Eustace and Hilda (19 page)

To the sound of voices in the room above was added the thud of feet and other noises less easy to identify. Volleys of bath-water cascaded past the window, and the smell of cooking, never quite extinct at Cambo, poured through invisible openings and mingled with the perfume of Mr. Cherrington's cigar. Supper couldn't be far off, supper under the gas-mantle that still needed changing, cold supper except for the vegetable which was now announcing itself as cabbage. Just time for another glass. It was his fourth, and it brought Mr. Cherrington a degree of resolution that neither he nor his sister knew that he possessed. When they rose a few minutes later he had carried the day. Eustace was to have Miss Fothergill's legacy but, in deference to his aunt's wishes, he was not to be told of his inheritance or how it would affect his future.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the bath-room, another conversation was in progress. It was more than a year now since Eustace had been promoted to taking his bath alone. At first he viewed the privilege with dismay, it was fraught with so many dangers. The taps were of a kind that would turn interminably either way without appreciably affecting the flow of water. Even grown-up people, threatened with a scalding or a mortal chill, lost their heads, distrusted the evidence of their senses, and applied to the all-too-responsive taps a frantic system of trial and error. And there were many other things that might go wrong. Eustace no longer feared that he would be washed down the waste-pipe when the plug was pulled out, but he had once put his foot over the hole and the memory of the sudden venomous tug it gave still alarmed him. If his whole leg were sucked in he might be torn in two. The fear that the bath-water might overflow, sink into the floor and dissolve it, and let him down into the drawing-room, the accident costing his father several hundred pounds, was too rational to scare Eustace much, though it sometimes occurred to him; but he had conceived another terror more congenial to his temperament. The whitish enamel of the bath was chipped in places, disclosing patches of a livid blue. These spots represented cities destined for inundation. Each had a name, but the name was changed according to Eustace's fancy. Sometimes a single submersion satisfied his lust for destruction, but certain cities seemed almost waterproof and could be washed out time after time without losing their virtue. Those he cared about least came lowest in the bath, and as the upper strata of sacrifice were reached so Eustace's ecstasy mounted. When at last, after much chilly manipulation of the taps, the water rose to Rome, his favourite victim, the spirit of the tidal wave possessed him utterly. But he rarely allowed himself this indulgence, for above Rome, not much above, an inch perhaps, there was another spot, the Death-Spot. If the water so much as licked the Death-Spot Eustace was doomed.

But to-night he was not to be alone. As a special privilege Minney was coming to tell him about the funeral. He had asked her about it the moment she got back, but she was busy and kept putting him off. “You don't want to hear about funerals,” she said more than once. But Eustace did want to hear, and he obscurely resented the suggestion that he was too young to know about such things. Yet his nerves quailed before the ordeal. A mixed feeling of eagerness and dread possessed him which increased with every moment that Minney did not come.

He had lost count of the days between his last visit to Miss Fothergill and her death. They could not have been many, for he was told that she had never recovered consciousness, a phrase he did not fully understand, though it oppressed his spirits with its heavy importance, its air of finality, the insuperable barrier it placed between his imagination and Miss Fothergill. That warm region of thought, which for the past year she had furnished with objects delightful to contemplate and ideas that were exciting to follow, had seemed a gift for ever. Now she had died and taken it with her. The blinds were down, they said, at Laburnum Lodge, cheerful tradesmen no longer whistled their way to the back door, the postman had cut the house out of his rounds, all signs of life had stopped. Unused, the oak gate dropped still further on its hinges, soon the catch would be rusted to the socket, and to get in one would have to climb over, but only bold errand boys would dare to do that. ‘I shall never go that way again,' thought Eustace. ‘I shall keep the other side, the lighthouse side, and the cliffs and the sands. And at least once a week I shall go to Old Anchorstone churchyard and put flowers on her grave.'

That grave was much in his thoughts. He had not seen it, for they had discouraged him from going to the funeral; they had not actually forbidden it, nothing seemed to have been forbidden him since Miss Fothergill's death. This added to his sense of strangeness, as if a familiar landmark, a warning to trespassers, for instance, had been suddenly taken down. She had not died, he was told, while he was with her; he must not worry over it, the hand he had held was not a dead person's hand. For a moment Eustace breathed more freely, though his sense of importance suffered: to have held the hand of a dead person was a unique distinction. No child of his age that she had ever known, Minney told him, had enjoyed such an experience, and Eustace, who already had a passion for records, felt disappointed, when he did not feel relieved, at having missed this one. He would have liked to boast of it a little, even if it was not quite a record, but they did not seem to want to hear him, and Hilda, whom he had obliged to listen, reminded him that he was crying when Alice brought him home.

But all the same she was impressed, he could see that, and she had been very kind to him this afternoon when the house had been emptied of its grown-up occupants and he and she had been left alone to look after Barbara, whose spirits were even higher than usual and who could not understand that this was no time for climbing about on chairs and bursting into peals of insensate laughter. Eustace thought she ought to have worn some sign of mourning, a black bow on her pinafore, perhaps, since her hair was too short to hold one; but this idea was not taken up. He himself had a black tie and a black band sewn on his sleeve. He looked forward to wearing them out of doors. Strangers would ask each other, ‘Who is that little boy who seems to have suffered such a terrible loss?' and perhaps stop him and ask him too. And his friends—but then who were his friends? Not Nancy Steptoe, the belle of Anchorstone; painfully, conscientiously law-abiding now, he had not spoken to her since the day of the paper-chase. More than once, when he raised his hat to her, she had looked as though she would like to stop, her eyebrows lifted in a question, her mouth half smiled, but Eustace with averted head had passed on. And now she hardly recognised him, and her friends of whom she was the acknowledged queen, followed suit. Dick Staveley? But since Christmas Dick Staveley had made no sign. Lost in the vast recesses of Anchorstone Hall, moving beneath towering ceilings and among innumerable sofas, he carried on a glorious existence from which, even in imagination, Eustace felt himself shut out. If only Hilda had taken more kindly to his proposal to teach her horsemanship! There she was in her dark blue dress, the nearest thing to black her wardrobe afforded, her long legs making an ungainly V, her drooping head forming with her bent back the question mark that Minney so often deplored, when she might have been with Dick careering over the sands to the sound of thundering hoofs, while Eustace, standing on a rock or other safe eminence, acted as a kind of winning-post. ‘Hilda wins by a head!'—but no. In vain to evoke this thrilling picture, in vain to imagine a life of action, of short-breathed emotions among radiant and care-free companions, quickly entered into and as quickly over. Disabled by the cruel reality of the paper-chase, that dream had fluttered with a broken wing; and then Miss Fothergill had almost exorcised it, Miss Fothergill who sweetened life by taking away its rough surfaces and harsh pressures, who collected in her drawing-room, where they could be enjoyed without effort, without competition and without risk, treasures that one side of Eustace's nature prized more dearly than the headier excitements of physical experience. Indeed, she had come to mean to him all those aspirations that overflowed the established affection and routine employments of his life at Cambo; she was the outside world to him and the friends he had in it; his pioneering eye looked no further than Laburnum Lodge, the magnetic needle of his being fixed itself on Miss Fothergill.

Now, lying in the bath, waiting for Minney, he was aware not only of the pure pain her loss had caused but also of the threatening aspect of the outside world, fuming and coiling above its shattered foundations. And as often happened, his sense of general peril sharpened into a particular dread. ‘Supposing I was the City of Rome,' he thought, ‘and the tidal wave was really somebody else, perhaps Hilda, then it would kill me and without ever touching the Death-Spot at all.'

He scanned the sides of the bath. Rome was still high and dry; the inundation had only reached Odessa, which had been flooded out many times without giving Eustace any intimate feeling of power. Would it not be better, on this ominous evening, to be on the safe side, and let some of the water out? To do so would be to convict himself of cowardice; it was a course that, if persisted in, Eustace realised, might end in his not being able to have a bath at all; but surely when Fate seemed so active round him, it was allowable to make a small concession, to safeguard his peace of mind? He leaned forward to reach the chain, so intent on outwitting destiny that he did not hear the door open.

“Well!” exclaimed Minney, her business-like tones heavily charged with apology. “Am I so late? Have you finished? Were you just going to get out?”

Eustace recoiled from the chain into a supine posture, and to recover his self-possession began to pat the water with his hands.

“No,” he said mournfully, “I was only going to let some of the water out, that's all.”

“Why, bless the boy,” said Minney, bustling forward, “you haven't got half enough as it is. Do you want to be left with a high-water mark?” So saying she turned on both the taps; two boisterous undiscriminating torrents poured in, as though eager to wipe out all Eustace's landmarks. She was wearing a white apron over her black dress; it looked like a surplice. Through the steam he could see that her rather sparse honey-coloured hair was pulled back tighter and done more carefully than usual.

“I didn't have time to change,” she said. “Barbara's been up to all sorts of tricks. She
is
a little monkey.”

Eustace felt too depressed to ask what Barbara had been doing; but he was interested in her state of mind, which already showed signs of independence.

“Did she say she was sorry?” he asked.

“No, you can't make her say she's sorry, you know that quite well. She just laughs, or she screams. Now, where are you dirtiest? Shall I do your face first, and get it over?”

Taking the flannel she leaned forward and screwing her face up bent on Eustace a look of ferocious scrutiny. He saw that her eyes were red.

“Why, you've been crying,” he said.

“Well, can't I cry sometimes?” Minney brushed away a tear as she spoke. “You often do.”

A note of interrogation hung almost palpably between them.

“Did the funeral make you feel very sad?” asked Eustace.

“Oh well—it did a little, but not much; it was such a lovely day, for one thing. The sun shone all the time.”

Under Minney's vigorous ministrations Eustace was perforce silent. When she had finished wiping his eyes he said:

“I watched you all get into the carriage. Mr. Craddock was in black too. And the horse was black. He's called Nightmare. Mr. Craddock once told me so.”

“It's a she,” said Minney. “And she can't help being in black you know. She hasn't anything else to wear. She would be in black for a wedding too.”

Eustace smiled wanly at this pleasantry.

“Did you walk all the way?”

“Oh no. Just up the hill through the town. When we got to the high road, away from the houses, we began to trot. Now give me your left hand. What
have
you been doing?
You're
in black and no mistake.”

“Did you pass Anchorstone Hall?” asked Eustace.

“No, you ought to remember, you can only drive through the park on Thursdays. We went down the white road, as you used to call it, and one of those nasty motor things came by and smothered us in dust. The road follows the park wall round. Of course you can see the chimneys over the top of the trees—those tall chimneys, they're more like turrets, and you can see a bit of the house from the church door. Now give me your other hand. Oh! What a blackamoor!”

“Was Dick Staveley there?” asked Eustace, passively extending his right hand.

“Just as we drove up he was coming through that old-fashioned stone gateway that leads into the park. So pretty it is, all carved. And there's a pond in front of the church, do you remember that, with trees round one side and ducks swimming about? They sounded so cheerful, all quacking away.”

“Did you talk to Dick?” Eustace asked, trying to make Minney's picture fit in with his very hazy recollections of Old Anchorstone Church.

“Oh no, his mother and father were with him, you see, and a young lady who might have been his sister, and several more, quite a party they were. He bowed to us and took off his top hat. You don't talk to people going into church. We followed them in but they went right up in front, to a pew in the chancel.”

“And when did Miss Fothergill arrive? Or was she there already?”

Minney started.

“Why, what questions you ask. Now bend forward and I'll give your back a scrub. What a good thing you don't use it as much as your hands.... No, she wasn't there then.”

“Was she in Heaven?”

“Yes, I expect so. Only they had to bury her body, you see, and that was outside the church door, in the coffin. They carried it in afterwards, down the aisle with the clergyman walking in front and the choir singing.”