Nelly stays on till the end of the month, but the silly rush to the shores of Lake Como has already begun and soon there won’t be a pig left in Gadara. If you are feeling dull, and inclined for further dullness, come out here. I shall be pleased to see you, and Venice looks its best in October. Later on I go south. Why not join me in Rome for Christmas? You will see a lot of old faces, if that’s any inducement. I suppose it’s too much to ask you to write—the young never do—but you have my address. I write to the one you gave me, though I don’t find it very credible. What does Cambo mean?
Yours,
JASPER BENTWICH.
The head growled but the tail wagged. Lady Nelly’s letter had a nice ending too. Eustace couldn’t quite remember how it went. There would be no harm in just putting the pieces together, and he might even keep as a memento the fleur-de-lis on the flap of the envelope, a device which, for some obscure but exciting heraldic reason—perhaps descent from the Bourbons—she was privileged to use. How distinguished, how personal her writing-paper was, this special paper which she kept for her special friends. The part at the beginning he knew almost by heart. She had felt after all she couldn’t keep his watch, it was much too pretty; besides, “Why should I need anything of yours so long as I have you?” And if he meant the watch to be a parting gift, as she suspected he might, then all the more, she felt, must she repudiate it. “Nothing is farther from my mind than an illegal separation.” And really she didn’t need a watch: “As you’ll remember, I rely on other people to be punctual.” Though broken at the joins, the lovely curves of her handwriting began to resume their sweep and sway. Here was Jasper’s tribute to her late guest—“And from Jasper of all people!”—and Countess Loredan’s characteristic comment: “Of course you paid him no attention, Nelly, so he had to go away!” The general impression was of deep mourning on the Piazza: “I never saw so many people in black.” Then the reference to Hilda—“an absolutely certain cure at Le Thillot, in the Vosges—rather expensive, I’m afraid, but I’m making inquiries. The best thing in nervous cases—and, believe me, I’ve had some experience—is absolute segregation from relations. No relation, however distant, however near, however dear, must cross the threshold. At the mere sound of a relation, one’s nerves wither.” This brought her to Anchorstone where “I used to suffer tortures, simply because those dear people were relations”; and a misprint that had amused her, something about sculpting one’s relation’s hips.
But all the same, Eustace, I think you should pay them a visit, they would appreciate it, and you are so suited to carrying an olive branch. Vendettas are such a bore, don’t you think? however much one is in the right. But what I rather hope is that you’re back in nice cosy Willesden with your sister enthroned at the clinic. In any case, you must keep the second week-end in October for Whaplode: Antony and I went into the whole thing most carefully so that there should be no mistake—I’ve persuaded him that an historian should be more date-conscious—so you’ll be there, won’t you? No shirking. Oxford doesn’t begin until mid-October, if then.
Some more people have been here—darlings in their way, but I don’t think they would have interested you. A hard-drinking lot, Tonino tells me, but I expect you’ve forgotten the Wideawake Bar?
You’ll know who this comes from. I’m too tired, dearest Eustace, and too utterly devoted to sign myself anything but
N.
Eustace looked up in a dream to see Minney standing at his shoulder. He jumped.
“Why, what are you up to?” she said. “You seem to have been doing a jig-saw puzzle. You’d forgotten Miss Hilda, hadn’t you?”
“I believe I had,” Eustace said.
“Well, hurry along to her now, or she’ll think something’s happened to you. People get such strange fancies when they’re ill. I’ll clear up those pieces, or do you want to keep them?”
“Only these two.” Rather self-consciously Eustace extracted the address and the fleur-de-lis.
“I’m glad people don’t write me those long letters,” said Minney, advancing with the crumb-brush and tray. “I shouldn’t know how to answer them.”
The letters were destroyed, but their influence lived on, and Eustace entered into a troubled state of being in which the worse no longer seemed to exclude the bad. Not to be able to go to Whaplode could be accepted as part of his penance; not to spend Christmas in Rome, that too was a milestone on the way of expiation. But to disregard the advice of his tutor, that was very like insubordination, and wilfully to endanger his chances of a possible First, that was sinning against his career—and to Miss Cherrington’s nephew, if not to Eustace, a grievous sin. He would have to decide something, and quickly; for in spite of Lady Nelly’s optimistic calendar-making, Term began in less than a fortnight.
He wished he could consult somebody, somebody of stable, independent judgement. Stephen was the obvious choice, but Eustace felt shy of applying to him; whatever their future relations might be, at present they were almost inaccessible to each other, and it takes time for a new intimacy to thrive under the shadow of an old one. If he approached Aunt Sarah (whose sense of justice he respected) he would have to wear a white sheet, and this was distasteful to the new Eustace, the letter-less Eustace, now precariously in the ascendant. Jimmy and Barbara were his hosts, and they had a right to be consulted in any plan he might make, so he put the question to them, as casually as he could, choosing the time, about six o’clock, when Jimmy got back from Ousemouth, glad his day’s work was over, glad to be reunited to Barbara, for whom he felt and showed an increasing tenderness.
But they didn’t give him much help. Their demeanour showed that the idea of Eustace wanting to resume his studies at Oxford was new to them; they had their own situation to consider, and naturally couldn’t spare much thought for other people’s. Barbara said at once, as he guessed she would, “Of course you must go back to Oxford, Eustace. Leave Hilda to us; we’ll look after her all right, won’t we, Jimmy?” But Jimmy hesitated. The aspect of the problem that dominated Eustace—his moral obligation to stay at Hilda’s side—didn’t seem to weigh with Jimmy at all; at any rate, he made no reference to it, and he entirely agreed that it was a pity for Eustace to interrupt or abandon his work at Oxford. Indeed, he seemed to attach more importance to a degree than Eustace did. “But who’s to carry her, that’s the thing?” he said. “You and I can move her about, and when I’m out you can do it at a pinch alone; but Minney can’t, and Barbara mustn’t” (here Barbara made a face at him) “so where should we be? And who’s to take her in the bath-chair? She doesn’t want a nurse, and the doctor says she doesn’t need one, and anyhow, they’re damned expensive. Why not ask Hilda herself?”
But Eustace could not bring himself to do that. It would be forcing Hilda’s hand: she would be almost bound to release him. Besides, the more he thought of it—and his thoughts, forbid them though he might, would fly to Oxford—the less was he able to see himself basking in the intellectual or the festal glow while Hilda sat, alone or without any real companionship, at Anchorstone, unable to get out, unable perhaps to move from her room, while the days grew darker and shorter and colder, and the interest in life, which even he could not always keep alight in her strained, tired, listless eyes, gradually flickered out. No, it could not be done.
But surely something could be done. Eustace had lost the singleness of purpose he had enjoyed before the letters came. Then he had acquiesced in Hilda’s illness; now he rebelled against it. He reviewed his relationship with Hilda. After all, it was as much to her advantage as to his that she should get well. Dr. Speedwell, benign and cheery, came twice a week, but he had nothing new to suggest. “You are your sister’s best medicine,” he would say, “and should be taken in frequent doses.” This pleasantry got a little on Eustace’s nerves. The mixture as before didn’t seem to be doing Hilda much good.
“You said a shock might cure her,” he remarked diffidently.
“Yes, but it must be the right kind of shock, and
I’m afraid I haven’t got the prescription. Bursting a paper bag wouldn’t do—it’s got to be mental as well as physical.”
The routine of Hilda’s existence was specially designed to preclude shocks. Not only was she carried from room to room, and up and down stairs, with every precaution not to jolt her, but she was never told anything that might upset her. The banquet of life, so far as she partook of it, had to be predigested for her.
Eustace wondered if they were on the wrong tack, and on his solitary bicycle rides, and during his night walks, almost as solitary, with Hilda, when automatically he waited for the answer which did not come, he tried to imagine the kind of shock that might restore her. Something in the nature of a practical joke, he supposed; startling, even alarming for the moment, but quickly over. The mere idea of a practical joke was abhorrent to the old Eustace, but the serried moustaches of the new one harboured it without turning a hair.
One night, when he was pushing her along the cliff, in an interval of that dialogue which was like talking to himself, the idea came to him. He had taken his hands off for a moment to light a cigarette; and his heart turned over, for the bath-chair moved of its own accord a few inches nearer the cliff’s edge. Only a few inches, but the sweat came out on his forehead. When he had recovered himself he jerked back the chair and hurried it inland.
If the mere thought of such a catastrophe could so affect him, how would a dress-rehearsal of it with the cliff’s edge much nearer, and the chair moving much quicker, affect Hilda?
The scene enacted itself many times in his imagination, and always when Hilda realised her danger she cried out, and the spell that held her was broken. He tried to persuade himself that he owed it to Hilda to give the plan a trial, and more than once he was on the point of taking Dr. Speedwell into his confidence. But the words never got beyond his lips, and as for translating the idea into action, when the opportunity for action came, as it often did, he could not make the smallest move. His whole being refused. More than that, one part of him took fright at the other part that was issuing such treacherous orders, and insisted that he should provide himself with two large granite chips to stick under the wheel if ever he felt tempted to put his theory to the test. These wedge-shaped stones, bulging in his pockets, marked a return to the bad old ways; he regretted the lapse, but at night he never went without them.
This conflict, the most recent of the many that had troubled his mind, brought a new sense of strain into his relationship with Hilda. Whereas before he had looked forward to their evening outings as something that he did, unquestioningly, for her good, now he dreaded them; he could not reconcile the two voices, one accusing him of cowardice, the other of foolhardiness and cruelty—yes, and of something worse than those. The bath-chair, this mentor told him, would not stop at the cliff’s edge; he had a subconscious wish to get rid of Hilda, the albatross that was hung around his neck. A sinister shape, a shadowy third, walked at his side as he took her for her nightly airing, prompting him with evil promptings. He would not listen, of course not; but what if the insidious whisper should somehow pierce the ears he was stopping against it, and start some impulse over which he had no control? The vision of himself as a destroyer came back to him.
Eustace tried to sterilise these fancies with an application of commonsense. At night it would be no use trying to scare Hilda; even by moonlight she would hardly take in what was happening; he could dismiss the plan from his mind until she consented to go out by day. Also, like The Boy Who Couldn’t Shiver and Shake (whose trials Eustace had studied even to the point of wondering whether some wriggling fish in a bucket of water might not do the trick), Hilda was not at all easy to frighten: danger only exhilarated her. In that case it would be better to drop the shock idea altogether, and trust to Time to bring a cure.
These reflections comforted Eustace somewhat when, Jimmy helping, he lifted the bath-chair down the steps and steadied its passage through the white gate. “Good hunting!” Jimmy would call after them, when he was in a jovial mood, and Eustace would try to think of a reply. Then the night received them, the night that had once been kindly and serviceable as an invisible cloak. Now it shut him in with his thoughts which, as always, craved the light, but looked out on darkness. He found himself longing for publicity and for the world to know the position he was in. All this secrecy, this stumbling about in the darkness, peering round for shapes, listening for footsteps, hurrying past lamp-posts, tunnelling into the gloom, made him feel furtive and sinister to himself. People would wonder what he was up to, slinking by them with averted head, and associate him with the things of the night, nocturnal creatures that prowl and prey. There goes the funny lady, yes, and the funny gentleman too. Soon they would identify the daily with the nightly Eustace; and in spite of the pockets free from wedges, the head held high, the warm revolving smile for all and sundry, they would recognise his black aura and nudge each other.
18. A BICYCLE RIDE
ONE MORNING when he was working in the drawing-room he was surprised to see a car draw up at the door and Jimmy get out.
A second glance showed him that the car was Jimmy’s car; but what was he doing here, at this time of day? All the morning there had been a subdued hubbub in the house; doors opened and shut, footsteps pattered overhead; more than once the telephone bell rang, and now here was Jimmy. What could it mean?
Eustace was stumbling on the explanation when in came Barbara. She seemed to be carrying a great many things, and Jimmy, who followed her, was even more heavily laden. A sense of happy urgency, combined with mystery, came from Barbara; Jimmy looked at once sheepish, anxious and triumphant.
“Well, darling,” said Barbara, bearing down on Eustace with all sail set, “don’t get up from your books, and don’t look scared, but the moment’s come, at least they tell me it has. I’m sure it’s a false alarm and you’ll see me back to-morrow, but if they are right, James Edward isn’t pretending any more. Dear, dear Eustace, I’m going to make an honest uncle of you. You will be his godfather, won’t you? I’ve told Jimmy I want him to grow up exactly like you.”
“Oh no,” cried Eustace, glancing at Jimmy with dismay. “No. You must make him quite different from me. I’ll tell you how later on. You must let him——” He stopped, realising that Barbara had been putting a brave face on things, and this wasn’t the moment to start a serious discussion on her child’s upbringing. Why had she kept her preparations so secret, as if they were something that didn’t matter, how had she the courage to smile now, even if it was a forced smile, as though all the world were at her feet, when she had this ordeal before her? He had never imagined that he had anything to learn from Barbara. Looking at her radiant face and her huge unwieldy body which she managed with so much unconscious dignity, he felt proud and humble, uplifted and abased.
“Now, Babs, you mustn’t wait about,” said Jimmy.
“But I shall wait,” said Barbara. “Why, I may not see Eustace again for ages, and he’s my best, my only brother! How I came to have such a clever brother I’ve never understood. Of course I never talk to him, I never open my mouth to him, I don’t dare to; I just watch the marvellous things he does, and listen to his words of wisdom, quite mum. But now I’m in a privileged position, so I shall talk for once, and tell him how fond I am of him—from afar, of course—just as fond as Hilda and Lady Nelly and Countess Lorryvan and all those other grand people.” And bending down she covered Eustace’s face with kisses.
“I don’t know why I’m saying all this,” she went on rather breathlessly, “only I’m going away and leaving you with Hilda—it’s a bit dull for you, isn’t it? Poor old Hilda, I’ve said good-bye to her—that didn’t take long; Jimmy doesn’t like me to stay long with her, he says it’s bad for James Edward, did you ever hear anything so silly? She began to tremble, so I knew it was time to go. But she was so sweet, she tried to smile. Well, I’ve said everything an expectant mother should say, so good-bye, darling Eustace, and listen for the joy bells ringing.”
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She looked around her, as though a little dazed at her accomplishment, and Eustace jumped up and gave her his arm, for the first time since they walked down the aisle together. She leaned on it heavily, or pretended to, and did not release her hold until they came to the narrow strait between the bath-chair and the perambulator, when perforce they walked singly. Minney was at the car door, half inside, arranging rugs and hot-water bottles. “I feel so important,” Barbara said; “I feel as if no one in the world was as important as I am. I should have liked the whole Gang to be here, to give me a rousing send-off. Some of them may be dropping in to-morrow; you’ll look after them, won’t you, Eustace, and make them drink my health?” Eustace promised he would. “And cross your thumbs for me or say a little prayer, or something. Oh, it does feel so strange to be going away! If I wasn’t so glad, I should wish I wasn’t—does that sound Irish? I’ll send Jimmy back to you if I can —to help with Hilda, you know. I don’t want him glooming around.” She was settled in the car now, tucked up and swaddled, her face looking small and pale at the apex of so much upholstery. Eustace saw that Jimmy’s large, bony hands were trembling on the wheel, and he kept looking back at Barbara as if to make sure she was there. “I can’t wave, I can’t move,” Barbara called to them. “Good-bye, Eustace! Good-bye, Minney! Come and see us soon! Love to Hilda! Love——”
Eustace and Minney watched the car out of sight. Minney put her handkerchief to her eyes the moment she had finished waving, and Eustace would have liked to do the same with his. Barbara’s hour had come and gone so quickly.
He turned back to what seemed an empty house. It wasn’t empty, of course, for Minney was with him and Hilda was upstairs, and the daily maid was doing the rooms. Hilda meant much more to him than Barbara did, even at this moment of her glory. But Barbara populated the house; her warm, contagious presence penetrated its coldest corners; when she went she took away much more than herself, more than herself and James Edward; she took a whole circulatory system of reverberations and extensions. Whereas Hilda’s room was isolated, as separate from the rest of the small house as if a sheet of disinfectant had been hung outside the door that Eustace tiptoed past.
Eustace and Hilda Page 78