And it was true that Alvina"s will was indeterminate, at this time.
She was _resolved_ not to marry. But her will, like a spring that is. .h.i.tched somehow, did not fly direct against the doctor. She had sent in her resignation, as he suggested. But not that she might be free to marry him, but that she might be at liberty to flee him. So she told herself. Yet she worked into his hands.
One day she sat with the doctor in the car near the station--it was towards the end of September--held up by a squad of soldiers in khaki, who were marching off with their band wildly playing, to embark on the special troop train that was coming down from the north. The town was in great excitement. War-fever was spreading everywhere. Men were rushing to enlist--and being constantly rejected, for it was still the days of regular standards.
As the crowds surged on the pavement, as the soldiers tramped to the station, as the traffic waited, there came a certain flow in the opposite direction. The 4:15 train had come in. People were struggling along with luggage, children were running with spades and buckets, cabs were crawling along with families: it was the seaside people coming home. Alvina watched the two crowds mingle.
And as she watched she saw two men, one carrying a mandoline case and a suit-case which she knew. It was Ciccio. She did not know the other man; some theatrical individual. The two men halted almost near the car, to watch the band go by. Alvina saw Ciccio quite near to her. She would have liked to squirt water down his brown, handsome, oblivious neck. She felt she hated him. He stood there, watching the music, his lips curling in his faintly-derisive Italian manner, as he talked to the other man. His eyelashes were as long and dark as ever, his eyes had still the attractive look of being set in with a s.m.u.tty finger. He had got the same brownish suit on, which she disliked, the same black hat set slightly, jauntily over one eye. He looked common: and yet with that peculiar southern aloofness which gave him a certain beauty and distinction in her eyes. She felt she hated him, rather. She felt she had been let down by him.
The band had pa.s.sed. A child ran against the wheel of the standing car. Alvina suddenly reached forward and made a loud, screeching flourish on the hooter. Every one looked round, including the laden, tramping soldiers.
"We can"t move yet," said Dr. Mitch.e.l.l.
But Alvina was looking at Ciccio at that moment. He had turned with the rest, looking inquiringly at the car. And his quick eyes, the whites of which showed so white against his duskiness, the yellow pupils so non-human, met hers with a quick flash of recognition. His mouth began to curl in a smile of greeting. But she stared at him without moving a muscle, just blankly stared, abstracting every sc.r.a.p of feeling, even of animosity or coldness, out of her gaze.
She saw the smile die on his lips, his eyes glance sideways, and again sideways, with that curious animal shyness which characterized him. It was as if he did not want to see her looking at him, and ran from side to side like a caged weasel, avoiding her blank, glaucous look.
She turned pleasantly to Dr. Mitch.e.l.l.
"What did you say?" she asked sweetly.
CHAPTER XII
ALLAYE ALSO IS ENGAGED
Alvina found it pleasant to be respected as she was respected in Lancaster. It is not only the prophet who hath honour _save_ in his own country: it is every one with individuality. In this northern town Alvina found that her individuality really told. Already she belonged to the revered caste of medicine-men. And into the bargain she was a personality, a person.
Well and good. She was not going to cheapen herself. She felt that even in the eyes of the natives--the well-to-do part, at least--she lost a _little_ of her distinction when she was engaged to Dr.
Mitch.e.l.l. The engagement had been announced in _The Times_, _The Morning Post_, _The Manchester Guardian_, and the local _News_. No fear about its being known. And it cast a slight slur of vulgar familiarity over her. In Woodhouse, she knew, it elevated her in the common esteem tremendously. But she was no longer in Woodhouse. She was in Lancaster. And in Lancaster her engagement pigeonholed her.
Apart from Dr. Mitch.e.l.l she had a magic potentiality. Connected with him, she was a known and labelled quant.i.ty.
This she gathered from her contact with the local gentry. The matron was a woman of family, who somehow managed, in her big, white, frilled cap, to be distinguished like an abbess of old. The really toney women of the place came to take tea in her room, and these little teas in the hospital were like a little elegant female conspiracy. There was a slight flavour of art and literature about.
The matron had known Walter Pater, in the somewhat remote past.
Alvina was admitted to these teas with the few women who formed the toney intellectual elite of this northern town. There was a certain freemasonry in the matron"s room. The matron, a lady-doctor, a clergyman"s daughter, and the wives of two industrial magnates of the place, these five, and then Alvina, formed the little group.
They did not meet a great deal outside the hospital. But they always met with that curious female freemasonry which can form a law unto itself even among most conventional women. They talked as they would never talk before men, or before feminine outsiders. They threw aside the whole vestment of convention. They discussed plainly the things they thought about--even the most secret--and they were quite calm about the things they did--even the most impossible. Alvina felt that her transgression was a very mild affair, and that her engagement was really _infra dig_.
"And are you going to marry him?" asked Mrs. Tuke, with a long, cool look.
"I can"t _imagine_ myself--" said Alvina.
"Oh, but so many things happen outside one"s imagination. That"s where your body has you. I can"t _imagine_ that I"m going to have a child--" She lowered her eyelids wearily and sardonically over her large eyes.
Mrs. Tuke was the wife of the son of a local manufacturer. She was about twenty-eight years old, pale, with great dark-grey eyes and an arched nose and black hair, very like a head on one of the lovely Syracusan coins. The odd look of a smile which wasn"t a smile, at the corners of the mouth, the arched nose, and the slowness of the big, full, cla.s.sic eyes gave her the dangerous Greek look of the Syracusan women of the past: the dangerous, heavily-civilized women of old Sicily: those who laughed about the latomia.
"But do you think you can have a child without wanting it _at all_?"
asked Alvina.
"Oh, but there isn"t _one bit_ of me wants it, not _one bit_. My _flesh_ doesn"t want it. And my mind doesn"t--yet there it is!" She spread her fine hands with a flicker of inevitability.
"Something must want it," said Alvina.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Tuke. "The universe is one big machine, and we"re just part of it." She flicked out her grey silk handkerchief, and dabbed her nose, watching with big, black-grey eyes the fresh face of Alvina.
"There"s not _one bit_ of me concerned in having this child," she persisted to Alvina. "My flesh isn"t concerned, and my mind isn"t.
And _yet_!--_le voila!_--I"m just _plante_. I can"t _imagine_ why I married Tommy. And yet--I did--!" She shook her head as if it was all just beyond her, and the pseudo-smile at the corners of her ageless mouth deepened.
Alvina was to nurse Mrs. Tuke. The baby was expected at the end of August. But already the middle of September was here, and the baby had not arrived.
The Tukes were not very rich--the young ones, that is. Tommy wanted to compose music, so he lived on what his father gave him. His father gave him a little house outside the town, a house furnished with expensive bits of old furniture, in a way that the townspeople thought insane. But there you are--Effie would insist on dabbing a rare bit of yellow brocade on the wall, instead of a picture, and in painting apple-green shelves in the recesses of the whitewashed wall of the dining-room. Then she enamelled the hall-furniture yellow, and decorated it with curious green and lavender lines and flowers, and had unearthly cushions and Sardinian pottery with unspeakable peaked griffins.
What were you to make of such a woman! Alvina slept in her house these days, instead of at the hospital. For Effie was a very bad sleeper. She would sit up in bed, the two glossy black plaits hanging beside her white, arch face, wrapping loosely round her her dressing-gown of a sort of plumbago-coloured, dark-grey silk lined with fine silk of metallic blue, and there, ivory and jet-black and grey like black-lead, she would sit in the white bedclothes flicking her handkerchief and revealing a flicker of kingfisher-blue silk and white silk night dress, complaining of her neuritis nerve and her own impossible condition, and begging Alvina to stay with her another half-hour, and suddenly studying the big, blood-red stone on her finger as if she was reading something in it.
"I believe I shall be like the woman in the _Cent Nouvelles_ and carry my child for five years. Do you know that story? She said that eating a parsley leaf on which bits of snow were sticking started the child in her. It might just as well--"
Alvina would laugh and get tired. There was about her a kind of half bitter sanity and nonchalance which the nervous woman liked.
One night as they were sitting thus in the bedroom, at nearly eleven o"clock, they started and listened. Dogs in the distance had also started to yelp. A mandoline was wailing its vibration in the night outside, rapidly, delicately quivering. Alvina went pale. She knew it was Ciccio. She had seen him lurking in the streets of the town, but had never spoken to him.
"What"s this?" cried Mrs. Tuke, c.o.c.king her head on one side.
"Music! A mandoline! How extraordinary! Do you think it"s a serenade?--" And she lifted her brows archly.
"I should think it is," said Alvina.
"How extraordinary! What a moment to choose to serenade the lady!
_Isn"t_ it like life--! I _must_ look at it--"
She got out of bed with some difficulty, wrapped her dressing-gown round her, pushed her feet into slippers, and went to the window.
She opened the sash. It was a lovely moonlight night of September.
Below lay the little front garden, with its short drive and its iron gates that closed on the high-road. From the shadow of the high-road came the noise of the mandoline.
"h.e.l.lo, Tommy!" called Mrs. Tuke to her husband, whom she saw on the drive below her. "How"s your musical ear--?"
"All right. Doesn"t it disturb you?" came the man"s voice from the moonlight below.
"Not a bit. I like it. I"m waiting for the voice. "_O Richard, O mon roi!_"--"
But the music had stopped.
"There!" cried Mrs. Tuke. "You"ve frightened him off! And we"re dying to be serenaded, aren"t we, nurse?" She turned to Alvina. "Do give me my fur, will you? Thanks so much. Won"t you open the other window and look out there--?"
Alvina went to the second window. She stood looking out.
"Do play again!" Mrs. Tuke called into the night. "Do sing something." And with her white arm she reached for a glory rose that hung in the moonlight from the wall, and with a flash of her white arm she flung it toward the garden wall--ineffectually, of course.
"Won"t you play again?" she called into the night, to the unseen.
"Tommy, go indoors, the bird won"t sing when you"re about."