Flowering Wilderness eotc-2 Read online

  The ring was on now, the fateful words said, the exhortations over; they were going to the vestry. Her mother and Hubert followed. Dinny sat motionless, her eyes fixed on the East window. Marriage! What an impossible state, except—with a single being.

  A voice in her ear said:

  “Lend me your hanky, Dinny. Mine’s soakin’, and your uncle’s is blue.”

  Dinny passed her a scrap of lawn, and surreptitiously powdered her own nose.

  “Be done at Condaford, Dinny,” continued her aunt. “All these people—so fatiguin’, rememberin’ who they aren’t. That was his mother, wasn’t it? She isn’t dead, then.”

  Dinny was thinking: ‘Shall I get another look at Wilfrid?’

  “When I was married everybody kissed me,” whispered her aunt, “so promiscuous. I knew a girl who married to get kissed by his best man. Aggie Tellusson. I wonder. They’re comin’ back!”

  Yes! How well Dinny knew that bride’s smile! How could Clare feel it, not married to Wilfrid! She fell in behind her father and mother, alongside Hubert, who whispered: “Buck up, old girl, it might be a lot worse!” Divided from him by a secret that absorbed her utterly, Dinny squeezed his arm. And, even as she did so, saw Wilfrid, with his arms folded, looking at her. Again she gave him a swift smile, and then all was hurly-burly, till she was back at Mount Street and Aunt Em saying to her, just within the drawing-room door:

  “Stand by me, Dinny, and pinch me in time.” Then came the entry of the guests and her aunt’s running commentary.

  “It IS his mother—kippered. Here’s Hen Bentworth!… Hen, Wilmet’s here, she’s got a bone to pick… How d’you do? Yes, isn’t it—so tirin’… How d’you do? The ring was so well done, don’t you think? Conjurers!… Dinny, who’s this?… How do you do? Lovely! No! Cherrell. Not as it’s spelled, you know—so awkward!… The presents are over there by the man with the boots, tryin’ not to. Silly, I think! But they will… How d’you do? You ARE Jack Muskham? Lawrence dreamed the other night you were goin’ to burst… Dinny, get me Fleur, too, she knows everybody.”

  Dinny went in search of Fleur and found her talking to the bridegroom.

  As they went back to the door Fleur said: “I saw Wilfrid Desert in the church. How did he come there?”

  Really Fleur was too sharp for anything!

  “Here you are!” said Lady Mont. “Which of these three comin’ is the Duchess? The scraggy one. Ah!… How d’you do? Yes, charmin’. Such a bore, weddin’s! Fleur, take the Duchess to have some presents… How d’you do? No, my brother Hilary. He does it well, don’t you think? Lawrence says he keeps his eye on the ball. Do have an ice, they’re downstairs… Dinny, is this one after the presents, d’you think?—Oh! How d’you do, Lord Beevenham? My sister-inlaw ought to be doin’ this. She ratted. Jerry’s in there… Dinny, who was it said: ‘The drink, the drink!’ Hamlet? He said such a lot. Not Hamlet?… Oh! How d’you do?… How d’you do?… How d’you do, or don’t you? Such a crush!… Dinny, your hanky!”

  “I’ve put some powder on it, Auntie.”

  “There! Have I streaked?… How d’you do? Isn’t it silly, the whole thing? As if they wanted anybody but themselves, you know… Oh! Here’s Adrian! Your tie’s on one side, dear. Dinny, put it right. How d’you do? Yes, they are. I don’t like flowers at funerals—poor things, lyin’ there, and dyin’… How’s your dear dog? You haven’t one? Quite!… Dinny, you ought to have pinched me… How d’you do? How d’you do? I was tellin’ my niece she ought to pinch me. Do you get faces right? No. How nice! How d’you do? How d’you do? How d’you do?… That’s three! Dinny, who’s the throwback just comin’? Oh!… How d’you do? So you got here? I thought you were in China… Dinny, remind me to ask your uncle if it was China. He gave me such a dirty look. Could I give the rest a miss? Who is it’s always sayin’ that? Tell Blore ‘the drink,’ Dinny. Here’s a covey!… How d’you do?… How de do?… How do?… Do!… Do!… How?… So sweet!… Dinny, I want to say: Blast!”

  On her errand to Blore Dinny passed Jean talking to Michael, and wondered how anyone so vivid and brown had patience to stand about in this crowd. Having found Blore, she came back. Michael’s queer face, which she thought grew pleasanter every year, as if from the deepening impress of good feeling, looked strained and unhappy.

  “I don’t believe it, Jean,” she heard him say.

  “Well,” said Jean, “the bazaars do buzz with rumour. Still, without fire of some sort there’s never smoke.”

  “Oh! yes, there is—plenty. He’s back in England, anyway. Fleur saw him in the church today. I shall ask him.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Jean: “if it’s true he’ll probably tell you, and if it isn’t, it’ll only worry him for nothing.”

  So! They were talking of Wilfrid. How find out why without appearing to take interest? And suddenly she thought: ‘Even if I could, I wouldn’t. Anything that matters he must tell me himself. I won’t hear it from anyone else.’ But she felt disturbed, for instinct was always warning her of something heavy and strange on his mind.

  When that long holocaust of sincerity was over and the bride had gone, she subsided into a chair in her uncle’s study, the only room which showed no signs of trouble. Her father and mother had started back to Condaford, surprised that she wasn’t coming too. It was not like her to cling to London when the tulips were out at home, the lilacs coming on, the apple blossom thickening every day. But the thought of not seeing Wilfrid daily had become a positive pain.

  ‘I HAVE got it badly,’ she thought, ‘worse than I ever believed was possible. Whatever is going to happen to me?’

  She was lying back with her eyes closed when her uncle’s voice said:

  “Ah! Dinny, how pleasant after those hosts of Midian! The mandarin in full feather! Did you know a quarter of them? Why do people go to weddings? A registrar’s, or under the stars, there’s no other way of preserving decency. Your poor aunt has gone to bed. There’s a lot to be said for Mohammedanism, except that it’s the fashion now to limit it to one wife, and she not in Purdah. By the way, there’s a story going round that young Desert’s become a Moslem. Did he say anything to you about it?”

  Dinny raised her startled head.

  “I’ve only twice known it happen to fellows in the East, and they were Frenchmen and wanted harems.”

  “Money’s the only essential for that, Uncle.”

  “Dinny, you’re getting cynical. Men like to have the sanction of religion. But that wouldn’t be Desert’s reason; a fastidious creature, if I remember.”

  “Does religion matter, Uncle, so long as people don’t interfere with each other?”

  “Well, some Moslems’ notions of woman’s rights are a little primitive. He’s liable to wall her up if she’s unfaithful. There was a sheikh when I was in Marakesh—gruesome.”

  Dinny shuddered.

  “‘From time immemorial,’ as they say,” went on Sir Lawrence, “religion has been guilty of the most horrifying deeds that have happened on this earth. I wonder if young Desert has taken up with it to get him access to Mecca. I shouldn’t think he believes anything. But you never know—it’s a queer family.”

  Dinny thought: ‘I can’t and won’t talk about him.’

  “What proportion of people in these days do you think really have religion, Uncle?”

  “In northern countries? Very difficult to say. In this country ten to fifteen per cent of the adults, perhaps. In France and southern countries, where there’s a peasantry, more, at least on the surface.”

  “What about the people who came this afternoon?”

  “Most of them would be shocked if you said they weren’t Christians, and most of them would be still more shocked if you asked them to give half their goods to the poor, and that would only make them well disposed Pharisees, or was it Sadducees?”

  “Are you a Christian, Uncle Lawrence?”

  “No, my dear; if anything a Confucian, who, as you know, was simply an ethical philosopher. Most of
our caste in this country, if they only knew it, are Confucian rather than Christian. Belief in ancestors, and tradition, respect for parents, honesty, moderation of conduct, kind treatment of animals and dependents, absence of self-obtrusion, and stoicism in face of pain and death.”

  “What more,” murmured Dinny, wrinkling her nose, “does one want except the love of beauty?”

  “Beauty? That’s a matter of temperament.”

  “But doesn’t it divide people more than anything?”

  “Yes, but willy nilly. You can’t make yourself love a sunset.”

  “‘You are wise, Uncle Lawrence, the young niece said.’ I shall go for a walk and shake the wedding-cake down.”

  “And I shall stay here, Dinny, and sleep the champagne off.”

  Dinny walked and walked. It seemed an odd thing to be doing alone. But the flowers in the Park were pleasing, and the waters of the Serpentine shone and were still, and the chestnut trees were coming alight. And she let herself go on her mood, and her mood was of love.

  CHAPTER 7

  Looking back on that second afternoon in Richmond Park, Dinny never knew whether she had betrayed herself before he said so abruptly:

  “If you believe in it, Dinny, will you marry me?”

  It had so taken her breath away that she sat growing paler and paler, then colour came to her face with a rush.

  “I’m wondering why you ask me. You know nothing of me.”

  “You’re like the East. One loves it at first sight, or not at all, and one never knows it any better.”

  Dinny shook her head: “Oh! I am not mysterious.”

  “I should never get to the end of you; no more than of one of those figures over the staircase in the Louvre. Please answer me, Dinny.”

  She put her hand in his, nodded, and said: “That must be a record.”

  At once his lips were on hers, and when they left her lips she fainted.

  This was without exception the most singular action of her life so far, and, coming to almost at once, she said so.

  “It’s the sweetest thing you could have done.”

  If she had thought his face strange before, what was it now? The lips, generally contemptuous, were parted and quivering, the eyes, fixed on her, glowed; he put up his hand and thrust back his hair, so that she noticed for the first time a scar at the top of his forehead. Sun, moon, stars, and all the works of God stood still while they were looking each into the other’s face.

  At last she said:

  “The whole thing is most irregular. There’s been no courtship; not even a seduction.”

  He laughed and put his arm around her. Dinny whispered:

  “‘Thus the two young people sat wrapped in their beatitude.’ My poor mother!”

  “Is she a nice woman?”

  “A darling. Luckily she’s fond of father.”

  “What is your father like?”

  “The nicest General I know.”

  “Mine is a hermit. You won’t have to realise him. My brother is an ass. My mother ran away when I was three, and I have no sisters. It’s going to be hard for you, with a nomadic, unsatisfactory brute like me.”

  “‘Where thou goest, I go.’ We seem to be visible to that old gentleman over there. He’ll write to the papers about the awful sights to be seen in Richmond Park.”

  “Never mind!”

  “I don’t. There’s only one first hour. And I was beginning to think I should never have it.”

  “Never been in love?”

  She shook her head.

  “How wonderful! When shall it be, Dinny?”

  “Don’t you think our families ought first to know?”

  “I suppose so. They won’t want you to marry me.”

  “Certainly you are my social superior, young sir.”

  “One can’t be superior to a family that goes back to the twelfth century. We only go back to the fourteenth. A wanderer and a writer of bitter verse. They’ll know I shall want to cart you off to the East. Besides, I only have fifteen hundred a year, and practically no expectations.”

  “Fifteen hundred a year! Father may be able to spare me two—he’s doing it for Clare.”

  “Well, thank God there’ll be no obstacle from your fortune.”

  Dinny turned to him, and there was a touching confidence in her eyes.

  “Wilfrid, I heard something about your having turned Moslem. That wouldn’t matter to me.”

  “It would matter to them.”

  His face had become drawn and dark. She clasped his hand tight in both of hers.

  “Was that poem ‘The Leopard’ about yourself?”

  He tried to draw his hand away.

  “Was it?”

  “Yes. Out in Darfur. Fanatical Arabs. I recanted to save my skin. Now you can chuck me.” Exerting all her strength, Dinny pulled his hand to her heart.

  “What you did or didn’t do is nothing. You are YOU!” To her dismay and yet relief, he fell on his knees and buried his face in her lap.

  “Darling!” she said. Protective tenderness almost annulled the wilder, sweeter feeling in her.

  “Does anyone know of that but me?”

  “It’s known in the bazaars that I’ve turned Moslem, but it’s supposed of my free will.”

  “I know there are things you would die for, Wilfrid, and that’s enough. Kiss me!”

  The afternoon drew on while they sat there. The shadows of the oak trees splayed up to their log; the crisp edge of the sunlight receded over the young fern: some deer passed, moving slowly towards water. The sky, of a clear bright blue, with white promising clouds, began to have the evening look; a sappy scent of fern fronds and horse chestnut bloom crept in slow whiffs; and dew began to fall. The sane and heavy air, the grass so green, the blue distance, the branching, ungraceful solidity of the oak trees, made a trysting hour as English as lovers ever loved in.

  “I shall break into cockney if we sit here much longer,” said Dinny, at last; “besides, dear heart, ‘fast falls the dewy eve.’”…

  Late that evening in the drawing-room at Mount Street her aunt said suddenly:

  “Lawrence, look at Dinny! Dinny, you’re in love.”

  “You take me flat aback, Aunt Em. I am.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Wilfrid Desert.”

  “I used to tell Michael that young man would get into trouble. Does he love you too?”

  “He is good enough to say so.”

  “Oh! dear. I WILL have some lemonade. Which of you proposed?”

  “As a fact, he did.”

  “His brother has no issue, they say.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Aunt Em!”

  “Why not? Kiss me!”

  But Dinny was regarding her uncle across her aunt’s shoulder.

  He had said nothing.

  Later, he stopped her as she was following out.

  “Are your eyes open, Dinny?”

  “Yes, this is the ninth day.”

  “I won’t come the heavy uncle; but you know the drawbacks?”

  “His religion; Fleur; the East? What else?”

  Sir Lawrence shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “That business with Fleur sticks in my gizzard, as old Forsyte would have said. One who could do that to the man he has led to the altar can’t have much sense of loyalty.”

  Colour rose in her cheeks.

  “Don’t be angry, my dear, we’re all too fond of you.”

  “He’s been quite frank about everything, Uncle.”

  Sir Lawrence sighed.

  “Then there’s no more to be said, I suppose. But I beg you to look forward before it’s irrevocable. There’s a species of china which it’s almost impossible to mend. And I think you’re made of it.”

  Dinny smiled and went up to her room, and instantly she began to look back.

  The difficulty of imagining the physical intoxication of love was gone. To open one’s soul to another seemed no longer impossible. Love stories she had read, love affa
irs she had watched, all seemed savourless compared with her own. And she had only known him nine days, except for that glimpse ten years ago! Had she had what was called a complex all this time? Or was love always sudden like this? A wild flower seeding on a wild wind?

  Long she sat half dressed, her hands clasped between her knees, her head drooping, steeped in the narcotic of remembrance, and with a strange feeling that all the lovers in the world were sitting within her on that bed bought at Pullbred’s in the Tottenham Court Road.

  CHAPTER 8

  Condaford resented this business of love, and was, with a fine rain, as if sorrowing for the loss of its two daughters.

  Dinny found her father and mother elaborately ‘making no bones’ over the loss of Clare, and only hoped they would continue the motion in her own case. Feeling, as she said, ‘very towny,’ she prepared for the ordeal of disclosure by waterproofing herself and going for a tramp. Hubert and Jean were expected in time for dinner, and she wished to kill all her birds with one stone. The rain on her face, the sappy fragrance, the call of the cuckoos, and that state of tree when each has leaves in different stage of opening, freshened her body but brought a little ache to her heart. Entering a covert, she walked along a ride. The trees were beech and ash, with here and there an English yew, the soil being chalky. A woodpecker’s constant tap was the only sound, for the rain was not yet heavy enough for leaf-dripping to have started. Since babyhood she had been abroad but three times—to Italy, to Paris, to the Pyrenees, and had always come home more in love with England and Condaford than ever. Henceforth her path would lie she knew not where; there would, no doubt, be sand, fig-trees, figures by wells, flat roofs, voices calling the Muezzin, eyes looking through veils. But surely Wilfrid would feel the charm of Condaford and not mind if they spent time there now and then. His father lived in a show place, half shut up and never shown, which gave everyone the blues. And that, apart from London and Eton, was all he seemed to know of England, for he had been four years away in the war and eight years away in the East.