The Education of Eric Lane Part 13

"I was asleep then; and I'm at lunch now."

"Who are you lunching with?" she enquired with unabashed interest.

"Oh, n.o.body that matters! What is it, Lady Barbara? What do you want, I mean?"

"I want to talk to you. Don't you _like_ talking to me?"

"At the proper time and in the proper place. I say, you know, this is becoming a little bit tiresome."

There was a short pause; then a crestfallen voice murmured:

"I'm sorry, Eric. I'm truly sorry. I apologize."

"Lady Barbara!" he cried.

There was only a dull click, a silence and then a brisk nasal voice saying, "Number, please?"

Eric strode wrathfully back to the coffee-room.

"You can't do right with that d.a.m.ned girl," he muttered.

His companions were already paying their bills, so he abandoned his cheese and walked upstairs with them to the bright biscuit-coloured card-room overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace. While the others drank their coffee, he tried to write a very short, very simple note which somehow rejected his best efforts of phrasing. He had torn up four unsatisfactory drafts when Lord Ettrick threw away his cigar and asked whether any one was walking towards the Privy Council.

"I'm only scribbling one note," Eric answered.

What he was always in danger of forgetting was that Barbara was really only a child; she had begun to speak with a delightful ripple of laughter, and he had driven it from her voice. When she apologized, there was something hurt, something very much surprised--as though he had seen her smiling and slapped the smile away.

"_Please forgive me_," he wrote. "_I didn't mean to be rude._"

5

Before deciding whether to send his letter by hand, Eric ascertained that, by posting it, he could be sure of its reaching its destination by the last delivery. Then he walked through the Park with Lord Ettrick, left him at the door of the Privy Council Office and returned home for an hour's work before rehearsal. On leaving the Regency, he came back to Ryder Street and dressed for dinner. His own letters clattered into their wire cage at a quarter past eight, and, before sitting down to dinner, he transferred the telephone to his dining-room. The child was unlikely to refuse so open an invitation to ring up and say that all was well. . . .

There was no call during dinner, no call as he worked in the smoking-room with the telephone and lamp on a table at his elbow, no call when he went to bed, though he lay reading for half-an-hour after his usual time, to be ready for her. The morning brought a pencilled note ("Surprisingly tidy hand," Eric commented, "seeing what she's like"), instinct with a new aloofness and restraint. "_After your refres.h.i.+ngly plain hint that I was a nuisance to you, I determined that you should not have occasion to suffer from my importunity. You may lunch with us on Sat.u.r.day, if you like. And I shall be very glad indeed to see you, but you must not feel that you are doing this to please me.

I SAY as you THINK: that I have no claim on you. Barbara._"

Eric smiled indulgently and tossed the note into a despatch-box before ringing for his secretary. He must be more careful in future. . . .

When he looked at his engagement-book on Sat.u.r.day morning, he found that Barbara had named no hour; which was characteristic of her. When he telephoned to the house, there was no answer; which--by no great stretch of calumny--was characteristic of the house in which she lived. Ninety per cent. of the people that he knew lunched at half-past one, excluding a Cabinet Minister, who lunched punctually at a quarter past two, and three Treasury clerks and one novelist who lunched at one; accordingly, at half-past one, he presented himself in Berkeley Square, to be informed by a sedately combative butler that luncheon was at two o'clock but that Barbara was believed to be in her room.

Eric followed his guide up four short flights of marble stairs and was shewn into the untidiest room that he had ever seen, filled in equal measure with the priceless and the worthless. The bindings of Riviere rubbed shoulders with tattered paper-backs; a cabinet of j.a.panese porcelain was outraged by foolish, intrusive china cats; there was a shelf of Waterford gla.s.s with a dynasty of blown-gla.s.s pigs, descending from the ten-inch-high parent to the thumb-nail baby of the litter--gravely and ridiculously arranged in a serpentine procession.

Fifty kinds of trophy adorned the mantel-piece, ranging from a West African idol at one end to a pathetic, brown-eyed Teddy Bear at the other, with stiff, conventional photographs and occasional miniatures for punctuation. He recognized his own silver flask--and pa.s.sed on, with a smile. Three small tables were almost buried beneath their load of pink carnations; a box of cigarettes, half-open and half-empty, lay tucked between the cus.h.i.+ons in each of three arm-chairs, and the white bearskin rug was littered with _The Times_, a round milliner's box, two cheque-books and a volume of Ronsard.

The butler looked dispa.s.sionately at the confusion and withdrew, giving it up as a hopeless task. A moment later he returned to inform Eric that her ladys.h.i.+p would be with him immediately. Ten minutes later Barbara came in by another door to find him cautiously picking his way through the disorder and examining her books and pictures.

"I didn't expect you so early," she began. "Will you give me a little kiss, or am I still a nuisance?"

"You didn't say any time, so I chanced half-past one," Eric answered.

"If you'd told me to come at two, you'd still have been ten minutes late, wouldn't you?" he added with a laugh. "Lady Barbara, your conception of tidiness----"

She opened her eyes wide at him in unfeigned surprise.

"My dear, but you should see my bedroom!" she suggested.

"The purple bedroom?"

"Did you remember that? I believe you're beginning to like me, Eric.

Come and sit down instead of fidgeting."

He paused to finish his inspection, ending up with the nursery toy-cupboard on the mantel-piece.

"Hullo! I don't know this one of Jack Waring," he exclaimed on reaching a cabinet photograph in a silver frame.

Barbara lighted a cigarette and came beside him, resting her hand on one shoulder and looking over the other at the photograph, her hair brus.h.i.+ng against his cheek.

"He---- Give me another match, Eric; this is burning all down one side---- It's good, don't you think?"

"The best I've ever seen of him, poor chap. I must get his sister to give me one."

"And don't forget that you're going to find out whether they've had any news of him, will you? Johnny Carstairs asked the Foreign Office to make enquiries through Copenhagen and Madrid, but he hasn't been able to find out anything."

"I should be afraid there's nothing to find out," Eric murmured. "He's been missing for weeks."

"But if he's been wounded or lost his identification disc--a hundred things. And it takes months to get news sometimes. D'you like my pig family, Eric?"

"Not among Waterford gla.s.s," he answered. "Except as part of the general setting for you."

She replaced the photograph, laughing, and took his arm, leading him round the room and giving him the history of her trophies, until a footman knocked and announced that luncheon was on the table.

Eric spent the next five minutes being pushed round a large library, which seemed to contain twice as many voices as people, and introduced to a second person before he had fixed the ident.i.ty of the first. Lady Crawleigh was timorous and subdued, with an air of having been all her life interrupted in the middle of her sentences and with a compensating pair of flas.h.i.+ng pigeon's eyes which seemed to miss nothing.

"I'm so glad Babs gave us the opportunity of meeting you," she said to Eric. "I enjoyed your play so much. Your first, wasn't it? It must be a glorious sensation to make such a success at the outset."

("She takes in a thousand times more than she ever gives out," Eric said to himself; then he found himself being spun through the rest of the family. "Wonder what she does with it?")

Lord Crawleigh interrupted an indignant, staccato conversation with Lady Maitland, who was holding her own with emphatic shakes of a ma.s.sive head, to touch finger-tips and introduce him to his sister--the whole done cholerically and with the air of transacting a great deal of tiresome business in a short time.

("Bullies the life out of every one, I've always heard," was Eric's private comment, as he was introduced to a pair of tow-haired young officers with limp hands; "except the girl. And she bullies him.")

"I knew you by sight at Oxford," said Lord Neave, withdrawing his limp hand jerkily, as though he feared that it would be stolen. "You were at Trinity, weren't you? You, er, know my brother Charles--Mr. Lane."

Eric grasped a second limp hand, received a quick, business-like nod from John Gaymer and found himself confronted by the d.u.c.h.ess of Ross.

"No one will introduce us!" she cried shrilly with a vermillion pout.

"I've _so_ much wanted to meet you, Mr. Lane. You _wouldn't_ dine when I asked you! Won't _some one_ introduce us _properly_!"

The babble of high-toned voices, the quick patter of speech, the sense of hurry, the hyperbolical intimacy and enthusiasm were bewildering to a man who was naturally shy and at that moment mentally tired. Eric commended his soul to his humour and circ.u.mambulated the room, two steps at a time, until a sudden lessening of noise and tension told him that luncheon had dawned upon Lady Crawleigh as a thing to be not only discussed but eaten.