White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  “Yes, I think I do want to go,” she said at last. “I should like to see Mejuffrouw Nora again and perhaps the little Ida. And the Queen.”

  “And the Queen! Does he know her, then?” But his tone was not so mocking as the words, and when he had spoken them, silence fell. He continued to look at her, and when, glancing away from the gliding water at which she had been staring, she turned to him and met his eyes, she did something that afterwards seemed to her the strangest event of that extraordinary drive: she quickly shut her own. At once, thoughts about kissing rushed into her mind, and she could think of nothing else, and in an effort to drive them away, she screwed up her face as if she were about to take some medicine.

  The next thing that happened was that the arm was withdrawn and she heard the engine start up.

  She opened her eyes. She had never seen Jooris looking so cross.

  “There was some rubbish about your being a film-star too, wasn’t there?” he said presently. “That afternoon we all had tea in that place, I mean. Does his sister say anything about it in her letter?”

  “She says he—Mijnheer Ruddlin—may be able to get me a job with Mijnheer Burke.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “Oh, a very big man in the pictures,” vaguely, “he chooses the people to be in them or something, I don’t know. But he’s very important.”

  “Well,” said Jooris with energy, “now I’ll tell you what I think will happen about all this. You’ll go to England and stay with these people because you want to. Right. You won’t enjoy it. …”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?” she cried, roused to indignation at last by his crossness and the way he had been going on with his arm. “I want to go to England, I want to see the Family Ruddlin again.” And indeed, stimulated in some way by his disapproval, she now longed to make the visit: he had made up her mind for her.

  “Why? Because you aren’t the sort that enjoys being away from home and all the people you know, that’s why. And then this Mijnheer Burke won’t give you a job, and you’ll come all the way home again, and a whole week of your holiday will be wasted. That’s all.”

  She was longing to ask him if he still wanted her to come to the farm, but she did not dare. So these two old friends drove on in silence.

  The country was left behind now and they were going quickly through the outlying suburbs of Bruges. The Three Towers stood up dark and thoughtful against the deepening grey of the sky, and beneath Saint Saviour’s Cathedral the old houses with their tiled roofs, peaked windows and stepped gables were shining with homely lights. Ydette tried to think about the film that she was going to see after supper.

  The van swooped across the plaats and, whirling round in front of the greengrocery, screeched to a stop.

  “Great God, Jooris, what a way to drive!” exclaimed Marie. “What’s the matter? Is Grandad dead?”

  “Wasn’t at six o’clock. Can’t say what’s happened since then, of course,” came snappishly from round at the back of the van. He lifted out Ydette’s bicycle and set it, with considerable emphasis, down on the cobbles.

  “And you’ve brought Yddy home. … That’s right … now she’ll be in good time for the bioscoop … Yddy …”

  But Ydette had gone quickly into the house.

  SITTING MOTIONLESS IN the corner-seat which a young man had found for her on the boat-train, she was still under the spell of her first sight of England.

  The Koenig Leopold had moved onwards through low, rippling waves seemingly too indolent to lift themselves up from the great, mild, gleaming plain of the sea, and the balm, the freshness, which began to descend upon the passengers had seemed in some way the beginning of England, revealing herself, quietly and strangely unsubstantially, yet how majestically! in these her first watery outposts and bastions. The sun had gone down into a great mist of heat, and through the calmness beginning to descend on empty ocean and cloudless firmament the ship had glided on to the accompaniment of her own water-music.

  Ydette had stood throughout the voyage by the rail, looking out over the fading, coloured mists in the west and now and then down into the clear dark sea traced under with luminous white foam; near at hand, the water talked strongly and ripplingly to itself; far away, it was radiant and silent.

  And presently she had begun to see something looming up out of the transparent mists that were the faint colours of a ripening peach.

  It—they—there was more than one of them—were high, pale objects which at first also appeared transparent, or in some way unsubstantial, but as the ship drew nearer she was able to see that they were cliffs; towering masses of white rock rising from a beach which, to eyes accustomed to the Flanders coast, appeared small as a toy. It was scattered over with big white boulders, and the waves breaking on it were mere ripples. Along the summit of the cliffs ran a thin line of a mysteriously deep and dark green. She could see one or two tiny figures walking briskly along up there, in the quiet, fading blue sky, and even make out a bounding little dog. The ship had shut off its engines, and was now sweeping onwards into this scene—which looked still, and far-away, and strange, as if it were a picture—in almost complete silence; they were approaching the hoary walls, overgrown with dripping masses of seaweed, of a small harbour within which the peaceful water stretched itself in an unrippled expanse of peach-pink.

  The men waiting on the quay for the ship were not shouting or rushing about, the air was as hushed as if it were falling asleep, and Ydette felt as if England, the unknown country of the insubstantial cliffs and those small white and grey houses climbing undramatically up the dark green hollows and clinging to the roads and fields that led up, up, up to the mass of great grey stones on the summit—England herself was commanding Ydette, and the ship, and the men on the quai, in an old, strong, calm voice to be quiet, to be at peace, and to behave.

  When she was not dreamily regarding these sights and sounds, she was going over in her mind the final scenes at home: her parting with the aunts and such of the neighbours as had been told of her impending visit to the English tourists who had kept in touch with her for four whole years.

  She had received from the aunts, more particularly Aunt Marie, warnings about not losing her passport, her clothes or her money: that there had not been warnings about avoiding graver dangers was perhaps due to the fact that Ydette had never been one for going with boys.

  As for Nora Ruddlin’s remarks about her getting a job with this bioscoop man, aunts and niece alike did not take it very seriously. Ydette had felt throughout all Christopher’s deft hints about her possible future career on the films—that the idea was ridiculous, and impossible, and just one of a young Englishman’s mad whims. The particular pleasure offered to her temperament by the cinema, the dreamlike quality, the shadowiness, the exaggeration of the people and places which it presented, had been far more the cause of her frequent visits there than any wish to follow up the hints and promises thrown out by Christopher. Something in Ydette’s nature ‘took to’ the dream-world of the cinema ‘like a duck to water’, but if Christopher had been able to return each year to Bruges and learn a little more about her, he would very soon have realized that her relation to the world of stardom was—at present, at least—the entirely passive one of admiring spectator. But year after year there had always been good reasons for his not going.

  Now, as she sat watching the dim fields, bordered by black, encircling woods, sinking away into twilight, she began to see the faces and hear the voices which she had left behind in Brugge more clearly than she saw her fellow passengers, and to think more about the Sint Katelijnstraat (they would just be having supper, and the lights would be shining in the big house) than of England going past in the dusk. The large fields in which grew nothing but grass seemed to her a waste of good land—for there were but few animals grazing in them—and almost every little house had a strange contraption of wires springing from its roof which must, she supposed, serve some useful purpose but which was so unfamiliar
to her that it added to that atmosphere of mystery with which England had seemed to her to be imbued. It was so big, so untidy, so wooded and quiet. The train stopped once or twice at little stations where the tall, slender trees, laden with dim, fragile leaves and revealing between their stems the blue-green labyrinths of a wood, came crowding right down to the railway line and looked silently in at the windows, causing her to turn uneasily away.

  And always at the back of her mind was the memory of Jooris’ face as she turned away from him that evening; sullen, heavy, and yes, cross. In all the seventeen years that she had known him, he had never been cross with her—and how Ydette did mind people being cross! And now she was miles and miles away from him, and sitting in this rather dirty English railway carriage that was carrying her still farther away with every turn of its wheels; drawing ever nearer to the station named Victoria, where Nora would meet her, and she was growing more and more unhappy every minute.

  I was a fool to come, she thought, with the severe common sense which persistently tempered her dreaminess, and which was pure Flemish.

  What a huge, echoing place was ‘Victoria’, crowded with thousands of people hurrying in every direction, while far-off, hollow voices boomed indistinguishable sentences in a tongue that certainly was not English, high overhead in the vast, curving roof. Ydette took down her suitcase and her carpet-bag from the rack, and, firmly clasping her large, sensible umbrella, stationed herself, with murmurs of apology to her fellow travellers, at the window. Now she could see the long, grey platforms, stretching away into the distance and losing themselves under the clear, colourless lights in the roof. She had never before felt so lonely.

  She looked carefully over the heads of the hurrying crowd before she descended from the train, and to her intense relief saw Nora Ruddlin standing at the far end of the platform. She had never felt at ease with Christopher’s sister, but at least, amongst these thousands of strangers, here was a face that she knew; and in a moment her long, limp hand in its black glove was being wagged up and down with a rather determined heartiness.

  “‘So this is London’,” said the young lady who stood beside Nora; her voice sounded as if she were smilingly telling a child a secret, and Ydette, looking down on this small, slender person from her greater height, was bewildered by the contrast between her dress, which was that of a peasant from the Austrian mountains, and the intellectual expression in her eyes. “I expect it all seems very strange to you, doesn’t it?” Evelyn Berrow continued, “but you will have lots of exciting things to tell them when you get home, won’t you?”

  Ydette, feeling more ill at ease and unhappy every moment, managed to nod, and then Nora exerted herself to find a taxi and got them all into it; in a short time they were driving through the hot, quiet streets of Kensington, which Ydette, too shy to look at her companions, stared at in silence.

  The other two had been murmuring together. Now Evelyn’s soft voice addressed Ydette.

  “I was thinking … perhaps we ought to warn you just a wee bit about Hilary—Miss Perowne (she’s the friend Nora and I share the flat with). She may seem—well, sometimes people who don’t know her find her the least little bit difficult. She’s a darling, really. Only she gets so tired, especially just now when she’s working for an examination, and when she’s tired she’s inclined to be a little alarming—oh, and one thing we really ought to tell her about, oughtn’t we?” turning to Nora, “is not making a noise. Your room is next to hers and she’s a terribly light sleeper, and lack of sleep upsets her more than anything. So if you can just remember not to hurl your boots about,” Evelyn laughed, “it would be all to the good.”

  “She is ill?” Ydette asked after a staring pause.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake don’t say that! It’s the one thing no-one’s allowed to say, or there really will be an ‘atmosphere’. No. You just remember to be very quiet in your room and everything will be all right.”

  She smiled, with her head poking forward and a soft wisp falling down from her fashionably cut hair.

  Nora had been listening to Evelyn’s remarks with rather less than her customary approval. She loved Evelyn with all her heart: it was impossible to imagine even a husband being closer to her in spirit than was Evelyn, and one of the qualities which she most doted on in her friend was that simplicity which she privately compared to crystal, and fluids like spring-water and new milk. But somehow, when she saw Evelyn with Ydette, she had an uneasy and disloyal feeling that Evelyn’s simplicity rang false—or appeared to. This did not make her any fonder of the Foreign Visitor in the dowdy black coat. She sighed, and explained to Ydette that Christopher was exceedingly busy, but was coming to the flat soon after breakfast on the following day, and would take her out to see London.

  Ydette heard in melancholy silence. These endless, wide, grey streets where the coloured lamps were just beginning to burn under the fading sky made her feel very sad, and when they stopped at the large red-brick block of flats and climbed the echoing stairs to Number 30, she was well in the grip of home-sickness. And although she had never been one of those girls who consciously prefer the company of the other sex, she was beginning to feel oppressed by the continuous company of strange mejuffrouws. The one who opened the door to them was more frightening than either of the others; Nora seemed an old friend, compared with this small white face and large green eyes like a cat’s that looked crossly at Ydette through hornrimmed glasses. Oh yes, she was cross, very cross, and Ydette knew it; there was no hiding it from her when someone was cross, and although the latest one shook hands, and said in French “How nice to see you, Ydette. Welcome to England,” her thin, white fingers felt so bony and cool, and her voice was so light and sharp, that Ydette did not feel welcomed in the least.

  The flat, too, was alarming; the rooms were almost as large as those at the big house and everything seemed either very dark and shining or very pale and looking as if it would break if you touched it. Ydette sat on the edge of a chair, clutching a cup of coffee that did not smell or taste like the coffee at home, crumbling an alien biscuit and not cheered by the incomprehensible remarks called to one another by the mejuffrouws as they moved quickly about their domestic affairs between the rooms:

  “Chris has been very masterful about all this, hasn’t he?” “Oh, we’re congratulating ourself; we think our fortune’s made.” “Not our fame?” “Oh, I do do us the justice to think it’s our fame, rather than our fortune, that we’re after.” “What do you think of the ‘find’?” “The intelligence is in inverse ratio to the size of the optics, I should imagine.” “Good heavens—that takes me back to the Upper Fourth—I haven’t called them that since we were all in it.” “I think all this is in rather bad taste.”

  The last remark was made coldly by the cross young lady in the glasses, who up till now had not said a word, and when she had said it a silence fell. Then they began to talk about bedrooms and breakfast and baths, in a way that Ydette could understand.

  She declined their offer of a bath for herself. She made a habit of using creams and lotions; she took concern over many matters which troubled her workmates not at all; but a great splashy bath all over oneself on a Thursday night, even when one did not have to go out to the public baths for it—no. So they all crisply bade her good night, and in a few moments more she was alone at her bedroom window, looking rather fearfully out at a distant cluster of towers rising in unfamiliar silhouettes against the greenish, moonlit sky, and struggling with a strong impulse to cry.

  “Where are you taking her?” Nora asked Christopher, after breakfast on the following morning, when Ydette, having timidly greeted him, had gone to get her scarf and coat—“to the studio for lunch?”

  “No, I’ll do that on Monday, if everything goes well. How’s she liking it?”

  “I don’t really know. She hardly utters. She seems a bit under the weather, but of course, she may be shy of Hil and Evelyn. What do you think of her?”

  She spoke without apprehen
sions about his probable answer; her former fears of his becoming entangled with Ydette had vanished—simple Nora!—on his marriage.

  “Oh, she’s perfectly ravishing … to look at. I can’t keep my camera-eye off her. I never saw such angles; I can’t wait for her to have a test. But I don’t feel nearly so easy about the other necessary qualities—teachability and temperament and so on—and there’s one vital thing I’m almost sure she’s short of, and that’s sex appeal.”

  “I suppose that’s very important?” his sister said.

  “It is and it isn’t—I mean, it needn’t take the obvious form (that sounds like a corny pun); it can be something else than hip-waggling and cleavage, but it’s got to be there in some way. And I rather doubt if she has it at all.”

  “These are deep waters,” said Nora, with a caustic wag of her head, and then Ydette reappeared, her scarf carefully tied under her chin, somewhat lifted out of a pensive mood induced by the exchange of largely incomprehensible remarks at breakfast, by seeing Mijnheer Chris again, and hearing his warm and friendly welcome.

  That day he took her in his fashionably shabby little car to the places that he was certain she would want to be able to tell the aunts that she had seen: Westminster Abbey, Piccadilly, St Paul’s and finally Buckingham Palace, where they were so fortunate as to catch a glimpse of the Royal children driving through the gates. She appeared to enjoy it all, and ate, with less caution than he had expected her to show, an ample luncheon at a Chinese restaurant. But not once during the day did she become animated, or show a glimpse of the positive, endearing quality which he remembered as giving attraction to her personality when she was a child, and which he had always thought of as typically Flemish. She was pensive, she drooped; more than once she sighed unromantically through her nose; she went off into brown studies; and when he sounded her about getting a job of some sort in a studio, she merely shook her head and answered that they expected her back at work on the nineteenth. Did she like it there? Oh yes … and then she was quiet for fifteen minutes.