Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  Peggy, with a gallant effort to appear unconcerned, went to meet Susan and Jed.

  “The—the beer must have gone to Ronald’s head, I think,” she said with a very creditable laugh. “He was—was being quite melodramatic!”

  “How thrilling for you,” said Susan lightly, but she put her hand through the younger girl’s arm. “We won’t hurry back, it’s too hot. Mr. Armstrong, you don’t seem to feel the heat. Would you mind going on and getting the boys to start a fire for tea?”

  Jed Armstrong nodded and left them to follow slowly down the hill.

  “Susan,” said Peggy rather piteously, “why are men such beasts?” She was still trembling.

  “Oh, darling!” Susan laughed, but her hand closed on Peggy’s arm protectingly. “You don’t call Ronald Graham a good specimen of man, I hope?”

  “He—he said such horrible things—”

  “It was the beer, I expect,” said Susan. She knew that the girl had been shocked and frightened, but to take the matter seriously would only make Peggy cry. “Don’t think any more about it, my dear. One has to make allowances for the creatures, and I do think that it isn’t fair to judge the rest by the one rather unfortunate example—”

  Peggy gave a long shuddering sigh and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, like a small boy.

  “Better now?” said Susan.

  “Yes, thank you. Only I do wish I didn’t ever have to see him again.”

  “Can’t your father get another organist?”

  “Oh no! I wouldn’t tell father or mother anything about it. And, you see, Ronald doesn’t do it for money; and besides, he’s really good at it. No; I’ll just have to keep out of his way as much as I can,” said Peggy resignedly.

  Susan changed the subject, and by the time they had rejoined the party on the shore, Peggy was quite cheerful again.

  The boys, boy-like, were as wolfishly hungry for tea as if they had not eaten any luncheon, but the others were only thirsty, and sat about toying with sandwiches generously sprinkled with sand, and gulping down cups of rather smoky tea. Shena Graham wore the expression of a cat which had recently lapped a saucer of rich cream, and Oliver smiled fatuously whenever he met her large, empty-looking brown eyes. Susan, irritated and slightly disgusted, could not make up her mind which of the Grahams she disliked more—brother or sister.

  She turned away and spoke to Peggy, now amicably, squabbling with the Scott boys beside her.

  “Did your mother give you any message about the woman who is coming to lecture on jam-making to her Women’s Guild, Peggy?” she asked. “She wanted to know if I could provide a meal for the lecturer, and, of course, I shall be delighted, but I haven’t heard yet which day she is coming.”

  Peggy, with a large piece of gingerbread half-way to her mouth, stared at her with blue eyes of concern.

  “Good heavens!” she said. “You’re feeding her? Mother must be mad. Didn’t she let you know? It’s this evening—”

  A dreadful thought occurred to Susan.

  “‘MacIlwaine!’” she said faintly. “‘Arriving Abbeyshiels six-thirty. Please meet’.”

  4

  “Damnation!” muttered Jed Armstrong, drawing in to the side of the narrow road and stopping his car.

  Susan said nothing, but in her heart she echoed his words. Since he had whirled her away from Sunburgh at her urgent request, before any of the others were ready to leave, misfortune had dogged them relentlessly. This was their second puncture, and as they had left the main road for various rambling byways which Jed had vowed were short cuts, there was no hope of assistance from passing cars. The rest of the picnic party would not come this way, and the spare wheel had already been substituted for the tyre which had punctured first. The precious moments were flying past, and the train bearing the jam-making expert whom Susan had promised to meet and feed before handing her over to the Muirfoot Women’s Guild at seven-thirty drew steadily nearer Abbeyshiels. Meantime, an inner-tube had to be repaired. . . .

  They disembarked, and Jed Armstrong, kicking moodily at a tyre as flat as one of Donaldina’s pancakes, uttered curses not loud but deep, like Macbeth, while Susan looked forlornly up and down the stretch of road which mocked her by its emptiness. They were alone in a silent land of broad meadows and waving, sun-browned corn. Jed glanced at his companion, and a slow, rueful smile overspread his countenance.

  Against her will, against her better judgment, for she felt that she ought to be exceedingly angry with him, Susan began to smile also, and in a second they were both laughing helplessly and heartily.

  “I doubt,” he said at last, “that Miss MacIlwaine—if she is a Miss—will have a long wait at Abbeyshiels.” His tone was grave, even penitent, but a devil of amusement leapt in his eyes.

  He took off his coat to start repairing the tube, in which a large nail had made what dentists call with gloomy zest “a serious cavity.” After a time, during which he wrestled alone in a cloud of sulphurous language, Susan offered her unskilled assistance, and they wrought together, getting hotter and dirtier with each passing minute. Any idea of meeting Miss (or Mrs.) MacIlwaine had long since vanished by the time they were under way once more, and Susan’s hopes were now fixed on reaching home before darkness overtook them, which seemed, in her pessimistic frame of mind, highly improbable.

  “We must stop at the first post office we come to and send a telegram,” she said. “Mrs. Cunningham will have to make apologies for me, though I don’t envy her the task.”

  “Oh, that’ll be all right,” Jed assured her easily. “She’ll just put all the blame on you.”

  “That,” said Susan with some bitterness, “will be so nice for me, won’t it?”

  “Well, you can always shift the blame on to me,” he retorted, maddeningly good-humoured. “I don’t mind.”

  “I daresay you don’t!” cried Susan angrily. “But it would only be fair if you did take a share of the blame. Whose fault was it that we left the proper road and got all those punctures?”

  “Well,” he began with the air of one weighing the matter judicially, “you might call it the fault of whoever left those nails in the road for the car to pick up. Or it might be just the inscrutable workings of Providence old Cunningham is always talking about. Or—”

  Here Susan uttered an indignant noise, suspiciously like a snort.

  “Come, now,” he said, still amiably, while the car tooled along at a pace which in a horse would have been best described as a leisurely amble. “Come, now, there’s no use flying into a rage. The thing’s done, and if they can’t have their jam, I’ve no doubt they’ll manage to amuse themselves some other way. That’s the worst of you folk who’re used to town life: you can’t leave things be. You—”

  “Would you mind hurrying a little?” asked Susan bleakly, his reasonableness only having the not uncommon effect of making her more unreasonably angry. With a sidelong glance at her, which she intercepted in the windscreen, he obeyed, sending his old car banging and bumping over the stony surface until her teeth chattered. At last, as they came to the straggling fringes of a small village, she cried, “Stop, please!”

  He slowed down. “Bumping too much for you?” he asked with a smile for which Susan could cheerfully have killed him. “I thought you’d have to give in, though you’re as obstinate as a mule.”

  “And you,” said Susan, “are as rude as—as a Scotsman. I can’t think of anything worse. No, I have not given in. I want to send off that telegram.”

  A small, dilapidated cottage with three unsavoury bottles of sweets in one fly-blown window had the welcome words “Post Office” on a board above the door. Susan descended from the car and marched up the path. The door resisted her efforts to open it, and after she had knocked until her knuckles were sore and her small remaining stock of patience exhausted, a woman emerged from a neighbouring cottage.

  “Ye needna’ keep chap-chappin’ awa’ there,” she said sourly. “Can ye no’ see the p’stoffice is shut? I
t’s the hauf day, an’ he’s awa’ aff tae see his guid-sister.”

  “But I want to send a telegram—” Susan began.

  “Weel, ye canna’. If ye like tae come back the morn’s mornin’, ye’ll can get sendin’ it then.”

  A burst of laughter from the shameless Jed answered this suggestion. Susan paid no attention to him. “I’m afraid to-morrow won’t do,” she said. “Is there nowhere I could telephone from? No house near?”

  The woman pondered for a while. “A hoose?” she muttered in tones of amazement. “A hoose?” And then suddenly: “Ou, ay. There’s Kelpieha’. They’ve the telephone there.”

  “How do we get to it?” asked Susan quickly.

  There followed a string of instructions which were as Greek to her, though her companion in misfortune appeared to understand the injunctions to “haud awa’ by,” and “tak’ the turn ye’ll see at the hinner end o’ the wood ablow the hill.”

  “Right,” he said briskly. “Many thanks. Come on, Miss Parsons.”

  They roared off down a long hill with a sharp bend in it; up the farther side the road could be seen again, climbing towards a line of beeches which looked as if they might shelter a house.

  “We’ll need to put on speed if the old car’s to get up that,” said Jed Armstrong, nodding his head at the hill opposite. He set his large foot firmly on the accelerator, and they fled down, taking the corner with a perilous lurch. Below them, in the hollow, was the gleam of water, but no bridge. With a tremendous splashing they rushed at what Susan took to be a ford; the wheels went round bravely, the water rose about them, and finally, with a sigh, the engine expired, leaving them in the middle of the river.

  “It’s a pity,” said Jed mildly, “that she didn’t think to tell us about the ford.”

  5

  There are some situations for which no language, however strong, is adequate. In silence they abandoned the car after several futile attempts to make it move and, wading through the shallows beyond, walked with wet squelchings up the hill, their shoes bubbling as the water oozed out of them. The thought that another half-yard would have seen them past the deepest part did not make the mishap any less infuriating. Susan hoped that in other circumstances she would have taken this series of accidents with philosophic calm; but as, wet of foot and in oil-stained garments, she trudged gloomily beside Jed Armstrong, she was haunted by the pale, accusing image of the unknown MacIlwaine, left to languish at Abbeyshiels railway station. Her one desire was to reach a telephone and communicate the news to the minister’s wife, via Mrs. Davidson, and the “mile and a bit” which they had been told lay between the village and Kelpieha’ house seemed, like a piece of elastic, to have stretched into leagues.

  On gaining the top of the hill they were confronted by a meeting of four ways without any guiding signpost.

  “It can’t be far now,” said Jed. “We’ve come a good mile, I should think.”

  But the crossroads stared inexorably, and there was not a symptom of human habitation in sight. Spurning the absurd suggestion that she should “toss for it,” Susan exclaimed eagerly, “There’s an old man. Ask him.”

  A venerable figure, white-bearded, bending under a load of sticks, was approaching at a snail’s pace, and Jed hailed him forthwith.

  “Eh?” said the aged man, eyeing them suspiciously. “I didna’ hear ye. Ye’ll need tae speak a wee thing looder. I’ve been deif this twal’month syne.”

  Jed Armstrong drew a deep breath and then, in a bellow which made the surrounding country ring, enunciated the one word: “KELPIEHA’!”

  “Nae need tae roar on me, man. Ye’ve a voice like a bull! Haud on tae yer left, an’ ye’ll see the back-entrance on yer richt,” said the old man peevishly.

  “The back entrance? Is that the quickest way to the house?”

  Again the old eyes travelled slowly over them from head to foot. “Ye’ll gang in the back gate,” he said firmly and finally, and hobbled on his way.

  The thought of her appearance had not been included in Susan’s anxieties, but now, with this insistence on the “back entrance,” she began to wonder whether it was possible to arrive at a strange house in her present state of dirt, dishevelment and damp, and demand to use the telephone. A glance at Jed confirmed her fears as to what she must look like herself, and though she walked on at his side, she decided meanly that he would have to go up to the house alone, while she lurked under cover somewhere to await his return.

  In a tone which forbade argument she told him so; and, rather to her surprise, he merely nodded and said, “All right.”

  A gate broke the long line of trees just ahead, and buildings could be seen looming behind it.

  “Here we are,” said Jed.

  He advanced boldly, while Susan prepared to efface herself in a modest manner behind a convenient clump of rhododendrons. As he neared the gate, and before she could hide, there came a joyous soprano cry of: “Here they are!” and a bevy of young men and maidens, variously attired in day and evening dress, rushed out into the road.

  “I say, you’re awfully late, you know,” said a tall young man in plus-fours of the most exotic pattern, and a cut more nearly resembling a Turkish woman’s trousers than any male garments Susan had ever seen. He spoke reproachfully. “Have you had a breakdown?”

  “Yes, we have,” said Jed bluntly. “The car’s still in the ford, and it’ll take a couple of horses to pull her out.”

  “Well, it can’t be helped, and, anyhow, you’re here at last. The fiddler’s been doing his damnedest, but it’s pretty poor without the piano—”

  “You’ve made a mistake. I haven’t got your piano. I want to use your telephone for a minute, and—”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Only come on. It’s not the piano we want, but the pianist. You are the pianist from Abbeyshiels, I suppose?” said the young man, addressing Susan. A note of doubt had crept into his voice.

  Susan had been standing mute, wondering vaguely if she were in Bedlam, and, now she shook her head. “I’m sorry—” she began.

  “Why, good Lord, it’s Armstrong of Reiverslaw!” broke in another voice, and a new young man, wearing a dinner-jacket, who had added himself to the party, bounded forward and smote Susan’s companion on the back. “Jed, you old ruffian, what are you doing so far from home?”

  A perfect babel of explanation and inquiry burst forth, in the course of which Susan gathered that Kelpieha’ was holding a tenants’ and employees’ dance in honour of the son of the house, whose twenty-first birthday it was; that though the hired fiddler had arrived, the pianist engaged to share his labours had failed to put in an appearance; and that the dance looked like being a dismal frost in consequence.

  “We’ve kept ’em fairly happy up to date,” said the plus-foured one. “But now. . . .” He made a gesture of despair. “The thing’s turning into a rough-and-tumble. Half of us haven’t been able to get away to dress yet.”

  “If you’ll let Miss Parsons here use your telephone, and give her a change of shoes and stockings, she’ll play the piano for you.”

  This egregious suggestion was made by Jed Armstrong, and before Susan could even open her mouth to protest she was whirled away in the direction of the house by a loudly chattering group of young women.

  While the daughter of Kelpieha’ swept her up to a bedroom and literally flung the contents of her wardrobe at Susan’s wet feet, someone else rang up Muirfoot and brought the welcome tidings that Miss MacIlwaine had arrived safely, and was even then making plum jam in front of the admiring eyes of the Women’s Guild.

  A few minutes more, and after performing a hasty toilet and “changing her feet,” Susan was hurried down to a large, gloomy dining-room, where a meal had been assembled. Here she found Mr. Armstrong solemnly waiting for her, and solacing himself with whisky-and-soda. They ate, hastily and uncomfortably, the chill remnants of what had been a hot dinner, embarrassed by the continual entrances and exits of members of the house-party, whose eagerness to
carry them to the scene of action was barely tempered by politeness.

  “I’ve never felt so acutely that appetite was a crime,” murmured Susan plaintively when, for a few seconds, she was alone with Jed, “or that hunger was a vulgar failing! I was hungry when I sat down, but eating under the calculating eyes of those young things, who keep glancing from my plate to the clock and back again, is too much for me. Another bite and I shall choke!”

  Jed quite evidently harboured no such feelings. He cut himself a liberal helping of cold beef, and assured Susan that if she had to thump a piano half the night she would need nourishment, and placidly continued to eat. But she was not sufficiently impervious to the prevailing impatience to profit by his good advice, and presently, amid audible murmurs of thanksgiving, announced that she had finished, and was hustled from the room, leaving him seriously attacking a second portion of cold meat and salad.

  The barn, in which the dance was taking place, was lighted by many oil lamps, whose feeble flickering was still mocked by the long rays of the sinking sun. At the far end of the building the fiddler, perspiring freely, had sunk on a bench, exhausted by his efforts to produce unaided a volume of sound which could contend successfully with the clamour of tongues. A knot of ploughmen and herds in their stiff Sunday clothes hung about the doorway, eyeing the girls who clustered, giggling, at one side of the improvised ball-room and exchanged highly flavoured personalities with their neighbours. Pressing through the crowd, Susan was at last brought face to face with the battered piano which stood across one corner.

  “I suppose you realize,” she said desperately, “that I don’t know any of the music?”

  This objection was airily waved away. “It’s noise they want,” said the young host reassuringly. “Just thump on, and never mind about wrong notes.”

  “Ay, ay, Maister Wat,” chimed in a burly farmer. And to Susan: “Gie’s the auld dances, lassie, the Circassian Circle and Petronella. Nane o’ yer frog’s-trots nor foxes’-walks here!”