“Not that sort of travel,” Love said, and added most unfairly, “and it doesn’t broaden the mind nearly as much as all those cream-cookies and éclairs will broaden your beam, Vi.”
“Don’t be so vulgar,” retorted Violet with spirit. “And you’ve eaten nearly as much as I have.”
“I’m not fat, and you are.”
“There’s more of me to fill, then.”
“Who’s being vulgar now?” asked Love triumphantly. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how big you are, the human stomach is a small bag capable of holding a pint and a half when distended. I read that in a book.”
“Mine holds more,” Violet insisted placidly. “And anyhow, I know more about my own stomach than you do.”
“Well, I won’t argue with you,” said Love, finding this last statement impossible to contradict. “But you’ll have to reduce a whole lot before men will bother with you.”
“I can’t be bothered with men,” said Violet, still eating calmly, like a cow, and with a cow’s bland, unthinking stare.
“You’ll be sorry for that some day.”
“No, I won’t,” said Violet. “Because I mean to go in for travel seriously, and write books about all the queer places I’ve been to. And when you’re married and stuck down in one place with a dull husband and a lot of crying babies and servants giving notice, you’ll read my books and wish you were me.”
“How can you write a book’?” said Love. “You can’t even spell!”
“My secretary will see to all those tiresome bits for me,” was Violet’s serene answer, and this serenity, so unlike her as a rule, goaded Love into indiscretion.
“Well,” she said angrily, “you needn’t crow, for my husband won’t expect me to stay stuck in one place, babies or no babies. I’m going to marry a sailor and go all over the world with him.”
This did shake Violet out of her maddening composure. “A sailor?” she repeated. “Do you mean that Commander Marsh who’s been staying at Craigrois such a lot this summer?”
On the principle that one may as well be hanged for a sheep, Love nodded.
“Oh, Love! Why didn’t you tell me? Has he proposed yet? But of course he must have, how silly of me—”
“I’m not prepared to say anything more at present, and this is in confidence,” began Love with dignity, and added relievedly: “Oh, here’s Janey at last!”
“Well, gells,” said Jane, coming to a stop beside their table. “What pigs you are! What a tea you must have had! You’ll never be able to curtsey, and Madame Florabelle will flay you. Are you ready? We’d better walk, I think, to shake down some of that food.”
The class was held in a long room, one of a nest of halls in a building in Queen Street. Several girls and one or two older women were already there, pinning on old lace curtains to each other’s shoulders to represent trains, with a good deal of chatter and laughter, which ceased abruptly as the pouter-pigeon figure of Madame, trotting on tiny high-heeled shoes, still phenomenally active, came briskly into their midst.
Followed an hour of strenuous activity and merciless criticism, during which lack of breath and cracking knee-joints were never considered. Madame, well over seventy, was indefatigable. Raising her skirt to show a pair of short but still shapely legs, she performed a series of deep and elegant curtseys, talking the whole time, undistressed by her exertions.
“Lock the knees—so—” she said briskly. “It maintains a better balance. Now, Miss Cranstoun, the head lowered as you make your obeisance, raised to look at their Majesties as you rise. Yes. that is quite nice. Graceful, not too stiff, but the tempo is a little on the slow side. Miss Magdalen Cranstoun, a trifle less jerky, if you please. No, no, Miss Graham, that will not do. Please remember that you are not taking part in a contra-dance. This is a court-curtsey, not a bob. Mrs. Devine, I recommend for you and the other married ladies a curtsey slightly less deep. To fall over would be an everlasting disgrace both to you and to me. For a married lady, the stateliness of her deportment should take the place of depth in the obeisance. The débutantes, of course”—sweeping their shrinking forms with a keen glance—“will curtsey to the ground. Do not poke the head forward, Miss Graham. Remember never to turn your back on the Throne, Miss Magdalen Cranstoun . . . No, ladies, if you smile, it must be with the eyes only. Kindly bear in mind the fact that you are being presented to your Sovereign. A smile suggests familiarity, as to an equal. . . . Gather the train with grace, Mrs. Riddell, do not clutch it as if it were a woollen shawl. Allow the fan to droop across the body towards the floor while curtseying, Lady Jones, it gives a good line. I do not approve of fans being unfurled. It is too reminiscent of the stage, too flamboyant altogether. . . . There will be no necessity for you to pick up your own trains, ladies. You may not stoop in the Presence. A pace will gather them and throw them over the left arm, which should be gracefully extended to receive them. If you should be sitting down later on, I beg that you will not fling yourselves into chairs like sacks, but will subside with dignity—so. It will do more justice to your lovely gowns and feathers. The right foot drawn back to the chair, with the weight of the body poised on it, the left pointed—so. And now”—her class, drawing inaudible breaths of relief, prepared unostentatiously for departure—“And now, ladies, we will go through the entire procedure again, starting with the handing of your name-cards at the Throne-Room door. On the announcement of your name you will curtsey to his Majesty—down on the left knee, up on the left foot, three short steps to the right and curtsey to her Majesty. Down on the left knee—to the floor, Miss Graham, please. Remember that you rank as a débutante, though you have been out a year—up on the left foot, and on towards the farther door, keeping the head and left shoulder turned towards the Throne. Then the left arm extended to receive the train, and you are through the door and out of the Throne-Room. . . . No handbags, ladies, please, unless they are sufficiently small to be concealed in the same hand that holds the fan or flowers. More rapidly yet smoothly, there must be no delay in the procession. As you curtsey to the King, the lady before you is making her curtsey to the Queen, and so on. You will each follow immediately behind the lady who is presenting you. Is that quite clear? Now.”—Once more the tentative glances at watches, the fumbling with the safety-pins which held the practise trains in position. Once more the inexorable “Now, we will run through the curtseys once more, I am not altogether satisfied with the carriage of the heads. The débutantes must try to be less self-conscious and awkward in the movements. Are you ready, ladies? Attention, if you please!”
“And yet people fight and struggle and quarrel and scrimp to be presented!” wailed Violet, as the class finally tottered out into the wide grey street with its tree-shaded sloping gardens hiding it from Heriot Row down the hill to the north. “Working for exams at school was fun and games compared with what we’ve just been put through!”
“Madame Florabelle believes in earning her fee!” said Jane with a rather weary chuckle. “The muscles of my legs are so sore that I doubt if I’ll be able to put my foot on the clutch or the accelerator.”
“I’ve got a blister on my heel with all that walking up and down,” announced Violet. “And I’m hungry.”
“Violet, you can’t still be hungry—”
“I’m not still hungry, I’m hungry again,” said Violet with dignity. “And you know we’ll get home too late to have a proper dinner, it will only be soup and sandwiches and things. I must have nourishment now.”
They compromised on large quantities of plain chocolate in slabs, and after a hurried cup of coffee, started westwards for home again, munching their chocolate.
“How awful it would be if we hadn’t been taught to do it properly—” said Love, the least tired and most practical of the three, her mind still running on court procedure. “I mean, the actual curtseying is nothing to the rest of it! All that stepping and counting, up with your head, down with your head—”
“‘Off with her head!’” muttered Violet
deeply. But Love did not so much as hear this interruption. “All that holding of the fan across the body and not crossing the feet, and I’m sure I’ll mix it up,” she continued. “I can’t imagine how the girls are going to manage who say they know all about curtseys because they learnt to do them at school, dancing, and don’t need any more lessons, thank you. Can you?”
“Unless sheer fright and nervous excitement make us forget all we’ve been taught,” said Jane. “We ought to acquit ourselves well enough not to disgrace Madame—I’m sure she has spies hidden in the Throne-room to tell her if we do it wrong—if it’s any comfort.”
“It isn’t, much,” said Violet.
“It will be, on the night,” Love said sagely. ‘“We’ll all be only too thankful then that we know the drill by heart.”
“We’ve more than a fortnight to forget it in,” Violet pointed out.
“Only a fortnight!” exclaimed Jane. “It will be gone like a flash before we know it, with all these fittings and things.”
She was right. The long days of June, when the sun moved imperially almost the full circle of the skies between dawn and dusk, dropping reluctantly behind the bills to north-west for only a few hours of semi-darkness, went past as if winged. There seemed to be no time to enjoy the spectacle which Nature, greatest of all pageant-masters, had arranged to celebrate Midsummer. The coronation of a King and Queen at Westminster Abbey had drawn millions to London to see man-made pomp and circumstance at its most splendid, yet few of these lifted their eyes from drab tasks of everyday for a glimpse of summer’s crowning attended though it was by a blazing glory which no other monarch could hope to rival. The low-lying meadows and marshes were purple with wild orchis the last of the marigolds glowed richly golden among the green, tall yellow flags rose stately above their broad sword leaves, Queen of the meadow added a froth of perfumed creamy lace to enrich a robe which Solomon in his splendour never hoped to wear. The countryside went in holiday attire of green and gold, the moors began to put on the rose of bell-heather, and for bonfires the whole western sky burned wonderfully, evening after lovely evening.
They were strange days for Jane, who had now to arrange her thoughts of the future without reference to John, once the greatest part of it, now of no importance, except possibly as a brother-in-law. This readjustment cost her many nights of broken sleep, a certain loss of appetite, but she could still laugh, if not as often as before. There was no doubt in her mind that John liked Love, found her amusing, attractive and full of spirit. Each time he had come to Craigrois during the weeks following the breaking of his engagement to Jane—if such a nebulous unannounced understanding could be so described—it had been on Love’s invitation. What her parents felt about it Jane did not know, but judging from the fact that Lady Cranstoun had taken to saying hopefully: “Of course Love is still a mere child!” she thought there must be a little uneasiness lurking in the maternal mind at least. They certainly would not want to lose Love almost as soon as they had her home again after years of boarding-school and an extra year’s absence in France. For that reason alone, Sir Magnus probably would refuse to consent to an engagement in the meantime. Love’s own feelings were not divulged. She remained poised, calm, gay, and determined to do as she wished even at risk of crossing swords with her redoubtable parents.
On one curious occasion Jane and her mother found themselves, to their mutual astonishment and embarrassment, on the brink of confidences, and then after the first startled words, they had drawn back, timid bathers afraid to make a plunge, and the conversation had trickled away into a discussion of trains, feathers and long white gloves, as so many conversations had a way of doing just then. But it had been surprising enough, even that glimpse of one another’s thoughts, and Jane did not forget it for a long time.
Years were to pass before she ceased to connect the sight of baskets of artificial wild roses being filled for the collectors to carry round the parish on Alexandra Day, late this year because of the Coronation, or their curious clothy smell, with Lady Cranstoun’s sudden opening question, haltingly put.
“I thought that John Marsh was a friend of yours, Janey?” Her hands were busy with the rose-sprays, her eyes intent on what she was doing.
There was a slight, barely noticeable pause, and then Jane said lightly: “So he is, Mother. I saw quite a lot of him when I was staying with the Mariners.”
“He seems,” said her mother with a little laugh as if deprecating her own foolishness, “to see more of Love than of you nowadays.”
“Oh, well, why not? It’s good for Love to have a man of a reasonable age to play about with. And after all,” said Jane more lightly than ever, “he isn’t my property, Mother, you know.”
Lady Cranstoun finished one basket and started to twine roses round the top of another before she made the remark which brought them to the very edge of the deep pool. “Don’t let Love have it all her own way, Janey,” she said.
For an instant Jane had a violent longing to burst into tears and sob out the whole silly story; but pride and the reserve which was second-nature to all the Cranstouns, froze the words on her lips. “My dear Mother!” she said, with the effect of drawing back hurriedly from the brink in case even her feet should get wet.
Lady Cranstoun at once took several steps in the same direction. “Of course,” she said, the familiar sentence seeming to reassure her by its mere sound, “Love is a mere child still! One is apt to forget that.”
“Of course she is,” Jane agreed; and that was all.
For the rest of the time she battled for peace of mind unaided by her mother. She was helped through May by the bustle of Coronation festivities in the village—the dinner to the old people, tea and games for the young, a bonfire, a barrel of beer, and dancing on the lawn at Craigrois after dark for all—the local Girl Guide celebrations, which included a District Church Parade with the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigade; and the entertainment, during one hectic Saturday, of a poor Guide company from Glasgow. June was fully occupied by preparations for the Drawing-room to be held at Holyrood early in July, and the time passed somehow; not very happily, it might be, but with sufficient excitement to keep her from brooding. And Peregrine Gilbert in his quiet way was a great support. He had taken her out for many walks at odd hours of the day, dawn and gloaming being his favourite times, had shown her where a pair of herons were nesting high in the old spruce-firs behind Allander, the first occasion for years, with various other matters of interest to both of them.
The arrival of the large square envelopes containing their summons to appear before the King and Queen proved unexpectedly stirring, especially to Love. Lady Cranstoun, to whom, naturally, it was nothing new, took it with serene composure, but her younger daughter thrilled as she read that
The Lord Chamberlain is
commanded by Their Majesties to invite
Miss MAGDALEN CRANSTOUN
to an Afternoon Party in the Garden of the
Holyroodhouse
(Weather permitting)
This was exciting enough, but how much more so that other:
The Lord Chamberlain is
commanded by Their Majesties to summon
Miss MAGDALEN CRANSTOUN
to a Court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse
Ladies: Court Dress with feathers and trains.
Gentlemen: Full Court Dress.
Love slept with hers under her pillow, and by day they occupied the centre of her mantelpiece, from which she had swept away all the other invitations which had previously adorned it.
It seemed to Jane that her younger sister was preoccupied and busy with her own affairs throughout June. She spent days in dressmaking, for which she had a distinct talent, shut up in the schoolroom cutting out materials from paper patterns, and covering the floor with scraps, threads and pins, to the despair of the housemaid who swept the carpet. Even Violet Graham, putting aside her travel-craze and abandoning for the time a record of her walking-tour in Germany—(‘How shall
I discribe my fealings on first setting foot in the Black Forrest, that home of all the fairy tails we loved in childhood days?’)—became obsessed with a passion for needlework and whirred a sewing-machine with more diligence than accuracy as she tried to follow Love’s directions.
Apart from keeping an indulgent and approving eye on Jane’s expeditions with Peregrine. Love did not bother her with teasing questions, nor did she let drop any further hint of her plans for Jane’s future. The omission was ominous, if Jane had had any thoughts to spare for it.
On Midsummer’s Eve Love and Violet, who had come over to Craigrois for the night, retired early to the bedroom they had insisted on sharing, and there prepared to perform several mystic rites with an air of solemnity which belied their sceptical remarks.
“Of course it’s all the most fearful rot,” said Love, hanging like a young witch over a small pan which was heating on a spirit-stove on the old-fashioned marble-topped wash-stand.
“Oh, of course. But there’s no harm in amusing ourselves. Besides, I have to know about folk-lore for my travel-book,” agreed Violet. “What exactly happens?”
“When the lead boils I pour it into that dish of cold water and it solidifies, and you tell your fate from the shapes the bits turn,” said Love with the importance of a high-priestess. “But it’s taking an awfully long time.”
“There’s a very queer smell,” murmured Violet, sniffing. “Sort of burning—”
“Oh!” Love gave a wail of disappointment. “It’s all dried up and got mixed with the bottom of the pan! How disgusting, and I haven’t any more lead. Open the window quick, Violet, and let the smell out, or the whole house will come up interfering and asking what we’re doing.”
Violet obediently threw open the window, while Love disconsolately blew out the spirit-lamp and set the ruined saucepan on the hearth, wondering ruefully what Mrs. Sword would have to say about it on the morrow.
Love Comes Home Page 14
