‘I quite agree with you,’ said Everard.
‘But I thought you were a schoolmaster too,’ said Lydia.
‘But not a headmistress, I am thankful to say.’
‘Do you know Miss Pettinger then?’ asked Lydia.
‘I once had the horror of meeting her,’ said Everard gravely.
‘You’ve said it,’ remarked Lydia, with her American accent, and was just going to give her amplified views on her headmistress when Kate drew her aside.
‘Lydia,’ she said, ‘have you no stockings on again?’
‘Oh Kate, they all needed darning, and anyway this skirt touches the ground, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘I mended two pairs and put them on your dressing-table,’ said Kate with mild reproach.
‘Oh, Kate, what an angel you are. Need I put them on? Don’t you hate wearing stockings, Mr Carter?’
‘I can’t say that I do,’ said Everard, ‘but then they rarely come my way.’
‘Where’s Merton?’ said Mr Keith, looking at his watch. ‘It’s five and twenty to nine.’
‘He’ll be down in a second,’ said Lydia. ‘I was showing him that ghastly pair of pyjamas Mother got me at Bournemouth, and we laughed so much that it made us late, and that was why I had to put on my dress as I came downstairs and never looked on my dressing-table, or I’d have seen the stockings, so that’s really why, and anyway one of my suspenders burst.’
Any further domestic details were cut short by the appearance of Noel Merton, looking so elegant, so entirely unconscious of his elegance, that Kate’s feelings leapt to her eyes. Everard Carter, seeing her face, felt that his journey must continue, with no visible, no possible ending, and listened with much amusement to his hostess’s description of his great-aunt Sibyl. At dinner, seeing that Lydia, who was next to him, was preparing to monopolise not only Noel but the whole table, he devoted himself to her entertainment, and was favoured with many original, though not very valuable reflections on Shakespeare, Latin literature, cocker spaniels, and the incredible horribleness of Miss Pettinger. In this last he was able so heartily to sympathise that he won Lydia’s deep respect and even attention. Mr Keith registered mental approval of a man who could get the upper hand of his younger daughter, and when, after the ladies had left them, he found that Everard came of a legal family and had read law himself before becoming a schoolmaster, his approval was complete.
‘What made you give up the law, Carter?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t afford it,’ said Everard. ‘My people weren’t well off and I had a chance in a school, so I took it.’
‘Too bad, too bad,’ said Mr Keith.
‘I don’t know,’ said Everard. ‘We schoolmasters are, I admit, an awful, creeping, degraded race, class-conscious, hardly emerged from the cocoon of the usher, but there is something. I don’t yet know what it is. Some of us honestly like boys, some don’t. Now, I could bang the heads of any two of the boys in my house or my form together twenty times a day, with the greatest pleasure, and yet I’m wretched without them. I get them at about thirteen, when the shades of the prison house are closing, when they are changing from the frank devils of the prep schools to the more subtle fiends of public school. I see them through mental and moral mumps and measles. I send them on to the Universities, business, the army; spotty, it is true, but improved. Most of them are glad to escape. The few who remember me think of me as an old dodderer who did his poor best. I have no home but my house, no particular future, for good headmasterships are scarce, and I’m not very ambitious. But I like it better than anything in the world.’
‘I wish I did,’ said Colin. ‘Does one ever stop feeling that boys despise one?’
‘Never,’ said Everard. ‘It is a faint comfort to hug the consciousness that after all we really know a little more than they do. I have got a good many boys out of scrapes, from attacks of religion to calf-love, and though they have gone on despising me, they have conceived a faint, a very faint respect for my office. That is perhaps worth while. I don’t know.’
‘I suppose schoolmastering is a kind of lay priesthood,’ said Noel, interested.
‘Roughly, very roughly, yes. Just as, roughly, the legal profession is a trade union. That is why you make more mark in the world than we do. You have more solidarity.’
‘I thought,’ said Mr Keith, ‘that schoolmasters were a pretty solid body.’
‘I think Mr Carter would say, if he weren’t afraid of boasting,’ said Noel, ‘that in the higher branches of his profession the solidarity becomes mostly a matter of form, a weapon for help in case of real need, but a weapon one would rather not use, partly from a feeling of personal integrity, partly because one doesn’t much care to be under the same flag as those who use the weapon politically, without thinking of duty. I imagine that with Mr Carter his sense of his rights would always be outweighed by his sense of duty. I know my old housemaster, whom I confess I regarded in Mr Carter’s own words as a well-meaning old dodderer, would have been chucked out of any self-respecting union as a blackleg of the first water. I only realised much later how he had given his time and mind and strength, not to speak of reduced fees in some cases, to boys who needed it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Everard. ‘Do you never work over and above what the letter of your profession demands?’
‘Oh, well,’ said Noel.
‘I must say, speaking as a mere solicitor,’ said Mr Keith, ‘that in the matter of looks the legal profession scores heavily.’
‘That,’ said Everard, ‘is certainly a point against the ushers. Why most barristers look like very distinguished hawks, or Admirals of the Fleet, while schoolmasters look like anything or nothing on earth, I don’t know. It isn’t fair.’
‘Mr Birkett looks perfectly normal,’ said Colin.
‘So do I, I flatter myself,’ said Everard, ‘but that proves nothing. Take any large gathering of us, and you will be horrified by the varieties of ill-made faces and bodies, the booming and squeaking voices.’
‘Anyway,’ said Colin loyally, ‘a lot of parsons look worse. You see them at conferences and things at Barchester.’
‘To go back to our talk,’ said Noel, ‘is it partly being with young people that makes schoolmastering attractive?’
‘No,’ said Everard. ‘It is being perpetually with the young that turns us into boneheads and fossils. Imagine a life in which you rarely talk to people on your own intellectual level. We may sharpen our wits on them, it is one of our few weapons, and an unfair one at that; it is not until they are in their last year that we can sharpen our wits against them. And by that time they are usually so earnest. Age and crabbed youth simply cannot live together for very long, without age either going under or assuming a protective coat of cynicism, and when it comes to cynicism they can beat us at our own game now.’
‘Have another glass of port,’ said Mr Keith, ‘and we’ll go to the drawing-room. Well, Colin, what do you think of it all?’
‘I think what Everard says is perfectly splendid, but a little frightening. I really like school quite a lot, if only the boys wouldn’t look at me.’
‘They don’t look at you, Colin, they look through you,’ said Everard, staring into his port as if it were the soothsayer’s pool of ink. ‘When we are young we all look through our elders, to see what lies beyond. And when we see what is there, we are the elders ourselves. I wish, at the end of this rather boring disquisition, into which Mr Merton has lured me, I could say I have no regrets for my own crabbed youth. There are moments when one misses it quite desperately.’
He spoke with abstracted melancholy, looking not at Colin, a good dozen years younger than himself, but at Noel Merton, for whom Kate’s eyes had shone.
When they reached the drawing-room, Lydia had been dismissed to do her essay on Addison and Pope. Noel didn’t play bridge, so he and Kate talked very comfortably while the others played. Everard, conscious of his duty as a guest, played with concentration, his back to the talkers, dete
rmined to let no echo of their voices come between him and the cards, and was rewarded by winning seven shillings.
‘I never thanked you for sewing on that button, Miss Keith,’ said Everard, before they went upstairs. ‘You haven’t by any chance got the old one, have you?’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Kate. ‘I threw it away. I could look for it if you like. Did you want it?’
‘Not particularly. Please don’t bother,’ said Everard. ‘I just thought I might like it.’
He went to bed, humming to himself ‘I sent thee late a rosy wreath’, and wishing that ‘waistcoat button’ could be substituted without seriously impairing the poetic and rhythmical value of that well-known lyric.
5
Whitsun Picnic
Seldom had Lydia passed a more agreeable Whitsun. Her friend Noel, it is true, did not give her quite so much of his company as she had expected, but she did not grudge him to Kate, though what on earth Noel could find to talk to Kate about, she could not guess. On the other hand, Mr Carter, who was almost as nice as Noel, devoted himself to her to a flattering extent, and as Colin seemed to prefer their company, Lydia was certain of an audience. Mr Carter also obliged with some very useful tips about Addison and Pope, and by his and Colin’s joint exertions she was dragged through what she had described as that whacking great ode of Horace with the bit about Lacedaemonium Tarentum, a line which at least had the merit of requiring practically no translation. To Colin’s great admiration Everard also took a short ode about Lucina in his stride, while Lydia showed in its subject a lack of interest which well became her years.
‘Of course I know all about babies,’ she said scornfully, ‘botany and birth-control and all that. Rot, I call it. I say, Colin, let’s have a picnic on Sunday up the river. If it goes on being as hot as this it’ll be ripping.’
Colin agreed heartily, but suddenly said, ‘Oh, Lord!’
‘What is it?’ asked Everard.
‘I didn’t tell you,’ said Colin, ‘that evening I had supper at the Head’s house, the day after Hacker left the bath on, the Birketts said they were probably going to the Rectory for Whitsun, with Rose.’
‘And therefore Philip,’ said Everard.
Lydia asked what they were talking about, and on hearing their difficulties said she didn’t see why they were worrying, but if they’d rather go down-stream she didn’t mind. This plan was shattered at Sunday breakfast by Mrs Keith, who said she had met Colin’s nice headmaster and his wife at dinner at the Deanery the night before, and had arranged with them for a joint picnic to be held on Parsley Island.
‘There aren’t any campers there yet, so Farmer Brown told your father a week or two ago,’ said Mrs Keith, ‘and if it keeps as hot as this it will be very nice for you. When my Uncle Oswald was in Calcutta they went up-country every weekend for a kind of picnic, but of course everything went on elephants, because they had a Rajah’s son at his school who couldn’t go by train because of losing caste or something. There was a very pretty daughter of Mrs Birkett’s there, Colin, she said you were a great friend of hers, so I thought that would be nice for you. Your father and I will drive as far as the ferry, and you young people can go up in the boats and take us across. Will you drive with us, Mr Carter?’
Everard, realising without animus that he was somehow not a young person, though Noel, who was about his own age, was, said he would be delighted, but Lydia protested violently that Everard must come in the boat.
‘Really, Lydia,’ said her mother. ‘Mr Carter, I am so very sorry. Those young people seem to use Christian names almost before they know the surnames.’
‘Oh Mother!’ said Lydia, ‘I couldn’t say Mr Carter. Besides Everard doesn’t mind, do you, Everard? I mean being a schoolmaster doesn’t make you be a mister for the rest of your life, and anyway Everard beat me at tennis, and rode my bicycle backwards all up the grass border without falling off, and I fell off twice.’
‘I don’t know how often I have told you not to ride on that grass border,’ said her father.
‘Then,’ said Kate quickly, ‘I must see about food. Will you take the drinks in the car, and we can take the food in the boat.’
‘What about the thermos that leaks?’ said Mrs Keith.
‘I got a new one last week, Mother, and there’s your big one, and that one of Robert’s he left here, and that other one in the leather case, so we ought to do. Mr Merton, you like Gentlemen’s Relish, don’t you? Mr Carter, do you like any special sandwich?’
Everard was torn between wishing she didn’t so well remember what Merton liked, and gratitude to her for taking an interest in his own tastes. He also wished that the fact of his having eaten four more sandwiches than Merton yesterday had not so entirely escaped her notice, but to keep himself humble he said he liked Gentlemen’s Relish too.
Mrs Keith forced the unwilling Lydia to put on stockings and go to Northbridge church with her and Mr Keith, while the others played some lazy tennis and sat about in the garden, enjoying the blazing heat. By lunch-time it was so hot that everyone was glad of open windows and ice in the drinks. Lydia took off her stockings again and appeared in an exiguous and shapeless garment with holes for her head and arms, considered by her suitable for picnics, and firmly refused to change, on the grounds that she always fell into the river, and the less she had to change the better.
At half-past three, Kate, Lydia, Everard, Noel and Colin staggered sleepily down to the boat-house with baskets of food and a rug. Heavy white clouds were massing over the downs, and Kate said there would be thunder, but she thought not till after tea. She with Everard and Colin packed into the boat, while Lydia annexed Noel for the coracle, and said she would punt him up-stream, adding that she had never fallen into the river going up-stream yet. At Parsley Island they tied up the boat and landed. It was a pretty island, with grass and beech trees down to the water’s edge and a little thicket on the farther side. On the opposite bank was the ferryman’s boat, and a few yards lower down the Rectory exhibited its Gothic revival windows and well laid out garden, embanked with a red brick wall along the river. A punt was moored at the foot of a flight of brick steps. A golden Sunday calm brooded over everything, and when Lydia stopped talking there was no sound but the distant noise of the weir, farther up-stream.
‘By Jove,’ said Colin, ‘those boys are somewhere on the island. Shall we explore?’
‘I thought you didn’t like boys,’ said Everard, lying full length on his back, his voice muffled by the hat he had put over his face.
‘No more I do,’ said Colin, ‘but they might like some tea. I remember what camping was. Bacon and sausages till you burst the first day, and then starvation. Besides, those are rather nice boys.’
‘Because they are products of my house,’ said Everard.
‘I expect you are right,’ said Colin seriously.
‘I brought some iodine and some buttons and things,’ said Kate, ‘in case they needed them, so we might go and look.’
‘All right,’ said Everard, getting up.
The island was not large, and before they had gone far they heard voices. A winding path led them through the thicket to the brink of what looked like a small disused sand or gravel pit. Swan and Morland were sprawling upon the ground, dressed in very dirty shorts. Morland had a disgraceful linen hat tilted over his nose, and Swan wore his spectacles and a green eye-shade. Both were reading. A very small tent with the flaps neatly turned up was near by, and the remains of a fire were smouldering. At the sound of footsteps the readers looked up.
‘Hist, brother, Gorgio shunella!’ said Swan, recognising the intruders.
Morland took out of his mouth the piece of grass he had been chewing, marked his page with it, shut the book, and got up.
‘Come into the dingle, sir,’ he called to Colin. ‘Genuine scholar gypsies; baked hedgehogs, drabbed bawlor, poisoned cake from Mrs Hearne’s recipe for anyone who likes, and beds for all who come,’ he added, pointing proudly to the tent.
The party descended into the dingle. Colin introduced Noel, Kate and Lydia to Swan and Morland, who did the honours of the dingle with true Romany courtesy. Everard and Colin they received as temporary equals, with that fine shade of condescension which only an equal can appreciate. To Noel they were equally polite, and agreeable, while managing to convey to him the impression that civility to strangers was the necessary duty of any gentleman. Kate they accepted at once as one of the grown-ups set over them by Providence, and Lydia, after an almost imperceptible exchange of glances, passed as a good fellow, though with not much intellect.
‘What are you reading?’ asked Noel.
‘The score of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps, sir,’ said Swan. ‘It’s immensely interesting, but I’m not sure if the use of the brass is legitimate. What do you think?’
Summer Half: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) Page 10