Eustace and Hilda (25 page)

“How long?” asked Hilda. “A week, a month, a year?”

“It might be more than a year.”

Hilda stared at him through unshed tears.

“But where are you going to? Who's going to take care of you? You've never stayed away from home before and you know you can't look after yourself.”

“I don't know where I shall be,” said Eustace. Suddenly a picture of Anchorstone churchyard occurred to him, and of Miss Fothergill being laid in her grave that windy day. He had never before thought of his disappearance in terms of burial.

“Perhaps not very far from here,” he said.

“Oh, if you're not going far it won't matter so much,” said Hilda. “Because we shall be able to drive over and see you and bring you things. But you must be somewhere, in someone's house, I mean. Everybody except a tramp lives in a house, and I shouldn't think you'd want to leave us just to become a tramp.”

“I don't want to leave you.”

“Well, who says you have to?”

“They all do, really.”

“But I don't understand—they can't turn you into the street—they're very fond of you. And who is there for you to stay with near here? It would have been different while Miss Fothergill was alive. You could have gone to her. But she's dead.”

Distress had made Hilda angry, as it so often did. Eustace's heart began to race; he couldn't bear the strain of all this talk at cross-purposes and must find some way of bringing it to an end.

“I missed her very much at first,” he began, “but I don't miss her so much now. You see, she is with God. And perhaps you won't miss me very much when I go away.”

Hilda stared at him uncomprehending.

“Because it will be rather the same, you see.”

There was a long silence. Then Hilda said:

“Do you mean you are going to die?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Instantly a feeling of complete peace possessed him. His sense of his surroundings, never very strong except when they helped to intensify his thoughts, faded away; the long struggle with his fate, inside him and outside, seemed over. But Hilda's voice recalled him to actuality. She had risen from the rock and was standing over him, her face transformed with fury and pain.

“How can you say such a wicked thing? You don't know what you're talking about. You must be mad. I shall go straight home and tell them!”

Eustace rose too, and began to tremble. “They'd only tell you the same as they told me.”

“It's nonsense. You're not ill, are you, I mean you're not specially ill? People don't die just because they say they're going to. You can't
think
yourself dead.” She glared at him accusingly. “Don't you feel well?”

“I don't feel very well,” said Eustace, beginning to cry. “But it isn't only that. I've had warnings and messages—you wouldn't understand. And I feel it here,” he made a vague gesture, his hand swept over his heart and rested on his forehead—“as though I hadn't long to stay. It isn't the same with me as it used to be, even here on the sands. Don't be angry with me, Hilda. You'll make me sorry I told you. I didn't want to.”

“But I
am
angry with you,” cried Hilda. “How dare you talk like that? I see how it is—you
want
to go away—you
want
to leave us! You tried before, the time of the paper-chase, but you had to come back. You had to come back from Miss Fothergill too. You think you'll be with someone who loves you more than we do—that's why you talk about dying! But I won't allow it! I'll stop you! I'll see you don't slip away!” She looked wildly at Eustace and advanced a step towards him: he recoiled. “I shan't leave you,” she whispered, still more excitedly and making passes at him with her spade. “I shan't let them get by me, whoever they are, and I shan't let you. I shall always be there. I shan't let you walk along the cliff-edge alone, and I shall take away your knife, and your ball of string too, so that you can't do anything to yourself! You'd like to, wouldn't you? You'd like to get rid of us all!”

Eustace's eyes grew round with terror. Dimly the meaning of what Hilda had been saying began to detach itself from the violence of the words. The cliff's edge ... the knife ... the ball of string. He began to visualise them, and to realise what they stood for. The string was for his neck, the knife was for his throat, and the cliff's edge was for his whole body.... Turning away from Hilda he began to stray and stumble towards the sea. The sun was in his eyes, dazzling him; it shone from the sky, from the foaming crests of the breakers, from the tiny water-furrows between the sand-ribs. Faintly the sound of hoof-beats caught his ears; sliding below his reasoning faculty, their rhythm started a vision in his mind. Clop-clop, clop-clop, on they came, and the chariot, too, came nearer, fringed with fire. But Hilda had flung herself at the horses' heads. In one hand she held the knife, with the other she was hanging to the reins. The near horse turned to bite her, and she fell; and the horses trampled on her and the wheels of the chariot passed over her.

Suddenly the air was full of voices, and Eustace heard his name called. He turned round and saw, not far away, a party of people mounted on horseback. No, they were not people, they were children, or two of them were, and he thought he recognised them, but his eyes were still too full of sun to see properly and his mind too troubled to take in what he saw. While he tried to adjust his faculties to this new situation, one of the riders drew away from the group and came towards him. The horse screwed and sidled and tossed its head, but she brought it to a stand within a few yards of him.

“We've come to congratulate you, Eustace,” Nancy Steptoe said.

T
HE WORDS
were hardly out of her mouth when, as though at a pre-arranged signal, the other members of the party put their steeds in motion. To the accompaniment of much prancing, head-tossing and tail-swishing, they joined their spokesman, and after some manœuvring formed a rough semicircle round Eustace.

“Congratulations, Eustace!” said Gerald Steptoe.

“Congratulations, Eustace!” said Dick Staveley.

“Congratulations!” after a second's hesitation said the lady on Dick's right.

Eustace stared at them in amazement.

“Aren't you going to speak to us, Eustace?” said Nancy, with a flash of her frosty eyes. “Are you still angry? He isn't supposed to speak to us, you know,” she confided to the others, “and now I expect he's too proud to as well.”

With the tail of his eye Eustace looked round for Hilda, but he could not see her.

“She's just behind you,” said Nancy, interpreting his glance. “Good-morning, Hilda,” she called over his head. “We were passing by, so we thought we'd stop to congratulate Eustace.”

“Good-morning, Nancy,” said Hilda shortly. “It's very kind of you to congratulate Eustace, but I don't know what it's for and nor does he.”

“They don't know!”

“They haven't been told!”

“Well, really!”

Only the lady on Dick's right contributed nothing to the hubbub of incredulity and surprise. Erect and a little apart she sat, in a grey riding habit whose close fit made her seem to Eustace's eyes unbelievably slim and elegant. She wore her hair in a bun under her bowler hat. You could not expect her to speak, you could not expect a goddess to speak, her whole appearance spoke for her. But she raised her eyebrows slightly and made a movement with her shoulders, as if to imply that among ordinary mortals anything might happen.

High in the air above him, as it seemed to Eustace, the chime and jingle of voices went on. Now the little fountains of exclamation and interjection had died down, and they were discussing something, but the wind tore the words to pieces along with the wisps of foam from the horses' lips, and Eustace could not understand their drift. Soon the discussion became an argument, almost a wrangle: the figures seemed to stiffen on their saddles; arms jerked; heads turned abruptly. At last Dick appealed to the lady on his right.

“What do you think, Anne?”

She hesitated and looked down at Eustace with a greater appearance of interest than she had yet shown.

“I should tell him,” she said. “I think it would be kinder.”

“You tell him, Dick,” said Nancy.

Dick Staveley braced himself, power and authority descended on him, and for the first time Eustace realised that he was once more in the presence of his hero.

“Here, come a bit nearer,” Dick commanded.

Eustace edged his way cautiously towards the towering rampart of tossing heads, shining eyes, and hoofs that pawed the sand.

Dick bent towards him.

“You've come into a fortune,” he said.

“A fortune?” repeated Eustace.

“You'll have to explain, Dick,” Anne said. “He doesn't know what a fortune is.”

“Oh yes I do,” exclaimed Eustace; “it's a great deal of money.”

“Quite right. Well, somebody's left you a great deal of money.”

“But who left it to me?”

“Can't you guess?”

Eustace shook his head.

“Just look at him,” said Dick. “He doesn't know who left it to him, and he can't guess. He has such masses of friends waiting to die and leave him their money that he simply doesn't know who it is. We don't have friends like that, do we, Anne? Our friends never die and if they did they wouldn't leave us anything. I want to know how Eustace manages it. I expect he murders them.”

“But I haven't any friends,” cried Eustace.

“Well, one less now, of course. It was very suspicious, you know, the way she died. She was quite well in the morning. She called on her lawyer and said to him: ‘Just get out some stamps and sealing-wax and red tape, and so on, because I'm going to change my will. I'm going to leave all my money to a young friend of mine, who is coming to tea with me this afternoon.' Well, you went and we know what happened. It did seem rather odd.”

“Miss Fothergill?” gasped Eustace. “Do you mean Miss Fothergill?”

“You've got it.” Dick began to clap, and they all joined in, while Eustace, possessed by emotions so unrecognisable that he did not know whether they were painful or delicious, stared blankly at Dick's laughing face.

“You don't look very pleased,” said Dick at length.

“Oh, but I am,” said Eustace. “I was just wondering what Hilda would think.” He turned to his sister as he spoke.

“Well, and what does Miss Cherrington think?” asked Dick, and as plainly as if it had been yesterday instead of a year ago Eustace remembered the coaxing voice in which Dick used to speak to Hilda.

“I think it's very nice for Eustace,” she said, speaking expressionlessly, as if mesmerised. “I hope it won't make any difference to him—I mean,” she corrected herself. “I hope it won't make him any different.”

“Oh, but it will!” Nancy's clear voice rang out in mockery and triumph. “For one thing, he's going away to school.”

Going away, going away: so that was what going away meant: not what he thought it did.

As their dread meaning evaporated, the words seemed to shrink and dwindle, from the capital letters of a capital sentence to the smallest of common type. Utterly insignificant, they now carried hardly any meaning at all, and the thing in Eustace that had been swelling like a tumour shrank and dwindled with them. But the word ‘school' still meant something; it conjured up a picture of the brown prison-house sidling up to Cambo like a big boy preparing to kick a small one.

“Not Mr. Johnson's?” he said.

“Oh no,” said Nancy. “Not a potty little school like that. Why, tradesmen's sons go there. No, a school in the South of England.”

Nancy's tone established for ever in Eustace's mind a conviction of the social superiority of the South over all parts of England, particularly East Anglia.

“St. Ninian's at Broadstairs it's to be, I'm told,” said Gerald. “Not half a bad place. Some very decent fellows go there, very decent. We played their second eleven at cricket this summer. We drove over from St. Swithin's in a brake, and they gave us a jolly good feed. St. Swithin's is in Cliftonville, you know. Of course, that's different from Margate. No trippers or anything of that sort.”

“Is it at all like Anchorstone?” Eustace asked. “Are there any rocks?”

“I dare say there are, but you couldn't jump on them, you know. No one does. They wouldn't let you, and besides you wouldn't want to. It's a kids' game.”

Eustace felt as if the landscape of his life was streaming by him while he, perilously balanced on a small white stone in the midst of the flux, searched in vain for some landmark which would confirm his sense of the stability of existence.

“You'll like it at St. Ninian's,” Dick Staveley said. “It was my pri. too.”

Eustace looked puzzled.

“My private school, I mean. You don't stay there after you're fourteen. Then you go to a public school.”

“And then to the 'Varsity,” said Nancy.

“But when shall I begin to work?” asked Eustace. “I mean, when shall I start to earn my living?”

“Oh, you won't ever have to do that, will he, Dick?” said Nancy. “You'll be like Dick, you won't have to work, you'll be much too rich. You'll live at home and play golf, or shoot, or hunt, or something like that, and the rest of the time you'll spend abroad, at Homburg or Carlsbad or one of those places.”

The landscape was now flashing by at a speed that left Eustace no time to sort out his impressions. But Nancy's picture of a future exempt from toil and effort was one he never forgot.

“But will Daddy have to work?” he asked.

“Well, we really hadn't thought about that, had we? Yes, I expect so. The money doesn't belong to him. It's yours, or will be when you're twenty-one. I expect he'll come and spend his holidays with you if you ask him, and don't happen to be abroad.”