Even Mr Voss suffered a pang for cornfields and ripe apples.
‘Seldom have I regrets for the Germany I have left,’ he remarked to Miss Hollier, ‘although I will suddenly realize I have a yearning to experience another German summer. The fields are sloping as in no other land, with such slow sweeps. The trees are too green, even under dust. And the rivers, ah, how the rivers flow!’
So that the excellent Miss Hollier felt quite melancholy.
Then Mrs Bonner, who had a surprise for Mr Voss, brought a book she had remembered, that some governess had left, it could have been, of German verses, evidently.
‘There,’ she said, with an amusing laugh, as if patting bubbles upward.
‘Ach,’ breathed Voss, down his nose.
But he seemed pleased.
He began to read. It was again a dream, Laura sensed, but of a different kind, in the solid egg of lamplight, from which they had not yet been born.
Voss read, or dreamed aloud:
‘Am blassen Meeresstrande
Sass ich gedankenbekümmert und einsam.
Die Sonne neigte sich tiefer, and warf
Glührote Streifen auf das Wasser,
Und die weissen, weiten Wellen,
Von der Flut gedrängt,
Schäumten und rauschten näher und näher.…’
He closed up the book rather abruptly.
‘What is it, Mr Voss?’ Mrs Bonner asked. ‘You must tell,’ she protested.
‘Ah, yes,’ begged Miss Hollier. ‘Do translate for us.’
‘Poetry will not bear translation. It is too personal.’
‘That is most unkind,’ said Mrs Bonner, who would pursue almost morbidly anything she did not understand.
Laura now turned her back. She had touched hands with the German, and exchanged smiles, but not those of recognition. She did not wish for this. He was rather sickly when moved by recollection of the past, as he was, in fact, when collected and in the present. She was glad when the dinner was served and they could give their attention to practical acts.
All went well, although Cassie had overdone the beef. Mr Bonner frowned. Dishes were in profusion, and handed with unexpected skill, by Rose Portion, whose condition was not yet obvious beneath her best apron, and an elderly man, lent by Archdeacon Endicott who lived in the same road. The Archdeacon’s man was of awful respectability, in a kind of livery and cotton gloves, and only once put his cotton thumb in the soup. In addition to these, there was the invisible Edith, whose oo-errr was heard once from behind doors, and who would gollop the remainders of puddings before walking home.
Voss ate with appetite, taking everything for granted. That is how it ought to be, Laura had to tell herself. She was annoyed to find that she was fascinated by his method of using a knife and fork, and determined to make some effort to ignore.
‘I would be curious to read little Laura’s thoughts,’ remarked Tom Radclyffe, with the pomposity of one who was about to become her cousin.
It did amuse him to be hated, at least by those who could be of no possible use.
Laura, however, would not hate just then.
‘If I take you at your word, you may regret it,’ she replied, ‘because I have been thinking of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything. I was thinking how happy one can be sitting inside a conversation in which one is not compelled to take part. Words are only sympathetic when they are detached from their obligations. Under those conditions I am never able to resist adding yet another to my collection, just as some people are moved to make collections of curious stones. Then, there was the pretty dish of jellied quinces that I saw in the kitchen this evening as I passed through. Then, if you still wish to hear, Miss Hollier’s garnet brooch, which I understand she inherited from an aunt, and which I would like to think edible, like the quinces. And there was the poem read by Mr Voss, which I did understand in a sense, if not the sense of words. Just now, it was the drumstick on Mr Palfreyman’s plate. I was thinking of the bones of a dead man, uncovered by a fox, it was believed, that I once saw in Penrith churchyard as I walked there with Lucy Cox, and how I was not upset, as Lucy was. It is the thought of death that frightens me. Not its bones.’
Mrs Bonner, who feared that the limits of convention had been exceeded, was making little signs to her niece, using her mouth and the corner of a discreet napkin. But Laura herself had no wish to continue. It was obvious that her last remark must be the final one.
‘Dear me, if these educated young ladies are not the deuce,’ said Tom Radclyffe, whose turn it was to hate.
Ideas disturbed his manliness.
‘I am sorry, Tom, to have given you literally what you asked for,’ Laura said. ‘You must take care not to run the risk in future.’
‘I am sorry that you should have such horrid thoughts on a jolly occasion. The bones of a dead man in a grave!’ Miss Hollier said. ‘Mr Palfreyman has been telling me such delightful, really interesting and instructive things about birds.’
Mr Palfreyman appeared sad.
He was, in fact, happiest with birds, and realized this as he watched Miss Hollier’s shining teeth. But he was wrong, he knew, unreasonably so. Some people cannot bear to touch the folded body of a dead bird. He, on the other hand, must learn to overcome his impulse to retreat from kind hands.
Puddings had by this time been brought: brittlest baskets of caramel, great gobbets of meringue. When the big, thick, but somehow thoughtful woman who was waiting at table set down among them the jellied quinces, Voss saw that it was indeed a pretty dish, of garnet colour, with pale jade lozenges, and a somewhat clumsy star in that same stone, or angelica.
Then the German looked across at the niece, who had been avoiding him all the evening, it seemed, though until that moment he had not felt the need for her attention. Without intending it sardonically, he smiled and asked:
‘If you have not understood the poem by the words, how would you interpret it?’
Laura Trevelyan frowned slightly.
‘You yourself have made the excuse that must always be made for poetry,’ she replied.
Just at that moment, under the influence of discussion, everyone else at the table was deaf to the German and the young woman, who were brought together for the first time since the Pringles’ picnic, rather more closely than Laura would have wished.
However, she now returned his smile, and said:
‘You must allow me my secrets.’
He wondered whether she was being sincere, or just womanly, but as he had drunk several glasses of wine, he did not really care. Her head, he noticed, was glittering in its setting of candlelight, either with the hysteria of a young girl, or that sensibility at which she hinted, and which he rather despised unless he could learn its secrets.
He kept looking at her on and off, while she bent her head and knew that some kind of revelation must eventually take place, terrible though the prospect was.
In the course of ritual, after the ladies had abandoned the gentlemen to the port and everyone had been bored for a little, Mrs Bonner pounced on Mr Topp and smiled and asked: Would he? It was obvious that he had been invited only for this moment. As it was invariably the case, he was neither surprised nor offended, but addressed himself to the pianoforte with such relief that the susceptibilities of his hosts would have been hurt if they had but considered. Mrs Bonner, however, was creating groups of statuary. This was her strength, to coax out of flesh the marble that is hidden in it. So her guests became transfixed upon the furniture. Then Mrs Bonner, having control, was almost happy. Only, thought and music eluded her. Now she was, in fact, standing in her own drawing-room with this suspicion on her face, of something that had strayed. If she could have put her finger on it, if she could have turned infinity to stone, then she would have sunk down in her favourite chair, with all disposed around her, and rested her feet upon a little beaded stool.