I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water.
I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the postmaster wrote out a telegram.Wewere "taking the chance" now. Such a little thing—my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my mother her life.
The postmaster rang up Brighton.
The doctor was out.
What could be done but leave a message!
I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not thought of that before?
Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the driver to Littlecombe.
"Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too, waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted mind.
That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor? "The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch arrogance—"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We had not seen him—at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from other golfers.
I ran most of the way to the farm.
As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the pathway with a sort of rigidity ofgait, I received an impression of something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my errand.
He did not want to come; I could see that.
He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner.
I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our regular doctor would be with us very soon.
He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown.
"We mustn't lose time," I said.
As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf clubs thrown down in a stone passage.
He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for a warning.
The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed, at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.
What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered young golfers in Norfolk jackets—far too like them, to help in so dire a need as ours.
I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps, why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan would go far." He had gone toofar in the direction of overwork. He had been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long hours....
And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help."
We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my younger sister was not to know if my mother——
"Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster—almost at a run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me without an effort.
Mother, mother!——
Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing. "Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning."
Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children.
Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles?
"I am taking you the short cut," I said.
"Of course."
We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All that gentleness and beauty——
What a richness had been lavished on our lives!
I had never begun to understand it before this evening—never once had thanked her.
Mother, mother!——
The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was nearly over now. And her time—— Was that nearly over too? Where would she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that evening.
"Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once who was always made faint by it."
He did not look at me again.
But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind.
Now we could see the red tile roof.
Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my running.
As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of Duncombe garden.
Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever.
Before I entered the house a strange thing happened.
A great peace fell on me.
I knew, without asking, that all was well.
Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic light was this, then, that was shining on the world?
He saw my mother, and told us what to do.
Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his verdict.
As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me—eyes suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh.
"You don't think she is going to die?"
"Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always hope——"
"Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My mother!..."
He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning.
I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's life—and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and soul.
Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald and red-gold and azure—a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was like the quickness of God.
For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some direction.
There seemed no need to talk.
Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it.
Then it would come again.
He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a great misery behind him.
No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give.
The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I hadn't the heart to worry her with questions.
We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an air.
She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs.
There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as engaged, shesaid, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards.
We were all agog. When was she going to be married?
She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards.
Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance.
I wished we three had a pittance.
For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would die. Then he would have plenty.
Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought over some of his photographsfor us to look at. We did not admire him at all.
But we never told Hermione.
As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing.
If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses were up—all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would find I had been gone for hours.
The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old devotions paled.
Mercifully, nobody knew.
I looked for him all the next spring. In thesummer I said to myself, I shall never see him again.
Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my mother.
I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard.
No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow.
I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out.
I had not dreamed him. He was true.
The next day brought him.
I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The others seemed gladder to see him than I.
He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe,instead of tramping all that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse even than the Club House brew.
The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us.
Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made him confess he could not tell Indian from China.
"Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no one noticed.
It was wonderful to see him again—to verify all those things I had been thinking about him forthe year and four months since he went away.
But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without embarrassment.
I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him, too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird. Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any sisters."
He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them.
But the confession seemed to have brought himnearer, to make him more human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh, happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like?
"Oh——" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were "all right."
The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too.
My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was "like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling still to keep up the property—a losing battle. And a second brother, not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was "trying to grow tea in Ceylon."
Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to.
I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing out the wordresearchwith a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer.
That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve—a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip—and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field—that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden.
My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of thedévot, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint.
I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium.
Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushingSchwärmerei, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics.
The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor.
Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance.
But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking.
She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"—a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put.
"Three weeks."
"A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors."
He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays—thank God!—in a laboratory.
Which was scarcely polite.
"Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells."
He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit.
"No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance—oh, naturally, notherkind.
What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded.
Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight....No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton—Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand."
They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind."
"Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.
Hermione was not a bit dashed. "Youmay look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin.
"Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?"
"Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain."
He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said, would be waiting for his foursome.
A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of "story-telling."
"You said you were only going to stay three weeks."
To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly."
"——and all the while arranging to settle down and live here."
I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously.
"What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded.
"Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in the country?"
"Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said.
As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara seemed to speak for him. "——just to live in for a while," she said quite gently.
"Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag over his shoulder, and made for the front-door.
"What do you want a bungalowfor, then?"Hermione's teasing voice followed after him.
"——mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before.
Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have some place to keep one's traps," he called back.
Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face almost beautiful.
I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow.
A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron, painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard.
The field belonged to Lord Helmstone.
Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work.
As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on. And those noises—which he was, strangely, still more sensitive to—produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at "country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us—Eric rather out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit:
"——wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At four, this kind ofthing——" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy, impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens oftheirgoings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you (with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down for hours. Nothing!'" Thenindignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single jubilant "'Quack! There she is——'" and a rising chorus, till anyone not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a sigh: "Now, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck! Buck!'"—or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a loud crow of great authority.
The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him.
And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked.
I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable.
She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in at first one window and then another. She said there was nothingbut a stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see in than you could see through the wall.
The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after all, she said.
Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?"
"Oh, quite well, thank you."
"Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read the whole day and half the night."
No, he didn't read all the time.
"What do you do then?"
Ah, there was no telling.
And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he didn't want to.
Hermione announced that she had been to call.
"Yes," he said, "I heard you call."
She stared.
"You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?"
"Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at his ease.
Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my life I ever saw Hermione blush.
"What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!"
"Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I alwaysambusy when I'm at the Bungalow."
She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.)
"Yes, I heard you try the door."
"Well, youarean extraordinary being—shutting yourself up with brown paper pasted over the windows——"
"——only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."
"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"
He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."
"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."
"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."
She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he makes bombs."
"Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.
"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make counterfeit money."
"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be counterfeit."
One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures—poor little darling guinea-pigs.
She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.
"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"
He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.
But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets."
"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs."
"'Keeping them'—I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them."
"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."
Of course she hadn't been able to keep thembeyond their natural span. "But I never did anything horrible to them."
Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed.
Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child."
But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the dogs such whippings as you do."
Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand.
"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "Foryourpleasure. And profit. Nottheirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to keep them?
In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.
Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said. "I shall just notice how long you keep them."
"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."
Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?"
"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune."
Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. Myidea is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a day——"
"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did."
While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."
There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow.
This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs.
Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that helooked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.
"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.
"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione—not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it."
I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back—the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person.
We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came.
That pleased me more than anything.
He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of hisabout Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I, too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.
Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit."
A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse—long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes—— Then he died.
Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It was a fine way to die."
He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the governing class, out of touch with the real work of theworld—no wonder they still groped after the military idea.
They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other, wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with those other "preachers"—in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of merely living off the sheep of his pasture.
But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of talking.
We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed up his moustache andbegan to heckle him. What had hedone—except to use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the achievements of—for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha,Science!No phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation—the force that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the Government done even for Science?
Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of wisdom.
"When I ope my mouth let no dog bark."
No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his work—humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact—these kept him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away from the limelight. He was unwritten about—unknown. Even when,after years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was the least excited. TheDaily Mailwas quite unmoved. The service done mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's turkey:
"——she was more than usual calm,She did not give a single damn."
He was not complaining.
All this was wholesome.
"Science!"
"No high-piled monuments are theirs who choseHer great inglorious toil—no flaming death.To them was sweet the poetry of prose,And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath.
"Who wrote that?" my mother asked.
With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of the human race."
And he told us about him.
I asked to have the verse written down.
Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; butstill, a splendour only to dazzle me—not to light and lead.
When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then to steal a look.
When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon that background.
My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption—the long, blessed hours while other people slept.
To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric, had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint, this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving.
All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since she was born—till thatafternoon when I began to think furiously about her again.
Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I thought they had all three gone to the links.
I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said, rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the more delicate fruits on the wall.
All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started, and stood as still as the apple-tree.
Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other bending down. He kissed her—Eddie Monmouth.
I turned and fled back to the house.
The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of my dreaming.
Bettina!—old enough to be kissed by a man!
So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only just had her sixteenth birthday.
I tried that night to lead up to a confidence.
But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to tell me her great secret just at first.
So I waited.
Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding.
Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for India. The bride a girl they had never heard of.
I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up courage to steal a glance—not a cloud on Betty's face.
Here was courage!
But what the poor child must be going through.—I could not leave her to bear this awful thing alone....
When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew.
She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little. Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mindlike that!" she said. "He was very nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas."
At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering alone.
But I was wrong.
Bettinadidlike Ranny Dallas best!
He liked Bettina, and flirted with her.
I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly.
But I saw more than that.
I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or with waking now and then to thrill at stories about otherpeople's courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why shouldInot rouse myself and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live laborious days?
It was then the Great Idea came to me.
Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away without a word about the radical change that had come over a life outwardly the same.
That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my mother—French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me.
I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall.
I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "likedhim best"—liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and who had not cared for her at all.
I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny.
All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was "chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants."
I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of being so—chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean. And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he looked.
I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn. Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say thathewouldn't be seen ridingsuch a bicycle—"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew, had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake. Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to think about the shover-chap."
After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them—and, for all I could do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina.
I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there Ranny got the chaffing.
"What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what he'd come for.
"Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship."
"Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would say to us: "Here'sa fella usen't to care a doit for golf—and now this passion!"
When Lord Helmstone said that—which, in the way of facetious persons secure from criticism, he did a great many times—a colour like a girl's would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh——?"
"In this weather?"
"Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep down superfluous tissue. Eh—what?"
People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly.
When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well, but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone, she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way.
I said that was quite different, and we verynearly had a serious quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan, I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty.
This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South.
They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step."
Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two. There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers, and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behaverather badly to Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor—Captain Gerald Boyne—Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing in our own room that night, or rather morning—I didn't know how strongly he had spoken.
We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us.
My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in the morning."
So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked different to me—this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of thedimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world was looking like this!
We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold; but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air of justification—"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss, just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so divinely!"
I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said.
"Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had promised him——" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent her dancingat allwith Captain Boyne.
"But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded her.
"Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she forgot to keep her voice down.
My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called.
We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he say?"
I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in particular—he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he danced badly.
"Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me."
"Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you."
Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione, and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on. Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up.
And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'"
Betty said "No."
"'Why not?Whyhaven't you told him?'"
"He would ask for a reason."
"'Very well, give it'"
"'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said.
"'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and—we waltzed that time too."
"Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that."
No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the cotillion."
"Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous."
She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there."
"I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz after he had said he 'made a point of it'—I wasn't to dance again with 'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh,Gerald Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my wife, I should forbid it.'"
"'But,' I said, 'I'mnotyour sister!'—Betty tossed her head, laughing softly—'and I'm not your wife——'"
I asked her if she had said it like that?
Yes, she had. "And I said, too—I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began to cry.
I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being so angry makes me cry."
"You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take off her shoes and stockings.
"I'mnotcrying because I'm tired, but because"—she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown—"it's a disappointment to see anyone so silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes."
When she was ready for bed, she stood meditatinga moment. And then: "Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of people. Has he you?"
"Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright.
"——asking me like that,at a ball, if I liked Captain Boyne best—a man I'd never seen before—don't you call it very rude?"
"No; only a little foolish——"
Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on talking I shall have to come in."
We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty began: "Ranny——"
"Sh!" I said.
The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and pictures and china animals—all the odds and ends we had cherished most since we were babies.
When Bettina had come in that night, the firstthing she did was to clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and, most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured ribbons.
When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust them under the bed.
A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again.
I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery—punishing her toys when things went wrong.
What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law.