Flower o' the Peach

by Perceval Gibbon

It was here that he saw a stage-play for the first time in his life, sitting in a back-seat in the town hall among young shop-assistants and workmen, not a little distracted between the strange things upon the stage which he had paid to witness and the jocular detachment from them by the young men about him. The play at first was incomprehensible; the chambermaid and the footman, conversing explanatorily, with which it opened, were figures he was unable to recognize, and he could not share the impression that seemed to prevail among the characters in general that the fat, whitish heroine was beautiful. The villain, too, was murderous in such a crude fashion; not once did he make a clean job of an assassination. Christian felt himself competent to criticize, since it was only a week or so since he had pulled a trigger and risen on his elbow to see his man halt in mid-stride and pitch face forward to the earth. He was confirmed in his dissatisfaction by the demeanor of his neighbors; they, men about town, broken to the drama and its surprises, were certainly not taking the thing seriously. After a while, therefore, he made no effort to keep sight of the thread of the play; he sat in an idle content, watching the women on the stage, curious to discover what it was in each one of them that was wrong and vaguely repellent.

His neighbors had no doubts about it. "There 's not a leg in the whole caboodle," one remarked. "It 's all mouth and murder, this is."

Christian did not clearly understand the first phrase, but the second was plain and he smiled in agreement. He looked up to take stock of another character, a girl who made her entrance at that moment, and ceased to smile. Her share in the scene was unimportant enough, and she had but a few words to speak and nothing to do but to walk forward and back again. She was thin and girlish and carried herself well, moving with a graceful deliberation and speaking in an appealing little tinkle to which the room lent a certain ring and resonance; she accosted the villain who replied with brutality; she smiled and turned from him, made a face and passed out again. And that was all.

The young man who had deplored the absence of legs nudged his neighbor to look at the tall young Boer and made a joke in a cautious whisper. His precaution was unnecessary; he might have shouted and Christian would not have heard. He was like a man stunned by a great revelation, sitting bolt upright and staring at the stage and its lighted activity with eyes dazzled by a discovery. For the first time in his life he had seen a woman, little enough to break like a stick across his knee, brave and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her strength and courage while her femininity made all the male in him surge into power. Gone was his late attitude of humorous judgment, that could detach the actress from her work and assess her like a cow; the smile, the little contemptuous grimace had blown it all away. He was aghast, incapable of reducing his impression to thoughts. For a while, it did not occur to him that it would be possible to see her again. When it did, he leaned across the two playgoers who were next to him and lifted a program from the lap of the third, who gaped at him but found nothing to say.

"That meisjie, the one in a red dress—is her name in this?" he inquired of his neighbor, and surprised him into assistance. Together they found it; the unknown was Miss Vivie Sinclair.

"Skinny, wasn't she?" commented the helpful neighbor sociably.

But Christian was already on his feet and making his way out, and the conversational one got nothing but a slow glare for an answer across intervening heads.

And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar or rare. The connoisseur would have put her down without hesitation for a product of that busy manufactory which melts down the material of so many good housemaids to make it into so many bad actresses. Her sex and a grimace—these were the total of her assets, and yet she was as good a peg as another for a cloudy youth to drape with the splendors of his inexperienced fancy and glorify with the hues of his secret longings. Probably she had no very clear idea of herself in those days; she was neither happy nor sad, as a general thing; and her aspirations aimed much more definitely at the symptoms of success—frocks, bills lettered large with her name, comely young men in hot pursuit of her, gifts of jewelry—than at success itself. As she passed down the main street next morning, on her way to the telegraph office in the town hall, she offered to the slow, appraising looks from the stoeps a sketchy impression of a rather strained modernity, an effect of deftly managed skirts and unabashed ankles which in themselves were sufficient to set Fereira thinking. It was as she emerged from the telegraph office that she came face to face with Christian.

"Well, where d'you think you 're comin' to?"

This was her greeting as he pulled up all standing to avert a collision. Clothes to fit both his stature and his esthetic sense had not been procurable, and he had been only able to wash himself to a state of levitical cleanliness. But his youthful bigness and his obvious reverence of her served his purpose. She stood looking at him with a smile.