The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (20 page)

Priscilla did not move and did not offer to shake hands, so he stood on the hearthrug and spread out his own to the blaze, looking down at her with bright, audacious eyes. He thought he had not yet seen her so beautiful. There was an extraordinary depth and mystery in her look, he thought, as it rested for a moment on his face, and she had never yet dropped her eyelashes as she now did when her eyes met his. We know she was very hungry, and there was no strength in her at all. Not only did her eyelashes drop, but her head as well, and her hands hung helplessly, like drooping white flowers, one over each arm of the chair.

"I came in to ask Mr. Neumann-Schultz if there's anything I can do for you," said Robin.

"Did you? He lives next door."

"I know. I knocked there first, but he didn't answer so I thought he must be here."

Priscilla said nothing. At any other time she would have snubbed Robin and got rid of him. Now she merely sat and drooped.

"Has he gone out?"

"Yes."

Her voice was very low, hardly more than a whisper. Those who know the faintness of hunger at this stage will also know the pathos that steals into the voice of the sufferer when he is unwillingly made to speak; it becomes plaintive, melodious with yearning, the yearning for food. But if you do not know this, if you have yourself just come from dinner, if you are half in love and want the other person to be quite in love, if you are full of faith in your own fascinations, you are apt to fall into Robin's error and mistake the nature of the yearning. Tussie in Robin's place would have doubted the evidence of his senses, but then Tussie was very modest. Robin doubted nothing. He saw, he heard, and he thrilled; and underneath his thrilling, which was real enough to make him flush to the roots of his hair, far down underneath it was the swift contemptuous comment, "They're all alike."

Priscilla shut her eyes. She was listening for the first sound of Tussie's or Fritzing's footfall, the glad sound heralding the approach of something to eat, and wishing Robin would go away. He was kind at times and obliging, but on the whole a nuisance. It was a great pity there were so many people in the world who were nuisances and did not know it. Somebody ought to tell them,--their mothers, or other useful persons of that sort. She vaguely decided that the next time she met Robin and was strengthened properly by food she would say a few things to him from which recovery would take a long while.

"Are you--not well?" Robin asked, after a silence during which his eyes never left her and hers were shut; and even to himself his voice sounded deeper, more intense than usual.

"Oh yes," murmured Priscilla with a little sigh.

"Are you--happy?"

Happy? Can anybody who is supperless, dinnerless, breakfastless, be happy, Priscilla wondered? But the question struck her as funny, and the vibrating tones in which it was asked struck her as rather funny too, and she opened her eyes for a moment to look up at Robin with a smile of amusement--a smile that she could not guess was turned by the hunger within her into something wistful and tremulous. "Yes," said Priscilla in that strange pathetic voice, "I--think so." And after a brief glance at him down went her weary eyelids again.

The next thing that happened was that Robin, who was trembling, kissed her hand. This she let him do with perfect placidity. Every German woman is used to having her hand kissed. It is kissed on meeting, it is kissed on parting, it is kissed at a great many odd times in between; she holds it up mechanically when she comes across a male acquaintance; she is never surprised at the ceremony; the only thing that surprises her is if it is left out. Priscilla then simply thought Robin was going. "What a mercy," she said to herself, glancing at him a moment through her eyelashes. But Robin was not used to hand-kissing and saw things in a very different light. He felt she made no attempt to draw her hand away, he heard her murmuring something inarticulate--it was merely Good-bye--he was hurled along to his doom; and stooping over her the unfortunate young man kissed her hair.

Priscilla opened her eyes suddenly and very wide. I don't know what folly he would have perpetrated next, or what sillinesses were on the tip of his tongue, or what meaning he still chose to read in her look, but an instant afterwards he was brought down for ever from the giddy heights of his illusions: Priscilla boxed his ears.

I am sorry to have to record it. It is always sweeter if a woman does not box ears. The action is shrewish, benighted, mediæval, nay, barbarous; and this box was a very hard one indeed, extraordinarily hard for so little a hand and so fasting a girl. But we know she had twice already been on the verge of doing it; and the pent-up vigour of what the policeman had not got and what the mother in the train had not got was added I imagine to what Robin got. Anyhow it was efficacious. There was an exclamation--I think of surprise, for surely a young man would not have minded the pain?--and he put his hand up quickly to his face. Priscilla got up just as quickly out of her chair and rang the handbell furiously, her eyes on his, her face ablaze. Annalise must have thrown herself down the ladder, for they hardly seemed to have been standing there an instant face to face, their eyes on a level, he scarlet, she white, both deadly silent, before the maid was in the room.

"This person has insulted me," said Priscilla, turning to her and pointing at Robin. "He never comes here again. Don't let me find you forgetting that," she added, frowning at the girl; for she remembered they had been seen talking eagerly together at the children's treat.

"I never"--began Robin.

"Will you go?"

Annalise opened the door for him. He went out, and she shut it behind him. Then she walked sedately across the room again, looking sideways at the Princess, who took no notice of her but stood motionless by the table gazing straight before her, her lips compressed, her face set in a kind of frozen white rage, and having got into the bathroom Annalise began to run. She ran out at the back door, in again at Fritzing's back door, out at his front door into the street, and caught up Robin as he was turning down the lane to the vicarage. "What have you done?" she asked him breathlessly, in German.

"Done?" Robin threw back his head and laughed quite loud.

"Sh--sh," said Annalise, glancing back fearfully over her shoulder.

"Done?" said Robin, subduing his bitter mirth. "What do you suppose I've done? I've done what any man would have in my place--encouraged, almost asked to do it. I kissed your young lady,
liebes Fräulein
, and she pretended not to like it. Now isn't that what a sensible girl like you would call absurd?"

But Annalise started back from the hand he held out to her in genuine horror. "What?" she cried, "What?"

"What? What?" mocked Robin. "Well then, what? Are you all such prudes in Germany? Even you pretending, you little hypocrite?"

"Oh," cried Annalise hysterically, pushing him away with both her hands, "what have you done?
Elender Junge
, what have you done?"

"I think you must all be mad," said Robin angrily. "You can't persuade me that nobody ever kisses anybody over in Germany."

"Oh yes they do--oh yes they do," cried Annalise, wringing her hands, "but neither there nor anywhere else--in England, anywhere in the world--do the sons of pastors--the sons of pastors--" She seemed to struggle for breath, and twisted and untwisted her apron round her hands in a storm of agitation while Robin, utterly astonished, stared at her--"Neither there nor anywhere else do they--the sons of pastors--kiss--kiss royal princesses."

It was now Robin's turn to say "What?"

XVI

He went up to Cambridge the next morning. Term had not begun, but he went; a Robin with all the briskness gone out of him, and if still with something of the bird left only of a bird that is moulting. His father was mildly surprised, but applauded the apparent desire for solitary study. His mother was violently surprised, and tried hard to get at his true reasons. She saw with the piercing eye of a relation--that eye from which hardly anything can ever be hidden--that something had happened and that the something was sobering and unpleasant. She could not imagine what it was, for she did not know he had been to Creeper Cottage the night before and all the afternoon and at dinner he had talked and behaved as usual. Now he did not talk at all, and his behaviour was limited to a hasty packing of portmanteaus. Determined to question him she called him into the study just before he started, and shut the door.

"I must go mater," he said, pulling out his watch; he had carefully avoided her since breakfast though she had laid many traps for him.

"Robin, I want to tell you that I think you splendid."

"Splendid? What on earth for? You were telling me a very different sort of thing a day or two ago."

"I am sorry now for what I said on Sunday."

"I don't think a mother ought ever to say she's sorry," said Robin gloomily.

"Not if she is?"

"She oughtn't to say so."

"Well dear let us be friends. Don't go away angry with me. I do appreciate you so much for going. You are my own dear boy." And she put her hands on his shoulders.

He took out his watch again. "I say, I must be off."

"Don't suppose a mother doesn't see and understand."

"Oh I don't suppose anything. Good-bye mater."

"I think it so splendid of you to go, to turn your back on temptation, to unwind yourself from that wretched girl's coils."

"Coils?"

"My Robin"--she stroked his cheek, the same cheek, as it happened, Priscilla had smitten--"my Robin must not throw himself away. I am ambitious where you are concerned, my darling. It would have broken my heart for you to have married a nobody--perhaps a worse than nobody."

Robin, who was staring at her with an indescribable expression on his face, took her hands off his shoulders. "Look here mater," he said--and he was seized by a desire to laugh terrifically--"there is nothing in the world quite so amusing as the way people will talk wisely of things they don't in the faintest degree understand. They seem to feel wise in proportion to their ignorance. I expect you think that's a funny speech for me to make. I can tell you I don't think it half as funny as yours was. Good-bye. I shall miss my train you know if you keep me, and then I'd be exposed again to those--what was the word? ah, yes--coils. Coils!" He burst into loud laughter. "Good-bye mater."

She was staring at him blankly. He hastily brushed her forehead with his moustache and hurried to the door, his face full of strange mirth. "I say," he said, putting in his head again, "there's just one thing I'd like to say."

She made an eager step towards him. "Do say it my darling--say all that is in your heart."

"Oh it's not much--it's only God help poor Tuss." And that was the last of him. She heard him chuckling all down the passage; but long before his fly had reached Ullerton he had left off doing that and was moulting again.

It rained that day in Somersetshire, a steady, hopeless rain that soaked many a leaf off the trees before its time and made the year look suddenly quite old. From the windows of Creeper Cottage you could see the water running in rivulets down the hill into the deserted village, and wreaths of mist hanging about the downs beyond. The dripping tombstone that blocked Priscilla's window grew danker and blacker as the day went by. The fires in the cottage burnt badly, for the wood had somehow got wet. The oilcloth and the wall-papers looked very dismal in the grey daylight. Rain came in underneath the two front doors and made puddles that nobody wiped away.

Priscilla had got up very late, after a night spent staring into the darkness, and then had sent for Fritzing and told him what Robin had done. The unhappy man's horror will be easily imagined. She was in bed the night before when he came in, quite cured of her hunger and only wanting to be alone with her wrath. Fritzing had found no one in the parlour but Tussie clasping an immense biscuit-tin in his arms, with a face so tragic that Fritzing thought something terrible must have happened. Tussie had returned joyfully, laden with biscuits and sardines, to find the girl standing straight and speechless by the table, her face rigid, her eyes ablaze. She had not so much as glanced at the biscuits; she had not said a single word; her look rested on him a moment as though she did not see him and then she went into the next room and upstairs to bed. He knew she went upstairs to bed for in Creeper Cottage you could hear everything.

Fritzing coming in a few minutes later without the cook he had hoped to find, was glad enough of Tussie's sardines and biscuits--they were ginger biscuits--and while he ate them, abstractedly and together, Tussie looked on and wondered in spite of his wretchedness what the combination could possibly taste like. Then, after a late breakfast on the Wednesday morning, Priscilla sent for Fritzing and told him what Robin had done. The burdened man, so full already of anxieties and worries, was shattered by the blow. "I have always held duelling in extreme contempt," he said when at last he could speak, "but now I shall certainly fight."

"Fight? You? Fritzi, I've only told you because I--I feel so unprotected here and you must keep him off if he ever tries to come again. But you shall not fight. What, first he is to insult me and then hurt or kill my Fritzi? Besides, nobody ever fights duels in England."

"That remains to be seen. I shall now go to his house and insult him steadily for half an hour. At the expiration of that time he will probably be himself anxious to fight. We might go to France--"

"Oh Fritzi don't be so dreadful. Don't go to him--leave him alone--nobody must ever know--"

"I shall now go and insult him," repeated Fritzing with an inflexibility that silenced her.

And she saw him a minute later pass her window under his umbrella, splashing indifferently through all the puddles, battle and destruction in his face.

Robin, however, was at Ullerton by the time Fritzing got to the vicarage. He waved the servant aside when she told him he had gone, and insisted on penetrating into the presence of the young man's father. He waved Mrs. Morrison aside too when she tried to substitute herself for the vicar, and did at last by his stony persistency get into the good man's presence. Not until the vicar himself told him that Robin had gone would Fritzing believe it. "The villain has fled," he told Priscilla, coming back drenched in body but unquenchable in spirit. "Your chastisement, ma'am, was very effectual."