Eustace and Hilda (62 page)

“Yes,” said Anne slowly, “I think he does.” She waited for the talk round them to gather volume. “Do you think she likes him?”

Eustace wondered what Anne wanted him to say.

“Would you like her to?”

Anne kept her eyes fixed on her plate.

“I don't think that's got much to do with it. I might say, would you?”

“Yes.” Eustace drew a long breath. The monosyllable, out at last, released in him a shining wave of glory. He did not notice its effect on her until he heard her say, in a smothered voice:

“Oh,
nothing
would matter, if only they were here.”

She had turned away from him, and he saw her shoulders shaking.

With a tremor in it of unwonted feeling, Sir John's voice came down the table. The butler was bending over his chair.

“Edie, my dear, Crosby wants to know if you'd like the Hall lights put out now?”

Everyone instinctively looked towards the great window, which the pale-blue dusk outside was turning from amber to green.

Lady Staveley hesitated. “Is it late?” she said.

“Yes, it is rather late,” said Sir John gently.

Eustace realised that the port-wine glass and the dessert-plate meant the meal was nearly at an end. He did not remember them being brought; without noticing he had taken coffee, which he never drank.

“Yes, put them out,” Lady Staveley was saying. “I know you like the candles best.”

Crosby then asked Sir John another question; Eustace could not hear what it was, but Sir John nodded, and Crosby must have given some signal, for immediately the two footmen appeared one on each side of the table and began to draw away the chairs which had been left for Dick and Hilda. When Lady Staveley saw what they were doing, “No, no,” she said, “please leave them.”

For a moment the men stood in doubt, their large hands on the backs of the chairs, their silver buttons gleaming, their faces expressionless. “Put them back, then,” said Sir John, “if her ladyship wishes it.”

The men complied, and disappeared soft-footed down the steps of the daïs. A switch clicked, and the room was in darkness except for the four pairs of candles.

It was like being in a theatre when the lights went down. The window was the proscenium arch and the night the stage. The darkness crowded against the window panes; beyond the lattice it thinned away into the silvery blue of the moonlit sky.

The party sat passive and expectant, looking out, awaiting some development on the shadowy earth or in the luminous sky. But none came, and the thought crossed Eustace's mind, ‘Perhaps it is we who are on the stage, and the night is looking in at us with its thousand eyes, waiting for us to do something.' But it was not for him, he felt, to open the play, and he sat listening to the silence which had become like a presence in the room. Sir John's voice broke it.

“The port is with you, Cherrington,” he said.

With a guilty start Eustace poured himself a glass and handed the decanter to Anne. She was passing it on mechanically without so much as a glance at it when all at once she changed her mind and filled her glass half full.

Raising the wine to his lips, Eustace turned to her and murmured:

“To their safe return!”

But Anne would not pledge him. With a tiny shake of her head and a look half reproachful, half sad, she put down the glass untasted. “I'll wait,” she said.

Little spurts of conversation started and blew themselves out like puffs of wind on a still day. Eustace did not venture into the field again, but listened with admiration and envy to Antony and Lady Nelly, who seemed to find things to say which jarred on nobody, and to Victor Trumpington, who could strike the right note merely by being himself. Monica was silent, and from the way that neither Sir John nor Antony looked at her when they spoke, he thought she must be crying.

After a time, when everyone seemed to feel that the effort of speaking was greater than the words were worth, Lady Staveley, making the familiar gesture of rearrangement on the site of her vanished knives and forks, said:

“Do you want us to leave you now, John?”

Sir John gave a little cough.

“Well, my dear, that's for you to say. It's always nice to have the ladies with us.”

“I feel a little tired, perhaps we all do,” said Lady Staveley. Her glance travelled half-way down the table and then stopped, as though unable to encounter the sympathy of so many eyes. “I shan't go to bed, but I thought——” she broke off. The social effort was taking toll of her too much. She wanted to be alone with her family, but did not know how to say so.

“What about a short rubber of bridge?” suggested Sir John, rather in the tone of a doctor prescribing to his patient an obvious but unwelcome remedy.

The cards rose up at Lady Staveley, the fat King of Spades, the smirking Queen of Diamonds, the raffish Knave of Hearts, mocking and taunting her. Habit and tradition made it extremely disagreeable to her to show the weakness that an infringement of the day's routine implied, but she was a woman, and she knew that the masculine nature seldom resented the custom-breaking exactions of feminine caprice. But in word she always deferred to her husband, and she meant to do so now.

“Perhaps some of the others would like to play,” she said. “I shall——” Again she stopped, hoping, with a rush of feeling akin to hysteria, that her husband would help her out. But he only looked at her with puzzled attentiveness, digging his chin in slightly, which was his way of showing embarrassment; and it was Lady Nelly who said:

“Couldn't we persuade Mr. Trumpington to play us one little piece on the piano, and then I expect some of us will want to go to bed.”

Lady Staveley snatched at this straw as if it was heaven-sent.

“Yes, please do, Victor,” she said.

“Now, no prima-donna stuff,” said Sir John. “Fellow plays like a professional, you know, but it's horses' work to get him started.”

But Victor was already on his feet and half-way down the steps.

“Can you see?” called Anne. Victor said he knew the way and a moment later they heard his footsteps sounding loud and hollow on the spiral staircase that led up to the gallery. When he turned on the light by the piano, his head and shoulders were visible over the balustrade. Eustace and the others on his side of the table turned their chairs round to watch him—so far removed from them now, not only by space but by his talent, which Eustace at once realised was considerable.

He played Franck's Prelude, Aria and Finale. The noble, declamatory music with its military stride and confident accent marched through the room, filling it with flags and cheering crowds, a gallant expedition setting out in the morning of life to win a spiritual prize. Eustace thought he knew why Victor chose this piece; not only was it, superficially at any rate, the very breath of encouragement, but it expressed all those sentiments which he, Victor, so sedulously kept out of his daily manner. Here, at the piano, protected by the anonymity of art, he could walk in old heroic traces without being betrayed. Sir John was right to say that he played like a professional. He had the evenness of touch, the restrained, impersonal approach to emotion; he did not hurry when the music was easy, and slow up when it was difficult. He could let go without letting himself go. He did not single out morsels for special attention, lingering over them, detaching them from the context. But alongside these virtues of discipline and self-control went a certain mechanical quality, a want of intimacy and individuality, a tendency to hide the contours of the music under a glitter of execution, an inclination to play rather loudly all the time and sometimes to play very loudly indeed.

It was in a lull following one of these salvoes that Eustace first heard the aeroplane. That is to say, his ear heard but his mind was unconvinced, and the next moment the faint, purposeful purring was drowned by a new fortissimo. He stole a look at the others and saw that they had not heard what he had. Their faces were folded in sorrow or closed in respectful attention to the music; their heads were bowed; Lady Nelly's nodded. Eustace guessed that it was a relief to Lady Staveley to be able to look as unhappy as she felt.

Again the steady hum creeping across the sky-line of his ear. If only he could be sure! ‘Enough!' he longed to say. ‘Listen, listen! It's them! They're back!' But if he should be wrong? ‘No, Mr. Cherrington, that was the electric-light engine. You wouldn't know, but it always goes about this time. A natural mistake, but we wish you hadn't made it.'

He listened again, but the sound, so meaningless in itself, so meaningful to all their hearts, had ceased without (he looked again for confirmation) leaving a ripple of its passage on the faces round him. Victor played on. The music seemed triumphant now—triumphant over the throb of yearning and unsatisfied desire that beat through it. As the climax approached, his features, regular to the point of insignificance, stiffened into a mask of sternness and impassivity, on which the little blond moustache seemed to have been stuck by a practical joker. The last chord came, and he sat for a moment as if in silent colloquy with the instrument; then the light went out, his silhouette disappeared, and they heard his footsteps coming down the staircase.

A ragged round of applause greeted him.

“Bravo, Victor.”

“Thank you very much, that was lovely.”

“He's missed his real vocation.”

“If he only let his hair grow, he could play at the Albert Hall.”

They all laughed dutifully at Sir John's well-worn pleasantry, and Victor, whose face had resumed its mondaine manner, remarked:

“Rather sentimental, but I like it.”

No one took this up. Lady Nelly's hands slid from her lap to the chair seat and she straightened herself slightly. Lady Staveley rose, and they all followed her example. How tired and shrunken they looked, mannequins of their own clothes, dummies of themselves, unequal to the splendour of the room and the centuries of success stored up in it.

“Well,” said Lady Staveley in an uncertain voice, “I wish you all good-night.”

“Good-night,” they answered in curiously respectful voices, and were moving to follow her when Sir John said:

“Turn on the light, Victor, there's a good fellow, and we'll put out the candles.”

Blinded by the glare of the electric light, the shaded candles darkened from living rose to lifeless crimson. Sir John uncovered his, and extinguished the feeble flame with a wave of the hand. Eustace tried to do the same but he lacked the technique. As he was bending forward to blow out the flame it suddenly streamed away from him. He looked up, surprised by the draught, and saw the door opening. It swung to, then opened again, and Hilda stood on the threshold, with Dick's head and shoulders outlined against the sky behind. Dazzled and blinking, with jerky, cramped movements, she came down the steps like a marionette, and Dick followed her, his arms swinging a little from the elbows.

“They're back!” said Lady Staveley in a wondering tone.

“We'd almost given you up,” said Sir John. “What on earth happened to you?”

Dick walked past Hilda and rested his knuckles on the table as if he was going to make a speech.

“We came down rather unexpectedly,” he said. “You didn't worry about us, did you?”

Victor was the first to recover himself.

“Oh no,” he said. “We never gave you a thought. We just went about our Sunday duties.”

But for once nobody paid him any attention, they all crowded round Dick as if they wanted to touch him.

Hilda was standing by herself outside the circle, enveloped in her own sense of strangeness and fixed in the spotlight of her vitality. She did not answer Eustace's look.

Dick turned to her and their eyes all followed his.

“We're very hungry,” he said. “Is there anything to eat?”

Lady Staveley recollected herself with a start. “My dear,” she said, turning to Hilda, “of course there is. You must be famished. Where did you have your last meal?”

“Ah!” said Dick.

“Well, no doubt you'll tell us later. Ring the bell for Crosby, would you?”

“Is there a bell, Mama?”

Lady Staveley was reminded that Dick did not like to be asked to do small jobs.

“It doesn't matter.... Here he is. Mr. Richard is back, Crosby.”

“Yes, my lady. We heard the aeroplane.”

“What? You heard the aeroplane and didn't tell us?”

“We thought you'd hear it too, my lady, and besides, we understood that Mr. Trumpington was playing the piano.”

There was a general smile at this.

Lady Staveley went across to Sir John and murmured something in his ear.

“Well,” said Sir John, “it's poison at this hour, but have it if you like. Bring us some champagne, Crosby.”

“And would you like the curtains drawn, Sir John?”

“Yes, draw the curtains.”

The night was shut out and forgotten.

“Now,” said Sir John, “would you like us to watch you eat, or would you rather we went away and amused ourselves with a rubber till you've finished?”

“We must stay to drink their healths,” said Lady Staveley quickly.

“Why, Edie, you wanted to go to bed a minute ago. I never knew you so changeable. Let's all sit down, then, and light the candles. Here's your place, Miss Cherrington, we kept it for you. I should think you're quite glad to be separated from Dick—you won't want to trust yourself to him again.”

“I'm afraid it was my fault as such as his,” said Hilda.

“You'll have to explain that statement later, young lady,” said Sir John.

She smiled at him as, with a touch of gallantry, he bent over her chair and helped to push it to the table. As if struck by a sudden impulse she raised her hands to her head with a proud, free gesture, and took her hat off; and speaking in tones more natural because more commanding than any she had used here since she came, said to Sir John: