Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 13 – Stockley · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 13Part III · The Ways of a Lover
18
Literature · Romance
Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship) 13
Part III · The Ways of a Lover
StockleyEnglish
"For life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan."--ROBERT SERVICE.
March was in like a lamb, and on a fair morning all the windows of Villa Duval stood open, letting in floods of sunlight, gusts of warm sea-scented wind, and the sound of waves crushing and swinging up and down the sandy beaches of Normandy. Perhaps it was because pere Duval who built it was an old sailor and lighthouse-keeper that the rooms of the Villa were curiously like ship-cabins with their wooden walls and bare deck-like floors. Looking out through the porthole windows at the view of blue waves rippling from the bay up the river it would not have seemed unnatural to find the Villa gently rocking with the incoming tide. Down in the garden pere Duval hoeing weeds fostered the illusion by croaking the ghost of an old sea song that he had lilted bravely enough forty years before from his fishing boat or when he kept the lighthouse at Les Sept Isles. He had built the Villa with his own hands after the sea and he had done with each other; but not for his own habitation. With its pink and blue tables and chairs made and lovingly painted by himself, beds from the Paris Bon Marche, stout bed-linen that had been part of mere Duval's marriage portion, marvellous mirrors and decorated crockery bought with trading coupons that represented many pounds of coffee from the Cafe Debray Company, it was considered far too wonderful and shining to be the habitation of a mere Normandy peasant. So the old man and his granddaughter Hortense lived in a couple of rooms beneath the wonder house, which was perched high and reached only by a flight of steps to the front door. The Villa lay nearer to the beach than any other in Mascaret, and for this reason was always one of the first to be taken by summer visitors. But at the end of the previous summer pere Duval had achieved an extraordinary piece of luck in letting it for the whole autumn and winter to some mad Americans, who were now fixtures for the coming summer also.
The mad Americans had received this title by reason of their eccentric habits and customs, to say nothing of their clothes. They never wore anything, week-day or Sunday, but red woollen sweaters and short skirts, and the girl most shamelessly showed her legs bare to the knee. Also the whole band of three bathed in the sea on the coldest of winter days. Evidently their mental condition was known elsewhere than in Mascaret, for more than once when they were staying at Les Fusains, the villa they had first taken, letters came from America addressed to Les Insains, and the occupants of Les Fusains had received these bland and unblinking from the hands of Jean Baptiste the postman. The postmaster, who understood a little English, had explained the jest to his village cronies, adding that the writing of the eldest mad one so much resembled the writing of a hen, that it was small wonder that mistakes were made over her address. That they were Americans was certain, for every three months American Express money orders came for them, and the eldest Insain promptly changed these for French money mandats and forwarded them to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. These fantastiques doings deeply impressed the villagers, and had provided them with many an interesting hour of gossip over their black coffee and cider.
And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into corners. She considered that she was being certainly very noble and useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence assumed by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person, and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion, of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt to a faint shell-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent, sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.
Haidee had grown into a beauty.
She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea, whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched rather husky treble the lay of pere Duval.
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eau
Va sans peur mon petit bateau."
In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of the Paris Daily Mail were spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her hands fall among the curly peel scrapings on the table, and gazed sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.
It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all scraps of paper, stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the road. A moment later the shell-pink bathing costume became part of the dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before the Daily Mail, attacked the potatoes with the same nobility of purpose she had used for the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at Bran's head bobbing up and down in the old Jules Duval. When her eyes strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh.
"What a day for a sail, Val!"
Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume.
"I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!"
"Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of rotten old March!"
She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder.
"I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's."
"Who will get dejeuner?" inquired Val, laconically.
"I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a problem in Algebra.
"Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any one would be."
Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts passed to pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr. Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the Sage of Craigenputtock!
Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue, blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus plays on the floor.
At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay. Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for paying Haidee's school fees.
"Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts, half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in kicks) "and get a proper bonne. We may be able to afford old M'am Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup."
"The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. I think potatoes and cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh! How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut my head off."
"Cockerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say "rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is getting awfully thin."
Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as long and thick as Haidee's own.
"It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured, and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind; always, always he was there, haunting the rooms of her memory and the chapelle ardente of her heart, perfuming every thought, influencing every action. Because of him she cried aloud now:
"I will have it cut off, Haidee. Go and tell the barber to come this afternoon. I 'll have it cut close--shaved--so that it must grow thick again. I won't be an old woman without hair! Oh, Haidee--an old bald hag whom no one loves!" Desolation crept into her voice, it had long dwelt in her eyes.
"Don't be a silly, Val," said matter-of-fact Haidee. "I love you and Bran loves you and Garry loves you."
"No, no--Garry hates me--he never writes!" She flung herself into a chair, and two of the salt bitter tears that were always lurking in the background, but which she seldom shed, oozed out of her eyes as if they had come from a long distance and gave her great pain. Haidee made no attempt to comfort her, but presently went out of the house to where Bran was just casting off anchor from the Jules in view of a voyage to New York.
"Val 's crying," she said briefly.
"What for?" asked Bran, but immediately letting go anchor and beginning to climb in a business-like way over the side of the boat. The eye that he cocked at Haidee was of the same smoke-blue as his mother's, and held the same wistful lion-cub glance.
"Just the old yellow snake," said Haidee, already on her way back to put on the potatoes, for well she knew that if she did not there would be none for lunch that day.
Bran found Val swiftly, and climbing upon her knees began to kiss her wet eyes. She kissed him back passionately, holding him with such convulsive tightness that he was at last obliged to give a small howl.
"O--h! you're hurting me, Mammie--just a little bit."
She kissed him again then, comforting him, reproaching herself, and drying away her tears in his bright hair.
"You know I would n't hurt my little cubby-cub for a million pounds."
"Would you for a million millions?"
"Never!"
"For a ship as big as the Tu-te-onic?" Bran adored ships, and could imagine most crimes being committed to acquire one.
"Never, never, jamais!"
"Not if some one came and asked you to give me just a teeny weeny hurt?"
"If some one came to me and said, 'I 'll give you the whole sea full of ships with all the beautiful things in the world in them, if you just crush your little Bran's finger till he howls,' I would say, 'You get out of here, Beel, or I keel you.'"
Bran gave a joyful prance at the familiar quotation from Stephen Crane's story of Mexico Bill, long since transformed by Val into an exciting game, in which he performed the ro1e of Bill, and she and Haidee were two Mexican braves in sombreros and draped blankets. He was just about to propose a full-dress rehearsal of this drama when Val, reading the inspiration in his eye and feeling quite unfit for any such diversion, headed his mind off in another direction.
"If any one came and offered you a million pounds to hurt your mammie, would you do it?"
"No," said Bran, adding darkly, "but I'd ask him where he lived."
"And then?" Val smiled into his hair. There was a pause; at last in a soft whisper spoke Bran the brigand:
"I 'd take a sword and go and pierce him in the night and get his million pounds for you." He embraced her ardently. It was characteristic of her that she did not rebuke him for the lawlessness of his plan. She thoroughly understood the spirit that could rob, pillage, and even do murder for the sake of a loved one.
They began to laugh and play. Val suddenly fell in love with her plan to have her hair cut off. She arranged a red handkerchief on her head, turban-fashion, to see how she would look. Eventually she decided to wear a fez and return to her habit of cigarette smoking to match her new appearance. Haidee declared that she too would love a fez, so Val sat down and wrote to the Army and Navy Stores for two, on the condition that Haidee went to the village at once to tell the barber to come immediately after lunch. Now that she had decided to have her hair cut the thing could not be done soon enough to please her.
Regretfully Haidee changed her bathing-dress for her navy-blue skirt and scarlet sweater, also a floppy hat of brown suede for which Val had paid a pound in Jersey at a time when they were very hard up indeed, just because it suited Haidee's peculiar style of cowboy beauty. Looking like a handsome conspirator, she sallied forth down the road that led to the village, for Villa Duval lay a good half-mile from Mascaret, with nothing between but the blacksmith's shop, a hotel, and a couple of fishermen's cottages.
The blacksmith's wife's brother, known to all the world, including Haidee and Bran, as "mon oncle" was whitewashing the outside of the blacksmith's cottage against the day when the rose-tree trained over the door would burst into leaf and large pink roses. A little farther on, in front of the hotel, two men were scattering red brick dust over the long flower beds on the sloping lawns, preparatory to planting out the letters "Grand Hotel de la Mer" in blue and white lobelias, thus combining patriotism with an excellent advertisement of the hotel. When the May excursion boat moored alongside the digue, the first thing to greet the eyes of the passengers would be the blue and white lettering on the brick-red beds.
These signs and symbols of approaching summer cheered the heart of Haidee, and she hummed a little song to herself, as she went light-foot along the curving picturesque terrace that led to the village.
Already she seemed to smell upon the air the luscious heavy scent of travellers' joy that would presently hang in waxen bunches from the high walls of La Terrasse and Villa Albert. These were the only two villas on the Terrace, and they pertained variously to a Paris specialist in madness, and the controller-general of a great French bank. Between the two villas lay a large and valuable plot of ground, overgrown and tangled up with creepers, brambles, cabbage stalks, rose bushes, and seeding onions, set in the midst of which was a dilapidated one-room hut. The hut was the fly in the ointment of the specialist in lunacy and the controller-general. They could do nothing to remove this picturesque slum from their gates, for old veuve Michel, who lived there and drank two bottles of cognac a day and sang gay ribald songs by night, owned the land by right of some old French statute, and no one could turn her out for as long as she lived. Haidee and Bran considered veuve Michel a very charming person indeed. She was fat and merry and gentle, called them her nice little hens and gave them apples and pears (for she also owned an orchard up the cliff) all through the winter when there was no fruit to be got any nearer than Cherbourg. Naturally they liked and appreciated the old woman. Haidee had a good mind to go in and pay her a visit, but she decided it was better not, as old veuve would just be sleeping off her morning bottle of cognac preparatory to starting on the afternoon one; also Haidee remembered that she was hungry, and had better hurry back and help get lunch. Still she could not help stopping once or twice to examine for signs of little pink tips the lower branches of the tamarisk-trees which grew on one side of the Terrace--on the other side was the grey stone river wall with the tide lapping blue against it.
Haidee loved tamarisks with a joy that she was sure was unholy because they looked so wicked and painted somehow when they were all dressed out in their pink feathers. She fancied that Jezebel must have had a bunch of them stuck like an aigrette in her beautifully coiffee hair, and the same pink tint on her cheeks when she looked out of the window for the last time. Anyway why were tamarisks the only trees to be found growing in the ruins of Babylon? And why had she read somewhere, that in the days of ancient Rome tamarisks were bound around the heads of criminals? It was a nuisance to have to forsake these interesting meditations to enter the little soap-scented shop of the village barber, but she stayed no longer than to bid him come to the Villa at three o'clock to cut off Madame's hair. Next she called at Lemonier's to command a sack of coal, and noted that Lemonier had evidently been drunk again, for Madame had a black eye. It was funny to think that such a jolly big red man should be so cruel! Haidee meditated on this subject on the return journey, also on the horrible price of coal--sixty-five francs a ton and it disappeared like lightning. No one seemed to know why "Carr-diff," as they called it, should be so dear. Hortense, closely questioned on the subject by Val anxious for information, said that it must be because the people in England hated the French and were still angry that Normandy did not belong to them.
"Well, have n't you got any coal mines in your own blessed country?" asked Haidee.
"Certainement!" Hortense had replied indignantly. "We have
Newcas-sel!"
The barber arrived at three o'clock, and Val sat trembling before her dressing-table. She had arranged two mirrors so that she could view the whole proceeding, but as soon as the barber commenced she closed her eyes tight. Bran and Haidee stationed themselves at either side of the table to see fair play.
The barber was frankly amazed at the decision of Madame to cut off her feathery hair. Even at the last moment he asked--holding it up in his hands and shaking it out in sprays:
"Does Madame realise what a change it will make in her appearance? Would it not be better if Madame had it merely cut short, leaving about two inches all round a la Jeanne d'Arc, so--?" He stuck his little pudgy fingers out below her ears to show the desirable length.
"No, no, no!" cried Val, without opening her eyes. "Does he think I want to look like a pony with my mane hogged! Cut it off close, it must grow long and thick as it used to do. Tell him, Haidee."
Haidee told him as much as it was good for him to know--no mention of ponies.
"Bon!" said Monsieur le Barbier agreeably, but he looked doubtful, thinking to himself that hair seldom grew much after the age of thirty, and the lady looked well that. When one side was gone Val opened her eyes and gave a deep cry. If it could have been replaced then, she would have abandoned her idea and made the best of what she had. As it was she closed her eyes again, but during the rest of the operation great tears rolled down her face upon her tightly clasped hands. And when all was over the children were swept from the room and she locked herself in with her heart's bitterness. Even Bran was not permitted to comfort her.
It is true that nothing makes a greater difference to the appearance of a woman than to cut off her hair. The tale of every sin she has committed and every sorrow she has suffered seems to be written bare and unsheltered upon her face for all the world to read. What subtle alleviation there is in a frame of hair round the face of a sinner it is hard to say: but it is a problem whether Mary Magdalene, with all her shining story of repentance would have appealed to the love and chivalry of the world in quite the same way if she had been handed down through the ages without her wondrous hair.
When Valentine Valdana looked in the glass at her pale, oval face with no darkness above it to soften the fine lines of her temples, faintly hollowed cheeks, and sombre eyes whose defect appeared to have become suddenly accentuated, she longed in shame and dismay for a mask. It seemed to her that she had indecently exposed her sorrows to the world; that exile, misery, and all the failures of her life were plainly written for even the most unintelligent eye to read. A curious sense too of having done something disloyal to others in revealing her unhappiness crept into her mind for an instant, but she made haste to dismiss it, and would not even specify the vague "others" to herself. None knew better than she the power of a beloved hand to strike deepest, to hollow out cheeks, sharpen temples, and put shadows into eyes: but she would never have admitted it. Hers was no accusing heart. She blamed nobody but herself for her failures--not even the Fate that had bestowed on her that double nature of artist and lover which rarely if ever makes for happiness. She only felt the despair of the convict and almost wished herself one, so that she might hide in a cell. At length she sought her gay scarf of asphodel-blue and arranged it over her head like a nun's veil. It was thus that she presented herself to the children in the kindly dusk. Supper already stood upon the table. Haidee displayed unusual tact, but Bran was full of curiosity.
"Are you always going to wear that wale tied on you?" he inquired.
"Until my hair grows long again," said poor Val, biting her lip painfully.
"Sleep in it too?" Val nodded, and Haidee made haste to help Bran to pommes frites which he loved.
Next morning, Bran waking up and throwing out an arm for his matutinal hug, encountered something strange to his touch: something round, bumpy, and slightly scrubby, very different to the soft nest he was used to dabble his hand in as soon as he woke. The blue scarf had slipped down while Val slept and her shorn head lay cruelly outlined upon the pillow. Bran knelt up and considered her in consternation mingled with pity, then finding himself in the attitude of prayer, mechanically crossed himself and murmured his morning orison, his eyes still fixed on his mother's head:
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my heart, take it please, and preserve it from sin."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I give you my soul and my life.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me in my last agony.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, grant that I live and die in thy holy company. Amen."
Immediately afterwards humour, that Irish vice, overcame all gentler feelings; like a certain famous Bishop of Down, Bran would lose a friend for a joke. He woke Val with a cruel jest:
"Bon jour, Monsieur le Cure!"
The cure of Mascaret was a Breton as rugged as his country, with haggard spiritual eyes and an upper lip you could built a fort on, as the saying is; he intensified his uncomeliness by wearing his hair so close-shaved that it was impossible to say where his tonsure began or ended. To be told by her loving but candid son that she resembled this good man was a cruel thrust to Val, and the memory of it darkened life for many days to come. She wrapped herself in gloom and the blue veil, and nothing more was heard of the fez cap and cigarettes except that in good time the Stores forwarded them and the French Customs taxed them. After once trying on the fez and finding herself the image of a sallow and melancholy Turk, she had cast it from her. Her one instinct was to hide her ugliness from every one. Even at the sight of John the Baptist she would fly and hide, and she never left the house except after dark, when for exercise she would sometimes race Haidee up and down the digue, or run along the beach at midnight, her scarf floating behind her in the wind, and her head bare to give her "roots" a chance.
These proceedings gravely annoyed the Customs officers distributed in the little straw-littered watch-huts that line the Normandy coast. Instead of tucking themselves in their blankets for a peaceful night, they were obliged to keep awake for fear the mad American woman meant either to commit suicide or meet a boat full of brandy and cigars from Jersey.
