“The one with shingles,” remembered Charles.
“Yes … poor girl….”
Charles scowled. He hated poor girls with sad stories, and he could detect some calamitous history in his mother’s manner; there were far too many of them in her employment, gallantly supporting bedridden parents or bastard babies. And against this one he had an especial grudge; she had caused him to be dragged from his bed and sent into Ravonsbridge at an impossible hour on Christmas morning. He had never seen her, and he never wanted to see her. While his mother told them how well Miss Carmichael seemed to be shaping he wondered why all poor girls should fall into two types: the brave, bright blondes, and the damply despondent brunettes. The brunettes were the more unappetising, the blondes the more fatiguing. Not that he ever saw very much of them, but he was obliged sometimes to offer them bread and butter when they came to Cyre Abbey for patronage and advice at tea-time. On the whole, he thought, the brunettes were the worst, and decided that Miss Carmichael must be one of those sallow passionate girls who are deceived by villains and refuse to send their triplets to an adoption society.
“So now, dear, if you’ve finished,” said his mother, “I’ve put a lot of literature I got from Headquarters on your desk in the library. You’d better go up and look it over before these people come.”
Charles was hustled upstairs and presented with a great deal of very dull material, including a list of jokes, sent in by the local association, which might raise a laugh in a Ravonsbridge audience. His spirits sank as he looked them over. The recommendations sent by Headquarters struck him as having been written by half-wits for morons. He could have stated the Liberal case better himself while still in the kindergarten. But he remembered that he must try not to talk above the heads of his audiences. A tendency to do this was, he believed, his chief defect as a public speaker. It was not easy to scramble down to the mental level of the people whom he must convince, and he had found, by experience, that a tacit assumption of equality never flattered them as much as it ought.
After a while he thrust the pamphlets aside and turned to a more congenial task—an answer to a letter which had been sitting on his desk for several days. He pondered for a while and then began to write rapidly:
*
MADAM,
(Monument to Dickon Salter)
I regret that I am unable to offer any support whatever to this project. Nor can I refrain from comment upon certain inaccuracies in the pamphlet which accompanies your letter.
(1) The Ravon has nothing to do with a bird. It is a corruption of the Celtic word Avon, or Afon, meaning a river.
(2) Dickon Salter was not hanged upon Gibbet Hill in 1357. He was hanged in the courtyard of Severnton Castle in 1349.
(3) Gibbet Hill was called Carlings Hill until 1735, when it took its present name from a gallows erected there for the execution of Bob Mantrip, a highwayman.
(4) Dickon Salter was not a Ravonsbridge citizen. He did not even come from Severnshire. According to the Cyre Abbey records he came from Norfolk.
(5) There is no evidence whatever that he “led the common people in an age-long struggle against privilege”. He led a band of robbers which infested Slane forest for ten years and pillaged the common people on their way to Severnton market. In 1348 he sacked and burnt Slane Bredy, a hamlet which was then entirely populated by swineherds. It was the common people who eventually united to catch him and deliver him to justice.
(6) He could not have been hanged for burning Lord Ravonsclere’s haystacks, for there was no Lord Ravonsclere in 1349. The Ravonsclere title dates from 1688. I think that the author of your pamphlet here confuses Dickon Salter with William Salter of Ravonsford, who was convicted of arson, and transported to Botany Bay in 1825. The haystacks in this case belonged to Sir Harry Knevett of Slane St. Mary’s.
(7) The reference to “unjust taxes” is obscure. I infer a further confusion with Richard Shotter, a cordwainer, who, in 1602, led the burgesses of Ravonsbridge in a successful demand for exemption from certain tithes. But Shotter was not hanged; he was subsequently elected Mayor of Ravonsbridge three times. There is a monument to him in the Parish Church. He amassed a large fortune but had a reputation for starving his apprentices….
*
Penelope looked into the library and asked if he had finished, as his canvassers were due by the three-thirty bus.
“There are no buses‚” he assured her. “They’ll have to walk. They won’t be here before dark.”
“Who says there are no buses?”
“Ladislaw told me so, at church.”
“Charles! Why didn’t you say so at lunch?”
“It didn’t occur to me. Look, Penelope … do you happen to know who—” he studied the letter he had received, “—Grace Meeker may be?”
“Oh, Charles, how can you ask? She’s that awful woman who has got onto the Town Council. Why? Has she been writing to you?”
“Yes. She’s raising money for a monument to Dickon Salter on Gibbet Hill. She believes that he was hanged there for protesting against unjust taxes laid upon the common people by my ancestors. She assures me that the time has now come when our townsfolk dare to pay tribute to a local martyr. The monument is to have a raven carved on it, and a pretty strong reference to servile chains.”
“What cheek!” commented Penelope, without much interest.
Charles wished that there could have been someone at Cyre Abbey who might have appreciated the scholarly broadside with which he meant to demolish Mrs. Meeker. Penelope was very stupid. And his mother, though she shared his interest in local history, would have wondered at him for writing such a letter and asked what good it could do. The desire to score, especially off an inferior, was not characteristic of the Ravonscleres. Perhaps it came from the plebeian Millwoods.
Penelope had gone to the window and was looking out.
“Here they are,” she said.
He joined her. The snow had ceased to fall, the wind had dropped, and the sky was a little lighter. Up the wide avenue a party of people was trudging towards the house, each figure picked out and isolated against the white vacancy of the unbroken snow, which presented no background to absorb, group or soften them. Animated units, they advanced, with that appearance of drama which so often permeates a snowy scene.
“There must have been a bus,” said Charles. “How like a Breughel they look, especially Miss Turner. What has she got on her head?”
“I believe they’re called Pixie hoods.”
“No! What a ghastly name! Who is the girl in the red coat, coming along behind the rest?”
“Oh, that’s Ianthe Meadows. And the tall girl with her is Miss Carmichael.”
“Ianthe? She’s not coming?”
“Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Mamma thought it would be good for her to have something to do.”
Charles went back to his desk and sat down.
“In that case,” he said, “the whole thing is off.”
“What is off?”
“This tea-party, as far as I’m concerned. I shall stay up here as long as Ianthe is in the house. Mamma must be mad.”
“But Charles …”
“Just because we are all sorry for Canon Pillie, nobody is allowed to say that that girl ought to be shut up. After that Hunt Ball, to which Mamma insisted I should take her …”
“But Charles …”
“I’ve made up my mind. I’m never going to have her wished onto me again, in any capacity. Mamma knows how she behaved at the Hunt Ball.”
“Yes, and for that very reason she thinks it’s a good idea to invite Ianthe here; just to pass it over, I mean, as something too childish and silly to notice. She says all Ianthe wants is to attract attention, and she’d think she was a heroine if she was banned from Cyre Abbey. It’s a much better snub to invite her here with all the Institute people.”
Charles saw the point of this and reflected that though the Ravonscleres did not enjoy snubbing, as he did, they were adepts in the art of it. But then
he shook his head.
“Not when I’m in the house‚” he said obstinately. “I never wish to live through a more ghastly evening than I did at that ball. You’d better go down and tell Mamma I shan’t show up at this tea-party.
*
“Charles,” said Ianthe, as she stumbled through the drifts beside Lucy, “will probably hide when he knows I’m coming. He doesn’t like me very much.”
She waited for Lucy to ask why, but Lucy would not oblige her, and merely said that she had never met him, though she had seen him from a window at the Hostel and thought he looked élancé.
“Come again?” exclaimed Ianthe.
“Élancé,” repeated Lucy boldly.
“Oh, Lucy! You do use elegant expressions. What a thing it is to be an educated girl! Well, his mother made him take me to a Hunt Ball once, and he was so obviously reluctant that I got fed up and decided to create a little excitement. So I whispered to one or two people that we’d just got engaged. In five minutes it was all over the room. Oh, my dear! The sensation! He couldn’t make it out, till someone congratulated him, and I must say he’s no gent, for he denied it. I’ve never had such fun in my life! Poor Charles!”
All this was perfectly true—an unusual state of things where Ianthe was concerned. But Lucy never thought of believing it and said:
“I wonder he’s asked you to canvass for him.”
“Oh, that’s Lady Frances. She thinks it more dignified to ignore my girlish pranks. Besides, some sensible occupation will be so good for me, you know. Look, Lucy, let’s sit on this log for a minute, and wait till all the others are in the house. Then we can make our entrance.”
“Not me,” said Lucy, quickening her pace.
“Oh, you are a sticky thing. Oh, you are a whelk! A perfect limpet. Do you like trooping round with a mob? You can’t!”
“You stay behind and make an entrance if you like. I’m not stopping you.”
“I’m sick and tired of being all by myself. What I need is a nice friend who’ll be a good influence over me. If only you’d be nice to me I should be much more normal.”
“I am nice, but I’m not going to be dragged into any exhibitionism. If you don’t behave yourself this afternoon I’ll drop you.”
“Oh, I’ll behave. I promise! I’ll be just like Bess Turner. You wait. Everyone will be perfectly astonished at my good behaviour….”
“Do hurry up. They’re all waiting for us at the door. They won’t ring the bell till we catch them up.”
“Oh, aren’t they cows? Aren’t they just like a flock of cows at a gate waiting to be milked? They’re simply terrified. They think a butler will open the door, and they aren’t used to butlers. But Lady Frances will probably open the door, because it’s the butler’s day out. All the servants at Cyre Abbey sit on their fannies while the Millwoods do the work: its noblesse oblige, you know.”
They joined the waiting mob and Rickie timidly rang the bell. After a long pause a cross-looking woman in a green overall opened the door and admitted them into a hall littered with dog-leads and Wellingtons, where they removed outer wraps and snow-boots. Then, clustered shyly together, they were ushered into a room full of chintz chairs, where Penelope received them and abruptly commanded them to sit. Her mother, she said, would be down in a moment.
Poor Penelope’s natural gaucherie was not lessened by the thought of the scene probably going on upstairs between her mother and Charles. She sat on a low chair, revealing two inches of navy woollen knickers under her short tweed skirt, and tried to entertain them by asking gruff questions of each in turn. Even Rickie was so much subdued that he merely said the choir was rehearsing the St. John Passion Music without trying to hum any of it. Ianthe alone made an attempt to rescue the conversation. She talked easily and pleasantly about their bus ride and the snow-drifts. A stranger, hearing her help Penelope out, might have been pardoned for supposing that she was the earl’s granddaughter and Penelope the country bumpkin. Occasionally she threw a side glance at Lucy as if to ask if she was not behaving well.
After ten awkward minutes Lady Frances appeared. Her face told Penelope that Charles was obdurate, but its anxiety gave place to disappointment when she counted her visitors. She had expected to see twice that number. Where, she asked, were all the others? Had not a notice been put on the Institute board?
Who was to tell her that her Staff was mainly Conservative, while the great majority of the students were Socialists? Nobody liked to do so, except Robin Barlow, one of the dramatic students, who was not, indeed, a Liberal, was without any political convictions, but who hoped for Millwood patronage. He had no objection to letting her know how undeserving some of his fellow students were, but she cut him short with:
“What a pity! Well … the chosen few must work all the harder.”
Spreading a large map of the town on a table, she arranged them in couples and gave to each couple an assignment of streets, for house-to-house canvassing. They were not, she said, to be daunted by a Labour poster in the window. They were to knock on every door and argue on the doorstep as long as they possibly could. If they called between six and seven in the evening, they would catch people at supper.
Ianthe suggested that they might canvass the people in the cinema queues. This was the only independent suggestion made by anybody, and Lady Frances looked pleased, both by the idea and by such proof for her theory that rational occupation was all that poor Ianthe needed. As time went on proceedings became more and more of a discussion between Lady Frances and Ianthe, in which the girl seemed to be answering for the rest of the party. The surprise which she had prophesied was visible on all sides, for nobody had ever heard her talk so sensibly before and her appearance at the bus-stop had caused a good deal of dismay. But it was her new method, as Lucy saw, of causing a sensation, and very well she did it, except for an occasional tendency to imitate Bess too faithfully. The name of Lady Frances was introduced rather often.
“Yes, Lady Frances … no, Lady Frances …” and once: “Yes, Lady Frances, I will dew!” in accents that were pure Bess.
But nobody noticed this except Lucy and, possibly, Robin Barlow, who began to stare at Ianthe with cautious admiration.
At five o’clock they were led into the dining-room for tea and Lucy gleefully observed that there were buns. She would have to make the most of the buns in her account of this trip to Melissa, in order to make up for the disappointment over Terrific Charles, though his absence was so strange and so uncivil that it really made a better story than his presence, however impressive. She could not imagine what had happened to him, for he was apparently in the house, and she nearly made herself giggle once or twice by inventing fantastic explanations for it. But it never occurred to her to believe that he was hiding from Ianthe; to disbelieve Ianthe had become a reflex action.
Before the meal was over, however, he appeared — brought down by a belated reflection that he would be giving Ianthe more consequence by staying away than by coming. But he was in a vile temper and showed it. Lucy, now able to scan him at close quarters, decided that she had never met a less attractive young man.
“He walked here and he walked there,” she would quote in her letter to Melissa, “fancying himself so very great. I wish you had been there, my dear, to give him one of your sets down.”
For a few minutes she was possessed by an impulse to set him down herself, and had it on the tip of her tongue to ask if he would not say something inspiring, something that might encourage them to go through fire and water for him since, as yet, they had only been through snow. But her anger flickered and failed, as all emotions had a habit of doing nowadays. She sighed and drank her tea and thought that nothing really mattered.
Before they left the table he pulled himself together and muttered a few sentences about gratitude for their help. He spoke a little about the Liberal cause, very mournfully, so that everyone felt all lost save honour; and they sat staring gloomily at their plates until Robin asked him what they were t
o say about Marshall Aid.
To this subject Charles had given a good deal of thought for he had travelled about Europe, during the past year, and had observed its workings in several countries. He replied with some animation, describing what he had seen, and Lucy was just upon the point of granting him intelligence when Lady Frances interrupted him to make a fuss about their bus. If they were to catch it in the village they ought all to be off.
Robin replied with a suggestion that they should first find out by telephone whether there would be any bus to catch. Rumour had it that the late buses were to be cancelled, owing to the snow-drifts, and Robin did not intend to walk home, even in the sacred cause of his own career. His companions thought him very bold: none of them would have dared to use the Cyre Abbey telephone. But they were glad enough when the rumour was confirmed and Lady Frances announced that they must all be driven home by Charles in the station waggon.
“But if the bus can’t get through,” said Lucy, as they stood about in the hall waiting for their conveyance, “how can your car go?”
Lady Frances explained that Charles would not take the bus route through the narrow valley, but go the straight way over Gibbet Hill, which would probably be free from drifts. The night was clearing and the clouds had parted when Charles brought the waggon to the door. Down the steps they crunched, slipping in the snow. Ianthe got in first and took the rearmost bench with Robin, where she could continue a decorous flirtation which had sprung up between them during tea. For Robin was taking a day off: as a general rule he was considered to be the property of Wendy Howell, who played all the leads in the Drama School productions, but who had refused to come this afternoon on the grounds that she was a Communist. All the others climbed in after them, leaving the front seat, beside Charles, empty: Lucy, however, was detained for a moment in the hall by Lady Frances, who told her that new lodgings had been arranged for her next term, in Sheep Lane.
“But I don’t want to leave the Angeras,” protested Lucy, “and another landlady might object to my bassoon.”
“Mrs. Sparkes won’t. She’s stone deaf and a very good cook, much too good for Mr. Finch who is there now. You’ll have a sitting-room and a bedroom. Much more peaceful. Think it over. Good night.”
Lucy Carmichael Page 11
