Читать книгу The Raft - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 7

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Jehane had been granted her wish and she was frightened. The river stretched before her, a lonely ghost, glimmering between soaked fields and beaten countryside. The rain-fall must have been heavy in the hills, for the river was swollen and discolored: branches, torn from overhanging trees, danced and vanished in the swiftly moving current. With evening a breeze had sprung up, which came fitfully in gusts, bowing tall rushes that waded in the stream, so that they whispered “Hush.” In the distance, above clumped tree-tops, the spires of Oxford speared the watery sky; red stains spread along white flanks of clouds—clouds that looked like chargers spurred by invisible riders.

The man of whom she knew so little and whom she desired was standing at her side. She was terrified. She had gained her wish—at last they were alone together.

Behind them, up the hill, the cosy inn nestled among its quiet arbors. Across the river the ferryman sat whistling, waiting for his next fare to come up. Moving away through misty meadows on the further bank a white speck fluttered mothlike.

“She’ll get home all right, don’t you think?”

“Why not? She always does.”

“But it’ll be late by the time she reaches Cassingland. She’s got to catch the tram into Oxford, to harness up and then to drive out to the rectory. It’ll be late by the time she arrives.”

“She’d have been later if she’d returned by river with us.—See, she’s waving at the stile.—Girls have to do these thing’s for themselves, Mr. Barrington, if they have no brothers.”

He stroked his chin. “Girls who have no brothers should be allotted brothers by the State.”

She faced him daringly. “I should like that. I might ask to have you appointed my brother.”

“You would, eh! Seems to me that’s what’s happened.—Funny what a little customer Nan is for making her friends the friends of one another: she was just the same in the old days. One might almost suspect that she’d planned this from the start—bringing us out all comfy, and leaving us to go home together.—But, I say, can you punt?”

“I can, but I’m not going to.”

He stepped back from her involuntarily and eyed her. There was a thrill of excitement in her clear voice that warned and yet left him puzzled. She filled him with discomfort—discomfort that was not entirely unpleasant. While Nan was present, she had been watchful and silent; now it was as though she slipped back the bars of her reticence and stepped out. He tingled with an unaccustomed sense of danger. He weighed his words before expressing the most trifling sentiment. Usually he was recklessly spontaneous; now he feared lest his motives might be mistaken. What did she want of him? She had gazed down from the window and beckoned him with her eyes—him, a stranger. Whatever it was, Nan knew about it, and had cried about it the moment his back was turned. He distrusted anyone who made Nan cry.

Silence between them was more awkward than words—surcharged with subtle promptings that words disguised; he took up the thread of their broken conversation.

“If you’re not going to punt, how are we going to get back? I’ll do my best, but you’ve seen what a duffer I am.”

“We’ll sit in the stern and paddle. With the current running so strongly, we could almost drift back.”

He followed her down the slope. She walked in front, her head slightly turned as though she listened to make sure that he followed. He noticed the pride of her handsome body, its erectness and its poise—how it seemed to glide across the grass without sound or motion. He summed her up as being abnormally self-conscious and wilfully undiscoverable. He wondered whether her restraint hid a glorious personality, or served simply as a disguise for shallowness of mind.—And while he analyzed her thus, she was scorning herself for the immodesty of her fear and dumbness.

Kneeling down on the landing to unfasten the rope, he pieced his words together. “I ought to apologize for what I implied just now. It must have sounded horribly ungallant to suggest that you should work while I sat idle.” She did not answer till they were seated side by side in the narrow stern. Taking a long stroke with her paddle, she shot a searching glance at him; the veil drew back from her eyes, revealing their smoldering fire. “That’s all right. I don’t trouble. You needn’t mind.”

Though she had not blamed him, she had not excused him.

Night was falling early; outlines of the country were already growing vague. Edges of things were blurred; from low-lying meadows silver mists were rising. In the great silence grasses rustled as cattle stirred them, the river complained, and a solitary belated bird swept across the dusk with a dull cry.

It was dangerous and it was tempting—he could not avoid personalities. He tried to think of other things to say, but they refused to take shape. His perturbation seemed the rumor of what her mind was enacting. Several times inquisitive inquiries were on the tip of his tongue; he checked them. Then her body lurched against him; their shoulders brushed.

“You have a beautiful name.”

“Indeed! You think so?”

“For me it has only one association.”

Again she brushed against him. He caught the scent of her hair and, in the twilight, a glimpse of the heavy drooping eyelids.

“I mean that poem by William Morris—it’s all about Jehane. You remember how it runs: ‘Had she come all the way for this’——?”

“You’re frightened to continue. Isn’t that so?” Her tones were cold and quiet. “ ‘Had she come all the way for this, to part at last without a kiss?’—I remember. It’s all about dripping woods and a country like this, with a river overflowing its banks, and a man and a girl who were parted forever ‘beside the haystack in the floods.’ Jehane was supposed to be a witch, wasn’t she? ‘Jehane the brown! Jehane the brown! Give us Jehane to burn or drown.’ There’s something like that in the poem—— I suppose I make you think only of tragic things?”

“Why suppose that?”

“Because I do most people.”

“In my case there’s no reason for supposing that. I oughtn’t to have mentioned it.”

“Oh yes, you ought. You felt it, though you didn’t know it. It’s unfortunate for a girl always to impress people as tragic, don’t you think? Men like us to be young. You’re so young yourself—that’s your hobby, according to Nan.—But if you want to know, you yourself made me think of something not quite happy—that’s what kept me so quiet on the way up.”

“I thought I’d done something amiss—that perhaps you were offended with me for the informal way in which I introduced myself.”

She gave him no assurance that she had not been offended.

“Here’s what you made me think,” she said:

“She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot.”

“Rather nice, isn’t it, to find that we’ve had such a cheerful effect on one another?”

“But—but why on earth should I make you think of that?”

She left off paddling and glanced away from him; a little shiver ran through her. When she spoke, her voice was low-pitched but still penetrating.

“Let me ask you a question. Do you think that it’s much fun being a girl?”

“Never thought about it.”

“Well, it isn’t.”

“I should have supposed that, for anyone who was young and good-looking, it might be barrel-loads of fun to be a girl in Oxford.”

“Well, I tell you that it isn’t. You’re always wanting and wanting—wanting the things that men have, and that only men can give you. But they keep everything for themselves because they’re like you, Mr. Barrington—they’ve never thought about it.”

“I’m not sure that I understand.”

“Bother! Why d’you force me to be so explicit? Take the case of Nan—she’s one of thousands. She’s got nothing of her own—no freedom, no money, no anything. She’s always under orders; she’s not expected to have any plans for her future. She creeps to the windows of the world and peeps out when her father isn’t near enough to prevent her. Unless she marries, she’ll always be prying and never sharing. She’s a Lady of Shalott, shut up in a tower, weaving a web of fancies. She hears life tramp beneath her window, traveling in plume and helmet to the city. Unless a man frees her, she’ll never get out.—Oh, I oughtn’t to talk like this; I never have, to anyone except to Nan. Why do you make me? Now that it’s said, I hate myself.”

“Don’t do that.” He spoke gently. “I’m glad you’ve done it. You’ve made me see further. We men always look at things from our own standpoint.—I suppose we’re selfish.”

He waited for her to deny that he was selfish.

“There’s no doubt about it,” she affirmed.

They paddled on in silence till they came to the lasher. Together they hauled the punt over the rollers—there was no one about. When it had taken the water on the other side, Jehane stepped in quickly; while his hands and thoughts were unoccupied, she was afraid to be near him. He stood on the bank, holding the rope to keep the punt from drifting; his head was flung back and he did not stir. Through the network of branches moonlight drifted, making willows, gnarled and twisted, and water, rushing foam-streaked from the lasher, eerie and fantastic. He was thinking of Nan and the meaning of her crying.

“Miss Usk, it was very brave of you to speak out.”

She laughed perversely; she was so afraid of revealing her emotion. “You must have queer notions about me. I’ve been terribly unconventional.”

They drifted down stream through Mesopotamia, pursued by the sandal-footed silence. When Barrington spoke to her now, it was as though there lay between them a secret understanding. What that understanding was she scarcely dared to conjecture. Here, alone with him in the moon-lit faery-land of shadows, she was supremely at peace with herself.

At Magdalen Bridge they tethered the punt; it was too late to return to the barges.

Outside her father’s house they halted. Through the window they could see the high-domed forehead of the Professor, as he sat with his reading-lamp at his elbow.

“You’ll come in? You had some business with father that brought you down from London?”

“But it’s late. If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to see him to-morrow.”

“Are you staying for long in Oxford?”

“I hadn’t intended.”

“But you may?”

“I may. It all depends.”

“Good-by then—till to-morrow.”

Professor Usk sank his head as she entered, that he might gaze at her above his spectacles. “Home again, daughter? Been on the river with Nan, they tell me! It’s late for girls to be out by themselves.”

She answered hurriedly. “Mr. Barrington was with us.”

“Ah, Barrington! Nice fellow! Did he say anything about my book?”

She was on tenterhooks to be by herself. “He’ll call tomorrow.”

“Have you been running, daughter? You seem out of breath. I’ve a minute or two to spare; come and sit down. Tell me what you’ve been doing. Did Barrington say whether that book of mine had gone to press?”

She backed slowly to the threshold and stood with the handle in her hand.

“I’ve a headache, father.”

She opened the door and fled.

Locking herself in her room, she flung herself on the bed and lay rigid in the darkness, shaken with sobbing. Pressing her lips against the pillow to stifle the sound, she commenced in a desperate whisper, “Oh God, give him to me. Dear God, let me have him. Oh God, give——”