SALLY was not happy at Monk’s Hall. In London she had been very lonely, and she had persuaded Nigel to join the Settlement because she hoped to make friends there, and to secure some recognition for her precarious little liaison. But, since the advent of Tilli, her hold on him had weakened and she had formed no other ties. At the best she was treated with contemptuous good-nature by the more tolerant members of the party, and to many she was an object of open mockery. Nigel had always been inclined to bait her, even in the old days, and the rest of them caught the habit from him. Her cowardice was a standing joke with them, especially her terror of an encounter with Trevor’s mother. They used to invent pretexts for sending her over to Water Hythe with notes and messages. She was too timid and too anxious to propitiate them ever to refuse, as they were well aware, but her desperate stratagems and excuses were extremely entertaining. And if she was forced into going, she would dawdle about in the fields for hours in the hope of finding an envoy who would do her business for her. If she caught sight of Catherine in the garden or by the river, she would scuttle round under the lee of hedges and do her business at the back door in peace. But generally, as she slunk back past the house, all the dogs would rush out at her and try to bite her, as they did to no one else except tramps. She never needed to ring a bell, even if she had dared, for the whole household ran out when she came, to quiet the uproar
Sometimes Catherine would come out at her, too, and then Sally would spin round in an agony of terror, unable to tell her business or to run away.
“Oh, Miss … Miss … er … Down, Cairny, down! Be quiet, Patsy! They won’t hurt you. They didn’t know who you were. Have you brought a note from Mrs. Crowne?”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Frobisher, thank you very much.”
“Down, Cairny! Bad dog!”
“It was nothing, Mrs. Frobisher. It was just … Lise just wanted …”
“Down, Patsy! Come in, please … Miss …”
And Sally would follow Catherine helplessly into the hall, delivering her message with many apologies and self-contradictions. Once, inspired by a sort of abashed defiance, she plumped herself down uninvited into a chair, thinking:
“I will not be treated like a servant. I won’t stand her insulting ways.”
“It’s nothing, Mrs. Frobisher. I just said I’d drop in and give you a message, as I happened to be passing this way.”
“Yes?”
Catherine did not sit down, and Sally was sorry for her bold move, since the stander has an advantage over the sitter. She stared up into the enemy’s face and wriggled.
“Lise wanted to know …”
“You mean Mrs. Trevor? Yes?”
“Lise wanted to know if you had any plums this year to spare, because our crop has failed and she could do with some for jamming.”
“Plums? Dear me! I must speak to my gardener. I don’t know … one doesn’t know how many she’ll be wanting.”
“I think she wants all she can get.”
“I’d no idea their crop had failed. Of course, I know it’s been a bad year. Our own crop hasn’t been …”
“Because, if you haven’t any to spare, I’m to go over to Ratchet and see if Emily has. We’d have asked her in the first place, only we didn’t know she was coming back from abroad so soon.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Luttrell would care … I daresay I could manage … perhaps I shall be seeing Mrs. Trevor in a day or two, and then she can give me the exact particulars.”
“She wants to know at once, Mrs. Frobisher. She’s writing out her order to the stores for jamming sugar.”
“Then perhaps she had better send me a note. A note would be best. A message of this description is so very vague, isn’t it?”
Catherine always pretended that Sally’s messages were in some way inadequate, partly to discourage the woman from coming to her house and partly from a general wish to be offensive.
“She can’t write anything more than I’ve told you, Mrs. Frobisher. She wants to know if you’re likely to have any plums to spare, because she’s writing her stores’ order and she’s had plums from you other years.”
“Thank you. I’ll write to her. She’s writing her stores’ order, and she’s had plums from me other years …” repeated Catherine vaguely. “Good morning.”
Sally got up. She wished that she could say to Catherine, “You’re no lady!” But she said nothing, except to repeat, with a pale smile:
“Then I’m to say you’ll write, Mrs. Frobisher?”
“If you will.”
“I just dropped in as I was passing,” insisted Sally, as she edged towards the door. “I thought I’d save Lise the trouble.”
The dogs in the porch began to growl at the sight of her, and she got herself out of the house in the usual tumult. As she scurried back across the fields, she rehearsed inwardly a scene with Catherine in which she should give the old lady a piece of her mind.
“And will you kindly tell me what right you have to treat anybody like you do? I could tell you a thing or two that would make you sit up. If you knew all I do, perhaps you wouldn’t think such a lot of yourself. Up at Monk’s Hall they simply laugh at you. You ought to hear, the way they talk about you behind your back. I’m not respectable, am I? And what about Lise? Oh! I beg your pardon. Mrs. Trevor. Didn’t you once used to treat her like you treat me, and didn’t you have to climb down about it? Think I don’t know? And what about Norman Crowne? He was a relation to be proud of, wasn’t he? I’ve got ears. I can hear what’s said. I’ve eyes. I can see what’s going on as well as anybody else, and better than some people, I daresay. I could tell you a pretty story if you were to ask. I must say, Mrs. Frobisher, I don’t think you’ve brought up your own children so very well. You’re so busy picking on me, you don’t want to know what they’ve been up to, I suppose. But I always say that a man that goes on like Trevor does is nothing but a dirty rotter. Carrying on with a married woman! It’s a pity nobody ever wrote and told you about it. Somebody ought. It ought to be known. I’ve a good mind …”
And Sally pictured Catherine getting a letter one morning which might begin: Dear Madam, you will pardon a word of warning from a friend.
“I’ve a very good mind,” she said to herself, as she began to climb the hill.
Made bold by indignation, she strode along without looking where she was going, and in the wood she nearly fell over William, who was lying on his back under a beech-tree. She begged his pardon with fewer apologies than usual.
William removed his gaze from the leafy roof over his head and blinked at her sleepily.
“Been for a walk?” he asked.
“I’ve been taking a message for Lise,” said Sally, speaking rather quickly and panting a little. “And I must say I do wish you’d ask Lise not to send me any more on those sort of messages. It’s not what I expected when I was brought here.”
“What sort of message?” began William, sitting up.
“I’m quite ready, I’m sure, to do all I can to help and that. But I don’t like going where I’m not wanted, and the way your aunt treats me! I won’t stand it. As if I was so much dirt.”
“I’m sure Lise wouldn’t ask you to go anywhere if she thought you didn’t like it. Why don’t you …”
“I didn’t come here to be insulted, and I don’t care who I say it to.”
As a matter of fact, she would only have dared to say it to William. For they were fellow-sufferers; he also was ignored by the other inmates of Monk’s Hall, and knowing this, she was not afraid of him.
“I’ve as good a right as anybody in the place,” she declared, “and a great deal better than some. I don’t see that she’s got so much to be proud of, I’m sure. I wouldn’t be proud of Trevor, if he was my son. But then there’s none so blind as those that won’t see. She’s not the only one.”
“I’m sorry if she was rude,” said William distractedly. “You must simply refuse to go there again.”
“I certainly shan’t. Not if it was ever so. Not if you all begged and prayed me to. But it’s funny the people she does ask to go and see her. I should have thought … oh, well! One mustn’t say what one thinks, I suppose.”
She tossed her head and flounced off into the bushes, leaving William to make out what all the storm had been about.
He pondered for a few minutes, and could come to no conclusion save that Sally looked like a weasel. Perhaps he had better not go on guessing at what she had meant. He rolled over on to his back again and stared upwards into the flickering green shadows. The broken mood had escaped him: it was floating away. He could catch nothing of it. Sally had upset him.
These invasions of his tranquillity were becoming more frequent; or else his own capacity for withdrawal was diminishing. Twenty times a week he would find that he was involved in some reverberating passage of words. He could no longer sit for hours without hearing anything of the discussions which raged about him: he had begun to listen, and though he seldom followed any conversation with continuous attention, he heard enough to make him dumbly resentful.
Presently he got up and made his way moodily back to the house. Nobody was indoors. All the large rooms were empty, their doors and windows open to the airs and sounds of the summer days. For a few minutes he stood uncertainly in the hall, like a visitor, and then he went into the common-room, which was full of toys belonging to the Hackbutt children. These he began to put away carefully, for the want of anything better to do. He was as quiet as he could be because he did not want to be drawn into the discussion which was taking place on the terrace outside. Charlotte, Lise and Bertha were sitting there in the sunshine, shelling peas, and it sounded as though Trevor had lounged out from his work to tease and contradict them. They made a noise, intermittent and clamorous, like starlings in a winter hedge. It was the permanent noise of Monk’s Hall from ten in the morning until midnight, and William had grown very wary in evading it. Now, as he put the ninepins softly back into their box, he heard Trevor say:
“But when was all this? They haven’t been back so very long.”
“Yesterday. I went over there with mother,” said Charlotte.
“I must go too. I must see it for myself. Go on, Car. Tell some more.”
“Well … they take in the Spectator. And he is reading aloud Mahon’s ‘Life of Nelson’ to her in the evenings.”
“I always said she’d settle down,” proclaimed Bertha placidly. “I always knew they’d be quite happy once they’d … once they’d …”
“Quite! We take your meaning, Bertha.”
“No, but it’s wonderful what a difference being happy makes to her,” pursued Charlotte. “She’s a different woman.”
“I think she was always a happy little person,” said Bertha. “Before she married, anyhow.”
“Oh, no!”
This burst from the other three simultaneously, and Trevor added: “That was all bluff. But how, exactly, is she different now, Car?”
“Oh, she’s getting so dull. Quite wrapped up in all the dull things he likes. The garden and all that. They do nothing but tell you that their cactus has flowered, and it’s only supposed to do it once in a hundred years. I expect they’ll write to the Spectator about it.”
“Well, I always did think him one of the dankest creatures on the face of the earth. But in her it’s positively depraved. It’s a tragedy of the bedroom.”
“Really, Trevor, must you talk like that?”
“I’m quoting Tolstoi. It’s in Gorki’s ‘Conversations,’ and I thought it so true and helpful that I copied it out into my little book: ‘Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of disease and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be—the tragedy of the bedroom.’”
“Do you copy things down into a book?” asked Bertha in the short, embarrassed pause which followed this quotation.
“He copies things which apply to himself,” Charlotte told them. “That’s why he calls them helpful. And I am asking myself what bedroom …”
“Anything that applies to me applies to the whole of the human race. I have a genius, really, for being normal: I’m a sort of common denominator of all the passions. If there ever was such a thing as I’homme moyen sensuel …”
“If everyone in this house using a French expression was to pay a fine of sixpence, we could very soon pay off our obligations to poor William …”
“Well, the mean, sensual man, if you like. But it’s a phrase you can’t translate.”
“In this case,” put in Lise, “it’s a very good translation. It has gained in truth what it has lost in …”
“I used to keep a commonplace book at school,” Bertha told them. “But I never kept it up.”
“Trevor means to tell us that he has survived the Great War, but that he’s bound to succumb in the end to some designing female.”
“Not designing. Very few women are capable of anything so coherent as a design.”
William had left off listening. He knew that they always ended by talking in this way whenever they began to discuss their friends. They would go on until it was time for another meal.
He had begun to play, quite intently, with the wooden bricks on the floor, making them into a little theatre with an apron stage. It struck him that it might be fun to write a play for puppets, and he could, in Peter’s workshop, construct a proper theatre for them, with a curtain and scenery and footlights. He remembered that Trevor had once owned such a toy; it had been an object of keen envy to himself and Emily. And a play for puppets would be the best sort of play, since it could be presented without any complicated dealings with other human beings.
As he crouched on the floor beside his bricks the conversation outside, with its laughter and pauses, floated in and out of his consciousness. He was aware, vaguely, that the same couple were still under discussion when he heard Trevor say:
“The long and short of it is that she’s lost her virginity.”
He wished that Trevor would not talk like that, and was glad to hear a protesting snort from Lise.
“Your interpretations are so gross,” said Trevor. “I am referring to a state of mind. Some women remain virgins all their lives, however often they marry.”
“As, for example?”
“But some seem to lose their very identity when they change their names. This is a case in point. Here you have a woman who is temperamentally a virgin. She is capable of an absolutely concentrated devotion; she can worship with the undissipated passion that is possible to a nun, and nobody else. All the forces of her nature are centred upon one object. All right, Car. I’ve my own views on the matter, but I’ll keep them to myself, though I expect you all know what they are. There’s nothing like being discreet.”
Bertha was heard to utter, shyly, a few remarks about the value of experience. But he talked her down.
“No, Bertha. No, no, no! All this talk about experience is wrong. Believe me. No woman survives her experiences. They take up all her foreground. They aren’t of the slightest use to her, because she doesn’t live long enough to get over them. All inspired women are virgins. Our forefathers knew that. It’s the only condition in which their inevitable sex is thrown into the balance with them instead of against them.”
“Funny,” said Charlotte. “I said much the same thing to mother, coming home yesterday.”
“What on earth made you say such a thing to mother?”
“Oh, she annoyed me so. She’s so triumphant about it all. I think old women are terrible. They talk of life beginning when it’s really over.”
“And you said that inspired women are all virgins?”
“Practically that. One uses different words to mother.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t think she listened. She would keep maundering on about their cactus, and how she’s sure it isn’t true about its flowering only once in a hundred years, because she remembers it in ’82. But she did say that she’d never come across any inspired women, except perhaps Sarah Bernhardt. I don’t think she meant it as a retort. She was just in a mood for reminiscence.”
“Still, I expect it shut you up, just the same,” said Trevor.
“God!” thought William. “How they talk! I wish they’d all get lockjaw!”
His theatre was not finished, but he had used all the bricks. He sat back on his heels and stared at it morosely before he took it to pieces. The group outside the window was silent for a moment, and then Charlotte said, in a lower tone:
“Perhaps there’s nothing in that story of Tilli’s, after all.”
“She doesn’t always speak the truth,” said Lise.
“She never speaks it,” said Trevor.
William got up from the floor and prepared to make an escape. He did not mind what they said about their own friends, but he supposed that he ought not to listen in silence while they called his wife a liar. He peered into the hall and saw Sally sitting on the stairs, doing a crossword puzzle. Panic-stricken, he bolted back into the room. Bertha was asking what story of Tilli’s this might be.
“Why, surely you’ve heard!” said Trevor. “I thought it had gone the round of the house. Everybody has discussed it with everybody else in strict confidence. It seems, or rather, Tilli asserts, that Emily ran away from Philip on her wedding-day. And went … where do you suppose?”
“Back to William.”
“Got it in one.”
“Emily?” thought William. “Emily? Is it Emily they’ve been … Christ! I must stop it.”
He went across to the piano and began to play upon it very loudly. He made a horrid noise, for he was full of fury. Fragments of their discussion kept returning to his mind. He thumped discordantly, half blinded by rage, until the voice of Trevor called him to order.
“Look here, William! You mustn’t make that noise.”
“I shall if I like.”
“Not in this house. Now, don’t swear. And pray don’t lose your temper. I know you like strumming, but we’ve all got to sacrifice something.”
“Have we? Then you can sacrifice your bloody gramophone.”
“Not at all. In playing the gramophone I am considering the greatest good of the greatest number. Most of us like it. In fact, we are all just going to dance to it.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Cousin William, you forget yourself.”
At that moment the gramophone was let loose by Tilli in the dining-room. William jumped up, strode furiously through the echoing rooms, and commanded her to stop it.
“But why?”
“I won’t have that noise. It disturbs me.”
She gaped at him, and then exchanged glances with Trevor, who had strolled in casually after William and was looking on with an expression of extreme amusement. A rising excitement coursed through the three of them which was to Tilli pure pleasure.
“I had thought,” she said, “that nothing could do that.”
“Nothing can,” Trevor assured her. “He’s merely peevish because I won’t let him play the piano. Come, Tilli.”
They began to dance. William stopped the gramophone and took off the record.
“Take care!” Tilli started forward. “That is a new one.”
“Is it?”
He looked at it for a moment and then he threw it out of the window on to the hard path outside. Tilli screamed with satisfaction. The sight of anything being thrown out of a window reminded her of Van Tuyl and the good old days. William threw all the records within reach out of the window, one after another. Trevor tried to pull him away. The little Hackbutts, playing outside, were astonished at the hailstorm of records on the path and set up a squeal of excitement. The two cousins scuffled and swore and belaboured one another. Tilli shrieked for help, until the rest of the household rushed in and put an end to the fight.
“What is it? What was the matter?” asked Bobbie, looking from one furious young man to another.
Tilli was repeating, again and again:
“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! C’est un assassin, cet homme. Mais un assassin!”
“I don’t like his gramophone,” explained William, panting.
But nobody believed him, and Bobbie said very sharply:
“We can’t have this sort of thing in the house. If you want to fight, you must go out somewhere.”
Trevor, whose nose was bleeding, repeated in a muffled voice, from behind a pocket-handkerchief, that he should play the gramophone whenever he pleased.
William turned to Tilli, who had never ceased to hiss the word assassin at him.
“Stop that noise!” he said. “Go upstairs. And you, Peter, clear this thing away.” He pointed to the gramophone. “I won’t have it in the house. And some of you had better wash the floor.”
There were spots of blood on the strawberry paint where Trevor had been standing. And in the hall there were more spots and up the stairs to the bathroom, where he had fled to hold his head under a tap.
William went after his wife, up to their room. She had left off hissing and was standing in sullen silence before her purple dressing-table. In the glass she saw William come into the room and stand behind her. He was no longer scowling; his equanimity was almost re-established.
“I lost my temper,” he remarked pleasantly.
She turned round and looked him in the face.
“I think you are always a little late,” she told him. “If you had been wise, you would have lost your temper sooner.”
“If you don’t believe me,” said Sally, “come and see for yourself.”
Nigel joined her by the window and looked down into the garden.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” he asked.
“Haven’t you eyes?”
“I see Trevor and Tilli sitting under a mulberry-tree. I’ve sat with Tilli under that tree myself before now; but she wasn’t my mistress for all that. So I don’t think it proves that she’s Trevor’s. God, Sally! What a mind you’ve got!”
“Oh, yes! I know it’s all my dirty mind. You would say that. But don’t you be too sure. She’s very deep. And he’s deep too. I shouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t playing a very deep game between them.”
“I’ve seen Peter sitting under that tree with Lise. Of all the public places …”
“That’s just it. They go on in this open way just to put everybody off.”
“You’re quite mistaken. Trevor is too much set on making this settlement a success to get himself entangled with her. And besides, he’s got an odd puritanical strain. I’ve noticed it. I suppose it’s the Frobisher taint coming out. He’d have scruples; obligations to William and all that. I know Trevor and his scruples. He’s ashamed of them, but they’re there.”
“You haven’t any of them yourself, have you?”
“What d’you mean?”
“You don’t worry much about your obligations to William, do you? If it was you …”
“It isn’t me. It never was me.”
“Oh, yes, it was. Once upon a time. Only it turned out that she was only playing you up to make Trevor jealous.”
“Or you. And she certainly succeeded.”
“If she’d been serious, you wouldn’t have thought twice about William, or me either.”
“I never could stand a jealous woman.”
“I never trusted her. The very first day she came here I said to Lise …”
“She’s a married woman, anyhow.”
“Nigel! How dare you! After all I’ve done for you!”
“Well? What have you done for me?”
“I’ve given you the greatest thing a woman can give …”
“So you’re always telling me. I can’t see so very much to it.”
“And now you throw it in my face. I’m respectable. I’d always been respectable till I met you.”
“It does you credit, I’m sure.”
“And you bring me here to associate with people like that Tilli. Why, she never has a bath but once in a blue moon.”
“You can always go if you don’t like it.”
“Oh, if you want to turn me out …”
“You’re perfectly impossible. You know very well it was you who insisted on coming. I was against it. I didn’t think you’d get on with the other women. You’re too … respectable.”
“I didn’t think I was to be treated like this. But, of course, if you’re tired of me …”
“By God, I am tired of you and your eternal caterwauling! And, what’s more, if it goes on, Sally—do you hear this?—if it goes on, I won’t stand for it. You can do what you like about going or staying, but I’ve done with you.”
“After all I’ve …”
“You talk as if you’d got nothing out of it. Haven’t I kept you these three years?”
“I suppose you grudge me my food now. Not that you pay for it here.”
“All right. Say what you like. But you’ll only have yourself to blame if I leave you one of these days.”
“After all I’ve done for you! I’m sure I wish we’d never come near the place. I’m sick of it.”
“You couldn’t be more sick of it than I am. I’m sick of it and I’m sick of you.”
“I’ve given you the greatest …”
The door slammed behind Nigel, and Sally burst into tears. She cried in miserable, half-hearted little sniffs, for she had not the power to be effective, even in rage and despair. But there was a real passion of hatred in her eyes as she looked down once more at the garden, where Tilli sat with Trevor.
“All right,” she muttered. “All right. You just wait. You’ve taken him away from me. That’s what you’ve done. But we’ll see. You’re a lousy cat, but I’ll get even with you. Just you wait!”
And from that hour she kept her enemy under a strict watch, waiting her time. Her position in the household gave her plenty of opportunity for this surveillance. She had come to be regarded as a sort of unofficial assistant to Lise, a congenial task, full of small secrets, confidences and responsibilities. She ran errands, wrote lists and told tales of the servants. She liked to be obliging, and to be thanked, and to hear people say: “Oh, ask Sally.” The care of the linen cupboard was given over to her, and she gave out the clean sheets and bullied the little Hackbutts when they spilt tea in their beds, and was able to tell Lise in a whisper that William always slept in his dressing-room.
“And Trevor’s bed often isn’t slept in, either.”
“They all sleep on the roof in this hot weather.”
“They’ll spoil the mattresses.”
“Well, if William doesn’t mind …”
“William’s as blind as a bat. And a good thing too, I should say. If he wasn’t, he might see some funny things going on in this house. Of course, foreigners have different ways to us.”
“You’d better not let your imagination run away with you,” Lise advised her.
“Imagination! You don’t need much imagination where some people are concerned. No! But I’ll just tell you one thing I saw. You’re to let this go no further, mind.”
“You see so much, Sally.”
“I’ve always been pretty sharp, if that’s what you mean. If there’s anything going on, I always seem to notice it. But, mind you, I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you. I just happened to be looking out of my door when she was coming down from the bathroom …”
“She? D’you mean Tilli?”
“Yes. And I was thinking to myself: ‘Well, it’s a wonder, she’s had a bath for once.’ She had on that dressing-gown of hers with the green dragons. I must say I don’t think it’s very nice, do you, Lise?”
“It’s only a kimono.”
“But it’s all open under the arms. I wouldn’t wear such a thing. But, anyhow … Trevor was coming up the stairs, and, if you’ll believe me … well … I hardly like to tell you.”
“You’d better, now you’ve begun, or I shall imagine the most dreadful things.”
“I suppose it was an accident. It must have been. But she dropped her soap, or something, and stooping to get it, you know, this kimono fell right open!”
“I know. It’s a way they have.”
“I could see perfectly plainly. She was …”
“Oh, well, it was an accident.”
“That’s what I said to myself. But if it had been me, I must say I wouldn’t have passed it off with a laugh. I couldn’t.”
Lise made very little of this story, but Bertha Hackbutt was rather shocked when it came round to her. She retailed it to Mandy, and said doubtfully that it must have been an accident. Mandy replied that he was not sure.
“Why, Mandy! How can you? You mean …”
“I mean …” He nerved himself to speak the thought which had nagged at him for weeks. “I mean, Bertha, that the sooner we get ourselves out of here the better.”
“Oh, Mandy!”
Bertha looked quite dazed, as if somebody had knocked her on the head. She scanned his face anxiously, and then she looked round the sitting-room where they had been so snug. The caravan had been great fun. She had always insisted on that. But her heart sank at the thought of going back to it, and her tired, patient eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Mandy!” she said.
“I know, my dear. It’s hard on you. But I don’t like the way things are going here. It’s not what we expected: not what we understood, when first William invited us.”
“After all, it’s none of our business what the other people do here, is it?”
“I don’t like this communal life. William said nothing about it, when first he asked us to stay; and you know we were in two minds about coming when we realised what we were in for. But we were in such straits.”
“We are still.”
“My play is finished now.”
“I know, dear. But that won’t feed us or keep a roof over our heads.”
“I’m bound, some day, to get it taken, and then …”
“But, Mandy, where could we go? How could we live? We’ve sold the caravan.”
“People do live,” said Mandy desperately. “Nobody ever actually starves nowadays. At least, I never heard of such a thing. If other people manage to get along, I suppose we shall. Oh, Bertha? Don’t cry! You’re generally so brave.”
“I can’t help it. It’s all too much. It’s too much for me. Just when we’d got a little peace and quietness and decency. And the room looks so nice, with the rhyme sheets all pinned up. I could almost pretend it was the little house we planned to have when we got married. And Dorrie’s croup was so bad last winter, I know she’ll never get through another if we have to go back to that awful, rough life, and it was such a comfort to know that they were getting enough to eat, anyway. I’d never been so happy before. I might have known it was too good to last. Oh, Mandy! We must wait! We must wait until there’s some hope of you making some money. We can live on very little, ever so little, but we can’t live on nothing at all.”
Mandy groaned. It was all quite true. He wandered miserably about the room, the battered, useful room which was, to Bertha, a palace. He paused for a moment beside the special writing-table which was now his, where Marmaduke the typewriter might rattle all day without disturbance. And he remembered how hard it was to type on an upturned packing-case.
But it was Bertha’s gallant little attempts at decoration which smote him most bitterly. She had tried so hard to make the place look pretty, and it was a marvel to him that she should have kept the heart for it. He knew very well that the vagrant, uncertain life of the caravan was hateful to her, though she had tried to make a gay picnic of it all, because she loved him and because she was a woman of enormous courage. In her soul she hankered after some trim little house in a garden suburb, with art shades in distemper, and Monday washing-days, and a local dramatic society. In that life she would have been happy and contented, despite all their grinding anxieties and their seven hungry children.
“Do at least wait until one of your plays has been accepted,” she was entreating.
“That may be never.”
It burst from him unexpectedly, and they were both a little shocked. For he was usually the most hopeful of men—always on the point of making a fortune. But the truth had, in this moment of distraction, escaped him.
“If you feel like that,” she said slowly, “if you really feel like that, you’ve no right, no right, to take us all away from here. You ought to hang on as long as you can, for my sake, and the children’s.”
She faced him accusingly.
“I’m very fond of William,” he began.
“So am I. But I don’t put him before my children.”
“I can’t stand this life any more, Bertha. I can’t go on living on him, and thinking … as I do think … of his wife. Talking as we’ve just been talking.”
“I don’t believe anything at all,” cried Bertha, valiantly blind. “I don’t believe a word Sally says. It’s just her spite. She wants to make trouble. I’m sorry I told you. I didn’t know you’d take this line about it, else I wouldn’t have. After all, we know nothing.”
“We know nothing now. But it’s jumpy, the way we all live on top of one another. I’m frightened of what we may come to know before we’re through. Supposing (I’m just putting it to you), supposing we all found ourselves entangled in some ugly scandal. We might be dragged in as witnesses.”
“Do you mean … a divorce, or something like that?” she whispered.
“That sort of thing. It might happen. And think what a horrible case it would be. The whole circumstances … the publicity … Crowne is such an unfortunate name. Think of the figures we’d cut, living here on William, supposing we had come to know any really damaging facts against Tilli. Holding our tongues because it paid us. We must get away before it comes to that. We know nothing, as you say. We must go while there’s time.”
“It’s William’s fault. He ought to take her away. He ought to see …”
“Why should they go? This is their house.”
“But couldn’t you speak to him? Couldn’t you point out…”
“What could I point out? Nothing that he couldn’t see for himself, if he wanted to.”
“Still, it’s Trevor that ought to go, not us. If he had any decency, or any sense, he would go.”
“I daresay. But he hasn’t. No, it’s we who will have to go, I’m afraid.”
“You may. If your conscience is so tender, you can. But I shan’t. I shall stay here with the children. They shan’t starve, if I can help it, just because you’re a failure and can’t support us.”
“Bertha!”
“I must look out for myself and the children, if you won’t.”
“A failure! You never threw it at me before.”
“There’s a limit to everything.”
Mandy had turned quite green, as though he was going to be sick.
“In our worst times,” he said at last, “worse times than this, you never turned on me. Oh, I know it’s true, but it’s awful to hear you say it. I wish to God we’d never come here. A roof and food we’ve got, but that’s all. You hate me, don’t you?”
She flung herself on the floor beside him, repentant.
“Oh, Mandy, Mandy! Forgive me! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I oughtn’t to have spoken like that. It was wrong. I was wrong. Do forgive me!”
“You only spoke the truth, my poor girl.”
“You were quite right. This house has done us nothing but harm.”
“My poor Bertha! If it would do you and the children any good, I’d jump into the river, and be thankful.”
“No, no, no! Don’t talk like that. Of course our ship will come in some day.”
“It won’t. You know it won’t, and so do I. I am a failure, and I always shall be. I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried. Other men seem to get on, and I never could see why I shouldn’t too. But I don’t, though I can’t quite understand how it is. And you have to suffer for it.”
“I don’t suffer, because I’ve got you, and that makes me happy. I was wicked to speak like that. It was just in a moment of exasperation. You must forgive me. You must forget it. I’m sure I don’t want to stay in this horrible place one minute longer than we need. But oh … it’s the children, Mandy. What is going to happen to them?”
“I know.”
“Do at least speak to Trevor. Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you? It’s him or our children. Try to make him go away. He ought. He must go away, if he thinks it out.”
“I’ll try,” said Mandy heavily.
He kissed his wife and assured her many times that her hasty words had not hurt him. But they had, and she knew it. They never spoke of this dispute again, and they never forgot it. For the rest of their lives they thought of Monk’s Hall with shame, as a place where life had been too much for them.
Mandy waited a few days in a mood of miserable uncertainty, and then he went to Trevor, driven by a conviction that no more time could be lost.
“I detest coming to you about this,” he began. “But I’ve been talking to Bertha, and we agreed that I’d much better come straight to you.”
“Well?” asked Trevor crossly, adding: “The people in this house are always talking things over, and then coming straight to me. I never saw such a place. Is it about the use of the bathroom, because …”
“Oh, no. We’ve come to an agreement about that. It’s … it’s something much more disagreeable than that, I’m afraid. I … we … you … we think you ought to know that a good deal of gossip is going on in the house about you and Tilli.”
“Oh, really? No, I didn’t know. What sort of gossip?”
“The usual sort.”
“Who’s gossiping?”
“I gather that Sally is responsible for most of it.”
“Sally? What does she say?”
“Nothing very definite. I haven’t heard her. I only heard of it through Bertha. I suppose it’s the sort of thing that’s bound to go on among women, anywhere. But she hints at an accusation which would be very serious, if it were true. The sort of thing which, as William’s friends, we can’t allow to be said.”
“I see,” said Trevor thoughtfully. “I agree. I’ll talk to Sally. I’ll shut her up. Fancy Sally! That little rat of a woman! Who’d have thought it?”
“I don’t believe that talking to Sally will do much good. The harm’s done now.”
“Well, then, what do you expect me to do about it?”
“We thought you ought to know. It makes the atmosphere of the place very unpleasant for any friends of William’s. We don’t want, of course, to go away. In fact, it would be a disaster for us if we had to go just now, but …”
“Go? You aren’t thinking of going, are you?”
“We don’t want to,” repeated Mandy miserably. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to unless this sort of talk is stopped. And it won’t stop while Tilli and you are both here.”
“Then what’s the alternative?”
“Well, we just wanted to know … You did mention, the other day, that you would like to go to Dalmatia this autumn. And we wondered if you really had any plan of that sort.”
“Are you suggesting that I should go away?”
“Even if it was only for a time. It would mean that all this gossip might die down.”
“Well, I’m damned! Look here, Mandy. Are you suggesting that you believe any of Sally’s tales? Because if you are, say so.”
Mandy swallowed twice, thought of Bertha, and toiled on.
“We don’t believe a word of it. We know you well enough … but we don’t trust Tilli. That’s the long and short of it. Of course we don’t know her very well.”
“My dear fellow, either you believe this story, or you don’t. If you do, you must believe it of both of us. You can’t say that you believe it of her and not of me. Unless,” he added suspiciously, “there’s another man in the case. And if there is, my going away wouldn’t improve matters.”
“There’s no other man,” said Mandy, driven on to speak the truth. “But we don’t like the way things are going. We think you spend too much time with her: that you behave in a way that is bound to give rise to talk. We think the situation is the sort of situation which is bound to end in trouble of some sort. It’s giving the place a bad name in the neighbourhood already, so I’m told. I’m sorry. We don’t want to think this. But we can’t help it. And if we think it, we’d better go. Only Bertha was so unhappy that I promised her I’d speak to you before we made up our minds.”
“In case you could persuade me to go instead,” exclaimed Trevor bitterly. “Thank you, Mandy. It was very good of you. But don’t make up your minds in too much of a hurry. I’ll think it over. I’ll speak to Sally. I’ll make her take back every syllable of it.”
He went off, quite dizzy with rage, to have it out with Sally. But he got very little satisfaction from her.
“I never said a thing that wasn’t the truth,” she asserted. “Besides, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You’ve been slandering Tilli.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well, you’ve been criticising her.”
“What if I have? It’s no business of yours.”
“I won’t have gossip of that sort going on in the house.”
“Pardon?”
“If you haven’t definitely accused her, you’ve hinted at a very shocking thing. You know that quite well.”
“What sort of thing?”
“That she has been unfaithful to William.”
“With who?”
Trevor avoided the trap and said that accounts, on that point, seemed to differ.
“Well, you do surprise me!” said Sally.
“But you must understand that you can’t stay here if you talk in this way. If I hear any more of it I shall have to ask you to go.”
“Go? I’ll have to go, will I? I’ll go when William tells me to, and not before.”
“You came here, you and Nigel, as my friends, not his. And I won’t have …”
“You’ll turn us out? I like that! Because you think I see too much. But the Hackbutts and Lise and Bobbie, that daren’t say a thing for fear they’ll be turned off to starve, they can stay, I suppose? You can do what you like, and they won’t say anything. That’s a nice idea, I must say.”
“If this is the way you talk, the sooner you go the better.”
“Oh, really? It’s you that ought to go, let me tell you. Everybody says so. But, of course, you’ll turn us all out rather than go yourself.”
And she flounced off, leaving him speechless with surprise. He had never expected her to hold her own so well. And he remembered wrathfully that he had once been sorry for her. He had even taken the trouble to talk to her at parties because she looked so lonely. He wished now that he could wring her neck.
In spite of himself he began to wonder if she was right, and Mandy was right, and whether he had not better leave Monk’s Hall. The very idea of it was heartbreaking to him, for he knew that the Settlement would fall to pieces at his departure. His hopes and schemes, begun at first in idleness, had come to mean so much to him. He really believed that he might have made something of Monk’s Hall if only Tilli had left him alone.
He had not betrayed his cousin, and he was still trying to persuade himself that he never would. The possibility was fantastic. He did not love this woman. He was quite sure that he hated her. She no longer appeared to him as beautiful, amiable or intelligent. He still desired her, but he could in no way deceive himself as to the brutality of his relation to her. The hours spent in her company had been hours of degradation and torment.
Nor did he believe that she would ever yield to him. She was cold. She was playing with him. It was part of her infernally clever campaign to get rid of him. In time he would tire her out and then she would go away. He would remain: he would survive the storm she had brought into his life. She should not beat him in a duel like this.
But he had not foreseen the publicity of this affair, or the threatening of a scandal which would mean the ruin of all his plans. If in the minds of the whole party he was already Tilli’s lover, then she had succeeded in her aim just as surely as if he had really surrendered to her. The only course before him would be to pack up and go. He felt this so strongly that he got out his suit-case and began to study a continental Bradshaw for convenient boat trains. By lunch-time he had even put out all his ties upon a bed as a first step towards packing.
At lunch, however, all the reasons against departure came flowing back on him. Peter Yates was full of a printing-press which was to be set up in one of the barns. And this scheme reminded Trevor of all that Monk’s Hall was to have been. He recollected that his plans had scarcely begun to mature: that this group of people was but the nucleus of a future community which he had in mind. The very meagreness of this first year’s achievement had roused him to a much more passionate belief in the possibilities of his idea. But if he went away now, he would never see a day when Monk’s Hall would rank as a sort of Kelmscott. And how his mother would triumph!
“Yet one of us must go,” he thought.
He took care not to look down the long table, past the litter of food and flowers, to the place where Tilli sat silent at the bottom. But he knew exactly how she was crumbling her bread. He knew all her gestures by heart with a precision bred of hatred. He was aware that she had never glanced at him. And he wondered what was passing in her mind. He wondered what she would say when she knew that he was going. She would be pleased. And as soon as she had got rid of him, she would go away herself, for he was sure that she disliked the place.
Perhaps, if he went to her and said that he was going, confessed to surrender, she might, impossibly capricious as she was, wage war no longer. He thought that he knew the secret of her bitterness against him: it was because he had once rejected her for the sake of Monk’s Hall. Now she was avenged. She had the house. She had ousted him. And their quarrel had never really been over the house, but over his defiance of her power. On this score she was also even with him; his departure would prove it. She would know that he fled from her, and knowing this, she might forgive him. A confession of his own subjugation might end this long duel, and she, satisfied, might go away. An interview of some sort might be worth trying before he packed that suit-case upstairs. And he could not in any case go away until he had raised the price of a ticket, for he only had half a crown and that would not get him nearly far enough.
He thought that lunch would go on for ever. And in the midst of his perplexities he felt a sudden disgust for this herd life, with its noisy, disorderly meals. He was revolted by the great plates of pudding dealt out by Lise, the flat contradictions which Peter was shouting across the table to Nigel, the want of any real coherence. A picture of Water Hythe in its hushed security rose up before him. It would be very cool on a day like this. He almost wished himself there, in his mother’s dining-room, eating one of the very excellent salads which she used to make for him. She always made one on the first day of the holidays, because he loved them so, and never got them at school. Suddenly he was sorry that things had fallen out so badly between them. She was a wonderful old lady, in spite of her faults. Her life was all in a piece; she knew exactly what she wanted. It was a pity that she wanted such impossible things.
At last the meal was really over, and they all trooped out into the hall. Although he did not look, he was aware that Tilli had taken a red silk parasol and was gone into the garden. Outside it was very hot; the lawn danced in a dazzling shimmer of light. He took up a newspaper and pretended to read until the last of the chattering groups had disappeared. Then he went in search of her.
The sunshine was like a blow, it was so fierce. Even the children were languid and stayed indoors. He could not think that she had walked far, though he knew that she loved it. No day could be too hot for her, after the long winter which had so chilled her little bones.
He tracked her to the kitchen garden, where the four red brick walls threw back the heat like a furnace. Fruit ripened everywhere, in an abandoned profusion, but everything seemed motionless and dead in the glare, even the clusters of glutted wasps on the plum-trees. Tilli sat on an old wooden seat at the end of a long, box-edged path. Under the ruby shade of her parasol her pallor glowed warmly. She said nothing when Trevor came and planted himself in front of her
“I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said.
“You are going?”
“Yes.”
“I did not know.”
“Nobody knows. I’ve only just made up my mind.”
He liked the discomfort of this interview, in the glare. It would keep him to the point and make him brief. Nobody could talk for long in an oven.
“You know why I’m going,” he said, “and I hope you’re satisfied. You always wanted to drive me away, didn’t you? Well, you’ve done it now. You’ve got your house.”
“When are you going?” asked Tilli thoughtfully.
“To-morrow.”
“And you say that I have driven you away? How is that?”
He hesitated. The whole truth would be inopportune. He could not tell her that he was running away from gossip. She would laugh at him.
“You know quite well how it is,” he said at last. “I only want to tell you that you’ve got the house.”
“The house? But I do not want it.”
“That’s no affair of mine.”
“Quite soon I am going away. Perhaps at once. Then, Trevor, you could stay.”
He was unable to repress a start of eagerness. Smiling slightly, she went on:
“I think you have been very foolish. A year ago you ran away from me.”
“Yes.”
“And yet, if you had not been in such a hurry, you could have had this house, just the same. And, perhaps, I should not have married William. But now you will lose it all. But yes! you will lose it all. For I do not think that I shall go away just yet.”
“Tilli, what do you want? Do you want me to say I’m beaten? I’ve said it. Do you want me to apologise for my behaviour a year ago? I will, if you like. Do you want me to say that I daren’t go on living in the same house with you? I’ve practically said it already. You know I daren’t. What more do you want?”
“I do not want you to go away,” she said.
“I must, if you stay. I want you. I’ve always wanted you. Every moment here is torture to me. I can’t stand it any longer.”
“I do not want you to go away.”
“I daresay not. You like to see me suffer.”
“It is not necessary that you should suffer, as you call it. I have been angry with you. That I admit. But also I have loved you. Perhaps a great deal better than you deserve. But still I love you.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t.”
“I do. I would go away with you, if you would take me. But you wish to stay here; so I also shall stay here. You torment yourself for no reason at all.”
“Do you mean … But then, there’s William.”
“William! He is nothing to me any more.”
“I know. But I’ve lived on him for a year.”
“He has been foolish to allow it. Many times have I warned him.”
“Have you?”
“He should have sent you away, Trevor.”
“Of course he should.”
“But he would not listen. He will not see. I don’t think that he wishes to see.”
“I know. But still …”
Suddenly she lost her calm. She jumped up and faced him furiously.
“Still, still, still! You would rather go away! William will not know. But you would rather go away. Very well. You can go! Since you would prefer it, you can go. For me, I shall go too. I shall not stay with you or with William. You are both mad. I would rather be poor: I would rather live in London …”
“Don’t speak so loud! I hear people coming.”
“You think only of yourself. You are not so mad as you pretend. What do I care if they come? I don’t want to stay here. If I am going, they can say what they like. I shall be amused …”
“Oh, Tilli, do for heaven’s sake be quiet. I think they’re coming into the garden. Listen!”
There was a sound of voices beyond the brick wall. Sally was saying:
“What I tell Lise is this: she ought to count the pillowcases before they go to be aired. It’s not a bit of good …”
Tilli began to laugh softly.
“She is coming to pick fruit,” she said. “How it will interest her to find us here!”
They were trapped, for there was no way out of the garden but a door through which Sally must, in a few seconds, enter it. Trevor looked round wildly for cover. He could see none save a small potting-shed at the end of the path where the seat was. He touched Tilli’s sleeve.
“Come in here a minute,” he whispered hoarsely. “We must settle this.”
Tilli followed him, still laughing. And he could not help laughing himself. They scurried along the path, quivering with secret, intimate laughter. Trevor felt as though all his power of resistance was drowned in it. He pulled open the rickety door and drew her in after him. A hot, damp smell of earth and roots blew out at them, and as they shut the door a voice inside said:
“Why the hell didn’t you knock? You might have spoiled my whole day’s work, letting the light in like that.”
They remembered that this shed was sometimes used by Peter as a dark-room. Helplessly they stood in the sweltering darkness, beside his ruby lamp, while he showed them the negatives he had been developing. It was plain that Peter took their visit as a compliment.
After tea Trevor decided to pay a call upon his mother. It was many weeks since he had been to Water Hythe, and he hardly knew how he should behave when he got there, but an obscure hope drove him on. He told himself that he might induce her to help him, but he wished, really, to make her responsible for his ultimate decision. His suit-case was not yet put away, and, thanks to Peter, he was not yet finally committed with Tilli. If his mother would advance him a little money, he would stick to his plan of leaving Monk’s Hall immediately. If she refused to do so, she must be regarded as to blame for anything that might occur.
The unfairness of this arrangement was not apparent to his mind, for he had convinced himself that his situation was entirely due to his mother’s parsimony. If she had been more liberal, he would never have been forced to live in William’s house, in the dangerous neighbourhood of William’s wife. But he wanted the reassurance of knowing that she had once more refused to assist and understand him. For it was quite plain that he could not leave Monk’s Hall with a bare half-crown in his pocket. He had borrowed too much from William, and nobody else in the house had any money at all.
So he set off in a curious mood of bitter detachment, pretending to himself that his fate had been already taken out of his hands. He was so much detached that he was even able to argue with himself—with that small section of himself which retained, exasperatingly, a trace of Frobisher, a narrow, nagging rectitude of outlook which never had much effect upon his conduct, but which existed in his consciousness and made him uncomfortable.
“How can I help myself?” he enquired. “How can anybody help themselves? Look round you! Look at Bobbie, with his career ruined. Look at Mandy, drowning with eight stones round his neck. Look at Nigel! Look at William!”
“Bobbie,” said that inner voice, which was so like Catherine’s voice, “is suffering from his want of enterprise. He’d have done all right if he’d sold the place long ago and gone out to the colonies with Lise. Mandy shouldn’t have married without prospects. William is so self-centred that he ought never to have married at all, and Nigel deserves all he gets. You, Trevor, didn’t want to work for a living. Therefore you have got yourself into this mess. It is character, not circumstance, that shapes our lives.”
“I didn’t choose to be born. That was a circumstance over which I had no control whatever. And very important, too. If I had been born to a different mother, I might have been a different man. And this worship of character is pure Frobisher. I’m bound to react from it. In my father’s day it was a fashion to be earnest and striving and to go about proclaiming that one’s head was bloody but unbowed. If I hadn’t been forced to wallow in it as a boy, perhaps I shouldn’t have taken such a dislike to it.”
He was a little put out to find that Philip and Emily were sitting with his mother when he got to Water Hythe. They were all closeted together in the pleasant, shady gloom of the hall, and as he came in it struck him that they looked up with a sort of resentment at his intrusion. He wondered what family discussion was being interrupted.
Catherine, however, received him cordially and showed no surprise at his sudden visit. She gave him the feeling as if she had been waiting for it. She even looked complacent when Emily asked him for news of Monk’s Hall.
“Not much news,” mumbled Trevor. “The little Hackbutts can’t get rid of their hay fever, and Nigel got stung by a wasp yesterday. One of Bobbie’s pigs got into the kitchen garden the same day that one of Charlotte’s poems got into the Adelphi. Tuesday last week, I think it was. We began to rehearse Rosenkavalier, but we’ve decided we won’t act it, because I haven’t time to learn the part of Baron Ochs. That’s all. How did you get on abroad? You went to mountains, didn’t you?”
“Yes. The Tyrol.”
“Did you climb?”
“No. We walked up some.”
“You mean,” said Philip, “that we ran up. I never saw anyone go so fast as Emily does up a mountain. I couldn’t keep up with her. It nearly killed me. We aren’t going to mountains again, for if we do she will certainly come back a widow.”
“I see. And what is this rumour that your cactus has flowered?”
“Oh, you haven’t seen it!” cried Emily. “You must, before it’s over. They only do it once in a hundred years, you know.”
Catherine contradicted this, and for a few minutes they all grew very warm about the cactus. Trevor observed Emily curiously. He was aware of a change in her, but he did not think that it was for the worse. He would have said that she was even more beautiful than before; she had acquired a poise and placidity which were very compelling. Charlotte had found it dull, but then, Charlotte was a woman. In the old days he had admired Emily as he might have admired some beautiful picture or statue. He had been cold to her. But now it occurred to him to wonder that he had never been in love with his romantic cousin. No other woman of his acquaintance could compete with her. It was strange that this ripening of loveliness should have lain in wait for dull old Philip, who had not changed a bit. Philip was like a house or a hill. As one remembered him in childhood, so he remained.
Catherine beamed upon them both. She liked exhibiting the domestic concord of the Luttrells. It would be a good lesson for Trevor, a sermon on the futility of rebellion. Presently she took her niece away with her upstairs, with a mysterious reference to some things that she wanted Emily to see. The two of them went out with an air of secret importance, like two priestesses performing a rite, and Trevor turned vengefully on Philip.
“Is Emily writing another book?” he asked.
“No. She’s taking a rest from her writing.”
“She hasn’t given it up?”
“Well, I don’t know at all if she will go on. She feels, and I agree with her, that her work up till now has been very poor. It was striking, but too immature to be taken seriously. Not worth going on with.”
“And now she has the cactus to water.”
Trevor spoke low, and Philip, who was getting a little deaf, did not catch what he said.
“Very true,” he said. “But that reminds me. We were wondering the other day where all those early poems of hers can be. The things she wrote when she was quite a little girl. Some of them were most amusing. I should like to make sure that they are kept. She thinks that they are all in some old box together, but your mother has no idea where it can be.”
“I know. All our first efforts are together, somewhere in the attic. At least, it was there I last saw them. If they haven’t been moved, I could lay hands on them any time.”
“Well, I wish that you or Charlotte would have a look for them some day. I’d like to have them. I like to think of Emily when she was a little girl.”
His tone struck Trevor as being a great deal too complacent. And it was odd that he should like to think of Emily when she was a little girl, unless he had entirely forgotten what she used to be like.
“I’ll go and look for them now,” said Trevor. “I’ve nothing to do. If I find them, I’ll post them to you.”
He knew that he had better not sit with Philip any longer; the old temptation to be impertinent was nagging at him. So he hurried off upstairs, and as he passed the open door of his mother’s room, a fragment of conversation drifted out to him.
“… those are matinée coats. You’d better take them all, for you can’t have too many.”
“But, Aunt Catherine, aren’t they any use to you?”
“My dear child, I’ve kept them all these years, hoping that you or Charlotte …”
“Matinée coats!” thought Trevor, as he raced up the noisy attic stairs. “What a ridiculous idea! Why does she want so many? Nobody goes to matinées.”
The attic was large and stuffy and full of old-fashioned luggage. Last year’s apples, spread out on wooden trays, had made it smell like a cider-press. Long ago it had been a playroom for four children in wet weather. Their tramping feet, their laughter, had shaken the old beams. But now it was given over to silence, dust, and the sleepy buzzing of bluebottles. Emily’s skipping-rope still hung on a nail by the door, while under the window there was a heap of rusty skates, stringless tennis rackets, and torn butterfly-nets. All the ghosts of the household were collected in that room under its roof, and nothing looked as though it would be used or wanted any more. Yet a faint halo of romance, an immediate sense of the past, lingered over the broken musical instruments, the stamp-collections, typewriters, fishing-rods and framed school groups.
Trevor stood for a moment in the doorway with a sense that the room had been waiting for him. There had been a childish legend that it was haunted. Nobody ever used to go up there after dark. And now, though it was bright day, the little window was so thick with dust that a sort of twilight seemed already to have fallen. But it was not so dim that he could not perfectly descry the young man who sat on the trunk by the window. A smooth, round head was very clearly outlined against a beam of dusty light. It was bent forward intently, and after a second it turned upon Trevor a face that was familiar to him. He grew very cold in spite of the airless warmth of the attic. Time paused, while he stared, and his companion stared back at him, through the shadows, with a gaze full of meaning.
The panes of the window, a crack in the plaster on the wall, began to glimmer through the stare. The bent head was a dim shadow against the light. It was gone. Nobody was sitting on the trunk by the window.
Trevor breathed again, in a great sigh. At last he pulled himself together and went nearer. He told himself that it had been the heat and the closeness of the attic. In so faint a light it would be possible to imagine anything. Nor was it the first time that his sight had deceived him in such a way. Once he had seen a school friend, standing at the edge of a pool where he was bathing. At his call the figure vanished. It was a trick, an illusion of shifting lights among the bushes beside the pool. And this also was an illusion. But it is never comfortable to see oneself …
For some time he could not pluck up courage to open the trunk by the window. He nearly went away. But at last, a little gingerly, he pulled up the lid, and a great blast of camphor rushed out at him. A snowstorm of loose pages, all scrawled over in a round hand, fell out on to the floor in a cascade. It was “The Pollipantos, an Imaginary History of an Island, by William and Emily Crowne.” The whole tray of the box was full of it. Trevor picked out a page, and read:
“Now when we had sailed 50 leaugs we sounded and it was 30 fathums. And by the bits of driftwood and leaves floating past us and by the appearance of the birds flying over the masts which were robbins, wrens and etc., we congectured that land must not be many leageus away. So we sent up the cabbin boy, an ajile and noble youth, called William, and he cried out Land I see! so that all hands broke into a cheer.”
This was Emily, and he put it on one side for Philip. But the next sheet was William’s. He knew it by the Greek E, an affectation which had prevailed at Bassetts in those days.
“The blackness of the night the denseness of the pathless virgin forest and the loud roaring of savage beasts the hissing of serpents the buzzing of deadly poisonous insects smote upon our terrified years. Our spirist qualed but the corage of the dauntless William encoraged us a good deal. Follow me! he cried dashing fearlessly into the pathless virgin …”
Trevor read on, rummaging among the strewn sheets on the floor. They carried him back into the past, until four lost children, emerging from these scribbled sheets, were sprawling beside him in the dusty sunshine. And as his mind ranged back over the years, he was fain to ask himself whether any trace of those children could still be discerned, or whether any germ of their present selves had been at work, shaping them, in those former days. He wondered if their growth, their inevitable change, had ever been conscious, and if they had had any sort of choice.
It seemed to him that they had not. There had been no real freedom. Irresistible, uncomprehended forces had been at work on them. Passion had broken up the single, divine vision of childhood. Distrust and danger had stolen on them unawares. At no point could they have helped themselves, because at no point could they have known what was being done to them. The uselessness of struggle, of flight, was borne in upon him overwhelmingly.
With a heavy heart he sorted out Emily’s work from the rest. For Emily was the only one among them who had ever, consciously, defied her fate. And now she was the most lost of any. She was married. She was happy. Happiness had engulfed her.
He took his way downstairs, with a last backward glance to make sure that the attic was really empty. The Luttrells had gone, and the time had come for him to make his request to his mother. Perfunctorily he made it, as they stood in the porch together, though he knew very well that no good would come of it, But he thought:
“I’d better try. I don’t know for certain till I’ve asked her. If I’m going to escape, I shall. If not …”
“Mother,” he said, “can you lend me a little money?”
“Why, Trevor?”
“I want to go away. I want to go abroad for a time. I think it would be a very good thing if I did.”
“You want to leave Monk’s Hall?”
“Not exactly. I want to get away from it for a time. Things aren’t easy there.”
Catherine was aware of this, for Tilli’s tales had not been carried for nothing.
“It’s what I’ve been expecting,” she said. “When you are my age, Trevor, you’ll learn to foresee things more.”
“I daresay. But one never learns that until it’s too late to be much use.”
“You can always take the advice of older people, you know.”
“What’s your advice to me now?”
“You know very well. Adopt a profession and work hard at it. If you will undertake to do this, we will discuss the question of money. You must know that I don’t grudge you anything.”
“I know, mother. But I want to get away at once.”
Catherine paused and reflected. She did not think that it would be wise to make things too easy for Trevor. It might be better that he should stay at Monk’s Hall until he was heartily tired of it. If she kept him waiting he might learn to be a little more reasonable.
“Why are you in such a hurry to go?” she asked.
“I can’t explain. There’s been a certain amount of quarrelling, and I can’t work.”
“Ah!” She repressed a smile. “I’ll think it over.”
“You won’t give me anything now? To-night? I’ll pay it back later on. I haven’t a penny, and I can’t get away unless I can raise a few pounds.”
“Certainly not to-night, Trevor.”
“Oh, very well.”
He turned on his heel and was gone. Nor would he pay any attention when she called after him. As he strode across the lawn, she stood rather sadly in the porch, watching him. She was inflexible, but tormented. The long martyrdom of motherhood was as heavy on her as it had been on the first day that she had let him walk by himself, and he fell down and cut his head. There were tears on her cheeks as she turned reluctantly back into the house. The portrait of Frobisher by Watts looked down with an impassive woodenness upon her grey and shaking head.
Trevor hurried through the fields and over Ash Hill. The woods were full of children’s voices, and as he crossed the grove he came upon a peaceful group. Emily and Bertha Hackbutt were sitting together on the grass. They were tired, after the long day, and they sat silent, their busy women’s hands lying idle in their laps. Round them, on every side, young children were sprawling and staggering. Bobbie’s hen-coops, put out on the hill for the summer, were close by, and hens pecked about in the grass among tumbling babies. A herd of little pigs went grunting through the bushes. Pigs, hens and babies seemed to be massed together in one fine confusion of live-stock. It was a teeming, fertile picture. The two women sat in the midst of it, immobile, ruminative rather than thoughtful. They surveyed the country with blank eyes. Bertha would sometimes cast a word of command to one of her boys, but her chidings were languid. She looked like a farm woman, a great russet cow, chewing the cud. Emily’s beauty was asleep. She, too, in her fecundity and her silence seemed to be mindless, benevolent and calm, like the earth which bore her.
And Trevor, looking at them, pondered once more upon the immense secret strength of women, their immutability, the folly of resistance to their hidden forces. He felt that he had known it all in some other life. He had seen before, with the same pang of dread, a group of women and children sitting on the ground amid possessions, cattle and live-stock. Since those days he had changed. But these would never change. They were stronger than men in their resistance to time and circumstance. They moved to a rhythm of their own, the slow rhythm of the earth. They hearkened to a wisdom of their own, a terrible, ancient, wordless wisdom. Man, in his brief agonies, may sow and reap and build cities and name the stars, but he comes at last to lay his bones in those fields which he has called his own.