The Education of Eric Lane Part 16

And the water was tepid. . . .

2

"I have been apologizing for you," said Lady Lane pointedly, as Eric hurried late and ill-humoured into the drawing-room.

He had ready at hand a caustic little speech about inadequate hot-water supply and insufficient bathrooms, but it was intended for domestic consumption and, after one scowl at Geoff, he laid it aside. Family altercations, like family jokes, should be reserved for the family, though no one else emulated his moderation. He wondered whether the servants grew as weary as he did of the story about the cross-country journey from Oxford to Winchester; it was dragged up at his expense whenever any one missed a train--and trains were missed weekly.

Servants, of course, could always leave; they always did. Perhaps they made bets which would hear the Oxford-to-Winchester story most often in three months; perhaps they met in sullen conspiracy and pledged themselves to decamp in a body the next time any one heard it. . . .

That tepid bath had chilled his enjoyment of everything. . . .

"I'm sorry to be late," he murmured, stiffly impenitent.

Agnes Waring was in the foreground, talking to his father; he shook hands shyly and squeezed past her to Nares, the apologetic, ineffectual vicar, and from Nares to Mrs. Waring, who was talking to a young officer whom she had brought over with her party. Colonel Waring stood by the fire, retailing safe newspaper opinions on the war and representing to Eric's theatre-trained eyes, with their pa.s.sion for "types," almost too perfect a picture of the younger brother who had pa.s.sed from twenty years in a cavalry regiment to half-pay retirement and a certain military pretentiousness of daily life. There was no one else. Had their lives depended on it, Lashmar could not yield another man or woman.

"Entertaining here always reminds me of a musical comedy," Eric murmured to Sybil. "Where one goes, all go:

"_Oh, we're all of us a-going back to Lon-don, Over ocean; that's the notion_. . . .

"Song and dance. Curtain. Who's the fellow in uniform?"

"Mr. Benyon. A friend of the Warings," Sybil answered. "You're not going to be patronizing, _are_ you?"

Eric pulled up and banished the ill-humour induced generally by the sleepiness of the country and, in particular, by that tepid bath-water.

He had looked forward to the week-end, he proposed to enjoy himself; there was no need even to ask where he had been placed at dinner. Sybil, at nineteen, wors.h.i.+pped every word and movement in Agnes Waring at twenty-eight--her way of laughing and speaking, her phraseology, her mental outlook; every opinion was introduced with the words, "Agnes says----" Two years before, when the infatuation was in its perfervid youth, Sybil had made up her mind that her brother was to marry Agnes; the determination was still so strong that she was uneasy at the presence of young Benyon.

Eric had no strong view either way; Agnes was fair, slight and small-featured with observant grey eyes and a good deal of detached humour. Since the incubation of his first unsuccessful play, he had argued out every character and situation with her; when feminine psychology was in dispute, her ruling was accepted without cavil. More than once, as they splashed conversationally through the Lashmar woods, he had felt that she gave even a self-sufficient bachelor something that he lacked and would always lack; and, whenever the ubiquitous, dry celibacy of the Thespian smoking-room oppressed him, his thoughts drifted to Agnes Waring and a doll's house somewhere on the Eaton estate, with one table, two chairs and an avalanche of green silk cus.h.i.+ons in the drawing-room. . . . He was not in love with her; but, when Sybil telephoned to find whether he was coming to the country for the week-end, he had resolved to retouch his conception of Agnes. For the first time in his life he could not only afford to marry; he could regard marriage from the standpoint of an eligible bachelor. If he was not in love with Agnes, he was in love with love. . . .

Distant voices wakened him from his reverie, and he found the long, low white-and-gold drawing-room buzzing with congratulations. Benyon had been to the "Divorce" three nights before; old Nares rubbed his hands, coughed and described a proud moment, a _very_ proud moment, when he had been taken behind at the Lyceum and presented to Sir Henry Irving. There followed an ingenuous account of his make-up. . . . Eric smiled elastically, stroking his chin and letting his gaze wander round the white panelled walls, the gilt sofa and chairs and the gold and white overmantel--the coming of Dionysus to Europe in a chariot drawn by lions. He realized for the first time how much he hated overmantels.

Sybil was now talking to Agnes, but she withdrew discreetly at his approach and gave him an opportunity, as they went in to dinner, for a question about Jack.

"We've heard nothing since the August report that he was missing," said Agnes. "I'm keeping my mind a blank. I couldn't build all sorts of wonderful hopes on his being a prisoner and then, perhaps, have to go through the whole thing again. . . . Mother's quite certain, of course; but then mothers are like that, bless them. . . . I'll let you know, if we hear any news, Eric."

"Thanks very much. By the way, can you spare me one of the van Laun photographs of him?"

Agnes thought for a moment and then wrinkled her forehead.

"He was never taken by van Laun."

"But I've seen one."

"Where?"

"He gave one to Lady Barbara Neave."

Her forehead wrinkled in deeper lines of perplexity.

"I didn't know he even knew her. . . . He never mentioned her name; I suppose he thought I should disapprove."

Eric was tempted to coax an opinion of Barbara; but they had known each other for less than a week, and, if he went round collecting the judgements of all who had ever heard of her, no one would believe that a serene, professional spirit of enquiry prompted his curiosity. While native caution kept him hesitating, the opportunity slipped away; Agnes surrendered to the boisterous advances of Geoff, and he turned to find Mrs. Nares tentatively conversational on his left.

For a quarter of an hour Eric listened with one ear to the parish history of Lashmar. Unknown names married and begot families; unknown names sickened and died or were unexpectedly revived when the copiously described symptoms had rendered recovery an affront to the imagination; a few unknown names joined the army; one man was a prisoner, another wounded; and two more lastingly discredited Lashmar by saying that, when the army wanted them, the army could come and take them. Eric was informed that he would hardly know the dear old village now; he felt that he could support the privation with fort.i.tude and hoped its annals might be closed with that felicitous generalization, but Mrs. Nares had recollected her husband's gallant attempt to be accepted as a chaplain and the Bishop's gracefully worded inability to spare him, with a postscript in his own writing to commend such spirit in a man of sixty-two and to hold him up as an example to his juniors.

Eric made mental notes of Mrs. Nares and memorized some of her more engaging mannerisms. If he could work her up, he could find room for her; but he must also find some one to play her with a breathless, unpunctuated patter; Kitty Walters seemed to have gone to America for good, but Dorothy Martlet could take the part. . . . The whole dinner, the atmosphere of the place were a satire on life in a remote country-house. He wondered what the party at Crawleigh Abbey was like. . . .

An unforeseen question rebuked his inattention. Eric disposed of it skilfully; but the thread of thought was snapped, and he looked round the table to see what had been happening since his reverie began. Agnes had been set at liberty by Geoff and was watching Eric as he watched the others. Their eyes met, and both smiled.

"Conscription between your father and Benyon over Sybil's body," he murmured, disentangling the conversations. "Needlework Guild between the guv'nor and Mrs. Nares. Poor old guv'nor. . . . V.A.D. training between mother and the vicar. '_Naval Occasions_' between your mother and Geoff.

D'you ever feel you'd like to stir all this up with a pole, Agnes? We're too far from the coast for an air-raid. . . . And, if you had one, no one would ever talk about anything else for the rest of his life; it would be like the Famine in Ireland or the Wesley descent on Cornwall."

A maid, squeezing through the inadequate fairway behind the chairs, b.u.mped Eric's back and made him spill his wine. "This place gets on my nerves!" he added irritably.

Out of the corner of her eye Agnes looked at his mobile, discontented face and crumbled her bread in silence for a moment.

"Don't give up coming here altogether," she pleaded.

Eric sipped his wine thoughtfully and avoided her eyes. Here was an opportunity, had he cared to take it, for opening up a greater intimacy with Agnes; but his mind was unconcentrated and he did not know what he wanted.

"I suppose I shall come down from time to time," he answered vaguely.

"I've been so looking forward to hearing about all you've been doing. We don't make much history in Lashmar."

It was common ground between them that the Warings lacked money for her to live as independently as all Warings felt that every Waring had a right to live. Each generation of younger brothers had been confined within an ever-narrowing circle; and, but for the war, Jack would now be patiently going the North Eastern Circuit, the first Waring to apply his mind to law; but for Jack and the money spent on him at Oxford, Agnes would have gone to Newnham and prepared a career for herself.

"You're too good for this place, you're wasted," Eric broke out after a moment's silent brooding.

"There's not much choice, is there?"

Eric brooded again.

"Are you happy?" he asked.

"Happier than you are, I think," she answered with a smile.

"Why on earth d'you say that?" he asked in surprise.

"You just seem changed to-night," Agnes replied. "Have you been working too hard?"

Over his port--which would not stand comparison with any from the artful little cellar in Ryder Street--Eric tried to settle in his mind how much she had seen and how much she had imagined. There was a.s.suredly this much change in him, that to-night Agnes was not even waking him to dispa.s.sionate interest; he had no attention to spare her. And yet it was not that Barbara had captured his mind; she was nothing but an elf of mischief, dancing in the suns.h.i.+ne backwards and forwards across his path, pelting him with flowers, vanis.h.i.+ng and reappearing. Restlessness or discontent must have peeped from behind the suave mask. He had meant to be more friendly, far more friendly; they had not met for nine months;--and both were disappointed.

In the drawing-room Agnes kept her chair a few inches behind the circle of the others, watching, listening and reflecting. Eric seemed to think that he was still at one of the tiresome long parties where he was expected to glitter and to be shewn off; he had talked very well at times, but he felt that he had been making voluble conversation in a nervous dread of silence between them. His new life was rather turning him into a public entertainer; he was enigmatic and unapproachable.

3

As Eric, with caution born of experience, lit one of his own cigars and made room for Geoff at his side, an idea came to him so seductive, so simple and so compelling that he wondered why he had never thought of it before. When Geoff asked: "Are you down here for long, or are you going back on Monday?" Eric answered with unsought inspiration:

"I shall go back on Sunday night."