CHAPTER VIII
MAX CARRADOS BECOMES INTERESTED IN TRIFLES
WITH twenty minutes—which probably meant half an hour in the end—up her sleeve so to speak, Miss Tilehurst felt that she had the situation well in hand, and she even stayed to finish off her work of cutting out the faded roses from the central bed before she gathered everything into the Sussex trug and began to think of her own preparations. Otherwise she might have missed Dr Olivant on his second incursion into her domain and although the interest of the afternoon had shifted materially with the arrangement for Mr Carrados’s visit, it was not to be denied that the doctor—whom even nineteen would scarcely presume to call old—cut a very personable figure.
‘I am returning the watering can with very many thanks,’ he said in the ceremonious way which Miss Tilehurst thought so distinguished, ‘but I am afraid that you will think me no end of a nuisance. I find now that if I am to do any good I shall have to borrow a hammer.’
‘Well, I fancy that the resources of my establishment may be even equal to that,’ replied Miss Tilehurst with the sort of smile which so arch a reply demanded. ‘At all events, if you will wait here a minute—’
‘I feel that I am giving you a great deal of trouble.’
‘So far I haven’t observed it. And in any case you aren’t doing now since my very exceptional maid is evidently hovering about on the chance of being useful. She has the remarkable quality, Dr Olivant,’ confided Miss Tilehurst, holding up a beckoning finger in Ophelia’s direction, ‘of generally being there if she is wanted—or, indeed, if she is not wanted. Ophelia, bring this gentleman a hammer, will you? I expect that you’ll find one in the kitchen table drawer.’
‘That I will, mum,’ replied Ophelia, dashing off like a young mustang.
In the circumstances it did not seem quite nice to Miss Tilehurst to leave one who might be technically regarded as a guest standing there alone. Ophelia could be trusted to be back, as she would herself declare, ‘in half a jiffy’, and the doctor would be equal to the conversational moment.
‘What a lovely old-English kind of garden you have,’ he dutifully remarked. ‘Flowers are a passion of mine, but of course in Harley Street—’ a melancholy shake of the head dismissed that famous but unhorticultural thoroughfare from the landscape.
‘At all events you shall have one for your button-hole now, Doctor,’ said Miss Tilehurst, sacrificing a promising young Betty Uprichard without the least compunction. ‘Yes, it is rather flourishing, but of course this dreadful drought—Still, if you are going for a holiday I don’t suppose that you will complain on the score of fine weather.’
‘I am hoping to reach Eastbourne tonight. Even a doctor—even a nerve specialist—has to knock off now and then—Mrs—er?’
‘Tilehurst, Doctor. Miss Tilehurst.’
‘Miss Tilehurst? Curious. A very old patient of mine—Sir Bellamy Binge—had a sister who married—’
‘Here you are, sir,’ interposed Ophelia, breaking upon this momentous reminiscence and thrusting a decidedly infirm-looking tool into the doctor’s hand. ‘Don’t think you’ve gone and done it if the head flies off when you’re hitting. It often does.’
‘Oh, Ophelia,’ said her mistress in some concern, ‘surely we have a better—’
‘This will do capitally, my dear Miss Tilehurst, I do assure you,’ professed Olivant. ‘The strain I shall put upon it is not likely to result in any disaster,’ and since Miss Tilehurst was not anxious to detain him if it really would do, he retired again to grapple with the intricacies of his car in the quiet side lane while she took the opportunity of apprising Ophelia of the variation in their usual routine as they went up to the house together.
‘We shall be having tea in the summer-house this afternoon, Ophelia. Miss Melhuish is bringing a gentleman here and I want to have things a little different.’
‘Tea in the summer-house, mum! That will be nice, won’t it?’ Ophelia was intrigued, visibly impressed, but also inconveniently reminded. ‘Did you ever have tea in a hay-field, mum? I did once and you wouldn’t believe—’
‘No—yes, but never mind that just now, Ophelia. This gentleman who is coming is blind and so I want you to be very careful.’
‘That I will, mum. Does he have a toby dog, I wonder?’
‘Dog?’ repeated Miss Tilehurst vaguely.
‘Yes, to lead him about the street. Most of them do. Mother had an Uncle Billy—’
‘You must tell me about your mother’s uncle—er—William another time—I want you to get on with your work now. Mr Carrados has an attendant, not a dog, but I do not imagine that he will bring him here. Now change as quickly as you can and then put out the things in the kitchen ready.’
‘Were you meaning to use the company tea set out there—the little old cups with blue and gold things on them?’
‘Yes, the Crown Derby service—and please do be careful with them, Ophelia. Then you had better cut both white and brown bread-and-butter, some very thin anchovy paste and cucumber sandwiches, and we will have quince jelly and strawberry jam and for cake cherry and almond.’
‘I say!’ murmured Ophelia.
‘Anything else I will see to myself and I will look in at the kitchen between now and then to make sure that you have all the things ready. And, by the way, Ophelia, you may as well put out cups and so on for five—one never knows; someone else may drop in.’
‘You know that I am bringing Uncle Max, don’t you, Miss Tilehurst dear? And you know that you are coming to Miss Tilehurst’s, don’t you, Uncle Max dear? So surely that’s enough? I think formal introductions are frightfully stuffy.’
Miss Tilehurst, with everything going well, had been out in the front garden again when her visitors appeared. Visualising Mr Carrados’s arrival she had rather dreaded the ceremony of getting the blind man into a chair in her crowded little drawing-room and almost immediately getting him out again. On a day like that nothing seemed more natural than to be sauntering about the lawn, and then they could stroll round the garden until tea appeared. After all, what was the good of taking a man who could not see into a drawing-room?
Both laughed as they shook hands but Miss Tilehurst felt that she had been defrauded of something that she had looked forward to by Nora’s offhand manner, and she was glad that Mr Carrados took the occasion to rebuke his niece—though of course it was done in the nicest possible manner.
‘I am afraid that the rising generation thinks a great deal that we used to set considerable store by “frightfully stuffy”,’ he remarked mildly. ‘I say “we” hoping that Miss Tilehurst sides with me.’
‘So it was, Uncle Max,’ retorted Nora. ‘Ghastly stodgy. Family pride and great fat dinners and social tradition. All that hank and bunk and tosh and spludge. Sickening.’
‘Well, my dear, I hope that I am not too old to learn even yet. I must begin with the New Vocabulary.’
‘It is not we who are too old to learn, Mr Carrados; it’s they who are too young to understand,’ put in Miss Tilehurst a shade tartly. ‘Now would you care to walk round the garden and see—oh, forgive me! I—I—’
‘You pay me a great compliment, Miss Tilehurst,’ said Carrados reassuringly. ‘Already you treat me as an ordinary human being, you see, not as a helpless log. That is what I want people simply to do—flatter me that I’m not a nuisance. Certainly I should like to go round your garden and perhaps I shall not miss much. Here, for instance, at the very start there is something that I haven’t come across for years’—he turned to the rose bed near which they had been standing and indicated a particular bush—‘you can only find this in an old-established garden nowadays. I hear that it’s quite gone out of fashion.’
‘Why, is there anything special about it?’ demanded Nora. ‘It looks a very ordinary sort of flower as far as that goes.’
‘Nothing but its extreme rarity: it would almost seem as though modern conditions kill it. Miss Tilehurst knows what it is, I’ll be bound. Don’t you see: she’s laughing?’
‘Oh go on, have your little joke, my dears,’ said Nora benignly. ‘What is the great scream anyway? I know you’re dying to tell me.’
‘It’s only an old-fashioned cabbage-rose, Nora, and it’s called The Maiden’s Blush. The curious thing is that it has become almost extinct for some reason.’
‘Ha! ha!’ Nora affected a mechanical laugh such as is current in the school-room to express non-amusement. ‘But there are still red cabbages about. They are the sort that get into pickles.’
‘Both sorts have their points no doubt. There was a bush of this against the porch of our old home when I was a boy—’
‘Now, now, Uncle; if you are going to wax sentimental over a cabbage—well, a cabbage-rose or a rose-cabbage, I don’t mind—whatever will you be like when we get to the horse-radishes? Come along, old dear,’ she prompted, taking his arm affectionately; ‘I think Miss Tilehurst wants to speak to someone for a minute.’
It was, as might be guessed, the punctilious Olivant come to return the tool, for surely it would be extravagant to suggest that he could have any interest in looking into the circumstance of these fresh arrivals in Miss Tilehurst’s garden. Nor is it to be assumed that the lady herself had any wish to neglect him, for instead of pleading her guests to get off with a perfunctory ‘Oh, thank you’, she sent them on ahead, saying: ‘Excuse me just a moment, please. Take Mr Carrados along, won’t you, Nora?’ and waited for the doctor.
‘May I thank you and return the hammer?’ he said, with his usual air of raising even the slightest act into a courtly ceremony. ‘You will be relieved to hear that there was no untoward mishap.’
Uncle and niece had sauntered on but at the first words of that distinctive voice Nora found herself gently detained as Mr Carrados paused to ‘look at’ a fine dahlia.
‘Who is our friend over there?’ he asked, dropping his voice to a discreet whisper.
‘Oh, he isn’t anybody—I mean he doesn’t live about here,’ she replied, with the same precaution. ‘Some London doctor or other. Elephant? No, Olivant, a Harley Street specialist she said. That’s his car come to grief in the side lane.’
‘Ah.’ There must have been some incautious quality in his tone for Nora fastened on the simple interjection.
‘Why “Ah” fraught with all that portent, old dear? You don’t happen to know him, do you?’
‘I don’t know any Dr Olivant, Nora.’
‘Well then, you don’t know him. Why won’t you say so in a plain straightforward manner, Uncle Max? I’m afraid you’re getting to be rather too fond of being mysterious when there’s nothing at all to make a mystery out of.’
‘Yes, possibly it is becoming a habit with me, my dear,’ he admitted. ‘I must reform or I shall become the very worst sort of back number.’
‘Dear Uncle Max!’ murmured Nora happily. Life was all such an enchanting game, wasn’t it?
Meanwhile, Miss Tilehurst, having received the hammer with due relief, was furthering the little idea that had occurred to her in the kitchen.
‘If you don’t actually need to drive off immediately, Dr Olivant, perhaps you would take a cup of tea with us before you go on? We shall be having it out here very simply on the lawn presently.’
‘You are really extremely kind, Miss Tilehurst. I should certainly enjoy a cup of tea after my exertions.’
‘We are only waiting for my nephew to get back—and if he is much longer we must perforce begin without him. Would about ten minutes—?’
‘Admirably for me. I think I’ve located the trouble but I haven’t quite put it right yet.’
‘Then that is settled,’ she confirmed. ‘I will let you know when tea is ready.’
‘Isn’t it really too bad of Geoffrey just on this of all afternoons?’ lamented Miss Tilehurst after she had consulted her ancient gold watch for the fifth time within ten minutes. ‘I can only suppose that he has met someone who has inveigled him in for a few games of tennis.’
‘Not likely—if he didn’t go out in flannels,’ objected Nora. ‘Ten to one that he has drifted back to that utterly rancid old office to put some extra work in. On a day like this too!’
‘Nora!’ exclaimed Miss Tilehurst almost severely—the family woman’s inherent reverence for the source of bread-and-butter—‘the office is his business. My nephew, Mr Carrados,’ she explained, ‘is connected with the paper mills here where they make the Bank of England note paper. It is, of course, a highly responsible position.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Carrados, ‘naturally—where they make the Bank of England note paper. And how extraordinarily interesting his work there must be. Has he to do directly with the paper when it’s made or is his department purely clerical?’
‘That I cannot say—except that I know millions of pounds worth of bank-note paper is at times in some way in his keeping. I’m afraid you’ll think me dreadfully ignorant, Mr Carrados, but I understand very little about such things and to tell the truth I have always scrupulously refrained from seeming to pester Geoffrey with questions about business.’
They were gathering raspberries into cabbage leaves then, Miss Tilehurst having asked Carrados if he cared for them with cream and having received an enthusiastic admission. She now proceeded to assemble all their spoil on the largest leaf and was surprised to notice that the blind man’s contribution to the stock was rather more than either her own or Nora’s. Not for the first time that day she wondered secretly whether it was not all an elaborate piece of bluff, with Mr Carrados able to see just as well as she could. Others beside Miss Tilehurst had in the past experienced a similar misgiving.
‘I think we have reached the limit of our patience now; Geoffrey must put up with “husband’s tea” when he does come,’ she declared as the raspberry business was completed. ‘If you will bring Mr Carrados round, Nora, I’ll run on with these and see if Ophelia has got everything ready. By the way, I asked Dr Olivant to join us at tea—the poor man must be feeling exhausted.’
With the trifling exception of a mishap to the green dessert dish, Ophelia felt—as she confided now and then to Sultan, the lethargic Persian—that she was doing all that could be humanly expected. The fragments of the dessert dish had been temporarily secreted under some rags in the sink cupboard and for the rest Ophelia put her trust in the frailty of human memory and, when it did come out, the softening hand of time. Unfortunately Miss Tilehurst had this very dish in mind when she came in with the raspberries, so that instead of being able to refer casually to something as having happened in a vague and oblivious past, Ophelia was suddenly faced with the discovery of a fault in which she would be detected red handed as it were, and held doubly blameworthy.
‘Green dish, mum?’ she replied, becoming goggle-eyed with conscientious effort. ‘I wonder what can have become of that? I don’t seem to have noticed it about lately. I think the last time must have been when Nipper was eating something out of it. I wonder if he can have broke it somehow?’
‘Nonsense,’ retorted Miss Tilehurst briskly; ‘I saw it myself quite lately. And once again, Ophelia, you must not let the animals have our plates and dishes. Never mind looking now’—for the conscientious girl was exploring the most unlikely places—‘this one will do instead. Now go and ask Dr Olivant if he would care to wash his hands—they may be dirty after that kind of work—and if he would, show him up to the bathroom and take a can of hot water and put out a towel.’
Ophelia was free to breathe naturally once more, the matter of the green dish being dismissed to a wholly negligible morrow. She sought Dr Olivant in the lane and delivered her message with scrupulous exactness.
‘I was to ask you, please, if you’d like to wash yourself after you’ve done your dirty work, sir.’
Looking at Ophelia it was impossible to suspect her of elaborate guile and Dr Olivant did look at her: for fully five seconds he bent a level glance on her unsophisticated features. Then he looked at his own hands and with a short laugh detached himself from the consideratio
n of engine troubles.
‘Well, yes; it would be as well perhaps, wouldn’t it?’ he admitted. ‘Come now, my dear’—as she stood awkwardly waiting for him to lead the way and he for her—‘if we are to get on you must be my cicerone.’
‘That I never will, sir,’ appallingly retorted Ophelia, bristling up into virtuous indignation. ‘The very idea—and a gentleman like you too! I shall leave your water outside the bathroom door now.’
‘Don’t be silly, girl; that only means that you’ve got to show me where I am to go,’ explained Olivant, his manner at once dropping several degrees in the social register. And as he followed he privately commented beneath his breath on her inopportune want of sense in terms that would have been surprisingly fundamental for Harley Street.
‘I find that we shall have to give up the idea of sitting in the arbour,’ said their hostess as the sauntering pair appeared. ‘The table is all right to serve the tea from, but the rustic seats are definitely not equal to the responsibility of being sat on, and I know of nothing more embarrassing than to find one’s chair collapsing when you have a cup of tea in one hand and a plate of something in the other.’
‘I think it rather fun,’ said Nora. ‘After all, it helps out a picnic.’
‘Then you shall provide the fun, dear,’ declared Miss Tilehurst. ‘Dr Olivant can do as he likes when he arrives but I insist on Mr Carrados being less humorous. There is a garden form under the catalpa, Mr Carrados, if you prefer the shade, or a chair here in the open—’
‘I am all for the sun while it lasts, if you give me the choice,’ said Carrados, putting out his hand unerringly and accepting the chair Miss Tilehurst had indicated. ‘We don’t get so many summers like this in England that you can afford to throw away a minute of one.’
‘Heroic man! And you, Nora—seriously, the bench in there is out of the question?’
‘Then perhaps I can be useful?’ suggested Nora. ‘If not, I’ll be one of the shady ones.’
‘Useful? Well, Ophelia can take the tea but perhaps you wouldn’t mind—when Dr Olivant appears—if you would bring him across—he mayn’t quite like—’
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