Eustace and Hilda (28 page)

He glanced at the figures, only a moment since engraved with so much pride and excitement. They looked ill made, sprawling. No wonder Hilda had found fault with them. Divide by two, divide by two. Yes, there it was, the division, the simple piece of division, that had been so fatal to happiness. Supposing the sand was a slate, how easy it would be to wipe those figures off! And in a way it was a slate, for here was the sea crawling up to blot out what he had written. It was not too late to change his mind.

Hilda was a girl who didn't care much for money. When her brother Eustace wanted her to share his fortune with her, she made him do a lot of sums. She did not understand that that's not what money's for. It's for more important things like hunting and shooting and going abroad. You can do sums without having money, in fact if you have money you needn't do sums, you can pay someone else to do them. Eustace offered Hilda half his money, but all she did was to make him practise writing eights. So he said, ‘I've changed my mind, I don't think I'll give you the money after all and you can be a governess as Aunt Sarah said.' And Hilda said, ‘Oh, Eustace, I am so sorry I made you do the eights, after you had been so generous to me. Please, please let me have the money; I don't at all want to be a governess. I shall be terribly homesick and lonely, and they will all be very unkind to me, and say I am not teaching the children in the right way because I haven't been to school or got any degrees. Please, please, Eustace, remember how we were children together.' But Eustace said, ‘I'm afraid it's no good, Hilda, you see I never change my mind twice.' Then Hilda said, ‘Oh, but you've written it down, it's a promise and you can't break a promise.' But Eustace pointed to the sea and said, smiling, ‘I'm afraid there won't be much left of my promise in a few minutes' time.' Then Hilda began to cry and said, ‘Oh, how can you be so cruel?' but Eustace didn't listen because he had a heart of stone.

Strengthened and emboldened by this meditation, Eustace turned resolutely to Hilda who had taken up her spade and was negligently dashing off some very accurate eights.

“I suppose if only one person had the money, it would go on being a thousand a year till he was seventy-eight?”

“Yes,” said Hilda, without looking up. “It would. I should keep it all if I were you. Don't bother about me. Let's pretend we were just doing a sum for fun.” She made another eight, more infuriatingly orthodox than the last.

This was not at all what Eustace had bargained for. His newly found firmness of purpose began to ooze out of him. Still, the pleasures of vindictiveness, once tasted, are not easily put aside.

“Should you mind being a governess very much?” he asked. It occurred to him that she genuinely might not mind.

“I dare say I shouldn't really,” said Hilda. “It would depend what the children were like. They might not be so easy to manage as you are. Of course I'd rather go to school, but as you won't be here in any case, it doesn't matter much what I do.”

Eustace had to admit to himself that this was a handsome speech, and the more he thought about it the handsomer it seemed. Revenge died in his heart and was replaced by a glow of another kind. He looked at Hilda. Poised, doubtless, over another superlative eight, she stood with her back to him; on her worn blue dress where she had been sitting on the rock were seaweed and the stains of seaweed. The sight touched him as he was always touched when her habitual command over circumstances showed signs of breaking down. The taste of pride was sour in his mouth. He must make her a peace offer.

“Let me see if I can do an eight like one of yours,” he said placatingly.

Assuming her air of judgement Hilda watched him do it.

“Not at all bad,” she pronounced. “You're improving.”

The stretch of sand on which they stood now bore the appearance of a gigantic ledger, but towards the middle there was still a space left, a vacant lot shaped like a shield, which challenged Eustace's feeling for symmetry and completeness. “I'm going to draw something,” he announced. He moved over to the virgin patch and began to make a design on it. After a minute or two's work he drew back and studied the result, sucking his lower lip.

“What's that?” asked Hilda.

“You'll see in a moment.”

He returned to his sketch and added a few lines.

“I still don't see what it is,” said Hilda.

“It's meant to be a heart. A heart isn't very easy to draw.”

“And what's that sticking through it?”

“That's an arrow. Look, I'll put some more feathers on its tail.” Eustace got to work again and the tail was soon almost as long as the shaft and the head combined. “Now I'll just make its point a little sharper.”

“I shouldn't touch it any more if I were you,” said Hilda, proffering the advice given to so many artists. “You're making the lines too thick. A heart doesn't have all those rough edges.”

“It might be bleeding, from the arrow. I'll put in a few drops of blood falling from the tip and making a little pool.” Formed of small round particles rising to a peak in the middle, the pool of blood looked far from fluid.

“Those drops look more like money than blood,” said Hilda.

“They might be money as well as blood—blood-money,” said Eustace, trying to defend his draughtsmanship. “There is such a thing, isn't there?”

“Yes, it's what you pay for freedom if you're held in bondage,” Hilda told him.

Eustace turned this over in his mind. “I don't think I want that. Blood looks better than money in a picture because it's a prettier colour. I never saw a picture with money in it.”

“You haven't seen all the pictures there are,” said Hilda. “There might be one of the thirty pieces of silver.”

“No, because Judas kept them in a bag so they shouldn't be seen,” said Eustace glibly. This was one of those border-line remarks which he sometimes allowed himself when in a sanguine mood. The statement couldn't be disproved, so it wouldn't count as a lie even if he wasn't sure it was true.

“But have you ever seen a picture with blood in it?” asked Hilda.

“Oh yes,” said Eustace. “Bible pictures are often bloody.” He felt there was something wrong with this as soon as he said it, and Hilda left him in no doubt.

“Daddy told you not to use that word,” she cautioned him. “It's wicked and besides you might get taken up.”

“I meant blood-stained,” said Eustace hastily, and hoping the alternative had not jumped into his mind too late to avert the sin of blasphemy. Crime was much less heinous. “Only here, in this picture,” he hurried on, as though by changing the subject he might conceal his slip from powers less vigilant than Hilda, “I haven't made the drops run into each other properly. I'll put in some more. There, that's better. But wait, I haven't finished yet.”

He walked backwards and fixed on the diagram a scowl of terrifying ferocity. “I think this is how I'll do it. Don't look for a minute. Shut your eyes.”

Obediently Hilda screwed her eyes up. A long time seemed to pass. At length she heard Eustace's voice say, “You can look now.” This is what she saw:

“You understand what it means, don't you?” asked Eustace anxiously.

“Yes, I suppose I do. Thank you, Eustace.”

“That's the right sign for pounds, isn't it, an L with a cross?”

“It ought to have two, but one does almost as well.”

Eustace felt pleased at being so nearly right.

“I had to make the arrow-head pointing at you,” he said, “because, you see, it was going that way already, and I couldn't alter it. And of course it's bringing you the money. But it won't hurt you, at least I hope not, although I drew it at a venture. I don't think it will, do you? You see, it isn't touching you.”

“A sand-arrow couldn't hurt me, silly,” said Hilda. “Besides, it's crooked. But I don't think Aunt Sarah would like us to write our names up anywhere. She's always been strict about that.”

Eustace looked troubled.

“I know what I'll do. I'll rub out all of our names except the capital letters.” He scrabbled on the sand with his foot. “Now it just says E to H.”

Thus edited, the diagram looked at once intimate and anonymous.

“Which of our hearts is it?” asked Hilda, after giving Eustace time to admire the beauty of his handiwork.

“Well, I meant it to belong to both of us,” said Eustace, “I ought to have drawn two, perhaps, but I didn't quite know how to make them fit. If you like you can imagine another heart at the back of this one, exactly the same size. It would be there though you couldn't see it. Then the arrow would go through both and then of course they would be joined for ever. Unless you would rather think of us as just having one heart, as I meant before.”

“I think there had better be two,” said Hilda, “because your heart is weaker than mine. I mean, you strained it once, didn't you?—and they might not beat quite together.”

“Very well,” said Eustace. “I'll make a shadow here to show there's something behind.” He took up his spade.

“Now the heart looks as if it had grown a beard,” said Hilda, laughing. “It's getting old, I'm afraid. How about the time? Oh, Eustace, it's one o'clock already. We must hurry. You won't be able to count the steps.” They set off towards the cliffs.

“Let's stay here just a minute,” panted Eustace as they reached the summit. “I want to get my breath and I want to see what's happened while we were coming up.”

They paused, ignoring the stale challenge of the automatic machines, and clasped the railings with which the cliff, at this point, had been prudently fortified. How comforting, after all their tremors and uncertainties, was the feel of the concrete under their feet and the iron between their hands. They had to cling on, or the wind, shooting up the cliff with hollow thuds and mighty buffets, might have blown them over. Hilda's head over-topped the railings but Eustace still had to peer through. Putting on their watch-dog faces they scanned the rock-strewn shore. From here the waves looked disappointingly small, but every now and then the wind-whipped sea shivered darkly over its whole expanse. It was coming in with a vengeance; like many other creeping things it made more headway when one's back was turned.

“Look, Hilda,” cried Eustace, “it's all covered up! All the bit that the horses kicked up has gone, and our hearts have gone too! You wouldn't know we had ever been there. It's just as though nothing had happened all the morning—the longest morning we ever spent on the sands!”

“There's still a bit of the pond left that we didn't finish,” said Hilda, “and our footmarks coming away from it.”

“They'll soon be gone too,” said Eustace.

“Now don't stand staring any longer,” said Hilda. “We ought to be home by now. Come on, let's run.”

They started off, and Eustace was soon left behind.

“Don't go quite so fast, please, Hilda,” he called after her. “I can't keep up with you.”

He made the appeal for form's sake, not expecting her to heed it; but to his surprise he saw her slow down and then stop. When he came up with her she held out her hand and said a little self-consciously:

“Let's pretend we're having a three-legged race.”

Overjoyed, Eustace took her hand and they stood looking at each other inquiringly, as if they had just met for the first time, fellow-competitors measuring each other's strength.

“Who would it be against?” Eustace asked.

Hilda dropped his hand and thought a moment. She was never quick at choosing players to fill imaginary rôles.

“Well, the Steptoes perhaps. They always want taking down a peg. But anyone you like, really. The whole world.”

At the ring of this comprehensive challenge Eustace seemed to see cohorts of competitors swarming on the cliff and overflowing into the Square. Many of them, in flagrant disregard of the rules of the race, were mounted on horses.

“What will the prize be, if we win?” he asked.

“Of course we shall win,” said Hilda. “Won't that be enough for you? You think too much about prizes. Prizes are only for games.”

“But isn't this a game?” said Eustace, who always dreaded the moment when practice ended and performance began.

“You can think so if you like,” said Hilda. “I shall pretend it's real.... Now where's my handkerchief?”

She brought it out of her pocket, fingered it for a moment, then stuffed it hastily back, but not before Eustace had noticed how sodden and crumpled it was.

“I'm afraid mine's too small,” she said. “Give me yours if you haven't lost it. You don't mind if it gets pulled about a bit, do you? It isn't one of your best.”

Protesting that he didn't mind, Eustace aligned his foot with Hilda's. Sinking on to one knee she passed the handkerchief round their ankles.