Presently Lord Trimingham looked up and said: “Hullo, there’s Mercury!”
“Why do you call him Mercury?” asked Marian.
“Because he runs errands,” said Lord Trimingham. “You know who Mercury was, don’t you?” he asked me.
“Well, Mercury is the smallest of the planets,” I said, glad to know the answer but suspecting an allusion to my size.
“You’re quite right, but before that he was the messenger of the gods. He went to and fro between them.”
The messenger of the gods! I thought of that, and even when the attention of the gods had been withdrawn from me, it seemed to enhance my status. I pictured myself threading my way through the Zodiac, calling on one star after another: a delicious waking dream, which soon became a real one, for in the midst of chewing a long, succulent grass I dropped off to sleep. When I awoke I did not at once open my eyes; I had a feeling they would laugh at me for having slept and I wanted to put off the moment as long as possible; and I heard Marian say to her mother: “I think he must be bored to tears, Mama, trailing round with us; he’d be much happier pottering about on his own.”
“Oh, do you think so?” Mrs. Maudsley said. “He’s so devoted to you, Marian, he’s your little lamb.”
“He’s a darling,” Marian said, “but you know what it’s like when you’re a child: a little of grown-up people’s company goes a long way.”
“Well, I can ask him,” Mrs. Maudsley said. “Just now he makes us thirteen—I don’t know if that matters. It’s unfortunate about Marcus.”
“If Marcus has got measles,” said Marian carelessly, “I suppose we shall have to put the ball off?”
“I see no reason for that,” said Mrs. Maudsley with decision. “We should disappoint so many people. And you wouldn’t want to, Marian, would you?”
I didn’t hear what Marian’s reply was, but I was conscious of the clash of wills between them. After feigning sleep a little longer, I cautiously opened my eyes. Marian and her mother had moved away; most of the other guests were standing about, still talking; the two carriages were drawn up in the shade; the horses were tossing their heads and whisking their tails to keep the flies off. Upright on their boxes the coachmen towered above me, their cockaded silk hats almost touching the leafy branches and making deeper tones of dark against the shade. The play of shadows pleased me. As casually as I could I got up, hoping to escape notice; but Lord Trimingham saw me.
“Aha!” he said. “Mercury’s been off duty, taking a nap.”
I smiled back at him. I was aware of something stable in his nature. He gave me a feeling of security, as if nothing that I said or did would change his opinion of me. I never found his pleasantries irksome, partly, no doubt, because he was a Viscount, but partly, too, because I respected his self-discipline. He had very little to laugh about, I thought, and yet he laughed. His gaiety had a background of the hospital and the battlefield. I felt he had some inner reserve of strength which no reverse, however serious, would break down.
All the same, driving back on the one unoccupied box seat (the footman had the other), I was aware (though I did not admit it to myself) that I found the coachman’s factual conversation more satisfying than the trifling, purposeless, unanchored talk that I had been listening to before I fell asleep. I liked giving and receiving information and he supplied it just as did the signposts and the milestones—to the appearance of which, as every few minutes they hove in sight, I eagerly looked forward. Sometimes he couldn’t answer my questions. “Why are there so many by-roads in Norfolk?” I asked. “There aren’t any where I live.” He didn’t know, but generally he did, and with him I felt I was getting somewhere. With them there was nothing to catch hold of: gossamer threads that broke against my mind and tired it. The conversation of the gods!—I didn’t resent or feel aggrieved because I couldn’t understand it. I was the smallest of the planets, and if I carried messages between them and I couldn’t always understand, that was in order, too: they were something in a foreign language—star-talk.
Under the multicoloured roof of parasols below me—a Roman tortoise against the sun—more than one man’s straw hat was taking shelter. The buzz of talk reached me—how they kept it up!—but I was under no obligation of politeness to listen. At first I had been a little wounded by Marian’s suggestion that I should be left out of future expeditions; but now I realized that she had made it for my benefit, and her “he’s a darling” kept coming back to me, like a sweet taste in my mouth. Of course I valued the prestige of being with them; I enjoyed our triumphal progress through the country-side, the passers-by staring at the carriages, the children running to open gates and scrabbling on the ground for the pennies that the coachman nonchalantly threw them. But I could imagine them in my mind, and bask in their radiance, just as well, and perhaps better, when I was away from them; for then I had the essence of the experience without its accidental drawbacks of arranging my face and trying to look interested when I wasn’t. I thought of the outhouses, I thought of the bathing-place, I thought of the straw-stack down which I could now slide whenever I liked—I even thought of the rubbish-heap. They were places which appealed to me in an intimate way and which I longed to revisit.
“Do you know Ted Burgess?” I asked the coachman.
“Oh yes,” he said, “we all know him round here.”
Something in his tone made me say: “Do you like him?”
“We’re all neighbours,” the coachman answered. “Mr. Burgess is a bit of a lad.”
I noticed the Mister, but the rest of the remark was disappointingly meaningless. Ted Burgess did not seem in the least like a lad to me.
At last we came to what I had been specially looking for-ward to—the hill, the one real hill of the drive, its one sensational feature. A warning notice loomed up and gradually came nearer:
TO CYCLISTS
RIDE WITH CAUTION.
I had made a joke to myself about this. “Two cyclists ride with caution” meant that any other number could take what risks they liked. I tried to explain this to the coachman, but he was busy with the brakes. Down we went, the horses’ hindquarters, writhing and flecked with sweat, pressed up against the dashboard. Looking back I saw the carriage behind us similarly labouring. As the brakes grew hotter, a pungent smell of burning rose, which for some perverse reason was incense to my nostrils. The sense of strain and crisis grew: all sensation was sharpened to a point.
At last we were at the bottom, and both carriages came to a stand. Now the reverse process faced us—less exciting, less fraught with dread, but scarcely less spectacular, for now the check-reins were slackened and the men of the party dismounted to make the ascent easier for the horses. A warm humanitarian feeling possessed me: I begged to be allowed to get down too.
“Why, you won’t make any difference!” said the coachman, rather to my chagrin, but all the same he helped me down those springy, skimpy footholds on which one might so easily slip. I aligned myself with the men and tried to fit my short stride to their long ones.
“My word, how cool you look!” Lord Trimingham said, touching his face with a silk handkerchief. He wore a white linen suit and, unlike the others, had a panama hat, which was attached to his coat by a button and a black cord: it looked extremely elegant, as did all his clothes; perhaps one noticed them the more because of the contrast with his face. “This is the hottest day we’ve had so far.”
I took a few prancing steps to show how little I regarded it; but I remembered what he had said, and when we were all back in our places, and the horses were moving at their slow swinging trot, my obsession with the heat returned. Perhaps today would break a record. If only it would, I thought, if only it could! I was in love with the exceptional, and ready to sacrifice all normal happenings to it.
My first thought, on arriving, was to hurry to the game larder; but in this I was thwarted. For one thing, tea was ready, and for another I had a letter from my mother, which had come by the afternoon post. “Master Leo
Colston, c/o Mrs. Maudsley, Brandham Hall, near Norwich.” I looked at the address with pride: yes, that was where I was.
I liked to be specially alone when reading my mother’s letters: even the game larder was too exposed for that. Sometimes I took refuge in the lavatory, but now that I had a room of my own I was assured of privacy. Thither I retired, like a dog with a bone, but for the first time I could not feel really interested in my mother’s letter. The small concerns of home, instead of coming close to me and enveloping me as I read about them, remained small and far away; they were like magic-lantern slides without a lantern to bring them to life. I did not belong there, I felt; my place was here; here I was a planet, albeit a small one, and carried messages for the other planets. And my mother’s harping on the heat seemed irrelevant and almost irritating; she ought to know, I felt, that I was enjoying it, that I was invulnerable to it, invulnerable to everything .…
She had given me for the visit a black leather writing-case which had an inkpot embedded in its top right-hand corner. I tried to write to her, but I was out of touch. It was not like at school, when I carefully edited my letters until hardly anything remained except the fact that I was well and the hope that she was; I wanted to tell her about my promotion and the ampler ether, the diviner air that I now breathed. But even to me my efforts sounded feeble. Viscount Trimingham said I was like Mercury—I run errands—Marcus’s sister Marian is still very nice to me, I think I like her the best of them all—it is a pitty she is going to be married only then will she be a Lady Viscount—what could it mean to her, what did it mean to me, that made me feel so self-important? I did say something about all this and about Marcus being unwell (though of course I didn’t mention measles); I told her of all the festivities, past and to come—the picnics, the cricket match, the birthday party, and the ball; I thanked her for saying I might bathe, and I promised not to bathe unless someone was with me; and I was her loving son. But even that sounded false, and a touch condescending, as if an immortal was acknowledging kinship with a mortal.
Poor effort as it was, the letter took me a long time to write, and it was past six when, hot-foot, I reached the game larder. I expected something sensational and I was not disappointed. The mercury had declined to eighty-five; but the marker, nearly half an inch above it, recorded ninety-four. Ninety-four! Perhaps it was a record, a record at any rate for England, where I believed the shade temperature had never reached a hundred. It was my ambition that it should. Only six degrees to go! A mere trifle, the sun could easily accomplish that; perhaps it would tomorrow. As I stood musing, I seemed to feel within me the world’s tremendous meteorological effort to excel itself, to pass into a region of being which it had never attained before. I was myself the mercury (had I not been called Mercury, I thought confusedly) soaring ever to new heights; and Brandham Hall with its still unexplored altitudes of feeling was the mountain on which my experience would be won. I felt intoxicated and light-headed, as though some miraculous boon had been granted to me, something that took me outside myself and the limitations of my normal personality. Yet it was not a solitary experience, it was linked inseparably with the expectation that I saw reflected in the faces round me. They too were looking forward to a fulfilment, and I knew its stages as distinctly as if they had been rungs in a ladder: the cricket match, my birthday party, and the ball.
And then? Then there was to be a coming together, which my mind, hesitating and half unwillingly, was learning to associate with Marian and Lord Trimingham. Yet there were the stirrings of rapture in that thought too; the shedding, the sacrifice of the part of me that found its happiness in her.
“Enjoying yourself?” said a voice behind me.
It was Mr. Maudsley, also bent on meteorological investigation.
Wriggling (I could not help wriggling when he spoke to me), I told him that I was.
“Been pretty hot today,” he remarked.
“Is it a record?” I asked eagerly.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “I shall have to look it up. Hot weather suit you?”
I said it did. He took up the magnet. I did not want to see the testimony to the day’s heat obliterated, but muttered something and hurried off.
Confused by the encounter, I forgot what my next move was to be, and found myself straying near the lawn, where figures in white were strolling about as aimlessly as I. It was far from my intention to join them; I wanted to be alone with my sensations, and I made for the ha-ha that separated the lawn from the park. I knew from experience that it was high enough to hide me. But it was too late; I had been sighted.
“Hi!” called Lord Trimingham’s voice. “Come here! We want you!”
He came to the edge of the ha-ha and looked down at me.
“Trying to sneak past in dead ground,” he said.
I did not recognize the military allusion, but the general purport of the accusation was quite clear to me.
“Now you’re always running about,” he said, “can you find Marian and ask her to make a four at croquet? It’s all we’re any of us good for. We’ve looked for her and we can’t find her, but I believe you have her in your pocket.”
Involuntarily my hands went to my pockets, and he laughed.
“Well,” he said, “you must bring her in alive or dead.”
I trotted off. I had no idea where to look, and yet it never occurred to me that I should not find her. My footsteps took me round the house, away from its noble and imposing aspects, which meant so little to me, past the huddle of buildings at the back, which meant so much, and along the cinder track that led to the abandoned outhouses. And it was there that I met her, walking rather quickly and with her head held high.
She did not see me at first, and when she did she eyed me stonily. “What are you doing here?” she said.
I felt guilty as children do when asked their business by a grown-up person; but I had my answer ready, and I felt sure that it would please her.
“Hugh asked me to tell you—” I began.
“I asked you to tell me?”
“No, not you, Hugh.”
“Not you, you,” she repeated. “I can’t understand a word you say. Is it a game?”
“No,” I said wretchedly, for it seemed I was fated to mispronounce Hugh’s name. “Hugh, you know Hugh.”
“Yes, of course I know myself,” she said, apparently more mystified than ever. We were standing still, but I noticed that she was breathing rather quickly. “Now let’s talk about something else,” she said, as though she had humoured me long enough. For a moment it occurred to me that she didn’t want to talk about Lord Trimingham and was deliberately putting me off; but I had to deliver my message.
“It’s not you, it’s Viscount Hugh,” I said; there could be no misunderstanding now, and I waited to see her face light up. But it didn’t; her eyes moved quickly to and fro and she looked almost vexed.
“Oh, Hugh,” she said, almost like an owl hooting. “How stupid of me. But you do pronounce his name in a funny way.”
It was the first unkind thing she had said to me and I suppose I looked dashed, for she noticed my embarrassment and said more kindly:
“But people have different ways of saying it. Well, what does he want?”
“He wants you to play croquet.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Nearly seven o’clock.”
“We don’t dine until eight thirty, do we? All right, I’ll go.”
Friendship restored, we walked along together.
“He said I was to bring you dead or alive,” I ventured to say.
“Oh, did he? Well, which am I?”
I thought this very funny. After we had joked a bit she said:
“We’re going to luncheon with some neighbours tomorrow. They’re all grown up, as old as the hills, quite mossy, and Mama thinks you might be bored. Should you mind staying here?”
“Of course not,” I replied. I remembered it was she, and not her mother, who thou
ght I might be bored, but I didn’t hold it against her; she was like the girl in the fairy story whose words turned to pearls as they fell from her lips.
“What shall you do to amuse yourself?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, playing for time, “I might do several things.” This sounded rather grand.
“What for instance?”
I was flattered by her interest; but pinned down, I could only think of one thing.
“I might go for a walk.” Even to me this sounded a pedestrian thing to do.
“Where shall you walk to?”
I had an inkling that she was guiding the conversation, and half clairvoyantly I followed her lead.
“Well, I might slide down a straw-stack.”
“Whose?”
“Well, perhaps Farmer Burgess’s.”
“Oh, his?” she said, and sounded so surprised. “Leo, if you go that way, will you do something for me?”
“Of course. What is it?” But I knew before she spoke.
“Give him a letter.”
“I was hoping that you’d say that!” I exclaimed.
She looked at me, seemed to debate with herself, then said:
“Why? Because you like him?”
“Ye—es. Not so much as Hugh, of course.”
“Why do you like Hugh better? Because he’s a Viscount?”
“Well, that’s one reason,” I admitted, without any false shame. Respect for degree was in my blood and I didn’t think of it as snobbery. “And he’s so gentle, too. I mean, he doesn’t order me about. I thought a lord would be so proud.”