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 course. She’s in bed with a chill and there’s no chance of her being able to travel, and all these people coming—— Andy, I’m nearly demented.”
“It’s a pity, but surely we can manage ourselves.”
“We can not manage ourselves”; and in her despair poor Mrs. Jackson nearly burst into tears. “A bonnie-like mess of things I’d make with no one beside me to tell me what to do! You know quite well that if I can put my foot in it I do it, and I can’t talk. And, oh! the dance! the orchestra and the purveyors. . . . Oh dear, dear, what made me think of trying to entertain? It was you, Andy, that said we should give a dinner to pay back, but the dance was a bit of show-off on my part.”
“Wouldn’t Mrs. Douglas help us?”
Mrs. Jackson dismissed the suggestion with an impatient shake of her head.
“It wouldn’t be the same. With Nicole Rutherfurd beside me playing the daughter of the house I could have faced anything. Andy, could we not send wires to every one that we’ve got something? Influenza or a nervous breakdown. . . . I’m sure I’ve got that right enough.”
Andy thought for a minute. “Isn’t there another Miss Rutherfurd, a cousin? Wouldn’t she come?”
“She’s called Miss Burt, and she’s a stand-offish thing; not a bit like my girl. Besides, she wouldn’t come.”
“You could ask her.”
As a drowning man clutches at a straw, so Mrs. Jackson clutched at this possibility. “You send a wire then, Andy, an urgent wire so that they’ll see things are desperate.—Or mebbe I’d better write. . . . She’d be a lot better than nobody.”
* * * * *
It was now the 9th of March, and Miss Barbara Burt might arrive any minute. Andrew had gone to meet her in the car, much against his
