Читать книгу Dawn's Left Hand - Dorothy M. Richardson - Страница 4

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For these three, the time she had spent living out in Oberland a golden life within her life, had been just a fortnight of dark London days leading towards spring. Each morning they had come unenviously downstairs to find again, behind the small disturbances and adjustments that disturbed them so little, their sense of untroubled everlastingness. Helped by the warmth of their clear fire that always looked wide, in spite of the narrow, villa grate.

Its glow brightened the frosty sunlight coming in above the little hedges of dense snowy-white lace set along the lower halves of the windows and giving the heavy curtains each side the small bay their rich warmth.

They were all eager to go on with their experiences, backwards, from last night’s story of the return journey, into the life preceding it. At leisure. There it all lay, represented by her presence. Awaiting the time when every one should have been carefully provided. Meantime, the to and fro of needful words, the sight of their morning eyes, fresh and dark in their familiar faces, the long, good moments into which flowed the refreshment of their rich serenity, deepened this morning by their sense of entertainment ahead.

They were eager, not through insufficiency but because of their sufficiency that survived Florrie’s hopeless engagement, Grace’s wrecked romance and Mrs Philps’s large experience of ‘trouble,’ unchanged.

And yet, she reflected, taking in the new, plain wall-paper upon which their heavily gilt-framed, old-fashioned pictures stuck out with an uneasy prominence, with its narrow, gay frieze of sunlit landscape, they particularly liked ‘to march with the times.’ But only because within all times, however new, they found what already they possessed, over which time had no power. Yet this morning they were a fortnight older than when she had seen them last, a fortnight nearer death, of which they always spoke with grave horror and dilated eyes.

But she could imagine each one of them recovering at the end, with a secret, unseen smile of surprise, behind the externals that in the deaths of others so horrified them, this unassailable happy serenity of being of which they were so unaware and that made the background of life in their company a single continuous moment troubled only now and again by the remembrance of their unconsciousness of its perfection.

Her experience was passing over to them. They were up amidst the sunlit snows, meeting her friends, realizing them in their direct, changeless way; making allowances for her enthusiasm, yet loving it, welcoming each word and seeming to be waiting for her at every point of her journey through her so different life. As if prepared for each experience in advance, and yet seeming not to see, as they accompanied her into a life that for them was new and strange, how very strange was any life at all.

Perhaps it was just their unquestioning acceptance that made life flow from them so strongly that most of her friends seemed, by comparison, uncreated. In some essential way. In the way the innocent Croydon family and the innocent people at the Alpenstock had made them seem uncreated. And yet these uncreated friends would dispose of these three and of the Croydoners and Alpenstockers in a single generalization....

Wandered too far into the contemplation of incompatibles that was the everlastingly disturbing background of social life, she felt the threads of her discourse slipping away and looked across at the row of little villas on the other side of the road, the unchanging outposts of her life in this secluded room, and found them changed. And turned back to the table to finish the picture of the ski-contest with the magical strangeness of the villas before her eyes within the background of the scene she was contemplating. Behind the black-clothed figure of the bird-man, poised, with out-flung arms moulded by close-clinging, soft black sleeves from shoulder to glove, for a second against the sky’s brilliant blue above the glistening snow-slope, was the vision of these little houses, that once had seemed so sharp in outline, blurred to softness by the English air so that their edges seemed actually to waver upon it.

The excitement of the discovery of their new individuality broke into her voice, enlivening it as she finished her sketch, so that the three listeners were the more moved by what they were seeing; sharing her emotion, without knowing that it arose from the recognition of the gentle mistiness, even in bright sunlight, of English outlines.

Strange and delightful that this simple discovery should be so moving as to seem in itself enough as a result of foreign travel and should go on, while the general to and fro of remarks was assailing her attention, wrapping her in a happiness that thrilled through her voice which was now claiming her attention for its own quality grown strange: sounding the gentle south of England, the west country, too, perhaps, of her family’s origin, and the large-gardened, uncrowded south-western suburbs—as so often, before, she had heard it sound here in the alien north, where voices grated even at their gentlest and bore, for all occasions, a bared and cutting edge; but without recognition of its essentials beyond the flattering assurance that she herself belonged to a superior, more cultivated way of being; the way of being that amongst the Oberlanders had been all about her and of which at this moment she was being aware as clearly as of the misty English villas as it made, on her behalf, within the inflections of her voice, statements clearer than any spoken words, enchanting and delighting her as she was delighted and enchanted by the people she loved, giving her a thrilling certainty as to the unseen future, shaming her into the knowledge that in her case they were unjustifiable, that she had grown level with almost none of them, and yet lending their quality to every word she spoke.

Returning, she looked forth at strangers still radiating delight, still sounding their alien voices and making hers sound in response and again proclaim itself a barrier and yet the vehicle of her everlasting communion with them; of her prevailing with them by virtue of the echo within it of the way of being from which it had come forth.

They were hovering now between their desire for more talk and the pull of the shape of their day. The freshness of the breakfast hour was over, the scene drawing to its end, each member of the party moving away into the depths of her secret, separate existence. Her own claimed her, to the new gay undertone that presently in the open she would hear more clearly.

And going down into town for her delayed luggage she heard it everywhere. In every one about her was hilarity, deep-seated; in every one moving in the open, though not on holiday. It was there even in the worried and the sorrowful, the creator of their worry and their sorrow.

Inside the clangorous great station the secret joy palpitated in the exciting, metal-smelling air like the beating of wings. It emanated even from those who were setting out, deedily, only for suburbs, and reached and transformed every hideous object within their sight.

Joy is eternity. Eternity is joy. In railway stations and in trains people enter perforce their own eternity. So that men, even when faced with disaster, so long as they can move from place to place and get away into eternity, are commonly more cheery than women, though unaware of what it is that makes them so.

In Oberland the eternal being of woman is an escorted procession. Its men are trained to pay homage to the giver of life and the pain-bearer. They seek eternity in the Services, in hobbies, in art or science, games. And never consciously find it. Their bondage to the womanly woman is a life-bondage, to eternity personified.

The jingling hansom was carrying her back to her London, filled with people to whom the golden eternity had been just fourteen ‘ordinary’ days and who, knowing nothing of the change in her that at present seemed to be everlasting, would endanger and perhaps destroy it. She wished she could hand them, like a certificate, at least her record of social success. They would misinterpret. Amongst them all only Hypo would understand. He would say, to demonstrate his insight, ‘You’ve been flattered, my dear, by kindly people at loose ends, to the top of your bent. You’re a little drunk with it all. I’m not objecting to that. Good for you, good for everybody, once in a way,’ and, having protested, begin his own subtle, but still quite obvious flattery, for his own ends. But he would understand that discovery about oneself is impersonal, as well as personal, like a discovery in chemistry.

Piecemeal, everything piecemeal. What Oberland had been, apart from people, no one would ever know. Yet its beauty had entered into her for ever; its golden glow must surely somehow reveal itself. It lay even over the nauseating, forgotten detail of Flaxman’s now rapidly approaching.

The cab drew up at the mouth of the court. At number two, Perrance filled the doorway, one of the wings of his grime-stiffened cape brushing the jamb as he slouched through on his way to his basement. The unchanged sights of the court seemed, as she entered it, to re-open the door just slammed by Perrance, to deny her absence and promise speedy obliteration of her memories and destruction of her renewed strength.

Together with the reek pouring from the opened door, came the rebuff of the narrow staircase up which the weedy cabman might refuse to carry her luggage. Her mind turned away from this difficulty. Beyond it, waiting for her upstairs, was not the Flaxman life grown unendurable, but renewal and continuation of the golden glow.

Turning from the door to the empty court, she met the blue-eyed friendly glance of a neat working-man, not a Flaxmanite, seeming, as he responded without a word to her confident question and went about her business serenely, as if it were his own, the first of a procession of friends emerging from the future.

Selina was out. But the rooms were filled with the dry, sweet fragrance of mimosa. Once, only once, she had told Selina that the scent of mimosa in a wintry room said, each year, that life is summers. Selina had missed her; was offering from her side of the curtain that for so long had seemed the embodiment of their incompatibility, this tribute to their early days.

A pile of letters. Tributes to Oberland, to Oberland past and her return to London accomplished. But alone up here she had no sense of return. The memories accumulated since she landed were like a transparent film through which clearly she saw all she had left behind; and felt the spirit of it waiting within her to project itself upon things just ahead, things waiting in this room as she came up the stairs. To open all these letters and drop into communication with the lives they represented would be to divert its course.

Graceless she felt, ungrateful, and could not care. Even Hypo’s thin grey envelope failed to bring the usual electric shock. It stood out from the others only because her detailed response to it preceded perusal. With planned cunning, he had chosen this moment for one of his concentrated attacks; the obvious moment; the wrong moment; showing him as he was alone in himself, far-off, irrelevant to personal life. And, except for her annoyance with his planned persistence, she felt him stand, compared with the vast strange promise within, in an equality of indifference with all these others. It was only, she thought, as she sat down to open his letter, with the unlocated being of these people that she desired communication and not at all with the sight and sound of their busy momentary selves.

‘Welcome to your London, my dear. I’m more in love with you than ever.’

When she reached the small interwoven capitals forming the signature she felt herself returned from flight, unawares, towards a far distance and felt the strong beating of her heart quieten before a vision of this shapely device, so deftly continuing and completing the design of the written lines, set down, in a kind of sincerity, beneath innumerable documents such as this.

He was ‘in love’ in his way; once again. But behind the magic words was nothing for her individually, for any one individually. And his brilliance, the mental qualities she had hitherto found so full of charm, had somehow, unaccountably, become overshadowed. She no longer felt the importance of trying to find forms of expression for alternative interpretations of his overpowering collection of facts. She felt at this moment that any interpretation was preferable to his and no plan at all better than even the most workable of plans born of the assumptions science was helplessly forced to make. He was offering a stone, a precious stone; but there might be bread waiting hidden in the world whose approaching distances seemed no longer filled only with queer irregular people who held most others in scorn.

She flicked the card, whose wording he had already forgotten, between thoughtful fingers: momentary purpose and plan, converging upon what she had seemed to be a fortnight ago. Supposing a kindly Philistine, with a fixed world and almost no imagination, were in his place? Impossible. Breathlessly impossible. Philistines or intellectuals ... is there no alternative? Nobody, nobody. She wanted nobody she already knew. But did she wish him away? Or even averted? Only for a while forgotten. And that he could be, since he was fixed, in his place, far away.

Sure of possessing the immediate future, clear of obstacles and with the golden glow undimmed above it, she turned to the other letters and found amongst them one from Alma which somehow she had passed over. The sight of it drew all the rest together, making them seem like the various flowers of a single bunch and rebuking, as if it were a living presence, her desire to escape from their friendly challenges. She hesitated before submitting herself to the always strange, strong spell of Alma’s written words, that already in advance were charming and rousing her with their veiled appeal from someone who was neither quite the Alma she had known in girlhood, nor the Alma who humorously fitted herself into an adopted summary of human existence.

When the torn flap of the envelope revealed the graceful hurrying script, she felt herself set down beyond release within the pattern of the life she had left behind on the far side of eternity. Gay, affectionate greetings sailed, bearing down her protests, across the page....

‘And, my very dear, tremendous doings. We’re invading your London; next week. We’ll do a Wagner, you and me and Hypo.’

Not from the past and representing it, but from the golden future and heightening its glow they came to her as she imagined the impersonal sitting down together, before a large stage made vast by outpouring music, of the three equally reduced to silence and committed to experience whose quality could not be stated in advance.