‘I suppose so; I don’t imagine she’s awake yet really. Did you have a good time?’
‘No, lousy. Why on earth did you go away like that without me?’ Walter flung himself out of the room.
‘Hity-tity,’ said Amabelle. ‘So that’s the tone, is it? Well, so long as one knows. How much did you lend him, Jerome darling?’
‘A fiver,’ said Jerome, who was now sitting up and reading The Times.
‘I’ll give it to you myself. It was rather a shame, I suppose, leaving him there. Still, half-past six, you know, and he hadn’t been seen by anyone since midnight.’
‘There are trains,’ said Jerome, pursuing his own line of thought, ‘and road coaches.’
‘In those clothes? I hardly think he could have.’
‘He had an overcoat. He must know he can’t afford Daimler hires. It would have been more honest.’
‘It would have been most unlike Walter. How goes the journal, Paul?’
‘Grand. I’m reading the first volume now. This morning I got to where “Dearest Mamma very kindly gave me permission to go a little way into the shrubbery with Sir Josiah Bobbin, and while there he said that it would make him very happy if I should become his wife. I replied in some agitation, due to the beatings of my poor heart, that my future must be decided by dearest Mamma and dear Papa; whereupon he told me, to my immeasurable joy, that he had already solicited and obtained their consent to our union. We then went back into the drawing-room, where I was embraced by dearest Mamma, dear Papa and all my dear brothers and sisters, also by poor Aunt Agatha, who all said that they hoped I should be very very happy. It was a most touching scene, and I felt quite faint from joy and emotion.” Isn’t it exquisite?’ said Paul enthusiastically. ‘The account of her wedding is too perfect; I can’t remember that exactly, but I’ll bring it along sometime. You know, Amabelle, I think I shall be able to write something unusually good after this, thanks entirely to you and Bobby, of course.’
‘Don’t mention it, old boy,’ said Bobby. ‘Just remember me in your dedication, though. “To my friend, Sir Roderick Bobbin, Bt., great grandson of Lady Maria, without whose help, encouragement and never failing sympathy this book could hardly have been written.” Something on those lines, you know.’
Paul said nothing. He intended to dedicate the ‘Life’ to Philadelphia Bobbin.
15
Shortly after the New Year, foot and mouth disease vanished from the cow-sheds of Gloucestershire, and the Bobbin hunt was able to resume its season. Lady Bobbin was now rarely to be seen between breakfast, at which meal she would appear booted and spurred to eat vast quantities of meaty foods, and tea-time, when she would loudly re-live the day for the benefit of Philadelphia, Paul and Michael. Her accounts of what had happened were always interspersed with bitter criticisms of the young female members of the hunt, who, according to her description of their appearance, might be supposed to come out hunting in full evening dress and with the sole idea of abstracting the attention of their men friends from the serious business on hand.
‘There was Maisie Critchley, in a pink shirt and a satin stock (I know you’ll hardly believe me), made up to the eyes and her hair all fuzzed out under her bowler. Perfectly disgusting. I can’t imagine why she bothers to get up on a horse at all; she can’t go for nuts and she spends her whole time coffee-housing with young Walters. Then, of course, he’s too busy holding her horse while she makes up her face and so on to think of anything else. I don’t know what the young people are coming to. Lucky thing my poor father is dead, that’s what I say. It would have broken his heart to see all these goings-on.’
Paul, hoping to see some painted sirens, went to one or two meets; but the women seemed to him, young and old, to be of a uniform plainness, with hard, weather-beaten faces entirely devoid of any artificial aids to beauty. He could only suppose that Lady Bobbin, in the delirium of the chase, was subject to hallucinations which took the form of satin stocks and pretty painted faces.
Bobby, who, rather against his will, admitted to a fondness for hunting, usually accompanied his mother and stayed out most of the day; but Philadelphia, since having as a child broken nearly every bone in her body when her pony fell at a stone wall out cubbing, had no nerve left. She and Paul now spent their time between Mulberrie Farm, both Sally and Amabelle having taken a great fancy to her, and the barrow, where Michael was busily conducting excavations with the aid of four members of the local unemployed.
‘That book you lent me,’ she said one morning as they were walking towards the barrow; ‘I finished it in bed last night. It’s very sad, isn’t it?’
Paul looked at her with positive rapture.
‘Did you really think so?’ he said incredulously.
‘Yes, of course. It is dreadful – I cried at the end.’
‘Oh, you didn’t, Philadelphia?’
‘Yes, I did. Why, don’t you think it’s very sad?’
‘I do. But nobody else does, you know. They don’t understand it; all the reviewers thought it was meant to be a funny book.’
‘How could they? How perfectly absurd. I think it’s too terrible, and wonderfully written, isn’t it? Poor Leander Strutt, he was so happy at Oxford, d’you remember? And so miserable when he was working for the pawnbroker. I’m sure that must be true of certain young men. I’m sure lots of them are happy until they leave their university and then never happy any more.’
‘Indeed,’ said Paul eagerly, ‘you are so right. I was just like that myself. I don’t believe I shall ever be as happy again as I was at Oxford.’
‘It is different for girls, of course. I had a dreadful childhood; I was wretched the whole time. How I longed to be grown-up!’
‘And now that you are grown-up, is it any better?’
‘Up to now I haven’t thought so. I came out in London, you know, about three years ago, and went to parties, which I simply hated. I didn’t like the people I met, and they didn’t like me either. Since then I’ve just lived down here, with nothing to do and no friends, and been even more miserable than I was as a child. But I’ve always felt that there must be people somewhere in the world whom I could like and get on with, and I see that I was right.’ She paused a moment, and then said, ‘Now that you and Sally and Amabelle and Michael have all appeared in my life I’m very happy indeed. I don’t know what I shall do when you all go away.’ Her eyes filled with tears as she said this.
Paul felt rather annoyed at the inclusion of Michael’s name in this group of superior beings.
‘I’ve got a great secret to tell you,’ he said.
‘Have you? What?’
‘I wrote Crazy Capers.’
‘You did, Paul? Oh, how thrilling. I do feel excited to think that I know a real author at last. But how clever you must be; as clever as Michael I should think, or even cleverer. It is a lovely book. I don’t understand, though, why you wrote under another name; I should want everyone to know that I was the author if I wrote something so wonderful.’
‘My real name,’ said Paul, ‘is Fotheringay. Fisher was my mother’s name.’ And he told her why he had come to Compton Bobbin. ‘Thank God I did,’ he added, looking at her lovely face.
After this conversation Paul appeared in a new light to Philadelphia. She had already felt that she might fall in love with him, now she knew that she had done so. An author in disguise is a more heroic figure than a holiday tutor.
They arrived at the barrow to find Michael in his shirtsleeves, grouting about in the bottom of a hole, now about five feet deep, which had been dug by the workmen.
‘We may strike the treasure at any moment now,’ he cried, in a voice strangled with excitement. ‘At any moment we may come upon the charred bones of the great Viking and his wives, the human ashes, surrounded by great spears and shields and gleaming gold ornaments, painted sherds and jewelled necklaces.’
Paul and Philadelphia, fired by his enthusiasm, leapt into the pit and began feverishly to dig.
‘Be
careful,’ cried Michael, in great agitation. ‘All this earth must be properly sifted. I think perhaps you had better leave it to me; you can stand on the edge there, if you like.’
This proved, however, in the bitter east wind that was blowing, to be rather a chilly occupation, and they very soon went home again.
That afternoon, coming in from a visit to Mulberrie Farm, they were met by Michael, who almost screamed, ‘Come and see, come and see. I’ve found him; I’ve found the Viking with all his ornaments, great painted sherds, gold breastplates – ’
‘Where – where?’
‘On the billiard table.’
They rushed to the billiard-room, where they found, reposing on newspaper, a small heap of earthy objects. There was a bit of bone, a square inch of what looked like broken flowerpot, some apparently meaningless pieces of metal and a tiny gold wire. These were the great skeleton, the sherds, the spears and shields, the jewelled necklaces for which Michael had so perseveringly and so expensively been searching. Such, however, is the power of an archaeological imagination that Michael himself, able to reconstruct out of these bits and pieces the objects of which they had (perhaps) originally formed a part, regarded them as a most valuable and interesting addition to modern knowledge. His gratification knew no bounds when, having dispatched his treasure to the British Museum, that revered institution graciously accepted it. (The piece of bone, however, under expert examination, proved to be not that of a Viking but of a pig.)
16
The point-to-point meeting of the South Cotswold hunt took place in some of Major Stanworth’s fields. To celebrate the occasion, Amabelle gave a lunch party which consisted of the Monteaths, Major Stanworth, his little boy Adolphus and Paul. Bobby, who had, of course, been invited, was obliged, greatly to his disgust, to attend a farmers’ luncheon in a large, damp and evil-smelling tent on the race-course itself. In the absence of his always cheerful rattle the party at Mulberrie Farm settled down to a meal of unrelieved gloom. Sally made no attempt to conceal her wretchedness and never for one moment stopped crying, her emotion being due to the fact that, in spite of all her efforts to prevent such a thing from happening, Major Stanworth had lent Walter one of his horses to ride in the nomination race. Nobody liked to break in upon her too evident grief with a merry remark, and her tears, though of the unobtrusive variety, stealing down her cheeks one by one instead of gushing forth in uncontrolled abandon, had a most depressing effect on the general spirits. Major Stanworth, a kindly and not insensitive soul, was perfectly well aware that poor Sally regarded him as a particularly low and evil type of murderer, and kept on making pathetic little advances to this unresponsive Niobe.
‘Really, Mrs Monteath,’ he said nervously, ‘you need not feel in the least upset. I assure you, there is no need to worry like this. Old Foxtail, the horse that Walter is going to ride, has never put a foot wrong in his life, never. Please believe me. He may be a bit slow, but there’s no safer ride in the country. Surely you must realize that I would never think of putting Walter up on one of my horses unless I knew that it was perfectly safe – would I, Mrs Fortescue?’
‘No, of course not, darling,’ said Amabelle, looking at him affectionately; ‘but all the same, I do think it’s rather dreadful for my poor Sally, and none of us are blessing you exactly, because now, you see, we shall all have to go out in this ghastly east wind to see Walter doing or dying, whereas otherwise we might have drunk our cherry brandy by the fire and imagined ourselves at the point-to-point instead. Now, Walter dear, before I forget, I mean to bet five shillings on you, not that I imagine for a moment that I shall win anything, but just for old sake’s sake, don’t you know.’
‘Each way, or win only?’ said Walter professionally. (‘If you don’t stop crying like this, Sally, I shall divorce you – I wish you’d try to be more controlled on these occasions; think of the women of Sparta, can’t you?) It may make all the difference to my tactics when approaching the last fence. You see, if it’s win only I might feel obliged to bump and bore a bit, otherwise I should probably sit tight and get a comfortable third. So make up your mind and let me know, will you?’
‘That’s all right, old boy,’ said Paul. ‘You ride a really filthy race. Above all, don’t miss any opportunity to cross Captain Chadlington; he’s riding a horse called Stout Unionist (out of True Blue by Brewery) and I shall die if he wins.’
‘Oh, so he’s back again, is he?’
‘Yes, he came back for the point-to-point last night.’
‘How’s the Infernal Machine?’
‘Grand. He’s going to ask a question about it in the House.’
‘I think we should be going on out,’ said Amabelle, ‘although a more unpleasant idea in this weather I can hardly imagine, myself! Just listen to the wind, howling down the chimney – ugh! Come on, Sally, my poor darling, I can lend you a fur coat and a nice big hankie, and we might tie hotwater bottles next to our tummies, don’t you think? Very nice and pregnant we shall look, too.’ She led the weeping Sally from the room.
‘You’ll be blind, you know, Walter, old boy, if I may say so,’ remarked Paul, who had been watching Walter fill his glass with unusual abandon.
‘Yes, I mean to be,’ said Walter. ‘I’m terrified,’ he added confidentially as Major Stanworth left the room, ‘never been so frightened in my life. But nothing hurts nearly so much if you’re drunk, does it? I once saw a drunk man fall thirty feet, on to a stone pavement, too; he wasn’t hurt a bit. Come on, then; are we all ready for the pretty spectacle of my demise? Cheer up, Sally, think of the Roman matrons, darling. Besides, you’re quite attractive enough to get some more husbands, though, of course, I doubt you finding anything quite up to my form again. Have we got lots of cherry brandy in the car?’
The point-to-point course lay on the exposed and wind-swept side of a hill and the cold which assailed Amabelle’s party on their arrival at this scene of action was beyond what would be thought possible by anyone not accustomed to the pleasures of rural England in winter. Walter, by now fairly drunk, got out of the car and strode about in his overcoat, accompanied by Major Stanworth, Paul and Bobby. He went down to look at the water jump, had a talk to Major Stanworth’s groom, and generally behaved in what he imagined to be a professional manner. Amabelle and Sally huddled up together for warmth in the Rolls-Royce, clasping innumerable hot-water bottles, and refusing to move out of it until Walter’s race should begin. This was third on the programme. After the first race, at which there were many accidents, poor Sally was even further depressed by seeing the motor ambulance leave the course with its groaning load. A reserve of pride in her nature, however, prevented her from making any more scenes, and it was with a comparatively cheerful face that she went off to the paddock when the time came for Walter to mount. Amabelle still declared that nothing would drag her from the car, so Paul took Sally under his protection. He pointed out Captain Chadlington, whose ordinarily red face was now mauve from cold and harmonized unpleasingly with his racing colours of black, cerise cap and old-gold sleeves. Lady Brenda, in expensive tweeds and holding a brown leather shooting stick, was talking to friends nearby; it seemed to Sally that she was viewing her husband’s approaching peril with unnatural calm.
‘You can go into the paddock, if you like, Sally,’ said Bobby, who was accompanied by a pretty little Jewess with thin leg’s and a spotted scarf.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t dare,’ shivered Sally, ‘your mother looks too forbidding today, doesn’t she? Besides, Lady Prague is in there.’
At last the terrible moment came and the crowd round the paddock drew back to make a path for the horses, who jogged off with much tossing of heads and jingling of harness towards the start. They were soon lost to sight over the brow of the hill, and Walter was last seen leading the field at an uncontrolled gallop and fishing madly in the air for a stirrup with his left foot.
‘Now,’ said Paul, taking Sally’s arm in a fatherly manner, ‘where would you like to go? Shall we watch the r
ace from the winning post or would you rather be at one of the jumps?’
‘Where is he most likely to be killed?’ asked Sally, her teeth chattering. She was by now in a state of utter resignation, regarding herself as a widow already; she felt, however, that she would like to be at hand to close Walter’s eyes and hear his dying words, if any.
‘Sally, dear, please don’t be so absurd. Walter rode in several grinds at Oxford. I remember it quite well,’ lied Paul, ‘and he never had a scratch. I promise faithfully that he’ll be all right – do stop worrying. Let’s go to the last jump of all, shall we? Giles Stanworth says we can see most of the course and the finish from there.’
‘Just as you like,’ said Sally in a dull voice. She was wondering vaguely which of her male acquaintances she could bear to marry in the event of Walter’s death.
Presently there was a murmur all over the race course, somebody in the crowd said ‘They’re off,’ and a distant thunder of hoofs could be heard.
‘There,’ said Paul triumphantly, ‘what did I tell you? They’re all over the first jump. Walter’s among the first three; can you see? Would you like these glasses?’
‘No thanks,’ said Sally. ‘I never can see anything but sky through them.’
‘I believe Walter’s bound to win, you know; all over the second jump and he’s still leading. Isn’t it grand. Cheer up, Sally, it’ll soon be over. Now they go round the hill and we shan’t see them for a minute or two.’
A voice in the crowd behind was heard to say confidentially: ‘Here, photographer – I’m Sir Roderick Bobbin and that’s my cousin, Lady Brenda Chadlington, in the beige hat. If you take our photographs you’ll get promotion, I should think.’ And a moment later, ‘Oh, look, Brenda darling, we’ve been photographed! No, of course I won’t tell him our names if you’d rather not.’
‘Here they come,’ said Paul excitedly. ‘Walter’s still leading; aren’t you thrilled, darling? Over the water jump, only one more now – over that – here they come – come on, Walter – come on, old boy – ’