Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
anything, week-day or Sunday, but red woollen sweaters and short skirts,
and the girl most shamelessly showed her legs bare to the knee. Also
the whole band of three bathed in the sea on the coldest of winter days.
Evidently their mental condition was known elsewhere than in Mascaret,
for more than once when they were staying at Les Fusains, the villa they
had first taken, letters came from America addressed to Les Insains, and
the occupants of Les Fusains had received these bland and unblinking
from the hands of Jean Baptiste the postman. The postmaster, who
understood a little English, had explained the jest to his village
cronies, adding that the writing of the eldest mad one so much resembled
the writing of a hen, that it was small wonder that mistakes were made
over her address. That they were Americans was certain, for every three
months American Express money orders came for them, and the eldest
Insain promptly changed these for French money _mandats_ and forwarded
them to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. These _fantastiques_ doings
deeply impressed the villagers, and had provided them with many an
interesting hour of gossip over their black coffee and cider.
And the "Insane ones" never knew a thing about it. On this mild March
morning they were variously engaged in simple and peaceful occupations
not unsuitable to those of feeble mind. Upstairs, one of them, a girl of
sixteen with bare feet and hair swinging in long brown braids, was
swishing the sheets from the beds and flicking all stray garments into
corners. She considered that she was being certainly very noble and
useful. Her face bore the expression of complacent beneficence assumed
by those who are aware that they are doing the work of another person,
and doing it ten times better than that other person. She wore a
bathing dress that was slightly small for her, made combination-fashion,
of twill whose pristine scarlet had long since been bleached by sea salt
to a faint shell-pink. It was embroidered by black and white darns of a
primitive, not to say aboriginal description. Her bare arms were
decorated with some beaten copper bracelets of the New Art school, but
her slim legs, brown and very long from the knee down, were innocent of
stockings. She was tanned all over with the faint, transparent,
sherry-coloured tan of a woodland nymph, and her delicately curved cheek
wore the tint of woodland berries, wine-brown eyes full of sunshine and
shadows, long, flickering, silky hair, a red, sulky mouth.
Haidee had grown into a beauty.
She swished the sheets of heavy linen from the beds and cast them in
rumpled heaps upon the floor, taking many a glance out at the sea,
whistling a tune at one moment, in another echoing with her high-pitched
rather husky treble the lay of _pere_ Duval.
"Le bon Jesu marchait sur l'eau
Va sans peur mon petit bateau."
In the room below, listening to Haidee's rustling feet and the song of
the sea, was Val Valdana. Two sheets of the _Paris Daily Mail_ were
spread upon the table to protect the cloth, while in wistful and
desultory fashion she prepared the vegetables for lunch. Her thin brown
fingers decked in their strange stones and old enamels were stained with
potato juice, and a number of small new potatoes lay dimpling pink at
the bottom of an earthenware bowl glazed brown without and pale yellow
within. But Val's thoughts were not with the potatoes. She often let her
hands fall among the curly peel scrapings on the table, and gazed
sombrely, almost sightlessly before her. Shipwreck was in her eyes, and
exile, and all the bitterness of bright hopes broken, and talent lying
fallow and useless. Her lips looked as if the laughter had been bitten
out of them in an attempt to keep within the desperate cry of her heart.
It was as well perhaps that overhead Haidee suddenly decided that
helping to get lunch would be more amusing than making beds. Hasty and
conclusive sounds denoted that she was "finishing up," directing by
means of a few masterly flicks with a bath towel, all scraps of paper,
stockings, stray shoes, letters, etc., into a proper and decent
seclusion under the beds. Then her feet rustled on the stairs and
through the kitchen, stayed for a moment at the front door from whence
she threw a laugh and a call to Bran playing in the old boat across the
road. A moment later the shell-pink bathing costume became part of the
dining-room decoration, and its wearer, seated before the _Daily Mail_,
attacked the potatoes with the same nobility of purpose she had used for
the bedrooms. Val, leaning back in her chair, her hands listlessly on
the table before her, her face full of a moody weariness, had plainly
struck work. A silence prevailed broken only by the scratch of Haidee's
knife on the potatoes. When she sometimes needed the handle of her
knife to delicately scratch the tip of her nose she ceased work for an
instant, while she glanced at Valentine, or through the open window at
Bran's head bobbing up and down in the old _Jules Duval_. When her eyes
strayed to the blue moving surface beyond she gave a sigh.
"What a day for a sail, Val!"
Val waked from her sombre dream, and looking for the first time with
some shade of recognition at her, became aware of the bathing costume.
"I think you want to die of pneumonia, Haidee!"
"Oh, I 'm not cold, and it's so jolly and loose. It makes me feel as
though summer is here already. Don't I wish it were June instead of
rotten old March!"
She plumped a potato into the bowl and dexterously used the handle of
the knife to flick a long streak of hair over her left shoulder.
"I do believe it's warm enough for a second swim to-day, Val ... let's
hurry up and go down to the beach, shall we? ... Yes, do, let's."
"Who will get _dejeuner_?" inquired Val, laconically.
"I could kick that rotten Hortense!" responded Haidee savagely, and all
her cowboy instincts came out and sat upon her face. "Do you believe
she is really sick?" she asked, in the manner of one propounding a
problem in Algebra.
"Of course not.... She's sick of doing housework, that's all.... Any
one would be."
Haidee considered this awhile scowling, but her thoughts passed to
pleasanter subjects, and her face presently regained its harmony. From
the kitchen came a sound like the purring of a man-eater of Tsavo
enjoying a full meal, but it was only the boiler, which always purred
when the stove was red-hot. Haidee made haste to finish the potatoes
though her eyes considered many things. She regarded a brown print of
Carlyle on the wall above Val's head, and wondered as often before if he
had really gone about London with a hat of that shape! And had he
really heaved half bricks at the people he did not like? ... that
tickled her cowboy humour and she smiled broadly. How beautifully Mr.
Whistler had draped that nice gendarme's cloak over the thin legs of the
Sage of Craigenputtock!
Her glance wandered again to the expanse of blue water sparkling in the
sun--the Barleville Bay and the river were both full now, and blue,
blue! She wished she could collect all that blueness and put it into a
jewel to hang round Val's neck. Val looked lovely with bits of blue on
her--like an Arab Madonna, though she could also look like Mary
Madgalene. Sometimes when she had Bran on her lap she looked happy and
contented, but with far-away hills in her eyes--just like St. Anne in da
Vinci's picture where Mary is sitting on her mother's knees while Jesus
plays on the floor.
At other times, when she twisted a grey scarf around her hair and ran in
the wind Val could look like a Spanish dancing girl, or a mad Malay.
Again an artist in the Latin Quarter had done a water-colour of her in
which, with her head a little on one side and a wistful inquiring look
in her smoke-blue eyes, she reminded Haidee of a baby lion cub once seen
in the Bronx Park Zoo. But to-day Val looked old and sad; her yellow
serpent was eating at her heart, and Haidee knew why. The American mail
had reached Cherbourg the day before, but no letter had come to Villa
Duval. Hardly any letters came from Westenra now, except an occasional
one to Haidee and the regular money draft every three months which Val
as regularly sent away to a Paris bank and never touched except for
paying Haidee's school fees.
"Never mind, Val," said Haidee, half in response to her own thoughts,
half in continuation of their brief conversation. "As soon as your play
is finished we 'll kick Hortense out" (Haidee's mind still dealt in
kicks) "and get a proper _bonne_. We may be able to afford old M'am
Legallais, don't you think? They say she can make lovely onion soup."
"The play will never be finished," said Val darkly. "Pots and pans
won't let me finish it--they spoil the scenery. I _think_ potatoes and
cabbages! You can smell garlic and stewed veal in the love scenes. Oh!
How can one go on living? If it were n't for you and Bran I would cut
my head off."
"Cockerels!" said Haidee, in the same way as a rude boy might say
"rats!" "Cut your hair off instead," she counselled unfeelingly, "it is
getting awfully thin."
Val sprang up and ran like lightning into the next room, where there was
a mirror on the wall. Her hair lay in feathery clouds about her face and
forehead, and there seemed to be heaps of it, but it was true that when
she came to do it up one small comb at the back held all in place. Yet
she remembered the time not long ago when it had fallen to her waist as
long and thick as Haidee's own.
"It is this confounded writing plays--and stewing veal!" she murmured,
and stared at herself desperately. She had the eyes of the exile who
never for one moment forgets his exile; only, it was not one country she
mourned but many. Poor Val! she was too, that rare unhappy thing, a born
lover. Never for one moment was the man she loved out of her mind;
always, always he was there, haunting the rooms of her memory and the
_chapelle ardente_ of her heart, perfuming every thought, influencing
every action. Because of him she cried aloud now:
"I _will_ have it cut off, Haidee. Go and tell the barber to come this
afternoon. I 'll have it cut close--shaved--so that it _must_ grow
thick again. I won't be an old woman without hair! Oh, Haidee--an old
bald hag whom no one loves!" Desolation crept into her voice, it had
long dwelt in her eyes.
"Don't be a silly, Val," said matter-of-fact Haidee. "I love you and
Bran loves you and Garry loves you."
"No, no--Garry hates me--he never writes!" She flung herself into a
chair, and two of the salt bitter tears that were always lurking in the
background, but which she seldom shed, oozed out of her eyes as if they
had come from a long distance and gave her great pain. Haidee made no
attempt to comfort her, but presently went out of the house to where
Bran was just casting off anchor from the _Jules_ in view of a voyage to
New York.
"Val 's crying," she said briefly.
"What for?" asked Bran, but immediately letting go anchor and beginning
to climb in a business-like way over the side of the boat. The eye that
he cocked at Haidee was of the same smoke-blue as his mother's, and held
the same wistful lion-cub glance.
"Just the old yellow snake," said Haidee, already on her way back to put
on the potatoes, for well she knew that if she did not there would be
none for lunch that day.
Bran found Val swiftly, and climbing upon her knees began to kiss her
wet eyes. She kissed him back passionately, holding him with such
convulsive tightness that he was at last obliged to give a small howl.
"O--h! you're hurting me, Mammie--just a _little_ bit."
She kissed him again then, comforting him, reproaching herself, and
drying away her tears in his bright hair.