Only the trousers were missing. Eustace had collected everything else. It was too exasperating. None of this would have happened if he had left his tennis things at home; but he believed them to be indispensable to a country house visit. They were to wear, not to play in. Dick must not think him too much of a crock, nor must the servants. If he was asked to play, he had told himself, he could easily find some excuse. Sir John’s command had taken him by surprise; now his bluff was called; now he was punished.
There were two chests of drawers in the room and a built-in cupboard, with white doors. Both the doors were ajar, and at subtly different angles, which increased the impression of discomfort; most of the drawers were half-way out, and one had come right out, defying all Eustace’s efforts to put it back. Mixed up with the clothes which he had taken off, and which were lying on the floor, were some he had pulled out in his hurry; the ends of two or three ties peeped coyly over the edge of one drawer, a loop of his relief braces drooped from another. The swing pier-glass that always hung its head, and the long mirror attached to the wall, trebled the scene of disorder; and wherever he moved he saw two reflections of his thighs, too thin or too fat whichever way you cared to look at them, covered, but hardly to the point of decency, by his flapping shirt-tails.
They must all be waiting for him, getting more and more impatient. Where’s that Cherrington, or whatever he’s called? Why doesn’t he turn up? Not content with persuading his precious sister to get Dick killed, he keeps us hanging about.... And meanwhile Sir John Staveley, faced by an empty tennis-court, grows more and more irritable and vents his ill-humour on the innocent ball-boys. ‘Stop playing about! Stand still, can’t you? Don’t you know I can have you birched for this? Stop blubbering, you fool, for God’s sake!’
What should he do? Useless to ring, for the bell didn’t ring, and if it did, how terrible to face, after ten minutes’ wait, the raised eyebrows, the outraged stare, of the entering footman.
‘Did you ring, sir?’
‘Yes, I did. I’m afraid I can’t find my white flannel trousers.’
‘If you’ll excuse my saying so, sir, it’s not likely you’ll find them under all that mess. That mess will take me at least fifty-five minutes to clear up, and this is my evening out.’
‘Oh, I am so sorry.’
‘It’s no good your apologising, sir, I was only saying to them in the Hall, that, of all the guests who’ve ever stayed here in my experience, man and boy, you’ve given far the most trouble. We wondered where you had been brought up, sir, we did, straight. Not in a gentleman’s house, I said, believe me.’
Eustace looked round in despair. He had been through all the drawers three times; now he must go through them again. The first drawer stuck at an obstinate angle, and would not budge either way. Perhaps it would be best just to tidy things up, put on his Sunday suit again, walk composedly down to the tennis-court (only he didn’t know the way) and say in his most ordinary voice, ‘Isn’t it maddening, but I find that I haven’t got any flannel trousers (or I’ve left my trousers behind, or my trousers are lost, or the moths have eaten my trousers, or my trousers have vanished into thin air). I’m sorry to disappoint you, but these things will happen, won’t they? and three makes quite a good game. Yes, Sir John, those ball-boys are rather troublesome. No home discipline, I fear. They’re just the same at our place.’
What a drab prospect; but at any rate to face the facts and act realistically would win the approval of Stephen, who had often warned Eustace that he did not give facts their proper value. Dejectedly he scooped up some of the things from the floor and replaced them in the drawers; next the eavesdropping ties (he had brought ten, in all; how could he expect to wear them?) rejoined their companions; then the yellow felt braces, that seemed to be straining for liberty, were laid on the dress trousers to which they were attached. As he was doing this Eustace gave the braces a tweak; the black garment fell forward; and there, exactly beneath, like the sun in total eclipse, were the white trousers he had been looking for. All thought of restoring order among his possessions forgotten, Eustace struggled into his trousers, dashed downstairs and charged across the courtyard. By the iron gate stood Victor, a tall, solitary figure practising an imaginary fore-hand drive which even at this distance gave Eustace an uneasy feeling of being outclassed.
“Hullo,” said Victor, withdrawing his weight from his left foot and undulating upwards. “How quick you’ve been. Those girls are not down yet. Why do women always take such ages to get ready? Let’s walk along to the tennis-court, shall we, and have a knock up. No sign of the prodigals returning, I suppose?” He gave the sky a perfunctory glance, and looked altogether as unlike Stout Cortez as it was possible to look. “Feeling anxious about your sister?” he asked, amiably but with the minimum of inquiry in his tone.
Eustace said he didn’t feel really anxious.
“Dick usually brings ’em back,” remarked Victor with something like a sigh.
They walked in silence under the chestnuts, then Victor said:
“A chap I know told me he heard you read a paper at Oxford—something about Nineteenth-century Mystics.”
“Oh, did he?” exclaimed Eustace.
“I said he couldn’t have, because there weren’t any.”
“Well, not perhaps in the sense that St. Teresa of Avila was a mystic,” said Eustace cautiously.
“Anyhow, he said it was a damned good paper.”
This simple statement changed Eustace’s whole outlook. He had misjudged Victor. Far from being just a man at the Foreign Office, and a supercilious one, he had a fine, sensitive spirit which he concealed from all but Eustace. Would it be safe to pursue the mystic way with him?
Eustace thought not, but ventured to say:
“There was Emily Brontë, for instance.”
“‘No coward soul is mine’—and all that.” Victor’s habitual languor of utterance was so markedly at variance with Emily’s spirit, that Eustace could hardly suppress a smile.
“Well,” he said diffidently, “I think ‘Last Lines’ is more onto-logical than mystical—she had outgrown her mysticism when she wrote that.”
“Good Lord, what words you use. I don’t know what mysticism is, but can you grow out of it, like a weak chest or a tendency to chilblains?”
“Wordsworth thought so,” said Eustace. “In the ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’”—he stopped to clear his voice of didacticism—“of course Wordsworth was speaking of nature mysticism; Christian mysticism is different—it’s an aspect of faith, I suppose—and perhaps you couldn’t grow out of that unless you lost your faith. But nature mysticism may fade into the light of common day, or even be choked, I should think, by hard facts that stop up the outlets of the soul.”
“Quoting from your paper?” said Victor, genially suspicious.
Eustace blushed.
“Well, the last little bit.”
“You say that hard facts may—er—stop up the outlets of the soul.” Victor’s voice, like a pair of tongs, dangled the phrase distastefully. “But what I don’t understand is this. Isn’t mysticism a way of escaping from hard facts, and the harder they are don’t they the more confirm the mystic in his mysticism?”
Eustace heaved a sigh. “In some cases they may. But not all mystics are unhappy, or driven to mysticism by unhappiness. Blake was a very happy man, and St. Teresa was a very practical woman, not in the least afraid of facts. But all mystics have a commutative faculty in the mind which enables them, at the moment of vision, to be unconscious of all facts, or rather all facts but one. If they were conscious of the smallest fact, a toe-nail, for instance, separate from the experience, they would lose the experience. What I meant was, that a fact might become too—too self-assertive to yield to the mind’s transforming quality. Then you could have no sense of union with reality, because reality would be tethered, so to speak, to the fact, whatever it was.”
“Do you speak from experience?” asked Victor, swinging his racquet
at an imaginary ball.
“Oh no,” said Eustace. “I have no claim whatever to be a mystic. My sense of external reality is imperfect, so they tell me, but that’s not at all the same thing.” Just a blind creature, he thought, moving about in a world not realised. He laughed awkwardly. Victor’s unlooked-for sympathy had surprised him out of his usual reticence, and he wondered what this conversation would sound like if reported to Dick.
“That’s what I shall say when I miss the ball”—Victor gave Eustace a sidelong glance. “‘Excuse me, but my sense of external reality is imperfect.’ I must be a mystic, for I have a sense of complete union with the ball when it’s not there.” He leaned forward and swooped into another imaginary drive.
They came to a gate in the belt of chestnuts. “Here we are,” said Victor, “on the threshold of reality.”
The court lay immediately before them, a terracotta expanse flickering behind wire-netting. At the far end, by the little pavilion, two small boys, in attitudes of intense absorption, were bouncing the balls up and down apparently to see which could make them bounce the highest.
“It’s easy to tell Sir John isn’t here,” said Victor. “By God, I’ll have their blood.” His voice betrayed no anxiety to execute his threat, and at their approach the boys, with an admirable blend of dignity and haste, dissociated themselves from their game, and the smaller one began to walk down the court in an aloof manner, whistling unconcernedly at the sky.
Once inside the netting Eustace experienced the exciting renewal of personality that a tennis-court always gave him. He was on trial again, and though the sensation was not altogether pleasant, something in him welcomed it. He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. A boy advanced, and with a measuring eye bounced two balls towards him.
“Do you like three, sir?” He spoke in an awed voice, as though to Wilding or Tilden or Norman Brookes. Eustace shook his head and called across the net to Victor:
“I’m awfully bad, you know.”
“We all say that,” said Victor. “I expect you’re a dark horse really.”
11. DOWN TO EARTH
LADY STAVELEY had given orders that the curtains should not be drawn. Perhaps she thought that when darkness fell the lighted windows might serve as a beacon to the returning aeroplane, circling in uncertainty above the sand-banks of the cold North Sea; or else she hoped to catch a glimpse of it streaking past the great window in the twilight, and be the first to say ‘Here he is’ or (she must school herself to remember) ‘Here they are!’
She sat facing the window, and Eustace, on her left, with Victor Trumpington opposite, could turn his head and watch the daylight fading from the sky, and lingering on the heads of the white rhododendrons and azaleas, when their crimson and orange neighbours were shadows of their former hue. At a man’s height from the floor an open lattice in the amber wall let in the air and showed the true tones of the evening.
It had been nearly nine when they sat down to dinner. Now the meal was half-way through. The tension had increased, but the irritability and veiled recrimination had gone; hope was anæsthetised and they were facing the inevitable. They were, or seemed to be; Eustace was not. Their eyes told him, the consciously hushed movements of the servants told him, reason told him, that he had little hope of seeing Hilda alive. But his heart told him otherwise; the exultation he had felt at the moment of her taking off still glowed there, and glowed more brightly now that there was no longer blame and hostility on the faces round him. He could not testify to his confidence, for it would only sound silly and callous to them, and at times his mind shared their anxiety. Besides, they had given him no chance: the conversation, whether general or particular, had by common consent turned on indifferent matters, ignoring the challenge of the empty chairs. When they did speak of Dick and Hilda, it was in ordinary tones, as of people who had just gone out of the room and would come back at any moment.
“I shall follow your sister’s career with great interest,” Lady Staveley was saying, “and I hope we shall have the opportunity of seeing her again. I’m sorry she can’t stay over Monday. I expect her work keeps her pretty busy.”
“Oh yes, it does,” said Eustace. “At any rate”—he smiled—“she thinks it does. She always says that if anything happened to her, the clinic would go to pieces the next day.”
The words slipped out before he was aware of them; too late, he bit his lip. Lady Staveley quickly rearranged her remaining knives and forks, and crumbled a bit of bread. She was wearing a day dress, Eustace noticed, and almost no jewellery.
“You must persuade her to come again,” she said. “This has been such a short visit, and she’s hardly seen anything of the place. You missed your walk on the sands with her, didn’t you?”
Eustace said that didn’t matter.
“Next time you come, we won’t let Dick monopolise her,” Lady Staveley said. “I was thinking about your first visit, so long ago. Dick was only a boy then, wasn’t he?”
“About fifteen or sixteen,” Eustace said; “but he seemed very grown up to me.”
“It’s his birthday in July,” said Lady Staveley. “We were going to——” She stopped. “Excuse me, so stupid of me, I forget what we were going to do. Do you make a great deal of birthdays in your family, Mr. Cherrington?”
“We’ve always kept Hilda’s,” said Eustace, “for some reason, much more than mine or Barbara’s—she’s my younger sister—though as a matter of fact, Barbara gets more presents than either of us, and Hilda doesn’t really care about that sort of thing.”
“When is her birthday?” asked Lady Staveley.
“In May,” said Eustace, and something impelled him to add, “she was twenty-eight.”
“Dick will be thirty-two,” said Lady Staveley. “How young you all seem.”
Eustace saw that her lips trembled, and he would have liked to change the subject, but he lacked the conversational resource, and it was Victor Trumpington who said:
“Did I hear you say young, Lady Staveley? I feel older than the chair on which I sit.”
They all laughed immoderately at this sally, partly, Eustace guessed, because it relieved the strain, and partly because Victor was evidently a licensed jester, privileged to make jokes which would have been condemned as contrary to the canon if uttered by anyone else. Feeling that Victor had won his hostess in fair fight, Eustace addressed himself to Anne, who had no other neighbour except an empty chair. Lady Nelly, on Sir John Staveley’s right, seemed very far away, and Monica, on his left, hardly more than a blur across the red-shaded candles. Antony was talking to her; Eustace could see the line of his jaw; he expressed himself with everything he had, even his bones seemed to be articulate. A vacant place came next him, bristling with knives and forks.
“We don’t seem to have arranged the table very well to-night,” Anne said. Unlike Lady Staveley, she was wearing an evening dress and more make-up than the night before. “Mama left it to me, and I didn’t seem able to divide the family.”
“But you have divided it,” said Eustace, renewing his survey of the disposition of the diners. “Aren’t all the Staveleys separated, except Sir John and Lady Nelly?”
“We shan’t be when Dick comes back,” said Anne. “This place” —she made a movement with her left hand—“is for him. And there’s your sister, over there.”
Eustace glanced across the table, almost expecting to see Hilda materialise before him. He did not know what to say to Anne, whose hidden distress belied her brave words and the rouge which gave them colour.
“I’m sure Dick won’t find fault with the arrangement,” he said, “if you don’t.”
“He’s oddly particular about little things like that,” said Anne. “He won’t really be pleased to see Mama in a day dress. He has a great regard for appearances.”
“Has he?” said Eustace, surprised. “For all of them? I thought he was rather unconventional.”
Anne hesitated.
“In a way he is,” she said,
bringing Dick back into the present tense. “But not where clothes are concerned. He can’t bear one to be dowdy or untidy. He’s always on to me about it.”
“But you’re beautifully dressed!” exclaimed Eustace, looking in open admiration at what he could see of Anne’s lavender-grey gown, which seemed to him the height of fashion. He did not believe it possible that any Staveley, or any member of the aristocracy, for that matter, could conceive of another as dowdy or untidy.
“I’m afraid he doesn’t think so,” said Anne, with that resigned, almost welcoming acceptance of an unwelcome fact that Eustace had more than once noticed in her. “But I’m glad you do. And I hope he’ll like this, because I got it for him—to wear at his birthday party, that Mama was telling you about.”
“But you put it on to-night!”
“Yes,” said Anne, “I thought I would.”
There was a pause.
“Have you got him a present?” asked Eustace.
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” said Anne. “He isn’t easy to give a present to. But I’m going up to London soon. What do you suggest?”
Eustace and Hilda Page 47