The rectory was on one side the Papple, in the rather steep valley, the village was beyond and above, further down, on the other side the swift stream. At the back of the rectory the hill went up steep, with a grove of dark, bare larches, through which the road disappeared. And immediately across stream from the rectory, facing the house, the river-bank rose steep and bushy, up to the sloping, dreary meadows, that sloped up again to dark hillsides of trees, with grey rock cropping out.
But from the end of the house, Yvette could only see the road curving round past the wall with its laurel hedge, down to the bridge, then up again round the shoulder to that first hard cluster of houses in Papplewick village, beyond the dry-stone walls of the steep fields.
She always expected SOMETHING to come down the slant of the road from Papplewick, and she always lingered at the landing window. Often a cart came, or a motor-car, or a lorry with stone, or a laborer, or one of the servants. But never anybody who sang Tirra-lirra! by the river. The tirra-lirraing days seemed to have gone by.
This day, however, round the corner on the white-grey road, between the grass and the low stone walls, a roan horse came stepping bravely and briskly down-hill, driven by a man in a cap, perched on the front of his light cart. The man swayed loosely to the swing of the cart, as the horse stepped down-hill, in the silent sombreness of the afternoon. At the back of the cart, long duster-brooms of reed and feather stuck out, nodding on their stalks of cane.
Yvette stood close to the window, and put the casement-cloth curtains behind her, clutching her bare upper arms with the hands.
At the foot of the slope the horse started into a brisk trot to the bridge. The cart rattled on the stone bridge, the brooms bobbed and flustered, the driver sat as if in a kind of dream, swinging along. It was like something seen in a sleep.
But as he crossed the end of the bridge, and was passing along the rectory wall, he looked up at the grim stone house that seemed to have backed away from the gate, under the hill. Yvette moved her hands quickly on her arms. And as quickly from under the peak of his cap, he had seen her, his swarthy predative face was alert.
He pulled up suddenly at the white gate, still gazing upwards at the landing window; while Yvette, always clasping her cold and mottled arms, still gazed abstractedly down at him, from the window.
His head gave a little, quick jerk of signal, and he led his horse well aside, on to the grass. Then, limber and alert, he turned back the tarpaulin of the cart, fetched out various articles, pulled forth two or three of the long brooms of reed or turkey-feathers, covered the cart, and turned towards the house, looking up at Yvette as he opened the white gate.
She nodded to him, and flew to the bathroom to put on her dress, hoping she had disguised her nod so that he wouldn’t be sure she had nodded. Meanwhile she heard the hoarse deep roaring of that old fool, Rover, punctuated by the yapping of that young idiot, Trixie.
She and the housemaid arrived at the same moment at the sitting-room door.
“Was it the man selling brooms?” said Yvette to the maid. “All right!” and she opened the door. “Aunt Cissie, there’s a man selling brooms. Shall I go?”
“What sort of a man?” said Aunt Cissie, who was sitting at tea with the rector and the Mater: the girls having been excluded for once from the meal.
“A man with a cart,” said Yvette.
“A gipsy,” said the maid.
Of course Aunt Cissie rose at once. She had to look at him.
The gipsy stood at the back door, under the steep dark bank where the larches grew. The long brooms flourished from one hand, and from the other hung various objects of shining copper and brass: a saucepan, a candlestick, plates of beaten copper. The man himself was neat and dapper, almost rakish, in his dark green cap and double-breasted green check coat. But his manner was subdued, very quiet: and at the same time proud, with a touch of condescension and aloofness.
“Anything today, lady?” he said, looking at Aunt Cissie with dark, shrewd, searching eyes, but putting a very quiet tenderness into his voice.
Aunt Cissie saw how handsome he was, saw the flexible curve of his lips under the line of black moustache, and she was fluttered. The merest hint of roughness or aggression on the man’s part would have made her shut the door contemptuously in his face. But he managed to insinuate such a subtle suggestion of submission into his male bearing, that she began to hesitate.
“The candlestick is lovely!” said Yvette. “Did you make it?”
And she looked up at the man with her na?ve, childlike eyes, that were as capable of double meanings as his own.
“Yes lady!” He looked back into her eyes for a second, with that naked suggestion of desire which acted on her like a spell, and robbed her of her will. Her tender face seemed to go into a sleep.
“It’s awfully nice!” she murmured vaguely.
Aunt Cissie began to bargain for the candlestick: which was a low, thick stem of copper, rising from a double bowl. With patient aloofness the man attended to her, without ever looking at Yvette, who leaned against the doorway and watched in a muse.
“How is your wife?” she asked him suddenly, when Aunt Cissie had gone indoors to show the candlestick to the rector, and ask him if he thought it was worth it.
The man looked fully at Yvette, and a scarcely discernible smile curled his lips. His eyes did not smile: the insinuation in them only hardened to a glare.
“She’s all right. When are you coming that way again?” he murmured, in a low, caressive, intimate voice.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Yvette vaguely.
“You come Fridays, when I’m there,” he said. Yvette gazed over his shoulder as if she had not heard him. Aunt Cissie returned, with the candlestick and the money to pay for it. Yvette turned nonchalant away, trilling one of her broken tunes, abandoning the whole affair with a certain rudeness.
Nevertheless, hiding this time at the landing window, she stood to watch the man go. What she wanted to know, was whether he really had any power over her. She did not intend him to see her this time.
She saw him go down to the gate, with his brooms and pans, and out to the cart. He carefully stowed away his pans and his brooms, and fixed down the tarpaulin over the cart. Then with a slow, effortless spring of his flexible loins, he was on the cart again, and touching the horse with the reins. The roan horse was away at once, the cart-wheels grinding uphill, and soon the man was gone, without looking round. Gone like a dream which was only a dream, yet which she could not shake off.
“No, he hasn’t any power over me!” she said to herself: rather disappointed really, because she wanted somebody, or something to have power over her.
She went up to reason with the pale and overwrought Lucille, scolding her for getting into a state over nothing.
“What does it MATTER,” she expostulated, “if you told Granny to shut up! Why, everybody ought to be told to shut up, when they’re being beastly. But she didn’t mean it, you know. No, she didn’t mean it. And she’s quite sorry she said it. There’s absolutely no reason to make a fuss. Come on, let’s dress ourselves up and sail down to dinner like duchesses. Let’s have our own back that way. Come on, Lucille!”
There was something strange and mazy, like having cobwebs over one’s face, about Yvette’s vague blitheness; her queer, misty side-stepping from an unpleasantness. It was cheering too. But it was like walking in one of those autumn mists, when gossamer strands blow over your face. You don’t quite know where you are.
She succeeded, however, in persuading Lucille, and the girls got out their best party frocks: Lucille in green and silver, Yvette in a pale lilac colour with turquoise chenille threading. A little rouge and powder, and their best slippers, and the gardens of paradise began to blossom. Yvette hummed and looked at herself, and put on her most dégagé airs of one of the young marchionesses. She had an odd way of slanting her eyebrows and pursing her lips, and to all appearances detaching herself from every earthly consideration, and floating through the cloud of her own pearl-coloured reserves. It was amusing, and not quite convincing.
“Of course I am beautiful, Lucille,” she said blandly. “And you’re perfectly lovely, now you look a bit reproachful. Of course you’re the most aristocratic of the two of us, with your nose! And now your eyes look reproachful, that adds an appealing look, and you’re perfect, perfectly lovely. But I’m more WINNING, in a way. — Don’t you agree?” She turned with arch, complicated simplicity to Lucille.
She was truly simple in what she said. It was just what she thought. But it gave no hint of the very different FEELING that also preoccupied her: the feeling that she had been looked upon, not from the outside, but from the inside, from her secret female self. She was dressing herself up and looking her most dazzling, just to counteract the effect that the gipsy had had on her, when he had looked at her, and seen none of her pretty face and her pretty ways, but just the dark, tremulous, potent secret of her virginity.
The two girls started downstairs in state when the dinner-gong rang: but they waited till they heard the voice of the men. Then they sailed down and into the sitting-room, Yvette preening herself in her vague, debonair way, always a little bit absent; and Lucille shy, ready to burst into tears.
“My goodness gracious!” exclaimed Aunt Cissie, who was still wearing her dark-brown knitted sports coat. “What an apparition! Wherever do you think you’re going?”
“We’re dining with the family,” said Yvette na?vely, “and we’ve put on our best gewgaws in honour of the occasion.”
The rector laughed aloud, and Uncle Fred said:
“The family feels itself highly honoured.”
Both the elderly men were quite gallant, which was what Yvette wanted.
“Come and let me feel your dresses, do!” said Granny. “Are they your best? It IS a shame I can’t see them.”
“Tonight, Mater,” said Uncle Fred, “we shall have to take the young ladies in to dinner, and live up to the honour. Will you go with Cissie?”
“I certainly will,” said Granny. “Youth and beauty must come first.”
“Well, tonight Mater!” said the rector, pleased.
And he offered his arm to Lucille, while Uncle Fred escorted Yvette.
But it was a draggled, dull meal, all the same. Lucille tried to be bright and sociable, and Yvette really was most amiable, in her vague, cobwebby way. Dimly, at the back of her mind, she was thinking: Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing IMPORTANT?
That was her constant refrain, to herself: Why is nothing important? Whether she was in church, or at a party of young people, or dancing in the hotel in the city, the same little bubble of a question rose repeatedly on her consciousness: Why is nothing important?
There were plenty of young men to make love to her: even devotedly. But with impatience she had to shake them off. Why were they so unimportant? — so irritating!
She never even thought of the gipsy. He was a perfectly negligible incident. Yet the approach of Friday loomed strangely significant. “What are we doing on Friday?” she said to Lucille. To which Lucille replied that they were doing nothing. And Yvette was vexed.
Friday came, and in spite of herself she thought all day of the quarry off the road up high Bonsall Head. She wanted to be there. That was all she was conscious of. She wanted to be there. She had not even a dawning idea of going there. Besides, it was raining again. But as she sewed the blue dress, finishing it for the party up at Lambley Close, tomorrow, she just felt that her soul was up there, at the quarry, among the caravans, with the gipsies. Like one lost, or whose soul was stolen, she was not present in her body, the shell of her body. Her intrinsic body was away, at the quarry, among the caravans.
The next day, at the party, she had no idea that she was being sweet to Leo. She had no idea that she was snatching him away from the tortured Ella Framley. Not until, when she was eating her pistachio ice, he said to her:
“Why don’t you and me get engaged, Yvette? I’m absolutely sure it’s the right thing for us both.”
Leo was a bit common, but good-natured, and well-off. Yvette quite liked him. But engaged! How perfectly silly! She felt like offering him a set of her silk underwear, to get engaged to.
“But I thought it was Ella!” she said, in wonder.
“Well! It might ha’ been, but for you. It’s your doings, you know! Ever since those gipsies told your fortune, I felt it was me or nobody, for you, and you or nobody, for me.”
“Really!” said Yvette, simply lost in amazement. “Really!”
“Didn’t you feel a bit the same?” he asked.
“Really!” Yvette kept on gasping softly, like a fish.
“You felt a bit the same, didn’t you?” he said.
“What? About what?” she asked, coming to.
“About me, as I feel about you.”
“Why? What? Getting engaged, you mean? I? no! Why how COULD I? I could never have dreamed of such an impossible thing.”
She spoke with her usual heedless candour, utterly unoccupied with his feelings.
“What was to prevent you?” he said, a bit nettled. “I thought you did.”
“Did you REALLY NOW?” she breathed in amazement, with that soft, virgin, heedless candour which made her her admirers and her enemies.
She was so completely amazed, there was nothing for him to do but twiddle his thumbs in annoyance.
The music began, and he looked at her.
“No! I won’t dance any more,” she said, drawing herself up and gazing away rather loftily over the assembly, as if he did not exist. There was a touch of puzzled wonder on her brow, and her soft, dim virgin face did indeed suggest the snowdrop of her father’s pathetic imagery.
“But of course YOU will dance,” she said, turning to him with young condescension. “Do ask somebody to have this with you.”
He rose, angry, and went down the room.
She remained soft and remote in her amazement. Expect Leo to propose to her! She might as well have expected old Rover the Newfoundland dog to propose to her. Get engaged, to any man on earth? No, good heavens, nothing more ridiculous could be imagined!
It was then, in a fleeting side-thought, that she realised that the gipsy existed. Instantly, she was indignant. Him, of all things! Him! Never!
“Now why?” she asked herself, again in hushed amazement. “Why? It’s ABSOLUTELY impossible: absolutely! So why is it?”
This was a nut to crack. She looked at the young men dancing, elbows out, hips prominent, waists elegantly in. They gave her no clue to her problem. Yet she did particularly dislike the forced elegance of the waists and the prominent hips, over which the well-tailored coats hung with such effeminate discretion.
“There is something about me which they don’t see and never would see,” she said angrily to herself. And at the same time, she was relieved that they didn’t and couldn’t. It made life so very much simpler.
And again, since she was one of the people who are conscious in visual images, she saw the dark-green jersey rolled on the black trousers of the gipsy, his fine, quick hips, alert as eyes. They were elegant. The elegance of these dancers seemed so stuffed, hips merely wadded with flesh. Leo the same, thinking himself such a fine dancer! and a fine figure of a fellow!
Then she saw the gipsy’s face; the straight nose, the slender mobile lips, and the level, significant stare of the black eyes, which seemed to shoot her in some vital, undiscovered place, unerring.
She drew herself up angrily. How dared he look at her like that! So she gazed glaringly at the insipid beaux on the dancing floor. And she despised them. Just as the raggle-taggle gipsy women despise men who are not gipsies, despise their dog-like walk down the streets, she found herself despising this crowd. Where among them was the subtle, lonely, insinuating challenge that could reach her?
She did not want to mate with a house-dog.
Her sensitive nose turned up, her soft brown hair fell like a soft sheath round her tender, flowerlike face, as she sat musing. She seemed so virginal. At the same time, there was a touch of the tall young virgin WITCH about her, that made the house-dog men shy off. She might metamorphose into something uncanny before you knew where you were.
This made her lonely, in spite of all the courting. Perhaps the courting only made her lonelier.
Leo, who was a sort of mastiff among the house-dogs, returned after his dance, with fresh cheery-O! courage.
“You’ve had a little think about it, haven’t you?” he said, sitting down beside her: a comfortable, well-nourished, determined sort of fellow. She did not know why it irritated her so unreasonably, when he hitched up his trousers at the knee, over his good-sized but not very distinguished legs, and lowered himself assuredly on to a chair.
“Have I?” she said vaguely. “About what?”
“You know what about,” he said. “Did you make up your mind?”
“Make up my mind about what?” she asked, innocently.
In her upper consciousness, she truly had forgotten.
“Oh!” said Leo, settling his trousers again. “About me and you getting engaged, you know.” He was almost as off-hand as she.
“Oh that’s ABSOLUTELY impossible,” she said, with mild amiability, as if it were some stray question among the rest. “Why, I never even thought of it again. Oh, don’t talk about that sort of nonsense! That sort of thing is ABSOLUTELY impossible,” she re-iterated like a child.
“That sort of thing is, is it?” he said, with an odd smile at her calm, distant assertion. “Well what sort of thing is possible, then? You don’t want to die an old maid, do you?”
“Oh I don’t mind,” she said absently.
“I do,” he said.
She turned round and looked at him in wonder.
“Why?” she said. “Why should you mind if I was an old maid?”
“Every reason in the world,” he said, looking up at her with a bold, meaningful smile, that wanted to make its meaning blatant, if not patent.
But instead of penetrating into some deep, secret place, and shooting her there, Leo’s bold and patent smile only hit her on the outside of the body, like a tennis ball, and caused the same kind of sudden irritated reaction.
“I think this sort of thing is awfully silly,” she said, with minx-like spite. “Why, you’re practically engaged to — to —” she pulled herself up in time —“probably half a dozen other girls. I’m not flattered by what you’ve said. I should hate it if anybody knew! — Hate it! — I shan’t breathe a word of it, and I hope you’ll have the sense not to. — There’s Ella!”
And keeping her face averted from him, she sailed away like a tall, soft flower, to join poor Ella Framley.
Leo flapped his white gloves.
“Catty little bitch!” he said to himself. But he was of the mastiff type, he rather liked the kitten to fly in his face. He began definitely to single her out.
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