Eustace and Hilda (97 page)

He reproached himself with this, and took his spirit to task for not plumbing new depths of despair. He thought that not to worry was the same as not to care: how could he be sorry unless his pulse raced, his stomach churned, and his bowels turned to water? But though the winds of self-criticism blew from every quarter, they did not ruffle him. The sight of Hilda, the wreck of Hilda, her slight squint, her drooping eyelid, her embryo movements that ended in a tremor, had somehow brought him peace. The blow had fallen, and by falling had cured him of his dread of it.

It cured him of many dreads and of their inconvenient manifestations in his daily life. For many years his consciousness had been beset by the need to discover devices to forestall the future, amulets, sometimes clothed in a show of reason, against ill luck. Before he went out he must remember to take enough money to guard against some serious eventuality, such as being taken ill and having to enter a nursing-home which would only receive him on terms of cash down. His pockets bulged with duplicates of objects that he feared he might lose—handkerchiefs, keys, matches. He must have two watches in case one stopped (not an irrational dread, for he had given Miss Fothergill's watch to Lady Nelly and his Venetian timepieces only flirted with Time). For extended absences from his base he sometimes took an extra pair of socks. Then there was his brandy flask, almost as heavy as a pistol and with an outline hardly less conspicuous. This, too, he discarded, for along with the other dreads that had forsaken him was the dread of death. Indeed, when Dr. Speedwell, grey-headed but still spruce and natty, said, “Well, young man, you're not looking any too fit, would you like me to run the stethoscope over you?” Eustace refused, saying he had never felt better.

Thus disburdened in mind and body, Eustace felt a new lightness. It was not the lightness of ecstasy, such as he had known when he saw Hilda received into the sky, nothing like that, but a sensation akin to the physical release of shedding one's winter underclothing for the summer. Realising he had overspent him-self and could no longer afford to hire a car to take him about, he bought, after some conscientious haggling, a second-hand bicycle, and on this he meant to visit the haunts of his childhood; but only because they were destinations that he knew, not with any intention of recovering the past: to do that would be childish, and he had put away childish things.

Meanwhile, there was Hilda to consider, indeed—a circumstance which more than any other contributed to his peace of mind—there was only Hilda to consider. His task, his life, lay with her. Care of her was to be his expiation. Eustace seized on this gratefully. It was the obvious course, something that no one could either praise or blame him for. It was realistic, and Eustace was trying to persuade his mind that his mistakes were not so much due to wickedness as to his habit of turning all experience into fantasy. The temptation to see things larger than life, to invest them with grandeur and glamour and glory—that had been his downfall. Everything, he told himself, could be traced to that; above all, his wish to aggrandise Hilda and make her the Lady of Anchorstone Hall. He had made her the victim of his size-snobbery; and what better cure for snobbery than to study Hilda as she was, try to accommodate himself to her moods, wait on her, and think of things to say to her?

He had never been good at monologue; his conversation, such as it was, depended a good deal on catching an overtone in an interlocutor's remark and matching it with another of his own to make a shred of harmony that trembled into oblivion as quickly as the Lost Chord. He had always been tongue-tied with deaf people. With Hilda he had to be extremely explicit; marshall his ideas, find a topic and hold the floor. Those oblique approaches, that waiting for a sign in the voice, were no use at all. He found unsuspected nuggets of definiteness in himself and also the power to adopt a persuasive, even a commanding, tone; and it was in response to a mixture of the two that Hilda at last overcame her repugnance to the public gaze and allowed him to take her out in the bath-chair.

She would only go in the dark, however, which meant, at this time of year, setting out after their early supper. Methodical now, he prepared for their first venture by making a survey of the terrain; he walked all the way to the lighthouse with his eyes on the ground, taking note of ruts and bumps, and places where kerbstones had to be negotiated. The cart-track below the square had been transformed into a macadamised highway, fringed on one side by large new houses, facing the sea. Regrettable in itself, the change spelt safer and smoother progress for the bath-chair; still, he was glad when the road petered out in a semicircle weedy from disuse and the grass unrolled its carpet. He was nearly opposite the Second Shelter with its slate-blue roof, and these were the cliffs he knew. To tread the turf and see the green again was soothing to the eye and refreshing to the feet after the unyielding pavements of Venice lit by their whitish glare. Green, the colour of hope, was a rarity in Venice.

He stooped down and picked a blade of grass and examined it carefully. It was short and sapless and brown at the tip, and Eustace's imagination could take no pleasure in it. But remember, he admonished himself, its beauty is in its essential quality; it is not the totter-grass, or the sword-grass, least of all the Grass of Parnassus; it is ordinary common
grass
, but a Chinese painter might have given a lifetime to portraying it, and that without any idealisation, each patient stroke taking him nearer to the heart of grassness in the grass. And this demi-lune of bird's-foot trefoil, egg-yellow blobs shading to orange and red, it is not the strelitzia, the Queen Flower of Central Africa; it is not the Morning Glory convolvulus; it is not the Night-blowing Cereus; still less is it the
Sequoia gigantia
, the Big Tree of California, or the Blue Gum tree of Australia, tallest of trees, or the Cedar of Lebanon, the most noble, or the Banyan tree of India, the tree of widest girth. It is a hardy, humble little flower, quite content to be trodden on or wheeled over. But Titian or Botticelli would not have disdained to give it a place of honour in their pictures or found it less in keeping with the spirit of Flora than more imposing flowers with grander names.

So Eustace mused, and meanwhile his steps were bringing him nearer to the red-capped Third Shelter and the cliff's edge. The hedgerow which used to cling to it so tenaciously had disappeared, a casualty of the erosion that was slowly eating away the face of the cliff. Far below, no doubt, among the débris of boulders that buttressed the great wall, could be found fragments of quickset, brittle, dried, and dead, that the birds used for their nests. Never mind; some time the ancient landmark had to go, and it had been, he remembered, a trap for paper bags and other litter; but it would have served, on dark nights, when he was pushing the bath-chair, to show him how near to the verge he was, for there was no railing now, it had gone the same way as the hedge, and the remains of the old one—a post here and there and a spar or two sticking out into space—were scantier than they used to be. High time that the Urban District Council, which flaunted their names and notices everywhere, took the matter in hand and put up a proper fence, even if it did fall down after a few years, for the place was not really safe, especially for people whose duty took them out after nightfall.

Eustace raised his eyes unwillingly, for already he had several times seen, and did not want to see again, the desecration of the lighthouse, the pharos of Anchorstone. Gone was the white summit with the golden weather-cock, gone the circular glass chamber, shrouded with dense white curtains, within which gleamed the rainbow-coloured lantern—glass behind glass. The building had been dismantled and decapitated, and the headless trunk, stark as the base of an abandoned windmill, had been painted a hideous maroon. But that was not all; a notice, now at last legible to Eustace's short-sighted eyes, proclaimed: ‘The Old Lighthouse Tea House.' All the equipment of the lighthouseman's craft had disappeared: the larger and smaller flag poles webbed with rigging, the two low, square, whitewashed huts whose doors, defended by iron palisades, were kept so ostentatiously locked, the smell of oil which haunted the buildings with its secret and mysterious suggestion. The many printed prohibitions that made the precincts of the lighthouse a place of awe, fearsome to approach, had gone, and in their stead were hands with the index fingers stretched in invitation: ‘This way to the Tea Rooms'; ‘Ladies'; ‘Gentlemen.' Before, you had been told to keep out; now you were asked to come in. The god had deserted his shrine and commerce had taken it over.

The new Eustace did not waste his time on regretting the transformation. If the lighthouse had outgrown its usefulness, far better that it should be turned into a tea-shop, where many people might refresh themselves, and where perhaps, later on, a few weeks, a few months, a few years later, when she was well enough to eat in public, Hilda and he too might come and have their tea. It would make a but de promenade, as Countess Loredan might have said.

He turned from the lighthouse and looked over the cliff. The sea was far out, and straight in front of him, beyond Old Anchorstone, the mussel-bed, that great black sandbank, extended its giant length like a stranded whale. No, not like a whale—Hamlet had laid that trap for Polonius: it was a sandbank, and like a sandbank, and no good would come of seeing it as something else.

Stephen had been right to warn him against his trick of idealisation, of preferring an image to reality, yes, and sometimes the image of an image. Soon, after he arrived Eustace had had a letter from Stephen, a letter stiff, almost rigid, with apology. He did not think Eustace would want to see him after what he had said in his previous letter. He offered no excuse: the letter had been written under emotional stress; some of its facts, he had afterwards learned, were inaccurate; all its inferences and charges were as untrue as they were unkind; he begged Eustace to forgive him. Eustace composed a long telegram in reply, saying that he entirely understood, nothing had been altered, Stephen must come down to Anchorstone at the earliest possible moment. The telegram was eloquent with protestations and superlatives, but Eustace tore it up: it was an unjustifiable piece of extravagance, and moreover, as Stephen himself had said, the natural pace at which things happened was the right pace. Instead he wrote a letter, from which the ardour of reconciliation was carefully kept out, merely saying that Stephen would be very welcome.

When they met they met almost as strangers. Of all the little jests that Eustace had been half hoping for, the stately gibes at his new way of life with spade and bucket, none came to birth. Ceremoniously they helped each other on with their coats, for the weather had turned colder, and handed each other their hats, and paced side by side under the shadow of Palmerston Parade; nor did Stephen ever speculate on the kind of people, the illicit couples, coiners, and fugitives from justice who must inhabit those strange cylindrical niches, or comment playfully on the efforts Anchorstone was making to assume the status of a full-grown health resort.

Their relations were business-like, and they talked of business. The directors had arrived at a compromise: they would not continue to pay Hilda her salary, but they would keep her place open provided she recovered in reasonable time. Eustace asked how long reasonable time might be, and Stephen shrugged his shoulders. In answer to his firm's representations they had promised to take what steps they could to prevent any further slanders being spread about Hilda; the chief culprit had been discovered and dismissed, but of course there was no sure way, they said, of stopping people's tongues. Hilda had sunk a third of her share of Miss Fothergill's legacy in the clinic, Eustace about a sixth of his; if the money could not be recovered, it would still be useful for bringing pressure to bear on the directors, and meanwhile neither Hilda nor Eustace had been reduced to penury. They would have to be very careful, that was all, and in their present position opportunities for extravagance were few.

Stephen stayed at the Wolferton Hotel, a building which had always impressed Eustace as a child by its magnificence. To sit among the palms in its glass winter-garden that overlooked the steeply sloping green on one side, and on the other two the sea, had seemed to him one of the supreme rewards of human endeavour, and its noble zigzag fire-escape had kindled in his imagination conflagrations of unparalleled splendour. Back from the Palazzo Sfortunato, he had been amused by its solid pretentiousness, but now, as he entered it for the first time, no longer protected by Lady Nelly's purse, he realised that the modest luxury of the Wolferton was far beyond his means.

They dined together in the winter-garden under the palms, which rustled drily at them, and talked at first of indifferent matters, of Stephen and his prospects and of Eustace and his. The comparison, though neither of them drew it, was eloquent, as eloquent as that between the rose-shaded lamp on their table and the cold northern twilight gathering outside. Eustace explained that he could not return to Oxford until Hilda was better; he would go on reading for Schools, of course; somehow he would get over the difficulty of finding the books he needed, and perhaps he would work to more purpose when he had fewer distractions. Of course, if Hilda's illness was prolonged, he might have to give Oxford up and drastically revise his future plans.

“What do the doctors say?” asked Stephen. It was the first time he had spoken of Hilda, except in connection with her affairs.

Eustace told him. “They think some kind of a shock might cure her,” he added.

Stephen said nothing, and Eustace, goaded by his silence, suddenly asked the question which he had been wanting to ask ever since Stephen arrived.

“Would you like to see her?”

“Would she like me to?” countered Stephen.

Eustace had sounded Hilda, and she had made it quite clear she did not want to see Stephen. The old Eustace would have said no to Stephen's question, would indeed have been horrified by any other answer; but the new one, a more forceful personality, did not allow his ideas of what was good for Hilda to be bounded by mere verbal truth. If taxed, he could explain afterwards that he had not understood what she meant; a reasonable excuse, for it was not always easy to tell.