Читать книгу Heirs Apparent - Philip Gibbs - Страница 11

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Audrey’s arrival home was by taxi cab from Guildford station to the old vicarage at Hartland near Clandon, a distance of five miles, at a cost of ten shillings. Having saved her fare to town, she considered that she was justified in this expense, although undoubtedly there would be a fuss about it if her mother discovered the extravagance. Anyhow her swollen ankle was a good justification.

She had not that easy mind, unconscious of moral turpitude, which enabled Julian to face his parents with bland tranquillity. The announcement that she had been sent down from Oxford would not be received as an insignificant affair. Her mother had “bucked” a good deal about “my dear daughter at Somerville” to all the old frumps of the surrounding neighbourhood. Her father had reduced his smoking allowance and sold some of his rare books as a help to the payment of her fees and her pocket money. Poor, adorable Dad! The frigid economies of a country vicarage, always of the bread-and-scrape order, ever since she could remember, and especially since the war, had become still more austere as a consequence of her University career. Even the two babes, Julia and Celia, aged ten and twelve, had suffered in the restriction of jam, pocket money, and other creature comforts, because their eldest sister was to do brilliant things at Oxford before getting an appointment as a High School mistress. O parental ambitions and illusions! What a crash there would be when she told her awful news. Impossible to give the details of that last little binge with the boys when certainly she had drunk too many cocktails, broken through a college window after hours, and trampled on Beatrice Tuck’s blobby nose. Impossible to justify the hilarious adventures of youth to a mother who was very strict on the smaller proprieties and to an unpractical, other-worldly father who lived continually in the presence of God, who looked at life with the eyes of a smiling mystic, and exalted womanhood by his adoration of the Virgin Mother.

Audrey refused in her soul to admit that she should have done otherwise than as she did. She had done nothing mean, nothing beastly, nothing dishonourable. She had merely grabbed at the fun of life with both hands and enjoyed natural liberty with an orgy of laughter. The boys and girls had given her a good time. The boys especially had been frightfully good to her and all that was decent. It was true that Clatworthy had been rather inclined to go off the deep end and she had had to restrain his over passionate advances and outrageous sense of humour. Some episodes with that young man had been embarrassing, she was bound to admit, but harmless and entertaining. There was nothing base about Johnny Clatworthy. As for Julian Perryam, the very angels of heaven would have been edified by his correct behaviour. He had the quiet courtesy of one of Arthur’s knights, the purity of St. Louis of France. That evening when she had offered him her cheek in the White Hart Inn, he had kissed her with almost ridiculous indifference. She ought not to have done that perhaps! But after all, why not be simple and friendly and natural? She had wanted that kiss. It was a good touch to the end of a perfect day, and he looked so handsome and brotherly and boyish standing there fumbling in the knapsack for her pyjamas. She gave a little gulp of laughter at the reminiscence and then wondered again how she could possibly explain these things to her father and mother. There would be a dreadful row.

The open taxi, which was an imported Ford, was driven by young Fred Hibbard, who had once sung in the choir with her and grinned at her attempts to teach Old Testament history in the Sunday School. She sat next to him on the front seat and chatted a little, after remarking on the glorious clumps of gold where the gorse was like a miracle.

“Any local news, Fred?”

He smiled shyly, with his gaze on the road.

“Not much, Miss. Lord Pervical has put the old Hall up for sale. Can’t stand the taxes and all that.”

“That’s rotten! All the old estates are going. England’s coming down in the world.”

“Looks like it. And Colonel Mont is breaking up his park for building lots. Tearing down the trees something frightful. Spoiling the country side.”

“What a ghastly shame! I’d like to shoot people who cut down trees like that!”

“I suppose they want the money. Times are hard for the gentry just now. Never be the same again in my opinion. The war has to be paid for. Pity it was ever started. They won’t get me again.”

Audrey laughed. “Too late to go back on that, Fred. Seen my father lately?”

“Yes. Took him to Guildford the other day to sell some more of his books. A rare stock of ’em he must have. There’s nothing he doesn’t know, I daresay.”

“Just a few things,” said Audrey. “I’m one of them.”

“I see your brother’s home again. Lost his job, so they say at the Onslow Arms.”

“What! Out of a job again? That’s perfectly awful!”

Audrey laughed rather ruefully. If Frank had got the sack from the Bank it would make things more difficult for her. Two black sheep in one flock were rather too many! Poor old Dad! He would be fearfully worried and become more mystical than ever. And Mother would fret and fuss at having the boy hanging about again. Frank was certainly the limit. She had never believed he would stick it out in the Bank. He hated office work like poison. And who could expect otherwise of a boy who had been a Wing Commander and flown over German battlefields before he was nineteen, and played tricks in the sky like a young Mercury? A Bank! With caged wings. He was never happy unless he was out of doors, sloping about with tramps and village boys, consorting with gipsies, yarning in the bar parlours of country inns, and making queer friends anywhere he could find them between Surrey and the Sussex Downs.

“Well, good afternoon, Fred, and here’s something for yourself.”

Audrey braced herself for coming troubles, and walked bravely up the weed grown path to the square-built Georgian house with a stone portico and two pillars with crumbling plaster which was her father’s vicarage. She had lived here for most of her life since her father had been a curate in a London slum which she remembered vaguely as a place of brightly lighted shops, clanging tram-cars, shouting costers, and large gin palaces outside which frowsy women gathered with their perambulators. That was Walworth, to which her father looked back as an earthly Paradise because of the work he had done there in “soul saving.” He deplored his lack of opportunities among the week-end cottages and golf bungalows of this Surrey village.

“The villa plot to sow and reap, to act the villa lie,

Beset with villa fears to live, midst villa dreams to die!”

The hall door was open as usual, and one of her father’s old black hats hung on the pegs inside the passage. But she knew he was out by the absence of his blackthorn stick from the umbrella stand. One of Frank’s caps was there, and by a cigarette end lying on the worn oilcloth she knew that her brother was about. How shabby everything looked! How poverty-stricken, after the polished floors and solid comfort of Somerville! Though it was May and the sun was shining again after the morning rain, the old winter curtains draped the windows—a dark and gloomy green—and the house smelt damp, like a graveyard, Audrey thought, with spirits that suddenly sank to zero. But after flinging her blue hat on a hall chair, and pushing her hair back from her forehead, she called out with deliberate cheerfulness:

“Hulloa, everybody! Who’s at home?”

The little maid, a girl of sixteen whom Mrs. Nye had engaged for economy’s sake on low wages in return for training, opened the kitchen door with a startled look.

“Good gricious, Miss Audrey! You back?”

“Back for good, Lizzie. Where are they all?”

“The master’s round at church,” said the girl. “And mistress is talking in the drawing-room with Miss Raven, and Master Frank”—here she gave a little giggle—“is oiling his motor-bike in the back garden.”

Audrey shuddered at the thought of Miss Raven in the drawing-room and made a dart for the back door with a little low whistle to her brother.

Frank was sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow by the greenhouse, in a pair of khaki breeches, much oil-stained, and an old blue shirt, open at the front. He was smoking a cigarette and regarding the disintegrated portions of an ancient “Indian.” An old wire-haired terrier lay in an attitude of couchant regardant. This brother of Audrey’s was a reddish haired fellow with a square cut face and whimsical mouth, and soft brown eyes like a young deer’s.

“Hullo, kid!” he said, without much surprise. “What’s the matter with you?”

Audrey took one of his cigarettes and tousled his hair a little.

“Everything’s the matter! I’ve been sent down from Somerville for disorderly behaviour!”

She gave a little squeal of laughter, but with a nervous note in it.

“Good for you,” said Frank calmly. “Another rebel in the family. Won’t our parents be pleased?”

“I hear you’ve chucked the Bank, old boy. What the dickens will you do now?”

“The Bank chucked me,” corrected her brother. “I don’t blame them at all. I made a most elaborate mess of their books, and the end came when I drew a Sopwith Scout, 1918 type, on the inside cover of my ledger. Pure absent-mindedness, as the governor would say.”

“Things are approaching a blood-curdling crisis,” said Audrey.

They reached the crisis after the departure of Miss Raven whose big boots made a scrunching noise down the gravel, so conveying the news of her exit to Audrey’s quick ears. Mrs. Nye started up with a little cry, not of pleasure, but of pained surprise, when Audrey made a rapid appearance in the drawing-room with a cheery greeting and a plea for tea.

“Audrey! What in the world brings you back? And what is this dreadful scandal I hear from Miss Raven?”

Mrs. Nye was a delicate lady, who ought to have been dressed in lavender silk with a lace cap, but wore instead a blue serge coat and skirt and a little black hat. Twenty-three years as a clergyman’s wife in difficult parishes—she remembered with something like terror the squalor of that Walworth parish—had made her white-haired before her time and had given her a look of perpetual worry. She was very popular with other clergymen’s wives because of her untiring energy in the cause of the Girls’ Friendly Society and her unerring sense of tact with the parishioners. She had trained large numbers of young girls as domestic servants who were quite a boon to the big houses in Surrey where they took good places as parlour maids until they got into trouble with the local shop-boys, and she still found time to maintain a regular correspondence with old school friends, to whom she quoted passages from the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the discourses of Fénelon, the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and other works which had developed her moral character and sense of duty at the very select school for young ladies in Clapham Park where she had been one of the favourite girls. Audrey acknowledged in her generous moments that her mother was as near perfection as any woman could be while belonging to this wicked world, but in moments of impatience she had gone as far as blaming God because she was born with a mother who was distressed at the least untidiness, shocked at the smallest impropriety, and alarmed at the first hint of that natural depravity which even as a child had lured Audrey into dangerous, joyous, and devilish adventures.

Audrey’s skill in tactics took advantage instantly of her mother’s reference to Miss Raven.

She gave ground which was quite untenable and covered her weak position by a bold attack upon the enemy’s position.

“I’ve been sent down, Mother, for a somewhat injudicious rag. But what it has to do with that cat Miss Raven I fail utterly to see. Another dreadful scandal, eh? Why, the woman would sniff a prehistoric scandal in the mummy room at the British Museum! She’s a pest to the neighbourhood. She ought to be suppressed with poison gas or something!”

At ordinary times Mrs. Nye would have been lured off the main track by this somewhat violent assault upon one of the most energetic helpers in the parish. But Audrey perceived instinctively that in this case she could not obtain that argumentative relief.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Nye, “it’s a most terrible shock that you have been sent down.”

“I thought it would be,” said Audrey, helping herself to tea.

“You know how we have stinted and scraped to keep you at the University—”

“Yes,” said Audrey. “And I notice it’s the same old bread and scrape for tea!”

“Your poor father has even denied himself tobacco for your sake.”

“Poor old Daddy!” said Audrey, attacking the cake.

Mrs. Nye looked at her daughter with timid eyes.

“Audrey, there’s something far more dreadful I want to speak about. Something I must ask you—”

“Ask anything you like, mother dear,” said Audrey patiently. She racked her mind, as Julian had done, for any sin which might have poked up its ugly little head in the light of day. There was that episode with Johnny Clatworthy. No, foolish as it had been, there was nothing in it. Absolutely nothing. Beatrice Tuck’s expansive and ridiculous nose? Well, there was nothing very dreadful in having trodden on it. It might improve it. Too many cocktails? Well, of course it was a bad habit, and she had certainly been rather merry once, but surely mother couldn’t have heard of that?

“My dearest child,” said Mrs. Nye, in an almost shamefaced way, “I hate to put this question to you, but I feel that I should be hiding my head in the sand like an ostrich if I didn’t face the truth whatever it may be.”

The idea of her mother hiding her head in the sand like an ostrich had a curiously hysterical effect upon Audrey, and she laughed with ripples of mirth which she tried to check when she saw her mother’s eyes fill with tears.

“My wild Audrey!” said Mrs. Nye. “I pray God to protect you from your own love of adventure, your sense of fun! It’s so dangerous. It leads young girls into so many temptations. I tremble to think that what Miss Raven suggests may contain even a grain of truth.”

“What on earth does the creature suggest?” asked Audrey with impatient enquiry.

“She says that she met you at a village near Oxford—in the company of a young man.”

“Profoundly true,” said Audrey. “ ‘What about it,’ as the poet says?”

“You actually contemplated walking to London together—”

“It didn’t come off,” said Audrey. “My ankle gave out.”

“Miss Raven tells me she met a gentleman named Major Iffield at Victoria station, who mentioned that he had seen you both at Henley. Audrey! My dear child! Have you gone mad or something? I implore you to tell me what has happened—what you have been doing with that young man.”

Audrey did not answer the question in a direct way. She drew her brown eyebrows together and hoped “devoutly,” she said, but with suppressed ferocity, that she might have the pleasure of seeing Miss Raven roast at the stake, or boil in oil, or hang in chains on Gibbet Hill. She regretted that the ducking stool and other methods of popular punishment had been abandoned by the increase of sentimentality in the modern mind. As for the facts of the case, she was willing for all the world to know that she had walked to Henley with a Balliol boy and, if he liked, would walk as far as Hell with him. After which outburst of anger and oratory Audrey departed to her room, leaving her mother a prey to the deepest anxiety.