“She could always have left,” said Miss Fielding. “There is no need for anyone to put up with that sort of thing an instant longer than they want to. There are the Labour Exchanges and the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Girls’ Friendly Society and, since the war, countless refugee aid societies.”
“But of what use are those, dear lady, if they exist in one stratum and Vartouhi in another?” asked Richard in his silkiest voice. He was so much moved and so resented his pain that he lashed out like a wounded snake. “The societies exist; Vartouhi exists; but at no point do their activities intersect.” His mother glanced at him, surprised.
“That’s what I meant; she ought to have gone to one of them and they would have helped her, silly little thing. She isn’t quite as bad as she was when she first came, but she’s still very secretive and peculiar,” said Miss Fielding. “I suppose she made quite a mouthful about it to you.”
“Oh, no, she didn’t say much,” Kenneth answered, getting up. “Well, I don’t know about everybody else but I’m going to bed.” He was glad that he had not told them about the sailor and the knife. None of them understood, not even Betty, sympathetic as she was. And I’m damned if I give Con that to chew over, he thought.
“A good idea; the evening has been wasted so we may as well ‘call it a day,’ as they say,” said Miss Fielding, also getting up. “Well, Vartouhi seems to be quite happy here, that’s one good thing, and I will write to Charles Omopoulos to-morrow and ask him for the latest news from Bairamia and the Khar-el-Nadoon. That ought to cheer her up.”
Not necessarily, thought Richard, struggling up and supporting himself upon the stick which he now used. Maddening woman! She will write to Charles Omopoulos to-morrow; she always does what she says she will; and so strong is the blend of coarse kindness with detestability in her character that one is denied the comfort of wholeheartedly disliking her. I give her up; I renounce and abandon her; shade of Marcel Proust, she is yours.
Kenneth went round locking up the house, having told Betty to run off to bed and not fuss when she murmured something about her fire-watch. The cat Pony yawned and stretched enormously at him from its blanket in the hot tidy kitchen where the clock ticked loud and fast. He peered into the quiet glowing interior of the boiler and slammed its doors to. Everything was in order. Someone (Betty, no doubt) was running in bath water upstairs. Kenneth felt restless and gloomy. The sound of his sister’s clear voice briskly uttering the name “Khar-el-Nadoon” sounded on in his mind, drowning the echo of another voice that had made the words sound very different.
“Have you heard of the European Reconstruction Council, dear?” inquired Richard, as Betty came into his room half an hour later to say good night. He was in bed, with the reading-lamp shining on his gaunt face and Montaigne’s Essays and the Economist on the pillow.
Betty sat on the bed, and thought for a minute and then shook her head.
“I had this from them this morning.” He held up a letter. “They are opening a training school at Blentley shortly and want me to give some lectures during the coming term, on the financial systems of the invaded countries.”
His mother nodded. “I see. Getting ready for after the war.”
“Exactly. Fully trained students will be sent to Europe immediately it is possible to deal with the social problems. (Well, you knew that, of course.) The Council is sponsored and financed by the Government.”
“It should be quite interesting.”
“I think so. And I have only three pounds left, so the money is very necessary too. The lectures won’t take up all my time, so I shall get some part-time work in a small factory as well. That ought to be possible.”
“If it doesn’t knock you up, darling,” she said, looking at him fondly.
“I shan’t undertake anything that I’m not capable of performing. That would be foolish, as well as a disguised form of vanity. It appears that my name was suggested to the Council by Sir William Beveridge.”
“Oh—ho! Nice little compliment, Rick.”
“Well,” he looked down with a demure smile, “I am not insensible of the honour. The point is: does Miss Fielding object to my being here so strongly that she will seize upon this change in my habits as an excuse to get rid of me?”
“I should take no notice of Connie,” said Betty with decision, “I think she really likes us all being here, only she must have someone to grumble at. Her bark is worse than her bite.”
“You will observe,” said Richard, lying back on the pillows, “that we both assume that she is head of the household. Fielding really does dislike me but the fact fails to register with me.”
“Poor old Ken,” said Betty vaguely, and slid off the bed. She had on an amber dressing-gown over an amber silk nightgown that made the best of her dark hair and tea-rose skin. “I don’t think he really dislikes anyone. Well, he isn’t the head of the household, of course. Good night, dear.”
“Good night. You are a pretty and delightful and good woman, Betty.”
“My dear boy! Aren’t you always telling me I’m not your type? Thank you, all the same. You wait until you’ve got a household of your own!” she added teasingly.
“When I have, I shall be head of it,” said Richard, opening Montaigne’s Essays.
CHAPTER 15
THE NEXT MORNING after Kenneth and Betty had gone to work and Miss Fielding had settled herself with The Times, Vartouhi went upstairs to Miss Burton’s apartments.
It was raining, and the cold light came through scudding clouds into Miss Burton’s sitting-room with its summprlike furnishings of white paint and blue flowered chintz and basket chairs and many photographs, and made them look flimsy and uncosy. But the room was well warmed by a large electric fire and by it Miss Burton sat with Ouida’s The Massareenes. She herself preferred the later and less romantic novels of this writer to the earlier ones; it was her mother who had been the fervent admirer of Wanda and In Maremma and the rest and who had passed her collection on to her daughter; but Miss Burton liked to pull out one of the novels while she was dressing or digesting her lunch and read a few pages. She now put the book down and smiled at Vartouhi.
“There you are, Vartouhi. I hadn’t forgotten. Look,” she indicated a table where the hats had been put out, “there they are. See which you like.”
“Thank you, Miss Burton.”
“That looks charming!” exclaimed Miss Burton in a minute; she had been interestedly watching the trying on of the beige hat and the white one and now admired Vartouhi in a large pale blue felt. “But you can’t see yourself properly in that glass; let’s come into the bedroom.”
“Oh, yes, you must have that one!” she said as Vartouhi smiled at herself in the long mirror as a country girl of fifty years ago would have smiled at cherry ear-rings.
“Vary pratty,” announced Vartouhi.
“Very. Highly unsuitable and becoming,” drawled The Usurper, looking out of Miss Burton’s amused eyes for a moment. Her visits were becoming rarer as Miss Burton grew older.
“You’d better have them all,” she went on with abrupt kindness, “I shan’t ever wear them again.”
“Three hat!” murmured Vartouhi, staring at them as they lay on the bed. “This morning I have no hat, now I have three hat. Oh thank you thank you, Miss Burton!”
“You needn’t thank me. I like you to have them.”
“I do something for you,” said Vartouhi eagerly.
“Oh no, my dear, there’s no need for that, really.”
“Yas, yas, I do something for you. You tell me what you like, I do it.” Her gaze moved round the room, looking, at once, for something to do. Miss Burton’s gaze went with hers, and lingered on a half-open drawer stuffed with coloured wool and knitting needles and embroidery frames.
“Well,” she said, laughing but slightly ashamed, “if you really do want to be a kind girl you can tidy up that shocking drawer for me.”
Vartouhi went over to the drawer and looked down int
o the confusion of brilliant wools and silks. Suddenly she violently shook her head.
“No! Miss Burton, I will not tidy. I make you a thing, a pratty thing, all colours. You have old sheet, old rug, old something, I make you a pratty thing.”
“Oh, well, really——” said Miss Burton, attracted but foreseeing some objections to the plan, including protests from Miss Fielding at Vartouhi’s wasting her time. “That would be very nice, but——”
“Yas. I do it.” Vartouhi interrupted her vigorously, kneeling in front of the drawer and plunging her hands into the silk. “All this red, all this yellow, all this green, I make a beautiful thing. You find out old sheet; I make.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you, Vartouhi. Er, what would I use it for?”
“Put it on you bed,” answered Vartouhi with a flashing smile, “Yas, Miss Fielding! I come!” and she ran downstairs in response to a distant bellow.
“So tiresome,” said Miss Fielding, standing in the hall with The Times, “Mrs. Archer hasn’t turned up and I particularly wanted to see her to-day to ask her about her grandson doing Little Frimdl. Can you look in there on your way to the town, Vartouhi, and find out what is the matter? I hope to goodness she’s not ill. I will do the beds to-day,” and Miss Fielding stalked back into the drawing-room to finish The Times, irritated by the prospect of doing the beds.
In the little study, Richard was stamping a letter to the European Reconstruction Council, which accepted the post they offered, and deciding that he would try to walk down the road to post it, for he must get the normal powers of his ankle restored as quickly as possible if he was to undertake daily journeys to work in the New Year. His satisfaction at the prospect was twofold, for he looked forward to doing some congenial work again and also to earning some money. He had saved fifty pounds during the time he had been working with the Dove Players but, as he had told his mother, that money was nearly all gone now.
The rain had stopped and an icy wind was ruffling the pools in the road as he limped out of the gates. Sky and fields and trees were steely with winter yet wet with cold rain, and only the delicious freshness of the air compensated for such an unpleasant day. Richard never took much notice of weather or made many concessions to its variations and on this occasion he had no hat and an enormously long scarf of faded blue wool twisted three times round his neck, an ancient trench coat, and a pair of beautiful boots, hand-made by Hill’s, that he had bought for thirty shillings from an aristocratic Leftist friend. He had practised walking in the garden during the past week and it was with some confidence that he set off slowly down the road.
“Hey! You get cold in you head!” called Vartouhi mockingly, as she came up behind him. He turned and smiled at her.
“No I shan’t, I never wear a hat. Where’s the bicycle this morning?”
“It has burst in its wheel.”
“Oh. Are you going in to shop?” he said, a little confused by being alone with her. He noticed vaguely that she looked different this morning, and, when he brought his mind to bear on the matter, observed that she was wearing a large pale blue hat.
“Your hat is new, isn’t it?” he went on.
“Miss Burton give me. Vary pratty,” she said proudly.
Richard said nothing to this, but looked down at her with so much meaning that she was compelled to do something about his look, but all she did was to give him a smile which, not for the first time, disconcerted him by its malice. He suddenly remembered the smile of a five-year-old child belonging to some friends of his when scoring off a younger brother. She really doesn’t like me, he thought. But her eyes and the full curve of her sallow cheeks were so enchanting against the pale blue of the hat that his thoughts were suddenly scattered by a rush of feeling.
“Vartouhi——” he said, quickly, “you are so lovely!”—and then stopped, unable to continue because of a conviction that he was addressing something that could not possibly understand, like a flower or a kitten.
“Oh yas!” said Vartouhi, looking pleased but scornfully half-shutting her eyes. “I know you think so I am lovely. You look at me all the time.”
“Well, yes, I do, I’m afraid. Er—I can’t help it. Don’t you like me to look?”
“Make me laugh,” said Vartouhi, and did so, putting her little hand over her mouth and giggling at him through it. The gesture was astonishingly foreign and he was instantly reminded of those silly charming Asiatic faces seen so many times in travel films, flying from the camera or peeping rapturously round doorways and veils. He did not like it. A feeling very like repulsion touched his mind for an instant.
“I’m glad I amuse you,” he said stiffly.
“Now you are cross to me. I don’t care. Make me laugh again,” and she repeated the gesture but now her eyes were sparkling angrily.
“Well, no one likes to be laughed at,” he said more mildly.
“I like it. But I do not like to be angry at. Make me angry too also.”
“I can’t laugh at you,” he said slowly, stopping to rest on his stick for a moment while he looked down at her. “You make me feel too much.”
“I am varry pratty,” she said complacently, “that is why you feel. There were some many man in Bairamia ask my father to marry me.”
“I’m sure they did, Vartouhi.”
“He say, no. They have no money enough.”
“Well, I haven’t either.”
“I see, Rich-ard. You have bad clothes and no money at all.”
This time Richard did laugh, though the mixture of exasperation and fascination into which he was floundering was no laughing matter.
“Here’s the pillar-box,” he said, stopping under a long wall where the rhododendrons dripped, “I’m not coming any further.”
“Good-bye, Rich-ard,” said Vartouhi gaily with a nod, and continued on the road towards Mrs. Archer’s, while Richard limped homewards, thinking that the situation between himself and Vartouhi showed signs only of becoming less satisfactory: for it was by no means a case of simple desire and it was most certainly not a case for the remedy of marriage; you don’t marry a kitten or a child of five. No; it is simply the “bad fate like that in the fairy stories,” he thought once more.
Mrs. Archer lived in an old cottage at the end of a long narrow garden which in summer blazed with flowers and even now had a cold pink rose or two on the leafless bushes above beds of sturdy winter spinach. The cottage had an undulating roof of rotting dark silver thatch where starlings nested, and very outside sanitation, and Mrs. Archer longed to get out of it and go and live in one of the Council houses on the St. Alberics road. People (not Archers) had been living in her cottage for nearly two hundred years and, what with the pump and the sanitation and the starlings and their mess and the tiny coal fire which was all she had to cook on, she felt it was time the place had a rest. She had long since stopped noticing how pretty it was.
The front door was shut, and as Vartouhi went down the cinder path she heard excited voices. She looked with contempt at the cottage. This was the kind of house that her father’s fruit workers lived in, small, old and cramped, a pitiful place compared with the spacious stone rooms of her own home and the gorgeously carpeted and curtained mansion, flowing with tinned music and hot water, where dwelt her employers. She marched up to the door and gave a loud knock.
In a minute Mrs. Archer opened it. She was flushed and excited and behind her Vartouhi saw a tiny dark room crowded with people; an old woman and a small boy and a young woman and several middle-aged ones, all staring towards the door.
“Yes?—oh, it’s you,” said Mrs. Archer. She never addressed Vartouhi in any other way.
“Good morning, Mrs. Archer,” retorted Vartouhi with a passable imitation of Miss Fielding’s manner. “Miss Fielding ask why you do not come this day morning.”
“Come to see why I didn’t come to work, I expect, haven’t you?” pursued Mrs. Archer, who always kept up a running translation of Vartouhi’s remarks. “Well, we’ve had
a bit of excitement here. Our George has won a medal!”
“I do not understand.”
“For fighting. My George, my son. He went for three of those Huns in some place in Norway on one of those Commando raids—you know—bang! bang! shoot Germans!” and Mrs. Archer imitated somebody firing a rifle.
“That’s not the way you handle a tommy-gun, Gran,” interrupted the small boy, pushing his way between the females to the door. “Like this—pr-rr-rr-rr!” and he slowly moved his arms to and fro, machine-gunning
“Ah-ha! I know!” exclaimed Vartouhi, smiling. “I see on the pictures. Your George do that?”
“Yes. In Norway. In the snow. Mopped up three of them and took a position all on his own. The Government’s given him a medal and he’s come home on leave this morning, unexpected. So that’s why I’m having a holiday to-day.”
“Medal—like this, see?” interrupted the small boy, who had personally undertaken Vartouhi’s enlightenment. “These are my gran-dad’s. For killing Germans in the old war. Medal—see?”
“Sidney Archer, you put those back at once!”
“I understand.” Vartouhi had been examining the case he held out to her, and now looked up smiling. “I am so please. He is very brave and good, this man. I would like him to see.”
“He’s upstairs now, having a bit of a wash,” said Mrs. Archer repressively, and the young woman came slowly over to the door and put her pretty face over Mrs. Archer’s shoulder, without speaking.
“Is good for you, Mrs. Archer. So brave a son,” said Vartouhi. “I tell Miss Fielding.”
There was some murmuring from the interior of the room and the words “do her good” could be detected.
“That’s right. You tell her I shan’t be in to-day because my son’s got a medal——”
“Mum!” exclaimed a confident male voice from somewhere upstairs, “come and find me a shirt, will you? and spare my blushes!”
“You get along, George Archer!” said his mother. “That’s Miss Burton’s hat, isn’t it?” she added, looking with interest at the pale blue felt.