“The sandwiches . . .” said Mrs. Swithin, coming into the kitchen. She refrained from adding “Sands” to “sandwiches,” for Sand and sandwiches clashed. “Never play,” her mother used to say, “on people’s names.” And Trixie was not a name that suited, as Sands did, the thin, acid woman, red-haired, sharp and clean, who never dashed off masterpieces, it was true; but then never dropped hairpins in the soup. “What in the name of Thunder?” Bart had said, raising a hairpin in his spoon, in the old days, fifteen years ago, before Sands came, in the time of Jessie Pook.
Mrs. Sands fetched bread; Mrs. Swithin fetched ham. One cut the bread; the other the ham. It was soothing, it was consolidating, this handwork together. The cook’s hands cut, cut, cut. Whereas Lucy, holding the loaf, held the knife up. Why’s stale bread, she mused, easier to cut than fresh? And so skipped, sidelong, from yeast to alcohol; so to fermentation; so to inebriation; so to Bacchus; and lay under purple lamps in a vineyard in Italy, as she had done, often; while Sands heard the clock tick; saw the cat; noted a fly buzz; and registered, as her lips showed, a grudge she mustn’t speak against people making work in the kitchen while they had a high old time hanging paper roses in the barn.
“Will it be fine?” asked Mrs. Swithin, her knife suspended. In the kitchen they humoured old Mother Swithin’s fancies.
“Seems like it,” said Mrs. Sands, giving her sharp look-out of the kitchen window.
“It wasn’t last year,” said Mrs. Swithin. “D’you remember what a rush we had — when the rain came — getting in the chairs?” She cut again. Then she asked about Billy, Mrs. Sands’s nephew, apprenticed to the butcher.
“He’s been doing,” Mrs. Sands said, “what boys shouldn’t; cheeking the master.”
“That’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Swithin, half meaning the boy, half meaning the sandwich, as it happened a very neat one, trimmed, triangular.
“Mr. Giles may be late,” she added, laying it, complacently, on top of the pile.
For Isa’s husband, the stockbroker, was coming from London. And the local train, which met the express train, arrived by no means punctually, even if he caught the early train which was by no means certain. In which case it meant — but what it meant to Mrs. Sands, when people missed their trains, and she, whatever she might want to do, must wait, by the oven, keeping meat hot, no one knew.
“There!” said Mrs. Swithin, surveying the sandwiches, some neat, some not, “I’ll take ’em to the barn.” As for the lemonade, she assumed, without a flicker of doubt, that Jane the kitchenmaid would follow after.
Candish paused in the dining-room to move a yellow rose. Yellow, white, carnation red — he placed them. He loved flowers, and arranging them, and placing the green sword or heart shaped leaf that came, fitly, between them. Queerly, he loved them, considering his gambling and drinking. The yellow rose went there. Now all was ready — silver and white, forks and napkins, and in the middle the splashed bowl of variegated roses. So, with one last look, he left the dining-room.
Two pictures hung opposite the window. In real life they had never met, the long lady and the man holding his horse by the rein. The lady was a picture, bought by Oliver because he liked the picture; the man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the rein in his hand. He had said to the painter:
“It you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves are on the trees.” There were leaves on the trees. He had said: “Ain’t there room for Colin as well as Buster?” Colin was his famous hound. But there was only room for Buster. It was, he seemed to say, addressing the company not the painter, a damned shame to leave out Colin whom he wished buried at his feet, in the same grave, about 1750; but that skunk the Reverend Whatshisname wouldn’t allow it.
He was a talk producer, that ancestor. But the lady was a picture. In her yellow robe, leaning, with a pillar to support her, a silver arrow in her hand, and a feather in her hair, she led the eye up, down, from the curve to the straight, through glades of greenery and shades of silver, dun and rose into silence. The room was empty.
Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.
Across the hall a door opened. One voice, another voice, a third voice came wimpling and warbling: gruff — Bart’s voice; quavering — Lucy’s voice; middle-toned — Isa’s voice. Their voices impetuously, impatiently, protestingly came across the hall saying: “The train’s late”; saying: “Keep it hot”; saying: “We won’t, no Candish, we won’t wait.”
Coming out from the library the voices stopped in the hall. They encountered an obstacle evidently; a rock. Utterly impossible was it, even in the heart of the country, to be alone? That was the shock. After that, the rock was raced round, embraced. If it was painful, it was essential. There must be society. Coming out of the library it was painful, but pleasant, to run slap into Mrs. Manresa and an unknown young man with tow-coloured hair and a twisted face. No escape was possible; meeting was inevitable. Uninvited, unexpected, droppers-in, lured off the high road by the very same instinct that caused the sheep and the cows to desire propinquity, they had come. But they had brought a lunch basket. Here it was.
“We couldn’t resist when we saw the name on the signpost,” Mrs. Manresa began in her rich fluty voice. “And this is a friend — William Dodge. We were going to sit all alone in a field. And I said: ‘Why not ask our dear friends,’ seeing the signpost, ‘to shelter us?’ A seat at the table — that’s all we want. We have our grub. We have our glasses. We ask nothing but—” society apparently, to be with her kind.
And she waved her hand upon which there was a glove, and under the glove it seemed rings, at old Mr. Oliver.
He bowed deep over her hand; a century ago, he would have kissed it. In all this sound of welcome, protestation, apology and again welcome, there was an element of silence, supplied by Isabella, observing the unknown young man. He was of course a gentleman; witness socks and trousers; brainy — tie spotted, waistcoat undone; urban, professional, that is putty coloured, unwholesome; very nervous, exhibiting a twitch at this sudden introduction, and fundamentally infernally conceited, for he deprecated Mrs. Manresa’s effusion, yet was her guest.
Isa felt antagonised, yet curious. But when Mrs. Manresa added, to make all shipshape: “He’s an artist,” and when William Dodge corrected her: “I’m a clerk in an office” — she thought he said Education or Somerset House — she had her finger on the knot which had tied itself so tightly, almost to the extent of squinting, certainly of twitching, in his face.
Then they went in to lunch, and Mrs. Manresa bubbled up, enjoying her own capacity to surmount, without turning a hair, this minor social crisis — this laying of two more places. For had she not complete faith in flesh and blood? and aren’t we all flesh and blood? and how silly to make bones of trifles when we’re all flesh and blood under the skin — men and women too! But she preferred men — obviously.
“Or what are your rings for, and your nails, and that really adorable little straw hat?” said Isabella addressing Mrs. Manresa silently and thereby making silence add its unmistakable contribution to talk. Her hat, her rings, her finger nails red as roses, smooth as shells, were there for all to see. But not her life history. That was only scraps and fragments to all of them, excluding perhaps William Dodge, whom she called “Bill” publicly — a sign perhaps that he knew more than they did. Some of the things that he knew — that she strolled the garden at midnight in silk pyjamas, had the loud speaker playing jazz, and a cocktail bar, of course they knew also. But nothing private; no strict biographical facts.
She had been born, but it was only gossip said so, in Tasmania: her grandfather had been exported for some hanky-panky mid-Victorian scandal; malversation of trusts was it? But the story got no further the only time Isabella heard it than “exported,” for the husband of the communicative lady — Mrs. Bl
encowe of the Grange — took exception, pedantically, to “exported,” said “expatriated” was more like it, but not the right word, which he had on the tip of his tongue, but couldn’t get at. And so the story dwindled away. Sometimes she referred to an uncle, a Bishop. But he was thought to have been a Colonial Bishop only. They forgot and forgave very easily in the Colonies. Also it was said her diamonds and rubies had been dug out of the earth with his own hands by a “husband” who was not Ralph Manresa. Ralph, a Jew, got up to look the very spit and image of the landed gentry, supplied from directing City companies — that was certain — tons of money; and they had no child. But surely with George the Sixth on the throne it was old fashioned, dowdy, savoured of moth-eaten furs, bugles, cameos and black-edged notepaper, to go ferreting into people’s pasts?
“All I need,” said Mrs. Manresa ogling Candish, as if he were a real man, not a stuffed man, “is a corkscrew.” She had a bottle of champagne, but no corkscrew.
“Look, Bill,” she continued, cocking her thumb — she was opening the bottle— “at the pictures. Didn’t I tell you you’d have a treat?”
Vulgar she was in her gestures, in her whole person, over-sexed, over-dressed for a picnic. But what a desirable, at least valuable, quality it was — for everybody felt, directly she spoke, “She’s said it, she’s done it, not I,” and could take advantage of the breach of decorum, of the fresh air that blew in, to follow like leaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel. Did she not restore to old Bartholomew his spice islands, his youth?
“I told him,” she went on, ogling Bart now, “that he wouldn’t look at our things” (of which they had heaps and mountains) “after yours. And I promised him you’d show him the — the—” here the champagne fizzed up and she insisted upon filling Bart’s glass first. “What is it all you learned gentlemen rave about? An arch? Norman? Saxon? Who’s the last from school? Mrs. Giles?”
She ogled Isabella now, conferring youth upon her; but always when she spoke to women, she veiled her eyes, for they, being conspirators, saw through it.
So with blow after blow, with champagne and ogling, she staked out her claim to be a wild child of nature, blowing into this — she did give one secret smile — sheltered harbour; which did make her smile, after London; yet it did, too, challenge London. For on she went to offer them a sample of her life; a few gobbets of gossip; mere trash; but she gave it for what it was worth; how last Tuesday she had been sitting next so and so; and she added, very casually a Christian name; then a nickname; and he’d said — for, as a mere nobody they didn’t mind what they said to her — and “in strict confidence, I needn’t tell you,” she told them. And they all pricked their ears. And then, with a gesture of her hands as if tossing overboard that odious crackling-under-the-pot London life — so — she exclaimed “There! . . . And what’s the first thing I do when I come down here?” They had only come last night, driving through June lanes, alone with Bill it was understood, leaving London, suddenly become dissolute and dirty, to sit down to dinner. “What do I do? Can I say it aloud? Is it permitted, Mrs. Swithin? Yes, everything can be said in this house. I take off my stays” (here she pressed her hands to her sides — she was stout) “and roll in the grass. Roll — you’ll believe that . . .” She laughed wholeheartedly. She had given up dealing with her figure and thus gained freedom.
“That’s genuine,” Isa thought. Quite genuine. And her love of the country too. Often when Ralph Manresa had to stay in town she came down alone; wore an old garden hat; taught the village women not how to pickle and preserve; but how to weave frivolous baskets out of coloured straw. Pleasure’s what they want she said. You often heard her, if you called, yodelling among the hollyhocks “Hoity te doity te ray do . . .”
A thorough good sort she was. She made old Bart feel young. Out of the corner of his eye, as he raised his glass, he saw a flash of white in the garden. Someone passing.
The scullery maid, before the plates came out, was cooling her cheeks by the lily pond.
There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud. Under the thick plate of green water, glazed in their self-centred world, fish swam — gold, splashed with white, streaked with black or silver. Silently they manoeuvred in their water world, poised in the blue patch made by the sky, or shot silently to the edge where the grass, trembling, made a fringe of nodding shadow. On the water-pavement spiders printed their delicate feet. A grain fell and spiralled down; a petal fell, filled and sank. At that the fleet of boat-shaped bodies paused; poised; equipped; mailed; then with a waver of undulation off they flashed.
It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself. Ten years since the pool had been dredged and a thigh bone recovered. Alas, it was a sheep’s, not a lady’s. And sheep have no ghosts, for sheep have no souls. But, the servants insisted, they must have a ghost; the ghost must be a lady’s; who had drowned herself for love. So none of them would walk by the lily pool at night, only now when the sun shone and the gentry still sat at table.
The flower petal sank; the maid returned to the kitchen; Bartholomew sipped his wine. Happy he felt as a boy; yet reckless as an old man; an unusual, an agreeable sensation. Fumbling in his mind for something to say to the adorable lady, he chose the first thing that came handy; the story of the sheep’s thigh. “Servants,” he said, “must have their ghost.” Kitchenmaids must have their drowned lady.
“But so must I!” cried the wild child of nature, Mrs. Manresa. She became, of a sudden, solemn as an owl. She knew, she said, pinching a bit of bread to make this emphatic, that Ralph, when he was at the war, couldn’t have been killed without her seeing him— “wherever I was, whatever I was doing,” she added, waving her hands so that the diamonds flashed in the sun.
“I don’t feel that,” said Mrs. Swithin, shaking her head.
“No,” Mrs. Manresa laughed. “You wouldn’t. None of you would. You see I’m on a level with . . .” she waited till Candish had retired, “the servants. I’m nothing like so grown up as you are.”
She preened, approving her adolescence. Rightly or wrongly? A spring of feeling bubbled up through her mud. They had laid theirs with blocks of marble. Sheep’s bones were sheep’s bones to them, not the relics of the drowned Lady Ermyntrude.
“And which camp,” said Bartholomew turning to the unknown guest, “d’you belong to? The grown, or the ungrown?”
Isabella opened her mouth, hoping that Dodge would open his, and so enable her to place him. But he sat staring. “I beg your pardon, sir?” he said. They all looked at him. “I was looking at the pictures.”
The picture looked at nobody. The picture drew them down the paths of silence.
Lucy broke it.
“Mrs. Manresa, I’m going to ask you a favour — If it comes to a pinch this afternoon, will you sing?”
This afternoon? Mrs. Manresa was aghast. Was it the pageant? She had never dreamt it was this afternoon. They would never have thrust themselves in — had they known it was this afternoon. And, of course, once more the chime pealed. Isa heard the first chime; and the second; and the third — If it was wet, it would be in the Barn; if it was fine on the terrace. And which would it be, wet or fine? And they all looked out of the window. Then the door opened. Candish said Mr. Giles had come. Mr. Giles would be down in a moment.
Giles had come. He had seen the great silver-plated car at the door with the initials R. M. twisted so as to look at a distance like a coronet. Visitors, he had concluded, as he drew up behind; and had gone to his room to change. The ghost of convention rose to the surface, as a blush or a tear rises to the surface at the pressure of emotion; so the car touched his training. He must change. And he came into the dining-room looking like a cricketer, in flannels, wearing a blue coat with brass buttons; though he was enraged. Ha
d he not read, in the morning paper, in the train, that sixteen men had been shot, others prisoned, just over there, across the gulf, in the flat land which divided them from the continent? Yet he changed. It was Aunt Lucy, waving her hand at him as he came in, who made him change. He hung his grievances on her, as one hangs a coat on a hook, instinctively. Aunt Lucy, foolish, free; always, since he had chosen, after leaving college, to take a job in the city, expressing her amazement, her amusement, at men who spent their lives, buying and selling — ploughs? glass beads was it? or stocks and shares? — to savages who wished most oddly — for were they not beautiful naked? — to dress and live like the English? A frivolous, a malignant statement hers was of a problem which, for he had no special gift, no capital, and had been furiously in love with his wife — he nodded to her across the table — had afflicted him for ten years. Given his choice, he would have chosen to farm. But he was not given his choice. So one thing led to another; and the conglomeration of things pressed you flat; held you fast, like a fish in water. So he came for the week-end, and changed.
“How d’you do?” he said all round; nodded to the unknown guest; took against him; and ate his fillet of sole.
He was the very type of all that Mrs. Manresa adored. His hair curled; far from running away, as many chins did, his was firm; the nose straight, if short; the eyes, of course, with that hair, blue; and finally to make the type complete, there was something fierce, untamed, in the expression which incited her, even at forty-five, to furbish up her ancient batteries.
“He is my husband,” Isabella thought, as they nodded across the bunch of many-coloured flowers. “The father of my children.” It worked, that old cliché; she felt pride; and affection; then pride again in herself, whom he had chosen. It was a shock to find, after the morning’s look in the glass, and the arrow of desire shot through her last night by the gentleman farmer, how much she felt when he came in, not a dapper city gent, but a cricketer, of love; and of hate.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 245
