Daphne in Fitzroy Street/Chapter 1

T WAS the fifth of April. Also it was a very fine day. Further, it was Daphne’s birthday—the eighteenth. Besides this, it was a Thursday, the jour de sortie, when all the girls who had friends and relations were taken away into the bosom of families. Daphne had no relations or friends in any of the tall, flat-faced, green-shuttered houses in the town, nor did any family of hers have its address at any of the white villas that slept in green gardens out among the orchards.

She was not the only one whom no mother called for, no white-capped, prim-lipped bonne escorted through the gay, interesting, alive streets. Inez de Mattos, her people owned a castle in Spain, and no visitors ever called to see her; Guilberte, her people were in Paris; Madeleine had no relations; and Columbine Pinsent’s grandfather was packing in far away Chicago the pork that should make her an heiress. And there were others.

Columbine was to leave at Midsummer, to cross the ocean and take up those honours wrung from protesting pigs. Little Inez would be at school for a long while yet. Madeleine was to be a nun someday, and Guilberte would only leave school to be married. Daphne—well, Daphne had always been at school, and she hated it, and loved it, and was bored by it, and interested in it, and felt for it all the ebb and flow of varied emotion which girls feel for their homes.

The sun shone with a clear sparkle on the ivy leaves that framed the refectory windows. Long, narrow horse-shoe tables, spread with coarse, unbleached linen, were outlined by a vivid, varying fringe of girls, mostly eating thin soup and wide slabs of pain de ménage. The English girls ate eggs and drank chocolate. The whole seventy-four were gesticulating like monkeys and chattering like parrots. For Thursday was a holiday. And on holidays one might talk at meal times without fear or restraint. On other days, if one talked, it had to be done without moving one’s lips, in a voice too low to be heard above the clatter of plate and spoon and the setting down of the yellow mug after drinking. Daphne had invented this way of talking, and in it she and Columbine were easily first.

“I’ve arranged everything,” said Columbine, breaking her eggs into her mug and mixing them with vinegar and salt. Usually it was Daphne who arranged everything, but this being her birthday, etiquette demanded a temporary abdication. “Marie Thibault’s to get her brother to go back to college to fetch a ball he’ll say he lost in the garden. And he can lower the things to us over the wall. It was thoughtful of those old chaps to build the boys’ school next to the girls’ school, wasn’t it?”

“It was all one convent once,” said Daphne, through a mouthful of toast. Those whom the cook loved had toast with their eggs – slices of toast as big as little tea-trays and very much thicker. “We’re going to have the loveliest feast,” she went on, stooping to the round-eyed, thin-faced child beside her, “because it’s your Daffy’s birthday.”

“I know that,” said the child, superior; “hasn’t my Daffy wondered what its Dormouse has been doing all her playtime in wonderful secrecy?”

“I’ve wondered till I haven’t been able to sleep for wondering. What was it, honey of my heart?”

“You don’t think,” said the child, “that I could tell you the secret of my life now, all in the middle of the bread-and-butter and soup? Afterward, when all the girls have been fetched. Just you and me, alone in the garden—and Columbine, because she helped. Just us three and the secret splendidness.”

“I don’t know how I shall bear to wait,” said Daphne, who had found it hard, during these last weeks, to avoid knowing every stitch of the secret splendidness ardently worked at and hidden on her approach under the child’s black cotton sarrau.

“I’ve got a present for you, too,” said Columbine, “if Doris will let me give it after hers.”

“You’ve remembered what I said?” said Daphne, turning on her friend with a threatening frown. “I won’t stand any nonsense, you know”

“I’ve remembered. But it’s hard to be forbidden to spend more than two francs on the only girl one ever loved, when one is”

“When one is rolling in money—yes, fling your hateful money in my penniless face! I’m glad you remembered the day, though.” Her china-blue eyes were soft and bright.

“It’s the kind of date one does forget, isn’t it—the day that brought into the world the dearest, prettiest, cleverest, nicest”

“Mademoiselle Carrmichel,” said the cool, clear voice of Madame from the crown of the horseshoe, “will remain after the others. I have to speak to her.”

“Oh, Coreopsis!” sighed Daphne—“Oui, Madame—Oh, Coreopsis, what have I done now!”

“And on your birthday, too. What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” said Daphne, hopelessly.

“When I do naughtiness,” observed Doris, with pride, “I always know.”

“There’s no mistake about your naughtiness, is there, my cabbage?” said Daphne, as the seventy-three rattled and rustled, rose and filed out. “Now for it. Wish me luck, Columbine, or rather pray to St. Nicholas. He’s the one who looks after naughty children. My doom is fixed—all is indeed over. Farewell. I’ll come out to the terrace as soon as I’ve caught it.”

“Caught what?” asked Doris, eagerly. “Oh, will you show it to me when you’ve caught it?” “I’ve no doubt I shall show it,” said Daphne ruefully. “Red eyes—on one’s birthday, too. Here goes!”

The terrace is built on a cliff that goes down a sheer forty feet to the white road that follows the winding line of the river. This is why the pupils at the most select school in provincial France are allowed to walk there without surveillance, and to look out, from that safe height, on the dangers and temptations of the wicked world. And in safety. Little stray wavelets of the great sea of iniquity that surges outside school boundaries sometimes dash themselves against that tremendous fortification, but always in vain.

When an impressionable Polish artist, fired by the vision of cloudy blond hair and blue and white, the festival dress of an enfant de Marie, purchased a bow, and, winging his arrow with an impassioned billet addressed to La Belle Blonde, shot at the terrace, his shaft stuck in one of the clipped beech-trees of the terrace berceau, and the first person to see it was Madame.

“Hold!” she said, “what a droll of a bird! The gardener shall fetch it down tomorrow—with the ladder.”

And, on the morrow, by means of the ladder, the gardener did bring down an innocent arrow, winged with the blank sheet of an exercise book—because Daphne, adventurous, prompt, and alleging a finger cut in the sharpening of a pencil, had escaped from the afternoon drawing-class, her hand bound in a handkerchief where crimson lake and burnt sienna artfully simulated gore. She had run like a deer to the terrace, climbed the tree, disengaged the billet of adoration, replaced it by a folded blank paper, and got back to her sympathising class, when she had torn up and buried the amoristic effusion—less in the interest of school discipline than in that of the enfant de Marie. The adventure made her happy for a week. It satisfied that sense of personal competence to any crisis that the routine of school was inadequate to feed.

It was Daphne, too, who discovered the northwest passage. All along the top of that part of the old convent, which was now the modern girls’ school, ran a great garret, eighty or ninety feet long. It was next to the box-room where the trunks of pupils were kept, the trunks where clothes not in use were stored and books not judged suitable for school reading. The box-room was only visited under strictest supervision. At the back of it was a pile of old lumber—things cast out of use, but by some thrifty hand not cast out of house and home—dusty brown saddles, the tangled straps of broken harness; dressers and settles and chairs that no one wanted any more; the carved throne of a bishop, all Gothic tracery and tarnished gilding; the broken, heaped up, angular woodwork of the old chapel, and, God knows how it came into a convent, a squarely-knit oaken cradle.

It was Daphne who spied, beyond all, a light gleam through the shadows of this outworn usefulness, and longed to explore what she knew was a hole or a door in the corner of the partition wall. But surveillance was too keen. In the big garret, however, where the seed potatoes were kept, and the heaps of turnips and carrots and haricot beans, where the onions and the cobwebs hung from the rafters, there was no surveillance—because there was no right of entry. Everyone knew where the key of the grenier hung in the portress’s lodge, but it was Daphne who, light-footed and light-fingered, lifted it from its nail while the portress snored in the July afternoon quiet, stole up the many stairs three at a time, fleet as a climbing panther, opened the grenier door, and traversed, quiet and quick as any panther, its whole long length. The box-room was not forty feet long. There must be another room behind it. And there was. The partition did not reach to the outer wall—the rough ends of the laths stuck through the plaster toward the outer wall, but yet leaving a space where Daphne’s slimness might pass, did indeed, with a squeeze and a torn apron, pass unhurt. And now she was in a room lighted only by a skylight, the mate to the skylight in the grenier. and in front of her was the door in the wall and through it the mingled lines like broken scaffolding, of chair and table and heaped discarded furniture. She shifted a chair here, a table leg there—made a practicable tunnel through the heap, blocked it with old curtains; and henceforth everyone’s box and everyone’s confiscated literature was available at any hour and Daphne was the school heroine. The key that Marie Thibault’s brother had got made from a wax impression of the key that blinked in the sun on the wall of the portress’s lodge lay in Daphne’s deep under-pocket. And her heart was glad every time she felt its secret weight jog her knee.

Madame’s surveillance was strict; she thought that she knew everything in her girls’ lives. And, indeed, she did know most things till Daphne came to her kingdom—Daphne, whose father was a bookworm, whose grandfather was an explorer, whose great-grandfather was a lieutenant at Trafalgar.

Columbine and Doris went down through spring sunshine toward the terrace. The garden was covered with light veils of plum-blossom and little green new leaves, through which boughs and tree trunks still showed strongly black. The borders of the path were alight with anemones, early tulips, late daffodils, and the beginnings of the fallen sky of forget-me-nots. The high wall that lowered above the fruit trees bore a line of mingled fire and blood, wall-flowers red and brown and yellow. The larch by the old convent graveyard, away to the right, wore its new spring green studded with ruby buds. All about was the slender green promise of white lilac and the fat grey promise of flags. The beech alley was all grey stems touched with a million bright, hard buds.

“Like very sharp drawing-stumps, aren’t they?” said Columbine, as she and the child passed onto the shadow-netted stones of the terrace.

“Yes, just,” said the child, “and the trunks and the branches look as if they had been polished with black-lead. Have you got my present?”

“Next to my heart. Look!”

From the front of her dress she drew a little roll of pink tissue-paper, unrolled it, and showed the “secret splendidness”—a kettle-holder, bearing a kitten on a red cushion worked in Berlin wool, cross-stitched, grounded in blue, and lined and corded with crimson satin.

“It is like a dream of heaven,” said the child, in a hushed voice.

“It’s very, very beautiful,” said Columbine. “Mine’s not half so nice. And, mind you, don’t say mine’s nice or she won’t take it. Let’s play conquerors till she comes. There are lots here against the rose hedge.”

“We’ve played conquerors,” shouted Doris, as Daphne came quickly down the path, “for ever and ever, and I’ve won. Did she scold you very, very?”

Daphne reached them, a whirlwind of fluttered black pinafore and long red hair.

“Oh!” she cried, catching one in each arm. “Pinch me, both of you. Am I alive or am I dreaming? Am I the most wretched girl in the world or am I mad with joy? Pinch me, pinch me, and settle the question one way or the other.”

“What ever?” The three fell in a tumbled heap on the blue-green faded garden seat.

“Oh, my dears!” Daphne gasped. “We’re to go home tomorrow—Doris and me. I thought we never, never should, and I’m going to spend every penny I’ve got in a blow-out tonight. Madame goes to see her sister, and together they go to the Mayor’s ball. Course quite clear and I can get round old Claudine, and Miss Henney will be writing to her sweetheart. We’ll have the show of our lives. And then I shall never, never see you again, my Columbine!”

“Oh yes, you will,” said Columbine, aghast, but conscientiously consolatory. “I’ll come and see you the minute I leave school.”

“Oh no—I know you never will. Everything’s over forever, and I’m to put my hair up, so as to be respectable for travelling!”