White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  Of course there couldn’t be jealousy, when you hated a face as he hated Ydette’s, yet when he had heard Christopher’s idiotic remark about her being photogenic, he had wanted to snarl, Leave her alone. You try taking pictures of her and you’ll be surprised what’ll happen to you.

  He plunged down the slope, kicking out sand in every direction and causing May and Nora to exchange resigned glances, and all the way down he was struggling with the impulse to dare the danger, to sneer at Christopher: you ought to film her, some time.

  “Are you coming along?” he said to him, instead, while he was unlocking the door of the big white car that stood parked in a hollow of the overhanging bluff, and Christopher nodded. “Yes, thanks, I may as well.”

  “All right, then. We’ll drop them at the house and go; we can be in Oostende in fifteen minutes.”

  “I expect we can, with you driving …” and they grinned at one another. As he climbed into the car after his mother, Christopher was thinking that although Adriaan might be a peculiar little swine he was good company; he always had been; his malice was endlessly entertaining, and when he was annoyed his vocabulary was something to hear; he was never boring either, a quality which strongly recommended his society to Christopher.

  Nora stood on the edge of the dune and watched until the car was out of sight, not wistfully, but because she had nothing else to do. How very good looking her father was still; she was only now beginning to realize that his height and his grace in movement, and his clear, dark eyes and the dark hair beginning to turn to a grey almost silver, were all helped by his fortunate passions for drinking cold water and going for long walks. When she had been twelve or so, his charming looks had been to her a part of his goodness and his kindness, and she had thought of him as personifying the “Intellectual Beauty” of Shelley’s hymn. Now she knew that beauty was accidental; her father’s appearance was just as much a matter of chance as her own un-abundant hair and the weak eyesight inherited from her mother and the skin that nothing (not even long walks and cold water) could really improve.

  I wish I were an American.

  The surprising thought came up suddenly out of nowhere, as she turned away and began to walk moodily back towards the house. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the lights beginning to twinkle and flash out among the pink-and-white stucco hotels along the digue at Zandeburghe, and beyond the white curve of the dune, which stood up, rounded and silvery and touched here and there with dark fringes of grass in the clear twilight, there wound away a long curve of dim land stretching into the distance, glittering and sparkling all along its length. The pleasure-towns of the Belgian coast were lighting up for the evening; the dancing-places and the cafés, the restaurants and the bistros and casinos, the promenades under clipped trees, and the cinemas, the strolling-grounds for the ‘girls of that class’ who grew up so quickly, the places where people chattered and held hands and kissed. If I were an American girl, something would have been done about my skin, she thought.

  As she began to descend into the broad hollow in the dune where the group of houses was situated, remembering that there was a new book on Physics waiting to be begun in preparation for next year’s work in the Upper Sixth, she saw Ydette and her escort crossing the lower part of the sands.

  They were walking at a short distance apart, still laughing, and looking at one another. Nora could not honestly say to herself that their laughter was vulgar. If it had not been for the adolescent ring in their voices (and even that sounded neither self-conscious nor hysterical) she might have taken it for the laughter of children; the old words that used to be spoken about laughter, hearty and sweet, came into her head as she listened. The young man was even taller than Ydette, and Nora now realized that the impression of smartness which she had received from him was due to his uniform; a dark beret cut across his hair, fair as the sand of the dunes, in a hard and audacious line that no civilian hat ever achieves, and his long thin body was set off by battledress. His face was red and he had a long nose; that much she had observed. No film-star; not a patch—if you thought about such things—on Ashton. It was a very Flemish face; she had noticed—or rather, had had them thrust upon her because their owners were selling her something or taking a ticket from her or explaining the way to her, for by nature she was unobservant as well as shortsighted—scores of similar faces, all up and down Bruges and Zandeburghe and Brussels and Ghent, ever since the holiday had started.

  She stalked over the verandah and into the house, and as she shut the door she heard the laughter that was childish and hearty and sweet ringing on; in her mind’s ear; through the lively, darkening air now twinkling with the lights of the pleasure towns; over the wet, shining surface of the darkening grey sands.

  AS SHE PACED beside the large, nodding head of Klaartje on the way down to the sea, on a day when the Ruddlins’ holiday in Belgium was slightly more than halfway through its course, Ydette was feeling a little sad, but not—not really—surprised. This was not the first time that tourists had shown friendliness to her one morning and a cool manner the next, and perhaps (she thought) she had almost been prepared for such an attitude on the part of Mejuffrouw Nora, for hadn’t she thought of her, from that first moment when she had looked up and seen her standing there with the little Ida in her hand, as the cross girl? It was only when Mijnheer Adriaan had come up, and Ydette had learned that the two visitors were friends of the van Roeslaeres, that she had looked at them with anything more than the friendly, but business-like, glance which she gave to all touristry, and it was only because of the connection with the big house that she minded Mejuffrouw Nora not saying good-morning to her, or smiling good-bye when she came to take away Ida after her daily ride (a treat which Ydette, secretly defying the aunts, had more than once contrived for her to enjoy without payment).

  The two girls, the cross one and the little one, had stayed at the foot of the dune as usual for a little while this morning after Ida’s ride was over, the cross one reading her book (what a big one, it must be something to do with lessons) and the little one digging in the sand; occasionally she ran over to bestow on Klaartje, as he rested between his excursions to the waves, a series of pats smart enough to startle a smaller horse but felt by him no more than the feet of an alighting fly. These visits, however, had ceased towards twelve o’clock, when Ydette saw Ida checked in the act of running towards her, and held for a moment, straining unwillingly away, while a warning and a lecture were evidently being delivered. Then Nora returned to her book and Ida had to content herself with an occasional frantic waving of her spade in Ydette’s direction. It was unkind of the mejuffrouw. Why shouldn’t Ida come?

  It didn’t matter. Quickly, as the morning passed away, Ydette lifted the warm, small bodies up in her arms and settled each child comfortably on the low benches in the cart.

  “All right? Comfy?” (She had found that in one of the English books lent to her by Madame van Roeslaere and she always used it to the English children.) “Allons!” and down to Klaartje’s head she would go, and take up the leading string. The children sat in two rows, smiling in anticipation or looking rather apprehensive; some eyes would be fixed in delightful expectancy upon Klaartje. Could that mountain really be going to move?

  “Gee up! Getalong!” A gentle tug at the reins, and they are off; Klaartje not so much moving forward as launching himself, like some majestic ship, upon the waters of activity perpetually surging about his own majestic calm; and the cart crunches slowly across the glittering grey sand, making broad deep tracks and a series of deep, hollow, romantic shapes that might have been left by a giant.

  We are getting nearer; now the waves are very loud. Shall we go right into them? Oh, if the cart went right into the sea with us in it!

  But it doesn’t, of course. Precisely at the edge, where the tracks of hoofs and wheels begin to blur away the instant they are made, there is another jerk on the rein, and Klaartje allows himself gradually to decline into a halt.

 
; For perhaps five exquisite seconds the cart pauses at the extreme limits of the land, while the entire expanse of the North Sea (and perhaps never in its history has it been farther from being referred to as the German Ocean) pours itself into our eyes: they are filled with it: our backs are to the land and we can’t see anything but greyness and sparkle and glitter, and then some of us begin to feel bored—why doesn’t the cart go on, why doesn’t the horse turn round?—and some of us sneeze with the salt taste and the dazzle of it all, and Ydette, who has finished slowly counting under her breath, gives the third tug at the rein and slowly, satisfyingly slowly, while everyone enjoys the peril of the situation and the slurring of the wheels in the sand and even a certain reluctance to turn round (too manageable to be called obstinacy, but thrilling in its hint of worse to come) on the part of Klaartje—we are set towards land again.

  Just before twelve o’clock, when all the Belgian world thinks about nothing for two hours except its lunch, the tall, fair young man, the brother of those two girls, came walking quickly across the sands.

  “Hullo, Ydette. Lovely morning, isn’t it?” he said, surprising her by stopping beside her as she was about to sit down and begin on her sausage and bread, and smiling at her; his eyes were screwed up against the glare of the sun; his teeth looked very white, and his bright hair was blowing about in the wind; his grey shorts showed long brown legs, and his dark blue coat had a device of shields, rather like those on the wall of the big house, on one pocket. “Had a busy morning?” he went on. Kind, friendly voice: her heart warmed to it.

  “Oh yes, Monsieur. But so busy. All the children who came at the weekend—so many, they all want to ride.”

  “I expect they do. And how’s the horse standing up to it?”

  “Standing——?” She was puzzled; the English taught her by Adèle van Roeslaere had included some idioms, but not many.

  “How does he like being so busy, I mean—he’s not getting tired—not falling down under the weight of so many children?”

  She nodded—and Christopher saw with pleasure, mixed with an eager satisfaction, how her face responded to the change of her mood as she tried to understand what he was saying: the smile vanished, and a solemn and—well, actually it was rather dumb, but it wasn’t in the least unendearing—look replaced it.

  He lingered for a few minutes, chatting to her; out of the corner of his eye he was perfectly aware that Nora had looked up from that enormous tome she was crouching over (who but Nolly would read Toynbee on the beach, in the middle of a seaside holiday?) and had her eyes fixed steadily on them … let her stare; it was about time that Mistress Nora’s irritating interest in every female he talked to and went about with was taken in hand … but just now he was wondering if it would be too soon to ask this child if she ever went to the pictures?

  But he decided not to risk it; after all, he had nearly another ten days in Zandeburghe during which to lay his foundations, and he mustn’t scare her off … looking critically and coolly, but always with that sense of pleasurable excitement, at the face of ivory and darkness lifted to his own, he didn’t think it likely that she was going about yet with boys; she did look such a child, when you saw her in close-up; in spite of her height, but he didn’t want her to think he was trying to ‘get off’ with her. Above all … yes, that above everything … he didn’t want to get in the hair of those old battleaxes of aunts, or whatever they were.

  He was just about to make his farewells, quite satisfied with his ten minutes’ manœuvres, when there came a raucous hail from the direction of the digue:

  “Y-dette! Y—dette!”

  “Yes, what is it, Aunt Marie?” shouted Ydette back, in Flemish and with a most ineffectual attempt to make her soft voice carry as far as the square black shape standing on the skyline.

  “Jooris—he just came by on his bike—got a bit of leave last night—he said don’t forget you’re going to the molen next Sunday,” shrieked the distant figure, “says he’ll treat you to a roomijs.”

  “No, no, I’ll remember.”

  She turned back to Christopher, smiling.

  “What was that in aid of—what was that about?” he asked, then paused. “Didn’t she like you talking to me?”

  “Oh no, Monsieur.” Ydette looked rather shocked. “My aunt tell me that my friend will take me a walk next Sunday to the molen.”

  “Molen? What’s that?”

  But, although smiling still, she shook her head; her English did not extend to the word mill, and Christopher stored it away, to ask his father the meaning.

  “Is it a boy-friend?” he asked, in a teasing elder-brother tone, and awaited the answer with considerable interest; for, if she were going about with boys, it would be easier to ask her to come to the pictures with him; on the other hand, if she were more emotionally developed than she looked, and had one particular boy-friend, it might make his foundation-laying far more difficult.

  But she was in fits of laughter.

  “That seems to have gone well,” he observed, smiling with something more than sympathy (really, when she laughed her face was enchanting). “What’s the joke?”

  “Boy-friend! But of course no. He’s—he’s—it’s Jooris. I’m not …” she hesitated, her expression changed, and he watched fascinated … “I’m not … I don’t … I’m not gaan met any boy,” she ended gravely.

  “Gaan met … is that ‘going with’?” he asked, guessing, and she nodded. But she still looked grave, and when he smiled his good-bye and went off, he only succeeded in getting a very slight smile in return.

  But what a charmer, he was thinking, as he walked quickly across the sands to the solemn figure of Nora, sitting with a rather straight back above the ponderous volume of the Gibbon of the ’fifties and keeping her gaze fixed dolefully upon her approaching brother, and what angles and bones! This could be one of the really big ones. And it’s only three years to wait. In three years she’ll be eighteen. If I let her slip through my fingers I shall never stop cursing myself … but I’m not going to. I’ve found her, and she’s going to be my find.

  “Well,” he said coolly to Nora as he came up, “what’s the matter with you? Toynbee given you indigestion?”

  “Was I looking as if I had indigestion? I’m sorry if it affronts you,” rearing her long neck disdainfully, “no, as a matter of fact I’m feeling slightly sick … I was sitting here perfectly inoffensively, reading and keeping an eye on Dogfight (who will keep on charging down to worry Ydette), and an old man came round the corner,” glancing at the curve of the digue, “and—well, he—it sounded like a hiccough. Oh, all right,” disgustedly, “I know it’s very funny, but if you could have seen him—he had on one of those round caps the old things wear over here, and he was practically in rags and he was kind-of wagging his head and he looked absolutely mad—as a matter of fact, I think I’ve seen him before, I think he’s the one who sweeps down the plank walk outside the huts every morning and collects the rubbish—but really—if you could have seen him, Chris—why doesn’t somebody do something about people like that?”

  “They do, in England. It’s only because it’s over here and you aren’t used to it,” he said drowsily, having arranged himself at full length beside her on the sand.

  “Well, I wish somebody would do something about him.”

  There was silence for a little while. Nora read diligently and even assimilated what she read, but beneath the words that appeared so large and clear under the powerful glass of her spectacles, and the intellectual concepts which they conveyed to her brain, there ran through her nerves a series of shaken and disgusted and pitying impressions, a kind of shamed annoyance, because she felt pretty certain that the old man’s sly, lingering leer, directed towards herself, had been caused by the fact that she wore a skirt, and was sitting alone. Really …

  Presently she tapped the page and said, in a tone at once authoritative and musing:

  “I suppose you could apply Toynbee’s theory of Challenge and Resp
onse to human beings, couldn’t you?” No reply. She went on with slightly more self-consciousness, “I mean—I was thinking about someone like that old man, the idea, I mean, of Toynbee’s theory being carried out in each individual person … I was just thinking, the challenge he had to meet must have been very definitely too much for him. Don’t you agree?” A pause. “Chris——Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes, but this isn’t the kind of morning to talk about that kind of thing.” He opened one eye and, seeing that she was looking distinctly mortified, went on, “When you get up to Oxford——”

  “If I do,” she interrupted tartly.

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure that you will, and so is Ashton (there, I saved that up as a tit-bit for you) … when you get up to Oxford, you’ll have plenty of people to talk about that kind of thing with.”

  “But I want to talk about it with you! Damn Oxford. Chris, why have you been so peculiar to me lately?”

  “Haven’t been peculiar. Don’t know what you mean.”

  “Well—we always used to—I only meant by ‘peculiar’ that you never seem to want to talk to me about anything nowadays and——”

  He did not answer, having learned, through a certain amount of experience which his good-looks had brought him, that it never did to relax his rule of not talking to a girl when she was showing signs of making a scene; and he had found that its application usually worked. He supposed that it would do equally well with a sister, and evidently it did, because when he cautiously opened one eye again, Nora had returned to her book. Her lower lip did look a bit sulky and her eyes a bit shiny but there wasn’t any need to do anything about that, and he shut his own eye and went to sleep.