Her main bitterness was that they had this peace. She was cutting the painter, but they were going on in this peace; her world was waning. It was the fact that her friend Bobbie’s husband, Sir Gabriel Blantyre—formerly Bosenheim—was cutting down expenses like a lunatic. In her world there was the writing on the wall. Here they could afford to call her a poor bitch—and be in the right of it, as like as not!
III
Valentine was awakened by the shrill overtones of the voice of the little maid coming through the open window. She had fallen asleep over the words: “Saepe te in somnis vidi!” to a vision of white limbs in the purple Adriatic. Eventually the child’s voice said:
“We only sez ‘mem’ to friends of the family!” shrilly and self-assertively.
She was at the casement, dizzy and sickish with the change of position and the haste—and violently impatient of her condition. Of humanity she perceived only the top of a three-cornered grey hat and a grey panniered skirt in downward perspective. The sloping tiles of the potting-shed hid the little maid; aligned small lettuce plants, like rosettes on the dark earth, ran from under the window, closed by a wall of sticked peas, behind them the woods, slender grey ash trunks going to a great height. They were needed for shelter. They would have to change their bedroom: they could not have a night nursery that faced the north. The spring onions needed pricking out: she had meant to put the garden pellitory into the rocks in the half-circle; but the operation had daunted her. Pushing the little roots into crevices with her fingers; removing stones, trowelling in artificial manure, stooping, dirtying her fingers would make her retch. …
She was suddenly intensely distressed at the thought of the lost coloured prints. She had searched the whole house—all imaginable drawers, cupboards, presses. It was like their fate that, when they had at last got a good—an English—client, their first commission from her should go wrong. She thought again of every imaginable, unsearched parallelogram in the house, standing erect, her head up, neglecting to look down on the intruder.
She considered all their customers to be intruders. It was true that Christopher’s gifts lay in the way of old-furniture dealing—and farming. But farming was ruinous. Obviously if you sold old furniture straight out of use in your own house, it fetched better prices than from a shop. She did not deny Christopher’s ingenuity—or that he was right to rely on her hardihood. He had at least the right so to rely. Nor did she mean to let him down. Only …
She passionately desired little Chrissie to be born in that bed with the thin fine posts, his blond head with the thin, fine hair on those pillows. She passionately desired that he should lie with blue eyes gazing at those curtains on the low windows. … Those! With those peacocks and globes. Surely a child should lie gazing at what his mother had seen, whilst she was awaiting him!
And, where were those prints? … Four parallelograms of faint, silly colour. Promised for tomorrow morning. The margins needed bread-crumbing. … She imagined her chin brushing gently, gently back and forward on the floss of his head; she imagined holding him in the air as, in that bed, she lay, her arms extended upwards, her hair spread on those pillows! Flowers perhaps spread on that quilt. Lavender!
But if Christopher reported that one of those dreadful people with querulous voices wanted a bedroom complete? …
If she begged him to retain it for her. Well, he would. He prized her above money. She thought—ah, she knew—that he prized the child within her above the world.
Nevertheless, she imagined that she would go all on to the end with her longings unvoiced. … Because there was the game. … His game … oh, hang it, their game! And you have to think whether it is worse for the unborn child to have a mother with unsatisfied longings, or a father beaten at his … No, you must not call it a game. … Still, roosters beaten by other roosters lose their masculinity. … Like roosters, men. … Then, for a child to have a father lacking masculinity … for the sake of some peacock and globe curtains, spindly bedposts, old, old glass tumblers with thumb-mark indentations. …
On the other hand, for the mother the soft feeling that those things give! … The room had a barrel-shaped ceiling, following the lines of the roof almost up to the rooftree; dark oak beams, beeswaxed—ah, that beeswaxing! Tiny, low windows almost down to the oaken floor. … You would say, too much of the showplace: but you lived into it. You lived yourself into it in spite of the Americans who took, sometimes embarrassed, peeps from the doorway.
Would they have to peek into the nursery? Oh, God, who knew? What would He decree? It was an extraordinary thing to live with Americans all over you, dropping down in aeroplanes, seeming to come up out of the earth. … There, all of a sudden, you didn’t know how. …
That woman below the window was one, now. How in the world had she got below that window? … But there were so many entrances—from the spinney, from the Common, through the fourteen-acre, down from the road. … You never knew who was coming. It was eerie; at times she shivered over it. You seemed to be beset—with stealthy people, creeping up all the paths. …
Apparently the little tweeny was disputing the right of that American woman to call herself a friend of the family and thus to be addressed as “Mem!” The American was asserting her descent from Madame de Maintenon. … It was astonishing the descents they all had! She herself was descended from the
