Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  “Oh, have they? Well, you were expecting them about now, weren’t you? All right; I’ll tell her.”

  She turned to Nell.

  “John’s papers for his Medical have come. They’re being forwarded on here today from Odessa Place and your Aunt Peggy wants you to make sure that he gets them safely. (She says you know what he is.) What?”

  She turned again to the receiver, while Nell, nodding, continued to sweep energetically and to play with and then dismiss, a silly idea of losing the papers and thus gaining for him a short time of further freedom. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Anna said. “How tiresome for you. (Nell, that American girl has run off with John’s friend Benedict.) But I expect it’s really rather a relief, isn’t it? Now you can get somebody efficient. Oh, have you? Already? I hope she’s better than the last one. Well, thank you again …”

  Nell was just going out of the door when Anna hung up the receiver. At the same moment Martin Sely came pottering out into the hall to begin the ceremony of coat-brushing, hat-handing, and seeing-off which he and Anna had lately fallen into the habit of performing every time he left for Saint Saviour’s, but Nell scarcely heard the discussion about Gardis and Benedict which followed; she could think of nothing but the fact that John was going away. Impatiently she struggled with the pain which was gripping her.

  “How large it looks.” She came back to the hall, and duty, and the affairs of the day, to find her father wonderingly surveying the Face staring out through the drawing-room door. “But I suppose we shall get used to it. Now remember, Nan, you’ve promised faithfully not to ‘look in’ until I get back this afternoon. No cheating.”

  Anna said indignantly that she never cheated, and shut the door on them.

  “Daddy, do you mind if I fly ahead?” Nell said. “I walk so much faster than you do—and I’ve masses to do this morning.”

  “Can’t you just walk with me to the end of the road, Helen? We never see one another nowadays, and I want to talk to you.”

  “Of course, Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  The papers will be there when I get home this evening. I wish she hadn’t asked me to give them to him, he’ll be beastly about it. …

  “Yes? I’m sorry. What did you say, Daddy?”

  She had seemed to hear something about “all these young people … can’t something be done …”

  “It doesn’t matter. You don’t seem able to give me your attention this morning.”

  They were already near the turning where he must turn aside to make his way down into Kentish Town.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I really do have so much to think about … I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. I’ll talk to you about it some other time. Good-bye.”

  They parted with absent, and slightly ruffled, smiles.

  Poor Daddy—(Nell’s thoughts stayed with him for a moment as she darted off into the High Street) he does begin to stoop. But he doesn’t look so lost, now, as he did, so he must like his vergering, and it must be good for him, and that’s a good thing. …

  It also gave her an excuse not to feel guilty at now forgetting him completely.

  But as he went on down the hill into the wide streets of shabby, pale grey houses in Kentish Town, where in the main roads the buildings seem almost visibly flaking and shaking down under the merciless, hollowing noise of the passing traffic even as the banks and bed of a river are visibly worn down beneath the rush of it in spate, and to be dumbly entreating a respite in which to be silent, to be clean, to be themselves, he was still thinking about that American girl and the boy.

  All these young people whom he saw, from his silence in the background, coming and going in the house—with their proud movements and strong bodies, were often in his thoughts; and if, this morning, his growing concern for them all was mixed with pleasurable anticipations of going on with his polishing of the pews (he meant by degrees to do the woodwork throughout the church) and with thoughts about tea that afternoon, at which he and Anna would enjoy the cakes brought home for them by Nell, and the novelty of seeing ‘the thing’ at work, this mixture of the important with the trivial was only what had been going on in his life—and his mind—ever since he had known that his misery had left him.

  It had seemed, right at the end, when he had felt the touch of the Spirit while he was descending the steps near Christchurch, that the entire experience might be going to lead on into something important and big, but that had not happened. It had been humbling to realize it, but then the whole business had been humbling … he supposed. He did not really feel it so. He seldom thought about it nowadays.

  But these young people … there seemed no way of getting at them. They were immovably encased in their own complacency. The very thought of ‘tackling’ one of them made his stomach quail. It was strange to remember how confidently he used to lecture the mildly erring young (such harmless adolescents!) at Morley Magna two years ago.

  He paused for a moment to rest, standing with the duster crumpled up in one hand while he looked critically at the pew. It would take months, of course, to get it looking as it ought to look. The cavernous, dim, lofty spaces of the church soared above him while he stood there, a big silent man absorbed in what he was looking at, forgetful for the moment of the young people and their peril. A voice suddenly said casually within him, you could always pray for them, and at once, without hesitating, he knelt down and followed the suggestion.

  It was a long, rather fierce prayer that he made, although all the time that he was praying he had a picture before him of the young stony faces and the young self-loving eyes that was positively daunting: it absolutely ignored the prayer and was impermeable to it, as a column of granite might seem to ignore and be impermeable to a wreath of mist. The prayer belonged in another dimension to those young figures, and there could not conceivably be any interlocking between them, or any communication.

  He got up from his knees and dusted himself.

  Not an encouraging experience. But then perhaps he was not meant to feel encouraged, and, in any case, what did his feeling of encouragement or discouragement matter, what did it matter whether he felt his prayer had been a good one or a bad one or a lukewarm one, so long as he ignored all his feelings and went on, every day, doggedly and faithfully and importunately praying?

  “That poor kid never come in last night,” said Tansy, as soon as Nell entered the kitchen.

  “Nerina? Good heavens. What did you do?” Nell paused with a shoe suspended half-way to her foot; this was disturbing; it might affect her own plans for leaving very punctually tonight in order to pick up the letter with the Medical papers in it, arriving from Odessa Place.

  “Lady B. carried on. Tearing strips off us left, right and centre. Well … stands to reason. Had to stand-up the boy friend.”

  Nell contented herself with a whistle.

  “Not but what that hasn’t been happening more than once lately,” Tansy continued mysteriously, while rapidly peeling potatoes. “Everything in the garden’s very far from lovely there nowadays, if you ask me.”

  “Did Nerina telephone or anything?” Nell never encouraged kitchen gossip about Miss Berringer’s private life, and now was anxious to find out exactly how matters stood with the Evening Girl.

  “Not a word so far,” Tansy said.

  “’Tis all these party transformations she’s going after,” Mary, sitting at the table, spoke for the first time, “and who would blame her, cheering herself up now that her boy’s been taken by the Army?”

  Nell thought it extremely unlikely that Nerina was consoling herself for the absence of Chris by going to parties. Since his departure for a camp in the north almost a week ago, she had gone about her work wearing a smile like a sweet cold mask, answering sympathetic questions with an airy politeness. Tansy and Mary were rather shocked by her attitude, but Nell had been half expecting that one day she would simply fail to come in. She almost knew what Nerina was enduring.<
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  “Does anyone know her address?” she asked.

  They said that Lady Bottlewasher would be sure to have it.

  But that evening, to her raging impatience, Nell was asked to stay until eight o’clock, with the promise of an extra half-crown, because again Nerina had not turned up.

  Miss Berringer admitted in a sharp tone that she had no idea where her Evening Girl lived.

  “I wish I had; I’d get one of you to go round and see what on earth she’s playing at. It’s most unlike her.”

  Nell nodded. She was flying through the process of laying up for suppers with a very flushed face.

  “I don’t think she’s been late or away once since she’s been here, has she?” Miss Berringer went on.

  “Indeed, and she has not,” Mary chanted, solemnly wagging her head.

  “She’s worried about Chris,” Tansy said.

  “Worried about him? A thing that size? All she needs to worry about is whether the British Army can meet his appetite. Well, Nell, you’ll be here until eight. I suppose you can’t possibly do the entire evening for me?”

  Nell shook her head. “I’m going out. I’m sorry,” but as she spoke she was thinking that policy would recommend her staying: Miss Berringer might later on be a useful person to know.

  “Oh. Well, I shall just have to …” and her employer left the kitchen muttering.

  The instant she got into the hall, Nell’s eye went to the chest where the day’s letters were always arranged. Nothing but a circular for Margie. He must have come in earlier, and taken the letter away. Or perhaps it had not come?

  “Mother?” Hearing muffled voices from the drawing-room, she half-opened the door, only to be received with cries of “S’sh!” and “Do go away—this is so interesting,” while in half-darkness a bluish-white square glowed and changed. Really—! “Mother, did that medical call-up letter come for John?” she asked.

  “Yes …” droned Anna, eyes fixed hypnotically upon the screen.

  “Oh. Well, it isn’t there now.”

  “Then I expect he’s taken it. How late you are. You can get yourself something, can’t you, Daddy and I don’t want to miss this.”

  Nell withdrew, a little shocked amidst all her disturbed thoughts and feelings by the sight of her mother, the reader, absorbed by a toy.

  She did not want any supper. She did just snatch up an apple as she looked into the dining-room, with the silly hope that he might be sulking there; then she ran upstairs eating it. She was half-hoping that he wasn’t in the house; if he had the papers he would be furious, and striking out at everything and everybody, more especially Nello, like a … like a snake, and then again, he might pretend that he had not had them, and lie about it, and she wouldn’t know if he had had them or not … except that in a few days, of course, someone would begin asking questions.

  She opened her bedroom door.

  “Hullo, Nello.” The low, lazy, darling voice. “Do you mind my being here? My bedroom is so dusty.”

  He was sitting on the old chintz-covered sofa in front of her window, and as she came in he slowly turned his head away from the leaves of the sycamore and their shadows, and gave her his charmer’s smile.

  “I like you being here,” Nell said.

  It was the kind of confession she almost never made, but she knew from the first glimpse of him that this was one of the rare times when something like that could be said. It would be accepted exactly as it had been spoken; with a kind of light sweetness and calm: she knew exactly the mood he was in, and it was the one she liked best. Obediently, she turned to meet it.

  “Doesn’t Mrs. Holdsworth dust your bedroom?”

  She seated herself beside him, lying one arm along the sofa rail, and looked at him. It seemed a pity that all her cross and painful learning of his moods would be wasted because they were never going to live together over her tea-shop—but Nell quietly dismissed the sting. Here were peace, and fading sunset, and the shadows of leaves: let her make the most of them.

  “Oh, I suppose so. It isn’t real dust, it’s a kind of dusty light … it’s nicer here, anyway. Well, Nello, I expect you know The Papers have come. They sound like something in a before-1914 spy story, don’t they?”

  “Oh … have you got them?” was all that she could say.

  “I have,” he tapped his pocket with a touch of drama. “And I go for my Medical on the tenth.”

  “But that’s only a week from today!”

  “I know. It is almost upon us, isn’t it? Don’t look so startled, Nello. I am feeling quite differently about my National Service now. I shall look on it as ‘experience’ (I dislike the word ‘copy’; it’s inexpressive and cheap) and submit myself to it without protest.” The drowsy grey eyes were fixed smilingly upon her own.

  “You may not pass the Medical,” Nell said.

  But he shook his head. “I don’t think we should count on that. I’ve always been very strong; I never remember being ill in my life. I see no reason why They should find anything wrong with me. Besides,” turning round animatedly, “why are we talking like this anyway? It will be too long an experience, two whole years of it, but I’m going through with it. There must be something fresh to say about Service life; I shall be the one to say it. Or perhaps I shall re-say the things that have always been true about soldiers, in a fresh way.”

  “Why soldiers? Have you always thought of going into the Army? I should have thought …”

  “Now what, Nello darling? What would you have thought?” taking her hand and moving it up and down.

  “That the Air Force or the Navy would be more interesting to a writer.”

  He dropped her hand. “Everything’s interesting to a writer … have you never wondered why I didn’t try to get deferred? You see,” as she nodded, “that—not trying to—was a kind of sacrifice to my writing, as well. If I’d got myself to a University—and I could have, you know, Nello; I’m clever; I’m ‘a great passer of examinations’, as someone—Aldington, was it? said of that ass D. H. Lawrence—and started off on a promising career, I expect I could have got deferment. But that would have meant being tied down; not being completely free to wander about and do what I want to and go where I choose. And these two years have been …” He stopped, and turned slowly, to look at the sycamore tree where the low dusty rays lingered. “Very useful,” he ended.

  “Of course, no-one could get deferment on the grounds that they were training themselves as a writer,” he added, after a silence, “or everyone would be doing it. So I’ve had to arrange my affairs to fit in with Theirs. And really, you know, it hasn’t turned out too badly.” He smiled at her. “I’m resigned to doing my best, Nello. I expect you will soon be getting letters from me telling you how ‘grand’ it all is and that I’m ‘mad keen’.”

  Nell sat looking at him, with thankfulness flowing into her heart. This change of attitude might lead on to anything: might make him into a sensible, open-air-loving boy, who liked plenty of sleep and regular meals, and hated dishonesty and always told the truth, and then she would be able to concentrate all her energy upon getting her tea-shop, because she need not worry any more about John.

  “I’m awfully glad,” she said.

  “I thought you might be. I’ve always told you, haven’t I? that you need not worry about me. Well now,” his voice slid on without change of expression, “what do you think about silly Benedict and dear little Gardis? Wasn’t it a fatal thing to do? Ben was just beginning to get a foot in with his poetry. This will set him back years.”

  “Oh … yes … well. …” Her sudden recollection of having been very angry with him for his supposed hand in that affair was unwelcome; she did not want to spoil the peace, and her thankfulness. She took a weak refuge in silence.

  “… of course people will take any amount of that ‘wild one’ pose from poets nowadays; they’re all expected to be ‘wild’ just as all doctors are expected to provide the raw material for future hagiographers. …”

&
nbsp; “What is a hagiographer?” She felt that she ought at least to interrupt occasionally, not just sit there implying approval of his verdict on this affair which had, she was certain, not ended as he had planned.

  “Someone who writes about saints,” kindly, “… but it’s fatal to start being ‘wild’ before anyone has heard of you … it’s much better to get yourself well known first and then be wild; drink too much; womanize like mad; even be a pervert, if you can stomach it … or get into debt on an impressive scale. But dropping all your contacts and running off to Spanish Morocco with a little bitch of whom nobody’s ever heard … that was very silly of Ben.” His voice was gentle, but he glanced away as he spoke, and she could tell that he was remembering that day at Kenwood House, and his shifting plots and plans during the fortnight that followed, with cold anger.

  She murmured yes, it was silly, and left it at that: she was pleased that his scheming had failed and yet sorry for his disappointment. The unexpected thought came to her that she would be relieved when he had gone away into the Army. It was uncomfortable to have her feelings for him and her opinion of him so much at variance.

  “Is Aunt Peggy furious?” she asked, for something to say.

  “No, I don’t think so (I don’t think of her as an aunt, of course; aunts were put here to get furious). I think she’s relieved, on the whole. And so am I. Those two were getting tedious. They were so much older than most of us, you see. Of course in theory I believe that age should make no difference in friendships, but it does, you know. It does.”

  “Gardis was only nineteen.”

  “Twenty-four,” smiling.

  “Was she?”

  “You’re so endearingly ‘green’ Nello dear. ‘Pushing’ twenty-five.”

  “I should never have thought it,” said Nell, pondering.