“I wish,” said Rachell impatiently, “that you wouldn’t always talk in metaphor.”
“It amuses me,” said Ranulph.
Rachell flushed with sudden anger. “I suppose your behaviour this afternoon amused you?”
“No,” said Ranulph, “I can’t say I was amused. My little exhibition of passion was quite genuine. . . . So was yours.”
He raised one eyebrow and looked at her mockingly. At the thrust Rachel’s flush disappeared and she went quite white.
“I love you,” said Ranulph, “but it was never my intention to make the matter quite so obvious. . . . I was certainly very crude. . . . Something caged in me got out.”
“As did my vanity,” said Rachell.
“Oh?” queried Ranulph, “caged vanity? I daresay it did you good to let it out for a moment. I am glad to have done obeisance to your beauty.”
“Well, please don’t do it again.” She got up and faced him. “I hope what you said just now was no more than a sop to my vanity?”
Ranulph smiled. “Love? No, it was the truth. The thing is between us. On your side as well as mine.”
Rachell flushed again. “How dare you—”
“Oh, a mere molehill to my mountain and capable of being crushed by circumstances. We will ignore it. Most things die if ignored. What was it Benvolio and Romeo said? ‘In love—out—of love.’ The passage from one to the other can be accomplished with a little good will.” He smiled, bitterly, and she was touched.
“I am so sorry. Will you find it hard?” she asked. Her voice was soft and her whole figure seemed melting a little. Ranulph’s face hardened.
“With your sympathy—yes; without it—perhaps not.”
She drew herself up. “Then you shall not have it,” she said. “Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
She walked to the door, but he called to her a little urgently.
“Rachell.”
She paused. “Yes?”
“Human relationships are queer things. No single one is like any other one. I think yours and mine is quite unique, and not altogether despicable.”
She turned and looked at him. To her horror she saw he was trembling as with an ague, and that his eyes were alight with a feeling whose depth his words had hardly hinted at. She had not realized it had gone so far with him. . . . In a minute it was gone.
“Well, that’s finished with,” he said lightly, “and don’t reproach yourself. The thing is not despicable.”
“No,” she said, and smiled. Then she went out and shut the door, leaving him alone.
Chapter 9
I
GOOD FRIDAY and Holy Saturday of that year were long remembered on the Island, the one for its beauty and the other for its storm and shipwreck. By the du Frocqs they were remembered as marking the beginning and the end of an epoch. To both, the Island and the family, those two days together seemed to bring home the twin facts of life and death with a rather terrible force.
As Easter approached Toinette began to suffer from what the Islanders call “avertissements”—warnings of evil to come. She heard queer noises about the house, bumps when there was nothing to bump, steps going up and down stairs when everyone was in bed, the crowing of cocks at unusual hours, the howling of dogs and hooting of owls. She came down every morning goggle-eyed and full of it, and Rachell had the greatest difficulty in making her keep her avertissements more or less to herself.
“You’ll see, madame, you’ll see,” she said, “something terrible will ’appen.”
“Be quiet, Toinette,” said Rachell. But it was no good. Strong minded as the du Frocqs were Toinette’s avertissements sent a little shiver of uneasiness through them all.
Even Ranulph, on Good Friday morning, felt the least bit disturbed. He was standing at his window looking across the farmyard to the meadow beyond. There were ladies-smocks now in the meadow grass, and along the hedge was a line of budding bluebells. His gaze, dreamily appraising the blue and the silver, wind-rippled, suddenly became fixed. A familiar bearded figure was walking across the meadow. The face turned towards him and he saw quite clearly the man’s queer tawny eyes and a great scar across one cheek. He knew the fellow. He was puzzled at first to think who it was, then he realized it was himself. He recoiled and there flashed through his memory the peasant superstition that the dying sometimes see their own wraith before their death. Then he recovered himself and looked out of the window again. . . . There was nothing there. . . . Laughing at his own stupidity he turned back into the room and reached for his cap. . . . He was going to take the children down to L’Autel beach to roast limpets, according to the quite outrageous custom of the Island on Good Friday.
II
This Good Friday was perhaps more vividly remembered by Michelle than by anyone else. She began the morning by having one of her customary moments of clear and lovely thinking and she went on from that to have one of her equally customary violent falls from virtue. But after that, with the help of Ranulph, she got nearer than she had ever got before to reconciling the two.
She awoke at dawn. She had been dreaming, she didn’t quite know why, of wings. All night they had been rustling and flapping round her. For the most part they had been the familiar wings that she knew, the serene slow flappings of the gulls, the soft whir of Rachell’s doves, the little flip-flaps of the robins and the wrens, but every now and then there would come a beating and a violent rushing, and something terrible would sweep like a great wind through the gentle sounds. Whenever this happened she would wake up suddenly with a feeling of terror, realize it was only a dream and go to sleep again.
When she awoke finally it was to find a wind blowing, not a gale but the fresh south-westerly wind that sometimes precedes a gale. She thought perhaps the sound of it, penetrating her sleep, had made her dream of all those wings. But it was a gay, jolly wind, it didn’t account for that terrible flapping thing. . . . She thought of Toinette’s avertissements and shivered a little.
Then she jumped out of bed, ran to the window and pulled the curtain. She gasped at what she saw. It had been raining in the night, but now there was a dawn beautiful beyond anything she had ever seen. It had a naked, rather terrible beauty, wind-swept and amazingly clear. The sky, a cold intense blue-green, was scattered all over with little windy wisps of cloud of a burning gold, flecking larger, steadier clouds, pale hued, almost invisible, that had not yet caught the sun. Down on the horizon, over the sea, were bars of cloud of a rich blood-red. From where she stood she could see, over the courtyard wall, the garden and the orchard, and the twisted oak trees. Easter was late that year, and the apple blossom was already out and at the mercy of the wind. White petals were drifting like blown sea spray at every gust of wind and the fat coral buds, terrified, were clinging, limpet-like, to the brown twigs. Below the apple trees the bluebells and ladies-smocks were dancing and shifting and, down the garden path, on each side, the stolid spires of hyacinths and the wallflower buds, black with folded colour, were bowing and swaying. The air was so amazingly clear that Michelle felt she could almost see each individual petal and crinkled leaf. Such a clearness, and such a vivid sky, were ominous. She looked beyond to the row of old oak trees. Yes, they were tossing their arms already, black and rather alarming against those red streaks of cloud.
But Michelle was not afraid of storms and she passed quickly from foreboding to amazement at the morning’s beauty. Those tossed little plumes of cloud made her think of the ruffled feathers of a dove’s breast. Her mind full of birds it seemed to her that the farther clouds beyond them, sailing more steadily before the wind, were like widespread slowly beating wings. It was years later that a poet[5], seeing, perhaps, such a sunrise as this, was to write:
[5]Gerard Hopkins.
“. . . though the last lights off the black west went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards spring
s—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
If Michelle could have read those words she would have pounced on them joyously as expressing perfectly the feeling in her that was trying to find expression, but as it was she had to grope about in her own mind for the words she wanted, for words she must have; she and the sunrise had met and from all union there is birth.
She remembered how last summer, out at La Baie des Mouettes, she had thought of beauty as a bird and of all the scraps and shreds of beauty that make up that shining whole as feathers in her wings. And then she had thought of love and truth and beauty as being the same, just different facets of the orbed drop. She had realized that the problem of life is one of unity. The orbed drop of light, the winged beauty, is there, but how melt into its radiance and become one with it? But she had got no farther than that, for Peronelle and Jacqueline had interrupted her and she had immediately behaved abominably. But now, so early in the morning, with no one to disturb her, here was a further chance of getting somewhere. Reality, she knew, is beyond knowledge, and only to be apprehended a little in the form of pictures. The picture of the dove was presented to her now and she fixed her thoughts upon it. The warm brooding golden breast and the wings above stretching farther than she could see, almost invisible. The one turned earthwards and the others beating in heaven. Earth and heaven united by that great gleaming spirit. For yes, a bird was the symbol of spirit as well as the symbol of beauty, and love and truth and beauty were different facets of that orbed drop of light that hangs at the tip-top and must be—spirit. Then if spirit were the shining whole of beauty every scrap and shred of beauty must be spirit too. Spirit must be not only a great dove brooding over the world but also a mysterious something indwelling created things. It must be like the candle set in a coloured lantern that gives unearthly beauty to what without it is only a dull affair of paint and glass. Michelle thought again. Was it in her? She knew that she could love, that she could on rare, very rare, occasions, think clear thoughts and say sweet things. That must be spirit. The same spirit that made a bluebell a lovely thing and set magic in a blackbird’s song, the same spirit that brooded winged over the world; and she must learn how to link the spirit in her to all those other effluences of spirit. But how? How? Did anyone ever find out? Did nuns in their convents know, or those hermits who had gone away to live in caves, alone with day and night and silence? She felt that if she looked for a little longer at that great dove in the sky she would begin to know. Propping her elbows on the window sill and her chin in her hands she gazed and gazed. She could feel, as Jacqueline had felt in the Convent rock garden, something in her stretching out to join something in the beauty outside her, but it was only a sensation and it did not satisfy her as it had satisfied Jacqueline. It was not enough to feel; feeling, she realized, was fleeting and not always to be trusted, she wanted to be. She wanted something permanent, some union that could be held and kept with her always. If she waited patiently perhaps—perhaps. . . .
It was at this moment that Colette, full of the best intentions, awoke, perceived Michelle, and running across the room butted her in the back. A starving, homeless beggar who has tramped for miles uphill in bitter weather to gain a promised meal at a warm fireside, and then has the door shut in his face, could not have been more crazily, heartbrokenly, savagely outraged than Michelle at this moment. She leapt to her feet with whirlwind fury and boxed Colette on the ears. Now Colette had never suffered this outrage at the hands of anyone but Madame Gaboreau, and to have it presented to her in the bosom of her own family was simply more than she could stand. She was normally a placid, sweet tempered creature, but the blow, bringing back as it did the memory of the terror of that day at grandpapa’s, and rewarding with cruelty her excellent intentions, completely bowled her over. She howled. She roared. She screamed. She stamped. She kicked. The row brought Peronelle rushing in, slipperless, her nightgown flying behind her.
“What in the world are you doing to Colette?” she demanded fiercely.
“She butted me in the back—horrid little thing—I boxed her ears.” Michelle had a considerable temper of her own and it was now thoroughly roused. Her cheeks flamed and her heart within her grew harder and harder.
“You—boxed Colette’s ears? Colette? And she’s just been ill.” Peronelle flung back her head and each separate golden hair stood straight out, quivering with rage.
“She’s perfectly well now,” said Michelle sullenly, “quite well enough to have her ears boxed. She’s been spoilt, that’s what it is. She thinks she can do what she likes—nasty little beast.”
The red flag of battle was now flying in Peronelle’s cheeks too. She swung her long slender arms and the box on the ears she gave Michelle had about it the overwhelming strength of a righteous cause. Michelle yelled. Colin, charging joyously in in his nightshirt, and not knowing on which side to ally himself, tilted at each in turn to be on the safe side. Jacqueline, clinging to the door knob in terror, sobbed. Colette roared. The uproar brought in Rachell in her nightgown and André in his nightshirt. It took twenty minutes of hard work, and a spanking for Colin, to restore anything like order, and even then the backwash of sobs echoed through the house till breakfast time.
It was a silent meal. Rachell looked round her family with despair. Where did they get these awful tempers from? Colin and Jacqueline, before the riot was quelled, had also been in tempers of sorts. Even now she felt it was by no means over. Peronelle and Colin, whose tempers were of the firework variety, were themselves again and eating hugely, but Michelle was silent, sullen and hard, and ate nothing. She would, Rachell felt, be quite likely to set them all off again before the day was over. Michelle, she thought, was very, very difficult. Unquestionably the most difficult of the children. There seemed no reason for her appalling outbursts. She seemed to fall into them suddenly like a man tumbling down a precipice. . . . From what heights did she fall? . . . And then, having fallen, she did not recover, she remained apparently stunned for hours and hours, stupid and dull and sullen, and quite impossible to live with.
“André,” said Rachell suddenly, “it’s Good Friday. I shall take the children to church this morning.” That would, she thought, keep them quiet and out of mischief.
“You can’t, dear,” said André mildly, “Lupin’s gone lame and I want Gertrais on the farm.”
Rachell gave an exclamation of annoyance. . . . It was just like André to make difficulties. . . . To walk both ways would be too much for the children. . . . Her eyes flashed. . . . Ranulph, looking at her, thought it was easy to see where the children got their tempers from. He had been watching the scene with his customary rather irritating expression of humour, now he smiled broadly. Rachell, guessing why, shot arrows at him out of her eyes. . . . He smiled yet more broadly.
“It’s Good Friday,” he said, “since, owing to equine engagements and disabilities, we can’t be Christians we’ll be heathens. I’ll take the children to roast limpets on the shore. That, I believe, is the heathen custom of this Island?”
“It’s extremely kind of you, Mabier,” said André gratefully, “It’ll be a comfort,” he added darkly, “to get the children out of the way.”
He did not usually speak like this, but it had been an exhausting morning and spanking Colin on an empty stomach always wearied him. Michelle, stung to the quick by his tone, sank yet deeper into the mud that engulfed her.
“Very well, then,” said Ranulph, with an irritating brightness, “we’ll go to L’Autel beach. We’ll start in an hour and take our lunch.”
“Not Colette,” said Rachell. “It’ll be too far for her.”
Colette, now quite restored, smiled fatly. She didn’t mind not going. She would be able to play in the garden with those other three who never, never boxed her ears.
“I’m sure we don’t want her,” said Michelle acidly. P
eronelle jumped to her feet, the red flag running up again. “Hold your tongue!” she shouted. “You’re a loathsome toad, you’re a—”
Rachell arose in majesty. “If I hear a single word more from any of you,” she stormed, “you shall all be locked in the stable for the day.”
“I think,” said Ranulph, “that we will go to L’Autel beach as soon as ever the lunch is cut.”
III
They went. It was quite a long walk and the exercise and fresh air, making as they did little punctures in the balloons of temper and letting out the gas, proved beneficial. They hadn’t gone half a mile before everyone but Michelle had recovered. She, nasty thing, walked half a pace behind the rest and glowered. Ranulph, fond of her, felt that a knot needed untying here and his fingers itched to be at it.
L’Autel beach was on the flat side of the Island and they walked downhill all the way through narrow corkscrew lanes. In no other part of the world, thought Ranulph, could you find lanes quite like these. On each side a rampart of earth and stones was crowned by a thick matted hedge of twisted honeysuckle, veronica, fuchsias and escallonia. Behind these stunted oak trees bent over to form a roof. Most lanes, if they were not actually water-lanes, had a little trickle of a stream running down one side, edged by vivid luxuriant fern. In summer the scent of mingled honeysuckle and escallonia was overpoweringly lovely but Ranulph, when in Africa he had been choking in dust storms, had always thought of the pungent spring scent of the lanes; wet earth and ferns and moss, primroses and bluebells and the wind from the sea laden with salt.
To-day the lanes were almost startlingly vivid. The double clearness of rain past and storm to come gave to each primrose and buttercup petal, and to each patch of blue sky seen between bright green leaves, the brilliance and hardness of mosaic. There was no distance. The leaves and flowers at the bottom of a lane seemed, as you walked down, to be crowding up to meet you and weaving a brilliant flat pattern just in front of your eyes, a pattern that receded as you walked, and seemed to be luring you on into the very heart of beauty.