Читать книгу Certain People - Edith Wharton - Страница 5

Table of Contents

It began exactly as she had expected. A surprised parlour maid—why surprised?—showed her into the low panelled room that was so full of his presence, his books, his pipes, his terrier dozing on the shabby rug. The parlour maid said she would go and see if Miss Aldis could come down. Nora wanted to ask if she were with her brother—and how he was. But she found herself unable to speak the words. She was afraid her voice might tremble. And why should she question the parlour maid, when in a moment, she hoped, she was to see Miss Aldis?

The woman moved away with a hushed step—the step which denotes illness in the house. She did not immediately return, and the interval of waiting in that room, so strange yet so intimately known, was a new torture to Nora. It was unlike anything she had imagined. The writing table with his scattered pens and letters was more than she could bear. His dog looked at her amicably from the hearth, but made no advances; and though she longed to stroke him, to let her hand rest where Christopher’s had rested, she dared not for fear he should bark and disturb the peculiar hush of that dumb watchful house. She stood in the window and looked out at the budding shrubs and the bulbs pushing up through the swollen earth.

“This way, please.”

Her heart gave a plunge. Was the woman actually taking her upstairs to his room? Her eyes filled, she felt herself swept forward on a great wave of passion and anguish... But she was only being led across the hall into a stiff lifeless drawing-room—the kind that bachelors get an upholsterer to do for them, and then turn their backs on forever. The chairs and sofas looked at her with an undisguised hostility, and then resumed the moping expression common to furniture in unfrequented rooms. Even the spring sun slanting in through the windows on the pale marquetry of a useless table seemed to bring no heat or light with it.

The rush of emotion subsided, leaving in Nora a sense of emptiness and apprehension. Supposing Jane Aldis should look at her with the cold eyes of this resentful room? She began to wish she had been friendlier and more cordial to Jane Aldis in the past. In her intense desire to conceal from everyone the tie between herself and Christopher she had avoided all show of interest in his family; and perhaps, as she now saw, excited curiosity by her very affectation of indifference.

No doubt it would have been more politic to establish an intimacy with Jane Aldis; and today, how much easier and more natural her position would have been! Instead of groping about—as she was again doing—for an explanation of her visit, she could have said: “My dear, I came to see if there was anything in the world I could do to help you.”

She heard a hesitating step in the hall—a hushed step like the parlour maid’s—and saw Miss Aldis pause near the half-open door. How old she had grown since their last meeting! Her hair, untidily pinned up, was gray and lanky. Her eyelids, always reddish, were swollen and heavy, her face sallow with anxiety and fatigue. It was odd to have feared so defenseless an adversary. Nora, for an instant, had the impression that Miss Aldis had wavered in the hall to catch a glimpse of her, take the measure of the situation. But perhaps she had only stopped to push back a strand of hair as she passed in front of a mirror.

“Mrs. Frenway—how good of you!” She spoke in a cool detached voice, as if her real self were elsewhere and she were simply an automaton wound up to repeat the familiar forms of hospitality. “Do sit down,” she said.

She pushed forward one of the sulky arm-chairs, and Nora seated herself stiffly, her hand-bag clutched on her knee, in the self-conscious attitude of a country caller.

“I came—”

“So good of you,” Miss Aldis repeated. “I had no idea you were in this part of the world. Not the slightest.”

Was it a lead she was giving? Or did she know everything, and wish to extend to her visitor the decent shelter of a pretext? Or was she really so stupid—

“You’re staying with the Brinckers, I suppose. Or the Northrups? I remember the last time you came to lunch here you motored over with Mr. Frenway from the Northrups’. That must have been two years ago, wasn’t it?” She put the question with an almost sprightly show of interest.

“No—three years,” said Nora, mechanically.

“Was it? As long ago as that? Yes—you’re right. That was the year we moved the big fern-leaved beech. I remember Mr. Frenway was interested in tree moving, and I took him out to show him where the tree had come from. He is interested in tree moving, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes; very much.”

“We had those wonderful experts down to do it. ‘Tree doctors,’ they call themselves. They have special appliances, you know. The tree is growing better than it did before they moved it. But I suppose you’ve done a great deal of transplanting on Long Island.”

“Yes. My husband does a good deal of transplanting.”

“So you’ve come over from the Northrups’? I didn’t even know they were down at Maybrook yet. I see so few people.”

“No; not from the Northrups’.”

“Oh—the Brinckers’? Hal Brincker was here yesterday, but he didn’t tell me you were staying there.”

Nora hesitated. “No. The fact is, I have an old governess who lives at Ockham. I go to see her sometimes. And so I came on to Westover—” She paused, and Miss Aldis interrogated brightly: “Yes?” as if prompting her in a lesson she was repeating.

“Because I saw Gladys Brincker the other day, and she told me that your brother was ill.”

“Oh.” Miss Aldis gave the syllable its full weight, and set a full stop after it. Her eyebrows went up, as if in a faint surprise. The silent room seemed to close in on the two speakers, listening. A resuscitated fly buzzed against the sunny window pane. “Yes; he’s ill,” she conceded at length.

“I’m so sorry; I ... he has been ... such a friend of ours ... so long...”

“Yes; I’ve often heard him speak of you and Mr. Frenway.” Another full stop sealed this announcement. (“No, she knows nothing,” Nora thought.) “I remember his telling me that he thought a great deal of Mr. Frenway’s advice about moving trees. But then you see our soil is so different from yours. I suppose Mr. Frenway has had your soil analyzed?”

“Yes; I think he has.”

“Christopher’s always been a great gardener.”

“I hope he’s not—not very ill? Gladys seemed to be afraid—”

“Illness is always something to be afraid of, isn’t it?”

“But you’re not—I mean, not anxious ... not seriously?”

“It’s so kind of you to ask. The doctors seem to think there’s no particular change since yesterday.”

“And yesterday?”

“Well, yesterday they seemed to think there might be.”

“A change, you mean?”

“Well, yes.”

“A change—I hope for the better?”

“They said they weren’t sure; they couldn’t say.” The fly’s buzzing had become so insistent in the still room that it seemed to be going on inside of Nora’s head, and in the confusion of sound she found it more and more difficult to regain a lead in the conversation. And the minutes were slipping by, and upstairs the man she loved was lying. It was absurd and lamentable to make a pretense of keeping up this twaddle. She would cut through it, no matter how.

“I suppose you’ve had—a consultation?”

“Oh, yes; Dr. Knowlton’s been down twice.”

“And what does he—”

“Well; he seems to agree with the others.”

There was another pause, and then Miss Aldis glanced out of the window. “Why, who’s that driving up?” she enquired. “Oh, it’s your taxi, I suppose, coming up the drive.”

“Yes. I got out at the gate.” She dared not add: “For fear the noise might disturb him.”

“I hope you had no difficulty in finding a taxi at the Junction?”

“Oh, no; I had no difficulty.”

“I think it was so kind of you to come—not even knowing whether you’d find a carriage to bring you out all this way. And I know how busy you are. There’s always so much going on in town, isn’t there, even at this time of year?”

“Yes; I suppose so. But your brother—”

“Oh, of course my brother won’t be up to any sort of gaiety; not for a long time.”

“A long time; no. But you do hope—”

“I think everybody about a sick bed ought to hope, don’t you?”

“Yes; but I mean—”

Nora stood up suddenly, her brain whirling. Was it possible that she and that woman had sat thus facing each other for half an hour, piling up this conversational rubbish, while upstairs, out of sight, the truth, the meaning of their two lives hung on the frail thread of one man’s intermittent pulse? She could not imagine why she felt so powerless and baffled. What had a woman who was young and handsome and beloved to fear from a dowdy and insignificant old maid? Why, the antagonism that these very graces and superiorities would create in the other’s breast, especially if she knew they were all spent in charming the being on whom her life depended. Weak in herself, but powerful from her circumstances, she stood at bay on the ruins of all that Nora had ever loved. “How she must hate me—and I never thought of it,” mused Nora, who had imagined that she had thought of everything where her relation to her lover was concerned. Well, it was too late now to remedy her omission; but at least she must assert herself, must say something to save the precious minutes that remained and break through the stifling web of platitudes which her enemy’s tremulous hand was weaving around her.

“Miss Aldis—I must tell you—I came to see—”

“How he was? So very friendly of you. He would appreciate it, I know. Christopher is so devoted to his friends.”

“But you’ll—you’ll tell him that I—”

“Of course. That you came on purpose to ask about him. As soon as he’s a little bit stronger.”

“But I mean—now?”

“Tell him now that you called to enquire? How good of you to think of that too! Perhaps tomorrow morning, if he’s feeling a little bit brighter...”

Nora felt her lips drying as if a hot wind had parched them. They would hardly move. “But now—now—today.” Her voice sank to a whisper as she added: “Isn’t he conscious?”

“Oh, yes; he’s conscious; he’s perfectly conscious.” Miss Aldis emphasized this with another of her long pauses. “He shall certainly be told that you called.” Suddenly she too got up from her seat and moved toward the window. “I must seem dreadfully inhospitable, not even offering you a cup of tea. But the fact is, perhaps I ought to tell you—if you’re thinking of getting back to Ockham this afternoon there’s only one train that stops at the Junction after three o’clock.” She pulled out an old-fashioned enamelled watch with a wreath of roses about the dial, and turned almost apologetically to Mrs. Frenway. “You ought to be at the station by four o’clock at the latest; and with one of those old Junction taxis ... I’m so sorry; I know I must appear to be driving you away.” A wan smile drew up her pale lips.

Nora knew just how long the drive from Westover Junction had taken, and understood that she was being delicately dismissed. Dismissed from life—from hope—even from the dear anguish of filling her eyes for the last time with the face which was the one face in the world to her! (“But then she does know everything,” she thought.)

“I mustn’t make you miss your train, you know.”

“Miss Aldis, is he—has he seen any one?” Nora hazarded in a painful whisper.

“Seen any one? Well, there’ve been all the doctors—five of them! And then the nurses. Oh, but you mean friends, of course. Naturally.” She seemed to reflect. “Hal Brincker, yes; he saw our cousin Hal yesterday—but not for very long.”

Hal Brincker! Nora knew what Christopher thought of his Brincker cousins—blighting bores, one and all of them, he always said. And in the extremity of his illness the one person privileged to see him had been—Hal Brincker! Nora’s eyes filled; she had to turn them away for a moment from Miss Aldis’s timid inexorable face.

“But today?” she finally brought out.

“No. Today he hasn’t seen any one; not yet.” The two women stood and looked at each other; then Miss Aldis glanced uncertainly about the room. “But couldn’t I—Yes, I ought at least to have asked you if you won’t have a cup of tea. So stupid of me! There might still be time. I never take tea myself.” Once more she referred anxiously to her watch. “The water is sure to be boiling, because the nurses’ tea is just being taken up. If you’ll excuse me a moment I’ll go and see.”

“Oh, no; no!” Nora drew in a quick sob. “How can you? ... I mean, I don’t want any...”

Miss Aldis looked relieved. “Then I shall be quite sure that you won’t reach the station too late.” She waited again, and then held out a long stony hand. “So kind—I shall never forget your kindness. Coming all this way, when you might so easily have telephoned from town. Do please tell Mr. Frenway how I appreciated it. You will remember to tell him, won’t you? He sent me such an interesting collection of pamphlets about tree moving. I should like him to know how much I feel his kindness in letting you come.” She paused again, and pulled in her lips so that they became a narrow thread, a mere line drawn across her face by a ruler. “But, no; I won’t trouble you; I’ll write to thank him myself.” Her hand ran out to an electric bell on the nearest table. It shrilled through the silence, and the parlour maid appeared with a stage-like promptness.

“The taxi, please? Mrs. Frenway’s taxi.”

The room became silent again. Nora thought: “Yes; she knows everything.” Miss Aldis peeped for the third time at her watch, and then uttered a slight unmeaning laugh. The blue-bottle banged against the window, and once more it seemed to Nora that its sonorities were reverberating inside her head. They were deafeningly mingled there with the explosion of the taxi’s reluctant starting-up and its convulsed halt at the front door. The driver sounded his horn as if to summon her.

“He’s afraid too that you’ll be late!” Miss Aldis smiled.

The smooth slippery floor of the hall seemed to Nora to extend away in front of her for miles. At its far end she saw a little tunnel of light, a miniature maid, a toy taxi. Somehow she managed to travel the distance that separated her from them, though her bones ached with weariness, and at every step she seemed to be lifting a leaden weight. The taxi was close to her now, its door was open, she was getting in. The same smell of damp hay and bad tobacco greeted her. She saw her hostess standing on the threshold. “To the Junction, driver—back to the Junction,” she heard Miss Aldis say. The taxi began to roll toward the gate. As it moved away Nora heard Miss Aldis calling: “I’ll be sure to write and thank Mr. Frenway.”