“All right. That just shows you don’t know anything about beauty. No one
ever thought very much of Rosie till I saw her like the sun shining
silver. It wasn’t till I painted it that anyone knew that her hair was
the most lovely thing in the world.”
“Did you make her neck and her breasts and her carriage and her bones?”
I asked.
“Yes, damn you, that’s just what I did do.”
When Hillier talked of Rosie in front of her she listened to him with a
smiling gravity. A little flush came into her pale cheeks. I think that
at first when he spoke to her of her beauty she believed he was just
making game of her; but when she found out that he wasn’t, when he
painted her silvery gold, it had no particular effect on her. She was a
trifle amused, pleased of course, and a little surprised, but it did not
turn her head. She thought him a little mad. I often wondered whether
there was anything between them. I could not forget all I had heard of
Rosie at Blackstable and what I had seen in the vicarage garden; I
wondered about Quentin Forde, too, and Harry Retford. I used to watch
them with her. She was not exactly familiar with them, comradely rather;
she used to make her appointments with them quite openly in anybody’s
hearing; and when she looked at them it was with that mischievous,
childlike smile which I had now discovered held such a mysterious
beauty. Sometimes when we were sitting side by side in a music hall I
looked at her face; I do not think I was in love with her, I merely
enjoyed the sensation of sitting quietly beside her and looking at the
pale gold of her hair and the pale gold of her skin. Of course Lionel
Hillier was right; the strange thing was that this gold did give one a
strange moonlight feeling. She had the serenity of a summer evening when
the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky. There was nothing dull in
her immense placidity; it was as living as the sea when under the August
sun it lay calm and shining along the Kentish coast. She reminded me of
a sonatina by an old Italian composer with its wistfulness in which
there is yet an urbane flippancy and its light rippling gaiety in which
echoes still the trembling of a sigh. Sometimes, feeling my eyes on her,
she would turn round and for a moment or two look me full in the face.
She did not speak. I did not know of what she was thinking.
Once, I remember, I fetched her at Limpus Road, and the maid, telling me
she was not ready, asked me to wait in the parlour. She came in. She was
in black velvet, with a picture hat covered with ostrich feathers (we
were going to the Pavilion and she had dressed up for it) and she looked
so lovely that it took my breath away. I was staggered. The clothes of
that day gave a woman dignity and there was something amazingly
attractive in the way her virginal beauty (sometimes she looked like the
exquisite statue of Psyche in the museum at Naples) contrasted with the
stateliness of her gown. She had a trait that I think must be very rare:
the skin under her eyes, faintly blue, was all dewy. Sometimes I could
not persuade myself that it was natural, and once I asked her if she had
rubbed vaseline under her eyes. That was just the effect it gave. She
smiled, took a handkerchief and handed it to me.
“Rub them and see,” she said.
Then one night when we had walked home from the Canterbury, and I was
leaving her at her door, when I held out my hand she laughed a little, a
low chuckle it was, and leaned forward.
“You old silly,” she said.
She kissed me on the mouth. It was not a hurried peck, nor was it a kiss
of passion. Her lips, those very full red lips of hers, rested on mine
long enough for me to be conscious of their shape and their warmth and
their softness. Then she withdrew them, but without hurry, in silence
pushed open the door, slipped inside, and left me. I was so startled
that I had not been able to say anything. I accepted her kiss stupidly.
I remained inert. I turned away and walked back to my lodgings. I seemed
to hear still in my ears Rosie’s laughter. It was not contemptuous or
wounding, but frank and affectionate; it was as though she laughed
because she was fond of me.