Short Stories 1927-1956 (18 page)

Grummumma – crooking that charming little finger of hers on her plump white hand – having tossed off the last drops of her customary glass of sherry, the crumbs of her Bath Oliver having been already neatly brushed up into a heap on the damask tablecloth – rose at last to her feet.

‘This afternoon,’ she explained, with a last hasty brush of her
table-napkin
over her lips, ‘I have to see Colonel Sprigge with reference to the Home.’ Her Home, that was, for Girls; not the one whose roof so
capaciously
sheltered herself and the young man still seated at the table. ‘And what are
you
proposing to do?’ She archly wagged her head at him.

Cecil’s head with its peaked shade, as it slowly veered round in her direction, had a peculiar resemblance to a searchlight, though a searchlight has no cowl.

‘I thought, you know,’ he said, ‘of looking over my arrow-heads. Or I might, perhaps, take another little stroll.’

‘Well, my dear boy, no matter,’ returned Grummumma in that ample fashion which somehow always seemed to suggest a tinge of magnanimous impatience, ‘do exactly what you please. But don’t for mercy’s sake fatigue your eyes with those dreadfully uninteresting, and I am sure, perfectly murderous, scraps of flint. We can imagine to what dreadful bloodthirsty uses
they
must once have been put. And if you
do
take a walk, keep out of the sun. Tea, then, in your own room, at half-past four. If my talk with Colonel Sprigge permits it, I shall be home about six.’

She was gone, silks, voice, presence, and all. And Cecil was left alone with his raspberry tart and cream, and his thoughts. He sat on until he heard the large varnished door emphatically shut. For a few minutes even after that he remained absolutely still in his chair. And then the skirts of the
parlourmaid
sounded at the door. He rose and, seizing his grey felt hat and his malacca cane, followed Mrs le Mercier out into the afternoon sunshine.

He had armed himself with the key to the gate of the neighbouring ‘Gardens’, the freedom of which Grummumma shared with her discreet neighbours. Following a winding, bush-screened, gravel path, he came to a seat beside a patch of ornamental water; and there he sat down.

An immense dejection, hardly due to any heedlessness of diet, had taken
possession of him. All that he had intended to say to his stranger – all, rather, that deep down in his mind, even though unexpressed in words, he had hoped to make clear to her – welled up into remembrance. All that he had actually said and done, those clumsy, stuttered speeches, the absurd, motionless way in which he had stood, that conceit about his own silly name, the hideous discourtesy of refusing to share hers after practically
asking
her to tell him it, all that miserable meaninglessness – the whole scene came flooding back to remembrance.

He did not mind the young woman’s thinking him anything she pleased except only the feeble nincompoop he had shown himself to be. The clear, cool voice re-echoed in his mind – her openness, the frank, matter-of-fact tone in which she had claimed the missing glove. He knew exactly how she had stood there, poised and still, searching him with her eyes. Why, he hadn’t even offered her his hand when he had said good-bye. Had he even raised his hat? His thoughts whirled impotently in a vortex. He longed to go fumbling off once more into the High Street with the faintest shadow of a hope that she might by a miracle be there. And to think that, when she had appeared, he had been gloating into a hatter’s! And now a whole day to go; and that voice echoing on – unnaturally quiet, surely, for her age! Supposing she fell ill, or – why, anything might happen to prevent their meeting again. And he hadn’t even the smallest notion where she lived!

Perhaps she was just being kind to him. He was used to that. Why should she really have had the faintest intention of meeting him again, of being made horribly conspicuous by standing there in that vile crowd of sightseers talking into a kind of green silk funnel. Perhaps she had just wanted to get rid of him.

No, no. Nothing mattered. He must just wait. Just wait for the chance to put everything right; to
tell
her that nothing mattered, except only that she must not let him be any kind of a trouble or burden; that he would never bother her again. And might he perhaps …?

The strained eyes remained tightly shut for a few moments. When they opened again,
a solitary swan that had somehow contrived to keep its pride and beauty even in the muddy shallows of this ‘ornamental water’, had floated in close under the bank, as if
in need of company, or possibly of crumbs. Cecil stared at the creature from under his shade. Its virgin snow burned in the sunshine at least as purely as those on the far mountain-tops he would never see. The arched plumes of its wings were softly mantled. Its round eye glittered. Its dark-webbed feet were softly paddling beneath the greenish oil-like water.

It was an awful thing to sit there looking at it, and be so unhappy. Cecil was torn to pieces with longing. He didn’t want to live any more. If the first real miracle that had happened in his life could leave him as miserable and
dejected as this, what of the rest, of the years that remained? If only he had had a little worldly wisdom, he might at least have known what
not
to say. He could at least have shown the rudiments of courtesy. Why, she must have scarcely any money at all, not enough even to buy a new pair of gloves with, and he had forced the confession of it out of her like the most unutterable of cads!

But there comes an end at last even to self-abasement. A wan and rather sickly smile had spread over Cecil’s face as he continued to watch this sequestered bird on the water. He took the scapegoat glove out of his pocket and examined the little, round, worn hole in the first finger of it. A sigh that was uncommonly like a sob shook him. ‘May God bless you for ever and ever!’ he muttered in an anguish of sentiment, and pushed it back into his pocket again. And as if the swan had been positively tarrying in the narrow creek beneath him for this precise benediction, it now unruffled its
rose-flushed
wings and, steering into the blaze of the sun, oared itself out of his sight.

Cecil turned home. There was one thing to be thankful for. He had been given a latchkey – to save the servants. He turned that key very quietly in the lock. It was twenty minutes to five, though how his charming watch had managed to deceive itself into making hours of what had seemed a few minutes completely baffled him.

His tea was awaiting him in the large white sitting-room that adjoined his bedroom. He poured it out – tepid, rich, red-brown, and there under the cover of the dish was the particular kind of scone with a trace of butter on it that he had detested the taste of ever since he could remember. And there too was yesterday’s slice of plum cake. And out
there
the chirruping of sparrows. Everything was exactly the same as it had always been; and he himself – gross, clumsy, dull-witted – was merely somebody in a dream that had already come to an end. It was monstrous, this ‘life’!

He put down his cup, rose to his feet, tiptoed out of the room, and having reached his dressing-table, took up the brushes he found there. But this was pretence of course; he had not come to brush his hair. He had come to see as much as possible of the self that she had seen from top to toe. For a minute or two he stood listening, then raised his face by a painful inch or so to peer in at what was confronting him in the wide mahogany
looking-glass
. And almost before the slightest sensation of the agony that would ensue, if he persisted, had made itself felt, almost before he had time to realize the fatuity of the attempt, he had turned abruptly away and was presently nibbling his buttered scone, and, despite Grummumma’s warnings of the perils of indigestion, had poured himself out an even richer and
redder
cup of tea.

The sparrows continued to chirp, the western sunlight to pour into the
room. But the waft of steam with its gentle gyrations on the surface had thinned away and the contents of the handsome Dresden cup were stone cold before Cecil came out of his second long reverie that day. It was not a happy reverie; for one tiny memory that had been steadily skulking at the back of his mind had at last gnawed its way out. And the process had left him with a deadly hollow ache beneath his heart. Grummumma might be a jealous goddess, but until this instant Cecil had never been conscious of such pangs. Yet, as he gazed on in memory at the shoes, the skirt, the sleeve, and the bare hand that had for an instant touched his own, he was
conscious
of but one corroding doubt – that ring! – a ring of discoloured
turquoises
which he had seen encircling the third finger of that left hand!

Yet when he raised his head at last, something very like serenity had come back into his mind. He would explain everything tomorrow. He would be perfectly calm and collected. He would give back the glove and prove at any rate that he was ‘gentleman’ enough, however queer a specimen, to withdraw out of this stranger’s life with a little more courtesy and less confusion than had accompanied his intrusion into it.

To judge from Grummumma’s
sotto
voce
remarks to the parlour-maid during their solitary dinner that evening, the consultation with Colonel Sprigge on the affairs of the Home had tried her patience. Apart from this, the courses followed one another in silence. And the occasional
diamond-like
effects of Grummumma’s eyes in her rather wax-like face, owing to this pre-occupation, were otherwise engaged than in scrutinizing the young man who sat opposite her.

When, next morning, Cecil glided rapidly past under Mr Flaxman Smith’s drawing-room window, the pretty parlour-maid, glancing down at him,
discovered
two things, and both of them to her consternation, for today was her afternoon out: first, that it looked as if
a storm was coming on, and next, that her kitchen clock had once more and quite unaccountably lost at least half an hour.

But it was Cecil who paid for them by finding himself at his trysting-place exactly that much before his time. He hated being a spectacle, yet this
morning
it didn’t seem in the least to matter. Waiting gave him the opportunity, too, to get cool again and to recover externally, at any rate, his usual
fastidious
serenity and aloofness. If only his thoughts would follow suit! If only he could breathe more easily! If only he could for an instant suppose that she would come!

So helpless and motionless the figure of the young man showed at last, standing there like a sentry close up against the private doors of the
tobacconist’s
and the ironmonger’s shops, that a tender-hearted young woman, taking him for an unfortunate aristocrat who had come down in the world,
actually pressed a threepenny-piece into the loose, dangling hand, and then sped rapidly on. Little actions may have large effects. Cecil’s icy-hot chagrin had instantly given way to an almost childish amusement. Threepenny-bits are for luck. And Cecil actually lifted the coin to his lips and deliberately spat on it before pushing it into his waistcoat pocket. It was money gotten under false pretences. He might at any moment be run in. A shudder of sheer dare-devilry coursed down his spine. Let come what would – if only it were she! This peculiar smile was still hovering over the lower part of his face when, indeed, the young woman, as punctual as May Day, and as
unexpected
as a miracle, was suddenly once more in his company; and Cecil found himself in gentle motion at her side.

The grotesquely intense face of the day before could not so much as have hinted at the joy that now radiated from it – from his very finger-tips. And but one glance at it affected the mind this young stranger supposed she had ‘made up’. Nonetheless, ‘Look here, before I go,’ she was saying
breathlessly
, ‘I have been thinking over what happened yesterday. And what first I can’t understand is why you shouldn’t have given me my glove then and there.’

Cecil’s fingers holding his cane managed somehow also to clasp tight the threepenny-bit in his waistcoat pocket, while his other hand kept guard on the glove. His good angel was smiling at him from over his narrow shoulder.

‘Why, you see,’ he said, with an instinctive little bow that might have graced a Spanish grandee, ‘it seemed so horribly public, and I knew you hated being looked at. Besides, you said I might keep it. Of course,’ he added as if almost driven into a corner, ‘I ought to have gone straight off to the police.’

‘The police,
that
thing! The things you say! Still, I
do
say you must have picked it up very, very quickly. I came back the next moment to look for it, and there was nothing and nobody there – besides all this, I mean. It seems so very odd to me you didn’t
notice
who had been so stupid. I am always losing things; though I really don’t see why I should be reminded of it by – by strangers.’ There was a pause, and then in a flash, and sharp as a dart, came the question: ‘Had you ever seen me before?’

Cecil faltered. ‘If you are going to be angry,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I shall be able to do or say anything at all. All I want is just to try and explain
myself
and to give you the glove back. At least I don’t, I mean,
want
to do that, but must. It was hateful of me to keep it. You see, I hardly know anybody, though that is not
why – I wanted to
know
you.
I had never, never seen you before, on my oath – and now … I suppose you’d hardly believe it possible, but – since then, I have thought of
nobody
,
of
nothing
else.’

The dark, attentive eyes had slipped over his delightfully tasteful apparel,
head to heel. How little it told her. And yet that ‘I don’t know why,’ and the quiet, restful sigh that had followed his last words had suddenly stilled the cautious, suspicious mind within.

‘You don’t know anybody! Then in that case how can you possibly
want
to know anybody you know absolutely nothing about? Why, it’s broad —’ and again she could have bitten her tongue off at such clumsiness – ‘You haven’t even,’ she rapidly corrected herself, ‘asked me who I am. Quite the contrary. What is more, I can’t stop talking to you in this hateful mob of people. Probably you don’t know how they stare – and don’t care. But I
have
got appearances to keep up.’