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Page 43
"Ah," said Mrs. Fisher, "I knew you were not asleep. If you had
been you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground."
"Waste," said Mrs. Fisher. "I don't like smoking for women, but
I still less like waste."
"What does one do with people like this?" Scrap asked herself,
her eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare
but appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.
"Now you'll take my advice," said Mrs. Fisher, touched, "and not
neglect what may very well turn into an illness. We are in Italy, you
know, and one has to be careful. You ought, to begin with, to go to
bed."
"I never go to bed," snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as
forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing
the part of Poor Jo in dramatized version of Bleak House--"I'm always
moving on," said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman;
and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet
parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.
It was wonderful, Scrap's voice. It had given her, in the ten
years since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit
can have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable. She ought,
with a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every
kind of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the speaking
voice; and what a fascination, what a spell lay in that. Such was the
liveliness of her face and the beauty of her colouring that there was
not a man into whose eyes at the sight of her there did not leap a
flame of intensest interest; but, when he heard her voice, the flame in
that man's eyes was caught and fixed. It was the same with every man,
educated and uneducated, old, young, desirable themselves or
undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and
Tommies--during the war she had had a perplexing time--bishops equally
with vergers--round about her confirmation startling occurrences had
taken place--wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant
or idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how
long and securely married: into the eyes of every one of them, when
they saw her, leapt this flame, and when they heard her it stayed
there.
Scrap had had enough of this look. It only led to difficulties.
At first it had delighted her. She had been excited, triumphant. To
be apparently incapable of doing or saying the wrong thing, to be
applauded, listened to, petted, adored wherever she went, and when she
came home to find nothing there either but the most indulgent proud
fondness--why, how extremely pleasant. And so easy, too. No
preparation necessary for this achievement, no hard work, nothing to
learn. She need take no trouble. She had only to appear, and
presently say something.
But gradually experiences gathered round her. After all, she had
to take trouble, she had to make efforts, because, she discovered with
astonishment and rage, she had to defend herself. That look, that
leaping look, meant that she was going to be grabbed at. Some of those
who had it were more humble than others, especially if they were young,
but they all, according to their several ability, grabbed; and she who
had entered the world so jauntily, with her head in the air and the
completest confidence in anybody whose hair was grey, began to
distrust, and then to dislike, and soon to shrink away from, and
presently to be indignant. Sometimes it was just as if she didn't
belong to herself, wasn't her own at all, but was regarded as a
universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work. Really men . . . And
she found herself involved in queer vague quarrels, being curiously
hated. Really women . . . And when the war came, and she flung
herself into it along with everybody else, it finished her. Really
generals . . .
The war finished Scrap. It killed the one man she felt safe
with, whom she would have married, and it finally disgusted her with
love. Since then she had been embittered. She was struggling as
angrily in the sweet stuff of life as a wasp got caught in honey. Just
as desperately did she try to unstick her wings. It gave her no
pleasure to outdo other women; she didn't want their tiresome men.
What could one do with men when one had got them? None of them would
talk to her of anything but the things of love, and how foolish and
fatiguing that became after a bit. It was as though a healthy person
with a normal hunger was given nothing whatever to eat but sugar.
Love, love . . . the very word made her want to slap somebody. "Why
should I love you? Why should I?" she would ask amazed sometimes when
somebody was trying--somebody was always trying--to propose to her.
But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence.
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