She was standing looking at her friends the trees. Behind them spread that lovely silver sky, and the air was filled with the murmur of the sea. The brightness of the sky behind the black branches was dazzling, and she blinked and shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again she saw that three heads had popped up from behind the bank, and that three pairs of eyes were looking at her from between the trunks of the trees. Just at first, with that brilliant silver light behind them and shining round each head like a nimbus, she could not see their faces, but after a moment she saw that they were children and that they were smiling at her. She was delighted. “Come on,” she cried.
They scrambled over the bank between the trunks of the trees and came to her. They were extraordinarily jolly children, two boys and a girl. Thinking about them afterwards she was surprised to find that she did not know in the least how old they were. They didn’t seem to have any age. They were just children. But they were evidently Island children for they knew all the Island games and songs and nursery rhymes. Colette had a perfectly glorious morning playing with them. They played the pebble game, singing its rhyme as they played.
“Mon toussebelet va demandant,
Ma fausse vieille va quérant,
Sur lequel prends tu, bon enfant?”
And they played the cushion game that, brought by an Islander to England centuries before, had so delighted Charles the Second. And they played the lovely dancing game, careering round and round over the aconites in the orchard and singing the refrain as they danced, “Saluez, Messieurs et Dames. Ah! mon beau lau-ri-er!” And when Colette was tired she sat down on the bank under the oak trees and the children sang nursery rhymes to her. They sang all Colette’s favourites, the Island shoeing song, “Ferre, ferre la pouliche,” and “L’alouette, l’alouette, qui vole en haut,” and the cradle song, “Dindon Bolilin, quatre éfants dans la bain de Madame.” Their voices, sweet and shrill, floated, across the orchard and the garden, but strangely enough, Colette found afterwards that no one in the house seemed to have heard them singing. When the dinner bell rang the children popped over the bank and disappeared. As they went one of the boys said something that puzzled Colette. “You very nearly came to us,” he said, “wouldn’t it have been fun if you had?” But he had gone before she could ask him what he meant. “Come back to-morrow,” she shouted to the empty bank. “Yes, coming back to-morrow;” the words, called by three young voices, sounded like silver bells tolling very far away.
III
“How long has Mademoiselle Colette been in the garden?” asked Rachell of Toinette.
“Ten minutes,” said Toinette, “she took ’er goloshes. She said she must ’urry. They were waiting for ’er.”
“The—the—her imaginary playmates?” stammered Rachell. Somehow the mention of these children of Colette’s made her heart beat twice as fast as usual.
“What an’ ’ead that child have for romancin,’ ” giggled Toinette lovingly, “she told me their names to-day.”
“What are their names?” Rachell could hardly get the words out.
“Martin, Matthieu and Renouvette,” said Toinette.
The kitchen seemed whirling round Rachell. She dropped the potatoes she was peeling and groped her way out to the front door, Toinette staring after her with goggle eyes. Clinging to the lintel of the door she tried to look across the courtyard to the garden but there seemed a mist in front of her eyes. . . . Martin, Matthieu and Renouvette. . . . Her three dead children. Had Colette heard the names and attached them to her three imaginary playmates? . . . Or had—or was—? Rachell’s thoughts seemed reeling. With her hands in front of her, as though she were groping in darkness, she crossed the courtyard and came to the entrance to the garden. In front of her stretched the moss-grown path, bordered now by a blaze of golden crocuses. Colette, her back to her mother, was running down the path. Each of her hands was held out as though holding the hands of two children running one on each side of her and every now and then she laughed back over her shoulder as though at a third. Rachell watched till Colette disappeared behind the trees of the orchard and still she stood at the garden door, watching and straining, but she could not see what Colette saw. For a long time she stood there, breathing deeply, a great joy glowing all through her, then she turned and went, treading on air, back to the kitchen and her potatoes. She had not seen with her eyes—the dead are the dead, and the living are the living, and only a child may pass without harm from one world to another—but conviction was hers. She was gloriously, radiantly happy. She was as happy as the blackbird who had sung on the lilac bush. Martin, Matthieu, and Renouvette were out there in the garden, dancing between the crocuses and in and out of the apple trees. . . . Martin, Matthieu and Renouvette. . . . They were still at Bon Repos. The light of their lives was still part of its radiance. Nothing, she knew now, could put out that light and nothing, she vowed to herself, nothing in all the world, could make her leave this home where it shone.
IV
It was a half-holiday, and after dinner all the children offered to help wash up. Gone were the happy days when Rachell could go to her room and leave the washing up to Sophie. Anything left to Toinette was never finished till midnight. The function of a helper being primarily to get in the way, Rachell sighed a little, but she marshalled them out to the scullery and dealt round dish cloths. It was bad for their characters to have their generous impulses quenched. Toinette squeaked with delight. There was nothing she liked better than to have the whole of her beloved family with her in the scullery, where she could gaze with admiring eyes into each face in turn and do no work at all. Michelle and Peronelle splashed about in two tubs of hot water, and the rest stood round in a semi-circle and dried. Everyone talked at once and Colette, who should have been lying on her bed, sat on top of the copper and laughed her soda-water syphon laugh. Then, as is the way of children, they suddenly began to make portentous announcements. Colette began it. A propos of nothing at all she suddenly stopped laughing and announced, “I shall get married and have ten babies.”
They all laughed except Rachell, who was silent with intense relief. Her fear that Colette might become a nun had been strengthened by the morning’s events. . . . The child seemed to have such a gift for the supernatural. . . . But if, even at six years old, her mind was already bent on domesticity Rachell felt she might be more at ease.
“I shall marry,” said Peronelle, flinging her dish cloth like a lassoo round Colin’s neck, “if I can find a man with no beard who never has a cold in the head. But I shan’t have ten children. Five’s enough. Don’t you find five quite enough, mother?”
“I wouldn’t be without one of you,” declared Rachell, “but, yes, I think five’s enough.”
“I shall teach,” said Michelle primly.
“What else can you do with a face like yours?” asked Colin rudely. “You’re a prig. Men don’t marry prigs.” He didn’t like washing up, and he had been annoyed by Peronelle’s damp dish cloth coiling round his neck, and he felt suddenly, as he often felt, that there were too many women in the world.
“You beast, Colin!” said Peronelle hotly, and dropped a plate.
“If he likes to make vulgar remarks, let him,” said Michelle with increased primness, “they hurt no one but himself.” The atmosphere became a little tense.
“What are you going to be, Colin?” asked Rachell, to lighten it.
Colin did not answer, but the eyes he flashed angrily round on her were an intense sea blue—tinged, perhaps, by his future. . . . His mother’s heart sank.
“Can’t you answer when mother speaks to you?” demanded Peronelle, fuming. “You’re a rude, vulgar, nasty little toad, and you’ve made me smash this plate!”
Colin lowered his head and butted. Peronelle, with great skill, ducked and seized him round the legs. Rachell pushed them, locked in a death grip, out into the yard and shut the door on them. She sighed. She always
found it very tiring to be helped by the children.
“I’ve done this lot,” said Michelle, “I think I shall go and read Plato. You can call me if you want me, mother.”
“Very well, dear,” said Rachell meekly, and Michelle walked from the scullery with chilly dignity.
Peace now descended. Toinette splashed greasily by herself in one tub, and Rachell and Jacqueline tackled the other. Colette, singing a little song to herself on top of the copper, seemed to have forgotten all about them.
“Mother,” announced Jacqueline, “I’m going to take the veil like St. Theresa.”
Rachell dropped a dish cover. Toinette emitted a squeak of joy and then thrust her knuckles into her mouth. That Madame should break something after scolding her, Toinette, day in and day out for her smashings, was really too delicious. Jacqueline stooped to pick up the pieces and her mother looked down at the top of her head with bewildered astonishment. She had been afraid of Colette’s desires turning in that direction, but not Jacqueline’s. She had always thought of Jacqueline as an empty-headed rather frivolous little creature. Well, one never knew. Jacqueline’s eyes, as she rose up from the floor with the broken dish cover in her hands, held the same look as Colin’s had done when he announced that he must be a sailor. . . . She meant what she said.
“You see, mother,” Jacqueline continued solemnly, “I’m not clever with people like Peronelle is. I can’t make them laugh and tell me things. And I’ve no brains so I can’t teach them like Michelle’s going to do. But Soeur Monique says that however much of a goose you may be you can always pray for them. That’s what I shall do. I shall pray like St. Theresa’s Carmelites, and my unseen influence will be immense.” She ended on a note whose loftiness, borrowed from Soeur Monique, was quite overwhelming. Toinette, overwhelmed, dropped a butter dish. Rachell was both astonished and horrified. Astonished that Jacqueline should admit her own shortcomings—she who could never in the past be brought to admit anything against herself—horrified at the priggishness of her remarks. Really, it was quite enough to have Michelle prigging about the place, to have Jacqueline as well would be too much. Then she remembered that priggishness is an inevitable stage in spiritual development, and was ashamed of herself. But, nevertheless, you could have knocked her down with a feather. As soon as the washing up was finished she staggered off to the corn bin to find André. She knew he was there doing accounts. When she came in he was sitting at the table in the window writing. He slipped his blotting paper over the scattered pages to hide them. Rachell sat down on a sack of meal and sketched his children’s futures to him.
“I can’t let Colin be a sailor, it’s too dangerous a life, and I can’t let Jacqueline take the veil—her hair’s so pretty,” she wailed.
“Let them do what they like,” said André. He paused, sketching arabesques on the blotting paper with his pen. “I often think,” he said sombrely, “that looking for happiness through work is like tunnelling through the solid rock for gold. One needs to put driving power, the whole force and drive of one’s nature, behind one’s tunnelling if one is to get through. How can one do that if one’s heart is not in one’s work? Let them do what they want to do.”
He turned his back on Rachell, pushing some pages that still peeped out farther under the sheltering blotting paper. Rachell wondered why he was so anxious to hide the farm accounts from her, and why he was doing them on loose pages instead of in the usual account book.
“Let the children choose their own work,” André went on. “I want them to enjoy it. They’ll have to work hard—and soon.”
“Soon?” There was a hard edge to his voice that frightened Rachell. He swung round and looked at her.
“The six months is more than up,” he said. “We agreed, if you remember, to stay on for six months more at Bon Repos and then see how we stood.” His eyes looked a little desperate, like a trapped animal’s, and his voice, as always when he was deeply moved, was dull and flat.
“How do we stand?” Rachell gripped the sack on each side of her and felt cold. The lovely spring day seemed to darken.
“It’s very simple,” said André. “Our money—your money—is finished. We had hoped my father would have had something substantial to leave. Well, he hadn’t. He left debts, as you know. . . . Those miserable horses.”
“He left a little,” pleaded Rachell.
“Enough to help us move from Bon Repos and settle in some little house while I look about for a clerkship.”
“You—my husband—a clerk!” Rachell could hardly speak for indignation.
“My handwriting,” said André cynically, “is beautiful.”
Rachell got up and shook the dust from her black skirts. She had been very tired after the washing up and her native strength and determination had for the moment forsaken her. Now they flowed back. She stood in front of André, dominating him. The door had swung open, and behind her he could see the lovely world of Bon Repos—the cobbled courtyard with the doves strutting in the sun, the doorway crowned with its huge old lintel, the front door of the house with its French inscription over it and the fuchsias on either side, the little diamond paned windows with the passion flower creeping round them. In front of it all stood Rachell like a tigress defending her young.
“The money that father left,” she told André, “will keep us here for four months longer.”
“And then it, too, will be gone and there will be nothing left to start us in a new way of life.”
André’s voice was harsh with obstinacy. Rachell saw she was going to have a harder tussle with him than she had had before, but over against his weak obstinacy she set her real strength and knew that she would win.
“We are going to stay here until the last possible moment,” she said.
“You are normally a clear-headed woman; why are you so amazingly unreasonable on this one point? You know quite well that I cannot make this farm pay.”
“Since Ranulph Mabier came here and helped you things have been better.”
André winced, and the angry blood surged to his forehead. Her thrust was cruel but true. In a thousand unobtrusive ways Ranulph, practical, competent and clear-headed, had eased the situation on the farm. André swallowed down his humiliation. “Mabier is a better farmer than I am, but even with his help this farm still does not pay—and I do not like accepting his help.”
“Nevertheless, we will not go till we are driven.” Behind her Rachell could hear the cooing of the doves and the rustling of the wind in the budding fuchsia bushes. In her mind’s eye she could see her parlour with the yellow flames of the driftwood fire touching with fingers of light the Chinese dragons and the gillyflowers, the butterflies and the forget-me-nots. She could move her treasures to another house—to the hideous modern villa of a jobbing clerk—but the spirit of Bon Repos that infused them with life would be dead and about them there would be the scent and horror of corruption. And the children—the living children—here they had the strength and beauty of fishes in the sea, but what would they be like taken out of their home? Breathless, suffocating things. And the dead children? There was no power, anywhere, that could tear her from this garden where they played. She raised her arms for a moment as though to protect the little world behind her.
“Once again, Rachell,” said André harshly, “what makes you so crazily unreasonable?”
“Do you remember what I said before?” said Rachell. “You can’t create a thing and then destroy it. That is murder. You and I have created something here. We have brought to life a living spirit in Bon Repos. It is a real thing; it fills the house and everything in it, and gives them life. It is like a light shining out. You must not, cannot put it out.”
She felt what he had felt on Christmas night when he watched the long beam of light from the kitchen window stretching out across the courtyard to the garden and the cliff beyond. He started, and his will was a little shaken. When he
spoke again it was more weakly.
“Don’t you realize that the longer we put off the crash the greater it will be when it comes?”
“It will never come. Something will happen to prevent it.”
He gave an exclamation of impatience. “You said that before.”
“And I say it again. It is true. I know that it is true.”
Rachell’s faith in her own vision, so often wavering, grew stronger the more he opposed her, and as the flame of it burnt up she bent her will more and more strongly to oppose him. There was no softness in her now, no shadow of yielding. She did not, as she had done before, melt him with tears. She was too desperate to cry. She bore him down with the solid rock of her opposition. For a little while longer they argued, and then the interview ended abruptly in the usual complete rout of André. But it did not end happily. For, perhaps, the first time in their married life Rachell’s gifts of loving finesse and persuasion were lost in her driving strength. She did not leave André feeling that the decision come to was his. She left him feeling a beaten and humbled creature. The argument over, he swung round in his chair, his back towards her, and bent over his papers. Turning to go she looked at him and was pierced to the heart by his attitude.
“André,” she said, “let me help you with those miserable accounts.”
“They are not accounts,” he said.
“Then what are you doing?”
“I am writing. I am keeping myself sane by the exercise of my art,” he said, and turned his back on her once more.
Rachell felt as though he had struck her a blow between the eyes. He wrote—and he had never told her. He had a secret life, and he had kept her out of it. She thought she had his whole confidence, and she had not. All these years he should have been putting his whole driving power into the farm, their means of livelihood, and instead of that he had frittered away his strength on what was probably nonsense. She had devoted her whole life to him, given him all that she had, and how had he rewarded her? He had lost all the money she had given him and brought her and her children to the verge of ruin. She went back across the courtyard, across the hall, and upstairs to her bedroom. Her heart was very hard towards him. She threw herself face downwards on her bed.