Читать книгу The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 6

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There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked.

They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower.

To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him—"quite simply and gently" said Kitty—that she had been very foolish and had let her friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband.

The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.

"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment. Oh, I know that I did, too!—don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see—see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh—it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak—just because I did listen."

"Ah, do forgive him—just because you were so strong that you never let him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come.

She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid, as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The serpent of weariness still slept.

"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day—how they talked and talked about themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, analysing long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy of being forgiven—"Tell me; you loved me so much that you were willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me;—but, if you hadn't been going to die—oh darling!—then you would have loved me too much to give me up, wouldn't you?"

His arm was about her, a book between them—unread, it usually was unread—and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house; Kitty had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her husband there and, despite his protest, had kissed his hands, with tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat.

He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious answer: "But then I couldn't have set you free, dear."

"No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But—would the fear of losing me have made you re-fall in love with me? You know you only re-fell, darling, only knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, in saying that I loved you; but you would have loved me—not in that dreadful, big, inhuman way—but loved me, just me—loved me enough to fight for me, wouldn't you?"

He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel have a little dust on its shining hair? It was a foolish angel, as he knew; and it lived for love, as he knew; and women who did that and who didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle—he remembered the swift train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one forgot the outer world and need not consider it again; it was done with him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would have loved you for yourself; I would have fought for you."

"And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if only it had been sooner, sooner."

Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; but he remembered it; remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought, where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths.

Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two friends who dropped in upon them for a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing a stage that now and then they agreed to have set up before the bower. These figures, their own relation to them, quickened the sense of secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes; they had lovers' dexterities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay little escapades when they would run away for an hour drifting on the river or wandering in the woods. And the formalities and chatter of social life—all these queer people interested in queer things, people who used the present only for the future, who were always planning and looking forward—made the hidden truths the sharper and sweeter. Nothing, for the two lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that made the marionettes so insignificant and that made their love so deep. There was, for them, no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. There were no ends, or, rather, they were always at the end. And there was nothing for them to do except to love each other.

"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette," Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such an uncanny and charming creature;—the future doesn't exist for him at all."

Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had now become so beautifully appropriate—for what is literalness but a seeing of the fact as standing still?—Kitty tried to smile but begged him not to jest about such things.

"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."

She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do you hate to leave me!"

She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now to soothe her passionate weeping.

He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise. Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.

Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;—it didn't go quite so fast or carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty seemed to swing even faster and further.

She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious, and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both. Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a mark.

It was then that the blossoms began to look a little over-blown, the paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and enervating.

She saw him as dead, and the thought of death, always with her, renewed her pity and her adoration; he knew that his own background lent a charm enthralling and poignant to his every word, look and gesture. But for him this charm and this renewal were lacking. He could not feel such pity, either for her or for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty, and, by degrees, the tragedy would fade and the beauty of their last weeks together would remain with her. There was no cavern yawning behind Kitty's figure; life, inexorably, showed him her smiling future.

And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No: he could keep up; he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide from himself that its swing was growing mechanical.

By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in Paradise. Holland was tired; profoundly tired.

He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with books under the trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes. He wanted very much to read and to forget himself—to forget Kitty—for a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a moment's notice, and must remember to look up and smile at her or to read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were candid, they were frightened; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then, they were drinking in some new knowledge; a new fear and an old fear, come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see; but he was not so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was thinking of.

She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders.

"What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her, as he had asked on that morning three weeks before.

"Nicholas—Nicholas—are you feeling worse?" she returned.

Holland was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he might relax his hold. Actually a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lapping through him.

"I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing back her hair. "You know, I shall suffer hardly any pain; but I do feel very tired."

"In what way tired?" Another alarm was in her voice.

"Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course, one doesn't die without fading."

He felt, when he had said it, that the words, in spite of his care, were cruel; that she would feel them as cruel; he had gone too fast; had tried to grasp at his immunity too hastily.

"Nicholas!" she gasped. "You speak as if I were accusing you!"

"Accusing me, darling! How could you be! Of what?"

"Oh, Nick," she sobbed, hiding her face on his breast—"Am I tiring you? Do you sometimes want me to go away and to leave you more alone?"

His heart stood still. Over her bowed head he looked at the sunlit trees and flowers, the hazy glory of the summer day, a phantasmagoric setting to this knot of human pain and fear, and he said to himself that unless he were very careful he might hurt her irremediably; he might rob her of the memory that was to beautify everything when he was gone.

He had found in a moment, he felt sure, just the right quiet tone, expressing a comprehension too deep for the fear of any misunderstanding between them. "There would be no me left, Kitty, if you went away. I am you—all that there is of me. You are life itself; don't talk of robbing me of any of it; I have so little left."

She was silent for a moment, not lifting her face, no longer weeping. Then in a voice curiously hushed and controlled she said: "How quiet you are; how peaceful you are—how terribly peaceful."

"You want me to be at peace, don't you, dear?"

"You don't mind leaving life. You don't mind leaving me," she said.

"Kitty—Kitty——"

She interrupted his protest: "I've nothing to give you but love; I've never had anything to give you but love. And you are tired of that. You are going, you are going for ever. I shall never see you again. And you don't mind! You don't mind!" She broke into dreadful sobs.

Helpless and tormented he held her, trying to soothe, to reassure, to convince, recovering, even, in the vehemence of his pity, the very tones of passionate love, the personal note that her quick ear had felt fading. She sobbed, and sobbed, but answered him at last, in the pathetic little child language of their first honeymoon that they had revived and enriched with new, sweet follies. But he felt that she was not really comforted, that she tried to delude herself.

"You do feel tired—in your body—only in your body?—not in your soul?" she repeated. "It isn't I, it's only you."

"It's only I who am dying," he almost felt that, with grim irony, he would have liked to answer for her complete reassurance. The funny, ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him; she would rather have him die than have him cease to love her.

Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, seemed to gaze from green shadows among branches; the mocking faces of pucks and elves to tilt and smile in the breeze-shaken flowers;—that subtle gaze, that sinister smile, of what did it remind him? All Nature was laughing at him, cruelly laughing; yet all Nature was consoling him.

His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in death and contradiction. Not affinity, not the growing needs of normal life had brought them together; only the magic of doom and the craving to be loved.

Poor Kitty; she did not know. It was his love she loved, his love she clung to and watched for and caressed. She did not know it, but she would rather have him dead than have him loveless. That was the truth that smiled the sinister smile. One might summon one's courage to smile back at it, but one was rather glad to be leaving it—and Kitty.

And, in the days that followed, when from the pretence of passion he could find refuge only in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the weariness, he began to wonder when the pretence would become reality. He began to want to die.

This weariness, this irritation, this disgust belonged to life rather than to death; it was a sharp longing to escape from consciousness of Kitty—Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspicion. It was a nostalgic longing for the old, tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests. The month was almost up, and yet he was no worse; was he really going to last for another month?

He said to Kitty one morning that he must go up to town. Her face grew ashen. "The doctor! You are going to the doctor, Nicholas?"

"No, no; it's only that Collier is passing through. I heard from him this morning. He wants to see me."

"Why should you bother and think about work now, darling?"

"Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can until the end."

He tried to keep lightness in his voice and patience out of it.

"Let him come down here. I'll write myself and ask him." She, too, was assuming something. She, too, was afraid of him, as he of her.

"He hasn't time. He is on his way to the Continent."

"It will be bad for you to travel now. And London in August!" Her voice was grave, reproachfully tender.

"No, dear, I promise you I will run no risk."

"Promise as much as you will"—now, gaily, sweetly, falsely, but how pathetically, she clasped her hands about his arm;—"but I couldn't think of letting you go alone: you didn't really believe I'd let you go alone, darling: I'll come too, of course. Won't that be fun!—Oh, Nick, you want me to come! You don't want to get away!"—The falsity broke down and the full anguish of her suspicion was in her voice and eyes. It was this sincerity that pierced him and made him helpless—sick and helpless. He was able now to blindfold its dreadful clear-sightedness by swift resource: he acted his delight, his gratitude: he hadn't liked to ask his dearest—all the bother for only a day and night; he had thought it would bore her, for he must be most of the time with Collier; but, yes, they would go together, since she petted him so; they would do a play; he would help her choose a new hat; it would be great fun.

Yet, while he knotted the handkerchief around her eyes, turned her about and confused her sense of direction, as if in a merry game, he knew that fear and suspicion lurked for them both in their playing.

He had, indeed, meant to go to the doctor, but now that must be postponed. The meeting with Collier, his chief at the Home Office, was his only gulp of freedom. At the hotel Kitty waited, and his heart smote him when he found her sitting just as he had left her, mute, white, smiling and enduring. She hadn't even been to her dressmaker's or done any shopping as she had promised him to do. "I know I am absurd;—I know you think me, silly;—but I can't—I can't do anything—think anything—but you!" she said, her lips trembling.

"Absurd, darling, indeed!" he answered, "as if you couldn't think of me and order a new dress at the same time! You know I told you I wanted to see you in a pale blue lawn—isn't lawn the pretty stuff?—And what of the hat? You do want one?—Come, let us go out and I'll help you to choose it."

But she did not want to go out; she only wanted to sit near him, lean her head against him, have him make up to her for the hours of loneliness. He knew that night at the play that she hardly heard a word, and that when once or twice, he was lured from his absorption and made to laugh, really forgetting, really amused, his laughter hurt her. She gazed at the stage with wide, vacant eyes. He felt the strain of being in town with this desperate devotion beside him worse than the strain of being shut up with it in the country; for there Kitty need hide and repress nothing, and his danger of hurting her by forgetfulness was not so great. He was like a prisoner led about by his gaoler, manacles on his wrists and ankles and a yoke on his neck; there was a certain relief in going back to prison where, at all events, one wasn't so tormented by the sights and sounds of freedom, nor so conscious of chains and the watchful eye upon one.

"This is the end," he thought, as, in the train, they sat side by side, holding hands and very silent, but that, from time to time, when their eyes met, she would smile her doting, hungry smile and murmur: "Darling."

After this, the prison again; the high walls and stifling sweetness of Paradise, and then, thank goodness, release.

How strange a contrast to the journey a month ago, when, stunned, shot through, he had only felt the bliss of home-coming, the longing for the nest. It was all nest now; there was no space for the fear of death. He was shut in, smothered by this panting breast of love.