Venus Over Lannery Read online

  “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 myse
lf 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.”

  The Colonel barked a laugh. “The white man’s burden, my dear Emily; and doubly important among all these young savages! I may even be driven to a white tie.”

  Mrs. Dryden turned to Elsdon with a gesture of mock admiration. “There’s nothing Bob won’t do for the Old Country. Come and walk with me as far as the house, George.”

  They moved away together, leaving the Buxteds to watch the tennis. At the front door they separated, Emily Dryden to retreat to her study—she would have scorned to call her workroom a boudoir—and Elsdon to enjoy the respite of a solitary stroll in the garden. He paused at the bottom of the steps, considering which’ direction to take, but before he had made up his mind Mrs. Dryden’s car came round the corner of the house and stopped beside him. A short, thick-set man, bare-headed and dressed in black, got out, and Elsdon realised from the parson’s hat he carried in his hand that he must be the expected curate. The chauffeur carried his suit-case up the steps, but the curate, instead of following, turned to Elsdon. “How do you do? Is Mrs. Dryden in the garden?”

  “She has just this moment gone in,” explained Elsdon, “to write letters.”

  “Then I won’t disturb her,” said the curate. Elsdon found himself pleasantly impressed by the easy friendliness of his manner and also by his face. What particularly commended his face to Elsdon at that moment was its total lack of good looks. He positively thanked God for the fellow’s ugliness. “I was just going for a stroll in the garden,” he said. “Would you care to join me?”

  “Yes, I should like to,” said the curate, and Elsdon was soothed and reassured by that unadorned affirmative. “My name is Francis Todd,” he added, as they took the path that skirted the long flowerborder.

  Elsdon replied with his own name. “I’ve been trying to learn new names and fasten them on to new faces all afternoon,” he explained.

  Todd laughed. “I’m fairly good at that. You see, it’s part of my job: I come from a crowded parish in South London.”

  “In that case”—Elsdon made a gesture enveloping the whole bewildering party—“this will be mere child’s play to you.”

  “Absolutely,” said Todd; “especially as I know some of them already, I believe.”

  “It will even be a rest for you, no doubt. It’s strange that what is one man’s rest should be quite a formidable undertaking for another. Mind you, it’s not that I’m a misanthrope, but I’m unaccustomed to young people in the mass and I find it quite a problem to adapt myself.”

  “O, there I’m like you,” said Todd. “In fact, I’m incapable of adapting myself, and if I were to succeed I should be lost. But why should one try?”

  “Well, merely so as to get in touch,” said Elsdon. Todd was silent for a moment. “I don’t think you can get in touch with others,” he said at last, “by losing touch with yourself. After all, we’re in touch already, aren’t we; we all belong to the same civilisation.”

  “You don’t feel there’s any difference, for instance, between the young people here and your people in South London?”

  Todd shook his head. “No real difference. There are superficial differences, of course, such as a Cockney accent.”

  “And some difference in intelligence, surely?” “Not in real intelligence. There’s a difference in education and consequently a difference in the materials of intelligence, but not in the intelligence itself. At least,” he added, “I don’t notice any.”

  They had reached a garden-seat at a point where three paths met, and sat down by common consent. “Well, at least,” said Elsdon with a laugh, “I don’t feel I have to do any adapting in talking to you. Tell me, how long have you been in your South London parish?”

  “Six years,” said Todd.

  “Then isn’t it possible, if you’ll pardon the sugge
stion, that your—what shall I say?—your finer perceptions have, in self-defence, become blunted?”

  “It depends on what you mean by finer perceptions. What I should call my finer perceptions have been immensely sharpened. But I’ve ceased to shudder at stinks and dirt, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah,” said Elsdon, “then you have, after all, done some adapting.”

  “O, lots of it, to circumstances. But that’s simply a matter of the senses, isn’t it?”

  “And we were talking of human relations. Yes,” said Elsdon, “I quite see your distinction. At the same time, unless one has extraordinarily wide sympathies, I don’t see how, without adapting, one is to get in touch with all sorts and conditions.”

  “Perhaps you don’t want to,” said Todd. Elsdon laughed. “No, I rather believe that’s true.”

  “Then don’t. To adapt oneself minute by minute and person by person falsifies all human relations. The only hope of achieving any relation is to be completely one’s self.”

  “Ah,” said Elsdon, “isn’t that a counsel of perfection? I’m not sure I know what my self is. For each friend I’m aware that I have a slightly different self, a self tuned-in, as it were, to the particular friend. I don’t do it deliberately, nor, I think, am I guilty of hypocrisy to any of them. Even when I’m alone my self varies with my moods. Evidently you’re more stable than I am.”

  “I suspect it’s simply that I’m less aware of my self. I lead a very busy life: I don’t get time for introspection.”

  Elsdon sighed. “You speak as if introspection were an idle luxury. On the contrary, life sometimes forces it on you as a punishment, makes it a condition of your regaining your balance.”

  Todd noticed the undertone of bitterness in his companion’s voice. “Don’t imagine,” he said, “that I was boasting of my freedom from introspection. I only stated it as a fact, a condition of my present life.”

  Todd, Elsdon found, was looking at him with quick sympathy, and it seemed to him that he had never before seen a face, even the most beautiful, with an expression so honest and so warmly human. By comparison, Norman’s was a mere paper-lantern with no candle in it, Roy’s a mere poster advertising charm. Yes, he thought to himself again, thank God for an ugliness like this, with so much more real beauty than mere good looks. They resumed their walk and their talk and at last joined the others at the tennis-court.