's all right. That's at home. We can turn 'em out at ten o'clock, and be in bed in reasonable time. It's that damned Casino I bar——"

And so on. Early to bed and a nap after lunch certainly suited Alec. I have seen once-fine athletes settle down like this before.

I had been at Ker Annic some days, when about the last thing I expected had happened to me. I have just told you how little I cared whether I ever wrote another book or not. Well, that morning I had remained in my room after coffee and rolls to write a couple of necessary letters. These finished, I had sat gazing out of the window at nothing in particular, lazily content with the beauty of the morning. Then, suddenly and without the least premeditation, I had taken a fresh sheet of paper and had begun to make detached and random notes. These had presently strung themselves together, and by and by a phrase had sprung up of itself....

Whereupon, in the very moment of my despairing of ever writing again, I had realised that my next novel was stirring within me.

Now let me tell you the part that Jennie Aird played in this.

I frankly admit that the writers of my own generation have sometimes been a little smug and make-believe about young girlhood. We have seen a lovely thing, and perhaps have let its mere loveliness run away with us, to the loss of what I believe is nowadays called "contact." We have not seen the butterfly's anatomy for the pretty bloom of its wing. Nevertheless, I cannot see that the eager young morphologists who are succeeding us have so very much to teach us after all. To read some of these you would think that the whole moving mystery had been disposed of when they had said that a young girl became conscious, shy, and had a talk with her mother. If it must be anatomy or bloom, I think I shall go on preferring the bloom. I have no wish to exchange the eyes in my head for that improved apparatus that turns a woman's hand that is meant to be stooped over into a shadowy bundle of metacarpal bones.

At the same time I do not take it for granted that youth is necessarily the happiest season of our lives. I remember my own youth too well for that. Emotionally, I am aware, it is all over the shop. It will giggle in church or make a heartbreak out of nothing, indifferently and with tragical facility. It is exploring the new-found marvels within itself against the day when its eyes shall open to the miracle of another. That, at any rate, and as nearly as I can express it, was the state of Madge Aird's sleeping beauty of a daughter on the evening of the party of which Madge and Alec had spoken.

It was a ravishing evening of late light over an opal sea. The same dusk that turned the begonias velvety-black in their beds made luminous the pale hydrangeas, until they resembled the glimmering whites and mauves of the frocks that moved in and out among them. The villa was lighted up like a paper lantern, and the moving couples inside made ceaselessly wavering shadows across the lawn. Over the ragged bay the phares winked in and out, and beyond the ilex and chestnut a faint luminosity trembled—the corona of Dinard lighting up for the night.

They danced in and out between the wide hall and the salon where the gilded Ganymede struggled with the Eagle—youngsters in their first dinner-jackets, sylphs with their plaits swinging about their softly-browned napes, their elders mingling among them or watching them from the walls. Madge, in a frock that seemed to be held up singly and solely by her presence of mind, played fox-trots. Alec was busy "buttling" in the little recess where a scratch supper had been set out. The air was filled with the light talk in French and English, throbbed with the rhythm of the foxtrotting piano.

For half an hour or so I made myself agreeable to a number of ladies of whose names I had not the faintest idea; then, with a sense of duty done, I turned my back on the pretty scene and strolled into the garden. On the whole I was pleased with my day. That was what I had wanted—the solace and security of being at work again. Nothing world-shaking or tremendous; I simply wanted to get on with the unpretentious job that was mine, and incidentally to be tolerably well-paid for it. That, when all was said, was the way of wisdom, the kind of thing men very properly get knighthoods for and had their portraits hung up in Clubs. It seemed to me that I had been through a very evil time, and that now that I was rid of the weight of it life was worth living again. I paced the paths of the gay artificial little garden, my thoughts on all manner of pleasant times to come.