“If it’s too cold for you, I could easily put it half down.”
“Oh no, thank you. I like fresh air. It’s not cold to-day, either.”
“It will grow colder as we get nearer Oxford, I’m afraid. Are you leaving the train at Oxford, too, or going further north?”
Too! He was going to Oxford, then. Perhaps he knew Carol and her husband — perhaps they were destined to meet then — perhaps it was the beginning of a life-long dream come true....
It wasn’t she who’d entered into conversation — it was he. So he couldn’t think that she’d wanted to, which Irma knew was fatal, with any really nice man.
And they began to talk.
Oxford — architecture — music — books — poetry — and Irma growing more and more sure every moment that this was her affinity, at last.
Suddenly a dreadful thought struck her.
But how could one find out, without asking?
As though the sympathy between them was so marvellously strong that he had, in some telepathic way, caught her thought — but she fervently hoped that he hadn’t — suddenly he alluded, casually, to the fact of being a bachelor. It was all right.
In vain did Irma chide herself, and remember that things didn’t happen, like that. They did sometimes, somehow — they did!
Her heart sang.
Outwardly, her small, intense face grew prettier and less strained as she forgot herself more and more.
They went on talking.
If only the journey would never end! Again, there was telepathy between them. He asked her, diffidently, where she was going to stay, and whether he might hope to meet her again.
“My name is Stevenson — Miss Irma Stevenson — and I’m staying with some people called Mathieson — they’ve got a house on the Abingdon road — I don’t know whether by any chance you know them?”
“Is he the Magdalen man — Professor Claude Mathieson?”
There was recognition in his voice. He did know the Mathiesons — he and she were bound to meet again.
“I know Mrs. Mathieson quite well, and her children. They are—”
With a grinding jar of brakes the train came to a standstill.
But it wasn’t Oxford Station, thank Heaven! It was the middle of a peculiarly bare and desolate stretch of country.
“Why are we stopping here?”
He put his head out of the window, and his shoulders were so broad that they filled the opening. That was attractive....
“I can’t see anything. We shall go on in a few minutes, I suppose.”
They didn’t.
The train remained stationary and they went on talking, more absorbed than ever.
Then presently, there were voices outside, an official giving information.
“I’ll just find out—”
He put his head out of the window again, and she heard him calling, in a pleasantly authoritative and masculine way:
“I say, guard!”
When the colloquy was over, he jerked the window up again, and sat down in his corner seat, facing her.
His eyes were smiling.
“Are you in a great hurry to reach Oxford, Miss Stevenson?”
“Well, no—” she confessed and blushed slightly.
Her trick of blushing had never altogether left her, although it had long since ceased to be a fashionable accomplishment.
“Because there’s been a fall of rock or something, on the line — a landslip, in fact — and it’ll take them some time to clear it away, so that we can get on.”
“No one has been hurt, or anything like that?”
“Oh no. It just means a delay — and if you don’t mind that—”
He looked at her expressively.
“No,” said Irma, in a low voice, and looking down. “I don’t mind that. But perhaps you — you’re in a hurry?”
“Indeed I’m not. In fact, this is the very best thing that’s ever happened to me—”
She raised her eyes and met his for a blissful moment.
The miracle, the disturbing, bewildering, long-awaited miracle, was happening.
They went on talking, sounding a more personal and intimate note.
Architecture, music, books, poetry, were succeeded by philosophy, religion, life, ideals.
The understanding between them was perfect — everything that Irma had ever dreamed of and more.
She no longer doubted that they would meet again, in Oxford. He intended it to happen, and it was inevitable that it should happen.
Every now and then he asked her solicitously if she was cold, or tired, or very hungry.
“By Jove, I believe there’s a restaurant car on this train! You might be able to get a cup of tea.”
He rang, but no one came, and he insisted on going off to see whether he could find the cook’s galley.
Irma, in the few minutes that she was alone, tried in despite of herself to summon back the last vestige of common sense.
It couldn’t be — it was impossible — she didn’t even know his name — and perhaps, although he wasn’t married, he might be engaged.
But she knew that he wasn’t.
There might, of course, be other obstacles. Poverty.
Irma smiled, at the futility of that objection. She had never been poor any more than she had ever been rich, but she knew very well that, to the true romantic, poverty is more necessary than are riches.
How truly romantic she herself was, she had never fully realized until this moment, when romance stood justified before her.
She wondered what the Mathiesons would say. One would have to tell Carol about it by degrees — and make her understand the wonder of it. Irma felt, in the undefined way in which she often felt things, rather than clearly thought them, that the sheer, intrinsic wonder of her story redeemed it from being a merely fortuitous adventure, cheapening to her dignity.
Would Carol understand?
Though she was almost dizzy with unbelievable happiness, she was still conscious of a faint, underlying anxiety on this point, gnawing at her.
But she almost forgot it, when he came back again, carefully carrying two very thick cups and saucers, filled with steaming tea and a plate of cut bread and butter.
“There!” he said joyfully.
They put the things down on the seat next to where Irma sat (it reminded her again, with a pang of almost terrifying happiness, of the extraordinary chance which had kept the carriage empty of everybody save themselves, at Paddington) and they had a queer, delirious, delightful picnic meal, with the strong tea and the massive pieces of bread and butter.
He was not serious, now. Indeed he made Irma laugh a good deal — and she was not in the habit of laughing often, since life had always seemed to her a very serious business. There was something new, and infinitely exhilarating, in this shared laughter. Then, when the train suddenly began to move, they ceased to be frivolous. They talked gravely, earnestly, almost desperately, as fields and trees and houses and telegraph-poles appeared to fly past the window, bringing them nearer and nearer to the journey’s end.
She was frankly staring at him now, and he at her, as though each tried to memorize the features of the other, to be constantly recalled until their next meeting.
It had been taken for granted between them, almost without words, that there should be such a meeting.
But so far had Irma’s thoughts carried her now, that she was wildly wondering if he intended to tell her that he loved her, before they reached Oxford.
Swiftly and suddenly, she realized that she didn’t know his name.
The train was slowing down, the spires of Oxford were in sight.
Once again, their thoughts synchronized.
“You don’t know my name,” he said, with the grave smile that she had learnt to watch for with passionate eagerness. “It’s Robertson — Douglas Robertson. I’m — oh, let me!”
He lifted down her dressing-bag from the rack, and pulled her suitcase from under the seat.
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“Don’t bother—” she stammered, hardly knowing what she said.
“You know it’s not a bother!” he answered and his gaze compelled hers.
She fought against a blissful shyness, conquered it, and murmured almost inaudibly—” I know.”
“Do you mean—” he began shakily, and just then the train slowed down, and then stopped.
It couldn’t be the end — they must have a moment more together — and she made no attempt to gather up her gloves, her purse-bag and her umbrella, preparatory to stepping out on to the platform.
“May I write to you? I must see you again—” he urged, low and rapidly. “I know where you are — with Mrs. Mathieson — here’s my address—”
His fingers were shaking as he thrust a card into her hand.
“It’s been the most wonderful—”
Tones that seemed to Irma unbelievably shrill cut across his last words —
“Hallo, my dear! There you are. Your train is simply hours late.”
Carol Mathieson’s hand tore open the door, impelled Irma to alight.
“My dear! Claude’s here — by the bookstall. If you’ll tell him what you’ve got, he’ll see to your luggage.”
Carol’s arm, thrust through hers, guided Irma down the platform.
Despairingly she turned her head.
“One minute, Carol—”
“Your dressing-bag! All right, I’ll mount guard. Just let Claude know what you’ve got in the van — it’ll save time — we shall be hours late for tea.”
The man called Douglas Robertson had carefully lifted the dressing-bag and suitcase down to the platform.
She saw him raise his hat to Carol Mathieson. They spoke.
It comforted Irma.
Carol would ask him to the house on the Abingdon Road.
“We’ve got a friend, coming to dinner to-night, Irma — a very brilliant man. A poet. You’ll like him — no — he’ll like you — you’ll like each other. He travelled down with you yesterday.”
Claude Mathieson hurried up, greeted her, and received her vague information about luggage.
She always travelled with a good deal of luggage.
She stood by him, unhelpfully, while he supervised a porter.
“Now then — where’s Carol?”
Carol was beside them laughing.
“Come along, dear — you must be tired after that awful delay. How long did you have to wait? They telephoned down the line, so we knew what it was. This way, Irma, dear.”
She could not see Douglas Robertson anywhere, but tight in her trembling hand, she held his card.
Soon — it must be soon.
Everything else seemed so unreal, after those hours of supreme romance.
Carol was laughing again, softly.
“Claude, she travelled down with Robertson — he spoke to me at the station. Irma, dear, you will be flattered — he thought you were the new governess, who’s coming next week for the children! Poor man, his face fell a yard when I said you were a friend of ours. I hope he wasn’t a nuisance, on that long journey.”
“Robertson is rather a nice fellow, and quite interesting in his own way,” said Claude Mathieson quietly. “And he’s a very good dentist.”
It seemed to Irma for a moment that the air reverberated with the crash of her broken dreams, her irretrievably shattered romance.
But it was Claude, starting the engine.
“Get in, dear,” said Carol briskly.
Irma obeyed, first dropping into the gutter the card that her fingers had been grasping, and upon which her blurred gaze could barely decipher the name with the damning inscription below: Dental Surgeon.
OIL PAINTING —— CIRCA 1890
IT comes back to me as an oil-painting of that period: — smooth and heavy, with something viscous in the quality of its smoothness, and set in a large gilt frame, heavily moulded. I can see it all objectively — I have been able to do so for years. I see it too often. I don’t know why, for I hate it.
But perhaps that is why.
It is curious to hate it so, after thirty years, for at the time and soon afterwards, in my spoiled youth, I hated and resented very little. I wouldn’t have dared, to hate or to resent, except sometimes on Frederica’s account.
Thinking back, I feel as if the Mungar road epitomized it all.
We went for walks, along the Mungar road, with Mademoiselle. Cold, shrewish, biting walks in the winter — and it seems to have been always winter — or the yet more disagreeable season that lies between winter and the English spring.
A north-east wind, tearing down from the Yorkshire moors, howled between the dark, leafless hedges of the Mungar road — Mungar being a wretched little hamlet at the bottom of a steep hill — a dozen forlorn cottages, each one huddled apart, with frozen puddles lying between, and broken fences and discarded tins that no gleam of sun ever turned to silver. When we had reached Mungar, the object of the walk was accomplished, and we turned round and retraced the three miles back again.
At twelve and eleven years old, Frederica and I walked one on each side of Mademoiselle, and sometimes we each held one of her hands, inertly, just from custom. We did not know what we looked like. I was told, long afterwards, by a mocking servant, and I haven’t been able to forget. I know that what she said was true, although she said it vulgarly, and even brutally. Both of us were very tall, and round-shouldered as children are who play no active games and are deficient in vitality. I remember that we mostly looked at the ground as we walked, partly to avoid facing the icy wind and partly, I suppose, because we were not interested. In spite of that, both of us stumbled often. We dragged our feet — Frederica was myopic, besides, although it was not found out until later.
We wore clothes that my grandmother thought picturesque. She had been artistic, as the saying then was, in her youth.
So we had dark green velvet pelisses, and Kate Greenaway bonnets, dark green too. I never see the colour now, without feeling how much I hate it.
Sometimes I feel it to be curious that, although we so seldom saw other children, and never played with them, we yet knew that we should be to them objects of ridicule. For they wore blue serge sailor-suits, and red or blue tam-o’-shanters.
Other little girls had plaits, or curls. We had very closely cropped, straight, dark hair, that fell just below our ears. It was another of my grandmother’s fads.
We did not protest, although these peculiarities made us unhappy and eternally self-conscious.
We knew that protest, from us, would have hurt my grandmother dreadfully. She was like that — helplessly, quiveringly vulnerable where personal relations were concerned. She taught us to be like that, too.
An old person, living only with servants and dependents, and children who have no parents, easily acquires great power. My grandmother never bullied, or scolded — scarcely ever gave a direct order. She just dominated. It was absolute, that domination of hers. I don’t know how far the other people in the house submitted. Mademoiselle was naturally colourless.
Our personalities — Frederica’s and mine — were like warped, fragile things grown in an unnatural atmosphere, impelled into unnatural directions. There was nothing spontaneous.
I have sometimes wondered if even our passionate devotion to one another was tainted by the moral unwholesomeness of our lives. For we were never normally selfish, or greedy, or quarrelsome.
Our rare disputes were strange, morbid, un-childlike contests in self-sacrifice. Each of us was afraid lest the other should suffer, or be deprived. The most acute conflict that I can ever remember as taking place between us was once when, at the age of thirteen, I found out that Frederica had been awake all one night with toothache and had not gone to rouse Mademoiselle and ask for remedies, because I had complained of headache the day before, and she did not want to wake me.
When I found out I was angry and very unhappy. I felt that I could never feel safe again, about Frederica. She might be suffering any
pain, and I shouldn’t know.
I tried to make her promise that she would always tell me whenever she was ill or in any pain. She wouldn’t promise, because she could not bear the thought of my anxiety.
We disputed over it, miserably, for weeks.
How incredible, all of it, to the normal ones of our own generation — how entirely fantastic to the generation of to-day!
It’s partly for that reason that I’m recording it — as a study in psychological values that can, surely, no longer prevail anywhere. A slimy, heavy, repulsive portrait in oils — that’s how I see us, in our childhood at Scorpe.
The house wasn’t pretty and wasn’t particularly ugly. Like everything else it was subordinated entirely to my grandmother’s personality. In spite of her “artistic” pretensions, she had no feeling whatever for anything outside the range of human relationships.
The cult for antique furniture had not yet arisen in those days — but if it had, she wouldn’t have heard of it in that remote Yorkshire locality. The house was merely crowded with things — some good, many bad — incongruously disposed. She liked neither gardening nor any other country pursuit.
She would sit over the fire for hours and hours, reading one book after another — mostly novels, but sometimes poetry or biography — or sometimes just talking — always, always about people — with Miss Batten, her companion, or Mademoiselle, or Frederica and myself.
Miss Batten was just clever enough to make a good listener. Her comments gave the cue to the rest of us. Mademoiselle, who did not succeed in learning English properly in eight years, contented herself with nodding, her sallow face expressionless, her small, gaunt body always intent on edging nearer and nearer to the fire.
But Frederica and I listened always gravely and eagerly. What else had we to feed on?
And my grandmother was amusing — not really profound, nor analytical, because she was never truly impartial. She had in reality only one criterion — her own prejudice. But she had a vivacious, incisive style, and a certain lightly caustic humour.
I think, now, that Frederica and I laughed, very often, because we had so little else to laugh at. We never knew the perfectly unreasoning merriment that is the prerogative of normal, healthy children. It would certainly have been called silly, and that, to the colossal, sensitive egotism to which we were bred, must have been its deathblow.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 546
