I had her name in my mind, when I looked across Fay’s shoulder and saw her not a yard away. I don’t know what Fay had been saying, but she must have said it more than once, because when I did hear her she sounded really peeved.
“Car, are you deaf? I want to stop-my brooch has come undone.”
I had to stop, because the brooch fell and rolled almost under Anna’s feet. She was sitting alone at a table; but I could see she hadn’t been alone long, for there were two glasses, and a chair pushed back. I retrieved the brooch and got up with it in my hand, and just as I was giving it to Fay, I saw Bobby Markham coming along with his brother. They came up to Anna, and Bobby said,
“May I introduce my brother Arbuthnot?”
Anna wasn’t too effusive-and I don’t wonder. Arbuthnot Markham isn’t exactly a human ray of sunshine. Bobby’s a fat-headed-looking sort of chump; but there’s something about Arbuthnot that makes me want to go home. He’d look better if he was bald like Bobby-his hair’s too black and shiny.
I heard him say, “I took the liberty of asking my brother to introduce me.” Then he asked her for a dance, and Fay and I finished ours.
I went and talked to Miss Willy after that. I was afraid she’d want to dance-and it’s just like dancing with a steam-engine. But she said she wanted to talk to me, and then I wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to risk being crushed. She’s a most overpowering person, and I don’t know how Isobel stands living with her. If it weren’t for Isobel, she’d have come some awful smash long ago.
I’ve never met any one with so much exuberant enthusiasm going to waste.
She began at once to talk about my uncle, and about Anna. She hadn’t any of Isobel’s hesitation. She called Anna quite a number of things that made me feel better, and she was wildly indignant on my uncle’s behalf.
And then she broke off to tell me all about a row she’d had with old Monk, and from that she got on to another row with the Vicar-I think the one with Monk had something to do with Anna, but not the one with the Vicar-and in the middle of the second row she suddenly switched back on to Uncle John and said I must come down and be reconciled to him. Now I happen to know that Miss Willy hasn’t had a good word to say for me ever since the smash. I don’t blame her, because it was on Isobel’s account; but I wondered why she should be all over me now. Then it came down on me like a cartload of bricks. If Isobel was going to marry Heron, I didn’t matter any more-Miss Willy could let her naturally kind instincts rip, have me to stay, reconcile me to Uncle John, and annoy Anna, all at one blow. I discovered that she had heard Anna allude to her as a blatant old maid. That clinched it-I was convinced that she regarded me as a convenient retort.
I seem to have written reams about last night, but I’m nearly through. I want to get it all down, and then go over it and see what I can make of it. There are just two more things to get down. I think one of them’s important.
Fay said she’d go home in a taxi, and I went out to get one. When I was coming back, I saw Anna come down the steps with Arbuthnot Markham. There wasn’t room for my taxi to draw up, so I nipped out and cut across behind the car Anna was getting into. There was rather a jam and a crowd on the pavement, and I didn’t particularly want her to see me, so I stood and waited for her to get in and shut the door. She got in, and then she leaned out of the window, and she said to Arbuthnot Markham, “He mustn’t go to the Tarrants-he mustn’t.”
He said something I didn’t catch.
Anna’s got a carrying voice. She said,
“You must stop him somehow.”
And then he stepped back, and she drew in her head, and the car went on.
Well, she must have meant me. And there isn’t anything strange in her not wanting me to go and stay with the Tarrants, because she naturally isn’t keen on my being anywhere within ten miles of Uncle John. But why tell Arbuthnot about it? I’d seen him introduced to her about half an hour before, and it struck me as pretty good going.
I got Fay, and we drove home. I wished I had walked, because she began to play up like she does sometimes. I shouldn’t want to flirt with Fay if there wasn’t another woman on earth-and she might have the common intelligence to know that I wouldn’t want to flirt with Peter’s wife. She doesn’t mean anything, of course, but it’s jolly bad form, and she riled me till I told her so straight out. In a way I’m fond of her, like you are of a second or third cousin, and it annoys me to see her making an ass of herself.
It began with my saying she ought to drop this silly Miss Everitt business and call herself Mrs. Lymington. I said it wasn’t fair. It isn’t. It worries me to hear Corinna talking about Peter as if she were engaged to him. Of course I didn’t mention Corinna-I just said it wasn’t fair. And the silly goose made eyes at me and said,
“Because some one might fall in love with me? Is that what you mean?”
It wasn’t in the least what I meant, but I let it go at that, and I supposed it encouraged her.
“If I hadn’t been married to Peter-” she stopped there and put her head against my arm.
I said, “You are married to Peter.”
“And if I weren’t,” she said-“if I’d been free all the time-would you have fallen in love with me?”
I said, “No, I shouldn’t,” and I said it pretty sharply.
“If I were free now-”
I took her by the shoulder and put her back in her own corner of the car.
“Drop it, Fay!” I said. “You don’t mean anything, and you know it, and I know it, so why the devil do you do it? If you ask me, it’s the rottenest of rotten bad form.”
She flared out at me.
“I didn’t ask you! I’m not asking you anything! I hate you!”
“Don’t be an ass, Fay,” I said.
Then she began to cry and said I was a brute.
XIX
September 2lst-I’ve just been reading over what I wrote yesterday. The two points that matter are:
Who is employing me?
and
Why?
There are a lot of subsidiary ones. The most important of these seem to be:
1. Anna’s connection with the affair.
2. Bobby Markham.
3. Fay.
I don’t know what to think about Anna. If I hadn’t lost my temper, I might have got something out of her. That’s the worst of a temper-it always lets you down. I don’t think she’s the big noise in this affair.-I think she butted in. If I thought the money came from her, I’d chuck the whole show.
Bobby Markham-I can’t make out whether it was he who interviewed me in the hut. Anna certainly gave me to understand that it was Bobby-but that’s a good enough reason for its being some one else. Then there’s the question of whether Bobby could have been in the hut to meet me after spending the evening with the Tarrants. I don’t think so much of this point as I did, because I hadn’t a watch, and though I think we were at the hut by eleven I may be mistaken. It oughtn’t to take more than an hour from Putney to Linwood, but I was thinking of other things. I didn’t notice how fast we were going, and I suspect the driver went out of the way on purpose. Then Isobel says Bobby didn’t go away till about twenty past, after starting to say good-night at eleven. That’s vague too. I can imagine time hanging a bit heavy whilst a fathead like Bobby was making pretty speeches. I suppose he could have got to the hut in ten minutes if he took the path through the woods.
All the same it sticks in my mind that it wasn’t Bobby. I wonder if it was Arbuthnot. If Anna had never met Arbuthnot before, how did she get to the point of telling him to keep me away from the Tarrants, all in about half an hour? She spoke as if she was accustomed to giving him orders, too-I noticed that. She might have been speaking to the butler, and he took it the same way, as if it was a matter of course that she should fire orders at him out of a taxi. No, I couldn’t believe that it was the first time they’d met. And if it wasn’t, why go through the farce of an introduction, unless they particularly wanted me to
think that they were strangers?
Well that’s all I can get out of Bobby for the moment.
Then there’s Fay. All the threads that connect Fay with this affair are as indefinite as the spider’s threads that you get blown across your face on a dewy morning-you can’t see them, and you can’t find them, but you keep on feeling that they’re there. Why should Fay want five hundred pounds just when five hundred pounds is being dangled in front of me? And then why should she afterwards go back on all that and swear she never said she was in a hole at all? And why did Isobel’s letter disappear, and Z.10’s first letter? And why did Fay cut her dance with me, just when cutting it obliged me to dance with Anna? It looks damned silly written down. Gossamer threads.
The post has just come in. Miss Willy has asked me to go down to them next Tuesday. That’s one letter. The other is a registered one with twenty five-pound notes in it and not a line of writing. If any one had told me a week ago that I should have a hundred pounds spread out in front of me on this table, it would have sounded like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales. And if they’d gone on to say that all I wanted to do with it was to send it back, I should have told them that they were talking through the back of their neck. A week ago I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, or how long my last pair of boots would hold together. Now I’ve got into a kind of twisted fairy story in which bank-notes come tumbling out of letters like the diamonds and pearls which dropped from the mouth of the wretched child with the fairy godmother in Grimm. I remember, even in the nursery, thinking how beastly it must have been, and wondering whether she got any of her teeth broken on the diamonds.
I am writing to Miss Willy to say I won’t come. And this is what I’m going to write to Z.10:
Dear Sir,
I have just received £100 in five-pound notes. I suppose these are the funds spoken of in the note I received last night. [There are too many “received’s” but I want to keep it stiff,] I should be glad to be given some work to do. I want to make it clear that I cannot continue to receive money which I have not earned. I was willing to accept a retaining fee for a reasonable time, but a sum of £100 does not come under that heading. I shall therefore return it, unless in the course of the next week I am satisfied that I have done, or am doing, something to earn such a salary.
Yours faithfully,
Carthew Fairfax.
XX
A Letter from Corinna Lee to Peter Lymington:
Peter honey, go right out and buy yourself a pair of yellow stockings. Did you know that meant being jealous? I didn’t until Mrs. Bell, who is my cousin Car’s landlady, told me. There’s a girl in the same house-and isn’t she a friend of yours, and why didn’t you tell me about her? Her name is Fay Everitt, and she’s pretty but very bad style, and she hates me like I hate cold water down the back of my neck, and I couldn’t think why until Mrs. Bell said, “It’s just her yellow stockings, Miss.” Well, I thought she was color blind, and I said, “They’re not yellow, Mrs. Bell, -they’re taupe.” And she laughed and laughed, and told me, “yellow stockings is just a way of saying folks is jealous, miss.” She said Fay Everitt “wears them constant.” I don’t think she likes my being friends with my cousin Car.
Peter, he is a perfect lamb. So now you know why you’ve got to go out right away and buy yourself those yellow stockings. Isn’t it a pity he’s got a girl already?
Why didn’t you tell me about her? I’m not wearing yellow stockings, because I love her too. She is an enchanting person called Isobel Tarrant, and she lives with a perfectly fierce aunt in a real old cottage with 1675 over the door. Why didn’t you tell me about Isobel? I can’t think why you didn’t fall in love with her. Perhaps you didn’t know her-that would be a good reason. Or perhaps you didn’t want to snatch her from Car. Or perhaps you are secretly in love with her all the time. Please tell me about this when you write. If there are any dark secrets in your past, I would like to know about them right away, and not find them out afterwards like they always do in books. I think I have used the wrong adjective. Isobel couldn’t be a dark secret-she isn’t that sort. But even if she’s a bright secret, I would want to know about her.
I am going down to Linwood to stay. I love Linwood and my cousin John, but I am glad that Anna Lang is not my cousin. She is only Cousin John’s wife’s niece, and not my relation at all. Car says he is glad about this too. I love Car. But perhaps you needn’t be very jealous-I have just mailed a letter to Poppa to tell him that if he thinks I’m forgetting you over here, he’s just got to think again. I’d be very lonely without you if I didn’t think a lot about how real nice it was going to be when I get back.
Do you think about me every day? I hope you do. Poppa said I wasn’t to write you love letters whilst I was over here. He couldn’t call this one a love letter, could he-not reasonably? But it kind of feels as if it was going to turn into one, so I should think I had better stop.
Corinna
If I hadn’t promised Poppa, I would send you my love and a lot of kisses.
Dear Peter, I send you my kind regards. I will tell Poppa I sent them.
XXI
Isobel Tarrant came down through the woods walking slowly. In a few minutes she would be clear of the trees. She walked more slowly still. The path was narrow, and on either side of it were the straight black trunks of pine trees frosted with gray-green lichen. It was a bright, clear morning. The sky above the pine trees was a very pale blue. The patches of sunlight which flecked the path were a very pale gold. It was still in the wood.
Isobel stood for a moment and let the stillness in. She had wept until she could weep no more; but now the pain that had made her weep had ceased. She felt as if her tears had washed it away and left an empty place where it had been. She shrank piteously from this emptiness. It was as if she had had Car in her heart all these years, and as if now he had gone and there was only an empty place. It would not have been so hard to bear if she had not allowed herself to hope. For three years she had not hoped. She had lived one day at a time and kept her eyes from the future. And then all at once the future had been irradiated with hope. Car was to come to Linwood to meet his uncle-to step back into his old place-to come back to them. She did not say he was coming back to her, but the thought lay warm at her heart. And then in a flash the radiance had gone and the dark closed down. Car wouldn’t come.
Isobel looked back to the moment at breakfast when Miss Willy had opened his letter and announced that he wouldn’t come. It didn’t hurt now, because nothing hurt any more; but in that moment it had hurt so much that she did not know how she had kept herself from crying out. It didn’t hurt now, because nothing hurt any more; there was only an emptiness and blackness where the pain had been. And she must come down out of the woods, and go back to lunch and hear Miss Willy say all over again the things which she had said at breakfast, and would say again at tea.
The stillness of the woods was broken by the sound of footsteps. Isobel began to walk on at once and quickly. She had nothing that she could say to any one at this moment. She felt a sort of faint panic at the thought of voice and words echoing in this emptiness. But she had not heard the footsteps soon enough. Mr. Carthew had almost caught her up, and when she began to walk on, he called after her:
“Isobel-wait a minute! Where are you off to in such a hurry, young woman?”
He was about the last person she would have chosen to meet, but there was no help for it. When you have been properly brought up, certain things become automatic. Isobel turned at once and, turning, smiled with her usual sweetness. She did not consciously make an effort. She smiled and waited for Mr. Carthew.
“Well, where are you off to?” he said again.
“Home to lunch.”
“Well, there’s no hurry about that. Miss Willy’s never been in time for a meal in her life-what? I can’t think how she ever gets a cook. I know she doesn’t keep ’em-she told me herself the other day she’d had thirteen since Christmas. And what beats me
is, how does she get ’em-what? How does she get ’em? That’s what I want to know. You wouldn’t think there were so many cooks left in England -that is, you wouldn’t if you listened to the twaddle every one talks about the servant question. And the moral of that is-don’t listen to it. Least listened to, soonest ended-what? Did you ever hear that proverb before?”
Isobel went on smiling. Her lips felt a little stiff, but it was easier than saying anything. You didn’t really have to talk to Mr. Carthew. He liked people who would listen whilst he told long stories about things which couldn’t ever really have been very interesting to anybody, or said what he thought about the government and the condition of agriculture. He liked talking on these subjects to pretty young women who did not answer back or have views of their own.
Isobel prepared herself to listen, but for once in a way he fell silent and walked beside her, flicking at the pine needles with his stick, his broad shoulders stooped, his weather-beaten face wrinkled and puckered, and his bushy eyebrows drawn together in a frown over the small, rather sunken gray eyes.
He looked sideways once or twice at Isobel, and just as she became aware of this, he stopped dead, cleared his throat, and said gruffly,
“I wanted to see you.”
The trees were thinning out to the edge of the wood. A patch of sunlight touched Isobel’s cheek.
“She’s been crying,” said Mr. Carthew to himself. “Bless my soul, she has!”
Isobel stepped back into the shade. She looked faintly startled. Her heart beat a little faster.
He cleared his throat again.
“About that nephew of mine-” he said, and saw the color spring into the pale oval of her face.
“About Car?” Why should any one want to speak to her about Car? Car wouldn’t come-Car didn’t want to come. Why should any one want to speak to her about Car?
Beggar’s Choice Page 12
