Eva Trout (8 page)

“That’s not necessary!” called out the other.

“I’m sorry,” said Eva. She got back on to the path.

“I’m not royalty.”

“I could not,” Eva explained, “see.”

“No—this
is
dazzling, all of a sudden!” Miss Smith, bringing to light two books which she’d been keeping for shelter, while yet the rain fell, under the oilskin, came to a standstill not far from Eva, casting round her a look at the brilliantly glistening grass and despoiled cherry trees quivering with prismatic drops. “There should be a rainbow?” She threw a glance round the sky.

“No?” said Eva, sharing the disappointment.

“Are you in a hurry?” Miss Smith asked. (It had not seemed so.) “I only was looking for a snail.”

“You collect them?”

“This was for nature-study.”

“It’s not urgent?” Eva shook her head. “I am glad we met, then.—How are you getting on?”

“I am trying to,” said the girl, with a touch of passion.

“You listen very intently. But I really wanted to know, are you glad you’re here?—or does ‘here’ seem strange, still?”

Eva examined the path’s brickwork; then, down to its very roots, some nearby grass.

“Or perhaps that is rather a question?” asked Miss Smith.

“Anywhere—” Eva began. She began again: “Anywhere would seem strange to me that did not.”

“Eva, do look at me!—not away.”

“The sun’s in my eyes.”

“Yes, of course it is,” the other said quickly, penitent. “Let’s both go the way I’m going, shall we, then we shall both have the sun behind us.” So they began to. Ahead stood the pleasant house with nothing to hide: the original Lumleigh Court, now the school’s headquarters. Towards it, ahead of the walkers went their two shadows: Eva saw nothing else. Miss Smith, too, saw them—”Yes, we’re like coming events! But,” she went on, “what were you saying before? Anywhere would seem strange to you that did not… what?”

“Seem strange.”

“That is a complicated thought.”

“To me,” said Eva, expanding, “nowhere does not, by now —a little.” But then she thought of the castle. “Or almost nowhere.”

“How
steamy
it all is, suddenly!” cried the other. Oppressed, stifled, she moved apart from Eva. “Tropical. You’ve been in the tropics, have you?—I know you’ve travelled.” Sweat came out on her forehead. “Will you hold these”—she thrust the books at the girl—”and help me out of this?”—she tugged at the oilskin. Eva, demented, clutching the books, one-handedly tugged at the oilskin also. Miss Smith got herself out of it, but let Eva carry it, saying: “Thank you.” Adding: “They’re suffocating, those things. I’m better now.”

“Are you delicate, Miss Smith?”

“No; made of steel. Only, I’m claustrophobic.” She left the warning to sink in. They walked on. “Why,” asked Miss Smith retrospectively, “did you say, ‘by now’? I wonder whether that means that you’ve travelled too much? Satiation could give you that feeling of unreality.”

“Have I that feeling?”

“You’ve been trying to say so. You go everywhere with your father, somebody told us—there is only your father?”

“Only my father.”

“He must miss you,” speculated Miss Smith, gently.

Here came the nice house. And in a way already they were half into it—their shadows were entering the verandah, which had a tesselated pavement of red and slate-blue; for Lumleigh Court, though surrounded by the contemporary, was Victorian. The verandah, for a wonder, was empty—nobody there to perceive, by Eva’s expression, that the world now came to an end. Or did it? “We can go in through the dining-room,” said Miss Smith, addressing herself to a French window. “Though you mustn’t make a habit of this, Eva!”

“Am
I
coming in with you?”

“Aren’t you?”

They went through the house to the library;
it
was empty. “What are books for, I wonder,” mused the teacher of English. She replaced her two, then drew from their different shelves three others, which she’d made for unerringly. “What they are not for is to be simply gazed at!” she told Eva; who, moving from section to section of the bookcases, was doing exactly that, though with steadfast awe. “Do you ever read?”

“I am frightened to.”

“I see. Could you ever get over that?”

The girl took out a lovely morocco volume and nursed it, looking upon it sorrowfully. She said nothing.

“If you were read aloud to? Stories, at the beginning? Poetry? Shall we see what happens?”

“Miss Smith …?”

“I think we should try, don’t you?”

“Miss Smith … how can you be so good to me?”

Then a girl came in. This first manifestation took place at 5.10 in the evening, by the library clock.

To anyone looking back (Eva never did) there could have seemed to be something occult about the pact entered into. Yet all belied this: the affable wide window, young May beech branches fanwise in country jugs, blond woodblock flooring solidly underfoot… Nothing hidden except what was in the books. Something disembodied Miss Smith; neither then nor later did Eva look upon her as beautiful or in any other way clad in physical being. Miss Smith’s
noli mi tangere
was unneeded in any dealings with Eva—who
could
have touched her? In fact, at that time, that particular spring at Lumleigh, the young teacher was in a state of grace, of illumined innocence, that went with the realisation of her powers. They transcended her; they filled her with awe and wonder, and the awe and wonder gave her a kind of purity, such as one may see in a young artist. No idea that they could be power, with all that boded, had so far tainted or flawed them for her. About Iseult Smith, up to the time she encountered Eva and, though discontinuously, for some time after, there was something of Nature before the Fall. There was not yet harm in Iseult Smith—what first implanted it? Of Eva she was to ponder, later: “She did not know what I was doing; but did I?”

The month of May ended by being summer. One of Eva’s impediments was, any written work. “Well, leave it!” Miss Smith decreed, sweeping it all away. “That can come later. It panics you—doesn’t it?—out of all proportion.”

“Forever leave it?” asked Eva dolefully.

“No, no—just till you’re clearer.”

“My handwriting’s clear, though?” the girl said, brightening.

“Copper-plate! Who taught you?”

“Governesses.”

“I thought so. How many of them?”

“Many,” said Eva, after reflection. “Whenever we came to a new place where we were to remain for more than some hours, my father would telephone down for one, doing so only later for a stenographer. He took care to.”

“What stupendous hotels.”

The Trout girl scented mockery. She went on defiantly: “Yes, they could also always obtain a horse for me, a masseur for my father’s friend, a hypnotist to allow my father to sleep.” She capitulated. “Is that
only
why I am extraordinary?”

“You’re not.—I
should
like you to think, though. You have thoughts, I know, and sometimes they’re rather startling, but they don’t connect yet.”

“Are they startling?” asked the gratified,owner.

“They startle you, don’t they?—But try joining things together: this, then that, then the other. That’s thinking; at least, that’s beginning to think.”

Eva fitted her knuckles together. She frowned down at them. “Then, what?”

“Then you go on.”

“Till when?”

“Till you’ve arrived at something. Or found something out, or shed light on something. Or come to some conclusion, rightly or wrongly. And then what?—then you begin again.”

“Why, however?” Eva asked, not unreasonably.

Miss Smith whirled her fingers over her forehead: a parody of despairingness. She laughed aloud, an abandon which was endearing. “Honestly, how can I tell you? It’s what is done, Eva. Try—”

—A clanging began.

“That,” Eva said sanctimoniously, “is the chapel bell.”

She was all for observances. Also, the routine here acted as a conveyor-belt, smooth and ceaseless. High scholastic standards not only did not alarm her, she was fervently for them—latitude being allowed her on the grounds of her being partly foreign (this no one queried) and partly handicapped: in what particular or for what reason she was to be taken to be the latter was not gone into. Part of Lumleigh’s good characer was that it invariably made room for a “case” or two— what could better have demonstrated the school’s fearlessness? Eva was therefore assimilated, without surprise, by her good-mannered if not enthusiastic companions, whom she was slow to distinguish one from another. Floppy clean hair, smelling of the school shampoo, oblong wrist watches, Connemara pullovers and a habit of humming seemed to be universal. The pullovers seldom came off, for the girls were
frileuses
and this was an English summer—when they did come off, under them were striped shirts, all of them tailored to the same pattern. And under the shirts?—again, similarity.

The five co-existors with Eva in the white dormitory did what they could to put her into the picture. Guidance was offered, in sentences beginning, “I shouldn’t—” or “I don’t think if I were you—”. Having done their utmost, they then went on as though (which they would have preferred) she were not there: not by them, for that reason, was it brought home to Eva, the monstrous heiress, that she was unable to speak—talk, be understood, converse. They were to be shaken by one discovery: this coaching Eva was having from Miss Smith? Crucial examinations now lay ahead for several of these girls, who worked till they squinted, but had one of them ever been singled out? As one, however, they put envy behind them. The sessions must, they decided, be therapeutic. But, Miss
Smith
… How far could compassion go?

That Eva also wondered—till slowly credulity overtook her. Then, through one after another midsummer night, daylight never quite gone from the firmament, cubicle curtains round her like white pillars, she was kept amazed and awake by joy. She saw (she thought) the aurora borealis. Love like a great moth circled her bed, then settled. Air came to her pillow from hay-fields where, not alone, she had walked in a trance, or the smell of the rushy and minty and earthy wetness of moments at the fringe of the stream returned. The silence of buildings and of the garden was now and then disturbed by a sigh.

Her spirit struggled under this new belief, as though for breath—it was too much for her. “I cannot!” she once cried out to the sleeping dormitory. By day, she went about haggardly. Her countenance with its look of subjection, bewilderment, fatalism, took on more and more the cast of her father’s. The alteration in her came to be noted.

“I hear you look as though you had seen a ghost,” said Miss Smith one evening, examining Eva to see if this were so.

“Am I complained of?” the girl asked—for her, quickly. “Would they send me away?”

“What should anyone send you away for?”

“What would
become
of me?” clamoured on Eva, senselessly.

Miss Smith, with the flat of her hand, made a to-and-fro movement to calm the air down. “Everyone knows, and admires, how hard you’re trying—indeed,
I
know! Only I know how hard. Perhaps, too hard?—I believe I am tired too. We mustn’t exhaust one another, Eva.”

“I am so very sorry,” the girl said, though in a strangely remorseless tone.

“I don’t think you really are; and neither am I.” Miss Smith leaned back, considered what she had said, but did not emend it. She sat at her table, on which stacks of exercise books supplicated, open, for attention—those topmost, exposing their lines of writing, were weighted into position by broken fragments of marble, from what tomb or temple? This being Miss Smith’s one room, there was against one wall a divan on which it was to be taken that she slept. At the pillow end of it, crooked downward like an inquisitive stork, an anglepoise lamp stood—not yet lit. Books were mustered in the low white shelves provided by the school: to whom or what they, the books, belonged was an open question. But for a cherry-coloured cardigan—which, tossed away, had fallen short of the divan on to the floor—and Miss Smith herself, little betrayed the fact that anybody inhabited this room. “Are you coming nearer the surface, I wonder?” her voice asked. “I want you to.”

“Yes. I am.”

“Yet there are sometimes times when I think you would rather go on being submerged. Sometimes you cling to being in deep water. What are you afraid of?”

Eva might have said: “That at end of it all you’ll find out that I have nothing to declare.” She did not, of course—instead, she stooped (she was sitting on a Windsor chair, by a window) and pulled off one of her moccasins. She began to pluck, with absolute concentration, at one of the beads embroidered on to the leather: this one was working loose on its thread.

“Where does that horror come from?” asked her teacher.

“Albuquerque.—You are dragging me up from the bottom of a lake, Miss Smith?”

“Nobody’s ‘dragging’ you. Come up of your own accord, or stay where you were.”

“I am very heavy, however,” the girl said, twisting hard at the bead.

“I shall fine you sixpence for each time you say ‘however’!”

“My father will have to send me more pocket-money!” The bead came away—for whichever reason, Eva gave a deep-in-the-thorax laugh. Then: “What,” she asked, “is the matter with ‘however’?”

“Oh, it’s pompous, it’s unnatural-sounding, it’s wooden, it’s deadly, it’s hopeless, it’s shutting-off—the way you use it! It’s misbegotten!”

“Like I am,” pointed out Eva, manoeuvring her foot back into the moccasin. This, which took time, kept her face hidden. “Why do you care for me?”

Miss Smith drew her chair closer in to her table. She lifted one of the chunks of marble, analysed one or two of the lines of writing, put the weight back. She gave half a smile and said: “What a question!”

“One thing,” declared Eva, “I
have
done.”

“Well—what?”

“Learned that religious poem.”

“
Religious
poem?”

“It is to God, I think.” “Oh, one of the metaphysicals. Say it, then.” Eva agonised. “I don’t know whether I can … I shall say the end.”

“Go on,” said Iseult patiently.