“Oh, and you must have someone like Jasper on the place, to teach the boys about rabbits and ferrets and fishing,” said Lydia.
They all plunged into the fray again till Octavia, with a rather married air, summoned Mr. Needham to get ready to walk back. Philip said he would walk with them.
“I think,” he said, getting up, “that I’d rather like to specialize in little boys who are going into the Navy. Doubtless being in the Army makes one prefer every other service, but I have a weakness in that direction.”
Leslie looked up at him with a smile of such gratitude and friendliness as seriously upset his circulation for a moment. He then, most ungratefully, felt a distinct jealousy of the brother for whose sake she liked little boys who were going into the Navy. Good nights were said.
“I did like your plans about the school, Philip,” said Leslie, not noticing that she did not say Colonel Winter. “Let’s talk about it again. I’ll be out of a job myself after the war, I expect, if you need a secretary. I’ll frighten the parents like anything.”
Philip said he would love it, if she really meant it. He was going to try to get over to hear Mrs. Morland’s talk, he said, because he adored her books with all the lower side of his nature, and perhaps he might come to tea first. Or stay to dinner, said Leslie.
Colonel Winter, Mr. Needham and Octavia walked down the drive. A moon with a bright, hard face, rather swollen on one side, was shining, and their torches were not needed. Octavia appeared to have enjoyed her evening very much and had a good deal to say to her betrothed as she was going back to Barchester on the following day, so Philip was left to his own thoughts, which in their turn we may leave to the reader’s imagination as they were of little value to anyone but himself, and consisted largely in an insane desire to say “Oh, Leslie” to the moon, but not wishing to disturb his companions, he refrained.
At the vicarage they stopped to see Octavia safely bestowed. Miss Horniman opened the door, said she wouldn’t ask them in as there was nothing to drink, and that she had pretty well finished clearing up and would be going the day after tomorrow. Octavia, bidding an unimpassioned farewell to her escort, went in and shut the front door. The men walked quickly on to Ladysmith Cottages, for the night was cold.
“Mrs. Allen wouldn’t let me have a key,” said Mr. Needham, “and I’m afraid she’s sitting up for me. But if you don’t mind risking it I have got a little rum.”
Philip thanked him very much. Mr. Needham knocked cautiously at the door. After a brief interval the noise of several bolts, chains and locks being unfastened was heard and the door was half-opened by Nannie Allen, who in a long pink flannel dressing-gown, a large Shetland shawl and a rather dashing boudoir cap fringed with curling-pins, presented a very impressive appearance in the dimly lighted hall.
“Oh, well, good night, Winter,” said Mr. Needham. “I hope I’m not late, Mrs. Allen.”
“Straight to bed you go, sir,” said Nannie. “I’ve mended that nasty tear in your pyjamas and they’re airing in front of the gas fire. You can take your shoes off down here.”
An inner voice told Philip that he was not wanted. Nannie slammed the door, bolted, barred and locked it. Philip pursued his way to the Dower House, thinking as he went of an ideal school, full of delightful little boys, presided over by himself and the perfect secretary, or co-head, or even headmaster’s wife, though of course that was simply an idea and one didn’t know anyone likely to take on the job.
Gradually he fell into a trance from which he was roused by his own voice remarking, “Leslie, Leslie,” to sleeping nature. He then discovered that he was standing still, facing the wrong way, and feeling rather cold. So he pursued his way to the Dower House, where he arrived without any further incident.
CHAPTER X
ALL Dr. Ford’s plans worked, as they usually did. On the Thursday appointed for Mrs. Morland’s talk to the convalescents his shabby old car rattled into the yard, where Selina was pegging out a few clorths, the phrase being not hers but Cook’s. He got out, as did Mrs. Morland.
“Well, Mrs. Crockett, still breaking all hearts,” said Dr. Ford, whose deliberately eighteenth-century manner was much admired by his humbler friends.
“Oh, sir,” said Selina, dropping a clothes-peg in her confusion.
“That old Silleena’s breaking old Jasper’s heart,” said a slow voice behind them, making Mrs. Morland start. She turned and saw a picturesque figure lounging against the arch that led to the kitchen garden.
“That’s Margett, Sir Harry’s keeper,” said Dr. Ford, thus causing Mrs. Morland to feel an alarmed interest in the family she was about to meet. “Well, Margett, got the old lady yet?”
“No, Jasper hasn’t got her yet,” said the head keeper, deliberately speaking of himself in the third person to make an impression on Mrs. Morland. “But he’s got something as he knows on, and he’ll get the old lady yet.”
Seeing that his affectation of half-witted rusticity had made its full effect on the strange lady, he lounged away till he was well out of sight, when he fell into his usual purposeful stride and went about his work.
“Old impostor,” said Dr. Ford. “But he knows his business. Come on, Tony.”
A young officer who had been sitting in the back of the car, watching this scene with inscrutable, age-weary eyes, got slowly out and joined the party. Dr. Ford, ignoring him, as he had always successfully done since Tony Morland was an exhaustingly talkative little boy with a passion for trains, led the way along the kitchen passage into the house, where Lady Waring was waiting to give tea to the speaker, and went off to the hospital. The two ladies had a slight acquaintance and liked each other without intimacy. If the truth must be told, which it mostly mustn’t as being apt to cause disagreeableness, Lady Waring almost classed Mrs. Morland in her mind as a very worthy sort of person. Indeed she would have relegated her wholly to this category, had she not, with the pathetic illusion of the well-born who have never tried to write, felt something of the same nervous respect for a female author as the Middle Ages (whatever they were, for certainly no one was ever conscious of belonging to them, but rather to the present enlightened age) felt for the enchanter Vergilius. If she had realized, as she probably did not, that Mrs. Morland earned enough money to keep herself and help her sons, she would have respected her even more and been even more nervous. As for Mrs. Morland, that lady had no illusions at all about herself and never stopped being surprised at her own earning powers, feeling with the calm of despair that each new book would be a failure and the last she would ever write. Much to Tony’s annoyance he was secretly impressed by his mother’s mild celebrity.
“I hope you won’t mind my bringing my youngest boy,” said Mrs. Morland to Lady Waring. “He is on leave.”
Lady Waring expressed pleasure and Tony inclined his body slightly over her hand, which action made a good impression, as perhaps he had meant it to.
“Hullo, Lydia,” said Tony, concealing with Red Indian stoicism his surprise at seeing an old friend.
“Hullo, Tony,” said Lydia. “I haven’t seen you since we rode on the roundabout at the Pomfret Madrigal flower show and you got the coconut at the shies. I got married to Noel Merton. This is Leslie Waring, she’s Lady Waring’s niece. I say, you’re a gunner, so’s my brother, Colin Keith.”
This led to a delightful conversation. Tony, it is true, had not seen Colin since he was at Southbridge School, but the fact that they were both attached to the Barsetshires was considered just as good. Tony, with a faint appearance of an early Christian offering incense to Jupiter against his principles, then handed teacups. There was not very much time for talk before the lecture. Leslie thought Tony a quite pleasant young man, like so many other young second lieutenants, but her mind was not in the room. Philip had said something about coming to hear Mrs. Morland speak and possibly coming to tea first. She had said, Or stay to dinner. What a fool she was. She should have said, Yes, do come to tea and then stay to dinner. Why lose any time wh
en time was so short and went so soon. She felt an attack of petulance coming upon her, so was silent, making most commendable efforts to bring herself to a better frame of mind.
Lady Waring asked after Mrs. Morland’s sons, rather vaguely, not being quite sure how many there were.
“Thank you very much, all very well indeed, I am glad to say,” said Mrs. Morland, pushing her hair off one side of her face the better to get down to her subject and so setting her hat a little askew. “That is, at least, I haven’t heard from Gerald for six weeks, but I hardly expected to, and John hasn’t written for quite some time, but as I know where he is, though I mustn’t say, though of course everyone knows, it’s not surprising, for writing-pads are such a nuisance and tanks not the best place to write home in, rocking up and down all the time. I do get a cable from Dick from time to time, but whenever I don’t hear from them I know they are all right, because if the War Office or the Admiralty can annoy you by sending a telegram to say everyone is dead or missing they will most certainly do so. I am trying to arrange a code with Tony and then he can tell me where he is when he goes abroad, but it is extremely difficult. Because first,” said Mrs. Morland, looking round to see that her audience was attending and dropping a large horn hairpin as she did so, “there are such a lot of places he might go to that there are really hardly enough words; then if we did get a code arranged we couldn’t write it down, at least he couldn’t, in case he was taken prisoner with it on him, and then the Germans would know where he was; then he might never go abroad at all, and how silly it would be if he were sent to Weston-super-Mare and not allowed to say where he was and hadn’t a code word for it. For there are really too many places in England to have a code name for them all. Of course, abroad there aren’t so many places, so it isn’t so bad. Still, as I said, I have great confidence in the War Office telling me anything horrid at once, which is such a comfort.”
Her hearers, slightly overwhelmed by this lucid exposition, were silent for a moment, sorting out what Mrs. Morland had said, while the gifted authoress picked her hairpin up and pushed it into her head.
“Mother,” said Tony, “when I am killed, don’t write a little book about me to say the world is the poorer for my loss.”
“Of course I won’t,” said his mother indignantly. “I dare say Adrian will want me to—you know Adrian Coates, my publisher, I expect,” she added to Lady Waring, “he married George Knox’s girl, Sybil, and never bothers me except to choose jackets for books, and why books go on having jackets when we are asked to economize paper, I cannot think. Still, all the jackets are torn off and go into salvage which the Government seems to want, so I dare say it’s all right, though you would think it would be simpler just to put the amount of paper you would have used for jackets straight into salvage instead of wasting time and money printing things all over it, or even having pictures—but however much he wants it, I shan’t,” said Mrs. Morland, triumphantly returning, as she nearly always did, to her original thesis. “And what is more,” she added defiantly, “I shall not put No letters please in The Times, though even if I did I wouldn’t put a comma after letters, and anyway it’s rather like saying Deliver no circulars, because you can’t order people to not deliver a thing even if you do split your infinitives. I hope everyone would write to me and say how much they liked you, because it’s the only time they would take the trouble, though I dare say they do all like you very much only they don’t say so. Besides, I should cry so much over the letters and I believe crying is really better for me than anything and then I can tear up all the letters and give them to salvage, which is, I believe, absolutely the only thing the Government thinks about sometimes.”
Tony appeared to be unmoved by his mother’s apologia, merely remarking to Lydia, “Mamma rather fancies her own letters when people are dead,” to which Lydia, whose meeting with Tony had sent her back to her schoolgirl days again, said she knew exactly the kind of letter she would like to write when Miss Pettinger died and she hoped the Barchester Chronicle would print it, because she knew the Barcastriana, the official organ of the Barchester High School, wouldn’t.
Lady Waring said, with what in one so well-bred and so self-controlled was almost a sigh, that she and Sir Harry had been very much touched by the expressions of sympathy they had received on their son’s death and felt that many friends had given themselves real trouble to write when there was so little to say. But only Mrs. Morland heard what she said, for Leslie, having picked out from Mrs. Morland’s disconnected remarks the fact that she had a son in the Navy, was only waiting till that lady had finished to inquire from Tony where his brother was. Dick Morland was in quite another part of the world from Cecil, but the discovery that they had both been in the same ship at the outbreak of war cheered her up very much.
It was now nearly five o’clock, so Lady Waring and her party went through into the big house. Matron had posted a nurse to catch them as they came in, whose colleagues, all deeply interested in seeing Mrs. Morland who wrote those nice books, were clustering round doorways, or industriously straightening the hall furniture. Lady Waring, with her well-trained memory for names and faces, introduced their guide as Nurse Poulter.
“This way, Mrs. Morland,” said Nurse Poulter, much gratified. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, Mrs. Morland, how I love your books. As I said to Matron this morning, we all feel we are going to have a great treat.”
Then were then wafted into the Old Bookroom, where Matron was delighted to meet Mrs. Morland, whose nice books she had enjoyed so much.
“But just one weeny criticism if I may, Mrs. Morland,” she said, “just a quite professional one. In your last book, or was it the last but one, the one where the wicked Italian count is disguised as the government inspector who goes round the dress shops to see that they are using little enough material, you know the one I mean——”
“That was the last,” said Mrs. Morland. “I know it was, because the villain was to have been Brazilian and then they seemed to be becoming allies so I had to change him. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to ring the changes on one’s villains. If only Hitler had a few more allies it would be much easier.”
“Dear, dear,” said Matron, “well we all have our trials and that is one which never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of. But as I was saying, when the nurse comes to look after the heroine after the Italian count has drugged her and left her senseless in the stockroom, you mention that she had a smart uniform with slanting pink stripes under her light blue cloak. Now that uniform, Mrs. Morland, simply does not exist. I must say—I was back at the Mid-Central where I trained when I happened to be reading it—that it gave the staff sister and I quite a hearty laugh, for as I said to her, such a uniform simply does not exist. But that is the only little fly on the scutcheon, for I can assure you we were all tearing the copy from each other’s hands.”
Mrs. Morland, in spite of her large and constant public, was always surprised, interested and pleased to hear that anyone had really read her books, though sometimes a little depressed by the way in which her friends lent their copy, or even the library copy, to one another, and she took very seriously any technical criticism that came her way.
“You see,” she said earnestly to Matron, “I didn’t like to make it a real uniform, because the hospital it belonged to mightn’t have liked it, for, if you remember, the nurse was really only a half-German woman, who had married an Englishman but only did it to spite England, in disguise, and all she did was to keep the heroine under drugs till the villain could come, but it was really the hero disguised as a doctor and he killed her with a poison that left no trace.”
“Of course,” said Matron. “How you think of your plots I cannot imagine. Only you see, the nurse wearing a light-blue cloak seemed to point to Knight’s, and of course we Mid-Central nurses were quite excited, because we just wondered if any of the Knight’s nurses had really been spies in disguise. But that quite explains it, and I am most grateful, Mrs. Morland.
Now I think the boys are quite ready for what we all know is going to be a thoroughly enjoyable little talk.”
After a polite struggle for loss of precedence between Lady Waring and Matron, they went across the hall. Matron led the party along the side of the billiard-room to the further end. Tony, following them, was held up by Lydia as she stopped to speak to Sergeant Hopkins, who wanted to know if there was any news of Captain Keith.
“Not yet,” she said cheerfully. “Anyway, I don’t expect to hear for ages. Nobody is having letters now, at least no one I know, but I’ll let you know at once.”
“Sergeant Hopkins,” said Tony.
“Sir!” said the sergeant jumping up and saluting.
“We were on a course in Middleshire last year when I was a cadet and the sergeant got run into by a lorry,” said Tony to Lydia. “Then my employers sent me somewhere else. What happened to you, sergeant?”
Sergeant Hopkins looked round.
“I am supposed to be on duty here, sir,” he said, “but the boys will be all right now, leastways till the Sheep’s Head opens.”
“Six?” said Tony. “Lydia, will you tell my Mamma that I shall report for duty in Lady Waring’s drawing-room at 6.15. Come and tell me your troubles, sergeant, and I’ll give you the lowdown on Captain Keith. He was a master for one term at the school where I was. And then we’ll go down to the Sheep’s Head before six, have a quick one together and be back here for me to fetch my mother.”
Sergeant Hopkins, delighted to meet an old friend who knew the Captain, glanced quickly round, saw that his flock did not look as if they would be up to any particular mischief, and followed Tony from the room.
“Do they let you smoke here?” Tony asked, handing his cigarette-case to the sergeant, who took one and thanked him. “Hullo, cat. Who are you?”
“He’s Winston, sir,” said Sergeant Hopkins. “He’s a cheeky little beggar. Runs after his own tail like anything.”
Growing Up Page 26
