The Constant Nymph. Margaret Kennedy Kennedy
worry about Tony, my dear love. She’ll be all right. She’ll settle down. She’s … she’s just growing up. That’s not comfortable. But it happens to everybody. God help them!’
Teresa seemed hardly to listen, but his last sentence caught her attention and she asked curiously:
‘Do you believe in God then?’
He thought about it and said that he did.
‘Though I’m blest if I know what I mean when I say it. What do you believe, Tessa?’
She hesitated and then told him how, a few minutes since, she had felt herself to be on the brink of a discovery.
‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said sadly ‘That’s because I’m so very ignorant. When I say God, I don’t know what I mean. If I was Roberto I’d be better off, for I would know. I’d mean that God up there.’
And she nodded towards the Calvary, standing out clear against the sky above them, guarding even in this lonely place the secret of man’s eternal pain.
‘You don’t mean Him?’ she asked Lewis rather doubtfully.
Lewis replied, almost furiously, that he did not. He hurried her past the place and they wandered away, round the corner of the hill, to a sort of platform where they could look across at the Karwendal ranges, distant, icy, inhuman. Here, if anywhere, dwelt the divinity which they both worshipped. They sat down together on the grass and fell to talking in hushed tones as if afraid of disturbing the silent immensity of the night. He told her a number of things, he hardly knew what; small, absurd things which he had seen and done in his wandering life. They caught her attention and soothed her distress. Soon she was laughing, and when at last they set off for home she was skipping along beside him with the light-heartedness which usually belonged to her.
He had always thought her the pick of the bunch. She was an admirable, graceless little baggage, entirely to his taste. She amused him, invariably. And, queerly enough, she was innocent. That was an odd thing to say of one of Sanger’s daughters, but it was the truth. Innocence was the only name he could find for the wild, imaginative solitude of her spirit. The impudence of her manners could not completely hide it, and beyond it he could discern an intensity of mind which struck him as little short of a disaster in a creature so fragile and tender, so handicapped by her sex. She would give herself to pain with a passionate readiness, seeing only its beauty, with that singleness of vision which is the glory and the curse of such natures. He wondered anxiously, and for the first time, what was to become of her.
He knew.
He had always known, and until tonight he had taken it for granted. She was barely two years younger than that sister whose history she would inevitably repeat. Paulina, too, was fashioned for the same fate. Unbalanced, untaught, fatally warm-hearted, endowed with none of the stolid prudence which had protected the more fortunate Kate, they were both likely to set about the grimy business of life in much the same way. He knew what company they kept; lust, a blind devourer, a brutish, uncomprehending Moloch, haunted their insecure youth, claiming them as predestined victims.
And tonight he discovered that he could not accept this. He had always supposed, vaguely, that Teresa would spare his feelings by growing up quite suddenly of her own accord; leaping into an experienced maturity which should demand no compassion. Now he grasped disturbing possibilities. While she was still so childish, so liable to be hurt, she ought to be safeguarded. She must be … she must be shut up. There were too many Birnbaums about. He scowled so dreadfully and marched her down the hill at such a pace that she wanted to ask him what was the matter now. He could not know that he was humming that song which Caryl had written for Kate, since he had heartily abused it. Yet the tune of it was on his lips:
lch schau dich an und Wehmuth
Schleicht mir in’s Herz hinein.
He need not have distressed himself so violently on her account. She was guarded by the constant simplicity of her young heart. He was himself the only man who could ever betray it, and she had been his, had he known it, as long as she could remember. Her love was as natural and necessary to her as the breath she drew, which is, perhaps, the reason why he divined nothing of it. And if he had known he would not, probably, have thought her fortunate. He would have wished her a better fancy. As it was, he thought that if she were his little girl he would put her into a convent. He knew little of convents, but he imagined that they were safer for girls than Sanger’s circus. Lina, by way of precaution, ought to be in one too. It would be dull, perhaps, but there were, on the whole, worse things than dullness. He wondered whether he could, as an intimate friend, persuade Sanger to take some steps about it.
They parted at the house door and he climbed up to his room in the annexe. Teresa danced away to the girls’ bedroom and remembered on the threshold that Antonia might still be crying there. She put her head round the door and saw that the room was empty. It was a large barn of a place with very little furniture. There was one bed for Kate and Tony and another for Tessa and Lina. Kate’s clothes were packed away in a painted chest under the window, but the entire wardrobe of the other young ladies lay about permanently in heaps on the floor amid books, music, guitars, cigarette ends, cherry stones, and dust. Entering hastily, Teresa began to pull off her clothes and fling them down about the room as she promenaded in the moonlight, humming gaily her little duet with Lewis in ‘Breakfast with the Borgias’. An old pair of Kate’s stays lay across a chair and she tried them on, observing with dismal accuracy how far too ample was their fit.
‘Yet Kate’s not fat,’ she reflected, ‘it’s I who am such a scarecrow. I wish I was Caterina.’
This was a sister of Roberto who had helped with the housework in Genoa and who, at fifteen, possessed a figure which was the secret envy of Teresa and Paulina. In their eyes a southern richness of outline was the height of beauty and they deeply deplored their own angular contours. Teresa was still sitting in her brief chemise wondering sadly how to grow fat when Paulina sauntered into the room, and, after glancing twice behind her in a nervous way, began in a scared whisper:
‘I say … Tessa …’
‘Yes?’
Paulina shuffled her feet, unable to proceed.
‘Yes! What is it?’
‘Oh, Tessa!’ cried Paulina with a little gasp.
‘Espèce d’imbécile! What’s the matter?’
Paulina came quite close and clutched her arm.
‘I’m frightened,’ she said in a very low voice.
‘What? Lina, what is it?’
‘Will you come, please?’
‘Come! Where?’
‘Tony and I are frightened … at a very funny thing.’
‘A funny thing! Where?’
‘In … in Sanger’s room.’
‘Were you in there?’
‘No. We heard it. Outside the door.’
The sacredness of Sanger’s room was an unbroken law. No child ever ventured there without express permission.
‘What did you hear?’
‘A funny noise. Do come, Tessa!’
Teresa got up and made for her father’s room.
‘Is Caryl there, Lina?’
‘No,’ panted Paulina, still clutching her arm. ‘He’s gone down to the valley to help Kate carry up the milk.’
They climbed the stairs to the top landing, where they found Antonia and Sebastian listening intently outside Sanger’s closed door.
‘It’s nothing; he’s just snoring,’ asserted Antonia.
‘Listen, Tessa!’ commanded the boy.
She listened and wondered that the whole house did not tremble.