The third thing that Verity dropped, that morning, was three pounds of
salmon, right in Deborah’s blindly-descending path. She knew Deborah
wouldn’t step on anything as squishy as salmon.
“I want to ask your opinion about something,” she said, leaving the
salmon barrier-wise on the pavement, “so come along to the café, and
be asked it like a lamb. It’s no use pretending that I’ve got scarlet
fever or a new hat, or anything of that kind that you simply can’t be
seen with, because I’m thoroughly bored with my own society, and I mean
to have yours.”
“You want to pat me,” Deborah said fiercely, looking at her hardly with
reddened eyes, “and I won’t have it! I won’t! I won’t!”
“How terribly limited you are!” Verity sighed pityingly. “I want to
talk to you solely and entirely about myself. Otherwise, why should
I pick you up in the pig-market on a Saturday morning, when you have
pointedly cut me three times this week?”
“I shall hold you to that, if I come!” Deborah yielded weakly to the
hidden strength in the demure little figure before her. “And, mind, at
the first pat--I go!”
“What did you want to know?” she asked, later, seated at a table in an
upstairs room, overlooking the street.
“Know?” Verity, her eyes on the traffic, was a trifle vague until
Deborah’s stern gaze collected her wits with a jerk. “Oh, I wondered if
by any chance you knew the author of----?”
“I don’t!” Deb got to her feet. “Good-bye!”
Verity pulled her down again.
“No, it wasn’t that. It was--let me see----” looking anxiously at the
crowd--“oh, I know! Should you think red roses and green tulle----?”
“I shouldn’t!” Deb made another effort. “You’re a little wretch,
Verity! You might have known I wanted to be alone.”
Verity clung to her, gazing despairingly at the stairs.
“I’ve remembered the real reason--honest Injun, I have! I just wanted
to know whether the best way to manage a parson is to marry him?”
“Marry him?” Deb sank into her seat. “Now, Verity, what are you up to?
Tell me at once. I won’t move till you do!”
“Oh, there’s nothing at all to worry about,” Verity replied, pouring
out coffee with beautifully concealed triumph. “The question hasn’t
arisen yet, in any way. I put it merely as a business proposition.
Something must be done with the new parson at Cantacute, and as I’m
much the bravest person in the place--sugar, dear? Here’s the cream.”
Deb opened her lips wrathfully, but got no further, for Verity was
listening to somebody else,--indeed the whole café was listening,--to
an intensely vitalised young person who roared directions to his
chauffeur as he plunged headlong into the building, afterwards tearing
up the stairs with the impetuosity of several elephants gone amok. Such
was the usual advent of Larruppin’ Lyndesay.
Deb knew who was coming before the black bullet head and sturdy
shoulders cannoned round the corner into Witham’s illustrious mayoress,
who had looked in for an innocent glass of milk; and while he was busy
picking her up and dusting her down, shooting her to the ground floor
and thrusting her into his own car, she called her friend to account.
“Why did you do it?” she asked reproachfully. “You know I can’t meet
any of the Lyndesays. And Larrupper will tell the whole town I am here!”
“The new parson----” Verity began innocently, and Deb leaned across the
table and shook her. Then she sat down and covered her face with her
hands.
“Can’t you understand,” she added, very low, “that it hurts me to meet
them, seeing that I can have nothing to do with them any more?”
“Just because one berry had a grub in it, I don’t see why you need
burn the whole bush!” Verity answered doggedly. “You’ve been treated
abominably, scandalously! Please credit some of us with sufficient
decency to realise _that_. You’re behaving as though we were a crowd
of savages dancing round you with assegais! And the Arevar Lyndesays
had nothing to do with the affair, anyhow. Larrupper’s awfully hurt
because you’ve given him the cold shoulder, and I won’t have Larrupper
ill-treated. It’s like being cruel to a--a donkey. And he’s quite upset
enough as it is over the Mayoress.”
The mayoral catastrophe seemed to have disorganised Larrupper
completely, for, upon his volcanic return, he rushed at the nearest
table and shook hands with two girls he had never seen in his life,
before he discovered Verity sitting with shocked eyes fixed on the
ceiling.
“Disgraceful!” she observed, looking like a disapproving tombstone.
“I’m not sure that we ought to know you. Sit down and say the first
three stanzas of the Catechism, just to let the steam off your voice
before you speak to Deborah.”
But Larrupper, crimson with emotion to the thick roots of his inky
hair, seized upon Deb’s hand without an instant’s hesitation.
“Oh, you’ve been cruel, Debbie dear!” he reproached her. “I called
and called, an’ stood outside an’ swore an’ threw things, an’ they
gave me the boot every time, an’ told me you weren’t seein’ anybody.
We’ve always been pals, you and I, ever since we fell into the river
together, tryin’ to be trout, an’ to shut your door in Larrupper’s
pleadin’ face is what I’d never expected to get from you,--hanged if I
did!”
“I’ve finished with the lot of you, Larry,” Deborah said gently. “I’m
going to be a Lyndesay all by myself for the rest of my existence, so
you can just keep on the other side of the road when you see me coming,
for your poor relation doesn’t intend to know you. It’s no use arguing.
I mean what I say.”
Larrupper upset both cream-jugs.
“That’s a footlin’ way of talkin’,” he said. “Haven’t I adored you
always, an’ been ready to lift the roof off the world for you, as you
don’t need tellin’? An’ just because things have gone to smoke through
that bunglin’ bounder of a Slinker----”
“_Larrupper!_” Verity’s little voice was almost shrill.
“Just because Slinker----” (Larry, when interfered with, always
erupted louder than ever)--“just because Slinker behaved like
a--a--a--low-down, crawlin’ scallywag----”
“_Larrupper!_”
“You think the rest of us are not good enough to be seen dead with.
But we’re a fairly decent lot, for all that; Laker is, anyhow, an’
Larrupper’s quite a charmin’ imitation; an’ if you’re goin’ to give
us all the go-by on Slinker’s account, you’re makin’ us responsible
for somethin’ we didn’t know of any more than you; an’ if that isn’t
glarin’ injustice, I’d like to hear of a better sample!”
“I’ve been hurt,” said Deb, staring at the table, “so naturally I’m
looking round for somebody to get back on. And you happen to be the
nearest, that’s all.”
“And what about me?” asked Verity. Deb, looking up, caught a look of
real pain on the small face. “If it hadn’t been for that three pounds
of salmon, you’d have lost the two people who love you best in the
world, and serve you jolly well right!”
“Where _is_ the salmon?” Deb put in suddenly, her conscience smiting
her, and Verity blinked away her tears and laughed.
“Somewhere on the pavement, I suppose. I forgot all about it, to tell
the truth. Yours is a very expensive friendship. And, by the way, it
was to pay a bet I lost to the parson.”
“What parson?” Larry interjected quickly, with interest.
“The new Cantacuter. (You have to have everything repeated to you,
Larry, every time we meet!) I bet him three pounds of salmon that he
couldn’t get Billy-boy Blackburn to join his Young Men’s Soul-Savers or
whatever he calls them; and he did, so I have to pay up. It’s for their
annual bean-feast or something of the kind.”
“He seems an individual with some strength of purpose,” Deborah
observed. “But why were you so anxious to know if the best way----?”
Verity kicked her without remorse.
“He has such dreadfully ‘Fall in and follow me’ views about women,” she
went on. “Expects them to take a back seat when they’re not wanted,
and run and work like blaz--blacks--when they are--under _him_, of
course. Men proudly goose-stepping in front is how he sees life; women
trailing meekly behind. That’s his line throughout--though I must say
he does his best to sweeten the pill with rather painfully obvious
flattery. He comes to see me every other day, to ask me to join things
and support things and sing in things and collect for things. He tells
me I am so beloved in the village; that I have religious eyes; that my
influence for good is--well, little short of the Bishop of London’s.
And all the time he regards me merely as a tool for his using! I leave
Voltaire and Shaw and the Pankhursts about all over the place when he
calls, but he doesn’t see them--he’s too busy collecting me. It’s my
face and my voice, I suppose, that make him think I’d be a fine tail to
his heavenly comet. But I’ll teach him, see if I don’t!”
“You’d much better leave him alone,” Larrupper remonstrated. “What’s
the use of botherin’ about him, anyway?”
“Leave him alone?” Verity’s eyes flashed. “Leave my unfortunate village
to struggle with him alone? Never! I’m not a suffragette or anything
else in the ironmongery line, but to have a stranger thinking he’s more
influence than I in my own place is the very last thing I’ll put up
with! He may have Billy-boy and the salmon; he may have his own private
little gloat; but there’ll be something very wrong with the universe
if Verity Cantacute doesn’t come out top in the end!”
Deb rose. “Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m very angry with you both,
but all the same you’ve warmed the cockles of my heart. No, Larry, I
will _not_ be taken home in your car like the remains of the Mayoress.
You can come to see me if you insist, but I warn you that I shall not
be over-polite to you. Oh, of _course_ I love you, you inky-headed
baby! That isn’t the point. The point is that Lyndesays of Crump and
Arevar can no longer be on friendly terms with Lyndesays of Kilne. So
good-bye.”
Larry stood up, looking pathetic.
“An’ who’s to help me with Verity an’ the sky-pilot? It’s always like
this. Just as she’s thinkin’ she might possibly make up her mind to
marry me, off she goes an’ starts a hobby of some kind, an’ I get
shoved into the background. Parson-squashin’s all very well, but it
takes so much of her energy, an’ she forgets that I’m--well, just
waitin’. And nobody has the faintest influence with her but you, Debbie
darlin’, as you know. Mayn’t I really take you home? I’ve got a new----”
“Yes, I know,” Deb interrupted ruthlessly. “A new carburettor or a
gudgeon-pin or a ball-bearing. You always have. Thank you, Larry. I’ve
given up cars. And I won’t, I won’t, I _won’t_ be patted!”
After she had gone, Verity cried unaffectedly behind the sheltering
screen, while Larry, almost weeping himself, kicked things miserably
and chopped splinters off the table.
“It’s hurt her so dreadfully!” she said, “every bit of her; her pride,
her affection, _herself_. She’ll never be the same again. And people
are saying such hateful things. I could strangle them--the--the
alligators! Slinker was a rotter, but he was quite decent to her--she’s
bound to miss him a little. And think of all he represented! She
couldn’t help but feel that. And now she’s nothing--nothing--except her
name and her pride. What can we do for her? What _can_ we? Not that
it’s any use asking _you_!”
“There’s Christian,” said Larrupper, slowly, and Verity looked up with
a start. Their eyes met across the table, and Larrupper nodded his
black head.
“Laker’s a good sort,” he went on, apparently irrelevantly. “Always
goin’ about pickin’ up the cryin’ an’ the crocked. It’s just meat an’
drink an’ five rounds of golf to old Laker. There’s never any knowin’,
is there, dear--I mean, old girl?”
Verity looked at him almost approvingly as she thrust various parcels
into his arms, preparatory to rising.
“Larry,” she observed kindly, “I do believe you’re growing a brain!”