You can’t blame her, he thought with fairness. What would I think had she appeared in one of her grandma’s mother hubbards? He remarked her reddish dark hair and the delicate slope of her shoulder. (I’ll put my hand there and let it slip down her arm as she turns.)
Without looking up, she said suddenly: ‘Did Uncle Joe tell you about Donald?’ (Oh, hell, thought Jones.) ‘Isn’t it funny,’ her chair scraped to her straightening knees, ‘we both thought of moving at the same time?’ She rose, her chair intervened woodenly, and Jones stood ludicrous and foiled. ‘You take mine and I’ll take yours,’ she added, moving around the table.
‘You bitch,’ said Jones evenly and her green-blue eyes took him sweetly as water.
‘What made you say that?’ she asked quietly. Jones, having to an extent eased his feelings, thought he saw a recurring interest in her expression. (I was right, he gloated.)
‘You know why I said that.’
‘It’s funny how few men know that women like to be talked to that way,’ she remarked irrelevantly.
I wonder if she loves someone? I guess not — like a tiger loves meat. ‘I am not like other men,’ he told her.
He thought he saw derision in her brief glance, but she merely yawned delicately. At last he had her classified in the animal kingdom. Hamadryad, a slim jewelled one.
‘Why doesn’t George come for me!’ she said as if in answer to his unspoken speculation, patting her mouth with the tips of petulant, delicate fingers. ‘Isn’t it boring, waiting for someone?’
‘Yes. Who is George, may I ask?’
‘Certainly, you may ask.’
‘Well, who is he?’ (I don’t like her type, anyway.) ‘I had gathered that you were pining for the late lamented.’
‘The late lamented?’
‘That fox-faced Henry or Oswald or something.’
‘Oh, Donald. Do you mean Donald?’
‘Surely. Let him be Donald, then.’
She regarded him impersonally. (I can’t even make her angry, he thought fretfully.) ‘Do you know, you are impossible.’
‘All right. So I am,’ he answered with anger. ‘But then I wasn’t engaged to Donald. And George is not calling for me.’
‘What makes you so angry? Because I won’t let you put your hands on me?’
‘My dear woman, if I had wanted to put my hands on you I would have done it.’
‘Yes?’ Her rising inflection was a polite maddening derision.
‘Certainly. Don’t you believe it?’ his own voice gave him courage.
‘I don’t know . . . but what good would it do to you?’
‘No good at all. That’s the reason I don’t want to.’
Her green eyes took him again. Sparse old silver on a buffet shadowed heavily under a high fanlight of coloured glass identical with the one above the entrance, her fragile white dress across the table from him: he could imagine her long subtle legs, like Atalanta’s reft of running.
‘Why do you tell yourself lies?’ she asked with interest.
‘Same reason you do.’
‘I?’
‘Surely. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.’
‘Do you know,’ she remarked with speculation, ‘I believe I hate you.’
‘I don’t doubt it. I know damn well I hate you.’
She moved in her chair, sloping the light now across her shoulders, releasing him and becoming completely another person. ‘Let’s go to the study. Shall we?’
‘All right. Uncle Joe should be done with his caller by now.’ He rose and they faced each other across the broken meal. She did not rise.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘After you, ma’am,’ he replied with mock deference.
‘I have changed my mind. I think I’ll wait here and talk to Emmy, if you don’t object.’
‘Why Emmy?’
‘Why not Emmy?’
‘Ah, I see. You can feel fairly safe with Emmy: she probably won’t want to put her hands on you. That’s it, isn’t it?’ She glanced briefly at him. ‘What you really mean is, that you will stay if I am going out of the room, don’t you?’
‘Suit yourself.’ She became oblivious of him, breaking a biscuit upon a plate and dripping water upon it from a glass. Jones moved fatly in his borrowed trousers, circling the table again. As he approached she turned slightly in her chair, extending her hand. He felt its slim bones in his fat moist palm, its nervous ineffectual flesh. Not good for anything. Useless. But beautiful with lack of character. Beautiful hand. Its very fragility stopped him like a stone barrier.
‘Oh, Emmy,’ she called sweetly, ‘come here, darling. I have something to show you.’
Emmy regarded them balefully from the door and Jones said quickly: ‘Will you fetch me my trousers, Miss Emmy?’
Emmy glanced from one to the other ignoring the girl’s mute plea. (Oho, Emmy has fish of her own to fry, thought Jones.) Emmy vanished and he put his hands on the girl’s shoulders.
‘Now what will you do? Call the reverend?’
She looked at him across her shoulder from beyond an inaccessible barrier. His anger grew and his hands wantonly crushed her dress.
‘Don’t ruin my clothes, please,’ she said icily. ‘Here, if you must.’ She raised her face and Jones felt the shame, but his boyish vanity would not let him stop now. Her face a prettiness of shallow characterless planes blurred into his, her mouth was motionless and impersonal, unresisting and cool.
Her face from a blur became again a prettiness of characterless shallowness icy and remote, and Jones, ashamed of himself and angry with her therefore, said with heavy irony: ‘Thanks.’
‘Not at all. If you got any pleasure from it you are quite welcome.’ She rose. ‘Let me pass, please.’
He stood awkwardly aside. Her frigid polite indifference was unbearable. What a fool he had been! He had ruined everything.
‘Miss Saunders,’ he blurted, ‘I — forgive me: I don’t usually act that way, I swear I don’t.’
She spoke over her shoulder. ‘You don’t have to, I suppose? I imagine you are usually quite successful with us?’
‘I am very sorry. But I don’t blame you. . . . One hates to convict oneself of stupidity.’
After a while hearing no further sound of movement he looked up. She was like a flower stalk or a young tree relaxed against the table: there was something so fragile, so impermanent since robustness and strength were unnecessary, yet strong withal as a poplar is strong through very absence of strength, about her; you knew that she lived, that her clear delicate being was nourished by sunlight and honey until even digestion was a beautiful function . . . as he watched something like a shadow came over her, somewhere between her eyes and her petulant pretty mouth, in the very clear relaxation of her body, that caused him to go quickly to her.
She stared into his unblinking goat’s eyes as his hands sliding across her arms met at the small of her back, and Jones did not know the door had opened until she jerked her mouth from his and twisted slimly from his clasp.
The rector loomed in the door, staring into the room as if he did not recognize it. He has never seen us at all, Jones knew, then seeing the divine’s face he said: ‘He’s ill.’
The rector spoke. ‘Cecily—’
‘What is it, Uncle Joe?’ she replied in sharp terror, going to him. ‘Aren’t you well?’
The divine balanced his huge body with a hand on either side of the doorway.
‘Cecily, Donald’s coming home,’ he said.
3
There was that subtle effluvia of antagonism found inevitably in a room where two young ‘pretty’ women are, and they sat examining each other with narrow care. Mrs Powers, temporarily engaged in an unselfconscious accomplishment and being among strangers as well, was rather oblivious of it; but Cecily, never having been engaged in an unselfconscious action of any kind and being among people whom she knew, examined the other closely with that attribute women have for gaining correct instinctive impressions of another’s character, clothes, morals, etc.
Jones’s yellow stare took the newcomer at intervals, returning, however, always to Cecily, who ignored him.
The rector tramped heavily back and forth. ‘Sick?’ he boomed. ‘Sick? But we’ll cure him. Get him home here with good food and rest and attention and we’ll have him well in a week. Eh, Cecily?’
‘Oh, Uncle Joe! I can’t believe it yet. That he is really safe.’ She rose as the rector passed her chair and sort of undulated into his arms, like a slim wave. It was beautiful.
‘Here’s the medicine for him, Mrs Powers,’ he said with heavy gallantry, embracing Cecily, speaking over her head towards the contemplative pallor of the other woman’s quiet watching face. ‘There, there, don’t cry,’ he added, kissing her. The audience watched this, Mrs Powers with speculative detached interest and Jones with morose speculation.
‘It’s because I am so happy — for you, dear Uncle Joe,’ she answered. She turned graceful as a flower stalk against the rector’s black bulk. ‘And we owe it all to Mrs — Mrs Powers,’ she continued in her slightly rough voice, like a tangle of golden wires, ‘she was so kind to bring him back to us.’ Her glance swept past Jones and flickered like a knife towards the other woman. (Damn little fool thinks I have tried to vamp him, Mrs Powers thought.) Cecily moved towards her with studied impulse. ‘May I kiss you? do you mind?’
It was like kissing a silken smooth steel blade and Mrs Powers said brutally: ‘Not at all. I’d have done the same for anyone sick as he is, nigger or white. And you would, too,’ she added with satisfying malice.
‘Yes, it was
