It appeared that he had seen Ellen at a tennis party some years earlier and had made up his mind, then and there, to marry her. Having enquired about her, and learnt that she was not yet sixteen, he made no further attempts to see her until she should have reached marriageable age. Soon after her twentieth birthday he presented himself once more, made his proposals, and was promptly accepted by Ellen. Mrs. Annesley had thought the acquaintance too slender, but Ellen was determined, and there was nothing really to be said against the match.
Louise sat in a front pew, where the smell of lilies made her feel a little faint, and looked at the bridegroom’s square shoulders (Gordon did stoop a little), and tried to remember what Ellen had been like at fifteen. Rather brown and sturdy, she thought, and extraordinarily childish. It was amazing. She could not make it out, or believe that Ellen, at any age, could have been capable of arousing so romantic an attachment. Romance did come to the oddest people. It was not quite fair. For Ellen had never wanted to be romantic. This was a feather in her cap which she had neither desired nor deserved. It would have been much less surprising if Gordon had fallen in love with Louise when she was only fifteen. She had been a lovely child, brimful of sensibility. She had embroidered a whole tapestry of the Romaunt of the Rose at an age when Ellen could do nothing except climb trees. And yet the owner of these magnificent shoulders had been consumed for four years by a single-hearted passion for the scratched, tanned, treeclimbing Ellen.
It was not Gordon’s fault that he had fallen short of this standard. He had never had the opportunity, and as soon as he did see Louise he felt all that he ought. Nobody was to blame. And yet she thought it was not fair. The unfairness of it still rankled at the back of her mind, all these years afterwards, as she sipped her coffee and looked at Gordon’s cultured profile. Could Dick play the lead all by himself? Indeed he could. He had done it at the wedding, and he had been doing it ever since.
“When we have picked a great many mushrooms,” persisted Kerran, “and played the piano, and gone on with yesterday’s conversation for several weeks, is there to be any sort of … sort of climax? I mean, to put it baldly, is anything in particular to happen?”
“Oh no,” said Louise directly. “That would be rather vulgar. If anything does happen it must be very, very subtle and Henry James-ish.”
In which Dick, with his overwhelming charm, was to play lead all by himself. Kerran grinned. But he did not want to tease her, so he let it pass. It was probably quite true that she did not wish anything to happen in the coarser sense. She liked situations, and these mature best in an atmosphere of contemplative idleness. Having obtained her situation she would never let it grow beyond a certain point. She would keep it well pruned, like a dwarf tree in a Japanese garden, and endless discussion would be the only fruit that she would allow it to bear.
“I feel that we have never had time to discover ourselves, our real selves,” she was saying. “Life gets more stupid and vulgar and false every day. We invent a hideous noisy object like a motor or a gramophone and we call that progress. We pay calls on people that we don’t like, and catch trains to places we don’t want to go to, and buy things we don’t need. But here we have got away from all that. We have no neighbours. We shall lead no social life. There are no shops and no trains. We shall be thrown back entirely on ourselves. I am curious to see what we make of it. We are all fairly civilised …”
“Is Maude?”
“Don’t go on about Maude. Of course I don’t mean her, or Ellen either, if it comes to that. I mean you and me, and Dick, and Barny, and Guy Fletcher, if he comes.”
“All men except you!”
“I know. But that’s not my choosing. If you’ll give me the names of a few really civilised women I’ll invite them to-morrow. I don’t know any. I want to arrive at … oh, how shall I put it? … at a sort of collective enjoyment and sympathy. A kind of New Republic … oh yes, and there’s Gordon! Having somebody who really does know a great deal will give us … give us …”
“Ballast.”
“I thought ballast was something which one kept for throwing overboard. But you see what I mean?”
He thought that he did. She wanted to play at a new game. And, as in their nursery days, everybody else had got to come and play it with her. When she wished to blow soap bubbles nobody else might suggest hide-and-seek. Now they were to play at being Turgenev characters, with Dick as hero and a possible situation as a prize. She was so eager and solemn that he felt sorry for her, knowing she would most certainly be disappointed.
This was not the first time that she had set herself, in all good faith, to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Poor material had never daunted her. As a child she was always writing plays which the rest of them had to act. Barny would sulk. Kerran would clown his parts, and Ellen, though willing, could never get anything by heart. But none of this discouraged Louise. She continued to believe that they might produce some remarkable and artistic effect if only everyone would do exactly what they were told. Her bribes were as pathetic as her threats. He could remember hiding rebelliously with Barny in some raspberry canes when she had called a rehearsal, and hearing her frantic entreaties as she searched the garden:
“Oh, Kerran! Oh, Barny! Why are you so unkind to me? I’ll give you my camera if only you’ll promise not to make it funny in the scene when you’re proposing to me!”
Poor Louise! What a pity that she must always be trying to turn people into something they were not! But he would do his best. He would be as Russian as he could. Their holiday would turn out to be no different from any other summer holiday, but he would not leave her unsupported.
“There’s only one thing I don’t see,” he said. “Why was it necessary for us all to come so far?”
“Because it is so beautiful. We must have a beautiful background. And it’s isolated. And another thing: we, the Annesleys, have Celtic blood in our veins, I think it is just that side of us that gets stifled in England. Really, we are exiles.”
“Aha! I thought we should hear of the Celtic Twilight before we’d done. I suppose the Irish chieftains, who built this place, used to sit round and get on with yesterday’s conversation.”
At this point Gordon suddenly emerged from his cloud.
“Most unlikely,” he told them. “The architecture is pure Norman. Late Norman. So late that I am puzzled. I cannot think who can have built such a castle, just here, and for what purpose. It belongs to a date when English, or rather Norman, influence was little felt outside the pale. I have two theories …”
Louise left the dining-hall.
Gordon was to give them ballast. His erudition was to be the most solid dish in that banquet of the soul which she had provided for herself and her family. But she felt that she would savour it better when Dick and Barny and Guy Fletcher had arrived to share it with her.
3
“So you see,” she wrote to her mother, “Kerran really does understand. That touch about the mushrooms was exquisite, don’t you think?
“And it is all going to be the greatest success. Even Muffy has no criticism to make, except that she has already begun to make a fuss about Ellen, who, if you please, is going to fall downstairs! Really, you know, mother, I sometimes feel that Muffy ought to have gone to Ellen instead of me. She would have, of course, if I had not married and had a baby first. Since she has, and always will have, this passion for Ellen, I wonder that she did not prefer to wait. She has never been fond of me or sympathetic to me. Even when we were children, Ellen was always put first. If it was I, and not Ellen, who had ‘a special reason for being careful’ (a real Muffyism that!) we should hear nothing about the stairs. Muffy has always been a perfect Spartan to me at those times.
“However! I will not let Muffy spoil my happiness. Nothing will ever make me regret having taken Inishbar, even if Ellen falls downstairs twice a day. The photographs which we saw, lovely as they are, cannot convey one half of its charms. The country all round is bewitching, and t
he air is so soft and clear. The mountains which roll down to the lough are quite high on the landward side; we can see crags and glens which are sublime enough for anyone except Gordon (who, as you know, will not look at anything smaller than Mont Blanc). To the west, the sea end of the lough, the slopes are gentler. They melt gradually into a range of sandhills, which are usually the most vivid streak in the whole landscape. Killross, the village where we shall do our shopping, is hidden behind them. We cannot see it from the island.
“The last part of the journey was fascinating. Just before we landed two swans rose up from the reeds and flew away across the water towards the sea and the sunset. The children were enchanted. Rosamund has written a charming little poem about the swans, which I must send to you. At least, I think it charming.
“She appreciates it all, exactly as I knew she would. Children do, I think. It is worth while, taking them to beautiful places, especially when they have the ill fortune to live in a deadly one. They may not know it, but they will store up impressions this summer which will be a joy all their lives, and, one hopes, an antidote to the Woodstock Road. I am so glad I was firm about Torquay. I do not want them to have Torquay minds. It is just possible that Jennie and Harry are too young to ‘look at scenery,’ but for Rosamund and Charles I am sure it is the right thing. Of course Rosamund is an exceptional child. She is very like me in many ways. I do not expect Hope, for instance, will get so much out of it, though she is only a year younger.
“And, by the way, about Hope! I do want you to back me up in a campaign I am going to have about her legs. Really, Ellen ought to take them more seriously. They will be such a handicap to the poor child later on. I am going to drop some pretty broad hints. There must be exercises she could do. Ellen is much too vague about appearances.
“The island is small and most of it is covered with fine old trees, a great contrast to the bare hillsides you see all round. At the top of a gentle slope of grass you see ‘four grey walls and four grey towers.’ Three of these towers are round, and one, the keep, is square and rather taller than the others. There are not many rooms. The bedrooms are in the towers, each of which has its own winding staircase, opening on to a central courtyard, a quadrangle, in fact. The great dining-hall (a splendid room with a fireplace at each end) takes up the whole of the southern side. The kitchen and the servants’ quarters are to the east, and the drawing-room, a long gallery with windows looking on to the lake, is on the west. On the fourth side of this rectangle, the north, there is not much room because of the great gateway in the middle. But there are two sorts of guard-rooms on either side of the gate, and into one of these the Nugents have put a bath! So you see we are quite modern! I think it should really be quite easy to run, for stone staircases do not need much cleaning, but to silence any possible complaints I am going to get Maude to go over to Killross (when she comes) and see if she cannot hire a couple of local peasant women to help the maids.
“I gather that the Nugents only finished furnishing the place when they decided to let it. They used to come here and picnic, sitting on packing cases, etc. And they have also a one-roomed cottage, over on the mainland, where Mrs. N. comes sometimes, but it, too, is let this year, so the boatmen told us. It is the only house visible from the island, a little white dot on the mountain side, about 2 miles away. I wonder …”
Kerran, strolling past the drawing-room window, stopped to look in at his sister.
“The post boat has been,” he told her.
“No! Has it gone?”
“About five minutes ago.”
“Why couldn’t anyone have told me? It’s most tiresome. Yesterday they didn’t come till past four. How is one ever to know? I never heard of anything so inconvenient.”
“The mail car doesn’t go out from Killross till tomorrow, I believe. If you’ve got a letter you want posted, I’ll row down and take it for you.”
“Oh no, thanks. It doesn’t matter.” She threw down her pen. “It was only to mother. Did they bring anything?”
“Not much. There was a letter from mother, but it was for Muffy.”
“Oh!” said Louise.
“And one or two for you. I put them on the table in the dining-room.”
Louise went out across the court. With the tail of her eye she caught sight of Muffy in the doorway of the keep, and her demeanour became at once very stately. She walked more slowly. She swept across the courtyard, letting go the skirt which she had caught up in one hand as she ran down the steps. Her pale face, in its cloudy aureole of hair, became rigid, more aquiline, more set in its displeasure.
This was one of the few things, perhaps the only thing, which she did not like about the castle: the extraordinary publicity of life in the courtyard. Somebody was always standing at a doorway, watching where one went and what one did. In order to pass from one room to another it was always necessary to come out into the open. Each tower had its separate doorway and so had the drawingroom, the dining-room, the bath-house, the kitchens and the keep. There was no way of escaping from the castle save through the one great north gate.
She had commented on this enforced publicity to Kerran, who pointed out that life in the towers, up their winding staircases, would be, on the other hand, correspondingly private. After a day spent in communal goings and comings they would each retire into a remote fortress. Their party would split up completely at night. They would cease to be dwellers in the same house—people who go to bed up the same staircase and whose rooms stand side by side on a single landing.
“But we shan’t split into units,” objected Louise. “We shall most of us split into couples. All of us. Because if Guy Fletcher comes I shall have to put him in your room.”
“Quite so. And these couples will converse the more freely because the walls are several feet thick.”
Louise was not quite sure if she liked this. She foresaw a number of conversations carried on simultaneously in each of the tower rooms. This pairing off of married couples was a nuisance. She had felt it before, even when they were all assembled in a more centralised house. Her labours in the daytime were apt to be undone at night. She would take endless pains to bring Barny, or Ellen, to her way of thinking, and then Barny would go to bed with Maude, and Ellen would go to bed with Dick, and they would talk it over and come down next morning as obstinate as ever. Kerran was the only one of them who was not leagued against her in some secret marital alliance. Kerran was the only one upon whose loyalty she could rely. Even her mother, so sympathetic and so uncritical, was carrying on a secret correspondence with Muffy.
“But I shall take no notice,” she thought, as she swept into the hall. “I shan’t ask what mother was writing about.”
When, five minutes later, she reappeared, the stately displeasure had quite vanished. She no longer swept. Holding up her skirt and waving her letters, she ran right across the court and out at the north gate.
“Oh, Kerran! Gordon! Kerran! Where are you? Do come here.”
Kerran emerged from a clump of arbutus bushes.
“Oh, Kerran! Do listen. The most extraordinary thing. Who do you think the Nugents’ cottage is let to? Who? You know I wrote and asked if we could use it as a picnic house? And Mrs. Nugent says we can’t because Elissa Koebel is there.”
“No,” said Kerran, definitely and finally.
He had seen the cottage. He had rowed past it several times on his way down the lake to Killross. It was very small. And he had seen Elissa Koebel. It was impossible to imagine that she would be shut up in so very small a house. She would burst through the roof like a jack-in-the-box.
“No. I don’t believe it!”
“But she is. Mrs. Nugent says so. She’s been ill and she’s come here to rest. Read the letter. Read what she says.”
He began to read the letter. His incredulity melted into dismay.
“My poor Louise! Just when you’ve been boasting that you had no neighbours.”
Louise took him up with disconcerting eagerness.
<
br /> “Why? Why? Do you think I ought to call on her?”
“Good heavens, no! But they’ll come here, probably. They’ll come and want to see over the castle.”
“They?”
“She can’t be here alone. Whoever heard of a prima donna staying anywhere alone? She’s probably got her husband there, and several lovers, and some children, and her old mother, and an impresario, and an accompanist, and a maid and a masseuse. I expect that’s her motor that we heard on the lake road yesterday evening. You remember? We wondered who on earth it could belong to. I expect it’s hers.”
“But, my dear Kerran, the cottage only has one room. Mrs. Nugent described it when she first wrote about the castle. One room with a half-loft for a bedroom.”
“Good heavens! You don’t say so. What an extraordinary thing! They can’t all …”
“Read her letter. She says Madame Koebel is completely alone.”
They had got to the landing stage and they stood there, looking down the lake at the little white speck on the mainland, the little house which had only one room and a half-loft.
“How very, very odd,” repeated Kerran.
Louise, for her part, did not think it at all odd. It was exactly what she would have expected. Exactly what she would have liked to do herself, if she had been Elissa Koebel. But only a great artist would have done it.
“It may be so,” said Kerran, turning the letter over. “It must be so. By all accounts she’s a very unconventional person.”
A Long Time Ago Page 7