The Beggar Maid Read online

  THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD

  BELIEVE IN THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND THOU SHALL BE SAVED

  Why did Flo have those, when she wasn’t even religious? They were what people had, common as calendars.

  THIS IS MY KITCHEN AND I WILL DO AS I DARNED PLEASE

  MORE THAN TWO PERSONS TO A BED IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL

  Billy Pope had brought that one. What would Patrick have to say about them? What would someone who was offended by a mispronunciation of Metternich think of Billy Pope’s stories?

  Billy Pope worked in Tyde’s Butcher Shop. What he talked about most frequently now was the D.P., the Belgian, who had come to work there, and got on Billy Pope’s nerves with his impudent singing of French songs and his naive notions of getting on in this country, buying a butcher shop of his own.

  “Don’t you think you can come over here and get yourself ideas,” Billy Pope said to the D.P. “It’s youse workin for us, and don’t think that’ll change into us workin for youse.” That shut him up, Billy Pope said.

  Patrick would say from time to time that since her home was only fifty miles away he ought to come up and meet Rose’s family.

  “There’s only my stepmother.”

  “It’s too bad I couldn’t have met your father.”

  Rashly, she had presented her father to Patrick as a reader of history, an amateur scholar. That was not exactly a lie, but it did not give a truthful picture of the circumstances.

  “Is your stepmother your guardian?”

  Rose had to say she did not know.

  “Well, your father must have appointed a guardian for you in his will. Who administers his estate?”

  His estate. Rose thought an estate was land, such as people owned in England.

  Patrick thought it was rather charming of her to think that.

  “No, his money and stocks and so on. What he left.”

  “I don’t think he left any.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Patrick said.

  And sometimes Dr. Henshawe would say, “Well, you are a scholar, you are not interested in that.” Usually she was speaking of some event at the college; a pep rally, a football game, a dance. And usually she was right; Rose was not interested. But she was not eager to admit it. She did not seek or relish that definition of herself.

  On the stairway wall hung graduation photographs of all the other girls, scholarship girls, who had lived with Dr. Henshawe. Most of them had got to be teachers, then mothers. One was a dietician, two were librarians, one was a professor of English, like Dr. Henshawe herself. Rose did not care for the look of them, for their soft-focused meekly smiling gratitude, their large teeth and maidenly rolls of hair. They seemed to be urging on her some deadly secular piety. There were no actresses among them, no brassy magazine journalists; none of them had latched on to the sort of life Rose wanted for herself. She wanted to perform in public. She thought she wanted to be an actress but she never tried to act, was afraid to go near the college drama productions. She knew she couldn’t sing or dance. She would really have liked to play the harp, but she had no ear for music. She wanted to be known and envied, slim and clever. She told Dr. Henshawe that if she had been a man she would have wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

  “Then you must be one,” cried Dr. Henshawe alarmingly. “The future will be wide open, for women. You must concentrate on languages. You must take courses in political science. And economics. Perhaps you could get a job on the paper for the summer. I have friends there.”

  Rose was frightened at the idea of working on a paper, and she hated the introductory economics course; she was looking for a way of dropping it. It was dangerous to mention things to Dr. Henshawe.

  She had got to live with Dr. Henshawe by accident. Another girl had been picked to move in but she got sick; she had T.B., and went instead to a sanitarium. Dr. Henshawe came up to the college office on the second day of registration to get the names of some other scholarship freshmen.

  Rose had been in the office just a little while before, asking where the meeting of the scholarship students was to be held. She had lost her notice. The Bursar was giving a talk to the new scholarship students, telling them of ways to earn money and live cheaply and explaining the high standards of performance to be expected of them here, if they wanted their payments to keep coming.

  Rose found out the number of the room, and started up the stairs to the first floor. A girl came up beside her and said, “Are you on your way to three-oh-twelve, too?”

  They walked together, telling each other the details of their scholarships. Rose did not yet have a place to live, she was staying at the Y. She did not really have enough money to be here at all. She had a scholarship for her tuition and the county prize to buy her books and a bursary of three hundred dollars to live on; that was all.

  “You’ll have to get a job,” the other girl said. She had a larger bursary, because she was in Science (that’s where the money is, the money’s all in Science, she said seriously), but she was hoping to get a job in the cafeteria. She had a room in somebody’s basement. How much does your room cost? How much does a hot plate cost? Rose asked her, her head swimming with anxious calculations.

  This girl wore her hair in a roll. She wore a crepe blouse, yellowed and shining from washing and ironing. Her breasts were large and sagging. She probably wore a dirty-pink hooked-up-the-side brassiere. She had a scaly patch on one cheek.

  “This must be it,” she said.

  There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility. How else could they have supplied so many right answers, so many pleasing answers, how else distinguished themselves and got themselves here? And Rose had done the same.

  “I have to go to the john,” she said.

  She could see herself, working in the cafeteria. Her figure, broad enough already, broadened out still more by the green cotton uniform, her face red and her hair stringy from the heat. Dishing up stew and fried chicken for those of inferior intelligence and handsomer means. Blocked off by the steam tables, the uniform, by decent hard work that nobody need be ashamed of, by publicly proclaimed braininess and poverty. Boys could get away with that, barely. For girls it was fatal. Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class. Was this true, and was she foolish enough to care? It was; she was.

  She went back to the first floor where the halls were crowded with ordinary students who were not on scholarships, who would not be expected to get A’s and be grateful and live cheap. Enviable and innocent, they milled around the registration tables in their new purple and white blazers, their purple Frosh beanies, yelling reminders to each other, confused information, nonsensical insults. She walked among them feeling bitterly superior and despondent. The skirt of her green corduroy suit kept falling back between her legs as she walked. The material was limp; she should have spent more and bought the heavier weight. She thought now that the jacket was not properly cut either, though it had looked all right at home. The whole outfit had been made by a dressmaker in Hanratty, a friend of Flo’s, whose main concern had been that there should be no revelations of the figure. When Rose asked if the skirt couldn’t be made tighter this woman had said, “You wouldn’t want your b.t.m. to show, now
would you?” and Rose hadn’t wanted to say she didn’t care.

  Another thing the dressmaker said was, “I thought now you was through school you’d be getting a job and help out at home.”

  A woman walking down the hall stopped Rose.

  “Aren’t you one of the scholarship girls?”

  It was the Registrar’s secretary. Rose thought she was going to be reprimanded, for not being at the meeting, and she was going to say she felt sick. She prepared her face for this lie. But the secretary said, “Come with me, now. I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”

  Dr. Henshawe was making a charming nuisance of herself in the office. She liked poor girls, bright girls, but they had to be fairly good-looking girls.

  “I think this could be your lucky day,” the secretary said, leading Rose. “If you could put a pleasanter expression on your face.”

  Rose hated being told that, but she smiled obediently.

  Within the hour she was taken home with Dr. Henshawe, installed in the house with the Chinese screens and vases, and told she was a scholar.

  She got a job working in the Library of the college, instead of in the cafeteria. Dr. Henshawe was a friend of the Head Librarian. She worked on Saturday afternoons. She worked in the stacks, putting books away. On Saturday afternoons in the fall the Library was nearly empty, because of the football games. The narrow windows were open to the leafy campus, the football field, the dry fall country. The distant songs and shouts came drifting in.

  The college buildings were not old at all, but they were built to look old. They were built of stone. The Arts building had a tower, and the Library had casement windows, which might have been designed for shooting arrows through. The buildings and the books in the Library were what pleased Rose most about the place. The life that usually filled it, and that was now drained away, concentrated around the football field, letting loose those noises, seemed to her inappropriate and distracting. The cheers and songs were idiotic, if you listened to the words. What did they want to build such dignified buildings for, if they were going to sing songs like that?

  She knew enough not to reveal these opinions. If anybody said to her, “It’s awful you have to work Saturdays and can’t get to any of the games,” she would fervently agree.

  Once a man grabbed her bare leg, between her sock and her skirt. It happened in the Agriculture section, down at the bottom of the stacks. Only the faculty, graduate students, and employees had access to the stacks, though someone could have hoisted himself through a ground-floor window, if he was skinny. She had seen a man crouched down looking at the books on a low shelf, further along. As she reached up to push a book into place he passed behind her. He bent and grabbed her leg, all in one smooth startling motion, and then was gone. She could feel for quite a while where his fingers had dug in. It didn’t seem to her a sexual touch, it was more like a joke, though not at all a friendly one. She heard him run away, or felt him running; the metal shelves were vibrating. Then they stopped. There was no sound of him. She walked around looking between the stacks, looking into the carrels. Suppose she did see him, or bumped into him around a corner, what did she intend to do? She did not know. It was simply necessary to look for him, as in some tense childish game. She looked down at the sturdy pinkish calf of her leg. Amazing, that out of the blue somebody had wanted to blotch and punish it.

  There were usually a few graduate students working in the carrels, even on Saturday afternoons. More rarely, a professor. Every carrel she looked into was empty, until she came to one in the corner. She poked her head in freely, by this time not expecting anybody. Then she had to say she was sorry.

  There was a young man with a book on his lap, books on the floor, papers all around him. Rose asked him if he had seen anybody run past. He said no.

  She told him what had happened. She didn’t tell him because she was frightened or disgusted, as he seemed afterward to think, but just because she had to tell somebody; it was so odd. She was not prepared at all for his response. His long neck and face turned red, the flush entirely absorbing a birthmark down the side of his cheek. He was thin and fair. He stood up without any thought for the book in his lap or the papers in front of him. The book thumped on the floor. A great sheaf of papers, pushed across the desk, upset his ink bottle.

  “How vile,” he said.

  “Grab the ink,” Rose said. He leaned to catch the bottle and knocked it on to the floor. Fortunately the top was on, and it did not break.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Come on upstairs. We’ll report it.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “He can’t get away with that. It shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “There isn’t anybody to report to,” Rose said with relief. “The Librarian goes off at noon on Saturdays.”

  “It’s disgusting,” he said in a high-pitched, excitable voice. Rose was sorry now that she had told him anything, and said she had to get back to work.

  “Are you really all right?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “I’ll be right here. Just call me if he comes back.”

  That was Patrick. If she had been trying to make him fall in love with her, there was no better way she could have chosen. He had many chivalric notions, which he pretended to mock, by saying certain words and phrases as if in quotation marks. The fair sex, he would say, and damsel in distress. Coming to his carrel with that story, Rose had turned herself into a damsel in distress. The pretended irony would not fool anybody; it was clear that he did wish to operate in a world of knights and ladies; outrages; devotions.

  She continued to see him in the Library, every Saturday, and often she met him walking across the campus or in the cafeteria. He made a point of greeting her with courtesy and concern, saying, “How are you,” in a way that suggested she might have suffered a further attack, or might still be recovering from the first one. He always flushed deeply when he saw her, and she thought that this was because the memory of what she had told him so embarrassed him. Later she found out it was because he was in love.

  He discovered her name, and where she lived. He phoned her at Dr. Henshawe’s house and asked her to go to the movies. At first when he said, “This is Patrick Blatchford speaking,” Rose could not think who it was, but after a moment she recognized the high, rather aggrieved and tremulous voice. She said she would go. This was partly because Dr. Henshawe was always saying she was glad Rose did not waste her time running around with boys.

  Rather soon after she started to go out with him, she said to Patrick, “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was you grabbed my leg that day in the Library?”

  He did not think it would be funny. He was horrified that she would think such a thing.

  She said she was only joking. She said she meant that it would be a good twist in a story, maybe a Maugham story, or a Hitchcock movie. They had just been to see a Hitchcock movie.

  “You know, if Hitchcock made a movie out of something like that, you could be a wild insatiable leg-grabber with one half of your personality, and the other half could be a timid scholar.”

  He didn’t like that either.

  “Is that how I seem to you, a timid scholar?” It seemed to her he deepened his voice, introduced a few growling notes, drew in his chin, as if for a joke. But he seldom joked with her; he didn’t think joking was suitable when you were in love.

  “I didn’t say you were a timid scholar or a leg-grabber. It was just an idea.”

  After a while he said, “I suppose I don’t seem very manly.”

  She was startled and irritated by such an exposure. He took such chances; had nothing ever taught him not to take such chances? But maybe he didn’t, after all. He knew she would have to say something reassuring. Though she was longing not to, she longed to say judiciously, “Well, no. You don’t.”

  But that would not actually be true. He did seem masculine to her. Because he took those chances. Only a man could be so careless and demanding
.

  “We come from two different worlds,” she said to him, on another occasion. She felt like a character in a play, saying that. “My people are poor people. You would think the place I lived in was a dump.”

  Now she was the one who was being dishonest, pretending to throw herself on his mercy, for of course she did not expect him to say, oh, well, if you come from poor people and live in a dump, then I will have to withdraw my offer.

  “But I’m glad,” said Patrick. “I’m glad you’re poor. You’re so lovely. You’re like the Beggar Maid.”

  “Who?”

  “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. You know. The painting. Don’t you know that painting?”

  Patrick had a trick—no, it was not a trick, Patrick had no tricks—Patrick had a way of expressing surprise, fairly scornful surprise, when people did not know something he knew, and similar scorn, similar surprise, whenever they had bothered to know something he did not. His arrogance and humility were both oddly exaggerated. The arrogance, Rose decided in time, must come from being rich, though Patrick was never arrogant about that in itself. His sisters, when she met them, turned out to be the same way, disgusted with anybody who did not know about horses or sailing, and just as disgusted by anybody knowing about music, say, or politics. Patrick and they could do little together but radiate disgust. But wasn’t Billy Pope as bad, wasn’t Flo as bad, when it came to arrogance? Maybe. There was a difference, though, and the difference was that Billy Pope and Flo were not protected. Things could get at them: D.P.’s; people speaking French on the radio; changes. Patrick and his sisters behaved as if things could never get at them. Their voices, when they quarreled at the table, were astonishingly childish; their demands for food they liked, their petulance at seeing anything on the table they didn’t like, were those of children. They had never had to defer and polish themselves and win favor in the world, they never would have to, and that was because they were rich.