Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 8

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Helen Ombersley noticed particularly the confident mood in which Miles returned from Uffley that day. Though he habitually kept his anxieties and encouragements to himself, she always became aware of them through those intuitive perceptions which sheer physical proximity has the power of developing between married people—even between those, she thought, who were married unhappily. “Not that our married life has been anything but ideal,” she told herself, stooping down to pick handfuls of groundsel from the long border at right angles to the house, in which now, as the Darwen tulip-buds coloured and opened, she was daily finding surprises of disappointment or delight.

Their marriage had begun, indeed, as a passionate romance in the days when her father, Lord D’Abitot, still lived at Stoke Priory, and Miles—he was a subaltern then—had ridden over from Chaddesbourne to court her.

Thinking back on that period now (her thoughts had a deliciously vagrant habit when she was gardening) she could remember, she could almost hear the clop-clop of his horse’s hoofs on the red gravel drive—and there she stood waiting for him, a child even younger than Catherine, under the benignant eyes of the two great Van Dycks in the Adam Hall! She could hear her heart beating fast as the rhythm of trotting hoofs became leisurely and stopped; the thud on the gravel as he dismounted, the bridle’s clink as he tied his horse to the ring in the portico. Slowly, slowly—for even in love Miles had been methodical—he mounted the steps one by one, until, being able to bear the sweet agonising suspense no longer, she opened the door and smiled at him, and Miles, advancing, swept off his hard hat and bowed to her with a gesture Van Dyck’s cavaliers could hardly have bettered, displaying his chestnut curls (officers wore their hair longer in those days) and releasing that waft of pomade which, together with faint memories of Cuba, was the characteristic aura of a late Victorian soldier.

She could smell that masculine aroma now as, in memory, he bowed over her hand and whispered: “Have we time to take a short turn in the garden before tea?”

Then he offered her his arm in the courtliest manner: such a robust young man; so clean, so neat, so confident (and why not?) in his soldierly, hard integrity of body and mind; proud too (and why not, again?) of being a Chaddesbourne Ombersley; proud, enormously, of his regiment, yet without an atom of pretentiousness, because all these things, in spite of his pride in them, were a matter of course.

“Have we time to take a short turn in the garden before tea?”

It was in the topiary garden at Stoke Priory, she remembered, amid the smooth yew hedges, the chalky statuary, that Miles had asked her to marry him (a cuckoo was calling then; a cuckoo called now) and she had accepted him. Their spring courtship had all the atmosphere of Lord Tennyson’s Maud—a poem which nobody dreamed of reading in these days. But what poetry! Helen Ombersley thought, and glowed, recalling it. “There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate.... Love was really splendid and passionate in those days,” she thought. Men reverenced women, like Arthur and his knights (with the exception of poor Lancelot), and no nice girl ever went to a Hunt Ball without a chaperon. Whereas now....

“These tulips are all old varieties,” she thought. “And I’m sure that wretched man Follows has never lifted them for years. That’s why they’ve deteriorated. And Follows has deteriorated too, because he’s not been lifted either. I want new kinds of tulips, but Miles can’t possibly afford them; and I want a new kind of gardener too, but he’s been here so long that if he were lifted now it would probably kill him. I shall have to arrange this herbaceous border myself,” she thought, “and for once, I shan’t have to leave it.” Her mind went back to the numerous gardens she had made and been forced to leave. Wherever her husband’s life took her she attempted to make a garden. Hot cannas in Egypt, gigantic zinnias in Poona. Sometimes she had been torn away from them before they came into flower.

“And our early married life,” she thought, “was just as ideal.” (Cuckoo ... cuckoo.... Would that wretched bird never stop?) All its intimacies had been governed by—what should she call it?—decorum, respect. It was a relationship which had never lost its fineness in the haphazard familiarities that were current now even among people of their own type of breeding. Miles never forgot—as quite nice people, or people who ought to be nice, forgot now—that he was a gentleman and she a well-born lady, so that their union had kept the flavour of formidable alliance between “high contracting parties.”

To a certain extent, of course, they had lived their own lives. That, no doubt, was one of the reasons why romance had survived. In those days ladies had not presumed to share all their husbands’ activities. The regimental life of a serving soldier was, quite properly, a separate existence, held, tacitly, as inviolable as the doors of his club. One accepted these minor separations along with the major ones, such as the regiment’s tours of foreign service in Egypt and India and the three years’ frightening hiatus of the Boer War. They passed swiftly, too—that was natural enough in the life of a woman who had borne four children and considered it her duty to devote herself to their upbringing and education. And although one’s husband seemed almost a stranger when he came home from South Africa or from peacetime service abroad, it was surprising how quickly, how gladly, one picked up the threads of one’s married life, almost as if they had never been broken—“because marriage of our kind,” she thought, “the old-fashioned civilized marriage, isn’t a thing of loosely-knit sentiments and easy emotions, but a firm-woven texture of mutual faith and respect, quite superior to degrading suspicions and little, mean jealousies and petty selfishness—a life as stable and dignified as a house like this....”

For now, rising from her knees at the end of the border, she saw the warm, red-brick flank of Chaddesbourne Hall. It did not appear, from that angle of view, a beautiful house. It was too deep for its height, and the slates of the high-pitched roof which showed through the stone balustrade had a purplish tinge. Yet its strongest effect was one of four-square solidity; the man who planted it there had intended it to stay. It was eminently a reticent house. There were no fussy gables (as in that horror of Mr. Hackett’s which made Miles so savage); no wilful or whimsical decoration distracted the eye from its sober horizontality; it expressed, through the medium of the local material—that masonry against which the cascading panicles and pale leaves of wistaria appeared so luminous—the poise, the self-respect, the staid common sense of a Worcestershire squire of the late eighteenth century; it was an architectural expression of wisdom rather than culture, of security rather than riches, of comfort rather than aspiration, of confidence rather than pride, of moderation in all things: a complete expression (now that she came to think of it) of its present possessor, her husband.

“A house to be lived in, not looked at,” Helen Ombersley thought, slowly removing the earth-stained gloves which she wore for gardening. The fact that a word like “lived” came into her mind was an encouraging sign. Since the slaughter of Dick and Roger she had merely existed, like the tail of a worm which still wriggles when a spade has cut it in two. She had accepted life—if this paralysis of all feeling deserved that name—not because she found any vestige of savour or joy in it, but because she believed God wished it, because, she supposed, it was her duty to live for Miles and dear Jack and Catherine. She had sometimes wondered if Miles had suffered half as deeply (the children, of course, were too young, too buoyant for true desolation); but in moments of real emotion his lips were closed automatically; apart from occasional “short leave,” he had never left his brigade, and when they met, in those brief and poignant moments, she had contrived—at what cost none could guess—to exhibit a fair imitation of the Roman mother, and known, by the way he played up to her rather than by any weakening gestures of tenderness, how much he admired this hollow show of fortitude. When first Miles came home she had made up her mind to force herself to speak of their sons just as if they were still alive; but when the time came she knew that she dared not face this risk to her false composure and his, so that their names remained unspoken; and this knowledge of her own limited courage had taught her a new canon of discipline which forbade her not merely to speak those names, but even to shape them in her mind, obeyed so successfully that from that day to this they had never yet crossed her lips.

That was why she was shocked when, on this bland evening, dreamily aware of the mass of the Hall’s flank enkindled by sun, of the wistaria’s falling plumes, of bees searching the limes, of a gust of white lilac, she surprised herself saying to herself: “How Dick would have loved this!” She was shocked because the escape of those words, slipped free, in an abstracted moment, from her steeled inhibition, produced none of the retribution she was schooled to dread: neither anguish nor tears, but rather the incredible relief of rain after drought—more than that: of birth after travail. “How Dick would have loved this!” She murmured the words aloud; and it seemed to her now as if they rejoiced in their release, floating happily away like white puffs of cloud or blown cherry-blossom, and that a softness like that of the lilac-perfumed air stole into her cold, empty heart, by the way they had passed and warmed it, salved it, filled it with vague incredible content.

“Something strange has happened to me,” she thought. “I believe I am coming alive. And they want me to come alive. I’m sure they are glad of it. I’m going to be happy here. It’s as though they were smiling....” And she found she was smiling herself, no longer bravely—as often she smiled—but serenely, unconsciously—she almost dared to think happily. “Can it really be over?” she asked herself. “Is this going to last?”

She distrusted this miracle, above all for its suddenness. Perhaps she had reached the term set to her mourning by Time, the slow healer of all things. Perhaps this strange lightening of the spirit resembled one of those jewelled landscapes, disclosed instantly and then gone for ever, that flash through sudden thinnings of mountain mist. Yet even when that transfiguring light had faded from the rosy walls—as it did at that moment—and left them cold, she still felt, for the first time in many years, most oddly at home. If her Dick would have loved Chaddesbourne Hall, she loved it too, for some quality transcending mere beauty. Why? she wondered.... Perhaps because it resembled Stoke Priory, the house she had always thought of when she used the word “home”—not so much in itself (though the date and style of the building were the same) as in its familiar surroundings: the great elms, the cawing of rooks, the still water in which it was mirrored, the orchard-lands falling towards Severn, in that sense of an immanent invisible girdle of peaceful hills. Was there some healing quality, particular to herself, in this sweet native air? Did her spiritual roots run as deep as Miles’s, though she did not know it, into this tawny soil? A stray stanza of poetry sang through her mind and seemed to answer her:

“In my own shire if I was sad

Homely comforters I had:

The earth, because my heart was sore

Sorrowed for the son she bore;

And standing hills, long to remain,

Shared their short-lived comrade’s pain.”

Thus the Worcestershire poet spoke for her. Perhaps that was it. She had come home for healing to the waters of Abana and Pharphar, to Severn and Avon, the rivers of her own country; to its smell, to its speech. Hadn’t she smiled when old Follows—who was such an incompetent gardener, had called elder trees “ellerns,” and wood pigeons “quices,” and green woodpeckers “stockeagles,” and complained when the rooks grew busy in the walnut trees, that “them there great crows was gullocking the bannuts;” yet she knew what he meant, and those fine Saxon words were the music of all her childhood, like the cracked village chimes and the singing notes of the handbell-ringers at Christmas. She had returned to a world in which nothing had to be learned anew, to a kind of life of which she was mistress by birthright, a world in which, without effort or adjustment, she could regain her long-lost self and be true to it, as Shakespeare said.

“I believe,” she thought, “I am going to be happy again.” Yet happiness, in her case—unlike unhappiness—could never be the mere product of a personal mood. It depended too much on the state of mind of her husband and Jack and Catherine. Were they going to be happy at Chaddesbourne? Miles certainly was. His single-mindedness, his capacity for living in the present and taking things as they came, made him happy (though never excited) wherever he might be; and the rehabilitation of Chaddesbourne, for all its difficulties, was the task to which he had looked forward ever since he was a boy. But Jack and Catherine ... would Chaddesbourne mean anything, or at least the same things, to them?

It seemed unreasonable to expect that it should. Until the day of their grandfather’s funeral they had never set eyes on it. To them it must seem at first sight a gloomy and not even comfortable house tucked away in the wilds of the country miles from anywhere: just another—and not a particularly pleasant—halting-place amid the many peregrinations of their war-ridden childhood. She had noticed with some concern (for she always watched him) Jack’s restlessness and obvious boredom on that first visit. It was a pity, she felt, that he wasn’t going to Sandhurst. All the Ombersleys were born to be soldiers (or ought to be) and soldiering would have settled him. But he wouldn’t. The war had knocked all the romance and glitter out of military life; and Jack, though in most things he didn’t resemble his father, had all Miles’s obstinacy, with none of his respect for tradition. Modern Oxford, he told her, was stiff with “temporary” captains and majors and colonels, who stalked down the High as if they thought they owned it and blithered about the old war from morning till night, and regarded him and his Eton friends, who had more right to be there than they had, as childish intruders. When Miles talked to him about Sandhurst Jack had gone positively mulish. None of his friends were going into the army, he said, and why should they? There wouldn’t be another war in his lifetime, anyway!

Then what did he propose to do? Miles sternly enquired. (It wasn’t the least bit of good being stern with these war-time children: she knew that to her cost.)

“Oh, I don’t know, Father,” Jack said. “There’s no need to worry about that yet. Most of my school friends are going into business.”

“Into business?” Miles laughed. The idea of an Ombersley going into business tickled him.

But oddly enough (providentially too, Helen Ombersley thought, for she knew her son better than he), Miles hadn’t insisted on Jack’s going into the army. He had something else, as she knew, in the back of his mind. He was determined that the mistakes of the last generation should not be repeated in this; he was going to catch his son young and train him thoroughly for his proper destiny as the next owner of Chaddesbourne; he was going to teach him to know the place through and through and love every acre, to make it the central pride and devotion of his life. The sooner Jack began to think of it in that way the better. They would work things out and talk things over together, father and son: the ideal combination which he had missed. As Jack said, there was no hurry. In the end he would come to it naturally. He was an Ombersley....

Perhaps. She wondered. Jack wasn’t the same kind of Ombersley as her husband. The difference was not merely physical, though there, too, it was striking. It was a difference of texture. Though he had plenty of physical courage, Jack’s fibre was so pliable (she wouldn’t admit it was weak) compared with her husband’s. He didn’t, she guessed, take Miles’s infrangible standards of conduct for granted; even when he submitted to them, as he generally did, he couldn’t always respect them. Institutions that Miles reverenced blindly because they were English, games like cricket, for instance (one of the first things he had done at Chaddesbourne had been to put ropes round the pitch in the park), appeared to Jack slightly childish and dreadfully slow. Slow.... That word, she believed, was the key to the difference between them; explaining why he had jibbed at the army, why, she feared, he might jib at Chaddesbourne. He was impetuous, nervously, callously impatient of all things smooth and leisurely, of old books, of old songs, of (she sometimes feared, though he tried not to show it) old people. His mind was on wires, like his body, incapable of repose. Neither one nor the other could stay fixed for five minutes on end, and when either moved it went off like a screaming rocket. For speed—this insensate, bewildering modern speed—was his god.

That was why he had made such a friend, first at school and then at Oxford, of Trevor Tregaron, the son of the man who made motor-cars, whose eccentric grandfather had died, more or less bankrupt, at her old home, Stoke Priory. The Tregaron boy was quite nice, he had charming manners; but she couldn’t help feeling that his influence on Jack was pernicious: they were always risking their lives together at Brooklands on racing-cars, and Jack’s last letter from Christ Church had told her they were learning to fly (she hadn’t dared to tell Miles)—as if enough unfortunate boys hadn’t lost their lives flying in the war! Besides which, young Tregaron’s father was a millionaire; he had far too much money to play with, and set the pace there as well. Of course Jack was only a child, she reminded herself. But such a ruthless, passionate child! Could a nature like his, as Miles fondly believed, consent to “settle down” so soon in the sober routine of Chaddesbourne?

Once or twice she had ventured to speak of these doubts to Catherine. Jack and Catherine had grown up together and still shared their secrets. But Catherine was almost as much a puzzle to her as Jack, which seemed wrong: a mother should certainly understand her own daughter—“your daughter’s your daughter the whole of your life,” the old saw insisted. The strained atmosphere of the “home front” had been more wearing for girls than for boys; boys, at school, were kept busy with games and lessons and drilling, and isolated from the contagious anxieties and sufferings of their elders; while Catherine, who was older than Jack and, being a girl, developed more quickly, had been much more aware, in those sensitive years, of the distress that surrounded her. A young girl, condemned to live alone with a broken-hearted mother, had so little chance of losing herself in normal activities; she just wondered and brooded. That was why—even though Helen Ombersley didn’t wholly approve of it—she had consented to Catherine’s joining the V.A.D. and working for a time in Lady Bemerton’s hospital at Wyshford. Bea Bemerton was a woman of the world with an unquestionable sense of propriety; and Wyshford Abbey, of course, was an officers’ hospital—though in those days, as Miles bitterly complained, the word “officer” didn’t necessarily signify “gentleman.”

However, there were quite a number of “nice” girls nursing at Wyshford, and when first she went down there to stay a week-end she was encouraged to see how quickly Catherine had improved. In the space of a few short weeks that languid, coltish child had become a woman. The severe nurse’s uniform, with its great red cross, became her; her cheeks glowed with colour; she had acquired an astonishing air of poise and self-possession. “Your girl is a beauty,” Lady Bemerton told her. “I can foresee many hearts being broken.” Then she saw Mrs. Ombersley’s face grow anxious, and declared she was only joking. “My dear Helen,” she said, “you needn’t worry your head about that.... Our patients, poor lambs, are too proper for words, and I keep my eye on them. I can assure you that things of that kind don’t happen at Wyshford.”

Yet something had happened at Wyshford in spite of Lady Bemerton’s eye. What, exactly, it was, Helen Ombersley never knew, for Catherine never told her, and for that very reason she suspected it must have been of that kind. When the Armistice came and the Bemertons’ hospital was closed, the Catherine who rejoined her in London was not the Catherine she knew. She was older—but so many years older! The colour had faded from her cheeks. And though she was as sweet and thoughtful as ever—with a kind of chastened sweetness (and, Heaven knew, Helen Ombersley needed it), her soft eyes looked hurt. It was a strange thing, Helen thought, for the two of them to be living together, each trying to help the other with little forced gaieties and unreal bright smiles, each hiding, and with such virtuosity, her awful emptiness.

“If she’ld only confide in me,” Helen Ombersley thought, “it might make her feel easier. It’s this awful suppression of feeling that desolates her.” Sometimes when Catherine came to kiss her good night and she took the child in her arms, so that the hurt eyes were hidden, she had a sensation that Catherine was on the verge of telling her, or crying, perhaps, and held her breath. Then, quietly, determinedly, Catherine would raise her head, her eyes tearless, her sweet lips set in a deliberate smile. She would put her hand to her forehead and smooth back her beeswax-coloured hair.

“Shall I put out the light, darling?” she would say. “Are you sure the window’s not open too wide? I’m afraid it may rattle. The wind’s rising.”

And Mrs. Ombersley would say: “No, I’m sure it won’t rattle. I love to feel the air on my face. Good night, darling child.” She saw Catherine stepping to the door—she was a beautiful mover in spite of her tallness—and her pale, lovely face, so ineffably simple, so childlike, illumined for one ghostly moment till the switch clicked under her long fingers and the light went out and the door softly closed behind her, and each returned to her soul’s own proud solitude.

It was a great blessing, Helen Ombersley thought, in those days, that Catherine could “lose herself,” as people were supposed to do, in her music. That was another world of sensation which she couldn’t share with her daughter—none of the D’Abitots or Ombersleys were musical or ever had been—but when she heard Catherine playing her piano for hours on end (until she sometimes feared she would wear herself out), she imagined and hoped that the child was finding some form of emotional expression denied to herself. She had an extraordinary delicacy of touch, people said, combined with a power that was almost masculine. At times, when she played, the house seemed to rock with wild music like a ship in a storm. It was as though then—and then only—in these birth-pangs of sound her passionate nature found speech. Sometimes, when the communicable stress of her playing became well-nigh unbearable, Mrs. Ombersley would stand listening at the door till she could stand it no longer, and enter to see Catherine turn round with a startled look and as pale as a ghost.

“My darling,” she would say. “Are you never going to stop? You’ll tire yourself out!”

And Catherine would blink and smile: “Oh, Mother, you frightened me. What time is it? The clock’s stopped. I haven’t the least idea. Let’s go out and get some fresh air.”

They went walking together—they were living in Chelsea then—along the Embankment. Barges breasted the sallow ebb and gulls screamed noisily above them. They walked briskly, side by side, the two tall, slender black figures, each immersed in her separate dream, until suddenly one or the other, made conscious of a neighbouring loneliness, would smile or put out a gloved hand. In those days London still bristled with reminders of the war: well-fed officers home on leave swaggering in their be-ribboned uniforms, soldiers in hospital blue, here and there the pinched face of a man who had lost an arm or a leg or hobbled with a stick. For them the war was well over; the gulls in the bleak sky screamed gaily; securely—for what mattered now?—the strung barges stripped the tide.

But gradually the uniforms, khaki or blue, grew rarer and rarer; you could walk for an hour on the Embankment without meeting one. People were bored with the memory of the war, and many contrived to forget it. So soon, Helen Ombersley thought, so soon forgotten! But neither she nor Catherine could forget.

That was why it had come as something of a relief when Miles, with his regiment, was brought home from the Rhine and ordered to Aldershot. It had meant leaving London, which didn’t really suit Catherine; the hurried uprooting, the physical jolt of setting up house in Farnham. And then came a second jolt; her father-in-law’s death, and the even more radical transference to Chaddesbourne. If what Catherine needed was shaking out of herself, these two should help her, quite apart from the healing effects of Worcestershire air which, Mrs. Ombersley firmly believed, had sovereign virtues. How otherwise could she account for the gradual change in herself which had culminated this afternoon in that very odd moment of exaltation and hope? It seemed likely that Catherine, with the natural resilience of youth, would recover even more quickly. “Though she still looks so pale,” Mrs. Ombersley thought, “and moves so languidly. Perhaps she needs iron. If she doesn’t improve, I must get that nice Dr. Selby, whom Miles speaks so well of, to come and prescribe for her.”