Eustace and Hilda (20 page)

“Was it dark in the church? Were you frightened?”

“Oh no. It's a very light church as churches go, no stained glass in the windows. I wasn't frightened. I've been to so many funerals. Besides, there was nothing to be frightened of.... Now, let me have that foot. Why, I declare it's shivering. Are you cold? Shall I turn on some more hot water?”

“No, I'm not cold,” said Eustace. “I was only thinking of her in the coffin. It must have been dark in there, mustn't it? And she couldn't move or get out, like I can here. She never could move very easily, of course. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for her. I always used to fetch little things for her, but she called for Miss Grimshaw when she wanted to get up. Was Miss Grimshaw there?”

“Yes, she was sitting in front with the relations, cousins I think they were.”

“I wish I'd been there,” said Eustace, “I'm sure she wondered why I wasn't. I'm sure she'd rather have had me than Miss Grimshaw. If I had died she wouldn't have been well enough to go to my funeral,” he went on tearfully, “but I was quite well enough to go to hers.”

“Now, now,” said Minney, scrubbing vigorously. “Look at that brown spot. It doesn't come out whatever I do. It must be under the skin. We discussed all that. Little boys don't go to funerals. Miss Fothergill wouldn't have wished it. She said to me more than once, ‘I want him to enjoy himself.' If it makes you cry to hear about it, what would you have been like if you'd been there? I've told you,” she added, “it really wasn't so sad. She was an old lady, and ill, and she suffered a great deal, and I dare say she wasn't sorry to go.”

“Would it have been sadder if I'd died instead?” asked Eustace.

“Well, some people might think so, but I should say good riddance to bad rubbish. Anyhow you're not dead yet, not by any means. The other leg now, unless you've lost it!”

“What was the grave like?” asked Eustace. “Was it a very deep hole like a well in the middle of the church? Could you see to the bottom?”

“She wasn't buried in the church,” Minney told him. “She was buried outside in the churchyard, in the sunshine. There was a wind blowing, and the men had to hold on to their hats. Dick Staveley's came off, and he looked so funny running after it and trying to look dignified at the same time. Your Aunt Sarah looked very nice. I always say, the plainer the clothes she wears the better they suit her. And your Daddy looked such a gentleman. It's funny how a man always seems to look younger in a top hat. We'll have you wearing one, one of these days.”

“Should I look younger?” asked Eustace.

“You might, you look so old and ugly now.”

“I'm sure you looked very nice too,” said Eustace, momentarily hypnotised by Minney into seeing Miss Fothergill's interment as a kind of fashion parade.

“Oh, I don't care what I look like as long as I look neat. I do hate to look untidy. Especially,” added Minney incautiously, “at a funeral. Stand up now,” she went on hastily, “and I'll finish you off.”

Eustace obediently stood up. Minney had told him a great deal, but he felt that there was still something he wanted to ask her, some question which she had perhaps deliberately evaded. He did not know what it was, but as the ritual of the bath drew to an end the unspoken, unformulated inquiry pressed at the back of his mind demanding utterance. He felt that if he failed to include it in his interrogation of Minney something would go terribly wrong; not only would this interview, which could never be repeated, be wasted, but the whole of his relationship with Miss Fothergill would be stultified and meaningless. A door would close on his memories of her to which he would never find the key.

It was some feeling that he wanted, a feeling that he would have had if he had been present at the funeral, a feeling of which Minney, with her intuitive understanding of the paths of least resistance in his mind, was wilfully defrauding him. He felt sure she would supply the answer, release the sensation that his heart was groping for, if only he could surprise her into telling him. It must be something worthy of his friendship with Miss Fothergill, something that would recapture and retain for ever a fragment of the substance of his experience with her, since their original meeting near the Second Shelter. The minutes were passing and he would miss it, he would miss it.

“Was that all?” he asked lamely. “Did you come away then?”

Minney felt, perhaps justifiably, that she had done very well. She had kept Eustace interested, as she could tell by the fact that he had stopped shivering, and by many other signs. She had made the funeral seem like an ordinary afternoon's outing, almost a picnic. She had soothed and calmed herself. If she was jealous of Eustace's affection for Miss Fothergill she was unconscious of being so, for she was a generous-minded woman; but she thought, as Miss Cherrington did, that it was looming too large in his life, and that it was an obstruction to the normal development of his nature.

In this perhaps she was right. The pressure, personal and moral, that Hilda had brought to bear on Eustace had deflected the current of his being. His spirit had been exhausted, not so much by his encounter with Miss Fothergill as by the act of rebellion with which he had tried to avoid it. The consequences of the paper-chase, that seeming judgement from Heaven, lay heavy on his health but still more heavily on his spirit, warning it off the paths of adventure it was just beginning to tread. Though disabled it was by no means broken; it had sought and found fulfilment in the charmed shelter of Laburnum Lodge. But at a sacrifice—if it be a sacrifice to escape from the muddy, turbulent main stream into an enchanted backwater. In an indoor atmosphere, prepared by affection and policed by money, youth's natural dislike of what is ugly and crippled and static had dropped away from Eustace. To find his most intimate satisfaction in giving satisfaction, to be pleased by pleasing, this was the lesson that Miss Fothergill had taught him. She did not mean to. She had tried not to. No woman, certainly no young woman, wishes a man she loves to be deficient in desire and indifferent to the call of experience. She is jealous of his emotional security even if it rests in her. That was why the female element in Cambo, directed by Hilda, had forced on Eustace the revolutionary step, the complete change of barometric pressure, that his commerce with Miss Fothergill involved. And that was why, when he began to thrive in the new climate, they instinctively felt he had vegetated enough. Minney, who was not the least fervent of his well-wishers, shared their view.

She heard his voice, more insistent now, repeating the question:

“Was that all, Minney? Did you go away after that?”

“Now let me see. Where was I?... Oh yes!” Minney thought she saw her way clear. “Well, it wasn't quite over. You see, they had to bring the coffin out of church, and they carried it to the graveside, and put it down with all the flowers, the wreaths and the crosses beside it——”

“Did you see my flowers?” Eustace asked.

Minney said she had. “And then, of course, we all stood round without moving, the gentlemen bare-headed. Miss Cherrington and your father and I, we stood a little way back, because, of course, we weren't great friends of Miss Fothergill's, only acquaintances, through you really, and we didn't want to seem to push ourselves forward, since Miss Fothergill's friends and relations aren't anything to us, of course, and I doubt if we shall ever see or hear of them again. Now just slide down under the water, Eustace, and wash off all that soap, and then I'll give you a good rub with this hot towel here.”

Carefully, gingerly, unconsciously observing the economy of movement demanded by the peril of the Death-Spot, Eustace allowed himself to be submerged; but his mind still cried out for the appeasement, the signal of dismissal, the final stab of intense feeling, without which the past year and all it meant to him would be like a victory without banners, a campaign without a history, a race without a prize.

“Tell me a little more,” he begged.

“There's nothing more to tell,” said Minney, relief brightening her voice. “The clergyman went to the graveside while the coffin was being let down, and said something over it.”

“What did he say?”

Minney hesitated. There was a passage in the Burial Service which she knew by heart: and it came at the exact moment that Eustace was asking about. She could not hear it without crying, and even the recollection of it pinched her throat and pricked the back of her eyes with tears. The emotion was her tribute to mortality everywhere, not especially to Miss Fothergill; but she didn't want to let Eustace see it, and she said:

“Oh, it's something they always say at funerals. They say it for everyone, you know, not just for Miss Fothergill. You wouldn't understand it if I told you.”

But while she was speaking an echo of the sentences made itself heard in her mind and altered the expression of her face. Eustace noticed the involuntary quivering of her lips and was immediately aware of an inner tingling, as though part of him that had gone to sleep was coming to life.

“Please tell me, Minney,” he said, “it won't matter if I don't understand.”

His head pillowed on the dingy enamel he looked up at her, at her kind plain face which, under the stress of indecision, had become remote and impersonal and stern. “Perhaps I can manage it,” she thought, and she opened her lips, but the tremor round her mouth and the ache in her throat warned her to stop. She drew a long breath and looked down at Eustace. His eyes were fixed on her in a look of entreaty, something shone in them that she had not seen before and that at once kindled in her an answering flame and an overwhelming impulse to tell him what he wanted to know. She felt she owed it to him. Yet still she hesitated, by training, by second nature, unwilling to recognise his status as a human being, his right to suffer as grown-up people suffered. Yet why not? He would have to learn some time, why not now while there was still in sorrow the balm and healing which he unconsciously desired?

Minney's face assumed a solemn, set expression as though carved in wood, and in a voice unlike her own, but not unlike a clergyman's, she began to speak, looking across Eustace at an imaginary congregation beyond the bath-room wall.

“‘I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead that die in the Lord....'”

Suddenly the wooden mask crumpled; her voice choked and she could not go on. Tears ran down her face and dropped with heavy splashes into the bath. Eustace gazed at her in bewilderment; he had never seen her or any grown-up person lose control before. Then, feeling in himself the effect that the words had had on her, and moved by the sight of her distress, he too began to cry. The sound of sobbing filled the room and mingled with the chuckling and gurgling of the hot-water tank. With a blind plunging movement Minney turned away and wiped her eyes on a corner of Eustace's towel. Meanwhile he, possessed by unrecognisable emotions and fearful of losing them, cried with unconscious cruelty:

“What else did he say, Minney? What else did he say?”

The habit of authority, which would have bidden her tell Eustace, “Now, now, that's enough,” had forsaken Minney. She returned to the barrier of the bath, composed her face as well as she could, and forgetting where she had left off, began again:

“‘I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, from henceforth blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; even so, saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.'”

Eustace was transported by the beauty of the words. They glowed in his mind until, perhaps from some association with his present position, they turned into a golden sea, upon the sunshine-glinting ripples of which he and Miss Fothergill, reunited and at rest from their labours, floated for ever in the fellowship of the blessed. He had never felt so near to her as he did now. Perhaps he was no longer alive; perhaps what he once dreaded had come to pass, and he had been drowned in the bath without noticing it. If so, death was indeed a blessed thing, buoyant, warm, sunshiny, infinitely desirable.

Withdrawn in ecstatic contemplation, Eustace failed to see that on Minney the words of promise had had a very different effect. She was weeping more bitterly than before. In an effort to hide her emotion she had stooped down to pick up his dressing-gown, which was lying on the floor. But her sobs betrayed her, and Eustace, hearing them and missing the much-loved face which had been the day-spring of his celestial imaginings, returned to reality with a painful jolt. Intent on comforting her he hastily pulled himself out of the bath, tidal waves of unexampled grandeur swept round it, and one slapping billow, not content with inundating Rome, climbed and climbed towards the Death-Spot....

So much he saw from the tail of his eye as he ran to Minney. “No, no,” she said, forestalling with the bath-towel his proffered embrace. “You mustn't kiss me. Look how wet you are. You're making a pool, and if you go on crying” (Eustace was now mingling his tears with hers) “it'll grow into an ocean. There, there, I'll dry your eyes and you can dry mine.” Having rendered each other this service they smiled, and both were surprised, for it seemed as though they had been a long time without smiling. “How tall you are,” said Minney. “Why, you'll soon be right up to my shoulder. I should like to see you a little fatter though!” The clanging of a bell, rhythmical, irritable and insistent, interrupted her. “You will be late for supper,” said Eustace, alarmed.

“Only a little,” said Minney. “I can still hear them talking. Listen!”

The sound of two voices, each burrowing a separate track into the silence, came up from the room below.

“Do you think they're talking about the funeral?” asked Eustace.

“Oh, we're going to forget all about that; that's over and done with. Poor Miss Fothergill! Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?”