Eustace and Hilda (61 page)

They walked in silence under the chestnuts, then Victor said:

“A chap I know told me he heard you read a paper at Oxford—something about Nineteenth-century Mystics.”

“Oh, did he?” exclaimed Eustace.

“I said he couldn't have, because there weren't any.”

“Well, not perhaps in the sense that St. Teresa of Avila was a mystic,” said Eustace cautiously.

“Anyhow, he said it was a damned good paper.”

This simple statement changed Eustace's whole outlook. He had misjudged Victor. Far from being just a man at the Foreign Office, and a supercilious one, he had a fine, sensitive spirit which he concealed from all but Eustace. Would it be safe to pursue the mystic way with him?

Eustace thought not, but ventured to say:

“There was Emily Brontë, for instance.”

“‘No coward soul is mine'—and all that.” Victor's habitual languor of utterance was so markedly at variance with Emily's spirit, that Eustace could hardly suppress a smile.

“Well,” he said diffidently, “I think ‘Last Lines' is more onto-logical than mystical—she had outgrown her mysticism when she wrote that.”

“Good Lord, what words you use. I don't know what mysticism is, but can you grow out of it, like a weak chest or a tendency to chilblains?”

“Wordsworth thought so,” said Eustace. “In the ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality'”—he stopped to clear his voice of didacticism—“of course Wordsworth was speaking of nature mysticism; Christian mysticism is different—it's an aspect of faith, I suppose—and perhaps you couldn't grow out of that unless you lost your faith. But nature mysticism may fade into the light of common day, or even be choked, I should think, by hard facts that stop up the outlets of the soul.”

“Quoting from your paper?” said Victor, genially suspicious.

Eustace blushed.

“Well, the last little bit.”

“You say that hard facts may—er—stop up the outlets of the soul.” Victor's voice, like a pair of tongs, dangled the phrase distastefully. “But what I don't understand is this. Isn't mysticism a way of escaping from hard facts, and the harder they are don't they the more confirm the mystic in his mysticism?”

Eustace heaved a sigh. “In some cases they may. But not all mystics are unhappy, or driven to mysticism by unhappiness. Blake was a very happy man, and St. Teresa was a very practical woman, not in the least afraid of facts. But all mystics have a commutative faculty in the mind which enables them, at the moment of vision, to be unconscious of all facts, or rather all facts but one. If they were conscious of the smallest fact, a toe-nail, for instance, separate from the experience, they would lose the experience. What I meant was, that a fact might become too—too self-assertive to yield to the mind's transforming quality. Then you could have no sense of union with reality, because reality would be tethered, so to speak, to the fact, whatever it was.”

“Do you speak from experience?” asked Victor, swinging his racquet at an imaginary ball.

“Oh no,” said Eustace. “I have no claim whatever to be a mystic. My sense of external reality is imperfect, so they tell me, but that's not at all the same thing.” Just a blind creature, he thought, moving about in a world not realised. He laughed awkwardly. Victor's unlooked-for sympathy had surprised him out of his usual reticence, and he wondered what this conversation would sound like if reported to Dick.

“That's what I shall say when I miss the ball”—Victor gave Eustace a sidelong glance. “‘Excuse me, but my sense of external reality is imperfect.' I must be a mystic, for I have a sense of complete union with the ball when it's not there.” He leaned forward and swooped into another imaginary drive.

They came to a gate in the belt of chestnuts. “Here we are,” said Victor, “on the threshold of reality.”

The court lay immediately before them, a terracotta expanse flickering behind wire-netting. At the far end, by the little pavilion, two small boys, in attitudes of intense absorption, were bouncing the balls up and down apparently to see which could make them bounce the highest.

“It's easy to tell Sir John isn't here,” said Victor. “By God, I'll have their blood.” His voice betrayed no anxiety to execute his threat, and at their approach the boys, with an admirable blend of dignity and haste, dissociated themselves from their game, and the smaller one began to walk down the court in an aloof manner, whistling unconcernedly at the sky.

Once inside the netting Eustace experienced the exciting renewal of personality that a tennis-court always gave him. He was on trial again, and though the sensation was not altogether pleasant, something in him welcomed it. He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. A boy advanced, and with a measuring eye bounced two balls towards him.

“Do you like three, sir?” He spoke in an awed voice, as though to Wilding or Tilden or Norman Brookes. Eustace shook his head and called across the net to Victor:

“I'm awfully bad, you know.”

“We all say that,” said Victor. “I expect you're a dark horse really.”

L
ADY STAVELEY
had given orders that the curtains should not be drawn. Perhaps she thought that when darkness fell the lighted windows might serve as a beacon to the returning aeroplane, circling in uncertainty above the sand-banks of the cold North Sea; or else she hoped to catch a glimpse of it streaking past the great window in the twilight, and be the first to say ‘Here he is' or (she must school herself to remember) ‘Here they are!'

She sat facing the window, and Eustace, on her left, with Victor Trumpington opposite, could turn his head and watch the daylight fading from the sky, and lingering on the heads of the white rhododendrons and azaleas, when their crimson and orange neighbours were shadows of their former hue. At a man's height from the floor an open lattice in the amber wall let in the air and showed the true tones of the evening.

It had been nearly nine when they sat down to dinner. Now the meal was half-way through. The tension had increased, but the irritability and veiled recrimination had gone; hope was anæsthetised and they were facing the inevitable.
They
were, or seemed to be; Eustace was not. Their eyes told him, the consciously hushed movements of the servants told him, reason told him, that he had little hope of seeing Hilda alive. But his heart told him otherwise; the exultation he had felt at the moment of her taking off still glowed there, and glowed more brightly now that there was no longer blame and hostility on the faces round him. He could not testify to his confidence, for it would only sound silly and callous to them, and at times his mind shared their anxiety. Besides, they had given him no chance: the conversation, whether general or particular, had by common consent turned on indifferent matters, ignoring the challenge of the empty chairs. When they did speak of Dick and Hilda, it was in ordinary tones, as of people who had just gone out of the room and would come back at any moment.

“I shall follow your sister's career with great interest,” Lady Staveley was saying, “and I hope we shall have the opportunity of seeing her again. I'm sorry she can't stay over Monday. I expect her work keeps her pretty busy.”

“Oh yes, it does,” said Eustace. “At any rate”—he smiled—“she thinks it does. She always says that if anything happened to her, the clinic would go to pieces the next day.”

The words slipped out before he was aware of them; too late, he bit his lip. Lady Staveley quickly rearranged her remaining knives and forks, and crumbled a bit of bread. She was wearing a day dress, Eustace noticed, and almost no jewellery.

“You must persuade her to come again,” she said. “This has been such a short visit, and she's hardly seen anything of the place. You missed your walk on the sands with her, didn't you?”

Eustace said that didn't matter.

“Next time you come, we won't let Dick monopolise her,” Lady Staveley said. “I was thinking about your first visit, so long ago. Dick was only a boy then, wasn't he?”

“About fifteen or sixteen,” Eustace said; “but he seemed very grown up to me.”

“It's his birthday in July,” said Lady Staveley. “We were going to——” She stopped. “Excuse me, so stupid of me, I forget what we were going to do. Do you make a great deal of birthdays in your family, Mr. Cherrington?”

“We've always kept Hilda's,” said Eustace, “for some reason, much more than mine or Barbara's—she's my younger sister—though as a matter of fact, Barbara gets more presents than either of us, and Hilda doesn't really care about that sort of thing.”

“When is her birthday?” asked Lady Staveley.

“In May,” said Eustace, and something impelled him to add, “she was twenty-eight.”

“Dick will be thirty-two,” said Lady Staveley. “How young you all seem.”

Eustace saw that her lips trembled, and he would have liked to change the subject, but he lacked the conversational resource, and it was Victor Trumpington who said:

“Did I hear you say young, Lady Staveley? I feel older than the chair on which I sit.”

They all laughed immoderately at this sally, partly, Eustace guessed, because it relieved the strain, and partly because Victor was evidently a licensed jester, privileged to make jokes which would have been condemned as contrary to the canon if uttered by anyone else. Feeling that Victor had won his hostess in fair fight, Eustace addressed himself to Anne, who had no other neighbour except an empty chair. Lady Nelly, on Sir John Staveley's right, seemed very far away, and Monica, on his left, hardly more than a blur across the red-shaded candles. Antony was talking to her; Eustace could see the line of his jaw; he expressed himself with everything he had, even his bones seemed to be articulate. A vacant place came next him, bristling with knives and forks.

“We don't seem to have arranged the table very well to-night,” Anne said. Unlike Lady Staveley, she was wearing an evening dress and more make-up than the night before. “Mama left it to me, and I didn't seem able to divide the family.”

“But you have divided it,” said Eustace, renewing his survey of the disposition of the diners. “Aren't all the Staveleys separated, except Sir John and Lady Nelly?”

“We shan't be when Dick comes back,” said Anne. “This place” —she made a movement with her left hand—“is for him. And there's your sister, over there.”

Eustace glanced across the table, almost expecting to see Hilda materialise before him. He did not know what to say to Anne, whose hidden distress belied her brave words and the rouge which gave them colour.

“I'm sure Dick won't find fault with the arrangement,” he said, “if you don't.”

“He's oddly particular about little things like that,” said Anne. “He won't really be pleased to see Mama in a day dress. He has a great regard for appearances.”

“Has he?” said Eustace, surprised. “For all of them? I thought he was rather unconventional.”

Anne hesitated.

“In a way he is,” she said, bringing Dick back into the present tense. “But not where clothes are concerned. He can't bear one to be dowdy or untidy. He's always on to me about it.”

“But you're beautifully dressed!” exclaimed Eustace, looking in open admiration at what he could see of Anne's lavender-grey gown, which seemed to him the height of fashion. He did not believe it possible that any Staveley, or any member of the aristocracy, for that matter, could conceive of another as dowdy or untidy.

“I'm afraid he doesn't think so,” said Anne, with that resigned, almost welcoming acceptance of an unwelcome fact that Eustace had more than once noticed in her. “But I'm glad you do. And I hope he'll like this, because I got it for him—to wear at his birthday party, that Mama was telling you about.”

“But you put it on to-night!”

“Yes,” said Anne, “I thought I would.”

There was a pause.

“Have you got him a present?” asked Eustace.

“As a matter of fact, I haven't,” said Anne. “He isn't easy to give a present to. But I'm going up to London soon. What do you suggest?”

Eustace thought hard, but the harder he thought the more completely did the thinking part of his mind succumb to Anne's conviction that her brother was dead.

“I expect he has most of the things he wants,” was the only contribution he could make. “It's the same with Hilda in a way, though of course she hasn't so many things as Dick. I often think that she would rather have something taken away from her than given to her. The things I give her never seem to become part of her, if you know what I mean.”

Anne smiled her rare, sweet smile.

“Yes, I do know. But Dick isn't like that. He wants things very much, only he doesn't want them long.”

“After he's got them, you mean,” said Eustace.

“Yes, he wants them for a long time before he gets them,” Anne said. “And sometimes, I must say, he likes them afterwards. He kept a tobacco pouch I'd given him for years and had the rubber part renewed when it wore out.”

“Why not give him another?” asked Eustace.

“I wanted to give him something rather special this time,” said Anne.

Eustace felt drawn towards her.

“I think one should give people presents, don't you?” he said. “Even if one enjoys the giving more than they do the receiving. Of course, some people are much more present-able than others. I can imagine wanting to give Dick a present. I should like to give him one myself.”

“I think you have given him one by coming here,” Anne said. She smiled again, and Eustace wondered how he could ever have thought her indifferent and reserved. “He's often talked about you lately and said how much he wished we could get you down.”

“I
am
pleased to hear that,” cried Eustace. “I didn't think he could care much about me, I'm not really his sort. But I think he likes Hilda, don't you?”