Free Poor Caroline by Winifred Holtby Page B

Roux, in terms more credit able to her heart than her discretion. The third announced the birth of her son. The next letter from South Africa came a year later and was from Hugo de la Roux himself. It told of the death of his wife in giving birth to a second child, a girl called Eleanor. After that, the Smiths heard of the de la Roux's no more, until years later a business friend of Mr. Smith's described a pleasant visit to the de la Roux's home outside Pretoria. 'De la Roux's a very decent fellow - very well thought of. In the Government service. Of course, the veterinary service in South Africa's quite IT. Different to a vet in England. Yes, the boy's A. 1., going to study mining engineering in the U.S.A. he tells us. The girl? Oh! a fine little girl - quite a kid. High-diving champion of the Trans vaal Girls' schools, they tell me, and plays a top-hole game of tennis. Clever too. Going to college next year. Says she's going to be a vet like her father. Not much sort of a job for a woman, I say, but you never know what girls will do in these days. A game little lass. Quite the hostess and all that. Thought a lot of out there, I should say, the de la Roux's.'
    That was in 1926. Two years later the Smiths heard that Hugo de la Roux had been killed in a motor accident, that the boy was in America, and the girl quite alone. They decided to let bygones be bygones. Mr. Smith asked his wife to invite Agatha's child to Marshington. Somewhat to their surprise, she came, and within forty-eight hours of her arrival, the Smiths decided that they had been right in their original estimation of the catastrophe of a mixed marriage and its products. They did not like Eleanor de la Roux. They did not like her small, thin figure, her lean brown hands, nor her boyish tweed coats and tailored shirts. They did not like her disconcerting silence, nor her equally dis concerting questions. They did not like her low husky voice, with its faint suggestion of a colonial accent, and her frequent use of Afrikaans ejaculations. She was not what Mrs. Smith called an easy guest. The girls confirmed this con demnation.
    'Well, anyway, she won't be here for long. She says she's going to London to a secretarial college.'
    'Why on earth? When she has done two years at science in South Africa, why doesn't she go on with it?'
    'She says she does not want to be a vet, now.'
    'I expect she's the sort of girl who never knows what she does want.'
    'I don't like this idea of a girl at her age on her own in London,' said Mrs. Smith.
    'Well. We don't want her here, do we?' asked the prac tical Betty.
    'And she's of age, isn't she? And her money's all her own. She can do what she likes.'

    Eleanor was of age. She had nearly four thousand pounds of her own. She could do what she liked. She was going to London to a secretarial training school to learn shorthand, typing and business method. She did not consult the Smiths about her future. She went forward very quietly, using in troductions from her university in the Transvaal, writing her letters, making her plans. She told the Smiths just as much as she thought it necessary for them to know about her business, and she sat for hours, her small hands folded in her lap, her grey eyes staring straight before her, saying nothing, doing nothing.
    'If you ask me,' concluded Betty, 'I should say she was a bit queer in the head.'
    It did not occur to the Smiths to attribute any of their cousin's eccentricity to the shock of her father's death, to her loneliness, her grief, and the disruption of all that had been her former life. They did not know of the agony which kept her wakeful night after night, feeling in her nerves the jolt of her father's car as its wheel caught in the rut, and the axle snapped, turning the whole world upside down in a crashing nightmare. They could know nothing of her torturing won der whether her father had been stunned immediately, or whether he had lain conscious, helpless, and in pain, pinned beneath