Cluny Brown (14 page)

“But they're to keep us tidy!” protested Cluny.

“Your caps keep you tidy,” retorted Mrs. Maile.

Mr. Syrett, gazing critically at Hilda, observed that on second thought she looked not so much like a pony as like a plum-pudding with holly on top. Hilda, always easily swayed, at once struck her colours; but Cluny sat defiant, with cheeks flaming scarlet as her bow.

“Cluny Brown, go upstairs and put your cap on,” ordered Mrs. Maile.

Cluny set her lips together. She did not quite dare to say, “I won't,” but her expression said it for her.

“She'd better go upstairs and stay there,” said Mr. Syrett.

Cluny instantly rose. It was ten o'clock, a face-saving circumstance welcome to all parties.

“Good night, all,” said Cluny.

She cast an urgent glance at Hilda, but Hilda had just got hold of
Home Chat,
and until she had read the correspondence there was no shifting her. She bent her snoodless noddle over the page, pretending not to see or hear. Cluny stalked out—taking by error not the door to the back way, but that to the main hall. Dignity forbade her to return, and after a moment's hesitation she proceeded defiantly up the broad shallow treads of the great staircase. She hoped she wouldn't meet any one, but didn't much care if she did; and this was lucky, for there on the landing stood Mr. Belinski.

He was standing motionless, as though he had been watching her come up, and Cluny (in a mood to anticipate criticism) prepared to meet some comment on her illicit presence. His first words, however, were unexpected.

“Surely it is the male bird,” remarked Mr. Belinski, “who changes plumage?”

Cluny stopped short and glared at him.

“What d'you mean by that?” she snapped.

“In the spring, in the season of courtship, the male bird produces finer feathers, in order to attract the hen. Have you never seen a pigeon?”

“Are you referring to anything to do with me?” asked Cluny coldly.

“I refer to your very becoming headdress. You should wear it all the year round. How is Mr. Wilson?” asked this odious man.

“Quite well, thank you.”

“I hope he appreciated your poetic
tour de force
.”

“I don't know what a
tour de force
is.”

“Any unusual enterprise, frequently undertaken with the object of arousing admiration, or love. But if he just wants to make you recite, he might as well buy a parrot.”

Cluny pushed past him—she had to, for he would not move—and swept along the corridor with an air of icy disdain. Or such was her intention; but when she reached her room, and looked at herself in the glass, and saw her flushed face and eyes big with tears, misgiving overcame her. She thought she looked just like a jugged hare.

“Who do you think you are?” demanded Cluny of her reflection; and pulled off her bright adornment and threw it on the floor.

But before getting into bed she picked it up again. It hadn't been bought, after all, for the benefit of Mrs. Maile, or Syrett, or the Professor. Burrowing her head into the pillow, Cluny summoned up a kinder face than any of theirs—a face lined and resolute, sober, inapt to smile, but neither mocking nor severe.

II

Fortunate Cluny, to have such a face to turn to in distress! Fortunate Cluny, in the volatility of her spirits! She was never down for long. Had she been drowning, she would have come up not three times, but nine. (Like the black cat Mr. Belinski once called her.) Andrew in London, with a greater trouble to bear, was also far less resilient. If he stayed in town a week longer it was without enjoyment, and chiefly for the purpose of showing Betty Cream how little her refusal had affected him.

He did this by ringing her up and asking her to lunch or dinner at very short notice, and then ringing off again almost before she had time to explain a previous engagement—or even time to accept. On the one occasion when Betty rang up him, he perversely assumed she wanted John Frewen, who without the least pride grabbed the receiver and the consequent privilege of escorting Betty to a movie. Andrew met them after it (as though by chance) and they all had supper together. If the company of two rejected suitors had any effect on Betty, she did not show it; practically every young man she went out with had proposed to her at one time or another, and she never let it make any difference. (This attitude, sometimes known as having your cake and eating it, occasionally drew unkind comment from young women.) Betty tucked into creamed haddock and contributed her usual carefree observations with the greatest friendliness; John Frewen basked in her mere presence; but Andrew was so struck by the hollowness of life in general, that the next day he went home.

Leaving his bags at the station, he walked the six miles to Friars Carmel. His spirits were now low but calm, for he had come to a decision: he had decided to put Betty finally out of his mind. She was incurably frivolous, and incurably shallow; without setting up to be anything special himself, Andrew could not but see that she was unworthy of him. The only wonder was that he had ever given her a serious thought. “I suppose every man makes a fool of himself once,” reflected Andrew—perhaps optimistically; and at least he had had the excuse of extreme youth. When he first saw Betty, at a May Week Ball, he had been no more than twenty: one ages a great deal between twenty and twenty-tliree. Moreover, she had been wearing a white frock, and Betty in white was an admitted knock-out. The second time, on the river, she wore a floppy sort of hat, which undeniably suited her. His infatuation had been perfectly natural, and the fact that it had lasted three years was a tribute rather to his own character than to hers. He had thought seriously of her, in fact, because his was a serious mind.

Serious and calm, therefore, drained of all passion, Andrew reached Friars Carmel and met his mother in the hall. Lady Carmel was carrying a large china swan, which she had just unearthed from the back of a cupboard, and which she proposed to fill with wild cherry, if it did not leak. She set it down in order to embrace her son, and as Andrew glanced at it over her shoulder a wry notion struck him: that there, aptly materialized, was his own emotional lot. For some moments he did not hear a word his mother said: he was too overwhelmed by what was practically a portent. The hard white china mimicking soft plumage, the rigid pinions that would never answer to a breeze, the hollow body and moveless eye—the whole a mere simulacrum of something lovely and alive: such would his own life be. Andrew suddenly saw himself, a very old man without a heart, doddering around like a character in one of Chekhov's plays. Or possibly Ibsen's.

“Andrew!” repeated Lady Carmel. “Did you have a nice time?”

“Splendid,” said Andrew.

“How is John?”

“John's splendid.”

“I suppose you didn't see Cynthia Duff-Graham?”

“Is she in town?”

“Well, she was, dear, but only for two days, on her way to visit in Kent. So the Colonel's all alone, but I shall ask him to lunch anyway, and then he'll ask us back. That's two things,” said Lady Carmel. “If the weather warms we might have a picnic—”

“Darling,” said Andrew, “what on earth are you talking about?”

“About the week after next, dear. There didn't seem time to get up a proper house-party, but I've asked Elizabeth Cream.”

Andrew sat down on the chest beside the swan. He felt as though he had received a sudden blow, below the belt. The monstrous news shattered at a stroke all his hardly won peace of mind. (The china swan in smithereens.) It upset all his calculations. And then another thought, or blow, struck him: when had the invitation been sent?

“Mother, when did you ask her?”

“Soon after you'd left, dear.”

Andrew made a hasty calculation. Between his arrival in London and the night of his proposing just a week had elapsed. It was possible, it was probable, that Betty had even then received the invitation. What was not probable, knowing her habits, was that she had even yet replied to it. But he had to know.

“I don't suppose you've heard from her?”

“Yes, dear, I have—though only just.” Lady Carmel smiled indulgently. “I heard from her yesterday.”

“Do you mean she's
coming?
”

“But that's what I'm telling you, dear! She's coming next Friday week!”

Andrew was dumbfounded. The facts, it seemed, were beyond dispute; they were only incredible. Only the night before he had bidden Betty farewell—not formally, of course, not sentimentally, but in so many words. “I'm going back to Friars,” he had told her, “I don't suppose I'll be seeing you for some time.” And Betty had smiled. She hadn't actually said anything, he remembered, in either agreement or denial—which didn't alter the deceitfulness of her conduct. The deceitfulness of it! To stand there smiling, letting him say good-bye to her, when all the time she knew that within a couple of weeks they would be under the same roof! What the devil was the meaning of it? Or was there no meaning at all, beyond sheer mischief-making and an innate love of devious ways? Considering Betty's character as a whole, Andrew decided that this was probably the correct answer.

His eye lighted upon the swan; but it no longer reminded him of his own hollow life. It reminded him of Leda, who had fallen for a bird, of Helen, who had brought down the towers of Troy. He thought that Betty belonged to the same race.

“I'm sorry, Mother,” he said aloud, “but I'm afraid I shan't be here.”

“You won't be here!” Lady Carmel stared at him. “But, my dear boy—”

“I've got to go up to town again. I've a lot to do.”

For a moment Lady Carmel paused; then, as once before, made her unanswerable point.

“But I have invited her.”

“My being in town needn't stop her coming.”

“It would look extremely rude,” said Lady Carmel firmly. “She is invited as your friend. I know you are very worried about the fate of the country, Andrew—but that is no reason for losing your manners.”

Andrew looked at the china swan, and wished he could wring its neck.

Chapter 14

I

Whenever Andrew returned to Friars Carmel, after however brief an absence, he had always to struggle against a rather disturbing sensation. He could describe it only as Lord-of-the-Manorishness. Convinced that he felt more at home in Bloomsbury; frequently upsetting his mother by saying the whole place ought to be turned into a guest-house for miners—Andrew nevertheless felt a strong desire that Friars Carmel should remain exactly as it was. (He disliked even the most trifling changes: once when Lady Carmel altered the arrangement of the drawing-room, Andrew walked round it all evening like an uneasy dog, refusing to settle; until Lady Carmel intuitively decided that she liked the old arrangement best.) The simple explanation, that he had a lot of his father in him, disturbed Andrew even more: much as he respected many of Sir Henry's qualities, Andrew could not but realize that in the modern world Sir Henry was as much a survival as the platypus—and that in fact only inherited property (Friars Carmel) enabled him to survive at all. Here Andrew did his father an injustice: simple, willing and conscientious, Sir Henry would have made a happy carpenter; but it was quite true that he had gone through life without ever realizing the narrowness of his pleasant path. Andrew realized it very clearly; he saw, for himself, that path narrow into nothingness; and if the day of the squire were over—what was he, Andrew, doing with Lord-of-the-Manorish feelings?

They were a sort of moral appendix. He was suffering from a moral appendicitis.

He was also suffering from unrequited love, and a growing conviction that the object of it was coming to Friars Carmel from purely sadistic motives.

Andrew, in short, was in a mood where he had to discuss himself with some one, and the obvious person was the Professor. (He did not know it, but it was as Lord of the Manor that he had brought Belinski to Friars Carmel: as his grandfather had domiciled a stray Nihilist, and his great-grandfather a French prisoner.) The morning after his return he wandered off to the stables to see whether Belinski was working, and found him in the yard watching Sir Henry mount Golden Boy.

Sir Henry's promenades on horseback were now few and far between, partly because he resented his diminished powers, partly because he felt it so deuced hard to leave Ernest Beer behind. (The last time hounds met in the neighbourhood it was said that the two old men had gone out to look at them ride-and-tie, and no one who knew Sir Henry disbelieved the story.) He had to mount now from a block, the groom standing watchful at the horse's head; Sir Henry heaved up his stiff bulk and came down in the saddle light as a lad.

“Sorry I can't mount ye,” he said to Belinski. “You should ha' been here ten years ago.”

Ernest Beer muttered something under his breath and went to open the yard gate. Sir Henry gathered up his reins. They folded like ribbons; every inch of leather, saddle, girths, head harness, gleamed from years of rubbing; on Golden Boy's quarters light rippled like watered silk.

“You're in good trim, sir,” said Andrew.

Sir Henry grunted, and took Golden Boy through the gate and turned him into the lane without a break in the smooth rhythm of his pace. The two young men followed and ranged alongside; they had no difficulty in keeping up.

“I, don't like leaving old Ernest,” complained Sir Henry, as the gate shut behind him. “One time we were out together four days a week. What d'you think of
that,
Professor?”

He flicked up with his whip towards a great barn, now empty since he had ceased to farm in the slump after 1918. Belinski looked at it seriously.

“It is magnificent. I have never seen a thatched roof on so large a building.”

“Wheat-straw,” said Sir Henry proudly. “Grew it myself, sold the grain. That's the sort of thing this lad ought to be occupying himself with.”