The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  Sipping and gossip ended the day. At midnight she crept shivering into bed, having bestowed some sweets and Black Market oranges in the two sad, flat stockings hanging on the bed-rail; and in the shy and sceptical prayer which she murmured before she fell asleep, she asked a blessing upon her friend and her friend’s husband and children.

  When Sylvia had been sitting upon the suitcase for some ten minutes she saw a light coming towards her over the fields which seemed to her to be bobbing up and down in an irritable manner. However, she was now so hungry, cold and tired that she had ceased to be afraid of facing an angry farmer, and she therefore went down to meet the lantern, calling cheerfully:

  “Is that Mr. Hoadley? It’s me—Sylvia Scorby. I say, I’m ever so sorry I couldn’t get here before. I missed two trains from London on account of them being so crowded.”

  Mr. Hoadley was very surprised to see her, and also slightly annoyed, for he had by this time given up all hope of her and was returning to the farm resigned and ready to make the most of what was left of the evening’s pleasantness. He also disliked having to jump abruptly from one state of mind into another, but he did notice with satisfaction that she seemed—from what he could make out in the dimness—to be a tall strong girl, and the cheerfulness of her voice was disarming.

  “You’ve certainly given me an afternoon of it,” he answered gruffly, but putting out his hand for her to shake. “I’d given you up for to-night. How did you find your way here? (This way—it isn’t far, and we’ve kept some supper for you.)”

  This was good news for Sylvia, who enjoyed eating better than anything in the world except shrieking with her friends and going to the pictures, and soon she was giving Mr. Hoadley a lively account of her adventures on the journey—and she included Emilio’s attempt to kiss her.

  He let her talk away without making any comment, but the incident confirmed his personal belief that Emilio was the worse character of the two Italians, and it also gave him a favourable sidelight upon Sylvia herself. If she had displayed virtuous indignation even he, charitable and good-natured as he was, would have suspected its genuineness, for he was no fool and he took human nature for granted; but her robust mingling of impatience with laughter as she related Emilio’s discomfiture convinced him that if there were to be any trouble “in that way” later on, it would be started, not by this girl, but by the Italians.

  Nevertheless—missing trains, picking up Italians in that Linga-Longa place, dodging kisses at nine o’clock at night on lonely roads—no, it was not what you might call a good beginning; she must be a scatter-brained creature, and, glancing at her as they went up the path leading to the door and light from the windows fell upon her eyes and hair, Mr. Hoadley wished that the Board had sent him someone with glasses and a wig.

  The next moment Sylvia stood in the kitchen of the farmhouse, a long, low chamber running the whole length of the front of the building, with windows whose broad sills supported ancient shutters freshly painted grey, and a floor of narrow pale red bricks scooped into hollows by the tread of feet throughout two hundred and fifty years. The walls were washed in rose colour and divided at irregular intervals by wide oak beams richly blackened by smoke from countless household fires, and the ceiling was similarly adorned.

  Mrs. Hoadley could feel pride in entertaining a family party in such a room, and this evening she appeared at her best; flushed, complacent, hospitable, and pressing her light cakes and flaky sausage rolls upon the circle gathered about the fire. Supper proper was over, but the company was at the agreeable stage of sipping and smoking. Some had cigarettes and some had pipes, but the kitchen was so large that the air remained no more than agreeably warm, and tolerably fresh.

  The inglenook was filled by an iron range which Mrs. Hoadley seldom used, preferring the gas cooker installed upon the opposite wall, but to-night the whole top of this cumbrous object had been removed, converting it into an open brazier in which glowed a splendid mass of fiery cinders rendered fiercer by the frost outside, and supporting upon itself a massive log of oak up which climbed golden flames. Some eight people or so were gathered about the warmth; two little boys were reclining half-asleep against their mother’s side and every now and then someone would remark that those boys really must go up to bed; and then the conversation would go on as before.

  When Sylvia and Mr. Hoadley entered, everybody looked up and exclaimed, and said that she must be cold, and they all drew aside to give her room by the fire except Mr. Waite (whom she at once privately labelled Dirty Dick because of the cold look he gave her). Mr. Waite was sitting in a corner sipping the mulled beer which Mr. Hoadley had invited him to share on this Christmas Eve because he did not like to think of him alone up there with his chickens and his books. Mr. Waite for his part disapproved of Sylvia from his first glimpse of her; a loud, provocative, painted young girl with dyed hair.

  She was confused and made shy for the moment by the light and the heat from the fire and the many faces and voices after the darkness and silence outside, and only smiled nervously in reply to Mrs. Hoadley’s brisk pleasant questions, allowing herself to be installed in a retired corner with her supper on a small table, while the kettle was put on again for her tea and the company tactfully left her to herself.

  But when she had finished her supper (which was a good one and promised hopefully for the future) she joined the circle about the fire and soon began to join in, and then to dominate. the conversation; telling them about her adventures on the journey and making them laugh, while her lovely eyes moved half-bashfully, half-audaciously, from one face to another and her voice grew louder, her laugh more frequent, as her nature expanded in the warmth of that general attention which was its strongest need.

  From the darkest, warmest corner, where the shadow of the overhanging mantelpiece partly obscured the light, four eyes smallened by age yet still very bright watched her unceasingly, following every movement of her laughing face. A little old man and woman sat there side by side, both toothless, both past eighty years. They were like two small brown nuts, with all the satin smoothness of youth dried away. She had a dress of plum-coloured cloth, sewn with opal beads in a rich pattern round its high neck, the skirt carefully drawn up to show a black petticoat of crackling silk and a fairy-like foot in a tiny black boot; he wore a suit of thick cloth of the square cut of forty years ago, exhaling a musty odour. He was bald, but her thinning hair, parted and braided and coiled in a knot, was black as a girl’s and showed off the earrings, shaped like cornucopias filled with roses and of a rich red gold rarely seen nowadays, that dangled from her tiny withered ears. These were old Joseph and Nancy Hoadley, the farmer’s grandparents. They lived at Amberley, some seventeen miles away, and that morning he had driven over to fetch them from their home amidst the willow woods and marestail grasses of the Wild Brooks.

  They, and the rest of the company with the exception of Mr. Waite, found Sylvia highly entertaining, though they did not admire her so much as she thought they did and they all wondered whether Mr. Hoadley would get any work out of her, for her small, white dimpled hands looked as useless as they were pretty. Mr. Waite simply thought that she was a bold piece who ought to be smacked.

  It was late when the party finally separated for the night. Mrs. Hoadley, carrying a candle, took Sylvia up to the small chamber with sloping roof and tiny window that was to be her own. There was barely room for the large young creature to turn herself about as she undressed by the soft light from the oil lamp, but this did not trouble her, for she was intoxicated by her social success during the evening and so prepared to be delighted with all the circumstances of her new life that she fell asleep with a smile on her lips.

  “Well, what do you think of her, Molly?” asked the farmer, when he and his wife were alone.

  “She thinks plenty of herself.”

  “She looks strong, that’s one good thing. We can do with all of that; we don’t want any weaklings here.”

  “Great lump,” said Mrs. Hoa
dley, but not ill-naturedly.

  “She might be a bit stupid at learning things; she talks too much, she’ll never listen, I’m sure,” he went on.

  “She made you laugh, anyhow; I haven’t heard you make such a noise for months. And she keeps herself clean. That’s something.”

  “Girls mostly do nowadays, Molly,” he said mildly.

  “Don’t you believe it!” she snapped. “Not as clean as that girl does.”

  He had taken it for granted that Sylvia’s manner and appearance would meet with his wife’s strong disapproval, and was resigned to a series of scenes culminating at last in the girl’s dismissal, but Mrs. Hoadley’s responses were not always calculable, and he now knew from her tone that she had decided to approve. He was relieved, and decided in his turn to suppress the story about Emilio.

  In fact, Sylvia brought with her something of the nervous excitement and sense of quickened living that belongs to a city, and this was the salt, the flavour, for which the city-bred Molly Hoadley craved. She felt vaguely that Sylvia’s opinion of country scenes and country routine, which she herself found so dull, would be like her own, and it was this that had really decided her in the girl’s favour.

  Mrs. Hoadley would have been content to live in a suburb of some great city with a culture based upon the teapot rather than upon the fermented grape. Everything in the suburb would have been pretty, sensible, pleasant and orderly and run on electricity, and all the men would years ago have shot themselves or run away to sea. Because she was conscientious and fond of her husband, she did the work of two women on the farm: she scamped no detail, she forced herself to perform, to the last hairsbreadth and beyond, the duties she most disliked; but she dreaded the black icy winter mornings as much as she did the glaring summer ones noisy with crowings and cries; and shrank from the occasional necessary contacts with warm, hairy, unexpectedly strong animal bodies. Above all, she was depressed by the quiet, and the year-long lack of plentiful and frequent human company; she disliked equally the long hushed winter evenings and the long light summer ones when every flower in the hedge seemed to stare at her.

  For the sake of having on the farm the company of another woman who shared her views (even if the woman was only a chit of eighteen) she was prepared to overlook dyed hair and a loud manner.

  10

  RONALD FELT THAT he would return to Germany with an easier mind if he had heard a doctor’s verdict upon Meg, whose temperature went up to a hundred and one every night without correspondingly alarming symptoms during the day. On the day before his leave expired, therefore, he walked over to the farm and, having with some difficulty traced and succeeded in talking to a doctor recommended by the Hoadleys, he arranged for him to visit Meg that afternoon.

  The fields were still covered in snow, and the only moving objects in the white landscape were himself, and the smoke going up from the cottage chimney into the windless grey sky. He took off his snow-caked boots in the porch, and went down the passage in stockinged feet into the untidy parlour, now scented with balm from the Christmas tree and the metallic odour of tinsel decorations. Louise was there, reading a book in the clear glare of light from the snow with her elbows resting upon the table, and although she glanced up and said, “Hullo, Father” and smiled as he entered, she at once returned to her book. He stood by the fire, supporting himself by one hand against the mantelpiece, and turned his numbed feet in front of the flames, and presently, as he gazed absently out of the window at the hushed landscape, he began to quote in a low tone—for the pleasure of speaking and hearing the French—a poem beloved by him in his youth:

  Qu’il est doux, qu’il est doux d’écouter des histoires,

  Des histoires du temps passé,

  Quand les branches d’arbre sont noires,

  Quand la neige est épaisse et charge un sol glacé!

  Louise had raised her head from her book at the first sound of the words and, after listening attentively, now took advantage of the pause he made while recalling the next verse:

  “What does it mean, Father? It’s French, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It means: How delightful it is to listen to stories of the olden days, when the branches of the trees are black, and the snow is thick and covers a frosty earth.”

  “But it rhymes, I heard it. Is it a poem?”

  “Yes; by Alfred de Vigny. It’s called Snow.”

  “Say some more.” She left her book and came over to the fire to lean against him. He put his arm about her (how slender she was, and her scanty jersey was darned on the shoulder—but the children of the Homeless People were skeletons and their clothing was rags) and went on, with an expression of pain that gradually faded as the words performed their spell:

  Quand seul dans un ciel pâle un peuplier s’élance—

  Louise listened, with her eyes fixed dreamily upon the fire. When he came to Est-ce vous, blanche Emma, princesse de la Gaule? he broke off.

  “There! No more,” he said, and gently kissed her. “That’s the best place to end at.”

  “Oh why, Father? Do go on. I like it so much.”

  “Because that line is the heart of the poem. When I was seventeen it summed up all the Dark Ages for me.”

  He had forgotten that he was talking to somebody aged only ten, but she, while only half-understanding what he had just said, was charmed by the unfamiliar sounds and his air of imparting a secret. She moved closer to him and murmured again, looking up into his face:

  “Do say some more.”

  He was struck by the intelligence in her eyes, thirsty for what she did not realise as knowledge, and asked abruptly:

  “Louise, do you want to go to school?”

  “I shan’t mind. Jenny’s going too,” she answered, but her dreamy, eager expression was now replaced by a wary one, for all grown-ups, even father, had this habit of pouncing questions upon one which might lead to a row.

  “Yes, but how do you, yourself, feel about it?”

  “I shan’t mind,” she repeated, a little uneasily now, and glanced towards her book lying on the table.

  “You love reading, I know, but how about your arithmetic—tables, and that sort of thing?”

  “I can do adding and subtracting and some multiplying. Jenny can do dividing, too. She was just starting on long dividing when we went away from Lyle Villas and didn’t have Miss Leeper any more.”

  “Let’s hear your tables up as far as you know,” said her father.

  She began confidently enough, but broke down half-way through six times, and he shook his head.

  “High time you went to school, Weez.”

  “You’re cross with me,” she announced, in a voice of flat despair.

  “Not a bit, dear; don’t sound so miserable. You’ve got a good brain and if you work you’re going to be a clever woman. Now run off and finish your book.”

  He went into the kitchen to tell Alda what he had arranged with the doctor, aware as never before of the backwardness of his daughters in the elements of a thorough and solid education. He saw that he had allowed himself to be overcome by the difficulty of finding living accommodation close to a reputable school, by the long waiting lists for admission into the schools themselves, above all, by Alda’s casual attitude towards the matter and he made up his mind then and there that whether Jenny and Louise were happy at the convent or not, they must stay there for as long as was possible.

  He said as much to them before he left the next day, leaving them with rather long faces; for a word from him impressed them more, coming from such a grave, seldom-seen, revered source, than all Alda’s frequent fireworks. The snow was melting under driving rain, it was impossible to play in the meadows, and the prospect of a long sojourn at the convent was rendered doubly depressing in their flat, after-Christmas mood.

  “Cheer up, my Jen,” he said, and stooped to kiss her doleful face. His battered luggage was piled all about him; the taxi waited at the edge of the field, and beside him stood Alda holding up the umbrella
with which she insisted on sheltering him although he protested that he would have to get wet sooner or later.

  “Good-bye, darling, darling Father.” They clung to him, standing upon tiptoe to reach his neck, his waist, and hugging him with their thin arms. When he had disengaged himself, he glanced up at the window and there was Meg in her dressing-gown held aloft by Jean, smiling and waving with her fair mane floating about her face.

  “Nothing much wrong with her to-day,” he said to Alda as they splashed across the field towards the taxi. The doctor had announced that Meg was suffering from a slight infection, not of a serious nature, of which there was A Good Deal About. England was full of such short, tiresome, nameless and apparently causeless fevers after the Second World War. Perhaps they blew across from Europe; perhaps they wavered up out of the dirty scarred streets in the towns, perhaps they were bred in bodies sick to death of pain and monotony and violence and grief. No one seemed to know, and of course the doctor did not express these picturesque views; he said that M. & B. was not necessary but might be tried if the temperature persisted, smiled at Meg and very gently pulled her hair, and went away. This morning, however, the temperature was slightly under normal, which was a favourable sign.

  “Oh, I’m not worrying about her any more, but I expect we shall all get it—and in a house this size, in this weather——”

  She had not meant to complain to him, but the words slipped out.

  “Poor old girl,” he said. “But Jean’s here to help you, and I should get her to stay on for a bit, if she will.”

  “Oh, she’ll stay all right. The difficulty will be to get rid of her. Still, she will be a help. Here we are. Good-bye, my darling.”