Sunflower (19 page)

With an encircling movement of his little paws he seemed to draw them together into a ring of intimacy that excluded everybody else in the world. He conveyed to them with a spent smile, that, though miserable, he was now enjoying the relative relief of being with people that he really liked; and he said very simply, ‘You folks must be dying for your dinner. I should have chased those rogues out long before you came but for—what’s happened here.’

Soothingly she asked what she felt he wanted to tell them. ‘Why, whatever’s happened?’

He looked down. His face worked.

‘Why … Hurrell’s dying.’

Essington exclaimed testily, ‘Hurrell! Hurrell dying! He can’t be dying! Why, he’s no older than I am!’

Francis Pitt said dexterously, ‘That’s the devil of it. He’s no age at all!’ and then turning to Sunflower and looking on the ground at her feet, he repeated, slowly and pitifully, ‘Yes, Hurrell’s dying!’

It seemed to hurt her hand that she could not lift it to stroke his ravaged face. She murmured, ‘Oh, I am so sorry! Then you won’t want us about. Hadn’t we better go away?’ It would be dreadful if he said yes. She did not want to go away from him.

His eyes shot up to hers, and he exclaimed: ‘For God’s sake, no! I have been looking forward to this all day!’ He gave her a deliberate, pressing glance that was a reminder of the other glance he had given her when she first came into the room, and held out one hand towards her, as if he would have liked to go on talking to her and wanted her to stay there so that he could get back to her at the first possible moment, while he turned to deal with Essington, who was complaining irritably, ‘But he can’t be
dying
! He wasn’t dying when you dined with us on Monday night!’ She watched him fiercely, wishing she could get the grief out of him by some simple, violent physical act, as one sucks poison out of a wound, while he answered grimly and patiently, ‘He is dying now, and he was dying then. Of a thing called galloping consumption which I daresay you thought, as I did, a handy device of the novelists. Which is rare enough in real life, which is nearly unknown in a man of his age. “Acute miliary tuberculosis”, the doctors call it. It got its teeth into him six weeks ago, when he got a chill speaking in a draughty marquee down at some damned women’s Liberal federation in Sussex. It will finish him, they say, in six weeks’ time. Of course he doesn’t know. We’ve kept it from him …’

She loved the way he loved his friend. She had to keep her lids lowered in case she cried too. ‘I don’t know what I shall do without him. I’ve known him ever since I came to London. I’ve lived by him ever since I came to London. I don’t know what I shall do …’ She wished that she could have pressed his dear hideous grief-ruddled face against the warm flesh at the base of her throat, not that she wanted to be familiar, but because that used to quiet Essington when he had his crying-fits after Versailles. Looking hard at him, partly in case she might read in his expression some way she might help him, and partly in order that she might remember him as completely as possible after they parted that night, she noticed that the brownish tints of his hair and skin were the colour of fireside shadows. Something at the back of her mind which had not been impressed by any of this scene, which was refusing to attach any serious importance to an emotion felt by a man about another man, seized on this note of warmth exultantly and prophesied that there would come a time when all this nonsense would be given up and the real business of living would begin, satisfyingly, nutritiously. Shocked, she forced herself back to her loyal duty of pity and distress. Pitching his voice deeper and deeper lest it should squeak up into tears, he was saying: ‘It was easy to move him out of his stuffy little hole of a flat in the Temple and get him out here. You see, he’s practically had a bedroom here for years. I used to keep him talking so late at nights, I hope to God it wasn’t bad for him …’ Now, Essington had hardly any close friends, and none that he loved like this. He was kept from it by the dreadful justice of his mind. It was really justice and not mere censoriousness, even now it was making him say very clearly and distinctly, so that the meaning disadvantageous to himself should not be missed, ‘It’s plucky of you to have him here. I … should have been afraid of the infection.’ But it kept him from friendship just as much as the meaner quality might have done, because it never let him pass through the first phase when you are silly about people, when you believe that they are perfect and want to be with them all the time, and get so fond of them that it doesn’t matter much when you find they’ve got their faults like anybody else. There had been a time when she’d been an idiot about Maxine, and would have told anybody that she was unselfish, though really old Maxi was dog-lazy and never did a stroke if she could put it on somebody else; but by the time she had found out that she had found also that you could tell old Maxi anything and she would understand and not say that you hadn’t any self-respect because you stayed with Essington though he was cruel to one; and anyway she had by then got so used to seeing Maxi’s face about that it had a special value like places that one has known all one’s life. She expected Francis Pitt had been silly about Hurrell like that when he first met him, and that it had worked out all right. He had pretended that the old man had got everything, and in the course of the pretence he had found out what he had got. But Essington could not go through such a process, for by merely looking at people he knew the truth about them. His eyes would close up from below like a cat’s, and he would purr a phrase which would record the bad in them without malice and the good in them without affection, and that was that. So he had no friends as she had Maxine, as Francis Pitt had Hurrell. Yet he was not unloving. If you got to know him, you could see that often he had an aching feeling in his heart like anybody else. He had wanted dreadfully to make up his misunderstanding with Hurrell, he was minding it that Hurrell was going to die. Querulously, he was now trying to alter that fact by talk. ‘But can’t anything be done for him? Is Cornelliss the best man, do you think? … Doctors are always such fools … Mind you, I was told thirty years ago that I had just six months to live …’ He was always like this when he heard that anybody was dying. Indeed he was always like this when he was faced with any evil which could not be brought to an end by being clever about it, or for that matter with any good which couldn’t be completely accounted for and controlled by reason. That was why he was so horrid to her, although he loved her. Their love wasn’t reasonable. It wasn’t logical that he should have grown really to care for a woman who was quite stupid, who couldn’t be of any real use to him except to make love to, so he was constantly examining this state of affairs with distrust and suspecting that he must be allowing himself to be governed by appetite and base emotion like the bad leaders who were responsible for most of the woes of the world. Also the situation arising out of their being in love vexed him because he had worked it all out cut and dried and everything in the garden should have been lovely. They lived together without being married because they did not believe in the institution of matrimony; they lived together openly enough for it to be generally known because it was wrong to be hypocritical; they did not live together quite publicly because that would have been to violate other people’s susceptibilities unnecessarily; they did not have children because it would have been difficult with servants and governesses. They ought to have been perfectly happy. It was unreasonable that she should mind what quite negligible people said about her; it was unreasonable she should mind doing without things that if she had had them would have caused endless trouble. It was his sense of her unreason that made him go bickering about her house—or was there another twist to it? Did he mind her unreasonably minding those things or did he mind the still more unreasonable way he minded her minding them? Did it not turn a sword in his heart when he saw her grieving, and was not his bickering half a squeal at his own pain and half a quarrel with the fate that had hurt his beloved woman and not at all the sheer callousness it pretended to be? She looked at his fine, fretful face and knew that she was right. Here, as always, his soreness was sweetness tortured into the likeness of the opposite. But she did not feel, as she always used to when she had found out some excuse for him, any flush of tenderness. It did not take away from her that feeling that she was caught in a trap, that she would die starving …

It was like food to be with Francis Pitt. He did not deny the death of his friend, though to admit it was anguish to him. The truth was wringing out of him in sullen phrases … ‘There is no hope. None at all. The only thing is to get him through it as easily as possible. There are little things one can do …’ He narrowed his eyes and lowered his head as if he talked of some way of cheating in a game, and that the other player might overhear. ‘Keeping him quiet at the time when the haemorrhages are most likely to come …’ She could see him standing by a campfire in defence of something that lay long and white and still, drawing himself to his full little height as death came down on them from the dark sky, his long arms crooked and his little paw hands stretched out flat in front of him ready to do things more cunning than direct blows, his eyes a little open so that he could watch his enemy but nearly closed so that his enemy should not see what he planned, his feet set dancing-light so that he could dodge and feint. The first men in the world must have looked like him. They too would have no need to be tall. For hunting and snaring it would be better if they were little …

The footman had said twice that dinner was ready, but they had not heard. She wished that they had. She wanted to see him doing something sensible like eating, building himself up instead of spending himself on this emotion about another man. And if he was sitting down at table people would not be bursting in on him, people that she did not know anything about, people who knew things about him she did not. After a minute she touched him on the sleeve and said timidly, ‘They’re saying dinner’s ready.’ He let her see by a slight tired movement of his head that he had heard her, that he longed to go to dinner but was too exhausted to deal with the technical problem of how to interrupt with politeness Essington’s description of how obstinate and incompetent and without ideas the government had found the medical profession when they were drafting the Insurance Act; and that he resigned it all to her. So she set them off by moving slowly to the door. It was nice, as dancing with him would have been, to feel him walking beside her, keeping time with her. She bowed her head and stooped so that he would notice as little as possible how much taller she was. From now on it was all going to be lovely. He would be settled in his chair at the table, a thick wide mahogany door would be shut on them, they would become involved in the undisturbable ritual of dinner. He would eat, he would feel better, they would be able to enjoy him, his queer earthy face, his queer rough voice, the force that flowed out of him.

But nothing nice ever happens easily. Out in the hall was Etta, looking very harassed and wearing one of those dark dresses that were quite good but made one feel depressed because they so obviously had been bought without any particular person in mind, and she was standing by a table where a greyhound sort of man with glittering pince-nez sat writing something with an attaché case open beside him. At the sight of him Francis Pitt drew a little away from her and moved closer to Essington and came to a halt, saying, ‘Ah, Cornelliss, I thought you had gone. You are good to us, giving us so much time. Miss Fassendyll, Lord Essington, this is Sir Robert Cornelliss, my doctor and my friend …’

Sunflower smiled vaguely at the doctor, and looked away from him at the clumsy Victorian furnishings, the gross carvings of the staircase banisters, the soup-like colourings of the woodwork and wallpaper. This was a mighty little gnome that had taken this mediocre house that was built to be the home of a butter-merchant with six plain daughters, and filled it with great people, a great drunkard, a great thief, a great man dying, a great man grieving for him, a great doctor …

Wistfully Francis Pitt enquired, ‘When ought you to hear from this Viennese chap who says he’s got this serum?’

Cornelliss answered, kindly but oddly without deference, ‘Tomorrow, sometime. But remember I don’t believe in it myself.’

A sudden scratching on the paper told of a pretentious signature. He gave what he had been writing to Miss Pitt and began to shut up his attaché case. Francis Pitt watched him with the attention that children give to the most purely mechanical proceedings of greatly respected adults. She wished she could have pulled him on by the hand.

Cornelliss stood up, but did not go. Sunflower looked at him to see why not, and found his eyes set on her face. She assumed an expression of blandness. Not even now could she bear to throw away that tedious triumph, though she felt sick with the frustration of her desire to see Francis Pitt seated at the table, fixed, eating, resting, sealed to her society.

Cornelliss said, ‘It is interesting to meet Miss Fassendyll after I have admired her so often on the stage.’

She shuddered. She had forgotten that she had to act. His eyes shifting to Essington, he continued, ‘I think you know my wife. She has spoken several times of having met you at bazaars and charity matinées and so on.’

‘Oh yes!’ She felt pleased. It was nice to think that dull people like this met other dull people and were happy together. ‘Lady Cornelliss. Why, of course! She’s wonderful. She gets on so well with all the princesses you have to have for those sort of things. But then when you come to think of it,’ she meditated, ‘she looks just like a princess. Why, she might be one of the royal family herself, to look at her …’

Francis Pitt made an involuntary grunt of amusement, and Cornelliss sharply turned his back on them while the footman put on his coat. She supposed she had said one of the stupid things that made Essington so angry. Well, she did not care, so long as it had cheered up Francis Pitt.