Part 4

She had worked in a canteen, where the preoccupation of everyone had been the procuring and dispensing of primitive things--food, and drink, and warmth. Women had worked with their hands for men who had been fighting, and were going to fight again.

Valeria had been the quickest worker there, one of the most efficient. The manual work, the close contact with material things, had satisfied some craving within herself of which she had not before been actively conscious.

She had learnt to cook and had become proficient with astonishing ease. Scrambled eggs interested her more than herbaceous borders, more than choir practises, more, to her own surprise and shame, than evening readings-aloud at home.

The canteen jokes, elementary, beer-and-tobacco-flavoured, had amused her whole-heartedly. She had laughed, foolishly and mirthfully, for sheer enjoyment, knowing all the time that, judged by the criterion of St. Gwenllian, the jests were pointless, the wit undeserving of the name.

Very soon she had ceased to dwell upon any remembrance of the criterion of St. Gwenllian. She had let herself go.

There had been brief, giggling intimacies with girls and young women whom Valeria could certainly not visualize as intimates in her own home, allusions and catchwords shared with the men or the orderlies, childish, undignified escapades which she was aware that the Canon would have regarded and apostrophised as vulgar. Those days now seemed like a dream.

Even the girl with whom she had shared a room for six months no longer wrote to her.

She, the bobbed-haired, twenty-two-year-old Pollie Gordon, had had love-affairs. Valeria remembered certain confidences made by Pollie, and still blushed. Pollie had been strangely outspoken, to Miss Morchard’s way of thinking, but she had been interesting--revealing even.

Valeria ruefully realized perfectly that Pollie Gordon, whether one’s taste approved of her or not, had lived every moment of her short life to the full. She was acutely aware of contrast.

“And I’m twenty-seven!” thought Val. “I’d better go and be a cook somewhere. If only I could! Or marry Owen--supposing he asks me. Anyway, one might have children.”

A humourous wonder crossed her mind as to her ability to cope with the intelligent, eclectically-minded children that Owen Quentillian might be expected to father.

“It’s a pity he isn’t poor. I believe I should be better as a poor man’s wife, having to do everything for him, and for the babies, if there were babies.... The Colonies, for instance....”

Although she was alone, Val coloured again and tears stood in her eyes.

“What a fool I am!”

It was this painfully sincere conviction that sent her to seek the oblivion of sleep, rather than any recollection of the fidelity in that which is least, enjoined upon her by her father.

For the next few days Valeria was zealous in gardening and tennis playing. She also, on two occasions, fetched volumes of Lamartine and asked her father to read aloud after dinner.

Her physical exertions sent her to bed tired out, and made her sleep soundly.

It surprised her very much when Lucilla, who never made personal remarks, said to her:

“Why don’t you go away for a time, Val? You don’t look well.”

“I’m perfectly all right. I only wish I had rather more to do, sometimes.”

Valeria looked at her elder sister. She was less intimate with her than with Flora. No one, in fact, was intimate with Lucilla. She spoke seldom, and almost always impersonally. At least, one knew that she was discreet....

Val, on impulse, spoke.

“Do you suppose--don’t be horrified, Lucilla--do you suppose Father would ever think of letting me go away and work?”

Lucilla gave no sign of being horrified.

She appeared to weigh her answer before she replied.

“I don’t think it would occur to him, of his own accord.”

“Oh, no. But if one asked him? Would it make him dreadfully unhappy?”

“Yes,” said Lucilla matter-of-factly.

Valeria, disappointed and rather angry, shrugged her shoulders.

“Then, of course, that puts an end to the whole thing.”

Lucilla finished stamping a small pile of the Canon’s letters, laid them on the table, and placed a paper-weight upon the heap before turning round to face her sister.

“But why, Val?”

“Why what?”

“Why need it put an end to the whole thing? You know as well as I do that it would make Father unhappy for any one of us to suggest leaving home. But if you really mean to do it, you must make up your mind to his being unhappy about it.”

“Lucilla!”

Lucilla did not elaborate her astounding theses, but her gaze, sustained and level, met Valeria’s astonished eyes calmly.

“You don’t suppose I’m as hideously selfish as that, do you?”

“I don’t know what you are. But you’ve a right to your own life.”

“Not at anyone else’s expense.”

Lucilla began to stamp postcards.

“Lucilla, you didn’t mean that, did you?”

“Of course I did, Val.”

“That I should hurt _Father_, and go away just to satisfy my own restlessness, knowing that he disapproved and was unhappy? I should never know a moment’s peace again.”

“Well, if you feel like that, I suppose you won’t do it.”

“Wouldn’t you feel like that, in my place?”

“No, I shouldn’t; but that’s neither here nor there. It’s for you to decide whether a practical consideration or a sentimental one weighs most in your own particular case.”

“Sentimental?”

Val’s indignant tone gave the word its least agreeable meaning.

“It is a question of sentiment, isn’t it? Father likes to have you at home, but he’s not dependent upon you in any way.”

“But wouldn’t he say that my place was at home--that it was only restlessness and love of independence...?” Valeria stammered.

She suddenly felt very young beneath the remote, passionless gaze of her sister. For the first time in her life she saw Lucilla as a human being and not as an elder sister, and she was struck with Lucilla’s strange effect of spiritual aloofness. It would be very easy to speak freely to anyone so impersonal as Lucilla.

“It’s ever since I got back from France,” said Val suddenly. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, exactly, but I’ve ... wanted things. I’ve wanted to work quite hard, at things like cooking, or sweeping--and I’ve been sick of books, and music, and botany. I don’t feel any of it is one scrap worth while. And, oh, Lucilla, it’s such nonsense, because no one wants me to cook or sweep, so I’m just ‘seeking vocations to which I am not called,’ as Father always says. Perhaps it’s just that I want change.”

Lucilla was silent.

“Do say what you think,” Val besought her with some impatience.

“I will if you like, but it isn’t really what I think, or what Father thinks, that matters. It’s what you think yourself.”

Valeria stamped her foot.

“I don’t _know_ what I think.”

“Better go away,” Lucilla then said briefly.

“Work?”

“Yes, if that’s what you feel like. Of course, marriage would be better.”

“Lucilla.”

“You asked me to say what I thought,” her sister pointed out.

“I suppose you mean Owen Quentillian,” Val said at last. “But even if I did that--and he hasn’t asked me to, so far--it would only mean just the same sort of thing, only in another house. There’d be servants to do the real work, and a gardener to do the garden, and a nurse for the babies, if there were babies. Owen talks about farming Stear, but he’d do it all out of books, I feel certain. We should be frightfully--frightfully civilized.”

“Owen _is_ frightfully civilized.”

“Well, I don’t think I am,” said Val contentiously.

“Lucilla, do you like Owen?”

“Yes. I’m very sorry for him, too.”

“Why?” Valeria could not believe that Owen would be in the least grateful for Lucilla’s sorrow. It might even be difficult to induce him to believe that anyone could be sufficiently officious to indulge in such an emotion on his behalf.

“I think his shell-shock has affected him much more than he realizes,” Lucilla said. “I think his nerves are on edge, very often. He’d be a difficult person to live with, Val.”

Valeria remained thoughtful.

She knew that Lucilla’s judgments, if rarely put into words, were extraordinarily clear-cut and definite, and as such they carried conviction to her own intuitive, emotional impulses of like and dislike.

“Father likes Owen so much. Wouldn’t he be pleased if one ever did?” Val said elliptically.

“Very pleased, I should think.”

“Of course, that isn’t really a reason for doing it.”

Lucilla apparently found the wisdom of her sister’s observation too obvious for reply.

“Not the only reason, anyway.”

Lucilla’s silence was again an assent.

“Gossiping in the morning, my daughters?”

The Canon’s deep, pleasant voice preceded him as he paused outside the open window.

“Is that as it should be? Lucilla, my dear love, at your desk again? You look pale--you should be in the open air. Is not the day a glorious one? When this world about us is so unutterably fair, does it not make one think of ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what things He hath prepared for them that love him’?”

The Canon’s uplifted gaze was as joyful as it was earnest.

“Heaven seems very near, on such a day,” he said softly.

Val, always outspoken, and struggling with the unease of her own discontent, joined him at the window and said wistfully:

“I can’t feel it like you do, Father. I wish I could.”

“Little Valeria! It will come, my dear; it will all come. These things become more real and vivid to us as life goes on. So many of those I love have gone to swell the ranks of the Church Triumphant, now--such a goodly company of friends! How can I feel it to be a strange or far-away country, when your mother awaits me there, and my own dear father and mother, and such a host of friends? What a meeting that will be, with no shadow of parting any more!”

Valeria was conscious of foolish, utterly unexplained tears, rising to her throat at the tender, trustful voice in which her father spoke.

How she loved him! Never could she do anything that would hurt or disappoint him. The resolution, impulsive and emotional, gave her a certain sense of stability, welcome after all her chaotic self-questionings and contradictory determinations.

“Will you give Owen and myself the pleasure of your company this afternoon, Valeria? We meditate an expedition to Stear--an expedition to Stear.”

She said that she would go with them.

None of the Canon’s children had ever refused an invitation to go out with the Canon since the days when the Sunday afternoons of their childhood had been marked by the recurrent honour of a walk with Father. An honour and a pleasure, even if rather a breathless one, and one that moreover was occasionally liable to end in shattering disaster, as when Flora had been sent home in disgrace by herself for the misguided sense of humour that had led her, aged five, to put out her tongue at the curate. Or that other unforgettable episode when Val herself, teased by the boys, had vigorously boxed Adrian’s ears.

She smiled as she recollected it, and wondered if Owen remembered too, and yet there was a sort of disloyalty in recalling the affair too closely.

The Canon had been so _very_ angry! His anger, as intense as it was memorable, had been succeeded by such a prolonged period of the blackest depression!

Val realized thankfully that it was a long time since any of them had seen the Canon angry.

She turned aimlessly down the garden.

The Canon had already gone indoors. He was never other than occupied, and Valeria had never seen him impatient of an interruption.

“The man who wants me is the man I want,” the Canon sometimes quoted, with his wonderfully attractive smile.

“Father _is_ wonderful. _Never_ could I disappoint or grieve him,” thought Val vehemently.

She suddenly wheeled round and returned to the open window, determined that Lucilla, the astonishing Lucilla, should know of her resolution.

“You know what we were talking about just now?” she demanded abruptly.

Lucilla looked up.

“I’ve quite made up my mind that your advice was wrong,” said Val firmly. “I know you said what you thought was best, and it’s nice of you to want me to be independent, but, after all, one’s duty comes first. I don’t believe it’s my duty to dash away from home and make Father unhappy.”

Lucilla looked down again.

“Of course, if anything happened _of itself_ to make me leave home, it would be quite different. If I married, or anything like that. But just to go away for a purely selfish whim----”

She paused expressively.

“I couldn’t do it, you know.”

“Well--” Lucilla’s tone conceded, apparently, that Val had every right to judge for herself. Further than that, it did not go.

“Lucilla, if you really think like that, about living one’s own life, and I suppose from the aggravating way in which you won’t say anything, that you do--why don’t you do it yourself?”

“But I haven’t any wish to,” said Lucilla, looking surprised.

“Haven’t you ever had any wish to?”

“Oh, yes, once. But not now.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Val pursued desperately. She felt as though she was coming really to know her sister for the first time.

“I suppose because I thought, like you, that it wouldn’t do to leave Father.”

“But you don’t think that any more?”

“No.”

“Did anyone advise you?”

“Oh, no. There wasn’t anything to advise about. One has to think things out for oneself, after all.”

“Oh!” Val was conscious of her own perpetual craving for approval from everyone, for any course that she might adopt.

“Did you ever ask anyone’s advice, Lucilla?”

“I don’t think so. If I did, it would be because I meant to take it, and I can’t imagine wanting to let anyone else decide things for me. Just talking about one’s own affairs isn’t taking advice, though people like to call it so.”

“I think it’s a very good thing you’re not married,” said Val crossly. “You’re too superior.”

“Perhaps that’s why no one has ever asked me,” said Miss Morchard with calm.

Valeria, in spite of her momentary elevation of spirits in resolving never to grieve her father, prepared for the visit to Stear in a discontented frame of mind.

At the last moment Adrian suddenly announced a wish to accompany them.

“My dear! But of course--” The Canon’s pleasure was very evident. “Owen, you will welcome this lad of mine as part of our little excursion, eh? Why not make one of the old-time family parties? Why not let us all go and explore this future home of Owen’s? It’s not very often that I have a free afternoon nowadays--and to have all my dear ones to make holiday with me would be indeed a rare joy.”

He looked round him expectantly.

“The caretaker won’t be able to manage tea for so many,” said Lucilla, looking at Quentillian.

“There speaks my practical housekeeper!

For though on pleasure she was bent, She had a frugal mind.

“Eh, Lucilla? Could you not contrive a basket for us, my dear, picnic fashion? Come, come, let’s have an impromptu picnic. What say you, young people?”

They said what the Canon wanted them to say. No one, Val felt, could have done otherwise, in the face of his eagerness. She was partly disappointed, and partly relieved. There had been a certain romance in going with Owen to see Owen’s home, with the barely acknowledged wonder whether it might not one day also be hers.

But there was no hint of romance in the solidly packed basket presently produced by Lucilla, and reluctantly carried by Adrian, nor in Flora’s tardiness that nearly caused them to miss the train, nor in her Father’s gentle, humourously worded rebuke to her.

(v)

If Valeria was slightly discomposed by the tribal nature of the expedition to Stear, Quentillian was seriously annoyed by it. He had figured to himself a grave and gentle readjustment of values, when he should see the place that he had known since boyhood transformed into a setting for the figure of Valeria.

He did not suppose himself to be tempestuously in love, but he had made up his mind that he greatly wished to marry Valeria.

A wistful uncertainty possessed him as to whether Valeria would wish to marry him.

Stear looked forlorn and uninhabited, and the repairs were even less advanced than Quentillian had expected them to be.

He reflected that he ought to be upon the spot, and shuddered involuntarily, and to his disgust, at the lonely prospect.

Since his shell-shock, he had very often been afraid of his own company, and the knowledge was peculiarly galling to him.

“Your lines have fallen to you in pleasant places, Owen,” said the Canon genially.

“You are optimistic, sir,” said Quentillian rather dryly. “It will be months before these men are out of the place.”

“You should move in yourself,” Lucilla suggested.

“I believe I should.”

“Thoughtless Lucilla! Why should Owen leave his present quarters, if he is happy with us, as I trust he is? Aye, dear Owen, you are very welcome at St. Gwenllian whilst your own nest is being prepared for you.”

The Canon’s ready hand sought Quentillian’s arm.

Owen glanced at Lucilla half apologetically, but her gaze, impervious to subtleties, and mildly cheerful, met his very readily.

“Please stay on with us, if you should care to.”

“Thank you,” said Quentillian non-committally.

Later, at the Canon’s suggestion, he took them to visit the church.

“You will one day have the responsibility of finding a new shepherd for the flock here, I understand, Owen.”

“I shall hope for some advice from you, sir.”

“Aye, indeed? It’s a very good living, is it not? Though that is very far from being the first consideration--very far, indeed.”

“What’s it worth?” Adrian inquired.

“I believe it’s considered worth about £700 a year.”

“A job for a married man,” said Adrian casually.

An involuntary flash of amused comprehension passed between Quentillian and Valeria. He understood it to be in reference to this when she said to him in a low voice on leaving the church:

“I don’t think Olga Duffle would make a clergyman’s wife, do you?”

“I should doubt it.”

“But Adrian couldn’t really be thinking of it.”

“I thought he’d decided against the Church.”

“So he has. I think it was one of the greatest disappointments Father has ever had.”

“Your father would only have wished it if Adrian had wished it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Val emphatically. “Naturally, he looks upon it as a question of vocation. Father is the last person to ignore that.”

She hesitated, and then said: “Owen, do you believe that everyone has a vocation?”

The question, to him so oddly reminiscent of the perplexities of a bygone age, nearly made him laugh, but his amusement was wholly tender.

“I don’t believe in a special vocation straight from Heaven for each one of us,” he admitted. “You know, I never can believe that Heaven takes that acute personal interest in individuals that religious people always emphasize when they’re talking about themselves. But, of course, there are certain lines of development----”

“I think,” Val said seriously, “that I should like to feel I had a definite job in life, that no one but myself could do. I feel so--indefinite.”

“I believe I might enlighten you on that subject,” Owen replied in measured accents.

“I don’t mean Sales of Work or a botanical collection, Owen.”

“I know you don’t. The sales of work and the collections were never a means of self-expression, were they?”

“They did stand for something, though.”

“For your wish to please somebody else?”

“The wish is still there, Owen.”

“Val, you know I think self-abnegation is all wrong.”

He was half laughing, but the flushed face that she turned towards him was altogether earnest.

“Don’t think me arrogant, Val, but I do so wish I could make you see it as I do. Don’t you see that the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice was only the swing of the pendulum, from the brutal old days when men rejoiced in seeing their fellow-creatures tortured and killed? Feelings had to be developed, and so the Sermon on the Mount was preached. The pendulum has swung too far the other way now--charity has come to mean self-advertisement or sentimentality.”

Quentillian, deeply interested in his own exposition of views that were by no means new to him, was brought up short by a call from behind him.

“Hi, Owen! Are you walking for a wager? I want to ask you something.”

Quentillian, not at all disposed to welcome Adrian and his interrogations, was obliged to slacken his steps as Valeria did hers.

Adrian was swishing at the long grasses on either side of the road with a slender length of ash.

“Look here, old man, have you got anybody in your eye for that living?”

Adrian’s head was studiously turned towards his depredations with the ash-stick.

“Because if you haven’t--not that it matters to me, particularly, you understand, but I’ve got a friend, who might be the man you want.”

“Who is he?”

“I should have to sound him first,” Adrian explained. “I suppose you’d want a youngish fellow and--and I suppose you’d rather he was married?”

“Not in the least.”

Adrian looked disturbed.

“I thought a parson’s wife was useful in a large, straggling sort of place like this. Not that it matters to me.”

“Is your friend married, Adrian?” Val enquired.

Quentillian could not decide whether the simplicity of her manner was ironical or no.

“He isn’t married at present. I think he’s engaged. You see, a living like this would justify a man in getting married, wouldn’t it?”

“It would depend on the sort of person he wished to marry.”

“Supposing she had a little money of her own?”

“The sort of girls who marry clergymen never do have money of their own,” said Quentillian, firmly.

On this discouraging pronouncement, they were rejoined by the rest of the party.

Nevertheless Valeria contrived to enquire of Quentillian, in a disturbed murmur:

“What _can_ Adrian be thinking of?”

It was not at all difficult to guess what Adrian could be thinking of, and became still less so as the days slipped by and his infatuation for Miss Olga Duffle led to her inclusion in innumerable games of tennis and impromptu tea-parties at St. Gwenllian.

“What can he _see_ in her?” Valeria demanded, after the fashion of sisters.

Quentillian was unable to provide any adequate explanation of the phenomenon, but he was fully prepared to discuss it, and prolong thereby the sense of intimacy with Valeria.

It seemed to Quentillian that a new, slight, tinge of gravity shadowed Valeria’s frankness.

With all the logic and consistency of most persons so situated, Quentillian alternately viewed this as being hopeful or unhopeful, in the extreme, for the fulfilment of his wishes.

He was slightly amused at finding himself in the extremely conventional position in which he had so often viewed, with dispassionate distaste, the spectacle presented by other men, and this amusement was not without its share in determining him to submit his proposal to Valeria in writing.

A tendency, real, or fancied by Quentillian’s self-consciousness, on the parts of Flora and Adrian at least, to vacate any room in which he and Valeria might be, upon excuses of a shadow-like transparency, finally brought Quentillian to the point of leaving St. Gwenllian, under promise of an early return.

“You must come back, to us, dear Owen--you must come back,” the Canon repeated. “I want many a talk with you yet, and Adrian here will miss the evening confabulations in the smoking-room--eh, Adrian? Stear will hardly be ready for you yet awhile, to our advantage be it spoken, so you must make your home with us in the meanwhile. Come and go quite freely, dear lad.”

“Thank you very much.”

Quentillian felt that he had already said these words all too often, and conscientiously sought to vary the formula.

“It’s been a delightful time altogether, and I’m more than grateful. It’s been wonderful to get such a kind welcome after these years abroad.”

“Ah, dear fellow!”

The Canon’s fine face softened as he laid his arm across the younger man’s shoulders.