Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  “I was only thinking ... As a matter of fact I was thinking about my future.”

  “You’re lucky. Most of us have only our pasts to think about,” he rallied himself, as much as her.

  “You don’t have much past at my age, do you?” For some reason she chose to take this seriously. “I’m only fifteen, and I haven’t done much — yet.”

  “Do you want to ‘do’ things, Kay?”

  “I’m not sure,” she reflected. “It’s all — indistinct. Actually I can’t imagine being grown up at all. I suppose I might die, like Aunt Laura, ‘in the bloom of my youth’?” There was a delicate irony in the tone, but his brows contracted resentfully. Like most children who grow quickly, the record of Kay’s childhood had been one of ill-health.

  “Poor joke. What’s all this about your future?”

  She was drawing off her gloves, smoothing them, and laying them on her knee; she rested her folded hands lightly upon them, and Richard looked quickly away. If you must be a schoolgirl, Kay, why can’t you have a schoolgirl’s hands — red, a little clumsy about the knuckles, hastily trimmed into tidiness with a careless flourish of the manicure scissors?

  “I want to have my own life a little longer.” At the faltering note in her voice, his head came round again: Kay?

  “I don’t know how to say it — and it sounds as if I’m criticizing Mummy. You won’t think I’m doing that, will you? Mummy’s wonderful; you do see she’s wonderful don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, but —”

  “Then that’s all right; because I couldn’t say what I was going to say if you didn’t. But people are bound to have their own lives, aren’t they?”

  “I think I see what you are getting at; but go on, Kay.”

  “It’s so difficult to say, because — oh well, because if people want to have things their own way they ought to have some sort of idea how they want to have them — shouldn’t they? I mean, it’s stupid — it’s — it’s vulgar to be different just for the sake of being different. But it’s not that — truly. Oh — it’s no use,” said Kay despairingly. “I don’t even know how to say it.”

  “Let’s see if I can help you.” He spoke after a pause, during which he fought down his joy, his indecent joy, that she had brought her problem to him. “What you really want is to be free to choose; that’s all — isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” She drew a deep breath, grateful for his understanding. “That’s all. It’s not a very — unreasonable thing, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.” If Bell could be brought to see it that way!

  “I’ve always looked forward to — life,” said Kay with a simplicity that forced him to suppress a smile. “You know — The city’s shining spires We travel to.’ I don’t mean careers or any of the usual sort of things. I don’t want to do anything or be anything special” — she emphasized the words youthfully — “at least I don’t at present. I mean, just knowing things in a general sort of way: knowing and understanding and experiencing.”

  “Well, isn’t that simply growing up? Nobody can stop you growing up, Kay!” He damned his own hypocrisy for making a joke of it.

  Her winged glance of impatience covered the paths and the slowly moving multitudes.

  “I’m not so sure I do want to be grown up. Look; don’t you see? Their faces are so stupid and shut, like closed doors. As if they want to shut everything out — everything ...” A movement filled in the hiatus left by the words. “As if they were locked up! As if they know they’re old, and they want to be old, and they don’t want to be bothered with the sun and the trees and the sort of — sort of dancing of the grass!”

  ‘The English face’ — Richard gave himself up to sententiousness — ‘“is notoriously incapable of expressing emotion. I dare say a great many of them are enjoying themselves, in their gloomy fashion, as much as Jo and Flinders!”

  “Oh no.” The curtain of her hair swung with her moving head. “Don’t you see they’re like prisoners? They’ve never had freedom. Long ago — perhaps before they were born — somebody planned what they were to do and how they were to be, and they’re just doing it, without even trying to shake themselves loose ... It makes me frightened,” she ended; Richard had to bend his head to catch the whispered words. Something he had once read about the “torment of a child’s imagination” slipped into his mind: what was that, he wondered, beside the torment of these adolescent fears — which he sought words to dispel? But were they all ghosts? For all the vividness of her imagination, Kay had never been one to start at shadows, and he felt it was wise to go carefully, to find out, if possible, if there was any foundation for the uneasiness which undoubtedly was there.

  “You see, Mummy has worked out a sort of plan ... I don’t mean it’s bad or that there’s anything the matter with it except — it’s not mine! I know she only wants us to be happy and — safe; but safety isn’t living, is it? You’ve got to take chances sometimes, and get into messes, perhaps, and get yourself out somehow or other. It’s awful to say this, isn’t it? I couldn’t say it to Mummy; she’d be most frightfully hurt. I do see that — considering she’s practically given up her life to us —”

  “Kay!” He was surprised at the sharpness of his own voice. “Now, Kay, listen: I want you to promise me something. You must promise you won’t give way to that kind of muddled, sentimental thinking. Your mother,” said Richard carefully, “has a very full, active life of her own, which has got nothing whatever to do with you and Jo. It is the most arrant rot to say that she has given up everything for you two. She has got her own career —”

  “She only started it for our sake.” Surprising that he had never before noticed the decision of Kay’s little, pointed chin.

  “Rubbish. Good heavens, Kay, I know your mother! She’d have gone mad if she hadn’t found an outlet for all that energy of hers. The truth is, she’s got an amazing gift tor organizing, and it simply comes natural to her to organize you and Jo as she organizes her own work and life. Sooner or later — I allow it seems rather soon — you are bound to show her that you are capable of managing for yourself.”

  “She’ll never believe it,” said Kay with painful wisdom.

  “I don’t doubt she’ll be very surprised.” He admitted to himself that the prospect of Bell’s surprise was formidable. “But after all ... ! She’s too sensible not to see your point of view if you put it clearly before her —”

  The face she turned to him was a small, blank mask, guiltless of irony; he wondered if she was conscious of the unfathomable irony in her words.

  “Put it clearly — to Mummy? But I wouldn’t know how.”

  Well, there was something in that. What Bell called “a good plain talk” was too often productive, as one knew from experience, of confusion on both sides. Richard remembered “plain talks” with Bell which had reminded him of a buffalo fighting its way inch by inch through a thorn hedge; the buffalo got there at last, but maddened, half blinded, and, actually, too dazed to remember what all the fuss was about. Poor Bell! — red-faced, hot-eyed, wiping away the film that argument brought out, always, on her upper lip; baffled, a little hurt, and, finally, throwing it all off with her deep-chested laugh — “Go on with you! Getting me all worked up about nothing!” — making a bagatelle of her opponent’s most passionate arguments and convictions, sweeping all gustily aside with a kiss or a pat, and continuing along the track of her own unshaken and unshakable opinions as if no one had said a word.

  “The worst part is,” Kay was saying, “I see her point of view. She’s only got Jo and me, and I suppose it’s natural to suppose she’ll go on having us ... That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve seen the signs already.”

  “And what are the signs?” he asked with deliberate lightness,

  “Well, for one — this thing about my leaving school next year.”

  “Next year’s a long way off,” began Richard, and was checked by her look that reproached him with failing her.

  “But I want t
o stop until I’m seventeen, and take matriculation.”

  “Why, Kay ... do you like school?”

  Startled, as though sensing a criticism, she replied, “Why? Oughtn’t I to?”

  For God’s sake, child, he wanted to say, don’t appeal to me as though I were the final arbiter of your existence! A sullen resentment of his own futility swept over Richard; he leaned forward abruptly, seeming to concentrate on the business of drawing some complicated and foolish pattern with his stick in the dust at his feet. The even voice went on:

  “One’s got to learn things — and you can’t go to school twice.”

  “But why do you want to matriculate? You’re not going to be a bluestocking, are you?”

  “Oh no!” She appeared to find the suggestion amusing. “But it would finish — the design. I think each part of our lives makes a sort of a design, don’t you? Like the Seven Ages of Man ... I wonder what he’d have written if he’d done Seven Ages of Women? Shakespeare was good about women, wasn’t he? I do wonder what made him so good, and people like Scott and Dickens so bad. Do you know, I don’t like any of Dickens’ women except Lady Dedlock —”

  Richard paused in his drawing to point with the stick toward Jo and Flinders, abandoned to exhaustion on the grass.

  “Darling — you’re sure you want to have a discussion on English literature?” Her hair swept his outstretched wrist as she bent over it to look at the time; he snatched it back, as though the faint silken contact had burned it. “We ought to be eating soon —”

  “But you do see what I mean?” she hurried on with anxious tenseness. “It’s really not much use leaving school before one’s seventeen — because you don’t fit in anywhere. Seventeen’s grown up, isn’t it, Mr. Dick?”

  “I suppose you’d call it so, Kay,” he muttered.

  “And the out-of-school life belongs to the grown-up people, in the same way school belongs to children; there really isn’t much room for you if you’re a child! I’d sooner stop at school, really I would, until I have finished growing up; it’s much more comfortable for everybody. Don’t you think Mother might see that?”

  “Well, doesn’t she?” Of course Bell didn’t. When had she ever been known to “see” anything that conflicted with her own designs?

  “Perhaps I don’t put it the right way. You see, she always thinks I’m working too hard and spoiling my eyes or getting round-shouldered or something. But since she stopped me reading in bed I often don’t go to sleep for hours, and it’s that that gives me dark marks, like spectacles —”

  “But this matriculation; what do you want to do with it?”

  “I don’t know ... I suppose I might have to earn my living someday? People do lose all their money and have to work, don’t they? Or I might write books ... Mr. Dick: Mother thinks my drawing and my dancing are so good. They aren’t really; only ordinary. And I don’t really want to draw or dance; I’d much rather do English literature, or languages, that I could go on enjoying after I leave school. I’d like to be able to read books in French-Mademoiselle says the French writers are the best in the world. We’ve been doing Lettres de mon Moulin, and I like it awfully. Mademoiselle says one must read French ‘pour savoir l’humanite.’ I shan’t have any chance after I leave school — and I can’t get it all in in one year!”

  “Don’t plead like that, child; you know I’m on your side. I’ll do my best; but I suppose your mother wants you at home.”

  “Yes, but I can’t think why. She’s out almost all day, and she goes out a good deal in the evenings too. Susan and Jo and I play cards, or we knit, and Susan reads to us. Susan reads very well, but it generally has to be books Jo would like. I’d so much rather read to myself; there are such hundreds of books I’m longing to read, but I’m not allowed. You don’t think I’m a beast, do you, saying these things about Mummy? But it truly seems sometimes as if she doesn’t know herself what she wants me to do. It doesn’t seem to make sense — telling a person she’s nearly old enough to leave school, and being vexed if she wants to read grown-up books —”

  “I say, I’m awfully hungry. Please, is it time for lunch?” Jo had come up, and stood before them, radiant, slightly panting, exuding that blend of health and clean, hot child that accompanied her like an aura. Flinders was beside her, lolling his tongue. The resemblance between them was so ludicrous that one almost expected Jo to wag her tail. Energy blew out of her like gunpowder; on her round, brown face, in the crinkles of her eyes, in the moles that drew attention to them and to the blue-whiteness of her small, even teeth, was written that determination to have a good time which even the lenient Richard had been known to describe as formidable. “I say, Flin’s dying of thirst. Will they give him some water where we’re going? Where are we going? Please can I have some orange juice with lots and lots of ice in it?”

  “Come along.” As Kay rose he realized with a shock that her head was nearly up to his shoulder. She’s no longer a child! Of course not a child, at fifteen, he told himself impatiently — triumphantly — yet with something like fear behind the triumph.

  “Oh no, Kay, not gloves,” Jo was pleading.

  “Yes, honestly — you’ve got to.” Kay held out gravely the clean pair of white silk gloves she had produced from her handbag. “You know what Mummy says, and we’re going — where are we going?” Her eyes signaled to Richard for support.

  “Well, as a matter of fact I thought we’d go to Hill Street.”

  “Do you mean to Lady Emily’s? Oh! Is she expecting us?” breathed Kay. “Oh, Jo — your hair! And you’ve got a grass stain on your frock — oh dear, I wish I’d known. Mummy’d be so —”

  “Never mind grass stains and hair. I thought lunch out of doors would be nicer than a stuffy restaurant on a day like this.” “Heavenly! Oh, Jo, please put your gloves on!”

  “All right — all right. You’re getting as fussy as Mummy,” grumbled Jo, struggling to drag white silk over a hot brown hand. “They’ll only half go on; will that do? I say, what fun going to Lady Emily’s; did she ask us? Did she ask Flin? Come on, Flin; race you to the gate!”

  A silence fell between the other two, following more sedately, a silence of which one, at least, was sharply conscious, as he was conscious of the figure moving lightly, like a shadow at his side. Kay — with your ankles of a fawn, your still, waxen face and limp flag of silken hair falling languidly beneath the brim of your schoolgirl’s hat. Why can’t you hurry and grow up, Kay? Why do you cling so obstinately to your troublesome childhood — as if you know how it becomes you and are loath to exchange one beauty for another, untried? Or is it some adolescent instinct that warns you to protect yourself — from yourself — and — me? If so, follow it; follow it, Kay, for the love of God! So like a little gazelle you walk, putting down one foot, fastidiously, a little in front of the other so that your ankles almost brush in passing ... your tender ankles ... Why do we have to walk in silence ... ?

  “Oh, I forgot: Mummy told me to ask — have they axed you yet, Mr. Dick?” She used the word proudly, as one who has just learned its meaning. Looking down, he met the adult challenge of her eyes, strange in her childish face: as though she were saying, “Look, I am not a little girl any longer. Jo is not here, so please talk to me as you would talk to a person of your own age,” and felt virtue drained from him by the appeal.

  “My department wants to send me to Geneva.”

  “I know — the League of Nations.” She nodded; it was something they had learned at school. “Are you going?”

  He suddenly knew he was not, and shook his head.

  “No. I don’t believe in it. I’d rather stop at home — if they can find me something to do.”

  “Haven’t you got anything to do now?”

  “Not much — except occupy an office in a building that used to be a hive of misdirected energy; it’s more like a mausoleum now,” he told her dryly.

  “ ‘Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there; on the doorpost and lintel the dust lies
undisturbed.’ Like that?”

  “Where on earth did you get that?”

  “Aylwin; haven’t you read it? Oh, it’s lovely. It’s by somebody called Watts Dunton —”

  “That reminds me.” They had almost reached the gate, where Jo, with the mania for perpetual motion of which Richard often accused her of having discovered the secret, was engaged in a jumping match with Flinders. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a small, thick book. “I think you will like that — if you don’t know it already.”

  “William Morris?” She took it delicately; she had the way of handling books, he thought, that had belonged to the owner of this book — in the past; folly, to see a hand, hardly less small and narrow, slip over hers. He had an impulse to snatch the book back, in protection — not of that poor shadowy hand which had passed beyond the need of such protection, alas, forever, but of the unconscious child, turning the thin pages rapidly in search of the table of contents. “I know; he was one of the Pre-Raphaelites. Oh, what titles: ‘The Sailing of the Sword’ ... ‘The Gillyflower of Gold’ ...’

  “What is it?” Jo came prancing up.

  “A book” — absently.

  “Show me. Oh, poetry. You know, isn’t it funny?” Jo appealed gravely to Richard. “I just can’t manage poetry. I do think reading’s hard enough without people making it more difficult with rhymes. But Kay loves it,” she hastened politely to reassure him. “If you don’t take care she’ll begin reading and forget all about lunch —”

  “Look, Jo, here’s a picture —”

  “It smells!” Jo’s small pug nose wrinkled with pleasure. Kay lifted her head.

  “I know. It’s heavenly. Whose is it? Lady Emily’s?”

  “What — the perfume?” He became aware of it on his hand; a quick pang went through him. “No — it’s just some I happened to have — in the house.”