Eustace and Hilda (101 page)

These reflections comforted Eustace somewhat when, Jimmy helping, he lifted the bath-chair down the steps and steadied its passage through the white gate. “Good hunting!” Jimmy would call after them, when he was in a jovial mood, and Eustace would try to think of a reply. Then the night received them, the night that had once been kindly and serviceable as an invisible cloak. Now it shut him in with his thoughts which, as always, craved the light, but looked out on darkness. He found himself longing for publicity and for the world to know the position he was in. All this secrecy, this stumbling about in the darkness, peering round for shapes, listening for footsteps, hurrying past lamp-posts, tunnelling into the gloom, made him feel furtive and sinister to himself. People would wonder what he was up to, slinking by them with averted head, and associate him with the things of the night, nocturnal creatures that prowl and prey. There goes the funny lady, yes, and the funny gentleman too. Soon they would identify the daily with the nightly Eustace; and in spite of the pockets free from wedges, the head held high, the warm revolving smile for all and sundry, they would recognise his black aura and nudge each other.

O
NE MORNING
when he was working in the drawing-room he was surprised to see a car draw up at the door and Jimmy get out.

A second glance showed him that the car was Jimmy's car; but what was he doing here, at this time of day? All the morning there had been a subdued hubbub in the house; doors opened and shut, footsteps pattered overhead; more than once the telephone bell rang, and now here was Jimmy. What could it mean?

Eustace was stumbling on the explanation when in came Barbara. She seemed to be carrying a great many things, and Jimmy, who followed her, was even more heavily laden. A sense of happy urgency, combined with mystery, came from Barbara; Jimmy looked at once sheepish, anxious and triumphant.

“Well, darling,” said Barbara, bearing down on Eustace with all sail set, “don't get up from your books, and don't look scared, but the moment's come, at least they tell me it has. I'm sure it's a false alarm and you'll see me back to-morrow, but if they are right, James Edward isn't pretending any more. Dear, dear Eustace, I'm going to make an honest uncle of you. You will be his godfather, won't you? I've told Jimmy I want him to grow up exactly like you.”

“Oh no,” cried Eustace, glancing at Jimmy with dismay. “No. You must make him quite different from me. I'll tell you how later on. You must let him——” He stopped, realising that Barbara had been putting a brave face on things, and this wasn't the moment to start a serious discussion on her child's upbringing. Why had she kept her preparations so secret, as if they were something that didn't matter, how had she the courage to smile now, even if it was a forced smile, as though all the world were at her feet, when she had this ordeal before her? He had never imagined that he had anything to learn from Barbara. Looking at her radiant face and her huge unwieldy body which she managed with so much unconscious dignity, he felt proud and humble, uplifted and abased.

“Now, Babs, you mustn't wait about,” said Jimmy.

“But I shall wait,” said Barbara. “Why, I may not see Eustace again for ages, and he's my best, my only brother! How I came to have such a clever brother I've never understood. Of course I never talk to him, I never open my mouth to him, I don't dare to; I just watch the marvellous things he does, and listen to his words of wisdom, quite mum. But now I'm in a privileged position, so I shall talk for once, and tell him how fond I am of him—from afar, of course—just as fond as Hilda and Lady Nelly and Countess Lorryvan and all those other grand people.” And bending down she covered Eustace's face with kisses.

“I don't know why I'm saying all this,” she went on rather breathlessly, “only I'm going away and leaving you with Hilda—it's a bit dull for you, isn't it? Poor old Hilda, I've said good-bye to her—that didn't take long; Jimmy doesn't like me to stay long with her, he says it's bad for James Edward, did you ever hear anything so silly? She began to tremble, so I knew it was time to go. But she was so sweet, she tried to smile. Well, I've said everything an expectant mother should say, so good-bye, darling Eustace, and listen for the joy bells ringing.”

She looked around her, as though a little dazed at her accomplishment, and Eustace jumped up and gave her his arm, for the first time since they walked down the aisle together. She leaned on it heavily, or pretended to, and did not release her hold until they came to the narrow strait between the bath-chair and the perambulator, when perforce they walked singly. Minney was at the car door, half inside, arranging rugs and hot-water bottles. “I feel so important,” Barbara said; “I feel as if no one in the world was as important as I am. I should have liked the whole Gang to be here, to give me a rousing send-off. Some of them may be dropping in to-morrow; you'll look after them, won't you, Eustace, and make them drink my health?” Eustace promised he would. “And cross your thumbs for me or say a little prayer, or something. Oh, it does feel so
strange
to be going away! If I wasn't so glad, I should wish I wasn't—does that sound Irish? I'll send Jimmy back to you if I can —to help with Hilda, you know. I don't want him glooming around.” She was settled in the car now, tucked up and swaddled, her face looking small and pale at the apex of so much upholstery. Eustace saw that Jimmy's large, bony hands were trembling on the wheel, and he kept looking back at Barbara as if to make sure she was there. “I can't wave, I can't move,” Barbara called to them. “Good-bye, Eustace! Good-bye, Minney! Come and see us soon! Love to Hilda! Love——”

Eustace and Minney watched the car out of sight. Minney put her handkerchief to her eyes the moment she had finished waving, and Eustace would have liked to do the same with his. Barbara's hour had come and gone so quickly.

He turned back to what seemed an empty house. It wasn't empty, of course, for Minney was with him and Hilda was upstairs, and the daily maid was doing the rooms. Hilda meant much more to him than Barbara did, even at this moment of her glory. But Barbara populated the house; her warm, contagious presence penetrated its coldest corners; when she went she took away much more than herself, more than herself and James Edward; she took a whole circulatory system of reverberations and extensions. Whereas Hilda's room was isolated, as separate from the rest of the small house as if a sheet of disinfectant had been hung outside the door that Eustace tiptoed past.

Compact as Cambo was, it had never assimilated Hilda's room.

“Well!” said Minney, “to think that she should be the first of you!” She spoke elliptically, but Eustace knew what she meant, and accepted for himself and Hilda the reproach of barrenness. He patted Minney's useful, well-worn hand. So many children had been through those hands that she had come to think of herself as entitled to the status of parenthood.

“Now we shall be together like we used to be,” she went on, “and you'll be my little boy again.” Her tone was business-like rather than wistful, and made Eustace feel that he might look backwards, at any rate for a moment, without incurring the fate of Lot's wife.

“You were always such a loving little thing,” she said. “Of course you loved Miss Hilda best, but you loved me too.”

“I still do, dearest Minney,” said Eustace, pressing her hand.

“Oh yes, I know you do,” said Minney with serene assurance. “Only people don't love in quite the same way when they grow up. I suppose it wouldn't be right if they did. And poor Miss Hilda so afflicted too. But she'll get better, you'll see, one of these days. You won't always have to be watching over her.”

“Oh, I don't mind that,” Eustace said.

“No, I don't believe you do. You were always a good boy, weren't you? You never gave any trouble.”

“Oh yes, I did,” said Eustace. “I——” On the brink of a lengthy confession he drew back, reminding himself that self-reproach was weakness.

“Well, you were always good with me, and if anyone says anything different, they may. Now you must go back to your books, just as if nothing had happened, and I'll go to Miss Hilda—I expect she's all worked up inside.”

Eustace took Minney's advice but could not act on it, for he too was worked up. He felt that the occasion called for a celebration—but what, and with whom, and where? His friends were far away; they stretched out their hands to him in vain; they were divided from him by much more than distance, by the barrier of his will, by the thick rampart of denials and inhibitions with which he kept them out. Barbara's friends, the Gang, were coming to-morrow, but he wanted to do something to-day. The only opportunities for celebrating that Anchorstone offered him were the celebrations of the past which he had forbidden himself. The sands, dearly as one part of him longed to go there, were still out of bounds. But he had his bicycle and the freedom of the roads; why not make the expedition he had promised himself, through Old Anchorstone, skirting the Park, and back by Frontisham Hill? If he could ride up Frontisham Hill it would be a sign, almost a proof, that there was nothing wrong with him, and that the Eustace of the past, ailing and in need of guidance, was a myth created by his own fears.

Eustace had to be on special terms with somebody or something. In Venice it had been Lady Nelly, and Jasper, and the promise of Antony's presence, thrown so brightly on the screen of his mind. In Venice he had felt lonely only when Lady Nelly, faithless, looked away from him. His time of travail for Hilda did not count, for then all the processes of his being were distorted or reversed. In Venice he had bought no bibelots for himself; he had not felt the need of them: as an outlet for his extra-personal affections the present from Anchorstone sufficed. But that brown-pink relic had lost its virtue and now lay in a drawer discredited, awaiting the moment when he would have strength of mind to throw it away. Meanwhile he needed a substitute, an object in whose presence he could feel that sense of identity completed by a possession which had prompted his purchases in the lonely days at the Ministry of Labour. Here he could not satisfy this craving, for Anchorstone boasted no antique shop; and if it had he might have resisted the temptation to enter, for bric-à-brac was useless and dust-harbouring and static, a throw-back to the bad old times. Besides, he could not afford such indulgences. But a bicycle was different: a bicycle was an object of high practical utility, a vital adjunct of industry, essential to the well-being of the proletariat; and with his bicycle Eustace now began to feel the joy of intimate association, the sweet pride of possession.

Jimmy had chosen it for him, from among a stable of second-hands steeds, and it was rather like Jimmy in being rawboned and workman-like and unadorned—the sort of bicycle one might find lying against a hedge with a rush-bag of tools strapped to the carrier. But it had been a good one in its day, a sports model, a roadster; it boasted a three-speed gear, and Eustace did not take long to discover points in which it excelled all other bicycles. He kept it in a shed in the backyard of Cambo, the porch being fully occupied; sometimes he went in, in the middle of the morning, to wipe it with an oily rag, according to Jimmy's instructions; sometimes for no better reason than to look at it and make sure it was there. Theoretically he had mastered the messy process of mending a puncture, and quite looked forward to the moment, which had not yet come, when he would feel the wheel wobble and the rims bumping upon the road. Then he would dismount, take the roll of cotton-waste from the saddle-bag, extract the scissors, the india-rubber, the solution, and the chalk, and begin that delicate operation on the viscera of his friend which would unite them yet more closely by the bonds of mutual benefit.

He was envisaging this scene of the Good Samaritan and the sports model when the door opened and Minney came in. Slightly puffing out her cheeks, she looked mysterious and important.

“Miss Hilda wants to tell you something,” she said, using the old formula. “You'd better go and find out what it is. I'm not sure, but I think she wants you to take her out in the bath-chair while it's still daylight.”

Minney was right: that was what Hilda did want. Whether she was borne to this decision on a gust of confidence caught from Barbara's serene approach to her ordeal, Eustace could not tell. But the fact was enough, and it was arranged that after an early tea Hilda should emerge from the shadows and make her bow to the sun.

Eustace had uprooted many of the bad habits that came from living in a wish-fed world; but one still clung to him: he did not know how long a thing would take, or if he did, he could not act upon his knowledge. Besides, the long bicycle-ride was to be his treat: a double treat, a twofold celebration, now that it also expressed his gratitude for Hilda liberated from her fears. So he started off a little sooner after luncheon than Miss Cherrington would have deemed quite wise—but what did a touch of indigestion matter to someone as strong as he was?—and climbing on to the bicycle by its charmingly archaic step (he was careful always to leave it in its lowest gear, for fear of strain), he rode up the hill beside the brown-faced houses. It was a sharp tug, and he found himself puffing; but now came a level bit, parallel with the cliff, and then the much gentler slope of Coronation Avenue. Mafeking, Ladysmith, Pretoria, Omdurman, Bulawayo, Rorke's Drift (Eustace always passed that smug villa with a mental absit omen: could its occupants have known what the name meant?), then a dash into Wales: Bryn Tirion and Plas Newydd, and then the highroad, the town's femoral artery, which led to Old Anchorstone, its parent. This was no longer the white road of his childhood: tarmac had restrained its diffuseness, and the hedges, though spotty with cigarette cartons, wore their autumn livery undefiled by dust.