Eustace and Hilda (3 page)

“What made Hilda so batey just now?” she presently inquired.

‘Batey' was a word from the outside world, the world of day-schools and organised games with which Nancy was familiar. Batey: Eustace's father, who disliked slang, had protested against it, and his aunt had forbidden him to use it. Whatever Hilda might be she was not that.

“She wasn't batey,” he said slowly.

“Well, what was she then?” demanded Nancy. “I saw her pulling you about, and she went away kicking up no end of a din.”

Eustace pondered. If he should say that he had been unkind to Hilda, Nancy would laugh at him, in her polite, incredulous way. He was always acutely conscious of having to live up to her; that was one reason, among others, why he liked being with her. He wanted to make a good impression. But how could he do that without sacrificing his sister's dignity, which was dear to him and necessary to his sense of their relationship?

“She was very much upset,” he said at last.

Nancy nodded sagely, as though she understood what Eustace had left unexpressed and respected his reticence. Sunning himself in the warmth of her hardly won approval, and feeling he had done his best for Hilda, Eustace let his sister and her troubles slip out of his mind. He redoubled his exertions and soon, to the accompaniment of a little desultory conversation, a large mound, unmistakably castellated, began to rear itself in the midst of Nancy's plot.

Eustace took a pride in seeing it grow, but Nancy—beyond seconding his efforts with a few negligent taps—seemed content to resign the task to him. He is only an infant, she thought, in spite of his engaging manners.

L
EFT TO
himself, Eustace fell into a day-dream. He thought of his toys and tried to decide which of them he should give to his sister Barbara; he had been told he must part with some of them, and indeed it would not make much difference if they were hers by right, since she already treated them as such. When he went to take them from her she resisted with loud screams. Eustace realised that she wanted them but he did not think she ought to have them. She could not use them intelligently, and besides, they belonged to him. He might be too old to play with them but they brought back the past in a way that nothing else did. Certain moments in the past were like buried treasure to Eustace, living relics of a golden age which it was an ecstasy to contemplate. His toys put him in touch with these secret jewels of experience; they could not perform the miracle if they belonged to someone else. But on the single occasion when he had asserted his ownership and removed the rabbit from Barbara who was sucking its ears, nearly everyone had been against him and there was a terrible scene. Minney said he never took the slightest interest in the rabbit until Barbara wanted it, his aunt said he must try not to be mean in future, and Hilda urged that he should be sent to bed on the spot. “It will be good for him in the end,” she said.

Eustace's resistance was violent and, since Hilda hardly obtained a hearing, really unnecessary; but in his heart he agreed with her. Expiation already played a part in his life; it reinstated him in happiness continually. Hilda was the organiser of expiation: she did not let him off: she kept him up to the scratch, she was extreme to mark what was done amiss. But as the agent of retribution she was impersonal: she only adjudicated between him and a third party. It was understood that from their private disputes there was no appeal to a disinterested tribunal; the bitterness had to be swallowed and digested by each side. If Hilda exposed her wounded feelings she did not declare that Heaven was outraged by the spectacle: she demanded no forfeit, no acknowledgement even. She did not constitute herself a law court but met Eustace on his own ground.

The thought of her, intruding upon his reverie, broke it up. There she sat, on the large rock in their pond which they had christened Gibraltar, her back bent, her legs spread out, her head drooping. It was an ugly attitude and she would grow like that, thought Eustace uncomfortably. Moreover, she was sitting recklessly on the wet seaweed which would leave a green mark and give her a cold, if salt-water could give one a cold. Minney was superstitious, and any irrational belief that tended to make life easier was, Eustace instinctively felt, wrong. Still Hilda did not move. Her distress conveyed itself to him across the intervening sand. He glanced uneasily at Nancy who was constructing a garden out of seaweed and white pebbles at the gateway of the castle—an incongruous adjunct, Eustace thought, for it was precisely there that the foemen would attack. He had almost asked her to put it at the back, for the besieged to retire into in their unoccupied moments; where it was it spoilt his vision of the completed work and even sapped his energy. But he did not like the responsibility of interfering and making people do things his way. He worked on, trying to put Hilda out of his mind, but she recurred and at last he said:

“I think I'll go back now, if it's all the same to you.”

He hoped by this rather magnificent phrase to make his departure seem as casual as possible, but Nancy saw through him.

“Can't leave your big sister?” she inquired, an edge of irony in her voice. “She'll get over it quicker if you let her alone.”

Eustace declined this challenge. It pained him to think that his disagreement with Hilda was public property.

“Oh, she's all right now,” he told Nancy airily. “She's having a rest.”

“Well, give her my love,” said Nancy.

Eustace felt a sudden doubt, from her tone, whether she really meant him to deliver the message.

“Shall I?” he asked diffidently. “I should like to.”

Something in the question annoyed Nancy. She turned from him with a whirl of her accordion-pleated skirt, a garment considered by Eustace miraculous and probably unprocurable in England.

“You can say I hate her, if you'd rather,” she remarked. She looked round: her blue eyes sparkled frostily in her milk-white face.

Eustace stood aghast. He didn't think it possible that strangers —people definitely outside the family circle—could ever be angry.

“I'll stay if you can't get on so well without me,” he said at length, feeling his way.

She laughed at him when he said this—at his concerned face and his earnestness, his anxiety to please. So it was nothing, really: he was right, you couldn't take much harm with strangers. If they seemed cross it was only in fun: they wouldn't dare to show their feelings or make you show yours: it was against the rules. They existed to be agreeable, to be a diversion.... Nancy was saying:

“It's very kind of you to have stayed so long, Eustace. Look what a lot you've done!” A kind of comic wonder, mixed with mockery, crept into her voice: Eustace was fascinated. “Gerald will never believe me when I tell him I built it all myself!”

“Will you tell him that?” Eustace was shocked by her audacity, but tried to keep his voice from showing disapproval.

“Well, I'll say you did all the work while I looked on.”

Gerald will think me a muff, decided Eustace. “Couldn't you say we did it together?”

Nancy's face fell at the notion of this veracious account. Then it brightened. “I know,” she said. “I'll tell him a stranger came in a boat from the yacht over there, and
he
helped me. A naval officer. Yes, that's what I'll tell him,” she added teasingly, seeing Eustace still uneasy at the imminent falsehood. “Good-bye, Mr. Officer, you mustn't stay any longer.” With a gentle push to start him on his way she dismissed him.

It was too bad of Hilda to leave his hat lying in a pool. However cross she might be she rarely failed to retrieve his personal belongings over which, even when not flustered and put out, he had little control. Now the ribbon was wet and the “table” of
Indomitable
, a ship which he obscurely felt he might be called upon at any moment to join, stood out more boldly than the rest. Never mind, it was salt-water, and in future the hat could be used for a barometer, like seaweed, to tell whether bad weather was coming. Meanwhile there was Hilda. It was no good putting off the evil moment: she must be faced.

But he did not go to her at once. He dallied among the knee-high rounded rocks for which the beach of Anchorstone (Anxton, the Steptoes called it in their fashionable way) was famous. He even built a small, almost vertical castle, resembling, as nearly as he could make it, the cone of Cotopaxi, for which he had a romantic affection, as he had for all volcanoes, earthquakes and violent manifestations of Nature. He calculated the range of the lava flow, marking it out with a spade and contentedly naming for destruction the various capital cities, represented by greater and lesser stones, that fell within its generous circumference. In his progress he conceived himself to be the Angel of Death, a delicious pretence, for it involved flying and the exercise of supernatural powers. On he flew. Could Lisbon be destroyed a second time? It would be a pity to waste the energy of the eruption on what was already a ruin; but no doubt they had rebuilt it by now. Over it went and, in addition, an enormous tidal wave swept up the Tagus, ravaging the interior. The inundation of Portugal stopped at Hilda's feet.

For some days afterwards Eustace was haunted at odd times by the thought that he had accidentally included Hilda in the area of doom. He clearly hadn't got her all in but perhaps her foot or her spade (which, for the purpose of disaster, might be reckoned her) had somehow overhung the circle, or the place where the circle would have been if he had finished it. The rocks couldn't take any harm from the spell, if it really was one, and he hadn't meant to hurt her, but it was just this sort of misunderstanding that gave Fate the opportunity to take you at your word. But Eustace had no idea that he was laying up trouble for himself when, with arrested spade, he stopped in front of Hilda.

“It only just missed you,” he remarked cryptically.

Silence.

“You only just escaped; it was a narrow shave,” Eustace persisted, still hoping to interest his sister in her deliverance.

“What fool's trick is this?” demanded Hilda in a far-away voice.

Discouraging as her words were, Eustace took heart; she was putting on her tragedy airs, and the worst was probably over.

“It was an eruption,” he explained, “and you were the city of Athens and you were going to be destroyed. But they sacrificed ten Vestal Virgins for you and so you were saved.”

“What a silly game!” commented Hilda, her pose on the rock relenting somewhat. “Did you learn it from Nancy?”

“Oh no,” said Eustace, “we hardly talked at all—except just at the end, to say good-bye.”

Hilda seemed relieved to hear this.

“I don't know why you go and play with people if you don't talk to them,” she said. “You wouldn't if you weren't a goose.”

“Oh, and Nancy sent you her love,” said Eustace.

“She can keep it,” said Hilda, rising from the rock, some of which, as Eustace had feared, came away with her. “You've been very cruel to me, Eustace,” she went on. “I don't think you really love me.”

Hilda never made a statement of this kind until the urgency of her wrath was past. Eustace also used it, but in the heat of his.

“I do love you,” he asserted.

“You don't love me.”

“I do.”

“You don't—and don't argue,” added Hilda crushingly. “How can you say you love me when you leave me to play with Nancy?”

“I went on loving you all the time I was with Nancy,” declared Eustace, almost in tears.

“Prove it!” cried Hilda.

To be nailed down to a question he couldn't answer gave Eustace a feeling of suffocation. The elapsing seconds seemed to draw the very life out of him.

“There!” exclaimed Hilda triumphantly. “You can't!”

For a moment it seemed to Eustace that Hilda was right: since he couldn't prove that he loved her, it was plain he didn't love her. He became very despondent. But Hilda's spirits rose with her victory, and his own, more readily acted upon by example than by logic, caught the infections of hers. Side by side they walked round the pond and examined the damage. It was an artificial pond—a lake almost—lying between rocks. The intervals between the rocks were dammed up with stout banks of sand. To fill the pond they had to use borrowed water, and for this purpose they dug channels to the natural pools left by the tide at the base of the sea-wall. A network of conduits crisscrossed over the beach, all bringing their quota to the pond which grew deeper and deeper and needed ceaselessly watching. It was a morning's work to get the pond going properly, and rarely a day passed without the retaining wall, in spite of their utmost vigilance, giving way in one place or other. If the disaster occurred in Eustace's section, he came in for much recrimination, if in Hilda's, she blamed herself no less vigorously, while he, as a rule, put in excuses for her which were ruthlessly and furiously set aside.

But there was no doubt that it was Hilda who kept the spirit of pond-making alive. Her fiery nature informed the whole business and made it exciting and dangerous. When anything went wrong there was a row—no clasping of hands, no appealing to Fate, no making the best of a bad job. Desultory, amateurish pond-making was practised by many of the Anchorstone children: their puny, half-hearted, untidy attempts were, in Hilda's eyes, a disgrace to the beach. Often, so little did they understand the pond-making spirit, they would wantonly break down their own wall for the pleasure of watching the water go cascading out. And if a passer-by mischievously trod on the bank they saw their work go to ruin without a sigh. But woe betide the stranger who, by accident or design, tampered with Hilda's rampart! Large or small, she gave him a piece of her mind; and Eustace, standing some way behind, balanced uncertainly on the edge of the conflict, would echo some of his sister's less provocative phrases, by way of underlining. When
their
wall gave way it was the signal for an outburst of frenzied activity. On one never forgotten day Hilda had waded knee-deep in the water and ordered Eustace to follow. To him this voluntary immersion seemed cataclysmic, the reversal of a lifetime's effort to keep dry. They were both punished for it when they got home.