The Constant Nymph

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘Your father,’ he said, ‘made a mistake when he married your mother. He was caught as Lewis is now caught; his appetites were stronger than his common sense. But he broke through all that; he had so much brutality. Lewis will not treat this woman as Sanger treated your mother. He is not brutal.’

  ‘Isn’t he? He’s insanely cruel sometimes.’

  ‘Cruel? Yes! That is a different thing. Clever people are cruel. Stupid people are brutal.’

  ‘Sanger wasn’t stupid.’

  ‘He was not clever. His strength was that; it made him so different! And, for a man of genius, little heart, he was wonderfully insensitive.’

  ‘And I can’t see that Florence has done Lewis any harm. It’s lovely, this Concerto he has written.’

  ‘It is good, yes!’ mused Jacob. ‘Something has happened to him in this year. “Breakfast with the Borgias” was the beginning. We thought that was a joke, but it was a sign. Always, before that he had a … how would you call it? … a gêne … a constraint … almost a terror, of his own power to write melody. He could do it, and he would not. It seemed sad to me, for those who could do that have been so few … not half a dozen …’

  ‘Sanger stopped him.’

  ‘I know. It was a pity, your father’s influence. While he was your father’s disciple he would never obey his own nature. He was a revolté and Sanger’s was the music of revolt. Now he is becoming free of all that.’

  ‘Well! Florence isn’t stopping him.’

  ‘Nothing will stop him. I think that he should have a hearing in this country. Sanger will soon be popular. Then also the early work of Lewis. The Symphony in Three Keys! This year we will have that, and next year the new Concerto.’

  ‘You will see about it?’ cried Tony.

  ‘I will think of it. This Concerto is good, but until now I had never thought of his future. He has fought himself.’

  ‘He’s a good conductor. Better than Sanger was.’

  ‘That is so,’ agreed Jacob. ‘I will see him some time and ask him if he would like a concert.’

  Antonia looked very pleased, for if Jacob said that anybody should have a concert, they generally had one. And a year ago she was sure that he would never have thought of risking money on Lewis. She planned to tell Florence all about it.

  Lewis jogged home, through the wintry twilight, on the top of an omnibus. He was feeling rather lugubrious for he expected his house to be chilly. The boards were too bare and the furniture too hard and sparse; there was none of the fat comfort and untidiness that make for warmth. When Florence was there, of course, it was different. She made a sort of glow in it. But she had fallen out with him and was gone to sulk at Cambridge. That was the truth, though he had been so light-hearted about it at Lexham Gardens. She had asked Millicent and her husband to dine with them, and he, when told of it, had demanded that the invitation should be cancelled. They had come to terrible grief. Florence said that there were some things which nobody could do; he had replied that there was nothing that he could not do, and that he would write Millicent himself if she did not. Also that his letter, if written, would probably be the ruder of the two. She had commanded and implored him. She had said that it was very humiliating for her, and that she would not submit to it. She had frozen him for three days and then, finding it, as he suspected, difficult to keep up, went off to Cambridge. He had no doubt but that she was fortifying herself by pouring out the whole shocking history to her father.

  Meanwhile the innocent wretch had left him alone, with no better chaperon than Roberto, in a neat, cold house which always smelt of furniture polish, cheered by the bleak hope that on Monday a neat, cold wife might return to him. He wished that he could have stayed all night with the Birnbaums. He wanted company and distraction, for he had practically finished his Concerto and there was nothing in his head; a dangerous time, when, formerly, he would have gone to stay with the Sangers.

  The omnibus came to Kew Bridge and he got off. He whistled as he hastened down to the river and picked his way along the narrow path, in front of the little quiet houses. The river gurgled against the wooden groynings, and across the water he could hear the pulsating throb of a power house. He stood still for a moment, listening with the absent, instinctive concentration that was his nature. Tall thin chimneys stood up against the Winter sunset. Presently the ‘Mary Blake’ came chugging down stream, with a string of barges in tow, and he turned to stare after her, kicking little bits of gravel into the water.

  ‘Tide nearly high!’ he observed, to the frosty air.

  On the railway bridge just below his house a District train flashed jewelled windows into the river and he thought, rather wistfully, of all the clerks rushing to their supper and the evening paper in crowded little homes at Richmond or Kew. He felt still more reluctant to eat his own meal alone in an empty house, but he dragged slowly along, humming to himself with a grim chuckle:

  ‘Se vuol ballare, signor contino!’

  He opened the small iron gate in front of his house, and started backward with a cry as three people rose up from the deep shadow of the portico above. They had been sitting in silence on his doorstep.

  ‘It’s Lewis!’ breathed a voice, and he was nearly throttled by a small pair of arms, flung round his neck, and half a dozen frantic kisses.

  ‘How … who … why! Paulina!’ he stammered. ‘Sebastian! How did you get here?’

  ‘We’ve run away,’ said Paulina. ‘We had to. Sebastian ran away from his school, so we thought we’d better too.’

  ‘We found your house all shut up,’ continued Sebastian more calmly. ‘So we sat on the doorstep and waited for somebody to come.’

  Lewis looked up at the third person on the step above him. She hovered, a little uncertainly, in the shadow.

  ‘Tessa!’ he said eagerly. ‘Is that Tessa?’

  Then she came down to him and he caught her up and turned her face to the last of the daylight, to make sure that he had got her. He heard her laugh and say:

  ‘Yes, it’s me! I’ve come to lay my bones among you.’

  ‘Oh, Tessa! This is splendid! How long it’s been!’

  Yet she hardly seemed real. She was so pale, like a shadow, and in his arms she seemed to have no weight at all; she had alighted there as some fragile, snowy flower might drift down to the grass of an orchard upon a windless night in May.

  ‘Look up!’ he commanded. ‘Lift your head up, Tessa, and kiss me!’

  She tilted her face up and they kissed, a clinging embrace that was more like a farewell than a greeting. To her that instant brought a pang, a dim echo of times past; to him, an apprehension of change, a foreshadowing of loss and grief to come. They drew quickly apart and she said:

  ‘Are you going to let us into your house, Lewis?’

  He pulled a latchkey from his pocket and, unlocking the door, he lifted her up and brought her into the hall. The others followed and the door shut with a clap which resounded through the empty rooms. He stood still in the darkness for a moment, reflecting, asking himself what sort of parting they had had, six months ago. Strange that he could remember nothing of it! He supposed that it was some time in June, somewhere in the Tyrol, but it seemed that he had let her go without a thought, robbed, surely of his wits, by some foolish preoccupation. Then he remembered that he had been getting married. He switched on the light and saw her again, close beside him, young and round-faced, blinking a little in the sudden brilliance. Two telegrams lay on the hall table. They had arrived during the afternoon and Roberto had put them carefully into view before going out. Lewis opened them. The first said:

  Sanger sisters disappeared this morning last seen 9 A.M. are they with you will not inform police unless hear from you have also wired Cambridge Wragge.

  The next, which was from Florence, said:

  Wire received here saying Sebastian has run away if he turns up at the Green keep him and wire me.

  These telegrams Lewis read out, and Teresa commented:

 
‘Sanger sisters sounds like a music hall turn.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lewis, determined to be practical and efficient, ‘we must wire to Florence, and all these schools, to say that you are safe. Come into the music-room.’

  They were much impressed by the music-room, and Sebastian immediately began to play the piano while Lewis concocted the telegrams which he was to send. The girls, sitting on either arm of his chair, made suggestions and alterations. The finished product to Florence ran:

  All children here have wired schools don’t bother to come back your loving husband.

  In the messages to the schools they were anxious to be as abusive as possible, but Lewis, with some remnants of prudence, insisted upon censorship. Eventually they compromised with a brief intimation of Sebastian’s whereabouts, in the case of his school, and, to Cleeve, the message:

  Sanger sisters safe they are not coming back to your school Dodd.

  ‘Because we can’t possibly go back,’ insisted Paulina. ‘We bore it in silence …’

  ‘No,’ said Teresa sadly, ‘not in silence …’

  ‘I did,’ said Sebastian. ‘Nobody has ever heard a word of complaint from me.’

  ‘What made you run?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘They said I was to be in the school choir!’ Sebastian told them, with calm indignation,

  And he began to play a Beethoven Sonata, op. 111, very solemnly, as if its shocked sevenths gave point to his feeling of outrage, Soon he was making a considerable noise, and the girls, screaming over the din, gave an account of the elopement. Sebastian had objected to many things at his Preparatory. He did not get enough time to practise, he had an inadequate piano with three notes broken, and an instructress who knew nothing about it. His life there was clearly a waste of time and this business of the choir had been the last straw. He had taken advantage of a half holiday and a paper chase to slip off and get to the station. Here he caught a train which went to a Cathedral town not ten miles from Cleeve, where his sisters were; so he thought he might as well pay them a visit before going on his travels. He pawned his coat and cap, bought others, had a meal, and went on to Cleeve, feeling that he had covered his tracks very successfully. Late in the evening he presented himself boldly at Farnborough Lodge, the College boarding house where Teresa and Paulina were incarcerated, and asked to see them. He told the lady who interviewed him a very plausible tale of an uncle who had brought him to Cleeve and who was coming next day in person to take the girls out. She never thought of disbelieving him, for it is not usual to suspect such small creatures of so much villainy. She summoned the girls and left the three together. He, finding them unhappy, persuaded them to run away too. Then he left them and spent a very uncomfortable night in the garden of an empty house, fearing the questions that might be asked if he took a room anywhere. Next day the girls put all their money in their pockets and hid themselves in a dressing-room until the whole of the College was assembled in the great hall for morning prayers. Then they put on their hats and walked out of the building, knowing that their loss would not be discovered until the house assembled for lunch at one o’clock. It would be presumed, in the classes where they should have been, that they were absent through illness.

  Sebastian met them at the railway station, whither they got themselves in some trepidation, and they took the next train to London. Having found their way to Strand-on-the-Green, they had spent the rest of the time sitting on the doorstep.

  ‘If we’d known how simple it would be,’ said Paulina, ‘we’d have done it long ago. Only we didn’t know where to run. Why didn’t you answer our letters, Lewis?’

  Lewis looked uncomfortable and said he had forgotten.

  ‘Tessa said you wouldn’t answer.’

  ‘Did you, Tessa? Why?’

  ‘Because you have a forgetful nature.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Yes, you have.’

  ‘I think I heard Roberto come in. Listen!’

  ‘Roberto!’ they cried. ‘Is he here?’

  And they rushed out to embrace Roberto. In the kitchen there was little trace of Florence. All was a lovely confusion. Roberto could not make a pudding without using every bowl in the house, and never washed a dish until all were dirty. A grand washing up took place every two or three days, and one was evidently almost due, for dirty crockery was piled high on the chairs and tables and even on the floor. Tomatoes, spilling out of a paper bag, splashed the room with colour, onions hung in strings from the ceiling, and the whole place smelt gloriously of garlic.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Teresa, with her arms round Roberto’s neck, ‘this is like getting home!’

  Lewis pitched a ham off a chair by the fire and sat down. He pulled Paulina on to his knee and began to fill his pipe.

  ‘We’ll have our supper in here,’ he said. ‘It’s warmer.’

  ‘It certainly is the place for us,’ said Teresa.

  15

  Two letters had come for Florence by the early post next morning. Paulina picked them up from the mat under the letter-box in the hall and brought them to Lewis, who was eating his breakfast in the kitchen.

  ‘They’ve both got the Cleeve post mark,’ she said, ‘and one is from Miss Wragge. I expect she will explain how she came to mislay us. Do open it and see what she says.’

  ‘That I can’t do,’ said Lewis. ‘It belongs to Florence. She wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you steam it open?’ she suggested. ‘Then you could shut it up again and she won’t know. We do so want to hear what’s in it; and she won’t tell us perhaps.’

  ‘These things,’ said Lewis grandly, ‘are not done.’

  ‘He talks like a book, so he does,’ commented Teresa.

  ‘And he’s quite right,’ said Sebastian. ‘She wouldn’t do it to his letters.’

  ‘I can’t think who this is from,’ said Paulina, peering at the other envelope. ‘It’s typewritten, I think.’

  Teresa turned quite pale and got up to look at it too. She suggested that it might be from Miss Butterfield.

  ‘Oh, Tessa? Do you think so?’

  Paulina also looked frightened and Lewis asked who Miss Butterfield might be. They told him solemnly that she was the head-mistress.

  ‘Then what is Miss Wragge?’

  ‘Only the house-mistress. There are twelve of them, you know; one to each house, and one for the day girls. But Miss Butterfield is the head of the whole College. She lives in a house by herself. They must have told her about us.’

  ‘Well, naturally, my good girls! Two pupils couldn’t very well disappear without her hearing something of it. Marmalade, Sebastian? What was this lady like, that you blanch at her very name. Did she birch you?’

  ‘No—o! Oh, no!’

  ‘Did anyone birch you?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘What did they do to you when you were naughty?’

  They seemed at a loss to explain, but they intimated that it had been something awful. It was not so much what was done as what was said.

  ‘I know what it was,’ put in Sebastian wisely. ‘They said, “Naughty girl Sanger! Don’t do it again!” And you cried for the rest of the day. That’s the way they do at girls’ schools.’

  Teresa and Paulina looked very indignant, but they had to admit that it was something a little like that. Sebastian exchanged a glance with Lewis, a grin of amused contempt at women and their ways. Lewis said:

  ‘But go on about Miss Butterfield. Was she old?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Teresa. ‘She was called Miss Helen Butterfield, M.A. And she used to read prayers in the morning in a black cloak, with a queer blue thing round her neck. And she had a most beautiful voice; quite different from Miss Wragge, who used to read prayers at the house in the evening and sort of barked them. And she saw people … bishops and parents and people … and she saw the girls if anybody had died, or if they’d done anything perfectly dreadful. And she used to give addresses to us on Fortitude and Friendship a
nd things like that. She was very nice looking, and had lovely clothes. She very nearly knew our names.’ This was said in a tone of modest pride. ‘We once had a lecture on music from a funny old granpa … I forget who he was … but I met her showing him over the College next day. And she put her hand on my shoulder and stopped me and said: “This is Esther Sanger, one of Albert Sanger’s daughters. I think I told you that we have two of them here in the College.” And he said: “How are you, my dear? How are you?” I could see he knew Sanger and was trying to figure out who my mother probably was. I was so startled at Miss Butterfield speaking to me that I couldn’t say anything; so I just made a curtsey! … And she laughed and said: “You can see that Esther has been to school in Germany. Run along, my child! We mustn’t keep you.” I’d forgotten that in England it isn’t manners to curtsey when an old gentleman takes notice of you.’

  Lewis gaped at this recital and said at last:

  ‘Do you know, I think it was high time you came away. I don’t quite like the sound of Miss Helen Butterfield.’

  ‘Oh, but she was wonderful!’ insisted Teresa. ‘Really she was. Everybody thought so. I’m sure, whatever happened to her, she would always know exactly how to behave.’

  ‘Tessa didn’t hate it all nearly as much as I did,’ Paulina explained.

  ‘Didn’t you, Tessa?’ asked Lewis jealously. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh … it was interesting in a way. It was new.’

  ‘Still, you ran away. You came here.’

  ‘Yes, because the others did. I barred being left there by myself. I didn’t like it well enough for that. Look, Lewis! We haven’t seen your house yet. You’ve got some more rooms, I suppose, besides what we’ve seen?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll show you the whole concern.’

  He took them first to the dining-room, which was washed white, with an oak cottage dresser and blue plates. There was a gate-legged table, polished almost black, with a lustre dish on it full of golden oranges. The chimney piece was bare save for a Russian ornament of brilliant enamels which blazed through the sombre-tinted room. Lewis mentioned that Florence wished her house to look like the Karindehütte; an idea which puzzled the children very much. They thought this a poor, bare sort of room, not worthy of their lady cousin. Paulina asked hopefully if the pewter flagons on the sideboard were silver.