The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 15
The first evening in Creeper Cottage was unpleasant. There was a blazing wood fire, the curtains were drawn, the lamp shone rosily through its red shade, and when Priscilla stood up her hair dusted the oak beams of the ceiling, it was so low. The background, you see, was perfectly satisfactory; exactly what a cottage background should be on an autumn night when outside a wet mist is hanging like a grey curtain across the window panes; and Tussie arriving at nine o’clock to help consecrate the new life with Shakespeare felt, as he opened the door and walked out of the darkness into the rosy, cosy little room, that he need not after all worry himself with doubts as to the divine girl’s being comfortable. Never did place appear more comfortable. It did not occur to him that a lamp with a red shade and the blaze of a wood fire will make any place appear comfortable so long as they go on shining, and he looked up at Priscilla—I am afraid he had to look up at her when they were both standing—with the broadest smile of genuine pleasure. “It does look jolly,” he said heartily.
His pleasure was doomed to an immediate wiping out. Priscilla smiled, but with a reservation behind her smile that his sensitive spirit felt at once. She was alone, and there was no sign whatever either of her uncle or of preparations for the reading of Shakespeare.
“Is anything not quite right?” Tussie asked, his face falling at once to an anxious pucker.
Priscilla looked at him and smiled again, but this time the smile was real, in her eyes as well as on her lips, dancing in them together with the flickering firelight. “It’s rather funny,” she said. “It has never happened to me before. What do you think? I’m hungry.”
“Hungry?”
“Hungry.”
Tussie stared, arrested in the unwinding of his comforter.
“Really hungry. Dreadfully hungry. So hungry that I hate Shakespeare.”
“But—”
“I know. You’re going to say why not eat? It does seem simple. But you’ve no idea how difficult it really is. I’m afraid my uncle and I have rather heaps to learn. We forgot to get a cook.”
“A cook? But I thought—I understood that curtseying maid of yours was going to do all that?”
“So did I. So did he. But she won’t.”
Priscilla flushed, for since Tussie left after tea she had had grievous surprises, of a kind that made her first indignant and then inclined to wince. Fritzing had not been able to hide from her that Annalise had rebelled and refused to cook, and Priscilla had not been able to follow her immediate impulse and dismiss her. It was at this point, when she realized this, that the wincing began. She felt perfectly sick at the thought, flashed upon her for the first time, that she was in the power of a servant.
“Do you mean to say,” said Tussie in a voice hollow with consternation, “that you’ve had no dinner?”
“Dinner? In a cottage? Why of course there was no dinner. There never will be any dinner—at night, at least. But the tragic thing is there was no supper. We didn’t think of it till we began to get hungry. Annalise began first. She got hungry at six o’clock, and said something to Fritz—my uncle about it, but he wasn’t hungry himself then and so he snubbed her. Now he is hungry himself, and he’s gone out to see if he can’t find a cook. It’s very stupid. There’s nothing in the house. Annalise ate the bread and things she found. She’s upstairs now, crying.” And Priscilla’s lips twitched as she looked at Tussie’s concerned face, and she began to laugh.
He seized his hat. “I’ll go and get you something,” he said, dashing at the door.
“I can’t think what, at this time of the night. The only shop shuts at seven.”
“I’ll make them open it.”
“They go to bed at nine.”
“I’ll get them out of bed if I have to shie stones at their windows all night.”
“Don’t go without your coat—you’ll catch a most frightful cold.”
He put his arm through the door to take it, and vanished in the fog. He did not put on the coat in his agitation, but kept it over his arm. His comforter stayed in Priscilla’s parlour, on the chair where he had flung it. He was in evening dress, and his throat was sore already with the cold that was coming on and that he had caught, as he expected, running races on the Sunday at Priscilla’s children’s party.
Priscilla went back to her seat by the fire, and thought very hard about things like bread. It would of course be impossible that she should have reached this state of famine only because one meal had been missed; but she had eaten nothing all day, —disliked the Baker’s Farm breakfast too much even to look at it, forgotten the Baker’s Farm dinner because she was just moving into her cottage, and at tea had been too greatly upset by the unexpected appearance of her father on the wall to care to eat the bread and butter Annalise brought in. Now she was in that state when you tremble and feel cold. She had told Annalise, about half-past seven, to bring her the bread left from tea, but Annalise had eaten it. At half-past eight she had told Annalise to bring her the sugar, for she had read somewhere that if you eat enough sugar it takes away the desire even of the hungriest for other food, but Annalise, who had eaten the sugar as well, said that the Herr Geheimrath must have eaten it. It certainly was not there, and neither was the Herr Geheimrath to defend himself; since half-past seven he had been out looking for a cook, his mind pervaded by the idea that if only he could get a cook food would follow in her wake as naturally as flowers follow after rain. Priscilla fretting in her chair that he should stay away so long saw very clearly that no cook could help them. What is the use of a cook in a house where there is nothing to cook? If only Fritzing would come back quickly with a great many loaves of bread! The door was opened a little way and somebody’s knuckles knocked. She thought it was Tussie, quick and clever as ever, and in a voice full of welcome told him to come in; upon which in stepped Robin Morrison very briskly, delighted by the warmth of the invitation. “Why now this is nice,” said Robin, all smiles.
Priscilla did not move and did not offer to shake hands, so he stood on the hearthrug and spread out his own to the blaze, looking down at her with bright, audacious eyes. He thought he had not yet seen her so beautiful. There was an extraordinary depth and mystery in her look, he thought, as it rested for a moment on his face, and she had never yet dropped her eyelashes as she now did when her eyes met his. We know she was very hungry, and there was no strength in her at all. Not only did her eyelashes drop, but her head as well, and her hands hung helplessly, like drooping white flowers, one over each arm of the chair.
“I came in to ask Mr. Neumann-Schultz if there’s anything I can do for you,” said Robin.
“Did you? He lives next door.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.