Read Ebook: Challenge by Sackville West V Victoria

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Ebook has 1289 lines and 56945 words, and 26 pages

'Gone to do his hair'--the phrase came to his mind as he saw the priest walk briskly away, tripping with the old familiar stumble over his soutane, and saw the long wisps faintly red on the black garment. 'Like a woman--exactly!' he uttered in revolt, clenching his hand at man's degradation. 'Like a woman, long hair, long skirt; ready to listen to other people's troubles. Unnatural existence; unnatural? it's unnatural to the point of viciousness. No wonder the man's mind is unhinged.'

He was really troubled about his friend, the more so that loyalty would keep him silent and allow him to ask no questions. He thought, however, that if Eve volunteered any remarks about Paul it would not be disloyal to listen. The afternoon was hot and still; Eve would be indoors. The traditions of his English life still clung to him sufficiently to make him chafe vaguely against the idleness of the days; he resented the concession to the climate. A demoralising place. A place where priests let their hair grow long, and went temporarily mad....

He walked in the patchy shade of the lemon-trees towards the house in a distressed and irascible frame of mind. He longed for action; his mind was never content to dwell long unoccupied. He longed for the strife the elections would bring. The house glared very white, and all the green shutters were closed; behind them, he knew, the windows would be closed too. Another contradiction. In England, when one wanted to keep a house cool, one opened the windows wide.

He crossed the veranda; the drawing-room was dim and empty. How absurd to paint sham flames on the ceiling in a climate where the last thing one wanted to remember was fire. He called,--

'Eve!'

Silence answered him. A book lying on the floor by the writing-table showed him that she had been in the room; no one else in that house would read Albert Samain. He picked it up and read disgustedly,--

'... Des roses! des roses encore! Je les adore ? la souffrance. Elles ont la sombre attirance Des choses qui donnent la mort.'

'Nauseating!' he cried, flinging the book from him.

Certainly the book was Eve's. Certainly she had been in the room, for no one else would or could have drawn that mask of a faun on the blotting paper. He looked at it carelessly, then with admiration; what malicious humour she had put into those squinting eyes, that slanting mouth! He turned the blotting paper idly--how like Eve to draw on the blotting paper!--and came on other drawings: a demon, a fantastic castle, a half-obliterated sketch of himself. Once he found his name, in elaborate architectural lettering, repeated all over the page. Then he found a letter of which the three first words: 'Eternal, exasperating Eve!' and the last sentence, ' ... votre r?veil qui doit ?tre charmant dans le d?sordre fantaisiste de votre chambre,' made him shut the blotter in a scurry of discretion.

Here were all the vivid traces of her passage, but where was she? Loneliness and the lack of occupation oppressed him. He lounged away from the writing-table, out into the wide passage which ran all round the central court. He paused there, his hands in his pockets, and called again,--

'Eve!'

'Eve!' the echoing passage answered startlingly.

Presently another more tangible voice came to him as he stood staring disconsolately through the windows into the court.

'Were you calling Mith Eve, Mathter Julian? The'th rethting. Thall I tell her?'

He was pleased to see Nana, fat, stayless, slipshod, slovenly, benevolent. He kissed her, and told her she was fatter than ever.

'Glad I've come back, Nannie?'

'Why, yeth, thurely, Mathter Julian.'

Nana's demonstrations were always restrained, respectful. She habitually boasted that although life in the easy South might have induced her to relax her severity towards her figure, she had never allowed it to impair her manners.

'Can I go up to Eve's room, Nannie?'

'I thuppoth tho, my dear.'

'Nannie, you know, you ought to be an old negress.'

'Why, dear Lord! me black?'

'Yes; you'd be ever so much more suitable.'

He ran off to Eve's room upstairs, laughing, boyish again after his boredom and irritability. He had been in Eve's room many times before, but with his fingers on the door handle he paused. Again that strange vexation at her years had seized him.

He knocked.

Inside, the room was very dim; the furniture bulked large in the shadows. Scent, dusk, luxury lapped round him like warm water. He had an impression of soft, scattered garments, deep mirrors, chosen books, and many little bottles. Suddenly he was appalled by the insolence of his own intrusion--an unbeliever bursting into a shrine. He stood silent by the door. He heard a drowsy voice singing in a murmur an absurd childish rhyme,--

'Il ?tait noir comme un corbeau, Ali, Ali, Ali, Alo, Macachebono, La Roustah, la Mougah, la Roustah, la Mougah, Allah!

'Il ?tait de bonne famille, Sa m?re ?levait des chameaux, Macachebono....'

He discerned the bed, the filmy veils of the muslin mosquito curtains, falling apart from a baldaquin. The lazy voice, after a moment of silence, queried,--

'Nana?'

It was with an effort that he brought himself to utter,--

'No; Julian.'

With an upheaval of sheets he heard her sit upright in bed, and her exclamation,--

'Who said you might come in here?'

At that he laughed, quite naturally.

'Why not? I was bored. May I come and talk to you?'

He came round the corner of the screen and saw her sitting up, her hair tumbled and dark, her face indistinct, her shoulders emerging white from a foam of lace.

He sat down on the edge of her bed, the details of the room emerging slowly from the darkness; and she herself becoming more distinct as she watched him, her shadowy eyes half sarcastic, half resentful.

'Sybarite!' he said.

She only smiled in answer, and put out one hand towards him. It fell listlessly on to the sheets as though she had no energy to hold it up.

'You child,' he said, 'you make me feel coarse and vulgar beside you. Here am I, burning for battle, and there you lie, wasting time, wasting youth, half-asleep, luxurious, and quite unrepentant.'

'Surely even you must find it too hot for battle?'

'I don't find it too hot to wish that it weren't too hot. You, on the other hand, abandon yourself contentedly; you are pleased that it is too hot for you to do anything but glide voluptuously into a siesta in the middle of the day.'

'You haven't been here long, remember, Julian; you're still brisk from England. Only wait; Herakleion will overcome you.'

'Don't!' he cried out startlingly. 'Don't say it! It's prophetic. I shall struggle against it; I shall be the stronger.'

She only laughed murmurously into her pillows, but he was really stirred; he stood up and walked about the room, launching spasmodic phrases.

'You and Herakleion, you are all of a piece.--You shan't drag me down.--Not if I am to live here.--I know one loses one's sense of values here. I learnt that when I last went away to England. I've come back on my guard.--I'm determined to remain level-headed.--I refuse to be impressed by fantastic happenings....

'Why do you stop so abruptly?' Did her voice mock him?

He had stopped, remembering Paul. Already he had blundered against something he did not understand. An impulse came to him to confide in Eve; Eve lying there, quietly smiling with unexpressed but unmistakable irony; Eve so certain that, sooner or later, Herakleion would conquer him. He would confide in her. And then, as he hesitated, he knew suddenly that Eve was not trustworthy.

He began again walking about the room, betraying by no word that a moment of revelation, important and dramatic, had come and passed on the tick of a clock. Yet he knew he had crossed a line over which he could now never retrace his steps. He would never again regard Eve in quite the same light. He absorbed the alteration with remarkable rapidity into his conception of her. He supposed that the knowledge of her untrustworthiness had always lain dormant in him waiting for the test which should some day call it out; that was why he was so little impressed by what he had mistaken for new knowledge.

'Julian, sit down; how restless you are. And you look so enormous in this room, you frighten me.'

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