The Three Sisters | Page 5

agony. It writhed through the
windows, seeking its natural attenuation in the open air. It writhed
through the shut house and was beaten back, pitilessly, by the roof and
walls. To let it loose thus was Alice's defiance of the house and her
revenge.
Mary and Gwenda heard it in the dining-room, and set their mouths and
braced themselves to bear it. The Vicar in his study behind the
dining-room heard it and scowled. Essy, the maid-servant, heard it, she
heard it worse than anybody, in her kitchen on the other side of the wall.
Now and then, when the Polonaise screamed louder, Mary drew a
hissing breath of pain through her locked teeth, and Gwenda grinned.
Not that to Gwenda there was anything funny in the writhing and
screaming of the Grande Polonaise. It was that she alone appreciated its
vindictive quality; she admired the completeness, the audacity of
Alice's revenge.
But Essy in her kitchen made no effort to stand up to the Grande
Polonaise. When it began she sat down and laid her arms on the kitchen

table, and her head, muffled in her apron, on her arms, and cried. She
couldn't have told you what the Polonaise was like or what it did to her;
all that she could have said was that it went through and through her.
She didn't know, Essy didn't, what had come over her; for whatever
noise Miss Alice made, she hadn't taken any notice, not at first. It was
in the last three weeks that the Polonaise had found her out and had
begun to go through and through her, till it was more than she could
bear. But Essy, crying into her apron, wouldn't have lifted a finger to
stop Miss Alice.
"Poor laass," Essy said to herself, "she looves to plaay. And Vicar, he'll
not hold out mooch longer. He'll put foot down fore she gets trow."
Through the screaming of the Polonaise Essy listened for the opening
of the study door.

VIII
The study door did not open all at once.
"Wisdom and patience, wisdom and patience----" The Vicar kept on
muttering as he scowled. Those were his watchwords in his dealings
with his womenkind.
The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed to
him his god-like serenity. He was unaware that he was trying to control
at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.
He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned
and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen. The Vicar's body stretched
tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false
show of muscular energy. The Vicar's face had a subtle quality of
deception. The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut
moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled)
made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic. It approached,
and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated pupils, the stare
of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red mouth revealed its

profound and secret sensuality.
The interior that contained him was no less deceptive. Its book-lined
walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not. He had
had an eye to this effect. He had placed in prominent positions the
books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a
schoolmaster. You were caught at the very door by the thick red line of
The Tudor Classics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato, with
Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's Translations
in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey and Butcher
and Lang; by Æschylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had carried
the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes behind a
little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous temptation. Of his
own accord and with a deliberate intention to deceive, he had added the
Early Fathers, Tillotsen's Sermons and Farrar's Life of Christ.
On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes of
The Record, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie
Corelli. On the ledge of his bureau _Blackwood's Magazine_, uncut,
lay ready to his hand. The Spectator, in process of skimming, was on
his knees. The Standard, fairly gutted, was on the floor. There was no
room for it anywhere else.
For the Vicar's study was much too small for him. Sitting there, in an
arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had taken
flight before the awful invasion of his furniture. His bookcases
hemmed him in on three sides. His roll-top desk, advancing on him
from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair. His
bureau, armed