Eustace and Hilda (44 page)

The room was filling up now with members ordering their pre-prandial sherry. They stared at Antony, but he went on as though unconscious of them.

“But we were talking about Dick. Well, he had rather a chequered career. I think he was always slightly in revolt against the stiffness and stuffiness of Anchorstone—hence the practical jokes, which were more startling than funny. He wanted life to be dangerous. That was quite in the Staveley tradition, in a way; they were always a menace to any bird or beast that crossed their path. But he used to say he thought the animals ought to be armed too, and once he dressed up as a pheasant and peppered one of the shooters. Of course there was a frightful row and he was made to apologise, but a good many people thought it rather funny. And at Oxford he was the same—he was at your college, you know, and he once said what a good thing it would be if the Garden Quad could be turned into a zoo, with lions and tigers frisking about in it, livening up the Dons and the more sedentary undergraduates. He organised one or two rags too, of the more painful kind, which ended in broken bones and the Acland Nursing Home. He used to walk about, so I've been told, with a secret smile, as though he had put a time-bomb under the University and was waiting for it to go off.”

“That was before the war, I suppose,” said Eustace. “I'm glad he's not here now. Shall I be held responsible if he tries to blow up the Flat?”

“Oh, now he's more rangé. At least I should think so. But he used to be rather a heart-breaker too. Before the war he had an affair with a village maiden, which nearly ended in the law courts; and during the war he got involved with a young unmarried girl of good family, which was much more serious.”

“Why was it more serious?” Eustace asked.

“Well, socially, I mean. What made it more unfortunate was that she was engaged to be married, and because she had been talked about, the young man broke it off. In old days that would have counted against Dick, he would have been cold-shouldered, you know, and not asked about. But he had done so well in the war that it was forgiven and almost forgotten. He would have done even better, I believe, if he hadn't preferred danger to discipline and been plus guerrier que la guerre, so to speak.”

Eustace laughed.

“I am glad you told me all this. Now I shall be on my guard.”

“But that's ancient history,” said Antony. “After the war he stayed on in the Middle East, among the Arabs, and made quite a name for himself as a mystery man, a sort of small-scale Colonel Lawrence. There were a great many rumours—that he was never coming back, that he had become a Mohammedan and kept a seraglio, that he was fighting against us, that he was dead and being impersonated by an Arab (he looks rather like one), and so on. He was as legendary and elusive as Waring or the Scarlet Pimpernel. Now, it appears, he has given all that up, and come back to be a politician—a rising hope of the stern, unbending Tories. Though from what I hear of his speeches he sounds more like a Socialist or a revolutionary or what is this new-fangled thing?—a Fascist.”

“Do you think he's a man to beware of?” asked Eustace.

“Oh
no
,” said Antony, pouncing on the negative like a cat on a mouse. “He's rather a picturesque figure in our drab age. Glamorous, you know, without the Hollywood association of the word. At least, that's how he would like to appear. I'm not sure myself that it will come to anything.” He looked up and saw the clock. “Oh, Eustace, it's a quarter to eight. I must fly. And we haven't talked about you at all. Just wasted time on those dreary Staveleys. It's all my fault. When can we meet?”

“Well, I'm free almost any time,” said Eustace.

“You're not, you're not,” wailed Antony, and an expression of the deepest woe took possession of his features. “You have a permanent engagement with Stubbs's Charters, an everlasting alibi.”

“No, no,” protested Eustace. “I've finished with him. I'm a chartered libertine now.”

“Oh, how witty you are,” Antony exclaimed. “But if it isn't Stubbs, it'll be something else; I know you delight in bondage. You're like Andromeda, rejoicing in her rock.”

“Indeed not,” said Eustace. “I pray for an appointment with Perseus.”

“Well, then,” said Antony, “let me find my little book.” He began to dive into his pockets; his hands came out full of letters and envelopes. “Isn't it awful?” he said. “I haven't answered any of them.” He threw them into the chair and rose to his feet, to have greater freedom of movement for the search.

All round them conversations ceased, and the members began to eye Antony, some with raised eyebrows, others with scarcely concealed smiles—for his inability to find his engagement book had become a legend with his friends. Some maintained that it didn't exist; others, who had seen it, as Eustace had, declared that it was just a means of gaining time, of lulling the inviter, or invitee, into a false security. As to whether it was a good sign, for the fulfilment of the engagement, that the diary should be found, opinion was sharply divided, one section affirming that Antony never broke, another that he never kept, an engagement that was written down in his book.

“Here it is, here it is,” he cried. “Strange, I never knew I had this pocket. It must have been put in by the tailor to confuse me.”

He retreated towards the fireplace like a dog with a bone, and began to ruffle the leaves. “Wednesday seems to be full up, and there's a blot all over Thursday. What can that mean? Friday sounds such an inauspicious day. Would you be free on Friday?”

“I'm sure I could be,” said Eustace; “but don't bother, Antony.”

Antony groaned, and frowned portentously at the little book.

“Somehow I don't
like
the idea of Friday. It's so near the weekend, for one thing, and one never knows what will happen then. And next week seems so far away, and yet so near the end of Term. Perhaps it
is
the end of Term?” He fixed on Eustace a look of anguished interrogation. “You can't tell me? Of course not. Look, look, I'll write to you. No, I'll telephone, that would be better, so much quicker and more satisfactory. We know where we are, then. But I remember you haven't got a telephone. I haven't either. No one has. Such a stupid arrangement. Do they expect us to communicate like birds of the air? Oh, dear, what shall we do? Perhaps if I sent a messenger from the lodge, and asked him to wait——”

Eustace was too intent on observing the criss-cross flight of Antony's mind, tortured by the intolerable necessity of pinning itself down, to hear the door open; but he became aware of a stir behind him, and looked up to see five or six members of the Lauderdale Society standing round. They were in evening dress and a little self-conscious, and with them was an older man, not at all self-conscious, despite the carnation in his buttonhole.

‘What is he doing here?' thought Eustace, his mind, as often, halting between the rival reality of two situations. ‘He doesn't belong to our party. He must be looking for someone. He'll go away if I stop thinking about him. He
must
go away, he doesn't fit in.' Warm and relaxed by friendship, his being shrank from the effort of encountering a stranger. But the stranger did not move away, and studying his face, the features of which were so much more declared and positive than those of the faces round him, Eustace began to remember it, and as he remembered the stranger began to smile.

“You must be Eustace Cherrington,” he said. “The last time I saw you I gave you three cheers. But I expect you've forgotten?”

Eustace was tongue-tied; for a moment he was back on the sands at Anchorstone, with Hilda beside him and the wind blowing against their tear-stained faces, while Dick, at the head of his troupe, broke the news of Miss Fothergill's legacy.

“That was a long time ago,” he began, but Dick had turned away and Eustace heard him say, “Good Heavens, there's Antony!”

Antony, clasping his recovered correspondence, gave Dick a glance like the flight of a crooked arrow. “You must look me up,” he said. “Eustace'll tell you where.”

With his conjurer's flair for disappearance he melted from them: the air, with which he had so much in common, seemed to receive him into its transparency. Dick turned to Eustace.

“You must tell me all about yourself,” he said, “and about your sister. Wasn't her name Hilda?”

“It still is,” said Eustace, “but think of you remembering.”

R
ETURNING
to Willesden for the vacation, Eustace found that he missed Barbara much more than he had expected to. Admittedly she had been a noisy and disturbing element. At ordinary times she tripped, whisked, and scurried; if she was in a hurry or put out, she rattled and banged; her progress—and she was never long in the same place—was marked by the slamming of doors or by doors left open; she laughed and giggled and let fly volleys of little screams, like parakeets escaping from a cage; the moment she came in the telephone began to ring, and her voice, which for telephone purposes was high-pitched and self-conscious, could be heard all over the house; she was never more in his way than when she was telling him, with quick rushes of explanation and apology, that she must get out of it; she made the house feel much smaller and more cramped than it need have. And then there were the evenings which he had described to Stephen, when the gramophone droned to the strains of jazz, or revolved unheeded, with an insistent, sibilant, breathy whisper, while voices, unwillingly subdued, discussed which record to put on next, and Eustace waited for the tune to start and the rhythmic shuffle to begin.

It had been trying; it was the kind of thing that anyone who wanted to work had a right, perhaps even a duty, to complain about, and Eustace, who had a strong sense of what other people would think tiresome, and was more influenced by that than by his own grievances, did complain, to outsiders, if he thought he could make his sufferings sound funny. But he had been obscurely aware that all these manifestations of unreason had a purpose and were a prelude to something. They were the noises of the orchestra tuning up, getting itself ready to play its piece.

The wedding was the first chord: in it the meaning of these seemingly aimless dissonances suddenly appeared. But the piece was being played elsewhere, at Barbara's little house in Hitchin, and the sounds that reached Willesden were only echoes from a distant concert room.

He ought to have been relieved, but he was not, for with the confusion a kind of virtue had gone out of the place. Silence reigned and Eustace had become aware of his own footsteps and the ticking of the clock. The routine which Barbara had so of-ten interrupted became a kind of tyrant demanding excesses of regularity.

Long ago Aunt Sarah had canalised her life; it never overflowed or enriched the land round it with the untidy detritus of living. Eustace felt that he was to blame; he had grown up too much in awe of her to try to get into touch with her. He had too easily taken it for granted that she disapproved of him. Hilda and Barbara had grown up under the same shadow, but they hadn't been chilled by it. They were at their ease with Aunt Sarah—why wasn't he? Of course Hilda, though so different, and planned on a so much larger scale, had been Aunt Sarah's spiritual child: they took the same things seriously. Barbara was irrepressible—a hundred Aunt Sarahs could not have daunted her; she wanted life, not an attitude to life, and Miss Cherrington seemed able to understand this, better in a way than he did, and not to resent it.

Eustace looked back and could see in his past life few signs of the adolescent fevers and eruptions, the sudden heats and flushes, the ungainliness, the awkwardness, the untidiness, the undiscriminating enthusiasms, the instinct to snatch and spoil and waste, to discover fresh personalities, to experiment with friends, and clothes, and catchwords, to quarrel and make it up, to follow the fashion, to be silly and frivolous and unashamedly selfish—which were the signs of Barbara's spring-time.

For him those days had been swallowed up by the war—the war that had added four years to his life, but given nothing to its content, which had put him back with men, except for Stephen, much younger than himself, whose point of development, suitable to them but not perhaps to him, he had adopted. His emotional life was not stationary, it was actually retrogressive. How much farther back shall I go? he wondered. For the slowing-up process had not begun with the war.

True, Army life, and the routine of a Government Department had gone against his nature, they gave him nothing to reach out to, and it was then that he first consciously cultivated the stoicism of outlook, the mental habit of enduring rather than experiencing, of standing outside what was happening, which had seemed at the time not only helpful but noble. But he could find traces of it, unconsciously practised, long before that: even at school, where he had been a personage and appreciated and lived in the heart of things. His memory sped back to the sands of Anchorstone, to the period of Hilda's supreme domination, to Miss Fothergill's drawing-room where he had temporarily exchanged that domination for another less obvious but more intimate, more—more weakening. What had taken him to Laburnum Lodge? On flew his thoughts. Why, the backwash of the paper-chase—the paper-chase, his one gesture of rebellion and defiance, his one great bid for freedom.

If only that gesture had succeeded! But everything had conspired to make it a fiasco: the fainting in the woods, the torturing anxiety of everyone who loved him, the long, expensive illness from which his health, he fancied, had never fully recovered—all brought on by self-will, by disobedience, by not doing what he was told, by thinking he knew better. It was then that he had subconsciously decided that what he wanted was automatically wrong, and that to strike out for himself was to infringe the Moral Law. If I'd had more vitality, thought Eustace, perhaps I shouldn't have been so logical. And I might have been more enterprising if I'd been kicked out into the world, to sink or swim. But Miss Fothergill's legacy took away the risk of that. I had her eighteen thousand pounds to fall back on. For a moment he tried to wish he hadn't had it; but as the mental effort failed, and reality asserted itself, he felt a warm rush of relief. He could see her hand in its black mitten, the hand like the hand of a lion which he had once dreaded so much, stretched out under its loose lace sleeve to give him the shilling he had won from her at piquet. The hand, the mortmain, was still extended, still doling out shillings.