HE AND SHE FACE LIFE TOGETHER
Call on Gwen he must, Dick told himself next day. He went down to the village on foot, that the going might be longer. Swerving, irresolute, into the general store, he bought a ball of string he did not need and lingered to turn over a pile of fly-blown postcards. Some of them represented actresses dressed in pre-war fashion. How silly such finery seemed now —those tucked blouses, those flowers and feathers in the cart-wheel hats! Three little children’ came into the shop and stared up at him, solemn as owls.
“Like some sweets?” he asked.
The eldest dimpled, but the toddler hid its face in her pinafore.
“Let’s have six penn’orth of those,” Dick said, pointing to a large bottle of coagulated raspberry drops. When they had been dug out with a knife, he thrust them into the little girl’s palm.
“Go on! Eat them! Don’t be shy!”
He would have liked to suck one himself. They used to be a solace at school. But the stout woman behind the counter was watching him. She nudged her husband and winked.
“The Captain ’ud like to stand the whole world treat to-day,” she chuckled.
What the hell…! Dick thought.
“Our Megan’s in service at the Vicarage,” she continued, beaming at him. “She was telling us last night as we might look for a happy event.”
Dick muttered something and hurried out into the road. Women were watching him from cottage doorways. He almost ran past them. But once safe inside the Victorian Gothic porch of the Vicarage, he began to loiter, staring at the bicycle, the perambulator and the goloshes. When at last he had pulled the bell, its faint tinkling at the end of a long passage sounded mournfully in his ears.
In the empty drawing-room he gazed at the photographs of plain people ranged upon the upright piano, and wondered why ebonized furniture had been fashionable about the time his mother was married. Ugly stuff! Then he heard footsteps approaching. They were a woman’s, light, swift, decisive. He braced himself to smile. She opened the door and, closing it softly behind her, leaned against it.
“Hello,” he said.
And she said, “Dick!”
He saw that her embarrassment was as painful as his own. It was a bond of sympathy between them. He took a step towards her. She smiled nervously and looked down at her tightly clasped hands.
“I’ve come to ask you up to tea,” he stammered, “at Plâs Einon.”
Then she looked at him, smiling, with tears in her eyes, and he was moved to pity—she looked so very grateful. How she must love him! Poor Gwen, he thought, dear Gwen! I’ll be jolly kind to her. And hurriedly he gave her cheek an awkward little kiss.
He had hoped that the continuance of Gwen’s half-mourning might enable her bridegroom to escape publicity. Didn’t she think they might be quietly married at once? he asked, wishing her to suppose that ardour was the reason of his haste. She was not reluctant. “Then I could wear my going-away dress—no wedding gown and so forth. Yes, it would save a lot of expense.” A woman economising on her trousseau surprised him, and he told himself that she was doing it for his sake; but the explanation was not quite satisfactory. He didn’t know what to believe, so swift and so conflicting were her decisions.
There would be no reception after the wedding: she agreed to that. But no sooner had he escaped this ordeal than he was faced by another. Friends might be denied their entertainment and champagne, but tenants and retainers must have their customary tea and be allowed to make their traditional speeches.
“Good Lord! But why?” asked Dick.
“Because, dear, they always have. And they’re planning a presentation. The parish is frenzied with excitement about it. The illuminated-address-and-rose-bowl party is waging war on the inkstand-and-album-with-views-of-the-estate opposition. I’m not supposed to know, but rumours of the battle came to me through my spies.”
“Can’t we choose what we’d like?” Dick ventured.
She laughed at him. “What a revolutionary idea!”
“Oh well, we can always pawn what we’re given,” he remarked, trying to sound cheerful.
To his astonishment, the smile vanished from her face. “Dick, how can you! We must keep whatever we’re given all our lives, and in a prominent place too, or the servants will tell their relations.”
“Oh Lord! Need we always consider what the servants will say?”
“You have to when you’ve a position to keep up,” she said. “And you must be ready with a speech of gratitude. You’d better go along to the study now and prepare it.”
He made a wry face. “Couldn’t all this fuss be put off till we come back from abroad?”
She shook her head. “It’s always been the custom—”
He could have shouted at her—“I wish to heaven you wouldn’t use that damned phrase so often!” Thrusting his hands boyishly deep into his pockets, he took a turn about the room. When his irritation was a little cooled, he said, “I say, Gwen, let’s get married in town. You could run up there to-morrow on the pretext of buying clothes, what? And I’d slink off and join you.”
“And disappoint our kind vicar and his wife, when I’ve been their guest for so long?”
“Hang it all,” he grumbled, “it’s not their funeral.”
“What a way to talk of our wedding,” Gwenllian exclaimed and set him an example of laughter. But he could not laugh. A childish desire to stamp assailed him, as she went on speaking with the firm brightness of a nurse exhorting her little charge to obey. “My godfather expects to officiate. He’d be shocked if I rushed off to London to get married in a hole and corner fashion.”
“I thought a Bishop was supposed to be so busy nowadays that he wouldn’t mind missing a wedding,” Dick growled.
“He’s a very old friend of the family,” she answered with dignity. “And it isn’t often that our poor vicar has the chance of meeting his Bishop. Our parish is so out of the world. Besides,” she added, running her fingers caressingly over Dick’s sleeve, “we mustn’t be selfish and think only of our own wishes, now that we’re so happy, must we?”
“If you put it like that,” he stammered, shamed into compliance, “go ahead. Make what arrangements you think fit for the Bishop and this infernal tenants’ beano. I’ll foot the bill.”
The last sentence compensated him for much.
Next day he was turned out of the dining-room. “Miss Gwennie’s orders was to serve your meals in the study, sir,” he was told. He disliked eating surrounded by leather-bound books; they reminded him of his schooldays and of his inability to win prizes; but he submitted. For days the maids were too busy cleaning silver and washing china to attend to his comfort, and whenever he entered any room, the chair in which he wished to sit was always being carried out of it. He became increasingly nervous and restless until the tenants came, ate, made speeches and were at last dispersed.
“Thank God,” he swore to himself; then, “that shan’t ever happen again.”
He went into the study, and having mixed a stiff whiskey and soda, flung himself down on the horsehair sofa. It was the only downstairs room that the women had left undisturbed. The sporting-prints, the guns and fishing-rods of his predecessors encumbered it. Must chuck out this old junk, he thought, twisting his body about. What’s the good of having money if you can’t make yourself comfortable? All these antiques may look jolly fine till one comes to five with ’em. I don’t blame impoverished families for letting the Yanks have ’em. If any Yank makes me an offer—God, he was tired! His throat ached with so much talking: his hand from being wrung so often and so hard. To play the country gentleman and to be married were not the soft jobs he had imagined. Today had been hell. Tomorrow, too, there would be the commotion of restoring the house to its normal order. The next day packing must begin for the wedding tour. Why couldn’t newly married people get used to each other in some familiar place instead of having to endure the additional embarrassments of foreign hotels? He had heard too many funny tales of other men’s honeymoons not to fear that he would be made to look a fool on his own. Meanwhile, there’d be orders to leave with the servants and financial arrangements to make with the agent. He didn’t look forward to his interview with Mr. Lloyd. “I intend to act as my own agent in future,” he would say. It had sounded easy enough as Gwenllian had put it. But it wasn’t easy at all. Not only would Lloyd resent losing his job, but he’d know well enough that the new owner of Plâs Einon was incapable of managing his own estate. He wouldn’t say: “So Miss Gwenllian’s taking charge of you is she?” but he’d think it, and a sarcastic, contemptuous—yes, by God, a pitying—look would come into his eyes which Dick already knew too well. In the discomfort of the horsehair sofa, he planned rebellion. He’d go to Gwenllian now and say, “Look here, Gwen, don’t you think we’d better keep Lloyd on after all?” or perhaps he’d say decisively but casually: “Gwen, I’ve decided that for a little while at any rate…” But it was useless. She’d say they must economise. She’d say they could do it much better themselves. She’d remind him that, during the war, when Lloyd was away with the Yeomanry, she’d done it single-handed. “Then why on earth did you ever hand it back to him?” he’d ask, and she would answer that of course when the estate had passed from her brother to a stranger different arrangements had had to be made. “But you’re not a stranger any more, are you, Dick!” she would add. “I am entitled to work for you now, as I did for my own people.” They would go over the old ground again. It was useless to argue with Gwen. Easier to face Lloyd and get rid of him, he thought, and the rebellious leg which had been dropped over the side of the sofa was submissively returned to it. When Lloyd was done with, he reflected, there’d still be the lawyer with the marriage settlement; and even on the eve of his wedding, when a fellow expected a lively dinner with his bachelor friends to buck him up, he would have to entertain Gwen’s old fogey of a Bishop. What the devil did one talk about to a Bishop, and a Welsh Bishop at that?
Little Johnnie Smith, the last of his school friends left alive, was coming down to be best man. Captain Smith, he was now, with an M.C. and a toothbrush moustache. He had no job and no particular place in society—just “blueing ” his gratuity, like so many of his class, Dick thought with superior compassion, but what good company he’d been that night at the Troc! Afterwards they’d both gone on to a night club of which neither was a member. Dick, sprawling on the prim Victorian sofa, in his quiet study, grinned over his memories. Amusing chap, Johnnie! He’d shove his way in anywhere. But perhaps it had been a mistake to invite him down here, where standards were different. And yet a man must be loyal to his old pals. But what would Gwen and her county matrons and her blessed clergy think of Johnnie? Dick’s mind swerved away from the harsh expressions “ill-bred,” “bad-form,” “suburban.” He substituted modern. That was it, he told himself, trying to justify his former choice of friends. Gwen and her circle were a bit behind the times. They expected people still to talk and behave like characters out of that dull writer’s novels his mother used to read —Strumpet or Trollope—something of the kind. Absurd in 1919. Like caged mice, his thoughts scuttered hither and thither, and he grew weary of his attempt to reconcile the claims of old friendship and social advancement. Flash Frank was the fellow he ought to have asked to be best man. No-one could accuse him of not being a sahib. But would he have deigned to come? Old wounds in Dick’s pride began to throb. When he had been a country squire longer and felt more sure of himself, then he would show Plâs Einon to the man of all others he had most dreaded and most idolised. Now his thoughts fled to the less distinguished and subtle bullies of his Dulwich schooldays. How they’d have jeered, damn them, if they’d seen him—“Little Scrub ”—blushing like a girl, this afternoon while his tenants made speech after speech addressing him as if he were a Ruritanian royalty about to espouse the world’s most beautiful princess! How the Welsh laid it on! And what a grotesque looking lot they were—some of the older ones bearded, some whiskered, some more like dagos than Englishmen! They had seemed to him a people, not only of a foreign race, but of a past age, having gargantuan appetites and Shakespearean humour. Their use of biblical phraseology would have shocked his Bible-reading mother, and their frank talk of the breeding of animals have discomforted his town-bred acquaintance. He himself was repelled by their toil-blunted fingers and their sweaty smell of earth and farm. They puzzled him, too; for though they expressed a feudal devotion to the house of which he was become the head, they were not curbed or ill at ease as common soldiers were in the presence of an officer. Beneath both their flattery and their joking familiarity—broad, sometimes, as that of Juliet’s nurse—he had been aware of keen observation and criticism. It seemed that they revered the name of Einon-Thomas, and that Gwenllian had won their unbounded admiration. But of himself, what was the opinion forming behind those shrewd, watchful eyes?
What did it matter? A parcel of ignorant yokels! His mind tried to escape from its cage of self-distrust. But it was caught by the knowledge that without Gwenllian he would not have known what to do with his party. She it was who had seated the guests in order of precedence, so that none was affronted; she who enquired by name after all their absent relations; she who pressed them to eat, with an inconceivable urgency and persistence. She had capped their local anecdotes throughout what had seemed to him an endless afternoon, and had never ceased to laugh, chatter and gesticulate with the best of them. Silent and constrained, he listened to her in astonishment, using their dialect, rolling her Rs, raising her voice at the end of each phrase. Why ever did she do it? To put these common people at their ease, he supposed, though, heaven knew, they all appeared more at home in his own house than he did! Gwen was a marvel of tact, he told himself. I ought to be jolly grateful to her. Ought to be!
While he was helping himself to a second whiskey and soda, she came into the room.
“Hello,” he said, putting down the glass with a feeling of guilt, “I thought you’d gone.”
“My dear” she exclaimed, closing the door behind her and coming to him with outstretched hands, “as though I could, without saying good night and thanking you for your lovely, lovely party!”
Rebuked, he felt himself flush. He must try to be civil, though his head was aching. “You must have thought me beastly rude,” he forced himself to apologise, “shutting myself up here. I wouldn’t have done it, only I saw you walking down the drive with that awful female who dug me in the ribs and said—” He stopped abruptly, wishing that he had not alluded to the incident. He could not repeat what she had said in front of Gwen. It had been something coarse about twins—all very well for a music-hall, but before a gentlewoman about to marry—
To his astonishment she laughed. “You mustn’t mind what they say, Dick. They haven’t left the eighteenth century. I hope they never will.”
His eyes widened.
“Well,” she challenged, “aren’t they better than the betwixt-and-betweeners who live in cities—all alike, cardboard dummies cut by the million to one pattern?”
There was a glow in her cheeks. Dick had never seen her more handsome or animated than now, when he was throbbing with the fatigue and annoyance of the past few hours. Could she really have enjoyed what he had so much disliked? He stared at her dumbfounded.
“Why are you so solemn?” she asked, seizing the lapels of his coat and playfully shaking him. “Because of what dear old Mrs. Jones Cefn-Coed predicted? You must learn to laugh at our people’s humour, Dick, however crude it may seem. You must practise cracking that sort of homely jest yourself. Father was an adept at it, and they adored him. ‘ A merry gentleman,’ they used to say, ‘ no pride on him at all.’ English people think we’re a gloomy race because we are religious. But let me tell you, you’ll never win a Welshman’s affections, unless you can crack a joke with him. He has the great heart of the ancient Greek, Dick,” she went on with increased vehemence. “Yes indeed! Don’t look so unbelieving. He doesn’t keep his heart in his pocket, whatever his detractors may say. He likes money, like another, and he loves a bargain. But it’s the prosaic English who put money first. Better than gold, we love music and song, poetry and rhetoric, the history and traditions of our race, and, above all, our land.”
“Oh,” said Dick. He had never known her declaim like this, though she always seemed to him to become unnecessarily enthusiastic when she spoke about the Welsh. He tried to bring the conversation down to a saner level. “Why did you go off with that old woman?”
Gwenllian let go the lapels of the coat and sighed. “Oh, she wanted to confide in me about her daughter’s trouble. She’s in terrible distress, poor old darling, though she hides it heroically under a lot of nonsense. Nobody guesses in the parish. She’s managed to keep all the prying neighbours at bay. But she trusts us, of course.”
And suddenly the woman he was going to marry flung her arms round Dick’s neck. The warmth of this unexpected embrace startled him. A chaste kiss was all they had exchanged since the day when she had wept in his arms and he had found himself pledged to marry her.
“Oh, Dick, Dick,” she cried, “aren’t you proud? Aren’t you glad?”
“What of? What for?” he had it on his tongue to ask. But discretion kept him silent, staring at her, his arms clasped, rather limply, round her waist. Hers were tight about his neck. She had thrown back her head and was looking intently into his bewildered face.
“Isn’t it splendid,” she asked him, “that our people love and respect us so? Still, Dick, though taxation has made us so poor. You wouldn’t change places with an upstart millionaire, would you, Dick? Or with any man on earth who draws a fortune from dividend warrants without personal power or family prestige?”
Dick looked confused. Only that morning, going through his rent-roll, he had wished that his money were invested in the funds.
“Dick,” Gwenllian persisted, “it does mean something to you to keep going what has gone on for so long?”
He grinned and tightened his hold on her waist. Her emotion made her look superb, but it appeared to him slightly ridiculous.
“Say something, Dick,” she urged. “Tell me it’s going to mean to you all that it means to me. Promise, Dick, promise!”
“Of course, my dear,” was all he could say. He felt extremely foolish. But she was so close, so warm, so vibrant, that her passion communicated itself to him. Suddenly excited, though not by the subject of her appeal, he buried his face in the mass of her hair, and kissed it. He kissed her ear, then her neck. He pulled back her head and kissed her mouth. His kisses were not dry and quick as they had been hitherto. Fatigue and boredom were swept away. For the moment he was eager, who had been reluctant, or at least indifferent. “I love you,” he told her, “I love you,” because, for an instant, his pulses were throbbing with desire for her or for any other comely, responsive woman.
But she believed what he said. She looked up at him with an expression of mingled tenderness and triumph.
“Oh my dear,” she whispered, “my darling! I want to be so proud of you—always. We’re going to make a success of it, aren’t we, you and I, for the sake of the place?”
He was too excited to read the omens.