Читать книгу The Raft - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 4

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It was said of Jehane that she married blindly on the re-bound. She herself confessed in later life that she married out of dread of becoming an old maid.

A don’s daughter at Oxford has plentiful opportunities for becoming an old maid. Undergraduates are too adventurously young and graduates are too importantly in earnest for marriage; whether too young or too earnest, they are all too occupied. To bring a man to the point of matrimony, you must catch him unaware and invade his idleness. Love, in its initial stages, is frivolous.

This tragic state of affairs was frequently discussed by Jehane with her best friend, Nan Tudor. Were they to allow themselves to fade husbandless into the autumn of girlhood? Were they too ladylike to make any effort to save themselves from this horrid fate?—In the gray winter as they returned from a footer match, on the river in summer as the eights swung by, in the old-fashioned rectory-garden at Cassingland, this was their one absorbing topic of conversation. Ye gods, were they never to be married!

They watched the privileged male-creatures who had it in their power to choose them: that they did not choose them seemed an insult. When term commenced, they would dash up to their colleges in hansoms and step out confident and smiling. They would saunter through the narrow Oxford streets to morning lectures, arm-in-arm, in tattered gowns, smoking cigarettes, jolly and lackadaisical. In the afternoon, with savage and awakened energy, they would strive excessively for athletic honors. At night they would smash windows, twang banjoes, rag one another, assault constables and sometimes get drunk. At the end of term they would step into their hansoms and vanish, lords of creation, in search of a well-earned rest.

Jehane contrasted their lives with Nan’s and hers. “They’ve got everything; our hands are empty. We’re compulsory nuns and may do nothing to free ourselves. When he comes to my rescue, if he ever comes, how I shall adore him.”

Then together they would fall to picturing their chosen lover. Unfortunately the choice was not theirs—their portion was to wait for him to come.

They knew of lean, striding women in North Oxford who had waited—women whose hair had lost its brightness, who fondled dogs and pretended to hate babies.

Jehane and Nan adored babies. They loved the feel of little crumpled fingers against their throats and the warmth of a tiny body cuddled against their breasts. They never missed an opportunity for hugging a baby. They never passed a young mother in the streets without a pang of envy.

Why was it that no man had chosen them? Gazing at their own reflections, they would tell themselves that they were not bad-looking—Jehane with her cloudy brown eyes and gipsy mane of night-black hair, Nan all blue and flaxen and fluffy. The years slipped by. Where was he in the world?

For eight years, since she was seventeen, Jehane had never ceased watching. Every New Year and birthday she had whispered to herself, “Perhaps, by this time next year he will have come.” Marriage seemed to her the escape to every happiness.

Now that she was twenty-five she grew desperate; from now on, with every day, her chance of being one of the chosen would diminish. As she expressed it to Nan, “We’re two girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the land of marriage with all the little children, the homes and the husbands; we’ve no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us and put off in boats to our rescue, we’ll be caught in the current of the years and swept out into the hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us. Oh, dear!”

When Jehane spoke like this Nan would laugh; except for Jehane, no such thoughts would have entered her head. They didn’t worry her when she was with her rector father at Cassingland, occupied with her quiet round of village-duties. In her heart of hearts she believed that life was planned by an unescapable Providence. Her placid philosophy irritated Jehane. She said that Nan’s God was a stout widower in a clerical band; whereat Nan would smile dreamily and answer, “Wouldn’t it be just ripping if God were?”

At such times Jehane thought Nan stupid.

That Jehane should have been so romantic about marriage was inexplicable, save on the ground that she voiced the passions which her parents had suppressed in themselves.

Her father, Professor Benares Usk, was the greatest living Homeric scholar—a tall, bowed man with a broad beard that flowed down below his watch-chain, a bald and venerable egg-shaped head and a secret habit of taking snuff. He had lost interest in human doings since Greece was trampled by the Roman Eagles. Both he and Mrs. Usk were misty-eyed—they had frictioned off the corners of their personalities in the graveyards of the past; their minds were museums, stored with chipped splendors, the atmosphere of which was stuffy.

Mrs. Usk was an authority on Scandinavian folk-lore—a thin, fine-featured, flat-breasted woman who wore her dresses straight up and down without a bulge. Her soft gray hair was drawn tightly off her forehead and twisted at the back into a hard, round walnut.

Only on Sunday afternoons was the house thrown open to visitors; then Jehane would offer tea to ill-at-ease young bloods, while her father fingered his beard and made awkward efforts to be affable, and her mother, ignoring the guests, sat bolt upright in her chair and slumbered. What a look of relief came into the tanned faces of the men when they caught up their hats and departed. They had come as a duty to see not Jehane but her father; and now they went off to their pleasures. Oh, those Sunday afternoons, how they made her shudder!

Often she marveled at her parents—what had brought them together? To her way of thinking, they knew so little about love and could so easily have dispensed with one another. Like dignified sleepy house-cats, they sat on distant sides of the domestic hearth, heedless of everything save to be undisturbed.—Ah, when she married, life would become intense, ecstatic—one throb of passion!

There was a story current in the ‘Varsity of how the Professor cared for Mrs. Usk. He had taken her for a drive in a dog-cart, he sitting in front and she, characteristically, by choice at the back. Deep in thought, he had jolted through country-lanes. Her presence did not occur to him till he had returned to Oxford and had drawn up before his house; then he perceived that she was not there and must have tumbled out. Some hours later, having retraced his journey, he found her by the roadside with a broken leg. For the next three months the greatest living Homeric scholar did penance, wheeling an exacting lady in a bathchair. Doubtless, he planned his great studies of the Iliad as he trundled, and the chair’s occupant constructed English renderings of Scandinavian legends. At all events, next autumn they each had a book published.

These were the influences under which Jehane grew up. Her parents were more like children to her than parents, gentle and utterly absorbed in themselves; they were no earthly use when it came to marriage. She could not apply to them for help; they would have thought her indelicate, if they had thought about it at all. Probably they would not have understood. Sometimes marriage came to girls—sometimes it didn’t; nobody was to blame whether it did or didn’t. That would have been their way of summing up. Meanwhile Jehane was twenty-five; she had begun to abandon hope, when the great change occurred—it commenced with William Barrington.

It was early summer. The streets had been washed clean by rain and were now haunted by strange sweet perfumes which drifted over walls from hidden college-gardens. Nan had driven in from Cassingland and had come to Jehane for lunch and shelter. It was afternoon; the sun was shining tearfully over glistening turrets and drenched tree-tops.

Jehane unlatched the window and leant out above the flint-paved street, looking up and holding out her hands. From far away, out of sight on the river, came the thud of oars and hoarse shouts where the eights were practising. Halfway down the street the tower of Calvary soared, incredibly frail and defiant, against a running sea of cloud.

“There’s not a drop. If you don’t believe me, feel for yourself. Let’s——”

She drew back swiftly, looking slightly flustered.

From the back of the room Nan’s voice came smooth and unhurried, “What’s the matter? Why don’t you finish what you were saying?”

“It’s a man,” Jehane whispered.

In an instantly arranged conspiracy, Nan tiptoed over to her friend. Cautiously they peered out. No sooner had Nan’s eyes found what they sought than she darted back; Jehane, with rising color, remained bending forward.

The bell rang. A few seconds later, the front-door opened and shut. Jehane drew a long breath and stood erect. Laughing nervously, she patted her face with both hands. “You look scared, you dear old thing—more fluffy than ever: just like a tiny newly hatched chicken—— But it’s happened in the world before.”

“Oh, Jehane, how could you do it?”

“Do what?”

“You know—stare at him like that.”

“I looked; I didn’t stare. Why, my dear, that’s what woman’s eyes were made for.”

“But—but you flung your eyes about his neck. You’ve dragged him into the house.—And I want to hide so badly.”

“I don’t.” Jehane feigned a coolness which she did not possess.

A step sounded on the stairs. Nan buried her hot cheeks in a bowl of lilac. A maid entered with a card.

Jehane looked up from reading it.

“Don’t know him, Betty. What made him come?” Betty looked her surprise. “To see master, of course. That’s what he said.”

“But you told him father was out?”

“I did, miss. But he’s all the way from London. Seems the master gave him an appointment. He told me to tell you as you’d do instead.”

“Just like father to forget. We’re going on the river; I suppose I’ll have to see him first.—No, Nan, I won’t be left by myself.—Betty, you’d better show him up.”

Nan threw herself down on the sofa, crushing herself into the cushions, as far from the door as she could get. “I wish I’d not come. Jehane, why did you do it?” Jehane seated herself near the window where the light fell across her shoulder most becomingly. She spread out her skirts decorously and picked up a book, composing her features to an expression of sweetest demureness—that it was a Greek grammar did not matter. In answer to Nan’s question she replied, “Little stupid. Nothing venture, nothing have.”