“I see,” said Hilda thoughtfully.
“And this morning I had a letter from him to say, would we go down to Anchorstone Hall for a week-end.”
“Would we go?” asked Hilda.
“You and I.”
Eustace expected Hilda to refuse at once, and the pause that followed had an unnatural, timeless quality.
“You go by all means. You always like meeting strangers. I shan’t.”
That was categorical enough, but Eustace, encouraged by the pause, said, “Oh, do come, Hilda.”
“But why do you want me to go?” cried Hilda. “Why do you want me to do something I don’t want to do? I don’t meddle in your life, do I?” she demanded. “Or if I do, it’s just for your—for your——” But the word he was waiting for did not come, and Hilda went on after a moment. “But what advantage should I get from going to Anchorstone?”
“You could discuss the clinic with Dick,” suggested Eustace lamely.
“The clinic, the clinic—it’s always the clinic!” cried Hilda, using the word to lash herself. “I don’t know why, but you try to get round me with the clinic. If Mr. Staveley wants to know about the clinic, he can write to me, or better still to my secretary, who will give him the illustrated brochure and all the details.”
“But wouldn’t you like to get away from here for a bit?” said Eustace, trying another tack.
“Perhaps I should, but not to go among a lot of smart people I don’t know from Adam and who would be bored to death with me. We shouldn’t have a thing in common, and I haven’t the clothes for that sort of visit.”
“But you could get some,” said Eustace, surprised at his own persistence. “There’s plenty of time. Dick doesn’t want us until the first week-end in June.”
“Oh, he’s named a day, has he?”
“Well, he suggested that one. Would you like to see his letter? I brought it with me.”
Eustace began to feel in his pocket.
“No, thank you. Well, as you’ve got it out, perhaps I’d better see what he does say.”
Eustace handed her the letter. Hilda was a quick reader. Her eyes flicked to and fro, the whites were very blue. After a moment she laid the letter down.
“Why, have you read it already?” exclaimed Eustace.
“Not quite. I suppose I’d better finish it,” and she took the letter up again.
“Funny kind of ‘p’s’ he makes, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, where? Show me,” cried Eustace.
“Well, here, for instance.” Leaning towards Eustace, Hilda pointed to the passage with a long fore-finger reddened by work and cold winds. “ ‘Important-looking’—and here too, ‘Perhaps you could persuade.’ Rather childish, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps they are,” said Eustace doubtfully.
“I wonder why he thinks me ‘important-looking’?” Hilda remarked.
“You mean, he might have said something else?”
“Well, no; but he must always be seeing important people.”
“You do look important in photographs,” said Eustace.
“Do I? Is that what the photographers mean when they say ‘Not quite so stern’?”
“He looks rather stern himself, so perhaps he likes people who do,” said Eustace.
Hilda turned the letter over once or twice.
“I couldn’t tell him much about Child Welfare,” she said. “I only know my own side of it. But I could put him on to people who do. He doesn’t seem to care for cripples. There I rather agree with him—what we want is to turn them out healthy citizens.”
“You could discuss that with him.” For a moment, Eustace’s imagination toyed with a picture of Dick and Hilda, their heads together, poring over large-scale diagrams of children with spinal curvatures and tubercular hips.
“Discuss, discuss,” muttered Hilda. She gave the letter another glance and then handed it back to Eustace. “Thanks for letting me see it,” she said. “But I don’t think I’ll go.”
Eustace had expected this, but Hilda had shown signs of relenting, and the blow was all the harder when it fell.
“Oh, Hilda,” he said, “it would have been such fun. We could have seen all the old places together, the rocks where we used to have our pond, and the lighthouse and the water-tower. They would all seem much smaller of course—not so—so important. I love to think of those days when we were always together. We hardly ever are now.”
Eustace sighed. Losing the future, he would lose the past too.
“They weren’t always such happy days for me,” said Hilda. “I’ve never felt so miserable in my life as I did the evening you ran away on the paper-chase. And then you were ill and they wouldn’t let me see you. And then for a year or more you were always at Miss Fothergill’s, and hardly had a word for us at home. And there was Nancy Steptoe, too, that silly, stuck-up little girl: you were always wanting to go about with her. And towards the end Father started drinking too much; of course, you didn’t know about that, but I did. And then we went to school, and I was very lonely. You were so near to me at St. Ninian’s but they hardly ever let us meet.”
Hilda’s eyes smouldered at the recollection. “Poor Hilda!” Eustace murmured.
“After that there was the war and more anxiety about you, Eustace; it wasn’t your fault, but I never had a peaceful moment while I thought you might be dragged off to the Front. You were always in my thoughts when those stupid V.A.D.’s used to talk about their boys and so on. They laughed at me for caring so much about you.”
That Hilda could so pity herself made her the more pitiable to Eustace. He, he, had brought these woes upon her.
“I don’t know why I tell you all this,” she went on, “but you do see, don’t you, that my real place is here at Highcross? This is where I’m happy and I never want to leave. I know that tiresome things keep happening, like this hitch about the field, and the servants giving trouble, and nasty, smelly little undercurrents that have to be nosed out and cleaned up. Human nature’s awful the moment it’s left to itself, it sinks into the lowest rut or drainpipe it can find. But that’s just what I’m here for, to find those things out and put them right. They don’t really discourage me, or spoil what I feel when I come in and sniff the beeswax, and hear the whole place busy round me, holding me up, just as I hold it up. Come and look,” she went on, leading Eustace to the window opposite. “It may not seem much to you, but it’s my life to me.”
They stood side by side looking out. In the square, walled enclosure the grass was very rough, Eustace noticed now, but it shone golden in the evening sun, and the place was full of spaciousness and peace. Down in the valley lights were coming out; on the road which wound upwards on the left, the lamps were already lit. He could see them curving towards him. At one point a spur of the hill hid them; then, brighter and larger, they reappeared.
The foreground fell away, only the distance was visible. The elm trees in the hedgerow that bounded the meadow beyond the garden wall might have stood on the edge of an abyss, so distinct were they, so shadowy and ill-defined their background.
“You see why I’m so fond of it, don’t you?” said Hilda.
“I do,” said Eustace.
“And why I don’t want to go away even for a night?”
“Ye—es. But you’d be coming back again.”
“Are you still thinking about Anchorstone Hall?”
“Well, if it didn’t do you any good to go, it couldn’t do you any harm.”
Hilda turned away from the window.
“I wonder why you’re so anxious for me to go?” she said sharply. “It can’t be simply because you know I don’t want to.”
“I think you’d enjoy yourself once you got there,” said Eustace, half-heartedly using an old formula.
“No, I should feel like a fish out of water among all those Society people. I shouldn’t do you any credit. I should just be a handicap to you and an embarrassment.”
Eustace was touched by this rare moo
d of humility in Hilda.
“You’ve read Dick’s letter. It’s you they want, not me.”
“I’m not just being disobliging,” Hilda said. “I have an instinct against going. Are you thinking that if I didn’t they’d find some excuse for not asking you?”
Eustace blushed.
“Well, that’s what happened before, when we were at Anchorstone.”
“And you were disappointed?”
“Yes, but not only on my account. I wanted to see you in that setting, with everyone saying how lovely you were, and opening the door for you, and picking things up for you, and asking if you wanted to do this or that—like a princess, you know.”
Hilda said nothing.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t feel shy or nervous. It would be different if you’d only been asked casually. But Dick made such a point of it, and he’s the only son, after all. You couldn’t feel you weren’t welcome.”
“All right,” said Hilda. “Since you want me to go, I’ll go. But if it’s not a success, you’ll be to blame.”
“I’ll take the risk,” said Eustace gaily.
Keen as a pang, bright as a sword, a shaft of joy transfixed him. Reason could not tell him why, but his whole being was flooded with happiness, and he felt as though nothing could ever go wrong again. Was it because almost for the first time he had bent Hilda’s will to his? Such a victory would be cause for elation, but not for this astonishing sense of well-being which went through him like wine, flooding the dry, dusty corners of his nature, blunting the thorns and prickles which pierced his consciousness the moment it heard the call to happiness. So strong was the pressure of the feeling, that he was unable to stand still, and began to walk up and down in front of the electric clock, muttering to himself.
Hilda gave one of her laughs.
“I wish you could see yourself,” she said. “You look so funny.”
Under the liberating effect of movement the tide of joy had equalised its flow and achieved a perfect balance of possession. There was now no part of him to which the life-giving ichor had been denied.
“You have made me happy,” he said. “I never felt so happy before.”
“That’s your destructiveness coming out,” said Hilda. “You look forward to seeing me sacrificed on the social altar. When you were a little boy you used to play at being a tidal wave or an earthquake or the Angel of Death. You were always destroying things—in your imagination, of course.”
Eustace could remember the access of power that glorified his being when he had overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum. But surely that had nothing to do with this transforming sense of lightness and release—as though he had been reborn, as though a weight had dropped off him. What was the weight, and where had it gone? Why this sensation of relief as if all his life he had been suffocated?
“I’m going to throw you out now,” Hilda was saying, “or you’ll be terribly late for Aunt Sarah.”
For once Eustace was proof against the dread of a scolding. Unaware of motion, he floated downstairs. Half-way across the beeswaxed floor Hilda stooped and picked something up. It was a pigskin glove, hardly worn.
“Why, that’s one of Mr. Hilliard’s. Now I shall have to post it to him. I wish people wouldn’t leave their things behind. I’d almost forgotten he was here, it seems so long ago.”
6. THE STAVELEYS IN CONCLAVE
THE BANQUETING HALL at Anchorstone, and the kitchens leading off it, were the oldest part of the house, all that was habitable of the building put up by Roger de Staveley at the end of the fifteenth century. The kitchens had rooms above that were still used by the servants, but the Hall itself had none, and was much in its original state, except that in some places the indented battlements had been renewed. Built of red brick, with a low-pitched lead roof capped by two louvres, it looked smaller and less impressive outside than in. This was partly because the level of the courtyard had risen, docking the doorway of two feet of its former height. The family habitually used this entrance, inconvenient as it was in wet weather. The other way in, by the kitchen below or the minstrels’ gallery above, had the advantage of being under cover, but it meant a long journey through passages and up and down stairs, whereas the courtyard door could be reached in a few strides from the door of the New Building.
The New Building was L-shaped. Anchorstone Hall, as it now stood, would have been a hollow square but for the gap, half as long as one of the sides, between the Banqueting Hall and the New Building. A light railing, with a wrought-iron gate in it, stretched across the gap, fencing off the courtyard from the garden.
The blue clock in the tower above the gateway showed two minutes to half-past one as Sir John Staveley emerged from the Victorian doorway of the new wing and walked across the uneven surface of the courtyard to the Tudor doorway of the Banqueting Hall.
His hair showed almost white under the dark-grey cap that he always wore to make the transit. His clothes were dark grey too, their cut was the cut of twenty years ago; the breeches, tight round the knee, looked in the distance rather like Court breeches. The stockings that covered his thin, well-shaped legs had as little pattern as was consonant with not being perfectly plain. They were the country clothes a clergyman might have worn, but there was nothing clerical in Sir John’s bearing. Although he walked with a slight stoop and seemed to feel the inequalities of the ground, his step was almost jaunty, and did not need the assistance of his stick.
He went down the short flight of steps into the Banqueting Hall, on to the daïs, and straight into the glorious glow of the big window. At almost any time of day its greenish gold panes gave the light the tones of sunset. The other windows were set high in the wall, in Tudor fashion, and little but the sky could be seen from them; this one was the whole height of the wall and built out into a bay, so that it seemed to gather the garden into the room. On the daïs was the dining-table, shrunk to its smallest size, hardly more than a square. Here they sat in summer, but in the winter it was too draughty, and they used the refectory table that ran down the body of the hall.
Sir John laid his cap and stick on their accustomed chair and took out his watch. “Does her ladyship know it’s time for luncheon?” he said to the butler.
The butler was used to this query, for it happened every other day. Not that Lady Staveley was unpunctual, but Sir John, though by no means a martinet, could not bear to wait a moment for his meals. “I’ll go and see, Sir John,” he said. As he opened the door a youngish woman stepped through.
“Good morning, Anne,” said Sir John, and kissed her. “What have you been doing with yourself all this fine morning?”
“I’ve been doing the flowers for one thing,” said Anne, “and then I walked down into the village and did a few things there.” Her face lit up as she was speaking and became almost animated; when she ceased the interest flickered out, and was replaced by the look of a grey day, not sullen or lowering, but as though resigned to the unlikelihood of change. Her grey flannel suit fitted her beautifully, but like her expression it had the air of reducing all occasions to one.
“I congratulate you on being so usefully employed,” said her father, “and on being so punctual, too.” He paused, as if searching for another subject for congratulation, and then said, “I think we had better begin. Your mother wouldn’t want us to wait. What’s happened to Crosby?”
“I think you sent him away,” said Anne.
“So I did, so I did. I’m always forgetting.” The door opened. “Ah, here’s her ladyship. Edie, we were just going to begin without you.”
Plump and a little out of breath, Lady Staveley sat down with her back to the window, and Crosby gently propelled her chair towards the table. Two footmen did the same service for Sir John and Anne. The diamond and the turquoise rings glinting on her short, chubby fingers, Lady Staveley began to rearrange her spoons and forks: this was a rite, and no one spoke till it was finished. She looked a comfortable, motherly woman at first sight, but her face in repose had the coldnes
s of authority and a touch of pride.
“I’ve had a busy morning,” she said. “So many things to see to. Did you know the flower show was to be on the twenty-first?”
They both admitted ignorance.
“Yes, and Bates is quite beside himself. He says we shall have nothing worth showing.”
“He always says that,” said Anne. “He sent in some quite nice flowers this morning.”
“Yes, and how beautifully you’ve arranged them,” said Lady Staveley, looking at the six small silver vases filled with early sweet-peas, and done with such a careful eye to symmetry that you could not tell one from another.
“Oh, I don’t know!” Anne regarded her handiwork without enthusiasm. “They have different ways of doing flowers now, all in a heap with reds and pinks together, which clash to my eye. I’m afraid my ideas of floral decoration are rather old-fashioned.”
“Well, we’re old-fashioned people,” said Lady Staveley comfortably, “and they suit us. Did you do the flowers for the bedrooms as well?”
“I did,” said Anne. “I tried to make them a little different—the men’s and the women’s, I mean—the men’s blue and plain and upstanding, the women’s pink and fussy and drooping, but it was too much for me, and in the end I made them all alike.”
“No wonder,” said Sir John. “I never heard such a fanciful idea. And why do people want flowers in their bedrooms, anyway? I don’t suppose they ever look at them. I won’t have ’em in mine—I always knock ’em over. Of course, if you’re an invalid it’s another matter. But they ain’t healthy: even in hospitals they put them out at night—shows that they poison the air.”
“Anchorstone isn’t a hospital now, thank goodness,” said Lady Staveley energetically. “Those days are over. And I shouldn’t like any guest of mine to find a bedroom with no flowers in it. We’re not quite barbarians yet.”
“All right, my dear,” said Sir John, who seemed content to relinquish his opposition rôle. “Have it your own way. I was only trying to lighten your burdens, or rather Anne’s. By the by, who is coming this afternoon?”