I remember how on that enchanted morning one of the servants, no longer a companion-in-arms but shrunk to his former status, came up to me and said: “You saved the situation for us, Master Leo. We should have been done for if you hadn’t caught him. Of course his lordship took the wicket in a manner of speaking, but it was you really. And we didn’t half enjoy your songs.”
Now the thought of the farmyard had lost its magic for me; it was as dead as a hobby that one has grown out of. I had never really relished its strong smells or the feeling that some dangerous animal might get loose and turn on me. As for the straw-stack, I had tasted to satiety every experience it had to offer, and I now thought, as Marcus did, that straw-stack sliding was a puerile occupation, unworthy of a fully fledged private-school boy. I was, in fact, a little ashamed of it. I was looking forward to taking up my old life with Marcus, to renewing our talks and jokes and to furbishing up our private language. I thought of some new juicy insults to try out on him.
So sure was I that Marian would have no more messages for me to carry that I did not dream of asking her. Indeed, I thought it would be tactless to ask her, just as it was tactless to ask one’s schoolfellows if they had been doing something that one knew they had given up. It would be a mistake to mention it to her. The whole thing was done with. Totally ignorant as I was of love affairs, and little as I knew about their conventions, I felt sure that when a girl was engaged to a man, she did not write letters to another man calling him “Darling.” She might do it until the day of the engagement, but not after. It was automatic; it was a rule, like leaving the wicket at cricket when you were out; and it scarcely crossed my mind that to comply with it might be painful. I had plenty of experience of force majeure and I rebelled against it only when it was manifestly unjust. Private injustice was the lot of schoolboys, as witness Jenkins and Strode, but grown-up people were exempt from it, for who was there to be unjust to them?
It no longer seemed to me that my life would be the poorer for the cessation of my secret traffic between the Hall and the farm. My feeling for Marian was possessive only when Ted entered into it, and Ted was now eliminated. I didn’t seriously regard Lord Trimingham as a rival: he was on a higher plane, the plane of imagination. I sincerely wanted Marian’s happiness, both for her sake and for mine; my happiness would be crowned by hers. I thought of happiness as following naturally on the attainment of some aim, like winning a cricket match. You got what you wanted and were happy: it was quite simple. Who could not want to get Lord Trimingham?—and by getting him, so Marcus told me, Marian would also get his house. Married to her, he could afford to live there. The trail of gold followed her, too.
All this was eminently satisfactory as a subject of contemplation, and I thought about it, almost with rapture, when I was not thinking about myself and my own achievements. I had an overwhelming desire to tell my mother about it, and in the space between breakfast and starting for church I wrote her a long letter, in which I represented Marian and myself as living on twin pinnacles of glory. I also told her that Marian had asked me to stay another week. Mrs. Maudsley had confirmed the invitation in her after-breakfast orderly-room: she said a great many sweet things to me. Among them was a compliment that I specially treasured: she was glad that Marcus had found such a nice friend. I told my mother this, and added: “Please let me stay if you’re not too lonly without me, I have never been happier than I am now except with you.”
I posted the letter in the hall letterbox and was relieved to see some letters showing through the glass door. I had a morbid fear that they might have already been collected, though the post did not go until the afternoon.
Waiting for the other church-goers to assemble, I wondered how I should spend the afternoon, and my thoughts, as to some very distant object, flew to Ted. He had promised to tell me something; what was it? I remembered: he was going to tell me all about spooning, and at the time I had been very eager to hear. Now I was much less eager, hardly eager at all. But perhaps some time, not this afternoon, I would let him tell me; I had fifteen more days at Brandham, and it would be only polite to go and say good-bye to him.
One thing more was added to me before I left for church. Though there were clouds about, the temperature, I knew, was rising: the weather hadn’t broken after all.
Again I was lucky with the Psalms; the Sunday before there had been forty-four verses; this Sunday there were forty-three, seven below the danger-line. Truly providence was on my side. Also I knew we should not have the Litany, as we had had it last Sunday; this also was a great gain. Less than ever was I in a mood to repent of my sins or to feel that other people should repent of theirs. I could not find a flaw in the universe and was impatient with Christianity for bringing imperfection to my notice, so I closed my ears to its message and chose as a subject of meditation the annals of the Trimingham family emblazoned on the transept wall. I had a special interest in it now that Marian was to be admitted to its ranks; she would be a Viscountess, Marcus had told me; and for the first time I noticed that wives were included in the mural tablets: hitherto I had thought of the family as an entirely masculine phenomenon. It did not say, however, that they were viscountesses: Caroline his wife … Mabelle his wife—what an affected way of spelling Mabel! The next moment it seemed pretty and aristocratic, such was the Trimingham spell. “Marian his wife”—but I would not let myself think of that: to me they were both immortal. Immortal—the word had a lovely quality that gave new lustre to my reverie. Why should the race of Triminghams ever die out? My excitement mounting, I thought of the ninety-ninth Viscount, then the hundredth, and tried to calculate in what century he would occur. The thought of their unbroken line, stretching down the ages, moved me deeply. “And yet,” I told myself, “it has been broken; there is no memorial to the fifth Viscount.” My mind disliked the lacuna and tried to by-pass it. At last, by dint of persuading myself that the missing memorial must be in another part of the building, I managed to regain my altitude. The solemn atmosphere of church reinforced the sufficiency of earthly glory; in a mystical union of genealogy and mathematics the time flashed by.
Again Lord Trimingham was the last to leave. I thought that Marian would wait for him, but she didn’t, so I did. Most of my shyness with him had worn off, and I was disposed to think that everything I did or said became me. But I did not want to broach at once the subject that was uppermost in my mind.
“Hullo, Mercury,” he said.
“Can I take a message for you?” I asked, too tactful (and I was proud of this) to suggest the name of the recipient.
“No, thank you,” he replied, and I noticed the contentment in his tone. “It’s very good of you to offer to, but I don’t think I shall have many more messages to send.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why not, but I thought I knew and said instead, less tactfully: “She hasn’t left her prayer-book behind this time?”
“No; but did you ever know such a scatterbrained girl?” he said, as if to be scatterbrained was something to be intensely proud of, and as if I must know any number of girls who were.
I said I did not, and hoping to draw him out and at the same time, perhaps, to collect a compliment for myself, I added: “Doesn’t she play the piano well?”
“Yes, and don’t you sing well?” he answered, taking the bait at once.
Delighted with the success of my ruse, I cut a few capers, after which it seemed quite easy to ask: “Why is there no fifth Viscount?”
“No fifth Viscount?” he echoed. “What do you mean? There are plenty of fifth viscounts.”
“Oh, I expect there are,” I answered airily, not wishing to seem ignorant of the peerage. “But I meant in the church. There isn’t a fifth of your viscounts, not a fifth Viscount Trimingham.”
“Oh, I see,” he said. “I didn’t know you meant him. I’d forgotten which number he was. But yes, there was one.” He was silent.
“But why isn’t he there?” I insisted.
“Well, you s
ee,” said Lord Trimingham, “it was rather a sad story. He was killed.”
“Oh,” I exclaimed, agreeably titillated, for this was more than I had hoped for. “In battle, I expect.” I remembered how many of the viscounts had served in the forces.
“No,” he said, “not in battle.”
“In an accident?” I prompted; “climbing a mountain perhaps? Or rescuing somebody?”
“No,” he answered, “it wasn’t really an accident.”
I could see he didn’t want to tell me, and a week ago I should have stopped probing him. But now, on the crest of my wave, I felt I could afford to go on.
“What was it?”
“If you really want to know,” Lord Trimingham said, “he was killed in a duel.”
“Oh, what fun!” I cried, astonished that he didn’t want to discuss this ancestor, who now seemed to me the most interesting of the Triminghams. “What had he done? Was it to avenge his honour?”
“Well, yes, in a way,” Lord Trimingham admitted.
“Had someone insulted him? You know, called him a coward or a liar?—Of course, I know he wasn’t,” I added hastily, fearful of seeming to associate myself with the insult.
“Well, no, they hadn’t,” Lord Trimingham said. “He fought the duel about somebody else.”
“Who?”
“A lady. His wife, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh.” My disappointment was almost as bitter as when I realized what the messages I had been carrying between Ted and Marian were about. But Marcus had told me that only an outsider spoke of a woman as a lady. It was one of his shibboleths. Now I could tell him that Lord Trimingham did, which was something. Trying to sound interested I said:
“The Viscountess?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, my voice dull and heavy, “that people fought duels about ladies.”
“Well, they did.”
“But what had she done?” I didn’t much care, but it was only polite to ask.
“He thought she was too friendly with another man,” said Lord Trimingham, shortly.
I had an inspiration. “He was jealous?”
“Yes. It happened in France. He challenged the man to a duel, and the man shot him.”
I was struck by the unfairness of this, and said so. “It ought to have been the other way round.”
“Yes, he was unlucky,” Lord Trimingham said. “So they buried him in France, away from his own people.”
“Did the Viscountess marry the other man?”
“No, but she lived abroad, and the children came to live in England, all except the youngest, who stayed with her in France.”
“Was he her favourite?” With the egotism of my sex, I assumed that the child was a boy.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
I was glad to have had the explanation, and unsatisfactory as it was to my sensation-loving mind, I was impressed by his unsensational way of telling it. Something of the sadness of human life came through to me, its indifference to our wishes, even to the wish that calamity should be more colourful than it is. The ideas of acceptance and resignation were hard for me to entertain: I thought that emotions should be more dramatic than the facts that caused them.
“If she hadn’t been the Viscountess would he have minded so much?” I asked at length.
He laughed in a puzzled way.
“I don’t imagine that the fact of her having a title made any difference. He gave it to her, he couldn’t feel snobbish about it.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” I exclaimed, realizing that my delicacy in not wanting to describe a viscountess as a mere wife had led to confusion. “What I meant was, would he have minded so much her having another—friend, if he hadn’t been married to her, but just engaged?”
Lord Trimingham thought this over. “Yes, quite as much, I should think.”
As I ruminated on his answer, it slid into my mind, for the first time, that there was a parallel between the fifth Viscount’s situation and his own. I dismissed the idea at once, so sure was I that Marian had given up being too friendly with Ted. But it affected my imagination and I said, for anger always interested me:
“Was he angry with her too?”
“I don’t think so,” Lord Trimingham answered. “More upset.”
“She hadn’t done anything wicked?”
“Well, she’d been a bit unwise.”
“But wasn’t it her fault as well as the man’s?”
“Nothing is ever a lady’s fault; you’ll learn that,” Lord Trimingham told me.
This remark, confirming something I already felt, made an immense impression on me.
“Was the man a very wicked man?” I asked. I didn’t much believe in wickedness, but the word thrilled me.
“He was a good-looking blackguard, I believe,” Lord Trimingham said, “and it wasn’t the first time—” He broke off. “He was a Frenchman,” he added.
“Oh, a Frenchman,” I said, as if that explained everything.
“Yes, and a good shot, by all accounts. I don’t suppose he was a specially wicked man, judged by the standards of his time.”
“But now would he be?” I was determined to find wickedness somewhere.
“Yes, now it would be murder, at least in England.”
“But it wouldn’t be murder if the fifth Viscount had shot him instead, would it?” I asked.
“It would be now,” Lord Trimingham said.
“That doesn’t seem very fair,” I observed. I tried to picture the scene as I had read about it in books: the coffee and pistols for two in the early morning, the lonely place, the seconds measuring out the distance, the dropped handkerchief, the shots, the fall.
“Did he—the fifth Viscount—bleed very much?” I asked.
“History doesn’t relate. I shouldn’t think so. A bullet wound doesn’t bleed very much, unless it hits an artery or a vein.… Duelling’s been abolished in England, and a good thing, too.”
“But men still shoot each other, don’t they?” I asked hopefully.
“They shot me,” he answered, with what I took to be a smile.
“Yes, but that was in a war. Do they still shoot each other over ladies?” I imagined a carpet of prostrate women, over whom shots rang out.
“Sometimes.”
“And it’s murder?”
“In England, yes.”
I felt that this was as it should be; and then, anxious to have his opinion on a question that had long exercised me, I said:
“The Boers break the rules of war, don’t they?” My father had bequeathed his pacifism to me, but Lord Trimingham, the war hero, had shaken it.
“The Boer’s not a bad feller,” said Lord Trimingham tolerantly. “I don’t dislike him personally. It’s a pity we have to shoot so many of them, but there you are. Hullo,” he added, as if surprised at a sudden discovery, “we’ve caught up with Marian. Shall we go and talk to her?”
15
ALL THROUGH luncheon fragments of my conversation with Lord Trimingham kept coming back to me. Two things stood out: one was that, whatever happened, it was never a lady’s fault, and the other, that it might be necessary to kill someone though you didn’t really dislike him. These were new ideas to me, and their magnanimity appealed to me very much.
At the longed-for moment when our elders ceased eating their peaches and began to look about them instead of showing off to each other (grown-up conversation always seemed to me a form of showing off) I caught Marcus’s eye and we did our usual bunk. Hardly were we out of earshot, however, when Marcus said:
“I’m afraid I can’t come with you this afternoon.”
“Why ever not, you sewer-rat?” I demanded, acutely disappointed.
“Well, it’s like this. Nannie Robson, our old nannie, lives in the village and she isn’t very well and Marian said would I go and spend the afternoon with her. What good I shall do her I don’t know, and zounds, man, how her house smells! Enough to raise the roof. But I suppose I
must go. Marian said she was going herself after tea. Cripes, partner, you can think yourself lucky not to have a sister.”
Still trying to control my disappointment, I said: “Shall you tell Nannie Robson about the engagement?”
“Good Lord, no. It would be all round the village if I did. And don’t you tell anyone, either. I shall chop you up into the teeniest-weeniest little pieces if you do.”
I retorted suitably.
“Now what will you do?” asked Marcus languidly. “How will you occupy your silly self? Towards what destination will you drag your evil-smelling carcass? Not to that bally old straw-stack?”
“Oh no,” I said. “I’ve said good-bye to that. I might hang round the rubbish-heap awhile and then—”
“Well, don’t get carted away by mistake,” Marcus said. I was angry with myself for giving such an easy score, and we had a slight tussle before parting.
After more than a week of neglect the rubbish-heap had suddenly regained its fascination for me. I liked pottering about on its malodorous confines, scanning its surfaces and probing its depths for the accidentally discarded treasures that, someone had assured me, many if not most trash-collectors came across during their rounds, enabling them to retire on fortunes. But first I bent my steps to the game larder. Although I felt a little lonely, my exaltation of the morning had not worn off; it gave an upward impetus to all my thoughts, as the sun did to the gossamers; and as usual I cast about in my mind for a subject of contemplation which would raise them still higher. Some of these, I knew, would lose their power because I could only think of them in a limited number of ways; even my catch, even my song, had, I suspected, yielded me all the ecstasy they could. My memory and imagination would add nothing to them. But I was always finding new facets to Marian, and here was one ready for my use: her kindness to her old nurse. My mother used to read to me from a book called Ministering Children, in which two high-born young ladies—Anne Clifford and Lady Gertrude were their names, I think—did acts of charity and rescue work among the needy villagers. To these my imagination added a third, Marian, and I began to fit her into the story, making her, I need hardly say, the most outstanding of the trio for beauty as well as for good works.