The Three Sisters Part 26

She went on. "We're strangers and perhaps you don't like us very much, and you feel that singing for us would be like singing the Lord's song in a strange country; you feel as if it would be profanation--a kind of disloyalty."

"Thot's it. Thot's it." Never had he been so well interpreted.

"It's that--and it's because you miss him so awfully."

"Wall--" He seemed inclined, in sheer honesty, to deprecate the extreme and pa.s.sionate emotion she suggested. I would n' saay--O'

course, I sort o' miss him. I caann't afford to lose a friend--I 'aven't so many of 'em."

"I know. It's the waters of Babylon, and you're hanging up your voice in the willow tree." She could be gay and fluent enough with Greatorex, who was nothing to her. "But it's an awful pity. A willow tree can't do anything with a big barytone voice hung up in it."

He laughed then. And afterward, whenever he thought of it, he laughed.

She saw that he had adopted his att.i.tude first of all in resentment, that he had continued it as a pa.s.sionate, melancholy pose, and that he was only keeping it up through sheer obstinacy. He would be glad of a decent excuse to abandon it, if he could find one.

"And your friend must have been proud of your voice, wasn't he?"

"He sat more store by it than what I do. It was he, look yo, who trained me so as I could sing proper."

"Well, then, he must have taken some trouble over it. Do you think he'd like you to go and hang it up in a willow tree?"

Greatorex looked up, showing a shamefaced smile. The little la.s.s had beaten him.

"Coom to think of it, I doan' knaw as he would like it mooch."

"Of course he wouldn't like it. It would be wasting what he'd done."

"So 't would. I naver thought of it like thot."

She rose. She knew the moment of surrender, and she knew, woman-like, that it must not be overpa.s.sed. She stood before him, drawing on her gloves, fastening her squirrel collar and settling her chin in the warm fur with the movement of a small burrowing animal, a movement that captivated Greatorex. Then, deliberately and finally, she held out her hand.

"Good-bye, Mr. Greatorex. It's all right, isn't it? You're coming to sing for _him,_ you know, not for _us_."

"I'm coomin'," said Greatorex.

She settled her chin again, tucked her hands away in the squirrel m.u.f.f and went quickly toward the door. He followed.

"Let me putt Daasy in t' trap, Miss Cartaret, and drive yo' home."

"I wouldn't think of it. Thank you all the same."

She was in the kitchen now, on the outer threshold. He followed her there.

"Miss Cartaret--"

She turned. "Well?"

His face was flushed to the eyes. He struggled visibly for expression.

"Yo' moosn' saay I doan' like yo'. Fer it's nat the truth."

"I'm glad it isn't," she said.

He walked with her down the bridle path to the gate. He was dumb after his apocalypse.

They parted at the gate.

With long, slow, thoughtful strides Greatorex returned along the bridle path to his house.

Alice went gaily down the hill to Garth. It was the hill of Paradise.

And if she thought of Greatorex and of how she had cajoled him into singing, and of how through singing she would reclaim him, it was because Greatorex and his song and his redemption were a small, hardly significant part of the immense thought of Rowcliffe.

"How pleased he'll be when he knows what I've done!"

And her pure joy had a strain in it that was not so pure. It pleased her to please Rowcliffe, but it pleased her also that he should realise her as a woman who could cajole men into doing for her what they didn't want to do.

"I've got him! I've got him!" she cried as she came, triumphant, into the dining-room where her father and her sisters still sat round the table. "No, thanks. I've had tea."

"Where did you get it?" the Vicar asked with his customary suspicion.

"At Upthorne. Jim Greatorex gave it me."

The Vicar was appeased. He thought nothing of it that Greatorex should have given his daughter tea. Greatorex was part of the parish.

XXV

Rowcliffe was coming to the concert. Neither floods nor tempests, he declared, would keep him away from it.

For hours, night after night, of the week before the concert, Jim Greatorex had been down at Garth, in the schoolhouse, practicing with Alice Cartaret until she a.s.sured him he was perfect.

Night after night the schoolhouse, gray in its still yard, had a door kept open for them and a light in the solemn lancet windows. The tall gray ash tree that stood back in the angle of the porch knew of their coming and their going. The ash tree was friendly. When the north wind tossed its branches it beckoned to the two, it summoned them from up and down the hill.

And now the tables and blackboards had been cleared out of the big schoolroom. The matchboarding of white pine that lined the lower half of its walls had been hung with red twill, with garlands of ivy and bunches of holly. Oil lamps swung from the pine rafters of the ceiling and were set on brackets at intervals along the walls. A few boards raised on joists made an admirable platform. One broad strip of red felt was laid along the platform, another hid the wooden steps that led to it. On the right a cottage piano was set slantwise. In the front were chairs for the princ.i.p.al performers. On the left, already in their places, were the glee-singers chosen from the village choir.

Behind, on benches, the rest of the choir.

Over the whole scene, on the chalk white of the dado, the blond yellow of varnished pinewood, the blazing scarlet of the hangings, the dark glitter of the ivy and the holly; on the faces, ruddy and sallow, polished with cleanliness, on the sleek hair, on the pale frocks of the girls, the bright neckties of the men, the lamplight rioted and exulted; it rippled and flowed; it darted; it lay suave and smooth as still water; it flaunted; it veiled itself. Stately and tall and in a measured order, the lancet windows shot up out of the gray walls, the leaded framework of their lozenges gray on the black and solemn night behind them.

A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning, palpitating things.

Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. It helped him to face without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them alien) faces in the front row of the audience: Mr. Cartaret and Miss Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he had done one night for Greatorex's mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen (not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest of them all). Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister.

Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned.

If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though less continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for subst.i.tuting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected pa.s.sions. It held in its impalpable web his dreams, the divine and delicate things that his grosser self let slip. He would forget, forget for ages, until, in the schoolroom at concert time, at the first caress of the magical smell, those delicate and divine, those secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again. And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic. It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause. It was the only form of intoxication known to him that did not end in headache and in shame.