(ii)
“This is like old times,” said Quentillian.
Lucilla Morchard smiled, shook hands with him, and made no answer, and Quentillian immediately, and with annoyance, became conscious that the occasion was not in the least like old times.
Apparently Miss Morchard did not accept clichés uncritically.
Her face, indeed, expressed a spirit both critical and perceptive. Quentillian could still trace the schoolgirl Lucilla in the clearly-cut, unbeautiful oval, with the jaw slightly underhung, grey, short-sighted eyes, and straight black brows. Her dark hair was folded plainly beneath her purple straw hat, but he could discern that there was all the old abundance of it. Her figure was tall and youthful, but her face made her look fully her age. He surmised that Lucilla must be thirty-five, now.
“This time, my father is here to welcome you.”
She turned round, and Quentillian saw the Canon.
“Ah, dear fellow! Welcome—welcome you be, indeed!”
A hand grasped Quentillian’s hand, an arm was laid across his shoulders, and the Canon’s full, hearty voice, very deep and musical, rang in his ears.
Quentillian felt inadequate.
With all the acute self-consciousness of the modern, he was perfectly aware that Canon Morchard’s warmth of feeling and ardour of demonstration awoke in himself nothing but a slight, distinctly unpleasant, sensation of gratitude, and a feeble fear of appearing as unresponsive as he felt.
“I think it’s the same Owen Quentillian, isn’t it?”
The steady pressure of the Canon’s arm compelled his unwilling returned prodigal to remain still, facing him, and submit to a scrutiny from kind, narrowed eyes.
“Just the same. All is well—well, indeed.”
The Canon’s hand smote Quentillian gently between the shoulders, as they walked down the platform.
“The trap is waiting, dear boy. They are eager for your arrival, at home. I have my whole goodly company awaiting you, thank God—Lucilla here, and my merry Valeria, and little Flora with her incurably shy ways, and my Benjamin—the youngest of the flock—Adrian. You and Adrian must have many talks, dear lad. I want just such a friend for him as yourself—full of youth, and fun, and merriment, as he is himself, and yet able to help him when it comes to facing the deeper issues—the deeper issues. You young people must have many wise, deep talks, together, such as youth loves. I remember my University days so well and how ‘we tired the sun with talking’—aye, Owen, your father and I were famous philosophers, once upon a time! How does that strike you, eh?”
It struck Quentillian principally that his father’s contemporary reminded him oddly of a book of late Victorian memoirs, but he did not voice the impression aloud.
Instead, it was a relief to him to be able to make an obvious, and yet perfectly sincere, comment upon the unchanged aspect of the old red-brick house, standing well away from the small town.
“Valeria is our gardener,” said Canon Morchard. “You will be consulted about various borders and the like, no doubt. But we have all of us an interest in botany. You must remember that from the old days, eh? There was a collecting craze, if I remember rightly, that led to a great deal of friendly rivalry amongst you children.”
Quentillian’s recollection of the collecting craze differed so drastically from that of the Canon, that he glanced involuntarily at Lucilla. She met his eye calmly, but he fancied a little latent hostility in her unconsciousness.
It rather served to confirm his impression of the extreme lack of spontaneity that had characterized those bygone excursions into the realms of Nature. They had been undertaken, at least by himself and his ally and contemporary, Valeria, with one eye, as it were, upon the Canon’s study window. Even Adrian, if Quentillian remembered rightly, had relaxed the normal enthusiasm of boyhood in the pursuit of bird’s eggs, after the wondrous eye for detail of the bird’s Creator had been sufficiently often pointed out to him.
“Welcome home,” said the Canon happily. “You remember the old garden? I seem to recollect some capital fun going on amongst the old rhododendron bushes at hide-and-seek, eh? We play lawn-tennis, nowadays. I see a sett is going on now. Who is here this afternoon, Lucilla?”
“Captain Cuscaden is playing with Flora, and I suppose it’s Mr. Clover in the far court.”
“To be sure. Clover is my excellent curate, who has been one of ourselves for several years now. Sit ye down, young people, sit ye down. Tea will be out here directly, and the players will no doubt come for refreshment.”
The Canon settled himself with the deliberation of a heavily-built man, and leant back in his wicker chair, with finger-tips joined together, the breeze stirring the thick grey hair upon his temples.
It was a cameo-like head, with something of the ivory colouring of a cameo, but the cameo’s blank orbs were replaced by deeply-set, brilliant hazel eyes of which the flashing, ardent outlook recalled at once the child and the fanatic. Innumerable fine lines were crossed and recrossed at the corners of either socket, but the broad forehead was singularly open and unlined.
Quentillian noted the feminine sweetness of the closed mouth, contrasting with the masculine jut of the strong, prominent jaw. His mind registered simultaneously the recollection of the Canon’s violent and terrifying outbursts of anger, and his astonishing capabilities of tenderness.
The latter expression was altogether predominant, as the tennis players came to join the group under the cedars.
“Valeria—Flora—you need no introductions here, dear lad. Clover, let me present my old pupil—one of whom you have very often heard us speak—Owen Quentillian. This is my very good friend and helper. And.... Ah, Captain Cuscaden—Mr. Quentillian.”
Quentillian fancied less enthusiasm in this last introduction, and it seemed to him significant that no descriptive phrase followed the name. Either Captain Cuscaden was not worth classifying, or he could not satisfactorily be relegated into any class, and Quentillian suspected that Canon Morchard would resent the latter state of affairs more than the former.
At all events, Cuscaden was good-looking, of bold allure and sunburnt face, revealing the most perfect of teeth in a pleasant smile.
Mr. Clover was sandy and pale and seemed to be talkative.
“I believe I should have known you anywhere,” Valeria Morchard told Quentillian, frankly gazing at him. He was not sorry to have the opportunity of gazing back as frankly at her.
As children, the handsome or unhandsome looks of Val, his inseparable playmate, had naturally interested him not at all. He had vaguely acquiesced in the universal nursery dictum that Flora, with her fair curls and wide, innocent eyes, was pretty, but he now found her blond slenderness insignificant in the extreme compared to Valeria, with her tall and perfectly balanced figure, ripe-apricot bloom, and brown laughing eyes. No longer a very young girl, she somehow combined the poise of her twenty-seven years with a shy, semi-abruptness of diction reminiscent of seventeen.
Quentillian thought her charming.
So, apparently, did the other men.
“And who bore off the palm of victory?”
Canon Morchard indicated the tennis court.
“We won, at five games all. A very good sett,” Clover replied. “My partner’s service is almost invincible.”
Canon Morchard smiled.
“We think Valeria’s service is her strong point,” he explained to Quentillian. “She was coached by our dear David, and David is no mean player, I assure you. Little Flora needs to stand up to the ball better—stand up to the ball better. Flora has the feminine tendency to hit out too soon—eh, Flora? Our champion is Adrian, however. You and he will have some great contests, I foresee.”
The more the Canon foresaw, the more did Quentillian’s own aspirations turn in search of contrary directions. The only diversion of those predicted by his host, of which he felt able to tolerate the thought, was that of being consulted by Valeria upon the herbaceous borders.
“Clover, there, has a particularly good stroke on to the back line, but you’ll get to know it. Have you played at all since you left the ’Varsity?”
“I got a good deal of tennis when I was home on leave in nineteen-sixteen, but nothing after that, when I was in Mesopotamia.”
“Were you not in Flanders, dear boy?”
“In ’fifteen and ’sixteen,” said Quentillian briefly.
He wished to remember neither his two years on the Western front, nor his many months in Hospital with shell-shock.
“Where did you and David meet, in Mesopotamia?” inquired Lucilla.
Quentillian had forgotten her presence, if not her existence, but he felt grateful to her for sparing him the tentative category of his soldiering capabilities which he suspected the Canon of having in readiness.
He was not, however, given time to answer Lucilla’s question.
The Canon’s hand was uplifted.
“Ah, Lucilla my dear—please! My little talk with Owen there, is to come later. There is so much that I want to hear about our David—much, indeed. And you shall have your share of news about your brother, my child, but wait—at least wait—until we have had our little private talk together.”
Lucilla bent her head a little under the rebuke either in acquiescence or to conceal some slight confusion; but Valeria blushed hotly and unmistakably, and everyone looked constrained except the Canon, who looked rather severe, rather grieved, and at the same time perfectly serene. When he spoke again, it was with marked suavity.
“Tell us something of your literary work, dear fellow,” he requested Quentillian. “I am ashamed to say that I have read nothing of yours, as yet. My time is so little my own. Lucilla here is our literary critic.”
He placed his thin, beautiful hand, for a fleeting moment upon his eldest daughter’s hand.
“Lucilla tells me that she knows your work. Critical essays, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Quentillian gravely acknowledged the truth of the assertion. His self-consciousness rather enhanced than diminished in him a keen appraisement, perhaps rather less detached than he would have liked it to be, of his own literary value.
“I published a small volume of essays before the war, but since then I have only been a very occasional contributor to one or two of the reviews.”
“Ah, yes. You must let me see what you have done, some day. This is the era of youth. Indeed, some of the things I see in print today strike me as not only crude and immature, but absolutely mischievous—false, foolish, shallow teaching from those who have never submitted to be taught themselves. I am not afraid of that in your case, Owen. But remember this, all you young people: Nothing can be of real or lasting value that is not founded upon the broad principles of Christianity—charity, self-sacrifice, humility, loving-kindness. One feels that, more than ever, nowadays, when cynicism is so much in fashion.”
The Canon leant back in his chair again with his eyes closed, as though momentarily exhausted by the extraordinary passion with which he had spoken.
So profoundly did Owen Quentillian disagree with his host, that he remained absolutely silent. He reminded himself that since his majority he had sought, voluntarily, only the companionship of those whose views were at least as progressive as his own. He had almost forgotten that those other, older, views existed, were held with a passion of sincerity contrasting oddly with the cool, detached, carefully impersonal logic that was the only attitude contemplated by himself and his kind for the consideration of all problems of ethics, morals, or of Life itself.
No doubt the Canon did not admit the normal evolution of the art of self-sacrifice to be self-advertisement, and held the officious pelican to be the best of birds.
Quentillian, horribly aware of his own priggishness, wanted to reform the whole of the Canon’s philosophy at once.
Nevertheless he retained enough humour to hope that the preposterous desire had not been apparent in his silence.
His eyes met those of Valeria Morchard, and read there amusement, and something not unlike protest.
Lucilla, in her level voice, offered him tea.
“The cup that cheers,” said Mr. Clover in a nervous way.
The ineptitude roused in Quentillian a disproportionate sense of irritation and renewed his old conviction that his nerves were not even yet under his complete control.
As though the Canon, too, were mildly averse from such trivialities, he began to speak again.
“What one feels in the cleverness of the day is the note of ugliness that prevails. Do you not feel that? The sordid, the grotesque, the painful—all, all sought out and dwelt upon. That, we are told, is the new realism. We know, indeed, that there is a sad side to life, but is it realism to dwell only upon one side of the picture? Surely, surely, a sane optimism were the better outlook—the truer realism.”
“You don’t think, then, that the optimism of England is responsible for her present plight, sir?”
Quentillian’s tone was one of respectful suggestion, but he was aware that Val, beside him, had suddenly caught her breath as though at an audacity, and that Flora and Mr. Clover were both gazing anxiously at the Canon.
A flash of lightning shot from those ardent eyes straight into the passionless irony of the younger man’s.
“But for England’s optimism, there would be no England today. It was the spirit of optimism that won the war, Owen.”
A sick recollection of men, armed and disciplined, taking steady aim at other men, standing against a wall to be shot for cowardice or treason, of grey-faced commanders leading those who followed them into certain death, all surged into Quentillian’s rebellious mind. They, the men who had been there, had known better than to prate of optimism.
They had faced facts, had anticipated disaster, had envisaged the worst possibilities, and their pessimism had won the war.
“Are you, too, bitten with the folly of the day?”
The Canon’s voice was gentle again, his arm once more laid across Quentillian’s shoulders.
“Did I not hear something about shell-shock, dear fellow? We must have no talk of the war here. Thank God for that He hath brought it to an end. Tell me, dear lad, will you play tennis?”
Bewildered, almost affronted, Quentillian yet agreed to play tennis, feeling himself more like a forward boy, being treated with forbearance, than like a modern intellect illuminating the way of thought for the older generation.
He played with Valeria as his partner, and found the Canon’s eulogy of her service to be entirely justified.
He found an opportunity at the end of the game of expressing his admiration for her play, and she replied, conventionally enough, that she had a great deal of practice.
“There isn’t much else to do,” she added, with a slight grimace.
Under pretext of looking for a distant ball, they continued the conversation.
“If you remember this place at all,” Val said, “you know how dull it is. Just tennis in the summer, and horrible bazaars and jumble sales, and never a new person or a new idea from year’s end to year’s end.”
“It sounds appalling. But, after all, you’re not bound, in the old, antiquated way. You can go away.”
“No I can’t,” she said bluntly. “I did get to France, for six months, during the war, but it was only because it was the war. And even then—oh, well, the sort of letters I got were enough to make me feel that Father really hated my being there.”
Quentillian was genuinely aghast.
“But I thought that sort of attitude had gone out with all the other Victorian traditions. I thought women did what they liked—were as free as men.”
“That’s what it says in the books I read, and what some of the girls I met in France told me. But it isn’t like that here. And one can’t hurt Father. You know what he’s like—so good, and so sensitive, and—and so noble, somehow. He makes modern things seem trivial—vulgar, even.”
“Your father is a reactionary,” said Quentillian kindly, rather as one might say: “Your father is a Hottentot.”
“You mustn’t think that he just wants us to stay at home and arrange the flowers,” Val said. “You know how he always wanted us to have intellectual interests. Oh, Owen, don’t you remember the collections?”
She broke off, and blushed and laughed.
“It seems so very natural—I’ve so often thought of you as Owen.”
“That was very nice of you, Val,” said Quentillian calmly.
He had every intention of retaining his early privileges, where Val was concerned.
“I should like to read some of the things you’ve written,” she said abruptly. “Lucilla reads your articles, and has always admired them.”
It seemed to Quentillian so extremely natural that anybody who read his articles should admire them, that he was conscious of receiving a slight shock when Valeria added:
“I gather that Father wouldn’t like them at all. Lucilla always kept them out of his way.”
“She is devoted to him, I can see that.”
“Yes, of course.”
Something in her voice made him look at her, and she exclaimed, half laughing and half petulant: “We’re all devoted to him, Lucilla and Flossie and I! I didn’t mean the least shadow of a criticism of him. Only that it’s a little difficult, sometimes, to keep up to his level.”
It seemed to Quentillian so monstrous a state of affairs that the Canon’s three daughters should have no worthier aim in life than the one implied, that something of his feeling was reflected in his face, and Valeria on the instant applied herself to looking for the missing ball, found it, and returned to the tea-table and the group there.
The Canon was again speaking, this time to young Cuscaden.
“If it is to be Canada, I believe I could give you one or two introductions that might be of service to you. The Government people, for instance.... I have one or two very good friends amongst them. You are really anxious to leave the Army and try colonization?”
“Quite determined to, sir.”
“Ah, you young fellows, you young fellows! It seems to me that there is none of the spirit of stability that existed in our day! But perhaps the wish to see further afield is a natural one. Certainly, my own greatest regret is that I have had so little time for travelling.”
He turned to Lucilla.
“Your dearest mother and I had planned a visit to Italy the very year that she was taken from us. Well, well! It was not to be. I shall never see the Eternal City now, I imagine, except with the eyes of the mind. Clover, you are amongst those who have seen Rome. Think of it! Seen Rome, where Peter healed and Paul preached the Gospel, where Laurence and Agnes and Cyprian and countless others were martyred! Tell us something of the Coliseum.”
Mr. Clover did not give the effect of being an eloquent person, but he had evidently been called upon before by the Canon, and he gave a not unilluminating little description, punctuated, and indeed supplemented, by Canon Morchard’s exhaustive comments.
Quentillian listened in a sort of amazement, not at all untinged by a rather uncertain wonder as to how he should ever sustain his own part in these ingenuous conversations....
The others, he saw, listened, with the possible exception of Lucilla, whose eyes were fixed upon a distant flower-bed.
Captain Cuscaden kept his gaze upon Valeria, but he put in an occasional question, generally upon a subject of architecture. Flora played with a leaf and said nothing at all, and Val, unconsciously, Quentillian felt sure, repeated everything her father said in more colloquial English.
“It amazes me to realize that with a lack of all our modern appliances, such veritable giants of architecture should yet have been raised,” mused the Canon.
“Yes, isn’t it wonderful to think they had none of our machines and things, and yet made those enormous statues and gates and things?” said Val.
“Well for us, indeed, that they did so, my child. Every fresh excavation proves to be a new link with the past.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Clover.
“Yes, all the new things they dig up seem to make a fresh link with those old Roman days,” echoed Val faithfully.
“Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Clover.
“If any of you young people followed the accounts of the recent Egyptian excavations—Valeria, I think you are our keenest antiquarian—were you not struck by the extraordinary confirmation of Scripture narrative afforded by each fresh discovery?”
This time Mr. Clover only said “Indeed?” and Valeria repeated:
“Yes, it all carried out the things one reads in the Bible, didn’t it?”
“We required no such confirmation, certainly, but it comes to one as a fresh joy, and brings these things home with full force.”
And Mr. Clover, with what Quentillian perversely chose to regard as misplaced ingenuity, once more found a variation of his formula, and remarked, “Indeed, yes.”
On these lines they talked about Egypt.
Then they talked about Rome again.
Then they went back to Egypt.
Quentillian looked at the rebellious profile beneath Val’s shady hat, and came to the conclusion that, whether she fully realized it or not, she was as profoundly bored as himself.
It was Captain Cuscaden who released them from the strain, by rising to take his leave.
“I’m sorry you have not seen Adrian. He will be disappointed to have missed you,” Canon Morchard said courteously. “Another day, when Adrian is at home, you must come over again. He is spending the afternoon with friends at a distance, and will hardly be home before dinner-time. You must come over again.”
“Thank you, sir. I should like to very much.”
Something in the Captain’s prompt reply convinced Quentillian that his acceptance was not merely a conventional one.
“Your motor-bicycle is round by the hall door,” said Valeria, and she and Captain Cuscaden left the garden together.
“And now, dear lad, you and I must have some talk together.”
Rather to Quentillian’s dismay, the firm and genial pronouncement of his host seemed to have been anticipated. Lucilla could be discerned bending over the distant flower-bed which had been the object of her solicitation during the talk about Rome, and Flora had disappeared. Mr. Clover now turned and hastened towards the house.
“You and I have had our heart-to-heart talks before now, Owen,” said the Canon affectionately. “We must have many more of them, dear fellow—many more.”