Return I Dare Not Page 8

  “I know now that she had nothing to go on. She only knew that we’d been out late and the rest was all guesswork. But at the time I thought he must have told her. … I don’t suppose I had many wits about me that morning. She talked about her duty as a mother to get him out of this scrape; I know she meant me to think he’d told her, even if she didn’t say so. I can’t remember. I can’t remember exactly what she said. Only the nightmare horror of it. And I wasn’t sure of anything, even that he would stick to me. I knew he regarded me as a servant. And I wanted to run away. So I packed my box and marched out of the house and took a taxi to Waterloo.

  “It wasn’t till I got to the station that I realised I had no money at all. Only threepence-halfpenny. I’d never had any wages paid and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask for them. The taxi man wanted his fare. I was at my wits’ end. He was horrible and made a great fuss and shouted till quite a crowd collected. He kept shouting to the other taxi men: ‘Hi, Nobby! Look at ’er! She ain’t got no money. Took my taxi from Hampstead and now she ain’t got no money. And I carried down ’er boxes.’ You’ve no idea what it’s like to have no money at all. And it was August, you see. I couldn’t think of anyone in Town that I could borrow from. And at last a man in the crowd paid my fare and took me into the station. I was so bewildered and so anxious to get away from all those staring people that at first I was grateful. But not for long. He suggested that we should go and have a drink somewhere quiet. And then I realised that I’d been picked up. He was worse to get away from than the taxi man. I don’t know what I should have done if I hadn’t suddenly caught sight of Alec. I didn’t know him well, but he had stayed here once and I felt: any port in a storm. I flew after him and asked him to lend me a pound. And the last clear memory I have is of Alec, looking quite at sea but very courteous, fishing out a notecase.

  “After that it’s all blurred. He was very kind. He saw at once that I was in trouble, and took charge of me. I suppose he got rid of my corner boy. I don’t know. He took me home himself: at least he must have managed to disappear before I actually got home, for I don’t remember arriving with him then. But he came down a week or two later and asked me to marry him. He knew most of the story. Not about Ford, I mean, but about the Ushers. I told him on the way home, I think. I remember the shame and humiliation I felt when he looked after me so beautifully. Things that woman had said, horrible things, kept coming back to me and I felt they were true. She said I’d never starve because there would always be some man quite ready to look after me.

  “When I got home I told most of it to my mother, not everything, and she helped me to keep it from my father. But she didn’t understand, and when Alec appeared she urged me to marry him at once. She said I would be much happier married. So I did. I hadn’t really the spirits or the energy to fight about it, and Alec was very kind. I was so wretched, and felt that anything would be better than waiting and waiting to hear some word from Ford. Because he knew how to find me. I’d told him where I lived, that night, and what my real name was. But he never wrote and he never came, and I began to believe that his mother was right and that he was glad to be out of a scrape. I was ill and miserable, and marrying Alec seemed to be the only way to put an end to it, and he was so good to me, and my mother was so insistent, that I gave in.

  “But Adrian, do you know, Ford did come, and I never knew. I never knew till last summer when we happened to meet in Austria. When he got borne that night and found me gone he was in despair. And next day he rushed down to Basingstoke and eventually found his way over the downs here. He actually got as far as that little white path you can see on Ullmer Ridge, when he saw me down below, riding with some man or other who was staying here. He knew at once that it was I because of my hair. And he asked an old shepherd up there who I was, and the man told him, and pointed out Syranwood. I suppose he made out that we were great people in these parts. Anyhow, it frightened Ford. He didn’t know what to make of it. He thought I’d been playing with him. And he turned round in a rage and walked back to Basingstoke. But if he hadn’t, if he’d come down and claimed me, I think I’d have gone with him, anywhere. We were born for each other, and it’s been fate, nothing but fate, that has separated us. He has never looked at a woman since, and I … I have never known a moment’s happiness.”

  This was quite true and Adrian admitted it. Unhappiness hung about her perpetually. All the people who loved her were terribly sorry for her. And she was ready to share this unhappiness with Ford, a consciousness of dividing fate, a rubicon never quite crossed.

  “I’ve told him that he has all of me that matters already,” she said. “But I can’t do what he wants. I can’t go off with him and leave Alec. Even for his own sake I can’t. It would be madness … at this stage in his career … his work ought to come first. If I love him I must insist on that!”

  “Poor Ford,” murmured Adrian.

  Laura turned her sad, wild eyes on him, full of a mute reproof. He should have said:

  “Poor Laura.”

  He hastened to say it. Perhaps it was Poor Laura, after all. Because Ford, at least, had culex pseudopictus. If her story was true, and he believed a good deal of it, she was in the right when she called it a sad one. Ten years had taken more from her than they had from Ford. She might talk of her vows to Alec, and of Ford’s career, but she was thinking of the change in herself.

  “You don’t love him now as you did then, Laura, whatever you may say.”

  “I can’t. But does anyone? Doesn’t the best of us … get lost, somehow, very soon?”

  Adrian agreed hastily, taking refuge in a melancholy generalisation. In his rôle of chorus as well as confidant he felt that some reference to the common lot was needed to round off this very sad story, and he quoted, sombrely:

  “There’s not a joy the world can give, like that it takes away.”

  “How true!” thought Laura.

  And how good was Adrian! How unfailing in his sympathy, and how apt to clothe the harsh contour of the passions with a soothing mantle of sentiment. He could quote beautifully.

  “O could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,

  Or weep as I could once have wept o’er many a vanished scene——

  As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,

  So midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.”

  “Dear, dear Adrian.”

  8. The Lake.

  Nothing like Poetry, thought Adrian, and then remembered unexpectedly that Paul Wrench was lying in a German mortuary, with his bleak, thin nose sticking up in the air.

  “Did you know Paul Wrench is dead?” he asked.

  Laura sat up in dismay.

  “It’s not true!”

  She felt the loss to literature almost as keenly as he did. And they began to disinter episodes in that queer, unornamental life with a comfortable sense that it was over. But this was no subject to keep them sitting long in the yew parlour and soon they were pacing slowly back towards the house. Laura suggested that there was time for a bathe before dinner. But Adrian shook his head. He cut a lean figure in a bathing suit and he wanted to avoid, as long as possible, an encounter with Solange. So he set off towards the library, intending to write an article, a few first impressions of Paul Wrench while the subject was still fresh in his mind. But, on opening the library door, he heard a racket within which, for a moment, kept him standing on the threshold. The greater part of the room was hidden by a large leather screen and behind it he heard Corny say:

  “Were every drop of blood that runs in thy adultrous veins a life, this sword (dost see?) should in one blow confound them all. Harlot! Rare, notable harlot, that with thy brazen face …”

  It had crossed Adrian’s mind that he might be intruding upon another tête-à-tête, but the reference to the sword reassured him. Peeping round the screen he saw Aggie, in cloth of gold, standing with joined hands. Hugo, pale green with fatigue, sat on a table and clutched a prompt
copy. Adrian had never seen that drained green shade on any face but once, when he had been taken on a yacht to the tropics and one of the cooks, crazy with the heat, had jumped overboard.

  “Why do you wear a halo?” he asked Aggie. “Surely that’s not necessary for Anabella.”

  Aggie explained. The proper head-dress had not come yet and she was obliged to wear this pearl cap which had done duty in the last tableau where she had posed as an angel. Her maid, not able to understand that Aggie ever acted anything more terrestrial, had stupidly failed to remove the halo. However, it was very becoming. She turned to Hugo for her cue.

  “The man, the more than man …” prompted Hugo.

  “The man, the more than man that got this spwightly boy … you ought to wush at me with a dagger, Corny.”

  Adrian, after another glance at Hugo, did a kind thing. He broke up the rehearsal, insisting that Aggie ought really at this point to go up and practise all her labials in front of a glass. He told her straight out that she mooed rather over them.

  “Say ‘the man, the more the man’ ten times over,” he urged, “and then you’ll see what I mean.”

  Aggie looked a little peevish, but Adrian was known to be a good critic and she was known to take her work seriously, so off she went. And Hugo was at last free to go for a swim and cool his aching head.

  Solange and Marianne had been bathing ever since tea and Ford very soon joined them. But they took little notice of one another. For a time the lake had been given up to sheer athletics. Ford, powerful and plebeian, had done trick diving by himself at one end of the pool. The girls rode on a rubber horse, played with some diving discs and did good work collecting the rose leaves which showered down upon the water and grew sodden. There was no shouting, splashing, or noisy laughter. Then, as the shadows lengthened, Philomena made her appearance and the gathering became more social. Seeing no sign of Hugo she decided not to go in at once. Her green silk tunic would stand the water, but it did not look its best when it was wet and the freshness of the colouring was lost. So she sat on the grass under the rose bushes and enjoyed the cooling air. Hugo would come sooner or later and Aggie was doing herself no good by being so autocratic. He had given Philomena a look, when he was dragged away, which was entirely reassuring. And now, all the time that he was reading ’Tis Pity indoors (rehearsals were no treat to him) he would be longing for the lake and more congenial company.

  She had devised a most original bathing cap, so transparent as to make her hair into a gold frame, and confined by a little wreath of flowers. But she took it off as she lay on the grass, enjoying the feel of the soft breeze on her skin and blowing through her hair. She was not in a hurry. She was not impatient. She was consciously happy. The smell of mown grass was pleasant, and the rose petals drifted down on to her hair.

  One end of the pool was in shadow now, but beams of dappled light fell on the diving scaffold. Over and over again did those two indefatigable girls climb up and stand there, poised solemnly for a moment with their arms above their heads. Then they would skim downward, straight into the water with hardly a splash, like a couple of fishes. Their thick shrimp-coloured caps hid their hair completely and their faces were like nuns’ faces, pink and null. In their bodies, as they lifted their arms, there were youth and vigour but little grace. Philomena envied them nothing. She was glad not to be a girl any more. Could anything, she asked herself as she watched them, be more unknowing than the way they moved? Marianne was going to be a magnificent creature, a second Laura, but at present she just seemed to be too large for herself. And Solange was as straight and spare as a boy. No. There were no points about being a girl. One had it all to go through. One married the wrong man too young, and one lost virginity, not, as poets believe, in the twinkling of an eye, but gradually like something pounded up in a mill. Nor was it enjoyable, though one tried to think so at the time. One had a lot to go through before enjoyment became a possibility.

  And she looked with grave satisfaction at the slim soundness of her own legs. They were perfect, from waist to ankle, long, smooth and white, almost more beautiful than her arms. She had avoided that sharp bisecting line at the mid-thigh which is the blemish of so many bathing dresses. Her tunic hung loose in rounded petals to the knee, over a brief maillot, so that when she moved or swam, there was always the gleam of white flesh through silk. The sense of her own beauty possessed and exalted her so that she was lifted clear out of yesterday’s indecision. She was sure of Hugo and she was sure of herself. No anxieties or scruples beset her, for she knew that she could get anything she wanted so long as she preserved this sense of rightness and balance. She could do as she pleased, nor was there any need to wonder what was going to happen. Nothing would happen unless she willed it.

  “But it shall,” she thought, with a faint, reckless tremor of anticipation. “I’m going to go on with it.”

  Lady Geraldine came down to the lake. It was always rather a shock to see her there, for at sixty-eight she looked her age. She came padding over the grass in a queer wrap made out of some oriental shawl, bright red but a little moth-eaten and smelling of camphor. Her gnarled old feet were thrust into leather sabots, and on her head she wore a battered rush hat.

  “Such a noise in the library,” she complained as she sat down on the grass beside Philomena. “I heard it as I came past the window. Poor Aggie is saying a piece all about strumpets …”

  Nobody else in the world ever called Aggie poor. But Geraldine had always done so, and, like most of her vagaries, it might possibly have been a piece of malice. To her it was as if no years had passed since poor Aggie was a lumpish girl of fourteen whose nose always bled in church.

  Philomena peered into the ravaged beauty of that face and wondered, not for the first time, what was really at the back of Geraldine’s mind. She was as mysterious as the Queen of Sheba. There was no plumbing the depths of her inward emancipation. For complete submission to Otho in every detail of existence had taught her how to hide herself, and behind a wall of disconcerting vagueness she led a lawless and independent life. Nobody had ever penetrated into that uncomplicated country, and her lovers knew even less of her than Otho did. If there had ever been any lovers. Philomena would have liked to be sure. But nobody was sure. That tranquil simplicity had blinded everyone.

  Now she gave a shock to Ford by taking off her wrapper and standing up on the bank in a salmon-pink chemise made of very cheap artificial silk and trimmed with cotton lace. Philomena remembered once more that if you are rich enough you can do and wear anything you like. And Ford, who saw that even this garment was shortly to be removed, dived quickly under water. But his panic was premature, for beneath her chemise she wore a faded black bathing dress with an anchor embroidered on the front of it. Taking off her rings she hung them on a twig of a rose bush, pulled an oilskin cap over her tousled white hair, and jumped into the pool. She was still a fine swimmer though she had given up diving.

  Up to the far end, by the diving board, she went, and then back again, the oilskin cap travelling swiftly and silently over the water. And behind her, swimming in a row, came the pink heads of Solange and Marianne and Ford with his hair plastered down over his eyes, for they had all been seized with an impulse to do a couple of lengths before coming out.

  Philomena was beginning to feel chilly. The sun was nearly off the pool and to be looking blue would spoil everything. But she was relieved to see Gibbie come bounding from the house. Evidently the rehearsal was over and Hugo would soon be on his way. Gibbie burst into the pool with a jocular splash and began to be funny with the rubber horse. The quiet was over.

  “Are you going out or coming in?” he called to Philomena on the bank.

  “We’re all going out,” replied Lady Geraldine, as she climbed on to the bank. “It’s nearly dinner time. Beata!”

  Marianne, who was used to being called after any of her aunts, came swimming to the bank edge.

  “Have I arranged the table?”

  “No, gra
ndmamma. I think Laura’s doing it.”

  “Aren’t we a man short?”

  “No, we’re even numbers unless Mr. Bechstrader comes. I think I remember how Laura’s done it: you, Mr. Pott, Aggie, Mr. Cooke, Solange, Uncle Alec, Mrs. Grey, Sir Adrian, me, Mr. Grey, Laura and Mr. Usher.”

  “Humph.”

  Geraldine looked at Ford’s head as it sped away down the lake again.

  “Have I got to have them both? Is there anybody besides Laura who knows anything about mosquitoes?”

  “Solange does. She knows a lot about them.”

  “Ho, does she? Well, why not … oh, I suppose we’d better leave it to Laura.”

  Philomena bit her lip angrily. Adrian and Alec! Why should she have to sit between Adrian and Alec? And Aggie, of course, was to get Hugo. She glanced across the lawn impatiently to see if he was coming, for she had suddenly grown tired of waiting for him. This hour, which was to be her own, was flying past; it was being wasted. All her contented assurance fell away from her as she thought of Adrian and Alec, and the cruel shortness of life. At this rate the week-end would soon be over and she would go back to London having missed her chance. If anything was to happen she must make it happen immediately.

  As soon as he appeared on the other side of the lawn she climbed to the highest dive, a board in a pollarded willow, where she could stand with green leaves behind her. And she stayed there just long enough before she dived, so that he could see her and wish that he had come out sooner. Her white legs flashed under the silky water and her yellow head with its flowery cap came up. Hugo was standing staring on the bank.

  “Philomena?”

  He leapt into the water beside her and the girls immediately retreated from the bath as though it had been contaminated. Seizing their cloaks they made for the house, followed by Ford. Lady Geraldine, sitting on the grass, had gone into one of her long Sibylline trances, so that Hugo and Philomena had the pool to themselves, undisturbed by Gibbie who plunged merrily about with his horse in one corner.