The White Peacock (4 page)

He sat twisting his fingers; she was very contrary.

"Bring your chair up," she said, sitting down at the table and opening a
book. She talked to him of each picture, insisting on hearing his
opinion. Sometimes he disagreed with her and would not be persuaded. At
such times she was piqued.

"If," said she, "an ancient Briton in his skins came and contradicted me
as you do, wouldn't you tell him not to make an ass of himself?"

"I don't know," said he.

"Then you ought to," she replied. "You know nothing."

"How is it you ask me then?" he said.

She began to laugh.

"Why—that's a pertinent question. I think you might be rather nice, you
know."

"Thank you," he said, smiling ironically.

"Oh!" she said. "I know, you think you're perfect, but you're not,
you're very annoying."

"Yes," exclaimed Alice, who had entered the room again, dressed ready to
depart. "He's so blooming slow! Great whizz! Who wants fellows to carry
cold dinners? Shouldn't you like to shake him Lettie?"

"I don't feel concerned enough," replied the other calmly.

"Did you ever carry a boiled pudding Georgy?" asked Alice with innocent
interest, punching me slyly.

"Me!—why?—what makes you ask?" he replied, quite at a loss.

"Oh, I only wondered if your people needed any indigestion mixture—pa
mixes it—1/1 ½ a bottle."

"I don't see——" he began.

"Ta—ta, old boy, I'll give you time to think about it. Good–night,
Lettie. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—Georgy—of someone else.
Farewell. Come along, Sybil love, the moon is shining—Good–night all,
good–night!"

I escorted her home, while they continued to look at the pictures. He
was a romanticist. He liked Copley, Fielding, Cattermole and Birket
Foster; he could see nothing whatsoever in Girtin or David Cox. They
fell out decidedly over George Clausen.

"But," said Lettie, "he is a real realist, he makes common things
beautiful, he sees the mystery and magnificence that envelops us even
when we work menially. I
do
know and I
can
speak. If I hoed in the
fields beside you——" This was a very new idea for him, almost a shock
to his imagination, and she talked unheeded. The picture under
discussion was a water–colour—"Hoeing" by Clausen.

"You'd be just that colour in the sunset," she said, thus bringing him
back to the subject, "and if you looked at the ground you'd find there
was a sense of warm gold fire in it, and once you'd perceived the
colour, it would strengthen till you'd see nothing else. You are blind;
you are only half–born; you are gross with good living and heavy
sleeping. You are a piano which will only play a dozen common notes.
Sunset is nothing to you—it merely happens anywhere. Oh, but you make
me feel as if I'd like to make you suffer. If you'd ever been sick; if
you'd ever been born into a home where there was something oppressed
you, and you couldn't understand; if ever you'd believed, or even
doubted, you might have been a man by now. You never grow up, like bulbs
which spend all summer getting fat and fleshy, but never wakening the
germ of a flower. As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants
bringing forth. Things don't flower if they're overfed. You have to
suffer before you blossom in this life. When death is just touching a
plant, it forces it into a passion of flowering. You wonder how I have
touched death. You don't know. There's always a sense of death in this
home. I believe my mother hated my father before I was born. That was
death in her veins for me before I was born. It makes a difference——"

As he sat listening, his eyes grew wide and his lips were parted, like a
child who feels the tale but does not understand the words. She, looking
away from herself at last, saw him, began to laugh gently, and patted
his hand saying:

"Oh! my dear heart, are you bewildered? How amiable of you to listen to
me—there isn't any meaning in it all—there isn't really!"

"But," said he, "why do you say it?"

"Oh, the question!" she laughed. "Let us go back to our muttons, we're
gazing at each other like two dazed images."

They turned on, chatting casually, till George suddenly exclaimed,
"There!"

It was Maurice Griffinhagen's "Idyll."

"What of it?" she asked, gradually flushing. She remembered her own
enthusiasm over the picture.

"Wouldn't it be fine?" he exclaimed, looking at her with glowing eyes,
his teeth showing white in a smile that was not amusement.

"What?" she asked, dropping her head in confusion.

"That—a girl like that—half afraid—and passion!" He lit up curiously.

"She may well be half afraid, when the barbarian comes out in his glory,
skins and all."

"But don't you like it?" he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders, saying, "Make love to the next girl you
meet, and by the time the poppies redden the field, she'll hang in your
arms. She'll have need to be more than half afraid, won't she?"

She played with the leaves of the book, and did not look at him.

"But," he faltered, his eyes glowing, "it would be—rather——"

"Don't, sweet lad, don't!" she cried laughing.

"But I shouldn't—" he insisted, "I don't know whether I should like any
girl I know to——"

"Precious Sir Galahad," she said in a mock caressing voice, and stroking
his cheek with her finger, "You ought to have been a monk—a martyr, a
Carthusian."

He laughed, taking no notice. He was breathlessly quivering under the
new sensation of heavy, unappeased fire in his breast, and in the
muscles of his arms. He glanced at her bosom and shivered.

"Are you studying just how to play the part?" she asked.

"No—but——" he tried to look at her, but failed. He shrank, laughing,
and dropped his head.

"What?" she asked with vibrant curiosity.

Having become a few degrees calmer, he looked up at her now, his eyes
wide and vivid with a declaration that made her shrink back as if flame
had leaped towards her face. She bent down her head and picked at her
dress.

"Didn't you know the picture before?" she said, in a low, toneless
voice.

He shut his eyes and shrank with shame.

"No, I've never seen it before," he said.

"I'm surprised," she said. "It is a very common one."

"Is it?" he answered, and this make–belief conversation fell. She looked
up, and found his eyes. They gazed at each other for a moment before
they hid their faces again. It was a torture to each of them to look
thus nakedly at the other, a dazzled, shrinking pain that they forced
themselves to undergo for a moment, that they might the moment after
tremble with a fierce sensation that filled their veins with fluid,
fiery electricity. She sought almost in panic, for something to say.

"I believe it's in Liverpool, the picture," she contrived to say.

He dared not kill this conversation, he was too self–conscious. He
forced himself to reply, "I didn't know there was a gallery in
Liverpool."

"Oh, yes, a very good one," she said.

Their eyes met in the briefest flash of a glance, then both turned their
faces aside. Thus averted, one from the other, they made talk. At last
she rose, gathered the books together, and carried them off. At the door
she turned. She must steal another keen moment: "Are you admiring my
strength?" she asked. Her pose was fine. With her head thrown back, the
roundness of her throat ran finely down to the bosom which swelled above
the pile of books held by her straight arms. He looked at her. Their
lips smiled curiously. She put back her throat as if she were drinking.
They felt the blood beating madly in their necks. Then, suddenly
breaking into a slight trembling, she turned round and left the room.

While she was out, he sat twisting his moustache. She came back along
the hall talking madly to herself in French. Having been much impressed
by Sarah Bernhardt's "Dame aux Camelias" and "Adrienne Lecouvreur,"
Lettie had caught something of the weird tone of this great actress, and
her raillery and mockery came out in little wild waves. She laughed at
him, and at herself, and at men in general, and at love in particular.
Whatever he said to her, she answered in the same mad clatter of French,
speaking high and harshly. The sound was strange and uncomfortable.
There was a painful perplexity in his brow, such as I often perceived
afterwards, a sense of something hurting, something he could not
understand.

"Well, well, well, well!" she exclaimed at last. "We must be mad
sometimes, or we should be getting aged, Hein?"

"I wish I could understand," he said plaintively.

"Poor dear!" she laughed. "How sober he is! And will you really go? They
will think we've given you no supper, you look so sad."

"I have supped—full——" he began, his eyes dancing with a smile as he
ventured upon a quotation. He was very much excited.

"Of horrors!" she cried completing it. "Now that is worse than anything
I have given you."

"Is it?" he replied, and they smiled at each other.

"Far worse," she answered. They waited in suspense for some moments. He
looked at her.

"Good–bye," she said, holding out her hand. Her voice was full of
insurgent tenderness. He looked at her again, his eyes flickering. Then
he took her hand. She pressed his fingers, holding them a little while.
Then ashamed of her display of feeling, she looked down. He had a deep
cut across his thumb.

"What a gash!" she exclaimed, shivering, and clinging a little tighter
to his fingers before she released them. He gave a little laugh.

"Does it hurt you?" she asked very gently.

He laughed again—"No!" he said softly, as if his thumb were not worthy
of consideration.

They smiled again at each other, and, with a blind movement, he broke
the spell and was gone.

Autumn set in, and the red dahlias which kept the warm light alive in
their bosoms so late into the evening died in the night, and the morning
had nothing but brown balls of rottenness to show.

They called me as I passed the post–office door in Eberwich one evening,
and they gave me a letter for my mother. The distorted, sprawling
handwriting perplexed me with a dim uneasiness; I put the letter away,
and forgot it. I remembered it later in the evening, when I wished to
recall something to interest my mother. She looked at the handwriting,
and began hastily and nervously to tear open the envelope; she held it
away from her in the light of the lamp, and with eyes drawn half closed,
tried to scan it. So I found her spectacles, but she did not speak her
thanks, and her hand trembled. She read the short letter quickly; then
she sat down, and read it again, and continued to look at it.

"What is it mother?" I asked.

She did not answer, but continued staring at the letter. I went up to
her, and put my hand on her shoulder, feeling very uncomfortable. She
took no notice of me, beginning to murmur: "Poor Frank—Poor Frank."
That was my father's name.

"But what is it mother?—tell me what's the matter!"

She turned and looked at me as if I were a stranger; she got up, and
began to walk about the room; then she left the room, and I heard her go
out of the house.

The letter had fallen on to the floor. I picked it up. The handwriting
was very broken. The address gave a village some few miles away; the
date was three days before.

"My Dear Lettice:

"You will want to know I am gone. I can hardly last a day or two—my
kidneys are nearly gone.

"I came over one day. I didn't see you, but I saw the girl by the
window, and I had a few words with the lad. He never knew, and he felt
nothing. I think the girl might have done. If you knew how awfully
lonely I am, Lettice—how awfully I have been, you might feel sorry.

"I have saved what I could, to pay you back. I have had the worst of it
Lettice, and I'm glad the end has come. I have had the worst of it.

I was numbed by this letter of my father's. With almost agonised effort
I strove to recall him, but I knew that my image of a tall, handsome,
dark man with pale grey eyes was made up from my mother's few words, and
from a portrait I had once seen.

The marriage had been unhappy. My father was of frivolous, rather vulgar
character, but plausible, having a good deal of charm. He was a liar,
without notion of honesty, and he had deceived my mother thoroughly. One
after another she discovered his mean dishonesties and deceits, and her
soul revolted from him, and because the illusion of him had broken into
a thousand vulgar fragments, she turned away with the scorn of a woman
who finds her romance has been a trumpery tale. When he left her for
other pleasures—Lettie being a baby of three years, while I was
five—she rejoiced bitterly. She had heard of him indirectly—and of him
nothing good, although he prospered—but he had never come to see her or
written to her in all the eighteen years.

In a while my mother came in. She sat down, pleating up the hem of her
black apron, and smoothing it out again.

"You know," she said, "he had a right to the children, and I've kept
them all the time."

"He could have come," said I.

"I set them against him, I have kept them from him, and he wanted them.
I ought to be by him now—I ought to have taken you to him long ago."

"But how could you, when you knew nothing of him?"

"He would have come—he wanted to come—I have felt it for years. But I
kept him away. I know I have kept him away. I have felt it, and he has.
Poor Frank—he'll see his mistakes now. He would not have been as cruel
as I have been——"

"Nay, mother, it is only the shock that makes you say so."

"This makes me know. I have felt in myself a long time that he was
suffering; I have had the feeling of him in me. I knew, yes, I did know
he wanted me, and you, I felt it. I have had the feeling of him upon me
this last three months especially … I have been cruel to him."

"Well—we'll go to him now, shall we?" I said.

"To–morrow—to–morrow," she replied, noticing me really for the first
time. "I go in the morning."

"And I'll go with you."

"Yes—in the morning. Lettie has her party to Chatsworth—don't tell
her—we won't tell her."

"No," said I.

Shortly after, my mother went upstairs. Lettie came in rather late from
Highclose; Leslie did not come in. In the morning they were going with a
motor party into Matloch and Chatsworth, and she was excited, and did
not observe anything.

After all, mother and I could not set out until the warm tempered
afternoon. The air was full of a soft yellowness when we stepped down
from the train at Cossethay. My mother insisted on walking the long two
miles to the village. We went slowly along the road, lingering over the
little red flowers in the high hedge–bottom up the hillside. We were
reluctant to come to our destination. As we came in sight of the little
grey tower of the church, we heard the sound of braying, brassy music.
Before us, filling a little croft, the Wakes was in full swing.

Some wooden horses careered gaily round, and the swingboats leaped into
the mild blue sky. We sat upon the stile, my mother and I, and watched.
There were booths, and cocoanut shies and round–abouts scattered in the
small field. Groups of children moved quietly from attraction to
attraction. A deeply tanned man came across the field swinging two
dripping buckets of water. Women looked from the doors of their
brilliant caravans, and lean dogs rose lazily and settled down again
under the steps. The fair moved slowly, for all its noise. A stout lady,
with a husky masculine voice invited the excited children into her peep
show. A swarthy man stood with his thin legs astride on the platform of
the roundabouts, and sloping backwards, his mouth distended with a row
of fingers, he whistled astonishingly to the coarse row of the organ,
and his whistling sounded clear, like the flight of a wild goose high
over the chimney tops, as he was carried round and round. A little fat
man with an ugly swelling on his chest stood screaming from a filthy
booth to a crowd of urchins, bidding them challenge a big, stolid young
man who stood with folded arms, his fists pushing out his biceps. On
being asked if he would undertake any of these prospective challenges,
this young man nodded, not having yet attained a talking stage:—yes he
would take two at a time, screamed the little fat man with the big
excrescence on his chest, pointing at the cowering lads and girls.
Further off, Punch's quaint voice could be heard when the cocoanut man
ceased grinding out screeches from his rattle. The cocoanut man was
wroth, for these youngsters would not risk a penny shy, and the rattle
yelled like a fiend. A little girl came along to look at us, daintily
licking an ice–cream sandwich. We were uninteresting, however, so she
passed on to stare at the caravans.

We had almost gathered courage to cross the wakes, when the cracked bell
of the church sent its note falling over the babble.

"One—two—three"—had it really sounded three! Then it rang on a lower
bell—"One—two—three." A passing bell for a man! I looked at my
mother—she turned away from me.

The organ flared on—the husky woman came forward to make another
appeal. Then there was a lull. The man with the lump on his chest had
gone inside the rag to spar with the solid fellow. The cocoanut man had
gone to the "Three Tunns" in fury, and a brazen girl of seventeen or so
was in charge of the nuts. The horses careered round, carrying two
frightened boys.

Suddenly the quick, throbbing note of the low bell struck again through
the din. I listened—but could not keep count. One, two, three,
four—for the third time that great lad had determined to go on the
horses, and they had started while his foot was on the step, and he had
been foiled—eight, nine, ten—no wonder that whistling man had such a
big Adam's apple—I wondered if it hurt his neck when he talked, being
so pointed—nineteen, twenty—the girl was licking more ice–cream, with
precious, tiny licks—twenty–five, twenty–six—I wondered if I did count
to twenty–six mechanically. At this point I gave it up, and watched for
Lord Tennyson's bald head to come spinning round on the painted rim of
the round–abouts, followed by a red–faced Lord Roberts, and a villainous
looking Disraeli.

"Fifty–one——" said my mother. "Come—come along."

We hurried through the fair, towards the church; towards a garden where
the last red sentinels looked out from the top of the holly–hock spires.
The garden was a tousled mass of faded pink chrysanthemums, and
weak–eyed Michaelmas daisies, and spectre stalks of holly–hock. It
belonged to a low, dark house, which crouched behind a screen of yews.
We walked along to the front. The blinds were down, and in one room we
could see the stale light of candles burning.

"Is this Yew Cottage?" asked my mother of a curious lad.

"It's Mrs. May's," replied the boy.

"Does she live alone?" I asked.

"She 'ad French Carlin—but he's dead—an she's letten th' candles ter
keep th' owd lad off'n 'im."

We went to the house and knocked.

"An ye come about him?" hoarsely whispered a bent old woman, looking up
with very blue eyes, nodding her old head with its velvet net
significantly towards the inner room.

"Yes——" said my mother, "we had a letter."

"Ay, poor fellow—he's gone, missis," and the old lady shook her head.
Then she looked at us curiously, leaned forward, and, putting her
withered old hand on my mother's arm, her hand with its dark blue veins,
she whispered in confidence, "and the candles 'as gone out twice. 'E wor
a funny feller, very funny!"

"I must come in and settle things—I am his nearest relative," said my
mother, trembling.

"Yes—I must 'a dozed, for when I looked up, it wor black darkness.
Missis, I dursn't sit up wi' 'im no more, an' many a one I've laid out.
Eh, but his sufferin's, Missis—poor feller—eh, Missis!"—she lifted
her ancient hands, and looked up at my mother, with her eyes so
intensely blue.

"Do you know where he kept his papers?" asked my mother.

"Yis, I axed Father Burns about it; he said we mun pray for 'im. I
bought him candles out o' my own pocket. He wor a rum feller, he wor!"
and again she shook her grey head mournfully. My mother took a step
forward.

"Did ye want to see 'im?" asked the old woman with half timid
questioning.

"Yes," replied my mother, with a vigorous nod. She perceived now that
the old lady was deaf.

We followed the woman into the kitchen, a long, low room, dark, with
drawn blinds.

"Sit ye down," said the old lady in the same low tone, as if she were
speaking to herself:

"Ye are his sister, 'appen?"

My mother shook her head.

"Oh—his brother's wife!" persisted the old lady.

We shook our heads.

"Only a cousin?" she guessed, and looked at us appealingly. I nodded
assent.

"Sit ye there a minute," she said, and trotted off. She banged the door,
and jarred a chair as she went. When she returned, she set down a bottle
and two glasses with a thump on the table in front of us. Her thin,
skinny wrist seemed hardly capable of carrying the bottle.

"It's one as he'd only just begun of—'ave a drop to keep ye up—do now,
poor thing," she said, pushing the bottle to my mother and hurrying off,
returning with the sugar and the kettle. We refused.

"'E won't want it no more, poor feller—an it's good, Missis, he allers
drank it good. Ay—an' 'e 'adn't a drop the last three days, poor man,
poor feller, not a drop. Come now, it'll stay ye, come now." We refused.

"'T's in there," she whispered, pointing to a closed door in a dark
corner of the gloomy kitchen. I stumbled up a little step, and went
plunging against a rickety table on which was a candle in a tall brass
candlestick. Over went the candle, and it rolled on the floor, and the
brass holder fell with much clanging.

"Eh!—Eh! Dear—Lord, Dear—Heart. Dear—Heart!" wailed the old woman.
She hastened trembling round to the other side of the bed, and relit the
extinguished candle at the taper which was still burning. As she
returned, the light glowed on her old, wrinkled face, and on the
burnished knobs of the dark mahogany bedstead, while a stream of wax
dripped down on to the floor. By the glimmering light of the two tapers
we could see the outlined form under the counterpane. She turned back
the hem and began to make painful wailing sounds. My heart was beating
heavily, and I felt choked. I did not want to look—but I must. It was
the man I had seen in the woods—with the puffiness gone from his face.
I felt the great wild pity, and a sense of terror, and a sense of
horror, and a sense of awful littleness and loneliness among a great
empty space. I felt beyond myself as if I were a mere fleck drifting
unconsciously through the dark. Then I felt my mother's arm round my
shoulders, and she cried pitifully, "Oh, my son, my son!"

I shivered, and came back to myself. There were no tears in my mother's
face, only a great pleading. "Never mind, mother—never mind," I said
incoherently.

She rose and covered the face again, and went round to the old lady, and
held her still, and stayed her little wailings. The woman wiped from her
cheeks the few tears of old age, and pushed her grey hair smooth under
the velvet network.

"Where are all his things?" asked mother.

"Eh?" said the old lady, lifting up her ear.

"Are all his things here?" repeated mother in a louder tone.