The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  Glancing again at the letter she discovered the answer to the last question: Jean proposed to come to Pine Cottage.

  So I shall just leave everything to Mr. Barrowford and beetle down to you for a week or two, darling. You won’t mind, will you? I’ll sleep in the coal cellar and go Dutch in everything, of course.

  That’s all very well, thought Alda, slightly dismayed, but what about——

  “Yes, Jen, what is it?”

  “He won’t take them,” said Jenny in a tactful whisper, jerking her head towards the slender haughty figure in the porch, who was standing very erect and monosyllabically replying to the questions of Meg and Louise.

  “Oh, what nonsense,” muttered Alda, and hurried down the passage.

  “Don’t you like cigarettes?” she demanded, bluntly yet sweetly, and smiling into his sullen face. “The children bought them specially for you and your friend.”

  “Yes, go on,” urged Meg, gazing up at him through her fringe, which needed cutting. “They cost a shillun and two pennies.”

  “Meg!” exclaimed Jenny and Louise, scandalised.

  Fabrio looked down at her for a moment; then he swiftly stooped, put his hands gently about her plump body, and smartly squeezed her, twice, as if she had been a doll that squeaked, and she gave two loud, gasping laughs. Jenny and Louise laughed too; it was so funny; and Fabrio’s face changed at the sound, becoming alight with friendliness. Louise pushed the cigarettes into his pocket, crying, “Oh, you’re going to take them!” and Meg danced up and down, shouting, “Again! Again!”

  “Thank—you,” he said, smiling, and Alda thought how much better-tempered his face looked when he smiled than did Emilio’s face, which was always smiling.

  “I would-a like a-book,” he said, turning to her. “A—English book.”

  “To read?” she cried. “Of course! I’ll see what we’ve got.”

  “I—am-a learning to read English.”

  “Yes—wait a minute—I’ve got one that will be just the thing for you,” and she hurried away.

  In a few minutes she returned.

  “There!” she said, holding out to him a thick volume in a battered green and gold cover. “I Promessi Sposi, The Betrothed Lovers, by Manzoni, you know—famous Italian writer. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. This is an English translation.”

  Fabrio reverently took the eighteenth-century Italian classic, with its faded brown pages and end-papers stained by water splashes, in his strong hands, large in proportion to his frame and coarsened by years of work in the open air. Alda watched his face with growing sympathy and interest as he slowly repeated under his breath some of the English words on the title page.

  “Is it any good?” she asked at last, choosing her words.

  He shook his head dejectedly.

  “Not-a much. I cannot read-a, much,” he answered without looking up. “No good-a, this,” and he handed it back to her. The animation had died out of his face.

  To her, it was strange to see the strong feelings struggling on eyes and lips and held back by his ignorance of her language, and then, suddenly, the dam burst, and Fabrio burst into a flood of Italian to which she listened; at first uncomprehendingly and then with increasing embarrassment, for although she could not understand a word he was saying it was perfectly plain to her that he was pouring it all out to her; his loneliness, his loathing of captivity, and his longing for his native land. She thought, too, from the expression in his blazing blue eyes that he was imploring her to be his friend.

  What could she do? Only listen with sympathetic nods and murmurs that became increasingly mechanical, while the children stood round demanding, “What is he saying, Mother? What’s the matter? Doesn’t he like the cigarettes?”

  Suddenly he ceased. He turned away, shaking his head and making a downward, backward flinging of the hand as if condemning every word that he had uttered to a hell of hopelessness, and then Alda realised that Mr. Hoadley was standing by the gate, calling sternly to him.

  Fabrio went straight towards his master, and Alda, having returned Mr. Hoadley’s irritable “Good morning,” went back into the house with I Promessi Sposi, and a little smile on her pretty mouth. All her relationships with men had been gay and triumphant, so why should she not smile?

  But while she was getting through the morning’s work with the help of Jenny and Louise, she decided (in spite of that smile) that all encouragement of Fabrio, beyond the barest courtesy, must now cease.

  Any kindnesses in the form of talks, or books, or cigarettes would actually be unkindnesses, leading to the increase of that romantic admiration which he clearly felt for herself and to uncharitable comments from Mrs. Hoadley, who was just the type to make them (in this opinion Alda was less than just to Mrs. Hoadley). There would be rebukes from his employer; perhaps even a loss of the dignity, both private and public, of Mrs. Ronald Lucie-Browne. She had the strongest contempt for married women who flirted, and never realised that her own eyes and manner were innocently inviting.

  It would be easy enough to quell his admiration, for he was only a peasant; Mr. Hoadley had told her as much; had he been a young Italian barrister or business man the task might have been more difficult.

  Thus did Alda and her Dissenting ancestry dismiss Fabrio’s manhood.

  He, after hearing in furious silence some angry words of reproof for gossiping from Mr. Hoadley, had gone on the farmer’s orders down to the hay rick by the Small Meadow. This was a smallish rick garnered during the previous June, and where it had already been cut into for winter supplies, the surface of sombre gold looked good enough for a man to eat. He was ordered to get down fodder for the cows.

  His feet ached with the cold inside his heavy boots and as he wielded the fork his hands gradually became numbed, but he did not mind the discomfort, for he was accustomed to hard work in the open air and took it for granted under blue sky or grey; what he did mind, what set his face in sullenness and made his eyes look savage, was the double wound to his pride.

  The first he had inflicted upon himself, when he had lost control and poured out to the kind Signora (that comely, matronly mother of three daughters) all his hatred of the camp and his shame that he could barely read and write. He had not known this shame until he entered the Army, but since his captivity he had brooded upon it; sometimes in a dim, puzzled way, he believed that if he had known how to read and to write fluently, he might have avoided being taken prisoner, or escaped before he was brought to England, and his ignorance made him feel inferior to the other men in the camp, for the only other two who were similarly handicapped were a fierce vile-tempered Roman from the Trastavere, prematurely aged by vice, and a half-witted Sicilian lout from the hills of Calabria. Fabrio felt—he knew—himself to be the superior of both these creatures and he hated to feel himself linked with them in a common ignorance.

  Then his master, that accursed man set over him whose very name he could not pronounce accurately, had insulted him in front of the Signora, with whom he had been getting on so well! He had shouted at him as if he were a slave!

  And Fabrio did not feel himself a slave. How should he? in that unbroken pride of youth which is so strong that the young man or woman who experiences it feels: I shall never die, and this warm sunny wind blows into my face while I stride against it like a lord of the earth, and then (if she is a girl) she moves her rounded neck to see her gold earrings reflected in the window of the car and feels her power, right down to the very tips of her eyelashes. Fabrio, too, was still sustained by his former close contact with the earth and the sea, though month by month, as the life of the camp held him fast, the refreshing force declined in strength. In his own village and the nearby port he had been able to earn by his own hands enough to contribute to the family needs and to pay for his own needs and pleasures; pleasures strong and delightful to him, however simple and poor they might have appeared to over-civilised people. In San Angelo the young men had accepted him as their equal and the young women had been e
ager for his notice and he had not wanted more than this; he had been happy, like a bird in the woods or a cricket in the olive groves, never thinking, seldom unhappy except when a mood of melancholy (heritage and penalty from that drop of purer blood in his veins) drifted across his soul.

  Holy Mother! he thought now, if I could drive this into him! and he struck the fork savagely into the bristling surface of the rick and shook it furiously to and fro, so that the misty shapes of the far-off Downs were momentarily veiled by a shower of dark fragments.

  But as he worked, his anger gradually died away, driven down into the heaps of fodder and lifted into the air by his aching arms. This work was very different from driving the wedges into his father’s olive-press in the courtyard of the ruinous stone cottage where the Caetani had lived for many, many generations; or trampling the scanty vintage in autumn with his sisters, but this cold, damp earth strewn with gleaming yellow straw was the same earth that he knew, crumbling under the lizard’s flicking flight, in Italy (he could feel it now, hot between his toes) and that bird with the red bosom who perched on the gate and sang his sweet notes out into the still air lived in a wood even as did the nightingales of San Angelo. Fabrio looked meditatively at the bird and wondered if it were good to eat, and so his anger ran out and was lost in the vast, frontierless fresh air.

  Mr. Hoadley, having been to see what Emilio was up to and found it comparatively harmless, encountered his wife picking her way across the farmyard with a bottle of warm milk pressed against her white coat for the kids which were her especial care. Not a hair was out of place under her neat turban and her face expressed resigned disgust. She glanced at him, then asked:

  “What’s the matter, Neil?”

  “Oh—Fabrio. I sent him up to the cottage with their letters and there he was, wasting his time jabbering away to Mrs. Lucie-Browne. I’ve had enough of it; I’m going in to Horsham this afternoon to ask the Office” (Mr. Hoadley meant the West Sussex Agricultural Board’s office) “to let us have a girl to train. We can teach her all we shall want her to know in the six weeks they allow, and if she’s quick and willing it’ll be well worth it.”

  “Oh yes—if,” said his wife, but as she did not dislike the prospect of some female company, she did not put forward any objections to the plan, of which he had been talking for some time, and he went off.

  She swung open one of the stable doors and five tiny kids rushed across the dim, clean place to greet her, white as snow and gleamy as silk, with bells of delicate flesh swinging from their throats. She shut the door and knelt among them, singling out the weakest and thrusting the teat of the bottle into his eager mouth to make sure that he received his share and was not crowded out by his stronger brothers. While he jerked and sucked and his yellow eyes shone with pleasure, she looked distastefully down upon the innocent heads of the others, who butted her sides and trampled her boots with tiny sharp hooves as they ravened for their turn.

  Alda sat for a moment by the open window to re-read her friend’s letter. Jean must be told candidly that she could not come before Christmas, because there was a chance that Ronald might come home on leave. After Christmas, though it would mean a complicated reorganisation of the sleeping arrangements she would be glad of Jean’s company, her help with the housework and, frankly, of her contribution to the household expenses, for although it was possible to live more cheaply in the country than in a city, the rent of the cottage and other expenses came to nearly five pounds a week, and after Christmas the elder children’s school fees would be added to the total. To meet it, there was Alda’s allowance from Ronald’s pay as a Major, and a small income from some investments made before the Second World War in various municipal undertakings in Ironborough which paid a low rate of interest. Alda occasionally received handsome cheques from her father, whose favourite she was, but Ronald’s widowed mother, of better birth than Alda’s family, could not afford to do this for her son; indeed, he and his sister occasionally had to help her with money.

  Poor old Jean, I expect she will find it lonely in that awful luxury flat without a tree for miles, thought Alda as she addressed her letter. And it did not seem strange to her that Jean, used to every comfort, should suggest coming to stay in a poky, dark, ugly cottage that was too crowded with people to be agreeable, for she had become used, in the twenty years of their friendship, to having Jean seek her company.

  After Fabrio’s outburst, the Italians came no more to the cottage with the letters, and Alda who rightly assumed that Mr. Hoadley had forbidden them the place saw them only rarely. The children missed their visits, and something amused and mischievous in herself (which never seriously contended with the Dissenters but prevented them from having things all their own way) missed the sight of Fabrio’s comeliness and the admiring glances of Emilio.

  Jean had written to say that she would come down immediately after Christmas, but since her own letter Alda had sadly heard that the chance of Ronald’s arriving for Christmas had vanished. Still, with a faint lingering hope, she had not sent this news to Jean.

  “Mother!” exclaimed Jenny in her scandalised tone, on the morning of Christmas Eve, “that poor man’s books! Here they are still poked away in a cupboard and not read, and you haven’t even thanked him for them yet.”

  “No more I have, love. Look—will you paint him a Christmas card? and Louise can run down to the farm and find out his address? We’ll post it this afternoon.”

  There was a carol service at St. Wilfred’s Church in Sillingham that day at three o’clock, and Alda had thought it better to take the children to it rather than attempt Matins on Christmas morning.

  “Do a golden bell,” said Louise, hanging over Jenny as the latter arranged her paint-box on the table.

  “All right. (Don’t loll on me, Weez, you know I hate it.) And we’ll all sign it, shall we, Mother?”

  “Meg can do Meg her mark, like people used to in the old days when they couldn’t write,” said Louise.

  “I can wite ‘Meg,’” said that person indignantly, looking up from her game with bricks beside the fire.

  “Only copying, you can’t really write. Shut up now, please. I want to do this,” and Jenny began to draw a large bell upon a square of stiff paper. She drew and painted neatly in a conventional style, but there was more life and originality in the scenes crammed with odd, stiff little figures with which Louise sometimes filled half an exercise book in a drawing fit lasting for days.

  “I suppose there’s no hope of father coming at the very last minute, is there, Mother?” Louise now asked wistfully, letting her hair fall over her eyes which peered mournfully through it.

  “Not a hope, I’m afraid. (Don’t do that to your hair, darling, you look like a homesick Skye terrier.)”

  “It is miserable,” said Louise, and sighed.

  It is, thought Alda; and then she remembered the people—children—existing in cellars in Europe with not enough food and warmth to keep the life in their bodies, and felt heartily ashamed of herself.

  “Ow!” protested Meg, finding herself suddenly pulled sideways and kissed in an access of thankfulness. “What a howwid kiss. Wait a minute and I’ll gib you a marbellous one.”

  She had just concluded this ceremony, which she performed with tightly-shut eyes as if to concentrate her energies, when Jenny said proudly:

  “There. Finished,” and held up the card.

  “That’s very nice, Jenny. Now, Weez, get your things on and run off to the farm and ask Mr. Waite’s address. You’d better write it down.”

  Louise did not like going out of the warm parlour into the freezing air. She possessed less vigour than Jenny, and enjoyed warmth and solitude, and “the wreathéd trellis of a working brain” employed upon reading or drawing better than running about in the open air; but after she had once or twice drawn her breath in gasps and pushed her chin down into her muffler to escape the fierce cold, she suddenly noticed that there was ice on the puddles; grey ice looking so solid that—perhap
s one could stand on it with one foot (Louise stood so, for an instant)—and then with two! (she brought the other foot forward)—and still it did not break!

  There was a chain of such pools leading towards the farm and along them she went; now sliding, now grinding her heel into the cat-ice at the edges, now glancing vaguely about her and enjoying the novelty, rather than the beauty of the scene. Behind the cottage the pines towered up, covered with heavy white frost and revealing the beautiful symmetry usually concealed by their own darkness. Louise had quite forgotten what she had come out for.

  Mr. Waite was returning along the track from the farm, where he had gone to telephone about some balancer meal for his battery birds which had failed to arrive. Walking slowly with his head down against the slight, wandering, icy wind, he was thinking what a beastly cold morning it was; the corn on the third toe of his left foot throbbed steadily and the one on the little toe of his right foot was quiet, biding its time. This meant that rain was coming; there would be a thaw; there would be impassable roads; breakdowns; burst pipes. These thoughts passed in gloomy, orderly procession through his head as he trudged along the causeway between the frozen lagoons, and on either side of his boots the round silver faces of billions of crowding air bubbles imprisoned in the ice looked up at him; the tideless winter air floated above, below and all about him, with its country sweetness frozen into an arctic freshness, and every grass blade had its mail-coat of frost and its miniature shadow, cast by the faint sunlight. O ye Ice and Snow, bless ye the Lord. A beastly cold morning and the pipes will probably burst, thought Mr. Waite.

  Had he followed his strongest instincts, which were to make himself comfortable and to disapprove of other people, he would have ignored Louise, but some other instinct prompted him, as their paths crossed, to address her.

  “Where are you going to, my pretty maid?” he inquired. “Fairyland?”