The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  Old Balliol knew that he was dying, and he resented it. He was surprised that he should resent it. For many years now he had had no particular zest for living. A widower for a dozen years, he had been lonely. He had nothing to look forward to. One day, one month, one year had been very like another. But now that the time had come, he felt the same resentment that he had as a schoolboy at the end of the holidays. He was glad to be going back. He was rather bored with home. Yet he resented the idea of things going on without him.

  Lying now, propped up among his pillows, he was resentful because he would never see in their full summer livery the greening hedges and the blossoming witch-elm, the budding chestnuts; because the apricots would swell and redden on the walls beside the greenhouse; because the Dutch garden would be gay with tulips; stocks would be bright along the bowling-green; because in a few days there would be the sound of the mower on the tennis-court; in the evening boys would be practising cricket on the green; yokels would sit at the trestled tables before the Plough with their mugs of cider. Just as it always had been, and he not there to see it. It would go on, as it always had, though he was a part of it no longer.

  “Hasn’t Stella come yet?” he asked.

  “They should be here any moment now.”

  “I want to see the boy first.”

  But when the sound of wheels on the gravel drive announced the arrival of the carriage, when Edward was in the room beside him, his hand lying between his son’s, he did not feel that he had much to say. He was glad to have his son sitting there. But all that they had to say to one another had been said long ago. Their differences of opinion, their confidences were in the past. He had a hatred of dramatics. Talking was a big effort. They sat in silence.

  “I’m worried about Stella,” he said at length.

  “I don’t think you need be. She’s happy. She’s doing very well at the job of hers.”

  “I wish she’d marry.”

  “Jane and I are asking a number of young men to meet her.”

  The old man made no reply. The effort of those few words had exhausted him.

  “Would you like to see Stella now?”

  The old man nodded.

  All that day he lingered on, growing weaker and weaker as the warmth of the spring day lessened. The nurse that had been sent for arrived, shortly after tea. She was stern, angular, competent. Balliol disliked the business-like way in which she set her things out on the table at his side. She must have seen so many people die. She had probably made up her mind already how long his father would live; had looked up trains, planning her departure.

  Most of the afternoon Stella sat in the sick room, not talking, holding her father’s hand; while Balliol sat reading downstairs, or pacing slowly the garden paths.

  Had he been a sentimentalist he would have re-lived his boyhood through that afternoon, reviving memories, seeking the locality of this and that association; saying to himself, for forty years this has been my home. For a hundred and fifty my family have lived here. In a few weeks strangers will be busy with their renovations.

  But Balliol was without that kind of sentiment. Instead, as the late April afternoon died slowly, he pondered in his own impersonal way the fortunes of a family such as his; seeing it as he always saw such problems as part of a general pattern.

  In the far Georgian days when this house was built, it had been the lot of a county gentleman to die under the roof where he was born. He inherited the home and the responsibilities that a grandfather had handed to his father. His education was a matter of discipline: a whipping into shape. The sprinkling of conversation with a classical tag or two was considered an accomplishment comparable with the water colours and piano scales of Victorian débutantes; a man’s job was to look after his land and his tenants, pay his tithes and take his place in the family pew on Sundays.

  It was for such a life that he himself had been prepared, and practically the only quarrel he had ever had with his father was the result of his decision to lead a London life. To old Balliol it had seemed a terrible thing that his son should renounce the responsibilities that four generations of Balliols had held in trust; that his son should go into trade, even though a good palate was a gentleman’s possession.

  It had taken much argument and a long array of figures to convince him that an estate such as theirs could no longer maintain a family in comfort. It was all very well for the farmer whose needs were moderate. But an estate of four times the size was needed for the support of an establishment such as the earlier Balliols had maintained.

  “And it’s not as though it were going to stop here,” Edward Balliol had continued. “Money buys half as much as it used. I read an article the other day prophesying that by the middle of the next century we should be paying as much as a shilling in the pound in income tax.”

  That was how he had argued in the ‘eighties. Events had proved him right. He had been justified. No one could have foreseen the Boer War. And the exceptional conditions that had sent the income tax to fourteen pence. It had come down, of course. It would come down still further. But no one could tell what might not have happened by the middle of the century. This at least was clear. The property was no longer capable of supporting that old ample way of living. Field after field had been sold to repair deficits in the budget. There was not much left now except the house. The farm buildings had been rented; the rents that came from them barely supported their own upkeep. The place had lasted his father’s time, but it would never have lasted his.

  It would now either be engulfed by a larger estate or bought up by a young farmer with ambition but modest demands of life. There was no room in the country any longer for people like himself, living upon their land. The land could not support their way of life. One had to expand or go under. To become a big landowner, or earn a living in a city and regard one’s house in the country as a week-end cottage. This house was one of a hundred others right through the country. So he argued with himself as the day wore on to evening.

  Once or twice he went up to his father’s room. He could see little change. Each breath was laboured; the exhaustion following each breath was complete. If the effort seemed less, it was only because the strength had lessened, so that the trembling of the canopy about the bed was slighter. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could stay for. He believed that his father would live through the day. His father had told him once that he always woke up at four in the morning and pulled on another blanket. At four o’clock the body’s vitality was lowest. “It will be at four o’clock that I shall die,” he had said.

  Dinner was a silent meal. Little attempt was made at conversation. The Balliols had always kept a good table. The momentum of long training that keeps a driven object in its line for some time after the driving force is spent, prepared a meal comparable with any other Balliol remembered. The claret was of the right temperature. But the eyes of the maid who served the meal were red. “Yet she’s only known him for three years.”

  “Did he talk to you much?” said Balliol, when they were alone over the coffee in the drawing-room.

  Stella shook her head.

  “Hardly a word. He just wanted me beside him.”

  “You were always his favourite.”

  A twinge of jealousy that he had fancied dead made his voice sound sharp. Stella had always been his father’s favourite. He had always resented it. Why should she have been? She hadn’t been a particularly good daughter. She’d done the things she’d wanted; gone her own way; made her home in London instead of here with him. Why should he have set such high stock by her? With his thoughts centred on her, even now when he had grandchildren growing up.

  Stella noticed the slight asperity in his voice, but let it pass.

  “Things are going to be very different now,” she said.

  So she had realized, then.

  “It’ll mean an independent income for you.”

  “I didn’t mean that.…”

  “What did you mean?
”

  “In other ways. It’s…” she hesitated. “It’s a responsibility to have someone to whom you matter as much as I did to him; who was really affected by what I did. There won’t be anybody like that again.”

  “Will that make much difference?”

  She nodded.

  “There are a great many things I didn’t do, because I knew they’d hurt him. I’d feel free to do them now. I would be hurting no one. I’ve only myself to consider.”

  Her brother stared at her in amazement. He could not think what she was talking about. He couldn’t see Stella flinging her bonnet over windmills.

  VII

  Roy Rickman, as befitted a young man with his way to make, was extremely punctilious in the fulfilment of his social obligations. He had none of the casualness of manners that marked so many of his contemporaries. Within a fortnight of the receipt of hospitality, he had paid the call that was the acknowledgment of his indebtedness. Ten days after he had dined at the Balliols he presented himself at their front door at four o’clock in the afternoon, in his social uniform of silk hat and morning coat. Usually he considered the leaving of cards an ample tribute to a dinner party, but the memory of Mrs. Balliol’s friendliness caused him, to his own surprise, to ask the maid if Mrs. Balliol was at home. To his surprise also he was relieved to find she was.

  He handed his hat, gloves and umbrella to the maid.

  “Six years ago I’d have had no umbrella. I’d have been wearing a frock coat and I’d have carried my hat and gloves into the drawing-room. Thank heavens, that piece of formality is over.”

  Jane Balliol was at the window, arranging a bowl of flowers. She turned as the door opened. Her back was towards the light, so that he could not see her features, but there was a little gasp in her voice.

  “You! Oh, but how nice of you.”

  Her welcome warmed him. She really was glad to see him.

  “I was just going to have tea. You’ll join me, won’t you?”

  They sat down side by side on the narrow, straight-backed chesterfield. They began to talk easily, without effort, as though they were old friends. He had a comfortable easy sense of relaxation, of being able to say what he thought, naturally; knowing that he would be understood; not having to worry about the impression he was making; not being outside himself.

  The tea arrived and with it an increased sense of intimacy; a cosy sense of letting the conversation drift; knowing that each topic would lead to another topic; that they would never run short of things to say.

  She asked him about the guests at her dinner party; what impression each had made on him.

  “What did you think of my sister-in-law?”

  “The one who talked so much?”

  “Yes.”

  “She seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what she thought.”

  “Did you think her attractive?”

  “Well… I mean.…”

  Jane smiled. She shouldn’t, she supposed, be talking in this way about her husband’s sister to so young a man. And one that she scarcely knew. But it seemed so easy.

  “She’s not the kind of girl you’d fall in love with?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  His astonishment was so considerable that she laughed outright.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “I’m twenty-four.”

  “Were you very much in love with her?”

  “I thought I was.”

  “That’s really the same thing, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Roy hesitated.

  It was the kind of opening that he was adroit at creating and exploiting. Gallantry was not at the moment in his mind, but he was one of those men for whom every conversation is a form of courtship. He was by no means inexperienced and he knew how effectively a woman can be wooed by a description of some previous romance. She sees herself in the position of the woman; she sees her courtier as a lover. “I should like to be thought of in that way,” she thinks. “I should like things to happen that way to me.”

  The nature of the story depends upon the audience. The story that would thrill a girl would not impress a mature and worldly woman. Mrs. Balliol was a woman in the middle thirties, with three (or was it four?) children. He wasn’t sure. Yet even so he did not feel that he could tell to her the kind of story that would suggest passion, intrigue, despair, stolen moments, “the little grace of an hour.” There was something untouched, unawoken, an untarnished quality of spirit, about the steady intent look of her grey-blue eyes. He did not feel that she was the right audience for a sophisticated story. At the same time, she would not be interested in a young girl’s story. By way of compromise he told her a young story in an adult way.

  “It’ll sound very foolish, I’m afraid. There’s so little of it to tell. It’s one of those things that come to nothing; like a bud that comes too early or too late.

  “It was six years ago. I was in Geneva. I had gone there during a long vac. to polish up my French. I was staying at one of those pensions where it is supposed that nothing but French is ever spoken, and where in point of fact you find some other Englishmen and speak nothing but English the whole time. That’s what would have happened to me, if she’d not been there. She was French; she was not eighteen. I was surprised at her being there till I discovered that the patronne was a cousin. She could not have been more ruthlessly chaperoned. I was never alone with her. There were always four other people in the room. We never said an intimate thing to one another. But you know how it is when you’re young: how by looking at one another, by reading a newspaper together, by agreeing that you like to eat strawberries and cream, with the fruit, the cream, the sugar separate, not all mushed up, you build up—well, I don’t know what you build up, but you fall in love.

  “I don’t know what she felt about me. I know what I felt about her. It was bound up with romanticism, chivalry. I used to picture situations when I’d die for her, when I’d achieve wild acts of valour for her. You can guess the kind of things. I would devote my whole life to her service. When she left the pension and went back to Paris, I thought I should die, I was so miserable. And there was nothing to show for it. I hadn’t a note from her, not a photograph, not a lock of hair. She’d nothing of mine, either. Nothing to remember me by. I was afraid that she’d forget me, before I could prove to her that I was worthy of her. It might take so long. She was so beautiful. She would be so far away, so many men during that time would wish to marry her. ‘I must make her a present,’ I told myself.

  “I had no money, nothing. My parents were wise about that. They knew if I had money I should spend it. They arranged to pay all my pension expenses direct. Even my pocket money: I had nothing except a few sous. The only thing of any value that I had was my return ticket, a first-class one. They had been generous there. ‘Well, I can pawn this,’ I thought.

  “I didn’t get much for it. I forget how much or how little. But I know that there wasn’t a great deal left over when I had bought the fourth-class ticket that was to take its place. A few hundred francs, not more. I spent every sou of them on a small gold brooch. It was probably a tawdry, trumpery little thing. Probably it wasn’t really gold at all; just gilt. But it cost me all I had. I thought it exquisite.”

  He paused, looking at her interrogatively, to see how the history was affecting her. Her face wore an intent expression that encouraged him to change slightly the tempo of the story; making it, since she took it seriously, less ironic than he had intended.

  “I counted the hours after I had sent it. I made the most exhaustive inquiries at the post office to know how soon I could expect an answer. So much depended on the reply. Would she send me a short little note of thanks or a real letter? If it were to be a real letter then she would probably take a day or two to write it. On the first morning when I could hope for a reply, though I was so excited that I awoke with daylight, though I listened for the postman’s knock for a ful
l half-hour before there was any possibility of his arriving, I almost hoped that there would be no letter with a French postmark beside my plate at the breakfast table. When I saw a pile of letters waiting there, my heart sank. All those letters could not be from friends. I ran them over quickly with my fingers. I gave a sigh of thankfulness. They had English stamps on them; every one.

  “There was a second post, late in the afternoon. I did not expect to hear by it. If she was going to wait, it would not be for a few hours, not for a day. She would need a whole night to think over her reply. I did not associate with her the small package that arrived by registered mail that the femme de chambre brought in high excitement, with the explanation that she had herself signed for it.

  “Then I saw the French stamp mark. I did not dare to open it. Was this package of good or evil omen? I had not expected her to send me anything. She might have thought the exchange of gifts was the equivalent of an exchange of vows. Or she might have thought ‘He’s sent me something, what a nuisance! I suppose I must send him something, too.’ The present might have meant either of those two things. I tore open the envelope that was bound round a smaller enclosed packet, with what novelists describe as mingled feelings.

  “It was in a handwriting that was unfamiliar; that was not hers, round and flourished; it was masculine and methodical. I turned quickly to the signature. It was her father’s. I stared at it. My courage waned. Then, with slow fingers, I turned back to the first page. It was very brief. His daughter, he said, had shown him the present that I had sent her. He was returning it herewith. In England very probably things were different. But in France ‘it was not convenable for young ladies to receive presents from young gentlemen.’

  “I re-read the letter, then I opened the packet. There it lay: the trinket I had chosen with such care and thought, that I had wrapped up so carefully, that I had pictured lying against her heart. It had symbolized our romance. Its return symbolized its death. I felt that I wanted to die. I pushed the brooch into my pocket. I walked out of the house. Dinner would be ready in twenty minutes, but I had no appetite.