Читать книгу The Black Dog, and Other Stories - A. E. Coppard - Страница 5

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On an August morning a few weeks later they travelled down together to see her father. In the interim Orianda had resigned her appointment, and several times Gerald had met her secretly in the purlieus of Tillington Park. The girl’s cool casual nature fascinated him not less than her appearance. Admiration certainly outdistanced his happiness, although that also increased; but the bliss had its shadow, for the outcome of their friendship seemed mysteriously to depend on the outcome of the proposed return to her father’s home, devotion to that project forming the first principle, as it were, of their intercourse. Orianda had not dangled before him the prospect of any serener relationship; she took his caresses as naturally and undemonstratively as a pet bird takes a piece of sugar. But he had begun to be aware of a certain force behind all her charming naivete; the beauty that exhaled the freshness, the apparent fragility, of a drop of dew had none the less a savour of tyranny which he vowed should never, least of all by him, be pressed to vulgar exercise.

When the train reached its destination Orianda confided calmly that she had preferred not to write to her father. Really she did not know for certain whether he was alive or even living on at the old home she so loved. And there was a journey of three miles or more which Orianda proposed to walk. So they walked.

The road lay across an expanse of marshy country and approached the wooded uplands of her home only by numerous eccentric divagations made necessary by culverts that drained the marsh. The day was bright; the sky, so vast an arch over this flat land, was a very oven for heat; there were cracks in the earth, the grass was like stubble. At the mid journey they crossed a river by its wooden bridge, upon which a boy sat fishing with stick and string. Near the water was a long white hut with a flag; a few tethered boats floated upon the stream. Gerald gave a shilling to a travelling woman who carried a burden on her back and shuffled slowly upon the harsh road sighing, looking neither to right nor left; she did not look into the sky, her gaze was fastened upon her dolorous feet, one two, one two, one two; her shift, if she had such a garment, must have clung to her old body like a shrimping net.

In an hour they had reached the uplands and soon, at the top of a sylvan slope where there was shade and cooling air, Gerald saw a sign hung upon a sycamore tree, The Black Dog by Nathaniel Crabbe. The inn was small, pleasant with pink wash and brown paint, and faced across the road a large yard encircled by hedges, trees, and a gate. The travellers stood peeping into the enclosure which was stocked with new ladders, hurdles, and poles of various sizes. Amid them stood a tall burly man at a block, trimming with an axe the butt of a willow rod. He was about fifty, clad in rough country clothes, a white shirt, and a soft straw hat. He had mild simple features coloured, like his arms and neck, almost to the hue of a bay horse.

“Hullo!” called the girl. The man with the axe looked round at her unrecognizingly. Orianda hurried through the gateway. “Father!” she cried.

“I did not know. I was not rightly sure of ye,” said the man, dropping the axe, “such a lady you’ve grown.”

As he kissed his daughter his heavy discoloured hands rested on her shoulders, her gloved ones lay against his breast. Orianda took out her purse.

“Here is the money I stole, father.”

She dropped some coins one by one into his palm. He counted them over, and saying simply “Thank you, my dear,” put them into his pocket.

“I’m dashed!”—thought Loughlin, who had followed the girl—“it’s exactly how she would take it; no explanation, no apology. They do not know what reproach means. Have they no code at all?”

She went on chatting with her father, and seemed to have forgotten her companion.

“You mean you want to come back!” exclaimed her father eagerly, “come back here? That would be grand, that would. But look, tell me what I am to do. I’ve—you see—this is how it is—”

He spat upon the ground, picked up his axe, rested one foot upon the axe-block and one arm upon his knee. Orianda sat down upon a pile of the logs.

“This is how it is ... be you married?”

“Come and sit here, Gerald,” called the girl. As he came forward Orianda rose and said: “This is my very dear friend, father, Gerald Loughlin. He has been so kind. It is he who has given me the courage to come back. I wanted to for so long. O, a long time, father, a long time. And yet Gerald had to drag me here in the end.”

“What was you afraid of, my girl?” asked the big man.

“Myself.”

The two visitors sat upon the logs. “Shall I tell you about mother?” asked the girl.

Crabbe hesitated; looked at the ground.

“Ah, yes, you might,” he said.

“She died, did you know?”

The man looked up at the trees with their myriads of unmoving leaves; each leaf seemed to be listening.

“She died?” he said softly. “No, I did not know she died.”

“Two years ago,” continued the girl, warily, as if probing his mood.

“Two years!” He repeated it without emotion. “No, I did not know she died. ’Tis a bad job.” He was quite still, his mind seemed to be turning over his own secret memories, but what he bent forward and suddenly said was: “Don’t say anything about it in there.” He nodded towards the inn.

“No?” Orianda opened her crimson parasol.

“You see,” he went on, again resting one foot on the axe-block and addressing himself more particularly to Gerald: “I’ve ... this is how it is. When I was left alone I could not get along here, not by myself. That’s for certain. There’s the house and the bar and the yard—I’d to get help, a young woman from Brighton. I met her at Brighton.” He rubbed the blade of the axe reflectively across his palm—“And she manages house for me now, you see.”

He let the axe fall again and stood upright. “Her name’s Lizzie.”

“O, quite so, you could do no other,” Gerald exclaimed cheerfully, turning to the girl. But Orianda said softly: “What a family we are! He means he is living with her. And so you don’t want your undutiful daughter after all, father?” Her gaiety was a little tremulous.

“No, no!” he retorted quickly, “you must come back, you must come back, if so be you can. There’s nothing I’d like better, nothing on this mortal earth. My God, if something don’t soon happen I don’t know what will happen.” Once more he stooped for the axe. “That’s right, Orianda, yes, yes, but you’ve no call to mention to her”—he glared uneasily at the inn doorway—“that ... that about your mother.”

Orianda stared up at him though he would not meet her gaze.

“You mean she doesn’t know?” she asked, “you mean she would want you to marry her if she did know?”

“Yes, that’s about how it is with us.”

Loughlin was amazed at the girl’s divination. It seemed miraculous, what a subtle mind she had, extraordinary! And how casually she took the old rascal’s—well, what could you call it?—effrontery, shame, misdemeanour, helplessness. But was not her mother like it too? He had grasped nothing at all of the situation yet, save that Nathaniel Crabbe appeared to be netted in the toils of this housekeeper, this Lizzie from Brighton. Dear Orianda was “dished” now, poor girl. She could not conceivably return to such a menage.

Orianda was saying: “Then I may stay, father, mayn’t I, for good with you?”

Her father’s eyes left no doubt of his pleasure.

“Can we give Gerald a bedroom for a few days? Or do we ask Lizzie?”

“Ah, better ask her,” said the shameless man. “You want to make a stay here, sir?”

“If it won’t incommode you,” replied Loughlin.

“O, make no doubt about that, to be sure no, I make no doubt about that.”

“Have you still got my old bedroom?” asked Orianda, for the amount of dubiety in his air was in prodigious antagonism to his expressed confidence.

“Why yes, it may happen,” he replied slowly.

“Then Gerald can have the spare room. It’s all wainscot and painted dark blue. It’s a shrimp of a room, but there’s a preserved albatross in a glass case as big as a van.”

“I make no doubt about that,” chimed in her father, straightening himself and scratching his chin uneasily, “you must talk to Lizzie.”

“Splendid!” said Gerald to Orianda, “I’ve never seen an albatross.”

“We’ll ask Lizzie,” said she, “at once.”

Loughlin was experiencing not a little inward distress at this turn in the affair, but it was he who had brought Orianda to her home, and he would have to go through with the horrid business.

“Is she difficult, father?”

“No, she’s not difficult, not difficult, so to say, you must make allowance.”

The girl was implacable. Her directness almost froze the blood of the Hon. Loughlin.

“Are you fond of her. How long has she been here?”

“O, a goodish while, yes, let me see—no, she’s not difficult, if that’s what you mean—three years, perhaps.”

“Well, but that’s long enough!”

(Long enough for what—wondered Loughlin?)

“Yes, it is longish.”

“If you really want to get rid of her you could tell her ...”

“Tell her what?”

“You know what to tell her!”

But her father looked bewildered and professed his ignorance.

“Take me in to her,” said Orianda, and they all walked across to “The Black Dog.” There was no one within; father and daughter went into the garden while Gerald stayed behind in a small parlour. Through the window that looked upon a grass plot he could see a woman sitting in a deck chair under a tree. Her face was turned away so that he saw only a curve of pink cheek and a thin mound of fair hair tossed and untidy. Lizzie’s large red fingers were slipping a sprig of watercress into a mouth that was hidden round the corner of the curve. With her other hand she was caressing a large brown hen that sat on her lap. Her black skirt wrapped her limbs tightly, a round hip and a thigh being rigidly outlined, while the blouse of figured cotton also seemed strained upon her buxom breast, for it was torn and split in places. She had strong white arms and holes in her stockings. When she turned to confront the others it was easy to see that she was a foolish, untidy, but still a rather pleasant woman of about thirty.

“How do you do, Lizzie?” cried Orianda, offering a cordial hand. The hen fluttered away as, smiling a little wanly, the woman rose.

“Who is it, ’Thaniel?” she asked.

Loughlin heard no more, for some men came noisily into the bar and Crabbe hurried back to serve them.