The Chosen and the Rejected

Miss Lucy Hillier and Miss Florence Greg had kept up a school friendship, corresponding inter­mittently even through the years when emotional adventures are the chief pre­occupation of young women and friendship with persons of their own sex merely a relaxation from the real business of life.

But the time came when both ladies found themselves in the predicament of having no niche in life to fill, and the thoughts of each turned naturally to the other.

Lucy wrote—‘Wouldn’t it be fun to share a little cottage in the country? I don’t think I could live alone—one is apt to become quite peculiar with no one but oneself to think about—and you are the only person I could bear to live with. We do see eye to eye in most things, and we’ve never got on each other’s nerves. So what about it?’

And Florence replied—‘Dearest Luce, what a heavenly idea! To live in a house that was at least partly one’s own, and not to have to weigh every word, would be paradise. I have become quite inhibited. One’s brother is no longer one’s brother when he gets him a wife, and, though I have nothing against Edwina as such, she is rather diminishing as a sister-­in-­law. My shadow has grown considerably less. You know what I mean? Oh! I long to live near a creek, with wet sandy wastes and sea-­gulls, and grow carnations in a little sandy garden. Sand is good for them, and I’ve never had enough.’

The cottage was found, but not near a creek. Florence, who had a passion for water, had to make do with a little brook that ran at the bottom of the garden. Lucy was delighted that one saw nothing but fields from the window, and a wood. She looked upon it as her own private wood and promised herself many poetical hours picking primroses and feeling about Nature the way the Greeks did. The dividing line between herself and a dryad would be very thin, given solitude and the light wine of ecstasy that sometimes ran in her veins.

But the wood turned out to be one of those unrewarding thickets in which nothing grows but scrub, and the trees are lean and hairy with a repulsive growth of whiskery lichen—a beggarly, untidy, rather sodden place, with a smell of something dead in it.

The cottage was not exactly period; but there was nothing in its design to offend, and, colour-­washed pale yellow and with a blue front door, it was really most attractive. Anyone coming up the path could tell the kind of people who lived there by a glimpse through the window of beech boughs in a pottery jug, a copper warming-­pan on the wall and little clay animals from Pompeii on the sill. There was also a witch bell which reflected a small enchanted garden on one side and on the other a mysterious white room, with two strange foreshortened ladies leading rapt and interesting lives in some remote world of dream.

Lucy was one of those women who do not photograph well because their attraction is chiefly in their colouring; but her intelligence came through always. Her eyes looked piercingly out of the pasteboard, her wild, light eyes; and people said—‘So that is Miss Hillier. What an intelligent face!’ She had those apple-­green eyes, a pale clear skin and reddish hair, and was so thin through that she gave the impression of being as hollow as a shell. But not unpleasingly thin, only intriguingly so in the right places, like elegant antique pottery.

Florence Greg had a dark, merry face, and was inclined to plumpness. Her olive cheeks were faintly stained with pink and her mouth was beautifully shaped and as bright as rowanberries. Her dark hair had a strand of grey in it just over her forehead. Perhaps she was not quite as intellectual as one might have wished, but she had an intelligence of the heart that made her a restful companion. When she went away for a few days, Lucy missed her as one misses a fire on a chilly day.

There was not much society of the kind to which they were accustomed in the village. The vicar’s wife said that the people in the great house were very exclusive and not Christians. They lived unto themselves.

‘All that,’ she said, ‘is coming to an end. Two people living in an enormous house with a staff of servants to wait on them and more hothouse fruit than they know what to do with—it’s all wrong! Arthur says if England goes Bolshie, it will be the fault of people like the Prydes.’

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ said Lucy. ‘I must say I think it would be a pity to turn it into a hostel, or whatever it is they are going to do with the stately homes. Something very gracious will perish, I’m afraid, when the aristocratic tradition is thrown on the bonfire. It is grace,’ she said, ‘that is so sadly lacking in those who are about to inherit the earth.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ asked Mrs. Smithers, rather fiercely.

‘I don’t know,’ Miss Hillier replied, with her maddeningly tranquil air; ‘but surely not the fault of those who have cared for beauty.’ Her eyes looked through Mrs. Smithers, like the eyes of a leopard, at something wild and far away.

Helensgrove was a square stone house mellowed by time to the colour of old pearls. Fluted pillars supported the upper structure, and stone goddesses, mossy and bird-­stained, clutched their draperies or bent their bows at intervals along the terrace.

Seen from the road, riding the green waves of parkland like a great ship, the house seemed as mysterious and self-­contained as a ship far out at sea. No life could be discerned in it. No one walked on the terrace, or looked out of a window. No gardener trimmed a yew hedge. No visitor mounted the curving flight of steps to the portals. To Lucy and Florence, hurrying by, the imposing façade seemed to hide a way of life as remote from theirs as the trancelike state of the inhabitants of the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

They were considerably surprised one day when a car drove up to the gate of the cottage, and a tall, delicate-­looking woman descended.

‘Mrs. Pryde!’ they said, simultaneously; though neither had seen the lady before. Something of her personality must have got through to them from the somewhat unilluminating remarks of Mrs. Smithers.

‘You go, Floss!’ said Miss Hillier, hastily re-­lighting the spirit-­kettle. They must, unconsciously, have been influenced by the attitude of the village toward the exclusive lady of the manor, for they felt a little flustered. While Florence went to the door, Lucy gave an anxious glance about the room. The Cézanne colour-­print and the Kelim rugs reassured her.

Mrs. Pryde stood in the doorway, obscuring Florence, and looked in with an expectant air. She had the delicate, sharp face of a fairy, with long pointed eyes, high cheekbones and a pointed mouth, like a sweet almond, above a determined square chin that contradicted her other features. ‘Out of strength cometh forth sweetness,’ one thought. Or should one have been on one’s guard against a jaw that seemed to tether her fly-­away features to the symbol of a formidable will?

She had the air of a lady who lets fashion go hang if it clash with her personality, and who sees no reason not to be picturesque in the country. A silver scarf was wound round her hair and a puce-­coloured cape swung from her shoulders. This mauve and silver look made one think of October flowers with dewy cobwebs on them.

All this Lucy took in with her quicksilver wits before she released the long transparent hand held out to her. As Mrs. Pryde raised her hand to loosen her cape, one’s eye was caught by the glitter of enormous diamonds, which seemed to heliograph the intimation that she was a greatly cherished person, and to attract and hold all the light in the room. Florence’s hands looked very brown and square and unwanted in contrast.

Mrs. Pryde said—‘It is so exciting that you have come to live in our little village. We are so hidden in this fold of the hills that people seldom find us out; and sometimes one longs for a little talk with one’s own kind.’

‘How delightful,’ said Florence, ‘that you should be sure we are your own kind! I do hope you will not be disappointed.’

Lucy could have wished that Florence were not quite so ingenuous. One should not seize on a delicate implication and put a pin through it.

‘Oh, but doesn’t one always know?’ said Mrs. Pryde, resting her hollow cheek on her hand, as if she were about to ponder deeply upon some intricate matter. ‘I passed you in the car on the Carnock road, and I thought at once—“Those are our kind of women.” My chauffeur said—“They are the ladies who have taken Martin’s Cottage.” ’

‘I wonder what it could have been about us,’ said Florence, carrying her a cup of tea.

‘I went home and told my husband. He asked me to describe you, and I said—“One of them is like a fox, and the other like a partridge . . . only the partridge is larger than the fox. The wind was blowing through their hair, and they wore amusing clothes,” I said, “and were carrying berries and boughs.” ’

‘Now, isn’t that strange! Lucy has a photograph of herself as a baby, and it’s very like a fox-­cub,’ said Florence, looking at Mrs. Pryde as if she were some kind of sibyl; ‘and, of course, I am brown and dumpy.’

‘You have the soft colouring of the landscape . . . as if you partook of its nature.’ Mrs. Pryde made a movement with her left hand, as if she were stroking some feathered thing. ‘But Miss . . . Hillier, isn’t it? . . . surprises one like a fox in a glade. I mean, one can’t see a fox, can one? without a little shock of delight. And I—Christopher always says so—am like an alien figure painted on, a Regency woman who doesn’t really belong.’

‘How very interesting!’ said Lucy, eagerly. ‘That’s exactly the impression I had of you.’

‘Really? Christopher would love you! We seldom meet anyone nowadays who talks our language. Will you come and dine with us tomorrow? We will send the car for you.’

‘We’d love to,’ said Lucy. ‘I think it’s delightful the way we’ve plunged into personalities on our first encounter. One could know people for years without being told one was like a fox.’

‘But personalities are so important, aren’t they? I mean, they are chiefly what one becomes involved in—whether one will or no. They are the mental atmosphere of our lives,’ said Mrs. Pryde, somewhat cryptically. ‘I am using the word in a different sense, I know, but what is history but the play of personalities on the life of their time. The late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century is my favourite period. All those entrancing women who knew that personal relationships are the thing, cost what they may.’

The conversation that followed was delightful to Lucy, and when at last Mrs. Pryde drew on her gloves, quenching the glitter of her diamonds, it was as if the evening star had set too soon. They saw her down the path and bestowed in her car with tender solicitude by the chauffeur. A faint scent of heliotrope still lingered in the room when they returned to it.

The car came for them the next evening and they drove through the soft landscape like two queens.

‘I wonder what he is like,’ said Lucy, in an undertone.

‘People’s husbands are often disappointing. They lurk in the study until one has gone,’ said Florence; ‘or, if they do like one, it is at second hand.’

As they approached the house, which hitherto they had seen only from afar, their pulses fluttered a little. It seemed to be watching for them with a hundred golden eyes, and the headlights, picking up the façade, gave it an even more dreamlike quality than it had at a distance. They were shown into a room so large that Mrs. Pryde at the far end seemed too little for its vastness; until she came forward like the informing spirit of so much space, and one saw that space as well as light was her prerogative. Without the scarf, her hair was revealed as of that silky mole-­colour that has a greenish tinge in it like the bark of a beech, and this greenish light seemed to be faintly reflected in the ivory of her skin.

‘If one were a modern painter,’ Lucy thought, ‘one would give her a green face.’ But Florence’s thoughts were on other lines; not so much thoughts, as a comprehensive flash of intuition, for which she did not attempt to find words, that for all her inconsequent chatter, the world was Mrs. Pryde’s oyster and everything in it reflected in her consciousness.

‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.’ The words came into Florence’s head, as she followed her hostess to the enormous wood fire that crackled on the hearth.

The door opened and Mr. Pryde came in quietly. Lucy’s heart gave a little jump like a fish. Mrs. Pryde had said that he would love her; but a man with a face like this was not to be disposed of in friendship by his wife. He won’t take us at her valuation. If we bore him, he will go into his study, as Florence said, and close the door against us. We shall be ‘those women’ when we intrude, and less than the dust at other times.

He had a haggard, Rembrandt face, with the deep-­set eyes of a tired old monkey. It sprang out at one as if from an ambush. There was no gainsaying the voice in one’s mind that told one instantly and with appalling clarity that one was caught in a trap.

‘But I am not that kind of woman,’ said Lucy to herself, clenching her hands in her lap. ‘I have never been at the mercy of my senses. Cynical and cold, that’s what I am. Look how thankful I’ve been, looking back, that something has always happened to prevent my marrying. Like Daphne changing into a laurel. Not, my goodness me, that any of them was an Apollo. This elderly faun—it’s ridiculous.’

But she knew in her nerves that the most dangerous appeal is to the imagination. His face seemed familiar to her in some unreal way, as if she had imagined it to fit some character in a book. She could live deeply in a book. There was always the book as the author wrote it and the book as re-­created by Lucy. But she couldn’t recall the character to which she had given Mr. Pryde’s face.

‘These girls have been so clever with Martin’s Cottage, Christopher. They have made it look like some dear little studio in Chelsea—yellow and blue, you know. You must really come and see it.’

‘Oh, but she shouldn’t! One had to make do with makeshifts; paint and pottery and colour-­prints. But here, in this vast room, every bibelot was a museum-­piece, and the one picture, mellow with golden light, certainly School of Giorgione, if not by the master himself.’

‘He is such a hermit,’ went on Mrs. Pryde. ‘Wild horses won’t drag him away from Helensgrove. And yet we have been such great travellers. We have been simply everywhere, even to Tibet.’

‘And come back at last, having discovered that the mind is its own place. One takes one’s world with one. Do you agree?’ He turned suddenly and looked rather fiercely into Lucy’s eyes.

‘Yes, oh! yes,’ she said, ardently, offering up her face like a little pale platter with a glowing fruit of expression on it. She felt tremendously elated.

‘Let me take your glass.’ He went to the tray and poured her out some more sherry.

‘Oh, but one is my limit, really,’ she protested.

‘Is that so?’ He stood before her, holding the wineglass between his finger and thumb, considering her with a queer twitching of the eyebrows. A smoky light seemed to drift across his face, as when refracted light is thrown by ripples on the leaves of a tree that grows by water. And then, compelling her gaze to meet his own, as if he were set on making her understand the significance of what he was about to do, he raised her glass deliberately to his lips.

A tremor went through Lucy. ‘He confuses one’s thoughts and makes one imagine absurd things,’ she thought.

Mrs. Pryde’s voice talking to Florence, and Florence’s deep responses, seemed to come from very far away. They were like two people carrying on a conversation regardless of the music that was holding the two other occupants of the room in thrall.

Drama seemed to have invaded Lucy’s life, even if it were only a drama of the imagination, staged in her own mind. There was a vacant place beside her on the sofa. Mr. Pryde would sink into it, and heaven only knew what things might be said. She felt keyed up, outside herself, capable of rising to anything.

But the damping thing was that Mr. Pryde, looking about, chose an armchair some way off, leaving her islanded in a pool of light and out of reach of the conversation between the two other women. One had the impression that he had retreated to some château d’Espagne to think his own thoughts and had left one with a rusty key that would unlock no door to his mind.

When they got back, the cottage seemed very small and horribly ‘arty-­crafty’.

‘Everything looks so pseudo,’ said Lucy, with a sigh. ‘I’m afraid we are rather pseudo, too.’

‘That’s only because they are two such remarkable people,’ said Florence, in her serene way. ‘I think they are the most romantic couple I have ever met. I love their beautiful courtesy to each other, and the way he treats her—like a queen.’

Poking up the ashes of the fire, she looked dreamily into it. She was thinking that if one were to come in unexpectedly and find her in his arms, one would be as moved as when lovers come together in great poetic drama. But she did not confide this idea to Lucy. She guarded very jealously the poet in herself, the queer lurking vagabond who shrank from the flicker of an eyelash and fainted at a prick of irony. Though Florence never translated the whispers of this familiar, it was, nevertheless, his presence deep within her that made her so valuable a companion.

Of course Mr. Pryde never came to Martin’s Cottage. He was not that kind of man. But Florence and Lucy were always being invited to Helensgrove, and, the more they saw of the Prydes the more they were fascinated by her infinite variety and his air of inscrutability.

One could discuss almost anything with her, except intimate matters; in that respect she was like women in Victorian novels, into whose bedrooms the reader is not invited to penetrate.

Florence knew something of Lucy’s more flattering love-­affairs, and Lucy was accustomed to expand sometimes to other sympathetic ears and to receive in exchange the not always discreet confidences of her married friends. But Mrs. Pryde was impervious to hints of past romance. She was deaf to those oracular utterances which solicit the enquiring word that is to unlock the closed door. She was not interested in love affairs, except those between historical personages. Ne crede Byron. Yes; that was touching and belonged to poetry. But it was no use trying to invest oneself with a little glory by recalling some mori­bund love. Something austere and fastidious in her forbade the exploitation of the former lover. One would as soon have dared to enquire into matters that she chose to keep private. Were they, for instance, romantically in love with each other?

Florence never doubted it. An ideal relationship had been revealed to her, and she felt about it as she felt about poetry.

But Lucy had a different conception of the relations between Mr. and Mrs. Pryde. Lucy, in her private mind, preferred to imagine Christopher Pryde as a prince whose exquisite princess did not satisfy some hunger of his spirit. Like a prince, she thought, he was capable of seeking consolation elsewhere. Oh! but a spiritual consolation; one that could be sought and found without disloyalty; something that was no more than an awareness in two minds of possibilities that could never become reality.

It was an exciting situation that suited her down to the ground. He had drunk from her glass; he had afterwards neglected her. Neither action might have had the least significance but for that smoky drift of light across his face. It was that which had related the second action to the first and had suddenly brought peril and glory into her life. You red-­gold woman like a fox, you are dangerous to my peace of mind.

Words should not come into one’s head when one is dealing with an ineffable situation. She could dismiss them as mere folly, as not having constituted a thought, as having come from the same crazy region as the poetry one hears in dreams, which seems pregnant with significance until one awakes and finds it utter nonsense.

Sometimes he was brusque almost to the point of rudeness. One could then repudiate utterly the other half of one’s double life. It had, simply, never existed.

And then, sometimes, a thing happened; and one slipped into that nebulous other world and played one’s dazzling rôle. When, for instance, he said—‘Miss Hillier, come into my study and I will show you a coffer that belonged to the Duke of Alva.’

She watched his hands slide back the panels of the coffer, and, making appropriate comments, she touched appreciatively the enamelled visages of saints and virgins on the lid.

‘Château d’Espagne . . . why do those words come into my head when I think of you?’ she asked.

‘Do you think of me?’ he said, turning and looking into her eyes.

She dropped her eyelids, and stood very still. There was a tense moment of silence, and then, with the ghost of a laugh, he turned the key in the coffer, went across to the door and opened it. Nothing had happened; but it was with the oddest feeling of having been kissed on the lips that she returned to the other room.

And yet she was able to feel guiltless, as if she had had ‘an affair with the moon in which there was neither sin nor shame’.

She could play her dual rôle with amazing adroitness, being at one and the same time merely the friend of Mrs. Pryde who had come to tea, and the red-­gold woman of her most secret imagination. She could say to Florence on the way home in matter-­of-­fact tones—‘When he likes, Mr. Pryde can be very interesting; though sometimes he skulks in his study as if he hadn’t much use for us.’

Florence stood still on the path, with the February skeletons of the trees behind her holding up the cold shell of the moon in their arms.

‘Oh, but he is interesting! He fascinates me. Isn’t it strange that those two should have found each other in this great world? It makes one believe in Fate.’

Her warm brown eyes, her rowan lips, her simplicity! How noble she was! How much more lovable than one’s subtle self! And how much less thrilling to be Florence than to be Lucy!

‘But you like her best, don’t you?’ Lucy said, looking back at the house that glimmered pale as the moon in the half-­light, guarded by its ghostly goddesses and lit here and there by the amber square of an uncurtained window. ‘Personally, I think she’s a lamb.’

‘I think she is the most outward-­looking person I’ve ever known. She has so much self because everything is part of her.’

‘Are we?’ asked Lucy, curiously.

‘Our essences. I don’t know what mine is, except that she feels me kind of earthy, like loam. And the bright queerness of you, Luce. You remember, she saw you once as a fox . . . something quick and secret and unexpected.’

Lucy gave Florence’s arm a little squeeze. She was a comfort­able person to have about. She could add her quota of appreciation to fortify that sense of her own personality that accompanied Lucy’s thoughts like a golden phantom.

‘Of course, she has a strong personality,’ said Lucy, going on happily with the conversation, which would probably continue intermittently till they separated for the night—so potent was the spell cast by Helensgrove and its occupants.

The moon had changed its colour from the greenish pallor of newly-­peeled wood to a silvery lustre as of windblown aconites, and was already throwing their shadows before them when they came abreast of Lucy’s rejected wood. The dead leaves of the scrub oak that last the winter through made an eerie scratching sound as the wind stirred them, and a swollen brook gurgled noisily somewhere in the undergrowth.

Lucy gave a little shiver. The place seemed a symbol of desolation, and she hastened to speak again of Helensgrove, quickening her footsteps.

‘Have you noticed,’ she said, ‘how that enormous room contracts into the space around Hildegarde?’ (Yes; she was Hilde­garde to them by this time.) ‘One no longer notices the Giorgione or the flowers; or anything but her hands swooping about and her strange face. And then her conversation . . . one can almost see it, like butterfly wings, flitting from topic to topic; but never, never,’ said Lucy, turning in at the gate of the cottage, with a thought at the back of her mind, that it was very small and dark and lonely . . . an outpost of civilization, as it were, and terribly near the fringes of desolation, with an ear cocked to hear the dreadful whispering of dead leaves and idiot water . . . ‘but never, never,’ she said, waiting for Florence to unlock the door, ‘giving away what one most wants to know.’

They slipped inside and quickly closed the door. The faintly stuffy, warm, comforting smell of their own little refuge greeted them—a Floss-­and-­Luce smell of wood-­ash and sandalwood and coffee-­beans. Florence put on the light and poked the banked-­up fire. The curtains were already drawn, the kettle on the hob, and the cat asleep on the hearthrug.

‘What does one most want to know?’ she asked.

‘What there is, really, inside all the layers of petals. Do you remember as a child pulling rosebuds to pieces to find a fairy? Do you suppose one would ever get through to the real Hildegarde?’

‘I think only he does that,’ said Florence, secure in her beautiful dream.

And then, after all, the day came when Mrs. Pryde said something so intimate that they were struck dumb with embarrassment.

She was lying on the sofa when they came in, her looks more fragile and her eyes more shadowed than usual.

‘My dear, are you not well?’ asked Florence, hastening to her side and putting her gently back as she attempted to rise.

‘I have had one of my attacks . . . nearly my last, I think. It’s my heart, you know.’ She touched her breast and smiled. ‘One day I shall go out like a candle. It seems it is attached by a single string, and when that snaps . . . pouf! Then one of you girls will have to marry Christopher.’

There was a moment of shocked silence.

Lucy felt suddenly naked, like a goddess on a cold hillside, afraid of mortal eyes. Florence’s expression was horrified and compassionate.

Then she sank on her knees and put her arms about Hildegarde.

‘Darling,’ she said, with a crooning pigeon-­note in her voice, ‘people with hearts often live to a great old age.’

‘But I shall not,’ said Hildegarde, without emotion. ‘Sometimes I forget about it; for months I don’t give it a thought. But not just after an attack. Then I know. That is why we have been living here so quietly. We don’t talk about it, Christopher and I; but I am afraid he remembers more than I do. You know,’ she went on, twisting her ring round and round her finger, ‘he would be lost without someone who admired him most tremendously—and I think you both do that. He is rather an intriguing creature, isn’t he? So poetic and appealing.’

Lucy and Florence cast down their eyes and said nothing. Their sense of embarrassment was so acute that they could not look at each other. It would have been easier to look at Hildegarde, who now seemed as cold and impersonal and scintillating as an iceberg, inhuman in her detachment. (Oh! but the poet in Florence crouched in the innermost recess of her being and covered his face.)

‘But vanity,’ Mrs. Pryde went on, reaching out her hand to a vase of hot-­house flowers and extracting a waxy, exotic spray of something nameless to them, ‘vanity, you must know, is his darling sin. He calls it pride. “I am as proud as Lucifer.” He can say that, grandiloquently.’

Her lips twitched, and she gave a little gurgle of laughter. ‘So touching! But it makes him very vulnerable. My dears, you must never not pretend to think him more noble than any man, living or dead. He couldn’t bear it. And more fascinating. Once, after reading Donne . . . but you probably wouldn’t know . . . his erotic poetry . . .’ She raised her delicate eyebrows questioningly; but the movement was lost on them, who were looking intently into their laps. ‘I was idiotic enough to confess that there is a poem which makes one his mistress. I might have known that Christopher’s vanity would be deeply mortified . . . even by so ghostly a rape.’ She gurgled again with laughter. ‘We had a scene. Oh! he is quite exciting to be married to, I can assure you.

‘I said to him, only the other night—“When you are left alone, my dear, you must marry one of those dear creatures. I’ll pave the way,” I said. And, do you know, he looked quite alarmed. He said—“For God’s sake, not—” ’ Here Hildegarde paused, and laughed softly, looking from one to the other.

‘I am not going to tell you which name. I couldn’t very well, could I? But it seems, doesn’t it? that the prospect of one of you does not displease him. Dear Lucy, dear Florence,’ holding out a hand to each, ‘I hope that one of you will not refuse to take my place.’

They took their leave shortly afterwards. There seemed nothing to say that could decently be said.

Of Helensgrove there would never again be anything to say. The chosen one and the rejected went home in silence. For very different reasons, they sought no answer to the question—which was which?