Eustace and Hilda

by L. P. Hartley

  “Well, in a way, perhaps. But I’m like a top that always needs whipping; I’m inert, I don’t go by myself. Barbara does.”

  “And Hilda?”

  “She relies on something outside herself, but she’s different again—she’s like a dynamo. I don’t know what would happen if the voltage, or whatever it’s called, got changed, or if someone threw a spanner in the works.”

  “What unpleasant metaphors you use,” said Stephen. “I don’t think machinery’s a fit subject for ordinary conversation. But if we must talk about power-houses and such-like organs of generation —aren’t you really their chief source of supply?—their oil jet, their crankshaft, their coupling-rod, their carburettor, their sparking-plug, their three-speed gear, their little oil-bath, their turbine, their—what is it that poets are beginning to write about?—their pylon——”

  Eustace laughed.

  “Well, in a material sense I am. Of course, Barbara has what money Daddy was able to leave her, and Aunt Sarah has a little of her own, and naturally Hilda and I contribute something to the household expenses—but not much. Don’t imagine I’m a sort of hero in the family; Hilda and Aunt Sarah feel in their hearts, I think, that Miss Fothergill’s legacy was a divine dispensation meant to put me on my mettle, and take away any excuse for failure. They know I’m always looking for such excuses. My health is one. If they feel indebted to me, as they may do, they think the best way to repay me is by an extra-strong dose of moral supervision.”

  “What tree do they want to see you at the top of?”

  “I don’t think they know.”

  “They would find no satisfaction, for instance, in watching you scale the social ladder?”

  Eustace blushed.

  “I’m afraid they wouldn’t see anything meritorious in that. Hilda would rather I was a steeple-jack.”

  “But in some way or other, it’s got to be ‘O altitudo’?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “‘He that is down shall fear no fall’—I think I shall constitute myself an anti-Hilda agent, warning you of the perils of the heights and extolling the virtues of the lower levels—‘Eustace, I charge thee, fling away ambition. By this sin fell the angels.’ Hilda couldn’t deny the sound Christian morality of that, could she?”

  “Oh, she isn’t in the least worldly. It’s some kind of moral eminence that she would like to see me on.”

  “Even that might be a bad eminence. Think of the dangers of spiritual pride!”

  “I often think of them.... But I wouldn’t like you to go away with the idea that because Hilda sometimes pricks me, she is therefore a thorn in my side, or that she urges me to do impossibilities. When I said I owed her a great deal, it was an understatement. But for her I might be pushing up daisies in France.”

  “Oh, Eustace, what an expression! Never, never, use it again. But how did she do that? How did she come between you and—and the daisy-chain?”

  “Well, when the war broke out, Hilda was quite carried away by it. She was living at home, wondering what she should do. She had tried her hand at several things and given them up—chiefly because she doesn’t find it easy to work with other people. The war gave her her opportunity—she was just twenty-one when it broke out, and it was an inspiration to her. As I told you, she didn’t get on very well to begin with, but they soon realised how valuable she was. Meanwhile, I lingered on at school and enjoyed, rather ingloriously and not very whole-heartedly, all the privileges one has at the top—you know what an autocrat one becomes even if one isn’t good at games, which I wasn’t. To my secret satisfaction I had a medical exemption from playing football, on account of my heart. Hilda wanted to see me in khaki, of course; you couldn’t expect her not to. But she was always very nice about it, and said she would like me to be a hospital orderly, or a mess-waiter, or a storeman, or something of that sort. She never imagined I should be passed fit for general service; but when I did join up, in the autumn of nineteen-fifteen, I was. Hilda was disgusted, her sense of justice was outraged, and she immediately set about getting the decision altered. She had learned something of the ways of the R.A.M.C., and she took me about from one doctor to another until my medical history must have been known to half the British Army.”

  Stephen tilted his head back a little and turned his eyes away from Eustace. He seemed to be looking over the top of something that obscured his view—his mental view, for there was no material object in the way.

  “Did you mind her doing that?” he asked.

  Eustace took a moment to answer.

  “Well, yes and no. Of course, it was rather undignified appearing before Medical Boards armed with a sheaf of doctors’ certificates. It didn’t make a very good impression. I don’t think I should have gone through with it but for Hilda—I shouldn’t have had the moral courage. They wouldn’t have thought the better of me, though, if they had known that my sister was egging me on. Perhaps they did know, for it was she who set the machinery in motion. They may even have seen her walking up and down outside the camp gates, waiting to hear the result of the examination.”

  “Did she really do that?” Stephen’s voice sounded incredulous.

  “Yes, more than once. I remember coming out and she was so agitated she couldn’t speak or ask me what had happened. She hated the neighbourhood of camps, too. She admired soldiers in the abstract, but she never liked them near her—it was one of her troubles when she was a V.A.D.”

  “I can see it would be a handicap,” said Stephen. “What a curious war you must have had, tied to the chariot-strings of this beautiful Boadicea and whirled out of harm’s way.”

  Eustace glanced uneasily at his confessor. Stephen’s sympathy had its limitations. He could feel with you for a certain distance, and then his sense of the ridiculous or the unsuitable stepped in, and you realised you were not confiding in an alter ego, but in someone who was supplementing or correcting your version of events with an interpretation of his own.

  “Oh, I didn’t spend all the war like that,” said Eustace. “I soon got settled down in the Ministry of Labour. Hilda helped to arrange that I should still wear khaki. She wasn’t altogether satisfied with my progress, but I still think I was more use sitting on a stool than standing in a trench. I say I think that, I don’t always feel it. But I hadn’t many of the qualities of a soldier. And Hilda was quite right about my health. Even sitting down I got a tired heart, or something, and just before the end of the war I was given another Medical Board, which discharged me from the Army. They didn’t tell me exactly what was wrong, but recommended me to rest for six months. That was why I came up here so long after everyone else. I didn’t expect to be discharged, and asked if there wasn’t anything else I could do; but the President of the Board said to me, ‘My poor boy, you have done your utmost for your King and Country.’”

  Eustace paused.

  “Did he really say that?” asked Stephen.

  Eustace was surprised, and for a brief instant wondered if Stephen disbelieved everything he had said. But he came of a legal family, and was going to be a lawyer himself; no doubt he had to practise incredulity. It was a useful accomplishment which he, Eustace, might do well to learn. He turned to Stephen with a smile.

  “Yes, that’s what he said.”

  “Well,” said Stephen. “I’m sure he was right. Thank you for the recital, Eustace. You have been most patient in satisfying my—I fear—indiscreet curiosity. I shall reserve my comments for another occasion. In a minute or two I’m going to tell you the story of my life. I’ve arranged it (I think ‘it’ there is the mot juste) in six sections. First, birth and repressions. Second, childhood in Torquay and repressions. Third, youth in Kensington and repressions. Fourth, school and repressions. Fifth, the war and escape from repressions. Sixth, my future as a solicitor, which will be the longest and most glorious section, and will tell, among much else, how I mean to inflict repressions upon others. But before I start, I think you will need a drink and I will put a record o
n the gramophone, because the key of our conversation will have to change—not into a higher key, I’m afraid, but into a more commonplace one, say from C sharp minor into E flat. Now what would you like to hear?”

  Hardly had Eustace said ‘Schubert’ when he remembered a peculiarity in Stephen often commented on by his friends. He would ask them to choose a record, but he never played the one they chose. So Eustace was not surprised to hear his host say:

  “If you don’t mind, I don’t think we’ll have Schubert.”

  He moved across to a cabinet made of some pale, highly polished wood, with glass knobs, and began to pull out the drawers.

  “No, not Beethoven. He would suit Miss Hilda perhaps—gigantic gestures against a hostile sky—but not us. Our feelings are too complex. No, nor Brahms either—Heavens, how Miss Hilda would despise those steamy wallowings! Away with Brahms, she would say—let him stew in his own undergrowth. Boccherini? I don’t know why I ever got that record, I wouldn’t even bring it to your sister’s notice. I can hear her say ‘That sugared eighteenth-century chit-chat of “Haydn’s Wife,” as they called him, makes me sick. How could it help anyone to be better? What possible use is it to God or man?’”

  “I don’t think Hilda despises people quite as much as you imagine,” Eustace put in.

  “Well, she couldn’t help despising him... Berlioz now, the Damnation of Faust.” Stephen looked interrogatively at Eustace. “That’s more the kind of thing, isn’t it? But no, Miss Hilda would see through the bluster and posturing to the hollow core within. ‘Full of sound and fury,’ she would say—’signifying nothing. Take it away! Burn it!’”

  “Oh, she’s not so violent as that,” protested Eustace. “At least, not often. And she wouldn’t quote Shakespeare: she isn’t at all literary, you know.”

  “She would see through Berlioz all the quicker for not being. I’m sure she detests shams. I rather like them, but I should never dare tell her so. Now what have we? Borodin. Isn’t it odd how every composer’s name begins with B? I think Borodin is the most unsuitable we’ve turned up yet. Whining, plangent, amoral if not immoral, Oriental, moody, emotionally self-indulgent; Miss Hilda has just written a memorandum to Lenin saying that on no account must Borodin be played within the borders of the Socialist Soviet Republics. ‘Very well, Miss Cherrington, his memory shall be liquidated.’ Perhaps we shall never find what we’re looking for —perhaps there isn’t any music that expresses your relationship to Miss Hilda.”

  “It must bring you in too,” said Eustace. “Don’t forget that. It must suggest the story of your life that you’re to tell me.”

  “Rather a difficult synthesis,” Stephen said. “Much as I should like to be admitted, I think I had better be kept out. I should strike an alien note. For instance, I should want to know how Miss Fothergill’s money is invested and whether Miss Hilda’s clinic stands on a sound financial footing. I should have to be present as a ground bass, growling and droning away while you and Miss Hilda disport yourselves on the upper registers. I keep forgetting Miss Barbara. I don’t know why—you didn’t tell me much about her. Perhaps she could be introduced as a note that is always forgotten? It would be rather difficult. The music could pause—pausa lunga, pausa grande—to indicate that Miss Barbara has been suitably forgotten, and then start again.”

  “I don’t really forget her,” said Eustace, rather ruefully; “it simply is that I’ve been so much with Hilda.”

  “It simply is—it simply is,” echoed Stephen. “What a lot of responsibility you give to that poor ‘it.’ We might have a trio in which one part was always silent, except for a brief passage marked allegro giocoso. Then the ’cello would describe the carpet being rolled up and the furniture put out to freeze in the hall, or break its legs on the staircase, followed by an outburst of jazz, with some ingenious double-stopping to give the effect of feet shuffling on the floor. During that movement the first and second violins would leave the platform in a marked manner, and only return to play their andante con massima tenerezza when the carpet had been re-laid, and the furniture fetched out of hiding.”

  Eustace laughed. “I’m afraid we are a bit like that,” he said.

  “I knew,” said Stephen. “The new movement would start with a lovely, slow, ascending passage to indicate that every feature of the allegro—every wrinkle in the carpet, all the scraping and scratching of the furniture, every note of jazz and all the heavy breathing of the dancers—had been put completely out of mind. There might be a bar or two of restrained welcome to your Aunt Sarah on being allowed to return to her own drawing-room.”

  “Oh, she generally goes to bed,” Eustace said.

  “Poor Aunt Sarah! How does she get there, if all the furniture’s on the stairs?”

  “I expect she finds a way round it,” said Eustace. He was slightly nettled by this unflattering reconstruction of his home life. Stephen did not appear to notice.

  “Well, I won’t follow her any farther,” he said. “I shall leave her frustrated by the fire-irons and ambushed by the arm-chairs. Now I must return to my task. Ah, here’s something that might do. Yes, I think it will do.” He took out two records. “Of course, it only gives one aspect of the case. I say ‘it’ deliberately, in order to arouse suspense.”

  “Which aspect?” asked Eustace.

  “You’ll hear. But perhaps you know the piece?” Stephen added. “Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins.”

  Eustace did not know it. He had ambitions to be musical, and music-teachers had cherished ambitions on his behalf; but at a certain point he had stuck. It was a point he had reached in several of his studies, a respectable distance from the ground but out of sight of the summit. He had learned—perhaps too readily—to take these stopping-places for granted and not try to improve on them. Their presence still constituted a challenge, but then, the background of his mind was littered with challenges. How often had he begun to discuss music with a musician, only to find himself out of his depth, clutching at some straw of information that was not knowledge, though it had the air of being; while his interlocutor, not suspecting that a fraud was being practised on him, launched into deeper waters where Eustace dared not follow. Yet how dull it was to say, ‘I haven’t heard that,’ or ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what the Lydian Mode is.’ Stranded on some convenient sandbank, Eustace would try to lure the expert back to the shallows of his subject without exposing his own ignorance.

  Enclosed in this mood of self-depreciation he suddenly realised that the music had been going on for some time. That was what music did for him: it made him think more intensely, but about something else. He really must pay attention. One could not always tell, at least he could not always tell, with Bach: there were signs that this concluding phrase might be the last but one. He stole a glance at the position of the gramophone needle. Yes, it would be.

  “That was lovely,” he said, as Stephen got up to turn over the record.

  “I don’t believe you heard a note,” said Stephen. “But you must listen to the next movement, for this is just how I imagine you and Miss Hilda in your times of greatest spiritual” (he paused for a moment)—“interpenetration.”

  He gave Eustace a slight bow, which Eustace automatically returned; and the movement began.

  If Eustace did not understand music, he could appreciate and enjoy it, and the first phrase of that divine melody held him spell-bound, not only to the spirit of the music, but for a time to the music itself; so that when Stephen, his impassive face transformed and softened, murmured, “You see that you begin to repeat what your sister says,” he heard as well as saw what Stephen meant.

  “Yes, but I answer her sometimes, too,” he said. Stephen nodded. Did Hilda ever repeat what he said? he wondered. He did not say much that was worth repeating—but he sometimes quoted Hilda’s remarks, the more trenchant and incisive ones, half in admiration and half in malice. But that was not the kind of repeating Stephen meant. He frowned. The music seemed to rebuke him with its nobility,
its integrity of feeling. His thoughts travelled back. It was not in their everyday relationship, he realised, that such harmony was to be found. There Hilda always took the lead. Stephen should have chosen an air with an accompaniment as his symbol of their relation to each other. This was all give and take.

  The music went on, establishing in his mind its convention—if a mood so living could be called a convention—of flawless intellectual sympathy, of the perfected manners of the heart. The beauty was founded on the reasonableness of each utterance; it was born miraculously out of a kind of logic; the notes were not the parents of beauty, as with Schubert, but the children. This celestial conversation gave a sense of union no less compelling than the impulse to a kiss.

  Eustace’s mind travelled back, looking for the moments when he and Hilda had been most nearly in accord. He seemed to have to go a long way back, to the cliffs of Anchorstone, when she asked him to partner her in a pretence three-legged race; to the Downs, after another race in which they had defeated Nancy Steptoe and her brother, Hilda’s traditional foes. He remembered the exquisite sense of communion he had with her then; he remembered a similar enlargement of the spirit when he had persuaded her to accept the half of Miss Fothergill’s legacy. The quality of these moments could be heard, he fancied, in the serene interaction of the two violins. But they were the outcome of emotional stress, in one or two cases of differences and hard words; how could they compare with this music, which was like a reconciliation without a quarrel?

  And what was there to show lately for the promise of those early days? Had he fulfilled his manifold obligations to Hilda? Had he paid her back? He had given her the money, true; he had been as good as his childhood’s word, but only after a struggle with his conscience very unlike the eager giving on the beach at Anchorstone. Since then, in moods of self-complacency, he had caught himself reasoning that he had done for Hilda all that he could be expected to do, and that his generosity entitled him to all the efforts she made for him, entitled him even to feel annoyed and irritable when those efforts required, as they often did, corresponding exertions on his part. Indeed, Hilda was always putting her oar in, constituting herself the voice of conscience; she was a task-mistress, leading the chorus, undefined, unrecognised, but clearly felt, of those who thought he ought to try more, do more, be more, than he had it in him to try, or do, or be.