Thursday, the half-holiday, came with a hard frost, and sun. Leo arrived with his car, the usual bunch. Yvette disagreeably and unaccountably refused to go.
“No thanks, I don’t feel like it,” she said.
She rather enjoyed being Mary-Mary-quite-contrary.
Then she went for a walk by herself, up the frozen hills, to the Black Rocks.
The next day also came sunny and frosty. It was February, but in the north country the ground did not thaw in the sun. Yvette announced that she was going for a ride on her bicycle, and taking her lunch, as she might not be back till afternoon.
She set off, not hurrying. In spite of the frost, the sun had a touch of spring. In the park, the deer were standing in the distance, in the sunlight, to be warm. One doe, white spotted, walked slowly across the motionless landscape.
Cycling, Yvette found it difficult to keep her hands warm, even when bodily she was quite hot. Only when she had to walk up the long hill, to the top, and there was no wind.
The upland was very bare and clear, like another world. She had climbed on to another level. She cycled slowly, a little afraid of taking the wrong lane, in the vast maze of stone fences. As she passed along the lane she thought was the right one, she heard a faint tapping noise, with a slight metallic resonance.
The gipsy man was seated on the ground with his back to the cart-shaft, hammering a copper bowl. He was in the sun, bare-headed, but wearing his green jersey. Three small children were moving quietly round, playing in the horse’s shelter: the horse and cart were gone. An old woman, bent, with a kerchief round her head, was cooking over a fire of sticks. The only sound was the rapid, ringing tap-tap-tap of the small hammer on the dull copper.
The man looked up at once, as Yvette stepped from her bicycle, but he did not move, though he ceased hammering. A delicate, barely discernible smile of triumph was on his face. The old woman looked round, keenly, from under her dirty grey hair. The man spoke a half-audible word to her, and she turned again to her fire. He looked up at Yvette.
“How are you all getting on?” she asked politely.
“All right, eh! You sit down a minute?” He turned as he sat, and pulled a stool from under the caravan for Yvette. Then, as she wheeled her bicycle to the side of the quarry, he started hammering again, with that bird-like, rapid light stroke.
Yvette went to the fire to warm her hands.
“Is this the dinner cooking?” she asked childishly, of the old gipsy, as she spread her long, tender hands, mottled red with the cold, to the embers.
“Dinner, yes!” said the old woman. “For him! And for the children.”
She pointed with the long fork at the three black-eyed, staring children, who were staring at her from under their black fringes. But they were clean. Only the old woman was not clean. The quarry itself they had kept perfectly clean.
Yvette crouched in silence, warming her hands. The man rapidly hammered away with intervals of silence. The old hag slowly climbed the steps to the third, oldest caravan. The children began to play again, like little wild animals, quiet and busy.
“Are they your children?” asked Yvette, rising from the fire and turning to the man.
He looked her in the eyes, and nodded.
“But where’s your wife?”
“She’s gone out with the basket. They’re all gone out, cart and all, selling things. I don’t go selling things. I make them, but I don’t go selling them. Not often. I don’t often.”
“You make all the copper and brass things?” she said.
He nodded, and again offered her the stool. She sat down.
“You said you’d be here on Fridays,” she said. “So I came this way, as it was so fine.”
“Very fine day!” said the gipsy, looking at her cheek, that was still a bit blanched by the cold, and the soft hair over her reddened ear, and the long, still mottled hands on her knee.
“You get cold, riding a bicycle?” he asked.
“My hands!” she said, clasping them nervously.
“You didn’t wear gloves?”
“I did, but they weren’t much good.”
“Cold comes through,” he said.
“Yes!” she replied.
The old woman came slowly, grotesquely down the steps of the caravan, with some enamel plates.
“The dinner cooked, eh?” he called softly.
The old woman muttered something, as she spread the plates near the fire. Two pots hung from a long iron horizontal-bar, over the embers of the fire. A little pan seethed on a small iron tripod. In the sunshine, heat and vapour wavered together.
He put down his tools and the pot, and rose from the ground.
“You eat something along of us?” he asked Yvette, not looking at her.
“Oh, I brought my lunch,” said Yvette.
“You eat some stew?” he said. And again he called quietly, secretly to the old woman, who muttered in answer, as she slid the iron pot towards the end of the bar.
“Some beans, and some mutton in it,” he said.
“Oh thanks awfully!” said Yvette. Then suddenly taking courage, added: “Well yes, just a very little, if I may.”
She went across to untie her lunch from her bicycle, and he went up the steps to his own caravan. After a minute, he emerged, wiping his hands on a towel.
“You want to come up and wash your hands?” he said.
“No, I think not,” she said. “They are clean.”
He threw away his wash-water, and set off down the road with a high brass jug, to fetch clean water from the spring that trickled into a small pool, taking a cup to dip it with.
When he returned, he set the jug and the cup by the fire, and fetched himself a short log, to sit on. The children sat on the floor, by the fire, in a cluster, eating beans and bits of meat with spoon or fingers. The man on the log ate in silence, absorbedly. The woman made coffee in the black pot on the tripod, hobbling upstairs for the cups. There was silence in the camp. Yvette sat on her stool, having taken off her hat and shaken her hair in the sun.
“How many children have you?” Yvette asked suddenly.
“Say five,” he replied slowly, as he looked up into her eyes.
And again the bird of her heart sank down and seemed to die. Vaguely, as in a dream, she received from him the cup of coffee. She was aware only of his silent figure, sitting like a shadow there on the log, with an enamel cup in his hand, drinking his coffee in silence. Her will had departed from her limbs, he had power over her: his shadow was on her.
And he, as he blew his hot coffee, was aware of one thing only, the mysterious fruit of her virginity, her perfect tenderness in the body.
At length he put down his coffee-cup by the fire, then looked round at her. Her hair fell across her face, as she tried to sip from the hot cup. On her face was that tender look of sleep, which a nodding flower has when it is full out, like a mysterious early flower, she was full out, like a snowdrop which spreads its three white wings in a flight into the waking sleep of its brief blossoming. The waking sleep of her full-opened virginity, entranced like a snowdrop in the sunshine, was upon her.
The gipsy, supremely aware of her, waited for her like the substance of shadow, as shadow waits and is there.
At length his voice said, without breaking the spell:
“You want to go in my caravan, now, and wash your hands?”
The childlike, sleep-waking eyes of her moment of perfect virginity looked into his, unseeing. She was only aware of the dark, strange effluence of him bathing her limbs, washing her at last purely will-less. She was aware of HIM, as a dark, complete power.
“I think I might,” she said.
He rose silently, then turned to speak, in a low command, to the old woman. And then again he looked at Yvette, and putting his power over her, so that she had no burden of herself, or of action.
“Come!” he said.
She followed simply, followed the silent, secret, overpowering motion of his body in front of her. It cost her nothing. She was gone in his will.
He was at the top of the steps, and she at the foot, when she became aware of an intruding sound. She stood still, at the foot of the steps. A motor-car was coming. He stood at the top of the steps, looking round strangely. The old woman harshly called something, as with rapidly increasing sound, a car rushed near. It was passing.
Then they heard the cry of a woman’s voice, and the brakes on the car. It had pulled up, just beyond the quarry.
The gipsy came down the steps, having closed the door of the caravan.
“You want to put your hat on,” he said to her.
Obediently she went to the stool by the fire, and took up her hat. He sat down by the cart-wheel, darkly, and took up his tools. The rapid tap-tap-tap of his hammer, rapid and angry now like the sound of a tiny machine-gun, broke out just as the voice of the woman was heard crying:
“May we warm our hands at the camp fire?”
She advanced, dressed in a sleek but bulky coat of sable fur. A man followed, in a blue great-coat; pulling off his fur gloves and pulling out a pipe.
“It looked so tempting,” said the woman in the coat of many dead little animals, smiling a broad, half-condescending, half-hesitant simper, around the company.
No one said a word.
She advanced to the fire, shuddering a little inside her coat, with the cold. They had been driving in an open car.
She was a very small woman, with a rather large nose: probably a Jewess. Tiny almost as a child, in that sable coat she looked much more bulky than she should, and her wide, rather resentful brown eyes of a spoilt Jewess gazed oddly out of her expensive get-up.
She crouched over the low fire, spreading her little hands, on which diamonds and emeralds glittered.
“Ugh!” she shuddered. “Of course we ought not to have come in an open car! But my husband won’t even let me say I’m cold!” She looked round at him with her large, childish, reproachful eyes, that had still the canny shrewdness of a bourgeois Jewess: a rich one, probably.
Apparently she was in love, in a Jewess’s curious way, with the big, blond man. He looked back at her with his abstracted blue eyes, that seemed to have no lashes, and a small smile creased his smooth, curiously naked cheeks. The smile didn’t mean anything at all.
He was a man one connects instantly with winter sports, skiing and skating. Athletic, unconnected with life, he slowly filled his pipe, pressing in the tobacco with long, powerful reddened finger.
The Jewess looked at him to see if she got any response from him. Nothing at all, but that odd, blank smile. She turned again to the fire, tilting her eyebrows and looking at her small, white, spread hands.
He slipped off his heavily lined coat, and appeared in one of the handsome, sharp-patterned knitted jerseys, in yellow and grey and black, over well-cut trousers, rather wide. Yes, they were both expensive! And he had a magnificent figure, an athletic, prominent chest. Like an experienced camper, he began building the fire together, quietly: like a soldier on campaign.
“D’you think they’d mind if we put some fir-cones on, to make a blaze?” he asked of Yvette, with a silent glance at the hammering gipsy.
“Love it, I should think,” said Yvette, in a daze, as the spell of the gipsy slowly left her, feeling stranded and blank.
The man went to the car, and returned with a little sack of cones, from which he drew a handful.
“Mind if we make a blaze?” he called to the gipsy.
“Eh?”
“Mind if we make a blaze with a few cones?”
“You go ahead!” said the gipsy.
The man began placing the cones lightly, carefully on the red embers. And soon, one by one, they caught fire, and burned like roses of flame, with a sweet scent.
“Ah lovely! lovely!” cried the little Jewess, looking up at her man again. He looked down at her quite kindly, like the sun on ice. “Don’t you love fire! Oh, I love it!” the little Jewess cried to Yvette, across the hammering.
The hammering annoyed her. She looked round with a slight frown on her fine little brows, as if she would bid the man stop. Yvette looked round too. The gipsy was bent over his copper bowl, legs apart, head down, lithe arm lifted. Already he seemed so far from her.
The man who accompanied the little Jewess strolled over to the gipsy, and stood in silence looking down on him, holding his pipe to his mouth. Now they were two men, like two strange male dogs, having to sniff one another.
“We’re on our honeymoon,” said the little Jewess, with an arch, resentful look at Yvette. She spoke in a rather high, defiant voice, like some bird, a jay, or a crook, calling.
“Are you really?” said Yvette.
“Yes! Before we’re married! Have you heard of Simon Fawcett?”— she named a wealthy and well-known engineer of the north country. “Well, I’m Mrs. Fawcett, and he’s just divorcing me!” She looked at Yvette with curious defiance and wistfulness.
“Are you really!” said Yvette.
She understood now the look of resentment and defiance in the little Jewess’ big, childlike brown eyes. She was an honest little thing, but perhaps her honesty was TOO rational. Perhaps it partly explained the notorious unscrupulousness of the well-known Simon Fawcett.
“Yes! As soon as we get the divorce, I’m going to marry Major Eastwood.”
Her cards were now all on the table. She was not going to deceive anybody.
Behind her, the two men were talking briefly. She glanced round, and fixed the gipsy with her big brown eyes.
He was looking up, as if shyly, at the big fellow in the sparkling jersey, who was standing pipe in mouth, man to man, looking down.
“With the horses back of Arras,” said the gipsy, in a low voice.
They were talking war. The gipsy had served with the artillery teams, in the Major’s own regiment.
“Ein sch?ner Mensch!” said the Jewess. “A handsome man, eh?”
For her, too, the gipsy was one of the common men, the Tommies.
“Quite handsome!” said Yvette.
“You are cycling?” asked the Jewess in a tone of surprise.
“Yes! Down to Papplewick. My father is rector of Papplewick: Mr. Saywell!”
“Oh!” said the Jewess. “I know! A clever writer! Very clever! I have read him.”
The fir-cones were all consumed already, the fire was a tall pile now of crumbling, shattering fire-roses. The sky was clouding over for afternoon. Perhaps towards evening it would snow.
The Major came back, and slung himself into his coat.
“I thought I remembered his face,” he said. “One of our grooms, A.1. man with horses.”
“Look!” cried the Jewess to Yvette. “Why don’t you let us motor you down to Normanton. We live in Scoresby. We can tie the bicycle on behind.”
“I think I will, “said Yvette.
“Come!” called the Jewess to the peeping children, as the blond man wheeled away the bicycle. “Come! Come here!” and taking out her little purse, she held out a shilling.
“Come!” she cried. “Come and take it!”
The gipsy had laid down his work, and gone into his caravan. The old woman called hoarsely to the children, from the enclosure. The two elder children came stealing forward. The Jewess gave them the two bits of silver, a shilling and a florin, which she had in her purse, and again the hoarse voice of the unseen old woman was heard.
The gipsy descended from his caravan and strolled to the fire. The Jewess searched his face with the peculiar bourgeois boldness of her race.
“You were in the war, in Major Eastwood’s regiment!” she said.
“Yes, lady!”
“Imagine you both being here now! — It’s going to snow —” she looked up at the sky.
“Later on,” said the man, looking at the sky.
He too had gone inaccessible. His race was very old, in its peculiar battle with established society, and had no conception of winning. Only now and then it could score.
But since the war, even the old sporting chance of scoring now and then, was pretty well quenched. There was no question of yielding. The gipsy’s eyes still had their bold look: but it was hardened and directed far away, the touch of insolent intimacy was gone. He had been through the war.
He looked at Yvette.
“You’re going back in the motor-car?” he said.
“Yes!” she replied, with a rather mincing mannerism. “The weather is so treacherous!”
“Treacherous weather!” he repeated, looking at the sky.
She could not tell in the least what his feelings were. In truth, she wasn’t very much interested. She was rather fascinated, now, by the little Jewess, mother of two children, who was taking her wealth away from the well-known engineer and transferring it to the penniless, sporting young Major Eastwood, who must be five or six years younger than she. Rather intriguing!
The blond man returned.
“A cigarette, Charles!” cried the little Jewess, plaintively.
He took out his case, slowly, with his slow, athletic movement. Something sensitive in him made him slow, cautious, as if he had hurt himself against people. He gave a cigarette to his wife, then one to Yvette, then offered the case, quite simply, to the gipsy. The gipsy took one.
“Thank you sir!”
And he went quietly to the fire, and stooping, lit it at the red embers. Both women watched him.
“Well goodbye!” said the Jewess, with her odd bourgeois free-masonry. “Thank you for the warm fire.”
“Fire is everybody’s,” said the gipsy.
The young child came toddling to him.
“Goodbye!” said Yvette. “I hope it won’t snow for you.”
“We don’t mind a bit of snow,” said the gipsy.
“Don’t you?” said Yvette. “I should have thought you would!”
“No!” said the gipsy.
She flung her scarf royally over her shoulder, and followed the fur coat of the Jewess, which seemed to walk on little legs of its own.
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