Return I Dare Not Page 13

  … qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres,

  Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eaux.

  Les grands jets d’eaux sveltes….

  The other life, vast, serene, enchanted, lay all about him. He sank into it while the voice rose and fell on a last cadence:

  … Parmi les marbres …

  Into the final tinkling, tender drops of music broke Corny’s sibilant whisper.

  “This,” he hissed, “is the way one ought to spend the evening, don’t you think?”

  A kind of tremor passed down the averted backs of Solange and Marianne. But they continued to take no notice of their audience. People had a way of coming in like this to listen, of an evening, but they soon went off again.

  “Sing this,” murmured Solange, snatching up the austerest song that she could find.

  And Marianne began uncompromisingly:

  Oh Lord! How long must I

  In this dark prison lie?

  Solange did not place the chords quite right, so they did it again. Three times over did Marianne ask how long she must lie in a dark prison, and Corny began to fidget. Hugo, irritable and wide awake, sat up on his sofa. He thought that he had never heard a more annoying song. It was like a cold bath. And, as it went on, it translated his agreeable dream in harsh fact.

  Where but faint gleams of Thee salute my sight

  Like doubtful moonshine, in a cloudy night….

  “I’m going to bed,” announced Hugo.

  Corny scuffled out after him. For by this time Walter Bechstrader would have arrived and there would be drama of some sort going on downstairs.

  “But are you really going to bed?” he asked Hugo when they were outside the door.

  “Yes,” snapped Hugo. “I’m tired.”

  He strode off and Corny sent after him a glance of faintly puzzled disapproval. It was much too early for the life and soul of the party to be going to bed. Straws show which way the wind blows and Corny was a connoisseur in straws. He shook his head slightly as he set off downstairs, and foresaw himself agreeing with his friends that it was A Pity. Not at once perhaps, but before very long.

  Bechstrader had come, as a peculiar booming monologue, going forward in the drawing-room, assured Corny before he got to the bottom of the stairs. It was like the note of a benevolent and cultured gong. For Laura, discovering that he would be obliged to go back in the course of Sunday, and that the time at her disposal was short, had lost no time in introducing him to Ford. She was determined to vindicate the importance of mosquitoes.

  But she had not intended, at this stage, more than a general exchange of politeness, and controversy was beginning much too soon. The real business of the evening should have been done in the library, well after midnight, when Walter had been worked up to it. It took a little beating about the bush to mellow him, but after he had laid down the law for a couple of hours he would generally become malleable and put his hand in his pocket.

  Her plans were miscarrying. For nobody would have expected Walter to know so terribly much. The usual river of words flowed from him, all about nothing as it seemed at first. But presently, to her horror, a definite meaning emerged. And a very unpleasant meaning it was, as coming from a rich patron. For though he was very interested to meet Ford, and though he knew all about Yeshenku, it appeared that he did not believe in culex pseudopictus. Somebody had been getting at him. Some rival had put ideas into his head. For the whole trend of his monologue, and the number of authorities which he misquoted, bore witness to a recent interview with some other expert. And there were, after all, many eminent people who thought that Ford’s conclusions were moonshine.

  Laura grew angry and nervous. She looked at Ford appealingly, hoping that he would wake up and defend himself. But he said nothing. He merely puffed at the cigar which had been given to him and looked at Walter in contemptuous silence. Nobody helped her. Lady Geraldine had gone into one of her trances, while Aggie, temporarily recovered from her sulks, was amusing the company by doing her famous imitation of a monkey eating nuts, making sudden screeches which disturbed Walter as much as his undeviating flow exasperated her. Each privately thought the other ill-mannered.

  Walter, growing more benevolent as he grew more damning, told Ford with a smile that pseudopictus was not, probably, a culex at all. It was an anopheline, of a species already well known to entomologists. Whereat Ford got up and walked away. Laura’s failure became apparent to everybody in the room.

  “Now, Ford,” she exclaimed with a laugh, “the gauntlet’s been flung and you mustn’t go away. I don’t know the answer to this, or I’d take up the challenge myself.”

  “For people who know anything about the subject,” said Ford, “there is my article in the last issue of the British Medical Journal. In that I have answered, to the best of my ability, the more serious criticisms which have been levelled against my work. But I have never met anybody before who took Mr. Bechstrader’s view. It is obvious that he has not understood the arguments against me, so that I would find it very difficult to set him right.”

  “You’ve the great body of professional opinion against you,” said Bechstrader, rather angrily.

  “I know. And it takes me all my time to hold out against that. I don’t propose to bring my case before the man in the street until I’ve secured the attention of the people who matter.”

  Walter Bechstrader, who had never been called the man in the street before, gave an enormous sigh of astonishment. Like a deflated balloon he seemed to shrink and shrivel. For nobody who wanted his money had ever refused to listen to him respectfully, and in return for patronage he liked the innocent pleasure of being treated as an equal.

  “Well, well,” he said dazedly. “Well, well!”

  Laura’s smile covered a paroxysm of sick dismay. She ought to have known how it would be. The whole plan was a mistake, and she had been aware of it, the moment she saw Ford getting out of the car with Hugo and Aggie. He had looked bleak and red and anxious, and he had a air of hurried purpose. He was like somebody coming on business, a piano tuner or an undertaker, not an interesting young protégé. And he had worn a dreadful hat which had lain about in the hall ever since, to remind her of his shortcomings. She could not think why somebody did not take it away. Perhaps the servants really thought that it belonged to a piano tuner. Everybody must know that he had come for some definite purpose and he had shown them all that it was not for Walter’s money.

  As if this was not already too much, Aggie, who was in a nasty temper, declared that they were to play ‘Platitudes’ and that Ford and Laura were to go out first.

  “Oh no!” cried Laura. “Let’s send Adrian and Corny.”

  “They can go after,” said Aggie. “I’ve thought of such good ones for you and Mr. Usher.”

  “What?” asked Ford alarmed. “I can’t. Is it something highbrow?”

  “Not a bit. You go out and we choose a bromide for each of you, and then you come in and hold a conversation …”

  “I can’t hold conversations …”

  “And you have to see which can say your bromide first.”

  “Come on,” said Laura, with a black look at Aggie. “Let’s get it over.”

  They went out into the hall and she began at once to scold him.

  “You were perfectly impossible. You were very rude to him. And you came here especially to meet him.”

  “Did I?”

  “You want to go to Yeshenku again, don’t you? And you want the money to do it? Yet you won’t even be civil to the man who might give it to you. I know he was tiresome. But you can’t care terribly much for your work, if you put your personal vanity in front of it. What does it matter how you get the money as long as you get it?”

  “But Laura. I won’t get it. Your husband’s friends can hardly be expected to finance me when they know …”

  “Ssh!”

  A servant came through the baize door and they had to change the subject.

  Ford look
ed doubtfully round the hall, so different from the halls that he was used to, where the stairs hit his nose as soon as he came in at the front door. The beauty and grace of Syranwood astonished and depressed him, for he was not insensible to these things and had a correct, well-judging eye. But he had become resigned to doing without them, and was content now to divide his life between the Guthrie Institute and his mother’s house at Hampstead.

  “Is it because you don’t want to give up all this?” he asked suddenly.

  “Hush. We can’t talk here. People keep coming through.”

  Syranwood had frightened him before. When he saw it first, from the path over Ullmer Ridge, it had frightened him so much that he had run away. He had thought that she could not possibly be ready to give up ‘all this’ for him and his poverty. And for that cowardice she had since reproached him bitterly. She had said that those three weeks of hard work in his mother’s house had meant more to her than anything in her life since. She had complained of her great unhappiness. If it had not been for her reproaches, for that unspoken appeal, he would never have dared to come again. And he had not come to be made a fool of but to clear the matter up.

  “If you’ve no use for me after all,” he said, “I’ll make peace with your talkative friend. But you must say what it is that you really want, and you won’t.”

  “I want to help you.”

  “Why?”

  Corny called them back into the drawing-room before Laura could explain why. A platitude was whispered to each in turn and they advanced to their chairs. Ford exclaimed loudly:

  “I can be led but not driven!”

  Too late the rules of the game were properly explained to him. As Hugo remarked, when told of it next morning, one shouldn’t play parlour games with a wooden horse.

  So Gibbie and Adrian were sent out. They did their best manfully, but they were not funny enough to rescue the evening, and the party broke up early. Corny felt that, on the whole, he had collected no conversational fodder for the coming week. There was nothing to report save, perhaps, a certain oddness in the behaviour of Hugo. Something was amiss there. Aggie was dissatisfied, for one thing, and it was upon Aggie that the temperature of the week-end depended. Hugo had been summoned to amuse her and all his brilliance, all his success, should have been laid at her feet. But he had not quite risen to the occasion, though he had made them all laugh at dinner. Without knowing it they were reacting to the overstrain which had been, hitherto, so carefully hidden. Hugo had no business to be so tired, and if he was going to show it, he had better not have come.

  So thought Corny, as he saw them all off to bed. On principle he was the last to go, for he hated the idea of missing anything. He hovered in the hall, pouring out glasses of orangeade for the women, and watching them go upstairs. Had Hugo exerted himself they would not have been doing this before two o’clock in the morning. But soon they had all vanished save Bechstrader, whose gong was now resounding in the library as he told Adrian about literature. Corny thought that he had accounted for everybody, but in order to make sure he took a last turn round the garden.

  The night was still beautifully warm, and the moon had grown smaller as it sailed far above the trees to the empty top of the sky. The laurestinus hedge now screened a silent kitchen wing, for the last plate had been washed and the scullions had gone creaking up to their attics. A late night smell had begun to rise from the garden, a smell of earth and the flowers of other years, and the night stocks were a little less heady. Corny trotted round the box-edged paths, skirted the kitchen garden, and took a peep into the yew parlour. A fragment of white on a rose bush caught his attention. It was a piece of Honiton lace, torn out of one of Geraldine’s veils, and he smiled as he examined it. So that was where Geraldine had been in the half hour that he lost sight of her: sitting in the yew parlour, probably with Philomena.

  Round to the front of the house he went, to inspect the dim, grey expanse of lawn and the swimming pool. His glowing cigar-end bobbed and dipped round the edge of the water. When he stood still he could hear, although there was no wind, a faint rustle and whisper among the leaves, as though some life was stirring there. Everything else was immobile, static in the moonlight. And yet the earth was rushing on through space.

  He sighed.

  He hated being alone, because his unshared thoughts were all very melancholy. But he was obliged to conceal that, for a life sentence of buffoonery had been passed upon him. At school he had been popular because he was considered to be funny, and it had been so ever since. He did not know why because he never felt very funny, but people continued to laugh when he said things. Had he ever indulged in a personal extravagance, had he fallen in love or got religion, they would have taken it as a monumental joke. It hurt his feelings. Once, when taking a world cruise with Aggie and some of her friends he had dived into a shark-infested bay to rescue a drowning man, and even this act of heroism had been received with ill-suppressed mirth. The idea of Corny being eaten by a shark had convulsed the whole party behind his back. He knew it and believed that in the worst event they would hardly have been able to keep straight faces. And though they listened to him civilly when he recited poetry he had never been able to communicate the thrill which certain lines could give him. Always, when he began, did he hope to electrify his hearers, and invariably he was crushed by the limitations of his own voice. His one success had led to his marriage. Arriving at a very mixed house party in the company of Mrs. Worthington, known as the Racing Widow, a tête-à-tête in the car had been forced on him and he had at first found it difficult to sustain a sporting conversation. But a remark which she made about hounds reminded him of a certain famous passage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he quoted it. Mrs. Worthington was deeply impressed, regretted that she read so little, and asked the name of the author several times. Corny was passionately grateful to her, and a marriage ensued which was received by all his acquaintances as the crowning jest of his career.

  He came to a standstill and threw a small pebble into the lake. It fell with a plop, and the widening rings caught the moonlight as they spread across the water. In a perfect circle they spread and spread until they kissed the grass at his feet. Soon they were gone and the water was as still and dark as before. Again the thought visited him how the dark lake, and the solid downs, and the trees, the fields, the village and the sleeping graves in the churchyard were all being rushed through space at a speed so inconceivable that it seemed like immobility. His body went with them, but his soul stood still. He was not yet entirely, like the dead in Ullmer Churchyard, a part of time and space. The idea fell into his mind like the pebble into the lake, and expanding emotions spread and spread across his being. He quoted aloud:

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks and stones and trees.

  But the words when spoken did not match the magnitude of the idea. His voice had been cold and prim. It had no echo. He tried again to achieve that noble resonance which should have filled the night.

  “R-r-r-rolled r-r-r-r-round … Oh my God!”

  13. The Good Man.

  A red cigar-end, like an errant firefly, was bobbing round the far side of the lake and he made after it hopefully, only to track down Gibbie, who was scarcely worth pursuit unless it might be for information about the book trade.

  “Good-night, Gibbie!”

  Gibbie growled a civil reply and hurried off into the house. He told himself that Corny was more like a black beetle than it was possible for any man to be—dark, shiny, hollow and ubiquitous. Nobody was safe with Corny in the house. He was the sort of person who might almost be found hiding under the bed.

  Bechstrader’s gong was still booming in the library, but in the drawing-room all the lamps had been turned out. Gibbie mixed himself a drink and stood for a moment at the garden door before going up. He heard the stable clock strike one, and thought:

  “It doesn’t feel as late as this.”

  His cigar prevented him from smel
ling the earth and the ghosts of last year’s flowers, which haunted the sleeping thickets. His trouble stood round him like a stiff tent, holding off the influence of the night and all possibility of quietude. He shook himself and finished his drink. It was time to go up. Sooner or later he would have to do it and perhaps she might be asleep.

  She was not. He heard her calling as soon as he went into his dressing-room. For she had been waiting for him, lying alone in her big bed, and she wanted to re-open the whole, wretched business. But he could not face it. He had done his best for one day. Talk about it any more he could not. Any more discussion would only make him angry again. So he pretended not to hear her gentle summons.

  “Gibbie!”

  He wound up his watch and took out his studs.

  “Gibbie!”

  He sat down on the edge of his bed and began to do his accounts for the day, writing in a little note book all that he had spent, working backwards to the paper which he had bought that morning at Baker Street Station.

  Tip to Porter at Basingstoke. 1/6

  ,, ,, ,, ,, 1/–

  Railway fares …

  “Gibbie!”

  She would go on like that all night. He got up heavily and opened the door into her room.

  “What is it, Philomena?”

  “Why didn’t you come in and say good-night to me?”

  “I thought you might be asleep.”

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

  He said nothing to that, for a moment, and then, bidding her good-night, he turned back towards his room.