Читать книгу This Shining Woman - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Each man is in his Spectre's power

Until the arrival of that hour

When his humanity awake

And cast his Spectre into the Lake. William Blake. Jerusalem, 1804.

AS the storm blew away across the Welsh hills and the watery light of a chill evening fell over the lonely farm, the girl peered out from her hiding-place—the loft of a small barn that was, like the rest of the wretched estate, dirty and neglected.

Her apprehensive but resolute glance ranged over a dreary scene. Not only was the landscape sombre, massive in outline and dark in colouring, but the farm lands showed thriftlessness and poverty; broken fences, swinging gates, gaunt and filthy straying animals formed the foreground to a grey stone house with a slate roof that matched in drab hues the gloomy scene. Household uses had polluted the stream that, gushing clear and brilliant from the mountainside, here flowed sluggishly, clogged with refuse, through the yard where a few hens scratched, and a few cotton garments flapped on a string fastened between two poles.

The bleak aspect of the house was not softened by the squares of soiled white dimity curtains at the severe, flat windows or by the melancholy resignation of the underfed dog stretching his iron-coloured fleece in front of the half-opened door that revealed a dark interior.

The watching girl's peaked, intelligent face became sharp with concentration as she gazed and listened, on the alert for enemies.

A violent shouting of her name—"Mary! Mary!"—first in a hoarse male voice, then in the querulous tones of a woman, made the little girl withdraw instantly into her shelter and lie down trembling and panting on the boards rough with chaff and dust.

The man's angry cries came nearer; the child heard her name mingled with obscene curses, which were to her so familiar as to cause her no astonishment; she peered cautiously through a chink in the wooden side of the barn and saw her father stumbling through the wet overflow of the steaming midden heap; he still held the whip with which he had an hour before thrashed his Mary, and he looked round in a sidelong fashion, alternately shouting and muttering and poking the while with his whip in an aimless fashion at the piles of refuse, the squawking hens, the broken, rusty farm implements on the rough ground.

Mary lay rigid; she knew how to escape out of the ruined barn by the back, she knew the path up to the hills, and she meant to run away to that cold and stormy refuge if her father found her; she had no regrets for her forfeited supper and bed; indignation was stronger in her wild little heart than fear; she preferred any danger to the risk of being again beaten by the big red-faced man in the patched, shabby clothes, who was plainly searching for her, blaspheming because she had escaped him.

His fury had been roused against the dog, and while the younger children had stood round, crying hysterically because the friendly, amusing animal was being beaten, Mary had leapt at the tyrant and struggled for the whip, crying out the while in a frenzy of indignation. She was soon mastered, and received the punishment intended for the beast. Her father had dragged her into the kitchen, and in front of the untidy hearth had thrashed her in the presence of her mother and the other children.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft, though she hated her husband, liked the dog and pitied Mary, yet was a strict upholder of discipline and filial obedience, therefore she did not interfere, but relieved her breaking nerves by violently scrubbing with a soapless brush the long neglected dresser.

Mary's punishment, which she had endured stoically, for she was deeply relieved that the dog had escaped, was interrupted by the arrival of a Welshman with an overdue account for cattle meal.

The creditor was not reassured by the sight of the farm—obviously bankrupt—and the ragged family, or soothed by the debtor's swaggering airs of London gentility. He brusquely demanded his money, and during the noisy altercation that followed Mary had fled to the barn through a heavy storm of rain that broke over the gloomy landscape.

Now the creditor had been got rid of somehow, and Mr. Wollstonecraft, in a humour rendered more vindictive by that violent interview, was searching for his victim. The brow-beaten mother, with spiritless obedience to her master, continued to cry, "Mary! Mary!" as she shuffled the evening meal on to the table, pausing now and then to shout out of the window or up the stairs.

Mary, lying mute in the old granary, viewed her father as he prowled below, and considered him with the detachment of hatred.

Edward Wollstonecraft was in the prime of life, stoutly built, tall, with good features, and thick auburn hair tied back by a dirty string; a week's growth of reddish beard disfigured his inflamed face, his linen was torn and dirty, his high boots required both cleaning and mending. He looked what he was—one of those wastrels who, bred as gentlemen—that is, as human beings on whom money has been spent, who have been allowed soft living, authority and leisure—have never learned any kind of profession or performed any manner of work, but have been employed solely in spending on vicious self-indulgence a patrimony gained by another's thrift and labour.

Banks of purple clouds blew again across the purple hills and increased the rapidity with which the dusk fell over the miserable farm. A dim light showed in the kitchen windows, and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft, in a voice that had once been pretty and with an Irish accent that was still pleasing, timidly called her husband in to supper.

The exasperated man gave up his search, and roaring a last defiance to the truant—he knew where she was hiding, she should go to bed hungry for a vixen, and so on—returned to his wretched home.

Mary gave a great sigh and relaxed her tense attitude; her head sunk on to her folded arms; her bruised body quivered with relief under the dress of common material.

She was sixteen years of age and knew a good deal of the miseries of existence; her intelligence, acute and precociously developed, wondered at her misfortunes, which seemed grotesque and unnatural, but she was forced to accept them with resignation, since she knew nothing else.

She acquiesced in her mother's constant sigh: "A little patience, and all will be over." An end would come, Mary believed, peace would follow all these miseries; death, she thought, was the name of this peace, this end; God would take them to Heaven, where there would be ease and silence. She had seen in many graveyards the names of those who had died much younger than herself; "a little patience," then, and relief would come.

Yet something strong and ardent that she could not herself understand surged in the child's spirit and struggled against this patience, this resignation. Zest for life warmed her, though she had never known any joy; ambition urged her, though she did not know what there was to achieve.

She was also, without knowing as much, bold, proud and exquisitely sensitive, and her circumstances galled her at every point. She detested being in subjection to a creature whom she despised, she revolted against the indecencies of a drunkard's poverty-bitten home, and she felt with keen poignancy every detail of her own pain and degradation and of that of her mother, brothers and sisters whom she loved fondly.

The dark filled the granary. Mary huddled into some old rough sacks. She would not return to the house. She was not afraid of solitude or the night, and this was not the first time that she had slept in the barn or in the passage outside the room that she shared with Everina and Eliza, ready dressed so as to be able to fly at the first alarm.

She had little imagination, and was not troubled by supernatural terrors; her fears and her consolations were alike material. As she lay huddled in the barn she began to plan—not for the first time—to escape from her father's power. She had seen girls no older than herself working on the scattered Welsh farms, driving the cattle, herding the sheep, scouring pans at the open doors; they seemed, these cheerful creatures in their red shawls and bright hats, to be happier than she was. She did not mind work, arid surely she could earn her food and some loft in which to sleep, and, in her snatched leisure, to study.

Her dearest possessions were a few books that had been bought for her when she had gone to school in Beverley, and she dreamed now of wrapping these in a kerchief—as soon as it was light enough to creep back to the house and fetch them—and running far, far away over the hills until she reached some farm or cottage that required an eager, willing little servant.

She peered through the chink in the boards at her home. The yellow speck of a rush-light showed in each of the upper windows; the children were going to bed, Charles and James in one room, Eliza and Everina in the other. The house was silent; probably Mr. Wollstonecraft had gone down to the dark and straggling village to drink at the dirty inn.

His Irish wife, who had been bred a gentlewoman, would be clearing up the house, trying, though hampered by exhaustion and despair, to preserve the decencies, even the niceties, of life.

Tears came into Mary's eyes. She knew that she could not escape, could not forsake these fellow-victims. She rose, shook off the husks that clung to her damp dress, left the barn and, picking her way carefully through the disorder of the yard, entered the house.