Eustace and Hilda Read online

  “Why couldn’t we?” asked Eustace. All at once, as the thought struck him, he ceased crying. It seemed to cost him as little effort to stop as it costs a dog to wake out of sleep. “They didn’t mean to hurt each other.”

  The disaster that had overtaken their remedial measures was so present to him that he forgot the almost equally painful situation those measures had been meant to relieve, and thought of the previous relationship of the shrimp and the anemone as satisfactory to both.

  “But they were hurting each other,” remarked Hilda. “Anyhow the anemone was eating the shrimp, if you call that hurting.”

  Eustace could see no way out of this. His mind had no power to consider an unmixed evil, it was set upon happiness. With Hilda’s ruthless recognition of an evil principle at the back of the anemone affair his tears started afresh.

  “Now don’t be a cry-baby,” Hilda not at all unkindly admonished him. “There’s Gerald and Nancy Steptoe coming, nasty things! If you stand still a minute,” she went on, preparing with the hem of her blue frock to renew the assault upon his face, “they’ll think it’s only the wind.”

  The appeal to Eustace’s pride was one Hilda tried only for form’s sake; she thought it ought to weigh with him, but generally, as she knew, it made him irritable.

  “I want to go and talk to Nancy,” he announced. His attitude to other children was tinged with a fearful joy, altogether unlike his sister’s intolerant and hostile demeanour. “Gerald’s left her by herself again: he’s climbing up the cliffs, look, and she daren’t go.”

  “What do you want to talk to her for?” asked Hilda, a trifle crossly. “It’s her fault, she shouldn’t have let him.”

  “She can’t stop him,” said Eustace. His voice had a triumphant ring, due partly to his knowledge of the Steptoes’ private concerns and partly, as Hilda realised, to a feeling of elation at the spectacle of Gerald’s independence. This spirit of rebellion she resolved to quench.

  “Come along,” she said authoritatively, snatching his hand and whirling him away. “You know,” she continued, with an exaggeration of her grown-up manner, “you don’t really want to talk to Nancy. She’s stuck-up, like they all are. Now we’ll see what’s happened to the pond. Perhaps we shall be in time to save it.”

  They scampered across the sands, Eustace hanging back a little and trying to wave to the lonely Nancy, who, deserted by her daring and lawless brother, had begun to dig herself a castle. Now that they seemed to be out of harm’s way Hilda stopped and looked back. They could just see the ground plan of Nancy’s fortress, which she had marked out on the sand with a spade and which was of an extravagant extent.

  “She’ll never get that done,” Hilda remarked. “They’re always the same. They try to make everything bigger than anybody else, and then they leave it half done and look silly.”

  “Should we go and help her?” suggested Eustace. Nancy looked very forlorn, labouring away at the outer moat of her castle.

  “No,” Hilda replied. “She can do it quite well herself, or she could if Gerald would have come away from those cliffs where he’s no business to be and may very likely cause an avalanche.”

  “I want to go,” cried Eustace, suddenly obstinate.

  “I say you can’t,” said Hilda half teasingly.

  “I will, I want to!” Eustace almost screamed, struggling to get free. Bent like a bow with the effort, his feet slipping from under him, his hat off, and his straight fair hair unpicturesquely rumpled, he looked very childish and angry. Hilda kept him prisoner without much difficulty.

  Some three and a half years older than Eustace, she was a good deal taller and the passion and tenacity of her character had already left its mark on her heart-shaped, beautiful face. Her immobility made a folly of Eustace’s struggles; her dark eyes looked scornfully down.

  “Diddums-wazzums,” she at last permitted herself to remark. The phrase, as she knew it would, drove her brother into a frenzy. The blood left his face; he stiffened and stopped struggling, while he searched his mind for the most wounding thing to say.

  “I want to play with Nancy,” he said at last, averting his eyes from his sister and looking small and spiteful. “I don’t want to play with you. I don’t ever want to play with you again. I don’t love you. You killed the shrimp and you killed the anemone” (he brought this out with a rush; it had occurred to him earlier to taunt Hilda with her failure, but a generous scruple had restrained him), “and you’re a murderer.”

  Hilda listened to the beginning of the speech with equanimity; her features continued to reflect disdain. Then she saw that Nancy Steptoe had stopped digging and could both see and hear what was passing. This unnerved her; and the violence and venom of Eustace’s attack touched her to the quick. The words were awful to her. An overwhelming conviction came to her that he did not love her, and that she was a murderer. She turned away, with great ugly sobs that sounded like whooping-cough.

  “Then go,” she said.

  Eustace did not go at once. Hilda always stooped when she was in trouble; he watched the bent figure making its way back to the scene of their pond-making. She lurched, walking uncertainly with long uneven strides, and she did not seem to notice where she was putting her feet, for twice she stumbled over a projecting stone. The outburst over, Eustace’s anger had melted away; he wanted to follow Hilda and make it up. In such matters he had no pride; apology came easily to him, and he regretted intensely everything that he had said. But he didn’t go. Hilda wouldn’t have forgiven him; he would have to undergo her silence and her disapproval and the spectacle of her suffering which she would try to control but would not try to hide. He could not bear being disapproved of, and though he had a weakness for comforting people it withered away in the presence of Hilda’s implacable and formidable grief. He had lost his wish to play with Nancy; the desire to have his own way rarely survived the struggle it cost him to get it. But he obscurely felt that he was committed to a line of action and must go through with it.

  Trailing his spade he walked awkwardly across the sands to Nancy, and, arriving at a respectful distance, put up his disengaged hand to take off his hat. This polite gesture missed completion, however, for the hat was still lying where it had fallen in the course of his altercation with Hilda. A look of surprise crossed his face and, with hand still upraised, he gazed aloft, as though he expected to see the hat suspended above his head.

  Nancy laughed. “Good-morning, Eustace,” she said.

  Eustace advanced and shook hands formally with her. Dainty, his nurse, Miss Minney, had called her, and the word suited her well. Eustace often wanted smoothing down, but never more than at this moment. His blue jersey had worked up and was hanging about him in ungainly folds, one sock was on the point of coming down, his face was flushed and tearful and his whole appearance presented a sharp contrast to Nancy’s. He was the more aware of this because Nancy, her pink-and-white complexion, her neatness and coolness and the superior way she wore her clothes, had often been held up as a model to himself and his sister.

  “Good-morning, Nancy,” he said. His voice, in addressing strangers, had a peculiar and flattering intimacy; he seemed to find a secret pleasure in pronouncing the name of the person to whom he was speaking, as though it was a privilege to utter it. “Would you like me to help you with your castle? I’ll go on digging and you can just pat it down,” he added heroically.

  Nancy accepted this chivalrous offer, thanking him briefly. One reason why Eustace liked her was that she never made a fuss. If she was crossed or disappointed she took it silently, like a grown-up person; she did not turn herself inside out and call up all the resources of her personality. And if pleased she still kept a kind of reserve, as though the present moment’s gratification was slight compared to those she had had and would have. Four years older than Eustace, she already possessed an experience, additions to which were classified and examined instead of treated on their own merits as isolated prodigies and visitations of Heaven. She was n
ot at all informal or domestic: she had standards.

  “What made Hilda so batey just now?” she presently inquired.

  ‘Batey’ was a word from the outside world, the world of day-schools and organised games with which Nancy was familiar. Batey: Eustace’s father, who disliked slang, had protested against it, and his aunt had forbidden him to use it. Whatever Hilda might be she was not that.

  “She wasn’t batey,” he said slowly.

  “Well, what was she then?” demanded Nancy. “I saw her pulling you about, and she went away kicking up no end of a din.”

  Eustace pondered. If he should say that he had been unkind to Hilda, Nancy would laugh at him, in her polite, incredulous way. He was always acutely conscious of having to live up to her; that was one reason, among others, why he liked being with her. He wanted to make a good impression. But how could he do that without sacrificing his sister’s dignity, which was dear to him and necessary to his sense of their relationship?

  “She was very much upset,” he said at last.

  Nancy nodded sagely, as though she understood what Eustace had left unexpressed and respected his reticence. Sunning himself in the warmth of her hardly won approval, and feeling he had done his best for Hilda, Eustace let his sister and her troubles slip out of his mind. He redoubled his exertions and soon, to the accompaniment of a little desultory conversation, a large mound, unmistakably castellated, began to rear itself in the midst of Nancy’s plot.

  Eustace took a pride in seeing it grow, but Nancy—beyond seconding his efforts with a few negligent taps—seemed content to resign the task to him. He is only an infant, she thought, in spite of his engaging manners.

  2. PATCHING IT UP

  LEFT TO himself, Eustace fell into a day-dream. He thought of his toys and tried to decide which of them he should give to his sister Barbara; he had been told he must part with some of them, and indeed it would not make much difference if they were hers by right, since she already treated them as such. When he went to take them from her she resisted with loud screams. Eustace realised that she wanted them but he did not think she ought to have them. She could not use them intelligently, and besides, they belonged to him. He might be too old to play with them but they brought back the past in a way that nothing else did. Certain moments in the past were like buried treasure to Eustace, living relics of a golden age which it was an ecstasy to contemplate. His toys put him in touch with these secret jewels of experience; they could not perform the miracle if they belonged to someone else. But on the single occasion when he had asserted his ownership and removed the rabbit from Barbara who was sucking its ears, nearly everyone had been against him and there was a terrible scene. Minney said he never took the slightest interest in the rabbit until Barbara wanted it, his aunt said he must try not to be mean in future, and Hilda urged that he should be sent to bed on the spot. “It will be good for him in the end,” she said.

  Eustace’s resistance was violent and, since Hilda hardly obtained a hearing, really unnecessary; but in his heart he agreed with her. Expiation already played a part in his life; it reinstated him in happiness continually. Hilda was the organiser of expiation: she did not let him off: she kept him up to the scratch, she was extreme to mark what was done amiss. But as the agent of retribution she was impersonal: she only adjudicated between him and a third party. It was understood that from their private disputes there was no appeal to a disinterested tribunal; the bitterness had to be swallowed and digested by each side. If Hilda exposed her wounded feelings she did not declare that Heaven was outraged by the spectacle: she demanded no forfeit, no acknowledgement even. She did not constitute herself a law court but met Eustace on his own ground.

  The thought of her, intruding upon his reverie, broke it up. There she sat, on the large rock in their pond which they had christened Gibraltar, her back bent, her legs spread out, her head drooping. It was an ugly attitude and she would grow like that, thought Eustace uncomfortably. Moreover, she was sitting recklessly on the wet seaweed which would leave a green mark and give her a cold, if salt-water could give one a cold. Minney was superstitious, and any irrational belief that tended to make life easier was, Eustace instinctively felt, wrong. Still Hilda did not move. Her distress conveyed itself to him across the intervening sand. He glanced uneasily at Nancy who was constructing a garden out of seaweed and white pebbles at the gateway of the castle—an incongruous adjunct, Eustace thought, for it was precisely there that the foemen would attack. He had almost asked her to put it at the back, for the besieged to retire into in their unoccupied moments; where it was it spoilt his vision of the completed work and even sapped his energy. But he did not like the responsibility of interfering and making people do things his way. He worked on, trying to put Hilda out of his mind, but she recurred and at last he said:

  “I think I’ll go back now, if it’s all the same to you.”

  He hoped by this rather magnificent phrase to make his departure seem as casual as possible, but Nancy saw through him.

  “Can’t leave your big sister?” she inquired, an edge of irony in her voice. “She’ll get over it quicker if you let her alone.”

  Eustace declined this challenge. It pained him to think that his disagreement with Hilda was public property.

  “Oh, she’s all right now,” he told Nancy airily. “She’s having a rest.”

  “Well, give her my love,” said Nancy.

  Eustace felt a sudden doubt, from her tone, whether she really meant him to deliver the message.

  “Shall I?” he asked diffidently. “I should like to.”

  Something in the question annoyed Nancy. She turned from him with a whirl of her accordion-pleated skirt, a garment considered by Eustace miraculous and probably unprocurable in England.

  “You can say I hate her, if you’d rather,” she remarked. She looked round: her blue eyes sparkled frostily in her milk-white face.

  Eustace stood aghast. He didn’t think it possible that strangers —people definitely outside the family circle—could ever be angry.

  “I’ll stay if you can’t get on so well without me,” he said at length, feeling his way.

  She laughed at him when he said this—at his concerned face and his earnestness, his anxiety to please. So it was nothing, really: he was right, you couldn’t take much harm with strangers. If they seemed cross it was only in fun: they wouldn’t dare to show their feelings or make you show yours: it was against the rules. They existed to be agreeable, to be a diversion.... Nancy was saying:

  “It’s very kind of you to have stayed so long, Eustace. Look what a lot you’ve done!” A kind of comic wonder, mixed with mockery, crept into her voice: Eustace was fascinated. “Gerald will never believe me when I tell him I built it all myself!”

  “Will you tell him that?” Eustace was shocked by her audacity, but tried to keep his voice from showing disapproval.

  “Well, I’ll say you did all the work while I looked on.”

  Gerald will think me a muff, decided Eustace. “Couldn’t you say we did it together?”

  Nancy’s face fell at the notion of this veracious account. Then it brightened. “I know,” she said. “I’ll tell him a stranger came in a boat from the yacht over there, and he helped me. A naval officer. Yes, that’s what I’ll tell him,” she added teasingly, seeing Eustace still uneasy at the imminent falsehood. “Good-bye, Mr. Officer, you mustn’t stay any longer.” With a gentle push to start him on his way she dismissed him.

  It was too bad of Hilda to leave his hat lying in a pool. However cross she might be she rarely failed to retrieve his personal belongings over which, even when not flustered and put out, he had little control. Now the ribbon was wet and the “table” of Indomitable, a ship which he obscurely felt he might be called upon at any moment to join, stood out more boldly than the rest. Never mind, it was salt-water, and in future the hat could be used for a barometer, like seaweed, to tell whether bad weather was coming. Meanwhile there was Hilda. It was no good putting
off the evil moment: she must be faced.

  But he did not go to her at once. He dallied among the knee-high rounded rocks for which the beach of Anchorstone (Anxton, the Steptoes called it in their fashionable way) was famous. He even built a small, almost vertical castle, resembling, as nearly as he could make it, the cone of Cotopaxi, for which he had a romantic affection, as he had for all volcanoes, earthquakes and violent manifestations of Nature. He calculated the range of the lava flow, marking it out with a spade and contentedly naming for destruction the various capital cities, represented by greater and lesser stones, that fell within its generous circumference. In his progress he conceived himself to be the Angel of Death, a delicious pretence, for it involved flying and the exercise of supernatural powers. On he flew. Could Lisbon be destroyed a second time? It would be a pity to waste the energy of the eruption on what was already a ruin; but no doubt they had rebuilt it by now. Over it went and, in addition, an enormous tidal wave swept up the Tagus, ravaging the interior. The inundation of Portugal stopped at Hilda’s feet.

  For some days afterwards Eustace was haunted at odd times by the thought that he had accidentally included Hilda in the area of doom. He clearly hadn’t got her all in but perhaps her foot or her spade (which, for the purpose of disaster, might be reckoned her) had somehow overhung the circle, or the place where the circle would have been if he had finished it. The rocks couldn’t take any harm from the spell, if it really was one, and he hadn’t meant to hurt her, but it was just this sort of misunderstanding that gave Fate the opportunity to take you at your word. But Eustace had no idea that he was laying up trouble for himself when, with arrested spade, he stopped in front of Hilda.

  “It only just missed you,” he remarked cryptically.

  Silence.