by Ursula Bloom
It seemed to her that there was no future save to return to the office, where she would probably be laughed at for ever. To return to work for the rest of her life, while Miss Thomas bragged about saving her money, and the miserable little odd fifteen pounds a year it brought in ‒ or whatever it was. Ann would be constantly reminded by Cuthbert of how she had frittered away her fortune. She was quite sure that he would consider it a fortune by that time.
She heard all the familiar sounds of the hostel; Eva creaking up the wooden stairs to bed; later, Herbert. Below in the kitchens the lights went out, and there was the sound of stout shoes and of stuff skirts swinging as the Frau adjourned to rest. There was light chatter in the lofts where the maids lodged. The blind of the room over the wood shed was drawn, and against its pale yellow, lit by the flickering candle flame from within, there came the shadow of Sophie undressing. Curves, large curves and dents, and outlines! Sophie who evidently wore corsets and unhinged them carefully, and then spread enormously with relief.
And bye and bye mein Herr creeping furtively out of the house like a cat, and keeping always in the shadow as he edged towards the wood shed. Really, thought Ann, it was all rather dreadful.
Mein Herr was supposed to sleep in the little back bedroom allotted to him by the Frau. When the little Minna had been born years ago, the doctor had said that there must be no more children. They had had no ideas of contraception, but had decided that they must sleep apart, and therefore the Frau had allotted the back bedroom to mein Herr ‒ one could never let it to a guest anyway, for it had only a skylight, and was not considered healthy ‒ and he had remained there ever since.
Ann heard it all from her balcony. Last of all she saw Pablo and the chit, coming like lovers, hand in hand, out of the forest. The dark and lovely green of the Tannenbaum at night lent them a glamour. They came closer, carelessly, thinking that the whole world slept, and they alone were awake.
Under the balcony they stopped.
‘Oh no, he doesn’t sleep with me,’ the chit was saying, ‘come right up.’
‘None will hear?’ whispered Pablo.
‘Well, and who cares if they do?’
She was brave, this chit! She had the high courage of youth. She dare laugh in the very face of fate. Ann felt a tremendous responsibility on her shoulders. A certain smugness seemed to possess her. She thought of the woman taken in adultery, and it seemed to her that the chit was that woman. She heard the two of them coming up the stairs. They were not trying to be quiet about it; love had made them very bold. It is horrible, Ann told herself, and they must not be allowed to do it. For Eva’s sake. For Herbert’s sake. For her own sake too.
She opened her door.
They were just going into the room that the chit had chosen, she with her arm round Pablo, he looking down into her eyes. There was something about his languorous attitude which incensed Ann, and she grew quite brave.
‘Look here,’ she said, ‘you can’t do this. I heard.’
The chit released her hold of Pablo, and eyed Ann quite coldly. ‘Well, upon my word, you’ve got a nerve! What business is it of yours?’
‘I shall call your husband,’ said Ann, knowing quite well that she would never dare to do so, ‘it’s positively disgusting. Here in the hostel, with the first Mrs. Temple not two doors away.’
‘What did you say?’
It was the first inkling that the chit had got of the truth. Her eyes went glassy, her mouth grew hard. ‘You aren’t going to tell me …?’ she began hotly.
‘Oh, my God!’ exclaimed Pablo. ‘What the ’ell for did you tell her that?’
‘Herbert’s first wife is here ‒ in the hotel? She isn’t that sour-looking old trout at dinner?’ demanded Gwen. There was something about her face that frightened Ann. She stepped back, put out a hand to protect herself, and touched Pablo. But he had scant sympathy.
‘It would haf been most all right,’ he said grudgingly, ‘the ozzer wife keep the ’usband busy, and now you go tell her. Oh women, what fools! Oh God!’
‘How can you be so disgusting?’ flashed Ann, stung to retort. ‘They were divorced. And now to have this happen.’
The chit came closer. Her eyes were round and hard, her mouth was set. ‘You mean your friend was the first wife?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then that’s why Herbert came here. He wanted to see her again. The dirty little beast! It’s because of her that I can’t have the three-carat diamond I wanted in Vienna. It’s because of that stinking alimony that we have to pay her, blast it! It’s because of her, and all the time he had a sneaking love for her, and comes back here, brings me, he …’
Ann and Pablo bundled the chit into the bedroom between them. They tried to calm her. She was making a dreadful noise, the sort of noise that Ann remembered, too late, a very common girl does make when she is angry or miserable. She refused to be quiet.
‘It ees all your fault for telling her,’ complained Pablo, ‘a darn fool thing to do. No wonder she ees angry. You make the beeg meestake.’
Calming the chit was not easy! She fought like a mad thing. She wanted to go and see Eva and to tell her what she thought of her, and ‘that stinking alimony’. She’d been longing to meet Eva for some time, she explained, and she wasn’t going to miss this chance, not for anybody, she wasn’t. She seemed to have forgotten Pablo, and the night which had promised so well in the lists of love. Ann wished that she had never interfered, for anyway, though she might have been behaving as the woman taken in adultery, it would have kept her quiet, and that was something.
‘Oh, do please go to bed, and we’ll talk it over in the morning,’ begged Ann.
What a hope!
‘Think I’m going to be talked to by a bit like you?’ retorted the chit. ‘I’m going to do what I think best and I won’t be bullied by anybody. It’s my business, and not yours.’ Which was of course true.
Into this scene Herbert walked. Herbert was not looking his best. He was one of those unfortunate men who are not blessed with a waist, and therefore he could not wear a belt, but had to rely on braces to support his more necessary articles of apparel. Pyjamas refusing to remain tied about his ample middle, he had long ago given up the attempt, and therefore he wore a neat little nightshirt. Why a man should look so ridiculous in a nightshirt nobody yet has been able to explain, but he does. Herbert, his dressing-gown only hastily hung about him, looked merely absurd as he came into the chit’s room. He had heard the noise. He had tried to ignore it, but there had come a moment when he could do so no longer. She was making too much noise for that. He had been obliged ‒ oh, most reluctantly ‒ to come and see what the trouble was.
‘Whath all thith?’ he demanded. His speech was slightly difficult, for some of his teeth were reposing on the wash-hand-stand in a glass of water. It was the absence of these teeth which made him lisp. At the moment it seemed difficult to understand how such a girl as the chit could ever have accepted such a poor spectacle for a husband as Herbert. It was also quite easy to understand how Eva had given him up.
‘Whath all thith?’’ he demanded.
The chit stared at him. ‘I’ve found out why you brought me here. I know now what you’re playing at, you snake in the grass, you! Do you take me for a perfect fool, you old devil with your two wives?’
Herbert could think of nothing more tactful to say than, ‘Who told you?’
‘I did,’ said Ann.
‘But why? Why?’ asked the miserable Herbert.
Ann had no idea why. She now had no idea whatsoever.
It was obviously the wrong thing to have done, and she could not see what was the thing to do to put it straight. The chit was furious. She was dangerously furious. Her eyes were hard and savage, her colour was coming and going in patches. There was no gainsaying her. Pablo was angry too. With all this fuss and flurry he did not see how he was going to get what he wanted out of the night, and he blamed Ann for the whole thing. Jealousy, thought Pablo, sempre
la donna!
Herbert was furious that Ann could not have kept quiet just when the most difficult meal had been safely negotiated, and he had thought that he was round the worst corner! He had been asleep when the noise had started, and he had had a most beautiful dream that a convenient ’bus ran before breakfast to Bolzano, and he and Gwen were in it with no further ado. Then he had awakened to the savage sounds of argument, to a noise like a hell-fiend let loose, and old associations had warned him that it was Gwen. No other woman would make a noise like that.
‘How dare you bring me here, you dirty little devil?’ she challenged him, ‘with that wife of yours under the same roof. I won’t stand for it. Now I’ll damned well tell her off about that filthy alimony trick. Why should we starve while she grows fat? Money’s no good to an old trout like she is.’
Very unfortunately Eva heard the noise. At first she had thought that perhaps the Frau had discovered the infidelities of mein Herr, and she had therefore ignored it; but then certain familiar sounds had dawned on her intelligence, and her curiosity had overcome her. She had pulled on a dressing-gown, intending only to peep out into the passage, then she had come as far as the doorway. She must have heard every word. She was for a moment transfixed with horror. Herbert saw her first. He swallowed hard and he waved frantic fat hands in deprecation, but owing to the regrettable tooth trouble the words would not come. Ann went across to Eva.
‘Oh, go away,’ she implored, ‘do go away. You don’t know what a dreadful girl she is.’
‘Yes, that’s it. You call me names,’ said the chit, ‘you’re a lady, I must say. Both of you, I don’t think.’
Pablo leaned across the bed to her. He laid a restraining hand upon Gwen’s arm. ‘We send all to bed?’ he suggested. The idea obviously presented its possibilities to the chit. She hesitated. Then it was that Eva drove home her shaft. She wasn’t going to be bested by a girl like this.
‘Herbert. Do you realize what that young man is suggesting to your wife? How can you stand there and listen to it? It’s disgusting enough that you married a girl like that, but more disgusting that you allow her to carry on like this under your very nose.’
‘Pleath,’ besought Herbert, still frantically waving his fat hands. ‘Do go to bed. Everybothy. Do go to bed.’
Eva pulled herself up. She looked at the chit. There was something compelling about her; the only thought that struck Ann was how on earth could she ever have married Herbert?
Eva was Junoesque, there was no gainsaying her, even the words died on the lips of the agitated chit. She had met her match. Herbert was sadly handicapped by the nightshirt, and the lack of the teeth, and the fact that he ran so much to fat, but even at his best he could not have been an Adonis. Beside him Pablo looked like a god. The ripple of muscles under the live skin of his throat; the long slender lines of thigh and body, the dark eyes, flashing amusedly from Eva to Gwen, from Gwen to Eva, glancing a little coldly now and then at Ann. For hadn’t she caused it all? Hadn’t she come sneaking in out of sheer jealousy, to see what was to be seen? And when she had seen it she hadn’t liked it, and serve her right too! He had no patience with her.
‘I won’t be talked to like that,’ shrieked the chit; ‘if you don’t take that woman out of my room, I’ll slap her, I will. I tell you I will. I don’t care. She’s an old trout, and she’s jealous of my being young and pretty and having fun …’
Her voice suddenly became dulled, for Herbert, very red in the face, had bustled them out and had shut the door between. They were in the passage, Ann and Eva and Herbert. An ill-assorted trio. The mild eyes of a stuffed elk looked down on them regretfully, a creature of the wild and of the forest, which, had it been able to speak, would have said with Puck, ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
‘Really, Herbert,’ said Eva, ‘you must remove that impertinent little chit. She’s to go first thing. How you ever dared to have come here at all is more than I can understand.’
‘I didn’t mean …’ began Herbert.
Eva lost all patience.
‘And don’t stand there lisping at me. Go and get your teeth if you must talk, but I’d much rather you went to bed.’
‘I wanth to go to bed,’ lisped Herbert.
He went.
But Ann did not sleep. She lay there in between the cool sheets, and she listened to the noises of the forest like a sea around her. The sighing of trees heart to heart, the stirring communion of the branches. She listened also for those very noises that she did not want to hear. Everybody seemed to have forgotten that the chit had been left with Pablo and that he had not come out of her room. What was happening there? She felt herself going hot with shame. Life, how cruel it was! Love, how inconsequent!
And until to-night she had actually allowed herself to fall half in love with Pablo. She felt that must always be the most terrible part of it. He had attracted her. He still attracted her, even in spite of all the wickedness of to-night.
She must get away, run away, escape from all this. She must be the one who caught the train from Merano. She had behaved like a child and it was the most humiliating thing in the world. It was absurd to suppose that you could cheat life of so much as a year. That had been part of the glamour of the cruise, the infection of the sea-fever that had got her. She had imagined that she was young again, and she wasn’t. She was thirty-five. She was thirty-five all through, every hour of it.
It was ridiculous.
She could not sleep, because still some fragment of her being clung to Pablo. Still she loved him in that stupid physical way which refused to be silenced. In spirit she was with him.
She was jealous of the chit, she knew that, although she had tried to believe that she was just indignant with her. She coveted the embraces that Gwen would be receiving. It was all very wicked of her, she told herself, but she could not stem the tide within her. She did love him.
And things being as they were she must leave as soon as ever she could and get out of this unreal world, back to the old world, where typewriters tapped, and the only diversion the day offered was the debate as to whether they could have Bourbon biscuits for tea, or not. What possible excuse could she offer mein Herr and Eva? And anyway, would she not have to stay until her luggage came, and the rest of the money? Or could she go now, uproot herself as it were, and get aboard a train for somewhere ‒ she did not much care where ‒ before Mittagsessen?
Then mercifully she turned sleepy.
VI
She awoke with the exquisite beauty of the dawn flooding the room. The air was like wine. In the forest, hundreds of birds twittered an overture to the morning. Bells were ringing in the village below, and from the Kirche on the opposite mountain. The forest green rolled down and down to the village, where the darkness of cypresses and cedars and ilex changed to the fuller, younger green of larches. Gradually the trees gave place to the meadows, where the cows grazed, their bells tinkling against their soft throats. Opposite, the clouds rolled up the mountain sides, and above their grey tulle wisps the jagged peaks pierced the pink of the sky, and turned rosy themselves. ‘In the Dolomites,’ Eva had told her, ‘the very mountains blush.’ They were blushing now.
She got up, for somehow she could not sleep, and she felt the longing to walk. She wanted to smell the earth, and the gentians and the columbines, and the clustering red and white lilies which grew beside the hostel.
Outside her room, on the landing, Sophie was indolently dusting with a feather brush. She looked surprised to see Ann, but stifling a yawn she went on with her work. She was not interested in it; she thought the English lady must be mad to get up when there was no need for her to get up. But then most English ladies were mad. They were a mad race.
On the veranda Ann came face to face with Pablo. He was very creased and crumpled, he had obviously slept ‒ that is to say if he had slept at all ‒ in his clothes. His eyes were ringed with tiredness, his hair rumpled. He stopped her as she would have passed him by.
‘I
suppose that now you hate me?’
Ann wished that the very fact of his being there did not thrill her. She said, ‘What you choose to do is obviously no business of mine,’ and tried to pass him.
But Pablo would not be passed so easily.
‘I come to the forest also,’ he said, ‘it is most nice in the early morning, ya?’
They walked a few steps side by side. Then Ann stopped, she was indignant, she was furious. This could not be. ‘How dare you come with me after last night?’ she demanded. ‘Everybody else seems to have been blinded to what happened, but I know. You were with that dreadful girl all the time. I suppose you have only just left her now?’
He did not deny it. ‘That is truth,’ he said cheerfully.
What could you do with such a rogue? He linked his arm in hers, and although she longed to cast him off she could not. The green received them as it had received him with Gwen the night before. The irony of it! The warm tarry smell seemed to engulf them, the earth smell mingling with it, dry and powdery, the faint essence of lilies and gentians.
He said, ‘You do not understand the man so well. With men when they desire a woman they do not need to love her.’
‘I don’t want to discuss this.’
‘Ya, but you do. I desire you. You refuse me. I see the girl. I zink she is also woman. Any woman. It does not mattaire. The woman I want, wants me not, therefore anyone. I not care. Ya?’
Ann could not see that it was ya at all. She replied, ‘You are talking disgustingly, and I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care what you did. I am going away from here, right away, and at once. I’ve finished with it all.’
He came to a standstill. ‘You go away?’
