Between the acts, p.10
Between the Acts, page 10
“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 He felt the champagne withdrawing and hastened, before the last trace of geniality was withdrawn, to make the most of it, as if he cast one last look into a lit-up chamber before going to bed.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 begun 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 quarterdeck, 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 cud 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.”
