“Oh yes, you will. You must stay for the birthday party.”
“Does your nephew shoot?”
“No, he won’t. I think he’s still secretly afraid of the bang. He used to disapprove, rather, too.”
“I was afraid of the bang till the last war.”
“Ah, yes, that made a difference.”
Before we went out, I rang the bell again, and told Charles that when Mrs. Carlice returned, he was to tell her that I was out in the garden with Mr. Payne.
“Neither of you would like to meet,” I said, while we walked across the lawn to the bed of salpiglossis, “when Major Inchley is in attendance. Let Dora get rid of him first. I know you’re nervous about meeting her, but you must let me help you over that stile. I know what these family reunions can be, particularly if there’s business behind them.”
“The trouble is,” he said meditatively, “she doesn’t want to see me at all, and least of all here. And she wouldn’t approve of my meeting any of you.”
“Aren’t you making her into a bit of an ogre?” I asked. “One does when one doesn’t see people often. The only reason she hasn’t asked you here more was that——”
I was about to say “she didn’t feel very sure of herself,” but realised suddenly that despite the bond of the shot rabbit, I hardly knew him well enough to say that about his sister. However, he surprised me by finishing my sentence for me with the words, “I didn’t want to come,” and smiled at me sideways.
As he bent down over the rabbit, hesitating to pick it up in his hand, I wondered what his secret really was. A little wind blew across from the silver birches, and for one moment I felt very slightly cold, as if the first faint ripple of winter had touched me.
With an effort he lifted the rabbit up, and said, “I was afraid I should find I hadn’t killed it. But it’s dead all right.”
“Let me show you the garden,” I said. “We’ll leave the rabbit here till we come back. I’ll tell Charles about it, and he shall give it to one of the men.”
We began our tour of the garden, but somehow I felt no inclination to show it off to the visitor. I never paused and said, “The house looks quite attractive seen from here,” or, in Ruth Draper fashion, “This border was simply glorious in June.” It came home to me, with the sudden chill of that burst of wind from the west, how much older I was than when I had been exiled to London by Claude’s marriage to Dora. My winter was approaching. Every year now I should feel the cold more keenly. A time would come when I should be too feeble to do more than scratch the surface of that garden. I had been exiled too long—no, not too long—but I must waste no more time in waiting. The hour of my return was overdue.
It came home to me also during that walk, how, in spite of my “independence,” and the way in which I had been allowed to domineer at Carlice, I had bottled up my hopes within myself. Hadn’t the time come, at last, to shed the mask? The arrival of Stephen Payne, in whom I knew I could take a spiritual interest, though of course no more, excited me in a way he couldn’t guess. It was a symbol of my coming fight—as desperate as the fight of which he was telling me. For, oblivious for once of the garden, and busy with my own thoughts, I had encouraged him to talk to me, and was hearing all that was uppermost in his mind—his quarrel with his trustee, Dr. Rusper, and the stoppage of his allowance.
“I came here,” he said, “intending to sponge on Dora, and on you, if she wouldn’t help. I wanted to show her my empty pockets, turning them inside out, with nothing falling out but bits of dirty fluff, and saying, ‘Now, what are you going to do about me?’ As a matter of fact, I still have one pound eight and six, but you needn’t tell her.”
“But what can Dora do?” I asked him. “She could, I daresay, give you a five-pound note. But would that help you?”
“It would delay the asylum for ten days. That’s something.”
“It isn’t for that that you walked five miles from Busley station.”
“Now what would you do about it, if you were my sister?”
“That depends on my relations with your trustee.”
I watched his face carefully as I said this, but he showed no sign of reading a double meaning into my words. Evidently he knew nothing of that little secret.
He only replied, “She must have influence with him, if only she’d bother herself to use it. She could say she’d back me if I made some application to the court. Rusper would hardly dare to flout both members of the family. Between us, we could make a pretty good case for having him removed from the trusteeship. As it is, with Dora not caring twopence, or even being vaguely against me, I shouldn’t carry any weight. He could rake up—oh, there have been times when I haven’t behaved very wisely—and I think he’d get away with it. Could you talk her round?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I might force her to agree with me, but, frankly, if I took your side, I’m not sure that I shouldn’t be putting her against you.”
“I must risk that.”
“Besides,” I went on, “she wouldn’t like the way you’ve confided in me. If only we had time to take things more slowly——”
“If it hadn’t been the eleventh hour, I should never have dared to come here, or talk to you like this. Do speak to Dora.”
“Very well.”
We walked in silence between the big yew hedges at the eastern side of the lawn. “We shall both be ashamed of ourselves later,” I thought, “if we ever meet again. We shall feel shy at the thought of having undraped our selfishnesses so quickly. But I’ve been draping mine for so many years. It’s a relief. He’s too preoccupied now with his own concerns to sum me up. He’ll do that afterwards, when he’s got what he wants, or is behind the bars. Then he’ll realise, as I do now, how very unlike both of us this meeting has been.”
“I’m asking you for everything and giving you nothing,” he said suddenly. “But that, I believe, is the way a request should be made.”
I wondered quickly if he knew that my purse was longer than Dora’s, and whether he was counting on me in that way too. Well, what if he was? It wasn’t a time to resent that sort of thing.
“We’ve now gone right round the garden,” I said, “and you haven’t really seen anything. When we get to the end of this avenue, you’ll find yourself at the side of the main lawn, with the house in full view. Dora should be back now. If you like, you can loiter down here, and I’ll send her to you. Or we can advance boldly together. When Charles gives her my message, she’ll get rid of Major Inchley quickly enough. At least, I gather she will, from what you’ve told me. Or I can stay with you here, and wait till she comes to find us. This is probably the first time anybody’s ever been nervous about meeting Dora.”
He laughed, a little too readily and too long.
“Oh, let’s go and meet her. If Major Inchley is still there, what does it matter? It’s part of my game to show myself in respectable company. I regard all acquaintances as possible witnesses for me in court.”
We turned the corner of the hedge and looked across the lawn. Through the morning-room window I caught a glimpse of Dora’s black dress against the white panelling. She was walking up and down, straightening a cushion perhaps or putting the biscuits away. Too nervous to come out and meet us. Well, there was no reason to spare her that little ordeal.
“She’s there,” I said. “We’ll go closer and I’ll call her to come out. Difficult meetings are easier in the open air. She won’t have to ask you to sit down. And if you begin to talk—as you’ll have to, as soon as I’ve slipped away—it won’t seem quite so formal. Dora! Dora!”
I shouted gaily, like a child that has found a bird’s nest. There was a flash of black across the window, and she came out by the side door on to the lawn, with quick steps.
“Did you have a good day?” I asked, when she was about three yards away.
/>
She stopped suddenly, looked at her brother, hesitated, and then said, “Oh yes, quite good. Two winners, but they were favourites. Well—Stephen!”
I said, “Your brother’s come to us for the birthday party. I told Charles to put his things in the room next the grey room. And now, I’m going to leave him in your charge.”
Before either of them could speak, I went indoors and up to my bedroom.
4
If my window had looked over the front lawn, I might have been tempted to watch them, to see whether he kissed her, or took her arm, whether they wandered round the garden together, or whether she drove him indoors at once. But my window looked westwards over the little garden with the cherry trees towards the line of beeches that twisted round with the lane towards Noakes’ cottage and the letter-box in the wall. I was in the room I had always had, where the setting sun about that time of the year struck through the top of the beeches on to my dressing-table and for a few moments filled the mirror with strange colours.
It was still an hour off sunset, and for some reason I felt too tired to sit and wait for it. Instead of remembering to deal with the shot rabbit, I did something I hardly ever do before dinner, and lay down on my bed and shut my eyes. “I’m here now,” I thought, “and I won’t be driven away. I’m here, in the innermost core of the place, in my own bed, where I want to die. Oh, gradually, when this crisis has passed, if it ever does pass, I shall find my debonair self coming back again. For the moment I’ve been jolted out of all that. I’m lying here, clutching the earth, and making it mine.”
Indeed, it did seem to me, pressing my heels into the mattress, as if the mattress were earth—the essential earth of Carlice—and I were burrowing into it for such security as one could still hope to find.
Stephen Payne wished to live the life of his own mind. Cornwall—yes, for the moment. It was a caprice, a source of inspiration, but he carried his real world about with him in his head. I in my wishes was more materially bound. It wasn’t the life of the mind that I wished to live, but a life which oozed from one particular place. Take me away, and I become nobody—a hyena with the mask of a gracious old lady.
Is this an ugly passion? Are passions ugly? And if I get what I want, what shall I give in return? I have passed the age of giving. I am here to take. It seems to me, I have been giving all my life—giving way to others.
Stephen Payne is no real kindred of mine. He’s of a superior order. Certainly I shall do any little thing I can for him, if only to propitiate the unknown. But my real kindred is the tramp I saw, sitting under the beeches, eating his bread and cheese. When I saw him, I knew that he sat there, not because he was too infirm to move, or couldn’t get work, or for any laudable reason of that sort, but because he liked the place, and for an hour in his wandering life had taken root in the roots of those old trees. And for once there was no policeman at hand to move him on.
Chapter X: RONALD CARLICE
1
I THOUGHT on the way back, “When I get home they’ll look at me curiously, as people look at someone who’s been in prison or had the most frightful of operations. They’ll probe me in a thousand gentle little ways, to see if I’ve changed again, or at least have begun to waver. They’ll have a specially lovely food served, to remind me that food in Russia isn’t so good as it is in an English country house. They’ll put the best linen sheets on my bed to remind me that people don’t have linen sheets in Russia. They’ll have the garden neat and beautiful to remind me that in Russia there are no gardens, as we understand them. They’ll watch me carefully, hoping for a sign that I’m relenting. They’ll talk to me circumspectly, as one talks to an invalid. They’ll say I’ve got too thin—even thinner than I usually am. They’ll say, ‘We must fatten you up with good English fare—the good English fare of Carlice Abbey.’ And in spite of everything I’ve said, by word of mouth, by letter and by telegram, they will have arranged some kind of a birthday party for me.”
Small wonder if I couldn’t bring myself to arrive till two days before my birthday!
And they’ll nearly succeed in having their way with me. That’s why I feel so ashamed. Have I got to admit to such weakness—to confess that my point of view was simply an undergraduate’s enthusiasm, or that, while I know that I was right and they were wrong, my whole upbringing is too much for me and puts me, ultimately, on their side and not on the side to which I should belong? Will they find out, whatever I do or say, that I was miserable in Russia, and am really coming back like a convalescent to a convalescent-home, tired and shocked and longing desperately for the little bourgeois conventions, those decent curtains which they hang between themselves and life in the raw—those pieces of solicitude which are charming to me because they were ingrained in me from the day of my comfortable birth? Will they guess that I can’t help reminding myself that I’m committed to nothing, except the good opinion of a few friends? That I can still easily stage a come-back, and decide to enjoy life, concerts, first-nights, good food, race-meetings, yachting, witty society, poetry, fine linen, old china, old furniture, and all the rest of it? It may still be possible to go on like that for a dozen years or so. Shall I sell myself to the devil for the sake of those dozen years? And adopt the view of my class and say, “Oh well, if you destroy us, you destroy civilization, and there really isn’t much point in surviving afterwards”? And there’s this more subtle argument. I used the phrase, “Sell myself to the devil,” but, according to my creed, my self is utterly unimportant to the scheme of things. And there isn’t a devil. Personal salvation is, in no case, a legitimate ideal. So what does it matter what I do with my self—that self which my creed will hardly concede to me?
All this means that I must be more than usually on my guard. I must make no concession. I must be, if necessary, standoffish, awkward, churlish and offensive. I mustn’t even allow myself to think. I must obey blindly the categorical imperative.
2
It was Aunt Dora who met the car as I drove in. Still in black. Of course, it’s still the same year that my sister Joan was killed in.
“Well, Ronnie,” she said, “I’m sure you have so much to tell us. But, my dear boy, how frightfully thin you’ve grown. You ought to have gone on a cruise like me. It did me so much good. We haven’t arranged any party, but I’m afraid you’ll find somebody here you never expected. It’s my brother Stephen. My half-brother really. His mother died when he was born, and my father married mother only three years afterwards. He’s come to see me on business, and Aunt Isabel suggested he should stay till over your birthday. He’s had rather a hard life, though it’s his own fault. I do hope he won’t annoy you.”
She was so garrulous, she almost followed me into the lavatory when I went to wash. She was looking very well, and showed a vitality which I hadn’t remembered noticing in her for a long time. I wondered if she really had taken it in when I told her, before going away, that I intended to make big changes after my birthday. Was she working herself up for a torrent of tears when I had to say, “Please have your things packed”?
She was the first woman I had talked to since Russia. The first female contrast. I suppose I may as well face the facts and admit that I can’t allow Rose to mean anything to me now. I must marry, of course, but the daughter of an Oxfordshire farmer wouldn’t do. I should have her mother, covered with imitation furs, sidling up to me and saying, “Can’t you do something for my poor little Rosie? She’s so unhappy. Do give her a new dress or a piece of jewellery. We didn’t think she was marrying someone without a family and with all those fantastical ideas.” And before I knew where I was, there’d be a scene, and I should have the fur-clad lady rolling about the floor. No, Rose mustn’t do for me, though she’d make a splendid wife from the point of view of the family, if only they had the wit to realise it. Just as Dora was a splendid wife for my father—if only she’d had children. What should I have been like if I’d
had half a dozen step-brothers and sisters?
Happily Rose’s image has grown faint. The family don’t know that they have only to get her over here to make me abjure all my virtuous resolutions. If they did, they’d send for her at once. At least, Aunt Isabel would. Whenever I say “the family” I really mean her. There’s nobody else to mean.
After I’d got rid of Dora by washing my hands, I went to the library, and looked out of the window till I knew luncheon would be ready. “I’ll meet Isabel at the table,” I thought; “while she’s at her food she won’t be so occupied with me. It’ll be a good place, too, in which to meet the uninvited guest, on whom I shall have to waste politeness for forty-eight hours.” I have never been able to talk to middle-aged men. I’d rather have a crusted Colonel of eighty than someone who tries to understand you, and meet you halfway, and went through the war and thinks that that made him understand all about life.
While I was waiting, looking at my watch rather than at the view, Eames came in to say that the mistress wondered if I should like anything sent upstairs. I almost said that I should like all my meals sent upstairs for the next forty-eight hours, but told him to tell them I would join them in the dining-room in two minutes. I had meant to account for my lateness by saying I had been doing a little unpacking, but as Eames had caught me idling in the library that excuse was taken from me.
I came down slowly—the squire descending the escalier d’honneur —and went into the dining-room. Isabel was on her feet, helping herself to some salad on one of the side-tables. She came forward with a plate in one hand and offered me her other. “When and where,” she asked, “did you have your last meal?”
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