Yours to Command

by Mary Burchell

  And the only solution would be for her to leave Fernhurst. If not immediately, and that seemed impossible, then as soon as she decently could. At the end of the term at any rate.

  But the end of term was a long way off. At present the whole length of term stretched before her, every day and every week of which, she now felt, would be a martyrdom. It would have been bad enough to know him indifferent. But to have to see him as the fiancé—and, later, the husband of someone she knew. That was not to be borne.

  Except that one could bear anything if one had to.

  She made her escape as soon as she gracefully could, pleading non-existent duties in Park House. But as soon as she found herself in the outer air again, she knew that she could not go back to her own quarters to sit there and think and think.

  She walked without fixed purpose in the general direction of the main gate. And presently a small figure passed her and said, with perky friendliness, “Good evening, Matron.”

  “Why, hello, Edward.” She stopped and smiled down mechanically at young Manning. “How’s the head?”

  “All right now, thank you Matron. Some whacking great bruises came up on my—well, on other places,” explained Edward delicately. “But I’m almost well now. Sister Matron says I’m to have one more night in the San. and then I really start school tomorrow.”

  “I’m so glad,” Sydney said kindly. “I must write to your uncle and tell him you’re well again. I promised to do so.”

  “And would you tell him about Alistair too, please, Matron?” Edward said, peering earnestly at her through the dusk.

  “Alistair?”

  “He’s my young brother,” explained Edward, with a curious mixture of pride and deprecation. “He’s five and he’s over in the Prep. Quite a nice kid.”

  “I’ll go and see him now,” Sydney promised.

  “Oh, thank you, Matron!” Edward said, and went on his way to the San.

  Sydney went out of the grounds by the main gate. The Prep., which was housed in a large, light, much more modern building than Fernhurst itself, was situated just across the road. About thirty boarders resided there, most of them children of parents stationed abroad, and the Matron of the Prep, was a stout, middle-aged motherly sort of woman, called Mrs. Grainger.

  She greeted Sydney cheerfully and said she would probably find Alistair having his knees scrubbed, since he and half a dozen others had been discovered playing Indians along the muddy path leading to the shrubbery.

  So Sydney went into the long, light wash-room, where, sure enough, about eight little boys were either ecstatically dabbling their hands in grimy suds, or sitting on a bench having their knees scrubbed by Assistant Matron. All looked that particular mixture of devil and angel which is peculiar to little boys who have been enjoying themselves illicitly.

  “Hello,” said the nearest one companionably, on sighting Sydney.

  “Hello,” she replied. “Which of you is Alistair?”

  “I’m Alistair,” announced a well-fed-looking angel (not at all like Edward) who was sitting on the bench, wriggling his bare toes and contemplating them with an expression of fascinated interest.

  “Shall I do his knees?” enquired Sydney of Assistant Matron, who seemed a trifle hot and flurried.

  “Oh, thank you, Matron, if you don’t mind. It’s only what you might call first aid repairs. If I’d had my way, I’d have popped them straight into their baths and then into bed,” Assistant Matron declared.

  “But then we’d have missed our supper,” said Alistair in an unexpectedly deep voice.

  “And that would have been a tragedy in your case,” retorted Assistant Matron rather tartly, as Sydney dropped down before Alistair and began to remove the first layer of mud from his fat knees.

  He transferred his absorbed gaze from his toes to Sydney.

  “I like to have you scrub my knees,” he said graciously.

  “Do you?” Sydney smiled. “Just as a cat likes to be rubbed under its chin?”

  “I don’t like to be rubbed under my chin,” Alistair told her gravely. “But then I’m not a cat. I like to have you scrub my knees because you’re pretty, and I pretend you’re my slave.”

  “I see,” said Sydney, resisting an insane desire to kiss him “Shall I tell your uncle, when I write to him, that you pretend I’m your slave?”

  “Are you going to write to Uncle Lucas?”

  “Yes.”

  “About me?”

  “And Edward, yes. What shall I tell him from you?” Sydney asked.

  Alistair gave this his most serious consideration.

  “You can tell him I’m not going to be an actor, after all,” he said at last. “I’m going to be a postman. But only for letters,” he added languidly. “Parcels are too heavy.”

  “All right. But perhaps your uncle will be disappointed about your not wanting to be an actor. He’s a very famous actor himself, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t think he’s a good actor,” stated Alistair pontifically. “I fell asleep when they took me to see him act. But I liked the circus.

  “I might go into a circus if I don’t become a postman,” he went on thoughtfully.

  “Well, it’s been circus enough with the lot of you this afternoon,” declared Assistant Matron. “Now—are you all cleaned up?”

  “Yes, Matron,” chorused three grubby little boys who had been attending not very successfully to their own ablutions. But after some further attention, even they were passed as fit once more, and Assistant Matron prepared to hustle them all off to their early supper.

  “Good-bye, then.” Sydney patted Alistair’s round cheek. “I’ll be sure to tell your uncle about your being a postman.” And then she went away, faintly comforted by the scene.

  But as soon as she emerged from the drive which led to the Prep., she was presented with a sight which jerked her back into painful awareness of how cruelly her world had changed. For outside the main gate of Fernhurst stood a chauffeur-driven car, and Hugh, bare-headed and unmistakable in the lamp-light, was just handing someone into it with an attentive and solicitous air.

  It was not difficult to guess who this was and, even as Sydney hesitated, wondering how to retreat into concealment without being melodramatic, she saw him step back and wave his hand. The car drove away and, like people in a stage set, Hugh and she were left facing each other, alone, and with only the width of the road between them.

  Retreat now was quite impossible. So, gathering all her self-control, Sydney did the only thing left to her. She crossed the road quite calmly and joined him, knowing that, for the distance from the main gate to Park House at least, she would have to maintain some sort of impersonal conversation.

  At least he accepted the situation with the same outward calm as herself. And, as they turned back into the grounds together, he said, almost formally, “It was a great surprise to find you here at Fernhurst.”

  “It must have been. Not a very—happy surprise, I’m afraid,” she added, before she could stop herself. “I’m so sorry about it. If I’d had any idea that it was you who were coming here as the new Head, I should have left, of course.”

  “Nonsense!” he exclaimed, and the tone was almost violent. “Surely we don’t have to carry over such a degree of bad feeling from the past?”

  “Bad feeling? Oh, no—no, I didn’t mean that at all.” She was suddenly passionately anxious that he should not suppose any personal rancour lingered-in her mind. “That wasn’t meant—resentfully. Only—only it must all be so embarrassing for you and—”

  “Not at all,” he assured her, again in that unfamiliarly formal tone. “Why should it be?”

  “Oh, Hugh—” But she had the impression that he stiffened at that, and she knew all at once that his control was a thin and brittle thing, after all. “I thought,” she said, stumbling once more into hasty speech because silence was even worse, “I thought that, now you’re engaged to Marcia—” She stopped. “How long have you been engaged, by the way?”
she asked, and this time her voice was almost formal.

  There was the very slightest pause. Then he said, “A week.”

  “A—a week! Then it’s quite—recent?”

  “The actual engagement, yes. But we’ve known each other a long time, as you know.”

  “Yes, of course, of course.”

  “Everyone seemed to like Marcia.” It was he who now seemed to think that almost any conversation was better than a pregnant silence. “I’m glad. In a school like this the Head’s wife counts for a good deal.”

  “Yes,” Sydney agreed mechanically. “It’s better for a Headmaster to be married.”

  “Are you suggesting that’s why I became engaged?” he enquired drily.

  “No, Hugh. Certainly not. I wasn’t suggesting anything. I hope,” she said bravely, “that you and Marcia will be very happy. And I’m sure she’ll make a splendid Headmaster’s wife. I—I leave you here. This is the entrance to Park House.”

  He started to say good night, once more very much the Head of Fernhurst. Then suddenly his manner and his voice changed and, just as she was turning away, he exclaimed almost urgently, “Sydney—just one moment—”

  She turned once more, in some surprise, and looked at him in the light that streamed from Mr. Dingley’s study.

  “What is it?”

  “Your—being here ... Does that mean that you left home in the end? That the family are no longer your—your chief concern?”

  “I wasn’t needed any more,” she said flatly. “Didn’t you know? Father married again. Six months after we—parted.”

  The light was quite clear here, and so she saw the unmistakable look of consternation which passed over his face.

  “My God,” he said very quietly, “why didn’t you let me know?” And she thought the words had escaped him almost without his own knowledge.

  “I couldn’t, Hugh,” she said quietly. “Time goes on—gulfs widen—and there’s no way back.”

  A sort of appalled silence hung between them for a moment. Then he said rather tonelessly, “Of course. You’re right. There’s never a way back.”

  Then he turned and walked away into the darkness without another word.

  Shaken to the core, Sydney went into the house. It was, she told herself, wrong to attach too much importance to something said in a moment of nostalgic emotion. The fact of his engagement to Marcia was the one real, inescapable thing.

  She hung up her coat and went to see that everything was in order for the boys’ supper. And immediately the maddening, insistent trivialities of ordinary life claimed her.

  She looked in at the dormitories to see that all was in order, did a little salutory but not too interfering tidying, and then went to her own rooms to make out some beginning-of-term returns. In about an hour she would have to go down to have dinner with the Dingleys in their private dining-room, and hear Hugh discussed, and probably Marcia too, as though neither of them meant anything to her.

  “But I must get used to it,” she told herself. “I must get used to it. This is only the beginning.”

  Doggedly she completed her returns, trying not to let Hugh’s strong, infinitely beloved face come between her and the pages.

  He was engaged to Marcia. She had been presented to all the staff as his future wife. Even if he wanted to go back ... But why should Sydney suppose that he did? Why assume that Hugh was marrying Marcia for less than love?

  What he had said—about there never being a way back—probably had no more significance than any other generalisation, voiced at a moment of nostalgic recollection. It was too easy, when one was imaginative and unhappy, to read significant meanings into perfectly ordinary remarks.

  “He’s going to marry Marcia, and everyone knows it. That’s the one thing I must remember,” Sydney told herself. Then she went down to dinner with the Dingleys and young Mr. Corbin, the junior history master, who also lived at Park House.

  “A very satisfactory afternoon,” remarked Mr. Dingley, which was his way of saying that the new Head looked like being just the sort of fellow they had all hoped for.

  “She’s nice too,” his wife added elliptically. “Dresses well but not too well, and made herself very friendly. What a coincidence that you should already know her, Matron.”

  “Yes.” Sydney smiled creditably. “She and her mother lived for some while in my home town. It was there,” she added steadily, "that I met Mr. Lulworth.”

  “You didn’t mention that you knew him when I first told you about his coming,” Mrs. Dingley pointed out a little curiously.

  “I didn’t really—recall him immediately,” Sydney said quickly, unable to think of any other way out of the difficulty on the spur of the moment.

  “How funny,” said Mrs. Dingley, surprised but satisfied. “I shouldn’t have thought he was a man who was easy to forget.”

  Not easy to forget!

  “I had quite a chat with Miss Downing,” put in Mr. Corbin. “She lives in London now, doesn’t she?”

  “Does she?” Sydney strove not very successfully to look interested. “I had lost sign of her for some time.”

  “Yes, she lives with her mother still, but in a flat in St. John’s Wood,” explained Mr. Corbin, pleased to have the distinction of knowing so much about at least one of the people under discussion. “Oddly enough, as she was telling me, it’s next door to Lucas Manning whose two kids are here. At least, they’re his wards, aren’t they; not his own children?”

  Immediately after dinner Sydney escaped to her own quarters. She had two really charming rooms on the first floor, a smallish bedroom and a good-sized sitting-room with windows along two sides. Now the curtains were drawn against the outside darkness and, with a bright coal fire leaping in the grate, the place looked cosy and home-like.

  “I shall hate leaving here,” Sydney thought, reviewing again what she had supposed was her irrevocable determination to go as soon as she conveniently could. “And yet, if I stayed—”

  She wondered if one could ever grow used to the sort of misery which oppressed her at the moment, or whether, having endured one term of it, she would find it easier to go on and somehow resign herself to a life which included a happily married Hugh almost on her doorstep.

  “I can’t tell. I must just go on and tackle the problems of each day as it comes,” Sydney told herself. “I need not make any big decisions yet. I must just go on.”

  And, in determined pursuit of this idea, she looked round for the next task ready to her hand. There was the letter to Lucas Manning, of course. She had promised him good news of Edward as soon as it was available. It would be better to write it this evening while the visit to Alistair was fresh in her mind.

  Sydney got out her writing-case, abstracted a sheet of letter-paper and began, “Dear Mr. Manning—”

  To her surprise, she found it not at all difficult to go on. At that moment she hardly thought of him as a celebrated stage figure, completely outside her usual orbit, but just as the guardian of Edward and Alistair who, as he himself had said, probably worried about them rather more than he would have done if they had been his own children.

  She told him of Edward’s complete recovery, and how she just made the acquaintance of Alistair.

  “I lost my heart to him,” she admitted, “although I hope and think I concealed the fact with matronly objectivity. He asked me to break it to you that he intends to be a postman, having a rather poor opinion of the stage after all, except in so far as one may regard the circus as a stage.

  “I may add that he tells me that he pretends to himself that I am his slave and likes to have me scrub his knees.”

  When she read the completed letter through, Sydney was struck by its somewhat unprofessional tone. She could not really imagine any of the other matrons writing to any of the other parents or guardians in these terms. On the other hand, Lucas Manning had not seemed altogether the kind of person to expect a strictly professional report. His own conversation, come to that, had had its
unconventional side.

  In the end, Sydney decided to send the letter as it was. But some sort of shyness held her back from mentioning the tickets for Yours to Command. She was anxious not to have him think that the friendly, easy tone of her letter betokened any intention of imposing upon him.

  However, it seemed that Lucas Manning was a man of his word. For, by return of post, back came a letter, typed on the somewhat flamboyantly headed letter-paper of the Olympic Theatre.

  “Dear Miss Dayne,” it said, “Mr. Manning asks me to thank you very much for your kind report on his two nephews, which he greatly enjoyed.

  “He would also like to remind you that, if you would care to have them, there will be two tickets available for you at any performance you like to choose. Perhaps you will be good enough to let me know when you have chosen a date, and I will arrange for two tickets to be left in your name at the box office.”

  The letter was signed — “C. L. Roberts (Secretary).”

  It was impossible not to be gratified, even flattered, by this attention. And Sydney, who was suffering badly in her pride as well as her heart over Hugh’s defection, felt a warm rush of gratitude towards Lucas Manning for making her feel of at least some small account once more.

  To visit town during term-time was not easy, she knew. The usual dearth of late trains put an evening performance out of the question, and on ordinary days of the week matrons were not expected to be absent all day, which was what would virtually be necessary. However, by an intelligent system of co-operation between the various houses, it was usually possible to have one Saturday in three free. It so happened that Sydney’s first free Saturday came very early in the term and was due at the end of the first complete week. So, hoping that she would not seem to be snatching at the offer too precipitately, she wrote back to C. L. Roberts (Secretary) saying she would very much appreciate a ticket for the next Saturday matinee, but that two tickets would be unnecessary as she knew hardly anyone in London, and no one who could share the afternoon with her.

  A brief reply duly informed her that the required ticket would be awaiting her at the box office. And from this single incident Sydney drew the sole consolation open to her during that long first week, when daily and hourly she knew that Hugh was, in fact, within a few hundred yards of her, but in everything that really mattered, a thousand miles away.