The house of broken dreams

Chapter I

i

T ONDON wrapped helplessly in a great gold wave of August sunshine, bleaching the very shadows that would have stemmed its molten onrush, so that they lay fragile as lace across the pavement under the railings of the Temple Gardens and again in a waver¬ ing grey line where the parapet divided the sequined glitter of the river from the hard glare of the road.

Two young men, hot and tired and irritable, stopped for a second in the shadow of one of the plane trees. It had a deceptive gossamer quality that afforded no real respite from the hectic sun, but the short, sturdy young man unscrewed his aching blue eyes sufficiently to twinkle up at his companion.

“You're a prig, Angus, a prig wallowing in his priggishness. You make me tired!"

“It's my duty, Bobbie. Once you’ve seen your duty. . .

“Damn it! you’re married to it.”

The tall young man laughed. His hair, his face, 7 his eyes were brown. A young evening breeze fluting adventurously in the leaves above his head, shifted them, and the yellow sunlight came through and var¬ nished his brownness.

“Look here, Bobbie, what's the use of getting rattled?"

“I hate to see a good man go wrong. Look here . . . think of it! Paris! Italy! Spain! Egypt! . . . and you're going to stay here and turn your¬ self into a blinking creche! Is it fair on me?"

“Is it fair on them to go?"

“Apparently they’re busy praying you will."

“It was all right while their father was alive. One supposes he kept this rag-tag and bobtail in order, but to go abroad and leave those two girls to cope with them and that boy to run wild. It’s unthinkable."

“You want to interfere, Angus. Why not look things straight in the face? Other people’s troubles are often much more exciting than your own happi¬ ness. You’re going to enjoy it."

“They’ve got my back up," Angus Reid owned curtly.

“Ah! now we get it! They’ve got your back up!" Robert de Bouton grinned. “All right, Angus, but for God’s sake be honest with yourself about motives, that’s all. Priggishness isn’t a virtue, it’s a state of personal preservation. I’m telling you you’ve never lived. I want you to live. All your life you’ve been doing your duty by someone. It’s become a bad habit. It’s growing on you."

Angus Reid laughed. He linked his arm in his friend’s.

“Good old puffing Bobbie,” he said easily. “We never see alike in anything. Barton will be gone if we don’t buck up.”

ii

The lawyer received them gravely.

They were hot from climbing his dusty, sunspangled stairs; his room was narrow, dim, unbeliev¬ ably cool. It was like entering water. It suited him. Entrenched behind his huge desk he was not unlike some watchful, wily old carp; faded, a little bleached and slumberous, with ugly outstanding ears on either side of his narrow head, like gills.

“It is hot to-day, quite a record heat. The Evening News says we have broken the record for ten years. Remarkable! I suppose you have come to see me about the O’Rane trusteeship? Do you propose to accept it, Mr. Reid?”

Angus Reid said he did.

“Admirable,” said the lawyer.

“Damnable!” exploded Robert de Bouton.

The lawyer looked at him. It was as if something had darted past him in the water, neither interesting nor frightening, but faintly disturbing. It was as if he waited for the ripples to subside before he said: “It is only fair to tell you they are incensed at the idea of a guardian and trustee. I understand they will resist the slightest interference. Briefly, I gather they are already in a state of siege.”

“From whom?”

lo The House of Broken Dreams

‘‘From Miss Fannie O’Rane. She was here this morning. She was extremely excited. The whole position is most awkward. I pointed out that it was a difficult position for a young man of twenty-six to be suddenly left sole guardian and trustee to a family. She seemed to derive amusement from the idea, con¬ siderable amusement.”

“Is she pretty?” broke in Robert de Bouton.

“I do not know that it matters at this juncture.”

“Or any juncture,” added Angus Reid curtly.

The lawyer put his arms on the desk. Robert crossed his leg and a gleam of sun crept through the shades and settled on the toe of his shoe. It set a silver butterfly shimmering in the cloudiness of the high ceil¬ ing. Until the lawyer spoke it seemed the only live thing in a dead and dank world. He said very slowly:

“Mr. Reid, I went there.”

The room came suddenly to life, Robert de Bouton's toe became so still that the butterfly poised above them.

“Well?” said Angus Reid.

The lawyer shrugged. “Unbelievable!” he said. “Simply unbelievable!”

“In what way?”

“An almshouse for down-at-heels ragamuffins, neither more nor less. I was appalled. Impossible people, dangerous people. I met a curate and his wife there. I said something of the sort to him. He was furious. I told him it was idealism gone mad. He said the Bible was full of that; they’re those sort of people.”

“They must have money to run a place like that Suppose I stop their allowance?”

“I should not counsel anything rash, Mr. Reid.”

“Of what does the household consist?”

The lawyer put his thumbs and little fingers slowly together, widened his hands to a trellis, fitted it slowly over his nose and mouth and spoke through it.

“Miss Fannie O’Rane, twenty-three; Kane O’Rane —she is twenty. July O’Rane, twelve and a half; and Patrick O’Rane, fifteen.”

“And the rest?”

“I met an old violinist, a penniless painter, a clown past work, a poet, and I believe there are other pen¬ sioners.”

“They shall be cleared out.”

“Steady, Mr. Reid, steady now! They are pre¬ pared for you to take that particular point of view and action . . . they are prepared.”

“In what way?”

“They have put their heads together. An alteration in the present arrangement suits none of them.”

“I presume I can enforce authority?”

“Legally, yes.”

“The police ...” broke in Robert de Bouton.

“Miss Fannie mentioned that this morning,” said the lawyer. “Publicity would be most undesirable, embarrassing. The whole thing makes a romantic story, the sort of story the Press loves to get hold of. It would be difficult for Mr. Reid. It appears that Miss Fannie and this old poet have written it up in anticipation. I must say as she read it to me it seemed full of points, not without wit, considerable wit. I should put the police and the attendant publicity out of my mind definitely. I should really, Mr. Reid.”

"‘Did Miss O’Rane ask any questions about me?”

“She appeared entirely uninterested.”

“If I were you, Angus, I should let them go to the devil their own way.”

Angus Reid looked at his friend. Mr. Barton looked at Angus Reid, then he appeared to slumber behind his cage of latticed fingers. Angus explained to Robert de Bouton.

“Harry O’Rane and my father were pals at school, then at Oxford. Then Mr. O’Rane married a street harpist and Peter married mother, and then . . .”

The lawyer smiled thinly behind the mask of his interlaced fingers. Robert de Bouton said: “Quite.”

Angus said suddenly:

“I shall write to Miss O’Rane and ask her if she will put me up while I am in town. Where is their house ?”

“In Soho, Mr. Reid. One of those quiet, old-fashioned houses in a quiet square, very pleasant. Not many of them left now. You go through a street full of cheap restaurants, and suddenly you come to it. Delightful. I was charmed. You have quite decided to accept the trusteeship?”

“Mr. O’Rane’s letter made it difficult to refuse.”

“It is a question of sentiment.”

“I see it as a duty. What education have these young people had?”

“I should say they have accumulated a tremendous amount of general knowledge.”

“I wish you’d ask them to put me up too, Angus?”

Angus Reid rose and held out his hand.

“I’ll come to-morrow and go through Mr. O’Rane’s papers with you. It seems to me the first thing to do is to gain admittance to the house and see how things lie.”

“They wouldn’t mind putting me up,” interrupted Robert de Bouton eagerly. “It seems a sort of hotel.”

They went down the sun-flecked stairs side by side. In the Temple the shadows had spread, the light had mellowed, the Thames ran between her grey banks like a gilt ribbon, the scribble of roofs was sharp against the fading sky.

“It would be a lark to change places,” said Robert de Bouton. “They don’t know either of us. Now that’s an idea.”

Angus Reid said with a faint, pleased smile: “It’s going to be difficult, very difficult. I’d like to talk to Marjorie about it.”

“Hampstead?” I don’t think I’ll come, Angus.

“Why not?”

“Too bracing,” answered Robert de Bouton vaguely. hi

As the taxi hurried through the jostling carnival of the Strand, swirled past the square frown of St. Martins-in-the-Fields and darted up the Charing Cross Road, Angus Reid felt solidly, comfortably mature. He was about to legislate and administrate. It was in the execution of these offices that he had hitherto most clearly realized himself. He was able to stand back and watch himself at work, and admire the neatness and surety with which his tidy, logical, compartmented mind functioned. The conditions of his life had made this attitude almost subconscious : a widowed mother with property, voluble ineffectual spinster aunts with incomes derived from the same source, a crowd of advice-claiming, timid elderly friends of his mother’s. These had fostered that consciousness of living more vitally, more solidly, when he was coping with affairs. He liked to be surrounded by them, chirping like sparrows, advising, suggesting, explaining, and let his mind dart away with the untidy mess and muddle of their problems, sort it all out like a neat housemaid, and, while they still fumbled and quibbled, pass it back, sorted, solved, arranged. It gave him a satisfying, almost thrilling, feeling of reality, so that he moved among these dependent, rootless minds like a real per¬ son among shadows. It was the only expression of power open to him, and he enjoyed power.

He was half conscious that that was the motive that had been behind his acceptance of the guardian¬ ship of the O’Rane family. He was too honest to shy away from it. He looked it squarely in the face.

He smiled a little as the taxi threaded its way through Camden Town.

The glare had abated, the heat had lessened. As the taxi chugged up the gritty incline of Haverstock Hill his strained eyes rested gratefully on trees. The roar of London dropped back. Men in tennis flannels were hurrying up the hill, a couple of Japanese turned out of a side street and louped under his car and across the road like lithe little animals. It pleased him; he liked to see men playing games, women sewing, children playing, kittens chasing their tails. His emo¬ tional side was so undeveloped that he honestly believed

The House of Broken Dreams ij

conventional actions to be a sign of national health and individual purity and goodness.

It seemed almost like a personal compliment when he found Marjorie Moneypenny sewing in the garden.

The Moneypennys possessed one of those delightful slumbering houses that Hampstead still cradles jeal¬ ously in leafy arms. It had been built originally in green fields, and being guarded by tall trees never woke to consciousness of the maze of houses that had grown up round it, and never lost its friendly, welcom¬ ing, country-house expression. There was something at once dignified and pathetic in the wide-eyed inno¬ cence of its many windows, the blandness of its easily opened oak door.

Augustus Moneypenny was a Hampstead enthusiast. His rooms were full of old paintings and prints of Hampstead, his library full of books about it. The purchase of Keats’ house for the nation had been like a wedding in the family. The erection of a new house on an old site was like a funeral.

The desecrating hand of the garden expert had never been permitted in the Moneypenny property. Marjorie Moneypenny in white linen greeted Angus in surroundings from which Kate Greenaway might have just flitted.

“Hasn’t it been hot!” she said. “Are you thirsty, Angus ?”

Her smile, her eyes, her hair were bright and a little hard. It was as if Nature having secured a certain finish had lacquered and left her; one could not imagine her smile, her eyes or her hair fading or softening.

“Where’s Bobbie de Bouton?”

“Oh, Bobbie couldn’t come.”

“Are you going abroad with him?”

“No, I’ve definitely decided not to. Where’s your mother ?”

“In the house, probably crying. They're going ” she sighed.

“I thought they only came in on Saturday.”

“That’s all. Someone told mother the tradespeople told the maids how many times she changed and that was why they wouldn’t stay. Since then we’ve changed our tradespeople with every new maid. Mother’s writing to Harrods to deliver bread, but we’ve come to the end of the local milkmen.”

“Where’s your father?”

“Oh, he found a book on Hampstead in Petticoat Lane and he’s gone to see if there really is a well in someone’s garden.”

“I’ve decided to accept the trusteeship. Bobbie de Bouton says I’m a prig.”

“Oh, well!”—she dismissed that easily—“he’s half French.”

The garden was cool with twilight; stars twinkled like forgotten toys in the branches above her head. Angus looked at the neat straight gilt of Marjorie’s hair, the bright blueness of her direct eye.

“You’re awfully understanding,” he submitted.

Marjorie smiled. She had no idea she had a compartmented mind into which people threw small troubles to be sorted out and little joys to be approved. She had no idea how nervously her friends fed her through the narrow openings in her sympathies fearing lest anything too lively, unwieldy or uncatalogued should get through and upset her tight little mental perfection. Angus liked her because he never had anything but small and tidy offerings to present, and she assimilated those easily and gracefully.

'‘What sort of people are the O’Ranes?”

“Awful!”

“In what way?”

“Every way. You simply can’t run life on senti¬ ment and ideals, Marjorie. You must Have a settled plan and discipline. O’Rane ran a sort of open house for rotters.”

“What sort of rotters?”

“Artists, writers, musicians, an old clown.”

“Good gracious!”

“I’m going to clear them out and put the household in order. The girls must go abroad, the boy must be educated. It’s no good letting people grow up like that. They’re a danger to the community.”

“Will they mind?”

“Apparently they’re in a state of siege now.”

“Who?”

“All of them. You can understand the pensioners don’t want to be turned out of free board and lodging, and the O’Ranes prefer their Bohemian mode of life. I daresay it’s more exciting. Miss Fannie appears to be the chief rebel. Of course she’s outside my juris¬ diction. She’s of age, but the others are minors. I’m not going to let those wastrels batten on the O’Rane children anyway. I expect that’s why O’Rane nomi¬ nated a guardian when he died. He saw the peril of the future, brought up as he had brought them up, and leaving them in the circumstances he did.”

“It really is extraordinary!”

Mrs. Moneypenny wandered through the French windows and came towards them; although she was nearly fifty her hair and eyes and smile were nearly as gleaming and bright as her daughter’s; only with her something had slackened and withered beneath the lacquer. Her voice was quite feeble.

“How do you do, Angus? Hasn’t it been hot? You are going to stay to supper, aren’t you? That’s right. Marjorie, I’ve just thought; it’s no good having Harrods. They go next door.”

Mrs. Moneypenny turned to Angus. Her lower lip trembled.

“Fancy!” she said, “I only asked her for hot water in the bedrooms before dinner, and only last night I sent them to the cinema. I feel they don’t bother about me at registry offices any more, and I’ve spent pounds on advertising.”

Marjorie said after her mother had gone:

“The O’Ranes haven’t ever seen you, Angus?”

“Well, I don’t think Bobbie Bouton’s is a bad idea.”

“What idea?”

“Let them think you are he when you go there. It would give you time to look round, and they would’nt be suspicious of you, only of him.”

“Good gracious!” I’m not afraid of the O’Ranes. I’m their legal guardian. Look here! I’ll tell you what Barton said about the legal position.”

When he had finished Marjorie said:

“Well, my dear boy, you don’t want to get in the papers.”

“No, I don’t.”

“A girl like that isn’t handicapped by any sense of honour or fair play.”

“I’m not going to give in.”

“It’s no good using force,” said Marjorie.

She looked at him. In the growing darkness his brown eyes looked very liquid, almost black, his face was strong and oval. She’d often thought of marrying Angus. They thought alike, or rather they assimilated the same sort of thoughts and impressions, they en¬ joyed the same prejudices. They would have a very happy, shiny, chintzy sort of home, and, unlike her mother, she would keep her servants.

Mrs. Moneypenny called them in to supper.

Angus thought how pleasant it would be if they were going through the square of yellow light made by the windows to their own supper table without Mrs. Moneypenny. The thought was like a cushion put for his mind. He rested on it, idly.

“Wine or lemonade, Angus?” said Mrs. Moneypenny. “We can’t have a new milkman, Marjorie; I’ve used the last. He’s very deaf. He couldn’t talk to them unless they shouted. I’ve never heard them shouting. Shall I tell them we’ll do without the hot water in our bedrooms and ask them to stay?”

“I shouldn’t, mother.”

“I think I will, Marjorie. It’s so difficult, Angus. I’d like to live in a hotel.”

“It’s no good, mother. They’ve got another place.”

“But they haven’t been out since they came here!”

“I know. The milkman found it for them.”

IV

When Angus left the Moneypennys he walked home. He was in a queer mood. His mind ran in its accus¬ tomed grooves and then he pulled up sharply. He could not understand why it should pull up. His mind was unaccustomed to explorative excursions, it trav¬ elled towards clearly defined destinations.

Haverstock Hill was sharply black and white as he descended it; beyond Chalk Farm the hot yellow glare of lights engulfed him again. He tried to hitch his oddly pirouetting mind on to Marjorie Moneypenny but it refused to be hitched. The thought of her dulled him a little. It was as if she strayed, bright-eyed and neatly coiffured as usual, in blouse and skirt into a world that had inexplicably become en fete. He was sincerely troubled that he could no longer contemplate her with his usual gratitude for her healthy brightness, her practical common sense, her extreme comeliness.

Camden Town seemed to him strangely beautiful, full of tingling colour, great pools and oblongs and discs of extraordinary brilliance, the heaped shininess of plums and greengages and apricots on the barrows, the shinier ruby of the glistening meat, the silveriness of the fish stalls; the great bottles of coloured water in the chemists’ shops glowed like mammoth fruit, and threading through this the people, black and white, somehow like pierrots and pierrettes in a highly decorated carnival, with their questing colourless faces and their empty eyes.

At Mornington Crescent he turned off towards Bloomsbury and life dropped behind him, and the world grew black and white again and almost hushed.

It was a queer, unreal night, a night given over to summer magic with a cold moon rising high and clouds that seemed millions of miles off like black mountains. The houses, too, were like fallen black velvet mountains crouching on either side of him, making him feel incredibly little and lonely and some¬ how pathetic to himself. The shadows mothered lovers, the night was so still that their murmurs, their low laughter, even their kisses tip-toed across to him on it and seemed to tickle his ear mischievously.

He thought he would find out where the O’Ranes lived and have a look at their house. He tried to accept the idea of a sudden whim, but he knew it had been with him as a definite intention even before he left the Moneypennys.

He had great difficulty in finding it. The moon had reached the ebony mountains, the bald face of the clock that seemed to hang from the stars registered one o'clock.

Yet he did not find it. It found him. It found him in the queer way a church will suddenly find you—like a quiet answer to an unspoken question. He came out of a little, petty, twittering, prying street, the home of the smell of a thousand dishes, into the peace of it.

There was a garden in the square. He went into it and the trees spread themselves between him and the stars like lace over diamonds.

He did not hunt for the O’Ranes’ house. He sat down on a seat and shut his eyes, and the darkness seemed to confer greater privacy than he had ever known.

Somewhere in the street he had left, a man, prob¬ ably drunk, was singing in a powerful, unmusical voice. It had hardly any inflection or notes. In the little garden it had the mysterious monotony of a priest’s chant.

One by one his drilled thoughts slipped out of their niches and went to play by themselves so that they were no longer his docile, familiar pupils but gay little unknowns who bewildered him. He seemed to run helplessly from one group to another.

He knew he had found the garden unlocked by chance because he could smell night-scented stocks, and he knew London dare not leave her flowers un¬ guarded, but cherishes them with all her other imported treasures.

He opened his eyes and saw a little statue through the trees.

It was like something cut out in white paper and laid on black velvet, so stark and pale it was. It had goat’s feet. It piped. It seemed to Angus it had piped time to a standstill, but when he looked at the clock that hung among the stars he saw that an hour had been stolen from him and lost.

It was two o’clock in the morning.

As he sought the exit to the twittering street he found the O’Ranes’ house. It was tall and narrow and elegant like the others. The solidity of its front door seemed almost like a rebuff. He stared up at it, and its darkened windows stared blindly down.

He raised his hat to it, and the foreignness of the action and the impulse woke him with a sort of shock. The magic of the night evaporated like mist. Marjorie Moneypenny came back suddenly like a real person into a dream.

Behind that door was muddle and overgrown ideals and disordered convention.

He was angry with himself like a man who has lost his way and had to find it again. Incredible that he should have lost it, because he knew it so well.

Things wanted putting straight, people wanted put¬ ting straight behind that door.

O’Rane had trusted him to do those necessary things he hadn’t the strength of character to do himself.

He’d get behind that door by hook or by crook and see what common sense would do. He felt his common sense rush up to him in incredible strength; backed by that he could force anything.

Victory was in his walk when he left the square.

Bobbie Bouton was asleep on the sofa of their hotel sitting-room when he came in.

He sat up, absurdly rumbled, and pointed grinning to the clock.

“Been getting engaged all this time?”

Bobbie’s brilliant blue eyes twinkled.

“That’s good. Look here, I’ve been thinking the devil of a lot about this O’Rane business. It’s not a bit of good your going swashbuckling in.”

“I don’t propose to.”

Bobbie said, “Sorry, milord, sorry.”

v

They held a council of war.

The blinds were half drawn so that glittering square gold mats of sunshine lay immediately below the win¬ dows of each end of the room and the rest was purplish shadow. Where it was deepest and softest they sat at an old round table, their elbows on it, staring at each other, three girls and a boy.

The boy said with a thrill of sheer glee in his voice, “I hereby declare a state of siege,” and laughed.

The three girls did not laugh, they stared at each other with great, soft, serious eyes. Then Kane O’Rane said with a funny, impatient little wriggle of her shoulders:

J “You can cut that out, Pat. Fannie is all right, but the rest of us are minors. He can do anything with us, anything with you.”

“I’d like to see him! Huh! I suppose I could run away! Huh!”

Kane said, still wriggling her shoulders with nervous impatience: “Oh! Pat! don’t be younger than you need! It’s so trying!”

Fannie O’Rane got up from the table abruptly and walked to the window that faced the square. She stood on the mat of sunlight and became a figure in gold; pale gold her bare, angular, little-girl arms gripped behind her back, vivid gold the brown of her dress, deeper gold her crown of frizzy hair. This gold figure standing square addressed them in the shadow over its shoulder. It said: “It’s all so difficult. We don’t want to antagonize him because we don’t quite know what his power is. He comes into the house as an enemy, but we mustn’t deny him admittance because he could force it if he wanted to. Oh dear! Oh dear! I’m only just beginning to realize what peculiar people we are.”

Kane O’Rane’s voice crisped from the shadows.

“I don’t see that.”

“No, if you weren’t you would.”

Pat O’Rane broke out, “Why can’t we fight him, Fannie ?”

Kane reined him in promptly: “My good young ass!”

When Fannie O’Rane moved out of the sunlight the room seemed to go dark. She said:

“It’s all so difficult, my dears. We’ve lived so out of the world here. I don’t know whether you can understand. I saw it when that lawyer talked. I mean, he showed me that the world thought father quite, quite mad. I think when the world was younger and there weren’t so many people wanting so many things there were more like Daddy. There aren’t any now. Father was a sentimentalist, an emotionalist. When the lawyer talked I suddenly saw things. I’m only trying . . . trying to tell you that it will, it

must seem like a lunatic asylum to Angus Reid and his friend. People don’t assume personal responsibil¬ ity for other people . . . they pay rates and build

workhouses . . . and . . . and screw enough out of people’s fears of hell and hope of Heaven to build institutions for people other people have kicked down! That’s what they do! People don’t work for indi¬ viduals, they don’t care about individuals. They work for something they call ‘the Race’ or ‘the Community’; it gives them a sense of power ... it gives them more scope. People like old Pip . . . they ticket

them and tie them up in bundles and keep them some¬ where till they die. All over London there are old people being kept in bunches till they die; in workhouses and almshouses, and young people kept in creches and institutions and their ideas nipped off and their ambitions trimmed so that they shall fit in all the little dull corners of life where no one wants to be and round things off. I want you to see that . . . that those two young men thought father

was mad, that’s all.”

Judy burst out:

“But Fannie, they couldn’t turn old Pip and Miss Proctor out . . . after all these years. Why!

They’re so old! They were father’s pensioners.”

Fannie said in a low voice: “That’s what I’m afraid of, Judy dear. That’s what I’m going to fight. Daddy left no instructions, no provision for them in his will. My share of the money isn’t sufficient to keep things going here and Mr. Reid has full control over yours. He can withhold. It is because of that we must propitiate him. Those old people . . .

they’re like children,” she stopped and choked, she flung her hands out. “It’s unthinkable! unthinkable!”

Judy wailed:

“What did Daddy do it for! What did he make Angus Reid our guardian for! We were so happy!”

“I think he got frightened. He realized when he was dying that he hadn't left us any real place in life. He made a place for us with his own brain and he was taking it with him.”

Someone in the room below began to play a minuet. They played very sedately, softly. The player seemed to hesitate a little, the music came as if it were remem¬ bered rather than seen.

“Every day she practises,” Fannie said; her lips trembled. “It isn’t only them we’ve got to guard . . . it’s their precious unfulfilled dreams. We’ve

got to make Angus Reid see them as we see them . . . as Daddy saw them! Children! help me!