“Oh, he looked down at her as if he were shy. Then he said—‘You’ve a long memory, Madala!’ Yes, he called her Madala from the first. It annoyed me. She said—‘Oh, do you remember when Mother was so ill once? You were very kind to me then.’ Then she said something which amazed me. I’d known her for two years before she told me anything about that Sylvania tragedy, but to him she spoke at once. ‘They’re dead,’ she said, ‘Mother and Father. They’re drowned. There isn’t anyone.’ But her voice! It made me quite nervous. I thought she was going to break down. He said, with a stiff sort of effort—‘Yes. I heard.’ That was all. Nothing sympathetic. He just stood and looked at her.”
“Well?” said Miss Howe impatiently.
“Oh—nothing else. I finished picking up the sandwiches. She introduced me, but I don’t think he realized who I was. It annoyed me very much that she insisted on his eating lunch with us. As I said to her afterwards, it wasn’t suitable. Buns in a bag! But there he sat on a damp stone (he gave Madala his overcoat to sit upon) perfectly contented. I confess I wasn’t cordial. But he noticed nothing. Obtuse! That was how I summed him up from the first—obtuse! And no conversation whatever. Madala did the talking. I believe she asked after every cat and dog for twenty miles round. And her lack of reticence to a comparative stranger was amazing. She told him more about herself in half an hour than she had told me in four years. But she was an unaccountable creature.”
“Yes, that’s just it. One never knew what Madala would do next, and yet when she’d done it, one said—‘Of course! Just what Madala would do!’ But it wasn’t like her to neglect you, Nita!”
“Oh, she noticed after a time. She began to be uncomfortable. I—withdrew myself, as it were. You know my way. She didn’t like that. She tried—I will say that for her—she did try to direct the conversation towards my subjects. Useless, of course. He was, not illiterate—no, you can’t say illiterate—but curiously unintellectual. Socialism now—somehow we got on to socialism. That roused him. I must say, though he expressed himself clumsily, that he had ideas. But so limited. He had never heard of Marx. Bernard Shaw was barely a name to him. Socialism—his socialism—when we disentangled it, was only another word for the proper feeding of the local infants—drains—measles—the village schools. Beyond that he was mute. But Madala chimed in with details of American slum life, and roused him at once. They grew quite eloquent. But not one word, if you please, of her own work. Anything and everything but her work. He did ask her what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ said she in an offhand way, ‘I scribble. Stories.’ And then—‘It earns money, and it kills time.’ Yes, that’s exactly how she put it. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘that’s not the spirit—’ I’d never heard her use such a tone before. She had such high ideals of art. It jarred me. I thought that she ought to have known better. But she looked at me in such a curious way—defiant almost. She said—‘It’s my own spirit, Nita. Oh, let me have a holiday!’ And at that up she jumped and left us sitting there, and wandered off to the stile and was over it in a second. We sat still. The hedge hid her. Then we heard her call—‘Cowslips! Oh, cowslips!’ I thought he would go when she called, but he sat where he was, listening. It was one of those hot, still days, you know. There was a sort of spell on things. There were bees about. We heard a cart roll up the road. I wanted to get up and talk, make some kind of diversion, and yet I couldn’t. We heard her call again—‘Hundreds of cowslips! I’m going to make a cowslip ball.’ Her voice sounded far away, but very clear. And there was a scent of may in the air, and dust—an intoxicating smell. It made me quite sleepy. It was just as if time stood still. Three o’clock’s a drowsy time, I suppose. And he never stirred—just sat there stupidly. But I was too sleepy to be bored with him. Presently back she came. She had picked up her skirt and her petticoat showed—it was that lavender silk you gave her, Lila. So unsuitable, you know, on those dirty roads. And her skirt was full of cowslips. She was just a dark figure against the sky until she was close to us; but then, I thought that she looked pretty, extremely pretty. Bright cheeks, you know, and her eyes so blue——”
“Grey—” said Mr. Flood, “the grey eyes of a goddess.”
“They looked blue, and she didn’t look like a goddess. She looked like a little girl. Well, there she stood, with her grey skirt and her lavender silk, and her cowslips—you know they have a sweet smell, cowslips, a very sweet smell—and tumbled them all down on the tombstone. Then she wanted string. Carey seemed to wake up at that. He’d been looking at her as if he had dreamed her. He produced string. He was that sort of man. Then she made her cowslip ball. I held one end of the string and he held the other, and she nipped the stalks off the flowers and strung them athwart it. That is the way to make a cowslip ball.”
“Nita, I love you!” cried Miss Howe for the second time, and the others laughed.
She stopped. She stiffened.
“I don’t know what you mean.”