Changing Winds Part 29

"She's coming down to dinner."

"I'm awfully glad," he replied. He hesitated for a second or two, standing with one foot on the last step of the stairs. "I say, Mary," he said.

"Yes, Quinny!" she answered, turning to him.

So she had not forgotten that she had called him by his nick-name.

"I say, Mary," he said again, still undecided as to whether he should speak his mind or not.

"Yes?" she repeated.

He went up a step or two of the stairs. "Oh, I don't know," he exclaimed. "I only wanted to say how nice it is to be here again!"

"Oh, yes!" Mary said, and he imagined that her tone was one of disappointment.

"I'll be down presently," he went on, and then he ran up the stairs to his room.

"I don't know," he said to himself, as he closed his door. "I'm d.a.m.ned if I know!"

He sat down at the writing-table and spread a sheet of notepaper in front of him. "I wish I knew!..." he murmured, and he wrote down the date. "Mary is awfully nice, and I like her of course, but Sheila!..."

He put the pen down again and sat back in his chair and stared out of the window. Out in the farmyard, he could hear the men bedding the horses, and there was a clatter of cans from the dairy where the women were turning the milk into cream. He could hear a horse whinnying in its stall ... and as he listened he seemed to see Sheila, as he had seen her on her uncle's farm before he had failed in courage, standing outside the byre with a crock in her hands and a queer, teasing look in her eyes. "You're the quare wee fella!" she was saying, and then, "I like you quaren well!..."

He seized the pen again and began to write.

7

He had almost finished the letter when Gilbert knocked on his door and shouted, "Can I come in, Quinny?"

He put the letter under the blotting paper, and called, "Yes, Gilbert!"

in reply.

"Aren't you ready yet?" Gilbert asked.

"No, not yet, but I won't be long changing!"

"Righto!" said Gilbert, going to the other window and looking across the fields. "Rum go about Ninian's uncle, isn't it?" he said, playing with the ta.s.sle of the blind.

"Eh?" said Henry.

"There must be something low in a man who marries a woman like that, don't you think?"

"Oh, I don't know. Why should there be?"

"Obvious, isn't it? I mean, there can't be much in common otherwise, can there? Unless the man's a sentimental a.s.s. It's as if you or I were to marry one of the girls out there in the yard, milking the cows. She'd be awfully useful for that job ... milking cows ... but you wouldn't want her to be doing it all the time. It depends, I suppose, on what you want to do. If you've got any ambition!..."

He did not finish the sentence, but Henry understood and nodded his head as if he agreed with him.

"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door.

"I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?"

"No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?"

"No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room.

Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear Ninian, half laughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old a.s.s, Mary!"

He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the hall.

"Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and put it in the waste-paper basket.

8

They pa.s.sed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her.

"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.

"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"

And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"

He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never "had it out" with her.

"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."

"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought.

"Something that will ... explain everything!"

Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."

He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life or begin the other. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.

"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or Cambridge!..."

"You're not much of a patriot," Ninian said.

"I don't want to be a d.a.m.ned patriot. I want to be with people I like. I don't see why I should be compelled to go and live with a lot of people I don't know and don't care about, just because I'm Irish and they're Irish, when I really want to be with you and Gilbert and Roger.... I haven't seen Roger since I left Rumpell's and I don't suppose I shall see him for a long time!"

Gilbert tried to mock him out of his anger. "This emotion does you credit, young Quinny!" he said, "and we are touched, Ninian and I.

Aren't we, Ninian! But you must be a man, Quinny! Four years hence, we shall all meet in London, _Deo volente_, and we'll be able to compare the education of Ireland with the education of England. Oh, Lordy G.o.d, I sometimes wish we hadn't got minds at all. I think it must be lovely to be a cow ... nothing to do but chew the d.a.m.ned cud all day. No soul to consider, no mind to improve, no anything!..."

Gilbert and he left Boveyhayne together, but Gilbert was only going as far as Templecombe with him, where he was to change on his way to Cheltenham. Ninian and Mary saw them off at Whitcombe, and when he remembered the circ.u.mstances in which she had seen him off before, Henry had a longing to take hold of her arm and lead her to the end of the platform, as he had done then, and tell her that he was sorry for everything and beg her to start again where they had left off that day ... but Gilbert was there and Ninian was there, and there was no opportunity, and the train went off, leaving the explanation unmade.

9

"Good-bye, Quinny!" Gilbert said at Templecombe.