by Sarban
The front door of the inn was open, and as Frances entered the little passage between the Bar and the Snug, a man in a faded khaki smock and flat cap opened the Bar door and paused, finishing a conversation with someone inside. He stopped speaking on seeing Frances and moved aside to let her go in. The landlord, in his shirtsleeves, looked up from behind his bar and regarded Frances with a discouraging blankness when she asked for a room.
Without apology he baldly replied that they didn’t put people up: couldn’t do it nowadays. But surely, Frances persisted, the inn couldn’t be full? It didn’t matter what sort of room, and if she couldn’t stay a week, a couple of nights, just this night would do. . . .
Well, he was sorry (and it seemed to her he grudged the conventional word) he hadn’t a room: he had the wife’s sister staying and the wife was near crippled with rheumatism and he hadn’t anybody else to help.
More hurt even than disappointed to find such patent unfriendliness in the human part of Chevrelbourne, Frances turned and went out. As she stood on the green turf in front of the inn, looking uncertainly at the nearest cottage, the man in the khaki smock came out and began gathering up the reins of the grey pony. He was a middle-aged, jolly looking fellow, Frances thought, and on the invitation of what seemed a sympathetic look he gave her as he prepared to mount to his driving seat, she stepped across and asked him if he knew of anyone who might put her up.
He pondered.
‘Nobody got no rooms free in this place, I reckon,’ he said, and it was at least consoling to Frances to hear the note of regret in his voice. ‘Old Tom there,’ the baker added, nodding towards the inn door. ‘ ’e don’t want to take no trouble. I reckon, Miss, you’ll have to go over to Lodersham. Try the White Hart there. ’T’aint a bad house. You walking, you say?’
‘Yes. But I wanted to stay here in Chevrelbourne. I’m a painter, you see. I wanted to do some work here.’
The baker nodded. ‘Yes, the trees bear a wonder of leaf about here and ’twould be well worth to take a picture of ’em. ’Tis a real pity if you’re gifted that way and not able to exercise your gift as your heart would like.’
He stood with one hand on the box of his van, looking down on the back of his patient pony. Frances waited, hoping that something might come of his understanding of her object.
‘Tell you what!’ he exclaimed with sudden inspiration. ‘There’s the ladies at the House. They might take you in. They’ve got room enough and tho’ it aint their business like it’s the innkeeper’s, they can’t afford to be so contemptuous of the letting of a lodging. You come with me. Sit up on the box and I’ll take you. ’Taint far out of my way.’
So Frances, holding her rucksack on her knees, sat on the box beside J. Bilcombe, Baker and Confectioner, of Lodersham, and was driven out of Chevrelbourne by a little lane that lay as it were in hiding under the chestnuts at the back of the churchyard. It ran between hedges that were yards broad and met overhead: dogwood and hazel twigs lashed the sides of the van as the pony trotted smartly on and every now and again a trailing briar hooked Frances’s sleeve. It was more a tunnel bored through the green mass of leaves than a lane; it was in keeping with Frances’s first impression that the trees of Chevrelbourne grew so close and heavy-leaved in deliberate concealment of something: this winding, private way into the heart of them seemed the appropriate way to penetrate their mystery.
J. Bilcombe, as he drove along, raised her hopes. The ladies, the two Misses Dorfray and their niece, he told her, were gentry in poor circumstances. Two white twice a week and buns every other Saturday he delivered at Chevrel House. The old Colonel, their father, had been thought a well-to-do man, but he had left them very poorly fixed. The baker couldn’t think, he said, why they hadn’t sold Chevrel long ago and set themselves up in a nice little bungalow in Lodersham, say or Ambourne. Not that they spent anything on the upkeep of the old place: it was going to rack and ruin as far as he could see, and perhaps it wouldn’t fetch a deal in the market today, but it would be enough to buy a little bungalow, and one of those nice little labour-saving modern places with a bit of garden would have suited them a deal better, he would have thought, than being buried in the deep of the wood.
Not a bit of it, was Frances’s first thought, when the sunlight brightened upon them again after the shade of the lane and she saw Chevrel House across a weedy clearing in the beech wood. People who liked living in such a place would surely pine and die in bungalow-ville. The house was not a great one, though it looked roomy enough. It was built of flint and brick and was thatched like the cottages of Chevrelbourne. A flint wall muffled in grey moss and rock-plants bounded a much-neglected garden in front of it and its elegant wrought iron gates were rusting pitiably for lack of paint. The woodwork of the house likewise needed paint and the thatch was so old and ragged in places that it could scarcely be weather-tight. Chevrel House, as a whole, was dingy and dilapidated and promised very little in the way of comfort and cleanliness, but it was just the place Frances had hoped to find. She felt a quite disproportionate fear of being a second time refused lodging as she followed the baker to the front door and waited, silent beside him, for the answer to his knock.
It was not answered from inside the house. The baker abruptly turned about and said, ‘Afternoon, Miss Dorfray,’ and Frances, who had been steadily gazing at the door-knocker, wheeled round to see a woman in an old brown dress and straw hat, carrying a garden trug full of peas in her hand, who had come from some recess of the garden behind them.
She murmured something inaudible from a few paces away where she had stopped, surprised at their arrival, holding herself as though ready to run away.
‘Not delivering this afternoon, Miss Dorfray,’ said the baker cheerfully—and it struck Frances that he was using more the tone in which one would reassure a timid child than that in which a country tradesman would speak to one of his ‘quality’ customers. ‘I haven’t made a mistake,’ he went on. ‘I’ll be round with your order Saturday, same as usual. But this young lady is looking for somewhere to stay in Chevrelbourne. . . .’
Frances hastened to plead her own case. She went up to the woman, speaking eagerly, explaining who she was and what she wanted. Before she had said much she was well aware that there was little need to explain why she wanted to stay in Chevrelbourne and not go on to the modern comforts of the White Hart at Lodersham. Miss Dorfray was not an old woman—at the most fifty-five, Frances would have said—though her straight, bobbed black hair was well mixed with grey and her thin brown face wore a net of fine wrinkles. It was an intelligent, refined face and Frances was sure that she was speaking to someone who understood her perfectly. Miss Dorfray did not interrupt her, however, but only studied her with soft brown eyes which seemed both a little sad and a little frightened.
When Frances had finished she spoke in a low voice, dropping her eyes and looking ill-assured.
‘I don’t know. You see my sister is away,’ she said. ‘I—I am quite alone. I should like to help you, of course, but you see we can offer you very little. We have nothing like the accommodation they could give you at the inn.’
‘Oh, I should be so grateful for anything, if you could manage it,’ Frances begged, surprised to hear such urgent pleading in her own voice. ‘I’d look after myself and be no trouble, I assure you. I should be out all day, and I don’t want anything elaborate in the way of meals. If you could find room for me . . .’
‘Well,’ Miss Dorfray hesitated. ‘I don’t know. We never have put anyone up—I mean, as—’ she paused and groped a little unhappily for the uncommercial expression. ‘I mean, any strangers,’ she concluded.
The fingers of her free hand groped over the peas in the trug she held, squeezing a pod nervously and bursting it, while she looked at Frances, unable to make up her mind.
J. Bilcombe intervened.
‘Now don’t you mind saying if it’s inconvenient, Miss Dorfray,’ he said. ‘I can easily give the lady a lift into Lodersham and we’re
bound to get her fixed up there, though I did bring her along in the belief that you might welcome a bit of company seeing that Miss Emily and the young lady have gone away for a bit.’
Miss Dorfray darted at the opening he gave her. ‘Yes, yes. It was very kind of you to think of me, Mr Bilcombe. Of course, if my niece had been here I don’t see that we really could . . . But I am all alone. It—it wouldn’t matter . . . and there isn’t anywhere else in the village and it’s getting quite late to go on to Lodersham. . . .’
Frances was too pleased to see that she was winning to wonder much why Miss Dorfray should have to think of excuses for taking her in, when the opposite would have been more to be expected.
The baker moved towards the gate saying he would bring Frances’s rucksack in.
‘Oh, but you had better see the room before you decide,’ exclaimed Miss Dorfray. ‘I—I am not sure . . . I don’t quite know what . . . what terms . . .’
Frances followed her into the house and up the stairs to a bedroom under the roof. It was quite well-furnished and had the unmistakable air of a spare room. No one had occupied it long enough to make it his or her own; the mattress was rolled up on the bedstead and the two easy chairs were draped in dust sheets. It looked a little bleak and bare now: the boarded floor and such furniture as was exposed were covered with a layer of dust. But the small dormer window opened onto a sea of sunlit foliage and Frances saw that the room could quickly be made comfortable and welcoming; it was certainly much better than she either needed or expected. So, with some embarrassment on both sides, the subject of terms was tackled and they hastily agreed on a sum for a fortnight’s board and lodging which was a good deal less than the White Hart would have demanded.
Frances went downstairs and took her rucksack from the baker.
‘You’ll be all right now, Miss,’ he said, as he mounted his van again and prepared to drive off. ‘I should ha’ thought of Miss Dorfray at first when I heard you asking in the Talbot, only I didn’t recollect then that Miss Emily and the niece was away. You’ve just dropped lucky.’
‘Why?’ asked Frances. ‘They seem to have a spare room.’
‘Ah, they’ve got the room,’ he said, ‘but she couldn’t have had you if the young lady had been at home.’ He shook his head and turned the pony round, calling above the grinding of his van wheels on the flinty road:
‘Good day, Miss. Glad to have been of service to you. I hope you find it all to your liking.’
Miss Dorfray, carrying sheets into the kitchen, offered to make some tea, but it was past tea-time and Frances would not hear of it. She would have liked to be allowed to get her own room ready, but the proffering seemed to cause such embarrassment that she did not persist.
She had read the signs of shabby gentility about the house and understood that there were matters Miss Dorfray would wish to keep hidden from a stranger.
‘It’s a lovely evening, still,’ she said, smiling. ‘I think I’ll go and look round for an hour outside, if I may.’
Miss Dorfray let her out through a door at the end of a wainscoted passage which ran through the house and showed her a wide, ragged lawn with cedars darkly shading two corners of it and beech woods advancing over three sides to stretch grey arms, green-sleeved in lacework of bright leaves, far over the unkempt edges of the grass.
Frances crossed the lawn and took at random a mossy path between the beeches. The air was still, and very warm, for all the shade of the leaves. Once out of sight of the lawn there was nothing to indicate that she was in the grounds of a private house: the woodland was as rough and wild as it must have been in the days before the Chase was enclosed. The grounds of Chevrel House were perhaps no more than a portion of the ancient forest, enclosed, no doubt by the first purchaser of the lot a century and a half ago, but left unimproved and unchanged. The path Frances followed had been little used. The undergrowth here and there almost blocked it and so few feet had gone over it that in places the moss was a continuous carpet from verge to verge. The way sloped down after a while and Frances could hear water running somewhere on her right hand.
She continued, sauntering through the woods and thinking of little besides the wood’s intricacies of light and shade and the difficulty of representing foliage in a way that really pleased her: not as masses of colour but rather, in some way, as groups of forms all generically similar and specifically different; she stroked the smoke-grey boles and pondered the texture of the bark, musing on Constable’s Ash Tree and marvelling at the art with which he used his vision and the vision that inspired him through the long labour of acquiring his perfect craftsmanship. And, thinking of the studies she might make here, of Chevrel’s trees, she began to wonder whether the secret she had half-seriously believed them to be hiding was a discovery in technique that she might make by devoted study, a secret within her own art which was itself anciently termed a mystery. The fancy pleased her but experience qualified it. Hm! but I don’t think an artist stumbles on secrets, he has to track ’em down by blessed pertinacity and hard work. Still, she felt again that little surge of excitement that comes with the realisation that you are on the right road to what you seek: the excitement that is the quicker and stronger when, the exact lineaments of your object of desire being unknown, its real form may surpass or confound all forecasts of fancy.
The path sloped more steeply down and Frances found the character of the wood suddenly change. She was in a younger growth where sapling beeches were outnumbered by ashes, oaks, poplars and alders, crowding each other close, rushing up in rivalry for the light’s favours from a lush, marshy bed of tall herb grasses. The air felt damper; there was an odour of wet earth rich in humus; the place felt full of eager life and the ground yielded springily beneath Frances’s feet as though there moved in it the restless resources from which the serried battalions of saplings drew their impatient strength. Her path was a narrow passage now between young trees as straight and close as a palisade, and at the end of the passage was an open space where the sunlight flashed on water.
She came out upon the edge of a large pond which had been made by damming a tributary of the Chevrel. The stonework of the dam could still be seen here and there through a light screen of willow bushes. All round, the young mixed wood came close, allowing nothing to be seen from the verge of the pond but an oval of sky framed by foliage. Frances trod down the long grass and stood on the margin, bending to peer down into the water. The sides of the pond went sheer down; there was no growth of reeds or water-weed at the edge and she could see a great depth of clear water below her: further out groups of water-lily leaves patched the still surface. She looked up again, stared round, wondering at the stillness and privacy of the place and the dreaming cool tranquility of water so unexpectedly spread before her. She had crossed no fence, seen no boundary mark of any kind: the pond must be part of Chevrel House property. The summer day’s heat had beaten down on Frances since breakfast-time; she was aware of the blouse clinging damply to her shoulders while the shadowy water below invited her to refreshment with a most winning cool breath. Where she stood, without another thought, she undressed and dived far out and down, exalting in the swift delicious caress that ran from finger-tips to toes. She found the water, after the first stroke, not so cold as she had expected and plunged again, seeking to touch the bottom. She reached it with difficulty. Breaking the surface again she squeezed the water from her short hair and struck out towards the head of the pond. She had not made three strokes when she stopped and threw herself round to flee towards the bank from which she had dived. Poised on a stone at the head of the pond was a human figure, still, naked and brown against the green and grey background of the trees.
A second later she had checked herself and turned again, to gaze more steadily at the figure. Human it was, but lifeless. She approached with a low breast-stroke and saw a bronze statue which a down-bending spray of foliage had hidden from her when she stood on the bank. The stream that fed the pond had been led through two art
ificial channels to form a miniature delta with two mouths poring their water over sills of stone. The bank at this end of the pond was revetted with regular mason-work to the bottom and the water seemed deeper even than at the other end, near the dam. On the tiny island between the two mouths of the stream was set a great block of carved stone; it was flush with the stone facing the bank and its lower edge was some two feet above the surface of the water. Mounted on this stone was the bronze figure.
Frances paddled with her hands, finding the best position from which to view it, and studied it with increasing interest. It was the figure of a very young man, well grown and muscular but with still a young boyish roundness in his cheeks, and a tender soft-lipped mouth. In his pose the sculptor had fixed a moment of a dance, the second when the body was taughtly raised on tip-toe and the arms were rising to complete an arch above his head; one arm was already raised in a graceful curve, continuing the clean line that flowed upward from the ankles, the other was bent before his chest, half way to joining its fellow. The arrested movement was completed for the imagination and the true conclusion of the unachieved rhythm of the arms suggested by both hands being represented as performing the same gesture: fingers held straight and close together, thumb pressed hard beside the forefinger and the whole hand bent backwards from the wrist. When the movement was completed, Frances saw, the hands might almost meet above the head in a gesture that might represent the uplifting of a chalice or the exhibiting of a trophy.
She realised that she had immediately classed the figure as Eastern and she had completed the half achieved movement from her memories of figures of Indian deities and dancers uplifting their arms with cupped hands in the performance of ritual acts. Yet despite the significance given to the hands—that formal rigidity of the fingers, which seemed to her typically Eastern—the figure as a whole was not Eastern. The head, with its boyish, handsome and half-laughing face and short, untidy curls, was entirely Western in type and execution. In the treatment of the body, too, despite the strong ritual suggestion of the pose, there was a freedom and a clear intention to create an individual that seemed to Frances quite foreign to all the Oriental sculpture she had ever looked at. The figure seemed to her artistically inconsistent; and yet it was extraordinarily pleasing: so extraordinarily attractive that, although she had stayed too long in the water and was beginning to tremble with cold, she could not easily bring herself to turn away. Only the idea that she might come at it by working round the bank moved her at last to strike away. As she did so, casting a last look over her shoulder, she hit on a possible reason why she had so readily classed it as Eastern work. She had given only a brief glance at the stone pediment, just enough to take in the fact that its visible faces were entirely covered with figures in high relief so intricately intertwined and crowded together as to produce, from the distance at which she saw them, only the general impression of rich ornamentation. But that welter of contorted, jostling shapes squeezed out, as it seemed, from the matrix stone’s excess, had said: ‘India’ to Frances without her being more than half aware of identifying the style.