“And you don’t feel the same about being Mother’s secretary?”
“I enjoy it enormously,” said Joan. “Who could help enjoying living with and working for Mrs. Dryden? But .. . I don’t know . . .”
“You don’t feel settled. But of course you don’t: how could you? It’s hard enough, in ordinary circumstances, to settle to a job that one hasn’t chosen for the pure love of it. I hated my job at first, you know.”
Joan glanced at her in surprise. “But surely you chose it, Cynthia?”
“Yes, I chose it, but because I felt compelled to, not out of love for slums and slumming and dirty uneducated people. What started me off was simply ... well, a sense of justice, a social conscience. I was going to take up music: I was going to Berlin to study the piano. Not that I should have been good enough to be a professional, but that didn’t matter. I have five hundred a year of my own and Mother has three thousand, so there was no point in making money. But that was just the trouble. It seemed to me monstrous that I should have all that money through no effort of my own, while other people lived in dirt and dreariness and semi-starvation. For that plain and simple fact—whatever people may say about Capitalism and Socialism and Communism—there seems to me to be no justification at all.”
“Of course there isn’t,” said Joan. “But what can one do? What could I do? I have just enough to live on—to live on, that is, in the class to which I belong—and no more. I don’t see how we can alter it.”
“It’s altering itself, fortunately; very slowly, of course; but still, conditions go on improving and freedom goes on spreading. I felt, like you, that I could do nothing, or almost nothing, to help in that. But there are other ways in which one can help. You know how Mother is always preaching about education. Her idea is that freedom and prosperity might turn out almost a disaster if people weren’t capable of profiting by them and enjoying them when they get them. There are ten thousand things people need to be taught, if only one can teach them, and that was where I felt I might be able to do something. So I just plunged in, and how I hated it at first. Frank and Mother both say that you’ve got to begin with their minds and souls by giving them ideas and imagination and morality—a real morality, of course, not a mere set of prohibitions. I didn’t quite agree with them. I thought you had to begin with their stomachs—give them enough food and teach them cooking and the facts about food values.”
“What? Before ideas and morality?”
“Rather! There’s no good sowing seeds if the soil’s bad: they don’t come up. It was with food that I started off when I began work in Frank’s parish, but now we’ve got instructors who do it much better than I did, and we have child-welfare instruction as well; and nowadays—but you know what I do nowadays: give them concerts and talks about music, get up plays, run the lending library and take them down, a dozen at a time, for a whole day in the country once a fortnight. It all sounds very humdrum, no doubt, but we all enjoy ourselves enormously. Good heavens! If only I were a millionaire, I would move the whole parish, lock, stock and barrel, down here and turn the place into a village community with a church and theatre and concert-room, and kitchens and workshops, a herd of cattle and a vast fruit and vegetable farm and work and leisure for everybody.”
“I rather thought you were starting something of the sort already,” said Joan. “Mrs. Dryden was showing me yesterday the plans for the new hostel she’s having built in the paddock.”
“Ah, Mother’s told you about the hostel? It will hold fifteen people; and next summer, if it’s ready, we shall have them down in relays for a week at a time.”
“And by then you and Frank will be married. How long have you known Frank, Cynthia?”
“Eight years. He had had an article in some weekly or other about religion or education or both—I don’t remember—which Mother thought extremely good, and in her usual way she got in touch with him and asked him down here. Yes, it’s eight years next month.” She laughed. “Not exactly a case of love at first sight, is it?”
“When I got engaged to Norman,” said Joan bitterly, “I’d known him just five months. We knew nothing of each other’s real natures. We didn’t even after we had married. Isn’t it an awful thing, Cynthia, that people can fall in love before they know each other, and, even worse perhaps, that one can go on loving someone with whom one has almost nothing in common? I suppose you would say that isn’t really love at all.”
“My dear, why should I say any such thing? But it’s obvious that, the better one knows one’s future husband, the more likely it is that one will be happy. You know, at least, what you’re in for. If you fall in love first, you may find, I suppose, when it comes to making friends, that you can’t, that there’s no basis for friendship. But if you make friends first and then fall in love, well, there you are, safe and sound. I used to think, you know, that I would never fall in love. I never got in the least excited about strange young men as most of my friends did. When they came to me, all thrilled, and poured out confessions under seal of deadly secrecy, I had no confession to offer in return and I used to look on their outpourings as so much sentimental nonsense.”
“So it was, probably,” said Joan grimly.
“Yes, probably it was. Still, I envied them secretly and I began to feel that there must be something wrong with me. Not that I was incapable of friendship. Frank and I were great friends. Our friendship was like a strong, healthy plant that went on putting out more and more leaves. I liked him more and more the better I knew him. How could I help it? Everyone does. And then, all of a sudden, the plant flowered.” She laughed—an amused, contented laugh. “I remember—and Mother remembers too; she reminded me of it the other day—that when he first came here I remarked to her what an ugly little man he was. So he is still, I suppose, but we soon became such friends that I ceased to notice it; and then I began to discover how extraordinarily expressive his face was. Now, I don’t mind telling you, Joan, he seems to me positively beautiful.”
Joan sighed. “I began by thinking Norman beautiful, and then his face changed: for me, anyhow, all the warmth and kindness faded out of it, till now”—she pressed her fingers over her eyes—“I try not to remember it.”
“Think of another face instead, Joan,” said Cynthia.
Joan looked at her in surprise. “Another? Whose?”
Cynthia stood up. “If you don’t know,” she said, “I won’t tell you.”
Chapter XXIV
After breakfast next morning, Frank and Cynthia set off for church. Mrs. Dryden, Joan and Eric walked with them to the end of the drive and then strolled back towards the house. At the foot of the steps Mrs. Dryden stopped. “I shall leave you two to your own devices,” she said. “I have some work to do that will last me till lunch-time. If you want to do a good deed, Joan, you will take Eric for a walk. These town-birds want exercise. To my mind, Cynthia and Frank would be much better off climbing Bouldon Hill than sitting in that badly ventilated church. However . . .”
She turned away and went up the steps. The young people looked enquiringly at each other. “I’d love a walk,” said Eric, “if you would.”
“Yes,” said Joan, “let’s go. But I must put on some thicker shoes.”
She ran up the steps and disappeared into the house, while Eric stood admiring the scarlet leaves of the Virginia creeper that climbed over the porch to the upper windows, and wondering whether his aunt had sent them off for a walk together designedly or with no other notion than giving them an occupation. As he stood waiting, an upper window opened and she looked out. “Hallo, are you going, you two?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m waiting for Joan to put on some shoes.”
She nodded, smiled, and closed the window. Ah, it was a put up job, then! What a wonderful old thing she was, keeping an eye on people like a beneficent providence, giving them a rap over the knuckles or an encouraging push, making silent judgments, silent plans for their good. In a few moments Joan came out and they set o
ff together.
They had had several walks together since Joan had been living at Lannery and they had reached that easy state of companionship in which silence is no embarrassment. In the days before she had become engaged to Norman, Joan had felt ill at ease with Eric. She had felt an urgency in him that bothered and oppressed her. With others he had seemed restrained, almost unresponsive, and she had wished that he would be more like that with her. If only he would leave her free, give her time. She liked him immensely, but she couldn’t respond to those brown, darkly searching eyes of his, nor to the eager attention he focused on her. If he had been articulate, if he had expressed what he felt for her in words, it would have been easier for her, perhaps, to understand her own feelings and for each of them to understand the other. But he didn’t speak; he was too shy perhaps; and then Norman had come on the scene, so charming, so lively, and so easy to get on with. There was nothing oppressive or urgent about him, and nothing inarticulate. He talked amusingly, flattered her airily and yet, it seemed, sincerely, purveyed his irresistible charm with perfect urbanity. He had made secret fun of Eric, always referring to him as “your painstaking admirer” or “your laborious swain,” and she had found it impossible not to laugh. What a relief he had been after poor Eric! And yet, she confessed to herself now, what an empty, shallow creature he really was, compared with Eric. Since she had come to live at Lannery she had become really fond of Eric. He seemed to have matured and grown up. He was no longer the intense, awkward, inarticulate boy, but a goodtempered, warm-hearted, friendly fellow with still some traces of a shyness which made his friendliness the more attractive. She had always been glad when she heard he was coming down for the week-end, and twice he had asked her to lunch with him when she went up to London to see her solicitor.
But now, as he and she made their way along the field-path that skirted the river, she felt less at her ease than usual. She had been pondering on what Cynthia had said yesterday: “Think of someone else’s face, Joan.” And, when she had pretended not to understand whom she had meant, Cynthia had retorted: “O, if you don’t know, I won’t tell you.” What had Cynthia meant exactly? Was she simply expressing her own idea that she and Eric ought to marry, or was she hinting to her that Eric was still in love with her? How childish to pretend she didn’t understand! Couldn’t she have replied: “You mean Eric?” and given Cynthia a chance of continuing? No! Her instinct had been right. It was something other than childishness that had prevented her. It would have been outrageous to discuss it. It would have been like forcing open a rosebud, as she had sometimes done when she was a child, before it was ready to bloom. It must be left alone to blossom in its own time. Cynthia too knew that: that was why she had said no more.
They were crossing the footbridge that spanned the river and they stopped to lean over the rail and watch the long weed, like dark-green hair, waving idly in the unhurrying flow of the water.
“When will you be going up to London again?” Eric asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably not for a long time. Mrs. Dryden has asked me to go on being her secretary. I wish I knew if I was being really useful to her or if she has asked me only out of kind–ness. What do you think, Eric?”
“Do you have much work to do?” he asked.
“O, lots! There are lots and lots of letters to be typed and filed, and extracts to be made from books and reports.”
“Well, isn’t that proof enough?”
“It would be, if it wasn’t for the fact that she had no secretary before. Don’t you think that means that she doesn’t really require one?”
“But I thought it was all settled that you should stay here till . . .”
“Till the case was finished. But now that it is finished ...”
“Finished?” he said. “You mean . . .?”
“Haven’t you heard that it came on last Thursday?”
He stared at her in astonishment. “Good heavens, no! I’ve heard nothing. And it went through all right, of course?”
“Yes, there’s nothing now but to wait for it to be made absolute.”
“You’ve nothing more to worry about? I am glad, Joan. You’ve been having a wretched time of it, I know. What a blessed relief!”
“That’s why I feel doubtful as to whether I ought to let Mrs. Dryden keep me here any longer.”
“O, but of course you must,” he replied resolutely. “You seem very certain all of a sudden,” she said.
Eric laughed. His certainty arose, not at all from any decision about the question she had asked, but from the realisation that she was free, or almost free, and that if she were to leave Lannery he might lose sight of her. Yes, she must be made to stay at Lannery a little longer, even if he had to go to his aunt and confide in her. He felt that a crisis had caught him unawares. What was he to do? He mustn’t let her slip away from him again, and yet he couldn’t ask her now to marry him, that would be not only tactless but rash. For all he knew, her feelings were still involved with Norman. He hadn’t once ventured, during all these months, to talk to her either of Norman or the divorce; he had left it to her to raise the subject and she had never done so. But would it be possible to ask her if she thought that, some day . . .?
“You like being Aunt Emily’s secretary, don’t you?” he asked.
“I should think I do,” she said. “She makes you feel so marvellously alive. And I enjoy the work. I should enjoy it even if it was nothing more than the job of typing and filing. I love the routine and the drudgery of it. But it’s not only that. You see, she tells me of all her schemes and ideas and it’s extremely interesting. The days fly past with incredible speed; it seems as if we’d no sooner got started on Monday than the week’s over and Cynthia and you, sometimes, are coming down for the week-end. When I think of the life I led in London, bottled up inside myself...”
She had turned away, then, from her life with Norman? Was that a sign in his favour, he wondered, or did it mean that she had turned away from married life altogether? “You think,” he asked, “that everyone ought to have a job?”
“Yes,” she said, “I do. Leisure is no good to anybody, at least not to us of to-day. Our grandmothers may have liked it, but I don’t believe they did. I believe they sat and ate their hearts out and grew old from lack of anything else to do. Doesn’t it seem to you awful to live as I lived in London, with two servants to do all the work, two servants to work for two people, one of whom had nothing whatever to do but give a few orders and do a little shopping?”
“But still,” he said lamely, “there are people who are not married and have a job and yet aren’t happy.”
“Like Daphne,” said Joan. “Of course there are—thousands; but did I say there weren’t?”
“No, perhaps you didn’t. But I rather thought you suggested that marriage and idleness made people unhappy.”
“I’m sure I didn’t,” she said; “or, if I did, I certainly didn’t mean to. What I meant was that having nothing to do is almost sure to make us unhappy.”
“O, I agree with that,” said Eric; but he was thinking of Daphne. Joan’s mention of her name had startled him. He had shot a shamefaced glance at her, but he had seen at once that her remark was quite guileless. But now his thoughts began to run on that strange affair with Daphne which had already faded from his mind so rapidly that it seemed little more than a dream. He could almost have believed that it had never happened. None the less he must tell Joan about it before he asked her to marry him. That was quite clear in his mind, so clear that he did not have to find reasons for or against it. But he would have not only to tell her but to try to make her understand.
They were climbing the slope of Bouldon Hill and, half-way up, they turned to look back. The country had dropped away beneath them; the little white bridge which they had crossed only a few minutes ago had already shrunk to the size of a child’s toy. On their left, larch-trees shot high above their heads in hanging showers of yellow like the golden rain of a firework d
isplay, and, on the bare slope to their right, rust-brown bracken and scarlet-stemmed willow-herb rose waist-high. A felled tree lay at the edge of the path and he suggested that they should sit down. He had made up his mind to force himself to tell her at once about the Daphne affair, and he plunged in, headlong, without preparation. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he began, “something I want you to know, that happened only a few months ago. You know, don’t you, that when you became engaged to Norman I was hoping that ... that you . . .”
“Yes, Eric,” she said; “I know.”
“Well, after that,” he said, “after you were married, I felt rather bored with life of course. I felt, as you were saying just now, bottled up inside myself. And then one day I met a girl I knew whom I hadn’t seen for some time. She had been in the same sort of state as I, when we met. She had had a row with a man she was in love with. We had tea together. She seemed to me awfully nice and amusing and we chattered away like anything, as if we had both woken up for the first time for months. We arranged to meet again, and after that we spent a lot of time together. You’ve no idea what a relief it was to shake off the months and months of gloom and become all cheerful and irresponsible. It was just what I wanted and I fell in love with her. There are different ways of falling in love, you know, Joan,” he said solemnly.
“I know that,” she said.
“You do?” He seemed surprised that she should understand that. “But can you believe that one can fall in love quite frivolously, almost force oneself to fall in love for the mere fun of the thing? Not that I felt exactly that it was frivolous, but I knew perfectly well that I didn’t want to marry her. But I thought it would be very nice to have a sort of lighthearted affair.”
“And was she in love with you?” Joan asked.
“She said she wasn’t and behaved as if she was. When I took her at her word and told her I would put it out of my mind, she was quite annoyed and called me a turncoat and told me she had been beginning to ... to respond. She was determined not to let me escape, and at last, when we were staying with some friends, I looked out of my bedroom door one night and saw she had left hers ajar. She was waiting for me. She admitted it afterwards.” He broke off. “Does all this sound very . . .? Can you imagine yourself being really in love and then, when you had been disappointed, going off in a reckless, cheerful way with someone else?”
Venus Over Lannery Page 18