Читать книгу The Lacquer Lady - Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse - Страница 16

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‟OH, Fanny, where did you get that lovely handkerchief? What beautiful embroidery ... you are a lucky girl!”

“That? Oh, Agatha, do you like it? It’s nothing much. Captain Bagshaw—you remember him—brought me a dozen like that from Rangoon. It is rather nice, but nuns always embroider so well. If only they didn’t charge so much!”

It ought to have happened like that ... but Agatha, intent on her own life, that (strangely enough, she being so ordinary) occupied her as profoundly as Fanny’s important life occupied her, never even noticed the dainty handkerchief that Fanny flourished so assiduously. Fanny had to say:

“Agatha, what do you think of my new handkerchief?” which was not the same thing at all. And even then Agatha only said: “Oh, yes, how pretty. Fanny, do you think one ought to allow family ties to interfere with one’s own inner convictions? I mean, if we did, where would the great saints have been? After all, there is that saying, ‘he that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me ...’ ” which really had nothing to do with Fanny.

Agatha, walking to and fro in the dark room beneath the triple roof, looking out at the wet green of the trees, smelling all the fresh scents awakened by the rain, her skin damp and hot, her body languid, yet conscious all the time that she was I, I, I, Agatha Lumsden, me myself, within this warm, damp envelope of flesh, felt her mind as alive and irritant with her thoughts as her body would have been beneath the crawling of ants.

“The only important thing in the world is religion. What we are here, as long as we do right, matters not at all. Mr. Protheroe said ... never mind what he said, he’s only a young man, after all. I want to be good, to be good. Where did I read that sentence ... to be a saint, a great saint, and to save many souls ... ? That’s what we ought to want. Protheroe ... a nice sort of name. A saint is like Saint Teresa. Of course she was a Roman Catholic, but ... or Saint Francis of Assisi ... so was he. But their saints are ours too, before they broke away ... of course they’re ours too. Saints are saints. To be a saint, and a great saint, and to save many souls. ... But can they have been quite like us? I mean ... to send clothes to the wash, to have to do all the things one has to do every day ... cleaning one’s teeth ... and the other things.... It doesn’t seem to fit. Did even our Lord have to ... no, that’s blasphemy. I mustn’t. But everything is so mixed up. Mr. Protheroe ... but how beastly, how horrid of me, of course he doesn’t ... but of course he does, or he’d die. How beastly of me, how hateful I am. Oh, Lord, I want to help Thy Kingdom. Lord, help me ...”

And Agatha, pulses drumming, scrupulously honest, anxious, the colour flickering on her wan cheek-bones, wrestled throughout the rains, clinging on to all she had been taught, to all that would always catch warningly at her skirts, grow away as she might.

Fanny, pretty, insecure Fanny—odd how the word “insecure” seemed to fit Fanny quite fairly and to bring solace to Agatha, who would consciously have hated a friend to be insecure—flitted, bright and charming, through the slanting rays of sunlight that visited Agatha’s kalā town days. But Agatha knew that in herself, in Agatha, not in Fanny, lay the focus of existence. There had been great missionary saints, there was Saint Francis Xavier, who was martyred by the Japanese. Agatha’s whole soul melted and fused into ecstatic brightness at thought of that crown to love and devotion which was martyrdom. And yet I am such a coward, it’s only conceit makes me even think of martyrs in relation to myself. I can’t bear even to burn my fingers when I’m lighting the lamp.

Agatha thinks she’s so good, thought Fanny resentfully—unaware as the birds flying about the eaves, of Agatha’s intense humility and earnestness—and yet she’s selfish. I always thought to be interested in other people instead of yourself was what made people good, but Agatha isn’t a bit interested in my new handkerchiefs.

And Agatha, watching Fanny go, caught a glimpse of the lovely curve of her slightly flat cheek and the tender line of her chin and neck against the doorpost as she went, and felt, with the sudden catch of her heart that pure beauty was apt to give her.—Ah, how lovely ... ! I know somehow what a man must feel when he sees someone like that.... I wish I could paint, really paint, not just satin table-centres.

Agatha had been brought up with the oblique Puritanical bias which the shades of Catholicism involve, that distrust of beauty which the monastic spirit holds no less than the Protestant, and Keats had always been presented to her as “too lush,” just as Shelley had been “too pagan,” while a broad-minded literary tolerance was applied to both.... They just weren’t Tennyson, or even Browning. Thus the echoes of sudden joy and satisfaction that had reverberated through Agatha’s youthful mind at first meeting—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” had been turned into echoes of disapprobation. Only goodness was truth, beauty could, unfortunately (owing to the devil’s adroitness at turning the choicest gifts of God to base uses) be a snare. And a snare was not truth. What Agatha’s singing instinct told her of Fanny’s curve of cheek and jaw, no sooner echoed through her mind than she tried to cast it forth. Only the soul mattered. To be a saint, and a great saint, and to save many souls. How hot it was ... and how short and irritable poor Papa was when he came home from school.

That evening Agatha stood before her little wavy-surfaced mirror and stared at her own reflection. She pinched the flesh of her thin cheek till it whitened, sure proof of her own actuality and the reality of the whole world. Deep throughout her being, knocked the knowledge that, for good or ill, this was her only life on this earth, that, though not Helen of Troy, she was quite pretty, that she was young, that she had to do something about it all soon, that she was Agatha Lumsden, I, I, I. Her finger-nails, her hands, the aspect of her knuckles, the texture of her skin, the flushing that came upon her cheeks, the gloss of her hair, its greasiness when it wanted washing, were all herself, all I. This enforced intimacy, these almost shocking terms of knowledge on which she lived with the fabric of her own being, would let her have no rest. She seized the handkerchief from Captain Bagshaw’s set that Fanny had given her (driven to such a measure by the impossibility otherwise of fastening the importance of the occasion on Agatha’s mind) and fastened round her brow the soft fold of linen. I should look like that if I were a Sister.... And again Agatha heard her mind saying: To be a saint ... to be a saint.... Clear as the repeated notes of a bell it sounded.

From the leper settlement managed by the Sisters came the tones of the bell ringing for the evening Angelus. And, like an echo, from the distant trees, floated the deep voice of a prayer-gong, as a devout mendicant passing through the world on what was but one, as he knew surely, of his many pilgrimages, struck it to the honour of the Lord Buddha.

Fanny arrived home from the unsatisfactory Agatha’s a moment before Captain Bagshaw, red and perspiring, and assuming a look of casual chance, descended from his hired bullock-wagon. Fanny passed into the Moroni compound without apparently observing him. She was acutely aware of how somehow pathetic and touching her slim back-view, with its provocatively waggling bustle and the tiny white muslin train that went jerking up the verandah steps after her, must look, as the slim little white-clad figure, so young and fragile, passed into the gloom of the bungalow. And she was truly touching and pathetic and fragile, just as Agatha was truly agog with the desire for saintliness, for each was young and overburdened with the weight of her own insistent life.