by Alec Waugh
you allow me, please, to pass!
“No,” the man answered angrily. “I won’t. There’s plenty of room farther back. Why can’t you go there? “humour. To strangers it might be entertaining. To members of one’s family, impossible. David quite liked his brother, but he was bored by him. The Simon Merivales of life can be taken only in small doses, at the most a couple of hours weekly. It was a relief that they should have met this Heritage. For quite a while now he would be absolved of the task of listening. In grateful silence he sauntered beside Ransom towards the mound.
A wicket had fallen since they had left their seats, but the cricket had not been consequently enlivened. Desultory maidens were interspersed with singles, and David Merivale, who despised cricket as heartily as do the majority of rugger men, began, as half-an-hour earlier Ransom had begun, to search the crowd for a familiar face, and with similar results. There were a number of persons that he knew, but no one to whom he wished to speak. It was going to be an exceedingly tedious afternoon.
Beside him his brother was moralising on post-war psychology. “Are you aware, Heritage,” he was asserting, “that there are going up to Oxford now men who have never seen a sovereign in their lives, who cannot remember the beginning of the War, and most indistinctly the course of it. Do you realise that in five years’ time Oxford will be full of men to whom the War is no more than a piece of history?”
David Merivale sighed wearily. He had heard all that so many times. The War was over. Why could not people get on to the next thing, and he turned away to contemplate the profile in the next block of a girl whose pink parasol must, he felt, be obscuring the view of at least a dozen people. He could see beneath the wide brim of her hat the tip only of her chin. But in the poise and carriage of her head there was an arresting quality of attraction. She must be, he felt, extremely pretty. If only she would turn his way. She was, however, not only a block away, but six rows in front of him. It was not a probable contingency, and it was essential that he should see her. He rose in his seat.
“Going?” his brother asked him.
“No, but I can’t sec here. I’m going a couple of rows farther forward. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Laboriously, and to the immense inconvenience of everyone in the row, he extricated himself into the gangway. Six rows in front of him. Then he had better go nine or ten rows down. The tenth row down was, however, only three rows from the field and was consequently crowded.
“No room here,” he was informed surlily. “You’d better go farther back.”
But David was in no spirit for retreat. He had good eyesight. He could read the number 187 at the extremity of the row; the number at the edge of the gangway was 144. There was room, that was to say, in the row for forty-four people. He then proceeded to count the number of persons actually present. There were forty-two, which meant that somewhere along that clustered row there were distributed two empty spaces. This he proceeded to explain to the surly custodian of the row.
“But there’s no room; you can see that,” he was informed.
“There seems to be no room, because everyone is occupying slightly more space than that to which he is entitled. You will all have to compress yourselves a little.”
“It’s a hot day,” he was informed.
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry, but there it is. Will you allow me, please, to pass?”
“No,” the man answered angrily. “I won’t. There’s plenty of room farther back. Why can’t you go there?”
“For the best of reasons,” David replied brightly, “because I do not want to. May I pass, please?”
“There’s no room here,” the man persisted.
“In your opinion, no; in the opinion of the M.C.C. there is. And as the M.C.C. are in charge here, I shall be forced, unless you allow me to pass, to summon a policeman. It is unnecessary? I thank you. I repeat, I thank you very much.”
And he proceeded to stumble awkwardly past twenty-eight of the forty-two occupants of the resentful row. The twenty-ninth protested.
“And how much farther, sir,” he grumbled, “do you propose to go?”
David Merivale paused and looked upwards and backwards towards the girl with the pink parasol. There was no one immediately in his way. He could see her as well from here as anywhere.
“How much farther?” the man repeated.
“No farther,” David answered cheerfully. “I am going to sit next you. Thank you.” And, to the extreme discomfort of some eighteen overheated persons, a place was made for him.
“Admirable,” said David. “I can see admirably from here.” He took off his hat, placed it beside his feet, and, turning round, leant with his elbow against the seat, his head averted from the field, to stare appreciatively into the centre of the adjoining block.
She was prettier even than he had suspected. A dainty, a featured prettiness, a prettiness of mouth and nose and eyes, of soft outline and fading curve, a prettiness that was the mark though, clearly, of a genuine and high-spirited independence. She must, David Merivale reflected, be an extremely jolly girl. He observed gratefully that the cricket did not seem to be amusing her any more than it had amused him. She fanned herself lazily with her match card, read a few paragraphs of the newspaper that lay across her knee, glanced casually about her; sooner or later she should be bound to look at him. He continued to stare, avidly.
The majority of people, when they find that they are being stared at, drop their eyes hastily. The girl with the parasol, on realising that a young man in the adjoining block was staring at her, merely returned the stare. For a full twenty seconds she returned it, then turned quietly away and resumed her study of the match; and precisely at that heady moment David realised that the young man who sat beside her was a member of his own college. He jumped instantly and ecstatically to his feet and began to push his way towards the gangway. “Sorry to trouble you all,” he murmured, adding conciliatorily to certain testy commentators; “I shall be back in a few minutes.”
The young man beside whom the girl was sitting was not by any means a prominent member of the University. He had only been up one term. He played cricket badly, had few brains, and was not a speaker. His name David recollected vaguely to be Tristram, and his father, someone had told him, sold cotton profitably somewhere. He did not remember ever to have spoken a word to him, but that at such a moment did not matter. Besides Tristram would regard it as a considerable honour to have been even noticed.
At the entrance to the other stand David Merivale discovered that it would cost him five and ninepence to transfer his seat. The flood of his finances was at a pitiably low ebb; he had in fact that very day chosen the economical discomfort of a sandwich lunch, but unhesitatingly he passed a ten-shilling note across the turnstile.
“Hullo, Tristram! “he exclaimed expansively, “this is nice to see you.”
Tristram, who had held Merivale for the whole of his first term in awed and timorous veneration, rose to his feet in stammering embarrassment.
“Oh yes, Merivale, how nice, yes, of course—my mother, Mr David Merivale, member of my college. My father, and Blanch, my sister. Yes, do sit down. It’s bad, isn’t it; we’re going to lose this match—oh, look—no, it’s all right. You were here yesterday?—no, I was; a wonderful catch that got Taylor out. Man fell right over making it. I expect you heard. Lost us the match. We’ve never got straight since. I suppose, though, after last year the Tabs deserved it.”
There are those who bury their nervousness in silence; Tristram belonged to the species that endeavours to conceal it beneath garrulity, and David Merivale with a pained and inattentive smile upon his lips, acutely conscious of Blanch Tristram’s presence at his elbow, and of the mischievous and appraising scrutiny of her eyes, waited for the torrent of ungrammatical sentences to cease.
For ten slow-passing minutes it continued; continued till it could be borne no longer. In the midst of a trailing and seemingly endless anacoluthon David turned away his hea
d. “Does this,” he said, stretching out a hand towards the cricket, “bore you as completely as it bores me? ”
“That,” she replied, “I can hardly tell. But it bores me quite a lot.”
“It bores me awfully.”
“Yes.”
“I’m a rugger man, you see.”
“And does that prevent you enjoying cricket?”
“No, not quite; but well, you see, I didn’t want you to think that because I didn’t like cricket I didn’t care for games.”
“No, of course not.”
“Because I do, you see, Miss Tristram, frightfully. I’ve played in trial matches and all that sort of thing, I mean. Cricket’s too slow, though, and too technical.”
Her eyes, all the while that they were talking, never shifted from his face. They were still critical, but they smiled a little now.
“Do you know John well?” she asked.
“John?”
“John, my brother.”
“Oh, your brother. I didn’t know he was called John. Do I know him well,” he hesitated, then decided to be truthful. “No, not very well,” he said. “He only came up last term. I expect,” he concluded hopefully, “that I shall be seeing much more of him when the football’s started.”
“I see,” she answered, and in her eyes there was a twinkle of gay mischief. There was a pause, and for fear that John Tristram might occupy it with a further series of dissertations, David hastened to inform Blanch Tristram that he too possessed a brother—a brother who rather bored him.
“He will talk about the War,” he explained, “and I get so tired of hearing people talk about the War. Don’t you, Miss Tristram?”
“Frightfully,” she agreed.
“I know that it was all very terrible and that, but it’s over now. And we’ve got the next thing to get on with.”
‘That’s what I always feel,” she said,
He was delighted that she should agree with him.
“Do you, I’m so glad. I think that’s what we ought to feel—our lot. It wasn’t our fault that the War came when we were too young for it. They seem all of them to think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves because we were too young. But for all their talk, they “don’t seem to be doing anything very wonderful themselves just now.”
“They’re doing nothing,” she said, “they’ve just stopped where the Armistice left them.”
At that moment David became conscious of a series of movements on his right. Hats were being collected and sticks dropped.
“We’re going to tea, Blanch, before the squash,” Everard Tristram was announcing.
They rose to their feet, Blanch Tristram’s hand was half stretched out in leave-taking. But David was equal to the situation. “A very good idea, sir,” he exclaimed. “Just the right time. I’ll lead the way.”
Mr and Mrs Tristram exchanged glances. John Tristram blushed and fumbled with his tie. In Blanch’s eye a mischievous smile sparkled.
“Do you often,” she said, “do this sort of thing?” as they walked past the tavern to the tea tents.
“This sort of thing?” he asked. “What sort of thing?”
“What,” she explained, “you’ve been doing for the last half-hour. Staring at a person you don’t know, getting introduced to her by a boy you hardly know, accepting an invitation to tea that you have not been offered.” Her face was hidden beneath the wide brim of her hat, but he could tell from the intonation of her voice that she was smiling.
“Never before,” he said. “Honest, never before. You see,” he added, “I’ve never wanted to before.”
She raised her face, and her eyes met his fearlessly, unwaveringly. “I see,” she said.
For two hours, till shortly after six the gradual emptying of the ground began, David refused to be detached from her.
“When am I going to see you again?” he asked, as finally they rose to go. “Soon, please, let it be soon,” he said.
“Hadn’t you better ring me up,” she answered. “I’m in the phone book. Everard’s my father’s name.”
“Yes, but—“he paused, wondering how far one could go at a first meeting. “You couldn’t manage a dance on Friday, I suppose?”
She also hesitated. “Friday, let me see, what day is that.”
“The eleventh. It should be a decent show. Lady Manon Granta. She’s taken Everton Hall for it. Do come.”
She looked at him, a critical, calculating look; a look that weighed and appraised, and took account of. Then she nodded her head slowly. “Very well,” she said, “I’ll come. You can call for me at ten.”
“And who, John,” said Mrs Tristram, as they drove back from Lord’s, “did you tell me that that rather curious young man was?”
“David Merivale, mother.”
“I’ve never heard you speak of him.”
“I don’t know him very well.”
“Very curious; he behaved as though you were his greatest friend. And do you say that you didn’t know him either, Blanch?”
“I didn’t, mother,” Blanch answered. “But,” she added, “I do now.”
Chapter VIII
“Now Change Your Partners All”
Every year Lady Manon Granta gave a dance. “I can’t think,” she would say, “why I should bother to. I shan’t know a quarter of the people there by sight, and not a twentieth of them by name. But I suppose one’s got to remind people once a year that one’s alive, and, at any rate, my poor husband seems to like it.”
Her social activities were indeed the only part of her life from which her husband can be said to have drawn any actual satisfaction. It would be perhaps untrue to say that he had married her entirely for her social prominence. His choice of Manon, as there were at the time he made it some dozen similarly placed women who would have been ready to accept him, must be regarded as the result at least of preference. And it might be argued that seventy-five per cent, of the year’s marriages are solemnised, less because a man feels that it will be impossible for him to live without a particular woman, than because he has reached a point at which marriage has become possible and desirable. He does not so formulate his intentions, but that is the way things happen. He is in a marrying mood. The field of his choice is restricted by his age, his income, his appearance, and his position, restricted alone by the extent of his acquaintance.
Most marriages, it might indeed be argued, do not begin with any enraptured wooing of “the only girl in the world,” but with a more or less calculated preference between some odd half-dozen. That more or less was how Charles Granta’s courtship had been conducted. He had wanted a wife, but he had not wanted any wife. He had not wanted money, he had enough of that himself. He wanted beauty, though, and breeding and popularity. After looking round London for a year, he had decided that Lady Manon Muir was the most attractive woman in the circle into which he wished to marry. And he had set himself to woo her. Her title undoubtedly added to her beauty. The one was the complement of the other. Neither would have been complete without the other. And that, because at the time she had not realised it, Manon had never been able to forgive. That she had married him for his money was another matter. “He cannot have imagined I was in love with him; he knew that I should not have married him if he had not been extremely rich. It must have been quite clear to him,” she had confessed in one of her rare moments of confidence, “why I accepted him. He can’t pretend that he got me under false pretences. But he did make me think that he was in love with me. And that I can’t forgive him. If a man wants me for myself well enough to pay the equivalent of two hundred thousand for me, he is making me a genuine offer that I can turn down or take as I think fit; but when it comes to paying that price for my name and my connections, well it’s not the same thing, my dear and I don’t like it.”
She had made this confession to a candid friend. “You mean, my dear,” she had been told in answer, “that you had thought you were worth two hundred thousand and you find it’s only what your great, great, gr
eat-grandparents did that’s worth it, which has hurt your pride a little.”
“Perhaps,” she answered. “But then my pride—well, it’s about all I’ve got, you know.”
And as she stood at the head of the wide flight of stairs welcoming her guests, she flung more than one sidelong and disdainful glance at the self-congratulatory smile that was on such occasions rarely absent from her husband’s mouth.
In the Times next morning the affair was described as a small dance; actually there were about six hundred people present, and the large ballroom was so congested that for a long time it was scarcely possible to discover who was and who was not present. Certainly Eric Somerset, who had Qmitted to bring a partner with him, was for the first half-hour completely lost. He had never been to so big a dance before. He had expected to be given a programme on his arrival, to be introduced immediately to embarrassingly large numbers of attractive maidens, and to be asked every subsequent five minutes by his hostess whether he could not possibly spare a dance for such “a nice girl who had only just arrived and knew scarcely anyone.” He had not expected to arrive at a house from whose main door ran a red-awninged passage down to the pavement; he had not expected to walk up that passage between two deep rows of eager spectators, who had stood since ten o’clock watching with envying, appraising eyes the dischargal, car by car, of party after party. He had not expected to find the foot of the stairs thronged by young men awaiting as they drew on their gloves the delayed uncloaking of their partners. In a condition of acute confusion he had walked up the stairs towards his hostess, had his name announced as Mr Merrick Forset, been greeted with a radiant but unseeing smile, had fled past it to the seclusion of a sheltering corner, there to stand gazing helplessly down the long L-shaped room in whose far angle the band beat out the broken rhythm of “Horsey keep your Tail up.”
In this vast, swaying, undulating crowd there did not seem to be a single man or woman that he knew. Despairingly his eyes searched there for a familiar face. Who were all these people? what was he doing here among them? and, more important still, what was he to do next? The music ceased; there was a moment of spasmodic clapping, but the dance had been already encored once, and the violinist pulled the silk handkerchief from his collar and sat down to fan his face with it. The ballroom became a buzz of emptying conversations, as couple after couple passed out to the balcony which ran the length of the main room, or into the adjoining drawing-room, against one of whose walls was drawn a long buffet side-board. About him on all sides was a swelling roar of talk, out of which here and there he could detect a mumbled introduction. “You do know so-and-so, don’t you?” Some of the men were taking visiting-cards from their waistcoat pockets and jotting down on them the number and partner of the dances. But in all that crowd he could not see a single face that he knew. Would there never be any introducing. He walked out on the gallery of the staircase, to see at the foot of the staircase the same crowd and the same press of people moving up the stairs to be announced. For half-an-hour yet there was no chance of Lady Manon being disengaged. He turned back towards the ballroom to see at the opposite corner of it, in agitated conversation with the musicians, in a suit that seemed to gather and reflect like a sheet of ice the diffused radiance of the candelabra, the tall, graceful figure of Chris Hammond.