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Authors: Elizabeth Bowen

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costless courage, kept intact his stocks of dummy cartons and tins. In the confectioner's windows the ribbons bleached on dummy boxes of chocolate among flyblown cut-outs of pre-war blondes. Newsagents without newspapers gave out in angry red chalk that they had no matches either. Pasted inside a telephone booth, a notice asked one to telephone much less. The sun did not shine; and, as in May so often, there was something uneasy about the lowered sky and ink-blue fumy darkness across the distance. The leaves of the pollarded trees along the pavement burned an unnatural green. One seemed to have left the churchyard with its alert headstones for a scene of less future, order and animation. Thankful, at any rate, that they did not live here, the mourners glanced at their dark reflections in the darkling windows as they streamed past the shops: in the hush, an express train not stopping here could be heard roaring away down the main line. "We are actually full of soldiers," said Mrs. Tringsby, piloting the party across the trafficless street. "They are always an interest; my dear people love them. But I suppose they are all at their dinner now." Stella, not yet aware of her standing as heir's mother, was glad when her turn for a word from the lawyer came. She was ready for company; it was by the merest chance that she had not been left to walk quite alone--one of the Tringsby patients had drawn alongside, but he skipped on and off the pavement and did not speak. Trying to fight off the influence of the street and day, and still more of the memory of the grave--on which, it seemed to her, they had so shamefacedly, hurriedly turned their backs--she supported herself by thinking about Robert. When the lawyer bowed at her elbow and said how much he regretted Roderick's having been unable to come, she explained for the second time that he was in the Army. The lawyer accepted this with an incredulous second bow, and said he would ask for a word with her later on. She at once looked deeply apprehensive: he, as though to dispel something, cleared his throat and asked if _she__ had any idea who the stranger might be. "Not the slightest," said she, having looked behind her. "Hasn't anyone else?" "Apparently not. And he does not correspond with anyone on my list." "Oh dear," said Stella vaguely. "So what do you think he's up to? Perhaps he simply saw the thing in _The Times__." "But I did not put place or time of the funeral in _The Times__; in accord with general feeling that it should be strictly private." "But, good heavens," cried Stella, "_whose__ general feeling? Anybody would think Cousin Francis had been hanged! I cannot feel he'd have liked things hole-in-a-corner. I should have liked to have given him a send-off." "All this has been very trying for Dr. and Mrs. Tringsby." "But really much more trying for Cousin Francis!" The lawyer, who had compressed his lips, unparted them to begin, "But, my dear lady...," paused, sized up Stella, began again. "I allow for feeling," he said. "I am not without feeling. At the same time, placed as I have been, and in the absence of any expressed wish of any near relation of Mr. Morris's, I could not have felt myself justified in ignoring the interests of Dr. and Mrs. Tringsby. The charge of uncertified patients, such as they undertake, is at all times a delicate matter. I am satisfied that their conduct of Wisteria Lodge is above reproach. I have been, therefore, at pains to safeguard the establishment against further disturbance and, still more, publicity of an unwelcome kind." "Oh." Oppressed by so much explanation, Stella glanced away from the lawyer towards her other companion--the hatless Tringsby patient not unlike Mr. Dick. Something struck her--"Of course," she suggested, "your stranger you cannot place may be one more of the Wisteria Lodge party?" "Oh?..." said the lawyer, "ah..." He moved on ahead at once to check up the matter with Mrs. Tringsby. As he failed to return to put Stella right, she continued to think of Harrison as a Tringsby patient: she continued to look at him in that light when, at the hotel, he came up with a cup of coffee. Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again. Her uncontrovertible sense of Harrison's queer-ness dated, she saw ever afterwards, from that day of the funeral. His stops in talking, apparently due to some inner cramp; the exaggerated quietness of his movements, as though their importance must be at all costs hidden; his ununified way of regarding you simultaneously out of each eye--these, in the months that followed, were to keep on alimenting her first idea. He had followed the funeral like a shark a ship. "Originally," she was to tell him from time to time, "I took for granted you were a lunatic; and I am still not so certain that I was wrong." No sooner had the procession reached the hotel than Stella was prised apart from it by the lawyer. In default of any other place where they could be private, he took her to a recess under the stairs: here, surrounded by hanging mackintoshes, he made known to her the effect of Cousin Francis's will, and placed in her hands the envelope of the typescript copy. Askance, she asked: "But aren't you going to read it aloud to everyone?" "I shall be ready to do so, in response to any expressed wish. As you and I know, it affects no one else here. It is, as you say, a pity your son could not be present. As against which, his being still a minor and your being his guardian makes the legacy, for the time being, equally your concern." "Yes, of course, I see." Agitated, not knowing what she felt and wondering what Roderick would feel, she rejoined the party in the private room upstairs. Looking round at the others with a new eye, she supposed that, if they knew what was in the will, they would look with a new eye at her. Not one of these faces stood out clearly; the interior, with its maroon walls, was, like the day outdoors, overcast. The windows wore wire gauze half-blinds; through one window a chestnut threw its viridian reflection, balancing waxy flowers, into a tarnished mirror across the room. And this tall wide mirror, relict of some vanished ballroom, reflected also Roderick's father's people, sombrely milling around the buffet. Mrs. Tringsby, annoyed by the misunderstanding about Harrison--who did not look to her, she had told the lawyer, at all the type of person she would have had in her house--had placed her two real dear people side by side on a bench, at the greatest possible distance from the intruder: circulating, herself, amongst the rest of the party, she plied back from time to time to the bench with more sandwiches, and could be heard to hope that they were enjoying themselves. No sooner was Stella inside the room than Harrison came up with the cup of coffee. "Or if you'd rather," he said, "I see there's some so-called port." "This looks very nice," she said, accepting the coffee, neutrally smiling. "Or, one could always nip down and see what they've got in the bar?" "No, thank you; this really looks very nice." She attempted to move away, but he headed her off again with a plate of sandwiches. "Not much of a send-off, this," he said, "for the poor old boy. What a place to snuff out in, when everything's said and done!" "Wisteria Lodge?" "Well, I mean to say--in a nut-house! If he had even been having a bit of fun..." She frowned, bit into a sandwich, and revised, at least for the moment, her idea. So, one was once more back where one started--nowhere. She said: "Oh, you knew him, then?" "Why not?" said he, eyeing her in a moody but somehow rallying way. "What else would make one show up at _a__ show like this?" "I don't know, really." "You probably can't place me?" "I don't know that I've tried--I had not seen Cousin Francis for such a long time that I have no idea whom he might not know." "Frankly, no more had I," said Harrison promptly. "At this side of the water, that's to say. You rather cut out Ireland? I knew him there. What an old place that was of his--right off the beaten track! And what a reception one got there--quite Oriental! Yes, dear old Frankie and I had great get-togethers. You'd be surprised how often I heard your name--I _do__ rightly take it you're Mrs. Rodney?" "Yes," she said, far from pleased. She looked round the room, hoping for some way out. She resignedly added: "You come from Ireland?" "I go there." "Fishing?" "Alas, no time." She had rather thought not. She passed on to her second idea--which was also, in its own way, to strike down a root--that he must be a travelling salesman, gentleman-type. She could picture him punting up in a small car and broaching country-house steps, to assure the owner he had a fine old place here. Cousin Francis had always looked kindly on new inventions, though with a final reluctance to take advantage of them. With regard to heating, lighting and plumbing he was happy to keep Mount Morris in, almost, its original state; and his farm was run and his land worked with few aids unknown in his grandfather's day--none the less, systems, outfits, fit-ups, gadgets and all forms of mechanised labour-savers entranced him; he wrote for booklets containing further particulars of almost every device he saw advertised. He had flirted, to within danger of breach of promise, with an air-conditioning plant, a room-to-room telephone, an electric dish-washer and a fireproof roof. Any salesman would find him as easy to "interest" as he would prove impossible to pin down. He could be written off as a famous waster of time. "Yes, remarkably fine old place he had there, too," said he, with an apparent clairvoyance which made her start. "And now, I seem to remember, that's to go to your son?" Too much annoyed by his manner to be surprised at his knowledge, she said: "I believe so, yes," and glanced round the room again. She told herself, it was like her to have attached this person: from every point of view this was the last straw. She caught, and held for a moment, the solicitous eye of a Colonel Pole. Meanwhile, Harrison uttered--for the first time, where she was concerned--his laugh. "You wonder a bit," he said, "at my spotting you? As one's not, as a rule, introduced at a show like this, one puts two and two together.--_My__ name, by the way, is Harrison.--Frankly, there's no one else here who very well could be you--I having, as one might say, so oft heard your praises sung!" She exclaimed--to herself, aloud, overlooking him--"If I'd ever known he remembered me, still was fond of me, liked to talk about me! I could have so often so easily gone to see him--or else sent him Roderick, if he'd wanted that!" "Yes," agreed Harrison smugly, "rather a pity, really. One so often thinks of a thing too late." Tears filled her eyes; from that moment she hated him. He went on: "Now, when I saw old Frankie in London the other day--" "_You__ saw him? This time--since he came over?" "Mm-mm. Why not?" "You ran into him?" "Far from it--we'd got a date. That was when he came to mention he was due down here, this place, next day, to look up the poor old girl. We left it I was to give him a ring again first thing next morning when he'd got back to London. When I did ring, the fat was in the fire. The hotel had just been notified he'd popped off. And more, his lawyers had taken over, and on their instructions they'd locked his room up; which was the devil, he having some stuff of mine. Of course I went round, but the management were not playing. So I then thought, well, the remaining thing one can do is to stand by the poor old boy through the final round. Next, of course, the question arose--but _where__? To cut short a longish story, I put two and two together. Knowing there'd been a run on London burying-space, and that one would think twice these days about shipping a stiff to Ireland, I considered here a good bet, which it proved. I may say, I went to the trouble of checking up. "You certainly went to a good deal of trouble." "Then again, why not, after all?" said he. "An old friend." She just was beginning to wonder why the reply did not, somehow, either rebuke or convince her, when Colonel Pole approached with a glass of port. Colonel Pole, with whom her refugee glance had found its mark, had for some time now been wishing to cross the gulf dividing this lady from the rest of the party; now that his wife Maud had fallen into conversation with Mrs. Tringsby, he seized the opportunity of doing so. With a courteous determined movement of the shoulder he drove a wedge between Stella and Harrison: the latter immediately turned away. Colonel Pole said he supposed she did not remember him? "Of course I remember you!" Stella said. "Do you still breed those lovely Samoyede puppies?" "Hitler has put the lid on that, for the time being. You would not care for some port?... I'm afraid you're right." Colonel Pole shook his head. "Frankie himself," he said, "would have done us very much better. Making allowance for everything, I cannot feel this solicitor fellow has done his best--at the same time, he strikes me as taking a bit too much on himself. Bit of a bee in his bonnet about these Tringsbys--makes one fancy he must have put money into their place? And he does not seem clear who is here today and who isn't--for instance, your son is _not__ with us, I understand?" "No. He--he couldn't get leave in time." "Very gallant of you, coming down on your own like this." Colonel Pole, looking cautiously after Harrison, added: "Or is that a friend of yours?" "No." "I somehow thought not," he exclaimed--the more warmly because Maud had taken the other view. "I should not be surprised to hear that you've no idea who he is--any more, that's to say, than the rest of us have?" "He says his name is Harrison." "_That__ does not tell one much." She agreed. Colonel Pole went on: "He's not been annoying you?" "Not exactly." "He did not happen to say what he thinks he is doing here?" "He knew Cousin Francis in Ireland." "Ireland? Things may not be what they were in that unfortunate country, but you won't get me to believe that chap is an Irishman! So what was he up to there, I should like to know?" "I don't think he said." "Up to some kind of hanky-panky, I should not wonder." "Apparently Cousin Francis knew all about him." "It was characteristic of Frankie," said Colonel Pole, "not to spot hanky-panky when he saw it. Up to a point he'd listen to any story; he was as innocent as a babe unborn. At the same time, he'd got a memory like a sieve--he had no doubt completely forgotten he ever met this fellow." "I don't think he can have," said Stella mildly. "They met by appointment in London only the other day." "What, not _this__ time?" said Colonel Pole, changing colour. "That is what Mr. Harrison told me. The day before Cousin Francis came down here." "Now that I just don't believe!
Appointment? Meeting in London? Why, not a soul knew Frankie was in this country. _You'd__ heard nothing?--I thought not: no more had Maud and I. And, from what I've made out this morning, all the rest here today were just as much in the dark. To tell you the truth, it's been that that's hit me as hard as anything--Frankie's coming over to England and never letting me know! He and I, you know--or perhaps you don't--no, how should you?--grew up as boys together; one time, we were like brothers. Blood is thicker than water, whatever else they invent. You set store by your memories when you get to my age." Colonel Pole, already looking unhappy, paused, frowned, and further lowered his voice. "One or two things lately have made me ask myself whether this drawn-out wretched business about poor Nettie could have unsettled Frankie in any sort of way. Then came this Irish muddle, to top the lot--there was no braver country when I was young. Not that it does to think of the old times. Once you hand over the reins to a pack of rebels--! But there, again, you had Frankie--obstinate as a mule. You had to allow for the fact that his roots were there: he got to be as touchy as--well, I should not care to say! For instance, last Christmas, writing my yearly letter, I couldn't resist a dig; it may have been wrong of me. I wrote, 'You must be proud, these days, of your precious country!' Whereupon, will you believe me, he fired a letter back fairly blowing my head off--this and that and the other, in a pretty nearly nationalistic strain. Even Maud said, 'Why, Frankie's losing his sense of humour.' I am bound to say that, beyond agreeing with Maud, I did not make much of that at the time. It is only now--I mean, it is only since--_You__ don't imagine I could have hurt him, do you? He and I have been sparring since we were so high. Still, there it stands: he came over to England this time, after all these years, without one word to me. However... What about more coffee?" "No, thank you very much." "What you probably need, like me, is a decent lunch. Morning like this takes it out of one, makes one think. P'raps I see things out of proportion? No, whatever you say, that was _not__ like Frankie.--There's another thing I should very much like to know--what's to become of the place?" Stella raised her eyes. "It's been left to my son." "Indeed? Is that so...?" Colonel Pole digested this slowly. "All the more pity," he said, "if that's the way Frankie saw things, that that boy of yours could not be here today." Cogitation appeared in his blue eyes; he eyed the heir's mother with unaffected concern. "A white elephant. What will the boy do?" "As he knows nothing yet, I have no idea." "The last sort of thing that _his__ generation wants. Myself, I was never happier than in the old days there; I can see that place today, every stick and stone. But we've got to face it: all that's a thing of the past. It's bitter to me, all right, to think of Mount Morris going. At the same time," said Colonel Pole, sternly raising his voice and squaring his shoulders, "I advise you to advise the boy to get rid of it--sell outright, before he ties himself up. At his age, one has got to move with the times. All that timber should go for a pretty price. One thing he should do at once is, take the roof off the house, or they'll be popping nuns in before you can say knife. Tell him that from me." "I will. But he must decide for himself." "Well, to think of Frankie!--D'you know, I'd no idea he'd had the pleasure of ever meeting your son?" "They never did meet. And Roderick never has seen Mount Morris." "All for the best, no doubt: sentiment won't have to enter in." "No, I suppose not," she agreed sadly. "Sentiment," said Colonel Pole, "is the devil. Has made more mess of more men's lives, if I may speak so plainly, than drink or women. However, your young Robert--" "--Roderick," she impassively corrected. "I beg your pardon: Roderick--he and his generation will have no use for that. All they will want is to travel light. After all, the future is in their hands." "In that case, how can they travel light?" Colonel Pole looked baffled. "Well, they can have the future: shall not myself be here to see what they make of it--Let's see--_-you__ know Mount Morris, I fancy?" "I once did. Victor and I were there for our honeymoon." He dared not decide whether her eyes, with their misted askance look, were those of the victim or of the _femme fatale__. He did not know the whole of that story, and did not want to. What one had heard was this--that about two years after her marriage Stella Rodney had asked her husband for a divorce. It could but be that there was someone else in her life; however, the injured Victor, up to the last quixotic, had let her divorce him. That injustice, crowned by her being given custody of the child, had left her forever detestable to Victor's family, headed by the Maud Pole group. Victor was understood to have worshipped Stella, how wrongly! Not long before their marriage he had emerged from the 1914 war with a wound still troublesome, shaken health--a man who called to be built up, and she had cast him down. Her worthlessness had lost him wife, son and home. Three weeks after the decree was made absolute he had died, in the place he had taken refuge, the house of a kindly middle-aged woman who had already nursed him during the war. The sole satisfaction for Maud and the family had been this--that the unknown man for whose sake Stella had sacrificed Victor's life did not attempt to claim her now she was free; therefore, there _she__ was; living, one heard, with, her son in a succession of little houses about the country on an income estimated by Maud Pole to amount to about nine hundred a year. Beyond one rumour that while occupying a dower house she had been having a flirtation with her landlord, little more had been heard of her, good or bad. All that, though ancient history, had been regrettably raked up by her appearance at the funeral, and today was very much in the air. Colonel Pole, however, still could not but think it gallant of her to have come. Having never, at least so far as he knew, found himself eye to eye with a _femme fatale__, he had no means of knowing whether he now did so. Whether it was or was not under the influence of the shock of Frankie's death that he had to, could only, speak to her from the heart, he could not say. She certainly was not barefaced--no longer meeting her eyes he looked, havering, at the string of pearls round her throat showing no sign of age. She was better than gallant, she was feeling; she brought grace to this sparse ignoble burying of poor old Frankie far from his own land. It was outrageous she should have been left to Harrison. He said: "Well, if there's ever anything I can do..." "What I am really dying for is a cigarette." Stella finished herself, in the view of all, by returning to London in charge of Harrison. The Poles, she found, were travelling in the opposite direction; their homeward journey would take them into the Midlands. She had gained face, for the time being, from the length of her conversation with Colonel Pole; three or four more of the family, after that, had bowed or briefly spoken to her. But none of the few who had bowed or spoken turned out, alas, to be catching the London train; it was those who persisted in doing neither who formed, at the other end of the station platform, a close group in chilly talk. As for Harrison, _he__ had shot out of the hotel bar in time to catch up with Stella on the station approach, saying: "Good. So we all go the same way home.... First smoker?" he asked, as the train drew in. She said: "I'm travelling third." "Oh, come--for Frankie's sake I think we blow the expense!" In the train, he paid up the difference on her ticket--and, she saw, on his own--with the air of one getting value for money. "It's not every day," he said, blithely shovelling into his pocket the change from a pound note, "that one runs into someone one's been wanting to meet. I had rather hoped your son might have been on the party also--I expect he'd have made a point of that if he'd known? I'd have liked to have met him. Perhaps we might fix that up?" "Roderick's always away now he's in the Army." "Lonely for you--or is it?" Harrison said. "I cannot quite see why you want to meet him." "In the first place, obviously, isn't he your son?" Seeing no reason to take this up, she busied herself with lighting one of the cigarettes Colonel Pole had transferred from his case into her own. Harrison's case, whipped out just not in time, snapped shut again like the jaws of a chagrined crocodile. "And another thing--or would this seem funny to you?--your son, to me, seems all that's left of old Frankie." "Oh?" she said, far less coldly. "That's how I see it. At the same time, there's something else. Ha-ha--now you mustn't think I'm going to be a nuisance! I really am anxious to get back that stuff of mine, which, as I told you, they've got under lock and key with the rest of the doings at his hotel. Which could be quite a lengthy not to say ticklish matter. You know what they are, those lawyers: don't give a damn. I understand that your son is residuary legatee--" "But isn't it the executors who would have access to Cousin Francis's things? You should go to them, surely?" "How right you are. And that's where I shall go, of course. But here's where we come up against another awkward point--there is nothing to show that the stuff _is__ mine. Me just turning up to claim it out of the blue might strike those executors as a bit fishy; I wouldn't blame them; I'd think it fishy myself. Old Frankie would have vouched for me like a rajah--but then, if we'd got _him__ with us none of this would arise. As things are, you see how I'm placed? If your son could take me along and explain he knew me--" "But Roderick doesn't know you." "Yes, but he would by then. Or say you knew me--" "I'm sorry, but that would not be true." "Ha-ha--but we're rapidly making it true, I hope?" That she did not share the hope she intimated in any possible way--by leaning absently back as he leaned ardently forward (he had secured for their journey two facing corner seats), by looking sideways out at the flying landscape, by becoming too distant even to show surprise. After a curative interval she remarked: "I am not even clear what you left in Mr. Morris's room. Goods, of some sort? Prospectuses? Samples, of any kind?" "Good gosh, no--simply one or two papers." She, who was seldom as rude as this, said: "Perhaps you've been writing poetry?" Focussing upon Stella his not-quite squint, he replied in good faith: "No, that's never been much my line. No, this was simply something I jotted down, with a view to entertaining the old fellow. You remember, he was a tiger for facts and figures." "If you carry all that in your head, why not just jot it down again?" "Well, it was my stuff partly, partly some stuff he gave me. We swapped; then I worked the thing out to show him how two and two made four. If you'd care to hear the entire story, off we go--it was like this--" "--No, I needn't trouble you. Keep it for the executors." "In that case, we're back where we started." It appeared that they were. Only one thing revived her: they seemed to be nearing London. Hoardings became more frequent; garden fences criss-crossed; ruins began to string out along the main line. As the suburbs thickened on either hand she felt less constricted, and bolder. Though they were not alone she had felt gated off from their fellow-travellers by Harrison's way of sticking a leg across, and, still more, by his fixing forceful manner to her. That this had not attracted attention she could not hope. Soon now, however, should come King's Cross. "No, I can't see how I can help you," she said firmly. "I could only say you knew Cousin Francis, and after all, you can always say that yourself." "Oh, absolutely," agreed Harrison. "Absolutely." "I see it's annoying for you." "It could be more so." "Oh?" "It's put me into the way of talking to you." She raised her voice a frigid half-tone, to say: "I might write to one executor, whom I know a little. Also, could you not show them Mr. Morris's letter to you, making that appointment you kept in London?" "That's an idea, you know." He looked at her respectfully with both eyes. At King's Cross she succeeded, or fancied herself to have succeeded, in giving him the slip. He went ahead to try for a taxi; she made a loop through the crowd and got into the Underground. She did not expect to have to give him another thought--after consideration, she saw no reason to involve herself in his dealings with the executors. He did not know her address; her name was not in the London telephone book. When, therefore, two evenings later Harrison rang her up to say how much he hoped she had got home safely, she was not so much annoyed as point-blank astounded. Both feelings were cast into the shade by what had become, by that time, her ruling worry--Roderick _had__ been genuinely put out at not having been told beforehand about the funeral: she had never had any idea he could feel so strongly. Not only in order to make this good but that she and he might have the necessary business talk, she took yet another train on her next free day, to meet Roderick near where he was in camp. Meanwhile, she posted to him the copy of Cousin Francis's will: he should have time to digest this before they met. Had he done so? The afternoon appointed found them face to face with each other across a teashop table: Roderick, with a frown, unfolded the document, which had been a good deal thumbed. His eyes ran down the typescript till they stopped at a line--"Look, this is where I want to know what you think. When he's said about he bequeathes Mount Morris, the lands, the etcetera, etcetera, and so on, to his cousin Roderick Vernon Rodney, me, he goes on, '_In the hope that he may care in his own way to carry on the old tradition__.'--_Why__ must lawyers always take out commas?" "Because what they write is meant to be clear without them." "Well, in this case it isn't. Which _did__ Cousin Francis mean?" "Which what, darling?" "Did he mean, care in my own way, or, carry on the old tradition in my own way?" Uncomprehending, Stella returned her eyes to the cropped top of Roderick's downbent head. "In the end, I suppose," she hazarded, "it would come to the same thing?" "I'm not asking what it would come to; I want to know what he meant." "I know. But the first thing is that you'll really have to decide--" "What should I decide? He's decided. It's become mine." "We must think what you're going to do." "But I want to know which he meant. Does he mean, that I'm free to care in any way I like, so long as it's _the__ tradition I carry on; or, that so long as I care in the same way he did, I'm free to mean by 'tradition' anything I like?" "There was another cousin of

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