Maid In Waiting eotc-1

by John Galsworthy

  “Help!”

  “Oh! I’ll be quite impersonal. Here we have a self-consciousness, developed and controlled to the point when it becomes unselfconsciousness. To this lady Self is the unforgivable intruder. We observe a sense of humour, not devoid of wit, which informs and somewhat sterilises all else. We are impressed by what I may call a look not so much of domestic as of public or social service, not to be found in our other types. We discover a sort of transparency, as if air and dew had got into the system. We decide that PREcision is lacking, precision of learning, action, thought, judgment, but that DEcision is very present. The senses are not highly developed; the aesthetic emotions are excited more readily by natural than by artificial objects. There is not the capacity of the German; the clarity of the French woman; the duality or colour of the Italian; the disciplined neatness of the American; but there is a peculiar something—for which, my dear, I will leave you to discover the word—that makes me very anxious to have you in my collection of cultures.”

  “But I am not in the least cultured, Uncle Lawrence.”

  “I use the infernal word for want of a better, and by it I don’t mean learning. I mean the stamp left by blood plus bringing-up, the two taken strictly together. If that French woman had had your bringing-up, she yet wouldn’t have had your stamp, Dinny; nor would you with her bringing-up have had her stamp. Now look at this pre-war Russian; more fluid and more fluent than any of the others. I found her in the Caledonian Market. That woman must have wanted to go deep into everything, and never wanted to stay there long. I’ll wager she ran through life at a great pace, and, if alive, is still running; and it’s taking much less out of her than it would take out of you. The face gives you the feeling that she’s experienced more emotions, and been less exhausted by them than any of the others. Here’s my Spaniard; perhaps the most interesting of the lot. That’s woman brought up apart from man; I suspect she’s getting rare. There’s a sweetness here, a touch of the convent; not much curiosity, not much energy, a lot of pride, very little conceit; might be devastating in her affections, don’t you think, and rather difficult to talk to? Well, Dinny, will you sit to my young man?”

  “If you really want me to, of course.”

  “I do. This is my hobby. I’ll arrange it. He can come down to you at Condaford. I must get back now and see ‘Snubby’ off. Have you proposed to him yet?”

  “I read him to sleep last night with Hubert’s diary. He dislikes me intensely. I daren’t ask him anything. Is he really ‘a big noise,’ Uncle Lawrence?”

  Sir Lawrence nodded mysteriously. “Snubby,” he said, “is the ideal public man. He has practically no feelers, and his feelings are always connected with Snubby. You can’t keep a man like him down; he will always be there or thereabouts. India-rubber. Well, well, the State needs him. If we were all thin-skinned, who would sit in the seats of the mighty? They are hard, Dinny, and full of brass tacks. So you’ve wasted your time?”

  “I think I’ve tied a second string to my bow.”

  “Excellent. Hallorsen’s off too. I like that chap. Very American, but sound wood.”

  He left her, and, unwilling to encounter again either the india-rubber or the sound wood, Dinny went up to her room.

  Next morning by ten o’clock, with the rapidity peculiar to the break-up of house-parties, Fleur and Michael were bearing Adrian and Diana off to Town in their car; the Muskhams had departed by train, and the Squire and Lady Henrietta were motoring across country to their Northamptonshire abode; Aunt Wilmet and Dinny alone were left, but the Tasburghs were coming to lunch and bringing their father.

  “He’s amiable, Dinny,” said Lady Mont: “Old School, very courtly, says ‘Nevah,’ ‘Evah,’ like that. It’s a pity they’ve no money. Jean is strikin’, don’t you think?”

  “She scares me a little, Aunt Em; knows her own mind so completely.”

  “Match-makin’,” replied her aunt, “is rather amusin’. I haven’t done any for a long time. I wonder what Con and your mother will say to me. I shall wake up o’ nights.”

  “First catch your Hubert, Auntie.”

  “I was always fond of Hubert; he has the family face—you haven’t, Dinny, I don’t know where you get your colourin’—and he looks so well on a horse. Where does he get his breeches?”

  “I don’t believe he’s had a new pair since the war, Auntie.”

  “And he wears nice long waistcoats. Those short waistcoats straight across are so abbreviatin’. I shall send him out with Jean to see the rock borders. There’s nothin’ like portulaca for bringin’ people together. Ah! There’s Boswell-and-Johnson—I must catch him.”

  Hubert arrived soon after noon, and almost the first thing he said was:

  “I’ve changed my mind about having my diary published, Dinny. Exhibiting one’s sore finger is too revolting.”

  Thankful that as yet she had taken no steps, she answered meekly:

  “Very well, dear.”

  “I’ve been thinking: If they’re not going to employ me here, I might get attached to a Soudan regiment; or I believe they’re short of men for the Indian Police. I shall be jolly glad to get out of the country again. Who’s here?”

  “Only Uncle Lawrence, Aunt Em, and Aunt Wilmet. The Rector and his family are coming to lunch—the Tasburghs, they’re distant cousins.”

  “Oh!” said Hubert, glumly.

  She watched the advent of the Tasburghs almost maliciously. Hubert and young Tasburgh at once discovered mutual service in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. They were talking about it when Hubert became conscious of Jean. Dinny saw him give her a long look, enquiring and detached, as of a man watching a new kind of bird; saw him avert his eyes, speak and laugh, then gaze back at her.

  Her aunt’s voice said: “Hubert looks thin.”

  The Rector spread his hands, as if to draw attention to his present courtly bulk. “Dear Lady, at his age I was thinnah.”

  “So was I,” said Lady Mont; “thin as you, Dinny.”

  “We gathah unearned increment, ah-ha! Look at Jean—lithe is the word; in forty years—but perhaps the young of today will nevah grow fat. They do slimming—ah-ha!”

  At lunch the Rector faced Sir Lawrence across the shortened table, and the two elder ladies sat one on each side of him. Alan faced Hubert and Dinny faced Jean.

  “For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful.”

  “Rum thing—grace!” said young Tasburgh in Dinny’s ear. “Benediction on murder, um?”

  “There’ll be hare,” said Dinny, “and I saw it killed. It cried.”

  “I’d as soon eat dog as hare.”

  Dinny gave him a grateful look.

  “Will you and your sister come and see us at Condaford?”

  “Give me a chance!”

  “When do you go back to your ship?”

  “I’ve got a month.”

  “I suppose you are devoted to your profession?”

  “Yes,” he said, simply. “It’s bred in the bone, we’ve always had a sailor in the family.”

  “And we’ve always had a soldier.”

  “Your brother’s deathly keen. I’m awfully glad to have met him.”

  “No, Blore,” said Dinny to the butler, “cold partridge, please. Mr. Tasburgh too will eat something cold.”

  “Beef, Sir; lamb, partridge.”

  “Partridge, thank you.”

  “I’ve seen a hare wash its ears,” added Dinny.

  “When you look like that,” said young Tasburgh, “I simply—”

  “Like what?”

  “As if you weren’t there, you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Dinny,” said Sir Lawrence, “who was it said the world was an oyster? I say it’s a clam. What’s your view?”

  “I don’t know the clam, Uncle Lawrence.”

  “You’re fortunate. That travesty of the self-respecting bivalve is the only tangible proof of American idealism. They’ve put it on a pedestal, and
go so far as to eat it. When the Americans renounce the clam, they will have become realists and joined the League of Nations. We shall be dead.”

  But Dinny was watching Hubert’s face. The brooding look was gone: his eyes seemed glued to Jean’s deep luring eyes. She uttered a sigh.

  “Quite right,” said Sir Lawrence, “it will be a pity not to live to see the Americans abandon the clam, and embrace the League of Nations. For, after all,” he continued, pursing up his left eye, “it WAS founded by an American and is about the only sensible product of our time. It remains, however, the pet aversion of another American called Monroe who died in 1831, and is never alluded to without a scoff by people like ‘Snubby.’

  “‘A scoff, a sneer, a kick or two,

  With few, but with how splendid jeers’—

  D’you know that thing by Elroy Flecker?”

  “Yes,” said Dinny, startled, “it’s in Hubert’s diary; I read it out to Lord Saxenden. It was just then he went to sleep.”

  “He would. But don’t forget, Dinny, that Snubby’s a deuced clever fellow, and knows his world to a T. It may be a world you wouldn’t be seen dead in, but it’s the world where ten million more-or-less-young men were recently seen dead. I wonder,” concluded Sir Lawrence, more thoughtfully, “when I have been so well fed at my own table as these last days; something has come over your aunt.”

  Organising after lunch a game of croquet between herself and Alan Tasburgh against his father and Aunt Wilmet, Dinny watched the departure of Jean and her brother towards the rock borders. They stretched from the sunken garden down to an old orchard, beyond which rose a swell of meadow-land.

  ‘THEY won’t stop at the portulaca,’ she thought.

  Two games, indeed, were over before she saw them again coming from a different direction, deep in talk. ‘This,’ she thought, hitting the Rector’s ball with all her force, is about the quickest thing ever known.’

  “God bless me!” murmured the smitten clergyman, and Aunt Wilmet, straight as a grenadier, uttered a loud: “Damn it, Dinny, you’re impossible!…”

  Later, beside her brother in the open car, she was silent, making up her mind, as it were, to second place. Though what she had hoped for had come to pass, she was depressed. She had been first with Hubert until now. She needed all her philosophy watching the smile coming and going on his lips.

  “Well, what do you think of our cousins?”

  “He’s a good chap. I thought he seemed rather gone on you.’”

  “Did you now? When would you like them to come over?”

  “Any time.”

  “Next week?”

  “Yes.”

  Seeing that he did not mean to be drawn, she lapsed into savouring the day’s slowly sinking light and beauty. The high land, Wantage, and Faringdon way, was glamoured by level sunlight; and Wittenham Clumps bastioned-up the rise ahead. Rounding to the right, they came on the bridge. In the middle of it she touched his arm:

  “That stretch up there is where we saw the kingfishers, Hubert; d’you remember?”

  Halted, they gazed up the quiet river, deserted and fit for the bright birds. Falling light sprinkled it through willows on the southern bank. The quietest river, it seemed, in the world, most subdued to the moods of men, flowing with an even clear stream among bright fields and those drooping shapely trees; having, as it were, a bland intensity of being, a presence of its own, gracious and apart.

  “Three thousand years ago,” said Hubert suddenly, “this old river used to be like those I’ve seen in the wilds, an unshaped flow of water in matted jungle.”

  He drove on. They had their backs to the sunlight now, and it was like driving into what had been painted for them.

  And so they sped on, while into the sky crept the sunset glow, and the cleaned-up fields darkened a little, and gathered loneliness under the evening flight of birds.

  At the door of Condaford Grange Dinny got out, humming: “‘She was a shepherdess oh! so fair’,” and looking into her brother’s face. He was, however, busy with the car and did not appear to see the connection.

  CHAPTER 12

  The outline of a young Englishman of the inarticulate variety is difficult to grasp. The vocal variety is easily enough apprehended. Its manners and habits bulk large to the eye and have but little importance in the national life. Vociferous, critical, ingenious, knowing and advertising only its own kind, it forms an iridescence shimmering over the surface of the bog, and disguising the peat below. It constantly and brilliantly expresses almost nothing; while those whose lives are spent in the application of trained energy remain invisible, but none the less solid; for feelings continually voiced cease to be feelings, and feelings never voiced deepen with their dumbness. Hubert did not look solid, nor was he stolid; even those normal aids to the outline of the inarticulate were absent. Trained, sensitive, and no fool, he was capable of passing quiet judgment on people and events that would have surprised the vocal, but, except to himself, he never passed it. Till quite recently, indeed, he had lacked time and opportunity; but seeing him in a smoking-room, at a dinner-table, or wherever the expressive scintillate, you would know at once that neither time nor opportunity was going to make him vociferous. Going into the war, so early, as a professional, he had missed the expanding influences of the ‘Varsity and London. Eight years in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, a year of illness and the Hallorsen expedition, had given him a remote, drawn, rather embittered look. He was of the temperament that, in idleness, eats its heart out. With dog and gun or on a horse, he found it bearable, but only just; and without those adventitious aids he wilted. Three days after the return to Condaford he came to Dinny on the terrace, with ‘The Times’ in his hand.

  “Look at this!”

  Dinny read:

  “SIR,—

  “You will pardon me, I trust, this intrusion on your space. It has come to my knowledge that certain passages in my book, ‘Bolivia and Its Secrets,’ published last July, have grievously annoyed my second-incommand, Captain Hubert Charwell, D.S.O., who had charge of the transport of the expedition. On re-reading these passages I certainly believe that in the vexation caused me by the partial failure of the expedition, and owing to the over-strained state in which I returned from the adventure, I have passed undue criticism on Captain Charwell’s conduct; and I wish, pending the issue of the second and amended edition which I trust will not be long delayed, to take this opportunity of publicly withdrawing in your great journal the gravamen of my written words. It is my duty and pleasure to express to Captain Charwell and the British Army of which he is a member, my sincere apology, and my regret for any pain I may have caused him.

  “Sir, Your obedient servant,

  “EDWARD HALLORSEN (Professor).

  “Piedmont Hotel,

  “London.”

  “Very handsome!” said Dinny, trembling a little. “Hallorsen in London! What the devil does he mean by this all of a sudden?”

  She began pulling yellowed leaves out of an Agapanthus. The danger of doing things for other people was being disclosed to her.

  “It almost looks like repentance, dear.”

  “That fellow repent! Not he! There’s something behind it.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You!”

  Dinny quailed behind her smile.

  “I met Hallorsen at Diana’s in London; he was at Lippinghall, too. So I—er—got at him.”

  Hubert’s sallowed face went red.

  “You asked—you begged—?”

  “Oh! no!”

  “What then?”

  “He seemed to take rather a fancy to me. It’s odd, but I couldn’t help it, Hubert.”

  “He’s done this to curry favour with you?”

  “You put it like a man and a brother.”

  “Dinny!”

  Dinny flushed too, angry now behind her smile.

  “I didn’t lead him on. He took this highly unreasonable fancy, in spite of plenty of cold water. But, if you ask m
e, Hubert, he has quite a decent side to him.”

  “You would naturally think so,” said Hubert, coldly. His face had resumed its sallow hue and was even a little ashened.

  Dinny caught impulsively at his sleeve.

  “Don’t be silly, dear! If he chooses to make a public apology for any reason, even such a bad one, isn’t it all to the good?”

  “Not when my own sister comes into it. In this thing I’m like—I’m like a—” he put his hands to his head: “I’m in Chancery. Anyone can punch my head, and I can’t move.”

  Dinny’s coolness had come back to her.

  “You needn’t be afraid that I shall compromise you. This letter is very good news; it takes the wind out of the whole thing. In face of this apology, who can say anything?”

  But Hubert, leaving the paper in her hand, went back into the house.

  Dinny had practically no ‘small’ pride. Her sense of humour prevented her from attaching value to her own performances. She felt that she ought to have provided against this contingency, though she did not see how.

  Hubert’s resentment was natural enough. If Hallorsen’s apology had been dictated by conviction, it would have soothed him; arising from a desire to please his sister, it was only the more galling; and he clearly abhorred the Professor’s fancy for her. Still, there was the letter—an open and direct admission of false criticism, which changed the whole position! At once she began to consider what use could be made of it. Should she send it to Lord Saxenden? Having meddled so far, she decided that she would, and went in to write the covering letter.

  ‘Condaford Grange. Sept. 21.

  ‘Dear Lord Saxenden,—

  ‘I am venturing to send you the enclosed cutting from today’s “Times,” for I feel it excuses me to some extent for my effrontery the other evening. I really ought not to have bored you at the end of a long day with those passages of my brother’s diary. It was unpardonable, and I don’t wonder that you sought refuge. But the enclosed will show you the injustice from which my brother has suffered; and I hope you will forgive me.