Return I Dare Not Page 11

  Genially and in soaring spirits she turned to poor Sir Alec and wrung out of his work-parched brain a few sparse drops of conversation. He could talk about dry fly-fishing and the Bar, but she could not sustain many exchanges on the first topic and the fear of being a bore kept him rather short upon the second. Twenty years before, as a youngish man, he had greatly desired to keep up interests outside his work, and certain relics of that odd ambition had become habits. He still took little books of poetry about in his pocket, in the hope that he might some day find the time and energy to read them. And he still tried not to tell legal stories. So they talked about Jane Austen and Philomena, suppressing a yawn, thought, as she always thought, what a pearl Alec would have been if he was not so overworked and if he had married somebody nicer. A good wife would have made him so happy, and she had nothing but condemnation for Laura, who would not keep accounts, who took a pride in being unpunctual and who refused to have children. So she cooed away to him, and completely turned her back on the sulky Adrian who had once more displayed his snobbishness. And she actually succeeded in making Alec laugh three times before the arrival of asparagus silenced them.

  By a strange tradition this fastidious company laid down their forks and seized the limp and oily objects in their fingers, dangling them high in the air. It was not a pretty sight: but nobody thought this except a small pageboy, recently imported from an orphanage, who was assisting at this dinner as a first step on the road to footmanhood. Having never seen asparagus eaten before, this innocent was overcome with giggles and had to leave the dining-room. Whereat it was decided that he would never do in house service, so he was apprenticed to a garage. And did very well. So that this asparagus course was the turning point in his career.

  Corny took advantage of the silence to be repeating some poetry. In his churchy voice he could be heard reciting those lines which he had already recollected in the train, the lines which Paul Wrench had written in his album. Everybody began at once to say things about Paul Wrench. But Adrian did not say his bit, because Philomena had already heard it and Marianne, on his other side, was too young to know how good it was. He thought of those “First Impressions of Paul Wrench” which he had begun to write in the library before dinner, and which would be printed in his Weekly next Wednesday. And he thought of all the grave lamenting which he would be called upon to do in the next ten days. And suddenly he asked himself if he really cared a bit.

  Literature had lost one of the brightest buds in its coronal. He, as a ‘louse in the locks of literature’ (for so, in a spasm of disgust, did he term himself), ought to be greatly concerned. But did lice mind what happened to buds? And did he feel any genuine sense of bereavement? He did not. The loss of one of his own front teeth would have distressed him infinitely more. He cared so very little for literature, when it came to the point. It was all humbug. Everything in his life was humbug, just as everything in Paul Wrench’s harsh, unpretending life had been as real as a gravel beach to bare feet (a good simile and one which he must use in his impressions).

  “For what have I lived?” he wondered, as he dangled the asparagus over his head.

  To write, twenty years ago, a life of Voltaire which had become a minor classic.

  To eat asparagus in the houses of the rich.

  No. That was not being fair to himself. He could have done without the asparagus. He was not a sensual man, and he valued his company above his dinner. The major portion of his honesty had not been sacrificed for a mess of pottage. He had been betrayed by a far more insidious temptation, by the attempt to ignore every element in life which did not fit in with his ideal of freedom and urbanity. Being a poor man, he had made shift to pretend that he was not, because the truth of poverty interfered with this mirage of an exquisite existence. And this, in itself was not ignoble, had he not been reduced to suggesting that gilt was gold. If these stately homes, this life of the leisured, had been all that he pretended, then any sacrifice might have been worth while. But they were not. And in his heart he knew that the great patron whose influence had first moulded him to this ideal was a paltry liar, a romancier de concierge in disguise. Such a world had never existed outside a novelist’s imagination. The surface might be produced. At Syranwood the surface was almost flawless. The mechanism, the apparatus, the dinner table, the flowers, the women’s fair, long-chinned faces, the bloom of the peaches in the Wedgwood baskets, it was all exquisite. And beneath the surface it was all your elbow: nothing exquisite about Aggie, or Corny, or Laura, or the parrot-house noises they were making, no originality, no freedom, and no beauty beyond that which money can secure. Yet for them, and for their like, he, who had once known value when he met it, had sacrificed his muse. He had taken Hugo’s plays seriously, because they were in the fashion, he was jealous of Corny, he had quoted Byron to Laura and read Donne to Aggie as though childbirth must necessarily hurt her more than other people.

  But he had remained a gentleman. Nobody could deny that. He was perhaps the only really well-bred critic of any standing. A gentle suavity distinguished him amid the hysterical squeals, the pompous grunts of his colleagues. In these days of tabloid culture he might still call himself something of a scholar. He had a sense of proportion, a scale of reference, and he had done a little towards keeping up the old standards. In thus taking stock of himself he ought not to be unfair or to miss out what might remain to his credit. He could condemn without being personally offensive. How many of his contemporaries could do that? And he could praise without exaggeration. Or very nearly, for he still wished that he had not once been betrayed into comparing Hugo with Congreve. And he had stood out against the dangers of intellectual arrogance; his tastes were catholic and humane and he gave a fair hearing to everybody. He had never been ashamed to confess that the second-rate could often charm and entertain him. In fact he had created the cachet which now surrounded the word ‘competence.’ He read detective novels, he went to murder plays and made no bones about enjoying them.

  And to struggling writers of merit he had given many a helping hand. He published them in his Weekly. He got the Prize Committees upon which he sat to give them awards. He used his influence to get them Civil List pensions. He was notoriously kind to promising young men, talking to them delightfully and without condescension, and giving them reviewing to do. His benevolence had even included an offer of friendship to Paul Wrench at a time when Wrench’s friends were never very easy. Nobody would ever know how much he had tried to do for that unfortunate creature. A certain successful stock breeder from Darlington had once consulted him in a scheme for patronising the arts. On being told that Wrench was a good poet on the point of starvation this man was greatly impressed. He had offered a pension of £250 for three years, on the condition that Wrench should produce at least two volumes of poetry during that period, a reasonable stipulation and calculated to stimulate industry.

  Of the subsequent scene Adrian could not, even now, think without a flush of vexation. He had been prepared for a certain amount of surliness, but Wrench’s language had passed all bounds. And now the foolish fellow was dead. He had never been anyone’s enemy but his own, and he had achieved fame in spite of himself. East Prussia was the devil of a way off. If it had been nearer there might have been quite an impressive gathering at the funeral. But nobody would go as far as that.

  “Except me,” decided Adrian surprisingly.

  He found that his mind was made up. He was going. He wished to be there. And that was his answer to these furies which had been scourging him. Even if he was too late for the ceremony he could at least stand for an hour in meditation beside the poet’s grave, in a windswept cemetery on the shores of the Baltic. Among them all he would be the only one to whom Paul Wrench meant as much as that. Nor would he mention the expedition to any one else. It should be made for his own satisfaction, to prove to the Furies how much more the loss of a poet meant to him than a gap in his front teeth. If he, a poor and busy man, could afford this journey, there must surely rem
ain some grain of idealism in his spiritual composition. Unkind friends, jealous rivals, might call him an old snob, a week-end essayist, but the tribunal in his own heart must acquit him.

  And afterwards it might gradually leak out.

  “Did you know Adrian actually went to Wrench’s funeral?”

  “Fancy his caring as much as that!”

  Posterity might couple the name of Upward with that of Wrench’s grave.

  Reassured, he saw the women prepare to leave the table. He was quite himself again, which was timely, for his reputation as a talker had grown on port.

  11. Nightstocks.

  The drawing-room was rich with a bloomy dusk and Laura turned on one or two lights. All the night whispers and smells drifted in through the windows on the wings of vagrant moths. Unconsciously the women dropped their voices to a lower key, tuning themselves to the twilight as they fluttered about the dim room, powdering their noses and discussing Hugo. Their soft, murmuring laughter was like the cooing of doves.

  “I’ve always been so fond of him …”

  “Such a pity …”

  “A creole, isn’t she?”

  “But darling, aren’t creoles black?”

  “Do you know I’ve never seen her.”

  “Aggie! It’s not true. You couldn’t have helped …”

  “Really too well dressed, in that spit-and-polish American way. I expect she always wears afternoon dresses in the afternoon.”

  “… and invariably in the weekly papers …”

  “Somebody ought to disentangle him. He’s much too nice …”

  “And the money he must be making …”

  “Aggie! We think it’s your mission.”

  “Don’t you think that Aggie ought …”

  Nobody asked what the girls thought, for Hugo, though not much their senior, was no affair of theirs. So they handed the cigarettes in silence and slipped off as soon as they could, through the long windows on to the terrace behind the house.

  The moon was rising and there was only a little fleck of pale sky left in the west, to show where the sun had been. The girls ran down the garden paths, between the clipped box bushes, and paused by the fountain pool. In the wan light there was no difference between Marianne’s pink chiffon and the yellow she had lent to Solange. They were two flitting wraiths and their low-pitched voices hardly broke the quiet of the summer night. Only one thing in the garden looked whiter than they did, and that was the long bed of lilies by the south wall.

  “Do you like lilies?” asked Solange, pausing to sniff.

  “No,” snapped Marianne.

  “I thought you didn’t. Why?”

  “They’re like Aggie—too good to be true. You think: how wonderful! And then the smell makes you sick. And you see there’s a brown dead leaf hanging down somewhere on their stalks.”

  Solange laughed. She had fewer reasons for disliking Aggie.

  They went down the path, past the lilies to a place where peach trees sprawled against the brick and a great, untidy bed of night stocks sent out an aromatic blast. The struggling, insignificant flowers stood out like a faded Milky Way of small stars. Even at night, in their hour of glory, they were nothing to look at. But their scent was more than a scent. It was a world. It filled the soul with a transport of hope and melancholy. Solange and Marianne stood in silence, sniffing vigorously.

  “If lilies are like Aggie,” said Solange, “then night stocks are like you.”

  “Euphemei.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Greek.”

  “I didn’t know you knew Greek.”

  “I don’t really. Miss Fosdyke used to teach me some, but we never got further than things like: ‘Oh that I might be buzzed about by bees’ and ‘the hoplites escaped their own notice rushing about in the market place.’ But I learnt Euphemei from my Uncle Julian. It’s a polite way of saying ‘Shut up’.”

  “How can anyone escape their own notice?”

  “The Greeks could apparently.”

  Solange meditated for a moment and then said:

  “It would be a lovely thing to do. I suppose you’d say that animals did. But you mustn’t be cross if I say that night stocks are like you. They are. Horrid people don’t know about them, and they’re just as good if you stand near them or go half a mile off. Whereas a lily, especially a Madonna lily …”

  “I’d rather be a dead nettle than a Madonna lily.”

  “Oh? Do you think dead nettles are bad flowers?”

  “Harmless. But uninteresting. Listen! There’s a nightingale. No, it can’t be! It’s too late.”

  Far away, in some elm trees across the hay fields, they could hear four long, clear whistles. But the music was so faint that a burst of laughter from the house soon smothered it. Aggie’s voice, raised in glee, came through the drawing-room window.

  “He bit her? Not Sally?”

  “No, no! Not Sally. Netta.”

  “Poor Sally! How she would have enjoyed …”

  “It’s not true!”

  “But Philomena! Where?”

  “Oh, only on the shoulder. And his aide-de-camp …”

  The voices dropped and Marianne said:

  “They’re having fun now we’ve gone.”

  Solange said:

  “Funny to think of Aggie disentangling anyone!”

  Marianne would have thought it funny if she had not still been so unhappy. She was listening for the sound of the men’s voices coming into the drawing-room, and a few minutes later, in a sudden significant lull of the women’s laughter, she heard Adrian saying something about ‘Charles’ Wain over the new chimney.’ Breaking suddenly away from her friend she flew lightly up the path and on to the terrace outside the drawing-room window. Inside she could see Hugo, talking to her grandmother. He was still there. And she darted away again, her pale skirts brushing the glass as if she had been a bird blown past the window.

  “What was it? What did you run away for?” demanded Solange, as she returned.

  “To see if Aggie has begun.”

  “Has she?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I wonder …” began Solange.

  “What?”

  “You’ll be offended.”

  “I expect so. But that doesn’t generally stop you.”

  “I wonder you don’t disentangle him yourself.”

  “How …?”

  “Oh, anybody could do it. He’s as vain as a peacock. Just let him see that you haven’t fallen at his feet.”

  “I meant what for? Why should I?”

  Voices echoed under the arch of night. They were all coming out on to the terrace and the garden was full of pale, fluttering skirts. The two girls sought safety in the pleached alley, where they were hidden.

  “We’re safe here,” said Marianne. “They’ll all go and look at the lilies. They’re Aggie’s favourite flower. She’ll tell him to come and smell them with her.”

  “Hope he gets his nose all yellow,” muttered Solange viciously.

  “He’ll remember not to, I expect. He never escapes his own notice.”

  “Oh Marianne, you can’t! You really can’t …” she could not get her tongue round the indecent word. “You can’t …”

  “I do.”

  “Then for heaven’s sake why don’t you lift a finger to get him?”

  “What good would that do?”

  “You’d be better than Aggie. At least you can disentangle him from that.”

  Now Lady Geraldine was calling to them. She wanted a note taken over to the rectory inviting the parson and his wife to dinner on Sunday. Voices echoed the summons from under the apple boughs, and between the box bushes.

  “Ssh! Don’t answer,” whispered Marianne. “Don’t you see, it isn’t Aggie, or that Creole person, or anybody like that that he needs to be disentangled from. It’s much worse …”

  “Mary … Anne! Solange! Mary … Anne!”

  “It’s himself. You see? Himself. At least, not th
at, but the person he has to pretend to be. He doesn’t want … he doesn’t like…. Oh look! Let’s run!”

  One end of the pleached alley was darkened by the figure of Corny, who had been sent to look for them. They fled down the leafy tunnel only to fall into the arms of Hugo who was coming in at the other end. Solange swerved to avoid him, but Marianne was caught, picked up, carried out into the moonlight, and set on her feet as if she had been a large doll. She did not resist. But when he released her she shook out her skirts and waited haughtily for an explanation.

  “Grandma wants you,” said Hugo.

  He was speaking, of course, in inverted commas, and she ought to have appreciated the audacious fantasy of it. Heaven help her if she supposed that he naturally talked like that, and saw no difference between Lady Geraldine and the grandmother of some brood at Gunnersbury. It was a bromide, so obvious that nobody ought to have been able to mistake it.

  Marianne thanked him stiffly and walked away.

  “The modern girl,” mused Hugo, looking after her, “has no sense of humour. No sense of humour at all. That’s another thing to remember about her. She is, as certain of the Americans say, dumb. She’s a dumb-bell.”

  But was she?

  “Tell me,” he said to the first fluttering frock that he met under the apple boughs, “tell me more about the modern girl.”