Dinny said drily: “In fact, then, Wilfrid has no case in the eyes of our world.”
“In the eyes of the world that runs the Empire, I’m afraid—none, Dinny. Could it be otherwise? Unless there were complete mutual confidence between these isolated beings that none of them will submit to dictation, take a dare, or let the others down, the thing wouldn’t work at all. Now would it?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, you can take it from me. Michael has explained to me how Desert’s mind worked; and from the point of view of a disbeliever like myself, there’s a lot to be said. I should intensely dislike being wiped out over such an issue. But it wasn’t the real issue; and if you say: ‘He didn’t see that,’ then I’m afraid my answer is he didn’t because he has too much spiritual pride. And that won’t help him as a defence, because spiritual pride is anathema to the Services, and indeed to the world generally. It’s the quality, you remember, that got Lucifer into trouble.”
Dinny, who had listened with her eyes fixed on her uncle’s twisting features, said:
“It’s extraordinary the things one can do without.”
Sir Lawrence screwed in a puzzled eyeglass.
“Have you caught the jumping habit from your aunt?”
“If one can’t have the world’s approval, one can do without it.”
“‘The world well lost for love,’ sounds gallant, Dinny, but it’s been tried out and found wanting. Sacrifice on one side is the worst foundation for partnership, because the other side comes to resent it.”
“I don’t expect more happiness than most people get.”
“That’s not as much as I want for you, Dinny.”
“Dinner!” said Lady Mont, in the doorway: “Have you a vacuum, Dinny? They use those cleaners,” she went on, as they went towards the dining-room, “for horses now.”
“Why not for human beings,” murmured Dinny, “and clear out their fears and superstitions? Uncle wouldn’t approve, though.”
“You’ve been talkin’, then. Blore, go away!”
When he had gone, she added: “I’m thinkin’ of your father, Dinny.”
“So am I.”
“I used to get over him. But daughters! Still, he must.”
“Em!” said Sir Lawrence, warningly, as Blore came back.
“Well,” said Lady Mont, “beliefs and that—too fatiguin’. I never liked christenin’s—so unfeelin’ to the baby; and puttin’ it upon other people; only they don’t bother, except for cups and Bibles. Why do they put fern-leaves on cups? Or is that archery? Uncle Cuffs won a cup at archery when he was a curate. They used. It’s all very agitatin’.”
“Aunt Em,” said Dinny, “all I hope and want is that no one will agitate themselves over me and my small affair. If people won’t agitate we can be happy.”
“So wise! Lawrence, tell Michael that. Blore! Give Miss Dinny some sherry.”
Dinny, putting her lips to the sherry, looked across at her aunt’s face. It was comforting—slightly raised in the eyebrows, drooped in the lids, curved in the nose, and as if powdered in the hair above the comely neck, shoulders and bust.
In the taxi for Paddington she had such a vivid vision of Wilfrid, alone, with this hanging over him, that she very nearly leaned out to say: “Cork Street.” The cab turned a corner. Praed Street? Yes, it would be! All the worry in the world came from the conflict of love against love. If only her people didn’t love her, and she them, how simple things would be!
A porter was saying: “Any luggage, Miss?”
“None, thank you.” As a little girl she had always meant to marry a porter! That was before her music master came from Oxford. He had gone off to the war when she was ten. She bought a magazine and took her seat in the train. But she was very tired and lay back in her corner of the third-class carriage; railway travelling was a severe tax on her always slender purse. With head tilted, she went to sleep.
When she alighted from the train there was a nearly full moon, and the night was blowy and sweet-smelling. She would have to walk. It was light enough to take the short cut, and she climbed the first stile into the field path. She thought of the night, nearly two years ago, when she came back by this train with the news of Hubert’s release and found her father sitting up, grey and worn, in his study, and how years had seemed to drop off him when she told him the good news. And now she had news that must grieve him. It was her father she really dreaded facing. Her mother, yes! Mother, though gentle, was stubborn; but women had not the same hard-and-fast convictions about what was not ‘done’ as men. Hubert? In old days she would have minded him most. Curious how lost he was to her! Hubert would be dreadfully upset. He was rigid in his views of what was ‘the game.’ Well! she could bear his disapproval. But Father! It seemed so unfair to him, after his forty years of hard service!
A brown owl floated from the hedge over to some stacks. These moony nights were owl-nights, and there would be the screams of captured victims, so dreadful in the night-time. Yet who could help liking owls, their blunt soft floating flight, their measured stirring calls? The next stile led her on to their own land. There was a linhay in this field where her father’s old charger sheltered at night. Was it Plutarch or Pliny who had said: ‘For my part I would not sell even an old ox who had laboured for me’? Nice man! Now that the sound of the train had died away it was very quiet: only the brushing of a little wind on young leaves, and the stamp of old Kismet’s foot in the linhay. She crossed a second field and came to the narrow tree-trunk bridge. The night’s sweetness was like the feeling always within her now. She crossed the plank and slipped in among the apple-trees. They seemed to live brightly between her and the moving, moonlit, wind-brushed sky. They seemed to breathe, almost to be singing in praise at the unfolding of their blossoms. They were lit in a thousand shapes of whitened branches, and all beautiful, as if someone had made each with a rapt and moonstruck pleasure and brightened it with starshine. And this had been done in here each spring for a hundred years and more. The whole world seemed miraculous on a night like this, but always the yearly miracle of the apple blooming was to Dinny most moving of all. The many miracles of England thronged her memory, while she stood among the old trunks inhaling the lichen-bark-dusted air. Upland grass with larks singing; the stilly drip in coverts when sun came after rain; gorse on wind-blown commons; horses turning and turning at the end of the long mole-coloured furrows; river waters now bright, now green-tinged beneath the willows; thatch and its wood smoke; swathed hay meadows, tawnied cornfields; the bluish distances beyond; and the ever-changing sky—all these were as jewels in her mind, but the chief was this white magic of the spring. She became conscious that the long grass was drenched and her shoes and stockings wet through; there was light enough to see in that grass the stars of jonquil, grape hyacinth and the pale cast-out tulips; there would be polyanthus, too, bluebells and cowslips—a few. She slipped on upward, cleared the trees, and stood a moment to look back at the whiteness of the whole. ‘It might have dropped from the moon,’ she thought: ‘My best stockings, too!’