Tante Part 9

"Karen Woodruff."

"Les Solitudes, "April 5th.

"Dear Mr. Jardine,--What you say makes me feel quite troubled. I know you write playfully, yet sometimes one can _dire la verite en riant_, and it is as if you had found my letters very empty and unresponsive. I did not mean them to be that of course; but I am not at all in the habit of writing letters except to people I am very intimate with. Indeed, I am in the habit only of writing to my guardian, and it is difficult for me to think that other people will be interested in the things I am doing. And in one way I do so little here. Nothing that I could believe interesting to you; nothing really but have walks and practise my music and read; and talk sometimes with Mrs. Talcott. About once in two months the vicar's wife has tea with us, and about once in two months we have tea with her; that is all. And I am sure you cannot like descriptions of landscapes. I love to look at landscapes and dislike reading what other people have to say about them; and is not that the same with you? It is quite different that you should write to me of things and people; for you see so many and you do so much and you know that to someone in the depths of the country all this must be very interesting. So do not punish me for my dullness by ceasing to write to me.--Sincerely yours,

"Karen Woodruff."

"Les Solitudes, "April 10th.

"Dear Mr. Jardine,--Of course I will write you descriptions of landscapes!--and of all my daily routine, if you really care to hear. No; I am not lonely, though of course I miss my guardian very much. I have the long, long walks with Victor, in wet weather over the inland moors along the roads, and in fine weather along the high cliff paths; sometimes we walk ten miles in an afternoon and come back very tired for tea. In the evenings I sit with Mrs.

Talcott over the fire. You ask me to describe Mrs. Talcott to you, and to tell you all about her. She is with me now, and we are in the morning room, where we always sit; for the great music-room that opens on the verandah and fronts the sea is shut when my guardian is not here. This room looks over the sea, too, but from the side of the house and through an arabesque of trees. The walls are filled with books and flowering bulbs stand in the windows. We have had our tea and the sunlight slants in over the white freesia and white hyacinths. There are primroses everywhere, too, and they make the room seem more full of sunlight. You could hardly see a more beautiful room. Mrs. Talcott sits before the fire with her skirt turned up and her feet in square-toed shoes on the fender and looks into the fire. She is short and thick and very old, but she does not seem old; she is hard; not soft and withered. She has a large, calm face with very yellow skin, and very light blue eyes set deeply under white eyebrows. Her hair is white and drawn up tightly to a knot at the top of her head. She wears no cap and dresses always in black; very plain, with, in the daytime, a collar of white lawn turning over a black silk stock and bow, such as young girls wear, and, in the evening, a little fichu of white net, very often washed, and thin and starchy. And since her skirts are always very short, and her figure so square, she makes one think of a funny little girl as well as of an old woman. She comes from the State of Maine, and she remembers a striving, rough existence in a little town on the edge of wildernesses. She is a very distant relation of my guardian's. My guardian's maternal grandparents were Spanish and lived in New Orleans, and a sister of Senor Bastida's (Bastida was the name of my guardian's grandfather)--married a New Englander, from Vermont--and that New Englander was an uncle of Mrs. Talcott's--do you follow!--her uncle married my guardian's aunt, you see. Mrs. Talcott, in her youth, stayed sometimes in New Orleans, and dearly loved the beautiful Dolores Bastida who left her home to follow Pavelek Okraska. Poor Dolores Okraska had many sorrows. Her husband was not a good husband and her parents died.

She was very unhappy and before her baby came--she was in Poland then,--she sent for Mrs. Talcott. Mrs. Talcott had been married, too, and had lost her husband and was very poor. But she left everything and crossed to Europe in the steerage--and what it must have been in those days!--imagine!--to join her unfortunate relative. My guardian has told me of it; she calls Mrs. Talcott: '_Un coeur d'or dans un corps de bois._' She stayed with Dolores Okraska until she died a little time after. She brought up her child. They were in great want; my guardian remembers that she had sometimes not enough to eat. When she was older and had already become famous, some relatives of the Bastidas heard of her and helped; but those were years of great struggle for Mrs. Talcott; and it is so strange to think of that provincial, simple American woman with her rustic ways and accent, living in Cracow and Warsaw, and Vienna, and steadily doing what she had set herself to do. She speaks French with a most funny accent even yet, though she spent so many years abroad, so many in Paris. I do not know what would have become of my guardian if it had not been for her. Her father loved her, but was very erratic and undisciplined. Mrs. Talcott has been with my guardian for almost all the time ever since. It is a great and silent devotion. She is very reticent. She never speaks of herself. She talks to me sometimes in the evenings about her youth in Maine, and the long white winters and the sleigh-rides; and the tapping of the maple-trees in Spring; and the nutting parties in the fall of the year. I think that she likes to remember all this; and I love to hear her, for it reminds me of what my father used to tell me of his youth; and I love especially to hear of the trailing arbutus, that lovely little flower that grows beneath the snow; how one brushes back the snow in early Spring and finds the waxen, sweet, pink flowers and dark, shining leaves under it. And I always imagine that it is a doubled nostalgia that I feel and that my mother's Norway in Spring was like it, with snow and wet woods. There is a line that brings it all over me: 'In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes.' It is by Emerson. The Spring here is very lovely, too, but it has not the sweetness that arises from snow and a long winter. Through the whole winter the fuchsias keep their green against the white walls of the little village, huddled in between the headlands at the edge of the sea beneath us.

You know this country, don't you? The cliffs are so beautiful. I love best the great headlands towards the Lizard, black rock or grey, all spotted with rosettes of orange lichen with sweeps of grey-green sward sloping to them. Victor becomes quite intoxicated with the wind on these heights and goes in circles round and round, like a puppy. Later on, all the slopes are veiled in the delicate little pink thrift, and the stone walls are festooned with white campion.

"Then Mrs. Talcott and I have a great deal to do about the little farm. Mrs. Talcott is so clever at this. She makes it pay besides giving my guardian all the milk and eggs and bacon, too, she needs.

There is a farmer and his wife, and a gardener and a boy; but with the beautiful garden we have here it takes most of the day to see to everything. The farmer's wife is a stern looking woman, but really very gentle, and she sings hymns all the day long while she works. She has a very good voice, so that it is sweet to hear her.

Yes; I do play. I have a piano here in the morning-room, and I am very fond of my music. And, as I have told you, I read a good deal, too. So there you have all the descriptions and the details. I liked so much what you told me of the home of your boyhood. When I saw you, I knew that you were a person who cared for all these things, even if you were not an artist. What you tell me, too, of the law-courts and the strange people you see there, and the ugly, funny side of human life amused me, though it seems to me more sorrowful than you perhaps feel it. People amuse me very much sometimes, too; but I have not your eye for their foibles. You draw them rather as Forain does; I should do it, I suspect, with more sentimentality. The fruit comes regularly once a week, and punctual thanks seem inappropriate for what has become an inst.i.tution. But you know how grateful I am. And for the weekly _Punch_;--so _gemutlich_ and _bien pensant_ and, often, very, very funny, with a funniness that the Continental papers never give one; their jests are never the jests of the _bien pensant_. It is the acrid atmosphere of the cafe they bring, not that of the dinner party, or, better still, for _Punch_, the picnic. The reviews, too, are very interesting. Mrs. Talcott reads them a good deal, she who seldom reads. She says sometimes very acute and amusing things about politics. My guardian has a horror of politics; but they rather interest Mrs. Talcott. I know nothing of them; but I do not think that my guardian would agree with what you say; I think that she would belong more to your party of freedom and progress. What a long letter I have written to you! I have never written such a long one in my life before, except to my guardian.--Sincerely yours,

"Karen Woodruff."

"Les Solitudes, "April 15th.

"Dear Mr. Jardine,--How very nice to hear that you are coming to Cornwall for Easter and will be near us--at least Falmouth is quite near with a motor. It is beautiful country there, too; I have driven there with my guardian, and it is a beautiful town to see, lying in a wide curve around its blue bay. It is softer and milder than here. A bend of the coast makes so much difference. But why am I telling you all this, when of course you know it! I forget that anyone knows Cornwall but Mrs. Talcott and my guardian and me. But you have not seen this bit of the coast, and it excites me to think that I shall introduce you to our cliffs and to Les Solitudes. If only my guardian were here! It is not itself, this place, without her. It is not to see Les Solitudes if you do not see the great music-room opening its four long windows on the sea and sky; and my guardian sitting in the shade of the verandah looking over the sea.

But Mrs. Talcott and I will do the honours as best we may and tell you everything about my guardian that you will wish to know. Let us hear beforehand the day you are coming; for the cook makes excellent cakes, and we will have some baked specially for you. How very nice to see you again.--Sincerely yours,

"Karen Woodruff."

CHAPTER IX

On a chill, sunny morning in April, Gregory Jardine went out on to his balcony before breakfast and stood leaning there as was his wont, looking down over his view. The purpling tree-tops in the park emerged from a light morning mist. The sky, of the palest blue, seemed very high and was streaked with white. Spring was in the air and he could see daffodils shining here and there on the slopes of green.

He had just read Karen Woodruff's last letter, and he was in the mood, charmed, amused and touched, that her letters always brought. Never, he thought, had there been such sweet and such funny letters; so frank and so impersonal; so simple and so mature. During these months of their correspondence the thought of her had been constantly in his mind, mingling now not only with his own deep and distant memories, but, it seemed, with hers, so that while she still walked with him over the hills of his boyhood and stooped to look with him at the spring gushing from under the bracken, they also brushed together the dry, soft snow from the trailing arbutus, or stood above the sea on the Cornish headlands. Never in his life had he so possessed the past and been so aware of it. His youth was with him, even though he still thought of his relation to Karen Woodruff as a paternal and unequal one; imagining a crisis in which his wisdom and knowledge of the world might serve her; a foolish love-affair, perhaps, that he would disentangle; or a disaster connected with the great woman under whose protection she lived; he could so easily imagine disasters befalling Madame von Marwitz and involving everyone around her. And now in a week's time he would be in Cornwall and seeing again the little Hans Andersen heroine. This was the thought that emerged from the sweet vagrancy of his mood; and, as it came, he was pierced suddenly with a strange rapture and fear that had in it the very essence of the spring-time.

Gregory had continued to think of the girl he was to marry in the guise of a Constance Armytage, and although Constance Armytage's engagement to another man found him unmoved, except with relief for the solution of what had really ceased to be a perplexity--since, apparently, he could not manage to fall in love with her--this fact had not been revealing, since he still continued to think of Constance as the type, if she had ceased to be the person. Karen Woodruff was almost the last type he could have fixed upon. She fitted nowhere into his actual life. She only fitted into the life of dreams and memories.

So now, still looking down at the trees and daffodils, he drew a long breath and tried to smile over what had been a trick of the imagination and to relegate Karen to the place of half-humorous dreams. He tried to think calmly of her. He visualized her in her oddity and child-likeness; seeing the flat blue bows of the concert; the old-fashioned gold locket of the tea; the sealskin cap of the station. But still, it was apparent, the infection of the season was working in him; for these trivial bits of her personality had become overwhelmingly sweet and wonderful. The essential Karen infused them. Her limpid grey eyes looked into his. She said, so ridiculously, so adorably: "My guardian likes best to be called von Marwitz by those who know her personally." She laughed, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. From the place of dream and memory, the living longing for her actual self emerged indomitably.

Gregory turned from the balcony and went inside. He was dazed. Her primroses stood about the room in the white and blue bowls. He wanted to kiss them. Controlling the impulse, which seemed to him almost insane, he looked at them instead and argued with himself. In love? But one didn't fall in love like that between shaving and breakfast. What possessed him was a transient form of _idee fixe_, and he had behaved very foolishly in playing fairy-G.o.dfather to a dear little girl. But at this relegating phrase his sense of humour rose to mock him. He could not relegate Karen Woodruff as a dear little girl. It was he who had behaved like a boy, while she had maintained the calm simplicities of the mature. He hadn't the faintest right to hope that she saw anything in his correspondence but what she had herself brought to it. Fear fell more strongly upon him. He sat down to his breakfast, his thoughts in inextricable confusion. And while he drank his coffee and glanced nervously down the columns of his newspaper, a hundred little filaments of memory ran back and linked the beginning to the present. It had not been so sudden. It had been there beside him, in him; and he had not seen it. The meeting of their eyes in the long, grave interchange at the concert had been full of presage. And why had he gone to tea at Mrs.

Forrester's? And why, above all why, had he dreamed that dream? It was his real self who had felt no surprise when, at the edge of the forest, she had said: "And I love you." The words had been spoken in answer to his love.

Gregory laid down his paper and stared before him. He was in love.

Should he get over it? Did he want to get over it? Was it possible to get over it if he did want to? And, this was the culmination, would she have him? These questions drove him forth.

When Barker, his man, came to clear away the breakfast things he found that the bacon and eggs had not been eaten. Barker was a stone-grey personage who looked like a mid-Victorian Liberal statesman. His gravity often pa.s.sed into an air of despondent responsibility. "Mr. Jardine hasn't eaten his breakfast," he said to his wife, who was Gregory's cook. "It's this engagement of Miss Armytage's. He was more taken with her than we'd thought."

Gregory had intended to motor down to Cornwall, still a rare opportunity in those days; a friend who was going abroad had placed his car at his disposal. But he sent the car ahead of him and, on the first day of his freedom, started by train. Next day he motored over to the little village near the Lizard.

It was a pale, crystalline Spring day. From heights, where the car seemed to poise like a bird in mid-air, one saw the tranquil blue of the sea. The woods were veiled in young green and the hedges thickly starred with blackthorn. Over the great Goonhilly Downs a silvery sheen trembled with impalpable colour and the gorse everywhere was breaking into gold.

It was a day of azure, illimitable distances; of exultation and delight.

Even if one were not in love one would feel oneself a lover on such a day.

Gregory had told himself that he would be wise; that he would go discreetly and make sure not only that he was really in love, but that there was in his love a basis for life. Marriage must a.s.sure and secure his life, not disturb and disintegrate it; and a love resisted and put aside unspoken may soon be relegated to the place of fond and transient dream. Perhaps the little Hans Andersen heroine would settle happily into such a dream. How little he had seen of her. But while he thus schooled himself, while the white roads curved and beckoned and unrolled their long ribbons, the certainties he needed of himself merged more and more into the certainties he needed of her. And he felt his heart, in the singing speed, lift and fly towards the beloved.

He had written to her and told her the hour of his arrival, and at a turning he suddenly saw her standing above the road on one of the stone stiles of the country. Dressed in white and poised against the blue, while she kept watch for his coming, she was like a calm, far-gazing figure-head on a ship, and the ship that bore her seemed to have soared into sight.

She was new, yet unchanged. Her att.i.tude, her smile, as she held up an arresting hand to the chauffeur, filled him with delight and anxiety. It disconcerted him to find how new she was. He felt that he spoke confusedly to her when she came to shake his hand.

"People often lose their way in coming to see Tante," she said, and it struck him, even in the midst of his preoccupation with her, as too sweetly absurd that the first sentence she spoke to him should sound the familiar chime. "They have gone mistakenly down the lane that leads to the cliff path, that one there, or the road that leads out to the moors.

And one poor man was quite lost and never found his way to us at all. It meant, for he had only a day or two to spend in England, that he did not see her for another year. Tante has had signs put up since then; but even now people can go wrong."

She mounted beside the chauffeur so that she could guide him down the last bit of road, sitting sideways, her arm laid along the back of the seat. From time to time she smiled at Gregory.

She was a person who accepted the unusual easily and with no personal conjecture. She was so accustomed, no doubt, to the sudden appearance of all sorts of people, that she had no discriminations to apply to his case. There was no shyness and no surmise in her manner. She smiled at him as composedly as she had smiled over the Great Wall of China in Mrs.

Forrester's drawing-room, and her pleasure in seeing him was neither less frank nor more intimate.

She wore a broad hat of sun-burnt straw and a white serge coat and skirt that looked as if they had shrunk in frequent washings. Her white blouse had the little frills at neck and wrists and around her throat was the gold locket on its black ribbon. Her eyes, when she turned them on him and smiled, seemed to open distances like the limitlessness of the moorland. Her tawny skin and shining golden hair were like the gorse and primroses and she in her serenity and gladness like the day personified.

They did not attempt to talk through the loudly purring monotones of the car, which picked its way swiftly and delicately down the turning road and then skimmed lightly on the level ground between hedges of fuchsia and veronica. As the prospect opened Karen pointed to the golden shoulder of a headland bathed in sunlight and the horizon line of the sea beyond. They turned among wind-bitten Cornish elms, leaning inland, and Gregory saw among them the glimmer of Les Solitudes.

It was a white-walled house with a high-pitched roof of grey shingles, delicately rippling; a house almost rustic, yet more nearly n.o.ble, very beautiful; simple, yet un.o.btrusively adapted to luxury. Simplicity reigned within, though one felt luxury there in a chrysalis condition, folded exquisitely and elaborately away and waiting the return of the enchantress.

Karen led him across the shining s.p.a.ces of the hall and into the morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and, with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically, she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that the famous altar-piece had been temporarily removed and that he could not really judge the chapel without its culminating and consecrating object. "If only Tante were here!" she said. "It seems so strange that anyone should see Les Solitudes who has not seen her in it. I do not remember that it has ever happened before. This is the dining-room--yes, I like to show it all to you--she planned it all herself, you know--is it not a beautiful room? You see, though we are Les Solitudes, we can seat a large dinner-party and Tante has sometimes many guests; not often though; this is her place of peace and rest. She collected all this Jacobean furniture; connoisseurs say that it is very beautiful. The music-room, alas, is closed; but I will show you the garden--and Mrs.

Talcott in it. I am eager for you and Mrs. Talcott to meet."

He would rather have stayed and talked to her in the morning-room; but she compelled him, rather as a sacristan compels the slightly bewildered sight-seer, to pa.s.s on to the next point of interest. She led him out to the upper terrace of the garden, which dropped, ledge by ledge, with low walls and winding hedges, down the cliff-side. She pointed out to him the sea-front of the house, with its wide verandah and cl.u.s.tered trees and the beautiful dip of the roof over the upper windows, far gazing little dormer windows above these. Tante, she told him, had designed the house. "That is her room, the corner one," she said. "She can see the sunrise from her bed."

Gregory was interested neither in Madame von Marwitz's advantages nor in her achievements. He asked Karen where her own room was. It was at the back of the house, she said; a dear little room, far up. She, too, had a glimpse of the Eastern headland and of the sunrise.

They were walking along the paths, their borders starred as yet frugally with hints of later glories; but already the aubrietia and arabis made bosses of white or purple on the walls, and in a little copse daffodils grew thickly.

"There is Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, quickening her pace. Evidently she considered Mrs. Talcott, in her relation to Tante, as an important feature of Les Solitudes.

It was her relation to Karen that caused Gregory to look with interest at the stout old lady, dressed in black alpaca, who was stooping over a flower-border at a little distance from them. He had often wondered what this sole companion of Karen's cloistered life was like. Mrs. Talcott's skirts were short; her shoes thick-soled and square-toed, fastening with a strap and b.u.t.ton over white stockings at the ankle. She wore a round straw hat, like a child's, and had a basket of gardening implements beside her.

"Mrs. Talcott, here is Mr. Jardine," Karen announced, as they approached her.

Mrs. Talcott raised herself slowly and turned to them, drawing off her gardening gloves. She was a funny looking old woman, funnier than Karen had prepared him for finding her, and uglier. Her large face, wallet-shaped and sallow, was scattered over with white moles, or rather, warts, one of which, on her eyelid, caused it to droop over her eye and to blink sometimes, suddenly. She had a short, indefinite nose and long, large lips firmly folded. With its updrawn hair and impa.s.sivity her face recalled that of a Chinese image; but more than of anything else she gave Gregory the impression, vaguely and incongruously tragic, of an old shipwrecked piece of oaken timber, washed up, finally, out of reach of the waves, on some high, lonely beach; battered, though still so solid; salted through and through; crusted with brine, and with odd, bleached excrescences, like barnacles, adhering to it. Her look of almost inhuman cleanliness added force to the simile.

"Mr. Jardine heard Tante last winter, you know," said Karen, "and met her at Mrs. Forrester's."