Читать книгу An Obstinate Headstrong Girl - Abigail Bok - Страница 13

The memorial for Aunt Evelyn was now upon them, and Lizzy, hoping to persuade all her family to attend, spent hours locating appropriate readings for each one. In this effort she was not entirely successful, as her relations had their own ideas of taste. Lydon, who had just seen Splendor in the Grass for the first time and was enamored of Natalie Wood, was determined to read Wordsworth’s lines from which the title was drawn, shrugging off John’s objection that the poem was about the death of a child. Mary pored mightily over her Bible and in the end settled, to Lizzy’s disappointment if not surprise, on the Ninetieth Psalm (“You have set our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your countenance. For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh”). Kitty and Jenny refused to read anything at all, and Lizzy was inclined to think that the less her younger siblings were heard from at the event, the better.

On arriving at the Gardiners’ house, the Bennets discovered quite a motley crowd assembled. Lizzy recognized some of the faces from the ball, and turned sharply to avoid meeting Morris Collins’s eye, colliding with Charley Bingley as she did so. He promptly led her and John off to make further introductions among the younger set. His friends all had a sleek, well-fed look that led Lizzy to guess that these were members of the Enclave families Mr. Collins had made so much of. The appraising way some of them sized up her clothes confirmed her surmise, and she found herself every bit as ready to dismiss them from her mind as they were eager to abandon her and cluster around Fitzwilliam Darcy when he appeared in the doorway. But her satirical grimace in John’s direction was intercepted by one young woman, less glossy than the rest, who smiled at her with shrewd comprehension.

“Charlotte Lucas,” she reminded Lizzy, extending her hand as John strolled off with Charley, chattering animatedly. “They are a little transparent, aren’t they?”

“I can’t quarrel with their taste in slighting me,” said Lizzy, “but I’m not sure fawning over Fitzwilliam Darcy is much of a compliment to their understanding. And I’m certain it isn’t good for him to be so lionized: he seems by nature very proud, and such attentions can only make him smug.”

“Is it any wonder that such a fine young man, with family background, money, everything else in his favor, should think highly of himself?”

“I would think more highly of him if he didn’t think of himself at all.”

“But who among us has the nobility of spirit to do that?”

“Very true,” agreed Lizzy with a laugh.

Caroline Bingley drifted up to them, looking and smelling expensive. “Ah, Charlotte, Elizabeth Bennet,” she said, doing them the honor of remembering their names. “What a mob this is. I certainly hope not everyone plans to read, or we’ll be here all night! And what do you suppose they are doing here?” she demanded, indicating a pair of Mexican men, standing apart in a corner looking stiffly awkward. “Are we going to have Spanish poetry as well as English?”

“Neruda has some beautiful poems about love and loss,” Lizzy couldn’t resist saying.

“I heard that they worked for Evelyn Bennet in her garden,” said Charlotte.

“In that case, I should go speak with them,” said Lizzy promptly, seizing her chance to escape Caroline Bingley.

She was rescued at length from her laborious attempts in halting Spanish to make the men feel welcome by Mrs. Gardiner’s calling the group to order. “Thank you all for coming this evening to honor our dear friend Evelyn Bennet. As most of you know, many years ago she created a forum for her friends and neighbors to enjoy the companionship of the mind—the group of readers we have known as the Live Poets Reading Society. We’ve gathered each month ever since and read aloud to one another from works serious and frivolous, in poetry and prose, anything that inspired us, intrigued us, entertained or enlightened us. Our group has no assignments, no deadlines or rules to follow—we simply get together to enjoy the fellowship of the written word.

“It is difficult to imagine our circle of friends without her in it, but equally difficult to imagine a better way of honoring her than by meeting to read in her memory. We hope these readings will bring her among us once again.

“But we know our meetings will never be quite the same, so those of us who have participated in the Live Poets for years spoke over the weekend and decided that we can be Live Poets no longer. We will go on meeting and reading together, but henceforth we will be known as simply the Poets—for the heart of the Live Poets is gone.”

She paused to collect herself, and continued: “Before her voice was silenced but when she knew she had little time left, she asked me to read something to you after she was gone. So here are the last words of Evelyn Bennet, as composed by Christina Rossetti.” And she recited Rossetti’s “Remember”:

Remember me when I am gone away

Gone far away into the silent land . . .

The readings ranged over a wide variety of styles and reflected many tastes. Some evoked personal details of Evelyn Bennet’s life, while others were more universal expressions of death and loss. For Fitzwilliam Darcy, who had known her only slightly, the evening began with feelings of discomfort and regret that he should have yielded to Caroline Bingley’s insistence that they attend. He felt himself to be intruding on others’ grief, and was wary of the danger that the occasion might revive his feelings about the loss of his parents, which he had struggled always to keep under regulation. And it was as he feared: the language of the readings worked a transformation on him as he listened, opening his heart to the commonality of bereavement and requiring the utmost self-control to maintain his outward composure.

Having observed enough of the Bennet family at the Red and White Ball to anticipate their contributions with little enthusiasm, he was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Bennet. He liked the dry reserve with which he read some lines of Swinburne’s:

From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Darcy wondered if the man realized how many different ways those words could be taken, and thought with wry amusement that he did.

But the simple lines of William Penn’s “Union of Friends,” read by Edward Gardiner, effected his undoing: “Death cannot kill, what never dies . . . Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.”

Darcy was thus experiencing an unfamiliar state of emotional vulnerability when one of the Bennet girls arose to speak. He recognized her vaguely as the one who had danced with George Carrillo, and prepared himself for inanity. She named the author of her selection, a poetess he had never heard of, and the name—Pattiann Rogers—did not inspire him with optimism.

Lizzy stood before the group of strangers a little breathless, concerned to do proper honor to her aunt and her own feelings, and unsure how her reading would be received. But there was nothing for it but to forge ahead.

All morning long

they kept coming back, the jays,

five of them, blue-grey, purple-banded,

strident, disruptive. They screamed

with their whole bodies from the branches

of the pine, tipped forward, heads

toward earth, and swept across the lawn

into the oleanders, dipping low

as they flew over the half-skull

and beak, the blood-end of one wing

lying intact, over the fluff

of feathers scattered and drifting

occasionally, easily as a dandelion—

all that the cat had left.

Darcy lost the thread of the poem for a moment in his astonishment. What could this girl be about? What had this folderol about a dead bird to do with anything? But even as he told himself of his outrage, he could not take his eyes off her, the way her whole body vibrated as she plunged through the words. He dragged his mind back to attention.

Mothers, fathers, our kind, tell me again

that death doesn’t matter. Tell me

it’s just a limitation of vision, a fold

of landscape, a deep flax-and-poppy-filled

gully hidden on a hill, a pleat

in our perception . . .

Darcy felt the turn in the poem, and unconsciously leaned forward to meet what was coming.

But this time, whatever is said,

when it’s said, will have to be more

reverent and more rude, more absolute,

more convincing than these five jays

who have become the five wheeling spokes

and stays of perfect lament, who, without knowing

anything, have accurately matched the black

beaks and spread shoulders of their bodies

to all the shrill, bird-shaped histories

of grief; will have to be demanding enough,

subtle enough, shocking enough, sovereign

enough, right enough to rouse me, to move me

from this window where I have pressed

my forehead against the unyielding pane,

unyielding all morning long.

After this extraordinary recitation the girl sat down again without ceremony. To Darcy it was as if she had stripped naked and run through the room—and he was mortified to find himself dwelling on this analogy rather longer than was necessary—but he could not entirely convince himself that he was outraged. No sooner had he gotten it clear in his mind that she was outré, a philistine, than his thoughts returned to dwell on the recollection of her intensity, hypnotized by the little breaths she took between lines, the concentration in her dark eyes. And he could not ignore the inconvenient truth that after the first major loss of his own life—that of his parents—he had felt the same intractable pain, the same stubborn tenacity of grief that echoed through her words. The readings went on, but not even Shelley’s “Adonais,” Whitman’s “Last Invocation,” or the stray Psalm could fix his attention.

At last the final reading was complete, and Darcy found Caroline Bingley at his elbow. “I can guess what you’re thinking,” she said.

“I certainly hope not.”

“You’re congratulating yourself on your good fortune in never having been so foolish as to join the Live Poets. Can you imagine spending many evenings in this fashion? The insipidity and yet the noise; the nothingness and yet the self-importance of these people! I must hear your thoughts on the subject.”

“You’re doomed to disappointment, I’m afraid. I considered it a very appropriate way to honor a friend’s memory; and my thoughts were running on more agreeable lines. I was meditating on how the honest expression of authentic emotion can enhance a woman’s beauty.”

Caroline immediately demanded to know who had inspired these reflections.

Still in the grip of poetry’s enchantment, Darcy replied, “Elizabeth Bennet.”

“Elizabeth Bennet! The passionate little birdwatcher! You astonish me. Maybe you’re smelling the roses because your inamorata is a gardener. Did you know that Lizzy Bennet is a gardener? She’s working for some friends of mine. When you’re married, she can re-landscape Pemberley Ranch—tear out all your mother’s beautiful flowerbeds.”

“A woman’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, and from love to marriage, in a moment.”

“Oh, I think it was your imagination that did that,” said Caroline. But seeing him retire behind his habitual wall of indifference, her fears were allayed, and she continued to indulge her wit at the expense of the Bennets and the neighborhood at large.