Venus Over Lannery (2 page)

She was speaking of a couple who, he now saw, were approaching the house along the brilliantly coloured border that bounded the lawn on the north-west. “A curious, interesting little couple,” she was saying, and, as she spoke, Elsdon noticed, by a surprising flash from the faces of both, that both wore spectacles. “She,” said Emily, “has recently escaped from home—a very prim vicarage, I gather—and is studying medicine. He, Roger Pennant, is an engineer. I haven't quite gathered whether they're actually engaged or only in the preliminary stages. She's completely under his thumb and, apparently, likes it. She follows him about like a little dog and gobbles up everything he says.”

“And is it worth gobbling?” asked the Colonel grimly.

“O, quite,” said Mrs. Dryden. “At least a good BL
deal of it is. He's very intelligent about music and pictures: I've had some interesting talks with him. Unfortunately he thinks that life can be explained by mathematics, and that, of course, makes him rather a dogmatic and narrow-minded young man in some respects; but no doubt he'll get over that. And in course of time, no doubt, she'll escape from under his thumb. I hope she does so before they marry.”

The Colonel laughed his dry laugh. “If she does,” he said, “perhaps they won't.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Buxted mildly, “
I
didn't, till
we
had.”

The Colonel looked shocked, then amused. “True,” he said; “but you let me down very gently and very gradually, Ida. It was not till afterwards that I saw how it had happened.”

“You mean to say,” asked Elsdon, “that, at the time, you didn't even know it
was
happening?”

“Hadn't the ghost of an idea,” said the Colonel.

“And how
did
it happen, Bob?” asked Mrs. Dryden, enormously amused.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “she began by bossing, or shall I say mothering, my subalterns. It was imperceptible at the time. It was only when the company sergeant-major—or colour-sergeant, as we called them in those days—had completely succumbed that I discovered what was up, and by that time, of course, it was too late.”

“So you yielded gracefully?” someone asked.

“Tolerably!” said his wife before the Colonel could reply. “He blustered a little at first.”

“Blustered?” said the Colonel sharply.

“A
little,
Bob,” Mrs. Buxted gently insisted.

The Colonel smiled benignly. “Well, perhaps I did. But I soon threw up the sponge. The fact was, you see, that actually it was a great relief. I found it surprisingly restful, when off parade, to be ... well, off parade.”

“Whereas I,” said Ida, “found it surprisingly bracing to be
on
parade occasionally.”

“And what about the subs and the coloursergeant?” asked Elsdon.

“I suspect they knew nothing about it,” said the Colonel.

“Nothing whatever,” said Ida conclusively.

They had forgotten the two young people, and Elsdon, looking up, was just in time to see the young man—what was his name? Roger?—vanish into the house and the girl obediently trotting up the steps after him. Those two at least, with their spectacles, it would be easy to differentiate from the herd, and the other three who had come out of the house half an hour ago with tennis-rackets—he might be able to identify them, though not so certainly. No doubt before long the girl would change her pale-blue dress and lose what little identity she had acquired for him. But there were swarms of others, surely, still unsorted. He turned to Mrs. Dryden. “How many young people have you got here?”

Mrs. Dryden closed her eyes. “Let me see. The two we noticed just now ...”

“And the two that came out with tennis-rackets and the tall fair young man that ran after them.”

“I didn't see him,” said Mrs. Dryden. “Tall and fair? That would be Norman Gardner.”

“That's five,” said Elsdon, holding up five fingers of one hand. “How many more?”

“Only two besides my Cynthia. There's the young actor, I don't remember his name, the ridiculously handsome young man who is always, as it were, offering you his handsomeness on a tray, like a butler at a garden-party. If you haven't already noticed him, you can't help doing so soon. And then there's the girl he's brought with him—Daphne Somebody-or-other—an amusing but, I fancy, rather an empty little creature.” She gave a low, reflective laugh. “She has a gaze of such wide, doll-like innocence that, in me at least, she rouses the gravest suspicions.”

“My dear Emily!” protested Ida Buxted. Her friend's sharp tongue never failed to shock and delight her.

“Well, Ida,” said Mrs. Dryden, “if a young woman of twenty-two has the eyes of a child of five, evidently there's something wrong. Either she's lamentably undeveloped or deliberately playing a part.”

“And what part,” asked the Colonel, “does she play with her actor?”

“That,” said Mrs. Dryden, “I don't know. I
really know nothing whatever about them except that they gave Cynthia a great deal of valuable help in getting up a play at her girls' club in London. In fact he—what's his name? Roy Somebody—produced the play and the young woman made the dresses.”

A maid came across the grass to announce that tea was waiting in the summer-house near the tenniscourt, and with the unimpulsiveness of age the four elders got out of their chairs and began to move across the lawn. Mrs. Dryden turned to Elsdon. “If you'd rather not face the herd, George, go back to the house and ask Elizabeth to give you tea in my study.”

Elsdon hesitated, but only for a moment. “No, Emily, don't pander to my cowardice. I'll persevere.”

“By the way,” she said, as they continued their walk, “there'll be one more for you to cope with, though not so young as the rest: Francis Todd, a curate, a little over thirty.”

“A curate?” exclaimed the Colonel. “What next? I thought you didn't hold with the Church, Emily?”

“Perhaps not; but, as you know, Bob, I don't hold with the Army either, and yet I can put up with an occasional colonel if he's a really good one.”

Their brief quartet of laughter broke out again through the hot hum of the summer afternoon and, as it died down, the soft, repeated thud of a driven tennis-ball came to their ears.

Under the leaf-and-flower-shaded pergola that formed a portico to the summer-house the tea-table glittered with a soft iridescence, and behind it, like a fishing fleet with green sails crowded into a little harbour, a semicircle of deck-chairs presented a background of complicated planes and angles. Cynthia Dryden, standing at the table, had begun to pour out tea. In two of the deck-chairs—the only ones occupied—sat the spectacled couple, Roger Pennant and the girl Edna, who got up, as the elders joined them, and began to hand tea-cups and plates. The game of tennis was still proceeding. A young man—Elsdon put him down at the first glance as the actor—was displaying his good looks in the role of umpire, sitting on the top of a pair of steps and alternately announcing the score and making jocular criticisms of the play. Eric Brand, Mrs. Dryden's nephew, was playing with the pale-blue girl. Both played with a busy, smiling efficiency, ignoring the umpire's facetiousness. But the fair youth on the other side replied in kind and, just before serving, threw a ball and caught the actor on the top of the head. The ball rocketed upwards and vanished over the summerhouse. Cynthia, as she poured the tea, raised a disapproving eye. “That will have to be found before you get any tea, Norman,” she shouted. Elsdon had been studying Norman's partner, a small, slim girl in green. By a process of elimination he identified her as the actor's young woman. She played with an ostentatious helplessness, missing nearly every ball. Norman served again, and with a loud twang of his
racket Eric returned the ball hard and low. It skimmed between his two opponents and grazed the back-line. There was a shout from them all; they instantly abandoned their play-attitudes, like actors when the curtain has dropped, and began to drift towards the pergola. The green girl shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I warned you that I was putrid,” she said to Norman.

He bowed with mock politeness, laying his racket across his heart. “It had to be seen to be believed,” he said. He lifted the net that surrounded the court. “Come and help me to find the ball.”

“Not likely!” replied the green girl, strolling off towards her actor, who had jumped down from his ladder. But he—deliberately, it seemed—turned away and went off with Norman to hunt for the missing ball. They returned with it almost immediately and joined the others round the tea-table. The girls, all except Cynthia, had sat down. Eric had taken a cup to his partner and was offering her a plate of scones with the earnest devotion of a young Lancelot. Roy the actor strode to the table and began to hand plates with a florid elegance, while Norman, in his airy way, had paused to converse with the seated Mrs. Buxted, thereby escaping these tiresome responsibilities. Mrs. Dryden, who had been provided with tea and bread-and-butter by the engineer, had taken the chair next his and was deep in conversation with him and Edna. Elsdon observed the four young men, noting their names, their appearance and those illuminating details of their behaviour, till each
began to take on his particular personality. The girls, being seated, were less easily observed. The green girl on his left was still harping on her inefficiency, to her neighbour, Colonel Buxted. Elsdon listened to their conversation. “I simply wrecked the game,” she was saying. “I'm hopeless at tennis.”

“Ah, my dear young lady,” said the Colonel, “that's because you won't let yourself play well.”

“You mean I play badly on purpose?”

“Well, not on purpose, perhaps, but your body wants to play well and you don't give it a look in.”

“Ah, you're a psychologist.”

“No, I'm a retired colonel. But as an officer one picks up a certain amount of elementary psychology. Now take rifle-practice. I noticed long ago that, whenever you hit the bull, you had known, as soon as you pressed the trigger, that you were going to. If you know you're not going to ... well, you don't. As a subaltern I used to tell the men that, and it worked astonishingly. Needless to say you've got to know the mechanics of the thing first. But you do know something of the mechanics of tennis; I was watching you and I saw you did.”

“So that if I tell myself I'm going to win the game, I'll win it.” There was a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

The Colonel laughed. “O, come; there's more than that in a game of tennis, especially in mixed doubles. There's your partner to be considered, he may let you down; not to speak of the fellows at the
other side of the net. And besides all that, you've got to tell yourself the truth. There's no use my telling myself that I'm going to jump over the moon, is there? It was you, by the way, who said ‘tell myself': what I said was ‘know.'”

Elsdon turned to his neighbour on the right. It was the spectacled girl. “Did you hear what the Colonel was saying? Tell me what you think of it. You're a doctor.”

She laughed. “A doctor? Not yet, but I hope to be, some day.”

“But was the Colonel right?”

“O, absolutely!” she said. She lowered her voice. “But in Daphne's case the point is, I'm afraid, that she would rather
not
play well.”

“Ah,” said Elsdon with a chuckle, “I'm afraid you're an even deeper psychologist than the Colonel.”

“It's kind of you to say so,” said Edna. “Some people would have simply called me a cat.”

Elsdon recalled how, half an hour ago, Emily Dryden had called her a little dog. It was strange that a girl of such sharp perceptions should be under anyone's thumb. “One of the less beneficial effects of love!” he reflected.

The young engineer's voice broke through his reflections. “I don't say now, but some day.”

Emily's low, musical tones replied. “O, I grant you that some day the Kingdom of Heaven will have its place in the last chapter of Pendelbury's
Arithmetic,
but by that time mathematics and poetry will
be one, and the human race will have become a race of archangels.”

“But why drag in archangels?” Young Pennant's voice was querulous.

“Because, if I don't, you'll run away with the idea that the discovery will be made by silly little people like you and me. I can't consider the great unknown merely as
x
: for me it is—what shall I say?—an august mystery.”

“But does it make any difference what we call it?”

“All the difference in the world. Words have a prodigious power.”

“Not in science.”

“No, but in life, which is still something more than science.”

“But listen, Mrs. Dryden . . .”

Elsdon heard no more, for at that moment Cynthia Dryden came over to speak to his neighbour. “Edna, you'll play in the next set, won't you? And Roger. And who else?” She glanced round the company. “Roy,” she called to the actor, “you haven't played yet.”

“O, yes, he has,” said Norman. “He played the umpire—a pretty good performance, though perhaps just the least bit stagy.”

But Cynthia had moved on towards the blue girl. “Joan, you'll play again, won't you?”

Elsdon saw Eric dart a quick glance at Joan, as if hoping she would refuse, and a few minutes later he saw that Cynthia herself had joined the actor as
partner against Edna and Roger and that Eric and Joan were strolling away together. Norman—unwillingly, Elsdon thought—had become involved in a lively conversation with Daphne. He kept glancing at the retreating figures of Eric and Joan, but Daphne had collared him and wasn't going to give him a chance to escape. “Let's go round,” Elsdon heard her say, “to the other side of the court. We can watch much better from there.” At the other side of the court, he noted, they would be close to Roy. He recalled Roy's determined avoidance of Daphne before tea. Evidently some sort of silent struggle was going on between them, and the unfortunate Norman, who was longing to butt in between Eric and Joan, had been commandeered by Daphne as so much powder and shot. Did he realise it, Elsdon wondered, or did the frown that clouded his customary blandness imply no more than annoyance at the frustration of his own schemes? Yes, undoubtedly these young people were amusing to study, especially now that he had succeeded in identifying them all. Mrs. Dryden rose from her chair, saying that she was going in to write letters. “Dinner will be at eight,” she said. “I don't suppose these boys will dress, so you, George, must do as you feel inclined. Bob, I know, can't face dinner in anything but dressclothes.”