IV
It is strange about that picnic; I remember so little about it. It merges in my mind into so many others. I remember that we went up the Cherwell; a long way up, past Water Eaton and under Islip Bridge, and that we had tea and supper, and came back late; but all that was the same as many other picnics, and I cannot remember anything distinctive about this one, except being in a canoe with Walter for a part of the time, and finding him hard to talk to.
It is curious to realize that it made so little impression on my mind when it made so much on his. He told me afterwards that he had hesitated about coming. He wanted to finish a bit of work that afternoon, and then George ran into him in the quad and asked him to come.
‘Half-past two at Guy Laurier’s rooms,’ George had said, and he had answered: ‘Oh, thanks awfully. I’d love to come,’ and gone on to his room, thinking; ‘I needn’t go, after all, if I don’t want to. I’ll wait and see what I feel like when the time comes.’
And he had gone back to his own room and worked at Demosthenes all the morning. By lunch-time he had almost finished what he was doing. He had lunch in his own room, and then went on with the work. He heard the clock strike two, and remembered George, but he said to himself: ‘I needn’t decide yet. I don’t think I will go.’
Then he got intent on his work, and really forgot when it was half-past. When he came to a pause it was nearly three; he looked at his watch and remembered George again.
‘The Lauriers and their cousin and my sister,’ George had said.
Walter was shy of girls, especially the kind of girls he imagined us to be, and he had even then a sort of prejudice against Guy and Hugo.
He says that he was irritated by their air of superiority, when he knew they had nothing to be superior about. But I believe he was attracted by them too, and annoyed with himself for being attracted. He says that he decided first that it was too late to go, and then thought, ‘If I don’t go, it will be because I am afraid of them, and afraid of going at the wrong time’; and that decided him the other way. As soon as he decided to go he became in a great hurry, and ran all the way down New College Lane. He said he felt a fool when he tumbled on the stairs, and he said he knew we thought him funny. That made me ashamed, for I had not supposed he would see what we thought at all. That was always happening, though, with Walter. He seemed so stupid at times, as though he didn’t understand anything one was feeling or thinking at all, and then long afterwards one found out that he had understood quite a lot.
He said that he looked at me as he came into the room, and that he thought me beautiful, and different from anything he had ever seen before. Of course poor Walter had not seen many women before besides his mother and Maud, and of course I was quite different from them—and that then he wished that he had not come. He said that he felt suddenly that his clothes were all wrong, and he remembered that he had not brushed his hair before he came out, and that for the first time in his life he wished he was different from what he was, handsomer and smarter, and more like what he despised as a rule.
‘I blessed George Addington,’ he said afterwards, when he was talking to me about that afternoon. ‘He was the only person who made me feel at ease. I forget now what he said—something quite ordinary—but I didn’t feel he was sizing me up and not quite liking me, as I did with the rest of you.’
He said that he went a long way with me in a canoe and that we talked about New College and the windows in the Chapel, and that he was impressed by my knowledge of stained glass.
That too is funny, for I never knew much about glass, nor was much interested in it, and I don’t remember talking about it at all.
He says that I was kind to him, not snubby or supercilious as he had expected. Why he should have expected that I can’t understand. Neither Guy nor Hugo was snubby, and certainly not George.
He was afraid I should be annoyed at going in the boat with him. I don’t suppose I minded which boat it was. We were all quite near together as far as I remember, and I was very happy on those picnics.
He said that he felt envious of Guy and Hugo because they were often with me, and he felt they were not good enough for me: ‘Just the idle commoner type,’ he called them—and that I was better than that. He knew even at the time he told me that he had been wrong about them; he got to understand something of them both in the end, but never very much. He was never fair to them, nor they to him, but they realized it more than he did.
At that time, too, he thought me much cleverer than I am.
Walter could not care for anyone whom he did not think clever, and he did care for me. He has told me how he went back to his rooms after that picnic and stood by the window in the dark, and said to himself over and over again:
‘I am in love—I am in love with Helen Woodruffe,’ and that he could not sleep that night, but walked about his room till early morning. It seems curious to me when he was feeling so much I should have felt so little; that I should have had no notion of what was going on in his mind.
I suppose it was like Hugo. I had just not been thinking about him.