As far as I had a purpose, it was to avoid being alone with her. She, I dimly realized, was the rock on which I had split. Ted had frightened me more, perhaps, but she had hurt me more; with men, as with boys, I knew more or less where I was: I did not expect them to be nice to me. Schoolboys have a much clearer perception of one another’s characters than grown-ups have, for their characters are not obscured by a veil of good manners: they deal in hard words, they have no long-term policy, as men have, for asserting themselves, they prefer short profits and quick returns. Ted was like a schoolboy, angry one moment, good-humoured the next. I did not feel, until the end, that he had any greater regard for me than one thrusting male has for another, and I was prepared to take him on those terms; and though I idealized him, and myself in him, I had sunk no great capital of confidence in him.
But in Marian I had. Against her I had no such defences. She was my fairy godmother. She combined the roles of both fairy and mother: the magical benevolence of the one, the natural benevolence of the other. I had no more imagined that she could turn against me than that the good fairy of a fairy story could turn against the hero she protected. But she had, and so had my real mother: that was a betrayal, too. The difference was that Mother did not know what she was doing and Marian did.
So my policy was to keep clear of her. I knew that it was shortsighted and that I should have to see her some time, if only to give her Ted’s message. And as to that I was gradually coming to a conclusion that needed more resolution than anything I had yet done at Brandham Hall. I did not know if I should be able to bring myself to do it when the moment came; but it was the logical outcome of seeing myself as the pivot of the situation: I and only I could make the machinery break down, and if the machinery broke down, so would the situation. On one thing I was determined, that I would take no more messages.
Our first meeting was uneventful. Marian was at dinner, but she had brought two guests down with her; the table had lengthened again, the talk was general. She smiled at me as she used to and teased me a little across the table; then Marcus and I went off to bed.
Next morning, Thursday morning, Mrs. Maudsley appeared at breakfast. She greeted me warmly—no, not warmly, for warmth was not in her nature, but with a full and flattering sense of what was due to a guest who had been unavoidably but most regrettably neglected. I studied her, looking for symptoms of hysteria, but could detect none. She was paler, I thought, than she had been, but she was always pale; her glance still had its special quality of not travelling but arriving, and her movements were as deliberate as ever. Yet tension had returned to the breakfast table; again I was afraid of making an awkward gesture, of spilling something, of drawing unfavourable attention to myself. And after breakfast, instead of the relaxation of the past three days, the feeling of beginning the day on low gear, there came her voice, at which other conversation died, and the ominous “Now, today …”
As Marcus and I were going out he whispered to me wickedly: “The awe-mongers have come back,” and I tittered, but at the disloyalty, not at the joke. I was going to reply when a voice behind us said: “Marcus, I want to borrow Leo from you for a moment,” and I found myself following Marian.
I can’t remember where the interview took place, but I know that it was indoors and that the usual feeling one has that someone might come in was absent.
She asked me how I had been getting on without her and I said: “Very well, thank you,” which I thought safe and noncommittal, but it didn’t please her, for she said: “That’s the first unkind speech I’ve heard you make.” I hadn’t meant it unkindly and a man would not have thought it was unkind, yet immediately I felt contrite and began to wonder how I could propitiate her. She was wearing a new dress; I had got to know the others and noticed the difference. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked. “No,” she replied. “Someone asked me out to dinner, but I felt more like dying than dining. I missed Brandham every minute. Did you miss me?”
I was thinking what I should answer, for I didn’t want to be caught out a second time, when she said: “Don’t bother to say yes if you didn’t.” She said this with a smile, and I said untruthfully: “Of course I did,” and as I said it I half thought I had; at any rate I wished I had. She sighed and said: “I expect you think me a ghastly old governess, don’t you?—slanging you and calling you names. But I’m not really—really I’m a good-natured girl.”
I didn’t know what to make of this; was she saying she was sorry, as Ted had? Only once before had I known her to apologize, except for something entirely accidental, like treading on somebody’s toes. And this was her sole reference to the episode: she seemed to regard it as closed.
“I suppose you went about with Marcus?” she asked. “Did you get into any mischief?”
“Oh no,” I answered righteously. “We talked French.”
“French!” she said. “I didn’t know that French was one of your accomplishments. What a lot you can do—singing, cricket, French!” Her beautiful eyes searched me for a weak spot and found it.
But I was wary, I only said: “Marcus is much better at French than I am. He knows the irregular verbs.”
“Very irregular, I dare say,” Marian said. “But anyhow you enjoyed yourself?”
“Oh yes,” I said politely. “I’m sorry you didn’t.”
“No, you’re not,” she said surprisingly, “you’re not sorry in the least. You couldn’t care if I dropped dead in front of you. You’re a hard-hearted little boy, but then, all boys are.”
Although she made it sound a compliment, and I would rather have been called hard-hearted than soft-hearted, I didn’t altogether relish this. But I couldn’t tell if Marian was serious.
“Are men hard-hearted too?” I asked, to change the subject. “I’m sure Hugh isn’t.”
“Why?” she said. “What makes you think he isn’t? You’re all alike, millstones, blocks of granite—or the beds at Brandham, if you want something really hard.”
I laughed. “My bed isn’t hard,” I said.
“You’re lucky. Mine is, harder than the ground.”
“I’ve never slept on the ground,” I said, interested by her comparison, “but I know a boy who has. He said it made his hip sore. Did you find that?”
“What makes you think I’ve slept on the ground?” she countered.
“Because you said your bed was harder.”
“Well, so it is,” she said, “a great deal harder.”
I guessed then that she didn’t mean a real bed.
“But Brandham is such a nice place,” I said, groping towards something.
“Who said it wasn’t?”
“Well, you said the beds—”
“Were hard? Well, so they are.”
She was silent and I felt for the first time that she was unhappy. This was a revelation to me. I knew that grown-up people were unhappy—when a relation died, for instance, or went bankrupt. At such times they were sure to be unhappy; they had no option: it was the rule, like mourning after a death, like a black margin round the writing paper. (My mother still used it for my father.) They were unhappy to order. But that they should be unhappy in the way that I was sometimes, because something in my private life, to which perhaps I couldn’t give a name, had gone wrong—that hadn’t occurred to me. And in any case I should never have associated unhappiness with Marian. She seemed to have happiness at her beck and call, like her other moods, and to be above the need for it. I thought I knew why she was unhappy, but I wanted to make sure.
“Do soldiers have to sleep on the ground?” I asked.
She looked at me surprised; her mind was far away.
“Yes, I suppose so. Yes, of course they do.”
“Did Hugh have to?”
“Did I—no—no, yes, no, yes—I never slept on the ground.”
I had never seen her confused before.
“Not you,” I stammered, aghast anew at this stupid pitfall of pronunciation. “Hugh, Hugh, Hugh,” I hooted.
&nbs
p; “Oh, Hugh,” she said expressionlessly. “Yes, I’ve no doubt he had to.”
I said, a little shocked by her callousness about Lord Trimingham: “And will Ted have to?”
“Ted?”
Her astonishment should have warned me, but my mind’s antennæ were blunted and I went on:
“Yes, when he goes to the war.”
She stared at me stupefied and her mouth fell open.
“Ted going to the war? What do you mean?” she said.
It had never crossed my mind that she didn’t know. In a flash I remembered that Lord Trimingham had seen him on Monday, after Marian had left. But it was too late to draw back.
“Yes,” I said. “Hugh told me. Hugh asked him to join up and he said he might. Hugh said it—it was on the cards he would go.” I wanted to make it perfectly clear to Marian, and incidentally to myself, what Ted’s position was. I knew that I had put too many “Hughs” into it (this was not quite accidental: I was sheltering myself behind him), but I was utterly unprepared for the outburst that followed.
“Hugh!” Marian exploded. “Hugh! Do you mean that Hugh has persuaded Ted to enlist? Do you really mean that, Leo?”
I was frightened, but realizing that I was not the main object of her anger, I mumbled:
“He said he’d tackled him.”
“Tackled?”
I thought she didn’t know what “tackled” meant. “It’s a word they use in football,” I explained, “for—bringing a man down.”
“Oh!” cried Marian, and it was as if something had pierced her. “You mean Hugh made Ted say he’d go?”
Her face had gone white and her eyes were like dark holes in a sheet of ice.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he made him, how could he? Ted’s as strong as he is—stronger, I should think.” This seemed a conclusive argument to me. But not to Marian.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “Ted is as weak as water. Hugh’s far stronger.”
I could not understand this at all. It seemed, like many things that grown-ups said to one another, the opposite of the truth. But now a new look came into Marian’s face, fear contending with anger.
“He might have, he might have,” she repeated, more to herself than to me. “Did he say why he wanted Ted to go?”
The ice-holes yawned as if they would draw me under.
“Yes,” I said, and if I had been vindictive I should have enjoyed seeing Marian shrink away. “He said he was a single man with no ties and would make a first-rate N.C.O. That’s a kind of officer who isn’t a real officer,” I explained. People were always explaining things to me and I rather enjoyed explaining back. “Hugh also said that Ted was a good shot, but it was different with a rifle. He meant it’s easier to miss with a rifle.”
Marian’s face changed again. Something peered out of it from behind her eyes. “He is a good shot,” she said, “he is a good shot. My God, if Hugh dares! But I’ll not let him,” she went on wildly: I could not tell whom she meant, Ted or Hugh. “I’ll soon put a stop to it! I’ll make Ted put a stop to it! I tell you, Ted’s a dangerous man when his blood’s up.”
I shivered, and my mood, which had to some extent pursued its own course, independent of her ravings, began to take its colour from hers.
“No, he won’t go to the war,” she said more quietly. “I’ll see to that. Blackmail’s a game two can play at.”
I didn’t know what “blackmail” meant, and, with all my thirst for knowledge, was too frightened to ask.
“I’ll tell Hugh—” She broke off. “A word would do it.”
“What word? What will you tell him?” I demanded.
She stared at and through me. “I’ll tell him I won’t marry him if Ted goes.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t!” I cried, seeing at once how fatal such a course would be, seeing too the fifth Viscount stretched before me, dead from a tight-lipped bullet wound that didn’t bleed. “You see, Hugh doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know?”
“He doesn’t know about the messages.”
She screwed her eyes up tight as if she was trying to work a sum out in her head. “Doesn’t know?” she repeated. “Then why does he want Ted to go to the war?”
“Oh,” I exclaimed, thankful to be on firm ground at last, “I told you. It’s because he’s patriotic—what my father called a Jingo—and he wants to raise men for the Army. I know it’s that—he almost said so when he said he wasn’t an advertisement for Army life himself.”
She looked at me as if I was another person and she wasn’t sure who. “You may be right,” she said doubtfully, but with the lift of hope in her voice. “You may be right. In that case,” she said inconsequently, “it’s just silly of Ted and I shall tell him so.”
“Why is it silly?” I asked. For us children “silly” was a word of very strong, though generalized, disapproval. I wanted to defend Ted from it. “Why is it silly?” I repeated when she didn’t answer.
“Oh, because it is. Why should he go, because Hugh asks him to?”
Afterwards I guessed why she said Ted was silly. She thought he was making a scruple of her being engaged to Hugh, and was going to the war to salve his conscience. But that didn’t occur to me then, and I said, with unconscious cruelty, still trying to defend him from the charge of silliness:
“But perhaps he wants to go!”
Her eyes grew round with terror. “Oh, but he couldn’t!” she cried.
I saw the look but misconstrued it, thinking her terror was for Ted, not for herself. All at once a thought long kept at bay, from loyalty to Lord Trimingham, from a confused recognition of its hopeless unsuitability, rose to my lips:
“Marian, why don’t you marry Ted?”
It was only for a moment, but in that moment her face reflected all the misery she had been going through; it was a heart’s history in a look. “I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” she wailed. “Can’t you see why?”
I thought I did, and since so many barriers between us were being overturned, I added—it seemed only logical:
“But why are you going to marry Hugh if you don’t want to?”
“Because I must marry him,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand. I must. I’ve got to!” Her lips trembled and she burst into tears.
I had seen grown-up people with red eyes, but I had never seen a grown-up person cry before, except my mother. My mother when she cried became unrecognizable. Marian didn’t: she was just Marian in tears. But there was a change—in me. For when she cried, she was not Marian the deceiver, Marian who for her own purposes had taken me in and then called me green, but the Marian of the first days, Marian who had taken pity on me, who had rescued me from being laughed at, Marian who had curtsied to me at the concert, Marian of the Zodiac, Marian whom I loved.
The sight of her tears loosened mine and I cried too. How long we cried I do not know, but suddenly she looked up and said—her voice altered by her tears, but not sobbing, and as though it had nothing to do with our previous conversation:
“Did you go down to the farm while I was away?”
“No,” I said, “but I saw Ted.”
“Did he have a message for me?” she asked.
“He said today was no good as he was going to Norwich. But Friday at six o’clock, same as usual.”
“Are you sure he said six o’clock?” she asked, puzzled.
“Quite sure.”
“Not half past six?”
“No.”
For answer she rose and kissed me; she had never kissed me before.
“And you won’t mind taking our notes as usual?”
“No,” I breathed.
“Bless you,” she said. “You’re a friend in a thousand.”
I was still savouring those words and remembering the kiss when I looked up and saw I was alone.
I had remembered my plan, but I had forgotten, and Marian had apparently forgotten, that my birthday was to be kept on Friday at tea-time. I thought I should be
spending it at home when I asked Ted if I should take a message. I didn’t think I should be present when the message took effect.
21
MY CONVERSATION with Marian left behind a glow which at first I was only too content to bask in. At some level of consciousness, not perhaps the deepest, we were reconciled. That was a great thing; once it would have been the great thing—but there was still a reservation in me somewhere, not about her, but about what she was doing. Dimly I felt that the two must be kept separate—just as her unhappiness and her tears had to be kept separate from my conception of her as a divinity: they were mortal, she was not.
That was one reason for my improved morale: I could think of her almost as I used to. And I could think of the green bicycle coasting after her without wishing it had been another colour; green had nearly lost its horrors for me. There was another reason, too, why I felt the springs of being starting up again. The air had been cleared: so many things had been said; I myself had said quite daring things, things that had carried weight with an older person.
Yes, I was on much better terms with myself and with the world. But I had learned one thing during the last days: it didn’t follow, because I was happier, that things were inevitably going better. It didn’t follow, because certain secrets had been dragged into the daylight, that they were no longer dangerous.