Eustace and Hilda (86 page)

But had Stephen outgrown his taste for paradox? There had been little trace of paradox in his letter. That letter had been written straight from the shoulder, or the heart. It was written in the key of every communication that, since he could remember, had affected Eustace most. It upbraided, it warned, it admonished. It accused him of neglecting Hilda. It stirred in him all the feelings of guilt which, a few months ago Stephen had set out to destroy by every weapon of ridicule in his armoury. It told him that Hilda was ill, and hinted that it was his fault that she was ill; it besought him to return to England.

He felt in his pocket for the letters which, reckless of their damaging effect upon his suits, he carried about with him to fortify himself with other people's flattering interest in his personality. They were for spiritual emergencies, just as the flask of brandy (another, even more disfiguring bulge) was for a physical emergency, and he changed them when their potency showed signs of failing. Here was Antony's, the leading letter of the day, still in its envelope, for Eustace felt that the envelope helped to retain the letter's virtue. He read it again; but how little of a pick-me-up it was. At once all the thoughts that he had been keeping at mind's length crowded upon him, jostling him to the edge of the abyss, the great fissure in the landscape of his mind which he had always been aware of but had never dared to look into.

Movement, as always, brought him some mental relief, and he wandered on, heedless of his surroundings, until he found himself standing by a large doorway through which people were drifting in and out. Within, the place had a dusty, work-worn air as if meant for use, not enjoyment, for passing through, not for lingering. Absently Eustace looked again: it was the General Post Office, an ancient palace not unknown to Baedeker, for Giorgione had glorified its walls with frescoes. Traces of them could be seen from the Grand Canal, but not from here.

Hilda was in trouble, and if he looked over the edge of the abyss he might learn what that trouble was. He drew a little nearer to it, not near enough to see properly, but near enough to make his mind dizzy. How often as a child at Anchorstone had he been told not to go too near the edge of the cliff! He had been obedient to that advice, then and thereafter; he had steered clear of the edge of any cliff. But already, to his partial view, a scene was taking shape, not in the depths, indeed, where he dare not look, but well below the surface.

‘I'm afraid, Miss Cherrington, we cannot vote you another thousand pounds. It's quite out of the question.' ‘But I cannot possibly carry on at the clinic without it.' ‘I'm sorry. We can only repeat what we said.' ‘In that case I must tender my resignation.' ‘Miss Cherrington, we learn your decision with the profoundest regret. We are fully conscious of what the clinic owes to your efficiency, initiative, and enterprise. But we cannot ask you to reconsider your resignation. Reports have reached us of unexplained absences that in someone with a different record from yours would have been regarded as gross derelictions of duty. We do not ask you to explain; we do not wish to probe into your private affairs. But we are satisfied that for some months now the place has been going downhill. Yes, even as I speak, Miss Cherrington, I can feel it moving under me. You have taken a great interest in the superstructure, but you have neglected the foundations. To repair those foundations would cost at least a thousand pounds which, in the circumstances, as I said, we are not inclined to grant.'

At this point there seemed to be a commotion; something happened, someone came in, there was a shifting of positions, a vague effect of general post. Then Eustace heard Hilda's voice ringing, triumphant: ‘It's all right, gentlemen, I have the thousand pounds. No thanks to you, though. It is the gift of a well-wisher, who prefers to remain anonymous.' ‘Then may we take it that you will withdraw your resignation?' ‘Yes, this once.' ‘And that the absences complained of will not recur? That you will not, in fact, disappear again?' ‘Gentlemen, I——' A mist boiled up from the abyss, and Eustace could see no more.

He walked into the post office (in Venice few doors had doorsteps), wondering why the faces coming out looked so dull and sad. He found a foreign telegraph form and wrote ‘Stephen Hilliard.' The message came easily enough.

He left the post office lighter in step, lighter in heart, lighter by a thousand pounds.

“You look as if someone had given you a present,” said Lady Nelly when, sweating and panting, Eustace breasted the rather steep staircase that led, abruptly and without preamble, into Fortuny's Aladdin's cave. “I never saw you look so cheerful. Who have you been talking to all the time I've been waiting here? Who was the counter-attraction?” Her questions seldom demanded an answer: they brushed the hard surface of interrogation as lightly as a butterfly's wing.

Eustace waited to recover his breath.

“Tell me,” went on Lady Nelly, “for I must take a leaf out of her book.” Her smile held immobile the two women who were standing near, patience on their faces, but a hint of restlessness in their hands.

“I just did an errand at the post office,” said Eustace; “and I couldn't find my way at first. I'm so sorry.”

“I never saw anyone look less so,” said Lady Nelly. “Sorrow must be meat and drink to you. Every hour I must think of something to make you rue.”

Eustace searched in his mind. “If I look cheerful it's because of the present you are going to give me.”

“I won't refuse you a present,” said Lady Nelly, “since you ask me; but this is for your sister, you know.”

Eustace's face turned redder. “That was a slip of the tongue,” he muttered miserably. “When I said ‘me' I meant Hilda. You see, it's the same thing.”

“Is it?” said Lady Nelly dubiously. “Well, that simplifies things very much. If I give you a dressing-gown, will your sister regard it as a present to her?”

Eustace's face fell. “Well, you see, I have one,” he said.

“We'll think about the dressing-gown afterwards,” said Lady Nelly. “You've convinced me that your theory doesn't work. Your sister wouldn't get any pleasure from your dressing-gown. Now put away these ideas of combined identities, and come and help me to choose something for her.”

The sofa in front of them and the table between them were soon deep in piles of silk and brocade. The room hypnotised Eustace. Colours were everywhere, on the walls, on the floor, on the painted ceiling; and the sunlight, filtering through the looped and pleated curtains, filled the air with radiant dust. It was like breathing a rainbow. Noiselessly, smilingly, the two women brought down bale after bale, piece after piece: here was a pattern of yellow and cream, wooing each other, almost indistinguishable; here wreaths and tendrils of green on a ground that was nearly white; here a soft blue with a mother-of-pearl sheen on it; here a cardinal red bordered with gold braid.

“I like that one,” said Eustace tentatively.

“Do you?” said Lady Nelly. “I thought you'd gone to sleep.” She narrowed her eyes a little. “No, it's too—too uncompromising. It wouldn't mix. One has to be seen with other people. She could wear it once or twice, perhaps, but that seems a pity with a Fortuny dress. Do you know what colour she likes?”

“She generally wears blue.”

“I remember how well that blue dress suited her. But she might like something different now.”

“Something older?” suggested Eustace.

“Well, not exactly older. She's not much older, is she? She's still very young. But flowers change as the season passes.”

“The dahlias must be out now,” said Eustace.

“Your sister is rather like a dahlia, isn't she?” said Lady Nelly. “At least she was. I understand your thinking of her as a strong single colour. But blue, not red—a blue dahlia, a prize bloom.”

“Dahlias don't grow old gracefully,” Eustace said.

“I don't think of her as a dahlia now. That's over, her dahlia phase. I think of her as a night-scented stock—no, that's too bunchy. An iris, perhaps. I'm no good at analogies. But something fragrant.”

“That would be a great change,” exclaimed Eustace, to whom Hilda had always seemed as scentless as dew.

“No, no, not a great change, but I dare say a welcome one.”

“But scent is for someone else's benefit,” objected Eustace.

“Well, there's no harm in that.”

“I should hardly know her as you describe her,” said Eustace uneasily. “Do you think she'll know me?”

“Oh yes.”

“I haven't changed, then?”

“No, my mignonette, you haven't. But I expect you will, if she has.”

An instinctive conservative, Eustace thought all change was for the worse.

“I don't think Hilda would change easily,” he said at last.

“No change is very easy.”

“I hope it didn't hurt her.”

“Perhaps it did, but we long for it.”

“Hilda was so happy as she was,” said Eustace.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, yes. She never wanted to leave the clinic, even for a week-end.”

“So it was you who persuaded her to go to Anchorstone?”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” said Lady Nelly, smiling. “You have a lot to answer for.”

Muffled to an echo of itself, the boom of the midday gun ruffled the air and set all the motes dancing. The two women exchanged glances. “Come along,” said Lady Nelly briskly. “We must concentrate. Perhaps they can help us. An evening dress for a young lady,” she said in Italian. “Tall, darkish, with blue eyes.”

“Is the lady married?” asked one of the women.

“Not yet,” said Lady Nelly. “But we see no reason why she shouldn't be. Now we want two colours, one for her and one for someone—everyone else.”

“What are your colours?” Eustace asked.

“My colours? Do you mean the pastel shades in which I drape my middle-age? They wouldn't do.”

“No, I meant your family's colours,” said Eustace blushing.

“Oh, I see,” said Lady Nelly. “The flowers of the genealogical tree. But do you mean the colours of the upstart Lanchesters or the ancient Staveleys? Those I inherited or those I acquired?”

“Well, the Staveleys, perhaps.”

“Let me think. Silver and blue. Argent and azure.”

“Argent and azure,” repeated Eustace, savouring the words. “Wouldn't they do?”

“What a happy thought,” said Lady Nelly. “I see I must always take you shopping with me. Here's the very piece.” She pulled at a corner of stuff that stuck out from a heap of fabrics of a lighter hue. The gorgeous pile tottered. One of the women steadied it while the other dexterously dislodged Lady Nelly's choice. In a moment the whole length lay before them, a stretch of evening-coloured sky with silver tulips climbing over it.

“But we shall want much more than this,” said Lady Nelly. “It has to be accordion-pleated.”

Eustace remembered Nancy's dresses that had so enraptured his youthful imagination. His mind shied away from the thought, but returned to it again, for this was more beautiful than anything Nancy would ever wear. If there was no balance of benefit in a comparison, the balance Eustace always hoped to find, at any rate it was better to be at the top end of the see-saw.

Lady Nelly turned from giving instructions to the two women.

“But it may need altering,” she said. “I'll give you my dressmaker's direction.”

“When should she wear it?” Eustace asked. “I mean, for what sort of occasion?”

“Oh, any light-hearted occasion,” said Lady Nelly. “Any occasion that doesn't point definitely to something else. Not at a wedding, perhaps, not for a dinner-party, not at a race-meeting. It's what used to be called a tea-gown. She could wear it at a garden-party, I think; but it's meant for those little in-between times when nothing's been planned, when we feel happy, but don't quite know what to expect, when the door opens and someone comes in.” She smiled at Eustace. “If I'd been younger you'd often have seen me in a Fortuny dress.”

“Are they very smart?” asked Eustace, thinking how ill smartness and Hilda went together.

“Oh no, they're High Bohemia, almost Chelsea. They're for off-duty—any kind of duty. They don't invite comparisons—they mean you've stepped away from the throng for a moment and want to be looked at for yourself—not stared at, just looked at with kindly attention and affectionate interest. A moment of not conforming, not a gesture of rebellion. So often we have to look just like everyone else.”

Eustace wondered how he should explain all this to Hilda.

“I expect there are plenty such moments in your sister's life,” said Lady Nelly, as if answering his thoughts. “She'll know when to put the dress on.”

They were standing up now, and little flights of smiles and thanks and compliments circled and hummed round them like bright-plumaged birds, mingling with the spilt colours of the room to produce in Eustace a heady feeling of lightness and happiness.

Outside in the campo the strong sun smote them with all the vigour of its undisciplined attack, so that for a moment Eustace did not see Silvestro propped against the Gothic doorway. He sprang to attention and strode ahead through the narrow, shaded calle, looking back like a dog to make sure they were following him.

As they sat down in the empty gondola, Eustace recaptured the sensations of his first ride with Lady Nelly. He was afraid to break the spell, but a worm of doubt had wriggled into his happiness, and to banish it he said: “Will they have the dress ready before I go?”

“What's this scare you've been getting up about going away?” said Lady Nelly. “The regatta's to be next week, and after that Grotrian's going to play. I can't possibly let you go. People will think we've quarrelled. Besides, I should be most unpopular if I let you slip through my fingers. Venice would be up in arms. Only this morning Grotrian was asking me about you and congratulating me on having such a charming, clever, diffident, unspoilt guest.”