I'll Never Marry! Page 3

  It wasn’t quite so easy to establish friendly terms with these older children—girls, all of them— as with their tinies; their smiles were shy, and they had little to say. But when, having escorted her to the play-room, they discovered that she was ready to be genuinely interested in their games and hobbies, their tongues were loosened: it was a question of who could claim her attention.

  They were an attractive, nicely mannered set, but one child in particular— a ten-year-old called Maureen—made the keenest impression on her. Black-haired, white-skinned, with high cheekbones and dark blue eyes, there was something in her expression which Catherine found unbearably touching. She smiled; but behind her smile there was gravity, and a resigned sadness painful to see in so young a child. And Matron’s words flashed back into Catherine’s mind: “Every child who comes here bears a burden or sorrow—of which, little by little, we try to set her free.” Certainly there was a burden here.

  The children, she found, had extremely varied hobbies. Fair-haired Winnie, the oldest child in the Home, was an excellent needlewoman; she would be fifteen soon, she told Catherine importantly, and was going to Great Garsford in a few months’ time to learn dressmaking as an apprentice. Several girls from the Home had gone to a big shop there to train, and all of them had done well.

  Music, on the other hand, was dark-eyed Nicola’s chief interest. A graceful, vivid child, she had been learning the piano for some time, and was to start the violin next term. She possessed quite a good library of piano music, which she showed Catherine with pride, explaining that it had belonged to her grandfather, who had been a professional musician.

  Ruth, solid and rosy-cheeked, did not care much for indoor activities, she confessed. Birds and animals were what she liked, and she was keeping a list of all the wild creatures she saw. She had lately been put in charge of the chickens and rabbits, she said, her eyes lighting up as she spoke, and was actually learning to milk a goat which had been presented to Matron.

  Smothered shrieks of laughter greeted this last observation—laughter in which Ruth, though rather pink, was very soon joining.

  “If they tried it themselves, they wouldn’t be quite so amused, would they, Ruth!” Catherine responded, smiling. “I’ve had some—and I know. Talk about bruises! I was black-and-blue my first week.”

  “Yes, but did you get the knack eventually?” Ruth demanded eagerly. “If so, do you think you could possibly give me a lesson? Mr. Barbin, who gave Nanny to us, showed me once how to do it, but she seems so much more in awe of him than of me.”

  “I’ll try to reduce her to order—that is, if she isn’t too large and fierce,” Catherine promised, laughing, and then turned her attention to another child, who was thrusting a book of pressed flowers into her hands.

  Always more at ease with children than with older people, Catherine was very soon feeling at home with them all, and they with her, and when, presently, Matron came in with mugs of milk and a great plate of bread-and-butter, she gave Catherine a warmly encouraging smile, as if to say, “You’re doing very well!”

  By eight o’clock all the youngsters were in bed, and Matron, Miss Dewney and Catherine sitting down to their own supper in the cosy kitchen. And then, over macaroni cheesy and steaming cocoa,’ Catherine related the story of her mistake at Great Garsford station; how she had been wafted to Garsford Manor by Andrew Playdle, to be brought back, when the error was discovered, by one of his friends who was staying at a house a few miles away.

  “You went off with Mr. Playdle?” Matron was regarding her with blank astonishment. “But how could you possibly make such a mistake?”

  “He was looking out for a girl he had not met before—a friend of his sister’s,” Catherine explained. “For my part, I noticed that there was a truck attached to his car, and took it for granted, when he came up and said, ‘Good evening,’ that he was the right man.”

  “And what did he say when he found that you were coming to work at the Home?” Hilda Dewney’s voice was sarcastic. “I can’t imagine his being exactly effusive.”

  Catherine flushed, remembering all too clearly that sudden drop in the temperature—his obvious relief when Roland Alldyke volunteered to take over the task of driving her to her real destination.

  “His mariner changed, I must admit,” she said. “I was surprised, because I’d thought at first that he was particularly amusing and friendly.”

  “I found him disappointing in that way, too,” Matron put in, frowning a little. “From what I’d heard of him before we came here, I was hoping he’d be a pleasant neighbor. But it hasn’t worked out that way at all. He seems to dislike children and to resent our ever having come here; so naturally we do our best to keep out of his way.”

  “It is a shame!” Catherine was looking quite upset. “Fancy how lovely it would be for the children if they could visit the farm sometimes. Think how Ruth would adore it.”

  “They’ll never get the chance of that,” Hilda asserted, with a loud sniff of angry contempt. “He is the utterly selfish sort, and the only thing, as Matron says, is to avoid him.”

  Slowly and most unwillingly Catherine nodded agreement with this point of view. But in spite of her own conviction of Andrew’s churlishness, a queer sharp feeling of regret persisted.

  What a pity—what a terrible pity—it was!

  CHAPTER THREE

  That first evening at the Home gave Catherine certain impressions which the following days served to deepen rather than to correct.

  Matron proved an ideal person to work with, partly because she had a completely unprofessional outlook. A widow, whose own two children, both boys, were now out in the world, she had chosen her present career simply from a love of children in general. She was motherly in a sensible, practical, homely way, and after the fashion of all good mothers she gave to everyone around her the feeling of happy security. The children—those, at least, who had been with her for any length of time—flew to her instinctively with their problems, their small joys and Sorrows; for though she had, as she confessed to Catherine, no time to read books on psychology, or to study “isms,” she was quick to grasp their point of view. They could count on her for sympathy, sound advice, and a warm affection in which there was no trace of sentimentality.

  Hilda Dewney was of a different type altogether. She had originally intended to be a hospital nurse, and had, indeed, completed three years’ training in a children’s hospital. But the work had been too strenuous for her, and she had taken a post as assistant foster-mother, imagining—quite wrongly, she now rather ruefully declared—that the life would be easier. She was a tower of strength in cases of illness and accident, ready to take on the heaviest responsibilities, and conscientious to a degree and, busy as she was, her sphere of usefulness was by no means confined to the Home. A close friend of the District Nurse, and respected by the local doctor for her strong sense of duty, she frequently lent a helping hand to both of them behind the scenes; and though the villagers found her town-bred quickness a shade alarming, it gave them considerable satisfaction to know that when “Doctor” and “Nurse” were engaged on a difficult case, miles away—for the district was large—they still had someone with a hospital training in their midst, ready to come to the rescue if Johnny scalded himself or baby was taken with an attack of croup.

  Like Matron she was fond of children, but she lacked almost entirely the older woman’s gift of being able to remember how life had looked to her as a child. She wanted the little ones in her care to be healthy, hygienically clean, and happy, and took it for granted, Catherine sometimes felt, that the first two qualities pre-supposed the third.

  The sand pit in which the toddlers so revelled was, to Hilda, not an infantile paradise, but a place for getting freshly laundered clothes dirty in the shortest possible time; and plastic clay, she admitted frankly, was the bane of her life. They had to be tolerated, together with such things as mud pies and pet caterpillars, because they had come to be accepted as part of the mode
rn educational system. But in her heart she regarded them as enemies to the great cause of order and cleanliness.

  She did not, Catherine soon sensed, approve altogether of Matron’s go-as-you-please methods; her early training had given her too deep a veneration for routine and discipline. And since she could not, naturally, hope to alter Matron, she did her best to see that Catherine who, though older by a few months, was her junior, performed all her tasks according to plan.

  “There is less discipline here than in almost any good boarding school,” she complained to Catherine one day during her first week, when the hubbub of the children getting tidy for dinner was more pronounced than usual. “The children ought to be lined up in silence before they file into the dining room, not allowed to chatter and laugh like this.”

  “But children at boarding-school have a home to go to in their holidays,” Catherine objected mildly. “This is ‘our’ children’s home—and Matron wants them to feel that it is their home, and not a school.”

  “Talking in the bedrooms, too,” Hilda fumed, disregarding Catherine’s observations altogether.

  “But they don’t, once the lights are out!” Catherine protested.

  This time Hilda deigned to hear her remark. “They are not supposed to, but they do, sometimes, and I’ve noticed you’re not nearly sharp enough with them,” she retorted. “Another thing, if a child of ten doesn’t make her bed properly, it’s for you to stand over her and see she does it neatly, not help her put it right. They’ll only laugh at you behind your back if you’re so lax.” And with that she swept on her way.

  But her tendency to snap when things were, not done precisely her way did not perturb Catherine unduly; it was as nothing to the treatment she had been accustomed to receive from Marion. Hilda’s tone might be tart at times, but there was no hint of that half-impatient, half-pitying contempt which Catherine had found so paralyzing.

  Why, indeed, should there be? she asked herself boldly. And knew, in that moment, that already she was better equipped to hold her own against Marion, should her sister ever again try to dominate and overawe her.

  Geoffrey Barbin, the young market gardener who was so good a friend to the Home, she quickly grew to know and like.

  He arrived at the back door one fine morning, with a great basket of new peas—a tall, diffident young man with fair hair, freckles and a faintly humorous smile—and far from reproaching her for the trouble she had given him on the afternoon of her arrival, he was all apologies for being, as he expressed it, “a thought late,” at the station.

  His advent caused a cheerful commotion among the children, who were all eager to see what he had brought them, and since the gift was peas, he was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm.

  “Don’t be surprised if it’s spinach next time,” he told them, with a wink at Catherine, as she handed him back his basket, adding, when the resulting shrieks of protest had died down: “Spinach and boiled cod, that’s the right diet for children, isn’t it, Miss Emberley? Spinach for vitamins, and cod for improving the brain.”

  “Mr. Barbin, you’re a very generous man—but a very wicked one!” Hilda had come into the kitchen, and joined Catherine now at the back door. “You undermine all my efforts to make the children like spinach—”

  “I know! Which is the most valuable of all vegetables,” Geoffrey put in, grinning broadly. “But tell me this, Miss Dewney, in strict confidence: Did you always eat up your spinach, like a good little girl?”

  Hilda flushed slightly. The children had all gone back to their play, so that his question could hardly be said to be subversive of discipline, but she was not sure, it seemed, whether she quite appreciated being teased like this.

  And then, to Catherine’s relief, her face broke into smiles: “As a matter of fact, I could never swallow the stuff when I was a child,” she confessed. “But if you ever give me away—!”

  “Never,” he declared, laughing. “By the way, it will be broad beans next time. Payment? Not for this little lot. It’s a present.” And with that he hoisted the empty basket under his arm and took his departure.

  “He’s an absurd creature, but amazingly generous.” Hilda’s face was soft as she watched his retreating figure. “He lets us pay for the ordinary things, like cabbages and potatoes and carrots. But when it’s a case of luxuries—like these early peas, for instance—he refuses to charge.” And then she added, turning back into the kitchen: “Rather different from that surly Playdle man, isn’t he? I can’t see the children flocking round him, as he comes into the gate, they’d run a mile, more likely.”

  “Maybe Mr. Playdle’s just not used to children,” Catherine put in defensively, as she fetched out a large bowl, and sat on a nearby bench in the sunshine, with the basket of peas beside her. Somehow Hilda’s bitter dislike of Andrew made her wish to find some sort of excuse for him. Contrariness on her part, no doubt, but there it was.

  Hilda’s reply to this observation was lost, for Ruth and Winnie, followed at a distance by the hesitant Maureen, came running up to her, with the announcement that it was their day to help with the preparations for dinner.

  “Miss Emberley doesn’t want more than two of you,” Hilda exclaimed. “An extra one will be in her way. It’s not Maureen’s turn, surely?”

  “No, but Maureen has never shelled peas in her life,” Winnie explained, coaxingly, slipping her arm round Hilda’s waist. “Let her help for a little while. She does so want to.”

  “Oh, you kids. It’s impossible to organize you.” With a mollified smile, induced no doubt by Winnie’s cajolery, Hilda went back into the house, to get on with the thousand and one jobs which awaited her capable hands. And the children, dragging up some garden stools, set to work with zest to help Catherine with the peas.

  Rosy-cheeked Ruth, who was keen on outdoor activities, took care to explain to Catherine that though “our Matron” couldn’t cope with growing enough vegetables for them all, she was a “frightfully clever” gardener.

  “Our fruit trees will soon be doing better than anyone’s,” she declared, “and we grow all kinds of lovely salad things besides lettuces. As for our herb garden, people come from all over the place to beg Matron for roots.”

  “She’s a much finer cook than most of the other children’s mothers,” Winnie put in, “that’s why she needs all sorts of herbs. At the Women’s Institute they think no end of her. When I was having tea with Hetty Briggs the other day her mother was saying that our Matron was the most valuable member there.”

  Listening to the two girls’ innocent boasting of the merits of their beloved Matron, Catherine’s mind strayed, after a while, to Hilda’s sarcastic remarks about Andrew Playdle. Surely if Andrew were to pay a visit to the Home, and learn to know the children, his churlish attitude would change. How could any normal person spend an hour among them, and still cherish feelings of animosity?

  Surely he would find their loyalty to “our Matron” oddly touching. And the behaviour of the children—surely it contrasted well with that of youngsters in more fortunate circumstances. Look at Winnie and Ruth, for instance. Girls of that age did not usually care to have a younger child tagging after them. Yet they had made it their business to see that shy, lonely little Maureen should have the treat she wanted—even so simple a treat as shelling peas.

  And then, as she helped the children take the empty husks to the compost heap, common sense came to her rescue.

  What did it matter, anyway, whether Andrew Playdle took an interest in the children or not? It wasn’t likely that they ever gave him a thought. And why, indeed, should they, since, according to Hilda, they seldom set eyes on him?

  Before long, however, she found that she had been wrong in accepting this statement from Hilda at its face value. A townswoman, born and bred, Hilda, when she accompanied the children on their walks kept chiefly to the high road. Catherine, on the other hand, struck out at once for the fields and woods, and since Andrew’s estates covered a large acreage she frequently
caught glimpses of his big, tweed-clad figure and coppery head. Usually he was alone—but for his spaniel bitch—or accompanied by a man whom she guessed rightly to be his bailiff; but sometimes, at intervals, he had a girl with him—a girl whom her keen eyes recognized instantly as Beryl Osworth.

  If he, for his part, noticed her, he gave no sign. But one June afternoon when Catherine was out with some of the children on a flower-hunting expedition, he came riding on his chestnut mare down a lane at right-angles to the one in which they were rambling, passing so close that some sort of greeting was inevitable.

  Beryl, who was riding with him—looking very attractive in her well-cut linen jacket and workmanlike jodhpurs—contented herself with the briefest of nods, but after a moment’s hesitation, Andrew turned back, leaving his companion to go on alone, and trotted up to Catherine and the children.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, and though his smile was forced, it was nevertheless a smile. “How are you getting along?”

  “Very well,” Catherine returned coolly, wishing fervently that the children wouldn’t stare in quite so open a fashion. “And you?”

  He did not answer that last piece of conventional politeness. He asked, almost abruptly: “Would you like to bring a dozen or so of the children to have tea in the hay next Saturday? I’ll provide the feast if they’ll bring their own mugs or cups.”

  There were excited “O-oh’s” from the children, and Catherine, unable to disguise, her astonishment and pleasure, said frankly: “It’s very kind of you. I shall have to ask Matron, of course, but I don’t imagine she’ll make the slightest objection. In fact she’ll be most grateful.”