Travelling north, they travelled backwards from early summer, through
late and middle spring, and came to their own hill-top at last, to find
the roads still grey and wrinkled with winter mud, and only the beeches
green, for Brackenhurst was always three weeks behind the rest of Kent.
Laura settled down with touching good faith to enjoy her spring all over
again and more completely than before, because Oliver was left behind in
Italy and could not interrupt. She actually believed, you see, that life
will give you the same good gift twice over. Oh, of course, she did not
expect to see so much of Justin now that she was at home.... Importantly
she acknowledged her duties, her social and parochial duties, to
Gran’papa and Aunt Adela and Brackenhurst.... And Justin would be going
to business.... She was vague about his income and responsibilities, but
she took it for granted that his days would be fully employed.
They were, but not as she expected. Aunt Adela was quite horrified when
Laura’s notions were accidentally conveyed to her.
“Oh no, my dear, why shouldn’t he? Oh, of course old Mr. Cloud used to
go up two or three times a week. His hobby—there was no real necessity.
Besides, it’s been a company for years now. Mrs. Gedge told me so. Mrs.
Gedge has shares. And Mrs. Cloud has money of her own as well. What
should Justin Cloud go to business for?”
What indeed? Laura was only too pleased to find that Justin would have
time on his hands. Firmly she suppressed the conviction of her
industrious forebears, the inherited conviction that a man who did not
begin work at nine in the morning and return worn out at half-past six,
was somehow cheating the universe. And, since there was no need for
Justin to work, set herself to help him to play.
But there again they differed.
They had talked about Architecture in the Italian play-ground, about
Botticelli, and Carpaccio, and Dante, and Excavations, and Francis of
Assisi, and Giotto, and so on steadily through the alphabet to Virgil
and Zenobius. And vaguely, without actually canvassing the matter, she
expected to go on thinking and talking to Justin about these entirely
satisfactory and absorbing subjects for the rest of their natural lives.
But she had reckoned without Justin, without old habits, and a flying
visit to Bellew, and an enlarged but by no means completed collection
crying out for attention. Art?—when nests were tucked away in the
Brackenhurst hedges and nests swinging high in the Brackenhurst woods
and birds rising from every tussock of green heather on flat-topped
Brackenhurst Hill to mislead the enemy? Art? Art was in Italy, or if she
must cross Europe with them at Laura’s invitation, Justin, like a
sensible Briton, insisted on finding her lodgings in town. And there
they had left her, the foreigner, the bored great lady, to yawn away her
days in Chelsea attics and overheated galleries. Of course they promised
to come and look her up constantly: and Laura meant, and Justin thought
he meant, to keep that promise. But the train service from Brackenhurst
was a slow one: and the weather was perfect.
Besides—didn’t Laura understand?—he _enjoyed_ pottering round the fields
with a collecting-box.
But after Botticelli—birds’ eggs?
I know. I know. It’s distressing. Naturally, you want an explanation:
and if the case were a woman’s, I could satisfy you. I’m sure I could;
for, if you can but happen upon it, there is always sound policy behind
a woman’s wildest extravagance—drinks of pearl or Bartholomew Eves. But
Nero fiddles because he _enjoys_ fiddling and wants to see the pretty
fire. And if we accept that elementality as, if not justifying, at least
explaining our mere man, how much more must it suffice us in
considerating that amiable _reductio ad absurdum_ of a man that we call
a collector. I am to explain to you a collector? I am to explain why a
respectable elderly lawyer runs about Epping Forest with a butterfly net
on Sunday afternoons? why your favourite _jeune premier_ haunts a
down-at-heel farmhouse for the twin china spaniels’ sake upon its
parlour mantelpiece? why a square inch of orange paper changed hands the
other day for near a thousand pounds? and why H. J. Cloud, Esq., after
refreshing dalliance with the wonders of a wonderful world, returns,
unconscious of incongruity, to his home, to his habit, to his hobby, to
his beloved and incomparable birds’ eggs? How can I explain? What am I
to say? Collectors are made that way. We must accept them as we accept
love, or triplets, or earthquakes, as eccentricities of Nature,
unaccountable but interesting.
Besides, I collect pewter myself.
So taking Justin for granted——But that, you see, is what Laura could not
do.
Here was Justin, with his years, his brains, his position—why—why—he had
been to Oxford! He would have been a B.A. if he hadn’t had influenza! He
had been round the world! He knew interesting people! He had once been
to dinner with Mr. Wells! A man like Justin could do anything he
chose—go into Parliament—write a book (she was convinced that he could
write a book if he would only take the trouble, for there was a
something about his letters ...) and here he was, settling down to—to
collecting birds’ eggs! Birds’ eggs!!
She put it to him once in desperation—“Why birds’ eggs?”
But then, as Justin said to her—“Why not?”
They never got farther than that.
But it was patent that Laura, slightly annoying to Justin though her
attitude might be, must stick to her principles and remain aloof. And
for a wavering, half-hearted week or two she did remain aloof, attending
strictly to her own affairs, settling down to quiet life in
Brackenhurst, to dusting the drawing-room and paying calls with Aunt
Adela and bearing with a Gran’papa grown no younger and no less tetchy
in two years. Out of the tail of her eye, however, she could observe
Justin, missing her but little, it seemed, as, his camera hung from his
shoulder, he passed her in Brackenhurst by-ways with a nod and a smile.
That she could have borne longer, but when she next took tea at the
Priory she found that Annabel Moulde, who had also left school and put
up her hair and who wore a frock and a manner that made Laura feel
childish, was also taking tea at the Priory, and that Justin (who had
never liked Annabel) was nevertheless confiding to her, over chocolate
_éclairs_, items of oological interest that he ought to have been
telling Laura. (Surely he ought to have been telling them to Laura?)
She said less about cruelty to parent birds, and the comparative value
of a dead shell and a live songster as she stood beside Justin ten
minutes later at his open cabinet and admired a fortnight’s spoils.
Justin (I do not know why) had asked her to come and look at them, and
Annabel (I do not know how) had been left in the drawing-room to talk to
Mrs. Cloud. Annabel was calling on Mrs. Cloud, wasn’t she?
And Laura went out with Justin the next morning by invitation, and was
sound on the axiom that birds could not count. On the following
afternoon she was the proud discoverer of a willow-wren’s nest that
Justin had overlooked, and their Saturday whole-day expedition to the
Warren Woods beyond Beech Hill was such a success that it became a
weekly institution.
Behold her then, one warm Friday night of June, retiring to bed at ten
o’clock after a day of virtue and housewifery. Aunt Adela was away for
the week-end: and after turning out the dining-room with Maud Ann;
impressing her idea of chervil salad (acquired from sundry student
festivals in forsaken Rue Honorine) upon Aunt Adela’s severely British
cook; entertaining the Vicarage, that always mistook at-home days, with
tea and small-talk; and playing double-dummy, grimly, with Gran’papa all
the long light beckoning evening, she felt that she was at last and
indeed a grown-up lady; but that as long as she had her Saturdays with
Justin she could bear it. Behold her further, producing from the bottom
of her hat-box a most private store of candles (Aunt Adela did not
approve of young people reading in bed) washing out her newest blouse
and ironing it then and there with the spirit iron that Mrs. Cloud had
given her in Italy: and thereafter, tucked up in bed, absorbed in a
_chronique scandaleuse_, with plates, of the thrush family (order
Passeres), not to mention their cousins the warblers and the
white-throats, and their collaterals the tits and the finches and the
pipits and the shrikes, and so leave her, at last, in the dazed middle
of a sentence, to sleep and the shifting pageant of her dreams.
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