3
Rory Dundas, being a capricious young man, devoted himself, that morning, not to Concha, but to Anna and Jasper.
After he had been taken to scratch the backs of the pigs, and to eat plums in the orchard, Anna proposed a game of clock-golf.
“Are you coming to play?” they called out from the lawn to Concha, Arnold, and David, who were sitting in the loggia.
“No, we’re not!” called back Arnold.
Concha would have liked very much to have gone; first, because it seemed a pity to have incurred for nothing Teresa’s stare and the Doña’s raised eyebrows; second, because she had been finding it uphill work to keep Arnold civil, and David in the conversation. But her childhood’s habit of docility to Arnold had become automatic, so she sat on in the loggia.
“I think, maybe, I’ll go and try my hand ... they seem nice wee kiddies,” said David, and he got up, in his slow, deliberate way, and strolled off towards the party on the lawn.
“Kiddies!” exclaimed Arnold in a voice of disgust, when he was out of ear-shot. “The Scotch always seem to use the wrong slang.”
“You’re getting as fussy as Teresa,” laughed Concha.
“Oh, if it comes to that, she needn’t think she’s the only person with a sense of language. What’s the matter with her? Each time I come down she seems more damned superior. Who does she think she is? She’s reached the point of being dumb with superiorness, next she’ll go blind with it, then she’ll die of it,” and, frowning heavily, he began to fill his pipe.
His bitterness against Teresa dated from the days before the War when he used to write poetry. He had once read her some of his poems, and she, being younger and more brutal than she was now, had exclaimed, “But, Arnold, they’re absolutely dead! They’re decomposing with deadness.” He had never forgiven her.
“I suppose she gives you a pretty thin time, doesn’t she? She does hate you!”
Concha blushed. An unexpected trait in Concha was an inordinate vanity—the idea that any one, child, dog, boring old woman, could possibly dislike her was too humiliating to be admitted—and though one part of her was fully aware that she irritated, nay, jarred æsthetically upon Teresa, the other part of her obstinately, angrily, denied it.
“I don’t care if she does ... besides she doesn’t ... really,” she said hotly.
She then chose a cigarette, placed it in a very long amber holder, lit it, and began to smoke it with an air of intense sensuous enjoyment. Concha was still half playing at being grown up, and one of the things about her that irritated Teresa was that she was apt to walk and talk, to pour out tea, and smoke cigarettes, like an English actress in a drawing-room play, never quite losing her “stagyness.”
“Do you know where the shoe pinches?” asked Arnold. “It’s that you are six years younger than she is; if it were less or more it would be all right—but six years is jolly hard to forgive. You see, Teresa is still nominally a girl. By Jove!” and he gave a short, scornful laugh, “there she is, probably telling herself that you get on her nerves because you’re frivolous, and like rag-time, and all the rest of it, while all the time she, the immaculate, is just suffering from suppressed sex, like any other spinster.”
This explanation definitely jarred on Concha: she, too, suspected Teresa of being jealous of her, but deep down she hoped that this jealousy was based on something less fortuitous and more flattering to herself than six years’ juniority; nor did she like being thought of as a mere frivolous “fox-trotter.” She had the tremendous pride of generation of the post-War adolescent; she and her friends she felt as a brilliant, insolent triumphant sodality, free, wise, invincible, who, having tasted of the fruit of the seven symbolic trees of Paradise, and having found their flavour insipid, had chosen, with their bold, rather weary eyes wide open, to expend their magnificent talents on fox-trots, revues, and dalliance, to turn life and its treacherous possibilities into a Platonic kermis—oh, it was maddening of Teresa not to see this, to persist in thinking of them as frivolous, commonplace, rather vulgar young mediocrities! She should just hear some of the midnight talks between Concha and her friend, Elfrida Penn ... the passion, the satire, the profundity!
As a matter of fact, these talks were mainly of young men, chiffons, the doings of their other schoolfellows, what their head mistress had said to them on such and such an occasion at school, with an occasional interjection of, “Oh, it’s all beastly!” or a wondering whether twenty years hence they would be very dull and stout, and whether they would still be friends.
But midnight talks are apt to acquire in retrospect a great profundity and significance.
Also, the crudeness of Arnold’s words—“suppressed sex, like any other spinster”—shocked her in spite of herself. Her old, child’s veneration for Teresa lived on side by side with her new conviction that she was passée, out-of-date, pre-War, and it made her wince that she should be explained by nasty, Freudian theories.
“Oh, Lord! I’m sick of it all!” she cried with exaggerated vehemence.
“Sick of what?”
“This.”
“I suppose it’s pretty difficult at home now?”
“Oh, well, you know it’s never been the same since Pepa died.”
This time it was Arnold that winced; he could not yet bear to hear Pepa mentioned.
“It’s made the Doña a fanatic,” Concha continued, “and she never was that before, you know. Who was it? Teresa, or some one, said that English ivy had grown round Peter’s rock, and birds had made their nest in it ... before. But now she’s absolutely rampantly Catholic ... you know, she wants to dedicate the house to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and have little squares of stuff embroidered with it nailed on all the doors....”
“Good Lord!”
“But, of course, Dad won’t hear of it.”
“Well, I don’t quite see what it’s got to do with him—if it makes her happier,” and his voice became suddenly aggressive.
“And she’d do anything on earth to prevent either of us marrying a Protestant ... after all, what do-o-oes it all matter? Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
And Concha, who, for a few moments, had been completely natural, once more turned into an English actress in a drawing-room play.
“Um ... yes ...” said Arnold meditatively, sighing, and knocking out the ashes of his pipe.
“Hulloa!” she suddenly drawled, as a plump, grinning, round-faced, young man made his appearance on the loggia.
It was Eben Moore, son of the vicar and senior “snotty” on one of His Majesty’s ships.
As to his name—it was short for Ebenezer, which, as Mrs. Moore continually told one, “has always been a name in my husband’s family.... My husband, you know, is the youngest son of a youngest son,” she would add with a humorously wry smile, as if there was something at once glorious and regrettable in belonging to the Tribe of Benjamin.
His face perceptibly fell as he caught sight of the two personable men playing clock-golf on the lawn.
“Aow lor’! You didn’t tell me as what there was company,” he said, imitating the local accent.
“Good God!” muttered Arnold, who found Eben’s humour nauseating; and he slouched off to join Guy, who was writing letters in the billiard-room.
“Got it?” said Concha, stretching out her hand and looking at him through her eyelashes.
Eben giggled. “I say! It’s pretty hot stuff, you know.”
“E-e-eben! Don’t be a fool; hand it over.”
Eben, grinning from ear to ear, took a sealed envelope out of his pocket and gave it to her, and having opened it, she began to read its contents with little squirts of laughter.
From time immemorial, young ladies have had a fancy for exercising their calligraphy and taste in copying elegant extracts into an album; for instance, there is a Chinese novel, translated by an abbé of the eighteenth century, which tells of ladies who, all day long, sat in pagodas, copying passages from the classics in hands like the flight of a dragon. Harriet Smith, too, had an album into which she and Emma copied acrostics.
Concha owned to the same harmless weakness; though the extracts copied into her album could perhaps scarcely be qualified as “elegant”: there was, among other things, an unpublished play by W. S. Gilbert—(“What I love about our English humour—Punch, and W. S. Gilbert—is that it never has anything ... well, questionable,” Mrs. Moore would sometimes exclaim to the Doña), Wilke’s Essay on Woman, and Poor but Honest.
One day, Teresa, happening to come into Concha’s room, had caught sight of the album, and asked if she might look at it.
“Oh, do, by all means,” Concha had drawled, partly from defiance, partly from curiosity.
Impassively, Teresa had read it through; and then had said, “I’d advise you to ask Arnold the next time he’s in Cambridge to find you an old copy of Law’s Call to a Devout Life—that man in the market-place might have one—beautifully bound, if possible. Then take out the pages and bind this in the cover.”
Concha had done so; and if she had been as relentless an observer of Teresa as Teresa was of her, she might have detected in what had just transpired a touch on Teresa’s part of under-stated, nevertheless unmistakable, cabotinage.
The contents of the sealed envelope, which was causing her so much amusement, was a copy of the song, Clergymen’s Daughters that on his last leave she had persuaded Eben on his return to his ship to make for her from the gun-room collection, and which he had not on their previous meeting had an opportunity of giving her.
But she was not aware that there are three current versions of this song, corresponding to the X, the double X, and triple X on the labels of whisky bottles, and that it was only the double X strength that Eben had given her.