The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence (best books for students to read txt) 📕

There were already acquaintances on the tram. She nodded in answer to their salutation, but so obviously from a distance, that they kept turning round to eye her and Ciccio. But they left her alone. The breach between her and them was established for ever—and it was her will which established it.

So up and down the weary hills of the hilly, industrial countryside, till at last they drew near to Woodhouse. They passed the ruins of Throttle-Ha'penny, and Alvina glanced at it indifferent. They ran along the Knarborough Road. A fair number of Woodhouse young people were strolling along the pavements in their Sunday clothes. She knew them all. She knew Lizzie Bates's fox furs, and Fanny Clough's lilac costume, and Mrs. Smitham's winged hat. She knew them all. And almost inevitably the old Woodhouse feeling began to steal over her, she was glad they could not see her, she was a little ashamed of Ciccio. She wished, for the moment, Ciccio were not there. And as the time came to get down, she looked anxiously back and forth to see at which halt she had better descend—where fewer people would notice her. But then she threw her scruples to the wind, and descended into the staring, Sunday afternoon street, attended by Ciccio, who carried her bag. She knew she was a marked figure.

They slipped round to Manchester House. Miss Pinnegar expected Alvina, but by the train, which came later. So she had to be knocked up, for she was lying down. She opened the door looking a little patched in her cheeks, because of her curious colouring, and a little forlorn, and a little dumpy, and a little irritable.

"I didn't know there'd be two of you," was her greeting.

"Didn't you," said Alvina, kissing her. "Ciccio came to carry my bag."

"Oh," said Miss Pinnegar. "How do you do?" and she thrust out her hand to him. He shook it loosely.

"I had your wire," said Miss Pinnegar. "You said the train. Mrs.
Rollings is coming in at four again—"

"Oh all right—" said Alvina.

The house was silent and afternoon-like. Ciccio took off his coat and sat down in Mr. Houghton's chair. Alvina told him to smoke. He kept silent and reserved. Miss Pinnegar, a poor, patch-cheeked, rather round-backed figure with grey-brown fringe, stood as if she did not quite know what to say or do.

She followed Alvina upstairs to her room.

"I can't think why you bring him here," snapped Miss Pinnegar. "I don't know what you're thinking about. The whole place is talking already."

"I don't care," said Alvina. "I like him."

"Oh—for shame!" cried Miss Pinnegar, lifting her hand with Miss Frost's helpless, involuntary movement. "What do you think of yourself? And your father a month dead."

"It doesn't matter. Father is dead. And I'm sure the dead don't mind."

"I never knew such things as you say."

"Why? I mean them."

Miss Pinnegar stood blank and helpless.

"You're not asking him to stay the night," she blurted.

"Yes. And I'm going back with him to Madame tomorrow. You know I'm part of the company now, as pianist."

"And are you going to marry him?"

"I don't know."

"How can you say you don't know! Why, it's awful. You make me feel
I shall go out of my mind."

"But I don't know," said Alvina.

"It's incredible! Simply incredible! I believe you're out of your senses. I used to think sometimes there was something wrong with your mother. And that's what it is with you. You're not quite right in your mind. You need to be looked after."

"Do I, Miss Pinnegar! Ah, well, don't you trouble to look after me, will you?"

"No one will if I don't."

"I hope no one will."

There was a pause.

"I'm ashamed to live another day in Woodhouse," said Miss Pinnegar.

"I'm leaving it for ever," said Alvina.

"I should think so," said Miss Pinnegar.

Suddenly she sank into a chair, and burst into tears, wailing:

"Your poor father! Your poor father!"

"I'm sure the dead are all right. Why must you pity him?"

"You're a lost girl!" cried Miss Pinnegar.

"Am I really?" laughed Alvina. It sounded funny.

"Yes, you're a lost girl," sobbed Miss Pinnegar, on a final note of despair.

"I like being lost," said Alvina.

Miss Pinnegar wept herself into silence. She looked huddled and forlorn. Alvina went to her and laid her hand on her shoulder.

"Don't fret, Miss Pinnegar," she said. "Don't be silly. I love to be with Ciccio and Madame. Perhaps in the end I shall marry him. But if I don't—" her hand suddenly gripped Miss Pinnegar's heavy arm till it hurt—"I wouldn't lose a minute of him, no, not for anything would I."

Poor Miss Pinnegar dwindled, convinced.

"You make it hard for me, in Woodhouse," she said, hopeless.

"Never mind," said Alvina, kissing her. "Woodhouse isn't heaven and earth."

"It's been my home for forty years."

"It's been mine for thirty. That's why I'm glad to leave it." There was a pause.

"I've been thinking," said Miss Pinnegar, "about opening a little business in Tamworth. You know the Watsons are there."

"I believe you'd be happy," said Alvina.

Miss Pinnegar pulled herself together. She had energy and courage still.

"I don't want to stay here, anyhow," she said. "Woodhouse has nothing for me any more."

"Of course it hasn't," said Alvina. "I think you'd be happier away from it."

"Yes—probably I should—now!"

None the less, poor Miss Pinnegar was grey-haired, she was almost a dumpy, odd old woman.

They went downstairs. Miss Pinnegar put on the kettle.

"Would you like to see the house?" said Alvina to Ciccio.

He nodded. And she took him from room to room. His eyes looked quickly and curiously over everything, noticing things, but without criticism.

"This was my mother's little sitting-room," she said. "She sat here for years, in this chair."

"Always here?" he said, looking into Alvina's face.

"Yes. She was ill with her heart. This is another photograph of her.
I'm not like her."

"Who is that?" he asked, pointing to a photograph of the handsome, white-haired Miss Frost.

"That was Miss Frost, my governess. She lived here till she died. I loved her—she meant everything to me."

"She also dead—?"

"Yes, five years ago."

They went to the drawing-room. He laid his hand on the keys of the piano, sounding a chord.

"Play," she said.

He shook his head, smiling slightly. But he wished her to play. She sat and played one of Kishwégin's pieces. He listened, faintly smiling.

"Fine piano—eh?" he said, looking into her face.

"I like the tone," she said.

"Is it yours?"

"The piano? Yes. I suppose everything is mine—in name at least. I don't know how father's affairs are really."

He looked at her, and again his eye wandered over the room. He saw a little coloured portrait of a child with a fleece of brownish-gold hair and surprised eyes, in a pale-blue stiff frock with a broad dark-blue sash.

"You?" he said.

"Do you recognize me?" she said. "Aren't I comical?"

She took him upstairs—first to the monumental bedroom.

"This was mother's room," she said. "Now it is mine."

He looked at her, then at the things in the room, then out of the window, then at her again. She flushed, and hurried to show him his room, and the bath-room. Then she went downstairs.

He kept glancing up at the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms, taking in the size and proportion of the house, and the quality of the fittings.

"It is a big house," he said. "Yours?"

"Mine in name," said Alvina. "Father left all to me—and his debts as well, you see."

"Much debts?"

"Oh yes! I don't quite know how much. But perhaps more debts than there is property. I shall go and see the lawyer in the morning. Perhaps there will be nothing at all left for me, when everything is paid."

She had stopped on the stairs, telling him this, turning round to him, who was on the steps above. He looked down on her, calculating. Then he smiled sourly.

"Bad job, eh, if it is all gone—!" he said.

"I don't mind, really, if I can live," she said.

He spread his hands, deprecating, not understanding. Then he glanced up the stairs and along the corridor again, and downstairs into the hall.

"A fine big house. Grand if it was yours," he said.

"I wish it were," she said rather pathetically, "if you like it so much."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Hé!" he said. "How not like it!"

"I don't like it," she said. "I think it's a gloomy miserable hole. I hate it. I've lived here all my life and seen everything bad happen here. I hate it."

"Why?" he said, with a curious, sarcastic intonation.

"It's a bad job it isn't yours, for certain," he said, as they entered the living-room, where Miss Pinnegar sat cutting bread and butter.

"What?" said Miss Pinnegar sharply.

"The house," said Alvina.

"Oh well, we don't know. We'll hope for the best," replied Miss Pinnegar, arranging the bread and butter on the plate. Then, rather tart, she added: "It is a bad job. And a good many things are a bad job, besides that. If Miss Houghton had what she ought to have, things would be very different, I assure you."

"Oh yes," said Ciccio, to whom this address was directed.

"Very different indeed. If all the money hadn't been—lost—in the way it has, Miss Houghton wouldn't be playing the piano, for one thing, in a cinematograph show."

"No, perhaps not," said Ciccio.

"Certainly not. It's not the right thing for her to be doing, at all!"

"You think not?" said Ciccio.

"Do you imagine it is?" said Miss Pinnegar, turning point blank on him as he sat by the fire.

He looked curiously at Miss Pinnegar, grinning slightly.

"Hé!" he said. "How do I know!"

"I should have thought it was obvious," said Miss Pinnegar.

"Hé!" he ejaculated, not fully understanding.

"But of course those that are used to nothing better can't see anything but what they're used to," she said, rising and shaking the crumbs from her black silk apron, into the fire. He watched her.

Miss Pinnegar went away into the scullery. Alvina was laying a fire in the drawing-room. She came with a dustpan to take some coal from the fire of the living-room.

"What do you want?" said Ciccio, rising. And he took the shovel from her hand.

"Big, hot fires, aren't they?" he said, as he lifted the burning coals from the glowing mass of the grate.

"Enough," said Alvina. "Enough! We'll put it in the drawing-room." He carried the shovel of flaming, smoking coals to the other room, and threw them in the grate on the sticks, watching Alvina put on more pieces of coal.

"Fine, a fire! Quick work, eh? A beautiful thing, a fire! You know what they say in my place: You can live without food, but you can't live without fire."

"But I thought it was always hot in Naples," said Alvina.

"No, it isn't. And my village, you know, when I was small boy, that was in the mountains, an hour quick train from Naples. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer—"

"As cold as England?" said Alvina.

"Hé—and colder. The wolves come down. You could hear them crying in the night, in the frost—"

"How terrifying—!" said Alvina.

"And they will kill the dogs! Always they kill the dogs. You know, they hate dogs, wolves do." He made a queer noise, to show how wolves hate dogs. Alvina understood, and laughed.

"So should I, if I was a wolf," she said.

"Yes—eh?" His eyes gleamed on her for a moment.

"Ah but, the poor dogs! You find them bitten—carried away among the trees or the stones, hard to find them, poor things, the next day."

"How frightened they must be—!" said Alvina.

"Frightened—hu!" he made sudden gesticulations and ejaculations, which added volumes to his few words.

"And did you like it, your village?" she said.

He put his head on one side in deprecation.

"No," he said, "because, you see—hé, there is nothing to do—no money—work—work—work—no life—you see nothing. When I was a small boy my father, he died, and my mother comes with