Return I Dare Not Page 26

  “Mathilde must look after her,” she thought. “I can’t stop her from meeting these queer people here, with Laura coming so often. This is no place for her till she’s married.”

  And she nodded sagely at Hugo who was going back to the place where he came from.

  “I think,” said Marianne reappearing, “that Hugo ought to go up and change his clothes. He has to walk to Ullmer Halt.”

  “Walk?” echoed Lady Geraldine. “But surely, didn’t I order a car for him yesterday? You want to go to that funeral, don’t you? Surely we arranged …”

  “Oh no,” cried Hugo and Marianne together, “that was Adrian.”

  “Oh yes, I remember. But can’t you go with him?”

  Hugo looked at Marianne. He did not much fancy the idea of walking to Ullmer Halt and he waited for her to say that he might drive with Adrian. But she buried her face in her coffee cup and said nothing.

  “What about it?” he ventured at last.

  “It depends where you’re going,” she said.

  Which meant that she did not trust him alone with Adrian. But she was quite wrong. He made a face at her, behind Lady Geraldine’s back, as he said:

  “All right. I’ll walk. If you’ll see that my things are sent back to the flat.”

  “Yes,” said Marianne. “I’ll see that’s done.”

  “Then I think we’ll say good-bye,” said Lady Geraldine, putting down her cup. “You must want to be going. We’ve been very glad to see you here. Marianne, come with me. I want you.”

  “What?” exclaimed Hugo, blankly. “What?”

  He had not thought that she would be whisked away from him like this. He had supposed somehow that she would at least come with him to Ullmer Halt. They had settled nothing beyond Marianne’s vague promise about marrying him some time. There was something which he ought to have asked her. But perhaps he needn’t as she had promised to marry him. Still he wanted to ask her and it was impossible in front of her grandmother.

  “I say!” he cried, pursuing them into the passage. “I say … Marianne! I haven’t said good-bye!”

  He seized her hand and tried to pull her back into the larder, but Lady Geraldine kept a firm hold upon her other arm so that he could not pull one without pulling both.

  “No, no,” said Lady Geraldine. “You’ve had plenty of time to say good-bye in, and Fletcher will be coming.”

  Marianne laughed at both of them and told them not to quarrel.

  “And don’t pull me in half between you. It’s not necessary. I’m not going to be bullied by either of you. I’m going upstairs now. If Hugo has anything more he wants to say, I think it will keep. And if there’s anything more that grandmamma doesn’t want me to say I think that’ll keep too.”

  She spoke so firmly that they both released her. And as Fletcher poked a tortoise-like head out of his door she ran off down the passage. Hugo looked after her and said to Lady Geraldine:

  “I think we must call it a draw.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Lady Geraldine. “You don’t think anything of the sort. You think it’s mate in one move. Well …” she gathered her shawls about her. “You may be right. If you are, you’ll be an exceedingly fortunate young man. Good-bye, and mind you catch that train.”

  She pattered off upstairs to her own room and immediately sat down to write to Mathilde. I am worried about Marianne, she wrote, and then she wondered if she really was worried about Marianne. She had been worried yesterday, foreseeing all the pains and perils of a first love, knowing, fearing, yet powerless to defend. She might send the child away to Rome, but she could never teach her to ride her own fate. Ride, or be ridden, that issue could only be determined by Marianne herself. It had been the same with each of her daughters in turn and not one of them had ever taken her so completely by surprise. Experienced old horsewoman that she was, she had never seen such a magnificent leap into the saddle as Marianne had taken that morning. Her darling Marianne, her last, and best beloved: The child of her age, and the soul of her youth. No, she was not, ever again, going to be worried about Marianne. She crossed out the sentence and wrote:

  Marianne has fallen in love. Nobody much. One of those young men who come down here to meet Laura and Aggie. But if you don’t want her to marry him you must set to work at once. She ought to see people, and as I can’t take her about I think she had better come to you. Put him out of her head if you can: she’s perfectly reasonable. It’s nobody’s fault but yours, Mathilde, for leaving her here so long. So if you have anyone up your sleeve you’d better waste no time. Will you come home to fetch her, or shall I send her out?

  She chuckled, as she blotted the page, for she knew quite well whom Mathilde had got up her sleeve and she thought him very undeserving. Hugo Pott might be nobody much, but at least he would serve as a spoke in Mathilde’s wheel.

  Twenty minutes later, spying from her window, she saw him go down the garden. The grey light was gone and the heavens were rosy and warm. Chawton Beacon, caught by the unrisen sun, turned yellow above the violet shadows of the valley. A light wind ruffled the leaves and the small birds, waking all together, sang from every bush. Hugo went quickly across the terrace and disappeared into the pleached alley.

  “Gone back to his mosquitoes,” she thought, with extreme satisfaction.

  Long might he stay there!

  28. I Have No Name.

  Hugo had no intention of walking to Ullmer Halt. He did not know the way for one thing, and his heel hurt him. Nor did he believe that Marianne would require anything so unnecessarily dramatic: it would be almost as bad as the knapsack, the open road and all those horrors. The fact that he was going should be enough for both of them, and the means of transport might safely be left to the suggestions of common sense. So he went to the village and hired the Ullmer taxi as soon as its sleepy owner could be dragged out of bed.

  It was nearly seven o’clock before he finally went rattling up the hills over the downs in the very oldest Ford that he had ever seen, and he might just as well have gone to Basingstoke and enjoyed the larger choice of trains to be had there. But he did not think of that, and was in no hurry, anyhow. It would be possible to get from Ullmer Halt to Torquay in the course of time and that was all he cared about. The taxi took him over the downs and over the edge beyond where the grassy hillsides fell away to the plain again.

  “You want the Up train?” asked his driver, as they began to rattle downhill again.

  “No,” said Hugo. “No. The Down train.”

  “Then you won’t catch it. Not the Down train you won’t. That’s the Down train.”

  And he pointed to a little snake of smoke which crept along amid the chequered fields and woods below them. It seemed to be crawling across country at the rate of one inch an hour.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “And you’ll have to wait an hour for the next. There aren’t many trains stop at Ullmer Halt. You’d better have gone to Basingstoke, if it was a Down train you wanted.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Hugo.

  They went on rattling down the hill. In the fields the haymakers were already creaking out with their carts. Hugo was beginning to feel quite hungry again already, in spite of the bread and cheese and almonds and raisins and sugar that he had eaten. He had that slight dizziness and headache which is the lot of people who take unaccustomed exercise in the early morning. His mind worked slowly. He was in no hurry to make plans for the future, unless they were forced upon him. His freedom was too large for him. He refrained from thinking about it, but sat dozing in the warm sunlight on the tiny platform of Ullmer Halt more conscious of his heel than anything else.

  A solitary porter pottered in and out of a signal box or rolled a milk can from one part of the station to another. Presently he went off to breakfast. Hugo wondered what he would have to eat. An egg perhaps; for there were hens clucking and scratching about in a paddock behind the station and a woman who might have been the porter’s wife came out of a cottage with a tin p
an of food for them. She might sell eggs, but he could not eat them raw. He had better wait for his breakfast till he got to the junction. A train of some sort would come in time, though at present the bright line of metal running away through the fields looked as if it might be deserted for the rest of the day.

  He put all his pennies into a slot machine and got some slabs of mouldy chocolate which he was not hungry enough to eat, and when a gong clanged loudly in the signal box he stared hopefully along the line. But nobody else took any notice of it at all. The hens clucked drowsily and a bumble bee buzzed up and down the hollyhocks. Hugo tried lying down upon the station seat, but it was too narrow and he rolled off it. The booking office had no seat in it at all, only a weighing machine and a notice about sheep scab. So he began to walk up and down the platform until he heard the hopeful sound of a car driving up. If other people were coming there must be some train soon.

  There was a trample of boots in the booking office and a chauffeur appeared with several suitcases. The man looked familiar somehow. He stacked them up and returned without noticing Hugo. And then Gibbie, with a face of thunder, came striding out on to the platform. He did not notice Hugo either, but went straight to the very end of the station as if he could summon the train by looking angrily down the line.

  There was more luggage than could ever have belonged to Gibbie, and Hugo wondered how many more of the Syranwood party were about to join him. Not Corny, he hoped. For there was nowhere to hide but the signal box. How right he had been to say that he could never get away! He was so much afraid of meeting Corny that the face of Adrian, peeping timidly out of the booking office, was a positive relief. He hailed it with a friendly grin.

  “Hullo?” said Adrian surprised.

  “But I thought you were going to Basingstoke,” said Hugo.

  Adrian explained. They had missed the train at Basingstoke and Gibbie was very unreasonably annoyed about it. Apparently they had had a most unpleasant drive. For Adrian, not knowing that he was to have a companion, had come down with a politic lateness to find Gibbie champing on the doorstep. The chauffeur had said that they could not possibly reach Basingstoke in time and had insisted upon bringing them to Ullmer Halt to catch a slow Up train with two changes. It was not at all what Adrian had intended. For Gibbie had no right to be so put out since he had given no notice, the night before, of his intention of coming too. But he behaved as if Adrian had made them late on purpose, and, by the time they got to the station, they were scarcely upon speaking terms.

  “It was entirely my fault,” said Adrian, candidly, as he drew Hugo with him to the opposite end of the platform. “But I think he might have kept his temper.”

  He assumed that Hugo was also taking the Up train, and he was so much pre-occupied with his grievance against Gibbie that he asked no questions. To him this meeting was a godsend, for it put an end to an uncomfortable situation. They would travel together and Gibbie could take his ill temper to a separate carriage. He liked Hugo, especially since their conversation the day before. To encourage young men was always his darling passion and few of them had been more open to encouragement than this one.

  “So you’re going to Paul Wrench’s funeral?” asked Hugo respectfully.

  Adrian laughed. These young people, these strenuous young people, were very endearing. Solange, he explained, would never forgive him if he did not go. But for all that, he would confess to his dear Hugo that he very much doubted if he ultimately would. He had looked up trains, but only Solange could have expected that to result in the so different activity of catching them. Solange, as was natural, at her time of life, mistook the value of … of gesture. One had made the same mistake oneself twenty, thirty, forty years ago. The vigour of middle age fell away from Adrian as he talked and he took on a look of distinguished decrepitude as though a whole headful of grey hairs had sprouted in the course of the night. Alas! Alas! One did not, relish a stormy crossing …

  “But you’ll have a very calm crossing,” Hugo pointed out. “It’s marvellous weather.”

  Adrian continued as though he had not heard … or night journeys in a third-class carriage. And when his young friends had left their forties behind them they might find, dared one say it? that the relative … the relative … Adrian sawed the air as the right word eluded him … gravity of these considerations had undergone a subtle alteration. To the hot blood of youth it might appear that one did not, to put it quite crudely in the idiom of Solange, care. But did one? He admired Paul Wrench. He considered a great poet to have been lost in Paul Wrench. But he was not going to Paul Wrench’s funeral and it was a relief to be able to say so to somebody.

  “And you, my dear Hugo, situated as you are, midway between the two of us? How do you look at it?”

  Hugo saw that he was expected either to be so extremely young that Adrian could laugh at him gently, or else to exclaim languidly:

  “I think you’re so right.”

  Habit was so strong that he hesitated for a moment before remembering that he need never again do the expected thing. For this freedom he was paying the price of sitting hungrily at Ullmer Halt with a blister on his heel and no prospect beyond Torquay. He remembered it with a gush of gratitude and relief which almost banished his headache. If Marianne thought that he could not be trusted in a car with Adrian she was making a great mistake.

  “I should be shocked if you went,” he said. “There was nothing Wrench loathed more, when he was alive, than humbug of any sort. I don’t think he’s a proper subject for it now he’s dead.”

  “Humbug?” queried Adrian fastidiously.

  He minded the sound of the word more than the implication. It jarred. It was the kind of word that Hugo, in his right mind, would never have used to a critic. Because after all, one was a critic, and a critic of some distinction, and if Hugo was going to take to writing poetry he had better not forget it. Malice one could forgive, but undistinguished abuse was quite another matter. Paul Wrench, who was often angry but never malicious, had made this mistake, but it was a pity that a promising young man should model himself on Paul Wrench.

  “Humbug?” he said, eyeing Hugo. “Dear me!”

  Hugo did not apologise. Having delivered himself of his declaration of independence he walked away and was leaning over the station railing among the hollyhocks, to watch the porter’s hens in the field. A signal clanked down some way along the line, and Gibbie was plodding back towards the booking office.

  “I do hope,” said Adrian, joining Hugo at the fence and laying a friendly hand on his arm, “I do hope you won’t forget to send me those verses we spoke of. It’s possible that I might be able to help you.”

  “Thank you,” said Hugo.

  “Not that you’ll have any difficulty in finding a publisher, of course. I don’t mean that. Even in these hard times I imagine that your success in the theatre and, if I may say it, your personal success, would ensure that. They’ll tell you that they don’t make money on it but they’ll take it. But you, I gather, in an adventure of this kind, aren’t thinking of success in the er … vulgar sense of the word, so much as recognition.”

  Hugo, whose object was to avoid recognition for the rest of his life, swung round at last.

  “Recognition?” he exclaimed. “But of what?”

  “An artist,” began Adrian …

  But his reply was lost in an outburst of self-advertisement from a hen which had just laid an egg. And Hugo would in any case have lost the thread of the argument, for the word ‘recognition’ had set some curious machinery spinning in his brain. It was as if a door had been opened somewhere, as if he were looking down some immense vista, at a little figure advancing towards him out of the future, a nameless man too small to hail him yet; moving already down the avenues of time. The thing was coming to him, but nobody else in the world would ever know that face. He smiled with an indulgent but unseeing eye at Adrian, who shouted something about Keats.

  “Chork-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chu
ck-chuck: Chork-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck …”

  “… thought the critics killed him,” persisted Adrian, “and they probably did. He knew, all poets know, that an artist can’t live without recognition. Without success … I grant you. But even Paul Wrench …”

  “Chork,-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck.”

  “… must keep in touch with the critical minds of his period. Wrench never saw that till too late in his life. And in consequence we all know how little recognition he ever got. Indeed I don’t think he’d have had any if it hadn’t been for …”

  “Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck …”

  “You and Corny,” suggested Hugo.

  Adrian, mollified, made a little deprecatory gesture. It seemed that his point had gone home, though it had not been necessary to bring Corny into it. He had been able, possibly, to enlighten his young friend as to the difference, the immense difference between recognition and success, without being too much obliged to stress the purity of the former or the vulgarity of the latter. There was no reason why Hugo, under proper guidance, should not in time achieve a chaste marriage of both.

  Far down the line a small dot appeared, framed under the foot-bridge and topped by a puff of smoke. It enlarged itself rapidly as the porter collected their suitcases. It filled up all the space under the bridge and the smoke, striking the archway, belched all round it. With a hiss and a rumble that drowned the clucking of the hens it drew into the station, while Adrian composed an illustrative epigram about names writ in water and names writ by aeroplanes across the sky.

  “Or names on visiting cards,” agreed Hugo, helping him into the carriage. “All of them means of identification. Good-bye, Adrian. Thank you for being so kind to me. Gibbie seems to be getting in further down.