There was a terrific rumpus down at the rectory, on account of Yvette
and the Window Fund. After the war, Aunt Cissie had set her heart
on a stained glass window in the church, as a memorial for the men
of the parish who had fallen. But the bulk of the fallen had been
non-conformists, so the memorial took the form of an ugly little
monument in front of the Wesleyan chapel.
This did not vanquish Aunt Cissie. She canvassed, she had bazaars,
she made the girls get up amateur theatrical shows, for her precious
window. Yvette, who quite liked the acting and showing-off part of it,
took charge of the farce called _Mary in the Mirror_, and gathered in
the proceeds, which were to be paid to the Window Fund when accounts
were settled. Each of the girls was supposed to have a money-box for
the Fund.
Aunt Cissie, feeling that the united sums must now almost suffice,
suddenly called in Yvette’s box. It contained fifteen shillings. There
was a moment of green horror.
“Where is all the rest?”
“Oh!” said Yvette casually. “I just borrowed it. It wasn’t so awfully
much.”
“What about the three pounds thirteen for _Mary in the Mirror_?” asked
Aunt Cissie, as if the jaws of Hell were yawning.
“Oh quite! I just borrowed it. I can pay it back.”
Poor Aunt Cissie! The green tumour of hate burst inside her, and there
was a ghastly, abnormal scene, which left Yvette shivering with fear
and nervous loathing.
Even the rector was rather severe.
“If you needed money, why didn’t you tell me?” he said coldly. “Have
you ever been refused anything in reason?”
“I--I thought it didn’t matter,” stammered Yvette.
“And what have you done with the money?”
“I suppose I’ve spent it,” said Yvette, with wide distraught eyes and
a peaked face.
“Spent it, on what?”
“I can’t remember everything: stockings and things, and I gave some of
it away.”
Poor Yvette! Her lordly airs and ways were already hitting back at her,
on the reflex. The rector was angry: his face had a snarling, doggish
look, a sort of sneer. He was afraid his daughter was developing some
of the rank, tainted qualities of She-who-was-Cynthia.
“You _would_ do the large with somebody else’s money, wouldn’t you?” he
said, with a cold, mongrel sort of sneer, which showed what an utter
unbeliever he was, at the heart. The inferiority of a heart which has
no core of warm belief in it, no pride in life. He had utterly no
belief in her.
Yvette went pale, and very distant. Her pride, that frail, precious
flame which everybody tried to quench, recoiled like a flame blown far
away, on a cold wind, as if blown out, and her face, white now and
still like a snowdrop, the white snow-flower of his conceit, seemed to
have no life in it, only this pure, strange abstraction.
“He has no belief in me!” she thought in her soul. “I am really nothing
to him. I am nothing, only a shameful thing. Everything is shameful,
everything is shameful!”
A flame of passion or rage, while it might have overwhelmed or
infuriated her, would not have degraded her as did her father’s
unbelief, his final attitude of a sneer against her.
He became a little afraid, in the silence of sterile thought. After
all, he needed the _appearance_ of love and belief and bright life, he
would never dare to face the fat worm of his own unbelief, that stirred
in his heart.
“What have you to say for yourself?” he asked.
She only looked at him from that senseless snowdrop face which haunted
him with fear, and gave him a helpless sense of guilt. That other one,
She-who-was-Cynthia, she had looked back at him with the same numb,
white fear, the fear of his degrading unbelief, the worm which was his
heart’s core. He _knew_ his heart’s core was a fat, awful worm. His
dread was lest anyone else should know. His anguish of hate was against
anyone who knew, and recoiled.
He saw Yvette recoiling, and immediately his manner changed to the
worldly old good-humoured cynic which he affected.
“Ah well!” he said. “You have to pay it back, my girl, that’s all. I
will advance you the money out of your allowance. But I shall charge
you four per cent. a month’s interest. Even the devil himself must pay
a percentage on his debts. Another time, if you can’t trust yourself,
don’t handle money which isn’t your own. Dishonesty isn’t pretty.”
Yvette remained crushed, and deflowered and humiliated. She crept
about, trailing the rays of her pride. She had a revulsion even from
herself. Oh, why had she ever touched the leprous money! Her whole
flesh shrank as if it were defiled. Why was that? Why, why was that?
She admitted herself wrong in having spent the money. “Of course I
shouldn’t have done it. They are quite right to be angry,” she said to
herself.
But where did the horrible wincing of her flesh come from? Why did she
feel she had caught some physical contagion?
“Where you’re so _silly_, Yvette,” Lucille lectured her: poor Lucille
was in great distress--“is that you give yourself away to them all.
You might _know_ they’d find out. I could have raised the money for
you, and saved all this bother. It’s perfectly awful! But you never
will think beforehand where your actions are going to land you! Fancy
Aunt Cissie saying all those things to you! How _awful_! Whatever would
Mamma have said, if she’d heard it?”
When things went very wrong, they thought of their mother, and despised
their father and all the low brood of the Saywells. Their mother, of
course, had belonged to a higher, if more dangerous and “immoral”
world. More selfish, decidedly. But with a showier gesture. More
unscrupulous and more easily moved to contempt: but not so humiliating.
Yvette always considered that she got her fine, delicate flesh from
her mother. The Saywells were all a bit leathery, and grubby somewhere
inside. But then the Saywells never let you down. Whereas the fine
She-who-was-Cynthia had let the rector down with a bang, and his little
children along with him. Her little children! They could not quite
forgive her.
Only dimly, after the row, Yvette began to realise the other sanctity
of herself, the sanctity of her sensitive, clean flesh and blood, which
the Saywells with their so-called morality succeeded in defiling. They
always wanted to defile it. They were the life unbelievers. Whereas,
perhaps She-who-was-Cynthia had only been a moral unbeliever.
Yvette went about dazed and peaked and confused. The rector paid in the
money to Aunt Cissie, much to that lady’s rage. The helpless tumour
of her rage was still running. She would have liked to announce her
niece’s delinquency in the parish magazine. It was anguish to the
destroyed woman that she could not publish the news to all the world.
The selfishness! The selfishness! The selfishness!
Then the rector handed his daughter a little account with himself:
her debt to him, interest thereon, the amount deducted from her small
allowance. But to her credit he had placed a guinea, which was the fee
he had to pay for complicity.
“As father of the culprit,” he said humorously, “I am fined one guinea.
And with that I wash the ashes out of my hair.”
He was always generous about money. But somehow, he seemed to think
that by being free about money he could absolutely call himself a
generous man. Whereas he used money, even generosity, as a hold over
her.
But he let the affair drop entirely. He was by this time more amused
than anything, to judge from appearances. He thought still he was safe.
Aunt Cissie, however, could not get over her convulsion. One night
when Yvette had gone rather early, miserably, to bed, when Lucille was
away at a party, and she was lying with soft, peaked limbs aching with
a sort of numbness and defilement, the door softly opened, and there
stood Aunt Cissie, pushing her grey-green face through the opening of
the door. Yvette started up in terror.
“Liar! Thief! Selfish little beast!” hissed the maniacal face of Aunt
Cissie. “You little hypocrite! You liar! You selfish beast! You greedy
little beast!”
There was such extraordinary impersonal hatred in that grey-green mask,
and those frantic words, that Yvette opened her mouth to scream with
hysterics. But Aunt Cissie shut the door as suddenly as she had opened
it, and disappeared. Yvette leaped from her bed and turned the key.
Then she crept back, half demented with fear of the squalid abnormal,
half numbed with paralysis of damaged pride. And amid it all, up came a
bubble of distracted laughter. It _was_ so filthily ridiculous!
Aunt Cissie’s behaviour did not hurt the girl so very much. It was
after all somewhat fantastic. Yet hurt she was: in her limbs, in her
body, in her sex, hurt. Hurt, numbed, and half destroyed, with only
her nerves vibrating and jangled. And still so young, she could not
conceive what was happening.
Only she lay and wished she were a gipsy. To live in a camp, in a
caravan, and never set foot in a house, not know the existence of a
parish, never look at a church. Her heart was hard with repugnance
against the rectory. She loathed these houses with their indoor
sanitation and their bathrooms, and their extraordinary repulsiveness.
She hated the rectory, and everything it implied. The whole stagnant,
sewerage sort of life, where sewerage is never mentioned, but where it
seems to smell from the centre to every two-legged inmate, from Granny
to the servants, was foul. If gipsies had no bathrooms, at least they
had no sewerage. There was fresh air. In the rectory there was _never_
fresh air. And in the souls of the people, the air was stale till it
stank.
Hate kindled her heart, as she lay with numbed limbs. And she thought
of the words of the gipsy woman: “There is a dark man who never lived
in a house. He loves you. The other people are treading on your heart.
They will tread on your heart till you think it is dead. But the dark
man will blow the one spark up into fire again, good fire. You will see
what good fire.”
Even as the woman was saying it, Yvette felt there was some duplicity
somewhere. But she didn’t mind. She hated with the cold, acrid hatred
of a child the rectory interior, the sort of putridity in the life.
She liked that big, swarthy, wolf-like gipsy-woman, with the big gold
rings in her ears, the pink scarf over her wavy black hair, the tight
bodice of brown velvet, the green, fan-like skirt. She liked her dusky,
strong, relentless hands, that had pressed so firm, like wolf’s paws,
in Yvette’s own soft palm. She liked her. She liked the danger and
the covert fearlessness of her. She liked her covert, unyielding sex,
that was immoral, but with a hard, defiant pride of its own. Nothing
would ever get that woman under. She would despise the rectory and the
rectory morality, utterly! She would strangle Granny with one hand. And
she would have the same contempt for Daddy and for Uncle Fred, as men,
as she would have for fat old slobbery Rover, the Newfoundland dog. A
great, sardonic female contempt, for such domesticated dogs, calling
themselves men.
And the gipsy man himself! Yvette quivered suddenly, as if she had seen
his big, bold eyes upon her, with the naked insinuation of desire in
them. The absolutely naked insinuation of desire made her lie prone and
powerless in the bed, as if a drug had cast her in a new, molten mould.
She never confessed to anybody that two of the ill-starred Window Fund
pounds had gone to the gipsy woman. What if Daddy and Aunt Cissie
knew _that_! Yvette stirred luxuriously in the bed. The thought of
the gipsy had released the life of her limbs, and crystallised in her
heart the hate of the rectory: so that now she felt potent, instead of
impotent.
When, later, Yvette told Lucille about Aunt Cissie’s dramatic interlude
in the bedroom doorway, Lucille was indignant.
“Oh, hang it all!” cried she. “She might let it drop now. I should
think we’ve heard enough about it by now! Good heavens, you’d think
Aunt Cissie was a perfect bird of paradise! Daddy’s dropped it, and
after all, it’s his business if it’s anybody’s. Let Aunt Cissie shut
up!”
It was the very fact that the rector had dropped it, and that he
again treated the vague and inconsiderate Yvette as if she were some
specially-licensed being, that kept Aunt Cissie’s bile flowing. The
fact that Yvette really was most of the time unaware of other people’s
feelings, and being unaware, couldn’t care about them, nearly sent Aunt
Cissie mad. Why should that young creature, with a delinquent mother,
go through life as a privileged being, even unaware of other people’s
existence, though they were under her nose?
Lucille at this time was very irritable. She seemed as if she simply
went a little unbalanced, when she entered the rectory. Poor Lucille,
she was so thoughtful and responsible. She did all the extra troubling,
thought about doctors, medicines, servants, and all that sort of
thing. She slaved conscientiously at her job all day in town, working
in a room with artificial light from ten till five. And she came home
to have her nerves rubbed almost to frenzy by Granny’s horrible and
persistent inquisitiveness and parasitic agedness.
The affair of the Window Fund had apparently blown over, but there
remained a stuffy tension in the atmosphere. The weather continued bad.
Lucille stayed at home on the afternoon of her half holiday, and did
herself no good by it. The rector was in his study, she and Yvette were
making a dress for the latter young woman, Granny was resting on the
couch.
The dress was of blue silk velours, French material, and was going
to be very becoming. Lucille made Yvette try it on again: she was
nervously uneasy about the hang, under the arms.
“Oh bother!” cried Yvette, stretching her long, tender, childish arms,
that tended to go bluish with the cold. “Don’t be so frightfully
_fussy_, Lucille! It’s quite all right.”
“If that’s all the thanks I get, slaving my half-day away making
dresses for you, I might as well do something for myself!”
“Well, Lucille! You know I never _asked_ you! You know you can’t bear
it unless you _do_ supervise,” said Yvette, with that irritating
blandness of hers, as she raised her naked elbows and peered over her
shoulder into the long mirror.
“Oh yes! you never _asked_ me!” cried Lucille. “As if I didn’t know
what you meant, when you started sighing and flouncing about.”
“I!” said Yvette, with vague surprise. “Why, when did I start sighing
and flouncing about?”
“Of course you know you did.”
“Did I? No, I didn’t know! When was it?” Yvette could put a peculiar
annoyance into her mild, straying questions.
“I shan’t do another thing to this frock, if you don’t stand still and
_stop_ it,” said Lucille, in her rather sonorous, burning voice.
“You know you are most awfully nagging and irritable, Lucille,” said
Yvette, standing as if on hot bricks.
“Now Yvette!” cried Lucille, her eyes suddenly flashing in her sister’s
face, with wild flashes. “Stop it at once! Why should everybody put up
with your abominable and overbearing temper?”
“Well, I don’t know about _my_ temper,” said Yvette, writhing slowly
out of the half-made frock, and slipping into her dress again.
Then, with an obstinate little look on her face, she sat down again at
the table, in the gloomy afternoon, and began to sew at the blue stuff.
The room was littered with blue clippings, the scissors were lying on
the floor, the workbasket was spilled in chaos all over the table, and
a second mirror was perched perilously on the piano.
Granny, who had been in a semi-coma, called a doze, roused herself on
the big, soft couch and put her cap straight.
“I don’t get much peace for my nap,” she said, slowly feeling her thin
white hair, to see that it was in order. She had heard vague noises.
Aunt Cissie came in, fumbling in a bag for a chocolate.
“I never saw such a mess!” she said. “You’d better clear some of that
litter away, Yvette.”
“All right,” said Yvette. “I will in a minute.”
“Which means never!” sneered Aunt Cissie, suddenly darting and picking
up the scissors.
There was silence for a few moments, and Lucille slowly pushed her
hands in her hair, as she read a book.
“You’d better clear away, Yvette,” persisted Aunt Cissie.
“I will, before tea,” replied Yvette, rising once more and pulling the
blue dress over her head, flourishing her long, naked arms through the
sleeveless armholes. Then she went between the mirrors, to look at
herself once more.
As she did so, she sent the second mirror, that she had perched
carelessly on the piano, sliding with a rattle to the floor. Luckily it
did not break. But everybody started badly.
“She’s smashed the mirror!” cried Aunt Cissie.
“Smashed a mirror! Which mirror! Who’s smashed it?” came Granny’s sharp
voice.
“I haven’t smashed anything,” came the calm voice of Yvette. “It’s
quite all right.”
“You’d better not perch it up there again,” said Lucille.
Yvette, with a little impatient shrug at all the fuss, tried making the
mirror stand in another place. She was not successful.
“If one had a fire in one’s own room,” she said crossly, “one needn’t
have a lot of people fussing when one wants to sew.”
“Which mirror are you moving about?” asked Granny.
“One of our own that came from the vicarage,” said Yvette rudely.
“Don’t break it in _this_ house, wherever it came from,” said Granny.
There was a sort of family dislike for the furniture that had belonged
to She-who-was-Cynthia. It was most of it shoved into the kitchen, and
the servants’ bedrooms.
“Oh, _I’m_ not superstitious,” said Yvette, “about mirrors or any of
that sort of thing.”
“Perhaps you’re not,” said Granny. “People who never take the
responsibility for their own actions usually don’t care what happens.”
“After all,” said Yvette, “I may say it’s my own looking-glass, even if
I did break it.”
“And I say,” said Granny, “that there shall be no mirrors broken in
_this_ house, if we can help it; no matter who they belong to, or did
belong to. Cissie, have I got my cap straight?”
Aunt Cissie went over and straightened the old lady. Yvette loudly and
irritatingly trilled a tuneless tune.
“And now, Yvette, will you please clear away?” said Aunt Cissie.
“Oh bother!” cried Yvette angrily. “It’s simply _awful_ to live with a
lot of people who are always nagging and fussing over trifles.”
“What people, may I ask?” said Aunt Cissie ominously.
Another row was imminent. Lucille looked up with a queer cast in her
eyes. In the two girls, the blood of She-who-was-Cynthia was roused.
“Of course you may ask! You know quite well I mean the people in this
beastly house,” said the outrageous Yvette.
“At least,” said Granny, “we don’t come of half-depraved stock.”
There was a second’s electric pause. Then Lucille sprang from her low
seat, with sparks flying from her.
“You shut up!” she shouted, in a blast full upon the mottled majesty of
the old lady.
The old woman’s breast began to heave with heaven knows what emotions.
The pause this time, as after the thunderbolt, was icy.
Then Aunt Cissie, livid, sprang upon Lucille, pushing her like a fury.
“Go to your room!” she cried hoarsely. “Go to your room!”
And she proceeded to push the white but fiery-eyed Lucille from the
room. Lucille let herself be pushed, while Aunt Cissie vociferated:
“Stay in your room till you’ve apologised for this!--till you’ve
apologised to the Mater for this!”
“I shan’t apologise!” came the clear voice of Lucille, from the
passage, while Aunt Cissie shoved her.
Aunt Cissie drove her more wildly upstairs.
Yvette stood tall and bemused in the sitting-room, with the air of
offended dignity, at the same time bemused, which was so odd on her.
She still was bare-armed, in the half-made blue dress. And even _she_
was half-aghast at Lucille’s attack on the majesty of age. But also,
she was coldly indignant against Granny’s aspersion of the maternal
blood in their veins.
“Of course I meant no offence,” said Granny.
“Didn’t you?” said Yvette coolly.
“Of course not. I only said we’re not depraved, just because we happen
to be superstitious about breaking mirrors.”
Yvette could hardly believe her ears. Had she heard right? Was it
possible! Or was Granny, at her age, just telling a barefaced lie?
Yvette knew that the old woman was telling a cool, barefaced lie. But
already, so quickly, Granny believed her own statement.
The rector appeared, having left time for a lull.
“What’s wrong?” he asked cautiously, genially.
“Oh nothing!” drawled Yvette. “Lucille told Granny to shut up, when
she was saying something. And Aunt Cissie drove her up to her room.
_Tant de bruit pour une omelette!_ Though Lucille _was_ a bit over the
mark, that time.”
The old lady couldn’t quite catch what Yvette said.
“Lucille really will have to learn to control her nerves,” said the old
woman. “The mirror fell down, and it worried me. I said so to Yvette,
and she said something about superstitions and the people in the
beastly house. I told her the people in the house were not depraved,
if they happened to mind when a mirror was broken. And at that Lucille
flew at me and told me to shut up. It really is disgraceful how these
children give way to their nerves. I know it’s nothing but nerves.”
Aunt Cissie had come in during this speech. At first even she was dumb.
Then it seemed to her, it was as Granny had said.
“I have forbidden her to come down until she comes to apologise to the
Mater,” she said.
“I doubt if she’ll apologise,” said the calm, queenly Yvette, holding
her bare arms.
“And I don’t want any apology,” said the old lady. “It is merely
nerves. I don’t know what they’ll come to, if they have nerves like
that, at their age! She must take Vibrofat.--I am sure Arthur would
like his tea, Cissie.”
Yvette swept her sewing together, to go upstairs. And again she trilled
her tune, rather shrill and tuneless. She was trembling inwardly.
“More glad rags!” said her father to her, genially.
“More glad rags!” she reiterated sagely, as she sauntered upstairs,
with her day dress over one arm. She wanted to console Lucille, and ask
her how the blue stuff hung now.
At the first landing she stood as she nearly always did, to gaze
through the window that looked to the road and the bridge. Like the
Lady of Shalott, she seemed always to imagine that someone would come
along singing _Tirra-lirra!_ or something equally intelligent, by the
river.
V
It was nearly tea-time. The snowdrops were out by the short drive going
to the gate from the side of the house, and the gardener was pottering
at the round, damp flower-beds, on the wet grass that sloped to the
stream. Past the gate went the whitish muddy road, crossing the stone
bridge almost immediately, and winding in a curve up to the steep,
clustering, stony, smoking northern village, that perched over the grim
stone mills which Yvette could see ahead down the narrow valley, their
tall chimneys long and erect.
The rectory was on one side the Papple, in the rather steep valley,
the village was beyond and above, further down, on the other side the
swift stream. At the back of the rectory the hill went up steep, with
a grove of dark, bare larches, through which the road disappeared.
And immediately across stream from the rectory, facing the house, the
river-bank rose steep and bushy, up to the sloping, dreary meadows,
that sloped up again to dark hillsides of trees, with grey rock
cropping out.
But from the end of the house, Yvette could only see the road curving
round past the wall with its laurel hedge, down to the bridge, then
up again round the shoulder to that first hard cluster of houses in
Papplewick village, beyond the dry-stone walls of the steep fields.
She always expected _something_ to come down the slant of the road from
Papplewick, and she always lingered at the landing window. Often a cart
came, or a motor-car, or a lorry with stone, or a labourer, or one of
the servants. But never anybody who sang _Tirra-lirra!_ by the river.
The tirralirraing days seem to have gone by.
This day, however, round the corner on the white-grey road, between the
grass and the low stone walls, a roan horse came stepping bravely and
briskly downhill, driven by a man in a cap, perched on the front of his
light cart. The man swayed loosely to the swing of the cart, as the
horse stepped down-hill, in the silent sombreness of the afternoon. At
the back of the cart, long duster-brooms of reed and feather stuck out,
nodding on their stalks of cane.
Yvette stood close to the window, and put the casement-cloth curtains
behind her, clutching her bare upper arms with her hands.
At the foot of the slope the horse started into a brisk trot to the
bridge. The cart rattled on the stone bridge, the brooms bobbed and
flustered, the driver sat as if in a kind of dream, swinging along. It
was like something seen in a sleep.
But as he crossed the end of the bridge, and was passing along the
rectory wall, he looked up at the grim stone house that seemed to have
backed away from the gate, under the hill. Yvette moved her hands
quickly on her arms. And as quickly, from under the peak of his cap, he
had seen her, his swarthy predative face was alert.
He pulled up suddenly at the white gate, still gazing upwards at the
landing window; while Yvette, always clasping her cold and mottled
arms, still gazed abstractedly down at him, from the window.
His head gave a little, quick jerk of signal, and he led his horse well
aside, on to the grass. Then, limber and alert, he turned back the
tarpaulin of the cart, fetched out various articles, pulled forth two
or three of the long brooms of reed or turkey-feathers, covered the
cart, and turned towards the house, looking up at Yvette as he opened
the white gate.
She nodded to him, and flew to the bathroom to put on her dress, hoping
she had disguised her nod so that he wouldn’t be sure she had nodded.
Meanwhile she heard the hoarse deep roaring of that old fool, Rover,
punctuated by the yapping of that young idiot, Trixie.
She and the housemaid arrived at the same moment at the sitting-room
door.
“Was it the man selling brooms?” said Yvette to the maid. “All right!”
and she opened the door. “Aunt Cissie, there’s a man selling brooms.
Shall I go?”
“What sort of a man?” said Aunt Cissie, who was sitting at tea with the
rector and the Mater: the girls having been excluded for once from the
meal.
“A man with a cart,” said Yvette.
“A gipsy,” said the maid.
Of course Aunt Cissie rose at once. She had to look at him.
The gipsy stood at the back door, under the steep dark bank where the
larches grew. The long brooms flourished from one hand, and from the
other hung various objects of shining copper and brass: a saucepan,
a candlestick, plates of beaten copper. The man himself was neat and
dapper, almost rakish, in his dark green cap and double-breasted green
check coat. But his manner was subdued, very quiet: and at the same
time proud, with a touch of condescension and aloofness.
“Anything today, lady?” he said, looking at Aunt Cissie with dark,
shrewd, searching eyes, but putting a very quiet tenderness into his
voice.
Aunt Cissie saw how handsome he was, saw the flexible curve of his lips
under the line of black moustache, and she was fluttered. The merest
hint of roughness or aggression on the man’s part would have made her
shut the door contemptuously in his face. But he managed to insinuate
such a subtle suggestion of submission into his male bearing, that she
began to hesitate.
“The candlestick is lovely!” said Yvette. “Did you make it?”
And she looked up at the man with her naïve, childlike eyes, that were
as capable of double meanings as his own.
“Yes lady!” He looked back into her eyes for a second, with that naked
suggestion of desire which acted on her like a spell, and robbed her of
her will. Her tender face seemed to go into a sleep.
“It’s awfully nice!” she murmured vaguely.
Aunt Cissie began to bargain for the candlestick: which was a low,
thick stem of copper, rising from a double bowl. With patient aloofness
the man attended to her, without ever looking at Yvette, who leaned
against the doorway and watched in a muse.
“How is your wife?” she asked him suddenly, when Aunt Cissie had gone
indoors to show the candlestick to the rector, and ask him if he
thought it was worth it.
The man looked fully at Yvette, and a scarcely discernible smile curled
his lips. His eyes did not smile: the insinuation in them only hardened
to a glare.
“She’s all right. When are you coming that way again?” he murmured, in
a low, caressive, intimate voice.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Yvette vaguely.
“You come Fridays, when I’m there,” he said.
Yvette gazed over his shoulder as if she had not heard him. Aunt Cissie
returned, with the candlestick and the money to pay for it. Yvette
turned nonchalant away, trilling one of her broken tunes, abandoning
the whole affair with a certain rudeness.
Nevertheless, hiding this time at the landing window, she stood to
watch the man go. What she wanted to know, was whether he really had
any power over her. She did not intend him to see her this time.
She saw him go down to the gate, with his brooms and pans, and out to
the cart. He carefully stowed away his pans and his brooms, and fixed
down the tarpaulin over the cart. Then with a slow, effortless spring
of his flexible loins, he was on the cart again, and touching the
horse with the reins. The roan horse was away at once, the cart-wheels
grinding uphill, and soon the man was gone, without looking round. Gone
like a dream which was only a dream, yet which she could not shake off.
“No, he hasn’t any power over me!” she said to herself: rather
disappointed really, because she wanted somebody, or something, to have
power over her.
She went up to reason with the pale and overwrought Lucille, scolding
her for getting into a state over nothing.
“What does it _matter_,” she expostulated, “if you told Granny to shut
up! Why, everybody ought to be told to shut up, when they’re being
beastly. But she didn’t mean it, you know. No, she didn’t mean it. And
she’s quite sorry she said it. There’s absolutely no reason to make a
fuss. Come on, let’s dress ourselves up and sail down to dinner like
duchesses. Let’s have our own back that way. Come on, Lucille!”
There was something strange and mazy, like having cobwebs over one’s
face, about Yvette’s vague blitheness; her queer, misty side-stepping
from an unpleasantness. It was cheering too. But it was like walking in
one of those autumn mists, when gossamer strands blow over your face.
You don’t quite know where you are.
She succeeded, however, in persuading Lucille, and the girls got out
their best party frocks: Lucille in green and silver, Yvette in a pale
lilac colour with turquoise chenille threading. A little rouge and
powder, and their best slippers, and the gardens of paradise began to
blossom. Yvette hummed and looked at herself, and put on her most
_dégagé_ airs of one of the young marchionesses. She had an odd way
of slanting her eyebrows and pursing her lips, and to all appearances
detaching herself from every earthly consideration, and floating
through the cloud of her own pearl-coloured reserves. It was amusing,
and not quite convincing.
“Of course I am beautiful, Lucille,” she said blandly. “And you’re
perfectly lovely, now you look a bit reproachful. Of course you’re the
most aristocratic of the two of us, with your nose! And now your eyes
look reproachful, that adds an appealing look, and you’re perfect,
perfectly lovely. But I’m more _winning_, in a way.--Don’t you agree?”
She turned with arch, complicated simplicity to Lucille.
She was truly simple in what she said. It was just what she thought.
But it gave no hint of the very different feeling that also preoccupied
her: the _feeling_ that she had been looked upon, not from the outside,
but from the inside, from her secret female self. She was dressing
herself up and looking her most dazzling, just to counteract the
effect that the gipsy had had on her, when he had looked at her, and
seen none of her pretty face and her pretty ways, but just the dark,
tremulous potent secret of her virginity.
The two girls started downstairs in state when the dinner-gong rang:
but they waited till they heard the voices of the men. Then they sailed
down and into the sitting-room, Yvette preening herself in her vague,
debonair way, always a little bit absent; and Lucille shy, ready to
burst into tears.
“My goodness gracious!” exclaimed Aunt Cissie, who was still wearing
her dark-brown knitted sports coat. “What an apparition! Wherever do
you think you’re going?”
“We’re dining with the family,” said Yvette naïvely, “and we’ve put on
our best gewgaws in honour of the occasion.”
The rector laughed aloud, and Uncle Fred said:
“The family feels itself highly honoured.”
Both the elderly men were quite gallant, which was what Yvette wanted.
“Come and let me feel your dresses, do!” said Granny. “Are they your
best? It _is_ a shame I can’t see them.”
“Tonight, Mater,” said Uncle Fred, “we shall have to take the young
ladies in to dinner, and live up to the honour. Will you go with
Cissie?”
“I certainly will,” said Granny. “Youth and beauty must come first.”
“Well, tonight, Mater!” said the rector, pleased.
And he offered his arm to Lucille, while Uncle Fred escorted Yvette.
But it was a draggled, dull meal, all the same. Lucille tried to be
bright and sociable, and Yvette really was most amiable, in her vague,
cobwebby way. Dimly, at the back of her mind, she was thinking: Why are
we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing _important_?
That was her constant refrain to herself: Why is nothing important?
Whether she was in church, or at a party of young people, or dancing
in the hotel in the city, the same little bubble of a question rose
repeatedly on her consciousness: Why is nothing important?
There were plenty of young men to make love to her: even devotedly.
But with impatience she had to shake them off. Why were they so
unimportant?--so irritating!
She never even thought of the gipsy. He was a perfectly negligible
incident. Yet the approach of Friday loomed strangely significant.
“What are we doing on Friday?” she said to Lucille. To which Lucille
replied that they were doing nothing. And Yvette was vexed.
Friday came, and in spite of herself she thought all day of the quarry
off the road up high Bonsall Head. She wanted to be there. That was
all she was conscious of. She wanted to be there. She had not even a
dawning idea of going there. Besides, it was raining again. But as she
sewed the blue dress, finishing it for the party up at Lambley Close
tomorrow, she just felt that her soul was up there, at the quarry,
among the caravans, with the gipsies. Like one lost, or whose soul was
stolen, she was not present in her body, the shell of her body. Her
intrinsic body was away at the quarry, among the caravans.
The next day, at the party, she had no idea that she was being sweet to
Leo. She had no idea that she was snatching him away from the tortured
Ella Framley. Not until, when she was eating her pistachio ice, he said
to her:
“Why don’t you and me get engaged, Yvette? I’m absolutely sure it’s the
right thing for us both.”
Leo was a bit common, but good-natured and well-off. Yvette quite liked
him. But engaged! How perfectly silly! She felt like offering him a set
of her silk underwear, to get engaged to.
“But I thought it was Ella!” she said, in wonder.
“Well! It might ha’ been, but for you. It’s your doings, you know! Ever
since those gipsies told your fortune, I felt it was me or nobody, for
you, and you or nobody, for me.”
“Really!” said Yvette, simply lost in amazement. “Really!”
“Didn’t you feel a bit the same?” he asked.
“Really!” Yvette kept on gasping softly, like a fish.
“You felt a bit the same, didn’t you?” he said.
“What? About what?” she asked, coming to.
“About me, as I feel about you.”
“Why? What? Getting engaged, you mean? I? no! Why how _could_ I? I
could never have dreamed of such an impossible thing.”
She spoke with her usual heedless candour, utterly unoccupied with his
feelings.
“What was to prevent you?” he said, a bit nettled. “I thought you did.”
“Did you _really now_?” she breathed in amazement, with that soft,
virgin, heedless candour which made her her admirers and her enemies.
She was so completely amazed, there was nothing for him to do but
twiddle his thumbs in annoyance.
The music began, and he looked at her.
“No! I won’t dance any more,” she said, drawing herself up and gazing
away rather loftily over the assembly, as if he did not exist. There
was a touch of puzzled wonder on her brow, and her soft, dim virgin
face did indeed suggest the snowdrop of her father’s pathetic imagery.
“But of course _you_ will dance,” she said, turning to him with young
condescension. “Do ask somebody to have this with you.”
He rose, angry, and went down the room.
She remained soft and remote in her amazement. Expect Leo to propose
to her! She might as well have expected old Rover the Newfoundland dog
to propose to her. Get engaged, to any man on earth? No, good heavens,
nothing more ridiculous could be imagined!
It was then, in a fleeting side-thought, that she realised that the
gipsy existed. Instantly, she was indignant. Him, of all things! Him!
Never!
“Now why?” she asked herself, again in hushed amazement. “Why? It’s
_absolutely_ impossible: absolutely! So why is it?”
This was a nut to crack. She looked at the young men dancing, elbows
out, hips prominent, waists elegantly in. They gave her no clue to her
problem. Yet she did particularly dislike the forced elegance of the
waists and the prominent hips, over which the well-tailored coats hung
with such effeminate discretion.
“There is something about me which they don’t see and never would see,”
she said angrily to herself. And at the same time, she was relieved
that they didn’t and couldn’t. It made life so very much simpler.
And again, since she was one of the people who are conscious in visual
images, she saw the dark-green jersey rolled on the black trousers of
the gipsy, his fine, quick hips, alert as eyes. They were elegant. The
elegance of these dancers seemed so stuffed, hips merely wadded with
flesh. Leo the same, thinking himself such a fine dancer! and a fine
figure of a fellow!
Then she saw the gipsy’s face; the straight nose, the slender mobile
lips, and the level, significant stare of the black eyes, which seemed
to shoot her in some vital, undiscovered place, unerring.
She drew herself up angrily. How dared he look at her like that? So
she gazed glaringly at the insipid beaux on the dancing floor. And she
despised them. Just as the raggle-taggle gipsy women despise men who
are not gipsies, despise their dog-like walk down the streets, she
found herself despising this crowd. Where among them was the subtle,
lonely, insinuating challenge that could reach her?
She did not want to mate with a housedog.
Her sensitive nose turned up, her soft brown hair fell like a soft
sheath round her tender, flower-like face, as she sat musing. She
seemed so virginal. At the same time, there was a touch of the tall
young virgin _witch_ about her, that made the housedog men shy off. She
might metamorphose into something uncanny before you knew where you
were.
This made her lonely, in spite of all the courting. Perhaps the
courting only made her lonelier.
Leo, who was a sort of mastiff among the housedogs, returned after his
dance, with fresh cheery-o! courage.
“You’ve had a little think about it, haven’t you?” he said, sitting
down beside her: a comfortable, well-nourished, determined sort of
fellow. She did not know why it irritated her so unreasonably, when he
hitched up his trousers at the knee, over his good-sized but not very
distinguished legs, and lowered himself assuredly on to a chair.
“Have I?” she said vaguely. “About what?”
“You know what about,” he said. “Did you make up your mind?”
“Make up my mind about what?” she asked, innocently.
In her upper consciousness, she truly had forgotten.
“Oh!” said Leo, settling his trousers again. “About me and you getting
engaged, you know.” He was almost as off-hand as she.
“Oh that’s _absolutely_ impossible,” she said, with mild amiability,
as if it were some stray question among the rest. “Why I never even
thought of it again. Oh, don’t talk about that sort of nonsense! That
sort of thing is _absolutely_ impossible,” she reiterated like a child.
“That sort of thing is, is it?” he said, with an odd smile at her calm,
distant assertion. “Well what sort of thing is possible, then? You
don’t want to die an old maid, do you?”
“Oh I don’t mind,” she said absently.
“I do,” he said.
She turned round and looked at him in wonder.
“Why?” she said. “Why should you mind if I was an old maid?”
“Every reason in the world,” he said, looking up at her with a bold,
meaningful smile, that wanted to make its meaning blatant, if not
patent.
But instead of penetrating into some deep, secret place, and shooting
her there, Leo’s bold and patent smile only hit her on the outside
of the body, like a tennis ball, and caused the same kind of sudden
irritated reaction.
“I think this sort of thing is awfully silly,” she said, with minx-like
spite. “Why, you’re practically engaged to--to----” she pulled herself
up in time--“probably half a dozen other girls. I’m not flattered by
what you’ve said. I should hate it if anybody knew!--Hate it!--I shan’t
breathe a word of it, and I hope you’ll have the sense not to.--There’s
Ella!”
And keeping her face averted from him, she sailed away like a tall,
soft flower, to join poor Ella Framley.
Leo flapped his white gloves.
“Catty little bitch!” he said to himself. But he was of the mastiff
type, he rather liked the kitten to fly in his face. He began
definitely to single her out.