The Derelict (Bottome, Century Magazine, 1917)/Chapter 7
Part III. Chapter VII
FANNY had learned to perfection the art of letting sleeping dogs lie; she was so delighted to have them asleep that she never even went in their direction.
It is an unusual art with women, and Geoffrey profited by it. There were no more uncomfortable moments between him and Fanny. Day after day they worked and chatted together. They talked about Geoffrey's pictures and Fanny's future profession, and they discussed inexhaustibly the question of Emily's cottage.
Fanny was, to begin with, the more practical of the two. She ruled off the narrow, climbing streets; they were certainly picturesque, but there was Mr. Dering's stiff knee, which would be sure to resent cobbles. She forced Geoffrey to see that Mrs. Dering would prefer a good kitchen range to a high north light, and hot water to the whole of the Atlantic out of a bedroom window.
They must remember, too, that Miss Emily would not like the smell of fish, which might n't all be fish, but some of it drains from the lower town, despite the county council.
It would probably be better to have a house outside the town. Carbis Bay was the obvious direction, but Emily had pleaded not to have the railway line anywhere near. She said she wanted to forget the existence of railways, though, of course, they would have to be near enough to get things down from town.
And then Fanny lost her head completely: she fell in love with a cottage. It was, as Geoffrey saw at a glance, hopelessly out of the question.
It was on the way to Clodgy Point, quite beyond everything else, a little silvery-roofed, forbidding cottage—a cottage which knew its way about in a storm and had dealt pitifully and hopelessly with an abandoned garden. What it did n't know about the north wind hardly needed teaching, but it had no water-supply of any kind, hot or cold, and depended on a pump in the garden.
Fanny would n't admit the failure of hope; she pointed out the growth of a blossoming apple-tree in a sheltered angle behind the cottage, and the presence of wall-flowers, against all scriptural authority, thriving permanently upon stony ground.
At the foot of the cottage were rocks and the open sea, and behind it, and not part of the garden, as Fanny tried to make out, was a group of gorse-bushes so compact and flaming as to account, perhaps, for the turning of Fanny's usually level head.
Inside—they got in quite easily through an unlatched window—was a kitchen where the inhabitants had always lived. It was black with venerable age and smoke and generous sheltering. It was just the kind of kitchen Fanny liked. It shared the floor with a small, stiff, chilly parlor, a dreadful place of wool mats, china dogs, and angular, unnatural shells. A revised form of step-ladder led to an upper story.
There were three rooms ("It's quite a large cottage!" Fanny exclaimed triumphantly), a double room, the size of the Derings' bath-room; and one that Geoffrey mistook for a cupboard. "I could sleep there easily," Fanny explained hurriedly, "and work for Miss Emily. You know, I really can cook, and you never saw me tidy a house. I have n't for years, of course, but I always used to at home."
There was also a room which Fanny hailed with delight as "perfect for Miss Emily."
Geoffrey eyed it doubtfully over Fanny's shoulder. It would have suited St. Ursula. There was room for an angel by the door, and her small slippers and a lily by the bedside. It was doubtful if there was room for the large American trunk that Emily always took about with her. American trunks take up more space than angels.
It had a rather large window looking over the rocks and the sea. The noise of the waves ran through the house resoundingly, as if it were a shell.
"Won't she love it!" cried Fanny, exultantly. "And I 'll work and do everything, and bring them up early tea. Don't you understand,—" she almost stammered in her eagerness,—"it 'll be my way of paying her back for all she's done for me?"
Geoffrey had never before seen Fanny excited. It was like seeing the sleeping Fury wake up and smile at you. This would be a disconcerting impression, but no one would want to stop her smiling.
Geoffrey temporized basely.
"Well," he said, "let's tell her all about it. But don't exaggerate, or she 'll be disappointed."
"She 'll never be that," said Fanny, confidently, as she descended the chicken ladder backward, "and it won't be exaggerating to say there are two flowering-currant-bushes outside the door, will it?"
There was nothing else in the garden but something which looked like a disappointed potato and an uncongenial sardine tin.
"We 're to ask at the lighthouse about it," Fanny said, reading a notice on a broken board at the gate. "I'm sure it 'll be almost nothing. I shall write to Miss Emily to-night."
Geoffrey had n't the heart to tell her that he had in his pocket, sent to him that morning by Emily herself, the address of a "desirable summer cottage at Lelant." He went to see it secretly next day. The door was opened by a butler. The house stood in a garden dramatically laid out with scarlet tulips, exactly the same distance apart, and when the tulips were over, there would be roses and dwarf sweet-peas. There were three sitting-rooms and six bedrooms, with a kitchen somewhere out of the way at the back.
The front door opened on a hall, with an old clock and a good oak settle. In fact, it was just the kind of cottage the Derings would be sure to like. It was called "The Nest." He told himself savagely as he banged the gate on the scarlet tulips that it would be too ridiculous to expect the Derlngs to take Fanny's absurd cottage. Why on earth should they? This, of course, was what he was being savage about, not because he knew they would n't.
Emily was to come down in June to settle the matter. She would stay at a hotel on the hill above St. Ives, a beautiful hotel, once a private house. There was a wood on the grounds which was, in the spring, like romance itself. Hart's-tongue ferns were there, as green as cumbers, and bluebells like dark flames, and above them elm and ash and oak, birch and pine, weaved gold and silver leaves together. Convenient seats were placed at intervals.
Geoffrey met Emily by the five o'clock train. He was to take her to tea at his studio. Fanny had prepared it with great care, and it included bluebells, Cornish cream, splits, raspberry jam, and an unpleasant cake with icing on it from the grandest of the small confectioners.
As soon as it was ready Fanny hurried away to Carbis. She wanted them to have it all to themselves, though she would have loved to see Emily meet the bluebells. She went away as completely as she could; but on every wall in the studio, and piled up to the roof, Fanny remained.
There was the picture of Fanny, in the blue dress, against the gray rocks; and an interior, with a pot of geraniums behind her head; and a curious full-length one of her, rather dark, with a shadow across her face. Fanny had never liked it. She thought shadows were silly when you could have sunshine. And there was the one Fanny liked best, of the cottage itself, with her standing under the apple-tree; only she had scolded Geoffrey for not having put in the pump.
There was something in all those pictures which Emily had never seen in Geoffrey's work before—a certain ruggedness and virility that was n't at all pretty.
"You have n't made her half as beautiful or half as sad as she really is," Emily complained as she ate the splits and cream. "I don't mean the pictures are n't wonderful; but somehow I 've always seen Fanny differently. This one with the gorse and the gray rocks has such a curious look, as if she'd been beaten down into the rocks, and yet was not at all sad."
"I don't see Fanny as sad," Geoffrey explained briefly.
"Oh, don't you?" asked Emily. "But you can't be beaten without being sad, can you?"
Geoffrey frowned. He did n't want to talk about Fanny being beaten.
Emily, however, did talk about it; she almost went on about it. They had n't seen each other for five weeks, and Geoffrey did n't really want to talk about anything. He felt like a dried rock, with the tide returning to it; but as long as Emily ate splits and talked, it would n't quite return. He found himself wishing that Emily would n't drink so much tea.
The next day Emily insisted on taking Fanny with them to see the cottage. Emily had gathered from Geoffrey's letters that Fanny loved her discovery, and though Geoffrey was afraid it would n't do, Fanny seemed to have set her heart upon it.
Emily had privately wished that if the cottage was unsuitable, Geoffrey would take Fanny's heart off it; but he obviously had n't done so, and probably the operation needed tact. Emily had come provided with quantities of exquisite tact. A good deal of it had to be used on the way to the cottage. Fanny said nothing at all, but looked persistently out to sea. Geoffrey, singularly clumsy and nervous, stuck his hands into his pockets, kicked at small pebbles, and whistled.
Fortunately, Emily was full of gaiety, and swept them both along toward the cottage as if she were a laughing wave and they were two pieces of rather passive sea-weed. She gave a charming little cry of pleasure at the sight of the little silvery, obstinate cottage set above the rocks.
"But what a dear little place this is!" she exclaimed. She looked a little surprised when Geoffrey explained it was actually the cottage they had come to see. She had apparently thought it something thrown in on the way. She lent herself to the blossoming apple-tree and the flowering-currants, but her eyes were doubtful over the pump. She thought it might make rather a charming sketch. When they let her in,—they'd brought the key this time from the coast-guard,—she looked round her with laughing eyes and said: "But, my dears, where is the dining-room?"
Of course this really settled it. Still, she went up-stairs, and heard the sea whisper and withdraw and whisper again through the little house. She sat on one of the rickety beds. It had lumps in it even for the casual sitter.
She got up and down the chicken ladder with Geoffrey's aid, and sniffed a little before she pointed out a black beetle in the kitchen. She put her hand on Fanny's shoulder and made her sit down beside her on the kitchen table, while Geoffrey went to the window and turned his back; and then Emily explained.
It seemed to Geoffrey that she explained too much, it went on so long, and was so reasonable and thoughtful and kindly; also some of the explanations repeated themselves as if they were too good to be used only once.
Geoffrey wished Emily could have said, "It won't do, Fanny, my dear; it won't do," and left it at that. But Emily never left things until she had altered them.
What she wanted to do now was to make Fanny see, ever so gently and kindly, that the cottage was a mistake; and it was unnecessary because Fanny had seen from the moment Emily had asked where the dining-room was that the cottage was a mistake. Only she loved her mistake, and Emily could not alter that.
Geoffrey said, "Come on; let's go," once or twice, but neither of them paid any attention to Geoffrey.
"You see, dear," Emily wound up, "it's a dear, little, funny, pretty cottage, and I simply love to have seen it,—we might even come out and have tea here one day, might n't we, Geoff, if we brought a thermos-flask?—but it would n't do to live in. You do see that now, don't you, Fanny?"
"Oh, yes, I see that now all right," said Fanny. "May I stay and lock up, and you and Mr. Amberley go on?"
"Well, it won't take you very long to turn a key in a door, will it?" asked Emily, playfully.
She was afraid that Fanny might be sulky. Her voice had sounded reluctant and uncertain, and Emily thought she ought to break up sulkiness. But Geoffrey seized her suddenly by the arm.
"Come on, Emily," he said, almost dragging her out into the garden. "Leave Fanny to lock up."
The next day Geoffrey and Emily went over to Lelant and took "The Nest."
It was exactly what the Derings wanted, but Fanny did n't offer to work for them; it would n't have done in a large house with three other servants. Fanny saw that for herself; there was no need to point it out to her. It went with the cottage.