Of course I had had plenty of provocation from Marian and Ted, but I had the fairness to see that I had attacked them first. They were defending themselves against me. I thought I knew what was best for myself, best for them, best for Lord Trimingham, best for everybody; so I was leaving. I did not feel I was running away. But I was. I was shaken and frightened and did not trust myself or anyone.
The hall box had been cleared and my letter would have to wait till morning. The other had got a start of it by more than half a day. But I did not doubt that it would bring the telegram of recall.
Crossing the hall, I ran into Lord Trimingham. “Just the man!” he said, as Marian had said before him. “Do you want to earn my good opinion?”
The others had offered me heavier bribes, but I saw no risk in taking this.
“Oh, yes!”
“Well, find Marian for me, there’s a good feller.”
My heart sank. She was the last person I wanted to see.
“But I thought you weren’t going to send her any more messages!” I protested.
For the first time in our acquaintanceship, if I read the signs aright, he looked put out, and I thought he was going to turn on me as the others had. He said, rather sharply:
“Oh, don’t worry if you’re busy. It’s just that I wanted to say something to her. She’s going to London tomorrow and I may not get another chance.”
“She’s going to London?”
“Yes, till Wednesday.” He spoke of her possessively, I thought.
“She never told me,” I said, in the offended tone of a servant who has not been apprised of a coming visitor.
“She has a lot to think about just now or I’m sure she would have. Now be a saint and find her, unless you can produce her out of your hat.”
Suddenly, with intense relief, I remembered a valid objection. “Marcus told me she was going down to see Nannie Robson after tea.”
“Confound Nannie Robson. Marian’s always going there, and she says the old girl’s losing her memory and forgets whether she’s been or not. Robson by name, Robson by nature, Mrs. Maudsley used to say. She ought to be called Rob-daughter now.”
I thought this an excellent joke, and was just running off when he called me back. “Don’t overdo it,” he said, with a return to his old genial manner. “You’re looking a bit pale. We mustn’t have two invalids in the house.”
“Oh, who’s the other one?”
“Our hostess, but she doesn’t want it talked about.”
“Is she very ill?” I asked.
“Oh no, it’s nothing much.” I could see he wished he hadn’t told me.
17
ON MY WAY to pay my deferred visit to the rubbish-heap I met Marcus.
“Bon soir, thou dusky varlet, whither away?” he said.
I told him my destination.
“Oh, don’t let’s go there. Je le trouve trop ennuyeux,” he said. “Let’s think of somewhere else.”
I sighed. It was to be a French conversation. French was one of the few school subjects that Marcus was better at than I was. He had had a French governess who had given him a good accent; he had also, unlike me, been abroad and there picked up words and phrases his governess would not have taught him. And he had an annoying habit, when one mispronounced a word, of repeating it with the right pronunciation. But he was not a prig, and had allowed his real French to be overlaid by a smattering of the pidgin French we all sometimes talked. I was his guest, with a guest’s obligation to comply. I had to admit that he had been decent in not insisting before on a form of conversation at which he shone and I didn’t. I don’t think he would have insisted on it then had he not still felt sore about my Saturday’s success. He thought I still needed taking down a peg, not knowing that this had been amply done already; and I was half aware of his intention and resented it. Often when we talked there was a spirit of verbal rivalry between us; we trod a knife-edge between affection and falling out; but this time our latent animosity was nearer to the surface.
“Je suggère que nous visitons les outhouses,” I proposed laboriously.
“Mais oui! Quelle bonne idée! Ce sont des places delicieuses.”
“I thought a place meant a square,” I remarked.
“Bon! Vous venez sur!” he said deflatingly, but lapsing, I was relieved to hear, into a kind of French that was less lesson-like. “Et que trouvons-nous là?”
“Le deadly nightshade, for one thing,” I replied, hoping to edge him into English.
“Vous voudriez dire la belladonne, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, atropa belladonna,” I replied, trumping his French with Latin.
“Eh bien, je jamais!” he rejoined, but I knew that I had scored, for the “Eh bien, je jamais,” though ironical, was a current admission of being impressed, and we returned for a while to our mother tongue, or rather to mediæval and facetious versions of it.
Nearly every term it happened that certain words and phrases ran like wildfire through the school and acquired a sort of fetishistic value. Everyone used them, but no one ever knew who started them. Conversely other words, which seemed intrinsically harmless, were made taboo, and their use excited the utmost derision. We had to guard our tongues against them. I could still hear my tormentors hissing “vanquished” at me. In a few weeks the vogue would pass and the words regain their normal value. “Vous venez sur” (you’re coming on) and “Eh bien, je jamais” (well, I never) were two of the latest.
The outhouses were about ten minutes’ walk away. They were adjuncts of an old kitchen garden that had been made, as such gardens sometimes were, at a considerable distance from the house. The path, a track of earth mixed with cinders, led through a long shrubbery of rhododendrons, and I imagine that when they were in flower it was much frequented; but now it was gloomy and forbidding and rather frightening, which was partly the secret of its attraction for me. Several times I had started out to revisit the deadly nightshade and had turned back before I reached it, overcome by an irrational dread; but only once, when I met Marian coming along it, had I ever seen anyone on the path. But with Marcus at my side my alarm was reduced to an agreeable pioneering thrill.
“Je vois l’empreinte d’un pied!” he cried, reverting to French.
We stopped and bent down. The path was very dry, the grass withered, the earth powdery; but it did look like a footmark, a small one. Marcus gave a whoop intended for a Red Indian war-cry.
“Eh bien, je jamais! Je dirai à Maman que nous avons vu le spoor de Man Friday.”
“Ou Mademoiselle Friday,” I suggested wittily.
“Vous venez sur! Certes, c’est la patte d’une dame. Mystère! Que dira Maman? Elle a un grand peur des voleurs!”
“I should have thought your mother was very brave,” I said, rebelling. “Braver even than mine,” I added, not wanting the talk to stray too far from my affairs.
“Mais non! Elle est très nerveuse! C’est un type un peu hystérique,” he said, with all the detachment of a doctor. “En ce moment elle est au lit avec une forte migraine, le résultat de tous ces jours de strain.”
I was glad that Marcus had broken down at the last word, but sorry to hear about his mother.
“But why is it a strain?” I asked. “She seems to have so many people to help her.” Like a housewife of today, I thought of strain in terms of housekeeping.
He shook his head mysteriously and raised his finger. “Ce n’est pas seulement ça. C’est Marianne.”
“Marian?” said I, anglicizing it.
“Mais oui, c’est Marianne.” He lowered his voice. “Il s’agit des fiançailles, vous savez. Ma mère n’est pas sure que Marianne—” He rolled his eyes and put his finger to his lips.
I didn’t understand.
“Will stick to her engagement, if you must be told in English.”
I was thunderstruck, not only at the news but at Marcus’s indiscretion. And I am almost sure that if he had not been carried away by his own French, and by trying to act the Fre
nchman, and by showing off to me, he would have been more careful. How much did he suspect? How much did his mother suspect? He was her favourite, that I knew; she didn’t care about Denys, she rarely spoke to Mr. Maudsley, at any rate in my hearing. Perhaps she confided in Marcus, as my mother sometimes confided in me—things that surprised me. Perhaps all women were liable, at moments, to let on. But how much did she know?
A thought struck me. “Vous avez vu votre sœur chez Mademoiselle Robson?” I brought out, after much consideration.
“Robsón,” repeated Marcus, with a heavy accent on the second syllable. “Mais non! Quand je suis parti, la Marianne n’était pas encore arrivée. Et la pauvre Robsón était bien fâcheuse, because she says that Marian hardly ever comes to see her,” said Marcus rapidly. “I say this in English for your benefit, you insular owl.”
“Lord Trimingham told me,” said I impressively, and ignoring the insult, “that Marian says that Nannie Robson has, well—has perdu sa mémoire,” I wound up with a slight flourish.
“Perdu sa fiddlesticks!” retorted Marcus, again breaking down. “Sa mémoire est aussi bonne que la mienne, et cent fois meilleure que la vôtre, sale type de woolgatherer!”
I clouted him for this, but the news disquieted me.
“Lord Trimingham also said that Marian is going to London tomorrow,” I said. “Pourquoi?”
“Pourquoi?” said Marcus, much more Frenchly than I had. “En part, parce que, comme toutes les femmes, elle a besoin des habits neufs pour le bal; mais en grand part, à cause de vous, vous—” The epithet failed him, and he puffed out his cheeks instead.
“A cause de moi?” I said. “Because of me?”
“Vous venez sur!” came the swift retort. “Yes, because of you! She has gone to get what perhaps you will understand if I say it is a cadeau.”
“A present!” I said, and for a moment compunction seized me. “But she has given me so many presents.”
“This is a very special one for your birthday,” said Marcus, speaking deliberately and loudly, as to a deaf person or a halfwit. “Entendez-vous, coquin? Comprenez-vous, nigaud? But you’ll never guess what it is.”
In my excitement I forgot my dread of Marian’s presents and their Danaän implication.
“Do you know what it is?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, but I don’t tell les petits garçons.”
I shook him till he cried “Pax.”
“Well, swear that you won’t tell anyone I told you.” I had shaken some of the French out of him too.
“I swear.”
“Swear in French, si vous le pouvez.”
“Je jure.”
“And swear that you’ll look surprised when Marian gives it to you—though you can’t help looking surprised, mooncalf, you were born that way.” And he mimicked my face.
“Je jure,” I intoned, ignoring his grimaces.
“Will you try to understand if I say it in French?”
I didn’t answer.
“C’est une bicyclette.”
To a child of today this might have seemed an anticlimax, to me it opened the gates of heaven. A bicycle was the thing I wanted most in the world and had least hope of getting, for it was, I knew by inquiry, beyond my mother’s purse. I plied Marcus with questions about it—its make, its size, its tires, its lamp, its brakes. “C’est une bicyclette Oombaire,” said Marcus, so Frenchly that at first I didn’t recognize the famous name; but to my other questions he would only answer “Je ne sais pas” in a maddening up-and-down singsong.
“Je ne l’ai pas vue,” he said at last. “C’est un type qui se trouve seulement à Londres, that is only found in London, espèce de blockhead. But I can tell you one thing that you haven’t asked me.”
“What?”
“Sa couleur, or as you would say, its colour.”
“What colour is it?”
“Vert—un vert vif.”
It was very slow of me but I took the word to be “verre,” and I stared at him, no doubt moon-faced and owlish, wondering how a bicycle could be the colour of a lively glass.
At last he enlightened me. “Green, green, mon pauvre imbécile, bright green,” and just as this vision was beginning to dawn on me in all its splendour, he added: “Et savez-vous pourquoi?”
I could not guess.
“Parce que vous êtes vert vous-même—you are green yourself, as the poor old English say,” he translated, to leave me in no doubt. “It is your true colour, Marian said so.” And he began to dance round me, chanting: “Green, green, green.”
I cannot describe how painful this disclosure was to me. Momentarily it took away all my pleasure in the thought of the bicycle. Most of Marcus’s gibes had run off me like water, but to be called green, that went home. And like other revelations of the day it cast a black shadow on the past, which I thought so secure. The green suit, that happy-making present, Lincoln green, the green of the greenwood, Robin Hood’s green—it too had been a subtle insult, meant to make me look a fool.
“Did she really say that?” I asked.
“Mais oui! Vraiment!” and he went back to his chanting and his dance.
Perhaps schoolboys no longer dance round each other, but they did once, and it was a most unnerving and exasperating experience for the victim. For a moment I hated Marcus, and I hated Marian: I saw how green I must look to her and realized how she had taken advantage of it. I would strike back, and in French.
“Savez-vous ou est Marian en ce moment-ci?” I asked carefully.
Marcus stopped dead and stared at me. “No,” he said, and his voice sounded strangely English. “Do you know where she is?”
“Oui,” I replied, thrilled to have turned his French against him. “Je sais bien.”
This was quite untrue; I had no idea where she was, though I guessed she was with Ted.
“Where, where?” he said.
“Pas cent lieues d’ici,” I answered, not knowing the French for “miles” and giving the impression, I suppose, that Marian was near at hand.
“But where, where?” he repeated.
“Je ne dis pas ça aux petits garçons,” I retorted, and began to dance round him in my turn, chanting: “Petit garçon, petit garçon, ne voudriez-vous pas savoir?”
“Pax,” cried Marcus at last, and I stopped gyrating.
“But do you really know where she is, honest Injun?” Marcus asked.
“Mais oui, mais oui, mais oui,” was all I would vouchsafe.
If I had remembered what a telltale Marcus was, I should never have proclaimed my supposed knowledge of Marian’s whereabouts; though the fact that I really did not know paradoxically made it seem less of a betrayal. Nor should I have done so had we been talking in English: I should have kept a guard on my tongue. But my French persona ran away with me. Trying to compete in French with Marcus, I felt a different being—as no doubt he did. In a foreign language one has to say something or look silly, even if the something were better left unsaid. But what weighed most with me was the feeling I was doing Marian a bad turn. By saying I knew where she was I got rid of some of my spleen against her; by not knowing, I salved my conscience.
We were walking in silence, every now and then taking a few skips to release the tension and let the bad blood out, when suddenly I saw something that turned me cold.
We were in sight of the outhouse where the deadly night-shade grew; and the deadly nightshade was coming out of the door.
For a second I actually thought it had been endowed with movement and was coming towards us. Then the phenomenon explained itself: the bush had grown so much since my last visit that the hut no longer held it.
On the threshold that it guarded we paused and peered in. Marcus was for pushing past it into the shed. “Oh, don’t,” I whispered, and he smiled and drew back: it was our moment of reconciliation. The shrub had spread amazingly; it topped the roofless walls, it pressed into their crannies, groping for an outlet, urged by a secret explosive force that I felt would burst them. It had
battened on the heat, which had parched everything else. Its beauty, of which I was well aware, was too bold for me, too uncompromising in every particular. The sullen, heavy purple bells wanted something of me that I could not give, the bold black burnished berries offered me something that I did not want. “All other plants,” I thought, “bloom for the eye; they are perfected for our view: the mysterious principle of growth is manifest in them, mysterious yet simple.” But this plant seemed to be up to something, to be carrying on a questionable traffic with itself. There was no harmony, no proportion in its parts. It exhibited all the stages of its development at once. It was young, middle-aged, and old at the same time. Not only did it bear its fruit and flowers together, but there was a strange discrepancy between the size of its leaves: some were no longer than my little finger, others much longer than my hand. It invited and yet repelled inspection, as if it was harbouring some shady secret that it yet wanted you to know. Outside the shed, twilight was darkening the air, but inside it was already night, night that the plant had gathered to itself.
Torn between fascination and recoil, I turned away, and it was then we heard the voices.
Actually there was only one voice, or only one voice audible. I recognized it at once, though Marcus didn’t; it was the voice of “When other lips,” speaking, no doubt, the language whose excess imparts the power it feels so well. But what I heard was a low insistent murmur, with pauses for reply in which no reply was made. It had a hypnotic quality that I had never heard in any voice: a blend of urgency, cajolery, and extreme tenderness, and with below it the deep vibrato of a held-in laugh that might break out at any moment. It was the voice of someone wanting something very much and confident of getting it, but at the same time willing, no, constrained, to plead for it with all the force of his being.