Island Magic

  “Yes,” said Colette.

  “What?” said grandpapa. “Well, you’re not to do it again. Do you hear? Eh?”

  “Why?” asked Colette.

  “Not suitable,” said grandpapa, “associating with the lower orders. Now finish up your pudding.”

  Colette finished it up, and the smoothness of the cream smoothed her bewildered feelings, but she did not for the rest of that day forget Toinette.

  After lunch they went hand in hand into the library to have their forty winks. Colette did not really feel the necessity for taking forty winks, but she pretended that she did so that grandpapa should feel quite polite and happy about taking his. . . . Rachell had told her that this was the correct way to behave under the circumstances.

  They sat down in two armchairs opposite each other. The chairs were so deep that Colette’s legs stuck straight out in front of her as though she were in bed. Grandpapa placed his newspaper over his head and Colette, placing her handkerchief over hers, closed her eyes and folded her fat hands over her tummy in imitation of his attitude. Usually she stayed like this, quite still, and just quietly wondering about things, until grandpapa gave a snort and woke up again, but to-day, as soon as a series of rhythmical nasal sounds told her that grandpapa was asleep, she whipped the handkerchief off her head, scrambled off her chair, ran across the room and out into the hall. She had made up her mind, while she finished her apple tart, to give her coral necklace, her most precious possession, to Toinette to comfort her. By great good fortune Rachell had that morning clasped her coral necklace round her throat. It had been given her by grandpapa on her fourth birthday, and Rachell had thought it would please the old man to see her wearing it. . . . He hadn’t even noticed it, so it hadn’t. . . . So often are the kindly impulses of women rendered futile by their unobservant men.

  She opened the baize door that led to the kitchen regions and stood wondering and uncertain. Dark steps led down to the black beetles of the basement, and more dark steps led up to the mice of the attics, but she did not know among which she would find Toinette, and she wanted to see Toinette alone. But the good luck or divine co-operation, call it what you will, that attends the charitable activities of the saints, was with her. As she stood waiting stumbling steps came up from below and she found herself looking down on the top of Toinette’s soiled cap. The cap rose up from the nether regions, grew level with her toes, her knees, and finally overtopped her.

  “Toinette,” she whispered.

  Toinette bounded to one side like a scared rabbit and her hand went to her side.

  “ ’Ow you frightened me, Mamzelle,” she whispered.

  Colette held out the coral necklace.

  “It is for you,” she said, “because you cried.”

  “Oo,” said Toinette, and her eyes in their swollen lids held tiny sparkles of pleasure, dim as stars lost in deep waters. Then she drew back and rubbed her hands up and down her thighs.

  “I couldn’t take it, Mamzelle,” she whispered, “I should be beat for taking your pretty t’ings.”

  “No one will know,” said Colette, “please, Toinette.”

  She held up the necklace and the little globes of colour burned in the darkness like tiny lamps. Toinette held out her cold fingers hungrily and touched them. They were still warm from Colette’s fat neck. She clutched them in a spasm of affection for the little giver and Colette let go and ran away. Toinette continued her stumbling progress towards the attics. Half-way she paused, and unhooking the high collar of her print dress fastened the corals round her neck underneath. The hard beads, pressed by her dress against her bony neck, hurt a little, but she endured the pain with the ecstasy of the pilgrim hobbling with peas in his shoes towards the shrine of his saint. But the love of the pilgrim for the saint was as nothing to the passionate adoration of Toinette for Colette, and the candles lit by him at the shrine in the sight of all men were neither so warm nor so bright as the little hidden red beads that rose and fell in darkness whenever Toinette breathed.

  Colette scuttled noiselessly back to the library, scrambled into her chair, spread her handkerchief over her head, folded her hands over her tummy and, when grandpapa snorted and awoke, was resembling a quite immovable infant Buddha.

  “Eh? What?” said grandpapa, “must have dropped off. Did you drop off?”

  Colette, who never lied, smiled fatly and said nothing.

  “You’ve a saintly disposition,” grandpapa told her, “produced by sound teeth and excellent digestive organs. Mind you don’t eat too much and admit the devil.”

  “No, grandpapa,” said Colette.

  “Good girl,” said grandpapa, “now we’ll play backgammon.”

  Colette was not really of an age to understand the intricacies of backgammon but grandpapa was always perfectly happy explaining the rudiments of the game to her, and making her moves as well as his own, while she stood by and rattled the dice, and the time passed very happily until Barker brought them afternoon tea.

  Most Islanders had a very late and very large tea, between five and six o’clock, embellished by crab or shrimps, curds and goche, but Barker couldn’t stand these heathen ways and had, after years of patient effort, succeeded in suggesting to the mind of grandpapa that this unseemly gorging was never indulged in by the Best People, and that tea and a little buttered toast at four o’clock was the height of culture. Grandpapa, though he felt he owed it to his professional position to be cultured, did not think much of its outward and visible sign. “Scorched bread and dish water,” he called it, and kept a hidden supply of goche inside his safe for private consumption only.

  But Colette thought afternoon tea lovely. The fragrant amber-coloured China tea, enlivened by four lumps of sugar, which grandpapa gave her in a Crown Derby teacup was very different from the milk and one lump of sugar in a blue mug dealt out to her at home by Rachell, and the little wafer squares of buttered toast, though they did not fill you up as satisfactorily as bread and jam and goche, were deliciously oily and crackly.

  Colette, her inward grieving over the sorrows of the world eased by the gift of her necklace, felt happy and secure as she sipped her tea with loud sucking noises, and smeared butter all over her nose.

  But after tea all her former terror returned with a rush. Madame Gaboreau, announcing that it was four-thirty and Jacqueline would be here to fetch her at any moment, appeared in the library and carried her off to be washed. Madame Gaboreau was now in a very bad temper. Toinette had broken two dishes, and her cringing way of lifting up both hands, like a dead mole, exasperated Madame Gaboreau beyond all reason.

  She led Colette upstairs without a single word, and her grip on the fat wrist was like a bracelet of hard iron. Colette was terrified. Madame Gaboreau’s cold grasp sent shivers of fear through her, and at every turn of the stairs she thought she saw thin weeping figures huddled in the shadows.

  Upstairs in Madame Gaboreau’s room, lit by only one candle, spluttering and wavering in the draught, she felt drowning in a sea of terror. The rain was tapping and scratching at the window like a mad creature trying to get in, and the crying wind of the morning had turned to a roaring tormented thing, beating imprisoned wings inside the chimney.

  “Don’t you know how to keep yourself clean when you eat? What a disgustingly dirty child you are!” said Madame Gaboreau, dabbing at Colette’s buttery face with a cold, scratchy sponge, and giving her a little shake. To Colette’s fear was added a sense of injustice. She knew she was not a dirty child. She was always as neat and clean as circumstances would allow, but sometimes circumstances were too much for her, and Barker, whose affection for her led him to use up at least half a pound of butter on her toast, was one of those circumstances. Two tears pricked behind her eyelids and then spilt over and trickled down her cheeks.

  “What in the world are you crying about?” demanded Madame Gaboreau, “and where is your coral necklace?” br />
  Colette, her lip trembling, made no answer.

  “What have you done with your coral necklace? Answer me, child!”

  Colette shook her curls. Her obstinacy acerbated Madame Gaboreau’s already ruffled temper.

  “I can’t send you home to your mother without your coral necklace,” she snapped, “if you don’t tell me what you’ve done with it I shall slap you. You’re a naughty, obstinate child.”

  But Colette, with the courage and truthfulness of the saints, would neither save herself with a lie nor deliver over Toinette to vengeance with the truth. She stood her ground and Madame Gaboreau slapped her hard.

  It was the first time she had ever been struck, and the blow was like an earthquake that ripped open the ground at her feet. That morning she had peeped through a little crack and seen horror below, but now horror came leaping up through the great fissure and suffocated her. Cruelty and terror and grief and pain were leaping round the dim room like dancing devils and a pall of darkness was closing down on her and crushing her. Crazy with fright she ran from the room, and as she ran she heard again the mad creature scratching outside the window and the tormented thing beating its wings inside the chimney.

  Helter-skelter she rushed down the stairs, the outraged Madame Gaboreau following more slowly with her hat and shoes, and fell headlong down the last six steps into the arms of grandpapa waiting at the bottom.

  “Eh? What?” said grandpapa, “are the furies at your heels?”

  They were, but she could not explain, she could only pant silently into grandpapa’s beard.

  “Taken fright at something,” explained Madame Gaboreau, creaking down the last flight, “a queer child at times. A peculiar bringing up, if I may say so.”

  “Humph,” said grandpapa, and he and Madame Gaboreau exchanged glances. They both had the lowest opinion of Rachell and all her works.

  Colette stood quaking with fright while Madame Gaboreau put on her shoes and cap and coat, and, whenever possible, she clutched grandpapa for protection from the powers of evil that seemed to emanate from Madame Gaboreau. Once she glanced up at his face, and in the dim light it was once more the face of the man she had seen that morning, with pouches under the eyes and a mouth sagging at the corners, and she let go of his coat with another little spasm of fright, her last protection gone. And at that moment the bell rang. . . . It was Jacqueline.

  Madame Gaboreau swung open the heavy door and there, standing under the lamp in the porch, like a visitant from another world, was Jacqueline. Her tam-o’-shanter was bright as a holly berry, her face had been whipped by the cold air to the colour of a red rose and her eyes were bright yet soft with the queer inward shining of a hidden joy. It was evident to even a casual observer that something wonderful must have happened to Jacqueline that day. She stood there smiling roguishly, sweetly, innocently, the personification of the love and cleanliness of Bon Repos, but she did not step over the lintel; that seemed a dividing line between her world and another. Behind her was the clean windy night and its fresh breath, blowing into the stuffy house, caught up Colette like a piece of thistledown and blew her across the lintel into Jacqueline’s arms.

  “Never said good-bye to her old grandfather, did you ever!” complained grandpapa. From the safety of the further side of the lintel Colette looked back into the hall and saw grandpapa and Madame Gaboreau standing there, no longer terrifying but infinitely old and pitiful, self-imprisoned creatures shut out from a world whose existence they did not even know of. With a rush of courage and affection Colette stepped back over the lintel, ran to them and hugged them, and then tore back to safety and Jacqueline.

  Grandpapa and Madame Gaboreau stared at the shut door with a feeling of loss, yet aware that something of Colette’s crystal clarity had been left behind in the murky house, piercing the vapours of evil thoughts, thinning them, driving them for the moment into dark corners. Then Madame Gaboreau sighed and moved towards the stairs. “Dear little thing,” she said, “I wish she came more often. I’m afraid I may have been a little hasty with her. I’ve enough to try me, goodness knows.” And at the thought of Toinette and her irritating incompetence Madame Goboreau’s mouth snapped shut like a trap, and the evil thoughts looked out again from banishment.

  Grandpapa grunted ungraciously, went back to his library and slammed the door. Seated in front of his fire he smoked a cigar and growled at the glowing coals. Somehow or other he had frightened Colette to-day. She had shrunk from him in the hall. Why? The memory of her shrinking lay heavy on his mind. He swore and jabbed at the coals with the poker. Was she to be alienated from him too? One by one they had shrunk from him and left him. His wife, Jean, André, his elder grandchildren, and now—would Colette go too? God knew he’d been a good enough husband, father, and grandfather. A bit of a disciplinarian perhaps, no patience with outlandish notions, but that, surely, was all to the good in the father of a family. Wild lads, such as Jean had been as a boy, needed the sting of the lash to break ’em in and useless imaginative notions, such as had flowered in André, must be nipped in the bud if the boy was not to grow up a sensitive ass. Was it his fault if the whip and rein had goaded one son to frenzy and driven the other into a morbid solitude? No, the fault was in them. They had inherited from their fool of a mother a passion for individual freedom in life and thought that had maddened him and been their own undoing. “Freedom.” How often had his wife, Jean, and André used that detested word to him. He loathed it. How often had Jean demanded freedom to live his own life, André to think his own thoughts and his wife, puling wretch, complaining in season and out of season that her husband cruelly possessed her body, mind and soul, that she must be free to breathe a little, think a little, be herself once in a way, or she would die . . . and she had. . . . Fool! . . . At the thought of her grandpapa got up and paced the room with short, irritated strides. Life, to him, was an affair of disciplined striving for material welfare, in which mankind must be marshalled in the regularity and order of an army, captained by those, such as himself, whose cool judgment and strong character marked them out for leadership. From the led the leaders had the right to demand unquestioning obedience and complete sinking of individual personality, and loyal and admiring service. . . . Freedom. . . . Bosh. . . . . . That way led to chaos. . . . Each of his sons had gone his own way and where were they now? Jean, dead in a gambling house as likely as not and André, a sentimental failure, living on his wife’s money. At the thought of his daughter-in-law grandpapa’s thoughts became positively savage. She had all the qualities he most admired in a man, cool judgment, strong character and the gift of leadership, but in a woman they drove him demented. Women had no right to lead—they should be led. Their part was to follow meekly and obediently in the rear with the commissariat, not to seize banner and sword and spur to the forefront of the battle. Rachell, confound her, had set herself up as the leader and guardian of her family instead of relinquishing the post to her father-in-law, and just look at the disasters that had accrued! The whole turn-out on the verge of bankruptcy and his grandchildren alienated from him. Confound the woman! Women were at the bottom of all the trouble in the world. Look at his wife and daughter-in-law; between ’em they’d ruined his life.

  Grandpapa’s savage meditations ended suddenly in the desire for a drink. He stopped striding round the room and rang the bell violently. As he stood in front of the fire silently waiting for Barker he became unpleasantly aware of the wind and the rain—scratching at the window like a mad creature trying to come in, moaning and beating with imprisoned wings in the chimney—the inarticulate crying out of the weak crushed by the strong. He swore and piled logs on the fire so that the roaring flames might drown their plaint.

  III

  Colette’s spirit, that day, had been voyaging for the first time into the darkness surrounding human life, but Jacqueline, to whom fear and pain had long been familiar, had voyaged even farther; she had gone right through th
e circle of darkness into the circle of illimitable light beyond.

  “I saw eternity the other night

  Like a great ring of pure and endless light,”

  wrote Vaughan, but to Jacqueline, when she had seen it that day, it had seemed more like the endless depth and length, and breadth and height of the sky, ringed only where it bent itself round the ball of darkness enclosing man, thrusting, probing, piercing with its spears of light to get through the darkness to him. And it had got through to Jacqueline. And, as always, it had used as the point of its spear the most trivial, common, even banal of happenings. Jacqueline had smashed a vase and so found God.

  She had not done this all in one day, she had begun her voyaging when she first went to the Convent, but this December day of wind and rain had seen her sail her boat into harbour and let down the anchor. She never forgot this day as long as she lived—this day and the one when she first went to the Convent.

  Rachell had been with her on that first day which now, so far had she travelled since, seemed hundreds of years ago. It had been a glorious September morning, warm yet with a delicious crisp edge of coolness to the warmth, and of a crystalline clearness. They had climbed together the steep steps leading to the Convent, Jacqueline palpitating with fright and clinging to Rachell’s hand. They passed the old church porch and stood in front of the heavy grilled door of the Convent. Rachell, using both hands and all her strength, pulled the great iron bell that hung beside it. It clanged in a dreadful hollow way and Jacqueline thought of dungeons and rats and tortures and shook all over. Then the shutter behind the grill shook and rattled, and finally shot back, and Jacqueline saw an immense pair of spectacles gazing out. Behind the spectacles, and nearly obliterated by them, was an old face framed in white linen.

  “Rachell, my dearest child,” cried a shrill sweet voice from behind the spectacles, and the great door, after a creaking and grumbling of bolts, was opened, revealing the tiny black-habited figure of Soeur Ursule. Reaching up she folded the tall Rachell in her arms and kissed her on both cheeks, for of all the pupils whom Soeur Ursule had taught within the old Convent walls Rachell was the one who did her the most credit. Perhaps a little of Rachell’s beauty of body and mind and spirit was due to heredity and upbringing, but if so, Soeur Ursule had decided it was such a small part as to be entirely negligible; she took the whole credit to herself and Soeur Monique, though admitting, of course, that the blessing of God and the intercessions of the holy saints had been of assistance in their efforts.