Encounters: stories (6 page)

COMING up the avenue in the February dusk he could see the flash and shimmer of fireUght through the naked windows of the Hbrary. There was something unearthly in those squares of pulsing light that fretted the shadowy fa9ade, and lent to the whole an air of pasteboard unreality.

The scrunch beneath his feet of the wet gravel brought his sister to the doorstep.

"Herbert!"she cried,"oh, do come in and see it all. You've been such ages to-day —what were you doing?"

"Your messages,"he said;"they delayed me. That stupid fellow at Billingham's had made a muddle over those window measurements for the blinds; I had to go over to the workshop and give the order personally."

Standing in the hall, he was surprised to hear his voice ring out into spaciousness.

"I never realised how big it was,"he said with gratification."Why, Cicely, you're

all in the dark. You might have lighted up and made the place look a bit more festive. It's all very well to hear how big one's house is, but I'd like to see it with my own eyes."

"I'm sorry,"said Cicely;"as a matter of fact I'd only just come in myself. I was out in the garden."

"Gardening?"

"No. Just poking about. You never heard anything like the way the thrushes sing. I never knew before they could sing like that. Or perhaps I'd never had time to listen. And the snowdrops are coming out all along the kitchen garden border. Oh, Herbert—"

"I shouldn't have thought that a house-move was exactly the most leisurely time to listen to thrushes. But of course!"

"But I had been working."

His injured dignity was impenetrable, like a barrier of steel. She turned aside from it with a shrug.

"Come in and see what I have done.

The library Janet!"she called down a

dark archway."Janet, tea! The master's in."

Down the far end of the long room was

an open fireplace. His chair was pushed up to the fire and an impromptu tea-table covered with newspaper had been set beside it. His books were stacked in piles against the walls, and their mustiness contested with the clean smell of scrubbed and naked boards.

"A nice room,"said Herbert."On Sunday I shall have a good long day at the picture-hanging. I can't have these windows. Cicely; they're quite indecent. Haven't you even got a dust sheet to pin up across them? Any tramp"

"I'll see. There won't be much light, though, anyhow. The man was in to-day about the fittings, and he says they won't be able to turn the gas on at the main till to-morrow afternoon. We shall have to do our best by candle-light. I've got some ready."

She folded paper into a spill and lighted a long row of candles, ranged in motley candlesticks along the chimney-piece.

"Tut-tut,"said Herbert."We shall find it very difficult to work. How tiresome these people are."

"Yes,"said Cicely.

He resented her tone of detachment. She had blown out her spill and stood twisting the charred ends of paper between her fingers. Long streaks of hair had loosened themselves and hung across her forehead, her cheeks were smeared with dust, her tall thin figure drooped with weariness, but her eyes were shining in the firelight with a strange excitement.

She became conscious of his irritated scrutiny.

"I must be looking simply awful"

"Yes,"said Herbert.

"I'd better try and tidy before tea."

"Yes. If we are going to have tea. If it doesn't come at once I really can't be bothered. There's a great deal for me to do, and I can't afford to waste any time."

He was a hungry man and peevish, having snatched a hasty and insufficient lunch. He thought that he detected a smile of indub gence as she raised her voice and shouted:

"Janet— hurry!"

They heard Janet stumbling up the three steps from the kitchen. She entered with

the squat brown tea-pot, one hand splayed against her heart.

"Such a house!"she gasped."It's that unexpected, really it is!"

They ate in silence. All Herbert's old irritation with his sister surged up within him. She was such a vague, uncertain, feckless creature; the air of startled spirituality that had become her as a girl now sat grotesquely on her middle-aged uncomeliness. He contrasted her with the buxom Emily. Emily would have known how to make her brother comfortable. But, of course, Emily had married.

She spoke.

"I suppose I might take mother's furniture. It really is mine, isn't it? Just that little work-table, and the book-shelf, and the escritoire."

"I don't see what you mean by ' take it.' It'll all be in the same rooms, in the same house as the rest. Of course, poor mother gave them to you. But I don't see how that makes any difference. I was thinking we might put that little escritoire in the drawing-room. It will look very well there."

Cicely was silent.

Herbert brushed the crumbs out of the creases in his waistcoat.

"Poor mother,"he unctuously remarked.

"Come and see the house,"said Cicely— she was aware that her quick speech shattered what should have been a little silence sacred to the memory of the dead—"come and see what you'd like to begin on, and what Janet and I had better do to-morrow. We got the bedrooms tidy, but your basin and jug are odd, I'm afraid. The cases of crockery haven't arrived yet

"I haven't got a basin and jug at all,"she said defensively.

Every step of Herbert's through the disordered house was a step in a triumphal progress. Every echo from the tiles and naked boards derided and denied the memory of that small brick villa where he and Cicely had been born, where their mother's wedded life had begun and ended; that villa now empty and denuded, whose furniture looked so meagre in this spaciousness and height.

He carried a candlestick in either hand and raised them high above his head as he

passed from room to room, peering round him into corners, looking up to moulded cornices and ceilings.

Standing in the big front bedroom he saw himself reflected in the mirrored doors of a vast portentous wardrobe, and beamed back at his beaming, curiously-shadowed face. Behind him he saw Cicely seat herself on the edge of the wire mattress, and place her candle carefully beside her on the floor. The mahogany bedroom suite loomed up round them out of the shadows. She sensed his radiant satisfaction with relief.

"It is 2l lovely house,"she said."Oh, Herbert, I do hope you're going to be happy!"

"I hope we both are,"he amended kindly."We must have some people staying. Cicely. The Jenkins, and that lot. Entertain a bit— after all, my dear girl, we can afford it now!"

He was glad when she did not seem to realise how their circumstances had bettered—it gave him the opportunity for emphatic reminders.

They passed out on to the landing, and

stood looking down into the depths of the well-staircase.

"I'm sure mother did want us both to be happy,"said Cicely, peering over the banisters. Herbert felt eerily as though she were deferring to the opinion of some unseen presence below them in the darkness.

"Of course she wished us the best, poor mother."He clattered a little ostentatiously past her down the stairs.

"She would have loved this house!"Her voice came softly after him, and he heard her limp hand slithering along the banister-rail.

"Damn the gas-man,"he muttered, feeling his way across the hall, where his candle-flames writhed and flickered in a draught. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, thus groping through an echoing, deserted house with a ghost-ridden, lackadaisical woman trailing at his heels. If only they'd had the gas on.

Cicely was a fool: he'd teach her!

At the root of his malaise was a suspicion that the house was sneering at him; that as he repudiated the small brick villa so the

house repudiated him. That Cicely and the house had made a pact against him, shutting him out.

He was no bourgeois and no parvenu. He, Herbert Pilkington, was good enough for any house bought with his own well-earned money. He pushed savagely against the panels of the drawing-room door.

This was the largest room in the house. A pale light fell across the floor from the scoops of two great bow-windows, and there was a glimmer in the mirrors—fixtures— panelling the walls.

Herbert put down his candles and stood back in admiration.

"Next year,"he said,"we will buy a grand piano; it would look well there, slanting out from that corner."

"The shutters—we ought to shut the shutters."Fussily he wrestled with the catches. For all his middle-aged precision he was like a child delirious over some new toy.

"It needs children; it's a room for children,"said Cicely, when the clatter had subsided.

Something in her tone filled him with a sense of impropriety. She was gripping the edges of the chimney-piece and staring down into the grate. Her knuckles stood out white and strained.

"Herbert, Richard Evans wrote to me again yesterday. To-day I answered him. I—I am going to be married."

Sitting on the Chesterfield, Herbert scrutinised his boots. He heard his voice say:

"Who is going to see about the furniture?"

His mind grappled with something immeasurably far away.

Cicely repeated,"I am going to be married."

Suddenly it flashed across him: he was full of angry light.

"Married!"he shouted,"married—you!"

"I thought it was too late,"she whispered,"till quite lately. Then, when mother went, everything was broken up; this move came—all my life I seem to have been tied up, fastened on to things and people. Why, even the way the furniture was arranged at No. 17 held me so that I couldn't get away. The way the chairs went in the sitting-room.

And mother. Then, when I stayed behind to see the vans off; when I saw them taking down the overmantels, and your books went out, and the round table, and the sofa, I felt quite suddenly ' I'm free.' I said to myself, ' If Richard asks me

again ' But I thought he must be tired

of asking me. I said, ' If only he asks me again I can get away before this new house fastens on to me.'"

With her stoop, her untidiness, her vagueness and confusion, her irritating streaks of mysticism, he wondered: Could any man find her desirable?

He remembered Richard Evans, thin and jerky and vaguely displeasing to his orderly mind; with his terrible spasms of eloquence and his straggly moustache. He had come in often when they were at No. 17 and sat for hours in the lamplight, with his shadow gesticulating behind him on the wall.

"Nobody needs me,"she was saying."Nobody wants me, really, except him. I see it now, and I've got to"

"What about me? Don't I count? Don't I need you? What about all these years;

the housekeeping?"His voice rose to a wail,"and what the devil am I to do about the move?"

"Of course I'll see you through the move. Really, Herbert"

"I've been a good brother to you. We've got along very well; we've had a happy little home together all these years, haven't we, and now poor mother's gone"

His eloquence choked him. He was stabbed by the conviction that she should be saying all this to him. Instead she stood there, muHshly, hanging down her head.

"You're too old to marry,"he shouted;"it's—it's ridiculous!"

"Richard doesn't think so."

"You don't seem to realise you're leaving me alone with this great house on my hands, this great barn of a house; me a lonely man, with just that one silly old woman. I suppose Janet '11 go off and get married next! Nobody's too old to marry nowadays, it seems."

"No,"she said with placid conviction "You'll marry, of course."

"Marry—me?"

She turned to look at him, pink, self-confident, idiotically pretty.

"But of course. That's what I've been

feeling. While I was here Men are so

conservative! But this is no sort of life for you really, Herbert; you want a wife, a pretty, cheery wife. And children"

"Children!"

"Oh, don't shout, Herbert. Yes, you don't want the family to die out, do you, after you've made such a name for it, done such fine big things?"

He felt that two springs were broken in the sofa, and pressed the cushions carefully with his hand to discover the extent of further damage.

"Damn it all,"he said querulously,"I can't get used to another woman at my time of life!''

"Herbert, you've got no imagination."Her tone was amused, dispassionate. She was suddenly superior, radiant and aloof; his no longer, another man's possession.

Her speech chimed in with his thoughts.

"Every man's got to have one woman!"

Taking one of the candles, she turned and left the room.

He sat there almost in the darkness; putting one hand up he fidgeted with his tie. Sleeking down his hair he smiled to find it crisp, unthinned and healthy.

Slowly and cumbrously the machinery of his imagination creaked into movement.

He saw the drawing-room suffused with rosy light. Chairs and sofas were bright with the sheen of flowered chintzes, hung about with crisp and fluted frills. Over by the fire was the dark triangle of a grand piano; the top was open and a woman, with bright crimpy hair, sat before it, playing and singing."A pretty, cheery wife."There was a crimson carpet, soft like moss, and a tall palm shadowed up towards the ceiling. Muffled by the carpet he heard the patter of quick feet. The little girl wore a blue sash trailing down behind her, and there was a little boy in a black velvet suit. They could do very well without Cicely's escritoire.

AFTER all,"said Marcia,"there are egoists and egoists. You are one sort of egoist, I am the other."

A ladybird had dropped on to her plate from a cluster of leaves above, and she invited it on to her finger and transferred it very carefully to the rail of the verandah.

"Differentiate,"said the stranger, watching the progress of the ladybird.

They were lunching on the verandah, and the midday sun fell through a screen of leaves in quivering splashes on to the tablecloth, the elusive pattern of Marcia's dress, the crude enamelled brilliance of the salad in a willow-pattern bowl, the dinted plate and cutlery slanting together at angles of confusion. The water was spring water, so cold that a mist had formed on the sides of their tumblers and of the red glass water-jug. They considered helpings of cold lamb, and their heads and faces were in shadow.

Through the open window the interior of the coffee-room was murky and repellent; with its drab, dishevelled tables, and chairs

so huddled tete-d-tete that they travestied intimacy. It was full of the musty reek of cruets and the wraiths of long-digested meals, and of a brooding reproach for their desertion whenever they turned their heads towards it. A mournful waitress, too, reproached them, flicking desultorily about among the crumbs.

From under the verandah the hotel garden slanted steeply down to the road; the burning dustiness beneath them was visible in glimpses between the branches of the lime-trees. Cyclists flashed past, and an occasional motor whirled up clouds of dust to settle in the patient limes. Behind their screen of leaves they two sat sheltered and conversant, looking out to where, beyond the village, the country fell away into the hot blue distances of June, and cooled by a faint wind that crept towards them through a rustle and glitter of leaves from hay-fields and the heavy shade of elders.

The jewels flashed in Marcia's rings as she laid down knife and fork, and, drumming with her fingers on the table, proceeded to expatiate on egoists.

"Don't think I'm going to be clever,"she implored him,"and talk like a woman in a Meredith book. Well, quite baldly to begin with, one acknowledges that one puts oneself first, doesn't one? There may be other people, but it's ourselves that matter."

He had relaxed his face to a calm atten-tiveness, and, leaning limply back in his chair, looked at her with tired, kindly eyes, like the eyes of a monkey, between wrinkled lids.

"Granted, if you wish it for the sake of argument. But"

"But you are protesting inwardly that the other people matter more? They do matter enormously. But the more they matter to you, still the more you're mattering to yourself; it merely raises your standard of values. Have you any children?"

"Six,"said the tired man.

"I have three,"said Marcia."And a husband. Quite enough, but I am very fond of them all. That is why I am always so glad to get away from them."

He was cutting his lamb with quiet slashing strokes of his knife, and eating quickly and abstractedly, like a man whose habits of

life have made food less an indulgence than a necessity. She believed that she was interesting him.

"My idea in life, my particular form of egoism, is a determination not to be swamped. I resent most fearfully, not the claims my family make on me, but the claims I make on my family. Theirs are a tribute to my indispensability, mine, a proof of my dependence. Therefore I am a perfectly charming woman, but quite extraordinarily selfish. That is how all my friends describe me. I admire their candour, but I never congratulate them on their perspicacity. My egoism is nothing if not blatant and unblushing.

"Now you go on!"she said encouragingly, helping herself to salad."Tell me about your selfishness, then I'll define how it's diflFerent from mine."

He did not appear inspired.

"Yours is a much better kind,"she supplemented."Finer. You have given up everything but the thing that won't be given up. In fact, there's nothing wrong in your sort of egoism. It's only your self-consciousness that brings it to life at all. In the middle

of your abject and terrible unselfishness you feel a tiny strain of resistance, and it worries you so much that it has rubbed you sore. It's mere morbidity on your part, that's what I condemn about it. Turn your family out into the street and carouse for a fortnight and you'll be a better man at the end of it. Mine is healthy animal spirits, mine is sheer exuberance; yours is a badgered, hectic, unavowed resistance to the people you love best in the world because, unknowingly, you still love yourself better."

"You wouldn't know the meaning of healthy animal spirits with six children on my income. I suppose what you are trying to say about me, is... the turning of the worm?"

"No,"said Marcia,"not exactly turning. I wonder if I am making a fool of myself? I don't believe you are an egoist at all. My ideas are beginning to desert me; I am really incapable of a sustained monologue on any subject under the sun. You see, generally I talk in circles; I mean, I say something cryptic, that sounds clever and stimulates the activities of other people's 109

minds, and when the conversation has reached a cHmax of briUiancy I knock down my hammer, Hke an auctioneer, on somebody else's epigram, cap it with another, and smile round at them all with calm assurance and finality. By that time everybody is in a sort of glow, each believing that he or she has laid the largest and finest of the conversational eggs.

"Goodness, youVe finished. Would you just call through the window and ask that woman if there's anything else to eat? She's been taking such an interest in our conversation and our profiles. Say strawberries if possible, because otherwise I have a premonition it will be blancmange."

The stranger put his head and shoulders through the window. Marcia studied his narrow back in the shabby tweed jacket, his thinning hair and the frayed edges of his collar. One hand gripped the back of his chair; she thought,"How terrible to see a man who isn't sunburnt."She listened to his muhied conversation with the waitress, and pushed her plate away, deploring the oiliness of the salad.

With flushed face he reappeared, and two plump arms came through the window after him, removed their plates, and clattered on to the table a big bowl of strawberries and a small greyish blancmange in a thick glass dish.

"I wonder if I'm tiring you,"said Marcia remorsefully."I know you came out here to be quiet, and I've done nothing but sharpen my theories on you ever since we made common cause against the coffee-room—it was worth while, too, wasn't it? Never mind, I'll let you go directly after lunch, and you shall find the tranquillity you came to look for underneath a lime-tree loud with bees. (I never take the slightest interest in Nature, but I always remember that touch about the bees. I came across it in a book.) I see a book in your pocket. If I wasn't here you'd be reading with it propped up against the water-jug, blissfully dipping your strawberries into the salt and wondering why they tasted so funny. But do let's eat them in our fingers, anyway. I never eat them with a spoon unless there's cream.... My husband says he finds me too exhilarating for a prolonged tete-a-tete''

He smiled at her with embarrassment, then leant his elbow on the warm rail of the verandah and looked down on to the road.

"It's so hot,"he said with sudden petulance,"so beastly hot. I didn't realise how hot it was going to be or I wouldn't have bicycled out."

"It's not very hot here, is it 1 Those leaves"

"No, but I was thinking about the hotness everywhere else. This makes it worse."

"Fancy bicycling. Do let me give you some blancmange; I think it is an heirloom. Did you come far?"

"From Lewisham."He added,"I work in a publisher's office."

"A publisher—how interesting. I wonder if you could do anything to help a boy I know; such a charming boy! He has written a book, but"

He flushed."I am not a—an influential member of the firm."

"Oh, then, p'raps you couldn't. Tell me, why did you come here to-day? I mean why here specially?"

"Oh, for no reason. Just at random. Why did you?"

"To meet somebody who hasn't turned up. He was going to have brought a lunch-basket and we were to have picnicked down by the river. Oh, nobody I shouldn't meet. You haven't blundered into an elopement. I've got no brain for intrigue. After lunch we were going to have sketched—at least, he would have sketched and I should have talked. He's by way of teaching me. We were to have met at twelve, but I suppose he's forgotten or is doing something else. Probably he wired, but it hadn't come before I started."

"Do you paint?"

"I've got a paint-box."She indicated a diminutive Windsor and Newton and a large water-colour block lying at her feet.

"I'm sorry,"he said diffidently."I'm afraid this must be something of a disappointment."

"Not a bit."She clasped her hands on the table, leaning forward."I've really loved our lunch-party. You listened. I've met very few people who could really listen."

"I've met very few people who were worth Hstening to."

She raised her brows. Her shabby man was growing gallant.

"I am certain,"she smiled,"that with your delicate perceptions of the romantic you would rather we remained incognito. Names and addresses are"

"Banality."

The leaves rustled and her muslins fluttered in a breath of warm wind. In silence they turned their faces out towards the distance.

"I love views,"she said,"when there isn't anything to understand in them. There are no subtleties of emotion about June. She's so gloriously elemental. Not a month for self-justification, simply for self-abandonment."

He turned towards her quickly, his whole face flushed and lighted up for speech.

With a grind and screech of brakes a big car drew up under the lime-trees.

Marcia leaned over the verandah rail.

"Ah,"she cried."Oh, John!"

She reached out for her parasol and dived to gather up her sketching things.

"How late you are,"she called again,"how late you are! Did you have a puncture, or what were you doing?"

She pushed back her chair with a grating sound along the tiled floor of the verandah, and stood looking down bright-eyed at his weary, passive, disillusioned face.

"I was right,"she said,"there are two sorts of egoists, and I am both."