Miss Cherrington stopped and looked at Eustace. She could not tell what was passing in his mind. His face, which usually followed and even forestalled the changes in an interlocutor’s mood, and was never more responsive than when he was being scolded, looked stony and rather cross, and the curves that the habit of amiability had stamped on his mobile features now belied their spirit. And the smudge of moustache was like a scrawled placard closing a right of way. Another Eustace was wearing his face. Instinctively, if against her will, Miss Cherrington was impressed by these signs of male independence; she felt she had made a false step, and her concern for Hilda, whose fate she believed to lie in Eustace’s hands, made her try, almost for the first time in her life, to conciliate him.
“But all these are rather sad things,” she said. “You haven’t told me about your time in Venice, though you wrote me two very interesting letters. Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Venice?” said Eustace. “Oh yes, I enjoyed myself. I had a very good time, but I don’t think you’d be specially interested to hear about it.”
“What makes you think that?” Miss Cherrington’s voice had the ironical inflection she so often used to Eustace. “I hope I take an interest in all your doings.” She gave an uncertain little laugh and awaited, but not quite confidently, the facial adjustments, and the “well, you sees” with which he was wont to refashion for her benefit a story of which he knew she wouldn’t approve.
But he only said, “I don’t think that sort of thing is quite in your line.”
Miss Cherrington was very much taken aback. She stifled an obvious retort, and at that moment a bell, which might have been the whole house cheeking her, buzzed like an angry wasp. Eustace turned white, and looked quickly to right and left. Then Minney was standing in the doorway, her face portentous with the gravity of her errand. She nodded and beckoned, but did not speak. Trembling, Eustace got up and followed her.
Miss Cherrington scarcely noticed his agitation, so astonished was she by the act of rebellion that had preceded it. She had caught in his face what she seldom allowed herself to see—a likeness to his father whom she had loved. Yes, in this very room, though it was so different then, Alfred Cherrington, fortified by whisky and a cigar, had defied her to refuse Miss Fothergill’s legacy. He had imposed his will on hers. Eustace had been upstairs with Minney, having his bath; she remembered the gush of the outgoing water, she almost expected, so rife were domestic sounds at Cambo, to hear it again. Hilda had been taking care of Barbara while they went to the funeral; dear little thing, she always was a pickle.
The day Miss Fothergill was laid to rest, the day that changed their lives, the day that gave Eustace back to Hilda. But only for a time: school stretched the elastic; the war, Oxford, Venice, they all stretched it, but now it had snapped to again. What had she wanted of Eustace? In what had he always fallen short? Why was she permanently discouraged and irritated by him? Except that once, when he ran away, he always did what he was told. Why did she wish that he belonged to someone else? Why could he only do right when he was carrying out Hilda’s orders? Why did she resent her brother’s occasional outbursts of fondness for him? Was it because he reminded her of his mother, Alfred’s plaything?
Miss Cherrington nodded. Alfred was wearing his straw hat; it had a guard, a black blob with a cord coming from it that fastened in his button-hole. His fair moustache was waxed at the ends—no, he had taken the wax off: wax was no longer the fashion. He looked gay and dashing in his new suit, and she felt proud of him. But no, it wasn’t his suit, it was a present from Eustace, who had got hold of some money and put them all permanently in his debt. Eustace had apologised for that many times, but he wasn’t apologising now. He had grown a moustache too, and was telling her, in effect, to mind her own business, and she felt she liked him better.
The door opened, and she started and must have looked alarmed, for Minney, who was obviously labouring under strong excitement, began reassuringly, “It’s all right, dear.” Horrified at the slip, she hastily corrected herself. “I mean, it’s all right, Miss Cherrington. They’re getting on beautifully. He’s sitting close beside her and talking to her just as if she were herself. I’d taken so much trouble with her to make her look nice—you know, she doesn’t want to be bothered sometimes, and get’s fretful and fidgety like a child. She would wear the uniform, but I pressed it and cleaned it, and put her chair with its back to the light—the way Miss Fothergill used to, you remember.” Miss Cherrington frowned, but Minney didn’t notice.
“And then I did something I’d never done before, and I wasn’t sure you’d like it, Miss Cherrington; but she’s got so pale these last weeks, and I knew she must have some make-up put away somewhere in that lovely gold compact-set he gave her. So I found it, and oh, Miss Cherrington, she didn’t want me to put it on, she shook her head and cried, but I said, ‘You must think of him, too, dear, as well as yourself; he won’t like to see you looking pale, it’ll give him quite a shock.’ So at last she gave way. Of course I didn’t quite know how to do it, I’ve never done such a thing before, and I don’t hold with it, but they all say you mustn’t put on too much, so I was very careful, and I think she does look nice—you’ll see her before you go away, won’t you?” Minney paused for breath.
“I’ve already said good-bye to her,” said Miss Cherrington. “I’m not sure it would be wise to disturb her a second time.”
“Just as you like of course, Miss Cherrington, only it seems a pity. Well, he came in and was breathing rather hard, but he went straight to her and took her hands, which were lying quite natural in her lap, in both his and said, ‘Oh, Hilda, I am glad to see you,’ or something like that.”
“Did he kiss her?” asked Miss Cherrington.
“Yes, he did, and then I was a little afraid for the rouge, what with that little moustache he’s got which makes him look so funny—but it was quite all right, and you wouldn’t have noticed any difference in her except for the cast and the eyelid that droops and the stiff, still way she sits. And then he began to talk to her and tell her how much he’d missed her and how he’d been thinking of her, all the way from Venice, he said, and that he knew she was going to get better, and he would never leave her till she did.”
Miss Cherrington nodded. “Did he refer to her—to her other trouble?”
“Mr. Staveley? No, he didn’t say anything about that, not while I was there; he talked about the room and how changed it was, but still the same in a way, and how he was looking forward to seeing all the old places again and the rides they would go together in the bath-chair.”
“Did she agree to that?” said Miss Cherrington eagerly. “I think that is so important.”
“I couldn’t quite tell, because he didn’t give her time to show whether she would or not; he seemed to take it for granted she would. And then he started telling her about Venice, how it was all canals and bridges—so inconvenient, I think—and how he’d written a book.”
“A book?” queried Miss Cherrington almost incredulously. “How could he have written a book?”
“Well, that’s what he said; but he didn’t tell her what it was about, and of course she couldn’t ask him, that was what made the conversation so one-sided. You say something to her, but you can’t be sure whether it’s what she wants to hear or not; you get discouraged when she makes no answers, though of course in the nature of things it can’t be otherwise. You might even think she wasn’t interested, though I’ve got so I can tell when she is. And sometimes when she didn’t answer he’d turn to me and say, ‘Isn’t that so, Minney?’ almost as if I was her. And then he slowed down a bit, and seemed to be wondering what to say next, so then I saw the ice was broken and I thought they’d get on better with me away, and I slipped out.”
“Thank you very much, Minney,” Miss Cherrington said. “I am devoutly thankful Mr. Eustace has come back at last. Did you notice any difference in her, in her physical condition, I mean? I suppose it’s too early to look for that.”
“I can’t say I did,” said Minney. “But I’m sure she hasn’t been quite so helpless this last day or two. Mr. Eustace, now, he looked as if he might be sickening for something. We shall have to feed him up. Of course he never was very strong.”
“I expect he’s been leading a rather tiring life,” said Miss Cherrington, “and then the journey on top of it. But you’ll take care of him, Minney; he was always your favourite.”
She made it sound an accusation.
“Well, I used to think Miss Hilda was a bit hard on him, but of course she can’t be now.”
“No, indeed.”
“I expect he’ll be glad to talk to me, just as a change from always asking questions. He seems quite the young man now, don’t you think so, Miss Cherrington?”
“Yes, I think he has changed. When did you last see him, Minney?”
“About two years ago. Of course he hadn’t the moustache then. That makes a man look more himself.”
“Is it a moustache?” Miss Cherrington asked. “I thought he had perhaps forgotten to shave.”
“Oh no, he told me it was on purpose. You see, it’s only had the journey and those two days in London. I wonder if it will be stiff or silky?”
“He may not keep it,” said Miss Cherrington. “I mean,” she added rather primly, “men don’t always.”
The grinding of brakes and other smaller sounds announced that a car was stopping at the door.
Miss Cherrington picked up her bag. Arm in arm, Barbara and Jimmy strolled past the window, opened the white gate, and stood looking critically at the car.
“Shall I fetch Mr. Eustace?” Minney asked. “He said be sure to tell him when you were going.”
“Better not, I think,” said Miss Cherrington. “I shall soon be seeing him again, and if he’s talking to Miss Hilda, and helping her, he couldn’t be more usefully employed.”
16. A MEDITATION ABOUT SIZE
THE WORSE is the enemy of the bad, and now that the worse had happened, Eustace felt much calmer. Sorrow inflicts a deeper wound, but nervous dread deranges all the processes of living. Eustace did not realise how much he had suffered from the uncertainty of what was happening to Hilda until the smoke had cleared away and the full extent and meaning of the disaster lay patent to his view. Suffering tempers the spirit and hardens it. Eustace’s moustache concealed a stiffening upper lip.
He reproached himself with this, and took his spirit to task for not plumbing new depths of despair. He thought that not to worry was the same as not to care: how could he be sorry unless his pulse raced, his stomach churned, and his bowels turned to water? But though the winds of self-criticism blew from every quarter, they did not ruffle him. The sight of Hilda, the wreck of Hilda, her slight squint, her drooping eyelid, her embryo movements that ended in a tremor, had somehow brought him peace. The blow had fallen, and by falling had cured him of his dread of it.
It cured him of many dreads and of their inconvenient manifestations in his daily life. For many years his consciousness had been beset by the need to discover devices to forestall the future, amulets, sometimes clothed in a show of reason, against ill luck. Before he went out he must remember to take enough money to guard against some serious eventuality, such as being taken ill and having to enter a nursing-home which would only receive him on terms of cash down. His pockets bulged with duplicates of objects that he feared he might lose—handkerchiefs, keys, matches. He must have two watches in case one stopped (not an irrational dread, for he had given Miss Fothergill’s watch to Lady Nelly and his Venetian timepieces only flirted with Time). For extended absences from his base he sometimes took an extra pair of socks. Then there was his brandy flask, almost as heavy as a pistol and with an outline hardly less conspicuous. This, too, he discarded, for along with the other dreads that had forsaken him was the dread of death. Indeed, when Dr. Speedwell, grey-headed but still spruce and natty, said, “Well, young man, you’re not looking any too fit, would you like me to run the stethoscope over you?” Eustace refused, saying he had never felt better.
Thus disburdened in mind and body, Eustace felt a new lightness. It was not the lightness of ecstasy, such as he had known when he saw Hilda received into the sky, nothing like that, but a sensation akin to the physical release of shedding one’s winter underclothing for the summer. Realising he had overspent him-self and could no longer afford to hire a car to take him about, he bought, after some conscientious haggling, a second-hand bicycle, and on this he meant to visit the haunts of his childhood; but only because they were destinations that he knew, not with any intention of recovering the past: to do that would be childish, and he had put away childish things.
Meanwhile, there was Hilda to consider, indeed—a circumstance which more than any other contributed to his peace of mind—there was only Hilda to consider. His task, his life, lay with her. Care of her was to be his expiation. Eustace seized on this gratefully. It was the obvious course, something that no one could either praise or blame him for. It was realistic, and Eustace was trying to persuade his mind that his mistakes were not so much due to wickedness as to his habit of turning all experience into fantasy. The temptation to see things larger than life, to invest them with grandeur and glamour and glory—that had been his downfall. Everything, he told himself, could be traced to that; above all, his wish to aggrandise Hilda and make her the Lady of Anchorstone Hall. He had made her the victim of his size-snobbery; and what better cure for snobbery than to study Hilda as she was, try to accommodate himself to her moods, wait on her, and think of things to say to her?
He had never been good at monologue; his conversation, such as it was, depended a good deal on catching an overtone in an interlocutor’s remark and matching it with another of his own to make a shred of harmony that trembled into oblivion as quickly as the Lost Chord. He had always been tongue-tied with deaf people. With Hilda he had to be extremely explicit; marshall his ideas, find a topic and hold the floor. Those oblique approaches, that waiting for a sign in the voice, were no use at all. He found unsuspected nuggets of definiteness in himself and also the power to adopt a persuasive, even a commanding, tone; and it was in response to a mixture of the two that Hilda at last overcame her repugnance to the public gaze and allowed him to take her out in the bath-chair.
She would only go in the dark, however, which meant, at this time of year, setting out after their early supper. Methodical now, he prepared for their first venture by making a survey of the terrain; he walked all the way to the lighthouse with his eyes on the ground, taking note of ruts and bumps, and places where kerbstones had to be negotiated. The cart-track below the square had been transformed into a macadamised highway, fringed on one side by large new houses, facing the sea. Regrettable in itself, the change spelt safer and smoother progress for the bath-chair; still, he was glad when the road petered out in a semicircle weedy from disuse and the grass unrolled its carpet. He was nearly opposite the Second Shelter with its slate-blue roof, and these were the cliffs he knew. To tread the turf and see the green again was soothing to the eye and refreshing to the feet after the unyielding pavements of Venice lit by their whitish glare. Green, the colour of hope, was a rarity in Venice.
He stooped down and picked a blade of grass and examined it carefully. It was short and sapless and brown at the tip, and Eustace’s imagination could take no pleasure in it. But remember, he admonished himself, its beauty is in its essential quality; it is not the totter-grass, or the sword-grass, least of all the Grass of Parnassus; it is ordinary common grass, but a Chinese painter might have given a lifetime to portraying it, and that without any idealisation, each patient stroke taking him nearer to the heart of grassness in the grass. And this demi-lune of bird’s-foot trefoil, egg-yellow blobs shading to orange and red, it is not the strelitzia, the Queen Flower of Central Africa; it is not the Morning Glory convolvulus; it is not the Night-blowing Cereus; still less is it the Sequoia gigantia, the Big Tree of California, or the Blue Gum tree of Australia, ta
llest of trees, or the Cedar of Lebanon, the most noble, or the Banyan tree of India, the tree of widest girth. It is a hardy, humble little flower, quite content to be trodden on or wheeled over. But Titian or Botticelli would not have disdained to give it a place of honour in their pictures or found it less in keeping with the spirit of Flora than more imposing flowers with grander names.
So Eustace mused, and meanwhile his steps were bringing him nearer to the red-capped Third Shelter and the cliff’s edge. The hedgerow which used to cling to it so tenaciously had disappeared, a casualty of the erosion that was slowly eating away the face of the cliff. Far below, no doubt, among the débris of boulders that buttressed the great wall, could be found fragments of quickset, brittle, dried, and dead, that the birds used for their nests. Never mind; some time the ancient landmark had to go, and it had been, he remembered, a trap for paper bags and other litter; but it would have served, on dark nights, when he was pushing the bath-chair, to show him how near to the verge he was, for there was no railing now, it had gone the same way as the hedge, and the remains of the old one—a post here and there and a spar or two sticking out into space—were scantier than they used to be. High time that the Urban District Council, which flaunted their names and notices everywhere, took the matter in hand and put up a proper fence, even if it did fall down after a few years, for the place was not really safe, especially for people whose duty took them out after nightfall.
Eustace raised his eyes unwillingly, for already he had several times seen, and did not want to see again, the desecration of the lighthouse, the pharos of Anchorstone. Gone was the white summit with the golden weather-cock, gone the circular glass chamber, shrouded with dense white curtains, within which gleamed the rainbow-coloured lantern—glass behind glass. The building had been dismantled and decapitated, and the headless trunk, stark as the base of an abandoned windmill, had been painted a hideous maroon. But that was not all; a notice, now at last legible to Eustace’s short-sighted eyes, proclaimed: ‘The Old Lighthouse Tea House.’ All the equipment of the lighthouseman’s craft had disappeared: the larger and smaller flag poles webbed with rigging, the two low, square, whitewashed huts whose doors, defended by iron palisades, were kept so ostentatiously locked, the smell of oil which haunted the buildings with its secret and mysterious suggestion. The many printed prohibitions that made the precincts of the lighthouse a place of awe, fearsome to approach, had gone, and in their stead were hands with the index fingers stretched in invitation: ‘This way to the Tea Rooms’; ‘Ladies’; ‘Gentlemen.’ Before, you had been told to keep out; now you were asked to come in. The god had deserted his shrine and commerce had taken it over.
Eustace and Hilda Page 75