“Am I right in thinking something’s happened to Dinny lately—I don’t mean that case—but when she was ill and you went abroad together?”
“Yes. The man I told you of that she was in love with two years ago was drowned out in Siam.”
“Oh!”
Adrian stole a look. What should Dornford’s face express—concern, relief, hope, sympathy? It only wore a little frown.
“There was a question I wanted to ask you, Dornford. Someone had settled the costs granted against young Croom in that case.” The eyebrows were raised now, but the face said nothing. “I thought you might have known who. The lawyers will only say that it wasn’t the other side.”
“I’ve no idea.”
‘So!’ thought Adrian. ‘No nearer, except that, if a liar, he’s a good one!’
“I like young Croom,” said Dornford; “he’s behaved decently, and had hard luck. That’ll save him from bankruptcy.”
“Bit mysterious, though,” murmured Adrian.
“It is.”
‘On the whole,’ Adrian thought, ‘I believe he did. But what a poker face!’ He said, however:
“How do you find Clare since the case?”
“A little more cynical. She expressed her views on my profession rather freely when we were riding this morning.”
“Do you think she’ll marry young Croom?”
Dornford shook his head.
“I doubt it, especially if what you say about those costs is true. She might have out of a sense of obligation, but otherwise I think the case has worked against his chance. She’s no real feeling for him—at least that’s my view.”
“Corven disillusioned her thoroughly.”
“I’ve certainly seldom seen a more disillusioning face than his,” murmured Dornford. “But she seems to me headed for quite an amusing life on her own. She’s got pluck and, like all these young women now, she’s essentially independent.”
“Yes, I can’t see Clare being domestic.”
Dornford was silent. “Would you say that of Dinny, too?” he asked suddenly.
“Well, I can’t see Clare as a mother; Dinny I can. I can’t see Dinny here, there and everywhere; Clare I can. All the same—‘domestic’ of Dinny! It’s not the word.”
“No!” said Dornford fervently. “I don’t know what is. You believe very much in her, don’t you?”
Adrian nodded.
“Enormously.”
“It’s been tremendous for me,” said Dornford, very low, “to have come across her; but I’m afraid so far it’s been nothing to her.”
“Much to allow for,” suggested Adrian. “‘Patience is a virtue,’ or so it used to be before the world went up in that blue flame and never came down again.”
“But I’m rising forty.”
“Well, Dinny’s rising twenty-nine.”
“What you told me just now makes a difference, or—doesn’t it?”
“About Siam? I think it does—a great difference.”
“Well thank you.”
They parted with a firm clasp, and Adrian branched off northwards. He walked slowly, thinking of the balance-sheet that confronts each lover’s unlimited liability. No waterings of capital nor any insurance could square or guarantee that shifting lifelong document. By love was man flung into the world; with love was he in business nearly all his days, making debts or profit; and when he died was by the results of love, if not by the parish, buried and forgotten. In this swarming London not a creature but was deeply in account with a Force so whimsical, inexorable, and strong, that none, man or woman, in their proper senses would choose to do business with it. ‘Good match,’ ‘happy marriage,’ ‘ideal partnership,’ ‘life-long union,’ ledgered against ‘don’t get on,’ ‘just a flare up,’ ‘tragic state of things,’ ‘misfit’! All his other activities man could insure, modify, foresee, provide against (save the inconvenient activity of death); love he could not. It stepped to him out of the night, into the night returned. It stayed, it fled. On one side or the other of the balance sheet it scored an entry, leaving him to cast up and wait for the next entry. It mocked dictators, parliaments, judges, bishops, police, and even good intentions; it maddened with joy and grief; wantoned, procreated, thieved, and murdered; was devoted, faithful, fickle. It had no shame, and owned no master; built homes and gutted them; passed by on the other side; and now and again made of two hearts one heart till death. To think of London, Manchester, Glasgow without love appeared to Adrian, walking up the Charing Cross Road, to be easy; and yet without love not one of these passing citizens would be sniffing the petrol of this night air, not one grimy brick would have been laid upon brick, not one bus be droning past, no street musician would wail, nor lamp light up the firmament. A somewhat primary concern! And he, whose primary concern was with the bones of ancient men, who but for love would have had no bones to be dug up, classified and kept under glass, thought of Dornford and Dinny, and whether they would ‘click’…
And Dornford, on his way to Harcourt Buildings, thought even more intensively of himself and her. Rising forty! This overmastering wish of his—for its fulfilment it was now or never with him! If he were not to become set in the groove of a ‘getter-on,’ he must marry and have children. Life had become a half-baked thing without Dinny to give it meaning and savour. She had become—what had she not become? And, passing through the narrow portals of Middle Temple Lane, he said to a learned brother, also moving towards his bed:
“What’s going to win the Derby, Stubbs?”
“God knows!” said his learned brother, wondering why he had played that last trump when he did, instead of when he didn’t…
And in Mount Street Sir Lawrence, coming into her room to say ‘Good-night,’ found his wife sitting up in bed in the lace cap which always made her look so young, and, on the edge of the bed, in his black silk dressing-gown, sat down.
“Well, Em?”
“Dinny will have two boys and a girl.”
“Deuce she will! That’s counting her chickens rather fast.”
“Somebody must. Give me a nice kiss.”
Sir Lawrence stooped over and complied.
“When she marries,” said Lady Mont, shutting her eyes, “she’ll only be half there for a long time.”
“Better half there at the beginning than not at all at the end. But what makes you think she’ll take him?”
“My bones. We don’t like being left out when it comes to the point, Lawrence.”
“Continuation of the species. H’m!”
“If he’d get into a scrape, or break his leg.”
“Better give him a hint.”
“His liver’s sound.”
“How do you know that?”
“The whites of his eyes are blue. Those browny men often have livers.”
Sir Lawrence stood up.
“My trouble,” he said, “is to see Dinny sufficiently interested in herself again to get married. After all, it IS a personal activity.”
“Harridge’s for beds,” murmured Lady Mont.
Sir Lawrence’s eyebrow rose. Em was inexhaustible!
CHAPTER 37
She whose abstinence from interest in herself was interesting so many people, received three letters on Wednesday morning. That which she opened first said:
“DINNY DARLING,—
“I tried to pay, but Tony would have none of it, and went off like a rocket; so I’m a wholly unattached female again. If you hear any news of him, let me have it.
“Dornford gets more ‘interesting-looking’ every day. We only talk of you, and he’s raising my salary to three hundred as compensation.
“Love to you and all,
“CLARE.”
That which she opened second said:
“MY DEAR DINNY,—
“I’m going to stick it here. The mares arrive on Monday. I had Muskham down yesterday, and he was jolly decent, didn’t say a word about the case. I’m trying to take up birds. There is one thing you could do for me
if you would—find out who paid those costs. It’s badly on my mind.
“Ever so many thanks for always being so nice to me.
“Yours ever,
“TONY CROOM.”
That which she read last said:
“DINNY, MY DEAR,—
“Nothing doing. He either didn’t, or else played ‘possum,’ but if so it was very good ‘possum.’ All the same, I wouldn’t put it past him that it WAS ‘possum.’ If you really set store by knowing, I think I should ask him point-blank. I don’t believe he would tell YOU a lie, even ‘a little one.’ As you know, I like him. In my avuncular opinion he is still on the gold standard.
“Your ever devoted
“ADRIAN.”
So! She felt a vague irritation. And this feeling, which she had thought momentary, she found to be recurrent. Her state of mind, indeed, like the weather, turned cold again and torpid. She wrote to Clare what Tony Croom had written of himself, and that he had not mentioned her. She wrote to Tony Croom, and neither mentioned Clare nor answered his question about the costs; she concentrated on birds—they seemed safe, and to lead nowhere. She wrote to Adrian: “I’m feeling I ought to be wound-up, only there’d be no dividend for the shareholders. It’s very cold and dull, my consolation is that little ‘Cuffs’ is beginning to ‘sit up and take real notice’ of me.”
And then, as if by arrangement with the clerk of the course at Ascot, the weather changed to ‘set warm’; and, suddenly, she wrote to Dornford. She wrote on pigs, their breeds and sties, the Government and the farmers. She ended with these words:
“We are all very worried by not knowing who had settled the costs in my sister’s case. It is so disquieting to be under an obligation to an unknown person. Could you by any means find out for us?” She debated some time how to sign herself in this her first letter to him, and finally wrote “Yours always, Dinny Charwell.”
His answer came very quickly:
“MY DEAR DINNY,—
“I was delighted to get a letter from you. To answer your last question first. I will do my best to get the lawyers to ‘come clean,’ but if they won’t tell YOU, I can’t imagine their telling me. Still, I can try. Though I fancy that if your sister or young Croom insisted they’d have to tell. Now about pigs”—there followed certain information, and a lamentation that agriculture was still not being properly tackled. “If only they would realise that all the needed pigs, poultry, and potatoes, nearly all the vegetables, much of the fruits, and much more than the present dairy produce, can really be produced at home, and by a graduated prohibition of foreign produce encourage, and indeed force, our home growers to supply the home market, we should, within ten years, have a living and profitable native agriculture once more, no rise to speak of in the cost of living, and a huge saving in our imports bill. You see how new I am to politics! Wheat and meat are the red herrings across the trail. Wheat and meat from the Dominions, and the rest (bar hot climate fruits and vegetables) home-grown, is my motto. I hope your father agrees. Clare is becoming restive, and I’m wondering if she wouldn’t be happier in a more active job than this. If I can come across a good one, I shall advise her to take it. Would you ask your mother whether I should be in the way if I came down for the last week-end this month? She was good enough to tell me to let her know any time I was coming to the constituency. I was again at Cavalcade the other night. It wears well, but I missed you. I can’t even begin to tell you how I missed you.
“Your ever faithful
“EUSTACE DORNFORD.”
Missed her! After the faint warmth those wistful words aroused, she thought almost at once of Clare. Restive! Who would be otherwise in her anomalous position? She had not been down at Condaford since the case. And that seemed to Dinny very natural. However one might say it didn’t matter what people thought, it did, especially in a place where one had grown up, and belonged, as it were, to the blood royal of the neighbourhood. And Dinny thought, unhappily: ‘I don’t know what I want for her—and that’s lucky, because one day she’ll see exactly what she wants for herself.’ How nice to see exactly what one wanted for oneself! She read Dornford’s letter again, and suddenly faced her own feelings for the first time. Was she or was she not ever going to marry? If so, she would as soon marry Eustace Dornford as anyone—she liked, admired, could talk to him. But her—past! How funny it sounded! Her ‘past,’ strangled almost from birth, yet the deepest thing she would ever know! “One of these days you’ll have to go down into the battle again.” Unpleasant to be thought a shirker by one’s own mother! But it wasn’t shirking! Spots of colour rose in her cheeks. It was something no one would understand—a horror of being unfaithful to him to whom she had belonged in soul if not in body. Of being unfaithful to that utter surrender, which she knew could never be repeated.
‘I am not in love with Eustace,’ she thought; ‘he knows it, he knows I can’t even pretend it. If he wants me on those terms, what is it fair for me—what is it possible for me to do?’ She went out into the old yew-hedged rose garden, where the first burst of roses had begun, and wandered round, smelling at this and that, followed half-heartedly by the spaniel Foch, who had no feeling for flowers.
‘Whatever I do,’ she thought, ‘I ought to do now. I can’t keep him on tenterhooks.’
She stood by the sundial, where the shadow was an hour behind its time, and looked into the eye of the sun over the fruit trees beyond the yew hedges. If she married him, there would be children—without them it would not be possible. She saw frankly—or thought she did—where she stood in the matter of sex. What she could not see was how it would all turn for herself and for him in the recesses of the spirit. Restless, she wandered from rose-bush to rose-bush, extinguishing the few greenfly between her gloved fingers. And, in a corner, with a sort of despair, the spaniel Foch sat down unnoticed and ate a quantity of coarse grass.
She wrote to Dornford the same evening. Her mother would be delighted if he would come for that week-end. Her father quite agreed with his views on agriculture, but was not sure that anyone else did, except Michael, who, after listening to him carefully one evening in London, had said: “Yes. What’s wanted is a lead, and where’s it coming from?” She hoped that when he came down he would be able to tell her about those costs. It must have been thrilling to see Cavalcade again. Did he know a flower called meconopsis, if that was the way to spell it, a sort of poppy of a most lovely colour? It came from the Himalayas, and so would be suitable for Campden Hill, which she believed had much the same climate. If he could induce Clare to come down it would rejoice the hearts of the aborigines. This time she signed herself ‘always yours,’ a distinction too subtle to explain even to herself.
Telling her mother that he was coming, she added:
“I’ll try and get Clare; and don’t you think, mother, that we ought to ask Michael and Fleur? They were very sweet to put us up so long.”
Lady Charwell sighed.
“One gets into a way of just going on. But do, dear.”
“They’ll talk tennis, and that’ll be so nice and useful.”
Lady Charwell looked at her daughter, in whose voice something recalled the Dinny of two years back.
When Dinny knew that Clare was coming, as well as Michael and Fleur, she debated whether to tell Tony Croom. In the end she decided not to, sorrowfully, for she had for him the fellow feeling of one who had been through the same mill.
The camouflage above her father’s and mother’s feelings touched her. Dornford—high time, of course, he was down in the constituency again! Pity he hadn’t a place of his own—didn’t do to get out of touch with the electors! Presumably he’d come by car, and bring Clare; or Michael and Fleur could call for her! By such remarks they hid their nervousness about Clare and about herself.
She had just put the last flower in the last bedroom when the first car slid up the driveway; and she came down the stairs to see Dornford standing in the hall.
“This place has a soul, Dinny. It may be t
he fantails on the stone roof, or perhaps the deep way it’s settled in, but you catch it at once.”
She left her hand in his longer than she had meant to.
“It’s being so overgrown. There’s the smell, too—old hay and flowering verbena, and perhaps the mullions being crumbled.”
“You look well, Dinny.”
“I am, thank you. You haven’t had time for Wimbledon, I suppose?”
“No. But Clare’s been going—she’s coming straight from it with the young Monts.”
“What did you mean in your letter by ‘restive’?”
“Well, as I see Clare, she must be in the picture, and just now she isn’t.”
Dinny nodded.
“Has she said anything to you about Tony Croom?”
“Yes. She laughed and said he’d dropped her like a hot potato.”
Dinny took his hat and hung it up.
“About those costs?” she said, without turning.
“Well, I went to see Forsyte specially, but I got nothing out of him.”
“Oh! Would you like a wash, or would you rather go straight up? Dinner’s at quarter-past eight. It’s half-past seven now.”
“Straight up, if I may.”
“You’re in a different room; I’ll show you.”
She preceded him to the foot of the little stairway leading to the priest’s room.
“That’s your bathroom. Up here, now.”
“The priest’s room?”
“Yes. There’s no ghost.” She crossed to the window. “See! He was fed here at night from the roof. Do you like the view? Better in the spring when the blossom’s out, of course.”
“Lovely!” He stood beside her at the window, and she could see his hands clenched so hard on the stone sill that the knuckles showed white. A bitter wind swept through her being. Here she had dreamed of standing with Wilfrid beside her. She leaned against the side of the embrasured window and closed her eyes. When she opened them he was facing her, she could see his lips trembling, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes fixed on her face.” She moved across to the door.
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