“He’ll say I should send Gittel.”
“Bring Gittel. She and Mireio love gossiping.”
“Perhaps. He’s irritable. He calls you Juno. What is that?”
“The wife of the king of the gods in Ancient Rome. She was frosty, sour. A nag – that dreadful thing women do because men won’t listen.”
“Then he’s asked you for favours?”
“Oh—”
“And you put him off. Ysabelle!”
“What? Do you want me to say yes?”
“No – no – but he’s so proud—”
“He’s a monster. He’ll grow tired of hunting me.”
“He has begun to dislike you. Tonight he said to me, Be careful what you say to her.”
“Then – I must flatter him more. Oh God,” said Ysabelle, “I’d even accept his caresses, if it were the only way.”
They sat in silence. Why was the silence so strange? Of course, here there was no nightingale.
“Perhaps,” said Ysabelle, “I can contrive to put some stupid pretty woman in his way, one that won’t recoil.”
“Sometimes . . .” said Hāna, “when I was only ten, I had little breasts, and he tried and tried to see them. When I wouldn’t, he made up a story about me to our father. I don’t know what Ernst said, but my father had my nurse tie my hands together every night for three months. She used to cry as she did it. But she’d never explain.”
Ysabelle got up. Before she could prevent herself, she retched violently. Hāna rushed to her. At the touch of Hāna the sickness was gone.
“Dionysos,” said Ysabelle, “the god of wine and madness, the breaker of chains – do you see sometimes, in the woods, the pine cones piled up together into the form of another cone, the drawing of an eye on a tree or rock – that’s the Eye of the Mother, whom Dionysos sometimes represents. And they killed two goats, and they poured wine. Let’s run away, Hāna.”
“How can we?” said Hāna.
It was true. They were immovable, fixed. One to the man, his life. The other to a place. They did not properly see this, how they had been warped to fit and nailed home. And yet escape was closed by a deep invisible wall.
Ysabelle thought, Perhaps he’ll die. An accident, thrown from the trap as the pony bolts at a flash of lightning, clap of moistureless thunder from the mountains. Or too much drink, a haemorrhage.
But Hāna kisses her breasts and Ysabelle melts like wax, and flows down into the rose-red fire.
Their clothes thrown away, murmuring in the stillness, cries choked back, not even a nightingale to shield them with her noisy song.
Hinges. Unhinged.
A locket? A door? Madness?
The story, told locally, clandestinely, was that Ernst returned unexpectedly, after all, that night – perhaps a quarrel with his friend? The house was in darkness and silence, and so he went up quietly to bed, which does not seem very like him, one would imagine actually he would make a disturbance, rouse everyone up, want things done. Or could he have been suspicious?
Passing – on tiptoe? Surely not – the door to Hāna’s room, he heard them whispering, and the creak of the wooden bed.
He flung the door wide on its hinges and found them naked, hair down, uncorsetted, undone – his sister Hāna and Madame Ysabelle.
This is not the case.
Ernst rode home in the trap at about nine in the morning, from his country breakfast with Le Rue. There had been no quarrel, for Ernst and Le Rue enjoyed a perfect mutual respect and approbation, tinctured pleasantly for each by a wisp of well-concealed tolerance; he for Ernst’s slight blindness to the essentials of science, since Ernst was so bound up in theory, nature and the world; Ernst for Le Rue’s slight blindness to theory, nature and the world, since Le Rue was absorbed utterly by science.
Ernst was not in an ill mood. Only the idea of Ysabelle’s having stayed with his sister that night was a small but tart irritant, that had begun to work on him directly he brought the trap on to the rough road, and saw her house before him under the mountains.
Ysabelle was a tease, or a fool. He was beginning, frankly, to notice the failings she had pointed out to him in herself, the elements that made her, she said, unworthy of him. Her “fear” of him he was not, now, so certain of. For fear, to women, was of course a powerful aphrodisiac. It had seemed to him, some four days previously, that this might be the real fount of her desires – to be physically mastered. And so, entering her home on the pretext of requiring eggs from Mireio’s hens, he had ended by pressing Ysabelle harshly to the wall of her white wooden sitting room, brutally kissing her mouth, penetrating it with his tongue, while with his free hand he mounded her skirt and squeezed, through layers of clothing, her most interesting feature.
She had somehow got away from him, and stood panting, her face as white as a china plate, her eyes inflamed. This might be arousal, and he approached her again, at which she hoarsely said, “I won’t be responsible for any harm.” And pulled a fire-iron up from the stone hearth.
“If you keep on like this,” he said, “you’ll put me off.”
“Get away from me,” she cried, like a peasant. But then she shook herself and said, putting down the nasty-looking implement, “Excuse me, Ernst. But I’m not for you. I can’t – expose myself to the tragedy of losing you, once you tire of me. You know how women are. This sort of liaison – will mean so much more to me.”
“I’d think, from another woman, this was a demand for a bourgeois marriage.”
Ysabelle threw back her head and laughed. She was hysterical and unappealing. Women were unhinged, one knew this, at certain times more so, and she was approaching that age when they were at their worst.
Why had he fancied her? Well, this was a barren spot.
He himself laughed shortly. “Then, good morning.”
Outside, Mireio came sidling with a basket of eggs. It seemed to him she leered at his reddened mouth. Doubtless that other bitch thought she could get more out of him by frustrating him, but he was not of that sort. Besides, if ever he were to marry, he would want youth, for sons, and some money, too.
His annoyance with Ysabelle did not abate as, mentally, he cast her off. He supposed this was a sexual matter. She had led him on, now would not accomodate him as she had hinted she would.
He did not like her. No. He would rather she did not come any more into his house. And Hāna must be warned. Hāna was too trusting, and such women as Ysabelle were not to be trusted. Particularly by their own sex, for women were faithless, and nowhere more so than with each other, filling each other’s heads with idiocy, always jealous, treacherous.
Seeing presently his own country house from the trap, Ernst thought that perhaps they might go back to the city. Le Rue could be invited to stay there, in a proper flat, say, with amenities, and efficient servants. Or perhaps not, for Hāna might well make eyes at him, as she had done before with their few male visitors, afterwards making out they had frightened her – familiar tale!
Some way still from Ernst’s house, the pony, unsatisfactorily also his property, cast a shoe.
Ernst got out, and stood cursing, damning the beast. Then he left it there, and went on foot towards his home, where Gittel must be sent to fetch a man for the horse from the village.
So, he approached, walking, in a morning loud with bird song – even the nightgales that, here, had not used their voices through the night. A church bell was tolling too, in the next valley. This was for a burial.
He saw them in a little nook, between the wall and a leaning wild cedar. Hāna’s hair was partly unpinned, but Ysabelle was dressed for her journey home along the upper valley. She wore her dark gown, as usual. She looked quite conventional, and conceivably, if he had met her like this, returning from the visit, as he would have done, a minute later, he would have thought her in fact very plain, of very little importance to himself.