Читать книгу Journey to Paradise - Dorothy M. Richardson - Страница 4

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Because Aunt Bertha is coming, something has come into the room. Making it different. The others must be thinking of her, too, but they don’t seem to notice that the room is different. Too full, although Pug is not here. She is somewhere else, getting grubby, not thinking about Aunt Bertha.

Mother and Mary and Ellen are standing up and talking. They are going. They will take it with them. Yes, it is going away. There will be plenty of room for it out in the hall. Berry follows them into the passage leading to the hall, sees, through the open garden door, the slack tennis-net waiting, alone. Running along into the hall, she sees them all standing talking at the wide-open front door. It is out in the garden now: sending in a broad blaze of sunlight. Not here in the drawing-room which is always waiting for people to come. Berry runs down its length and out into the conservatory. The plants and ferns don’t notice her. Perhaps Aunt Bertha isn’t coming after all.

Loud voices in the hall, sending away the lovely smell from her fingers that had just pinched a leaf of scented geranium. Aunt Bertha has come. Running out through the conservatory door she sees the back garden smiling to itself, looking like tomorrow. Down the steps and up the other steps and in by the back door and into the breakfast-room, to be back for a minute in the waiting for Aunt Bertha to come.

‘Sweet!’

Dickie, in his cage, all alone. ‘Sweet little Dick!’ Berry runs away, to forget the pain of Dickie’s loneliness, to lose the worse pain, just coming, of the thought of his nights alone under his baize cover.

The letter-cage half of the front door is bolted back as well as the other. They are all out in the porch and Berry can hear wheels creaking and scrunching on the drive. Ann bounces quickly into the hall from the back stairs, setting her cap straight. And now they are all on the steps below the porch, hiding Aunt Bertha. But Berry can imagine what Aunt Bertha has seen as she came up the drive between the high trees: the bed of shrubs in bloom in the middle of the sweep, lobelias thick all round the edge—did Aunt Bertha notice how blue they are?—the green lawn with the stone vases at the corners filled with calceolarias, so bright in the sun.

‘Eh, Bertha, well, me-dear.’ Mother’s voice like when you are ill, forgetting the garden and telling Aunt Bertha she is a cripple. Berry goes down the steps and gives Ellen a little push to get between her and Pug and see what Aunt Bertha is like. Perhaps she will stop being a cripple.

Short arms stuck out, jerking from side to side. Aunt Bertha on a visit, working herself forward on the seat of a bathchair, not looking at anybody, staring in front of her with her mouth open and her chin jutted out; feeling pain. Ann and the bath-chairman one on each side, not able to help because of the jerking arms. Presently she will be inside the house.

Berry wants them to push her back into the chair and trundle her away.

‘Now then!’ cries Aunt Bertha. She has sent up her underlip outside the other and is pressing so hard that it makes two lines, pains, one each side of her mouth. Ann and the chairman crook their arms under hers and she comes up bent forward, sticking out behind, with the hem of her dust-cloak sticking out still further. Her bent-over head comes round. A bullock in a straw hat. It does not move. But her eyes are moving. She looks at everybody in turn and smiles, and leaves off looking like a bullock.

Berry runs away, runs upstairs into the empty school-room that knows nothing about Aunt Bertha. But Berry knows. She looks at the lines turning into a smile, and looks into the brown eyes that know what was there when they were all waiting for her to come.

When Berry comes into the dining-room Aunt Bertha is sitting at the table with the others. Lunch is roast fowl, and wine-glasses. Aunt Bertha looks like a visitor, making a party. Someone has brought Dickie in. He is singing without stopping to breathe. So happy. No need to speak when she goes round to shake hands with Aunt Bertha, because everybody is talking louder than usual until Dickie stops.

When Aunt Bertha says anything she does not look at anybody. Her eyelids go down and the pains in her freckled white face look sharper while she thinks of what she is saying and all the same she goes on managing the things on her plate, carefully, while she is talking and you don’t know who she is going to look at until the end of what she says, and then she looks suddenly at whoever it is; and smiles.

Aunt Bertha is chapel. She has chapel hair, parted and shined back into a little ball behind her head. But muslin tuckers, fresh and new, round her white neck where there are no freckles, and coming out from under the brown silk dress sleeves on to her hands, gently.

Berry is grown-up. Sitting in a brown silk? with Sunday frills, managing a peach like that: letting it sit for a while in the middle of the plate being a lovely ripe peach; forgetting it and sitting up very straight, with her head turned to say something to someone quite at the other end of the table, but knowing all the time that the peach is there and presently taking up the silver knife and fork, very gently, so that they have time to shine as they move, and then doing the peeling and slicing in and out of what she is saying until at last she is saying something with the first little piece of peach standing still on the end of the fork, while she finishes what she is saying, and smiles. And then pops the piece of peach into her mouth and goes far away while someone else says something.

But Berry does not want to say bro-ther, in two words. Or live in a cottage thrown into another cottage, and make eight-een dressed dawls for a bazaar to buy a new chapel harmonium.

Berry sits at work, bent over it like Aunt Bertha, with a very quiet, calm face. Perhaps after a while, if she can go on feeling like this after Aunt Bertha has gone away, she will learn always to be pale and quiet and suddenly smile all over her face when she speaks. And learn to say something that is true, but not easy to say, so funnily that no one will mind. My work, Aunt Bertha says, and, your work. Important. Fancy-work. No. I Know that my Redeemer Liveth cannot possibly be fancy-work.

She thinks of the patchwork she will be doing when Miss Webb comes back. Miss Webb calls it learning to sew. And at first it was trying to keep the cotton clean and make neat stitches without a row of little blood-dots. And now it is easy. But Miss Webb does not know anything about the look of the different little pieces out of the rag-bag in the wardrobe-room, all smelling of lavender. She does not see the far-away inside of the little lilac pieces with the small pattern, nor want to look and look into the pattern and find out why it goes so deep. She does not know that the striped pieces are horrid.

Aunt Bertha looks up. But only so far as the bunch of skeins. Her eyes see the skeins, but she is thinking about something else. Her thoughts go on while she takes a fresh thread without ever looking across. With the point of her needle she presses back a little piece of fray and makes the next stitch so that it will just hold it down. Berry wishes there were a piece of fray in her text. But there is only to see that the thick gold silk goes into the right holes. And now Aunt Bertha is sitting back with her head on one side and her eyes screwed up to see how her work looks from a distance. And now she is going on with it, looking very stern. Lifting her head, Berry holds it on one side and screws up her eyes and sees all she has done, without looking from letter to letter: I know that my Re, looking so lovely that she cannot believe she has made it, and almost wishes she were a cripple so as to sit all day, like Aunt Bertha, having a party with her ‘materials’. Different coloured silks and many needles and a little silver thimble and ornamental scissors and presently something finished and looking lovely. And then thinking of something else to make.

The text is more than half finished, not counting the diamond-shaped full stop at the end. Her hand goes out to pat the worked silk, but quickly comes back as she remembers: Don’t handle the silks but when you’re threading them. The smooth gold bands of the letters are as clean as the silk in the skeins; and brighter. Much nicer than Pug’s. Pug’s text is in smaller letters: God is Love. Short, like Pug. And Aunt Bertha has done most of it because Pug is nearly always somewhere else and grubby. And there are only three days before Mother’s birthday. Aunt Bertha will be gone; not sitting in the breakfast-room, making it like a party all the morning; not going for drives with Mother and coming back and making tea-time like a party. She will be at home in the cottage thrown into another cottage.

Secretly, in Mother’s bedroom, Mary takes the texts out of the parcel. Pug’s is on the top. Small. It comes out of its wrapper and there it is, a framed picture held up by Mary. Ellen says isn’t it lovely and it is lovely, lovely; the crimson letters in the chestnut-brown frame. Ellen takes down Mother’s smallest picture and they hang up Pug’s text, to try. Pug, hanging up on the wall for everyone to see. And now Mary’s hands are on the paper covering the other text. Frightened, Berry feels. Shuts her eyes. Cannot move or speak. Sees, in her shut eyes, the big beautiful Redeemer in glossy, golden letters, and the rest not finished. But she can remember finishing it, and doing the diamond shape and the difficult scroll. She opens her eyes. Mary is taking off the wrapping. Away, away out on to the landing.

‘Lovely,’ Mary’s voice. Berry runs to the other end of the landing, with the word ringing in her ears. Outside the end window she sees the climbing roses looking in at her.

‘Berry!’

Where to hide? In the housemaid’s cupboard, crouched, hearing her breathing tell Ann’s brooms she is there, hearing Mary and Ellen go downstairs. Out of the cupboard, quickly across the landing, to look. There it is. Over the mantelpiece, the lovely golden words and the full stop and the scroll, hanging crooked. And too high to reach. And Mother will be coming up, sent up, Mary said, alone, ‘on some excuse’ to find the birthday surprise.

‘There, darling. It’s quite straight now, my chick. It’s a beautiful text, and you’ve done it very nicely, bunny-chub. Mother likes it very much indeed.’

‘The full stop is diamond-shape.’

‘Yes, my darling.’

‘Not round, like an ordinary full stop.’

‘No, dearie, it’s a beautiful full stop.’

Mother goes on looking at the text and Berry comes quite near; to see her face while she is looking. It is sad, and a hairpin she doesn’t know about is sticking out, ready to fall.

‘Poor Bertha!’

Berry feels a thump in her heart, and her face grows hot: stupid, stupid Mother. She only knows Aunt Bertha is a cripple. Why can’t she see her, up there, in the text, on the wall? She is spoiling the text, because she can’t see.