The Partnership (3 page)

1

By the time the long train backed into the station the platform was crowded, and Lydia felt hot, tired, dirty, and discouraged. It seemed already several days since Wilfred had put her into a compartment that morning. The early part of the journey had been fairly pleasant, but as she journeyed south the weather, which had been wintry and treacherous at home, passed with a bound to the suffocating warmth of spring, and Lydia's heavy fur-edged coat, from being a sensible and comforting precaution, became an intolerable—and shabby—nuisance. She had now stood for a large number of minutes beneath the huge glass dome of a London terminus, jostled by the continually increasing crowd of would-be passengers and clinging to a rather heavy suitcase; her figure drooped with fatigue and her courage was flagging. She positively blenched, as the train came in, at the thought of fighting her way to a seat; but as she had always prided herself on her efficiency in travel, she nerved herself to the effort and sprang into the moving train.
A seething crowd, as it seemed, surged into the carriage in her wake; there was a whirl of luggage being thrown into the rack, human bodies came into vigorous contact with her own shrinking form, and when the tide of porters receded, Lydia saw that the compartment was well-filled, and that her fellow-passengers were all women with the exception of a young soldier who had ousted her from her corner and was now bestowing various awkward parts of his equipment precariously in the rack above her head. Lydia glanced at him rather resentfully, for her fastidious nerves shrank from the prospect of human pressure on both sides throughout the journey; but she saw at once that he was innocent of any conscious offence, and with a faint sigh resigned herself to the inevitable. The soldier, however, had caught her look and misinterpreted it.

“If any of you ladies don't want me to travel in this compartment,” he announced in a determined boyish tone to the carriage at large, “you say so now and I'll clear out. I don't want any misunderstanding about it; if any of you ladies think I'm not fit to travel with, you say so now.”

Reassuring murmurs came from all sides, and one or two travellers cast severe glances on Lydia, who coloured and gave the lad beside her more than his fair share of room. He was not, however, so easily pacified; still standing, he embarked on a lengthy anecdote of how he and another soldier, both very respectable men, had once got into a compartment with some ladies
who had disapproved of their presence and said things to each other about it, and what he and the other soldier had said, and what the ladies had said, and how they had got out at the next station, and what they thought of ladies who thought like that about respectable men. As he interspersed all this with frequent injunctions to his present company to say so if they didn't want him to travel with them, he had not finished the recital of his wrongs when the ticket inspector appeared in the doorway. Sitting down abruptly, the lad dived into an inner recess of his uniform and produced a military pass, which he unfolded carefully with his thick fingers. He then became very helpful in the matter of handing the other passengers' tickets back and forth for inspection; and when one was dropped as it passed from hand to hand, fell on his knees and fished it out from amongst the welter of luggage stowed beneath the seat. The ticket belonged to a girl of about seventeen, sitting on the opposite side of the compartment, whose robust figure, merry blue eyes, and round rosy cheeks had already attracted Lydia's attention. She was execrably clothed in a rough brown coat much too small for her, which had a hole over one pocket; a white tam-o'-shanter, also much too small, poised itself unsuitably on her round head; her shoes were poor, and her large hands, which lay passively in her lap, bore no gloves. When her ticket was restored to her she smiled, revealing white and even teeth and curving her nice round cheeks attractively, but
said nothing. The soldier also fell suddenly and unaccountably silent; he threw himself back into his seat and gazed fixedly out of the window as though smitten by a sudden fit of shyness. He was a bonny lad; his cropped dark hair, grey-blue eyes, long dark lashes, and high cheekbones with a sprinkling of freckles upon them proclaimed him to Lydia's mind a Celt of some sort, and something caressing in his intonation supported this view.

Lydia took advantage of his temporary immobility to extend her cramped limbs, and began to recover her composure and look about her. Part of some kind of a sheathed weapon dangled from the rack between her head and its owner's; she glanced up at it in humorous alarm, and as she looked away met the merry glance of the girl opposite, who also appeared to appreciate the joke. Lydia smiled; the girl, too, gave her charming smile, then hastily averted her eyes and became solemn. The train began to move; it dragged itself out of the station and plodded wearily along beside immense iron girders between which occasional tantalizing glimpses of the sunlit river could be seen. The heat was overpowering, and an expression of fretfulness settled upon the faces of all the women in the compartment except the girl in the brown coat, whose face remained fresh and serene. After what seemed an interminable period of slow, bumping progression, the train at last gathered speed, and began to run swiftly through miles of dreary suburban backyards.
Its motion sent gusts of fresh air flowing through the open windows of the compartment; the tension relaxed, and conversations sprang up sporadically.

“Hot, isn't it?” observed the soldier on an intimate note, turning to Lydia as though she were his best friend.

Lydia, taken aback by this sudden affability, agreed that it was, very.

The soldier promptly undid a button or two of his tunic, smiling boyishly the while at Lydia, as though it were an understood thing between them that she approved of this proceeding. He then demanded whether “any of you ladies” objected to smoking. A somewhat sour look crept over the faces of some of the ladies referred to, but no one liked to offer any objection; so the lad produced a packet of cigarettes and smoked two rapidly. He then put away the packet with a sigh, and looked about him for some other form of amusement. His eyes crossed those of the girl opposite, and he gazed at her silently for a few moments. The train was now flying through the fields and orchards of Kent in a south-easterly direction; it had stopped once or twice, but nobody in the compartment seemed inclined to get out and nobody was able to get in—several people looked in yearningly through the window, but the soldier repelled them all by an emphatic statement that the carriage was full, and the supporting glare of eight pairs of eyes convinced them that he was telling the truth—and this
continued association for purposes of defence seemed to unite the compartment into a kind of comradeship. All at once the soldier began to confide to Lydia, in a loud cheerful tone, the story of his life. He had run away from home twice, he said, before he was of the proper age, in order to enlist in the army. His brother was a sergeant-major in India; and he too meant to rise—yes! He meant to be an officer before he was done. He had taken this course of instruction and that course of instruction, and yet another, and come out well in them all; and now he was on his way to a south-coast seaport to take a course of musketry.

“You going there, miss?” he inquired of Lydia with kindly condescension.

Lydia admitted feebly that she was. She felt considerably embarrassed at being the recipient of his confidences, for her fellow-passengers had all fallen silent and were hanging intently on his tale, while affecting—as could be read in their expressions—to despise Lydia for listening to it. Lydia's attempt to stem the flow of military reminiscence by cold and monosyllabic replies was unsuccessful; but she noticed that while the lad's face was persistently turned to her his eyes roved, and began to suspect that the rosy-cheeked girl in the tam-o'-shanter was his real audience. As if to confirm her suspicion, the girl at this moment removed the article in question, revealing a smooth head of straight dark short hair. She was not a pretty girl, but there was such a merry,
friendly look about her round rosy face, and such calm serenity in the way she clasped the tam-o'-shanter to her knee with one substantial hand for ten miles or so without making the slightest movement, that Lydia could not but feel that the soldier was justified in his interest, though she disapproved of it on principle. He was now explaining to her—he seemed to regard her as a person totally ignorant of everything appertaining to the affairs of this world—the stripes on his sleeve, which he told her meant he was a corporal; he also showed her the gold badge and lettering across the end of his shoulder which indicated his regiment. He spelled out the letters to her one by one as though she could not read; and Lydia, who understood this little manœuvre perfectly, coloured and wished that fate had not placed her by his side—somebody else might have known better how to avoid being used as a stalking-horse. In spite of her irritation, however, she was a little disappointed to find that, if one could judge by the name of his regiment, her inconvenient neighbour belonged to Shakespeare's county and not to any Celtic land. When, therefore, he proceeded to relate that his home was really in the north of Ireland, Lydia's satisfaction at being right about his race overcame her prudence, and she exclaimed that she knew he was a Celt.

With a superior air the lad corrected her; he was not, he said, a native of Ireland, but of Wales.

Lydia smiled with an air as superior as his own, and prepared to reassume her reserve, but it was useless; her sign of interest had undone her, and a stream of more intimate biography was poured into her shrinking ears. Photographs were produced, showing the lad in mufti—which became him very well—reading a book on the edge of a moor. Lydia gave them a perfunctory inspection and prepared to return them; but the boy opined that some of the other ladies might care to see them, and she was obliged to pass them on. Every passenger felt called upon to make some kindly comment, except the girl in the brown coat, who looked at them in silence and smiled with her eyes cast down. The soldier's gaze never left her face while the photographs were under her inspection; when they were restored to him he put them away with a musing air in a pocket which buttoned, and was silent for a space. After a while, however, a large station gave him the opportunity of saying to Lydia that the last time he was there he had come to escort a fellow-soldier to the gaol. Lydia's expression of horror evidently pleased him, for he promptly embarked on details of various sad moral cases he had known in the past three years. The way some of them went on, it appeared, was terrible; but
he
made nothing of that line. No!
He
meant to get on,
he
did; he was going to be an officer before he was done. Lydia hoped that this return upon his original theme meant that his subject-matter was exhausted, and he certainly turned to the
window and gazed out upon the passing scenery as though such was the case. But against her will Lydia observed that his attention to the scenery was more pronounced when the train was passing some dark wood or bluff which made the window into a reflector; when the landscape was not thus helpful he jerked himself abruptly round and threw out to the alarmed Lydia some spicy anecdote or other which was often—perhaps fortunately—drowned in the roar of the train.

At length the little cosmos of the train approached Lydia's destination. The soldier resumed his equipment with a tremendous clanking, and all the women in the carriage fidgeted about their hand-luggage, with the exception of the girl in the brown coat. She put on her tam-o'-shanter, but seemed unconcerned as to luggage till the last moment, when she suddenly reached up to the rack above her head and took down a paper parcel—and not a very large one at that, as Lydia observed compassionately. The train drew up; for a few minutes there was a terrible hurly-burly of the kind Lydia most detested: she was buffeted about helplessly hither and thither, and had murmured “Foyle Tower” vainly into the ears of several heedless drivers before at last she found herself seated in a hot and crowded station bus which was said to pass the place she wanted. The bus throbbed impatiently; just as it was about to start the girl in the brown coat, looking serene and reserved as usual, was pushed in with helpful cries by the conductor, and
squeezed into the opposite seat. The soldier, Lydia was relieved to find, had disappeared.

Almost the first place the bus called at was the shore side of a large hotel, which seemed, judging from its white stone frontage and extensive gardens, a very pretentious place indeed. To Lydia's amazement the girl in the brown coat dismounted here. As she was wandering, irresolute but stolid, towards the entrance, she was intercepted by a uniformed porter, who with a lofty gesture waved her off towards a small side door. Lydia's heart smote her as she realized that the child—for she was little more—had come to form part of the extra staff which the hotel was taking on for Easter; and this poignant impression persisted even when, ten minutes later, she found herself within the decorous and orderly precincts of Foyle Tower, with a card of rules hanging by her bedroom door. The incidents of the afternoon lay hot and confused in her mind, like those of a disorderly dream; but they were extraordinarily vivid, too. That absurd soldier! That poor child with the hole in her coat! But surely, thought Lydia, as the influence of Foyle Tower began to assert its sway, surely that hole could have been mended.

2

The night was dark. Lydia paced the uneven asphalt of the front—out of which the winter storms yearly tore huge jagged pieces—and listened rather mournfully to the monotonous roll
of the sea on the pebbled shore. Various flashing beams from lighthouses in France, on Dungeness, at Dover, jewelled the sea at rhythmic intervals, but Lydia was not capable of deriving much solace from such sources. She was aware that the night air was warm and balmy, and that the scattered lights made a pretty scene, but this did not console her, as it would have done Louise, for the disappointments and disillusionments of the day. The holiday home, as a matter of fact, was not a great success so far, from Lydia's point of view. The young people there had rapidly arranged themselves into couples and did not want to be organized; the older people sat about placidly and did not seem to want to be organized either. Lydia had somehow not succeeded in attaching herself to either group; she felt lonely and unwanted, and heartily wished herself back home again, where the need for her, in the unavoidable absence of the maid, was genuine. She sighed a little, and stared rather blankly at tire heaped pebbles and the sullen sea.