Читать книгу The Complete Works - O. Douglas (Anna Buchan) - Страница 26

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"There was a lady once, 'tis an old story,

That would not be a queen, that would she not

For all the mud in Egypt."

Henry VIII.

"It is funny to think," Elizabeth said, "that last Friday I was looking forward to your visit with horror."

"Hospitable creature!" Arthur replied.

"And now," she continued, "I can't remember what it was like not to know you."

They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner. Mr. Seton had gone out, and Buff was asleep after such an hour of crowded life as seldom fell to his lot. He had been very down at the thought of losing his friend, and had looked so small and forlorn when he said his reluctant good-night, that Arthur, to lighten his gloom, asked him if he had ever taken part in a sea-fight, and being answered in the negative, had carried him upstairs shoulder-high. Then issued from the bathroom such a splashing of water, such gurgles of laughter and yells of triumph as Buff, a submarine, dashed from end to end of the large bath, torpedoing warships under Arthur's directions, that Elizabeth, Marget, and Ellen all rushed upstairs to say that if the performance did not stop at once the house would certainly be flooded.

As it was, fresh pyjamas had to be fetched, the pair laid out being put out of action by the wash of the waves. Then Arthur carried Buff to his room and threw him head-over-heels into bed, sitting by his side for quite half an hour and relating the most thrilling tales of pirates; finally presenting him with two fat half-crowns, and promising that he, Buff, should go up in an aeroplane at the earliest opportunity.

Buff, as he lay pillowed on that promise, his two half-crowns laid on a chair beside him along with one or two other grubby treasures, and his heart warm with gratitude, wondered and wondered what he could do in return—and still wondering fell asleep.

Elizabeth was knitting a stocking for her young brother, and counted audibly at intervals; Arthur lay in a large arm-chair and looked into the fire.

"Buff is frightfully sorry to lose you. One two—one two. This is a beautiful 'top,' don't you think? Rather like a Persian tile."

"Yes," said Arthur rather absently.

There was silence for a few minutes; then Elizabeth said, "There is something very depressing about last nights—we would really have been much better at the Band of Hope, and I would have been doing my duty, and thus have acquired merit. I hate people going away. When nice people come to a house they should just stay on and on, after the fashion of princes in fairy-tale stories seeking their fortunes. They stayed about twenty years before it seemed to strike them that their people might be getting anxious."

"For myself," said Arthur, "I ask nothing better. You know that, don't you?"

"One two—one two," Elizabeth counted. She looked up from her knitting with twinkling eyes. "Did you hate very much coming? or were you passive in the managing hands of Aunt Alice?"

He looked at her impish face blandly, then took out his cigarette case, chose a cigarette carefully, lit it, and smoked with placid enjoyment.

"Cross?" she asked, in a few minutes.

"Not in the least. Merely wondering if I might tell you the truth."

"I wouldn't," said Elizabeth. "Fiction is always stranger and more interesting. By the way, are you to be permanently at the Foreign Office now?"

"I haven't the least notion, but I shall be there for the next few months. When do you go to London?"

In the spring, she told him, probably in April, and added that her Aunt Alice had been a real fairy godmother to her.

"Very few ministers' daughters have had my chances of seeing men and cities. And some day, some day when Buff has gone to school and Father has retired and has time to look about him, we are going to India to see the boys."

"You have a very good time in London, I expect," Arthur said. "I can imagine that Aunt Alice makes a most tactful chaperon, and I hear you are very popular."

"'Here's fame!'" quoted Elizabeth flippantly. "What else did Aunt Alice tell you about me?"

Arthur Townshend put the end of his cigarette carefully into the ash-tray and leant forward.

"You really want to know—then here goes. She told me you were tall—like a king's own daughter; that your hair was as golden as a fairy tale, and your eyes as grey as glass. She told me of suitors waiting on your favours——"

Elizabeth dropped her knitting with a gasp.

"If Aunt Alice told you all that—well, I've no right to say a word, for she did it to glorify me, and perhaps her kind eyes and heart made her think it true; but surely you don't think I am such a conceited donkey as to believe it."

"But isn't it true?—about the suitors, I mean?"

"Suitors! How very plural you are!"

"But I would rather keep them in the plural," he pleaded; "they are more harmless that way. But Aunt Alice did talk about some particular fellow—I think Gordon was his wretched name."

"Bother!" said Elizabeth. "I've dropped a stitch." She bent industriously over her knitting.

"I'm waiting, Elizabeth."

"What for?"

"To hear about Mr. Gordon."

"Oh! you must ask Aunt Alice," Elizabeth said demurely. "She is your fount of information." Then she threw down her knitting. "Arthur, don't let's talk any more about such silly subjects. They don't interest me in the least."

"Is Mr. Gordon a silly subject?"

"The silliest ever. No—of course he isn't. Why do you make me say nasty things? He is only silly to me because I am an ungrateful creature. I don't expect I shall ever marry. You see, I would never be a grateful wife, and it seems a pity to use up a man, so to speak, when there are so few men and so many women who would be grateful wives and may have to go without. I think I am a born spinster, and as long as I have got Father and Buff and the boys in India I shall be more than content."

"Buff must go to school soon," he warned her. "Your brothers may marry; your father can't be with you always."

"Oh, don't try to discourage me in my spinster path. You are as bad as Aunt Alice. She thinks of me as living a sort of submerged existence here in Glasgow, and only coming to the surface to breathe when I go to London or travel with her. But I'm not in the least stifled with my life. I wouldn't change with anybody; and as for getting married and going off with trunks of horrid new unfamiliar clothes, and a horrid new unfamiliar husband, I wouldn't do it. I haven't much ambition; I don't ask for adventures; though I look so large and bold, I have but a peeping and a timorous soul."

She smiled across at Arthur, as if inviting him to share her point of view; but he looked into the fire and did not meet her glance.

"Then you think," he said, "that you will be happy all your life—alone?"

"Was it Sydney Smith who gave his friends forty recipes for happiness? I remember three of them," she counted on her fingers, "a bright fire, a kettle singing on the hob, a bag of lollipops on the mantelshelf—all easy to come at. I can't believe that I shall be left entirely alone—I should be so scared o' nights. Surely someone will like me well enough to live with me—perhaps Buff, if he continues to have the contempt for females that he now has; but anyway I shall hold on to the bright fire and the singing kettle and the bag of lollipops."

She sat for a moment, absent-eyed, as if she were looking down the years; then she laughed.

"But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said.

Arthur laughed with her, and said:

"Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy."

"I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood."

Arthur shook his head at her.

"In your father's words, you are an absurd creature. Sing to me, won't you? seeing it's my last night."

"Yes." She went to the piano. "What shall I sing? 'A love-song or a song of good life'?"

"A love-song," said Arthur, and finished the quotation. "'I care not for good life.'"

Elizabeth giggled.

"Our language is incorrigibly noble. You know how it is when you go to the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford? I come away so filled with majestic words that I can hardly resist greeting our homely chemist with 'Ho! apothecary!' But I'm not going to sing of love. 'I'm no' heedin' for't,' as Marget says.... This is a little song out of a fairy tale—a sort of good-bye song:

'If fairy songs and fairy gold

Were tunes to sell and gold to spend,

Then, hearts so gay and hearts so bold,

We'd find the joy that has no end.

But fairy songs and fairy gold

Are but red leaves in Autumn's play.

The pipes are dumb, the tale is told,

Go back to realms of working day.

The working day is dark and long,

And very full of dismal things;

It has no tunes like fairy song,

No hearts so brave as fairy kings.

Its princes are the dull and old,

Its birds are mute, its skies are grey;

And quicker far than fairy gold

Its dreary treasures fleet away.

But all the gallant, kind and true

May haply hear the fairy drum,

Which still must beat the wide world through,

Till Arthur wake and Charlie come.

And those who hear and know the call

Will take the road with staff in hand,

And after many a fight and fall,

Come home at last to fairy-land.'"

* * * * *

They were half-way through breakfast next morning before Buff appeared. He stood at the door with a sheet of paper in his hand, looking rather distraught. His hair had certainly not been brushed, and a smear of paint disfigured one side of his face. He was not, as Mr. Taylor would have put it, looking his "brightest and bonniest."

"I've been in Father's study," he said in answer to his sister's question, and handed Arthur Townshend the paper he carried.

"It's for you," he said, "a sea-fight. It's the best I can do. I've used up nearly all the paints in my box."

He had certainly been lavish with his colours, and the result was amazing in the extreme.

Mr. Townshend expressed himself delighted, and discussed the points of the picture with much insight.

"We shall miss you," Mr. Seton said, looking very kindly at him. "It has been almost like having one of our own boys back. You must come again, and to Etterick next time."

"Aw yes," cried Buff, "come to Etterick and see my jackdaw with the wooden leg." He had drawn his chair so close to Arthur's that to both of them the business of eating was gravely impeded.

"Come for the shooting," said Mr. Seton.

"Yes," said Elizabeth, as she filled out a third cup of tea for her father, "and the fourth footman will bring out your lunch while the fifth footman is putting on his livery. Don't be so buck-ish, Mr. Father. Our shooting, Arthur, consists of a heathery hillside inhabited by many rabbits, a few grouse—very wild, and an ancient blackcock called Algernon. No one can shoot Algernon; indeed, he is such an old family friend that it would be very ill manners to try. When he dies a natural death we mean to stuff him."

"But may I really come? Is this a pukka invitation?"

"It is," Elizabeth assured him. "As the Glasgow girl said to the Edinburgh girl, 'What's a slice of ham and egg in a house like ours?' We shall all be frightfully glad to see you, except perhaps old Watty Laidlaw—I told you about him? He is very anxious when we have guests, he is so afraid we are living beyond our means. One day last summer I had some children from the village to tea, and he stood on the hillside and watched them cross the moor, then went in to Marget and said in despairing accents, 'Pit oot eighty mair cups. They're comin' ower the muir like a locust drift.' The description of the half-dozen poor little stragglers as a 'locust drift' was almost what Robert Browning calls 'too wildly dear.'"

"This egg's bad," Buff suddenly announced.

"Is it, Arthur?" Elizabeth asked.

Mr. Townshend regarded the egg through his monocle.

"It looks all right," he said; "but Buff evidently requires his eggs to be like Cæsar's wife."

"Don't waste good food, boy," his father told him. "There is nothing wrong with the egg."

"It's been a nest-egg," said Buff in a final manner, and began to write in a small book.

Elizabeth remarked that Buff was a tiresome little boy about his food, and that there might come a time when he would think regretfully of the good food he had wasted. "And what are you writing?" she finished.

"It's my diary," said Buff, putting it behind his back. "Father gave it me. No, you can't read it, but Arthur can if he likes, 'cos he's going away"; and he poked the little book into his friend's hand.

Arthur thanked him gravely, and turned to the first entry:

New Year's Day.

Good Rissolution. Not to be crool to gerls.

The other entries were not up to the high level of the first, but were chiefly the rough jottings of nefarious plans which, one could gather, generally seemed to miscarry. On 12th August was printed and emphatically underlined the announcement that on that date Arthur Townshend would arrive at Etterick.

That the diary was for 1911 and that this was the year of grace 1913 troubled Buff not at all: years made little difference to him.

Arthur pointed this out as he handed back the book, and rubbing Buff's mouse-coloured hair affectionately, quoted:

"Poor Jim Jay got stuck fast in yesterday."

"But I haven't," Buff protested; "I'll know it's 1914 though it says 1911."

He put his diary into his safest pocket and asked if he might go to the station.

"Oh, I think not," his father said. "Why go into town this foggy morning?"

"He wants the 'hurl,'" said Elizabeth. "Arthur that's a new word for you. Father, we should make Arthur pass an examination and see what knowledge he has gathered. Let's draw up a paper:

I. What is—

(a) A Wee Free? (b) A U.P.?

II. Show in what way the Kelvinside accent

differs from that of Pollokshields.

III. What is a 'hurl'?

I can't think of anything else. Anyway, I don't believe you could answer one of my questions, and I am only talking for talking's sake, because we are all so sad. By the way, when you say Good-bye to Marget and Ellen shake hands, will you? They expect it."

"Of course," said Arthur.

The servants came in for prayers.

Mr. Seton prayed for "travelling mercies" for the friend who was about to leave them to return to the great city.

"Here's the cab!" cried Buff, and rushed for his coat. His father followed him, and Arthur turned to Elizabeth.

"Will you write to me sometimes?"

Elizabeth stooped to pick up Launcelot, the cat.

"Yes," she said, "if you don't mind prattle. I so rarely have any thoughts."

He assured her that he would be grateful for anything she cared to send him.

"Tell me what you are doing; about the church people you visit, if the Peggy-child gets better, if Mr. Taylor makes a joke, and of course about your father and Buff. Everything you say or do interests me. You know that, don't you—Lizbeth?"

But Elizabeth kept her eyes on the purring cat, and—"Isn't he a polite young man, puss-cat?" was all she said.

Buff's voice was raised in warning from the hall.

"Coming," cried Arthur; but he still tarried.

Elizabeth put the cat on her shoulder and led the way.

"Launcelot and I shall see you off from the doorstep. You mustn't miss your train. As Marget says, 'Haste ye back.'"

"You've promised to write.... There's loads of time, Buff." He was on the lowest step now. "Till April—you are sure to come in April?"

"Reasonably sure, but it's an uncertain world.... My love to Aunt Alice."