HE RECEIVES A WARNING
Within Plâs Einon it was cool. As Dick passed through the large airy rooms, he heard the winged flutter of curtains and saw the tall flowers in their vases gently sway, but when he went out beneath the portico, it was as though he had entered a hot-house. The lawns were steaming—scented with white jasmine and roses, like a bath, he thought. A cloud of midges danced above the carriage sweep, always in motion, for ever in the same place. Bees droned from blossom to blossom. But the birds were strangely hushed. Why was the garden so silent, he wondered, missing something but not knowing what it was he missed. Only the rippling of the river, hidden by the beech trees’ midsummer foliage, came up from the dingle.
He stood blinking at the rich colours of the herbaceous border. The flowers had pretty names: larkspur and London-pride, sweet-william and snapdragon, peony, pansy, poppy, love-in-a-mist and golden-rod! It was a very beautiful place. Why didn’t he enjoy his ownership? Was it his fault? His brows began to wrinkle in puppyish perplexity. Could they have been mistaken, all those fellows in his regiment who believed that to own a fine house and an estate must make a man content?
I don’t take much pleasure in all this, Dick thought, scowling at the empty lawns. Gwen would say that that was because he hadn’t been bom to it; and, though he scarcely liked to admit it to himself, he was envious of the city clerks who lived in comfortable obscurity among their own class. He’d like to have more money than they had and he didn’t want to sit in an office all day, but he wanted everything else of theirs—their girls, their motorbikes, their boat on the river with a gramophone—and he’d like working in the back garden on Saturdays. Get your coat off, work a bit, come in for tea; perhaps a game of bridge afterwards. Better than giving orders and making speeches. He imagined at the tea-table under a pink-shaded lamp a young wife whom he could banter. There’d be jokes between them; they’d chatter in bed in the dark. And when he was working in the garden she’d trip after him in high- heeled shoes. He saw her shoes very clearly. Gwen would call them bad style. Still, they were what he liked on a pretty girl’s feet.
He was extremely sorry for himself. There was no-one here in whom he could confide, explaining that really he had very simple tastes and was quite easy to get on with if he was taken the right way. He would like to tell the truth about himself; but he never had—no, not to anyone, not to his mother— it sounded so damned silly. You couldn’t confess to a love of high-heeled shoes worn out of doors with diamond buckles and little straps criss-cross over the instep. Or was it sillier to go on pretending? He didn’t know. He had slept ill, and was in a mood, this sultry July morning, to question all the things he habitually accepted. That came of listening to Frances. Her annual visit disturbed him as much as it irritated Gwen. Frances upset everything.
Look at her at this moment, lolling in a deck chair, supple, enviably at ease, with a litter of books at her feet! Dick scowled at the untidy back of her head. Her hair was magnificent. But why must it always seem to be on the point of tumbling down? This rubbish she had taken to reviewing for the Lord only knew what sort of papers had given her more notions than ever. To Dick there was but one kind of notion; the sort that people were better without. Luckily, the things Frances said were not intended to be taken seriously; at any rate, he supposed not. But he found it hard to remember that some folk played with ideas as he had been taught to play with balls, and he wished that Frances would take up golf instead. Then he could motor her daily to the neighbouring links. Pleasant, that would be. For, in spite of her highbrow folly, she was a companionable woman—smooth and warm, with a dash to her. She understood so many things that a decent fellow had to leave unsaid, and, unlike her sister, she had not the mind of an old maid. He wanted to interrupt her odious reading, but was withheld by fear that she might laugh at his clothes.
This bright blue jacket and plus-fours, this scarlet tie and stockings increased his self-consciousness. And the worst of it was that he didn’t want to go otter hunting any more than she did. But, of course, he had been too civil to say so. The day she had told the Master what she thought of his pastime, Dick and his wife had been united for fully ten minutes by their feelings of disapproval.
“Frances has shocking manners!”
“I quite agree with you, my dear! And what rot she talked!”
Yet Dick had memories of a good day’s sport that left him ill at ease. When the little wet head bobbed up for the last time, he had seen terror in the hunted eyes and had felt a sharp twinge of kinship. Could the creature be suffering as he had suffered when the wail of a shell sounded above the angry popping of machine guns? Nonsense, he had told himself. Otters hadn’t a human imagination. But then—why those eyes? He had been sickened by the raging of the hounds, and even more by the yelling of men and women who surrounded the pool, cutting off their victim’s retreat, upstream or down. So big a pack, so large a crowd of people armed with poles … but he had forced himself to join them. They had told him that otters showed no mercy to salmon. That had been a relief.
Looking now at Frances, he decided that he would make the most of that argument to her. Strange that, while disagreeing with her opinions, he had come to crave for her approval! Grasping his pole, he walked across to her.
“Change your mind?” he hailed.
Frances let a volume of essays on economics drop through her fingers, and stretched her long arms above her head. He liked to watch her movements, graceful and unconcerned as those of a wild animal.
“What a grind it is having to think on such a sultry day,” she yawned.
“Chuck it then, for once!”
She shook her head, and he tried again. “It’s an awfully pretty sight, all this colour reflected in the water.” He made a wry face at his clothes. “And the country’s looking its best.”
She nodded. “I know. I used to love the setting.”
“You’re such an outdoor sort, really,” he went on. “I can’t understand what made you chuck every form of sport.”
“Decadence, I dare say,” she answered, smiling up at him. “Why do you hate killing things? Grandfather didn’t mind.”
“Nor do I,” Dick lied valiantly. “Not when it’s a case of vermin or game. They’ve got to be kept down, you know. If you’re so squeamish,” he added, “you needn’t stay for the kill.”
How oppressive the heat and the stillness were! When he had spoken, he noticed that she was pale, and as he watched her, she grew so much paler that he feared she was going to faint.
“I say,” he exclaimed, “has the weather knocked you up?”
She did not reply, but began to gaze at him as though she saw something tragic in his gaudily- clad figure. The sudden gravity of her look startled him.
“Are you all right? I say, are you all right?”
“Yes,” she answered almost in a whisper.
“Then what are you staring at me for, as if you’d seen a ghost?” He tried to laugh away a pang of fear.
“I was thinking of what you’d just said.” Her tone was that of one in a trance.
“What did I say? Only that you needn’t stay for the kill.”
The word had filled her with an unaccountable foreboding. It had drawn her mind out into regions where nothing was known but all things were secretly and profoundly certain. She shivered and sat up.
“Did you know, Dick,” she said, “that some of us Einon-Thomases are cursed with second-sight?” And she added, in a tone almost of entreaty: “I wish you hated all this!”
“All what? Otter hunting and so on?”
“This place—all of it. The whole way of life here.”
“What’s wrong? It’s comfortable, isn’t it?” he asked, at once defensive, his gaze moving over the garden he admired so much and enjoyed so little. “Why should I hate it?”
There was no warning that she could make him understand, but she said:
“If things go on as they are, Dick, something dreadful will happen here.”
He opened his eyes wide, alarmed by her earnestness. “There’s thunder about,” he said with a wriggle of discomfort. “It’s got on your nerves.”
And he continued to stare at her, fascinated by the pallor of her face, until he heard his wife’s voice cry out: “Dick, I’m waiting!”
He turned, startled, and saw her coming towards him out of the hall’s deep shadow. Dread touched him—a dread that was changed, as he looked her over, into a mood of frustrate and rebellious anger. Her short skirt and jacket were of the crude blue and her tie of the yet cruder scarlet prescribed for the killing of otters. Against these strident colours and the white of her masculine shirt, her skin looked faded and old. The collar she was wearing intensified her resemblance to those sporting spinsters of whom he had made fun in his boyhood. How could he have married such a woman, he asked himself in a sudden spasm of distaste. “What a beastly ugly kit that is,” he exclaimed.
Her eyebrows went up. “D’you think so? Then why d’you wear it yourself?”
He tried to pass off the clash of their antagonism with a laugh. “You insisted on it.”
“My dear Dick, you’re not a child. Though,” she added looking him up and down with disdain, “you so often behave like one.”
“Oh, well,” he said, still trying to appear unconcerned. “When in Rome, do as the Romans— eh, Frances?”
“I don’t, unless I happen to like their ways,” answered his sister-in-law.
“Oh,” said Gwenllian, “it’s no good your appealing against me to her. Frances never thinks or acts as other people do. You’d lose your reputation for originality if you did, wouldn’t you, dear?” There was malice in the elder sister’s smile, and Dick hated her for it. Frances might be eccentric; but she was a good sort. He’d be damned if that old cat should sneer at her!
“I’ve changed my mind,” he blurted out. “I’m going to stay and keep Frances company.”
He saw the detested black eyebrows raised once more and he turned his back on his wife.
“Indeed,” he heard her say. She was waiting there, silently, behind him. He felt her overpowering presence. In a flurry he added, “It’s too damned hot to go chasing up and down the country today.”
“I never heard you complain of the heat before. You are generally grumbling about the cold,” said the voice at his shoulder.
“Well, it is hot! Can’t I ever say what I like without your jumping down my throat?” he almost shouted.
Frances intervened. “Children! Children! What a thing to quarrel about! For goodness sake let him stay if he wants to!”
Dick turned round in time to see Gwenllian throw her sister a glance of icy resentment. “By all means,” she said, “if you have made him your convert. What excuse shall I give Colonel Howells—that Dick is busy reading Socialist economics?”
“Why the devil should you offer any excuse?” Dick broke out.
“They’re on our water,” Gwenllian replied, scrutinising a distant tree above his head.
“They’re there to please themselves, aren’t they?” he retorted, and he longed to shout at her, “Can’t you even look at me, you stuck-up prig?”
“You promised to be there,” she said, without lowering her glance.
“I’ve changed my mind, I tell you.”
“I see. So I shall have to keep your obligations for you.” And she added: “Perhaps I’d better say you were detained by estate business.”
He felt the flame of a blush run up his spine and burn his face. Damn her, taunting him with his ineptitude as a landlord and in front of her sister too!
“I’m afraid I only ordered a light luncheon for one,” she resumed, acidly polite, now that she had the satisfaction of seeing him turn red.
“I prefer bread and cheese,” he muttered, and scowled after her as she turned her back upon him and walked away.
Frances had sunk down again into her deck-chair.
“Bread and cheese and kisses,” he heard her murmur. He glanced at her with suspicion to see whether she was mocking him, but she seemed lapsed in a state of dreamy exhaustion. That queer turn she had, he thought, has left her fagged out. Damned uncanny, it was. He fetched a chair and flopped into it beside her to enjoy a quiet sulk. Filling a pipe, he brooded over his misfortunes. These odious wrangles with Gwen were becoming more frequent. They made him angrier while they lasted; their passing left him more shaken and sore. A life of continence was enough to sour any man who hadn’t chosen to be a monk. Yet, God knew, he had no desire ever again to be her lover! As for taking a mistress, that seemed to him as foreign as the eating of frogs. Once when he had remarked to Frank, “that sort of thing’s not quite English, what?” Frank had jeered, “you mean that it’s not respectable middle-class.” What Dick had meant in his heart was that it would have shocked his mother. There were furtive things a fellow didn’t want to do, unless he was driven to them. But it might come to that. You couldn’t look at a girl in this dreary district, without all the old tabbies getting on your track. Damned unfair when you’d done no wrong, but only wished you dared. And sitting hunched beneath his stately colonnade, scowling at the gay flowers in his garden, Dick wondered why everything seemed to go against him in spite of the honesty of his intentions.
Presently he saw the nursery procession making its careful way over the gravel. “Mind, darling,” he heard Nannie admonish. She was leading his wife’s heir by the hand. Her stout person was tightly encased in a grey coat that looked superfluous on so hot a day. Dick thought with discomfort of the thick corsets and petticoats she so obviously wore. The nursery-maid, who walked behind her, slowly pushing a glossy pram, was a meagre imitation of her elder, grey with black points, and closely girthed. The girl’s face was shiny with perspiration, yet on her hands, as on Nannie’s, were white cotton gloves, and on her feet stockings of black wool. Gwen would insist on making the poor devils uncomfortable, Dick thought, and the children too. No use his trying to interfere on behalf of the little blighters! Illtyd was so utterly her own. And if he tried to give Richard his share of attention, she grew furious with jealousy on her favourite’s behalf. They wouldn’t have much of a life with a mother who coddled one, snubbed the other, and would leave neither alone. What had been the use, anyway, of bringing more people into a world he couldn’t make head or tail of himself? But there they were. He had begotten them, though he hadn’t much wanted to, and it filled him with contradictory irritation that Gwen should behave as though she owed them to none but the Holy Ghost.
White clouds, piled up in rounded blobs like whipped cream, were beginning to cover the hard blue sky. But still the sunshine gilded Plâs Einon garden with an intense, metallic light. The green of the lawns was grown vivid as the covering of a billiard table. The motionless trees appeared no longer to be living things, but painted scenery against the backcloth of a stage. Theatrical, that’s what it looks, Dick suddenly said to himself. Like the setting on an empty stage for a play that’s about to begin. And it’ll be a tragedy according to Frances.
Out of the stifling silence she said: “Dick, in all the six years we’ve known each other, we’ve never told the truth.”
“Oh, I say,” he protested.
“You know quite well what I mean. About your marriage.”
“Don’t,” he muttered hastily. “I can’t possibly discuss it—with you of all people.” But he knew that it was in her he longed to confide.
“My dear,” she said, “why don’t you and Gwenllian separate?”
“Oh,” he declared, shocked that Gwen’s sister should suggest such a thing, “it hasn’t become unbearable—not yet.”
“Why go on until it does?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered vaguely. “There are the kids to be thought of.”
“D’you think children benefit so much by seeing their father and mother always at loggerheads?”
“People expect a married couple to stick it out for the sake of their kids,” he sighed.
Frances sat up and flashed her bright eyes on him. There were golden lights in their darkness. They seemed to burn with an impatient flame. “For heaven’s sake, try to think this matter out for yourself,” she cried. “How much do you mean to your children, or they to you?”
“Well, I couldn’t bear to hurt the little beggars,” he answered, trying to evade the issue. “I don’t even like to see Gwen as strict as she is.”
“That’s only your universal attitude of passive goodwill,” she told him. “How much do you and your children mean to one another positively?”
Her searching eyes compelled candour.
“Nothing,” he muttered, and hung his head.
“Don’t imagine I’m blaming you, my dear,” she said, laying one of her hands on his. “It’s simply that you’re not a born parent. You’ve always funked power and responsibility, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered, less humiliated than relieved to be telling the truth at last.
“Then leave it all to Gwenllian who revels in it,” she urged. “Go away from here at once, and find a job among the sort of people with whom you’re most at ease. You’d be popular in some sets, my dear. But you’ll never go down here.”
“I know that,” he admitted.
“And to be liked means such a lot to you,” she went on vehemently. “I hate to see you being starved of what you need.”
Then he confessed his real objection to a separation.
“I’d be in danger of starving, literally, if we tried to run two establishments, Gwen and I. And you must agree it would be inhuman to part her from all this.”
“Of course,” said Frances. “She’d have to stay on here. It belongs to her, in a sense.”
“That’s all very fine,” he grumbled, “but with present taxation and the boys to educate, how much d’you suppose there’d be left over for me to live on? Gwen never stops nagging if I take a month or two abroad in the winter.”
“I know, I know,” Frances exclaimed. “But poverty couldn’t be as damnable as living with someone who hates you.”
“I’ve tasted poverty before,” he declared, his small mouth grown stubborn under its trim moustache. “I’d clear out soon enough, if I could afford to live comfortably in my own quiet way. But there wouldn’t be enough, I tell you.”
“Then set to and earn it,” she flashed at him.
“What earthly chance has a fellow of my age, brought up in the Service? The best I could hope to pick up would be a billet abroad in some vile climate. You seem to forget how I was knocked about in the war. My health would never stand it.” And he fought with a foolish inclination to cry. “Besides,” he added, after a gloomy silence, “it isn’t as though I should ever be free to marry again and have another shot at being happy.”
“Gwenllian might be induced to divorce you.”
Dick wearily shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’d say it looked so bad.”
The clouds, which had by now blotted out all the blue of the sky, were no longer creamy. Some were of a lowering grey, others were toadstool yellow. One last gleam of sun fell upon the hillside that rose above the tree-tops of the dingle. Dick saw the whitewashed buildings of his farms, shining like pearls against their green setting, and he recalled the day on which he had first beheld his property. It had brought him none of the joy for which he looked. But since for Gwen and her heir’s sake he must not sell it, he’d be hanged if he didn’t at least wring what pride and comfort there was to be had out of the damned place! Frances was one of these unworldly fools who cared only for people and ideas. She hadn’t the sense to understand that a fellow couldn’t inherit a magnificent old country house, an estate, a position in the best county society, and then go back, of his own free will, to being a penniless suburban nobody. It might be jolly if he could. But it couldn’t be done.
The sky became a leaden lid closing down upon him. All sunlight was gone, and colour faded from the landscape. Over the hill opposite he saw a veil of rain descending and with its approach the sultry air grew chill and he shivered. A roll of thunder, reminding him of distant gun-fire, made him start.
“It’s coming,” he said. “Better take shelter.”
Frances did not reply. She gave a long sigh and began to gather up her books.
A cold shaft of rain struck him. “Come on in,” he cried, obstinate against this mad woman who wanted to part him from his money. Obstinate against her, angry with her for having troubled him, and yet, as she stood for an instant with the edge of a book forced upward into the curve of her breast, suddenly desiring to kiss her. He hesitated; perhaps, if he asked her, she might in her present mood, consent; and he lightened the weight on one of his feet as though he had the courage to take a pace towards her.
“Well, Dick,” she said, “what’s the matter?”
“I thought,” he began. “That is, I felt that—”
A blinding dazzle of lightning interrupted him. “Look,” he said, “let me carry the books,” and, though a clap of thunder had killed his words, he took the books almost roughly, and began to run for shelter, finding in this an excuse for putting his hand into hers.