“So you see,” she wrote to her mother, “Kerran really does understand. That touch about the mushrooms was exquisite, don’t you think?
“And it is all going to be the greatest success. Even Muffy has no criticism to make, except that she has already begun to make a fuss about Ellen, who, if you please, is going to fall downstairs! Really, you know, mother, I sometimes feel that Muffy ought to have gone to Ellen instead of me. She would have, of course, if I had not married and had a baby first. Since she has, and always will have, this passion for Ellen, I wonder that she did not prefer to wait. She has never been fond of me or sympathetic to me. Even when we were children, Ellen was always put first. If it was I, and not Ellen, who had ‘a special reason for being careful’ (a real Muffyism that!) we should hear nothing about the stairs. Muffy has always been a perfect Spartan to me at those times.
“However! I will not let Muffy spoil my happiness. Nothing will ever make me regret having taken Inishbar, even if Ellen falls downstairs twice a day. The photographs which we saw, lovely as they are, cannot convey one half of its charms. The country all round is bewitching, and the air is so soft and clear. The mountains which roll down to the lough are quite high on the landward side; we can see crags and glens which are sublime enough for anyone except Gordon (who, as you know, will not look at anything smaller than Mont Blanc). To the west, the sea end of the lough, the slopes are gentler. They melt gradually into a range of sandhills, which are usually the most vivid streak in the whole landscape. Killross, the village where we shall do our shopping, is hidden behind them. We cannot see it from the island.
“The last part of the journey was fascinating. Just before we landed two swans rose up from the reeds and flew away across the water towards the sea and the sunset. The children were enchanted. Rosamund has written a charming little poem about the swans, which I must send to you. At least, I think it charming.
“She appreciates it all, exactly as I knew she would. Children do, I think. It is worth while, taking them to beautiful places, especially when they have the ill fortune to live in a deadly one. They may not know it, but they will store up impressions this summer which will be a joy all their lives, and, one hopes, an antidote to the Woodstock Road. I am so glad I was firm about Torquay. I do not want them to have Torquay minds. It is just possible that Jennie and Harry are too young to ‘look at scenery,’ but for Rosamund and Charles I am sure it is the right thing. Of course Rosamund is an exceptional child. She is very like me in many ways. I do not expect Hope, for instance, will get so much out of it, though she is only a year younger.
“And, by the way, about Hope! I do want you to back me up in a campaign I am going to have about her legs. Really, Ellen ought to take them more seriously. They will be such a handicap to the poor child later on. I am going to drop some pretty broad hints. There must be exercises she could do. Ellen is much too vague about appearances.
“The island is small and most of it is covered with fine old trees, a great contrast to the bare hillsides you see all round. At the top of a gentle slope of grass you see ‘four grey walls and four grey towers.’ Three of these towers are round, and one, the keep, is square and rather taller than the others. There are not many rooms. The bedrooms are in the towers, each of which has its own winding staircase, opening on to a central courtyard, a quadrangle, in fact. The great dining-hall (a splendid room with a fireplace at each end) takes up the whole of the southern side. The kitchen and the servants’ quarters are to the east, and the drawing-room, a long gallery with windows looking on to the lake, is on the west. On the fourth side of this rectangle, the north, there is not much room because of the great gateway in the middle. But there are two sorts of guard-rooms on either side of the gate, and into one of these the Nugents have put a bath! So you see we are quite modern! I think it should really be quite easy to run, for stone staircases do not need much cleaning, but to silence any possible complaints I am going to get Maude to go over to Killross (when she comes) and see if she cannot hire a couple of local peasant women to help the maids.
“I gather that the Nugents only finished furnishing the place when they decided to let it. They used to come here and picnic, sitting on packing cases, etc. And they have also a one-roomed cottage, over on the mainland, where Mrs. N. comes sometimes, but it, too, is let this year, so the boatmen told us. It is the only house visible from the island, a little white dot on the mountain side, about 2 miles away. I wonder …”
Kerran, strolling past the drawing-room window, stopped to look in at his sister.
“The post boat has been,” he told her.
“No! Has it gone?”
“About five minutes ago.”
“Why couldn’t anyone have told me? It’s most tiresome. Yesterday they didn’t come till past four. How is one ever to know? I never heard of anything so inconvenient.”
“The mail car doesn’t go out from Killross till tomorrow, I believe. If you’ve got a letter you want posted, I’ll row down and take it for you.”
“Oh no, thanks. It doesn’t matter.” She threw down her pen. “It was only to mother. Did they bring anything?”
“Not much. There was a letter from mother, but it was for Muffy.”
“Oh!” said Louise.
“And one or two for you. I put them on the table in the dining-room.”
Louise went out across the court. With the tail of her eye she caught sight of Muffy in the doorway of the keep, and her demeanour became at once very stately. She walked more slowly. She swept across the courtyard, letting go the skirt which she had caught up in one hand as she ran down the steps. Her pale face, in its cloudy aureole of hair, became rigid, more aquiline, more set in its displeasure.
This was one of the few things, perhaps the only thing, which she did not like about the castle: the extraordinary publicity of life in the courtyard. Somebody was always standing at a doorway, watching where one went and what one did. In order to pass from one room to another it was always necessary to come out into the open. Each tower had its separate doorway and so had the drawingroom, the dining-room, the bath-house, the kitchens and the keep. There was no way of escaping from the castle save through the one great north gate.
She had commented on this enforced publicity to Kerran, who pointed out that life in the towers, up their winding staircases, would be, on the other hand, correspondingly private. After a day spent in communal goings and comings they would each retire into a remote fortress. Their party would split up completely at night. They would cease to be dwellers in the same house—people who go to bed up the same staircase and whose rooms stand side by side on a single landing.
“But we shan’t split into units,” objected Louise. “We shall most of us split into couples. All of us. Because if Guy Fletcher comes I shall have to put him in your room.”
“Quite so. And these couples will converse the more freely because the walls are several feet thick.”
Louise was not quite sure if she liked this. She foresaw a number of conversations carried on simultaneously in each of the tower rooms. This pairing off of married couples was a nuisance. She had felt it before, even when they were all assembled in a more centralised house. Her labours in the daytime were apt to be undone at night. She would take endless pains to bring Barny, or Ellen, to her way of thinking, and then Barny would go to bed with Maude, and Ellen would go to bed with Dick, and they would talk it over and come down next morning as obstinate as ever. Kerran was the only one of them who was not leagued against her in some secret marital alliance. Kerran was the only one upon whose loyalty she could rely. Even her mother, so sympathetic and so uncritical, was carrying on a secret correspondence with Muffy.
“But I shall take no notice,” she thought, as she swept into the hall. “I shan’t ask what mother was writing about.”
When, five minutes later, she reappeared, the stately displeasure had quite vanished. She no longer swept. Holding up her skirt and waving her letters, she ran right across the court and out at the north gate.
“Oh, Kerran! Gordon! Kerran! Where are you? Do come here.”
Kerran emerged from a clump of arbutus bushes.
“Oh, Kerran! Do listen. The most extraordinary thing. Who do you think the Nugents’ cottage is let to? Who? You know I wrote and asked if we could use it as a picnic house? And Mrs. Nugent says we can’t because Elissa Koebel is there.”
“No,” said Kerran, definitely and finally.
He had seen the cottage. He had rowed past it several times on his way down the lake to Killross. It was very small. And he had seen Elissa Koebel. It was impossible to imagine that she would be shut up in so very small a house. She would burst through the roof like a jack-in-the-box.
“No. I don’t believe it!”
“But she is. Mrs. Nugent says so. She’s been ill and she’s come here to rest. Read the letter. Read what she says.”
He began to read the letter. His incredulity melted into dismay.
“My poor Louise! Just when you’ve been boasting that you had no neighbours.”
Louise took him up with disconcerting eagerness.
“Why? Why? Do you think I ought to call on her?”
“Good heavens, no! But they’ll come here, probably. They’ll come and want to see over the castle.”
“They?”
“She can’t be here alone. Whoever heard of a prima donna staying anywhere alone? She’s probably got her husband there, and several lovers, and some children, and her old mother, and an impresario, and an accompanist, and a maid and a masseuse. I expect that’s her motor that we heard on the lake road yesterday evening. You remember? We wondered who on earth it could belong to. I expect it’s hers.”
“But, my dear Kerran, the cottage only has one room. Mrs. Nugent described it when she first wrote about the castle. One room with a half-loft for a bedroom.”
“Good heavens! You don’t say so. What an extraordinary thing! They can’t all …”
“Read her letter. She says Madame Koebel is completely alone.”
They had got to the landing stage and they stood there, looking down the lake at the little white speck on the mainland, the little house which had only one room and a half-loft.
“How very, very odd,” repeated Kerran.
Louise, for her part, did not think it at all odd. It was exactly what she would have expected. Exactly what she would have liked to do herself, if she had been Elissa Koebel. But only a great artist would have done it.
“It may be so,” said Kerran, turning the letter over. “It must be so. By all accounts she’s a very unconventional person.”
“She wants solitude. I can understand that so well. I want it myself, but I never get it. I’m not a bit surprised. I always thought she must be nice …”
“Oh, well …” said Kerran. “Nice! … Well …”
He had unhooked a rowing boat and held out his hand to steady her as she got in. But she needed no helping. She picked up her skirts, leapt in lightly, and took her seat in the stern. He pushed the boat off with one oar, and settled, facing her, on to his bench. The island slid away from them.
“Where are we going?” she asked idly.
“Just for a little row before it rains.”
“Is it going to rain? Don’t say so.”
“Yes, it is. The mountains are much too clear. And the smoke from Elissa’s chimney is going straight up in the air.”
“Oh! So it is,” said Louise, turning round to look. “Do you suppose she cooks her own meals? She must be a wonderful person. ‘Nice’ is the wrong word, I agree.”
“Quite wrong,” said Kerran. “Whom was your other letter from?”
“Guy Fletcher. Such a charming letter. He thinks he’ll get here some time next week. I’m so glad. He’s just the kind of person …”
Guy Fletcher was famous for his charming letters. Kerran felt that he must have made a face, for Louise looked up at him sharply. He was afraid that she might be going to bully him into stating his real opinion of Guy, a thing which she had often attempted, and to distract her attention he asked her to read the letter aloud.
As she did so he wondered how long it had taken Guy to write it. For anything so beautiful could not have been produced without considerable effort. There was no flaw in it anywhere. Each sentence had a perfect little rhythm of its own, was placed and set with a care that had been almost too loving and anxious. Kerran found himself growing strained and stiff as he listened. He longed for the relaxation of a clumsy word.
Guy Fletcher was a young don, a colleague of Gordon’s and much admired by Louise. In his vacations he wrote essays which were remarkable for their terrific concentration upon beauty. On Kerran, who had to review them, they produced an impression of stasis, but he did not say so, and because he could never quite make up his mind if this was Guy’s fault or his own, he praised them. It might be, perhaps, because his own soul was so gross that he should feel that no beauty in the world could be quite worth all this straining. And until he could be sure about it he thought it best to agree with Louise.
When the letter had flowed to its harmonious conclusion he began to row very vigorously indeed, impelled by a desire for some kind of effort that had nothing spiritual about it. Soon they were in the very middle of the lough. They could see the mountains behind the island and the deep blue trough of the haunted glen. They could see things which they had never seen before: the light bloomy haze which covered the hillsides for the last three days had melted and the slopes, with their patches of heather, tumbled boulders and green mossy bogs, stood out in vivid detail. All the mountains had come nearer. They were crowding in on the lake.
Out to sea it was raining. Black clouds piled up behind the yellow sandbanks to the west. In another hour these clouds would have drifted across the sun, and the first breath of wind would have whipped the glassy waters of the lough into ripples and waves. A grey curtain of rain would travel up, hiding the island from the shore and the shore from the island. Storm, wrack and mist would blot out the Haunted Glen. Already the sun had begun to shine a little more wanly, the waters grew paler, and the clear colours of the mountains took on a darker hue.
“I’d better go back,” said Kerran. “We shall get wet.”
“No, don’t,” she murmured. “I’m so happy.”
She leant over the side of the boat to trail a hand in the water.
“This is perfect,” she said, “this is what I came for.”
Kerran obligingly rested on his oars and let the boat drift. He did not think it would rain for an hour, and she was sure not to be happy much longer than that.
A tranced, brooding look had come into her eyes. He knew that she must have some tremendous plan ahead. But, after a long pause, all that she said was:
“I do hope Guy will bring his violin.”
“Sure to,” sighed Kerran.
“And the piano in the drawing-room is quite good. I’m so glad, because if …”
Her eyes strayed again towards the shore, where Elissa’s chimney sent up a thin column of smoke in the cooling air.
“My dear Louise!”
“Mrs. Nugent says she is resting. I shouldn’t ask her to sing, of course. But just think how lovely it would be if …”
“Louise, you don’t really … you aren’t really contemplating … you don’t surely mean to include Madame Koebel in our select little circle?”
“Why not? I shan’t intrude myself on her, naturally. But you said yourself that she might want to see over the castle. And you said yourself that we wanted more civilised women.”
“If she comes, I think you’d better be out.”
“But why?” Louise began to look anxious. “Isn’t she respectable?”
Kerran laughed.
“My dear Louise! You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
“Only on the stage. What nonsense you talk. How like a man, to think that because she’s an artist she must be … have you heard anything? Anything definite?”
Kerran reluctantly mentioned a few things that he had heard. But she refused to take him seriously.
“People always say that sort of thing about any famous woman. Especially men. Mediocre men like to revenge themselves against a superior woman by declaring that she must be immoral. I suppose you’re jealous at the idea of a woman doing anything. Look at Sappho. I’m always coming across that attitude. You say we gossip, but we don’t gossip half as much as you do. You’re always ready to believe such fantastic things. Especially about a woman. You mayn’t know it, but it all comes from a desire to belittle us, to sneer at our achievements.”
A fanatical glare had come into her eye and she bounced about so fiercely that the boat rocked.
“That’s why we haven’t got the vote,” she concluded bitterly.
“I know, I know, I know,” said Kerran. “You’re quite right. One shouldn’t repeat hearsay stories. But, as a matter of interest, Louise, tell me this. Supposing you knew for certain that she wasn’t … er … respectable, what would you do?”
Louise immediately told him to begin rowing again. He could see that she had no answer ready, and that she wanted to avoid an argument while she thought it out. She had very strict notions in general about respectability. But she did not wish to admit that these need prevent her from enjoying the friendship of Elissa Koebel. As Kerran rowed back across the lough she sought in her mind for a reconciling formula.
“You can’t judge everybody quite by the same standards,” she said at last.
“I know. But there’s no question of your judging the Koebel. You can refrain from judging a person without making a bosom friend of her.”
Louise rallied her forces.
“No. But it’s like this. I wouldn’t ask an Englishman to dinner if he had two wives. But when the Rajah of Mysond came to Oxford (he has a son at St. Jude’s) I asked him to lunch, though he has dozens of wives. In the same way, if some woman of my own … of my own class, got divorced, I should drop her. But a woman like Elissa Koebel I shouldn’t judge by the same standards that I’d use for myself and my friends.”
“But you wouldn’t have asked the Rajah to lunch on the island, would you?”
Louise ignored this.
“I know she belongs to another world—the demimonde, if you like. But that’s quite different from belonging to our world and becoming déclassée. Besides, what harm could she possibly do us? I ask you! Can you see me, or Ellen, or Maude, suddenly deserting the principles of a lifetime because Elissa Koebel has been asked to tea? Can’t you realise that women nowadays …”
“I’m not thinking of you women. I’m thinking of Gordon, and Barny, and myself, and Guy Fletcher … and Dick.”
“Dick?”
He had thought that last name would settle her. For the time being she said no more. There was just that element of uncertainty about Dick which could occasionally bring her up short, however confident she might be, however determined that all the others should dance to her piping.
“Do hurry up,” she said, shivering. “It’s getting cold and we shall be wet through in no time if we’re caught.”
By now the sun had quite disappeared and a stiff breeze silvered the surface of the water. Kerran rowed briskly and brought them into shelter under the rocky western slope of the island, where thickets of fuchsia and arbutus pressed up against the mouldering castle walls. There was a half-wild garden there and a broad terrace path running under the drawing-room windows. It was on this path that Kerran had stood, earlier in the afternoon, and looked in at his sister writing letters.
Suddenly Louise put up her hand and smilingly bade him listen. Music was in the air. It was Rosamund playing on the drawing-room piano. During the previous term she had learnt two Chopin waltzes and everyone had had a great many opportunities of hearing them since they came to the castle. Kerran bent to his oars and spun round the point towards the landing stage.
“It’s what I’d always planned,” said Louise dreamily. “Floating about on the lake and hearing music in the castle.”
Kerran asked if Hope could play.
“Hope? Hope Napier? Oh no! At least, she may have got as far as the ‘Merry Peasant.’ I don’t know.”
“Thank God!” thought Kerran.
He shipped his oars. They were only just in time, for the curtain of rain had already blotted out the sandbanks. Quite big waves were breaking on the beach and the landing stage. He held the boat steady for Louise to get out. But she did not move at once. She was brooding and planning again. Some new piece of generalship had engaged her attention. She climbed thoughtfully out of the boat and walked up to the castle beside him with an unseeing eye. Not Elissa this time, he thought, but something else which needed diplomacy. He could not help asking what it was.
“Do tell me what you’re thinking about.”
She looked at him vaguely, pushing away the clouds of dark hair from her temples.
“What am I … oh … only Hope’s legs.”