Clarissa couldn’t believe it.
“You will soon get used to it, and love it as I did,” she said.
“Never! I did not like the motion. I hate the noise, the shaking, and the wind. In our game, we can drive without any of those inconveniences.”
“But we have none of the fun, either.”
“Imagination takes us much further than anybody’s motor-car can go.”
To Agatha this sounded unanswerable.
“But it’s so futile only to pretend,” said Clarissa.
It was only by a great effort that Agatha could save herself from bursting into tears.
“Yet how much pleasure you and I have always had from pretending,” she said. “Are you never going to play our game again?”
“Of course I don’t mean that,” said Clarissa. “ I shall always love it. But if we really did the things we play at, they would be even more fun. I never thought it was possible before, but now I see what a lot we have missed.”
Then Agatha saw that she was too old for Clarissa.
She went upstairs and lay down on her bed, trying to master her troubled thoughts.
Over and over again she heard in her mind Clarissa’s words, so unconsciously cruel— “ What a lot we have missed … it’s so futile to pretend!”
And yet, Clarissa had been as entirely happy as she had herself. Agatha knew it as she looked back over the past six years. And she was aware, as she lay there, that she was indeed looking back on them as on to something that was over. She was recalling an atmosphere out of which she had already moved.
Strange that on the day when Clarissa was supposed to have grown up, Agatha should for the first time have learnt how much younger she was than herself—younger than she had ever been, and that she should have known that it was this spirit of youth which had broken in upon their peace.
Agatha had enjoyed the acting games, in which she and Clarissa passed practically the whole of their lives, because, through all the stirring adventures that they imagined together, there ran the serene certainty that they were all the while in a world where the events were entirely under control, where there were no surprises, and no disasters which did not bring their own remedy. Clarissa, on the other hand, had found in them her nearest point of contact with the real world of adventure. She had thrown herself into them perhaps more completely than Agatha, and they had satisfied her because she almost believed they were true; but now at one touch of the outer world, she had understood that what she wanted was life itself.
Slowly and painfully Agatha came to see that she could only keep Clarissa by going with her. She wished to do real things. Well, she should do them, but Agatha must share them. Hitherto, the course of their lives had been entirely directed by Agatha, and as long as she led, nothing ever happened. They did nothing; only played at it. Now Clarissa would be the guiding spirit, and it appeared that she would at once step out of the artificial world which Agatha had created for them to live in, and go to the everyday world which had always been so comfortably and remotely outside, a world which seemed to Agatha at once more commonplace and more disconcerting than their own.
She dreaded it, but when she came down to tea, her mind was made up. Still, their wills should be one, and that will—Clarissa’s. For Agatha knew, in spite of the terrors she had suffered in that motor-car, that she really dreaded nothing in the world but the breaking of the union between herself and Clarissa. She could face, and even enjoy, everything that they did together.
Chapter Nine
“I expect you thought me very stupid this morning,” Agatha said, as they sat at the tea table, eating birthday cake; “but I was not well. The car shook me a good deal, and we must remember that it was my first real long drive. I should enjoy it more later on.”
Clarissa’s face lit.
“I am so glad you will try again,” she said. “I do want you to like it as much as I do. I can’t really enjoy, anything that you hate.”
“I shall not hate it,” said Agatha, “ but I should feel safer driven by a really good professional driver, like Jenkins.” (Jenkins was their imaginary chauffeur.)
Clarissa slipped her hand under Agatha’s arm, and leant against her, looking very sweetly up into her face.
“Do let me learn to drive,” she whispered.
Agatha would not appear agitated.
“Yes, I think that you would drive very well some day,” she answered, “but I am nervous, you know. I can’t pretend that I’m not, and I should insist on your learning from a real chauffeur, and not from a wild young man.”
“I wonder who we could find to teach me.”
“No one here,” said Agatha firmly. “I should wish you to have the best lessons available, and I think you will have to take them in Bath.”
Clarissa jumped up and danced about the room, and Agatha, watching her, for some reason recalled the first time she had ever appeared, when she had run away down the long green path and had vanished at the end. She had that same look of fleet youth.
“It’s lovely, lovely!” she was saying. “And it is kind of you, when I know that really you don’t a bit want me to learn. But I believe you will love it when I can, and then we will have a motor of our own, shan’t we? And I can take you for all the expeditions that we have played at. Oh! What fun it’s going to be.”
It seemed to Agatha that she had parted for ever with her peace of mind. Where would this wild progress end? But for Clarissa’s sake she had resolved to go through with it, so she answered with an attempted gay serenity:
“Yes, darling. When you can drive it, we will have a motor of our own, but you must be a completely skilful driver first.”
Then began a fortnight of torment for Agatha. Every other day they went to a School of Motoring in Bath, generally driven there in David’s car, for he was enthusiastic over the lessons, and not at all hurt because he was not considered a “safe” teacher. Agatha suffered tortures during the drive, which was fifteen miles each way, and she hid from Clarissa the horrid fact that she was sick regularly every evening when they got home. She managed to control herself when they were actually in the car, though once she was obliged to fly from the tea table at Fortt’s, and lie down for nearly an hour, before she was able to face the journey home.
Clarissa was not a quick learner. This was something completely unlike anything she had ever attempted before. She had never even used a sewing machine and she was frankly puzzled by the big engine—the gears, the clutch, and the brake. The engineer who taught her had an unfailing flow of words—most of them unfamiliar ones, by which he fluently explained the technicalities of driving to her, and Clarissa listened to them with humble attention, but could seldom see their connection with the handles and pedals in the car. Agatha secretly hoped that she would after all find it too difficult to learn, and she fancied that the teacher thought so too. Her hopes were vain, for Clarissa was bent on being able to drive. On the days when she had no lesson, she spent the mornings in the coach house at the Rectory, sitting in David’s car, and there she practised gear changing, and the use of the brake and the clutch pedals, without starting the engine. She did this for hours at a time. Anyone else would have been bored, but not so Clarissa. Imaginary journeys in a real, though stationary, car, were one step more realistic than the motoring games she had played with Agatha, and she could be perfectly contented driving a car that never moved. The games of make-believe in which she had spent her life had given her the art of being happy wherever her imagination could work. So she sat contentedly in the garage, changing the gears of a motionless car, and Agatha began to hope that her motoring would not take her farther than the Rectory stable yard. That was the kind of motor journey she herself preferred.
David and Kitty could not understand Clarissa’s frame of mind. They were both exasperated by Miss Bodenham’s eccentricities, and they wanted to persuade Clarissa to take drives with them, and to practise on the road. It seemed to them insufferable that Clarissa’s activit
ies should be limited by Miss Bodenham’s capacities: that because she was sick in a moving car, Clarissa must sit in a stationary one; because she was afraid to drive herself, Clarissa could not learn on the road; because she wanted to keep Clarissa to herself, Clarissa must go nowhere without her. They boiled with an indignant pity which Clarissa neither expected nor desired. She felt none of the inhibitions for which they lavished on her their enthusiastic sympathy. When they stormed and rebelled, she laughed, saying she was just like Miss Bodenham herself, and knew exactly what she felt; and she honestly thought them lacking in imagination when they could not understand her enjoying her drives in the garage.
They came and talked to her when she was sitting in the car, and it was a new thing to Clarissa to find herself enjoying the society of her contemporaries. Up to now, she had known no one of her own age except Kitty Burns, and to tell the truth, Kitty was not very interesting. The two girls were used to each other, but they had never become intimate, and their afternoons together had been rather an effort to both. The arrival of David and his motor gave them an interest in common, but it was really David himself who filled the mornings in the coach house with interest and fun. Clarissa thought him an adventurer from the days of Queen Elizabeth. He was striking looking, lean, and urgent in figure, with very dark hair, and the eyes of a hunter—eyes that have searched far distances. He had been in places with names that sounded to Clarissa like magical spells: Mwaulo, Mbanga, Isombo, Bisagra, and it was wonderful to know that he had seen these places with his own eyes, had seen the strange tropical plants growing in them, had heard their wild beasts roaring round him in the night, and had not only fancied what they would be like.
And when David talked, Clarissa was thinking of only what he told her: she hardly looked on him as an individual at all. Like Agatha, she had no desire to make friends, she didn’t think about that. David, was the porter who opened for her the gate to the Kingdom of Reality, and she looked past him into a new world.
It was a world, too, far more amusing than her own. David had a funny, farcical mind, seeing incongruities and paradoxes and comical contradictions all around. He found unexpected absurdities in things which Clarissa had always taken for granted—the people in the village and their customs, so that every day was all at once much more fun. Life was full of things to laugh over.
Miss Bodenham felt it would be unsuitable on her part to spend hours every day sitting in David’s motor-car in the coach house. She would have liked to do this, but she was afraid of what the Burns family might think. She hated Clarissa to go off there without her, and she was constantly finding some excuse for running over to see her in the car. She disliked hearing the young people chattering as she drew near, and chattering too in what seemed a rather senseless way; and still more she disliked hearing Clarissa laugh at this nonsense. It was silly, and even vulgar. They were often quite noisy. Peals of laughter were heard in the garage.
She said nothing, but David and Kitty were quite aware of her disapproval, and when she appeared the conversation always seemed to change; it fell to a lower key. Agatha knew this, and disliked it particularly, for it seemed as if there had been something to be ashamed of. Really, she had merely recalled them to her own regular level, for her awkwardness in society always made other people shy and awkward too. Her presence in the garage put on to the others that restraint which, always characterized her social relationships, but what made her feel it as a new thing was that Clarissa, for the first time, had escaped outside this restraint: she had found touch with other people, and Agatha was tortured by the contrast.
She began to hate David and Kitty, knowing that they looked on her as a wet-blanket, and though she knew that Clarissa was not with them in this, she suffered acutely when she thought that they probably believed her to be so.
Agatha saw only one way out of it—a painful way, even a terrible way, but the only escape. Without more delay, she must buy Clarissa her own motor. She must take this new interest of hers and make of it something which they two possessed together without anyone else intervening. Then Clarissa would be able to sit in their own garage, and would be under no obligation to David. There would be no need for the other two to come and sit with her, for Agatha would be there herself. A desperate remedy, but there was no other.
Clarissa’s delight was unbounded. She guessed at no hidden motive in Agatha’s mind, although it was almost unbelievable that she should so soon have accepted the idea that they should own a motor. Evidently, Clarissa thought, Agatha was beginning to enjoy these drives to Bath so much that she wanted to be able to go further afield.
“Of course you won’t be able to drive it for a long time,” Agatha said. “But we will get the School of Motoring to send us a very skilled chauffeur who can bring it here, and stay to drive us about, and he can continue your lessons.”
The project entailed one more long day in Bath with David and Kitty. Clarissa wanted them to come to help to choose the motor, and Agatha herself thought it was as well to have a man for the occasion, and a man who understood something about the different types of cars which she believed were in existence, who would know what questions to put, and would see that they were not being cheated.
So they all went off for the day. The drive was torture to Agatha as usual, and in fact it was even worse than usual, for she felt she was driving to her fate and she could not foresee what that fate might be. Clarissa too enjoyed driving in David’s car less than she had done, for when they were on the road, she realized that, in spite of all her practising, she was quite incapable of taking control in the open, when there was any possibility of their meeting anyone. She felt a failure, but she hoped that it would perhaps be quite another thing when the motor was their own, and the new chauffeur had taught her.
But they all enjoyed Bath. Agatha herself was excited when she found she was actually buying a motor-car. The cars all looked so new, so important, so comfortable, so brilliant with varnish, and so luxuriously upholstered. Clarissa was on tiptoe with excitement, and sprang into every one that they were shown, to try the driver’s seat. There she sat, a pale little form in a pale dress, silhouetted against the firm unyielding sweep of the powerful lines of the various cars. David was completely master of the situation, and carried out the purchase in a manner that Agatha was obliged to admire; while Kitty felt that the whole transaction was due to her having introduced the Bodenhams into the motoring world.
Buying the motor took all the morning, and then they went to Fortt’s for luncheon. For the first time, Agatha began to think that she might some day agree with Clarissa that doing things together would be even more wonderful than imagining them. Lunching in a restaurant, for instance—the food was not a bit like what they had at home. Really Agatha liked it less, but it came as a surprise, and this gave it character. Clarissa thought it great fun to study the bill of fare with the other two, and to order dishes with mysterious names, without having the least idea of what they would be like. She ate ices, too, several of them, more than any of the party. She looked a most fairy-like little being, and yet she had always been able to eat more than Agatha, and she never had a touch of the indigestion which always coloured the tip of Agatha’s nose and the points of her cheek-bones, as well as giving rise to other uncomfortable symptoms if she ate anything rich.
They went to a concert in the Pump Room.
Agatha enjoyed the music but still more she enjoyed gazing at Clarissa’s face as she drank in the harmony of the Mozart quartette, and watched the movements of the players. There was rhythm in the very poise of her head, in the lines of her figure, so flexibly rigid, and in the way her breath came through her parted lips.
It was a new thing to her to listen to music, to follow the intertwining melodies, and to feel the completeness of the chords as they fell upon her untrained ear, and she seemed to have found something she was waiting for. It was as though a very delicate little instrument had been slowly and exquisitely created, chased, and polished, the
strings wound round the carved ivory keys, and then tuned, tuned, tuned in some silent workshop by a spirit worker; and now, all of a sudden, a bow was laid across the strings, and the first low tone drawn from them.
“She is my instrument,” thought Agatha. “The music within her is mine. And now it is being called out, articulated: and she and I hear it together.”
Her eyes drew Clarissa’s to themselves. They were always conscious of each other’s gaze.
Clarissa turned and brought Agatha into the softly lit circle of her happiness. They shared it. The other two were left outside. To them, this was an ordinary concert, one of many, and they were the ordinary commonplace listeners. Agatha and Clarissa found a new closeness of communion, hearing together for the first time the music of Mozart.
And it increased Agatha’s happiness to know that in this experience Clarissa was the leader. Alone, she would not have felt the music: it had never meant much to her. Clarissa was sensitive to impressions, as she herself had never been, and through Clarissa, she for the first time felt the thrill of being touched directly by the sheer beauty of sound.
And then she began to remember that all the beauty that she had ever found in poetry and in books had been shown to her, too, by Clarissa. It was Clarissa who had read it all to her. All had come to her in the tones of that little thin low voice. Tears filled her eyes.
In the evening they sat together and talked about their day. They forget to play their usual game.
“What a wonderful day it has been,” Clarissa said. “ We are going to be even happier than we have been before. Our motor will take us everywhere—miles and miles away, and we shall often hear music together. I wonder why we have never been to a concert before.”
“We enjoyed it far more than the others, who have heard so many,” Agatha answered. She couldn’t bear Clarissa even to suggest that perhaps they had wasted time in the past six years. If it came to that, what about her own thirty-eight years without concerts. She did not regret them, for she knew that now she possessed all in possessing Clarissa. Clarissa was her Eternity—that supreme simultaneity which holds all the wonders of time. Her only wish was that Clarissa should feel this too. Whatever new experience the day had given her, she seemed to have tasted it already in her love for Clarissa. All that happened to her could only show her, in ever new and changing lights, the treasure that was already hers.
Love Child Page 6