“I hope that went well,” said the colonel to Mrs. Winterbourne.
“You were all benevolence,” she replied; and to her surprise, she meant it. The hand holding the cup looked good-natured. She studied his person, which was of a piece with this character she had given him. She found herself speaking with some ardour, close to his ear. “I think you must be the kind of uncle that children worship.”
“Do you mean that?” he whispered, seriously. “I’d like to think so too. It would take some of the solitude out of life. One gets rather desperate about that at my time of life.”
“Why, Colonel Batten, you sound most melancholy. I can’t believe that …”
“Drop the Colonel, Mrs. Winterbourne, please. It sounds too stiff. I would like to think that we may be less formal than that. Tom Batten’s my name … but I beg your pardon. I am going too fast. It’s very odd. I don’t know why, but I’ve begun to accept the fact that I know you well: though it is hardly a fact yet, I suppose. I’d like to believe it is, though.”
“So would I, Col … Mr. Batten … what must I call you?”
“Not must, Mrs. Winterbourne. It is your choice.…”
They fell silent, as the American grew more enthusiastic and drowned all private conversation. He was directing the talk toward his main object.
“There’s no doubt that the juniors take first place at this time of year. It did me good to watch them around that Christmas tree. I like to contemplate those young lives, and to wonder what time will make of them. Maybe there is a destiny ahead for more than one of them.…”
“It will lead to the gaol for those two brats of Lady Millicent. They are the plague of the Embassy staff.” The commercial minister had not disclosed to the rest of the group that he knew Aloysius Sturm. He was content to drop a long shot from time to time. The American looked at him, puzzled at first, then realising who this critic must be, he set out to subdue him also by ingratiation.
“Well, sir. I had not expected to meet you in this homely company. That does me good, too. The human side of things, I say. It is always there …”
“You never said a truer word,” said the minister. Mary saw the doctor glance shrewdly from one to the other of the two guests. He said nothing, but sat relaxed, deep in his chair, the cup of tea on his knee perilously balanced. Mr. Sturm continued.
“Naturally, in my occupation, I like to look ahead along the roads that human personality will have to take. Call it predestination, if you like. I would say it was conscious method. Take any talent which a child may show, and I will say that it can be developed by wise and careful handling. That was a grand parable of Our Lord’s; a grand parable. The talent wrapped in a napkin. Think of that! Many is the napkin that I have unearthed, and unfolded … to reveal something that has made a mark in the world. I hope to go on with that gracious work. It makes me feel that my life has a purpose, and …”
“And a profit,” added the minister. The American looked at him gratefully.
“You never said a wiser word, sir. Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn. Mine is a humble task, Dr. Batten; but it brings a great sense of service into my life; just as your work must. But with you too, the labourer is worthy of his hire.”
“Every time,” said the minister.
“What’s biting him?” whispered the colonel to Mary, leaning close to her, so that she caught a pleasant whiff of shaving-soap. “What has he got against this chap?”
“Isn’t it the usual attitude of the Civil Servant toward the business man?”
“Maybe; but I wish he’d let him alone.”
The colonel was so earnest that Mary was forced to try to reassure him.
“Surely Mr. Sturm can hold his own? But is he a friend of yours?”
“Well, in a way. I’ve not known him very long. But he is a character, and a decent one too. The fact is, he wants to hear my nephew play. I have told him about the boy, and that roused his professional curiosity. He is an impresario: goes about the world talent-spotting, and promoting the careers of his finds. So what he has been saying is quite true; very near the bone.”
“That should make the meat sweeter,” she said, teasing him.
“Would you disapprove of that?” he asked.
“Why, would it matter if I did?”
“I begin to realise that it would mean a great deal.”
They looked at each other, and the intimacy was taken a step nearer. Mary again felt that touch of recklessness in the face of changing and breaking circumstances. Life was bringing surprises. She closed her eyes for a moment, as one does when spring sunshine caresses one’s face.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sturm was closing on his quarry. Addressing himself to the doctor, he said, “I’d take it as a privilege, Dr. Batten, if I might hear your little son play. My friend the colonel has told me of his gifts. It would be good to know if he is really a musician. Then we might discuss his future.”
“His future is safely in hand, Mr. Sturm,” said the doctor quietly, but dryly.
Further talk was stopped by a round game, proposed by the young ladies from the Embassy, two of whom were professional organisers. The group was broken up by a demand for chairs, which had to be set along the centre of the room for a game of musical chairs. The company took their places, and the children were dispersed among the grown-ups, so that an adult here and there was aware of clasping a miniature, and over-warm hand, taut with nervous excitement.
“I’ll play! I’ll play!” cried little Adrian: and he rushed to the piano, opened the lid, and clambered on to the stool.
“Is that the boy?” whispered Mr. Sturm, hungrily, to Mrs. Winterbourne, who stood next him in the human chain. She felt his hand tighten as he turned to look over his shoulder at the child on the piano-stool. Her other hand was in the colonel’s, and she gave an involuntary squeeze, which made him look at her secretly. She had showed that she was willing to share any conspiracy with him.
Adrian began to play ‘If all the world were paper, and all the sea were ink’, and the game began. So it proceeded, without incident, the players one by one dropping out as Adrian broke off and the scramble for chairs followed at each pause. At last only two were left, Joan and Mr. Sturm. Adrian’s delight at seeing this was noticed by everybody, for he shouted across the piano, while playing with exaggerated rhythm, marking the beat, as he thought, to Joan’s advantage, trying through the music to tell her when to plunge for the last chair. He was successful, and Joan won the game.
Before the guests dissolved their attention, to break into separate conversation and proposals for a new game, Adrian cried aloud, “Joan’s won! Joan’s won! And here she is, walking home!”
He played the tune loudly, then began to improvise a variation. Silence fell over the company. Even the children stood listening, the two small ruffians from the Embassy tiptoeing to their handsome mother, subdued by something that was, perhaps, a little too much for them; a little frightening.
Mary stood with her hand still in the colonel’s. She was watching Aloysius Sturm, who glared at the boy, his eyes protruding, his face covered in sweat. The doctor looked annoyed, but grew calmer as the music went on, winding its way through the strange imagination of this infant, clear as a hillside brook, and as precisely banked and bedded. It glittered, it paused and rushed, it changed pebbles to agate and chrysoprase, and weeds to strands of coral.
The little boy leaned closer to the keyboard, working his body, or having it worked, under a compulsion that drained the colour out of his cheeks and the light out of his eyes. The expression on his face was almost cretinous; or rather the lack of expression. His mouth moved, the lips twisting as though trying involuntarily to shape the notes that poured out. Now the boy was adapting the theme to a loose passacaglia, sending it tramping along like a crowd moving towards a public spectacle, louder and louder, more and more feet; the crowd grew, it became touched with mass hysteria; it was dangerous. Suddenly the boy broke the procession by three strong chords. The
n he lifted his hands, looked at them, and woke from his trance. His mouth worked convulsively, he turned and stared at the roomful of people. Then he spotted the two boys with their mother, and made a dive for them. They instantly responded, with a rough and tumble that broke the general tension, and the Christmas spirit surged back again.
“You see?” said Tom Batten, drawing Mary’s hand to the shelter of his arm. They stood behind the big screen, which had been pushed, half-closed, at right-angles to the wall, making an alcove.
“I am not musical,” said Mary. But something had disturbed her; the tip of the wing of genius, perhaps. She wanted to add, ‘But I love you, I love you!’ She accused herself of hysteria. But she did not withdraw her hand.
Chapter Ten
The God Disguised
In the middle of Christmas week, during those days of gathering gloom beside the death-bed of the year, Joan received a letter from her husband. It was addressed to her mother’s cottage at Limpsfield, for Joan had not informed him of the flight to Paris. There it had lain over Christmas, until the woman went in to re-direct it.
John was puzzled, and rather angry. What was Joan up to, he asked. A quarrel was a quarrel, though he could see no reason for it. But to take it too far was beyond all understanding, and he began to wonder if she was not working up for a nervous breakdown. She was doing too much, that was the trouble. He realised, he said, that life during term was over-full for her, with all the necessary social round; but to that she had been adding this research for her Professor, month after month without a break. No wonder that she had begun to imagine things. But to leave him out at Christmas like this, and to go home to her mother without making arrangements for the rest of the vacation, was carrying the misunderstanding too far. He had missed her terribly, even while following the trip along the Pennines. That had been wonderful, and would have done her a world of good if she had only been persuaded to come with him. It was, in fact, rather dreary doing it alone, he wouldn’t mind admitting; especially after that absurd row before she went off to Surrey. What was there to quarrel about, after all? Personally, he asked no more of marriage than he had already received, the staunch companionship of a person who wanted no more truck with sentimentality, and all that kind of thing, than he did.
At this point in the letter, Joan stopped reading, consumed by rage, and by despair. She found herself weeping, and had to wait a while before she could resume her attack on the letter. During this pause, she saw through her tears the dangerous result of trying to assume a character one does not naturally possess. School, Newnham, and this academic marriage, following the upbringing in a fatherless household where the widow lived repressed and artificially determined to sacrifice herself to the memory of the dead; this had been Joan’s world, luring her to the choice of an epicene attitude that had kept her creative instincts dormant until after marriage. She could not realise now that she wept for this deceit. The struggle against it remained, however; the struggle and the resentment against the man who might so easily have released her, as she unconsciously had hoped. But she had picked the wrong man.
The hopelessness lay in the fact that he was so decent, so faithful, so sublimely unaware, in his manichean contempt for the pleasures of the flesh. He was nearly ten years older than herself; but she felt that he was still a healthy schoolboy, with mud-caked knees, and interminable talk about the football field. Only with John it was mountains, and all the jargon of the climber. His official work at the physical laboratory he never discussed with her. That was another grievance. She wanted to be really an equal, not merely a playmate.
She read on, with nothing elucidated in her aching mind. John said that he proposed to come down to Limpsfield to fetch her, and to talk things out sensibly. So would she either ring him up early on Christmas Eve, or come home the day before, when he proposed to return?
Panic seized her. He would have gone down to Limpsfield and found the house empty. Would he know where to find the woman, to learn that they were in Paris? Of course he would, and that meant he was likely to follow. This letter was days old; it had been drifting about in the Christmas postal flood. What was to be done with him if he turned up here? But she realised that the shock of finding her vanished from the country might give him to pause. He did nothing on the spur of the moment. He had always to rope himself securely, and cut a foot-hold, before any advance. That was what made him such a good scientist, and a good mountaineer. It was not likely that he would do anything desperate, or even impulsive. She was assured of that.
By the way, he went on, as a means of making lighter weather, he had seen in The Times that a Colonel Batten was concerned in these recent revelations about the faked balance sheets of a certain Trust Company, as one of the many directors. Was that anything to do with her mother’s correspondent, the Dr. Batten in Paris, who wrote to her every year?
Joan stared at this paragraph; read and re-read it. Her distrust of the colonel was justified, after all. Her feelings about men were not far wrong, she was able to tell herself. The rest of her husband’s letter hardly mattered. His schoolboy emotions paled beside this bit of news. She left the last paragraph unread, jumped up, and went through to her mother’s room. But it was empty.
Here again was something odd. Mother had not said she was going out. Usually she lay on her bed for a nap after luncheon, and Joan had imagined she was asleep now.
The girl decided to go for a walk alone. It would give her a chance to think over John’s letter, and to consider what was to be done if he should follow her to Paris. She was so afraid of him now. She loved him, she wanted him. But she hated him for the cheat of their relationship.
She found the streets of Paris once again suffused with delicate sunlight, dust-moted with frost. The bare plane trees in the boulevards were almost ethereal, only their rounded fruits hanging distinctly, a sparse punctuation here and there. Down in the Luxembourg Gardens the air cleared a little, except for the smoke from a bonfire of tree-prunings, a scarf of blue-grey that wound among the empty boughs and along the avenues, carrying a bittersweet perfume out of the past, out of the wilderness. Joan smelled it, and her instinctive longings added fuel to her anger and frustration. She walked faster, round and round the more rural part of the Gardens where the espaliers of pears gave a privacy to lovers, and sorrowers. She was not among the former, and bitterness drove her away when she came upon a couple, sitting on a seat round a bend in the path. They were abandoned to each other, their mouths joined. She saw that they were middleaged. Disgusting! she said to herself; people of that age! But she knew that she was disgusted with herself because of the surge of hunger that gripped her. She turned back, hurriedly, and made for the open, towards the palace and the pond.
This problem of John had to be thought out, however. She slowed her pace, weighing the matter in her mind. If he comes, she said to herself, repeating the phrase again and again, and getting no further. If he comes! I want him to come, she almost cried aloud; but the desire was pushed back into the wild. It was these instinctive longings that had caused all the trouble. If only she could live with John in that equable, boyish comradeship, all would be plain sailing. But life was not proving so simple as that. Even this momentary touch of the senses, the smell of the wood-smoke, could upset the balance of a nicely-ordered relationship.
She heard a thrush singing, too. It sat in a lanky chestnut tree, one of the grove leading towards the pond, and its voice rang out in the afternoon air, a triple-sounding challenge to the time of the year, carrying messages of hope and even of certainty; new worlds, new generations, the full cycle of life. She stood below, looking up at the tiny, living ocarina in the tree-top. More evidence to call her a liar, and her husband a fool!
No further advanced in her cogitation, Joan approached the pond, where a crowd of French citizens and their children were in movement around the rim, all engaged in sailing new boats, shouting and laughing, urgent with directions and warnings, everybody happy, especially the elders. The
pond was full of this puerile traffic; tiny yachts, schooners, yawls, with sails of white, blue, plumcolour; modern vessels of steel, driven by clock-work, and some by steam (leaving a nostalgic whiff of methylated spirit over the surface of the water). Collisions occurred, to the accompaniment of shouts and cries of alarm. Two sailing vessels would become entangled, their progress arrested, while they clung together with shuddering sails, their owners unable to come to the rescue until they drifted inshore.
Joan watched with some curiosity, jostled even out of her worries for a while, her trained mind always ready to respond to a call to objectivity. She stood wratching a noble vessel, three feet long, whose rigging was exact in miniature and scale. The son and father were at work rigging the sails. Then the boat was launched. She watched it, and the first ripple as it responded to the fingers of the wind. The sails swelled out, the boat swung through a few degrees, then surged forward, the water almost cluck-clucking at the bows. “Oh!” murmured the young woman, and the gratified French father smiled at her as he passed, staff in hand, to run round to the opposite side of the pond, while the boy chose the other direction, bent and weighed down by anxiety.
Following the progress of the boat, she began to speculate where it would come to land. Then she saw the group across the water, three people and a child, in the act of launching a similar vessel. She saw Colonel Batten, the American Mr. Sturm, and little Adrian Batten, all three crouching, their heads together round the boat. Standing over them, intent as themselves, and holding a man’s walking-stick and gloves, was her mother.
Chapter Eleven
The Dangerous Years Page 9