The covenant - James A. Michener [613]
Tears came to her eyes and for some moments she wept, refusing to use a handkerchief, for these were not handkerchief tears. Pressing her fingers to her cheeks, she wiped the tears away, then left the chapel to walk slowly down one of the major sights of England and perhaps Europe, that expanse of green grass hemmed in by the walls of Clare, the chapel and King's. The buildings were admirably suited to each other, but it was the long sweep down to the River Cam and the Backs beyond that gave the place its nobility. Here she had been sitting on the grass one evening during the Maysthat week of frivolity which falls in Junewhen Noel Saltwood, from Oriel College at Oxford, drifted by in a boat with Cambridge friends he was visiting. They had met, fallen in love, and pledged a marriage which she had never once regretted. Life in Noel's South Africa had been rather primitive, and good conversation lagged, but often he encouraged her to get back to Salisbury, and from there to the theaters in London, with occasional excursions to Cambridge, and that had sustained her.
'Oh, Wexton, why in God's name did you do it?'
'Pardon, ma'am, but did you call?' It was a short little man wearing a rather long overcoat although the day was warmish, the kind of odd attendant one found everywhere.
'No. No. I was just thinking.' The man moved closer to assure himself that she was all right, then passed on. As he left she thought: I was indeed thinking. Of years gone, and of evenings on this grass when I first met Noel and his fine, unaffected approach to life. He listened like a country oaf to everything that Wexton and his clever friends and that brilliant young tutor said so glibly. And as he walked me back to my digs he said bluntly, 'I think your brother and his cronies are half-daft.'
'Don't you dare say a thing like that.'
'The way he ridicules everything. Don't you ever listen to him?'
So under Noel's tutelage she did listen, and Wexton and his friends, and especially the tutor, did ridicule everything. They despised Australia. They considered South Africa a blight. And they positively excoriated the United States. They also put George Bernard Shaw in his place, and John Galsworthy was beneath their contempt.
It was only then, spurred by Noel's sharp analysis, that she realized that her brother had fallen captive to a clique that idolized the young tutor, and in later years she watched with horror as they landed fine jobs in government, accelerated to positions of importance, then scurried off to Russia with high state secrets. Three of them, including Wexton, were living there now in lifelong exile. Two others had ended up in American jails, and one had committed suicide to avoid a treason trial. No one identified the tutor who had enlisted them, and so many others, in the revolution which was to eliminate excrescences like Australia, South Africa and America.
Oh, Wexton, I would travel to Leningrad on my knees if I could see you again! Once more she broke into tears, thinking of the dazzling manner in which this group of young brilliants had used the English language, and of the pitfalls into which it had led them. With them cleverness was four-fifths of the battle, she said to herself. Remember when one of them dismissed all of South Africa with a joke, even though he knew I was engaged to a South African: 'We had sense enough to let America win her war against us and got rid of that bad apple. We had to win our damned war against the Boers, and we're stuck with that atrocity.'
When she dropped her head in her hands, displaying an anguish that all could see, the little man in the long coat hurried back: 'Ma'am, I say, are you all right?' She was so preoccupied with her grief that she did not see another man, in a dark suit, who watched her from a far bend of the River Cam.
Very slowly