Читать книгу First the Blade - Clemence Dane - Страница 7

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Though its anticipation and memory can fill a lifetime, the actual emotion must inevitably measure its intensity by its brevity. Ecstasy and despair, those hill-tops of human experience, can offer, in the nature of things, no abiding place for a pilgrim’s feet.

With the return of the mere capacity for thought, Laura declined rapidly from her timeless bliss into a mood of active, bustling pleasure. A thousand devices and anticipations flitted through her mind as, in feverish excitement, she mapped out the day.

She would start at once, as soon as she had satisfied Nurse by appearing for milk and biscuits.... She and the twins were accustomed to wander, within limits, as they pleased.... She would be over the hill and away by the time Nurse was repacking the perambulator, and when she was missed, who would guess where she had gone?... At least, she was not so sure of that.... It was very strange that Nurse and Aunt Adela had never said a word about heaven being so close to Brackenhurst.... It looked as if they were afraid of her finding out ... as if they didn’t want her to see Mother.... She clenched her fist. If they tried to stop her now!... They had better not try, that was all! But she would not give them a chance.... She would not let them guess that she knew anything.... She, too, could pretend ignorance, even if she had to tell a story over it.... Mother couldn’t bear you to tell stories—but this was different.... She would explain it all to Mother, and of course Mother would understand.... Oh, the blessedness of being back with Mother who always understood!

She was so absorbed in her meditations that the nursemaid could approach unheard.

“Miss Laura, are you deaf? ’Ere I’ve calling till I’m ’oarse. Come along, do, you naughty child, an’ ’ave your biscuits. It’s eleven or more—you won’t eat no lunch if you leave ’em so late. Come along. What are you staring at?”

Laura’s eyes were as blank as a cat’s. She waved her hand airily as she scrambled to her feet.

“That over there. What’s that—that shining house, Nurse?”

“Green’ouse, I expect.” Nurse screwed up her eyes and followed the direction of Laura’s grubby finger. “Oh, that! That’s the Crystal Pallis. It stands very ’igh, you know. As ’igh as us, almost. Miss Laura, on’y look at your ’ands. Reely! A terrier’d ’ave more sense. If Miss Adela meets us——”

The Crystal Palace! As beautiful a name as any other for a Cœlestial City....

“Have you seen it before, Nurse?”

“Lord, yes—any fine day. Must ’ave a fine day, of course. I wonder I ’aven’t shown it you. I come at night once with my friend to see the fireworks. My friend, ’e——”

Laura broke in. She knew all about Nurse’s friend.

“Please to remember—Fifth of November?” She was puzzled.

“Not only then. Any night. Lights up all the sky—blues and reds, like joolry. Lovely. I’d like to see it close to.”

“Why—may any one go there?” asked Laura casually as they walked towards the beeches. But her indifference was the quivering indifference of a well-trained dog on trust before a lump of sugar.

“Lord, yes! Mother went once.”

“Your mother? Your mother too? Did she?”

“Yes. She went once. Brock’s Benefit. Fine time she ’ad too. Come along, Miss Laura.” She took her by her unwilling hand. “You can look at it after. It won’t run away.”

“Was it——What was it like, Nurse?”

“Well—it’s all glass, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Laura. “Like pure gold——Many gates?”

“Oh, I dunno——”

“Twelve, should you think?”

“I dessay. It’s a big place. What, Miss Laura?”

“Twelve thousand furlongs,” Laura was murmuring. She raised her voice. “What else, Nursie?”

“Oh, there’s fountains and parrots and stalls with joolry—that brooch of mine come from there—” (it was a sham moonstone that Laura and Nurse agreed in thinking superb) “and gardens something lovely. Orange trees, my mother said, and trees with tulips on ’em.”

She was thinking of magnolias, but Laura, lover of flowers, drew a deep breath, thrilling to a vision of the tallest tree on Beech Hill parti-coloured to its topmost twig with the tulips you buy in shops, long-stemmed, scarlet and purple, half a crown a dozen.

“Oh, Nurse!! And was there a river, Nurse?”

“Oh, yes—runs right through the grounds, with animals on the islands—what d’you call ’em—antiluviums—awful-looking beasts. Gave my mother the creeps, they did.”

Laura nodded, but she was not impressed. She knew them. She and Christian had known them in the Valley of the Shadow and had taken no harm. Yet to assure herself she asked——

“What are they like? Is it difficult to get past them?”

“Why, Miss Laura, they’re not real beasts. On’y stone. Just antiluviums. Sort of stone dragons, you know.”

“Oh, I see.” Laura nodded again as one enlightened. She was acquainted with the Dragon, too, and the Beast; had met them at church.... They were bound for a thousand years.... Turning into stone was a very good way of binding them.... She gave a great sigh of content. It was simply wonderful how everything fitted in....

I beg your pardon, Collaborator? You think it curious that the conversation should have been such a satisfaction to her?

But why? Her Cœlestial City hardly needed a nursemaid’s recognition?

Oh, I see. I see what you mean. But then you are arguing as a ‘grown-up.’ We grown-ups, of course, believe or disbelieve—black or white—one thing or the other—and there’s an end of it. But this is a child. A child can reconcile—look back, Collaborator—implicit belief and frank scepticism in a way that, to us, is all but incomprehensible. A child will show you a fairy ring without dreaming that it can be anything but the track of elfin feet, yet will instantly and vigorously denounce as a story-teller the contemporary who claims to have seen the Little People at their dancing. Fantasy and Common Sense sit see-saw in those early years, and keep a wonderful balance; but when the lanky ‘teens add their weight it is generally Common Sense that comes to earth with a thud, while poor Fantasy is jerked sky high and lost for good among the stars: which is a pity.

Do you understand now why Laura—who will always keep that balance, I believe, however old she grows—could, with only the Kent hills between her and heaven, be yet distinctly relieved that Nurse’s mother had been there before her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, you see, like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the counter of Nurse’s mother’s experiences and pronounced coin of the realm.

Laura—but I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Collaborator! I lose the thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but first let me talk myself out. And it is not polite to murmur “Impossible” pointedly to your pointed knitting needles!

But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the twins, eating her biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl.

She was always good when she was left alone, as the new nurse had at last discovered; so when the biscuits had been eaten and the children dismissed to another hour’s play before going home, it was with the twins that Nurse’s paperback shared her attention, rather than with Laura, slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was scarcely to be distinguished from a slim beech sapling a-sway in the wind. Nurse would have settled down to her reading with less composure if she could have seen beyond the screen of trees, have caught Laura’s backward glances, half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill-top, and her odd proceedings when she decided that she was out of every one’s inquisitive sight.

For Laura, the careless, the untidy, the hard-on-her-clothes, swayed, I suppose, by some broken memory of kind hands pinching up her ribbons and smoothing her curls, of eyes very proud and critical of their Laura, was first and fastidiously concerned with her appearance. She rubbed her hands as clean as she could on the grass, fastened a careless button, pulled up her stockings and adjusted her suspenders. Mother hated wrinkly stockings.... She tightened her hair ribbon, straining her hair off her face till her eyes nearly jumped out of her head, and did her best to brush the long locks, that the wind had whipped into rats’-tails, round and round her finger into the sausages that grown-ups desire. She took off her shoes and shook out the sand and bits of leaf, and tied them in the complicated tangle that Laura believed to be a ‘Louise’ knot, because it never under any circumstances came undone. Indeed, it needed scissors in the evening. Finally she took out her purse, poured the hoard into her lap and counted it breathlessly. A penny, three halfpennies, two farthings, and the threepenny bit that she had had given her to put in the plate on that fortunate Sunday when there had not, after all, been a collection. Sixpence exactly. Children were half price, so sixpence exactly could smuggle you through gates of pearl into your mother’s lap.

She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted once again the lie of the road through the valley below, and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, took to her heels and ran down the hill-side.