White Sand and Grey Sand

by Stella Gibbons

  “Steady on!” Christopher said with some indignation; “really, you go on sometimes as if you were right round the bend.”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  “Well, good luck and everything, but you might remember the rest of us aren’t. Now. We’re ready. Can we have the curtains drawn, please, and will you all sit down?”

  Everard, as the person sitting nearest to the windows, got up and began to pull the long draperies of red brocade over the small, clear panes with their inset lozenges of red and blue and syrup-yellow; when he came to the last one, however, he looked out, and found the prospect of the plaats in evening light, at which he had been looking without seeing it, so beguiling that he stopped to gaze for a minute before hiding it from his view. Behind him, the room was now in almost complete dimness, and he heard the whirring sound begin as Christopher started the projector; in his present mood, it irritated him faintly, and when, having drawn the last pair of curtains, he turned back to the room, he did not join the circle seated before the projector but went across to his former chair and sat down there, at the same time casually moving aside the curtains nearest to him so that, without letting any light into the room, he could continue, through a narrow slit, to look out at the square.

  He had seen so many of Chris’ films: they were all exceedingly well photographed, even interestingly so, and composed and chosen and all that, and Christopher was going into the film business, somehow, when he came down from Oxford: it was all settled, and Everard no longer found the subject very interesting. He felt more interest in his youngest daughter than he did in either of the elder children; he admitted that poor old Nolly, satisfactory as her brains and character might be, definitely got on his nerves, and when he saw Christopher so confident about what he wanted to do in life, and so likely to be able to do it without parental opposition or even criticism, he experienced a mixture of wry feelings (envy? regret? nostalgia?) so confused and disagreeable that he never voluntarily indulged in them. Like some other feelings, they were banished without an instant’s hesitation as soon as they reared themselves up within.

  He turned away from the quiet evening, and looked at the screen.

  A view of Dinant, bold and rugged against a sky filled with the bellying purple shapes of threatening clouds, was opening the performance, and there were admiring exclamations—but Everard’s eyes moved, in a moment, to the chimney-breast above the fireplace, crowning, with its milky brown wood lacily carved into light medallion and elegant swirl, the tiles of the grate itself, where ‘Chinamen’ (that was exactly what they were, seventeenth-century Europe’s conception of the Chinese), carrying hods of faggots or posturing with fans, were pictured in faint darker blue lines on tiles of palest dawn-blue.

  He looked at the screen again, and saw the gipsies that he and Christopher had talked to during their three-day trip to the Ardennes. The room was dim, but he could see everyone plainly: Hubert van Roeslaere and Adèle sitting side by side in the white-and-gold chairs with arms that had been brought in from the salon, and gazing indulgently; Nora, lounging back and looking critical; Adriaan, staring at the screen with a sneering scowl (bless the boy, when did he mean to start growing up?); May, sitting upright and gazing delightedly like a child—good old May, how she did revel in any entertainment, however simple; Christopher, the impresario, was manipulating the projector and making occasional comments on what was passing across the screen.

  “That’s all of that one,” he was saying, as the flower-market at Brussels passed from the screen amidst cries of admiration from May; “now this is the one …” his voice died away, as he manœuvred with the projector and exchanged low-toned remarks with Adriaan, then it rose again, “this is the one I really want you to see. This is Bruges.”

  And indeed it was; the Market, in all the strolling bustle and animation and life of Saturday afternoon; with the native Brugeois and his wife walking between the stalls hung with gay cottons, and pausing to inspect a sky-blue jug from amongst rows of them set out on the cobblestones, and the stout girl inside the Belgian version of a coffee-stall that stands almost within the dark archway below the Carillon tower, frying her oily-smelling goodies, while the bright summer sky smiled overhead, and the huge pastel-coloured cars were edging their way round the sides of the square, and the tourists and the cyclists were circulating, and the children marching back from school—oh and there, wending his way through it all, with shy eyes lashed like a doe’s looking determinedly downwards, a young friar clad all in brown, with rope-bound waist and sandalled feet.

  “Oh lovely, Chris! What a nice thing to have! We can show it to people on Sunday evenings——”

  “That really is a triumph,” generously, from Nora.

  “You should come here in three years’ time and take the Festival of the Sanguis Christi, the Holy Blood,” said Hubert van Roeslaere; “now that is something to see, the Belfry floodlit, and the procession through the streets, and the play they act in the Markt—oh, it’s a spectacle.” He himself did not quite see what all this enthusiasm for a completely ordinary picture of Saturday afternoon in the square was about; there had been a market there on Saturdays ever since the Belfry had been there; it was nothing out of the ordinary, just some stalls and some people.

  “Chris thinks the Sanguis Christi is commercialized and a bit vulgar,” said Adriaan’s voice, very maliciously, and Everard saw Adèle van Roeslaere turn her head in the dimness, with an uncontrollable kind of movement, to look at him.

  “If it had been going on this year, of course I should have filmed it; it’s a superb spectacle, and that’s a very good idea about coming back in 1957 (you really are the ruddy extent).” The last part of Christopher’s reply was uttered in an angry whisper.

  It had only taken a few seconds for this exchange to occur, and the shots of the Market and Belfry were only now leaving the screen. The camera then took the audience along curving alleyways lined by small pale houses with stepped roofs; it went tracking across cobbles rounded with age and gleaming moist and dark after a shower; lingering, as if pensively musing, on the Bonifacius bridge, and looking down into the water gliding beneath; then, after wandering, as if scarcely interested, over the steeply-rising roofs of the Choir immediately below, it suddenly soared straight upwards until it caught and held the heaven-piercing summit of the Sint Maria Kirke, and the beholder almost gasped, experiencing such a giddy sensation of height as to be almost bodily, after the sensation of enclosedness while the camera had been loitering in the small, shady, walled garden below.

  Everard was as familiar with all these places as he was with the High Street at home, and, while admitting the impressiveness and majesty of that perpendicular peak of sombre brick, he had been wishing that the addition of its four pinnacles in 1872 had never been thought of, when he heard Christopher’s voice, saying with a note of excitement in it that made it sound suddenly boyish, “And here’s my star.”

  The scene had changed to a long shot of the old mill, one of the two that still stand on the ramparts, and as Everard watched, it moved forwards until it took in a group of people gathered just below the structure; there was one, a very tall, dark, young girl wearing a light summer dress, who was standing quite still in the brilliant light, against the distant roofs of the city and its tremendous sky.

  “Ida’s bathing-hut girl?” Everard asked, on a questioning note; but of course he knew who it was; he had to say something aloud because—and the pain absolutely leapt at him and hung there clawing, like something alive—she was so like Margarith.

  He had realized, almost from the first time of seeing her, that she belonged to the same tall, dark, slender, physical type; it was common enough throughout the Low Countries, where its presence might be accounted for by intermarriage between conqueror and conquered during the Spanish occupation of four hundred years ago; but this was more than a resemblance in feature and large eyes and delicate mouth; more awe-inspiring yet, it was one of individuality. When, under the stare of his in
credulous eyes, this child turned suddenly towards the camera and laughed, she might have been a younger, a more light-hearted Margarith.

  Murmurs of interest and admiration were all around him.

  “How awfully nice she looks,” from May.

  “But she is handsome!” from Hubert van Roeslaere, with the intonation that used to be called ‘gallant’.

  “She isn’t really, not when you see her close to.” Nora, this time, cool and deprecating. “She’s too thin and her eyes are too big.”

  “You can’t be too thin for the screen.” The white glare showed Christopher’s absorbed, gratified expression, and lit up the face of Adriaan, who was standing very still and looking steadily at the picture.

  “But she must see herself, she is a budding ‘starlet’.” Hubert van Roselaere was good-naturedly insisting. “Is she coming in to see old Marieke this evening?” to his wife.

  “I don’t believe so——” Adèle was beginning rather repressively, when Everard, who had found himself absolutely unable to look at the face on the screen for another instant and had turned away and resumed his study of the plaats, uttered an exclamation.

  “What is it?” Adèle said nervously, starting and turning.

  “There’s something wrong—he’s fallen down—an old man. I think he must be ill,” Everard said, and as he spoke, the laughing young figures on the screen disappeared abruptly into dimness as the film ended.

  Everyone hurried across to the window, where Everard was now holding aside one of the curtains and admitting the strong evening light.

  There was no one moving in the plaats, but, extended on its stones, about halfway across to the arched niche at the far corner where the shutters were drawn down over the shop of the Maes’ sisters, lay the body of a man. It was dressed in dark trousers and a heavy blue upper garment which looked like a fisherman’s jersey; the group now gathered at the window could see his round dark cap lying beside him where it had evidently been knocked from his head as he fell, exposing his thin, silvery hair.

  “Do you think we ought to——” suggested Everard, pity for the figure sprawling there mingling with his relief at having escaped from the unbearable sight on the screen.

  “Of course. Adriaan——” began Adèle warmly. But Christopher and Adriaan were already halfway to the door.

  “I wonder who it is; there’s something familiar about him,” May went on, and then Nora exclaimed:

  “Oh! I know—it’s that poor old thing who helps down at our bathing-cabins sometimes—Klaas, I think they call him. He’s a horrid old man but I hope he’s all right.”

  They watched the young men hurrying across the square. Christopher reached the prostrate figure first, and, removing his dinner-jacket, rolled it up and placed it gently under the lolling old head.

  The eyes were shut. His breathing was stertorous, and the smell of drink came up strongly from the thick, patched, dirty clothes still carrying in their dim and faded rags some of the blueness of the sea; the big hands, knotted and veined and scarred, with hooked nails of violet-black, were clenched, as if in a silent rage that matched the expression on the bluish old face.

  “I think he’s a goner,” said Christopher in a low voice, and Adriaan nodded. “Shall I go and knock up the old girls?” he asked.

  “I suppose you’d better, but what we really ought to get is a doctor.”

  “Here comes your father—perhaps he’ll go over to them while I go and find one.” Adriaan got to his feet, and stood awaiting Everard, who now came hurrying towards them.

  When he got his first glimpse of the face resting on the pillow improvised by Christopher, he received his second shock of that evening, and it was doubly shocking for being of the same nature as the one that had already shaken him—he thought that he knew this face: it was old, wrinkled, its individuality already partly destroyed by that mysterious uniformity which illness bestows on the human countenance, and he associated it with Doorwaden and the hidden weeks in his own life. Hadn’t there been someone, a loutish older man, of whom she had gone in a kind of disdainful fear? He could not even remember a name in connection with what might only be some distortion of the memory, and wasn’t it much more probable that his trembling nerves were repeating the blow they had already received, and causing him to imagine a likeness where there was none?

  So he reassured himself. Yet he could not banish that haunting impression of familiarity, and as he knelt beside the heavily-breathing body, listening, without taking in what was being said, to the quick exchanges of his son and Adriaan, he was trembling.

  “Don’t you think I’d better go across to the old girls’ house?” Christopher was saying. “The poor chap was probably on his way there.”

  “Yes …” Everard pulled himself together, “that would be best. Adriaan—you had better go for a doctor—I expect you know the nearest one?”

  He himself did not want to be there when the child—the young girl who looked like Margarith—came out of her aunts’ house, but it was the obvious suggestion to make.

  Adriaan repeated a name and address (the doctor lived on the other side of the Steen straat, where most of them in the city set up their plates) and was relieved to scramble to his feet and hurry away. As he crossed the square, he saw Christopher knocking at the door of the little low greyish house next to the archway.

  “What is it? What do you want? The shop is shut—we have no more to sell,” announced Marie loudly and indignantly as she flung open the door at his imperious summons. “Is something the matter?” she went on, suspicion mingled with alarm as she recognized the young English mijnheer who often bathed from their tents. Well, at least it couldn’t be anything the matter with Ydette, who was at this very moment peering over her shoulder at the visitor. And moeder was upstairs safe in her bed with Jakoba sitting beside her … so it must be something wrong at the farm.

  “It’s the old man who works for you”—Christopher jerked his head over his shoulder—“he’s ill—can you come? I think he’s rather bad,” he added.

  “It’s Klaas—he’s fallen down!” cried Ydette, who had been staring across the plaats, and without hesitation Marie said, “I’ll get Aunt Jakoba.”

  While she was hurrying up the tiny flight of stairs as quickly as a prudent regard of their highly slippery state would permit, Christopher and Ydette confronted one another in silence. Remembering the scene afterwards, Christopher found that he had learned something from it about himself. He had stared, with fascinated eyes, past Ydette’s pale, frightened face into the little room beyond; a tiny space filled with tender shadows because the light was guarded and dim, a gleaming doll’s-house staircase winding up and away into them; a glimpse of old, blue, faded tiles covering the floor, and the long, velvety trumpets of hothouse flowers glimmering out of the dimness—he had hardly been able to tear his eyes away. Afterwards, he realized that it had been unnatural to be so absorbed by a mere background when people were suffering, and felt ashamed. But it had not been until afterwards. Ydette was saying:

  “Is he very ill, do you think, monsieur?”

  “I’m afraid he is, yes,” he said, “but don’t go over there——” as she started forward, “he looks so bad—it’s really—rather—I expect the doctor will be here any minute now.”

  They stood undecidedly together for a moment, then he heard voices inside the little dark room, and saw the old woman coming back again, accompanied by the taller, sterner sister. She took no notice of either himself or Ydette, but pushed past them and went straight out across the square towards the dark shape lying on the stones. Reaching it, she knelt down beside it.

  Ydette did not at all want to go across to Klaas. She felt sorry for him, of course, but she was far more frightened than sorry. But in a moment the question was settled for her by an imperious beckoning gesture from Aunt Jakoba, which Ydette instantly obeyed.

  What frightened her most when she looked down at Klaas was his poor bare head; she had never seen him before
without his greasy, round cap, and now there was something shocking in the blowing of his grey hair in the wind; it was dirty, too, and this, and the rough way the wind tugged at it, made her so sorry that she almost began to cry. He was exceedingly ill; she knew that at once, by his pallor and even more by his confused and wild expression. His eyes went wandering from face to face—first to the Englishman’s, who was kneeling beside him and re-arranging for greater comfort the jacket rolled beneath his head, then to Jakoba’s, who was sitting back on her heels on the other side, with both hands lying slackly at her sides as if in unfamiliar helplessness, staring at him, and last of all, to the face of Ydette herself—where his blood-veined eyes lingered with an expression of mocking malice.

  The blue lips sucked in and out and Everard Ruddlin bent nearer. “Can you get some brandy—cognac——” he was beginning to Jakoba, when there came a hoarse, mumbling mutter:

  “Met die manierin von van dame1—yes, just the same. I know—wasn’t good enough for her—met die manierin van een dame—just like your mother——”

  The eyes closed again. Everything was quiet for a minute; Ydette’s stomach seemed to be contracting, and it was cold and she felt horribly disturbed; she felt sick. Had she heard, really heard, that?

  She glanced as if for help, at the English gentleman; he was almost as pale as Klaas, and staring down at him with a puzzled look, and suddenly Jakoba startled them both by beginning to sob—loud, noisy, uncontrollable sounds that seemed to tear up from her chest. Everard looked at her helplessly, and a woman amongst a little group of neighbours and passers-by that had quickly gathered, leaned forward, muttering consolingly, as if to lift her up. But Jakoba writhed away.

  “Here’s the doctor,” someone said.

  “And a Sister; that’s right, they’ve brought one of the good Sisters——” this was Marie.

  The doctor was hatless and wore a dinner-jacket. He stooped beside the heaving old body. He felt the pulse, put his hand inside the rough jersey over the heart, and after a minute, shook his head. A sigh went round the tiny crowd.