Laura had never seen Titus so excited. His face was flushed, his voice was loud, the pupils of his eyes were extraordinarily dilated. But how much of this was due to love and how much to wasps and witchcraft it was impossible to say. And was Pandora part of the witchcraft too, a sort of queen wasp whose sting was mortal balm? Why should Titus offer her marriage? Why should Pandora accept it? They had always been such friends.
Laura turned to the girl to see how she was taking it. Pandora’s smooth cheeks and smooth lappets of black hair seemed to shed calm like an unwavering beam of moonlight. But at Laura’s good wishes she started, and began nervously to counter them with explanations and apologies for coming to Laura’s rooms for tea. She had dropped Titus’s teapot, and broken it. Laura was not surprised that she had dropped the teapot. It was clear to her that Pandora’s emotions that afternoon had been much more vehement than anything that Titus had experienced in his mental uproar. How well—thought Laura—she has hidden her feelings all this time! How well she is hiding them now!
These fine natures, she knew, always found comfort in cutting bread-and-butter. Pandora welcomed the suggestion. She covered three large plates, and would have covered a fourth if the butter had not given out. There were some ginger-bread nuts as well, and a few bull’s-eyes. Mrs. Leak must have surmised a romance. She marked her sense of the occasion by the tea, which was almost purple—as strong as wedding-cake, Titus said.
It was a savagely plain tea. But had it consisted of cocoa and ship’s-biscuit, Laura might have offered it without a qualm to guests so much absorbed by their proper emotions. Titus talked incessantly, and Pandora ate with the stealthy persistence of a bitch that gives suck. Meanwhile Laura looked at the new Mr. and Mrs. Willowes. They would do very well, she decided. Young as she was, Pandora had already the air of a family portrait; such looks, such characters change little, for they are independent of time. And undoubtedly she was very much in love with Titus. While he talked she watched his face with the utmost attention, though she did not seem to hear what he was saying. Titus, too, must be considerably in love. Despite the unreality of his behavior, and a swelled nose, his happiness gave him an almost romantic appearance. Perhaps it was that too recently she had seen him dancing on the Devil’s strings to be able to take him quite seriously; perhaps she was old-maidishly scornful of the authenticity of anything that a man may say or do; but at the back of her mind Laura felt that Titus was but a proxy wooer, the ambassador of an imperious dynastic will; and that the real match was made between Pandora and Lady Place.
Anyhow, it was all very suitable, and she must be content to leave it at that. The car from the Lamb and Flag was waiting to take them to the station. Titus was going back to London with Pandora to see her people, as Pandora had refused to face their approval alone. The Williamses lived pleasantly on Campden Hill, and were typical of the best class of Londoners, being almost indistinguishable from people living pleasantly in the country. What, indeed, could be more countrified than to be in town during September? For a moment Laura feared that she would be obliged to travel to London. The lovers had insisted upon her company as far as the station.
“You must come,” said Titus. “There will be all sorts of things I shall remember to ask you to do for me. I can’t remember them now, but I shall the moment the car starts. I always do.”
Laura knew this to be very truth. Nevertheless she stood out against going until Pandora maneuvered her into a corner and said in a desperate whisper: “O Miss Willowes, for God’s sake, please come. You’ve no idea how awful it is being left alone with some one you love.”
Laura replied: “Very well. I’ll come as a thank-offering.”
Pandora’s sense of humor could just contrive a rather castaway smile.
They got into the car. There was no time to spare, and the driver took them along the winding lanes at top speed, sounding his horn incessantly. It was a closed car, and they sat in it in perfect silence all the way to the station. Before the car had drawn up in the station yard Titus leaped out and began to pay the driver. Then he looked wildly about for the train. There was no train in sight. It had not come in yet.
When Laura had seen them off and gone back to the station yard she found that in his excitement Titus had dismissed the driver without considering how his aunt was to get back to Great Mop. However, it didn’t matter —the bus started for Barleighs at half-past eight, and from Barleighs she could walk on for the rest of the way. This gave her an hour and a half to spend in Wickendon. A sensible way of passing the time would be to eat something before her return journey; but she was not hungry, and the fly-blown cafés in the High Street were not tempting. She bought some fruit, and turned up an alley between garden walls in search of a field where she could sit and eat it in peace. The alley soon changed to an untidy lane and then to a cinder-track running steeply uphill between high hedges. A municipal kindliness had supplied at intervals iron benches, clamped and riveted into the cinders. But no one reposed on them, and the place was unpeopled save by swarms of midges. Laura was hot and breathless by the time she reached the top of the hill and came out upon a bare grassy common. Here was an obvious place to sit down and gasp, and as there were no iron benches to deter her, she did so. But she immediately forgot her exhaustion, so arresting was the sight that lay before her.
The cinder-track led to a small enclosure, full of cypresses, yews, clipped junipers and weeping-willows. Rising from this funereal plumage was an assortment of minarets, gilded cupolas and obelisks. She stared at this phenomenon, so Byronic in conception, so spick and span in execution, and sprouting so surprisingly from the mild Chiltern landscape, completely at a loss to account for it. Then she remembered: it was the Maulgrave Folly. She had read of it in the guide-book, and of its author, Sir Ralph Maulgrave, the Satanic Baronet, the libertine, the atheist, who drank out of a skull, who played away his mistress and pistolled the winner, who rode about Buckinghamshire on a zebra, whose conversation had been too much for Thomas Moore. “This bad and eccentric character,” the guide-book said, disinfecting his memory with rational amusement. Grown old, he had amused himself by elaborating a burial-place which was to be an epitome of his eclectic and pessimistic opinions. He must, thought Laura, have spent many hours on this hillside, watching the masons and directing the gardeners where to plant his cypresses. And afterwards he would be wheeled away in his bath-chair, for, pace the guide-book, at a comparatively early age he lost the use of his legs.
Poor gentleman, how completely he had misunderstood the Devil! The plethoric gilt cupolas winked in the setting sun. For all their bad taste, they were perfectly respectable—cupolas and minarets and cypresses, all had a sleek and well-cared-for look. They had an assured income, nothing could disturb their calm. The silly, vain, passionate heart that lay buried there had bequeathed a sum of money for their perpetual upkeep. The Satanic Baronet who mocked at eternal life and designated this place as a lasting testimony of his disbelief had contrived to immortalize himself as a laughing-stock.
It was ungenerous. The dead man had been pilloried long enough; it was high time that Maulgrave’s Folly should be left to fall into decent ruin and decay. And instead of that, even at this moment it was being trimmed up afresh. She felt a thrill of anger as she saw a gardener come out of the enclosure, carrying a flag basket and a pair of shears. He came towards her, and something about the rather slouching and prowling gait struck her as being familiar. She looked more closely, and recognized Satan.
“How can you?” she said, when he was within speaking distance. He, of all people, should be more compassionate to the shade of Sir Ralph.
He feigned not to hear her.
“Would you care to go over the Folly, ma’am?” he inquired. “It’s quite a curiosity. Visitors come out from London to see it.”
Laura was not going to be fubbed off like this. He might pretend not to recognize her, but she would jog his memory.
“So you are a grave-keeper as well as a game-ke
eper?”
“The Council employ me to cut the bushes,” he answered.
“O Satan!” she exclaimed, hurt by his equivocations. “Do you always hide?”
With the gesture of a man who can never hold out against women, he yielded and sat down beside her on the grass.
Laura felt a momentary embarrassment. She had long wished for a reasonable conversation with her Master, but now that her wish seemed about to be granted, she felt rather at a loss for an opening. At last she observed:
“Titus has gone.”
“Indeed? Isn’t that rather sudden? It was only this afternoon that I met him.”
“Yes, I saw you meeting him. At least, I saw him meeting you.”
“Just so. It is remarkable,” he added, as though he were politely parrying her thought, “how invisible one is on these bare green hillsides.”
“Or in these thick brown woods,” said Laura rather sternly.
This sort of satanic playfulness was no novelty; Vinegar often behaved in the same fashion, leaping about just out of reach when she wanted to catch him and shut him up indoors.
“Or in these thick brown woods,” he concurred. “Folly Wood is especially dense.”
“Is?”
“Is. Once a wood, always a wood.”
Once a wood, always a wood. The words rang true, and she sat silent, considering them. Pious Asa might hew down the groves, but as far as the Devil was concerned he hewed in vain. Once a wood, always a wood: trees where he sat would crowd into a shade. And people going by in broad sunlight would be aware of slow voices overhead, and a sudden chill would fall upon their flesh. Then, if like her they had a natural leaning towards the Devil, they would linger, listening about them with half-closed eyes and averted senses; but if they were respectable people like Henry and Caroline they would talk rather louder and hurry on. There remaineth a rest for the people of God (somehow the thought of the Devil always propelled her mind to the Holy Scriptures), and for the other people, the people of Satan, there remained a rest also. Held fast in that strong memory no wild thing could be shaken, no secret covert destroyed, no haunt of shadow and silence laid open. The goods yard at Paddington, for instance—a savage place! as holy and enchanted as ever it had been. Not one of the monuments and tinkerings of man could impose on the satanic mind. The Vatican and the Crystal Palace, and all the neat human nest-boxes in rows, Balham and Fulham and the Cromwell Road—he saw through them, they went flop like card-houses, the bricks were earth again, and the steel girders burrowed shrieking into the veins of earth, and the dead timber was restored to the ghostly groves. Wolves howled through the streets of Paris, the foxes played in the throne-room of Schönbrunn, and in the basement at Apsley Terrace, the mammoth slowly revolved, trampling out its lair.
“Then I needn’t really have come here to meet you!” she exclaimed.
“Did you?”
“I didn’t know I did. I thought I came here to be in the country, and to escape being an aunt.”
“Titus came here to write a book on Fuseli, and to enjoy himself.”
“Titus! I can’t believe you wanted him.”
“But you believe I wanted you.”
Rather taken aback she yet answered the Devil honestly.
“Yes! I do believe you wanted me. Though really I don’t know why you should.”
A slightly malevolent smile crossed the Devil’s face. For some reason or other her modesty seemed to have nettled him.
“Some people would say that you had flung yourself at my head.”
“Other people,” she retorted, “would say that you had been going about seeking to devour me.”
“Exactly. I even roared that night. But you were asleep while I roared. Only the hills heard me triumphing over my spoil.”
Laura said: “I wish I could really believe that.”
“I wish you could, too,” he answered affably; “you would feel so comfortable and important. But you won’t although it is much more probable than you might suppose.”
Laura stretched herself out on the turf and pillowed her head on her arm.
“Nothing could feel more comfortable than I do, now that Titus is gone,” she said. “And as for importance, I never wish to feel important again. I had enough of that when I was an aunt.”
“Well, you’re a witch now.”
“Yes. . . . I really am, aren’t I?”
“Irrevocably.”
His voice was so perfectly grave that she began to suspect him of concealing some amusement. When but a moment before he had jested she had thought a deeper meaning lay beneath his words, she almost believed that his voice had roared over her in the thunder. If he had spoken without feigning then, she had not heard him; for he had stopped her ears with a sleep.
“Why do you sigh?” he asked.
“Did I sigh? I’m puzzled, that’s all. You see, although I’m a witch, and although you sitting here beside me tell me so, I can’t really appreciate it, take it in. It all seems perfectly natural.”
“That is because you are in my power. No servant of mine can feel remorse, or doubt, or surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will never escape me, for you can never wish to.”
“Yes, I can quite well believe that; I’m sure I shall never wish to escape you. But you are a mysterious Master.”
“You seem to me rather an exacting servant. I have shaped myself like a jobbing gardener, I am sitting on the grass beside you (I’ll have one of your apples if I may. They are a fruit I am particularly fond of), I am doing everything in my power to be agreeable and reassuring . . . What more do you want?”
“That is exactly what I complain of. You are too lifelike to be natural; why, it might be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. No! if I am really a witch, treat me as such. Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me about yourself.”
“Tell me first what you think,” he answered.
“I think”—she began cautiously (while he hid his cards it would not do to show all hers)—“I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering about and succoring decayed gentlewomen.”
“There are warlocks too, remember.”
“I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance. Do you understand?”
He was silent. She continued, slowly, knitting her brows in the effort to make clear to herself and him the thought that was in her mind:
“It’s like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust further down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull. And on Sunday they put on plain stuff gowns and starched white coverings on their heads and necks—the Puritan ones did—and walked across the fields to chapel, and listened to the sermon. Sin and Grace, and God and the—” (she stopped herself just in time), “and St. Paul. All men’s things, like politics, or mathematics. Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair. And on the way back they listened to more talk. Talk about the sermon, or war, or cock-fighting; and when they got back, there were the potatoes to be cooked for dinner. It sounds very petty to complain about, but I tell you, that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down. Settling down! You never die, do you? No doubt that’
s far worse, but there is a dreadful kind of dreary immortality about being settled down on by one day after another. And they think how they were young once, and they see new young women, just like what they were, and yet as surprising as if it had never happened before, like trees in spring. But they are like trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off. If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up—when they might sit in their doorways and think—to be doing still!”
She paused, out of breath. She had never made such a long speech in the whole of her life, nor spoken with such passion. She scarcely knew what she had said, and felt giddy and unaccustomed, as though she had been thrown into the air and had suddenly begun to fly.
The Devil was silent, and looked thoughtfully at the ground. He seemed to be rather touched by all this. She continued, for she feared that if she did not go on talking she would grow ashamed at having said so much.
“Is it true that you can poke the fire with a stick of dynamite in perfect safety? I used to take my nieces to scientific lectures, and I believe I heard it then. Anyhow, even if it isn’t true of dynamite, it’s true of women. But they know they are dynamite, and long for the concussion that may justify them. Some may get religion, then they’re all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even if other people still find them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them, they know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know it’s there—ready! Respectable countrywomen keep their grave-clothes in a corner of the chest of drawers, hidden away, and when they want a little comfort they go and look at them, and think that once more, at any rate, they will be worth dressing with care. But the witch keeps her cloak of darkness, her dress embroidered with signs and planets; that’s better worth looking at. And think, Satan, what a compliment you pay her, pursuing her soul, lying in wait for it, following it through all its windings, crafty and patient and secret like a gentleman out killing tigers. Her soul—when no one else would give a look at her body even! And they are all so accustomed, so sure of her! They say: ‘Dear Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year? Perhaps a hot-water bottle. Or what about a nice black lace scarf? Or a new workbox? Her old one is nearly worn out.’ But you say: ‘Come here, my bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.’ That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wicked-ness—well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that—but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and—what is it?—‘blight the genial bed.’ Of course, given the power, one may go in for that sort of thing, either in self-defense, or just out of playfulness. But it’s a poor twopenny housewifely kind of witchcraft, black magic is, and white magic is no better. One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life. As for the witches who can only express themselves by pins and bed-blighting, they have been warped into that shape by the dismal lives they’ve led. Think of Miss Carloe! She’s a typical witch, people would say. Really she’s the typical genteel spinster who’s spent herself being useful to people who didn’t want her. If you’d got her younger she’d never be like that.”
Lolly Willowes Page 15
