“Of course not!” he protested eagerly, hurrying after her with the milk jug. “Ladies never break things.”
“Don’t you believe it,” she muttered, looking round for a dishcloth. “I’m the world’s champion smasher.” She pushed up her sleeves and took a steaming kettle from the horrid little stove.
“Oh, I can’t believe that, you know.”
“It’s true, all the same. You know,” she continued, beginning vigorously yet carefully upon the cups with a little mop, “you have mistaken ideas about women, Mr. Waite.”
“Have I?” He was standing still, with the tablecloth in his hand, looking at her.
“Yes. You’re old-fashioned about them.”
“I prefer to be,” he answered stiffly, taking a cup and beginning to dry it.
“I daresay you do, but it isn’t fair to all the women that you know personally.” She raised her voice. “Jean! Come and give a hand with the washing up!” But Jean had wandered away into the fields.
“That business about women riding, for example,” said Alda. “If everybody had those views none of us would ever do anything at all. Women aren’t always remembering that they’re women, you know.”
“Aren’t they?” Mr. Waite held the teacloth suspended while he gazed at her.
“Of course not! I don’t go creeping about all day thinking I’m a woman—I’m a woman. Do you go round thinking I’m a man—I’m a man?”
“Well—yes, I do, on the whole, I think,” he confessed. “Quite often, anyway!”
“Well, I don’t,” said Alda emphatically, setting down the last cup on the draining board. “I’m too busy enjoying or hating things and being a person.”
And she wrung out the miserable little dishcloth so hard that it tore.
“Oh, you are a feminist, then?” said Mr. Waite, but more in a tone of caution than in the one of righteous horror that might have been expected.
“Indeed I’m not; I think they’re crashing bores who can’t get their own way by natural means,” and she smiled: a smile which seemed an emanation from her hair, her eyes and her delightful nose. “Besides,” she went on more vaguely, “who would want the things they do? Oh, there you are,” to Jean, who now strolled in with hands in her pockets, “where have you been? It’s all done.”
“Looking for the blackbird,” Jean answered. “Look,” and she held up between her white forefinger and thumb a dark spike of bluebells in bud, “Isn’t that very early? They usually aren’t out until late April. I say, can I help you put things away?”
It was now Alda’s turn to wander away after the children while Jean and Mr. Waite made journeys between the kitchen and a beastly little cabinet lined with dirty plush in which the cups were stored. Jean said nothing, and he too was silent at first. Once or twice, when he was not looking, she glanced at him and thought how good-looking he was: Alda would have approved of this, but not of the thoughts which accompanied the glance. He, for his part, completely approved of Miss Hardcastle; her clothes, her placid silly manner, the casque of gilt hair that slid obediently as she moved her head yet never became untidy, her lack of disturbing qualities.
He also liked the aura of money which surrounded her. He was used to this type of girl at home in Daleham; the only daughter of wealthy parents, dressed in the height, but not the extreme, of fashion, with an ingenuous manner that did not match her sophisticated clothes and hairdressing. Such had been the provincial belles with whom he had danced and motored in his early youth, before the loss of the family money, and he felt much more at ease with Miss Hardcastle than he did with Mrs. Lucie-Browne. Presently he was making a mild joke or two, to which Jean, always ready for a laugh, cheerfully responded.
“Want to see the chickens hab their tea,” announced Meg threateningly, bustling into the room. She halted, lowering at them from under her fringe.
“Little girls should ask nicely and say ‘please’,” retorted Mr. Waite, slowly rising to his full height after tucking away the last cup, and looking down gravely upon her.
“I’m afraid there won’t be time for the chickens, it’s after Meg’s bedtime now,” said Alda, and thereupon what Mr. Waite, with sudden irritation, thought of as the whole tribe swarmed into the parlour. “Say good-bye to Mr. Waite, children.”
Did Mr. Waite shut the door upon them and turn back into his quiet room, in which the last light now lingered, with a feeling of relief, or did he loiter in the porch, watching them go across the meadow until they were out of sight, and then reluctantly re-enter his lonely bachelor abode? Reader, we have to irritate you by saying that he did both; he lingered a little at the door, and yet he was satisfied to take up the morning paper and sit down in the silent room to glance over it before going out to feed the chickens. But a strong impression remained with him; a shape, a face, certain intonations in a voice, presented themselves to him over and over again, against his will, until at last he pushed the paper aside and went out to his evening’s work.
“Oh, doesn’t the fresh air smell lovely—it’s like a present!” cried Jenny, as soon as the garden gate had shut behind them.
“Be quiet, Jen, he’ll hear you,” said Louise, glancing back at the cottage. “Mum,” taking her mother’s arm, “can we have a high tea when we get back? I’m starving.”
“So am I,” called back Jenny, who had run on ahead. “Those cakes! Ugh! I bet they didn’t come from the Linga-Longa!”
“Meg could peck a bit,” remarked a cross voice from below Alda’s waist, as if to itself. Alda silently stooped and lifted her up: the intonation meant that she was overtired.
“Poor man, he did his best, he just isn’t used to women with our appetites,” said Jean.
“He isn’t used to women at all,” muttered Alda. “All right, we’ll all have sardine sandwiches for supper when we get in.”
“Jean, does your side still hurt?” she went on.
“I can feel it, thanks, but it isn’t bad.”
“Try rubbing it with that stuff of mine to-night, it’s marvellous. You probably won’t know you’ve got a side to-morrow.”
“My botty still hurts,” sighed Louise. “Mother, need I have any more riding lessons? I do hate them.” She looked pathetically, but without real apprehension, at her mother. Alda’s bark was worse than her bite and her daughters knew it.
“Well——” Alda hesitated, then glanced at Jean.
“Don’t make her learn any more if she doesn’t want to,” said Jean cheerfully.
“Oh, thank you, darling, darling mother!” cried Louise, dancing about to express her gratitude and relief.
“Now don’t go telling everybody at the convent that you were thrown,” said Jenny severely, but also beginning to dance. “Come on, let’s go on ahead and lay the supper ready for the sandwiches.”
The evening hush led Jean’s thoughts on towards evenings of high summer, and she remembered seeing the lights of Paris sparkling in blue-grey August mist as they glided past the windows of the train which bore herself, a child, towards the mountains: awakening in the hour before dawn and drowsily hearing, to the hollow rumbling of milk churns rolled along the platform, the far-off, sonorous voices of porters chanting, “Lyons, Lyons”: awakening again—in the ghostly light before sunrise—the hour of the Resurrection—and turning her face towards the air blowing in through the window of the carriage where she lay and feeling it cold: becoming aware of effort trembling through all the train’s length and realising that it was now climbing: creeping into the corridor through the greyness and leaning out of the window: breathing the chill air fresh with dewy scents: looking out over dim green hillocks and fields and vales under a sky clear as water, with blossoming fruit trees standing like white clouds come down to earth: rubbing her eyes as smoke from the engine drifted across them for a moment and then, when the smoke drifted away again, suddenly seeing something far off on the horizon; an unsubstantial vastness heaving itself solemnly up into the colourless sky and touched with a spectral light, som
ething which at one glance transformed all the scale of the land over which she was gazing: oh! it must be, it was, a mountain crowned with snow.
Her parents had at least given her holidays abroad, she thought; lonely holidays spent dawdling about in French and Swiss and Italian hotels while her parents were off ski-ing or sun-bathing or gambling, but never dull while she could look about her, and had money to buy a Tauchnitz edition of an English novel, and could exchange shy remarks in halting, execrable French with chambermaids and waiters and concierges. Years later, when she came to read Proust, she had thought that her own holidays had been not unlike those passed at Balbec by the delicate, morbid “I” of that story; she knew it all; the evening light on the white napkins laid on empty tables awaiting the hour of dining; the sharpened sense of life and importance given to fellow guests, who would have seemed ordinary in an uncoastal setting, by the brilliance and sting of sea air and light. Oh yes! she had cried to herself again and again in recognition when “I” fell in love with a girl he had never spoken to or had seen once through the window of a tram: and she remembered the page boy at the Miramar, the young life-saving attendant at the Bristol, and the waiter at the Floraison, and how she had silently loved them all. I have been in love so many times since I was eleven, she thought, but now something seems to be happening to me. Of course, he (this was Mr. Waite) is good-looking and he does ride marvellously but I don’t seem to be able to get thrilled about him. Of course, I still am very thrilled with my Mr. Potter.
“Somebody ought to get that man out of that place, he’s wasted there and I don’t know how he stands it,” said Alda suddenly, with a glance at her friend. “What do you think of him, Jean?”
Jean considered. “I’m sorry for him,” she said slowly, at last.
“Jean,” Alda said abruptly, “could you pull yourself together about him? Make up your mind to marry him and do it?”
Jean surprised her by answering, “I don’t suppose so,” in a tone different from any she had ever heard from her; it was both reserved and dry; but even as Alda, startled, turned quickly to look at her, she went on in her usual voice:
“He’s marvellously good-looking, of course, but, darling, I do think he’s the least bit dreary, don’t you?”
“He’s very dreary,” admitted Alda handsomely, “but he’s also kind. He is really, J., underneath all that pussyishness, and that’s what you want in a husband.”
“Pussyishness?” Again the dry, unfamiliar tone.
“No, kindness. (At least you would want it; Ronald is very kind, of course, but I could probably get on with him if he weren’t quite so kind, I’m tougher than you.) And Waite only seems dreary to us because we’re both used to other kinds of men. But most men, even dreary ones, are nice, if you get to know them,” concluded Alda.
Now this opinion, with all that it implied, contained the secret of such success as a woman as Alda enjoyed. To like men: their company, their conversation, their approval, and sometimes to challenge them a little—that, for a woman, is the passport to men’s affection and the love that leads to marriage. If she can also be prettily dressed, kind, and gay in the middle of an earthquake occurring on a Monday morning while she is doing the week’s wash, there is absolutely nothing to stop her from marrying as often, and whom, she chooses. (These remarks are addressed to all women who would like to be married, not to those straying outside the ring of domestic firelight who prefer children or music or even dogs to men.) We would add that the liking must be genuine, and not feigned to conceal rapacious or parasitic intentions.
“Are they?” said Jean, wonderingly.
To her, men meant love, and since the age of sixteen she had seen all men through that amethyst haze. It had not occurred to her to decide whether she truly preferred their company to that of any other, because she had been so feverishly sure that she did, but now, living down here in the country with no masculine society save occasional encounters with Mr. Waite, she was beginning for the first time to muse about what and whom she really did like.
“Of course they are,” said Alda carelessly, “and if you concentrated on him you’d soon get to like him.”
“I don’t dislike him, Alda. It’s only——”
“You can’t afford to be too fussy, J. They always seem to slip away from you somehow or some witch gets them at the last minute—I don’t know how it is—but down here there’s absolutely no competition. And he’d soon get to—see your point of view.”
They both laughed, and Meg stirred on Alda’s shoulder.
“He approves of you, and that’s a good beginning,” said Alda, as they went up the path to the cottage.
“Oh, does he, darling? Do tell me how you know; I never can tell, myself.”
“By the way he looks at you. But he does not approve of me,” and she chuckled.
Jean was silent. It had suddenly occurred to her that Captain Ottley and Michael Powers, two elderly men whom she had first met at Alda’s house, had approved of herself and slightly disapproved of Alda. And the more she thought about concentrating upon marrying Mr. Waite, the less she liked the idea, for she knew that she would never be able to keep to a plan of campaign, no matter how skilfully Alda mapped one out for her.
She began to talk in an amused, protesting tone:
“It’s so difficult, darling, having him living so near. I shall always be barging into him——”
“All the better,” said Alda. They were now in the cottage, and she turned to shut the door on the twilight fields.
“Yes, but rather embarrassing, darling. Besides, he hasn’t any money.”
“He’s got more than he seems to have, I expect,” said Alda (who thought that he surely could not have less). She did not add that Jean had more than enough for both.
A wail came from the kitchen:
“Do buck up, we’re simply starving.”
“Start without us, then, I’m going to put Megsy into bed, she’s asleep,” Alda called softly in reply, and went upstairs.
Jean was relieved by the interruption and went into the kitchen, where she found Jenny mourning because she could not manage the key of the sardine tin. It seems a pity that the people who are always trying to fly their repulsive aeroplanes at seven hundred miles per hour do not turn their colossal intellects on to simpler problems.
Later that evening, while they were sitting over their sewing, Jean said to Alda:
“Darling, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I do agree with it, only, if you don’t mind and won’t misunderstand it, I don’t think I want to concentrate on doing anything. I would rather things just came about naturally, if you know what I mean.”
“Just as you like, of course, J., only your affairs do have a habit of going wrong when they’re left to Nature and I’m all for taking the practical view and making a definite plan. French marriages are always arranged, and this idea of letting anyone just drift into marrying anyone else is only about a hundred years old, you know; in England, at any rate. In your case, I’m sure it would be better to try to run the whole affair in a practical way. But of course, if you want romance——”
“It’s not exactly that, darling——”
“By ‘practical’ I mean—never letting the idea of marriage with him out of your mind; not getting vague and sloppy or letting him see you’re attracted by him, keeping him guessing but not frightening him off—oh—it would be so easy!” and her eyes sparkled as if she saw herself stage-managing the affair.
“But—Alda—” Jean said hesitatingly—“there is his point of view—and besides, one hasn’t the right—I mean, don’t you believe that every human soul has a value?—and it may be really wrong to try to use other people for one’s own ends, as if they were things, not souls—oh, I can’t express myself properly—but——”
“Of course I believe people have souls, I’m not a heathen,” said Alda, staring, “but I’m bothered if I see what the fuss is about. Surely it’s better for the poor man to marry you a
nd get out of that dim life and perhaps develop his brain and be of some use in the world, and for you to have a husband and a home and probably children, than for both of you to stay unmarried because of some extraordinary idea about souls? The fact is, ducky,” she said more gently, “I don’t want to come the Old-Married-Woman over you, but honestly you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She was silent for a moment; she gazed down at her work but did not see the little sock she held, for she seemed to be casting her inward eye over the rich varied fields of her possessions, the family of human lives growing and flourishing about her with ripened sheaves or young promise of harvest.
It’s no use, you don’t understand, thought the virgin sadly. I do want all the things you have; I know how beautiful they are; but it’s like that Victorian picture called More Heavens Than One where the nun is watching the cottager bathing her baby, only in my case the idea is reversed. You’re telling me about your heaven, and I want—or I’m beginning to think I want—quite another kind.
18
“SYLVIA,” SAID MRS. Hoadley, a week or so later,“ a nice day out on Sunday would do you good. There’s this chicken I want to send to the old people at the Wild Brooks. How about your taking it over?”
“How about your posting it?” retorted Sylvia, showing her kitten’s teeth in a grin. The two were lingering over the tea-table, amid a dazzle of late sunrays falling on the crystal jam dish and the rich brown cake.
“Last time I posted one some miserable thief stole it,” snapped Mrs. Hoadley. She did not look well; her face was sallow and bore dark rings under the eyes.
“Next Sunday’s your day off, isn’t it? I think you’d better go. The old lady likes to see a new face now and then; and you’ll make a change for her,” she went on.
“I hate going places by myself.”
“Take your boy friend then,” and she got up and began half-heartedly to clear the table.
“Who—Fabrio?” Sylvia let out a screech of laughter and clasped her hands round her knees. “What a thought! Still, him and me don’t get on too badly nowadays. It’s an idea. He’d make a change for the old lady, if you like.”