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Three Sisters

<h2 id="id01144" style="margin-top: 4em">XXIV</h2> The next Sunday, early in the afternoon, Alice went, all by herself, to Upthorne. Hitherto she had disliked going to Upthorne by herself. She had no very subtle feeling for the aspects of things; but there was something about the road to Upthorne that repelled her. A hundred yards or so above the schoolhouse it turned, leaving behind it the wide green bottom and winding up toward the naked moor. To the north, on her right, it narrowed and twisted; the bed of the beck lay hidden. A thin scrub of low thorn trees covered the lower slopes of the further hillside. Here and there was a clearing and a cottage or a farm. On her left she had to pass the dead mining station, the roofless walls, the black window gaps, the melancholy haunted colonnades, the three chimneys of the dead furnaces, square cornered, shooting straight and high as the bell-towers of some hill city of the South, beautiful and sinister, guarding that place of ashes and of ruin. Then the sallow winter marshes. South of the marshes were the high moors. Their flanks showed black where they have been flayed by the cuttings of old mines. At intervals, along the line of the hillside, masses of rubble rose in hummocks or hung like avalanches, black as if they had been discharged by blasting. Beyond, in the turn of the Dale, the village of Upthorne lay unseen. And hitherto, in all that immense and inhuman desolation nothing (to Alice) had been more melancholy, more sinister, more haunted than the house where John Greatorex had died. With its gray, unsleeping face, its lidless eyes, staring out over the marshes, it had lost (for Alice) all likeness to a human habitation. It repudiated the living; it remembered; it kept a grim watch with its dead. But Alice's mind, acutely sensitive in one direction, had become callous in every other. * * * * * Greatorex was in the kitchen, smoking his Sunday afternoon pipe in the chimney corner, screened from the open doorway by the three-foot thickness of the house wall. Maggie, his servant, planted firmly on the threshold, jerked her head over her shoulder to call to him. "There's a yoong laady wants to see yo, Mr. Greatorex!" There was no response but a sharp tapping on the hob, as Greatorex knocked the ashes out of his pipe. Maggie stood looking at Alice a little mournfully with her deep-set, blue, pathetic eyes. Maggie had once been pretty in spite of her drab hair and flat features, but where her high color remained it had hardened with her thirty-five years. "Well yo' coom?" Maggie called again and waited. Courageous in her bright blue Sunday gown, she waited while her master rose, then, shame-faced as if driven by some sharp sign from him, she slunk into the scullery. Jim Greatorex appeared on his threshold. On his threshold, utterly sober, carrying himself with the assurance of the master in his own house, he would not have suffered by comparison with any man. Instead of the black broadcloth that Alice had expected, he wore a loose brown shooting jacket, drab corduroy breeches, a drab cloth waistcoat and brown leather leggings, and he wore them with a distinction that Rowcliffe might have envied. His face, his whole body, alert and upright, had the charm of some shy, half-savage animal. When he stood at ease his whole face, with all its features, sensed you and took you in; the quivering eyebrows were aware of you; the nose, with its short, high bridge, its fine, wide nostrils, repeated the sensitive stare of the wide eyes; his mouth, under its golden brown moustache, was somber with a sort of sullen apprehension, till in a sudden, childlike confidence it smiled. His whole face and all its features smiled. He was smiling at Alice now, as if struck all of a sudden by her smallness. "I've come to ask a favor, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice. "Ay," said Greatorex. He said it as if ladies called every day to ask him favors. "Will you coom in, Miss Cartaret?" It was the mournful and musical voice that she had heard sometimes last summer on the road outside the back door of the Vicarage. She came in, pausing on the threshold and looking about her, as if she stood poised on the edge of an adventure. Her smallness, and the delicious, exploring air of her melted Jim's heart and made him smile at her. "It's a roough plaace fer a laady," he said. "It's a beautiful place, Mr. Greatorex," said Alice. And she did actually think it was beautiful with its stone floor, its white-washed walls, its black oak dresser and chest and settle; not because of these things but because it was on the border of her Paradise. Rowcliffe had sent her there. Jim Greatorex had glamour for her, less on his own account than as a man in whom Rowcliffe was interested. "You'd think it a bit loansoom, wouldn' yo', ef yo' staayed in it yeear in and yeear out?" "I don't know," said Alice doubtfully. "Perhaps—a little," she ventured, encouraged by Greatorex's indulgent smile. "An' loansoom it is," said Greatorex dismally. Alice explored, penetrating into the interior. "Oh—but aren't you glad you've got such a lovely fireplace?" "I doan' knaw as I've thought mooch about it. We get used to our own." "What are those hooks for in the chimney?" "They? They're fer 'angin' the haams on—to smoak 'em." "I see." She would have sat there on the oak settle but that Greatorex was holding open the door of an inner room. "Yo'd better coom into t' parlor, Miss Cartaret. It'll be more coomfortable for you." She rose and followed him. She had been long enough in Garth to know that if you are asked to go into the parlor you must go. Otherwise you risk offending the kind gods of the hearth and threshold. The parlor was a long low room that continued the line of the house to its southern end. One wide mullioned window looked east over the marsh, the other south to the hillside across a little orchard of dwarfed and twisted trees. To Alice they were the trees of her Paradise and the hillside was its boundary. Greatorex drew close to the hearth the horsehair and mahogany armchair with the white antimacassar. "Sit yo' down and I'll putt a light to the fire." "Not for me," she protested. But Greatorex was on his knees before her, lighting the fire. "You'll 'ave wet feet coomin' over t' moor. Cauld, too, yo'll be." She sat and watched him. He was deft with his great hands, like a woman, over his fire-lighting. "There—she's burning fine." He rose, turning triumphantly on his hearth as the flame leaped in the grate. "Yo'll let me mak' yo' a coop of tae, Miss Cartaret." There was an interrogative lilt at the end of all his sentences, even when, as now, he was making statements that admitted of no denial. But his guest missed the incontrovertible and final quality of what was said. "Please don't trouble." "It's naw trooble—naw trooble at all. Maaggie'll 'ave got kettle on." He strode out of his parlor into his kitchen. "Maaggie! Maaggie!" he called. "Are yo' there? Putt kettle on and bring tae into t' parlor." Alice looked about her while she waited. Though she didn't know it, Jim Greatorex's parlor was a more tolerable place than the Vicarage drawing-room. Brown cocoanut matting covered its stone floor. In front of the wide hearth on the inner wall was a rug of dyed sheepskin bordered with a strip of scarlet snippets. The wooden chimney-piece, the hearth-place, the black hobs, the straight barred grate with its frame of fine fluted iron, belonged to a period of simplicity. The oblong mahogany table in the center of the room, the sofa and chairs, upholstered in horsehair, were of a style austere enough to be almost beautiful. Down the white ground of the wall-paper an endless succession of pink nosegays ascended and descended between parallel stripes of blue. There were no ornaments to speak of in Greatorex's parlor but the grocer's tea-caddies on the mantelshelf and the little china figures, the spotted cows, the curly dogs, the boy in blue, the girl in pink; and the lustre ware and the tea-sets, the white and gold, the blue and white, crowded behind the diamond panes of the two black oak cupboards. Of these one was set in the most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties—faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, tender faces, slightly blurred. All these objects impressed themselves on Ally's brain, adhering to its obsession and receiving from it an immense significance and importance. * * * * * She heard Maggie's running feet, and the great leisurely steps of Greatorex, and his voice, soft and kind, encouraging Maggie. "Theer—that's t' road. Gently, laass—moor' 'aaste, less spead. Now t' tray—an' a clane cloth—t' woon wi' laace on 't. Thot's t' road." Maggie whispered, awestruck by these preparations: "Which coops will yo' 'ave, Mr. Greatorex?" "T' best coops, Maaggie." Maggie had to fetch them from the corner cupboard (they were the white and gold). At Greatorex's command she brought the little round oak table from its place in the front window and set it by the hearth before the visitor. Humbly, under her master's eye, yet with a sort of happy pride about her, she set out the tea-things and the glass dishes of jam and honey and tea-cakes. Greatorex waited, silent and awkward, till his servant had left the room. Then he came forward. "Theer's caake," he said. "Maaggie baaked un yesterda'. An' theer's hooney." He made no servile apologies for what he set before her. He was giving her nothing that was not good, and he knew it. And he sat down facing her and watched her pour out her tea and help herself with her little delicate hands. If he had been a common man, a peasant, his idea of courtesy would have been to leave her to herself, to turn away his eyes from her in that intimate and sacred act of eating and drinking. But Greatorex was a farmer, the descendant of yeomen, and by courtesy a yeoman still, and courtesy bade him watch and see that his guest wanted for nothing. That he did not sit down at the little table and drink tea with her himself showed that his courtesy knew where to draw the dividing line. "But why aren't you having anything yourself?" said Alice. She really wondered. He smiled. "It's a bit too early for me, thank yo'. Maaggie'll mak' me a coop by and bye." And she said to herself, "How beautifully he did it." He was indeed doing it beautifully all through. He watched her little fingers, and the very instant they had disposed of a morsel he offered her another. It was a deep and exquisite pleasure to him to observe her in that act of eating and drinking. He had never seen anything like the prettiness, the dainty precision that she brought to it. He had never seen anything so pretty as Ally herself, in the rough gray tweed that exaggerated her fineness and fragility; never anything so distracting and at the same time so heartrending as the gray muff and collar of squirrel fur, and the little gray fur hat with the bit of blue peacock's breast laid on one side of it like a folded wing. As he watched her he thought, "If I was to touch her I should break her." * * * * * Then the conversation began. "I was sorry," he said, "to hear yo was so poorly, Miss Cartaret." "I'm all right now. You can see I'm all right." He shook his head. "I saw yo' a moonth ago, and I didn't think then I sud aver see yo' at Oopthorne again." He paused. "'E's a woonderful maan, Dr. Rawcliffe." "He is," said Alice. Her voice was very soft, inaudible as a breath. All the blood in her body seemed to rush into her face and flood it and spread up her forehead to the roots of the gold hair that the east wind had crisped round the edges of her hat. She thought, "It'll be awful if he guesses, and if he talks." But when she looked at Greatorex his face reassured her, it was so utterly innocent of divination. And the next moment he went straight to the matter in hand. "An' what's this thing you've coom to aassk me, Miss Cartaret?" "Well"—she looked at him and her gray eyes were soft and charmingly candid—"it was if you'd be kind enough to sing at our concert. You've heard about it?" "Ay, I've heard about it, right enoof." "Well—won't you? You have sung, you know." "Yes. I've soong. But thot was in t' owd schoolmaaster's time. Yo' wouldn't care to hear my singin' now. I've got out of the way of it, like." "You haven't, Mr. Greatorex. I've heard you. You've got a magnificent voice. There isn't one like it in the choir." "Ay, there's not mooch wrong with my voice, I rackon. But it's like this, look yo. I joost soong fer t' schoolmaaster. He was a friend—a personal friend of mine. And he's gone. And I'm sure I doan' knaw—" "I know, Mr. Greatorex. I know exactly how you feel about it. You sang to please your friend. He's gone and you don't like the idea of singing for anybody else—for a set of people you don't know." She had said it. It was the naked truth and he wasn't going to deny it. She went on. "We're strangers and perhaps you don't like us very much, and you feel that singing for us would be like singing the Lord's song in a strange country; you feel as if it would be profanation—a kind of disloyalty." "Thot's it. Thot's it." Never had he been so well interpreted. "It's that—and it's because you miss him so awfully." "Wall—" He seemed inclined, in sheer honesty, to deprecate the extreme and passionate emotion she suggested. I would n' saay—O' course, I sort o' miss him. I caann't afford to lose a friend—I 'aven't so many of 'em." "I know. It's the waters of Babylon, and you're hanging up your voice in the willow tree." She could be gay and fluent enough with Greatorex, who was nothing to her. "But it's an awful pity. A willow tree can't do anything with a big barytone voice hung up in it." He laughed then. And afterward, whenever he thought of it, he laughed. She saw that he had adopted his attitude first of all in resentment, that he had continued it as a passionate, melancholy pose, and that he was only keeping it up through sheer obstinacy. He would be glad of a decent excuse to abandon it, if he could find one. "And your friend must have been proud of your voice, wasn't he?" "He sat more store by it than what I do. It was he, look yo, who trained me so as I could sing proper." "Well, then, he must have taken some trouble over it. Do you think he'd like you to go and hang it up in a willow tree?" Greatorex looked up, showing a shamefaced smile. The little lass had beaten him. "Coom to think of it, I doan' knaw as he would like it mooch." "Of course he wouldn't like it. It would be wasting what he'd done." "So 't would. I naver thought of it like thot." She rose. She knew the moment of surrender, and she knew, woman-like, that it must not be overpassed. She stood before him, drawing on her gloves, fastening her squirrel collar and settling her chin in the warm fur with the movement of a small burrowing animal, a movement that captivated Greatorex. Then, deliberately and finally, she held out her hand. "Good-bye, Mr. Greatorex. It's all right, isn't it? You're coming to sing for him, you know, not for us." "I'm coomin'," said Greatorex. She settled her chin again, tucked her hands away in the squirrel muff and went quickly toward the door. He followed. "Let me putt Daasy in t' trap, Miss Cartaret, and drive yo' home." "I wouldn't think of it. Thank you all the same." She was in the kitchen now, on the outer threshold. He followed her there. "Miss Cartaret—" She turned. "Well?" His face was flushed to the eyes. He struggled visibly for expression. "Yo' moosn' saay I doan' like yo'. Fer it's nat the truth." "I'm glad it isn't," she said. He walked with her down the bridle path to the gate. He was dumb after his apocalypse. They parted at the gate. With long, slow, thoughtful strides Greatorex returned along the bridle path to his house. * * * * * Alice went gaily down the hill to Garth. It was the hill of Paradise. And if she thought of Greatorex and of how she had cajoled him into singing, and of how through singing she would reclaim him, it was because Greatorex and his song and his redemption were a small, hardly significant part of the immense thought of Rowcliffe. "How pleased he'll be when he knows what I've done!" And her pure joy had a strain in it that was not so pure. It pleased her to please Rowcliffe, but it pleased her also that he should realise her as a woman who could cajole men into doing for her what they didn't want to do. * * * * * "I've got him! I've got him!" she cried as she came, triumphant, into the dining-room where her father and her sisters still sat round the table. "No, thanks. I've had tea." "Where did you get it?" the Vicar asked with his customary suspicion. "At Upthorne. Jim Greatorex gave it me." The Vicar was appeased. He thought nothing of it that Greatorex should have given his daughter tea. Greatorex was part of the parish. <h2 id="id01268" style="margin-top: 4em">XXV</h2> Rowcliffe was coming to the concert. Neither floods nor tempests, he declared, would keep him away from it. For hours, night after night, of the week before the concert, Jim Greatorex had been down at Garth, in the schoolhouse, practicing with Alice Cartaret until she assured him he was perfect. Night after night the schoolhouse, gray in its still yard, had a door kept open for them and a light in the solemn lancet windows. The tall gray ash tree that stood back in the angle of the porch knew of their coming and their going. The ash tree was friendly. When the north wind tossed its branches it beckoned to the two, it summoned them from up and down the hill. And now the tables and blackboards had been cleared out of the big schoolroom. The matchboarding of white pine that lined the lower half of its walls had been hung with red twill, with garlands of ivy and bunches of holly. Oil lamps swung from the pine rafters of the ceiling and were set on brackets at intervals along the walls. A few boards raised on joists made an admirable platform. One broad strip of red felt was laid along the platform, another hid the wooden steps that led to it. On the right a cottage piano was set slantwise. In the front were chairs for the principal performers. On the left, already in their places, were the glee-singers chosen from the village choir. Behind, on benches, the rest of the choir. Over the whole scene, on the chalk white of the dado, the blond yellow of varnished pinewood, the blazing scarlet of the hangings, the dark glitter of the ivy and the holly; on the faces, ruddy and sallow, polished with cleanliness, on the sleek hair, on the pale frocks of the girls, the bright neckties of the men, the lamplight rioted and exulted; it rippled and flowed; it darted; it lay suave and smooth as still water; it flaunted; it veiled itself. Stately and tall and in a measured order, the lancet windows shot up out of the gray walls, the leaded framework of their lozenges gray on the black and solemn night behind them. A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning, palpitating things. Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. It helped him to face without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them alien) faces in the front row of the audience: Mr. Cartaret and Miss Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he had done one night for Greatorex's mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen (not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest of them all). Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister. Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned. If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though less continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for substituting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected passions. It held in its impalpable web his dreams, the divine and delicate things that his grosser self let slip. He would forget, forget for ages, until, in the schoolroom at concert time, at the first caress of the magical smell, those delicate and divine, those secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again. And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic. It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause. It was the only form of intoxication known to him that did not end in headache and in shame. Suddenly the charm that had sustained him ceased to work. Under it he had been sitting in suspense, waiting for something, knowing and not daring to own to himself what it was he waited for. The suspense and the waiting seemed all part of the original excitement. Then Alice Cartaret came up the room. Her passage had been obscured and obstructed by the crowd of villagers at the door. But they had cleared a way for her and she came. She carried herself like a crowned princess. The cords of her cloak (it was of dove color, lined with blue) had loosened in her passage, and the cloak had slipped, showing her naked shoulders. She wore a little dove-gray gown with some blue about it and a necklace of pale amber. Her white arms hung slender as a child's from the immense puffs of the sleeves. Her fair hair was piled in front of a high amber comb. As she appeared before the platform Rowcliffe rose and took her cloak from her (Greatorex saw him take it, but he didn't care; he knew more about the doctor than the doctor knew himself). He handed her up the steps on to the platform and then turned, like a man who has done all that chivalry requires of him, to his place between her sisters. The hand that Rowcliffe had let go went suddenly to her throat, seizing her necklace and loosening it as if it choked her. Rowcliffe was not looking at her. Still with her hand at her throat, she smiled and bowed to the audience, to the choir, to Greatorex, to the schoolmaster who came forward (Greatorex cursed him) and led her to the piano. She sat down, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and waited, enduring like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling of their feet. Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play. In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars. Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano. Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him; but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano. Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew. Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller. Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang. "Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!" sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear. The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn't) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself. As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe. When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice's defiance of the young lady from Morfe. It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of "Bravos" and "Encores." Even Rowcliffe said, "Bravo!" But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled. And Jim Greatorex stood up to sing. * * * * * He stood facing the room, but beside her, so that she could sign to him if anything went wrong. "'Oh, that we two-oo were May-ing Down the stream of the so-oft spring breeze, Like children with vi-olets pla-aying.'" Greatorex's voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor. It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos. The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as nothing else could have expressed the passions that were within him at that moment. It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be anything more to him than a child). "'Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod, With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast, And our souls—at home—with God!'" That finished it. There was no other end. And as he sang it, looking nobly if a little heavily over the heads of his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room. He had forgotten Essy. And at the sight of her his nobility went from him and only his heaviness remained. It didn't matter that they shouted for him to sing again, that they stamped and bellowed, and that he did sing, again and again, taking the roof off at the last with "John Peel." Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter now. And then something bigger than his heart, bigger than his voice, something immense and brutal and defiant, asserted itself and said that Come to that Essy didn't matter. She had put herself in his way. And Maggie had been before and after her. And Maggie didn't matter either. * * * * * For the magical smell had wrapped itself round Alice Cartaret, and her dove-gray gown and dove-gray eyes, and round the thought of her. It twined and tangled her in the subtle mesh. She was held and embalmed in it forever. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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