Disturbing Charm

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12. 1-12 Moonlight And The Charm



"O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest thy love prove likewise variable."

Shakespeare.

Now let us take the roof off, as is done in fairy stories about other charms.

Let us steal a peep, that is, inside various rooms of that hotel, where this story is laid.

In the basement, first of all, let us cast a glance at the appartement that had echoed to the feasting of that luncheon party, and had been later the scene of a sedate and ultra-English tea. Nobody there now, except the hotel manageress and her husband. Monsieur Leroux with that black domino beard of his, is dozing in the most capacious chair; Madame is poring over her accounts. Every now and then her eye lights up with a spark from the smouldering fire of pride within her; for who but she has such a right of feeling proud at the end of that day of meals and acclamations (and washing-up?). She thinks of her nephew Gustave's brilliant partie, and of the bedazzling of all her friends, most especially of the notary's wife, here in this very room. The little close room seems to her once more a-glitter with the glass and the silver and the display.... Only the prune-coloured velvet curtains are tightly drawn before the pots of imitation cyclamen, and there enters no gleam of the light that is bathing the forest and the sea without--light of the waning moon, melting and cool at once, at once disdainful and seductive.

Upstairs in the salle à manger the engaged couple have been dining as guests of the guests. Mrs. Cartwright and the Professor had suggested this, and their proposal was cordially received. The health of the fiancés had been drunk, and the old French gentleman with the red button-hole has added the toast to the next betrothed from that party there present tonight.

And now Gustave Tronchet and his bride-elect are still moving from group to group in the salon, and the diffident, old-maidish Englishwoman is transfigured. It astonishes her to think that she could ever have felt that violent shyness so early in the day. She has forgotten how her knees trembled as she faced that perfect zoo of foreigners, all beards and bosoms, come to inspect Mees Ouallshe.

She feels now that she carried it off admirably. She has been amplifying to herself since the ten words of French that she had managed to stammer out then, and by now they appear to her a classic oration. She feels she was born to this kind of thing. On her fiancé's stout arm she moves about the room like a spoon that is keeping on the stir a pan of hot and incredibly sweet social jam. As Mrs. Cartwright says to herself, "No ordinary English engagement to a man out of her own world could ever have brought the dear good creature these triumphs; let her enjoy them,"----and everybody enjoys seeing Miss Agatha Walsh radiant, while she even more enjoys being so seen.

As for Sergeant Gustave Tronchet, if he were not enjoying it, also, who should be? Accepted, rangé, adored!

He marshals her about from salle to salon and lounge, drawing her back as she peeps through the chink of the big hall door at the beckoning moonlight without.

"No, Agathe! You will inrhume yourself----"

She turns to beam brighter than the moon itself at the comely dark face of the only man who has ever protested whether she took cold or not. He, too, has been studying a speech in the language of the country into which he is marrying.

He brings it out, and the ears of love are quick to understand even his English, even his accent.

"I oueelle trai to you rendaire 'appeee, Agathe!"

"Oh," she breathed, with a little clutch to the blue-sleeved arm. "Oh, but you do, you have;"

They return to the salle....

But the assembled visitors cannot spend the whole evening in contemplating the happiness of Miss Walsh and of Gustave Tronchet, serjent d'artillerie.

Other groups begin to make their own arrangements; in one of the bedrooms the Madonna-like French mother and the Brittany nurse are putting to bed Lucien, the little damson-dark boy, who was also at Miss Walsh's tea; he is repeating, with the correct pronunciation of a child to whom all language is new, a little prayer that she has taught him:

"I see the moon and the moon sees me,
God bless the moon and God bless me!"

In another bedroom Olwen Howel-Jones has just run up to get into her big driving-coat; she thinks of going out for a breath of fresh air and of moonlight. Why not? Mrs. Cartwright will probably come if she's asked.




Roof on again here, please. For at this point of the story Mrs. Cartwright was standing just outside the salle windows beside the dark spiky shape of a cactus; she had put on a pale-hued wrap, and in the puzzling light and shade she appeared gleaming and straight as the flowering rod of the plant. Just as she was looking out to where a few riding lights showed in the Baissin, Jack Awdas strode up beside her.

"Come for a turn down on the sands," he suggested, cheerfully. "It's not cold; it is one perfectly good night for a walk."

Now it is almost easier to take the roof off an hotel and to look down unchecked into its various rooms than it is to unveil and take stock of the contents of a woman's mind with its strata upon strata of confusing elements.

So, for what Mrs. Cartwright was feeling, we will take her word as she told herself that she felt relieved and settled about the affaire Jack Awdas.

She was glad it was all over. The boy had imagined himself in love with her.

A great mercy that he had not, after the manner of some men, allowed himself to dangle and sigh and create an atmosphere in which one did not quite know where one was. He had voiced his absurd and youthful passion at once. He had actually proposed to her--to her who might be his mother. So much the better, as it happened; because now she had been able to say "No" definitely. It had all been definitely settled and tidied up in that wood on the way from the oyster park.

Now, it was finished.

Now, it was quite safe again.

It would be silly to avoid the boy since both of them knew where they were.

Besides, he had had that horrible nightmare. He would have to go flying again. Not even yet were his jangled nerves quite healed, poor child! He ought, he really ought to have some one to look after him, to give a thought to his welfare now and again ... some nice, sensible woman....

Mrs. Cartwright, in thus describing herself to herself, did not for one moment admit that if the boy had already proposed to her in the sunlight, he simply couldn't help himself in the moonlight.

So she answered him lightly and conventionally; she fell into step beside him. They walked.

She was too old for him, as she'd told him. A generation too old! But she was still not too old to walk with him, to listen to him. And ... When is a woman too old to wish she were young enough?

It was brusquely enough that Jack Awdas broke into speech.

"I say," he began, "how old should I have to be, then, before you'd want to marry me?"

She had been looking away across the Baissin with its twinkling lights, its guardian jewel flashing from white to red. She turned abruptly, dismayed, as one is dismayed when some trouble, dimly foreseen (and defied) descends upon one's head.

Oh dear.... Oh dear.... It was not quite at an end then? She had not yet definitely put a stop to this very young man's folly?

"Oh," she returned. "Oh, but we had agreed, I think, not to talk about ... that, any more...."

"Had we?" he retorted. "You had 'agreed,' perhaps. I hadn't."

"But----Please! There must be no more of it."

"What?" He threw up his head. "We must have it out, you know. We are going to."

"No, no----"

"Yes, I say. Yes. As I was saying----How old should I have to be before you'd want to marry me?"

Mrs. Cartwright gave a little hopeless sort of laugh to herself as she threw upon him that quick glance that seemed to be not looking.

He put on his coat (at her orders), his flyer's coat with the wide collar that made his head seem even smaller and the oval of his face more perfect as it rested against the fur. That young, young face topping the athlete's body that towered above her own, that spring and lilt of his walk had never before made such appeal to the sense of physical beauty that was in her.

Claudia Cartwright thought that in this faculty she brought up the arrears of the countless members of her own sex who would seem to be entirely without it. A woman had once said to her, "I don't find any man much under forty-five worth considering. Youth doesn't appeal to me. I never can see the attraction!" and to Mrs. Cartwright this was exactly as though her friend had boasted, "I am colour-blind! I can't tell one tune from another, either! Also, I never care for flowers."

The boy at her side was beautiful, in the diffused and shifting light, as a young marble Hermes dressed in the trappings of today and come to life to court her. The next twenty years might teach him many, many things--but they must strip from him one by one the charms of which he was all unconscious, as he demanded of her how old he must be to please her.

She should stop him there, she knew. Since he had not seen that it had been the end, she should put the definite end to it; go in.

She should not dally or coquet with this thing.

Instincts that she had thought long dead were lifting their heads within her; too strong to be beaten down at once. For the life of her the woman could not help dallying with that passing moment to which every woman alive cries out within herself, "Oh stay; Thou art so fair----"

Aloud she said (truthfully enough, but in a sense that he did not follow), "I might not want to marry you if you were older."

"Why not? Why not? The other day in the wood you said it was my age that you barred," he went on, persistently. "It isn't that you don't like me, is it? Is it? If you just happened to be my own age, then, you'd take me, wouldn't you?"

Would she? Ah, wouldn't she, she thought, vainly. And again for the life of her she could not keep that subtlest, faintest trace of coquetry out of her voice as she replied, "You seem very sure of that."

"Mustn't I be? Tell me at least. Tell me what you think of me!"

She seemed to catch herself back just in time from uttering follies. "I think you are a dear boy; one of the dearest that I have seen," she said, evenly. "But I know that you're wasting your time with an ageing woman like me."

"A what?" he almost snorted.

She repeated it all the more firmly, perhaps, because she knew that she was looking her youngest in that soft light of the waning moon.

"An ageing woman like me. For I am that. Just think of it, quite sensibly, for a moment. In a little while you would see me getting to be just the same as friends of your mother's, that you're specially nice to and talk to because they are old. Yes! Listen! It's coming. Before you have a line on your face or a grey thread in your hair."

"I shall get as bald as a coot. All flyers will; it's the tight leather caps, here----"

"Nonsense! Ages before that, my hair will be growing grey all over."

"It's quite grey now; absolutely white in the moonlight--silver! And it looks top-hole," he assured her, laughing down at her. "Why, you look wonderful. You always do. You can't talk about the usual sort of women getting old, and pretend you're going to be like that, because you aren't. How could you ever be? You're different."

"Only to you," she sighed, "and only for the moment."

"Moment! I swear I shouldn't ever alter----"

"No? Let's turn." They retraced on the sands the lines of their own footprints; his boot-marks making a contrast with the slim, light prints of the woman's shoes.

"What have you got on your feet?" he asked her presently, almost roughly, stopping to look down. "I never saw anything like the things women go out in. Haven't you got any sensible boots?... You aren't fit to take care of yourself, as a matter of fact. You've got to let me take care of you."

"My dear boy," she smiled, shaking the head on which the moonlight was spinning those prophetic webs of silver, "all nice men at your age begin to feel that need of taking care of something. A young girl, that's what you ought to be seeing to the shoes of, and looking for wraps for, and all that. Not me, not me. A young girl."

"What young girl?" he demanded mutinously.

Mrs. Cartwright was silent as they passed into the darkness under the wooden jetty. Out into the light again they came, and up the beach, back, in the direction of the hotel piazza, and of the old cannon that stood on its stone plinth at the foot of the stone steps. They reached the cannon, and still she had not spoken.

She was thinking, hard.

A young girl, she had said; and she could think without "minding" it in the least, that the best thing this lad of twenty-two could do would be to fall in love with a young girl. She had thought so several times lately. It was odd, however, that she always thought of this solution as "a" young girl, not any particular one. Not little Olwen Howel-Jones, for instance; oh, no! Nor her (Mrs. Cartwright's) young niece Stella, not any of the Mabels or Ethels or Dorothys that she knew at home, and to whom she might have introduced the boy. None of these could she think of for one instant in connection with Jack Awdas. Yet, one of these days, some lucky girl must be responsible for the happiness of all his days (not just of one glamorous afternoon in the forest) and all his nights (not just of one night when the power of darkness had been kept at bay, and when he had fallen at last asleep "as one whom his mother comforteth"). Yes, later on, there must be "a" young girl for him....

He stopped by the cannon.

"Don't go in. Just a little minute," he coaxed, softly. "I can't talk to you in there."

"It's no use talking," murmured Mrs. Cartwright.

But she did pause.

And, as he sat down on the body of that obsolete gun, and then, unfastening his thick coat, spread a flap of it out, she did yield so far as to sit down, in her pale wrap, on that corner of his coat beside him.

He leant an arm on the cannon behind her. Both looked in silence over the lagoon, towards the reef.

White, red; white, red--flashed the warning light.

She felt herself at the beginning of a conflict that must tear her this way and that; but his mind was single and set. He was just blind, obstinate, and keen.

He said, "I told you that night when you sat up with me what I thought of girls. I don't want 'em. I want you, and you're all I want; or ever shall. I can swear to that. Oh, I know myself! I can swear to it."

The arm behind her trembled a little with his earnestness.

For one mad moment Mrs. Cartwright admitted to herself that if she could be twenty-two again for one year, she would buy that year with the rest of the time that she had to live. Ah, to be twenty-two! To let that hard boyish arm close round her, clasp her, crush her! To turn, with lips and eyes aglow, to turn to him as she felt herself drawn to do--drawn, driven----

But because she felt thus she kept around herself that invisible, intangible armour of refusal which is every woman's at need and which no outside power can pierce. She did not need to move one half-inch away from that corner of his coat on which she sat. Yet ... Yet she could hardly believe that he did not guess at the growing disturbance in the heart that beat not so far, after all, from his own.

Appealingly he broke out. "You must marry me. I don't know why on earth you want to talk about other girls to me!"

"'Other' girls----!"

"Yes. You're just a girl to me. You are a girl, yourself. I can't see you as anything but a girl!"

She made a little gesture with her long arms, lithe and elastic still as when she was a schoolgirl, only more rounding in modelling; she pressed a hand to her hair, still brown and thickly growing. She turned away the face that showed lines brought by years of worry, of concentration upon her work; ah, they were there even in the moonlight and even though she tended her skin as prettier women often neglect to do. She could feel that in every inch and ounce of him this boy was alert and conscious of her nearness, of her suppleness of body, of that faint scent of rose, kuss-kuss and orris that clung about her.

It couldn't be. It mustn't be.

Lightly as little Olwen could have sprung up, Mrs. Cartwright sprang up from her seat upon the muzzled cannon and said quickly, "I am going in."

As she set her foot upon the first step of the piazza, she turned to young Jack Awdas with what she told herself would be, definitely, her last word upon the subject. Her little laugh was whimsical and mirthless as she said it.

"You think you see me as a girl? Ah! Wait until you see me beside a real girl!"