by E. H. Young
“No I have not,” her mother said emphatically. “I feel rather messy, that’s all.”
“But you look rather pleased.”
“I’m thinking what a nice staircase this is and how we’ve done nearly all the polishing of the rail ourselves. People’s hands! Your great-grandfather’s and your grandfather’s and your mother’s.
“And we’ve worn the carpet out too. People’s feet!” Sandra said, lightly mocking her mother.
“Ah well, that’s been in several houses. The staircase has never been anywhere else, but I can’t expect you to feel as I do about that.”
“And the carpet,” Sandra went on, “will be worse than ever if Felix and James walk on it in the new boots they’re getting. They say they’ve got nails in them like claws. I rather wish Miss Spanner hadn’t given them that money and I think she wishes so too. They’ve been showing her pictures of the sort of places they’re going to and they look very dangerous.”
“I like people to do dangerous things,” Rosamund said.
“Yes, it’s nice that they want to, but I wish they wouldn’t. Miss Spanner says it’s tempting Providence.”
“She must have a very poor idea of it or him, whichever it is. I don’t believe he or it is as weak-minded as all that, or as mean. Does she think it’s tempting Providence to cross the street? That’s just as dangerous. Where are they all? In the drawing-room? Then I’ll go and encourage the boys just to spite her.”
“After she’s been so kind?” Sandra said reproachfully.
“She’d be miserable if no one disagreed with her,” Rosamund said, and she went quickly up the shallow stairs, pausing once to look down at Sandra and make a little face at her and then Sandra had to smile.
There were times when she felt years older than her mother who seemed to this grave and anxious young person a little irresponsible though, in the service of her family, there was very little she forgot or left undone. It was her gaiety, only just under the surface at her most serious moments, her readiness to go upstairs now and tease Miss Spanner, which seemed to Sandra a little inappropriate in a mother. But she was lovely, Sandra thought, going back to the potatoes, a person to be proud of, especially at school functions where she could be compared with other mothers who were also, but much more definitely, old girls. She had felt the same kind of pride in her father. He might be tiresome at home but, outside it, she had never had to wish he would be different or to fear he would embarrass her. She had not known the acute suffering of seeing her parents with other people’s disapproving or scornful eyes. That would be much worse than having a father whose disappearance was a little difficult to explain, a little difficult but not impossible like bad manners or illiteracy which some people had to bear. Moreover, Sandra believed he would come back some day, miraculously changed, like people in tracts, and everything would be perfect, no, not quite perfect, for his return would involve the departure of Miss Spanner who would not want to go and Sandra, while she watched the potatoes, had to set to work for the solving of this problem.
Miss Spanner had retreated to her bedroom before Rosamund reached the drawing-room and she found the boys, each in a big armchair, absorbed in books and maps connected with their holiday. They did not look up when she came in; she doubted whether they knew she was there and, marvelling at masculine powers of concentration, she went away without interrupting them. More and more, as the days passed, she was jealous for all the happiness they could get and she was touched by their past concealment of desires they knew she could not gratify without a strain on her resources they would not ask her to make. She fancied Mr. Blackett’s good tidings for James would fall rather flat, but she had to pass them on.
“I want to see you to-night,” she said to him after supper. “Pop in before Agnes has a chance.”
“Anything serious?” he asked.
“You will be able to tell me that,” she said, and at once, when he appeared, she told him she had a message from Mr. Blackett.
“Blackett? Oh, next door.”
“He says if you want to see his daughter—it’s Flora, isn’t it?—you can go to his house to do so.”
“What for? I see her nearly every day already.”
“He says he finds you are meeting her clandestinely, that’s his own word.”
“Good Lord! Why should I?” He was thoughtful for a moment. “I’ve been for walks with her,” he said. “She’s interested in farming.”
“I see,” Rosamund said, and she looked down to hide how much she saw. He was pathetically simple. He did not know the first rules of the game but she would not cast doubts on an enthusiasm which, she thought, looking at him again, she could well understand.
“And last night,” said James, “we had a sort of picnic.”
“Just you two?”
“Yes.”
“Chilly, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it was, rather,” James said with a grin. “You see—well, never mind. The man’s mad. I was afraid you were going to tell me we couldn’t go to Wales for some reason or other. We’ve decided to go by night. That’ll give us two extra days. And then there’s ten miles to walk unless we can get a lift. But it won’t be a bad thing to walk. We’ll get into training and break in our boots. You’d hardly think there was anywhere nowadays, would you, ten miles from a station? And not a shop for another four. So we’ll send most of our stuff by post.”
“For the postman to carry?”
“That’s all right. There’s a mail van.”
“Then you won’t be entirely cut off. You’ll be able to get your love letters. And how I envy you!”
“What, the love letters?”
“No, I don’t think they’d be up to the standard I’m used to. And James, I’m sorry to persist but I think I’d better know. When you go for walks I’m told you don’t come back together.”
“We often come home together but we always part short of the Square. I don’t really care except that I’d rather the Spanner didn’t see us, though really she deserves a bit of fun, doesn’t she? But look here, I can’t go and call like a suitor, can I? It’s too silly. And why the blazes did he want to bother you about it?”
To that question Rosamund made no reply. “And you don’t feel like a suitor?” she said.
“Good Lord, no! What d’you think?”
“Not that, certainly. But I wonder whether he’s told Flora he has given me this message. I think you’ll have to go. It would be cruel to make her look foolish and I should hate Mr. Blackett to think you’re afraid of him. Can’t you make some sort of excuse? Take her a book or something?”
“And how often,” James asked gloomily, “shall I have to do that?”
“Oh, once or twice, perhaps, and then you’ll have your holiday.”
“And after that,” James said, “I may be otherwise engaged. I only hope it won’t be before.”
“Mr. Lindsay says you can go and work on his land at once if you like.”
“And of course you accepted the offer.”
“Oh, of course!” Rosamund said.
“That’s all right then.” He kissed her good night. “Did old Blackett make himself disagreeable?”
“I don’t allow people to be disagreeable unless I choose,” she said.
“Anyhow, he must be a rum bird.”
“Very. I don’t know where he perched himself last night but he told me he saw you in the Avenue, hand in hand.”
“Did he? Bad luck.”
“And I must say it sounded rather affectionate.”
“Well, what can one do—sometimes? Mind, she’s a nice girl. It’s all my fault, what fault there is.”
“And not much of that?”
“No, of course not,” James said impatiently. “And what sort of book shall I pretend I want to lend her? He’s sure to have a look at it, nosey old fool.�
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“Obviously one about farming,” she said.
He glanced at her, faintly suspicious, but she was quite grave. “The whole thing’s too obvious and what rot it all is! Why can’t we go in and out of each other’s houses naturally, if we want to, without all this fuss?”
“Ask Mr. Blackett.”
“He must have a bee in his bonnet.”
“Several, I should think. And Rhoda Blackett often does come here, to see Miss Spanner, though he doesn’t know it. They’ve taken a great liking to each other.”
“And I’ve taken a great liking to Miss Spanner. We’ve ordered the boots—did I tell you? But we shan’t need a rope. Smithers will have that.”
“I hope Smithers knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh yes, he’s had a lot of experience.”
“Then I wish he’d take Mr. Blackett into some really nasty place and scare the life out of him.”
“Vindictive old woman!”
“Good for his soul,” Rosamund said. “I don’t suppose he’s ever been physically frightened in his life. He seems to have avoided the perfect opportunity. Yes, it would do him a lot of good.”
“Funny ideas you get,” James said, going to the door.
“But it’s a good one, this. It’s just occurred to me, the value of being stripped bare by panic and seeing how puny you are without your clothes and how unimportant.”
“Well cheer up,” James said. “It looks as though there’ll be a general improvement in the human race before long.”
“In what’s left of it,” she agreed.
“A sort of answer to prayer from your point of view,” he said dryly.
“Well that’s one way of looking at it. No, I should call it penance for the penitent, but how many of us are that?”
Chapter XIII
“Why are you looking so pleased with yourself?” Miss Spanner asked.
For the second night running she had had to wait, with her door ajar, until Rosamund’s children left the coast clear for her own visit. Last night, first Chloe and then Felix had delayed her and to-night it was James. This was unusual. “Something in the wind,” she thought, giving her nose a knock.
“Because I’m feeling pleased,” Rosamund said. “I was thinking what nice children I have.”
“H’m,” said, Miss Spanner, “it’s early yet to be sure of that.”
“It’s not early to say they’re nice now, at this minute, you old curmudgeon. And little as you may think of them, you’ve been very good to them.”
“Pooh!” said Miss Spanner. “There’s nothing easier than giving away money when you have more than you need yourself.”
“Queer, then, that so few people do it.”
“And as a matter of fact I’ve been regretting it. Those boys are determined to break their necks.”
“Well, they’re their own necks and they’ll break them in a happy moment.”
“That’s a silly way to talk.”
“Yes it is, rather.”
“Affected.”
“Just a bit,” Rosamund admitted amiably.
“You’re unusually agreeable to-night. What’s the matter with you?” Miss Spanner asked sharply.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing from a woman,” Miss Spanner said sagely, “always means something. It’s a way of saying I’ll tell you if you go on asking questions.”
“You’ll ask them all right without any encouragement, Agnes dear. What do you want to know?”
“All this coming and going. A long talk with Chloe and another with Felix and now James to-night, and I hope none of them’s coming back again.”
“If you’d get a decent dressing-gown and do something to your hair you wouldn’t mind if they did.”
“On the contrary, if I adopted your standards of what you call decency, I should mind much more.”
“I’m only wearing a sort of modest evening dress,” Rosamund said, glancing at herself in the mirror.
“And I’ve never had an evening dress in my life. Since I put up my hair and long before that no one except my mother—”
“Your dear mother, Agnes. That’s the proper way to speak of the departed.”
“Yes, my dear mother,” Miss Spanner said, squinting a little, “no one else has seen me not fully clothed.”
“You mean covered.”
“Yes, covered. Now, don’t tell me they haven’t missed anything. I know that well enough.”
Frowning, Rosamund tightened her lips. “I wish you wouldn’t, you really oughtn’t to say things like that at this time of night. I shall never get to sleep for anger. Nothing, not even Mr. Blackett—”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He exists, doesn’t he? Nothing makes me so furious as thinking of your youth. And I can’t do anything about it. That’s what’s so infuriating. I’d like to do terrible things to your father and mother. I’d like to push them into a bed of nettles. Oh, but that’s not nearly bad enough. I’d like, yes, I’d like to shut them up in a room with rats. That’s the nastiest thing I can think of.”
“You’re very childish and you’re wasting your energy,” Miss Spanner said calmly. “It’s all over.”
“That’s just it.”
“And I rather like thinking about it. It amuses me. Anyhow, I learnt to be self-sufficient and to love books. This generation seems to care very little about them, but I’m bringing up that little Rhoda Blackett in the way she should go.”
Rhoda Blackett, essentially honest, had been a little disingenuous with Miss Spanner. Not naturally an ardent reader and with a father who had quite a little library at her disposal, she was borrowing books from Miss Spanner because so she gained an entrance into the bedroom like a secondhand shop, and she was reading them because that was the way to secure Miss Spanner’s friendship and, whatever her appetite might have been for literature, she would always have felt that what her father offered her was slightly tainted: the same book from Miss Spanner must have a different and more wholesome flavour. And she had permission to walk when she chose into the Frasers’ house, and upstairs to Miss Spanner’s room and when there was no answer to her knock she went inside, by permission again, and took a book from the shelves. This she laid open on her knee in case Miss Spanner arrived, but her attention was for the knick-knacks, the photographs of bearded men in frock coats and ladies wearing jet ornaments, the old-fashioned watch, its key attached to a gold chain, on a watch-stand beside Miss Spanner’s bed, the nightdress case embroidered in a design of bright pink roses. All this pleased Rhoda unaccountably but very much. She seemed to be living, when she sat there, in another time, not a distant but a very different one from her own and it was the nearness with the strangeness of it that gave it charm. She might so easily have had a mother who wore jet ornaments and her father actually had a beard, though not of the shape favoured by Miss Spanner’s relatives, and Rhoda was not sure whether she had fortunately escaped or unhappily missed a period in which people looked like this, solid and sure of themselves and their opinions and their place in the world. Even in the photographs, it was possible to see how firmly their feet were set on the ground. She felt at ease in this pictured company, more at ease though less exhilarated than she was with Miss Spanner. These people on the walls who stared at her glassily or kindly could not find her wanting and decide they had had enough of her and make it plain she need not come again and, because this would be a disaster, she who at sixteen, young in some ways for her age, went blundering, half asleep, through her work at school, was determined to keep her mind alert and found it less difficult when she was with Miss Spanner. And this was a different alertness from the one she practised on her own family. There she was quick to understand or, at least, to puzzle over what was going on in the mind of her father and mother and Flora but she was quite indiffer
ent as to what he and Flora might think of herself. She knew her mother would think nothing that was not kind and wise. She and her mother were sure of each other and verbal communication was almost unnecessary; with Miss Spanner, Rhoda had to be on her mettle, while her instinctive good sense warned her not to affect more intelligence than she really had. And she was a good, because she was a fascinated, listener. Part of Miss Spanner seemed to begin with the people in the photographs, another to linger in her own youth and the rest to have reached beyond the youth of the people in the house. Her clothes would not have come very much amiss in the earliest period, the modesty of her habits belonged to the middle one, but her mind had ranged a good deal farther than she chose to let the young Frasers know and farther than Rhoda could go with her. The Frasers, as Miss Spanner was aware, liked her very well, accepted her as she appeared to be and laughed at her oddities while they respected her character, and she was fond of them, but they had a lightness of touch, an apparent frivolity of outlook which made them, with their beauty, a little unreal to her. This clumsy girl, endangering the precious ornaments when she came into the room, gave Miss Spanner a self-confidence she secretly lacked. Rhoda’s eyes were not much concerned with outward appearances; it was the inside of Miss Spanner she wanted to see and Miss Spanner produced the best of it. It was not learning, for she had none; it was not wisdom or wit, though these were not altogether lacking; it was the desire for affection and the power to give it and an unspoken sympathy which, with an effort, was also scrupulous, for if Rhoda had been a little disingenuous with Miss Spanner, so had been Miss Spanner’s first approaches to Rhoda, but the questions she had meant to ask were never uttered, the probing she had meant to do remained undone. The child liked her, she knew that, and it was not with the tolerant, amused liking of the Frasers, but with some surprising pleasure in her company, and, in payment, curiosity must remain unsatisfied. This was the more easily done because Miss Spanner found herself the object of interest to someone else and she told the truth when she said she could now enjoy looking back on her youth. It provided her with entertainment for Rhoda who seemed to think it neither sad nor funny. Staring at Miss Spanner, she listened greedily to anything she was told and Miss Spanner would hardly have been human if she had not exaggerated a little. Where she showed restraint was in limiting the quantity she offered at a time and she would often catch herself up in a reminiscence and change the subject, thus whetting an appetite which was persistent but not exacting. Rhoda accepted these breaks in Miss Spanner’s narratives but, sooner or later, brought her back to the story.
