Читать книгу Blencarrow - Isabel Mackay - Страница 9

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Kathrine was sixteen when she put her hair up. She was in the High School then, a fourth-former expecting to take her teacher’s certificate at the end of the term. And she was to sing in the Glee Club at the Literary Society’s meeting on Friday night. Euan, knowing all these facts, might have foreseen something of the kind, but the actual happening found him unprepared. Indeed, so embarrassing was his expression of amazement upon noticing this evidence of her enfranchisement that Kathrine frowned and irately scribbled a note which she passed to him hastily by the usual method of under-desk mail delivery. On the note was written:

‘I’ve grown up!’

She hadn’t, of course. It was just a joke. Euan, glancing sideways to where she sat between him and the window, saw that she wasn’t grown up really. The thick plait which had lain so cosily in the hollow of her neck had disappeared and where it had been was now a soft, slim whiteness. That was all. Still braided, the hair itself fitted around the small head like a dark and shining cap. Tiny dark curls escaped beside the ear and at the nape of the neck. Her face, with its new coronal, seemed smaller than ever—but how pretty her ears were! Euan hadn’t known that an ear could be so pretty. He said as much to Garry when they walked home at noon. Garry said loftily that he seldom noticed ears. He, Garry, was a fifth-former now. Since education in Blencarrow was a matter of progression by never-varying steps, Garry, being one year older than Euan and Kathrine, was exactly one step higher than they. At the end of the term he would graduate, and Blencarrow, for a space, would know him no more. Euan, who was also ‘for the college,’ would not graduate for another year. Con, unhappily, would not graduate at all. At some fairly early period Con had become entangled in the cultural system and had broken loose in a semi-educated state, scandalous to think of. It was even whispered that, aided and abetted by his aunt, he was educating himself by a course of ‘free reading,’ anything but orthodox.

The trio in High School missed Con very much, although in Garry’s case the superior glories of the fifth form proved continually more absorbing. He was willing, however, to do everything possible for his eccentric friend and had more than once personally invited him to a meeting of the Literary Society. Both Euan and Garry felt that a few social affairs of that kind would have a civilizing effect hard to overestimate. It wasn’t as if Con were an outsider. His fantastic method of educating himself hadn’t worked out at all badly. He seemed to know quite a lot of things. And his clothes were not bad at all—if one could only induce him to wear them.

‘Kathy’s going to sing a solo at the Lit. on Friday night,’ said Euan. ‘That’s why she’s hoisted her hair. What do you say if we try to get hold of Con? Tell him Kathy’s going to be the whole show and he’s simply got to come.’

Garry agreed kindly that they might try. ‘And once we get him there,’ he continued, ‘we might introduce him to the girls—Ellen Nichol and Peggy Seymour and Annabel Stewart and—do you suppose he would be shy if we introduced him to Constance Blake?’

Euan wasn’t sure about Constance Blake. She had but lately moved to town—a rather wonderful person with a brow like alabaster and deep eyes. Also she was a swatter and was known to have no time for nonsense. Euan was frankly afraid of her, but Garry said that was simply silly. He himself had seen her home several times. She was just like other girls, he said, only you had to meet her on her own plane. Would Con be able to do that?

‘We’ll give him a whack at it, anyway,’ said Euan generously.

More than one of the High School literati remembered the occasion of Con’s visit. It was from that night that the controversy ‘Shall non-members be allowed to attend regular meetings of the Society?’ dated. There was a widespread feeling, especially among the young ladies, that while, naturally, no one would wish to exclude any one from the wider opportunity for culture and self-expression provided by the Society, still—well, one never knew who might come.

Euan and Garry were delighted to sponsor Con. But they felt a little nervous. Euan had never realized how big Con was. It was found that he overflowed the Assembly Room seat in the most absurd fashion. His legs were the chief trouble. Stretched out in front of him they interfered embarrassingly with his neighbour, turned sidewise they would have blocked the aisle, drawn up they threatened to disrupt the desk. But this was a detail and did not at all account for the widespread sensation caused by Con. Everybody looked at him: even turning round to do so, which is anything but correct.

He was the handsomest person in the room. Neither of the boys had realized how terribly handsome Con was. But they could see the girls put their heads together and whisper.

During the social interval—a break thoughtfully provided in the middle of the programme—Euan and Garry found themselves in polite but insistent demand. But only for introductions.

‘Though of course we all know Mr. de Beck—in a way,’ said Ellen Nichol graciously.

Phemie, a very grown-up and most demure Phemie, touched Euan delicately upon the coat-sleeve.

‘Do introduce him, Euan,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sure he won’t know me, I’m changed so much, and he’s almost never in town. Mother knows his aunt quite well.’

Euan performed the introduction:

‘Mr. de Beck, Miss Ellis.’

‘Hello, Phemie!’ said Con.

(‘And really,’ declared Miss Ellis afterwards, ‘the way he said it! You’d think I was five years old!’)

‘I say, Euan, where’s Kathy?’ asked Con, growing restive; ‘you said she was the whole show.’

‘She’s here, you’ll meet her in a moment. But just let me introduce you to—’

‘There she is now,’ said Con with animation, and, as Kathrine was some distance away and the social interval was making considerable noise, he put a finger to his lips and whistled. A real parlour whistle, not at all loud. ‘But,’ as Garry said gloomily afterwards, ‘it might just as well have been a steam siren.’ People don’t whistle in literary circles. Certainly not at the moment of being presented to Constance Blake.

(‘Poor Miss Blake went quite white,’ said Phemie in retailing it. ‘It was dreadful!—just as if she hadn’t mattered! And everybody stopped talking—oh, it was ghastly!’)

In that resulting moment of utter silence, Kathrine raised her hand and fluttered it at Con—a proceeding which, though slightly conspicuous, was still allowable. It meant, of course, only friendly recognition, but Con, taking it as a summons, passed unseeingly through the ring of the going-to-be-introduced, and, by the simple expedient of stepping over a desk, arrived without unnecessary delay.

‘Hello, Kathy,’ said Con. ‘Say, I wanted to tell you—’

But what he wanted to tell her was never known, for at that moment an outraged chairman rang the bell.

(‘Two minutes early, at least!’ recounted Phemie. ‘It was so noticeable! That poor Kathrine Fenwell! If I’d been her I’d have sunk through the floor! And she didn’t even get red. Just made room for him beside her as if nothing had happened. And wasn’t a bit nervous when she sang, either. Some people have no—well, you understand what I mean.’)

‘You were a perfect brick, Kathy,’ said Euan next day with considerable fervour. ‘I think he began to enjoy himself after he sat by you. Before that, he was so restless and bumped something every time he moved. When Johnnie Carter was giving that French Canadian piece, he sighed so that several looked around. He whispered to me that French Canadians don’t talk like that. He said if I liked he’d show them how French Canadians do talk, and I had a terrible time making him understand that he couldn’t because he wasn’t on the programme. What did you do to him, Kathy?’

‘Nothing. At least I told him it would soon be over and that we could have a talk afterwards. I said he could see me home.’

‘Oh!’ said Euan. He wondered if this did not betray a certain vanity on Kathy’s part.

‘I had promised Garry,’ she went on, ‘but I didn’t think he would mind, for once.’

‘Oh!’ said Euan again. ‘Well—see you later.’

He walked on moodily—his round and pleasing world again assailed by a dissatisfaction which had no name. Yes, undoubtedly Kathy was getting a bit snippy.

‘And likely as not putting her hair up will make her worse,’ he murmured disconsolately.