Eustace and Hilda

by L. P. Hartley

  She heard his voice, more insistent now, repeating the question:

  “Was that all, Minney? Did you go away after that?”

  “Now let me see. Where was I?... Oh yes!” Minney thought she saw her way clear. “Well, it wasn’t quite over. You see, they had to bring the coffin out of church, and they carried it to the graveside, and put it down with all the flowers, the wreaths and the crosses beside it——”

  “Did you see my flowers?” Eustace asked.

  Minney said she had. “And then, of course, we all stood round without moving, the gentlemen bare-headed. Miss Cherrington and your father and I, we stood a little way back, because, of course, we weren’t great friends of Miss Fothergill’s, only acquaintances, through you really, and we didn’t want to seem to push ourselves forward, since Miss Fothergill’s friends and relations aren’t anything to us, of course, and I doubt if we shall ever see or hear of them again. Now just slide down under the water, Eustace, and wash off all that soap, and then I’ll give you a good rub with this hot towel here.”

  Carefully, gingerly, unconsciously observing the economy of movement demanded by the peril of the Death-Spot, Eustace allowed himself to be submerged; but his mind still cried out for the appeasement, the signal of dismissal, the final stab of intense feeling, without which the past year and all it meant to him would be like a victory without banners, a campaign without a history, a race without a prize.

  “Tell me a little more,” he begged.

  “There’s nothing more to tell,” said Minney, relief brightening her voice. “The clergyman went to the graveside while the coffin was being let down, and said something over it.”

  “What did he say?”

  Minney hesitated. There was a passage in the Burial Service which she knew by heart: and it came at the exact moment that Eustace was asking about. She could not hear it without crying, and even the recollection of it pinched her throat and pricked the back of her eyes with tears. The emotion was her tribute to mortality everywhere, not especially to Miss Fothergill; but she didn’t want to let Eustace see it, and she said:

  “Oh, it’s something they always say at funerals. They say it for everyone, you know, not just for Miss Fothergill. You wouldn’t understand it if I told you.”

  But while she was speaking an echo of the sentences made itself heard in her mind and altered the expression of her face. Eustace noticed the involuntary quivering of her lips and was immediately aware of an inner tingling, as though part of him that had gone to sleep was coming to life.

  “Please tell me, Minney,” he said, “it won’t matter if I don’t understand.”

  His head pillowed on the dingy enamel he looked up at her, at her kind plain face which, under the stress of indecision, had become remote and impersonal and stern. “Perhaps I can manage it,” she thought, and she opened her lips, but the tremor round her mouth and the ache in her throat warned her to stop. She drew a long breath and looked down at Eustace. His eyes were fixed on her in a look of entreaty, something shone in them that she had not seen before and that at once kindled in her an answering flame and an overwhelming impulse to tell him what he wanted to know. She felt she owed it to him. Yet still she hesitated, by training, by second nature, unwilling to recognise his status as a human being, his right to suffer as grown-up people suffered. Yet why not? He would have to learn some time, why not now while there was still in sorrow the balm and healing which he unconsciously desired?

  Minney’s face assumed a solemn, set expression as though carved in wood, and in a voice unlike her own, but not unlike a clergyman’s, she began to speak, looking across Eustace at an imaginary congregation beyond the bath-room wall.

  “‘I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead that die in the Lord....’”

  Suddenly the wooden mask crumpled; her voice choked and she could not go on. Tears ran down her face and dropped with heavy splashes into the bath. Eustace gazed at her in bewilderment; he had never seen her or any grown-up person lose control before. Then, feeling in himself the effect that the words had had on her, and moved by the sight of her distress, he too began to cry. The sound of sobbing filled the room and mingled with the chuckling and gurgling of the hot-water tank. With a blind plunging movement Minney turned away and wiped her eyes on a corner of Eustace’s towel. Meanwhile he, possessed by unrecognisable emotions and fearful of losing them, cried with unconscious cruelty:

  “What else did he say, Minney? What else did he say?”

  The habit of authority, which would have bidden her tell Eustace, “Now, now, that’s enough,” had forsaken Minney. She returned to the barrier of the bath, composed her face as well as she could, and forgetting where she had left off, began again:

  “‘I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; even so, saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.’”

  Eustace was transported by the beauty of the words. They glowed in his mind until, perhaps from some association with his present position, they turned into a golden sea, upon the sunshine-glinting ripples of which he and Miss Fothergill, reunited and at rest from their labours, floated for ever in the fellowship of the blessed. He had never felt so near to her as he did now. Perhaps he was no longer alive; perhaps what he once dreaded had come to pass, and he had been drowned in the bath without noticing it. If so, death was indeed a blessed thing, buoyant, warm, sunshiny, infinitely desirable.

  Withdrawn in ecstatic contemplation, Eustace failed to see that on Minney the words of promise had had a very different effect. She was weeping more bitterly than before. In an effort to hide her emotion she had stooped down to pick up his dressing-gown, which was lying on the floor. But her sobs betrayed her, and Eustace, hearing them and missing the much-loved face which had been the day-spring of his celestial imaginings, returned to reality with a painful jolt. Intent on comforting her he hastily pulled himself out of the bath, tidal waves of unexampled grandeur swept round it, and one slapping billow, not content with inundating Rome, climbed and climbed towards the Death-Spot....

  So much he saw from the tail of his eye as he ran to Minney. “No, no,” she said, forestalling with the bath-towel his proffered embrace. “You mustn’t kiss me. Look how wet you are. You’re making a pool, and if you go on crying” (Eustace was now mingling his tears with hers) “it’ll grow into an ocean. There, there, I’ll dry your eyes and you can dry mine.” Having rendered each other this service they smiled, and both were surprised, for it seemed as though they had been a long time without smiling. “How tall you are,” said Minney. “Why, you’ll soon be right up to my shoulder. I should like to see you a little fatter though!” The clanging of a bell, rhythmical, irritable and insistent, interrupted her. “You will be late for supper,” said Eustace, alarmed.

  “Only a little,” said Minney. “I can still hear them talking. Listen!”

  The sound of two voices, each burrowing a separate track into the silence, came up from the room below.

  “Do you think they’re talking about the funeral?” asked Eustace.

  “Oh, we’re going to forget all about that; that’s over and done with. Poor Miss Fothergill! Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?”

  “Nothing else, Minney, thank you very much. Nothing else.”

  12. THE WEST WINDOW

  THE SUCCEEDING days passed slowly for Eustace. He was aware of an emptiness in his life and he did not know how to fill it. Nothing beckoned from outside; social adventures he had none; since his illness any extra exertion, even the questionable pleasure of the dancing class, had been ruled out. But rather to his surprise and Hilda’s there had been several drives in the landau lately, drives which had taken the best part of the day and almost transformed Mr. Craddock from an Olympian deity into a familiar friend. No longer did he insist on their joining him in the street by Boa Vista; he had mysteriously discovered that the rough, rutted track to Cambo was practi
cable after all, and now they had the satisfaction of seeing the carriage standing outside their door. In their excursions they had even gone as far as Spentlove-le-Dale, where the almshouses were, an expedition that needed two horses and had been undertaken by Mr. Craddock only once before that year. On the way they passed a waterfall, foaming over a rock in a coppice with an effect of irresistible power and energy which delighted Eustace, and which in old days would have taken a high place among his mental mascots. But now his imagination seemed to have lost its symbolising faculty, and nothing that he saw took root and flowered in his mind. A kind of melancholy settled over it, an apathy of the spirit, a clear transparent dusk like twilight, in which everything seemed the same colour and had the same importance. It was as though the black band and the black tie had imparted their sombre hue to the very air around him.

  To-day they were bound for Frontisham, an unambitious goal, but it meant they would skirt the edge of the little moor where the heather and the bog-cotton and the sundew grew—a perilous place, almost a marsh, dotted with pools of dark or reddish water in which one might easily be engulfed. Eustace liked to imagine himself springing from tuft to tuft with the lightness of an ibex. And at the end of the journey was a sight he always looked forward to: the west window of Frontisham Church.

  Mr. Cherrington was wearing a new suit, an oatmeal-coloured tweed, and a pair of brown boots; he looked gay and dashing.

  “Now you must pinch me,” he said to Eustace, who obeyed with docility but without enthusiasm. “Harder than that,” he ordered, with the playfulness in his voice that Eustace loved and dreaded, for it might so quickly turn to irritation. “You’ll have to eat some more pudding.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” asked Eustace anxiously, his fingers embedded in his father’s sleeve.

  “Can’t feel it,” said Mr. Cherrington; “it’s just like the peck of a little bird. There, that’s better. Now jump in and make yourself comfortable.”

  Eustace looked round at the little group standing between the freshly painted white gate with ‘Cambo’ staring from it and the waiting landau. There was Hilda in her navy-blue dress and black stockings, a rusty sheen on both; Minney with Barbara in her arms; his aunt heavily veiled and hatted, her purplish skirt slightly stained with chalk dust where it swept the ground. Something in her bearing, for he could not see her face, implied dissent. Eustace hesitated.

  “Oh, I forgot,” said Mr. Cherrington jocularly, “ladies first. Perhaps you’d like to ride on the box, Eustace.”

  Eustace glanced at Hilda.

  “Mr. Craddock always lets her drive down Frontisham Hill.”

  “And you don’t want to?”

  “Not specially.”

  “Very well, then, do as you please.”

  Seated between his father and his aunt, with Minney, and Barbara obviously waiting to do something unexpected, facing him, Eustace pondered. “Do as you please.” The sentence sounded strangely in his mind: it made him feel unfamiliar to himself and filled his spirit with languor. His thoughts and impressions, which at this early stage of the drive usually followed a fixed course, began to lose their sequence. When, in obedience to time-honoured custom, they drove into the deep rut opposite Cliff House, a calculated mishap which made Hilda and even Miss Cherrington rock with laughter, the jolt and the lurch took Eustace completely by surprise: he even wondered what they were laughing at. Almost for the first time the imposing façade of The Priory, a superior boarding-house with grey-painted dormer window projecting from a steep slate roof crowned with a chaveux-de-frise, failed to impress him, and the knowledge that there were people rich enough to enjoy for months on end the luxuries of its unimaginable interior failed to comfort him with its promise of material security.

  “Very well, then, do as you please.”

  But wasn’t the important thing to do what pleased other people? Shouldn’t self-sacrifice be the rule of life? Why had his father asked him to get into the carriage before any of them? Was it just a slip of the tongue? He had tried to make it seem so, but Eustace didn’t think it was. Since Miss Fothergill’s death there had been several occasions, it seemed to Eustace now, when his wishes had been consulted in a quite unprecedented way, and especially by his father. That he had always been waited on and spoilt and protected from harm, he knew very well, but this was something different: it involved the element of deference. Minney showed it and even Miss Cherrington, though it sat uneasily on her. There was a change in their bearing towards him. In countless small ways they considered his wishes. Something of the kind had happened after his illness, he had been told not to tire himself, not to get excited, not to strain his eyes and so on: but he had always been told. There had been an increase of affection and an increase of authority. But now the voice of authority faltered; he was often asked, often given his choice, and sometimes he caught them looking at him in a speculative fashion, almost with detachment, as though he had been taken out of their hands and they were no longer responsible for him. What did it mean? Did it mean they loved him less? ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’ Eustace was well acquainted with this text. Might it not follow that when the Lord ceased to chasten He also ceased to love?

  “Do as you please.”

  For a moment Eustace contemplated an existence spent in pleasing himself. How would he set about it? He had been told by precept, and had learned from experience, that the things he did to please himself usually ended in making other people grieved and angry, and were therefore wrong. Was he to spend his life in continuous wrong-doing, and in making other people cross? There would be no pleasure in that. Indeed what pleasure was there, except in living up to people’s good opinion of him?

  But Hilda’s attitude towards him had not altered. Her eye was still jealously watchful for any slip he might make. She still recognised his right to self-sacrifice. She had climbed on to the box without looking round the moment he surrendered his claim to it. True, she knew he was afraid to hold the reins going down Frontisham Hill, disliked seeing the horses’ hindquarters contracted and crinkling as the weight of the landau bore down on them, was alarmed by the grating of the brake and the smell of burning; but still there was glory in it, and that glory Hilda had unhesitatingly claimed for herself. She had taken the risk, and left to him.... What exactly had she left to him? The satisfaction of doing what she wanted. This was what Eustace understood; this was what was right.

  He looked round in a daze. They were trotting slowly up Pretoria Street. On the left was Mafeking Villa, as dingy as ever, the ‘Apartments’ notice still askew in the window, the front garden—a circular flower-bed planted with sea-shells, set in a square of granite chips—discreetly depressing; while a little way ahead, on the right, rose the shining white structure of the livery stable with its flag-pole and shrubs in tubs, as fascinating as the pier-head which, in extravagance of wanton ornament, it somewhat resembled. Here Brown Bess would certainly want to turn in, as she always did, for it was her home; and Mr. Craddock would say, “Don’t be in a hurry,” “All in good time,” “You haven’t earned your dinner yet”— playful gibes which Eustace looked forward to and enjoyed hearing, callous as they were. But to-day he was in no mood to be disheartened by the one prospect or elated by the other. He remembered that when they reached the end of the street and turned into the dusty high road they would have to pass Laburnum Lodge.

  He had not seen the house since her death, and he did not want to see it now. But how could he help seeing it? If he shut his eyes he would only see it more clearly in his mind. Mr. Craddock drove inexorably on. Nothing could make him stop, nothing but a steam-roller or one of those motor-cars he hated so. For asking him to stop in mid-career without a good reason there might be a penalty, as there was in a train; several pounds added to the fare. No one had ever tried it, not even his father; who could tell what the consequences would be?

  Do as you please.

  “Daddy,” said Eustace, “do you think we could go another way, not past Laburnum L
odge?”

  The words were spoken. Minney’s eyes opened in astonishment; Aunt Sarah’s eyes were suddenly visible behind her veil; and Mr. Craddock and Hilda, simultaneously turning inwards, craned their necks and gazed at him speechless. Eustace did not look at his father.

  “Well,” said Mr. Cherrington at last, “if you want to go another way I suppose there’s no objection. You don’t mind turning round, Craddock, do you?”

  Brown Bess had pulled up of her own accord, exactly opposite the livery stables.

  “If Master Eustace wants me to, I’m sure I will,” said Craddock. “Especially him being such a favourite with the late lamented lady.”

  There was a pause. Brown Bess began to draw across the street towards the open doors of the livery stable, from beyond which came confused sounds of swishing and stamping and munching, doubtless inviting to her ears.