The Gods and Mr. Perrin. Hugh Walpole

her husband, although playing against her, was infuriated at her stupidity; if she won, he hated being beaten, As it was, she was playing extremely badly, but was winning because of the good cards that she held. His brow was growing blacker and blacker. She held her cards so badly—she never could make them into a fan, and every now and again one fell with a sharp rattle against the table.

      Also she forgot sometimes that they were playing and broke into sentences that had to be instantly checked—as, for instance: “Oh, I saw Mrs.– I’m so sorry, it ‘s my lead.”

      “I believe this term.... Oh! I beg your pardon.... What are trumps?”

      Every now and again she gazed at the peacock screen, and the clock, and the dark corner of the room where there was a little water-color in a gilt frame, and they gave her comfort.

      The end of the rubber came, and Mrs. Dormer refused to play any more; they had had magnificent cards, but she had lost three shillings. She wouldn’t look at Mr. Perrin. He stood nervously moving one foot against the other, pulling his mustache.

      “No, really I’m afraid we must go. You ‘ve finished your rubber, Mrs. Comber? Yes, we ought to have won.... No, I can’t think how it was.”

      “Considering the way my wife’s been playing,” said Freddie Comber brutally, “I think it is just as well to stop.”

      Mrs. Comber chattered with amazing confusion as she helped Mrs. Dormer to get her cloak. In her eyes something bright was shining, and every now and again she put up her band to push back some of her black hair (always on the edge of a perilous descent) with a little, desperate action.

      “Good night. I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed it. We meet to-morrow, of course, although I can’t think why they aren’t going to play golf—there’s going to be such a storm in an hour or two, isn’t there?—probably because it’s football to-morrow afternoon. Yes, good-by.” Everyone departed. Mr. Perrin stood desperately with something going up and down in his throat. He had a sentence in his head: “Please, Miss Desart, do let me see you back to the lodge.” (Mrs. Comber had had to plant her out there to sleep because there was no room in their own tiny house.) He meant to say it, he wanted to say it. He clutched his mortar-board frantically in his band. Then suddenly be beard Traill’s voice:

      “Oh! please, Miss Desart—of course, I’ll see you back. Good night, Mrs. Comber. Thank you so much—I’ve loved it. Good night, Comber. Night, Perrin. Look out, Miss Desart, it’s dark.”

      Perrin felt his band just touched by Miss Desart’s, and her voice, “Good night, Mr. Perrin.”

      He was left alone on the step.

VI

      I don’t suppose that at this stage of things Isabel bad the very slightest idea of all the emotions that had been in play that evening. Her bead, as they walked away down the dark gravel path, was full of her hostess.

      “Poor Mrs. Comber,” she said, and then checked herself as though there were some disloyalty in talking about her. “I hate Mrs. Dormer,” she added quietly.

      “I don’t like her,” Traill said. “And Dormer’s such a jolly little man. I don’t envy; him.”

      “Oh! I don’t suppose it’s her fault any more than it’s anyone’s fault here about anything they do. It’s all a case of nerves.”

      There was going to be a storm soon. Already that little preparatory whisper of the wind, the ominous, frightened rustle of the leaves down the path, was about them. It was all very dark, with a curious white light on the horizon, and the dark buildings of the Lower School huddled against it in sharp, black outline like the broad backs of giants bending to the soil.

      The scent of trees—vague and uncertain in the daytime, but now clear and pungent—was borne through the air, and the voice of the sea, rolling in long, mournful cadences far below the hills, came up to them. The wind’s whisper grew into a furious, strangled cry; little eddies of it swept about their feet, and cascades of withered leaves fell wildly against them and were blown, sweeping, streaming away.

      They were silent. Traill was thinking of her voice. It was so grave and assured and restful. He thought that he could trust her tremendously. But there was reserve in it too, and he felt, a little hopelessly, that he might never perhaps get to know her better.

      When they got to the lodge gates, they stopped and stood for a moment silently.

      Then she said, looking very gravely in front of her at the dark bend of the road, “There must be such a storm coming up. I feel it all through me. It was depressing to-night, was n’t it?”

      “Just a little,” he said.

      “Anyhow, I’m glad you like it—being here. Mind you always do. I don’t want to be pessimistic when you are just beginning; but—well, you don’t mean to stay here for ever, do you?”

      “I should think not,” he answered eagerly. “Only a term or two at the most, and then I hope to go back to Clifton, my old school.”

      “That’s right—because—really it isn’t a very good place to be—this.”

      “Why not?” he asked.

      “It’s difficult to explain without maligning people and making things out worse than they really are.” She paused a moment, and then she went on: “Do you know, at the bottom of the hill, just before you get into the village, a melancholy orchard? One always passes it. You will see at the right time of the year lots of green apples on the trees, but they never seem to come to anything. And such blossoms in the spring! I ‘ve seen men working there sometimes. I don’t know what it is, but nothing ‘s any good there. They call it in the village ‘Green Apple Orchard.’… Well, I’ve stayed here a great deal, and there’s an obvious comparison.”

      “That’s cheerful,” he said, laughing. “It would, I suppose, be awful if one had to stay here for ever like Perrin and Dormer and the rest of them; but this time next year will see me somewhere better, I hope.”

      “Mind you stick to that,” she said eagerly. “I have a horrible kind of feeling that they all meant to go very soon; but here they are still—soured, disappointed. Oh! it doesn’t bear thinking of.”

      “One must have ambition,” he answered her confidently.

      She smiled at him, and took his hand, and said good night.

      He went, smiling, to his room. As he climbed into bed, the storm broke furiously.

      CHAPTER IV—BIRKLAND LOQUITUR

I

      AT the end of his first month young Traill looked back, as it were from the top of a hill, and thought that it all had been very pleasant. How much of this pleasantness was due to Isabel (although he had seen her during that period extremely seldom) and how much of it was due to his agreeable acceptance of things as they were without any very definite challenge to them to be different, it is impossible to say.

      The crowded day had of course something to do with it: the fact that there was never from the first harsh clanging of the bell down the stone passages at half-past six to the last leap into bed, jumping as it were from a heap of Latin exercises and the cold challenge of Perrin’s voice as he went round the dormitories turning lights out—never a moment’s pause to think about anything extra at all. But he was in no way a reflective person. He saw that his own small boys in their untidy, scrambling kind of way liked him and that the bigger boys of the Upper Fourth, to whom he taught French twice a week, revered him because of his football.

      The masters at the Upper School seemed pleasant fellows, although he might, had he thought about it, have perceived dimly an atmosphere of unrest and discomfort in their common room.

      With Moy-Thompson as yet he had had no dealings at all. He had been to supper there once on Sunday night, had been appalled by the dreariness of the whole affair, the shrivelled ill-temper of Moy-Thompson’s parents (aged about ninety apiece), the inadequacy of the food, the melancholy inertia of Mrs. Moy-Thompson; but he had had no nearer relations with him.

      He