Mushroom Town Part 7

"Another gla.s.s of wine, Mr. Ashton?" ...

Then there enters with a little commotion, and trips half running to the empty chair between John Willie Garden and Val Clayton, Mrs. Maynard. She wears a big black hat swathed in black tulle, and her dress is of black lace, with close sleeves that reach to the middle knuckles of her taper fingers. She shakes out the mitre of her napkin and breaks forth to Val as she settles in her chair.

"My horrid hair!" she pouts; "it always takes me three-quarters of an hour! Really, I shall have to stop bathing, but I do love it so. It seems a kind of fate; I always have to give up the things I love!"

Hereupon Val--or perhaps vermouth, since Val seems a little astonished at his own gallantry--suddenly replies that if he were like that he would have to give up Mrs. Maynard. If Mrs. Maynard also is a little surprised she covers it with great readiness.

"Oh, now the dreadful man's beginning again!" she cries. "If you will say those things, Mr. Clayton, I shall have to change places at table!"

Mr. Clayton asks here what is wrong with her hair.--"I think it's champion," he adds. "Very nice indeed," he adds once more.

"Oh, how can you!" (As a matter of fact, Mrs. Maynard's hair is rather wonderful, dark, and so long that she can sit on it.) "No fish, thank you," she says, with a smile to the waiter.

Then Mrs. Lacey's firm voice is heard. "Can anybody tell me whether there have been many wrecks on this coast?"

The person best qualified to give this information is John Willie Garden, but Mrs. Maynard has turned to John Willie, and is asking him whether he does not think she swims rather nicely. Her tendril-like fingers are again stroking his hair. Mrs. Lacey considers Mrs. Maynard's tulle-swathed hat the ostentation of modesty and the coquetry of mourning (if she is in mourning), and, getting no answer to her question about the wrecks, invents a name for Mrs. Maynard: "Mrs. Maynard--as she calls herself." Plates are changed, corks pop, and from time to time a seltzogene gives a spurt and a cough. Raymond Briggs explains that he is fond of strawberries, but strawberries are not fond of him. The chatter grows louder.

"I took her as a kitchen-maid, but she turned out quite a good plain cook----"

"Oh, like a top--as Dr. Smythe says, it's the air."

"Oh, I prefer it rustic; like this!"

"Quite so--the first tripper and I'm off!"

"So I opened her box myself; and there they were, if you please--four silver spoons!----"

"Now, June, you and Wy talk French--you haven't talked it for days----"

"John's booked the rooms for next year already----"

"Oh, Mis-ter Clayton! I never promised any such thing!"

"They can talk it if they like, as fast as a mill----"

"If I were you I should see Tudor Williams about it----"

"You can put on your oldest things and there's n.o.body to see you----"

"But really I'm almost ashamed to go about the fright I do!----"

"But that's a new dress?----"

"New!--Last year--but it's good enough for here----"

"Can't manage those double-l's----"

"Gutturals----"

"Llan--Thlan--Lan----"

"June, your legs are younger than mine--run and get Aunt May's letter out of my dressing-table drawer----"

"Mrs. Smythe?... The best thing for the baby, of course, but I can't help thinking that not quite so publicly----"

"Oh, I always let Percy suck, whoever was there!----"

"John will have his dinner in the middle of the day----"

"Smythe? Oh, one of the nicest fellows, but no push, I'm afraid----"

"That's his failing----"

"Where he misses it----"

"Extraordinary----"

"Well, some men are born like that----"

"Wait for things to come to them instead of going to fetch them----"

"Up t' Trwyn? We'll talk about it after I've had my forty winks. I must have my forty winks after my dinner."

"Lunch, William."

"Lunch, then."

"He will call it his dinner----"

"It is my dinner----"

Then Mr. Morrell makes a signal, the younger ones troop out, breaking into loud shouts the moment they are clear of the room. They are off to the beach again. Shall we follow them?...

What do the Welshmen think of it all? It suits Howell Gruffydd's book, as you see, and Howell has pacified John Pritchard with the promise of Bazaars; but the others? Dafydd Dafis, say?

Again nothing is going right for Dafydd. He feels that another friend has changed towards him--Minetta, to whom he used to sing Serch Hudol, and tell his stories of fays and water-beings and knights, and make much of for her elfin looks and quick and un-Saxon ways. For Minetta is already displaying the artist's heartlessness, and does not see the sorrow in Dafydd's eyes, but only what sort of a "head" he has from her special point of view, and how he will "come" upon a piece of paper. She tried to draw Dafydd only the other day, and ordered him, half absently, to turn his head this way and that, and grew petulant when her drawing went all wrong, and suddenly cried "Don't look at me like that!" when Dafydd turned his eyes on her with a tear in the corner of each. Poor Dafydd! He, like the Squire, would be better out of all this swiftly oncoming change....

But Dafydd, who is of the phrase-making kind, has made out of his sadness a phrase that more or less represents the att.i.tude of every Welshman in Llanyglo. He watched all these people coming in ones and twos and threes out of the hotel one morning and walking down to their deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the beach. He stood for a while, looking at the gay parterre of sun-shades and summer clothes, of kites and spades and buckets, and rings on fingers more carefully tended but of coa.r.s.er stuff than his own. And he listened to the accents that even his alien ear told him were strained and affected and false. And he gave them a half contemptuous and half pitying look as he turned away.

"These summer things," he said....

But Howell Gruffydd has Dafydd Dafis's measure also, and takes it, just as he took John Pritchard's, in a single word.

"Eisteddfodau," he whispered to Dafydd behind his hand....

For they may by and by be advertising Llanyglo by means of an Eisteddfod, and, as long as he is allowed to play, Dafydd does not greatly care who he plays to nor whether they understand him or not.

IV.

YNYS.

There came one day at about that time a Welsh gipsy fortune-teller to Llanyglo. Her name was Belle Lovell, she was a known character all over the countryside, and she was some sort of a connection of Dafydd Dafis's. There was always a packet of tobacco for her in the Squire's kitchen when she appeared, and her companion on her travels was her thirteen-years-old daughter Ynys.[1] Belle sold baskets and mended chairs, and Ynys drew the cart, which was no more than a large deal packing-case mounted on four perambulator wheels, and with two flat shafts roughly nailed to its sides. The mother's boots, which you might have hit with a hammer and not have dinted, resembled grey old wooden dug-outs; the child went barefooted and barelegged, and it would have been a stout thorn that could have pierced the calloused pads of her hardened soles.

[Footnote 1: p.r.o.n. "Unnis."]

These two appeared at Llanyglo at midday, ate their frugal meal on the doorstep of Dafydd's single-roomed cottage behind the Independent Chapel, and then, leaving the cart behind them, strolled down to have a look at that splendacious new caravan, Howell Gruffydd's shop. Belle, her greenish light brown eyes never for a moment still, gossiped with her old acquaintances; her daughter, whose head was as steadily held as if she balanced an invisible pitcher on it, stood looking at the green b.u.t.terfly-nets and red-painted buckets, admiring, but no more desiring them than she would have desired anything else impossibly beyond her reach. Her mother joined a group about Mrs. Roberts's door; the visitors, who had lunched, began to descend to the beach again; and there approached down the path that led to the Hafod Unos Ned, the oldest of the Kerrs.

Now Ned had run across Belle on many alder-expeditions, and, while the invasion of "summer things" had not driven Ned into naturalisation as a Welshman, it had, by emphasising the distinction between the well-to-do and the poor of the world, shown him how to jog along in peace with his neighbours. He gave Belle an intelligent grin, and jerked his head in the direction of the bathing-tents.

"Well, mother," he said, "ye've dropped in at just about th' right time."

"There iss no wrong time for seeing friends," Belle replied, in an up-and-down and very musical Welsh accent.

"Nay, I wanna thinking-g o' that," Ned replied, strongly doubling the "g" that terminated the present participle. "I wor thinking-g of a bit o' fortune-telling. There's a lot ovver yonder wi' more bra.s.s nor sense, and it allus tickles 'em to talk about sweethearts an' sich."

"Indeed Llanyglo has become grea-a-at big place, whatever," the gipsy replied, and continued her conversation with Mrs. Roberts.

And presently, whether she took the hint or whether she had come precisely for that purpose, Belle's greenish-brown eyes roved again, she made a slight gesture to Ynys, who had turned from the b.u.t.terfly-nets and was looking out to sea, and the pair of them made off along the beach in the direction of that bright plot of colour that made as it were a herbaceous border between the grey-green tussocks and the glittering sea.

For a hundred yards Belle's dug-outs left behind her a heavy shuffling track in the sand, parallel with the light kidney-shaped prints of the child who walked as if she carried an invisible pitcher on her head; and then, with the cl.u.s.ter of tents and parasols still far ahead, they stopped. John Willie Garden and Percy Briggs, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd ready to bear a hand if called upon to do so, but otherwise a little fearful of intruding, were victualling the blue-and-white collapsible boat for a cruise. But it was not in order to tell the fortunes of the three boys that Belle stopped. She stopped for the same reason that the street-seller pulls out his rattle or his conjuring trick, while his quick-silver eyes dart this way and that in search of his crowd. The only difference was that Belle was her own conjuring-trick. The gesture with which she performed it was superbly negligent. She had a wonderful old mignonette-coloured shawl, which, when she had talked with the group about Mrs. Roberts's doorstep, had been drawn up over her head; and suddenly she allowed it to fall to her shoulders. The effect might well have carried twice the distance it was intended to carry. Out of the folds of the shawl her neck rose as erect as the pistil of an arum lily. Against it gleamed her heavy gold earrings. Her cheekbones and the nodule of her high nose gleamed like bronze, and about the whorl of the springing of her hair at the back of her head the sunshine made as it were a sun-dog on the l.u.s.trous blackness. Her silver wedding-ring, an old tweed jacket that might have belonged to her kinsman Dafydd Dafis, and a patched old indigo petticoat, completed the legerdemain. Ynys, clad to all appearances in a single garment only, watched the boys exactly as she had watched the b.a.l.l.s and b.u.t.terfly-nets and buckets outside Howell Gruffydd's shop.

They too made a shining coup d'oeil. There was just swell enough to set the long breakers hurdling in, and wind enough to take the tops off them in rattling showers of brilliant spray. Indeed it was so merry a sea that, not half an hour before, Mrs. Maynard had declared to John Willie that she had come within an ace of drowning during her bathe that morning, and had asked him whether, had he seen her in difficulties, he would have come to her rescue. "Mmmmm, John Willie?" she had asked, curling his hair with her perfumed fingers; but John Willie, seeing Percy Briggs approaching, had jerked away his head. This had not been because he had been afraid of being laughed at by Percy. For that matter, Percy had confided to John Willie only a week before that he "liked their Minetta," and so was in no position to jeer at the softer relations. No; it had merely been that, as Llanyglo's curtain had risen, suddenly revealing a soft and alluring group of Euonymas and Wygelias and Hildas, not to speak of Mrs. Maynard herself, all temptingly set out like fruit upon a stall, the curtain of John Willie Garden's peculiar privacy had come down with a run. Mrs. Maynard was always trying to peep behind it, but probably there was nothing behind. Probably that was the reason it had come so sharply and closely down. No boy wants to show that he has nothing to show.

Smack!--A bucketful of spray drenched the stores, and the wave ran hissing and creaming back under the counter of the blue-and-white boat. John Willie shouted rather crossly to Eesaac Oliver.

"Pull her up a bit, can't you, instead of standing there doing nothing!"

Eesaac Oliver started to life and obeyed. He was rather a fetcher and carrier for these more happily circ.u.mstanced boys, but privately he knew himself to be in some things their superior. To tell the truth, Eesaac Oliver knew just a lee-tle too much about what went on within himself, and communicated it just a lee-tle too readily to others. For he dropped no curtain; on the contrary, the windows of his soul were flung wide open. The experience of the world he had acquired at the school at Porth Neigr had already caused him to declare himself as being thenceforward powerfully on the side of the angels; and that ingenious educational exercise which consists of speaking extempore on any subject given only a moment ago had a lee-tle abnormally developed certain natural powers of expression which his race rarely lacks. Had Mrs. Maynard attempted to stroke Eesaac Oliver's hair (which was thick and black, and rose in a great lump in front, falling thence in a lappet over his pale forehead), he would either have cried "Apage!" or else, suffering the seduction, would have undergone torments of remorse afterwards.

Therefore it was with a meek dignity that Eesaac Oliver bore a hand with the boat, and then fell back and a little enviously watched again.

Then that crafty and stately piece of legerdemain of Belle's had its reward. In his rippling cream alpaca, there approached along the sands Mr. Morrell himself, and Belle's neck no longer resembled the pistil of an arum lily. She bent ingratiatingly forward; as if a key had clicked, a dazzling smile cut her face into two; and after a jocular word or two Mr. Morrell bore her off, Ynys following. Let us follow too.

Do look at the contrast--those summer things, and the two wanderers in whom all the seasons are ingrained; carefully veiled and sunburn-cured complexions, and these other vagrants, brown as the upturned earth; the indefatigable maintenance of artificial att.i.tudes even before one another, and the grave ease of the child, the deliberate gesture with which the mother looses as it were in the sheath the only weapon she has against the world.... Frith's "Derby Day?" Yes, it is a little like it; but listen. Mrs. Maynard, with a sparkling glance about her that says "Mum," has slipped off her wedding-ring, and Belle has taken her hand. It is slim as a glove that has never been put on, and Mrs. Maynard intends to trip Belle if she can.

So, when Belle begins to promise Mrs. Maynard a husband who shall be such-and-such, there are winks and glances and nudges, as much as to say that now they are going to have some fun, and Mr. Morrell says, "Here, ho'd on a bit, mother--how do you know she isn't married?"

If Belle shows the knife for a moment, she does it so delicately that n.o.body notices it.

"If the prit-ty lady was married, her man he srink a ring upon her finger, red-hot, as they srink a tyre on a cart-wheel," Belle replies; and the reading of Mrs. Maynard's palm continues.

Mrs. Lacey, a pale blue hollyhock, looks as if she pooh-poohed the whole thing; but inwardly she is a-tremble with eagerness to have the fortunes of her two daughters told. As it happens, no sooner is Mrs. Maynard's hand dropped than Mr. Morrell, who happens to be standing next to June, catches her by the arm.

"Come on, June, and be told how to get a husband!" he cries, and he slips a shilling into Belle's hand.

June will never be prettier than she is now. She is indeed very pretty--apple-blossom and cream, bright-haired, freshly starched, back straight and elbows well down, and as glossy from top to toe as the broad mauve ribbon of her sash. Soon she will be as tall as her mother; already she is taller than her father, the landscape-gardener; and the thought of whether she will marry or not, and whether brilliantly or otherwise, never enters her head. Of course she will marry, and of course her marriage will be a brilliant one. "Marriage" and "brilliant marriage" are one and the same thing. In this, as in most other things, Wygelia is of the same opinion as June. A close understanding, which has not yet outgrown the form of surrept.i.tious kicks under the table, and private and abbreviated words, exists between the two sisters. Other things being equal, they would probably prefer to marry two brothers.

"I tell the prit-ty miss a harder thing than that--I tell her how to keep her man when she has got him," Belle replied amid laughter; and she proceeds to describe June's husband. He is to come over the water (landing at Newhaven, Mrs. Lacey instantly concludes, and taking the first train to the Boarding School at Brighton), and he shall be devoted to her, and she shall have such-and-such a number of children. (Mrs. Lacey straightens her back; this is something like; her grandfather, whom she remembers quite well, was June's great-grandfather, and will have been the great-great-grandfather of June's boys and girls, which is getting on, especially when you remember the younger sons and grandsons of somebodies, who are estate-bailiffs and engine-drivers and carriers of milk-cans in the Colonies.) When June's fortune is finished all applaud her, as if she had performed some feat of skill, and then Mr. Morrell seizes Wy.

"Come on, Wy--no hanging back--let's see what sort of a fist Wy's going to make of it----"

And Wy also is haled forward, blushing and conscious and biting her lip, and is told that for her too somebody is languishing, and that presently he will drink out of her gla.s.s and thenceforward think her thoughts, which are already complex. And Hilda's palm is read, and little Victoria Smythe's fat one, and Val Clayton's, and others, and silver rains into Belle's palm. Chaffingly Mr. Morrell offers her a sovereign for her takings, uncounted, but is refused. Then Mrs. Briggs "wants the boys done," and somebody is despatched along the sh.o.r.e for Percy and John Willie, and as they arrive, bearing their bottles of milk and parcels of jam-sandwiches (for the blue-and-white boat had been paid off), there comes up also Minetta, carrying her sketching-kit. She stands peering at Ynys, more as seeing in her a subject than as at a fellow-being.

So, idly and laughingly, an hour of the summer afternoon pa.s.ses; and then an accident mars its harmony. John Willie and Percy, feeling the pangs of thirst, had drunk their milk and had then set up the bottle as a mark to throw stones at; and Ynys, walking down to the sea-marge, has set her foot upon a piece of the broken gla.s.s. Unconcernedly she bathes the cut in the salt water.

But as the laughing group breaks up, and her mother calls her again, the blood wells out once more, dabbling with a dark stain those light kidney-shaped prints in the sand. Mrs. Garden and Mrs. Briggs see the child's plight simultaneously. It is a cruel gash, and the two ladies utter loud cries.

"Nay, nay, whativver in the world!" cries Mrs. Briggs, all of her that is not pure mother suddenly becoming pure Hunslet. "Nay, nay! Come here, doy!----"

She and Mrs. Garden kneel down before the gipsy child, and a dozen others gather round. Cries of sympathy break out.

"T' poor bairn!----"

"What a mess!"

"How did she do it?"

"John Willie, quick, run and get the kettle from the picnic-basket----"

"Indeed, lady dear, it iss noth-thing----"

"Quick, Ray, give me your handkercher too----"

Ynys' foot is bathed in fresh water from the picnic-kettle, and bound up with Mrs. Briggs's tiny lace handkerchief, with Raymond's large one over it to secure it. The blood has already come through before the tying is finished. And you forget the false accents and the elaborate pretences of these "summer things" of Llanyglo's little preliminary piece, and remember only the better things that lie beneath them. They flatter Ynys, and encourage her with admiring words.

"She's a very brave little girl, anyway!"

"What did you say her name was?"

"Ynys."

"Well done, Ynys! Soon be well----"

"John Willie, I've told you about throwing stones at bottles before--get you home till I come----"

"And you too, Percy Briggs; and you dare to stir out till I tell you!"

"Don't cry, little girl----"

Ynys has no thought whatever of crying. She makes no more motion than a pine makes when it bleeds its gouts of resin in the spring. But they continue to comfort her.