Читать книгу The Rutherfurd Saga - Anna Buchan - Страница 26

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“Why should calamity be full of words?”

King Richard III.

In the first week of March Nicole went out one day with Alastair looking for star-fish at low tide, slipped, and fell into a deep pool. Often she had done it before and had never been a penny the worse, and this time she laughed and made her wet shoes “chork” to amuse Alastair, and continued the search. But a wind came out of the east, a nipping and an eager air—and Nicole shivered and went home. The next morning she woke with a sore throat and a cough and a temperature, and it was evident that Rutherfurd would not see her that week. She admitted it herself, sitting up in bed, flushed with fever and distress at her own stupidity.

“Who would have supposed that I would take cold?” she croaked, “a thing I almost never do. And no one would want me for a visitor, coughing and sneezing and infecting everybody! I must give up the thought of Rutherfurd, and I hate to fail Mrs. Jackson when all her arrangements are made. . . . Babs, won’t you go in my place? You would be twice as useful anyway.”

“My dear, I couldn’t possibly offer myself.”

“No, but send a wire now, and if she writes suggesting you . . .”

“We’ll see,” said Barbara.

Mrs. Jackson’s letter when it came was a wail of despair. How was she to cope with her festivities with no one to stand by her to counsel and direct? What did Nicole suggest? Would Miss Burt think of coming? And Barbara, after much persuasion, consented to go.

“I’ll be a sort of death’s head at the feast,” she predicted. “You know I never can be gay to order as Nikky can. And I’ll hate the Jacksons when I see them really installed in our house. I feel already like Banquo’s ghost, or something like that.”

“You’re not ethereal enough for that,” Nicole reminded her, laughing. “I don’t see you flitting spectral fashion. . . . Oh, don’t make me laugh, for then I cough. You look so nice, my dear. Assure Mrs. Jackson that you aren’t bringing her influenza, that this is only a common chill got through wet feet in an east wind, and I’m really better already. . . . Be sure and tell me what you think of ‘Andy.’ ”

Barbara departed in the morning, and after luncheon Nicole announced that she couldn’t stay in bed one moment longer.

“Do let me get up and sit by the drawing-room fire,” she begged her mother. “Bed does me such a lot of harm. It has the same effect on me that having his hair cut had on Samson. And it’s so boring in bed; if I were up I could find a thousand things to do. And you needn’t tell Dr. Kilgour.”

“But you look so comfortable lying there with your pile of books and these lovely roses—Mr. Beckett must have sent to Edinburgh for them. . . . Have you read all the last batch of books that came from the Times?”

“Never looked at them,” Nicole said cheerfully. “You don’t want to read new books in bed, they’re too wearing. These are all ‘tried favourites,’ as we say of puddings.”

Lady Jane bent over to read the titles. “Starvecrow Farm, surely that’s an old book?”

“Don’t you remember it, Mother? The runaway bride and the splendid old hostess of the inn. I know no book that gives you a more wonderful feeling of atmosphere. You absolutely live in that comfortable inn among the mountains, through these November days, and suffer with the girl and her lover. . . . And The Good Comrade. Why, Mums, you surely haven’t forgotten ‘Johnnie’ and the stove called ‘Bouquet,’ and the Dutch bulb-growers? . . . Apart from the great books, what a lot of jolly good books there are in the world!”

“Yes,” said her mother, “but to go back to the subject of staying in bed, I’m afraid you’ll feel very wretched up.”

“Not in the least. I’ve no temperature, and I’m not such an unsightly creature now that the cold has left my head and settled comfortably on my chest.”

Lady Jane ceased to argue, and Nicole rose and dressed herself, adding as an invalid touch a rose-red satin dressing-gown with slippers to match, and assisted by Harris carrying things, took her way to the drawing-room. It was only five days since she had been in it, but she looked round appreciatively as if she had come back from a long journey, and settled down in one of the large arm-chairs by the fire with a sigh of satisfaction. After bed, she thought, what a joy to sit in a chair. A table drawn up by her side held a flask of eau-de-Cologne, a large bottle of smelling-salts, a tin of home-made toffee, and Simon Beckett’s roses, as well as her letter-case, in case she should think of working off some letters.

“Now, Mother, you sit opposite with your work. It is so jolly to have you there and not feel that I should be begging you to go downstairs and not bother to sit with me. I do hate being unselfish!”

Lady Jane picked up her work and smiled at her daughter.

“It did seem a most unnatural thing to have you in bed. I hardly ever remember you being ill. Barbara was inclined to take bronchitis as a child, but you and the boys were like Shetland ponies. Even when you had measles and other childish ailments you were hardly ill.”

“No. Measles was a very happy time. I remember hot lemonade as one of the chief joys, and The Just So Stories heard for the first time. I can feel the thrill of ‘the most wise Baviaan,’ and the tone of your voice as you read the delicious snatches of verse:

. . . comes Taffy dancing through the fern,

To lead the Surrey spring again. . . .

How long ago it seems!”

Nicole turned to tidy a pile of books on a stool, and presently said, “It does seem queer without Barbara. I always miss her so when she goes. Three o’clock. She’ll just be starting from Edinburgh. They’re to meet her at Galashiels. . . . D’you know, Mums, I believe Babs will be glad to be back at Rutherfurd even as things are. She pines for it: it meant such a lot to her. She felt secure there, impregnable. She will never be really happy in Kirkmeikle.”

Lady Jane put down her work.

“No,” she said. . . . “I can’t help worrying sometimes about Barbara. You are different. You have the gift of taking things as they come, and finding happiness in little things. I shouldn’t be unhappy about you though you missed what most women crave for most, but Barbara can’t make her own happiness, so to speak, it has to be made for her. It was always so as a child. . . . As you say, she misses Rutherfurd—it gave her a setting.”

Nicole clasped her hands round her knees. “What a pity there isn’t a male Erskine needing a wife, or would châtelaine be a more imposing word? That would be a setting. . . . I suppose people are like jewels, dull and lustreless when badly set, glowing and sparkling in their proper environment—— Why, the sun has come out, Mums. You must go out and enjoy it. You’ve been terribly stuck in the house these last few days. Walk along to the Red Rocks or look in and see Mrs. Brodie. Have you been to see Betsy lately? She greatly relishes your visits.”

Lady Jane looked out at the bright afternoon, then uncertainly at her daughter. “But are you sure you’ll be all right? Have you something to read?”

“Indeed I have. By the way, have you finished Mr. Beckett’s manuscript?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well?” said Nicole.

“Well—— It is good, I think, well told and clear, and written with more sense of style than, somehow, I had expected. But it’s so devoid of feeling as to be almost wooden. He could have made so much of the final scene, and he makes nothing. . . . Of course, there it is.—This is the man who was there, who did the thing, and he can’t talk. Whether would you have the story from him, or from the professional writer who was not there, but who can write beautifully about what he has heard, who can touch the heart and the imagination, thrill you, make the story live? Remember, I don’t say that Mr. Beckett couldn’t, if he liked, but he won’t. I may be entirely wrong, but reading, I had the feeling that he was giving us the bald narrative in case we weren’t worthy of anything else. This was his friend. He won’t cheapen his memory by making appeals to the emotions.—It’s the silent Englishman carried to excess.”

Nicole nodded. “I see what you mean, and I agree. But I liked it—the reticence in the telling. I’m so tired of writers that fling themselves about, emptying themselves of all they ever thought or felt, or being whimsical and elfin, that a plain, straightforward narrative delights me.”

“It’s very refreshing,” her mother said, as she put a log on the fire. “Now don’t move out of the room. Shall I tell Christina to keep out callers?”

“Oh, dear, no. A caller would be rather a treat! And I don’t want dry toast for tea, I want it buttered.”

“You’re no use as an invalid,” Lady Jane told her as she went out.

Just before tea Simon Beckett was shown in. He had been tramping over the links and brought a breath of the sea and the east wind into the quiet room. He stood at the door, hesitating—“Christina said you would see me, but I’m afraid I may give you more cold coming straight in out of the air.”

“Oh, do come in. Of course shake hands. It freshens me to see you. My head’s still fuzzy with quinine, and I seem to smell nothing but beef-tea made the old-fashioned way, and eucalyptus, but I’m really quite all right again, and properly ashamed of myself. . . . What a humiliating thing a cold is! If people can like you through a cold they’ll like you through anything. I wonder if Cleopatra ever snuffled!”

Simon sat down in the arm-chair on the other side of the fire-place, and said, laughing, “You’re not much accustomed to being ill, are you?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a temperature before, and I hardly know what it is to have a headache. Rude health is what I enjoy, and you’re not much of an invalid yourself,” and she laughed, as if the sight of the robust young man opposite amused and pleased her. They talked together, and Nicole was conscious of the feeling that she always had in Simon’s company, a feeling of comfort and content, of being able to dabble in the shallows of talk, knowing they would both be equally at home in the depths.

Presently she lifted the pile of manuscript that lay beside her on the table.

“Let’s speak about this,” she said.

Her companion at once became acutely miserable.

“Oh, I say, don’t,” he moaned. “You don’t know how horrible it is to have to talk about one’s own writing. I tell you what, write me a note about it: I’d like that.”

“But why should I, when there’s lots of things in it I want to discuss with you here and now? You don’t know how interesting it is for some one who can’t write to talk to a person who can. I’ve read so many books I ought to be a judge, but I don’t suppose that follows.” She patted the neatly typed sheets on her lap. “You are no tripe-merchant, my friend.”

Simon asked what exactly she meant by that.

“It’s a phrase of my brother Archie’s. When he thought an author spread himself too much, and blundered into pits of bad taste and made one hot with shame, he said, ‘Tripe-merchant.’ You are almost, if I may say it, too little of a tripe-merchant.”

Simon rumpled his hair miserably. “Say anything you like,” he said, “only get it over quickly.”

“Well, my crab about your book is that you make it all sound too easy. The first part is excellent, couldn’t be better. The description of the going, and the places you passed through, and the people you met, is delightful. You’ve got humour, and the human touch. But the actual climbing, the last arduous bit, the disaster, the coming back, you seem to me to shirk. You say, for instance, ‘We went from camp 5 to camp 6.’ Just like that! A ten minutes’ stroll on a pleasant path! The carrying of a parcel from Tottenham Court Road to Euston Station! a trifle! Remember, we’re not at all an imaginative people, we need to be told things, to be made to see them, if we are to realise. . . . And the disaster—well, reticence there, one can well understand. Still—he was your friend. Couldn’t you have said a little more—or couldn’t you bear to?”

Simon sat forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees. There was a boyish, perplexed look on his face that made Nicole think of the Bat.

“You see—I had to think of Cullis. He hated advertising. I never met such a chap for avoiding notice. I didn’t want to write the beastly book at all, but they said I must for I was there, but I’d hate Cullis to feel that I’d given him away. He was my best friend.”

Nicole said nothing, and in a minute Simon went on:

“If only he’d succeeded! Then I shouldn’t have minded. But to die like that when it seemed as if we were going to manage it—— Still, it was a great end. I like to think of him there among the heights—it was what he always wanted. And he died satisfied, I think, for he knew we wouldn’t leave it at that. He knew we’d come back. . . . Lots of people think that Cullis threw away his life—funny, isn’t it?”

“It seems like madness to many,” Nicole said.

“But you don’t think it madness?”

“No, but I see the tremendous pity of it. . . . In a war you must fight, but here you take your life and . . . Don’t you care whether you come back or not?”

“I?” . . . Simon cleared his throat. “When I came home ill and broken-up, all I asked for was to go back and lay my bones beside Cullis.”

The door opened and Christina appeared with the first preparation for tea, while just behind her came Lady Jane, saying:

“So you have a caller! How d’you do, Mr. Beckett? It was kind to come and cheer the invalid.”