“A loony talking to himself,” whispered Marcus; “shall we go and see?”
At that moment a second voice became audible, toneless, unrecognizable, but distinct. Marcus’s eyes lit up.
“Eh bien, je jamais! c’est un couple,” he whispered, “un couple qui fait le cuiller.”
“Fait le cuiller?” I echoed, stupidly.
“Spooning, you idiot. Let’s go and rout them out.”
Terrified equally at the thought of discovering or being discovered, I suddenly had an inspiration.
“Mais non!” I whispered. “Ça serait trop ennuyeux. Laissons-les faire!”
I started resolutely on the homeward path, and Marcus, after more than one backward glance, with a bad grace followed me. Through the mad pounding of my heart, and my general gratitude for deliverance, I found time to congratulate myself. It was the word “ennuyeux” that had done the trick; Marcus had used it to discredit the rubbish-heap; in all his large vocabulary it carried the greatest weight of disparagement. Precociously sophisticated, he knew that to be boring was the unforgivable sin.
“Confounded cheek, I call it!” Marcus fumed when we were out of earshot. “Why should they come here to spoon? I wonder what Mama would say.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t tell her, Marcus,” I said quickly. “Don’t tell her. Promise you won’t. Jurez, jurez, je vous en prie.”
But he wouldn’t oblige me, even in French.
Our amity restored, we walked along, sometimes sedately, with open, guileless faces, sometimes barging into each other with sudden charges. I thought of many things.
“How long do engagements last?” I asked. Marcus would be sure to know.
“Cela dépend,” he announced oracularly. “Perhaps you would rather I answered in English?” he said suddenly. “It is a language more suited to your feeble intelligence.”
I let this pass.
“In the case of grooms, gardeners, skivvies, and suchlike scum,” said Marcus, “it may go on forever. With people like ourselves it generally doesn’t go on very long.”
“How long?”
“Oh, a month or so. Deux mois, trois mois.”
I thought about this.
“Engagements are sometimes broken off, aren’t they?”
“That’s what is worrying Mama. But Marian would never be so folle—fou for you, Colston, in the masculine it describes you exactly—write it out a hundred times, please—so folle as to leave Trimingham planté là. What did I say, Colston?”
“Planté là,” I repeated humbly.
“Please construe it.”
“Planted there.”
“Planted there, indeed! Sit down. Next, next, next, next, next. Can no boy give a proper rendering of ‘planté là’?”
“Well, what does it mean?” I asked.
“‘Planté là’ means—it means—well, almost anything you like except ‘planted there.’”
I took this from him, too: my thoughts had veered again and were now swarming like flies round a honey-pot. The green bicycle! Even if it was an insult—and I had no doubt of that—I could swallow the insult. Could I bring myself not to swallow it, that was the question. The bicycle was already dearer to me than anything I possessed. I was sure that if I went away before my birthday I should not get it. They would be offended with me and return it to the shop, or perhaps give it to Marcus, though he had one already. I pictured myself riding it through our village street, which had become much nearer and clearer to me during the last few hours—jumping off and standing it against one of the posts that held the hanging chains that guarded our road frontage. How everyone would admire it! I couldn’t ride a bicycle, but I should soon learn. Mother would put a steadying hand on the saddle; so would the gardener … up and down the hills I should go, soaring, floating .…
And yet I wasn’t comfortable about it. There was a trap somewhere, I felt sure; and though I didn’t know the term “hush-money,” its meaning flittered, bat-like, about my mind.
I was too tired to hold any one thought for long, even the image of the bicycle. I had been so pleased with my handling of the situation at the outhouses; now I found myself wondering whether instead of whispering to Marcus, it wouldn’t have been better to have given a shout that would have warned them.
“Vous êtes très silencieux,” said Marcus. “Je n’aime pas votre voix, which is ugly, oily, and only fit to be heard at a village singsong. Et quant à vos sales pensées, crapaud, je m’en fiche d’elles, je crache upon them. Mais pourquoi avez-vous perdu la langue? Your long, thin, slimy, spotted serpent’s tongue?”
At his bedroom door we parted. There was plenty of time before dinner, and I stole down into the hall to look at the post-box. My letter was still there, leaning against the pane, with other letters behind it. I fingered the door and to my intense surprise it opened. I had the letter in my hand; tear it up and I had the bicycle too. A moment of excruciating self-division followed. Then I slipped the letter back and tip-toed upstairs with a thudding heart.
18
WHEN I CAME down to breakfast the next morning, the letter was gone. Oh, the peace of that moment! There were two absentees from the breakfast table, Marian and her mother. Marian, I learned, had caught the early train to London; Mrs. Maudsley was still in bed. I speculated on the nature of her complaint. Un type hystérique, Marcus had said. What were her symptoms? Did she have fits? All I knew about hysteria was that sometimes servants had it; I didn’t know what form it took, but I couldn’t connect it with Mrs. Maudsley, who, besides being a lady, was always so calm. That tense, still look of hers that caught you in its searchlight beam! She had been invariably kind to me; kinder in some ways, perhaps kinder in all ways, than Marian had been. Yet because of her very stillness I found her presence repressive: I shouldn’t have dared to love her if she had been my mother. Marcus did, but perhaps she showed another side of herself to him. She brought out all the clumsiness in Denys; when he saw her eye on him he always looked as if he was going to drop something—or had dropped it. Yes, with Mrs. Maudsley away one breathed more freely.
Did Marian love her? That I could not tell: I had seen them watching each other like two cats; and then, as cats do, turn away again, indifferently, as if whatever was at stake between them had somehow faded out. It wasn’t my idea of love; my idea of love was more demonstrative.
I had loved Marian, or so I should have said if anyone in my confidence had asked me (but there was no one; I certainly should not have told my mother). How did I feel to her? I asked myself the question as we knelt at prayers, when my thoughts should have been turned towards forgiveness; but I couldn’t answer it. I was still half expecting to see her mocking face across the table, and when I didn’t see it and realized I shouldn’t till Wednesday, relief surged up in me. By Wednesday, by Tuesday indeed, I should have got my marching orders: I should have finished with Brandham; already I felt in it but not of it.
Even when she was everything I most admired, even when to hear her voice speaking my name with its ironic, intimate inflexion had brought me as much happiness as a human relationship could give me, I had always been a little frightened of her, and fearful of falling below her standard. What that consisted in I don’t quite know, for it was not only her beauty. I don’t think I ever heard her say a clever thing, though I shouldn’t have recognized it if I had. No, it was her air of good-humoured impatience with things and people—her getting to a point before they did, and leaving it while they were still fumbling with it, her disturbing faculty of guessing what they were going to say before they said it, that made her seem superior to them. She arrived while they plodded; her short cuts made them seem heavy-footed and prosy. She wasn’t superior in the sense of being patronizing; she took a great interest in people, and never spoke to any of us as if he or she was someone else. But she had her own angle on us, and it was generally a slightly disconcerting one: she saw us not as we saw ourselves or as other people saw us. To me her vision of me as the Green Huntsman had alw
ays been intoxicating, a mirror in which I never tired of seeing myself: it was like a rebirth. And only she could perform the miracle; it was no good my saying to myself: “This is how Marian sees me.” The portrait wouldn’t come to life unless she held the mirror.
And now the mirror was cracked. Only I knew how much calculation underlay her apparent inconsequence, and all my thoughts of her were steeped in green and poisoned; I could hardly bear to look at my green suit. No use to tell myself now that she had given it me before I took to letter-carrying, because she had always thought of me as green; Marcus had told me so, and it didn’t occur to me he might have lied.
So I was relieved at her absence; relieved from the strain of having to keep up with her, of being what I thought she wanted me to be at every minute, a psychological exercise that had lost its magic; and relieved from the threat of an emotional show-down, involving perhaps further recriminations and unkind words, the desire for which I had read in her eyes, I thought, the day before.
It is I, the elder, the old Leo, who am making this postmortem; at the time I didn’t analyse my feelings much: I was content to feel the pressure of circumstances relax, and myself slipping into my humdrum, pre-Brandham state of mind, with nobody’s standards to live up to except my own.
Four of the week-end visitors had taken the early train with Marian, so we were a small party, only seven: Mr. Maudsley, Lord Trimingham, Denys, Marcus and myself, and an elderly Mr. and Mrs. Laurent, of whom I remember nothing except that they were quite unformidable. Even the table had shrunk and was now hardly longer than our dining-table at home, which I should see so soon. The cats were away; a wonderful feeling of détente prevailed. Denys took advantage of it to give us a long harangue on the best way of combating poachers. “But you forget, Papa,” he said more than once, “that this park is an exposed park. Anyone can get into it, anyone, anywhere, and we be none the wiser.” He rambled on, working himself up, arguing with himself when no opposition offered. He would not have dared to with his mother there; but Mr. Maudsley never snubbed him in my hearing, except that once, on the cricket field.
Presently our host rose, and we rose with him. “Have a cigar?” he abruptly inquired, his sunken eyes scanning face after face, including mine. He often asked this question at times of day which even I knew to be inappropriate; it was when he suddenly remembered his duties as host that he proffered this pistol-shot hospitality. We all smiled and shook our heads, and left the dining-room to the servants. No orderly-room, no plans for the day, no messages to take, no problems. We were free!
As I was going out, Marcus said: “Come with me, I want to tell you something.” Agreeably titillated, and wondering what it could be, I followed him into Mrs. Maudsley’s sitting-room—the blue boudoir, it was called. I should never have dared to venture into it, but Marcus was a privileged person where she was concerned.
He shut the door and said, rather self-consciously:
“Have you heard this one?”
“No,” I said instinctively, without waiting to hear.
“It’s very funny and rather rude.”
I was all ears.
Marcus composed his face into solemn lines and said: “The awe-inspirers have gone away.”
I rolled my eyes in agonized conjecture, hoping that somewhere on the confines of sight I might see this as very funny and rather rude, but I couldn’t, and finally had to say so.
Marcus frowned and put his finger to his cheek. Then he shook himself in exasperation and said:
“Oh, I’ve got it wrong. I remember now. Be sure to laugh: it’s frightfully funny.”
I composed myself to guffaw.
“It’s: ‘The awe-mongers have gone away.’ “
I tittered slightly from nervous reaction, not from having seen the joke. Marcus, realizing this, was vexed.
“You needn’t laugh if you don’t want to,” he said loftily, “but it is very funny.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said, for I knew how ill-advised as well as ill-mannered it is, not to appreciate a joke when it is told one. Worse still, it laid one open to the charge of being a thickhead.
“A man who is a prefect at a public school told a friend of mine, and he rocked with laughter,” Marcus said. “It was after some ushers had been sacked for spooning or something like that. They had been frightfully strict in form, cursing everybody and punishing them with extra assignments, which made it all the funnier. Can’t you see it now?”
“Not quite,” I confessed.
“Well, monger—you can have an ironmonger, or a fish-monger, or a cheesemonger or a costermonger, but have you ever heard of an awe-monger before?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“Well, isn’t it funny?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” I said doubtfully. Then, as I realized the ingenious use of the words, I began to laugh quite heartily. “But why is it rude?”
“Because ‘awe’ is a rude word, you dolt.”
“Is it?” I said, feeling as small as only someone can who has been caught out in ignorance of salacious matters. “Why is it rude?”
For answer Marcus laughed and laughed. He shut his eyes, wagged his round head from side to side, and shook all over. At last he said:
“You’re the best joke of all.”
I joined in the laugh, for fear of not seeming sporting, and then when he had laughed his fill I asked a second time, though it cost me a great sacrifice of pride to say it:
“But why is ‘awe’ a rude word? Please tell me.”
But he wouldn’t enlighten me and it’s my belief he couldn’t.
That day and the next were two of the happiest I spent at Brandham Hall. They did not compare with Saturday and Sunday morning; I did not feel, to use Ted’s phrase, “on top of the world.” Those were days of buoyant emotional health, of positive well-being such as I had never known. These were days of convalescence: I felt as if I was slowly picking up after a long illness; or as if in the middle of a tournament I had suddenly been whisked out of the field and put down among the spectators.
No one paid us a visit, nor did we pay any; for the first time at Brandham Hall it was like family life, not like a party. The strain of entertaining and being entertained was over: there was no obligation to talk or listen, we could be as uncommunicative as we liked. Denys took the opportunity to talk a great deal, but the rest of us put in a word when we felt like it. Many things in and about the house (though never its south-west prospect) became visible to me which hadn’t been visible before, so busy were we keeping the ball of sociability rolling. The weather grew more settled as well as hotter; on Monday the temperature was 82.9, on Tuesday it was 88.2: the climax in the 100’s that I hoped for seemed to be again approaching.
“Marian will be boiled in London,” Lord Trimingham said; “there’s nothing so hot as shopping.” I saw her in a crowded bicycle shop, oil melting in all directions. “Oh dear, it’s got onto my skirt, what shall I do?—and this is a new one I’ve just bought for my engagement.” But she wouldn’t have said that; she would have laughed and said something to make the salesman laugh; I remembered how it had been at Norwich. Out she comes, her oily dress sweeping the pavement, gathering up the dust; and behind her, in my mind’s eye, is a small green bicycle, a boy’s bicycle, complete with all the latest devices, including a brake front and rear, made like a horseshoe, not one of those outmoded models working on the tire of the front wheel such as Marcus had, which wore thin and wouldn’t hold you. Whenever she came into my thoughts, the bicycle followed her like a familiar, going by itself, keeping very close to her, dogging her footsteps.
A green bicycle! How difficult it is to keep out of one’s mind a painful thought that attaches itself, leech-like, to a thought one welcomes! If Marcus had not given me that unkind explanation of the bicycle’s colour, I might not have posted my letter to Mother.
Upon the certainty of her swift response my happiness reposed. I hoped she would not think it too extravagant to send a secon
d telegram; I rather dreaded having to show Mrs. Maudsley mine: it might give her a fit, or something.
On Tuesday morning I found a letter by my plate. The handwriting was unknown to me; the postmark was Brandham Rising, a near-by village. I couldn’t think whom it could be from, for only two people wrote letters to me, my mother and my aunt. I was so consumed with curiosity that I could hardly listen to what anybody said, but I couldn’t satisfy it because I hated to read my letters in public. As soon as the signal for departure—now so casual and informal—was given, I ran up to my room. To my intense annoyance, the house-maids were occupying it, as they so often were when I wanted it to myself; and I had to curb my impatience till they were gone.
BLACK FARM
SUNDAY
Dear Master Colston,
I am writing straight off to say how sorry I am I sent you off like that. It has quite upset me that I sent you off like that. I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t on purpose, but at the last minute I jibed at telling you something. Perhaps when you are older you will understand how it was and forgive me. It was quite natural you should want to know being a boy of your age but the fact is I didn’t feel like telling you at the moment. But I oughtn’t to have taken on so specially after telling me your Dad was dead—only I got my rag out as I do sometimes, that’s how it was.
I ran after you and called to you to come back but I expect you thought I was chasing you.
I don’t expect you’ll want to come again in a hurry but if you would like to come next Sunday at the same time I will try and tell you what you asked, and have some shooting and stay to tea. It was a shame you missed your tea, I hope they kept some for you at the Hall.