The Spanish Virgin

by V. S. Pritchett

  “So you see!” she mocked.

  “Oh, I know what it is. It’s a very convenient arrangement. Sometimes the woman wants you, and sometimes she doesn’t want you, but she will never let you go.”

  “But you are talking just like the play, which you say yourself is silly.”

  “There is one true passage in it, Crystal, in your part at the beginning of the third act in the scene in Court, where Doris says, ‘Many a man through the tyrannical divorce laws of his so-called free country is tied to a woman who is too selfish to release him.” He was very angry as he solemnly preached the lines.

  “I think that is absurd. Nobody could be so wicked.”

  “Oh, couldn’t they? Look at me. I haven’t lived with my wife for four years, but do you think she will let me go? Not a bit of it. I married her when I was a mere kid no older than you. She dragged me through one quarrel after another with every manager we worked for. And after I had not seen her for two years and was very ill I sent for her. She came because she thought I was dying. A most touching piece of affection. But she came with a lawyer to see that I left all my property to her. I shan’t forget it. I was never so quickly cured of an illness in my life. I shot her out of the place inside half an hour.”

  Dufaux was exalting in his wounds. He began to remember all his disasters in love and in money. He described to her how much he had lost; how his father and mother had been on the stage and had left him a comfortable sum which, owing to the machinations of his wife—and other women he added vehemently—had either vanished into their hands or dwindled in theatrical enterprises that had failed. He built up a luxurious scene of disaster, against which Crystal, moved and exalted too, saw him stalking, a tragic and lordly figure, a very god of calamity.

  “You know what I say is true,” he said. “All women know it.”

  He looked at her contemptuously.

  “Look at your mother,” he burst out. “She is a snake. She is simply without any conscience whatever. I found out a lot about her, unfortunately too late. Not content with going round with a tale on her tongue to all and sundry, she would do anything for money. She just sent you round as a bait. I cannot imagine anything more vile. And always she pretends it is not for herself but for you. That is how they always work. Never for themselves. Oh dear, no.”

  Crystal’s frozen spirit, released suddenly from the bondage of what had held her to him, melted and boiled into rage. Her pride returned.

  “You are insulting my mother, and you are insulting me.”

  “I am telling the truth.”

  “It is not the truth. It is a lie. My mother has done nothing of the sort. Oh, I keep on hearing all these absurd lies. I thought that you at least who pride yourself on being so quick to see things should not have seen through all this. But men are like this. They just take everything that is told them.”

  “You naturally defend your mother.”

  “I am not defending her.”

  “You are.”

  “No, I am not. What she does is nothing to do with me. That is why I do not listen to every tale that is going round.”

  She saw Dufaux was bewildered. They walked on in silence, with a cold space of sky between their shoulders. Crystal’s heart was joyful. She walked erect, her chin firm and her eyes alert. A dark bird was flicking its turning wings over the river whose light was engraved upon the declining afternoon. She was like that bird that could powerfully sweep up into the air and circle, feint and dart about him.

  “It would be surprising of course,” he said weakly to break the long silence, “if you did not defend her.”

  “I am not defending her. There is nothing to defend or deny. I am merely defending myself.”

  “I did not say anything about you.”

  “Oh yes, you did. You said I was a decoy.”

  “I said she used you as a decoy.”

  “Well, what is the difference? You said I was a decoy.”

  Crystal stopped and faced him. The Minster bell struck five. The sound bayed over the miles of flat fields like the cry of a chained hound. Crystal saw his tall figure silhouetted against the dead water, and the intent staring of his eyes.

  “You know,” she said mockingly, “you are being absurd to talk like this. I don’t suppose you know what you have said, and how ridiculous you have been. We are not on the stage at the moment.”

  He came forward and put a hand on her shoulder and said:

  “You don’t deceive me.”

  “But think of all the women who have deceived you,” she smiled, and added, “I don’t think we will stand here long, do you? because it is very damp.” Under the protection of the darkness she spoke without fear, and all things she saw seemed greater and more mysterious.

  They walked briskly back to the city. Their breath clouded on the cold air. He stopped to light a cigarette, and she saw his face lit up by the flash of the match and heard the hiss of the match as it struck the water. He hurried to catch her up.

  “After all,” he said scornfully, “it is nothing to me what you do.”

  “I thought perhaps by what you said …”

  Crystal was happy and triumphant, not only because she was now free of all fear of Dufaux, but also because by defending her mother she had silenced that voice in her conscience. Dufaux became uncomfortably gay and talkative, trying to pretend nothing had happened. He pointed to the lights of the city, the thin boughs of mist that rose out of the river and lay across it, the tower of the Minster rising out of its velvet habiliments of shadow.

  “A halo—do you see?” Dufaux said loftily, pointing to the faint glow of light above the city. “It is consecrated.”

  As they entered the outlying lighted streets they felt that some elusive wonder was leaving them, and they were moved by regrets for what they could not say …some profound dark sighing behind them, that grew fainter and fainter until it was snapped off by the noises of the city.

  Crystal was an alien among the gaudy cacophony of the traffic, the pa-paaing of sleek cars, the ringing and stamping of dray-horses, the crying newsboys, the shrill bicycle bells, and in those sudden silences of the traffic in which could be heard only hundreds of footsteps murmuring and lisping like voices.

  “Did ye have a nice time with Fonty down the river this afternoon?” asked Miss O’Malley in the dressing-room that night.

  “He is awfully funny,” she said.

  “He’ll be funnier still one of these days,” she replied, and laughed as though all her teeth were tin bells.

  Crystal began undressing and sitting in a vivid red and green kimono before her mirror, began to whistle softly some tune that had been played by all the barrel organs of Seville over two years ago and had woven itself into her memory. She gazed at herself, watching the pouting of her lips and the little hole in the middle from which the tune was coiling. She was very happy.

  “For God’s sake stop whistling,” cried out Miss O’Malley, and even the gipsy-like Mrs. Hawkins protested. “Unless ye want to bring bad luck to the company and mess us up worse than we are already.”

  The weeks sprang out of this crescendo of change into an aria of happiness for Crystal. In speaking to Dufaux she never again referred to his outburst against her mother. At first she had been depressed because he had evidently thought she shared her mother’s guilt, but perceived that a little mystery is excellent. She observed that sometimes Dufaux seemed proudly to regard her silence as agreement with his words, and at other times he was fearful of her opinion and anxious to make amends. The storm had cleared the air, and Crystal found excitement in the fact that it lay glassy, echoing and distant upon her horizon.

  Having forced herself in her own devious way from her bondage, she became coquettish and awakened him to pursuit. A score of meetings in his rooms or hers, in restaurants, dance halls, walks, a glittering and fascinating net of talk drew them apart from the rest of the company. For weeks it dragged round from one town to another, creaking, wheezing, declaiming, qu
arrelling, united by the common fear of extinction. Dufaux wooed her not openly first, but by indulging in long tirades of self-condemnation.

  “Fonty, you are romantic. You are always pretending to be a criminal,” she said one day when they had gone riding on the moors. They had hired the horses from a certain Captain Pigott, a genial, bearded, bear of a man with very wet lips and loud laughter, who owned the theatre. There was a touch of exaggeration even in Crystal’s riding habit which pleased the actor.

  “I like that from you. You do not live in this world at all.”

  “Ah, Fonty,” she shook her head. “I used to be so romantic, but now I have seen through everything. You do not guess how wise I am, how cynical. The thing is to have lots and lots of money and success, and not to mind how you get it.”

  Under cover of these absurd conversations each pressed his suit. As they rode, now she was cantering ahead of him and he, taken by surprise, was obliged to catch her up. They went for miles over crisp green commons and now he pursued, now she. The air drummed in their eyes and moved over the moorland as though they were riding along the bed of a vast lough of ice-cold water which had fallen out of the sky that morning. It seemed a sacrilege to allow the snorting animals to stamp their hoofs upon the stripes of sunlight that lay like sparkling emerald linen under the leafless trees. When Crystal and Dufaux turned back they passed through sun-quilled and mist-feathered woods, and their passage, the clicking of the horses’ shoes and the falling of their own voices, was like the passage of the stream that rang out of the moor’s throat.

  Dufaux took her back to his rooms for lunch,

  “You would make a lovely Imogen,” he said as she pulled off her hat and stood swaggering with her hands in her pockets.

  “I would love to be a man. Then everything would not be so tangled up!”

  “I am glad you are not.” He advanced towards her.

  She pulled a face and blinked her eyes.

  “May I go to your room to powder my nose?”

  While she was gone Dufaux began to pace up and down the crowded sitting-room, humming to himself. As the time went by he banged one fist into another exclaiming, “Oh damn, damn!” He sat down, sighing aloud:

  “Why can’t we clear out of this?”

  Then got up and began pacing up and down again, looking at himself in the mirror, and muttering, “You fool,” and again “You poor devil.” He wondered what Crystal was doing.

  She went into his room, which was at the back of the house. The varnished furniture made a mean semi-circle about the iron bed. The whole room looked like something that has been licked clean and bare to the bone by an hungry animal. Crystal went to the long mirror of the wardrobe murmuring, “Imogen”; then she went to the four other mirrors, in turn peeping into each, saying the name again and smiling. She returned to think about herself, in the long glass, to pat her hair, redden her lips, powder her nose, and she said, pointing to the reflection which pointed back at her:

  “He loves you and you love him. That is very wrong.”

  She moved nearer the glass and trembled at the nearness, the delicacy, the exactitude of her image. “The whole of herself, the good and the bad creeping nearer.” She thought.

  “Oh dear,” she whispered gently. She held her face in her hands: “He loves me. He loves me. Mustn’t he love me?” She turned to the window in despair, pleading with the clear sky. There was no cloud, nor bird, nor sign from heaven in it, but the new coppery telegraph wires ruled to a corner of the roof, and shining like a stave of golden music.

  “What a horrible room this is.”

  Then, as if dismissing her trouble, she began to examine the room with amusement. She saw a black, flat round thing on the shelf of a white cupboard, and she took it down. Click! Oh, it was an opera hat. She laughed at the magic, and tried the trick again. “What funny things Fonty has,” she exclaimed, trying the hat on before the mirror. She tilted the hat rakishly to right and to left, turratum, turratum, we march. Left. Right. Left. Right. The flirting drummer boys. She pushed it back on her head drunkenly and put her hands on her hips, “You shay you love me-sh.” She pulled the hat forward onto her forehead and frowning, “Now this is a serious business for a young woman of your age, heh! heh!” Then she twirled round and poised it prettily, exactly upright on top of her head, and made comical waving, snake-like gestures with her arms. She took a half crown from her breeches pocket, and screwed the coin into her left eye.

  “I walked along the Bois de Boulong,” she sang out in glee. “Haw. Haw!” On the whim of the moment, as lively as a bell, she marched out of the room and into the sitting-room where Dufaux was waiting by the window.

  “Good morning, ‘Miss Lance!’ How do you do? You are looking very beautiful,” she cried, raising the hat.

  Dufaux started:

  “Good Lord, Crystal!”

  “No. I said Good morning, ‘Miss Lance’,” said Crystal gravely. Dufaux edged along the sideboard, smiling to conceal his faintly annoyed bewilderment: for there he was, caught standing in the middle of his worries.

  “What …” he began.

  “I have come about something very important, ‘Miss Lance’,” she said in a formal declamatory tone. “Something very serious. You mistake me. You do not see me in my true colours. I,” she declared in a deep voice, carried away by her own excitement, “I am the Decoy!”

  She crept towards him, making sinister gestures and half-closing her eyes; her acting multiplied her daring. Dufaux, amused, annoyed, confused, embarrassed and excited too by the magic of fantasy which had danced into the room with her and was glistening in her eyes, advanced to catch her by the arm, as one is impelled to clap one’s hat upon a butterfly that has settled. She stepped out of reach.

  “Do not ter-rifle with me, ‘Miss Lance’,” she said melodramatically, “I have not come to ter-rifle!”

  He laughed down his confusion and stuck his hand in his pockets. She leered at him comically.

  “‘Miss Lance’,” she cried, with her hand on her heart. “I—I have known you but a short time …”

  “Alas, too long, ‘Mr. Dufaux’,” he said with malice.

  “Alas, too short a time for me, cruel ‘Miss Lance’. I do not know if I have the right to speak, for I am better at preaching than pleading, as you may have noticed. Yes? I dare not call you ‘Crystal’, that almost holy name,” she raised her eyes in saintly mischief, “though I would feign call you by a dearer appellation. But,” she became emotional, “I am only flesh and blood and trousers. Why should I conceal what my heart is too full to behold, I mean how can I conceal what my heart is brimming over with. Ah, ‘Crystal’, can you not see the pain that is in my heart, can you not read my eyes, have you no mercy on the anguish of my bosom? On the sufferings of one who tosses on his couch at night, dreaming of you, worshipping.…”

  She flung out her arms, and the half crown dropped from her eye. She paused to watch it spin along the floor, ring on the boards by the brass coal-box, and collapse. She stamped a foot.

  “Oh dear! How tiresome money is! Say something, Fonty. For goodness’ sake don’t stand grinning at me. Have you forgotten your lines. ‘Sure ye’re after spoiling me entrance’,” she said in Miss O’Malley‘s brogue.

  “Crashando it!” he exclaimed at the name of his enemy, and coming towards her. She dodged to the end of the table.

  “Don’t be ludicrous, Fonty,” she cried.

  “Crashando it!” he laughed eagerly and meaningly. His eyes were shining. “‘Mr. Dufaux!’” he commanded.

  “Oh ‘Miss Lance’,” she cried breathlessly, moving round the table away from him as he approached her. “How can I dare! What can I say! I have nothing to offer you. I have neither position, money nor fame, in fact between ourselves, I have a wife at Eastbourne. Eastbourne of all places! But you too have a mother in London. But I do not care. I am a dashing fellow. I have ruined hundreds and hundreds of women, poor souls, and often shed a tear over them. Your beauty bli
nds me. I—I should like to shed a tear over you. An ocean of love is beating inside me … No, go away, Fonty … the goodness of your soul has filled …Fonty! …with a courage I never knew I possessed. Nothing will alter the inflex …the inflexo …”

  “The inflection …” He made a grasp at her sleeve but she eluded him again.

  “Not at all. The inflexibility of my passion!”

  He took her by the shoulders, but that comical opera hat repulsed him. She laughed at him, as though trying to cool with laughter the rising heat of her excited blood.

  “Really, Fonty. You are ridiculous. You play very badly, very badly indeed. I am very glad you do not make love to me. You are not good at it at all.”

  “I don’t play,” he said, staring into her eyes which were flashing like two pools in wind; and trying to take her into his arms.

  “Go away, Fonty! Please! Let me go. I said you are not to make love to me.”

  “Oh, did you?” he said, pulling the hat from her head. Now he was free.

  “No, Fonty, please, go away. Remember I am the Decoy,” she cried with nervous severity, trying to step back to the door.

  He pulled her to him and kissed her forehead, her eyes, her hair, her cheeks as she struggled. Her fingers slipped from the door handle.

  “Fonty, please. There is someone coming. I must go.”

  “I don’t care. It is my turn now.”

  “Please. Oh, Fonty.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care who comes and what happens. You are wonderful and adorable and I love you. Damn everybody.”

  He kissed her roughly.

  “You dear creature.”

  “Fonty—let me go. Oh darling.”

  She slipped away from him, her bronze hair disordered, her white skin flushed and burning, her hair stinging her skin. Her eyes were darker and brighter. She put her hair straight by the mirror. He came up behind her and kissed her neck.

  “Oh dear,” she said, desperately, “Life! Money! Muddle!”

  But she felt this was like being at the heart of a strong light which blinded her to everything outside it.