by E. H. Young
“Why? Chloe’s lovely!”
But niceness for James at this stage did not involve any particular virtues except interest in what interested him. “Oh, Chloe’s not bad,” he agreed, and went back to the sitting-room to hear Miss Spanner saying, “As far as I remember, there’s no mention of gulls in the story of Noah’s Ark.”
“It couldn’t mention all the animals,” said Paul. “Far too many, but there were two of every kind so there must have been two gulls.”
“H’m,” said Miss Spanner, “I wonder how many there are in this ark of ours.”
“Ark?”
“Island,” said Miss Spanner.
“Must be millions,” said Paul.
“I believe you,” said Miss Spanner.
“I didn’t know you were interested in birds,” James said.
“Only in certain kinds.”
“Buzzards any good to you? We saw them in the mountains.”
“No, I don’t specialize in those,” she said.
“Agnes is talking in riddles,” Rosamund said. “She hardly knows a sparrow when she sees one.”
“But I do know a gull.”
“Heaps of them on the river,” Paul said. He was puzzled and a little uneasy. Longing to talk about the news, instead of, so inappropriately, about birds, to ask questions and offer opinions, hopeful that something really exciting was going to happen and that it would last long enough for him to have a share in it, he had a feeling that his remarks would not be welcomed and might be considered in bad taste and with the arrival of Felix at that moment he decided on discretion and said good night.
“And have a bath,” Felix said. “You must be filthy.”
“Not as filthy as you’ll be soon,” Paul said, making for the stairs.
“And Paul’s baths are my business,” Rosamund said. “You never speak to the boy without snubbing him and I won’t have it.”
“I must, I suppose, have caught the prevalent germ at some time,” Felix said suavely.
Chloe looked at him angrily. He was breaking the family convention of keeping a decent silence about their father and Sandra, of course, had recognized the allusion. It was painful to see how quickly her thin little face could sharpen, but part of Chloe’s anger came of her disappointment that it was Felix who had opened the front door and not the man for whom she had been listening.
“Oh, come and have a drink,” James said.
“Thanks. I’ve had several already.”
“Has he, do you think?” Rosamund asked when he had gone into his bedroom across the passage.
“Probably. Not too many, though. He’s all right.”
“All right! I call it all wrong,” Miss Spanner said.
“And now,” said James, “you’re going to tell us about your great-uncle who shot the tiger and wouldn’t have had a hand steady enough if he’d ever indulged in alcohol. You were going to tell us that, weren’t you, Miss Spanner?”
“I did think of mentioning it,” she admitted.
“But I’ll bet you anything he had a celebration that night.”
“What’s the good of betting about something we’ll never know?” Miss Spanner said and covered up this lapse in loyalty by saying hastily, “Besides, I don’t bet. There was never any betting in my family and never any drinking, not so much as a wine glass in the house,” and she looked at Rosamund and waited in vain for one of her usual retorts, but she was not listening. She was kneeling in front of the fireplace and lighting the wood laid ready in the hearth and Miss Spanner ostentatiously looked at the clock. Chloe looked at it too, but for a different reason.
“Just as we’re all going to bed,” Miss Spanner remarked.
“And in your house you never had a fire from the end of April till the beginning of October, did you, Miss Spanner?” Sandra said.
“Never,” she replied. “It was the eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth commandment, I forget which, we had so many extra ones.”
“I’m cold,” Rosamund said.
“You don’t wear enough underclothing,” said Miss Spanner.
“Down my back,” Rosamund said, and turned to let the growing warmth play on it.
“I’ll make some tea,” Sandra said, “and we’ll all sit round the fire. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Chloe said, “and I’ll come and help you.” She felt, all at once, that it would be comforting to be alone with Sandra. “I’m rather cold too,” she said.
“Are you? Then go back. You shouldn’t be in this basement,” Sandra said anxiously.
That was the worst of Sandra. It was impossible to hint at any kind of trouble without distressing her unduly, yet there was about her an almost visible aura of sympathy and in the glow of it Chloe felt she would be warmed.
“Just give me a hard hug, will you?” she asked casually.
Sandra obliged her willingly and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever done that before.”
“No, and don’t you dare to do it again without an invitation,” Chloe said, “I felt so cold,” she said again.
“And I’m sure,” said Sandra, warming the teapot, “it would be better if we talked instead of pretending, about what we’re all thinking of, I mean.”
“If we were all women we could. It’s not so easy with young men there because you’ve either got to sound heartless or frightened.”
“Then the boys should start it.”
“They think it wouldn’t be kind to Mother.”
“That’s silly,” said Sandra.
“Men are,” Chloe said. “They’re so old-fashioned. The nice ones,” she added.
Sandra accepted this enlightenment without comment and carried the tray upstairs.
“Tell Felix,” Rosamund said. He had an awkward temper but he did not sulk and Paul, coming downstairs in his dressing-gown, his head wet and glistening, his face flushed and his eyes sleepy from his hot bath, met the elder of his brothers in the passage and no one ever knew or would ever have suspected that the memory of Paul like this, with the contours of his face softened babyishly, often flashed into Felix’s mind at strange moments as the years wore on and Paul grew dangerously older, and put a special venom into what Felix had to do.
“I’m only fetching a book,” Paul said quickly.
“They’ve been making tea,” Felix told him. “You’d better come in and get your hair dry.”
“Can I? Oh good!” Paul said gratefully. James was easier to get on with but a kindness from Felix was doubled in worth.
It became quite a gay party round the fire, with Felix and James describing their holiday in detail and laughing, somewhat excessively, the others thought, at episodes which fell rather flatly on the ears of those who had not had all their physical senses sharpened by happiness and some sense of danger and their sense of humour more easily satisfied than usual but, in spite of the tea and the fire and the laughter, Rosamund still felt cold. She could not forget the darkness outside this bright room, not the kind, normal darkness of night but a darkness impregnated with an evil so positive that she believed she would be able to smell it if she went into the Square, and with evils less definite too, the follies and weaknesses and half betrayals of the past, now having their sneaking triumph, and out in that darkness somewhere was Fergus who ought to have been here. Her common sense and experience of him told her that he need not be pitied: these were the exciting conditions in which he flourished, yet she could not help seeing him as a waif and she longed to be able to call him in.
“We’ll have to tell Lindsay all about it,” she heard James say.
Yes, there was Piers too, she thought, but she need not worry about him. He was self-supporting; that was, perhaps, the quality she liked best in him. He could be buffeted by chance and keep his footing. He was the kind of man most admirable to women, the kind who will accept bein
g sacrificed, even unreasonably in their own eyes, without those signs of grievance so painful to the sacrificer.
“He’ll be here to-morrow,” she said.
“Let’s have him to supper, shall we?” James said.
“I expect he’ll come if you ask him. Do you know it’s eleven o’clock? We must go to bed.”
At that hour, Mr. Blackett decided that he must go to bed too and as he stood at his bedroom window, undressing in the dark for fear of waking Bertha, he saw the light in the sitting-room go out and the one in Mrs. Fraser’s bedroom come on. How long would that burn? he wondered. He would not be able to watch it from the bed in its new position but he had gained more than he had lost, a precious, new and unexpected piece of information at which he chuckled silently. A great deal of what had puzzled him unwillingly in Bertha’s conduct, not everything but quite enough to satisfy him, was now explained. How dull, and it was only fair to himself to say how modest, he had been! He had not suspected her of jealousy, she had seemed too placid for that emotion, but to-night she had been tripped into revealing it. For Mr. Blackett this was a delightful discovery. It gave their relations the piquancy they had lacked and it showed an acuteness he had suspected just as little, though on this discovery he did not dwell. Jealousy of Mrs. Fraser accounted for the new position of the bed and her professed liking for the woman was merely a covering for a very different feeling. And, more than likely, her carelessness about the time of his arrival and the coldness of her greeting had been caused by the comments in his letters on his new acquaintance and her feminine capacity for reading between the lines. Poor little woman, he thought with happy anticipation of amusement. It would do her no harm to believe she had offended him with that last sharp remark and, very carefully, he lifted the bedclothes and insinuated himself beneath them while she, breathing with the regularity of sound sleep, did not know whether or not to regret the retort he had wrung from her, but his fatuous conceit had been intolerable and she had difficulty in sustaining her even breathing when she thought of it.
Chapter XLI
Mr. Blackett’s first thoughts on waking were a continuation of those to which he had gone to sleep. At an age when most men and women, with resigned dismay, see themselves jogging into the future on a monotonous road promising no surprise or excitement, a road on which all the signposts pointed to duty and duty was only a repetition of yesterday, he had received just what he wanted in the way of stimulus. His signposts still pointed towards duty but the road had suddenly become much more interesting and he sprang out of bed, full of energy and good humour. And the news seemed to him to be satisfactory. The signs were favourable, he told his family, when he had opened his newspaper.
“Who for?” Rhoda asked.
He did not reply in words. The look he gave her was intended to convey his astonishment that such a question should follow his remark, that there could be any doubt that what he considered favourable could be anything but right for all concerned. “A ruthless opponent,” he said after a suitable pause, “and I have never considered him one, would neither have consented to continue negotiations nor would he have shown this charming consideration for the fatigues of an older man. That in itself is a very promising gesture. An essentially kindly people, I’ve always said so,” he added, wishing Rhoda would not look at him with so much earnestness. In anyone else it might have been explained as due attention to the family oracle, but he had never been able to deceive himself satisfactorily where Rhoda was concerned. He was distrustful, though he did not go so far as to suspect her of putting that question simply as a test. For information, as for everything else, she preferred Miss Spanner and, too young to realize a fraction of what war would mean, she half hoped for it just to prove her father humiliatingly mistaken and, perhaps, to open doors for herself which, otherwise, he might succeed in keeping shut.
“Mr. Blackett,” Miss Spanner reported a little later, “looked very genial and perky when he went by just now.”
“It’s remarkable how you see everything,” Rosamund said, “and you look rather perky yourself.”
“Yes, it’s one of the better dispensations of Providence, the interest we all take in our own affairs and the scrapings of happiness we can get under the very jaws of death, as you might say.”
“I’m glad you have some scrapings,” Rosamund said.
“Oh, yes, I get some,” said Miss Spanner.
What had cheered her when she woke was her little, secret triumph over Rosamund. It was the old maid, not the mother, to whom Chloe had given her confidence and her heart was warm for the girl who had always seemed remote, courteously tolerant of Miss Spanner’s presence, until last night when she had developed such charming qualities that Miss Spanner was now willing to deny her none. But Chloe had waked to the pain of wondering whether she had lost her lover: Rosamund to the worry about Felix which had been vaguely pursuing her through the night. Yes, these small personal joys and troubles took first place though this, which might or might not be trouble, was connected with the greater one: it was at times like this that a young man might make sure of a moment’s joy or commit some folly he recognized for what it was but believed he would not have much time for regretting. This morning, though he had a few days of holiday left, he had gone to the office.
“I wish,” Rosamund said to James, “you had stayed away a little longer.”
“So do I, but you know what Felix is.”
“No. I wish I did.”
They were in the garden again and again James was greasing his boots. “Mad as a hatter at times,” he said. “I’ll do his boots, too, while I’m about it and then I’ll put them away,” he looked at her with something like a wink, “for another time. Oh well, it was good, it was good, it was good!”
“Do you think Felix feels like that?”
“Of course. Either you feel like that or you have no use for it and he had plenty. Great natural aptitude, too. Smithers was quite impressed. A bit foolhardy, though, when he got the chance and that’s wrong, that’s not in the code. And it was good discipline for him to have to do what he was told and keep his mouth shut. Then he took it into his head that we ought to come back at once and back we came.”
“Well,” said Rosamund, “one never knows. One of you might have been killed if you’d stayed.”
“And what a lost chance of glory that would have been,” James said with his sardonic yet good-natured grin. “No In Memoriam notices with those nice little bits of poetry attached.”
“Don’t James,” Rosamund said sharply. “I wouldn’t indulge in any of those messages myself, but I can understand them and, after all, they are almost the only reminders we ever get that there was once a war. It has been blotted out as though we ought to be ashamed of it. Ashamed of it!” she cried. “Of a lot of other things but not of that. Yet your generation, how I don’t know, has been very subtly inoculated with the idea that we were in the wrong and those villains over there have posed and been accepted as the injured party ever since. And not only your generation. Strangely enough, mine too. Agnes was quite right about the gulls.”
“Oh, that’s what she was getting at, was it?” James said slowly.
“We’ve gulled ourselves,” Rosamund went on, not heeding him, “and been gulled for the last twenty years. Too lazy, too tired, to bother or foresee. And nearly all the best men gone, the ones who knew what they were fighting for and would have lived for it. It was easier to think all would be well. And we’re being gulled now. You needn’t look so sceptical and amused. You’ll find I’m right.”
“I’m not sceptical,” James said. “I’m not amused. I’m interested.”
“Yes, exactly! Just interested in a detached sort of way.”
“Interested in you,” James said. “You don’t often get excited and I didn’t know you felt like that.”
“No. My fault. In that way I’ve been as bad as anyb
ody else. Let’s pretend, we seemed to say, we didn’t fight a war for decency and justice. It’s not quite decorous to speak of it. And we’ve pretended so hard—and it’s the only thing we’ve really given our minds to—that we’ve made ourselves believe it. Most of us. I haven’t. Agnes hasn’t, Piers Lindsay hasn’t or,” she hesitated, “your father. We’re all the more to blame for keeping quiet and blurring over the violation of a treaty as though it was just an unfortunate little breach of manners or a forgivable misunderstanding. Have you ever heard anybody mention it? No. You all seem to think we were fighting for something we had no right to. It’s true that, at the end, we were fighting for our existence—we had to—and surely we had a right to that, but at the beginning it was for an ideal of decency and good faith. And it wasn’t fair to you or to the future, to let you grow up in ignorance of that. All I did, sometimes, was to ask you to make allowances for your father, and that seemed to amuse you too, as though he’d been doing something rather funny when he got his wounds. But perhaps,” she said, seeing how gravely he was listening, “I’m not being fair to you.”
“Go on,” he said encouragingly, and she laughed, though she had been near tears in her indignation and remorse and this unwonted speaking from her heart.
“You’d all starve if I did,” she said. “I must do some shopping.”
“I’ll come with you,” James said. “I expect you think carrying a basket is just the job for a degenerate young man.”
“No, James, I knew you were all right under the skin. And Felix too. I knew you would want to get back but I think you were in too much of a hurry.”
“As I’ve told you, that was Felix and now he’s mewed up in an office before he need be. What a life, anyhow, and the last thing I should have thought he’d choose.”
“Ah, there are two different sides to him, the hot and the cold. That’s his trouble, or may be,” Rosamund said, and she wondered whether the fixed candour with which James looked at her was not a little overdone and he did not pursue the subject.