“You only just escaped; it was a narrow shave,” Eustace persisted, still hoping to interest his sister in her deliverance.
“What fool’s trick is this?” demanded Hilda in a far-away voice.
Discouraging as her words were, Eustace took heart; she was putting on her tragedy airs, and the worst was probably over.
“It was an eruption,” he explained, “and you were the city of Athens and you were going to be destroyed. But they sacrificed ten Vestal Virgins for you and so you were saved.”
“What a silly game!” commented Hilda, her pose on the rock relenting somewhat. “Did you learn it from Nancy?”
“Oh no,” said Eustace, “we hardly talked at all—except just at the end, to say good-bye.”
Hilda seemed relieved to hear this.
“I don’t know why you go and play with people if you don’t talk to them,” she said. “You wouldn’t if you weren’t a goose.”
“Oh, and Nancy sent you her love,” said Eustace.
“She can keep it,” said Hilda, rising from the rock, some of which, as Eustace had feared, came away with her. “You’ve been very cruel to me, Eustace,” she went on. “I don’t think you really love me.”
Hilda never made a statement of this kind until the urgency of her wrath was past. Eustace also used it, but in the heat of his.
“I do love you,” he asserted.
“You don’t love me.”
“I do.”
“You don’t—and don’t argue,” added Hilda crushingly. “How can you say you love me when you leave me to play with Nancy?”
“I went on loving you all the time I was with Nancy,” declared Eustace, almost in tears.
“Prove it!” cried Hilda.
To be nailed down to a question he couldn’t answer gave Eustace a feeling of suffocation. The elapsing seconds seemed to draw the very life out of him.
“There!” exclaimed Hilda triumphantly. “You can’t!”
For a moment it seemed to Eustace that Hilda was right: since he couldn’t prove that he loved her, it was plain he didn’t love her. He became very despondent. But Hilda’s spirits rose with her victory, and his own, more readily acted upon by example than by logic, caught the infections of hers. Side by side they walked round the pond and examined the damage. It was an artificial pond—a lake almost—lying between rocks. The intervals between the rocks were dammed up with stout banks of sand. To fill the pond they had to use borrowed water, and for this purpose they dug channels to the natural pools left by the tide at the base of the sea-wall. A network of conduits crisscrossed over the beach, all bringing their quota to the pond which grew deeper and deeper and needed ceaselessly watching. It was a morning’s work to get the pond going properly, and rarely a day passed without the retaining wall, in spite of their utmost vigilance, giving way in one place or other. If the disaster occurred in Eustace’s section, he came in for much recrimination, if in Hilda’s, she blamed herself no less vigorously, while he, as a rule, put in excuses for her which were ruthlessly and furiously set aside.
But there was no doubt that it was Hilda who kept the spirit of pond-making alive. Her fiery nature informed the whole business and made it exciting and dangerous. When anything went wrong there was a row—no clasping of hands, no appealing to Fate, no making the best of a bad job. Desultory, amateurish pond-making was practised by many of the Anchorstone children: their puny, half-hearted, untidy attempts were, in Hilda’s eyes, a disgrace to the beach. Often, so little did they understand the pond-making spirit, they would wantonly break down their own wall for the pleasure of watching the water go cascading out. And if a passer-by mischievously trod on the bank they saw their work go to ruin without a sigh. But woe betide the stranger who, by accident or design, tampered with Hilda’s rampart! Large or small, she gave him a piece of her mind; and Eustace, standing some way behind, balanced uncertainly on the edge of the conflict, would echo some of his sister’s less provocative phrases, by way of underlining. When their wall gave way it was the signal for an outburst of frenzied activity. On one never forgotten day Hilda had waded knee-deep in the water and ordered Eustace to follow. To him this voluntary immersion seemed cataclysmic, the reversal of a lifetime’s effort to keep dry. They were both punished for it when they got home.
The situation had been critical when Eustace, prospecting for further sources of supply, came upon the anemone on the rock; while he delayed, the pond burst, making a rent a yard wide and leaving a most imposing delta sketched with great ruinous curves in low relief upon the sand. The pond was empty and all the imprisoned water had made its way to the sea. Eustace secretly admired the out-rush of sand and was mentally transforming it into the Nile estuary at the moment when Hilda stuck her spade into it. Together they repaired the damage and with it the lesion in their affections; a glow of reconciliation pervaded them, increasing with each spadeful. Soon the bank was as strong as before. But you could not help seeing there had been a catastrophe, for the spick-and-span insertion proclaimed its freshness, like a patch in an old suit. And for all their assiduous dredging of the channels the new supplies came down from the pools above in the thinnest trickle, hardly covering the bottom and leaving bare a number of small stones which at high water were decently submerged. They had no function except by the order of their disappearance to measure the depth of the pond; now they stood out, emblems of failure, noticeable for the first time, like a handful of conventional remarks exchanged between old friends when the life has gone out of their relationship.
Presently Hilda, who possessed a watch, announced that it was dinner time. Collecting their spades and buckets they made their way across the sand and shingle to the concrete flight of steps which zigzagged majestically up the red sandstone cliffs for which Anchorstone was famous. Their ascent was slow because Eustace had formed a habit of counting the steps. Their number appealed to his sense of grandeur, and though they usually came to the same total, a hundred and nineteen, he tried to think he had made a mistake and that one day they would reach a hundred and twenty, an altogether more desirable figure. He had grounds for this hope because, at the foot of the stairs, six inches deep in sand, there undoubtedly existed another step. Eustace could feel it with his spade. A conscientious scruple forbade him to count it with the rest, but—who could tell?—some day a tidal wave might come and lay it bare. Hilda waited patiently while he reassured himself of its existence and—a rare concession—consented to check his figures during the climb. She even let him go back and count one of the stages a second time, and when they reached the top she forbore to comment on the fact that the ritual had had its usual outcome. Standing together by the ‘Try-Your-Grip’ machine they surveyed the sands below. There lay the pond, occupying an area of which anyone might be proud, but—horrors!—it was completely dry. It could not have overflowed of itself, for they had left it only a quarter full. The gaping hole in the retaining wall must be the work of an enemy. A small figure was walking away from the scene of demolition with an air of elaborate unconcern. “That’s Gerald Steptoe,” said Hilda. “I should like to kill him!”
“He’s a very naughty boy, he doesn’t pay any attention to Nancy,” remarked Eustace, hoping to mollify his sister.
“She’s as bad as he is! I should like to——” Hilda looked around her, at the sky above and the sea beneath.
“What would you do?” asked Eustace fearfully.
“I should tie them together and throw them off the cliff!”
Eustace tried to conceal the pain he felt.
“Oh, but Nancy sent you her love!”
“She didn’t mean it. Anyhow I don’t want to be loved by her.”
“Who would you like to be loved by?” asked Eustace.
Hilda considered. “I should like to be loved by somebody great and good.”
“Well, I love you,” said Eustace.
“Oh, that doesn’t count. You’re only a little boy. And Daddy doesn’t count, because he’s my father so he has to love me. And Minne
y doesn’t count, because she ... she hasn’t anyone else to love!”
“Barbara loves you,” said Eustace, trying to defend Hilda from her own gloomy conclusions. “Look how you make her go to sleep when nobody else can.”
“That shows how silly you are,” said Hilda. “You don’t love people because they send you to sleep. Besides, Barbara is dreadfully selfish. She’s more selfish than you were at her age.”
“Can you remember that?” asked Eustace timidly.
“Of course I can, but Minney says so too.”
“Well, Aunt Sarah?” suggested Eustace doubtfully. “She’s so good she must love us all—and specially you, because you’re like a second mother to us.”
Hilda gave one of her loud laughs.
“She won’t love you if you’re late for dinner,” she said, and started at a great pace up the chalky footpath. Eustace followed more slowly, still searching his mind for a lover who should fulfil his sister’s requirements. But he could think of no one but God or Jesus, and he didn’t like to mention their names except in church or at his prayers or during Scripture lessons. Baffled, he hurried after Hilda along the row of weather-beaten tamarisks, but he had small hope of catching up with her, and the start she had already gained would be enough to make her in time for dinner and him late. What was his surprise, then, when she stopped at the corner of Palmerston Parade (that majestic line of lodging-houses whose beetling height and stately pinnacles always moved Eustace to awe) and called him.
He came up panting. “What is it, Hilda?”
“Sh!” said Hilda loudly, and pointed to the left, along the cliffs.
But Eustace knew what he was to see before his eyes, following the inexorable line of Hilda’s arm, had taken in the group. Fortunately they had their backs to him. He could only see the long black skirt and bent head of Miss Fothergill’s companion as she pushed the bath-chair. That was something to be thankful for, anyhow.
“It’ll only take you a minute if you go now!” said Hilda.
Eustace began to wriggle.
“Oh please, Hilda, not now. Look, they’re going the other way.”
But Hilda was not to be moved. “Remember what Aunt Sarah said. She said, ‘Eustace, next time you see Miss Fothergill I want you to speak to her.’”
“But next time was last time!” cried Eustace, clutching at any straw, “and I didn’t then so I needn’t now. Anyhow I can’t now or we shall be late for dinner!”
“Aunt Sarah won’t mind when she knows why,” said Hilda, her determination stiffening under Eustace’s contumacy. “If she saw us (perhaps she can from the dining-room window) she’d say, ‘Go at once, Eustace.’”
“I can’t. I can’t,” Eustace wailed, beginning to throw himself about. “She frightens me, she’s so ugly! If you make me go, I shall be sick at dinner!”
His voice rose to a scream, and at that moment, as luck would have it, the bath-chair turned round and began to bear down on them.
“Well, you certainly can’t speak to her in that state,” said Hilda, “I should be ashamed of you. I am ashamed of you anyhow. You’re growing up a spoilt little boy. Come along, I wouldn’t let you go now even if you wanted to.”
Eustace had won his point. He moved to the other side of Hilda, so as to put her between him and the slowly advancing bath-chair, and they walked without speaking across the green. Houses surrounded it on three sides; on the fourth it was open to the sea. They opened a low wooden gate marked ‘Cambo,’ crossed a tiny square of garden and, with elaborate precautions against noise, deposited their spades and buckets in the porch. The smell of food, so strong that it must already have left the kitchen, smote them as they opened the door. “I won’t say anything about Miss Fothergill this time,” whispered Hilda.
3. THE GEOGRAPHY LESSON
THE DAYS passed quickly: August would soon be here. Hilda and Eustace were sitting one on each side of the dining-room table, their lessons in front of them. Hilda stared at her sketch map of England, Eustace stared at her; then they both glanced interrogatively and rather nervously at Aunt Sarah, enthroned between them at the head of the table.
“Rutland,” said Aunt Sarah impressively.
Eustace liked geography; he knew the answer to Rutland, and he was also aware that Hilda didn’t know. When they played ‘Counties of England’ Rutland invariably stumped her. Eustace pondered. His map was already thickly studded with county towns while Hilda’s presented a much barer appearance. She wouldn’t mind if he beat her, for she always liked him to excel, indeed she insisted on it; she minded more if he failed over his lessons than if she did. Often when she reproved him for poor work he had protested “Anyhow I did better than you!” and she, not at all abashed, would reply, “That’s got nothing to do with it. You know you can do better than that if you try.” The effort to qualify for his sister’s approval was the ruling force in Eustace’s interior life: he had to live up to her idea of him, to fulfil the ambitions she entertained on his behalf. And though he chafed against her domination it was necessary for him; whenever, after one of their quarrels, she temporarily withdrew her jealous supervision saying she didn’t care now, he could get his feet wet and be as silly and lazy and naughty as he liked, she would never bother about him again, he felt as though the bottom had dropped out of his life, as though the magnetic north had suddenly repudiated the needle. Hilda believed that her dominion was founded upon grace: she shouldered her moral responsibilities towards Eustace without misgiving: she did not think it necessary to prove or demonstrate her ascendancy by personal achievements outside the moral sphere. Nor did Eustace think so; but all the same his comfortable sense of her superiority was troubled whenever she betrayed, as she was certainly doing now, distinct signs of intellectual fallibility. It was painful to him, in cold blood, to expose her to humiliation even in his thoughts, so with a sigh he checked his pen in mid-career and refrained from writing Oakham.
“That’s all,” said Aunt Sarah a few minutes later. “Let’s count up. And then I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Is it something nice?” asked Eustace.
“You always want to know that, Eustace,” said Aunt Sarah not unkindly. “I notice that Hilda never does. It is a great mistake, as you will find in after-life, always to be wondering whether things are going to be nice or nasty. Usually, you will find, they are neither.”
“Eustace is better now at doing things he doesn’t like,” observed Hilda.
“Yes, I think he is. Now, how many towns have you got, Hilda?”
“Twenty-five.”
“That’s not at all bad, especially as I sent you out shopping all yesterday morning. And you, Eustace?”
“Thirty-two—no, thirty-one.”
“That’s not very many. I expected you to do better than that.”
“But I helped Hilda shopping,” objected Eustace. “I carried the bread all the way home.”
“He wouldn’t go into Lawsons’ because he’s afraid of the dog.”
“Isn’t that rather silly of you, Eustace? If it doesn’t hurt Hilda, why should it hurt you?”
“It doesn’t like little boys,” said Eustace. “It growled at Gerald Steptoe when he went in to buy his other pocket-knife.”
“Who wouldn’t?” asked Hilda rudely.
“Hilda, I don’t think that’s very kind. And talking of the Steptoes—but first, what did you leave out, Eustace?”
With many pauses Eustace noted the names of the missing towns.
“And Oakham, too! But you know Oakham perfectly well: or had you forgotten it?”
“Of course he hadn’t,” said Hilda with feeling. “He always remembers it—just because it’s not important.”
“No,” said Eustace slowly. “I hadn’t forgotten it.”
“Then why didn’t you put it down?”
Eustace considered. He was painfully, scrupulously truthful.
“I didn’t want to.”
“Didn’t want to! Why, what a funny boy! Why
didn’t you want to?”
Again Eustace paused. An agony of deliberation furrowed his forehead.
“I thought it was best to leave it out,” he said.
“But, what nonsense! I don’t know what’s come over you. Well, you must write out twice over the names of the towns you missed, and Oakham five times. Hilda, you have been busy, so it will do if you mark them on your map in red ink. Then you can go and play. But first I want to tell you about Thursday.”
“Oh, is it to be Thursday?” asked Eustace.
“Wait a minute. You must learn not to be impatient, Eustace. Thursday may never come. But I was going to say, your father doesn’t go to Ousemouth on Thursday afternoon so we’re all going for a drive.”
“Hurray!” cried both children at once.
“And Mrs. Steptoe has very kindly invited us to join them on the Downs for a picnic.”
Hilda looked utterly dismayed at this.
“Do you think we ought to go?” she asked anxiously. “Last year when we went Eustace was sick after we got home.”
“I wasn’t!” Eustace exclaimed. “I only felt sick.”
“Eustace must try very hard not to get excited,” Aunt Sarah said in a tone that was at once mild and menacing. “Otherwise he won’t be allowed to go again.”
“But he always gets excited,” Hilda persisted, ignoring the faces that Eustace, who had jumped up at the news, was making at her from behind his aunt’s back. “Nancy excites him; he can’t really help it.”
Aunt Sarah smiled, and as her features lost their habitual severity of cast they revealed one of the sources from which Hilda got her beauty.
“It’s Eustace’s fault if he lets Nancy make him behave foolishly,” she said with rather chilly indulgence. “He must remember she is only a little girl.”
“But she’s older than me,” said Eustace. “She’s quite old; she’s older than Hilda.”
“In years, perhaps. But not in other ways. Hilda has an old head on young shoulders, haven’t you, Hilda?”
At the compliment Hilda smiled through her portentous frowns.