Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 3

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The two women looked at each other with a smile of comprehension as the old, old man who, considering his years, was still so amazingly active, rose restlessly from his arm-chair to go to the northernmost window of the enormous hall in which they were sitting and to look, over the west end of the dark lake, at the mill. He did this night after night now; but there had been years when he had carefully avoided that view.

All three were in evening clothes; it was the custom to dress for dinner, at the great house on the shelf of the hillside overlooking the two arms of the lake. The women were busy with embroidery; it was rare that either of them spoke on these long evenings after they had risen from table; and if there was occasion for an exchange of words, they were uttered under their breath.

The younger of the two, Lady Clark or Maud, as she was called by her intimates was the old man's daughter-in-law. Though she was still in her early forties, she had, to all appearance, at least for an outsider, only one aim left in life, namely to ease the old man's lapse into that senility which had to come at last, long as it had been staved off by her husband's unexpected death more than a decade ago. The older woman, Miss Charlebois, had once been the 'companion' of Mrs Samuel Clark, the long-dead wife of the old man, a senator of Canada, who had gone to the window whence he looked at the mill as if he must watch that nobody walked off with it.

Life in the house, as was natural in a place which stood aside from the main stream of life, followed a strict routine; and even Lady Clark lived largely in the past, perhaps for the very reason that, as far as the mill went, the future was hers; she was its largest shareholder; and there was now only one other, the old man who had certainly long since made her his heir.

Yet it was doubtful whether either of the women realized what went on in the old man as he looked at that mill which towered up, seventeen stories high, at the foot of the lake, like a huge pyramid whose truncated apex was in line with the summits of the surrounding hills. The mill which, in a physical sense, he had largely created had been his love before he had owned it; it had become the object of his hatred after it had become his; it had always ruled his destiny; it had been, it still was, the central fact in his life; it had never permitted him to be entirely himself; it had determined his every action. The history of the mill had been his history, beginning with the time when his father had started to build it; and again beyond the time when his son, having done something to it of which he himself disapproved, was killed by the stray shot of a striker. Whatever had happened to him, in his inner as well as his outer life, had been contingent upon its existence. His father had forced it on him; his son had thrown it back on his shoulders. It had led a life of its own, more potent, more decisive than the life of any mere human being. The individual destinies connected with it had merely woven arabesques around it. But, perhaps naturally, it was these living arabesques which held the old man's thought.

There it stood, two miles away, seen across the west basin of the artificial lake which the great power-dam had created by flooding back the river over its bottom lands which it had drowned.

Its image lay on the mirror-smooth water like a fairy palace inverted, bathed in light; and beyond the line where the base of that image touched the white line of the dam, its real counterpart rose steeply. It was flooded by the light from two score huge reflectors which converged their beams upon it, from the dizzy height of its narrow topmost storey to the wide ground floor with its eight cave-like openings through which led the tracks of the trains that carried the wheat in and the flour out, day and night, never ceasing, year after year. This vision of light, snow-white--for the whole tremendous structure was dusted over with flour, inside and out--closed the valley through which the turbulent North River had once run, though it was now tamed into the pleasant lake which, in its bosom, mirrored the stars.

The very perfection of the picture owed something of its beauty to the fact that the night was inky-black. Nothing of what lay between the house and the mill had a more than shadowy existence: the park sloping down, terraced, to the water's edge where huge retaining walls of concrete overlaid with marble checked the wash of rains and waves; and, beyond, the shoulder of the hill which had become a peninsula, screening the so-called Terrace from view. The spot-lights picked the mill out of the darkness, nothing else. The trees and slopes which intervened were mere silhouettes against the double vision of light.

To many people, as the old man was aware, that mill stood as a symbol and monument of the world-order which, by-and-large, was still dominant; of a ruthless capitalism which had once been an exploiter of human labour but had gradually learned, no less ruthlessly, to dispense with that labour, making itself independent, ruling the country by its sheer power of producing wealth.

To others, fewer these, it stood as a monument of a first endeavour to liberate mankind from the curse of toil; for it produced the thing man needed most, bread, by harnessing the forces of nature. The amazing thing--incomprehensible to one who had seen different methods of production--was that that monstrous edifice was filled with machines only which had come to be by a logic of their own and which did man's bidding without man's help, supervised by a handful of skilled workers who watched them, listened to them, oiled them, adjusted a screw here and there, and wiped accumulating flour dust from their swift and shining limbs. The machines worked silently, or at the worst with no more than a hum to which the human ear became habituated till it was no longer perceived. The few men needed to keep them running were engineers, electricians, chemists and . . . sweepers.

To still others, fewer again, the old man among them, it was the abode of gnomes and hobgoblins, malevolent like Alberich, the dwarf of the Rhinegold, but forced, by a curse more potent than their own, to do man's work. The uncanny thing about it was that these gnomes and hobgoblins--or were they jinn?--had the power of binding man to their service in turn, or to the service of the machines, as he, the old man, had been bound; and whenever, in his hoary old age, he fell under the spell of these dwarfish beings, he visualized them with two faces: one that of his father, one that of his son. In many ways these two had been alike.

Night after night the same thing repeated itself. He was sitting with these two women, in utter silence, essentially alone; for even with his daughter-in-law he communed only when they were by themselves; and then only about the trivialities of the day; never when a third person was present. Night after night he rose at last and went to the window, here in the hall, or upstairs in the gallery, to stare at the mill, at first puzzled, but gradually working out in his mind certain things which, the clearer they became, the more amazed him. Till at last, in order to explain them to himself, he began to review his whole life; or at least such parts of that life as stood out with sufficient decisiveness.

He could never get away from the feeling that, whatever he had done, he had done under some compulsion. Yet it was he who had determined the development of the mill; but it was, first his father, then his son who had chosen the time for every change proposed, thereby twisting his own purpose. The peculiar thing about it all was that neither his father nor his son had ever acknowledged him as the moving spirit. Even the world had not acknowledged him. His father as well as his son had been called 'great men'; he, who had always tried to temper necessity with a humane purpose, was called the 'octopus'!

It was true, his father, Rudyard Clark, had himself been a man 'of the people', a workman who had run the mill as it had been for the greater part of his lifetime by his own labour, aided by a few helpers and a single foreman; while he had been seeking his place in the sun, he had been a democrat; but when he had won success, he had become an autocratic ruler. His son, Edmund Clark, had done what he had done with the ultimate purpose of giving the people what they needed as a gift from above; if he had lived, he might have revealed himself as a public benefactor; but he had died. Between them, the two had forced him, Samuel Clark, to assume all the odium attaching to a task which he had not been allowed to fulfil in his own way.

Somewhat sadly, yet not without a feeling of relief, the old man at the window, staring at that mill which had come into being like a fact of nature, helping and harming the good and the bad alike, with that indifference which is nature's most striking attribute, realized that what he was doing in thus analysing and finally reviewing his life was preparing himself for death. He was setting his mental and spiritual house in order; not till he had done so could he rest, could he lie in peace. . . .

When, one night, after an hour or so at the window, he turned back into the great room with its bright, cheerful light, shed by the hundreds of bulbs in the central chandelier, and broken by the cascade of prismatic crystals surrounding them, the older of the two women, Odette Charlebois, stopping her needlework, glanced up at him with the benignant smile of the spinster to whom her employer is perfect. The younger, Lady Clark, Sir Edmund's widow, without laying down her embroidery, became conscious of the fact that in his sunken eyes hung two tears.

In the things of the daily life he had become like a child; and Lady Clark looked after him in a quiet, unobtrusive way which, to an outsider, would perhaps not have betrayed the profound affection which she harboured for him. The historic bearings of his life escaped her as they escaped the other woman. She saw in him simply a human being that had lived beyond his time, lovable, frail, and tragic because he who had once been young was old; because he who had lived and no doubt was still wishing to live was about to take leave of this world which to her, in spite of all, was a beautiful and desirable world, for leaves were green, and the stars were twinkling. She had married the son of this man without love; she had lost him without any shattering shock to the foundations of her being; but she would have thought it a suggestion of treason to her inner nature if anyone had advised her to snatch at the moment and let old age take care of itself. That she must acknowledge the claim which the father of her dead husband had on her went without saying.

He, almost tripped by the edge of the deep-napped and enormous rug, made for a door without stopping: the wrong door as it happened more and more frequently of late. She knew where he wanted to go.

But she waited till he was past the chesterfield on which she was sitting before she dropped her embroidery-frame and quickly rose to take his arm. He wished to sleep in the library instead of going upstairs to his bedroom; he often did; and by a slight pressure of her hand she directed him, pushing at the same time a button to summon his valet who was his junior by only fifteen years.