The Three Sisters | Page 5

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 ?schylus 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 to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement of the chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.
The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire, of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of the Vicar.
A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the northeast window.
On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace with God and man.
* * * * *
But when he