Friendly Young Ladies (28 page)

“The great thing,” she explained, “is to keep up some sort of a life of your own outside the job. When you take to sitting about in uniform in your free time, you may as well be dead. Your friend,” she added by way of a graceful return, “isn’t at all obvious, either.”

“That’s why she’s a friend of mine,” said Leo simply. (To him that hath shall be given was, she had long since discovered, a good rule of thumb.) “I’m like you, I prefer untypical people. You and I are rampant individualists, I suppose. It’s not fashionable, but it’s a lot more fun. Don’t you think so?”

Copying as far as possible Leo’s air of negligence, Norah agreed that it was. Helen had judged her correctly; she was well supplied with good sense. Tactics of pursuit would have alarmed her as effectively as they would have bored Leo, who, in any case, rated them abysmally low—not merely vulgar, but amateurish, which was worse. In this case, two exclusive people had naturally drifted together. It worked like birdlime. Norah had had more than two years of being improved; kindly, tactfully on the whole, amusingly sometimes, but unremittingly. Here was someone, clearly critical to a fault, who seemed not to think that any improvement was called for. It was immense.

“What are you laughing at?” she asked, further intrigued by a deep,
sotto voce
chuckle which Leo made no attempt to explain.

“Sorry. I was just thinking what an amusing time a person like you must have had in hospital. Subtly deflating these pompous sisters and so on. Though I suppose as a rule their hides are so thick you can’t get through them without being depressingly crude. Still, you must have had quite a lot of quiet fun all to yourself.”

She had limned, with a few economical strokes, the secret self-portrait of four young nurses out of five. To Norah, such penetration on the part of an outsider seemed quite uncanny. She said, deprecatingly, “Well, you certainly would blow your brains out if you didn’t give your sense of humour an airing now and again.”

Shreds of this conversation drifted over to Helen, as she shuffled the drawings in search of another suited to exposition. She coughed convulsively into her handkerchief, got up, and made a solicitous fuss over the refilling of Peter’s glass, which was only one third down.

“I don’t know if orthopaedic surgery is at all in your line. …” There were quite a number of orthopaedic drawings, illustrations to a monograph. Helen made the most of them. She had, at last, no reason to complain of an abstracted audience. Peter had become, suddenly, all eyes and ears. His head had come several inches nearer, and his comments were accompanied by intimate little glances. They were received into a blanket of bland, innocent friendliness. Helen had had her share of admiration, unforced to the point of occasional embarrassment; she could well afford to be amused this time, and she was. A small convex glass on the wall enabled her to see, without looking round, that the effect was being sadly wasted in the proper quarter. She felt, for a moment, quite sorry for him; her tender heart was apt to be moved by the most temporary reverses. She even allowed him to collect up her fingers accidentally, along with one of the papers, and returned his pressure with a maternal little squeeze. Then “Hullo,” she said over her shoulder. “Where are you people off to?”

Peter, who had not the advantage of the wall-mirror, had been preoccupied with the success of his outflanking move. He looked up. The position at which it had been directed was no longer there.

“Shan’t be a minute,” said Leo airily. “I’m just taking Norah to have a look at the canoe.” They disappeared; Leo motioning Norah, with a slight but gallant gesture, to precede her through the door.

Peter gazed after them. There was a moment in which his jaw actually dropped; an unfortunate moment, for it was an expression which sat so incongruously on his face that it brought Helen’s comic sense into play. She observed, with acute enjoyment, his rapid recovery, his thoughtful reorientation, and his too obvious resolve to make the best of a job which might turn out to be not so bad after all. The sound of a shy, hesitant step on the ladder cut short her entertainment; she had quite forgotten, for a while, that the performance had been a benefit one.

Elsie’s timing, though unconscious, had been perfect. She hit the exact moment when Peter had re-concentrated all his charm for the new
mise en scène
. As she appeared in the doorway, Helen stooped to gather in her drawings, moving so briskly that Peter’s best smile passed clean over her head. He received it back instead, from Elsie, in a pale tremulous reflection, like sunlight on a pool.

“Well,” said Helen, getting up, “I really must be getting something done about the supper. I hope those two on the river won’t go too far; but I suppose we shall have to risk having it a bit overdone, shan’t we?” She smiled at him with the most innocent sociability. “Hullo, Elsie. You’re just in time to look after the company while I’m gone.”

She moved smoothly off. Helen never bustled. She could accomplish more than most people without the appearance of effort.

Elsie had Peter quite to herself for more than half an hour. He acquitted himself with what, in the circumstances, amounted to credit, and was never once unkind. The talk was not, perhaps, exactly dynamic; but for this Elsie accepted, very readily, the whole responsibility. Like all shy people, she was used to conversations beginning to sag when she was called upon to support one end of them. Even with Peter it had happened sometimes before, though not for quite so long. She answered the questions he asked about her life and progress, and was saddened a little, but unsurprised, to find him not listening very attentively to the answers. She did not lose sight of the fact that in being thus
tête-â-tête
with him she was enjoying the highest felicity. But after ten minutes there was a strange intimation at the back of her mind that she had had it now, that she was already happy enough, that no more was necessary for the present. If, even, other people came in, and there were general conversation, it would not plunge her into despair. When, during a lengthy pause, Helen came to lay the table, she was conscious of something absurdly similar to relief, and jumped up to help in spite of Helen’s assurance that there was really nothing to do. Here was the moment, she reaffirmed, on which her thoughts had been set for days; but now, in its very shadow, her mind had run ahead again, and she looked forward to she knew not what; to the next meeting or its anticipation; to sitting, this evening, and watching him quietly from a corner; even to looking back on it from the completed security of the past. For only precocity, or maturity, or unreconciled age are choked by biting off more than they can chew; to this, its natural exercise, youth is mercifully adapted, like childhood to green apples. Hunger is not so early awake; the taste and scent of love sustain, and, as with green apples, do it sometimes better than the substance. Cruelty and disillusion are the only untransmutable pains. For cruelty Elsie retained the instinct of a lingering childhood; against it her choice had guarded her safely enough. Disillusion had gone out of the door just four minutes before she entered it. Peter’s first smile, as she arrived, she had somehow felt at once contained happiness enough to last the evening; and, ever since, an instinct wiser than herself had been advising her not to ask for more. Shakespeare, she remembered (trying to excuse and understand the feeling), had been shy too, like an imperfect actor on the stage. To-morrow, next week, there would be miracles. Today it was enough to expect them; meanwhile she trotted in and out of the kitchen, busied herself with a dozen small distractions, and brought Helen into the conversation whenever she could.

“Where’s Leo?” she asked, as she collected plates from the dresser.

“Out in the canoe,” said Helen, “with Norah Haynes. (The cheese is on the top shelf.) Norah trained with me at Hilary’s. She and Peter came along together. Have you laid a place for her, by the way?”

“Oh, no,” said Elsie cheerfully. “I didn’t.” She had just made good the deficiency when the canoe returned.

It was audible some minutes before it arrived, for just as it came within earshot, Norah had finished telling an amusing story, and Leo’s delighted laugh, crackling like a boy’s from deep to high, carried clearly across the water. Peter, whose perfunctory offer to help had been swept aside, got the full benefit of it through the open door, and felt an uncomfortable prickling at the back of his neck. The whole episode, he decided, was of the sort best ignored by an adult mind. One could only regret that a woman of Norah’s native intelligence could, after two years’ acquaintance with real values, be capable of such a lapse into the third-rate. He would intimate this to her in due course; she was, at least, capable of taking a hint. Meanwhile …

The canoe coasted in towards the bank, kissing it neatly under Leo’s practised hand. They were humming, as they landed, a verse of “Home on the Range,” which they had been harmonizing further up the river.

Where the graceful white swan goes gliding along

Like a maid in a heavenly dream. …

Elsie thought the soft voices, in the gathering dusk, romantically sweet and sad.

“We must meet again,” said Leo, in the voice that means, You cannot step twice into the same river; better not try.

“Yes,” said Norah, assenting both to the spoken courtesy and the unspoken truth. She was trying, half-heartedly, to imagine what she would think about all this to-morrow morning. It had been so light, so gracefully unreal, like an indiscretion at a masked ball. She gazed at Leo curiously, over the tie-rope of the canoe. One had thought, as far as one had previously thought at all, of thick women in starched evening shirts, and intense, shy-making confidences. … Norah found that, as after a moderate indulgence in champagne, little remained behind except a general impression that one had been unusually witty and charming, together with a feeling of light-hearted sophistication and no harm done. And indeed, anything that happens in a light canoe, even when moored, must needs be moderate enough.

Leo caught her eye and gave her a broad, outrageous, comprehensive wink.

“Come on in,” she said, “and eat your supper like a good girl.”

They were both blinking a little in the electric light indoors. Peter ignored Norah’s entrance with quiet unobtrusive dignity; so it was Leo who introduced her to Elsie, in a manner which did nothing to alter Elsie’s belief that she had been a friend of the household for years. Supper went quite well; for a party of four women and one man, who moreover contributed very little, it had almost a swing. Norah was in excellent form; she was feeling, in fact, rather full of herself, and Peter’s disapproval, of which she was quite well aware, she found to her own secret surprise had no effect whatever on her spirits. She was conscious of being one up on him, a most unusual feeling and quite astonishingly satisfactory. For Elsie, it was the best part of the day. When Peter did talk, he talked mostly to her; but these desultory moments, while they uplifted, called for no effort, and the general talk freed her from any responsibility for bridging the intervals between. She could sink into herself, look at him now and again; remind herself that it was she whom he had come to see, a truth evident now beyond mistake and sufficient in itself. Helen’s personality at the head of the table was like a bland fluid holding everyone else’s in smooth suspension. Only Leo, leading Norah on with concealed ingenuity from strength to strength, but already experiencing the sad ennui of victory, and Peter, who had even passed the stage of thinking what he would say to Norah on the way home, wanted the evening to end.

Its ending was, however, predetermined by the hour of Norah’s last train home. Peter had indeed intended suggesting, on their way to it, that she should spend the night at his hotel instead. A kind of expectation of this kind had hung between them when they set out; fortunately, Peter thought, an unspoken one. He had decided, on reflection, to behave just as though nothing had happened, except that the invitation would not be made. That ought to answer sufficiently well. Of course, if it had been a man … An enlightened freedom from the least taint of jealousy was, he could claim without conceit (and often did) one of his specialities, to which it was almost a pleasure to give an occasional airing. Tolerance, generosity, detachment in a real situation; these satisfied the aesthetic sense, supported the ego, and incidentally, in practice, seldom failed to succeed. They flourished less handsomely in a soil salted with the ludicrous. Peter was unaccustomed to having rises taken out of him, to the point of scarcely recognizing the operation when it was performed; he was, however, quite clearly aware of being not amused.

It was almost at the point of departure that his mercurial spirits began to recover. Suddenly it occurred to him that so theatrical an exhibition argued, after all, a certain interest in the audience. It might even be this odd creature’s idea of an amatory challenge. At the moment of leave-taking, he decided, he would try this theory out. A quick thrust-and-parry of glances, a moment of tension, a flash of humour, the picking up of a gauntlet … it would be, anyway, a good exit-line. He began rehearsing it inwardly, but stopped because Elsie was looking at him oddly, and he suspected that his face was, perhaps, rehearsing too.

“I really shall have to go in a few minutes,” said Norah. “What a shame.”

“
Must
you go back to town tonight?” Leo looked along under her lashes. “What about a shakedown here, and a swim in the morning?”

Norah declined in unexceptionable terms; but Peter, who had seldom seen her blush, found the demonstration ill-timed. He rallied his forces, with more determination than ever, for the coming clash, and worked out a strategic plan by which his adieux to Leo would be slightly isolated, and left till the last.

“Why,” said Helen, turning in her chair, “look who’s here. Come in, Joe.”

“Hullo,” said Joe. He leaned in at the doorway, shabby, brown, unintrusive and placidly at home. “I came for my line, but I’ve found it. Don’t anyone move. Thanks for drying it, Leo. Good night.” He began to withdraw.