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BETWEEN THE ACTS |
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They had met first in Scotland, fishing—she from one rock, he from another. Her line had got tangled; she had given over, and had watched him with the stream rushing between his legs, casting, casting—until, like a thick ingot of silver bent in the middle, the salmon had leapt, had been caught, and she had loved him. Bartholomew too loved him; and noted his anger—about what? But he remembered his guest. The family was not a family in the presence of strangers. He must, rather laboriously, tell them the story of the pictures at which the unknown guest had been looking when Giles came in. “That,” he indicated the man with a horse, “was my ancestor. He had a dog. The dog was famous. The dog has his place in history. He left it on record that he wished his dog to be buried with him.” They looked at the picture. “I always feel,” Lucy broke the silence, “he’s saying: ‘Paint my dog.’” “But what about the horse?” said Mrs. Manresa. “The horse,” said Bartholomew, putting on his glasses. He looked at the horse. The hindquarters were not satisfactory. But William Dodge was still looking at the lady. “Ah,” said Bartholomew who had bought that picture because he liked that picture, “you’re an artist.” Dodge denied it, for the second time in half an hour, or so Isa noted. What for did a good sort like the woman Manresa bring these half-breeds in her trail? Giles asked himself. And his silence made its contribution to talk—Dodge that is, shook his head. “I like that picture.” That was all he could bring himself to say. “And you’re right,” said Bartholomew. “A man—I forget his name—a man connected with some Institute, a man who goes about giving advice, gratis, to descendants like ourselves, degenerate descendants, said . . . said . . .” He paused. They all looked at the lady. But she looked over their heads, looking at nothing. She led them down green glades into the heart of silence. “Said it was by Sir Joshua?” Mrs. Manresa broke the silence abruptly. “No, no,” William Dodge said hastily, but under his breath. “Why’s he afraid?” Isabella asked herself. A poor specimen he was; afraid to stick up for his own beliefs—just as she was afraid, of her husband. Didn’t she write her poetry in a book bound like an account book lest Giles might suspect? She looked at Giles. He had finished his fish; he had eaten quickly, not to keep them waiting. Now there was cherry tart. Mrs. Manresa was counting the stones. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy . . . that’s me!” she cried, delighted to have it confirmed by the cherry stones that she was a wild child of nature. “You believe,” said the old gentleman, courteously chaffing her, “in that too?” “Of course, of course I do!” she cried. Now she was on the rails again. Now she was a thorough good sort again. And they too were delighted; now they could follow in her wake and leave the silver and dun shades that led to the heart of silence. “I had a father,” said Dodge beneath his breath to Isa who sat next him, “who loved pictures.” “Oh, I too!” she exclaimed. Flurriedly, disconnectedly, she explained. She used to stay when she was a child, when she had the whooping cough, with an uncle, a clergyman; who wore a skull cap; and never did anything; didn’t even preach; but made up poems, walking in his garden, saying them aloud. “People thought him mad,” she said. “I didn’t. . . .” She stopped. “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy. . . . It appears,” said old Bartholomew, laying down his spoon, “that I am a thief. Shall we take our coffee in the garden?” He rose. Isa dragged her chair across the gravel, muttering: “To what dark antre of the unvisited earth, or wind-brushed forest, shall we go now? Or spin from star to star and dance in the maze of the moon? Or. . . .” She held her deck chair at the wrong angle. The frame with the notches was upside down. “Songs my uncle taught me?” said William Dodge, hearing her mutter. He unfolded the chair and fixed the bar into the right notch. She flushed, as if she had spoken in an empty room and someone had stepped out from behind a curtain. “Don’t you, if you’re doing something with your hands, talk nonsense?” she stumbled. But what did he do with his hands, the white, the fine, the shapely? Giles went back to the house and brought more chairs and placed them in a semi-circle, so that the view might be shared, and the shelter of the old wall. For by some lucky chance a wall had been built continuing the house, it might be with the intention of adding another wing, on the raised ground in the sun. But funds were lacking; the plan was abandoned, and the wall remained, nothing but a wall. Later, another generation had planted fruit trees, which in time had spread their arms widely across the red orange weathered brick. Mrs. Sands called it a good year if she could make six pots of apricot jam from them—the fruit was never sweet enough for dessert. Perhaps three apricots were worth enclosing in muslin bags. But they were so beautiful, naked, with one flushed cheek, one green, that Mrs. Swithin left them naked, and the wasps burrowed holes. The ground sloped up, so that to quote Figgis’s Guide Book (1833), “it commanded a fine view of the surrounding country. . . . The spire of Bolney Minster, Rough Norton woods, and on an eminence rather to the left, Hogben’s Folly, so called because. . . .” The Guide Book still told the truth. 1833 was true in 1939. No house had been built; no town had sprung up. Hogben’s Folly was still eminent; the very flat, field-parcelled land had changed only in this—the tractor had to some extent superseded the plough. The horse had gone; but the cow remained. If Figgis were here now, Figgis would have said the same. So they always said when in summer they sat there to drink coffee, if they had guests. When they were alone, they said nothing. They looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same. “That’s what makes a view so sad,” said Mrs. Swithin, lowering herself into the deck-chair which Giles had brought her. “And so beautiful. It’ll be there,” she nodded at the strip of gauze laid upon the distant fields, “when we’re not.” Giles nicked his chair into position with a jerk. Thus only could he show his irritation, his rage with old fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole of Europe—over there—was bristling like. . . . He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly. He, too, loved the view. And blamed Aunt Lucy, looking at views, instead of—doing what? What she had done was to marry a squire now dead; she had borne two children, one in Canada, the other, married, in Birmingham. His father, whom he loved, he exempted from censure; as for himself, one thing followed another; and so he sat, with old fogies, looking at views. “Beautiful,” said Mrs. Manresa, “beautiful . . .” she mumbled. She was lighting a cigarette. The breeze blew out her match. Giles hollowed his hand and lit another. She too was exempted—why, he could not say. “Since you’re interested in pictures,” said Bartholomew, turning to the silent guest, “why, tell me, are we, as a race, so incurious, irresponsive and insensitive”—the champagne had given him a flow of unusual three-decker words—“to that noble art, whereas, Mrs. Manresa, if she’ll allow me my old man’s liberty, has her Shakespeare by heart?” “Shakespeare by heart!” Mrs. Manresa protested. She struck an attitude. “To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler . . . Go on!” she nudged Giles, who sat next her. “Fade far away and quite forget what thou amongst the leaves hast never known . . .” Isa supplied the first words that came into her head by way of helping her husband out of his difficulty. “The weariness, the torture, and the fret . . .” William Dodge added, burying the end of his cigarette in a grave between two stones. “There!” Bartholomew exclaimed, cocking his forefinger aloft. “That proves it! What springs touched, what secret drawer displays its treasures, if I say”—he raised more fingers—“Reynolds! Constable! Crome!” “Why called ‘Old’?” Mrs. Manresa thrust in. “We haven’t the words—we haven’t the words,” Mrs. Swithin protested. “Behind the eyes; not on the lips; that’s all.” “Thoughts without words,” her brother mused. “Can that be?” “Quite beyond me!” cried Mrs. Manresa, shaking her head. “Much too clever! May I help myself? I know it’s wrong. But I’ve reached the age—and the figure—when I do what I like.” She took the little silver cream jug and let the smooth fluid curl luxuriously into her coffee, to which she added a shovel full of brown sugar candy. Sensuously, rhythmically, she stirred the mixture round and round. “Take what you like! Help yourself!” Bartholomew exclaimed. He felt the champagne withdrawing and hastened, before the last trace of geniality was withdrawn, to make the most of it, as if he cast one last look into a lit-up chamber before going to bed. The wild child, afloat once more on the tide of the old man’s benignity, looked over her coffee cup at Giles, with whom she felt in conspiracy. A thread united them—visible, invisible, like those threads, now seen, now not, that unite trembling grass blades in autumn before the sun rises. She had met him once only, at a cricket match. And then had been spun between them an early morning thread before the twigs and leaves of real friendship emerge. She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. Why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation. Bartholomew felt it; Giles felt it. Had he been a horse, the thin brown skin would have twitched, as if a fly had settled. Isabella twitched too. Jealousy, anger pierced her skin. “And now,” said Mrs. Manresa, putting down her cup, “about this entertainment—this pageant, into which we’ve gone and butted”—she made it, too, seem ripe like the apricot into which the wasps were burrowing—“Tell me, what’s it to be?” She turned. “Don’t I hear?” She listened. She heard laughter, down among the bushes, where the terrace dipped to the bushes. Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground, bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady; sun-flecked in summer, dark and damp in winter. In the summer there were always butterflies; fritillaries darting through; Red Admirals feasting and floating; cabbage whites, unambitiously fluttering round a bush, like muslin milkmaids, content to spend a life there. Butterfly catching, for generation after generation, began there; for Bartholomew and Lucy; for Giles; for George it had began only the day before yesterday, when, in his little green net, he had caught a cabbage white. It was the very place for a dressing-room, just as, obviously, the terrace was the very place for a play. “The very place!” Miss La Trobe had exclaimed the first time she came to call and was shown the grounds. It was a winter’s day. The trees were leafless then. “That’s the place for a pageant, Mr. Oliver!” she had exclaimed. “Winding in and out between the trees. . . .” She waved her hand at the trees standing bare in the clear light of January. “There the stage; here the audience; and down there among the bushes a perfect dressing-room for the actors.” She was always all agog to get things up. But where did she spring from? With that name she wasn’t presumably pure English. From the Channel Islands perhaps? Only her eyes and something about her always made Mrs. Bingham suspect that she had Russian blood in her. “Those deep-set eyes; that very square jaw” reminded her—not that she had been to Russia—of the Tartars. Rumour said that she had kept a tea shop at Winchester; that had failed. She had been an actress. That had failed. She had bought a four-roomed cottage and shared it with an actress. They had quarrelled. Very little was actually known about her. Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language—perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up. The laughter died away. “Are they going to act?” Mrs. Manresa asked. “Act; dance; sing; a little bit of everything,” said Giles. “Miss La Trobe is a lady of wonderful energy,” said Mrs. Swithin. “She makes everyone do something,” said Isabella. “Our part,” said Bartholomew, “is to be the audience. And a very important part too.” “Also, we provide the tea,” said Mrs. Swithin. “Shan’t we go and help?” said Mrs. Manresa. “Cut up bread and butter?” “No, no,” said Mr. Oliver. “We are the audience.” “One year we had Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” said Mrs. Swithin. “One year we wrote the play ourselves. The son of our blacksmith—Tony? Tommy?—had the loveliest voice. And Elsie at the Crossways—how she mimicked! Took us all off. Bart; Giles; Old Flimsy—that’s me. People are gifted—very. The question is—how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever—Miss La Trobe. Of course, there’s the whole of English literature to choose from. But how can one choose? Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read; what I haven’t read.” “And leaving books on the floor,” said her brother. “Like the pig in the story; or was it a donkey?” She laughed, tapping him lightly on the knee. “The donkey who couldn’t choose between hay and turnips and so starved,” Isabella explained, interposing—anything—between her aunt and her husband, who hated this kind of talk this afternoon. Books open; no conclusion come to; and he sitting in the audience. “We remain seated”—“We are the audience.” Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. They rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you. This afternoon he wasn’t Giles Oliver come to see the villagers act their annual pageant; manacled to a rock he was, and forced passively to behold indescribable horror. His face showed it; and Isa, not knowing what to say, abruptly, half purposely, knocked over a coffee cup. William Dodge caught it as it fell. He held it for a moment. He turned it. From the faint blue mark, as of crossed daggers, in the glaze at the bottom he knew that it was English, made perhaps at Nottingham; date about 1760. His expression, considering the daggers, coming to this conclusion, gave Giles another peg on which to hang his rage as one hangs a coat on a peg, conveniently. A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman—his head was close to Isa’s head—but simply a —— At this word, which he could not speak in public, he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair. “Oh what fun!” cried Mrs. Manresa in her fluty voice. “A little bit of everything. A song; a dance; then a play acted by the villagers themselves. Only,” here she turned with her head on one side to Isabella, “I’m sure SHE’S written it. Haven’t you, Mrs. Giles?” Isa flushed and denied it. “For myself,” Mrs. Manresa continued, “speaking plainly, I can’t put two words together. I don’t know how it is—such a chatterbox as I am with my tongue, once I hold a pen—” She made a face, screwed her fingers as if she held a pen in them. But the pen she held thus on the little table absolutely refused to move. “And my handwriting—so huge—so clumsy—” She made another face and dropped the invisible pen. Very delicately William Dodge set the cup in its saucer. “Now HE,” said Mrs. Manresa, as if referring to the delicacy with which he did this, and imputing to him the same skill in writing, “writes beautifully. Every letter perfectly formed.” Again they all looked at him. Instantly he put his hands in his pockets. Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear. She started. Again, sounds of laughter reached her. “I think I hear them,” she said. “They’re getting ready. They’re dressing up in the bushes.” Miss La Trobe was pacing to and fro between the leaning birch trees. One hand was deep stuck in her jacket pocket; the other held a foolscap sheet. She was reading what was written there. She had the look of a commander pacing his deck. The leaning graceful trees with black bracelets circling the silver bark were distant about a ship’s length. Wet would it be, or fine? Out came the sun; and, shading her eyes in the attitude proper to an Admiral on his quarter-deck, she decided to risk the engagement out of doors. Doubts were over. All stage properties, she commanded, must be moved from the Barn to the bushes. It was done. And the actors, while she paced, taking all responsibility and plumping for fine, not wet, dressed among the brambles. Hence the laughter. The clothes were strewn on the grass. Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that were sixpenny dish cloths, lay on the grass or were flung on the bushes. There were pools of red and purple in the shade; flashes of silver in the sun. The dresses attracted the butterflies. Red and silver, blue and yellow gave off warmth and sweetness. Red Admirals gluttonously absorbed richness from dish cloths, cabbage whites drank icy coolness from silver paper. Flitting, tasting, returning, they sampled the colours. Miss La Trobe stopped her pacing and surveyed the scene. “It has the makings . . .” she murmured. For another play always lay behind the play she had just written. Shading her eyes, she looked. The butterflies circling; the light changing; the children leaping; the mothers laughing— “No, I don’t get it,” she muttered and resumed her pacing. “Bossy” they called her privately, just as they called Mrs. Swithin “Flimsy.” Her abrupt manner and stocky figure; her thick ankles and sturdy shoes; her rapid decisions barked out in guttural accents—all this “got their goat.” No one liked to be ordered about singly. But in little troops they appealed to her. Someone must lead. Then too they could put the blame on her. Suppose it poured? “Miss La Trobe!” they hailed her now. “What’s the idea about this?” She stopped. David and Iris each had a hand on the gramophone. It must be hidden; yet must be close enough to the audience to be heard. Well, hadn’t she given orders? Where were the hurdles covered in leaves? Fetch them. Mr. Streatfield had said he would see to it. Where was Mr. Streatfield? No clergyman was visible. Perhaps he’s in the Barn? “Tommy, cut along and fetch him.” “Tommy’s wanted in the first scene.” “Beryl then . . .” The mothers disputed. One child had been chosen; another not. Fair hair was unjustly preferred to dark. Mrs. Ebury had forbidden Fanny to act because of the nettle-rash. There was another name in the village for nettle-rash. Mrs. Ball’s cottage was not what you might call clean. In the last war Mrs. Ball lived with another man while her husband was in the trenches. All this Miss La Trobe knew, but refused to be mixed up in it. She splashed into the fine mesh like a great stone into the lily pool. The criss-cross was shattered. Only the roots beneath water were of use to her. Vanity, for example, made them all malleable. The boys wanted the big parts; the girls wanted the fine clothes. Expenses had to be kept down. Ten pounds was the limit. Thus conventions were outraged. Swathed in conventions, they couldn’t see, as she could, that a dish cloth wound round a head in the open looked much richer than real silk. So they squabbled; but she kept out of it. Waiting for Mr. Streatfield, she paced between the birch trees. The other trees were magnificently straight. They were not too regular; but regular enough to suggest columns in a church; in a church without a roof; in an open-air cathedral, a place where swallows darting seemed, by the regularity of the trees, to make a pattern, dancing, like the Russians, only not to music, but to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts. The laughter died away. “We must possess our souls in patience,” said Mrs. Manresa again. “Or could we help?” she suggested, glancing over her shoulder, “with those chairs?” Candish, a gardener, and a maid were all bringing chairs—for the audience. There was nothing for the audience to do. Mrs. Manresa suppressed a yawn. They were silent. They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing, in company. Their minds and bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately to feel or think separately, nor yet to fall asleep. We’re too close; but not close enough. So they fidgeted. The heat had increased. The clouds had vanished. All was sun now. The view laid bare by the sun was flattened, silenced, stilled. The cows were motionless; the brick wall, no longer sheltering, beat back grains of heat. Old Mr. Oliver sighed profoundly. His head jerked; his hand fell. It fell within an inch of the dog’s head on the grass by his side. Then up he jerked it again on to his knee. Giles glared. With his hands bound tight round his knees he stared at the flat fields. Staring, glaring, he sat silent. Isabella felt prisoned. Through the bars of the prison, through the sleep haze that deflected them, blunt arrows bruised her; of love, then of hate. Through other people’s bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt—she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon—a desire for water. “A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water,” she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass. Mrs. Manresa longed to relax and curl in a corner with a cushion, a picture paper, and a bag of sweets. Mrs. Swithin and William surveyed the view aloofly, and with detachment. How tempting, how very tempting, to let the view triumph; to reflect its ripple; to let their own minds ripple; to let outlines elongate and pitch over—so—with a sudden jerk. Mrs. Manresa yielded, pitched, plunged, then pulled herself up. “What a view!” she exclaimed, pretending to dust the ashes of her cigarette, but in truth concealing her yawn. Then she sighed, pretending to express not her own drowsiness, but something connected with what she felt about views. Nobody answered her. The flat fields glared green yellow, blue yellow, red yellow, then blue again. The repetition was senseless, hideous, stupefying. “Then,” said Mrs. Swithin, in a low voice, as if the exact moment for speech had come, as if she had promised, and it was time to fulfil her promise, “come, come and I’ll show you the house.” She addressed no one in particular. But William Dodge knew she meant him. He rose with a jerk, like a toy suddenly pulled straight by a string. “What energy!” Mrs. Manresa half sighed, half yawned. “Have I the courage to go too?” Isabella asked herself. They were going; above all things, she desired cold water, a beaker of cold water; but desire petered out, suppressed by the leaden duty she owed to others. She watched them go—Mrs. Swithin tottering yet tripping; and Dodge unfurled and straightened, as he strode beside her along the blazing tiles under the hot wall, till they reached the shade of the house. A match-box fell—Bartholomew’s. His fingers had loosed it; he had dropped it. He gave up the game; he couldn’t be bothered. With his head on one side, his hand dangling above the dog’s head he slept; he snored. Mrs. Swithin paused for a moment in the hall among the gilt-clawed tables. “This,” she said, “is the staircase. And now—up we go.” She went up, two stairs ahead of her guest. Lengths of yellow satin unfurled themselves on a cracked canvas as they mounted. “Not an ancestress,” said Mrs. Swithin, as they came level with the head in the picture. “But we claim her because we’ve known her—O, ever so many years. Who was she?” she gazed. “Who painted her?” She shook her head. She looked lit up, as if for a banquet, with the sun pouring over her. “But I like her best in the moonlight,” Mrs. Swithin reflected, and mounted more stairs. She panted slightly, going upstairs. Then she ran her hand over the sunk books in the wall on the landing, as if they were pan pipes. “Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of the mind, Mr. . . .” she murmured. She had forgotten his name. Yet she had singled him out. “My brother says, they built the house north for shelter, not south for sun. So they’re damp in the winter.” She paused. “And now what comes next?” She stopped. There was a door. “The morning room.” She opened the door. “Where my mother received her guests.” Two chairs faced each other on either side of a fine fluted mantelpiece. He looked over her shoulder. She shut the door. “Now up, now up again.” Again they mounted. “Up and up they went,” she panted, seeing, it seemed, an invisible procession, “up and up to bed.” “A bishop; a traveller;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget.” She stopped at a window in the passage and held back the curtain. Beneath was the garden, bathed in sun. The grass was sleek and shining. Three white pigeons were flirting and tiptoeing as ornate as ladies in ball dresses. Their elegant bodies swayed as they minced with tiny steps on their little pink feet upon the grass. Suddenly, up they rose in a flutter, circled, and flew away. “Now,” she said, “for the bedrooms.” She tapped twice very distinctly on a door. With her head on one side, she listened. “One never knows,” she murmured, “if there’s somebody there.” Then she flung open the door. He half expected to see somebody there, naked, or half dressed, or knelt in prayer. But the room was empty. The room was tidy as a pin, not slept in for months, a spare room. Candles stood on the dressing-table. The counterpane was straight. Mrs. Swithin stopped by the bed. “Here,” she said, “yes, here,” she tapped the counterpane, “I was born. In this bed.” Her voice died away. She sank down on the edge of the bed. She was tired, no doubt, by the stairs, by the heat. “But we have other lives, I think, I hope,” she murmured. “We live in others, Mr. . . . We live in things.” She spoke simply. She spoke with an effort. She spoke as if she must overcome her tiredness out of charity towards a stranger, a guest. She had forgotten his name. Twice she had said “Mr.” and stopped. The furniture was mid-Victorian, bought at Maples, perhaps, in the forties. The carpet was covered with small purple dots. And a white circle marked the place where the slop pail had stood by the washstand. Could he say “I’m William”? He wished to. Old and frail she had climbed the stairs. She had spoken her thoughts, ignoring, not caring if he thought her, as he had, inconsequent, sentimental, foolish. She had lent him a hand to help him up a steep place. She had guessed his trouble. Sitting on the bed he heard her sing, swinging her little legs, “Come and see my sea weeds, come and see my sea shells, come and see my dicky bird hop upon its perch”—an old child’s nursery rhyme to help a child. Standing by the cupboard in the corner he saw her reflected in the glass. Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass. Then she slipped off the bed. “Now,” she said, “what comes next?” and pattered down the corridor. A door stood open. Everyone was out in the garden. The room was like a ship deserted by its crew. The children had been playing— there was a spotted horse in the middle of the carpet. The nurse had been sewing—there was a piece of linen on the table. The baby had been in the cot. The cot was empty. “The nursery,” said Mrs. Swithin. Words raised themselves and became symbolical. “The cradle of our race,” she seemed to say. Dodge crossed to the fireplace and looked at the Newfoundland Dog in the Christmas Annual that was pinned to the wall. The room smelt warm and sweet; of clothes drying; of milk; of biscuits and warm water. “Good Friends” the picture was called. A rushing sound came in through the open door. He turned. The old woman had wandered out into the passage and leant against the window. He left the door open for the crew to come back to and joined her. Down in the courtyard beneath the window cars were assembling. Their narrow black roofs were laid together like the blocks of a floor. Chauffeurs were jumping down; here old ladies gingerly advanced black legs with silver-buckled shoes; old men striped trousers. Young men in shorts leapt out on one side; girls with skin-coloured legs on the other. There was a purring and a churning of the yellow gravel. The audience was assembling. But they, looking down from the window, were truants, detached. Together they leant half out of the window. And then a breeze blew and all the muslin blinds fluttered out, as if some majestic goddess, rising from her throne among her peers, had tossed her amber-coloured raiment, and the other gods, seeing her rise and go, laughed, and their laughter floated her on. Mrs. Swithin put her hands to her hair, for the breeze had ruffled it. “Mr. . . .” she began. “I’m William,” he interrupted. At that she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile, as if the wind had warmed the wintry blue in her eyes to amber. “I took you,” she apologized, “away from your friends, William, because I felt wound tight here. . . .” She touched her bony forehead upon which a blue vein wriggled like a blue worm. But her eyes in their caves of bone were still lambent. He saw her eyes only. And he wished to kneel before her, to kiss her hand, and to say: “At school they held me under a bucket of dirty water, Mrs. Swithin; when I looked up, the world was dirty, Mrs. Swithin; so I married; but my child’s not my child, Mrs. Swithin. I’m a half-man, Mrs. Swithin; a flickering, mind-divided little snake in the grass, Mrs. Swithin; as Giles saw; but you’ve healed me. . . .” So he wished to say; but said nothing; and the breeze went lolloping along the corridors, blowing the blinds out. Once more he looked and she looked down on to the yellow gravel that made a crescent round the door. Pendant from her chain her cross swung as she leant out and the sun struck it. How could she weight herself down by that sleek symbol? How stamp herself, so volatile, so vagrant, with that image? As he looked at it, they were truants no more. The purring of the wheels became vocal. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” it seemed to say, “or you’ll be late. Hurry, hurry, hurry, or the best seats’ll be taken.” “O,” cried Mrs. Swithin, “there’s Mr. Streatfield!” And they saw a clergyman, a strapping clergyman, carrying a hurdle, a leafy hurdle. He was striding through the cars with the air of a person of authority, who is awaited, expected, and now comes. “Is it time,” said Mrs. Swithin, “to go and join—” She left the sentence unfinished, as if she were of two minds, and they fluttered to right and to left, like pigeons rising from the grass. The audience was assembling. They came streaming along the paths and spreading across the lawn. Some were old; some were in the prime of life. There were children among them. Among them, as Mr. Figgis might have observed, were representatives of our most respected families—the Dyces of Denton; the Wickhams of Owlswick; and so on. Some had been there for centuries, never selling an acre. On the other hand there were new-comers, the Manresas, bringing the old houses up to date, adding bathrooms. And a scatter of odds and ends, like Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, retired, it was understood, on a pension from a tea plantation. Not an asset. He did his own housework and dug in his garden. The building of a car factory and of an aerodrome in the neighbourhood had attracted a number of unattached floating residents. Also there was Mr. Page, the reporter, representing the local paper. Roughly speaking, however, had Figgis been there in person and called a roll call, half the ladies and gentlemen present would have said: “Adsum; I’m here, in place of my grandfather or great-grandfather,” as the case might be. At this very moment, half-past three on a June day in 1939 they greeted each other, and as they took their seats, finding if possible a seat next one another, they said: “That hideous new house at Pyes Corner! What an eyesore! And those bungalows!—have you seen ’em?” Again, had Figgis called the names of the villagers, they too would have answered. Mrs. Sands was born Iliffe; Candish’s mother was one of the Perrys. The green mounds in the churchyard had been cast up by their molings, which for centuries had made the earth friable. True, there were absentees when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call in the church. The motor bike, the motor bus, and the movies—when Mr. Streatfield called his roll call, he laid the blame on them. Rows of chairs, deck chairs, gilt chairs, hired cane chairs, and indigenous garden seats had been drawn up on the terrace. There were plenty of seats for everybody. But some preferred to sit on the ground. Certainly Miss La Trobe had spoken the truth when she said: “The very place for a pageant!” The lawn was as flat as the floor of a theatre. The terrace, rising, made a natural stage. The trees barred the stage like pillars. And the human figure was seen to great advantage against a background of sky. As for the weather, it was turning out, against all expectation, a very fine day. A perfect summer afternoon. “What luck!” Mrs. Carter was saying. “Last year . . .” Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily, others stopped talking guiltily. All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes. While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rosebud in pink, advanced; took her stand on a mat, behind a conch, hung with leaves and piped:
So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?
“She’s England,” they whispered. “It’s begun.” “The prologue,” they added, looking down at the programme. “England am I,” she piped again; and stopped. She had forgotten her lines. “Hear! Hear!” said an old man in a white waistcoat briskly. “Bravo! Bravo!” “Blast ’em!” cursed Miss La Trobe, hidden behind the tree. She looked along the front row. They glared as if they were exposed to a frost that nipped them and fixed them all at the same level. Only Bond the cowman looked fluid and natural. “Music!” she signalled. “Music!” But the machine continued: Chuff, chuff, chuff. “A child new born . . .” she prompted. “A child new born,” Phyllis Jones continued,
She glanced back over her shoulder. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine buzzed. A long line of villagers in shirts made of sacking began passing in and out in single file behind her between the trees. They were singing, but not a word reached the audience. England am I, Phyllis Jones continued, facing the audience,
Her words peppered the audience as with a shower of hard little stones. Mrs. Manresa in the very centre smiled; but she felt as if her skin cracked when she smiled. There was a vast vacancy between her, the singing villagers and the piping child. Chuff, chuff, chuff, went the machine like a corn-cutter on a hot day. The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away.
The words petered away. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Then at last the machine ground out a tune!
The pompous popular tune brayed and blared. Miss La Trobe watched from behind the tree. Muscles loosened; ice cracked. The stout lady in the middle began to beat time with her hand on her chair. Mrs. Manresa was humming:
She was afloat on the stream of the melody. Radiating royalty, complacency, good humour, the wild child was Queen of the festival. The play had begun. But there was an interruption. “O,” Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, “the torture of these interruptions!” “Sorry I’m so late,” said Mrs. Swithin. She pushed her way through the chairs to a seat beside her brother. “What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England? That little girl? Now she’s gone . . .” Phyllis had slipped off her mat. “And who’s this?” asked Mrs. Swithin. It was Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter. She now stood where England had stood. “O, England’s grown . . .” Miss La Trobe prompted her. “O, England’s grown a girl now,” Hilda sang out (“What a lovely voice!” someone exclaimed)
“A cushion? Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Swithin, stuffing the cushion behind her back. Then she leant forward. “That’s England in the time of Chaucer, I take it. She’s been maying, nutting. She has flowers in her hair . . . But those passing behind her—” she pointed. “The Canterbury pilgrims? Look!” All the time the villagers were passing in and out between the trees. They were singing; but only a word or two was audible “. . . wore ruts in the grass . . . built the house in the lane . . .” The wind blew away the connecting words of their chant, and then, as they reached the tree at the end they sang:
They grouped themselves together. Then there was a rustle and an interruption. Chairs were drawn back. Isa looked behind her. Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Haines, detained by a breakdown on the road, had arrived. He was sitting to the right, several rows back, the man in grey. Meanwhile the pilgrims, having done their homage to the tomb, were, it appeared, tossing hay on their rakes,
—that was what they were singing, as they scooped and tossed the invisible hay, when she looked round again. “Scenes from English history,” Mrs. Manresa explained to Mrs. Swithin. She spoke in a loud cheerful voice, as if the old lady were deaf. “Merry England.” She clapped energetically. The singers scampered away into the bushes. The tune stopped. Chuff, chuff, chuff, the machine ticked. Mrs. Manresa looked at her programme. It would take till midnight unless they skipped. Early Briton; Plantagenets; Tudors; Stuarts—she ticked them off, but probably she had forgotten a reign or two. “Ambitious, ain’t it?” she said to Bartholomew, while they waited. Chuff, chuff, chuff went the machine. Could they talk? Could they move? No, for the play was going on. Yet the stage was empty; only the cows moved in the meadows; only the tick of the gramophone needle was heard. The tick, tick, tick seemed to hold them together, tranced. Nothing whatsoever appeared on the stage. “I’d no notion we looked so nice,” Mrs. Swithin whispered to William. Hadn’t she? The children; the pilgrims; behind the pilgrims the trees, and behind them the fields—the beauty of the visible world took his breath away. Tick, tick, tick the machine continued. “Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath. “Which don’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.” “Isn’t that enough?” William asked himself. Beauty—isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgetted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present. Who was she looking for? William, turning, following her eyes, saw only a man in grey. The ticking stopped. A dance tune was put on the machine. In time to it, Isa hummed: “What do I ask? To fly away, from night and day, and issue where—no partings are—but eye meets eye—and . . . O,” she cried aloud: “Look at her!” Everyone was clapping and laughing. From behind the bushes issued Queen Elizabeth—Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco. Could she be Mrs. Clark of the village shop? She was splendidly made up. Her head, pearl-hung, rose from a vast ruff. Shiny satins draped her. Sixpenny brooches glared like cats’ eyes and tigers’ eyes; pearls looked down; her cape was made of cloth of silver—in fact swabs used to scour saucepans. She looked the age in person. And when she mounted the soap box in the centre, representing perhaps a rock in the ocean, her size made her appear gigantic. She could reach a flitch of bacon or haul a tub of oil with one sweep of her arm in the shop. For a moment she stood there, eminent, dominant, on the soap box with the blue and sailing clouds behind her. The breeze had risen.
—those were the first words that could be heard above the roar of laughter and applause.
Here the wind gave a tug at her head dress. Loops of pearls made it top-heavy. She had to steady the ruffle which threatened to blow away. “Laughter, loud laughter,” Giles muttered. The tune on the gramophone reeled from side to side as if drunk with merriment. Mrs. Manresa began beating her foot and humming in time to it. “Bravo! Bravo!” she cried. “There’s life in the old dog yet!” And she trolloped out the words of the song with an abandonment which, if vulgar, was a great help to the Elizabethan age. For the ruff had become unpinned and great Eliza had forgotten her lines. But the audience laughed so loud that it did not matter. “I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” Giles muttered to the same tune. Words came to the surface—he remembered “a stricken deer in whose lean flank the world’s harsh scorn has struck its thorn. . . . Exiled from its festival, the music turned ironical. . . . A churchyard haunter at whom the owl hoots and the ivy mocks tap-tap-tapping on the pane. . . . For they are dead, and I . . . I . . . I,” he repeated, forgetting the words, and glaring at his Aunt Lucy who sat craned forward, her mouth gaping, and her bony little hands clapping. What were they laughing at? At Albert, the village idiot, apparently. There was no need to dress him up. There he came, acting his part to perfection. He came ambling across the grass, mopping and mowing.
He skipped along the front row of the audience, leering at each in turn. Now he was picking and plucking at Great Eliza’s skirts. She cuffed him on the ear. He tweaked her back. He was enjoying himself immensely. “Albert having the time of his life,” Bartholomew muttered. “Hope he don’t have a fit,” Lucy murmured. “I know . . . I know . . .” Albert tittered, skipping round the soap box. “The village idiot,” whispered a stout black lady—Mrs. Elmhurst— who came from a village ten miles distant where they, too, had an idiot. It wasn’t nice. Suppose he suddenly did something dreadful? There he was pinching the Queen’s skirts. She half covered her eyes, in case he did do—something dreadful.
And off he skipped, as if his turn was over. “Glad that’s over.” said Mrs. Elmhurst, uncovering her face. “Now what comes next? A tableau. . . ?” For helpers, issuing swiftly from the bushes, carrying hurdles, had enclosed the Queen’s throne with screens papered to represent walls. They had strewn the ground with rushes. And the pilgrims who had continued their march and their chant in the background, now gathered round the figure of Eliza on her soap box as if to form the audience at a play. Were they about to act a play in the presence of Queen Elizabeth? Was this, perhaps, the Globe theatre? “What does the programme say?” Mrs. Herbert Winthrop asked, raising her lorgnettes. She mumbled through the blurred carbon sheet. Yes; it was a scene from a play. “About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Carinthia—that’s the Duke’s daughter, only she’s been lost in a cave—falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. That’s I think what happens,” she said, looking up from the programme. “Play out the play,” great Eliza commanded. An aged crone tottered forward. (“Mrs. Otter of the End House,” someone murmured.) She sat herself on a packing case, and made motions, plucking her dishevelled locks and rocking herself from side to side as if she were an aged beldame in a chimney corner. (“The crone, who saved the rightful heir,” Mrs. Winthrop explained.)
She bawled. They bawled. All together they bawled, and so loud that it was difficult to make out what they were saying: apparently it was: Did she remember concealing a child in a cradle among the rushes some twenty years previously? A babe in a basket, crone! A babe in a basket? they bawled. The wind howls and the bittern shrieks, she replied. “There is little blood in my arm,” Isabella repeated. That was all she heard. There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of the youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it. Did the plot matter? She shifted and looked over her right shoulder. The plot was only there to beget emotion. There were only two emotions: love; and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that when she cut this knot in the centre? Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing. But what was happening? The Prince had come. Plucking up his sleeve, the beldame recognized the mole; and, staggering back in her chair, shrieked: My child! My child! Recognition followed. The young Prince (Albert Perry) was almost smothered in the withered arms of the beldame. Then suddenly he started apart. “Look where she comes!” he cried. They all looked where she came—Sylvia Edwards in white satin. Who came? Isa looked. The nightingale’s song? The pearl in night’s black ear? Love embodied.
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