Читать книгу Despair's Last Journey - David Christie Murray - Страница 13

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Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.

To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet rested upon it.

The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to the June sunlight, framing its scrap of landscape, with the windlass of the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child’s figure and the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache, and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.

‘Carry—so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger, she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and skimmed into the back garden.

‘Oh, you silly!’ cried one of the girls; ‘it’s only Paul.’

She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in, patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry, but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress’s bonnet Her hair was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.

‘Paul?’ she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron. ‘Is Paul a cousin, too?’

‘Of course he is,’ said the girl who had called her back; ‘he’s our first cousin, Paul is.’

‘Is he,’ she asked, with demure face and dancing eye—’ is he—in a kissing relationship?’

‘Try him, my wench,’ said Paul’s uncle.

She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her head. Paul’s face was like a peony for colour, but he pouted his lips also, and bent to meet hers. When they had almost met, she drew her head back with a demure shake and a look of doubt The kitchen rang with laughter at Paul’s hangdog discomfiture. The innocent, wicked, tantalizing eye mocked him, and he was awhirl with shame; but he found in the midst of it a desperate courage, and, throwing one arm around her neck, he kissed her full on the lips with a loud rustic smack.

‘Well,’ she said, with a face of horrified rebuke, all but the eyes, which fairly danced with mirth and mischief, ‘if that’s Castle Barfield manners, I’d better go home again.’

‘Quite right, Paul,’ said Paul’s uncle. ‘Stand none o’ their nonsense, lad.’

‘Oh, but, uncle,’ said she, ‘you would think him milder to look at him—now, wouldn’t ee?’

Paul knew the speech of the local gentry, he knew his father’s Ayrshire accent, and his own yokel drawl; but this new cousin spoke an English altogether strange to his ears, and it sounded fairylike. He stared in foolish worship.

‘You’d better know who you be,’ said Paul’s uncle, ‘and shake hands. This is your grand-uncle’s grand-niece, Paul. May Gold her name is. May, my darlin’, this is Paul Armstrong.’

She held out her hand, and Paul took it shyly in his own. He had very rarely touched a hand which was not roughened more or less by labour. The warm, soft pressure tightened on his own hard palm for an instant only, but he tingled from head to foot as if he had touched something electric.

‘Oh!’-she said, ‘this is Uncle Armstrong’s little boy? She was by two years his senior, and for a girl she was tall; but he was more than on a level with her so far as mere height went, and the phrase cut him at the heart. She took the strawberry-pottle from her head with both hands, as if it had been a crown, and laid it on the kitchen dresser. ‘I’ve heard my father talk of his father five hundred times. My father thinks no end of Uncle Armstrong. He says that for a man of learning he never met anybody one half so sensible.’

Paul fell head over heels in love with the pretty cousin from Devonshire. That is to say, he fell in love with his own dreams about her, and they were sweet enough for any lad to fall in love with. She sang and she played, she brimmed over with accomplishment, which was all rustic enough, no doubt, but angel-fine to Paul, and exotic, and not like anything within his knowledge. She played and she sang that afternoon, and never again had Paul’s ears drunk in such tones of heaven.

He went home in an ecstasy of delight and anguish. How beautiful she was! what a grace enveloped her! Her very name was a ravishment—a name of spring and flowers and pure bright skies. May! He dared to whisper it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May! May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but before the phantom of that missing button his soul grovelled, until it sprang up once more to hover round her foot, her hand, her eyes, her voice, her name of May! May! May! and, with shudders of frostiest self-reproach and richest pleasure, round the memory of that kiss!

In a week or two Paul had grown devoutly religious, and had no idea of the real why. The Church Vale cousins were ardent churchgoers, for the girls were at the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side of the feminine magnet.

So the dweller at the tent door sees himself at church, a pious varier from chapel. The July sunbeams are falling through stained glass; the roof-beams of the nondescript old building are half visible in shadow. The windows are open, and a warm, spiced wind flutters through in pleasantly successful disputation with odours of dry-rot and chilly earth and stone. The sheep are bleating amongst the mounded graves, and the curate is bleating at the lectern. A yearning peace is in Paul’s heart, and the pretty distant cousin is near at hand, with a smell of dry lavender in her dress. The first twining of feeling and belief is here, the earliest of many of those juggleries of Nature which make a fool of reason. Oh, sweet hour! oh, happy world! oh, holy place, where she is! Oh, harmless, innocent calf-love! A jolly old throstle is singing away in the elm which overhangs the parson’s gate. There is a disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare’s-tail clouds which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.

And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul, and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate, gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry sunshine; there is no such nectar any more as foamed in the shining pail.

On the way from Church Vale to Beacon Hargate there is a brook, which now runs ink and smells of evil, and in those days flowed so clear that you could count the parcel-coloured pebbles at the bottom, through water which was sometimes pellucid as diamond, and sometimes of a cairngorm colour. The arched pathway over it, with its weather-stained, square-cut timber guards at either side, was called June Bridge, and above and below the bridge, in curved hollows of the banks where the bed of the brook was earthy, water-lilies floated, sliding with the stream, and tugging back on their oozy anchorage. Paul found his goddess leaning on this bridge, watching the lilies, and began to hum whilst he was yet out of hearing,

‘May, on June bridge, in July weather,’ and to make a song in his head.

‘Can ee swim, Paul?’ asked his goddess.

‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I can swim right enough. Want them lilies?’ She nodded, smiling. ‘I’ll get ’em for you.’

He climbed the bridge, and dropped into the meadow.

‘I’ll wait for ee,’ said May, and sauntered on out of sight.

Paul stripped and dived, came up with a shake of the head, and swam down-stream. He reached the water-lilies in a dozen strokes, laid a hand on the stalk of one in passing, and tugged at it. The stem proved to be tougher than he had guessed, and he dropped his feet to find bottom. He was out of his depth, but he set both hands low and twisted at the stem. This took him under water, but he came up smiling triumph, threw his prize into the meadow, and paddled round the group on an outlook for the finest blooms. One in the very middle of the floating bed was fresh and flawless, and he swam for it. A number of cold weedy things were round his legs at once, and before he knew it he was thickly meshed. The slimy touch sent an unpleasant thrill through him, but he had no sense of fear as yet He wrenched off the bloom he had aimed for, and again he went under water. Then he found he could not rise, and a sudden spasm of terror shook him. He struggled madly, and the pulses in his head beat like bells. Just when the case seemed desperate, and he felt as if he must take breath or die, something gave way. He surged upward, and got one great gulp of air. His senses came back to him, and the terror died away. He threw himself upon his back and paddled, and, keeping his face above water thus, he tried artrully and slowly to extricate his legs from the net which held them. A minute went by, and he was bound as fast as ever. Instinct told him that another struggle meant ruin, and yet instinct bade him struggle. He set his teeth and paddled softly. How long could he last like this? he asked himself; and at that instant he seemed to find an answer. The attitude in which he floated was becoming rapidly more and more upright. There was a sinking weight upon his feet.

At this he shrieked for help, but he paddled softly and without hurry all the same. He listened as well as he could for the beating in his ears. The fields seemed deserted, but he called again. He closed his eyes and listened, paddling softly, with set teeth. He was nearly upright in the water now, and the weight still dragged But there was yet an inch or two to spare, and he was resolved to make the most of his chances. He called for help again, and a voice answered him petulantly from the bank.

‘You silly toad!’ said the pretty cousin. ‘What do you want to frighten me like that for?’ ‘I’m drowndin’!’ Paul answered.

‘Not you!’ said the pretty cousin. She made a movement of disdain, and turned away; but Paul yelled at her with a fear so vivid that she turned again with a white face, and fell upon her knees. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she cried, ‘are ee really drownin’?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Paul doggedly. ‘These blasted weeds is pullin’ me down. Be quick! Tie that there lace thing to your parasawl, and shy it to me. Look slippy, or it’ll be all up with me. Hold your end tight. Now, shy! Pull now! Gently—gently.’

He reached the bank, and gripped it with both hands. There was no need to say that he had had a fright. His wide eyes and the colour of his face said that.

‘Can ee get out now?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Paul; ‘I’m anchored.’

‘I’ll pull ee out,’ said she, rising to her feet; and Paul thrust one hand towards her. She took him by the wrist, stuck both heels in the crisp turf, and pulled. Paul set an elbow on the brink, and strained upwards with all his might Something sucked out of the stream-bed, and the waters went muddy. ‘You’re coming!’ cried May, and gave a haul which was meant to be victorious; but Paul still hung like a log.

‘There’s about a ton of it,’ said Paul. ‘It’s tied like ropes.’

‘Gimme t’other hand,’ returned young Devon. ‘I’ll pull ee out if I dies for’t.’

Paul surrendered the other hand, and she pulled. There was another suck at the bottom of the stream, and Paul came up by a foot. She went backwards for a new vantage-ground, and pulled again, and Paul came to bank, clothed from the waist downward in water-lily leaf and weed, and lay face downwards helpless on the turf at her feet.

‘Now,’ she said tartly, ‘you’re not goin’ to faint, I hope!’ Paul said nothing. ‘Like a girl,’ she added, with disdain.

‘Not me,’ answered Paul, with his nose in the turf. ‘What have I got to feint for?’

He asked the question with feeble scorn, and fainted.

May Gold stooped to a basket which lay near her, and, taking from it a pair of garden scissors, knelt beside Paul, and began to snip his bonds. He woke to find her thus engaged, and a virginal sweet sense of shame filled him. Her fingers touched his skin at times, and he tingled with a soft fire.

‘Nobody’d think it from they grimy paws,’ said May Gold to herself; ‘but he’ve got a skin as fair as a maid’s.’

Paul heard the words, and shuddered exquisitely as she laid her soft warm hand on his shoulder, leaning over him, and slicing away at the withes in a business-like fashion.

‘I’ll finish that,’ he said tremulously.

‘La,’ she cried, ‘the child’s awake all the time! There’s the scissors; I’ll go and wait in the lane.’

Paul lay still for a moment listening to the rustle of her dress; and when it had gone out of hearing he rolled over, and with a shaking hand began to free himself of the remnant of his bonds. He had not, so far, had time to think of the imminent peril from which he had escaped. He had been near death. Death! What a grip at the heartstrings! He had had his second of terror in the fact, but the fact was nothing like the looking back on it There was no urgent fear now to compel him to the restraint of cowardice, and at this instant he was coward from scalp to sole—from heart to skin coward. The peril escaped was a thousand times more horrible than the peril endured, and he quailed now that the danger was over.

All his thoughts and half his feelings had hurried for weeks past towards prayer. In his extremity he had not prayed or thought of praying. A cool, self-centred, self-preserving something in his mind had taught him to command all his own forces for one purpose. Would he have been damned if he had lost the power to pray before that cunning mentor of the flesh deserted him?

He dressed lingeringly and feebly, and when he had done so he went back to the tangle of water-weeds he had left on the river-bank. There were a dozen of the lovely waxlike blooms amongst them, uninjured. He snipped them away with the scissors, and, climbing the stile with heavy feet, surrendered them to May.

‘Oh,’ she said shrilly, ‘take ’em away! I couldn’t bear to look at ’em!’

‘Take ’em,’ said Paul. ‘They jolly nigh cost me my life.’

Before he answered (or before she caught the meaning of his answer) she had flung them into the roadway; but at the instant when she understood him she made a dart at them, gathered them all together in her hands, and sped to the brookside. There she lay at length upon the turf, and washed the blooms in the flowing water. Then she gathered long tough grasses, and looped them together until she had made a cord, with which she bound the waxen posy. Paul followed and sat near, languidly propped on one hand to watch her.

‘Paul Armstrong,’ said May, and he knew at once by this manner of address that she was going to be severe with him, ‘I’d no idea you was so wicked.’

‘Oh,’ Paul answered defensively, ‘I ain’t wicked—not over and above.’

‘You’re a very wicked boy indeed,’ she said. ‘You was in danger of your life—there’s no mistake about that, though at first I didn’t believe you.’

‘There’s nothing wicked in that,’ said Paul

‘Ah 1’ she cried, her little white teeth gripping one end of the grassy cord whilst she wound the other about the stems of the water-lilies, ‘I can see you know what I mean. Using bad language in the very face of death and danger! I wonder you wasn’t drowned for a judgment.’

‘Oh, come,’ Paul answered. ‘I didn’t use bad language.’

‘Oh, yes, you did, though,’ she retorted. ‘And I’m not going to be friends with a boy as talks like that.’

‘Not friends!’ said Paul. ‘Why, May?’ He spoke in an accent of incredulous reproach.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m properly shocked, I tell ee. I’m never going to be friends again.’

‘If I thought that was goin’ to be true,’ said Paul, ‘do you know what I’d do?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t want to.’

‘I’d hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.’

‘You’d do what? she asked.

To ‘hull’ is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was strange to her.

‘I’d throw myself into that brook this minute, and never come out again.’

‘Oh, you wicked boy!’ she cried, but her eyes sparkled with triumph. She quenched the sparkle. ‘It is true; and after that piece of wickedness, it’s truer than ever.’

Paul rose to his feet; his face was white, and his eyes stared as they had done when she had just rescued him.

‘Good-bye, May,’ he said.

‘Good-bye,’ she answered coolly.

‘You’re never goin’ to be friends any more, May?’

‘No,’ she said, but rose to her feet with a shriek, for Paul had taken two swift paces, and had plunged back into the brook, clothes and all. ‘Paul!’ she shrilled after him. ‘Paul! Don’t ee drown. Don’t ee now. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t ee!’

Paul stood shoulder-deep in the stream, and she besought him from the bank with clasped hands and frightened eyes.

‘Goin’ to be friends,’ said Paul grimly.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘Come out, do, there’s a dear!’

Paul reached the bank in a stroke, and climbed back into the meadow. The instant he gained his feet she rushed at him and boxed his ears furiously. Paul laughed with pleasure. He had had his head punched by every fighting peer within a mile of home, and the soft little hands fell like a sort of fairy snowflakes.

‘Oh, you wicked, wicked, wicked boy!’ she raged, stamping her foot at him. ‘You can go in again as soon as ee want to. I won’t be so fullish as to call ee out.’

‘D’ye mean it?’ asked Paul, suddenly grim again.

‘No,’ she said, fawning on him with her hands, but doing it at a distance for fear of his wet clothes. ‘But, Paul, child, you’ll catch your death. Run home.’

‘I’m not a child,’ said Paul. ‘I’m within two years as old as you are, May. I say, May———’

‘Oh, do run home!’ she coaxed him. ‘Do ee, now, Paul, for my sake.’

‘I’m off,’ said Paul. ‘Ask me anything like that, and I’ll walk into fire or water.’

‘Why, Paul,’ said the little Vanity, turning her face down, and looking up at him past her beautiful lashes and arched brows, ‘whatever makes you talk like that?’

‘Because it’s the simple truth,’ said Paul ‘You try me, May.’

‘But why is it the simple truth?’ she asked.

‘Because——’ said Paul fiercely, and then stopped dead.

‘Oh, that’s no answer,’ she said, with a little sway of her hips. She kept her eye upon him, but turned her head slightly aside. She might have practised glance and posture all her life and made them no more telling. But Paul’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and she was alarmed. ‘Don’t stop to tell me now,’ she said, and seeing that he was about to protest, she added swiftly: ‘Come and tell me to-night, Paul, won’t ee, now? And run home now, Paul, do, there’s a dear. Run, and then you won’t catch cold—to please me, Paul.’

So Paul ran, and ran himself into a glow, and felt as if the fire of comfort in his heart would have warmed the Polar regions. Until time and experience taught him better, he always wanted a big word for even the least of themes.

‘Man,’ said old Armstrong once (but that was years later), ‘ye’d borrow the lungs of Gargantua to sing the epic of a house-fly.’

‘Yes, dad,’ said Paul; ‘that’s a capital imitation of my style,’ and they both chuckled affectionately.

But now his mind was a mere firework of interjections—squibs, bombs, and rockets of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Now!’ and ‘She’ll listen! and ‘She’ll despise me!’ He was within a month of sixteen, and he was in receipt of sixpence a week as pocket-money, but the second fact was to be no more durable than the first. He could neither stay at sixteen nor at the sixpence. Time would take care of the one event, and Paul of the other. An immediate marriage, perhaps even an early marriage, was out of question. It might be necessary to wait for years. There was a fortune to be made, of course, and though it might come by some rare chance to-morrow, it might, on the other hand, take time.

‘We’ve got to be practical,’ said Paul.

Whether Paul were a greater ass than most imaginative boys of his years may be a question, but he was as serious about this matter as if he had been eight-and-twenty, and when he reached home he had been rejected and had died of it, and accepted and married many times over. He got into his working clothes after a thorough rub down, and, except for a touch of languor, was none the worse for his morning’s adventure. Armstrong was out on business for the day, and in the drowsy afternoon Paul laid an old press blanket on the office floor, took a ream of printing-paper for a pillow, and slept like a top. This made an end of languor, and when the hour of freedom struck, he ran down the weedy garden and raced upstairs to his attic-chamber, and there attired himself in his best. These were days when the cheapest of cheap dandies wore paper cuffs and collars, then newly discovered, and Paul made himself trim in this inexpensive fashion. He had spent half an hour at his ablutions before leaving the office, and walked towards his rendezvous all neat and shining.

May met him at the door with a finger on her lips and a pretty air of mystery.

‘I’ve had to fib about ee. Uncle Dan saw you run past all wet this morning, and he asked. I had to tell him something. I said you fell in trying to reach them watter-lilies. I didn’t want your own uncle to know your wickedness.’

There was not time for more, for Uncle Dan himself appeared at this moment.

‘None the worse for your duckin’, eh, Paul?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘We’re goin’ to have a bit of music, lad. Come in and sit down, if you’ve a mind to it.’

Paul half welcomed and half resented the putting off of the decisive moment He was in a dreadful nervous flutter, his hopes alternately flying like a flag in a high wind, and drooping in a sick abandonment of everything. And May was more ravishing than ever. She had stuck the stem of a rose in one little ear like a pen, and the full flower itself nestled drooping at her cheek. There was never anything in the world more demure than her face and her manner, but the frolic eye betrayed her mood now and then, and Paul was half beside himself at every furtive smile she shot at him. A local tenor, the pride of the church choir, was there, and May and he sang duets together, amongst them ‘Come where my love lies dreaming.’ Paul’s heart obeyed the call with a virgin coyness, and his thoughts stole into some dim-seen shadowed sanctuary, some place of silence where the feet fell soft, and a pale curtain gleamed, and where behind the curtain lay something so sacred that he dared not draw the veil, even in fancy. ‘Her beauty beaming,’ sang the local tenor. ‘Her beauty beaming,’ May’s voice carolled. Heaven, how it beamed! The boy’s emotion choked him. If shame had not lent him self-control, he would have broken into tears before them all.

The musical hour wore away, and the local tenor had a supper engagement, and must go. May slid from the room, and soon after her voice was heard calling ‘Paul.’

Paul answered.

‘Come here a minute,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to ee.’

Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.

‘Look at that,’ she said, and Paul looked.

The four poplars clove the intense dark blue, but not so loftily as in his first remembrance of them. The street was quiet Not a sound disturbed the humming spicy silence of the summer night Paul turned from that sweet intoxication to her face. She smiled at him, and his heart seemed to swoon. He did not know till later, but she suffered from some very slight tenderness of the eyes which made them shrink from too much light, and he had never seen her in her full beauty until this moment, when they seemed so large and deep that he could scarcely bear to look at them. She had a hat in her hand, and she held it out to him, still smiling, but so dreamily, so unlike herself, that he could but look and tremble and wonder. He took the hat mechanically, and saw that it was his own. He thought himself dismissed, and his heart changed from a soft ethereal fire to cold lead.

‘Auntie!’ she called—‘Aunt Deb ‘Me and Paul’s goin’ to take a bit of a walk. I’ve got to give him a lecture.’

Some affectionate assenting answer came, and May floated into the moonlight, across the street, and into a shady alley which lay between two high-hedged gardens; then into moonlight again, across another road, through a clinking turnstile, and into a broad field, where Paul had played many a game of cricket before and after working hours. From here the open country gleamed, mystic and strange; every hill and dale familiar, and all unlike themselves, as a friend’s ghost might be unlike the living friend.

Her first words jarred his dream to pieces.

‘You’re a funny boy, Paul. After all that fullishness of yours this morning I met your brother Dick. He gave me something. I’ve got it here this minute. I want to know if it belongs to you—really. Dick says it’s all your very own, but I don’t more’n half believe him. I say you must have copied it out of some book. Now, di’n’t ee?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul huskily. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a piece of poetry,’ she said. ‘Can you make poetry?’

‘I try sometimes,’ said Paul.

It cost an effort to answer. He wanted her to know, and he shrank from her knowing.

‘Did you make this?’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell it.’

She spoke the lines prettily, and put away her rustic accent, all but the music: