The Derelict (Bottome, Century Magazine, 1917)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
They traveled to St. Ives separately. Geoffrey spent the journey in smoking interminable cigarettes and thinking of Emily. Fanny spent it in not thinking at all. She wondered idly from time to time what would happen if she made eyes at a young man in the opposite corner. Ultimately they went into the dining-car together, and he said grace before his lunch. Still, Fanny was not sure how much that would have helped him. She had known piety crumble more easily than savoir-faire. Savoir-faire was more elastic. However, she was n't going to try, of course.
Geoffrey took a studio the day before Fanny arrived. It was not exactly what he wanted. No studio has ever been exactly what any artist wanted, but he saw that he could work in it. It seemed to grow upward out of a gray rock.
The lower part of St. Ives has a strange affinity to rocks, and the houses hang and cling together, up the short, uneven streets, like a heap of shells.
Above it are reared the stately biscuit-boxes, designed for lodgings, readily found in all English watering-places; and around the village, in a wide half-circle, stretches the murmurous blue bay.
Carbis Bay is to the right of St. Ives, hidden by sandy alps and hideously spotted by bungalows and residences. On the left of St. Ives a small green flap of land runs out into the sea. It is known as the Island, and beyond it the coast spreads, bleak and wild, free of bungalows and railway lines, a land of elfin enchantment, meager and rock-strewn, the haunt of old secrets, a dumb, close-lipped companion of the sea.
Geoffrey had chosen his studio in one of the narrow, cliff-like streets overlooking the Island. He told Fanny by a post-card when he expected her, and when she came he painted her. He was the type of man who, in being agreeable to one woman, is likely to be disagreeable to all the rest. He did not set out to be disagreeable; he simply did not notice them.
He painted Fanny with an absorption which was not so much hostile as unhuman; he hardly spoke to her, except to order her poses, for three days.
Fanny sat there listlessly, with her hands in her lap. She had a formidable capacity for sitting still; through the studio window she could watch the emerald-green Island and the fishermen spreading their delicate nets on the grass.
Sometimes the Island would blaze up with all the colors under the sun: light-red table-cloths, sky-blue overalls, pink garments of singular shapes and sizes, blew and unfurled themselves before her watching eyes. This was on washing-day, and only if the sun was lenient.
"I'm having a good rest, anyhow," Fanny thought to herself.
Then Geoffrey woke up. Perhaps you cannot paint any human being for long with understanding, and remain permanently unsympathetic toward her, and Fanny's face had been responsive to life. It was not a brilliant mask, or the face of a lovely china doll, all surface and no depth. It had the quality of incandescence; a light shone through her from her inner self, a curious, fitful light. On the third day Geoffrey said to her in a friendly voice the only words he had yet addressed to her which were not perfunctory or practical.
"You 're the best model," he said, throwing down his brush and giving a sigh of satisfaction, "I ever had, bar none."
"Well, that's something, is n't it?" said Fanny.
She took him where she found him. There was no resentment in her voice, and no irony; only a certain inconsequent friendliness.
It occurred to Geoffrey that he had n't been very pleasant to Fanny. He had never asked her if she was comfortable in her lodgings or how she was or whether she liked St. Ives. He had determined from the first only to use her as a model, but he might have been more civil. The way of transgressors is hard, but the virtuous sometimes make their pathways harder still.
"I dare say you 're tired," he said kindly. "You can rest now; there's a spirit-lamp somewhere about if you care to make yourself a cup of tea."
"You would n't think just sitting still would tire you, would you?" Fanny asked, obediently rising to her full height and lifting her arms above her head with a splendid long movement of relief. "It's having to, I suppose. Funny what a lot of starch that puts into things, is n't it?"
Geoffrey did not answer; he saw no reason why he should discuss the disabilities of the moral law with Fanny.
After they had had tea, he asked her how she liked St. Ives. Fanny stood at the window looking out over the bay.
"Oh, I like it all right," she said at last. "I 've always liked the sea: it keeps going all the time. Funny these roofs are; they look for all the world like the sea-gulls' wings."
Geoffrey joined her. A catch had just come in; the bay was filled with the swooping, swirling lightning of the sea-gulls' wings, and the little fisher houses, crowding down to the brim of the bay. their roofs aslant, and silvery with rain-washed slate, seemed on the verge of joining in the flight.
"Curious I had n't noticed it before," Geoffrey murmured. "They do shape like wings; I must paint them. I 'll take a gray day; it 'll bring it out more. Thank you for the idea, Miss Fanny."
Then he asked her if she was comfortable where she was and feeling stronger.
Fanny stared at him, but it was not the bold, unwavering stare she had given him in London. It had a different quality, a little startled and pathetic, as if she was surprised that any one should care to know how she was or whether she was comfortable or not.
"Thanks," she said a little uncertainly; "I'm all right." Then she added, with a sudden spark of pleasure in her eyes, "They gave me lots of cream; I sent some to Miss Emily this morning."
Geoffrey was touched. He had not thought of sending cream to Emily; he had thought of nothing but his work.
Of course he wrote to Emily every day, and Emily wrote to him, beautiful, long letters, full of her demonstrative tenderness. They kept him up.
He wondered a little what kept Fanny up. He thought he would try things pleasanter for Fanny.
He did make things very much pleasanter. After the work of the day was over they explored the coast together.
Fanny, hatless and gloveless, trod the yellow sands with a new, happy freedom. She laughed often, and sang sometimes, little, tuneless melodies that sounded like the rise and fall of the sea. The color filled her cheeks; the haggard lines vanished from her face, and the hollows from under her eyes. Her laughter was good to listen to; it had no ring of silliness or coarseness. It was the easy laughter of a child.
Her speech was very infrequent and plain; she did not want to talk much, but she liked Geoffrey's companionship. She strode along beside him, with her head up and the wind in her hair, as unaware as a boy and as unprovocative as a blade of grass.
She was quite friendly to Geoffrey now, but it was a more impersonal friendliness even than his own. It struck Geoffrey as odd how little Fanny could have known of friendliness. She seemed to have no language for it, and no small exchange of little kindlinesses.
He asked her once:
"Have n't you made any friends down here—besides me?"
Fanny shook her head.
"No," she said. "They would n't like it if they knew what I was, and I would n't like it if they did n't; so there you are."
Geoffrey was brought up curiously short by this reply. He had quite forgotten what Fanny was. He had believed that his only safeguard was a cold imperviousness to her presence.
Now he discovered that her presence itself was the most impervious substance he had ever come across.
Thrown with her day by day for many hours, there were a hundred opportunities for the obtrusion of little intimacies. He could n't, however cold he was, have prevented their arising; but they did n't arise.
When he became more friendly and more communicative, Fanny dealt with his friendliness exactly as she had dealt with his coldness, as something in the atmosphere which could n't be helped and must be accepted. If it was cold, you put on wraps and shivered; if the sun came out, you sat in it and enjoyed yourself.
It was as if her whole attitude toward life was without condemnation or personal recognition. She had learned that her place in the universe was small.
Geoffrey became first less guarded and then frankly incredulous. He could have sworn she was innocent—innocent not, perhaps, of experience, but of all contamination from experience. He was not right: she was contaminated; but for the moment he was right, for she had forgotten her contamination.
It was he himself who brought it back to her.
"I'm damned if I can see," he exclaimed suddenly, "how it ever happened. Hang it all! you don't look the kind of person,—after all, I 've seen lots of them,—who goes under or stays under. I can't make you out, Fanny."
They were sitting on the gray rocks, between the violent bushes of flowering gorse. The sea lay far below them, a long, blue line. Geoffrey had been painting Fanny in a circle of gray rocks. She wore a blue linen frock of Emily's, the shade of a gentian. The light had altered too much for Geoffrey to go on painting. He stopped, and moved abruptly so that he could face her.
"I can't understand it," he repeated savagely. "It must have been a beastly shame. You are n't like that! I could swear it was n't any fault of yours."
The color went out of Fanny's face; her mouth grew sullen.
"You don't know what I'm like," she said in a low voice. "What's the use of talking about it, anyway?"
"Are n't we friends?" demanded Geoffrey. "I'm not so cold-blooded as all that. I'd like to know your story. I would n't have at first; rather not. But then I did n't know what a good sort you were. Why, you 're no end of a chap! We 've had three weeks together now, and we 've got on like anything; so I think you might trust me."
"That's where trouble begins," said Fanny, coldly, "trusting people. No. I don't mean my troubles this time; anybody's troubles. You want to steer clear of confidence tricks if you mean to keep on the right side of things. It's true we 've had a good time, but the less said about it the better. Have you finished what you 've been doing?"
"Oh, all right, all right," said Geoffrey, stiffly. "Yes, I 've finished for to-day, thanks. Perhaps you'd like to go home?"
Fanny's heavy lids lifted slowly. She looked at Geoffrey. It was a look that drove the blood to his face. Her lips parted in a curious, ironic smile.
"Good Lord!" she said, "what fools men are! If I were Miss Dering, I would n't let you out of my sight for a gold-mine. And you think it's you I'm not trusting! You cut along home; I'm all right—by myself."
And Geoffrey left her. He wanted to believe he left her out of sheer temper, she had been exasperatingly rude and off the point, or out of chivalry at the appeal of her defenselessness; but he knew that he had left her from fear.
He felt his weakness. He thought he had been guarding against it, he thought Emily's beautiful letters were preventives; in a flash he had seen he had no protection whatever except the singular absence of all attack from Fanny.
Her look had been an attack, and the only way he had been able to stand out against it was by precipitate flight. He ran down the hill as if he were pursued by the Furies. There were no Furies pursuing him. They remained behind with Fanny, and Fanny never looked at him like that again. She settled with the Furies.
She appeared in the studio toward supper-time with a basket packed with mushrooms, a lettuce, and a cream cheese. She stewed the mushrooms in milk, mixed the salad, and laid the table, while Geoffrey, pretending not to notice her, wrote to Emily. For once Emily did not notice something wrong, and yet there was something wrong in Geoffrey's letter. It was the defensive letter of a good man in a bad temper.
Then Fanny walked over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Come along now," she said gently, "and eat the mushrooms while they 're hot." Her tone was that of an indulgent mother to a wayward child; but it was a safe tone, and Geoffrey ate his mushrooms comfortably.
After supper, when Fanny had washed up and cleared away, she sat in the open doorway, at the top of the high, narrow street.
"You can come here, Mr. Amberley," she said. "I thought it over up there—what you said, you know. I'd forgotten about it at the time, and it made me cross to have to think of it again. But I don't mind you knowing—all there is to know. Fetch the kitchen chair up, so I don't have to shout. I don't want to astonish the natives. Have you your cigarettes? Well, give me one, then, and you won't tell Miss Dering, will you? It's no use ladies knowing the way things are. It only upsets them. What they like to think is we 're just weak or wicked. 'Unfortunate sisters,' Miss Emilv calls us; love and the world well lost, that's their idea. It's lost all right, and I dare say it's love sometimes; but with nine out of ten of us it is n't love. It's what it was with me, I expect, being too much pinched to stand it. I had an offer of twelve pounds a year, all found, as a nursery governess when I was seventeen. There were eight of us in the family. My father was a clergyman, a bit too fond of cider; my mother was a farmer's daughter. He met her at the farm he'd first started drinking in, and as soon as I could get out I had to get out. He had a hundred and twenty pounds a year, so you can figure what that meant, can't you?"
Geoffrey sat there figuring what it meant. He had n't the slightest inclination to tell Fanny's story to Emily, but, strangely enough, it was not to spare Emily. He felt as if he wanted to spare Fanny Emily's knowledge of it. Emily would go down to the root of things, and the roots of things are unpleasant places to be taken down to.
Fanny spoke without the slightest effort or self-pity. She simply stated facts; that made it easier for Geoffrey to listen. He smoked hard, looking over the top of Fanny's head out to sea.
Fanny did n't see the sea; while she talked she watched two very stout fishermen urging a donkey and cart up the narrow street. It was a difficult operation, and it interested her very much.
"There were lots of things we needed at home," she continued. "I had a brother next to me. I wanted him to go to a good school; he was a clever little chap. Then there was my sister with a bad back; she ought to have been taken up to London for proper treatment. And boots—we all of us were always wanting boots. I never had a decent dress in my life, and we were n't supposed to play with the village children, and any other children would n't play with us.
"There was the squire's family, and young Henry—he was the squire's son—stared his silly eyes out at me in church. I thought a lot about that. Once or twice when I went to do the marketing he met me coming back through the fields. He was n't much to look at, but he had a lot of money. Henry promised me a good lot of money for Jimmy's school and Hetty's back and the boots, and he gave it to me, too, directly we got to London, and father sent the money back to me, with, written on a paper round the check, 'The wages of sin is death.' That was all right, of course; but I did n't have eight children, and spend on cider what ought to have kept them, did I?
"When you come to think of it, it must be a lot easier to slop out a text than keep it. You can't blame religious people that they prefer slopping out; only it's apt to put you off religion.
"Henry promised to settle some money on me, and I dare say he would have done it, only he got killed in the South African war before he'd arranged it.
"I dare say you wonder why I came to pieces so suddenly at my age. I'm twenty-two, you know, two years younger than Miss Emily. But I got ill; that did me in. I had to sell some of my jewelry to get back to England; I was in Paris at the time. I hung about in London selling things, and living on what I got for them for a while before I got really bad.
"I had friends, you know, but I was too seedy to look them up; besides, they were n't people you could go to if you were seedy. Finally, I had to take to lodgings. The hotels I was used to were too expensive, and then I got quite laid up with pain, and light-headed, and finally the doctor that the landlady called in got me taken off in an ambulance to the hospital. So that's all there is to it."
"You did n't like that kind of life," said Geoffrey, in a low, moved voice; "you did n't like it, Fanny?"
Fanny got up. She always went back to Carbis Bay before nine, and she heard the church clock striking.
"Well," she said consideringly, "I don't suppose most people like their lives, do they? I did what we all have to do: I lumped it."