Short Stories 1927-1956 (20 page)

‘Here I am,’ her voice ran on breathlessly, in broken cadences up and down its scale – a clear, challenging voice; ‘here I am, talking and talking,
yet you are telling me nothing at all about yourself. And soon there won’t be another chance.’

‘Another chance!’ cried Cecil in guttural tones. ‘You mean you won’t see me again? You can’t mean that! Why, here I am, seeing you now – if,’ he added dismally, ‘if seeing is the right word to use. And yet I still keep on saying to myself: “It’s not the ten-thousandth part.” Please do try and understand: I want to see
you
–
you.
Oh, your very self! You couldn’t have meant that.’

‘
Me
?’ returned a faint and rather shaken voice. ‘Me! there’s nothing in
me.
Besides,’ and the tones flattened a little in spite of the fact that a faint smile had crept into her eyes, ‘that would be seeing me double.’

‘I said it. I mean it,’ said Cecil stubbornly. ‘I don’t believe it would be possible for me ever to know you enough. Everything you say leads me on as if, oh! into another world, and even this one – I can’t explain. I never knew there was such a place to be in as where we are now, and yet,’ it was as if a sudden light had flooded his mind, ‘what you have said as yet has been nothing but – sign-posts.’

The dark eyes pondered. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘if I thought you were not meaning every syllable you say I should never hold up my head again.’

The thin, delicate face was now averted; the narrow left hand, as if purely of its own volition, had turned itself palm upward on her knee. Even a young man twenty times less accustomed to looking down than Cecil might have noticed it. But if he did, he made no movement. He merely sat a little stiller.

‘Mean? You!’ he said, as if in utter perplexity. ‘Why, even to be seen with a creature like me must be a – an imposition.’ His head stared round on its shoulders. ‘I assure you,’ he said with a sudden gleam of humour, ‘it’s an imposition even to me.’

Hardly had the little rill of answering laughter sounded out in the sullen air when a headlong rush of wind swept over the motionless meadows that lay opposite to them, turning their rich seeding brown to a livid green, and sweeping the waters of the river into a rippled shield of beaten metal. Dry leaves were flying in it. The tree above them was swept as if by one vast, multitudinous sigh. There came a pause; and then out of the blue-black, cloud-vaulted heavens above their heads, a thin river of light suddenly
flickered
, like the fangs of a serpent. And as if at a signal, the solid globe beneath this day-benighted couple shook beneath a rattling crash of thunder.

Of the two, the young man must have been the least prepared for this assault. He showed not the faintest trace of being startled, however. He just quietly laid his hand on the upturned palm and in his haste almost
whispered
: ‘Quick, how high is the tree above us? I don’t know this place. You are frightened. Where shall I take you? Quick!’

The fingers beneath his remained perfectly passive. The laughter that came in reply seemed almost as meaningless as a child’s, and as full of gaiety.

‘It’s the littlest tree I’ve ever seen,’ she answered, ‘and the loveliest. Green and round and bushy, like a toy tree. And they go on like a row of umbrellas right along the bank. So unless they are really aiming at us up there, nothing will matter. Frightened! Please, please understand, I love it all. It’s only the rain I am thinking of. What happens to me never, never matters. But what will your – what will the lady you spoke to me about think if you get back wet through?’

‘Will you
please
not talk like that. Please not to. It’s you I am thinking of, and —’

‘And here it comes,’ cried the young woman triumphantly. Her ‘it’ was neither lightning nor thunder, but a dense, league-long veil, part hail, part rain, that had now come sweeping over the all but blotted-out expanse of country before her eyes. Its
avant-couriers
smote ferociously and with a sharp
tap,
tap,
tap
on Cecil’s silk shade. The wind swept over them as if it were perceptibly condensed against their bodies. An enormous confusion filled the air.

And then, well, indeed you never knew what this odd young man would be doing next. At this moment he was unbuttoning his coat. ‘You must take this,’ he was saying; ‘you have got only the flimsiest things on. Why, I can see your arm through the silk.’

‘Please, please,’ she cried, catching both his wrists in her entreaty, ‘don’t do anything so utterly stupid. Oh, please – just think! Whatever would they say! And you’ll get your death of cold. Look now, see, we’ll get round to the other side. There. Do you realize it’s a lime tree over us; and it’s
coming
into flower. There’s nothing to do – nothing, I
swear
– but just to stay here quietly underneath it until the rain’s over.’

Quite apart from the haste with which she had panted these sentences, the clamour of the storm now almost drowned her voice. But actions speak louder than words. Cecil struggled no more. And the two of them cowered as close as they could against the dark, smooth bole of the young linden tree now tenting her bright green branches over their heads.

When Nature is in one of her passing fits of hysteria, poor little humans must just sit still and smile. Nevertheless, any chance observer of one of these young faces, and of all that was visible of the other, would hardly have described them as smiling. There is a happiness of the spirit that seems to draw an almost grotesque mask over human features, that distorts and makes strange and absurd and yet seems to irradiate them, as if they were merely of glass made for a light to show through.

The next few days of Cecil’s life were spent in bed and were at the same time (so far as his mind was concerned), the most active, the most wretched yet rapturous, and the longest he had ever known. The lime tree had proved to be an imperfect umbrella. Cecil had hastened home at last through the rain-washed streets – blindingly silver-bright in the sunshine – in an amazed happiness, on tenterhooks of anxiety, and soaked to the skin.

Grummumma had listened steadily on to his rambling explanations, at the same time rapidly comparing his attempts at chronology with the dining-room clock. Though he had an advantage denied to most men, in that his tell-tale eyes were concealed, Cecil hadn’t the making of a skilful prevaricator. This unusual eloquence in so reticent a young man was
suspicious
. Grummumma, like an immense well-fed cat at a mouse’s hole, watched his lips and his hands as he sat there, attempting to swallow his belated luncheon without exhibiting too obvious an effort. But whatever speculations she may have pursued within remained unexpressed. She was all credulity and indulgence. Even when next morning she stood over him, clinical thermometer between finger and thumb, and announced that his temperature was 101°, she refrained from any ‘I told you so.’ After all, the mouse was safely in its hole again, and there would be ample time to find out where it had been straying.

The storm was followed – a rather unusual caprice in an English summer – by a spell of happy, halcyon weather. The patient, however, lying there on his back in his beautiful brass bed, the blinds at the window all but
shrouding
his room, his shade over his eyes, enjoyed it only at second hand. When Mrs le Mercier was not either giving him his physic or sitting over him while he consumed milk pudding, his cousin Eirene was. She, however, was the more restless nurse of the two, and again and again would interrupt the
Cranford
she was reading to him in order to mince over to the window and peep out at the day.

‘You can’t think how lovely it is,’ she would cry gaily over her shoulder. ‘It’s a
thousand
pities, you poor thing. And I simply can’t imagine why you didn’t take shelter in a shop. You always go that way, don’t you, Cecil?’

And once more Cecil would be compelled to remember the precise terms of the rather fantastic little story he had invented to explain his sousing, a story received by Eirene with a variety of reactions. After what was perhaps the fifth attempt to glean a little further information, she returned to his bedside and, so to speak, took the bull by the horns.

‘What auntie, you know, has perfectly made up her mind about
now
is that you really want somebody to take more care of you. And I am going to be one of the “somebodies”. You are getting mopish, Cecil. You just shut yourself up away from everybody, though you
know
how sympathetic we all can’t help being. And what’s more, I believe you make things out worse
than they are, just to spoil yourself a little. The doctor was saying only the other day that, even if it is a little painful, you ought to try ever so little to – you know what I mean – to
make
yourself better.’

‘My eyes, you mean?’ interjected Cecil from his pillow.

‘And aren’t our eyes,’ cried Eirene brightly, ‘almost, as it were, ourselves? Why,
you
see things that I have never even noticed at all. It’s quite, quite wonderful. Still, you mustn’t mind my speaking out a little, even though you never seem to be really listening to half I say. You couldn’t tell me a single word about that last chapter I have been reading, now, could you? And I can’t bear reading aloud, especially in a room like a vault.’

Cecil remained perfectly still in his bed. ‘You have been kindness itself, Eirene,’ he replied in a flattish voice; ‘and it’s hateful to keep you here. Do please take a little rest. And – and might I have half an hour’s more
Cran
for
d
after
dinner?’

‘Well, if I must, I must, you naughty boy. But promise me, if I do, that you’ll get a little sleep. We all do so much want to help you all we can. It’s
so
difficult – just groping in the dark.’

There was almost a hint of tears in her voice, and she stooped prettily, though not very far down, as if to blow him a kiss right in underneath the green shade, for as a matter of fact she had always felt a peculiar disinclination to confront those hidden eyes. How was she to tell, then, if her incipient kiss had reached its destination? She eyed the long, green-cowled hummock mistrustfully. ‘And you’ve
promised
to turn over a new leaf?’ she concluded.

The door gently closed, and the rack on which Cecil lay resumed its more leisurely activities. Of all the rats that were gnawing at his mind, one was never for a moment satisfied – what must his stranger be thinking of him now? With unprecedented presence of mind, his last words had been that he would be found edging along around the shop-end of the crescent at a quarter-past eleven every morning,
ad
infinitum.
Just about then, it appeared, would be her only chance of a few free minutes except in the evenings, and on Thursdays; and even they were precarious. Why, Cecil had not attempted to find out.

Sheer instinct had told him that circumstances had never been very kind to her. He realized she must be ‘poor’, and the very sound of the word sent him rushing away from it in his mind as fast as ever he could. From infancy he had been lapped in comparative luxury, and the merest suspicion that beneath Luxury’s silken skirts were concealed two bony knees filled him with incredible dismay. Nonetheless he knew with the immense assurance of mere faith that somehow or other she was not going to be poor for very long; that he was going to just sweep those circumstances up into a pile and burn them.

There never was a more helpless creature than himself; he knew that, too. And yet, once or twice in his life, he had determined to have his own way, and this was going to be another time. But how see her? How keep his tryst? How write to her? How let her have but one word to show that it was only a silly old temperature and a Grummumma and a doctor and a quickwitted, nimble-tongued cousin that were for the moment keeping him away?

He had so many times re-explored in imagination that hour by the river that he now knew every inch of it by heart. And what is more, huddling there beside her under the linden tree, he had actually managed to speak of his infirmity. It was the one thing in the world his tongue hated and detested having anything to do with. Still, it had somehow stumbled out; and the ordeal had not only proved an immeasurable relief but had also won an immeasurable reward.

‘Think worse of you for
that
!
Oh, what an utter meanness you must feel in me! Why, all along I have almost hoped you were
blind
;
for then, you see, I might have been of help, though I don’t quite see how –
i
f
ever, I mean, we
are
going to meet again. “Worse”, indeed! I’d ask the thunder just to swallow me up if I even so much as thought you thought it.’

Her face had been turned away from him as she spoke; and the grass at his feet, studded with small, snow-white daisies and here and there a yellow dandelion, had showed a wild, violent green beneath yet another riot of lightning.

But why did that particular ‘blind’ still make his heart stand still with delight, while Eirene’s nattier little pronunciation of the word just now, rankled in his side like a poisoned arrow? Could anything be odder? And what, indeed, was the matter with Eirene?

Two days ago she was just a first cousin much removed, waiting for him like a lightship, so to speak, irremovably in the offing, both a warning and an eventual refuge against all life’s storms. He had always known that if nobody more satisfactory turned up for her Eirene would probably decide to marry him. Grummumma had often spoken about it, quite plainly,
however
playfully; and since Cecil had always hated thinking of the future, he habitually left that future to wait until the present caught up with it.

And now the present had actually done so. And he knew as well as if it had been written down on paper, first that Eirene had suddenly made up her mind – just as if
his
chill had been
her
conflagration, and next, that he had also made up his own. He didn’t know exactly how he could manage to persuade his stranger to accept for the time being about two-thirds of his modest income. But it was his, and he was going to do so, and by sheer logic Eirene was therefore
not
going to marry him.