Sunflower (18 page)

For Francis Pitt was doing it too. He was returning these false gestures in their own kind with adeptness, without repugnance. She shivered. It was as if behind her she had heard a whistling, a crazy whistling, that warned her that the enterprise on which she had come out was not safe.

A feeling of resistant doggedness came on her. She compressed her lips and to shift her thoughts she turned her head away from the two men. Her eyes fell on the girl in the armchair, who was pressing a little handkerchief against her lips and looking as if, though she was so sulky that she did not want to call anything by its right name, she would soon have to admit that she was feeling sick. Sunflower sent an imploring glance at Francis Pitt and found his eyes just shifting from her face. With deliberate, canny, good humour he said, ‘But true friend as you’ve been to me, Jack, I refuse to take on the burden of all your friendships. I see no reason at all why I should have your friend Canterton parked in my hall!’

The pleasantness was suddenly sponged off Murphy’s face. ‘And what’s wrong with Canterton?’

‘God knows, God knows!’ chuckled Francis Pitt. ‘Something that cost about twenty-seven shillings a bottle, I expect. Lanson ’11, I should think, if he’s been in your company for some hours. Anyway, Jack, it’s time you took him out of my hall.’

Drunkenness was at last dissolving the iron will’s determination to be currying. ‘I’d like to know since when Canterton stopped being good enough for you! Let me tell you he’s my friend, and I am loyal to my friends …’

Francis Pitt swung round so that his back was turned to Essington and Sunflower, but they could see from the thrust of his head and shoulders that he was ramming a steady stare into the other’s flushed, brawling face as he might have rammed a revolver muzzle. After a second he chuckled again, shifted his weight to one foot and said easily, ‘Yes, yes, I know well that Canterton’s a grand fellow, but just at the moment he seems to me not so good as I’ve seen him. So take him home, take him home.’

‘Sure, I’ll do that,’ responded Sir John, suddenly genial. ‘And I’m sorry it’s happened like this. ‘Tis his sense of the responsibilities that weigh too heavy on him at times and then he just helps himself over the stile, that’s what it is, he just helps himself over the stile. Let’s not forget that with all his weakness he’s a great man, a great man.’

‘Hurry along, Jack,’ said Francis Pitt, firmly. ‘The morals of my butler and my footman are going down by inches every time your friend snores.’

Sir John shook hands exhaustively with Essington, who emitted a faint, distasteful, mewing sound. ‘It’s been one of the best days of my life, and mind you I mean what I say and am no flatterer, that I first met the man whom by and large I admire as much as any man who’s alive today.’ With an air of having been brought up to behave politely to ladies when he was young and never having forgotten it, he was careful to reassume an expression of urgent concupiscence when saying goodbye to Sunflower. Then he called, ‘Come on, Billie!’ in a tone that dreadfully expressed the minimum to which the relationship between father and child could be cut down. There was a sort of loyalty in it, as if the grizzled wolf would fight for his cub against the rest of the pack, a sort of kindness, as if he would let her bury her fangs in one flank of the carcase of his kill; and there was nothing more. With such late human inventions as her honour he would not concern himself.

The girl stood up. The stubborn little golden moon of her face was preternaturally blank and stolid, and her body swayed to and fro like an inverted pendulum above her pony-like stance. She said contentiously to nobody, ‘I’m all right.’ They all, except her father, who was walking with a jockey’s springy tread to the door, watched her in agony. It seemed as if at any moment she would fall forward on the floor. Sunflower heard the breath hiss through Francis Pitt’s teeth as he moved forward to the rescue. He must be feeling awful. If you had these people carrying on like this in your house you would want to send everything away to the cleaners, they were so sort of dirty. And it was so dreadful for him that it had happened when he had got visitors, and one of them was Essington, whom he respected and would want to have everything nice for. She remembered how poor little Mummie had cried after she had the insurance manager’s wife who lived at the big house at the corner in to tea and Aunt Emma had come in in the middle smelling of whisky and asking riddles. It was lovely of Francis Pitt to be so patient with the girl, to take her arm so gently and say so kindly as he led her out of the room, ‘You must come some day soon and tell me what you think of the new hard court.’ And he looked over his shoulder with a most apologetic air when he passed Sir John, who had paused at the open door to shout, ‘And I shall expect you and Miss Fassendyll at me party next Wednesday. Number one hundred Carlton House Terrace! ‘Tis slightly larger than the other houses in the Terrace. I’m giving this party for the Rajah of Kuda Tala, who’s a very old friend of mine, and we’re going to have a grand time—I’m having the Embassy band to dance to and Tetrazzini and Pachmann and Chaliapin and Nora Bayes for a spot of music, and me secretary—Pearl La Salle—ah, she’s a fine woman—’ he waved a hand at Sunflower as if to explain what he meant, ‘she’s thought out a colossal scheme of floral decoration! There’s going to be nothing on our tables but the best champagne and nothing on the walls but the finest orchids! And in my house, let me tell you, we allow a magnum of champagne for each person! So goodbye to you till then! From now on, Lord Essington and Miss Fassendyll, I count you as among my friends!’

‘Oh, too good of you!’ wailed Essington; and at last Francis’s short bearish arm came round the door, plucked Sir John by the coat sleeve and turned the handle.

In the sudden peace Sunflower and Essington drew close together and slipped their hands into each other’s. They were both breathing deeply, as if they had been involved in a brawl.

‘Say what you like, it’s worse for a woman to get drunk than a man.’ She shuddered. Supposing it had been she whom Francis Pitt had seen flushed and staggering … She went on gravely, ‘I really oughtn’t to touch anything at all. You know, Ess, I had an aunt who used to take a drop too much, I did tell you that before we began.’

‘My dear, sweet, clean little Sunflower, I don’t think you need to be frightened,’ he said; and stopped to give her a tender kiss. ‘You don’t belong to the same breed of animal as Miss Billie, and the things that happen to her won’t happen to you. And don’t worry your dear muddled head about Aunt Emma. All this talk about heredity in these matters is bunkum. If Aunt Emma hadn’t lived in a dreary little warren like Chiswick—’

‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad,’ she murmured. ‘It wasn’t hardly ever so bad as this …’

‘—she probably wouldn’t have had to get the colour and romance she wanted out of the whisky bottle. But these people! These people! Sunflower, that man’s a thief. He’s robbed decent people all over the world. There are men and women living on crusts in garrets because of his knaveries. And he spends his loot on this guzzling and swilling, this belching and reeling—’

‘Wasn’t it dreadful for poor Mr Pitt!’

‘But why does he have such people in his house? If he’s got friends like these it isn’t any sort of place for us. I wish we hadn’t come. You didn’t specially want to come, did you?’ He looked at her plaintively and searchingly. ‘You didn’t specially want to come, did you, Sunflower?’

She hesitated. ‘I did … rather. I … liked the look of Miss Pitt.’

‘Yes, yes!’ he assented heartily. ‘You two did seem to get on very well together, I remember noticing that. I dare say you’ll be able to pull off quite a jolly friendship with—’

‘Also,’ she added, ‘you wanted to see Mr Hurrell.’

‘Yes, of course, of course, that was really why we came. I wish to God he’d turn up.’ He looked at his watch and gave it an irritable shake, as he always did; for whatever hour it might be, he always wished it different. ‘Well, I don’t know that I particularly want to see him after all. I learned at Versailles that he isn’t as scrupulous as I am, but he’s even less scrupulous than I thought if he can bear to come here and be smacked and elbowed by the Hiccuping Wing of the Tory Party.’

Now that he was not standing right beside her she began to think of Francis Pitt’s face as it had looked when he first came into the room. After a moment she cried out to Essington, though he was still walking about speaking angrily of politics. ‘Who can it be that’s ill? It must be someone that he’s very fond of, he looked so awful. Who can it be?’

He said acrimoniously, ‘And in any case Hurrell was one of the cabinet who gave this rogue his baronetcy. Sunflower, it can’t be borne! Of course honours have always been bought—both parties have sold them by the score, by the hundreds!—but never till now to men who could not turn up at the accolade without special permission from the Governor of Portland Jail! That verminous little shyster got his baronetcy from Bryce Atkin’s coalition just after I left, and they gave it to him knowing what he was—’

‘You could see Mr Pitt didn’t think much of him, if you watched him closely,’ said Sunflower, nodding wisely.

‘They knew his whole record. Birtley came to me about it and I went to Bryce Atkin myself. He
knew
—’

‘It must be awful to have friends that you can’t very well turn from the door, can you, and yet know they’ll carry on like this. But I do wonder who’s ill. They said it was a he …’

‘I told Bryce Atkin the whole story with my own lips. And he used a lot of his filthy tobacconist’s girl-charm on me, and swore he’d do something about it. And the next week it was in the Birthday—’

There was a soft thud against the door, and it was opened with a sound of scuffling. No one came in and the handle rattled as if someone were making a counter-attempt to shut it again. A pretentious voice, foppishly powdered with a lisp, declaimed: ‘Let me get at Ethington. I want to talk to him. Abthurd that a man of hith talent shouldn’t be with uth … Thethe mad ideath, nothing in them. Nature red in tooth and claw. I could ecthplain it all to him in five minuteth …’ Pitt’s voice cut in, rough and humiliated, ‘For God’s sake, Canterton!’ and the door banged.

‘Oh, it’s a shame, it really is!’ said Sunflower. ‘When he’s got visitors, and there’s trouble in the house! If he were a woman he’d burst out crying. Why, of course he’s been crying. That’s why his face looks all funny … Oh …’

Essington sat down as if he had suddenly grown very tired. ‘Sunflower, I wish that drunkard Canterton hadn’t got my job.’ He spoke with a kind of noble peevishness that was at once complaining and selfless. ‘There are good people in that ministry, steady little people who’ve given their lives to building it up. People who always made me feel rather ashamed when I got any credit, as they’d done twice the work I ever did, and never got their names in the papers since they weren’t—’ he smiled up at her as if this were a joke that would perhaps strike her as funnier than he quite liked, ‘great like me. And now they’re under this fuddled oaf, and one day there will be such a mess. There’ll be some act of tipsy impudence—of quarrelsome instructions to one of the tipsy cads he has as secretaries—and there’ll be a row that’ll bring the sky down with the trade unions or whatever it is he’s lurched up against. Think of that lout butting into a delicate negotiation with the Triple Alliance, the pet plan of some spectacled little man who was ordinated to the job by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and has done nothing else all his good little life destroyed with a hiccup …’ He closed his eyes, took her young hand and held it to his forehead; and for a moment was silent. ‘Only … it’s his kind of man England seems to want nowadays … not mine …’

‘Oh, lovie, don’t fret, don’t fret,’ she said; and found something to say that might have comforted him, if she had not at once forgotten it, turning her head to listen if there were not the sounds of an automobile engine starting outside the drive.

He did not raise his wrinkled old lids. ‘And when his lot go out the country still won’t want us. They’ll call in the Labour Party … which isn’t a Party but a bazaar of ideas got up by a vegetarian mothers’ meeting … Bolshevism … anti-vaccination … lunacy reform … mm … the sad case of Comrade A. at Peckham … trivial special cases …’

‘They’ve gone,’ she said exultantly. A car had rolled down the drive. ‘He’ll be back in a moment.’ She drew away her hand.

He sat up, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘Anyway it all works out in dinner being preposterously late.’ He groped for the hand she had taken away, but started and exclaimed, ‘Sunflower, how beautiful you look! Such a lovely, tender, grave Sunflower it is tonight! And yet she’s wearing her little girl face too! Really, you don’t look a day older than you did when I first met you twelve years ago, only far, far lovelier. And you’ve such a glowing colour! You haven’t been putting things on your face, have you? No, it’s natural!’

She smiled at him, happily, shyly, turning the rings on her fingers.

‘Oh, such a beautiful Madonna Sunflower it is!’ he went on proudly. ‘What queer beasts women are! They put on different degrees of beauty as they might put on different dresses. Lately you’ve been just a handsome woman. I haven’t thought the kind of dresses women have to wear nowadays suited you particularly. But tonight you’re astonishing, you are a queen of beauty. And there’s no reason for it …’

She turned away from him, because Francis Pitt came back into the room.

All the commotion he had had to go through to get rid of these horrid people had left him more dishevelled than ever, with his tie slipping round to one side and his hair straggling right down over his ears, so that he looked like a flop-eared spaniel pup which had been rolling about in the dust with the other puppies. It was queer how he kept on making one think of some sort of an animal. It would be lovely to touch him, his body would be warm like an animal’s. If you found him lying asleep and woke him he would make funny whimpering little noises just as a puppy would. But there was more than that to him, he was far more than just dear and fubsy. As he crossed the room to them, his massive head down on his chest, his half-shut eyes just glinting grey under his heavy brows, force seemed to pour out of him. He was great, like Essington. And there was something pleasanter than greatness pouring out of him … She had heard the phrase, ‘A wind from the Spice Islands’ … It was like that, a rumour of things hot and sweet in the mouth, or gentle pungencies … He was a fragrance, and he was a time: the hour when people say, ‘The tide has turned, now we can start’, or, ‘It will not hurt any more’, the hour after which all things are fortunate and easy. She would be happier for days because of the little time she was going to have with him this evening, she would not mind Essington so much. It was so wonderful of him to do all this for a person when he was utterly miserable; he must be very miserable, for his face was all crumpled with crying, and though men did cry a lot, much more than you were warned beforehand, he wasn’t the sort that would cry easily. She wished she could put out her hands as he came near and take his grief from him. She saw it as a warm bundle, of a size that would be easy for her to carry in her arms.