“We were wondering if we ought to contact Mr. Hoadley in Brighton.”
“I wouldn’t bother him. Fabrio will be back by this evening, I expect, and Mr. Hoadley would only be annoyed at a fuss over nothing.”
“It was Sylvia’s idea really,” Mary called back, setting out across the dripping grass.
“It would be. Don’t let her fuss you; she’s a great half-wit.”
The children were so ready to exclaim and enlarge their eyes over the news that after a while Alda refused to discuss it any more, but this did not prevent them from retiring into their bedroom and mulling it over until lunch, and afterwards they returned to it with unslaked interest. Meg took no part in it, for out of sight was out of mind with her, except where her mother was concerned, and she passed the time peacefully in tilting Gilbert’s jam jar up and down in order to make him lose his balance.
At the farmhouse there was the atmosphere that might be expected where the occupants are a pregnant woman, an Italian, and a stage-struck adolescent. Mary did help to maintain a more sensible attitude at first, but as the day wore on and the rain poured down, and there was no sign of Fabrio, she too became depressed; and when Alda walked over in top-boots and raincoat early in the afternoon, she found them all seated round the fire, drinking tea and very low. The day’s duties were being performed, but in a perfunctory manner, and not one of those odd indoor tasks which Mr. Hoadley made it an admirable habit to perform upon wet days had been so much as thought of. Gloomy speculation and fruitless agitation held the field.
Alda smiled at Mrs. Hoadley and took up a letter for herself that had arrived by the morning’s post, wondering as she did so when Jean was going to write.
But it was to be eighteen months before she again heard from her friend.
“If only Mr. Hoadley was coming back to-night!” said Mrs. Hoadley for the seventh time, pushing over her cup for Sylvia to refill, “I should sleep so much easier if I knew there was a man in the house.”
Emilio looked at her with a bilious eye, but said nothing. He was not quite sure of her meaning, and he was too much under the influence of last night’s cider to speak up for the honour of his sex. Let all these women weep, he thought, drinking tea out of his saucer. My brother is no doubt stewing a rabbit somewhere in the woods, glad to get away from La Scimmia for a while, and would that I were with him! To-morrow I must go back to that accursed camp; therefore let me make the most of the time still left to me.
“Well, please leave us a little sugar, Emilio!” exclaimed Mrs. Hoadley with a disagreeable titter. “That’s only three spoonfuls you’ve had for one cup of tea. It’s a mercy all of us haven’t got a sweet tooth!”
“Scusa?” said Emilio politely. He was wondering if there were any drink left in that barrel; he had not been able to get near the shed on his last search for Fabrio, and he thought that he would soon go out to look again.
“It’s funny; I’ve got such a strong feeling he is at the camp,” Mary was saying, “I suppose you wouldn’t let me telephone there later on, when we’ve had another look for him?” to Mrs. Hoadley.
Sylvia was sitting by the fire, sulky and red-eyed. She now looked up and said impatiently:
“All right, if you want to get him into the hell of a row. If you telephone, they’ll be certain he’s done a bolt—gone to London, p’raps.”
“Well, p’raps he has,” said Mrs. Hoadley drearily. “Oh dear, I do wish Mr. Hoadley was coming home to-night. I dread the darkness coming.”
“Well, it won’t come until about ten o’clock, thanks to the Government, and when it does there’s a full moon,” said Alda dryly.
“Oh, you don’t know—he may be desperate!”
Emilio said nothing, but one yellow eye slid round the corner of the cup from which he was drinking and regarded Mrs. Hoadley with derision.
“Highly unlikely, I should think,” said Alda.
“Oh, you don’t know—men get so worked up—and Italians are so hysterical—I beg your pardon, Emilio, but you know they are—and he was in such a state last night. His eyes! Shall I ever forget them!”
“Oh go on, all of you, say it’s my fault, I know you think it is, and if he’s dead that’ll be my fault, too!” burst out Sylvia, in a kind of howl. She stood up and re-knotted her scarf, sobbing noisily. “It isn’t my fault, I never asked him to get crazy about me, did I?”
Emilio continued to suck up tea. His other eye peered round the cup, looking equally yellow but this time fixed upon Sylvia.
“Good gracious, Sylvia, don’t go on like that. No one’s accusing you, I’m sure I never said a word to her, did I, Mary?”
But Mary, her natural good sense reinforced by the presence of Alda, was deftly clearing away the dinner, and she glanced at the clock. It was a quarter past two, a good three-quarters of an hour later than the farmhouse party usually got up from the midday meal.
“I must get on, I promised Mr. Hoadley I’d get all those flower seeds into packets for him and then you and I’ll have to get onto the milking,” she said to Sylvia, at whom all the others were now lackadaisically gazing. “What are you going to do now?”
“M-m-muck out the bull’s shed,” blowing her nose desolately.
“Right. Emilio, I expect you’ve got plenty to do, haven’t you?” and Mary, having done her best to break up the party, sailed out into the scullery with a tray of plates. Alda’s heart warmed to her, the more because she was sure that Mary liked Fabrio better than Sylvia did, and was inwardly far more grieved for him.
Mrs. Hoadley raised her eyebrows. It seemed to her that Mary was taking rather much on herself. She was almost giving orders. Let her have a baby, then she won’t feel so brisk, thought Mrs. Hoadley crossly. However, Mary’s tone had a bracing effect upon her, and she went slowly upstairs to change her morning slippers for neater ones.
Emilio went off, pulling a sack over his head against the rain, and Alda and Sylvia were alone.
“Cheer up, Sylvia, for goodness’ sake!” Alda said impatiently, after watching her slowly pulling on her boots, slowly putting on her raincoat, and sniffing the while.
Sylvia said nothing.
“What did you want to turn him down for, silly child?” Alda went on more quietly. “I told you he was a good match. Now see what you’ve done!”
Suddenly Sylvia hurled her boot to the far end of the room. It hit a pot of geraniums on the windowsill, which fell to the stone floor with a crash. Earth and bruised flowers and snapped leaves and broken flowerpot were scattered all about. The cat, which had been resting under the table, flew out with a sharp howl and blundered into a chicken which was mincing in from the scullery, where Emilio had left the door open. The chicken rushed out flapping and squawking with the cat after it and the scandalised voice of Mrs. Hoadley was heard crying from upstairs:
“What on earth’s the matter? Fabrio, is that you?”
Sylvia was blubbering noisily with her fists thrust into her eyes, and Alda could just make out the words: “All your fault—all your fault!”
“All my fault? What do you mean? What rubbish!” she said. She could hear Mrs. Hoadley’s slow steps coming down the stairs.
“Yes, it is! If you hadn’t poked your nose in and told me what to do—it wasn’t your business—nothing to do with you—” and her voice rose hysterically as she remembered Fabrio’s smile. She believed that he had killed himself. Men did do such things, when they were crazy about women.
“Don’t be absurd, Sylvia, you’re hysterical. Pull yourself together,” said Alda very sharply indeed, as Mrs. Hoadley entered.
“What’s the matter now, Sylvia?” the latter said with an irritable sigh. “You’d better go and get on with your work. It’ll take your mind off things.”
More sobs and incoherent sentences in which the words “shan’t!” and “unkind” were distinguishable.
Alda said nothing. She sat down and picked up the local newspaper. She had come here intending to chat with Mrs. Hoadley, and
Sylvia’s tantrums were certainly not going to drive her away. But she was also slightly embarrassed. Sylvia was an idiot, of course, making such a fuss and completely misunderstanding well-meant attempts to help her, but Mrs. Hoadley might also misunderstand if Sylvia poured out the story to her. So much for educating the masses, thought Alda (it was as well that the passionate individualist, Sylvia’s late father, could not hear her lumping himself and and his family with the masses). Really, it’s getting dull here, I shall be glad to leave at the end of next month, she thought, quite forgetting how delightful life at the farm had seemed only yesterday.
Mrs. Hoadley glanced from the red agitated countenance to the calm brown one. It was plain that they had had words, but she did not want to hear what about. She was too tired after yesterday’s exertions and too worried about Fabrio to want any more fuss. She said, not unkindly, to Sylvia:
“There, that’ll do. Get on with the next job, Sylvia. It’s wonderful what a cure work can be, isn’t it, Mrs. Lucie-Browne?”
Mrs. Lucie-Browne, with her eyes fixed upon the pages of the East Sussex Advertiser and Chronicle, made a non-committal noise.
Sylvia blundered off. She was raging with bitterness towards Alda. She took it all as a joke, did she? She thought everything was going to be fine and there was nothing to worry about, did she? Just let her wait a bit, and see! Wait till they dragged the ponds in Saint Leonard’s Forest that night, and the hooks caught in Something—and they pulled It up out of the dark waters—and the moon shone on a gleam of chestnut hair! Here the tears spurted again as she went out into the rain. And she had driven him to his doom! By her heartlessness, her coldness. She would never forgive herself. All her life long she would carry the mark of this Horror upon her. The next time she went to see Mr. Smedley-Porter at the Canonbury School of Dramatic Art he would tell her that she had gained Something which was of immeasurable benefit to her Art: she had suffered. And however brilliant her career; however large the lights in which her name appeared in the West End, she would never, never forget the Italian prisoner who had gone down into the Dark Places for her.
Here she trod upon a broom which Emilio, another individualist, had cast carelessly from him, and it flew up and bumped her. The sharp undeserved pain shook her out of her orgy, and she realised that the rain was increasing in severity. She drew the sack closer over her head and hoped that Fabrio, if not yet dead, were under shelter. We might have been all right, Fabrio and me, if she hadn’t interfered, she thought vaguely, with a sudden pang that was not in the least enjoyable, as she cautiously opened the door of the bull’s shed.
Alda remained for half an hour with Mrs. Hoadley, salting down runner beans into big jars against the winter and listening to every imaginable supposition as to Fabrio’s fate; from his having jumped a lorry bound for Brighton and thence made for Dover and the Channel en route for home, to his having gone mad and concealed himself in those deserted shacks up in the woods with the object of waylaying Sylvia and murdering her. Later she contrived to steer Mrs. Hoadley away from the subject by an account of the new house in Ironborough. This was a happy thought, for Mrs. Hoadley delighted to talk about Ironborough; and in listening to a detailed account of the contents of Alda’s linen-cupboard, which her mother was storing for her against their return, she forgot Fabrio and his fate for quite twenty minutes.
As Alda went home across the dripping fields, which yet did not look dismal because of the abundance of the surrounding vegetation and because there was still no hint in the air of autumn, she wondered a little for her own part where Fabrio was. She was not surprised that he had gone. How wretched he had looked last night! And he had made no attempt to conceal it! He had behaved like an unhappy child. It would be very tiresome to be married to a man of that type, but of course, no man of one’s own class would be of that type. Self-control was the first rule for the gently-bred, and perhaps it was the last remaining characteristic distinguishing them from those who were not.
She still thought that he and Sylvia could have made a match of it, and if he returned in a sobered mood and Sylvia met him in one of joyful relief at his return, they might yet do so. But as Alda cheerfully roused the somnolent children from their books and paint-boxes with the announcement of tea; setting the cups on the table and mixing some cakes which were to be eaten hot and driving her daughters round to find the spoons and the jam, most of her thoughts were turned eagerly towards Ironborough and the new life there, and Fabrio, Sylvia, Mr. Waite, the Hoadleys, all seemed on this dim rainy afternoon to belong already to the past. Harvest was over; Jean would soon write to say that she was to marry her Mr. Potter at once and that Alda must come to the wedding; and in less than six weeks the Lucie-Brownes would again be living in Ironborough: familiar, smoky city where Alda’s family had lived and been respected for sixty years and where her daughters—and now, she hoped, her son—would live in their turn.
“Tea’s ready,” she called, coming in with the plate of cakes. “Come along,” to Meg, who was gazing out of the window. “Can you see the Big Meadow, lovey, with all the sheaves? The harvest’s over, and next month we’re going home.”
Of all the party at the farm, Mary passed the pleasantest afternoon, in arranging seeds collected from vegetable and flower garden during the summer in envelopes and labelling them. The large curved seed of the marigold; and the poppy seed small as dust; the flat yellow grain in which dwells the wallflower; and the large, blue and purple, marbled seed of the runner bean, were sifted out from their litter of withered stem and leaf and neatly classified. Two hours passed so quickly that she was surprised when she heard Sylvia bellowing in the distance that it was milking time (sounding rather like one of those about to be milked, thought Mary, who was getting tired of Sylvia).
… Afterwards, no one could remember who first brought Mr. Hoadley’s rook-rifle into the discussion. Mrs. Hoadley always vowed that Emilio had been trying to get his hands on it ever since he first clapped eyes on it, and that he took advantage of the general anxiety about Fabrio to suggest that he should go forth armed upon his search. Mary said that everyone got so moody and upset as evening came on that no one could remember exactly what they did say, and Mr. Hoadley (soon to be the father of a perfectly enormous son with lungs like a bullock and a will of iron whom his mother worshipped) blamed everyone impartially. Whoever was to blame, one fact is clear. When Emilio went out at half-past eight to look for Fabrio, he was carrying Mr. Hoadley’s rifle. He left the women sitting in the kitchen over a final cup of tea as he stepped reluctantly into the twilight.
The rain had ceased, but it had been so persistent throughout the warm, still day that a mist had arisen from woods and meadows as evening advanced, and now lingered among the motionless trees, thick and bluish between their heavy green leaves. Now and again one drop of water fell from the soaked boughs, and the brimming ditches ran fast, with a light covering of petals and dried stems and seeds swirling along their surfaces.
Emilio was so pleased to hold a weapon again that he even made some attempt to carry out a promise to Mrs. Hoadley, and search those deserted huts up in the copse. This rite consisted in approaching to within fifty yards of the huts, pointing the rifle at the one which was so ruined as to be practically open to the elements, and shouting in Italian and English: “Is anyone inside there? Answer or I fire!”
No one did answer, but he thought he had better not fire Mr. Hoadley’s rifle because of Mr. Hoadley, so he went back, almost noiselessly, through the wet, quiet woods; down the hill and across a meadow enclosed by coppices where ran a tiny stream. It was a miniature river gliding between banks a few feet high, which was marked upon a map dated 1530, in the possession of this land’s owner. Meadow, coppices and stream covered not more than five acres of land and were only two miles from the main road: but they proved, as they lay there under the grey evening sky in deep solitude, how small England is, and how secret still: in spite of holiday camps, and motor coaches and the horrifying increase in our
numbers, how secret still!
Emilio leapt the stream with the rifle gaily pointing at all angles and went through the trees, keeping a look-out for something to shoot. He was enjoying the outing; he had no intention of reporting his friend’s whereabouts even if he found him, and now he was on his way to the scene of last night’s festivities to try that little barrel for a last drink.
Across the home meadows he went. There were no lights in Mr. Waite’s cottage, for Mr. Waite had not yet returned from London, where he had spent the day with his fiancée (in case anyone should ask, the care of his chickens had been entrusted to Miss Dodder).
Emilio entered the precincts of the farm, and at once began opening doors, with the rifle ready, and demanding in a low tone: “Art thou there, my comrade?” Soon (having received no reply from the bull’s shed or the stable where the little goats were kept) he naturally found himself at the door of the shed he was making for. He opened it, he aimed the rifle; he put his question, but again there was no answer. He shrugged his shoulders and went in, carefully drawing the door to after him. The little barrel was still there, and he went over to it. He turned the tap. Alas, after a few delicious drops which he sucked up with eagerness, there were no more. The barrel was dry. The padrone, that monster of injustice, that hard man, had drained it before he left home that morning. Emilio swore, and decided that he had searched enough for one evening. Now he would return, and see if there were anything left to eat.
On the way he passed the granary. He remembered that it had always been a favourite haunt of his friend’s, and, almost without thinking, he pushed open the door (which stood slightly ajar), poked the rifle round it, and bawled, “Art thou there, my brother?”
The rifle barrel was struck violently down. Then it was pulled forward. It was jerked out of his hand. It vanished. The inside of the granary was almost dark. Fabrio’s voice said gruffly out of the darkness:
“What art thou doing, threatening with rifles? thou, who couldst not hit a tank at five yards. Do not be a fool, and come inside. I would speak with thee.”
The Matchmaker Page 40