Читать книгу Dawn's Left Hand - Dorothy M. Richardson - Страница 5

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Above the shoulder of the parlourmaid announcing her from the doorway, she saw Densley standing at his table reading a letter, preoccupied, making use of spare seconds. And though not a patient, she felt again, as she had always felt on first entering the subdued light of this quiet room, a weakening of her scepticism before his specialized knowledge, and an uncomfortable sense of the ceaseless procession of stricken men and women, trustfully, one by one, crossing this space of floor between door and chair to learn the worst or, at the best, to be reminded that death is waiting and their span of years at the longest only a small number.

But as the maid withdrew and she came forward, the room whose door closed softly behind her was just the room that held his intimate lonely life. And he was once more only his friendship, an everlasting friend standing there in silhouette against the long window-blind yellowed by the sunlight it was keeping out.

At his best, tall and slender, in profile, with head bent so that the whole of its beautiful line, starting from the base of the neck and abruptly disappearing beneath the rounded edge of vigorously sprouting curls to appear again in the curve of the venerable small bald patch, was clearly visible, embellished by the outstanding close-cropped curls breaking into its shape. Newly cropped, and gleaming in the dim light. Very fresh and neat he looked, furbished up for the spring, very serré in the new grey frock-coat whose tails in an instant would perform their dervish-whirl as he swung round and came with outstretched arms to take her by the shoulders and get in the first words, and smother her response with his avalanche of laughter.

But he remained motionless, though now she had nearly reached the victims’ chair. If he were really absorbed, she had read into the carefully casual wording of his summons an eagerness he did not feel. She recalled him hunched over his table, throwing down his pen and coming to meet her half-way across the room; talking into the telephone and murmuring a greeting for her the moment it became his turn to listen. This deliberate postponement of his welcome was new. Pretending to be engrossed in his letter, he was reminding her that her life was but one amongst the many he scanned day by day. And whilst this silent statement checked her eagerness to be congratulated and rejoiced over, he was accumulating advantage that would make his pounce the more effective when it came.

But if he were going to refuse to be a flattering mirror for her joy, this visit would turn into a continuation of a conflict of which she had grown weary. This should be the last time. Never again would she waste her golden leisure in fruitless discussion. This progress across the well-known room was the prelude to farewell. Glancing away from him towards its further space, she became aware of a deep peace and her eyes returned to him. Still holding, as if he were alone, his tranquil pose, he was waiting for her to recognize this peace as the reality beneath their differences.

With a pang of guilt she remembered her impulsive, too-affectionate letter from the Alpenstock promontory. It was on the strength of that letter that he was daring this test. The living peace in the room was like a light that seemed to flow towards them both from the corner that formed a triangle with him where he stood and herself where she stood; or to flow from each of them and meet exactly in the corner towards which at their different angles they both faced.

But there was nothing surprising in that. Any two souls could meet if only sometimes they would be silent together and wait. She ought to have known that his Celtic soul would be aware of this. But it would be unfair to let him travel too far in imagining an atonement that did not exist. Yet even as these thoughts flashed through her mind she was regretting the passing of the strange experience of sharing with him an instant of eternity and, in order ever so little to recall it, she banished thought and resisted the further movement that would bring her too near to be ignored and saw, with her eyes on his quietude, the perspective of their friendship open, claiming its place amongst the memories laid up in this room of the years of her London life.

Saw him again as the unknown Great Man serenely produced by Eleanor Dear from her diminishing stock of ‘influenchoo peopoo’ ... summoned and coming, a tall handsome saviour in dress-clothes, to her sick-room at midnight, tired and harassed, gently talking and questioning and writing; ignoring the friend in the corner until suddenly he insulted her and her beloved London night-streets by asking, without troubling to look at her, whether she were equal to going out and ringing up a chemist. And her first visit, as Eleanor’s agent, to sound him before she cast her desperate net over Taunton. And, as a single occasion, all the sittings, in this room, over Eleanor’s difficulties and the business of rescuing Taunton, secretly, under the shadow of Harley Street, under the threat of death, not lifting until Eleanor was provided for away from the brightness of lives still unthreatened.

And all their meetings and conflicts all over London, since the day she had lectured him, with Veresaief’s Confessions of a Doctor as text, on the inevitable ignorance of the high priests of Medicine; and all his kindly human sympathy with her Socialists and Anarchists and Suffragists ... and his belief that their hold on her was only a makeshift....

‘Glad to be back, dear-girl?’ he murmured thoughtfully.

‘I’m not back yet; still much more there than here,’ she said, smiting at his preparedness to sit down and state her experience in what he believed to be its right proportions; drawing her out with questions and greeting her answers with head thrown back and mouth wide for his indrawn laughter—its final gasp bringing him forward to smite her knee and make his comments and wait, eyes still filled with laughter, for her to share his mirth at her expense. Not one word of enthusiasm should he have, nor anything that might give him food for amusement.

Still remaining ambushed behind his letter, he flung out, as she advanced, an arm that found and gently shoved her into the confessional chair whence nothing was visible but the tall screen hiding the place of anxious disrobings, his littered table and himself, in profile against the high oblong of screened sunlight ... swinging round with a single swift movement to face her, seated; long grey-trousered legs elegantly crossed, crease going to the devil ... spats ... a pink moss-rosebud, a grave, tired face surveying her as though she were a patient, a new patient.

He was quite innocent, tired and London-worn, emerging with grave simplicity from preoccupations that made havoc of his grandeur, accentuated the dreadful rosebud more completely than would the debonair manner that perhaps he had worn an hour ago.

‘Whose wedding have you been to?’ she asked cruelly, through her pity that condemned as monstrous the demand that he should turn aside from his exacting affairs to pay tribute to her festivity.

Mentally she added silk hat and light gloves and set him amongst guests thronging to the reception, saw him play his part, a lightly, musically moving figure of benevolence; radiating, as she had seen him at Socialist gatherings they had visited together, the kindly humanity most of the Lycurgans possessed only as a dogma with which to bludgeon their opponents.

True democracy, the ruling of everybody by their best selves, was more readily to be found amongst the Oberlanders than amongst professed Socialists? And here, to her hand, was a topic that would represent her experiences, give him the key to them in a way that would rob him, if by chance this present gravity were assumed, of what he was secretly chuckling over in advance, and startle him by putting his own case better than he had done in their many battles, and also, by making it one with hers, demonstrate the truth in both and his own one-sidedness.

‘I’ve been to no wedding, my dear.’

This was the low, pitying tone he used when she failed to be moved by some specially ‘moving’ human drama selected from his day’s experiences.

He looked away, towards the writing-table, took up a paper-knife and thoughtfully tapped the table’s polished edge.

‘Then why so glorious?’

She smiled, to cover her failure to approve, but with averted eyes, so that she might no longer see the pink rosebud soften his good looks with its dreadful prettiness. Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps the intolerable effect was produced by apathy, by the weariness he was not trying to conceal; spring weariness after his too arduous winter.

Their voices sounded together and she threw away the beginning of her hopeful topic to attend to his meditative voice—the Celtic shape of its tone, the first two words on one middle note, then one two notes higher with a curve in its course that brought it two notes lower than the opening words, then ding-dong up and down, the last drop curving up at its end as if to redeem statement by giving it the form of courteous question; but to-day the persuasiveness, that always made his words seem spoken from the sure ground of belief, was not there, the end of his sentence fell sadly amongst the bright echoes their many meetings had left in this corner of the room. She heard the slithering discouraged soft fall of the paper-knife upon the table and looked up and found him sitting, with lightly clasped hands, forward in his chair regarding her: calm brow, steady searching eyes, the look of weariness vanished, the rosebud serenely saying that physicians have their lighter moments.

‘Ye had a brave time, dear-girl?’

He spoke with grave warmth, inviting confidence. Watching his eyes while she banished from her mind all she had brought with her into the room, she could not find the shadow of a smile; but, even while she refused to afford him material, there he sat, entrenched, solidly representing dispersive generalizations. And to-day he was not waiting for her to withhold or give him his chance to pounce. Turning away his eyes he went on: ‘I saw Campbell this morning; he told me ye were back and that he’d never seen ye look so well.’

Professional interest; but she was not going to be drawn into discussing her health that was restored for evermore since she had seen the light on the mountains.

‘Of course,’ she said judicially, conveniently recalling an overheard phrase: ‘the Swiss winter is marvellous. You go out unable to grasp the meaning of a newspaper column’—she felt her stored wealth shift away, as if assailed, as if threatening to depart—’and after twenty-four hours you can read a stiff treatise and remember each point.’

‘Did ye read stiff treatises?’

‘No; but I could remember anything I wanted to, and see into things.’ She threw her raised voice after him as he got up and moved away—feeling herself forgiven, having testified, attempted to testify an incommunicable experience—to the blinded window through whose open upper half now came the sound of a car drawing up at the door: interruption punctually at hand, just as she was back again in that moment on the promontory that had filled everything with light, just as she could, she felt, have answered, even though irrelevantly, all the questions on earth.

With a click the blind had shot up, letting in the yellow London sunlight, and in its dense blaze she stood up to depart, for now the thudding of the engine filled the room, voices shouting it down sounded from the pavement and the steps, and the door-bell buzzed through the hall.

‘You are fortunate,’ she sang out into the blinding light, into the indifferent ears preoccupied already with the communications of the arriving patient, ‘to have a corner house!’ and saw the several corridors of gold that broke across the long grey street and felt herself already escaped into its echoey stillness, going, as she had come, unspent, to meet the green mists of the park and find its new crocuses; find the close ranks of mauve and white hiding the grass of that little alley again, stand and look and again feel that cool English freshness as if touching her all over, as if she were unclothed.

‘Campbell was right,’ he said gently into the stillness restored by the stopping of the engine; ‘it’s made ye like a red, red rose.’

Her happy blush revealed to her the shape of her body—as if for her own contemplation, as if her attention were being called to an unknown possession that yet was neither hers nor quite herself—glowing with a radiance that was different from the radiance of the surrounding sunlight; and turning to bend and gather up the gloves on which she had been sitting she seemed to journey far away from him and from herself into the depths of her being and mingle there with an unknown creature rising to meet and take her nature and transform it to the semblance of his ideal. And in this semblance, a stranger to herself and nameless, she came upright with the retrieved gloves in her hand and turned to face him in the room’s sunlight that now seemed the light of open spaces.

‘Your patient,’ she had said before she was aware, towards him still standing leisurely in his window-space ... approaching, saying, swiftly he passed her: ‘He’s early; he can wait. Sit down again’—and disappearing into the background whence he asked, as the everyday door of his bookcase came open with an insouciant squeak, whether she had ever been to Italy.

‘No,’ she said and paused, remembering Guerini and his revelation of an Italy that was not the Italy of her dreams. And his dogmas, and his amazement in hearing them questioned, and his anger, dull brown like his clothes, and hers that had cured her, and his sorrow and belated willingness to look at alternative interpretations, and his obliteration by Eaden in whom the same dogmas, being held thoughtlessly, had seemed so much more monstrous and implacable. And seemed at this moment not to matter so very much. Neither Guerini’s nor Eaden’s nor Densley’s nor any man’s to matter perhaps at all, except to themselves. Thought of all together, reverberating over the world in all its languages, they seemed just an unpleasant noise; like the chattering of those born deaf. Yet she felt that even now, hearing them, it would be impossible to content herself, as she had observed so many women do, with a wise smile. Even now.

But this was flying off, running off with what might be an illusion. She wished the window-blind back in place that she might see more clearly, see his face when he left his books and returned; discover whether his general strangeness to-day meant that on the strength of her absurd letter he was again minded to risk, was not expecting, a rebuff, and was yet, because he once had had one, proudly nervous and uncertain—and meanwhile she must remain here, balanced between return to her customary life and the way of being she had entered a moment ago and that could be, she now realized with sober astonishment, her chosen way till death—or whether he were simply engrossed in some sad case whose story she would presently hear told in his way of telling: pausing at every turn for signs of sympathy, and yet ready to laugh over her harsh comments. And again she was reminded of Eleanor. And this time the thought of her brought within the sun’s streaming light a darkness that centred in herself who a moment ago had felt transparent to endless light. A forgotten, deliberately forgotten darkness disqualifying her to be anything to anybody....

‘What has become of Eleanor Dear?’

‘When did ye last heere of her, lassie?’ The sparing, softly treading tone of his stories of his most dreadful cases: gentle judgment, without reproach.

‘Oh, I don’t know—ages ago’—her voice was hard, frostily selfish, something for a man to fly from—’when that heroic little Jew took her to Egypt.’

‘Then ye’ve not heard of her death?’

It was not shock or sadness that kept her silent. Immense, horrible relief in being certain that now the burden of Eleanor would never again return upon her hands. And great wonder, that Eleanor had done her dying. Somewhere, in some unknown room, she had accomplished that tremendous deed. Alone.

‘Rodkin took her to Egypt’—he was bringing the comfort of his voice across the room—’first consulting me’—but remained out of sight behind her chair with a book, slowly turning its leaves that went over with a crumpling sound, large, glazed clay-paper leaves; heavy—’and kept her there for something over eighteen months. She got no better. When they returned, she was beyond human aid. His resources were exhausted. We got her into St Aloysius’s. The sisters were kind and grew fond of her. My mother visited her daily and was with her when she passed away. I think she was happy at the end.’

Eleanor, forced to cease fighting and accept, lying there hollow-eyed and emaciated, growing weaker and weaker, but still charming; free, while she waited for those halls of Zion all jubilant with song, to charm these new friends....

‘The little atheist Russian Jew was a better Christian than the English curate.’

‘He married her; in Egypt. The bairns have father and name.’

‘Lancelot and Lobelia ... Rodkin.’ Her voice trembled with laughter. In which he joined, and Eleanor, driving away her fierce authoritative little frown, and with rose-blush and arch affectionate smile, seemed, from heaven, to be joining too. She would. She would accept anything but reproach. Ease had come, though the picture of herself indignantly preaching at Eleanor for wasting Rodkin’s substance remained an immovable torment and disgrace. He had laughed his lightly gasping extremity of laughter and yet did not come round to face and share her mirth. But she felt absolved. He knew, better perhaps than any one, he had seen again and again, the worst that was in her—intolerance, hatred, malice ... no, not malice, something worse, uncharitableness, the things he most deplored—without condemnation. He knew perfectly, from first to last, all of Eleanor’s manœuvrings; without condemning them. Small wonder he was the beloved physician.

Her sense of her own being, with its good and bad carelessly unmasked, more at ease in this room than in any other but her own, was expanding beyond this corner she knew so well, taking possession of the unvisited parts of the room brought near by his perambulating voice; feeling its way into the wider spaces within the air that filled its visible limits. But imperfectly, hindered by the direct glare of the sun and the presence of the patient waiting in the next room.

‘I asked ye about Italy, because I rather think of going there.’ This time his voice, coming from the farthest end of the room, as if he were in that deep recess and looking out of its tall, narrow window, was like the voice of someone giving a cheery morning greeting to someone else suddenly and gladly seen from the midst of busy preoccupation: confident of response, not needing to wait and take note of it. It came nearer than if he were sitting at her side.

‘People were going down,’ she said, and the distance they had to travel made her words songful—they were meeting across the length of the sad room; he and she, from the far distances of their separate beings, obliterating, with the sounds of their common to-day, the melancholy echoes left within it—‘from Oberland. They go, in one day, from the Swiss winter into the Italian spring.’

‘I’ll go,’ he chanted back through the clatter of a dray turning into a neighbouring mews, ‘if I go, from Paris, where I’ll be attending the Medical Congress the first week in May.’

The dray thundered swiftly over the cobble-stones, spreading a clamour that consumed every other sound.

‘Don’t ye think,’ said his gentlest voice just above her head, ‘I’ll have earned a holiday?’ His arms, linked by the large book, came over and round her, and the book came down opened upon her knees: a double-page picture of Venice, Grand Canal edged by stately buildings, gondolieri gracefully driving swift gondolas along the flat water; moonlight and song. He was crouching at her side, his face out of sight, just level with her own, one arm along the back of the low chair, the other tilting the book inwards from the blinding light.

‘Isn’t that where people go for their honeymoon?’ he murmured thoughtfully, as if considering the picture.

She felt him watching while she waited, gazing through the outspread scene, for words more in harmony than was this arch jocularity with the steady return of the strange new light within her that now streamed forth to join the blinding sunlight, so that she was isolated in a mist of light, far away from him and waiting for the sound of her name.

‘Ye still scorn honeymoons.’

He was gone. The light flowed back into herself as she turned and saw him standing tall and upright, elbow on mantelpiece, several feet away, saw his face, sad above the pink rosebud and as nearly stern as in its changeless kindliness it could ever be.

What had he seen while he watched? Her perfect stillness while she contemplated a proposition? And perhaps he was right. The strange vision of the future expanding endlessly in light had held as she gazed into it no personal thought of him and prompted no response.

Gently she approached him, trying in the way she again pleaded for his wretched patient to convey the change produced in her regard by this discovery of him as a source of marvels. But he held her off with casual talk. He now believed, and she grew scarlet and took hasty leave as the thought came, that he had completely surprised her, and that this belated response was a clutching at an opportunity whose quality had been realized while she sat silent. And perhaps he was right in that too. Perhaps the strange glory to which she had responded was born of a selfish rejoicing. Perhaps, watching her, he had read only the signs of a secret, selfish triumph. Missed some essential, unmistakable sign.

Yet gravely and with a meditative enviousness he had said more than once that a husband opens for his wife the gate of a temple into which he may not follow her. And still in that moment of being wrapped in light that could have come only through the opened gate, he had expected her to respond in kind to his sly jocularity? Had closed the gate and left her outcast because she was kept silent and entranced, forgetting his personal presence, seeing only the newness of life into which she was about to stop.

Walking on down the street, she turned again towards that strange moment, trying to recall the experience. But it was the visible pageant of marriage that rose before her eyes; so suitably, she felt now, a floral pageant. Wistfully, with new knowledge and interest, she watched the form of the satin-clad bride adream in a vast loneliness of time that was moving with the swiftness of the retreating movement of the years that were leaving her for ever, amidst a bevy of wide-awake, hopeful bridesmaids, vanish into the dark porch of the church whose clamour of bell-notes, falling in cascades into the sunlit air, brightened the light upon the grey buildings; saw the led bride, a lonely representative of humanity, measuring off the last moments of her singleness, reluctantly until the other equally lonely representative came in sight, waiting for her at the altar, and the footsteps of her spirit hurried to be with him.

She heard the two voices sound out from time into eternity, amidst a stillness of flowers; and the triumphant crashing of the Mendelssohn March as the two figures came forth from the vestry door and came down the aisle towards the light falling upon them from the high west window.

It was because life with Densley would hold the light of an in-pouring eternity that she had found herself willing to throw in her lot with his. In Hypo there was no sense of eternity; nor in Michael, except for the race, an endless succession of people made in God’s image, all dead or dying.

Yet she was approving the rescue of Densley. Vibrating within her, side by side with resentment, was relief. And as she surveyed the little back street, where now she found herself, in search of food to be consumed in the ten minutes left of her lunch-hour, she felt, with a comfortingly small pang of wistfulness, the decisive hour that had just gone by slide into its place in the past and leave her happily glancing along the shop-fronts of this mean little back street.

Teetgen’s Teas, she noted, in grimed, gilt lettering above a dark and dingy little shop....

Teetgen’s Teas. And behind, two turnings back, was a main thoroughfare. And just ahead was another. And the streets of this particular district arranged themselves in her mind, each stating its name, making a neat map.

And this street, still foul and dust-filled, but full now also of the light flooding down upon and the air flowing through the larger streets with which in her mind it was clearly linked, was the place where in the early years she would suddenly find herself lost and helplessly aware of what was waiting for her eyes the moment before it appeared: the grimed gilt lettering that forced me to gaze into the darkest moment of my life and to remember that I had forfeited my share in humanity for ever and must go quietly and alone until the end.

And now their power has gone. They can bring back only the memory of a darkness and horror, to which, then, something has happened, begun to happen?

She glanced back over her shoulder at the letters now away behind her and rejoiced in freedom that allowed her to note their peculiarities of size and shape.

From round the next corner came a distant, high, protesting, nasal yell dropping into a long shuddering gurgle: Punch. She turned the corner. There they were at the end of the street.

In front of a greengrocer’s a few slum children standing in the muddy street, more numerous elders, amongst them a busy doctor, paused for a moment, a teacher, excusing her delight with a sceptical smile, two rapt hospital nurses.

Munching one of the greengrocer’s foreign apples, tasting like pineapple, she held up her face towards the mimic theatre high in air, from which joy flowed down upon this little crowd eagerly and voluntarily gathered together.