Yvette did not keep her promise. The few March days were lovely, and
she let them slip. She had a curious reluctance, always, towards taking
action, or making any real move of her own. She always wanted someone
else to make a move for her, as if she did not want to play her own
game of life.
She lived as usual, went out to her friends, to parties, and danced
with the undiminished Leo. She wanted to go up and say goodbye to the
gipsies. She wanted to. And nothing prevented her.
On the Friday afternoon especially she wanted to go. It was sunny,
and the last yellow crocuses down the drive were in full blaze, wide
open, the first bees rolling in them. The Papple rushed under the stone
bridge, uncannily full, nearly filling the arches. There was the scent
of a mezereon tree.
And she felt too lazy, too lazy, too lazy. She strayed in the garden
by the river, half dreamy, expecting something. While the gleam of
spring sun lasted, she would be out of doors. Indoors Granny, sitting
back like some awful old prelate, in her bulk of black silk and
her white lace cap, was warming her feet by the fire, and hearing
everything that Aunt Nell had to say. Friday was Aunt Nell’s day. She
usually came for lunch, and left after an early tea. So the mother and
the large, rather common daughter, who was a widow at the age of forty,
sat gossiping by the fire, while Aunt Cissie prowled in and out. Friday
was the rector’s day for going to town: it was also the housemaid’s
half day.
Yvette sat on a wooden seat in the garden, only a few feet above the
bank of the swollen river, which rolled a strange, uncanny mass of
water. The crocuses were passing in the ornamental beds, the grass was
dark green where it was mown, the laurels looked a little brighter.
Aunt Cissie appeared at the top of the porch steps, and called to ask
if Yvette wanted that early cup of tea. Because of the river just
below, Yvette could not hear what Aunt Cissie said, but she guessed,
and shook her head. An early cup of tea, indoors, when the sun actually
shone? No thanks!
She was conscious of her gipsy, as she sat there musing in the sun.
Her soul had the half painful, half easing knack of leaving her,
and straying away to some place, to somebody that had caught her
imagination. Some days she would be at the Framleys’, even though
she did not go near them. Some days, she was all the time in spirit
with the Eastwoods. And today it was the gipsies. She was up at their
encampment in the quarry. She saw the man hammering his copper,
lifting his head to look at the road; and the children playing in the
horse-shelter: and the women, the gipsy’s wife and the strong, elderly
woman, coming home with their packs, along with the elderly man. For
this afternoon, she felt intensely that _that_ was home for her: the
gipsy camp, the fire, the stool, the man with the hammer, the old crone.
It was part of her nature, to get these fits of yearning for some place
she knew; to be in a certain place; with somebody who meant home to
her. This afternoon it was the gipsy camp. And the man in the green
jersey made it home to her. Just to be where he was, that was to be at
home. The caravans, the brats, the other women: everything was natural
to her, her home, as if she had been born there. She wondered if the
gipsy was aware of her: if he could see her sitting on the stool by the
fire; if he would lift his head and see her as she rose, looking at him
slowly and significantly, turning towards the steps of his caravan. Did
he know? Did he know?
Vaguely she looked up the steep of dark larch trees north of the
house, where unseen the road climbed, going towards the Head. There
was nothing, and her glance strayed down again. At the foot of the
slope the river turned, thrown back harshly, ominously, against the low
rocks across stream, then pouring past the garden to the bridge. It was
unnaturally full, and whitey-muddy, and ponderous, “Listen for the
voice of water,” she said to herself. “No need to listen for it, if the
voice means the noise!”
And again she looked at the swollen river breaking angrily as it came
round the bend. Above it the black-looking kitchen garden hung, and the
hard-natured fruit trees. Everything was on the tilt, facing south and
south-west, for the sun. Behind, above the house and the kitchen garden
hung the steep little wood of withered-seeming larches. The gardener
was working in the kitchen garden, high up there, by the edge of the
larch-wood.
She heard a call. It was Aunt Cissie and Aunt Nell. They were on the
drive, waving Goodbye! Yvette waved back. Then Aunt Cissie, pitching
her voice against the waters, called:
“I shan’t be long. Don’t forget Granny is alone!”
“All right!” screamed Yvette rather ineffectually.
And she sat on her bench and watched the two undignified, long-coated
women walk slowly over the bridge and begin the curving climb on the
opposite slope, Aunt Nell carrying a sort of suit-case in which she
brought a few goods for Granny and took back vegetables or whatever
the rectory garden or cupboard was yielding. Slowly the two figures
diminished, on the whitish, up-curving road, labouring slowly up
towards Papplewick village. Aunt Cissie was going as far as the village
for something.
The sun was yellowing to decline. What a pity! Oh what a pity the sunny
day was going, and she would have to turn indoors, to those hateful
rooms, and Granny! Aunt Cissie would be back directly: it was past
five. And all the others would be arriving from town, rather irritable
and tired, soon after six.
As she looked uneasily round, she heard, across the running of water,
the sharp noise of a horse and cart rattling on the road hidden in the
larch trees. The gardener was looking up too. Yvette turned away again,
lingering, strolling by the full river a few paces, unwilling to go
in; glancing up the road to see if Aunt Cissie were coming. If she saw
her, she would go indoors.
She heard somebody shouting, and looked round. Down the path through
the larch trees the gipsy was bounding. The gardener, away beyond, was
also running. Simultaneously she became aware of a great roar, which,
before she could move, accumulated to a vast deafening snarl. The gipsy
was gesticulating. She looked round, behind her.
And to her horror and amazement, round the bend of the river she saw a
shaggy, tawny wave-front of water advancing like a wall of lions. The
roaring sound wiped out everything. She was powerless, too amazed and
wonder-struck, she wanted to see it.
Before she could think twice, it was near, a roaring cliff of water.
She almost fainted with horror. She heard the scream of the gipsy, and
looked up to see him bounding upon her, his black eyes starting out of
his head.
“Run!” he screamed, seizing her arm.
And in the instant the first wave was washing her feet from under her,
swirling, in the insane noise, which suddenly for some reason seemed
like stillness, with a devouring flood over the garden. The horrible
mowing of water!
The gipsy dragged her heavily, lurching, plunging, but still keeping
foot-hold both of them, towards the house. She was barely conscious: as
if the flood was in her soul.
There was one grass-banked terrace of the garden, near the path round
the house. The gipsy clawed his way up this terrace to the dry level of
the path, dragging her after him, and sprang with her past the windows
to the porch steps. Before they got there, a new great surge of water
came mowing, mowing trees down even, and mowed them down too.
Yvette felt herself gone in an agonising mill-race of icy water,
whirled, with only the fearful grip of the gipsy’s hand on her wrist.
They were both down and gone. She felt a dull but stunning bruise
somewhere.
Then he pulled her up. He was up, streaming forth water, clinging to
the stem of the great wisteria that grew against the wall, crushed
against the wall by the water. Her head was above water, he held her
arm till it seemed dislocated: but she could not get her footing. With
a ghastly sickness like a dream, she struggled and struggled, and could
not get her feet. Only his hand was locked on her wrist.
He dragged her nearer till her one hand caught his leg. He nearly went
down again. But the wisteria held him, and he pulled her up to him. She
clawed at him, horribly; and got to her feet, he hanging on like a man
torn in two, to the wisteria trunk.
The water was above her knees. The man and she looked into each other’s
ghastly streaming faces.
“Get to the steps!” he screamed.
It was only just round the corner: four strides! She looked at him: she
could not go. His eyes glared on her like a tiger’s, and he pushed
her from him. She clung to the wall, and the water seemed to abate a
little. Round the corner she staggered, but staggering, reeled and was
pitched up against the cornice of the balustrade of the porch steps,
the man after her.
They got on to the steps, when another roar was heard amid the roar,
and the wall of the house shook. Up heaved the water round their legs
again, but the gipsy had opened the hall door. In they poured with the
water, reeling to the stairs. And as they did so, they saw the short
but strange bulk of Granny emerge in the hall, away down from the
dining-room door. She had her hands lifted and clawing, as the first
water swirled round her legs, and her coffin-like mouth was opened in a
hoarse scream.
Yvette was blind to everything but the stairs. Blind, unconscious of
everything save the steps rising beyond the water, she clambered up
like a wet, shuddering cat, in a state of unconsciousness. It was not
till she was on the landing, dripping and shuddering till she could
not stand erect, clinging to the banisters, while the house shook and
the water raved below, that she was aware of the sodden gipsy, in
paroxysms of coughing at the head of the stairs, his cap gone, his
black hair over his eyes, peering between his washed-down hair at the
sickening heave of water below, in the hall. Yvette, fainting, looked
too and saw Granny bob up, like a strange float, her face purple, her
blind blue eyes bolting, spume hissing from her mouth. One old purple
hand clawed at a banister rail, and held for a moment, showing the
glint of a wedding ring.
The gipsy, who had coughed himself free and pushed back his hair, said
to that awful float-like face below:
“Not good enough! Not good enough!”
With a low thud like thunder, the house was struck again, and
shuddered, and a strange cracking, rattling, spitting noise began. Up
heaved the water like a sea. The hand was gone, all sign of anything
was gone, but upheaving water.
Yvette turned in blind unconscious frenzy, staggering like a wet cat
to the upper staircase, and climbing swiftly. It was not till she was
at the door of her room that she stopped, paralysed by the sound of a
sickening, tearing crash, while the house swayed.
“The house is coming down!” yelled the green-white face of the gipsy,
in her face.
He glared into her crazed face.
“Where is the chimney? the back chimney?--which room? The chimney will
stand----”
He glared with strange ferocity into her face, forcing her to
understand. And she nodded with a strange, crazed poise, nodded quite
serenely, saying:
“In here! In here! It’s all right.”
They entered her room, which had a narrow fire-place. It was a back
room with two windows, one on each side the great chimney-flue. The
gipsy, coughing bitterly and trembling in every limb, went to the
window to look out.
Below, between the house and the steep rise of the hill, was a wild
mill-race of water rushing with refuse, including Rover’s green
dog-kennel. The gipsy coughed and coughed, and gazed down blankly. Tree
after tree went down, mown by the water, which must have been ten feet
deep.
Shuddering and pressing his sodden arms on his sodden breast, a look
of resignation on his livid face, he turned to Yvette. A fearful
tearing noise tore the house, then there was a deep, watery explosion.
Something had gone down, some part of the house, the floor heaved and
wavered beneath them. For some moments both were suspended, stupefied.
Then he roused.
“Not good enough! Not good enough! This will stand. This here will
stand. See that chimney! like a tower. Yes! All right! All right! You
take your clothes off and go to bed. You’ll die of the cold.”
“It’s all right! It’s quite all right!” she said to him, sitting on a
chair and looking up into his face with her white, insane little face,
round which the hair was plastered.
“No!” he cried. “No! Take your things off and I rub you with this
towel. I rub myself. If the house falls then die warm. If it don’t
fall, then live, not die of pneumonia.”
Coughing, shuddering violently, he pulled up his jersey hem and
wrestled with all his shuddering, cold-racked might, to get off his
wet, tight jersey.
“Help me!” he cried, his face muffled.
She seized the edge of the jersey, obediently, and pulled with all her
might. The garment came over his head, and he stood in his braces.
“Take your things off! Rub with this towel!” he commanded ferociously,
the savageness of the war on him. And like a thing obsessed, he pushed
himself out of his trousers, and got out of his wet, clinging shirt,
emerging slim and livid, shuddering in every fibre with cold and shock.
He seized a towel, and began quickly to rub his body, his teeth
chattering like plates rattling together. Yvette dimly saw it was
wise. She tried to get out of her dress. He pulled the horrible wet
death-gripping thing off her, then, resuming his rubbing, went to the
door, tip-toeing on the wet floor.
There he stood, naked, towel in hand, petrified. He looked west,
towards where the upper landing window had been, and was looking into
the sunset, over an insane sea of waters, bristling with uptorn trees
and refuse. The end corner of the house where the porch had been, and
the stairs, had gone. The wall had fallen, leaving the floors sticking
out. The stairs had gone.
Motionless, he watched the water. A cold wind blew in upon him. He
clenched his rattling teeth with a great effort of will, and turned
into the room again, closing the door.
Yvette, naked, shuddering so much that she was sick, was trying to wipe
herself dry.
“All right!” he cried. “All right! The water don’t rise no more! All
right!”
With his towel he began to rub her, himself shaking all over, but
holding her gripped by the shoulder, and slowly, numbedly rubbing her
tender body, even trying to rub up into some dryness the pitiful hair
of her small head.
Suddenly he left off.
“Better lie in the bed,” he commanded, “I want to rub myself.”
His teeth went snap-snap-snap-snap, in great snaps, cutting off his
words. Yvette crept shaking and semi-conscious into her bed. He, making
strained efforts to hold himself still and rub himself warm, went again
to the north window, to look out.
The water had risen a little. The sun had gone down, and there was a
reddish glow. He rubbed his hair into a black, wet tangle, then paused
for breath, in a sudden access of shuddering, then looked out again,
then rubbed again on his breast, and began to cough afresh, because
of the water he had swallowed. His towel was red: he had hurt himself
somewhere: but he felt nothing.
There was still the strange huge noise of water, and the horrible bump
of things bumping against the walls. The wind was rising with sundown,
cold and hard. The house shook with explosive thuds, and weird, weird
frightening noises came up.
A terror creeping over his soul, he went again to the door. The wind,
roaring with the waters, blew in as he opened it. Through the awesome
gap in the house he saw the world, the waters, the chaos of horrible
waters, the twilight, the perfect new moon high above the sunset,
a faint thing, and clouds pushing dark into the sky, on the cold,
blustery wind.
Clenching his teeth again, fear mingling with resignation, or fatalism,
in his soul, he went into the room and closed the door, picking up her
towel to see if it were drier than his own, and less blood-stained,
again rubbing his head, and going to the window.
He turned away, unable to control his spasms of shivering. Yvette had
disappeared right under the bedclothes, and nothing of her was visible
but a shivering mound under the white quilt. He laid his hand on this
shivering mound, as if for company. It did not stop shivering.
“All right!” he said. “All right! Water’s going down!”
She suddenly uncovered her head and peered out at him from a white
face. She peered into his greenish, curiously calm face, semiconscious.
His teeth were chattering unheeded, as he gazed down at her, his black
eyes still full of the fire of life and a certain vagabond calm of
fatalistic resignation.
“Warm me!” she moaned, with chattering teeth. “Warm me! I shall die of
shivering.”
A terrible convulsion went through her curled-up white body, enough
indeed to rupture her and cause her to die.
The gipsy nodded, and took her in his arms, and held her in a clasp
like a vice, to still his own shuddering. He himself was shuddering
fearfully, and only semiconscious. It was the shock.
The vice-like grip of his arms round her seemed to her the only stable
point in her consciousness. It was a fearful relief to her heart,
which was strained to bursting. And though his body, wrapped round
her strange and lithe and powerful, like tentacles, rippled with
shuddering as an electric current, still the rigid tension of the
muscles that held her clenched steadied them both, and gradually the
sickening violence of the shuddering, caused by shock, abated, in his
body first, then in hers, and the warmth revived between them. And as
it roused, their tortured, semiconscious minds became unconscious, they
passed away into sleep.
X
The sun was shining in heaven before men were able to get across the
Papple with ladders. The bridge was gone. But the flood had abated, and
the house, that leaned forwards as if it were making a stiff bow to
the stream, stood now in mud and wreckage, with a great heap of fallen
masonry and debris at the south-west corner. Awful were the gaping
mouths of rooms!
Inside, there was no sign of life. But across-stream the gardener had
come to reconnoitre, and the cook appeared, thrilled with curiosity.
She had escaped from the back door and up through the larches to the
high-road, when she saw the gipsy bound past the house: thinking he was
coming to murder somebody. At the little top gate she had found his
cart standing. The gardener had led the horse away to the Red Lion up
at Darley, when night had fallen.
This the men from Papplewick learned when at last they got across the
stream with ladders, and to the back of the house. They were nervous,
fearing a collapse of the building, whose front was all undermined and
whose back was choked up. They gazed with horror at the silent shelves
of the rector’s rows of books, in his torn-open study; at the big brass
bedstead of Granny’s room, the bed so deep and comfortably made, but
one brass leg of the bedstead perching tentatively over the torn void;
at the wreckage of the maid’s room upstairs. The housemaid and the
cook wept. Then a man climbed in cautiously through a smashed kitchen
window, into the jungle and morass of the ground floor. He found the
body of the old woman: or at least he saw her foot, in its flat black
slipper, muddily protruding from a mud-heap of debris. And he fled.
The gardener said he was sure that Miss Yvette was not in the house. He
had seen her and the gipsy swept away. But the policeman insisted on
a search, and the Framley boys rushing up at last, the ladders were
roped together. Then the whole party set up a loud yell. But without
result. No answer from within.
A ladder was up, Bob Framley climbed, smashed a window, and clambered
into Aunt Cissie’s room. The perfect homely familiarity of everything
terrified him like ghosts. The house might go down any minute.
They had just got the ladder up to the top floor, when men came running
from Darley, saying the old gipsy had been to the Red Lion for the
horse and cart, leaving word that his son had seen Yvette at the top of
the house. But by that time the policeman was smashing the window of
Yvette’s room.
Yvette, fast asleep, started from under the bedclothes with a scream,
as the glass flew. She clutched the sheets round her nakedness. The
policeman uttered a startled yell, which he converted into a cry of:
“Miss Yvette! Miss Yvette!”
He turned round on the ladder and shouted to the faces below:
“Miss Yvette’s in bed!--in bed!”
And he perched there on the ladder, an unmarried man, clutching the
window in peril, not knowing what to do.
Yvette sat up in bed, her hair in a matted tangle, and stared with wild
eyes, clutching up the sheets at her naked breast. She had been so very
fast asleep, that she was still not there.
The policeman, terrified at the flabby ladder, climbed into the room,
saying:
“Don’t be frightened, Miss! Don’t you worry any more about it. You’re
safe now.”
And Yvette, so dazed, thought he meant the gipsy. Where was the gipsy?
This was the first thing in her mind. Where was her gipsy of this
world’s-end night?
He was gone! He was gone! And a policeman was in the room! A policeman!
She rubbed her hand over her dazed brow.
“If you’ll get dressed, Miss, we can get you down to safe ground. The
house is likely to fall. I suppose there’s nobody in the other rooms?”
He stepped gingerly into the passage and gazed in terror through the
torn-out end of the house, and far-off saw the rector coming down in a
motor-car, on the sun-lit hill.
Yvette, her face gone numb and disappointed, got up quickly, closing
the bedclothes, and looked at herself a moment, then opened her drawers
for clothing. She dressed herself, then looked in a mirror, and saw
her matted hair with horror. Yet she did not care. The gipsy was gone,
anyhow.
Her own clothes lay in a sodden heap. There was a great sodden place
on the carpet where his had been, and two blood-stained filthy towels.
Otherwise there was no sign of him.
She was tugging at her hair when the policeman tapped at her door. She
called him to come in. He saw with relief that she was dressed and in
her right senses.
“We’d better get out of the house as soon as possible, Miss,” he
reiterated. “It might fall any minute.”
“Really!” said Yvette calmly. “Is it as bad as that?”
There were great shouts. She had to go to the window. There, below, was
the rector, his arms wide open, tears streaming down his face.
“I’m perfectly all right, Daddy!” she said, with the calmness of her
contradictory feelings. She would keep the gipsy a secret from him. At
the same time, tears ran down her face.
“Don’t you cry, Miss, don’t you cry! The rector’s lost his mother, but
he’s thanking his stars to have his daughter. We all thought you were
gone as well, we did that!”
“Is Granny drowned?” said Yvette.
“I’m afraid she is, poor lady!” said the policeman, with a grave face.
Yvette wept away into her hanky, which she had had to fetch from a
drawer.
“Dare you go down that ladder, Miss?” said the policeman.
Yvette looked at the sagging depth of it, and said promptly to herself:
“No! Not for anything!”--But then she remembered the gipsy’s saying:
“Be braver in the body.”
“Have you been in all the other rooms?” she said, in her weeping,
turning to the policeman.
“Yes, Miss! But you was the only person in the house, you know, save
the old lady. Cook got away in time, and Lizzie was up at her mother’s.
It was only you and the poor old lady we was fretting about. Do you
think you dare go down that ladder?”
“Oh yes!” said Yvette, with indifference. The gipsy was gone anyway.
And now the rector in torment watched his tall, slender daughter slowly
stepping backwards down the sagging ladder, the policeman, peering
heroically from the smashed window, holding the ladder’s top end.
At the foot of the ladder Yvette appropriately fainted in her father’s
arms, and was borne away with him, in the car, by Bob, to the Framley
home. There the poor Lucille, a ghost of ghosts, wept with relief till
she had hysterics, and even Aunt Cissie cried out among her tears:
“Let the old be taken and the young spared! Oh I _can’t_ cry for the
Mater, now Yvette is spared!”
And she wept gallons.
The flood was caused by the sudden bursting of the great reservoir,
up in Papple Highdale, five miles from the rectory. It was found out
later that an ancient, perhaps even a Roman mine tunnel, unsuspected,
undreamed of, beneath the reservoir dam, had collapsed, undermining
the whole dam. That was why the Papple had been, for that last day, so
uncannily full. And then the dam had burst.
The rector and the two girls stayed on at the Framleys’, till a new
home could be found. Yvette did not attend Granny’s funeral. She stayed
in bed.
Telling her tale, she only told how the gipsy had got her inside the
porch, and she had crawled to the stairs out of the water. It was known
that he had escaped: the old gipsy had said so, when he fetched the
horse and cart from the Red Lion.
Yvette could tell little. She was vague, confused, she seemed hardly to
remember anything. But that was just like her.
It was Bob Framley who said:
“You know, I think that gipsy deserves a medal.”
The whole family suddenly was struck.
“Oh, we _ought_ to thank him!” cried Lucille.
The rector himself went with Bob in the car. But the quarry was
deserted. The gipsies had lifted camp and gone, no one knew whither.
And Yvette, lying in bed, moaned in her heart: Oh, I love him! I
love him! I love him! The grief over him kept her prostrate. Yet
practically, she too was acquiescent in the fact of his disappearance.
Her young soul knew the wisdom of it.
But after Granny’s funeral, she received a little letter, dated from
some unknown place.
“Dear Miss, I see in the paper you are all right after your ducking,
as is the same with me. I hope I see you again one day, maybe at
Tideswell cattle fair, or maybe we come that way again. I come that day
to say goodbye! and I never said it, well, the water give no time, but
I live in hopes. Your obdt. servant Joe Boswell.”
And only then she realised that he had a name.
_The Botolph Printing Works, Gate Street, Kingsway, W.C.2_