The Only Poet (8 page)

So she came forward to protect Adela by her presence. For she was quality, and the people of Peartree Green would never dare to look impertinently at anybody belonging to quality.

‘How do you do, dear?' she said pleasantly, and dropped a kiss lightly on her lips.

The porters ceased to gape, the hay-cart moved again. The stationmaster's baby was hushed.

Adela, always a little dazed by formal kisses, hesitated a minute before she expressed her real regard for Evelyn by wringing her hand. She smiled round the green banks of the railway-cutting and said emphatically, ‘How well your wild roses are coming on.' They weren't Evelyn's wild roses, so she gazed at them dispassionately and answered, ‘I suppose so. Your train is late. The dog-cart's waiting. You sent your luggage in advance, didn't you?'

The dog-cart outside looked just like a toy with its sleek, motionless horse, the immovable groom with a highlight shining fixedly from his top hat, and the neatness and glitter of the polished wood and brass. It revived in Adela the feeling that life with Aunt Olga was half a fairy-tale and wholly a joke.

As she got into the dog-cart the groom turned round to lift aside a rug. She met his eyes and remembered him. ‘How's that baby?' she asked with a leaping directness.

‘There's another now,' he answered, ‘a boy.' Then Evelyn got in and he cracked his whip.

The lane to Peartree Green, being a true South Hertfordshire lane, climbed a hill and ran straightly along the top of a ridge between two high grass banks sprigged with primroses and surmounted by a hedge breaking into green and here and there splashed with the foam of may-bloom. Every now and then at some sudden rise of the road one looked over the hedge at the purplish elm-tops of some other ridge. For the bland green fields sloped down to broad wet vales, and rose swellingly again to another height, topped with such a lane as this. And on the other side they sank again and rose again, and so on. So that to left and right ridges rose one above the other, each one dimmer and bluer than the last, till they melted into the haven of the horizon.

Adela liked driving through this quiet country that always looked as if it was prepared for a garden-party with Evelyn. Evelyn fitted into it so swell, as was only natural: for she was an aristocrat, one of those who had ordered the countryside from the dawn of Society. For on her father's side she was a Furnival, and the Lorikoffs, her mother's people, were, in spite of their Russian name, of the blood of many noble families. And Evelyn was an aristocratic type. She was an undismayed twenty-nine, not beautiful, but good to look upon and eminently ‘right'. Her fairness was quite unradiant, but gave the impression that she was cool like the inside of a rose. There was no beauty about her thin figure itself, for the waist was thick and her hips were too flat, but she looked immensely strong and moved slowly with a deliberate grace. Her face disdained expression, but about her there was a suggestion of reserved force and self-control that often made Adela, with her obsession of shyness and her sudden grasps at emotion, feel a fool.

After a long silence Evelyn asked: ‘How's Aunt Amy?' She was so determined not to put herself out for anybody that she did not open her mouth when she spoke, so that her voice drawled through her teeth.

Adela winced. She was aware from the intonation that she should have asked at once how Aunt Olga was. She didn't see why. She was quite certain that Aunt Olga was all right. No one could imagine the lady – who weighed twelve stone and ate everything she liked and rode to hounds – being anything else. Nevertheless she felt guilty. ‘Oh, very well – how's Aunt Olga?' she stammered, hating herself for showing so plainly that she had felt the rebuke.

‘Has had a touch of bronchitis. Went out to the Stitchington meet when she hadn't really got over a cold in her chest. Came home a wreck.'

‘I am sorry.' She forced concern into her voice.

‘She's all right again, however.'

Then there fell another silence.

‘Been doing well at school?'

‘Fairly well. I won the Science Scholarship. But of course I can't use it.'

‘That's a pity. It would have been such a nice start for you. I mean, one makes such nice friends. Was it Girton or Newnham?'

In Adela's most fatuous moments she had never thought of the University as a place where one went to make friends. She felt her flesh creep.

‘No, nowhere like that. I could have gone with it either to Liverpool or Manchester (that's Victoria University) or Leeds.'

‘Oh. Then it doesn't matter so much, does it? They're quite new places, aren't they?'

‘They have the loveliest laboratories,' said Adela passionately. A stray sentimentalist passing by would have said that her eyes were the eyes of a childless woman yearning for a babe. But really she was looking down the vista of a laboratory, looking lovingly at the light shining back from the glass jars and the scales, watching enviously the quiet figures of those who were privileged to work there.

‘Yes, but it isn't that sort of thing that
lasts,
is it? I mean, at Girton and Newnham there's an atmosphere.'

‘I wouldn't waste my money going to an atmosphere. I want to study Science,' snapped Adela, her eyes filling with fierce tears. The next moment she thought: ‘I mustn't be cross. Hang it all, I am her guest,' and looked nervously at her. But evidently Evelyn hadn't noticed, for her clear brows were serene. How could she be so obtuse about the thirst for knowledge? It was the only passion Adela knew and to her it was as sacred as religion, they say, is to some people. She pushed back the suspicion that Evelyn was stupid, in view of the conception of aristocracy she had formed that morning, for she was young enough to keep to her conceptions for twenty-four hours together. Of course there were so many physical and social delights at Evelyn's command that it would have been sheer greed in her to lust after knowledge.

‘Mother and I have talked very seriously over your prospects for the last month or so,' said Evelyn impressively. ‘And we came to a definite conclusion last night.'

‘I don't see how you could do that!' exclaimed Adela blankly. ‘I didn't know myself that I couldn't use my scholarship till yesterday evening.' She was Adela Furnival, prizeman of the Mary Patience Grammar School (established 1725), and seventeen years and three months, and she objected very strongly to anybody discussing such an important subject as herself without consulting her. She compressed her lips and prepared to speak shrewishly. Then she leapt to her feet and looked around with ecstasy. ‘Oh, Evelyn, do let's get out and walk.'

They had left the lane. Peartree Green lay to their left, thrown down on the hilltop like a crumpled handkerchief, rucked up into absurd little hillocks, crossed by deep folds from whose velvet-green depths there flashed the lights of scattered waters. It was sundered in two by a wide avenue of age-old elms, whose green treetops sang slowly in the wind. To the left a billow of orchard blossom raised its snowy crest above a sun-soaked red brick wall and seemed about to break, but always the light breezes beat it back. Facing this across the Green was the village inn, with its balcony blazing with jolly red geraniums, and a great swinging yellow sign of the rising sun, neighboured by an ivy-clad house in whose sleek garden a curate mowed the lawn. Next to it noble Scotch firs guarded the yellow stone front of some great house. And far, far down the straggling of the Green there stood the pear tree that, they said, had given it its name, a whirling pillar of light in the quivering radiance of the sun. It caught the eyes and gave so bold a proclamation of the wonder of the world that the blood leapt in Adela's veins and she laughed in sheer excitement.

‘Very well, we'll walk,' said Evelyn indulgently. So they got down and Adela ran up on to the springing turf. She wished she had that black-and-tan puppy to play with now, and reproached herself because she had not given it all the caresses it had asked for when she had had it. Running on a few paces before Evelyn, she walked down the avenue with her head bent back so that she could see the pattern the branches stamped out against the sky. She turned round to cry out on the beauty of the day, and saw on her cousin's face a gentle smile – the kind of smile a voluntary helper would bestow on a Bethnal Green infant enjoying the benefits of the Fresh Air Fund.

She smarted horribly. But the sight of the shining pear tree reminded her that she was right, and she refused to feel snubbed. ‘Oh, Evelyn, you are a callous brute!' she cried.

‘I dare say it is a change after Saltgreave,' said Evelyn. ‘I can't think why you didn't settle down at a place like this instead of going to that abominable place.' She spoke with an air of pained and amused common sense.

‘I couldn't have got any Education!' exclaimed Adela.

Evelyn's tone changed to one of pained and amused ‘niceness'. ‘Perhaps not. But it would have been nicer for your mother, wouldn't it?'

‘And how in the wise world could Mother have made money by typewriting in a hole like this!'

‘Oh,' said Evelyn. ‘She wouldn't have needed to. You can live on very little here. I believe you can get quite a nice cottage in the village for half a crown a week.'

‘Indeed you can't,' declared Adela.

‘My dear, how can you tell? Rents are very different –'

‘I've read it dozens of times in Fabian tracts and things. And anyway there aren't half enough cottages – you told me yourself about the overcrowding –'

‘Oh, but I think that is just their lack of fastidiousness –'

Adela wanted to respect Evelyn and did not want to think she was stupid. So she pretended she had not heard it. ‘So there aren't any to let. And anyway, in such a snobby place as this it wouldn't have done for you to have pauper relatives herding in a tiny cottage down the village, would it?'

‘I only meant somewhere
like
this,' said Evelyn tranquilly. ‘Not here, of course. It wouldn't do.'

Adela stopped dead. She wanted to strike Evelyn across the mouth and call her out to a duel with pistols. The implication, blandly delivered in that lazy voice, was that Amy and Adela really ought to huddle their poverty and squalid circumstance out of the way of the delicate into the darkest corner they could find. It was insolent and silly: no one had the right to despise them for their war against penury. Yet this insolence and silliness had the power to strip her of every quality. She felt ugly and sordid and uncouth: she stumbled as she walked. Her passion seemed insurgent yet mean, like a beaten lackey's.

Then the avenue ended and they walked over the long-haired hillocks, nearer and nearer to that shining pear tree. But Adela was blind and deaf with humiliation.

The ground swelled suddenly into a mound, on which she paused, breasting the winds that raced uphill and cooled her cheeks. As Evelyn came up behind her she lowered her head sullenly. Her eyes fell on a little dewpond folded in under the prow of the mound, which the lucid light, streaming down through the smooth surface waters on to the emerald weeds that strove upward to the air, made like a hard jewel graved in its depths with some fine pattern. As she looked and smiled, a young man who sat facing her on the green walls of earth that prisoned this little glory of water smiled back at her and dropped a stone into the pond. The jewel shattered into a thousand fragments that liquefied and changed – the coursing white clouds above, the trembling weed, the oily circles of the rippling – and slowly clarified into the same hard jewel as it began. Adela raised her wide eyes to the young man's face. He too had been watching the pond with delight. He stretched out his hand to a little heap of stones that lay at his side and was picking up another, when Evelyn spoke.

‘You have had a busy afternoon, Arnold!'

He rose to his feet and slowly dropped in another stone. ‘Oh, one does see Life in Peartree Green!' he laughed. His voice was delicate and sleek, like lovely silk.

They all watched the pond in silence, Evelyn holding her peace with a kind of hard deference to the young man. He stood with his hands on his slim hips, his straight black brows knitted in attention. As soon as he had raised his head she said languidly: ‘Well, there is tea. May we go on?'

This time he did not answer her but spoke across to Adela, fixing her eyes for one second before the words came. ‘What do you think of it?'

She was a little dazzled by his face. The contrast between his black hair and his smooth white skin was unnatural but quite beautiful. His expressions illuminated his face like the changing lights from a beacon, showing now the right proportioning of his forehead, now the subtle curves of his thin lips, or the fine line of the jaw. There was a sort of boyishness about it, yet the lids were very tired. From the midst of her imaginings about him she heard her voice blurt out strongly: ‘If you had been a poor man and poorly dressed, they would have thought you the village idiot!'

He took her meaning, smiled, and said it in literary words. ‘Being a rich man, as men go, I can afford to spend the afternoon in the consideration of beauty.'

Out of the tail of her eye she perceived that Evelyn, not understanding what they had said, had come to the conclusion that her pauper cousin had committed a gaucherie, and, compressing her lips with annoyance, was strolling over to Arnold, murmuring, ‘Really, I insist on tea.' The young man let her pass him and waited for Adela. It took Evelyn a minute to grasp this, and then she said over her shoulder: ‘Oh, I must introduce you two. My cousin Adela – Mr Arnold Neville.'

‘But you said your cousin was a schoolgirl!' cried the young man indignantly.

‘Well, so she is.'

‘She isn't. She's twenty come Michaelmas, and very serious-minded for her age.'

‘I'm seventeen,' said Adela, looking at him round-eyed.

‘I'm thirty,' answered the young man. Her eyes grew rounder. ‘Honour bright. Evelyn, tell her I'm speaking the truth.'