The Three Sisters Part 2

Would he? Would Essy have the sense? No. Not unless the lamp was lit there. Essy wouldn't show him into a dark room. And Essy was stupid.

She might have _no_ sense. She might take him straight into the study and Papa would keep him there. Trust Papa.

Alice got up from her sofa and left the room; moving with her weary grace and a little air of boredom and of unconcern. She was always most unconcerned when she was most intent.

Outside in the pa.s.sage she stood a moment, listening. All the ways of the house gave upon the pa.s.sage in a s.p.a.ce so narrow that by stretching out one arm she could have touched both walls.

With a door open anywhere the pa.s.sage became a gully for the north wind. Now, with all doors shut, it was as if the breath of the house was being squeezed out there, between closing walls. The pa.s.sage, instead of dividing the house, drew it together tight. And this tightness was intolerable to Alice.

She hated it. She hated the whole house. It was so built that there wasn't a corner in it where you could get away from Papa. His study had one door opening into the pa.s.sage and one into the dining-room.

The window where he sat raked the garden on the far side. The window of his bedroom raked the front; its door commanded the stairhead. He was aware of everything you did, of everything you didn't do. He could hear you in the dining-room; he could hear you overhead; he could hear you going up and downstairs. He could positively hear you breathe, and he always knew whether you were in bed or not. She drew in her breath lest he should hear it now.

At the far end of the pa.s.sage, on the wall-s.p.a.ce between the staircase and the kitchen door, raised on a small bracket, a small tin lamp showed a thrifty flame. Under it, on a mahogany table-flap, was a row of bedroom candlesticks with their match-boxes.

Her progress to the table-flap was stealthy. She exalted this business of lighting the drawing-room lamp to a desperate, perilous adventure.

The stone floor deadened her footsteps as she went.

Her pale eyes, half sullen, half afraid, slewed round to the door of the study on her right. With a noiseless hand she secured her matches and her candle. With noiseless feet she slid into the darkness of the drawing-room. She dared not light her candle out there in the pa.s.sage.

For the Vicar was full of gloom and of suspicion in the half hour before prayer-time, and at the spurt of the match he might come out bl.u.s.tering and insist on knowing what she was doing and where she was going, whereas presently he would know, and he might be quiet as long as he was satisfied that she wasn't s.h.i.+rking Prayers.

Stealthily, with her air of desperate adventure, she lit the drawing-room lamp. She shook out the puffs and frills of its yellow paper shade. Under its gaudy skirts the light was cruel to the cramped and shabby room, to the huddled furniture, to the tarnished gilt, the peris.h.i.+ng tones of gray and amber.

Alice set the lamp on the top of the cottage piano that stood slantwise in a side window beyond the fireplace. She had pulled back the muslin curtains and opened both windows wide so that the room was now bared to the south and west. Then, with the abrupt and pa.s.sionate gesture of desire deferred, she sat down at the little worn-out Erard and began to play.

Sitting there, with the open window behind her, she could be seen, and she knew that she could be seen from over the wall by anybody driving past in a high dog-cart.

And she played. She played the Chopin Grande Polonaise, or as much of it as her fingers, tempestuous and inexpert, could clutch and reach.

She played, neither with her hands nor with her brain, but with her temperament, febrile and frustrate, seeking its outlet in exultant and violent sound. She fell upon the Erard like some fierce and hungry thing, tearing from the forlorn, humble instrument a strange and savage food. She played--with incredible omissions, discords and distortions, but she played. She flung out her music through the windows into the night as a signal and an appeal. She played (on the little worn-out Erard) in ecstasy and expectation, as if something momentous hung upon her playing. There was joy and triumph and splendor in the Grande Polonaise; she felt them in her heart and nerves as a delicate, dangerous tremor, the almost intolerable on coming of splendor, of triumph and of joy.

And as she played the excitement gathered; it swung in more and more vehement vibrations; it went warm and flooding through her brain like wine. All the life of her bloodless body swam there, poised and thinned, but urgent, aspiring to some great climax of the soul.

VII

The whole house was full of the Chopin Grande Polonaise.

It raged there like a demon. Tortured out of all knowledge, the Grande Polonaise screamed and writhed in its agony. It writhed through the windows, seeking its natural attenuation in the open air. It writhed through the shut house and was beaten back, pitilessly, by the roof and walls. To let it loose thus was Alice's defiance of the house and her revenge.

Mary and Gwenda heard it in the dining-room, and set their mouths and braced themselves to bear it. The Vicar in his study behind the dining-room heard it and scowled. Essy, the maid-servant, heard it, she heard it worse than anybody, in her kitchen on the other side of the wall. Now and then, when the Polonaise screamed louder, Mary drew a hissing breath of pain through her locked teeth, and Gwenda grinned.

Not that to Gwenda there was anything funny in the writhing and screaming of the Grande Polonaise. It was that she alone appreciated its vindictive quality; she admired the completeness, the audacity of Alice's revenge.

But Essy in her kitchen made no effort to stand up to the Grande Polonaise. When it began she sat down and laid her arms on the kitchen table, and her head, m.u.f.fled in her ap.r.o.n, on her arms, and cried. She couldn't have told you what the Polonaise was like or what it did to her; all that she could have said was that it went through and through her. She didn't know, Essy didn't, what had come over her; for whatever noise Miss Alice made, she hadn't taken any notice, not at first. It was in the last three weeks that the Polonaise had found her out and had begun to go through and through her, till it was more than she could bear. But Essy, crying into her ap.r.o.n, wouldn't have lifted a finger to stop Miss Alice.

"Poor laa.s.s," Essy said to herself, "she looves to plaay. And Vicar, he'll not hold out mooch longer. He'll put foot down fore she gets trow."

Through the screaming of the Polonaise Essy listened for the opening of the study door.

VIII

The study door did not open all at once.

"Wisdom and patience, wisdom and patience----" The Vicar kept on muttering as he scowled. Those were his watchwords in his dealings with his womenkind.

The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed to him his G.o.d-like serenity. He was unaware that he was trying to control at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.

He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen. The Vicar's body stretched tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false show of muscular energy. The Vicar's face had a subtle quality of deception. The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled) made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic. It approached, and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated pupils, the stare of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red mouth revealed its profound and secret sensuality.

The interior that contained him was no less deceptive. Its book-lined walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not. He had had an eye to this effect. He had placed in prominent positions the books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a schoolmaster. You were caught at the very door by the thick red line of The Tudor Cla.s.sics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato, with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey and Butcher and Lang; by aeschylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had carried the illusion of scholars.h.i.+p so far as to hide his Aristophanes behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous temptation. Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen's _Sermons_ and Farrar's _Life of Christ_.

On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes of _The Record_, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie Corelli. On the ledge of his bureau _Blackwood's Magazine_, uncut, lay ready to his hand. The _Spectator_, in process of skimming, was on his knees. The _Standard_, fairly gutted, was on the floor. There was no room for it anywhere else.

For the Vicar's study was much too small for him. Sitting there, in an arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had taken flight before the awful invasion of his furniture. His bookcases hemmed him in on three sides. His roll-top desk, advancing on him from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair. His bureau, armed to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement of the chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.

The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire, of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of the Vicar.

A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the northeast window.

On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace with G.o.d and man.

But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled inimically.

Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge. He was inclined rather to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether. And not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by his daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place.

Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge and defy.

She had made a fool of herself.

She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left five months ago. It had been the talk of the little southern seaside town. He thanked G.o.d that n.o.body knew it, or was ever likely to know it, here.

For Alice's folly was not any ordinary folly. It was the kind that made the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive vicar.

He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself here. By his decisive action in removing her from that southern seaside town he had saved her from continuing her work. In order to do it he had ruined his prospects. He had thrown up a good living for a poor one; a living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was n.o.body to feel him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.

So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If it had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.

But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting deity could require no more of him.

And it wasn't the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects. Looking back he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish, by the folly or incompetence of his womankind.