Besides, look at the shadows under poor Lucille’s eyes, and the wistfulness in the beautiful eyes themselves. Oh, if some awfully nice, kind, protective sort of man would but marry her! And if the sporting Lucille would let him!
Yvette did not tell the rector, nor Granny, about the Eastwoods. It would only have started a lot of talk which she detested. The rector wouldn’t have minded, for himself, privately. But he too knew the necessity of keeping as clear as possible from that poisonous, many-headed serpent, the tongue of the people.
“But I don’t want you to come if your father doesn’t know,” cried the little Jewess.
“I suppose I’ll have to tell him,” said Yvette. “I’m sure he doesn’t mind, really. But if he knew, he’d have to, I suppose.”
The young officer looked at her with an odd amusement, bird-like and unemotional, in his keen eyes. He too was by way of falling in love with Yvette. It was her peculiar virgin tenderness, and her straying, absent-minded detachment from things, which attracted him.
She was aware of what was happening, and she rather preened herself. Eastwood piqued her fancy. Such a smart young officer, awfully good class, so calm and amazing with a motor-car, and quite a champion swimmer, it was intriguing to see him quietly, calmly washing dishes, smoking his pipe, doing his job so alert and skilful. Or, with the same interested care with which he made his investigation into the mysterious inside of an automobile, concocting jugged hare in the cottage kitchen. Then going out in the icy weather and cleaning his car till it looked like a live thing, like a cat when she has licked herself. Then coming in to talk so unassumingly and responsively, if briefly, with the little Jewess. And apparently, never bored. Sitting at the window with his pipe, in bad weather, silent for hours, abstracted, musing, yet with his athletic body alert in its stillness.
Yvette did not flirt with him. But she did like him.
“But what about your future?” she asked him.
“What about it?” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth, the unemotional point of a smile in his bird’s eyes.
“A career! Doesn’t every man have to carve out a career? — like some huge goose with gravy?” She gazed with odd naïveté into his eyes.
“I’m perfectly all right today, and I shall be all right tomorrow,” he said, with a cold, decided look. “Why shouldn’t my future be continuous todays and tomorrows?”
He looked at her with unmoved searching.
“Quite!” she said. “I hate jobs, and all that side of life.” But she was thinking of the Jewess’s money.
To which he did not answer. His anger was of the soft, snowy sort, which comfortably muffles the soul.
They had come to the point of talking philosophically together. The little Jewess looked a bit wan. She was curiously naïve and not possessive, in her attitude to the man. Nor was she at all catty with Yvette. Only rather wan, and dumb.
Yvette, on a sudden impulse, thought she had better clear herself.
“I think life’s awfully difficult,” she said.
“Life is!” cried the Jewess.
“What’s so beastly, is that one is supposed to fall in love, and get married!” said Yvette, curling up her nose.
“Don’t you want to fall in love and get married?” cried the Jewess, with great glaring eyes of astounded reproach.
“No, not particularly!” said Yvette. “Especially as one feels there’s nothing else to do. It’s an awful chickencoop one has to run into.”
“But you don’t know what love is?” cried the Jewess.
“No!” said Yvette. “Do you?”
“I!” bawled the tiny Jewess. “I! My goodness, don’t I!” She looked with reflective gloom at Eastwood, who was smoking his pipe, the dimples of his disconnected amusement showing on his smooth, scrupulous face. He had a very fine, smooth skin, which yet did not suffer from the weather, so that his face looked naked as a baby’s. But it was not a round face: it was characteristic enough, and took queer ironical dimples, like a mask which is comic but frozen.
“Do you mean to say you don’t know what love is?” insisted the Jewess.
“No!” said Yvette, with insouciant candour. “I don’t believe I do! Is it awful of me, at my age?”
“Is there never any man that makes you feel quite, quite different?” said the Jewess, with another big-eyed look at Eastwood. He smoked, utterly unimplicated.
“I don’t think there is,” said Yvette. “Unless — yes! — unless it is that gipsy” — she had put her head pensively sideways.
“Which gipsy?” bawled the little Jewess.
“The one who was a Tommy and looked after horses in Major Eastwood’s regiment in the war,” said Yvette coolly.
The little Jewess gazed at Yvette with great eyes of stupor.
“You’re not in love with that gipsy!” she said.
“Well!” said Yvette. “I don’t know. He’s the only one that makes me feel — different! He really is!”
“But how? How? Has he ever said anything to you?”
“No! No!”
“Then how? What has he done?”
“Oh, just looked at me!”
“How?”
“Well you see, I don’t know. But different! Yes, different! Different, quite different from the way any man ever looked at me.”
“But how did he look at you?” insisted the Jewess.
“Why — as if he really, but really, desired me,” said Yvette, her meditative face looking like the bud of a flower.
“What a vile fellow! What right had he to look at you like that?” cried the indignant Jewess.
“A cat may look at a king,” calmly interposed the Major, and now his face had the smiles of a cat’s face.
“You think he oughtn’t to?” asked Yvette, turning to him.
“Certainly not! A gipsy fellow, with half a dozen dirty women trailing after him! Certainly not!” cried the tiny Jewess.
“I wondered!” said Yvette. “Because it was rather wonderful, really! And it was something quite different in my life.”
“I think,” said the Major, taking his pipe from his mouth, “that desire is the most wonderful thing in life. Anybody who can really feel it, is a king, and I envy nobody else!” He put back his pipe.
The Jewess looked at him stupefied.
“But Charles!” she cried. “Every common low man in Halifax feels nothing else!”
He again took his pipe from his mouth.
“That’s merely appetite,” he said.
And he put back his pipe.
“You think the gipsy is a real thing?” Yvette asked him. He lifted his shoulders.
“It’s not for me to say,” he replied. “If I were you, I should know, I shouldn’t be asking other people.”
“Yes — but — ” Yvette trailed out.
“Charles! You’re wrong! How could it be a real thing! As if she could possibly marry him and go round in a caravan!”
“I didn’t say marry him,” said Charles.
“Or a love affair! Why it’s monstrous! What would she think of herself! — That’s not love! That’s — that’s prostitution!”
Charles smoked for some moments.
“That gipsy was the best man we had, with horses. Nearly died of pneumonia. I thought he was dead. He’s a resurrected man to me. I’m a resurrected man myself, as far as that goes.” He looked at Yvette. “I was buried for twenty hours under snow,” he said. “And not much the worse for it, when they dug me out.”
There was a frozen pause in the conversation.
“Life’s awful!” said Yvette.
“They dug me out by accident,” he said.
“Oh! — ” Yvette trailed slowly. “It might be destiny, you know.”
To which he did not answer.
EIGHT
The rector heard about Yvette’s intimacy with the Eastwoods, and she was somewhat startled by the result. She had thought he wouldn’t care. Verbally, in his would-be humorous fashion, he was so entirel
y unconventional, such a frightfully good sport. As he said himself, he was a conservative anarchist, which meant, he was like a great many more people, a mere unbeliever. The anarchy extended to his humorous talk, and his secret thinking. The conservatism based on a mongrel fear of the anarchy, controlled every action. His thoughts, secretly, were something to be scared of. Therefore, in his life, he was fanatically afraid of the unconventional.
When his conservatism and his abject sort of fear were uppermost, he always lifted his lip and bared his teeth a little, in a dog-like sneer.
“I hear your latest friends are the half-divorced Mrs. Fawcett and the maquereau Eastwood,” he said to Yvette.
She didn’t know what a maquereau was, but she felt the poison in the rector’s fangs.
“I just know them,” she said. “They’re awfully nice, really. And they’ll be married in about a month’s time.”
The rector looked at her insouciant face with hatred. Somewhere inside him, he was cowed, he had been born cowed. And those who are born cowed are natural slaves, and deep instinct makes them fear with prisonous fear those who might suddenly snap the slave’s collar round their necks.
It was for this reason the rector had so abjectly curled up, who still so abject curled up before She-who-was-Cynthia: because of his slave’s fear of her contempt, the contempt of a born-free nature for a base-born nature.
Yvette too had a free-born quality. She too, one day, would know him, and clap the slave’s collar of her contempt round his neck.
But should she? He would fight to the death, this time, first. The slave in him was cornered this time, like a cornered rat, and with the courage of a cornered rat.
“I suppose they’re your sort!” he sneered.
“Well they are, really,” she said, with that blithe vagueness. “I do like them awfully. They seem so solid, you know, so honest.”
“You’ve got a peculiar notion of honesty!” he sneered. “A young sponge going off with a woman older than himself, so that he can live on her money! The woman leaving her home and her children! I don’t know where you get your idea of honesty. Not from me, I hope. — And you seem to be very well acquainted with them, considering you say you just know them. Where did you meet them?”
“When I was out bicycling. They came along in their car, and we happened to talk. She told me at once who she was, so that I shouldn’t make a mistake. She is honest.”
Poor Yvette was struggling to bear up.
“And how often have you seen them since?”
“Oh, I’ve just been over twice.”
“Over where?”
“To their cottage in Scoresby.”
He looked at her in hate, as if he could kill her. And he backed away from her, against the window-curtains of his study, like a rat at bay. Somewhere in his mind he was thinking unspeakable depravities about his daughter, as he had thought them of She-who-was-Cynthia. He was powerless against the lowest insinuations of his own mind. And these depravities which he attributed to the still-uncowed, but frightened girl in front of him, made him recoil, showing all his fangs in his handsome face.
“So you just know them, do you?” he said. “Lying is in your blood, I see. I don’t believe you get it from me.”
Yvette half averted her mute face, and thought of Granny’s barefaced prevarication. She did not answer.
“What takes you creeping round such couples?” he sneered. “Aren’t there enough decent people in the world, for you to know? Anyone would think you were a stray dog, having to run round indecent couples, because the decent ones wouldn’t have you. Have you got something worse than lying, in your blood?”
“What have I got, worse than lying in my blood?” she asked. A cold deadness was coming over her. Was she abnormal, one of the semicriminal abnormals? It made her feel cold and dead.
In his eyes, she was just brazening out the depravity that underlay her virgin, tender, bird-like face. She-who-was-Cynthia had been like this: a snowflower. And he had convulsions of sadistic horror, thinking what might be the actual depravity of She-who-was-Cynthia. Even his own love for her, which had been the lust love of the born cowed, had been a depravity, in secret, to him. So what must an illegal love be?
“You know best yourself, what you have got,” he sneered. “But it is something you had best curb, and quickly, if you don’t intend to finish in a criminal-lunacy asylum.”
“Why?” she said, pale and muted, numbed with frozen fear. “Why criminal lunacy? What have I done?”
“That is between you and your Maker,” he jeered. “I shall never ask. But certain tendencies end in criminal lunacy, unless they are curbed in time.”
“Do you mean like knowing the Eastwoods?” asked Yvette, after a pause of numb fear.
“Do I mean like nosing round such people as Mrs. Fawcett, a Jewess, and ex-Major Eastwood, a man who goes off with an older woman for the sake of her money? Why yes, I do!”
“But you can’t say that,” cried Yvette. “He’s an awfully simple, straightforward man.”
“He is apparently one of your sort.”
“Well. — In a way, I thought he was. I thought you’d like him too,” she said, simply, hardly knowing what she said.
The rector backed into the curtains, as if the girl menaced him with something fearful.
“Don’t say any more,” he snarled, abject. “Don’t say any more. You’ve said too much, to implicate you. I don’t want to learn any more horrors.”
“But what horrors?” she persisted.
The very naïveté of her unscrupulous innocence repelled him, cowed him still more.
“Say no more!” he said, in a low, hissing voice. “But I will kill you before you shall go the way of your mother.”
She looked at him, as he stood there backed against the velvet curtains of his study, his face yellow, his eyes distraught like a rat’s with fear and rage and hate, and a numb, frozen loneliness came over her. For her too, the meaning had gone out of everything.
It was hard to break the frozen, sterile silence that ensued. At last, however, she looked at him. And in spite of herself, beyond her own knowledge, the contempt for him was in her young, clear, baffled eyes. It fell like the slave’s collar over his neck, finally.
“Do you mean I mustn’t know the Eastwoods?” she said
“You can know them if you wish,” he sneered. “But you must not expect to associate with your Granny, and your Aunt Cissie, and Lucille, if you do. I cannot have them contaminated. Your Granny was a faithful wife and a faithful mother, if ever one existed. She has already had one shock of shame and abomination to endure. She shall never be exposed to another.”
Yvette heard it all dimly, half hearing.
“I can send a note and say you disapprove,” she said dimly.
“You follow your own course of action. But remember, you have to choose between clean people, and reverence for your Granny’s blameless old age, and people who are unclean in their minds and their bodies.”
Again there was a silence. Then she looked at him, and her face was more puzzled than anything. But somewhere at the back of her perplexity was that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of the free-born for the base-born. He, and all the Saywells, were base-born.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll write and say you disapprove.”
He did not answer. He was partly flattered, secretly triumphant, but abjectedly.
“I have tried to keep this from your Granny and Aunt Cissie,” he said. “It need not be public property, since you choose to make your friendship clandestine.”
There was a dreary silence.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go and write.”
And she crept out of the room.
She addressed her little note to Mrs. Eastwood. “Dear Mrs. Eastwood, Daddy doesn’t approve of my coming to see you. So you will understand if we have to break it off. I’m awfully sorry — .” That was all.
Yet she felt a dreary blank when she had posted her le
tter. She was now even afraid of her own thoughts. She wanted, now, to be held against the slender, fine-shaped breast of the gipsy. She wanted him to hold her in his arms, if only for once, for once, and comfort and confirm her. She wanted to be confirmed by him, against her father, who had only a repulsive fear of her.
And at the same time she cringed and winced, so that she could hardly walk, for fear the thought was obscene, a criminal lunacy. It seemed to wound her heels as she walked, the fear. The fear, the great cold fear of the base-born, her father, everything human and swarming. Like a great bog humanity swamped her, and she sank in, weak at the knees, filled with repulsion and fear of every person she met.
She adjusted herself, however, quite rapidly to her new conception of people. She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one’s bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile. So, with the rapid adaptability of the postwar generation, she adjusted herself to the new facts. Her father was what he was. He would always play up to appearances. She would do the same. She too would play up to appearances.
So, underneath the blithe, gossamer-straying insouciance, a certain hardness formed, like rock crystallising in her heart. She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies. Outwardly, she seemed the same. Inwardly she was hard and detached, and, unknown to herself, revengeful.
Outwardly she remained the same. It was part of her game. While circumstances remained as they were, she must remain, at least in appearance, true to what was expected of her.
But the revengefulness came out in her new vision of people. Under the rector’s apparently gallant handsomeness, she saw the weak, feeble nullity. And she despised him. Yet still, in a way, she liked him too. Feelings are so complicated.
It was Granny whom she came to detest with all her soul. That obese old woman, sitting there in her blindness like some great red-blotched fungus, her neck swallowed between her heaped-up shoulders and her rolling, ancient chins, so that she was neckless as a double potato, her Yvette really hated, with that pure, sheer hatred which is almost a joy. Her hate was so clear, that while she was feeling strong, she enjoyed it.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 562
