Читать книгу First the Blade - Clemence Dane - Страница 5

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If they had only told her that her mother was dead!

Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the beloved mongrel who was poisoned, and Grandmamma, and birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had explained it all to her at the time. Remembering, she would still have had, in the shock, her mother to lean upon. And, especially to a child, death’s finality is its own anodyne. But nobody, with that anxious English substitution of euphemism for tact, ever used the bald word ‘death.’ Mother, she was told, was alive and well and happy. She was living in heaven with Jesus and Our Father. She knew everything that Laura did, and one day, if Laura were good, she would see her again.

Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a superfluity of imagination, and a knowledge of life that would have amused a London sparrow!

It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at any moment, and she would come, of course, from the station, along the dusty high-road that swept past the end of the lane and that you could see from the window of the inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in desperation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion, scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy days, keep a mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden window-seat to watch the distant strip with an air of expectancy that would have made that awaited mother’s heart ache.

The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, boundaries were enlarged, and from the end of the lane a wider vista was under her observation, a white river on which black, far-away specks were for ever swimming boat-like into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into figures of men and women—women in tweedy skirts and blue ribbons and little straw hats, that were always Mother until they were near. What mad terrier-rushes that high-road saw, helter-skelter down the last hundred yards, and what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away.

But fine weather brought worse things than disappointment. It brought the long daily walks, and picnics, sometimes, when an aunt who was doing her duty by roly-poly nephews and a taciturn niece, thought it time for a treat. And then would come the scenes, delays, excuses, direct petition, and the final ‘temper,’ the white-hot rebellion that exhausted alike the bored nursemaid and bewildered aunt, and did indeed at first accomplish Laura’s object of being left behind. For, locked in the night-nursery to consider its sins, the ha’porth of misery, perched on its high chair like a tousled bird, would be fiercely rejoicing that once more it had staved off catastrophe—a mother arriving and departing again while her little girl was out for a walk.

But such a reason could not be explained to Aunt Adela, Who Smelt of Lanoline.

Laura hated Aunt Adela as she hated every one in those first interminable months in that alien household. Her all-satisfying intimacy with her mother had created in her a habit of indifference to the rest of even her own tiny world, and now, stranded among semi-strangers, she was at first so shy and so fastidious that, in the happiest circumstances, it would have taken time before she learned how to make or receive advances. But it is not easy to be polite with a hidden trouble gnawing, like a fox, at one’s vitals: and Laura did not try over hard. For Laura, fighting for her memories like a dog for its bones, with a more insidious foe than honest Aunt Adela, had lost already much of her treasure, dropping one by one as she struggled the pretty ways her mother had taught her, and growing, in her bitter loneliness, into a very wild apple of a small girl, over whom aunt and household and visitors shook their heads in despair.

She became, of course, as the months went by, outwardly more amenable—was tamed as a wolf-cub can be tamed, into a semblance of domesticity. There came, at least, an end to the flinging of a frantic body from side to side of its cage. She bruised herself at last into a state of acquiescence, and even learned to do tricks. But she never forgot that she was trapped. Aunt Adela, taking Wilfred and James to her well-meaning heart, would wonder why it was so much more difficult to do her duty by Laura. Laura had been naughty at first, but under her, Adela’s, wise management she was certainly settling down. Yet there was something about her that Adela found, she hardly knew why, disturbing—distressing even. Why couldn’t Laura be more like other children? Why, for instance, would she not make friends with the playfellows of Adela’s anxious choice? A conscientious aunt might well plume herself on the advantages she could confer—advantages that her late lamented, yet (between you and her) eccentric sister-in-law had never troubled to procure for an excessively spoiled daughter. There were the Vicar’s daughters—such well-behaved children. There were the two nieces of Brackenhurst’s great man, old Timothy Cloud, thrice Mayor of the neighbouring market town before he died and had a stained glass window in Brackenhurst parish church. And there was the son himself, young Justin Cloud, though he was at school of course, and older, but nominally at least an ornament of a most select little circle.

Above all there were the five little Mouldes, models of deportment, with neat pinafores, and straight fair hair, and white eyelashes, and noses moistly pink, like puppies. Laura was expected to invite or to go to tea with them at least once a week, though it soon appeared that the visits needed Aunt Adela’s eye to be even superficially successful. Only Aunt Adela’s eye could prevent Laura from retiring under the nearest bed with a book, and refusing to budge till it was time for herself or her visitors to depart. It enraged Laura that the accident of age should mark her down for friendship with Annabel Moulde, a sly, skinny child to whom Aunt Adela invariably referred as “A little mother. So good to all her brothers and sisters.” As if Laura didn’t try to be good to Wilfred and James—when Aunt Adela wasn’t looking!... Because it was for Mother ... because she had promised ... not to please Aunt Adela ... not to show off like Annabel.... Laura despised Annabel for her ostentatious virtue and her meagre bookshelf—Queechy, Ministering Children, Melbourne House, Jessica’s First Prayer.... She was expected to be friends with a little girl who enjoyed—yes, enjoyed—reading Jessica’s First Prayer! Yet Annabel, unconsciously, had done her a good turn; for Laura, bursting with the humorous horror of that discovery, had been impelled to break her habit of silence to impart the joke, tentatively, to Gran’papa Valentine—and Gran’papa, over his spectacles and his Boswell, had been surprised into a chuckle, and a stirring of interest in a granddaughter to whose credit he had heard little, and, conversation developing, had ended, to their mutual amazement, in bestowing upon her the freedom of his sitting-room and his biscuit tin, and certain of his unlocked bookshelves. After which there was, at least, always Gran’papa!

Gran’papa’s room was the pleasantest in the house—small, square and cosy. The furniture was of some yellowish wood, glassy with polish, and there was a chequered crimson tablecloth and, summer and winter, a dancing yellow fire. The window was always open, and the fresh warmed air smelt faintly of biscuits and tobacco and old bindings. The pictures on the walls hung orderly, in couples, Landseer engravings and framed coloured casts of trout; for Gran’papa was a fisherman. He was a fiddler too, though here zeal outran discretion. His violin was wrapped away in silk and velvet, like a lady, and Laura was never quite sure that it was not, say—first cousin? to the fairy fiddle in Grimm’s. She longed to experiment. There was the big desk with ink and seals and wax, and neat papers innumerable, and a pot with marigolds or mignonette, and always there was sunshine and the bad-tempered canary, that would dash at you from its open cage, with peckings and shrill squeaks of jealous rage, till Gran’papa whistled, when it would perch upon his finger or his skull-cap, and slowly condense from a passionate puff-ball into an elegant little gentleman in lemon yellow breeches and snuff-coloured swallow-tails, with an eye so fixed and bright that you could swear it wore a monocle.

A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild’s throat, the picture of stern old Gran’papa, with his whole edifice of dignity built up so solidly, from his square-toed boots and speckless broadcloth and his grey satin tie with its pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue eyes, and the unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head, fantastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up Laura, looking back, a long way back, might begin, belatedly, to miss a half-forgotten Gran’papa, might wonder whether, after all, she had sufficiently appreciated him, realize with a sigh that she had learned in those young years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully as he had loved her; though ‘love’ was not a word that Laura could imagine Gran’papa using, any more than she could hear him saying, ‘pretty girl’ when he meant, he emphatically meant, ‘an elegant young female.’ Even ‘young woman’ would have been a concession for Gran’papa’s nice ear. Just so, Laura’s phrase would have been tempered by Gran’papa to ‘affection,’ ‘esteem,’ ‘respect.’ And there she would have agreed with him again, for she certainly respected him profoundly. And he, secretly, respected her, because in her he could recognize his own keen, fastidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, but intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and kindred minds. Not kindred souls—there they parted company; for where Laura’s affection could invariably be trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the testing tool of her grandfather’s hypercritical taste had left him, at the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at all—save Laura. That Laura, his flesh and blood, had something of his own grey matter in her head too, was a secret delight to him: and by the time he was eighty and she eighteen, Laura had discovered that secret and how, in consequence, to wind him, for all his tetchiness, round her finger. But that is at yet eight or nine years ahead, and Laura only beginning to discover that in Gran’papa’s room, at Gran’papa’s lowest bookshelf, she could sometimes forget to wonder if Mother would come this afternoon.

Gran’papa’s bookshelf was crammed with volumes so tall and heavy that to pull one out was breathless work, and to lift it a greater feat than lifting the coal-scuttle or Wilfred who weighed three stone. They had to be read by a literary Laura reposing on her stomach, her legs waving airily, her elbows so chafed and reddened by the harsh carpet and her own weight, that they are to this day her worst point. Which is the reason, Collaborator, if the matter has bothered you, that Laura, even at that dinner-party we shall attend sooner or later, never wore really short sleeves.

But the books were worth it, even to the later Laura at her most feminine hour when Justin, unprompted, had admired her frock and said, not joking, that he liked red hair. (Truly—he said so!) For the books were an education, and an education is more useful than pretty elbows when one has a Justin for whom to stand tiptoe.

But to the early Laura, with her mother half lost and Justin not yet found, they were not education but Nepenthe—Nepenthe and the Fields.

There was Herodotus, and The Swiss Family Robinson, and Gulliver’s Travels; Pamela, and a first edition of Alice (Gran’papa approved of Tenniel) and three or four single poems, each a book to itself, with a profusion of bright-coloured illustrations—Gilpin, The Elegy on a Mad Dog, The Three Jovial Hunstmen, and Laura’s favourite, So She went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf. There was the Churchman’s Family Bible, with Adam in voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with hair like Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were the Cruikshanks—huge albums into which Gran’papa had pasted every print or drawing of his favourite artist that he had come across in fifty magpie years. And there was Mr. Punch, immortal Mr. Punch, endless volumes of him, inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation of the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian politics with which Laura of the tenacious memory could, on occasion, confound an opponent. Pouring over the cartoons, devouring the antiquated letter-press as only a small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela one day on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition of group after group of Her Majesty’s Ministers who had died before she was born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for instance, and pitied him deeply for losing his wife, for she had him thoroughly entangled with The Lord of Burleigh. But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and ‘Joey,’ whose speeches in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept and learned by heart, and would declaim unweariedly to the looking-glass and the indifferent twins, and who was nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming, unfocussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. Alfred Jingle.

Worship was even then, I suppose, a necessity of her nature, and, her chief altar veiled, her mind was in process of becoming a pantheon, in which Jane Eyre and Jephthah’s daughter, Mary Stuart and Napoleon (it shocked her intensely that Gran’papa could refer to him familiarly as ‘Boney’) shared incense with Wamba son of Witless, and Admiral Byng, and poor Arachne, who did sew better than Minerva anyhow! For Laura’s gods were generally selected for their misfortunes’ sake. She had the instinct for lost causes: would always be the loyalest of rebels. Indeed her early and equal passion for John Milton and Marie Corelli was occasioned by the fact that here, at least, were two who could appreciate a poor devil’s good points. If Laura could have had Providence under her orders for but one busy hour, how topsy-turvily perfect the world would have rolled on again, with never a discrowned king nor a carrotless donkey nor a motherless eight-year-old in all its boundaries. Her baby sorrows had intensified her inborn sympathy with any ill-treated thing, and, as the leaves began to fall in that first lonely autumn, she would fling small, motherly arms round the shivering poplar on the lawn as she passed it, and hug it and warm it, with defiant glances at the comfortable fir trees and well-dressed laurels: would rescue dying flowers from the bonfire, and worms from the birds, and birds from the pussy-cat: and when she found a tell-tale hole and a nibbled book in Gran’papa’s bookshelf she was quite as anxious as the mouse to preserve the secret. Can you see Laura, Collaborator, breathing heavily with excitement, eye and ear cocked against detection, guiltily dropping stolen cheese down that mouse’s tunnel before she corked it up and turned with equally eager sympathy to the smoothing of the poor torn book, and so, incidentally, to her reward? For in that brown, ancient book, with its long s’s and its wood-cuts and its map, she found the information that neither Gran’papa nor Nurse nor Aunt Adela would give her, nothing more or less than a definite description of her mother’s new home, and full directions as to how Laura was to get there.

She and the mouse had happened, in short, upon an early edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress.