Eustace and Hilda

  There was a tremendous report. Startled, Eustace looked up to see all the clocks in the shop pointing accusing hands to midday. Begging the jeweller to keep the watch till he came again, Eustace rushed out. Directly in front, almost hanging over him, was a severe classical façade; in the open doorway, surmounted by a low stone pediment, a dark-red curtain swung slowly to and fro. The church had occurred. But it was too late to see the Titians; he was due in the Piazza, and Lady Nelly did not like to be kept waiting.

  The same report startled Lady Nelly, but she was not in the Piazza, she was in her sitting-room, reading a letter.

  Dearest Nelly,

  I was very glad to hear you are so comfortably settled in Venice. It’s such years since I took a furnished house, and then it was always from someone we all knew—Moira, or Betty, or Joan Cargill. I don’t know how I should feel about taking a house abroad, especially when you say it probably doesn’t belong to its real owners, but to an antiquaire who may sell it at any moment! Don’t you feel rather insecure? And the servants. I know some people like foreign servants, but I should never feel I could quite trust them as I do our dear Crosby and the others who have been with us so many years. But you always had an adventurous spirit!

  Well, Dick’s birthday is over and I feel relieved in more ways than one. (And in case he should forget to thank you, let me tell you how pleased he was with your congratulations.) The dear boy was in fine feather most of the time, and I think he thoroughly enjoyed seeing so many old faces (we sat down eighteen to dinner, just think of it!).

  Since the war, and since he’s been so much in the East, and then what John calls stumping the country, he’s grown a little restless, and I think it was a pleasure to him to realise that his old friends hadn’t, and were ready and anxious to take things up where they had been left off—you know what I mean. And Monica is a tower of strength, with such reserves of good nature and common sense.

  Miss Cherrington was there, of course. In your letter you didn’t seem to think that Dick took such a serious interest in her as I thought he did, and that perhaps, granted his rather peculiar temperament, it might be no bad thing if he did ask her to marry him. (I’m sure she still would, even now.) I agree that they have certain qualities and interests in common, but I felt, and feel more than ever now, that it is just those things that would be the danger—I mean their both being so headstrong and uncompromising and anxious to get things done without regard to ways and means. That wouldn’t matter so much if they had been brought up in the same world, but I’m afraid that speaking a different language they would never find the right thing to say to each other or compose the little differences that can be smoothed over by the kind of word you’re used to hearing. You’ll think me snobbish—I express myself badly, and I know that times have changed and marriages more unsuitable than this happen every day. But as an instance of what I mean: on the last evening of the party Miss Cherrington wore a red dress—my dear, there was nothing really against it, it would have looked all right on the stage, I dare say, but it wasn’t right for Anchorstone. Dick, you know, notices anything of that sort perhaps more than you or I would, and I happened to hear him say to her (he thought they were alone), “That dress of yours, Hilda, will set the Thames on fire. Did you choose it yourself, or did you send someone round the corner for it?” She said, “Why, don’t you like it?” And he said, “Only behind a fire-guard,” or something like that. Well, Monica would just have laughed, but Miss Cherrington was thoroughly upset and looked like a thundercloud. I was afraid she would burst into tears later in the evening when they were playing charades and got a little excited and merry, as young people will. Poor girl, she has no gift for being anything but herself. Dick isn’t much of an actor, but he likes to see things go, and I could tell he was irritated by the way Miss Cherrington wouldn’t play up and seemed stiff and awkward with the others who were all trying to be nice to her. I expect he felt she would be a handicap on any occasion that didn’t involve life or death.

  I must say she was quite different when she arrived, much more self-confident, so perhaps it was the red dress that turned the scale. What odd things we have to be thankful to. She left by an early train—I believe, though I don’t know—without saying good-bye to Dick. He was in my room at the time; he came in to talk to me, a thing he seldom does.

  Please remember me to Mr. Cherrington and thank him for his excessively kind messages. I dare say you are finding him a useful element in your parties; he is certainly more adaptable than his sister. If he should mention us, say we are old-fashioned people who jog along in the same rut and are not smart or amusing or clever or very rich (though I imagine he knows that now), and that Dick, au fond, is rather like us—not the sort of man to make a girl of his sister’s type happy. Indeed, I’m not sure he hasn’t made her rather unhappy already. I wish he was more careful of other people’s feelings. Naturally we don’t want a repetition of the kind of thing that happened more than once when he was much younger. I’m sure he is sensible enough to see the folly of that now, but I’ve felt anxious ever since Miss Cherrington came to the house—which is partly why I shall be thankful to have the situation ‘liquidated’ (as those dreadful Russians say) as soon as possible.

  Fondest love, dear Nelly, from your affectionate

  EDIE.

  Lady Nelly sat a moment in thought, and a tiny cloud troubled the weather of her face, erstwhile so lovely and so temperate.

  Slowly she tore the letter in pieces, and remembering her overdue appointment with Eustace, collected what she needed for the Piazza and walked downstairs to the waiting gondola.

  Meanwhile Eustace was installed at Florian’s and had ordered a white vermouth from Lady Nelly’s favourite waiter. He had hurried and perspiration dripped from him on to the ancient pavement. But his disappointment at missing the Titians was more than counter-balanced by his satisfaction at not being late for Lady Nelly. Apart from the risk of incurring her divine displeasure (he had never experienced it, so it had the terror of the unknown), he especially did not want to miss this rendezvous. Quite possibly it was one of the last he would have with her alone, for to-day or to-morrow she was expecting guests for the Feast of the Redeemer. To-morrow night, so everyone assured him, that much-heralded festival was really to take place; already he felt excited about it, but he wished that he and Lady Nelly could have had it to themselves, undiluted by the society of Lord and Lady Morecambe, whoever they were. (Eustace’s rather vicarious acquaintance with titles now enabled him to think of them almost disrespectfully.) True, they were not staying for long, and being on their honeymoon, would probably be much together; but they were to be succeeded by others, in fact, by an endless series of guests whose arrivals and departures, and the impetus those occasions would give to conversations in which he could take no real part, would disturb the rhythm of his life with Lady Nelly.

  He had set his chair where he could see her coming, and was watching so intently the portal on the left side of the Piazza that he did not hear a footstep behind him.

  “Well, Eustace,” said a slightly querulous, well-bred voice. “All alone?”

  “I was,” said Eustace, rising to shake hands with Jasper Bentwich. “But I’m not now. And Lady Nelly’s coming in a minute.”

  “In a minute, in a minute,” repeated Jasper irritably, giving the chair that Eustace offered him a housemaid’s look before deigning to sit down. “The world is stagnant with people waiting for that woman. And yet she doesn’t like to be kept waiting herself.”

  “Oh well,” said Eustace. “It’s different for her.”

  “Why is it different?”

  “She has her own time, like summer,” Eustace said. “But I did have to run to get here.”

  Jasper turned a critical monocle on him. “You look a little heated,” he said. “Never hurry—it only makes dogs run after you and bark.” In his oatmeal-coloured suit he looked as cool as a refrigerator. “And it’s so unbecoming.” He looked at Eustace again. br />
  “‘La fretta che l’onestade ad ogni atto dismaga’—Must I translate?”

  “Please.”

  “‘The haste that takes the goodness out of every action.’ You know your Dante?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Virginia Woolf is right. You young people never read. It makes you so difficult to talk to. But you do write. How’s the book going?”

  Eustace could not meet his eye.

  “Not as I should like,” he muttered.

  “Venice is no place to work in,” said Jasper. “It’s much too articulate. Why trouble to think, when everything you see thinks for you and at you, and says what it thinks so much better than you could? I always advise people not to write in Venice. They try to compete with the place, and that’s fatal. The only thing to do in Venice is nothing. Still, as you’ve begun, you’d better go on.”

  “Yes,” said Eustace, uncomfortably.

  “Only yesterday,” Jasper went on, “Laura Loredan, tiresome woman, roared at me half-way across the Piazza, ‘On dit que le chef d’œuvre de Monsieur Cherrington sera réussi.’”

  “Oh dear,” Eustace groaned.

  “Why ‘Oh dear’? Do you mind all Venice knowing that you’re writing a book? She’s taken quite a fancy to you. She still thinks you’re a tennis champion, of course.”

  “Oh, but I told her I wasn’t.”

  “A tennis champion who’s writing a book. You’ll have to dedicate it to her.”

  Eustace’s conscience, which throughout the conversation had been swelling with protest to the displacement and damage of his other mental organs, now demanded utterance.

  “Well, Jasper, to tell you the truth——”

  “My dear fellow, I never want to hear the truth,” said Jasper, “especially when it’s volunteered to me—œuf sur le plat. Ah, here’s Nelly.”

  Quicker than Eustace’s, his eye had seen the creamy-white galleon breasting the ripples of heat that flickered up from the pavement.

  “Nelly, your guest tells me he has been making headway with his book.”

  “Oh!” said Eustace.

  Lady Nelly was helped into a chair.

  “Yes, Jasper, isn’t it splendid? And I take all the credit. I won’t let him go to the Lido, I’ve kept him out of the Wideawake Bar, I’ve done everything that an Egeria should. He will owe his fame entirely to me.”

  “And to Laura. She’s been blowing his trumpet.”

  “Dear Laura, she’s a past-mistress of that instrument.”

  “Well, I’ve been advising him not to write.”

  “Oh, Jasper, how could you, undoing all my good work.”

  “Too many people have written about Venice already.”

  “How do you know he is writing about Venice?” said Lady Nelly placidly, giving Eustace a neutral look. “Did he tell you he was?”

  Jasper’s features corrugated round his monocle.

  “He didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  Eustace felt increasingly uneasy.

  “Of course he wouldn’t contradict you. He’s too well brought up. He always tries to spare the feelings of his elders, as you must have noticed.”

  “You make him sound very insincere, and me very old.”

  “I was only defending him from the charge of being contradictious,” said Lady Nelly.

  “Good Heavens! I should never have accused him of that.”

  “You don’t know him as I do,” said Lady Nelly. “I’ve had to tame you, haven’t I, Eustace, and break you of your habit of saying no, and of always looking for flies in the ointment?”

  “You’ve certainly made me like a lot that I didn’t when I came,” Eustace said.

  “Is that necessarily a good thing?”

  “Yes, I have widened his sympathies. You couldn’t say as much, could you, Jasper? Can you honestly tell me, Eustace, that in all the conversations you’ve had with Jasper you’ve ever come away liking anyone or anything better?”

  “Well, him,” said Eustace.

  “Very prettily said. But as I was walking down the Piazza I could see disillusion turning your features to brass. You were looking absolutely hag-ridden, almost suicidal. If I hadn’t turned up in the nick of time, you would have gone home and thrown that book into the canal.”

  Eustace gave a nervous cough.

  “I dare say he would have thanked me afterwards,” Jasper said. “But all women are alike. You can’t be happy until you’ve made some wretched man do something he’d far rather not do.”

  “I simply don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lady Nelly, shaking her head. “It sounds like an insult, and if Eustace was a dog I’d set him on you. I suppose you’d say that was making him do something he didn’t want to, but you’d be wrong, wouldn’t he, Eustace?”

  “My fingers are itching to get at him,” said Eustace.

  “Thank you,” said Lady Nelly. “Now, Jasper, I’ll pay for our drinks, to save you from doing something you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to be put in the wrong,” grumbled Jasper, feeling in his pockets.

  Lady Nelly beckoned the waiter.

  “No, let me, this time,” she said. “You like being in the wrong really, just as much as Eustace hates it. And to show you forgive me, come in our boat to the Redentore to-morrow.”

  Jasper’s eyes clouded with irritation.

  “How can I come, Nelly,” he said, “when you ask me at such short notice? I promised Laura weeks ago that I’d go with her party.”

  “Oh, how unlucky I am,” cried Lady Nelly. “But perhaps you wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Harry Morecambe is coming with his newly married wife. You don’t like honeymoon couples, do you?”

  Jasper shrugged his shoulders.

  “Does anyone? And where should I have sat—on the floor?”

  “Oh, we would have found a little niche for you,” said Lady Nelly.

  “Thank you, I shall be better off among the untitled guests in Laura’s fourth boat. But perhaps you’re not taking Eustace? You’ll make him stay behind, to write his book?”

  “I shall make him do nothing he doesn’t want to,” said Lady Nelly. “It will be a long, tiring evening, and if he prefers to write, I shan’t stand in his way.”

  At the Luna they separated, Jasper having declined the offer of a ride.

  When Eustace and Lady Nelly were in the gondola she turned to him and said, “I did my best for you, Eustace, but you’ll really have to get on with that book.”

  The words so lightly spoken took hold of Eustace’s mind and continued to reverberate. He spent the afternoon in desultory fashion on the Zattere, watching the construction of the bridge of boats. He had grown to love the long, eventful promenade with its swarms of children. The well-to-do walked sedately with their nurses, who wore clothes so bright and billowy they might have been crinolines; the others screamed and shouted, and many of them were in and out of the water all the time, climbing out on to the nondescript line of boats moored to the bank. Their thin brown bodies gleamed in the sun. On ordinary days a stream of traffic, including the largest liners, passed up and down the Canal, and the water was always broken, but to-day the bridge of boats was holding it up. Only in the middle, where the span was still incomplete, could it pass through. Eustace’s mind, which liked completeness, was worried by the gap. Far away, on the opposite shore, the cold grey front of the Redentore church, the plainest possible statement of a church, impassively received the arc of the bridge that started at its foot.

  Eustace had a special reason for wanting to be out of the house this afternoon. Lord and Lady Morecambe were arriving, they had telegraphed to say so, and Eustace envisaged with sadness the change impending in his routine. Clever as Lady Nelly was at dividing her attention without appearing to lessen it, there would now be jokes, smiles, gifts of sympathy and understanding, that were not meant for him. He would have to adapt himself. Nothing would be the same or look the same; the bridge to felicity would be broken, like the bridge
to the Redentore. She would see him, he felt, through the indifferent, perhaps hostile eyes of her other guests, and he would have to modify his vision of her to allow for these competing presences. The fortnight’s idyll was over.

  All the more necessary, then, that he should have something else to think about, some private mental sanctum to retire to; and what better could there be than the writing of his book that she had enjoined on him, the book that ‘all Venice’ believed him to be writing? But what could he write about? Picking his way through the children, Eustace reviewed the possibilities. In his life he had written a great many essays and some longer papers. The ‘Nineteenth-century Mystics’ had taken three-quarters of an hour to read. That was the limit of his knowledge of any subject: after six thousand words it petered out.

  But he was here to read, not write; and he had read quite a lot. Oh, why had Lady Nelly imposed this task on him? Merely to gratify an idle whim? He could not even be sure she meant it seriously. Perhaps she wanted to make him sound more interesting to her friends. If so, Eustace did not blame her; he was aware that he had few qualifications for being the cavalier servente of a lady of fashion. Nor could he feel resentful if she chose to make him sail under false colours, since he had none of his own. How wonderful it would be (his mind grown suddenly optimistic told him) if he could really write a book, and justify the claim she had made for him!

  ‘Didn’t you know, Eustace Cherrington wrote his masterpiece when he was staying with Lady Nelly Staveley in Venice? Who was Lady Nelly Staveley? Oh, she was an Edwardian grande dame almost forgotten now, of course, but it was in her house that Eustace Cherrington wrote——(title to be supplied later). Yes, there’s a tablet on the wall of the Palazzo Contarini Falier commemorating him, just as there is on the Vendramin, where Wagner breathed his last. How proud she must have been to sponsor such a marvellous piece of writing! Well, of course he dedicated it to her—she will go down to posterity on the fly-leaf of——’