Part 11

Meanwhile Rose was growing up. When Eustace returned she was eight and I did not want better company. In herself she was interesting, and it was interesting also to compare her with her mother at the same age: I almost felt sometimes as if both were present. She was more with me than the other Rose had been, for I was now less often out and away, having a younger man to take the harder work: and when I was away it was for shorter periods because the car was so much swifter than poor old Silver. Another reason was that this Rose was less friendly with the neighbours: not because of any natural shyness, but because she did not receive the same quality of welcome. The little Rose of twenty years earlier, whose father had died suddenly, was more acceptable than the little Rose of to-day, whose mother had run away from husband and child with another man—and that man the heir to the Hall. We are often not logical in our censorious moods; and one of the last things to go, in the decay of feudalism, will be respect for the Great House. No one was so mean or courageous as to refuse Rose’s acquaintance; but she must have felt instinctively that she was a little under a cloud and therefore have been the more prepared to keep within the home borders.

She was, however, as welcome as sunshine in both adjoining territories—the Westerleys’ and the Sturgis’s. Colonel Westerley, who was getting very blind, found her invaluable as a guide. Again and again I have listened to them on their tours round the beds, Rose’s clear little voice raised (for he was getting deaf too) to keep him in touch with the progress of every plant.

“This is where the fritillaries are”—she had great difficulty with some of the names. “There are two new purple speckled ones and three white.”

“Now we’re opposite the auriculas. The yellow ones are terrific.”

“Oh dear, how the rain has broken down the tulips!”

“Now we’re opposite the hedge-sparrow’s nest. Wait a minute while I see if there are any more eggs. No, only three still.”

So she would mark the changes of each morning, meanwhile leading the gentle old warrior by the hand.

The three Sturgis sisters—though none of them was destined to soar to the realms of bliss as Mrs. Julius Greville—fulfilled part of the destiny that the other Rose, all unconsciously, had planned for them, by becoming the most solicitous foster-mothers to her daughter. Out of their unselfishness and their leisure they suggested that Rose should go to them for lessons: a proposal that I was very glad to accept; and so it came about that the eldest gave Rose an hour a day with pencil and paint brushes in the studio (Rose’s grandfather’s studio), and the other two each an hour in more general instruction. Having a full measure of the Quaker placidity to keep them contented with their lot, they had no wish to roam, and were thus ever to be depended upon.

Not that their lot was to be despised, for they had turned Theodore’s house into a very beautiful serene place. It was a Georgian house, panelled in white, with many recesses; and the three sisters had filled these with blue china. The gods dispense their gifts capriciously, and upon these descendants of a sect vowed to hostility to the arts and graces they had conferred the most exquisite taste. A series of provident ancestors had put them into a position to gratify most of their wishes, and their home kept pace with modern culture in all its quieter aspects.

* * * * *

Rose, you see, if she had not many friends, had very good ones. Her chief lack was the chief lack of many only children—contemporaries. How much happier she would have been had she playmates of her own age, I cannot say; but it is absurd to pretend that without them she was unhappy.

And this I can say with certainty: she kept me young. She did not actually transform me into a contemporary, but she so arranged it that there was very little awkwardness or fear between us. I am not pretending to have been in her complete confidence, I am merely stating the fact that we were under very little constraint together.

Even had we been real contemporaries, how could we really have known each other! A man may guess at a man’s thoughts, may fairly safely measure him by himself; but how can a man guess at a girl’s thoughts? Speech reveals so few of them. If while one is speaking twenty words one can be thinking of a hundred different things, what of the silent pauses? How they must teem! Where was my Rose when her blue eyes looked through their black lashes into space? How could I follow her unaided? Or would she have aided me? Not would, but could. Could she have told me? Could any of us tell all our thoughts in any given hour? Even if ships that passed in the night signalled to each other the whole passenger list there would always be a few of the steerage and some of the crew unnamed. And if those were revealed, there would still be a stowaway!

* * * * *

One matter never mentioned between Rose and me was her mother’s _faux pas_. What the child knew about this I did not discover, or wish to. I am old-fashioned enough to prefer to talk of grown-up matters only with grown-up people. The longer the gaiety and happiness of children can be unclouded by knowledge of the difficulties and disasters which can proceed from our emotional instincts, the better. So far as I was concerned Rose was ignorant of her mother’s rebellion. We talked about her as a child, but we did not touch on recent history. English families are marvellous in their capacity to regulate conversational reservations.

One funny little pet turn of speech to which Rose was addicted comes back to me very vividly as I write. Every one has favourite locutions, and Rose had the habit of prefacing many of her remarks with the phrase “As a matter of fact”; only, being mostly in a hurry to express herself, she used to contract the last three words to one: “As a maffact.” Very few minutes could pass, when we were together and she was unburdening herself on this or that question, without her beginning a sentence: “As a maffact, Dombeen.”

* * * * *

When the War came Rose was thirteen and I was sixty-five; and we were therefore both non-combatants. But it did not leave us—any more than anyone else—untouched; for I was old enough to be saddened and shocked by the calamities that it bred; and Rose was young enough to be ripe for the new Hedonism which the peace inaugurated and which is still in full swing. Ronnie, the other Rose told me, longed to be in it, but was too delicate, and they remained on their estate throughout its lengthy course.

The War found the old Colonel still living, but he did not long survive. He was not of the kind that spends its breath in lamenting the decadence of the Army in present times—I never heard him couple the Service and the dogs—but he had had his little autobiographical weaknesses, in which border skirmishes played no inconspicuous part, and in the presence of the gigantic drama in Belgium and France he found his occupation gone. No one wanted to listen to him any more; and he was too aged and infirm to be of any use. The War must have hit countless other retired officers in this way and in a moment have dried up their streams of reminiscence and emptied all their boasts. The Colonel was, however, a rural gentleman and not a frequenter of clubs, and his lot was comparatively easy; but I saw a steady decline in his strength, and he did not long survive the death of two of his grandsons in the Battle of Mons.

* * * * *

The Colonel was not our only loss. Mrs. O’Gorman had been declining for some time, and in the early spring she also left us.

I have been at many death-beds, and at most the grief was that of the living rather than the dying. Nature has mercifully arranged that most people are ready for the end—even look forward to it. Suffering or weakness has broken down their resistance: the goal they desire is peace. Others, with more fight in them, morphia lulls into acquiescence. But Mrs. O’Gorman needed no drugs, nor were there tears to distress her. Being the last of her clan her house was uninvested by relations. Only the faithful Julia, her servants and I were about. Steadily and quietly her flame lowered and was extinguished.

“I’m ready to die,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be true to say I should want to if I had strength. It’s a muddling old world, but one hates the dark. And I like to know what’s going on. I should have liked to see your new Rose growing up. And that other Rose, poor darling, I don’t like leaving her. And my little Peek, it will be horrid not to be able to pat him and give him his sugar.

“Perhaps when we’re dead,” she went on, “we can still watch our friends. If so, you can be very sure I shall be watching you. But don’t worry. I won’t move the furniture or bother you with manifestations. I’ll simply be looking on, and if there’s any means by which a spirit can add to the content of a living friend, you can be sure I shall apply it. But there can’t be,” she added, “or we should all be happier.

“It’s a sin,” she said another time, “that all we can leave are our twopenny-halfpenny possessions. Why can’t we leave our brains? I don’t pretend that mine are particularly desirable, but they would be a godsend to that stupid woolly Mrs. Stansted, for example. It’s a pity I can’t hand them on to her.”

To the end she kept up her spirit and to the end she teased poor Julia.

“Have you ordered your mourning yet?” she asked her once.

Julia’s reply was a sound of protest and a sob.

“But I want you to. I told you to. All this fuss about a simple little matter like dying is so ridiculous. Don’t you want me to be happy in heaven, Julia?”

More sobs.

“Now listen. I command you to get your mourning. I want to see if it becomes you. Why shouldn’t I? A young bride is allowed to see the bridesmaids who are to follow her to the church; why should an old widow woman be prevented from seeing what her chief mourner will look like?”

Nothing, however, could get Julia to consider death a subject matter for discussion, or as anything but a gaunt, grisly, abnormal happening.

“I hope they don’t insist on one’s entering heaven the very instant one dies,” Mrs. O’Gorman said at another time. “That won’t suit me at all. What I want is a really long sleep first—weeks and weeks of it. What do you think, Julia, will they be in such a hurry?”

Poor Julia, all this was hard to bear; but when the old lady’s soul and body did at last part company and her will was made public, it was found that the legacy to her faithful companion was ten times larger than she had foreshadowed in conversations. The poor of the village were remembered also, and both the Roses had little mementoes.

* * * * *

We lost the Fergussons too, although not by death. They had not long remained at the Hall after the burial of the hatchet, even though my invaluable attendance was theirs once more. They had become restless and discontented. The Hall estate had been bought for Ronnie to succeed to; and of what use was it now? Sir Edmund had nothing to do—his interest in tree-planting and general improvements disappeared, and he gradually took a dislike to the place. The result was that they left for one of the Continental health resorts—Aix-les-Bains, I think it was. When they went I decided to take no new patients, and gradually allowed my practice to pass to others, and when Mrs. O’Gorman died I retired altogether.

* * * * *

I said something a little while back about Rose and her ignorance of her mother’s flight—or, at any rate, silence regarding it. That was when she was a child. But later, when she had reached the teens, references to her mother gradually came naturally into her conversation, and she would even ask me about her.

“Tell me about mother, Dombeen,” she would say. “Was she like me? Mrs. O’Gorman says that our voices are just the same.”

“Did you like her better than me?” She wanted to know this very badly.

I have no doubt that she had collected other views as well as mine and had a fairly sound idea of the situation.

“Of course it was naughty to run away from father,” she began once, after one of Eustace’s visits, “but—” Here she broke off with a suspicion of a chuckle.

I was careful not to ask her to finish the sentence.

Sometimes she propounded terrible posers, which were not made any simpler by being dropped from clear skies in the midst of talk on the most innocent of themes. I remember one evening I was pointing out the constellations.

I had just said, “That’s Orion’s Belt,” when she inquired, “Do you think, Dombeen, that husbands and wives, when they love other people, ought to go on living together?”

“But that has nothing to do with astronomy,” was my feeble reply.

Another time, after another of Eustace’s visits: “What do men look like when their hearts are broken?”

“If I found I had married the wrong man I should leave him,” was another announcement. (This was when she was sixteen.) “As a maffact, Dombeen, I expect I shall make a mistake like that. I don’t see how one can help it. I’ve always got tired of everything up to now, so why should it be different with a husband?”

This was the War virus working with a vengeance! We all had to adjust ourselves to that, we old people.

I don’t know how it is with my contemporaries, but the truth about me is that at thirty I was much surer of myself and of accepted dogma than I am at seventy. At thirty, if I had heard a young girl remark that chastity is absurdly overrated, I should have been shocked; to-day I find myself capable of wondering if it may not be true: if we do not, in protecting that shadow, allow much sound substance to deteriorate? Doctors see more than most spectators, and with these eyes I have watched many and many an open-natured girl shrivel into an old maid and her finer juices turn to gall—all because she was not wooed and had not the courage to defy convention and woo for herself. The older one grows, the smaller is the number of sins. I can enumerate very few now, and if I live much longer there will be only one, and that is meanness.

“Aren’t our bodies our own, to do as we like with?” is a question that may be said to be in the air in these days. And how explain to any young person, girl or boy, that the answer is No?

Rose was not, so far as I could tell, as modern as this. But of course I could not hope for complete knowledge of her, even if I had probed for it. December and April are not confidants: at most they can be sympathetic. Such insight as I had into her philosophy and creed of living had to be gathered from generalities: from her comments on the day’s news, from her selective readings aloud from the papers, from her attitude to local misdemeanour: whether lenient or censorious. Lenience was certainly her tendency. In the idiom of to-day she was “for” all insurrectionists; she could even find it in her heart to be sorry for miners. “I don’t wonder they strike, poor things. The mystery is how they can go on digging that horrid black stuff at all, in the pitch dark too, no matter how much you pay them.”

* * * * *

It was one afternoon when Rose was eighteen that I realized that she was no longer merely a girl. Suddenly the peace of the garden was invaded by a series of snorts and explosions, and a motor-car rushed up the drive—one of those absurd little cars, very small and low, like an important roller skate, with just room for two, and a naked nymph in silver and without shame poised over the bonnet by way of mascot. The kind of vehicle brought into existence to meet the demands of second-lieutenants. Immediately afterwards I was told that a gentleman wished to see me, and behold there he was, in the sitting-room—a tall young man with a tiny moustache exactly the same width as his nose, and purple socks. Although obviously not lacking in self-assurance, he advanced rather nervously.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. “You know I have retired from practice.”

“O, it isn’t about any old malady,” he explained. “Thank Heaven I’m as fit as a fiddle. The fact is, I wanted to ask your advice. It’s about—Miss, Miss Holt.”

“Yes?” I said. I knew instinctively what was coming, but it was no business of mine to make it any easier for the young bandits who proposed to carry off this treasure.

“Well,” he said, “the fact is, you know, she’s—there’s no one so topping; or perhaps you don’t know?”

“Why should I be ignorant?” I asked. “Because I’m so old?”

“Well, I don’t mean that,” he replied. “But you’re her guardian, aren’t you? And living here as she does. . .”

“Oh I see,” I said. “You mean that only strangers can discover how delightful people can be?”

“No, not exactly that,” he stammered, “although, as a matter of fact, you know, one does rather take one’s own people for granted. My sister Belle now—to me she’s the stodgiest kind of old thing, but you should see the fellows after her. Like flies. They’re not as keen as I am about Miss Holt, though.”

“Then I must suppose,” I said, “that Rose—Miss Holt—is much nicer away from home than she is when she is there.”

“Oh no!” he replied, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure she’s always charming.”

“Well, if neither of these is the reason, I am bound,” I said, “to fall back on the theory that I am too old to recognize sweetness when I see it.”

He was in a hole now and showed it. I liked him for his confusion. I liked to think that any young man, particularly one who had been through a war so much more destructive of good manners and good morals and honest standards of living than of militarism, should still be capable of embarrassment.

“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I smoke?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Every one smokes now. Tobacco is the next thing to mother’s milk.”

He took a cigarette from a gold case and tapped it. “I’m afraid it’s only a gasper,” he explained.

“I’d rather it was a pipe,” I said.

“Pipes don’t appeal to me any more,” he replied. “I took to cigarettes in France and I’ve never gone back.”

A few whiffs seemed to give him courage. “I came to see you,” he said at last, “because I want to marry Miss Holt.”

I was silent for a minute, during which I was taking him all in, and reviewing Rose’s life, and seeing them together, and speculating on the future, and realizing how different this happy-go-lucky youth, with a touch of effrontery and few thoughts for anything but motoring and dancing, was from the husband I had been wishing for her. It is extraordinary what a lot can be thought about in sixty seconds. Meanwhile he puffed his gasper and nursed his little moustache and swung a leg with so much purple sock now exposed that a suspender was visible too.

“Do you live about here?” I asked at last. “I don’t seem to remember your face.”

“I’m staying with my uncle, Major Wilkinson,” he said. “My name’s Sibthorp.”

“And what do you do?”

“Well, I’m not doing anything at the moment. I’ve only just been demobbed. I may possibly go back to Oxford. But I’d rather make some money. There’s talk of the mater setting me up as a chicken-farmer. There’s a devil of a lot of eggs wanted.”

“And what did you do in the war?”

“I was in the Air Force. Jolly lucky too. I never had a scratch.”

“But you scratched a Hun or two, I hope?”

“I fancy I did,” he said.

“Any medals?” I said.

“I got the D.S.O.,” he replied simply.

“You must let me shake your hand,” I said, “but remember that it is entirely without prejudice to the other matter. Do you happen to know how Miss Holt feels about it?”

“O I think she thinks I’m a pretty decent sort,” he said.

“Why do you like her?” I asked. “She doesn’t rouge.”

“I loathe rouge,” he said warmly.

I shook him by the hand again—again warning him that it was without prejudice.

“Does she like you at all?” I asked.

“She likes jazzing with me, I know,” he assured me.

“Life isn’t a dance,” I replied.

“No, of course not,” he said. “I know that. I know it’s a jolly serious affair.”

“And you are proposing that Miss Holt should help you with the poultry?” I suggested.

“She’d love it,” he said. “It’s a great lark.”

“This means,” I said, “that you would have to live in the country, and give constant attention to the work. No more jazzing, and very little motoring except to the market? Do you think that’s an existence for a girl of brains and ambition and high spirits, who happens to be an artist too?”

His face took on an expression of perplexity.

“But—but—she’d be married,” he said.

“So you think that love in an isolated cottage surrounded by roosters and incubators, with only one human companion, is a sufficient paradise to offer her? Upon my word, you seem to me to be uncommonly sure of your fascination. She would have to be very fond of you to give up her present home and pursuits, even with the society of a very aged man occasionally thrust upon her, and take to chicken-farming. Doesn’t it occur to you that that would be a big sacrifice?”

“But—but one must begin,” he said. “The poultry business would only be a start. We might go on to much bigger things.”

“It will be time to talk about marriage,” I said, “when you have made some of that progress.”

“Then you refuse to consider me?” he asked ruefully.

“Not at all,” I said. “It is not for me to decide anything. Rose has a father. But I should certainly put what obstacles I could in your way, until you had something better to propose as a means of livelihood than a chicken-farm in the air.”

“But you don’t forbid me to see her, or anything like that?” he asked eagerly.

“Of course not. And I couldn’t if I wanted to. See as much of her as she wants.”

“And if she told you that I—if she ever said anything about marrying me—you wouldn’t put a spoke in the wheel, would you?”

“I should do nothing to discourage her,” I said—“not from any desire to see her marry you, but for the opposite reason. Old though I am, I have not forgotten that forbidden fruit is the most attractive. So I shouldn’t forbid you.”

“I say, that’s brainy,” he said, with genuine admiration. “I should never have thought of that.”

“May I ask,” I said, “if you have put your case to Miss Holt?”

“Not in so many words,” he replied. “I thought I would see you first.”

“That’s rather an unusual course nowadays, isn’t it?”

“Well, that’s how the mater felt, anyway. It was her idea.”

“You talked it over with your mother?”

“Yes.”

“So Rose is all ignorant of this visit?”

“Yes,” he said.

I shook hands with him again.

“You are a very remarkable young man,” I said. “You respect your mother’s wishes and you don’t like rouged girls. I most cordially hope you will succeed in the egg market. But as for Rose, I can tell you something. Rose is in love with nobody.”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I happen to know her fairly well,” I replied, “and to have kept her under a certain amount of observation.”

“But—but—”

“You mean, once more, that I am too old? Maybe; but I guess that on this particular subject I am right. I’ll tell her that you called. Good afternoon.”

“Oh, sir,” he said, “will you? Wouldn’t it be better to say nothing about it and let me see her first?”

“It might be,” I replied; “but that isn’t the way that Miss Holt and I do things. We put the cards on the table. Good afternoon.”

He walked moodily to his little runabout, cranked it, lighted another cigarette (although what use a cigarette can be in a thirty-mile gale such as he was about to create for himself, I have no notion) and was off.