Randalls Round (18 page)

It was nearly dark when she turned back into the house. She made it a rule to go the rounds of all the rooms each night, to make sure that there were no open windows or smouldering cigarette ends (“You know what men are!”) – and now, thanks to Lucy’s maunderings, she would have to do this by the inadequate light of an electric torch, since candles carried in the hand were hardly safe. She thought, as she tripped over forgotten and unnecessary steps and felt her way along the winding passages, that the house was more inconvenient than she had thought. Odd that, with all its twists and turns, it should somehow seem familiar. One would soon get used to its irregularities. And the girls wouldn’t mind. Girls, she reflected bitterly, never mind anything really badly. Girls were what men had made them – giddy, fickle, heartless. They had found that faith and loyalty and depth of feeling didn’t pay – thanks to men.

“Men!”
she muttered aloud, slamming a door.
“Men!
All alike! just use women and throw them away – forget they exist. No wonder girls…”

She stopped short. A tiny sound, like the faint echo of a sob, caught her ear.

She stood, listening intently. No – not a sound. Or – yes, there it was again – a sound of muffled, pitiful, hopeless crying.

For a moment she stood there, straining every sense. Then suddenly relief swept over her; “It’s a child,” she thought. “Some child who’s brought one of the men his tea, and got left behind… It was just here somewhere.”

She walked briskly down the passage, making encouraging sounds, opening every door, examining every room, flashing the beam of her torch into every corner. The house was empty and still.

“Very odd,” thought Annis, annoyed. “It must have been some trick of the wind.”

And she finished her rounds and went back to her cosy little sitting-room, with its Georgian furniture and Victorian silhouettes, to study catalogues and reports. She spent a peaceful and busy evening, and slept extra well in consequence.

The morning was sunny and mild, and Annis seized the opportunity to go over the garden, which she had not yet investigated, with a view to turning it to the best advantage for “her girls.” The lawns should be cut and rolled and turned into courts for tennis and badminton; the gravelled courtyard outside the old stables would be excellent for netball; she might fix up fives in the stables themselves. And she would leave bits of real garden simply for rest. She would keep the old flower-borders, with their fragrant hedges of rosemary and lavender and lad’s love. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance. And lad’s love – there was some song about it –

“What is lad’s love and the love of a lad?

Lad’s love is green and gray;

And the love of a lad is merry and sad

Here yesterday – gone today.

Heigh-ho, hey!

Here yesterday – gone today!”

Yes, there was something melancholy, as well as sweet, about lad’s love. Perhaps that should go…

But the old rose-garden, with its formal beds and stone seats and sundial, must certainly remain. She liked the sundial. It would have a motto, she was sure – “Time flieth, hope dieth” – why did the words come into her head? She had not seen them anywhere that she remembered.

She strolled across. Yes, she was right. The words were almost obliterated, worn and over-grown with moss, but they were there. She leant over the slab, tracing them with an idle finger.

“Timeflieth, hope…”

Annis suddenly stiffened. She remained, her hands resting lightly on the old stone slab, her eyes bent on the motto; but she, too, might have been carved in stone. For she felt, as certainly as she had ever felt anything, that someone stood behind her, reading the words over her shoulder – someone sneering, hating, despising her… She could hear her pulses beating in her throat – she could not breathe…

And then, as suddenly, these symptoms passed. She was alone in the winter sunshine, and a robin sang sweet and shrill in the bare rose-trees. She drew a deep breath, looked slowly round her, and walked thoughtfully into the house.

It was some time before she threw off the impression of those few seconds; but when she did she was very much ashamed of herself, and in consequence very angry.

“Idiot!”
she said crossly to herself. “Been overdoing it, I suppose, like all the other fools… I’ll go to bed early tonight.”

It was Saturday, and the workmen went early, so Annis was able to make her rounds in the bleak light of a winter afternoon. She looked very carefully through each room, and then locked it. She wasn’t going to have the trouble she’d had last night over that imaginary child. She’d make sure, this time, that every room was empty before she locked it – the big bedrooms with the old four- poster beds, the little slip of a room with the spinet, the pale old drawing-room that still smelt faintly of pot-pourri – she examined and locked them all.

What a lot of rooms there were! – and each with some trace of occupation. Why, in this one there was an old-fashioned work-table with needlework still in it, the needle rusted into the stuff! How could people ever have done that endless, jigsaw patchwork, she wondered as she took it up. But how pretty some of the stuffs had been! Those scraps of blue silk with tiny bright posies – charming. She touched the silk lovingly. Then she stood, her fingers stiffening, listening intently.

The spinet. Quite unmistakably she heard the faltering, tinkling notes of unpractised fingers – scales, broken by false notes, or ending abruptly. In the pauses there came little sobbing sounds… Annis stood motionless in the gathering dusk, her cold fingers clutching the old, old patchwork, listening to the faint, jingling notes of the spinet in the locked room next door…

The sound changed. There was a jangle, as if the performer had dropped weary hands from the keys; and then, very slowly and uncertainly, there came an air, picked out with one faltering hand – the old, plaintive, haunting tune, “Will ye no’ come back again?”

It, too, broke off half finished, and again there came the sound of hopeless, muffled weeping…

Or was it rain? Rain was pattering softly on the windows. There was no other sound except the beating of her own heart…

Annis thrust the old patchwork back into the table. She ran, stumbling, to the door, locked it behind her, fled back to her own little sanctum, and locked herself in. She stood leaning against the door, breathing hard and unevenly, her hand still on the latch.

What was that – that pale figure facing her, with wide, staring dark eyes in a white face… Only herself, reflected in the panel mirror opposite the door. For a moment it had looked different… But it was only herself, Annis Breck, white-faced, with staring, frightened eyes…

She crossed to the hearth and sat down. She was trembling violently. She sat looking with some surprise at her own shaking hands. The rain beat softly on the windows, melancholy and persistent. The grey, rain-swept garden sighed in the evening wind.

Annis rose, rather unsteadily, and went across to put up the shutters. The garden was so sad, grey in the rain. The sundial glimmered in the dusk. Was that – ? No, only a mist-wreath curving about the dial – it has dissolved already. But oh, how dreary, how melancholy! She put up the old white shutters hurriedly, and at an incredibly early hour sought the comfort and security of her bed.

Annis awoke with a start. What was it that had awakened her? Surely she had heard something. Was it a voice? A name, echoing in her ears? Or was it the spinet – “Will ye no’ come back again?”
“Timeflieth, hope dieth
.” Yes – and a girl – a girl dressed in a frock of blue silk, patterned with tiny gay posies – a girl at the spinet – a girl by the sundial, tracing the sad old motto, while slow tears dropped on the stone slab – a girl called Annis…

The girl had her own face. She understood it now. And his name – ah, how had she ever forgotten it? – his name had been Richard…

ADELA YOUNG must have come up to Oxford at the same time as myself; but no one, in a way, knew that she had. She was one of those people whom one never notices, physically or mentally – the kind of person whose adjectives you always qualify with “-ish.” She was smallish, thinnish, palish, with dim brownish hair and pale scared eyes. She had a timid, withdrawing manner; she dressed always in rather dismal neutral tints – dull greys and dim greens and fawnish drab, and tussore silk, to match her sallow skin. She was a good deal ignored.

I should never have known Adela, or the old lady, if it hadn’t been for a silly bet. One does these things in one’s first year – risky, futile, daring things – rather caddish things sometimes – with perhaps half-a-crown on them. Someone had ragged me on my numerous acquaintances, and I’d retorted by saying that anyone could make friends with anyone else if they wanted to. Maude Evans caught me up at once.

“Rot!” she said, with her usual affectation of breezy brusquerie. “There’s some people no one would ever know.”

“I bet there’s nobody in College I couldn’t get to know if I wanted to,” I asserted, with more assurance than was at all warranted. Maude had that effect on me.

Maude thought rapidly. I could see her, as I watched her challengingly, going over all the various types of people – the superior, the literary, the sporting, the fashionable, the “swots.” I felt pretty safe. I was only a fresher, but I had possibilities of friendships with all these types.

“You’d never get to know little Whatshername- that washed- out little dishcloth – Young, that’s it. I bet you’d never get thick with her.”

I had my doubts too, really. It was like betting you’d quarrel with a sofa-cushion. But of course I took her on.

“Bet I will,” I said at once.

“How much?” Maude caught me up. She always had rather an eye to the main chance.

“Oh – what you like.” I expected the usual half-crown.

“Bet you a fiver you don’t.”

That stung me. Maude would never have risked such a sum – five pounds means a good deal to a girl undergraduate – if she hadn’t felt certain of winning.

“Right,” I said immediately.

Then we settled the terms of the bet. I was to have invited and been invited – the latter was, of course, the important point – to six walks or meals by the end of the term: to have got some sort of real confidence (“heart to heart talk,” we called it) out of little Young, and have wangled an invitation to stay at her home before the end of the next term – the summer term.

Even as I took it on I felt a good deal of a cad. I felt much worse when I began the campaign. The college invitations were all right – one could take them as meaning a lot or as meaning nothing; but to fish for confidences and try to secure an invitation to stay with her people – rotten, both of them. I felt dimly even then that, even when tiresome, both are honours – often the highest honours one person can do another. But I’d been dared. Much as I wanted to win five pounds from the comparatively wealthy Maude Evans, little as I liked the idea of parting with any of my much smaller income to her, what really
mattered
was that I had been challenged and had accepted the challenge. So I set about the siege of Adela Young.

It was extremely difficult. Maude couldn’t have chosen a more hopeless subject. Certainly if I could “make good” with her I could with anyone, I thought, as I studied her across the dinner table that night. She looked permanently scared – she hardly raised her voice above a whisper, and her remarks, when audible, were merely hurried agreements with whatever the last speaker had said. She was silent whenever possible; her very movements were furtive and rapid, as if she had to get through the meal against time, and secretly. For the first time I felt rather
intriguée
about her. Plain, awkward, nondescript as she was, I felt something unusual, almost mysterious, about her. I was even rather thrilled by the idea of finding out more about her.

I caught her up as she was silently scuttling to her room after dinner – I remembered, now that I came to think of it, that she almost never waited for coffee after dinner, nor, indeed, for any semi-social function like that.

“I say,” I said, overtaking her, “you’re taking Mods. this term, aren’t you?”

“Y-Yes,” she breathed, looking terrified.

“I wonder if I might come in and go over the Plato with you?”

She said nothing, just goggled at me.

“You are taking the Plato set books, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I thought so. I’ve seen you at the classes.”

“Yes.”

We seemed stuck. I tried again.

“I meant to go over the stuff with Hanson and Phil Leamore, but they say they aren’t going to revise at all. Shall you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When are you going to go over the Plato?”

She looked at me mutely, her mouth opening and shutting like a newly caught fish. She seemed quite incapable of making any suggestion.

“Could you possibly do it tonight?”

“Oh, yes. ”

I began to wonder if she
could
say anything except “Yes” and “Oh, yes.”

“Then may I come along now?” I pressed on.

She said nothing but opened her door for me. She had the oddest manner as she did it – reluctant, almost, and yet half anxious. I wondered rather cockily if she was one of those people you meet sometimes who, when they want a thing, are half afraid of getting it.

As we entered I looked curiously round to see what ideas of decoration such a person (or thing – she hardly seemed to be a real person) would have. She had apparently none. Not a picture, not a flower, not a cushion or a novel or a vase or a photograph was there. Just the usual regulation college furniture and the set books for Pass Mods. I’ve seldom seen anything so chilling, so absolutely impersonal. I began to regret the bet. Maude Evans was probably right – there were people you could never get to know, because there was nothing to know; and Adela Young was one of them. She had a nondescript face and figure, and inside – nothing. Nothing at all. However I’d undertaken it and I’d go on. I sat down – on a stiff college chair – you couldn’t somehow sit naturally on the floor in that dead-alive room – and opened the “Apology” of Plato.