“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, bloodred 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 mandolin 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 mandolin! 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 the sash. It was a lovely moonlight night of September. Below lay the little front garden, with its short drive and its iron gates that closed on the high-road. From the shadow of the high-road came the noise of the mandolin.
“Hello, Tommy!” called Mrs. Tuke to her husband, whom she saw on the drive below her. “How’s your musical ear—?”
“All right. Doesn’t it disturb you?” came the man’s voice from the moonlight below.
“Not a bit. I like it. I’m waiting for the voice. ‘O Richard, O mon roi!’—”
But the music had stopped.
“There!” cried Mrs. Tuke. “You’ve frightened him off! And we’re dying to be serenaded, aren’t we, nurse?” She turned to Alvina. “Do give me my fur, will you? Thanks so much. Won’t you open the other window and look out there—?”
Alvina went to the second window. She stood looking out.
“Do play again!” Mrs. Tuke called into the night. “Do sing something.” And with her white arm she reached for a glory rose that hung in the moonlight from the wall, and with a flash of her white arm she flung it toward the garden wall—ineffectually, of course.
“Won’t you play again?” she called into the night, to the unseen. “Tommy, go indoors, the bird won’t sing when you’re about.”
“It’s an Italian by the sound
