3
The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest, yet which are the last to go.
Imperceptibly, the breach widened between Teresa and Concha; Concha had now completely given up pretending that their relationship was an affectionate one, and they rarely spoke to each other.
It was evident, too, that the lack of harmony between their parents, noticeable since Pepa’s death, had recently become more pronounced.
Dick was often absent for days at a time; and one day Teresa happening to go into the Doña’s morning-room found her sitting on the sofa looking angry and troubled, a letter on her lap. Teresa took the letter—the Doña offering no protest—and read it. I was a bill to Dick from a London jeweller for a string of pearls. Puzzled, she looked questioningly at the Doña, who merely shrugged her shoulders.
In the servant’s hall, too, there seemed to be discord, rumours of which drifted upstairs via Parker the maid, Parker had a way of beginning in the middle, which made her plot difficult to follow, but which perhaps had a certain value as a method of expressing such irrational things as the entanglement of primitive emotions. Her stories were like this: “And she said: ‘see you don’t get Minchin in the garden,’ and Mrs. Rudge said, ‘oh then some one else’s name would be Walker’; and I said, ‘if Dale hadn’t been killed in the War he would be in your cottage and that’s what the War has done for you!’ and I said, ‘you’ve children, Mrs. Rudge,’ I said, ‘and I hope it won’t come knocking at your door some day,’ and Lily said, ‘trust Parker to be after an unmarried man,’ and I said, ‘don’t be so rude, Lily, it’s Nosey Parker yourself ... even though I don’t go to chapel!’ That was one for Mrs. Rudge, you see: oh, they’re a set of beauties!”
The previous head-gardener, Dale, for whom the middle-aged Parker had had a tendresse, had been killed in the War. She looked askance at his successor Rudge for wearing dead men’s shoes, and for being that unpardonable thing—a married man; and into the bargain he was a dissenter. Then there was Minchin, the handsome cowman, whom Dick was thinking of putting into the garden....
It was all very complicated; but seeing that light is sometimes thrown on the psychology of the hyper-civilised by the researches of anthropologists among Bantus and Red Indians, perhaps these tales of Parker deserved a certain attention—at any rate, behind them there loomed three tremendous forces: sex, religion and the dead....
One day, to the surprise of every one but the Doña, there arrived in time for dinner Dick’s dearest friend, Hugh Mallam.
He was a huge shaggy creature, if possible, more boyish than Dick. He and Dick were delighted at seeing each other, for Hugh lived in Devonshire and rarely came as far north as Plasencia, and all through dinner plied each other with old jokes and old memories; and from the roars of laughter that reached the drawing-room after they had been left to themselves they were evidently enjoying themselves extremely over their port wine.
The next morning Teresa coming into the morning-room, found the Doña and Hugh standing before the fire, the Doña looking angry and scornful while Hugh, in an instructive and slightly irritated voice, was saying: “Sorry, Doña, but I can’t help it ... I can’t help being the same sort of person with Dick that I’ve always been ... it’s like that ... I know it’s very wrong of him and all that, but I can’t help being the same sort of person with him I’ve always been ... I....”
“Yes, yes, Hugh, you’ve said that before. But do you realise what a serious thing it is for me and the children? You seemed very shocked and sympathetic in your letter—for one thing, a family man simply can’t afford to spend these sums; then there’s the scandal—so bad for the business and Arnold ... and you promised me yesterday....”
“I know, but I tell you, as soon as I saw old Dick I knew that I couldn’t lecture him, one can’t change.... I can’t help being the same sort of person with him I’ve always been. But I really am most awfully sorry about it all—the old blackguard!”
“Well, if you hear that we are ruined, perhaps you’ll be sorrier still.”
“That won’t happen—no tragedies ever happen to any one who has anything to do with me—ha! ha! They couldn’t, could they, Teresa? I’m much too——”
“Hush!” said the Doña sharply, suddenly noticing the presence of Teresa; and, with a look of extreme relief, Hugh slunk through the French window into the garden.
So the Doña had actually been trying to turn Hugh into their father’s mentor! It was not like her; she was much too wise not to know that the incorrigibly frivolous Hugh was quite unsuited to the part.
Parallel with the infallible wisdom that is the fruit of our own personal experience, there lie the waste products of the world’s experience—facile generalisations, clichés, and so on. Half the follies of mankind are due to forming our actions along this line instead of along the other. There, Dick and Hugh were not two human beings, therefore unique and inimitable, but ‘old school friends’—and to whose gentle pressure back to the narrow way is one more likely to yield than to that of an ‘old school friend’?
But the very fact of the wise Doña acquiescing in such a stale fallacy, told of desperation and the clutching at straws.
Of course, Hugh was perfectly right—the shape and colour of his relationship with Dick had been fixed fifty years ago at the dame’s school in Kensington, to spring up unchanged all through the years at each fresh meeting. They could not change it; why, you might as well go and tell an oak that this spring it was to weave its leaves on the loom of the elms.
He had been right, too, in saying there would be no catastrophe. The fate of Pompeii—a sudden melodramatic blotting out of little familiar things—would never, she felt sure, overtake Plasencia. Things at Plasencia happened very slowly, by means of a long series of anticlimaxes.