Eustace and Hilda

by L. P. Hartley

  Eustace had been secretary to several societies, more than one of which had died of inanition under his somewhat languid administration; but the Lauderdale, an old-established body with a long pre-war tradition, was too tough to succumb to his euthanasiac methods.

  In front of the green-baize notice-board in the vestibule he paused. As usual he found nothing but announcements about the activities of the Flat-iron, and of other clubs, mostly athletic; but Eustace was haunted by the idea that one day a notice would be put up declaring him expelled for the infringement of some rule of which he had never heard. This notice he would fail to see, and continue to frequent the club until at last one member, deputed by the others, would lead him to the board and silently point out the fatal sentence. Nervously he scanned the rules, of which every member possessed a copy, but his attention generally gave out before he reached the end, and he was never sure if he was not violating numbers XIX, XX, or XXI.

  Expulsion from the Flat (as it was affectionately called) did sometimes befall members who failed to pay their bills, but never for more recondite offences. Eustace would be the first to be turned out for having used its premises for the purpose, say, of some unlawful trade. It would be a terrible disgrace, second only to being sent down, and socially more damaging even than that.

  Why, he wondered, turning into the club’s familiar smoking-room, did human beings, the moment they banded together, have to invent all kinds of sanctions and taboos, designed to trip up the unwary? The room was empty; it was a little past six, the slack time between tea and dinner. He crossed over to a window-seat and watched the corners of Carfax, black with people. None of them looked up; none of them appeared to realise that here, only a few feet above them in mere physical altitude, was a summit of social eminence to which they could never attain. A feeling of warmth invaded Eustace’s breast; he tried to banish it, but without success. The Flat-iron Club was often ridiculed by those who did not belong to it, and sometimes by those who did. A wag had said:

  The Flat-iron Club

  Is well worth the sub.

  It’s full of oddities

  My God it is.

  But all the same, membership of ‘the Flat’ conferred distinction —a distinction that appeared to be as eagerly sought by the veterans of the war, still plentiful at the University, as by unfledged Freshmen. The desire for it was evidently something one did not grow out of. Over on the table lay the Candidates’ Book. Eustace took it up, to see if there were any new names that might benefit by his support. He turned the pages. For those who knew how to read it, the book was something more than a social guide. By the number of signatures under a man’s name you could tell just how popular he was; you could tell, too, who were his friends and, in some cases, who were his enemies. Here and there was a page defaced by the names, heavily and ostentatiously scratched out, but still legible, of those who had publicly and significantly changed their minds about their former protégés. How many stories had collected round their mutilated signatures, how many friendships had been broken by them! Only Proust, an author Eustace was beginning to feel he had read, could have done justice to the saga of slights, cuts, insults and vendettas that was apt to follow an unsuccessful flirtation with the Flat. But when Eustace tried to describe these dramas to Hilda, she proved a disappointing audience.

  “Surely you don’t go to Oxford to waste your time over that sort of thing?” she said, and then rather inconsequently asked if Stephen Hilliard was a member. When Eustace told her he hadn’t wanted to be, she remarked with considerable satisfaction, “I knew he had some sense.” Barbara, on the other hand, was much more sympathetic; Barbara enjoyed talking about people and the way they behaved. But it was just after she had got engaged to Jimmy Crankshaw; and at the back of her mind, Eustace could tell, was the feeling that Jimmy had no part in anything that the Flat-iron Club stood for, and because of her loyalty to him she slightly resented its importance in Eustace’s eyes. Of course, it’s only important to me, thought Eustace uneasily, as a subject of conversation.

  It was sad how the fact of not being able to share a joke separated one from people. Separated, of course, was too strong a word, but it created a frontier, a water-shed for experience, instead of a valley. Failure to see the same things as funny often meant a general failure to see eye to eye, because humour was common ground where the high-brow and the low-brow, the rich and the poor, could meet without self-consciousness.

  Life at Oxford made one lazy about adjusting oneself, Eustace decided. The people who thought and felt alike drew together; and after that, within the circle, everyone was encouraged to be himself to the top of his bent. Eustace tried to cultivate the kind of remark his friends expected of him, and win the commendation ‘That’s a typical Eustace’; but not always with success, for what they liked was something he was surprised into saying—it consisted in a kind of discrepancy between his view of a thing and the accepted view—and by no amount of trying could he surprise himself. The sally must be unself-conscious, and it was esoteric, it needed a trained audience.

  Eustace the ingénu, the un-terrible enfant terrible, wouldn’t go down well with the outside world, hadn’t gone down well, he suspected, in spite of Barbara’s protestations to the contrary, at her wedding. That had been on her eighteenth birthday, just before Christmas.

  Jimmy had passed his examination, a job was in sight or just round the corner, and she would not wait. Aunt Sarah had counselled delay, she had even called upon Eustace, rather with the air of one invoking the support of a broken reed, to withhold his consent, or at any rate to speak to Barbara with the authority of an elder brother.

  Full of distaste for his mission Eustace approached Barbara, to be greeted by a volley of the little screams with which she had been accustomed, from a baby, to receive any attempt to turn her from her purpose; so after some half-hearted efforts to put the practical objections to the marriage before her, he gladly subsided into the more grateful rôle of saying how heartily he approved, how glad he was for Barbara’s sake, and how much he liked Jimmy. In this he was not insincere, for the sight of Barbara’s happiness would have melted a harder heart than Eustace’s, although she expressed it in trills and snatches of song, sudden gestures, agonised starts as if joy had run a pin into her, that were slightly shocking to his sense of fitness.

  As for Jimmy, he was not at all like a character in Henry James, definitely a representative of the Better Sort rather than of the Finer Grain, but Eustace could not help warming to his friendliness and directness of approach. The possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding, of fire and misfire, that made social intercourse fascinating to Eustace did not exist for Jimmy, who brushed them aside much in the same way as his invariable tweed coat knocked over the little objects with which Eustace had too freely sprinkled the Willesden tables. He treated life like a machine that would go if set up properly and given plenty of oil and power. These both existed in his own nature; the power was steam rather than electricity, the oil was crude, but not sticky or glutinous. Messy Jimmy might be, but it was the messiness of the engine-room or the garage, a creative messiness inseparable from energy and movement, in the busy stir of which Eustace sometimes felt static and functionless and outmoded, but he did not mind that. Though he preferred the society of sympathetic people, he enjoyed the sense of the complementary, when the complementary was softened by goodwill, as it was in Jimmy’s case. But it made him feel nervous and inadequate, like an accompanist who knows that more is expected of him than mere dovetailing, however adroit.

  On the day of the wedding the sense of the complementary had been almost overpowering, principally perhaps because the Crankshaws, a vigorous and flourishing tribe, a symbol of increase and multiplication, so greatly outnumbered the Cherringtons, who had put out few branches, and not all of those could be mustered for the ceremony. Eustace had never had a diadem of aunts and uncles. His mother had been an only child; his father’s eldest sister, Lucy, who had lived for many years in German
y as a kind of companion in the family to whom she had once been governess, returned to England before the war, and now lived in a boarding-house in Bournemouth. Eustace liked the idea of her: she had travelled, and used to send him picture postcards of the places she visited, but she had never got on with Aunt Sarah, who felt her to be half a foreigner, with alien ways of thinking. There were some distant cousins with whom they still exchanged Christmas cards, and whom they referred to by their Christian names, but the names had no personalities attached to them, and when their owners appeared at the wedding, as a few of them did, they had to introduce themselves. The circle of critics who continually asked each other, ‘What is Eustace doing?’ without ever obtaining a satisfactory reply, existed chiefly in his imagination. Miss Cherrington had never been one to cultivate friends. She regarded them as something that no properly appointed household should be without, they had a place in the good housekeeping of life, but, like the best linen, they were not for everyday use.

  Hilda’s friends were fellow-workers in whatever field of endeavour she was engaged, and were united to her by nothing more personal than a common aim. Eustace brought to the wedding one or two friends of old standing, but much the largest contribution to the bride’s party came from the bride herself—school friends whom the warmth of her nature kept within screaming-distance, and several young men, carefully chosen, to whom the inevitable disappointment of being present at Barbara’s wedding to someone else would be less grievous than the disappointment of not being asked.

  But, all told, the bride’s contingent mustered hardly a score, several of whom were unknown to each other, whereas the bridegroom’s following amounted to double that number, and gave the impression of being treble, so enormously did the exuberance of their personalities multiply the impact of their presence. Even in church, walking up the aisle with Barbara, buxom and blossomy, clinging to his arm, Eustace was aware of a blast of insurgent vitality, like an incitement to procreation, from the pews on his right, a shuffling, a rustling, a turning and nodding of expectant faces; whereas from the thin ranks on the left there was no such demonstration, only a discreet slewing of the eyes and then the attitude proper to church. Responsive to atmospheres, Eustace felt relaxed on one side and rigid on the other. He wondered how Barbara felt—Barbara so like him to look at, so unlike him in temperament.

  Six years younger than he when they entered the church, he felt she was now as old as he was, and would be older by the time they reached the altar steps. This advance in experience seemed a reproach to him; yet paradoxically, as they stood together on the left of the lectern, he had the fancy that the bridegroom’s friends must see him as a bent, hoary bachelor, whom the sweets of marriage had passed by. But that was nonsense; even if four years had slipped out of his life, he was only twenty-four, and his coat was cut by one of the best tailors in Oxford. On Jimmy’s coat, he could see, the braid was much too wide, while the best man was wearing a lounge suit. Jimmy looked pale and ill-at-ease, and at the sight Eustace’s confidence began to mount. If his appearance was not out of tune with the proceedings, neither perhaps was he. He began to feel an aptitude for weddings descend on him, strengthening him. He even looked back to where Jimmy’s adherents, though more stationary now, were still giving off their pre-matrimonial fume. As it billowed towards him, his glance caught a bright eye under a bold hat. ‘It’s your turn next,’ the eye seemed to say, and for a moment he believed it.

  But afterwards, in the Tivoli Café, at the wedding breakfast, the necessity for adjustment became more pressing and precise than anything implied by a distant interchange of glances with a sparkling eye. For there were so many sparkling eyes, such areas of black satin, bulging unfashionably, and of gayer colours, on figures tubular or flat; such an agitation of arms, plump or slender, such a harvest of cheeks, pink and red under the electric light, such a confusion of loud, confident voices, which were not easily stilled when Eustace rose to propose the health of the bride and bridegroom.

  “I should stand on a chair, if I were you,” said a stout, glossy, highly coloured lady who had noticed his ineffectual efforts to make himself the centre of attention. “They’ll all see you then.”

  Eustace longed to be unseen and even more to be unheard, but in the latter design he was foiled, for someone on the edge of the throng, with a glass of champagne ready in his hand, called out good-naturedly, “Speak up, we can’t hear you.”

  “It’s the Oxford accent,” a voice nearer to Eustace muttered, and there was a smothered laugh. But when he got under way they gave him a good hearing, and took his one joke very well. Indeed, he was quite sorry to leave his perch and return to the arena, where the stout lady like a lioness roared her congratulations.

  “You did that very well,” she said. “You ought to be President of the Union.”

  Eustace got her another glass of champagne, and was surprised to find himself lingering not unwillingly in her padded conversational embrace, instead of moving on to his own party, who were standing about in ones and twos, without seeming to make much fun for themselves or mixing with the others.

  “And who pays for all this?” she said. “I suppose you do. A bit stiff, isn’t it?”

  Eustace said it would be if it became a habit; but after all, one’s sister only got married once, at least he hoped so.

  “But you have another,” the strange lady exclaimed. “Such a beautiful girl. Barbara’s nice-looking, of course; but the other’s a real beauty. Hasn’t anyone wanted to marry her?”

  Eustace felt he ought to resent this question on Hilda’s behalf, but it surprised him; somehow he had never thought seriously of Hilda in connection with marriage.

  “Oh, Hilda,” he said vaguely. “I don’t know what her plans are.”

  “Well, I know what some men’s plans will be,” retorted the lady, “unless she lives in a convent.”

  “In a way she does,” said Eustace; “in a clinic for crippled children, a place called Highcross Hill.”

  “Of course, I’ve read about it,” said the lady, “and what a wonderful work she’s doing there. But, you know, Cupid will creep in anywhere. If she’s fond of children she’ll be wanting one for herself.”

  Eustace would have liked to explain that Hilda wasn’t exactly fond of children, in that way; she was sorry for them, and wanted to help them. But he didn’t feel he could analyse her character to this stranger, whose mind was fluttering to the beat of Cupid’s wings. So making the excuse that he must speak to the bridegroom’s mother, he drifted away.

  The elder Mrs. Crankshaw was tall and dark, and had something of Jimmy’s gauntness of feature; she was vaguely Spanish-looking, which pleased Eustace, who liked foreigners.

  “How kind you have been,” she said. “Jimmy’s dressing-case, Barbara’s bracelet, and that marvellous cheque! Really you shouldn’t have done it. Unless you are made of money,” she added, narrowing her eyes as if to see him better.

  Eustace blushed as though he had been caught boasting of his riches. Stephen Hilliard, whom he had consulted, had been dismayed at the sum he proposed to give Barbara, and advised him to cut it down by half.

  “If you give so much you’ll create a false impression,” he said.

  “But who should I create a false impression on?” Eustace had demanded. “Only Barbara and Jimmy need know, and the people immediately concerned.”

  “On yourself chiefly,” Stephen had answered. “Five hundred pounds would be out of proportion to—well, I mean it would be out of proportion. It wouldn’t correspond. It would mean something different from what you mean.”

  “What do I mean?” Eustace had asked uncomfortably.

  “You mean to be generous,” said Stephen; “but generosity isn’t measured that way. People are only capable of assimilating a certain amount of generosity—the rest is wasted, worse than wasted; it will make them think you live in a fool’s paradise.”

  “But that won’t matter, if I don’t,” said Eustace, hurt.

&nbs
p; “There are several kinds of paradise,” said Stephen, oracularly, “none of them suitable to earth-dwellers. Do be advised, Eustace. If you don’t think I’m right, ask Miss Hilda. She would say at once, ‘Two hundred and fifty is quite enough for Barbara. You mustn’t make the Crankshafts think you’re a millionaire, and you mustn’t think so yourself.’ I should never dare to say that to you, but she would, unhesitatingly.”

  “I don’t think I agree with you,” said Eustace. “I think I have quite as much sense of money as she has.”

  “How can you say that,” asked Stephen, “after she rescued for you the hundred a year the College was trying to filch from you? In matters of finance, as in all matters, her opinion is absolutely sound.”

  Fragments of this conversation flashed through Eustace’s mind as he confronted Mrs. Crankshaw’s inquiring eye, and he wondered what she would have thought had the cheque been as large as he originally intended. He felt embarrassed, and wondered if it was something in him that made people talk to him so openly about subjects which were usually treated with reserve, or whether it was a convention among the Crankshaws and their circle.

  “Oh, I’m not at all rich,” he said; “don’t imagine that. But we all want to make the wedding a success, don’t we? I think it is a success, don’t you?”

  “A great success,” said Mrs. Crankshaw decidedly. “I’ve always said, there’s nothing like marrying while you’re young. Now you must look round and see if there’s anyone you fancy.”

  Involuntarily Eustace gazed about him at the munching, swilling throng. Barbara and Jimmy were the centre of an everchang-ing but never depleted nucleus; he could see the smiles and brightened eyes and heightened manner of those who came to offer congratulations, and the delighted responsiveness, somewhat sheepish on his part, altogether radiant on hers, of the bride and bridegroom.