And then! ah, then, the lovely, glowing intimacy of the evening, between mother and son, when they deciphered manuscripts and discussed points, Pauline with that eagerness of a girl for which she was famous. And it was quite genuine. In some mysterious way she had saved up her power for being thrilled, in connection with a man. Robert, solid, rather quiet and subdued, seemed like the elder of the two — almost like a priest with a young girl pupil. And that was rather how he felt.
Ciss had a flat for herself just across the courtyard, over the old coach-house and stables. There were no horses. Robert kept his car in the coach-house. Ciss had three very nice rooms up there, stretching along in a row one after the other, and she had got used to the ticking of the stable clock.
But sometimes she did not go to her rooms. In the summer she would sit on the lawn, and from the open window of the drawing-room upstairs she would hear Pauline’s wonderful, heart-searching laugh. And in winter the young woman would put on a thick coat and walk slowly to the little balustraded bridge over the stream, and then look back at the three lighted windows of that drawing-room where mother and son were so happy together.
Ciss loved Robert, and she believed that Pauline intended the two of them to marry — when she was dead. But poor Robert, he was so convulsed with shyness already, with man or woman. What would he be when his mother was dead? — in a dozen more years. He would be just a shell, the shell of a man who had never lived.
The strange, unspoken sympathy of the young with one another, when they are overshadowed by the old, was one of the bonds between Robert and Ciss. But another bond, which Ciss did not know how to draw tight, was the bond of passion. Poor Robert was by nature a passionate man. His silence and his agonised, though hidden, shyness were both the result of a secret physical passionateness. And how Pauline could play on this! Ah, Ciss was not blind to the eyes which he fixed on his mother — eyes fascinated yet humiliated, full of shame. He was ashamed that he was not a man. And he did not love his mother. He was fascinated by her. Completely fascinated. And for the rest, paralysed in a life-long confusion.
Ciss stayed in the garden till the lights leapt up in Pauline’s bedroom — about ten o’clock. The lovely lady had retired. Robert would now stay another hour or so, alone. Then he, too, would retire. Ciss, in the dark outside, sometimes wished she could creep up to him and say: “Oh, Robert! It’s all wrong!” But Aunt Pauline would hear. And, anyhow, Ciss couldn’t do it. She went off to her own rooms, once more, once more, and so for ever.
In the morning coffee was brought up on a tray to each of the rooms of the three relatives. Ciss had to be at Sir Wilfrid Knipe’s at nine o’clock, to give two hours’ lessons to his little grand-daughter. It was her sole serious occupation, except that she played the piano for the love of it. Robert set off to town about nine. And as a rule, Aunt Pauline appeared to lunch, though sometimes not till tea-time. When she appeared, she looked fresh and young. But she was inclined to fade rather rapidly, like a flower without water, in the daytime. Her hour was the candle hour.
So she always rested in the afternoon. When the sun shone, if possible she took a sun-bath. This was one of her secrets. Her lunch was very light; she could take her sun-and-air-bath before noon or after, as it pleased her. Often it was in the afternoon, when the sun shone very warmly into a queer little yew-walled square just behind the stables. Here Ciss stretched out the lying-chair and rugs, and put the light parasol handy in the silent little enclosure of thick dark yew-hedges beyond the old red walls of the unused stables. And hither came the lovely lady with her book. Ciss then had to be on guard in one of her own rooms, should her aunt, who was very keen-eared, hear a footstep.
One afternoon it occurred to Cecilia that she herself might while away this rather long afternoon hour by taking a sun-bath. She was growing restive. The thought of the flat roof of the stable buildings, to which she could climb from a loft at the end, started her on a new adventure. She often went on to the roof; she had to, to wind up the stable clock, which was a job she had assumed to herself. Now she took a rug, climbed out under the heavens, looked at the sky and the great elm-tops, looked at the sun, then took off her things and lay down perfectly securely, in a corner of the roof under the parapet, full in the sun.
It was rather lovely, to bask all one’s length like this in warm sun and air. Yes, it was very lovely! It even seemed to melt some of the hard bitterness of her heart, some of that core of unspoken resentment which never dissolved. Luxuriously, she spread herself, so that the sun should touch her limbs fully, fully. If she had no other lover, she should have the sun! She rolled over voluptuously.
And suddenly her heart stood still in her body, and her hair almost rose on end as a voice said very softly, musingly, in her ear:
“No, Henry dear! It was not my fault you died instead of marrying that Claudia. No, darling. I was quite, quite willing for you to marry her, unsuitable though she was.”
Cecilia sank down on her rug, powerless and perspiring with dread. That awful voice, so soft, so musing, yet so unnatural. Not a human voice at all. Yet there must, there must be someone on the roof! Oh, how unspeakably awful!
She lifted her weak head and peeped across the sloping leads. Nobody! The chimneys were too narrow to shelter anybody. There was nobody on the roof. Then it must be someone in the trees, in the elms. Either that, or — terror unspeakable — a bodiless voice! She reared her head a little higher.
And as she did so, came the voice again:
“No, darling! I told you you would tire of her in six months. And you see it was true, dear. It was true, true, true! I wanted to spare you that. So it wasn’t I who made you feel weak and disabled, wanting that very silly Claudia — poor thing, she looked so woebegone afterwards! — wanting her and not wanting her. You got yourself into that perplexity, my dear. I only warned you. What else could I do? And you lost your spirit and died without ever knowing me again. It was bitter, bitter — ”
The voice faded away. Cecilia subsided weakly on to her rug, after the anguished tension of listening. Oh, it was awful. The sun shone, the sky was blue, all seemed so lovely and afternoony and summery. And yet, oh, horror! — she was going to be forced to believe in the supernatural! And she loathed the supernatural, ghosts and voices and rappings and all the rest.
But that awful, creepy, bodiless voice, with its rusty sort of whispers of an overtone! It had something so fearfully familiar in it, too! And yet was so utterly uncanny. Poor Cecilia could only lie there unclothed, and so all the more agonisingly helpless, inert, collapsed in sheer dread.
And then she heard the thing sigh! — a deep sigh that seemed weirdly familiar, yet was not human. “Ah well, ah well! the heart must bleed. Better it should bleed than break. It is grief, grief! But it wasn’t my fault, dear. And Robert could marry our poor, dull Ciss tomorrow, if he wanted her. But he doesn’t care about it, so why force him into anything?” The sounds were very uneven, sometimes only a husky sort of whisper. Listen! Listen!
Cecilia was about to give vent to loud and piercing screams of hysteria, when the last two sentences arrested her. All her caution and her cunning sprang alert. It was Aunt Pauline! It must be Aunt Pauline, practising ventriloquism, or something like that. What a devil she was!
Where was she? She must be lying down there, right below where Cecilia herself was lying. And it was either some fiend’s trick of ventriloquism, or else thought-transference. The sounds were very uneven; sometimes quite inaudible, sometimes only a brushing sort of noise. Ciss listened intently. No, it could not be ventriloquism. It was worse: some form of thought-transference that conveyed itself like sound. Some horror of that sort! Cecilia still lay weak and inert, too terrified to move; but she was growing calmer with suspicion. It was some diabolic trick of that unnatural woman.
But what a devil of a woman! She even knew that she, Cecilia, had mentally accused her of killing her son Henry. Poor Henry was Robert’s elder brother, twelve years older than Robert. He had died
suddenly when he was twenty-two, after an awful struggle with himself, because he was passionately in love with a young and very good-looking actress, and his mother had humorously despised him for the attachment. So he had caught some sudden ordinary disease, but the poison had gone to his brain and killed him before he ever regained consciousness. Ciss knew the few facts from her own father. And lately she had been thinking that Pauline was going to kill Robert as she had killed Henry. It was clear murder: a mother murdering her sensitive sons, who were fascinated by her: the Circe!
“I suppose I may as well get up,” murmured the dim, unbreathing voice. “Too much sun is as bad as too little. Enough sun, enough love-thrill, enough proper food, and not too much of any of them, and a woman might live for ever. I verily believe, for ever. If she absorbs as much vitality as she expends. Or perhaps a trifle more!”
It was certainly Aunt Pauline! How — how terrible! She, Ciss, was hearing Aunt Pauline’s thoughts. Oh, how ghastly! Aunt Pauline was sending out her thoughts in a sort of radio, and she, Ciss, had to hear what her aunt was thinking. How ghastly! How insufferable! One of them would surely have to die.
She twisted and lay inert and crumpled, staring vacantly in front of her. Vacantly! Vacantly! And her eyes were staring almost into a hole. She was staring in it unseeing, a hole going down in the corner, from the lead gutter. It meant nothing to her. Only it frightened her a little more.
When suddenly, out of the hole came a sigh and a last whisper: “Ah well! Pauline! Get up, it’s enough for to-day.” Good God! Out of the hole of the rain-pipe! The rain-pipe was acting as a speaking-tube! Impossible! No, quite possible. She had read of it even in some book. And Aunt Pauline, like the old and guilty woman she was talked aloud to herself. That was it!
A sullen exultance sprang in Ciss’s breast. That was why she would never have anybody, not even Robert, in her bedroom. That was why she never dozed in a chair, never sat absent-minded anywhere, but went to her room, and kept to her room, except when she roused herself to be alert. When she slackened off she talked to herself! She talked in a soft little crazy voice to herself. But she was not crazy. It was only her thoughts murmuring themselves aloud.
So she had qualms about poor Henry! Well she might have! Ciss believed that Aunt Pauline had loved her big, handsome, brilliant first-born much more than she loved Robert, and that his death had been a terrible blow and a chagrin to her. Poor Robert had been only ten years old when Henry died. Since then he had been the substitute.
Ah, how awful!
But Aunt Pauline was a strange woman. She had left her husband when Henry was a small child, some years even before Robert was born. There was no quarrel. Sometimes she saw her husband again, quite amiably, but a little mockingly. And she even gave him money.
For Pauline earned all her own. Her father had been a Consul in the East and in Naples, and a devoted collector of beautiful exotic things. When he died, soon after his grandson Henry was born, he left his collection of treasures to his daughter. And Pauline, who had really a passion and a genius for loveliness, whether in texture or form or colour, had laid the basis of her fortune on her father’s collection. She had gone on collecting, buying where she could, and selling to collectors or to museums. She was one of the first to sell old, weird African figures to the museums, and ivory carvings from New Guinea. She bought Renoir as soon as she saw his pictures. But not Rousseau. And all by herself she made a fortune.
After her husband died she had not married again. She was not even known to have had lovers. If she did have lovers, it was not among the men who admired her most and paid her devout and open attendance. To these she was a “friend”.
Cecilia slipped on her clothes and caught up her rug, hastening carefully down the ladder to the loft. As she descended she heard the ringing, musical call: “All right, Ciss” — which meant that the lovely lady was finished, and returning to the house. Even her voice was wonderfully young and sonorous, beautifully balanced and self-possessed. So different from the little voice in which she talked to herself. That was much more the voice of an old woman.
Ciss hastened round to the yew enclosure, where lay the comfortable chaise longue with the various delicate rugs. Everything Pauline had was choice, to the fine straw mat on the floor. The great yew walls were beginning to cast long shadows. Only in the corner where the rugs tumbled their delicate colours was there hot, still sunshine.
The rugs folded up, the chair lifted away, Cecilia stooped to look at the mouth of the rain-pipe. There it was, in the corner, under a little hood of masonry and just projecting from the thick leaves of the creeper on the wall. If Pauline, lying there, turned her face towards the wall, she would speak into the very mouth of the tube. Cecilia was reassured. She had heard her aunt’s thoughts indeed, but by no uncanny agency.
That evening, as if aware of something, Pauline was a little quieter than usual, though she looked her own serene, rather mysterious self. And after coffee she said to Robert and Ciss:
“I’m so sleepy. The sun has made me so sleepy. I feel full of sunshine like a bee. I shall go to bed, if you don’t mind. You two sit and have a talk.”
Cecilia looked quickly at her cousin.
“Perhaps you’d rather be alone?” she said to him.
“No — no,” he replied. “Do keep me company for a while, if it doesn’t bore you.”
The windows were open, the scent of honeysuckle wafted in, with the sound of an owl. Robert smoked in silence. There was a sort of despair in his motionless, rather squat body. He looked like a caryatid bearing a weight.
“Do you remember Cousin Henry?” Cecilia asked him suddenly.
He looked up in surprise.
“Yes. Very well,” he said.
“What did he look like?” she said, glancing into her cousin’s big, secret-troubled eyes, in which there was so much frustration.
“Oh, he was handsome: tall, and fresh-coloured, with mother’s soft brown hair.” As a matter of fact, Pauline’s hair was grey. “The ladies admired him very much; and he was at all the dances.”
“And what kind of character had he?”
“Oh, very good-natured and jolly. He liked to be amused. He was rather quick and clever, like mother, and very good company.”
“And did he love your mother?”
“Very much. She loved him too — better than she does me, as a matter of fact. He was so much more nearly her idea of a man.”
“Why was he more her idea of a man?”
“Tall — handsome — attractive, and very good company — and would, I believe, have been very successful at law. I’m afraid I am merely negative in all those respects.”
Ciss looked at him attentively, with her slow-thinking hazel eyes. Under his impassive mask she knew he suffered.
“Do you think you are so much more negative than he?” she said.
He did not lift his face. But after a few moments he replied:
“My life, certainly, is a negative affair.”
She hesitated before she dared ask him:
“And do you mind?”
He did not answer her at all. Her heart sank.
“You see, I’m afraid my life is as negative as yours is,” she said. “And I’m beginning to mind bitterly. I’m thirty.”
She saw his creamy, well-bred hand tremble.
“I suppose,” he said, without looking at her, “one will rebel when it is too late.”
That was queer, from him.
“Robert!” she said. “Do you like me at all?”
She saw his dusky-creamy face, so changeless in its folds, go pale.
“I am very fond of you,” he murmured.
“Won’t you kiss me? Nobody ever kisses me,” she said pathetically.
He looked at her, his eyes strange with fear and a certain haughtiness. Then he rose, and came softly over to her, and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“It’s an awful shame, Ciss!” he said softly.
She caught his hand
and pressed it to her breast.
“And sit with me sometimes in the garden,” she said, murmuring with difficulty. “Won’t you?”
He looked at her anxiously and searchingly.
“What about mother?”
Ciss smiled a funny little smile, and looked into his eyes. He suddenly flushed crimson, turning aside his face. It was a painful sight.
“I know,” he said. “I am no lover of women.”
He spoke with sarcastic stoicism, against himself, but even she did not know the shame it was to him.
“You never try to be,” she said.
Again his eyes changed uncannily.
“Does one have to try?” he said.
“Why, yes. One never does anything if one doesn’t try.”
He went pale again.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said.
In a few minutes she left him, and went to her rooms. At least she had tried to take off the everlasting lid from things.
The weather continued sunny, Pauline continued her sun-baths, and Ciss lay on the roof eavesdropping, in the literal sense of the word. But Pauline was not to be heard. No sound came up the pipe. She must be lying with her face away into the open. Ciss listened with all her might. She could just detect the faintest, faintest murmur away below, but no audible syllable.
And at night, under the stars, Cecilia sat and waited in silence, on the seat which kept in view the drawing-room windows and the side door into the garden. She saw the light go up in her aunt’s room. She saw the lights at last go out in the drawing-room. And she waited. But he did not come. She stayed on in the darkness half the night, while the owl hooted. But she stayed alone.
Two days she heard nothing; her aunt’s thoughts were not revealed; and at evening nothing happened. Then, the second night, as she sat with heavy, helpless persistence in the garden, suddenly she started. He had come out. She rose and went softly over the grass to him.
“Don’t speak!” he murmured.
And in silence, in the dark, they walked down the garden and over the little bridge to the paddock, where the hay, cut very late, was in cock. There they stood disconsolate under the stars.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 683