‘There is something about me which they don’t see and never would see,’ she said angrily to herself. And at the same time, she was relieved that they didn’t and couldn’t. It made life so very much simpler.

  And again, since she was one of the people who are conscious in visual images, she saw the dark-green jersey rolled on the black trousers of the gipsy, his fine, quick hips, alert as eyes. They were elegant. The elegance of these dancers seemed so stuffed, hips merely wadded with flesh. Leo the same, thinking himself such a fine dancer! and a fine figure of a fellow!

  Then she saw the gipsy’s face; the straight nose, the slender mobile lips, and the level, significant stare of the black eyes, which seemed to shoot her in some vital, undiscovered place, unerring.

  She drew herself up angrily. How dared he look at her like that? So she gazed glaringly at the insipid beaux on the dancing floor. And she despised them. Just as the raggle-taggle gipsy women despise men who are not gipsies, despise their dog-like walk down the street, she found herself despising this crowd. Where among them was the subtle, lonely, insinuating challenge that could reach her?

  She did not want to mate with a house-dog.

  Her sensitive nose turned up, her soft brown hair fell like a soft sheath round her tender, flower-like face, as she sat musing. She seemed so virginal. At the same time, there was a touch of the tall young virgin witch about her, that made the house-dog men shy off. She might metamorphose into something uncanny before you knew where you were.

  This made her lonely, in spite of all the courting. Perhaps the courting only made her lonelier.

  Leo, who was a sort of mastiff among the house-dogs, returned after his dance, with fresh cheery-o! courage.

  ‘You’ve had a little think about it, haven’t you?’ he said, sitting down beside her: a comfortable, well-nourished, determined sort of fellow. She did not know why it irritated her so unreasonably, when he hitched up his trousers at the knee, over his good-sized but not very distinguished legs, and lowered himself assuredly on to a chair.

  ‘Have I?’ she said vaguely. ‘About what?’

  ‘You know what about,’ he said. ‘Did you make up your mind?’

  ‘Make up my mind about what?’ she asked, innocently.

  In her upper consciousness, she truly had forgotten.

  ‘Oh!’ said Leo, settling his trousers again. ‘About me and you getting engaged, you know.’ He was almost as off-hand as she.

  ‘Oh that’s absolutely impossible,’ she said, with mild amiability, as if it were some stray question among the rest. ‘Why I never even thought of it again. Oh, don’t talk about that sort of nonsense! That sort of thing is absolutely impossible,’ she reiterated like a child.

  ‘That sort of thing is, is it?’ he said, with an odd smile at her calm, distant assertion. ‘Well, what sort of thing is possible, men? You don’t want to the an old maid, do you?’

  ‘Oh I don’t mind,’ she said absently.

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  She turned round and looked at him in wonder.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why should you mind if I was an old maid?’

  ‘Every reason in the world,’ he said looking up at her with a bold, meaningful smile, that wanted to make its meaning blatant, if not patent.

  But instead of penetrating into some deep, secret place, and shooting her there, Leo’s bold and patent smile only hit her on the outside of the body, like a tennis ball, and caused the same kind of sudden irritated reaction.

  ‘I think this sort of thing is awfully silly,’ she said, with minx-like spite. ‘Why, you’re practically engaged to – to –’ she pulled herself up in time – ‘probably half a dozen other girls. I’m not flattered by what you’ve said. I should hate it if anybody knew! – Hate it! – I shan’t breathe a word of it, and I hope you’ll have the sense not to. – There’s Ella!’

  And keeping her face averted from him, she sailed away like a tall, soft flower, to join poor Ella Framley.

  Leo flapped his white gloves.

  ‘Catty little bitch!’ he said to himself. But he was of the mastiff type, he rather liked the kitten to fly in his face. He began definitely to single her out.

  VI

  THE next week it poured again with rain. And this irritated Yvette with strange anger. She had intended it should be fine. Especially she insisted it should be fine towards the weekend. Why, she did not ask herself.

  Thursday, the half-holiday, came with a hard frost, and sun. Leo arrived with his car, the usual bunch. Yvette disagreeably and unaccountably refused to go.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t feel like it,’ she said.

  She rather enjoyed being Mary-Mary-quite-contrary.

  Then she went for a walk by herself, up the frozen hills, to the Black Rocks.

  The next day also came sunny and frosty. It was February, but in the north country the ground did not thaw in the sun. Yvette announced that she was going for a ride on her bicycle, and taking her lunch as she might not be back till afternoon.

  She set off, not hurrying. In spite of the frost, the sun had a touch of spring. In the park, the deer were standing in the distance, in the sunlight, to be warm. One doe, white spotted, walked slowly across the motionless landscape.

  Cycling, Yvette found it difficult to keep her hands warm, even when bodily she was quite hot. Only when she had to walk up the long hill, to the top, and there was no wind.

  The upland was very bare and clear, like another world. She had climbed on to another level. She cycled slowly, a little afraid of taking the wrong lane, in the vast maze of stone fences. As she passed along the lane she thought was the right one, she heard a faint tapping noise, with a slight metallic resonance.

  The gipsy man was seated on the ground with his back to the cart-shaft, hammering a copper bowl. He was in the sun, bare-headed, but wearing his green jersey. Three small children were moving quietly round, playing in the horse’s shelter: the horse and cart were gone. An old woman, bent, with a kerchief round her head, was cooking over a fire of sticks. The only sound was the rapid, ringing tap-tap-tap of the small hammer on the dull copper.

  The man looked up at once, as Yvette stepped from her bicycle, but he did not move, though he ceased hammering. A delicate, barely discernible smile of triumph was on his face. The old woman looked round, keenly, from under her dirty grey hair. The man spoke a half-audible word to her, and she turned again to her fire. He looked up at Yvette.

  ‘How are you all getting on?’ she asked politely.

  ‘All right, eh! You sit down a minute?’ He turned as he sat, and pulled a stool from under the caravan for Yvette. Then, as she wheeled her bicycle to the side of the quarry, he started hammering again, with that bird-like, rapid light stroke.

  Yvette went to the fire to warm her hands.

  ‘Is this the dinner cooking?’ she asked childishly, of the old gipsy, as she spread her long tender hands, mottled red with the cold, to the embers.

  ‘Dinner, yes!’ said the old woman. ‘For him! And for the children.’

  She pointed with the long fork at the three black-eyed, staring children, who were staring at her from under their black fringes. But they were clean. Only the old woman was not clean. The quarry itself they had kept perfectly clean.

  Yvette crouched in silence, warming her hands. The man rapidly hammered away with intervals of silence. The old hag slowly climbed the steps to the third, oldest caravan. The children began to play again, like little wild animals, quiet and busy.

  ‘Are they your children?’ asked Yvette, rising from the fire and turning to the man.

  He looked her in the eyes, and nodded.

  ‘But where’s your wife?’

  ‘She’s gone out with the basket. They’ve all gone out, cart and all, selling things. I don’t go selling things. I make them, but I don’t go selling them. Not often. I don’t often.’

  ‘You make all the copper and brass things?’ she said.

  He nodded, and again offered her the stool. She sat down.

  ‘You said you’d be here on Fridays,’ she said. ‘So I came this way, as it was so fine.’

  ‘Very fine day!’ said the gipsy, looking at her cheek, that was still a bit blanched by the cold, and the soft hair over her reddened ear, and the long, still mottled hands on her knee.

  ‘You get cold, riding a bicycle?’ he asked.

  ‘My hands!’ she said, clasping them nervously.

  ‘You didn’t wear gloves?’

  ‘I did, but they weren’t much good.’

  ‘Cold comes through,’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’ she replied.

  The old woman came slowly, grotesquely down the steps of the caravan, with some enamel plates.

  ‘The dinner cooked, eh?’ he called softly.

  The old woman muttered something, as she spread the plates near the fire. Two pots hung from a long iron horizontal bar, over the embers of the fire. A little pan seethed on a small iron tripod. In the sunshine, heat and vapour wavered together.

  He put down his tools and the pot, and rose from the ground.

  ‘You eat something along of us?’ he asked Yvette, not looking at her.

  ‘Oh, I brought my lunch,’ said Yvette.

  ‘You eat some stew?’ he said. And again he called quietly, secretly to the old woman, who muttered in answer, as she slid the iron pot towards the end of the bar.

  ‘Some beans, and some mutton in it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, thanks awfully!’ said Yvette. Then, suddenly taking courage, added: ‘Well, yes, just a very little, if I may.’

  She went across to untie her lunch from her bicycle, and he went up the steps to his own caravan. After a minute, he emerged, wiping his hands on a towel.

  ‘You want to come up and wash your hands?’ he said.

  ‘No, I think not,’ she said. ‘They are clean.’

  He threw away his wash-water, and set off down the road with a high brass jug, to fetch clean water from the spring that trickled into a small pool, taking a cup to dip it with.

  When he returned, he set the jug and the cup by the fire, and fetched himself a short log, to sit on. The children sat on the floor, by the fire, in a cluster, eating beans and bits of meat with spoon or fingers. The man on the log ate in silence, absorbedly. The woman made coffee in the black pot on the tripod, hobbling upstairs for the cups. There was silence in the camp. Yvette sat on her stool, having taken off her hat and shaken her hair in the sun.

  ‘How many children have you?’ Yvette asked suddenly.

  ‘Say five,’ he replied slowly, as he looked up into her eyes.

  And again the bird of her heart sank down and seemed to die. Vaguely, as in a dream, she received from him the cup of coffee. She was aware only of his silent figure, sitting like a shadow there on the log, with an enamel cup in his hand, drinking his coffee in silence. Her will had departed from her limbs, he had power over her: his shadow was on her.

  And he, as he blew his hot coffee, was aware of one thing only, the mysterious fruit of her virginity, her perfect tenderness in the body.

  At length he put down his coffee-cup by the fire, then looked round at her. Her hair fell across her face, as she tried to sip from the hot cup. On her face was that tender look of sleep, which a nodding flower has when it is full out. Like a mysterious early flower, she was full out, like a snowdrop which spreads its three white wings in a flight into the waking sleep of its brief blossoming. The waking sleep of her full-opened virginity, entranced like a snowdrop in the sunshine, was upon her.

  The gipsy, supremely aware of her, waited for her like the substance of shadow, as shadow waits and is there.

  At length his voice said, without breaking the spell:

  ‘You want to go in my caravan now, and wash your hands?’

  The childlike, sleep-waking eyes of her moment of perfect virginity looked into his, unseeing. She was only aware of the dark strange effluence of him bathing her limbs, washing her at last purely will-less. She was aware of him, as a dark, complete power.

  ‘I think I might,’ she said.

  He rose silently, then turned to speak, in a low command, to the old woman. And then again he looked at Yvette, and putting his power over her, so that she had no burden of herself, or of action.

  ‘Come!’ he said.

  She followed simply, followed the silent, secret, over-powering motion of his body in front of her. It cost her nothing. She was gone in his will.

  He was at the top of the steps, and she at the foot, when she became aware of an intruding sound. She stood still, at the foot of the steps. A motor-car was coming. He stood at the top of the steps, looking round strangely. The old woman harshly called something, as with rapidly increasing sound, a car rushed near. It was passing.

  Then they heard the cry of a woman’s voice, and the brakes on the car. It had pulled up, just beyond the quarry.

  The gipsy came down the steps, having closed the door of the caravan.

  ‘You want to put your hat on,’ he said to her.

  Obediently she went to the stool by the fire, and took up her hat. He sat down by the cart-wheel, darkly, and took up his tools. The rapid tap-tap-tap of his hammer, rapid and angry now like the sound of a tiny machine-gun, broke out just as the voice of the woman was heard crying:

  ‘May we warm our hands at the camp fire?’

  She advanced, dressed in a sleek but bulky coat of sable fur. A man followed, in a blue great-coat; pulling off his fur gloves and pulling out a pipe.

  ‘It looked so tempting,’ said the woman in the coat of many dead little animals, smiling a broad, half-condescending, half-hesitant simper, around the company.

  No one said a word.

  She advanced to the fire, shuddering a little inside her coat, with the cold. They had been driving in an open car.

  She was a very small woman, with a rather large nose: probably a Jewess. Tiny almost as a child, in that sable coat she looked much more bulky than she should, and her wide, rather resentful brown eyes of a spoilt Jewess gazed oddly out of her expensive get-up.

  She crouched over the low fire, spreading her little hands, on which diamonds and emeralds glittered.

  ‘Ugh!’ she shuddered. ‘Of course we ought not to have come in an open car! But my husband won’t even let me say I’m cold!’ She looked round at him with her large, childish, reproachful eyes, that had still the canny shrewdness of a bourgeois Jewess: a rich one, probably.

  Apparently she was in love, in a Jewess’s curious way, with the big, blond man. He looked back at her with his abstracted blue eyes, that seemed to have no lashes, and a small smile creased his smooth, curiously naked cheeks. The smile didn’t mean anything at all.

  He was a man one connects instantly with winter sports, ski-ing and skating. Athletic, unconnected with life, he slowly filled his pipe, pressing in the tobacco with long, powerful, reddened finger.

  The Jewess looked at him to see if she got any response from him. Nothing at all, but that odd, blank smile. She turned again to the fire, tilting her eyebrows and looking at her small, white, spread hands.

  He slipped off his heavily-lined coat, and appeared in one of the handsome, sharp-patterned knitted jerseys, in yellow and grey and black, over well-cut trousers, rather wide Yes, they were both expensive! And he had a magnificent figure, an athletic, prominent chest. Like an experienced camper, he began building the fire together, quietly: like a soldier on campaign.

  ‘D’you think they’d mind if we put some fir-cones on, to make a blaze?’ he asked of Yvette, with a silent glance at the hammering gipsy.

  ‘Love it, I should think,’ said Yvette, in a daze, as the spell of the gipsy slowly left her, feeling stranded and blank.

  The man went to the car, and returned with a little sack of cones, from which he drew a handful.

  ‘Mind if we make a blaze?’ he called to the gipsy.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Mind if we make a blaze with a few cones!’

  ‘You go ahead!’ said the gipsy.

  The man began placing the cones lightly, carefully on the red embers. And soon, one by one, they caught fire, and burned likes roses of flame, with a sweet scent.

  ‘Ah lovely I lovely!’ cried the little Jewess, looking up at her man again. He looked down at her quite kindly, like the sun on ice. ‘Don’t you love fire? Oh, I love it!’ the little Jewess cried to Yvette, across the hammering.

  The hammering annoyed her. She looked round with a slight frown on her fine little brows, as if she would bid the man stop. Yvette looked round too. The gipsy was bent over his copper bowl, legs apart, head down, lithe arm lifted. Already he seemed so far from her.

  The man who accompanied the little Jewess strolled over to the gipsy, and stood in silence looking down on him, holding his pipe to his mouth. Now they were two men, like two strange male dogs, having to sniff one another.

  ‘We’re on our honeymoon,’ said the little Jewess, with an arch, resentful look at Yvette. She spoke in a rather high, defiant voice, like some bird, a jay, or a rook, calling.

  ‘Are you really?’ said Yvette.

  ‘Yes! Before we’re married! Have you heard of Simon Fawcett?’ – she named a wealthy and well-known engineer of the north country. ‘Well, I’m Mrs Fawcett, and he’s just divorcing me!’ She looked at Yvette with curious defiance and wistful-ness.

  ‘Are you really!’ said Yvette.

  She understood now the look of resentment and defiance in the little Jewess’s big, childlike brown eyes. She was an honest little thing, but perhaps her honesty was too rational. Perhaps it partly explained the notorious unscrupulousness of the well-known Simon Fawcett.

  ‘Yes! As soon as we get the divorce, I’m going to marry Major Eastwood.’

  Her cards were now all on the table. She was not going to deceive anybody.

  Behind her, the two men were talking briefly. She glanced round, and fixed the gipsy with her big brown eyes.

  He was looking up, as if shyly, at the big fellow in the sparkling jersey, who was standing pipe in mouth, man to man, looking down.