Supper at Leys was the formal meal of the day, with the Seniors in their dancing silks and the rest in supper frocks, but on Saturdays when so many had “Larborough leave” it was a much more casual affair. Students sat where they pleased, and, within the bounds of convention, wore what they pleased. Tonight the atmosphere was even more informal than usual since so many had departed to celebrate the end of Examination Week elsewhere, and still more were planning celebration on the spot after supper. Henrietta did not appear — it was understood that she was having a tray in her room — and Madame Lefevre was absent on concerns of her own. Fr?ken and her mother were at the theatre in Larborough, so Lucy shared the top table with Miss Lux and Miss Wragg, and found it very pleasant. By tacit consent the burning question of Arlinghurst was not referred to.
“One would think,” said Miss Lux, turning over with a fastidious fork the vegetable mysteries on her plate, “that on a night of celebration Miss Joliffe would have provided something more alluring than a scranbag.”
“It’s because it’s a celebration night that she doesn’t bother,” said Wragg, eating heartily. “She knows quite well that there is enough good food waiting upstairs to sink a battleship.”
“Not for us, unfortunately. Miss Pym must put something in her pocket for us when she is coming away.”
“I bought some cream puffs in Larborough on the way home from the match,” Wragg confessed. “We can have our coffee in my room and have a gorge.”
Miss Lux looked as if she would have preferred cheese straws, but in spite of her chill incisiveness she was a kind person, so she said: “I take that very kindly of you, so I do.”
“I thought you would be going to the theatre, or I would have suggested it before.”
“An out-moded convention,” said Miss Lux.
“Don’t you like the theatre?” asked the surprised Lucy, to whom the theatre was still a part of childhood’s magic.
Miss Lux stopped looking with a questioning revulsion at a piece of carrot, and said: “Have you ever considered what you would think of the theatre if you were taken to it for the first time, now, without the referred affection of childhood pantomimes and what not? Would you really find a few dressed-up figures posturing in a lighted box entertaining? And the absurd convention of intervals — once devoted to the promenade of toilettes and now perpetuated for the benefit of the bar. What other entertainment would permit of such arbitrary interruption? Does one stop in the middle of a symphony to go and have a drink?”
“But a play is made that way,” Lucy protested.
“Yes. As I said; an out-moded convention.”
This dashed Lucy a little, not because of her lingering affection for the theatre, but because she had been so wrong about Miss Lux. She would have said that Miss Lux would be a passionate attender of try-out performances in the drearier suburbs of plays devoted to a Cause and Effects.
“Well, I nearly went tonight myself,” Wragg said, “just to see Edward Adrian again. I had a terrific rave on him when I was a student. I expect he’s a bit passé now. Have you ever seen him?”
“Not on the stage. He used to spend his holidays with us when he was a boy.” Miss Lux ran her fork once more through the heap on her plate and decided that there was nothing further worth her attention.
“Used to spend the holidays! At your house?”
“Yes, he went to school with my brother.”
“Good heavens! how absolutely incredible!”
“What is incredible about it?”
“I mean, one just doesn’t think of Edward Adrian as being an ordinary person that people know. Just a schoolboy like anyone else.”
“A very horrid little boy.”
“Oh, no!”
“A quite revolting little boy. Always watching himself in mirrors. And possessed of a remarkable talent for getting the best of everything that was going.” She sounded calm, and clinical, and detached.
“Oh, Catherine, you shatter me.”
“No one I have ever met had the same genius for leaving someone else holding the baby as Teddy Adrian.”
“He has other kinds of genius though, surely,” Lucy ventured.
“He has talent, yes.”
“Do you still see him?” asked Wragg, still a little dazzled to be getting first-hand news of Olympus.
“Only by accident. When my brother died we gave up the house that our parents had had, and there were no more family gatherings.”
“And you’ve never seen him on the stage?”
“Never.”
“And you didn’t even go a sixpenny bus-ride into Larborough to see him play tonight.”
“I did not. I told you, the theatre bores me inexpressibly.”
“But it’s Shakespeare.”
“Very well, it’s Shakespeare. I would rather sit at home and read him in the company of Doreen Wragg and her cream puffs. You won’t forget to put something in your pocket for us when you leave your feast, will you, Miss Pym? Anything gratefully received by the starving proletariat. Macaroons, Mars bars, blood oranges, left-over sandwiches, squashed sausage rolls —”
“I’ll put a hat round,” promised Lucy. “I’ll pass the hat and quaver: ‘Don’t forget the Staff.’”
But as she lifted the champagne bottle out of its melting ice in her wash-bowl she did not feel so gay about it. This party was going to be an ordeal, there was no denying it. She tied a big bow of ribbon to the neck of the bottle, to make it look festive and to take away any suggestion of “bringing her own liquor”; the result was rather like a duchess in a paper cap, but she didn’t think that the simile would occur to the students. She had hesitated over her own toilette, being divided between a rough-and-tumble outfit suitable to a cushions-on-the-floor gathering, and the desire to do her hosts honour. She had paid them the compliment of putting on her “lecture” frock, and doing an extra-careful make-up. If Henrietta had taken away from this party by her vagaries, she, Lucy, would bring all she could to it.
Judging by the noise in other rooms, and the running back and fore with kettles, Stewart’s was not the only party in Leys that evening. The corridors smelt strongly of coffee, and waves of laughter and talk rose and died away as doors were opened and shut. Even the Juniors seemed to be entertaining; if they had no Posts to celebrate they had the glory of having their first Final behind them. Lucy remembered that she had not found out from The Nut Tart how she had fared in that Anatomy Final. (“Today’s idea may be nonsense tomorrow, but a clavicle is a clavicle for all time.”) When she passed the students’ notice-board again she must look for Desterro’s name.
She had to knock twice at the door of Number Ten before the sound penetrated, but when a flushed Stewart opened the door and drew her in a sudden shyness fell on the group, so that they got to their feet in polite silence like well-brought-up children.
“We are so glad to have you,” Stewart was beginning, when Dakers sighted the bottle and all formality was at an end.
“Drink!” she shrieked. “As I live and breathe, drink! Oh, Miss Pym you are a poppet!”
“I hope that I am not breaking any rules,” Lucy said, remembering that there had been an expression in Miss Joliffe’s eye that she had still not accounted for, “but it seemed to me an occasion for champagne.”
“It’s a triple occasion,” Stewart said. “Dakers and Thomas are celebrating too. It couldn’t be more of an occasion. It was lovely of you to think of the champagne.”
“It will be sacrilege to drink it out of tooth-glasses,” Hasselt said.
“Well, anyhow, we drink it now, as aperitif. A course by itself. Pass up your glasses everyone. Miss Pym, the chair is for you.”
A basket chair had been imported and lined with a motley collection of cushions; except for the hard chair at the desk it was the only legitimate seat in the room, the rest of the party having brought their cushions with them and being now disposed about the floor or piled in relaxed heaps like kittens on the bed. Someone had tied a yellow silk handkerchief over the light so that a golden benevolence took the place of the usual hard brightness. The twilight beyond the wide-open window made a pale blue back-cloth that would soon be a dark one. It was like any student party of her own college days, but as a picture it had more brilliance than her own parties had had. Was it just that the colours of the cushions were gayer? That the guests were better physical types, without lank hair, spectacles, and studious pallor?
No, of course it wasn’t that. She knew what it was. There was no cigarette smoke.
“O’Donnell isn’t here yet,” Thomas said, collecting tooth-glasses from the guests and laying them on the cloth that covered the desk.
“I expect she’s helping Rouse to put up the boom,” a Disciple said.
“She can’t be,” a second Disciple said, “it’s Saturday.”
“Even a P.T.I. stops work on a Sunday,” said a third.
“Even Rouse,” commented the fourth.
“Is Miss Rouse still practising rotatory travelling?” Lucy asked.
“Oh, yes,” they said. “She will be, up to the day of the Dem.”
“And when does she find time?”
“She goes when she is dressed in the morning. Before first class.”
“Six o’clock,” said Lucy. “Horrible.”
“It’s no worse than any other time,” they said. “At least one is fresh, and there is no hurry, and you can have the gym. to yourself. Besides, it’s the only possible time. The boom has to be put away before first class.”
“She doesn’t have to go,” Stewart said, “the knack has come back. But she is terrified she will lose it again before the Dem.”
“I can understand that, my dear,” Dakers said. “Think what an immortal fool one would feel hanging like a sick monkey from the boom, with all the élite looking on, and Fr?ken simply stabbing one with that eye of hers. My dear, death would be a happy release. If Donnie isn’t doing her usual chore for Rouse, where is she? She’s the only one not here.”
“Poor Don,” Thomas said, “she hasn’t got a post yet.” Thomas with her junior-of-three in Wales was feeling like a millionaire.
“Don’t worry over Don,” Hasselt said, “the Irish always fall on their feet.”
But Miss Pym was looking round for Innes, and not finding her. Nor was Beau there.
Stewart, seeing her wandering eye, interpreted the question in it and said: “Beau and Innes wanted me to tell you how sorry they were to miss the party, and to hope that you would be their guest at another one before the end of term.”
“Beau will be giving one for Innes,” Hasselt said. “To celebrate Arlinghurst.”
“As a matter of fact, we’re all giving a party for Innes,” a Disciple said.
“A sort of general jamboree,” said a second Disciple.
“It’s an honour for College, after all,” said a third.
“You’ll come to that, won’t you, Miss Pym,” said a fourth, making it a statement rather than a question.
“Nothing would please me more,” Lucy said. And then, glad to skate away from such thin ice: “What has happened to Beau and Innes?”
“Beau’s people turned up unexpectedly and took them off to the theatre in Larborough,” Stewart said.
“That’s what it is to own a Rolls,” Thomas said, quite without envy. “You just dash around England as the fit takes you. When my people want to move they have to yoke up the old grey mare — a brown cob, actually — and trot twenty miles before they reach any place at all.”
“Farmers?” Lucy asked, seeing the lonely narrow Welsh road winding through desolation.
“No, my father is a clergyman. But we have to keep a horse to work the place, and we can’t have a horse and a car too.”
“Oh, well,” said a Disciple arranging herself more comfortably on the bed, “who wants to go to the theatre anyhow?”
“Of all the boring ways of spending an evening,” said a second.
“Sitting with one’s knees in someone’s back,” said a third.
“With one’s eyes glued to opera glasses,” said a fourth.
“Why opera glasses?” asked Lucy, surprised to find Miss Lux’s attitude repeated in a gathering where sophistication had not yet destroyed a juvenile thirst for entertainment.
“What would you see without them?”
“Little dolls walking about in a box.”
“Like something on Brighton pier.”
“Except that on Brighton pier you can see the expression on the faces.”
They were rather like something from Brighton pier themselves, Lucy thought. A turn. A sort of extended Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They were apparently not moved to speech unless one of their number made a remark; when the others felt called upon to produce corroborative evidence.
“Me, I’m only too glad to put my feet up and do nothing for a change,” Hasselt said. “I’m breaking in a new pair of ballet shoes for the Dem. and my blisters are spectacular.”
“Miss Hasselt,” said Stewart, obviously quoting, “it is a student’s business to preserve her body in a state of fitness at all times.”
“That may be,” said Hasselt, “but I’m not standing in a bus for five miles on a Saturday night to go anywhere, least of all to a theatre.”
“Anyhow, it’s only Shakespeare, my dears,” Dakers said. “It is the cause, my soul!’” she burlesqued, clutching at her breast.
“Edward Adrian, though,” volunteered Lucy, feeling that her beloved theatre must have one champion.
“Who is Edward Adrian?” Dakers asked, in genuine inquiry.
“He’s that weary-looking creature who looks like a moulting eagle,” Stewart said, too busy about her hostess’s duties to be aware of the reaction on Lucy: that was a horribly vivid summing-up of Edward Adrian, as seen by the unsentimental eyes of modern youth. “We used to be taken to see him when I was at school in Edinburgh.”
“And didn’t you enjoy it?” Lucy asked, remembering that Stewart’s name headed the lists on the notice-board along with Innes’s and Beau’s, and that mental activity would not be for her the chore that it probably was for some of the others.
“Oh, it was better than sitting in a class-room,” Stewart allowed. “But it was all terribly — old-fashioned. Nice to look at, but a bit dreary. I’m a tooth-glass short.”
“Mine, I suppose,” O’Donnell said, coming in on the words and handing over her glass. “I’m afraid I’m late. I was looking for some shoes that my feet would go into. Forgive these, won’t you, Miss Pym,” she indicated the bedroom slippers she was wearing. “My feet have died on me.”
“Do you know who Edward Adrian is?” Lucy asked her.
“Certainly I do,” O’Donnell said. “I’ve had a rave on him ever since I went to see him at the age of twelve in Belfast.”
“You seem to be the only person in this room either to know or to admire him.”
“Ah, the heathen,” said O’Donnell, casting a scornful eye on the gathering — and it seemed to Lucy that O’Donnell was suspiciously bright about the eyes, as if she had been crying. “It’s in Larborough I would be this minute, sitting at his feet, if it wasn’t practically the end of term and I lacked the price of a seat.”
And if, thought Lucy pitying, you hadn’t felt that backing out of this party would be put down to your being the only one present not yet to have a post. She liked the girl who had dried her eyes and thought of the bedroom slipper excuse and come gaily to the party that was none of hers.
“Well,” said Stewart, busy with the wire of the cork, “now that O’Donnell is here we can open the bottle.”
“Good heavens, champagne!” O’Donnell said.
The wine came foaming into the thick blunt tooth-glasses, and they turned to Lucy expectantly.
“To Stewart in Scotland, to Thomas in Wales, to Dakers at Ling Abbey,” she said.
They drank that.
“And to all our friends between Capetown and Manchester,” Stewart said.
And they drank that too.
“Now, Miss Pym, what will you eat?”
And Lucy settled down happily to enjoy herself. Rouse was not going to be a guest; and she was by some special intervention of Providence in the shape of rich parents in a Rolls-Royce going to be spared the ordeal of sitting opposite an Innes bursting with happiness that had no vestige of foundation.
But by noon on Sunday she was much less happy, and was wishing that she had had the foresight to invent a luncheon engagement in Larborough and so remove herself out of the area of the explosion that was coming. She had always hated explosions, literal and metaphorical; people who blew into paper bags and then burst them had always been regarded by Lucy with a mixture of abhorrence and awe. And the paper bag that was going to be burst after lunch was a particularly nasty affair; an explosion whose reverberations would be endless and unpredictable. At the back of her mind was the faint hope that Henrietta might have changed her mind; that the silent witness of those tell-tale lists on the notice-board might have proved more eloquent than her own poor words. But no amount of encouragement could make this hope anything but embryonic. She remembered only too clearly that a shaking of Henrietta’s faith in Rouse would not mean a corresponding access of belief in Innes as a candidate. The best that could be hoped for was that she might write to the Head at Arlinghurst and say that there was no Leaving Student good enough for so exalted a post; and that would do nothing to save Innes from the grief that was coming to her. No, she really should have got herself out of Leys for Sunday lunch and come back when it was all over. Even in Larborough, it was to be supposed, there were people that one might conceivably be going to see. Beyond those over-rich villas of the outskirts with their smooth sanded avenues and their pseudo everything, somewhere between them and the soot of the city there must be a belt of people like herself. Doctors, there must be, for instance. She could have invented a doctor friend — except that doctors were listed in registers. If she had thought in time she could have invited herself to lunch with Dr Knight; after all, Knight owed her something. Or she could have taken sandwiches and just walked out into the landscape and not come home till bed-time.
Now she sat in the window-seat in the drawing-room, waiting for the Staff to assemble there before going down to the dining-room; watching the students come back from church and wondering if she had sufficient courage and resolution to seek out Miss Joliffe even yet and ask for sandwiches; or even just walk out of College with no word said — after all, one didn’t starve in the English country even on a Sunday. As Desterro said, there were always villages.
Desterro was the first to come back from church; leisured and fashionable as always. Lucy leant out and said: “Congratulations on your knowledge of the clavicle.” For she had looked at the board on the way to bed last night.
“Yes, I surprised myself,” said The Nut Tart. “My grandmother will be so pleased. A ‘first’ sounds so well, don’t you think? I boasted about it to my cousin, but he said that was most unseemly. In England one waits to be asked about one’s successes.”
“Yes,” agreed Lucy, sadly, “and the worst of it is so few people ask. The number of lights under bushels in Great Britain is tragic.”
“Not Great Britain,” amended Desterro. “He says — my cousin — that it is all right north of the river Tweed. That is the river between England and Scotland, you know. You can boast in Dunbar but not in Berwick, Rick says.”
“I should like to meet Rick,” Lucy said.
“He thinks you are quite adorable, by the way.”
“Me?”
“I have been telling him about you. We spent all the intervals talking about you.”
“Oh you went to the theatre, did you?”
“He went. I was taken.”
“Did you not enjoy it, then?” asked Lucy, mentally applauding the young man who made The Nut Tart do anything at all that she did not want to do.
“Oh, it was as they say, ‘not too bad.’ A little of the grand manner is nice for a change. Ballet would have been better. He is a dancer manqué, that one.”
“Edward Adrian?”
“Yes.” Her mind seemed to have strayed away. “The English wear all one kind of hat,” she said reflectively. “Up at the back and down in front.”
With which irrelevance she trailed away round the house, leaving Lucy wondering whether the remark was occasioned by last night’s audience or Dakers’ advent up the avenue. Dakers’ Sunday hat was certainly a mere superior copy of the hat she had worn at school, and under its short brim her pleasant, waggish, pony’s face looked more youthful than ever. She took off the hat with a gesture when she saw Miss Pym, and loudly expressed her delight in finding Lucy alive and well after the rigours of the night before. This was the first morning in all her college career, it seemed, when she had positively failed to eat a fifth slice of bread and marmalade.
“Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins,” she observed, “so I had need of shriving this morning. I went to the Baptist place because it is nearest.”
“And do you feel shriven?”
“I don’t know that I do, now you come to mention it. It was all very conversational.”
Lucy took it that a shamed soul demanded ritual.
“Very friendly, though, I understand.”
“Oh, frightfully. The clergyman began his sermon by leaning on one elbow and remarking: ‘Well, my friends, it’s a very fine day.’ And everyone shook hands with everyone coming out. And they had some fine warlike hymns,” she added, having thought over the Baptist good points. She looked thoughtful for a moment longer and then said: “There are some Portsmouth Brothers on the Larborough road —”
“Plymouth.”
“Plymouth what?”
“Plymouth Brethren, I suppose you mean.”
“Oh, yes; I know it had something to do with the Navy. And I’m Pompey by inclination. Well, I think I shall sample them next Sunday. You don’t suppose they’re private, or anything like that?”
Miss Pym thought not, and Dakers swung her hat in a wide gesture of burlesque farewell and went on round the house.
By ones and twos, and in little groups, the students returned from their compulsory hour out of College. Waving or calling a greeting or merely smiling, as their temperaments were. Even Rouse called a happy “Good morning, Miss Pym!” as she passed. Almost last came Beau and Innes; walking slowly, serene and relaxed. They came to rest beneath the window looking up at her.
“Heathen!” said Beau, smiling at her.
They were sorry they missed the party, they said, but there would be others.
“I shall be giving one myself when the Dem. is over,” Beau said. “You’ll come to that, won’t you?”
“I shall be delighted. How was the theatre?”
“It might have been worse. We sat behind Colin Barry.”
“Who is he?”
“The All-England hockey ‘half.’”
“And I suppose that helped Othello a lot.”
“It helped the intervals, I assure you.”
“Didn’t you want to see Othello?”
“Not us! We were dying to go to Irma Ireland’s new film —Flaming Barriers. It sounds very sultry but actually, I believe, it’s just a good clean forest fire. But my parents’ idea of a night out is the theatre and a box of chocolates for the intervals. We couldn’t disappoint the old dears.”
“Did they like it?”
“Oh, they loved it. They spent the whole of supper talking about it.”
“You’re a fine pair to call anyone ‘heathen,’” Lucy observed.
“Come to tea with the Seniors this afternoon,” Beau said.
Lucy said hastily that she was going out to tea.
Beau eyed her guilty face with something like amusement, but Innes said soberly: “We should have asked you before. You are not going away before the Dem., are you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Then will you come to tea with the Seniors next Sunday?”
“Thank you. If I am here I should be delighted.”
“My lesson in manners,” said Beau.
They stood there on the gravel looking up at her, smiling. That was how she always remembered them afterwards. Standing there in the sunlight, easy and graceful; secure in their belief in the world’s rightness and in their trust in each other. Untouched by doubt or blemish. Taking it for granted that the warm gravel under their feet was lasting earth, and not the precipice edge of disaster.
It was the five-minute bell that roused them. As they moved away, Miss Lux came into the room behind, looking grimmer than Lucy had ever seen her.
“I can’t imagine why I’m here,” she said. “If I had thought in time I wouldn’t be taking part in this God-forsaken farce at all.”
Lucy said that that was exactly what she herself had been thinking.
“I suppose there has been no word of Miss Hodge having a change of heart?”
“Not as far as I know. I’m afraid it isn’t likely.”
“What a pity we didn’t all go out to lunch. If Miss Hodge had to call Rouse’s name from a completely deserted table, College would at least be aware that we had no part in this travesty.”
“If you didn’t have to mark yourself ‘out’ on the slate before eleven, I would go now, but I haven’t the nerve.”
“Oh well, perhaps we can do something with our expressions to convey that we consider the whole thing just a bad smell.”
It’s the being there to countenance it she minds, thought Lucy; while I just want to run away from unpleasantness like a child. Not for the first time, she wished she was a more admirable character.
Madame Lefevre came floating in wearing a cocoa-brown silk affair that was shot with a metallic blue in the high-lights; which made her look more than ever like some exotic kind of dragon-fly. It was partly those enormous headlamps of eyes, of course; like some close-up of an insect in half-remembered Nature “shorts”; the eyes and the thin brown body, so angular yet so graceful. Madame, having got over her immediate rage, had, it seemed, recovered her detached contempt for the human species, and was regarding the situation with malicious if slightly enjoyable distaste.
“Never having attended a wake,” she said, “I look forward with interest to the performance today.”
“You are a ghoul,” Lux said; but without feeling, as if she were too depressed to care greatly. “Haven’t you done anything to alter her mind?”
“Oh, yes, I have wrestled with the Powers of Darkness. Wrestled very mightily. Also very cogently, may I say. With example and precept. Who was it who was condemned to push an enormous stone up a hill for ever? Extraordinary how appropriate these mythological fancies still are. I wonder if a ballet of Punishments would be any good? Sweeping out stables, and so forth. To Bach, perhaps. Though Bach is not very inspirational, choreographically speaking. And a great many people rise up and call one damned, of course, if one uses him.”
“Oh, stop it,” Lux said. “We are going to connive at an abomination and you speculate about choreography!”
“My good, if too earnest, Catherine, you must learn to take life as it comes, and to withdraw yourself from what you cannot alter. As the Chinese so rightly advise: When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. We connive at an abomination, as you so exquisitely put it. True. But as intelligent human beings we concern ourselves with the by-products of the action. It will be interesting to see how, for instance, the little Innes reacts to the stimulus. Will the shock be a mortal one, will it galvanise her into action, or will it send her into crazy throes of galvanic activity that has no meaning?”
“Damn your metaphors. You are talking nonsense — and you know it. It is someone else’s rape we are invited to countenance; and as far as I know there is nothing in the history of philosophy, Chinese or otherwise, to recommend that.”
“Rape?” said Fr?ken, coming in followed by her mother. “Who is going to be raped?”
“Innes,” Lux said dryly.
“Oh.” The twinkle died out of Fr?ken’s eye, leaving it cold and pale. “Yes,” she said, reflectively. “Yes.”
Fru Gustavsen’s round “Mrs Noah” face looked troubled. She looked from one to another, as if hoping for some gleam of assurance, some suggestion that the problem was capable of being resolved. She came over to Lucy in the window-seat, ducked her head in a sharp Good-morning, and said in German:
“You know about this thing the Principal does? My daughter is very angry. Very angry my daughter is. Not since she was a little girl have I seen her so angry. It is very bad what they do? You think so too?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
“Miss Hodge is a very good woman. I admire her very much. But when a good woman makes a mistake it is apt to be much worse than a bad woman’s mistake. More colossal. It is a pity.”
It was a great pity, Lucy agreed.
The door opened and Henrietta came in, with a nervous Wragg in tow. Henrietta appeared serene, if a little more stately than usual (or than circumstances demanded) but Wragg cast a placatory smile round the gathering as if pleading with them to be all girls together and look on the bright side. Their close-hedged antagonism dismayed her, and she sent an appealing glance at Madame, whose dogsbody she normally was. But Madame’s wide sardonic gaze was fixed on Henrietta.
Henrietta wished them all good morning (she had breakfasted in her own room) and she had timed her entrance very neatly, for before her greeting was finished, the murmur of the distant gong made the moment one for action, not conversation.
“It is time for us to go down, I think,” Henrietta said, and led the way out.
Madame rolled her eye at Lux in admiration of this piece of generalship, and fell in behind.
“A wake indeed!” Lux said to Lucy as they went downstairs.
“It feels more like Fotheringay.”
The demure silence waiting them in the dining-room seemed to Lucy’s heightened imagination to be charged with expectation, and certainly during the meal College seemed to be more excited than she had ever seen it. The babble of conversation deepened to a roar, so that Henrietta, coming-to between her busy gobbling of the meat course and her expectation of the pudding, sent a message by Wragg to Beau, asking that College should contain themselves.
For a little they were circumspect, but soon they forgot and the talk and laughter rose again.
“They are excited to have Examinations Week over,” Henrietta said indulgently, and let them be.
This was her only contribution to conversation — she never did converse while eating — but Wragg served up brave little platitudes at regular intervals, looking from one to the other of the shut faces round the table hopefully, like a terrier which has brought a bone to lay at one’s feet. One could almost see her tail wag. Wragg was to be the innocent means of execution, the passive knife in the guillotine, and she felt her position and was tacitly apologising for it. Oh, for Pete’s sake, she seemed to be saying, I’m only the Junior Gymnast in this set-up, it’s not my fault that I have to tag along in her rear; what do you expect me to do? — tell her to announce the damned thing herself?
Lucy was sorry for her, even while her pious pieces of the obvious made her want to scream. Be quiet, she wanted to say, do be quiet, there is nothing for a situation like this but silence.
At last Henrietta folded up her napkin, looked round the table to make sure that all her Staff had finished eating, and rose. As the Staff rose with her, College came to its feet with an alacrity and a unanimity that was rare. It was apparent that they had been waiting for this moment. Against her will, Lucy turned to look at them; at the rows of bright expectant faces, half-smiling in their eagerness; it did nothing to comfort her that they looked as if at the slightest provocation they would break into a cheer.
As Henrietta turned to the door and the Staff filed after her, Wragg faced the delighted throng and said the words that had been given her to say.
“Miss Hodge will see Miss Rouse in her office when luncheon is over.”
Lucy could no longer see the faces, but she felt the silence go suddenly blank. Become void and dead. It was the difference between a summer silence full of bird-notes and leaves and wind in the grasses, and the frozen stillness of some Arctic waste. And then, into the dead void just as they reached the door, came the first faint sibilant whisper as they repeated the name.
“Rouse!” they were saying. “Rouse!”
And Lucy, stepping into the warm sunlight, shivered. The sound reminded her of frozen particles being swept over a snow surface by a bitter wind. She even remembered where she had seen and heard those particles: that Easter she had spent on Speyside when they had missed the Grantown bus and they were a long way from home and they had to walk it every foot of the way, under a leaden sky into a bitter wind over a frozen world. She felt a long way from home now, crossing the sunny courtyard to the quadrangle door, and the sky seemed to her as leaden as any Highland one in a March storm. She wished for a moment that she were at home, in her own quiet little sitting-room, settling down for a Sunday afternoon of unbroken peace, untouched by human problems and unhurt by human griefs. She toyed with the idea of inventing an excuse to go when tomorrow morning’s post would give her a chance; but she had looked forward like a child to the Demonstration on Friday, and she had now a quite personal interest in what had promised to be for her merely something new in spectacles. She knew all the Seniors personally and a great many of the Juniors; she had talked “Dem.” with them, shared their half-fearful anticipation of it, even helped to make their costumes. It was the summit, the triumphant flower, the resounding full-stop of their College careers, and she could not bear to go without seeing it; without being part of it.
She had dropped the rest of the Staff, who were bound for the front of the house, but Wragg, coming behind her to pin a notice on the students’ board, mopped her forehead in frank relief and said: “Thank heaven that is over. I think it was the worst thing I have ever had to do. I couldn’t eat my lunch with thinking of it.” And Lucy remembered that there had indeed been the phenomenon of a large piece of tart unfinished on Miss Wragg’s plate.
That was life, that was. Innes had Heaven’s door shut in her face, and Wragg couldn’t finish her pudding!
No one had yet come out of the dining-room — College appetites being so much larger than Staff ones, their meals lasted at least ten or fifteen minutes longer — so the corridors were still deserted as Lucy went up to her room. She resolved to get away from Leys before the crowd of students overran the countryside. She would go away deep into the green and white and yellow countryside, and smell the may and lie in the grass and feel the world turning on its axis, and remember that it was a very large world, and that College griefs were wild and bitter but soon over and that in the Scale of Things they were undeniably Very Small Beer.
She changed her shoes to something more appropriate to field paths, crossed to the “old house” and ran down the front stairs and out by the front door so as to avoid the students who would now be percolating out of the dining-room. The “old house” was very silent and she deduced that there had been no lingering in the drawing-room after lunch today. She skirted the house and made for the field behind the gymnasium, with vague thoughts of Bidlington and The Teapot stirring in her mind. The hedge of may was a creamy foam on her right and on her left the buttercups were a golden sea. The elms, half-floating in the warm light, were anchored each to its purple shadow, and daisies patterned the short grass under her feet. It was a lovely world, a fine round gracious world, and no day for — Oh, poor Innes! poor Innes! — no day for the world to turn over and crush one.
It was when she was debating with herself whether to cross the little bridge, to turn down-stream to Bidlington, or up-stream to the unknown, that she saw Beau. Beau was standing in the middle of the bridge watching the water, but with her green linen dress and bright hair she was so much a part of the sunlight-and-shadow under the willows that Lucy had been unaware that anyone was there. As she came into the shade herself and could see more clearly, Lucy saw that Beau was watching her come, but she gave her no greeting. This was so unlike Beau that Lucy was daunted.
“Hullo,” she said, and leaned beside her on the wooden rail. “Isn’t it beautiful this afternoon?” Must you sound so idiotic? she asked herself.
There was no answer to this, but presently Beau said: “Did you know about this appointment?”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “I— I heard the Staff talking about it.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Then you knew this morning when you were talking to us.”
“Yes. Why?”
“It would have been kind if someone had warned her.”
“Warned whom?”
“Innes. It isn’t very nice to have your teeth kicked in in public.”
She realised that Beau was sick with rage. Never before had she seen her even out of temper, and now she was so angry that she could hardly talk.
“But how could I have done that?” she asked reasonably, dismayed to be taken personally to task for something that she considered none of her business. “It would have been disloyal to mention it before Miss Hodge had announced her decision. For all I knew she might have altered that decision; when I left her it was still possible that she might see things from —” She stopped, realising where she was headed. But Beau too had realised. She turned her head sharply to look at Miss Pym.
“Oh. You argued with her about it. You didn’t approve of her choice, then?”
“Of course not.” She looked at the angry young face so near her own and decided to be frank. “You might as well know, Beau, that no one approves. The Staff feel about it very much as you do. Miss Hodge is an old friend of mine, and I owe her a great deal, and admire her, but where this appointment is concerned she is ‘on her own.’ I have been desolated ever since I first heard of it, I would do anything to reverse it, to waken up tomorrow and find that it is just a bad dream; but as to warning anyone —” She lifted her hand in a gesture of helplessness.
Beau had gone back to glaring at the water. “A clever woman like you could have thought of something,” she muttered.
The “clever woman” somehow made Beau of a sudden very young and appealing; it was not like the confident and sophisticated Beau to look for help or to think of her very ordinary Pym self as clever. She was after all a child; a child raging and hurt at the wrong that had been done her friend. Lucy had never liked her so well.
“Even a hint,” Beau went on, muttering at the water. “Even a suggestion that there might be someone else in the running. Anything to warn her. To make the shock less shattering. To put her on her guard, so that she wasn’t wide open. It had to be punishment, but it needn’t have been a massacre. You could have sacrificed a little scruple in so good a cause, couldn’t you?”
Lucy felt, belatedly, that perhaps she might have.
“Where is she?” she asked. “Where is Innes?”
“I don’t know. She ran straight out of College before I could catch her up. I know she came this way, but I don’t know where she went from here.”
“She will take it very badly?”
“Did you expect her to be brave and noble about the hideous mess?” Beau said savagely, and then, instantly: “Oh, I’m sorry. I do beg your pardon. I know you’re sorry about it too. I’m just not fit to be spoken to just now.”
“Yes, I am sorry,” Lucy said. “I admired Innes the first time I saw her, and I think she would have been an enormous success at Arlinghurst.”
“Would have been,” muttered Beau.
“How did Miss Rouse take the news? Was she surprised, do you think?”
“I didn’t wait to see,” Beau said shortly. And presently: “I think I shall go up-stream. There is a little thorn wood up there that she is very fond of; she may be there.”
“Are you worried about her?” Lucy asked; feeling that if it were merely comforting that Beau planned, Innes would surely prefer solitude at the moment.
“I don’t think she is busy committing suicide, if that is what you mean. But of course I am worried about her. A shock like that would be bad for anyone — especially coming now, at the end of term when one is tired. But Innes — Innes has always cared too much about things.” She paused to look at the water again. “When we were Juniors and Madame used to blister us with her sarcasm — Madame can be simply unspeakable, you know — the rest of us just came up in weals but Innes was actually flayed; just raw flesh. She never cried, as some of the others did when they’d had too much for one go. She just — just burned up inside. It’s bad for you to burn up inside. And once when —” She stopped, and seemed to decide that she had said enough. Either she had been on the verge of an indiscretion or she came to the conclusion that discussing her friend with a comparative stranger, however sympathetic, was not after all the thing to do. “She has no oil on her feathers, Innes,” she finished.
She stepped off the bridge and began to walk away up the path by the willows. “If I was rude,” she said, pausing just before she disappeared, “do forgive me. I didn’t mean to be.”
Lucy went on looking at the smooth silent water, wishing passionately that she could recover the little red book which she had consigned so smugly to the brook two days ago, and thinking of the girl who had no “duck’s back”— no protective mechanism against the world’s weather. The girl who could neither whimper nor laugh; who “burned up inside” instead. She rather hoped that Beau would not find her until the worst was over; she had not run to Beau for sympathy, she had run as far and as fast from human company as she could, and it seemed only fair to let her have the solitude she sought.
It would do Beau no harm at any rate, Lucy thought, to find that the world had its snags and its disappointments; life had been much too easy for Beau. It was a pity that she had to learn at Innes’s expense.
She crossed the bridge into the games field, turned her face to open country and took the hedge gaps as they came; hoping that she might not overtake Innes, and determined to turn a blind eye in her direction if she did. But there was no Innes. No one at all moved in the Sunday landscape. Everyone was still digesting roast beef. She was alone with the hedges of may, the pasture, and the blue sky. Presently she came to the edge of a slope, from which she could look across a shallow valley to successive distances, and there she sat with her back against an oak, while the insects hummed in the grass, and the fat white clouds sailed up and passed, and the slow shadow of the tree circled round her feet. Lucy’s capacity for doing nothing was almost endless, and had been the despair of both her preceptors and her friends.
It was not until the sun was at hedge level that she roused herself to further decision. The result of her self-communing was a realisation that she could not face College supper tonight; she would walk until she found an inn, and in the half-dark she would come back to a College already hushed by the “bedroom” bell. She made a wide circle round, and in half an hour saw in the distance a steeple she recognised, whereupon she jettisoned her thoughts of an inn and wondered if The Teapot was open on Sundays. Even if it wasn’t perhaps she could persuade Miss Nevill to stay her pangs with something out of a can. It was after seven before she reached the outskirts of Bidlington, and she looked at the Martyr’s Memorial — the only ugly erection in the place — with something of a fellow interest, but the open door of The Teapot restored her. Dear Miss Nevill. Dear large clever business-like accommodating Miss Nevill.
She walked into the pleasant room, already shadowed by the opposite cottages, and found it almost empty. A family party occupied the front window, and in the far corner were a young couple who presumably owned the expensive coupé which was backed in at the end of the garden. She thought it clever of Miss Nevill to manage that the room should still look spotless and smell of flowers after the deluge of a Sunday’s traffic in June.
She was looking round for a table when a voice said: “Miss Pym!”
Lucy’s first instinct was to bolt: she was in no mood for student chat at the moment; and then she noticed that it was The Nut Tart. The Nut Tart was the female half of the couple in the corner. The male half was undoubtedly “my cousin”; the Rick who thought her adorable and who was referred to in College parlance as “that gigolo.”
Desterro rose and came over to meet her — she had charming manners on formal occasions — and drew her over to their table. “But this is lovely!” she said. “We were talking of you, and Rick was saying how much he would like to meet you, and here you are. It is magic. This is my cousin, Richard Gillespie. He was christened Riccardo, but he thinks it sounds too like a cinema star.”
“Or a band leader,” Gillespie said, shaking hands with her and putting her into a chair. His unaccented manner was very English, and did something to counteract his undoubted resemblance to the more Latin types of screen hero. Lucy saw where the “gigolo” came from; the black smooth hair that grew so thick, the eyelashes, the flare of the nostrils, the thin line of dark moustache were all according to the recipe; but nothing else was, it seemed to Lucy. Looks were what he had inherited from some Latin ancestor; but manner, breeding, and character seemed to be ordinary public school. He was considerably older than Desterro — nearly thirty, Lucy reckoned — and looked a pleasant and responsible person.
They had just ordered, it seemed, and Richard went away to the back premises to command another portion of Bidlington rarebit. “It is a cheese affair,” Desterro said, “but not those Welsh things you get in London teashops. It is a very rich cheese sauce on very soft buttery toast, and it is flavoured with odd things like nutmeg — I think it is nutmeg — and things like that, and it tastes divine.”
Lucy, who was in no state to care what food tasted like, said that it sounded delicious. “Your cousin is English, then?”
“Oh, yes. We are not what you call first cousins,” she explained as Richard came back. “The sister of my father’s father married his mother’s father.”
“In simpler words,” Richard said, “our grandparents were brother and sister.”
“It may be simpler, but it is not explicit,” Desterro said, with all the scorn of a Latin for the Saxon indifference to relationships.
“Do you live in Larborough?” Lucy asked Richard.
“No, I work in London, at our head office. But just now I am doing liaison work in Larborough.”
In spite of herself Lucy’s eye swivelled round to Desterro, busy with a copy of the menu.
“One of our associated firms is here, and I am working with them for a week or two,” Rick said smoothly; and laughed at her with his eyes. And then, to put her mind completely at rest: “I came with a chit to Miss Hodge, vouching for my relationship, my respectability, my solvency, my presentability, my orthodoxy —”
“Oh, be quiet, Rick,” Desterro said, “it is not my fault that my father is Brazilian and my mother French. What is saffron dough-cake?”
“Teresa is the loveliest person to take out to a meal,” Rick said. “She eats like a starved lion. My other women friends spend the whole evening reckoning the calories and imagining what is happening to their waists.”
“Your other women friends,” his cousin pointed out a trifle astringently, “have not spent twelve months at Leys Physical Training College, being sweated down to vanishing point and fed on vegetable macedoine.”
Lucy, remembering the piles of bread wolfed by the students at every meal, thought this an overstatement.
“When I go back to Brazil I shall live like a lady and eat like a civilised person, and it will be time then to consider my calories.”
Lucy asked when she was going back.
“I am sailing on the last day of August. That will give me a little of the English summer to enjoy between the last day of College and my going away. I like the English summer. So green, and gentle, and kind. I like everything about the English except their clothes, their winter, and their teeth. Where is Arlinghurst?”
Lucy, who had forgotten Desterro’s abrupt hopping from one subject to another, was too surprised by the name to answer immediately and Rick answered for her. “It’s the best girls’ school in England,” he finished, having described the place. “Why?”
“It is the College excitement at the moment. One of our students is going there straight from Leys. One would think she had at least been made a Dame, to listen to them.”
“A legitimate reason for excitement, it seems to me,” Rick observed. “Not many people get professional plums straight out of college.”
“Yes? It really is an honour then, you think?”
“A very great one, I imagine. Isn’t it, Miss Pym?”
“Very.”
“Oh, well. I am glad of it. It is sad to think of her wasting the years in a girls’ school, but if it is an honour for her, then I am glad.”
“For whom?” Lucy asked.
“For Innes, of course.”
“Were you not at lunch today?” asked Lucy, puzzled.
“No. Rick came with the car and we went over to the Saracen’s Head at Beauminster. Why? What has that to do with this school affair?”
“It isn’t Innes who is going to Arlinghurst.”
“Not Innes! But they all said she was. Everyone said so.”
“Yes, that is what everyone expected, but it didn’t turn out like that.”
“No? Who is going, then?”
“Rouse.”
Desterro stared.
“Oh, no. No, that I refuse to believe. It is quite simply not possible.”
“It is true, I am afraid.”
“You mean that — that someone — that they have preferred that canaille, that espèce d’une—!”
“Teresa!” warned Rick, amused to see her moved for once.
Desterro sat silent for a space, communing with herself.
“If I were not a lady,” she said at length in clear tones, “I would spit!”
The family party looked over, surprised and faintly alarmed. They decided that it was time they were going, and began to collect their things and reckon up what they had had.
“Now look what you have done,” Rick said. “Alarmed the lieges.”
At this moment the rarebits arrived from the kitchen, with Miss Nevill’s large chintz presence behind them; but The Nut Tart, far from being distracted by the savoury food, remembered that it was from Miss Nevill that she had first had news of the Arlinghurst vacancy, and the subject took a fresh lease of life. It was Rick who rescued Lucy from the loathed subject by pointing out that the rarebit was rapidly cooling; Lucy had a strong feeling that he himself cared nothing for the rarebit, but that he had somehow become aware of her tiredness and her distaste for the affair; and she felt warm and grateful to him and on the point of tears.
“After all,” pointed out Rick as The Nut Tart at last turned her attention to her food, “I don’t know Miss Innes, but if she is as wonderful as you say she is bound to get a very good post, even if it isn’t exactly Arlinghurst.”
This was the argument with which Lucy had sought to comfort herself all the long afternoon. It was reasonable, logical, and balanced; and as a sort of moral belladonna-plaster it was so much red flannel. Lucy understood why The Nut Tart rejected it with scorn.
“How would you like to have that preferred to you?” she demanded through a large mouthful of rarebit. “That” was Rouse. “How would you like to believe that they were going to pay you honour, a fine public honour, and then have them slap your face in front of everyone?”
“Having your teeth kicked in,” Beau had called it. Their reactions were remarkably similar. The only difference was that Desterro saw the insult, and Beau the injury.
“And we had such a lovely happy morning in this very room the other day with Innes’s father and mother,” Desterro went on, her fine eyes wandering to the table where they had sat. This, too, Lucy had been remembering. “Such nice people, Rick; I wish you could see them. We were all nice people together: me, and Miss Pym, and the Inneses père et mère, and we had an interval of civilisation and some good coffee. It was charming. And now —”
Between them, Lucy and Rick steered her away from the subject; and it was not until they were getting into the car to go back to Leys that she remembered and began to mourn again. But the distance between Bidlington and Leys as covered by Rick’s car was so short that she had no time to work herself up before they were at the door. Lucy said goodnight and was going to withdraw tactfully, but The Nut Tart came with her. “Goodnight, Rick,” she said, casually. “You are coming on Friday, aren’t you?”
“Nothing will stop me,” Rick assured her. “Three o’clock, is it?”
“No, half-past two. It is written on your invitation card. The invitation I sent you. For a business person you are not very accurate.”
“Oh, well, my business things I naturally keep in files.”
“And where do you keep my invitation?”
“On a gold chain between my vest and my heart,” Rick said, and went the winner out of that exchange.
“Your cousin is charming,” Lucy said, as they went up the steps together.
“You think so? I am very glad. I think so too. He has all the English virtues, and a little spice of something that is not English virtue at all. I am glad he is coming to see me dance on Friday. What makes you smile?”
Lucy, who had been smiling at this typically Desterro view of her cousin’s presence on Friday, hastened to change the subject,
“Shouldn’t you be going in by the other door?”
“Oh, yes, but I don’t suppose anyone will mind. In a fortnight I shall be free to come up these steps if I like — I shall not like, incidentally — so I might as well use them now. I do not take well to tradesmen’s entrances.”
Lucy had meant to pay her respects to the Staff before going to her room in the wing, but the hall was so quiet, the air of the house so withdrawn, that she was discouraged and took the line of least resistance. She would see them all in the morning.
The Nut Tart paid at least a token obedience to College rules, and it was apparent from the hush in the wing corridor that the “bedroom” bell must have gone some minutes ago; so they said goodnight at the top of the stairs, and Lucy went away to her room at the far end. As she undressed she found that her ear was waiting for a sound from next door. But there was no sound at all; nor was there any visible light from the window, as she noticed when she drew her own curtains. Had Innes not come back?
She sat for a while wondering whether she should do something about it. If Innes had not come back, Beau would be in need of comfort. And if Innes had come back and was silent, was there perhaps some impersonal piece of kindness, some small service, that she could do to express her sympathy without intrusion?
She switched off her light and drew back the curtains, and sat by the open window looking at the brightly lit squares all round the little quadrangle — it was considered an eccentricity to draw a curtain in this community — watching the separate activities of the now silent and individual students. One was brushing her hair, one sewing something, one putting a bandage on her foot (a Foolish Virgin that one; she was hopping about looking for a pair of scissors instead of having begun with the implement already laid out, like a good masseuse), one wriggling into a pyjama jacket, one swatting a moth.
Two lights went out as she watched. Tomorrow the waking bell would go at half-past five again, and now that examinations were over they need no longer stay awake till the last moment over their notebooks.
She heard footsteps come along her own corridor, and got up, thinking they were coming at her. Innes’s door opened quietly, and shut. No light was switched on, but she heard the soft movements of someone getting ready for bed. Then bedroom slippers in the corridor, and a knock. No answer.
“It’s me: Beau,” a voice said; and the door was opened. The murmur of voices as the door closed. The smell of coffee and the faint chink of china.
It was sensible of Beau to meet the situation with food. Whatever demons Innes had wrestled with during the long hours between one o’clock and ten she must now be empty of emotion and ready to eat what was put in front of her. The murmur of voices went on until the “lights out” bell sounded; then the door opened and closed again, and the silence next-door merged into the greater silence that enveloped Leys.
Lucy fell into bed, too tired almost to pull up the covers; angry with Henrietta, sad for Innes, and a little envious of her in that she had a friend like Beau.
She decided to stay awake a little and think of some way in which she could express to poor Innes how great was her own sympathy and how deep her own indignation; and fell instantly asleep.
Monday was an anticlimax. Lucy came back into a community that had talked itself out on the subject of Arlinghurst. Both Staff and students had had a whole day’s leisure in which to spread themselves over the sensation, and by night-time there was nothing more to be said; indeed every possible view had already been repeated ad nauseam; so that with the resumption of routine on Monday the affair had already slipped into the background. Since she still had her breakfast brought to her by the devoted Miss Morris, she was not there to see Innes’s first public appearance; and by the time she came face to face with the students as a body, at lunch, habit had smoothed over the rough places and College looked much as usual.
Innes’s face was composed, but Lucy thought that its normal withdrawn expression had become a shut-down look; whatever emotions she still wrestled with, they were under hatches and battened down. Rouse looked more than ever like Aunt Celia’s cat, Philadelphia, and Lucy longed to shut her out-of-doors and let her mew. The only curiosity she had had about the affair was to know how Rouse took that unexpected announcement; she had even gone the length of asking Miss Lux on the way down to lunch.
“What did Rouse look like when she heard the news?”
“Ectoplasm,” said Miss Lux.
“Why ectoplasm?” Lucy had asked, puzzled.
“It is the most revolting thing I can think of.”
So her curiosity remained unsatisfied. Madame twitted her about her desertion of them yesterday, but no one wanted to harp on the probable reason for it. Already the shadow of the Demonstration, only four days away, loomed large over them all; Arlinghurst was a yesterday’s sensation and already a little stale. College was once more into its stride.
Indeed only two small incidents livened the monotony of routine between Monday and Friday.
The first was Miss Hodge’s offer to Innes of the post at the Wycherley Orthopaedic Hospital, and Innes’s refusal of it. The post was then offered to and gratefully accepted by a much-relieved O’Donnell. (“Darling, how nice!” Dakers had said. “Now I can sell you my clinic overalls which I shall never use again, my dear.” And sell them she did; and was so delighted to have good hard cash in her purse so near the end of term that she instantly began to hawk the rest of her belongings round the wing, and was only dissuaded when Stewart asked caustically if the safety-pins were standard equipment.)
The second incident was the arrival of Edward Adrian, thespian.
This unlooked-for occurrence took place on Wednesday. Wednesday was swimming afternoon, and all the Juniors and such Seniors as had no afternoon patients were down at the pool. Lucy, who by prayer, counting, and determination, could just get across the bath, took no part in this exercise in spite of warm invitations to come in and be cool. She spent half an hour watching the gambols, and then walked back to the house for tea. She was crossing the hall to the stairs when one of the Disciples — she thought it was Luke, but she was still not quite certain about them — dashed out of the clinic door and said:
“Oh, Miss Pym, would you be an angel and sit on Albert’s feet for a moment?”
“Sit on Albert’s feet?” repeated Lucy, not quite sure that she had heard aright.
“Yes, or hold them. But it’s easier to sit on them. The hole in the strap has given way, and there isn’t another that isn’t in use.” She ushered the dazed Lucy into the quiet of the clinic, where students swathed in unfamiliar white linen superintended their patients’ contortions, and indicated a plinth where a boy of eleven or so was lying face down. “You see,” she said, holding up a leather strap, “the thing has torn away from the hole, and the hole in front is too tight and the one behind too loose. If you would just hang on to his feet for a moment; if you wouldn’t rather sit on them.”
Lucy said hastily that she would prefer to hang on.
“All right. This is Miss Pym, Albert. She is going to be the strap for the nonce.”
“Hullo, Miss Pym,” said Albert, rolling an eye round at her.
Luke — if it was she — seized the boy under the shoulders and yanked him forward till only his legs remained on the plinth. “Now clamp a hand over each ankle and hang on, Miss Pym,” she commanded, and Lucy obeyed, thinking how well this breezy bluntness was going to suit Manchester and how extremely heavy a small boy of eleven was when you were trying to keep his ankles down. Her eyes strayed from what Luke was doing to the others, so strange and remote in this new guise. Was there no end to the facets of this odd life? Even the ones she knew well, like Stewart, were different, seen like this. Their movements were slower, and there was a special bright artificially-interested voice that they used to patients. There were no smiles and no chatter; just a bright hospital quiet. “Just a little further. That’s right.” “That is looking much better today, isn’t it!” “Now, we’ll try that once more and then that will be all for today.”
Through a gap in Hasselt’s overall as she moved, Lucy caught a glimpse of silk, and realised that she was already changed for dancing, there being no interval between finishing her patient and appearing in the gym. Either she had already had tea, or would snatch a cup en route.
While she was thinking of the oddity of this life of dancing silks under hospital clothes, a car passed the window and stopped at the front door. A very fashionable and expensive car of inordinate length and great glossiness, chauffeur-driven. It was so seldom nowadays that one saw anyone but an invalid driven by a chauffeur that she watched with interest to see who might emerge from it.
Beau’s mother, perhaps? That was the kind of car that went with a butler, undoubtedly.
But what came out of the car was a youngish man — she could see only his back — in the kind of suit one sees anywhere between St. James’s Street and the Duke of York’s Steps any time between October and the end of June. What with the chauffeur and the suit Lucy ran through in her mind the available Royalties, but could not find an appropriate one; Royalty drove itself nowadays, anyhow.
“Thank you very much, Miss Pym. You’ve been an enormous help. Say thank you, Albert.”
“Thank you, Miss Pym,” Albert said dutifully; and then, catching her eye, winked at her. Lucy winked back, gravely.
At this moment O’Donnell erupted into the room clutching the large sifter of talcum powder that she had been having refilled by Fr?ken in the further room, and hissed in an excited whisper: “What do you think! Edward Adrian! In the car. Edward Adrian!”
“Who cares?” Stewart said, relieving her of the sifter. “You were a damned long time getting the talc.”
Lucy closed the clinic door behind her and emerged into the hall. O’Donnell had spoken truth. It was Edward Adrian who was standing in the hall. And Miss Lux had also spoken truth. For Edward Adrian was examining himself in the mirror.
As Lucy climbed the stairs she met Miss Lux coming down, and as she turned to the second flight could see their meeting.
“Hullo, Teddy,” Miss Lux said, without enthusiasm.
“Catherine!” Adrian said, with the most delighted enthusiasm, going forward to meet her as if about to embrace her. But her cool solitary hand, outstretched in conventional greeting, stopped him.
“What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you have developed a ‘niece’ at Leys.”
“Don’t be a beast, Cath. I came to see you, of course. Why didn’t you tell me you were here? Why didn’t you come to see me, so that we could have had a meal together, and a talk about old ——”
“Miss Pym,” Miss Lux’s clear accents came floating up the staircase, “don’t run away. I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
“But Catherine ——” she heard him say in quick low protest.
“It’s the famous Miss Pym,” Miss Lux said, in a you’ll-like-that-you-silly-creature tone, “and a great admirer of yours,” she added as a final snare.
Does he realise how cruel she is being? she wondered as she waited for them to come up to her, or is his self-satisfaction too great to be pierced by her rating of him?
As they went together into the deserted drawing-room, she remembered suddenly Stewart’s description of him as a “weary-looking creature who looked like a moulting eagle” and thought how apt it was. He had good looks of a sort, but although he could not be much older than forty — forty-three or four, perhaps — they already had a preserved air. Without his paints and his pencils and his toupees, he looked tired and worn, and his dark hair was receding. Lucy felt suddenly sorry for him. With the youth and strength and beauty of Desterro’s Rick fresh in her mind, she found the spoiled and famous actor somehow pitiful.
He was being charming to her — he knew all about her book; he read all the best-sellers — but with one eye on Miss Lux while she examined what was left of tea, inspected the contents of the tea-pot, and apparently deciding that a little more hot water would meet the case, lit the burner under the tea-kettle again. There was something in that consciousness of Catherine Lux’s presence that puzzled Lucy. It wasn’t in the part, as she had imagined the part for him. The successful star calling on the humble lecturer at a girls’ college should surely show more detachment; more willingness to peacock in front of the stranger, after the manner of actors. He was “doing his act” for her, of course; all his charm was turned full on, and it was a very considerable charm; but it was mere reflex action. All his interest was centred round the cool scraggy woman who rated him at some washy tea. It couldn’t be very often, Lucy thought with amusement, that Edward Adrian arrived on any doorstep without trumpets; for nearly twenty years — ever since that first heart-breaking Romeo had brought tears to the eyes of critics sick of the very name of Montague — his comings and goings had been matters of moment, he had moved in a constant small eddy of importance; people ran to do his bidding and waited for his pleasure; they gave him things and asked nothing in return; they gave up things for him and expected no thanks. He was Edward Adrian, household word, two feet high on the bills, national possession.
But he had come out this afternoon to Leys to see Catherine Lux, and his eyes followed her round like an eager dog’s. The Catherine whose estimate of him was a little hot water added to the tea-pot. It was all very strange.
“I hope you are doing well in Larborough, Teddy?” Lux asked, with more politeness than interest.
“Oh, yes; fair. Too many schools, but one must put up with that when one plays Shakespeare.”
“Don’t you like playing to young people?” Lucy asked, remembering that the young people she had met lately had not greatly liked having to listen to him.
“Well — they don’t make the best audience in the world, you know. One would prefer adults. And they get cut rates, of course; which doesn’t help the takings. But we look on it as an investment,” he added with generous tolerance. “They are the future theatre-goers, and must be trained up in the way they should go.”
Lucy thought that the training, if judged by results, had been singularly unsuccessful. The way the young went was in a bee-line to something called Flaming Barriers. It wasn’t even true to say that they “didn’t go” to the theatre; it was much more positive than that: they fled from it.
However, this was a polite tea-party and no time for home truth. Lucy asked if he was coming to the Demonstration — at which Miss Lux looked annoyed. He had never heard of a Demonstration and was all eagerness. It was years since he had seen anyone do any more P.T. than putting their toes under the wardrobe and waving their torso about. Dancing? Goodness, was there dancing? But of course he would come. And what was more, they should come back with him to the theatre and have supper with him afterwards.
“I know Catherine hates the theatre, but you could stand it for once, couldn’t you, Catherine? It’s Richard III on Friday night, so you wouldn’t have to put up with me in a romantic effort. It isn’t a good play, but the production is wonderful, even if it is I who say it that shouldn’t.”
“A criminal libel on a fine man, a blatant piece of political propaganda, and an extremely silly play,” Lux opined.
Adrian smiled broadly, like a schoolboy. “All right, but sit through it and you shall see how good a supper the Midland at Larborough can provide when egged on by a miserable actor. They even have a Johannisberger.”
A faint colour showed in Lux’s cheek at that.
“You see I remember what you like. Johannisberger, as you once remarked, tastes of flowers, and will take the stink of the theatre out of your nostrils.”
“I never said it stank. It creaks.”
“Of course it does. It has been on its last legs for quite two hundred years.”
“Do you know what it reminds me of? The Coronation Coach. A lumbering anachronism; an absurd convention that we go on making use of because of inherited affection. A gilded relic —”
The kettle boiled, and Miss Lux poured the hot water into the pot.
“Give Miss Pym something to eat, Teddy.”
An almost nursery tone, Lucy thought, taking one of the curled-up sandwiches from the plate he offered her. Was that what attracted him? Was it a sort of nostalgia for a world where he was taken for granted? He would not like such a world for long, that was certain, but it was quite possible that he wearied sometimes of the goldfish life he led, and would find a refreshment in the company of someone to whom he was just Teddy Adrian who used to come in the holidays.
She turned to say something to him, and surprised the look in his eyes as he watched Catherine spurning the various eatables. The amusement, the affection, that lit them might be a brother’s, but there was something else. A— hopelessness, was it? Something like that. Something, anyhow, that had nothing to do with brotherliness; and that was very odd in a Great Star looking at the plain and ironic Mistress of Theory at Leys.
She looked across at the unconscious Catherine, and for the first time saw her as Edward Adrian saw her. As a woman with the makings of a belle laide. In this scholastic world one accepted her “good” clothes, her simple hairdressing, her lack of make-up, as the right and appropriate thing, and took her fine bones and lithe carriage for granted. She was just the plain and clever Miss Lux. But in the theatre world how different she would be! That wide supple mouth, those high cheek-bones with the hollow under them, the short straight nose, the good line of the lean jaw — they cried aloud for make-up. From the conventional point of view Lux had the kind of face that, as errand boys say, would “stop a clock”; but from any other view-point it was a face that would stop them eating at the Iris if she walked in at lunch time properly dressed and made-up.
A combination of belle laide and someone who knew him “when” was no inconsiderable attraction. For the rest of tea-time Lucy’s mind was busy with revision.
As soon as she decently could she retired, leaving them to the tête-à-tête that he had so obviously sought; the tête-à-tête that Miss Lux had done her best to deny him. He pleaded once more for a theatre party on Friday night — his car would be there and the Dem. would be over by six o’clock and College supper would be nothing but an anti-climax, and Richard III might be a lot of nonsense but it was lovely to look at, he promised them, and the food at the Midland was really wonderful since they had lured the chef away from Bono in Dover Street, and it was a very long time since he had seen Catherine and he had not talked half enough to the clever Miss Pym who had written that wonderful book, and he was dead sick anyhow of the company of actors who talked nothing but theatre and golf, and just to please him they might come — and altogether what with his practised actor’s charm and his genuine desire that they should say yes, it was agreed that on Friday night they should go back to Larborough with him, witness his production of Richard III, and be rewarded with a good supper and a lift home.
As she crossed to the wing, however, Lucy found herself a little depressed. Yet once more she had been wrong about Miss Lux. Miss Lux was not an unwanted plain woman who found compensation in life by devoting herself to a beautiful younger sister. She was a potentially attractive creature who so little needed compensation that she couldn’t be bothered with one of the most successful and handsome men in the world today.
She had been all wrong about Miss Lux. As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.
The only person who was moved by Edward Adrian’s incursion into the College world was Madame Lefevre. Madame, as the representative of the theatre world in College, evidently felt that her own share in this visit should have been a larger one. She also gave Miss Lux to understand that she had, in the first place, no right to know Edward Adrian, but that, in the second place, having known him she had no right to keep him to herself. She was comforted by the knowledge that on Friday she would see him in person, and be able to talk to him in his own language, so to speak. He must have felt greatly at sea, she gave them to understand, among the aborigines of Leys Physical Training College.
Lucy, listening to her barbed silkinesses at lunch on Thursday, hoped that she would not ingratiate herself sufficiently with Adrian to be included in the supper party; she was looking forward to Friday night, and she most certainly would not look forward any more if Madame was going to be watching her all evening with those eyes of hers. Perhaps Miss Lux would put a spoke in her wheel in time. It was not Miss Lux’s habit to put up with something that was not to her mind.
Still thinking of Madame and Miss Lux and tomorrow night, she turned her eyes absently on the students, and saw Innes’s face. And her heart stopped.
It was three days, she supposed, since she had seen Innes for more than a moment in passing; but could three days have done this to a young girl’s face? She stared, trying to decide where the change actually lay. Innes was thinner, and very pale, certainly, but it was not that. It was not even the shadows under her eyes and the small hollow at the temple. Not even the expression; she was eating her lunch with her eyes on the plate in apparent calm. And yet the face shocked Lucy. She wondered if the others saw; she wondered that no one had mentioned it. The thing was as subtle and as obvious as the expression on the face of the Mona Lisa; as indefinable and as impossible to ignore.
So that is what it is to “burn up inside,” she thought. “It is bad to burn up inside,” Beau had said. Verily it must be bad if it ravaged a face like that. How could a face be at the same time calm and — and look like that? How, if it came to that, could one have birds tearing at one’s vitals and still keep that calm face?
Her glance went to Beau, at the head of the nearer table, and she caught Beau’s anxious look at Innes.
“I hope you gave Mr Adrian an invitation card?” Miss Hodge said to Lux.
“No,” said Lux, bored with the subject of Adrian.
“And I hope you have told Miss Joliffe that there will be one more for tea.”
“He doesn’t eat at tea-time, so I didn’t bother.”
Oh, stop talking little sillinesses, Lucy wanted to say, and look at Innes. What is happening to her? Look at the girl who was so radiant only last Saturday afternoon. Look at her. What does she remind you of? Sitting there so calm and beautiful and all wrong inside. What does she remind you of? One of those brilliant things that grow in the woods, isn’t it? One of those apparently perfect things that collapse into dust at a touch because they are hollow inside.
“Innes is not looking well,” she said in careful understatement to Lux as they went upstairs.
“She is looking very ill,” Lux said bluntly. “And would you wonder?”
“Isn’t there something one can do about it?” Lucy asked.
“One could find her the kind of post she deserves,” Lux said dryly. “As there is no post available at all, that doesn’t seem likely to materialise.”
“You mean that she will just have to begin to answer advertisements?”
“Yes. It is only a fortnight to the end of term, and there are not likely to be any more posts in Miss Hodge’s gift now. Most places for September are filled by this time. The final irony, isn’t it? That the most brilliant student we have had for years is reduced to application-in-own-handwriting-with-five-copies-of-testimonials-not-returnable.”
It was damnable, Lucy thought; quite damnable.
“She was offered a post, so that lets Miss Hodge out.”
“But it was a medical one, and she doesn’t want that,” Lucy said.
“Oh, yes, yes! you don’t have to convert me; I’m enlisted already.”
Lucy thought of tomorrow, when the parents would come and radiant daughters would show them round, full of the years they had spent here and the new achievement that was theirs. How Innes must have looked forward to that; looked forward to seeing the two people who loved her so well and who had by care and deprivation managed to give her the training she wanted; looked forward to putting Arlinghurst in their laps.
It was bad enough to be a leaving student without a post, but that was a matter susceptible to remedy. What could never be remedied was the injustice of it. It was Lucy’s private opinion that injustice was harder to bear than almost any other inflicted ill. She could remember yet the surprised hurt, the helpless rage, the despair that used to consume her when she was young and the victim of an injustice. It was the helpless rage that was worst; it consumed one like a slow fire. There was no outlet, because there was nothing one could do about it. A very destructive emotion indeed. Lucy supposed that she had been like Innes, and lacked a sense of humour. But did the young ever have the detachment necessary for a proper focusing of their own griefs? Of course not. It was not people of forty who went upstairs and hanged themselves because someone had said a wrong word to them at the wrong moment, it was adolescents of fourteen.
Lucy thought she knew the passion of rage and disappointment and hate that was eating Innes up. It was enormously to her credit that she had taken the shock with outward dignity. A different type would have babbled to all and sundry, and collected sympathy like a street singer catching coins in a hat. But not Innes. A sense of humour she might lack — oil on her feathers, as Beau said — but the suffering that lack entailed was her own affair; not to be exhibited to anyone — least of all to people she unconsciously referred to as “them.”
Lucy had failed to think of a nice non-committal way of expressing her sympathy; flowers and sweets and all the conventional marks of active friendship were not to be considered, and she had found no substitute; and she was disgusted with herself now to realise that Innes’s trouble, even though it was next-door to her all night, had begun to fade into the back-ground for her. She had remembered it each night as Innes came to her room after the “bedroom” bell, and while the small noises next-door reminded her of the girl’s existence. She had wondered and fretted about her for a little before falling to sleep. But during the crowded many-faceted days she had come near forgetting her.
Rouse had made no move to give a Post party on Saturday night; but whether this was due to tact, an awareness of College feeling on the subject, or the natural thrift with which, it seemed, she was credited, no one knew. The universal party that had been so triumphantly planned for Innes was no more heard of; a universal party for Rouse was something that was apparently not contemplated.
Although, even allowing for the fact that Lucy had not been present at the height of the excitement when presumably tongues would have wagged with greater freedom, College had been strangely reticent about the Arlinghurst appointment. Even little Miss Morris, who chattered with a fine lack of inhibition every morning as she planked the tray down, made no reference to it. In this affair Lucy was for College purposes “Staff”; an outsider; perhaps a sharer in blame. She did not like the idea at all.
But what she liked least of all, and now could not get out of her mind, was Innes’s barren tomorrow. The tomorrow that she had slaved those years for, the tomorrow that was to have been such a triumph. Lucy longed to provide her with a post at once, instantly, here and now; so that when tomorrow that tired happy woman with the luminous eyes came at last to see her daughter she would not find her empty-handed.
But of course one could not hawk a P.T.I. from door to door like a writing-pad; nor offer her to one’s friends like a misfit frock. Goodwill was not enough. And goodwill was practically all she had.
Well, she would use the goodwill and see where it got her. She followed Miss Hodge into her office as the others went upstairs, and said: “Henrietta, can’t we invent a post for Miss Innes? It seems all wrong that she should be jobless.”
“Miss Innes will not be long jobless. And I can’t imagine what consolation an imaginary post would be to her meanwhile.”
“I didn’t say imagine, I said invent; manufacture. There must be dozens of places all up and down the country that are still vacant. Couldn’t we bring the job and Innes together somehow without her going through the slow suspense of applying? That waiting, Henrietta. Do you remember what it used to be like? The beautifully written applications and the testimonials that never came back.”
“I have already offered Miss Innes a post and she has refused it. I don’t know what more I can do. I have no more vacancies to offer.”
“No, but you could get in touch with some of those advertised vacancies on her behalf, couldn’t you?”
“I? But that would be most irregular. And quite unnecessary. She naturally gives my name as a reference when she applies; and if she were not commendable ——”
“But you could — oh, you could ask for particulars of the post since you have a particularly brilliant student ——”
“You are being absurd, Lucy.”
“I know, but I want Innes to be very much sought-after by five o’clock this afternoon.”
Miss Hodge, who did not read Kipling — or indeed, acknowledge his existence — stared.
“For a woman who has written such a noteworthy book — Professor Beatock praised it yesterday at the University College tea — you have an extraordinarily impulsive and frivolous mind.”
This defeated Lucy, who was well aware of her mental limitations. Punctured, she stood looking at Henrietta’s broad back in the window.
“I am greatly afraid,” Henrietta said, “that the weather is going to break. The forecast this morning was anything but reassuring, and after so long a spell of perfect summer we are due for a change. It would be a tragedy if it decided to change tomorrow of all days.”
A tragedy, would it! My God, you big lumbering silly woman, it is you who have the frivolous mind. I may have a C3 intelligence and childish impulses but I know tragedy when I see it and it has nothing to do with a lot of people running to save their party frocks or the cucumber sandwiches getting wet. No, by God, it hasn’t.
“Yes, it would be a pity, Henrietta,” she said meekly, and went away upstairs.
She stood for a little at the landing window watching the thick black clouds massing on the horizon, and hoping evilly that tomorrow they would swamp Leys in one grand Niagara so that the whole place steamed with damp people drying like a laundry. But she noticed almost immediately the heinousness of this, and hastily revised her wish. Tomorrow was their great day, bless them; the day they had sweated for, borne bruises and sarcasm for, been pummelled, broken, and straightened for, hoped, wept, and lived for. It was plain justice that the sun should shine on them.
Besides, it was pretty certain that Mrs Innes had only one pair of “best” shoes.
Each successive day of her stay at Leys saw Lucy a little more wide awake in the mornings. When the monstrous clamour of the 5.30 bell had first hurled her into wakefulness, she had turned on her other side as soon as the noise stopped and had fallen asleep again. But habit was beginning to have its way. Not only did she not fall asleep again after the early waking, but for the last day or two she had been sufficiently conscious to know in some drowsy depths of her that the waking bell was about to ring. On Demonstration morning she made history by wakening before the reveillé.
What woke her was a faint fluttering under the point of her sternum: a feeling that she had not had since she was a child. It was associated with prize-giving days at school. Lucy had always had a prize of sorts. Never anything spectacular, alas — 2nd French, 3rd Drawing, 3rd Singing — but she was definitely in the money. Occasionally, too, there was a “piece” to be played — the Rachmaninoff Prelude, for one; not the DA, DA, DA one but the DA-de-de-de; with terrific concentration on the de-de-de — and consequently a new frock. Hence the tremor under the breastbone. And today, all those years afterwards, she had recaptured the sensation. For years any flutterings in that region had been mere indigestion — if indigestion can ever be mere. Now, because she was part of all the young emotion round her, she shared the thrill and the anticipation.
She sat up and looked at the weather. It was blank and grey, with a cool mist that might later lift on a blazing day. She got up and went to the window. The silence was absolute. Nothing stirred in the still greyness but the College cat, picking its way in an annoyed fashion over the dew-wet stones, and shaking each foot in turn as protest against the discomfort. The grass was heavy with dew, and Lucy, who had always had a perverted affection for wet grass, regarded it with satisfaction.
The silence was ripped in two by the bell. The cat, as if suddenly reminded of urgent business, sprang into wild flight. Giddy crunched past on his way to the gymnasium; and presently the faint whine of his vacuum-cleaner could be heard, like some far-distant siren. Groans and yawns and inquiries as to the weather came from the little rooms all round the courtyard, but no one came to a window to look; getting up was an agony to be postponed to the last moment.
Lucy decided to dress and go out into the dew-grey morning, so cool and damp and beneficent. She would go and see how the buttercups looked without the sun on them. Wet gamboge, probably. She washed sketchily, dressed in the warmest things she had with her, and slinging a coat over her shoulders went out into the silent corridor and down the deserted stairs. She paused by the quadrangle door to read the notices on the students’ board; cryptic, esoteric, and plain. “Students are reminded that parents and visitors may be shown over the bedroom wings and the clinic, but not the front of the house.” “Juniors are reminded that it is their duty to wait on the guests at tea and so help the domestic staff.” And, by itself, in capitals, the simple statement:
DIPLOMAS WILL BE PRESENTED ON
TUESDAY MORNING AT 9 O’CLOCK
As she moved on towards the covered way, Lucy visualised the diploma as an imposing roll of parchment tied up with ribbon, and then remembered that even in the matter of diplomas this place was a law unto itself. Their diploma was a badge to stick in their coat; a little enamel-and-silver affair that, pinned to the left breast of their working garment, would tell all and sundry where they had spent their student years and to what end.
Lucy came out into the covered way and dawdled along it to the gymnasium. Giddy had long since finished his cleaning operations — she had seen him from her window before she left her room contemplating his roses at the far side of the lawn — and it was apparent that Rouse had already performed her morning routine — the faint damp marks of her gym. shoes were visible on the concrete path — so the gymnasium was deserted. Lucy paused as she was about to turn along the path by its side wall, and stepped in at the wide-open door. Just as a race-course is more dramatic before the crowds blur it or an arena before its traffic writes scribbles over it, so the great waiting hall had a fascination for her. The emptiness, the quiet, the green subaqueous light, gave it a dignity and a mysteriousness that did not belong to its daytime personality. The single boom that Rouse used swam in the shadows, and the liquid light of the mirrors under the gallery wavered at the far end in vague repetition.
Lucy longed to shout a command so as to hear her voice in this empty space; or to climb a rib-stall and see if she could do it without having heart-failure; but she contented herself with gazing. At her age gazing was enough; and it was a thing that she was good at.
Something winked on the floor half way between her and the boom; something tiny and bright. A nail-head or something, she thought; and then remembered that there were no nail-heads in a gymnasium floor. She moved forward, idly curious, and picked the thing up. It was a small filigree rosette, flat, and made of silvery metal; and as she put it absently into her jersey pocket and turned away to continue her walk, she smiled. If the quiver under her sternum this morning had reminded her of school days, that small metal circle brought back even more clearly the parties of her childhood. Almost before her conscious mind had recognised it for what it was she was back in the atmosphere of crackers-and-jellies and white silk frocks, and was wearing on her feet a pair of bronze leather pumps with elastic that criss-crossed over the ankle and a tiny silver filigree rosette on each toe. Going down the path to the field gate, she took it out again and smiled over it, remembering. She had quite forgotten those bronze pumps; there were black ones too, but all the best people wore bronze ones. She wondered who in College possessed a pair. College wore ballet shoes for dancing, with or without blocked toes; and their gymnasium shoes were welted leather with an elastic instep. She had never seen anyone wear those pumps with the little ornament at the toe.
Perhaps Rouse used them for running down to the gymnasium in the mornings. It was certainly this morning the ornament had been dropped, since The Abhorrence under Giddy’s direction was guaranteed to abstract from the gymnasium everything that was not nailed down.
She hung over the gate for a little but it was chilly there and disappointing; the trees were invisible in the mist, the buttercups a mere rust on the grey meadow, and the may hedges looked like dirty snow. She did not want to go back to the house before breakfast, so she walked along to the tennis courts where the Juniors were mending nets — this was odd-job day for everyone, they said, this being the one day in the year when they conserved their energies against a greater demand to come — and with them she stayed, talking and lending a hand, until they went up to College for breakfast. When they marvelled at her early rising little Miss Morris had suggested that she was tired of cold toast in her room, but when she said frankly that she could not sleep for excitement they were gratified by so proper an emotion in an alien breast, and promised that the reality would beggar expectation. She had not seen anything yet, it seemed.
She changed her wet shoes, suffered the friendly gibes of the assembled Staff at her access of energy, and went down with them to breakfast.
It was when she turned to see how Innes was looking this morning that she became aware of a gap in the pattern of bright heads. She did not know the pattern well enough to know who was missing, but there was certainly an empty place at one of the tables. She wondered if Henrietta knew. Henrietta had cast the usual critical eye over the assembly as she sat down, but as the assembly was also at that moment in the act of sitting down the pattern was blurred and any gap not immediately visible.
Hastily, in case Henrietta did not in fact know about that gap, she withdrew her gaze without further investigation. It was none of her wish to call down retribution on the head of any student, however delinquent. Perhaps, of course, someone had just “gone sick”; which would account for the lack of remark where their absence was concerned.
Miss Hodge, having wolfed her fish-cake, laid down her fork and swept the students with her small elephant eye. “Miss Wragg,” she said, “ask Miss Nash to speak to me.”
Nash got up from her place at the head of the nearest table and presented herself.
“Is it Miss Rouse who is missing from Miss Stewart’s table?”
“Yes, Miss Hodge.”
“Why has she not come to breakfast?”
“I don’t know, Miss Hodge.”
“Send one of the Juniors to her room to ask why she is not here.”
“Yes, Miss Hodge.”
A stolid amiable Junior called Tuttle, who was always having to take the can back, was sent on the mission, and came back to say that Rouse was not in her room; which report Beau bore to the head table.
“Where was Miss Rouse when you saw her last?”
“I can’t remember actually seeing her at all, Miss Hodge. We were all over the place this morning doing different things. It wasn’t like sitting in class or being in the gym.”
“Does anyone,” said Henrietta addressing the students as a whole, “know where Miss Rouse is?”
But no one did, apparently.
“Has anyone seen her this morning?”
But no one, now they came to think of it, had seen her.
Henrietta, who had put away two slices of toast while Tuttle was upstairs, said: “Very well, Miss Nash,” and Beau went back to her breakfast. Henrietta rolled up her napkin and caught Fr?ken’s eye, but Fr?ken was already rising from table, her face anxious.
“You and I will go to the gymnasium, Fr?ken,” Henrietta said, and they went out together, the rest of the Staff trailing after them but not following them out to the gymnasium. It was only on the way upstairs to make her bed that it occurred to Lucy to think: “I could have told them that she wasn’t in the gymnasium. How silly of me not to think of it.” She tidied her room — a task that the students were expected to perform for themselves and which she thought it only fair that she likewise should do for herself — wondering all the time where Rouse could have disappeared to. And why. Could she suddenly have failed again this morning to do that simple boom exercise and been overtaken by a crise des nerfs? That was the only explanation that would fit the odd fact of any College student missing a meal; especially breakfast.
She crossed into the “old house” and went down the front stairs and out into the garden. From the office came Henrietta’s voice talking rapidly to someone on the telephone, so she did not interrupt her. There was still more than half an hour before Prayers; she would spend it reading her mail in the garden, where the mist was rapidly lifting and a shimmer had come into the atmosphere that had been so dead a grey. She went to her favourite seat at the far edge of the garden overlooking the countryside, and it was not until nine o’clock that she came back. There was no doubt about the weather now: it was going to be a lovely day; Henrietta’s “tragedy” was not going to happen.
As she came round the corner of the house an ambulance drove away from the front door down the avenue. She looked at it, puzzled; but decided that in a place like this an ambulance was not the thing of dread that it was to the ordinary civilian. Something to do with the clinic, probably.
In the drawing-room, instead of the full Staff muster demanded by two minutes to nine o’clock, there was only Miss Lux.
“Has Rouse turned up?” Lucy asked.
“Yes.”
“Where was she?”
“In the gymnasium, with a fractured skull.”
Even in that moment of shock Lucy thought how typical of Lux that succinct sentence was. “But how? What happened?”
“The pin that holds up the boom wasn’t properly in. When she jumped up to it it came down on her head.”
“Good heavens!” Lucy could feel that inert log crash down on her own skull; she had always hated the boom.
“Fr?ken has just gone away with her in the ambulance to West Larborough.”
“That was smart work.”
“Yes. West Larborough is not far, and luckily at this hour of the morning the ambulance hadn’t gone out, and once it was on the way here there was no traffic to hold it up.”
“What dreadful luck for everyone. On Demonstration Day.”
“Yes. We tried to keep it from the students but that was hopeless, of course. So all we can do is to minimise it.”
“How bad is it, do you think?”
“No one knows. Miss Hodge has wired to her people.”
“Weren’t they coming to the Dem.?”
“Apparently not. She has no parents; just an aunt and uncle who brought her up. Come to think of it,” she added after a moment’s silence, “that is what she looked like: a stray.” She did not seem to notice that she had used the past tense.
“I suppose it was Rouse’s own fault?” Lucy asked.
“Or the student who helped her put up the thing last night.”
“Who was that?”
“O’Donnell, it seems. Miss Hodge has sent for her to ask her about it.”
At that moment Henrietta herself came in, and all the vague resentments that Lucy had been nursing against her friend in the last few days melted at sight of Henrietta’s face. She looked ten years older, and in some odd fashion at least a stone less heavy.
“They have a telephone, it seems,” she said, continuing the subject that was the only one in her mind, “so I shall be able to talk to them perhaps before the telegram reaches them. They are getting the trunk call for me now. They should be here before night. I want to be available for the telephone call, so will you take Prayers, Miss Lux. Fr?ken will not be back in time.” Fr?ken was, as Senior Gymnast, second in rank to Miss Hodge. “Miss Wragg may not be at Prayers; she is getting the gymnasium put to rights. But Madame will be there, and Lucy will back you up.”
“But of course,” said Lucy. “I wish there was something more that I could do.”
There was a tap at the door, and O’Donnell appeared.
“Miss Hodge? You wanted to see me?”
“Oh, in my office, Miss O’Donnell.”
“You weren’t there, so I—”
“Not that it matters, now that you are here. Tell me: when you put up the boom with Miss Rouse last night — It was you who helped her?”
“Yes, Miss Hodge.”
“When you put up the boom with her, which end did you take?”
There was a tense moment of silence. It was obvious that O’Donnell did not know which end of the boom had given way and that what she said in the next few seconds would either damn her or save her. But when she spoke it was with a sort of despairing resolution that stamped what she said with truth.
“The wall end, Miss Hodge.”
“You put the pin into the upright that is fixed to the wall?”
“Yes.”
“And Miss Rouse took care of the upright in the middle of the floor.”
“Yes, Miss Hodge.”
“You have no doubt as to which end you attended to?”
“No, none at all.”
“Why are you so certain?”
“Because I always did do the end by the wall.”
“Why was that?”
“Rouse is taller than I am and could shove the boom higher than I could. So I always took the end by the wall so that I could put a foot in the rib-stalls when I was putting the pin in.”
“I see. Very well. Thank you, Miss O’Donnell, for being so frank.”
O’Donnell turned to go, and then turned back.
“Which end came down, Miss Hodge?”
“The middle end,” Miss Hodge said, looking with something like affection on the girl, though she had been on the point of letting her go without putting her out of suspense.
A great wave of colour rushed into O’Donnell’s normally pale face. “Oh, thank you!” she said, in a whisper, and almost ran out of the room.
“Poor wretch,” said Lux. “That was a horrible moment for her.”
“It is most unlike Miss Rouse to be careless about apparatus,” Henrietta said thoughtfully.
“You are not suggesting that O’Donnell is not telling the truth?”
“No, no. What she said was obviously true. It was the natural thing for her to take the wall end where she would have the help of the rib-stalls. But I still cannot see how it happened. Apart from Miss Rouse’s natural carefulness, a pin would have to be very badly put in indeed for it to be so far not in that it let the boom come down. And the hoisting rope so slack that it let the boom fall nearly three feet!”
“I suppose Giddy couldn’t have done something to it accidentally?”
“I don’t know what he could have done to it. You can’t alter a pin put in at that height without stretching up deliberately to it. It is not as if it were something he might possibly touch with his apparatus. And much as he prides himself on the strength of The Abhorrence there is no suction that will pull a pin out from under a boom.”
“No.” Lux thought a little. “Vibration is the only kind of force that would alter a pin’s position. Some kind of tremor. And there was nothing like that.”
“Not inside the gymnasium, certainly. Miss Rouse locked it as usual last night and gave the key to Giddy, and he unlocked it just after first bell this morning.”
“Then there is no alternative to the theory that for once Rouse was too casual. She was the last to leave the place and the first to come back to it — you wouldn’t get anyone there at that hour of the morning who wasn’t under the direst compulsion — so the blame is Rouse’s. And let us be thankful for it. It is bad enough as it is, but it would be far worse if someone else had been careless and had to bear the knowledge that she was responsible for —”
The bell rang for Prayers, and downstairs the telephone shrilled in its own hysterical manner.
“Have you marked the place in the Prayer book?” Lux asked.
“Where the blue ribbon is,” Miss Hodge said, and hurried out to the telephone.
“Has Fr?ken not come back?” asked Madame, appearing in the doorway. “Ah, well, let us proceed. Life must go on, if I may coin a phrase. And let us hope that this morning’s ration of uplift is not too apposite. Holy Writ has a horrible habit of being apposite.”
Not for the first time, Lucy wished Madame Lefevre on a lonely island off Australia.
It was a silent and subdued gathering that awaited them, and Prayers proceeded in an atmosphere of despondency that was foreign and unprecedented. But with the hymn they recovered a little. It was Blake’s and had a fine martial swing, and they sang it with a will. So did Lucy.
“Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand,” she sang, making the most of it. And stopped suddenly, hit in the wind.
Hit in the wind by a jolt that left her speechless.
She had just remembered something. She had just remembered why she had been so sure that Rouse would not be found in the gymnasium. Rouse’s damp footprints had been visible on the concrete path, and so she had taken it for granted that Rouse had already been and gone. But Rouse had not been. Rouse had come later, and had sprung to the insecure boom and had lain there until after breakfast when she was searched for.
Then — whose footprints were they?
“Students,” said Miss Hodge, rising in her place after lunch and motioning the rest of the Staff to remain seated, “you are all aware of the unfortunate accident which occurred this morning — entirely through the carelessness of the student concerned. The first thing a gymnast learns is to examine apparatus before she uses it. That a student as responsible and altogether admirable as Miss Rouse should have failed in so simple and fundamental a duty is a warning to you all. That is one point. This is the other. This afternoon we are entertaining guests. There is no secret about what happened this morning — we could not keep it secret even if we wanted to — but I do ask you not to make it a subject of conversation. Our guests are coming here to enjoy themselves; and to know that this morning an accident took place sufficiently serious to send one of our students to hospital would undoubtedly take the edge off their pleasure; if indeed it did not fill them with a quite unnecessary apprehension when watching gymnastics. So if any of you have a desire to dramatise today’s happenings, please curb it. It is your business to see that your guests go away happy, without reservations or regrets. I leave the matter to your own good sense.”
It had been a morning of adjustment; physical, mental, and spiritual. Fr?ken had come back from the West Larborough hospital to put a worried lot of Seniors through a routine that would allow for the fact that they were one short. Under her robust calm they took the alterations, and necessity for them, with a fair degree of equanimity; although she reported that at least a third of them shied like nervous colts each time they handled the right-hand front boom, or passed the place where it had fallen. It was going to be a miracle, Fr?ken said with resignation, if they got through this afternoon’s performance without someone or other making a fool of themselves. As soon as Fr?ken had released them Madame Lefevre took them over for a much lengthier session. Thanks to her physical prowess, Rouse had been part of almost every item on the ballet programme; which meant that almost every item had to undergo either patching or reconstruction. This thankless and wearisome business had lasted until nearly lunch-time, and the echoes of it were still audible. Most of the lunch-table conversation appeared to consist of remarks like: “Is it you I give my right hand to when Stewart passes in front of me?” and Dakers lightened the universal anxiety by being overtaken by one of those sudden silences common to all gatherings, which left her announcing loudly that my dears, the last hour had proved that one could be in two places at the same time.
The most fundamental adjustment, however, occurred when both Fr?ken and Madame had finished their respective revisions. It was then that Miss Hodge had sent for Innes and offered her Rouse’s place at Arlinghurst. Hospital had confirmed Fr?ken’s diagnosis of a fracture, and there was no chance that Rouse would be able for work until many months had passed. How Innes had taken this no one knew; all that anyone knew was that she had accepted. The appointment, having all the qualities of anti-climax and being overshadowed by an authentic sensation, was taken as a matter of course; and as far as Lucy could see neither Staff nor students gave it a thought. Madame’s sardonic: “The Deity disposes,” was the solitary comment.
But Lucy was less happy about it. A vague uneasy stirring plagued her like some mental indigestion. The patness of the thing worried her. The accident had happened not only opportunely but at the last available moment. Tomorrow there would have been no need for Rouse to go to the gymnasium and practise; there would have been no boom set up and no pin to be insecurely placed. And there were those damp foot-marks in the early morning. If they were not Rouse’s own, whose were they? As Lux had very truly observed, no one could be dragged anywhere near the gymnasium at that hour by anything less compelling than wild horses.
It was possible that they were Rouse’s prints and that she had done something else before going into the gymnasium for her few minutes on the boom. Lucy could not swear that the footprints actually went into the building; she could remember no actual print on either of the two steps. She had merely seen the damp marks on the covered way and concluded, without thinking about it at all, that Rouse was ahead of her. The prints may have continued round the building, for all she knew. They may have had nothing to do with the gymnasium at all. Nothing to do with the students, even. It was possible that those heelless impressions, so vague and blurred, were made by a maid-servant’s early-morning shoes.
All that was possible. But allied to the steps that were not likely to be Rouse’s was the oddity of a small metal ornament lying on a floor that had been swept twenty minutes before by a powerful vacuum-cleaner. An ornament lying directly between the door and the waiting boom. And whatever was conjecture, one thing was certain: the ornament was not lost by Rouse. Not only had she almost certainly not been in the gymnasium this morning before Lucy entered it, but she did not possess a pair of pumps. Lucy knew, because one of her helpful chores today had been to pack poor Rouse’s things. Miss Joliffe, whose task it would nominally have been, was overwhelmed by preparations for the afternoon’s entertainment, and had passed the duty on to Wragg. Wragg had no student to enlist as substitute, since they were all busy with Madame, and it was not a duty that could be entrusted to a Junior. So Lucy had willingly taken over the job, glad to find a way to be of use. And her first action in Number Fourteen had been to take Rouse’s shoes out of the cupboard and look at them. The only pair that were not there were her gymnastic shoes, which presumably had been what she wore this morning. But to be sure she summoned O’Donnell when she heard the Seniors come back from the gymnasium and said: “You know Miss Rouse very well, don’t you? Would you cast your eye over these shoes and tell me whether they are all she had, before I begin packing them.”
O’Donnell considered, and said yes, these were all. “Except her gym. shoes,” she added. “She was wearing those.”
That seemed to settle it.
“Nothing away being cleaned?”
“No, we clean our own — except for our hockey boots in winter.”
Well, that seemed to be that. What Rouse had worn this morning were regulation College gym. shoes. It was not off any shoes of Rouse’s that the little filigree rosette had come.
Then from where? Lucy asked herself as she packed Rouse’s belongings with a care she never accorded her own. From where?
She was still asking herself that as she changed her dress for the party. She put the rosette into one of the small drawers of the dressing-table-desk affair, and dully looked over her scanty collection of clothes for something that would be suitable to a garden-party afternoon. From her second window, the one looking out on the garden, she could see the Juniors busy with small tables and basket-chairs and tea-umbrellas. Their ant-like running about was producing a gay border of colour round three sides of the lawn. The sun streamed down on them, and the picture in its definition and variety of detail was like a Brueghel gone suddenly gay.
But Lucy, looking down at the picture and remembering how she had looked forward to this occasion, felt sick at heart; and could not bring herself yet to acknowledge why she should be heartsick. Only one thing was clear to her. Tonight she must go to Henrietta with the little rosette. When all the excitement was over and Henrietta had time to be quiet and consider, then the problem — if there was a problem — must be handed over to her. She, Lucy, had been wrong last time when she had tried to save Henrietta suffering by dropping the little red book into the water; this time she must do her duty. The rosette was no concern of hers.
No. It was no concern of hers. Certainly not.
She decided that the blue linen with the narrow red belt was sufficiently Hanover Square to satisfy the most critical of parents from the provinces, brushed the suede shoes with the brush so dutifully included by Mrs Montmorency, and went down to help wherever she could be useful.
By two o’clock the first guests were arriving; going into the office to pay their respects to Miss Hodge, and then being claimed by excited offspring. Fathers prodded doubtfully at odd gadgets in the clinic, mothers prodded the beds in the wing, and horticultural uncles prodded Giddy’s roses in the garden. She tried to find distraction in “pairing” the parents she met with the appropriate student. She noticed that she was searching unconsciously for Mr and Mrs Innes and anticipating their meeting with something that was half dread. Why dread? she asked herself. There was nothing in the world to dread, was there? Certainly not. Everything was lovely. Innes had after all got Arlinghurst; the day was after all a triumph for her.
She came on them unexpectedly, round the corner of the sweet-pea hedge; Innes walking between them with her arms through theirs and a light on her face. It was not the radiance that had shone in her eyes a week ago, but it was a good enough substitute. She looked worn but at peace; as if some inner battle was over, the issue settled for good or bad.
“You knew them,” she said to Miss Pym, indicating her parents, “and you never told me.”
It was like meeting old friends, Lucy thought. It was unbelievable that her only traffic with these people had been across a coffee table for an hour on a summer morning. She seemed to have known them all her life. And she felt that they in their turn felt like that about her. They really were glad to see her again. They remembered things and asked about them, referred to things she had said, and generally behaved as if she not only was of importance in their scheme of things, but was actually part of that scheme. And Lucy, used to the gushing indifference of literary parties, felt her heart warm afresh to them.
Innes left them together and went away to get ready for the gymnastic display that would open the afternoon’s programme, and Lucy walked over to the gymnasium with them.
“Mary is looking very ill,” her mother said. “Is there anything wrong?”
Lucy hesitated, wondering how much Innes had told them.
“She has told us about the accident, and about falling heir to Arlinghurst. I don’t suppose she is very happy at profiting by another student’s bad luck, but it can’t be just that.”
Lucy thought that the more they understood about the affair the better it would be if — well, the better it would be anyhow.
“Everyone took it for granted that she would get the appointment in the first place. I think it was a shock to her when she didn’t.”
“I see. Yes,” said Mrs Innes, slowly; and Lucy felt that more explanation was not necessary; the whole tale of Innes’s suffering and fortitude was clear to her mother in that moment.
“I think she might not approve of my having told you that, so —”
“No, we will not mention it,” said Innes’s mother. “How lovely the garden is looking. Gervase and I struggle along with our patch but only his bits look like the illustration; mine always turn out to be something else. Just look at those little yellow roses.”
And so they came to the gymnasium door, and Lucy showed them up the stairs and introduced them to The Abhorrence — with pricking thought of a little metal rosette — and they found their seats in the gallery, and the afternoon had begun.
Lucy had a seat at the end of the front row. From there she looked down with affection on the grave young faces waiting, with such tense resolution, Fr?ken’s word of command. “Don’t worry,” she had heard a Senior say, “Fr?ken will see us through,” and one could see the faith in their eyes. This was their ordeal, and they came to it shaken, but Fr?ken would see them through.
She understood now the love that had filled Henrietta’s eyes when she had watched with her on that other occasion. Less than a fortnight ago, that was, and already she had a proprietorial interest and pride in them. When the autumn came the very map of England would look different to her because of these two weeks at Leys. Manchester would be the place where the Disciples were, Aberystwyth the place where Thomas was trying to stay awake, Ling the place where Dakers was being good with the babies, and so on. If she felt like that about them after a matter of days, it was not much wonder that Henrietta, who had seen them come untried into their new life, had watched them grow and improve, struggle, fail, and succeed, not much wonder that she looked on them as daughters. Successful daughters.
They had got through their preliminaries, and a little of the strain had gone from their faces; they were beginning to settle down. The applause that marked the end of their free-standing work broke the silence and warmed them and made the affair more human.
“What a charming collection,” said a dowager with lorgnettes who was sitting next her (now who owned that? she couldn’t be a parent) and turning to her confidentially asked: “Tell me, are they hand-picked?”
“I don’t understand,” murmured Lucy.
“I mean, are these all the Seniors there are?”
“You mean, are these just the best? Oh, no; that is the whole set.”
“Really? Quite wonderful. So attractive, too. Quite amazingly attractive.”
Did she think we had given the spotty ones half a crown to take themselves off for the afternoon, wondered Lucy.
But of course the dowager was right. Except for a string of two-year-olds in training, Lucy could think of nothing more attractive to mind and eye than that set of burnished and controlled young creatures busy dragging out the booms below her. The ropes rushed down from their looped position near the roof, the window-ladder came to vertical, and over all three pieces of apparatus the Seniors swarmed in easy mastery. The applause as they put ropes and ladder away and turned the booms for balance was real and loud; the spectacular had its appeal.
Very different the place looked from that mysterious vault of greenish shadows that she had visited this morning. It was golden, and matter-of-fact, and alive; the reflected light from the sunlit roof showering down on the pale wood and making it glow. Seeing once more in her mind’s eye that dim empty space with the single waiting boom, she turned to see whose lot it might be to perform her balance on the spot where Rouse had been found. Who had the inner end of the right-hand front boom?
It was Innes.
“Go!” said Fr?ken; and eight young bodies somersaulted up on to the high booms. They sat there for a moment, and then rose in unison to a standing position, one foot in front of the other, facing each other in pairs at opposite ends of each boom.
Lucy hoped frantically that Innes was not going to faint. She was not merely pale; she was green. Her opposite number, Stewart, made a tentative beginning, but, seeing that Innes was not ready, waited for her. But Innes stood motionless, apparently unable to move a muscle. Stewart cast her a glance of wild appeal. Innes remained paralysed. Some wordless message passed between them, and Stewart went on with her exercise; achieving a perfection very commendable in the circumstances. All Innes’s faculties were concentrated on keeping her standing position on the boom long enough to be able to return to the floor with the rest, and not to ruin the whole exercise by collapsing, or by jumping off. The dead silence and the concentration of interest made her failure painfully obvious; and puzzled sympathy settled on her as she stood there. Poor dear, they thought, she was feeling ill. Excitement, no doubt. Positively green, she was. Poor dear, poor dear.
Stewart had finished, and now waited, looking at Innes. Slowly they sank together to the boom, and sat down on it; turned together to lean face-forward on it; and somersaulted forward on to the ground.
And a great burst of applause greeted them. As always, the English were moved by a gallant failure where an easy success left them merely polite. They were expressing at once their sympathy and their admiration. They had understood the strength of purpose that had kept her on the boom, paralysed as she was.
But the sympathy had not touched Innes. Lucy doubted if she actually heard the applause. She was living in some tortured world of her own, far beyond the reach of human consolation. Lucy could hardly bear to look at her.
The bustle of the following items covered up her failure and put an end to drama. Innes took her place with the others and performed with mechanical perfection. When the final vaulting came, indeed, her performance was so remarkable that Lucy wondered if she were trying to break her neck publicly. The same idea, to judge by her expression, had crossed Fr?ken’s mind; but as long as what Innes did was controlled and perfect there was nothing she could do. And everything that Innes did, however breath-taking, was perfect and controlled. Because she seemed not to care, the wildest flights were possible to her. And when the students had finished their final go-as-you-please and stood breathless and beaming, a single file on an empty floor as they had begun, their guests stood up as one man and cheered.
Lucy, being at the end of the row and next the door, was first to leave the hall, and so was in time to see Innes’s apology to Fr?ken.
Fr?ken paused, and then moved on as if not interested, or not willing to listen.
But as she went she lifted a casual arm and gave Innes a light friendly pat on the shoulder.
As the guests moved out to the garden and the basket-chairs round the lawn, Lucy went with them, and while she was waiting to see if sufficient chairs had been provided before taking one for herself, she was seized upon by Beau, who said: “Miss Pym! There you are! I’ve been hunting for you. I want you to meet my people.”
She turned to a couple who were just sitting down and said: “Look, I’ve found Miss Pym at last.”
Beau’s mother was a very lovely woman; as lovely as the best beauty parlours and the most expensive hairdressers could make her — and they had good foundation to work on since when Mrs Nash was twenty she must have looked very like Beau. Even now, in the bright sunlight, she looked no older than thirty-five. She had a good dressmaker too, and bore herself with the easy friendly confidence of a woman who has been a beauty all her life; so used to the effect she had on people that she did not have to consider it at all and so her mind was free to devote itself to the person she happened to be meeting.
Mr Nash was obviously what is called an executive. A fine clear skin, a good tailor, a well-soaped look, and a general aura of mahogany tables with rows of clean blotters round them.
“I should be changing. I must fly,” said Beau, and disappeared.
As they sat down together Mrs Nash looked quizzically at Lucy and said: “Well, now that you are here in the flesh, Miss Pym, we can ask you something we are dying to know. We want to know how you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Impress Pamela.”
“Yes,” said Mr Nash, “that is just what we should like to know. All our lives we have been trying to make some impression on Pamela, but we remain just a couple of dear people who happen to be responsible for her existence and have to be humoured now and then.”
“Now you, it seems, are quite literally something to write home about,” Mrs Nash said, and raised an eyebrow and laughed.
“If it is any consolation to you,” Lucy offered, “I am greatly impressed by your daughter.”
“Pam is nice,” her mother said. “We love her very much; but I wish we impressed her more. Until you turned up no one has made any impression on Pamela since a Nanny she had at the age of four.”
“And that impression was a physical one,” Mr Nash volunteered.
“Yes. The only time in her life that she was spanked.”
“What happened?” Lucy asked.
“We had to get rid of the Nanny!”
“Didn’t you approve of spanking?”
“Oh yes, but Pamela didn’t.”
“Pam engineered the first sit-down strike in history,” Mr Nash said.
“She kept it up for seven days,” Mrs Nash said. “Short of going on dressing and forcibly feeding her for the rest of her life, there was nothing to do but get rid of Nanny. A first-rate woman she was, too. We were devastated to lose her.”
The music began, and in front of the high screen of the rhododendron thicket appeared the bright colours of the Junior’s Swedish folk dresses. Folk-dancing had begun. Lucy sat back and thought, not of Beau’s childish aberrations, but of Innes, and the way a black cloud of doubt and foreboding was making a mockery of the bright sunlight.
It was because her mind was so full of Innes that she was startled when she heard Mrs Nash say: “Mary, darling. There you are. How nice to see you again,” and turned to see Innes behind them. She was wearing boy’s things; the doublet and hose of the fifteenth century; and the hood that hid all her hair and fitted close round her face accentuated the bony structure that was so individual. Now that the eyes were shadowed and sunk a little in their always-deep sockets, the face had something it had not had before: a forbidding look. It was — what was the word? — a “fatal” face. Lucy remembered her very first impression that it was round faces like that that history was built.
“You have been overworking, Mary,” Mr Nash said, eyeing her.
“They all have,” Lucy said, to take their attention from her.
“Not Pamela,” her mother said. “Pam has never worked hard in her life.”
No. Everything had been served to Beau on a plate. It was miraculous that she had turned out so charming.
“Did you see me make a fool of myself on the boom?” Innes asked, in a pleasant conversational tone. This surprised Lucy, somehow; she had expected Innes to avoid the subject.
“My dear, we sweated for you,” Mrs Nash said. “What happened? Did you turn dizzy?”
“No,” said Beau, coming up behind them and slipping an arm into Innes’s, “that is just Innes’s way of stealing publicity. It is not inferior physical powers, but superior brains the girl has. None of us has the wit to think up a stunt like that.”
Beau gave the arm she was holding a small reassuring squeeze. She too was in boy’s clothes, and looked radiant; even the quenching of her bright hair had not diminished the glow and vivacity of her beauty.
“That is the last of the Junior’s efforts — don’t they look gay against that green background? — and now Innes and I and the rest of our put-upon set will entertain you with some English antics, and then you shall have tea to sustain you against the real dancing to come.”
And they went away together.
“Ah, well,” said Mrs Nash, watching her daughter go, “I suppose it is better than being seized with a desire to reform natives in Darkest Africa or something. But I wish she would have just stayed at home and been one’s daughter.”
Lucy thought that it was to Mrs Nash’s credit that, looking as young as she did, she wanted a daughter at home.
“Pam was always mad on gym. and games,” Mr Nash said. “There was no holding her. There never was any holding her, come to that.”
“Miss Pym,” said The Nut Tart, appearing at Lucy’s elbow, “do you mind if Rick sits with you while I go through this rigmarole with the Seniors?” She indicated Gillespie, who was standing behind her clutching a chair, and wearing his habitual expression of grave amusement.
The wide flat hat planked slightly to the back of her head on top of her wimple — Wife of Bath fashion — gave her an air of innocent astonishment that was delightful. Lucy and Rick exchanged a glance of mutual appreciation, and he smiled at her as he sat down on her other side.
“Isn’t she lovely in that get-up,” he said, watching Desterro disappear behind the rhododendrons.
“I take it that a rigmarole doesn’t count as dancing.”
“Is she good?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen her, but I understand she is.”
“I’ve never even danced ballroom stuff with her. Odd, isn’t it. I didn’t even know she existed until last Easter. It maddens me to think she has been a whole year in England and I didn’t know about it. Three months of odd moments isn’t very long to make any effect on a person like Teresa.”
“Do you want to make an effect?”
“Yes.” The monosyllable was sufficient.
The Seniors, in the guise of the English Middle Ages, ran out on to the lawn, and conversation lapsed. Lucy tried to find distraction in identifying legs and in marvelling over the energy with which those legs ran about after an hour of strenuous exercise. She said to herself: “Look, you have to go to Henrietta with the little rosette tonight. All right. That is settled. There is nothing you can do, either about the going or the result of the going. So put it out of your mind. This is the afternoon you have been looking forward to. It is a lovely sunny day, and everyone is pleased to see you, and you should be having a grand time. So relax. Even if — if anything awful happens about the rosette, it has nothing to do with you. A fortnight ago you didn’t know any of these people, and after you go away you will never see any of them again. It can’t matter to you what happens or does not happen to them.”
All of which excellent advice left her just where she was before. When she saw Miss Joliffe and the maids busy about the tea-table in the rear she was glad to get up and find some use for her hands and some occupation for her mind.
Rick, unexpectedly, came with her. “I’m a push-over for passing plates. It must be the gigolo in me.”
Lucy said that he ought to be watching his lady-love’s rigmaroles.
“It is the last dance. And if I know anything of my Teresa her appetite will take more appeasing than her vanity, considerable as it is.”
He seemed to know his Teresa very well, Lucy thought.
“Are you worried about something, Miss Pym?”
The question took her by surprise.
“Why should you think that?”
“I don’t know. I just got the impression. Is there anything I can do?”
Lucy remembered how on Sunday evening when she had nearly cried into the Bidlington rarebit he had known about her tiredness and tacitly helped her. She wished that she had met someone as understanding and as young and as beautiful as The Nut Tart’s follower when she was twenty, instead of Alan and his Adam’s apple and his holey socks.
“I have to do something that is right,” she said slowly, “and I’m afraid of the consequences.”
“Consequences to you?”
“No. To other people.”
“Never mind; do it.”
Miss Pym put plates of cakes on a tray. “You see, the proper thing is not necessarily the right thing. Or do I mean the opposite?”
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean at all.”
“Well — there are those awful dilemmas about whom would you save. You know. If you knew that by saving a person from the top of a snow slide you would start an avalanche that would destroy a village, would you do it? That sort of thing.”
“Of course I would do it.”
“You would?”
“The avalanche might bury a village without killing a cat — shall I put some sandwiches on that tray? — so you would be one life to the good.”
“You would always do the right thing, and let the consequences take care of themselves?”
“That’s about it.”
“It is certainly the simplest. In fact I think it’s too simple.”
“Unless you plan to play God, one has to take the simple way.”
“Play God? You’ve got two lots of tongue sandwiches there, do you know?”
“Unless you are clever enough to ‘see before and after’ like the Deity, it’s best to stick to rules. Wow! The music has stopped and here comes my young woman like a hunting leopard.” He watched Desterro come with a smile in his eyes. “Isn’t that hat a knock-out!” He looked down at Lucy for a moment. “Do the obvious right thing, Miss Pym, and let God dispose.”
“Weren’t you watching, Rick?” she heard Desterro ask, and then she and Rick and The Nut Tart were overwhelmed by a wave of Juniors come to do their duty and serve tea. Lucy extricated herself from the crush of white caps and Swedish embroidery, and found herself face to face with Edward Adrian, alone and looking forlorn.
“Miss Pym! You are just the person I wanted to see. Have you heard that —”
A Junior thrust a cup of tea into his hand, and he gave her one of his best smiles which she did not wait to see. At the same moment little Miss Morris, faithful even in the throes of a Dem., came up with tea and a tray of cakes for Lucy.
“Let us sit down, shall we?” Lucy said.
“Have you heard of the frightful thing that has happened?”
“Yes. It isn’t very often, I understand, that a serious accident happens. It is just bad luck that it should be Demonstration Day.”
“Oh, the accident, yes. But do you know that Catherine says she can’t come to Larborough tonight? This has upset things, she says. She must stay here. But that is absurd. Did you ever hear anything more absurd? If there has been some kind of upset that is all the more reason why she should be taken out of herself for a little. I have arranged everything. I even got special flowers for our table tonight. And a birthday cake. It’s her birthday next Wednesday.”
Lucy wondered if any other person within the bounds of Leys knew when Catherine Lux’s birthday was.
Lucy did her best to sympathise, but said gently that she saw Miss Lux’s point of view. After all, the girl was seriously injured, and it was all very worrying, and it would no doubt seem to her a little callous to go merrymaking in Larborough.
“But it isn’t merrymaking! It is just a quiet supper with an old friend. I really can’t see why because some student has had an accident she should desert an old friend. You talk to her, Miss Pym. You make her see reason.”
Lucy said she would do her best but could offer no hope of success since she rather shared Miss Lux’s ideas on the subject.
“You, too! Oh, my God!”
“I know it isn’t reasonable. It’s even absurd. But neither of us would be happy and the evening would be a disappointment and you don’t want that to happen? Couldn’t you have us tomorrow night instead?”
“No, I’m catching a train directly the evening performance is over. And of course, it being Saturday, I have a matinée. And anyhow, I’m playing Romeo at night and that wouldn’t please Cath at all. It takes her all her time to stand me in Richard III. Oh dear, the whole thing is absurd.”
“Cheer up,” Lucy said. “It stops short of tragedy. You will be coming to Larborough again, and you can meet as often as you like now that you know she is here.”
“I shall never get Catherine in that pliant mood again. Never. It was partly your doing, you know. She didn’t want to appear too much of a Gorgon in front of you. She was even going to come to see me act. Something she has never done before. I’ll never get her back to that point if she doesn’t come tonight. Do persuade her, Miss Pym.”
Lucy promised to try. “How are you enjoying your afternoon, apart from broken appointments?”
Mr Adrian was enjoying himself vastly, it appeared. He was not sure which to admire most: the students’ good looks or their efficiency.
“They have charming manners, too. I have not been asked for an autograph once, all the afternoon.”
Lucy looked to see if he was being ironic. But no; the remark was “straight.” He really could not conceive any reason for the lack of autograph hunters other than that of good manners. Poor silly baby, she thought, walking all his life through a world he knew nothing about. She wondered if all actors were like that. Perambulating spheres of atmosphere with a little actor safely cocooned at the heart of each. How nice it must be, so cushioned and safe from harsh reality. They weren’t really born at all; they were still floating in some pre-natal fluid.
“Who is the girl who fluffed at the balance exercise?”
Was she not going to get away from Innes for two minutes together?
“Her name is Mary Innes. Why?”
“What a wonderful face. Pure Borgia.”
“Oh, no!” Lucy said, sharply.
“I’ve been wondering all the afternoon what she reminded me of. I think it is a portrait of a young man by Giorgione, but which of his young men I wouldn’t know. I should have to see them again. Anyhow, it’s a wonderful face, so delicate and so strong, so good and so bad. Quite fantastically beautiful. I can’t imagine what anything so dramatic is doing at a girls’ Physical Training College in the twentieth century.”
Well, at least she had the consolation of knowing that someone else saw Innes as she did; exceptional, oddly fine, out of her century, and potentially tragic. She remembered that to Henrietta she was merely a tiresome girl who looked down her nose at people less well endowed with brains.
Lucy wondered what to offer Edward Adrian by way of distraction. She saw coming down the path a floppy satin bow-tie against a dazzling collar and recognized Mr Robb, the elocution master; the only member of the visiting Staff, apart from Dr Knight, that she knew. Mr Robb had been a dashing young actor forty years ago — the most brilliant Lancelot Gobbo of his generation, one understood — and she felt that to hoist Mr Adrian with his own petard would be rather pleasant. But being Lucy her heart softened at the thought of the wasted preparations he had made — the flowers, the cake, the plans for showing off — and she decided to be merciful. She saw O’Donnell, gazing from a discreet distance at her one-time hero, and she beckoned to her. Edward Adrian should have a real, authentic, dyed-in-the-wool fan to cheer him; and he need never know that she was the only one in College.
“Mr Adrian,” she said, “this is Eileen O’Donnell, one of your most devoted admirers.”
“Oh, Mr Adrian-” she heard O’Donnell begin.
And she left them to it.
When tea was over (and Lucy had been introduced to at least twenty different sets of parents) the drift back from the garden began, and Lucy overtook Miss Lux on the way to the house.
“I’m afraid that I am going to cry off tonight,” she said. “I feel a migraine coming.”
“That is a pity,” Lux said without emotion. “I have cried off too.”
“Oh, why?”
“I’m very tired, and upset about Rouse, and I don’t feel like going junketing in town.”
“You surprise me.”
“I surprise you? In what way?”
“I never thought I should live to see Catherine Lux being dishonest with herself.”
“Oh. And what am I fooling myself about?”
“If you have a look at your mind you’ll find that that’s not why you’re staying at home.”
“No? Why, then?”
“Because you get such pleasure out of telling Edward Adrian where he gets off.”
“A deplorable expression.”
“Descriptive, though. You simply jumped at the chance of being high and mighty with him, didn’t you?”
“I own that breaking the engagement was no effort.”
“And a little unkind?”
“A deplorable piece of self-indulgence by a shrew. That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
“He is looking forward so much to having you. I can’t think why.”
“Thanks. I can tell you why. So that he can cry all over me and tell me how he hates acting — which is the breath of life to him.”
“Even if he bores you ——”
“If! My God!”
“—— you can surely put up with him for an hour or so, and not use Rouse’s accident as a sort of ace from your sleeve.”
“Are you trying to make an honest woman of me, Lucy Pym?”
“That is the general idea. I feel so sorry for him, being left —”
“My — good — woman,” Lux said, stabbing a forefinger at Lucy with each word, “never be sorry for Edward Adrian. Women spend the best years of their lives being sorry for him, and end by being sorry for it. Of all the self-indulgent, self-deceiving ——”
“But he has got a Johannisberger.”
Lux stopped, and smiled at her.
“I could do with a drink, at that,” she said reflectively.
She walked on a little.
“Are you really leaving Teddy high and dry?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“All right. You win. I was just being a beast. I’ll go. And every time he trots out that line about: ‘Oh, Catherine, how weary I am of this artificial life’ I shall think with malice: That Pym woman got me into this.”
“I can bear it,” Lucy said. “Has anyone heard how Rouse is?”
“Miss Hodge has just been on the telephone. She is still unconscious.”
Lucy, seeing Henrietta’s head through the window of her office — it was known as the office but was in reality the little sitting-room to the left of the front door — went in to compliment her on the success of the afternoon and so take her mind for at least a moment or two off the thing that oppressed it, and Miss Lux walked on. Henrietta seemed glad to see her, and even glad to have repeated to her the platitudes she had been listening to all the afternoon, and Lucy stayed talking to her for some time; so that the gallery was almost filled again when she took her seat to watch the dancing.
Seeing Edward Adrian in one of the gangway seats she paused and said:
“Catherine is coming.”
“And you?” he said, looking up.
“No, alas; I am having a migraine at six-thirty sharp.”
Whereupon he said: “Miss Pym, I adore you,” and kissed her hand.
His next-door neighbour looked startled, and someone behind tittered, but Lucy liked having her hand kissed. What was the good of putting rose-water and glycerine on every night if you didn’t have a little return now and then?
She went back to her seat at the end of the front row, and found that the dowager with the lorgnettes had not waited for the dancing; the seat was empty. But just before the lights went down — the hall was curtained and artificially lit — Rick appeared from behind and said: “If you are not keeping that seat for anyone, may I sit there?”
And as he sat down the first dancers appeared.
After the fourth or fifth item Lucy was conscious of a slow disappointment. Used to the technical standards of international ballet, she had not allowed in her mind for the inevitable amateurism of dancing in this milieu. In everything she had seen the students do so far they had been the best of their line in the business; professionals. But it was obviously not possible to give to other subjects the time and energy that they did and still reach a high standard as dancers. Dancing was a whole-time job.
What they did was good, but it was uninspired. On the best amateur level, or a little above. So far the programme had consisted of the national and period dances beloved of all dancing mistresses, and they had been performed with a conscientious accuracy that was admirable but not diverting. Perhaps the need for keeping their minds on the altered track took some of the spontaneity from their work. But on the whole Lucy thought that it was that neither training nor temperament was sufficient. Their audience too lacked spontaneity; the eagerness with which they had watched the gymnastics was lacking. Perhaps they had had too much tea; or perhaps it was that the cinema had brought to their remotest doors a standard of achievement that made them critical. Anyhow their applause was polite rather than enthusiastic.
A piece of Russian bravura roused them for a moment, and they waited hopefully for what might come next. The curtains parted to reveal Desterro, alone. Her arms raised above her head and one slim hip turned to the audience. She was wearing some sort of native dress from her own hemisphere, and the “spot” made the bright colours and the barbaric jewels glitter so that she looked like one of the brilliant birds from her Brazilian forests. Her little feet in their high-heeled shoes tapped impatiently under the full skirt. She began to dance; slowly, almost absent-mindedly, as if she were putting in time. Then it became evident that she was waiting for her lover and that he was late. What his lateness meant to her also became rapidly apparent. By this time the audience were sitting up. From some empty space she conjured a lover. One could almost see the hang-dog look on his swarthy face. She dealt with him: faithfully. By this time the audience were sitting on the edge of their seats. Then, having dealt with him, she began to show off to him; but did he not realise his luck in having a girl like her, a girl who had a waist, an eye, a hip, a mouth, an ankle, a total grace like hers? Was he a boor that he could not see? She therefore showed him; with a wit in every movement that brought smiles to every face in the audience. Lucy turned to look at them; in another minute they would be cooing. It was magic. By the time she began to relent and let her lover have a word in, they were her slaves. And when she walked away with that still invisible but undoubtedly subdued young man, they cheered like children at a Wild West matinée.
Watching her as she took her bow, Lucy remembered how The Nut Tart had chosen Leys because for the proper dancing schools “one must have a métier.”
“She was modest about her dancing after all,” she said aloud. “She could have been a professional.”
“I am glad she didn’t,” Rick said. “Coming here she has learned to love the English countryside. If she had trained in town she would have met only the international riff-raff that hang around ballet.”
And Lucy thought that he was probably right.
There was a distinct drop in temperature when the conscientious students reappeared to continue their numbers. Stewart had a Celtic verve that was refreshing, and Innes had grace and moments of fire, but the moment Desterro came among them even Lucy forgot Innes and all the others. Desterro was enchanting.
At the end she had an ovation all to herself.
And Miss Pym, catching the look on Rick’s face, felt a small pang.
It was not enough to have one’s hand kissed.
“Nobody told me that Desterro could dance like that,” she said to Miss Wragg as they went over to supper together when the guests had at last taken their departure with much starting up of engines and shouted goodbyes.
“Oh, she is Madame’s little pet,” Wragg said in the unenthusiastic voice of Madame’s follower speaking of a creature so far gone in sin that she did not play games. “I think she is stagey, myself. Out of place here, somehow. I honestly think that first dance wasn’t quite nice. Did you think that?”
“I thought it delightful.”
“Oh, well,” Wragg said, resignedly; and added: “She must be good, or Madame wouldn’t be so keen on her.”
Supper was a quiet meal. Exhaustion, anti-climax, and the recollection (now that they were idle) of this morning’s accident, all served to damp the students’ spirits and clog their tongues. The Staff, too, were tired after their shocks, exertions, social efforts, and anxieties. Lucy felt that the occasion called for a glass of good wine, and thought with a passing regret of the Johannisberger that Lux was drinking at that moment. Her heart had begun to thud in a horrid way when she thought that in a few moments she must take that little rosette into the office, and tell Henrietta where she found it.
She had still not taken it out of the drawer where she had left it, and after supper she was on the way up to fetch it when she was overtaken by Beau, who slid an arm into hers and said:
“Miss Pym, we are brewing cocoa in the Common Room, the whole shoot of us. Do come and cheer us up. You don’t want to go and sit in that morgue upstairs”— the morgue was presumably the drawing-room —“do you? Come and cheer us up.”
“I don’t feel particularly cheerful myself,” Lucy said, thinking with loathing of the cocoa, “but if you put up with my gloom I shall put up with yours.”
As they turned towards the Common Room a great wind out of nowhere swept down the corridor through all the wide-open windows, dashing the green branches of the trees outside against one another and tearing the leaves upward so that their backs showed. “The end of the good weather,” Lucy said, pausing to listen. She had always hated that restless destroying wind that put paid to the golden times.
“Yes; it’s cold too,” Beau said. “We’ve lit a wood fire.”
The Common Room was part of the “old house” and had an old brick fireplace; and it certainly looked cheerful with the flame and crackle of a freshly lit fire, the rattle of crockery, the bright dresses of the students lying about in exhausted heaps, and their still brighter bedroom slippers. It was not only O’Donnell who had had recourse to odd footwear tonight; practically everyone was wearing undress shoes of some sort or another. In fact Dakers was lying on a settee with her bare bandaged toes higher than her head. She waved a cheerful hand at Miss Pym, and indicated her feet.
“Haemostosis!” she said. “I bled into my best ballet shoes. I suppose no one would like to buy a pair of ballet shoes, slightly soiled? No, I was afraid not.”
“There’s a chair over by the fire, Miss Pym,” Beau said, and went to pour out the cocoa. Innes, who was sitting curled up on the hearth superintending a Junior’s efforts with a bellows, patted the chair and made her welcome in her usual unsmiling fashion.
“I’ve cadged the rest of the tea stuff from Miss Joliffe,” Hasselt said, coming in with a large plate of mixed left-overs.
“How did you do that?” they asked. “Miss Joliffe never gives away even a smell.”
“I promised to send her some peach jam when I got back to South Africa. There isn’t really very much though it looks a plateful. The maids had most of it after tea. Hullo, Miss Pym. What did you think of us?”
“I thought you were all wonderful,” Lucy said.
“Just like London policemen,” Beau said. “Well, you bought that, Hasselt.”
Lucy apologised for the cliché, and sought by going into further detail to convince them of her enthusiasm.
“Desterro ran away with the evening, didn’t she, though?” they said; and glanced with friendly envy at the composed figure in the bright wrap sitting upright in the ingle-nook.
“Me, I do only one thing. It is easy to do just one thing well.”
And Lucy, like the rest of them, could not decide if the cool little remark was meant to be humble or reproving. On the whole she thought humble.
“That’s enough, March, it’s going beautifully,” Innes said to the Junior, and moved to take the bellows from her. As she moved her feet came out from under her and Lucy saw that she was wearing black pumps.
And the little metal ornament that should have been on the left one was not there.
Oh, no, said Lucy’s mind. No. No. No.
“That is your cup, Miss Pym, and here is yours, Innes. Have a rather tired macaroon, Miss Pym.”
“No, I have some chocolate biscuits for Miss Pym.”
“No, she is going to have some Ayrshire shortbread, out of a tin, and fresh. None of your pawed-over victuals.”
The babble went on round her. She took something off a plate. She answered what was said to her. She even took a sip of the stuff in the cup.
Oh, no. No.
Now that the thing was here — the thing she had been afraid of, so afraid that she would not even formulate it in her mind — now that it was here, made concrete and manifest, she was appalled. It had all suddenly become a nightmare: the bright noisy room with the blackening sky outside where the storm was rushing up, and the missing object. One of those nightmares where something small and irrelevant has a terrifying importance. Where something immediate and urgent must be done about it but one can’t think what or why.
Presently she must get up and make polite leavetaking and go to Henrietta with her story and end by saying: “And I know whose shoe it came from. Mary Innes’s.”
Innes was sitting at her feet, not eating but drinking cocoa thirstily. She had curled her feet under her again, but Lucy had no need for further inspection. Even her faint hope that someone else might be wearing pumps had gone overboard. There was a fine colourful variety of footgear present but not a second pair of pumps.
In any case, no one else had a motive for being in the gymnasium at six o’clock this morning.
“Have some more cocoa,” Innes said presently, turning to look at her. But Miss Pym had hardly touched hers.
“Then I must have some more,” Innes said, and began to get up.
A very tall thin Junior called Farthing, but known even to the Staff as Tuppence-Ha’penny, came in.
“You’re late, Tuppence,” someone said. “Come and have a bun.” But Farthing stood there, uncertainly.
“What is the matter, Tuppence?” they asked, puzzled by her shocked expression.
“I went to put the flowers in Fr?ken’s room,” she said slowly.
“Don’t tell us there were some there already?” someone said; and there was a general laugh.
“I heard the Staff talking about Rouse.”
“Well, what about her? Is she better?”
“She’s dead.”
The cup Innes was holding crashed on the hearth. Beau crossed over to her to pick up the pieces.
“Oh, nonsense,” they said. “You heard wrong, young Tuppence.”
“No, I didn’t. They were talking on the landing. She died half an hour ago.”
This was succeeded by a dismayed silence.
“I did put up the wall end,” O’Donnell said loudly, into the silence.
“Of course you did, Don,” Stewart said, going to her. “We all know that.”
Lucy put down her cup and thought that she had better go upstairs. They let her go with murmured regrets, their happy party in pieces round them.
Upstairs, Lucy found that Miss Hodge had gone to the hospital to receive Rouse’s people when they arrived, and that it was she who had telephoned the news. Rouse’s people had come, and had taken the blow unemotionally, it seemed.
“I never liked her, God forgive me,” said Madame, stretched at full length on the hard sofa; her plea to the Deity for forgiveness had a genuine sound.
“Oh, she was all right,” Wragg said, “quite nice when you knew her. And the most marvellous centre-half. This is frightful, isn’t it! Now it will be a matter of inquiry, and we’ll have police, an inquest, and appalling publicity, and everything.”
Yes, police and everything.
She could not do anything about the little rosette tonight. And anyhow she wanted to think about it.
She wanted to get away by herself and think about it.
Bong! Bong! The clock in that far-away steeple struck again.
Two o’clock.
She lay staring into the dark, while the cold rain beat on the ground outside and wild gusts rose every now and then and rioted in anarchy, flinging her curtains out into the room so that they flapped like sails and everything was uncertainty and turmoil.
The rain wept with steady persistence, and her heart wept with it. And in her mind was a turmoil greater than the wind’s.
“Do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose,” Rick had said. And it had seemed a sensible ruling.
But that was when it had been a hypothetical affair of “causing grievous bodily harm” (that was the phrase, wasn’t it?) and now it had ceased to be hypothesis and it wasn’t any longer mere bodily harm. It was — was this.
It wouldn’t be God who would dispose this, in spite of all the comforting tags. It would be the Law. Something written with ink in a statute book. And once that was invoked God Himself could not save a score of innocent persons being crushed under the juggernaut wheels of its progress.
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, said the old Mosaic law. And it sounded simple. It sounded just. One saw it against a desert background, as if it involved two people only. It was quite different when one put it in modern words and called it “being hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
If she went to Henrietta in the ——
If?
Oh, all right, of course she was going.
When she went to Henrietta in the morning, she would be putting in motion a power over which neither she nor anyone else had control; a power that once released would catch up this, that, and the next one from the innocent security of their peaceful lives and fling them into chaos.
She thought of Mrs Innes, happily asleep somewhere in Larborough; bound home tomorrow to wait for the return of the daughter in whom she had her life. But her daughter would not come home — ever.
Neither will Rouse, a voice pointed out.
No, of course not, and Innes must somehow pay for that. She must not be allowed to profit by her crime. But surely, surely there was some way in which payment could be made without making the innocent pay even more bitterly.
What was justice?
To break a woman’s heart; to bring ruin and shame on Henrietta and the destruction of all she had built up; to rub out for ever the radiance of Beau, the Beau who was unconditioned to grief. Was that a life for a life? That was three — no, four lives for one.
And one not worth ——
Oh, no. That she could not judge. For that one had to “see before and after,” as Rick said. A curiously sober mind, Rick had, for a person with a play-boy’s face and a Latin lover’s charm.
There was Innes moving about again next-door. As far as Lucy knew she had not slept yet either. She was very quiet, but every now and then one heard a movement or the tap in her room ran. Lucy wondered whether the water was to satisfy a thirst or to cool temples that must be throbbing. If she, Lucy, was lying awake with her thoughts running round and round inside her skull like trapped mice, what must Innes be going through? Humourless she might be, unenamoured of the human species she probably was, but insensitive she most certainly was not. Whether it was thwarted ambition, or sheer anger and hate, that had driven her down to the gymnasium through the misty morning, she was not the sort to be able to do what she had done with impunity. It might well be, indeed, that given her temperament it was herself she had destroyed when she tampered with that boom. In the case-histories of crime there were instances of women so callous that they had come to a fresh blooming once the obstacle to their desires was out of the way. But they were not built like Mary Innes. Innes belonged to that other, and rarer, class who found too late that they could not live with themselves any more. The price they had paid was too high.
Perhaps Innes would provide her own punishment.
That, now she came to think of it, was how she had first thought of Innes, on that Sunday afternoon under the cedar. The stake or nothing. A self-destroyer.
That she had destroyed a life that stood in her way was almost incidental.
It had not, in any case, been intended as destruction; Lucy was quite sure of that. That is what made this business of starting the machine so repellent, so unthinkable. All that the insecure pin was meant to achieve was a temporary incapacity. An assurance that Rouse would not go to Arlinghurst in September — and that she would.
Had she had that in mind, Lucy wondered, when she refused the appointment at the Wycherley Orthopaedic Hospital? No, surely not. She was not a planner in cold blood. The thing had been done at the very last moment, in desperation.
At least, it had been achieved at the very last moment.
It was possible that its lateness was due to lack of previous opportunity. The way to the gymnasium might never have been clear before; or Rouse may have got there first.
“A Borgia face,” Edward Adrian had said, delightedly.
And Teresa’s great-grandmother’s grandmother, whom she resembled, she had planned. And had lived a long, secure, and successful life as a widow, administering rich estates and bringing up a son, without apparently any signs of spiritual suicide.
The wind flung itself into the room, and Innes’s window began to rattle. She heard Innes cross the room to it, and presently it stopped.
She wished she could go next-door, now, at this minute, and put her hand down. Show Innes the ace she held and didn’t want to play. Together they could work something out.
Together? With the girl who loosened that pin under the boom?
No. With the girl she had talked to in the corridor last Saturday afternoon, so radiant, so full of dignity and wisdom. With the girl who could not sleep tonight. With her mother’s daughter.
Whatever she had done, even if she had planned it, the result had been something she had neither planned nor foreseen. The result was catastrophe for her.
And who in the first place had brought that catastrophe?
Henrietta. Henrietta with her mule-like preference for her inferior favourite.
She wondered if Henrietta was sharing Innes’s vigil. Henrietta who had come back from West Larborough so strangely thin and old-looking. As if the frame she was strung on had collapsed and the stuffing had shifted. Like a badly stuffed toy after a month in the nursery. That is what Henrietta had looked like.
She had been truly sorry for her friend, bereft of someone she had — loved? Yes, loved, she supposed. Only love could have blinded her to Rouse’s defects. Bereft; and afraid for her beloved Leys. She had been truly moved by her suffering. But she could not help the thought that but for Henrietta’s own action none of this would have happened.
The operative cause was Innes’s vulnerability. But the button that had set the whole tragedy in motion was pressed by Henrietta.
And now she, Lucy, was waiting to press another button which would set in motion machinery even more monstrous. Machinery that would catch up in its gears and meshes, and maim and destroy, the innocent with the guilty. Henrietta perhaps had bought her punishment, but what had the Inneses done to have this horror unloaded on them? This unnameable horror.
Or had they contributed? How much had Innes’s upbringing been responsible for her lack of resilience? Given that she had been born without “oil on her feathers,” had they tried to condition her to the lack? Who could ever say where first causes lay?
Perhaps after all, even through the Law, it was the Deity who disposed. If you were a Christian you took that for granted, of course. You took for granted that nothing ever happened that there was no cause for. That everyone who would be tortured incidentally by Innes’s trial for murder had in some way “bought” their punishment. It was a fine comfortable theory, and Lucy wished that she could subscribe to it. But she found it difficult to believe that any deficiency on the part of parents as responsible and as devoted as the Inneses could warrant the bringing down on their heads of a tragedy so unspeakable.
Or perhaps ——
She sat up, to consider this new thought.
If God did dispose — as undoubtedly He did in the latter end — then perhaps the disposing was already at work. Had begun to work when it was she and not someone else who found the little rosette. It had not been found by a strong-minded person who would go straight to Henrietta with it as soon as she smelt a rat, and so set the machinery of man-made Law in motion. No. It had been found by a feeble waverer like herself, who could never see less than three sides to any question. Perhaps that made sense.
But she wished very heartily that the Deity had found another instrument. She had always hated responsibility; and a responsibility of this magnitude was something that she could not deal with at all. She wished that she could throw away the little rosette — toss it out of the window now and pretend that she had never seen it. But of course she could not do that. However rabbity and inadequate she was by nature, there was always her other half — the Laetitia half — which stood watching her with critical eyes. She could never get away from that other half of herself. It had sent her into fights with her knees knocking, it had made her speak when she wanted to hold her tongue, it had kept her from lying down when she was too tired to stand up. It would keep her from washing her hands now.
She got up and leaned out into the wet, lashing, noisy night. There was a puddle of rain water on the wood floor inside the window. The cold shock of it on her bare feet was somehow grateful; a physical and understandable discomfort. At least she did not have to mop it up, or wonder about a carpet. All the elements came into this place at their will and everyone took it for granted. One of Innes’s few volunteered remarks had been how lovely it had been one morning to waken and find her pillow crusted with snow. That had happened only once, she said, but you could always tell the season by what you found on your pillow in the morning: spiders in the autumn and sycamore seeds in June.
She stayed so long cooling her burning head that her feet grew cold, and she had to wrap them in a jersey to warm them when she got back into bed. That completes it, she thought: cold feet mentally and physically. You’re a poor thing, Lucy Pym.
About three o’clock when she was growing sleepy at last, she was shot wide awake by the realisation of what she was proposing to do. She was seriously considering keeping back evidence in a capital charge. Becoming an accessory after the fact. A criminal.
She, respectable, law-abiding Lucy Pym.
How had she got to that point? What could she have been thinking of?
Of course she had no choice in the matter at all. Who disposed or did not dispose was no concern of hers. This was a matter of public inquiry, and she had a duty to do. A duty to civilisation, to the State, to herself. Her private emotions had nothing to do with it. Her views on justice had nothing to do with it. However unequal and wrong-headed the Law might be, she could not suppress evidence.
How in the name of all that was crazy had she ever thought that she could?
Rick was right: she would do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose.
About half-past four she really did fall asleep.