Читать книгу The West Wind - Crosbie Garstin - Страница 7

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Twenty miles to the westward a sick woman lay abed and listened to the wind rising. She had been born on the bleak Bodmin moors during a tempest, and her youth had been spent in the very farmhouse where she now lay, a house which, perched high on granite cliffs, looked out upon the confluence of the English Channel and Atlantic and took every westerly gale straight in its weathered face. Few strangers came near the lone farmhouse, but always there had been the wind scurrying hither and thither about the place, whispering, crooning, singing rough shanties or bellowing with rage. The voice of the wind ran through her life like a leit-motif. She had invested it with personality, maturing as she herself matured. A lonely child she had fancied it a playmate, a mischievous boyish creature who scattered ricks, uprooted trees, blew hats off the dignified, inflated the washing into grotesque human shape and set it dancing on the clothes lines, pants, drawers and shifts, in a comic aerial ballet. As she grew older the wind took fresh shape, it became a lover, a bold, tempestuous, roving fellow who came up from the sea and rapped at her window o’ nights. She could never quite visualize him, but, for some unexplained reason, pictured him as tall and dark, bare-footed, wearing a knife in his belt. He would climb the old sycamore tree just under her window and sit swinging his legs in the branches and call to her by name. Then, in imagination, she would creep downstairs through the sleeping house, open the door and go off with him over the seas and far away, to the lands where there are palm trees, elephants and pagodas, to the isles of sunset and the gates of morning.

Then came a big lover of flesh and blood and she put the wind-man out of her mind—or tried to. But he came with a south-westerly gale in the grey dawn of her wedding day. She heard him as she lay abed, raging round the house, buffeting the window with his fists, threatening, imploring. “Go away,” she said, putting her head under the bed-clothes. “That foolishness is done with.”

But it was not—she had been listening to that voice too long and she could not stop the wind blowing. While she was well her thoughts were her own, but whenever she was ill and no longer had full control of herself, he came to the window and whispered.

Hovering now in and out of consciousness, listening to the sough of the gale, the patter of driven rain-drops on the pane, she knew that he was even then at hand.

She awaited his coming with every over-wrought nerve strung to its fullest. Would she see his face this time? Each time he came he seemed to grow a little clearer, less nebulous. Tall, dark, stripped to his shirt and breeches, the rain dripping from him—or was it salt water? Why should it be salt? A drowned man? A shudder ran through her. No, no, not that! What ghostly thoughts possessed her? It was madness. She must fight it off, must not weaken, must not listen. She strove to compose herself, to fix her mind on stable, mundane things; on her good husband and affectionate children, on household matters. Were the cows being properly milked, the poultry fed? That old braggaty^[1] hen was given to laying out, at the back of the hay-loft usually—she must tell the girl.

[1]

Spotted.

She was getting control. Her mind had stopped slipping backwards into the dark. She was herself again—almost. She would defy him, not listen—such foolishness!

Then clearly she heard it; the remembered creak in the sycamore boughs, the soft rap on the window and a low voice calling her name.