All the rooms in Bon Repos were soaked in peace. The sun, slipping round the house from east to west, sent long shafts of light through the little old windows and painted the whitewashed walls pink and amber and then pink again. The leaves of the passion flowers, creeping round the windows, set shadows dancing from floor to ceiling, and under the eaves birds twittered. The scent of flowers was everywhere, and always, night and day, the rooms were filled with the murmur of the sea.
V
Colin ran across the courtyard to the house, his nose twitching a little as the smell of baked apples floated out into the misty air. At the front door he stopped, for his mother was standing between the fuchsias watching for him.
Rachell du Frocq, standing with the glow of orange lamplight behind her and the scarlet fuchsias on either side, was a sight to make anyone stop and look, and look again. She was a beautiful woman, slender and straight as a stalk of lavender, tall and stately as a pine tree in a sheltered valley. She wore her masses of dark hair plaited and twisted like a great crown, and carried her head proudly poised as though aware of sovereignty. Her white skin was tanned by the sun and her eyes, under the strongly marked eyebrows of an artist with a sense of humour, were dark, flashing sometimes with vivacity, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with anger, but always with beauty and warmth. No one, looking at her, could have guessed that for sixteen years she had been the wife of an unsuccessful farmer, battling day after day with poverty, struggling with her husband to wrest for their children living and happiness from the earth and life. She had had eight children and had seen death take three of them from her. Yet, so strong did the flame of beauty burn in her, only the observant noticed the scars left by those sixteen years. Her lips were a little hard, as though they had been compressed too often in the bearing of pain, her hands, though they had not lost their shapeliness, had lost their beauty of texture, and her lids were faintly shadowed with purple, as though grief that had been denied expression had stained them. Perhaps she owed her unshaken loveliness to the spirit of independence that possessed her. Although she gave herself in love to her husband and children, although she claimed delighted kinship with the beauty and humour that she met in her way, yet at the same time in her innermost being she held herself aloof. There was a part of her, deeply withdrawn, that was wrapped in a great tranquillity, and this she defended fiercely from all violation. It was her very essence, independent of time or place or person, and all that threatened its peace, all outcry, anger or clamour, she hated and thrust away from her. It might be that this inmost core of quietness, stronger in its influence than the blows of fate, had preserved her beauty. However that might be, beauty dwelt in her like the lamp in a saint’s shrine and radiated from her like light. Everything she touched and lived with was lit by her beauty and glowed with her warmth. She was always dressed in black—she said it was so handy for funerals and therefore economical. She stressed the economy of it. She looked superb in black; had she not there would have been less said about economy and Rachell would have worn colours. In her shapely ears she wore little gold ear-rings shaped like shells, and in summer she wore tucked into her belt a maiden’s blush rose from the bush by the garden gate.
Colin stopped and looked at her. He smiled sadly. He loved her. She hurt him with her beauty.
“Colin, where have you been?”
The sadness in Colin’s smile melted away and cheek took its place. He loved prevarication and the exercise of his imagination.
“There’s a fog coming up, mother. It’ll be dirty weather at sea to-night. Did you hear the foghorn?”
Rachell waved this meteorological digression contemptuously aside.
“Where have you been, Colin? It’s very late.”
Colin came to her and turned his dirty face up to hers. His eyes, candid and beautiful, gazed unwaveringly straight into her eyes.
“I went to tea with the de Putrons, mother, and there was crab for tea and goche,[2] and afterwards Mr. de Putron took Denys and me out in the boat . . . Denys was sick . . . I wasn’t. . . . Mr. de Putron sent you his kind regards and is sorry we were back so late, but his watch had gone wrong. He took it in his bath. Mrs. de Putron said—”
[2]Cake.
“That will do, Colin,” Rachell interrupted sharply. The de Putrons, she knew, were spending the day on a neighbouring island. Seeing he was making very little impression Colin tried a new tack. He produced the pink bag of sweets.
“For you, mother darling. No one is to eat them but you, not even father. They are from Le Manouri’s.”
Rachell was touched.
“Oh, Colin, you bad boy, you shouldn’t. All your pocket money gone!”
She looked at him. What was one to do with a child like this? So generous and yet such a shocking little liar, so courageous and yet so shameless. She ought to punish him of course. She ought to whip him. But the evening, the day’s work ended, was so peaceful. She could not shatter its peace with violence and sorrow. Then, too, he was like her and she understood him to the very core. He wanted independence and he wanted serenity, and to get the two together he would go to any lengths. How was she to teach him that independence was a thing of the spirit, and never gained at the expense of integrity? She gave it up and led the way into the house.
At the kitchen door Colin was confronted with his father and his spirits rose. He loved romancing to his father. André du Frocq, good easy man, believed every word that was said to him, provided it was reasonably probable. Colin began to etch a few more details into the vivid picture of the de Putron tea party already existing in his mind.
André, small and thin, and bent with toil, his fair hair and beard already flecked with grey, his kind, light-brown eyes peering short-sightedly from behind glasses, stood at the door with his pipe in one hand and his newspaper in the other. His look of puzzled bewilderment was habitual to him, and not occasioned by his son’s behaviour only. A thinker and dreamer, forced by fate into the rôle of a practical man of affairs, a role he filled but poorly, he seemed always bewildered by his own inadequacy. Now, cruelly aware of his own inability to deal with the situation, he looked severely at his son and forced a hard note into his musical voice.
“Colin, where have you been? Your mother has been very anxious.”
Colin grinned.
“I’ve been with the de Putrons, father, and out in Mr. de Putron’s boat afterwards. We had a squiffing tea. Crab and goche, and apricot jam and tarts. The de Putron’s aunt was there . . . the one with the lovely ivory teeth made in Paris . . . they fell out . . . Mr. de Putron sent his kind regards . . . Denys was sick in the boat—” He paused, wondering what to select next from the wealth of imaginary detail that thronged his mind. His father, believing the de Putron legend, nevertheless filled the pause with reproof.
“You should not have gone to the de Putron’s without telling us. I have already forbidden you to be out so late alone. Your poor mother has been exceedingly anxious. You are never to go anywhere without asking permission first. Do you hear?”
Sudden anger surged up in Colin. Oh, these parents! What business of theirs was it where he went? He must be free, he must, he must. He would not be guarded and watched and caged. The fury of a trapped wild animal raged in him. He wanted to hurt his father. He would. He would tell him he had been out with Guilbert, Hélier, and Jacquemin. Then his father would know he had deceived him. Nothing hurt his father more than to find himself deceived. Colin flung back his head, opened his mouth—then stopped. His mother, standing behind him, was speechlessly crying out to him not to tell. The bond between Colin and Rachell was at all times very close. So strong were the filaments of sympathy between them that unspoken messages could slide from one to the other down the unseen threads. They came to Colin now, thick and fast, confused but compelling. She understood his rage. . . . She felt the same herself. . . . Not to be free was worse than anything. . . . But he was all wrong. .
. . He did not know what freedom meant . . . not yet . . . one day she would teach him that only the bound are free . . . a paradox . . . a new word that he must learn if he would live rightly. . . . And he must not hurt his father. . . . Above all, he must not hurt his father.
“I’m sorry, father.” Colin, smelling horribly of fish, embraced his relieved parent, pushed past him into the kitchen and precipitated himself into the midst of his three elder sisters, Michelle, Peronelle, and Jacqueline, who were preparing bowls of bread and milk by the fire.
“Wash him, one of you girls,” cried Rachell, “he’s filthy. Get him clean before we have supper.”
Peronelle, the second of the family, aged fourteen, seized Colin by the slack of his jersey and haled him into the scullery. Peronelle, the most practical of the family, was always the one to answer any urgent call for action, and to answer it, too, with a shattering energy. She was thin, small, vital, with fair, curly hair that sprayed round her face as though each separate curl had a vivid life of its own. Her tawny eyes and pale pointed little face were the animated sparkling mirrors of every emotion that possessed her. Courageous, quick-tempered, generous, truthful, intolerant and passionately loving, she was a perfect whirlpool of emotion. Just now she was in a towering passion with Colin. She adored her father and she loathed lies. Dirty little coward! He was afraid of being whipped, that’s what it was. She’d teach him! She slammed the scullery door, poured water into a bowl, soaped the flannel and fell upon her erring brother. Colin, his fishy jersey torn off his back and his sister’s hand twisting in his hair, submitted. Useless to try to make Peronelle understand his point of view; she did not understand nuances of temperament. Useless to fight her—when possessed by rage her physical energy was immense. Nothing to be done but give in and wait for an opportunity to get in a good hard kick on the shin.
“The de Putrons indeed!” stormed Peronelle as she scrubbed, “everyone knows they’ve gone off for the day with the Bailiff. Lying to a sweet innocent like father who believes every word you say! All that vulgar nonsense about the aunt’s teeth! Keep your mouth shut, you dirty little tike, or I’ll put soap in it!”
She turned to reach the towel. Colin delivered well and truly a good hard kick on the shin. Peronelle swayed. Though her energy and vitality gave her an appearance of strength she was in reality delicate. The kick hurt horribly. Waves of pain went up her legs into her back. She felt sick, but not a sound came from her. She set her mouth like a trap, swung her arms, and dealt Colin a terrific box on the ears. Colin, too, made no sound, and for a moment they swayed together, seeing stars. Then Peronelle seized the towel and dried him. Three minutes later, honours being even, they kissed lovingly and re-entered the kitchen glowing with affection.
“Now, children.”
Rachell lifted the saucepan of boiling milk from the fire and poured it on the cubes of bread in the children’s bowls. For herself and André there was home-cured ham and a jug of steaming coffee. Sophie, the maid, went home every evening, so the supper was Rachell’s province.
Peronelle and Colin slipped into chairs one on each side of their father, the one filled with protective, the other with contrite affection.
Michelle, the eldest, aged fifteen, sat on her mother’s right and stared into vacancy with dark eyes bright with thought. Her straight black hair was strained unbecomingly back from a face very like her father’s. She, like Peronelle, was small and thin, but whereas Peronelle was thin like a fairy, Michelle was thin like a scarecrow. Her clothes, which were usually torn, always seemed too big for her and whenever possible she put them on back to front. She was the despair of Rachell and Peronelle, for if she had cared to put them the right way round she would have been pretty. Her eyes were beautiful, and her shapely head, and her beautiful slender hands and feet. But Michelle did not care. What were clothes to her? She lived in a world of the intellect and the imagination, a world more real to her than that of Bon Repos and the Island, inhabited by people more visible to her eyes than her own exasperating relations. Later on in her life she was revered as an intellectual and a saint, but now she was voted a shocking, untidy little prig. . . . Only her father understood her.
But no one, not even her father, understood Jacqueline. Outwardly she was the perfect picture of a good, normal little twelve-year-old, pretty in an unexciting way, black-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked; but inwardly she was a whirlpool of queer unchildish desires, nightmare terrors, tormenting anxieties. Longing to be clever she could never learn anything, and the others laughed at her for her stupidity. Longing for friendship she was too agonizedly shy to claim it, and her awkward self-consciousness only repelled the admiration stirred by her pretty looks. Peronelle, gay, friendly and utterly unself-conscious, had love and admiration poured out at her little feet in heartsfull, but Jacqueline, starving, lived in outer darkness. When she had been in the making a little brother had been dangerously ill. He had died a few weeks before her birth. Anxiety, fear, sorrow, heartsick railing at fate, were woven into the very tissue of her being.
There was yet another female du Frocq, Colette, aged five, upstairs asleep in the cot in Michelle’s room.
Supper began happily. The du Frocqs all had a wonderful capacity for forgetting past unpleasantness. Colin’s doings had already passed from their minds and would not be alluded to again. Sufficient unto the day were the escapades thereof.
Rachell, seeing her husband tired and dispirited, thrust her own tiredness from her and entered into a gay description of a visit to Miss Marguerite Falaise, an interfering spinster who lived down the road. Rachell was a marvellous raconteur. Though she did not, like her son Colin, rely entirely upon imagination in recounting the day’s doings, her memory was sufficiently constructive to hang a gay embroidered border upon the sober garment of truth. She was unaware of her embroidery; she thought she only did good plain hemming. As she talked her black eyes sparkled and amusement rippled over her face like sunlight on water. Every now and then she laid down her knife and fork to gesticulate with both hands. As he listened the years rolled off André one by one. He forgot his cows and pigs and diseased tomatoes. He straightened his bent back and his eyes behind their glasses twinkled back at her. For the moment they were both young again, the children sitting between them forgotten.
Peronelle and Colin, usually fluent conversationalists, were completely silent, absorbed in food. They ate three times as much as anyone else; bread and milk, baked apples and cream, slice after slice of bread and dripping. Every now and then they heaved great sighs of utter repletion.
Jacqueline ate some of her bread and milk and then hid the rest under her spoon, anxiously hoping her mother would not notice. How could she eat when she knew herself to be dying? The knowledge made her feel sick and she couldn’t swallow. She had fallen down that afternoon and grazed her knee and now, under her black stocking, she felt quite sure she could feel the knee swelling. She had tetanus. She was going to die. Perhaps when she was dead the others would be sorry they had not loved her more. Perhaps they would cry. Yes, they would go to her funeral all dressed in black and crying dreadfully into pocket handkerchiefs with black borders. This was a pleasant thought and for a moment the band of iron that seemed clamped round Jacqueline’s throat loosened a bit; she even took another spoonful of bread and milk and swallowed it down. But then, quick as lightning, came another thought, a terrible one. She wouldn’t be crying into a black-bordered handkerchief in the sunshine, she would be in a wooden box nailed down tight so that she couldn’t get out, and they would put the box in the earth and bury it deep down, and perhaps she wouldn’t be dead after all, and would scream and shriek inside the box, and there would be so much earth on top that no one would hear her. . . . The perspiration was trickling down her back and she put up her hands to her throat where the iron band was clamped tight, tight. It seemed to her that she was screaming now. . . . She looked round at her family, at her father and mother talking to each o
ther and oblivious of her suffering, at Michelle gazing out of the window, at Colin shovelling bread and milk into his mouth as though he were Sophie stoking the fire, at Peronelle feeding herself daintily but with great rapidity and thoroughness. No, they none of them cared. Selfish beasts. She would be dead soon and perhaps, after all, they wouldn’t cry at her funeral. Cautiously she felt her knee and even as she felt it it swelled horribly under her fingers. If only she could tell someone about it, but she was so constituted that she could never express herself properly. What she said was never what she had meant to say. She could never think of the right words to express her fears. When she tried people just thought she was being funny and laughed. Sometimes she tried to tell things to Peronelle, but Peronelle, though her love was always warm and comforting, was too much a child of the daylight to see very far into nightmare. If Jacqueline told her, for instance, that she was frightened of being buried alive Peronelle would simply say in her downright way, “You won’t be, darling, I’ll see to it,” entirely disregarding the fact that being a year older than Jacqueline it was probable that she would be buried alive first. . . . Should she tell her mother about the tetanus? She glanced at Rachell’s sparkling face and decided that she couldn’t. Rachell would simply laugh, bathe the knee and say “Don’t be silly, darling,” and Jacqueline would feel a fool, and anything, simply anything, was better than feeling a fool. . . . Deep down in Jacqueline, hidden away, was the knowledge that other people thought her a fool, and she simply dared not face that knowledge. She wanted above all things to be admired, and with infinite care she had built up for herself a picture of herself as she would like to be, a creature beautiful and charming and very, very clever; from all self-knowledge that disturbed this picture she fled like a hare. . . . No, there was no one that she could tell. Anyhow, she would look lovely dead. Jacqueline du Frocq, the beautiful, charming, clever Jacqueline, dead . . . white and wasted. . . . But did one look beautiful after dying of tetanus? Did one, perhaps, swell? Oh, it was terrible! She wished she could be like Michelle, who was never frightened of anything that could happen to her body, never, in fact, gave it a thought.