Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows, where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
Mrs.Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl--Gertrude had found a disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle revival--while their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat near Mrs.Seddon.The little curate, stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring.
We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it.The curate was a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown, and understood these differences.She had the eagerness of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and personalities.We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on the way to Grantchester.
I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but determined.She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a lisp.And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.
"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under the apple-blossom.I didn't think then I should have to come down."(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them--at the Pitti and the Brera,--the Brera is wonderful--wonderful places,--but it isn't like real study," she was saying presently...."We bought bales of photographs," she said.
I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land, and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed translucent beside Gertrude.Even the little twist and droop of her slender body was a grace to me.
I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest and please her as well as I knew how.
We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit--he had given a talk to Bennett Hall also--and our impression of him.
"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter of social progress, and she listened--oh! with a kind of urged attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly.The little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and intelligent.
"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said."I'm glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink and more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our little group.Gertrude had been sipping admiration and was not disposed to play a passive part in the talk.
"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word."It's well Pa isn't here.He has Fits when people talk of socialism.Fits!"The initial laughed in a general kind of way.
The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at Margaret to gauge whether he had been too bold in this utterance.
But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression.He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we got to put in its place?""The thing that exists is always the more evident alternative," Isaid.
The little curate looked at it for a moment."Precisely," he said explosively, and turned stirring and with his head a little on one side, to hear what Margaret was saying.
Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, that she had no doubt she was a socialist.
