Читать книгу A Prayer for my Son - Hugh Walpole - Страница 5

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On the second day after Rose’s arrival Mrs. Parkin appeared at the Hall.

It was at once evident that she had come for one purpose and one purpose only—to look at Rose. She was a little bird-like woman whose eyes instantly spoke her mind. Over her tongue she had some command, over her eyes none at all. Were she bored with you her eyes showed it. Were she expecting the entrance into the room of someone more important or interesting than yourself her eyes showed it, for, while her tongue addressed you, her eyes were fixed over your shoulder at the door.

In this present instance her eyes devoured Rose. Her gaze absorbed everything. She stripped Rose of every shred of clothing, then dressed her slowly again, considering every article before she neatly readjusted it. While her eyes were thus occupied her tongue chattered. She scattered about her absent-minded friendliness. You would think to listen to her that her only desire was that Rose should be happy now that she had arrived, for the first time in her life, in ‘the dear, delightful, soaking Lake District.’ She could not help but speak of the Lakes as though she had invented and owned them, but in this she was only one of many, for everyone who lives in the Lake District does the same. She apologized for the rainfall rather as a lady letting her house apologizes for the hot-water system: ‘We must make you happy, dear Miss Clennell. We will show you our Lakes and you shall tell us about the League of Nations. That is Mrs. Broster’s hobby—the League, I mean, she is so very good about it and so enthusiastic. She gives us almost too many pamphlets!

‘You must come soon to see us. We live most simply but we have our little Circle. Music—do you care for music? There is Mr. Latter—he plays the piano quite delightfully. And Mrs. Lincoln sings—she has one of the most powerful contraltos I’ve ever heard. But you must come and try us out. Now Friday—next Friday. That is Roger’s birthday—our only boy. He is a great friend of John’s although he is three years older. They are the greatest friends. John thinks the world of him. Now come you must. I’ll take no refusal. John is coming, of course, and Michael Brighouse and perhaps the Colonel if he hasn’t a stupid meeting. Of course you’ll come. It will be a good opportunity to meet my friends. Maybe we shall have a little music—we older ones—while the children have their games.’

Rose promised. Mrs. Parkin vanished into her little Austin, eager, smiling, her eyes fixed on her next horizon.

During the following two days and nights the heavens opened and the rain descended. The rain never ceased for a single instant. It thundered down upon the house, personally, savagely, as though it wished to beat it to the ground. The house was so dark that, in the passages, Rose moved with her hand in front of her face as though she expected a bat or some other obscene animal to fly at her eyes.

Beyond the windows the whole world surrendered to the rain, hills, trees, stone walls, and always there was a roar of water beating with a kind of drumming rhythm in the air. The people in the house were entirely unconcerned with the rain and went about their duties placidly. Rose noticed that automatically they raised their voices to a higher pitch. She looked out of window and saw the white, almost phosphorescent stream on the fell-side leaping through the air. The old gardener, a sack over his shoulders, moved quietly along, water dripping from his cap.

On the second afternoon she was moving cautiously down the upper landing to her bedroom when she encountered John. He was dragging Rump by the collar. Rump with a look of blind and obsequious obstinacy was resisting at every step.

‘He hates to come upstairs,’ John explained. ‘He thinks Aunt Janet will be after him.’

‘Ought you to bring him upstairs,’ Rose asked, ‘if Aunt Janet doesn’t like it?’

‘Oh, she doesn’t mind. She only thinks she minds. Unless he’s very dirty of course. But he’s awfully afraid of her.’

‘He seems afraid of me too,’ Rose said. She knelt down and began to stroke him. He submitted but the whites of his eyes were turned towards the stairs. He was ready to run at a moment’s notice. On her knees she was very close to John. He did not move away. He considered her gravely.

‘You’re my mother, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And father’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

He drew a short trembling breath. ‘You haven’t bothered about me much all this time,’ he said.

The rain was thundering down but they could hear one another very easily.

She looked at him steadily.

‘Why haven’t you?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ she answered. ‘Because I knew your grandfather could give you so much that I couldn’t. He could send you to a fine school and I couldn’t. When you were a baby I had very little money.’

‘You might have come to see us sometimes,’ he said.

‘Would you have liked me to?’ she asked.

That question closed him up entirely.

‘Oh! it’s very decent here,’ he said casually. ‘Come on, Rump! There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ And he marched off down the passage.

Safe in her room she tried to read a book. But was she safe? She got up and began to walk about, the rain, as it seemed, marching with her. She saw herself in the long mirror and despised the small insignificant figure that she saw there. She was not far from tears. She had not cried for ten years and she would not cry now, but John, in those few short sentences, had brought back John’s father to her almost beyond endurance.

‘Humphrey!’ she murmured. ‘Humphrey!’ He had said to her once: ‘Rose, darling, you’re not at all what you think you are! You want to be hard and wise and sophisticated, but really you’re soft and not very wise and simple. You’ve got to love someone—otherwise you’re lost.’ Well, he had been wrong. For all these years she had been wise and sophisticated. She had hated sentimental people, sentimental ideas, sentimental books and plays, weak, flaccid philosophies. But she had been lonely. It came on her now in a flash that she had been unhappy and had known it but had never admitted it. Her obstinacy had carried her through, but carried her to what? To nothing at all. Nothing had been so real to her as that sentence of John’s a moment ago—’ You might have come to see us sometimes.’

Biting her lip, she fought her weakness. This was the sentimentality that she had always despised. She imagined what she would have thought and said if some woman had come to her and said: ‘So I gave up my child because I thought it was right, and then ten years later when I saw him again I wept and wanted him back.’

She must go. That was clear. She must leave this house and never return. She would throw herself into her work and perfect that self-training that would make her one of those wise controlled modern women to whom a cause was more than any person and a stern ideal more beautiful than any relationship.

But Humphrey! John, with the tuft of fair hair, the shy honesty, the physical independence, had brought Humphrey back so that he was with her in the room, his room where he had slept and dreamed—and from that very window he had looked out and seen the climbing fell.

His arms were round her, his cheek against hers, and his voice saying: ‘It won’t be easy, darling. It won’t be easy unless you love me enough ...’ She brushed her eyes with her hand, blew her nose and went down to find Colonel Fawcus.

She knocked on his study door and went in. He was there, seated at a large official-looking table, and in front of him a big book. Before him was a bottle of paste, in his hand a pair of scissors. He was very busy, his cheerful countenance grave, his eyes bent sternly on his task.

‘Who is it?’ he said quite fiercely, not looking up. ‘I thought I said——’

Then when he saw who it was he beamed.

‘Well, my dear——’

She stood some way from the desk, her hands at her side.

‘I’m disturbing you, I know——’

‘Not at all. I’m delighted to see you, my dear.’

‘I had to come. I couldn’t wait. I had to tell you that I must go away—at once. I must leave to-morrow.’

He stood up. He smiled at her like a benevolent father. He stretched out his hand.

‘Why, dear Rose, whatever is the matter? Go away? What nonsense! Come and sit down and tell me all about it.’

‘No. I won’t sit down, thank you.’

He came towards her. His large fresh healthy body closed in some of her horizon.

‘Colonel Fawcus,’ she said, ‘why did you ask me to come here?’

‘Why do you think I did?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea.’

‘Mightn’t it have been—curiosity?’

‘Curiosity? If that was it you would have asked me before.’

‘Perhaps not. Perhaps for a long while I felt rather bitterly. And then, maybe, after all these years, I felt that I had done wrong.’

‘But you knew what asking me here would mean—the gossip, the difficult position for John——’

‘Why, has anyone been rude or unkind to you?’

‘No—everyone has been very kind. That isn’t why I’m going.’

‘What then?’

Her voice faltered. ‘I hadn’t realized, I hadn’t known—what I would feel when I saw John again.’

He waited, looking at her with the greatest kindness and even tenderness.

She cried out almost desperately: ‘Oh, I can’t tell you! I can’t explain! And why should I? We are under no obligation to one another. We made a bargain and we’ve kept to it. I’ve seen John. I realize that he is in splendid hands, and so, having seen him, I can go away with a quiet mind.’

‘Have you had,’ he asked her, ‘a quiet mind all these years? You have never enquired about him, never written——’

‘I didn’t dare,’ she said very quietly. ‘I see now that he was never out of my mind. I pretended to myself. I was always thinking of him——’

‘And won’t you now, if you go away——?’

‘Perhaps I shall. But that will be better than staying here, loving him——’ She broke off. Her voice was trembling.

‘Must you?’ he said to her very gently and with such kindliness that suddenly her very soul revolted against the softness and sentimentality of her state. There was something uneasy, unreal, about their conversation, about her own feelings, even about his looks, and beneath all the unreality, some two layers down, there was a hidden reality of most important significance. The very fact that their conversation was unreal meant that something was developing, something that was using this unreality for its own purpose.

She shook her head as though she had come to some sudden resolve.

‘I don’t think we’re saying what we really think. I know you’re being very kind, trying not to hurt me. All that has happened to me is that I saw John half an hour ago and that he was so like Humphrey that I began to be soft and sentimental. I hate to be sentimental, and that’s why I am going.’

She had expected that at the mention of Humphrey’s name some emotion would have been expressed by him—in the eyes, in the corners of the mouth, in those eyes that were so kind and generous and yet, as she was beginning to realize, eyes upon eyes, so that in all probability there lurked quite another pair behind those bright ones.

He answered her very quietly. ‘My dear Rose, I don’t like sentimentality either. Of course you must go if you wish to. We all like you here——’

‘Not Janet,’ she broke in angrily.

‘Oh, Janet! Is she the cause of the trouble? Janet doesn’t matter. But if you like I will speak to her.’

‘Over my dead body,’ Rose cried out. ‘I admire Janet for not liking me. I’d have hated myself if I had been her. She’s perfectly polite to me and it’s not Janet that’s the trouble.’

‘Who then?’

‘Myself. I didn’t realize before I came how alive Humphrey would be in this house.’

‘And that’s why I want you to stay a little longer,’ he said. ‘You asked me just now why I invited you. Perhaps you are the only person in the world beside myself who knew really what Humphrey was. Perhaps I have been looking for that someone who knew him.’

‘Janet did,’ she cried.

‘Janet loved him, but never knew him. And that’s why Janet is jealous of you.’

‘No,’ Rose thought, ‘that is not the reason and he knows it’s not the reason. And it is not because of Humphrey that he asked me here.’

But she felt herself submitting. It was extraordinary the influence that he had. When you were with him in a room you wanted to do as he wished. He was almost double-sized, that is, he seemed to be on every side of you and you did not resent him because his kindness and his intelligence were so attractive. Yes, he was extremely intelligent and she had never realized it before. Why, with his charm and intelligence, then, hadn’t he become something much more than he was? Why had he not gone much further? Was he, knowing in himself how intelligent he was, deeply disappointed, and did he perhaps hope that she would understand and give him some kind of compensation? She had moved, without knowing it, nearer him, and at that instant he put his hand on her arm—a strong, fine hand with an almost iron pressure. She did not dislike his touch.

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘We all need you—myself, Janet, John. Don’t think about any gossip there may be. That will very soon die down. I don’t think you should run away from this before you have tested it a little. You are not a coward.’

She made no answer.

He went back to the table and sat down. He took up the paste-pot and looked over it at her, smiling, so exactly like a boy who was sticking stamps into an album.

‘Well,’ she said shyly, ‘I seem to have no will of my own.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’ he asked her.

‘Certainly it’s a bad thing,’ she answered almost fiercely. ‘I hate weak women.’

‘You’re not weak,’ he said, ‘only kind to a rather lonely old man.’ He threw up his head, laughing. ‘See how senile I am. I am arranging old press-cuttings of one or two feeble speeches I have made. Look.’

She came forward and glanced over his shoulder, and saw something that had just been pasted into the book headed: ‘Lt.-Col. Fawcus opens Rose Show at Carstairs.’ She thought: ‘What an extraordinary thing for him to take pleasure in! As though it mattered to anyone, his opening a rose show.’

They looked at one another and in his gaze she saw something pathetic and almost arrogant, as though he said to her: ‘You think it foolish of me to do this? One day you shall know.’

She felt a sudden curious nervousness and left the room.

On the Friday was the Parkins’ party and at first all that Rose could think of was young John’s excitement about this event. He had bought his present entirely with his own money. What he had bought was a small red writing-case, and this was because young Parkin had once said to John: ‘Oh, what a ripping writing-case!’ John’s had been all blue-leather and he was very proud of it. He would have liked to offer it to young Parkin, but it had been given him by his grandfather. He had seen that young Parkin wanted it and there had been rather uncomfortable moments. Young Parkin had so clearly expected John to offer it and John had thought: ‘I can’t give him this case, because Grandfather gave it me, but I will get him one for his next birthday.’

Rose realized on this morning how very highly strung John was. She was almost frightened by the intensity of his feeling.

‘Why do you like him so much?’ she asked him.

‘Oh! I don’t know,’ John said. ‘He’s awfully decent. I’m three years younger, you know, but he lets me do things with him and he never minds my not knowing as much as he does.’

‘I should think not,’ said Rose indignantly. ‘I’m sure you know a lot of things he doesn’t know.’

‘He’s most frightfully clever,’ said John. ‘He’s good at exams and games too. He’s good at practically everything, except swimming.’ He dropped his voice and into his eyes there came a look of awe. ‘It’s pretty rotten for him,’ John said, ‘but he’s frightened of the water. He is, really. His nurse, or someone, held his head under once. He gets blue all over the legs and arms before he is in the water at all, and he had an uncle who threw him in out of a boat. It’s dreadful, because at school he has to dive and everything so that the other boys won’t know. It’s a terrible secret. Nobody knows but me.’

‘Well,’ said Rose, who hated young Parkin already in prospect, ‘I’m glad there is something he can’t do.’

‘That’s the only thing,’ said John. ‘He’s teaching me to box.’

‘Do you like that?’ Rose asked, looking at his slender body and very sensitive face.

‘I don’t terribly,’ said John, ‘but I shall, he says, if I keep on at it. It isn’t much fun at first, you know, because you’re hit all the time. He just hits me where he likes and the other day I came back with my nose all swollen and Aunt Janet was very angry, but Grandfather said it was all right—it would make a man of me. Only you see,’ he went on more confidentially, ‘I’ve got to get thicker in the chest and I don’t know how to. I do exercises and everything, but perhaps I am young yet: they say two or three years make an awful difference.’

He packed up his red-leather writing-case himself with the utmost care and wrote on the outside in his large, boyish handwriting: ‘For Roger William Parkin from his sinsere friend, John Fawcus.’

Rose noticed that he had spelt ‘sincere’ with an ‘s’ instead of a ‘c,’ but she said nothing. She only wondered whether Roger Parkin would point out this mistake to her John. If he did she thought that she would probably kill him.

‘Do you think he can see through the tissue paper what it is?’ John asked. ‘I don’t want him to know until he has taken all the paper off.’

So Rose lied. ‘He won’t have the least idea what it is,’ she said.

They walked to the party, for the Parkins’ house was not very far away—Michael, Rose and John.

After that great tempest how dry the land was! But in the sky the soft watery spaces seemed to hold a bloom like flowers after rain. The Helvellyn range, where it approached the sky, also was faintly iris-coloured and thus the slopes ran almost into spring-warmed country. The brown of fell and tree had a feathery promise, the sun was hot, the snow all gone save for thin white shadows on the tops.

As they reached the bend of the climbing hill and saw St. John’s in the Vale below them it was all that Rose could do to keep back a cry, for the little narrow valley was bursting with life. Every tree seemed to be swelling with importance, the purple-veined tranquil smoke from the farm chimney moved upward with an exultant promise, sheep and cows raised their heads to gaze as though they expected some skyward manifestation. The light was so clear that detail, the green glitter of a leaf, the bubbling pause of the stream before a black stone, the dark lustre of a heap of manure, these things shone like sharp jewelled fragments. And the hills were so close. The rough fell was personally concerned in the civilized world of farm and garden; every hill had its double service of intercourse with man and the upward movement to the freedom of air and space. The sky was marbled with white feathers of cloud that formed changing patterns on the blue.

All was light and all was movement. Freedom and anticipation of some universal holiday were everywhere; the sky was water-dimpled, blue, trembling, the hillside damascened, the life of the valley tumultuous with colour, sharp green, ice-grey in the stream, amber brown of the tree-branches.

‘And that’s the Parkins’ house,’ said Michael.

Rose looked down to a white rambling house that was charming with its dovecote, its old rose-garden wall and a green lawn on which she could see figures moving like little dolls. Sometimes in March there comes surprisingly one of those warm days, almost a day of early summer. This moment’s pause before the move downwards seemed to her for some reason to be one of infinite importance. She was waiting, suspended in this world of white and blue sky, stirring breeze. For the last time perhaps she could make her choice. She could go back. She could run away. Once involved, once she risked that downward step, she was irrevocably caught. She looked about her, back to the rough and rolling fell, up to the soft, almost iridescent sky, then down to the detail of farms and animals and puppet human beings. She looked at John, who had already started down the side path. Then, with a little toss of the head, she followed him.

Michael, beside her, said: ‘Don’t be afraid of the people down there, of their gossip, I mean; or of their looking at you too sharply. It means nothing. It will only be a nine days’ wonder.’

She smiled. ‘You’re a noticing kind of young man. You thought I hesitated. Well, I did, and I’ll tell you honestly I didn’t know all I would be in for. If I had I expect I would have never come.’

‘Oh yes, you would,’ he said confidently, ‘and it’s a good thing you have. It’s probably saved John.’

‘Saved him from what?’ she asked, looking at the small figure ahead of them absorbed in its own thoughts and interests.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Michael answered lightly. ‘A boy ought to have a mother, oughtn’t he?’

‘I’m afraid he doesn’t like me very much,’ she said doubtfully.

‘Oh, he will,’ said Michael. ‘The story’s only just beginning.’

And then they were at the Parkins’ and Mrs. Parkin was there looking over Rose’s shoulder at the garden gate, her eyes wandering about like little magnets, hoping to attract as many steel filings as possible.

‘Well, Miss Clennell, this is good of you! And the Colonel couldn’t come? Too tiresome of him. But he’s such a busy man. What we would all do without him——’

She broke off and her eye picked up her son, a nice-looking boy, with black hair, dark eyes and a strong self-confident nose and chin.

‘Roger, here’s your friend, John. Miss Clennell, this is my boy—Roger.’

The boy had excellent manners. He seemed quite a grown little man already and he was perfectly at ease with everybody. But Rose’s attention was absorbed by her son. John was in a quiver of emotion and sensitive feeling. He was clutching his parcel and at the moment the boy joined them John pushed it into Roger’s hand. His face was crimson and he muttered something that nobody heard. Roger took the parcel rather like a monarch receiving tribute from one of his subjects.

‘Oh, I say, John, that’s awfully decent of you. How ripping!’

And he was about to investigate it when a boy came running across the lawn, calling out: ‘Roger, they say we are going to have races and there will be prizes,’ and he turned, holding his parcel, joined his friend, and with a rather hurried ‘Wait a minute. I’ll be back’ to John, ran across the lawn carrying the unopened parcel in his hand.

Rose’s whole soul seemed to be caught by her son. She did not appear to be looking at him, but was, it seemed, listening to some of Mrs. Parkin’s chatter. She did not, in fact, hear a single word. Only about her head a bee-swarm of voices. She was caught up by her son as though she were a part of him and he of her, physically as well as spiritually. His disappointment was so naked to her that her only longing was to protect him. No one, perhaps, saw it but herself, although she fancied that Michael was aware of it. John was making a courageous effort to cover it and stood looking at Mrs. Parkin and shifting from one small leg to the other. But his lips were trembling; there were tears in his eyes, and the defiant way in which he had thrown back his head as though he were challenging all the world to try and hurt him was simply his father over and over again. Roger had not even looked at the parcel. He had scarcely thanked the giver of it. And Rose at that moment felt for Mrs. Parkin’s offspring a hatred stronger than anything that even the Führer himself had ever been able to arouse in her.

She was soon compelled to think of herself, for Mrs. Parkin was bringing up to her one or two friends.

‘Miss Clennell, you must know Mr. Latter. What the Parkin family would do without Mr. Latter, it simply doesn’t know. You’re part of us, Reggie, aren’t you? Bone of our bone, we might almost say.’

And this, Rose thought, was especially applicable to Mr. Latter, who was very tall, very thin, and resembled a telegraph-pole in that he was constantly humming little indistinct tunes to himself just as the wires hum above your head as you walk in the country.

‘Reggie plays the piano, Miss Clennell, better than any amateur I have ever heard in my life. And to call you an amateur, Reggie, is a terrible insult. It simply is, Miss Clennell, that he plays for the love of playing and refuses to take a penny for his beautiful art, don’t you, Reggie? This is Miss Clennell, Reggie, a friend of Colonel Fawcus, and she is passionately fond of music, and the one thing in the world she wants is to hear you play.’

Rose knew at once that this long thin man with the high cheek-bones and a hungry look in his eye, as though he never had enough to eat, had heard all about her and probably knew much more of her private history than she knew herself. He did not look unkind or patronizing, but terribly unhappy, as though the one thing in the world he wanted was to escape, and she fancied that she detected a look almost of hatred that flashed from his despairing eyes to the little bird-like figure of Mrs. Parkin. However, she had not very much time to consider him because other ladies and gentlemen were speedily brought up to her and she detected in them all that same glance of inquisitive recognition. They, having heard everything about her but seeing her for the first time, were busily adding experience to surmise. She felt a panic rising within her and it was roused in her especially by the Morphew family, who curiously resembled rabbits, Miss Morphew in particular, having had her front teeth sadly neglected in early youth. In fact, as so often happens with people, physical appearances fitted in very exactly with occupation and interests. The Morphews were the famous naturalists, Mrs. Parkin explained, and there was nothing about cuckoos and moles and ferrets that they did not know. But Rose perceived that she herself was the animal whose habits they were just then intently studying. They stared at her as though they were stripping the very clothes off her back. She could detect Mrs. Morphew busily writing in her brain: ‘This little animal is unusual in several particulars. Its plumage is bright, but its appearance altogether deceptive, for as the dusk falls it flits from tree to tree uttering a shrill sharp note—’ and so on and so on.

Miss Morphew was especially excited. She was a plain girl, very badly dressed, self-conscious in all her movements, but her eyes were soft and pleading as though she were saying: ‘Oh, Miss Clennell, I do so want to get away from Papa and Mama. I don’t care about natural history a bit. I would like to be bold and daring as you have been, and I do hope you will tell me how I can manage it.’

But how the whole scene was becoming exceedingly animated. Mrs. Parkin was here, there and everywhere. She was stirring everyone up to show their very best paces, rather as a trainer with performing lions goes round from lion to lion trying to rouse them from their sleepy indifference. Rouse them she did. There were a number of children who passed with surprising quickness from the instructed politeness as proper little visitors to the excited horse-play of small animals released from their cages.

Rose heard Mrs. Parkin’s cheerful impersonal voice saying:

‘And now that the children are happy, shall we go indoors and have some music?’

‘How terribly difficult it is,’ she thought, ‘to be a really good hostess! Just when you have learnt the technique sufficiently you are ruined, because you are at last a professional and that is the one thing a hostess must not be.’ Mrs. Parkin was so thoroughly professional that Rose felt as though she were one of the Albert Hall choir being driven on to the platform to rehearse Elijah. What she wanted to do was to see that John was all right. As she moved to the door of the house she saw him waiting with several other anxious-looking children, while Roger Parkin and another boy picked sides for a game. She knew so well the embarrassment of that waiting. Would you be chosen? Or would you be left to that terrible lonely position when, in a kind of tortured agony, you heard someone say: ‘Well, I suppose I have got to have Rose.’ She knew just what John was feeling; how desperately he would be wanting to be on Roger’s side. She was on the point of saying: ‘Oh! I must just stay in the garden another few minutes: It’s quite warm even though it is March!’ but she hadn’t the courage, and meekly she followed her hostess in.

She found herself in an overcrowded drawing-room—a room containing a vast piano, many signed photographs, and an extraordinary, high, thin, white Chinese pagoda under glass—with a nervous little woman, with a voice like the rustle of dry autumn leaves, sitting beside her. This little lady told Rose frankly that she did not like music at all, but that she adored Mrs. Parkin.

‘I can’t help thinking that it’s a pity on a nice afternoon, with the sun shining, we should all sit in here listening to Beethoven. I never know which is Beethoven, and which is Bach and which is Brahms, and I am so dreadfully afraid of giving myself away.’

‘Why,’ asked Rose, ‘do you come if you dislike music so much?’

‘Well, of course, I love Emmeline and I do think she should be supported for the way in which she is trying to bring culture into Keswick.’

‘Does Keswick really want culture?’ Rose asked.

‘No, I don’t suppose it does,’ said the little lady, ‘any more than any other place. You either have culture, or you haven’t, don’t you think? And if you haven’t got it, you really don’t want somebody else to give it to you. You don’t want it and you ought to have it. That’s the way I look at it.’

‘Oh! I don’t agree at all,’ Rose said. ‘If you don’t want it, don’t have it. If you really hate music you will never like it however often Mrs. Parkin has concerts.’

‘Well,’ said the little lady, ‘Emmeline promises me that I shall like it one day. She says that it all seems difficult at first, but that suddenly one morning you find that you love it.’ Then she dropped her voice. ‘Of course I don’t think they play very well, Mr. Latter, I mean, and the Bunnings. And then I really do dislike Mrs. Lincoln’s singing. I know that she’s got a splendid voice, but she ought to be heard in the Rocky Mountains or in the African desert—somewhere where there is plenty of space. I have wondered sometimes whether the windows would not be broken in this little room: they shake like anything when she sings. Hush! they are going to begin.’

They did. Mr. Latter had sat at the piano with the melancholy anger of a prisoner picking hemp. He looked round the room with a complete loathing for everybody. Then he bent towards the piano and his face became more gentle, happier. He seemed suddenly to be wearing the right clothes and his figure looked no longer stiff and awkward. He played very well—Chopin and Delius and Holst. He was a real musician and a sudden peace came into the room as the beautiful notes softly stole about it, and very faintly, beyond the windows, came the cries and laughter of the children.

But Mrs. Parkin was restless, so as soon as one of her trained performers had begun his exercises she was eagerly thinking what the next item in the entertainment would be. She did not want the performance in the least, only that the performers should perform, and so when the last note of the gentle Holst chorale had died away, Mrs. Lincoln was being whispered to. She was indeed only too ready to sing. She rushed at the piano like a trained seal opening its mouth for sardines. Mr. Bunning was to play her accompaniment—a little man who had a resemblance to the Hatter in Alice. This was perhaps because of his large mouth, his almost imbecile, friendly smile at everyone in the room. Mrs. Lincoln sang ‘O Rest in the Lord’ at such a pace and with such violent determination that Mr. Bunning was left far behind. It was just as she finished and said in her jolly, deep, policeman’s voice: ‘And what will you all have next?’ that Rose saw the door open and a very surprising person enter.

The newcomer was a small, stout, untidy clergyman. He had a round, red face and his trousers were still bound with clips. He had plainly just come off a bicycle. His face was pleasant and agreeable, but, as Rose at once noticed, a little unsteady. He held his soft black hat in his hand and he smiled at everybody, but rather, Rose noticed, as though he were not sure of his welcome. It was at once clear that there was a reason for this, for Mrs. Parkin had just said to Mrs. Lincoln: ‘What’s that lovely thing, Hilda dear, about the moon and running water you sing so beautifully?’ when she was aware of her new visitor. She gave him a look of sharp and even angry disapproval.

‘How are you all?’ said the little clergyman. ‘I wasn’t asked, but I knew it was Roger’s birthday and I’ve brought him a present. Go on with your music now and don’t mind me.’

There was an empty chair on the other side of Rose and into this he dumped with a violent movement as though he had been dropped out of something. He seemed, Rose thought, a trifle unsteady on his legs. He regarded everyone most merrily in spite of Mrs. Parkin’s discontent and went on, sotto voce, to Rose:

‘Dear Mrs. Parkin doesn’t like my coming. She’s long given up asking me, but I come all the same, because I think it’s good for her. Do you ever do things to people because you think it’s good for them?’

‘No,’ said Rose. She was feeling uncomfortable because Mrs. Lincoln was just beginning to sing and their whispered conversation was plainly disconcerting her. ‘I’m not ever sure of what is good for people.’

The little clergyman nodded his head. ‘I always know exactly,’ he said. ‘It’s one of my gifts.’ Mrs. Lincoln began to sing.

There was a great deal of music. The Bunnings played duets and Mr. Latter the Moonlight Sonata. It became exceedingly difficult to stop Mrs. Lincoln, who almost before she had finished her song cried out: ‘And what will you have next, all of you?’ When at last tea arrived and she could sing no longer, she stood in the middle of the room, large and hearty and jolly, eating whatever came her way.

She cried out: ‘I like to sing. It does me good. No, I assure you, it’s no trouble at all. I sing as naturally as I breathe. Have done ever since I was a baby. So if you nice, dear, kind things enjoy listening and I enjoy singing, that’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘It would be all right,’ the little clergyman remarked to Rose, ‘if dear Mrs. Lincoln was not so sure it was all right. I like a little diffidence in public performers, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know that I do,’ said Rose. ‘A really diffident public performer is pretty terrible—you know, a lecturer with a whole bundle of apologies, or a singer who isn’t sure where the next bar is coming from.’

She did not quite know what she was saying, for she was longing to get away to rescue John, to be secure from all the curious eyes that inspected her. Only a few weeks ago she was sure she was completely indifferent to public opinion, and now a few country people in this little country room embarrassed her and made her angry. Some of them were moving out into the garden. She went too, the little clergyman at her side.

‘My name is Rackstraw,’ he said, ‘and you are Miss Clennell, I know. I heard all about you half an hour after your arrival at the Hall. There’s not a man, woman or child in Keswick, or its surroundings, who doesn’t know that you are John’s mother. That doesn’t worry you, does it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. What right had this little man to fasten himself upon her and speak to her so intimately? As she stood on the lawn and looked at the quiet sun-burned hills under a sky that was now all a milky blue, without a cloud upon it, she prayed that she might not make a scene. The sun was setting and it would soon be very cold. Everyone would be going home. She thought that she could hold on for the few minutes that remained. But what she wanted to do was to turn and cry out to all of them: ‘What has it to do with you whether I am John’s mother, or not?’

The little man went on:

‘Mrs. Parkin is very vexed at my coming to-day. There is nothing that she could possibly dislike more. That’s because I sometimes drink too much and always talk too much and always say what I mean.’

He drank too much?

Yes. His words came a little thickly and his eyes had that faint look of anxiety as of a dog who sometimes behaves badly in public and is so anxious not to shame his master.

Mr. Rackstraw went on: ‘I’m a clergyman, but I have no church. I believe in God, but no one listens to me because they all think my habits disgraceful. You might call me,’ he continued cheerfully, ’the real scandal of the neighbourhood.’ Then his voice became almost pleading. ‘I’m not really very scandalous, but I was drunk once publicly in my church, and now if I have a cold or a slight indigestion, or talk in a voice so that the words are indistinct, everyone thinks I have been drinking again.’

‘Why do you tell me all this?’ Rose asked.

‘Because,’ he answered, ‘I liked you the moment I saw you. People will tell you all this about me and more, but I’d rather you had it first-hand.’ Then he added: ‘If you stay here and are in any kind of trouble, remember that I’m not so foolish as I look.’

‘Yes, I will,’ Rose said. And they shook hands.

Afterwards, walking home, she thought that that was a very rude thing to have said.

The party was over. She, Michael and John walked up the dusky road, seeing the hills now like shadows against a white sky, in which stars were beginning to sparkle.

‘Have you enjoyed it?’ Michael asked. ‘Was it very tiresome?’

Rose shook her head.

‘I don’t know. Enjoyment certainly isn’t the word. The only thing I know is, I am going to stay and see it through.’

Her heart beating, she took John’s hand in hers. He let it lie there for a little while and then very gently withdrew it. They walked in silence over the brow of the hill.