Читать книгу Dimple Hill - Dorothy M. Richardson - Страница 6

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All but one of the passengers got down at the village, taking away into its rain-dulled twilight, with themselves and their packages, dense odours and the sound of heavy breathing. And the slow, wide, richly inflected voices with which they had greeted each other and talked together. Leaving the dim enclosure a haunted place. So much speech come down into, so heartily, yet leaving the far distances of their individual lives, visible in their faces in repose, solitary and unexpressed. Following them imaginatively to their homes brought no relief from the burden of this visible solitude. Villagers. Farm labourers. People seen afresh who had been seen here and there in brief glimpses, long ago. The sound and sight of them was dreadfully, deeply familiar. Never before experienced close at hand. Fear used to come, as well as oppression and sadness, and, even in childhood, a feeling of guilt, at the sight and sound of these people living outside the gates, circling, all their lives, in immovable circumstances over which they had no control. And it was the desire to avoid the sight of them and the problems they suggested, and the challenge they unconsciously flung at the world dependent upon them, that had kept one, during these last weeks, away from village and villagers.

‘You never worry about anything.’

Craven fear, of facing what they faced, what gave them, even at their most rubicund and kindliest, the moment they were not speaking, that expression of staring fixedly at something unchanging, relentless, and inexorable. It was worse than the secretly stricken expression of the town worker who realizes himself caught for life in a machine that will yield him, grudgingly, only the minimum. He, at least, has a vicarious amplitude, the support of London all about him, its oblivion-bringing resources and the illusion of stability created by its bustling surfaces.

When the carrier had hauled out the side of bacon propped at the far end of the bus, she moved up and across to the corner that would be nearest to the green hedge and the low fields as soon as they were clear of the village, flitting self-contained within the moment between two lives, swift and invisible upon light, impalpable feet, her spirit already dancing within the nowhere and everywhere whither she was bound, whither days ago she had been translated; so that now, for the first time, life-obstructing speculation and excitement were excluded from the experience of arriving amongst strangers in a strange place. Towards which the bus moved off as she reached her corner and sat revealed, before the eyes of the remaining prisoner, now no longer alongside but visible in his place near the door, as an ignorant excited tourist, peering, when the last of the cottages had vanished, through the low, narrow strip of window as if, in the surrounding fields, there were something to be seen.

Looking across, as the emptied vehicle became a racing chariot, interposing its oblivious impatience and the din of its loosely rattling joints between herself and the jolted hedgerows, she saw, rigid and motionless in the far corner, something strayed from a waxwork show ... a tailor’s mannequin ... a ventriloquist’s dummy—topped by a soft felt hat, with a downy bloom upon its clean unhandled nap, set, rather than worn, upon the head and, like the rest of the unassimilated garments, a size too large. Beneath it, twin bulges of smooth brown hair clasped, with a wig-like closeness, a round, paint-bright face whose wide blue eyes, expressionless, contributed nothing to the fixed smile that heightened the shock of encountering, in place of detached observation, this vacuous intentness.

The orbs came round, still unattained by the curving smile, and projected across the intervening space a gaze so wide and so all-embracing that for a moment she was lost in it, becoming both the instrument and the object of this horrifying glare.

‘A nice evening,’ she ventured, returning the smile. People like this, one person like this, was to be found in every village, always there, a common possession, unforgettable. He had caught her on the way from solitude to perfect human association, to remind her that country life included the visible, inescapable presence of every kind of affliction.

As if worked by a mechanism, the plump lower lip dropped to reveal the extremity of a tongue, repulsive herald to slow, difficult speech. But the soft ‘ath’ emerged as smoothly as the sound produced, in response to pressure, by a talking doll, and with just its abrupt, colourless tone. Smiling again, she turned away relieved. Friends with the local idiot, she could now compose herself to arrive in heaven.

The horses slowed for a hill. The steadied hedgerows flowed quietly. Discovering a catch upon the little square of window near her shoulder, she released and pushed the pane as far as it would go and met the outer air. Streaming from the misty rain-soaked meadows, visible whenever a gate passed by, it poured into her being, describing those meadows, miles of them covering the earth in all directions, solitary, averted in the dim light, breathing out secretly, unnoticed, the evening fragrance of all that grew in them; claiming her, not as something added to the rest, but as her known companions, left behind long ago and now returned to and demanding forgetfulness of everything but themselves, for whom, they declared, she had mistaken the strangers at the top of the hill.

If she had heard of the Roscorlas as living in London, would she have sought them out?

The place was not in the least like a farm. A white five-barred gate, fastened back, a sweep encircling a bed of evergreens, grass-bordered, a square plaster house, two-storied, bleak, an enclosed glass porch nakedly protruding, asking, in order that it might blend with the house, a share of the ivy sparsely climbing the left side of the frontage as far as the sill of an upper window.

A small trigger, on the lintel of the outer door, pulled on a wire and jangled a bell not far within.

A tall lean maidservant suggesting Wiggerson; like what Wiggerson might have been in a very godly household fifty years ago. The bony form that dipped, swiftly, as Wiggerson used to dip in eager service amongst the wealth-provided luxuries wherein she had no share, to seize and carry off one’s bag, was surmounted, in place of Wiggerson’s muslin mob and gallantly flying streamers, by an oblong strip of starch-stiffened cotton lace laid, mat-like, upon the narrow head whose reddish hair, scraped smoothly into a small high bun that tilted the little mat downward from back to front, helped the scant freckles to heighten the pallor of the long lean face. When again this face was visible and the pale blue eyes once more met her own, Miriam received with joy their cold, unseeing gaze. Announcing that Miss Roscorla was out and would be back in time for supper, the servant led the way upstairs, revealing upon brow and lips and thin cheek visible in profile as she rounded the angle of the short flight and was softly lit from above, the unmistakable look of conscious salvation.

It carried Miriam far away beyond the remembered Quaker meeting, wherefrom, indeed, she could recall no face bearing exactly this expression, back to Blewbury and the enigmatic vision of Great-Aunt Stone sitting blind and motionless in the clasp of the graceless parlour chair whose high back had the dreadful shape of a halved cylinder, plaintively querulous with all about her; crippled Aunt Emma on the other side of the fireplace, bent listeningly over her cross-stitch texts, distributing, without looking up, abrupt rallying comments and snappish rebukes; the convulsively talking uncles, coming and going and still, in late middle age, browbeaten and uneasy. And in them all, something that her eight-year-old mind, feeling its way, unhappy in the restricted surroundings, scared by the mysterious illiberality, had dimly recognized as an independent extension of each personal life, glad and free. A secret, new and strange, something not present in her own home, and outwardly expressed by this look shining from the face when in repose, this look of conscious salvation; the hall-mark of the chapel.

Encountered in a Quaker household, although in this young woman, now silently departed, it might be merely a youthfully exaggerated imitation of a deportment, it was nevertheless disconcerting.

A Philistine room, furnished without deference to shape and colour and, surprisingly, dominated from the end wall facing the large brass bedstead, by an enormous portrait: a dark, bouncing, handsomely dressed middle-aged woman whose swarthy face, topped by a heavily beribboned lace cap, was bounded on either side by large, low—hanging earrings—wealthy, a member of the mercantile aristocracy—sitting in judgment upon a world of incapables. Surely, not a Quakeress? When the candle was alight, she shone forth from shadows, filling the room with the din and bustle of the visible world. But immediately below her, at the wash-stand within whose rose-pink cake of fresh soap were safely stored the days to come, one escaped. And the dressing-table, set askew across a corner between wash-stand and window, proved also, since the eyes stared across the room and did not follow one about, just outside their line of vision. Nor did they bore one’s back as one stood at the window which turned out to be the one reached by the climbing ivy, and gave on a wide, dim expanse ending, very far away, against a brightness along the edge of the dark sky.

Opening to a gentle knock, Miriam found at her door a small stout woman—the mother or the daughter?—from whose dark brown eyes, as she made her explanations and apologies, there shone a smiling radiance so transforming the homely face that she regretted the almost immediate movement into the room, resulting in its unseen transference to inanimate things. But when presently the dumpy, dowdy little figure drew up in front of an opened drawer and, looking within, said gently: ‘That is petal-dust, to keep away moth’—immersed, at the end of her busy day, in the contemplation of a cherished, enchanting mystery, desirous of sharing it and, at the same time using its quiet presence as a test of the newly formed relationship—there was visible, upon the bent, candle-lit profile from which Miriam’s eyes shifted to gaze at the fine brown powder scattered over the drawer’s paper lining, and giving out a faint, dry fragrance that called up a fleeting vision of sunlit flowers moving from their prime to fade and die into the makings of this beneficent dust, something of that same radiance. And while they stood side by side, united in silent appreciation, Miriam felt it enfold and set her adrift upon the borders of the world wherein this woman had her being.

It was the head of a girl, revealing, while its attitude laid bare the line of the neck between hair and low, stiff collar-band, the semblance of childhood; a middle-aged, inexperienced girl, selfless and out-turned, full of objective interest in all about her and attentive, grown, through long practice, permanently attentive to guidance coming from within and productive of that withdrawn, far-listening look that recalled the remembered Quakers.

When they turned together to the room’s open space, the temporary cessation of audible interchange had produced, rather than the uneasiness that prompts a search for fresh conversational material, a time-expanding satisfaction and the sense, behind them, of an achieved, indefinitely durable past. It was easy, looking up at the alien flamboyance now confronting them from the wall with its splendour of indifference to things unseen, to make an apprehensive inquiry.

‘That is Mrs Joshua Bullingham, the mother of our last pupil, who had this room.’

‘Not a Quaker?’

‘No, she’s not a Friend. A Presbyterian lady.’

‘And your servant, who let me in?’

‘No. Eliza is a village girl, a Strict Baptist.’ She had turned as she spoke, with a smile that was almost a chuckle of glee over one’s confessed dismay, and a searching glance that betrayed her surprised interest in learning that one had at once spotted these two outsiders.