It was not till Annie came in to lay the table that he remembered the letter in his pocket. He might safely open it now, for the thought of lunch provided all the artificial stimulus necessary to live through the half-hour before it arrived.
The address, a London club, was scratched out, and by the side was written, Anchorstone Hall, Norfolk. The words gave him a curious thrill, and he put the letter down for a moment before reading it.
Dear Cherrington,
I enjoyed my reunion with the Lauderdale so much that I feel I ought to give the Secretary official expression of my gratitude. Not the least of the good things of the evening was the pleasure of meeting you again. You made a mistake, I think, to absent yourself from the ‘rag’—it was a really good show, quite in the old tradition—much better than my speech, I fear, but perhaps the one led to the other!
The war’s over, but, as I said, we don’t want the pendulum to swing too far the other way. At least I don’t.
Funny, I saw a picture of your sister in yesterday’s paper. I recognised her at once—she hasn’t changed much, but of course she’s more important-looking, and no wonder, having the charge of all those brats. I haven’t much time for cripples myself, but I admire anyone who has, and I shall see if something can’t be done about giving ventures like hers Government support.
You said you would like another look at the old house, so why not come down some time for a week-end?—and perhaps you could persuade your sister to come too, and give me the benefit of her views on Child Welfare! I’ll get my mother to write to her, if that seems more in order, and we might have my cousin Antony, since he’s a friend of yours, and my aunt, Nelly Staveley, who always enjoys meeting bright young men. Just a family party. I shall be touring round in May, so what about the first Sunday in June? Of course, if either of you can’t come, we’ll put it off, but I’m sure the College will excuse you, you must stand well with them after publicly disowning us bad boys the other evening! What fun it was, though.
My respects to your sister, and good luck with the books.
Yours,
DICK STAVELY.
I called on Antony, at his suggestion, but need hardly say he was out.
On a third reading the sting in the tail of the letter shed its venom and seemed quite playful. As a matter of fact, by no means all the members of the Lauderdale had taken part in the rag; Eustace was not alone in declining its excitements, and he had certainly shown no signs of open disapproval. It wasn’t only that he didn’t enjoy smashing things up: he had his rather delicate position in the College to consider. He would explain that to Dick Staveley, who would of course understand.... The rest of the letter was friendly.
How pleasant it would be to see Anchorstone Hall from inside.
The house had been a lodestar of his childhood, though for some reason it had always touched a negative pole in Hilda. She had refused to go when they were jointly invited, and Dick had never seemed to want him without her. Nor did he now.
But the Hilda of to-day, who had knocked about the world, would surely feel differently. She might perhaps find Dick interesting; he was obviously interested in her, and in what she was doing.
Eustace abandoned himself to a day-dream. It passed through several stages, growing more ambitious with each.
‘I’m just going to Anchorstone to spend a day or two with my sister, Hilda Staveley. Oh, didn’t you know? Yes, in July’ (Eustace’s imagination never allowed much time for things to happen) ‘at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. We couldn’t very well have the reception here, so Lady Nelly kindly lent us her house in Portman Square. But surely you knew, Stephen? We sent you an invitation.... The chicken-run? Oh, I expect she’s forgotten about that now—she’s given up the clinic—it was just a pastime really—she’s busy trying to make Anchorstone a little more habitable—it’s so Victorian—you must come and take a look at the old house some time—I’ll get Hilda to write to you, if that seems more in order.’
He did not tell his aunt about the second letter, but when he started off for Highcross Hill, he made sure that it was in his pocket.
5. LADY GODIVA OF HIGHCROSS HILL
HIGHCROSS HILL was the other side of London, in Surrey. To get there took nearly two hours and involved a great many changes, not only of tram and train, but of tense and mood. With the ring of a conductor’s bell-punch, the future hardened into the present; with the casual discard of a ticket, the present fluttered into the past. Drawing near to Hilda was a ritual. Eustace liked to approach his friends in this way; the successive stages were like purifications of his personality; other associations were dismissed, competing preoccupations were sloughed off, and he would bring to the encounter a mind like a clean slate, charged with expectancy —if a slate could be. The interest of seeing whether he was before or behind his schedule—for Eustace, like many unpunctual people, was exceedingly time-conscious—also helped, in its humble way, the process of perlustration. But to-day the process was not quite complete. His thoughts kept returning to the letter in his pocket. More than once he took it out and read it. When at last he arrived at Lowcross Station, it was still germinating in his mind, so that instead of waiting, as he usually did, to see the train dramatically disappear into the tunnel in the hill-side which almost overhung the platform, he brushed past the ticket collector and had to be recalled by one of those loud shouts, which always seem meant for someone else, to receive back the return half of his ticket.
The exertion of climbing the hill, however, pushed the letter into a lower stratum of consciousness. Eustace had been told to take hills easily. Highcross Hill could not be taken easily, but he had established certain rest stations at which he called, somewhat in the spirit of a railway train.
The fascination of this pretence had remained with him since childhood. He could be a fast or a stopping train, according to how fit he felt. To-day he was in good form. No signal-slack at the chestnut tree; no slowing down by the churchyard wall for repairs to the permanent way. He had reached the inn—appropriately called The Half-Way House—without a stop. The Half-Way House was a kind of Clapham Junction, and to wait there was compulsory. Alas! it was always shut at this hour; no chance of refuelling: the prosperous, brick-red face—heavily made up, Eustace felt, like a middle-aged barmaid’s—was impassive over its legends of Saloon Bar, Private Bar, Jug and Bottle: a cynic openly exhibiting her broken promises.
Eustace spent two minutes’ silence leaning against the square mast pole that supported the heavily flapping sign, and then, Excelsior! ‘Try not the pass, the old man said’; but the youth paid no heed, because he had Hilda waiting for him at the summit. ‘Dark lowers the tempest overhead.’ Eustace glanced up; it had been raining, as befitted an April day, but the sky was now quite clear. ‘The roaring torrent is deep and wide,’ the discouraging voice persisted. There was no torrent: Eustace pressed on through the now semi-Alpine scenery. ‘Beware the pine tree’s withered branch,’ counselled the voice—the peasant’s voice, speaking in English, for the Swiss were a cultivated nation. Sure enough, overhead there was a pine tree, and it had a withered branch. Exactly why the branch was dangerous Eustace had never understood. That it would fall off just as he was going under it was a supposition too unlikely to affright even the most timid. Longfellow’s stalwart traveller would scout such a risk; and to climb the tree and sit on the branch would be meeting trouble more than half-way.
Unexpectedly, for he had been doing so well, Eustace felt a little out of breath, but to stop now would be against the rules. The next station, the Gothic lodge of Highcross Place, was round the bend, out of sight. He was undoubtedly panting: supposing he just stopped for once, here, where he was, without paying any attention to his self-imposed traffic signals? It was no disgrace for a train to stop between stations. He stopped, but his heart went on thumping. ‘What shall I do?’ he wondered, panic rising in him. Seeing the pine tree’s withered branch, the youth decided to retrace his steps. There was no point in going on to die on
a mountain top: nobody would be the better for it. As he descended the mountain the peasant and the maiden and one or two more came out from behind some rocks and said, ‘Bravo, Eustace, you’ve done the right thing after all. None of us wanted you to go on. It would have been certain destruction.’
Eustace stood in thought, then began to go slowly down the hill. At once he felt better. But what shall I say to Hilda and Aunt Sarah? he thought. How shall I explain it? I shall have to say I had a heart attack; then they’ll send me to a doctor and he’ll order me to rest for six months. I shall miss Oxford, and I shan’t be able to go to Anchorstone Hall on June the 3rd, and I shall never start to earn my living. He stopped again, and at once his breathing became more difficult. Oh, come now, he thought, that can’t have done me any harm. And if I’m going to have a heart attack, I shall have it before I get home, anyway, so I might just as well have it here. He turned round. The maiden, the peasant and the two unidentified figures scrambled from behind the rock and besought him not to go on. ‘You will rue it if you do!’ they wailed. But the youth was obdurate, and pointed rather self-consciously to his banner.
Something seemed to be dragging at his feet; his heart swelled in his breast, and his steps came slower. Far below him he heard a cry: ‘Beware the awful avalanche!’ There was a roaring in his ears; the hill seemed to stretch up interminably into a great cone like the Matterhorn, and then without any warning but the roar, the cone seemed to slide from its place and topple down towards him. Trees, telegraph poles, houses, were tossed this way and that, springing, bouncing, disappearing; last of all came the clinic, riding on the crest of a huge hollow breaker of earth and rock. Now it was right over him; he could see the nurses leaning out of the windows, their staring eyes alight with doom. As he gazed the front door swung open, but not inwards, outwards, and with such force that it was dashed from its hinges, and in the opening stood Hilda, her hand on the shoulder of a crying child. She looked down and saw him and made a sign he could not interpret.
It was all over in a moment. The roaring ceased, and Eustace was standing on the rather suburban Surrey hillside, among comfortable-looking villas, and not far from the top. His heart was behaving more normally. It must be a trick of the nerves, he thought; I’ve had something like it before.
The clinic crowned the hill. Through the gateway, with its red-brick pillars capped by stone balls, the whole front elevation of the building could be seen. The middle part was genuine Georgian, to which the former owners had built on a wing in the same style. Now the directors of the clinic were adding another, balancing it, to provide extra accommodation. The new part was still deep in scaffolding, but it had made great strides since Eustace’s last visit. As he walked up the broad pathway, bordered on each side by a lawn, that led to the front door, he gazed with rapt curiosity at the rising annexe. The workmen were moving slowly to and fro, like spiders in a web. How could he, the static, be connected by such close ties with anything so progressive, so resurgent? Yet without him it wouldn’t have come into being. He was a distant link in the chain of causation, but an essential one. Hilda’s was the initiative behind the extension, but the money behind Hilda had been his. He put the thought away from him, disliking it, but a flush of proprietorship persisted, and he walked boldly across to the new wing and stood among the white-washed barrels which held the scaffolding poles and all the intricate edifice of cross-bars and rigging.
“Look out, Governor,” said a voice from above. “This pail of mortar’s none too steady.”
The abashed governor withdrew to a safe distance.
“Can you tell us the time, mate?” asked a stout man in a smeared overall which had once been white.
“Nearly half-past four,” replied Eustace in Oxford accents which, he feared, would militate against matehood in the ears of the workmen.
“Another bloody half-hour,” said the man, but he spoke with resignation not with rancour, and the remark was curiously soothing to Eustace’s still uneasy nerves. The sun came out and washed the faded red of the house with a pinkish glow. Down the flagged path a nurse was pushing an invalid carriage, in which Eustace could see, propped on a pillow, the motionless face of a child. The nurse was hurrying, and the starched linen of her cap streamed out behind her.
The child turned its head and said something, and she leaned over it and said, “All right, you’ll get your tea in a minute.”
“And so will some of us poor b——s,” observed one of the workmen in a loud aside, no doubt intended for the nurse’s ears. She looked up and away again, and the man grinned down at Eustace and winked.
“Wish we were cripples, chum,” he said in a friendly tone. “They don’t half have a good time here. Nurses to dress ’em and bath ’em and kiss ’em good-night. And the boss is a real Lady Godiva.”
The “boss” must mean Hilda. Feeling a little guilty, Eustace smiled at the man as knowingly as he knew how to, and wished him good-day. Then he went to the front door.
A maid with a hospital nurse’s indefinable touch of authority answered his ring.
“Is Miss Cherrington in?”
The maid’s demeanour suggested that if she was she might not necessarily want to see Eustace.
“Have you an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“What name, please?”
“Mr. Eustace Cherrington.”
The maid pursed her lips and looked slightly incredulous.
Am I very shabby? thought Eustace. Was that why the workman called me ‘mate’ and ‘chum’? It was not then the fashion at Oxford to take much trouble with one’s clothes. Perhaps the maid was merely thinking that Hilda must be a phœnix without kith and kin. But her manner relaxed somewhat as she said, “Come this way, please.”
After he had sat for a moment in the little white-panelled waiting-room another, rather older maid came in. She looked mysterious and important.
“Were you waiting for Miss Cherrington?” she said.
Eustace said he was.
“I will see if Miss Cherrington is free,” said the maid, and went away still with her air of preoccupation. After a brief interval she reappeared, this time with an expression of amusement.
“Miss Cherrington will be at liberty in a few minutes.”
The amusement was for him, of course. Eustace felt smaller and smaller. How much more important than he was this institution that he had helped to create! He was, and would always remain, the most private of private persons. No maidservant, certainly no succession of maidservants, would scrutinise his visitors, or defend his precious leisure from the incursions of the outside world. He would never have the kind of position that overflows the bounds of its owner’s personality, and commands respect and awe in those who have never met him. He would never belong to the public, as Hilda had begun to do.
Something stirred in him. Could it be jealousy? He hoped not. He did not mind taking a back seat. He rather enjoyed playing second fiddle. For this trait his friends at Oxford, dabblers in the new psychology, had found a technical, and pejorative, name. Eustace, defending himself, argued that it was humility, one of the foremost Christian virtues; but might the real explanation be that in acknowledging himself a poor creature, he was forestalling the criticism, and disappointment, of those who expected, or said they expected, ‘great things’ from him? Anyhow, he thought, Hilda is my memorial; she is making her mark in the world, she is my justification; she, the Lady Godiva of Highcross Hill. A flush of pride in her brought back to his mind the letter in his pocket—the letter that might bring them together again, partners in the same field.
The maid—the other maid this time—was again standing before him. She was struggling to keep a straight face, and Eustace felt irritated. What was there so laughable about him? Composing her features to an impersonal expression, she said: “Miss Cherrington will see you now.”
He followed her across the white, light hall, up the broad, shallow staircase, to the door of Hilda’s room. From inside came the so
und of voices.
“Mr. Cherrington,” said the maid.
Hilda was standing in the middle of the room, her face convulsed with laughter, and in a chair opposite sat Stephen, who didn’t seem to know at all how to behave in the presence of this paroxysm.
“Oh, Eustace, it was so funny,” Hilda burst out without preamble. “Mr. Hilliard had very kindly come down to see me on business —a bit of land at the back that we’ve been trying to buy for the clinic. I can’t think why he came—it’s such a small matter—but he did. So when I’d shown him round the clinic, as I show everybody, he went out to look at the new property, as he likes to call it. It’s a chicken-run really, the man keeps about thirty fowls there. Well, when he had assured himself that there were no Ancient Lights or other snags—of course I could have done that quite well myself—he said how interesting it would be to look inside one of the chicken-houses, and know what it felt like to be a hen. You did, Mr. Hilliard,” she added, for seeing the incredulous, indeed shocked expression on Eustace’s face, Stephen had opened his mouth as though to protest. “So he crept inside, and out of curiosity I followed—it was a squeeze, I can tell you. Then suddenly the thing tilted up—from our weight, I suppose—and for a moment we couldn’t get out. It was just then that Alice came to look for me. Of course she couldn’t see us, but she saw the chicken-house rocking up and down and heard us inside, and guessed what had happened. She’s a farm labourer’s daughter and knows about farmyard life, so she hung on to the end of the chicken-house, and brought it level, and we got out backwards, one after the other. I’ve never laughed so much.”
Utterly irrepressible, Hilda’s laughter returned and shook her from head to foot. Still lovely in mirth, she turned to share it with Stephen; he tried to join in, but with only partial success, and his pale face went as red as a beetroot.
Eustace and Hilda Page 36