Let no one ever try to guess what a child is thinking or is likely to think. Nina at eleven was a bundle of intuitions and instincts and lightning deductions. Never before had the possibility occurred to her of Dawkins being attracted to a woman, still less of his marrying one. The sublime egotism of childhood had taken it for granted that his life would be henceforth devoted to her service, but that afternoon it suffered a terrible shock. Nine had known the tender mercies of a step-grandmother; she had no wish to encounter those of a step-guardian. Personal fear was blended with personal jealousy. She wanted Dawkins all to herself. And, besides, Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter had a very decided personality, one which made itself felt immediately in the close confines of the drawing-room (very possibly Nina, child-fashion, was confusing scent and personality), and Nina had all the personality one room could hold. For her to meet another was like the drawing together of two opposite-charged thunder-clouds.
Nina, at tea, took note, with childish cunning, of Miss Lamb’s silence, and drew deductions from it at the same time as she forbore to comment. For Miss Lamb had much the same feelings as Nina. At the moment she had all that heart could desire, a house to manage, a man’s wants to anticipate, a child to cherish. But a lifetime of migration had impressed upon her the fleetingness of the good things of this world. Were Mr. Dawkins to marry, as she suddenly realized was possible, and were his wife to find no use for her or to take a dislike to Nina’s presence in the house and send her to a boarding-school, and all these were possible, too, then Miss Lamb would be cast out into an unloving world to begin again the dreary round of governessing or schoolmistressing. And in the very distant gray future (Miss Lamb mentally put her hands tremulously over her eyes and shunned the prospect, but she knew it was there) lay only the horrible dreariness of a home for decayed gentlewomen. Miss Lamb was sore afraid. So the two of them were very quiet during tea-time, and Dawkins, returning, was uncomfortably conscious of a state of strain in the atmosphere of the drawing-room, and of a reproachful look in Nina’s eyes as she glanced up at his entrance. But Dawkins, the thick-headed dolt, could not guess the reason.
During the days that followed the fear which had grown suddenly into the lives of Nina and Miss Lamb sank below the surface; it was not obvious, but it was always there, deep down. But the beauties of the surface were undeniable, and kept it hidden. That craze of Dawkins and Nina about running water blossomed out to the most amazing extent. The little green collapsible boat was good enough for little tentative excursions on the garden river, but it hardly fell in with their expanding ideas. One or two mysterious journeys by Mr. Dawkins to Thames-side boat-houses resulted one day in his carrying off Nina and Miss Lamb to Windsor and displaying to them a real motor-boat, a cabin cruiser with two berths in the cabin and a well in which people could sleep in addition, with a tiny pantry and galley, a most exquisite affair altogether. Nina went into raptures about it straightway, and did not even demand to be taken for a cruise on the spot, so busy was she prying into lockers and touching the shiny brasswork and the primus stoves and the handy canteen in the galley.
Even Miss Lamb caught the infection and was impressed by the cunning with which space was saved and the household convenience considered. And the bright solid paintwork and varnish were a joy to her; she did not blench when Nina and Dawkins together announced that very shortly—when the summer holidays came, in fact—the boat would be her home for days together.
This last decision had been reached by Dawkins in fumbling fashion. He did not understand his motives, and he did not try to, either. But there was an awkwardness about living in cramped quarters alone with Nina, child though she was. He looked to Miss Lamb to help him out of the difficulty; besides, there was no question of his inhabiting the little cabin with its five feet of headroom in the center; motor-boat cabins are not designed for men of his inches. And it is just possible that he looked ahead to an ill-defined future when Nina would be a child no longer and cruising à deux would be unthinkable to his sober mind—even if, as was highly probable, no thought of such difficulty ever occurred to Nina.
So Nina’s summer holiday was spent by the three of them exploring the Thames, the most modest of rivers which only displays her full beauties to the sincerely devout among her lovers. The Baby (that was the only name Dawkins’ unimaginative mind could devise after they had agreed that “Nina” untranslated would be inconvenient) nosed her way up-stream at first, past the glories of Cliveden and Marlow and Wargrave, past the ugliness of Reading and all the sweet beauty of Mapledurham and Cleve to the twin hills of Wittenham, until they reached that most definite of goals, Folly Bridge at Oxford. They went slowly enough, calling the aid of the dingey to explore the backwaters which were too weedy or shallow to accommodate the big boat.
And everybody blossomed out most amazingly. Miss Lamb’s elegant face and ladylike nose were burned to a fiery red by the sun on the water, and her skin came off in flakes, but she didn’t mind a bit. The careless life found her without a care. It was all so natural that Nina and Dawkins did not find it at all surprising to see Miss Lamb with her skirt kilted above her knees, splashing about in a backwater helping the dingey over summer shallows. She produced a most amazing sunbonnet which gave her an old-fashioned appearance which contrasted with her modern clothes as satisfactorily as mustard with beef so that she looked completely adorable. Her one failing was her childish fear of the primus stoves and their suspected propensity for blowing up the unwary, and this, as it happened, was of no importance; for Dawkins revealed himself in a new light as a cook of the first order. He prepared most delightful meals for them; they indulged in wild orgies of steak and onions, and he had a very deft hand for omelettes, so that Miss Lamb’s usually birdlike appetite expanded until she could hold her own even with Nina. And she showed no signs of thinking it out of place that at nightfall Dawkins should come into the cabin to kiss Nina good night while she was in bed as well in the opposite berth, in her severe night-gown with her hair plaited. The magic of running water had affected her, too.
Altogether they explored the Thames very thoroughly indeed, that summer. They made a mighty trip down the upper river from Lechlade in a skiff, leaving the Baby at Oxford, and spending a couple of nights in hotels. They paddled the dingey up St. Patrick’s stream and the Loddon and the Thame and the half-hundred other wonderful little rivers which contribute to the magic of the Thames. In fact, time flew so rapidly that Dawkins’ calculations were brought to nought. He had planned to visit the Lower Thames, too, to take the Baby down past the bridges and the Pool out to the Nore, but September only found them heading back for Windsor. They did not regret what they had missed; it had all been too lovely, from the lazy days of idle cruising upstream, and the long adventurous voyages in the dingey, to the morning shopping excursions in little, sleepy, sun-steeped villages and the vast meals and the wonderful entrancing evenings when the Thames looks her loveliest and stillness creeps out over the water.
There had been all the delights of swimming, too. Dawkins swam with the skill and power to be expected of a man of his bulk, but when they first started out Nina not only could not swim but was slightly scared at being expected to try. That feeling soon passed, however, when Dawkins found a bit of river three feet deep with a gravelly bottom and stood there in the sunshine in all the tremendous splendor of his muscular symmetry and invited her to join him. From rather timid splashings Nina passed in a few days to complete confidence, and soon with her hands on Dawkins’ shoulders would allow him to swim with her wherever he liked, although it seemed as if she would never, never be able to swim by herself and remember to breathe in only when her mouth and nose were above water. Then all at once toward the end of the holidays she suddenly found that she could, and swam a whole twenty yards toward Dawkins before it dawned upon her what she was doing and she started splashing again. Next time she swam properly, in her glaring little red costume, and by the time they came home she was already beginning to imitate Dawkins’ powerful o
verarm stroke, even though in her heart of hearts she feared she would never be able to copy the clean vigorous manner in which he dived from the counter of the Baby. And she was thoroughly sunburned and happy, and her thin face had freckled so much that with her pointed chin it looked exactly like a turkey’s egg.
Not one of them, not even Miss Lamb, was pleased to come home to the Other House and civilization and school again, but through the dark and hopeless winter they found a way of cheering themselves up, and that was with maps and imagination. Maps had played a great part in their river tour, and even Nina had learned to read them properly and place where they were and what was the nearest way to shops and water. When, during that winter, they felt the old urge coming over them they found that the surest way toward relief was to spread the maps before them and remember past adventures and plan fresh ones.
Miss Lamb discovered a new outlet for her tiny little talent for drawing, so far employed only in her feeble little water-colors and sketches. In the privacy of her own room, with copies of very old charts for models, she spent a good many happy hours before she proudly displayed to Nina and Dawkins the first half of the Chart of the Cruise of the Baby. This was a most wonderful affair—a long, long strip of paper bearing a pictorial history of the cruise. Miss Lamb had lavished detail upon it with the same loving kindness with which she lavished attention upon Dawkins and Nina.
Right from the beginning with its legend, “Here Ys Windsore,” every detail of the cruise was displayed in little drawings beside the windings of the river in the plan. “Here be Mermaydes” showed Nina swimming valiantly. “Here they doe offer up burnt Sacrifices” showed the mouth of the Thames and some one faintly recognizable as Dawkins dancing round a pyre—a little reminder of the time when Dawkins, summoned from the galley by Nina in her excitement over some passing herons, forgot that he had left the sausages in the frying-pan. Nina and Dawkins fell in love with it on the spot, and it was pinned in its appointed place as a dado round Nina’s play-room and added to strip by strip as time went on. Nina often told herself proudly that no girl in England had such a fine dado to look at. There was always something new to find in it; for it was Miss Lamb’s one masterpiece on a heroic scale—that one mightiest achievement which every one of us is capable of attaining once in our lives. It was the fair blossom called forth by the sun of happiness which of late had so warmed Miss Lamb’s spinsterly being. And Nina’s and Dawkins’ enthusiastic praises called forth the prettiest blushes to her fading cheeks.
Future ambitions blended with past memories. Nina roamed over the map of Europe seeking fresh worlds to conquer. Dawkins and she debated solemnly about the Seine and the Loire and the Rhine and the Danube. Nina caught her breath with excitement at the thought of penetrating past Vienna and Budapest even to the Black Sea. They compromised by deciding next summer merely on a vast tour through France—Dawkins with great diligence and by the aid of innumerable maps and text-books succeeded in discovering that it was possible to travel nearly two thousand kilometers by water in France without retracing one’s steps. There came a time when a casual remark from Dawkins enlightened Nina to the fact that the river system of the Amazon, seemingly, from the map, so well defined and clear-cut, was in reality half unknown, and that there were hundreds and hundreds of miles of broad tributaries as yet untraveled by white men. The conversation ended by their solemnly swearing to travel those rivers together, mapping and exploring, as soon as ever Nina was grown up. Nina meant every word of her vow when she made it, looking excitedly into Dawkins’ eyes; so did Dawkins.
Chapter XX
But that winter there were many other things to think about besides plans and projects. Nina was in IV-A now at school, and Dawkins was having to remember his entirely forgotten Latin in order to help with her home work. And Betty Slaughter had moved up to IVA too.
That was the trouble. For Betty, besides having a splendid admiration for Nina, would also frequently convey her invitations to visit her mother. Nina was fond enough of Betty—she was a splendid half-back at hockey who played up to Nina on the wing in true comradely style—but she hated those visits to Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter’s, hard though she would have found it to explain her dislike. Betty was the soul of chattering hospitality and her mother at the tea-table unbent to her most graciously. It was, it is to be supposed, that unbending which annoyed Nina. It did not ring quite true. Although it is hardly likely that Nina pieced together the evidence and drew logical conclusions from it in adult fashion, she nevertheless perceived Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter’s offhandedness toward Betty, and she sensed her entire lack of interest in children, and she was consequently suspicious of the lady’s ostentatious kindness toward her, flinching instinctively away from it. Let Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter spread her snares ever so subtly, Nina always contrived to avoid them while ignoring them, thereby nettling the lady considerably. There were queer moments at tea-time when sparks seemed on the point of flying; when Nina and Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter grew suddenly formal toward each other and oddly stiff in their manner—“bridling” would be an exaggerated way of describing it, but even Betty was puzzled and hurt at this vague friction.
These visits of Nina’s, however, undoubtedly served their purpose to Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter’s mind. For sometimes it was Mr. Dawkins who came in the car to fetch her home, and that meant a few minutes’ conversation with him while Nina was putting on her hat and coat, and Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter during those few minutes contrived to be charmingly maternal and hospitable and ladylike and womanly, all at once, to the deep impressing of Dawkins. It was surprising how differently Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter behaved when it was only Miss Lamb who called for Nina—and on the occasions when Nina was to go home by herself Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter verged even upon inhospitality in her anxiety to speed the parting guest.
Then of course there were Betty’s return visits, which Betty enjoyed so thoroughly and pathetically that neither Miss Lamb nor Nina could raise any objection to them. For well before it was time for Betty to go home Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter would arrive, tactfully attributing her earliness to the irregularity of the bus service, and she would talk away with Dawkins as hard as ever she could—to say nothing of the trip home, when neither Nina nor Miss Lamb would be present in the car when Dawkins drove them into Gilding again.
Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter was playing an anxious game with extreme skill. She knew she was fixed in Gilding unless marriage unfixed her. The little house was her own and all her friends lived in Gilding, and her little income which enabled her to move in nearly the best of Gilding society would be nothing in London—it would only mean a ghastly life in Balham or Gunnersbury, with far less chance of bettering her circumstances. The late Captain Slaughter (Gateson was her maiden name) had been before the war a professional man in the employ of the Gilding Urban District Council, and Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter just managed to make both ends meet by the aid of her officer’s widow’s pension, a tiny grant from the Council, an annuity purchased with the insurance money, and the government allowance for Betty’s school fees.
She was popular enough in the local women’s bridge club—i f popularity could be said to exist among those greedy-fingered women—but, curiously, the very women who were willing to double her no-trumps were strangely backward when it came to encouraging her presence among their menfolk. The sons who went up to town on the eight thirty-three and returned on the five twenty were deftly headed off from her, rather to their bewilderment, and Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter (with one eye on the quite well-off Slaughter family and for her own marketability) had no use for the husbands. Since the war one or two wealthy bachelors without hampering female relatives had sidled up to her and had sidled away again in time, but none of them had been half as attractive from any point of view as Mr. Dawkins. He was wealthy, he was almost good-looking, and passable enough in manners. He seemed a nice enough man as far as she could tell in other directions—in fact, it is to be believed that Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter would have been really and genuinely in lov
e with him had not the spirit of calculation caught her first. She was at any rate quite reconciled to the possible adoption of the plebeian name of Dawkins in exchange for her own aristocratic hyphenation.
In certain directions she found it hard to play her part well. She could not enter into Dawkins’ and Nina’s enthusiasm for ridiculous voyages under primitive conditions. She saved herself from wrinkling a disgusted nose at their excited joint account of orgies of steak and onions in the cramped cabin of the Baby, and she tried to laugh with them, but the laughter did not deceive Nina at all and hardly deceived Dawkins. All that sort of thing, she told herself grimly, would stop on marriage—a yacht at Cowes or Monte Carlo if they had to live on a boat, but nothing less. But for the present she tried to imitate their enthusiasm—just as she tried to imitate Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Nina. She played her cards with distinction, if not with brillance.
Dawkins, meanwhile, was moving steadily into society. At the golf club, with his handicap down to nine, he was a really popular figure now that he was not so cautiously reserved. For one thing, he had gradually grown quite keen about the game, now that he had other interests and could not devote all his time to it, and that loosened his tongue a little. He had to buy himself evening clothes, the first he had ever possessed in his life, in which to attend the club dinners. He found himself being asked here and there occasionally, for an unattached and reputedly wealthy male is invaluable for making numbers even or replacing some one who had fallen out. Once or twice in return he gave, after consultation with Miss Lamb, little bachelor dinner parties at the Other House, beautifully cooked and served, thanks to Miss Lamb’s anxious care, which helped him on the road to popularity. He received more than one assurance that if in the new year he chose to try again for membership in the Manor Club he would encounter no opposition. Things were developing quite placidly and normally when Mrs. Gateson-Slaughter decided to force the pace.
The Daughter of the Hawk Page 15