Eustace and Hilda

by L. P. Hartley

  Eustace looked again at the boat and laughed to think of the melodramatic end he had imagined for his voyage. The little craft renewed its invitation: he stepped down the bank and found that it was chained to a stake, and padlocked. Never mind, he would ask Dick for the key.

  Crossing a bridge, he found himself in line with the front of the house, the famous front that was illustrated in railway carriages and books on house architecture. He walked out into the park to have a good view.

  It was early Jacobean, he supposed, and rather like the front of a college, with the tower over the gateway and the wings flanking it. Flints were embedded in the grey stone, dark, sparkling points in the ashen-coloured wall. No trouble here to identify his bedroom: his window was on the left of the oriel window, which was Antony’s. Mentally he marked it with a cross. Yes, Stephen, that is my window, the window of the room I sleep in when I’m staying at Anchorstone Hall. How patiently the centuries had waited for his coming! They were still alive, imprisoned in that proud building. Uplifted, he stared at the mass of time-resisting masonry; and the outline of the space of which it robbed the sky was becoming printed on his mind when he was gradually aware of another shadow in the background. Around, above, beyond the silhouette of Anchorstone Hall, dwarfing that nice little place, towered the tremendous walls of Whaplode.

  Eustace crossed the bridge over the moat and received a salute from the janitor in his top hat. Returning the salute, he followed the path under the windows. They came down low enough for him to see in. There, on an indoor ledge, were the helmets Antony had spoken of: three of them, one lying on its side; they looked forgotten and at once romantic and slightly ridiculous, with their air of dusty defiance, of issuing a challenge which had expired centuries ago, and which no one, not even a housemaid, took up.

  Eustace turned the corner, leaving the stream, no longer canalised for defence, to throw a wide, shining crescent of water, almost a lake, between the garden and the park. Grey stone gave place to red; the path dipped; he was below the windows of the Banqueting Hall, too far below, he was glad to think, to be visible to the breakfasters. Towards the end of the wide lawn a wooden bridge with spokes, half Chippendale, half Chinese, led to an opening which must be the flower-garden, for through the gap came a burst of brightness and flashes of white and red. Declining its invitation, Eustace went straight on and suddenly found himself standing on the edge of a little ruin. From the uncut grass, now nearly grown to hay, rose here a pillar, there a fragment of wall. Much was upright, but more was lying flat; some of the stones were quite embedded in the grass, which flowed round and over them like water. That long stone with a cross on it might have been a coffin lid; the broken octagon, with a criss-cross moulding much weathered, standing on a pedestal, must have been a font. On one side the ruins were bounded by the wall of the Banqueting Hall; clinging to its pinkish face were fragments of tracery, bosses, corbels, capitals; some had caught the rain and were crusted with moss; here a door seemed to have been filled in, there a window. Eustace tried to see the logical connection of these remnants, and make a mental reconstruction of the wall as it must once have looked; but the clues were all at different levels; the door was half-way up the wall, the window disappeared into the ground: nothing fitted. Perhaps there had been a crypt.

  “Taking a look round?” said a voice behind him.

  Eustace turned with a start. Dick Staveley was standing there; he was leaning on the font, with his arms crossed.

  “I’m afraid I was,” said Eustace, always apt to apologise for any activity, however blameless. “I was trying to see how all that tracery fitted in. This was a chapel, I suppose?”

  “You’re right; lots of little Staveleys have been baptised in this font,” Dick said. “But at the time of the Reformation the Staveley of the day became such an ardent Protestant that he pulled the chapel down and used the stones for building purposes.”

  “What a vandal!” Eustace hoped this was not too strong a word to use of Dick’s ancestor.

  “Yes, and it’s said he had the site deconsecrated; do you smell a religious spring-cleaning?”

  “I can’t say I do,” said Eustace. “It seems a charming place, and full of atmosphere. I should come here often, if it belonged to me.”

  “I like it too,” said Dick unexpectedly, “better than a church with a roof.... Are you going to church, by the way? There’s no compulsion.”

  “I thought I would,” Eustace said; “but first I wanted to get hold of Hilda and ask her how her hands are, only I didn’t know which was her bedroom.”

  “I could have told you,” said Dick. “But in any case, you would have found her name on the door.”

  “Of course!” cried Eustace. “What a fool I am.”

  Realising that if he had used his common sense he would have spared himself a great deal of worry, he was overcome with vexation and self-reproach.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen her?” he said.

  Dick straightened himself slightly on the font.

  “Not this morning. I must ask her about her hands too. Is she a church-goer?”

  Eustace thought a moment.

  “No, she doesn’t go to church much. She’s not religious in the conventional sense.”

  “I thought she might be,” said Dick from across the font.

  Since the last evening Eustace had pictured him as always in violent motion, and was surprised that he could stand so still.

  “She has very strong principles, though, and high standards,” said Eustace, astonished to find himself talking so intimately to Dick. “But they’re more to do with working hard, and doing good in the world—you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I think I get you,” Dick said.

  “She judges people by the work they get done,” Eustace went on.

  “Not by the way they conduct their private lives?”

  “No,” said Eustace. “I don’t think she thinks much about that.”

  “But I suppose she has a private life of her own?”

  Eustace hesitated.

  “With us, of course, in the family, she has. Outside the family, she doesn’t seem to take much interest in people except as they affect her work at the clinic.” He paused. Talking of Hilda, he heard himself using a special voice, deeper than his own, pompous almost. He could not speak of her lightly, try as he would. “Purely personal relationships would seem a form of self-indulgence to her, I fancy,” he went on. “Of course, I don’t know.”

  “You mean, she wouldn’t take them very seriously?” said Dick; and before Eustace could answer, he added, “Doesn’t she interest herself in yours?”

  Eustace coloured. His life suddenly seemed bare of interesting personal relationships. But he did not want Dick to think so.

  “Oh no,” he said airily. “She leaves me to go my own way.”

  How untrue that was; and yet in the sense Dick meant, it was true.

  “And you leave her to go hers? You don’t feel you ought to play the heavy father to her?”

  Eustace laughed.

  “It wouldn’t be any good me trying. You see, she’s a good deal older than I am. Even my father, when he was alive, never exercised much parental control over her, and Mother died while she was a child.”

  “So you’re all alone in the world—orphans of the storm?”

  “Except for my younger sister, who’s married now, and my aunt, who makes a home for us. We have no other near relations.”

  “I see,” said Dick. “No one to mind what you do.” He leaned over the font and, taking hold of a bit of masonry that stuck out, tooth-like, from the gash in its side, wrenched the fragment off.

  To Eustace it was as if the stone cried out, and he could not hide the pain he felt.

  “Don’t distress yourself,” said Dick, smiling, “it would have had to come off, anyhow. I’m just forestalling wind and weather.” He threw the fragment playfully at Eustace, who caught and put it in his pocket.

  “Is your sister as fon
d of old places as you are?”

  Eustace wondered what answer Dick would want him to make.

  “I don’t think she is,” he said. “Of course, she might learn to be. But she thinks things ought to be shaken up. She likes change and distrusts the status quo; she looks forward not back.”

  “She doesn’t let the past worry her?”

  “Oh no,” said Eustace. “She puts it clean out of her mind.”

  “She cuts her losses, in fact. Very sensible of her. Tell me,” Dick went on, “at this clinic of hers does she give parties and beanos and so on? Excuse me asking you all these questions, but I always like to know how my friends live. I’m full of curiosity, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh yes,” said Eustace. “She arranges entertainments for the children, Christmas trees and conjurers, and picnics in the summer.”

  “But nothing more—more adult? No dances for the staff, or cocktail parties for the parents, or midnight follies for the doctors?”

  Eustace laughed.

  “If she does, she hasn’t told me. She’s not fond of dancing, and she doesn’t care for entertainments as such. They’re like a bazaar to her, or a flag-day; she works hard to make them a success, and then they’re over till the next one comes.”

  “A clean slate again.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Eustace took a glance at the portrait of Hilda which, with Dick guiding the pencil, seemed to be growing under his hand. It was not quite the Hilda he knew, this self-reliant young woman who was always cutting her losses and wiping the slate clean; but it had many of her characteristics. Above all, it seemed to please Dick, and Eustace was always pleased to please.

  “Why should we stand?” said Dick suddenly. “Let’s sit down. You look a bit tired. Feeling all right?”

  All at once Eustace was conscious of feeling tired, and at the same time he was touched that Dick had noticed it. Picking their way through the long grass and the débris, they came to the remains of a sedilia and sat down. It was an austere kind of seat.

  “Damned uncomfortable these old monks must have been,” Dick said. “Still, we shall be able to bear it for a minute or two. You’re not in a hurry to go?”

  “No,” said Eustace. “I should like just to have a word with Hilda before we go to church.”

  “Oh, you’ll have plenty of time for that.... Smoke?”

  Eustace took a cigarette from Dick’s gold cigarette-case.

  “Must be a long time ago we met you and your sister on the sands,” Dick said.

  “Fourteen or fifteen years,” said Eustace.

  “As much as that? Funny I should remember it so clearly.”

  “I do too,” said Eustace. “I could find the exact place. In fact, I was going to ask you if you’d mind if Hilda and I walked there this afternoon, just to see what it was like.”

  Dick seemed amused at this request.

  “Of course. We could all go, if you like, and take our shrimping nets. I dare say we could find some. Unless”—Dick paused—“unless they happen to have made some other plan.”

  “Oh, in that case——” cried Eustace.

  “Well, we’ll see. Do you remember Nancy Steptoe, the girl who was with us that day?”

  “Yes indeed,” said Eustace. “I’ve often wondered what happened to her.”

  “She married a smart-looking chap called Alberic,” said Dick; “but he turned out no good. I don’t know whether they’re still together. Better not to marry, don’t you think?”

  Memories of Barbara’s rather hugger-mugger but happy-seeming nuptials drifted into Eustace’s mind.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

  Dick pulled up a piece of grass and sucked it.

  “I notice you haven’t taken the plunge,” he said.

  “I’m not in a position to,” Eustace answered, “yet.”

  “I guarantee,” said Dick, “you’ll have more fun sunning yourself on the Lido with Aunt Nelly than you would setting up a house and paying people to push perambulators.”

  “Oh, did Lady Nelly tell you about that?” said Eustace.

  “Yes, you made quite a hit with her, you know. Charming woman—but I’m sure she’s been a lot happier since my lamented uncle died. He was a mill-stone round her neck. Never let yourself get tied up, that’s my motto. It seems to be the motto of a good many people in this house.”

  Just as he spoke Sir John and Lady Staveley came through the iron gate and passed close by without noticing them. Though they were walking in the opposite direction, they had the dedicated and purposeful air of people going to church.

  “There, you see,” Eustace ventured to say.

  “Well, yes. My father always likes to be ten minutes early for church, so Mama has to be too, to oblige him. It all ends in that.”

  “What does?” asked Eustace.

  “Marriage. Unless it first goes on the rocks.”

  “Well,” said Eustace vaguely, “I suppose there has to be a certain amount of give and take.”

  As soon as he had uttered this remark he was ashamed of its triteness. At Oxford his friends might have quoted it against him. ‘Eustace says there has to be a certain amount of give and take in marriage.’ He would have had to live it down. But Dick did not appear to be conversationally fastidious, for he only said, “That sort of bargaining doesn’t appeal to me. Hullo,” he added, “the bells have begun. Did you think of going to church? There’s no compulsion, mind.”

  The sound of the peal filled the air with an irresistible sense of Sunday, which Dick’s tweed suit had somehow banished from Eustace’s mind. He had meant to go, but he felt something was hanging on the conversation and did not want to break it off.

  “Were you going?” he temporised.

  “I might, for a consideration.”

  “What would that be?” asked Eustace.

  Getting no answer, Eustace turned his head and saw that Dick, forgetful of his presence, was staring across the lawn to where, through the gap in the hedge, the gay, seductive colours of the garden gleamed. Over the grass the light, irregular interplay of voices reached them, mingling with the rhythmic sinking and swelling of the bells. But the speakers were invisible.

  “Sounds like the girls,” said Dick. “Ah, there they are.”

  As they came through the gap in their bright flowery dresses they seemed to bring the freshness of the garden with them. On the chinoiserie bridge they stopped and looked down into the water.

  Leaning this way and that, their slender arms continuing the pattern of the delicate spokes below, they made a charming picture.

  “They look like dryads,” exclaimed Eustace.

  “I wouldn’t call Monica a dryad,” said Dick, not taking his eyes off the little group, “or Anne, either, bless her. Your sister, yes.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” cried Eustace. “That reminds me, I must go and ask her about her hands, and tell her about this afternoon.”

  He started up, but Dick said, “Wait a moment. Don’t let them see we’ve seen them.”

  The trio drifted across the lawn, Hilda in the middle. Eustace was pleased to see that her dress, though again somehow more emphatic than theirs, obviously had the same intention, even if more loudly proclaimed, and she kept in step with them, although the spring of her stride seemed cramped by strolling. Their faces looked friendly, almost respectful, as they turned towards her, while hers had the air it so often wore with strangers, of explaining something. If their conversation had not gone beyond the question and answer stage, at any rate they were not silent.

  When they were hidden from view behind the angle of the Banqueting Hall Eustace got up again and said, “I think I’ll run after Hilda now. I shall just catch her before she goes to church.”

  Dick had not taken his eyes off the place where the dryads were last seen.

  “I shouldn’t interrupt their girlish confidences,” he said, looking up at Eustace and not offering to move. “They’re getting to know each other, and young wo
men don’t find that easy. Won’t your message wait till after church?”

  “I suppose it will,” said Eustace uneasily.

  “Then sit down again and tell me some more.”

  Feeling he had betrayed a trust, Eustace obediently re-seated himself on the pinkish stone.

  “What shall I tell you?”

  “Tell me about the first man who was in love with your sister.”

  The question staggered Eustace. It seemed unfair, against the rules, below the belt, the kind of question no gentleman would ask. In the passing of thirty seconds he discarded as many answers.

  “In love with her?” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” said Eustace slowly, trying to keep resentment out of his voice.

  “You couldn’t? You must be very unobservant. Well, the first man who kissed her, then.”

  Amid the confusion of his thoughts, Eustace suddenly realised that the bells had stopped ringing, all except one, which went on monotonously repeating its summons until his brain seemed to throb beneath the strokes.

  “I don’t think any man has, except me,” he said.

  “Oh, come,” said Dick, polite but incredulous. He rose unhurriedly from the stone, brushed himself cursorily, and fixing on Eustace, whose expression had got quite out of control, a look of sceptical amusement, he added, “You can tell me as we go.”

  The hammer strokes were ringing in Eustace’s head.

  “I’ve left something in my room,” he muttered. “You go on. I’ll catch you up.”

  “As you like,” said Dick, almost indifferently, “you know where the church is,” and they parted.

  ‘Enter not into judgement with Thy servant, O Lord, for in Thy sight shall no man living be justified.’

  Making as little noise as he could, Eustace shut the iron-studded door and sat down breathless in the nearest pew. The unpunctuality that he deplored and dreaded had again overtaken him. The very principle of lateness moved faster than he did: it always caught him up. Why had he felt obliged to go to his room, just because he had told Dick he was going? To make his excuse seem genuine, he supposed. A childish piece of self-deception, for Dick knew as well as he did that he had nothing to go for. Yet his conscience, or whatever did duty for it, had demanded that he should climb right up to his room and after searching his mind for something to remember, decide on another half-crown for the collection. Well, now he had brought it he would have to give it, and that would be a lesson to him. Eustace felt abased.