The Three Sisters

by May Sinclair

XXV

Rowcliffe was coming to the concert. Neither floods nor tempests, he declared, would keep him away from it.

For hours, night after night, of the week before the concert, Jim
Greatorex had been down at Garth, in the schoolhouse, practicing with
Alice Cartaret until she assured him he was perfect.

Night after night the schoolhouse, gray in its still yard, had a door kept open for them and a light in the solemn lancet windows. The tall gray ash tree that stood back in the angle of the porch knew of their coming and their going. The ash tree was friendly. When the north wind tossed its branches it beckoned to the two, it summoned them from up and down the hill.

And now the tables and blackboards had been cleared out of the big schoolroom. The matchboarding of white pine that lined the lower half of its walls had been hung with red twill, with garlands of ivy and bunches of holly. Oil lamps swung from the pine rafters of the ceiling and were set on brackets at intervals along the walls. A few boards raised on joists made an admirable platform. One broad strip of red felt was laid along the platform, another hid the wooden steps that led to it. On the right a cottage piano was set slantwise. In the front were chairs for the principal performers. On the left, already in their places, were the glee-singers chosen from the village choir. Behind, on benches, the rest of the choir.

Over the whole scene, on the chalk white of the dado, the blond yellow of varnished pinewood, the blazing scarlet of the hangings, the dark glitter of the ivy and the holly; on the faces, ruddy and sallow, polished with cleanliness, on the sleek hair, on the pale frocks of the girls, the bright neckties of the men, the lamplight rioted and exulted; it rippled and flowed; it darted; it lay suave and smooth as still water; it flaunted; it veiled itself. Stately and tall and in a measured order, the lancet windows shot up out of the gray walls, the leaded framework of their lozenges gray on the black and solemn night behind them.

A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning, palpitating things.

Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. It helped him to face without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them alien) faces in the front row of the audience: Mr. Cartaret and Miss Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he had done one night for Greatorex's mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen (not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest of them all). Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister. Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned.

If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though less continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for substituting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected passions. It held in its impalpable web his dreams, the divine and delicate things that his grosser self let slip. He would forget, forget for ages, until, in the schoolroom at concert time, at the first caress of the magical smell, those delicate and divine, those secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again. And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic. It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause. It was the only form of intoxication known to him that did not end in headache and in shame.

Suddenly the charm that had sustained him ceased to work.

Under it he had been sitting in suspense, waiting for something, knowing and not daring to own to himself what it was he waited for. The suspense and the waiting seemed all part of the original excitement.

Then Alice Cartaret came up the room.

Her passage had been obscured and obstructed by the crowd of villagers at the door. But they had cleared a way for her and she came.

She carried herself like a crowned princess. The cords of her cloak (it was of dove color, lined with blue) had loosened in her passage, and the cloak had slipped, showing her naked shoulders. She wore a little dove-gray gown with some blue about it and a necklace of pale amber. Her white arms hung slender as a child's from the immense puffs of the sleeves. Her fair hair was piled in front of a high amber comb.

As she appeared before the platform Rowcliffe rose and took her cloak from her (Greatorex saw him take it, but he didn't care; he knew more about the doctor than the doctor knew himself). He handed her up the steps on to the platform and then turned, like a man who has done all that chivalry requires of him, to his place between her sisters. The hand that Rowcliffe had let go went suddenly to her throat, seizing her necklace and loosening it as if it choked her. Rowcliffe was not looking at her.

Still with her hand at her throat, she smiled and bowed to the audience, to the choir, to Greatorex, to the schoolmaster who came forward (Greatorex cursed him) and led her to the piano.

She sat down, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and waited, enduring like an angel the voices of the villagers and the shuffling of their feet.

Then somebody (it was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play.
In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande
Valse in A Flat, beginning with the long shake of eight bars.

Greatorex did not know whether she played well or badly. He only knew it looked and sounded wonderful. He could have watched forever her little hands that were like white birds. He had never seen anything more delicious and more amusing than their fluttering in the long shake and their flying with spread wings all over the piano.

Then the jumping and the thumping began; and queer noises, the like of which Greatorex had never heard, came out of the piano. It jarred him; but it made him smile. The little hands were marvelous the way they flew, the way they leaped across great spaces of piano.

Alice herself was satisfied. She had brought out the air; she had made it sing above the confusion of the bass and treble that evidently had had no clear understanding when they started; as for the bad bits, the tremendous crescendo chords that your hands must take at a flying leap or miss altogether, Rowcliffe had already assured her that they were impracticable anyhow; and Rowcliffe knew.

Flushed and softened with the applause (Rowcliffe had joined in it), she took her place between Greatorex and the schoolmaster. The glee-singers, two men and two women, came forward and sang their glees, turning and bowing to each other like mummers. The schoolmaster recited the "Pied Piper of Hamelin." A young lady who had come over from Morfe expressly for that purpose sang the everlasting song about the miller.

Leaning stiffly forward, her thin neck outstretched, her brows bent toward Rowcliffe, summoning all that she knew of archness to her eyes, she sang.

"Oh miller, miller, miller, miller, miller, let me go!"

sang the young lady from Morfe. Alice could see that she sang for Rowcliffe and at Rowcliffe; she sang into his face until he turned it away, and then, utterly unabashed, she sang into his left ear.

The presence and the song of the young lady from Morfe would have been torture to Alice, but that her eyelids and her face were red as if perpetually smitten by the east wind and scarified with weeping. To Alice, at the piano, it was terrible to be associated with the song of the young lady from Morfe. She felt that Rowcliffe was looking at her (he wasn't) and she strove by look and manner to detach herself. As the young lady flung herself into it and became more and more intolerably arch, Alice became more and more severe. She purified the accompaniment from all taint of the young lady's intentions. It grew graver and graver. It was a hymn, a solemn chant, a dirge. The dirge of the last hope of the young lady from Morfe.

When it ceased there rose from the piano that was its grave the Grande Polonaise of Chopin. It rose in splendor and defiance; Alice's defiance of the young lady from Morfe. It brought down the schoolhouse in a storm of clapping and thumping, of "Bravos" and "Encores." Even Rowcliffe said, "Bravo!"

But Alice, still seated at the piano, smiled and signaled.

And Jim Greatorex stood up to sing.

* * * * *

He stood facing the room, but beside her, so that she could sign to him if anything went wrong.

"'Oh, that we two-oo were May-ing
Down the stream of the so-oft spring breeze,
Like children with vi-olets pla-aying.'"

Greatorex's voice was a voice of awful volume and it ranged somewhere from fairly deep barytone almost to tenor. It was at moments unmanageable, being untrained, yet he seemed to do as much with it as if it had been bass and barytone and tenor all in one. It had grown a little thick in the last year, but he brought out of its very thickness a brooding, yearning passion and an intolerable pathos.

The song, overladen with emotion, appealed to him; it expressed as nothing else could have expressed the passions that were within him at that moment. It swept the whole range of his experiences, there were sheep in it and a churchyard and children (his lady could never be anything more to him than a child).

"'Oh, that we two-oo were ly-ing
In our nest in the chu-urch-yard sod,
With our limbs at rest on the quiet earth's breast,
And our souls—at home—with God!'"

That finished it. There was no other end.

And as he sang it, looking nobly if a little heavily over the heads of his audience, he saw Essy Gale hidden away, and trying to hide herself more, beside her mother in the farthest corner of the room.

He had forgotten Essy.

And at the sight of her his nobility went from him and only his heaviness remained.

It didn't matter that they shouted for him to sing again, that they stamped and bellowed, and that he did sing, again and again, taking the roof off at the last with "John Peel."

Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could matter now.

And then something bigger than his heart, bigger than his voice, something immense and brutal and defiant, asserted itself and said that Come to that Essy didn't matter. She had put herself in his way. And Maggie had been before and after her. And Maggie didn't matter either.

* * * * *

For the magical smell had wrapped itself round Alice Cartaret, and her dove-gray gown and dove-gray eyes, and round the thought of her. It twined and tangled her in the subtle mesh. She was held and embalmed in it forever.