Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  When her mother, in a temper, struck her, she would push her hair back from her face with a sharp movement of her hand and then would watch broodingly and cynically for the next move. “You hit me again,” she seemed to say, “and you will make a fool of yourself.”

  She was aware, of course, of a thousand influences in the house of which her mother and Hortense had never the slightest conception. From the cosy security of her cradle she had watched the friendly spirit who had accompanied (with hostile irritation) her entrance into this world. His shadow had, for a long period, darkened her nursery, but she repelled, with absolute assurance, His kindly advances.

  “I’m not frightened. I don’t, in the least, want things made comfortable for me. I can get along very nicely, indeed, without you. You’re full of sentiment and gush — things that I detest — and it won’t be the least use in the world for you to ask me to be good, and tender, and all the rest of it. I’m not like your other babies.”

  He must have known, of course, that she was not, but, nevertheless, He stayed. “I understand perfectly,” He assured her. “But, nevertheless, I don’t give you up. You may be, for all you know, more interesting to me than all the others put together. And remember this — every time you do anything at all kind or thoughtful, every time you think of any one or care for them, every time you use your influence for good in any way, my power over you is a little stronger, I shall be a little closer to you, your escape will be a little harder.”

  “Oh, you needn’t flatter yourself,” she answered Him. “There’s precious little danger of my self-sacrifice or love for others. That’s not going to be my attitude to life at all. You’d better not waste your time over me.”

  She had not, she might triumphantly reflect, during these eight years, given Him many chances, and yet He was still there. She hated the thought of His patience, and somewhere deep within herself she dreaded the faint, dim beat of some response that, like a warning bell across a misty sea, cautioned her. “You may think you’re safe from Him, but He’ll catch you yet.”

  “He shan’t,” she replied. “I’m stronger than He is.”

  II

  This must sound, in so prosaic a summary of it, fantastic, but nothing could be said to be fantastic about Sarah. She was, for one thing, quite the least troublesome of children. She could be relied upon, at any time, to find amusement for herself. She was full of resources, but what these resources exactly were it would be difficult to say. She would sit for hours alone, staring in front of her. She never played with toys — she did not draw or read — but she was never dull, and always had the most perfect of appetites. She had never, from the day of her birth, known an hour’s illness.

  It was, however, in the company of other children that she was most characteristic. The nurses in the Square quite frankly hated her, but most of the mothers had a very real regard for Lady Charlotte’s smart little lunches; moreover, it was impossible to detect Sarah’s guilt in any positive fashion. It was not enough for the nurses to assure their mistresses that from the instant that the child entered the gardens all the other children were out of temper, rebellious, and finally unmanageable.

  “Nonsense, Janet, you imagine things. She seems a very nice little girl.”

  “Well, ma’am, all I can say is, I won’t care to be answerable for Master Ronald’s behaviour when she does come along, that’s all. It’s beyond belief the effect she ‘as upon ’im.”

  The strangest thing of all was that Sarah herself liked the company of other children. She went every morning into the gardens (with Hortense) and watched them at their play. She would sit, with her hands folded quietly on her lap, her large black eyes watching, watching, watching. It was odd, indeed, how, instantly, all the children in the garden were aware of her entrance. She, on her part, would appear to regard none of them, and yet would see them all. Perched on her seat she surveyed the gardens always with the same gaze of abstracted interest, watching the clear, decent paths across whose grey background at the period of this episode, the October leaves, golden, flaming, dun, gorgeous and shrivelled, fell through the still air, whirled, and with a little sigh of regret, one might fancy, sank and lay dead. The October colours, a faint haze of smoky mist, the pale blue of the distant sky, the brown moist earth, were gentle, mild, washed with the fading year’s regretful tears; the cries of the children, the rhythmic splash of the fountain throbbed behind the colours like some hidden orchestra behind the curtain at the play; the statues in the garden, like fragments of the white bolster clouds that swung so lazily from tree to tree; had no meaning in that misty air beyond the background that they helped to fill. The year, thus idly, with so pleasant a melancholy, was slipping into decay.

  Sarah would watch. Then, without a word, she would slip from her seat, and, walking solemnly, rather haughtily, would join some group of children. Day after day the same children came to the gardens, and they all of them knew Sarah by now. Hortense, in her turn also, sitting, stiff and superior, would watch. She would see Sarah’s pleasant approach, her smile, her amiability. Very soon, however, there would be trouble — some child would cry out; there would be blows; nurses would run forward, scoldings, protests, captives led away weeping ... and then Sarah would return slowly to her seat, her gaze aloof, cynical, remote. She would carefully explain to Hortense the reason of the uproar. She had done nothing — her conscience was clear. These silly little idiots. She would break into French, culled elaborately from Hortense, would end disdainfully— “mais, voilà,” — very old for her age.

  Hortense was vicious, selfish, crude in her pursuit of pleasure, entirely unscrupulous, but, as the days passed, she was, in spite of herself, conscious of some half-acknowledged, half-decided terror of Sarah’s possibilities.

  The child was eight years old. She was capable of anything; in her remote avoidance of any passion, any regret, any anticipated pleasure, any spontaneity, she was inhuman. Hortense thought that she detected in the chit’s mother something of her own fear.

  III

  There used to come to the gardens a little fat red-faced girl called Mary Kitson, the child of simple and ingenuous parents (her father was a writer of stories of adventure for boys’ papers); she was herself simple-minded, lethargic, unadventurous, and happily stupid. Walking one day slowly with Hortense down one of the garden paths, Sarah saw Mary Kitson engaged in talking to two dolls, seated on a bench with them, patting their clothes, very happy, her nurse busy over a novelette.

  Sarah stopped.

  “I’ll sit here,” she said, walked across to the bench and sat down. Mary looked up from her dolls, and then, nervously and self-consciously, went back to her play. Sarah stared straight before her.

  Hortense amiably endeavoured to draw the nurse into conversation.

  “You ‘ave ’ere ze fine gardens,” she said. “It calls to mind my own Paris. Ah, the gardens in Paris!”

  But the nurse had been taught to distrust all foreigners, and her views of Paris were coloured by her reading. She admired Hortense’s clothes, but distrusted her advances.

  She buried herself even more deeply in the paper. Poor Mary Kitson, alas! found that, in some undefinable manner, the glory had departed from her dolls. Adrian and Emily were, of a sudden, glassy and lumpy abstractions of sawdust and china. Very timidly she raised her large, stupid eyes and regarded Sarah. Sarah returned the glance and smiled. Then she came close to Mary.

  “It’s better under there,” she said, pointing to the shade of a friendly tree.

  “May I?” Mary said to her nurse with a frightened gasp.

  “Well, now, don’t you go far,” said the nurse, with a fierce look at Hortense.

  “You like where you are?” asked Hortense, smiling more than ever. “You ‘ave a good place?” Slowly the nurse yielded. The novelette was laid aside.

  Impossible to say what occurred under the tree. Now and again a rustle of wind would send the colours from the trees to short branches loaded with leaves of red gold, shiv
ering through the air; a chequered, blazing canopy covered the ground.

  Mary Kitson had, it appeared, very little to say. She sat some way from Sarah, clutching Adrian and Emily tightly to her breast, and always her large, startled eyes were on Sarah’s face. She did not move to drive the leaves from her dress; her heart beat very fast, her cheeks were very red.

  Sarah talked a little, but not very much. She asked questions about Mary’s home and her parents, and Mary answered these interrogations in monosyllabic gasps. It appeared that Mary had a kitten, and that this kitten was a central fact of Mary’s existence. The kitten was called Alice.

  “Alice is a silly name for a kitten. I shouldn’t call a kitten Alice,” said Sarah, and Mary started as though in some strange, sinister fashion she were instantly aware that Alice’s life and safety were threatened.

  From that morning began a strange acquaintance that certainly could not be called a friendship. There could be no question at all that Mary was terrified of Sarah; there could also be no question that Mary was Sarah’s obedient slave. The cynical Hortense, prepared as she was for anything strange and unexpected in Sarah’s actions, was, nevertheless, puzzled now.

  One afternoon, wet and dismal, the two of them sitting in a little box of a room in the little box of a house, Sarah huddled in a chair, her eyes staring in front of her, Hortense sewing, her white, bony fingers moving sharply like knives, the maid asked a question:

  “What do you see — Sar-ah — in that infant?”

  “What infant?” asked Sarah, without moving her eyes.

  “That Mary with whom now you always are.”

  “We play games together,” said Sarah.

  “You do not. You may be playing a game — she does nothing. She is terrified — out of her life.”

  “She is very silly. It’s funny how silly she is. I like her to be frightened.”

  Mary’s nurse told Mary’s mother that, in her opinion, Sarah was not a nice child. But Sarah had been invited to tea at the confused, simple abode of the Kitson family, and had behaved perfectly.

  “I think you must be wrong, nurse,” said Mrs. Kitson. “She seems a very nice little girl. Mary needs companions. It’s good for her to be taken out of herself.”

  Had Mrs. Kitson been of a less confused mind, however, had she had more time for the proper observation of her daughter, she would have noticed her daughter’s pale cheeks, her daughter’s fits of crying, her daughter’s silences. Even as the bird is fascinated by the snake, so was Mary Kitson fascinated by Sarah Trefusis.

  “You are torturing that infant,” said Hortense, and Sarah smiled.

  IV

  Mary was by no means the first of Sarah’s victim’s. There had been many others. Utterly aloof, herself, from all emotions of panic or terror, it had, from the very earliest age, interested her to see those passions at work in others. Cruelty for cruelty’s sake had no interest for her at all; to pull the wings from flies, to tie kettles to the tails of agitated puppies, to throw stones at cats, did not, in the least, amuse her. She had once put a cat in the fire, but only because she had seen it play with a terrified mouse. That had affronted her sense of justice. But she was gravely and quite dispassionately interested in the terror of Mary Kitson. In later life a bull fight was to appear to her a tiresome affair, but the domination of one human being over another, absorbing. She had, too, at the very earliest age, that conviction that it was pleasant to combat all sentiment, all appeals to be “good,” all soft emotions of pity, anything that could suggest that Right was of more power than Might.

  It was as though she said, “You may think that even now you will get me. I tell you I’m a rebel from the beginning; you’ll never catch me showing affection or sympathy. If you do you may do your worst.”

  Beyond all things, her anxiety was that, suddenly, in spite of herself, she would do something “soft,” some weak kindness. Her power over Mary Kitson reassured her.

  The fascination of this power very soon became to her an overwhelming interest. Playing with Mary Kitson’s mind was as absorbing to Sarah, as chess to an older enthusiast; her discoveries promised her a life full of entertainment, if, with her fellow-mortals, she was able, so easily, “to do things,” what a time she would always have. She discovered, very soon, that Mary Kitson was, by nature, truthful and obedient, that she had a great fear of God, and that she loved her parents. Here was fine material to work upon. She began by insisting on little lies.

  “Say our clocks were all wrong, and you couldn’t know what the time was.”

  “Oh, but — —”

  “Yes, say it.”

  “Please, Sarah.”

  “Say it. Otherwise I’ll be punished too. Mind, if you don’t say it, I shall know.”

  There was the horrible threat that effected so much. Mary began soon to believe that Sarah was never absent from her, that she attended her, invisibly, her little dark face peering over Mary’s shoulder, and when Mary was in bed at night, the lights out, and only shadows on the walls, Sarah was certainly there, her mocking eyes on Mary’s face, her voice whispering things in Mary’s ears.

  Sarah, Mary very soon discovered, believed in nothing, and knew everything. This horrible combination, naturally, affected Mary, who believed in everything and knew nothing.

  “Why should we obey our mothers?” said Sarah. “We’re as good as they are.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mary, in a voice shocked to a strangled whisper. Nevertheless, she began, a little, to despise her confused parents. There came a day when Mary told a very large lie indeed; she said that she had brushed her teeth when she had not, and she told this lie quite unprompted by Sarah. She was more and more miserable as the days passed.

  No one knew exactly the things that the two little girls did when they were alone on an afternoon in Sarah’s room. Sarah sent Hortense about her business, and then set herself to the subdual of Mary’s mind and character. There would be moments like this, Sarah would turn off the electric light, and the room would be lit only by the dim shining of the evening sky.

  “Now, Mary, you go over to that corner — that dark one — and wait there till I tell you to come out. I’ll go outside the room, and then you’ll see what will happen.”

  “Oh, no, Sarah, I don’t want to.”

  “Why not, you silly baby?”

  “I — I don’t want to.”

  “Well, it will be much worse for you if you don’t.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “You can after you have done that.”

  “I want to go home now.”

  “Go into the corner first.”

  Sarah would leave the room and Mary would stand with her face to the wall, a trembling prey to a thousand terrors. The light would quiver and shake, steps would tread the floor and cease, there would be a breath in her ears, a wind above her head. She would try to pray, but could remember no words. Sarah would lead her forth, shaking from head to foot.

  “You little silly. I was only playing.”

  Once, and this hurried the climax of the episode, Mary attempted rebellion.

  “I want to go home, Sarah.”

  “Well, you can’t. You’ve got to hear the end of the story first.”

  “I don’t like the story. It’s a horrid story. I’m going home.”

  “You’d better not.”

  “Yes, I will, and I won’t come again, and I won’t see you again. I hate you. I won’t. I won’t.”

  Mary, as she very often did, began to cry. Sarah’s lips curled with scorn.

  “All right, you can. You’ll never see Alice again if you do.”

  “Alice?”

  “Yes, she’ll be drowned, and you’ll have the toothache, and I’ll come in the middle of the night and wake you.”

  “I — I don’t care. I’m go-going home. I’ll t-t-ell m-other.”

  “Tell her. But look out afterwards, that’s all.”

  Mary remained, but Sarah regarded the rebellion as ominous. She thou
ght that the time had come to put Mary’s submission really to the test.

  V

  The climax of the affair was in this manner. Upon an afternoon when the rain was beating furiously upon the window-panes and the wind struggling up and down the chimney, Sarah and Mary played together in Sarah’s room; the play consisted of Mary shutting her eyes and pretending she was in a dark wood, whilst Sarah was the tiger who might at any moment spring upon her and devour her, who would, in any case, pinch her legs with a sudden thrust which would drive all the blood out of Mary’s face and make her “as white as the moon.”

  This game ended, Sarah’s black eyes moved about for a fresh diversion; her gaze rested upon Mary, and Mary whispered that she would like to go home.

  “Yes. You can,” said Sarah, staring at her, “if you will do something when you get there.”

  “What?” said Mary, her heart beating like a heavy and jumping hammer.

  “There’s something I want. You’ve got to bring it me.”

  Mary said nothing, only her wide eyes filled with tears.

  “There’s something in your mother’s drawing-room. You know in that little table with the glass top where there are the little gold boxes with the silver crosses and things. There’s a ring there — a gold one with a red stone — very pretty. I want it.”

  Mary drew a long, deep breath. Her fat legs in the tight, black stockings were shaking.

  “You can go in when no one sees. The table isn’t locked, I know, because I opened it once. You can get and bring it to me to-morrow in the garden.”

  “Oh,” Mary whispered, “that would be stealing.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t. Nobody wants the old ring. No one ever looks at it. It’s just for fun.”

  “No,” said Mary, “I mustn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, you must. You’ll be very sorry if you don’t. Dreadful things will happen. Alice — —”

  Mary cried softly, choking and spluttering and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Well, you’d better go now. I’ll be in the garden with Hortense to-morrow. You know, the same place. You’d better have it, that’s all. And don’t go on crying, or your mother will think I made you. What’s there to cry about? No one will eat you.”