Encounters (Bowen)/Mrs. Windermere
In the doorway of Fullers', Regent Street, they came face to face. Mrs. Windermere grasped both Esmée's wrists, drew them towards her bosom, and cried in her deep tremolo, "My dear!"
Esmée had not imagined Mrs. Windermere out of Italy. She had never pictured that little pug-dog face without the background of flickering olives, or of velvety sun-gold walls, with cypresses dotted here and there like the exclamation-marks in the lady's conversation. Mrs. Windermere now regarded her with intensity through the long fringes of her hat-brim. She said, "The same Esmée!" and gently massaged the wrists with her thumbs.
"This is splendid," said Esmée inadequately, conscious of a rising pinkness and of the long stream of outcoming ladies dammed by their encounter. "What a funny coincidence!"
"God guided me, dearest!" Mrs. Windermere always mentioned the Deity with confidential familiarity; one felt she had the entree everywhere. "I meant to have lunched at Stewart's."
"I'm sorry you've had lunch."
"I will have more," said Mrs. Windermere recklessly. They pushed their way upstairs and stood over a little table in the window while it was vacated. Esmée untwined the dangling parcels from her fingers and propped up her umbrella in a corner. Mrs. Windermere scanned the menu with the detachment of the satiated, and Esmée confessed that she was hungry. "Then it must be rissoles," said her friend enticingly—"little chicken rissoles. I will have a cup of chocolate and an éclair." She gave the orders to the waitress and sat looking at Esmée and tapping a corner of the menu card against her mouth.
"But you don't live in town?"
"No," said Esmée; "I'm up for the day. You would have written, wouldn't you, if we hadn't met? I should have been so much disappointed if we'd never———"
"I hope to come and stay with you."
"That will be lovely," said Esmée, answering the smile. There was a moment's silence. "Do you miss Italy?"
"Ye-es." It was an absent answer; Mrs. Windermere's thoughts were concentrated elsewhere. "There's something strange about you, child," she said.
Esmée now remembered how her conversation had been always little rushing advances on the personal. She had a way of yawning reproachfully with a little click of the teeth and a "Surely we two know each other too well to talk about the weather?" if one tried to give the conversation an outward twist. Esmée had found their first walks together very interesting, they had had the chilly, unusual, dream-familiar sense of walking in one's skin. "There is something strange," said Mrs. Windermere.
"You look just the same as ever."
"There's a stillness here," said the other, slipping a hand beneath her fur. "Like the stillness in the heart of the whirlwind. Get right into it, live in your most interior self, and you're unchangeable. You haven't found it yet; you're very young, you've never penetrated."
"I don't think I have, perhaps," said Esmée thoughtfully, under the returning influence of Italy. "Perhaps I rather like twirling."
"Ye-es," said Mrs. Windermere, leaning back in her chair. Her lustrous eyes looked out mournfully, contentedly, from under pouchy lids, through the long fringes of her hat; her retroussé nose was powdered delicately mauve, the very moist lips had a way of contracting quickly in the middle of a sentence in an un-puglike effort to retain the saliva. Curly bunches of grey hair lay against her cheeks, a string of Roman pearls was twisted several times round her plump throat; her furs were slung across her bosom and one shoulder; her every movement diffused an odour of Violet de Parme. She had not removed her gloves, and opulent rolls of white kid encircled wrist and forearm; her sleeves fell back from the elbow. She was an orthodox London edition of her Italian self.
"Twirling," she repeated, narrowing her eyes. She looked round the mild, bright, crowded room, rustling with femininity, with its air of modest expensiveness. "Simply twirling? How"—with an obvious connection of ideas—"is your husband?"
"Very well indeed. He would like so much———" Esmée could not picture Wilfred meeting Mrs. Windermere. "He would have liked to have come up with me to-day," she concluded.
"Ye-es," said the other, looking beyond at something. "How did he ever come to let you go to Italy—alone?"
"I wasn't alone, though, was I? I was with Aunt Emma. Someone had to take her and I'd never travelled."
"Spiritually, you were alone. You were alert, a-tiptoe, breathlessly expectant. I came—but it might not have been I! How did he come to let you go like that? Men of his type are not so generous."
"But he isn't that type."
The waitress brought the cup of chocolate, the éclair and the rissoles. Mrs. Windermere stretched out across the dishes, gently disengaged the fork from Esmée's fingers, and turned her hand palm upwards on the table.
"That little hand told me everything," she said. "And do you know, child, you have his image at the back of your eyes. I know the type—little loyal person."
"Wilfred likes me to travel," said Esmée feebly. "He finds me rather a tiresome companion when he wants to talk about places, and you see he never has time to take me abroad himself."
"That was a very young marriage," said Mrs. Windermere, leaning forward suddenly.
"Oh. Do you think so?"
"But you're younger now, after four years of it. Warier, greedier, more dynamic. No children!—never to be any children?"
"I don't know."
"So wise and yet so foolish." She sipped delicately the hot chocolate, put the cup down, and once more slipped her hand under her fur. "The Mother-heart," she said, "is here. It grows and grows—stretching hands out, seeking, finding."
"I expect there are a great many outlets," said Esmée, helping herself to another rissole, "even if one never has any children of one's own. But I hope———"
"What you are seeking," said Mrs. Windermere firmly, "is a lover." She took her fork up, speared the éclair, and watched the cream ooze forth slowly with a smile of sensual contentment. She had been saying things like this repeatedly, all the time they were in Italy. But they didn't, somehow, sound quite nice in Fullers'. Esmée thought she saw a woman near them looking up.
"I don't think I am, you know," she argued gently, wondering at what date Mrs.Windermere had arranged to come and stay with them.
"Oh, child, child. . . . You can't, you know, there's been too much between us. And the Mother-heart knows, you know; the yearning in it brings about a vision. I see you treading strange, dim places; stumbling, crying out, trying to turn back, but always following—the Light." Mrs. Windermere laid down her fork and licked the cream from her lips. "And then," she said slowly, "I see the Light die out—extinguished."
There was a pause. "Thank you very much," said Esmée earnestly; "it—it saves a lot to know beforehand. I mean if the Light is going to go out there's something rather desperate about my following it, isn't there? Wouldn't it be———"
"The Light," interrupted Mrs. Windermere, "is yours to guard."
"But wouldn't it be———"
Mrs. Windermere bowed her head and drew her furs together.
"Such a child," she sighed.
"I think I'll have an éclair too," said Esmée timidly. "Won't you have another one to keep me company?"
"I?" started Mrs. Windermere. "I? Eclair? What? Oh well, if it's going to make you shy, my watching."
Esmée ordered two more éclairs. "What," she inquired, "are your plans? Did you think of going back to Italy?"
"With the swallows—not before the swallows. I must smother down the panting and the tugging, because my friends can't let me go. They just rise up and say I mustn't. Commands, of course, are nothing, but entreaties! Did I tell you in Italy what some people call me?" She laughed deprecatingly and watched the waitress threading her way between the tables with the éclairs. "They call me 'The Helper.' It sounds like something in a mystery play, doesn't it?"
"Oh yes. It's—it's a beautiful name."
"It does seem to be a sort of gift," said Mrs. Windermere, looking beyond her, "something given one to use. You see, I do see things other people can't see, and tell them, and help them to straighten out. Well, take your case. . . . And I've another friend in Italy, the one I was going to stay with after we parted—I don't know if I told you about her? Well, she left her husband. She grew up, and found she didn't need him any more. Well, I saw all that for her and was able to help her. I told the other man how things stood—such a manly fellow! He'd been hanging back, not understanding. Well, they went. I bought their tickets for them and saw them off to Italy. They've been having difficult times, but they'll straighten out—I'm still able to help them. I've been staying there a good deal. I am able to help them."
"I suppose they did feel it was the right thing to do," said Esmée.
"And you," said Mrs. Windermere, bringing her suddenly into focus. "What is going to happen to You? I must come down and have a look at this husband of yours, this Wilfred. Let me see———"
She dived suddenly, her bag was on the floor. She reappeared with it, and its mauve satin maw gaped at Esmée while she fumbled in its depths. Out came a small suède note-book, and Mrs. Windermere, feverishly nibbling the point of the pencil, ran her eye down the pages.
"The twentieth?" she said. "I could come then if you could have me. If not, the fourteenth of the next, for the week-end—but if I came on the twentieth I could stay longer. Failing the fourteenth———"
Esmée pondered, lowering her lashes. "I'm afraid, I'm awfully afraid it will have to be the fourteenth of next. All this month there'll be Wilfred's relations."
"Little caged thing," said Mrs. Windermere tenderly. "Very well, the fourteenth." She jotted down something in her note-book, looked across at Esmée, smiled, and jotted down some more, still with her head on one side and the little secret smile. "Ideas, ideas, coming and going. . . . And now! You to your shoppingses and I—well, childie?"
"Please, the bill," said Esmée to the waitress. "You must let me, please," she whispered to Mrs. Windermere.
"No, I don't like——— Oh well, well. I haven't got a Wilfred. Thanks, dear child!"
"They pushed their chairs back and went downstairs together. At the door, Esmée drew a valedictory breath. "It's been ever so nice," she said. "Lovely. Such a bit of luck! And now, I suppose———"
"Which way? Oh, Peter Robinson's? Well, I'll come with you. It doesn't matter about my little shoppingses."
Firmly encircling Esmée's wrist with a thumb and forefinger she led her down Regent Street.