A Difficult Young Man (16 page)

‘He doesn't like us.' I objected. ‘He wants Dominic.'

‘Then perhaps he'll go sooner,' said Steven. ‘Make yourselves as revolting as possible.'

I pushed up my nose and pulled down my eyes with my fingers, and we went to the library. Laura said to the colonel: ‘You will excuse me. I must get ready as we're off in a few minutes.'

However unpleasant Colonel Rodgers might have thought me, and I soon modified his opinion, nothing could dislodge him. At intervals Steven and Laura came into the library and said: ‘I'm sorry but I'm afraid we should be leaving now.' This had no effect, and the morning went on, with the car, packed with picnic baskets, waiting out in the avenue. Either Brian or myself was sent into the library to entertain the colonel, while our elders gathered in the drawing-room in indignant consultation. Apparently it would have been thought impossibly rude to walk out and leave an unwanted caller alone in the house.

‘Why in the deuce doesn't he go?' grumbled Steven.

‘He wants Dominic,' I said.

‘Where is he then?' demanded Steven. ‘It's always
Dominic who messes things up, either actively or just by existing.' He tugged impatiently at the embroidered bell-rope by the fireplace. When Watts came in he said:

‘Have you any idea where Mr Dominic has gone?'

‘Jonas says he said he was going to Dilton, sir.'

‘Well, will you ring up Dilton House and ask if he's there?'

In a few minutes Watts returned and said that Dominic was at Dilton and was staying to luncheon.

‘Now perhaps he'll go,' said Steven, and he sent me in to the library to tell Colonel Rodgers, to whom I said:

‘I'm awfully sorry sir, but Dominic won't be home till this afternoon.'

‘What! D'you mean to say he's not going to be in at all this morning?' asked the colonel.

‘No, he can't, sir. It's twelve o'clock now.'

‘But he promised faithfully he would come to see my new gun. I said you'll come tomorrow morning and he said yes. I distinctly remember his saying yes. He has a quaint little way of saying it. But I'm mad! He may be waiting there now, and I'm waiting here. I never thought of that.'

He stood up to leave, and as we had been praying all the morning for his departure, I should have let him go, but my natural truthfulness and the thought of his disappointment prevented me. Though I also knew that he did not really believe that Dominic was
at the Dower House, and was only putting on this act to comfort himself.

‘No, sir,' I said. ‘He's at Dilton. Watts rang up so that you'd know for certain and not be kept waiting.'

‘That was good of Watts, but what's he doing at Dilton? He's not after Sylvia, is he?'

‘Oh, no, sir,' I assured him, my natural truthfulness deserting me. ‘He thinks girls are silly.' This remark, as I hoped it would, eased the tension under which the colonel was labouring.

‘That's right,' he said. ‘A boy doesn't want to go chasing after girls. It's not manly.'

‘No,' I replied, though I did think it rather manly. ‘Anyhow,' I added, spoiling my effect, ‘if he likes any girl it's our cousin Helena Craig in Australia. He's always worshipped her, and no other girl would have a chance for long.' This upset the colonel again. He began to speak in a low bitter voice, more to himself than to me.

‘I've done the best I could for him,' he said. ‘I haven't thought of myself at all, only what would be a help to him in the army. When he failed I didn't say anything to him about my disappointment. Most people would have lost interest in him, but I didn't. They would have finished with him—utterly. But I did my best to give him a new interest. I opened to him the fascinating subject of natural history. Now I've bought a new gun. I fully intended to let him use it in the autumn as that's only a keeper's gun he has. I could still do a lot for him,
but I'm finished. If he doesn't want to see me, I'm not the man to force my company on anyone.'

I was dismayed. ‘Oh, sir,' I protested, ‘but he does want to see you. He loves going to the Dower House.'

‘D'you really mean that?' asked the colonel, looking at me keenly.

‘Yes, sir. He likes you tremendously, really. He's always talking about you.'

I might have tickled the colonel with some delicious feather. I had never seen his insect face so suffused with human feeling.

‘Is that so?' he said. ‘H'm, well perhaps I've wronged him. We must give him another chance, eh? I must be going now. Will you say goodbye to your parents for me, and apologize for my leaving so hurriedly, but I've already wasted too much of my morning?'

Forgetting his usual distaste for me, he shook my hand warmly, and in a minute I saw him striding with an air of elation across the lawn to the meadow bridge. I realized that he was another of those pickled boys, those adolescents kept in water-glass of which there seemed to be so many in England.

I ruffled my hair and affecting the gait of a drunken or broken man, I staggered into the drawing-room, where the family were waiting impatiently. My conversation with the colonel had been longer than I have recorded it, as there was a good deal of repetition on both sides. Exclaiming ‘Phew, he's gone!' I clasped my
head in my hands and collapsed on a sofa, but they were too anxious to get away to be amused by me, and in a few minutes we were driving down the avenue. Colonel Rodgers was half way across the meadow, and at the sound of the car, he turned and gave a jaunty wave of his arm.

Our excursion was not a great success as it took us some time to get over our irritation at being delayed by the colonel, though we also thought it funny. On the way home Miss Chambers picked some wild cherry blossom from the hedgerow.

When we arrived back at Waterpark, Dominic had not returned, but he came in about twenty minutes later. Miss Chambers had placed the cherry blossom before a console mirror at the end of the drawing-room, and the beauty and generosity of the arrangement seemed to reflect her own nature, as the dazzling white sprays were reflected in the mirror. When Dominic came in the first thing he saw was this splendid arrangement, and ignoring us all, his eyes glowing with joy, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, the spring!' We had all been annoyed with him at being the unconscious cause of our spoiled day, and Steven was prepared to scold him, but there was something so moving about his exclamation and the simple wonder of his expression, that no one could speak for a moment.

He then said: ‘Hullo, Mum. Hullo, Miss Chambers,' with the same gentle absent manner he had shown on his return from the day with the Mordialloc fishermen,
as if he had left his spirit in the place he had come from. He gave the impression that it would be as dangerous to speak to him sharply, as it is said to be to someone walking in his sleep. We gave a little not unkindly laugh at his innocence of all the trouble he had caused. He looked surprised, but he was never told of it.

A few nights later, after dinner, he took me aside and said that I was to come riding with him in the morning, and that we were to meet Sylvia and Dick at a point halfway to Dilton. I objected that I had no horse, but he said that I could ride the hack with which Steven, though he no longer hunted, had provided himself to ride about the farms. We were coming more and more to regard Steven's property as our own, and would borrow anything from his guns to his evening studs when occasion arose, and he suffered, though sometimes peevishly, the hungry generations to tread him down.

I said that the horse was too big for me, that I should look ridiculous on it, and that anyhow I did not like riding English horses, which had to be controlled all the time, like a motorcar, whereas at Westhill there had been perfect intuitive cooperation between myself and my pony. Dominic ignored my objection, and that mood of gentle brooding, like a landscape soothed with soft mists, which had clothed him since his return from Dilton, became more like the brooding before a storm, which I knew better than to oppose.

Steven allowed me to ride his hack, as he felt more guilty towards us because we were without horses, than because we were without conventional education, and after breakfast I
set out with Dominic to the rendezvous. Sylvia, like every young woman of her class at that time, was not allowed out riding without a groom, unless one of her brothers was with her. I do not know whether she had as much power over Dick as Dominic had over me, but she managed to make him oblige her in the same way. As soon as we met them at the entrance to a wide grassy ride through a wood, Dominic rode up to Sylvia and they cantered away. I made to follow them, but
Dick, either because he had been so instructed, or because he disliked Dominic and was glad to be rid of him, or because of his good nature, said: ‘Let them go.'

He and I rode aimlessly about for a while. Then we tethered our horses and went into the wood, where he told me of the habits of various birds and animals. I loved nature in a vague and expansive way, because of its scent and colour, and its intimations of a mysterious life, but I had never given it this detailed attention. Although he was quite non-intellectual, and remained throughout his life ignorant of all the arts, this knowledge gave him a kind of culture, as his knowledge of ants gave it to Colonel Rodgers.

Dick had been told to be back at the entrance to the ride at half-past twelve and Sylvia and Dominic appeared a quarter-of-an-hour later. Their faces were
radiant, Dominic's proud and lively and Sylvia's with all her peevishness dissolved, but I felt myself in the presence of some phenomenon which embarrassed me, not only because of my medieval exaltation of the virgin state, but because I could see nothing but painful complications ahead for Dominic, and consequently for all of us. I did not regard him and Sylvia as a pair of lovers in a wood, and nothing more, but rather as dynamite, and shortly after this ride he told me that he was going to marry Sylvia. I did not reply but only looked dejected.

‘Aren't you going to congratulate me?' he demanded hotly.

‘Well, yes,' I said dubiously. ‘I didn't know I ought to. What will everyone say?'

‘We don't mind what they say. Our lives are our own. If they don't agree we'll run away.'

‘That would be frightful,' I burst out, immediately seeing Lady Dilton being terribly rude to Laura.

‘Rot!' said Dominic angrily. ‘Grandpapa ran away with Grannie, didn't he?'

‘Yes, but they came back after dinner, and they had a lot of money. What will you live on?'

‘I'll work,' said Dominic. He spoke with such proud confidence that for the moment I forgot that the only work he was likely to be given was by someone whom Steven paid to employ him.

‘When will you tell them?' I asked.

‘This afternoon. We're going over to tennis. I must speak to Lord Dilton first.'

‘I can't come,' I protested, terrified. I visualized Lord Dilton politely but firmly showing us the door, and possibly some appalling rudeness from Lady Dilton, more outspoken in her resentment of Dominic's effrontery. I could not bear the thought of our being exposed to humiliation from these rich and brutal people. I felt as if I were in a wooden galleon about to engage a dreadnaught.

‘You'll have to come,' he said. ‘I told Sylvia you would.' When he said the name Sylvia all the pride melted, and his voice went husky in his throat. If he had been a chaffinch or a weazel and Dick had drawn my attention to it, I would have thought it of the greatest interest, but in a human being I thought it merely sloppy.

Like the knights of old, whom in temperament he resembled, Dominic illustrated the fact that there is no greater incitement to courage than a reciprocated love. He came into luncheon with a superb confidence, and I saw Steven looking at him quizzically, as much as to say: ‘What is this noble creature that has sprung from my loins?' His nobility seemed almost an anachronism in our century, or at any rate slightly out of place in our household, like an El Greco reproduced in the columns of
Punch
,
so that it produced a faint amusement, and everyone was good-tempered except myself, who was
dreading the explosion of the afternoon.

I asked if we might have the car to go over to Dilton, thinking at least it would give more dignity to Dominic's application than if we rode on our bicycles, and also that it would enable us to make a quicker getaway, but Steven refused, as he did not like Dominic's reckless driving, and he did not want to sacrifice the afternoon's work of a gardener. Dominic was so serene in his courage and the dignity with which it clothed him that he saw nothing incongruous in riding on a bicycle to ask our richest neighbour, who was also a peer, for his only daughter's hand.

As I pedalled along beside him, through the deep leafy lanes, I thought he was riding head-on at disaster, and that I should soon be returning, not with this proud and noble youth, but with Dominic outcast and dazed, the insulted and injured, knocked on the head as he always was when too confident in his chivalry, when he had jumped from the drag, or shouted at Mr Porson, or rebuked Aunt Baba. Or perhaps, even worse, he would be defiant, and planning to throw a rope-ladder up to Sylvia's window at midnight and run off with her to Gretna Green, if that place was still functioning. I imagined subsequent appalling rows between our two families, perhaps lawsuits or duels. My imagination was not balanced by contact with those of other boys. Also I did not really believe that the things I imagined would happen, any more
than Dominic would really have liked me to slash his face when he said: ‘I would like to be wounded.'

When we arrived and were about to be shown into the room most used by the family, Dominic said pompously that he wanted to see Lord Dilton. The man replied that his lordship was out and my spirits rose, like those of a timid soldier who hears that a battle is postponed. Then Sylvia, who must have been waiting for us, came out into the hall. She and Dominic gravitated together and when she could turn her eyes from his she told me that I would find Dick down on the tennis courts.