The Rutherfurd Saga. Anna Buchan
“Well?” said Nicole.
“Well—— It is good, I think, well told and clear, and written with more sense of style than, somehow, I had expected. But it’s so devoid of feeling as to be almost wooden. He could have made so much of the final scene, and he makes nothing. . . . Of course, there it is.—This is the man who was there, who did the thing, and he can’t talk. Whether would you have the story from him, or from the professional writer who was not there, but who can write beautifully about what he has heard, who can touch the heart and the imagination, thrill you, make the story live? Remember, I don’t say that Mr. Beckett couldn’t, if he liked, but he won’t. I may be entirely wrong, but reading, I had the feeling that he was giving us the bald narrative in case we weren’t worthy of anything else. This was his friend. He won’t cheapen his memory by making appeals to the emotions.—It’s the silent Englishman carried to excess.”
Nicole nodded. “I see what you mean, and I agree. But I liked it—the reticence in the telling. I’m so tired of writers that fling themselves about, emptying themselves of all they ever thought or felt, or being whimsical and elfin, that a plain, straightforward narrative delights me.”
“It’s very refreshing,” her mother said, as she put a log on the fire. “Now don’t move out of the room. Shall I tell Christina to keep out callers?”
“Oh, dear, no. A caller would be rather a treat! And I don’t want dry toast for tea, I want it buttered.”
“You’re no use as an invalid,” Lady Jane told her as she went out.
Just before tea Simon Beckett was shown in. He had been tramping over the links and brought a breath of the sea and the east wind into the quiet room. He stood at the door, hesitating—“Christina said you would see me, but I’m afraid I may give you more cold coming straight in out of the air.”
“Oh, do come in. Of course shake hands. It freshens me to see you. My head’s still fuzzy with quinine, and I seem to smell nothing but beef-tea made the old-fashioned way, and eucalyptus, but I’m really quite all right again, and properly ashamed of myself. . . . What a humiliating thing a cold is! If people can like you through a cold they’ll like you through anything. I wonder if Cleopatra ever snuffled!”
Simon sat down in the arm-chair on the other side of the fire-place, and said, laughing, “You’re not much accustomed to being ill, are you?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a temperature before, and I hardly know what it is to have a headache. Rude health is what I enjoy, and you’re not much of an invalid yourself,” and she laughed, as if the sight of the robust young man opposite amused and pleased her. They talked together, and Nicole was conscious of the feeling that she always had in Simon’s company, a feeling of comfort and content, of being able to dabble in the shallows of talk, knowing they would both be equally at home in the depths.
Presently she lifted the pile of manuscript that lay beside her on the table.
“Let’s speak about this,” she said.
Her companion at once became acutely miserable.
“Oh, I say, don’t,” he moaned. “You don’t know how horrible it is to have to talk about one’s own writing. I tell you what, write me a note about it: I’d like that.”
“But why should I, when there’s lots of things in it I want to discuss with you here and now? You don’t know how interesting it is for some one who can’t write to talk to a person who can. I’ve read so many books I ought to be a judge, but I don’t suppose that follows.” She patted the neatly typed sheets on her lap. “You are no tripe-merchant, my friend.”
Simon asked what exactly she meant by that.
“It’s a phrase of my brother Archie’s. When he thought an author spread himself too much, and blundered into pits of bad taste and made one hot with shame, he said, ‘Tripe-merchant.’ You are almost, if I may say it, too little of a tripe-merchant.”
Simon rumpled his hair miserably. “Say anything you like,” he said, “only get it over quickly.”
“Well, my crab about your book is that you make it all sound too easy. The first part is excellent, couldn’t be better. The description of the going, and the places you passed through, and the people you met, is delightful. You’ve got humour, and the human touch. But the actual climbing, the last arduous bit, the disaster, the coming back, you seem to me to shirk. You say, for instance, ‘We went from camp 5 to camp 6.’ Just like that! A ten minutes’ stroll on a pleasant path! The carrying of a parcel from Tottenham Court Road to Euston Station! a trifle! Remember, we’re not at all an imaginative people, we need to be told things, to be made to see them, if we are to realise. . . . And the disaster—well, reticence there, one can well understand. Still—he was your friend. Couldn’t you have said a little more—or couldn’t you bear to?”
Simon sat forward in his chair, his hands clasped between his knees. There was a boyish, perplexed look on his face that made Nicole think of the Bat.
“You see—I had to think of Cullis. He hated advertising. I never met such a chap for avoiding notice. I didn’t want to write the beastly book at all, but they said I must for I was there, but I’d hate Cullis to feel that I’d given him away. He was my best friend.”
Nicole said nothing, and in a minute Simon went on:
“If only he’d succeeded! Then I shouldn’t have minded. But to die like that when it seemed as if we were going to manage it—— Still, it was a great end. I like to think of him there among the heights—it was what he always wanted. And he died satisfied, I think, for he knew we wouldn’t leave it at that. He knew we’d come back. . . . Lots of people think that Cullis threw away his life—funny, isn’t it?”
“It seems like madness to many,” Nicole said.
“But you don’t think it madness?”
“No, but I see the tremendous pity of it. . . . In a war you must fight, but here you take your life and . . . Don’t you care whether you come back or not?”
“I?” . . . Simon cleared his throat. “When I came home ill and broken-up, all I asked for was to go back and lay my bones beside Cullis.”
The door opened and Christina appeared with the first preparation for tea, while just behind her came Lady Jane, saying:
“So you have a caller! How d’you do, Mr. Beckett? It was kind to come and cheer the invalid.”
CHAPTER XXIII
“How blessed are we that are not simple men.”
The Winter’s Tale.
To say that Mrs. Jackson was disappointed on hearing that Nicole Rutherfurd was unable to fulfil her promise to help with the festivities is a poor, bald way of describing the utter despair that filled that poor lady. As people in moments of peril are said to see all their past life before them, Mrs. Jackson, still clutching the telegram, saw herself alone, unaided, exposed to the full battery of the county. It had been bad enough the thought of it all, the big dinner and the dance, even with Nicole beside her to bear the brunt, to receive, so to speak, the first shock of the encounter. On her would have depended the success or failure of the undertaking. But now—it was more than she could face by herself, and desperately she got on to her feet and went to look for her son.
She found him in the library, smoking a pipe, deep in a book, and, bustling towards him as fast as her high heels would permit, she wailed:
“Andy, she’s not coming!”
Andrew laid down his book, and getting up with his pipe in his hand, said, “Who?”
“Miss Rutherfurd, of