Читать книгу The Master of Man - Hall Sir Caine - Страница 8

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The winter passed, the spring came and nothing was done for Victor. His father made no effort to provide for his future, whether at another school, at college, or in a profession.

"I wonder at the Dempster, I really do," said Auntie Kitty.

"Leave him alone," said Janet—it would all come right some day.

Left to himself, Victor became the great practical joker of the countryside. Every prank for which no other author could be found was attributed to him. If any pretentious person fell into a ridiculous mare's nest people would say,

"But where was young Stowell while that was going on?"

In this dubious occupation of "putting the fun" on folks he soon found the powerful assistance of Alick Gell. That young gentleman, for his training on the land, had been handed over to the charge of old Tom Kermode, the Speaker's steward. But Tom, good man, foresaw the possibility of being supplanted in his position if the Speaker's son acquired sufficient knowledge to take it, and therefore he put no unnecessary obstacles in the way of the boy's industrious efforts not to do so. On the contrary he encouraged them, with the result that Alick and Victor foregathered again, and having nothing better to do than to make mischief, they proceeded to make it.

How much the Deemster heard of his son's doings nobody knew. Twice a day he sat at meat with him without speaking a word of reproof. But Janet saw that when report was loudest he wrote longer than usual in his leather-bound book before going to bed, and that his head was lower than ever in the morning.

At length Janet entered into a secret scheme with herself for lifting it up again. This consisted in prompting her dear boy to do something, to make an effort, to justify himself. So making excuse of the Deemster's business she would take Victor's breakfast to his bedroom before he had time to get up to it.

It was a bright room to the north-east, flooded with sunshine at that season after she had drawn the blind, and fresh, after she had thrown up the sash, with morning air that smacked of the blue sea (which came humming down from the dim ghost of Galloway), and relished of the sandy soil of Man, with its yellowing crops of rustling oats, over which the larks and the linnets tumbled and sang.

Victor was always asleep when she went in at eight o'clock, for he slept like a top, and after she had scolded him for lying late, he would sit up in bed, with his sleepy eyes and tousled hair, to eat his breakfast, while she turned his stockings, shook out his shirt, gathered up his clothes (they were usually distributed all over the room) and talked.

Victor noticed whatever she began upon she always ended with the same subject. It was Fenella Stanley. That girl was splendid, and she was getting on marvellously. Still at college "across"? Yes, Newnham they were calling it, and she was carrying everything before her—prizes, scholarships, honours—goodness knows what.

The island was ringing with her praise but Janet was hearing everything direct from Miss Green, the Governor's housekeeper, with whom she kept up a constant correspondence. That woman worshipped the girl—you never saw the like, never! As for the Governor, it was enough to bring tears into a woman's eyes to see how proud he was of his daughter. When he had news that she had taken a new honour it was like new life to the old man. You would think the sun was shining all over the house, and that was saying something there—the Keys being so troublesome. Of course he was "longing" for his daughter to come home to him, and that was only natural, but knowing how hard she was working now—six in the morning until six in the evening, Catherine Green was saying—he was waiting patiently.

"Aw, yes, yes, that's the way with fathers," said Janet. "Big men as they may be themselves, they are prouder of their children's successes than of their own—far prouder."

The effect of Janet's scheme was the reverse of what she had expected. By a law of the heart of a boy, which the good soul knew nothing of, Victor resented the industry, success and reputation of Fenella Stanley. It was a kind of rebuke to his own idleness. The girl was a bookworm and would develop into a blue-stocking! He had not seen her for years and did not want to see her, but in his mind's eye he pictured her as she must be now—a pale-faced young person in a short blue skirt and big boots, with cropped hair and perhaps spectacles!

Describing this vision to Alick Gell, as they were drying themselves on the shore after a swim, Victor said with emphasis that if there was one thing he hated it was a woman who was half a man.

"Same here," said Alick, who had had liberal doses of the same medicine at home, less delicately administered by his sister Isabella.

But where Janet failed, a greater advocate, nature itself, was soon to succeed. The boys were then in their nineteenth year, a pair of full-grown, healthy, handsome lads as ever trod the heather, or stripped to the sea, but there was a great world which had not yet been revealed to either of them—the world of woman. That world was to be revealed to one of them now.

II

It was a late afternoon early in September. The day had been wonderful. Over the bald crown above Druidsdale the sun came slanting across the Irish Sea from a crimsoning sky beyond the purple crests of the Morne mountains. Stowell and Gell had been camping out for two days in the Manx hills, and, parting at a junction of paths, Gell had gone down towards Douglas while Stowell had dropped into the cool dark depths of the glen that led homewards.

Victor was as brown as a berry. He was wearing long, thick-soled yellow boots almost up to his knees, with his trousers tucked into them, a loose yellow shirt, rolled up to the elbows of his strong round arms, no waistcoat, his Norfolk jacket thrown over his left shoulder, and a knapsack strapped on his back.

With long, plunging strides he was coming down the glen, singing sometimes in a voice that was partly drowned by the louder water where it dipped into a dub, when, towards the Curragh end of it, on the "brough" side of the river, he came upon a startling vision.

It was a girl. She was about seventeen years of age, bare-headed and bare-footed, and standing ankle-deep in the water. Her lips, and a little of the mouth at either side, were stained blue with blackberries—she had clearly been picking them and had taken off shoes and stockings to get at a laden bush.

She was splendidly tall, and had bronze brown hair, with a glint of gold when the sun shone on it. The sun was shining on it now, through a gap in the thinning trees that overhung the glen, and with the leaves pattering over her head, and the river running at her feet, it was almost as if she herself were singing.

With her spare hand she was holding up her dress, which was partly of lace—light and loose and semi-transparent—and when a breeze, which was blowing from the sea, lapped it about her body there was a hint of the white, round, beautiful form beneath. Her eyes were dark and brilliantly full, and her face was magnificently intellectual, so clear-cut and clean. And yet she was so feminine, so womanly, such a girl!

She must have heard Stowell's footsteps, and perhaps his singing as he approached, for she turned to look up at him—calmly, rather seriously, a little anxiously but without the slightest confusion. And he looked at her, pausing to do so, without being quite aware of it, and feeling for one brief moment as if wind and water had suddenly stopped and the world stood still.

There was a moment of silence, in which he felt a certain chill, and she a certain warmth, and both a certain dryness at the throat. The girl was the first to recover self-control. Her face sweetened to a smile, and then, in a voice that was a little husky, and yet sounded to him like music, she said, as if she had asked and answered an earlier question for herself:

"But of course you don't know who I am, do you?"

He did. Although she was so utterly unlike what he had expected (what he had told himself he expected) he knew—she was Fenella Stanley.

As often as he thought of it afterwards he could never be quite sure what he had said to her in those first moments. He could only guess at what it must have been by his vivid memory of what she had said in reply.

She watched him, womanlike, for a moment longer, to see what impression she had made upon him, now that she knew what impression he had made upon her. Then she glanced down at her bare feet, that looked yellow on the pebbles in the running water, and then at her shoes and stockings, which, with her parasol, lay on the bank, and said:

"I suppose you ought to go away while I get out of this?"

"Why?"

He never knew what made him say that, but she glanced up at him again, with the answering sunshine of another smile, and said:

"Well, you needn't, if you don't want to."

After that she stepped out of the river, and sat on the grass to dry her feet and pull on her stockings. As she did so, and he stood watching, forgetting (such was the spell of things) to turn his eyes away, she shot another look up at him, and said:

"I remember that the last time I was in these parts you ordered me off, Sir."

"And the last time I was at Government House you turned me out of the tennis court," he answered.

She laughed. He laughed. They both laughed together. Also they both trembled. But by the time she had put on her shoes he was feeling braver, so he went down on his knees to tie her laces.

It was a frightening ordeal, but he got through at last, and to cover their embarrassment, while the lacing was going on, they came to certain explanations.

Yesterday the Governor had telegraphed to the Deemster that he would like to fulfil his promise to visit Ballamoar and stay the night if convenient. So they had driven over in the carriage and arrived about two hours ago, and were going back to-morrow morning.

"Of course you were not there when we came," she said, "being, it seems, a gentleman of gipsy habits, so when Janet (I mean Miss Curphey) mentioned at tea that you were likely to come down the glen about sunset....

"Then you were coming to meet me?" he said.

She laughed again, having said more than she had intended and finding no way of escape from it.

When all was done and he had helped her up (how his fingers tingled!) and they stood side by side for the first time (she was less than half a head shorter than himself and her eyes seemed almost on the level of his own) and they were ready to go, he suddenly remembered that they were on the wrong side for the road. So if she hadn't to take off her boots and stockings and wade through the water again, or else walk half a mile down the glen to the bridge, he would have to carry her across the river.

Without more ado she let him do it—picking her up in his quivering arms and striding through the water in his long boots.

Then being dropped to her feet she laughed again; and he laughed, and they went on laughing, all the way down the glen road, and through the watery lanes of the Curragh, where the sally bushes were singing loud in the breeze from the sea—but not so loud as the hearts of this pair of children.

III

That night, after dinner, leaving the Deemster and the Governor at the table, discussing insular subjects (a constitutional change which was then being mooted), Victor took Fenella out on to the piazza, (his mother had called it so), the uncovered wooden terrace which overlooked the coast.

He was in a dark blue jacket suit, not yet having possessed evening wear, but she was in a gauzy light dress with satin slippers, and her bronze-brown hair was curled about her face in bewitching ringlets.

The evening was very quiet, almost breathless, with hardly a leaf stirring. The revolving light in the lighthouse on the Point of Ayre (seven miles away on its neck of land covered by a wilderness of white stones) was answering to the far-off gleam of the light on the Mull of Galloway, while the sky to the west was a slumberous red, as if the night were dreaming of the departed day.

They had not yet recovered from their experience in the glen, and, sitting out there in the moonlight (for the moon had just sailed through a rack of cloud), they were still speaking involuntarily, and then laughing nervously at nothing—nothing but that tingling sense of sex which made them afraid of each other, that mysterious call of man to maid which, when it first comes, is as pure as an angel's whisper.

"What a wonderful day it has been!" she said,

"The most wonderful day I have ever known," he answered.

"And what a wonderful home you have here," she said.

"Haven't we?" he replied. And then he told her that over there in the dark lay Ireland, and over there Scotland, and over there England, and straight ahead was Norway and the North Pole.

That caught them up into the zone of great things, the eternities, the vast darkness out of which the generations come and towards which they go; and, having found his voice at last, he began to tell her how the island came to be peopled by its present race.

This was the very scene of the Norse invasion—the Vikings from Iceland having landed on this spot a thousand years ago. When the old sea king (his name was Orry) came ashore at the Lhen (it was on a starlight night like this) the native inhabitants of Man had gone down to challenge him. "Where do you come from?" they had cried, and then, pointing to the milky way, he had answered, "That's the road to my country." But the native people had fought him to throw him back into the sea—yes, men and women, too, they say. This very ground between them and the coast had been the battlefield, and it must still be full of the dead who had died that day.

"What a wonderful story!" she said.

"Isn't it?"

"The women fought too, you say?"

"Thousands of them, side by side with their men, and they were the mothers of the Manxmen of to-day."

"How glorious! How perfectly glorious!"

And then, clasping her hands about her knee, and looking steadfastly into the dark of the night, she, on her part, told him something. It was about a great new movement which was beginning in England for a change in the condition of women. Oh, it was wonderful! Miss Clough, the Principal, and all the girls at Newnham were ablaze with it, and it was going to sweep through the world. In the past the attitude towards women of literature, law, even religion, had been so unfair, so cruel. She could cry to think of it—the long martyrdom of woman through all the ages.

"Do you know," she said, "I think a good deal of the Bible itself is very wicked towards women .... That's shocking, isn't it?"

"Oh, no, no," said Victor—he was struggling to follow her, and not finding it easy.

"But all that will be changed some day," said Fenella.

It might require some terrible world-trouble to change it, some cataclysm, some war, perhaps (she didn't know what), but it would be changed—she was sure it would. And then, when woman took her rightful place beside man, as his equal, his comrade, his other self, they would see what would happen.

"What?"

All the old laws, so far as they concerned the sexes (and which of them didn't?) would have to be made afresh, and all the old tales about men and women (and which of them were not?) would have to be re-told.

"The laws made afresh, you say?"

"Yes, and some of the judges, too, perhaps."

"And all the old tales re-told?"

"Every one of them, and then they will be new ones, because woman will have a new and far worthier place in them."

They had left the stained-glass door to the dining-room ajar, and at a pause in Fenella's story they heard the voice of the Governor, in conversation with the Deemster on the constitutional question, saying,

"Well, well, old friend, I don't suppose either the millennium will dawn or the deluge come whether the Keys are reformed or not."

That led Victor to ask Fenella what her father thought of her opinions.

"Oh well," she said, "he doesn't agree. But then .... (her voice was coming with a laugh from her throat now) I don't quite approve of father."

This broke the spell of their serious talk, and he asked if she would like to go down to an ancient church on the seaward boundary of the old battlefield—it was a ruin and looked wonderful in the moonlight.

She said she would love to, and, slipping indoors to make ready, she came back in a moment with a silk handkerchief about her head, which made her face intoxicating to the boy who was waiting for it, and feeling for the first time the thrilling, quivering call of body and soul that is the secret of the continued race. So off they went together with a rhythmic stride, down the sandy road to the shore—he bareheaded, and she in her white dress and the satin slippers in which her footsteps made no noise.

The ruined church was on a lonesome spot on the edge of the sea, with the sea's moan always over it, and the waves thundering in the dark through the cavernous rocks beneath.

Fenella bore herself bravely until they reached the roofless chancel, where an elm tree grew, and the moonlight, now coming and going among the moving clouds, was playing upon the tomb of some old churchman whose unearthed bones the antiquaries had lately covered with a stone and surrounded by an iron railing, and then she clutched at Victor's arm, held on tightly and trembled like a child.

That restored the balance of things a little, and going home (it was his turn to hold on now) he could not help chaffing her on her feminine fear. Was that one of the old stories that would have to be re-told .... when the great world-change came, the great cataclysm?

"Oh, that? Well, of course .... (he believed she was blushing, though in the darkness he could not see) women may not have the strength and courage of men—the physical courage, I mean...."

"Only physical?" he asked.

She stammered again, and said that naturally men would always be men and women, women.

"You don't want that altered, do you?" she said.

"Oh no, not I, not a bit," said Victor, and then there was more laughter (rather tremulous laughter now) and less talking for the next five minutes.

They had got back to the piazza by this time, and knowing that her face was in the shaft of light that came through the glass door from the dining-room, Fenella turned quickly and shot away upstairs.

For the first time in his life Victor did not sleep until after three o'clock next morning. He saw the moonlight creep across the cocoa-nut matting on his bedroom floor and heard the clock on the staircase landing strike every hour from eleven to three.

Now that he was alone he was feeling degraded and ashamed. Here was this splendid girl touching life at its core, dealing with the great things, the everlasting things, attuning her heart to the future and the big eternal problems .... while he!

But under all the self-reproach there was something joyous too, something delicious, something that made him hot and dizzy and would not let him sleep, because a blessed hymn of praise was singing within, and it was so wonderful to be alive.

He could have kicked himself next morning when he awoke late, and found the broad sunshine in his bedroom, and heard from Janet that Fenella had been up two hours and all over the stables and the plantation.

After breakfast (downstairs for him this time) the Governor's big blue landau, with two fine Irish bays, driven by an English coachman, came sweeping round to the front and he went out in the morning sunshine, with the Deemster and Janet, to see their guests away.

The Governor shook hands with him warmly, but Fenella (who was wearing a coat and some kind of transparent green scarf about her neck, and thanked the Deemster and kissed Janet as she was stepping into the carriage) looked another way when she was saying good-bye to him.

He slammed the door to, and stepped back, and the carriage started, and (while the other two went indoors) he stood and looked after it as it went winding down the drive, amid the awakened clamour of the rooks, until it came to the turn where the trees were to hide it, and then Fenella faced round and waved a hand to him. At the next moment the carriage had gone—and then the sun went out, and the world was dead.

That night after dinner Victor told his father that he would like to go into the Attorney-General's office, as a first step towards taking up the profession of the law.

"Good—very good," said the Deemster.