The Little Girls (36 page)

“Waste of whatever
that
was?” remarked Clare.

“I don’t want to get high.”

“No?”

“No.” Sheila’s gesture, almost that of a dancer, wafted hither and thither a diaphanous sleeve. “No,” she said, with that smile of hers, “not this evening.”

Francis plonked a finger bowl down in front of Mrs. Artworth. She barely noticed it. Not only had he worried the dust out of the cut glass, he had seated the bowl on a circular lace mat which, bloated by much washing, concealed the delicate and probably pretty plate on which it sat. As dessert consisted entirely of bananas, for the first peeling then consumption of which he’d provided her with a fanciful knife and fork, the bowl might play little part as a bath: it required grapes. As a discountenancer it fell fiat, under his very eye—Mrs. Artworth unfortunately regularly attended the best banquets. She removed the finger bowl and its bedding from her plate not only with
sang-froid
but absently, not ceasing to give her attention (and in a manner which during the course of dinner had settled into the motherly-ironical) to what Mr. William Delacroix was saying.

“Imagine,” she then observed, “her telling you that!”

The senior Delacroix did, however, to give him his due, react. “Surely,” he said, looking from one to another of the sparkling bowls, “these should have lotus blossoms floating in them, while we’re about it?”

“Anybody,” said William to Mrs. Artworth, “would imagine Roland had been to Simla… . No, but what a ceremony,” he continued, “it must have been! And most exciting, of course, the moment when you each of you put in her secret thing?”

Mrs. Artworth showed, almost, surprise. “Oh, she told you
that
?”

“For ever to be secrets of the tomb?”

She smiled. “That was the idea—I think?”

“And not a word of this,” William said, “not a word had one heard till this evening.”

“She didn’t over-tire herself, I hope?” said Mrs. Artworth, showing a glint of the nurse.

“I
don’t
think so. Did you find her tired, later?”

“Well frankly, no.”

“On the contrary, she seemed in wonderful spirits,” said Roland, turning on Mrs. Artworth a look not rendered less amiable by its slight formality (in a way, Roland’s deliberation gave his amiability more value). “Which, by all accounts, she’s been anything but—lately. You have done wonders.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said lightly, slighting herself. “I’ve done any little thing I can think of to cheer her up.—| You’d heard, then, rather worrying rumours?”

Francis, professionally hovering, failed to conceal the fact that he lent ear to this. “That will be all, Francis, I think,” said Roland.

“What about the port?”

“Oh, the port by all means.”

Out went Francis, rigid with the intention of not being absent long. Mrs. Artworth, having waited sceptically for the door to close (or even appear to), then said: “When people are frightened they exaggerate—I suppose.”

“So, in this case,” William said—for the moment tense, retrospectively— “one could only hope.” His brother enlarged the matter: “This whole thing began by being impossible to make head or tail of. Not only unlikely, unlike her. As a rule, as you know, she’s so very placid.”

That that aspect of their mother hadn’t, so far, struck her former school friend was concealed by Mrs. Artworth’s all-of-a-sudden interest in, well-nigh infatuation with, her finger bowl. Bunching together the tips of her pretty and manifestly unsullied right-hand fingers, she let them go in for a little dip. She looked on to her knee for her napkin —off it had slid, so, composedly, she shook the fingers dry, remarking: “That, then, was why you didn’t come before?”

The brothers closed ranks. Instantly though urbanely they made it clear that they did not intend to go into
that
(with her). Without, they hoped, allowing Mrs. Artworth to feel she had gone too far (which she had) they showed themselves ready for a change of subject. Francis’s coming in with the port aided them. “This, I can answer for,” Roland said, as the decanter was placed before him.

Tilting a glance at the port, with genuine languor (port bored her, still more the to-do about it) she said: “You selected it for her?” Still more coolly she added: “How lucky she is.”

“Except,” William remarked, “that she never drinks it.”

“Others do,” said his brother. “She had to have some.”

With a continuous swish of the pink sleeves—which, slit open downward from the shoulders, only to be gathered together again when they reached the wrists, somehow were more mellifluous than mere sleevelessness—Mrs. Artworth was peeling the banana she had, some minutes ago, broken off from the bunch on the silver dish levelled at her by Francis. Candles had failed to be found by Francis, Mrs. Delacroix and the Major having used the last; but the dining-room of which she was tonight the undoubted center-piece was not so unfavourably lit by lamps dotted over the sideboards and service tables. Mrs. Artworth, looking up from her task, beheld with awe and amazement the two wise governors brought forth by Dicey the idiot baa-lamb. “It is extraordinary to think…” she said.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, receding.

“Whose idea was it?” asked William. “I mean, the coffer?”

“Oh, I’m sure your mother’s. She had so many.”

“Who thought up those three extra-secret things?”

“That,” she said, having thought, “I believe was me.”

“Neither of us,” said Roland—entitling himself, by a glance, to speak for his brother—”now, of course, ever can hope to rest till we know what they were.”

“Oh, can’t you?” said Mrs. Artworth. “That’s too bad. As to what the two
others
put in, of course I don’t know.”

“To this very day?”

“To this very day.—What she put in, surely your mother’d tell you?”

“We asked her,” William confessed, “needless to say. But no go. No—she shut like a clam.”

“Adamant,” Roland supplemented.

“And Miss Burkin-Jones has also stuck to her guns?”

“I should think so. Clare’s always very strong-minded.”

“
Must
you,” asked William, “be as strong-minded as that?”

Mrs. Artworth gave one of them, then the other, the gaze of a mermaid seeing beyond horizons. “I’d feel bad if I told you when the other two haven’t. And worse—in a way?—if I told you when I’ve never told them. Laugh at me, but tell
them
I never would! Peculiar it may appear, after all these years, but I’d go to my grave, still, rather than have
them
know.”

“A-ha?”

“Really?”

“It’s all very well,” said she, “but you’d laugh if you knew what it really was.”

“This is a torture of Tantalus,” said William.

“Not that we’d want to tamper with your conscience,” said Roland, “but—?”

“Oh, very well then. My sixth toe.”

“Mrs.
Artworth
?”

“My sixth toe,” she enunciated, still more distinctly. “I was born with six on one foot.”

“Not on both?”

“In that case, it would have been my twelfth toe, wouldn’t it?”

They bowed to her superiority in arithmetic.

“It was promptly removed, of course. But Mother, for some sentimental reason, I can only think, kept it: so there it was in a bottle—in spirits, naturally. When the day came when I thought I should have a mascot, I asked her if she would give it me back. ‘What a strange idea,’ she said, but didn’t say no. So there I was, fitted out with a mascot.”

“But Mrs. Artworth, what made you bury it? Surely a mascot’s something one takes about with one?”

“Ah, but then,” she said, “there’s the risk of losing it!”

“Whereas, the tomb’s safe-keeping?”

She congratulated them on seeing that, with a nod. 
“‘There
it will be,
’
 I thought. ‘There it will be.’ Also, too, there was this—as you’ll understand. I’d have had to keep keeping it hidden: this solved that problem.”

“Surely, a mascot’s something one goes round showing?”

“Was that an object to go round showing?”

The sons failed, for the moment, to understand. They looked at each other. They looked at her.

She outstared them. “What,” she cried, “my deformity?”

A pause.

“You’re a very curious person, Mrs. Artworth,” Roland told her, with a deference made greater by his formality. “Am I asking too much if I ask, has it brought you luck?”

She shook a sleeve back, put a hand up: lightly the hand touched its way round her pretty hair. She looked at him sideways. “At what?” she teasingly asked.

He gravely told her: “You danced.”

His brother said: “Yes, we know that you danced.”

“Imagine,” she said, “her telling you. Still, why not? Yes—I used to be quite a little dancer, when I was a child.”

Into the cobwebby distance the bed retreated, lengthening everything: the room was an avenue at whose far end something was happening. Sleep. Deep into the curtains’ shelter, the head of the sleeper was invisible. Sleep so gave this room a sensual climate that to enter was to know oneself to be in the presence of an embrace. Was it to be feared, or to be hoped, that she might not wake? Or how if she never woke at all?

Down at this end, where Clare stood, the fire was awake —sunk in the grate, fluttering vaguely like a soul. Near it burned a lamp: the triple-silk shade at an angle made a mystery of the greater part of the room. The visitant, Clare, allowed herself to imagine others—as likely as she was, with more right, more ghostly only in name. Nor need those be the dead only: for instance, twist round the lamp a little and why should light not glimmer on Trevor’s spectacles as he stood in the door? The concave, bowed but not undignified man moved forward, sat down on the bedside needle-work stool, and held out a hand, saying: “Hullo, Dicey. Nice to see you again.” (“I wish I could go myself,” he had said on the telephone. Are not desires

acts? One is where one would be. May we not, therefore, frequent each other, without the body,
not
only in dreams?)

We were entrusted to one another, in the days which mattered, Clare thought. Entrusted to one another by chance, not choice. Chance, and its agents time and place. Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. You—she thought, looking at the bed—chanced not chose to want us again.

Clare turned round and, facing the chimneypiece, dared again to look into the world of china. Shepherds and shepherdesses branched towards one another their mended arms; beautiful bowls stayed cradled within their networks of cracks; stitches held obstinately together what had been broken; handles maintained their hold on cups by grasping with tiny alloy claws. She was looking into a fragile representation of a world of honour, which was to say un-failingness.

The soldier’s child also looked at the peaceful landscapes, the some grey, some coloured scenery-motifs on cups and bowls. Within no one of those miniature planets was there anything tumultuous. Whereas Nature is
my
terrible nature, the exile thought. She looked with longing at the everlasting sea shores, mountain peaks, bays and lakes, even at the castles on the frail rounded sides of the cups and bowls. Never had she found them anywhere else. She had loved them because they were not for her.

You—she thought, looking back at the bed again. Me. And of course Sheikie. Entrusted to one another before we knew. Mistrustful of one another, and how rightly. You were the least mistrustful, however wrongly. To a point you were right: in our way having noble natures, we know each other’s. We have our pride. Yet now, look! … Never should we have called each other to account: that was the catastrophe. But, see how remorseless children are—where were we to stop, and indeed how?

And now, nothing. There being nothing was what you were frightened of all the time, eh? Yes. Yes, it was terrible looking down into that empty box. I did not comfort you. Never have I comforted you. Forgive me.

Clare decided that she had better, now, get back to the White Hart. Turning to go, she thought of her last sight of the sands, from the sea wall: the wide sands and the running figure.

“Goodbye, Dicey,” she said—for now and for then.

The sleeper stirred. She sighed. She raised herself on an elbow, saying: “Who’s there?”

“Mumbo.”

“Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?”