Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  They turned into the familiar road, lined with giant willows which had been planted generations before as stakes of a fence but had taken root in that kindly soil and burgeoned like Joseph of Arimathea’s famous staff. The pale yellow leaves were drifting to the ground, and had already covered the road with a thick soft carpet, over which the Squib slithered almost without sound.

  “How nice it is to be home!” Susan said as they went into the house, and Tara came to meet them in the hall, his whole body agitated by the furious waving of his welcoming tail.

  “I say, Oliver,” asked Charles with respectful curiosity, when they had congregated close to the fire, “how did you manage to make up that poem of yours? It was a bounce, of course, I mean, stuff that sounds such utter gibberish couldn’t make sense even in Scots—but how?”

  “It was really extraordinarily simple,” said Oliver. “I borrowed a few lines at random from one Mr. Burns of honoured memory, and picked out the weirdest words that would rhyme, from the Scottish Dictionary, and the thing was done. There were some other words I’d have liked to put in, but either they were too long, or I didn’t dare to take the risk of using them or reading them aloud, so I had to drop them. They were beauties, too. It was a pity,” he added in a tone of gentle regret.

  “I think you did pretty well,” said Susan drily. “And I wonder that even you didn’t blush when you saw all those poor dupes sitting round you and listening to that balderdash!”

  “Blush? Why should I? A set of frauds, pretending to drink it all in and understand it!” cried Oliver.

  “Hear, hear!” Charles agreed heartily. “You deserved to win, if only for the sake of pulling the leg of old Miss Pringle—the high-priestess, I mean, the one who looked like a sofa on its beam-ends.”

  Oliver closed his eyes and shuddered. “I beg,” he said brokenly, “that you will refrain from even suggesting such a very indelicate act on my part. I wouldn’t touch Miss Pringle’s limb with a pitch-fork!”

  “No. Perhaps you’re right there,” Charles said, after a moment’s careful consideration of the question.

  “Well, there’s one thing certain,” said Oliver, slapping his sister resoundingly oh her shrinking shoulder. “And that is, you’ll have hard work to live up to the standard I’ve set for the family, Susan, my girl, novelist or not!”

  “I shall not try,” retorted Susan. “And, anyhow Peggy wasn’t taken in by your ridiculous poem. She had more sense.”

  “Peggy!” Oliver suddenly became serious, even gloomy, and started to prowl up and down the room, a sure sign that he was either worried or restless. “Why did Peggy contradict Miss Pringle like that, do you suppose? About the time they saw her with Ronald Graham, I mean.”

  Susan and Charles stared at him in open astonishment, and Charles murmured that personally he would swear black was white if he thought that it would annoy Miss Pringle.

  “I expect that was how Peggy felt,” said Susan. “You know what prying old busybodies the Miss Pringles are. It’s nothing to do with them if she chooses to go out on a wet afternoon and meet Ronald Graham.”

  “Has it occurred to you—” Oliver turned on her quite savagely, “that these same prying old busybodies could do quite a lot of mischief—and will, too, if that little fool of a girl isn’t more careful.”

  “But, Oliver, my dear—” began Susan, at a loss.

  Charles spoke for her. “As far as I remember, Noll, Miss Cunningham said she had not been out on that particular afternoon, so the old sharks must have made a mistake.”

  “That’s just what they didn’t do,” muttered Oliver, ashamed of his outburst, but doggedly sticking to the subject. “Peggy was out, and with that sulky brute Graham, for I saw her myself.”

  Charles pursed his lips and whistled softly. “Oh, like that, is it?” he said. Then, in a soothing voice: “But even so, Noll, I think she was justified in refusing to gratify the old ladies’ kindly curiosity, though she chose rather a stupid way of doing same. It was absolutely none of their damned business if she wanted to have a quiet walk with her young man and nothing said.”

  “They’ll make it their business, curse them!” said Oliver, with bitterness. “It’s all they live for, and a thing like that spread about in a small place, as they’ll spread it, can be quite damaging enough. If she hadn’t lied about it—”

  “I don’t believe Peggy did tell a lie,” said Susan very firmly. “What a range of mountains you’re making out of a molehill that isn’t even there! The Misses Pringle—yes, and you too, Oliver—must have mistaken someone else for Peggy. You saw her at some little distance, I suppose?”

  Oliver nodded.

  “Well, then! Lots of girls are small and fair and wear a blue coat and a red beret. It was probably some village lovely—Ronald Graham is just the type to cut a dash with them and enjoy his conquest.”

  “I recognized him all right,” muttered Oliver.

  “He’s pretty easily recognized, isn’t he?” said his sister. “Those long knock-kneed legs of his and that bouncing heather-step of a walk could hardly belong to anyone else.”

  “No. All the same—”

  “It’s perfectly ridiculous, particularly as Peggy can’t bear the creature. Now do stop being stupid, Oliver.”

  Susan’s common-sense view seemed to carry the day; and she retired to dress for dinner smiling a little over the everlasting childishness of men. “Charles fussing because he imagines he has met Mrs. Holden somewhere before, and can’t bear to be proved in the wrong. And Oliver, poor pet, in a flap because he thinks Peggy has told a lie. I believe he’s beginning to be jealous about her,” she thought. “Dear me. I think they ‘have their troubles to seek,’ as Donaldina says!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  “Just a moment,” said Oliver, interrupting his sister’s conversation with Charles. ‘‘Did I understand you to say that you promised the Cunninghams we’d give them a lift to Reiverslaw this evening?”

  “You did,” said Susan.

  “And how do you propose to cram six persons, none of them small except Peggy, into the Muirfoot taxi, plus the driver?”

  “Five of us should be able to get inside with a squeeze,” said Susan. “And one must sit in front with Gibbie Johnston, of course.”

  “I see. Perfectly simple. ‘One must sit in front’,” said Oliver with a hollow laugh. “I—I suppose that will be me? But how cleverly you’ve arranged it, haven’t you?” He walked to the window and, twitching aside a curtain, stared out bleakly into the gathering night.

  In the light that streamed out over the gravel from the bright room, the teeming rain could be seen falling in straight, relentless shafts. Even without this visible evidence, the noise of full water-pipes, gurgling melodiously, the continuous purring patter of the steady drops would have spoken plainly to the state of the weather.

  “‘Kiss me, Hardy,’” murmured Oliver faintly, letting the curtain fall back into place, and putting a hand over his eyes. “I do wish, Susan dear, that when you want to do a kindness to anyone it needn’t always be at some other hapless creature’s expense. Usually mine. Charity begins at home, and—”

  “I think you’re making a fuss about nothing,” said Susan. “After all, it’s a closed car.”

  Oliver groaned. “The back’s closed all right, hermetically sealed, in fact, but Gibbie doesn’t approve of these new-fangled notions in the front seat. There’s no glass at the sides, and I might as well run behind the car with an umbrella, or have a shower-bath, before starting, in all my clothes—”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said his sister heartlessly. “If your miserable Squib had not chosen to fall to bits you could have gone in her. And besides, you can wear a waterproof.”

  “Do you hear the woman, Charles? I can wear a waterproof, she says. What I really need, of course, is a deep-sea diver’s outfit, or a mackintosh dinner-jacket and under-fugs.”

  “Tough luck, old boy,” said Charles, lighting a cigarette. “Can
I lend you a pair of goloshes, or would you rather have a tot of cough mixture? You will have my thoughts and sympathy every inch of the way.”

  With an awful look Oliver left the room.

  “He’s great fun, isn’t he?” said Charles. “Quite got back to his old form. You and this place between you have done wonders, Susan. When I saw him in hospital after the crash I thought that if he didn’t pass out he’d be like old King Whatsisname, the one who never smiled again.”

  “Then you do think he’s all right now? Of course he’ll never be quite as fit as he used to be. That leg will always be a bother to him. But you do think he’s better? You know him so well, Charles—ever since Osborne—”

  “Yes. But he ought to marry,” said Charles bluntly.

  Susan laughed. “He’s so dreadfully large-hearted! I can’t quite see him settling down with one wife. A harem would be more in his line.”

  “That’s all very fine and large.” Charles remained obstinately serious. “But what happens to him when you marry?”

  This time her laugh was a trifle forced. “Dear me, Charles! You aren’t suggesting that I should get married, my dear? I’m a born old maid, and I rather like it, if the truth be told.”

  “Now you’re talking bunk. You could marry to-morrow, if you liked,” said Charles. “Oh, yes, I know you’re both very happy as you are, an’ all that . . . in the meantime. But one of those days one or other of you is bound to marry. Oliver’s just about done with the frittering stage, and once he finds his girl it’ll be haste to the wedding. And you wouldn’t want him to stay single because of you, Susan?” Charles very seldom dropped his normal tone of pleasant banter for earnestness. When he did, he talked with brutal candour and sound sense which commanded attention. At the thought of Oliver’s possible marriage, which suddenly sounded inevitable, Susan was conscious of a purely selfish pang. But she answered at once: “Of course I shouldn’t.”

  “And you wouldn’t want to stay on here as second fiddle, however well you liked his wife. It doesn’t do, you know, a triangular establishment like that. Not fair on any of the three.”

  “No,” Susan said, promptly and decidedly.

  “Then—what about you? Do you want to be just ‘Auntie Susan’ to the end of the chapter? You aren’t cut out for this bachelor-woman business, my sweet. You like a man to look after. Can’t you see that you’re bound to marry?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Charles!” Distress rang in Susan’s voice. “I don’t want to marry, I don’t even want to discuss such a possibility. I’ve put all that away long ago. I’ve been through it once—oh, I don’t mean I’ve been actually married, you needn’t look so startled! Nor have I been living in sin, as they say! But I was in love, badly in love, and he—well, he let me down. And as I’d put all my eggs of that particular kind into one basket, there was—rather a wholesale smash. I learnt my lesson by heart, Charles. I’m very trusting until I’ve been fooled. After that, I can’t be taken in again. Marriage without love has always struck me as being rather a poor show, so marriage doesn’t appeal to me any longer.”

  “Because one bounder treated you badly, are you going to distrust all men?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Perhaps not. But—I’m a burnt child, Charles. Can you blame me if I dread the fire?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I can. You aren’t a coward, and that’s a coward’s argument. No good using it on me. You see, I know you, Susan.”

  “I wonder.”

  “I don’t. Unless you still care for this—this man, you wouldn’t shirk marriage for a reason like that. Do you still care for him?”

  Susan shook her head. She had quite lost her air of faint, detached amusement, and looked, though piteously troubled, much younger.

  “Do you distrust—me, Susan?”

  “No. You’re my friend. ‘Faithful and just to me,’ Charles.”

  “I’d like to be more.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish you hadn’t said any of this. I’m so fond of you—”

  “It had to be said, sometime. So you’re fond of me, are you?”

  They were both standing by now, and Susan was shivering in spite of the fire close beside her. He took her hands in his.

  “Look at me,” he said, “and tell me straight that you don’t care for me.”

  Susan’s eyes, black with distress, met the long blue ones, usually so gay and careless, now stern and almost threatening.

  “Yes, I care for you,” she said. “But not enough!”

  He nodded as if he had heard what he expected, dropped her hands, and stepped back. “I thought so. Well, it will do for a start, and I won’t bother you again just now. But when Oliver gets engaged to be married, will you be engaged to me?”

  “I—I’ll think about it,” said Susan.

  “That’s a promise,” he said quietly. “I’d like you to think about it, to get used to the idea.”

  The sound of a car drawing up outside the door broke the tension, to Susan’s heartfelt relief.

  “What-ho, Oliver! The carriage waits!” cried Charles, going to the foot of the stairs and shouting in stentorian tones so like his everyday call that Susan began to wonder if she had not dreamed the whole of the past twenty minutes.

  His warning cry was seconded by the ringing of the bell. After a silence, the bell rang again. Susan awoke with a start to the fact that Donaldina had been given leave of absence to attend a “kirn” or harvest-home dance near Kaleford, for which festivity, undeterred by the weather, she must already have departed “Charles,” said Susan, joining him in the hall and speaking with a determined effort to be natural, “please open the door for Gibbie and tell him that we’re just coming. And we’ll have to bolt all the windows because there’s no one in the house to-night except Tara.”

  “Bolt? Did I hear you use the English word ‘bolt,’ my girl?” said the voice of Oliver from aloft, as Charles opened the front door to admit a rush of cold, wet air and the leather-coated form of Gibbie Johnston. “Surely you know,” continued the master of the house, unseen but very far from unheard, “that in Scotland windows are snibbed, and never bolted?”

  “Come and snib them, then. And hurry, or we’ll be late. Don’t forget to lock the front door after we’re out, and put the key in your pocket. Donaldina has the back-door key with her.”

  Susan went through the baize door and along the passage to make certain that all was fast there. The kitchen was bathed in a warm red glow from the banked-up fire, and before it lay Tara, gloomy and dull. He knew that his family was dining out, and hated it.

  Susan knelt down beside him and put her hand on his broad black forehead. Two brown eyes looked at her, the feathery tail beat a tattoo on the hearth-rug. He turned over and took her hand in his mouth, so gently that it might have been engulfed in a velvet bag.

  “Lovely,” said his mistress, “I’ll tell you a secret. You are the only man I love.”

  She was feeling hurt and bewildered. To rake up her miserable love-affair, hidden in decent obscurity for years, and resolutely put aside except in rare moments of weakness, had been a very painful business. It was not really Charles’s fault that the bare bones had been disinterred, but it had been ghastly, and now the bones refused to allow themselves to be buried again. Instead, they grinned at her like a pirate’s flag wherever she looked: would even strength of mind make it possible for her to shut her eyes to them after this? That last scene in the hotel bedroom, after she had run away to join him, and his wife had come, to find her waiting for him, already regretting the step she had taken, but too proud, too obstinate, to give in. . . . Susan shuddered. Again she could hear that other woman’s voice in pity: “You poor child! Did he tell you that I wouldn’t divorce him? It’s he who doesn’t want it, he’s afraid of endangering his position, losing his job” . . . and then her own precipitate flight, a nightmare of escape. . . . Every piece of furniture, hideous, bulky, in that room, was still familiar to her shrinking memory, the doub
le bed occupying a blatantly large amount of floor-space, the mirror which reflected her pale, shocked face, even the wall-paper, gross purple roses straggling over an ugly neutral-tinted background. . . . What a sordid, wretched ending to her brave, idiotic dream of defying the world’s disapproval by his side! “A romantic fool, that’s all I was,” thought this older, wiser Susan drearily. “And now, there’s Charles. I want to be friends with him. I’ve never really thought of him in any other way, attractive though he is; could we still be friends if we were married?” That would certainly put a different complexion on the matter. She knew Charles so well, saw him without any veil of illusion, trusted him. Perhaps, after all, sometime, it might work out happily that way. . . .

  “Susan! Susan! Come on, for the love of Mike! D’you want to arrive and find them halfway through dinner?”

  Susan dropped a kiss in the dusky hollow between Tara’s steadfast eyes, and a little comforted, hurried back to the hall.

  Her face wore its look of amused tolerance as she came upon Charles, expostulating heatedly with Oliver.

  “You can’t possibly go looking like that. It’s not decent. It’s an outrage,” he was saying.

  After one look at Oliver, Susan sank on the nearest chair in a fit of helpless laughter.

  He was wearing fisherman’s waders with snow-boots crammed on above them, and a waterproof. Round his neck was a large bath-towel arranged as a scarf, and on his head he had a sponge-bag pulled well down over his ears. He carried a red golfing umbrella in one hand, and in the other an enormous silk handkerchief.

  “But why not?” he said blandly. “Am I to catch my death of cold and sow the seeds of rheumatism merely to satisfy your sense of what is fitting? I maintain that I am suitably clad for the inclement weather. If my friends don’t like to take me as they find me, they can do the other thing.”