by Guy McCrone
But like David, Stephen also temporised. “I would think about it, Henry, before I did anything rash,” he said. “Have you got anywhere in mind?”
“No. Nowhere special. I thought David could tell me something about upkeep and that sort of thing.”
“Hullo, Uncle David! I’ve come down to see how your cold is! And to get your signature on one or two papers. Polly’s next door with the ladies.” Wil Butter had burst in upon him, virile, uncomfortable and full to excess of boisterous good humour.
David coughed a little to show his younger partner that he must really expect nothing of his frail condition. “Come and sit down, Wil,” he said feebly. “Glad to see you. How did you get here?”
“Train, of course. We walked up from the station.”
IV
“And how have things been at the office?” David asked. Not because he wanted, or, indeed needed to know, since both of them were well aware that the affairs of Dermott Ships went forward upon their prosperous way whether David was sitting in the Chairman’s room or whether he was not. It was of much more moment that Wil Butter should be on the spot to keep all the whips cracking. Still, David felt the question was expected of him.
“Oh, all right. Business a bit slow, but that’ll mend. I’ll show you this week’s figures. I’ve brought them. And by the way, I’ve been reading the riot act among some of these young clerks at the office, you will be glad to hear. Too much monkeying and not enough work!”
David smothered a sigh. Must he look at figures on a Saturday afternoon? And with this cold hanging about him? But he must not be so foolish as to discourage Wil’s zeal. For he well knew that the more his nephew worked the less he, himself, need trouble. Wil was, indeed, David’s sure shield against personal effort. The enduring of a pinprick or two was a low price to pay for his nephew’s assiduity. “I’ll be glad to go through these figures with you after tea, Wil,” he said, assuming what he felt to be the right expression of seriousness; and adding: “And I’m glad you’ve been pulling up the clerks. I must say I did feel there was a certain slackness. I had meant to speak myself.”
Wil smiled, taking David’s comments for exactly what they were worth. He turned to his other uncle. “And how is Sir Henry?” he asked genially.
“All right, thanks.”
“Lady Hayburn with you?”
“Yes. Your Aunt Phœbe is here.”
The three older men, each in his separate way, felt the vulgarity of Wil’s questions.
“Your Uncle Henry is thinking of a country place,” David said, as coldly as he dared.
“Good, Uncle Henry! Where?”
“I haven’t thought yet.”
“But you just feel you should be cutting a dash somewhere, is that it?”
“It’s not a question of cutting dashes,” Henry began uncomfortably. “It’s just that—”
“Your Uncle Henry is thinking about his position,” David interposed.
“Time he had a dignified home.” Stephen spoke for the first time since Wil’s arrival. Wil paid no attention to him.
“Well, you know, there comes a time—” David was beginning unctuously, but just then there was a welcome tinkle outside the door. David jumped up. “Hullo! Tea! Come along, everybody.” He was delighted to seek refuge from Wil’s gaucheness, even in a drawing-room full of women relatives.
“Wil! Wil, come here, dear.” Polly Butter, a plump, chattering little thing of twenty-six, sought to make herself heard above the general noise of teacups, greetings and invitations to sit here and there. “Wil,” she said when at length he stood beside her. “Here’s Aunt Phœbe. She’s just been telling me about Mentone.”
“Hullo, Aunt Phœbe. Back safe? How’s Robin?”
“And she says, Wil, that it’s just like midsummer. Fancy! Blue sea and sunshine and flowers and everything! We must go some time.”
Wil received his wife’s enthusiasm with a husband’s calmness. “I don’t know how you’re going to do that, old lady, with a boy of six and a girl of four.”
“Oh, I don’t mean now. I mean—”
“Talking about the Riviera, Grace,” Mrs. Dermott said, turning to her daughter at the tea-table. “Why don’t you and David take a run down there this Spring? It would do David all the good in the world.”
Grace, having poured tea for everyone, sat back and looked at her mother. “But how can I? What about Easter? I’ve promised Dave he can bring some young men from Cambridge.”
“Nonsense. You can put them off.”
Grace looked round the company of relatives seated in her large, ugly drawing-room, made sure that everyone was supplied, and smiled an indulgent, apologetic smile at her mother’s ageing foolishness. “Darling,” she said, “I can’t break promises. But you’re right about David. I wish he would go somewhere for a change! He hasn’t really been well since Christmas.”
Much to the surprise of everybody, Wil Butter picked up the thread. “Yes, Uncle David. Why don’t you go off for a month and take someone with you?”
“But how—?”
“Oh, the office will struggle along without you. I’ll be there.”
David did not quite like this. He knew very well how faint the struggle at the office would be.
“Go on!” Wil was insisting. “Go on; and if Aunt Grace can’t go, take Stephen Hayburn.”
“What? Both of us away from the office at once?” Stephen asked. The idea, nevertheless, enchanted him.
Wil did not even bother to notice this. He turned to his hostess. “Well? What do you say, Aunt Grace?”
“If it could be managed—” Grace said, smiling.
“Of course it could be managed!”
“I believe you just want to get rid of two old fogies!” David’s smile began to widen at the thought of himself and his crony Stephen on a bachelor holiday.
Wil grinned genially, thinking how very right his uncle was, gulped down his tea and held out his cup for more. “Why not fix it here and now?”
“You had better choose Mentone, then, and see how the boy is doing,” Henry said.
“Mentone, then?” Wil asked. “Is that fixed?”
David turned to his wife. “What do you say, Grace?”
“Of course, dear. It was my suggestion.”
“And you’ll come, Stephen, as my guest?”
“Well, it’s very kind, if—”
It pleased Wil, to be giving this exhibition of decisiveness. This was how he managed Uncle David at the office. “That’s that, then. And there’s no more to be said.”
Chapter Ten
“LOOK, Denise!”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?”
Denise and Robin were sitting on mule-back high above Mentone. They had come up by the cobbled track that leads to the old hill town of Castellar, then continues over a gap in the lofty mountain wall down into the first valley of Italy. A track which, though it looks nothing, has played some part in European history.
They had stopped on the hill above the cemetery to allow their animals to breathe. Here the way runs level, giving sweeping views of the bay of Garavan and the mountains.
And on this afternoon of March it was indeed beautiful. Far down there beneath them, the bay, placid and blue, lay, closely ringed about by white villas. Other houses, more scattered, stood embedded in the woods of the lower hillside. Higher, the silver-green of the olive tree, the richer greens of the orange and the lemon; next came the steeply ascending terraces of vines, of vegetables, of spring flowers. Still higher, the weathered limestone rocks sparsely covered with heath and thorn; and above all of these, the massive precipices, grey and towering, their edges hard and broken cutting into the blue of the clear springtime sky.
“Glad I dragged you away for the afternoon?”
Denise smiled in reply. She had come to a halt in her work, and was glad to fall in with Robin’s proposal that they should hire mules and ride to Castellar for tea. Yes. It was pleasant up here with the perfume of narcissi heavy in he
r nostrils and all the glory of the Riviera spring about her. “Ready to go on?” she asked after a moment, turning her mule’s head and letting Robin follow along the stony path.
Why had this excitable young Scotsman attached himself to her? Denise found herself wondering, as her animal ambled along, taking its own time. Robin’s enthusiasm for herself was so young, so callow, so unselfconscious and, if you really thought about it, so silly. The enthusiasm of a spoilt boy. But not of a stupid boy. Nor yet of a dull boy. Yes. Bright was the word for him; bright and quick. He would snatch your thoughts from you and throw them back embroidered with his own kind of fantasy. That was it. Robin amused her, kept her alert and stimulated.
Swaying easily to the sure-footed steps of her grey mount as it picked its way by the side of vineyards and through groves of gnarled olive-trees, Denise, with her monk’s cassock and close-curled head, was looking more like a young saint in a church window than ever. A shining, mediæval boy who had, in his high spirits, jumped up on this dull, docile beast, and was riding it sideways because he could not be bothered to turn and sit properly astride.
Was Robin in love with her? It was hard to believe that this unbridled gaiety was love. Robin was more likely to be in love with what she stood for—or what he imagined she stood for. He wanted to be a writer like herself. To know such people as she knew. To live what seemed to him a life of easy freedom. Well, perhaps he might, although Denise could scarcely think so. Unless, of course, he had enough money to publish his own books and wait. Then, in time maybe, those light, oddly original stories that, somehow, he always managed to write no matter what they had first decided upon together, might find him admirers and earn him some repute.
Now once more the track went upwards. Now they were leaving behind them the young vines and the terraced beds of flowers. Now, up here in the wild thickets of the hillside, violets and anemones grew as they best could among the tangle of heath and arbutus, of dwarf juniper, of rosemary and myrtle. Now, for a time, they must give all their thought to guiding their mules among these steep ascending rocks, to clinging to the creatures’ backs, to avoiding the low branches that overhung their way. But presently the track was running level once again upon a high, forgotten terrace overgrown with little twisted mountain pines.
“They climb like cats, these beasts!” Robin called to her.
She stopped and looked back at him. His thin, handsome face was flushed by the hazards of the climb. His collar was open, and the loose black bow he now wore as a neck-tie had become undone. The inevitable strand of hair hung over one eye.
The picture Robin made for her troubled Denise’s senses. Did it stir memory? Provoke old feelings? Was she touched, maternally perhaps, by the young man’s aspect, youthful and gallant, and yet at the same time frail?
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yes. Of course. Why? Do I look queer?”
“No. Tie your tie.” The famous smile was sympathetic and quizzical.
Was she, then, on her side, in love with Robin? Denise wondered. Well—? But not in a way that need worry either of them. Just enough to heighten her pleasure in this odd and sudden friendship; to give her patience when Robin burst in upon her while she was hard at work—a thing she would not tolerate from others—burst in, disregarding the agreed sign of the flowerpot on the balcony, to jabber excitedly about a new idea of his own. She had lectured him about this. Yet she did not really mind.
“You know, Denise, I think it would be better if I made Maurice a clerk in, say, some office, instead of a fiddler in an orchestra,” he said now, as he came to a halt beside her.
“Can you think of nothing but your stories? Even up here?”
“Well? Why not?” Robin had the one track mind of his father. “But don’t you see? It would make Maurice much dimmer. More true to life. Less arty and picturesque.”
“Well, try him that way if you feel like it. But not too dim, please! We’d better go on.” As she went, Denise sat brooding over Robin and this obsession of his. Now, why did he, so vivid, so vibrant himself, continually choose the half-tones in his work, always seek to avoid what was exciting and immediately effective? If he were going to do anything he must change this odd bias. The public bought bright colours and strong situations. “I’m going to show one of your stories to a man I know in Paris,” she called back moodily. “He’ll put you and your dim stories in their proper place! He’s been reared in the business.”
“Right. I can stand it. Which story do you think?” But just then they had rounded a bend and Robin shouted: “Look! There’s Castellar now! What a wonderful place!”
There, across a deep valley perched stark and remote upon its hill of ancient olive trees, the little town stood high and aloof, its brown crumbling walls and red roofs weathered by the years.
“There are plenty of hill towns like that around here,” Denise answered.
“Still, you can’t say that one doesn’t look like a bit of history!”
“Oh, it’s romantic enough, Robin. Captive Saracen maidens, and all the rest of it. Now it looks as if we’ve got to go round this way,” she added, moving forward once more.
II
Lucy Hamont sat finishing her meal. She felt at a loose end tonight. The professional teacher from whom she and two more were to have learnt some of the finer points in the new game of Bridge had sent word he could not come. The message had arrived too late to allow Lucy to arrange other distraction for herself.
“What has happened to Mr. Hayburn?” she asked of her friend the head waiter as he passed her table. “He doesn’t usually go out for dinner. Is he ill?”
The waiter replied that he had heard nothing, and that there had been no order to send anything to Mr. Hayburn’s room.
Lucy sat back looking about her idly. She rotated the stem of her wine-glass, ruminating. Robin was in her mind. And Denise St. Roch. Their friendship seemed to be growing fast. And Lucy did not now quite like it. She was not sure why.
But there he was, crossing the emptying dining-room, hurrying in as others were leaving, embarrassed at being so late for the table d’hôte.
Lucy was surprised at her own feelings of relief. Why, after all, should she worry about Robin Hayburn? “Hullo! There you are! I was just wondering what had happened to you!”
The young man sat down and accepted with apologetic thanks the plate of soup that was set before him with more speed than ceremony. “I’ve been with Denise to Castellar for tea.”
“To Castellar? And how did you get up there?”
“We hired mules.”
“I thought you had been out in the sun.”
He put a hand to a tingling cheek. “Yes. I was. It was wonderful! Like midsummer. What a strange old place it is!”
“Don’t overdo!”
“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Hamont. I’m having a tremendous time!”
And indeed he seemed to be. His eyes were bright, and all of him seemed to have become much more alive in the last weeks. Lucy sat watching him. A vague smile remained on her face, a friendly mask behind which she could think. “I’ll drink coffee here at the table,” she said to the waiter, who had come to remove Robin’s plate. “I want to talk to Mr. Hayburn.” Then turning to Robin she went on: “Well, I must say you don’t look particularly homesick.” She spoke the words lightly, but they were sent up as a kite.
The kite took the wind as she intended. “Well? Would you be?”
“What do you mean, Robin?”
“I’ve always wanted to have artists as my friends. I’ve wanted to create something. I’ve always wanted to—I don’t know—Oh, you must see what I mean, Mrs. Hamont.”
Lucy saw perfectly. But she decided to say: “Yes, I think perhaps I do.”
“Oh, but you must! We both come from much the same stuffy background! You must have felt the same thing!”
“Yes, I do understand, I suppose.” Lucy sat pondering. She did not bother to cast her mind back into her own past. She was done wi
th that. And for some reason, this boy’s present engrossed her. But what, particularly, was he finding in Denise that seemed to him so exhilarating?
“And now I’m getting so much from Denise St. Roch; and from you!” Robin went on.
“Oh! My dear boy!” Lucy laughed. But she was touched. “And what on earth can I have to give you?”
“Sympathy. Freedom to speak about what really interests me! Understanding!”
Lucy determined to be crisp. “Rubbish, Robin! Didn’t you have every freedom to talk at home? Surely you did! An only son!”
Robin’s face darkened. “No! Of course, Mother—no. She doesn’t really understand me, either.”
From which Lucy gathered that in the boy’s opinion, at least, Father’s understanding fell far short even of Mother’s. But Robin had better learn to understand others. Not to count on others understanding him. She would continue to be crisp. “And what wonderful things are you learning from Denise?”
“Oh, quite practical things! At the moment, as you know, it’s the short story. She thinks I’m doing better. Now she’s making me read Maupassant to study the shape and so on. And it’s very good for my French.”
“I’m sure it is!” Lucy might have laughed, openly and mockingly this time. But she only smiled, anxious neither to appear to despise his newfound interest, nor to turn his confidences from herself. She took a sip of coffee, then went on: “It may surprise you to know,” she said, “that I’m worrying about you, a little, young man. Promise me you won’t exhaust yourself.”
“With what?”
“Well—long excursions like today’s. Exciting new friendships. New discoveries, perhaps. Too much mental stimulation, shall we say?”
“My dear Mrs. Hamont! I’m feeling splendid. And I’m awfully happy. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy before.”