Another Part of the Wood Page 3

  “But it was a mistake,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  “Got ’im proper,” said the crowd to each other, without listening to a word that she uttered. “That’ll larn ’im,” they said.

  So Noodles laughed, and was accompanied in triumph to the hired Ford, and drove away amidst cheering with her shabby trunk and her battered dressing-case and her stringed instrument and her hockey-stick and her umbrella and——

  “Oh, dash!” said Noodles.

  For she had gone and left her Going-Away-Prize in the train.

  Chapter II

  The state of Noodles’s brother’s heart—Miraculous encounter at a musical party—Sylvia’s photograph and a word of six letters—Silence of Snubs Tipton.

  1

  Beaky wrote and said that he was coming down for Easter, and would Noodles find out if Mr. Cottenham felt like having Snubs Tipton as well. So Noodles chose what she thought was a good moment, which was while Mr. Cottenham was on the way back to his study from the dining-room, and he stopped, and looked over his spectacles, and looked away again, and straightened one of the Piranesis on the passage wall, and sighed, and looked at Noodles, and muttered something about its having nothing to do with him, and paddled off to his books and papers. So then Noodles understood that it was all right about Snubs, and she wrote back to Beaky and said so. “Darling Beaky, I’m thankful you’re coming for your little holiday, and I’ve asked about Snubs and that will be absolutely [? all right]. I’m thankful you’re both coming, as it is awfully dull at present. Nothing has happened since I got here, and the village seems absolutely empty. They have had foot and mouth and everybody has gone away in disgust. I was hoping to play Tennis at Mrs. Shirley’s, but they have gone away too and won’t be back till May and then only for week-ends. Mind you bring some new Records when you come. With love from Noodles.”

  But three days later Beaky wrote back and said that he wasn’t coming at all, offering as a vague sort of excuse the statement that Snubs had got a lot of work at the office. Mr. Cottenham bore up wonderfully on hearing of this change of plan, observing as before that it had got nothing to do with him, and again melting away into his study. But Noodles wrote another letter beginning, “Darling Beaky, you are a beast and I hate you,” and ending in the first draft, “P.S. Rude messages to Snubs.”

  Later, a second postscript was added, making an urgent appeal for more gramophone records— “even old ones, or ones you are sick of”—but they didn’t come, and the correspondence proceeded no further. It would have been rather an exceptional outburst of penmanship on both sides if it had. Yet as a matter of fact Beaky had actually started making up a parcel of old records for Miss Ursula Brett, The Manor House, Pippingfold, on the day that he suddenly saw Miss Sylvia Shirley driving down Oxford Street in a taxicab. And from that moment poor Noodles was absolutely forgotten.

  For if Miss Sylvia Shirley were driving down Oxford Street in a taxicab, it meant that she was not abroad—as he had somehow gathered from Noodles’s first letter—but was in London. His heart beat with great violence as he reached this deduction, and he accidentally lit the cork end of his next cigarette. Something, thought Beaky, had got to be done about this; which was a development of a rather similar idea that had struck him on first meeting Miss Shirley down at Pippingfold at Christmas. He and she and Noodles—and somebody else, he afterwards supposed —had then played tennis on the hard court at Green Hatches, which Mrs. Shirley had just taken. In three days they had reached Christian names, or their equivalent in the case of the Bretts, and there things had stuck. Noodles had most tiresomely caught a cold, and he had funked going over to Green Hatches by himself. Then he had come back to Wykeham Street and the City, and then—well, he hadn’t exactly liked to call at Mrs. Shirley’s house in London, because she hadn’t exactly suggested it. And he hadn’t exactly liked to write to Sylvia, because there wasn’t exactly anything to write about. Besides, it was all so absolutely out of the question that it was honestly far better to keep one’s balance while one still had the chance.

  Sometimes this attitude seemed so cowardly and coldblooded that young Mr. Brett despised himself. At other times it seemed rather clever. But in either case the original impulse to do something about it all remained suspended through January, February and March. “There you are,” said Beaky to himself at intervals. “I’ve got over it. It wasn’t anything.” Still, why go down to Pippingfold at Easter, when it always rained, if Green Hatches was going to be shut up?

  “What do you say, Snubs? Shall we stay where we are?”

  Snubs, who in the circumstances could hardly say anything else, said that he didn’t mind what they did. He may or may not have muttered some polite exaggeration about his work, but it was enough for Beaky, who knew quite well that Mr. Cottenham wouldn’t mind either. As for Noodles—well, it could only have been three nights at the outside, even if Snubs hadn’t gone and cracked one of his pistons which meant travelling like sardines by train. Then came the vision in the taxicab, and everything else was forgotten.

  “Steady!” said Beaky to himself, and looked up Mrs. Shirley’s number in the telephone-directory. The accompanying address, in Dolphin Street, was another jolting reminder of his own inadequate income. There ought to be more one day, of course, and even a bit of capital if his guardian could be squared; but Dolphin Street, he couldn’t help feeling, might expect rather more than that.

  “I see, Mr. Brett. And what sort of settlement would you be prepared to make on my daughter?”

  Help! The telephone-directory was flung back on the floor, and young Mr. Brett made a powerful effort to recover the equilibrium of January, February and March. How successful he was may be gathered from the fact that the following Sunday afternoon found him wandering through Dolphin Street, more or less disguised by an umbrella pulled tightly against the crown of his hat. From this moving ambush he observed, to his horror, that the blinds of Mrs. Shirley’s house were down and the shutters were closed. They were away. They were abroad, perhaps. Or even in America or India.

  Supposing he rang the bell, and asked.

  At this moment a dark stranger suddenly forced his way past him, and disappeared down the area steps. Too late Mr. Brett recognised Mrs. Shirley’s butler, with whom he had had some dealings at Christmas, and forgetting how completely he was screened by the umbrella and the rain and the Sunday afternoon twilight, he ran away in blind panic and only stopped because he was nearly run over by a bicyclist.

  “Oh, well,” he said to himself, “if they’re really abroad, there isn’t the faintest use doing anything. I expect the next thing I’ll hear is that she’s engaged to somebody, and that’ll settle it.”

  This ignoble mood even brought a certain amount of ignoble comfort—though it was a fitful sort of business which continued to alternate with a great deal of equally unfounded hope and despair. But any expectation of working his way back to the status quo was shattered by the innocent agency of Snubs Tipton.

  “Look here,” said Snubs, later in the week; “I’ve got to go, because the Framlinghams are friends of my people, and this is the fourth time they’ve asked me. I’ve no doubt it’ll be perfectly frightful, because it says ‘Music’ in the corner of the card, and we all know what that means. But if you’ve got the decency of a louse, you’ll come too. After all, I mean, it was dashed kind of them to ask you.”

  Beaky’s own opinion was that it was dashed unnecessary, seeing that the Framlinghams had never met him, and knew nothing about him except that he shared digs with the son of their old friends. He said something to this effect, and was about to add that he had never laid claim to decency in any shape or form, when he suddenly realised that if he were left alone that evening he would probably hang himself.

  “All right,” he said, magnanimously. “If your governor will go off and govern a lot of black men, I suppose you’ve got to face it. I’ll come.”

  “Thanks,” said Snubs.

  “But,�
� said Beaky, fiercely, “if you leave me alone once we’ve got there——”

  “Oh, I won’t do that. I shan’t know a soul.”

  “Music!” said Beaky, witheringly. “My boot!”

  So after dinner they both dressed up in clean shirts and white ties, and walked along till they came to the Framlinghams’ strip of red carpet, and threw their cigarettes into the gutter, and marched up the steps, and gave their hats and coats to a white-haired hireling with his mouth full of pins, and pulled down the fronts of their waistcoats, and removed all vestige of expression from their features, and started climbing the long stairs on tip-toe because the people at the top were all whispering, which was their tribute to the string quartette that was wailing in the crowded drawing-room.

  “This is all right,” said Beaky, in a low voice. “We shan’t be able to get in.”

  “Must,” muttered Snubs. “No good coming if they never see us.”

  “Go on, then,” said Beaky, out of the side of his mouth.

  The landing was covered with late arrivals, who showed how little they minded their position by instantly making a sort of lane for the party from Wykeham Street. “Go on!” they whispered, unselfishly. At the end of the lane an enormous quantity of men and women were sitting, packed very closely together, on little gilt chairs. Most of them were suffering acutely. The lights were far too bright, the chairs far too small, the string quartette far, far too industrious. The only. consolation in their cup was that nobody expects you to look anything but careworn and dismal during a programme of classical chamber-music—except, of course, after one of those very short encores, when the correct procedure is to titter insanely. The majority of victims clutched at little printed sheets of paper, which they kept folding and unfolding in the faint hope, apparently, that this process might have caused one or more of the items to disappear. They thought with sorrow of their past, present and future lives, and took violent dislikes to the backs of the people just in front of them. When the string quartette played gently, you heard their clothes creaking. When it played loudly, there was an immediate outburst of suspended coughing. Did one clap now, or was that only the end of another movement? If you clapped at the end of a movement, you were a cad. The string quartette frowned whenever this happened.

  Lady Framlingham sat uneasily on a little gilt chair of her own just inside the doorway. Occasionally she tapped her foot or waved her large ostrich-feather fan or tittered insanely, so as to show that she was listening to the very expensive music—which she would really have enjoyed, poor woman, if she could only have forgotten her responsibilities; but her eyes roved perpetually out on to the landing, beckoning to the guests who were rash enough to come within range, summoning them over the threshold, and directing them to pass on round the corner, where she was under the mistaken impression that there were still a few vacant seats. The doomed guests bowed, waggled their eyebrows at her, smiled in a horrible rictus, and sidled right into the trap—a cul-de-sac crammed and jammed with human beings on their hind legs, and no hope of escape until the string quartette had done its worst. The applause from this quarter of the room was extremely perfunctory, while the atmosphere was strongly reminiscent of the Black Hole of Calcutta. A fact not generally known, but perhaps worth mentioning, was that Sir Herbert Framlingham himself was concealed somewhere in this part of the crowd. There seems no reason to believe that he was enjoying himself.

  So Snubs’s fate was more or less sealed. He bowed and smiled at his hostess, and she laid a finger on her lips and smiled back at him. And then she jerked her head in such a manner as to compel him onwards and round the corner, and he called to mind the undoubted truth that he had missed three of these parties and that he was answerable for the honour of his parents, who were nearly four thousand miles away, and that it would all be over in another hour or so at the outside; and he wedged and insinuated himself into the throng, and let the string quartette interrupt his thoughts as little as possible while he played an imaginary game of golf on a mixture of several well-known courses. For Snubs was a philosopher, and had infinite resources in his own peculiar mind.

  But Beaky had a most extraordinary piece of luck. There he was, hot on his companion’s heels in the doorway, all ready to twist his features into the most dreadful, silent grin and to be sucked forward into the congested vacuum of the back drawing-room, when suddenly he felt a gentle tug at one of the tails of his dress-coat, and at the same instant a voice murmured the significant word “Hullo.”

  He shot into reverse, so abruptly as to fling another gentleman right into Lady Framlingham’s net. He sidestepped. He gasped.

  It was Sylvia. She was making that sort of face with her mouth—the description is Beaky’s, and not ours—which had fascinated him last Christmas and now fascinated him again.

  “Hull—o!” he whispered, beaming all over. “I say——”

  “Sh!”

  “What?”

  Sylvia made another, and equally fascinating, face with her eyes.

  “Let’s come,” said Beaky, translating the message and repeating it as one of his own.

  “Where?” said Sylvia, beginning to come.

  “Downstairs,” said Beaky, edging further and further away from the perilous doorway. “Let’s—let’s——”

  “Oh, but we can’t,” said Sylvia, as she followed him. “We mustn’t be rude.”

  “I saw you the other day,” said Beaky, pausing for a moment in his descent.

  “Oh, where?”

  Marvellous girl! He’d forgotten that expression of eager interest, but it was even more fascinating than the others. And the slight huskiness of the voice. It made him blink, and catch at the banisters.

  “In a taxi,” he said. “In Oxford Street. In a blue hat.”

  “Yes,” said the husky voice. “That was me. But I never saw you.”

  “Oh, of course not. I say, is your mother here?”

  “Yes. Upstairs. I ought to be with her really.”

  “Oh, no. I say, I never knew you were in London.”

  “Oh, yes. I say, how’s your sister?”

  “Noodles? She’s down at Pippingfold. She’s left school, you know.”

  “Oh, what fun!”

  “I say, shall we come in here?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Dining-room, I should say. I say, will you have a sandwich or something?”

  “Oh, no. We mustn’t start eating by ourselves.”

  (“We,” thought Beaky. “Ourselves.” Gosh!)

  “I say,” he said, aloud. “I nearly called on you the other day.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you?”

  “Well, I didn’t know—I mean, I thought— Well, ’s a matter of fact, the house seemed to be shut up.”

  “When?”

  “On Sunday.”

  “Oh, of course it was. We were in Norfolk.”

  Beaky immediately experienced a violent spasm of jealous loathing for the whole of this large county, which caused him to gulp and clench his teeth.

  “What?” said Miss Shirley.

  “Nothing. I say, shall we sit down somewhere? Here, I mean?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be rather rude? I mean, oughtn’t we to try and go upstairs?”

  “I don’t see why. The room’s bursting already. Besides——”

  “Oh, do tell me!”

  “I can’t stand that sort of music. Can you?”

  (Oh, Lord! What if he’d gone too far? What if she liked it?)

  “I think it’s absolutely foul,” said Miss Shirley, with great emphasis, and the most fascinating face of all. “But I adore the other kind.”

  “The ordinary kind, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Miss Shirley began to dance; slowly; then more quickly; then like an inspired marionette.

  “I say,” said Beaky. “That’s rather good. What was that last bit?”

  Miss Shirley did it again.

  “By Jove!” said Beaky, attempti
ng to imitate her.

  “No, no. More like this.”

  “Oh, I see. Like that?”

  “Yes.”

  They were both dancing—opposite each other, and at a distance of about six feet—when the white-haired hireling looked in at the door, and they stopped.

  “I ought to go upstairs, really,” said Sylvia.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” said Beaky. “They’ll all be coming down in a minute.”

  “Will they?”

  “Sure to be. I say, when are you going down to Pippingfold again?”

  “Well, not just yet. Mummie’s having it altered, you know. It’s full of builders.”

  “Why, what was wrong with it?”

  “Oh, nothing. But Mummie always does that, and as soon as she’s done it, she always goes somewhere else. It amuses her.”

  And what better reason could there be? But it didn’t amuse young Mr. Brett.

  “I say,” he gasped. “You don’t mean you’ll be leaving again?”

  “Bound to,” said Sylvia. “Sooner or later. Mummie never stays anywhere.”

  “Oh, I say …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I say, do you suppose she’d have a fit if I did come and call one day? In London, I mean?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Miss Shirley, showing no surprise at this rather remarkable question. “Why don’t you?”

  “By Jove!” said Beaky.

  “Here they all come,” said Miss Shirley.

  And here they all came—roaring down the stairs, and ravenous after the strain of the string quartette. A horrible noise they made, and very bad at getting out of each other’s way they were, but before you knew where you were they were all shouting and munching and shoving and turning the dining-room into a second Black Hole. Their laughter was perhaps the most nauseating sound of all. Beaky was still craning his neck to see what on earth had happened to Miss Shirley, when he suddenly found himself face to face with Snubs.