Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He
had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of
success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in
Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.
Miss Gwendolen Gould was eminently eligible--her income, though
comfortable, was not large enough to brand her husband as a
fortune-hunter; she was pretty in a well-bred way that satisfied the eye
without causing it to turn and gaze after her; and above all, she could
be relied upon never to do, say, or think an unusual thing. Like all
painters, when they are conventionally minded, Archie was the fine
flower of propriety--he owned to enough wild oats of his own sowing to
save him from inferiority in the society of his fellow-men, and he held
exceedingly rigid views on the subject of his womenkind. Gwendolen
might--doubtless had, for she was one of the large army of young women
brought up to no profession save that of sex--give this or that man a
kiss at a dance, but she would never have saved all of passion and
possibilities for one man, and lavished them on him, regardless of
suitable circumstances. Archie's name (that he hoped one day to adorn
with some coveted letters at which he now pretended to sneer) would be
perfectly safe with Gwendolen.
The only drawback to his complete content was that his fair, sleek
person showed signs of getting a trifle too plump--for he was only young
as a man who is nearly "arrived" counts youth. On the whole, however, it
was with a feeling of settled attainment that Archie left Nice and
proceeded to strike up into the Alpes Maritimes, totally unprepared for
any bizarre or inexplicable event--he would have laughed satirically at
the bare idea.
To do him justice, he worked hard, and he had a tremendous facility and
a certain charm that concealed his lack of true artistic sensitiveness.
There is probably nothing more difficult to interpret in paint than an
olive-tree--the incredible grey brilliance of the thing, each leaf set
at a slightly different angle, and refracting the light till the whole
tree seems made of blown mist and sharp-cut shadows. Archie painted
olives under every effect; sparkling in the sun, fog-grey on a grey day,
and pale with the shimmering under-side of straining leaves against a
storm-dark sky. He also painted very dirty children picking the ranked
violets and stocks that grew along the olive terraces, and this he
achieved without once descending into the realms of the "pretty-pretty,"
while at the same time infusing just the right amount of sentiment to
ensure a sale.
He painted here and there from Grasse to Le Broc, and then one day,
feeling he had taken all he could from the soft-scented land of olives
and flowers, he hired a motor to convey him up into the Back o' Beyond,
and drop him there. Once he met a couple of women bearing on their heads
the sheaves of tight little red rosebuds that look exactly like bundles
of radishes, and caught a whiff of the strange, bitter-sweet smell of
the newly cut stems. Then he passed an old shepherd in a cloak of faded
blue, with sheepskin legs cross-gartered to the knee, taking his lean,
golden-brown flock up into the mountains.
After that he saw no living thing, neither bird nor beast nor human, for
many miles. Rounded hills, opening out from each other in endless
succession and covered from crest to base with harsh yellow grass, and
strewn with grey boulders. Deep gullies that at one time had been set
alight and now were scorched and brown like plague-pits, with here and
there a patch of pale stones showing up lividly from the charred thorns
and blackened soil. Archie shivered, partly because of the keen wind
blowing down from the great plateau beyond the hills, partly because
something savage in the scene gripped at him.
The car throbbed on, higher and higher, till the road, winding acutely
along the edge of precipices, developed a surface that caused his
chauffeur to swear gently to himself. Valley after valley opened out,
long and narrow, and Archie noticed signs of a long-past cultivation in
the curved terraces into which the bed of each valley was cut, forming
an endless series of semicircles. There was no trace of any crop, and
the whole effect was as of some rude amphitheatre where prehistoric man
had sat and watched gladiatorial shows.
The car, sticking now and then in a rut, or jolting violently over
stones, finally crested the last rise, and Archie found himself on a
vast stretch of land ringed in by sharp-edged hills, like some dead,
gigantic crater; to the right, far away on a slope of the mountain
ring, lay a grey straggling town that looked hacked out of the hardened
lava. The only sign of life was in a patch of vividly green grass near
at hand, where hundreds of crocuses had burned their way up through the
earth and showed like a bed of thin blue flames.
Archie directed the contemptuous chauffeur towards the town, and they
finally drew up at the inn--a little green-shuttered affair, with a
stone-flagged passage, and a tortoise-shell cat drowsing beside the
door. Outside a _buvette_ opposite was a marble-topped table at which
sat a couple of workmen drinking cider. An evanescent gleam of sun shone
out, and the tawny liquid caught and held it, making each glass throw on
to the table a bubble of gold fire enmeshed in the delicate shadow of
the vessel itself. Archie stood transfixed for a moment with pleasure,
then, as the gleam faded and died, he entered the inn.
* * * * *
Like most people with the creative temperament, Archie Lethbridge was
the prey of environment. The unborn child is not more influenced by the
surroundings of its mother than a book or picture by those of its
creator. Draginoules took such a deep, sure grip of Archie that it did
more than merely affect his work--it began to upset his neatly arranged
values, and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, to substitute fresh ones in
their place. Draginoules, in short, behaved like a master of scenic
effects; it allowed a couple of days for the background to permeate
Archie's consciousness, and, when he was ripe for it, introduced the
human element, which, to a man of his type, means a woman.
It was one morning when he was washing brushes in the dim inn kitchen
that he saw her first. She came out of the _buvette_ to serve some
workmen, and Archie stopped dead in the act of swirling a cobalt-laden
brush round and round in the hollowed yellow soap he held. He always saw
the whole scene in memory as clearly as he saw it then--the low-fronted
_buvette_, the glass of the door refracting the light as it still
quivered from her passage; the pools of blue shadow that lay under the
table and chairs on the pavement; the blouse-clad figures of the
workmen, particularly a young man with a deeply burnt back to his neck;
and the girl herself, holding aloft a tray of liqueur glasses, that
winked like little eyes. All this he saw framed by the darkness of the
kitchen and cut sharply into squares by the black bars of the window;
then, as he mechanically went on frothing blue-stained bubbles out of
the soap, he said to himself, "I must paint that girl."
He soon found out that she was the niece of the stout couple who kept
the _buvette_, and that her name was Desiree Prevost. As they mentioned
her most people shrugged their shoulders. Oh, no, there was nothing
against the girl--though it was true her eyebrows met in a thick bar
across her nose, and old people had always said that was a sign of the
Loup-Garou; enlightened moderns, however, did not really hold by that.
The town was proud of her looks, for it considered her _tres bien_, the
highest expression of praise from a Provencal, who is a dour kind of
person, taking his pleasures as sadly as the proverbial Englishman, and
whose chief aim in life is to place one sou on the top of another, and
when possible insert a third in between.
Archie approached the aunt of Desiree on the subject of sittings with
some trepidation, but met with an agreeable pliancy from her, and a calm
though indifferent assent from Desiree herself. She had a high opinion
of her own value, and no amount of appreciation surprised her.
Scanning her afresh as they stood on the pavement making final
arrangements, Archie inwardly congratulated himself. From the heavy
brass-coloured hair massed with a sculptured effect round her
well-poised head, to the firmly planted feet, admirably proportioned to
the rest of her, she was entirely right for his purpose--she seemed the
spirit of Draginoules incarnate. Owing to the opaque pallor of her skin,
her level bar of fair eyebrow and heavily folded lids, her big, finely
modelled nose and faintly tinted mouth, all took on a sculptured quality
that made for repose; the very shadows of her face were delicate in
tone, mere breaths of shadows. Yet she was excessively vital, but it was
a smouldering, restrained vitality suggestive of a quiescent crater. Her
face was too individual to be perfect--the nose over big; the brow too
narrow for the full modelling across the cheekbones, but she had an
egg-like curve from turn of jaw to pointed chin. When she laughed her
teeth showed large and strong, and her throat was the loveliest Archie
had ever seen--magnificently big--and she had a trick of tilting her
head back that made the smoothly knitted muscles of her neck swell a
little under the white skin. As he painted her Archie used to find
himself racking his brains for some speech that would make her head take
that upward poise, so that he could watch the play of throat.
He chose his background well; a sheltered spot in a fold of hill just
beyond the town, where a slim young oak sapling still retained its
copper-hued autumn leaves, that seemed almost fiery against the deep,
soft blue of the sky. He had conceived of her as standing under the
oak-tree, so that, to him, working lower down on the slope she too
showed against the sky, seemingly caught in a network of delicate
boughs. Being below her he was also the richer by the soft,
three-cornered shadow under her chin, and the whole of her became a tone
of exquisite delicacy, as of shadowed ivory, in the setting of sky--that
sky of southern spring which seems literally drenched in light. The
tawny note of the oak-leaves was to be repeated in some sheep, which,
though kept subservient to the figure of Desiree, were to supply the
motive of the picture--or so Archie thought till the sudden freak that
made him introduce the fauns.
Desiree was all for robing herself in her best--a black silk bodice with
a high collar, and a be-trained, jet-spangled skirt, but Archie coaxed
her into wearing the dress he first saw her in; a mere wrapper of
indefinite prune colour, belted in at the waist to show the lines of her
deep chested, long flanked figure, and cut so low as to leave her throat
bare from the pit of it. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and
her arms showed milk-white as far as the reddened wrists and the big,
work-roughened hands that held a hazel switch across her thighs.
Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first
sitting, but Desiree was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue.
"I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I
have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry
once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the
washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady
there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In
Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me _l'Anglaise
manquee_!"
"Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was
considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provencal accent
that sounds exactly like a Cockney twang.
"Because I have the nature, the habits of an English woman. Oh, I assure
you! I like to live out of doors--to be out all day with one's bread and
a bottle of wine and sleep on the hillside--that is what I call living.
I always open my window at night, though my aunt says it is a folly. I
could go to England if I chose, as a maid. My English lady would have
me. Ah! how I long to see England. One gets so tired with Draginoules."
"But your friends--you would be sorry to leave them?"
"Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my
mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a
silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live.
I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but
I do not like them!"
"Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better
here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong.
"My fiance would kill himself," said Desiree serenely.
"Oh--you are fiancee?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that
absurd mingling of relief and regret.
"To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when
he gets a rise. _Helas! je ne serai plus fille!_"
Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's
imagination--"_Helas! je ne serai plus fille!_"
"What a _vierge farouche_!" he said to himself. "If I can get that
feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiance--he is very
devoted, then?"
"He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what
he does for me. He is mad about me."
She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she
was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiance
that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was
something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Desiree
that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the
journalist.
When a man and woman fall into the habit of discussing the intimate
things, such as love and marriage; and, above all, of comparing the
sexes; disaster, even if only a temporary one, is apt to follow. Archie
returned to the themes next time she posed for him.
"So you think a man can care too much for a woman?" he asked, and
stopped for a moment with raised brush to watch her answer. She shrugged
her shoulders slightly, yet enough to make the folds of her wrapper
strain upward for a fleeting moment.
"As to that I think women are worth it. But it is foolish to care
everything for one person."
"You could care for others, then--as well as M. Colombini?" asked
Archie with a sudden stir at his pulses.
"I? One can care a little--here and there. But commit a folly for a man,
that is a thing I would never do. And I am very fond of Auguste. If I
did not think we should be happy and faithful I should not marry him. I
look round on all the married people I know, and see nothing but
betrayal everywhere. Here a husband plays his wife false, there she in
her turn cheats him. Bah!--it is not good, that!"
"How right you are!" said Archie virtuously. "But you do not then think
it necessary to care as much for Auguste as he cares for you?"
"_Damme_, no! How should I? He pleases me, and he is good--I can respect
him. And I like him to kiss me . . ." the most charming look of
self-consciousness mingled with reminiscence flitted over her face--"but
for him--he is mad when he kisses me. Women do not care like that. It is
a folly. And it is always happier, Monsieur, when it is the husband who
cares the most. That is how men are made."
Oh, yes, thought Archie, she was a woman after all, this _vierge
farouche_, and more unashamedly woman, franker in her admissions of
knowledge--for she admitted in her expressive face and gestures more
than she actually said--than any woman of his world. He worked in
silence for a while then told her to rest.
She flung herself on the turf with an abandonment of limb and muscle
usually only seen in young animals, and he came and lay a little below
her and lit a cigarette. Desiree lay serenely, her face upturned, and he
studied her thoughtfully.
"Surely very few of your countrywomen are as blonde as you?" he asked
her. "Your eyes are blue, and your brows and lashes a faint brown and
your hair is----"
He paused, at a loss how to describe her hair. It was not golden, rather
that strong brass-colour that, had he seen it on a sophisticated
townswoman he would have dubbed "peroxide." It was oddly metallic hair,
not only in its colour, but in the carven ripples of it where she wore
it pulled across her low brow and massed in heavy braids round her head.
That way of wearing her hair right down to her brows, except for a
narrow white triangle of forehead showing, boy-like, at one side, gave
her an oddly animal look--using the word in its best sense. A look as of
some low-browed, heavy-tressed faun, fearless and unashamed--it was only
in her eyes that mystery lay.
"My hair?" she exclaimed, showing her big white teeth in a laugh as
frank as a boy's; "but that, you know, is not natural! It was an
accident!"
"An accident! How on earth----?"
"Why, I was doing the _menage_ for a chemist and his wife over the
border, at Cannes. And she had hair like this, and one day she gave me a
little bottle and said: 'Desiree, you're a good girl, but you don't know
how to make the best of yourself. You put some of this on your head.' I
rubbed some on, one side only, just to see what would happen, and next
day I found one half of my head golden--golden like the sun. 'Mon Dieu!'
I said, 'but what do I look like, one half yellow and one half brown!'
So I poured it on all over. It is nothing now because I have not put on
the stuff for so long, but at one time it was beautiful. Such hair!
Below my waist, and gold, oh, such a gold! Now it wants doing again."
She ducked her head down for him to see the crown of it, and he
perceived from the parting outwards two inches of unabashed dark
hair--almost blue it looked by contrast with the circling wrappings of
yellow. Archie, immensely tickled at finding this splendid young savage
in the Back o' Beyond with dyed hair, could but shout with mirth, and
Desiree, totally unoffended, joined in. When he went back that evening
he felt he knew her far better than on the preceding day. In intimacies
between men and women each day marks a distinct phase, making a series
of steps; and the only possible thing to do is to see that the steps do
not lead downwards. Like most people when on those magic stairs, Archie
gave no heed to the question.
The next day he unconsciously took up their conversation of the day
before--a sure sign of intimacy if ever there were one. They were
resting again, for he said it was too hot to work; and the sunset effect
he wanted was growing later every day.
"So you could care a little for some one else before you marry Auguste?"
he suggested lightly enough, and looking away from her to the snow
mountains that bared white fangs in the blue of the sky.
She laughed a little, stretched herself, drooped her lids, was in a
flash, and for a flash, entirely woman--alluring, withdrawing, sure of
herself. As she gained in poise Archie felt his own tenure on
self-control slipping away from him.
"Could you?" he persisted, his eyes by now back on her changing face.
"How does one care? What is it?" she evaded. "I do not think _you_ would
be able to tell me. You are so cold, so English, you would care just as
much as would be pleasant and never enough to make you uncomfortable!"
The penetration of this remark displeased Archie.
"But you are like that yourself," he objected. "You are the most cool,
calculating girl I ever met--everything you say shows it."
She rolled over slightly on the grass, so that her head, the chin thrust
forward on her cupped hands, was brought nearer to him but kept at the
provocative three-quarter angle suggestive of withdrawal. Her thick
heavy lids were drooped, but suddenly they flickered and half-rose to
show a gleam so wild, so unlike anything he had ever seen in her, that
Archie caught his breath. It was as though some alien spirit, a pagan,
woodland thing, was looking at him through the eyes of the
self-possessed, level-headed young woman, who at times even seemed more
_bourgeois_ than peasant.
"Desiree! How beautiful you are!" he cried.
"As beautiful as Mademoiselle your fiancee?" asked Desiree.
With a run Archie descended into the commonplace, and Desiree became for
him nothing but a pretty girl who went rather too far.
"Englishmen do not care to discuss the lady of their choice," he said
grandiloquently. "May I ask how you knew I was fiance?"
"I have seen her picture in your room," said Desiree frankly; "the
patronne told me there was one there. She is pretty, but yes, very
pretty. Her hair is so beautifully done in all those little rolls, one
would say it must be false. She is altogether mignonne, one would say
the head of a doll!"
Desiree was absolutely sincere in thinking she was giving Miss Gwendolen
Gould the highest praise possible. She would willingly have exchanged
her splendid muscular body for the slim, corseted form of Miss Gould,
and have bartered her strongly modelled head for the small, regular
features and Marcel-waved hair of the other girl. It was only his
perception of this that kept Archie from anger, and as it was the truth
of the praise hit him sharply. That night he sat down before the
miniature and conscientiously tried to conjure up the emotions of a
lover. The experiment was a failure.
When he came to go to bed he found, to his amazement, a sprig of myrtle
lying on his pillow--just a spray of leaves and a cluster of the purple
berries with their little frilled heads.
"How did that get there I wonder?" he asked himself, and then stooped,
with an exclamation of disgust. A corner of the turned back sheet that
trailed on the floor was lightly powdered with earth as though a muddy
shoe had stood on it. The footprint--if footprint it were--was oddly
impossible in shape, short and rounded, more like the mark of a hoof.
"Can the patronne's goat have got up here? I saw it wandering in the
passage to-day," thought Archie vexedly. "Beastly animal to drop
half-chewed green food all over my pillow!"
The injured man thumped his pillow and turned it over, so that the
despised myrtle sprig lay crushed beneath it. Then he went to bed and to
sleep.
"I dreamt of you all night, Desiree," he told her next day.
"I was pursuing you round rocks and over streams and through undergrowth
all night long. You were you and yet you weren't. Somehow I got the
impression that it was you as you would have been hundreds and thousands
of years ago. And I kept on losing you and then little satyrs beckoned
at me to show me the way you'd gone, and I stumbled on after the hoofs
that were always flashing up just ahead--just vanishing round corners."
"Satyrs? What are they?" asked Desiree.
Archie explained as picturesquely as possible, but was brought to a stop
by a curious change in Desiree's eyes. They wore the strained, misty
look of the person who is trying hard to catch at some long-lost memory.
Again he was startled by that strange feeling that something else was
looking from between those placid lids of hers.
"But I know," she began--"those creatures you are telling me--_what_ is
it I know about them?" She broke off and shook herself impatiently.
"Bah! It is gone. And then what happened--did you find me at the end?"
"I can't quite remember," said Archie slowly "Something happened, but
what it was is all blurred. I believe you're a wood-nymph, Desiree--a
wood-nymph whose father was a satyr--and he chased and caught your
mother and took her down through his tangle of undergrowth with his
hands in her hair, never heeding her screams. You have very definite
little points at the top of your ears, you know! We all have them a bit
to remind us of our wild-dog days, but yours are the most so I've ever
seen. Do you never take off all your clothes and go creeping and
slipping through the woods at night, to bathe in one of the crater-pools
by the light of the moon?"
"How did you know?" She turned wide, startled eyes on him, her quickened
breath fluttered her gown distressfully.
"What!--you do it, then?" exclaimed Archie.
"No! no! What folly are you talking!" She sprang to her feet and slipped
behind the oak-sapling, as though it were a defence against some danger;
across the boughs he saw her puzzled, fearful eyes. As he watched her
the expression of alarm faded--she put up her hand to her hair, gave it
a quieting pat and tucked some stray strands into place, then she looked
across at the easel.
"It must be time to work again!" she exclaimed. "Have we been resting
long, M'sieu? I feel as though I'd been asleep and you'd just awakened
me." She yawned as she spoke, stretching her strong arms in a slow, wide
circle, the muscles of her shoulders rounding forward and making two
little hollows appear above her collar-bones. The sight aroused the
artist in Archie, and he too scrambled up, and betook himself to work.
The sheep and goats that he had bribed the shepherd to pasture there
happened to "come" as he wanted them that evening, and he began to work
away at them in silence. One of the goats, a piebald, shaggy creature,
reared itself up on its hind legs, with its fore-feet against the tree
trunk, and began to nibble at the foliage. Something about the pose of
the creature sent a swift suggestion to Archie's mind, and he just had
time to rough in the legs, with their slight outward tilt, the hoofs
set firmly apart and the tail sticking out and up from the sharply
curved-in rump, before the animal dropped on all fours and moved away.
Archie, with the smile of the creator in his eyes, worked on, and the
goat's legs merged into the beginnings of a slim human body with the
hands leaning against the tree and the head, tilted on one side, peering
around at the figure of Desiree. Suddenly he gave an exclamation of
annoyance.
"There is some one watching us from those myrtle bushes. Confound the
beggar--some one from the village, I suppose."
Desiree turned sharply, just in time to see a brown face grinning
through the leaves. It was a face compact of curiously slanting
lines--upward-twitched tufts of brows, upward wrinkles at the corners of
the narrow eyes, and a slanting mouth that laughed above a pointed,
thrusting chin.
"That! That is only my little brother, M'sieu. It is one of God's
innocents and lame on both feet. Sylvestre! Come out and speak to
M'sieu--no one will hurt you."
The bushes rustled and parted and an odd little figure, apparently that
of a boy of about ten, came scrambling out with a queer, lungeing action
from the hips. The child's legs were deformed, but he swung himself
forward at a marvellous speed on a pair of clumsy crutches. Archie saw
that when he was not laughing his brown eyes were wide and grave, with a
look of innocence in them that contrasted oddly with the knowing gleam
they showed a minute earlier.
"But he is exactly what I want for the picture!" cried Archie, running
his hand through the boy's tangled curls and tilting his face gently
backwards. "He is exactly like the things I was telling you of. He must
sit to me."
He deftly tugged the boy's shirt out of his belt and peeled it off him,
exposing a thin little brown body with a skin as fine as silk. When he
felt the sun on his bare flesh the child made guttural sounds of
delight, flinging himself backwards on the ground; and, supported by his
elbows, letting his head tip back till his curls touched the grass. As
the shielding locks fell away, Archie saw with a thrill which was almost
repulsion, that dark brown hair grew thickly out of the boy's ears. . . .
"Would he stay still, do you think?" he asked Desiree.
"He will if I tell him," replied Desiree. "Come to me, Sylvestre," and
drawing the child to her she stroked his head and whispered to him with
a motherly gesture of which Archie would not have thought her capable.
He had listened to her exceedingly modern views on the subject of the
family, and her own strictly limited intentions in that respect.
After the addition of Sylvestre the picture made great strides, even if
the intimacy between Archie and Desiree advanced less rapidly than
before. And yet every now and again, in sudden flashes of wildness, in a
half-uttered phrase totally at variance with her normal self--little
things that she seemed to remember from some forgotten whole, Desiree
would give him that impression of being two people at once; and always,
on these occasions, she was as puzzled as he, and with an added touch of
something that seemed almost shame. For the everyday Desiree, that calm,
practical and comely young woman, Archie's friendliness was touched by
nothing warmer than the inevitable element of sex; but the shy, bold
thing that sometimes peeped from between her lids, that thing that
seemed to take possession of her beautiful body, and mock and allure and
chill him in a breath, that thing was waking an answering spirit in
himself, and he knew it. Miss Gould's portrait was unable to protect him
from wakeful nights, when he turned his pillow again and again to find a
cool surface for his cheek, nights when he would at last fling off the
clothes and lean out of the window to watch the steel-blue dawn turn to
the blessed light of everyday. He was living in a state of tension, and
it seemed to him that some great event was holding its breath to spring,
as though the very trees and rocks, the brooding sky and quiescent
pools, were all in some conspiracy, hoodwinking yet preparing him for
the moment of revelation.
It was on to the sensitive surface of this mood that a letter from
Gwendolen, announcing her speedy arrival on the Riviera dropped like a
dart, tearing the delicate tissues and stringing the fibres to the
necessity for haste. Gwendolen, aunt-dragoned, and Baedeker in hand,
meant the return to the acceptance of the old values that had once
filled him with complacency. And yet, with all the jarring sense of
intrusion that Gwendolen's advent instilled, there mingled a feeling
that was almost relief--as though he were being saved, against his will,
but with his judgment, from something too disturbing and beautiful to be
quite comfortable.
Three or four days after receiving Gwendolen's letter, he put the last
touches to the picture and informed Desiree he would need her no more.
She received the news quite calmly, apparently without regret--thus do
women tactlessly fail in what is expected of them. Archie felt absurdly
flat as he wrapped up his wet brushes in a week-old sheet of the _Petit
Nicois_. He also felt very virtuous, and told himself it was not many
men who would have refrained from making love to the girl under the
circumstances. It is astonishing what a comfortless thing is the glow of
conscious virtue--it is bright in hue but gives off no warmth.
There was a little hut, used for stacking wood, close to where he
worked, and here, thanks to the courtesy of the owner, he was wont to
put his picture for the night. Desiree, as usual, helped him to carry it
in and plant the legs of the easel firmly into the earthen floor. He had
worked late, and the sun had just slipped behind the far ridge of the
mountains; the tiny hut was filled with a deepening half-light, the
stacked brush-wood seemed wine-coloured in the warm shadow, here and
there a peeled twig stood out luminously. By the open door hoof-marks in
the trampled earth showed that the patronne's mule had been carrying
away wood that morning. That was as palpable as the fact that it must
have been Sylvestre's deformed foot which had soiled Archie's sheet, yet
those marks re-created the atmosphere of his dream, and seemed, in the
sudden confusion mounting to his brain at the warmth and nearness of
Desiree, to mix madly with Sylvestre, and rustled undergrowth and the
glimmer of elusive hoofs round myrtle-bushes--and the glimmer of
something whiter and more elusive still.
He could hear Desiree's breathing beside him--not as even as usual, but
deeper-drawn and uncertain, and turning, he met the sidelong glance of
her eyes.
"Desiree . . . you said you sometimes slipped out at night and played in
the woods--and the pools. Take me out with you to-night and show me
where you go and what you do. . . . I'll be awfully good, I swear I
will--you're not a woman, you're a nymph, a strange, uncanny thing. I
believe you meet your kinsfolk there and dance with them--Desiree!"
She looked at him for a moment in silence. In her eyes her normal and
her unknown selves contended.
"It is true I often go out as you say, something drives me, but I do not
know why myself. And I get very tired and can never remember clearly
what it has been like. It is as though I did it almost in my sleep, or
had dreamt it."
"It _is_ a dream--everything's a dream, and I've got to wake up soon.
Let's have this bit of dream together--Desiree!"
She yielded. They took bread and wine and apples for a midnight feast,
and set off together over the lava-fields to the woods that tufted the
mountain slopes. Through the deep, soft night the pallor of her face and
throat glimmered as through dark water. She held his hand to guide him
over the fissures and round the piled boulders, once he slipped on a
hummock of harsh grass, and felt her grow rigid on the instant to check
his fall. They were very silent, until, seated at the edge of the woods,
they ate their supper, and then they laughed softly together like
children, with fragmentary speech; and once Desiree sang a snatch of a
Provencal song; Archie, who knew his Mistral, joining in.
Presently, when they fell on silence again, it seemed the wood was full
of noises--stealthy footfalls, snapping of dry twigs, the rustling of
parted shrubs. As the late moon, almost at the full, swam up the sky,
making the distant snow-peaks gleam like white flames against the dusky
blue, and shimmering on the pools cupped here and there over the
hollowed expanse below, Archie could have sworn that the penetrating
light showed quick-glancing faces and bright eyes from the thicket. . . .
Once a great white owl did sail out with a beating of wings; so close to
them that they could see the stiff brows that bristled over his lambent
orbs, and once a strong smell and a gleam of black and white told of a
wild cat tracking her prey.
They buried the disfiguring remnants of their little feast, and then
Archie solemnly poured out what was left of the red wine on to the slope
below.
"For the gods!" he announced, "the liquor for us and the dregs for
them!"
"Ah!" cried Desiree, as though his action pricked sleeping memories to
life, "now I remember it all again! I forget when I go home, but then
the next time everything is clear again, and so it goes on."
She disappeared in a jutting spur of the wood, and Archie scrambled to
his feet and followed her. As he broke through to the further edge,
which hung over a wide pool, he caught his foot in something
soft--Desiree's clothes that lay in a circle, just as she had slipped
out of them.
She stood at the pool's brim, her hands clasping at the back of her
head; a thing to dream of. She was so lovely that all feeling died save
a passionate appreciation, keen to the verge of pain; she was so lovely
that of necessity she awoke an impersonal motion. Slowly she stretched
herself, and as the muscles rippled into curves and sank, the delicate
shadows ebbed and breathed out again on the pearl-white of her body.
Archie's every nerve was strung not to lose one line or one breath of
tone.
Putting out a foot she touched the water, so that little tremors soft as
feathers fled over the surface; then, as she waded in, deeper and
deeper, the water parted round her in flakes of brightness that shook
and mixed up and broke away. When she rose, dripping wet, the moonlight
refracted off her, was mirrored in the water, and thrown back again on
her--a magic shuttle weaving an aura of whiteness. Long arrows of light
fled back through the pool as she waded to shore, where she stood for a
moment motionless; head slightly forward, arms hanging, and one hip
thrown outwards as she poised her weight. Myriads of tiny,
crescent-shaped drops clung to her limbs like fish-scales, so that she
seemed more mermaiden than wood-nymph, but Archie's eyes proclaimed her
Artemis--she would have calmed a satyr as she stood. Thoughts of forest
glades were chill, sweet sports were held, and the wildest hoof was
tamed to the childlike kinship with Nature that is pagan innocence,
floated through his mind like visible things.
Suddenly she became conscious of his presence, and gave one glance in
which invitation and a certain calm aloofness seemed to mingle.
"Desiree!" stammered Archie, "Desiree!"
All at once excitement tingled through him, blurring his ideas, just as
chloroform sets the blood pricking with thousands of points and edges,
while dizzying the brain. She stayed still a second longer; then,
either the fearful nymph swayed her utterly, or, as it seemed to
Archie, a sudden rejection of him, the clumsy, civilized mortal, sprang
into her eyes. She flung up her head, turned, and was gone in the tangle
of the woods. Without more than a second's hesitation he plunged in
after her.
To Archie, whenever he looked back, that night seemed an orgy of
chase-gone-mad; gathering in force as it went and sweeping into its
resistless flow the most incongruous of elements.
He ran after her, stumbling, tripping, whipped across the face by
brambles. Everything in life was crystallized into the desire to catch
up, to track her to the enchanted green where, with her, he could become
part of a remote free life he had never imagined before. All his own
personality, except that in him which was hers, had ceased to
exist--work, Gwendolen, the great world, and the inn at Draginoules,
were wiped out of knowledge by the force of his concentration on one
thing. The arbitrary line drawn between the actual and the unreal, the
credible and the impossible, sanity and so-called madness, was swept
away. She, the descendant of the gods knew what strange race--a race
that perhaps had lingered in these crater-fastnesses and myrtle groves
long after it had died off the rest of the earth--was fleeing before him
through a wood alive with brightened eyes and quickened hoofs; and in
her veins the slender strain of blood derived from some goat-legged,
tall-eared thing--a strain asleep through the generations of her
ancestors, had mastered all the rest of her heritage, and was triumphant
in her soul as in Sylvestre's body. She ran on, swiftly, and without
effort, and Archie ran after her.
* * * * *
Dawn broke at last, reluctant, chill, showing the woods clear-edged and
motionless as though cut out of steel, glimmering on the quiet pools and
the ribbed lava slopes, though the hollow of the plain still held a
great lake of shadow.
Desiree's clothes lay no longer by the pool where she had bathed; no
trace of human presence remained; even the marshy edge showed only
trampled hoof-marks, as though some goat-footed herd had watered there.
To Archie, breaking through the undergrowth at the edge of the wood, it
seemed incredible that everything should look so much as usual. Still
more he felt the wonder when, with the broad sunlight, he reached his
inn. He himself felt so shaken in soul that even the thought of the
Englishman's panacea--a cold bath--failed to appeal to him as a solution
of all trouble. Plucked out of his accustomed place, flung by the sport
of what strange gods he knew not, into a headlong medley of undreamed
emotions, his values had been so violently disrupted that he could not
have told which held true worth--the normal life of Gwendolens and
one-man shows and newspaper criticisms, or what had passed in the woods
that night. And, whatever strange rite he had surprised, and whether it
were golden actuality that a man might live happy because he had once
seen, or the mere wildness of a dream, there had been something about it
which taught him not to blaspheme the revelation. He did not tell
himself that the _vin ordinaire_ must have gone to his head, or that he
had been a romantic fool worked on by moonlight. This was remarkable,
for few people are strong enough not to profane the past.
So much of grace held by him even when he found a letter awaiting him to
tell of Gwendolen's arrival with the obedient aunt at Cannes, whither
she summoned him. He debated whether to say good-bye to Desiree or not.
The matter was settled for him by meeting her accidently outside the
_buvette_. She was looking pale and jaded, not at all at her best, but
her eyes were blankly unknowing and clear of all embarrassment. She said
good-bye with charming unemotional friendliness and informed him that
she was going to be married very soon--Monsieur Colombini had had a rise
that justified it. Here was anti-climax enough, even if the cold bath,
the letter and the prose of packing were not sufficient. And yet, since
it had not been Desiree, the frank peasant, who had shown Archie the
wonders of that night, his memories remained. Half-fearful and half
splendid, not enough to make him walk with the vision beautiful, but
merely enough to spoil his pictures for the public, because instead of
being content with the merely obvious he was now always trying for
something beyond his powers to express. Enough also, to prick him to an
occasional weary clear-eyed knowledge of his Gwendolen--a knowledge that
was hardly criticism, for he admitted his kinship with her world. And
what it was that companioned him, that he strove to show in his
pictures, he never entirely told; for just as no woman ever tells what
it is her sex has and the other lacks--that something which makes all
the difference--just as no man tells a woman what it is he and his
fellows talk about when the last skirt has trailed from the
dinner-table, so no one ever tells the whole truth about the beloved.