‘Good God, I don’t know what she thought. Can’t you two stop picking on each other for five minutes?’ and he got up, strewing the paper all round him, and went out of the room. They heard his car start up, and go off.
Hetty went on with her grapefruit, Mrs Spring with hers. Presently, as her aunt sighed, Hetty looked up and said what was expected of her:
‘Vic seems very on edge lately. I imagine it’s the strain of spending so much time with the betrothed. It would strain me, too.’
‘Engagements are always trying,’ retorted her aunt sharply, ‘and you can see for yourself how on edge Phyl is. She does too much; she’ll never keep her looks if she doesn’t learn to relax a bit. And that makes her go at Vic, because she’s worn out and won’t see it. She’s not been herself for weeks.’
‘An advantage, I cannot but feel,’ drawled Hetty, ‘were it not that the substitute is, if anything, worse than the original.’
‘Don’t speak in tha— there, Hetty, I don’t want to pick on you on your twenty-first, but you make Phyl worse, you know. She’s always nervier when she’s been down here an hour or two and bickering with you. Why can’t you leave each other alone? I know she’s trying, I find her trying myself, I don’t quite know why, I think it’s because she’s so healthy. Anyway, I wish you would try to keep the peace until the twenty-eighth. Then they’ll be going off for six weeks and you and I will have time to get ourselves comfortably settled before they come home.’
Here was Hetty’s chance, but she did not take it. Better leave it until after the garden party. She observed pensively, finishing her grapefruit:
‘I detest her. To me she typifies all the varnished vulgarity and falseness of this horrifying age. Everything that she is, poetry is not. I wish that she would die, preferably violently.’
Before her staggered aunt could reply, in marched the antithesis of Poetry, wearing a becoming shirt-dress. She glittered with superficial health and energy, but she talked faster than she used, and her voice was shriller. The strain of being a minor society beauty, preparing for her wedding, supervising the furnishing of the flat and being engaged to Victor, whom she found daily more maddening, was telling even upon her superb health.
‘Many happy returns,’ nodding at Hetty. ‘Hope you liked your beauty-box. Edna, Vic hasn’t gone, has he? He is too sickening; he said last night he’d wait until I came down because I wanted to give him that bracelet to take back. The fools have made it too big, it falls off every time I put it on, and I wanted to tell him about the scent, too, I must have it for tonight and it won’t be in, those fools said, until late this afternoon. Can I have some fresh toast, please? Had any other presents, Hetty? Oh, help … books. Who from? What a weird cover.’
‘A girl I was at school with. You would not know her.’
‘Another of your brainy colleagues, I suppose. Edna, didn’t Vic say anything about that bracelet? I want to wear it tonight and he knows that perfectly well, and they could easily have made it smaller today and he could have called for it and brought it back this evening if he’d taken it this morning. It really is too sickening. Hetty, I haven’t done a thing about your present yet, I’ve been rushed to death, but I thought you might have my fox, just to go on with. I haven’t got it here, Anthea’s got it at the minute, but Vic’s giving me a new one, and I thought the old one would just do for you.’
‘You are very kind,’ returned Hetty coolly, going white about the nostrils, ‘but I do not much care to wear the skins of dead animals round my neck. When the skin of the dead animal happens to have been worn round your neck for a full two years, I dislike the prospect intensely. And if you give me your fox, I shall burn it.’
There was a shattered silence.
‘Or rather,’ drawling, ‘I shall request Heyrick to burn it. In the incinerator. Then,’ concluded Hetty, tapping an egg, ‘I need not touch it.’
Phyllis laughed angrily. A red stain had got up into her smooth dark cheeks.
‘Well, you needn’t be so snooty about it, just because it isn’t new. If I hadn’t been so frightfully hard up just now I’d have got you a new one. Good thing I didn’t, if that’s how you feel about it – you insulting, half-baked, affected little beast’ – her voice going up shrilly.
Hetty rose to her feet
‘Be quiet – both of you!’ cried Mrs Spring very angrily. ‘You ought to be ashamed – squabbling like children! Hetty, apologize to Phyllis at once.’
Hetty shook her head, and walked out of the room.
With this pleasing skirmish the festivities for Hetty’s twenty-first birthday were launched, and it was Mrs Spring’s task to whip up a gay and carefree atmosphere to greet the guests when they arrived for tea and tennis at three o’clock. As Hetty went about the house still looking white round the nostrils while Phyllis kept up a continual splutter like a catherine-wheel about Victor and the bracelet and the scent and Hetty’s extraordinarily amusing behaviour which some people might have taken seriously but thank heaven she, Phyllis, had a sense of humour – Mrs Spring found herself, by four o’clock, with a bad headache and feeling most unlike performing that ritual known as mingling with the guests.
However, she mingled, and by six o’clock tea and cocktails were well away and a party of about thirty people gathered from Stanton, Chesterbourne, Dovewood Abbey and Lukesedge was apparently enjoying itself. So cheerful and talkative and absorbed was everybody, leaping after tennis balls in the chilly sunlight or gossiping, hatless but in coats, on the veranda and in the drawing-room where the wireless was playing, that Hetty saw no reason why she should not slip away for ten minutes to the water-butt in the vegetable garden and cut the pages of Mithraic Emblems, which was her school-friend’s present.
The canopy of pale red and white blossom hung once more over the deserted orchard. The almond-trees were flowering and the cherry, the pear in a waterfall of white stars and the dark pink Siberian crab-apple. Hetty sat down on the three bricks with her back against the water-butt and opened Mithraic Emblems; but when she had read a few fiery, jewel-like lines she let the book fall on her lap and, leaning her head against the water-butt, stared up at the pale blue sky.
How difficult life was, how complicated and poisoned! How hard it was to have courage and make steadily for the things one wanted, ignoring everything else until one got them. She had planned to tell Mrs Spring at breakfast that she was going to leave Grassmere; then she had put it off until the party should be over. Now it was half-past six in the evening of her twenty-first birthday, the day that she had been looking forward to for nearly seven years, and she had not told her aunt, and was afraid that she would not. She said to herself: I’ll tell her tonight, after the dinner party, but she knew that the words were weak, an escape and a putting off. To give herself courage, she thought of the attic room in Bloomsbury – near, perhaps, to the very house where lived Virginia Woolf herself – with the view across pale and dark chimney pots under the smoky London sky, the noise of traffic coming up faintly, the smell of coffee brewing on the gas-ring and her own eyes moving, in a trance of content, over the pages of a book.
Looking down at Mithraic Emblems again with a sigh, she caught the flutter of a white apron moving between the trees. Oh dear, that would be Davies; she had said that she was going down to the orchard for ten minutes’ peace and asked the Welsh girl to let her know if people began wondering where she was.
Yes, it was Davies. But there was somebody with her, an elderly, shortish, slender and stooping man, wearing no hat and carrying – surely – a pile of books under one arm. In the other hand he held a round white parcel, stiffly upright.
Now they were coming under the canopy of apple-blossom, and the stranger, who wore glasses, was gazing up at the bloom as though he were more interested in it than in Hetty, who got doubtfully to her feet as they came near.
Little Merionethshire hurried up, while the man followed more slowly.
‘Oh, Miss Hetty,’ began Davies, ‘I hope you won’t m
ind me bringing the gentleman here, indeed, but Madam’s talking to Lady Dovewood and as he said it was you he wanted to see I thought I’d best bring him along here—’
‘And when I heard that you were down in the vegetable garden reading by the water-butt, I knew that you wouldn’t mind my coming,’ interrupted the stranger, looking at her with mild yet enthusiastic light eyes behind thick lenses, ‘because that’s just what your father used to do – steal away with a precious volume whenever he got the chance. I’m his brother, my dear. I’m your uncle, Frank Franklin.’
And, stooping unembarrassedly to put the parcel of books on the ground, he held out his hand, which Hetty bewilderedly took.
‘There, Miss Hetty,’ smiled Merionethshire, looking from one to the other, ‘isn’t that a nice birthday present for you? Your uncle.’
‘Yes … thank you, Davies,’ muttered Hetty. She went on staring, all her usual composure gone, at the thin fresh-coloured face of her uncle, in which she could see not the faintest likeness to her own.
‘I’d best be getting back, Miss Hetty, if you don’t mind?’ suggested Davies; ‘and if I were you, Miss, I wouldn’t stay down here too long, for Madam’s sure to ask for you in a minute.’
‘All right, Davies. Thanks very much, we’ll be along soon,’ said Hetty, then looked round confusedly to see if there was anywhere for Uncle Frank Franklin to sit down. But he, without a word, pulled out another three bricks from a pile near by, arranged them neatly, seated himself, and pointed to the other three. Still in silence, Hetty sat down facing him.
‘Before I say anything, I want to give you these,’ he began eagerly. ‘They were my suggestion. You see,’ holding out the rounded paper parcel, ‘we don’t know your tastes yet, Hetty, (though we hope to) but everybody must like violets.’
Opening the parcel with a mutter of thanks she found a bunch of the largest, darkest and finest violets she had ever seen. She breathed in their faint scent, and said warmly:
‘I do like them. How very kind of you; I could not have had anything that I liked better. You knew it was my birthday, then?’
‘They are the famous Windward violets,’ he said with a touch of complacence, gazing at the flowers. ‘Oh yes – indeed we did. Your Aunt Rose and I have followed your progress (so far as we could, Hetty) with deep interest ever since you were a baby. We wanted to adopt you, you know.’
‘Oh, are you that uncle? I just knew that there was someone …’
‘Yes. Your Aunt Rose and I, you see, have no children. We … no, we have no family. But your Aunt Spring thought it better for you to go with her, and no doubt it has all been much more comfortable for you … you have a beautiful home here, have you not? so spacious.’
‘I hate it,’ she answered simply.
‘Do you? Do you indeed?’ he said eagerly, looking pleased. ‘Why is that? Perhaps you cannot enjoy it because you are thinking of all the millions who can never hope to have enough to eat, let alone a place like this to live in, is that it?’
‘Oh no, it isn’t that, I’m afraid, Uncle Frank. It’s just that life here is so tedious, and they will not let me do what I want to do.’
‘And what is that? dear me, how I am running on, and I haven’t yet given you half your Aunt Rose’s messages, nor told you how I come to be here today … and perhaps you ought to be getting back to your friends?’
‘Oh, they can wait, and they aren’t my friends anyway, they’re Aunt Edna’s. I’m so enjoying it here. Do tell me why you came.’
‘Well, there happened to be a sale of books this morning at a place called Blackbourne (perhaps you know it, yes) and as I had to come down for that, your Aunt Rose said, Frank, why not take the bull by the horns and call on the Springs and try, at least try, to see Hetty.’
‘Uncle Frank,’ interrupted Hetty slowly, ‘you said you “had” to come down here for a sale of books. Why was that?’
‘Well, my dear, I’m a bookseller, you know. Your Aunt Rose and I have a bookshop on the corner of Acre Street in the Charing Cross Road. Did you not know that?’
‘No,’ said Hetty, staring at the pear-tree.
‘Well – but did your Aunt Spring never tell you anything about us?’
‘Uncle Frank,’ she said steadily, ‘I never knew that you existed until five minutes ago. I was always told that my father’s people were … not very well-off, you know, and bookish … and they’d never got on or anything – you know—’
‘Made money,’ he nodded. ‘Yes, I can imagine what you were told. Hetty, before we go any further, I must tell you that your Aunt Rose is a Communist, an active Communist working for the Revolution in Great Britain, and that I am a Socialist. A Fabian. Yes, well. Now go on.’
‘– and I just knew that there were two uncles, and one of them wanted to adopt me—’
‘That was me, your Aunt Rose and me. Your other uncle, Henry, is not married. He is a librarian in York.’
‘– and I certainly rather got the impression that my father’s people didn’t care much about me but just—’
‘– wanted to adopt you so that they could manage your money,’ nodded Uncle Frank. ‘Yes. Go on—’
‘– I never knew that you kept a bookshop,’ she ended, ‘or else of course I should have written to you years ago. Books are my chief interest in life.’
‘Are they, are they indeed. They were your father’s too, so that is quite natural. Of course,’ went on Uncle Frank, looking at once indignant and pleased, ‘your Aunt Rose and I supposed that you never wrote to us because of the bookshop. We thought that you were a shocking little bourgeois snob, Hetty, idle and pleasure-loving, a typical product of the capitalist system at its worst. Yet we could not help feeling an interest in you, my dear, because we remembered you as a baby and so we wrote sometimes to your Aunt Spring for news of you.’
‘She never told me. I was told nothing. It is too bad. Stupid, rude, narrow …’
‘She did not answer our last three letters, Hetty, and so naturally we did not try to see you, because we thought that you did not wish to see us. Your Aunt Rose it was,’ went on Uncle Frank, with relish, ‘who first thought that it might have been your Aunt Spring who was keeping you from us. Your Aunt Rose, though an out-and-out materialist in religious matters, of course, has these intuitions occasionally. Divine visionings, I always think of them as. But I do not say so to her, for of course she is rather sensitive about her intuitions.’
‘You must have thought me a detestable creature,’ said Hetty in a low tone.
‘Oh no, Hetty, not that. Just the helpless product of a corrupt and decaying system,’ said Uncle Frank tolerantly. ‘We are all cogs in it, Hetty, we cannot help ourselves. But we must leave all that for another talk, must we not? The main things now are that I have seen you,’ checking off the points on one open palm, ‘that we have talked together, and that the next time you are in London you will come to see us, will you not? and meet your Aunt Rose. Your Aunt Rose, though deeply affectionate, does not give her affection lightly. She needs knowing; I am the first to admit that, but when you do come to know her …’ He shook his head, as though the visions inside it were too dazzling to be put into words, then got up from the three bricks without difficulty (and anyone who has sat on three bricks will appreciate this achievement), collected his books, and glanced inquiringly first at the way through the orchard and then at Hetty, as though suggesting that it was time they made a move.
But Hetty stood with her back pressed hard against the water-butt and said resolutely:
‘Uncle Frank, may I come to live with you and Aunt Rose in London? Paying for myself, I mean? I have a hundred pounds a year of my own and I’m twenty-one today, so it’s mine to do as I like with. If I gave you and Aunt Rose a pound a week, could you keep me for that? If you have a spare attic room I should like that better than anything. I wouldn’t be any trouble. I only want to read all day, and later on perhaps I might get some kind of a job.’
‘Good gracious me, Het
ty, you go so fast, I cannot keep up with you!’ cried Uncle Frank, looking alarmed and pleased and triumphant all at once. ‘You can’t arrange things like this in five minutes, you know. And what is your money invested in, my dear? Your Aunt Rose disapproves of invested income, of course, and I am afraid that if it were invested in armaments or anything of that sort she would not for a moment entertain the idea of having you as a paying guest … a boarder, shall we say? … a lodger! How easy it is to be a snob, is it not? Well …’
‘I never heard my cousin (he looks after my money) say it was in armaments,’ said Hetty. ‘I think it’s mostly in Government stock … I suppose Aunt Rose’ (she tried to keep a satirical note from her voice) ‘would not approve of that, either?’
‘Bad enough, Hetty, but not so bad as armaments.’
‘Well, you will try, won’t you, Uncle Frank, to persuade Aunt Rose to let me come? You see, I was going to tell Aunt Edna today that I mean to go and live in London and you can see what a difference it would make, can’t you, if I could tell her that I was going to live with relations and not with strangers?’
‘But your Aunt Rose and I, Hetty, are strangers to you,’ he pointed out, beginning to lead the way back through the orchard. (‘Good gracious, we have been away here nearly an hour!) It is a very big step, you know, to give up all this comfort and luxury and beauty,’ glancing round him with a sigh, ‘for life in one room over a bookshop.’
‘But that’s exactly what I’ve always wanted,’ she cried. ‘I hate all this. It’s dead. I can’t be myself in it. It may be other people’s kind of beauty; it isn’t mine. I want something … I don’t know yet. Harder.’
He nodded as though he understood.
‘And it won’t come as a shock to Aunt Edna, either,’ she went on. ‘She’s always known that I wanted to get away from here, and go to college.’
‘You won’t be able to manage college, my dear, on your income, and keep yourself as well.’
‘Then I’ll borrow from my capital,’ recklessly, ‘and pay myself back when I get something to do.’