Nightingale Wood

by Stella Gibbons

  ‘Come up and take these measurements for me, will you? I’m usually good with windows, but my mind won’t function this morning.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Curtains. These are awful. I’m just going over to Selfridges to get some spotted net … and the kettle leaks … and there’s no tinopener.’

  Pause.

  ‘Saxon.’

  ‘Coming.’

  ‘Do hurry! I’ve got masses to do.’

  ‘All right; but I must just figure this out; it’s interesting.’

  Left, mutually figuring.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Mr Wither was very, very angry, shocked and disappointed with his daughter, but he had not meant her to go off at once like that.

  His ‘You leave this house tonight’ had met her passionate longing to escape from The Eagles; and she had rushed off sooner than he had meant her to. In fact, he had been so upset that he had scarcely known what he was saying, and when Mrs Wither ventured into his den about eight o’clock with a glass of port and a biscuit on a tray (the Withers met all crises with biscuits, not sandwiches) he was more upset than ever to hear that Tina had gone.

  There were a thousand matters to discuss and plan. Everything possible must now be done to make the situation seem as natural as possible: and Tina, by flying off into the night with a suitcase, had made it seem as unnatural as it could be. Fifty years ago, her flight would have been conventional; now, even to Mr Wither, it seemed melodramatic.

  ‘But you told her to go, dear,’ said poor Mrs Wither, bewildered.

  ‘You oughtn’t to have let her,’ was all he would say. ‘It’ll be all over the neighbourhood that I turned her out.’

  He sat staring into the black grate, waving the port away every time Mrs Wither wafted it towards him and looking so ill, with such frozen despair on his purple old face, that Mrs Wither forgot her own grief in her attempts to get him upstairs with a hot-water bottle and two aspirins. She finally did so; and sat beside his bed until he fell asleep.

  Then she came down again to the drawing-room, where Madge sat staring sullenly into the fire with pink, swollen eyelids, and they talked until after midnight. Madge would hear no defence of Tina, whom she had always despised. Tina had behaved like a street-girl, disgraced her family, and let down her class. Madge asked what Colonel Phillips would say, and – and Hugh, when his mother wrote to him about it, in India? Everybody would say that if that was the sort of thing the Wither girls did, the whole family must be a bit odd. This was the second thing of this sort that had happened to the family in less than three years; first Teddy, marrying that common little beast, and now Tina. Other families didn’t have that sort of thing happening to them, why should the Withers?

  Mrs Wither had no answer.

  Viola had long since crept up to bed, very unhappy and desolate. Her only friend at The Eagles had gone, and she was suspected of having helped the lovers. Victor did not love her, and he was going to marry someone else. Oh, Dad, darling Dad, I wish you weren’t dead. Soon she was crying into the pillow in the dark bedroom, while outside a suddenly awakened wind swept round the house. After a little while she prayed, a thing that she never did unless she wanted something. In the middle of a passionate prayer to God to make everything less rotten, it occurred to her that God must find it rather the limit only being prayed to when you wanted something, so she stopped, started over again, told Him that she was sorry she only prayed to Him when she wanted something, and asked if He would kindly bless everybody, as this seemed the most likely way of settling everybody’s troubles and everybody had so many. Comforted, she went to sleep.

  Now the winter closed upon Sible Pelden, and a frozen dreary season seemed to have closed, too, upon the people in The Eagles. The days grew shorter and shorter, grey and still without a gleam of sun or swept by gales of freezing rain. For weeks the wind whined round the house like a miserable old dog. From any window, the black trees could be seen fighting against a low, hurrying grey sky, the tall beeches moving slowly and gracefully along their length, the stockier oaks wildly tossing their top branches. The piercing wind tore over the ground, flattening the withered hair of the terrified grass and chilling human flesh to the bone. Outside the house, days and days of such weather passed, and inside the big, dark, quiet rooms sulky little fires burned, and pampas grass and branches of leaves, mummified by Mrs Wither, stood in the vases instead of flowers. Everywhere there were knife-like draughts that gave Viola colds in her head and set up lumbago, neuralgia and kidney troubles in the five older people.

  The day after Tina went, Mr and Mrs Wither had a long talk, and decided that their relatives must be told the truth about her marriage, but that friends and acquaintances must be informed that it had been with the consent of her parents, though it had come to them as a surprise, and (naturally) as a slight shock. But girls were so unconventional nowadays (and so self-willed, I shall say, promised Mrs Wither, smiling sourly) that they felt if they did not give their consent, the young people might get married without it!! They were at present staying in London with some friends of Tina’s. Their plans were uncertain.

  Accordingly, this is what Mrs Wither (Mr Wither standing a little apart in the background, as though under a cloud of helpless paternal shame) told Lady Dovewood when she met her one day in the Free Library in Chesterbourne. (Lady Dovewood had gone there to see if it was true that all the unemployed men in the town used it as a Club. It was true. So Lady Dovewood proposed to do something about it.) Lady Dovewood said the proper things about Tina’s naughty, wilful escapade, and when she got home she said to her husband, ‘Aubrey, you remember the Wither gairl, the younger one, thin and arty, well, she has run off with the chauffeur, just as I always said she would. Just like poor Kitty’s gairl. I knew she would. I saw it coming. Now don’t say I never told you, because I did.’

  Mrs Parsham and Mrs Phillips also said the proper things about Tina, agreeing with Mrs Wither when she stammered that Saxon was such a nice respe— such a nice boy and so devoted to Tina, and helping her to smooth the situation as much as was possible, for they were sorry for the poor woman. They were all the sorrier (so they said) because for years they had been saying what a dreadfully dull life the Withers led, quite unnecessary with all that money, and wondering how the daughters stood it, in these days when all the young people had their ‘jobs’. The poor, stupid Withers! they had brought it on themselves by the stifling life they had compelled their children to live; son marries a shopgirl, daughter marries a chauffeur. Now there was only the stout one left. What would the stout one do? Sympathetic but hopeful, Sible Pelden waited.

  But Madge did nothing, except go for long tramps in the east wind with Polo, now a fine young dog, rushing after leaves some yards ahead of her. Hugh Phillips’s regiment was at last ordered to Waziristan. His next letter to his mother would be written on active service. His young wife and the baby, Ned, would of course stay down country, in safety. ‘Polo. Come here,’ called Madge, and fondled his ears; the cruel wind made her eyes water and she rubbed them boyishly with her big fists.

  The masses in Sible Pelden, however, were not taken in by what Mrs Wither chose to say in the village shop, and to the maids at The Eagles, because they knew the truth. The Hermit had seen to that. He had told everybody in the Green Lion – the cross-roads louts, now grown to manhood, the realist barman, the proprietor Mr Fisher, and Mrs Fisher, and the red-haired postman who was sweet on Davies up at Springs’ – that this affair between Saxon and Tina had been going on ever since the summer, and when it was found out by old Shak-per-Swaw and his missus, there hadn’t half been a bull-and-cow up The Eagles. He’d been there, and heard it all. Never mind why. On business.

  No one was surprised to hear that Saxon and Tina had been carrying on ever since the summer. People had been using their eyes, putting two and two together, comparing notes. Besides, everyone had expected it. The first person who had seen Tina having a driving lesson in the summer had gone home to his wif
e and said that if something didn’t happen there, his name wasn’t what it was.

  The Withers naturally found the gossip in the village almost the most unpleasant part of their misfortune. Nothing was said directly to them, but they could imagine what was said behind their backs, and once Mr Wither, taking his constitutional on one of the few bright days in December, encountered the Hermit, who to his horror inquired in a shout if he were a grandad yet?

  Then there was the problem of Mrs Caker. The Withers felt that something should be done about Mrs Caker, but they did not know what. So they did nothing, except try not to meet Mrs Caker accidentally when they went out. As Mrs Caker did not at all want to meet any of them, they were successful. Mrs Caker was also suffering a little from village gossip; she knew that everyone must be saying it was awful for them up The Eagles to have their daughter married to a boy whose mother took in washing and had got a tramp living in the house. Mrs Caker had never been a naturally respectable woman; but she had once had a love of pretty clothes and gaiety and been the wife of a comfortably-off man, and she could now feel how low she had fallen. So she kept out of the village as much as possible, and when the Hermit came home and told her what people had been saying, she threw water over him, and cried. He would then hit her, and she would hit him but not so efficiently and try to shut him out of the house. Then the Hermit would try to kick the door down and the realist-barman at the Green Lion would remark, ‘They’re at it again,’ in a tone that somehow illuminated the whole problem of the sexes.

  Fawcuss, Annie and Cook had to put up with what they described as ‘impertinence’ from their fellow churchgoers; and all the Wither cousins, including one called Agnes Grice whose hobby was managing other people’s affairs, wrote long incoherent letters saying that what had happened was no more than what they had always supposed would happen to Christina ever since she went to that art school, adding that Mr and Mrs Wither must be sure to take care of themselves in this dreadful weather, as it would never do to have illness added to everything else.

  Mr Wither took the disaster very hard. He mentioned Tina no more in public, except when hypocritically backing up Mrs Wither, and when she was mentioned at home, he looked down his nose and was silent. But he allowed Mrs Wither to answer her weekly letters, and gave permission to Viola to send Tina’s books, a few pictures of which she was fond that had hung in her bedroom, and the rest of her clothes, to an address in London, care of a Mrs Baumer.

  All letters were also to be sent to this Mrs Baumer, and at first the family at The Eagles wondered who she was, but Tina’s second letter from Town explained that she was Betti Solomon, who was at school with Tina, and had married David Baumer, the painter. They had three beautiful kids, and were great fun. The Baumers, it appeared, were friends of Mr and Mrs Saxon Caker; Tina had met Betti one day, shopping in Selfridges, and Betti had asked her to come to a party and bring her husband. Now the Cakers went round there a good deal, and the Baumer boys enjoyed messing about with Saxon in the garage. Yes, Saxon had a job, and he and Tina were living over the garage in a mews, but it would be more convenient if letters were sent care of Mrs Baumer; Tina did not say why.

  Tina’s letters, as the winter went on, were cheerful; nay, they were gay; they were occasionally starred by a Name, for the Baumers knew many minor celebrities, and their parties were comparatively famous even in a party-crazy age. Tina and Saxon went to the Baumer parties and enjoyed them very much. Some colour from this unusual but interesting and satisfying life naturally got into the letters home, and made The Eagles, shut in the gloom of a country winter, seem more dismal than ever.

  Writers and painters, Jews and mews; it all sounded very bad indeed to Mr and Mrs Wither and Madge; but Viola believed only half of it, for she had, after long pondering and putting twos together, decided that the business about Adrian Lacey had all been fibs, invented by Tina so that she could be with Saxon, and in future Viola was going to be very careful about old school friends of Tina’s.

  Mrs Wither thought that Tina was not being punished as she should have been. Impudent, ungrateful Saxon, ungrateful, unnatural Tina! The text about the green bay-tree went through Mrs Wither’s mind. All the same, she could not help wishing very much to see Tina’s little home, her first married home! even if it was in a mews. It sounded so quaint; Tina had painted the door bright blue! How Mrs Wither would have enjoyed going up to Town ‘to see my married daughter’, even if that daughter was married to a chauffeur; and helping to choose curtains and china! But Mr Wither got so upset if she even hinted at going to see Tina that she did not dare to.

  It was too bad, the way her children always got married to queer people, in an underhand, sudden sort of way. Just as though their feelings had suddenly got too much for them, thought Mrs Wither. Why couldn’t they get married in a nice ordinary way, with engagements, and time to write to cousins living in Jamaica? And Mrs Wither had a little sniffle over Tina’s last letter.

  The scandal reached the Springs in London some five weeks after it happened, through Bill Courtney (it may be remembered that Bill was in love with Phyllis and had taken her home on the night of the Infirmary Ball) who met his beloved by delightful chance at a cocktail party. Phyllis, amused, passed the news on to the Springs. Mrs Spring could not blame anyone for running away from a house where they gave parties like that one in the summer, even if it was with the chauffeur, though she did wonder what in heaven’s name they will live on, the girl’s not got a penny of her own, has she? and Victor laughed. He liked a woman to show spirit – if she did not show too much, of course. But it did just occur to him, while he was laughing, that someone, at least, had had the guts to cut and run out of a situation that they couldn’t stick. Then he wondered how little Viola was getting on. Probably got someone else, by now; she won’t go begging, thought Victor, as though Sible Pelden was full of someone elses. Then he impatiently thrust away the slight annoyance caused by this thought, and drove off to dance with Phyllis for the third time that week.

  Hetty considered that Tina, reared in a nest of neurotics like The Eagles, should have achieved a more subtle escapade than marriage with a handsome oaf, and was disappointed in her accordingly.

  Tina and Saxon, meanwhile, were living a peculiar life but a happy one.

  Tina, finding herself and her husband on a sandbank, so to speak, between two classes, had gone to the artists. The artists do not mind if one is gentry or a common cad so long as one is neither a snob nor a bore; and the artists, who happened in this case to have that delightful, glowing Jewish warmth that can only be compared to a ripe apricot, received her and her young husband with sympathetic friendliness.

  Her own people (who were not so well born, after all, as to excuse their anger) might think that she had disgraced her class; Mr Spurrey’s servants might be rude and stand-offish and suspicious; but the Baumers accepted Mr and Mrs Caker as human beings; and Tina, with her husband, her home, and a pleasant social circle, was happier than she had dreamed it possible to be.

  Saxon was happy too, though he took to the new life more cautiously than did his wife. He liked his work, and was amused by the Baumers, though he was sometimes embarrassed by their frank speech; and though he wished that Mr Spurrey was not an old friend of Mr Wither’s, he was finding his employer easier to get on with as the weeks passed.

  Saxon was a sound judge of character, and when he put his mind to the job, he could manage people, as (until his own feelings took a hand) he had managed Tina. Now he began to manage Mr Spurrey.

  The old boy loved to jaw. His pet game was trying to put the wind up you, but he liked shooting off his mouth just for the sake of it, and Saxon trained himself to listen and drive at the same time, so that he could make the answers Mr Spurrey wanted. While motoring in London, of course, this was not so easy, but Mr Spurrey did not talk so much on the short drives between his house and the club or from sherry-party to dinner-party. Saxon knew that this was because he did not want any of his swell friends to se
e him chatting with his chauffeur, and so he was careful never to speak, in Town, unless he was spoken to.

  But on those long drives out into the Home Counties, with tea at an expensive road-house on the way back, that Mr Spurrey took for air and exercise every week or so, Mr Spurrey talked nearly all the time, and Saxon drove, listened, and answered.

  Cripes! how the old boy jawed. War, politics, money, the old days, modern women, income tax – Saxon had never thought an educated person could talk such rot. Even he, an uneducated chap up from the country, seemed to have read it all before in the papers. Now those Yid-friends of Tina’s, they talked a lot, too, about the same things that the old T. did, but they had something to say. Mad, most of it, but interesting, and it made you think.

  Saxon decided that if you were a born fool, education didn’t make much difference.

  It’s funny, thought Saxon, the old boy’s got all that money, and I’ve only got three pounds fifteen a week, yet I feel I’m better than him. Superior. That’s because he’s stupid, and I’m not. Poor old B.; he hasn’t had much of a time, in spite of his money.

  He meant that Mr Spurrey had always been lonely. Saxon knew that this was why Mr Spurrey liked to talk; and, with his usual mixture of cool self-seeking and detached kindliness, he encouraged him to talk. It was just as well to keep in with the old chap … and somehow you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

  Mr Spurrey was, in fact, lonely as only a crashing bore can be. People were nice to him, as has been explained earlier in the story, but somehow whenever he met someone (unless, of course, he had them pinned in a corner over a meal) that someone had to hurry off somewhere else. This had been happening to Mr Spurrey ever since he could talk; that is, for some seventy-three years. He naturally felt that he had missed something. He did not know what. He only knew that all his life, without realizing it, he had wanted to find someone who would listen while he talked; just listen, without smiling and hurrying away; listen for hours while he frightened them with horrific prophecies, and commented upon the amazing state of the world.