20 INEVITABLE

Another girl was already before the mirror in the dress-room, running a comb through fair hair; taller than Lalette. She looked over her shoulder at the newcomer with an expression not unlike that of a satisfied cat and went on with her task, humming a little tune; Lalette felt that she was being asked to speak first. “Your pardon,” she said, “but I have just come. Can you tell me where the soap is kept?”

The tall girl surveyed her. “We use our own,” she said, “but if you have not brought any, you may take some of mine tonight. In the black-dressing-box, there on the table—that is, if you do not mind violet scent.”

“Oh, thank you. I didn’t mean . . . My name is Lalette” (again the hesitation, a momentary question whether to say “Bergelin” here, but that was all dead and gone, she would never see him again) “Asterhax.”

“My name is Nanhilde. We don’t use second names in the Myonessae unless we have been married. Have you, ever?”

“I—”

“Oh, you must get rid of old-fashioned prejudices in a place like this. I used to think that being married was something I wanted so much; but it isn’t really. It only chains you to some man, and next thing you know, you’re sewing jackets and raising brats for him. You wait till you’re chosen; he’ll want to marry you and give up being an Initiate. They always do, and if you say yes, you’re lost, not your own mistress any more, and he’ll always blame you.”

Lalette had been washing her face. Now she lifted it from the towel in time to catch the middle term of the series. “But are you—are we of the Myonessae prevented from having children, then?”

“You are a greenie, aren’t you? Of course, not; only we don’t have to snivel around any man for their upkeep. There’s a couvertine for that. I have one there now; the diaconal who fathered him on me had his miniature painted and I’ll show it to you. Hurry with your dress and we’ll go down together. Old quince-face doesn’t like anybody to be late.”
367

She took Lalette’s arm and guided her along a hall already powder-grey with dusk, to the stairwell, where the racking note of a violin floated in a funnel of light. Below, it was all so different than Lalette had seen it in the morning, or even at noon, when she had eaten a rather gloomy meal of pulse and one apple, while the others around her chattered in a subdued manner under the eye of Dame Quasso. The whole place was now gay with lamps and someone had hung spring branches among them, under which girls were gathered in excited little groups, some of them talking to young men, the ruffles of their dresses vibrating, as though they too had caught the mood of animation. Among the moving heads Lalette could see how the double doors of the eating-hall were flung wide; at its entry the mattern stood, talking with a white-headed man dressed in grey, whose expression never changed. Dame Quasso beckoned; as Lalette worked her way in that direction, a voice floated past, “. . . I told her he already said he would choose me, and I don’t care if I do lose my place, I’m going to ask for an Initiate’s trial. . . .”

The eyes looked down into hers from a height. “This is our newest member, called Lalette,” said the mattern. “She is from Dossola, where she was accused of witchery, and she is somewhat troubled in mind.”

A long gaze. The grey man said; “It is because she feels compelled and has not learned the wonderful freedom of the service of the God of love. My child, witches find it harder than anyone else to forget the material self, but once they do so, attain the most surely to perfection.”

(Perfection? Lalette wanted to cry that it was no desire of hers.) She said; “The material self? I don’t really care what I eat—or where I sleep.”

The grey man said; “Do not think in mere terms of nourishment, which is a means of maintaining the material body we despise. In love, we serve the soul.”

(Lalette felt her inner gorge rising toward forbidden anger.) “I am not sure I understand.”

“Do not be troubled. Many fail to understand in the beginning, and to many, perfection comes after a long struggle in self-denial.”

The rebecks and flutes broke out, all in tune. Dame Quasso offered her arm to the grey man and Lalette looked around to see other pairings, two and two, moving into the eating-hall. She herself was suddenly left unattended, to go in with the blonde Nanhilde. The taller girl leaned close and said; “Nobody.”
368

“What do you mean?” said Lalette.

“Nobody. Not an obula tonight,” replied Nanhilde.
II

“Listen,” said Leece. “Oh, hear. I am not ignorant. If you really desire that I should come no more, I will not. I am not one to intrude.”

“Lovely Leece,” he said, “it is for you, not I,” (yet knowing it was for himself) and drew her hand to his lips, folding her fingers round the kiss he placed in the palm.

She looked at him intently. “There is a cold breeze,” she said, and stepping to the door, closed it before she ran across the room with little quick steps to throw back the covers and slip in beside him. The black brows brushed his cheek.

“If you hated me and really wanted to get rid of me, let me ask you, what would you do? How different would you behave toward me than you are now doing? You tell me that talking with you here in the morning gives you pleasure and is a help to you. Why do you wish to stop it then, if I am willing to come? And if you are thinking of any danger to me, why surely that is my concern.”

As her arm came around his neck and their lips met in the long deep kiss, he closed his eyes, not daring to look into hers, for this was no Damaris the maid (and it was not that he dared not, but that he would not). They came shuddering from the contact. “Ah, no,” he cried and drew her close again and for a third time. But then she said suddenly; “Three is enough,” and without another word slipped from beside him and was gone.

All nights were now turned into a prelude to the mornings, and all days to a prelude for the evenings, when one of the other sisters would talk with them and gently jest at them for a pair of lovers, until Rodvard and Leece went out for a stroll under avenues of plane-trees, where lights flickered through the leaves in the warm summer air. The elder Vyana or the younger Madaille often accompanied them on these journeys, laughing a great deal as they conversed on matters of no importance, for it was as though he and Leece had signed a treaty never to show anyone outside how deeply they were concerned with each other. In the mornings, when the subject turned to themselves, there were checks and uncertainties in their words; yet it was a topic they could not avoid. Rodvard would often leave his breakfast uneaten, the better to lie beside her, kissing and kissing, with now and then some little thing said.
369

“You must not love me,” she whispered one morning, turning her burning face from his; “not in the human way.”

“Why not, Leece? I love—this,” and kissed her again.

“Ah, so do I. But to love, to love—it would be falling into the hands of the Evil god for me to love you or you to love me, before you had been to instruction and accepted the doctrine of the Prophet. Do you understand?”

He did not (nor, when he broke the rule he had set on himself and looked into her eyes, could he read behind them any illumination). “I am not sure I want to be an Amorosian,” he said, gravely, “but if you say I shall not love you, I will try not to. Only—”

She hugged him close then, and her lips sought his to end this, and to say without words that this commerce of theirs was a pleasure for its own sake and might be brought to destruction by any talk of a deeper relation—or so he reasoned out her action, that night, as he lay in the hour between waking and sleep. The pleasure of it was so sweet that he dared do nothing to change the pattern; though when she tried to tell him of the strange religion of the Prophet, he would change the conversation to the mystery of their mutual attraction—in the midst of which a vertigo of kissing and clasping would come upon them and there would be silence for a long time. The door was always closed now; sometimes the footsteps of Dame Gualdis could be heard outside, but after the first time, when Leece slipped from the bed in panic, they paid no attention, for the mother neither knocked nor entered. Only when the steps sounded, Leece would gently hold his hand to make him cease fondling her breasts, which she now allowed him freely to do at all times, lying with dark lashes on her cheek and lips half parted.

She would not let him go further than this, nor did the cold Blue Star speak of any willingness to do so. When once, with senses reeling, he would have pressed the matter on, she said no, someone might come, there was no time, and made other excuses, though she kissed him as she said it, and caressed him with curious fingers. Yet it had become part of an unspoken agreement between them that he should ask for no more, only kiss her and be as bold as she permitted; and it was she who ultimately brought the matter into words.

“If we were married, you could have me whenever you wished.” She said it half regretfully (and he did look this time, catching behind her eyes something like a color, something that spoke of a desire in her, though somehow not of the same kind as his own).
370

By the convention into which they had fallen, he must now clasp her eagerly and say, “Ah, Leece,” and kiss her for a long time, before saying; “Yet if we did marry, and the mixture proved imperfect, consider how we might hate each other.”

“I like to kiss you,” she said simply. “Vyana cried last night. She saw him in the afternoon, and does not know what to do.”

“Feel my heart beat,” he said, placing her hand over it. “It would seem to me that she and her lover are really meant for a perfect union. Could she not enter the Myonessae and be chosen and persuade him to marriage afterward?”

The girl went stiff in his arms, looking at him with eyes wide in astonishment. “Why,” she cried, “that would be deception and sin—leading him from the service of the God of love to Evil. Oh, Rodvard, never say such things.”

There was a true trembling in her voice and he felt the moisture of a tear, where her face was pressed into the crotch of his neck. (It did not seem to him that a chance remark was a matter for such fervor, for as he knew religion, it was a guide, and the world would go mad if one tried to observe its commands in every particular.) But all this was only the background of a flicker of surprise across his mind, as he left her face and kissed her closed eyes. “Leece, Leece,” he said, “I didn’t mean—” and did not know what more to say.

“Oh, Rodvard, I could not bear it if you deceived me like that.”

“Do you think I am trying to?” (Kiss.)

“I do not know. No. Ah, we must not do this. It leads us into the hands of Evil. Rodvard, Rodvard, you must, if you want me. . . . Oh—” The word died into lips moving without sound, on which his lips closed, her breath began to come fast, she let his seeking fingers linger a moment at her breasts and slide past, he could not see her eyes, but without the intervention of his amulet, he knew that this was the moment—but at the very point of sliding from the crest, Leece flung herself gasping from his arms, and with a sob was gone.

Next morning his breakfast was left outside the door.
III

The linen stitching was very tedious. Five or six of them, all novices like herself, sat in a circle and went round the edges of napkins, drawing three threads, stitching them home, drawing three threads, bringing them home again, while the mattern or Mircella or one of the older girls read slowly from the First Book of the Prophet, pausing now and again to make exposition of the meaning of a passage. Talking was discouraged. At noon there was always the same meal of pulse with fresh greens or fruit, but in the evening sometimes a piece of meat.
371

Every fourth-day they all marched in procession to the house of religion and there was a service, not like those in the Dossolan churches, with their flowers and music, but merely a discourse, such as Lalette had first heard at the conventicle in Netznegon, with everybody embracing each other afterward, and prayers of grace pronounced by an Initiate. This took place at noon; after the service, no more work was done on these days.

After dinner and on the free afternoons, all were at liberty except for such matters as personal laundry. Most of the girls walked two and two for a while in the garden, where tall alleys of hollyhocks divided the vegetable plots on which some of the Myonessae labored during the day. Going on, out into the street was not forbidden, but not encouraged. Neither—as Lalette quickly discovered—was it very pleasant, for although these people of Mancherei had no badges of status, which at first seemed a very strange thing, everybody seemed to know at once that she was one of the sisterhood. This was all right as to older people, but in the half-twilight, young men would call out to her, or what was worse, sidle alongside her on the pave and try to make conversation, or offer a glass of wine.

She found their insinuation so infuriating that the second time this happened, with the fellow almost directly making an insinuation, only the memory of Tegval kept her from putting a witchery on him then and there. Dame Quasso had been walking in the garden that night. As Lalette came hurrying through the gate, she looked so long and intently that it seemed she must somehow have caught part of the Initiates’ trick of thought-reading, and to Lalette’s other troubles was added the fear of being known for a murderess.

On this night of all, the blonde Nanhilde would choose to come to her room for a talk, babbling against the clerks of account, who had allowed her far less than she deserved for some broideries she had done; “—and they gave ’Zina just double my price. I know what it is; she slips out of here on fourth-days and gets drunk with some of those clerks and lets them do anything they want. She’s awful.”

Lalette (upset, and wanting to talk about anything but this); “But how can she keep the mattern from knowing about it?”
372

“Oh, she is careful. A girl has to be in this place. She always gets back before bedtime, and her sister in town says she spends the afternoons there.”

Lalette sighed. “I thought, when I came here—”

Nanhilde said; “What did you expect to be different?”

Lalette’s hands fluttered. “Is there no way we can escape from the overwhelming lusts of men?”

“A girl in the Myonessae can do very well if she does not fear herself.”

Lalette burst into tears.