“Want any help?”
“No thank you, Mr. Fielding,” answered Vartouhi, all smiles and sunny surprise. “Is planty of spinach here.”
“Yes, it’s done well this year; better than last year.”
She continued to fill the bowl, and he stood at the door filling his pipe (which Miss Fielding, like someone running a mansion in the 1870’s, did not encourage him to smoke in the house) and watching her. He wanted her to come into the greenhouse; he suddenly thought it would be delightful to have Vartouhi beside him in the old place that he was so fond of, and he called to her:
“Come and see how tidy I’ve made it.”
“Is warm in here,” said Vartouhi, stepping over the threshold with her basin balanced against her hip.
“It always is, even in cold weather. It catches all the sun; it’s a regular sun trap.”
“You should have tomato in here, and grape too also,” she said, glancing round rather critically.
Now, if either of his sisters, or even Betty, had made this suggestion Kenneth would have thought, There you are, what did I tell you? Bothering, as usual. Bless them, but they do bother. But when Vartouhi uttered the words, his mind obediently did a somersault in order to retain its opinion of her, and he said heartily, “Splendid idea! I might try it this summer. I’ve never tried grapes. Do you know anything about growing them?” He turned a box upside down for her and she seated herself upon it with the basin of spinach on her knees.
“Oh yas, Mr. Fielding, we all have them in my country. We eat manny. You put them in the sun where it is varry hot and you give them blood to eat.”
“Oh yes, so you do. Dried blood. I remember now. By George, it sounds rather sinister, doesn’t it? feeding them on blood. Where do you get it from?”
“We kill a goat or a sheep,” she said indifferently, glancing round, “and cook him up with spice and use his blood. We eat him up for ourselves. Mr. Fielding, I think grape would look pratty, there,” and she pointed to the whitewashed wall opposite to the door.
“Do you? Well, so do I. If I get a vine and start it off in here, will you help me look after it, Vartouhi?”
“Will be varry pleased, Mr. Fielding! Always at home I am help with the fruits and here in England I am sad without doing it. All the girl help with the fruits in the Khar-el-Nadoon.”
“Ah, that’s the place you told me about before, isn’t it? The Valley of Apricots.”
“Yas. Is so pratty, Mr. Fielding. All the pink flower on the tree in the spring.”
“Pink? I thought apricot blossom was white—but I suppose you might call it very pale pink.”
“Is pink in the Khar-el-Nadoon.”
“Oh. What’s the soil?—I mean, when there’s a spring of water, is the ground all round it a sort of red?”
“Yas. And the water taste——” Vartouhi made the gestures of one who dislikes the taste of the water and he laughed.
“That’s the iron in it. I expect that’s what makes the apricot blossom a deeper pink, too; it’s supposed to have that effect.”
“Is pratty,” said Vartouhi, and stood up. “Mr. Fielding,” she began, and stopped.
“Yes?” His kind eyes looked at her, so betrayingly from under the brim of his old hat, but she was gazing down into the bowl of winter spinach and did not see.
“Is a beautiful, beautiful bottle of scent you give me.”
“I’m very glad you like it, Vartouhi.”
“Never have I had scent before. Nor a bracelet, too also. And now you give me scent and Rich-ard a bracelet! Is varry nice. Never have any men give me prasents except in Bairamia a man give my father a goat for me. Was rather old, too also.”
Kenneth did not laugh. He said glumly:
“Do you like the bracelet better than the scent?”
Vartouhi considered, gazing at the spinach. Then she said, lifting her eyes to his with a wicked smile:
“Soon the scent will be use up. The bracelet will not use up.”
He roared, though he was not pleased, and then he said eagerly, leaning towards her:
“Vartouhi, let me give you another bracelet, will you?”
“A necklace?” she breathed, catching his eagerness and leaning in her turn towards him with shining eyes. “Better to have a necklace because I have a bracelet, too also.”
“Right you are, then. A necklace—the prettiest one I can find. What kind would you like?”
“All gold and bead,” said Vartouhi promptly.
“All gold and beads. Right you are.” He foresaw that a visit to any shop in one of the flashier London arcades would provide him with something to delight her heart for about two guineas, and he was relieved. If she had asked for diamonds, he would have had to get them for her, and would have done it with that exasperation and pride that is the mark of infatuation in men, but he would also have felt utterly different about her. With her childish demand for “gold and bead” she had wrung his heart into a new tenderness and the greed on her little round face enchanted him with its innocence.
But a sobering thought now struck him.
“Er—” he began, and hesitated. How could he warn her not to let Miss Fielding see the necklace? If he did warn her it would spoil his pleasure in giving and her pleasure in receiving and make a shady secret out of a harmless little transaction. Dammit, why should he warn her? Why should Connie always mess everything up for him? He would defy Connie.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling and standing up. “Well, I’m afraid I must be getting on with my work.”
“I must go, too also.” Vartouhi paused at the door and absently raised the spinach bowl onto her head, where it balanced, under Kenneth’s fascinated gaze, as if it were growing there. “Is how we carry the apricot in basket,” she explained, then went on earnestly, looking up at him, “Mr. Fielding, I shall not tell Rich-ard you will give me a necklace because he want marry me. I say, No! but he is still want, and he will see the necklace and be angry at me. Is a nuisance, Rich-ard. So I will say, my sister Yania give me this necklace from the United States of America. Is a wicked lie, you think? So the old nuns would say that teach me speak English.”
“Er—no. Not wicked,” said Kenneth, very taken aback by the news that Richard had actually proposed, and at once feeling twice as jealous and apprehensive. “But why should you have to tell a lie at all? It isn’t any of his business if I give you a necklace. You aren’t engaged to him,” ended Kenneth, working himself into a righteous indignation over Richard’s impudence.
“Yas, is none of his business!” echoed Vartouhi heartily, evidently relieved to have moral support. “I will say, Mr. Fielding give me this because he is kind and good and is none of your business, Rich-ard!”
“Er—yes, something of that sort. Right you are, then; I’ll look out for your necklace and we’ll—keep it just a secret between ourselves, shall we?”
Vartouhi nodded and went off, but outside the door she turned back. Beneath the basin still balanced on her head her little face was excited.
“Mr. Fielding! I have a secret too also. Is something varry nice—but I will not tell you yet!” she said mysteriously, and hurried away.
What a dear little girl she is, he thought. Not like most women. Now, she doesn’t bother; and he sighed as he went on with his work. To his thoughts about his father and the anger of his sisters over his loan to his father, there were now added thoughts about Richard and his proposal to Vartouhi and thoughts about his private feelings, and he no longer felt peaceful. He had decided that Vartouhi had not come bothering, and he was too loyal to admit that the result was precisely the same as if she had.
CHAPTER 22
RICHARD FOUND A room outside Blentley for twenty-five shillings a week, which sum covered his meals and baths. It was in a little new bungalow, jerry-built and decorated in shades of beige and biscuit and brown, and furnished with mass-produced furniture and crockery in mean designs. None of the inanimate objects in the house were older than three years an
d the combined ages of its inhabitants, Richard and his landlady and her two little boys, added up to only sixty-four years, but this did not make for gaiety and a careless youthful atmosphere, as the little boys were very little and unnaturally good and given to catching colds and adding unbearably to the burden already carried by their mother, who was also little, and very meek and timid and good, and only lived for the postman’s daily visit which might bring a letter from Daddy away in the Middle East.
Richard had begun with the intention of having no social intercourse with his landlady, but the kind heart he had inherited from his mother and his own detached yet passionate interest in human beings as social units soon did away with that plan, and he found himself inquiring after the boys’ colds and bringing home friars balsam and camphorated oil in his pockets when their mother could not leave the house, and making comforting remarks when there had been a long gap without letters from the Middle East and she went about looking like a miserable little ghost. Neither she nor her boys ever made demands on Mr. Marten’s time and patience: they were so polite, so patient and good and quiet, they wanted so little to make their dim, peaky faces light up, that they completely won Richard’s head and heart, and slowly he began to return, with feelings of mingled shame and relief, to the first love that had filled his life before he met Vartouhi—the love of ordinary, helpless people all over the world.
Romantic love had seemed to him, before he fell a victim to it himself, a sort of beautiful bane—
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers;
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers,
and he had disliked the thought of it, just as he disliked a romantic attitude towards politics, and leaders, and religion. When he fell romantically in love he had therefore been surprised at himself, and this surprise helped him to keep a part of his mind detached from his own sufferings. Knowing that Vartouhi could never play an orderly part in that “blue-print” which he had drawn up for his life, he had known that he must either try to marry her and thereafter submit to a lifelong enchantment and an unending domination of his higher impulses, or else he must run away. He had seen more than one man bound body and mind to sorceresses; women without scruples or reason, possessing the immeasurably ancient power which may be called Eve. It was a rare type nowadays, and so rare among Englishwomen as to be practically non-existent, and it was his bad luck that he should have encountered a foreigner who was dowered with Eve in excess. He knew that he had been right to run away.
If I had had more physical strength, and had been vital and ambitious, so that I was capable of dragging her along and doing my work too, I might have married her and subdued her, he sometimes thought, but I have only one lung and a vast amount of work to get through in the next fifty years and it’s a bore, subduing people. And his reflections always ended with the bitter thought: she wouldn’t have me, anyway.
But gradually, as the quiet winter days went on with their routine of work and meals and long walks, he began to feel healed. The drabness and etiolation of the little house did not get on his nerves because, in spite of his physical delicacy, his nerves were healthy and his tastes were not those of an ivory-tower dweller. His landlady liked (loved was too strong a word to use of such a dim little person) her triangular teacups and her fumed oak furniture, and to the little boys and the absent soldier-father it meant Home, and Richard was not one to shudder aesthetically over what contented ordinary people. He could escape, if he wanted to, by looking at one of the many hundreds of pictures in his memory: a garden in Spain with azure tiles set in its brown walls and its colonnade, wreathed in budding vines, opening on a pool fringed with white and yellow iris; a swelling brown field in Sussex with a mass of golden young oak trees springing out of it. He could whistle “Tell me, fair ladies,” or murmur the verse about “The shepherds on the lawn” from the “Ode on the Nativity.” Kingdoms of the mind; they could not provide all that the heart desired but they could provide one kind of freedom.
He neither grieved because his landlady had not had his opportunities nor deplored the fact that she liked her anaemic bungalow. Let us get everybody properly fed first, he thought always, impatiently, and then, when the vitality of the peoples rises, so will their taste for rich strong beauty in all the arts, including those of everyday living.
He lived like a peaceful hermit for nearly a month. January had come, with snow and violets, and nearly gone, and he delivered his first lecture at the European Reconstruction Council’s training school. It dealt with the degree of industrialization reached by the States of the Danube Basin up to 1939, and was a success; that is, his fellow lecturers and teachers praised it and the people who were there to learn from it, did learn. He had the supremely satisfying experience of working hard and seeing his finished labours perform the task they were meant to do. He was also well paid for his work and that was very pleasant too. He sent half of his first cheque to the Spanish Republican Internees Comforts Fund and paid his mother back three pounds that he owed her. And he meditated—for he was no anchorite by temperament and disliked a life without feminine society—writing to Alicia Arkwright to suggest that they should lunch in London and go to a film together—“and I shall warn her that it must be inexpensively,” thought Richard.
Alicia was having a dreary New Year. The man she had met at the party had been sent out of England on a Government job and she was temporarily without anyone regular to kiss, while even her excellent health had broken down under the daily journey to the factory in a freezing bus full of coughing women, and she had had a heavy cold. She stayed away from the factory for a day or two, sitting up in bed in a snow-white fluffy jacket tied at the throat with red velvet ribbons, her dark hair caught up with a childish bow of the same ribbon on top of her head, and every morning her father, who was fond of her, came in and inquired, while folding his newspaper, did she want anything from Town—though Heaven knew that there wasn’t much to be had even if she did. She usually gave him some small commission, for he was a man who enjoyed spending money on women and his daughter thought this a trait to be encouraged. Then he would go off in the car that he was still allowed to run because he was head of a firm fulfilling very large Government contracts, and Alicia would be left alone, to read and blow her nose and stare out of the window at the garden under melting snow. In a lowered state, with time on her hands, she not unnaturally indulged in gloomy reflections about being twenty-eight next July and having no plans and not much hope for the future, and so on and so forth, and even wrote a depressed letter to her best friend, Crys, another tall cool girl like herself, with a commission in the W.R.N.S. Crys’s consolatory letter arrived by the same post as Richard’s invitation to go to London and see a film, and she was ridiculously pleased to hear from him, and at once wrote to explain why she could not come, ending with an inquiry as to why he always wrote letters, the telephone had been invented about 1890, or thereabouts, she believed.
“I dislike the telephone,” he wrote back on a post card of Milan Cathedral, “and never use it unless I cannot avoid doing so. I am sorry you have a cold and I will write to you again in a fortnight to see if you can come then.” The post card was signed “Yours affectionately, Richard.”
“‘Affectionately’!” exclaimed Alicia, throwing the post card down on the bed, “what a way to sign oneself! Just like Mash.” (Mash was the old governess of her childhood.) She picked the post card up again and after studying it severely, tore it in pieces. “But that’s rather how I feel about him—‘affectionately.’ He’s the sort of odd old thing you do feel affectionate about.”
With which serene piece of self-deception, she picked up Vogue and became absorbed in it.
Meanwhile, what was happening in that forcing-house of the passions, Sunglades?
Everybody was relieved when the holiday ended and they could return to their normal avocations, and the spirits of Miss Fielding were further lightened by the departure of her father for London, with hints that he would
probably not return for at least a fortnight, if at all; he would let them know. But her rejoicing was of short duration, for he returned in three days, more depressed than she had ever seen him, and it became alarmingly clear after he had been back a few hours that the cause of his depression was that he missed Betty. He cheered up wonderfully when she came in from the Ministry about seven o’clock, and Miss Fielding’s heart sank to zero when he announced, sparkling and joking his way through dinner, that they must make up their minds to seeing a great deal of him in future—a very great deal.
“Thinking of settling down here again, Father?” said Kenneth, who was also in excellent spirits, and had been so ever since he had visited London earlier in the week. Everybody, indeed, was cheerful except Miss Fielding. Betty was always cheerful, and Vartouhi was all smiles because she had had such a pretty necklace made of gold filigree beads and red jewels from her sister in America. She had met the postman in the lane that morning on her way into St. Alberics, and he had given her the parcel. It was quite a handsome present and must have cost at least ten dollars, perhaps more, in Miss Fielding’s estimation. Vartouhi was a lucky girl! three hats, and a bracelet, and scent! and now this charming necklace whose deep red and gold glowed against her smooth throat. No wonder her long eyes gleamed with delight.
“Ah—yes—well, perhaps, perhaps,” said Mr. Fielding, smiling and twinkling mysteriously and nodding at Betty, whose private reaction was Mercy on us! “It depends; it depends.”
Miss Fielding heard this with feelings close to despair. What! settle down again near St. Alberics, and spend the remainder of his days—and he was sure to live to ninety-odd ; not that, of course, she wanted anything to happen to him—popping in and out of Sunglades borrowing money from Kenneth and upsetting him by his bad example? Reviving scandalous memories in the minds of all the old friends and neighbours; perhaps marrying some highly unsuitable person years and years younger than himself—good heavens! perhaps marrying Betty! He looked at her as if he was going to propose that very evening ; and all Miss Fielding’s possessive instincts rose in fury at the thought. Why should he, who had caused Our Mother so much worry and distress (even Miss Fielding could not pretend that Our Mother had been broken-hearted over his departure), why should he, at the very end of his misspent life, settle down with a shallow frivolous woman like Betty who took no interest in world problems and had led an almost useless existence? Our Mother’s memory would be profaned by such a marriage, and Kenneth encouraged thereby to make a fool of himself in every direction. And what would they live on? Father had been practically penniless when he arrived at Christmas, Kenneth said. It would mean continual loans; perhaps even a settled quarterly allowance; endless complications. And above all there was the indecency, the sheer inappropriateness, of remarriage at seventy-eight. There might even be a paragraph in the Evening Standard about it. Miss Fielding’s face was red with rage as she cut up her corned-beef pudding.