Nightingale Wood

  ‘The wallpaper’s a sort of pale Futurist, all mixed, you know, and there’s a Hunting Scenes chintz,’ continued Mrs Spring.

  ‘It sounds marvellous; I think I’ll go up and look at it.’

  ‘There’ll be a drink when you come down. Some people are coming in. Now, Hetty,’ as Phyllis went out, ‘that’s how I want you to look one day. Phyllis has perfect taste and wears her things beautifully.’

  ‘Why?’ droned Hetty.

  Mrs Spring stared at her.

  ‘Why? What do you mean, why?’

  ‘Why does she wear them beautifully?’

  ‘How on earth should I know? Because she does, I suppose. It’s a gift … and you haven’t got it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Hetty was eating, rather than reading, large slabs of a very thin book of contemporary verse each page having a thick wodge of print, without capital letters, starting at the top and running nearly to the bottom. Her eyes were very close to the book and she frowned with concentration.

  ‘Hetty! Do put that down and go and make yourself fit to be seen. The Randalls will be back at any minute. Your stockings are twisted and your hat’s on straight; it ought to be right over one eye. What have you got hold of there, for pity’s sake?’

  ‘Ashes of Iron.’ Hetty began to bite a finger-nail, absently but with the ghost of a malicious smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ashes of Iron. It’s the name of a book. Poems.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ muttered her aunt, moving uneasily across the room to the wireless, making a little face of weariness and pain. ‘What on earth does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, but one has to read it and try to find out,’ said her niece sternly, going towards the door with the book carefully cradled in one hand.

  Mrs Spring switched on the wireless and music, of a sort, slowly grew in the big luxurious room.

  I don’t want to write, of course, mused Hetty, running upstairs two at a time, and anyway I know I can’t, but really, if one was a genius (as I suspect this Ashes of Iron man is) one could be it here without a soul (I err; I should say, without a body, for souls they have none) suspecting. Never heard of Greuze, never heard of Donat Mulqueen and Ashes of Iron! I might be Donat Mulqueen myself, for all they realize.

  She went into her bedroom and shut the door.

  She had a sitting-room too, but she liked her bedroom better because from it she could see the river. Not a corner of the orchard could be seen, and of course the waste land at the back of the vegetable garden was tucked well away at the side of the house, but the river had poetry; it was better than the unshadowed lawns, the neat beds of blazing flowers.

  Her room was big, light and pleasant, with conventionally charming furnishings that had been transformed by Hetty’s own odd, vivid and sure taste. Watts’s The Minotaur, Van Gogh’s Cornfield with Cypresses, a group of natives by Gauguin, looked strange but attractive against the pale pink wallpaper considered suitable for a virgin’s sleeping-place by Mrs Spring.

  Bookshelves stood against the four walls. They were shapely and well made, but were all second-hand; Hetty had picked them up on visits to Chesterbourne. She liked her shelves to have personality, as well as the books on them, and though it would have been simpler to order shelves to be fitted round the room, or to buy those bookcases that grow with the growth of their library, she had stood firm against the amusement of Victor and the irritation of her aunt, and had the shelves she wanted.

  She let down her thick lank hair and began to brush it, standing in front of the mirror and gazing dejectedly across the now sunlit lawns. The world was so beautiful! so crammed with romance, excitement, horror, irony! In every part of it, except at Grassmere near Sible Pelden in Essex, there were to be found truths that were stranger than fiction, and more satisfying. There were causes to live for, work to be done, philosophies to be examined, religions to be inquired into and rejected, and an ocean, a bottomless ether, of talk to be poured out at somebody – no matter who; someone else young, preferably, who would argue and know a little more than oneself but have the same kind of searching, eager mind. There were people to be taught, wrongs to be righted, there were politics and history and economics …

  I know just how Florence Nightingale felt.

  Why won’t they let me go to college, and then try to get a job?

  What’s the use of a finishing-school, full of useless lilies of the field in crepe-de-chine underclothing, who’ve never heard of Donat Mulqueen?

  Swiiiish! went the stiff brush, down the thick locks. Wait till I’m twenty-one! Only another year.

  There was a sharp tap at the door, which opened before she could say anything and admitted Miss Barlow.

  ‘What do you want?’ demanded Hetty. She casually put on a dressing-gown, for she still had the fierce modesty of extreme youth, and she hated the fastidious glance that Phyllis had given at her neglected, schoolgirlish underclothing.

  ‘Just want to see if you’ve got anything new and interesting to read,’ said Miss Barlow lightly, ‘and we haven’t seen each other for such ages that I wondered how you’ve been getting on all this time.’ She began to wander round the room, humming. ‘Not engaged yet?’

  ‘Go to hell.’ Hetty went on with her brushing.

  ‘You don’t mean to say that you’ve read all these?’

  No answer.

  ‘Come on, Hetty, don’t try it on with me. I’ve known you since you were twelve. You don’t really read all this stuff, you know, and understand it. Why, there are things here that Victor wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘It’s just affectation. Pose.’

  Hetty went on brushing with longer and longer sweeps. Her scalp tingled from the force of the brushing.

  ‘Poetry …’ Phyllis pulled out a book roughly, and opened it. Her heart was beating a little quicker than usual, not unpleasantly. She liked excitement, especially when it came from baiting somebody.

  She began to read dramatically:

  No truce with the I, the ravener,

  eater of bare nobility—

  ‘What utter rot! Why, it doesn’t even make – here – shut up, you little beast!’

  Hetty, hairbrush raised, charged at her, seized her by the shoulders and, with the full force of a sturdy body superior in weight if not in strength, barged her out of the room and, after a scuffle in the passage, slammed the door.

  ‘Bitch!’ observed Hetty, resuming her hairbrushing with a trembling hand. She murmured after a moment:

  No truce with the I, the ravener,

  eater of bare nobility, big-mouth—

  then shook her head impatiently, broke off, and began again in a low dreamy tone, gazing out across the green lawns:

  I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

  Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

  Of Adria towards Venice …

  Gradually, as the words left her lips, her expression grew calm, save for the old resentful look in the blue eyes, and when she went down a little later she was as usual.

  There were eight or nine people in the drawing-room, talking loudly in a haze of sunlit cigarette smoke through the noise of the wireless. Victor was making drinks for one group, and two pretty maids, one of whom was little Merionethshire with all her flowers on show, moved about with trays of delicious and carefully chosen food. There was the thick rich smell of good cigarettes, alcohol, scent, and well-washed people that Hetty called the Smell of Progress. She went and sat in a corner.

  Presently a very young man came over and sat down next to her.

  ‘Think we’ve met before, haven’t we?’ said the very young man. ‘At the Phillipses’ tennis party. Seem to remember your face. My name’s Anderson. We came over with the Randalls. Friends of yours, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had any more tennis lately?’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday.’

  ‘Weather’s been good, hasn’t it. Don’t like pl
aying in the heat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You going to the Infernal Ball?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ghastly show, isn’t it. But my mother will go, and my sister and I have to do our duty. I say, will you smoke?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I say, who’s that?’

  ‘To whom do you refer?’

  ‘I say! The tall dark girl with the marvellous figure.’

  ‘That is Miss Barlow.’

  ‘Isn’t she engaged to your cousin?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Marvellous-looking girl, isn’t she.’

  Hetty slowly turned her head, looked full at him and said in a low, melancholy voice:

  Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

  Nor peace within nor calm around,

  Nor that content surpassing wealth

  The sage in meditation found,

  And walked with inward glory crowned—

  Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure,

  Others I see whom these surround—

  Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;

  To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

  She stopped, struck by the look of rapt attention and admiration on the young, spotty face turned to her own.

  ‘I say! Do go on. That’s marvellous; it’s just how I feel sometimes. Who wrote it? You?’

  ‘Shelley.’

  ‘He did, did he? Well, he knew it all and then some. I say, do let me get you something.’

  This unexpected reaction to the Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples annoyed Hetty, but it made her think. She had wished to alarm and embarrass the very young man; she had only put words to his private discontents. Was it possible that others, as well as herself, found their lot imperfect?

  When the young man came back with something, she had slipped away.

  Old Phyl looks marvellous today, thought Victor, looking over at her as she stood in a group on the other side of the room. He thought, with pleasure, that he would take her out into the rhododendron shrubbery after dinner and kiss her – if she did not want to make up a four for bridge. And perhaps, even if she did want to, he would take her out there and kiss her just the same. She really must learn that he was master; she was too fond of her own way.

  Nevertheless, as he looked at her, he felt both affection and pride.

  She was not beautiful, but she had so many good points that nine men out of ten preferred her looks to those of beautiful women. Her figure was very pretty, her dark head, perfectly shingled, was a fine shape, with its severe line broken near the forehead by some tidy, feminine little curls. Her delicate nose and well-modelled mouth would wear well, and so would her fine clear skin, of which she took great care. Her slightly aquiline features contrasted oddly with her eyes, which should have been long-shaped in her type of face, but they were round, darkest brown, and sparkling. All her pleasure in dancing, in tennis and golf, in dress and motoring, shone in her eyes.

  She was smart, she was a good sport, and she would never let you down.

  Clothes do make a difference to women, mused Victor, who occasionally made discoveries of this kind. Hetty, now (the bunchy form of his cousin was just sidling out of the room), it was a pity old Het-Up dressed so badly.

  As for the two Miss Whoever-they-weres, the Withers, he did not think of them at all.

  CHAPTER VII

  Mr Wither, having seen Mr Spurrey off in the car, went into his den and was seen no more before dinner.

  This secluding of himself, like a witch-doctor before practising some rite, was intended to alarm the females, and did it so thoroughly that by the time they were sitting at table, everyone except Mr Wither himself was slightly hysterical.

  Even Madge was subdued. It was a Wither tradition that Madge Never Howled; had it not been a tradition, her mother and sister would have sworn that she had been. She spent the afternoon up at the Club, returned in a very silent mood, and sat slumped in a far corner of the drawing-room for the rest of the time before dinner, staring at an article on military life in India in the Illustrated Fortnightly.

  Before going down to dinner, Viola and Tina told each other that it was absurd to get so worked up simply because they were going to be rowed for being late for tea.

  They said indignantly that they were twenty-two and thirty-five (at least, Viola said that she was twenty-two and Tina said that she, Tina, was no longer a schoolgirl) and that the whole thing was simply ludicrous.

  Tina looked up the chapter on Fathers and Daughters in the book on feminine psychology, but the things it said (after a bit at the beginning of the chapter warning you not to be shocked) did not seem to have much bearing upon her case. What they warned you against was getting too fond of your father and letting him get too fond of you. As there seemed small danger of this situation arising between Mr Wither and herself, Tina put down the book with a little sigh; and Viola picked it up.

  ‘Good lord,’ said she, with a pink face, after a pause.

  ‘What’ve you found?’ laughing.

  ‘I say – who wrote this rot?’ She glanced at the cover. ‘Doctor Irene Hartmüller. Oh, a German.’

  ‘Viennese. Quite young, and brilliantly clever.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s bosh,’ but she continued to turn the pages gingerly. ‘Why – I say! – good lord! What a mind the woman’s got! Just like a German.’

  ‘Oh, Viola!’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You don’t really think that Germans have got a worse sort of mind than other people, do you?’

  ‘Of course I do. Everybody knows they have.’

  Tina sighed. She occasionally came across broad bands of sheer stupidity in her sister-in-law’s character which reminded her sharply that Viola had been educated at an inferior school which she had left when she was sixteen.

  ‘Well, they made the War, anyway,’ said Viola sulkily, dropping the book on the bed.

  Tina said nothing.

  ‘And all those Atrocities,’ persisted Viola, ‘and boiling down dead bodies for soup. Why, it’s well known. There are books about it. If they didn’t, why are they called Huns?’

  The gong interrupted her revelations; but each went downstairs feeling a little ruffled with the other.

  When Mr Wither was deeply annoyed with anybody he seldom made a direct attack upon them. He opened fire upon some other object, remote from his true one, and worked round to the latter, suddenly pouncing upon it when the culprit thought the danger past.

  This evening, in the quiet room with its handsome dull furniture, while the spring afterglow lit the black Persian boughs of the monkey-puzzle tree, Mr Wither broke his heavy silence thus:

  ‘I had to write to Jameson about that fellow again today.’

  Mr Jameson, an old acquaintance of the Withers, was Mayor of Chesterbourne.

  Mr Wither’s head was bent, showing its two wide bands of thin hair, over a plate of nasty blobby cod covered in white paste.

  ‘The Hermit, dear, do you mean?’ Mrs Wither knew all Mr Wither’s worries by heart.

  ‘No more a hermit than I am,’ intoned Mr Wither, breaking off a very small piece of bread. ‘The fellow’s a fraud. Spends most of his time in that public house at the cross-roads – what is it? The Lion. The Green Lion. Saw him there myself this morning, drinking with a lot of hobbledehoys. He had the insolence’ – Mr Wither took a little sip of tonic water – ‘had the insolence to make a remark about my walking-stick.

  ‘Shouted at me,’ added Mr Wither, drearily.

  ‘Oh, what did he say?’ irrepressibly exclaimed Tina.

  ‘I did not wait to hear,’ loftily responded Mr Wither, having raised everybody’s curiosity to screeching point. ‘I took no notice. I walked on my way.’

  Pause. Mr Wither passed his plate for more blob and paste. He had not looked at Tina and Viola, and though they knew his little ways, their fears were gradually being lulled. Perhaps the Hermit really had served as
a red-herring …’

  ‘I don’t know how he manages to live, I’m sure,’ contributed Mrs Wither, nervously moving her eyelids. She knew very well what storm was brooding.

  ‘Imposes on fools,’ droned Mr Wither, chewing.

  ‘He does a bit of digging for Colonel Phillips now and then,’ said Madge, looking up under her pink eyelids and speaking for the first time.

  ‘What have you been crying about?’ suddenly demanded her father, bending forward and staring at her.

  ‘Me?’ said Madge loudly, going brick-red. ‘Howling? What do you mean? You know I Never Howl. What on earth should I want to howl for?’

  ‘Don’t know, but your eyes are red,’ retorted her parent.

  ‘It’s the wind, I expect. There was a jolly nippy wind—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ interrupted Mr Wither. ‘Excuses.’

  ‘And suppose I have been howling,’ suddenly sobbed Madge, her face contorting like a baby’s while two huge tears broke cover and rolled down her face. She dashed down her table-napkin. ‘I don’t have much to keep me from howling, do I? You won’t even let me have a dog.’ Sob.

  Appalled faces stared at her from three sides.

  Mr Wither, however, remained unmoved, only bending more attentively over his cod.

  ‘Colonel Phillips has just got three ripping Sealyham pups,’ she continued shakily. ‘Thoroughbreds. He’s letting them go for two and a half guineas each. They’re a dead bargain. Do let me get one, Father. Please. I’ll keep it outside in the yard, honour bright I will. I won’t let it sleep on my bed’ – sob – ‘if you’ll only let me have it, Father. Please say yes.’

  Mr Wither continued to chew an almost non-existent fragment of cod with no change of expression.

  ‘Come on, Father, be a sport.’ Tina rushed recklessly in with an hysterical giggle, causing the frozen gazes of Mrs Wither and Viola to flicker across to her quivering face and remain there, fixed.

  ‘Madge is nearly forty, you know; old enough to know how to keep a dog in order. I’m glad she’s broken the ice, because,’ her voice quavered on shrilly in the dead silence, ‘I’m going to ask you to let me have something, too. I want to learn to drive the car.’