The Lost Girl - D. H. Lawrence (great books to read .txt) 📗

discarded apron—perhaps lost for ever.

"I shan't wear it on duty," she said. "You know that."

She had to go to tea with him. She avoided his love-making, by telling him any sort of spooniness revolted her. And he was too much an old bachelor to take easily to a fondling habit—before marriage, at least. So he mercifully left her alone: he was on the whole devoutly thankful she wanted to be left alone. But he wanted her to be there. That was his greatest craving. He wanted her to be always there. And so he craved for marriage: to possess her entirely, and to have her always there with him, so that he was never alone. Alone and apart from all the world: but by her side, always by her side.

"Now when shall we fix the marriage?" he said. "It is no good putting it back. We both know what we are doing. And now the engagement is announced—"

He looked at her anxiously. She could see the hysterical little boy under the great, authoritative man.

"Oh, not till after Christmas!" she said.

"After Christmas!" he started as if he had been bitten. "Nonsense!
It's nonsense to wait so long. Next month, at the latest."

"Oh no," she said. "I don't think so soon."

"Why not? The sooner the better. You had better send in your resignation at once, so that you're free."

"Oh but is there any need? I may be transferred for war service."

"That's not likely. You're our only maternity nurse—"

And so the days went by. She had tea with him practically every afternoon, and she got used to him. They discussed the furnishing—she could not help suggesting a few alterations, a few arrangements according to her idea. And he drew up a plan of a wedding tour in Scotland. Yet she was quite certain she would not marry him. The matron laughed at her certainty. "You will drift into it," she said. "He is tying you down by too many little threads."

"Ah, well, you'll see!" said Alvina.

"Yes," said the matron. "I shall see."

And it was true that Alvina's will was indeterminate, at this time. She was resolved not to marry. But her will, like a spring that is hitched somehow, did not fly direct against the doctor. She had sent in her resignation, as he suggested. But not that she might be free to marry him, but that she might be at liberty to flee him. So she told herself. Yet she worked into his hands.

One day she sat with the doctor in the car near the station—it was towards the end of September—held up by a squad of soldiers in khaki, who were marching off with their band wildly playing, to embark on the special troop train that was coming down from the north. The town was in great excitement. War-fever was spreading everywhere. Men were rushing to enlist—and being constantly rejected, for it was still the days of regular standards.

As the crowds surged on the pavement, as the soldiers tramped to the station, as the traffic waited, there came a certain flow in the opposite direction. The 4:15 train had come in. People were struggling along with luggage, children were running with spades and buckets, cabs were crawling along with families: it was the seaside people coming home. Alvina watched the two crowds mingle.

And as she watched she saw two men, one carrying a mandoline case and a suit-case which she knew. It was Ciccio. She did not know the other man; some theatrical individual. The two men halted almost near the car, to watch the band go by. Alvina saw Ciccio quite near to her. She would have liked to squirt water down his brown, handsome, oblivious neck. She felt she hated him. He stood there, watching the music, his lips curling in his faintly-derisive Italian manner, as he talked to the other man. His eyelashes were as long and dark as ever, his eyes had still the attractive look of being set in with a smutty finger. He had got the same brownish suit on, which she disliked, the same black hat set slightly, jauntily over one eye. He looked common: and yet with that peculiar southern aloofness which gave him a certain beauty and distinction in her eyes. She felt she hated him, rather. She felt she had been let down by him.

The band had passed. A child ran against the wheel of the standing car. Alvina suddenly reached forward and made a loud, screeching flourish on the hooter. Every one looked round, including the laden, tramping soldiers.

"We can't move yet," said Dr. Mitchell.

But Alvina was looking at Ciccio at that moment. He had turned with the rest, looking inquiringly at the car. And his quick eyes, the whites of which showed so white against his duskiness, the yellow pupils so non-human, met hers with a quick flash of recognition. His mouth began to curl in a smile of greeting. But she stared at him without moving a muscle, just blankly stared, abstracting every scrap of feeling, even of animosity or coldness, out of her gaze. She saw the smile die on his lips, his eyes glance sideways, and again sideways, with that curious animal shyness which characterized him. It was as if he did not want to see her looking at him, and ran from side to side like a caged weasel, avoiding her blank, glaucous look.

She turned pleasantly to Dr. Mitchell.

"What did you say?" she asked sweetly.

CHAPTER XII ALLAYE ALSO IS ENGAGED

Alvina found it pleasant to be respected as she was respected in Lancaster. It is not only the prophet who hath honour save in his own country: it is every one with individuality. In this northern town Alvina found that her individuality really told. Already she belonged to the revered caste of medicine-men. And into the bargain she was a personality, a person.

Well and good. She was not going to cheapen herself. She felt that even in the eyes of the natives—the well-to-do part, at least—she lost a little of her distinction when she was engaged to Dr. Mitchell. The engagement had been announced in The Times, The Morning Post, The Manchester Guardian, and the local News. No fear about its being known. And it cast a slight slur of vulgar familiarity over her. In Woodhouse, she knew, it elevated her in the common esteem tremendously. But she was no longer in Woodhouse. She was in Lancaster. And in Lancaster her engagement pigeonholed her. Apart from Dr. Mitchell she had a magic potentiality. Connected with him, she was a known and labelled quantity.

This she gathered from her contact with the local gentry. The matron was a woman of family, who somehow managed, in her big, white, frilled cap, to be distinguished like an abbess of old. The really toney women of the place came to take tea in her room, and these little teas in the hospital were like a little elegant female conspiracy. There was a slight flavour of art and literature about. The matron had known Walter Pater, in the somewhat remote past.

Alvina was admitted to these teas with the few women who formed the toney intellectual élite of this northern town. There was a certain freemasonry in the matron's room. The matron, a lady-doctor, a clergyman's daughter, and the wives of two industrial magnates of the place, these five, and then Alvina, formed the little group. They did not meet a great deal outside the hospital. But they always met with that curious female freemasonry which can form a law unto itself even among most conventional women. They talked as they would never talk before men, or before feminine outsiders. They threw aside the whole vestment of convention. They discussed plainly the things they thought about—even the most secret—and they were quite calm about the things they did—even the most impossible. Alvina felt that her transgression was a very mild affair, and that her engagement was really infra dig.

"And are you going to marry him?" asked Mrs. Tuke, with a long, cool look.

"I can't imagine myself—" said Alvina.

"Oh, but so many things happen outside one's imagination. That's where your body has you. I can't imagine that I'm going to have a child—" She lowered her eyelids wearily and sardonically over her large eyes.

Mrs. Tuke was the wife of the son of a local manufacturer. She was about twenty-eight years old, pale, with great dark-grey eyes and an arched nose and black hair, very like a head on one of the lovely Syracusan coins. The odd look of a smile which wasn't a smile, at the corners of the mouth, the arched nose, and the slowness of the big, full, classic eyes gave her the dangerous Greek look of the Syracusan women of the past: the dangerous, heavily-civilized women of old Sicily: those who laughed about the latomia.

"But do you think you can have a child without wanting it at all?" asked Alvina.

"Oh, but there isn't one bit of me wants it, not one bit. My flesh doesn't want it. And my mind doesn't—yet there it is!" She spread her fine hands with a flicker of inevitability.

"Something must want it," said Alvina.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Tuke. "The universe is one big machine, and we're just part of it." She flicked out her grey silk handkerchief, and dabbed her nose, watching with big, black-grey eyes the fresh face of Alvina.

"There's not one bit of me concerned in having this child," she persisted to Alvina. "My flesh isn't concerned, and my mind isn't. And yet!—le voilà!—I'm just planté. I can't imagine why I married Tommy. And yet—I did—!" She shook her head as if it was all just beyond her, and the pseudo-smile at the corners of her ageless mouth deepened.

Alvina was to nurse Mrs. Tuke. The baby was expected at the end of August. But already the middle of September was here, and the baby had not arrived.

The Tukes were not very rich—the young ones, that is. Tommy wanted to compose music, so he lived on what his father gave him. His father gave him a little house outside the town, a house furnished with expensive bits of old furniture, in a way that the townspeople thought insane. But there you are—Effie would insist on dabbing a rare bit of yellow brocade on the wall, instead of a picture, and in painting apple-green shelves in the recesses of the whitewashed wall of the dining-room. Then she enamelled the hall-furniture yellow, and decorated it with curious green and lavender lines and flowers, and had unearthly cushions and Sardinian pottery with unspeakable peaked griffins.

What were you to make of such a woman! Alvina slept in her house these days, instead of at the hospital. For Effie was a very bad sleeper. She would sit up in bed, the two glossy black plaits hanging beside her white, arch face, wrapping loosely round her her dressing-gown of a sort of plumbago-coloured, dark-grey silk lined with fine silk of metallic blue, and there, ivory and jet-black and grey like black-lead, she would sit in the white bedclothes flicking her handkerchief and revealing a flicker of kingfisher-blue silk and white silk night dress, complaining of her neuritis nerve and her own impossible condition, and begging Alvina to stay with her another half-hour, and suddenly studying the big, blood-red stone on her finger as if she was reading something in it.

"I believe I shall be like the woman in the Cent Nouvelles and carry my child for five years. Do you know that story? She said that eating a parsley leaf on which bits of snow were sticking started the child in her. It might just as well—"

Alvina would laugh and get tired. There was about her a kind of half bitter sanity and nonchalance which the nervous woman liked.

One night as they were sitting thus in the bedroom, at nearly eleven o'clock, they started and listened. Dogs in the distance had also started to yelp. A mandoline was wailing its vibration in the night outside, rapidly, delicately quivering. Alvina went pale. She knew it was Ciccio. She had seen him lurking in the streets of the town, but had never spoken to him.

"What's this?" cried Mrs. Tuke, cocking her head on one side. "Music! A mandoline! How extraordinary! Do you think it's a serenade?—" And she lifted her brows archly.

"I should think it is," said Alvina.

"How extraordinary! What a moment to choose to serenade the lady! Isn't it like life—! I must look at it—"

She got out of bed with some difficulty, wrapped her dressing-gown round her, pushed her feet into slippers, and went to the window. She opened