Читать книгу Parris Mitchell of Kings Row - Henry Bellamann - Страница 11

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A bright dream glimmered in the borderland of sleep as Parris waked the next morning, leaving only a single silver thread like a profile against the dark. As it faded there came the warming thought of the breakfast visit he would have with Father Donovan. The old priest had come to be a trusted friend and counselor.

Parris recalled the many times people had questioned him about that friendship. The Catholic element in the town was small and belonged largely to that unconsidered part of the population living in the south end of Kings Row—foreigners, for the most part. Parris had found Father Donovan, the parish priest, to be a wise and cultured man and a most congenial companion, sharing as he did Parris’ love of music and literature, where these things were more than apt to be ignored, or looked upon with scorn in the little Midwest community.

Suddenly Parris, wide awake, remembered the thing that had kept him up most of the night—his trip down to Jinktown at midnight, his reluctance to leave the troubled pair of watchers, and his own quandary as to what he should do about the case.

Elise was still asleep. As she lay there, her cheek softly flushed, her bright hair loose against the pillow, she seemed a little girl, and he was puzzled by the troubled expression that came and went across her face.

How gentle she was! But there was about her a curious resignation that was no part of youth. His sense of protectiveness, his tenderness toward her, had become so much a part of him that Parris believed himself deeply in love with her. But what Randy had said worried him. He was not now so sure of Elise’s happiness and content.

The sun was not yet up when he turned toward the south gate of the hospital grounds. The dew was heavy and silvery on the grass, still lushly green, although this was almost the beginning of August. The air was very still but one felt the stir and murmur behind the walls as the huge buildings awoke to another day.

The thought of the place and his work always sent a slight tremor of excitement along his nerves. Every day of his life the realization that he was a part of it had the impact of a fresh experience. Living and working among the monstrous phantoms, the distortions, the violent tensions and grotesque exhibitions of sick minds could never be a happy experience, but it could be immeasurably exciting. So, although the place did not weigh on his nerves, he anticipated with relief an occasional day of freedom.

As he left the hospital gates, he could see straight to the end of Federal Street, where the gray stone buildings of Aberdeen College for Men reared themselves solidly across the street. They looked like a heavy bank of clouds against the lightening sky. He passed the entrance of the School for the Deaf, an ugly, unprepossessing red brick structure, and looked out toward the end of Poplar Street where the grove of trees cut off the view of the State Penitentiary crouching behind high walls of masonry and brick.

Except for an occasional Negro cook on her way to work, the streets were almost deserted. He could hear in the distance the clop-clop of the milkman’s horse.

This was a good hour to be walking through the town, and because it was still too early for his breakfast appointment, he was glad of the time for a leisurely stroll. Kings Row looked unfamiliar in the dim gray light. The tremulous, shy quality of the dawn was just about to give way to the sharper look of day.

The brief season of lilacs and roses was over, and only verbenas and geraniums smoldered in occasional flower beds. In more pretentious yards a pair of trellises, diamond- or heart-shaped, lifted purple clusters of clematis.

The yards were all fenced. White pickets or palings set these front yards apart from each other and from the street. Fences kept out children and dogs, but they were also symbols of the privacy of the family—symbols of those social barriers which preserved caste. Only very poor people neglected their yard fences.

Just now, in the quiet of the early morning, a quality of peace, as wide as the pleasant farm country stretching out from the town, and as deep as the clear azure overhead, seemed to brood over the town and bless it. A bed of brilliant red geraniums on Ned Porter’s lawn gave forth a secret excitement.

A geranium, Parris thought, draws its red from a conviction. It believes in red.

He carefully avoided stepping on the bright silver trail of a snail that had set out upon its painful odyssey. As Parris crossed Union Street, he could see Randy McHugh’s house.

The thought of her was like a cool finger laid on a fevered pulse. Parris had been amazed at the way Randy had been able to stand alone. She had lost Drake and her father, and her brother Tod in quick succession, and yet she had assumed a quality of command that no one had dreamed she possessed. She was a remarkable person, rounded, complete, self-contained, and possessed of formidable strength and control. A beautiful woman! Something regal in the way she carried her red-gold head, something staunch and steadying in the direct gaze of her gray-blue eyes.

Thinking of Randy, he felt warm and comforted.

Mariah Shane, thin and gaunt and incredibly energetic, was serving breakfast to Father Donovan and Parris on the little brick terrace that connected the modest rectory with the Catholic church. Father Donovan always had breakfast out there when the weather permitted. The vine-covered lattice that cut off the view of Walnut Street gave it complete seclusion, and it was open to the flower garden that was the pride of Mariah’s heart.

Mariah had been caretaker and cook at the little rectory even before Father Donovan came to Kings Row. She was surprisingly active for her age, but she complained bitterly that she could not get as much work done in her garden as she would like.

The two men were talking of the varied aspects of the country about Kings Row, speaking particularly of the von Eln place and its possibilities.

“I quite understand, my son,” Father Donovan said, “your wish to reorient yourself in that place. Its natural environment has had much to do with building your character. But there is danger, too, for you there. You must recognize it, and in that way destroy its power to harm.”

“Danger?” Parris was startled. “What possible danger could there be?”

“It is this: that landscape is in some mystical sense your real home. It was traversed, studied, and reconsidered countless times during your childhood and during that more disturbing period, your adolescence. As each day changes the total of experience, a new light is cast backward over the familiar ways and places, changing their aspect and illuminating their importance. Now this is where the danger lies. It would be very easy for you to begin valuing the present not so much for its living actuality as for its effect upon the past. The past, my son, is a dangerous anodyne unless you can see it for what it actually is.”

Mariah placed a fresh pot of coffee before Father Donovan. Parris waited until Mariah had gone before he spoke.

“Probably you are right. I can think of events that have become bearable only when they have been divested of the harshness of proximity.”

Father Donovan leaned toward his young friend. “There’s a touch of bitterness in that remark, Parris. Do you wish to tell me what is troubling you?”

“Many things, Father. A cruel and unjust thing has just happened to a poor child in this town. It is so devastating that I wonder how she can face a present which must seem monstrous to her, and a future which is uncertain for herself and for two people who love her. She has had so little in the past to help her—and I pity her. She has nothing to draw on.”

“And you think a richer past would help her now in her need? Is that your honest belief?”

“Frankly, Father, I don’t know what I believe. But my own past has always stood behind my chair, touching me in every waking moment, pointing the way and propelling my steps.”

“Have you stopped to think,” Father Donovan’s voice had taken on a note of severity, “that perhaps this partakes of the nature of phantasy?”

“Not as I think of the phantasy of dreams. My past has entered deeply and completely into every fiber of nerve and muscle. I would not be divorced from it if I could.”

“That is why I warn you, Parris, about immuring your mind in that estate too often or too deeply. You may be relying on it as a protection against the too violent impact of present reality.”

“Might not that be a good thing?”

“Not in your case. You belong in the front ranks of men of service. Too much concern with the past could hamper your progress. Your problems, whatever they may be, must be faced in the light of today, not in the faint, remembered glow of yesterday.”

Parris’ eyes sparkled with interest. “I live the present with a certain amount of gusto, I think, and I welcome the future with a certain eagerness—”

“But,” Father Donovan interrupted, “are you sure you do not accept them because they will so soon be one with the timeless past?”

Parris smiled. “I give up, Father, I do try to go forward without reluctance, but I admit that I look backward with something like ecstasy.”

“There! You see? Already you have lost your way. I know one person who can hold you on your path. Your wife. My son, I am going to ask you something very personal. If you resent it, I shall be sorry, but I must ask it in any case.”

“Ask anything you wish. I always come to you when the going gets difficult.”

“I’ve no right to ask you this question, but you are too young a man to be retreating from life. Are you happy with your wife?”

“Happy? Yes—” Parris answered frankly, “but troubled, too. Elise is peace and sanity to me. She is my refuge from all the madness and unrest in the world. Of what I am to her I am not so certain.”

“It is your business to know. You understand other people—your patients. Why not your wife?”

“I can’t explain—quite. There’s an obscurity there I can’t reach through. She is like—like the shadow on a sundial. But,” he added hurriedly, “I’m sure she loves me.”

The voice of the old priest softened. “Perhaps she senses this backward-looking tendency of yours and feels she is not completely a part of your life.”

“But, Father, she is my life. I could not conceive of a world without her.” His voice was almost defiant, a fact that the wise old man noted.

“Yet you admit you prefer living in the past.” As he spoke, his patient fingers moved back and forth across the satiny damask.

Parris moved restlessly in his chair. “In a way, I think she represents that past to me. I am confused—I don’t know how to answer you, Father. I don’t even know what she would think of this discussion of the past we are having.”

Father Donovan poured fresh coffee in both cups before he replied. “Parris, you know how to cure others. You are singularly slow in recognizing symptoms in yourself. Again let me remind you that you are very young. It may sound platitudinous, but there are many experiences still in store for you.”

“Life is entirely too short,” Parris said, “for me to crowd into it all I wish to experience.”

“Perhaps it is the tragedy of consciousness that we desire to encompass the whole in our little flick of existence.”

“I’m afraid I confuse thinking with feeling and I get hopelessly lost.”

“Sometimes, my son, when thinking and feeling slide into each other and become one, some secret mathematic of the soul measures that segment which consciousness provides, and a leaping intuition spans the whole. In that instant the ceaseless trends of seeking are quieted for a moment and infinity is identified with peace.”

Parris leaned back in his chair, a puzzled frown puckering his brow. “I’m not sure that I follow you entirely.”

“Never mind, son. All of this is a cloudy kind of thinking and you will no doubt loose pragmatic destruction on my airy structures.”

“Not at all, Father. I believe you have taught me how to walk around every thought and to view it from every angle.”

“If you do that you can’t get very far off the track. I wish I could do as well.”

“But you do! In spite of your being a confirmed mystic, you—”

“ ’Tis my Irish blood, no doubt. Mystics we are, but we’ve our practical side as well.” Father Donovan’s smile was deprecatory.

“Maybe you are born mystics and become practical through environment?”

Father Donovan rested his chin on his clasped hands and gave the matter a moment’s thought. Then he shook his head.

“Maybe. More like, it’s our education. I was brought up in County Cork. My grandfather’s house was full of children. There were always lots of dogs and horses, and there were many people going in and out of doors and a great talk and laughter all the time. We didn’t learn anything very well, but we heard about everything.”

“But that sounds marvelous! What more could you want by way of an education? You were very lucky.”

“Yes,” Father Donovan nodded in agreement. “I was lucky. But it does not make me happy when I remember the many things I failed to do in those years.” He reached out with his strong, bony hand and touched the trellis near his chair. “Let’s sit here and look at these leaves that trouble not at all about their imperfections.”

Parris looked closely at the old man. The long-lashed lids of Father Donovan’s fine eyes showed a tired line that slanted to the net of close wrinkles about them. Eyes that seemed, above all else, wise—wise but keeping still the odd shyness that had always been so appealing.

“My son, we are so enmeshed with the earth that we seem somewhat born again with leaves and somewhat die with them. There is something that comes—a cargo from the infinite—when their green signals fly, and something goes when the bright, myriad, eager sails are set.” Father Donovan looked across the lawn to the thinning maples, and his voice was almost inaudible. He seemed to have forgotten his companion.

After a little he went on. “They will come and go so many times for you—but I have seen them go so often that all the past seems dark with falling leaves—falling and always falling, until soon they will cease as though there were no more dark leaves to fly or fall.”

“It’s curious, isn’t it,” Parris began hesitantly, moving his chair out of the sun, “how human relationships are clarified by a day such as this—by consideration of leaves and grass and water and clouds?”

“For those who can see and read them, yes.” Father Donovan ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Yesterday, Parris, Randy McHugh said much the same thing, but in different words. She has her problems but she has a remarkable philosophy.”

“Oh, Randy solves her problems by using her common sense. Even inanimate objects obey her. She lays friendly and healing hands on everything. I don’t believe mystery exists for Randy.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

“Just yesterday. Elise sees her often. Randy’s very busy. She’s been drawn into every activity in the town, it seems.”

“It’s that same common sense you were talking about. Randy McHugh is a fine citizen. Kings Row has need of others like her.”

“I agree with you completely. There’s something very gallant about her. She marches. The last we shall see of Randy will be a flag flying over the crest of a hill.”

Father Donovan nodded appreciatively. “Your own behavior is not unlike hers—in spite of your apparent withdrawals from conflict. I see you bringing those same forces to bear on diseased minds and disturbed personalities that Randy directs against injustices and inequalities where she finds them.”

“You are too kind, Father. I admit I need just such a boost as you are giving me, but I haven’t Randy’s complete and ready concentration. Where do you suppose she gets it? There’s nothing in her training and education that has even pointed in that direction.”

“You are mistaken about that.” Father Donovan smiled—a frank, engaging smile.

“But what—” he left his query suspended.

“Randy’s experiences have been unusual, to say the least. She’s had a fine education of the heart, my son.”

“Education of the heart,” Parris said musingly. “She turns to people for instruction, I suppose you mean, where you and I turn to books and to nature to identify our values. Is that it?”

“Not altogether. Preoccupation with the phases of nature helps us to know human values. And you, Parris, your zest for the manifestations of the workings of the human mind seems endless. I am not surprised that you are so comprehending of natural phenomena.”

“I’m not sure that I do comprehend them. It’s stupefying, really, this wilderness of leaves and stems and things that shoot from the ground with such formidable energy and in such confusion. All of this is raw material.”

“But it gives you pleasure,” Father Donovan suggested.

“It gives me pleasure, yes,” Parris answered a bit uncertainly. “I can contemplate a leaf, a single blossom, with a certain simple enjoyment, but for the whole of it—there’s something savage and terrifying about it. I feel it should be ordered, arranged. It should be made into meaning.”

Father Donovan shook his head slowly. “You always speak of ‘design,’ ‘order,’ but you are apt to ignore the basic significance of the thing itself. This leaf may be symbolic of birth, of life, of death. In the study of one little leaf you can encompass the lore of the universe. Wordsworth said it, more poetically.”

“Now you are being mystical again, Father. Someday I hope to be able to follow you on your imaginative flights, but not yet. I’m still trying to be a scientist.”

“Never mind. We understand each other. But you spoke earlier of some child who had received an injury—the child who had no past to draw on. Could you tell me more about what happened to her? You say she is poor. I wonder if I could help.”

“I think you could—but this is a matter of professional secrecy, Father. I can’t give you names. I suspect they are members of your church and you will probably learn it from them. The circumstances are these: a young girl was brutally assaulted last night by two unidentified men who first took the precaution to beat her escort into unconsciousness. In view of what would probably be the effect on the girl’s future state of mind, the family asked me to keep it a secret. I think they are right. There’s not much hope of discovering the criminals in any case.”

“That’s a tragic thing, Parris. Psychologically what is likely to happen to the child?”

“Any one of a number of things might result. Fortunately, a lad who is in love with her wants to marry her right away. That may serve to wipe out the horror from her own mind, but she will probably carry some deep soul-scars for the rest of her life.”

“To have been bodily assaulted was terrible enough,” Father Donovan said sorrowfully, “but to have suffered such an indignity to her soul—that could be incurable.”

“That is why I said I pitied her because she has no past to draw on. She probably has already a sense of inferiority, brought about by her lack of security in early childhood. I am afraid she may feel it more than ever now. She will feel that she has been defiled, contaminated, and always there will be the haunting fear of exposure. I can only hope that it won’t destroy her future happiness with the boy she will marry. They are deeply in love. I could see that.”

“Parris, you and I as well as all society can be blamed for this crime.”

Parris looked up, startled. “You and I?”

“Yes. As long as evil walks the land we should be doing something about the prevention of outrages such as this.”

Parris’ shoulders seemed suddenly to sag, a strange thing to see in so young a man, Father Donovan thought.

“What can we hope to do—other than to relieve pain? And that in itself is a puzzling thing.”

“Pain, my son, comes to everyone—sometimes it comes too early, as in this particular case. It is a concomitant of Creation’s travail. A man who ravishes a child is a brute, but much that passes as legalized love is brutish also. That is common knowledge.”

“I am a biologist, Father, but even a biologist doesn’t know how passion can be raised above the level of lust.”

“Now you are speaking bitterly because of this unhappy case which is weighing on your heart. Passion can be lifted above lust if it is sifted through the heart.”

“You really have faith in humanity, haven’t you?”

“I have faith in God, and faith can work miracles. It may even do something for this poor child.”

“Father, I feel unsure of my own stand in this matter. I’ve spent an uncomfortable night wondering if I’m doing the right thing in concealing this crime from the authorities. I want your advice.”

“Has the girl no clue as to who her assailants might be?”

“None. And it is not likely that any clues could be picked up. I must admit that I took my stand in an effort to protect the child and give her some chance to recover her mental health. Publicity would destroy that slender chance.”

“I think,” the old man said slowly, “you have done the wise thing, my son. Have you talked with your wife about it? Her reaction might help you to decide.”

“N-no,” Parris admitted, realizing that he had not considered telling Elise, that he had known intuitively that she could not understand the problem at all. It would only frighten her.

The wise old man was conscious of the momentary confusion in Parris’ mind, and went on in his level voice. “Try to dismiss the question, but try to help the child in her struggle to forget.”

“You take a load off my mind, Father. It was troubling me. The child will marry the boy she loves soon, I hope, and that will help her to forget.”

“If the affair is romantic enough to appeal to her imagination.”

Parris looked inquiringly at the old priest. He had not expected the conversation to take this turn.

“I wonder,” he said, “if romantic love isn’t, after all, more of a shadow than the real thing? Like walking in the dusk and never in the full blaze of sunlight.”

Something in the quality of Parris’ voice caught at the old man’s attention. He scrutinized the thoughtful face curiously.

“Pleasure, my son, is not happiness. Glory and heartbreak add up to the union. That’s God’s purpose.”

Parris rose to go. “It’s been good of you, Father, to give me so much time.”

“Your visits are the bright spots in my rather drab existence, my son. You must come as often as you can spare the time. I see Mariah looking a little troubled about her flowers. Shall we find what is wrong before you go?”

The dahlias Mariah had planted along the paling fence had not done so well this year. She was shaking her head mournfully over their skimpy appearance.

“What’s the matter with them, Father? Last year they was that pretty you could hardly bear to look at them, and this year we ain’t even had a bouquet of them for the church.”

“Never mind, Mariah,” Parris said sympathetically, “the season’s not right. They’ll likely be fine again next year.”

“The season’s got nothin’ to do with it,” she said with conviction. “Must be somethin’ I done or ain’t done. Maybe that peat moss was too hot for them, I wish I knew.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mariah,” Father Donovan begged. “Your marigolds and zinnias make up for the defaulting dahlias.”

“Yes, sir. I don’t rightly know what that word means, but I’m sure you’re right. I want to give Miss Elise a bunch when she comes by next time.”

“Thank you, Mariah. I’ll tell her. She will be very pleased. Thank you for the delicious breakfast you gave me.”

“It was a pleasure, Doctor. The Father likes to have company. I hope Miss Elise comes to see the garden soon. I like to look at her. I like the way she carries her head. Some people poke their heads up there, and some heads just naturally grow up there. You can tell the difference.”

“Why, thank you, Mariah. It’s a fine compliment you are paying her.”

“Well, I do think yourself should be rolling in gold, what with all the good wishes that do be following you this day.”

The old woman stood, hands on hips, looking after Parris as he walked down Walnut Street. “I do think, Father, that when the doctor passes it’s like a regiment was marching down the street.”

Father Donovan nodded, understanding the Irish compliment, and turned back toward his study.