“Oh, if you’re going to talk about books, we’ll be off,” said Aileen Kendal, hastily.
The disappearance of the Kendals, however, was scarcely noticed by Sallie and Martyn, who are always perfectly content to talk vigorously to one another.
Early in June, Christopher Ambrey, Claire’s soldier brother, came home from China. Mary, Sallie, Martyn and I all endeavored by various means, direct in my own case, and indirect in that of the others, to persuade Claire not to go to the docks to meet his ship.
“Why not?” said Christopher’s only sister, her voice trembling.
She knew very well why not, and so did we, but nobody had the courage to say brutally that it was because she could not be trusted not to make a scene.
In the end she remained at home, excited and restless, while the car was sent to the station. Before it returned one felt fairly certain that Claire, walking aimlessly all over the house, had mentally received and opened several telegrams respectively announcing Christopher’s death, a fatal accident to the train, his arrest and imprisonment in London, and the immediate cancellation of his leave. Also that she had held several imaginary conversations with her brother of so dramatic a character that she found herself bewildered and trembling when Christopher actually arrived and said nothing more sensational than—
“Well, Claire—this is splendid”—one of the noncommittal clichés of which he so frequently makes use, and which always fall like cold water upon poor Claire’s emotionalism.
She herself has a keen, if exaggerated, feeling for le mot juste in any situation, but this is shared by none of her family except Mary, and Mary’s words, at any time at all, are very few and Claire does not attach to them the importance that she does to her brother’s.
Christopher and Claire, the only children of their parents, are both victims of Christopher’s reaction from Claire’s temperamental excessiveness. He once told me that even as a little boy he had known himself unable to live up to his worshiping sister’s demands upon a degree of sensitiveness and intelligence that he did not possess.
She tried passionately to shield him from spiritual hurts that he would never have felt, and to exercise nursery influence over him long after he had outgrown the nursery. Her vicarious sufferings when Christopher first went to school must have been of dimensions that never came within the range either of Christopher’s limited imagination or of his experience.