by E. H. Young
“And all unnecessary,” he thought, not referring to his own troubles but to those made by other people far away and threatening to affect the order of his life and he turned to his bookshelves to find escape in noble poetry and to believe that, because he appreciated fine sentiments, they were those by which his life was governed.
And in the garden where the pale flowers shone out proudly among the darker ones whose colours were being stolen by the night, though their sweetness came, now and then, in little gusts of scent, Mrs. Blackett and Piers Lindsay and Rhoda still lingered, chatting casually about this and that, the elders remembering little happenings of their youth, egged on by Rhoda who was a charmed but, finally, not altogether a contented audience. Her mother, she found, must have laughed much more then than she did now, talked more too and been, it was evident, much happier and this was another little shock to Rhoda. In spite of that strange, puzzling look she had once seen her mother give her father, she had always assumed that her parents and most other adults must be happy. They could do anything they liked and what more could anybody ask? But Rhoda, though slowly, was growing up. She remembered that look and compared it with what she could see now of her mother’s face; she compared past moments of tension which she had mistaken for calm with what she could feel of relaxation in the atmosphere here, and there had been that other queer look, this time of her father’s, yet she had never heard a harsh word from one to the other. And perhaps people who were married did not exchange little comfortable nothings as her mother and her cousin were doing now; perhaps, with children, life became too serious; perhaps it was all her father’s fault. His presence curbed her own spontaneity—there had been a rare exception that evening before he spoilt it—and it might curb her mother’s. He seemed to put a cork into people’s mouths and only some special eagerness could eject it and suddenly, as though the cork had been applied, there was silence in the garden until Mrs. Blackett said, on a downward breath, “It’s time we went in.”
“Why?” Lindsay asked. “And what’s time, after all? It’s our servant, not our master.”
“Is it?” Mrs. Blackett said, a little sadly.
“Ought to be, anyhow. And it’s nice out here. I like to be in a quiet place and hear noises in the distance. It makes the quietness quieter.”
There were rattlings and rumblings in roads far beyond the Square and then a steamer on the river hooted its call of melancholy triumph.
“It’s high tide,” Mrs. Blackett said. Men were going out to sea or coming home from it, and nearer, startlingly near, there was another and an alien sound, melancholy too, but angry, the roaring of a lion in the Zoo.
“Hope and despair,” Mrs. Blackett said, and there was silence again until, as she started reluctantly for the house, Lindsay said, “You’re lucky in your neighbours, Bertha.”
“Am I? Oh yes,” she agreed hastily, “they are charming people but I’m afraid I don’t make friends very easily. I’m not like you, Piers,” she said with peculiar gentleness.
“No, just like yourself,” he said. “But I wasn’t thinking of the Frasers—”
“And Miss Spanner’s far the nicest anyway,” Rhoda said.
“You think so?” he said, giving this opinion due consideration. “What I meant was that you were lucky in not having gramophones and loud speakers on each side of you to spoil a night like this.”
“Yes, a lovely night,” Mrs. Blackett said, looking up to see an impatient star or two and taking in her cousin’s face in passing. “And isn’t it a wonderful thing?” she said and stopped.
“What?” Rhoda asked.
“A lovely night,” her mother replied but, before she remembered Rhoda’s presence, she had meant to record the blessedness of being able to keep certain hours and incidents inviolate, to enclose them in a frame of memory and put glass over them, safe from the contamination of less happy times. “And I’ve never asked you to have anything to eat or drink,” she said, at the foot of the stairs. “Shall we go into the kitchen now and make some coffee?”
“That would be fun,” Rhoda said.
“No, no, George will make some for me if I want it.”
“And I’m so glad you have George to look after you,” Mrs. Blackett told him.
She and Rhoda watched him out of sight and Mr. Blackett, hearing their farewells, listened for that halting footstep to stop at the Frasers’ door, but with mingled pleasure and annoyance he heard it going on until it became a faint tapping and then nothing.
“You,” said Rhoda to her mother, “and Miss Spanner and Cousin Piers are the nicest people I know. I wish they’d get married to each other and then, when I saw one of them I’d see them both.”
“Oh Rhoda,” Mrs. Blackett protested, “that wouldn’t do at all!”
“Well, why not? I know she isn’t very pretty, but I don’t think he’d mind about that.”
“Don’t you?” Mrs. Blackett said slowly and with interest.
“No, he has too much sense. And I expect that’s why he goes there such a lot.”
“But he doesn’t go so very often, does he?”
“Oftener than he comes here,” Rhoda said. “And who wouldn’t?” she added with youthful bitterness, a remark to which Mrs. Blackett made no reply.
CHAPTER XVII
That night, when Miss Spanner had gone to bed, Rosamund wrote a long letter to Fergus. She wrote it very quickly, not once hesitating for a word, then read it, laughed, with tears in her eyes, and tore it up. She had never intended to send it. She had written it for her own relief and the clearing of her mind, but she knew such an out-pouring would have made him laugh too and without tears, for their love, ardent as it had always been, had always had, she saw now, an astonishingly light quality. They had taken it naturally, as children take sunshine and rain, asking no questions, and he would have received sceptically and, she hoped, angrily, the news that she had more to give another man than she had given him. She had not been asked for it and never would be. It was buried treasure, but it was not altogether wasted. She set a slightly higher value on herself for being able to love without hope of reward and without melancholy, acknowledging Piers Lindsay as the man who, she had slowly come to believe, would have satisfied her completely in her maturity. And yet, in a way, she loved Fergus still. She could not imagine his physical presence without a little stirring of her senses, though her mind rejected him. He was her youth, her happiness, her laughter, and it would have been false and graceless to repudiate the past because, now, she could give a different allegiance to a man who, all that evening, had hardly spared her a glance, who, she thought, with amused annoyance, had everything he wanted in that George of his and would be very foolish, even if he were tempted, to exchange his easy freedom for the complicated situation in which love for her would involve him and she tried to think she cared for him enough—his quietness, his underlying, rarely expressed humour, the feeling of safety he gave her—to be glad nothing should disturb him. She did not succeed in doing that, but the letter she had written and destroyed was a farewell to the youth which was still so strong in her and would seem ridiculous to anybody else. And meanwhile, Fergus was setting out on a new adventure. It would be selfish not to help him on his way, undignified to betray the pique she could not deny, and she wrote another letter, telling him she would do as he wished when he gave her the necessary information, and finding some comfort in the knowledge that in serving him in what was likely to be a doubtful enterprise, she was not furthering any ends of her own.
“And after all,” she told herself, “I have had much more already than most people ever get,” and leaving her bed, she put on her dressing-gown and went on to the balcony.
It was a warm night and very still. Nothing moved in the Square. The evergreens in the Oval, testy things, always ready, given a chance, to scratch their neighbours and express their irritation with dry rustlings, did n
ot stir. The lamps burned steadily and in all the houses the lights were out except in the one behind her. It was like looking at a darkened stage before the actors had appeared, and the only sounds were those heard earlier from the Blacketts’ garden, the noise of traffic, more intermittent at this hour, but astonishingly clear. The lorries and the steamers might have been in the road just beyond the Square and it would hardly have surprised her to see a lion slinking from the bushes. That possibility had often occurred to her in her childhood, but it was the snakes she had really feared, often picturing one of them as it sneaked out of the Zoo and came, in terrible strong loops, up Chatterton Road, into the Square and up the balcony and fancying she would wake to see its flat head near her pillow in this room she was occupying now. But her father had had a strong wire door made to fit the French window and let the air in while it kept the snakes out and here it was still—she put out a hand to touch it—flat against the wall, broken here and there and rusty, but she would not have it taken away.
“You are very sentimental,” Chloe had told her.
“Perhaps,” she replied, “but if there’s any such kind thing I’ve done for you that you can remember when I’m dead, and I’m afraid there isn’t, I shan’t have lived in vain.”
“But you’ve been wonderful in never doing too much,” Chloe said.
“There are such a lot of you.” Thus Rosamund tried to reject this unexpected and welcome praise.
“And quite right too,” Chloe said. “I’m going to have a lot of children myself, even if we’re poor like us. I’ve no patience with these ones and twos and a car. I think it’s one’s duty to have more than that.”
“Duty?” The word came strangely from Chloe.
“Yes. And look at us. We scrape along very happily, don’t we?”
“Yes, we scrape along,” Rosamund said.
People, especially her own children, were very surprising. Chloe took all the gaiety she could get; the rest of her spare time was spent in fashioning pretty clothes with the skill and success of the single-minded and she might very well have looked on marriage as an opportunity for more gaiety, much more leisure and clothes she did not make herself, but she was prepared to sacrifice the figure on which she set such store, do without the luxuries towards which she was inclined and face a life of hard work and even hardship from a sense of duty. And she was one of a generation in disrepute as pleasure-seeking, lax in certain matters, according to old standards, indifferent to everything outside its own affairs and living carelessly in a world adrift on a strong sea, but then, Rosamund thought, though the older generation might have sterner rules of behaviour, they were adrift too and were either unaware of their danger or, conscious of their ineptitude, pretended all was well with the ship. And as she stood on that balcony where once she had had to peer through the railings instead of looking over them, whence she had watched Fergus come and go and come back again to stand under her window on such a night as this and assure her that he, like the snakes, could easily reach her, she remembered that his generation, too, had been viewed with dismay by its elders and confounded them by its gallantry and endurance. It was the same old story. The difference lay in the probability that, nowadays, Fergus would not remain on the pavement. Almost as a matter of course he would be with her and she was rather glad Chloe slept on a higher story, though she doubted whether the conscientious accountant would try to storm a fortress. Neither, she thought, would Mr. Lindsay, even with his physical powers unimpaired—he had too much fundamental decency—and Mr. Blackett, though he might toy with the idea, would not have enough skill or courage or impetuosity—but Fergus would. He had worked out the route long ago, by way of the area railings and a water pipe, and remembering him with painful vividness and thinking she could hear his light, strong footstep, she shut her eyes and told herself she would keep them shut until he was beside her and they were sure of each other again for a deceptive hour or two. She gave him time but he did not come. Those imagined footsteps stopped short of the house though she had half lifted her arms in welcome, and she could have cried out in her disappointment and desolation. Then, impatient with her own foolishness and her disloyalty to another love, she turned indoors and picked up the letter she had addressed and stamped. It was impossible to recover the past but for Fergus this letter was the future, and she must let him have it though she saw an arid one for herself, and putting on a coat, she went downstairs and let herself out of the front door.
She lingered beside the pillar box when she had dropped her letter within. It was a sturdy and respectable little structure to be near in the solitude of the night, and the night was too good to leave for the confinement of the house. The sky was thick with stars. She could not really believe they were great impersonal suns at an immeasurable distance from the earth, these little golden points. She still thought of them as she had done in childhood, as lamps put out in the daytime and lighted again at night, an expression of God’s desire to please and comfort human beings by filling every possible space with beauty. And to her they were not impersonal. There seemed to be a mind in each one of them, maliciously amused at times but always essentially friendly. God, she thought, must have used a sort of pepper pot for placing these things he had created so lavishly, some of them closely clustered, others scattered as though in a last fling of the pot, and in comparison with the immensity in which they were poised she knew she was smaller than a speck of dust, she was invisible and yet that acceptance of her own unimportance did not make life less interesting or, at times, less painful, and knowing she would not be invisible to the person, most likely a policeman, who was approaching with a dull official tread, she slowly went back to the house and the church clock struck twelve as she reached the door.
She had left it open; she now found it shut. She must have forgotten to put up the latch and the door had swung to, as its habit was. She could not tackle the climb to the balcony, she would have to wake the boys, but first she tried the area door, hoping someone had forgotten to bolt it as, many a time, she had discovered when she came downstairs in the morning. To-night, of course, it had been remembered, the kitchen window was locked, too, and then, as she stood down there, she heard the rapid footsteps she had been listening for a little while ago and as her heart leapt in her breast and she shrank further into the darkness, she hoped that this, too, was an illusion. The mood in which she could have abandoned herself to him had passed. Now she would not know what to do with him. He did not belong to her any more and she would be bitterly angry if he climbed up to her window. But he was not going to do that. She heard the jingling of coins and keys and calling breathlessly, “Don’t shut me out!” she emerged on to the pavement.
The figure, the bare head, the pose were those of Fergus, but it was Felix’s voice she heard.
“What on earth are you doing there?” he asked.
She took a step towards him and, laughing a little over the violent beating of her heart, she was glad to lean against him and to feel his arm go round her.
“And in your nightgown!” he exclaimed between anxiety and reproach.
“Yes, shocking, isn’t it?”
“But what’s the matter? What were you doing? I can feel your heart pumping. Have you been frightened?”
“No. Yes. Just a little. How absurd this is! But rather nice. Did you ever see so many stars? I thought you were in bed hours ago.”
“I thought you were.”
“So I was and then I had a little walk. Well, why not? And when I came back the door had shut itself and the area door is bolted. And then I heard you coming but I didn’t know it was you so I stayed down there until I heard your key. That was discreet, wasn’t it?”
“It all sounds very stupid to me,” Felix said, gently propelling her towards the door, “and you ought to know my step by this time.”
“Yes, but I don’t often hear it quite so early in the morning,” Rosamund said smoothly and, fumbl
ing for the light, she switched it on and looked at him under raised eyebrows, the only form of question she would put.
He did not answer it but, with unconscious effrontery, he put another. “What were you really doing?” he asked.
“Just saying good-bye to my young man,” she said.
Looking displeased, he shrugged that nonsense away. “I hope no one saw you,” he said and went into his bedroom without wishing her good night.
She sat down on the bottom stair. She did not know whether to be amused or angry. Again he had that mixed effect on her, the primitive part of her pleased by this masculine arrogance, the other annoyed by his presumption. It would never have occurred to Chloe to express disapproval. She would simply have laughed indulgently and hoped she had not taken cold and tucked her up in bed, but Felix, as a man, thought he had the right to criticize and punish her with stern looks, and the angry part of her nearly took control, urging her to follow him and show him what she could do herself in the way of scolding, but she did not obey this impulse. She went back to her bedroom, wishing this odd son of hers, who gave no account of his own night wanderings, had been able to laugh with her and kiss her and so, though unknowingly, to comfort her.
Chapter XVIII
It was still something of an adventure for Miss Spanner to have a meal in a restaurant. Nothing would have induced her to go alone into a place where there were men as waiters; she knew what they would think of her and how they would treat her and she had not the special kind of courage which could combat them, but in a teashop, where there were home-made cakes and young ladies in cretonne overalls, she was comparatively at ease when she had defied and conquered a slight feeling of guilt. Very rarely, while her parents lived, had she partaken of as much as a bun and a glass of milk outside her home and a sense of undue extravagance, almost of frivolity, had accompanied these little excursions. The old Spanners had been eloquent on the sanctity and sufficiency of the home. There was no need to eat outside it, a modern tendency they deplored, and no good reason for leaving it and it was on her return from one of those holidays she had at last relinquished that Miss Spanner had found, hanging near her bed and framed, the assurance that home-keeping hearts were happiest. The embroidering, in red and blue cross-stitch, of this remark had occupied Mrs. Spanner during her daughter’s absence and had probably made it well worth while. Neither of them ever mentioned it but every night, when she went to bed, Agnes had turned its face to the wall. She had the same pleasure in doing that as her mother had had in working it and her chief annoyance in giving up her annual holiday was Mrs. Spanner’s belief that the text had done its gentle work. It was the first thing she put on the bonfire she made in the little garden at the back of the house when the receipts and correspondence of two lifetimes had to be destroyed. The cheap white frame crackled venomously and took some of the secret venom from her heart, the canvas lasted a little longer and there was a sort of sadness in watching the disappearance of this evidence of something which had been perfect in its way. Her mother’s self-satisfied, unconscious selfishness had been without a flaw and Miss Spanner could not rid herself so easily of its effects; a tiny, gnawing worry spoilt any little pleasure she gave herself, but she fought it bravely and gradually became a little bolder.