Eustace and Hilda (40 page)

“‘Of course, we have our fashionable and expensive young men, and we're quite glad to have them and give them what they can absorb of the St. Joseph's outlook; their wealth and position give them influence in the outside world, and we like to keep in touch with that. It is they, by the way, whom your brother goes about with—naturally enough, for he knew some of them at school, and that is why some of us thought that the money he spends on wine-parties (don't look shocked) might be diverted into some (from the college point of view) more useful channel. I don't think they're really the right setting for him, and what I want you to do is to try to infuse into him some of the single-mindedness that you put into your work at the clinic—make him understand that life, either at the university or elsewhere, isn't just a matter of getting on easily with people and being called by a pet name.

“‘Can I rely on you to tell him something in that sense? It would come more effectively from you than from me—I should only alarm him, and he's rather easily alarmed. I may say that I shouldn't take so much trouble about him if I didn't like him.'

“With that he got up and said he was afraid he must bring our interview to an end, because he had an engagement, but he was glad I'd called and would always take an interest in our progress at Highcross. He took me as far as the Porter's Lodge, and then I went on to Beaumont Street. Eustace had just got back and was boiling the kettle for tea.”

“Well, you
were
in the soup!” exclaimed Barbara. “I should have died.”

“In the soup?” repeated Hilda. She might have been taking the expression literally, her voice showed so much astonishment. “Why? Nothing could have been simpler. I hadn't had time to forget. I told Eustace what the Master had said, word for word, just as I told you.”

“I hope you made him understand,” said Miss Cherrington.

“Oh yes.”

“How did he take it?” Barbara asked.

“Very well, all the part about working harder, and being less social, and not spending so much on wine. What he didn't seem to like was continuing to take the money for the scholarship after they had practically asked him to give it up. I said, ‘Nonsense.' I'd been over all that with the Master, and he was perfectly content for Eustace to keep it.

“Then Eustace was quiet for a bit, and I said, ‘What's bothering you now?' and he was silent in the way he is, but at last he said—‘Do you think the Master imagined that I had asked you to go and speak to him on my behalf and persuade him to let me keep the money?' And I said, ‘Of course not; why on earth should he think that?' But Eustace didn't seem quite satisfied and said, ‘Did you tell him you came off your own bat, so to speak?' Then I got a little impatient, and said, ‘What does it matter? Surely the main thing is that you should be allowed to keep the scholarship.'”

The front-door bell rang. Barbara jumped up. “That'll be Jimmy. I'll go and let him in.”

Hilda's eyes opened in surprise.

“It's Mr. Crankshaw,” said Miss Cherrington in a hurried aside. “A friend of Barbara's who—who comes sometimes.”

“What a bore!” said Hilda. “Well, I've told you all I had to tell. Eustace'll be all right now—and that's what I mind about.”

Jimmy Crankshaw was a tall, loosely built young man, with dark eyes, a shade too round, a wide mouth obviously intended for the pipe which he presently asked if he might smoke, and strong brown hair which had a way of gathering itself into tufts. He was wearing an old coat and flannel trousers that looked precariously clean, as if they waged a constant war against grease and this was a fleeting moment of victory.

“So glad to meet you,” he said to Hilda, giving her a look of friendly appraisal. “Barbara's often told me about her beautiful sister.”

Hilda resigned herself to the tribute, and, as though encounters of this kind were all in the day's work, she said:

“I expect you know more about us than we know about you, Mr. Crankshaw.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Barbara defiantly. “Aunt Sarah and I know a lot about him, don't we, Aunt Sarah?”

Thus appealed to, Miss Cherrington cast about in her mind for a form of reply that would reconcile truth with the civility owing to a guest.

“Only just now Barbara was telling me what a busy man you are, Mr. Crankshaw,” she said. “That's a good mark for anyone.”

Barbara looked gratefully at Miss Cherrington and glanced across at Hilda to see what effect this unobjectionable testimonial would have on her.

“We're all busy nowadays,” said Hilda, “and I'm glad to hear you're no exception, Mr. Crankshaw. What kind of busyness is it in your case?”

“Only just engineering, I'm afraid,” said Mr. Crankshaw, though his voice, to Barbara's relief, expressed no kind of diffidence. “But I'm doing a bit of pot-hunting and have to attend classes and pow-wows in the evening, that's why I couldn't get here before.”

“Don't trouble to apologise, Jimmy,” said Barbara; “we were having a little family conclave about my brother Eustace. You wouldn't have been able to join in.”

“How do you know?” asked Jimmy. “I might have had some very valuable advice to offer. I'm a practical man, and I gather your brother's a bit of a dreamer.”

Hilda rose and began to collect the coffee cups, making a sharp clatter.

“You mustn't say that sort of thing,” said Barbara. “Hilda won't let anyone criticise Eustace except herself.”

“I wasn't criticising him,” said Jimmy indignantly. “It isn't criticising to call anyone a dreamer.”

“Of course not,” said Miss Cherrington, taking up the cudgels for their guest. “In any case, none of us is exempt from criticism. It should not be unkind, of course. Eustace often needs direction, and we have all helped him with advice from time to time in a friendly way. I don't think he is silly enough to resent it.”

Miss Cherrington's voice implied that he might be.

“Now I vote we stop talking about Eustace,” said Barbara. “There ought to be a close season for discussions about him. It's a kind of game. When Jimmy knows him he'll be able to take part, and say, ‘I think Eustace ought to have done
this
'—when he fell out of the punt, for instance, and couldn't decide which bank to swim for—or, ‘Eustace was quite crazy to do that'—when he forgot to put on his muffler watching a Cockhouse match and caught a bad cold. Let's pick on Jimmy for a change. Isn't his tie a bit startling?”

Three pairs of eyes were switched on Mr. Crankshaw, and though they were swiftly withdrawn, their scrutiny left his face even redder than the tie.

“You'd think he was a Bolshevik, wouldn't you?” Barbara went on. “And of course he is, really, though he wouldn't dare to confess it here.”

Mr. Crankshaw folded his arms and scanned the faces arrayed against him—Barbara's teasing and cheeky, Miss Cherrington's fast losing all expression—a bad sign, and Hilda's, the beauty of which, he fancied, had begun to burn with a deeper glow. He decided to address himself to her.

“I'm not a Bolshevik, Miss Hilda,” he protested, “and the tie doesn't mean anything—Barbara ought to know that, because she gave it to me.”

“It isn't very kind to say that a tie I gave you doesn't mean anything,” said Barbara, pouting. “I shall think twice before I give you another.”

“They say women are never good at choosing men's ties,” said Hilda, giving Jimmy's tie another searching look. “Some people might think it makes you look like a railway porter, but of the two I would rather look like a Bolshevik. They do stand for something.”

“There, you see!” cried Jimmy triumphantly.

“Mind you, I don't agree with what they stand for,” Hilda continued, leaning her elbow on the table and shaking her clenched hand at Jimmy, who recoiled slightly. “They think a thing becomes right if enough people can be persuaded to do it. They have no sense of personal moral responsibility. I hope you're not like that.”

“Oh no,” said Jimmy, recovering himself. “But I believe in sharing it. Too much moral responsibility does no one any good. Now a country, or a firm, or any undertaking that depends on one man—what's going to happen to it if he falls ill or dies?”

“It may come to an end,” said Hilda. “But you must remember that it was his creation, and without him it wouldn't have existed. It wasn't created by sharing responsibility. Now if I died, the clinic at Highcross——”

Jimmy's eyes, which had wandered during Hilda's excursus on the subject of responsibility, suddenly brightened.

“I was reading about it in the paper,” he said. “And there is a picture of you, too.” He brought out his notecase and, wedged between some photographs only the edges of which could be seen, he found the cutting. “Brains, Beauty and Benevolence at Highcross,” he read.

“That's one I haven't seen,” said Hilda. They all got up and stared at the face as if it were a stranger's—as indeed it might have been, for without her colouring and with her severest expression Hilda looked thirty-seven instead of twenty-seven.

“Not bad, is it?” said Jimmy. “But you certainly do seem to have the cares of the world on you. Did you start the clinic from zero, Miss Cherrington?”

“Well, I transformed it,” said Hilda. “I met with a lot of opposition from the directors, but now I've got them where I want them, more or less. We're going to extend, of course.”

Barbara was still studying the photograph. “Aunt Sarah and I resent your being called ‘The beautiful Miss Cherrington,'” she said. “It sounds as if the other Miss Cherringtons were not. You wouldn't agree, would you, Jimmy?”

“Beauty runs in families,” Jimmy said.

“Now for that he shall have a whisky and soda, shan't he, Aunt Sarah?” said Barbara, getting up and pouncing upon the decanter. “And I'll light the gas-fire in the drawing-room, because it's too dismal sitting round this empty board.”

She disappeared, leaving the door open. A sharp pop was heard, and Jimmy said, “That's singed her eyebrows,” but otherwise no one spoke. Barbara returned, her face a little red from the encounter with the gas-fire.

“Now you must all talk brilliantly for two minutes,” she said, “while the room warms. Hilda has talked a great deal, I have filled in the awkward silences, Aunt Sarah likes to listen, so we'll call on Jimmy.”

Jimmy gulped down some whisky and said, “Shall I give you a demonstration?”

“Oh yes!” cried Barbara.

“That would be most interesting,” said Aunt Sarah, courteously.

“Yes, but don't blow us all up,” said Hilda.

“Well, I shall need some matches.”

“Oh no, not a match-trick!” said Barbara. “Just because he's a budding engineer, he thinks he can treat us like children. We want something scientific, with hydrogen and nitrogen and H2O and square-roots and logarithms and sines and co-sines.”

“I'm not a chemist or a mathematician,” said Jimmy, gaining confidence, “but I don't mind betting you won't be able to see how this is done until I show you. Now give me some matches, Barbara, there's a good girl.”

“You a pipe-smoker, and ask for matches!” cried Barbara in pretended indignation.

“Well, I've only got five left, and this needs twelve.... Here, don't come so close,” for Barbara, having furnished the matches, was now bending over him. “The others can't see through your thick head.”

“I was only watching to make sure you didn't cheat,” said Barbara.

“Now, ladies,” Jimmy announced in his rather loud voice, “here is the problem—to say with twelve matches what matches are made of. Two minutes allowed.”

With a professional gesture Jimmy pulled back his sleeves over clean but crumpled cuffs, and began to lay out the matches to the accompaniment of a good deal of patter, which Barbara mimicked from time to time. Keeping an eye on the changing dispositions of the matches, Miss Cherrington watched the group a little anxiously. In ordinary times she would have thought attention given to a match-trick worse than wasted. She did not think so now, but she thought that Hilda might. Hilda had moved round to Jimmy's other side, where she could see the play of the matches. Once or twice she bent forward to move a match, but most of the time she seemed to be looking down on the two heads, the fair and the dark, with an expression her aunt found difficult to decipher. It was quite unlike her to be interested in anything so frivolous as this; but once, when Barbara with an exclamation of impatience, knocked Jimmy's hand away, she thought she saw Hilda smile.

“Now the two minutes are over,” said Jimmy, straightening himself. “You've all had a fair chance. Do you give it up?”

They said they did.

“Then I'll show you,” said Jimmy, and letter by letter a word grew under his fingers: LOVE.

“Oh, how silly,” cried Barbara, shaking her head and sighing heavily. “You haven't taken us in, you've just wasted our time, hasn't he, Hilda?”

Hilda did not answer.

“Not so silly as to think a match could be made of elm,” said Jimmy. “You try lighting your gas-fire with an elmwood match, you'll be a long time at it.”

“And should I succeed any better if I tried with a love-match?” demanded Barbara.

“That's not for me to say,” said Jimmy with a laugh. “I don't know how inflammable your gas-fire is.”

“Well, anyhow, let's go to it now—should we, Aunt Sarah?” said Barbara. “But first give me back those matches. I don't like your thieving ways.”

“May I have them for a keepsake, if I promise not to strike them?” said Jimmy.

“May he, Aunt Sarah?” said Barbara.

“Of course. But they're safety matches, and won't strike without the box,” said Miss Cherrington seriously.