The larch-wood grew on one side of the hollow bridle-path that led
across the hill from Broadmoor to Pitland Street. The rest of the way
was through pine and birch with some oak scrub and a holly-bush or so at
the intersection of the main bridle-path with the smaller tracks which
ran straight down the slope.
They came out through a beech-tunnel that switch-backed narrowly between
palings and, at a turn in the path, saw the aisles of green larch-boles
shot with violet rising out of the bracken, greener at that time of year
than the feathery green of the curved, fine arabesques of the branches
above it.
It was nearly four o’clock when Gillian and Larry reached the
larch-wood, and the sun, held up by the long shadow of Holmbury Hill,
behind which in another two hours’ time it would be setting, was sending
slanting rays between the trunks of the trees.
The bluebells Larry had promised were there, though not in great masses:
but their coming disturbed a jay which fled away from them through the
purple tree-trunks, flying low so that the light flashed on his blue
head and picked out the black-and-white feathers in his wide, strong
wings. The brambles were all in bloom under the green fronds of bracken
and their pinky-white flowers repeated the tender rose of the horizon
seen beyond the green veil of the larch-spindles.
“It’s softer than the mountain larch-woods with snow behind them,” said
Gillian.
“Colouring’s sentimental,” said Larry, “but the drawing’s good. I’m
going to use it for the background of my fresco design. It’ll repeat
well, and I can change to sky instead of the hill behind it for the
figures. Panoramic pathetic fallacy. Dawn for the Changeling. You’re
very like a Dawn anyhow, Gillian; and twilight for the piping Eros.
Can’t put a violin into symbolism—and the lewte’s an instrument I never
could a-bear. It’s a filthy job altogether—I wish I’d never started on
it. I could draw Heinrich for ever, but this making a photograph-gallery
of one’s friends....”
“Then why do it?”
“Oh! I dunno. Hand to the plough and all that. Besides, it _is_ a good
idea. Why can’t you be the Eternal Feminine you look, Gillian, and cheer
the artist in his despondent hours?”
“I thought you meant it. Besides, I can quite see that there are times
when you would get tired of an idea like that. Are you putting all your
friends in?”
“No. Nor half mine enemies either. What could you do with Bird in a
fresco, for instance?”
“If you were Augustus John——” said Gillian.
“I shouldn’t be going in for a London County Council prize competition,
my poor dear Dawn. Try to rise to daylight, or is it your tea you need?”
“No, not yet. Let’s stay here. I like this mauve and green and rosy
wood. Why didn’t we bring Heinrich?”
“You think that because Heinrich can pick up sparrows in his hands as
though they were tennis-balls, that he’d be at home in a wood among
squirrels and nuts. But you are quite wrong. Heinrich is brother to the
sparrow who is a city bird. He’s good with Cockneys. But he’s an indoor
pet—that’s why the canary is not wasted on him, or that dreadful little
cat you’ve planted on us. But put him in the open and he’s lost. Think
of Heinrich in tweeds! It can’t be done. Heinrich suggests the spirit of
the wild to people who’ve only read about it in the Classics. He’s Art.
He’s the eternal Will to be Other. But there’s nothing of the English
public-school boy, the country gentleman about him. And that’s the man
who really enjoys your muddy lanes and your streaking red sunsets and
says ‘pretty dear’ to the rabbits he’s going to shoot.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gillian, “but you introduced me to Heinrich as a
faun.”
“And did you ever see a faun in Surrey? Or in Devonshire? Or in Wales?
I’ve heard of fairies in Wales. Little grey men with long beards who
don’t mean to let you see them—and there’s a lot of dialect ballad metre
about pixies on Dartymoor; but the faun—the faun, my child, is the
invention of the sophisticated artist.”
“Heinrich’s not sophisticated.”
“Heinrich in his way is a genius. But the home of his soul is Leicester
Square. I found him, covered with sparrows, on a bench in front of that
soaring tribute to Shakespeare which so fittingly presides over the
Empire, the Alhambra and Daly’s.”
“He’d be all right at Taormina,” said Gillian.
“And when his uncle’s money comes out of his will”—Larry grew emphatic
and a little angry—“he shall go there, if I can keep the vultures away
from him till then.”
“I suppose people might swoop down on him if he had money to give away.”
“Yes, they would. But that isn’t what I was thinking of.”
“What did you mean by vultures, then?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Heinrich’s very endearing,” said Gillian, passing on from vultures,
“he’s the kind of thing you’d like to put in your pocket and take home
to keep with your dolls.”
Larry looked at her quickly. It was the same sharp, surprised look she’d
seen jump into Toby’s eyes the day she found the chopped volume of
_Poems and Ballads_.
“That’s how the vultures feel,” he said shortly.
“But mine isn’t a devouring wish.”
“No. I don’t suppose it would be. You’d better leave it at that.”
So they watched a nuthatch pulling its way up the bole of a tree in
front of them; and wondered why it was there instead of the squirrels
which seemed more probable in such a place; and smoked Petit Caporal
cigarettes, which Larry got from a little shop near Victoria and
pretended to like, though Gillian, who wasn’t much of a smoker herself,
didn’t see how he could. And then they went down to Pitland Street and
came to Honeysuckle Cottage, so called because of the honeysuckle bush
which stood at the garden gate and was visited by gardeners for miles
around, being something of a curiosity. It was beginning to flower and
was full of bees that day, and Mrs. Print, who counted it one among many
occasions of her pride, stood by it, like a benevolent witch, a bent,
smiling figure in a black dress and a white apron, with smooth hair,
still black, parted tightly on either side of a nutcracker face that
looked as if it were carved out of old ivory.
“Hurry up, Mr. Browne,” she called to him as they crossed the green in
front of the house, “them lard-buns you ordered is baking themselves
dry, and it’s going to rain. You’ll be getting the young lady damp.”
The sky had clouded over, and as they drank strong Indian tea, heavy
with cream, and ate what Gillian thought was bilberry, but Mrs. Print
called “Hurt jam,” in her parlour, the rain began to fall outside. Mrs.
Print’s parlour was a room as full of flowering geraniums and other
hot-house plants as if it had been a conservatory instead of being the
chamber in which Mrs. Print stored the strange and occasionally valuable
things she’d spent a lifetime buying at the sales at great houses in the
countryside both here in Surrey and in Lincolnshire where she’d gone in
marriage with her first husband, a Mr. Booty of those parts. She had
returned at Mr. Booty’s death to her mother’s house which she had
inherited and to which she had welcomed Mr. Print, a meek little man
whom she had married, chiefly, said Larry, who recounted Mrs. Print’s
history to Gillian over their tea, because he was a gardener by trade
and could give professional services to the honeysuckle bush.
“It’s my belief, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, repeating what was clearly an
old and trusted joke, “that you and Mr. Print do something to that bush
to prevent its being a creeper. It isn’t a freak of nature at all, but
just a common work of art.”
Mrs. Print picked up a crumb from the Brussels carpet and smoothed a
plush chair-back that hung over the interlacing pattern of a beautiful
Heppelwhite settee.
“You’ve said that before, sir,” she answered with friendly scorn; “if
you was a gardener yourself you’d know better. How’s Miss Jerusalem?”
This appeared to be a frontal attack of considerable weight, for Larry’s
golden freckles disappeared into his blush as he answered, rather
hurriedly, “Oh, quite well, I fancy. What about getting to the station
in all this rain?”
“I’ll step round and see if Mandible’s got a trap going.” Mrs. Print was
immediately side-tracked by the appeal to her instinct for preserving
the young from damp.
And accordingly, ten minutes later, Gillian entranced, watched Mrs.
Print in an enormous black straw wide-awake trimmed with a plain band of
what was now very rusty black ribbon, her shoulders protected from the
elements by a small three-cornered red woolen shawl and carrying a
large, green cotton umbrella, “step” down the garden path and out across
the green on her way to see about a trap.
“Couldn’t we have gone ourselves?” she asked, feeling very young and
ruthless for exposing so bent a frame to the weather on her behalf.
“We might have tried to go, but we shouldn’t have gone. It’s my belief
that Mrs. Print takes a commission on orders for Mandible’s trap and
likes to book them herself.”
Presently Mrs. Print came back up the garden path and stood outside the
open glass door of the sitting-room while she unpinned her skirts and
shook the rain out of her umbrella.
“Mandible’s took the trap over to Malquoits with a party hisself,” she
announced over her shoulder, “but Madge’ll put the old pony into the
closed conveyance for ye, and you’ll have to be startin’ soon as she’s a
slow driver and the roads is slippery with all this wet.”
The June rain was falling heavily by this time. It washed the sandy path
before Honeysuckle Cottage into a golden ridge between two brawling
torrents which ran down to a pool at the south side of the green to meet
the motor-road where the rods of water broke into circles of spray with
a beating patter as they hit its shining, tarry blackness.
The “closed conveyance” driven by a small, morose girl from the brim of
whose straw hat the rain was falling in a stream over her large,
melancholy nose, swished through the rivulets beneath its wheels and
drew up outside the gate, where it stood, wreathed in the steam from the
old pony’s devoted and unclipped flanks, and waited while they said
good-bye to Mrs. Print. It was a very small, very old brougham; a
metropolitan, luxurious padded trifle with silver-and-ivory handles to
its doors, and ivory knots and buttons for the brocaded window-straps
and arm-rests, the heavy crimson cords and the flower-vase clip, the
pencil-tray and the hanging letter case, with which it still was fitted.
There was a shelf, under the window behind the coachman’s box, high
enough to take the paper-bordered bouquet of the lady it had once
carried to Court or to the Opera in the days when the Empress Eugénie
visited her royal cousin at Buckingham Palace. Two cords buttoned across
the roof had once held the silk hat of her escort when she drove out in
the daytime and could make room for one beside her silken skirts. It
might have been the original coupé designed by and built for the
fashionable beauty who first called her carriage after the original
garden-chaise of the fierce Lord Brougham; so neat was its finish, so
brave the excellence of its frame, so heroic the resistance to age and
decay which the cracked but still valiant leather of the coachwork, and
the remaining varnish on its slender wheels still offered to the eye.
Even the unkempt and dejected pony who stood, too low for his position,
between the curving shafts, could not destroy the serious elegance, the
accomplished and considered frivolity of its air.
“Hallo, Mrs. Print,” said Larry, surveying the “trap” between the
spreading leaves of a huge arum lily which stood in the parlour-window,
“why have I never seen this remnant of forgotten splendour before?”
“You generally walks to the station, sir,” said Mrs. Print dryly.
She had returned from escorting Gillian to the vehicle under her green
umbrella, and was now waiting for Larry to pursue through his various
pockets the exact equivalent in coin of the tea they had consumed.
“Mrs. Print is certainly a fairy. Is she your godmother, Larry?” said
Gillian as they drove away, the rain drumming on the roof and misting
over the windows of the little carriage where they sat, hunched and
crowded on account of Larry’s height and rucksack and the thickness of
his tweeds. Larry fidgeted and wiped the mist on the inside of the
window next him with a too easy unconcern.
“Oh, the Honeysuckle Bush is a great place for reading-parties. I’ve
known her ever since my first year at Trinity.”
Larry was silent for the rest of the drive. The noise of the rain, the
clop-clopping of the pony’s hoofs on the wet asphalt, the swish of
overhanging branches across the roof of the little brougham which held
them both so tightly, made it easy not to talk and Gillian, tired with
the long day in the open—they had walked eight miles to get to the
larch-woods—lay back against the worn but not ragged brocade of the
padded lining and wondered with a little sting of envy who Miss
Jerusalem was.
It must, thought Gillian, be rather wonderful to be a friend of Larry
Browne; very friendly to have been with him at Cambridge—there were
girls as well as men who belonged to that near past of his! Some of them
had come to the studio, easy, laughing creatures who talked of swimming
and tennis, of walking tours and winter sports and only very casually of
“jobs” which they took, not because they had to work to live, but
because it was better fun to be doing something. Miss Jerusalem, she
supposed, was one of these.
It was none of her business, and she had not fallen in love with this
tall, careless, beautiful Larry Browne; but, if ever she could come back
to live the life on earth again, as some people imagined possible, and
if she might, remembering this life, make her choice of the next time,
it would—of this she had long been sure—it would be that she might be
one of this free and happy company who were cradled in learning, and to
whom money was a means already granted and never an end to be pursued,
hardly even a necessity to be toiled for.
The sudden chilling of the summer air that had come with the rain, fell
also on Gillian’s mood as they travelled slowly between half-seen
hedges, down the long, gradual hill to the station in the valley. Larry
Browne, the friendly, argumentative companion and guide of the sunlit
hours of the day had now grown strange, detached, almost inimical.
Gillian had a sudden and desolating wonder. Was she boring him? The
thought had never occurred to her before, but if it should be—how was
he, how was she, to endure the rest of the cool, dim journey back to
London?
In the train Larry, who had cheered up as soon as they were released
from the antique confinement of Mandible’s closed conveyance, unpacked
his rucksack and offered her her choice of _The Three Mulla-Mulgars_ and
_Georgian Poetry_ to read till they got to Charing Cross. Gillian, who
had bought the anthology when it came out, chose the novel, which turned
out not to be a novel at all, but something so much better that she came
up as from the depths of a well to realize that the train had stopped at
Waterloo Junction which was why it had suddenly grown too dark to read.
The wistful merriment of the monkey-pilgrimage she had been following
with a sense of a new world to explore had chased away her own cloud of
self-pity, and she saw with a free heart the lemon and lavender of a
clearing sky reflected in the lamp-spangled waters of the Thames as the
train moved slowly into Charing Cross, and the lit clock of the tower of
Westminster pointed to half-past eight.
It was cold at Charing Cross. It was cold on the top of the No. 11
omnibus which trundled slowly down the rain-washed slope of Whitehall
and took its almost solitary way along Victoria Street, splashing
through the pools of petrol and water that had settled in the uneven
shallows of the traffic-furrowed road. Gillian’s spirits drooped again.
She was lonely. She was ending the day farther away from Larry than she
had been before it began. Lilac was at the other side of the world by
now, in Japan. There would be no one in the little flat under the roof
of the Mordaunt Club. The grate in the inner room would be empty, bare
and clean, the chimney swept for the summer. She did not even know if
there were a bundle of firewood in the cupboard by the scullery sink,
and there was a hole in her right stocking, right round the base of her
great toe, and her feet were cold, and by the time she had walked from
King’s Road to the Club, her feet in the thin shoes in which she had
walked so far that day, would be wet through. Gillian wished she were
there in the cold twilight, with the door locked, having a thorough good
cry. The omnibus stopped with a grinding jerk. Larry helped her off the
step with a kind hand under her elbow, which he held a moment in his
warm, firm palm as they walked along the slippery pavement together.
“Dumpy? Come and have supper with Heinrich and his mice—oh yes, he has
mice out when the sparrows have gone to roost. There’s sure to be cheese
and eggs, and we might make coffee and omelette with the Primus.”
“Oh, Larry! May I?”
“Yes, of course,” said Larry.
“I’ve got some macaroons and a Buszard cake,” said Gillian as they
passed the Club; “shall we get them too?—and Lady Bottomley often sends
down strawberries on Sunday.”
“Up we go to see,” said Larry, with enthusiasm.
* * * * *
A golden flicker of light under the door of Number Seven crept across
the landing to their feet as they reached the top of the stairs.
“Whoever—whatever!” Gillian was alarmed. “Is it on fire?”
“What a first-rate idea,” said Larry, “let’s hope it is a good one—omne
ignotum pro magnifico, or Hope for the best, as they say in the
schoolroom. Hadn’t we better go in and see?”
For Gillian was hesitating on the doorway. Her key was not in her
pocket.
“I’m frightened, Larry.”
“The longer you wait the more frightened you’ll be. Is the door locked?”
“I forget, I’ll try.”
The doors at the Mordaunt Club were so constructed that, even if you
forgot to lock them as you went out, nobody who didn’t know the secret
of the handles could open them from the outside.
Gillian pushed the knob and the door fell back.
The light came leaping and glowing from the inner room. Someone had
kindled a fire in the empty grate.