The Lost Girl · Chapter 7 (5/5)

Then, he looked up from stooping there under the horses, with a long, slow look of his yellow eyes, at Alvina. She felt unconsciously flattered. His long, yellow look lingered, holding her eyes. She wondered what he was thinking. Yet he never spoke. He turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to prick up alert.

“This is mine,” he said, with his hand on the neck of the old thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze.

“I think he’s nice,” she said. “He seems so sensitive.”

“In England,” he answered suddenly, “horses live a long time, because they don’t live⁠—never alive⁠—see? In England railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels.” He smiled into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable. But a deeper impulse made her smile into his face, as she said to him:

“They like you to touch them.”

“Who?” His eyes kept hers. Curious how dark they seemed, with only a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her, beyond her usual self, impersonal.

“The horses,” she said. She was afraid of his long, catlike look. Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her to be the only passionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in him. In him⁠—in what?

That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter afternoon were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwégin, in her deerskin, fringed gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her long hair down her back, and with marvellous cloths and trappings on her steed, riding astride on a tall white horse, followed by Max in chieftain’s robes and chieftain’s long headdress of dyed feathers, then by the others in war-paint and feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They carried bows and spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to the waist, in war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up from the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces. He was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback.

Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along the pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy, in an intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood on the pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and passed, jingling the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the wonderful colours of the barred blankets and saddle cloths, the scarlet wool of the accoutrements, the bright tips of feathers. Women shrieked as Ciccio, in his war-paint, wheeled near the pavement. Children screamed and ran. The colliers shouted. Ciccio smiled in his terrifying war-paint, brandished his spear and trotted softly, like a flower on its stem, round to the procession.

Miss Pinnegar and Alvina and James Houghton had come round into Knarborough Road to watch. It was a great moment. Looking along the road they saw all the shopkeepers at their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with the dusky Kishwégin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant, lurid stripes, sitting impassive and all dusky above that intermittent flashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect, easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes, and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying down his back: as he came nearer one saw the wolfskin and the brilliant moccasins against the black sides of his horse; Louis and Goeffrey followed, lurid, horrid in the face, wearing blankets with stroke after stroke of blazing colour upon their duskiness, and sitting stern, holding their spears: lastly, Ciccio, on his bay horse with a green seat, flickering hither and thither in the rear, his feathers swaying, his horse sweating, his face ghastlily smiling in its war-paint. So they advanced down the grey pallor of Knarborough Road, in the late wintry afternoon. Somewhere the sun was setting, and far overhead was a flush of orange.

“Well I never!” murmured Miss Pinnegar. “Well I never!”

The strange savageness of the striped Navajo blankets seemed to her unsettling, advancing down Knarborough Road: she examined Kishwégin curiously.

“Can you believe that that’s Mr. May⁠—he’s exactly like a girl. Well, well⁠—it makes you wonder what is and what isn’t. But aren’t they good? What? Most striking. Exactly like Indians. You can’t believe your eyes. My word what a terrifying race they⁠—” Here she uttered a scream and ran back clutching the wall as Ciccio swept past, brushing her with his horse’s tail, and actually swinging his spear so as to touch Alvina and James Houghton lightly with the butt of it. James too started with a cry, the mob at the corner screamed. But Alvina caught the slow, mischievous smile as the painted horror showed his teeth in passing; she was able to flash back an excited laugh. She felt his yellow-tawny eyes linger on her, in that one second, as if negligently.

“I call that too much!” Miss Pinnegar was crying, thoroughly upset. “Now that was unnecessary! Why it was enough to scare one to death. Besides, it’s dangerous. It ought to be put a stop to. I don’t believe in letting these show-people have liberties.”

The cavalcade was slowly passing, with its uneasy horses and its flare of striped colour and its silent riders. Ciccio was trotting softly back, on his green saddlecloth, suave as velvet, his dusky, naked torso beautiful.

“Eh, you’d think he’d get his death,” the women in the crowd were saying.

“A proper savage one, that. Makes your blood run cold⁠—”

“Ay, an’ a man for all that, take’s painted face for what’s worth. A tidy man, I say.”

He did not look at Alvina. The faint, mischievous smile uncovered his teeth. He fell in suddenly behind Geoffrey, with a jerk of his steed, calling out to Geoffrey in Italian.

It was becoming cold. The cavalcade fell into a trot, Mr. May shaking rather badly. Ciccio halted, rested his lance against a lamppost, switched his green blanket from beneath him, flung it round him as he sat, and darted off. They had all disappeared over the brow of Lumley Hill, descending. He was gone too. In the wintry twilight the crowd began, lingeringly, to turn away. And in some strange way, it manifested its disapproval of the spectacle: as grownup men and women, they were a little bit insulted by such a show. It was an anachronism. They wanted a direct appeal to the mind. Miss Pinnegar expressed it.

“Well,” she said, when she was safely back in Manchester House, with the gas lighted, and as she was pouring the boiling water into the teapot, “You may say what you like. It’s interesting in a way, just to show what savage Red-Indians were like. But it’s childish. It’s only childishness. I can’t understand, myself, how people can go on liking shows. Nothing happens. It’s not like the cinema, where you see it all and take it all in at once; you know everything at a glance. You don’t know anything by looking at these people. You know they’re only men dressed up, for money. I can’t see why you should encourage it. I don’t hold with idle show-people, parading round, I don’t, myself. I like to go to the cinema once a week. It’s instruction, you take it all in at a glance, all you need to know, and it lasts you for a week. You can get to know everything about people’s actual lives from the cinema. I don’t see why you want people dressing up and showing off.”

They sat down to their tea and toast and marmalade, during this harangue. Miss Pinnegar was always like a douche of cold water to Alvina, bringing her back to consciousness after a delicious excitement. In a minute Madame and Ciccio and all seemed to become unreal⁠—the actual unrealities: while the ragged dithering pictures of the film were actual, real as the day. And Alvina was always put out when this happened. She really hated Miss Pinnegar. Yet she had nothing to answer. They were unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest. Ciccio was just a fantasy blown in on the wind, to blow away again. The real, permanent thing was Woodhouse, the semper idem Knarborough Road, and the unchangeable grubby gloom of Manchester House, with the stuffy, padding Miss Pinnegar, and her father, whose fingers, whose very soul seemed dirty with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and green cloth, he was a mountebank and an extraneous nonentity, a coloured old rag blown down the Knarborough Road into Limbo. Into Limbo. Whilst Miss Pinnegar and her father sat frowsily on forever, eating their toast and cutting off the crust, and sipping their third cup of tea. They would never blow away⁠—never, never. Woodhouse was there to eternity. And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and have done with her. Whilst Miss Pinnegar lived on forever.

This put Alvina into a sharp temper.

“Miss Pinnegar,” she said. “I do think you go on in the most unattractive way sometimes. You’re a regular spoilsport.”

“Well,” said Miss Pinnegar tartly. “I don’t approve of your way of sport, I’m afraid.”

“You can’t disapprove of it as much as I hate your spoilsport existence,” said Alvina in a flare.

“Alvina, are you mad!” said her father.

“Wonder I’m not,” said Alvina, “considering what my life is.”