When they said good night outside her house, it was arranged that he should meet them at the Archway tube station, whence they could get a bus direct to Kew, at one o’clock on Saturday, and then he gave her a boyish and rather brotherly good-night kiss; she thought that this was partly U.S. Army routine, but it was very pleasant, and she went into the house swinging the posy he had bought her and not thinking about Dick Fletcher or Gerard Challis or even about Margaret Steggles, but only feeling cheerful and slightly intoxicated with music.
At the same hour, Mr Challis was working late at the Ministry. All that week he had been doing so, which fact had caused him to have only a hazy idea about his family’s social engagements. He always was vague about what his grandchildren were doing, partly from a natural lack of interest in such insipid activities and partly because he preferred to avoid thinking about them at all. He arrived home very late every evening, and dined in the library off an appetizing tray brought in by Cortway, then read for a little while and went to bed. In the morning he swallowed coffee with his nose in The Times, and only Seraphina opposite to him, and she read her letters and knew better than to talk to him. So he approached Saturday with a dim feeling that only he and Hilda were going to Kew; that the rest of the world would be miraculously absent from Kew on that day, and the glades and walks deserted.
He was in love. For the time being he had no creative work in hand and all his energies, fired and fanned by summer, were concentrated upon Hilda. He was in that state when a kind glance or word can act upon the senses like balm, giving a comfort to be treasured for days in secret, but as he was by now acutely aware of the incongruity between his fame, tastes and character and the abjectness of his love, he was at times both angry and unhappy. Seraphina resignedly supposed that there was Another One, and was slightly depressed by the fact. We are both getting older, she thought, sighing as she looked at herself in the glass. I do hope Gerry isn’t going to be one of those horrid old men. If only he could take an interest in the boys, and the children! That would be the natural thing, at his age. Well, perhaps not natural, but right, and so much nicer.
The reconciliation between Hebe and Alex and their plans for the large half-ruined house in St John’s Wood were her own chief sources of pleasure at present. Hebe had announced her intention of keeping a goat and bees in the vast shady garden, and when her mother had said how lovely the rooms would be for parties she had answered: ‘There won’t be any. What I’m going to do is to have some more children.’
Unfortunately, Saturday was a brilliantly fine day, and everybody in London seemed to be going to Kew. The buses and trains were crowded, as if it were a Bank Holiday, with women in light dresses and children who were steadily eating; every public seat was lined with old men enjoying the scene and the warm air, and every breadth of free grass in London was covered by picnickers, drunk with sunshine and successfully forgetting, for a few hours, the war.
‘Lucky, aren’t I?’ said Hilda to Mr Challis, as she sat beside him in the taxi which he had managed to secure to take them in comfort to Kew. The excursion would cost (he reckoned in terms of money) a few pounds. How much it would cost him in other terms he had not thought. The humbleness of a true lover struggled with his confidence in himself, based upon years of success with women.
He turned to look at Hilda. She wore a thin blue silk dress that exactly matched her eyes, and carried a large white handbag. Her slender bare legs were expertly painted brown and on her small feet were white shoes. (We have described these objects from a masculine point of view; now, shifting our focus – or altering the Frame, as Professor Eddington might put it – we may say that the dress was of cheap rayon, and the shoes and handbag last year’s; but they were all fresh and in perfect order, and Hilda wore them with such calm confidence that the effect could hardly have been improved.)
‘I am lucky,’ he answered, smiling, and took her hand in his cool one.
‘You’re telling me. I put off ever so many things to come to your old Kew to-day.’
‘Did you?’ bending towards her. ‘What things?’
‘Oh – tennis and going for a walk on the Heath; I nearly telephoned old Mutt to see’f she’d come too.’
Mr Challis was not interested in old Mutt. ‘Did you want to come with me?’ he asked, lowering his voice.
‘I’ll try anything once and I dare say it won’t be so bad when we get there. Besides, you kept on about it so, I thought I’d better come and get it over.’
‘Is that all you felt?’ he asked, withdrawing his hand.
‘Now, don’t get all haughty. Of course I wanted to come; it’s a nice day and I’m glad to be out of the or-fice. But I meant to tell you, I’ve got to be back early; I’ve got a date to-night.’
He was silent for a little while, then he said: ‘Don’t you think you might have kept the evening free for me? I’ve looked forward to this day for months.’
‘Don’t I know it! It was round about Boxing Day you started dating me up. Well, I would have, honestly, Marcus,’ with a smile that pierced his heart – ‘only someone rang me up this morning and’ – she began to look in her handbag – ‘I couldn’t get out of it.’
‘A man?’
‘No, one of the crocodiles from the Zoo, as a matter of fact. Look, aren’t we nearly there?’ and she bent forward to gaze out at the streets of Hammersmith, through which they were now passing. He jealously stared at her face. Not a shade of consciousness touched its brightness, and slowly he removed his gaze and let it rest moodily upon her little shoes. Phew! That was a near thing, thought Hilda, gaily surveying Hammersmith; and then, and only then, did a deeper pink begin to come into her face.
‘I have brought a tea-basket,’ he said presently, indicating an object in a corner. ‘Tea at any of the usual places would be unendurable.’
‘Is that what it is? What a bright idea; you are a dear, really,’ and she gave him another smile. ‘I thought it was papers or something.’
‘Have you never seen a tea-basket before?’ he asked, enchanted by such innocence.
‘No. Is it only for tea? Couldn’t you put lunch in it? Or do you have another kind for lunch? You do do yourself well, don’t you? What’s it got in it?’
‘Er – sandwiches, I believe, and the usual things.’
He had, in fact, charged his secretary with the task of filling the tea-basket, and she had done her best, which was considerable, for she was an efficient woman.
The taxi was now traversing a wide, shady road bordered on one side by a long wall, and suddenly, through the foliage of the massive trees, there was a startling glimpse of red and gold, soaring into the heavens.
‘Oh, what’s that?’ cried Hilda.
‘The Pagoda. Isn’t that a wonderful and exotic effect; that pure Chinese shape seen between the characteristically English shapes of the trees? I wanted you to see that.’
‘It’s so pretty against the blue sky.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, delighted by these evidences – or so he judged them – of the aesthetic faculty. ‘England is full of such incongruities; the Pavilion at Brighton and the Mosque at Woking are two of the most striking. And in any English drawing-room you will find minor instances of the same sort; Chinese cabinets and Japanese cups, Zulu spears and Afghan knives. Incongruity; the power to startle with a sense of pleasure. For me, that is half the secret of art.’
‘Come again?’ said Hilda pleasantly, but he did not have to descend to explanations for at that moment the taxi stopped at the gates of Kew.
As they walked through the entrance, Mr Challis prepared himself to enter the realm of intense emotional and possibly sensuous experience. The day favoured him. The sunrays had a clear brilliance, and a light wind tempered their warmth, blowing it upon the dying or budding flowers and bringing their scents sweeping in waves now low, now high, over the grass. There were the rounded brown masses of the fading hawthorns; tree after tree of them, reared up against the divine deep blue; and there were the
drifts of shrivelled acacia and laburnum petals blowing lazily along the walks. The glass roofs of the hothouses glittered in the sun (except where they were black and shattered by bombs) and the palms pressed spiked leaves against the panes of their prison. It seemed a special day. He gently put his fingers under Hilda’s elbow and guided her into Kew.
His plan was to lead her gradually to some remote glade. He knew of one where bluebells stood thick in May, and would now be a host of brown seed-pods winding endlessly away, low among the bright green grass under the emerald beeches. He removed his hat and lifted his face to the sun, so that the delicious wind blew on his forehead, and moved eagerly onwards.
‘It’s quite nice,’ said Hilda brightly, looking about her. She had no hat and her curls were only confined by a thick pale blue snood. ‘Isn’t there a crowd here to-day!’
There was indeed. The avenues and the brown may trees and the palms in their prison were shared by many thousands of people, and Mr Challis became slightly irritated by their presence. In and out he had to dodge; round laughing groups who had stopped to admire the water irises, and old people who preferred to saunter, while children darted under his nose and people stuck their feet out comfortably as they sat reading the newspaper.
‘What time does your train go?’ demanded Hilda at last, drawing back a little. ‘You’re in an awful hurry, aren’t you?’
‘I am sorry,’ he said at once, slackening his pace, and repressing an impulse to wipe his forehead. ‘I want to get you away from all these people.’
‘Fat chance,’ she answered gaily, glancing about her; and indeed, although they had now left the main walks and were proceeding across a grassy expanse which sloped to a lake overhung by weeping willows, there were still far too many people about; people sitting on the grass; people sprawling under the trees; people obviously proposing and being proposed to; people proclaiming that they loved and were beloved by their silence; people sitting quite close to other people but obviously not seeing the other people or even knowing that they were there, and thereby demonstrating the marvellous truth that The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
But Mr Challis did not wish to sit down in the middle of a lawn with Hilda and tell his love within twenty feet of another pair of lovers, and he hastened remorselessly on. Hilda had by now begun to cast glances at the tea-basket, but she said nothing, because after all it was his tea and to hint was not polite, for she combined a funny little set of conventional ‘that’s-Mum’s-good-girl’ manners with her native impertinence. All the same, she did begin to want her tea. However, so did he, she supposed, as otherwise what could account for his eagerness to find a suitable spot to sit down?
At last the bluebell glade came in sight, and certainly there were not quite so many people here. It was in a remote part of the gardens and was approached by a long broad avenue, mossy and shady and lined by magnificent trees, and too far away for little feet and tired old feet to make their way there. However, there were plenty of feet at Kew that day that were neither little nor old; large strong feet clad in good U.S. Army boots, and here were their owners, rubber-necking respectfully at the vast, gentle, ancient trees and chewing gum as they strolled along. Up and down they went, and they all glanced approvingly at Hilda’s snood and legs while Mr Challis doggedly urged her on, on, towards the bluebell glade.
‘Here –’ he said at last in a low tone, pausing amidst green shadows and sunny flickering rays. It was a space of rich grass, bent over by its own weight, with tiny twisted seed-sheaths, dried petals, the microscopic cast wing-cases of beetles, lying among the white roots. A few groups of people were in sight and the American soldiers still laughed in the broadwalk, but at least there was a sense of solitude.
‘Nice,’ pronounced Hilda, glancing round. ‘Why can’t they clear away all those dead bluebells?’
‘Their richness sinks back into the earth,’ he said. ‘Let us sit down,’ and he opened the tea-basket. Hilda saw this action with rising hope, but no; he only brought out a Shetland rug of fairy fineness, unfolded it, and spread it upon the ground.
‘Thanks,’ said Hilda, sitting down.
‘May I sit down too?’ he asked, still standing, looking yearningly down upon her sunny head.
‘Well, I should hope so, you aren’t going to have your tea standing up, I suppose?’
‘I shall be … close to you,’ he said a little unsteadily, seating himself.
‘Yes, there isn’t much room, is there? but it’s a lovely quality,’ and she respectfully fingered the rug. ‘Look, you leave a place just there,’ indicating some eight inches between them, ‘and we can put the tea on it,’ and she could not help a gleeful anticipatory glance towards the open basket.
There was a pause. Hilda, seeing her hint fall to the ground, gazed cheerfully about her and thought that it was nice to sit down for a bit, and Mr Challis, for all his experience, for all his fame and all his genius, gazed at her and swallowed convulsively, twice.
‘Pardon?’ she said, and turned her blue eyes upon him. ‘Did you say something?’
Her look struck his heart with loneliness and pain.
‘Hilda –’ he burst forth urgently, bending towards her. ‘I love you.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Hilda, going red. ‘Pardon?’ and in her confusion and surprise her pretty mouth opened and stayed open.
‘I love you,’ repeated Mr Challis recklessly, scrambling towards her across the eight inches. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to tell you like this, I meant to lead up to it gently, but I can’t – when you look at me like that – your eyes are so unutterably lovely –’
‘Well, don’t get so worked up,’ she said soothingly, putting out her hand and taking his – an action which was intended to serve the double purpose of calming him down and preserving the status quo of the eight inches. ‘It’s very nice of you. I’m fond of you, too – in a way, and you’ve been ever so kind to me, only Mum and Dad do think it’s funny the way you’ve never come to tea –’
‘Fond of me!’ he cried. ‘Is that all? I love you, good God, I love you!’
‘Yes, I heard you the first time, Marcus.’ Hilda was used to dealing with this sort of thing, and had usually found that a bright, firm manner, like that of a nurse, was successful in the more violent and unwelcome cases; while the welcome ones were so enraptured at having their kisses returned that they did not demand those fervent protestations of love which she (at least up until last Wednesday evening at a quarter to ten) had never felt the wish to make. But it now struck her that the hospital manner was not going to work upon poor old Marcus.
‘Don’t you realize what that means?’ He laid his hand upon her knee and she started away from him with a sharp ‘Don’t!’
‘I want you, body and soul,’ he said, withdrawing his hand and colouring sensitively as a boy, ‘I want to take you away with me, to wonderful unknown places and strange lands, to South America. We could be so happy together – I would give you everything you wanted –’
‘It’s ever so kind of you,’ interrupted Hilda firmly at this point, ‘but I’d rather not. It is kind of you really, I do mean it,’ she added, rather distressed by his stricken look, ‘but what’s the use of going on like that when I don’t – er – don’t feel like that about you? The fact is I – don’t feel like that about anybody.’ A pause. ‘Not about anybody,’ she repeated stoutly, as if reassuring herself.
‘Listen,’ he interrupted in a low persuasive tone, ‘it has come as a shock to you, I can see that – I’m sorry – I was mistaken – I thought you must know, a little, how I’ve felt about you for months. Just think it over. Don’t dismiss the whole idea at once. Oh, Daphne,’ he pleaded pitifully, ‘don’t say “no.” For God’s sake, give me a chance!’
It was at this moment that an interruption occurred. Across the grass a small figure in grey came bounding, waving his arms, and followed more slowly by a smaller and stouter female form in a pink frock. And through the air, as they approached Mr Challis and Hil
da with every sign of pleasure and excitement upon their broadly smiling faces, resounded their shrill cries:
‘Grandpa! Grandpa! It’s us! Grandpa! Grandpa!’
29
Mr Challis started to his feet and stood waiting for them to come up to him. He had turned pale, but after the one glance of amazement and fury which he had darted towards his grandchildren, he was immediately in control of himself and even managed to smile.
‘Well, this is a surprise!’ he said with stiff lips. ‘What are you doing here? And Emma, too?’ turning to the little girl who had now trotted into the group and stood silently gazing up at him.
‘Margaret and Earl brought us. Did you know we were coming?’ demanded Barnabas.
‘I had an idea you might be,’ returned Mr Challis, and dared to glance at Hilda, who was gazing from Barnabas to Emma and then at Margaret and Earl, who were coming over the grass towards them. Her face showed bewilderment, amusement, interest in the children, and then amazement as she recognized Margaret and scrambled to her feet. ‘Hullo, look who’s here!’ she called, waving. ‘Mutt, it’s me!’
‘Hullo, Hilda,’ returned Margaret, who had also gone pale, even paler than Mr Challis. She was not in such command of herself, but she managed to smile. ‘I didn’t know you knew Mr Challis – this is a surprise, isn’t it –’ she ended unsteadily, and then, turning to Earl, who was looking at Hilda with surprised admiration: ‘This is Earl Swinger, Hilda – Earl, meet Hilda Wilson, my best friend.’
Westwood (Vintage Classics) Page 39