Читать книгу First the Blade - Clemence Dane - Страница 8

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How long a day can be! An hour or less—so much less than an hour—how it can lie in one’s memory like an interminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten than towns passed in the train. How long a little time can be! Once I saw a woman—not Laura—grow old between a question and an answer—between the opening and the shutting of a door.

Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence with “When I was a little girl,” and look bewildered if you laughed. “When I was young,” said Laura, as innocently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with Mother at the beginning, and at the end of it—Justin. And yet, less of it than of the four-hour Odyssey that closes her childhood, that cuts her memories in two and provides you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely curious, as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting wearily, amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening skirts, amid vanities and ignorances and experiments, for body and brain to grow up to it.

Those four hours—joyfully down dale and up hill to another glimpse of a receding heaven, and then down dale again, not quite so springily—those four hours Laura never forgot. Each incident of the road—the stumble-stone that cut her knee: a bolting rabbit startling itself and her, and the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it stiffly like an Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that frightened her into ditches, and once a nettle-bed: that black wood where, through dead leaves, her own shadow had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were the echoes of her own: the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trailing and tropical, like pictures in the Swiss Family Robinson, with mighty garlands of old-man’s beard: a village pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies: babies on door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: dust and sunshine and the terrible tramps—each and all had been etched indelibly upon a mind that excitement had made more than ever sensitive to impressions.

She picked a bunch of flowers as she trotted along, for a mother who would appreciate them. They were fruit trees in heaven, of course, with leaves for the healing of the nations, like the eucalyptus tree, she supposed, on the vicarage front lawn; but Rev. xxii said nothing about flowers. “Too much pavement,” thought Laura, the gardener. She supposed that even if grass tried to seed itself in the dust of the cracks the dust would be gold.... There couldn’t be much nourishment in gold-dust.... Anyhow, here was one of Mother’s own autumn bunches for her, pulled from the dear chalk soil—an exquisite disorder of oat-grass and hips-and-haws, late sprigs of yellow-wort between the scabious cushions, like stars on a lilac sky, with oak-apples and bleached heather and fans of scarlet bracken—all put together by the skilful, flower-loving hands she had inherited from her mother.

A bigger part than she realized of her first light-footed hour had gone in the picking of them. The end of the second saw her passing a village bakery, with a wistful eye on the stack of loaves and bars of mouldy chocolate behind the blurred, thick panes. She hesitated as, through the open door, the round, red-rimmed baker’s clock told her, between hiccoughs, that it was half-past two and that she was hungry. So hungry, indeed, that for a moment her fingers closed on the purse at the bottom of her pocket. A penny, three half-pennies, two farthings and a threepenny bit.... Sixpence ... Gran’papa’s Euclid himself couldn’t make it more than sixpence.... No, she mustn’t.... Yet there was such virtue in a ha’penny bun—a round, shiny, sticky, steamy, curranty ha’penny bun! She supposed it wouldn’t do if she offered St. Peter fivepence halfpenny—and explained? If only St. John had the keys.... St. John would let her in at once, she felt sure. But St. Peter? He might, of course ... but perhaps it was wiser not to risk it.... When she got to Mother there would be tea, tea without bread-and-butter first, the kind of tea Aunt Adela never knew.... Mother would see to that.... She could wait.... She wasn’t so awfully hungry....

She turned resolutely from temptation and hurried on.

But she was no longer dancing effortlessly along like a kitten or a whirled leaf: her haste had become deliberate and would soon be painful. She was growing—infallible sign of exhaustion—conscious of her body: conscious that her back was aching; that she was thirsty as well as hungry; that, through her sand shoes, the surface of the road knubbed her wincing feet. She carried her bunch of flowers, drooping, too, by this time, across her shoulder to ease her tired arm, but they were very heavy. Such a great big bunch—but then Laura, her life long, will always undertake a little more than she can manage.

Above her the unconquered hill-road stretched as steep and long and high as Jack’s Beanstalk. She climbed it wearily, bargaining herself upward—

“I will go to the second bend, up to the white birch. If I do it in a hundred steps I will stop a minute. If I do it in ninety steps I will stop two minutes.”

But it was always more than a hundred steps for sand shoes, and so, honourably, though her breathless little body were rocking, she would not stop.

She reached the top at last, too hot from walking to flinch at the shock of the wind, or to notice that the sun had gone in: and found her goal again—twin towers and arched body—yet so strangely altered in an afternoon, that, as she looked, she gave a cry of dismay. It had been so near, so clear, a parrot’s flight from Beech Hill, but now, withdrawn to an immense distance, it rose without a glitter from the iron rim of the world, a grey, frozen blur upon the sullen sky.

She stared fearfully.

She couldn’t ... she hadn’t ... she couldn’t have made a mistake?... Yet what had happened?... What in the name of enchantment had happened to the Crystal Palace, the Cœlestial City, the bright and shining heaven?...

Enchantment! In a flash her scared wits seized at the only endurable explanation. Enchantment! Of course! Of course! Oh, blessedly of course! What was she thinking of so soon to forget Christian, and her Shepherds?...

Beware that ye steppe.... How they had rubbed it in too! And she hadn’t come to a single danger yet except motor-cars and the cow with the leering eye; did she suppose she was to win through without a qualm? Foolish Laura, to forget that between Delectable Mountains and the Gates of the City lies, with all its bewilderments, the Enchanted Ground.

The Enchanted Ground! Her eyes sought the far hills, and once more credulity was fortified into conviction, for even as she watched, the white autumn dusk uprose noiselessly, and before it city and hills alike shrank and were gone. It was as convincing a piece of magic as could be wanted.

Laura only wished Aunt Adela could have been there to see it—Aunt Adela, who did not believe in witches—Aunt Adela, always sniffing at Grimm’s Fairy Tales! Besides, even Aunt Adela would be—only for a moment—some sort of a companion, flesh and blood at least, at a small girl’s elbow, as she stands lonesomely on a strange hill-top, buttoning the reefer that had seemed so hot and thick down in the valley, pulling down cuffs of sleeves through which the wind is tunnelling, making shivering preparation for the plunge down—down—down—into Enchanted Ground.

Impossible to turn back now—wasn’t it?... What a notion?... Mother would be waiting.... Mother would know by now that she was coming.... One of the Shining Ones would be sure to have told her.... How excited Mother would be growing.... The Enchanted Ground stretched from sky to sky.... It was beginning to rain, and the wind cut through one’s reefer as if it were gauze.... But there was Mother.... She could get through somehow.... Only she must hurry, for it must be nearly tea-time.... She simply had to get to heaven by tea-time....

She shifted her autumn bunch, tucked her free hand between frock and skin to keep it as warm as might be, and, screwing up eyes and mouth against the drizzle that whipped her face, set off at a stumbling trot down her second hill-side in an afternoon.