Читать книгу The Woman Who Stole Everything and Other Stories - Arnold Bennett - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCONFESSION
“This is a tumulus,” Henry Kearns remarked, stopping by a grassy mound which rose irregularly out of the vast expanse of turf rolling around them in tremendous contours. “At least, so I’m told,” he added.
They had climbed very slowly to the second hilltop of the Downs above the village, and were five or six hundred feet above sea-level. In front of and below them, to the north, lay the measureless Flats, with long tongues of white mist lying across the land in places, and the twinkling of domestic lamps in the windows of County Council cottages, and a gleam of water here and there from the river.
“What is a tumulus?”
Henry exclaimed that a tumulus was a prehistoric sepulchre.
“How perfectly thrilling and horrid!” said Cora. “But I suppose they’re nothing but bones now. Why don’t people open them and see?”
“They do, sometimes. But there’s such a thing as a sense of decency. I vote we sit.”
Henry was hot after the exercise. They sat, side by side. No sooner had they left the confines of the village than Cora had taken off the Spanish shawl which covered her bare shoulders and carried it in her hand, waving it to and fro. She now threw it on the grass, but did not sit on it. There it was spread, its big red flowers and veridian leaves darkly showing. Henry leaned back in physical relief against the mound, found his cigarette case and passed a cigarette to Cora, who sat up straight enough. The brief flare of a match; the red ends of two cigarettes.
An enormous orange-tinted moon swam swollen and as if bursting with the potentialities of light over the summit of an eastern hill. The sky first, and then the earth, began to be illuminated as the colour of the moon changed from orange to pale yellow. The stars faded. Shadows appeared vaguely, and then sharply, defined. The turf brightened. Every blade of grass under the eyes of the pair could be distinguished from its neighbour. The daisies had wilted away, as the wheat on the lower slopes turned, ripening. No wind! No sound! No sound, as it seemed, in the whole world! But in the great, benignant heat of the night, black figures could be described afar off, moving solemnly in twos and threes, or solitary, on the surface of the downs. The heat had drawn the adventurous up to the heights; and awe was subduing every one of them.
“Uncle,” Cora breathed, in a melting, sad, sweet voice. “I must tell you. I think you’ve taken this business simply magnificently. Far better than I deserve. I know I’m wicked. I wish you could realise how awful I feel about it all.”
Her tones seemed to be sanctified by the secret yearnings for righteousness with which they were laden. She was sincerity itself, aspiration itself. And in her white, thin frock, which enveloped her only as a vapour might have done, she was vaporous too; so ethereal that a rough sigh from Henry might have blown her away.
Henry agreed privately that he had indeed behaved rather marvellously in the affair. While offering no reply to her intense assertions, he saw a chance of mastery and took it.
“Have you broken with Nick?” he asked bluntly and curtly, putting at the same time a shade of good-humoured, tolerant benevolence into his question.
“Oh, no! I don’t think so. Oh, no! I wouldn’t say I’d broken with him.”
“Does he know about this—who-is-it?”
“No.”
“Does he suspect? I’m not being inquisitive. I should like to help you—both.”
“I doubt if he even suspects. Men never do. They can’t believe that you could prefer anybody else to them. Too proud.”
True perhaps (thought Henry), if feline.
He demanded, more firmly:
“What’s the trouble between you and Nick? Now you can either talk quite freely to me, as if you were talking to yourself, or not at all. I don’t mind which, but it must be one or the other.”
“It’s all very vague,” she said submissively. “It’s a something, a je ne sais quoi——”
“Je ne sais quoi be hanged,” Henry exclaimed with calculated brutality. He felt that he was subjugating her, and that she needed, even perversely desired, the whip. “Tell me about the last great row you and he had.” He was curious to hear her version of the dance-club affray.
“Last great row! Oh, uncle.”
“Well there must have been one—you being a Kearns.”
“It was about money,” said Cora dismally.
“The usual thing!”
“No. Nick isn’t mean. I know he thinks I’m extravagant, but he never says so. Only he makes me feel it, and that’s worse than saying so. I’m not blaming him. He said I’d had I forget how much money last month. I said I hadn’t. I couldn’t believe it. You know I can’t keep accounts, and I’ve given up trying to. So he brought down his private account-book that he keeps locked up, and he showed it me. I’d never seen it before. Of course he could point out all the items—it was all so neat, it made me angry—well, it didn’t make me angry, because I was angry before, and I said I didn’t take his damned account-book. I said he might make mistakes like other people. He went cold and formal, like he does sometimes; he didn’t say any more. But next day, when it was all smoothed over and I asked him for some money he said ‘Certainly,’ quite nicely, and fetched his account-book and entered it up; and then he said, ‘Now you’ll initial this, please. We won’t have any more disputes of this sort any more.’ Naturally I was furious. I said it was an insult for a husband to ask a wife to sign for money. As if he couldn’t trust me, indeed! But no, he wouldn’t see it. And he wouldn’t give me the money until I had signed. And I wouldn’t sign. But as I had to have some money I did sign in the end. But I never forgave him for that—I meant for using what you’d call his economic power.... I suppose I was right to sign. Was I?”
“My good girl,” said Henry, with an air of disgust. “What a fool you were! If all your rows have been like that——! Here you disputed his accounts to start with—that is to say, you didn’t trust him—at least you pretended to yourself you didn’t trust him—because naturally you knew in your heart all the time that his accounts were correct—and then you refuse to do a perfectly ordinary thing—that everybody does as a matter of course. Do you call it an insult to be asked for a receipt? There’s no question of trust or distrust. Surely you can see that.”
“Yes,” said Cora softly. “I can see it now you explain it. But I’m not a man, and it’s no use pretending I am. I only wish Nick would explain things to me like that. But he doesn’t. He just goes white and taps his foot, and there we are—a scene! It isn’t that I don’t like Nick. I do. I was mad about him at one time—he’s such a fine dancer. I mean really fine.”
“Do you ever go out dancing together?” Henry asked, feigning simplicity.
“Oh, yes!”
“Even after your rows?”
“Oh, yes!”
“And I expect you want him to stay up too late, and he hates it, eh?”
“How funny you should say that! It’s quite true. That was the beginning of our very last row. But you see he’s always so hard about it. Time, time, time! Business, business, business! He simply can’t see there’s another side of life at all! That’s what I say.”
“Quite. But you do ask him for money, and he does have to earn it; and how can he earn it if you keep him up half the night? What’s your defence?”
“Oh!” she yielded. “I haven’t any defence. I’m quite capable of seeing that. But it’s only now and then. It isn’t every night. After all——. Well, what’s the use? I was wrong. There! When I’m wrong I always admit it. Nick never admits he’s wrong. Never! And even if he never is wrong, he might pretend he’s wrong sometimes, just to please me. Nobody likes living day and night with a perfect paragon.”
“There’s not much sense in that,” said Henry Kearns. “You can’t expect Nick to say he’s wrong when you both know he’s right.”
A couple of wanderers approached them on the wide grassy path. The girl was leaning rather heavily on the tall young man’s arm, and looking up at him. He looked downwards, with bent head. The girl was talking, the man listening. She was dressed in white; all the girls were dressed in white. Her voice came into hearing. A soft, sad, wistful voice, like Cora’s, seemingly charged with mysterious significances, as if saying lovely and solemn things about the deeps of existence. The immense concave of the sky might have subdued this couple also, as it had subdued Cora. Their tread was soundless on the resilient turf.
“I said, ‘If that’s how you look at it, my dear,’ I said,” the girl was saying.
Henry caught just those words and no more. The voice diminished to a murmuring again. The clinging girl glanced round at Henry in his dinner-jacket and straw hat, and at Cora in her evening frock, and at the Spanish shawl; she stared with hard impudence at Cora during a few steps, and then, sharply turning her head towards her young man, she ignored Cora as something negligible or contemptible. A common Cockney voice; thick ankles; no distinction of carriage! But still the passing was impressive, implicit with obscure portents. The couple were far down the slope now. Cora had apparently not noticed them.
“Yes,” she said meekly, after a long pause. “Yes.”
Henry Kearns had once more the apprehension of imminent drama. He envisaged Nick Ussher driving swiftly towards Cander. Should he tell Cora that Nick was on the way? Was she sufficiently vanquished to receive the news in the spirit in which it ought to be received? He nearly told her, and then recoiled from the step in alarm. Cora leaned back against the slant of the tumulus.
“Oh, how heavenly it is, the feel of the grass against your spine!” she softly exclaimed, wriggling and pressing her spine into the grass. “And this grave has never been opened for thousands of years!”
She shuddered with emotion. With what ardour she was capable of living, at moments! Henry Kearns almost envied her her extraordinary capacity for emotion! He was a mere learned fish compared to her. But how dangerous was her terrible latent store of emotion! He saw Nick getting nearer and nearer, and wished to God that to-morrow had dawned.
“If you aren’t breaking with Nick,” he said, judicially. “I suppose you’ll break with this what’s-his-name?”
“I suppose so,” she admitted. She gave a sob, then controlled herself. “Yes,” she said, apparently courageous. “I must—of course. But what have I to live for? That’s what I ask myself.”
“Well, now,” said Henry Kearns persuasively. “You’re coming down to bed-rock now. What do you live for as it is? Tell me about yourself, my dear. Tell me just what your life is. Tell me your ordinary day. I’m very interested.”
