Soon afterwards Lady Arbell came down.
“Not gone to bed yet, Val?” said her brother, frowning.
“Not yet, Reggie. Please don’t move, Mr. Spurway—unless you’re going upstairs?”
Hughie, aware that he was pleasantly drunk, told himself that he must be careful and at the same time inwardly applauded himself for what he felt certain was his masterly self-command.
“I think perhaps I will go up, now. Good-night, sir. Good-night, Lady Arbell.”
He hadn’t any difficulty with his speech, and his mind, he felt convinced, must be absolutely clear since he had so quickly realized that last time he’d seen Lady Arbell she’d been in the schoolroom with Primrose. Now, she was down here—so Primrose must be alone.
As usual, the drink would make it a little bit difficult for him to control his motor reactions. Drink always did that to him, whilst leaving his mind as clear as possible. If it wasn’t as clear as possible, Hughie told himself, he couldn’t possibly be thinking all this now, so logically and lucidly.
He heard their good-nights as from a distance, and concentrated his faculties on crossing the hall, avoiding the large chairs and small tables, and reaching the staircase.
Then he grasped the banister rail.
Now he’d be all right.
The wild misery of an hour before had receded. He knew, dimly, that it was still there waiting to attack him again—but for the moment he was freed from it. His present condition of semi-intoxication was really sharpening all his senses, he felt. He had distinctly heard what Lady Arbell had said, down in the hall, when he was already half-way up the stairs.
I want to tell you something, Reggie, she’d said. What on earth could she want to tell the General in the middle of the night? Perhaps it was something about Primrose.
Actually, thought Hughie, pausing on the stairs and wiping his forehead which was suddenly wet—although he was not hot— actually, that was the way in which people announced an engagement. Perhaps Primrose was engaged all the time and had told her mother about it in the schoolroom.
At the thought, he felt sick.
It appeared to him imperative that he should find Primrose at once and ask her whether this was true. He’d make her understand that he couldn’t go on like this. The words, that he had so often used to her before, seemed to speak themselves aloud: I can’t go on like this.
As though in ironic commentary on his own phrase, Hughie stumbled on the top step. He lunged forward, trying to regain his balance, caught at the air and then found himself clutching at some piece of furniture on the landing. The next instant he had pulled it over, an avalanche of books was falling about his ears and he had crashed onto his knees.
Terrified of being seen and found ludicrous Hughie scrambled up from the floor, trembling.
He was surrounded by the disordered books—there seemed to be enormous numbers of old-fashioned yellow-backed novels—and some half-dozen of them were still bouncing off the top step, down the stairs. The little circular bookcase lay on its side.
Someone came along the passage and at the same moment Lady Rockingham’s door flew open and the light from her bedroom illuminated the disordered landing plainly.
“Good Heavens, I thought a bomb had dropped on the house!” she said in mock-dramatic tones, standing framed in the doorway, a pale silk dressing-gown wrapped round her and her lovely hair loose and wavy on her shoulders.
“I’m frightfully sorry,” he stammered weakly.
To his horror he saw that it was Primrose who had come along the passage, from the schoolroom.
She stood a few feet away from him, one hand on her hip and the other one holding a cigarette, saying nothing.
“Of course, Hughie darling, there’s all the difference in the world between being drunk and being happy,” said Lady Rockingham suavely, “but one would rather like to know what you think you’re doing, don’t you know what I mean.”
“I’m frightfully sorry——”
“But you said that before. Do pick up those frightful books. Primrose will help you.”
“Help him my elbow,” Primrose said. “What a fool you look, Hughie!”
Humiliated, furious with himself, and now very drunk indeed, Hughie suddenly turned on her.
“I came up to find you. I’m not going on like this any longer,” he cried shrilly. “I shall leave here to-night.”
“I hope you’ll enjoy walking four miles to the station in the black-out carrying your luggage,” scoffed Primrose.
“Hughie, are you quite mad?” said Lady Rockingham.
There was nothing dramatic about the tone of the enquiry. She sounded merely impatient, and a little bit amused.
None of them, none of them understood what he was suffering, Hughie told himself on a fresh wave of agonized self-pity.
“You’re bats,” Primrose remarked. “Or else plastered, though I don’t know what there is to get plastered on in this house. Unless Rory’s been fool enough to give you some drink, not knowing that you’ve got a head that can’t take it.”
Lady Rockingham bent down and picked up two of the nearest books.
“’ Folle Farine’,”she read aloud, in a voice of mildly incredulous amusement. “Why on earth doesn’t darling Valentine send all this rubbish for salvage? I really must talk to her. Salvage is so important.”
Hughie stared and stared at Primrose.
Somehow, he must force her to see him as significant—a real person whom, if she would not love, she must hate or fear.
“Lonergan is a great deal too good for you,” he enunciated with careful and conscious distinctness.” I know you think you’re going to marry him. I heard your mother telling the Gel—General about it. And I can only say I’m damned sorry for him, marrying a bitch like you. Lonergan’s a decent fellow. A frightfully decent fellow. He’s kind. He’s frightfully kind.”
He suddenly wanted to weep, moved by the thought of Lonergan’s kindness.
The two women were quite silent.
Then Lady Rockingham, in a small, queer voice, read out mechanically:
“’ Verbena Camellia Stephanotis’, by Walter Besant—I ask you!”
She raised her eyes and looked at Primrose.
“He’s quite, quite drunk, darling. He must be. Hadn’t we better get him to his room?”
“He can go to hell, for all of me. He’s nothing in my young life,” Primrose remarked.
Hughie, shaking all over and afraid of bursting into tears, leant against the wall.
“That isn’t true,” he said loudly, addressing Primrose. “You know perfectly well it isn’t true. I meant a very great deal in your life—not so very long ago either. You let me make love to you, and then all of a sudden you changed, but you wouldn’t let me go. Not you! You played with me like a cat with a mouse. You’re cruel and heartless and you’re pro-promiscuous, too. Everybody knows you are. Now you’re playing the same game with Lonergan, aren’t you? But he isn’t such a fool as I’ve been. He’ll——”
Lady Rockingham put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a foolish, half-hearted, woman-like little shake.
“For Heaven’s sake, shut up. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re drunk. Go to bed and sleep it off, Hughie, like a good boy, and we’ll forget it.”.
“No,” said Hughie finding release and even pleasure in the scene. “You ought to know what she’s really like, all of you. If no one else has the guts to tell you, I have.”
He could hear his own voice, shouting.
“Be quiet! Do you want to have the whole house up here? Primrose—we shall have to get a man to deal with him. Can’t you fetch someone?”
Hughie emitted a sound that he characterized to himself as a reckless laugh.
He saw Primrose move swiftly through the open door of the bedroom and remained with his mouth only half closed, wondering what she was doing and whether he’d frightened her.
But he wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt Primrose. On
ly he’d felt obliged to let her know that he saw through her.
He decided that he must explain—reassure her.
He wanted to go after her, but all those damned books were in the way. He kicked at them unsteadily and then, as he seemed to have missed his aim, kicked again more viciously.
He heard Lady Rockingham shriek faintly and saw her rush to the other side of the landing.
Primrose stood in the doorway, holding in both hands a large, old-fashioned ewer patterned with red roses.
“You’ve got it coming to you,” she said, and dashed the ice-cold water full into his face and over his head and shoulders.
It was minutes before Hughie, choked, blinded and drenched, could see or hear anything at all.
When he could, he was conscious of nothing but extreme bodily discomfort and of the fact that he had been insanely drunk and was now sobered.
He saw Primrose’s face, her mouth pulled down on one side, her blue-green eyes contemptuous and unwavering, water splashed all down the front of her periwinkle-coloured dress, the empty jug rolling gently on its side at her feet, wiping her hands on a handkerchief.
Stumbling over the soaked and scattered books that strewed the floor in wild disorder, Hughie, his teeth chattering with cold, found his way to his own room.
XV
Venetia Rockingham was laughing rather unconvin-cingly.
“Darling, too uncivilized altogether. Of course the little horror was completely blotto—but really—! He’ll probably get pneumonia now, and die on you.”
“It’ll be okay by me if he does. But he won’t.”
“And, my dear, look at the mess!”
The thin, shabby carpet was wet through and so were most of the yellow-backed books. The circular pedestal bookcase that had contained them lay on its side, slowly spilling more volumes into the wet pools on the floor, and the rose-patterned water-jug had rolled against the jamb of the door.
“Too like the morning after an air raid, don’t you know what I mean. I wish I’d never brought him here, but I hadn’t the slightest idea he was that way inclined. It’s really too bad. Darling, was he quite mad, about Colonel Lonergan, or is there something in it? I needn’t tell you I’m the most broad-minded woman that God ever created—it’s being so tremendously one with my boys, I think, so that I simply, absolutely, see youth’s point of view—but I just couldn’t bear you to make any sort of mistake. And I do feel there’s something you ought to know.”
“I know it already, thanks frightfully. If you mean that Rory’s thinking of becoming my step-papa.”
Lady Rockingham glanced sharply at the smooth young face, expressionless beneath its heavy mask of make-up.
“Darling, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. And now what are we going to do with this deluge that you’ve created?”
“Leave it. The sluts can see to it in the morning.”
“Nonsense. All this wet—it’ll drip through the ceiling into the hall.”
“Will it?” said Primrose indifferently. “Oh, God! It has already—or something. They’re coming up.”
She leant back against the wall as her mother reached the top of the stairs.
They could hear the sound of the General’s two sticks further down on the lower steps.
Valentine held two or three of the yellow-backs in her hand.
She looked at the confusion on the landing and then at Primrose and Venetia.
“We haven’t been throwing the books at one another’s heads, darling, though I do admit it looks too like it for words. But the whole bookcase, as you perceive, has been turned over. What a frightful collection of rubbish, darling!”
Primrose laughed shortly.
“You’d better explain the tidal wave, aunt Venetia, hadn’t you? He’s your boy friend, you know, not mine.”
“It’s too late for explanations, my sweet. Your mother ought to be in bed, she looks tired to death. In one word, Val, poor Hughie has been a very naughty boy and having no head whatsoever has obviously been drinking and managed to crash into the furniture on his way to bed. Hence all this.”
“But where is he?” Valentine asked.
She bent and picked up one of the books and then let it fall again.
“Why is it all wet?” Her eyes fell on the water-jug.
“Have you been emptying the water-jug over him?” she enquired in a tone that held enquiry rather than surprise.
“That’s right,” Primrose acquiesced. “Blast, here’s uncle Reggie. I’ve had enough fun and games for tonight. I’m going to bed.”
“Darling, you can’t do that to us,” Venetia cried, a little shrilly. “It’s really your row, don’t you know what I mean, and you simply must stay and face it.”
The General reached the landing.
“What the devil’s been happening? Books don’t fly downstairs all by themselves, I suppose. And what on earth——”
A trickle of water, taking some freakish course over the uneven flooring, had reached his slippers.
“I’ll get a cloth,” Valentine said. “The bookcase got overturned, Reggie, and some water has been spilt. There’s no harm done.”
She turned towards the housemaid’s cupboard further along the passage.
Primrose said icily:
“Let’s not be so frightfully suave and polite and mysterious, shall we? Hughie Spurway somehow got hold of some drink—for which he has no head whatever and never has had ever since I’ve known him—and he’s roaring drunk. At least he was, until I sobered him up a bit by chucking some cold water at him.”
“Good God!” said the General. “Has everybody in this house gone mad? Mop up that disgraceful mess, for Heaven’s sake.”
Valentine returned with two worn and discoloured floor-cloths and knelt down.
“Here,” said the General, and he indicated the overturned and now empty water-jug with one stick.
Primrose, holding her long skirts up with one hand, set it erect.
“Where’s that damned young fool?”
“In his room, Reggie—so much the best place for him, don’t you feel? One is simply covered in blushes for ever having brought him down here, and of course I shall tell him exactly what I think of him in the morning. I heard him crashing up the stairs—but literally crashing, my dears—and naturally came out, and there were all these dreadful railway novels—Heavens! how it dates one to call them that—clattering down in every direction, and Hughie sputtering and stumbling in the midst, so that one knew only too well what was the matter, don’t you know what I mean.”
“He had a couple of whiskeys downstairs with me,” said General Levallois—(“Primrose, why in God’s name are you standing there without lifting a finger to help your mother?”)—but not enough to fuddle a child, I shouldn’t have thought. Unless he’d been drinking earlier in the evening.”
“Probably had,” Primrose said.
She had taken no other notice of the General’s admonition.
The General turned on her.
“And may I ask where you come into it? Chucking water about like some damned washerwoman. You don’t condescend to come home more than once in a blue moon, and then it’s only because of some man or other, and you behave about as badly as any young woman can do. I suppose you’ve made a fool of this unfortunate young idiot, and he lost his head.”
General Levallois had raised his voice until it had become a shout. His habitual manner of carping discontent had given place to one of indignant wrath.
“Reggie, please don’t,” said his sister.
She wrung out the cloth into the empty jug and straightened herself.
“Let’s leave it all, for to-night. He’s leaving the house to-morrow, anyway.”
“I’m not thinking about him,” said the General loudly. “I don’t give a twopenny damn for him, one way or the other, except that I think he’s practically off his rocker—and it’s your daughter who’s to blame. Carrying on with first one and then another chap, and then half a
dozen of them at once. Three days ago it was the Irishman——”
He stopped abruptly, recollection seizing him, and glared at Valentine.
Venetia Rockingham sank onto a hard, uncomfortable blackwood chair in a corner of the landing.
“Darlings,” she wailed, in the thinnest and most affected of voices, “one simply feels too like something in the middle act of some terribly Edwardian triangle play. Who is in love with the Lonergan person, and why, and how many people in this house has he been making love to?”
There was a dead silence when she stopped speaking.
Primrose turned on her a look of such concentrated, venomous hatred that her eyes seemed to recede into her head above the discoloured patches that suddenly stained her face.
Valentine, also, changed colour.
She had become white.
It was she who first found words with which to reply to Venetia and they were spoken with firmness and clarity.
“You’re unpardonable. There are things that can’t be said—and you say them. It was you who forced me to tell you that Rory Lonergan and I are going to be married. Primrose knows it already and so does Reggie.”
“You can’t marry the fellow,” said the General, in a sort of sullen aside. “Idiotic thing to do.”
Not one of the three women paid the slightest attention to him.
Valentine was facing her daughter.
“You’ve got a great deal to forgive me, Primrose,” she said. “I don’t know where I went wrong with you, but I know that I did—somewhere. I’ve destroyed the relationship between us. But about this, when you might so easily have hated me—I think we’ve understood one another,”
“That’s right,” said Primrose, and for the first time in many months her eyes—dense blue-green—met those of her mother, so identical in colour with her own.
There was no softness in the gaze of Primrose, but it held a kind of thoughtful appraisement, as though mentally she was readjusting some earlier, harsher judgment.
“Then everything in the garden is lovely,” Venetia Rockingham said with deliberate flippancy. “Quite, quite beyond me, darlings, all these givings and takings, don’t you know what I mean. I suppose poor Hughie was really too far gone to know what he was talking about—but I do feel we ought all to realize that Primrose, poor darling, has got the reputation of being a terribly bad little girl with her dreadful little Communist friends, and that if Hughie says nasty things in a naughty temper, there’s a very good chance of their being believed. I know you don’t mind what anyone thinks of you, Primrose darling, but if this Lonergan of yours is too mixed up in it all, isn’t it going to make it all very difficult for everybody?”
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