We hated to have him leave. But he had consolation. "Of course you'll come and see us. We're going back to my old house in Albemarle. It's a rotten shack, but Elise says it will be a corking place for me to write. And you'll all come down for week-ends."
We felt, I am sure, that it was good of him to ask us, but none of us expected that we should ever go. We had a premonition that Elise wouldn't want the deadwood of Jimmie's former Division. I know that for myself, I was content to think of Jimmie happy in his old house. But I never really expected to see it. I had reached the point of expecting nothing except the day's work, my dinner at the end, a night's sleep, and the same thing over again in the morning.
Yet Jimmie got all of us down, not long after he was married, to what he called a housewarming. He had inherited a few pleasant acres in Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful. There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched candlesticks. They were married in April, and when we went down in June poppies were blowing in the wide grass spaces, and honeysuckle rioting over the low stone walls. I think we all felt as if we had passed through purgatory and had entered heaven. I know I did, because this was the kind of thing of which I had dreamed, and there had been a time when I, too, had wanted to write.
The room in which Jimmie wrote was in a little detached house, which had once been the office of his doctor grandfather. He had his typewriter out there, and a big desk, and from the window in front of his desk he could look out on green slopes and the distant blue of mountain ridges.
We envied him and told him so.
"Well, I don't know," Jimmie said. "Of course I'll get a lot of work done. But I'll miss your darling old heads bending over the other desks."
"You couldn't work, Jimmie," Elise reminded him, "with other people in the room."
"Perhaps not. Did I tell you old dears that I am going to write a play?"
That was, it seems, what Elise had had in mind for him from the beginning—a great play!
"She wouldn't even, have a honeymoon"—Jimmie's arm was around her; "she brought me here, and got this room ready the first thing."