Chapter the Fourth — May at Udimore
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Bobby forgot that glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted it now very much. It left him—and Paul of Tarsus—at the mercy of Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight misquotations.
It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting, and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, lit the faces of the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.
When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible universe.
Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied. He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship, but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was impossible to believe she loved anyone else.
Yet in the last three or four months she had gone about with Devizes a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her; Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.
Except for Lambone’s unquenchable flow it had not been a very talkative party. To-night it was less talkative than ever. “This is too perfect,” Margaret Means had sighed. “I can’t talk. I just thank God I am alive,” and she had nestled into her big deck-chair upon the terrace. This was the girl—it had suddenly become apparent to Bobby a fortnight ago in London—whom Devizes intended to marry. Abruptly she had come upon the scene to destroy the triangle that had obsessed Bobby’s imagination. A sweetly pretty fragile thing she was; in the twilight she seemed as faint and fragrant as nightstock, and she was a wonderful pianist. Last night she had played for two hours. Paul’s sister, Miss Lambone, had been evoked from somewhere in the west of England to come and be hostess to the engaged couple. Bobby had tried to talk to Christina Alberta about Margaret, but Christina Alberta hadn’t wanted to talk about her. “You see,” said Christina Alberta compactly, “she has opened the whole world of music to him. That’s what brought them together. She’s clever; she’s very clear and clever.
“I’d never heard of her—until you mentioned their engagement.
“They’ve gone to concerts together and that sort of thing. He’s known her much longer than he has known me.”
“When did you first meet Devizes?”
“About the time my Daddy came to Midgard Street. As recently as that. It’s hardly six months. Paul Lambone took me to him to get advice about Daddy. But they have been going about—for more than a year. I thought it was just music that interested them. They’d seemed to be friends. And I thought he didn’t mean to marry again. He just suddenly decided.”
Christina Alberta reflected. “That’s the way with life, Bobby. Things accumulate, and then you suddenly decide.”
“Had she been undecided? Had she made him wait?”
“Not her,” said Christina Alberta with a remarkable hardness in her voice.
“No,” she said. “He decided.”
She seemed to feel there was still something to express. “He just took hold of the situation.”