But to-day she could not be quiet, could not concentrate. . . . Colin had said he would be a sailor. When she shut her eyes she saw his face floating on the water, grey like the face of the woman she had seen lifted out of the boat after the wreck. . . . In her ears was the sound of a great storm roaring.
An imperious hand was laid upon her arm and she opened her eyes to find Colin standing beside her. She was furious. No one, not even Colin, was allowed to disturb her quiet time. Her eyes blazed.
“Colin, how dare you!”
Colin was too angry himself to be abashed. “Mother,” he said, “I am going to be a sailor.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
They glared at each other.
Then the absurdity of it struck Rachell and she laughed. How ridiculous to get in such a state over a baby’s chance remark! Next week he would probably be saying he wanted to be a dentist or the Archbishop of Canterbury. . . . Yet she knew in her heart he wouldn’t. She put her arms round him and kissed him. Held against her heart he was deliciously warm, but flat and unresponsive as a hot water bottle.
“Darling,” she said, “you can’t be a sailor. I should never have a happy moment. Little son, you can’t do that. Be an engine driver, sweetheart.”
Colin kissed her right ear very politely above the little gold ear-ring shaped like a seashell, but said nothing.
“Anyway you’re too young for us to think about it now,” she hedged, “now run along.”
She released him and he went quietly from the room in dead silence. The back of his head expressed stony, unrelenting obstinacy.
Rachell, left alone, tried vainly to recapture her tranquillity, but in her ears was the sound of that great storm and before her eyes the waves were running and snarling like wolves.
VI
That same evening was memorable by reason of the first meeting of grandpapa and Ranulph. Grandpapa arrived first. He had lately taken a partner. After years of ill-treatment his patient stomach had begun to complain just a very little bit and grandpapa had come to the conclusion that it would be wiser to spend more time just sitting and quietly digesting, and less time in rushing round the Island after his patients. So he had imported a certain unfortunate young Englishman burdened with the name of Blenkinsop, into whose sufferings at the hands of grandpapa we need not go, since he is not important in the du Frocq history. But the importation of Blenkinsop had left grandpapa with a good deal of time on his hands, and he had taken to turning up unexpectedly at Bon Repos to see if Rachell was overfeeding the children. . . . He drove her perfectly frantic.
That evening, with supper and the children cleared out of the way, the lamp lighted and Ranulph not yet in, Rachell and André had settled down with sighs of relief to an hour’s peace.
Rachell was sewing. She had abandoned her darning and was stitching at a lovely piece of embroidery, a strip of white satin with blue cornflowers and yellow poppies on it that she had begun in the leisure of her honeymoon and had not finished yet. She had not the slightest hope of ever finishing it, but just now and then she worked at it for a few moments because of the enjoyment that it gave her. Somehow the creation of a thing that was intended simply to be beautiful and nothing else gave her a feeling of spaciousness that was simply delicious.
“Why?” she asked André.
André, who was reading, removed his spectacles and thought about it.
“Because a thing that has no practical value but exists simply to be beautiful, a picture or a symphony, or yellow poppies enriching white satin, is a vision of reality.”
“Why?” asked Rachell. “Shall I give this one orange petals or lemon?”
“A thing that’s intended to be useful ties down your spirit to mundane things, but a thing that is simply beautiful opens a window and lets you go free—that’s why you feel spacious. . . . That one must certainly have orange petals.”
Rachell threaded lemon silk in her needle, and looked at her husband. His eyes had dropped to his book again and his face, usually so shadowed with worry, looked alight. He hardly ever had time to read and she was sorry, for a book was to him what her embroidery was to her.
“André,” she murmured, “I wish you could go free more often.”
He looked up at her for a moment and the light that had been in his face seemed to drain inwards, leaving it darkened. It did not return till he was once more absorbed in his book.
They sat together quietly, their bodies at peace, their spirits voyaging, their hearts attentive to and lovingly conscious of each other, while the clock ticked as though each little soft sound was a tap closing more and more firmly the door that shut out the noisy world. Into their peace came suddenly the sound of briskly tapping hooves, the creaking of a sharply applied brake and then a strident voice.
“Walk the horses, damn you. . . . Don’t let them get cold. . . . Shan’t be long.”
The clock whirred complainingly, as though doors that had been closed flew open against its pressure. André dropped his book and Rachell ran her needle into her finger.
“Father,” she said, with infinite resignation in her tone.
Grandpapa, in a voluminous many-caped cloak and with his beaver on the side of his head, stalked in. They rose and found him a chair, but he did not subside into it till he had stamped about the room examining it in minute detail. He ran his finger along the dresser shelf to see if it were dusty, he compared the clock with his own watch, he looked at the egg chart that hung on a hook by the fireplace, he picked some diseased tomatoes out of a basket and looked at them, and he fixed his eyeglass in his eye and stared for some minutes in complete silence at a damp stain on the wall. This behaviour he called “seeing to things at Bon Repos.”
Rachell, praying for patience, commented on the state of the weather.
“What?” said grandpapa, “yes, damn chilly of an evening. October. Must expect it. . . . Your clock’s wrong. Always is. . . . No eggs to speak of. . . . Tomatoes diseased. . . . You’re a poor farmer, André. . . . Knew you would be. . . . Told you so. . . . No wonder the children are always ill if you live in such a damned unhealthy house. . . . What? . . . Look at that damp stain!”
“The children,” said Rachell icily, “are perfectly healthy.”
“Are they?” said grandpapa. “Three have died, haven’t they? . . . Your own fault. . . . Would live in this hole against my wishes. . . . What?”
Rachell went white to the lips, and André leant forward with an exclamation. . . . Hardly ever even to each other did they mention those three dead children. . . . Grandpapa’s voice grated on.
“Those you have left are too thin. Even Colette is fining down. . . . That’s overeating of course.”
“Overeating?” asked Rachell. She was crumpling her embroidery in her fingers, heartlessly crushing a yellow poppy against a blue cornflower in a way that took all the bloom off their petals.
“Overeating,” reiterated grandpapa; “it’s a well-known medical fact that if you overload a child’s stomach it only has to get rid of it and the consequent wasting—” He paused. “Well, I’ll say no more, but with that and this damned house you killed three of ’em.”
It was at this point that Ranulph appeared in the doorway. Rachell looked up, and in spite of her sick rage she noticed that he swayed a little and that his eyes were bloodshot. . . . She gave a little despairing sigh. . . . It had happened once before. . . . So awkward with André the secretary of the Island temperance society.
Ranulph was quite sufficiently master of himself to take in the situation . . . Rachell was suffering. . . . That old devil had gripped her and André in his two hands and was twisting them. . . . Twisting their hearts from love of torture. . . . He came forward and, leaning on the table, faced Dr. du Frocq.
“Get out,” he said.
“What! What! And who the devil are you?”
; The veins swelled on grandpapa’s forehead. He moved the lamp with a shaking hand so that he could see Ranulph’s face better. . . . They stared at each other. . . . The clock ticked. . . . They were motionless for what seemed to Rachell a century. . . . Then Ranulph jerked his head back a little so that his face was in shadow.
“Get out,” he said, “before I twist you as you twisted them.” His voice, thick and low, was infinitely dangerous. André went up to him and touched his arm.
“Monsieur Mabier, this is my father. I would ask you to remember that this is also my house.”
Ranulph turned and looked at André. His face was twisted as though by suffering and yet mocking at the same time.
“Father?” he said, “I beg your pardon.” He went to the door and, forgetting to stoop, hit his head against the lintel with a sickening thud.
“André,” cried Rachell, “go with him. He’ll hurt himself.”
André went. The two men, the one supporting the other, could be seen crossing the courtyard together. It was strange to Rachell to see them, who always seemed such poles apart, thus linked together as though in brotherhood.
There was complete silence in the kitchen until grandpapa’s rage went off the boil sufficiently to allow him to speak.
“Is that drunken brute your paying guest?” he spluttered at last.
“Yes,” said Rachell lifelessly. . . . Grandpapa had made her suffer so intensely for a few moments that she felt quite numb.
“Drunk as a lord,” said grandpapa.
“I think not,” said Rachell.
Grandpapa made a noise like the last half pint of water running out of the bath, “Don’t pretend, my dear, that you’re so innocent you don’t know when a man is drunk.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t drunk,” said Rachell tonelessly, “I merely did not consider him sufficiently drunk to be aristocratic. I thought him so slightly intoxicated as to be merely middle class—you saw, no doubt, that he showed a middle class capacity for noticing other people’s feelings—but no, you’re so aristocratic yourself that you probably didn’t see that.”
Grandpapa ignored this. “Do you intend to keep him here with the children? What? A fellow like that?” he asked.
“I do.”
“What does André say to that? What?”
“André thinks as I do.”
“Oh, does he?” said grandpapa nastily. “André, poor devil, always acts as you think or it would be the worse for him with a wife like you, but as for his thoughts, well, my dear, even a husband’s thoughts are his own, let me tell you. . . . No, I won’t stay, you’re too damn touchy to-night.”
He stalked out, muttering, and Rachell could hear him swearing at the coachman and puffing and blowing as he was heaved up into his seat, and then came the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and then silence.
But what a different silence to the one whose beauty grandpapa had broken. That one had held the stillness of a world narrowed to love and widened to eternity, yet shut to the clamour between. This one was dumb with the weight of hatred and grief. . . . When André came back he found Rachell in a heap on the floor, her head on the “jonquière,” sobbing.
He crouched on the floor beside her, his arms round her, but for a long time she would not speak. Then she voiced a fear, implanted in her long ago by grandpapa, that had haunted her for years.
“André, André, did I really kill the children with overfeeding?”
“No! No! No!” Fiercely he kissed her hair, her neck, the hands that hid her face. Under his hands he could feel the beating of her heart and the labouring of her breast.
The lamp went out, and in the dim light, twined together, they seemed one body. The shadows gathered round them and their world narrowed again to each other and their love, so that grandpapa and Ranulph were forgotten, yet grief was not forgotten and its darkness, pressing in on them, shut them out from the far loveliness where they had been before. . . . Each tick of the clock seemed a tap that closed the door on them more firmly. . . . They were two children shut out in the night, crying together. . . . Grandpapa had a lot to answer for.
Chapter 5
I
PERONELLE’S passion for Browning, which had hitherto been nothing but a nuisance to her family, causing her to creep away by herself and read just when they were wanting her or else to stay and quote him by the hour together just when they didn’t want her, became in the dark winter mornings a positive blessing. It caused her to get herself and the others out of bed in good time for school. Rachell in consequence had the highest opinion of Robert and had a good mind to write and tell him so. No longer had she to put on her dressing-gown while it was yet dark, and the draughts under the doors were cutting like knives, and go and drag the bedclothes off her protesting offspring—Peronelle saw to all that. Laziness and self-indulgence, Peronelle felt, were foreign to the mind of Robert. Promptitude, self-discipline, strong-mindedness, courage, these were all advocated by Robert, and getting out of one’s warm bed on a dark, cold winter’s morning gave one admirable training in all four. Peronelle could, in her mind’s eye, see exactly how that wonderful family would have behaved on December mornings. The moment that they were called the nightcapped heads of Browning, Mrs. Browning and the little Browning would have been lifted from their pillows as by clockwork, and the instant that the curtains were drawn and the hot water cans put in the basins, their feet would have been upon the mat. They would have washed and dressed with the utmost thoroughness, going behind their ears and not missing out any of the buttons, and then, with calm but cheerful courage, they would have descended to take up the noble duties of the day. This programme Peronelle never failed to carry out herself, but getting the others to follow her example was very uphill work. However, she managed it. She was never known to fail in accomplishing any bit of work to which she put her hand. At seven o’clock she would be awakened by Rachell tapping on the wall and at once, without giving herself time for thought, she would murmur, “I reach into the dark, feel what I cannot see and still faith stands,” reach for and light her candle, and thrust her toes out into the bitter air. Then she would pour ice-cold water into her basin, calling out as she did so, “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” Then she would drag the bedclothes off Jacqueline and leaving the poor exposed child curling up like a wood louse at the touch of winter’s finger, she would march into Colin’s room. He was a more difficult proposition, for as soon as he heard through the thin partition between their rooms the whereabouts of God and the state of the world he rolled himself completely up in his bedclothes and upon the entrance of Peronelle looked for all the world like an Egyptian mummy. However, she soon had him out of that. Seizing a hairbrush and casting herself on top of him she beat and pummelled and pinched and kicked until he yelled for mercy, and they both rolled on the floor with a resounding crash. With Michelle she tried oratory, for personal violence always made Michelle turn nasty.
“Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his feet,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?”
she would demand of Michelle.
“Lead us not into temptation, Lord!
Yea, but, Oh Thou whose servants are the bold—”
But at this Michelle would shout, “Oh, shut up, I’m sick to death of you and your Robert,” and arise. There was never any trouble with Colette. On the entrance of Peronelle the little cherub rolled to the floor with the suddenness of a rosy apple dropping into the orchard grass, and stayed there as placidly until picked up and washed.
On a particularly stormy and unpleasant morning at the beginning of December Colette plomped eagerly to the ground almost before Peronelle had got the door open, got to her feet, and, still heavy with sleep, staggered drunkenly towards the washstand before the candle was even lit. She was to spend the day with grandpapa. She was immensely
excited.
Every now and again grandpapa, bored with himself and the Island and all the internal organs in him and it, demanded that Colette should spend the day with him. An entire day spent in the company of grandpapa would have seemed to anyone else purgatory or worse, but to Colette, who loved him, it was a delight. . . . Extraordinary the affection which the worst of men can inspire in the breasts of the very best of the opposite sex.
“I’m going to spend the day with grandpapa,” she shouted, and had dragged her nightgown over her head before Peronelle had had time to pour the cold water into the basin.
In the intervals of eating an immense breakfast she chirped like a sparrow and later, driving into St. Pierre seated between Michelle and Peronelle, she sang hymns at the top of her voice—a sure sign with her of intense enjoyment.
II
Jacqueline and Colette were set down at the top of the hill while the others drove on to school. Grandpapa’s was not very far from the Convent, and Jacqueline could take Colette there on her way.
They bobbed down the cobbled street hand in hand, blown about like puff balls by the tearing wind from the sea, their dark blue overcoats buttoned up to their chins and their scarlet tam-o’-shanters pulled well down over their ears. The damp had made their hair curlier than ever, and yellow and black kiss-me-quicks surrounded their faces and clung like tendrils to their tam-o’-shanters. Colette had her indoor shoes and a clean white pinafore done up in a brown paper parcel, and she swung it backwards and forwards as she walked with the ecstatic abandon of a puppy wagging its tail. . . . They looked perfectly adorable.