THE FIRST LETTERS
“Hullo, Robert Roberts! Any letters for us?” sang out Theo.
She had darted out of the cottage, hatless, as usual, her nose already
peeling with sunburn and her long bare legs covered with midge-bites and
sea-holly scratches down to her white sand-shoes, to waylay our postman;
he’s the son of Mrs. Roberts, our landlady, a young Welsh giant who wears
that uniform coat for just that five minutes daily which it takes him to
deliver the mails at Porth Cariad.
“Yes, mam!” he announced. “Picture poss-card for you—I wonder shall I
have it, mam, when you read it? Blodwen and me is making a co-leckshon of
those. Letter for your mother; letter an’ _big_ parsal for the strange
young lady.”
I—who have not been seen in the place before this year—am the strange
young lady.
“Here you are,” said Theo, bringing the mail into the
kitchen-sitting-room where we’d just finished breakfast; a room that
boasts three grandfather clocks and five pairs of china dogs and a
dresser crowded with blue-and-white plates. “The letter and the ‘parsal’
for Nancy are both from the Adored One!”
Meaning her brother.
“And I suppose you’ll now have to fly off somewhere to read your
love-letter all by yourself.”
“Of course I must,” I laughed.
For it’s rather amusing in the face of all this to think that, except for
one sentimental scrap from Sydney, I’ve never had a love-letter to read
in all my life!
* * * * *
This duty-document of my official _fiancé’s_ I’ve taken out on to the
sand-hills; there’s a dip under the crest of one of them where I can curl
up in comfort out of the wind, facing the view across the bay, with that
pale lilac silhouette of the Carnarvonshire hills across the water.
How funny it seems to unfold a letter bearing the familiar heading of the
Near Oriental Shipping Company’s offices! But this one, actually, is not
type-written, and signed by a “William Waters, per pro.,” and a scrawled
“A. A.” of Mr. Alexander’s.
William Waters has written in his own hand; not a particularly good one,
either. Several sheets of it? Was it such an unusually slack day at the
office, then?
“July —, 1913.
“MY DEAR NANCY,
“I was glad to hear _from my mother_”
(I don’t see why he should underline the three last words; _I_ shouldn’t
be likely to write first.)
“that you’d arrived safely and were comfortably settled into
the cottages. I wonder what you think of Porth Cariad. I do
hope you won’t be bored to extinction in such a quiet spot;
but you were warned, weren’t you, not to expect esplanades and
pier-concerts and shops and things? Do you think you can manage
to make yourself at all happy without them?
“How do you like the bathing in that little bay next to the
cottages? Can you swim? If not, you will have to learn. I will
teach you.
“I am pretty keen on getting down myself, I can tell you. Town,
in this heat, is the abomination of desolation; and smelly. So
is the office. You’ve never been here in July. It’s awful. I’ll
let you know later when I shall be coming; time of train, etc.
“You were missed at The Lawn last night. I took a man who lives
near to share my solitary meal there, and to have a game of
billiards afterwards. He wanted me to try over ‘Ford of Kabul
River’ for him; I can’t accompany myself, though, and he made
an awful hash of it. I wished we’d dined in town and gone to a
show.
“When I go out to lunch I shall call at Fuller’s and order them
to send you on—for the look of the thing—a box of chocolates.
I hope they have one with a picture of forget-me-nots or
something of the sort on the lid,”
(Yes; they had. White satin, with the sprays of flowers embroidered in
pale blue silk.)
“as Theo notices everything. Don’t let her bag all the sweets,
though.”
(Here the writing gets more scrawly and hurried.)
“Have just got in from lunch, which I had with my uncle. He was
full of talk; you can imagine it!”
(I can.)
“I also saw two other men whom I’d got to meet, and as a result
of this, I think I’ve managed to get through the business that
was keeping me. So I shall be down at the end of the week after
all; cheers for some fresh air and a dip! Please be very glad
to see me, will you? as Theo—but I put that before.
“Just before I went out to lunch a very rum thing happened:
at least, I thought it was rum until I found out what it
was. I was opening the door of my room when I heard, in the
passage, _your voice_, Nancy! Yes, your voice, with that
little dare-devil tone you put on sometimes, saying these
extraordinary words: ‘_I think it’s to the Savoy that I’m going
out with Mr. Waters to-day_!’
“I couldn’t think what on earth was the meaning of it, with you
miles away in Anglesey.”
(But already I smiled, seeing what was coming!)
“I wondered what could have brought you back, or if I’d got an
hallucination—can you hear hallucinations?—and I bolted out
into the passage, nearly knocking over two of the typists who
were coming down it.
“Miss Smith (that’s the one whose affections are otherwise
engaged, isn’t it?) fled like a hare; but that tall, dark Miss
Robinson stood her ground, only moving aside a little for me
to pass. I stopped and asked her straight out, ‘Was it you who
were speaking a moment ago?’
“She said ‘Yes’—all meekness at once. ‘Mimicking hussy’ I
thought—for it really had been exactly the way I’ve heard you
speak, you know, sometimes. It was all I could do to keep from
laughing outright, but I just said ‘Well, I am writing to Miss
Trant to-day; can I give her any message from you?’
“And she said (in that ‘mim’ voice, which I’m blest if I shall
ever feel able to believe in again!) ‘Will you please give her
my love, Mr. Waters?’
“So with love from Miss Robinson, I remain,
“Your
“BILLY.”
(What’s this? “Your” Billy? It can’t be. Oh, no. It’s his disgraceful
handwriting. It’s the “r” being scrawled into the “s” like that. “Yours,
Billy,” is how it really reads. How stupid of me not to see that at once!
Then there’s a bit across the top.)
“Six-forty train Porth Cariad on Saturday. You might write and
tell me how you do like the place; and you might answer at
once, even if it’s only for the girls to take it to the post.”
So, for the benefit of Blanche and Theo, I will write at once; I’ll do
it out here, in pencil on my pad, as I’ve so often taken down his own
letters. (One of these days I shall tell him how I loathed it, and how
utterly impossible his dictation was!)
“Porth Cariad. July —, 1913.
“DEAR SIR,
“Your favour of yesterday’s date to hand, for which we thank
you.”
(There! I wonder how he’ll like that. Will he think that it goes on all
through?)
“The lovely sweets really were appreciated; but I didn’t let
Theo bag them all, nor take the pale-blue satin tie-up to make
a bow for Cariad, which was what she wanted to do. So then she
said of course Nancy would want to keep that ribbon to tie
round all your letters. She does notice everything, doesn’t she?
“As for how I like this place, I simply love it, and the
cottages—I’m in the bigger one with your mother, and Theo and
Blanche are together in the other until you come—and I love the
sand-hills with the sea-holly and little prickly brambly roses
and tiny purple pansies growing all over them,”
(I might slip a pansy from this place that he’s fond of into the
envelope? No, I mightn’t. There’s no Theo to “notice” at his end.)
“and the cloud shadows on those hills opposite, and Mrs.
Roberts, with her sackcloth cooking-apron and her clogs and the
boy’s cap she wears; and Blodwen, even if all the English they
know does always seem to be all about you! And I should hate a
pier-concert if there was one. There’s everything here to make
me quite happy. Since this very hot weather’s come, the bathing
is delicious. I learned to swim when I was a little girl, thank
you.”
(So he needn’t think he can teach me anything.)
“How was Mr. Albert Waters? Still chuckling and laughing ‘ho,
ho!’ I expect.
“_I_ laughed at your being taken in like that by Miss Robinson.
Yesterday morning I was almost taken in, by something that was
like you: a sharp tap against my bedroom window that might have
been a stone thrown up. But it was only a fat, speckly thrush
cracking a snail; there are always lots of them crawling out of
that southernwood bush by the door.
“Mrs. Roberts asks me to tell you,”
(What she _said_, in her speciously honeyed Welsh voice and with her
irresistible if toothless smile, was, “Tell your _Cariad_——” But I
needn’t put that.)
“that the ’ooden ’ooman—it took me some time to remember that
this was the figure-head on the cliff!—was want paint very bad,
and she wonder would you do it when you come. Welsh people, I
notice, are fond of ‘wondering’ like this, instead of asking
straight out for what they want; yet they generally seem to get
it.”
(Dear me, this is rather different from the blank sheet I might have
enclosed.... Anyhow, it mustn’t get any longer than his, so I’d better
stop now.)
“I will give this to Theo to post, and”
(Goodness, it is difficult to think of how to sign oneself to young men.
To Sydney I was always “Yours sincerely.” A stupid ending, means nothing
at all.)
“With kind regards.”
(No.)
“Assuring you always of my best attention,”
(No. A bit of that at the beginning was enough.)
“Will give this to Theo to post, and I am,”
(Well! What I _am_, after all!)
“Your official _fiancée_,
“MONICA TRANT.”
Ah! _Now_ there’s something I’d forgotten!
“P. S. I will remember what you’ve ordered—”
(No, that sounds rather nasty; rather too like Manner B. Cross it out.)
—“what you—wish”? No! “What you suggest about my being pleased
to see you on Saturday.
“N.”
As a matter of fact—I shan’t write it, as it might possibly give a wrong
impression!—but I really _shall_ be quite pleased to see Billy Waters
again. And now to find his young sister, and send her off to the post
with what she, in her innocence, imagines to be a return _love_-letter!