Eustace and Hilda (41 page)

“Preserve me from safety matches, they always let one down,” said Barbara. “There you are, Jimmy,” she added, handing him the miniature stack. “Aren't you glad that you can't set yourself on fire?”

“Don't be too sure,” he said, pocketing the matches.

In the silence that followed this interchange, Miss Cherrington rose to her feet. “It's past ten o'clock,” she said, “and I think I shall leave you young people together. I'll just give Annie a hand with the washing-up. Good-night Barbara, good-night Hilda dear, you're looking a little tired. Don't stay up too late,” she said as she was going through the door.

The remark seemed to be addressed to all three of them.

Hilda looked at her watch. “I have got a bit of a headache,” she said, “I don't know why—I never have one, but I suppose it's the long day.”

They had moved into the passage. The door at the end stood open, and the unseen gas-fire shed a subdued but cheerful glow on the furniture of the room beyond.

“Oh, don't go yet,” said Barbara. “We can't spare you—can we, Jimmy?”

Jimmy said they could not.

“It's very kind of you,” said Hilda; “but I've got one or two letters I must write.”

“Oh, please stay up a little,” pleaded Barbara. “Aunt Sarah would think it was most incorrect to leave Jimmy and me alone together—she'd have a fit.”

“Then I'll tell her I'm going,” said Hilda, “and she can act accordingly. Good-night, Barbara. Good-night, Mr. Crankshaw.”

Barbara and Jimmy shut the drawing-room door and stood a little uncertainly in the glow of the gas-fire.

“What's to happen now?” asked Jimmy.

“Oh, I expect Aunt Sarah will come in,” said Barbara. “But it won't be for a little while yet. I can hear the plates rattling.”

She had regained her composure.

“You don't think she'll send your sister instead?”

“Oh no, Hilda's got a will of iron.”

“Perhaps neither of them will come.”

“They will if I scream.”

He saw her fingers with the red light showing through them. “Darling,” he said, and took them in his own.

E
USTACE
climbed up the steep concrete staircase that led rather unceremoniously from the busy pavement of Cornmarket Street into the premises of the Flat-iron Club.

He would have liked to go quicker, for he was anxious to see about the arrangements for the dinner, but he had been told he must not hurry upstairs. He was conscientiously law-abiding, and for him doctor's orders had the force of law.

There was no reason why he should not get completely better, they said, if he took things quietly. A muted, slow-motion existence had become habitual to Eustace; it was like living in a slight fog. But one day the fog would lift. Taking things quietly would have come easily to him if it had not been for the accompanying obligation to work hard. Neither the College nor his family nor his conscience seemed to think the two were incompatible.

For five months now, since Hilda's interview with the Master, from which his memory shied away, he had been trying to combine them, and not without success, his tutor said.

They could promise nothing, of course, but a First was not out of the question, if he went on as he was doing now. Well, not perhaps exactly as he was doing now, for now he was fulfilling his function as secretary of the Lauderdale, a society recruited from among the members of St. Joseph's, but one of which the Fellows of the College did not whole-heartedly approve.

Eustace had been secretary to several societies, more than one of which had died of inanition under his somewhat languid administration; but the Lauderdale, an old-established body with a long pre-war tradition, was too tough to succumb to his euthanasiac methods.

In front of the green-baize notice-board in the vestibule he paused. As usual he found nothing but announcements about the activities of the Flat-iron, and of other clubs, mostly athletic; but Eustace was haunted by the idea that one day a notice would be put up declaring him expelled for the infringement of some rule of which he had never heard. This notice he would fail to see, and continue to frequent the club until at last one member, deputed by the others, would lead him to the board and silently point out the fatal sentence. Nervously he scanned the rules, of which every member possessed a copy, but his attention generally gave out before he reached the end, and he was never sure if he was not violating numbers XIX, XX, or XXI.

Expulsion from the Flat (as it was affectionately called) did sometimes befall members who failed to pay their bills, but never for more recondite offences. Eustace would be the first to be turned out for having used its premises for the purpose, say, of some unlawful trade. It would be a terrible disgrace, second only to being sent down, and socially more damaging even than that.

Why, he wondered, turning into the club's familiar smoking-room, did human beings, the moment they banded together, have to invent all kinds of sanctions and taboos, designed to trip up the unwary? The room was empty; it was a little past six, the slack time between tea and dinner. He crossed over to a window-seat and watched the corners of Carfax, black with people. None of them looked up; none of them appeared to realise that here, only a few feet above them in mere physical altitude, was a summit of social eminence to which they could never attain. A feeling of warmth invaded Eustace's breast; he tried to banish it, but without success. The Flat-iron Club was often ridiculed by those who did not belong to it, and sometimes by those who did. A wag had said:

But all the same, membership of ‘the Flat' conferred distinction —a distinction that appeared to be as eagerly sought by the veterans of the war, still plentiful at the University, as by unfledged Freshmen. The desire for it was evidently something one did not grow out of. Over on the table lay the Candidates' Book. Eustace took it up, to see if there were any new names that might benefit by his support. He turned the pages. For those who knew how to read it, the book was something more than a social guide. By the number of signatures under a man's name you could tell just how popular he was; you could tell, too, who were his friends and, in some cases, who were his enemies. Here and there was a page defaced by the names, heavily and ostentatiously scratched out, but still legible, of those who had publicly and significantly changed their minds about their former protégés. How many stories had collected round their mutilated signatures, how many friendships had been broken by them! Only Proust, an author Eustace was beginning to feel he had read, could have done justice to the saga of slights, cuts, insults and vendettas that was apt to follow an unsuccessful flirtation with the Flat. But when Eustace tried to describe these dramas to Hilda, she proved a disappointing audience.

“Surely you don't go to Oxford to waste your time over that sort of thing?” she said, and then rather inconsequently asked if Stephen Hilliard was a member. When Eustace told her he hadn't wanted to be, she remarked with considerable satisfaction, “I knew he had some sense.” Barbara, on the other hand, was much more sympathetic; Barbara enjoyed talking about people and the way they behaved. But it was just after she had got engaged to Jimmy Crankshaw; and at the back of her mind, Eustace could tell, was the feeling that Jimmy had no part in anything that the Flat-iron Club stood for, and because of her loyalty to him she slightly resented its importance in Eustace's eyes. Of course, it's only important to me, thought Eustace uneasily, as a subject of conversation.

It was sad how the fact of not being able to share a joke separated one from people. Separated, of course, was too strong a word, but it created a frontier, a water-shed for experience, instead of a valley. Failure to see the same things as funny often meant a general failure to see eye to eye, because humour was common ground where the high-brow and the low-brow, the rich and the poor, could meet without self-consciousness.

Life at Oxford made one lazy about adjusting oneself, Eustace decided. The people who thought and felt alike drew together; and after that, within the circle, everyone was encouraged to be himself to the top of his bent. Eustace tried to cultivate the kind of remark his friends expected of him, and win the commendation ‘That's a typical Eustace'; but not always with success, for what they liked was something he was surprised into saying—it consisted in a kind of discrepancy between his view of a thing and the accepted view—and by no amount of trying could he surprise himself. The sally must be unself-conscious, and it was esoteric, it needed a trained audience.

Eustace the ingénu, the un-terrible enfant terrible, wouldn't go down well with the outside world, hadn't gone down well, he suspected, in spite of Barbara's protestations to the contrary, at her wedding. That had been on her eighteenth birthday, just before Christmas.

Jimmy had passed his examination, a job was in sight or just round the corner, and she would not wait. Aunt Sarah had counselled delay, she had even called upon Eustace, rather with the air of one invoking the support of a broken reed, to withhold his consent, or at any rate to speak to Barbara with the authority of an elder brother.

Full of distaste for his mission Eustace approached Barbara, to be greeted by a volley of the little screams with which she had been accustomed, from a baby, to receive any attempt to turn her from her purpose; so after some half-hearted efforts to put the practical objections to the marriage before her, he gladly subsided into the more grateful rôle of saying how heartily he approved, how glad he was for Barbara's sake, and how much he liked Jimmy. In this he was not insincere, for the sight of Barbara's happiness would have melted a harder heart than Eustace's, although she expressed it in trills and snatches of song, sudden gestures, agonised starts as if joy had run a pin into her, that were slightly shocking to his sense of fitness.

As for Jimmy, he was not at all like a character in Henry James, definitely a representative of the Better Sort rather than of the Finer Grain, but Eustace could not help warming to his friendliness and directness of approach. The possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding, of fire and misfire, that made social intercourse fascinating to Eustace did not exist for Jimmy, who brushed them aside much in the same way as his invariable tweed coat knocked over the little objects with which Eustace had too freely sprinkled the Willesden tables. He treated life like a machine that would go if set up properly and given plenty of oil and power. These both existed in his own nature; the power was steam rather than electricity, the oil was crude, but not sticky or glutinous. Messy Jimmy might be, but it was the messiness of the engine-room or the garage, a creative messiness inseparable from energy and movement, in the busy stir of which Eustace sometimes felt static and functionless and outmoded, but he did not mind that. Though he preferred the society of sympathetic people, he enjoyed the sense of the complementary, when the complementary was softened by goodwill, as it was in Jimmy's case. But it made him feel nervous and inadequate, like an accompanist who knows that more is expected of him than mere dovetailing, however adroit.

On the day of the wedding the sense of the complementary had been almost overpowering, principally perhaps because the Crankshaws, a vigorous and flourishing tribe, a symbol of increase and multiplication, so greatly outnumbered the Cherringtons, who had put out few branches, and not all of those could be mustered for the ceremony. Eustace had never had a diadem of aunts and uncles. His mother had been an only child; his father's eldest sister, Lucy, who had lived for many years in Germany as a kind of companion in the family to whom she had once been governess, returned to England before the war, and now lived in a boarding-house in Bournemouth. Eustace liked the idea of her: she had travelled, and used to send him picture postcards of the places she visited, but she had never got on with Aunt Sarah, who felt her to be half a foreigner, with alien ways of thinking. There were some distant cousins with whom they still exchanged Christmas cards, and whom they referred to by their Christian names, but the names had no personalities attached to them, and when their owners appeared at the wedding, as a few of them did, they had to introduce themselves. The circle of critics who continually asked each other, ‘What is Eustace doing?' without ever obtaining a satisfactory reply, existed chiefly in his imagination. Miss Cherrington had never been one to cultivate friends. She regarded them as something that no properly appointed household should be without, they had a place in the good housekeeping of life, but, like the best linen, they were not for everyday use.

Hilda's friends were fellow-workers in whatever field of endeavour she was engaged, and were united to her by nothing more personal than a common aim. Eustace brought to the wedding one or two friends of old standing, but much the largest contribution to the bride's party came from the bride herself—school friends whom the warmth of her nature kept within screaming-distance, and several young men, carefully chosen, to whom the inevitable disappointment of being present at Barbara's wedding to someone else would be less grievous than the disappointment of not being asked.

But, all told, the bride's contingent mustered hardly a score, several of whom were unknown to each other, whereas the bridegroom's following amounted to double that number, and gave the impression of being treble, so enormously did the exuberance of their personalities multiply the impact of their presence. Even in church, walking up the aisle with Barbara, buxom and blossomy, clinging to his arm, Eustace was aware of a blast of insurgent vitality, like an incitement to procreation, from the pews on his right, a shuffling, a rustling, a turning and nodding of expectant faces; whereas from the thin ranks on the left there was no such demonstration, only a discreet slewing of the eyes and then the attitude proper to church. Responsive to atmospheres, Eustace felt relaxed on one side and rigid on the other. He wondered how Barbara felt—Barbara so like him to look at, so unlike him in temperament.