The Matchmaker

by Stella Gibbons

  The fat elderly manageress now appeared at the kitchen door in a greasy blue apron, clapping her hands at the customers and good-naturedly beseeching them all to go home and give the girls a chance to get a rest, and everyone began reluctantly to gather their possessions together and make their farewells, Sylvia among them.

  “Can you show me the way to Naylor’s?” she asked of Emilio.

  “It is long-a way. Three mile,” and he shrugged again.

  “I know that. I’m not asking you to come too. I just want to know the way.”

  “We come too,” nodded Emilio, buttoning his overcoat.

  “Oh no you don’t, thank you. I can manage,” she answered quickly, alarmed at the idea of dark roads, deserted and lonely, and these two on either side of her. Her confident assumption that she could deal with them departed abruptly.

  “We come,” smiled Fabrio, not quite pleasantly, and picked up his cap.

  “Didn’t you get me the first time, comrade? I don’t want you to come. Nienty. No can do. I’d rather go alone.” The three of them were now moving towards the door.

  “She is a-fraid,” said Fabrio, his musical voice now mocking her, whereupon they both began to laugh uproariously, standing on either side of her in the snowy street, whilst around them people gathered in groups, bidding one another “Good night” and “A merry Christmas.” She looked angrily from one laughing face to the other, not understanding a word they were saying.

  “Oh, very funny, very funny, ha-ha,” she interrupted at last. “Now suppose you tell me the way and I’ll be off—by myself, thank you.”

  “We come-a with you,” said Fabrio, suddenly ceasing to laugh. “We work there.”

  “Me an’ my fren’, we work-a at Naylor Farm,” Emilio explained in his turn. “We go back to campo this night, we go with you some tha way.”

  “Oh, you work there?” she cried.

  “You langurl,” said Emilio, nodding and touching the flash on her sleeve. “We work all of us together there, sometime perhaps.”

  “Oh, I get you. ‘Came the dawn.’ Come on, then, comrades, what are we waiting for? Let’s go,” and she slipped one arm through that of Emilio and the other—after a glance at his face—through Fabrio’s, and they set off.

  Emilio was enjoying himself. He lived in the moment, and would have agreed with Lord Byron that old-fashioned pleasures were good enough for him; Sylvia’s arm and side were warm against his own and an agreeable perfume breathed from her face and hair. From time to time, however, he glanced at the face of Fabrio, which he could faintly discern in the starlight, and saw that it was haughty, troubled and slightly averted from Sylvia. Now what’s the matter with him? thought Emilio, irritated, for he loved his friend without understanding him.

  Fabrio was annoyed at being unceremoniously seized by his arm, with never a hint of shyness on Sylvia’s part beforehand or of pride and pleasure after she had got it, and he also felt ashamed of being seen walking linked with this noisy young girl in trousers.

  He had seen “langurls” on previous occasions, of course, cycling past the camp or working in summer on the surrounding farms and always he had thought how shameless and ridiculous they looked, and when they were pretty that only made it worse. Now he was striding along beside one, with her fresh young presence troubling him, and now—oh Holy Saints, she was singing! Mother of God, thought Fabrio, and winced, what a voice!

  As the language difficulty made conversation constrained, Sylvia thought it best to sing, and what she chose to sing—as the untrodden snow rolled away before them in the starlight and keen winds wandered through the dusky leafless coppices—was Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Even so might some Pagan seller of lupin-seeds in the Rome of Nero have bawled a good tune which he had overheard the Christians singing in the night watches from their prison above the Circus. Sylvia had heard this good tune on the wireless.

  After listening for a moment or two, Emilio caught the air and joined in, but Fabrio uttered never a sound, sung or spoken, until the lights of the camp shone on the opposite side of the road, and then, as they all paused in their march, he abruptly shook off Sylvia’s arm, barely nodded to her, and strode off towards the gates of the camp, where the sentry walked up and down with chin sunk in his collar against the cold.

  “What’s biting him?” she demanded indignantly, but a conscious expression in her eyes and colour deepening in her face betrayed that she was not completely insensitive, and the glance which she gave along the lonely road lying ahead was apprehensive.

  Emilio only shrugged; he often found his comparative ignorance of English useful in embarrassing situations but in this case he did not know the answer.

  “I come-a with you,” was all he said, trying to take her arm again. His face looked pinched and yellow and not attractive in the dim light.

  “There’s no need for that,” she said, hesitating between a little mistrust of him and a real dread of the solitary walk before her, “You tell me the way.”

  “No-o, no-a. Very difficult, much, much. I come-a an’ show you.”

  The sentry had turned his head and was watching the two of them with a weary ironical grin.

  “All right then, if it isn’t far,” she said, and let him take her arm again and lead her down the road.

  Emilio calculated that he could walk with her for another quarter of an hour, for it was now half-past eight and he must be back in camp by nine; the last fifteen minutes must be spent in retracing his steps. Accordingly, when they had walked for some time in a silence made disagreeable by the fact that he had tried to kiss her and had been repulsed by a strong push and a loud indignant exclamation, he paused, and announced:

  “Now I go-a back to campo.”

  “Here, don’t do that, comrade!” she said, dismayed, and set down her suitcase (which he had not offered to carry) with an exasperated movement. “Where do I go from here?”

  Emilio, a man of few words when he liked, sulkily pointed to a wide gap in the leafless hedge on their left.

  “Down there? Thanks, I’m sure,” peering into the dimness. “Oo, it does look dark!”

  “Naylor Farm,” said Emilio, jerking his thumb at the gap. “Go on, go on, go on. Then Naylor Farm. Now I go back to campo. See you some-a day, signora-mees. Buona notte,” and he sketched a salute and turned away.

  “You are mean!” she called after him half-tearfully as his shape grew dim in the starlight.

  “Merry Christa-mas!” he called back mockingly, and was lost in the snow-lit gloom.

  Sylvia heard his footsteps grow fainter and finally cease, and stood there uncertainly, with her heart beating fast and lurid fancies engendered by the cinema, the wireless and the cheap bookstall rushing into her mind, assailing it with terrors as frightful as any imagined a hundred years ago by a peasant who could not write or read. She saw the front page of a certain morning paper with its heavy black headlines and on it her own name and the word Murder; she saw shapes in the white obscurity of the hedges buried in snow, motionless, watching her; she stared wildly about her and was almost ready to run, had she not been even more afraid that something would spring out of the shadows and run after her.

  Suddenly a woman on a bicycle came round the corner, pedalling placidly along with a cheerful little red lamp throwing its ray upon the trodden snow. It was the District Nurse, returning home after her day’s work, and she called a pleasant “Good night” as she went by.

  “Oo—please—is this right for Naylor’s Farm?” shouted Sylvia, running a little way after her.

  “First on the left; you can’t mistake it,” Nurse called, as her tiny ruby light dwindled away down the road, “then just keep straight on. Merry Christmas.”

  Sylvia made her way through the gap in the hedge, and was soon slowly moving across the frozen morass of mud covered by virgin snow between the road and the farm. The lights from the latter’s windows were still hidden by the dip in the meadows, and she could distinguish nothing beyond the dim blanc
hed wastes extending on every side, broken here and there by the elongated white hump of a hedge or a large vague object, laden with snow and looming against the sky, that was a tree, and she soon became frightened again. The stars were hidden once more behind clouds and an icy wind blew into her face; she went slowly, doggedly on with her legs aching from the effort of lifting them at every step from two feet of snow; a tiny dark figure that was the only moving object between empty fields and vast sky. Had she been in company with a friend she would have been shrieking with laughter and enjoying it all, but she was not capable of laughing at discomfort while enduring it alone.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Hoadley was coming across the meadows towards her, carrying a lantern like a Shepherd or a Wise Man, and, unlike either of them, in a bad temper. As he was a good-natured man he disliked being in a bad temper, and he also felt that it was wrong to be in one on Christmas Eve, when even his wife’s sharpness had been temporarily blunted by letters from home (Mrs. Hoadley, like Dante and Mr. Waite, was an exile; in her case, from Ironborough) and when there were a duck and a goose for the Christmas dinner to-morrow, and the farmhouse was full of his old parents from Amberley Wild Brooks and other relatives from out Pulborough way, including two little nephews of whom he, the childless man, was fond. But drat that girl! he had wasted the whole afternoon, when there were a thousand things to be done, in meeting three trains on her behalf; and finally he had had to come down here at nine o’clock at night in the forlorn hope that she might have come out on the eight o’clock bus from Horsham to Burlham and walked from there.

  The rays of the lantern beamed along the glittering surface of the snow as his massive patient figure trudged on, and each of his steps made a hollow deep enough for a rabbit to shelter in. He swung the lantern impatiently, so that its ray flickered upwards upon his frowning face, and peered ahead, searching for a human figure in the dimness.

  In the meantime, Sylvia had naturally taken the lights of Pine cottage for those of the farm, and was even now (though with some misgiving as she observed the smallness of the place and the lack of outbuildings and haystacks and that sort of thing surrounding it) knocking at the front door.

  9

  WITHIN, EVERYBODY WAS too busy to hear a knock at the front door, especially as they were not expecting one. Jean was undressing Meg and putting her into bed, while Jenny and Louise, with many whispers and grimaces, were moving their pillows and pyjamas into one bed in their room in order that Jean could sleep in the other. Alda was hastily preparing something more solid than the tea that had been awaiting herself and the children for Ronald, who had not eaten since early that morning, while giving him the latest family news.

  “Is that someone at the front door?” he interrupted her, from beside the kitchen fire where he was warming his numbed feet.

  “Oh no, darling, no one ever comes here at night. It’s only the children bumping about. Here, drink this while it’s hot.”

  “Alda, I’m sure that is someone at the door,” he said again in a moment, when he had taken some soup.

  “I’ll go—it must be someone from the farm with a parcel,” and she was going out of the room when he stopped her, saying:

  “Better let me go; we’re living in the New Dark Ages, remember,” and he put down the basin and went down the passage, moving slowly because he was weary and stiff from travelling.

  “Oo, please, is this Naylor’s Farm?” inquired a loud, fresh young voice plaintively as he switched on his torch and opened the door. He looked down (for she had retreated outside the porch and was standing below its step) into a pair of blue eyes shining beneath a mop of dyed hair, dark and damp from the recent snowfall.

  “I’m afraid not. This is Pine Cottage; the farm is about three hundred yards further on,” he answered.

  “Thank goodness for that, anyway,” she said, cheered by the pleasant educated voice and the sight of a tall masculine figure. “Sorry to have bothered you,” and she was turning away when Alda came down the passage to see who the visitor was.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the green jersey and Women’s Land Army flash on the coat sleeve, “Mr. Hoadley will be glad you’ve come! He thought you’d got lost; he’s been down to the station twice and we’ve just seen him go by here with a lantern; I expect he’s gone down to the road to see if you’ve come by the last bus.”

  “I simply can’t go back across that field; I’ll die,” declared Sylvia flatly, and sat down upon her suitcase. “I’ll wait here until he comes back and catch him,” and she gazed expectantly from one face to the other, obviously hoping to be invited to wait inside the house.

  “Won’t you—” Ronald was beginning, when a touch upon his arm from Alda silenced him.

  Every human instinct of sympathy, of hospitality, of desire to feed the hungry and shelter the outcast, had been aroused in him during the past months in Germany, and every one of those natural instincts had been denied full expression. He now thought of a house only as a place into which so many dispossessed persons (as homeless people are now called) could be fitted with some prospect of relief, if not of actual comfort; and the sweet narrow walls of his own family life had not yet had time to rise about him once more and shut out the ever-present vision of that horde of starved, filthy, hopeless, almost nameless, fellow-creatures to whom he was father and judge.

  But Alda felt the walls firmly and strongly about her, and she was certainly not going to invite another person into Pine Cottage that night, even though it was a snowy Christmas Eve.

  “He should be back any minute now,” she said brightly. “I’ll leave the door open for you, shall I? I won’t ask you in; you’d probably miss him. A merry Christmas! Good night,” and she went quickly back to the kitchen, leaving Sylvia sitting upon her suitcase in the snow.

  Ronald followed more slowly. He did not like to see a girl sitting on a suitcase in the snow, waiting; it was too much like what he had been seeing at every station, all through Germany, all through Belgium, all through France, during his journey of the past forty-eight hours; nevertheless, he looked tenderly at the back of Alda’s bright head as she bent over the stove, and loved her.

  Meg immediately turned her flushed cheek into the pillow and went to sleep, leaving Jean with nothing to do but stand a shaded candle upon the mantelpiece, make up one of the fires which she had lit in a mood of Christmas Eve recklessness in the two bedrooms earlier that afternoon and tiptoe away into the next room, where she found Jenny and Louise bouncing up and down in a heap of bed clothes upon the floor.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?” she demanded.

  “We’re making the bed and all these pillows and things needed a good shaking.”

  “I see. Well, now let’s put them back on the bed, shall we? and then you pop into the bathroom and wash and I’ll bring up your supper.”

  The children had an indulgent liking for Jean which was unconsciously modelled upon their mother’s half-derisive, half-affectionate attitude towards her, and although they barely regarded her as having a grown-up’s authority, they consented to do as she suggested and were soon sitting side by side in the large, freshly smoothed bed, gazing at the two long black stockings hanging from the brass rail at its foot and waiting for their supper, while the firelight danced upon walls and ceiling, transforming the ugly room with cosy mystery. Both wore dressing-gowns made by Alda from an ample old white shawl printed with a Paisley pattern in red and green which she had bought for a few shillings at a junk shop in some country town. There had not been enough of it to make a full-length one for Meg but all three children considered hers the best robe of them all, for it had a hem of green velvet a foot deep (discarded evening dress, Marion, vintage 1939) and Jenny called it “absolutely princess-like.”

  Jean was happy to be in this little house standing in the midst of the meadows, which, after the conventional luxury of her parents’ box-like flat in St. John’s Wood, seemed to her a romantic place. All her journey had been romantic; the snowstorm
, her struggle across the frozen fields with her suitcase, and finally, her entry, through the back door (which she greatly wondered to find unlocked) into a quiet, shadowy cottage where the fire burned in the parlour like a veiled garnet and all the clocks ticked peacefully through the afternoon hush. The recent bustle of her own life suddenly seemed to her blessedly remote. She had left behind her the documents to be signed and the relations to be consulted, the furniture dealers and lawyers and house agents and prospective tenants, and was now at rest, surrounded by the familiar atmosphere belonging to her oldest and closest friend.

  “Jean!” Alda’s voice came subduedly up the stairs. “Supper.”

  She had suspended branches of holly and yew with scarlet threads from the picture rail in the parlour, and these conspired with firelight and white tablecloth to fill the room with the mysterious innocent happiness of Christmas. Jean began to smile as she came down the dark narrow staircase into the light, and the other two, chagrined though they were at the spoiling of their family Christmas, smiled with her.

  The remainder of the evening passed pleasantly, as Meg did not awaken, and sleep must do her good, and half-way through supper Jean remembered that she had a bottle of gin in her suitcase, intended as a Christmas present for her hosts. (The late Mr. Hardcastle had known a number of wealthy, slightly mysterious men with hard faces who frequently sent him a bottle of this and a case of that, or gave him a tip in season about the other, and it was one of them, wishing to show respect to the dead, who had presented Jean with the gin.)