The Meadows of the Moon E-Book

James Hilton

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

At twilight a train from London deposited a man and a little girl at Patchley station. The man was grey-haired, though tall and of soldierly bearing, and the little girl was so tired that she could hardly drag one foot after the other. In the station-yard a pair-horse landau waited, and the coachman, as soon as he saw the couple, stepped down from his perch, touched his cap, and said: “Excuse me, sir, but are you Mr. Cordeiro?”
The other answered him in perfect English, but with a slight foreign accent. “That is my name. You are from Sky Peals, I presume?”
“Yes, sir. Will you kindly step inside?”

Leseprobe

THE MEADOWS

OF THE MOON

BY

JAMES HILTON

1927

© 2022 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383835288

CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter One: MICHAEL

Chapter Two: JOHN

Chapter Three: PETER

Chapter Four: PETER AND MICHAEL

Chapter Five: MICHAEL AND FRAN

Chapter Six: FRAN AND JOHN

THE MEADOWS OF THE MOON

PROLOGUE

1

At twilight a train from London deposited a man and a little girl at Patchley station. The man was grey-haired, though tall and of soldierly bearing, and the little girl was so tired that she could hardly drag one foot after the other. In the station-yard a pair-horse landau waited, and the coachman, as soon as he saw the couple, stepped down from his perch, touched his cap, and said: “Excuse me, sir, but are you Mr. Cordeiro?”

The other answered him in perfect English, but with a slight foreign accent. “That is my name. You are from Sky Peals, I presume?”

“Yes, sir. Will you kindly step inside?”

The stranger picked up the little girl in his arms and clambered into the landau. The coachman jerked the reins, and the horses clattered noisily through the narrow and tortuous Patchley High Street, putting on extra pace when at last they reached the open road through the countryside. Meanwhile, the twilight sank into darkness, and night had completely fallen when the horses stopped at a cottage set back from the road and adjoining a pair of huge and elaborate wrought-iron gates.

Here the coachman dismounted. “The house is a short walk through the meadows, sir,” he said, pointing through the intricate pattern of the gate.

Mr. Cordeiro seemed puzzled. “But surely—” he began, as if inclined to protest, and then he said quietly: “Cannot you drive us right up to the house? I and my grand-daughter have come a long journey, and we are both very tired.”

“Sorry, sir—sorry indeed—but this is as far as there’s any road. There’s only a footpath through the meadows. The lodge-keeper will show you the way.”

And at this point the lodge-keeper appeared out of his house and began to unfasten the massive gates. Mr. Cordeiro said no more, but helped the child out of the landau and followed the keeper in silence into the meadows beyond.

The night was pitch-black, with neither starlight nor moonlight, for with sunset had come thick banks of cloud that covered the whole sky. Only a dimly reddish tint over the western horizon showed where London lay. The walk was uphill, and Mr. Cordeiro carried the girl in his arms, until after a short distance the keeper, a finely-built young fellow, asked if he should carry “little missy” himself. The other agreed, remarking upon the length and steepness of the walk.

“That’s so,” answered the keeper. “It’s full ten minutes up to the house, and a long ten minutes in winter time and bad weather. It was old Mr. Savage that wouldn’t have any road built—he was so proud of these meadows he wanted everybody coming up to the house to have to walk through ’em. When he was gettin’ old, I had to wheel him all along of here in a Bath chair. Every day, that was, and any weather. . . .”

“There ought to be a road,” said Mr. Cordeiro vaguely.

“Some of us hope there will be, sir,” replied the other, “when the estate comes into younger hands. But Mrs. Savage isn’t one to have things altered.”

He broke off, as if aware that he had said enough. The rest of the walk was in silence.

2

Fifteen minutes later Mr. Cordeiro was standing in the library of Sky Peals, with his back to the huge empty fire-grate and his eyes employed in quiet, methodical observation. The girl was lying curled up in one of the leather-backed armchairs, fast asleep. All around the long and spacious room were shelves of volumes—several thousands of them, and more than half in a uniform binding of dark brown leather. In a further corner browsed a sleek grand piano, and in another there stood a vast mahogany pedestal-desk littered with papers. There were no pictures in the room except one over the fire-place of a fierce-looking side-whiskered man with black and sparkling eyes. A gilt tablet proclaimed him to be “John Savage.”

A door opened at the far end of the room, and a woman entered, dressed as for dinner. She was, Mr. Cordeiro estimated, in her early thirties, and he was surprised, for he had expected somebody rather older. As she came beneath the sombre glow of the chandelier he noticed that she was very beautiful, with the hard clear English beauty that was so different from the types more familiar to him.

“Mrs. Savage?” he exclaimed.

She nodded. “And you are Mr. Cordeiro?” She offered her hand, and with a courtly gesture he bent over it and touched the tips of her fingers with his lips. She had expected him to shake hands merely, and the unlooked-for gallantry surprised her.

“I was wondering what time you would arrive,” she said quietly, conquering her slight confusion. Then she saw the child. She stepped towards the chair, and then, observing the child to be asleep, checked herself. “Fran, I suppose?” she whispered, softly.

Mr. Cordeiro nodded. “Yes. . . . She is very tired after the journey. We landed in Glasgow early this morning and have been travelling all the while since.”

Mrs. Savage stepped to the wall by the side of the fire-place and touched a bell. “If she is so tired she shall go to bed immediately. It will be best for her. Michael is already in bed, but my elder son—John—stays up to dinner now—he is just ten years old. . . . By the way, you will join us at dinner?”

“If you will excuse my clothes, I will be delighted.”

“Oh, there will only be the three of us. We have very little company. It is a pity you cannot stay for a few days, but I suppose you are far too busy, as you said in your letter.”

“I am afraid so. I am due in Paris to-morrow evening.”

“Yes . . . yes. . . .”

She seemed hardly to be listening to him; her eyes were on the sleeping child. And at that moment the child stirred and moved her face so that the light fell upon it.

“She is pretty,” said Mr. Cordeiro, softly.

Not till the child turned her head sleepily back again did Mrs. Savage answer. Then she said slowly, and with curious intensity of utterance: “I—I—had no idea—she could be—so—so—like her father.”

3

They dined sombrely in the panelled room that was somehow mellow with age and memory. Mr. Cordeiro was introduced to the boy John, and noted with approval his quiet, forceful courtesy. There was something, after all, in the English bringing-up, something that, perhaps, no other nation quite achieved—some subtle paradox of deferential independence. As a student of racial characteristics, Mr. Cordeiro found himself interested in John.

But after dinner John shook hands and disappeared, leaving his mother to talk with the stranger alone. She led the latter into the library again, and offered him port and cigars. “If you don’t feel too tired to tell me,” she said, “I should like to know a few details. . . . Your letter was very short.”

He sipped his wine and nodded gravely. “I thought perhaps you might read about it in the English newspapers. . . . We were travelling down the coast from Guayaquil and ran into a storm. The boat was old and nearly worn-out—it simply crumpled under the heavy seas. There was hardly time to get out any of the small boats. . . . Fran and her mother were in the first one that could be launched. I never believed they would be rescued—the seas were so high. Peter and I stood in the saloon, waiting for the boat to heel over and finish us. It was then that he mentioned you. He said—‘If by any chance you and Fran should be saved out of the four of us, take her to—’ and then he gave me your name and address. He wrote it out on part of a cigarette-packet.”

“He was quite calm?”

“Yes—the calmest on board. Some of the others were screaming like devils. . . . Then an officer came into the saloon and told us to get into one of the boats. We went on deck, and all I remember is being wedged and jostled in a dreadful crowd and finally put into a boat. I tried to keep with Peter, but I couldn’t. I fancy he edged out of the crowd and went back to the saloon.”

“When at last we were picked up I found my daughter and Fran again. But my daughter caught a chill from the exposure and died before we reached Callao. Thus—” he shrugged his shoulders slightly—“the contingency that Peter foreshadowed had arisen, and so——”

She said, calmly and almost conventionally: “It was very good of you to come.”

He shook his head. “Not at all. As it happened, I had to make a business journey to Europe about this time. And besides, after the tragedy I was—rather—relieved—to know what to do with—with Fran. I live a lonely life—especially now—and—and—well—Ecuador is no place for a young English girl.”

“English—on one side.” It was as if she were uttering her thoughts.

“And Peruvian-Spanish on the other,” he rejoined, with a slight smile. “An excellent combination, I assure you.”

She filled up his glass and he saw then that her hand was trembling. Suddenly she said: “Mr. Cordeiro, have you any idea—any idea at all—why your son-in-law asked you to bring—Fran—to me?”

“You and he had been great friends at one time—that was all I assumed.”

“But didn’t you wonder?”

He gave her a smile almost oriental in its imperturbability. “What one wonders, Mrs. Savage, is not always what one dares to ask.”

“Did Peter know that my husband was dead?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. “That I cannot say. We had no time to discuss matters. Peter was not—communicative. . . .” He went on, more easily: “I am overjoyed to think that Fran will live here in your beautiful English home. Of course there will be money enough to pay for everything—I shall arrange all that. . . . I am not a poor man. . . . It is hard to leave her, but for her—for her—it is so much the best, is it not?” He waved his hand vaguely across the room. “I must look forward to seeing my grand-daughter again in perhaps four—five—or six—years—when I visit Europe again.”

She said, as if reckoning it out to herself: “Fran will be twelve then. And John will be quite a young man. . . . Just think. . . .”

But he did not think. Or perhaps to him there was nothing to think of. And after a very short and desultory conversation he was reminding her of his train at Patchley.

She rose and pressed the bell. “You must not miss your train, although it is a pity you could not have stayed. . . . The landau will be waiting for you at the lodge, but don’t forget that it is a few minutes’ walk from here.”

“Through your meadows,” he remarked. “Your meadows which everyone must pass.”

Her reply startled him by its sudden wistfulness. “How did you know that? Who told you? Was it Peter?”

“No . . . only the man at the lodge who showed me the way.”

In the hall, as he stooped again over her proffered hand, she said: “Fran had better take your name, Mr. Cordeiro. It will make everything—simpler. Fran Cordeiro . . . you understand——”

“I understand perfectly,” he interrupted.

She looked at him then—the last time, as a matter of fact, that she ever looked at him, and she wondered if the signal achievement of his life had really been to understand perfectly, or only to pretend that he did.

The servant was waiting to conduct him to the lodge, and with a final bow he left her and went away.

4

And meanwhile Fran slept. Her room was in the corner tower, facing the east and next to the nursery, and when she woke up in the morning the sunlight was pouring in like a great flood, making her blink her dark brown eyes bewilderedly as she gazed round on the unfamiliar scene. Then Miss Grimshaw, Michael’s governess, came in to dress her and administer a preliminary glass of hot milk. And as Fran took the glass into her hands Miss Grimshaw exclaimed, in a voice like the bark of a very small dog: “What do you say?”

Fran, tired and astonished in the presence of so much concentrated strangeness, stared dumbly. “Come, come,” reiterated Miss Grimshaw, barking more shrilly,—“WHAT DO YOU SAY?” And Fran, after profound and exhaustive self-examination, replied, softly: “I say what I like.”

Not till the dressing and admonitions were over was she permitted to stand by the sun-bathed window and look down. Then at last she saw the meadows as she would never afterwards forget them—rolling uphill and downhill into the farthest distance, spattered with daisies and buttercups, and mightily ablaze with the sunlight of a perfect June morning.

CHAPTER ONE

MICHAEL

1

Miss Grimshaw, or Grimmy as they called her, looked after Fran and Michael with prim and occasionally irascible vigilance. She taught them, amongst other things, Deportment, the “Parts of Speech,” the list of the English Sovereigns (with dates), and how to “line in” drawings that had previously been smudgily traced. John, of course, had long before finished with his share of Grimmy; he was in the Fifth Remove at Wellborough, and only at home during vacations. And Mrs. Savage, his mother and Michael’s, was in Fran’s eyes a benign goddess who came occasionally into the schoolroom and smiled.

She far more often smiled than spoke, and she had a lovely smile. It was a loveliness that was half sad. Once when Fran, copying Michael, called her “mother,” she said, with this lovely sad smile: “You mustn’t call me that, Fran. You see, I’m not your mother.”

Fran wanted to be helpful. “Then what shall I call you? Doesn’t anybody call you anything?”

And the answer came, as sadly as the smile: “You can call me—Nan—if you like.”

“Nan?—Nan!” The name was sampled, considered, and approved. “Oh, Nan’s a lovely name. . . . Isn’t it, Micky?” (The appeal to him was inevitable.)

All he deigned to reply was a stout asseveration: “I’m going to call you ‘Nan,’ too, if Fran does.”

And so it happened that they called her Nan, both of them, and that they always spoke of her as Nan. When John came home he was inclined to be superior about it. “ ‘Nan’—and ‘Fran’—” he echoed, with faint disparagement. “Seems to me rather a muddle. . . . Anyway, I shall go on calling her ‘mother.’ ”

To which Michael rejoined: “Yes, you do, John. Then she’ll always know which of us it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t have any real names at all, and you just had to call them what you liked?”

“Sort of idea you would have,” replied John.

2

John was quiet, good-looking in a rather homely way, and (so it seemed during those early years) of pleasantly average intelligence. He just failed to take his London Matriculation, but, on the other hand, he was very successful as a prefect (and afterwards, as head-prefect) at Wellborough. During vacations he used to spend a great deal of his time at the Bermondsey tannery whence the fortunes of the Savage family derived. To Fran and Michael he was rather like his mother—a vague abstraction, drifting in on their lives from time to time and making no real difference. He gave them occasional orders which they had to obey, but that was all.

Michael was almost his complete opposite. Michael was not so much good-looking as wonderful-looking; he had dark brown eyes of such intense brightness that they seemed to be actually consuming him from within; his eyes and his straggling, always intractable hair made him look almost ethereal. Yet, save for certain moods of unearthly shyness, he had quite a boyish supply of noise and laughter. Enthusiasms for one thing or another broke over him in constantly recurring waves; he was perpetually on fire with what John called “the sort of ideas he would have.”

Physically, he was inclined to be weak; at the age of twelve he was given a thorough examination by Myles, the family doctor, and pronounced unfit for the rigours of Wellborough life. “Keep him at home,” was Myles’ advice to Mrs. Savage. “Let him idle as much as he wants—the more the better. His brain’s precociously developed. . . . Perhaps, later on, he’ll be ready for the university. . . . He’ll burn up to nothing, if he’s not careful. I’ve seen these infant prodigies before—they’re marvellous in their teens, but when they reach their twenties they just go—phit—like a worn-out balloon. . . .”

Of John, Myles said, painting very vaguely a contrast: “He may seem slow, perhaps, but don’t worry. He’s got a good brain, and it’s expanding. Don’t think any less of him because he hasn’t got Michael’s fireworks.”

So while John pursued his solidly respectable career at Wellborough, Michael stayed at Sky Peals, doing almost exactly what he liked. And what he liked happened always to be what Fran liked as well.

3

The two were inseparables. They went about together everywhere, did everything together; John and Nan were curious outsiders in their world. Especially Nan. “She seems almost frightened of us,” Fran said once, and Michael replied: “She seems frightened of everything and everybody. She’s frightened of John—and even of Manning and the servants. In fact, I believe she’s frightened to be alive.”

John left Wellborough at the age of eighteen and, disdaining the university, came home to work at the Bermondsey tannery. He worked very hard and steadily, and all the time Michael was “idling.” But the “idling” was feverishly active; it consisted in a never-ceasing procession of occupations. At any time the outside observer might have decided that it was Michael who was working hard, and John who was pursuing an easy humdrum existence.

There was hardly anything that Michael did not do, or try to do, to some extent, or at some time or another. (The qualifications are all very necessary.) He wrote verses (which were occasionally accepted, and still more occasionally paid for, by magazines and periodicals); he wrote short stories (which were always too weird and breathless to have any commercial value); he began (but never had the patience to finish) innumerable novels and plays. He painted a little, played the piano with brilliant inaccuracy, tried to play the violin and the ’cello; was a good singer and a tolerably good amateur actor; dabbled in heraldry and astrology and physical culture and spiritualism and telepathy and “eurhythmics”; and had extraordinary theories about almost every conceivable thing, from the correct way of making coffee to the authorship of Wuthering Heights. And also, constantly, and violently, he fell in love.

4

He went up to Oxford when he was eighteen. Fran was lonely at Sky Peals without him; she did not know what to do with her time. John wanted her to come to the tannery and take up a business career, but the prospect did not attract her; she preferred, in the end, to attach herself to a women’s college in London and take courses in history and economics. About this time also there came news that her grandfather, Alvarez Cordeiro, had died in Peru, and had left her all he had—amounting in value to between ten and fifteen thousand pounds.

She saw Michael only during vacations and at the occasional week-ends when she visited him in Oxford during term-time. She found him there the centre of a literary and artistic coterie whose chief occupation seemed to be mutual admiration and the talking of vast quantities of semi-brilliant nonsense. Michael held his own with ease in such society, for semi-brilliant nonsense came to his lips (and always had come) from an apparently quenchless spring within. She never liked him very much during those week-ends at Oxford. She always felt: These other people make him silly. . . . She was certain, at all events, that they were making him waste his time and neglect even the most obligatory of studies.

And yet she knew, secretly, that she did like him. She never had doubts, but she often had difficulties. Always, for instance, when she met him first after an absence (whether at Oxford or at Sky Peals) her immediate thought was: “What did I see in you, Micky, that used to make me like you so much?” And then, an hour or a day or a week afterwards, when they were alone together at some odd moment, she would suddenly feel, with a curious inside comfort, “Ah, that, Micky, that’s what I like you for.” And that, the essence of him, was elusive and unanalyzable. All she could discern was that it was something rather childlike.

Everybody at Oxford seemed to think that a brilliant “First” would fall to him as a matter of course. It came, therefore, as a shock when he failed altogether in his final examinations.

5

He did not tell her till they were half-way home on that bright June morning. She had been staying with friends in London for several weeks, and on her return he met her at the station in the two-seater car. There was a drive now, leading right up to the house, but he preferred to leave the car at the lodge and walk over the meadows.

For the meadows were lovely in June. They heaped up like billows, and there was one place where nothing could be seen except the green waves of this inland sea, crested with buttercups and swelling against the horizon in wide-sweeping arcs. This was the spot where they had so often played together as children, where they had hidden amongst the long grasses, and where, when Miss Grimshaw had at last found them, she had always exclaimed: “Well, I declare!”

And here Fran looked at Michael. She saw him first of all as a stranger, and then, gradually, as a strange man hiding a boy. Somehow, although she had seen him intermittently during his college years, she had never realized till now that he had been growing older. The years had been like elastic, pulled more and more tightly, yet all the time linking them to boyhood and girlhood; but now, all at once, the elastic had snapped and they were man and woman.

She knew, long before he told her, that he had failed in his examinations. But she let him announce and explain. “It was awfully bad luck,” he said, without seeming especially perturbed. “You know, Fran, I’m not the examination sort . . . never could be. Things like that aren’t in my line. Pity, though, because it’s just happened at the wrong moment.”

She made no comment, knowing that he would explain further.

He went on, dreamily: “Fran, there’s going to be a first-class row at home.”

“Because you’ve failed?”

“Partly that. . . . And also about other things.”

“What other things?”

He said, with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders: “Money.”

“Money?” She was surprised. “But, Micky, that’s the last thing there ought to be a row about. We’ve got all the money we want. I’m sure Nan’s been very generous to me—always—and to you as well. And John——”

“Ah, John——” he echoed. Then came explanation in a fierce torrent. Apparently he had overspent during the past term at Oxford. Not that he had been at all extravagant—his biggest bills had been for books. John, however, had refused to allow him more than four hundred a year. Four hundred a year wasn’t really enough to keep mind and soul together (he loved his little epigram). Nan had let him spend what he liked up to then, and it hadn’t been much more than five hundred. But John had lately taken command of finances, had gone mad about economies, had already sacked half the servants and sold the stables. “We’ve both of us been away, Fran, and we haven’t noticed what’s been happening. John’s lord of creation now. He’s been playing for it for years, all the time you’ve been at Kensington and I’ve been at Oxford. No wonder he chose the works instead of the ’Varsity. . . . Poor old Nan—it’s no use going to her now—all she can say is: ‘John thinks this.’ ‘John would rather that.’ ‘I must ask John.’ Oh, it’s all sickening, damnable. . . . I believe I hate him so much—so much that I almost—respect him.”

The house lay ahead of them, nestling in the dark green fold of a hill; it seemed never so beautiful as at morning, when the sunlight kindled its old red brick to the colour of flame. As they approached, Fran remarked upon the scaffolding against the first-floor windows.

“That’s what he’s been doing with the money he’s saved,” said Michael, bitterly. “Pulling down the old wooden verandah—going to have an iron one instead—like a fire-escape. . . . That’s just like him, isn’t it?”

She had been perhaps dimly aware of the gradual transference of control from Nan to John. She had thought it natural enough, since John was growing older; it had certainly aroused no antagonism in her, hardly concern even. It had not seemed to affect her personally at all, for she spent most of her time in Kensington. It was Michael’s burning and impetuous protest that brought to her the first touch of apprehension.

She spent most of the day working in her own upstairs study, while Michael dashed off in the car to Patchley on some business or other. She might have accompanied him, but she did not trouble. As always, on meeting him after a longish absence, she wondered whether she really liked him a great deal or not.

Towards six in the evening she heard the sound of a car coming up the new drive; she went out on to the landing to look, but the workmen were at the main window, and the only other was the mullion window at the end, with its stained glass through which the evening sun was pouring rivers of molten red and blue. She looked through the red and saw a red John stepping from a red car with a red dust-coat on his arm. Then she stood on tiptoe and saw a blue John saying something to a blue chauffeur and walking across a blue courtyard.

John, untransfigured by stained glass, was less exciting. She met him later at the dinner-table, and as usual he was quietly polite. There was nothing noisy or blatant about him. He was not the Napoleonic type; his face, shrewd and perhaps forceful, was almost humdrum in certain lights. She studied his appearance with a new and closer interest; it was hard indeed to cast him for the rôle of tyrant.

He talked quietly about his day’s work at the tannery, and Nan approved and echoed everything he said. Michael’s failure, though obviously known, was not of course mentioned at all. After the coffee Michael went off on some errand of his own, and the others lingered talking for a while, but without saying anything of the least importance. Then John suggested that he should take Fran to inspect the new garages, and she agreed, because she could not very well refuse.

They went through the conservatories, and all the time she was half-wishing it had been Michael and not John who had commandeered her. John, however, was quite interesting in his own way; he was talking of the numerous improvements he was having made—a window here, an extra room there, and so on. “Quite recently,” he remarked, “when I came to look into the affairs of the house, I found them seriously rotten—structurally as well as financially. The bedroom verandahs, for instance, were all but falling down—eaten away by ants. The ants won’t eat the metal ones I’m having put up. . . . And as for the financial side of things, I decided there was nothing for it but a good straightforward row, once and for all.” He added, with a slight smile: “So I had the row—it was while you were away, about a fortnight ago—and as a result five of the staff have left. I discovered, for example, that the village grocer had been giving the servants tips—practically bribes—for them to be wasteful with things like soap and polishes. . . . Of course that had to stop. We don’t buy in the village now.”

He went on, after a pause: “I’ve been wanting to have a talk about this with you for some time, but you’ve been away so much. . . . And there’s the tannery as well. When I first began working there I made it my business to find out all I could about every section of the work. The result is that now, when I’m coming more or less into control, I know just what wants doing . . . and what I’m going to do. To be quite frank, there needs to be a reorganization from top to bottom—and a weeding-out of abuses. There’s been slackness of all kinds, and even corruption. . . . Machinery, too, wants over-hauling and modernizing. All that’s bound to cost money. But it’s got to be done, just as those verandahs had got to be renewed.”

“Well?” She wondered where all this was leading.

He said: “We’ve got to do the things that need to be done, and therefore we’ve got to economize in the things that needn’t be done. You see?”

She smiled faintly. She certainly saw, and to show him the completeness of her vision, she replied calmly: “Micky has just been telling me about one of your economies—a cut in his college allowance.”

He seemed by no means displeased that she had broached the matter so directly. “Michael is extravagant,” he said. “I made careful inquiries, and I came to the conclusion that four hundred is ample. . . . If he finds it impossible, he must come away and earn his own living.”

“But it’s chiefly books that account for his overspending, isn’t it? And books are hardly extravagance, are they?”

“Books?” He uttered the word with care. “Yes, it’s chiefly books, I’ll admit. Perhaps you’d like to see the books. They’re all in my room.”

“Your room?” she echoed, and he rejoined:

“Yes, my room. Let’s go and see them.”

He led the way rapidly back through the conservatories and into the house, then across the library into a room at the farther end which overlooked the prettiest corner of the gardens. She followed him rather bewilderedly. “You’ll be interested in his selections,” he remarked, as he closed the door behind him. “There they are,” he added, pointing to a glass-fronted case. “I put them in there because they’re obviously too good for my common old shelves.”

They were certainly the acquirements of a person of taste. A fine leather-bound edition of Walter Pater and the entire set of the Wessex Hardy were conspicuous features, but the single volumes were no less elegant. Adlington’s Apuleius, a sumptuously-bound Cervantes, Florio’s Montaigne, the plays of Cyril Tourneur—truly the choice of a collector whose tastes were both rich and catholic.

“This,” said John, picking up a slim quarto volume bound in delicate Italian leather, “is William Byrd’s Breviary of Health, printed in 1552. On the bill it is marked at five pounds.”

“But—but how did you get hold of all these?” Fran asked.

“I just wrote to Michael’s scout to send them here,” replied John, replacing William Byrd on the shelf. “When Michael couldn’t pay his bills out of his allowance I naturally asked to see them, and when I saw one for fifty pounds’ worth of books I thought it would be interesting to see what the books were. Incidentally, I had them valued by a London expert, and I find they’re worth twenty pounds at most. Your Oxford bookseller is evidently a shrewd judge of character. At present I’m negotiating with him to take back the lot for the purchase price less ten per cent.”

“Does Micky know all this?”

“Certainly not. He didn’t tell me when he bought them. Why should I tell him when I sell them?”

“But—they’re his books.”

“If he can pay for them himself—certainly. Not otherwise.”

6

She went early to her room that night, pleading tiredness. But it was not to sleep. The night was warm, and she took a wicker-chair close to the open window and read some of her notes on economic history—the subject in which she had specialized at college. But they did not hold her attention at all keenly, perhaps because of the many interruptions—the large moths that dashed themselves against the orange lamp-shade, the waves of perfume drifting up from the gardens below, and over everything the high, distant moon, a constant lure for her eyes.

It was almost midnight when she heard footsteps in the corridor outside, and then a sharp, eager knock at her door. She opened it, and Michael faced her. His cheeks were pale from some strong inward excitement; he stammered slightly as he spoke.

“Fran. . . . I thought I could see you reading by the window. Fran. . . . John’s got my b-books—all the b-books I b-bought in Oxford this last term. They’re in his study downstairs. How on earth . . . ? It’s queer. . . . I d-don’t understand. . . .”

“Come inside, Micky, if you want to talk. And—and—if you like—I’ll explain all about your books.”

She put the matter, as she thought, quite impartially. She told him exactly what had happened, and then made a few brief comments. “Of course, Micky, it was rather extravagant of you to buy all those expensive books. Mind, now, I’m not defending John. I certainly don’t think he ought to have written for them without telling you. You’re both of you wrong—to a certain extent.”

She had guessed that he would be angry, but she had hardly anticipated the extraordinary vehemence of his wrath. He almost trembled with rage as he listened to her quiet narrative. “Fran, I’ll not p-put up with it!” he stammered. “He treats me like a l-little schoolboy. . . . Fran—he’s only a few years older than me—why—why should I obey him? Writing to Oxford behind my back—the d—damned little c-cad!”

A curious feeling of pity for him overwhelmed her; it wrapped her round like a warm and living glow, kindling her cheeks and making her temples throb with her quickened heartbeat. She touched his sleeve and said: “It’s no use arguing, Micky—you’re wrong as well as John. All the same—I think—I think—perhaps—I’m rather more on your side than on his—at least—I mean——”

But she did not know what she meant. It seemed at that moment as though the moon blazed out more dazzlingly over the meadows; Michael must have noticed it, for he exclaimed suddenly: “Fran, come for a walk—somewhere—anywhere. I can’t sleep tonight, and it’s beautiful in the moonlight.”

She laughed softly. “What an absurd idea, Micky! Somebody would hear us and then there’d be a terrific burglar-scare. . . . Go to bed—you’ll soon be asleep.”

The moment came, as it was bound to come, when she knew that she did like him, when she felt that she knew him perfectly, every inch of him—his brown, eager eyes and gold-brown hair that would never comb out tidily, the mole on the back of his left hand which in the old days they had called “Christopher,” and, above all, his smile, sudden and almost bewildered, like a light that dazzled even himself.

He gave her that smile now. “I shan’t sleep,” he said, shaking his head. “I shall just lie awake all the night through—and plan out the battle.”

7

The battle took place the following day, but it did not proceed according to plan—certainly not according to Michael’s plan. The day was Sunday, and so John was able to ask Michael into his study after breakfast and talk to him at leisure. The books, of course, had disappeared from the glass case.

John was very calm and polite. He had a magnificent air of reasonableness. His attitude seemed always to say: “Come, now, be a good fellow and listen to my point of view. . . .” He began by assuring Michael that he had no desire to cause trouble, but that fifty pounds surplus expenditure over the allowance for a single term was rather a serious matter. He had, he explained, been trying to introduce some sort of costing system into the household finances; he allowed each person so much a month, after inquiry into needs, and if this sum were exceeded in any individual instance, the whole of the arrangements became disorganized. An equally serious matter was the sort of spending that had led to Michael’s excess. All the books, he thought, were rather unnecessary, “luxuries, at a time when it would be better if we could manage to do without luxuries.” And also, “I happen to know that some of the books are very richly bound——”

Here Michael sprang a mine. “Of course you happen to know. You wrote to my scout to send them to you. A dirty, rotten trick, and you needn’t think you’ll be able to explain it away!”

John was surprised, but not perturbed. He never was perturbed. “As I was saying, Michael, the books are very richly bound. They are also—and this is rather important from your point of view—worth nothing like the sums you paid for them. I had them independently valued in London. I should advise you to change your bookseller.”

“I’m damned if I do!” was Michael’s hot retort. “I’m not everlastingly thinking of pounds and profits and percentages! I’ve got used to dealing with old Driver, even if he does charge a few shillings more than somebody else, and I shall go on dealing with him!”

This, to John, was worse than revolt; it was heresy. “Your attitude, Michael, seems to me so unbusiness-like that I shan’t attempt to argue about it. All I will say is this: that if you want to remain at Oxford for another year and have another try for your degree you must give me your word that in future you will keep within your allowance. If you really insist on mingling business with sentiment, do so by all means, but at your own expense.”

“And you’ll pay Driver’s bill for last term, I suppose?”

“Most decidedly not. I am arranging with him now to take back the books at the purchase price less ten per cent.”

That was the final spark to the tinder. “The devil you are!” Michael cried, banging the table and striding to the door. “I’ve had enough of this. Go to hell and take your blasted ten per cent with you! That’s my answer, and the only one you’ll get!”

He rushed upstairs to Fran’s room and found her busy with her notes; by the time he reached her he was nearly in tears.

8

There was no doubt about it; Michael was at fault. He had, so she could judge from the story he poured out to her in a stream of eager words, woefully lost his temper, and thereby the breach, which John had tried to bridge, had been made wider. “He’s so damned calm about it—that’s what I can’t stand,” Michael exclaimed. “To listen to him talking, you’d think he was the most reasonable man on earth.”

“Perhaps he is,” said Fran quietly, yet it was only one part of her speaking; the other was full to bursting with a stormy sympathy for Michael. It was not in the least calm or reasoned, but something keenly personal that welled up spontaneously and would have broken its barriers if she had tried to impede it. It was not in the least like (for example) the sympathy she felt for the child-workers of the early factory system, or the revolting labourers of 1830.

The worst of it was, as Michael said, that John was so calm about it. There was none of that heroic bluster that would have put Michael instantly at his ease. At meals, which they were forced to take together, John’s attitude to Michael was no more than a shade cool; there was no open estrangement. It was obvious, too, that John had told Nan nothing at all, either of the quarrel or its origins.

Fran hardly saw John except at dinner; he caught the 7.05 from Patchley every morning in order to be at the works by the time the men arrived. But there was something ominous in the atmosphere, something that presaged a convulsion.

9

A few evenings later, as she was going up to her room, John stopped her. He said: “By the way, Fran, if you see Michael you might tell him that I’ve written to Oxford withdrawing him.”

She stared at him in stupefied astonishment.

“You have? You’ve done that? Already?”

He replied: “Yes. I told him I should, if he didn’t promise to keep within his allowance in future. He hasn’t given me his promise, so I’ve had to keep mine. I usually do.”

After a pause he added: “So now he must decide what he’s going to do for a living. I’ve a post vacant in my office which he can have if he applies for it within three days. After that I shall advertise.”

She told Michael later on that same evening. They were walking over the meadows amidst bright moonlight, and all around them the wind blew the grasses into rippling waves of silver. Rather to her surprise he was not angry. He merely said, when she had told him: “Oh, well, it can’t be helped. He can always beat me that way, because he has the power. And, of course, to work in his stuffy little office with his eye on me all the time—oh, it’s too absurd—I’d rather starve. . . .”

“Yet you don’t seem angry about it?”

He suddenly flung himself down amongst the grasses. “I suppose I’m not, really,” he answered, in a puzzled voice. He cried suddenly: “Fran, lie down here and look up at the moon. . . . No, no, I’m not angry. It’s so certain that he can beat me in his own way that I’ve lost all interest in the fight. And it’s just as certain that he can’t beat me in my way. . . . Besides, this moonlight’s like a drug—it soaks into you—makes you live in a sort of dream. . . . Fran, I’m beginning to be perfectly happy. It seems queer, doesn’t it, when there’s all this trouble in the air? But it’s true, and I don’t understand it a little bit. Why should I be happy? What have I got to be happy about? And yet I am happy—happy—oh, God, I’m happy. . . .”

He leaned forward and took hold of both her hands, pulling her down on to the slope beside him. “I think I might write verse for a living, or go on a farm, or be a travelling actor, or play the piano at a cinema, or run away to sea—anything rather than be John’s office-boy.”

The warmth of his body was kindling her, and beyond and deeper than the stillness of the night she thought she could hear a curious undercurrent of sound, as if the earth were murmuring under the white blaze of the moon. The sound rose till it throbbed in her temples like a dynamo; she put her hand on Michael’s arm as if seeking as well as giving sympathy. “I think you are going to have a very hard time, Micky,” she said.

His answer came like a voice from a different world. “I don’t care—I don’t care. Nothing could make me care, or make me less happy than I am. . . .”

10

Despite her sympathy for Michael, Fran found it difficult to dislike John. He seemed extraordinarily anxious to make her life at home easy and comfortable; he even (and it was like him that his idea of help should be so practical) offered to have her study refurnished and redecorated if she were intending to use it a great deal.

“I’m relieved to know that you’re not going to turn me out to earn my own living,” she said, pointedly.

“You can earn your own living if you like,” he answered, smiling. “Just go round the kitchens now and again and take an interest in the more ordinary details of the household. I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long while. . . . Mother, you see, doesn’t do that sort of thing very well, and I haven’t the time.”

She agreed to do as he suggested. He went on to talk about efficiency and economy, but she interrupted him. “I’ll help you willingly,” she said, “so far as the house is concerned. But don’t think I agree with your ‘efficient’ method of dealing with Michael, because I don’t.”

“All right.” He nodded quite imperturbably. “That’s frank, anyway. And I’ll be equally frank when you do something that I don’t agree with.”

Meanwhile, on a far stranger and more ethereal plane her friendship with Michael prospered. As always, she did not know why she liked him so much. Even his faults attracted her—his rash, impulsive ways, his tendency to judge hastily and wrongly, his unfair and contemptuous hostility towards John. “Old Percentage,” he called him. “He hasn’t a thought above material success. That’s why he can do nothing with me—because our standards are different. Really, in his heart, he must be frightened of me.”

Often during July and August they motored about the countryside in the old two-seater Delage. Michael drove, and his driving was like most other things that he did. He used to crawl very slowly along the country lanes and put on speed alarmingly at the outskirts of towns; he had also the habit of deciding to turn down attractive-looking side-roads just too late to negotiate the curve easily.