by E R Eddison
Glanford walked from the field, bat under his arm, shaking his head mournfully as he undid his batting-gloves. He went straight to the pavilion to put on his blazer, and thence, with little deviation from the direct road, to Mary. ‘I am most frightfully sorry,’ he said, sitting down by her. ‘I did so want to bring you a century for a birthday present.’
‘But it was a marvellous innings,’ she said. ‘Good heavens, “What’s centuries to me or me to centuries?” It was splendid.’
‘Jolly decent of you to say so. I was an ass, though, to get run out.’
Mary’s answering smile was one to smoothe the worst-ruffled feathers; then she resumed her conversation with Lucy Dilstead: ‘You can read them over and over again, just as you can Jane Austen. I suppose it’s because there’s no padding.’
‘I’ve only read Shagpat, so far,’ said Lucy.
‘O that’s different from the rest. But isn’t it delicious? So serious. Comedy’s always ruined, don’t you think, when it’s buffooned? You want to live in it: something you can laugh with, not laugh at.’
‘Mary has gone completely and irretrievably cracked over George Meredith,’ Jim said, joining them.
‘And who’s to blame for that?’ said she. ‘Who put what book into whose hand? and bet what, that who would not be able to understand what-the-what it was all driving at until she had read the first how many chapters how many times over?’
Jim clutched his temples, histrionically distraught. Hugh was not amused. The match proceeded, the score creeping up now very slowly with Margesson’s careful play. General Macnaghten was saying to Mr Romer, ‘No, no, she’s only twenty. It is: yes: quite extraordinary; but being only daughter, you see, and no mother, she’s been doing hostess and so on for her father two years now, here and in London: two London seasons. Makes a lot of difference.’
Down went another wicket: score, a hundred and fifty-three. ‘Now for some fun,’ people said as Tom Appleyard came on the field; but Margesson spoke a winged word in his ear: ‘Look here, old chap: none of the Jessop business. It’s too damned serious now.’ ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Margesson, in perfect style, sent back the last ball of the over. Appleyard obediently blocked and blocked. But in vain. For one of Bremmerdale’s master-creations of innocent outward show and inward guile sneaked round Margesson’s defence and took his leg stump. Nine wickets down: total a hundred and fifty-seven: last man, nine. Hyrnbastwick, in some elation, were throwing high catches round the field while Dilstead, Anmering’s next (and last) man in, walked to the wicket. Margesson said to Tom Appleyard, ‘It’s up to you now, my lad. Let ’em have it, damn slam and all if you like. But, by Jingo, we must pull it off now. Only seven to win.’ Appleyard laughed and rubbed his hands.
There was no more desultory talk: all tense expectancy. ‘If Sir Oliver gets the bowling, that puts the lid on it: never hit a ball yet.’ ‘Why do they play him then?’ ‘Why, you silly ass, because he’s such a thundering good wicket-keeper.’ George Chedisford, about sixteen, home from Winchester because of the measles, maintained a mature self-possession at Lord Anmering’s elbow: ‘I wish my frater – wish my brother was in again, sir. He’d do the trick.’ ‘You watch Mr Appleyard: he’s a hitter.’ By good luck, that ball that had beaten Margesson was last of the over, so that Appleyard, not Dilstead, faced the bowling: Howard once more, a Polyphemus refreshed. His first ball was a yorker, but Appleyard stopped it. The second, Appleyard, all prudent checks abandoned, stepped out and swiped. Boundary: four. Great applaudings: the parson’s children and the two little Rustham boys, with the frenzy of Guelph and Ghibelline, jumped up and down jostling each other. The next ball, a very fierce one, pitched short and rose at the batsman’s head. Appleyard smashed it with a terrific over-hand stroke: four again – ‘Done it!’ ‘Match!’
Then, at the fourth ball, Appleyard slogged, missed, and was caught in the slips. And so amid great merriment, chaff and mutual congratulations, the game came to an end.
‘Come into the Refuge,’ said Jim Scarnside, overtaking Mary as they went in to dress for dinner: ‘just for two twos. I left my humble birthday offering in there, and I want to give it to you.’
‘O, but,’ she said, pausing and looking back, one foot on the threshold of the big French window: ‘I thought it was a bargain, no more birthday presents. I can’t have you spending all those pennies on me.’ Her right hand was lifted to a loose hanger of wistaria bloom, shoulder-high beside the doorway: in her left she carried her hat, which she had taken off walking up from the garden. The slant evening sun kindled so deep a Venetian glory in her hair that every smooth-wound coil, each braid, each fine straying little curl or tendril, had its particular fire-colour, of chestnut, tongued flame, inward glow of the brown-red zircon, burnished copper, realgar, sun-bleached gold: not self-coloured, but all in a shimmer and interchange of hues, as she moved her head or the air stirred them.
‘Twenty pennies precisely,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t call that breaking a bargain. Come. Please.’
‘All right,’ she smiled, and went before him through the small tea-room and its scents of pot-pourri, and through the great skin-strewn hall with its portraits and armour and trophies and old oak and old leather and Persian rugs and huge open fire-place filled at this season with roses and summer greenery, and so by a long soft-carpeted passage to the room they called the Refuge: a cosy sunny room, not belonging to Mary specially or to her father, but to both, and free besides to all dogs (those at least that were allowed in the house) that lived at Blunds, and to all deserving friends and relations. Those parts of the walls that were not masked by bookcases or by pictures showed the pale reddish paper of Morris’s willow pattern; a frieze of his rich dark night-blue design of fruit, with its enrichments of orange, lemon, and pomegranate and their crimson and pallid blooms, ran around below the ceiling. There was a square table with dark green cloth and upon it a silver bowl of roses: writing things on the table and chairs about it, and big easy chairs before the fire-place: a bag of tools (saws, hammers, screw-drivers, pliers and such-like) behind the door, a leather gun-case and fishing-rods in this corner, walking-sticks and hunting-crops in that, a pair of field-glasses on the shelf, some dog-medicines: pipes and cigar-boxes on the mantel-piece: on a bureau a large mahogany musical-box: an early Victorian work-table, a rack full of newspapers, a Cotman above the mantel, an ancient brass-bound chest covered with an oriental rug or foot-cloth of silk: a Swiss cuckoo-clock: a whole red row of Baedekers on one of the bookshelves, yellowbacks on another: Wuthering Heights open on a side-table, Kipling’s Many Inventions open on a chair, and a text of Homer on the top of it: a box of tin soldiers and a small boy’s cricket bat beside them: over there a doll or two and a toy theatre, with a whole mass of woolly monkeys, some in silver-paper armour and holding pins for swords: a cocker spaniel asleep on the hearth-rug, and a little dark grey hairy dog, a kind of Skye terrier with big bat-like ears and of beguiling appearance, asleep in an armchair. There pervaded this room, not to be expelled for all the fresh garden air that came and went through its wide windows and door which opened on the garden, a scent curiously complex and curiously agreeable, as of a savoury stew compounded of this varied apparatus of the humanities. Plainly a Refuge it was, and by no empty right of name: a refuge from tidiness and from all engines, correctitudes, and impositions of the world: in this great household, a little abbey of Thélème, with its sufficient law, ‘Fay ce que vouldras’.
Mary sat on the table while Jim unearthed from somewhere a little parcel and presented it to her, with scissors from the work-table to cut the string. ‘Twenty, you see, for the birthday cake,’ he said, as she emptied out on the green baize a handful of little coloured candles.
‘You are so absurd.’
‘We ought to have the cake,’ he said. ‘No time for it now, though. Look: there are heaps of colours, you see. Do you know what they mean?’
‘How should I know?’
‘I’ll show you’: he began to arrange them side by si
de. ‘They’re highly symbolical. Nine white. Those are your nine first years: tabula rasa, from my point of view. Then, you see, a red one: a red-letter day for you when you first met me.’
‘Was I ten then? I’d forgotten.’
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci, always forgets. Now, look: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink.’
‘The rainbow?’
‘Haven’t I charming thoughts?’
‘Then three goldy ones. Gold dust in them,’ said she, touching them with one finger.
‘Because of the presents,’ Jim said, ‘that I’d like to have given you these last three years, had I been Midas or John D. Rockefeller. Last, you observe: Black. For my own sake, because you’re going to be married.’
‘My dear Jim, what awful nonsense! Who told you so?’
‘That would be telling. Isn’t it true?’ He backed to the fireplace and stood looking at her.
The sudden colour in her cheek, spreading yet lower as she faced him, made her seem (if that could be) yet lovelier. ‘It is not so,’ answered she. ‘Nor it was not so. And, indeed, God forbid it ever should be so.’
‘O dangerous resolution. But I really think it’s uncommon nice of you, Mary. Of course, for myself, I gave up hope long ago; and you’ll have noticed I’ve even given up asking you these last – two years, is it? No, since your last birthday:’ Mary gave a little start. He moved to the window, and stood not to look direct at her: ‘that was really when I decided, better give it up. But it does help my self-esteem to know there’s no one else in the offing,’ he said, lightly as before, playing with the scissors. ‘May I tell people the good news?’
‘Certainly not. Why should you go meddling with my affairs? I think it’s most insolent of you.’
‘Well, I thought you might like me to tell – well, Glanford: just to break the news to the pore fella.’
There was dead silence. He looked round. Mary’s head was turned away: she seemed to be counting the little candles with her finger. Suddenly she stood up: went over to the fire-place. ‘Sheila’s a naughty little thing,’ she said: the form curled up on the chair moved the tip of a feathery tail and, with a pricking and apologetic laying again of bat-like ears, cast up at Mary a most melting glance. ‘Ate a quarter of a pound of butter in the larder this morning; and yet now, what a little jewel she looks: as if butter wouldn’t melt.’ She bent and kissed the little creature between the eyes, a kind of butterfly kiss, then, erect again, confronted Jim.
‘It was infernal cheek on my part,’ he said, ‘to say that. Still: between old friends—’
Mary swept up the candles. ‘I must fly and change.’ Then, over her shoulder from the doorway, where she turned for an instant, tall, light of carriage in her white dress, like a nymph of Artemis: ‘Thanks for a word fitly spoken, mon ami!
IV
LADY MARY SCARNSIDE
THAT something which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary’s mouth peeked at itself in the looking-glass: a private interchange of intelligence between it and its reflection there, not for her to read. She turned from the dressing-table to the window. It was slack-water, and the tide in. Under the sun the surface of the creek was liquid gold. The point, with its coastguard cottage, showed misty in the distance. Landscape and waterscape departed, horizon beyond horizon, to that meeting of earth and heaven which, perhaps because of the so many more and finer gradations of air made visible, seemed far further remote in this beginning of midsummer evening than in the height of day. Mary stood for a minute looking from the window, where the airs stirred with honeysuckle scents and rose scents and salt and pungent scents of the marsh and sea.
Suddenly she moved and came back to the looking-glass. ‘“Then that’s settled, Señorita Maria. I carry you off tonight.” – And that,’ she said aloud, looking at herself with that sideways incisive mocking look that she inherited from her father, ‘was a piece of damned impertinence.’
There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in. O Angier, I’ll ring when I’m ready for you: ten minutes or so.’
‘Yes, my lady. I thought your ladyship would want me to do your hair tonight.’
‘Yes I’ll ring,’ Mary said, giving her maid a smile in the looking-glass. She retired, saying, ‘It’s nearly half past seven, my lady.’
Half past seven. And half past seven this morning. Twelve hours ago. Thrown from her ring, where the sun took it, a rainbow streak of colour appeared on the carpet: her white kitten made a pounce to seize the mysterious dancing presence, now there, now gone. And then, half past seven tomorrow. Always on the go, by the look of it: everything. Nothing stays. She moved her finger, to draw the iridescent phantom again along the carpet and so up the wall, out of reach from velvet paws that pounced. And yet, you can’t believe that. The whole point about a thing like this morning is that it does stay: somewhere it stays. What you want to find out how to get back to it: or forward? for it is forward, too. Or perhaps back and forward don’t belong to it at all: it just is. Perhaps back and forward just aren’t. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
To ride her down like that: if anyone had seen them. ‘Unpardonable,’ Mary said, as she took her seat at the mirror and began to let down her hair. And Tessa is a pretty good little mare: showed him a clean pair of heels for a mile or so. Something in the shadowy backgrounds of the mirror surprisingly assumed a neat little black thoroughbred horse’s face, and shockingly said to Mary: ‘Haven’t I a perfect mouth? to have understood and slowed down the least little bit in the world just at the—’
The north-westerly sun made it hot in the dressing-room. The door was shut between this and her bedroom, to keep that cool for the night: bedroom with windows that opened north and east to let in the mornings. She was in a kind of kimono of pale blue silk after her bath, and now, for this heat, while she sat to brush her hair, she untied the sash, and with a shake of her shoulders, let the soft garment fall open and down about her hips. ‘Carry you off tonight.’ It really was a bit much. The extraordinary coolness of it all, after that dreadful scene they had had at the end of April, when he had turned up five months before his time, and she had said – well, said enough to end it for most men, one would think. And yet now, this morning, after six weeks of obedient absence and silence— She had ridden to hounds often enough; but to be hunted like a hare! True, she had started the thing, in a way, by turning to ride off in the other direction as soon as she saw him. But still. Her bosom rose and fell with the memory of it: as if all the wide universe had suddenly run hunting-mad, and she the quarry: she and poor little Tessa with her flying feet: an excitement like darkness with sudden rollings in it like distant drums; and the trees, the solid ground, the waking buttercups and meadowsweet with the dew on them, the peggy-whitethroat on the thorn, the brier-rose at the edge of the wood, larks trilling invisible in the blue, the very upland newness of the summer air of this birthday morning, all had seemed as if caught up into that frenzy of flight to join in the hunt, multiplying the galloping music of Lessingham’s horse-hooves, now loud, now dim, now loud again, to a hue and cry and a gallop of all these things. And then the coolness of him, after this wild horse-race: the astounding assurance of this proposition, put to her so easily and as if it were the simplest thing in the world: and his having a motorcar, so that they shouldn’t be caught. Most monstrous of all, about the luggage: that he had luggage for her as well, every possible thing she could want, every kind of clothes.
How did he know? Mary laid down her brush and leaned back, staring into her own eyes for a minute in the looking-glass. Then, after a minute, some comical matter stirred in her eyes’ inward corners. ‘How did you know?’ she said, addressing not her own image but the mirrored door over its shoulder, as if somone had come in there and stood in the doorway. Then, with eyes resting on herself again, she said suddenly in herself: ‘This is how I should— If we were to be— If we are to be— But no, my friend. Not to be swept up like – like a bunch of candles.’
She and her looking-glas
s self surveyed one another for a while, coolly, in detail, not looking any more into each other’s eyes nor over each other’s shoulders to the door beyond. At length the looking-glass image said, not audibly, but to Mary’s inward ear: I suppose a man sees it differently. I think I understand, partly, how he might see it: something very delicate, easily hurt, easily broken, but so gentle that you couldn’t bear to. Like a field-mouse or some such: or like a baby. No, for what matters about a baby is what it is going to be; but this – here it is, full-fledged: what it is and what it ought to be, in one: doesn’t want to change: just to be. That is enough for anybody. And its power, what all power ought to be: not to overpower the weak, but overpower the powerful. Really it hasn’t any power: except that it need only lift a finger, and every power there is or ever could be must rise to protect it.
But that isn’t true (said the looking-glass image, going over with musing untroubled eyes the thing before it: chin, throat: gleam of a shoulder betwixt fallen masses of flame-coloured hair: arms whose curves had the motion of swans in them and the swan’s whiteness: breasts of a Greek mould and firmness, dove-like, silver-pure, pointing their rose-flowers in a Greek pride: and those wild delicate little perfections, of the like flame colour, beneath her arms): that isn’t true. And with that (perhaps for two seconds) something happened in the mirror: a two-seconds’ glimpse as of some menace that rushed upwards, like the smoke of some explosion, to yawning immensities bleak, unmeaning, unmindful of the worm that is man; into which void there seemed, for that moment, to be sucked up all comfort of cosy room, home, dear ones, gaiety of youthful blood, the sweet nostalgia of childhood born of the peace of that June evening, its scents, its inwardness and whispered promise: the familiar countryside that made a lap for all these: the sea, island-girdling of England: the kindly natural earth: the very backgrounds and foundations of historic time: sucked up, swallowed, brought to nought. And, naked to this roofless and universal Nothing, she: immeasurably alone, a little feminine living being, and these ‘little decaying beauties of the body’.
