Our eyes met; a real hatred in hers leaping up to meet mine.
“Let's play tennis,” I said, after a moment's pause.
“No,” she answered shortly, “I'm going indoors.”
“Very well.”
And that ended the affair with Sybil.
I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude
awoke from some preoccupation to an interest in my existence. She
developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her
fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,--she had pleasant soft
hands;--she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her arm
rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. They
were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlled
myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and entirely civil
indifference to her blandishments.
What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk--I forget
about what--with Sybil.
“Oh, Dick!” said Gertrude a little impatiently, “Dick's Pi.”
And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory
of my innate and virginal piety.
6
It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that
I think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard
which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But
if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that
shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.
She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in
my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small
hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is
humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'
Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really
learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in
mathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great
natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the
usual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.
There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do
in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school
training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind.
She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole,
she felt herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise
in order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night. She
carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and
inessentials of her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food for
which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal
cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented
it, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and
distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her
and her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three
years later, for a journey to Italy.
Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them
had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, played
the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arose
from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with various
introductions and much sound advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends,
and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto,
and at last Rome. They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa,
Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months or more they had had abroad, and now
Margaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very
civilised person.
New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs. Seddon
celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice,
with the clear intention of letting every one out into the garden if the
weather held.
The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort
on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather
pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich blossoming cherry
and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets
had been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as
it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade. And
Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink
face very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed
party,--we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk.
Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material,
all unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a
slenderer, unbountiful Primavera.
It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and
I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures and
groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a
large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and
open French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out upon
the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned.
The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with
a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviously
attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still
sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One of them
I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly hair on
which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band. He
wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a long
frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed his
hat and carried it in one hand. There were two tennis-playing youths
besides myself. There was also one father with three daughters in
anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half broken
in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and conscientiously “reet
Staffordshire.” The daughters were all alert to suppress the possible
plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.
They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were
mainly mothers with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering
of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together
and regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
all the time, though not formally absent.
Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and the
clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet
were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich
with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and
partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a disused
and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle
revival--while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat
near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup of
tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observation
he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring.
We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was a
Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret had
come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown,
and understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exile
to hear the old familiar names of places and personalities. We capped
familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the
Backs, and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl,
told a long confused story illustrative of his disposition to reckless
devilry (of a pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite
needlessly on the way to Grantchester.
I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair
face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always
slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but
determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even
musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp.
And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. “I went
to Grantchester,” she said, “last year, and had tea under the
apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down.” (It was
that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
“I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the Pitti
and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but it isn't
like real study,” she was saying presently.... “We bought bales of
photographs,” she said.