Quiet interior

Part One ; The Scrupulous Soul Page

I. Sisters and Mothers ii

II. Confidence ------ 22

III. Family Life 36

IV. The Scrupulous Soul - _ . .

V. A Cockney Outing 59

VI. The Rent in the Curtains - - - 71

VII. Gifts 83

VIII. Skeletons in the Cupboard - - 91

IX. Treble and Bass ----- m

X. Premeditation 125

CHAPTER I Sisters and Mothers

Claire went slowly upstairs, pulling off her reindeer gloves. As her head came level with the landing window, which looked out on to the paved court of a club, she saw the fine black tracery of leafless plane trees against the blue October sky. There was some magic for her in leafless boughs : she loved their austerity, the rhythm of their lines, unblurred by bursting, sticky buds, pricked vernal leaves, thick drooping foliage, tassels, streaks or cones of bloom. She loved etchings, the sharp silhouette of crags and masonry ; rain frozen in hard ruts ; dew on dark thorns ; frost pencillings on the pane ; the pale tints and thin lines of a wintry country-side. But this taste for severity and pallor was no indication of asceticism ; it was as sensuous and aesthetic as another’s love for deep banks of flowers, luxurious fabrics. One standing before an espalier crucified upon the wall, would rejoice if an apricot, sunned through to the core, dropped into his hand ; and Claire’s pleasure in the pattern of the espalier and its slender leaves would be no less.

There was in her appearance a clue to her tastes — something fastidious, and delicately sombre in her dress ; something '' slender and austere ” in the lines and colours of her countenance. Her face was pale, and significant only because it was clear-cut ; her hair dark and well under control ; her clothes mole-grey. Nothing in her, as it were, broke out — ^not a vivid jewel or ribbon nor a predominating feature ; her facial irregularities were not sufficiently marked to mar the whole effect of

II intaglio-like fineness and restraint : she would always be — ^precious, perhaps, but not generally prized. Not even a walk in the sharp morning air, shot through with brilliant sunlight, had tinged her cheeks, and her expression was dreamy. She had paced St. James’s Park half wrapped away in childish memories, half conscious of good health, fine weather and gentle melancholy. This last was all the toll demanded of her, to-day, by the war which hung like a vast obscure yet lurid black cloth against which she herself and the population of London moved and gesticulated like puppets too small for the proportions of their stage. Sometimes she was stricken with the horror of imagined and unimaginable death, agony and loss ; sometimes when she heard others talk complacently of the war, dealing with it in fatuous catchwords, she was filled with impotent amazed fury ; but to-day, her imagination having gone back into the past, sudden death, blood, uproar and pain seemed remote and improbable. The season of misty mornings and falling leaves denied the possibility of warfare.

Even in a dreamy mood Claire’s poise was alert. She moved easily ; without having given one halfthought to her chmb she had reached the third floor, and stood outside her sister’s room. She went quietly in.

Pauline lay asleep, in a white painted bed, whose posts were carved into conventional little palm-trees that reminded one of the sunshades held over court ladies by black boys in French prints. The whole room was white and buff, high, large, sunny and panelled. It was full now of frosty warmth, a very faint smell and a sense of well-being. Two wedge-shaped plaques of sunlight lay on the parquet beneath the windows ; Claire passed like a substantial shadow over them and looked out of the window into the street, which lay vacant in the sunny forenoon. Her sister did not move. The only noise was the stirring of the small fire, before which a green frock hung over a chair. The maid had lit the fire and that was all ; two green satin shoes lay where they had been tossed off beside the bed. The gilt travelling clock on the Adam mantelpiece struck eleven. Claire went over to it, and ran her finger nail down the golden beading ; the hands shone blue-black like a beetle’s wing. She leant above the fire, listening to the distant rumble of Westminster and to the deep quiet of the house. She was alone with a stranger ; even our intimate friends are strangers when they sleep, and have to be re-learnt. Sleepers are only a few degrees more like themselves than corpses are like the living beings they were a short while since. Claire and Pauline were intimate, but from proximity not friendship. Adolescence had partially alienated them, and the alienation did not disturb them. They were coolly fond, loyal with the loyalty of youth in a world ruled by the requirements of the old — ^not with the loyalty of love. They no more regretted the close ties of childhood than they regretted their old habit of chewing each other's thumbs. . . . One does, after all, grow up and alter.

Presently Claire went over to the bed and said, '' Wake up ! You lazy beast, wake up.”

Pauline half opened her grey eyes and mumbled :

Ooh. Beast to wake me. What time is it ? ”

“ Nearly noon.”

I didn’t get to bed till four. Ring, like a dear. Salmi of pheasant has no staying power.”

Was it fun ? ”

“Yes. But that oaf Gertrude had on a blue version of my dress — a sickly blue. Has Mamma got thej[^car out ? ”

“ Yes. I think she’s gone to some exhibition.”

“ Dash ! Never mind. Oh, I say, Claire, who do you think was there last night ? ”

“ Can’t think. All Bayswater, I suppose, preceded by noses.”

Funny ! It’s a pity you didn’t come. I somehow knew something was going to happen.”

“ Don’t start premonitions, for goodness sake. Well, who ? ”

** Ivor Webb.”

'‘Oh. What was he doing ? ”

" Sensation ? No sensation ! Really, Claire, I do think you might show a little intelligent surprise ; as Aunt Connie says, you've no social sense. . . . The great Ivor is on leave.”

Claire sat quiet, and with averted face, moving her eyes from one to the other of Pauline’s toilet accessories : ivory boxes and brushes, each set with a blue wedgwood medallion. It was only with a shrinking feeling that she recalled her brief relationship with Ivor Webb ; she was ashamed, not of the part she had played, but of the excitement which had tinged her disgust at his part — she ought only to have been repelled and indignant ; she had been, besides, moved, not altogether unpleasantly, and a little flattered. She excused her past self to her condemning present self : “I was only nineteen.”

" He’s coming to-day,” Pauline went on. " Shall you be in ? And does he take in what one wears ? ”

Claire noticed that Pauline regarded her as an authority on the young man. " No,” she answered.

"No, to which ? He suggested coming himself. I must have made an impression, Claire, mustn’t I ? What shall I wear ? ”

" Unadorned, save for a — I didn’t know you were keen on Ivor,” Claire said with sufficient nonchalance.

" Ah, you don’t know everything.” The younger girl’s tone was fatuous ; it irritated her sister, who got up from the bed and exclaimed impulsively : " Well, if you understand half he says you’ll be cleverer than me.” She immediately regretted her speech when Pauline, whose curiosity it had aroused, asked her what she meant.

** Oh well, I dare say I could cope with several Ivor Webbs now, but when he stayed with us at Sparrows I was your age. He spent the whole week talking — as though he had a bet on to utter several million sentences. But I dare say he won’t do that to you ; you’re pretty.’’

Pauline felt rather at a loss, but her answer was suitably, amusedly sceptical : '' He treated you specially, did he ? Epigrams, was it ? ”

No, not epigrams. But he did think he was being rather clever.”

Conscious of having been baffled — ^though why she had no idea — Pauline began to eat the breakfast that a maid had just brought in. ** What should you say was his best quality ? ” she presently asked.

I should say his appreciation of charm and intelligence and beauty. He’s always on the spot with his responsiveness — ^that’s the nice thing about him.”

” Yes, it is pleasant to be appreciated. ... Be an angel and turn on my bath.” Pauline’s perpetual assumption that those around her were willing, if not anxious, to serve her, was on the whole successful. Her sister went into the adjoining bathroom — ^tiny and white-tiled. When she returned, Pauline was standing before the mirror, rolling up her fawn-coloured hair, the crest of whose every little wave had a golden glint. Claire stood behind her, and looked at their two reflections ; herself, small and pale, and dark — perhaps even insignificant ; the other taller, rosier, clear and bright. There was between them a faint family likeness, due only to the characteristic which both had inherited from their mother — ^the downward slant of the brows and lids at their outer corners, which gave their eyes a dreamy look. Otherwise, facially Pauline resembled their father : she was pure Norris ; but she had her mother’s long legs — an inheritance of which Claire was extremely envious.

” Nice eyebrows ! ” said Pauline, with an affected childish intonation. “ Poke the fire before you go away.” And she vanished into the bathroom.

Claire deposited her outdoor clothes in her own room and went down to the back drawing-room, which was used by the whole family, and which the girls called the larder. It was shut off by folding doors from the large saloon, and in it were collected the most cherished, most familiar of those possessions which the Norrises had brought with them from Leicester to London three years ago. It was full of bad water-colours adored by the owners, hideous but beloved ornaments, ugly but comfortable chairs. There was a bureau with enough pigeon-holes to hold the papers of mother and daughters ; and a revolving bookcase whose corners viciously assaulted the unwary, which shook like an aspen when knocked, but when required to revolve demanded the full strength of one arm. There were objects which had immemorial positions on the mantelpiece (and until she had mastered these positions, a new housemaid was regarded by the female Norrises as an alien enemy) ; a lump of blue-john brought back by Mrs. Norris from her honeymoon in Derbyshire ; two Venetian glasses on dolphin pedestals, delicate as bubbles, spangled with dim gold ; a delphinium-coloured Chinese enamel cigarette-box inlaid with a green and lemon dragon, and a new photograph of Mrs. Norris’s sister Connie.

The sun never entered the back drawing-room in the forenoon ; it had a rather dank atmosphere. Claire’s first care therefore was the fire. Next she lit a cigarette, and looked out of the window, across the sooty iron balcony ; the view was the same as the passage window’s and her own room’s. Then she began her correspondence.

When Mrs. Norris entered she did not turn, she even scribbled with an added and quite fictitious absorption. This was her customary reaction from her mother’s hesitancy — ^her vague wandering, her gentle restlessness, her vacant fire-gazings. Claire, of all idlers the least ashamed, yet assumed an air of concentration when in proximity with her mother, perhaps for the mere reason that she herself was inclined to stare and dream and sit unoccupied with drooping hands ; it was partly, too, simply a manifestation of youth’s intolerance for the idiosyncrasies of older people.

Mrs. Norris was shaped like Pauline and walked with a balanced head. Her throat had the pre-Raphaelite fullness which supports the theory of nature’s tendency to imitate art. Dark hair grew high on her forehead and was drawn over her ears ; it was scarcely streaked with grey. Her face, its fineness blurred by the touch of middle-age, recalled the grave pallid young men of Italian pictures, dressed with sombre richness, stoled with fur. Her dress was spasmodically embroidered, and had a pendant pocket. Mrs. Norris was nearing fifty ; her daughters accused her chaffingly of living in a little world of her own.

'' Well, darling,” she said to Claire’s busy back, shifting the chairs to and fro a little, as was her habit.

“ I thought you’d gone out, mother.”

“I’m going at twelve to drop Tom at the House. He has to see a man . . .” her voice trailed off.

“ About a dog ? ” Claire prompted.

“ No. He’s called Montgomery.”

“ Oh yes, the Member.”

Mrs. Norris sat down softly, as she did ever5dhing, but her feet grated the irons on the fender. “ I once knew such a nice man called Montgomery. He beat copper most beautifully. But he quite went to pieces when his wife left him.”

“ I suppose he beat her too — or she him.”

Mrs. Norris had a disconcerting way of taking flippant remarks seriously.

“ After that, of course, he couldn’t be a craftsman any more. He took to — I think it was casting bells.”

“ What a nasty come-down.” Claire licked her envelope.

b

” Ah, but he had to work out his salvation, you see. I quite lost sight of him.”

“ And I suppose he’s casting bells to this very day.” Claire liked her tales neatly rounded off.

Yes, dear — unless he’s dead.”

Presently the girl turned round in her chair and said : Mother, did you see old Mr. Parsons’s death in the paper ? ”

“ Oh, my dear ! Really ? Poor old man ! I wonder what will happen to poor Clement ? ”

“ I can’t think — She’ll be horribly left.”

He has some relations, I suppose, that he can go to.’* They didn’t approve of his father — you know there was some scandal.”

“Yes. I often think it’s rather hard how children suffer for their parents’ peculiarities — it doesn’t make it any easier it being in the Bible.”

“ ‘ Peculiarities ’ is good. Not that most people’s relations’ d be much loss,” said Claire.

“ Perhaps not, darling ; but they are useful when your parents die,” Mrs. Norris returned, without irony.

“ Cherry brandy and currant cake. . . . Yes, I suppose so. But think how awful if they were patronising about the dead person. I’m sure Clement’s would be. They’d behave as though he’d been handicapped by a mad father, but could be set right by a course of Boiurnemouth. . . . Mother, could I ask him to come here for a bit ? ”

“ Certainly you could, my darling.”

Claire tiurned to her writing, but stopped to say over her shoulder :

“ I say, you remember Ivor Webb ? He’s on leave from France.” She expected no response ; but she had reckoned without that deity. Hospitality, of whom Mrs. Norris was a sincere though uncertain worshipper.

“ I’ll write a note and ask him to dinner.”

“ No ! ” said Claire.

“ Why, dear ? Do you mean that Clement being here will prevent us ”

** Yes — I mean, no. It’s not that. I don’t want him to come.”

“ Really, darling ? I thought you used to be such friends.” Her mother was genuinely surprised ; then in her ‘‘ teasing ” voice she added : Is Mr. Webb one of the aversions you modern girls tell us about ? ”

Well — ^yes,” her daughter answered, taking the line of least resistance.

Even so, Claddie, surely you needn’t impose your dislikes on others ? If Pauly wants him, surely you wouldn’t object ? ”

Claire had no retort to her parent’s inopportune display of a sense of justice; she sat silent, marvelling at the unerring directness of the sprite of contrariness who sometimes took possession of Mrs. Norris ; the latter had no inkling of Pauline’s latest flirtation — ^it had only begun last night ; it was simply in a spirit of contradiction that she invoked Pauline’s name, with unconscious pertinence, to counter Claire’s opposition.

“ It’s fatal to talk to mother,” thought Claire, not with utter injustice.

Mrs. Norris’s inability to concentrate long on one subject made serious conversation very difficult. The indirect method of suggestion was the one most successfully employed with her, and the girl wished that she had used it on this occasion, especially as she had no intention of revealing the true reason for her objection to Ivor Webb. She had broached the topic impulsively, and her mother’s unusual fit of reasonableness had foiled her. It now occurred to Claire that for Pauline to see the young man in her own home was preferable to her meeting him, probably in tete-d4ete, outside. She recalled Ivor’s attitude, for instance, towards the country — ^motoring, boating, walking ; the attitude of the actormanager who undervalues no scene or accessory, but who regards them as of no importance on their own account — as of importance only as forming the right background, and creating the needful atmosphere foi the drama of his relationships. She therefore answered :

If Pauline wants him here, by all means let him come.'*

** That's a dear girl." Mrs. Norris rose, and going over to her daughter, patted her shoulder. Claire put up her hand to capture one of her mother’s, which she held to her cheek. She not only loved her, she admired her, as one admires a charming, fragrant, but far from flawless work of art — a poem by Landor, a Chopin nocturne. She loved to see her mother dressed for a dinner-party in black velvet and Brussels lace, a thin glinting chain of diamonds round her neck, tall, graceful, serene, trailing across the lamp-lit drawing-room like an Orchardson heroine, grown middle-aged but retaining her mediocre decorative quality. On those festal nights Claire was wont to stand abashed by the serenity and vague dignity of her parent, feeling like a little girl before the grown-ups she deems omniscient and set above temptation and its rewards. But now, leaning her cheek against her mother’s hand, she felt herself both the older and the wiser : it was Mrs. Norris who was the child ; and it was Mrs. Norris who knew not trouble and the worm." Claire felt the weight of comparative omniscience, but was conscious of lacking serenity. Did every age, as it became the present, furnish the kicks and withhold the ha’pence ? Soon," she thought in mock horror, I shall begin to believe in ‘ happy, irresponsible, untroubled childhood ’ ! "

Mother, darling," she said, " there’s twelve striking — papa will swear if you keep him waiting."

'' Then it’s his wicked children who teach him to ! " With which retort Mrs. Norris threaded her way between the omnipresent furniture and faded from the room.

The girl’s remaining task was a letter of condolence. Clement Parsons was her friend, and yet she found no words that did not seem patronising, trite and obtrusive. Eventually she wrote as she would have spoken, from her heart :

Dear Clement,

I saw the announcement in the * T imes* I f you want somebody y Til come to Sparrows. Or, if you feel gregarious now or later on, come and stay here. You can wire. Mother and father would like it. I exfect you've already written, hut don't unless you want to. Dear Clement, it is dreadful. You know how sorry I am.

“ Yours ever,

Claire.”

CHAPTER II Confidence

A YOUNG man who had just emerged from the train stood looking from one to the other of the people on the platform. He was counting on Claire to meet him as she had promised. The station bewildered him, not so much by its size and clangour as by the myriad details which it presented to his senses — ^the contact of pushing strangers, of trucks, of eyes ; the thud of luggage and the din of voices and whistles ; the smell of train-oil and smoke and damp dirt and leather. He was used to noting in leisurely sequence or in quiet harmony a flight of birds, the blue bloom on cabbages, the limping gait of a sheep, the hum of agricultural machines, the odours of manure and bean-fields ; and his brain could register now only a confused impression of warring sounds, fugitive intersecting lines, obscme moving shapes and raw mixed but unmingled smells. . . . Then he saw Claire coming quickly through the thinning crowd, and, stooping, he caught up his two bags and went towards her. He noticed the change in her, due to her town clothes and her submission — ^until now unwitnessed by him — ^to a hat ; she carried gloves, too, and a purse, which gave her an unfamiHar look. But when he was close on her he saw the same Claire as ever look up at him with a hint of questioning in her queer dreamy brows.

For Claire, too, there was a change in her friend. His blue serge clothes, it was evident, even had she not known it, were not those he habitually wore. With his perfectly unconscious picturesque calm he had an incongruous look upon the dingy agitated platform ; and the incongruity was exceedingly pleasant to her eyes. The associations which were inseparable from him rose up to blot out the station : downs, beech-hangers, sheepcotes, chalkpits. Her knowledge of his circumstances, which were sufficiently unusual to appeal to her sense of romance, and of his daily life, with its implications of solidity and stability and peace, gave him a symbolic significance in her mind. He suggested to her imagination one of those archaic figures in stone, simple, yet subtle, touched with austerity and yet very human. His new loneliness now that the primary influence and devotion of his life was gone, though not apparent in his outward self, lent him in her eyes a new beauty and tenderness, as though rain ran like tears down the face of the stone figure while sunset gilded it. As they stood together under the vast grimy roofs and pillars of the station, she passed through an instant of exalted sentimentality ; as they turned to go, it faded, giving way to the normal sense of pleasure at seeing him again.

They went into the tube, and emerged again into the fine drizzle of a November afternoon. The hour was not far off dusk ; a sky uniformly grey hung over the grey houses ; the railings dripped.

Clement’s suit-case made a space between them so that Claire was able to glance at him without that sense of doing something intimate or important which one usually has when looking sideways at a person in close proximity.

** I’m so glad you decided to come. Father was very dubious about my going to Sparrows unchaperoned,” she said.

'' I nearly didn’t come. If I hadn’t left the farm now, I’d have stayed there for ever — ^until my king and country dragged me away. It’s to be put up for auction.”

Claire was startled. ” What will you do then ? Have you any plans ? ”

'' Only vague ones. . . . It may be sold first by private agreement. Farlow’s almost certain to buy it.”

” What about the furniture ? ’’

I shall sell some, and store the rest. It’s queer to be at a loose end.”

Queer,” she echoed, adding to herself : but I can’t know how queer.”

I had a letter from Aunt Julia asking me to make my * home ’ with them. It was rather decent of her, wasn’t it ? ”

“ Where’s that ? ”

Pur ley, wherever that is. It’s a name one knows, but I don’t place it.”

“ Pur ley ? Oh dear ! ”

Clement smiled : '' Is it as bad as that, you cockney ? I do think it was nice of the old girl. Father ” — ^he uttered the word with the shadow of a hesitation — ** wasn’t very soothing to her and Uncle Fred when they came to see us.”

Oh? ”

“No. They rolled up in a Ford like a young Eiffel Tower. One of our Jerseys had just calved and father wouldn’t talk about anything else. Uncle Fred must be rather squeamish — anyway. Aunt Julia tried to head father off by asking to see his famous ‘ library ’ ” — Clement paused to grin reminiscently.

“ Well ? ” Claire prompted.

“ He stared at the old boy, who was muffled up in several layers of coats, and said : * Yes, brother-in-law, you look as if a course of Rabelais would do you a world of good ! ’ He said ‘ look ’ as if he was giving Uncle Fred the benefit of the doubt.”

“ I suppose you’ll have to go and see them ? ” said Claire, after they had smiled in concert.

“ Oh.” The idea had evidently not occurred to Clement. “ Shall I ? ”

“ This is our street,” she returned, “ and ” — a moment later — “ this is our house.”

Upon the threshold, Clement surprised her by asking if he would “ have to see them all at once.” He knew her family pretty well, and had never before betrayed shyness or nervousness. I like being alone with you, so that I can talk,'’ he explained. Claire’s pity welled up ; her heart leapt out to him as they went silently across the hall ; she felt awkward, too, as youth does before a grief it has not experienced. I know nothing,” she accused herself. In spite of the feeling, which she had in common with most girls concerning most boys, that she was much the older and wiser, Clement's spirit, familiar with loss, seemed to tower above her.

Knowing that probably Mrs. Norris was in the back drawing-room, she directed tea to be sent up to the “ schoolroom,” on the same floor as the girls' bedrooms, and where she and Clement could talk undisturbed. She showed him his room, and having taken off her things, crossed the landing and leant over the stairs to call him, but the thought of him isolated and alone in the room below checked her — she had a sudden recognition of his individuality, not unlike the startling recognition of one’s own identity which occasionally occurs on looking in the mirror. ” Why, that’s me ! ” one silently exclaims, and Why, that’s Clement ! ” might have expressed Claire’s sensation now. Within that chamber was a body like to and yet different from hers, containing a spirit, a self unknown, for ever unknowable, mysterious and alien. She had her private vision of him as one who would work steadily and clear-sightedly, acquiring new wisdom, becoming, perhaps, even famous in his own compass as a farmer ; with a mind alive to new thoughts, with a heart rooted in the soil ; she had pictured him torn from his chosen way of life by the war, swallowed by the army — detestable machine — made the fellow of a million dullards and dilettantes; she had mourned in advance over the probability that what was rare in him — perseverance, insight, tolerance and fair mindedness — would be lost to the world, as his freedom would be lost to him. And now she realised suddenly the inviolability of the human soul. She had endowed him with qualities as a child endows a doll with the evil tendencies for which she slaps it ; and just as, perhaps, the puppet of wire and wax vibrates with an atomic but intense vitality , too small for the child to see, so Clement existed, apart from all she thought of him, moving, as the result of a million million hidden causes, towards a destiny unknown to any. If only I were God,” she said, I'd know it all. I’d know what would happen to him every instant of his life, and afterwards too.”

Presently Clement joined her and they went into the schoolroom. This was a bleak sea-green box, containing Pauline’s funereal ’cello case, and an old piano with a fretwork and blue-silk front. The hearth was insignificant. On a corner shelf stood two rows of children’s books that no one was ruthless enough to throw away. The newly-lit fire and Clement’s presence gave it a new look, but did not destroy its bleakness. Claire sat tiurned from the fire, to watch him prowl round the room, examining books and pictures. He opened the genteel piano, and softly, clumsily, struck a few notes.

“ It’s no use hitting middle G,” she said, it’s not uttered a word for years. And one of the thin D’s is still sticky where Hilary dropped golden syrup on it.”

” Thin ? ”

” Treble. Fat is bass.”

'' Did you all learn on this ? I wish I had. It was a queer kink in father.”

” I never learnt, though I was taught for a long time. Hilary and Pauline were swanks at it. They used to play Peer Gynt with yards of temperament. The only thing that made practising bearable was having the candles lit — on winter afternoons, you know — like this. It wasn’t allowed really. Once I set The Merry Peasant on fire.” She smiled, seeing, like a picture, the old warm Leicester nursery, rich with gaslight and firelight and illicitly lighted candles.