It was the strong arm of the goddess that caught and held me. I began to stammer:
‘Th-thanks awfully, I’m f-f-frightfully sorry.’
She had retrieved the currant loaf and handed it to me together with the stick. And then she smiled kindly and said cheerfully:
‘Don’t mention it. No trouble, I assure you,’ and the magic died completely before the flat, competent voice.
A nice healthy-looking well set-up girl, no more.
I fell to reflecting what would have happened if the Gods had given Helen of Troy exactly those flat accents. How strange that a girl could trouble your inmost soul so long as she kept her mouth shut, and that the moment she spoke the glamour could vanish as though it had never been.
I had known the reverse happen, though. I had seen a little sad monkey-faced woman whom no one would turn to look at twice. Then she opened her mouth and suddenly enchantment had lived and bloomed and Cleopatra had cast her spell anew.
Joanna had drawn up at the kerb beside me without my noticing her arrival. She asked if there was anything the matter.
‘Nothing,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘I was reflecting on Helen of Troy and others.’
‘What a funny place to do it,’ said Joanna. ‘You looked most odd, standing there clasping currant bread to your breast with your mouth wide open.’
‘I’ve had a shock,’ I said. ‘I have been transplanted to Ilium and back again.
‘Do you know who that is?’ I added, indicating a retreating back that was swimming gracefully away.
Peering after the girl Joanna said that it was the Symmingtons’ nursery governess.
‘Is that what struck you all of a heap?’ she asked. ‘She’s good-looking, but a bit of a wet fish.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Just a nice kind girl. And I’d been thinking her Aphrodite.’
Joanna opened the door of the car and I got in.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl has. It seems such a pity.’
I said that if she was a nursery governess it was probably just as well.
That afternoon we went to tea with Mr Pye.
Mr Pye was an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of bric-à-brac. He lived at Prior’s Lodge in the grounds of which were the ruins of the old Priory.
Prior’s Lodge was certainly a very exquisite house and under Mr Pye’s loving care it showed to its best advantage. Every piece of furniture was polished and set in the exact place most suited to it. The curtains and cushions were of exquisite tone and colour, and of the most expensive silks.
It was hardly a man’s house, and it did strike me that to live there would be rather like taking up one’s abode in a period room at a museum. Mr Pye’s principal enjoyment in life was taking people round his house. Even those completely insensitive to their surroundings could not escape. Even if you were so hardened as to consider the essentials of living a radio, a cocktail bar, a bath and a bed surrounded by the necessary walls. Mr Pye did not despair of leading you to better things.
His small plump hands quivered with sensibility as he described his treasures, and his voice rose to a falsetto squeak as he narrated the exciting circumstances under which he had brought his Italian bedstead home from Verona.
Joanna and I being both fond of antiquities and of period furniture, met with approval.
‘It is really a pleasure, a great pleasure, to have such an acquisition to our little community. The dear good people down here, you know, so painfully bucolic—not to say provincial. They don’t know anything. Vandals—absolute vandals! And the inside of their houses—it would make you weep, dear lady, I assure you it would make you weep. Perhaps it has done so?’
Joanna said that she hadn’t gone quite as far as that.
‘But you see what I mean? They mix things so terribly! I’ve seen with my own eyes a most delightful little Sheraton piece—delicate, perfect—a collector’s piece, absolutely—and next to it a Victorian occasional table, or quite possibly a fumed oak revolving bookcase—yes, even that—fumed oak.’
He shuddered—and murmured plaintively:
‘Why are people so blind? You agree—I’m sure you agree, that beauty is the only thing worth living for.’
Hypnotized by his earnestness, Joanna said, yes, yes, that was so.
‘Then why,’ demanded Mr Pye, ‘do people surround themselves with ugliness?’
Joanna said it was very odd.
‘Odd? It’s criminal! That’s what I call it—criminal! And the excuses they give! They say something is comfortable. Or that it is quaint. Quaint! Such a horrible word.’
‘The house you have taken,’ went on Mr Pye, ‘Miss Emily Barton’s house. Now that is charming, and she has some quite nice pieces. Quite nice. One or two of them are really first class. And she has taste, too—although I’m not quite so sure of that as I was. Sometimes, I am afraid, I think it’s really sentiment. She likes to keep things as they were—but not for le bon motif—not because of the resultant harmony—but because it is the way her mother had them.’
He transferred his attention to me, and his voice changed. It altered from that of the rapt artist to that of the born gossip.
‘You didn’t know the family at all? No, quite so—yes, through house agents. But, my dears, you ought to have known that family! When I came here the old mother was still alive. An incredible person—quite incredible! A monster, if you know what I mean. Positively a monster. The old-fashioned Victorian monster, devouring her young. Yes, that’s what it amounted to. She was monumental, you know, must have weighed seventeen stone, and all the five daughters revolved round her. “The girls”! That’s how she always spoke of them. The girls! And the eldest was well over sixty then. “Those stupid girls!” she used to call them sometimes. Black slaves, that’s all they were, fetching and carrying and agreeing with her. Ten o’clock they had to go to bed and they weren’t allowed a fire in their bedroom, and as for asking their own friends to the house, that would have been unheard of. She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody. I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn’t good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!’
‘It sounds like a novel,’ said Joanna.
‘Oh, my dear, it was. And then the dreadful old woman died, but of course it was far too late then. They just went on living there and talking in hushed voices about what poor Mamma would have wished. Even repapering her bedroom they felt to be quite sacrilegious. Still they did enjoy themselves in the parish in a quiet way … But none of them had much stamina, and they just died off one by one. Influenza took off Edith, and Minnie had an operation and didn’t recover and poor Mabel had a stroke—Emily looked after her in the most devoted manner. Really that poor woman has done nothing but nursing for the last ten years. A charming creature, don’t you think? Like a piece of Dresden. So sad for her having financial anxieties—but of course all investments have depreciated.’
‘We feel rather awful being in her house,’ said Joanna.