Eustace and Hilda (47 page)

Eustace stood in thought, then began to go slowly down the hill. At once he felt better. But what shall I say to Hilda and Aunt Sarah? he thought. How shall I explain it? I shall have to say I had a heart attack; then they'll send me to a doctor and he'll order me to rest for six months. I shall miss Oxford, and I shan't be able to go to Anchorstone Hall on June the 3rd, and I shall never start to earn my living. He stopped again, and at once his breathing became more difficult. Oh, come now, he thought,
that
can't have done me any harm. And if I'm going to have a heart attack, I shall have it before I get home, anyway, so I might just as well have it here. He turned round. The maiden, the peasant and the two unidentified figures scrambled from behind the rock and besought him not to go on. ‘You will rue it if you do!' they wailed. But the youth was obdurate, and pointed rather self-consciously to his banner.

Something seemed to be dragging at his feet; his heart swelled in his breast, and his steps came slower. Far below him he heard a cry: ‘Beware the awful avalanche!' There was a roaring in his ears; the hill seemed to stretch up interminably into a great cone like the Matterhorn, and then without any warning but the roar, the cone seemed to slide from its place and topple down towards him. Trees, telegraph poles, houses, were tossed this way and that, springing, bouncing, disappearing; last of all came the clinic, riding on the crest of a huge hollow breaker of earth and rock. Now it was right over him; he could see the nurses leaning out of the windows, their staring eyes alight with doom. As he gazed the front door swung open, but not inwards, outwards, and with such force that it was dashed from its hinges, and in the opening stood Hilda, her hand on the shoulder of a crying child. She looked down and saw him and made a sign he could not interpret.

It was all over in a moment. The roaring ceased, and Eustace was standing on the rather suburban Surrey hillside, among comfortable-looking villas, and not far from the top. His heart was behaving more normally. It must be a trick of the nerves, he thought; I've had something like it before.

The clinic crowned the hill. Through the gateway, with its red-brick pillars capped by stone balls, the whole front elevation of the building could be seen. The middle part was genuine Georgian, to which the former owners had built on a wing in the same style. Now the directors of the clinic were adding another, balancing it, to provide extra accommodation. The new part was still deep in scaffolding, but it had made great strides since Eustace's last visit. As he walked up the broad pathway, bordered on each side by a lawn, that led to the front door, he gazed with rapt curiosity at the rising annexe. The workmen were moving slowly to and fro, like spiders in a web. How could he, the static, be connected by such close ties with anything so progressive, so resurgent? Yet without him it wouldn't have come into being. He was a distant link in the chain of causation, but an essential one. Hilda's was the initiative behind the extension, but the money behind Hilda had been his. He put the thought away from him, disliking it, but a flush of proprietorship persisted, and he walked boldly across to the new wing and stood among the white-washed barrels which held the scaffolding poles and all the intricate edifice of cross-bars and rigging.

“Look out, Governor,” said a voice from above. “This pail of mortar's none too steady.”

The abashed governor withdrew to a safe distance.

“Can you tell us the time, mate?” asked a stout man in a smeared overall which had once been white.

“Nearly half-past four,” replied Eustace in Oxford accents which, he feared, would militate against matehood in the ears of the workmen.

“Another bloody half-hour,” said the man, but he spoke with resignation not with rancour, and the remark was curiously soothing to Eustace's still uneasy nerves. The sun came out and washed the faded red of the house with a pinkish glow. Down the flagged path a nurse was pushing an invalid carriage, in which Eustace could see, propped on a pillow, the motionless face of a child. The nurse was hurrying, and the starched linen of her cap streamed out behind her.

The child turned its head and said something, and she leaned over it and said, “All right, you'll get your tea in a minute.”

“And so will some of us poor b——s,” observed one of the workmen in a loud aside, no doubt intended for the nurse's ears. She looked up and away again, and the man grinned down at Eustace and winked.

“Wish we were cripples, chum,” he said in a friendly tone. “They don't half have a good time here. Nurses to dress 'em and bath 'em and kiss 'em good-night. And the boss is a real Lady Godiva.”

The “boss” must mean Hilda. Feeling a little guilty, Eustace smiled at the man as knowingly as he knew how to, and wished him good-day. Then he went to the front door.

A maid with a hospital nurse's indefinable touch of authority answered his ring.

“Is Miss Cherrington in?”

The maid's demeanour suggested that if she was she might not necessarily want to see Eustace.

“Have you an appointment?”

“Yes.”

“What name, please?”

“Mr. Eustace Cherrington.”

The maid pursed her lips and looked slightly incredulous.

Am I very shabby? thought Eustace. Was that why the workman called me ‘mate' and ‘chum'? It was not then the fashion at Oxford to take much trouble with one's clothes. Perhaps the maid was merely thinking that Hilda must be a phœnix without kith and kin. But her manner relaxed somewhat as she said, “Come this way, please.”

After he had sat for a moment in the little white-panelled waiting-room another, rather older maid came in. She looked mysterious and important.

“Were you waiting for Miss Cherrington?” she said.

Eustace said he was.

“I will see if Miss Cherrington is free,” said the maid, and went away still with her air of preoccupation. After a brief interval she reappeared, this time with an expression of amusement.

“Miss Cherrington will be at liberty in a few minutes.”

The amusement was for him, of course. Eustace felt smaller and smaller. How much more important than he was this institution that he had helped to create! He was, and would always remain, the most private of private persons. No maidservant, certainly no succession of maidservants, would scrutinise his visitors, or defend his precious leisure from the incursions of the outside world. He would never have the kind of position that overflows the bounds of its owner's personality, and commands respect and awe in those who have never met him. He would never belong to the public, as Hilda had begun to do.

Something stirred in him. Could it be jealousy? He hoped not. He did not mind taking a back seat. He rather enjoyed playing second fiddle. For this trait his friends at Oxford, dabblers in the new psychology, had found a technical, and pejorative, name. Eustace, defending himself, argued that it was humility, one of the foremost Christian virtues; but might the real explanation be that in acknowledging himself a poor creature, he was forestalling the criticism, and disappointment, of those who expected, or said they expected, ‘great things' from him? Anyhow, he thought, Hilda is my memorial; she is making her mark in the world, she is my justification; she, the Lady Godiva of Highcross Hill. A flush of pride in her brought back to his mind the letter in his pocket—the letter that might bring them together again, partners in the same field.

The maid—the other maid this time—was again standing before him. She was struggling to keep a straight face, and Eustace felt irritated. What was there so laughable about him? Composing her features to an impersonal expression, she said: “Miss Cherrington will see you now.”

He followed her across the white, light hall, up the broad, shallow staircase, to the door of Hilda's room. From inside came the sound of voices.

“Mr. Cherrington,” said the maid.

Hilda was standing in the middle of the room, her face convulsed with laughter, and in a chair opposite sat Stephen, who didn't seem to know at all how to behave in the presence of this paroxysm.

“Oh, Eustace, it was so funny,” Hilda burst out without preamble. “Mr. Hilliard had very kindly come down to see me on business —a bit of land at the back that we've been trying to buy for the clinic. I can't think why he came—it's such a small matter—but he did. So when I'd shown him round the clinic, as I show everybody, he went out to look at the new property, as he likes to call it. It's a chicken-run really, the man keeps about thirty fowls there. Well, when he had assured himself that there were no Ancient Lights or other snags—of course I could have done that quite well myself—he said how interesting it would be to look inside one of the chicken-houses, and know what it felt like to be a hen. You
did
, Mr. Hilliard,” she added, for seeing the incredulous, indeed shocked expression on Eustace's face, Stephen had opened his mouth as though to protest. “So he crept inside, and out of curiosity I followed—it was a squeeze, I can tell you. Then suddenly the thing tilted up—from our weight, I suppose—and for a moment we couldn't get out. It was just then that Alice came to look for me. Of course she couldn't see us, but she saw the chicken-house rocking up and down and heard us inside, and guessed what had happened. She's a farm labourer's daughter and knows about farmyard life, so she hung on to the end of the chicken-house, and brought it level, and we got out backwards, one after the other. I've never laughed so much.”

Utterly irrepressible, Hilda's laughter returned and shook her from head to foot. Still lovely in mirth, she turned to share it with Stephen; he tried to join in, but with only partial success, and his pale face went as red as a beetroot.

“Well,” said Eustace. “You have surprised me.”

“We surprised everyone, didn't we, Mr. Hilliard?” said Hilda. “I believe the staff thought it just as funny as we did. How Matron will laugh when I tell her.”

“I earnestly beg you not to,” said Stephen, whose blush, after disappearing a moment, had returned. “Unless she knows already, as I fear she may. The effect on discipline would be deplorable.”

The laughter left Hilda's face and her habitual sternness of regard returned.

Eustace noticed it with regret. “I don't know,” he said; “discipline requires tension, but you can't keep tension up too long at a time or it will crack and bring about a revolution. Not that there would ever be a revolution here,” he added hastily. “But if the tension is relaxed, as I think it ought to be for the sake of preserving discipline, mightn't it be better to relax completely, let go altogether, throw dignity to the winds, and—and revel in the hen-house, rather than unbend just a little, now and then, which is bound to seem self-conscious and patronising, and means, also, than the tension is never really kept up? I know at school”—he turned to Stephen—“a whole holiday was far more liberating than a termful of half-holidays, and made one able to work better, too.” He finished in some confusion.

“Bravo,” said Stephen. “I never heard Eustace make such a long speech, did you, Miss Cherrington? Quite an oration. Perhaps there's something in what he says. In that case, you ought to ask me down at least twice a year to do a comic turn for the good of discipline. Only of course you'd have to help me.”

Eustace was pleased to see that Hilda's good humour was restored.

“I won't forget,” she said. “If the situation ever gets desperate, I'll call you in.”

“I might have to wait a long time,” said Stephen with a touch of wistfulness new to Eustace. “Ask me while it's still under control.”

At this moment a maid brought in their tea. Eustace noted with satisfaction that her face showed the proper rigidity.

“One lump or two, Mr. Hilliard?”

“I sometimes ask for three.”

“You shall have three.”

“Hilda never allows me three,” said Eustace enviously.

“Oh, you're often here,” said Hilda. “This is Mr. Hilliard's only visit. Besides, he has come to see me on business.”

“And on pleasure, too,” said Stephen. “Does pleasure entitle me to another lump?”

Hilda smiled briefly.

“What report shall you take back to Messrs. Hilliard, Lampeter and Hilliard?” she asked.

“My report, if it deserves the name, is quite unofficial,” Stephen said. “I'm not a member of the firm, in any sense, and shan't begin to be till the end of June, when Schools are over. But I shall say I still think they are asking too much. You say the directors of the clinic are financially rather conservative, Miss Cherrington?”

“It is like getting blood out of a stone,” said Hilda vehemently. “I've had to fight for every improvement. I told them, at the last meeting, that if they would give half for this piece of land, which would be most valuable to us, I would pay the other half. But they refused. I expect it will end in my paying it all myself.”

Stephen's face grew serious and he drew a longer breath.

“You must forgive me, Miss Cherrington, but I don't think that would be wise. I doubt if it's even wise to offer to pay half. I know how much the clinic means to you, but it's still only an experiment, though a remarkably successful one, and you have your own position to consider. You mustn't overspend yourself.”

Hilda's long fingers brushed her brow.

“I hate counsels of prudence,” she said. “If I had listened to them, this place would never have got on its feet. I don't want to sound boastful, but everything that has been done here, everything, has been done by me.”

As her eye swept round the room the walls seemed to crumble and reveal the whole extent of the clinic.

“The new wing would never have been begun if I hadn't contributed to the cost. I loathe this cheese-paring policy. It never gets you anywhere. It hasn't in the country at large, and it won't here.”